With so many places being lost, and over time the living links to this ‘noble past’ too, it really is so important to have these stories not just captured but so well told, not least in order to reveal to those making the decisions and the ‘deals’ just what it is they are erasing.

As for Ocean House (Mac Fisheries old HQ home on Little Trinity Lane EC4 — between Fishmonger’s Hall at London Bridge and Fisheries founder William Lever’s UniLever building at Blackfriars) the bulldozers arrived 6 months ago. Gone too neighbouring Fur Trade House. Ongoing on site and across Upper Thames Street for another two years, the building of a 5-star Westin hotel that will stretch to and around Queenhithe Dock. No doubt there will be some fine fish on the menu.

None of which is actually as devastating, in terms of heritage subordinated and subsumed, as The City withdrawing the market porters’ licenses…

http://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/05/10/the-last-fish-porters-of-billingsgate-market/

I had thought that Billingsgate had ‘one of the best’ in their Ward Councillor Michael Welbank… professional mediator, arbitrator, as well as leading Town Planner…

Maybe the new Lord Mayor, as three weeks time — (Lord) Jeffrey Richard de Corban Evans, 4th Baron Mountevans, as a Maritime man, shipbroker, and specifically as a Trustee of Seafarers UK — would be interested in hearing a update from the License-less labourers of Billingsgate about market life subsequent to the City Finance Committee’s decision to introduce casual labour in 2012 …everything that City in fact stood against for more than 700 years in terms of the Livery system, not least by buying up rival ‘under-cutting’ commercial markets such as the Shadwell Fish Market which had stood on the site of today’s King Edward VII Memorial Park, in order protect ‘standards’ and workers’ rights…

My very best wishes to Charlie, and for all he is doing to educate the next generation 🙂

Hmmm, now I want some fish for tea. Nice bit of smoked haddock, perhaps.