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Photographer Barry Weston introduces his exuberant pictures of the Blues Dances held in Greenwich and Woolwich in the eighties,  published for the first time here today.

‘My route into the Blues Dances began in the mid-seventies when I ventured into a newly opened reggae record shop by Plumstead station. The shop was tiny, an end-of-row one-storey triangle barely six foot at its widest.

I was looking for the album King Tubby Meets The Upsetter at Grass Roots of Dub which I had read a review of and, although the owner, Noldie, did not have a copy, he asked if I was in a hurry and then played me some of the latest tunes he had. After selecting a small stack of singles I settled up and Noldie added a final 45 to the bag with the words ‘I think you’ll like this one.’ Sure enough Burn Babylon by Sylford Walker was the best of the bunch and with that I was hooked, returning every free day I had for the rest of the decade.

Through Noldie I met Lloyd ‘Junior’ McQueen and we started to hang out together at the Lord Howick pub in Woolwich. Noldie later arranged a slot DJ-ing at the Howick. Friday to Sunday, with me playing the Friday night and opening the other two nights from early ’78 to late ’79.

In ‘79 Junior started playing the Blues Dance at Guilford Grove in Greenwich. The Blues was run by Ghent & Mary in the basement of their large family house. At that time Blues Dances gave the Black British community a place to hang out and dance to reggae, free from the hassle that so often happened in pubs and clubs at the time, particularly when the National Front was at its most active.

We would leave the Howick on a Saturday night and then start the Blues at around half eleven at night, the dance running through to the early hours when the buses started again. It was a running joke to play the Jah Stitch toast with the lyrics ‘milkman coming in the morning’ just as the electric float and the clinking bottles could be heard before the first hint of dawn.

Junior would play through the the night with support from his brother Danny. I would step up and play a short set to give them a break and a chance to have a plate of Mary’s delicious food. To this day nothing can compare to fried red mullet goatfish at three in the morning with a Red Stripe to wash it down.

In early 1980, after seven years of working, I applied to the London College of Printing Art Foundation course as a mature student. To add to my portfolio I borrowed an Olympus Trip 35, a decent point-and-shoot compact camera, to teach myself the basics of photography. I was also planning on moving across to South London, so wanted to capture what had been a large part of my life over the preceding years.

These photos were taken over three consecutive Saturdays, mostly at the Blues Dance at Guildford Grove. One film roll starts at the Howick with George Thompson at the decks. Some photos show the bus trip between the Howick and the Blues and other pictures were taken at Noldie’s second, far bigger, record shop in 1981.

Between the time the photos were taken in 1980 and 1981, there was the appalling tragedy of the New Cross Fire at a party just half a mile down the road from Guildford Grove. This was movingly documented in Steve McQueen’s three part TV program Uprising about the fire and its consequences. The roots of Black British music sprang from Blues Dances like these, once running in West Indian communities in many cities, which have now largely disappeared.’ – Barry Weston

Photographs copyright © Barry Weston

Four-hundred-year-old stone floor at The Prospect of Whitby

Tempted by the irresistible promise of the riverside, I set out for Wapping to visit those pubs which remain in these formerly notorious streets once riddled with ale houses. Yet although there are pitifully few left these days, I discovered each one has a different and intriguing story to tell.

Town of Ramsgate, 288 Wapping High St. The first alehouse was built on this site in 1460, known as The Hostel and then as The Red Cow from 1533. The pub changed its name again, to the Town of Ramsgate, in 1766 to attract trade from Kentish fishermen who unloaded their catch at Wapping Old Stairs adjoining. Judge Jeffreys was arrested here in disguise, attempting to follow the flight of James II abroad in 1688, as William III’s troops approached London.

The Turk’s Head, 1 Green Bank. Originally in Wapping High St from 1839, rebuilt on this site in 1927 and closed in the seventies, it is now a community cafe.

Captain Kidd, 108 Wapping High St. Established in 1991 in a former warehouse and named after legendary pirate, Wiiliam Kidd, hanged nearby at Execution Dock Stairs in 1701.

Turner’s Old Star, 14 Watts St. In the eighteen-thirties, Joseph Mallord William Turner set up his mistress Sophia Booth in two cottages on this site, one of which she ran as an alehouse named The Old Star. In 1987, the current establishment was renamed Turner’s Old Star in honour of the connection with the great painter. Notoriously secretive about his lovelife, Turner adopted Sophia’s surname to conceal their life together here, acquiring the nickname ‘Puggy Booth’ on account of his portly physique and height of just five feet.

The Old Rose, 128 The Highway. 1839-2007

The last pub standing on the Ratcliffe Highway

The Three Suns, 61 Garnet St. 1851 – 1986

The Prospect of Whitby, 56 Wapping Wall. Founded 1520, and formerly known as The Pelican and The Devil’s Tavern.

What does a cat have to do to get a drink around here?

Sir Hugh Willoughby sailed from The Prospect of Whitby in 1533 upon his ill-fated attempt to discover the North-East Passage to China.

The Grapes, 76 Narrow St. Founded in 1583, the current building was constructed in 1720 – it is claimed Charles Dickens danced upon the counter here as a child.

You may like to read about my other pub crawls

The Gentle Author’s Pub Crawl

The Gentle Author’s Next Pub Crawl

The Gentle Author’s Spitalfields Pub Crawl

The Gentle Author’s Dead Pubs Crawl

The Gentle Author’s Next Dead Pubs Crawl

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Inspired by W S Graham’s poem, I took a walk through the nocturnal city, following in the poet’s footsteps with my camera to create this photoessay as an homage to Harold Burdekin

The Night City

Unmet at Euston in a dream
Of London under Turner’s steam
Misting the iron gantries, I
Found myself running away
From Scotland into the golden city.

I ran down Gray’s Inn Road and ran
Till I was under a black bridge.
This was me at nineteen
Late at night arriving between
The buildings of the City of London.

And then I (O I have fallen down)
Fell in my dream beside the Bank
Of England’s wall to bed, me
With my money belt of Northern ice.
I found Eliot and he said yes

And sprang into a Holmes cab.
Boswell passed me in the fog
Going to visit Whistler
Who was with John Donne who had just seen
Paul Potts shouting on Soho Green.

Midnight. I hear the moon
Light chiming on St. Paul’s.

The City is empty. Night
Watchmen are drinking their tea.

The Fire had burnt out.
The Plague’s pits had closed
And gone into literature.

Between the big buildings
I sat like a flea crouched
In the stopped works of a watch.

Unmet at Euston in a dream…

St Pancras Church

I ran down Gray’s Inn Road…

High Holborn

and ran till I was under a black bridge…

Boswell passed me in the fog…

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

I hear the moonlight chiming on St. Paul’s…

Fell in my dream beside the Bank of England’s wall to bed…

Whalebone Court

…just seen Paul Potts shouting on Soho Green…

Poem copyright © The Estate of W S Graham

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Fortified by a late supper of lamb cutlets, I set out after eleven through the streets of Spitalfields just as some of the residents were making their way to Christ Church for the midnight service, but I did not join them, instead I walked out into the City on Christmas Eve. As I passed through Brick Lane, the ever-optimistic curry touts were touting to an empty street and in Commercial St a few stragglers who had been out for the night loitered, but I left them all behind as I entered the streets of the City of London where there was no-one. Passing through the deserted Leadenhall Market, illuminated like a fairground, I slipped into the web of narrow alleys to emerge at the Bank of England. Here where the Bank, the Mansion House and the Royal Exchange face each other at this famous crossroads, the place was empty save a lonely policeman patrolling outside the Bank of England.

I headed down to the river and as I crossed the footbridge above the dark water with powerful currents churning in the depths below, I could enjoy the panorama of the vast city of empty rooms around me. Tonight, I was the sole rambler through its passages and byways, an explorer in the unknown territory of the familiar city, transformed by the complete absence of inhabitants. The sound of the gulls’ cry registered as it had not before and birdsong followed me throughout my journey into the dark streets, in which for the first time ever I heard the echo of my own footsteps in the centre of London.

Yet just as I had befriended the emptiness, I came round a corner in Southwark to see the cathedral glowing with light and the tune of a carol blowing on the breeze. I stepped down to the cathedral door and discovered a candlelit service in progress. An usher saw me through the glass door, and although I kept a respectful distance – imbued with the generosity of the season, he could not resist coming outside to lead me in. Before I knew it, I was in the midst of the service and it was overwhelming in contrast to the cold dark streets to which I had acclimatised. But once the bishop had led the choir in a procession through a haze of incense as the congregation sang “O Come all Ye Faithful,” the service was over. So as quickly as I arrived, I was able to return to my wandering.

Hastening Eastward along the Thames, I came to Tower Bridge where I crossed and skirted around the Tower of London. In the absence of floodlighting, its grim austerity came to the fore, yet even though all the gates were shut for the night I could see a few of the residents’ individual lights still burning within. From here I set out Westward, along Cheapside and Cannon St, where I came upon the fabled London Stone, built into an illuminated box in the wall, as I was passing on my way to St Pauls. Here also, the floodlighting was off, allowing Wren’s great cathedral to loom magnificently among the trees like some natural excrescence, a towering cliff of rock, eroded into pinnacles.

Winding my way onwards along the Strand through the courtyards and alleys, I found myself in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and I had it to myself. And in homage to the writer most famous for his walks by night through London, I visited the Old Curiosity Shop. Already, the night was drawing on and I discovered a sense of urgency, walking on purposefully even though I did not where I was going. At the Savoy, I turned down Carting Lane where I came upon one of just three people that I saw suffering the misfortune of sleeping out last night, though equally I was also aware of many bundled up in dark clothing with backpacks walking slowly and keeping to the shadows. I could only presume these people were walking all night in preference to sleeping in the frost.

I followed the Embankment along to Parliament Sq where there was no-one, apart from the antiwar protesters sleeping peacefully in their tents and statues of dead men standing around on plinths. Big Ben struck three in the morning and, without any traffic, I could sense the sound travelling around me, bouncing and reverberating off the stone buildings as I made my way up Whitehall. Coming to the end of Downing St, two policemen with machine guns on duty behind the fortifications spotted me, the lone figure in the street, and I realised they were focusing on me. Then, to my surprise, one waved, and so I returned the wave automatically and the atmosphere of unease was broken.

There were plenty of taxis for hire circling Trafalgar Square – they were the only traffic on the road by this time – but absurdly there were no customers to rent them. Looking through Admiralty Arch, I espied Buckingham Palace tempting me, and I wanted to go walking around St James’ Palace too, but weariness was also coming upon me. It was time to return home. I walked doggedly across Covent Garden, along Holborn and over Smithfield, then through the Barbican and so I found myself in Spitalfields again.

The city was as still as the grave and there was a keen edge to the wind, yet I had kept warm by walking continuously. It was as though I had travelled through a dream – a dream of an empty city. Although I delighted in the privilege of having London to myself, it is an alien place with nobody in it, so I was eager to renounce my monopoly and give the city back to everyone else again, because I longed for the reassurance of my warm bed. Already children were waking to unwrap parcels that appeared mysteriously in the night, although I must confess I saw no evidence of nocturnal deliveries upon my walk. It was now 4:30am on Christmas Morning and as I approached my front door, even before I took out the key to place it in the lock, a cry of a certain cat was heard from just inside, where he had been waiting upon my return for all this time.

Leadenhall Market at 11:50pm on Christmas Eve.

At the Bank at Midnight.

In Southwark Cathedral, 1:00am Christmas Morning.

Leaving Southwark Cathedral.

The London Stone in Cannon St.

At St Pauls, 2:00am Christmas Morning.

The Old Curiosity Shop, 2:30am.

At the Savoy, 2:45am.

In Carting Lane, next to the Savoy.

A lonely photographer at the London Eye, 2:55am

The Nativity scene in Trafalgar Square, 3:15am.

In Covent Garden, 3:30am.

At High Holborn, 3:45am.

At the Barbican, 4:00am on Christmas Morning.

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The temperature is plunging and I can feel the velvet darkness falling upon London. As dusk gathers in the ancient churches and the dusty old museums in the late afternoon, the distinction between past and present becomes almost permeable at this time of year. Then, once the daylight fades and the streetlights flicker into life, I feel the desire to go walking out in search of the dark nights of old London.

Examining hundreds of glass plates – many more than a century old – once used by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute, I am in thrall to these images of night long ago in London. They set my imagination racing with nocturnal visions of the gloom and the glamour of our city in darkness, where mist hangs in the air eternally, casting an aura round each lamp, where the full moon is always breaking through the clouds and where the recent downpour glistens upon every pavement – where old London has become an apparition that coalesced out of the fog.

Somewhere out there, they are loading the mail onto trains, and the presses are rolling in Fleet St, and the lorries are setting out with the early editions, and the barrows are rolling into Spitalfields and Covent Garden, and the Billingsgate porters are running helter-skelter down St Mary at Hill with crates of fish on their heads, and the horns are blaring along the river as Tower Bridge opens in the moonlight to admit another cargo vessel into the crowded pool of London. Meanwhile, across the empty city, Londoners slumber and dream while footsteps of lonely policemen on the beat echo in the dark deserted streets.

Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

Read my other nocturnal stories

Night at the Beigel Bakery

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‘It is a sort of family, a very strange family’

When you walk into the French House in Dean St, you enter a magical realm of possibility where you discover you are welcome and where you might meet almost anyone. It is the last place I can think of where the spirit of old Soho lingers and where you feel you are at the heart of London. It is a public place and yet people behave as if they were in private, a place where – just by walking in the door – you become accepted into a community.

Since 1891 when it opened, there have only been three publicans at the French House. In 1989, Lesley Lewis took over when Gaston Berlemont passed into legend. Today, Lesley presides with a regal hauteur worthy of Catherine Deneuve, a shrewd humour worthy of Marie Lloyd and a generosity of spirit worthy of Mistress Quickly.

On the road to the French house, Lesley performed with a python in cabaret before graduating to managing a strip club in Old Compton St in 1979, where admission cost 50p and senior customers brought sandwiches to stay all day. As it turned out, these formative experiences proved the ideal qualifications when destiny called.

Lesley tells how Gaston Berlemont’s family took over the pub from the first landlord, a German by the name of Schimdt, whose wife returned – after he had left the country at the outbreak of WWI – to sign over the lease on September 12th, 1914. Gaston spent his whole life at the French House and, on his return from WWII, his father said,”Enough of that. You’re behind the bar, I’m off.”

It was a brawl in the twenties between French sailors smashing pint glasses over each other’s heads that led to the house policy of only serving half pints of beer, which continues to this day with the annual exception of April 1st.

During the last war, the pub – known as the York Minister – became a centre for French ex-patriates in London, serving wine which was a rare commodity then. Gaston’s daughter Giselle recalls Errol Flynn and Orson Welles tasting wine in the cellar at this time, and in June 1940 General De Gaulle wrote his famous speech in the bar -“La France a perdu une bataille. Mais la France n’a pas perdu la guerre!” After the war, the nickname of ‘The French House’ stuck and, in 1984, the name was officially changed.

With such illustrious predecessors, it was a great delight and privilege to sit down with Lesley in a quiet corner of the bar and hear her story in her own words over a glass of Ricard.

“I was General Manager at Peppermint Park, a restaurant and cocktail bar in Upper St Martin’s Lane, and when they sold the company I was offered redundancy or a pub. So I took the pub. It was the George & Dragon in Clerkenwell, a marvellous old pub. I had never poured a pint in my life, but some of my staff came with me because we were all made redundant, and that was the start of loving the pub business.

It took me a while to get into the swing of things and I learnt a good few lessons. We had no idea what we were doing but the customers helped us. After the first week, we were called together by some of the regulars and they said, ‘Lesley, this is fine. We don’t mind you looking after our pub for us.’ That is the truth of pubs, it is not my pub it is the customers’ pub – because without them, we are absolutely nothing.

Slowly, we learnt to pull pints and amuse the customers. We were next door to the school of journalism so we had a lot of students, but most of our customers were the old time, edge-of-the-East-End, Clerkenwell people. They were characters – all been pretty much wiped out, it is something quite different now.

I lived above the George & Dragon and I live upstairs here, it is a very difficult job to do without living on the premises because you are pretty much on for seven days a week. After about five years in Clerkenwell, they offered me a ‘wine bar,’ and this was the wine bar! I knew the French House already and I had always loved it, and I have been here thirty years.

It was always full of wonderful characters – it still is, but they are different kinds of characters today – writers, painters and bohemians. Gaston was the landlord then and it was condemned when he retired in 1989, which I did not discover until I went to get the licence and I was given three months to sort it out. The place had been left to rack and ruin, which I think is probably why Gaston wanted to retire. He was facing a huge bill, instead I got the huge bill but it was worth it.

We had to rebuild it in a way that people would not notice, so we were building through the night. It was the most loved place in the world and I had this feeling I was going to destroy it but the red linoleum on the bar top had to go. It is British oak to go with the rest of the interior and it cost a fortune. Then I had to bash it up a bit so it looked in tune with the whole pub. The windows had not opened since the sixties but we fixed that. There was this awful seating along the window and you burnt your ankles on the heating which was underneath, so we got rid of that and bar stools came in. This pub has evolved.

I have stayed thirty years at the French House because I love it, this is what I do. It is a sort of family, a very strange family. Most of my staff have been with me a very long time and we are very close. Eighty per cent of my customers are regulars and we are all close to each other. We help each other through everything. To be honest, I do not know what I would do without it.

A big city can be a lonely horrible place sometimes and if there is a place where you can go for a bit of comfort and conversation. It is not just about drinking, it is about going to have a chat with somebody, and feel safe in an environment that is yours – where you are not threatened in any way, as you are in a lot of clubs. It is for all ages. Our eldest customer is Norman who is ninety-two but he does not come in very often and our youngest is a year and two months, Georgie’s little boy who has been coming in here since he was conceived.

For me, it all about the people who have been in here over the years – like Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, Dan Farson and Lucian Freud. I think at some point just about everybody who is anybody has put a foot over the threshold. They are all still here in a funny kind of way. Their essence is here.

I think it is really important that we keep our pubs. You notice how – particularly in Soho – they are disappearing all the time. It is even more important in the country villages where, if the pub goes, there is nothing. People need to have somewhere to go. It is a very British thing, a pub.”

Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie

The French House, 49 Dean Street, Soho, London, W1D 5BG

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These are the dead cats that once hung behind the counter of the celebrated “Dustbin Bar” at Dirty Dick’s Old Port Wine & Spirit House in Bishopsgate. It is a location that holds a special place in my affections as the first pub I ever went into in London, one day after work at the Bishopsgate Institute.

Although this was longer ago than I care to admit and regrettably the cats in this picture had already gone by then, yet I still recall the sense of expectation, entering the narrow frontage and walking back, and back, and back through the warren of rooms with sawdust on the floor – descending ever deeper into the bowels of the city, it seemed. And I can only imagine how this strange drama might have been enhanced by the presence of umpteen dead cats suspended from the ceiling.

This was how it was described in 1866 – “A small public house or rather a tap of a wholesale wine and spirit business…a warehouse or barn without floorboards – a low ceiling, with cobweb festoons dangling from the black rafters – a pewter bar battered and dirty, floating with beer – numberless gas pipes tied anyhow along the struts and posts to conduct the spirits from the barrels to the taps – sample phials and labelled bottles of wine and spirits on shelves – everything covered with virgin dust and cobwebs.”

Yet all was not as it might seem, because the presence of these curious artefacts was not due to unselfconscious eccentricity, it was an early and highly successful example of what we should call a “theme pub.” Established in 1745 as The Old Jerusalem, the drinking house took the name of Dirty Dick’s in 1814 and adopted his story along with it. The original of Dirty Dick was Nathaniel Bentley, a successful merchant with a hardware shop and warehouse in Leadenhall St in the mid-eighteenth century. After his bride-to-be died on their wedding day – so the legend goes – he never cleaned up again, never washed or changed his clothes. “It’s of no use, if I wash my hands today, they will be dirty again tomorrow,” he declared. Bentley died in 1809, and the Bishopsgate Distillers appropriated this story of the notorious dirty hardware merchant, adorning their bar with dead cats and cobwebs to perpetuate the legend.

Charles Dickens knew Dirty Dick’s and was fascinated with this myth of one who sealed up the door on the wedding breakfast and left the cake and table decorations to acquire dust eternally. In a letter to the printer of his weekly publication “Household Words” dated 30th December 1852, he wrote “Don’t leave out the Dirty Old Man, he is capital.” And it has been suggested that Nathaniel Bentley was the inspiration for the character of Miss Havisham in “Great Expectations.”

Dirty Dick’s was rebuilt in the eighteen seventies, though the cellars are of an earlier date, and now the bizarre artefacts are banished to a glass case, yet it is still worth a visit. Explore the wonky half-timbered spaces and seek out the secluded panelled rooms at the rear, where you can enjoy a quiet drink away from the commotion of Bishopsgate to contemplate the ancient coaching inns that once lined this street, long before the age of the railway and the motor car.

Nathaniel Richard Bentley – the origin of the myth of Dirty Dick.

Part of the former City Corner Cafe – now a takeaway food joint -was once an alley leading into Dirty Dick’s adorned with a series of these mosaics which illustrated the tale.

Dirty Dick by William Allingham

A Lay of Leadenhall

In a dirty old house lived a Dirty Old Man.
Soap, towels or brushes were not in his plan;
For forty long years as the neighbours declared,
His house never once had been cleaned or repaired.

‘Twas a scandal and a shame to the business-like street,
One terrible blot in a ledger so neat;
The old shop with its glasses,black bottles and vats,
And the rest of the mansion a run for the rats.

Outside, the old plaster, all splatter and stain,
Looked spotty in sunshine, and streaky in rain;
The window-sills sprouted with mildewy grass,
And the panes being broken, were known to be glass.

On a rickety signboard no learning could spell,
The merchant who sold, or the goods he’d to sell;
But for house and for man, a new title took growth,
Like a fungus the dirt gave a name to them both.

Within these there were carpets and cushions of dust,
The wood was half rot, and the metal half rust;
Old curtains—half cobwebs—hung grimly aloof;
‘Twas a spiders’ elysium from cellar to roof.

There, king of the spiders, the Dirty Old man,
Lives busy, and dirty, as ever he can;
With dirt on his fingers and dirt on his face,
The dirty old man thinks the dirt no disgrace.

From his wig to his shoes, from his coat to his shirt,
His clothes are a proverb—a marvel of dirt;
The dirt is prevading, unfading, exceeding,
Yet the Dirty Old Man has learning and breeding.

Fine folks from their carriages, noble and fair,
Have entered his shop, less to buy than to stare,
And afterwards said, though the dirt was so frightful,
The Dirty Man’s manners were truly delightful.

But they pried not upstairs thro’ the dirt and the gloom,
Nor peeped at the door of the wonderful room
That gossips made much of in accents subdued,
But whose inside no one might brag to have viewed.

That room, forty years since, folks settled and decked it,
The luncheon’s prepared, and the guests are expected,
The handsome young host he is gallant and gay,
For his love and her friends are expected today.

With solid and dainty the table is dressed—
The wine beams its brightest—flowers bloom their best;
Yet the host will not smile, and no guest will appear,
For his sweetheart is dead, as he shortly shall hear.

Full forty years since turned the key in that door,
‘Tis a room deaf and dumb ’mid the city’s uproar;
The guests for whose joyance that table was spread,
May now enter as ghosts, for they’re everyone dead.

Though a chink in the shutter dim lights come and go,
The seats are in order, the dishes a row;
But the luncheon was wealth to the rat and the mouse,
Whose descendants have long left the dirty old house.

Cup and platter are masked in thick layers of dust,
The flowers fallen to powder, the wine swath’d in crust,
A nosegay was laid before one special chair,
And the faded blue ribbon that bound it is there.

The old man has played out his part in the scene
Wherever he now is let’s hope he’s more clean;
Yet give we a thought, free of scoffing or ban,
To that Dirty Old House and that Dirty Old Man.

(First published by Charles Dickens in Household Words, 1853)

Nathaniel Bentley, Eccentric Character & Hardwareman of Leadenhall St – the well-known Dirty Dick

Photograph of City Corner Cafe copyright © Patricia Niven

Archive pictures courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

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I wish you would take me out to the theatre. I dream of leaving the gloomy old house one evening and joining the excited crowds, out in their best clothes to witness the spectacular entertainments that London has to offer. The particular theatre I have in mind is the Grecian Theatre attached to the Eagle Tavern in Shepherdess Walk, City Road between Angel and Old St.

The place seems to have developed quite a reputation, as I read yesterday, “The Grecian Saloon is really a hot house or a black hole, for the number of human beings packed in there every night would induce a supposition there was no other place of entertainment in London. At least two thousand persons were left unable to procure admission.” This was written in 1839, demonstrating that the popular art of having a good time – still pursued vigorously in the many pubs and clubs here today – is a noble tradition which has always thrived in the East End, outside the walls of the City of London.

“Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle, that’s the way the money goes…” The Eagle public house in the rhyme still exists to this day, though barely anything remains of the elaborate entertainment complex which developed there during the nineteenth century – apart from a single scrapbook that I found in the archive of the Bishopsgate Institute. All the balloon ascents, the stick fights, the operas, the wrestling and the wild parties may be over, and the thrill rides closed long ago, but there is enough in this album to evoke the extravagant drama of it all and fire my imagination with thoughts of glamorous nights out on the town.

You only have to walk through Brick Lane and up to Shoreditch on a Saturday night, through the hen parties and gangs of suburban boys out on a bevy, jostling among the crowds of the intoxicated, the drugged and the merely overexcited, to get a glimpse of what it might have been like two hundred years ago. With as many as six thousand attending events at the Eagle Tavern, we can assume that lines must have formed just as we see today outside nightclubs.

On the site of the eighteenth century Shepherd & Shepherdess Pleasure Garden, the Grecian Saloon developed at the Eagle Tavern to provide all kinds of entertainments, from religious events to conjuring and equestrian performances. There are only tantalising hints that survive of these bygone entertainments. Yet sentences like “We are glad to find that little Smith has recovered her hoarseness” and “We have little to find fault with save that the maniac was allowed to perambulate the gardens without his keeper” do set the imagination racing. There are many fine coloured playbills in the cherished album, crammed with enigmatic promises of exotic thrills. I wonder who exactly was the beautiful Giraffe Girl, or General Campbell, the smallest man in the world. Amongst so much hyperbole there is a disappointing modesty to learn that the central attractions are merely supported by the “artistes of acknowledged talent.”

Elaborate pavilions with all manner of special effects were constructed at the Grecian Saloon, which in turn became the Grecian Theatre in 1858 where Marie Lloyd made her stage debut aged fifteen. Eventually the building was acquired in 1882 by General William Booth of the Salvation Army and the parties came to an end. Yet this site saw the transition from eighteenth century pleasure garden to nineteenth century music hall. The many thousands of souls who experienced so much joy there over all those years impart a certain sacred quality to this location, even if it is now mostly occupied by Shoreditch Police Station.

Watercolours of the New Grecian Theatre in 1899, built during the management of George Augustus Oliver Conquest in 1858 and later purchased by General William Booth of the Salvation Army

Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I enjoyed an exciting day out recently at the magnificent Hippodrome in Cranbourn St on the corner of Leicester Sq and Charing Cross Rd – the veritable corner stone of the West End – which this year celebrates its 125th anniversary.

We were privileged to join Simon Thomas, the casino supremo, as he commenced his daily ritual of ‘walking the floor,’ greeting his staff of more than 950 – each of whom he knows by name – checking that his house was all in order and no lightbulbs needed replacing. Yet even before we arrived we were in awe of the history of this distinguished venue that has survived and upheld its reputation in the entertainment world for over a century through constant adaptation and reinvention.

This enormous Frank Matcham-designed theatre opened in 1900 as a circus of variety where the auditorium could be flooded to enable extravagant aquatic spectacles such as fifteen elephants swimming, acrobatic diving displays, a battle with a giant octopus, and large scale recreations of earthquakes and typhoons. Luminaries including Charlie Chaplin and Harry Houdini performed here in the early days before Ragtime and revue superseded circus and, somewhere in the midst of this, Swan Lake received its London premiere.

In the decades after the Great War, the craze for musical comedies held sway with stars including Jack Buchanan, Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn, interspersed with traditional annual pantomimes featuring Music Hall legends such as Lupino Lane, George Robey and Fay Compton. Glamour and variety better reflected the public mood after the Second World War with the emergence of stars like Shirley Bassey, Max Bygraves, Judy Garland and Tom Jones, and the Hippodrome adapted to become a dinner theatre, rebranded as the Talk of the Town in 1958.

When the liveried doorman ushered us past the velvet rope and we followed the red carpet into the theatre, we wondered what to expect. Frank’s Matcham’s auditorium was demolished in the fifties but it has been spectacularly reconstructed with new plasterwork from the original designs as part of the £40 million restoration in 2009. A casino floor now occupies the stalls where elephants once swam, and the stage where Judy Garland sang is now a studio theatre seating around 300 people where Magic Mike is performed twice nightly.

The Hippodrome is an enormous labyrinth of ceaseless life with a multiplicity of bars, restaurants and places to gamble, open to visit for free twenty-four hours of the day. Simon Thomas led us on an elaborate journey through the maze using his personal swipe card to employ private lifts and secret doors to travel discreetly from one part to another. We entered a speakeasy hidden behind a barbers’ shop and a cocktail bar behind an embossed, touch-sensitive door that only opens if you know where to push and the precise sequence to do it. When we walked through a wall into a Chinese restaurant where an AI-powered robot was clearing the tables, it came as no surprise.

Then it was into another lift, sweeping us up to visit the open-air bar and restaurant on the roof for a sunset view of Frank Matcham’s Roman charioteer that he placed on the top as a symbol of his epic creation, an architectural leitmotif that has its equivalents in the globe on the London Coliseum and the dancer on the Victoria Palace.

When Simon revealed proudly that guests came from far and wide to spend the entire weekend inside the Hippodrome, I realised he embodied the tradition of bold West End showmen whose enthusiasm and imagination have kept these Victorian palaces of popular entertainment open. After gambling so many millions, it is now his passion to keep it alive and I do not imagine he gets too much sleep. ‘I’ve been ten minutes late for each of my meetings all day,’ he confessed to me with a wry grin, rolling his eyes excitedly, ‘and I just catch keep up…’

The Hippodrome by night

A Cross-section of the Hippodrome in The Sphere (1904), showing how an elephant slid down a slide into the water-filled arena. Water spectacles were an integral part of the Hippodrome’s programme after opening in 1900 and the theatre had a water tank which flooded  the auditorium whenever a hydraulic a floor was lowered. © Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library

Gamblers at the casino

Frank Matcham’s charioteer upon the roof

Mid-afternoon the gaming floor

Programme for the Hippodrome revue of 1927, featuring the Hoffman Girls dance troupe, Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney, the Ralli Twins (society twin sisters Alison and Margaret Hore-Ruthven) with Jack Hylton and his orchestra. © Mary Evans Picture Library

Where once elephants swam…

Serious gaming

Where Swan Lake was first performed

The basement bar in the former hydraulic water tank

Simon Thomas, Casino Supremo

At the barber’s shop which conceals the entrance to the speakeasy

Glittery outfits and slot machines

The Chinese restaurant in the cellar

The robot that clears the restaurant tables and returns the plates to the kitchen

Dancers limbering up in advance of a performance of Magic Mike

Rooftop lettering Hollywood style

Album cover for Shirley Bassey Live at the Talk of the Town. In the seventies, Shirley Bassey performed here on numerous occasions. © Mary Evans Picture Library

Frank Derrett’s photograph of the Talk of the Town when the Three Degrees were headlining in the seventies

New photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

Learn more in The London Hippodrome – An Entertainment of Unexampled Brilliance by Lucinda Gosling published by Memory Lane Media

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As you will have realised by now, I am a night bird. In the mornings, I stumble around in a bleary-eyed stupor of incomprehension and in the afternoons I wince at the sun. But as darkness falls my brain begins to focus and, by the time others are heading to their beds, then I am growing alert and settling down to write.

Once I used to go on night rambles – to the railway stations to watch them loading the mail, to the markets to gawp at the hullabaloo and to Fleet St to see the newspaper trucks rolling out with the early editions. These days, such nocturnal excursions are rare unless for the sake of writing a story, yet I still feel the magnetic pull of the dark city streets beckoning, and so it was with a deep pleasure of recognition that I first gazed upon this magnificent series of inky photogravures of “London Night” by Harold Burdekin from 1934 in the Bishopsgate Library.

For many years, it was a subject of wonder for me – as I lay awake in the small hours – to puzzle over the notion of whether the colours which the eye perceives in the night might be rendered in paint. This mystery was resolved when I saw Rembrandt’s “Rest on the Flight into Egypt” in the National Gallery of Ireland, perhaps finest nightscape in Western art.

Almost from the beginning of the medium, night became a subject for photography with John Adams Whipple taking a daguerrotype of the moon through a telescope in 1839, but it was not until the invention of the dry plate negative process in the eighteen eighties that night photography really became possible. Alfred Stieglitz was the first to attempt this in New York in the eighteen nineties, producing atmospheric nocturnal scenes of the city streets under snow.

In Europe, night photography as an idiom in its own right begins with George Brassaï who depicted the sleazy after-hours life of the Paris streets, publishing “Paris de Nuit” in 1932.  These pictures influenced British photographers Harold Burdekin and Bill Brandt, creating “London Night” in 1934 and “A Night in London” in 1938, respectively. Harold Burdekin’s work is almost unknown today, though his total eclipse by Bill Brandt may in part be explained by the fact that Burdekin was killed by a flying bomb in Reigate in 1944 and never survived to contribute to the post-war movement in photography.

More painterly and romantic than Brandt, Burdekin’s nightscapes propose an irresistibly soulful vision of the mythic city enfolded within an eternal indigo night. How I long to wander into the frame and lose myself in these ravishing blue nocturnes.

Black Raven Alley, Upper Thames St

Street Corner

Temple Gardens

London Docks

From Villiers St

General Post Office, King Edward St

Leicester Sq

Middle Temple Hall

Regent St

St Helen’s Place, Bishopsgate

George St, Strand

St Botolph’s and the City

St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield

Images courtesy © Bishopsgate Institute

You might like to read these other nocturnal stories

The Nights of Old London

On Christmas Night in the City

Night at the Brick Lane Beigel Bakery

Night at The Spitalfields Market, 1991

Night in the Bakery at St John

On the Rounds With The Spitalfields Milkman