“I haven’t time in my life for much else than work”

These photographs show Sir John James Baddeley, Baronet – known colloquially as ‘JJ’ – taking a Sunday morning walk with his wife through the empty City of London in 1922, when he was Lord Mayor and residing at the Mansion House.

With his top hat, cane and Edwardian beard, the eighty-year-old gentleman looks the epitome of self-confident respectability and worldly success, yet there is a poignancy in his excursion through the deserted streets, when the hubbub of the week was stilled, pausing to gaze into the windows of the shabby little printshops that competed to supply letterheads and engraved stationery to the banks, stock-brokers and insurance companies of the City.

In those days, all transactions and share issues required elaborately-engraved forms and there was a legal obligation to list all the directors on business notepaper which needed constant reprinting and adjustment of the dies whenever there were staff changes. Consequently, the City of London teemed with small highly-specialised companies eager to fulfil the constant demand for all this printed paper.

At the time of these photographs, nearly sixty years had passed since, at the age of twenty-three in October 1865, JJ had set up independently as a die sinker in a shared workshop in Little Bell Alley at the back of the Bank of England under entirely inauspicious circumstances. The eldest of thirteen children, JJ had already acquired plenty of experience of the long hours of labour required to scrape a modest living in the trade of die-sinking and engraving when he was apprenticed to his father at fourteen years old in Hackney.

Even by the standards of nineteenth century fiction, it was an extraordinary story of personal advancement. JJ oversaw the transformation of his business from an artisan trade to an industrialised process employing hundreds in a single factory. Born into an ever-increasing family that struggled to keep themselves, he inherited a powerful work ethos and a burning desire to overcome the injustice his father had suffered. JJ can only have been a driven man, the eldest brother who set his own modest industry in motion and then drew in his younger siblings to assist with spectacular results.

“In January 1857, I started my business life with my father in his workshop in Hackney at the back of the house at the Triangle in Mare St where I first donned a white apron, turned up my shirt sleeves and did all sorts of jobs,” he wrote of his apprenticeship in the trade of die sinking, “sweeping up and lighting the forge fire, warming the dies and later forging them on the anvil, then annealing them and afterwards filing them to shape and, when engraved, hardening them and tempering them.”

“During the whole time there, I was the errand boy, taking the dies and stamps to the few customers that my father had, Jarrett at No 3 Poulty being the chief one,” he recalled at the end of his life, “Many a time have I trudged – in winter with my feet crippled with chilblains – to the Poultry and at night to his other shop in Regent St. During the time I was at work with my father I had very good health, but we were all poorly-clad and none of the children had overcoats.”

In 1851, Griffith Jarrett exhibited his popular embossing press at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, ordering the dies from JJ’s father who took on a larger house for his growing family and more apprentices on the basis of this seemingly-endless new source of income. Yet Griffith Jarrett exploited the situation mercilessly, inducing JJ’s father to make dies for him alone, then driving the prices down and eventually turning JJ’s father into a mere journeyman who worked like a slave and found he had little left after he had paid his production costs, impoverishing the family.

When, as a boy, JJ walked through the snow at night to deliver the dies for his father to Griffith Jarrett’s Regent St shop at 8pm or 10pm, Jarrett sometimes gave JJ tuppence to ride part of the way home. It was an offence of meagre omission that JJ never forgot.  “These two pennies were the beginnings of my savings which enabled me to set up in business for myself and to defy the man who for more than twenty years had my father in his clutches,” admitted JJ in later years.

“I began work by doing simple dies for my father at journeyman prices and began making traces, stops, commas, letter punches and other small tools. By the end of the year, I managed to get a few orders for dies from Messrs John Simmons & Sons who had a warehouse in Norton Folgate,” he recorded, looking back on his small beginnings in the light of his big success, “I turned out my work quicker than my competitors and gave better personal attention to my customers, trusting to this rather than obtaining orders by quoting lower prices.”

“These were very strenuous and hard working times, I commenced work at nine and seldom leaving before ten o’clock at night,” he confessed – but twenty years later, in 1885, the company occupied a six storey factory at the corner of Moor Lane and employed more than three hundred people. It was an astonishing outcome.

Yet, while embracing the potential of technological progress so effectively, JJ possessed an equal passion for craft and tradition – especially the history of Cripplegate where he became a Warden. “In 1889, an attempt to take down the St Giles Church Tower, after a good fight I saved it,” he wrote with succint satisfaction. Later, devoting a year of his life to writing an authoritative history of Cripplegate, he prefaced it with the words – “Let us never live where there is nothing ancient, nothing to connect us with our forefathers.”

No wonder then that, as an old man, John James Baddeley chose to stroll through the empty streets of London on Sunday mornings, pausing to look into old print shop windows, and consider his own place in the long history of printing and the City.

John James Baddeley’s business card

Over 300 hands were employed at Baddeley Brothers in Moor Lane, 1888

Engineering & Press Making Dept in the basement

Paper & Envelope Department on the first floor where over fifty hands are employed in envelope making, gumming, black and silver bordering, scoring etc

Die Sinking & Engraving Dept – The largest in the trade, twenty-one die sinkers are employed alongside twenty-one copperplate engravers and eight wood engravers.

Litho Dept on the second floor with fourteen copperplate presses, three litho machines, nine litho presses and three Waddie lithos

The view from the Mansion House in 1922

JJ in the Venetian Parlour at the Mansion House

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Does anyone know where Finsbury is anymore? If you ask people, they say “Do you mean Finsbury Park or Finsbury Sq?” It seems that the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury is as lost to us as Atlantis, El Dorado or Shangri La.

Studying Colin O’Brien’s wonderful photographs of Finsbury in the fifties in his forthcoming ‘London Life‘ brought this now-defunct Borough to mind, but it was Arnold Bennett who first led to me to Finsbury to seek the locations of his plangent novel of the booksellers of Clerkenwell, ‘Riceyman Steps.’ Thus it was that I decided to set out with my camera yesterday on a return visit in search of old Finsbury.

Finsbury occupied the site of an ancient fen that lay north of the City of London, but it only formally came into existence as a Parliamentary Borough in 1832 and by 1965 it was absorbed into Islington. Yet Finsbury may be said to be the territory west of Shoreditch, north of the City, east of Holborn and south of Islington – although, in my mind, the heart of Finsbury is around the old Finsbury town hall and it was this area that I chose to explore.

Walking up from Farringdon Station, along Turnmills St and Farringdon Lane, you encounter some of London’s earliest Peabody flats. Finsbury was well served by high quality social housing, from these handsome Victorian brick tenements to the post-war modernist Finsbury Estate on the other side of Clerkenwell – and it is the sympathetic counterpoint between these developments and the old terraces of the bourgeoise that define the personality of the place. A great many of the streets in Finsbury have not changed since Arnold Bennett’s time and the shabby old London that he wrote of may still be glimpsed by the perceptive visitor.

Crossing Rosebery Avenue and walking up Amwell St, you meet fine early-nineteenth century terraces and peaceful squares where a stillness prevails that is exceptional in central London. Major roads hem these streets and render them as backwaters without through traffic.

Willmington Sq is the first you discover, constructed around a small overgrown park and of pleasing domestic scale. Further up the hill, Myddelton Sq is the grandest in Finsbury yet you barely encounter a car there. City University fills up the lost part of Northampton Sq that was demolished, delivering students onto the lawn and encouraging an unexpected atmosphere of youthful fête champêtre.

Lastly, I would never have discovered Granville Sq, if I had not gone in search of ‘Riceyman Steps’ where the protagonist of Arnold Bennett’s novel had his bookshop. Although the bookshops of the steps are long-gone, this modestly-proportioned square paved with old flags and punctuated by manhole covers produced by local foundries is one of my favourites in the capital. Granville Sq may truly said to be part of the London nobody knows.

Looking up Farringdon Lane

Looking  along Clerkenwell Rd

Inside Three Kings, Clerkenwell Close

In Pear Tree Court

In Clerkenwell Close

Finsbury Health Centre by Berthold Lubetkin

Joseph Grimaldi lived in Exmouth Market

At the junction of Exmouth Market and Rosebery Avenue

Finsbury Town Hall

Passageway to Lloyd Baker Sq

In Great Percy St

At George Cruikshank’s house in Amwell St

Fig Tree at Clerkenwell Parochial School in Amwell St

Lloyd’s Dairy in Amwell St

In Myddleton Sq

St Mark’s, Myddleton Sq

In Myddleton Sq

In Arlington Way

City University, St John St

In Northampton Sq

In Margery St

In Lloyd Baker St

In Lloyd Baker St

In Granville Sq

Gwynne Place also known as ‘Riceyman Steps’ – leading from Granville Sq to King’s Cross Rd

‘Riceyman Steps’ in 1924

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In Old Clerkenwell

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Tim Hunkin at work on his Small Hadron Collider

Apart from the brief trauma of getting locked in the lavatory, it was a relatively uneventful rail journey from Liverpool St up to Suffolk to visit the workshop of Engineer & Cartoonist Tim Hunkin beside the estuary of the river Blythe. A bumpy ride in Tim’s van along the pot-holed track only served to heighten my expectation as we arrived at the water’s edge, where a vast expanse of mud stretched to the horizon reflecting the dramatic East Anglian sky.

A statue of Michael Faraday, parked beside an enormous clock face, a hen coop and a giant pocket calculator, welcomes you the world of Tim Hunkin. Since 1976, Tim has lived here in a cottage at the end of a long brick farmhouse and worked in a series of venerable black weatherboarded sheds. “Back then, The Observer agreed to pay my train fare to London once a fortnight,” he explained, “and that meant I was able to leave London and come to live out here.”

For decades, Tim contributed his Rudiments of Wisdom cartoon strip to the Sunday magazine, but gradually the slot machines took over and now he has two arcades of them – The Under the Pier Show in Southwold and the newly-opened, Novelty Automation in Holborn.

It was a humbling experience to enter the lair of the great inventor and observe him at work. All around were fragments of mechanical devices and intriguing pieces of junk that might one day contribute to one of his creations. Over nearly forty years, Tim has got everything nicely organised, with a wood workshop, a metal workshop, an engineering shop, all kinds of machines, and vast stocks of timber, metal and other stuff.

In spite of the apparent chaos, it is obvious that Tim knows where everything is and can lay his hand upon anything he might require at a moment’s notice. “I’m happiest when I am here in my workshop,” he confided to me and I was startled by the beauty of this unlikely factory, surrounded by trees coming into blossom and all the lush plant growth at the beginning of summer.

The premise of my visit was to view Tim’s latest invention, his Small Hadron Collider which is being unveiled at Novelty Automation in London today and you can go along to try for yourself from tomorrow. Conceived as a satire upon the bizarre world of Particle Physics, it is a based upon a seventies Japanese Patchinko machine that Tim imported from America.

After taking it apart and putting it back together again, Tim created various functions of his own devising and added flip signs with slogans from the world of Quantum Dynamics. Thus Tim’s machine permits even the entirely uneducated individual to have a lot of fun ‘playing’ at Particle Physics and, with only a modicum of application, it is possible to win a Nobel Prize. Who ever dreamed that Scientific Theory could offer such idle amusement?

Whenever Tim finds himself at a loose end or in need of inspiration, he jumps into his old van, negotiates the bumpy track and drives over to enjoy the laughter of visitors at his arcade on the pier at Southwold. I had the privilege of accompanying him that day and, even on a weekday in early summer, we discovered a lively throng. Most remarkable to me was the woman who took a break from walking her dogs to enjoy the dog-walking machine while her patient husband stood holding the leads. Dumbstruck with wonder, I stood contemplating the profound implication of this curious spectacle.

This woman loved walking her dogs so much that she could not resist Tim’s dog-walking machine which offered a virtual experience of equal or superior quality to actual dog-walking. It was the perfect metaphor of our paradoxical relationship with technology and a personal triumph for Tim.

To the Amusements

Tim solves a problem in Quantum Dynamics on his laptop

Tim searches for a screw

Tim demonstrates his metal pressing machine from Clerkenwell

Tim enjoys a thoughtful moment outside his workshop on the estuary of the river Blythe

At Southwold Pier

A woman takes a break from dog walking

Tim’s water clock

Southwold seen from the pier

NOVELTY AUTOMATION at 1a Princeton St, Bloomsbury, WC1. Wednesdays 11am – 6pm, Thursdays 11am – 7pm, Fridays 11am – 6pm & Saturdays 11am – 6pm

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Tim Hunkin, Cartoonist & Engineer

Click to enlarge Adam Dant’s Map of Huguenots in Spitalfields

Last year, we asked readers with Huguenot ancestors who once lived in this neck of the woods to come along to place their forebears on the Map of Huguenots in Spitalfields at Townhouse in Fournier St and more than three hundred of you did so.

Cartographer extraordinaire Adam Dant drew a huge map as big as a wall and Stanley Rondeau, whose great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jean Rondeau arrived as an immigrant in 1685, was the very first put a pin in it to mark his ancestor. Now Adam Dant has painstakingly inscribed all the entries on the map and it is almost full.

Before the Map of Huguenots in Spitalfields is printed shortly, it will be displayed again at the Townhouse for the week beginning June 1st – so those who have ancestors on it may come along to check that the facts are correct and offering a last chance for anyone who wishes their Huguenot forebears to be included.

Later in the month, the Map of Huguenots in Spitalfields will be available as as limited edition print and everyone whose ancestors are on it will be invited to a party to meet each other and witness the unveiling of the completed map.

Spitalfields was the most concentrated Huguenot settlement in Britain of the twenty-five thousand French Protestants who fled across the Channel, to save their lives after the Revocation of the Act of Nantes, in 1685 – and who thereby introduced the word refugee into the English language.

Stanley places his ancestor Jean Rondeau on the map

Stanley Rondeau, Spitalfields’ most celebrated Huguenot

Stanley Rondeau congratulates Adam Dant on his Huguenot Map of Spitalfields

Stanley recounts the tale of the Rondeaus of Spitalfields for Adam

Photograph of map © Patricia Niven

Photographs of Stanley Rondeau & Adam Dant © Sarah Ainslie

The Map of Huguenots in Spitalfields is at Townhouse, 5 Fournier St, during the week beginning 1st June and the completed map will be unveiled later in the month.

Click here to learn more about the HUGUENOT SUMMER festival

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Last Sunday, I told the story of John James Baddeley, the journeyman die sinker who rose to become Lord Mayor of London in 1922, and this week I explore the origins of this extraordinary family endeavour which spans five centuries and innumerable generations, and whose specialist printing business Baddeley Brothers still flourishes in Hackney

A mahogany four-train musical and quarter chiming longcase clock playing seven tunes, made by John Baddeley of Albrighton in Shropshire c.1760 (courtesy of Bonhams, London)

The celebrated Engraver and Satirist, William Hogarth, was first apprenticed as a Silver Engraver, while his contemporary, William Caslon, the father of British Letter Founding, was originally apprenticed to a Gunsmith – thus it comes as no surprise to discover a certain Phineas Baddeley apprenticed as a Clockmaker. You only have to look at the elegant italic lettering upon the engraved face of this fine eighteenth century longcase clock by John Baddeley to recognise the seamless nature of related trades in this era and the possibility of advancement for talented artisans who could redirect their skills to the most advantageous reward.

A skill in the creation of intricate and precise metalwork serves a Clockmaker, but may also be lent to the design of instruments. While draughtsmanship and the ability to carve lettering into metal plates permits an Engraver to create attractive designs for clients, he is also able to produce the printed copies too. Thus, in possessing technical and aesthetic skills equally, artisans were both designers and manufacturers, and through successive generations of Baddeleys, each apprenticed to the one before, individuals with diverse specialities found different ways to make an independent living.

As you will appreciate, this is a tale of many Baddeleys – and the earliest record of any of them is of Phineas Baddeley’s apprenticeship in July 1652  and his admittance at twenty-one years old to the Clockmakers’ Company in the City of London in 1661. Phineas established himself in Tong, situated on the boundary of Staffordshire and Shropshire with the Blue Mountains of Wales to the west and the Black Country, cradle of the Industrial Revolution, to the east. For subsequent generations in this border country, the Baddeleys enjoyed a significant reputation as clock and watchmakers, and a clock by John Baddeley of Albrighton counted out the hours at the church in Tong until 1983.

In the eighteenth century, John Baddeley rose to become a member of the Royal Society, was reputedly a clockmaker to George III (who collected more than two thousand timepieces) and, turning his attention to barometers and optics, invented a new type of refraction telescope. At his demise, he was recorded as ‘Gent’ in the Parish Register and commemorated by an unusual cast iron tomb in Albrighton churchyard, upon which the date of his death on January 25th 1804 is still legible as testimony to the enduring quality of his innovative memorial, most likely cast in the foundries of Coalbrookdale, less than ten miles away.

While other members of the Baddeley family embraced the possibilities of industry burgeoning in the shires around them, diversifying into producing jewellery in Birmingham and pottery in Stoke on Trent, it was John Rock Baddeley, born in 1797 in ‘The Cape of Good Hope,’ his father Thomas’s pub in Staffordshire, who first made his fortune in London. Remembered by subsequent generations as, “A clever draughtsman and very skilful die sinker, chiefly of jewellery spoon dies, badges and livery button dies,” John Rock married in Lewisham in 1818, but set set up home with his wife Lucy at 27 Seward St, Clerkenwell, where they had seven children.

It was a strategic location John Rock chose, positioned within proximity of the jewellery trade in Hatton Garden yet in the very midst of the clockmaking and printing industry which defined Clerkenwell at that time, ensuring professional security through the widest range of opportunities for employment. By 1841, he was in 63 Compton St- the next street to his brother Thomas, who had set up as an engraver in Rahere St, Clerkenwell. Although we know of no evidence they collaborated professionally, these two might be said to be the original ‘Baddeley Brothers’ who, by working as die sinkers and engravers at the fringe of the City of London, established a pattern of family industry in specialist printing which persists through their descendants to this day.

In the early nineteenth century, Hackney was still a rural area and, as a passionate fisherman, John Rock took keen advantage of it – setting out weekly with his rod and line north-eastward from Clerkenwell towards the White House Inn on the Hackney Marshes in search of sport. Besides founding the ‘True Waltonian Society’ in honour of Izaak Walton, whose ‘The Compleat Angler’ recorded Walton’s exploits fishing on the River Lea in the seventeenth century, John Rock was himself author of ‘The London Angler’s Book or Waltonian Chronicle’ which he published in 1834. As the sole surviving example of his engraving, his elegantly playful membership card for the Waltonian Society, designed in 1820, is the earliest Baddeleys’ print sample and a modest yet apt means to remember him.

Perhaps it was the connection to the White House Inn that led to John Rock’s son (who styled himself John Baddeley Junior, Engraver) marrying Elizabeth Beresford whose father was a Bailiff on the River Lea and ran a commercial fishery there? In 1841, after John Baddeley Junior had a completed a seven year apprenticeship to his father in Clerkenwell, the couple set up their first home in Goldsmith’s Row off Hackney Rd. The introduction of Rowland Hill’s Penny Post in 1840 boosted the trade for notepaper and envelopes in London, opening up the possibility to create all manner of personalised designs for stationery, often ornamented with crests and monograms.

Consequently, John Baddeley Junior’s business thrived and, in 1853, the growing family moved to a house in the Triangle, Mare St, with a large garden and a laundry which they converted into a workshop. So it was that they truly arrived in Hackney, at a location less than a hundred yards from where Baddeley Brothers now operates, more than one hundred and fifty years later.

“He made my die dish, spanner and a set of hammers,” recalled John Rock’s grandson John James Baddeley fondly, when he first set up on his own in Little Bell Alley in the City of London  in 1865, drawing intimate consolation from the generations of skilled endeavour that lay behind him at the anxious moment of commencement of his own chapter in the story of Baddeleys.

Mahogany eight day longcase clock by Thomas Baddeley c.1715 (courtesy of Bonhams, London)

John Baddeley’s Prayerbook 1779

John Rock Baddeley’s design for a membership card for the True Waltonian Society, 1830

John James Baddeley’s annotation upon the reverse of the card, confirming it as the earliest surviving Baddeleys’ printing sample

Clerkenwell in 1820 before the railway came through

Izaak Walton’s house on the corner of Chancery Lane and Fleet St

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Thanks in no small part to the campaign waged by readers of Spitalfields Life in spring 2013, Hackney Council refused the Geffrye Museum permission to demolish the 1838 Marquis of Lansdowne in Cremer St as part of a redevelopment designed by David Chipperfield that would have seen the pub replaced by a concrete box. It was the success of this campaign that led to the founding of The East End Preservation Society in November 2013.

Subsequently, the Geffrye responded to public opinion by creating a better scheme for development of the museum, designed by Wright & Wright which includes the Marquis of Lansdowne restored and opens up new areas of the almshouses. Yesterday this proposal was granted an award of eleven million pounds by the Heritage Lottery Fund - which is a very satisfactory result for all parties.

Perhaps no-one is happier than George Barker who was born in the Marquis of Lansdowne in 1931 and whose family ran the pub for three generations, from before 1915 until after World War II, serving the joiners, wood turners, cabinet makers and french polishers of Haggerston.

The Marquis of Lansdowne

George Barker was born in the upper room of The Marquis of Lansdowne in 1931. It was his family home, spanning three generations of Barkers – his grandfather William who came from a village in East Anglia at the end of the nineteenth century, his mother Lilian who ran the pub alone through the war and opened up every day during the Blitz, and lastly himself, the one who got a grammar school education and a Masters degree in Maths and has lived for the last fifty years in a beautiful house in Chorleywood.

No infamous killer took his victim to The Marquis of Lansdowne for her last drink. Charles Dickens did not visit The Marquis of Lansdowne and base a character in one of his novels upon a local eccentric discovered propping up the bar. In fact, the story of The Marquis of Lansdowne is a more important one that either of these, it is that of the working people who lived in the surrounding streets, for whom it was the centre of their community and meeting place for their extended families. In this sense, it is a quintessential East End pub and the history of this place cannot be told without reference to these people.

Haggerston has changed almost beyond recognition in recent decades and, all this time, The Marquis of Lansdowne has remained as the lone sentinel of a lost world. Yet when George Barker told me the story of his family and the life they led there, he brought that world alive.

“My earliest memory is of being a kid playing on the street, everybody played on the street in those days. A couple of times, I went into the Geffrye Museum and we collected caterpillars in the gardens. They used to have a playground with swings and a place to play football at the back of the museum.

I was born at The Marquis of Lansdowne in February 1931, but my family’s involvement with the pub goes back to the beginning of the century. My grandfather William George Barker told me that the Barker family came from a group of villages near Ipswich, moving to Hoxton at the end of the nineteenth century. He came to London in 1899 and worked as a barman for a year in the East End before becoming a policeman for twenty years.

Frederick Daniel Barker, my grandfather’s brother, was licensee of The Marquis of Lansdowne until he died of TB in 1919, when my grandfather took it over from Frederick’s wife Mary Ann. Then, when my grandfather died in the thirties, my father George Stanley Barker took it over until he died in 1937 when my mother Lily ran it. She remarried in 1939 and, as Lilian Edith Trendall, she held the license until 1954 when her husband Frederick Trendall took over after her death. I think they all made a living but it wasn’t a terribly easy life.

We had a side bar and then another one on the corner we called the darts bar, as well as the front bar and the saloon bar. Even then, there were redundant doors which meant that at one time the pub was divided up into more bars. The saloon bar had upholstered bench seats and bar stools, but the other bars just had wooden benches with Victorian marble-topped tables. The curved bar itself was in the centre, spanning all the divisions with a tall central construction for display of spirits and optics, and the beer pumps were in the front bar. I remember, as you came in the side door from Geffrye St, the wall had a large decorative painted panel advertising Charrington’s Beer and there were mirrors at the rear. The pub windows were of etched and cut glass, and above the main door was an illuminated panel with the words ‘Toby Beer.’ It was a Charrington pub and a wagon came with dray horses to deliver once a week from the brewery in Mile End. Further down Cremer St was the Flying Scud, a Truman’s pub, and the Star & Pack, a Whitbread pub.

On the Geffrye St side of the building was a kitchen which was – in effect – where we all lived, and an office. Above the kitchen was my bedroom, with a window looking onto Geffrye St and the railway arches. On the first floor at the corner was the front room where we didn’t go very often, and the main bedroom – where I was born – was on Cremer St, divided from the front room by a construction of wooden panels, as if it once had been one big room. All the arches were coal depots in those days. It was brought by railway every morning at six thirty and all the coal men would be filling sacks, and bringing their horses and wagons to carry it away. But it never woke me up though, because I got used to it.

In those days, on one side of the pub was a terrace of houses and on the other there were three shops. I remember Mrs Lane who ran the sweet shop next door and Mrs Stanley who had a cats’ meat shop where they sold horsemeat. In the thirties, there was a couple of fellows making springs for prams in the building across the road which became a garage in the nineteen forties. I recall there was a baker’s on the other side of the street too and H.Lee, a big furniture manufacturer, on the corner of the Kingsland Rd.

My mother, Lily, ran The Marquis of Lansdowne singled-handed through World War II. It was heavily bombed in the surrounding streets and, when there were raids, she took shelter in the spirit cellar which had been reinforced with stanchions. She had grown up in the area, and most people knew her and she knew them, and they had been to school together. She was quite an outgoing woman who enjoyed a bit of banter and a lot of chat with the customers. She was the daughter of James Wilson who ran the scrap iron yard opposite across Cremer St under a couple of arches. He started the business there and he had a place in Tottenham, so he left his three sons to run it.

There was a friendly community on our doorstep, she ran the pub and her three brothers ran the scrap iron business across the road, and there was another uncle called Harmsworth who had another two arches where he ran a furniture business – one of my aunts married him. All my uncles and aunts lived within about one hundred yards of each other. They were the Barkers, the Wilsons and the Cheeks. A Barker married a Wilson and then a Wilson married a Cheek and then a Cheek married a Barker. My mother had another three children with my stepfather in the forties, and we all lived together in the Marquis of Lansdowne. There was me and my sister Eileen, plus the twins Maureen and Christine, and their younger brother Freddie.

At the age of eight, I was evacuated during the Blitz, but when I came back it was still quite dangerous so I went to stay with an aunt in Kensal Green. I never lost contact because I cycled over at weekends and moved back at the end of the war when I was thirteen.

In the fifties, the business started to drift away. People didn’t have much money and television came along, so it could be quiet on week nights but it was always busy at weekends, and for celebrations like VE Day and the Coronation we got a special licence and opened from midday until midnight. Even if people had moved away, they came back for Saturday evenings to meet with their relatives and friends. I would be serving behind the bar – probably a little younger than I should have been – and by the age of eighteen I was regularly working there. I always looked after the place when they went in holiday.

My mother died in 1954 and my stepfather took over the pub. I studied for a Masters Degree in Maths at Woolwich Polytechnic and I was away from 1954-56 doing National Service. In 1957, I left The Marquis of Lansdowne forever – I was working for Hawker Aircraft in Langley by then. I only went back occasionally after that, not too often. As people moved out, it started dwindling away and I think my stepfather sold it to a family called Freeland who had been coalmen under the arches and then he moved away too.

If it had been up to me, I probably would have become a publican but I wasn’t going to wait for everyone else to die off first and, because of the war, I went to grammar school and then to university. I haven’t been back to Haggerston since the nineteen sixties.”

George Barker in the yard at The Marquis of Lansdowne aged six in 1937

George Barker was born in the bedroom facing onto Cremer St, indicated by the window on the left.

At The Marquis of Lansdowne, 1957. George Barker on right, aged twenty-five, with sister Eileen, centre back. The other three are his half-brothers and sisters from his mother Lilians second marriage to Frederick Trendall. The twin girls are Maureen on the left and Christine on right, with their brother Freddie between them.

George Stanley Barker & Lilian Edith Wilson, married at St Leonards, Shoreditch on 7th September 1929. Lilian ran the pub after the death of her husband in 1937 until she died in 1954.

Ex-policeman William George Barker who ran The Marquis of Lansdowne from 1919 – photographed in 191o, with his wife Annie Susannah Oakenfold and son George Stanley Barker, who took over from his father and ran the pub until 1937.

20th December 1911, William George Barker is reprimanded for bring caught in pubs in Shoreditch and Spitalfields while on duty as a policeman – eight years later he became landlord of The Marquis of Lansdowne and spent the rest of his life in a pub. - “Inattention to duty and wasting his time by being off his Division and being in the White Hart Public House, High St, Shoreditch, out of the City from 3:30 to 4:50pm (1 hour & 2o minutes) while on duty on 13th instant. Also, being in the King’s Stores Public House, Widegate St, from 5:05 to 5:40pm (35 minutes) while on duty, same date.”

February 22nd 1919, William George Barker applies to leave the police to take over the running of The Marquis of Lansdowne from his sister-in-law after the death of his brother Frederick Daniel Barker. “I respectfully beg to apply to the Commissioner for permission to resign my appointment as Constable in the City of London Police Force, one month from the above date. My reason for doing so is that my sister-in-law Mrs Mary Ann Barker Licensee of The Marquis of Lansdowne Public House, No 32 Cremer St, Kingsland Rd, is unable to carry on the business in consequence of a nervous breakdown and she wishes me to hold the license and conduct the business on my own responsibility.”

May 9th 1919, Charrington’s, Anchor Brewery, Mile End, seeks a reference for William George Barker from the Commissioner of Police at Snow Hill. Presumably, the incidents of Christmas 1911 were discreetly forgotten.

Dating from the Regency era, The Marquis of Lansdowne is the only old building left on Cremer St

George Barker is delighted that his childhood home is saved

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The Pub That Was Saved By Irony

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Henry Croft

Trafalgar Sq is famous for the man perched high above it on the column, but I recently discovered another man hidden underneath the square who hardly anybody knows about and he is just as interesting to me. I have no doubt that if you were to climb up Nelson’s Column, the great Naval Commander standing on the top would have impressive stories to tell of Great Sea Battles and how he conquered the French, though – equally – if you descend into the crypt of St Martin in the Fields, the celebrated Road Sweeper who resides down there has his stories too.

Yet as one who was born in a workhouse and died in a workhouse, Henry Croft’s tales would be of another timbre to those of Horatio Nelson and some might say that the altitude history has placed between the man on the pedestal and the man in the cellar reflects this difference. Unfortunately, it is not possible to climb up Nelson’s Column to explore his side of this notion but it is a simple matter for anyone to step down into the crypt and visit Henry, so I hope you will take the opportunity when you next pass through Trafalgar Sq.

Henry Croft stands in the furthest, most obscure, corner far away from the busy cafeteria, the giftshop, the bookshop, the brass rubbing centre and the art gallery, and I expect he is grateful for the peace and quiet. Of diminutive stature at just five feet, he stands patiently with an implacable expression waiting for eternity, the way that you or I might wait for a bus. Yet in the grand scheme of things, he has not been waiting here long. Only since since 2002, when his life-size marble statue was removed to St Martin in the Fields from St Pancras Cemetery after being vandalised several times and whitewashed to conceal the damage.

Born in Somers Town Workhouse in 1861 and raised there after the death of his father who was a musician, it seems Henry inherited his parent’s showmanship, decorating his suit with pearl buttons while working as a Road Sweeper from the age of fifteen. Father of twelve children and painfully aware of the insecurities of life, Henry launched his own personal system of social welfare by drawing attention with his ostentatious outfit and collecting money for charities including Public Hospitals and Temperance Societies.

As self-appointed ‘Pearlie King of Somers Town,’ Henry sewed seven different pearly outfits for himself and many suits for others too, so that by 1911 there were twenty-eight Pearly King & Queens spread across all the Metropolitan Boroughs of London. It is claimed Henry was awarded in excess of two thousand medals for his charitable work and his funeral cortege in 1930 was over half a mile long with more than four hundred pearlies in attendance.

Henry Croft has passed into myth now, residing at the very heart of London in Trafalgar Sq beneath the streets that he once swept, all toshed up in his pearly best and awaiting your visit.

Henry Croft, celebrated Road Sweeper

At Henry Croft’s funeral in St Pancras Cemetery in 1930

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At The Pearly Kings & Queens’ Harvest Festival

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The Lesson by Franta Belsky (1959)

For years, I passed Franta Belsky’s bronze sculpture in Bethnal Green every Sunday on my way to and from the flower market in Columbia Rd without knowing the name of the artist. Born in 1921 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Belsky fled to England after the German invasion and fought for the Czech Exile Army in France. Returning to Prague after the war, he discovered that most of his family had perished in the Nazi Holocaust, before fleeing again in 1948 when the Communists took over.

Creating both figurative and abstract work, Belsky believed that sculpture was for everyone. “You have to humanise the environment,” he said once, “A housing estate does not only need newspaper kiosks and bus-stop shelters but something that gives it spirit.”As you can see from this film of 1959, some local residents in Bethnal Green were equivocal about Belsky’s scupture at first – but more than half a century later it has become a much-loved landmark.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

The Lesson by Franta Belsky (1921-2000)

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The Man Beneath Trafalgar Sq

The House Mill of 1776 at Bromley by Bow is the largest tidal mill in the world and the only remaining mill at Three Mill Island on the River Lea, an artificial island created in ancient times – like Venice – by driving thousands of wooden stakes into the mud, for the purpose of harnessing the powerful tidal surge of the Thames. Daniel Bisson, a Huguenot, built the House Mill for grinding grain to bake bread and the manufacture of gin to supply London, and it functioned here until the end of World War II, before falling into disrepair.

Twenty-five years ago, William Hill saw the derelict mill from the train and came to explore. He became one of a group of committed volunteers who have been responsible for overseeing the magnificent restoration programme of recent years, and it was he who showed me round this week. We spent a couple of hours, climbing up and down ladders, and exploring every corner of the huge old mill, including those parts not open to visitors – enabling me to create this photographic record.

Initials of Daniel Bisson, builder of the mill, and his wife Sarah

View down the River Lea

Some of the beams at House Mill are one hundred foot long and may be recycled ships’ timbers

Nineteenth century wooden patterns for casting the machinery of the mill

Stretcher frames from World War I

Hopper where the grain was channelled down to the mill stones

The oasthouses and the clock mill

The Miller’s staircase

Millstones

Pegs where the millers hung their coats

Mill worker in the nineteen thirties

The same spot today

Iron frames for the nineteenth century mill wheels

The Clockmill

Visit The House Mill, Three Mill Lane, Bromley by Bow, London E3 3DU

Volunteers are always required to act as stewards, guides and to run the cafe at the House Mill. If you would like to help, please contact info@housemill.org.uk

Kate Wigley of the Warner Textile Archive in Braintree will be giving a lecture on The Royal Silks of Spitalfields on Tuesday June 9th at 7pm as part of Huguenot Summer in the newly-refurbished Hanbury Hall in Hanbury St. Here are a selection of images from the archive, which owes its origin to the collection of Warner & Sons – a family textile business that was founded by Benjamin Warner in Spitalfields and moved out to Braintree in 1892.

Mr Bunn & Mr Wheeler, weavers that moved from Hollybush Gardens, Bethnal Green, to New Mills in Braintree in 1895

Design by Anna Maria Garthwaite of Spitalfields

Spitalfields hand woven silk, c. 1743

Loughton Border Rulepaper, 1902

Rose Shamrock and Thistle – paper design by Arthur Silver for Princess May, 1891

Rose, Shamrock and Thistle, hand woven silk

Windsor border trials

Jasmine – hand woven silk and gold – for Princess Mary’s intended wedding to Duke of Clarence

Design by Arthur Silver for Princess May, 1894

Hand woven silk for Windsor Castle

Farringdon, hand woven silk with gold and silver

Rose, Shamrock & Thistle, 1880 – 1890, then rewoven for Buckingham Palace, 1923

Reville, hand woven silk with gold and silver for Queen Mary’s coronation

Benjamin Warner (1828-1908)

Images copyright ©Warner Textile Archive

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At Stephen Walters & Sons

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The Fan Museum in Greenwich is the brainchild of Helene Alexander who has devoted her life with an heroic passion to assembling the world’s greatest collection of fans – which currently stands at over five thousand, dating from the eleventh century to the present day.

In doing so, Mrs Alexander has demanded a reassessment of these fascinating objects that were once dismissed by historians as mere feminine frippery but are now rightly recognised as windows into the societies in which they were made and used, and upon the changing position of women through time.

Folding fan with bone monture & woodblock printed leaf commemorating the Restoration of Charles II. 
English, c. 1660 
(Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan (opens two ways) with ivory monture. Each stick is affixed to a painted palmette.
 European (probably French), c. 1670s
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Ivory brisé fan painted with curious depictions of European figures.
 Chinese for export, c. 1700(Helene Alexander Collection)

Ivory brisé fan painted in the style of Hondecoeter.
 Dutch, c. 1700 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with bone monture. The printed & hand-coloured leaf has a mask motif with peepholes. 
English, c. 1730

Folding fan with ivory monture, the guards with silver piqué work. The leaf is painted on the obverse with vignettes themed around the life cycle of one man. European (possibly German)  c. 1730/40 
(Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with ivory monture & painted leaf. 
English, c. 1740s
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with ivory monture & painted leaf, showing Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens.
 English, c. 1750s

Folding fan with wooden monture & printed leaf, showing couples promenading. 
French, c. 1795-1800
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with gilt mother of pearl monture & painted leaf, signed ‘E. Parmentier.
’ French, c. 1860s

‘Landscape in Martinique’, design for a fan by Paul Gauguin. Watercolour & pastel on paper. French, c. 1887

Folding fan with blonde tortoiseshell monture, one guard set with guioché enamelling, silver & gold work by Fabergé. Fine Brussels lace leaf. 
French/Russian, c. 1880s
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with smoked mother of pearl monture, the leaf painted by Walter Sickert with a music hall scene showing Little Dot Hetherington at the Old Bedford Theatre. 
English, c. 1890

Folding fan with tortoiseshell monture carved to resemble sunrays. Canepin leaf studded with rose diamonds & rock crystal, & painted with a female figure & putti amidst clouds, signed ‘G. Lasellaz ’92′. 
French, c. 1892
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with horn monture & painted leaf, signed ‘Luc. F.’
 French, c. 1900

Folding fan with ivory & mother of pearl monture, the painted leaf, signed (Maurice) ‘Leloir.’ 
French, c. 1900
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with mother of pearl monture & painted leaf, signed ‘Billotey.’ 
French, c. 1905
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Horn brisé fan with design of brambles & insets of mother of pearl. 
French, c.1905
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with Art Nouveau style tinted mother of pearl monture & painted leaf, signed ‘G. Darcey.’ 
French, c. 1905
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with tortoiseshell monture & feather ‘marquetry’ leaf. French, c. 1920

Visit The Fan Museum, 12 Crooms Hill, Greenwich, SE10 8ER

As part of Huguenot Summer you can visit the Fan Museum in the company of Curator Jacob Moss on July 13th

Under a Mercedes

Contributing Artist Lucinda Rogers draws on location, making her atmospheric detailed pictures with ink, crayon and watercolour, to capture the drama of workplaces and record these parts of London that are seldom seen except by those who are employed there.

She has accumulated a portfolio of large bravura drawings – from which these pictures are selected – recording the workshops, yards and factories of the trading, repair and small manufacturing companies in Peacock Estate, White Hart Lane, Tottenham, currently threatened by redevelopment as part of Haringey Council’s programme of  “restructuring the borough’s employment land portfolio.” Just as in the East End, these plans put active businesses at risk and jeopardise local jobs for the sake of high-density housing developments – a short-sighted policy that has been summarised as, “London is eating itself.”

Lucinda Rogers’ exhibition entitled EMPLOYMENT LAND PORTFOLIO opens today at Heyne Tillett Steel, 
4 Pear Tree Court, Clerkenwell, EC1R 0DS and runs for one week until next Sunday 7th June, as part of London Festival of Architecture.

DW General Wood Machinists  (Click this image to enlarge)

Santwynn Garment Manufacturers (Click this image to enlarge)

Fausto using a Capstan lathe, Archway Sheet Metal Works (Click this image to enlarge)

Pressers at Santwynn Garment Manufacturers (Click this image to enlarge)

DW Timber Supplies (Click this image to enlarge)

Making Doner Kebab Grills at Archway Sheet Metals (Click this image to enlarge)

Britannic Auto Transmissions (Click this image to enlarge)

Roy’s Tyres

Peacock Estate

Drawings copyright © Lucinda Rogers

Lucinda Rogers exhibition is open Monday – Friday from 11am until 5:30pm, and on Saturday and Sunday from noon until 4pm.

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Lucinda Rogers’ East End

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I walked over to Fleet St yesterday to pay a visit upon Dr Samuel Johnson who could not resist demonstrating his superlative erudition by recounting examples of lexicography that came to mind as he showed me around the rambling old house in Gough Sq where he wrote his famous Dictionary

House. n.s. [hus, Saxon, huys, Dutch, huse, Scottish.] 1. A place wherein a man lives, a place of human abode. 2. Any place of abode. 3. Place in which religious or studious persons live in common, monastery, college. 4. The manner of living, the table. 5. Family of ancestors, descendants, and kindred, race. 6. A body of parliament, the lords or commons collectively considered.

Acce’ss. n.s. [In some of its senses, it seems derived from accessus, in others, from accessio, Lat. acces, Fr.] 1. The way by which any thing may be approached. 2. The means, or liberty, of approaching either to things or men. 3. Encrease, enlargement, addition. 4. It is sometimes used, after the French, to signify the returns of fits of a distemper, but this sense seems yet scarcely received into our language.

To Rent. v.a. [renter, Fr.] 1. To hold by paying rent. 2. To set to a tenant.

Ba’ckdoor. n.s. [from back and door.] The door behind the house, privy passage.

Door. n.s. [dor, dure, Saxon, dorris, Erse.] The gate of a house, that which opens to yield entrance. Door is used of houses and gates of cities, or publick buildings, except in the licence of poetry.

Hábitable. adj. [habitable, Fr. habitabilis, Lat.] Capable of being dwelt in, capable of sustaining human creatures.

Time. n.s. [ꞇıma, Saxon, tym, Erse.] 1. The measure of duration. 2. Space of time. 3. Interval. 4. Season, proper time.

Stair. n.s. [ꞅꞇæᵹꞃ, Saxon, steghe, Dutch.] Steps by which we rise an ascent from the lower part of a building to the upper. Stair was anciently used for the whole order of steps, but stair now, if it be used at all, signifies, as in Milton, only one flight of steps.

Chair. n.s. [chair, Fr.] 1. A moveable seat. 2. A seat of Justice or authority. 3. A vehicle borne by men, a sedan.

Díctionary. n.s. [dictionarium, Latin.] A book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning, a lexicon, a vocabulary, a word-book.

A’ftergame. n.s. [from after and game.] The scheme which may be laid, or the expedients which are practised after the original design has miscarried, methods taken after the first turn of affairs.

Mystago’gue. n.s. [μυσταγωγὸς, mystagogus, Latin.] One who interprets divine mysteries, also one who keeps church relicks, and shews them to strangers.

Box. n.s. [box, Sax. buste, Germ.] 1. A case made of wood, or other matter, to hold any thing. It is distinguished from chest, as the less from the greater. It is supposed to have its name from the box wood. 2. The case of the mariners compass. 3. The chest into which money given is put. 4.  The seats in the playhouse, where the ladies are placed. (David Garrick’s box illustrated)

Fascina’tion. n.s. [from fascinate.] The power or act of bewitching, enchantment, unseen inexplicable influence.

A’fternoon. n.s. [from after and noon.] The time from the meridian to the evening.

Intelléctual. n.s. Intellect, understanding, mental powers or faculties. This is little in use.

Prívacy. n.s. [from private.] 1. State of being secret, secrecy. 2. Retirement, retreat. 3. [Privauté, Fr.] Privity; joint knowledge; great familiarity. Privacy in this sense is improper. 4. Taciturnity.

Lexicógrapher. n.s. [λεξικὸν and γράφω, lexicographe, French.] A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

Ca’binet. n.s. [cabinet, Fr.] 1. A set of boxes or drawers for curiosities, a private box. 2. Any place in which things of value are hidden. 3. A private room in which consultations are held.

A’bsence. n.s. [See Absent.] 1. The state of being absent, opposed to presence. 2. Want of appearance, in the legal sense. 3. Inattention, heedlessness, neglect of the present object.

Work. n.s. [weorc, Saxon, werk, Dutch.] 1. Toil, labour, employment. 2. A state of labour. 3. Bungling attempt. 4. Flowers or embroidery of the needle. 5. Any fabrick or compages of art. 6. Action, feat, deed. 7. Any thing made. 8. Management, treatment. 9. To set on Work To employ, to engage.

Way. n.s. [wœʒ, Saxon, weigh, Dutch.] The road in which one travels.

Court. n.s. [cour, Fr. koert, Dut. curtis, low Latin.] 1. The place where the prince resides, the palace. 2. The hall or chamber where justice is administered. 3. Open space before a house. 4. A small opening inclosed with houses and paved with broad stones.

Cat. n.s. [katz, Teuton. chat, Fr.] A domestick animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned by naturalists the lowest order of the leonine species.

To Mew. v.a. [From the noun miauler Fr.] To cry as a cat.

Visit Dr Johnson’s House, 17 Gough Square, EC4A 3DE

As part of Huguenot Summer, Beatrice Behlen of the Museum of London will be giving a talk at Dr Johnson’s House entitled MADE ACCORDING TO THE MODE – OBTAINING CLOTHES IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LONDON tomorrow, Thursday 4th June at 6:30pm. CLICK HERE TO BOOK

Ben Rea has been Illustrator-in-Residence at Dennis Severs House recently, meticulously recording every inch of the rambling old mansion to create the elaborate cross section you can see below, accompanied by his working drawings all annotated with measurements. This picture forms the centrepiece of Ben’s first London exhibition A SLICE OF SPITALFIELDS, which opens at Townhouse in Fournier St this Friday 12th June and runs until 12th July.

(Click on the image above to enlarge)

Ben Rea at the launch of the Save Norton Folgate campaign last February

Drawings copyright © Ben Rea

Portrait copyright © Simon Mooney

Ben Rea’s exhibition A SLICE OF SPITALFIELDS runs from 12th June until 12th July at Townhouse, 5 Fournier St, 11 – 6 daily

It is my great pleasure to unveil this bravura collaboration between Adam Dant, Cartographer Extraordinaire & Jonathon Green, Lexicographer of Slang – ARGOTOPOLIS is a map of London slang organised around relevant locations in the capital. Click on Adam’s map to study it in detail and read Jonathan’s glossary below to learn more about the language. A limited edition of 50 hand-tinted prints is available from TAG Fine Arts.

The Old Oak: rhyming slang, The Smoke, i.e. London

KEY TO THE SLANG WORDS & PHRASES IN ARGOTOPOLIS

compiled by Jonathon Green

Nappy Valley (David Cameron’s House, Notting Hill)

Misses: Missus or Mrs

Armful: an affectionate spousal embrace

Bit o’ Tripe: possibly rhyming slang but possibly a ref. to the human body as a ‘piece of meat’

Burick: Romani burk, a breast or Scottish bure, a loose woman

Doner: Italian dona, a woman

Poker-breaker: the domineering wife’s ‘breaking’ of her husband’s poker, i.e. penis

’Pon My Life: rhyming slang, a wife

Rib: woman as ‘Adam’s rib’

Ankle-biter: a child who has yet to walk

Bin-Lid: rhyming slang, a kid

Gawdelpus: a child, lit. God help us

Chip: a child, i.e. a chip off the old block

Yuppie Puppy: the progeny of the young and upwards mobile; also trustafarian

Lully: a child, from little or lullaby

Swag: a shop

Buttiken: a shop, from French boutique + ken, a house or place

Drum: a house or home, either he image of the hollow drum resembling a hollow house or room or the use of drum, the road, as a figurative ‘house’ for itinerants.

Plate o’ Meat: rhyming slang, the street

Bricks: the city streets, especially as seen from a prison cell.

Stones: the streets of London, the open air

Carsey: a brothel, pub or lavatory, from Italian casa, a house

Crib: a house, a pub, a shop, a brothel, a cheap theatre, a bed, a safe, a cell, the vagina; all from standard crib, a narrow room

Gaff: a fair, a cheap theatre, a dancehall, a brothel, a prison, a house, a bar, a casino, a hotel; from Romani gav, a (market) town

Clobber (Selfridges, Oxford St)

Piccadilly Fringe: a popular women’s hairstyle in which the hair is cut short into a fringe and curled over the forehead

Piccadilly Weepers: long side whiskers, worn without a beard

Dittos: a suit of clothes (jacket, waistcoat, trousers) all the same colour

Bobtail: a dandy, from the wide skirts of his jackets

Gorger: a dandy, perhaps from gorgeous

Spiff: a dandy, from spiff, echoic of a sharp sound and thus figuratively exciting, important, astonishing

All Nations: a multi-coloured or heavily patched coat; from ‘the flags of all nations’.

Immensikoff: a large overcoat; coined by the music-hall star Arthur Lloyd who called himself Immensikoff and appeared on stage in such a coat to sing, c.1868, his hit ‘The Shoreditch Toff’

Spittleonian, a yellow silk handkerchief, manufactured in Spitalfields

Arse-Rugs: trousers

Sin-Hiders: trousers; they disguise the male genitals

Moab: a turban-shaped hat, worn by women; a jocular reference to Psalm 60: ‘Moab is my washpot’

Billycock: a style of man’s hat; perhaps  a variation on bully-cocked, i.e. ‘cocked after the fashion of the bullies’ or pimps

Golgotha: a hat; pun on Greek golgotha, the place of skulls

Headlight, a large and ostentatious tie pin, usually a diamond one

Hopper-dockers / hock-dockies: shoes

Piccolo & Flute: rhyming slang, a suit.

Rig-Out: a costume; from nautical imagery: one’s clothes are one’s ‘rigging’

Cover-Me-Queerly: ragged clothing

Gropus:  a pocket; one must grope into its depths to find small items

Yiddish  (Sigmund Freud’s House, West Hampstead)

Goy: a gentile

Dreck: dirt

Fress: to eat

Kishkes: the intestines, the guts

Nudnik: a fool

Shpilkes: anxiety, nerves

Schnorrer: a beggar

Mozzle: luck

Plotz: to to lose emotional control

Bubbe Mayse: an old wife’s tale

Bogtrotters – Country Folk (Caravan, Outlying Rural London)

Carrot Muncher: the peasant’s staple diet

Clouted Shoon: lit. ‘a shoe tipped with iron and secured with iron nails’

Dog Booby: dog = male + booby = fool

Lob: dialect lob, a country bumpkin. Note Yiddish lobbes, a rascal and Dutch lobbes, a clown

Muck Savage: the idea that peasants are ‘savages’ living in filth

Nose Picker: a derogatory stereotype

Queer Cuffin: lit. ‘an odd bloke’

Sod Buster: the peasant’s agricultural labouring

Squab: SE squab, a raw, inexperienced person, also a young, unfledged bird or animal

Whopstraw: from whop, to hit; the work of threshing corn

Techies (Old St Roundabout)

Crapplet: a badly written or wholly useless app.

Angry Garden Salad: a poorly designed website GUI

Seagull Manager: (s)he flies in, craps all everything, then leaves

P.O.T.A.T.O.: “People Over Thirty Acting Twenty One’

Rasterbator: a designer who is obsessed with Photoshop

Salmon Day: a wasted day’s work: one has spent the entire day ‘swimming upstream’

Wall Humper: a person who, rather the removing the card from their pocket,  raises their hip in an effort to swipe it against a reader

Open Your Kimono: to reveal one’s business plans

Grok: to understand fully, from Robert Heinlein’s scifi novel Stranger in a Strange Land

Ohnosecond: the fraction of time it takes to realize one has committed a major error

Chips and Salsa: chips refers to computer hardware, salsa to software

The Fancy  – Boxing  (York Hall, Bethnal Green)

Brother of the bunch of fives: a prize-fighter

Broughtonian : a prize-fighter; from Jack Broughton, inventor of the first prototype boxing glove, writer of ‘Broughton’s Rules’ (which lasted 1743–1838) and champion of England 1730–5

Bruiser: a prize-fighter

Whister-clister / Whister-poop: a blow to the ear

Clicker: a knock-out blow

Knight of the mawley: a prize-fighter, from mawley, a hand or fist

Fibbing-cull: a prize-fighter, from fib, to punch

Buckhorse: a blow to the ear

Jobber: a blow to the head

Smeller: the nose or a blow that hits it

Winker: a blow to the winkers, i.e. eyes

Slasher: a prize-fighter

Milling-kiddy: a prize-fighter, from mill, to fight

Breadbasketer or  belly-go-firster : a blow to the stomach

Claret jug/ Claret cask / Claret-spout: the nose

Quackery (University College Hospital, Euston Square)

Nimgimmer: a surgeon or physician, esp. a specialist in venereal diseases

Knight of the Pisspot: a doctor, from the analysis of urine for medical purposes

Pintlesmith: a surgeon, lit. a ‘penis worker’

Crocus Pitcher: an itinerant quack doctor; also crocus (metallorum), a pun on croak, to die and crocus metallorum, oxysulphide of antimony

Twat  Scourer: lit. the ‘cleaner of the vagina’

Flesh Tailor: a surgeon

Dr Drawfart: an itinerant quack doctor

Clyster Pipe: a doctor; lit. ‘a pipe used to administer clysters, or enemas’

Jollop, medicine, from jalap, a purgative drug obtained from the tuberous roots of Exogonium (Ipomoea) purga

Bone juggler: a surgeon

Argy-Bargy – Political Dissent (Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell)

Boodler: a corrupt politician, from boodle, bribes

Mud-pusher: a member of parliament, i.e. an M.P.

Quockerwodger: a politician who works for a patron rather than his/her constituents; lit. ‘a wooden puppet which can be made to ‘dance’ by pulling its strings

Lefty: a left-winger

Red: a radical; specifically a Bolshevik, a Communist; synonymous with communism since its birth in 1848

Rad / Raddie: a radical

Threepenny Masher: a young man who poses as a gentleman but lacks the savoir-faire, not to mention the funds.

Jack-Gentleman: a man of low birth or manners who has pretensions to be a gentleman, thus an insolent fellow, an upstart.

Macer: a swindler, from a possible link to mason, one who acquires goods fraudulently by giving a bill that they do not intend to honour

Swell Mobsman: a leading pickpocket, often undistinguishable from the smartly dressed people he robs

Nobs & Gentry (The Guildhall, City of London)

Gentry-cove: an aristocrat or gentleman

Swell cove: an aristocrat or gentleman

Snot: a gentleman, who is seen as snotty or arrogant

Tercel-gentle: a well-off knight or any rich gentleman, lit. a male falcon

Skyfarmer: a criminal beggar who tours the country posing as a gentleman farmer fallen on hard times, backed by suitably impressive, if counterfeit, papers

Queer Duke: an impoverished gentleman

Jagger: a (country) gentleman, from German Jäger, a sportsman

Rye mort / Rye mush: a gentleman or gentlewoman, from Romani rei a gentleman + mort, a woman or mush, a man

Nob / Nib: probably from nobility or nobleman

Hipsters (Tea Building, Shoreditch)

Amazeballs: wonderful

Bro Hug: a manly hug between two men who are friends

Cray: amazing, remarkable, lit. crazy

Humblebrag: self-deprecation actually used for self-aggrandizement

Throw shade: to talk negatively about a third party

Peeps: people

Rando: a random person or thing

That Wins the Internet: a general exclamation of satisfaction

Grill: the face

Rack: the female breasts

Americana (US Embassy, Grosvenor Sq)

Ham Shank: rhyming slang, a Yank or American

Man up: behave in a manly or macho manner

Grow a Pair: the pair are testicles, again one is encouraged towards a macho posture

Fanny Pack: a small satchel tied around one’s waist; from fanny, the buttocks

Heads-up: a warning, a briefing

Do the Math: work it out

Touch Base: to speak to

Septic: rhyming slang, a Septic Tank, a Yank or American

Can I Get…: rather than UK could I have

I’m Good: things are satisfactory, synonymous with UK response to ‘how are you’ of ‘very well thank you’

Park Life (Peter Pan Statue, Kensington Gardens)

Bumblebee: rhyming slang, a tree

Dr Green: the grass

Sleep with Mrs Green: to sleep in the open air

Ruffmans: a wood

Robin Hoods: rhyming slang, the woods

April Showers: rhyming slang, flowers

Eiffel Towers: rhyming slang, flowers

Skylark: rhyming slang, a park

Joan of Ark: rhyming slang, a park

Crackmans: a hedge

Lad: a fox

Charlie: a fox, pun on the politician Charles James Fox (1749–1806)

Bufe / Buffer: a dog, either echoic of a bark or from Welsh bwch, a buck, a male animal

Carpet-herb: grass

Old Iron and Brass: rhyming slang, the grass

Penny-a-Pound rhyming slang, the ground

Gambling (Crockfords Casino, Mayfair)

Blackleg: his black boots

Buttoner: that member of a gang who entices suckers to play in a crooked game; he buttonholes the victim

Topper-toodle: a gullible fool, esp. as prey to crooked gamblers

Thimble-Rigger: operator of a cheating game of ‘find-the-lady’ or the ‘three-card-trick’

Spieler: a casino, from Yiddish spiel, to play

Rump and a Dozen: the 18^th century wager of a whole rumpsteak and a dozen bottles of claret

Punting-shop: a casino, from punt, to wager

Levanter: one who defaults on his debts, he lit. runs away to the Levant, i.e. the Middle East

Hazard-drum: a casino, from the game of hazard, a precursor of craps, and drum, a house

Grumble and Mutter: rhyming slang, a flutter

Whores  (Soho Sq)

(All but one terms are simple synonyms for ‘ladies of the night’)

Frisker: from frisk, to have sexual intercourse

Cockatrice: in myth, a hybrid monster with head, wings and feet of a cock, terminating in a serpent with a barbed tai; such a monster can kill with a single glance

Ramp: from rampant, spirited

Trot: from trot, a hag, an old woman; she also ‘trots’ down the street

Trull: from German Trulle, a prostitute

Tib: supposedly a typical name for a working-class woman

Bluegown: prostitutes confined in a house of correction once wore a blue dress as their uniform

Circus Cowboy: a rent boy, who frequented the Piccadilly Circus ‘meat rack’

Covent Garden Nun: the popularity of Covent Garden as a centre of whoring

Quean: a specific use of a general term for a woman

Market Dame: the popularity of Covent Garden as a centre of whoring

Kate / Kittie: a generic use of the proper name

Miss Town: her role as a quintessentially urban figure

Town Miss: her role as a quintessentially urban figure

Miss o’ the Town: her role as a quintessentially urban figure

Old Jack Lang – Rhyming Slang (St Mary Le Bow, Cheapside, City of London)

Brixton Riot: a diet

Emma Freuds: haemorrhoids

Iron Hoof: a homosexual, i.e. a poof

Newington Butts: the stomach or guts

Queen Mum: the buttocks, i.e. the bum

Tony Blair: hair, a chair or a nightmare

Petticoat Lane: a pain

Charing Cross: a horse

Westminster Abbey: a cabbie

Alf Garnett: the hair, i.e. the barnet (fair)

Lucre ( The Bank of England, City of London)

Draft on the Pump at Aldgate: a fake bank-note or fraudulent bill; the Aldgate pump offered no financial security for a draft, i.e. a written order for the payment of money

Coriander (seed): a figurative use of seeds as form of growth and as such necessary for life; money has the same importance

Wedge: originally a wedge of silver

Readies: i.e. ready money

Scrilla: possible from a scroll, on which accounts were once kept

Sponds: fom Greek spondlikos, i.e. spondulics

Mazuma: from Yiddish, ultimately Hebrew mazuma, prepared, ready

Gelt: from Yiddish and German, gold

Dosh: from doss, to sleep or a bed; thus originally the money required to pay for one’s accommodation

Bread: the ‘staff of life’, as is money

Rookeries – New Office Blocks (1 Old St Mary’s Axe, City of London)

Can of Ham: 60-70 St Mary’s Axe

Armadillo: City Hall

Walkie-Talkie:  20 Fenchurch St

Cheesegrater: Leadenhall Building

Pringle: the Olympic Cycle Track

Helter-Skelter: the Pinnacle Tower

The Prawn: Willis Building

Stealth Bomber: 1 New Change

Gherkin / Wally: 30 St Mary Axe

Shard: 32 London Bridge Street

Toffs (Buckingham Palace)

NQOCD: Not Quite Our Class, Darling

NSIT: Not Safe in Taxis

PLU: People Like Us

MTF: Must Touch Flesh

SOHF: Sense of Humour Failure

Yonks: a long time

Jew canoe: a large car, often a Jaguar

Killing: uproariously amusing

Gucky: the fashion label Gucci

Cockers-p: a cocktail party

Chateaued: drunk, not necessarily on claret

Wrinklies: old people

Stiffie: an invitation

Brill: brilliant

Nosh (Covent Garden Market)

Ozzimangerum, soup made from a leg of beef; from ox + French manger, to eat

Princess Di: rhyming slang, a pie

Fourpenny Cannon: a steak and kidney pie; the cost plus its supposed resemblance to a cannonball

Bags of Mystery: sausages, the specific meat ingredient is not specified by the seller

Alderman in Chains: a roast turkey garlanded in sausages

Banger: a sausage, which may explode in the pan

Sharp’s Alley Bloodworms: beef sausages or black puddings, from Sharp’s Alley, an abattoir near the Smithfield meat market in London]

Darby Kelly: rhyming slang, the belly

Chamber of Horrors: sausages

Zeps in a Cloud: sausage and mash

Sanguinary James / Bloody Jemmy / One-eyed Joint: an uncooked sheep’s head

Poodle: a sausage, a pun on hot dog

Irish Apricots: potatoes, the stereotyped link of the Irish and the potato

Violets: spring onions or sage and onion stuffing

Horn Root: celery, it is supposedly aphrodisiac

Welsh Turkey: a leek, the stereotyped link of the Welsh and leeks

Rose: an orange, possibly the fruit also has a pleasant smell

Whitechapel: rhyming slang, an apple

Teddy Bear: rhyming slang, a pear

Snob’s duck, a baked sheep’s head (which is far cheaper than a real duck)

Thames Butter: completely rancid butter, the ‘South London Press …published a paragraph to the effect that a Frenchman was making butter out of Thames mud at Battersea. In truth this chemist was extracting yellow grease from Thames mud-worms’

The Uproar (Covent Garden Opera House)

Synagogue: a shed – its use is not specified – standing at that time in the northeast corner of Covent Garden, London.

The Straights: a network of alleyways and small courts in an area bounded by St Martin’s Lane, Half Moon Street and Chandos Street,  the haunt of pimps, thugs and similar unsavoury characters.

Short’s Gardens: a state of temporary penury; a pun on the street Short’s Gardens in Covent Garden and short, impoverished

Mutton Walk: the saloon at the Drury Lane Theatre, Covent Garden; thus any street where one finds prostitutes, especially the junction of Coventry Street and Windmill Street in the West End.

The Finish / Carpenter’s Coffee Shop: Carpenter’s late-night coffee shop, sited in Covent Garden opposite Russell Street and ostensibly catering to the market porters, which closed only when the last customer had gone home into the dawn

Go Shop: the Queen’s Head tavern, Duke’s Court, Bow Street, London WC2.

The Lane: Petticoat Lane, Middlesex Street in the east End; Drury Lane, Covent Garden,  in the West End

Break One’s Shins Against Covent Garden Rails:

Russian Coffee House: the Brown Bear public house in Bow Street, Covent Garden, a popular haunt for both thieves and thief-takers.

Tekram: backslang for Covent Garden market

Hoorays (Chelsea Town Hall)

Maybs: maybe

Blates: blatantly

Defo: definitely

Dorbs / Adorbs: adorable

Totes: totally

Soz: sorry

Probs: probably

Presh: precious

Obvs: obviously

OMG!: Oh my God!

Slicksters  (Houses of Parliament, Westminster)

Craftsby: a cheat, a swindler

Swindling gloak: a swindler; gloak is synonymous with bloke, a fellow

Dunlop tyre: rhyming slang, a liar

Holy friar: rhyming slang, a liar

Cony-catcher: a confidence trickster, from cony, a rabbit, i.e. a sucker

Queer plunger: a confidence trickster who plunges into water and is saved from ‘drowning’; conveniently pre-assembled ‘rescuers’ then claim money for saving the person

Tweedler: a small-time confidence trickster; a stolen vehicle that is passed off a legitimate

Nuxyelper: a confidence trickster who fakes a fit in order to gain money from bystanders; from nux vomica, the fruit from which strychnine is produced, and which would induce vomiting

Jack-in-the-box: a street pedlar who specialises on con tricks

Shearer: a confidence trickster, who ‘shears’ the gullible ‘lamb’

The Law (Royal Courts of Justice, Fleet St)

China Street Pig: a Bow Street Runner

Thieves’ Kitchen: the Law Courts in the Strand

Theatre: a police, later magistrate’s court

Tenterden Park: the King’s Bench prison for debtors

Gentleman of the Three In(n)s : one who is in debt, in goal and in danger (of being hanged)

Fortune-teller / Conjuror: a judge, he ‘tells one’s future’

Ambidexter: a lawyer, he holds out both hands for bribes

Honest lawyer: a public house sign showing a headless man dressed in lawyer’s robes, the implication being that his honesty is only possible since, headless, he is bereft of the chance to speak.

God Box (St Paul’s Cathedral)

(All terms mean a clergyman, with an over-riding image of thumping the bible or pulpit)

Amen-Bawler

Bead Counter: the rosary beads

Smell-Smock: the clergyman’s alleged womanising

Mumble-Matin[s]

Black cattle: clergymen as a group

Soul Doctor / Soul Driver

Hum-Box Patterer: the hum-box is a pulpit

Cackletub: the tub is a pulpit

Good Book Thumper

Autem Cove / Pattering Cove: from autem, probably an altar, pattering, sermonising

Fur-men (Mansion House, City of London)

Bus-Bellied Ben: an alderman who ‘eats enough for ten’

City Bulldog: a constable

Lord Mayor: a large crowbar

Farmer: an alderman, from farm, to lease or let the proceeds or profits of customs, taxes etc. for a fixed payment

Alderman Lushington: a drunkard

Alderman’s Pace: a steady, careful pace, as befits an official with a fine sense of his own importance

Alderman Double Slang’d: a roast turkey garlanded with sausages

Recorder’s Nose: the rump of a chicken, duck, goose or other poultry.

City Wire: a fashionable woman; her use of wire to create elaborate hairstyles

Cit: a citizen, especially a merchant of the City of London

Brassic – Poverty (former Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East)

Pov / Povvo: an impoverished person.

Stig: a tramp or someone who resembles a tramp

Ding: a beggar, a tramp

Downrighter: a beggar, a tramp

Cursetor: a tramp or an impoverished lawyer

Fleabag: one who smells, usually a vagrant

Crank Cuffin: a tramp who poses as a sufferer from a sympathy-inducing illness

Abrahamer: a tramp, usually sporting picturesque rags to attract alms

Smelly Welly: a juvenile pejorative for a poor person who is seen as a tramp

Dosser: a tramp, a vagrant, a homeless person., from doss, to sleep (rough)

Cold Meat – Execution (Tower of London, Tower Hill)

Do the Newgate Frisk: from Newgate, outside public hangings took place from 1783-18688

Paddington Spectacles: the sack which is placed over the prisoner’s head prior to the hanging

Jig upon Nothing: the ‘dancing’ of the dying person’s feet as they choke to death

Climb the Leafless Tree: one of the many equations of the gallows with a ‘tree’

Have a Wry Mouth and Pissen Britches: a dry mouth and involuntary urination accompany one’s being hanged

City Stage: on which the guilty person ‘performs’

City Scales: the guilty man or woman is weighed off, i.e. sentenced and executed

Dance at Beilby’s Ball Where the Sheriff Pays the Fiddlers: the identity of Mr Beilby is unknown but a number of suggestions exist. [1] Beilby was a well-known sheriff; [2] Beilby is a mispronunciation of Old Bailey, the court in which so many villains were sentenced to death. [3] Beilby refers to the bilbo, a long iron bar, furnished with sliding shackles to confine the ankles of prisoners and a lock by which to fix one end of the bar to the floor or ground. Bilbo comes from the Spanish town of Bilbao, where these fetters were invented

Swing on Tyburn Tree: the Tyburn gallows at the west end of what would become Oxford Street, used for executions 1388–1783

Do the Paddington Frisk: Paddington was synonymous with Tyburn, original site of the main London gallows.

Terms for Places listed on the Tree Trunk

Alsatia: the 16th century ‘liberty’ south of Fleet Street, a law-free zone wherein crowded every fugitive villain

Black Mary’s Hole: a 17th century gay cruising ground in Clerkenwell, EC1

Cheape: Cheapside

Dilly: Piccadilly

Elephant; Elephant and Castle

Fleet: the river Fleet or Fleet Street

Garden: Covent Garden and its Market

Holy Land: the criminal rookery (i.e. slum) of St Giles (now the site of Centre Point)

In and Out; the Army & Navy Club, Piccadilly (from its doorposts which were thus painted)

Junction: Clapham Junction

Kangaroo Valley: Earl’s Court, once home of ex-patriate Australians

Lane: Petticoat Lane, focus of the Jewish East End

Mohocks: a gang of dissolute upper-class thugs, flourishing c. 1750

Newgate: London’s main prison, now the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey

Old Nask: Bridewell prison, Tothill Fields

Paddy’s Goose; a notoriously violent sailor’s pub on the Ratcliffe Highway

Queer Street: a figurative term for poverty

Recent Incision: the New Cut, Waterloo

Spittal: Spitalfields

Tyburn: London’s original execution ground, now Marble Arch

Up-West: the West End

Ville: Pentonville Prison, north London

Wanno: Wandsworth Prison, south London

X: Charing Cross

Yard: the police headquarters of Scotland Yard

Zoo: The Zoological Gardens, now London Zoo

Map copyright © Adam Dant

Text copyright © Jonathan Green

You may also like to take a look at

Jonathan Green’s Smithfield Slang

Adam Dant’s Map Of The Coffee Houses

The Meeting of the New & Old East End in Redchurch St

Redchurch St Rake’s Progress

Map of Hoxton Square

Hackney Treasure Map

Map of the History of Shoreditch

Map of Shoreditch in the Year 3000

Map of Shoreditch as New York

Map of Shoreditch as the Globe

Map of Shoreditch in Dreams

Map of the History of Clerkenwell

Map of the Journey to the Heart of the East End

Map of the History of Rotherhithe

Map of Industrious Shoreditch

Adam Dant’s Map of Walbrook

The two major destination for Huguenots in London were Spitalfields and Soho. As part of the current Huguenot Summer festival, Paul Baker took me on a walk around Soho and beyond to show me some of the significant sites that tell the story of the Huguenot presence. You can join Paul on a tour to learn more this Saturday 13th June from 11am until 1pm, meeting at Eleanor Cross outside Charing Cross Station. Walks also take place on 4th & 25th July – booking details are at the end of this feature.

Commemorated in Soho Sq, Charles II granted sanctuary to the Huguenots in 1681

Berwick St once had two Huguenot chapels, L’Église de la Pattente, 1689 and L’Élise du Quarré, 1694

At the corner of Greek St & Old Compton St from 1694 – 1770 was once the workshop of Paul Crespin, Silversmith, and Nicholas Sprimant, Silversmith, had his workshop in Old Compton St from 1716 – 1771

Samuel Romilly (1758-1818) was the son of a Frith St jeweller who became the Solicitor General, notable as an anti-slavery campaigner and for abolishing hanging, drawing and quartering, and his nephew Peter Mark Roget, the Physician, wrote the famous Thesaurus

In West St, this chapel was originally built as La Pyramid de la Tremblade in 1770, but in 1742 it became a Methodist Chapel when Samuel Wesley took over

Appointed Silversmith & Goldsmith to George III in 1716, Paul de Lamerie (1688- 1751) had his workshop at 40 Gerrard St and his trade card was designed by William Hogarth

The Huguenot L’Église de Leicester Fields was built in 1693 in Orange St

A Huguenot chapel of ease was built here in Spring Gardens in 1685 but burnt down in 1726 along with the gunpowder depot next door

This Statue of Charles I at the top of Whitehall was created by French sculptor Hubert Le Suer in 1633

In 1662, Charles II granted a patent for Huguenot Chapel in Savoy Hill provided they used the Book of Common Prayer in French

London’s first Huguenot chapel was on the site of Somerset House between 1653 and 1660

Click here to book for Paul Baker’s Huguenot Soho walk on Saturday 13th June at 11am

Click here to book for Paul Baker’s Huguenot Soho walk on Saturday 4th July at 11am

Click here to book for Paul Baker’s Huguenot Soho walk on Saturday 25th July at 11am

I could not decide whether to laugh or cry when I visited UBIQUITOUS UNIQUE organised by RECLAIM LONDON at the Red Gallery in Rivington St.

Displaying elevations of generic box-like new buildings planned for London – captioned with the hyperbolic texts used to promote these developments – the exhibition exposes the aesthetic bankruptcy of much contemporary architecture to startling effect.

Reclaim London asks ““What future are we constructing? It is not our future as a collective. No one has asked us. Other people are making these decisions.”

“The tower element of Plot 1 is intended to be ‘iconic’, and visible from a distance. It is designed to signal the regeneration of the market site.”

“The development will feature distinctive contemporary architecture. Rich in variety, it draws from the heritage of west London”

“A stunning tower adding to Central London’s dynamic skyline. The place from which to write your own life story…The apartments take their inspiration from the culture and landscape of Lexicon’s location. The result is an experience that breathes luxury, glamour and delight into every home.”

“A large-scale one-off regeneration project between Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, an area famous for its eclectic style and diverse community. Recognised for its strong sustainability ethos and distinctive contemporary architecture, the development will comprise stylish apartments, town houses and mews houses.”

“The limited visibility of this tower, within a dense urban environment, will do little more than reinforce the internal coherence of the residential conservation areas to the east and north east. The proposed development will recede within long views, and sit comfortably within the more immediate townscape.” (Heritage Appraisal)

“We firmly believe that it is the right location for a landmark building.” (Press Statement)

“One of the very few places in London where you can live, work and play right by the river.”

“The primary objectives were to develop a design which responds to and embraces its location – both in its immediate local setting and in its larger context, that has an appropriate sense of scale both at street level and in the areas where it can be viewed at a distance.”

“The building design has been refined to have a more sympathetic relationship between both The Old Post Office and The Telephone Exchange…A regular pattern of windows provides a calmness and order to the façade with lightweight upper storey punctuating the skyline.”

“Key Objectives: To create a landmark building emphasizing the gateway to and identity of the village and the wider area, with a distinctive architectural identity.”

“A game-changing breed of building designed by Terry Farrell & Partners. Think drop-dead gorgeous architectural details. Interiors designed for the design conscious. Communal space created to bring people together.”

“Fourteen storey landmark development for Alperton”

“Contributes to the enhancement or creation of local distinctiveness.” (Heritage Appraisal)

“As part of the redevelopment, land will be gifted to Lambeth Council to create a new primary school.”

“A rare place in London where people can live in and around outstanding modern architecture.”

“The proposals seek to respect the form, scale and grain of the surrounding townscape, and will make a positive contribution to the character of the area.” (Planning Statement)

Five years ago, I first wrote about Paul Gardner of Gardners Market Sundriesmen when he was being confronted with unrealistic rent increases which threatened to close his shop down, yet thanks to the widespread support shown by the community at that time Paul was able to face off the landlord’s agent. But now Paul Gardner’s rent is up for negotiation again and we all need to stand behind him, if we are not to lose Spitalfields oldest family business.

Paul Gardner, Paper Bag Baron of Spitalfields

I always delight to drop into the premises of my friend Paul Gardner, the paper bag seller of Gardners Market Sundriesman, 149 Commercial St, to observe the constant parade of long-standing customers who pass through, creating the life of this distinctive business. It was early one morning, when I called round at six-thirty – opening time – to enjoy a quiet chat before the rush, that Paul explained to me his great-grandfather James Gardner began trading here in this building as a Scalemaker when it was built in 1870 – which means Paul is a fourth generation Market Sundriesman and makes Gardners the longest established family business in Spitalfields.

Paul still has his great-grandfather’s accounts from the end of the nineteenth century, when as Scalemakers they serviced the scales for all the traders in the fruit and vegetable market on a regular basis. Turning the pages and scanning the lines of James’ fine copperplate handwriting your eye alights upon the names, Isaac, Isaiah and Ezekiel, indicative of the Jewish population that once defined the identity of Spitalfields. There is an ancient block of wood with three scoops carved out that are smoothed with wear, it has been in use since the days of Paul’s great-grandfather. Then his son Bertie (Paul’s grandfather) used it, then Bertie’s son Roy (Paul’s father) used it and Paul still keeps his cash in it today. As the twentieth century wore on, each of the successive Mr Gardners found that customers began to expect to buy their produce in a paper bag (a trend which is now reversed) and so the trade of dealing in bags supplanted the supply of scales entirely over four generations.

Turn your back on the traffic rattling down Commercial St and stand for a moment to contemplate the dignified Brunswick green frontage of Gardners Market Sundriesman. An old glass signs reads “Paper & Polythene Bag Merchant” and, sure enough, a variety of different coloured bags are festooned on strings like bunting, below them are some scales hinting at the origins of the business and then your attention is distracted by a mysterious wooden sieve, a memento of Paul’s grandfather. Enter the shop to be confronted by piles of bags of every variety in packets stacked up on either side and leaving barely any room to stand. Only two routes are possible, straight ahead leading into the dark recesses where the stacks grow taller and closer together in the gloom or turn right to the makeshift counter, improvised from an old counter-top supported upon yet more packets of bags. Beneath the fluorescent glow, the dust of ages is settling upon everything. You think you have entered a storeroom, but you are wrong because you neglected to notice Paul sitting at the counter in a cosy corner, partly concealed by a stack of bags. You turn to greet him and a vista appears with a colourful display of bags and tags and tapes and those old green-grocers’ signs that say “Today’s price 2/8″ and “Morning Gathered” – which creates a pleasant backdrop to the figure of Paul Gardner as he stands to greet you with a genial “Hello!”

With his wavy grey locks, gentle face, sociable manner and innate decency,  Paul could have stepped from another age and it is a joy to meet someone who has successfully resisted the relentless imperative to haste and efficiency at any cost, that tyrannises our age and threatens to enslave us all. When you enter the shop, you enter Paul’s world and you discover it is a better place than the one outside.

Paul was thirteen when his father Roy died unexpectedly in 1968, creating a brief inter-regnum when his mother took over for four years until he came of age. “I came here the first day after I left school at seventeen,” said Paul, “It was what I wanted to do. After the first year, my mother stopped coming, though my nan used to live above the shop then. I haven’t had a day off since 1972. I don’t make much money, I will never become a millionaire. To be honest, I try to sell things as cheap as I can while others try to sell them as expensive as they can. I do it because I have done it all my life. I do it because it is like a family heirloom.”

Paul Gardner’s customers are the stallholders and small businessmen and women of East London, many of whom have been coming for more than twenty years, especially loyal are the Ghanaian and Nigerian people who prefer to trade with a family business. Paul will sell small numbers of bags while other suppliers only deal in bulk, and he offers the same price per bag for ten as for a hundred. Even then, most of his customers expect to negotiate the price down, unable to resist their innate natures as traders. Paul explained to me that some have such small turnovers they can only afford to buy ten carrier bags at a time.

In his endeavours, Paul supports and nurtures an enormous network of tiny businesses that are a key part of the economy of our city. Many have grown and come back with bigger and bigger orders, selling their products to supermarkets, while others simply sustain themselves, like the Nigerian woman who has a stall in Brixton market and has been coming regularly on the bus for twenty-three years to buy her paper bags here. “I try to do favours for people,” says Paul and, in spontaneous confirmation of this, a customer rings with the joyous news that they have finally scraped enough money together to pay their account for the last seven years. Sharing in the moment of triumph, Paul laughs down the phone, “What happened, did you win the lottery or something?”

Paul has the greatest respect for his customers and they hold him in affection too. In fact, Paul’s approach could serve as a model if we wish to move forward from the ugliness of the current business ethos. Paul only wants to make enough to live and builds mutually supportive relationships with his customers over the longterm based upon trust. His is a more equitable version of capitalism tempered by mutual respect, anchored in a belief in the essential goodness rather than the essential greediness of people. As a fourth generation trader, Paul has no business plan, he is guided by his beliefs about people and how he wants to live in the world. His integrity and self-respect are his most precious possessions.“I have never advertised,” says Paul, “All my customers come because they have been recommended by friends who are already my customers.”

However, after Gardners survived two World Wars and the closure of the market, there is now a new threat in the form of rent increases demanded by greedy agents on commission, who can easily exploit the situation when chain stores eager to have a presence in the neighbourhood can pay high rents which they do not need to match with turnover. “I earn two hundred and fifty pounds a week,” reveals Paul with frank humility, “If I earned five hundred pounds a week, I could give an extra two hundred and fifty towards the rent but at two hundred and fifty pounds a week, the cupboard is bare.”

Ruminating upon the problem,“They’ve dollied-up the place round here!” says Paul quietly, in an eloquently caustic verdict upon this current situation in which his venerable family business finds itself now, after a hundred and forty years, in a fashionable shopping district with a landlord seeking to maximize profits. Paul needs to renegotiate his lease in a way that does not leave him solely working to pay the rent and we must support Paul by sending more business his way, because Paul is a Spitalfields legend we cannot lose. But more important than the history itself, is the political philosophy that has evolved over four generations of experience. It is the sum of what has been learnt. In all his many transactions, Paul unselfconsciously espouses a practical step-by-step approach towards a more sustainable mode of society. Who would have expected that the oldest traders in Spitalfields might also turn out to be the model of an ethical business pointing the way to the future?

Paul’s grandfather Bertie Gardner, standing with Paul’s father Roy Gardner as child outside the shop around 1930

Roy Gardner, now a grown man, standing outside the shop after World War II, around 1947

Gardners Market Sundriesmen, 149, Commercial St, Spitalfields, E1

You may also like to read about

At Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen

Paul Gardner, Paper Bag Baron

Roy Gardner’s Sales Tickets

Paul Gardner’s Collection

Joan Rose at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen

James Brown at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen

Vigil at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen

Christmas at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen

For the past year and a half, illustrator Alice Pattullo has been working at her studio in London Fields to create this splendid portfolio of screen prints of animals for each letter of the alphabet and it is my pleasure to publish the entire set of twenty-six for the first time today

A is for Armadillo who is short stout and round

B is for Beetle who stays close to the ground

C is for Crab who crawls on the sea bed

D is for Dove who likes to fly overhead

E is for Elephant who is anything but light

F is for fox who roams the city streets at night

G is for grizzly bear, a fierce looking fellow

H is for Hippo who is altogether more mellow

I is for Iguana a large scaly reptile

J is for jack rabbit who jumps mile after mile

K is for Kangaroo who takes hop, skip and bound

L is for leopard who moves fast across the ground

M is for Moth, a winged friend of the butterfly

N is for Nautilus who in his shell is quite shy

O is for okapi, our strange stripy friend

P is for polar bear who lives at world’s end

Q is for quail whose bright head feathers are fun

R is for Rhino who weights almost a tonne

S is for sloth who hangs and sleeps in a tree

T is for turtle who swims through the sea

U is for uakari whose face is small, wrinkly and red

V is for viper whose bite might leave you dead

W is for Whale, the biggest animal of them all

X is for Xantus who is remarkably small

Y is for Yak, like a cow with long hair

Z is for Zebra, so stripy you might stare

Copyright ©Alice Pattullo

Alice has produced an edition of thirty screen prints of each letter, sized at 60 x 60 cm, and priced at £100 each. If you would like buy prints email alice@alicepattullo.com

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Contributing Writer Rosie Dastgir meets Aminul Hoque as he returns to the familiar streets where he grew up, and reflects upon childhood memories of racism and football in Spitalfields in the eighties

Portrait of Aminul Hoque in Spitalfields by Sarah Ainslie

One bright morning in Whitechapel, I am sitting in the Brady Centre with Aminul Hoque, a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, when he asks a deceptively simple question - “Who are you?  If you aren’t Bangladeshi and you’re not really British, tell me who you are.”

The question of non-belonging is at the core of his new book, British Islamic Identity – Third Generation Bangladeshis from East London, an exploration of the lives of young Bangladeshis and the new British Islamic identity they have constructed for themselves. The book draws on hundreds of conversations that he conducted over a five year period with a group of young people, their friends and families, colleagues, boyfriends, girlfriends, social workers and teachers.

We meet in a place that is close to Aminul’s heart, near where he used to play football and where he grew up in a council flat with his family, after moving here, aged two, from Bangladesh. The trees are in blossom along a street now studded with new coffee joints and a starburst of silver street art glints against a grey brick wall, its reflection captured in a huge black puddle. The rough aesthetic of the area is almost unrecognizable from the place where Aminul grew up and where he spent years working with local young people.

“The conundrum is ‘not belonging’ because you are reminded you aren’t British,” Aminul explains, “Many young people express their sense that you need to be white to be British, so they say to me, ‘But I was born here, so what am I then? They keep telling me to go back where I come from. Go back where?  You tell me.’” But there is no going back – so where, then, do you go?

The image of the Bangladeshi community has changed from being quiet, hard-working and law-abiding to one that poses a national threat. Aminul suggests to me there has been a shift from old style racism to the politics of otherness, of difference.  “You are different, because you wear a hijab, you have a beard, you believe in the Ummah, you pray to a different god, you’re attracted to extremism,” he declares, quoting the commonplace assumptions.

Outsiders point fingers at the community for its refusal to be like others. Yet is it a refusal or, rather, is it the impossibility of that expectation? Expectation is a river that runs deep beneath the bedrock of the Bangladeshi community and the question is – do you cleave towards or against it?  Aminul seems to have done both, confounding some expectations and embracing others.

“I was football hungry growing up,” he says, as we take a stroll around Whitechapel towards a grassy football pitch that did not exist when he was a child. “It was a survival thing, growing up in Bethnal Green in the eighties and nineties.”

It was a time of poverty and of racism so commonplace that it was considered just a normal part of existence. ‘Paki-bashing’ was a feature of daily life and football was the antidote. Most families Aminul knew, including his own, were too poor to have a television back then, so they all watched football matches crammed into the front room of someone’s flat where they were lucky enough to have a telly.  On the estate where he grew up, he and his friends played football on a concrete pitch.

“It was like a prison,” he recalls, “with a barbed wire fence. The neighbouring block was for the white boys and girls and we wouldn’t go into their area for fear of being attacked, but they’d always come into ours.  And they’d do it routinely, just for fun. Paki-bashing.” A popular pastime in those days was for white kids to come and let loose their pit bulls when the Bangladeshi boys were playing football, trapping them in the pitch so they would have to climb the fence to escape the vicious dogs. Even going to school involved running a gauntlet through the neighbouring estate of predominantly white residents. “We were just really scared,” Aminul admits, “So we used to go in numbers. It was like a game of cat and mouse.”

Football was Aminul’s passion and he dreamed of making it as a professional. Bangladeshis have never really made it in the sport, yet he was determined to until his dream was shattered in 2002 when he fractured his leg during a game. Marooned in his bedroom, his leg in plaster, Aminul hit a low point. At his bedside sat a complete stranger. The stranger was his father, somebody he loved, yet barely knew. Everything was about to change.

“I’d never really had a proper relationship with my father emotionally – he was a disciplinarian, really, a fantastic person, always present, but he never spoke very much to me.”

The fracture forced the two men to start talking to each other. At first, it was simply the son asking the father to fetch the TV remote or a glass of water, but later it evolved into longer, deeper conversations. Out came the family photographs and the story of his father’s own migration to this country from Bangladesh – his hopes and dreams of return gradually unfurled. His father had eventually settled permanently in the East End of London after a period in the north of England, like many fellow Sylheti fellow migrants. It was 1963.

Talking to his father, Aminul discovered how tightly his own identity was bound up with his notion of home. Home was Bangladesh. Home was the river he jumped into, the mangos he pinched from the neighbours’ tree. Home was the country where Aminul had been born and yet it was unchartered territory.

Aminul shows me a black and white portrait of his grandfather, which features his mother as a young bride, left behind in Bangladesh while Aminul’s father struggled to become established in England. Behind the formal image lies a poignant story.

“My grandfather was very strict, old-fashioned, a conservative, traditional man, who gave my mum a hard time. She was expected to do chores, keep the house clean, but to her that was normal.” It was in the years just before the 1971 War of Independence with Pakistan and there were many women who had to live through the war while their husbands were away working in the UK. Snippets of his father’s oral history inspired a need to know more about his own identity and origins.

Once his broken leg had healed, Aminul took a journey home to his village in Bangladesh and, to his surprise, even though he had left when he was a baby, he experienced a magnetism drawing him to his birthplace that he could not fully explain. Is the place you are born so tied up with your sense of identity, he wonders?

He is a father of three daughters now, all born here. Animal and his wife, a teacher in the East End of London, used to visit Bangladesh regularly with their children but, these days, the trips are less frequent. His daughters’ connection to Bangladesh is minimal, acquired primarily via the medium of cable TV, yet they are reminded constantly, he says, that they are not actually British – and that herein lies the tragedy for this third generation of Bangladeshi young people.

In 1995, Aminul Hoque ventured south of London to study at Sussex University, confounding the usual expectations to stay close to home, as many Bangladeshis still do when choosing higher education. Encouraged by the example of his older brothers, it was an iteration of his own migration, away from the urban landscape of the East End to the undulating chalk hills of the Sussex Downs.  It was a world that was new and adventurous, very liberal, very welcoming, and white.

At Sussex, he studied Politics and History, with American Studies, and his fascination with the United States grew. Once more, he bucked expectations of what young Bangla boys from the East End do, by hopping across the Atlantic to study in the sleepy seaside suburban town of Santa Cruz in California.  He was frequently taken for Latino, something that did not phase him, but rather added to his youthful sense that identity is complex, fluid, and more than skin-deep. What did he do there, so far from home?  “I settled in,” he says, “It was amazing.”

These days, home is in Walthamstow, where he lives with his wife and three daughters. There is an expectation for the extended family to live in close proximity, sharing accommodation, mingling generations, yet Aminul chose to leave the East End for the suburbs. In Walthamstow, the attractions are manifold – the leafy appeal of Epping Forest, more living space, a garden, good schools nearby.

How does he find suburban life, I wonder, after the tight-knit world of the East End? Aminul is enthusiastic about it and the family have settled down – yet he mentions that, when they first arrived in the area, there was some resistance from the neighbours in the form of an objection to the building of a loft extension, which he had to overcome. One neighbour said, “This place is changing,” an indirect comment on the influx of people like Aminul, now that the suburbs no longer contain or express what they used to.

Yet Aminul seems adept at straddling traditional and progressive values in his work and life, in particular in his thoughts on Islam and feminism. He points out that there is now a burgeoning resistance from young women to be easily defined by old stereotypes. “Younger girls are part of a rising, educated generation – a numerate, literate generation, who are globally aware, and whose interpretation of culture and religion is not oral, handed down from their elders. It’s something they’ve read about for themselves. Girls are becoming financially independent, they’re going to university, they are challenging their fathers, their uncles, brothers, husbands.”

Expectations about who these young Muslim girls are and what they should do with their lives are being confounded, he says. Education has been a significant driver and the parents of third generation Bangladeshis are literate, engaged and critical. Unlike their parents, the first generation, they are more deeply engaged in their children’s education, in helping with homework, and pushing for participation in sport and after school activity. Consequently, the old image of underachievement is swiftly vanishing.

Does he challenge certain patriarchal attitudes to women and girls in the community? “I do challenge patriarchal conventions,” he admits with a smile, “and I get in trouble.” The elders sometimes get in a huff with his ideas. “Women should get to know their partners before marriage,” is one example he cites which causes plenty of friction and he admits he gets ticked off for being too westernized at times – “For insisting that women shouldn’t wait to eat after their men, but should that they should all sit down together.”

Sitting down together is an eloquent image of kinship and equality between the sexes and across generations. It carries the emblematic force of inevitability. Yet the journey to this point has been anguished, long and hard fought, even violent at times. When Aminul was around eight, he remembers one hot day when a group of white kids invaded the football pitch where he was playing with his friends, brothers and cousins. Name calling and teasing escalated into a brawl with his older brother being attacked and Aminul ran home to fetch help from his mother. She had once been set upon herself by a mob of men and women from a neighbouring estate yet, sensing her son was in danger, she was fearless. She abandoned her work at the sewing machine stitching garments and ran to her son’s rescue.

“I remember going back home with them,” Aminul says, eyes shining, “and I vividly remember the sound of the sewing machine, which was still running.“

In Hanbury St

Animul’s grandfather and mother, holding Aminul as a baby, taken in Bangladesh

In Heneage St

Aminul’s family in the eighties

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

British Islamic Identity – Third Generation Bangladeshis from East London is published by Trentham Books

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