Drink-In At The Still & Star
Please join me & The Victorian Society for a drink-in at the Still & Star, Aldgate, from 6:30pm next Tuesday 16th August to celebrate this historic pub and learn how to stop its demolition. Meanwhile you can register your objection online at the City of London Planning website.
Still & Star by Gustave Dore, 1880, and as it is today – montage by Adam Tuck
“Let us pass down Harrow Alley, leading to the City Clothes Exchange. Harrow Alley is Petticoat Lane over again – smaller, and, if possible, dirtier than her neighbour. Bestriding the path, like a greasy Colossus, leaning against the wall, or squatting in the mud, are men and women by the score. Beside, behind, and before them, are spread out their miscellaneous wares, to which they supplicate your notice or imperatively demand your attention.
The various public-houses in Petticoat Lane, Harrow Alley, and elsewhere, are generally crammed to excess. Through the open doorways we look into the back rooms, where some dozen men are always smoking, their faces lost in the clouds of smoke which emanate from their lips. These men are known to the initiated as Petticoat Lane fencers, or receivers of stolen goods. Patiently they sit in these filthy rooms, waiting news from their scouts, who they throw out as antennae to ‘feel the way,’ or for the appearance of the thief’s confederate, who ‘gives the office,’ and tells where the booty may be found.”
from The Wild Tribes of London by Watts Philips, 1855
Gustave Dore’s drawing of the Still & Star, 1880, from ‘London: A Pilgrimage’
The Still & Star
The proposed office block
You may like to read my original story
Yes! What a brilliant idea! If I can make it, I want to join you in this venture. Depends on stagecoaches down from the Great North Road. Best of luck and I would like a large gin, please. Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence. Seems about right.
The lack of sensitive planning in our cities is tragic. After reading about The Still and Star (what an ace name for a pub) here, I followed a link that my friend had put on Facebook to discover just how bad things are in Manchester. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jun/08/manchester-second-coming-heritage-developers-destroying-industrial-soul?CMP=share_btn_fb
I know your blog is local but you raise issues of national important.
Good luck with the drink in.
Great photo-montage. Have fun, wish I could join you there, but I will sign the petition. Good luck. Valerie
The “office block” looks like a futuristic prison.
Yet another vile building, another eyesore to blemish our heritage
Can folks in the US sign?
Who contrived that monstruosity?
Day by day, London is becoming just another vulgar-looking, petty nouveau-rich town. After all, money, not people, is behind it all.
I have registered my objection.
i live in madison, wisconsin, usa, but i was able to register an objection, so any of you other non-uk persons, give it a try. so many parts of the “developed” countries are being destroyed by the demolition of historic sites and replacing them with ugly, shoddy monstrosities that will probably need to be demolished in 30 years or so anyway. this creeping ugliness and loss of beauty and soul is happening here in madison, and in other places i have lived, such as san francisco, california. it is disturbing that money matters and history & aesthetics & human-ness don’t.