Comments on: Lost Spitalfields

By: Virginia Soskin

Virginia Soskin — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 15:54:59 +0000

We just learned our ancestor, Harry Miller, lived at 20 Spital Square. He was Jewish, a tailor, and this area was highly Jewish back in 1909. So we found several photos of 20 Spital Square, London, which was registered on his ship’s manifest when he arrived in New York at age 20. Gosh, it sure is amazing what you can find on the internet. Thanks for this site; it’s the only way people can preserve city streetscapes that are no more. We are thrilled to learn this information.

By: Brett Busang

Brett Busang — Sun, 30 Jul 2017 20:41:28 +0000

The story you tell, which involves the kind of wholesale destruction on which I have always thought American planners thrive, is as instructive as it is tragic. Expedient pragmatism appears to be a more or less universal compulsion and it is practiced, with a free hand, wherever space is at a premium and the pressures of any marketplace – whatever form they may take – lead rather than follow. Yet confronting the losses that are so eloquently documented in these photographs is another thing altogether. There is a visceral component that longs to remember, reflect, and perpetuate. Here in America, we are suspicious of presumably sentimental reasons for holding on to things that are no longer as useful as they were. Architecture can be re-purposed – and it is; even so, the context out of which it came, as well as the life that pulsates around it, no longer remains. When a thing comes out of a set of purposes and values that are as dead as the doornails that are swept away in dumpsters, the thing has lost its meaning. Can other meanings be imposed? Perhaps. Can something that is merely “pretty” survive because of aesthetics alone? As a person who is perhaps gratuitously attached to the past, I always hope so.

By: Catherine

Catherine — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 13:52:06 +0000

I agree with Libby. I’m spending too much time thinking of the past here, and I only moved here in the Seventies, but had visited as a young child. Thank you for these.

By: Kassie

Kassie — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 11:51:55 +0000

Thank you for such a poignant entry–I have just returned home from a brief London visit, and even in the few years I have been away, I am stunned by the changes. And yet, it is the same in New York, where my old Italian neighborhood is being wiped out by chain stores. While in London, I was thrilled to finally visit E Pellici and received such a warm welcome and had such delicious food! And then, to my dismay,as I was passing by, I spotted Chanel in the Spitalfields market. All thanks to you for sharing Spitalfields Life with all of us. You are an important keeper of the flame.

By: Margaret Nairne

Margaret Nairne — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 11:14:57 +0000

What haunting and poignant photographs! My ancestors lived in No.20 Spital Square – probably from when it was built until the 1780s and I have been researching the family history and writing a blog around my 4 x great aunt’s diary, written 1776. She often refers to her father “going to town” and he would have been at 20 Spital Square from where he and his brother ran their silk-weaving business – extraordinary to see inside the house. Her Grandmother lived at No.9 Spital Square and she mentions having dinner there and also staying there for the night. It is wonderful that these photographs exist – for me they create an acute awareness of the race of time.

By: Helen Breen

Helen Breen — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 11:04:07 +0000

Greetings from Boston,

GA, indeed much was lost. Spital Square looks too lovely to survive. Beautiful doorways at 20 and 32 Spital Square. Reminds me somewhat of the squares in Dublin. Interior woodworking at #23 is stunning.

Thanks as always…

By: Libby

Libby — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 08:57:59 +0000

What a beautiful opening paragraph. Exactly how it is for me in my London.

By: Barbara Elsmore

Barbara Elsmore — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 08:05:37 +0000

It is so reassuring to know of the existence of these photographs and that they in a place of safekeeping. It is good to see some internal photographs amongst them. Thank you for bringing them into the light.

By: John Barrett

John Barrett — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 07:40:37 +0000

A super set of pics on one it shows two boot scrapers on the steps. Artillery Passage fascinates me just for pedestrians has it a military history? Poet John

By: Jim McDermott

Jim McDermott — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 05:34:39 +0000

It tears at the heart-strings to consider what’s gone (and what’s replaced it). Every time I open my copy of ‘Lost London’ I feel something akin to bereavement. On the other hand, had something as lovely as Spital Square survived it would probably now be ‘occupied’ by absentee property investors, and use of its public space strictly regulated.