Nights Of Old London
The nights are drawing in and I can feel the velvet darkness falling upon London. As dusk gathers in the ancient churches and the dusty old museums in the late afternoon, the distinction between past and present becomes almost permeable at this time of year. Then, once the daylight fades and the streetlights flicker into life, I feel the desire to go walking out into the dark in search of the nights of old London.
Examining hundreds of glass plates – many more than a century old – once used by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute, I am in thrall to these images of night long ago in London. They set my imagination racing with nocturnal visions of the gloom and the glamour of our city in darkness, where mist hangs in the air eternally, casting an aura round each lamp, where the full moon is always breaking through the clouds and where the recent downpour glistens upon every pavement – where old London has become an apparition that coalesced out of the fog.
Somewhere out there, they are loading the mail onto trains, and the presses are rolling in Fleet St, and the lorries are setting out with the early editions, and the barrows are rolling into Spitalfields and Covent Garden, and the Billingsgate porters are running helter-skelter down St Mary at Hill with crates of fish on their heads, and the horns are blaring along the river as Tower Bridge opens in the moonlight to admit another cargo vessel into the crowded pool of London. Meanwhile, across the empty city, Londoners slumber and dream while footsteps of lonely policemen on the beat echo in the dark deserted streets.
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Read my other nocturnal stories
On Christmas Night in the City
On the Rounds With the Spitalfields Milkman
Other stories of Old London
Frank Derrett’s West End
Cranbourne St
Fancy a stroll around the West End with Frank Derrett in the seventies?
This invitation is possible thanks to the foresight of Paul Loften who rescued these photographs from destruction in the last century. Recently, Paul contacted me to ask if I was interested and I suggested he donate them to the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute, which is how I am able to show them today.
‘They were given to me over twenty-five years ago when I called at an apartment block in Camden,’ Paul explained. ‘A woman opened the door and, when said I was from Camden Libraries, she told me a solicitor was dealing with effects of a resident who had died and was about to throw these boxes of slides into a skip, and did I want them? I kept them in my loft, occasionally enjoying a look, but actually I had forgotten about them until we had a clear out upstairs.’
Later this week, I will publish what we have learned about the life of Frank Derrett.
Charing Cross Rd
Bear St
Coventry St
Regent St
Earlham St
Long Acre
Dover St
Carnaby St
Carnaby St
Charing Cross Rd
Cranbourne St
Dover St
Perkins Rents
Great Windmill St
Brook St
Conduit St
Frith St
Drury Lane
Dean St
Garrick St
Great Windmill St
Archer St
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Battle For The Bell Foundry
Rupert Warren QC will be representing us
The Public Inquiry into the future of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry commences next week on Tuesday 6th October at 10am. It is to be an online event for all to see, streamed live for ten days, and we hope as many as possible will watch.
At a Public Inquiry everyone has a right to participate, either in writing or verbally. If you would like to contribute a statement, either on behalf of yourself or your group – whether your community group, your history society or band of bell ringers – you are encouraged to do so. For a link to watch and to request to speak, send an email in advance to Elizabeth.Humphrey@planninginspectorate.gov.uk
We are delighted to announce that the East End Preservation Society’s petition to SAVE THE WHITECHAPEL BELL FOUNDRY as a fully working foundry has reached over 25,270 signatures. Please click here to sign if you have not already done so.
Meanwhile, Raycliff, the sneaky developers who want to convert the bell foundry into a bell-themed boutique hotel, have now launched their own campaign with leaflets and sponsored posts on facebook, inviting people to ‘Preserve the Whitechapel Bell Foundry‘ by supporting their development. Please do not be deceived by this misinformation. Their intention is to reduce bell founding to a sideshow for tourists, making tiny bells in the coffee bar of their hotel, when we all know that cappuccinos and casting are not compatible.
Leaflet produced by the Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry campaign
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The Secretary of State steps in
A Letter to the Secretary of State
Rory Stewart Supports Our Campaign
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
The Stars Are Bright
It is my delight to publish this dazzling gallery of images from THE STARS ARE BRIGHT, an exhibition of artists from Zimbabwe at The Theatre Courtyard Green Rooms, 36 Bateman’s Row, EC2A 3HH until 31st October
A revelatory collection of over six hundred paintings by young African artists of the nineteen-forties was discovered in St Michael & All Angels’ Church in Shoreditch in 1979 and seventy-five are now on display at a gallery nearby. The origin of these pictures was the Cyrene Mission School in Matabeleland, set up by Ned Paterson in 1938. He studied at the Central School of Art before joining the priesthood in Africa, where he encouraged his pupils to paint freely and create personal representations of their immediate world.
A visit from the Queen Mother in 1947 shone a light onto this work and in 1949 a show of paintings from the school opened at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour in London to great success. The acclaimed exhibition toured internationally with works acquired by the Royal Collection and the Smithsonian. Then the Cyrene Collection of paintings were put in store in Shoreditch and forgotten until they were acquired in 2018 by the Belvedere Trust who have organised the new exhibition.
Unseen since they were first exhibited, these paintings comprise a compelling and exuberant vision of the world. As remarkable for their abstract painterly qualities as for their documentary record, they bear vivid testament to the creative potential that can be unlocked by an inspirational teacher.
Story of My Life by Basil Mazibuko, 1947
The Careless Village by Basil Mazibuko, 1947
The Bent Tree by Mhletshwa Msidazi, 1946
Artist Christopher Msindazi, 1945
Artist Simon Hlabate
The Death Of Ananias & Sapphira by Samuel Songo, 1947
The Lonely Man by Ananias Mjuru, 1946
The Draught of the Fishes by Timothy Dhlodhlo
The First Day of Spring by Lever Matiwaza, 1946
Artist Tommy Augustine
The Good Shepherd by Livingstone Sango, 1945
The Raiders by Samuel Menaisi, 1947
Artist Moses Johuma
Tree Flowers by Barnabus Chiponza
Rocks & Flowers by W Nyatti, 1945
Village Horse & Trader by unknown artist
Paintings photographed by Debbie Sears
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John Thomas Smith’s Rural Cottages
Near Battlebridge, Middlesex
As September draws to an end and autumn closes in, I get the urge to go to ground, hiding myself away in some remote cabin and not straying from the fireside until spring shows again. With this in mind, John Thomas Smith’s twenty etchings of extravagantly rustic cottages published as Remarks On Rural Scenery Of Various Features & Specific Beauties In Cottage Scenery in 1797 suit my hibernatory fantasy ideally.
Born in the back of a Hackney carriage in 1766, Smith grew into an artist consumed by London, as his inspiration, his subject matter and his life. At first, he drew the old streets and buildings that were due for demolition at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Ancient Topography of London and Antiquities of London, savouring every detail of their shambolic architecture with loving attention. Later, he turned his attention to London streetlife, the hawkers and the outcast poor, portrayed in Vagabondiana and Remarkable Beggars, creating lively and sympathetic portraits of those who scraped a living out of nothing but resourcefulness. By contrast, these rural cottages were a rare excursion into the bucolic world for Smith, although you only have to look at the locations to see that he did not travel too far from the capital to find them.
“Of all the pictoresque subjects, the English cottage seems to have obtained the least share of particular notice,” wrote Smith in his introduction to these plates, which included John Constable and William Blake among the subscribers, “Palaces, castles, churches, monastic ruins and ecclesiastical structures have been elaborately and very interestingly described with all their characteristic distinctions while the objects comprehended by the term ‘cottage scenery’ have by no means been honoured with equal attention.”
While emphasising that beauty was equally to be found in humble as well as in stately homes, Smith also understood the irony that a well-kept dwelling offered less picturesque subject matter than a derelict hovel. “I am, however, by no means cottage-mad,” he admitted, acknowledging the poverty of the living conditions, “But the unrepaired accidents of wind and rain offer far greater allurements to the painter’s eye, than more neat, regular or formal arrangements could possibly have done.”
Some of these pastoral dwellings were in places now absorbed into Central London and others in outlying villages that lie beneath suburbs today. Yet the paradox is that these etchings are the origin of the romantic image of the English country cottage which has occupied such a cherished position in the collective imagination ever since, and thus many of the suburban homes that have now obliterated these rural locations were designed to evoke this potent rural fantasy.
On Scotland Green, Ponder’s End
Near Deptford, Kent
At Clandon, Surrey – formerly the residence of Mr John Woolderidge, the Clandon Poet
In Bury St, Edmonton
Near Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead Heath
In Green St, Enfield Highway
Near Palmer’s Green, Edmonton
Near Ranelagh, Chelsea
In Green St, Enfield Highway
At Ponder’s End, Near Enfield
On Merrow Common, Surrey
At Cobham, Surrey – in the hop gardens
Near Bull’s Cross, Enfield
In Bury St, Edmonton
On Millbank, Westminster
Near Edmonton Church
Near Chelsea Bridge
In Green St, Enfield Highway
Lady Plomer’s Place on the summit of Hawke’s Bill Wood, Epping Forest
You may also like to take a look at these other works by John Thomas Smith
John Thomas Smith’s Ancient Topography of London
John Thomas Smith’s Antiquities of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
Three Sneaky Developers
Why should I be surprised by developers being sneaky? Yet three recent local examples have caused me to gasp in wonder at the staggering audacity on display. Apparently the words ‘retain’ and ‘preserve’ now mean the opposite of what we thought they meant.
George Orwell would not be surprised by this doublespeak. In his book ‘Beyond Hypocrisy,’ Edward S. Herman outlines the principal characteristics thus, ‘What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it, and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.’
Three Regency canal-side cottages dated 1828-31 in Bethnal Green
Cottages demolished
Developers’ visualisation of the future scheme
These three bow-fronted Regency cottages, built between 1826 and 1831 and facing the canal in Corbridge Crescent, Bethnal Green, were an attractive local landmark and beloved of many.
In the planning application of November 2019 for their housing scheme the developer, Aitch Group, requested permission for ‘retention, restoration, external alteration and residential conversion of the existing Regency and Victorian Cottages.’
Yet now they have demolished the cottages – presumably to be replaced by replicas – and no-one can get to the bottom of whether this was lawful or not.
Rex Cinema opened in Bethnal Green Rd in 1938
Facade demolished
Developer’s visualisation of the future scheme
Originally Smart’s Picture House in 1913, this was remodelled in a magnificent Art Deco style by architect George Coles for Odeon impresario Oscar Deutsch as the Rex Cinema in 1938, becoming the Essoldo in 1949 and latterly Fankle Trimmings. Now it is to become a ninety-three room budget hotel developed by Accor in partnership with Keys Asset Management.
The developers’ ‘façade retention’ proposal of 2017 includes the sentence: ‘The façade restoration works will include a measured survey of the existing Bethnal Green Rd façade elevation to ensure the features of this element are maintained in the design.’
Even the councillors who approved the application did not understand that ‘façade restoration works’ meant demolition and construction of a new one.
Raycliff, the developers who plan to turn the Whitechapel Bell Foundry into a bell-themed boutique hotel, have flooded Whitechapel and Spitalfields with these leaflets encouraging local people to support their development as a means to ‘Preserve the Bell Foundry ®.’
In Raycliff’s original proposal, the old foundry buildings were to become an upmarket restaurant and private members’ club, but when UK Historic Building Preservation Trust challenged this by offering to buy the buildings at market value and re-open them as a fully working foundry, then Raycliff announced they would continue the tradition by casting bells in their hotel coffee bar.
We hope the Inspector at the Public Inquiry into the future of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry will recognise that bell founding and cappuccinos are not compatible.
The Public Inquiry into the future of the WHITECHAPEL BELL FOUNDRY is to be an online event, streamed live commencing Tuesday 6th Oct for 10 days. For a link to watch or to request to speak, send an email in advance to ELIZABETH.HUMPHREY@planninginspectorate.gov.uk
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William Whiffin, Photographer
William Whiffin (1878-1957) is one of the great unsung London photographers, which makes it a rare pleasure to present this gallery of his pictures from the collection of his granddaughter Hellen Martin. Born into a family of photographers in the East End, Whiffin made his living with studio portraits and commercial commissions, yet he strove to be recognised for his more artistic photography.
Lion Brewery and the Shot Tower, South Bank
The photographer’s son Sid Whiffin at Cooper’s Stairs, Old Queen St
Off Fetter Lane
The Pantheon, Oxford St
In Princes Sq, Stepney
Figureheads of fighting ships in Grosvenor Rd
At Covent Garden Market
Jewry Street, off Aldgate High St
Milwall & the Island Horse Omnibus, c.1910
St Catherine Coleman next to Fenchurch St Station
In Fleet St
In Buckfast St, Bethnal Green
At Borough Market
In Lombard St
Rotherhithe Watch House
Wapping Old Stairs
Junction of Cambridge Heath Rd & Hackney Rd
Ratcliff Stairs, Limehouse
Ratcliff Causeway, Limehouse
St Jude’s, Commercial St
Farthing Bundles at the Fern St Settlement, Bow
Houndsditch Rag Fair
At the Royal Exchange, City of London
Weavers’ House, Bethnal Green Rd
Off Pennington St, Wapping
Borough of Poplar Electricity Dept
Pruning in the hop gardens of Faversham
Photographs copyright © Estate of William Whiffin
Hellen Martin & I should be very grateful if readers can identify any of the uncaptioned photographs
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