Comments on: Along Old Street

By: Brenda

Brenda — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:04:50 +0000

It’s taken me 70 plus years to want to research this area of east London. I suppose familiarity breeds a contempt that is difficult to shrug off. I went to school at St lukes parochial school from the age of 5 until 11. I can still see the tiny, sooty playground with its awful outside toilets and inadequate shelter for wet weather. At that time, 1954 until 1960, there was a secondary section on the uppermost floors. We were regularly taken to St lukes church at Christmas and Easter, where some of us provided the choir. The headmistress at that time was a Miss Langley, rarely seen, but who insisted that my parents allowed me to take up my grammer school place, at Central foundation girl’s school in spital square.
The school faced the “old mint “,but was always referred to as the luny bin. I have since discovered that it indeed had been a hospital for ” lunatics ” in its former life. Many hours I spent gazing out of the high windows wondering what happened in that foreboding building.
Walking home, to Mark street now a small park!, often took me past John Wesley’s house and Bunhill where if you were brave you played hide and seek. But,most of the area was full of bombsites,interspersed with paper factories and rundown pubs.
So many people seem to recall happy times living in the east end of London but my aim from an early age was to escape the deprivation and ever lingering violence. It is only now that I realise I was living in such a historically rich environment.

By: Ken

Ken — Sat, 15 May 2021 20:10:46 +0000

I lived in Murray grove used to walk to old st tube station to get my dad the dog results.
I also did penny for the guy down in tha station on firework night.
My mother was a cleaner in moor fields eye hospital,
and I would walk up to meet her she always had stuff from the kitchen,
I loved the cornflakes covered in chocolate.
This was seventy years ago
The flat I lived in was called Marie Lloyd house after the famous musicale star.
Those were the days.
Lol ken

By: Marcia Howard

Marcia Howard — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 20:30:05 +0000

You make it all look extremely inviting, despite the occasional boarded up hostelry. Worth a personal visit.

By: Hilda Kean

Hilda Kean — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 12:45:58 +0000

I agree with you about the apparent nature of Old Street today but it is important to perhaps say a little more about the past. What is now a block of apartments at the junction of City Road and Old Street was the Methodist Leysian Mission since the C19th. Working closely with local working class people – in contrast , they argued, with the work of nearby more upmarket Wesley’s chapel.

Political discussions also took place in rooms in Old Street , including in the later C19th debates between the left and MP Charles Bradlaugh. Although he was eventually MP for Northampton he had been born in Baches St, off City Road by the Old St roundabout, from his childhood.

By: Su Corbaley

Su Corbaley — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 02:56:55 +0000

Boy do these photos make me homesick for a home that never was mine. I LOVE London. Thanks for this walk down Old Street.

By: pauline taylor

pauline taylor — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 22:54:26 +0000

Thank you. I have enjoyed reading all the comments here and I was especially interested to learn about the plumage trade as a family member was described as a feather comber in a 19th century census. Whitecross Street always interests me too as my great grandparents lived there for a while with their three surviving eldest children, and my grandfather, the youngest child, was born there, in Fosters Buildings, in 1874, Sadly my great grandmother was to die there seven years later. Her first child, Samuel Russell, had died before his second birthday and was buried in Bunhill Fields so there is a lot of family history in this part of London for me.

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 20:00:42 +0000

You’ve inspired me to take a walk that way. I used to drive along old street but rarely stopped off except to pop into safeways on my way home to Clapton Square. looking forward to a stroll around the area. Thanks.

By: Karl Renner

Karl Renner — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 19:57:46 +0000

You missed out the blue plaque to Priss Fotheringham, on the corner of Whitecross Street (opp. St. Luke’s)!

By: Gary Arber

Gary Arber — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 17:22:13 +0000

The street that I hated to walk in that area when I started to work at our family printing business at age of 15 was Gt. Eastern Street, equally as boring as Old Street, and I had the disadvantage of having to carry a heavy pack containing two reams of Large Post paper from the No.8 bus stop in Shoreditch High Street to Fergusons’s trade ruling works in Cowper Street
Gary

By: Tessa Boase

Tessa Boase — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 12:57:20 +0000

I too have been time-travelling in Old Street: this was the nexus for London’s plumage trade from around 1870 to 1920. Here all the feather manufacturers had their headquarters: Reuben Barnett, Aaron Blitz, Isaac Davis, Jacob Feis, Salomon Loewenstein, Schoetensack & Co … The trade was propped up by poorly paid female labour. I wonder if the Hand & Feathers pub is a nod to this now vanished profession that once employed so many thousand?
I researched this world as background to a book on the forgotten female founders of the RSPB, who were campaigning against feathered hats – or ‘murderous millinery’.
‘Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather’ takes its title from one plump, purple ostrich feather once worn by Mrs P, now held at the Museum of London – a mere stroll from where the feather workers once operated.