I think anyone elected or appointed to a London Board of any kind should have a compulsory course in architectural and social heritage. Perhaps then money wouldn’t count for ALL?

Thank you, G.A., for sharing these marvellous photos. Would that we could go back and walk there for just one day.

Then — yeeks! — women took up the bicycle, some even wearing baggy trousers. So, I imagine the people at the bicycle school, wavering along these dark streets while learning the new skill of staying upright. Such fun. GA, if you come across posts of women on bicycles or people learning to ride, that would make a great post.

amazing photos. Sad to know some building were destroyed in the name of progress.

thank you for these.

Debra

The City Bicycle School of the 1870s (image 2) would seem to have been a particularly pioneering enterprise that would be much valued in the Aldgate of today, 150 years later.

Meanwhile, south of the river, the King’s Head Yard — the third of GA;s “Inn Yard” images, and one of the most historic ‘Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens’ coaching inn yards leading off Borough High Street, itself one of London’s oldest streets, first formally laid out 2,000 years ago by the Romans.

On a scale equivalent to that closer to home in Spitalfields the battle against heritage destruction continues.

Earlier this summer yet another Planning Inspector intervention, with ‘newly arrived’ Great Portland Estates (GPE) and their architects of choice AHMM having been trying since 2018 to site a 146m high tower within the Yard, i.e 37 storeys in 4-5 storey conservation area context) including the removal of the backs of the Georgian terrace that defines the western end of St Thomas Street, and (suitably objective reporting from bdonline.co.uk”Intelligence for Architects”) “The Italianate façade of Keats House would be taken down from its present location on St Thomas Street and reassembled 2.7m to the west as the frontage of a new building to be delivered as part of the redevelopment.”

“Historic England “strongly objects” […] the “greatest harm” [..] would come from [the proposed building’s] “profound impact” on the special character and appearance of the Borough High Street Conservation Area, inside which the development site is located. […] “severe harm” to a range of designated heritage assets, most notably Guy’s Hospital but also including Southwark Cathedral.”

GPE have been unwilling to back down in the face of the local council refusing to even determine the Application, and so, as with developers elsewhere, GPE decided that Lockdown provided the ‘cover’ they needed to seek a favourable response from Central Government, After all to GPE’s mind and game plan, they’ve now also submitted a separate, alternative 103m high proposal that is (only now) 26-storey “plus mezzanine”. And whether 37 or 26+ storeys “The project seeks to enhance the area of Southwark around London Bridge station, St Thomas Street and Borough High Street by regenerating the under utilised historic yards to provide generous and accessible new public spaces, connect retail routes, and retain and restore built heritage on site.”…

Once again, it’s the ‘learned people’ of King’s College London who are implicated and indeed ‘front and centre’ in this desecration of the historic streetscape… King’s having already demolished, in the last 5 years, a little further up the street, the oldest extant 18th-century merchant house irrespective the site’s Historic England Grade-II listing. Only to put in its place and that of its adjoining ‘Pilgrim’s Way’ historic yard (Spur Inn and Nag’s Head) a crassly designed Tesco and Premier Inn, that may or may not have an expected life of 30 or so years, certainly not the 300 years achieved by the retail facility and lodgings they replaced…

London and UK readers would be right in seeing this as the ‘Argos-ification of architecture’

St Marys Ovaries… I worked in one of the old wear houses there in 1973.

Thank you.