A Lost Corner Of Whitechapel
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Now that Whitechapel Station has been completely rebuilt and the new Elizabeth Line is fully operational, few remember how it used to be half a century ago but photographer Philip Cunningham recorded the vanished streets and yards that once occupied this lost corner
Winthrop St
“I first started taking photographs of Winthrop St and Woods Buildings in Whitechapel in the mid-seventies. I remember the first time I went to Winthrop St on a cold frosty morning with a bright blue sky. A woman came out of one of the houses and asked what I was doing. ‘Photographing the streets,’ I said. ‘You’d better hurry up they’re coming down!’ she replied. She was right, within a few months they were gone.
‘Comprehensive Development’ was the only philosophy pursued by the London County Council and Greater London Council for rebuilding London after the war. Their planners complained that too much pre-war building was left, making comprehensive planning really difficult. Yet it would not have taken much imagination to have incorporated streets like these within any new development, creating a richer and more diverse urban landscape.
Even Mile End Place, where I lived in my grandfather’s house, was designated for demolition in 1968 to become a car park for Queen Mary College. Fortunately, the council did not have enough money to build flats for us to be decanted into so our street was saved.”
Winthrop St
Durward St School was built in 1876 and eventually restored by the Spitalfields Trust in 1990
Winthrop St
Winthrop St
Winthrop St
Winthrop St
Woods Buildings looking towards Whitechapel Market
“Woods Buildings was a subject I photographed over and over, it always held that feeling for me of Dickens’ London. To the left, as you approached the arch under the buildings, was a urinal and when I climbed the wall to take a look, it appeared to be for public use but had been bricked up. It must have been quite intimidating to pass through that passage at night.”
‘We live here, it’s not a toilet’
Entrance to Woods Buildings in Whitechapel Market
“By 1984, the land opposite Woods Buildings on the north side comprised a combination of wasteland and sheds where a boot fair would be held every Sunday. It was licensed by the Council and very popular. One Sunday, I observed a group of Romanians selling secondhand clothes just outside the compound which did not go down well with the gatekeepers as they had not paid a fee. There followed a quite violent fracas, although fortunately no one was seriously hurt and only a little blood spilt. I felt sorry for the children, it must have been frightening for them. Those were desperate days!”
Durward St
Photographs copyright © Philip Cunningham
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Philip Cunningham’s East End Portraits
Gravedigger’s Grave Stories
I am proud to publish these excerpts from GRAVE STORIES by a graduate of my writing course. The author, known as ‘Gravedigger’ invites you to visit the graveyard with the promise that ‘all of human life is here’ and tells the stories of the inhabitants.
I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes, and learn how to write your own blog.
If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.
SARAH SIDDONS (1755-1831)
Eighteenth century London’s best-known tragedienne, Sarah was the daughter of Roger Kemble, an actor-manager and at eighteen she married William Siddons, an actor in the touring theatre company. Sarah inspired ‘Siddons Mania,’ an extraordinary celebrity culture and allegedly left her audience in tears and some in hysterics.
Click here to read the full story of Sarah Siddons
JEREMY BENTHAM (1745-1832)
Born in Spitalfields, Jeremy Bentham advocated changes in the law to give women equal rights including suffrage, the right to public office and the right to divorce on the same terms as men, also to decriminalise homosexuality, to make slavery a crime and to protect animals from unnecessary suffering.
Click here to read the full story of Jeremy Bentham
ALFRED (1873-1945) & ADA SALTER (1866-1942)
Alfred became known as ‘the poor man’s doctor’ by charging sixpence for consultations, waiving his fee if people were unable to pay and introducing a mutual health insurance scheme in Bermondsey, described as the ‘NHS before the NHS.’ Ada was elected as Mayor, replacing the union jack with a red flag at the town hall. She campaigned against air pollution, through the establishment of a green belt and urban gardening, and in two years nine thousand trees were planted in Bermondsey.
Click here to read the full story of Alfred & Ada Salter
CAPTAIN THOMAS CORAM (1668-1751)
Thomas Coram was a ship builder and sea captain. Born in Lyme Regis, he went to sea at the age of eleven, building successful businesses in America and in London, before establishing the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury that bears his name today.
Click here to read the full story of Captain Thomas Coram
JOHN BETJEMAN (1906-1984)
John Betjeman’s passions encompassed Victorian gothic architecture, steam trains, the English countryside and seaside, provincial towns and country churches, and the cosy, banal miscellany of buttered toast, Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, Liberty lampshades and Hillman Imps.
At Chiswick House
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I decided to take advantage of the October sunshine by enjoying an excursion to Chiswick House. I have to confess that it is thirty years since I visited, in the footsteps of the writer Denton Welch who came here in the thirties with a picnic including a hardboiled egg and a piece of fruitcake. It was a great consolation to encounter these gardens again, like a old friend that has not been changed by the years.
William Kent’s garden was inspired by the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, and seeing it illuminated by the perfectly crystalline autumn sunlight this week, I could not resist the feeling I was exploring an eternal landscape that was outside time. I half expected to turn a corner of a box hedge and discover Denton with his blanket spread out upon the grass, waiting for me with a picnic for two of hardboiled eggs and fruitcake.
I can think of no better place to lose an afternoon in London than these gardens, why did I take thirty years to go back?
The Doric Column with Venus on the top at the centre of the Rosary
Sculpture of a lioness by Pieter Scheemakers, 1733
The Ionic Temple and Obelisk, 1722
In the Excedra
Herm in the Excedra
A Sphinx beneath the Lebanon Cedar
Classical villa designed by Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington
Designed by Inigo Jones for Beaufort House in Chelsea in 1621, this gateway was acquired by Lord Burlington in 1738 from his friend Hans Sloan
Bust of Caesar Augustus
The Corinthian capitals on the portico were carved by John Boson
Andreas Palladio by by John Michael Rysbrack
Inigo Jones by John Michael Rysbrack
In the Italian Garden
The Conservatory was designed by Samuel Ware and completed in 1813
Geraniums overwintering
The Classic Bridge, attributed to James Wyatt, was built for the 5th Duke of Devonshire in 1774
The Ionic Temple
Bust of Napoleon in the Rustic House designed by Lord Burlington about 1719
The Eye Catcher installed in 1970
The Cascade by William Kent
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Jim Howett, Designer
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In my opinion, Jim Howett is the best dressed man in Spitalfields. Here he is with a characteristically shy smile, sitting on a seventeen-twenties staircase in a houses in Fournier St he was restoring for the Spitalfields Trust. Jim was entirely at home in this shabby yet elegantly proportioned old house, a specifically localised environment that over time has become his natural habitat and is now the place you are most likely to find him.
For years, I admired Jim’s artisan clothing whenever I caught glimpses of him, always crossing Commercial St and disappearing through the market or off down Folgate St preoccupied with some enigmatic intent. When we were introduced, I discovered that Jim sleeps each night in the attic at Dennis Severs’ House and crosses the market every day to work in Fournier St with Marianna Kennedy, designing the furniture and lamps that have become ubiquitous in the houses around Spitalfields. I also learnt Jim is responsible for a significant number of the most appealing shopfronts in the neighbourhood.
At first, I assumed Jim was Irish on account of his soft vowels and quietly spoken manner, almost whispering sometimes, even swallowing his words before he utters them, and thereby drawing your attention to listen, concentrating to gather both what is said and what is unspoken. Such is the nature of his mind that Jim will begin a sentence and then pursue a digression that leads to another and yet another – though such is the intelligence of the man, that when he leads you back to the resolution of the original thought, it acquires a more precise import on account of all the qualifications and counter arguments. Without a doubt, Jim is a consummate prose talker.
Jim’s origins lie in Ohio in the foothills of the Appalachians, where he grew up in Salem. But Jim’s father worked in international development and in the nineteen-sixties the family moved to the Congo and then his father was transferred Vietnam, with the family ending up in London in 1967. Jim studied at the Architectural Association under the tutelage of Dan Cruickshank, subsequently working for a few years in prehistoric archaeology, before deciding to study at the London College of Furniture which was then in Commercial Rd.
Renting a room on Brick Lane, Jim dropped a card to his former tutor who wrote back to say he had just bought a house in Elder St full of broken furniture, so Jim set up a workbench in Dan’s basement to undertake the repairs.
“Dennis Severs knocked upon the door one day, looking for Dan,” Jim told me. “He said he’d just bought a house round the corner and wanted to do tours, and we thought he was crazy but we helped him set it up. I made the shutters, the partition with the arch in the dining room and I copied the fireplace from one in Princelet St.” he added, revealing the origin of his own involvement with 18 Folgate St, where today he is the sole resident. Before long, Jim was sharing a workshop with Marianna Kennedy and ceramicist Simon Pettet in Gibraltar Walk, sharing aspirations to create new work inspired by historical models by applying traditional craft skills. They found themselves amidst a community centred around the restoration of the eighteenth century houses, dubbed ‘Neo-Georgians’ by the media – a moment recorded today in the collection of magazines and photo features, illustrating the renaissance of Spitalfields, that Jim keeps in a box in his workshop.
Jim taught himself furniture making by copying a Hepplewhite chair – constructing four versions until he could get the proportion right – before he discovered that there was no market for them because dealers considered them too dangerously close to the originals as to approach fakes. Yet this irony, which was to hamper Jim’s early career as a furniture maker, served as a lesson in the significance of proportion in engaging with historical designs.
When Jim won a commission to design an armoire for Julie Christie, he thought he had found the path to success. “She gave me tip of half the value of my commission fee and I thought ‘This is as good as it gets’, but she remains the best client I ever had.” admits Jim, wistfully recognising the severely limited market for custom-built new furniture in antique styles. “I used to make these pieces and have no money left over to buy coffee afterwards,” he declared with a shrug.
The renovation of Spitalfields gave Jim the opportunity to become one of those who has created the visual language of our streets, through his subtle approach to restoring the integrity of old shopfronts that have been damaged or altered. Perhaps the most famous are A.Gold and Verdes in Brushfields St, 1 & 3 Fournier St and 86 Commercial St. In these and numerous other examples, through conscientious research, Jim has been responsible for retaining the quality of vernacular detail and proportion that makes this Spitalfields, rather than any other place. The beauty of Jim’s work is that these buildings now look as if they had always been like they are today.
Yet Jim is quick to emphasise that he is not an architect, explaining that his work requires both more detailed knowledge of traditional building techniques and less ego, resisting the urge to add personal embellishments. “The difference between me and architects, working on historic buildings is that I restrict myself to organising the space. I believe if a building has survived for two hundred years, it has survived because it has certain qualities. The reason, I don’t put my finger in the pie is because I can express myself in other things.”
While Jim spoke, he produced file after file of photographs, plans and maps, spreading them out upon the table in his workshop to create a huge collage, whilst maintaining an extraordinary monologue of interwoven stories about the people, the place and the buildings. I was fascinated by Jim’s collection of maps, spanning the last five hundred years in Spitalfields and I realised that he carries in his mind a concrete picture of how the place has evolved. When I have seen him walking around, he is walking in awareness of all the incarnations of this small parish, the buildings that have come and gone through past centuries.
It fired my imagination when Jim took me into the cellar of 15 Fournier St and pointed out the path across the yard belonging to the sixteenth century building that stood there before the eighteenth century house was built, telling me about the pieces of charred wood they found, because this was where debris was dumped after the Fire of London in 1666.
Simon Pettet portrayed Jim on one of his tiles as a fly on the wall, reflecting Jim’s omnipresence in Spitalfields. “I think if my father had not taken us to the Congo, I should still be there in Salem, Ohio,” confessed Jim with a weary smile, “because at heart I am a localist.” Jim showed me the missing finger on his left hand, sliced off while cutting a mitre from left to right, a mark that today he regards as the proud badge of his carpenter’s trade. In his work and through his modest personal presence, Jim has become an inextricable part of the identity of Spitalfields – after more than forty years, I hope we may now describe him as a local.
Jim at Jocasta Innes’ house in Heneage St, 1990
Jim with Dennis Severs and Simon Pettet, pictured in a magazine feature of 1991
Jim modelling his calfskin apron, 1991
Jim pictured in the penurious weavers’ garret at Dennis Severs’ House that today is his bedroom
In the Victorian Parlour at Dennis Severs’ House
Hoisting up the new cornice in Commercial St
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In The Secret Garret At Brunswick House
Readers may recall that I visited Brunswick House in Vauxhall to interview Adrian Amos, the founder of London Architectural Salvage & Supply Company (LASSCO), earlier this year. It was my pleasure to return later in the summer to write a feature about his secret garret in this astonishing eighteenth-century Palladian mansion, marooned today amidst a forest of towers, for The World of Interiors with photographs by Rachel Ferriman.
Click here to read my feature about Brunswick House in The World of Interiors
Adrian Amos
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The Lantern Slides Of Old London
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Years ago, I became enraptured by a hundred-year-old collection of four thousand lantern slides. They were once used for educational lectures by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute in Spitalfields. When Stefan Dickers became archivist there, he discovered the slides in dusty old boxes – abandoned and forgotten since they became obselete. Yet over the last decade, it has become apparent that these slides, which were ignored for so long, are one of the greatest treasures in the collection.
When I was first offered the opportunity of publishing these lantern slides which have been unseen for generations, I was overwhelmed by the number of pictures and did not know where to start. The first to catch my fancy were the ancient signs and symbols, dating from an era before street numbering located addresses and lettered signs advertised trades to Londoners.
Before long, I grew spellbound by the slide collection because, alongside the famous landmarks and grand occasions of state, there were pictures of forgotten corners and of ordinary people going about their business. It was a delight to discover hundreds of images of things that people do not usually photograph and I was charmed to realise that the anonymous photographers of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society were as interested in pubs as they were in churches.
The more I studied the glass slides, the more joy I found in these arcane pictures, since every one contained the rich potential of hidden stories, seducing the imagination to flights of fancy regarding the ever-interesting subject of Old London. Once I had published The Signs of Old London, I realised there were many other such sets to be found among the slides, as a result of the systematic recording of London which underscored the original project by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, a hundred years ago.
I do not chose not to clean them up or remove imperfections and dirt, or standardise the colour to black or a uniform sepia, either. Instead, I cherish the subtle variations of hues present in these slides and savour the beautiful colour contrasts between them, when laid side by side. There is a melancholic poetry in these shabby images, in which their damage and their imperfections speak of their history, and I have come to glory in the patina and murk.
In the Inns of Court
At Eltham Palace
At Euston Station
The Anchor at Bankside
Crocodiles at the Natural History Museum
Reading Room at the British Museum
Chelsea Pensioner
In Fleet St
In Fleet St
St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell
Between the inner & outer dome of St Paul’s
Along the Embankment
The Old Dick Whittington, Clothfair, Smithfield
Firemen take a tea break
Lightermen on the Thames
Flood in Water St, Tower of London
The White Tower, London’s oldest building
Glass slides courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
Take a look at these sets of the glass slides of Old London
Hairdressers Of The Eighties
I am delighted to publish these photos from A London Inheritance – written by a graduate of my blog course.
A few places are available for my course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches from Richard Fuest, eat cakes baked to historic recipes by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details
Dennis Gents Hair Stylist, note the razor blade sign
Ron’s Gents Hairdressers, Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, is still there but has changed from ‘Hairdresser’ to ‘Barber.’
His & Hers, ‘Executive Mood’ and ‘Avant Garde Mood’ hairstyles offered
June’s Ladies Hair Stylist. STE was the code for Stepney Green, letters were replaced by numbers around 1966.
Dave & Syd Strong, Gent’s Hairdresser
Gent’s Hairdresser moving into Ladies’ Hairdressing
Gent’s Hair Stylist, Puma Court, Spitalfields, run by Kyriacos Cleovoulou from 1962 until 2005.
Apples, Hair Stylist
Peter, Individual Gents Hair Stylist
The Saloon, customers peering out from the left of the window
Gentlemen’s Hairdressing Salon, Carter Lane, City of London
Mario’s Men’s Hairstylist
Hairdresser at 10 Laystall Street, Clerkenwell, with a plaque commemorating Giuseppe Mazzini as ‘the apostle of modern democracy inspired young Italy with the ideal of independence, unity and regeneration of his country.’
The Pleasant Gent’s Hairdresser is still going in Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell
Photographs copyright © A London Inheritance
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HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 6th & 7th February 2027
This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.
“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author
COURSE STRUCTURE
1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.
SALIENT DETAILS
The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 6-7th February, running from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.
Lunch will be catered by Richard Fuest and tea, coffee & cakes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £350.
Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.
