The Dead Man In Clerkenwell
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This is the face of the dead man in Clerkenwell. He does not look perturbed by the change in the weather. Once winters wore him out, but now he rests beneath the streets of the modern city he will never see, oblivious both to the weather and the wonders of our age, entirely oblivious to everything in fact.
Let me admit, although some might consider it poor company, I consider death to be my friend – because without mortality our time upon this earth would be worthless. So I do not fear death, but rather I hope I shall have enough life first. My fear is that death might come too soon or unexpectedly in some pernicious form. In this respect, I envy my father who always took a nap on the sofa each Sunday after gardening and one day at the age of seventy nine – when he had completed trimming the privet hedge – he never woke up again.
It was many years ago that I first made the acquaintance of the dead man in Clerkenwell, when I had an office in the Close where I used to go each day and write. I was fascinated to discover a twelfth century crypt in the heart of London, the oldest remnant of the medieval priory of the Knights of St John that once stood in Clerkenwell until it was destroyed by Henry VIII, and it was this memento mori, a sixteenth century stone figure of an emaciated corpse, which embodied the spirit of the place for me.
Thanks to the curator at the Museum of the Order of St John, I went back to look up my old friend after all these years. They lent me their key and, leaving the bright October sunshine behind me, I let myself into the crypt, switching on the lights and walking to the furthest underground recess of the building where the dead man was waiting. I walked up to the tomb where he lay and cast my eyes upon him, recumbent with his shroud gathered across his groin to protect a modesty that was no longer required. He did not remonstrate with me for letting twenty years go by. He did not even look surprised. He did not appear to recognise me at all. Yet he looked different than before, because I had changed, and it was the transformative events of the intervening years that had awakened my curiosity to return.
There is a veracity in this sculpture which I could not recognise upon my previous visit, when – in my innocence – I had never seen a dead person. Standing over the figure this time, as if at a bedside, I observed the distended limbs, the sunken eyes and the tilt of the head that are distinctive to the dead. When my mother lost her mental and then her physical faculties too, I continued to feed her until she could no longer even swallow liquid, becoming as emaciated as the stone figure before me. It was at dusk on the 31st December that I came into her room and discovered her inanimate, recognising that through some inexplicable prescience the life had gone from her at the ending of the year. I understood the literal meaning of “remains,” because everything distinctive of the living person had departed to leave mere skin and bone. And I know now that the sculptor who made this effigy had seen that too, because his observation of the dead is apparent in his work, even if the bizarre number of ribs in his figure bears no relation to human anatomy.
There is a polished area on the brow, upon which I instinctively placed my hand, where my predecessors over the past five centuries had worn it smooth. This gesture, which you make as if to check his temperature, is an unconscious blessing in recognition of the commonality we share with the dead who have gone before us and whose ranks we shall all join eventually. The paradox of this sculpture is that because it is a man-made artifact it has emotional presence, whereas the actual dead have only absence. It is the tender details – the hair carefully pulled back behind the ears, and the protective arms with their workmanlike repairs – that endear me to this soulful relic.
Time has not been kind to this figure, which originally lay upon the elaborate tomb of Sir William Weston inside the old church of St James Clerkenwell, until the edifice was demolished and the current church was built in the eighteenth century, when the effigy was resigned to this crypt like an old pram slung in the cellar. Today a modern facade reveals no hint of what lies below ground. Sir William Weston, the last Prior, died in April 1540 on the day that Henry VIII issued the instruction to dissolve the Order, and the nature of his death was unrecorded. Thus, my friend the dead man is loss incarnate – the damaged relic of the tomb of the last Prior of the monastery destroyed five hundred years ago – yet he still has his human dignity and he speaks to me.
Walking back from Clerkenwell, through the City to Spitalfields on this bright afternoon in late October, I recognised a similar instinct as I did after my mother’s death. I cooked myself a meal because I craved the familiar task and the event of the day renewed my desire to live more life.
The Museum of the Order of St John, St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, EC1M 4DA
On Publication Day For Endurance & Joy In The East End
When I first published David Hoffman’s photography of Fieldgate Mansion on Spitalfields Life back in 2013, I did not know where it might lead. But over the years I published more and more of his superlative pictures of the East End until we arrive, more than a decade later, at publication day for his monograph, ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END 1971 – 1987.
David Hoffman’s photography exhibition that accompanies his book is now open at the Museum of the Home and runs until March 30th. Over the coming months, I will be undertaking a lecture tour of the East End, showing David Hoffman’s photographs and telling the stories behind the pictures. Here are the first three dates to be announced.
Thursday 7th November 7:30pm at Wanstead Tap, 352 Winchelsea Rd, E7 0AQ
Sunday 24th November at Write Idea Festival, Tower Hamlets Town Hall, Whitechapel Rd, E1 1BJ
BOOKING OPEN SOON
Sunday 8th December at Bloomsbury Jamboree, Art Workers Guild, 6 Queen Sq, WC1N 3AT
BOOKING OPEN SOON
Cover price is £35 but if you order now you can buy it for £30
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
Lost Spitalfields
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Looking towards Spitalfields from Aldgate East
London can be a grief-inducing city. Everyone loves the London they first knew, whether as the place they grew up or the city they arrived in. As the years pass, this city bound with your formative experience changes, bearing less and less resemblance to the place you discovered. Your London is taken from you. Your sense of loss grows until eventually your memory of the London you remember becomes more vivid than the London you see before you and you become a stranger in the place that you know best. This is what London can do to you.
In Spitalfields, the experience has been especially poignant in recent years with the redevelopment of the Fruit & Vegetable Market, the Fruit & Wool Exchange and Norton Folgate. Yet these photographs reveal another Spitalfields that only a few remember, this is lost Spitalfields.
Spital Sq was an eighteenth century square linking Bishopsgate with the market that was destroyed within living memory, existing now only as a phantom presence in these murky old photographs and in the fond remembrance of senior East Enders. On the eastern side of Spitalfields, the nineteenth century terraces of Mile End New Town were erased in ‘slum clearances’ and replaced with blocks of social housing while, to the north, the vast Bishopsgate Goodsyard was burned to the ground in a fire that lasted for days in 1964.
Yet contemplating the history of loss in Spitalfields sets even these events within a sobering perspective. Only a feint pencil sketch of the tower records the Priory of St Mary which stood upon the site of Spital Sq until Henry VIII ‘dissolved’ it and turned the land into his artillery ground. Constructing the Eastern Counties Railway in the eighteen-thirties destroyed hundreds of homes and those residents who were displaced moved into Shoreditch, creating the overcrowded neighbourhood which became known as the Old Nichol. And it was a process that was repeated when the line was extended down to Liverpool St. Meanwhile, Commercial St was cut through Spitalfields from Aldgate to Shoreditch to transport traffic more swiftly from the docks, wreaking destruction through densely inhabited streets in the mid-nineteenth century.
So look back at these elegiac photos of what was lost in Spitalfields before your time, reconcile yourself to the loss of the past and brace yourself for the future that is arriving.
Spital Sq, only St Botolph’s Hall on the right survives today
Spital Sq photographed in 1909
Church Passage, Spital Sq, 1733, photographed in 1909 – only the market buildings survive.
17 Spital Sq, 1725
25 Spital Sq, 1733
23 Spital Sq, 1733
20 Spital Sq, 1723
20 Spital Sq, 1723
20 Spital Sq, 1732
32 Spital Sq, 1739
32 Spital Sq, 1739
5 Whites Row, 1714
6/7 Spring Walk, 1819
Buxton St, 1850
Buxton St, 1850
Former King Edward Institution, 1864, Deal St
36 Crispin St, 1713
7 Wilkes St, 1722
10 & 11 Norton Folgate, 1810 – photographed in 1909
Norton Folgate Court House, Folgate St, photographed in 1909
52 & 9a Artillery Passage, 1680s
Bishopsgate Goods Station, 1881
Shepherd’s Place arch, 1820, leading to Tenter St – photographed 1909
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Vanishing London
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Four Swans, Bishopsgate, photographed by William Strudwick & demolished 1873
In 1906, F G Hilton Price, Vice President of the London Topographical Society opened his speech to the members at the annual meeting with these words – ‘We are all familiar with the hackneyed expression ‘Vanishing London’ but it is nevertheless an appropriate one for – as a matter of fact – there is very little remaining in the City which might be called old London … During the last sixty years or more there have been enormous changes, the topography has been altered to a considerable extent, and London has been practically rebuilt.’
These photographs are selected from volumes of the Society’s ‘London Topographic Record,’ published between 1900 and 1939, which adopted the melancholy duty of recording notable old buildings as they were demolished in the capital. Yet even this lamentable catalogue of loss exists in blithe innocence of the London Blitz that was to come.
Bell Yard, Fleet St, photographed by William Strudwick
Pope’s House, Plough Court, Lombard St, photographed by William Strudwick
Lambeth High St photographed by William Strudwick
Peter’s Lane, Smithfield, photographed by William Strudwick
Millbank Suspension Bridge & Wharves, August 1906, photographed by Walter L Spiers
54 & 55 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the archway leading into Sardinia St, demolished 1912, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Sardinian Chapel, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, August 1906, demolished 1908, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Archway leading into Great Scotland Yard and 1 Whitehall, September 1903, photographed by Walter L Spiers
New Inn, Strand, June 1889, photographed by Ernest G Spiers
Nevill’s Court’s, Fetter Lane, March 1910, demolished 1911, photographed by Walter L Spiers
14 & 15 Nevill’s Court, Fetter Lane, demolished 1911
The Old Dick Whittington, Cloth Fair, April 1898, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Bartholomew Close, August 1904, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Williamson’s Hotel, New Court, City of London
Raquet Court, Fleet St
Collingwood St, Blackfriars Rd
Old Houses, North side of the Strand
Courtyard of 32 Botolph Lane, April 1905, demolished 1906, photographed by Walter L Spiers
32 Botolph Lane, April 1905, demolished 1906, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Bird in Hand, Long Acre
Houses in Millbank St, September 1903, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Door to Cardinal Wolsey’s Wine Cellar, Board of Trade Offices, 7 Whitehall Gardens
Old Smithy, Bell St, Edgware Rd, demolished by Baker St & Edgware Railway
Architectural Museum, Cannon Row, Westminster
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Insitute
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Endurance & Joy At The Museum Of The Home
This could never have happened without the astonishing generosity of the 500 people who contributed to the two crowd funds which made it possible.
It has taken five years work to bring this together and I am so proud to share it now. The exhibition opens at the Museum of the Home tomorrow and the book is published on Thursday.
It was my great privilege to be entrusted by David Hoffman with the responsibility of presenting his photography in the definite book and exhibition.
We could not have done it without the commitment and talent of designer Friederike Huber throughout this long project.
We look forward to welcoming all those who have signed up for our launch party on Thursday.
Cover price is £35 but if you order now you can buy it for £30 and you will receive a signed copy on publication, 17th October.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
The Battle For The Truman Brewery
Just some of the proposed office blocks the Truman Brewery
Readers will recall our campaign in 2020 to stop the owners of the Truman Brewery building an ugly shopping mall, but now they want to build massive office blocks across the site as well, we need to challenge this too.
Last time, we mobilised 7,487 letters of objection to the shopping mall, yet two councillors approved the application at a planning committee of only three people. Since then we have been fighting to challenge the legitimacy of this decision, taking our case to the Supreme Court.
Everything has changed now the new Tower Hamlets Council are onside. They have produced a Master Plan for the site that reflects local interests by advocating for social affordable housing across the site.
We want the needs of the community to be prioritised in the redevelopment of the Brewery. We reject this soulless corporate style development that will push up rents on Brick Lane, driving out independents and undermining the long-established Bangladeshi community.
Please help by writing an objection to the Truman Brewery development, using this simple guide below.
REASONS FOR OBJECTION
*The Truman Brewery’s development will be a gated office plaza which offers almost nothing to local stakeholders and the community.
*This proposal offers only a tiny amount of social and affordable housing which does not even begin to meet the need for homes in the area.
*The open space is small and has gates restricting access.
*It is geared to the workers in the new offices who are unlikely to be local people. The development offers too little for local small businesses and inadequately addresses the need for affordable workspaces.
*The bulky blocks cause harm to the Conservation Area and the setting of listed buildings, failing to respond to the character and heritage of Spitalfields.
HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY
You can help us stop this bad proposal by writing a letter of objection to the council as soon as possible.
Please write in your own words and head it OBJECTION.
Anyone can object wherever they live.
Members of one household can each write separately.
You must include your postal address or your objection will be discounted.
Quote all these Planning Applications
PA/24/01450/A1
PA/24/01451/A1
PA/24/01439/A1
PA/24/01475/NC
Send your objection by email to: development.control@towerhamlets.gov.uk
Or by post to: Planning Department, Tower Hamlets Town Hall, 160 Whitechapel Rd, London, E1 1BJ.
The proposed line of office blocks on Buxton Street would overshadow Allen Gardens public park
You can learn more about the Truman Brewery’s development proposal and Tower Hamlets Council’s Master Plan by visiting the free exhibition at the Kobi Nazrul Centre, 30 Hanbury St, E1 6QR, every Saturday and Sunday 12-4pm from 19th October.
The Save Brick Lane campaign is a coalition of local community and heritage groups including Bangladeshi East End Heritage Society, East End Preservation Society, East End Trades Guild, House of Annetta, Nijjor Manush, Spitalfields Life and Spitalfields Trust.
Richard Swallow’s Spitalfields Doors
Cover price is £35 but if you order now you can buy it for £30 and you will receive a signed copy on publication, 17th October.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
14 Fournier St
Richard Swallow introduces his exhibition of new paintings of the East End, the Thames and further afield, CITYSCAPE which opens at Townhouse next Saturday 19th October and runs until Sunday 3rd November.
‘There is nothing that excites me more than the urban landscape. Walking along the Thames or through the streets of Spitalfields, the architecture could not be more disparate. From steel and glass of the riverside buildings at St Pauls to the intimate beauty of Spitalfields. Tall and elegant Georgian facades, rich with classical details, mellow brick and enchanting doors contrast with the vast glass buildings of the encroaching modern city.’ – Richard Swallow
7 Fournier St
12 Fournier St
17 Fournier St
11 Elder St
9 Elder St
15 Wikes St
4 Princelet St
14 Wilkes St
13 Wilkes St
35 Fournier St
18 Folgate St
Paintings copyright © Richard Swallow
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