Taking a cue from Spitalfields’ textile history, Townhouse in Fournier St has brought together three contemporary makers for this year’s Shoreditch Design Triangle who each take inspiration from cloth, weaving and pattern, under the umbrella Patch, Pot & Print.

Mary Norden stitches fine collages with antique fabric from diverse sources, Katrin Moye makes ceramics with motifs from Huguenot design, while Janet Tristram & Cameron Short of Bonfield Block Printers design pieces of clothing including traditional prints. The prints below are from a Somerset Song Coat lined with images from folk songs collected by Cecil Sharp, which suit this harvest season ideally. At Townhouse, they will be presented a Spitalfields Coat.

All are welcome at the opening tonight from 6:30pm and the exhibition runs daily until 29th September.

Young Johnny-a-Selling

From the song, ‘Green Broom.’ It tells of a poor boy called Johnny – son of a needle furze-cutter – who is ordered ‘away to the woods for green broom.’ Having cut enough broom to sell, young Johnny goes to market where he is spotted by a ‘fair lady’ in ‘her window so high.’ She is love-struck and sends her maid to fetch him. As Johnny enters the lady’s room, she implores: ‘Will you marry a lady in bloom, in bloom?’ to which he consents.

The Seeds of Love

Whilst visiting clergyman Charles Marson of Hambridge, Somerset, Cecil Sharp overheard the gardener, John England, singing this song as he toiled. Captivated by the lyrics and melody, he noted it down – the date was 22nd August 1903 and Sharp’s song-hunting quest grew from it.

Like a Dove

From the song ‘Sovay, Sovay’ in which a wily young woman disguises herself as a highwayman, holds up her betrothed with a flintlock and – to establish his good faith – asks him to hand over his ring.

I Had Not the Liberty (the Seeds of Love)

The song is written from an unmarried woman’s point of view. In it, she reflects on a series of missed romantic opportunities – represented by the violet, the lily and the pink. Despite the song’s melancholic tone, the woman strikes a defiant note at its end – ‘For the grass that have been oftentimes trampled underfoot, give it time it will rise up again.’

John Barleycorn

This image is from the ancient folk song of the same name. In it, Barleycorn is a personification of the beer and whiskey crop, barley. The song tells a grisly tale of the indignities, attacks and eventual death he suffers, mirroring the various stages of barley cultivation. In this print, John Barleycorn is portrayed as a pagan totem – a kind of ‘Beowa’ an Anglo Saxon figure associated with barley and agriculture.

Hare & Greyhound

From ‘The Two Magicians’, a song that Cecil Sharp heard it from just one source – a blacksmith with the apt name of William Sparks. It tells the tale of a girl who refuses to marry a ‘husky, dusky, musty, fusky, coal blacksmith…’ The song takes a surreal turn as the girl resorts to shape-shifting to escape his advances. Little does she know that he, too, has the power to transform himself.

Wraggle Taggle Gypsies

It tells the story of a wealthy, landed lady who eschews her ‘privileged’ life to run off with a band of Romanies – by doing so, she frees herself.

Queen of May

From the melodious and haunting song, ‘As I walked through the Meadows’. It tells the tale of a boy who comes across a country maid – ‘so pretty, so dapper and pert’ – wandering the spring fields. Although just a young, innocent girl, she is the embodiment of all that is natural, bountiful and good – a Ceres, a goddess to him. He crowns her ‘the sweet Queen of May’.

Eyes that Could Not See

From a lyric in the song, ‘Bruton Town’ – Shakespearean and fairytale in equal measure.

Crystal Spring

The lyrics of the first verse are particularly evocative, transporting the listener to a cool, verdant Arcadia – ‘Down by some crystal spring, where the nightingales sing, Most pleasant it is, in season, to hear the groves ring…’ The print’s symmetry is inspired by a seventeenth century carved Bible box.

False Young Man

This image is from the folk song, ‘The Sprig of Thyme’. It tells the story of a country girl who falls foul of her suitors and their false promises. The cautionary tale, heavy with botanical symbolism and plant lore, was passed from mother to daughter across generations.

Images copyright © Janet Tristram of Bonfield Block Printers

I am delighted to publish this extract from A London Inheritance – written by a graduate of my blog course who is celebrating over five years of publishing posts online. Follow A LONDON INHERITANCE, A Private History of a Public City

I am now taking bookings for the next course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on November 9th & 10th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches from Leila’s Cafe, eat cakes baked to historic recipes by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details

If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.

The Crow Stone

This summer I finally visited two places I wanted to explore for years – locations that hold evidence of the City of London’s original jurisdiction over the River Thames, dating from when the City purchased it from Richard I in 1197. The exact powers of the City and their ability to apply them to the Thames and Medway were frequently in dispute, yet the City claimed control of the estuary until the nineteenth century.

A pair of stone obelisks were set up as a physical markers for a line crossing the river from west of Southend to Yantlet Creek on the Isle of Grain, marking the extent of the City’s legal powers. These stones are still in place, so I set out to visit both.

My first visit was to the Crow Stone on the north bank. It was easy. I walked over the embankment that forms the sea wall and, providing you have timed the tide correctly, the Crow Stone can be seen a short distance out from the beach.

The earliest evidence of a stone is from 1755, but the date on the current stone is 1836. Carved on the Crow Stone are the names of the Lord Mayor, Alderman and Sheriff who once demonstrated their control of the river by inspecting the condition of the stones, when such visits were a good excuse for a party, as the Illustrated London News describes –

“Thursday July 12th 1849, as Conservator of the River Thames, on behalf of the City of London, by prescription and usage from time immemorial, the Lord Mayor directed the Water Bailiff, as sub-conservator, to cause his name and the date of his visit to be inscribed on the boundary stone. The Lord Mayor then drank ‘God preserve the City of London’, the inscription on the ancient stone, and after distributing coins and wine to the spectators, the civic party returned to the steamer. The stone itself was in the water, so that it had to be reached in boats. The scramble for the money was a rumbustious affair.”

The earliest known boundary marker stone at Southend dates from 1755 and was removed from its original position next to the 1836 stone in 1950, when it was relocated to Priory Park in Southend. This stone really does look like it has spent two hundred years standing in the Thames Estuary, battered by the wind and the daily movement of the tides.

Next I wanted to see the London Stone on the south bank at Yantlet Creek on the Isle of Grain in Kent. Parts of the creek have now silted up so, while difficult to get to, the Isle of Grain is not strictly an island.

The London Stone is not easy to get to as there are no footpaths and to the east is a large danger area which was once a military firing range. My only route was to walk across Yantlet Creek at low tide, even if free time and tide times do not conspire to make life easy.

Yet the 4:00 am start was worth it because I arrived on the edge of Yantlet Creek at 6:15am. Low tide was just before 7:00am, so – hopefully – I had enough time to get across to the London Stone and return again before the tide started to rise in Yantlet Creek.

There is a bridleway that leads across flat pasture to where the land rises up to a footpath which runs along the top of the sea wall. As I walked, birds flew up from the surrounding grassland and their’s was a constant cry on the mud flats. Walking around to the edge of the Yantlet Creek, it was starting to look worryingly wide. Here I was able to find a way down the embankment, which was muddy, covered in seaweed and rather slippery, but I was able to cross over to the opposite shore.

It was just before low tide and water was running out from Yantlet Creek towards the estuary. I could see how deep the water would be when the tide came in again and the mud flats meant the tide came in rapidly and without warning.

The shore was sand and stone, providing a firm path to the London Stone which is a short distance out from the beach. It had been built on a platform with a raised stone pathway providing easy access without having to venture into the mud. Arriving at the London Stone at 6:45am as the sun rose over the Thames Estuary, in such an isolated location, was magical.

The City Press from September 1858 indicates the origin of the current stone – “During the past week, the Conservators of the River Thames visited the eastern limits of the Port of London. The ancient boundary stone near Yantlet Creek was found completely embedded in sand and shell. It is the intention of the Conservators, we understand, to place a new stone on the site of the ancient stone at Yantlet.”

I found it a wonderful experience, standing alone at the London Stone as the sun rose over the Thames Estuary. But it could have all been very different. If you decide to visit the London Stone, then do so at your own risk and do not use this post as a guide. The estuary is a dangerous place.

The location of the stones and the boundary line across the River Thames

The Crow Stone at Southend

Older version erected on the 25th August 1755 by the Lord Mayor, now preserved in a park in Southend

1849 visit to the Crow Stone by the Lord Mayor of London

First glimpse of the London Stone

Approaching the London Stone across the beach

The London Stone with navigational marker for Yantlet Creek

Text, film & photographs copyright © A London Inheritance

HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 9th-10th November 2019

Spend a weekend in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Spitalfields and learn how to write a blog with The Gentle Author.

This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.

“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author

COURSE STRUCTURE

1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.

SALIENT DETAILS

The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 9th-10th November from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.

Lunch will be catered by Leila’s Cafe of Arnold Circus and tea, coffee & cakes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £300.

Accomodation at 5 Fournier St is available upon enquiry to Fiona Atkins fiona@townhousewindow.com

Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.

Celebrating our tenth anniversary with favourite stories from the first decade

Photographer Philippe Debeerst sent me these splendid pictures which are accompanied by my own account of a visit to Malplaquet House.

Walking East from Spitalfields down the Mile End Rd, I arrived at the gateway surmounted by two stone eagles and reached through the iron gate to pull on a tenuous bell cord, before casting my eyes up at Malplaquet House.

Hovering nervously on the dusty pavement with the traffic roaring around my ears, I looked through the railings into the overgrown garden and beyond to the dark windows enclosing the secrets of this majestic four storey mansion (completed in 1742 by Thomas Andrews). Here I recognised a moment of anticipation comparable to that experienced by Pip, standing at the gate of Satis House before being admitted to meet Miss Havisham. Let me admit, for years I have paused to peek through the railings, but I never had the courage to ring the bell at Malplaquet House before.

Ushered through the gate, up the garden path and through the door, I was not disappointed to enter the hallway that I had dreamed of, discovering it thickly lined with stags’ heads, reliefs, and antiquarian fragments, including a cast of the hieroglyphic inscription from between the front paws of the sphinx. Here my bright-eyed host, Tim Knox, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, introduced me to landscape gardener Todd Longstaffe-Gowan with whom he restored the house. In 1998, when they bought Malplaquet House from the Spitalfields Trust, the edifice had not been inhabited in over a century, and there were two shops,“F.W. Woodruff & Co Ltd, Printers Engineers” and “Instant Typewriter Repairs,” extending through the current front garden to the street.

Yet this single-minded pair recklessly embraced the opportunity of living in a building site for the next five years, repairing the ancient fabric, removing modern accretions and tactfully reinstating missing elements – all for the sake of bringing one of London’s long-forgotten mansions back. Today their interventions are barely apparent, and when Tim led me into his Regency dining room, as created in the seventeen-nineties by the brewer Henry Charrington and painted an appetising arsenic green, I found it difficult to believe this had once been a typewriter repair shop. Everywhere, original paintwork and worn surfaces have been preserved, idiosyncratic details and textures which record the passage of people through the house and ensure the soul of the place lingers on. The success of the restoration is that every space feels natural and, as you walk from one room to another, each has its own identity and proportion, as if it were always like this.

By December 1999, the shops had been almost entirely removed leaving just their facades standing on the street, concealing the garden which had already been planted and the front wall of the house which was repaired, with windows and front door in place. Then, on Christmas Eve an exceptionally powerful wind blew down the Mile End Rd, and Tim woke in the night to an almighty “bang,” to discover that in a transformation worthy of pantomime, some passing yuletide spirit had thrown the shopfronts down into the street to reveal Malplaquet House restored. It was a suitably dramatic coup, because today the house more than lives up to its spectacular theatrical debut – it is some kind of curious masterpiece.

I hope Tim will forgive me if I confess that while he outlined the engaging history of the house with professional eloquence – as we sipped tea in the first floor drawing-room – my eyes wandered to the mountain goat under the table eyeing me suspiciously. Similarly, in the drawing-room, my attention strayed from the finer points of the architectural detail towards the ostrich skeleton in the corner.

As even a cursory glance at the photos will reveal, Tim & Todd are ferocious collectors, a compulsion that can be traced back to childhoods spent in Fiji and the West Indies. They have delighted in the opportunities Malplaquet House provides to display and expand their vast collection of ethnographic, historical, architectural and religious artefacts, natural history specimens and old master paintings. Consequently, as Tim kindly led me from one room to another, up and down stairs, through closets, opening cupboards in passing, directing my gaze this way and that, while continuously explaining the renovation, pointing out the features and giving historical context, I could do little but nod and exclaim in superlatives that grew increasingly feeble in the face of the overwhelming phantasmagoric detail of his collection.

Yet he confessed how fascinated he is by the everyday life of the Mile End Rd and the taxi office across the road that has remained open night and day since he first came to live here, before we walked into the walled yard at the rear, canopied by three-hundred-year-old tree ferns, and wondered at the echoing sound of a large community of sparrows that have made their home in this green oasis. It is a paradox of submitting to the spell of this remarkable house that the familiar external world is rendered exotic by comparison.

I have been in older houses and grander houses, but Malplaquet House has something beyond history and style, it has pervasive atmosphere. It has mystery. It has romance. You could get lost in there. When I came to leave, I shook hands with Tim and lingered, reluctant to move,  because Malplaquet House held me spellbound. Even after my brief visit, I did not want to leave, so Tim walked with me through the garden into the street to say farewell, in a private rehearsal for his own eventual departure from Malplaquet House one day.

Photographs copyright © Philippe Debeerst

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At Boughton House

At Beckenham Place

Who remembers Glynn Boyd Harte (1948-2003)? Doreen Fletcher told me that it was his superlative coloured pencil drawings that inspired her essays in this medium. I remember seeing his work at the Francis Kyle Gallery and being fascinated by his chic still lifes of radishes, wine glasses and packets of Gauloise Bleu on intricate woven French tablecloths. For years, I cherished postcards of these images on my book shelf.

Neil Jennings has organised a small show of Glynn Boyd Harte’s drawings, watercolours and lithographs, PACKETS & PLACES, at the Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury from Sunday 22nd until Friday 4th October, which offers the welcome opportunity to reacquaint yourself with this flamboyant master of the crayon, who died too soon in 2003.

The Blackfriar, Queen Victoria St, EC4

The Reuters & Press Association Building, 85 Fleet St

Upper St sub-station, Angel, Islington

Images copyright © Estate of Glynn Boyd Harte

An exhibition of Eleanor Crow’s watercolours of classic London shopfronts featuring many paintings from her book SHOPFRONTS OF LONDON, In Praise Of Small Neighbourhood Shops is at Townhouse in Fournier St from Friday 4th October. You are all invited to the opening and book launch on Thursday 3rd October from 6:00pm.

Eleanor will giving an illustrated lecture at Wanstead Tap on Wednesday 9th October, showing her pictures and telling the stories of the shops. Click here for tickets

Click here to order a signed copy of Eleanor’s book for £14.99

Victoria Fish Bar, Roman Rd

I try to eat fresh fish at least once a week and so, as I travel around the East End, I tend to navigate in relation to the fish shops. Eleanor Crow shares a similar passion, witnessed by these loving portraits of top destinations for fish, whether jellied eels, fish & chips or fresh on the slab. “These places are a reminder of our river-dependent history,” Eleanor informed me, “I love the look of London’s famous eel shops with their ornate lettering and wooden partitions. Nothing beats having a proper fishmongers’ shop or market stall in the neighbourhood – not only do the shops look good, but these guys really know about fish.”

F.Cooke, Broadway Market

The Fishery, Stoke Newington High St

George’s Place, Roman Rd

G. Kelly, Bethnal Green Rd

Mike’s Quality Fish Bar, Essex Rd

Davies & Sons, Hoe St

The Fish Plaice, Cambridge Heath Rd

Mersin Fish, Morning Lane

Dennis Chippy, Lea Bridge Rd

Kingfisher, Homerton High St

Mersin 2, Lower Clapton Rd

Golden Fish Bar, Farringdon Rd

Tubby Isaacs, formerly in Aldgate

L. Manze, Walthamstow High St

Sea Food & Fresh Fish, Chatsworth Rd

G. Kelly, Roman Rd

Steve Hatt, Essex Rd

Jonathan Norris, Victoria Park Rd

Downey Brothers, Globe Town Market Sq

Barneys Seafood, Chambers St

Billingsgate Market

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY FOR £14.99

At a time of momentous change in the high street, Eleanor’s witty and fascinating personal survey champions the enduring culture of Britain’s small neighbourhood shops.

As our high streets decline into generic monotony, we cherish the independent shops and family businesses that enrich our city with their characterful frontages and distinctive typography.

Eleanor’s collection includes more than hundred of her watercolours of the capital’s bakers, cafés, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, chemists, launderettes, hardware stores, eel & pie shops, bookshops and stationers. Her pictures are accompanied by the stories of the shops, their history and their shopkeepers – stretching from Chelsea in the west to Bethnal Green and Walthamstow in the east.

The rain is falling on Spitalfields, upon the church and the market, and on the streets, yards and gardens. Dripping off the roofs and splashing onto the pavements, filling the gutters and coursing down the pipes, it overflows the culverts and drains to restore the flow of the Black Ditch, the notorious lost river of Spitalfields that once flowed from here to Limehouse Dock. This was the watercourse that transmitted the cholera in 1832. An open sewer piped off in the nineteenth century, the Black Ditch has been co-opted into the drainage system today, but it is still running unknown beneath our feet in Spitalfields – the underground river with the bad reputation.

The shades of autumn encourage such dark thoughts, especially when the clouds hang over the City and the Indian Summer has unravelled to leave us with incessant rain bringing the first leaves down. In Spitalfields, curry touts shiver in the chill and office smokers gather in doorways, peering at the downpour. The balance of the season has shifted and sunny days have become exceptions, to be appreciated as the last vestiges of the long summer.

On such a day recently, I could not resist collecting these conkers that were lying neglected on the grass in the sunshine. And when I got home I photographed them in that same autumn sunlight to capture their perfect lustre for you. Let me confess, ever since I came to live in the city, it has always amazed me to see conkers scattered and ignored. I cannot understand why city children do not pick them up, when even as an adult I cannot resist the temptation to fill a bag. In Devon, we raced from the school gates and down the lane to be the first to collect the fresh specimens. Their glistening beauty declared their value even if, like gold, their use was limited. I did not bore holes in them with a meat skewer and string them, to fight with them as others do, because it meant spoiling their glossy perfection. Instead I filled a leather suitcase under my bed with conkers and felt secure in my wealth, until one day I opened the case to discover they had all dried out, shrivelled up and gone mouldy.

Let me admit, I feel the sense of darkness accumulating now and regret the tender loss of summer, just as I revel in the fruit of the season and the excuse to retreat to bed with a hot water bottle that autumn provides. I lie under the quilt I sewed and I feel protected like a child, though I know I am not a child. I cannot resist dark thoughts, I have a sense of dread at the winter to come and the nights closing in. Yet in the city, there is the drama of the new season escalating towards Christmas and coloured lights gleaming in wet streets. As the nights draw in, people put on the light earlier at home, creating my favourite spectacle of city life, that of the lit room viewed from the street. Every chamber becomes a lantern or a theatre to the lonely stranger on the gloomy street, glimpsing the commonplace ritual of domestic life. Even a mundane scene touches my heart when I hesitate to gaze upon it in passing, like an anonymous ghost in the shadow.

Here in Spitalfields, I have no opportunity to walk through beech woods to admire the copper leaves, instead I must do it in memory. I shall not search birch woods for chanterelles this year either, but I will seek them out to admire in the market, even if I do not buy any. Instead I shall get a box of cooking apples and look forward to eating baked apples by the fire. I am looking forward to lighting the fire. I am looking forward to Halloween. I am looking forward to Bonfire Night. I am looking forward to Christmas. And I always look forward to writing to you every day. The summer is over but there is so much to look forward to.

In today’s extract from my forthcoming book THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM I explore the origins of facadism, the bizarre architectural fad that is currently blighting the capital.

I now at halfway and need to raise another £2,400 to publish my book next month, so I ask you to empty your piggy banks and tip out your sixpences. Click here to help

You can also support publication by ordering a copy in advance for £15. Click here to preorder

I was always familiar with suburban houses adding porticos to enhance their status, cathedrals adorned by elaborate gothic west fronts and country houses evolving with the fortunes of successive generations through the addition of larger and grander classical façades. Some of the greatest of our cathedrals and country houses are the outcome of this approach to architecture, palimpsests in which the building’s evolution can be read by the perceptive viewer. In the past, new frontages were added to old buildings to modernise them or increase their importance. Yet in my time I have witnessed the in- verse – the removal of the former building and the retention of the façade.

The origin of façadism lies in the myth of the Potemkin Villages along the banks of the Dnieper River, built to impress Empress Catherine the Great on her visit to the Crimea in 1787 by her former lover Field Marshal Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin. Allegedly, painted façades with fires glowing behind were constructed by Potemkin when he was Governor of the region to give the Empress, sitting in her barge, the impression of Russian settlement in contested territory only recently annexed from the Ottoman Empire.

How appropriate that this story is without any convincing provenance and may contain no more reality that the façades it describes. Although this tale was likely invented by Potemkin’s political rivals, the legend of the Potemkin Villages has passed into common lore as a means to discuss notions of falsehood, whether architectural or ideological. Yet in the twentieth century, this fiction became a reality as successive authoritarian powers constructed façades to serve their nefarious purposes.

The Theresienstadt concentration camp was used by the Nazis from 1941 as a way-station to the Auschwitz death camp. When the Danish Red Cross insisted on an inspection in 1944, façades of shops, a cafe and a school were constructed as part of a beautification programme which succeeded in convincing the inspectors that nothing was amiss.

During the fifties, North Korea built Kijongdong as a model village designed to be seen from across the border in South Korea. The propaganda message was that this was an affluent settlement with a collective farm, good quality housing, schools and a hospital, but the reality was that these buildings were empty concrete shells in which automated lights went on and off.

In a strange enactment of the Potemkin Villages, when Vladimir Putin visited Suzdal in 2013, derelict buildings were covered with digitally-printed hoardings showing newly-built offices of glass and steel. Similar printed hoardings are often to be seen in London with images of the buildings behind, sheltering them from public view while the practice of façadism is underway.

You might conclude that these grim authoritarian precedents would discredit façadism as an acceptable practice entirely, yet it was legitimised by postmodernism at the end of last century. Irony and discontinuity were defining qualities of postmodern architecture, permitting architects to play games with façades and fragments of façades without any imperative to deliver an architectural unity. The ubiquitous façadism of today is the direct legacy of this movement, except now it is enacted without inverted commas and licensed as orthodox in the vocabulary of contemporary architecture.

Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin (1739-91), after Johann Baptist von Lampi the Elder

Drawing by Bedřich Fritta, a prisoner at Terezín, depicting the ‘beautification’ of the ghetto-camp undertaken by the SS before the Red Cross visit in 1944

Kijongdong, a Potemkin village built in North Korea as a model settlement designed to be seen from across the border in South Korea

Digitally-printed facade fitted to hide dereliction for Vladimir Putin’s visit to Suzdal, Russia, in 2013

An example of postmodern facadism

Imminent facadism at the former Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel

Imminent facadism in Norton Folgate where British Land are retaining only the front piers of the Victorian warehouses

Facadism proposed by Sir Norman Foster for the corner of Commercial St

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY FOR £15

“As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture which threatens to turn the city into the backlot of an abandoned movie studio.”

The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.

As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.

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The Creeping Plague of Ghastly Facadism

Tomorrow is the annual Pearly Kings & Queens’ Harvest Festival, gathering in Guildhall Yard at 12:30pm followed by a service at St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside

On the last Sunday afternoon in September, the Pearly Kings & Queens come together from every borough of  London and gather in the square outside the Guildhall in the City of London for a lively celebration to mark the changing of the seasons.

On my visit, there was Maypole dancing and Morris Dancing, there was a pipe band and a marching band, there were mayors and dignitaries in red robes and gold chains, there were people from Rochester in Dickensian costume, there were donkeys with carts and veteran cars, and there was even an old hobby horse leaping around –  yet all these idiosyncratic elements successfully blended to create an event with its own strange poetry. In fact, the participants outnumbered the audience and a curiously small town atmosphere prevailed, allowing the proud Pearlies to mingle with their fans, and enjoy an afternoon of high-spirited chit-chat and getting their pictures snapped.

I delighted in the multiplicity of designs that the Pearlies had contrived for their outfits, each creating their own identity expressed through ingenious patterns of pearl buttons, and on this bright afternoon of early autumn they made a fine spectacle, sparkling in the last rays of September sunshine. My host was the admirable Doreen Golding, Pearly Queen of the Old Kent Rd & Bow Bells, who spent the whole year organising the event. And I was especially impressed with her persuasive abilities in cajoled all the mayors into a spot of maypole dancing, because it was a heartening sight to see a team of these dignified senior gentlemen in their regalia prancing around like eleven year olds and enjoying it quite unselfconsciously too.

In the melee, I had the pleasure to grapple with George Major, the Pearly King of Peckham (crowned in 1958), and his grandson Daniel, the Pearly Prince, sporting an exceptionally pearly hat that is a century old. George is an irrepressibly flamboyant character who taught me the Cockney salute, and then took the opportunity of his celebrity to steal cheeky kisses from ladies in the crowd, causing more than a few shrieks and blushes. As the oldest surviving member of one of the only three surviving original pearly families, he enjoys the swaggering distinction of being the senior Pearly in London, taking it as licence to behave like a mischievous schoolboy. Nearby I met Matthew (Daniels’s father) – a Pearly by marriage not birth, he revealed apologetically – who confessed he sewed the six thousand buttons on George’s jacket while watching Match of the Day.

Fortunately, the Lambeth Walk had been enacted all round the Guildhall Yard and all the photo opportunities were exhausted before the gentle rain set in. And by then it was time to form a parade to process down the road to St Mary-le-Bow for the annual Harvest Festival. A distinguished man in a red tail coat with an umbrella led the procession through the drizzle, followed by a pipe band setting an auspicious tone for the impressive spectacle of the Pearlies en masse, some in veteran cars and others leading donkeys pulling carts with their offerings for the Harvest Festival. St Mary-le-Bow is a church of special significance for Pearlies because it is the home of the famous Bow Bells that called Dick Whittington back to London from Highgate Hill, and you need to be born within earshot of these to call yourself a true Cockney.

The black and white chequerboard marble floor of the church was the perfect complement to the pearly suits, now that they were massed together in delirious effect. Everyone was happy to huddle in the warmth and dry out, and there were so many people crammed together in the church in such an array of colourful and bizarre costumes of diverse styles, that as one of the few people not in some form of fancy dress, I felt I was the odd one out. But we were as one, singing “All Things Bring and Beautiful” together. Prayers were said, speeches were given and the priest reminded us of the Pearlies’ origins among the costermongers in the poverty of nineteenth century London. We stood in reverent silence for the sake of history and then a Pearly cap was passed around in aid of the Whitechapel Mission.

Coming out of the church, there was a chill in the air. The day that began with Summery sunshine was closing with Autumnal rain. Pearlies scattered down Cheapside and through the empty City streets for another year, back to their respective corners of London. Satisfied that they had celebrated summer’s harvest, the Pearlies were going home to light fires, cook hot dinners and turn their minds towards the wintry delights of the coming season, including sewing yet more pearl buttons on their suits during Match of the Day.

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The Bow Bells

An exhibition of Eleanor Crow’s watercolours of classic London shopfronts featuring many paintings from her book SHOPFRONTS OF LONDON, In Praise Of Small Neighbourhood Shops is at Townhouse in Fournier St from Friday 4th October. You are all invited to the opening and book launch this Thursday 3rd October from 6:00pm.

Eleanor will giving an illustrated lecture at Wanstead Tap on Wednesday 9th October, showing her pictures and telling the stories of the shops. Click here for tickets

Click here to order a signed copy of Eleanor’s book for £14.99

W. A. Down & Son, The Slade, Plumstead

“Butchers have enjoyed an unlikely renaissance recently due to an increased interest in provenance and a suspicion of processed meat in the light of the horse meat scandal. Consequently, customers are now willing to spend more to buy better quality meat despite the presence of a nearby supermarket. A butcher can sell a range of cuts for all budgets, as well as offering advice on how to prepare and cook the meat. The rise of the celebrity chef has also contributed, encouraging people to seek out specialist and traditional butchers, and to buy meat in the old-fashioned way.” – Eleanor Crow

M & R Meats, St John St, Clerkenwell

Hussey’s, Wapping Lane

J Whenlock, Barking Rd, Plaistow

The Cookery, Stoke Newington High St

W. D. Chapman, High Rd, Woodford Green

The East London Sausage Company, Orford Rd, Walthamstow

The Butchers Shop, Bethnal Green Rd

J. Geller, High Rd, Leytonstone

Meat N16, Church St, Stoke Newington

A. G. Dennis, High St, Wanstead

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY FOR £14.99

At a time of momentous change in the high street, Eleanor’s witty and fascinating personal survey champions the enduring culture of Britain’s small neighbourhood shops.

As our high streets decline into generic monotony, we cherish the independent shops and family businesses that enrich our city with their characterful frontages and distinctive typography.

Eleanor’s collection includes more than hundred of her watercolours of the capital’s bakers, cafés, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, chemists, launderettes, hardware stores, eel & pie shops, bookshops and stationers. Her pictures are accompanied by the stories of the shops, their history and their shopkeepers – stretching from Chelsea in the west to Bethnal Green and Walthamstow in the east.

After reporting on London homes and their owners in the Evening Standard for twenty years, Philippa Stockley has written RESTORATION STORIES, a book about old, mainly Georgian, houses and the heroic souls who saved them

A back yard in Spitalfields

Raised in suburban Surrey, I dreamed of London. Mine was a romantic, book-provoked dream with a twinge of David Copperfield, but many of us rebel against what we knew as children. Though whether I would rebel if I had been raised in a castle or an old rectory was never tested, for ours was an ordinary family house with a big garden.

It was a perfect environment to nurture fantasies of grandeur, enriched by novels. Fantasies that usually included a Georgian house with a gravel sweep and tall windows, or something resembling a house in a film or television adaptation. Always old, often grand, but sometimes a decrepit house with sun-shafted dust and elegant mystery. It made no difference that much of the allure was created by set dressers. For me, beauty – however achieved – has always been the thing.

My actual experience of London was limited to thrilling rare excursions — for fireworks or to feed the ducks in St James’s Park on a snatched lunch hour with my father. Rareness and desirability so often go together.

Eventually I inveigled myself into London, staying in small or transitory places until I won a scholarship to study clothing history at the Courtauld Institute. During my second year, I shared a modest Georgian house in Eel Brook Common with other students. Of aged London stock with a somnolent flagged back yard, it was the first Georgian house I lived in. While some rooms were small and at dusk it could be gloomy, it was lovely and felt completely right.

While studying, I designed and made the costumes for a production of Edward Bond’s Restoration, hammering them out on a miniature sewing machine. My budget was tiny, but I had heard of street markets in the East End. Rumour had it that there were great shed-like warehouses selling heaps of tat in glorious abundance and old clothing emporia, and murky carparks converted into seas of wonder, to navigate sustained by bagels and hot coffee.

For a few ice-sodden Sundays I set out at dawn and bought dodgy mink and rabbit tippets, and boxes of military buttons later safety-pinned to waistcoats and breeches. But I also encountered a clutch of streets whose derelict beauty was like a double-handed slap. It was a very cold winter. My memory of that time sparks with ice. Those cobbled streets, Fournier, Wilkes, Princelet — names themselves romantic — appeared steel-grey, frozen, sprinkled with hoarfrost and fairy-dust in equal measure. Windows were broken or boarded, timber and lead porticos were decaying, yet they were the most magical houses and the most beautiful streets I had ever seen. Walking among them was like walking through the pages of a forgotten book or stepping into a faded postcard. In memory they smouldered, the colour of ashes, yet lay restless in my mind and broke into my heart. Even if I could not afford one, I never forgot them.

Later, others bought and restored them, several of which now smile gravely from the pages of my book. They feel like old friends. All different and with strong personalities. Now that they have simmered in my heart for years, I have tried to give a glimpse of them and of the people who saved them.

The accounts that their owners gave of restoring their homes were fascinating and often funny. Many were wry or poignant, all were passionate. All talked as if their houses were alive  – which they are – and as if they had distinct characters – which they do. I believe people who adopt these houses are the same sort who go to animal shelters in search of a small manageable dog and come away with two former greyhounds – one lame – a blasphemous parrot and an old, lunatic cat. The determination to save, to nurture and restore, mixed with a dollop of eccentricity, is always there. A warmth, a largeness of spirit, much generosity, a hint of genial lunacy. These are the characteristics of those who save old houses.

When I write about homes in the Evening Standard, I always write about the house and its owner as inseparable, which makes every story unique. But Georgian houses are special: not only because of their age but because of their grace.

When describing that grace, proportions are often mentioned: the ratio of glazing to brickwork, the pattern of mouldings, the measure of dado-panelling to wall height and the form of the panels. All a given. Yet it is the millions of small constituents, making up the complex that fascinate me more – all the handmade things that together, bit by bit, become a house. Grace slumbers ineffable in every one, from the humblest, the bricks and the lime mortar joining them, to the slow-grown, hand-sawn timber joists, the hand-cut slate tiles or hand-moulded clay pantiles. Then, glass blown white hot and miraculously flattened, bubbling, for window panes, plaster smoothly laid over hand-cut laths, and — oh! — hand- or bucket-mixed paint. Paint mixed to recipes passed from one painter to the other. Very simple for plain colours: the quotidian slubs and duns and off-whites, the quick cheap fake mahogany and pleasant ochres. But also, colours mixed by eye, practice and judgement, by the skill that comes with repetition. Paints mixed with knowledge, not by a machine – made with oil for longevity and satisfying sheen, to protect but also to add gentle tones made with natural earth pigments.

Some of the houses I have written about are nearly three hundred years old – and one is much older – yet their inhabitants find that life with electricity, gas and wi-fi sits well alongside Georgian beauty. What unites these people is that they put beauty first. Their houses share similar temperaments, yet each is completely different. And in every case its beauty speaks for itself.

I enjoy the fact that many were built on just a few courses of bricks. Their neighbours, their half-basements, and their solid but flexible flagged floors of thick stone laid directly on to sand or dirt hold them up effectively – supplemented occasionally with lengths of steel today. They prove that there are economical and renewable ways to construct homes compatible with modern life. If we built them now, they could stand into the twenty-fourth century.

The smallest were usually dubbed ‘fourth-rate.’ These were often narrow terrace houses of three or four floors including attic and half-basement. Today, it is a perfect size for a couple or young family. Yet some are just fourteen-foot wide — my own is a case in point. It reminds me of an upended caravan. It is not large yet it is ample and this graceful sufficiency is another Georgian trick, unlike later Victorian two-up-two-downs, which introduced meanness and a rather glum squatness. Houses like mine demonstrate an economical use of the plot with a light footprint both actually and metaphorically, while retaining the proportions of their grand cousins. These fourth-rate houses are the soot-blackened town mice, the London sparrows.

They also remind anyone who makes things that will not last or cannot be recycled, or who continues to argue in favour of demolition and shoddy, short-term building, that houses made of brick, lime, timber, and stone live, breathe and move, and if left alone will do so for a very long time. They shift and whisper, creak and murmur, particularly on London clay. Architects and planners should study them afresh.

In Elder St

In Mile End

In Elder St

In Fournier St

In Whitechapel

In Elder St

In Whitechapel

In Elder St

In Cable St

In Fournier St

In Fournier St

In Elephant & Castle

On the Isle of Sheppey

In Elephant & Castle

In Whitechapel

In Cable St

Photographs copyright © Charlie Hopkinson

RESTORATION STORIES by Philippa Stockley is published by Pimpernel Press today

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A Renovation in Fournier St

David O’Mara’s Spitalfields

I write about the experience of photographing facades in today’s excerpt from THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM

We only have to raise the last £1000 now to publish this book on 31st October. Please click here if you are able to help

You can also offer support by ordering a copy in advance for £15. Click here to preorder

Eighteenth century house in Norton Folgate facaded by British Land

I am grateful to you the readers who alerted me to examples of façadism across the capital this summer, sending me on ‘façade safaris’ to compile the collection of trophy specimens which comprise my book. This photographic quest took on its own life and I must confess I sometimes took guilty delight in discovering those bizarre examples which offered the most photogenic possibilities.

Evidently, when the discussion takes place between developers, architects, planners and conservationists a certain nuance enters the debate too. It is in the nature of human beings to seek compromise when negotiating. The questions arise – ‘Surely it is better to keep the façade at least?’ versus ‘What is the point in keeping just the façade, why not get rid of the old building entirely?’ Yet this is looking at the question from the wrong direction. The real question that should be asked is ‘What is the point in keeping just the façade, why not simply keep the whole building?’

I hope my pictures clarify this debate by demonstrating how wrong the practice of façadism is and how, in each case, the original building should never have been destroyed. I defy anyone to look at this gallery of notorious façades in my book and not be appalled.

These have been years of accelerating development in the capital, with old buildings vanishing and new buildings appearing as the city transforms before our eyes. This environment has allowed the creeping plague of ghastly façadism to spread almost invisibly across the capital, while the attention of the populace has been distracted by the exotic new buildings emerging on the skyline. By their nature, these subtle reconfigurations are less visible than the more obvious visual changes even if the implications are no less significant.

When the façade of a building is preserved, there is a sense that the reality of the change of use of the site is denied, even if the mutation of the building is obvious.

The prevalence of façadism has coincided with the growth of digital culture and our fascination with the virtual as an alternative to the temporal world. When someone walks down the street with a mobile device in hand, they are not paying any attention the buildings or the world around them. People delight to curate their social media with attractive images of themselves, their friends and their pastimes, without much regard to whether or not this is a true picture of their lives.

In all societies, it is the purpose of culture to mediate between appearance and reality. It suits many people not to look too closely at the world around us and exist within a bubble, ignoring inconsistencies and believing half truths. My book is written at a strange moment when the most successful politicians are also the biggest liars. When old buildings speak to us, they tell troubling stories of past aspirations, of deprivation and of struggle, of industry and of privilege. I can understand how it can be easier to live with the surface of history and to ignore the changes that are happening around us in the present day. Façadism suits our times very well, it is indeed – as British Land claim – our ‘kind of authenticity.’

6 Palace Court, Bayswater Rd, Hyde Park, W2

Dating from 1892, this elegant mansion facing Hyde Park was de- signed by Carlos Edward Arthur Ryder in the style of the Aesthetic Movement and built by Holloway Brothers. It comprised four storeys plus mansard roof with gable pitched dormers, and a chamfered bay and arched recessed third floor, with attractive terracotta window dressings throughout.

Buckingham Gate, Westminster, SW1

This terrace of Grade II listed town houses opposite Buckingham Palace was probably designed by Sir James Pennethorne, c.1850–55. They are faced in stucco with Italianate details, comprising four tall storeys plus basements and dormered mansards. Each house is three windows wide with large Doric columned porticos and recessed plate glass sashes.

American Embassy, 30 Grosvenor Sq, Mayfair, W1

The American Embassy London Chancery Building was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen and constructed in the late fifties, opening in 1960. A gilded aluminium eagle by Theodore Roszak, perched on the roof with a wingspan of thirty-five feet, distinguishes this London landmark.

The building has nine storeys, of which three are below ground. Grade II listed, it is considered to be a classic of modern architecture in the twentieth century.

The United States paid a peppercorn rent to the Duke of West- minster for use of the land and, in response to an American offer to buy the site outright, the Duke requested the return of his land confiscated after the American Revolutionary War, namely the city of Miami.

Only the façade of Eero Saarinen’s building stands now, pending redevelopment as a luxury hotel.

The Anti-Gallican, 155 Tooley St, Bermondsey, SE1

The Anti-Gallican Society was founded around 1745 in response to the perceived cultural invasion of French culture and goods. The Society flourished in the Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763 and the Napoleonic Wars of 1799–1805, persisting through the nineteenth century.

Dating from before 1822, this pub retained its xenophobic title until it closed in 2006, before succumbing to a nameless office development in 2011.

Empire Cinema, 56–61 New Broadway, Ealing, W5

The Empire Cinema was designed by John Stanley Beard in an Italian Renaissance style. It was one of a pair of near identical theatres which were built by Beard for Herbert Yapp in 1934. The other was in Kentish Town and both were taken over by Associated British Cinemas (ABC) within a year of opening. Each had façades dominated by eight tall columns with a double row of windows between the inner six, and seated 2,175 people on two levels. The Empire closed in 2008 and was demolished in 2009 when the doors were installed in its counterpart in Kentish Town to replace ones lost over the years.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY FOR £15

“As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture which threatens to turn the city into the backlot of an abandoned movie studio.”

The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.

As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.

You may also like to take a look at

The Creeping Plague of Ghastly Facadism

I first came across artist Ruth Franklin‘s work in Whitechapel in 2015, when she displayed her cardboard sculptures of sewing machines and hairdressing tools, reflecting her family’s history in these trades in the East End.

‘My work is about the importance of household artefacts and family professions in uncovering childhood memories and family history,’ says Rachel.

‘I have been reflecting on my grandparents, who fled Poland in the early 1900’s, to settle in the East End of London, where they set up a tailors workshop. Looking too at my father’s profession as a women’s hairdresser, I have been creating tailoring and hairdressing ‘objects’, both real and imaginary, through sewn paper constructions, and amalgamated workshop and hairdressers tools.’

Now Ruth is showing her new sculptures of hand tools in a joint exhibition with Sara Radstone & Kate Starkey at House Mill on Three Mills Island in Bromley-by-Bow from Wednesday 9th – Sunday 13th October. All are welcome at the private view on Thursday 10th, 6–8:30pm.

The spectacular eighteenth-century House Mill is Europe’s largest tidal mill and, if you have never visited, this is an ideal opportunity.

Power drill (2019)

Hand drill (2019)

Hammer (2019)

Tape Measure (2019)

Sewing machine (2015)

Iron (2015)

Hairdryer (2015)

Hairdressing tools (2015)

Equipment (2015)

The Salon (2015)

Tools for the salon  (2015)

Curling machine (2015)

Manya (2015)

Alfy in May, mother’s brogue (2015)

Artwork copyright © Ruth Franklin

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At House Mill

The Palaseum Cinema (also known as the Ben Hur) painted by Doreen Fletcher, 1985

Ian Ben Hur, grandson of Ben Hur who was both projectionist and proprietor at the Palaseum Cinema in White Horse Rd, Stepney from 1917, sent me this glorious film celebrating a party thrown by his grandfather for eight hundred children at the Jubilee of 1935. Ben placed a camera on the front of a car to take some of the shots and showed the completed film to audiences at his cinema. How much I would love to have been there to witness their reaction.

Too often, we think of the East End in the thirties as defined by social problems, the poverty and deprivation, and the rise of fascism, yet these images confront us with the vitality of that society. The delightful sequences of crowds arriving at the cinema remind me of the Lumiere Brothers’ film of workers leaving the factory, with spectators offering spontaneous greeting as they recognise the camera. Above all, the wonder of this film is the exuberance of the community which is conveyed and no viewer can fail to be touched by these joyful personalities presenting themselves to the lens with such confident self-possession.

Ben Hur was born Henry Ben Solomon, but changed his name by deed poll to Ben Hur after gaining fame by beating a market bully who was a bare-knuckle boxing champion after seventy-seven rounds. He made money with a stage act as The World Strongest Man and used it to buy businesses including the Palaseum. Renowned for his charitable endeavours including donations to the Royal London Hospital, Ben lived until in 1960.

The Ben Hur cinema which was also known as the Palaseum was converted to a bingo club in 1962 and then a snooker club in the eighties, closing in 2007 before the building was demolished in 2008.

Celebrations in Challis Court by Rose Henriques (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)

In this set of John Player’s Cries of London from 1913 an appealing pantomime aesthetic prevails. These crudely printed cards portray an idealised old London in which the cats’ meat is as pink as the spots on a hat box and the hawkers are resolutely cheery as they go about the the streets plying their wares. Although the clouded skies that accompany each vendor will strike an unexpectedly familiar note of authenticity for any Londoner.

I cannot deny there is a little moralism in the text on the reverse of these cards, apparent when we are told that these itinerants, “were then a more respectable class than at present,” evidenced by the basket seller’s family who made “better kinds of baskets… some of them being neatly coloured and decorated.” Elsewhere we encounter “the cleanly housewife who strews sand plentifully over her floor,” and “the London housewives” who place Lavender in their linen cupboards.

Player’s Cries of London are a model of decorum except for the last two cards, the Dust Man (whose title still lingers in the vocabulary to describe Refuse Collectors) and the Chimney Sweep – who are missing their implicit companion, the Night Soil Man, as presumably too scatological. The Dust Man looks distracted while the Chimney Sweep is overly cheerful verging on the demonic. Even if these charismatic gaudy images have been more than a little sanitised, in the wicked grin of this bratty little urchin we are reminded of the witty libertarian spirit of the old Cries of London.

All Cries of London are fascinating to me – whether prints, cigarette cards, biscuit tins, plates or playing cards, because the changing nature of these images traces evolving perceptions of the urban poor. It is a genre that delights me by celebrating the infinite resourcefulness of those who created a living out of nothing on the streets of London.

You may like to take a look at

William Nicholson’s London Types

John Leighton’s London Cries

Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817

Adam Dant’s  New Cries of Spittlefields

Albert Gardens

In spite of the bombing, the slum clearances and redevelopments, the East End is still with us. In Stepney, there is an entire quarter of early nineteenth century terraces and squares that have survived the changes of the twentieth century. They are magnificent examples of the human quality of streetscape cherished by East Enders and also plangent reminders of what has been lost.

The Peacock, Aylward St

Corner of Antil Terrace and Senrab St

Corner of Antil Terrace and Dunelm St

Corner of Dunelm St

Senrab St

Who will rescue The Royal Duke, 474 Commercial Rd, designed by W.E. Williams, 1879?

Shepherd Boy in Albert Gardens, dated 1903, “Fonderies d’art du Val D’Orne, Paris”

In Albert Gardens

South East corner of Albert Gardens

North West corner of Albert Gardens

South East corner of Arbour Sq

In Arbour Sq Gardens

South West corner of Arbour Sq

North West corner of Arbour Sq

Terrace in East Arbour St

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Fred Wright, Head Messenger

At the George Tavern

The Lost Squares Of Stepney

Tim Hunkin contemplates a zero hours contract

It is always an event when creative mastermind Tim Hunkin unveils a new satirical slot machine and ‘The Fulfilment Center’ – which can be played at Novelty Automation in Holborn from today – is no disappointment.

Inspired by online warehouses, Tim’s machine features a picker with a trolley who must collect the required items in the allotted time or face the consequences. The challenge for the player is to direct the picker with a control knob and hurry them along the aisles by ‘walking’ upon the plates at the foot of the machine. At the end of the game, depending on their performance, the player is hired or fired. Needless to say, I was fired.

I popped over to visit Tim at his amusement arcade in Princeton St on Sunday and, once he had successfully installed his new machine, he explained it to me.

‘I read that the picking ‘guns’ Amazon workers carry tell them how many seconds they have to get from one product to the next. Suddenly I realised that a ‘fulfilment center’ could become one of my games – this is the name that Amazon give their warehouses, which always makes me laugh. The bad conditions that workers endure is well known and some have already written to me saying nice things about my machine. I don’t think their lives have got any better.

The way it works is that the player has to rush round the warehouse picking products. If you complete your day’s work in the time allotted – lucky person that you are – you get a zero hours contract. If you are not good enough, you get a P45. So you can’t win really.’

Novelty Automation, 1 Princeton St, Holborn, WC1R 4AX. Open Tuesday- Sunday 11am-5pm, with late opening until 8pm on Thursdays.

You may like to read my other stories about Tim Hunkin

Tim Hunkin, Cartoonist & Engineer

At Tim Hunkin’s Workshop

Tim Hunkin’s Housing Ladder

Tim Hunkin’s Air B’n’Bedbug Machine

Cover design by David Pearson

To celebrate the forthcoming publication of my new book THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM, I am giving an illustrated lecture showing some of London’s worst cases of facadism and explaining why it is happening and what it means.

I am especially delighted that this lecture will be held behind one of the facades in my book, the former Whitechapel Public Baths of 1846, Britain’s oldest purpose built public baths which were facaded in 2002 and are now part of London Metropolitan University.

The lecture is at 7pm on Monday 4th November at The Wash Houses, The Cass, London Metropolitan University, 25 Old Castle St, E1 7NT.

Click here to book your ticket

This event is presented with the gracious support of The Cass, London Metropolitan University

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY FOR £15

“As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture which threatens to turn the city into the backlot of an abandoned movie studio.”

The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.

As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.

You may also like to take a look at

The Creeping Plague of Ghastly Facadism

We are doing some work on the site this week and we hope it will proceed without disruption, but please be patient if it gets a little bumpy and normal service will be resumed shortly

Cover design by David Pearson

To celebrate the forthcoming publication of my new book THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM, I am giving an illustrated lecture showing some of London’s worst cases of facadism and explaining why it is happening and what it means.

I am especially delighted that this lecture will be held behind one of the facades in my book, the former Whitechapel Public Baths of 1846, Britain’s oldest purpose built public baths which were facaded in 2002 and are now part of London Metropolitan University.

The lecture is at 7pm on Monday 4th November at The Wash Houses, The Cass, London Metropolitan University, 25 Old Castle St, E1 7NT.

Click here to book your ticket

This event is presented with the gracious support of The Cass, London Metropolitan University

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY FOR £15

“As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture which threatens to turn the city into the backlot of an abandoned movie studio.”

The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.

As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.

You may also like to take a look at

The Creeping Plague of Ghastly Facadism