At St Botolph Without Aldgate
I am delighted to publish this extract of a post from A London Inheritance, written by a graduate of my blog writing course. The author inherited a series of old photographs of London from his father and by tracing them, he discovers the changes in the city over a generation. Follow A LONDON INHERITANCE, A Private History of a Public City
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My father’s photograph of St Botolph Without Aldgate in the fifties
The same view today
When I found the location where my father took his photograph only a single building remained in an entirely changed street scene. In his picture, the distinctive tower of St Botolph Without Aldgate is easily recognisable, although the top of the spire is missing through bomb damage. But there were no other obvious clues to identify where my father took his photo, although there is a bomb site between the church and the road.
I walked around the surrounding streets trying to find the location. My search was not helped by the new buildings obscuring the view of the church. However, when I walked down Dukes Place towards the junction with Creechurch Lane and Bevis Marks, I saw one building that looked familiar.
If you look to the left of the top photo, there is a tall building. If you look at the left of the photo below, the same building is still there – a lone survivor from the pre-war buildings in these streets.
Although the ground floor is different now, the upper floors have the same architectural features in both photographs. The building today is National Microfinance Bank House but, in my father’s time, it was Creechurch House. Walking down towards St Botolph’s without Aldgate, the church becomes visible and at the rear of the church are trees, much as in my father’s original photo.
The first written records mention St Botolph Without Aldgate in the twelfth century, although a Saxon church was probably built on the site, evidenced by tenth century burials in the crypt. Originally attached to the Priory of the Holy Trinity, it was rebuilt just before the dissolution during Henry VIII’s reign and restored in 1621. St Botolph without Aldgate was declared unsafe and demolished in 1739, making way for construction of the church we see today. This church by George Dance the Elder was built between 1741 and 1744 and aligned so the entrance and the tower faced the Minories.
“Without Aldgate” references the location of the church outside the walls of the City of London. There are several other St Botolph churches at the edge of the City, St Botolph Without Bishopsgate, St Botolph Without Aldersgate, and there was a St Botolph Billingsgate, destroyed in the Great Fire.
St Botolph established a monastery in East Anglia in the seventh century and died around the 680. In the tenth century, King Edgar had the remains of saint divided and sent to locations through London. They passed through the City gates and the churches alongside the gates through which the remains passed were named after St Botolph.He is the patron saint of wayfarers, who used the City gates as they travelled to and fro. It fascinates me that the names of these churches at the edge of the City of London today refer both to the Roman wall and to events from in tenth century.
St Botolph Without Aldgate viewed from the Minories
Elevation by George Dance the Elder of St. Botolph, c.1740s © Sir John Soane’s Museum
Section by George Dance the Elder of St. Botolph, Aldgate, c.1740s © Sir John Soane’s Museum
The interior of St Botolph without Aldgate retains the original galleries and Tuscan columns
The elaborate plasterwork was added between 1888 and 1895 by J.F. Bentley
Plasterwork by J.F. Bentley
Window commemorating the Stationers’s Company
Window commemorating the Paviour’s Company
Window commemorating the Spectacle Makers’ Company
An eighteenth century ceremonial sword rest
Photographs copyright © A London Inheritance
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David Hoffman At St Botolph’s In Colour
David Hoffman will be in conversation with Gaynor Tutani at the Museum of the Home tomorrow , Wednesday 20th November at 6:30pm. They will be showing photographs and discussing his new book and exhibition ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END.
This is the only event David is doing in person, so if you want to hear him speak please book now.
David Hoffman sent me this dramatic set of photographs that he took at the ‘wet shelter’ for homeless people – where alcohol and drugs were permitted – in the crypt of St Botolph’s Church, Aldgate, in the seventies. Readers will recall David’s series of black and white pictures of St Botolph’s shelter that I published, recording Rev Malcolm Johnson’s compassionate initiative offering refuge to the dispossessed without distinction.
These colour photographs make a fascinating contrast to the monochrome realism of David’s earlier series, offering a distinctive vision of the same subject that is both more emotive and visceral, yet also more painterly and even lyrical.
“These were shots undertaken as tests as much as documenting the wet crypt. The light was a mix of coloured fluorescent tubes and tungsten bulbs, and the types of film available that were sensitive enough to use in this relatively-dark environment also varied a lot in their sensitivity to different-coloured lighting – all of which made for unpredictable results as I moved around, and the push-processing required gave a lot of grain which cut down the sharpness I could achieve.
In those days, I was keen to show off my technical skills and didn’t really like the effect – so I quickly gave up using colour and returned to black and white. But, looking back at these pictures now, I wonder what I was thinking. I find the colour shifts and graininess quite gorgeous and I regret not taking the idea further.”
– David Hoffman
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
Cover price is £35 but you can buy it from Spitalfields Life for £30
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
David Hoffman At St Hildas
David Hoffman will be in conversation with Gaynor Tutani at the Museum of the Home on Wednesday 20th November at 6:30pm. They will be showing photographs and discussing his new book and exhibition ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END.
This is the only event David is doing in person, so if you want to hear him speak please book now.
Contributing Photographer David Hoffman sent me these glorious pictures of a party he attended at St Hilda’s Community Centre, Club Row, in 1975.
‘St Hilda’s East was established in 1889 by former pupils of Cheltenham Ladies College as ‘a community of people bound together in the service of the poor’. I came across it by chance in 1975. I was twenty-nine, just starting out as a photographer and this window into an East End from long ago immediately fascinated me.
I just walked in, asked if it would be OK to take some photos and got an immediate easy invitation to help myself. Quickly followed by offers of a cup of tea, a sandwich, a slice of cake… I think this was early December and I saw posters for the Christmas party so I invited myself along.
I found the spirit and the energy of what seemed to me to be such aged pensioners hard to believe. When one of the dancers flashed her knickers and winked at me, I wondered if my tea had been spiked and it was all a delirium. These photos, some unseen since I took them, not only prove that this was no hallucination but, rather disconcertingly, that those seemingly ancient people I photographed were all younger than I am now.’
David Hoffman
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
Cover price is £35 but you can buy it from Spitalfields Life for £30
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
Dennis Anthony’s Petticoat Lane
If you are looking to spruce up your linen cupboard with some fresh bolster cases or if it is time to replace those tired tea towels and soiled doilies, then these two lovely gentlemen are here to help. They have some super feather eiderdowns and quality blanket sets to keep you snug and cosy on frosty nights, and it is all going for a song.
One Summer Sunday in the nineteen fifties, Dennis Anthony took his camera down Petticoat Lane to capture the heroes of the epic drama of market life – all wearing their Sunday best, properly turned out, and even a little swanky. There is plenty of flash tailoring and some gorgeous florals to be admired in his elegant photographs, composed with dramatic play of light and shade, in compositions which appear simultaneously spontaneous and immaculately composed. Each of these pictures captures a dramatic moment – selling or buying or deliberating – yet they also reward second and third glances to scrutinise the bystanders and all the wonderful detail of knick-knacks gone long ago.
When the West End shops shut on Sundays, Petticoat Lane was the only place to go shopping and hordes of Londoners headed East, pouring through Middlesex St and the surrounding streets that comprised its seven “tributaries,” hungry for bargains and mad for novelty. How do I know this? Because it was the highlight of my parents’ honeymoon, when they visited around the same time as Dennis Henry, and I grew up hearing tales of the mythic Petticoat Lane market.
I wish I could buy a pair of those hob-nailed boots and that beret hung up beside the two sisters in shorts, looking askance. But more even than these, I want the shirt with images of records and Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle group, hung up on Jack’s stall in the final photograph. Satisfied with my purchases, I should go round to Necchi’s Cafe on the corner of Exchange Buildings and join those distinguished gentlemen for refreshment. Maybe, if I sat there long enough, I might even glimpse my young parents come past, newly wed and excited to be in London for the first time?
I am grateful to the enigmatic Dennis Anthony for taking me to Petticoat Lane in its heyday. I should like to congratulate him on his superlative photography, only I do not know who he is. Stefan Dickers, the archivist at the Bishopsgate Institute, bought the prints you see here on ebay and although they are labelled Dennis Anthony upon the reverse, we can find nothing more about the mysterious photographer. So if anyone can help us with information or if anyone knows where there are further pictures by Dennis Anthony – Stefan & I would be delighted to learn more.
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Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane
The Wax Sellers of Wentworth St
Tower Hamlets Women For Peace
David Hoffman will be in conversation with Gaynor Tutani at the Museum of the Home on Wednesday 20th November at 6:30pm. They will be showing photographs and discussing his new book and exhibition ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END.
This is the only event David is doing in person, so if you want to hear him speak please book now.
East End Peace Women’s Group in action in Dalston
Contributing Photographer David Hoffman‘s astonishing images of women’s protest in the eighties are an enduring and inspirational witness to our unquenchable desire for justice.
“Some of these photographs are of our gang, Tower Hamlets Women for Peace, along with two blokes from Tower Hamlets Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, blocking the Whitechapel Rd near the Cambridge Heath Rd crossing early in the morning of Tuesday 20th Dec 1983. Most of us were nicked and defended ourselves in a remarkable court case at which we were all found guilty but unconditionally discharged.
Other photographs show when we blocked Whitechapel Rd close to the Vallance Rd crossing, sometimes by crossing the road back and forth repeatedly rather than sitting down. We did this whenever we got a message on the Greenham ‘phone-tree’ that Cruise nuclear convoys were on the road. We wanted to publicise this as well as the fact that Whitechapel Rd is a Military Service Route to be taken over as such should our government or the United States government decide to wage a nuclear war.
There are also photographs here of the Blood Money demo outside British Association of Film & Television Arts at 195 Piccadilly where there was a conference of arms traders and manufacturers on International Women’s Day, 8th March 1984. Our Peace Group joined others there to chuck red paint in their general direction. One of the pictures shows the arrest of an older woman in a shawl writing a note on her wrist, who was the one who had the good wheeze – sadly not possible on modern public transport – of hopping onto a bus and chucking her paint from the platform as it passed. Unfortunately, the cops caught up with the bus at the traffic lights.
Various arrests and court cases ensued, of which I remember only my own at which I got off by showing – with the help of David Hoffman’s photos – that my red paint had actually hit BAFTA’s door, not the public pavement I was accused of damaging.” – A Member of Tower Hamlets Women for Peace
East End Peace Women’s Group in action in Whitechapel
East End Peace Women’s Group in action in Hackney
East End Peace Women’s Group in action in Piccadilly
“I started photographing protest and other social issues in the seventies. I was living in Whitechapel at that time and the women I knew were involved in squatting and generally trying to resist the horrors of the Thatcher era. The women’s peace movement really took off with the establishment of the American nuclear missile base in Greenham and East End women were among the most active and committed.
I felt privileged to be trusted with advance notice of some of the actions and to be able to photograph them. These pictures are from the winter of 1983-84 and, if anyone has caption information or memories to share, I would love to be able to add that to these images.”
David Hoffman
East End Peace Women’s Group in action in Whitechapel
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
Cover price is £35 but you can buy it from Spitalfields Life for £30
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
Old Dame Trot & Her Comical Cat
Photographer David Hoffman will be in conversation with Gaynor Tutani at the Museum of the Home on Wednesday 20th November at 6:30pm, discussing his new book and exhibition ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END.
This is the only event David is doing in person, so if you want to hear him speak please book now.
I must confess that I identify closely with Old Dame Trot – as illustrated in this early nineteenth century chapbook – knowing all too well how it is to share a home with a large feline personality…
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David Hoffman’s East End
Photographer David Hoffman will be in conversation with Gaynor Tutani at the Museum of the Home on Wednesday 20th November at 6:30pm, discussing his new book and exhibition ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END.
This is the only event David is doing in person, so if you want to hear him speak please book now.
“I took these photographs thirty to forty years ago – they are all from the East End, mostly around Whitechapel and Spitalfields.
I was born in the East End, but my parents’ upward mobility whisked me out to suburbia and it was only in my twenties that I gravitated back to my roots. I was immediately entranced by the atmosphere of joy and dilapidation. It was the spirit of the people you see in these pictures that lifted my spirits and showed me the direction which my career has followed ever since.” David Hoffman
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
You may also like to take a look at
David Hoffman at Fieldgate Mansions
David Hoffman at Smithfield Market
Cover price is £35 but you can buy it from Spitalfields Life for £30
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
