Given that this is officially the most depressing week of the year, I thought it was high time we brought on some entertainers to banish those January blues and cheer us all up, so I consulted the Concert Artistes Directory of 1922 in the Bishopsgate Institute to see what local talent was on offer.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Founded by John James Frost in 1790, Frost Brothers Ltd of 340/342 Commercial Rd was managed by his grandson – also John James Frost – in 1905, when these photographs were taken. In 1926, the company was amalgamated to become part of British Ropes and now only this modest publication on the shelf in the Bishopsgate Institute bears testimony to the long-lost industry of rope making and yarn spinning in the East End, from which Cable St takes its name.
First Prize London Cart Parade - Manila Hemp as we receive it from the Philippines
Hand Dressing
The Old-Fashioned Method of Hand Spinning
The First Process in Spinning Manila - The women are shown feeding Hemp up to the spreading machines, taken from the bales as they come from the Philippines. These three machines are capable of manipulating one hundred and twenty bales a day.
Manila-Finishing Drawing Machines
Russian & Italian Hemp Preparing Room
Manila Spinning
Binder Twine & Trawl Twine Spinning - This floor contains one hundred and fifty six spindles
Russian & Italian Hemp Spinning
Carding Room
Tow Drawing Room
Tow Spinning & Spun Yarn Twisting Room
Tarred Yarn Store - This contains one hundred and fifty tons of Yarn
Tarred Yarn Winding Room
Upper End of Main Rope Ground - There are six ground four hundred yards long, capable of making eighteen tons of rope per ten and a half hour day
Rope-Making Machines – This pair of large machines are capable of making rope up to forty-eight centimetres in circumference
House Machines – This view shows part of the Upper Rope Ground and a couple of small Rope-Making Machines
Number 4 House Machine Room
The middle section of a machine capable of making rope from three inches up to seven inches in circumference, any length without a splice. It is thirty-two feet in height and driven by an electric motor.
Number 4 Rope Store
Boiler House
120 BHP. Sisson Engine Direct Coupled to Clarke-Chapman Dynamo
One of our Motors by Crompton 40 BHP - These Manila Ropes have been running eight years and are still in first class condition.
Engineers’ Shop with Smiths’ Shop adjoining
Carpenters’ Store & Store for Spare Gear
Exhibit at Earl’s Court Naval & Shipping Exhibition, 1905
View of the Factory before the Fire in 1860
View of the Factory as it is now in 1905 - extending from Commercial St as far as Cable St
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Contributing Artist Lucinda Rogers who did the beautiful drawings of the East End streets in my first book Spitalfields Life, has now produced this set of six greetings cards printed in London which you can order direct from her website Lucinda Rogers’ Shop and she will post them off to you direct from her favourite Post Office in the Hackney Rd.
Spitalfields drawn from a rooftop in Hanbury St in 2002
Columbia Rd Flower Market drawn from the back of an empty flower lorry looking over the market
Smithfield Market - The General Market has been under threat for many years, but in 2014 was given a stay of execution when the Secretary of State agreed that the proposed demolition to build an office complex was wrong. However, the buildings are still deteriorating while we wait for the owners to swallow their pride and let the alternative scheme go ahead.
Brick Lane seen from the junction with Hanbury St before the construction of the minaret at the mosque
The Grassy Bridge - This view down Kingsland Rd from the time when the railway was still out-of-use is now altered by all the buildings that have appeared since and would will be rendered unrecognisable by the Bishopsgate Goodsyard proposals
Ash Grove Bus Garage – This was drawn at night in the bus depot at Hackney Central when Routemasters were still running
Drawings copyright © Lucinda Rogers
You can buy these cards along with prints and original drawings direct from Lucinda Rogers
You may like to take a look at more of Lucinda Rogers’ work
Rodney Archer, the Aesthete of Fournier St, & his pal Trevor Newton, the Curator, have been busy again, lining Rodney’s magnificent old house with a collection of original French nineteenth century designs for satins and silk velours, created at the Lyons factory of Antoine Donat between 1840 and 1865.
Trevor came upon these designs in a long-abandoned silk mill and they have not seen the light of day since the eighteen-seventies which accounts for their vibrant unfaded colours. Each design is labelled on the reverse with the date and instructions for setting up the loom, and all are for sale – many for as little as twenty pounds.
It certainly makes a splendid display in Rodney’s blue and gold drawing room on the first floor – the one with Oscar Wilde’s fireplace in it – and since these houses in Fournier St were built on the income from silk weaving, it is difficult to imagine a better location to enjoy these rich and extravagant designs, glowing in the February sunlight .
Rodney’s house will be open on Tuesdays, Thursdays & Saturdays from Thursday February 19th until Thursday March 19th - from 10am until 4pm weekdays and midday until 5pm on Saturdays. Numbers are limited and visits are by appointment only.
To receive an invitation, please email newtonartist@hotmail.com saying when exactly you would like to visit and how many will be in your party.
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In Spitalfields, we all live in the shadow of the old Truman Brewery founded in Brick Lane in 1666, which makes the history of Truman’s part of the history of the place and thus a subject of fascination to us all. So I was delighted to come upon these pristine Truman’s labels for beer bottles dating from the middle of the last century which have never been used. There is a timeless quality to the elegant simplicity of their design and their unusual use of bold colours, combined with fine hand-drawn lettering, delivers an appealing series of small graphic masterpieces.
If anybody has more old Truman’s Beer Labels or can tell me who designed them, please get in touch
You may also like to read my stories about Truman’s Beer
Picking Hops for Truman’s Beer
First Brew at the New Truman’s Brewery
Tony Jack, Chauffeur at Truman’s Brewery
Tim Hunkin
I know I cannot be the only one who still has a cardboard file of copies of Tim Hunkin’s genius cartoon strip, ’The Rudiments of Wisdom,’ clipped weekly from the Observer and cherished through all these years. So I hope you will appreciate my excitement when Tim invited me over to Bloomsbury last Sunday to photograph the arrival of his automata and slot machines, prior to next week’s opening of Novelty Automation, his personal amusement arcade.
I can now reveal that there were a few anxious moments as Tim’s nuclear reactor lurched violently while being manhandled from the van. But you will be relieved to learn that all the machines fitted through the door and are safely installed inside his tiny premises in Princeton St off Red Lion Sq, where – for a small fee – Londoners will be able to practice money-laundering, witness a total eclipse, lose weight, get frisked, get divorced, get chiropody and – of course – operate a nuclear reactor.
Yesterday I went back to admire Tim’s machines, illuminated and humming with life in their new home, which gave me the opportunity to have a chat with the engineer while he tinkered with the works, making his final adjustments and ironing out a few last minute snags. “I started making things as a child and the cartoons were a distraction at university when I couldn’t have a workshop,” he revealed modestly, his hands deep inside a machine, “I started drawing for a student magazine and that led me to the Observer.”
Leaning in close with a puzzled frown, Tim tilted his gold spectacles upon his brow and narrowed his eyes in thought, peering into the forest of cogs and levers. I hope he will forgive me if I admit could not ignore the startling resemblance at that moment, in his posture and countenance, to Heath Robinson’s illustrations for Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm stories.
“It’s much easier to make a living by drawing than by making things, and it’s harder to make things that work,” he confessed, turning to catch my eye, “I often say, I spent the first half of my life making things badly.”
“I just like being in my workshop, I get itchy feet sitting at a desk. But if my body gives out before my mind, I plan to write a huge book about Electricity,” he continued, growing excited as the thought struck him.
“I plan to hang on as long as I can,” he reassured me, returning his concentration to the machine.
“The ingredient you need when you make things is to know it’s worthwhile,” Tim said, half to himself, “There needs to be a point to it – sometimes I leave my workshop and go down to the arcade in Southwold and I see people laughing at my machines there. You can’t imagine how addictive that is for me.” Casting my eyes around the room at Tim’s array of ingenious and playful machines, each conceived with a sharp edge of satirical humour, I could easily imagine it. “I’m quite a loner, so it’s my connection to the world and it gives me great pleasure,” he confided without taking his gaze from the work in hand.
“People underestimate slot machines,” he informed me, almost defensively, “Once they have paid, they pay attention, read the instructions and concentrate because they have invested and they want to get their money’s worth. So you’ve really captured your audience.”
“In the eighties, I had a brush with the Art world, but I prefer the notion that, rather than buy your work, people buy an experience,” he concluded, adding “and you don’t have to be sophisticated to enjoy it.”
All this time, Tim had been fiddling with an hydraulic system which caused the eyes to shoot out of a bust of Sigmund Freud but – at that moment – was failing to pull them back in again afterwards. Constructed of old timber, the device comprised an automated bedroom with dream figures popping up from inside the wardrobe and outside the window.
“The machines are the stars not me,” Tim declared when I exclaimed in wonder to see the mechanism spring into life, “I’m looking forward to when I can get back to my workshop.” I left him there playing with the dream machine and I rather envied him.
Tim Hunkin and his team deliver their Nuclear Reactor in Bloomsbury
Tim Hunkin and the Dream Machine
NOVELTY AUTOMATION at 1a Princeton St, Bloomsbury, WC1R 4 AX, from Wednesday 11th February . Wednesdays 11am – 6pm, Thursdays 11am – 7pm, Fridays 11am – 6pm & Saturdays 11am – 6pm
(Click on this image to enlarge)
I learnt recently that British Land’s slogan is ‘Creating Places People Prefer’ yet this shows what they want to do to Norton Folgate in Spitalfields - demolishing more than seventy per cent of the buildings on a site which sits entirely within a Conservation Area.
In 1977 the newly-formed Spitalfields Trust, including Dan Cruickshank and with the support of Sir John Betjeman, stopped British Land from redeveloping Elder St in Norton Folgate, but now British Land have come back again to obliterate the neighbourhood under a hideous corporate plaza.
Their plans show no respect for one of the last fragments of distinctive Spitalfields streetscape which has evolved over centuries, replacing it with bland corporate office blocks of up to thirteen storeys, offering little to the tech industries and small businesses which thrive in the East End.
Next week, Dan Cruickshank and The Spitalfields Trust launch a campaign to stop British Land and save the Ancient Liberty of Norton Folgate – and it is my pleasure to curate an exhibition at Dennis Severs House, opening next Saturday, to which you are all invited.
The display illustrates stories of Norton Folgate’s rich cultural and social history, and showcases the Trust’s alternative scheme, devised by Architect John Burrell, whose alternative scheme for Smithfield Market was key to saving the market. Also, Adam Dant is unveiling his Map of Norton Folgate which will serve as the centrepiece of the show.
The focus of The Spitalfields Trust’s vision for the future of Norton Folgate is one that respects history – preserving the existing buildings and providing a wide variety of spaces suiting businesses of different scales which can deliver jobs for local people, and increasing the amount of housing, including affordable housing.
Alongside the exhibition at Dennis Severs House, there will be series of talks, readings and walks announced over coming weeks that explore Norton Folgate’s lively history, celebrating the presence of Christopher Marlowe, Charles Dickens and Sir John Betjeman in Norton Folgate.
British Land were responsible for the destruction of the northern half of Elder St in the seventies
Elder St in 1977 after demolition commenced
Dan Cruickshank shows the destruction to John Betjeman
Bishopsgate Without viewed from Norton Folgate, 1912 (Photo by Charles Goss)
Bishopsgate Without viewed from Norton Folgate, 2012
Colour photographs © Simon Mooney
Archive images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Although the deadline is 12th February, Tower Hamlets Council confirm they will accept emails and letters until the Hearing of the Application, which is likely to be in April. Please send comments by mid-March to be sure they are included in the planning officer’s report.
It is important to use your own words and add your own personal reasons for opposing this development. Any letters which simply duplicate the same wording will count only as one objection.
Be sure to state clearly that you are objecting to the application.
The following points are known as material considerations and are valid reasons for Councils to refuse Applications.
1. THE ELDER ST CONSERVATION AREA
British Land’s Application proposes the demolition of approximately 75% of the existing buildings on the site, yet the Application lies entirely within the Elder St Conservation Area – including the site of a scheduled Ancient Monument, and numerous listed and locally-listed buildings.
The Tower Hamlets Conservation Area Appraisal states, “Overall this is a cohesive area that has little capacity for change. Future needs should be met by the sensitive repair of the historic building stock.”
2. HEIGHT & MASSING
British Land’s Application proposes buildings of 11-13 storeys in a Conservation Area where the predominant height is only 3-4 storeys.
British Land’s Application replaces the fine grain of courtyards and distinctive buildings, the result of complex historical evolution, with inflexible monolithic structures based on large floorplates – focusing merely on short-term maximum return on investment.
These plans ignore the viability of the area in its current built form. Small-scale regeneration has worked in Shoreditch and Tech City.
Although there a consented (but universally disliked) previous scheme for the site, these new proposals greatly exceed it in height, in massing, in the loss of open space and in the mistreatment of the remaining historic buildings.
3. THE TREATMENT OF HISTORIC BUILDINGS
British Land’s Application undervalues the importance of the existing historic buildings, reducing them to shells.
4. THE NEW BUILDINGS
The design of new buildings on Norton Folgate, on Fleur de Lys St and on Elder St fail to reflect local character – and are much taller than the existing buildings, reaching a uniform 9-13 storeys, with little graduation.
5. THE CONSULTATION PROCESS
British Land’s consultation process failed to respond meaningfully to local objections, despite their claims to the contrary. From the first public meeting, it was clear that the scheme was already fully-formed.
6. HOUSING & JOBS
The proportion of housing is too low and the proportion of affordable housing is disappointing. British Land’s Application aims to make money at the expense of the needs of the local community.
British Land’s focus is on office jobs for non-local people – primarily high-income commuters. The percentage of retail use, which might provide local jobs, is hugely outweighed by office use.
WHERE TO SEND YOUR OBJECTION
Letters and emails should be addressed to
Beth Eite
planningandbuilding@towerhamlets.gov.uk
Quoting applications: PA/14/03548 and PA/14/03618
Town Planning, Town Hall, Mulberry Place, 5 Clove Crescent, London, E14 2BG
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
The Spitalfields Trust’s SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition is at Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, E1 6BX, from Saturday 14th February.
After I published my tiny collection of Old Truman’s Beer Labels last week, I was thrilled to hear from Stephen Killick in Australia who collected more than one hundred and fifty Truman’s Beer labels as a child – all issued between 1956 and 1960 – and placed them in scrapbooks.
Born in Poplar, Stephen began collecting at the age of nine and continued until the age of sixteen when he became a Mod. Stephen’s father used to deliver sugar to the Truman’s Brewery in Brick Lane and, whenever Stephen went along with him, the brewers gave him labels. Later, when the family moved out to Essex, Stephen collected beer and wine labels from other breweries and even ventured into cheese labels too, but these magnificent Truman’s Beer labels remain his first love.
Stephen Killick
You may also like to take a look at my original selection
or see another collection
It is my pleasure to welcome Tom Bolton author of Vanished City & London’s Lost Rivers writing about the lost hamlet of Ratcliff. Next week, Tom will be opening the SAVE NORTON FOLGATE cultural festival with a talk about London’s ‘lost’ neighbourhoods – making special reference to the Liberty of Norton Folgate – at the Bishopsgate Institute on Thursday 19th February at 6:30pm. All events in the festival are free – click here to book your ticket
The name ‘Ratcliff’ derives from the Red Cliff, a bank of light-red gravel which once rose from the Thames above Wapping Marsh. The gravel is now impossible to detect, much of it dug out and distributed around the globe as ballast in the ships that left Ratcliff for destinations far and wide. Ratcliff, the place that grew up by the river, is also depleted and forgotten after a century of severe decline. It was once the beating heart of London’s river trade, but suffered with the decline and fall of maritime London. The name ‘Ratcliff’ has faded into almost complete disuse, but for three hundred and fifty years it linked the thriving mercantile capital to imperial ports and global trade routes around the world.
Once known as ‘Sailor Town,’ Ratcliff was a hamlet when shipbuilders, ship-owners, captains, merchants and crew began to arrive during the reign of Elizabeth I, building wharves to anchor vessels at what was the closest practical landing spot to the City of London. The rapid growth of East London during the nineteenth century began with the docks and, as the city expanded, it enveloped Ratcliff which found itself the underbelly of a vast new industrial capital. Ratcliff gained a new reputation, as a place that represented the very worst of London, a thousand morality tales rolled into one neighbourhood just a cab ride from Fleet St.
‘Sailor Town’ had its origins at Ratcliff Cross, a landing place on the Thames at the western end of what is now Narrow St. The Cross itself was removed some time after 1732, but the stone slipway at Ratcliff Cross Stairs still marks the location of the quay, although it is now unfortunately inaccessible, locked away on a private stretch of foreshore. Not far away Ratcliffe Cross St, a now dilapidated lane between Cable St and Commercial Rd, was the site of the Ratcliff Market.
During the nineteenth century, Radcliff built a new reputation as the home of everything Victorian London loved to hate. There was no shortage of writers, particularly during the eighteen-fifties and sixties, who could barely contain their glee at the exotic excitements so conveniently close to home. Thomas de Quincey reflected the feverish fascination that buzzed around ‘Sailor Town.’ In a postscript to ‘On Murder’ he described the “manifold ruffianism shrouded impenetrably under the mixed hats and turbans of men whose past was untraceable to any European eye.” In ‘The Wild Tribes of London’, which gives it all away in the title, Watt Phillips writes, “Ratcliffe-highway by night! The head-quarters of unbridled vice and drunken violence-of all that is dirty, disorderly, and debased. Splash, dash, down comes the rain; but it must fall a deluge indeed to wash away even a portion of the filth to be found in this detestable place.”
The unexpected ‘Taxi Driver’ resonances are typical of the moral verdicts passed on Ratcliff. Anthropologist J. Ewing Ritchie analyses the Highway in ominous style, “I should not like a son of mine to be born and bred in Ratcliffe-Highway.” He adds obscurely that “In beastliness I think it surpasses Cologne with its seven and thirty stenches, or even Bristol or a Welsh town.” He blames hard drinking sailors or ‘crimps’ for the drunkenness, dancing and fighting he claims to have witnessed.
Foreigners took the blame for much of the mayhem – “Either a gin-mad Malay runs a much [sic] with glittering kreese [a Malay dagger], and the innocent and respectable wayfarer is in as much danger as the brawler and the drunkard; or the Lascar, or the Chinese, or the Italian flash their sea knives in the air, or the American ‘bowies’ a man, or gouges him, or jumps on him, or indulges in some other of those innocent amusements in which his countrymen delight.”
At the centre of everything in Ratcliff is the promise of the river and the reality of the mud. In Charles Dickens’ ‘Our Mutual Friend’ the “harbour of everlasting mud” oozes into the streets. Turn of the century accounts describe children who “would stand on Ratcliffe Cross Stairs and gaze out upon the rushing tide and upon the ships that passed up and down. At low tide they ran out upon the mud, with bare feet, and picked up apronfuls of coal to bring home. Needs must that a child who lives within sight of ships should imagine strange things and get a sense of distance and mystery.” Dickens’ Ratcliff is “a place of poverty and desperation, where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river.” It is depicted as isolated and semi-derelict, with boatmen inhabiting disused mills beside the river and making a living fishing dead bodies from the Thames.
But Ratcliff’s notoriety was relatively short-lived. The press coverage had an effect and the police took a firmer grip of the neighbourhood. By 1879, what “until within the last few years was one of the sights of the metropolis, and almost unique in Europe as a scene of coarse riot and debauchery, is now chiefly noteworthy as an example of what may be done by effective police supervision.” On Shadwell High St an Irish pub, the White Swan or ‘Paddy’s Goose’, was “once the uproarious rendezvous of half the tramps and thieves of London, now quiet, sedate, and, to confess the truth, dull—very dull.”
War-time destruction led to major redevelopment, resulting in new-build council estates and roads on a scale unsuited to a residential area. However, although Ratcliff was no longer commercially significant and had become physically fragmented, its reputation lingered past World War II. Ian Nairn, writing in 1966, reflected a familiar image of Ratcliff – “ ‘Cable St, the whore’s retreat’: a shameful blot on the moral landscape of London: an outworn slum area …all that is left of lurid Dockland. Its crime is not that it contains vice but that it is unashamed and exuberant about it.”
This is no longer the case, at least not in public, and exuberance is not a word associated with Ratcliff. The street patterns remain recognisable from 1811 but planning interventions, as well as bombing, unpicked the physical coherence of the area. Large-scale demolition was required for the building in the eighteen-nineties of the Rotherhithe Tunnel, which surfaces in what had previously been the centre of Ratcliff.
Only a street away from what was once Ratcliff Cross, the gaping mouth of the Limehouse Link tunnel sucks in its tribute of traffic from the Highway, Butcher Row whirls like a vortex around the Royal Peculiar of St. Katharine, the Commercial Rd is peppered with dereliction, and the viaduct carrying the Docklands Light Railway isolates Ratcliff from the world beyond, as the marshes once did.
‘Sailor Town’ has almost entirely disappeared, but evidence remains of what it used to be, from the long, high dock wall that runs the length of Pennington St to the buildings that survived against the odds. The ships have gone and the area has moved on. Seen from Ratcliff, the shimmering towers on the Isle of Dogs look like a mirage, and a different world. This is a neighbourhood shorn of the trade that created it, but clinging on to a name on a map that proves it was once somewhere.
Hamlet of Ratcliff in 1720
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The SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition I have curated for The Spitalfields Trust is at Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, E1 6BX, from Saturday 14th February.
In Norton Folgate, the magnificent array of nineteenth century warehouses on Blossom St and the adjoining handsome showrooms on Shoreditch High St form a unique composition of buildings – that was, from 1875 and until quite recently, the headquarters of Nicholls & Clarke, supplying hardware and ironmongery of all kinds.
Retaining only fragments of exteriors, British Land want to obliterate this complex under monolithic corporate office blocks of eleven to thirteen storeys, but thanks to Photographer Rachael Marshall we are able to assess the quality and appeal of these flexible spaces through her atmospheric pictures taken in 2010.
“My starting point was the fact that the creation of new buildings involves the destruction of landscapes and consumption of energy but 9% of property in the United Kingdom lies empty. In some parts of London this is 28%,” Rachael explained to me,”Shouldn’t bringing unused buildings back to life be expected in the same way that recycling a tin can is expected?”
Photographs copyright © Rachael Marshall
You will be able to visit these historic buildings for yourself between June 26th & 28th, when they host Best of Brittania 2015, featuring a dazzling array of British design and manufacture. Britain’s largest pop-up Department Store promises jewellery, shoes, mens’, womens’ & childrens’ clothes, home furnishings, bicycles & motorcars, food & drink, all produced in this country.
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Click here for a simple guide to HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY prepared by The Spitalfields Trust
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
The Spitalfields Trust’s SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition curated by The Gentle Author is at Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, E1
Click on the map to enlarge and study Norton Folgate in detail
Contributing Artist Adam Dant invokes an ancient curse upon despoilers in his new map which forms the centrepiece of the SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition at Dennis Severs House.
“This painstakingly hand-tinted lithograph is produced as a counter to the rapacious practices of the latest shower of uninspired London developers, architects and planners,” he informed me.
“Amongst renderings of the thoroughfares and vignettes of significant moments in the history of the neighbourhood, the beasts who perished in the dreadful fire at the London Aquarium stalk the witless cretins who seek to despoil the unique character of Norton Folgate,” Adam explained with relish, “The animals issue curses in the Jacobean tone of the areas former, colourful, thespian inhabitants.”
Adam Dant is producing a limited edition of thirty copies of his Map of Norton Folgate at £500 each – sized 30” x 22” and all hand-tinted by the artist. Contact AdamDant@gmail.com for purchase enquiries.
A certain Historian socks a certain Architect on the jaw
Click here for a simple guide to HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY prepared by The Spitalfields Trust
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
The Spitalfields Trust’s SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition curated by The Gentle Author is at Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, E1
Danish Illustrator Ebbe Sadolin (1900-82) visited London in the years following the War to capture the character of the capital, just recovering from the Blitz, in a series of lyrical drawings executed in elegant spidery lines. Remarkably, he included as many images of the East End as the West End and I publish a selection of favourites here from the forties.
George & Dragon, Shoreditch
St Katherine’s Way, Wapping
The Prospect of Whitby, Wapping
Stocks, Shoreditch
Petticoat Lane
Tower Green, Tower of London
The Olde Cheshire Cheese, Fleet St
Rough Sleeper, Shoreditch
Islington Green
Nightingale Lane, Wapping
Fleet St
Wapping churchyard
Tower of London
Commercial Rd, Stepney
St Pancras Station
High St, Plaistow
Bride of Denmark, Queen Anne’s Gate
Liverpool St Station
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Dan Cruickshank at the launch of the Norton Folgate campaign – photograph by Simon Mooney
Last year at a Public Inquiry, SAVE Britain’s Heritage & The Victorian Society fought against the redevelopment of Smithfield General Market and won a comprehensive victory when Eric Pickles, Secretary of State, confirmed the Planning Inspector’s verdict and threw out the plans. Bizarrely, English Heritage who are the government’s advisers on – and supposed champions for – historic buildings, took the side of the developer. They maintained that the gutting of Horace’s Jones’s great late nineteenth-century market for the insertion of an office block was acceptable.
At one point in the Inquiry, the developers even tried to convince the Inspector that the reuse in the new building of salvaged bits of the distinctive Phoenix columns from the original building which they were demolishing was a ‘sensitive restoration.’ Unsurprisingly, it was an argument that failed to impress the Inspector.
Yet, despite that landmark victory at Smithfield and the emphasis it placed upon the importance of protecting Conservation Areas, it appears English Heritage have not taken on board its implications. A year later in Norton Folgate, we find ourselves fighting another scheme threatening a Conservation Area in London with English Heritage on the developers’ side. Astonishingly, they have given their approval to the British Land scheme just as they gave their blessing to the Geffrye Museum’s proposal to demolish The Marquis of Lansdowne two years ago.
There are many echoes of the Smithfield case in the current battle for Norton Folgate. Like Henderson’s scheme at Smithfield, British Land’s proposal involves extensive demolition – in this case over 70% of all the existing fabric. It also involves mutilation of the sound historic buildings upon the site, including the fine warehouses on Blossom St, to allow the creation of large floor plates extending the entire length of the street. These will suit the requirements of the corporate financial industries of the City of London but will be of no use to the small businesses and tech companies that thrive in the East End.
At Smithfield Market, Henderson’s proposed keeping only a ‘crust’ of the old building and inserting offices behind it. Similarly, in Norton Folgate, British Land intend to retain a few facades and – just as at Smithfield – they propose, in one new building, to reuse some material salvaged from the old building they want to demolish. This is an approach that – bewilderingly – English Heritage describes as ‘sensitive restoration’ in their letter of advice to Tower Hamlets approving the scheme, which makes you wonder what ‘insensitive restoration’ could look like.
The folly of English Heritage’s position is exposed publicly in a new report by Alec Forshaw, an Independent Planning Consultant who was one of the heroes of the Smithfield victory. A universally-respected former Head of Conservation at Islington Council, Alec Forshaw has the insight and depth of experience to turn a case on its head through his quiet reasoning and brilliant analysis.
When the Spitalfields Trust approached Alec Forsaw, he recognised the injustice of British Land’s proposal and agreed to produce his own Appraisal for publication. His report examines the Norton Folgate scheme in light of Policy Guidance both nationally and locally, including Tower Hamlets’ own Conservation Area Appraisal. It is a devastating critique, dismantling the scheme point by point and exposing its dire shortcomings.
He rejects British Land’s argument, that the presence of tall buildings in Norton Folgate would mediate between the high-rise blocks in the City of London and the low-rise area to the east, as ‘dreadful and fatuous’ – and he condemns British Land’s stated aim of recycling salvaged fabric from demolition of the warehouses for reuse in one of their new office buildings as ‘vague …impossible to enforce’ and ‘meaningless.’
Alec Forshaw concludes -
“At the heart of this scheme are the aspirations of the land owners and their development partners for large floor-plate offices. It is an ambitious and expensive scheme to construct, and will require high rents from tenants to pay for it. It is the opposite of a light touch … A scheme with less intervention, which retained existing buildings, incorporated smaller scale infill, and provided a wider mix of uses in smaller units, would be cheaper to implement and more flexible for the future.”
“Measured against up-to-date national and local policy the current proposals are unacceptable and should be refused. They are contrary to Tower Hamlets’ planning and conservation policies and the Management Guidelines for the Elder Street Conservation Area …To approve the current scheme would be to threaten the very survival of not only the small Elder Street Conservation Area, but would put the wider Spitalfields and Shoreditch areas under further and greater threat.”
Alec Forshaw’s devastating report demonstrates that the Norton Folgate proposal – like the rejected Smithfield Market scheme – would result in an historic area of London being robbed of its distinctive spirit and sense of place which has evolved over centuries to reach its current atmospheric form.
British Land’s proposals ignore the successful genuinely conservation-led revitalisation of neighbouring areas which has been based on principles of repair and reuse. Instead, they set out to exploit the achievements of those who fought in recent decades to preserve the intimacy, complexity and meaning of one of London’s most fascinating and fragile historic enclaves. British Land have no scruple in sacrificing the neighbourhood to make money at the expense of local people.
Click here to read Alec Forshaw’s Appraisal of British Land’s Proposal in full
Norton Folgate as it is today
British Land want to remove over 70% of the fabric on their site in the Elder St Conservation Area
British Land want to increase the mass of the buildings by more than 50%
English Heritage describes this approach as ‘sensitive restoration‘
Architectural graphics by John Burrell of Burrell Foley Fischer
Click here for a simple guide to HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY prepared by The Spitalfields Trust
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
The Spitalfields Trust’s SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition curated by The Gentle Author is open today at Dennis Severs House and runs until March 15th
Behold the wonders of commerce and retail over a century ago, courtesy of the Hackney Year Book 1906 from the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute!
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Adverts from Shoreditch Borough Guide
On Sunday, Contributing Film-Maker Sebastian Sharples took a walk around Norton Folgate with Architectural Historian and Local Resident Dan Cruickshank, and this film is the result
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]
Click here for a simple guide to HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY prepared by The Spitalfields Trust
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
The Spitalfields Trust’s SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition curated by The Gentle Author is open today at Dennis Severs House and runs until March 15th
Rodney Archer as Edward II
I am proud to announce that I have persuaded Rodney Archer, the Aesthete of Fournier St, to take the title role of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II in a public reading of the play next Sunday 8th March at 6:30pm at The Water Poet in Folgate St, cast with a mixture of local people and luminaries of the theatrical profession, as part of the SAVE NORTON FOLGATE Cultural Festival.
We know Christopher Marlowe lived in Norton Folgate in 1589 and it seems likely that he wrote many of his most famous plays there including Edward II, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and The Massacre of Paris, some of which may have been performed at The Theatre and The Curtain nearby. Recent research into Elizabethan sewers and textual analysis of Edward II, published by the Journal of Early Modern Literary Studies - focussing upon the multiplicity of images of watercourses and drains in Marlowe’s script – suggests that it was written for The Theatre in Shoreditch and makes play upon the watery topography surrounding the building, as illustrated in the map below.
Click here to book your free ticket to see Rodney Archer in Marlowe’s Edward II
Christopher Marlowe lived in Norton Folgate
Map showing the position of The Theatre and the Soerditch by Joseph Quincy Adams, 1917
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Contributing Artist Adam Dant presents this map of Hackney that he has created as a complement to his maps of Shoreditch & Clerkenwell
1. In the sixteenth century, Hackney is the first village near London accommodated with coaches for occasional passengers, hence the name of Hackney carriages.
2. 1521 – Thomas More’s third daughter Cecilia marries Giles Herond in ‘Shackelwell’ & resides at an ancient manor there.
3. 1536 – Henry VIII is reconciled with his daughter Mary at Brook House, Hackney. Mary had not spoken to her father in five years.
4. 1559 – London’s last case of leprosy is recorded at St Bart’s isolation house, ‘The Lock Hospital.’ Established in 1280, it was Hackney’s first hospital.
5. 1598 – Playwright Ben Jonson kills fellow actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in the fields at Shoreditch and receives a felon’s brand on this thumb.
6. 1647 – The presence of Elizabeth of Bohemia & The Elector Palatine at an entertainment at ‘The Black & White house’ is commemorated in a window bearing their arms.
7. 1654 – Diarist John Evelyn visits Lady Brook’s celebrated garden at Brook’s House, Hackney.
8. 1682 – Prince Rupert discovers a new and excellent method of boring guns at his watermill in Homerton, but the secret of Prince Rupert’s metal dies with him.
9. 1701 – A bull baited by twelve dogs breaks loose at Temple Mills. Confusion and uproar ensue amongst the crowd of three thousand and a nine year old girl barely survives being tossed by the enraged animal.
10. 1750 – Legislature obliges people not to keep any other dogs but ‘such that are really useful’ after Charles Issacs at Hackney is bit by a dog and dies raving mad.
11. In the seventeenth century, the noted ‘Hackeny Buns’ of Goldsmith’s Row are as well regarded as those of ‘The Bun House’ at Chelsea.
12. 1665 – To be seen at Cooper’s Gardens for sixpence a person, the greatest curiosity that was ever seen, a white Dutch radish two feet and two inches round.
13. 1667 – In the church of St Augustine, Samuel Pepys eyes Abigail Vyner ‘a lady rich in Jewels but mostly in beauty, almost the finest woman that I ever saw.’
14. 1788 – In Cat & Mutton fields is seen the inhuman sport where any contestant catching ‘a soapy pig by the tail & holding it over his head’ wins a gold laced hat.
15. 1797 – The Hackney Militia gain a reputation for bumbling incompetence during the Napoleonic Wars.
16. 1811 – At The Mermaid Tavern pleasure gardens James Sadler & Captain Paget Royal Navy ascend in a balloon decorated in honour of The Prince Regent on his birthday.
17. 1787 – Plants from ‘Loddige’s Gardens’, originally owned by John Busch, gardener to Catherine the Great, are transferred to Crystal Palace.
18. 1805 – A stagecoach is broken to pieces and two ladies suffer severely when the vehicle overturns on the edge of a precipice at Hackney Wick.
19. 1816 – Brooke House, former home of Lady Brookes and Balmes House at Hoxton are opened as private lunatic asylums.
20. 1821 – Repairs are made at Hackney’s oldest brewery, Mrs Addison’s Woolpack Brewery on the Hackney Brook.
21. 1848 – Prince Albert opens The Hospital for Diseases of the Chest and in 1867 Princess Louise opens the North-Eastern Hospital for Sick Children in the Hackney Rd
22. 1850 – The construction of Victoria Park sweeps way hovels, formerly known as‘Botany Bay,’ and the inhabitants who are sent to another place bearing the same name.
23. 1866 – At the Parkesine Works in Wallis Rd and Berkshire Rd, Alexander Parkes manufactures the world’s first plastic.
24. 1880. – Hackney Wick firm Carless Capel & Leonard claim to have invented the term ‘petrol’ (St Peter’s Oil).
25. 1902 – Smallpox re-surfaces in Hackney with contagion found in a family of costermongers living in filthy conditions in Sanford Lane.
26. 1959 – Richard Burton films a scene for John Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’ at Dalston Junction Railway Station.
27. 1952 – The great fog causes death and chaos in Hackney when a motor-cyclist collides with a bus, a man dies on a railway line and crime has a little hey-day.
28. 1964 – Teenagers at The Dalston Dance Hall adopt the ‘purple heart’ pill popping craze.
29. 1970 – M.O.D investigates the sighting of a U.F.O over Hackney by Mr Douglas Lockhart, gliding across a clear sky at 11.35pm on a Saturday night.
30. 2007 – Terry Castle and volunteers at Bethune Rd unearth a hoard of Nazi twenty dollar gold coins whilst digging a frog pond.
31. 2011 – Grandmother Pauline Pearce ‘Hero of Hackney’ bravely stands up to a gang of looting rioters at the Pembury Estate.
32. Thousands of ‘booze fuelled revellers’ leave a trail of destruction along the Regents Canal ‘Canalival’ floating party.
The map of Hackney Old & New was commissioned from Adam Dant by James Goff who has been a patron of artists in Hackney since the eighties and you may see the original displayed in the Hackney office of Stirling Ackroyd in Mare St.
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Adam Dant’s Stories of Shoreditch Old & New
Adam Dant’s Stories of Clerkenwell Old & New
Trinity Green Almshouses, Mile End
You only have until this Sunday 8th March to catch Sophie Charalambous‘ exhibition at Jessica Carlisle Gallery. I was captivated by the soulful melancholy beauty of Sophie’s paintings of London from the moment I saw them, so Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I went over to visit her yesterday at her studio in London Fields where she has been working in an old garment factory for the past fifteen years. While her faithful hound who sneaks his way into many of the paintings dozed on the sofa, Sophie showed us her sketchbooks and I recognised a kindred spirit in Sophie’s love of the Thames – a romance nurtured by regular visits to the foreshore at Wapping and finding expression in magnificent moody paintings.
House by the Thames at Bankside
Drovers in London Fields
Sophie Charalambous
Life, Still, Winter
Pageant
Wapping Pierhead
On the Beach at Wapping Pierhead
Sketch for Wapping Pierhead, with raindrops
Warehouses in Wapping
Sketch for Trinity Green Almshouses, Whitechapel
Sophie Charalambous in her studio in London Fields
Paintings copyright © Sophie Charalambous
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Sophie Charalambous’ exhibition is at Jessica Carlisle Gallery, 83 Kinnerton St, SW1X 8ED, until Sunday 8th March at 6pm
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Madge Darby, Historian of Wapping
If any readers are considering investing in new outfits for spring, they might find some ideas here in these plates of over a century ago from Capper & Sons of 63 & 64 Gracechurch St, High Class Tailors, Riding Habit & Breeches Makers, & Juvenile Outfitters, courtesy of the Bishopsgate Insitute.
Single Breasted Chesterfield Overcoat – in soft black and blue llama
Cappers’ ‘Seymour’ Coat - made in new west of England waterproof coatings
Lounge Jacket Suit - in all the latest shades of Cashmere
Double Breasted Loung or Yachting Suit - in navy blue serge or cheviots and striped flannels
Morning Coat & Waistcoat - in black cheviot, llama and various cloths
Frock Coat & Waistcoat - in black Vicuna with silk facings
Double Breasted Chesterfield Overcoat – in Venetians, Beavers and Vicunas
Double Breasted Travelling Ulster - in waterproof but not airproof cloth
Dress Jacket Suit – in fine elastic twill or vicuna
Dress Suit - lined throughout in silk with silk facings
Norfolk Jacket & Knicker Suit - in west of England, Scotch & Irish tweeds
Boys’ Harrow Suit - in Cappers’ indestructible school suitings
Boys’ Eton Suit - made to measure in fine elastic twill
Cappers’ ‘Cottesmore’ Habit - with Norfolk plaits back and front
Cappers’ Quorn Habit - in fine Meltonian cloth for hard wear
Images Courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You might like to read these other stories about commerce in Bishopsgate & Gracechurch St
Businesses in Bishopsgate 1892
At James Ince & Sons, Umbrella Makers
Charles Goss’ Bishopsgate Photographs
Burne-Jones’ Works in the East End
These photos record the moment when Horace Warner introduced the Spitalfields Nippers to the Whitechapel Gallery at its opening in 1901. Now it is my pleasure, over a century later, to present the Spitalfields Nippers at The National Portrait Gallery in an illustrated lecture on Thursday April 2nd at 7pm, showing the photographs and telling the stories surrounding their creation.
Sir Edward Burne-Jones “If hope were not, hearts should break”
Tired of Art – A little Dorset St sleeper in Whitechapel Picture Gallery
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Click here to order a copy of Horace Warner’s SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS
