Railway footbridge at Poplar

You have only just a week – until 9th February – to catch the revelatory exhibition of Noel Gibson’s East London Street Scenes at the Tower Hamlets Local History & Archives in Bancroft Rd, which rediscovers an important painter from the nineteen seventies whose work has not been displayed for twenty-five years. These large paintings need to be seen in the gallery to fully appreciate the quality of impasto, with vivid black lines standing out in relief from the canvas and vigorous textures created with a palette knife, imparting a dramatic presence to these soulful visions.

Noel Gibson lived in the East End from 1962 until 1974 and the paintings in this show are the outcome of this period. Born in 1928 in Glasgow, Gibson originally trained as an opera singer and then became House Manger at the London Opera Centre based in the Troxy Cinema in Commercial Rd where he lived in a flat at the top of the building. A self-taught artist, he painted in the evenings after work.

“I began as an abstract painter but when I came to Stepney, I found paintings on my doorstep. Though I think there’s still a quiet abstract quality to my paintings. I am trying to express the spirit of the buildings, the strength of them and the people who were there. This is why I don’t put people into my paintings. People turn them into an episode with a background – but I am painting the background! I love these buildings. I walk the dog and I look at them at different times of day and in different weathers, and I keep going back. In a way I am making a record of a changing, I wouldn’t say a dying area, but often I go back to check up on a detail, a colour and a whole street has gone.” Gibson said in an interview in the Times in 1972.

Immensely successful in his day, enjoying acclaim and sell-out shows – one of which at St Botolph’s in Bishopsgate  was opened by Tubby Isaac the jellied eel king – Noel Gibson was featured on BBC’s “Nationwide,” a popular current affairs programme in 1972. In 1974, he moved to South London, working at Morley College and appointed Provost’s Verger at Southwark Cathedral, yet in 1985 he admitted, “I regard Tower Hamlets as the area of inspiration for my work and I will always return to it.”

Noel Gibson died in 2006 and this collection of paintings, originally bought by Tower Hamlets Council in 1970 to be shown in public buildings, came to light when the borough’s art collection was being photographed – inspiring Anna Haward to curate this beautiful show that recovers a major painter of the recent, yet already distant, East End.

Hessel St - “If this street were in Paris, everyone would have wanted to paint it.”

Brick Lane, looking north towards the Truman Brewery

St Anne’s, Limehouse

St John’s Tower

Small Red House in Bow

Street Scene in Poplar

The Victory in Poplar

Chilton St, Spitalfields

Tower House, Fieldgate St, Whitechapel

Arbour Sq

Noel Gibson

Images courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives

You may also like to read about Marc Gooderam, Painter

When Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien was growing up in a slum tenement in Clerkenwell in the nineteen forties, his mother used to give him a penny and send him out to buy a copy of the Evening Standard. Since 1827, the streets of London echoed to the cry of “Standodd! Midday Special! Standodd! Evening Special!” and, at its peak, there were over seven hundred distributors sending the paper as far afield as Liverpool and Brighton. Yet by the time the Evening Standard became a free paper two years ago, there were just one hundred and sixty distributors and today there are only sixty left. So when a handful of heroic distributors from the glory days of the Evening Standard gathered at the Bishopsgate Institute on Saturday for old times’ sake, I asked Colin to be there to take their portraits.

“I used to be a paper boy when I was at school in Catford in 1962.” recalled John Cato who worked for the Standard until 2008, “And when I left school at fifteen in 1965, the guy who delivered the Evening Standard asked me if I’d like to be his van boy. I had to be at the station to collect the papers at ten and I’d go off with him in the van to deliver and collect the money from the sellers. Then I’d go home for lunch and at two o’clock there’d be another driver I worked with to deliver the later editions. We got paid weekly, so on Friday I’d go back to Shoe Lane with the driver to collect my wages and I used to mix with the other van boys and we all made friends. Sometimes we used to socialise with the van boys from the Evening News, even though they were our competitors.”

It was a furious business, bundling up the papers and tying them up with string as they came off the printing presses in Shoe Lane, then sending them off continuously in the fleet of vans as the editions updated through the day. Years now after they retired, most of these men still have the ink-stained hands and backache that are marks of a lifetime in newspaper distribution.

Frank Webster started as a rounds boy, delivering papers to newsagents by bicycle four times a day.“I was thirty years old before I graduated to a driver,” he told me with shrug, “they said it was the longest apprenticeship – in fact, it was a bit of a closed shop, the families knew each other for generations. You needed a relative in the business to get a job and it was based on seniority, it was dead man’s shoes. Yet I always enjoyed going to work, being outdoors and meeting all the vendors, they were such characters.”

“Most of us took early retirement between 2007-2009 when they were trying to cut costs, before they sold the paper to Alexander Lebedev for £1 and it went free,” explained Rob Dickers with a philosophical grin. He started at fifteen and his father worked for thirty years as a compositor at the Standard since before World War II. “From the late sixties, there was a great sense of camaraderie but when the printing moved out from Shoe Lane to Rotherhithe and we were deunionised, the money dropped.” Rob and his pal John Cato were very active in the Chapel, as the branch of the union was termed. “I became Father of the Chapel, the shop steward,” revealed John, “The management de-recognised the union but I built it up again from three to eighty. That’s my claim to fame really.” John’s efforts ensured his members received better pensions and redundancy deals, crucial for the employees as the industry itself began to flag.

The retrospective irony is that while the newspaper managements enacted aggressive policies upon their workforce to drive costs down during the last decades of the twentieth century, in this century the entire newsprint industry finds itself eclipsed by electronic media. Yet these proud men are the last of a hardy breed who devoted their lives to keep the papers rolling and then fought fiercely against tyrannical employers to protect their livelihood as the world changed around them.

On this very day, the printing of the Evening Standard moves from Rotherhithe to Broxbourne and the first issue of  the London Evening Standard not printed in London hits the streets this morning. As a new chapter opens for the capital’s most famous paper, the implications of this new development are yet to be discovered. No longer is the cry of “Standodd! Midday Special! Standodd! Evening Special!” to be heard upon the streets of London, and the soul of the city is the lesser for it.

Victor Wilson, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 1972 – 2007.

Frank Webster, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 15th August 1966 – 30th September 2007.

Ron Chadwick, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 1963 – 2006.

Former Evening Standard headquarters at Shoe Lane.

David Patten, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 1966 – 2009.

John Cato, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 1965 -2008.

Peter Steward, Distributor at the Evening Standard from 1964.

Brian Eller, Distributor at the Evening Standard from 1970 -2008.

Rob Dickers’ Newspaper Distributor’s knife. The notch on the top knife was worn by winding string around the handle to tie the bundle. “They wouldn’t let you go to work without one of these and a union card,” said Rob.

Rob Dickers, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 1966 – 2010.

Barry Pach worked in the Bill Room at the Evening Standard from 1960 – 1989, writing the bills for the newspaper hoardings by hand.

Portraits and final photograph © Colin O’Brien

Archive images courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

Tom Ridge

For over twenty years, historian Tom Ridge has been fighting selflessly to save significant buildings that tell the story of the East End. A noble warrior who has single-handedly pursued a relentless campaign, writing letter after letter – waging what he terms “an endless battle” – Tom’s latest combat has been to prevent the demolition of the former Jewish Maternity Hospital in Underwood Rd in Spitalfields.

Beyond its significance as part of the history of the Jewish East End, the edifice was important as the last example of its kind in the country. Operating from 1911 until 1940, this pioneering institution was the personal mission of Alice Model who started and ran the hospital to help the sick among the poor and women at home with babies. Popularly known as Mother Levy’s Nursing Home, it was the first organisation in this country to provide home helps and maternity nurses, and among the many generations of East Enders who came into the world within the walls of this dignified Arts & Crafts building were Alma Cogan, Arnold Wesker and Lionel Bart.

The possibility of converting the elegant structure – which resembles a painting by Vermeer upon its street frontage – was never entertained, instead it was destroyed in a development by Peabody that was hastened through, in which a token consultation of the immediate residents was invited and then their wishes were ignored. Meanwhile, Angela Brady of Brady Mallalieu – the architectural practise designing the new building – who is the current RIBA president, said in The Guardian on 5th October 2011, “Let’s ask what people want,” emphasising that she is, “enthralled by the ‘rich mix’ of the capital’s culture.”

In harsh contrast to these sentiments, the developers sent a Prior Notification of Demolition to Tower Hamlets Council Planning Department that same month. Obtaining this approval in advance of any public consultation meant that Peabody could demolish the buildings irrespective of what the people of the East End had to say, and without any assessment of the historical importance of the existing structure or the environmental impact of a new block upon this quiet corner of Spitalfields.

Regrettably, this alarming set of circumstances is a familiar story for Tom Ridge, just the latest episode in a conflict in which for too long he has been a lone warrior, chasing bureaucrats around and becoming expert at deciphering their game of weasel words, as large organisations pursue their own interests at the expense of the culture of the East End. Occasionally, Tom will confess the weight of emotional responsibility he carries for his “failures” – those instances where he has lost the battle against developers and part of our history has gone forever – but it almost impossible to get him to disclose his successes.

Yet we all owe Tom Ridge a debt of gratitude for those important facets of the East End that have survived thanks to his heroic campaigning. It was he who discovered that an old building by the canal had been used by Dr Barnardo and was responsible for saving it, and creating the Ragged School Museum there - “because there should be a museum of the East End in the East End.” It was he who led the successful campaign to save the Bancroft Rd Local History Library when the Council would have preferred to close it down and sell off the collection. It was he who prevented buildings being constructed upon the small public park at the heart of Bethnal Green, by ensuring it was listed as of historic importance.

When Tom arrived in the East End from Liverpool in 1965, at the age of twenty-three, and asked the way to St Saviour’s School where he had been employed to teach geography, he was told to go over Stinkhouse Bridge and the walk down to cross Gunmakers’ Arms Bridge. Entranced by the poetry of these names – dating from 1818 – Tom did not at first realise their significance as part of a six mile ring of waterways, originating from the time when, “London was the greatest industrial city in the world  with the greatest port in the world.” Years later, Tom set up the East End Waterways group to preserve the canals and their attendant structures - “because the Waterways are the last places of peace and tranquillity in the East End.”

“I fell in love with the East End and its people – maybe it’s because I come from Liverpool which is also a port city.” Tom confided to me, tracing the origins of his passion, “I was born on a council estate in Everton, and my greatest excitement was travelling on the overhead railway along seven miles of dockland and looking into each of the docks, and seeing all the things there.”

Working in a post-war bomb-damaged East End as a young teacher, he witnessed the social effects of the closure of the London docks and the rebuilding of the territory. “I shall never forget the old cleaning ladies at the school saying to me, ‘Mr Ridge, we do miss our cottages. They took our cottages away.’”Tom recalled in sombre reminiscence, speaking of his days at St Saviour’s in Bow, -“what they were talking about were their terraced houses, that were almost entirely swept away.”

The Jewish Maternity Hospital in Underwood Rd. An elegant crow-stepped gabled building reminiscent of a streetscape by Vermeer. Although it had lost its diamond-paned leaded windows, it retained its original doors and ironwork.

The Arts & Crafts style cottage was designed by John Myers in 1911.

No amount of commemoration by Peabody will compensate for this shocking and needless destruction of a little building which meant so much to so many people. And as an affordable family home, it would have been a living memorial to a unique maternity hospital.

There are now only two historic Jewish welfare buildings which stand testament to that extraordinary outburst of vitality and creativity known as the Jewish East End. But the old people’s home in Mile End Road and the soup kitchen for the Jewish Poor in Spitalfields are relatively unknown and unloved buildings, compared to the pride of place which was embodied in the name “Mother Levy’s.”

This name and the remarkable history of the unique hospital run by women for women will live on in the history books about the East End, but as built evidence and a living memorial for future generations to understand and appreciate the Jewish East End, and the East End as an historic point of arrival for migrants from Europe and indeed the whole world, Mother Levy’s is dead.

All the buildings at the former hospital are being demolished by Peabody, aided and abetted by officers in Tower Hamlets Council but against the  unanimous wishes of its elected Councillors.All four hospital buildings on Underwood Road could and should have been adapted for residential use (with the utilitarian buildings at the back replaced by new homes). We began the campaign with this proposal but discovered that Peabody’s architects had already drawn up their plans for new buildings on the site of the former Jewish Maternity Hospital, which Peabody had purchased from Tower Hamlets Council in March 2011. It was at this point that Dr Sharman Kaddish, as director of Jewish Heritage UK, made her compromise proposal for the retention of the two cottages and their conversion to family homes.

Our petition to Peabody was based on this proposal and signed by about 760 people, including Arnold Wesker and former MP Mildred Gordon and councillors from all four political groups on Tower Hamlets Council. Dozens of letters were written to Peabody’s Chief Executive, Stephen Howlett. They included letters from the chairs of the Jewish East End Celebration Society and the East London History Society, Cllr Rabina Khan, and Cllr Bill Turner, the secretary of SAVE Britain’s Heritage and Lord Janner of Braunstone QC.

At the full council meeting on 29 November 2011, Cllr Judith Gardiner proposed the Labour group’s motion calling on the Mayor to negotiate with Peabody, and Peabody to spare the cottages. The motion noted that Peabody has a duty to optimise the amount of housing it provides but also to protect the borough’s heritage. Cllr Peter Golds, Leader of the Conservative group, spoke in support. Additionally, John Penrose MP, Minister for Tourism and Heritage recommended engagement between the Campaign, Council and Peabody for an amicable settlement to keep the two cottages. But Peabody was unmoved and, in demolishing the oldest and most attractive part of the former hospital, Peabody has committed the gross act of cultural vandalism which we all tried to prevent.

Tower Hamlets Council has the highest housing target in London and unless it formally identifies all its unlisted buildings which are heritage assets, and insists on their retention and adaptation by developers and housing associations, the borough will go on losing historical buildings capable of re-use. It is said that the Council has a list of 600 planned building sites for new housing. Most of the 600 sites will have existing buildings and doubtless many of them are unlisted buildings of some architectural and/or historic interest. Although none of them are likely to have been loved as much as Mother Levy’s, her tragic death must signal a new start for Tower Hamlets.

Had the 2008 Planning Statement for the redevelopment of the former hospital been made available for public comment, an altogether more transparent process may well have resulted in the retention and adaptation of the two cottages. Several years ago, Planning Statements for three redundant Tower Hamlets Council buildings were made available for public comment. As a matter of extreme urgency, all present and future council disposals must be subject to the same good practice. And as an integral part of this process, the Council must draw up a list of all unlisted heritage assets for retention and adaptation.

Tom Ridge

This is what became of the former Mother Levy’s Nursing Home where Alma Cogan, Lionel Bart, Arnold Wesker and many thousands of Jewish East Enders were born.

Portrait of Tom Ridge copyright © Lucinda Douglas Menzies

You may like to leave your own salute to Tom Ridge on the Save Mother Levy’s Campaign Facebook page

Nowadays the Spitalfields Market shuts at night, but for centuries this was when it opened, as a vast nocturnal wholesale market for fruit and vegetables. Initiated by charter signed by Charles I in 1638, it existed in Spitalfields until 1991 when it moved to a custom-built market hall in Leytonstone.

I have already published a few pictures of the market by Mark Jackson & Huw Davies –  two poets with cameras who came nightly during the last year and took thousands of photographs – but, returning to their vast canon of work to choose which to include in the Spitalfields Life book, I came across so many more wonderful images which have not been seen before that I could not resist publishing another selection for you today.

At the new market hall in Leytonstone forklift trucks were introduced, but in Spitalfields human labour dominated when it came to moving produce around whether by barrow, trolley or up on the shoulder. Such an occupation required brawn and physical fitness, attracting many ex-boxers, and the rigours of market life encouraged idiosyncrasy, as everyone fell into their larger-than-life roles over decades. Mark & Huw’s photographs delight in the dramatic chiaroscuro of bonfires, flaring lamps, glistening wet streets, velvet darkness and the coming dawn which impart these photographs an undeniable romance as a unique record of the last days of ancient market.

It is my privilege to be able to publish some of these photographs in print for the very first time in the book of Spitalfields Life, and the Bishopsgate Institute, which has digitized the entire collection, will be exhibiting a selection to coincide with publication.

Photographs copyright © Mark Jackson & Huw Davies

You can see the original selection of

Mark Jackson & Huw Davies’ Photographs of the Spitalfields Market

and read about

Spitalfields Market Portraits, 1991

Night at the Spitalfields Market, 1991

The Return of Mark Jackson

Billingsgate Market

(click on this plate or any of the others below to enlarge to full screen and examine the details)

In 1897, Charles Gosse, the first archivist at the Bishopsgate Institute, was lucky enough to buy a handsome 1809 edition of all three volumes of Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin’s “Microcosm of London” from Quaritch booksellers in Piccadilly with just one plate missing, yet it took him until 1939 to track down a replacement to fill the gap and complete his copy. And the single plate cost him more in 1939 than the entire three volumes in 1897. Then, unfortunately, the volumes was stolen in the nineteen eighties but, thankfully, returned to the Bishopsgate intact years later as part of Operation Bumblebee, tracking art thefts back to their owners – and just waiting on the shelf there for me to come upon them last week.

Augustus Charles Pugin, the architectural draftsman (and father of Augustus Welby Pugin who designed the Palace of Westminster) had the idea to create a lavish compendium of views of London life but it was the contribution of his collaborator Thomas Rowlandson which brought another dimension, elevating these images above the commonplace. While Pugin created expansive and refined architectural views, Rowlandson peopled them with an idiosyncratic bunch of Londoners who take possession of these spaces and who, in many cases, exist in pitifully unsentimental human contrast to the refinement of their architectural surroundings.

In only a few plates – such as Carlton House and the House of Commons – does Thomas Rowlandson submit to the requirement of peopling these spaces with slim well-dressed aspirational types that we recognise today from those familiar mock-ups used to sell anonymous cheap architecture to the gullible. Yet the most fascinating plates are those where he has peopled these rationally conceived public spaces with the more characterful and less willowy individuals that illustrate the true diversity of the human form and satisfy our voyeuristic tendencies, celebrating the grotesque and the theatrical. In Billingsgate Market, Rowlandson takes a composition worthy of Claude and peoples it with fish wives fighting, showing affectionate delight in the all-too familiar contrast exemplified by aspirational architecture and the fallibility which makes us human.

Fire in London – the dreadful fire which took place on 3rd March 1791 at the Albion Mills on the Surrey side of Blackfriars Bridge. We have selected this from many objects of a similar nature which frequently occur in this great metropolis, because the representation afforded an opportunity of a more picturesque effect, the termination of the bridge in front and St Paul’s in the background contribute interesting parts to a representation which is altogether great and awful.

Pillory, Charing Cross. A place chosen very frequently for this kind of punishment, probably on account of its being so public a situation. An offender thus exposed to public view is thereafter considered infamous. There are certain offences which are supposed to irritate the feelings of the lower classes more than others, in which case a punishment by Pillory becomes very serious.

Guildhall. Examination of a bankrupt before his creditors, Court of King’s Bench Walk. The laws of England, cautious of encouraging prodigality and extravagance allow the benefits of the bankruptcy laws to none but the traders. If a trader is unable to pay his debts it is misfortune and not a fault.

Leaden Hall Market is a large and extensive building of considerable antiquity, purchased by the great Whittington in 1408 and by him presented to the City.

Astley’s Amphitheatre. Mr Rowlandson’s figures are here, as indeed they invariably are, exact delineations of the sort of company who frequent public spectacles of this description. With respect to teaching horses to perform country dances, how far thus accomplishing such an animal renders him more happy or a more valuable member of the horse community is a question I leave to be discussed by the sapient philosophers.

Bartholomew Fair, a spirited representation of this British Saturnalia. To be pleased in their own way, is the object of all. Some hugging, some fighting, others dancing, while many are enjoying the felicity of being borne along with the full stream of the mob.

Bow St Office,  giving an accurate representation of this celebrated office at the time of an examination. The police of this country has hitherto been very imperfect, until Henry Fielding, by his abilities, contributed the security of the public, by the detection and prevention of crimes.

Covent Garden Market. The plate represents the bustle of an election for Westminster. The fruit and vegetable market certainly diminishes the beauty and effect of this place as a square, but perhaps the world does not furnish another instance of another metropolis supplied with these articles in equal goodness and profusion.

Christie’s Auction Room. The various effect which the lot – A Venus – has on the company is delineated with great ability and humour. The auctioneer, animated by his subject, seems to be rapidly pouring forth such a string of eloquence as cannot fail to operate on the feelings of his auditors.

The House of Commons is plainly and neatly fitted up, and accommodated with galleries, supported by slender iron capitals adorned with Corinthian capitals, from the ceiling hangs a handsome branch.

Drawing from life at the Royal Academy, Somerset House

The College of Physicians. There is nothing remarkable in the interior of the building except the library and the great hall – which is handsomely represented in this print is a handsome well-proportioned room. The eager disputatious attitude of the figure which is represented as leaning forward in the act of interrogating the candidate, is finely contrasted with two figures on the right hand, one of whom seems to have gathered up his features in supercilious indifference.

Exhibition Room, Somerset House. It would not be easy to find ay other artist, except Mr Rowlandson who was capable of displaying so much separate manner in the delineations placed upon the walls and such an infinite variety of small figures, contrasted with each other in a way so peculiarly happy. To point out any number of figures as peculiarly entitled to attention, would be an insult to the spectator, as very many would necessarily be left out of the catalogue, and everyone of taste will discern them at a glance.

Pass-Room, Bridewell. An interesting and accurate view of this abode of wretchedness. It was provided that paupers, claiming settlement in distant parts of the kingdom should be confined for seven days, prior to being sent of their respective parishes. This is the room apportioned by the magistrate for one class of miserable females.

Royal Cock Pit. It is impossible to examine this picture with any degree of attention, and not enjoy the highest degree of satisfaction at this successful exertion of the artists’ abilities. The regular confusion which this picture exhibits, tells a tale that no combination of words could possibly have done so well.

The Hall, Carlton House. Conceived with classic elegance that does honour to the genius of the late Mr Holland who as the architect, the tout-ensemble is striking and impressive.

The Custom House, in the uppermost of which is a magnificent room running the whole length of the building. On this spot is a busy concourse of nations who pay their tribute towards the support of Great Britain. In front of this building, ships of three hundred and fifty tons burthen can lie and discharge their cargoes.

Text extracts by  William Henry Pyne.

Images courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

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He might have a bath before departure and sometimes I walked into the bathroom to surprise him there lying in six inches of soapy water. Meanwhile downstairs, my mother perched lightly in the worn velvet armchair to skim through the newspaper. Then there were elaborate discussions between them, prior to our leaving, to negotiate the exact time of our return, and I understood this was because the timing and preparation of a Sunday lunch was a complex affair. My father took me out of the house the better to allow my mother to concentrate single-mindedly upon this precise task and she was grateful for that opportunity, I believed. It was only much later that I grew to realise how much she detested cooking and housework.

A mile upstream there was a house on the other riverbank, the last but one in a terrace and the front door gave directly onto the street. This was our regular destination. When we crossed the river at this point by car, we took the large bridge entwined with gryphons cast in iron. On the times we walked, we crossed downstream at the suspension footbridge and my father’s strength was always great enough to make the entire structure swing.

Even after all this time, I can remember the name of the woman who lived in the narrow house by the river because my father would tell my mother quite openly that he was going to visit her, and her daughters. For she had many daughters, and all preoccupied with grooming themselves it seemed. I never managed to count them because every week the number of her daughters changed, or so it appeared. Each had some activity, whether it was washing her hair or manicuring her nails, that we would discover her engaged with upon our arrival. These women shared an attitude of languor, as if they were always weary, but perhaps that was just how they were on Sunday, the day of rest. It was an exclusively female environment and I never recalled any other male present when I went to visit with my father on those Sunday mornings.

To this day, the house remains, one of only three remnants of an entire terrace. Once on a visit, years later, I stood outside the house in the snow, and contemplated knocking on the door and asking if the woman still lived there. But I did not. Why should I? What would I ask? What could I say? The house looked blank, like a face. Even this is now a memory to me, that I recalled once again after another ten years had gone by and I glanced from a taxi window to notice the house, almost dispassionately, in passing.

There was a table with a bench seat in an alcove which extended around three sides, like on a ship, so that sometimes as I sat drinking my orange squash while the women smoked their cigarettes, I found myself surrounded and unable to get down even if I chose. At an almost horizontal angle, the morning sunlight illuminated this scene from a window in the rear of the alcove and gave the smoke visible curling forms in the air. After a little time, sitting there, I became aware that my father was absent, that he had gone upstairs with one of the women. I knew this because I heard their eager footsteps ascending.

On one particular day, I sat at the end of the bench with my back to the wall. The staircase was directly on the other side of this thin wall and the women at the table were involved in an especially absorbing conversation that morning, and I could hear my father’s laughter at the top of the stairs. Curiosity took me. I slipped off the bench, placed my feet on the floor and began to climb the dark little staircase.

I could see the lighted room at the top. The door was wide open and standing before the end of the bed was my father and one of the daughters. They were having a happy time, both laughing and leaning back with their hands on each other’s thighs. My father was lifting the woman’s skirt and she liked it. Yet my presence brought activities to a close in the bedroom that morning. It was a disappointment, something vanished from the room as I walked into it but I did not know what it was. That was the last time my father took me to that house, perhaps the last time he visited. Though I could not say what happened on those Sunday mornings when I chose to stay with my mother.

We ate wonderful Sunday lunches, so that whatever anxiety I had absorbed from my father, as we returned without speaking on that particular Sunday morning, was dispelled by anticipation as we entered the steamy kitchen with its windows clouded by condensation and its smells of cabbage and potatoes boiling.

My mother was absent from the scene, so I ran upstairs in a surge of delight – calling to find her – and there she was, standing at the head of the bed changing the sheets. I entered the bedroom smiling with my arms outstretched and, laughing, tried to lift the hem of her pleated skirt just as I saw my father do in that other house on the other side of the river. I do not recall if my father had followed or if he saw this scene, only that my mother smiled in a puzzled fashion, ran her hands down her legs to her knees, took my hand and led me downstairs to the kitchen where she checked the progress of the different elements of the lunch. For in spite of herself, she was a very good cook and the ritual of those beautiful meals proved the high point of our existence at that time.

The events of that Sunday morning long ago when my father took me to the narrow house with the dark staircase by the river only came back to me as a complete memory in adulthood, but in that instant I understood their meaning. I took a strange pleasure in this knowledge that had been newly granted. I understood what kind of house it was and who the “daughters” were. I was grateful that my father had taken me there, and from then on I could only continue to wonder at what else this clue might reveal of my parents’ lives, and of my own nature.

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I keep returning to the Bishopsgate Institute to look at John Thomas Smith’s “Vagabondiana” – the collection of his magnificent etchings of street people in London, drawn from life two hundred years ago. The delicate, vivid lines and vigorous hatching of this rare artist evoke an entire world for me, and the closer I examine his work, the more I become in thrall to his compassionate yet unsentimental vision of existence.

In Spitalfields, there is a ceaseless street pageant that is never less than engaging. You do not have to walk down a street many times for the leading characters to emerge and, oftentimes, I drift – as if in dream –  engrossed by the elaborate panoply of life, as familiar faces appear and disappear, emerging like figures from a mechanical clock and then passing by upon their business to vanish from my gaze. Looking at John Thomas Smith’s portraits, I know he had the same experience and became fascinated, as I have been, to speak with those whose paths he crossed frequently in the city and discover the stories of those who might otherwise remain strangers.

Among his work, I found plates of figures in the clothing of the early seventeenth century, where he had redrawn images of the lost street life of an earlier London. While I look back two centuries to his work at the beginning of the nineteenth century, speculating upon our contemporary street life as the echo of that former age, John Thomas Smith looked back two centuries to another London. And, for both of us, the street cries form a continuum.

Just as I am familiar with the presence of Tom the Sailor, Molly the Swagman, Mick Taylor, the peacock feather sellers, the Bengali trolley men (and the many others I have written of in these pages), as constant inhabitants of the street – always present somewhere in the edge of my consciousness while I am walking round Spitalfields – so, “Vagabondia” records those who impinged daily upon the attention of John Thomas Smith in London two hundred years ago. Thanks to him, those that he knew live for me to the degree that I would not be entirely surprised, glancing from my window upon an empty midnight street in Spitalfields, to see one of these people coming trudging out of the shadows.

Of all the calamities with which a great city is infected there can be none so truly awful as that of the plague, when the street doors of the houses that were visited with the dreadful pest were padlocked up and only accessible to surgeons and medical men, whose melancholy duty frequently exposes them even to death itself.

Ratcatcher – The bite of the rat is keen, and the wound it inflicts painful and difficult to heal, owing to the form of its teeth, which are long, sharp and irregular.

The floors were not wetted, but rubbed dry, even until they bore a very high polish, particularly when it was the fashion to inlay staircases and floors of rooms with yellow, black and brown woods. These floors were rubbed by the servants who wore brushes on their feet, and they were, and indeed are, so highly polished, in some of the country mansions, that in some instances they are dangerous to walk upon.

It appears from the extreme neatness of this man and the goods that he exhibits for sale that they are of a very superior quality, probably of foreign manufacture. England can boast of superiority in almost every description of manufacture but it never rivalled the basket-makers and willow-workers of France and Holland. They have a great selection of wood and the females are taught the art of twisting it at a very early age.

Saloop, the subject of this etching, has superseded almost every other midnight street refreshment, being a beverage easily made, and a long time considered as a sovereign cure for headache arising from drunkennesss. It is a celebrated restorative among the Turks, and with us it stands recommended in consumptions, bilious cholics and all disorders stemming from acrimony in the juices.

Smithfield Pudding – It would be almost criminal to proceed in my account without a due encomium on the subject of it. The good qualities of an English pudding, more especially when it happens to be enriched with the due portion of enticing plums, are well known to most of us. The places where this excellent commodity is chiefly exposed to sale, in the manner described in the engraving, are those of the greatest traffic such as Smithfield on a market morning, where waggoners, butchers and drovers are sure to find their pence for a slice of hot pudding. Fleet Market, Leadenhall, Honey Lane and Spitalfields have each their hot pudding men.

A journeyman Prickle-maker who works in a cellar on the western side of the Haymarket. A Prickle is a basket used by the wine merchants for their empty bottles, and it is made loose with open-work so that when it is filled with bottles, it may ride easily in the wine merchant’s caravan, and without the least risk of breaking them.

Daniel Clarey, an industrious Irishman, well known to the London schoolboy as a gingerbread-nut lottery office keeper. Every adventurer in his scheme is sure of having a prize from seven to one hundred nuts, and some of his gingerbread shot are so highly seasoned, they are as hot as the noble Nelson’s balls, when he last peppered the jackets of England’s foes.

A lad who occasionally sweeps the crossing at the end of Princes St, Hanover Sq, and wears a long waistcoat surmounted by a soldier’s jacket.

Images courtesy © Bishopsgate Institute

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“We never know the worth of water till the well is dry” -Thomas Fuller, 1732

Hardly anyone notices this venerable pump of 1832 in Shoreditch churchyard, yet this disregarded artifact may conceal the reason why everything that surrounds it is there. Reverend Turp of St Leonard’s explained to me that the very name of Shoreditch derives from the buried spring beneath this pump, “suer” being the Anglo-Saxon word for stream.

The Romans made their camp at this spot because of the secure water source and laid out four roads which allowed them to control the entire territory from there – one road led West to Bath, one North to York, one East to Colchester and one South to Chichester. In fact, this water source undermined the foundations of the medieval church and caused it to collapse, leading to the construction of the current building by George Dance but, even then, there were still problems with flooding and the land was built up to counteract this, burying the first seven steps out of ten at the front of the church. Later, human remains from the churchyard seeped into this supply (as in some other gruesome examples) and it was switched over to mains water. Today, the sad old pump in Shoreditch has lost its handle, had its nozzle broken and even its basin is filled with concrete, yet a lone primrose flowers – emblematic of the mystic quality that some associate with these wellsprings, as sources of life itself.

Before the introduction of the mains supply in London, the pumps were a defining element of the city, public water sources that permitted settlement and provided a social focus in each parish. Now, where they remain, they are redundant relics unused for generations, either tolerated for their picturesque qualities or ignored by those heedless of their existence. When I began to research this subject, I found that no attention had been paid to these valiant survivors of another age. So I set out West to seek those other pumps that had caught my attention in my walks around the city and make a gallery for you of the last ones standing.

Holborn is an especially good place to look for old pumps, there I found several fine examples contemporary with the stately Georgian squares, and the Inns of Court proved rewarding hunting ground too. At Lincoln’s Inn, the porter told me they still get their water supply untreated from the Fleet river, encouraging me to explore South of Fleet St at the Temple, although to my disappointment Pump Court no longer has a pump to justify its name.

Up in Soho, at Broadwick St, you will find London’s most notorious pump, the conduit that brought a cholera epidemic killing more than five hundred people in 1854. Now it has been resurrected as a monument to the physician who detected the origin of the infection and had the pump handle removed. Today, the nearest pub bears his name, John Snow. The East End’s most famous specimen, the Aldgate Pump – that I have written of elsewhere in these pages – was similarly responsible for a lethal epidemic, underlining the imperative to deliver a safe water supply, an imperative that ultimately rendered these pumps redundant.

Perhaps the most gracious examples I found were by St Paul’s Cathedral, “Erected by St Faith’s Parish, 1819,” and in Gray’s Inn Square. Both possess subtle expressive detail as sculptures that occupy their locations with presence, and in common with all their pitiful fellows they stand upright like tireless flunkies – ever hopeful and eager to serve – quite oblivious to our indifference.

In Shoreditch churchyard, this sad old pump of 1832 has lost its handle, had its nozzle broken and basin filled with concrete, and is attended by a lone primrose.

In Queen’s Sq, Holborn this pump of 1840 has the coats of arms of St Andrew and St George.

In Bedford Row, Holborn, this is contemporary with its colleague in Queens Sq.

In Gray’s Inn Sq – where, in haste, a passing lawyer mislaid a red elastic band.

This appealing old pump in Staple Inn is a pastiche dated 1937.

This is the previous pump in the location above, more utilitarian and less picturesque.

In New Square, Lincoln’s Inn.

Between Paternoster Sq and St Paul’s Churchyard.

Outside the Royal Exchange in Cornhill. The text on the pump reads, “On this spot a well was first made and a house of correction built thereon by Henry Wallis Mayor of London in the year 1282.” Designed by architect Nathaniel Wright and erected in 1799.

Aldgate Pump marks the boundary between the East End and the City of London. The faucet in the shape of a wolf commemorates the last of these beasts to be shot outside the walls of the City.

London’s most notorious pump in Broadwick St, Soho. Five hundred people died in the cholera epidemic occasioned by this pump in 1854. Reinstated in 1992 to commemorate medical research in the service of public health, the nearby pub is today named “John Snow” after the physician who traced the outbreak to this pump. A red granite kerbstone across the road marks the site of the original pump.

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These are the dead cats that once hung behind the counter of the celebrated “Dustbin Bar” at Dirty Dick’s Old Port Wine & Spirit House in Bishopsgate. It is a location that holds a special place in my affections as the first pub I ever went into in London, one day after work at the Bishopsgate Institute.

Although this was longer ago than I care to admit and regrettably the cats in this picture had already gone by then, yet I still recall the sense of expectation, entering the narrow frontage and walking back, and back, and back through the warren of rooms with sawdust on the floor – descending ever deeper into the bowels of the city, it seemed. And I can only imagine how this strange drama might have been enhanced by the presence of umpteen dead cats suspended from the ceiling.

This was how it was described in 1866 – “A small public house or rather a tap of a wholesale wine and spirit business…a warehouse or barn without floorboards – a low ceiling, with cobweb festoons dangling from the black rafters – a pewter bar battered and dirty, floating with beer – numberless gas pipes tied anyhow along the struts and posts to conduct the spirits from the barrels to the taps – sample phials and labelled bottles of wine and spirits on shelves – everything covered with virgin dust and cobwebs.”

Yet all was not as it might seem, because the presence of these curious artefacts was not due to unselfconscious eccentricity, it was an early and highly successful example of what we should call a “theme pub.” Established in 1745 as The Old Jerusalem, the drinking house took the name of Dirty Dick’s in 1814 and adopted his story along with it. The original of Dirty Dick was Nathaniel Bentley, a successful merchant with a hardware shop and warehouse in Leadenhall St in the mid-eighteenth century. After his bride-to-be died on their wedding day – so the legend goes – he never cleaned up again, never washed or changed his clothes. “It’s of no use, if I wash my hands today, they will be dirty again tomorrow,” he declared. Bentley died in 1809, and the Bishopsgate Distillers appropriated this story of the notorious dirty hardware merchant, adorning their bar with dead cats and cobwebs to perpetuate the legend.

Charles Dickens knew Dirty Dick’s and was fascinated with this myth of one who sealed up the door on the wedding breakfast and left the cake and table decorations to acquire dust eternally. In a letter to the printer of his weekly publication “Household Words” dated 30th December 1852, he wrote “Don’t leave out the Dirty Old Man, he is capital.” And it has been suggested that Nathaniel Bentley was the inspiration for the character of Miss Havisham in “Great Expectations.”

Dirty Dick’s was rebuilt in the eighteen seventies, though the cellars are of an earlier date, and now the bizarre artefacts are banished to a glass case, yet it is still worth a visit. Explore the wonky half-timbered spaces and seek out the secluded panelled rooms at the rear, where you can enjoy a quiet drink away from the commotion of Bishopsgate to contemplate the ancient coaching inns that once lined Bishopsgate, long before the age of the train and the motor car.

Nathaniel Richard Bentley – the origin of the myth of Dirty Dick.

Part of the adjoining City Corner Cafe was once an alley leading into Dirty Dick’s adorned with a series of these mosaics which illustrated the tale.

Dirty Dick by William Allingham

A Lay of Leadenhall

In a dirty old house lived a Dirty Old Man.
Soap, towels or brushes were not in his plan;
For forty long years as the neighbours declared,
His house never once had been cleaned or repaired.

‘Twas a scandal and a shame to the business-like street,
One terrible blot in a ledger so neat;
The old shop with its glasses,black bottles and vats,
And the rest of the mansion a run for the rats.

Outside, the old plaster, all splatter and stain,
Looked spotty in sunshine, and streaky in rain;
The window-sills sprouted with mildewy grass,
And the panes being broken, were known to be glass.

On a rickety signboard no learning could spell,
The merchant who sold, or the goods he’d to sell;
But for house and for man, a new title took growth,
Like a fungus the dirt gave a name to them both.

Within these there were carpets and cushions of dust,
The wood was half rot, and the metal half rust;
Old curtains—half cobwebs—hung grimly aloof;
‘Twas a spiders’ elysium from cellar to roof.

There, king of the spiders, the Dirty Old man,
Lives busy, and dirty, as ever he can;
With dirt on his fingers and dirt on his face,
The dirty old man thinks the dirt no disgrace.

From his wig to his shoes, from his coat to his shirt,
His clothes are a proverb—a marvel of dirt;
The dirt is prevading, unfading, exceeding,
Yet the Dirty Old Man has learning and breeding.

Fine folks from their carriages, noble and fair,
Have entered his shop, less to buy than to stare,
And afterwards said, though the dirt was so frightful,
The Dirty Man’s manners were truly delightful.

But they pried not upstairs thro’ the dirt and the gloom,
Nor peeped at the door of the wonderful room
That gossips made much of in accents subdued,
But whose inside no one might brag to have viewed.

That room, forty years since, folks settled and decked it,
The luncheon’s prepared, and the guests are expected,
The handsome young host he is gallant and gay,
For his love and her friends are expected today.

With solid and dainty the table is dressed—
The wine beams its brightest—flowers bloom their best;
Yet the host will not smile, and no guest will appear,
For his sweetheart is dead, as he shortly shall hear.

Full forty years since turned the key in that door,
‘Tis a room deaf and dumb ’mid the city’s uproar;
The guests for whose joyance that table was spread,
May now enter as ghosts, for they’re everyone dead.

Though a chink in the shutter dim lights come and go,
The seats are in order, the dishes a row;
But the luncheon was wealth to the rat and the mouse,
Whose descendants have long left the dirty old house.

Cup and platter are masked in thick layers of dust,
The flowers fallen to powder, the wine swath’d in crust,
A nosegay was laid before one special chair,
And the faded blue ribbon that bound it is there.

The old man has played out his part in the scene
Wherever he now is let’s hope he’s more clean;
Yet give we a thought, free of scoffing or ban,
To that Dirty Old House and that Dirty Old Man.

(First published by Charles Dickens in Household Words, 1853)

Nathaniel Bentley, Eccentric Character & Hardwareman of Leadenhall St – the well-known Dirty Dick

Photograph of City Corner Cafe copyright © Patricia Niven

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Thomas Hugo, the nineteenth century historian of Bishopsgate, wrote a history of this thoroughfare prefaced with a quote from his predecessor, John Strype in 1754 -“The fire of London not coming unto these parts, the houses are old timber buildings where nothing is uniform.” While the rest of London had been rebuilt after 1666, Bishopsgate alone retained the character of the city before the fire and in 1857 Thomas Hugo was passionate that this quality not be destroyed – as he wrote in the strangely prescient introduction to his “Walks in the City: No 1. Bishopsgate Ward.”

“This quarter, so hallowed and glorified by olden memories, is unquestionably deserving of a foremost place in our affectionate regard. Our history, our literature and our art are associated with the charmed ground in closest and most indissoluble union. You can scarcely open a single volume illustrative of our national history which does not carry you in imagination to that still picturesque assemblage of edifices where, amid its overhanging Elizabethan gables and stately Caroline facades, its varied masses of pleasantly mingled light and shade, its frequent churches and sonorous bells, the greatest and best of Englishmen have successfully figured among their fellows, and to whose adorning and embellishment the noblest powers have in all ages been devoted. And yet, unhappily, this is the spot where alterations are most commonly made, and with perhaps least regard to the irreparable loss which they necessarily involve. Here, where, for all who are versed in our country’s literature, every stone can speak of its greatness, where the name of every street and lane is classical, where around multitudes of houses fair thoughts and pleasant memories congregate as their natural home and common ground, the demon of transformation rules almost unquestioned, lays its merciless finger on our valued treasures, and leaves them metamorphosed beyond recognition only to work a similar atrocity upon some other precious object. Special attention, therefore, on every account, as well as for beauty, the value, and the excellence of that which still remains, as for the insecurity and uncertainty of its tenure, is most urgently and imperatively demanded.”

John Keats was baptised in St Botolph’s Church, Bishopsgate.

The Bishop’s Gate was on the site of one of the gates to the Roman city of Londinium, from which led Ermine St, the main road North. First mentioned in 1210, Bishop’s Gate was rebuilt in 1479 and 1735, before it was removed in 1775. In 1600, Will Kemp undertook his jig from here to Norwich in nine days.

A mitre set into the wall marks the site of the former Bishop’s Gate today.

Crosby Hall, the half-timbered building at the centre of this picture was once Richard III’s palace. Other residents here included Thomas More, Walter Raleigh and Mary Sidney, the poet. Built by wool merchant John Crosby in 1466, it was removed to Cheyne Walk, Chelsea in 1910.

Elizabethan houses in Bishopsgate, 1857.

The Lodge, Half Moon St, Bishopsgate Without, 1857.

Paul Pindar’s House, Bishopsgate photographed by Henry Dixon for the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London in the eighteen eighties. Paul Pindar was James I’s envoy to Turkey and his house was moved to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1890.

A chef takes a break in White Hart Court.

Houses designed by Inigo Jones built in White Hart Court, Bishopsgate in 1610.

Bishopsgate in the aftermath of the IRA bomb in 1993.

The newly completed Heron Tower boasts Europe’s largest indoor fish tank.

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