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In 1930, basketmaker and artist Henry Silk sits alone in his sparsely furnished room in Rounton Rd in Bow surrounded by few personal possessions. He glances in the mirror and realises that he is no longer young. Yet the pair of medals from the Great War laid on the table remind him how lucky he is to be alive.

He wakes in the camp bed in the early morning and the empty green room is flooded with light as dawn rises over the rooftops of the East End and washing flaps on the line. Weaving baskets suits a contemplative nature and, when Henry returns from the kitchen with a cup of tea, he sits at the table with the pink cloth and studies the objects upon the surface in the morning sunlight.

The forms and colours of these familiar things fascinate him. His pipe, his purse and his pocket knife that he carried for years are as commonplace to him as his own hands. Each day, Henry paints a picture to catalogue his personal possessions, comprising the modest landscape of his existence. It is a whole life in a handful of paintings.

Henry Silk and his sister

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The Whitechapel Mount in 1801. Was the Mount an ancient burial mound? Was it where all the leylines converge in East London? Visit the site of the Whitechapel Mount on my new tour and discover the mystery of the Mount. Tickets are available on Sundays 23rd August, 6th and 23rd September, and 18th October. Tour includes tea and apple strudel at the Whitechapel Gallery. Click here to book

Between 2012-2014, photographer Colin O’Brien documented Whitechapel, recording the changes delivered by the Olympics and the building of the Elizabeth Line. A decade later the transformation has only accelerated.

Photographs copyright Estate of Colin O’Brien

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Impending gloom at the Mansion House, c. 1910

Given the relentless heatwave, I think the only prudent course of action is to withdraw into one of the drawing rooms of old London and close the curtains. A meagre ray of sunlight has filtered through the drapes, highlighting the dust upon the armoire. Stretch out upon the chaise longue, I shall take the sofa where I shall open my copy of War & Peace while my cat will settle upon the fauteuil.

These glass slides once used for magic lantern shows by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute reveal glimpses into the lavish drawing rooms occupied by those at the pinnacle of power in old London, and I can only wonder what the East Enders of a century ago thought when exposed to these strange visions of another world.

State Room Chelsea Royal Hospital, c. 1920

Drawing Room at Lindsay House, Chelsea, former home of the Moravians, 1912

Hall at Fulham Palace, c. 1920

White Drawing Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Dining Room at Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Christians’ Sitting Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Prince Consort’s Writing Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Throne Room at St James’ Palace, c.1910

Prince Consort’s Music Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Prince Consort’s Tapestry Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Empress Eugiene’s Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Bow Saloon, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Prince Consort’s Writing Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Prince Consort’s Music Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Queen Victoria’s Dolls’ House, Kensington Palace, c. 1910

Holland House, c. 1910

Lord Mayor’s Room, Mansion House, c.1910

Drawing Room, Goldsmiths Hall, c. 1920

Drawing Room, Armourers’ Hall, c. 1920

Small Hall at Cordwainers’ Hall, 1920

Drawing Room, Goldsmiths’ Hall, 1920

Drawing Room, Salters’ Hall, c. 1910

Drawing Room, Mercers’ Hall,  1920

Drawing Room, Devonshire House, c. 1910

Ballroom  at Devonshire House, c. 1910

Drawing Room, Whitehall Gardens, 1913

Prince Consort’s Dressing Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Belgian Suite Bedroom, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Prince Consort’s Study, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Bow Saloon, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Throne Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910

Vestry of St Lawrence Jewry, c. 1920

Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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]]> https://spitalfieldslife.com/2026/08/05/the-drawing-room-of-old-london-iii/feed/ 4 https://spitalfieldslife.com/2026/08/02/misericords-at-katherines-chapel/ https://spitalfieldslife.com/2026/08/02/misericords-at-katherines-chapel/#comments Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:01:06 +0000 https://spitalfieldslife.com/?p=207696

Tickets available on Sunday 23rd August & in September. Click here to book

Tutivillus the demon eavesdropping upon two women

I spent a morning on my knees in St Katharine’s Chapel in Limehouse, photographing these rare survivors of fourteenth century sculpture, believed to have been created around 1360 for the medieval St Katharine’s Chapel next to the Tower of London, which was displaced and then demolished for the building of the docks in 1825.

These marvellous carvings evoke a different world and another sensibility, combining the sacred and profane in grotesque and fantastical images that speak across time as emotive and intimate expressions of the human imagination. I am particularly fascinated by the sense of mutability between the human and animal kingdom in these sculptures, manifesting a vision of a mythic universe of infinite strange possibility which was once familiar to our forebears.

Intriguingly, these misericords appear to have been created by the same makers who carved those at Lincoln and Chester cathedrals, and a friary in Coventry.

After a sojourn of over a hundred years in Regent’s Park, the Royal Foundation of St Katharine, originally founded by Queen Matilda in 1147, moved back to the East End to Limehouse in 1948 where it flourishes today, offering an enclave of peace and reflection, sequestered from the traffic roaring along the Highway on one side and Commercial Rd on the other.

Centaur with club and shield

Tutivillus holds the parchment on the Day of Judgement

Owl

Bust of a bearded man in a striped cap with a cape and trailing drapery

Winged beast with a long tail and human head

Dragon

Edward III

Queen Philippa

Bishop’s head

Green man

Bearded man wearing a cap

A former Master of St Katharine’s was Chancellor of the Exchequer

Angel playing the bagpipes

Pelican in her piety with three chicks, supported by a pair of swans

Lion leaping upon the amphisbaena, supported by reptilian monsters

Coiled serpentine monster

Woman riding a beast with a man’s head

Elephant and castle surmounted by a crowned head

Beast with a hooded human head

Miser

Choir stalls with misericords

St Katharine’s Chapel was built in 1951 on the site of St James, Ratcliffe, destroyed in the blitz

Late fifteenth or early sixteen century carving of angel musicians playing a psaltery, a harp and tabor

The Royal Foundation of St Katharine, 2 Butcher Row, Limehouse, E14 8DS

With thanks to the Master of the Royal Foundation of St Katharine for permission to photograph the misericords

If you are interested to visit St Katharine’s Chapel please write to info@rfsk.org.uk

At Marks & Co, 84 Charing Cross Rd

After I left college and came to London, I rented a small windowless room in a basement off the Portobello Rd and I spent a lot of time trudging the streets. I believed the city was mine and I used to plan my walks of exploration around the capital by visiting all the old bookshops. They were such havens of peace from the clamour of the streets that I wished I could retreat from the world and move into one, setting up a hidden bedroom to sleep between the shelves and read all day in secret.

Frustrated by my pitiful lack of income, it was not long before I began carrying boxes of my textbooks to bookshops in the Charing Cross Rd and swapping them for a few banknotes that would give me a night at the theatre or some other treat. I recall the wrench of guilt when I first sold books off my shelves but I found I was more than compensated by the joy of the experiences that were granted to me in exchange.

Inevitably, I soon began acquiring more books that I discovered in these shops and, on occasion, making deals that gave me a little cash and a single volume from the shelves in return for a box of my own books. In this way, I obtained some early Hogarth Press titles and a first edition of To The Lighthouse with a sticker in the back revealing that it had been bought new at Shakespeare & Co in Paris. How I would like to have been there in 1927 to make that purchase myself.

Once, I opened a two volume copy of Tristram Shandy and realised it was an eighteenth century edition rebound in nineteenth century bindings, which accounted for the low price of eighteen pounds. Yet even this sum was beyond my means at the time. So I took the pair of volumes and concealed them at the back of the shelf hidden behind the other books and vowed to return.

More than six months later, I earned an advance for a piece of writing and – to my delight when I came back – I discovered the books were still there where I had hidden them. No question about the price was raised at the desk and I have those eighteenth century volumes of Tristram Shandy with me today. Copies of a favourite book, rendered more precious by the way I obtained them and now a souvenir of those dusty old secondhand bookshops that were once my landmarks to navigate around the city.

Frank Hollings of Cloth Fair, established 1892

E. Joseph of Charing Cross Rd, established 1885

Mr Maggs of Maggs Brothers of Berkeley Sq, established 1855

Marks & Co of Charing Cross Rd, established 1904

Harold T. Storey of Cecil Court, established 1928

Henry Sotheran of Sackville St, established 1760

Andrew Block of Barter St, established 1911

Louis W. Bondy of Little Russell St, established 1946

H.M. Fletcher, Cecil Court

Harold Mortlake, Cecil Court

Francis Edwards of Marylebone High St, founded 1855

Stanley Smith of Marchmont St, established 1935

Suckling & Co of Cecil Court, established 1889

Images from The London Bookshop, published by the Private Libraries Association, 1971

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Simon Chambers at the entrance to the ‘jungle’

Next time you walk through Spitalfields, stop at the junction of Princelet St and Wilkes St. Stand with your back to Brick Lane and look closely at the house on the right hand corner. You may be surprised to learn that buried beneath 1 Princelet St is – or rather once was – a ‘jungle.’

Let me take you back to the early nineties when Spitalfields was a place of abandoned buildings, bustling warehouses and overcrowded factories. There was no house on the corner of Princelet St and Wilkes St. It was literally a bomb site and piled with rubbish at least ten feet high, forever threatening to topple over onto passersby. A neighbour, Charlie Brandt who lived at 13 Wilkes St, overlooking the corner, built a fence out of timber and corrugated sheets, yet still the rubbish accumulated.

A plan to clear the rubbish and make a garden upon this site emerged. Like many things, no single person suggested the idea yet organically it came together. The plan was discussed between neighbours and, slowly, things began to happen. History had become piled up in front of us, so we set ourselves the challenge of making a new start.

It took five skips over a period of several months to clear the rubbish from the site. At the very top were plastic shopping bags of domestic refuse, chair legs and glass. Amongst these were syringes, balls of aluminium foil and used condoms. Then followed waste from nearby garment factories, rusty sewing machines and bags of shredded leather and cloth. Underneath it all, rubble and concrete from the Georgian building that had once stood there.

In 1993, I was a shy, introverted thirteen year old. I spent much of my time with the family cat Sheba and thought swearing was one of the worst things a person could do. I dreamt about being a ballet dancer and I did secret and exclusive performances for my siblings in my bedroom. I rarely left the house except to go to the Whitechapel Library to borrow Nancy Drew novels.

Whilst helping clear the site, I met youth workers, teachers, unemployed people, restaurant waiters, a storyteller, single parents, factory workers, a prostitute and other kids. These were the people who lived and worked in the surounding streets, with personalities and histories of kinds I had never encountered before.

Recently, I spoke with Simon Chambers who squatted 3 Princelet St, about what he remembers from that time. I met Simon just before the ‘jungle’ begun and, over the proceeding years, he became my oldest friend. “We had to clean out the space because rats were coming into the house and we asked the council several times to do it, because it was their land, but they refused. So we decided to do something about it ourselves,” he told me.

When the last of the skips was full, I remember all of us standing in the empty space, confident about what we had done but quite unsure as to where we were headed. Yet before long the ‘jungle’ began to take shape. I do not know where the name came from. Maybe it was a reference to the amount of rubbish or, possibly, an over-estimation of what we were going to create?

Neighbours donated soil, plants, bits of wood and tools. We built a wall using cobble stones that we found and Simon made benches out of railway sleepers. “In those days, people would dump all sorts of things that we could pick up. I found a great big door in Liverpool St that had been chucked out when a building was being cleared. We used this for a fence and then painted the wood with engine oil because we thought it would stop it rotting,” he recalled.

After the initial euphoria, we held meetings to discuss what we wanted out of the ‘jungle.’ It was a cultivated place where everyone had a voice and everyone was listened to. Over time, participating in these conversations changed me from the person I had been.

We discussed what to do about the massive buddleia with its lilac flowers that had grown amongst the rubbish. With my newly-developed sense of confidence, I led the charge to cut it down. I wanted the jungle to represent something new, a break from what it had been, but Simon argued that the buddleia should stay, that it had grown while the site had been abandoned and had its story to tell – plus it attracted loads of butterflies. So the buddleia stayed and I did not spend too much time agonising over it, because there were plenty of other things going on.

We organised parties that spilled out onto the street. One autumn, we led a lantern procession from the jungle to the Spitalfields City Farm and performed our interpretation of the Guy Fawkes story. We even considered the possibility of doing an alternative version of the Ripper tours that were becoming popular then, with the idea of inviting tour groups into our jungle.

Sets of keys were necessary to get in through the fence. My younger brother Ali, who was also involved in creating the jungle, remembers the keys circulated in such a way that they were always available from one of the neighbours whenever they were needed. He used to go and chill with his friends in the jungle.

The jungle thrived, becoming the centre of the community. A tree was planted and a fishpond dug out. There were treasure hunts at Easter and fireworks at New Year. Ali and Simon remember the bonfires, when we cooked food together and sang.

Over time, there were differences of opinion about who the jungle was for, and when and how it could be used. Some neighbours were concerned that the jungle was being used by ‘unwholesome’ people and the keys were finding their way into the hands of those we did not know, and stolen car radios were turning up amongst the bushes. There was fear that the jungle might become similar to its adjacent plot, also a bomb-site, that was cleared and turned into a car park, where junkies took heroin and prostitutes brought tricks. Yet others said that they did not mind how the jungle was utilised as long as people were respectful of the place.

Such are my memories of the impressions which that time and place left in my mind. With hindsight, the jungle and the discussions it generated seem quaint compared to the monumental changes that were occurring around us. Towards the end of the jungle, in the late nineties, ruined and derelict houses became scarce in Spitalfields as they were bought up by the well-heeled, who fashioned them into the homes they imagined them to once have been.

In my mind, it was around this time that the presence of estate agents became pervasive, though they had stalked these streets for longer than I was conscious of. Our neighbours were changing. Tempted by wads of money, many were moving out. Sweatshop workers were kicked out. My friend Simon, who had lived in Princelet St for many years, was forced to leave too.

Many of the buildings were replaced and occupied by people whom we did not know and whom we rarely saw, who led an altogether different sort of life. A developer came knocking on the doors of the jungle too. No one I spoke with remembered precisely when this happened or the details of it, but the land was sold and the jungle was demolished along with everything it stood for.

I was not around to see this happen. By then, I had become a fully blown teenager, interested in other things. I made new friends with new excitements that took me away from the jungle. I turned my back on it, blotting it out of my memory in order to make room for the next phase of my life. My brother Ali cannot remember the changes either. “One day it was the jungle and next a house had been built on top of it,” he said to me.

Only years later when the streets around it had irrevocably changed, the ‘jungle’ and its existence came back to me, and I realised that the restless roots below 1 Princelet St grew from a different time, of different ideals, sensibilities and possibilities.

Delwar (in blue) assists neighbours in clearing the ‘jungle’

Iqbal Hussain and pal

Charlie Brandt (resident of 7 Wilkes St with helpers)

In the centre, Simon Chambers with Ali Hussain on his shoulders and Iqbal Hussain in front, Halima Hussain to the left, surrounded by neighbours in 1993

Simon Chambers & Ali Hussain stand on the corner of Princelet St today

Simon & Ali with Ali’s daughter and niece

The corner of Princelet St & Wilkes St today where once there was a ‘jungle’

New portraits © Sarah Ainslie

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At Brick Lane Mosque

Arful Nessa, Gardener

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St Augustine’s Tower

I wonder how many people even notice this old tower, secreted behind the betting office in the centre of Hackney? Without  a second glance, it might easily get dismissed as a left-over from a Victorian church that got demolished. Yet few realise St Augustine’s Tower has been here longer than anything else, since 1292 to be precise.

“It is an uncompromising medieval building, the only one we have in Hackney,” Laurie Elks, the custodian of the tower, admitted to me as we ascended its one hundred and thirty-five steps, “and, above all, it is a physical experience.” Climbing the narrowing staircase between rough stone walls, we reached the top of the tower and scattered the indignant crows who, after more than seven centuries, understandably consider it their right to perch uninterrupted upon the weather vane. They have seen all the changes from their vantage point, how the drover’s road became a red route, how London advanced and swallowed up the village as the railway steamed through.

Yet inside the tower, change has been less dramatic and Laurie is proud of the lovingly-preserved cobwebs that festoon the nooks and crevices of his cherished pile, offering a haven for shadows and dust, and garnished with some impressive ancient graffiti. The skulls and hourglasses graven upon stone panels beside the entrance set the tone for this curious melancholic relic, sequestered among old trees just turning colour now as autumn crocuses sprout among the graves. You enter through a makeshift wooden screen, cobbled together at the end of the eighteenth century out of bits and pieces of seventeenth century timber. On the right stands an outsize table tomb with magnificent lettering incised into dark granite recording the death of Capt Robert Deane, on the fourth day of February 1699, and his daughters Mary & Katherine and his son Robert, who all went before him.

“There was no-one to wind the clock,” revealed Laurie with a plaintive grimace, as we stood on the second floor confronting the rare late-sixteenth-century timepiece that was once the only measure of time in Hackney, “so I persuaded my sixteen-year-old daughter, Sam, that she would like to do it and she did – until she grew unreliable – when I realised that I had wanted to wind the clock myself all along. I would come at two in the morning every Saturday and go to the all-night Tesco and buy a can of beans or something. Then I would let myself in and, sometimes, I didn’t put on the light because I know the building so well – and that was when I fell in love with it.” Reluctantly, Laurie has relinquished his nocturnal visits since auto-winding was introduced to preserve the clock’s historic mechanism.

It was the Knights Templar who gave the tower its name when they owned land here, until the order was suppressed in 1308 and their estates passed to the Knights of St John in Clerkenwell who renamed the church that was attached to the tower as St John-at-Hackney. Later, Christopher Urstwick, a confidant of Henry VII before he became king, retired to Hackney as rector of the church and used his wealth to rebuild it. Yet, to the right of the entrance to the tower, rough early medieval stonework is still visible beneath the evenly-laid layers of sixteenth century Kentish ragstone – bounty of the courtier’s wealth – that surmount it.

When the village of Hackney became subsumed into the metropolis, with rows of new houses thrown up by speculators, a new church was built down the road in 1797, but it was done on the cheap and the tower was not strong enough to carry the weight of the bells. Meanwhile, the demolition contractor employed to take down the old church was defeated by the sturdy old tower and it was retained to hold the bells until enough money was raised to strengthen the new one. Years later, once this had been effected, the fashion for Neo-Classical had been supplanted by Gothic and it suited the taste of the day to preserve the old tower as an appealing landmark to remind everyone of centuries gone by.

Thus, no-one can say they live in Hackney until they have made the pilgrimage to St Augustine’s Tower – where Laurie is waiting to greet you – and climbed the narrow stairs to the roof, because this is the epicentre and the receptacle of time, the still place in the midst of the mayhem at the top of Mare St.

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Laurie Elks, Custodian of the Tower

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George Cruikshank’s Comic Almanack published by Henry Tilt of Fleet St annually between 1835 & 1853, illustrated the continuum of festivals and seasons of the year for Londoners. (Click on any of these images to enlarge)

JUNE 1835 – At the Royal Academy

JUNE 1836 – Holidays at the Public Offices


JUNE 1837 – Haymaking

JULY 1835 – At Vauxhall Gardens

JULY 1836 – Dog Days in Houndsditch

JULY 1837 – Fancy Fair

AUGUST 1836 – Bathing at Brighton

AUGUST 1837 – Regatta

SEPTEMBER 1835 – Bartholomew Fair

SEPTEMBER 1837 – Cockney Sportsmen

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George Cruikshank’s Comic Alphabet

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I cycled along the River Lea to Waltham Abbey. On my approach, even from the riverbank, I could see the majestic tower rising over the water meadows as the Abbey has done for the past thousand years, commanding the landscape and undiminished in visual authority.

Once you see it, you realise you are following in the footsteps of the innumerable credulous pilgrims who came here in hope of miraculous cures from the holy cross, which had reputedly relieved Harold Godwinson of a paralysis as a child before he became King Harold.

To the south of the Abbey church lies the market square, bordered with appealingly squint timber frame buildings punctuated by handsome eighteenth and nineteenth additions. Despite the proximity of the capital, the place still carries the air of an English market town.

Yet the great wonder is the Abbey itself, founded in the seventh century, built up by King Harold and destroyed by Henry VIII. Despite the ravages of time, the grandeur and scale of the Abbey is still evident in the precincts which have become a public park. Although the church that impresses today is less than half the size of what it was, it is enough to fire your imagination. An imposing stone gateway greets the visitor to the park where long, battered walls outline the former extent of the buildings. A tantalising fragment of twelfth century vaulting, which formerly served as the entrance to the cloisters, encourages the leap to conjure the cloisters themselves where now is merely an empty lawn. A walled garden filled with lavender and climbing roses draws you closest to the spirit of the place.

The outline of the former Abbey church is marked upon the grass and at the eastern end lies a surprise. A plain stone engraved with the words ‘Harold King of England Obit 1066,’ indicating this is where legend has it that he was laid to rest after the Battle of Hastings. I realised that maybe the remains of the man in the tapestry, killed by the arrow in the eye, lay beneath my feet. Coming upon his stone unexpectedly halted me in my tracks.

This was one of those startling moments when there is a possibility of history being real, something tangible, causing me to reflect upon the Norman Conquest. A thousand years ago, their power found its expression in the vast complex of buildings here, which were destroyed five hundred years ago as the expression of another power.

We too live in a time of dramatic transition. The equivocal consolation of the historical perspective is that it reminds us that empires rise and fall, but life goes on.

Effigy of King Harold

Harold cradles Waltham Abbey in his arm

The Lady Chapel

Victorian villa in the churchyard

The Welsh Harp

These vaults are all that is left of the twelfth century cloisters

Here lies Harold, the last Anglo Saxon King of England

Waltham Abbey

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One house in Fournier St has wallpapers dating from 1690 until 1960. This oldest piece of wallpaper was already thirty years old when it was pasted onto the walls of the new house built by joiner William Taylor in 1721, providing evidence – as if it were ever needed – that people have always prized beautiful old things.

John Nicolson, the current inhabitant of the house, keeps his treasured collection of wallpaper preserved between layers of tissue in chronological order, revealing both the history and tastes of his predecessors. First, there were the wealthy Huguenot silk weavers who lived in the house until they left for Scotland in the nineteenth century, when it was subdivided as rented dwellings for Jewish people fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe. Yet, as well as illustrating the precise social history of this location in Spitalfields, the wider significance of the collection is that it tells the story of English wallpaper – through examples from a single house.

When John Nicolson bought it in 1995, the house had been uninhabited since the nineteen thirties, becoming a Jewish and then later an Asian tailoring shop before reaching the low point of dereliction, repossessed and rotting. John undertook a ten year renovation programme, moving into the attic and then colonising the rooms as they became habitable, one by one. Behind layers of cladding applied to the walls, the original fabric of the house was uncovered and John ensured that no materials left the building, removing nothing that predated 1970. A leaky roof had destroyed the plaster which came off the walls as he uncovered them, but John painstakingly salvaged all the fragments of wallpaper and all the curios lost by the previous inhabitants between the floorboards too.

“I wanted it to look like a three hundred year old house that had been lovingly cared for and aged gracefully over three centuries,” said John, outlining his ambition for the endeavour, “- but it had been trashed, so the challenge was to avoid either the falsification of history or a slavish recreation of one particular era.” The house had undergone two earlier renovations, to update the style of the panelling in the seventeen-eighties and to add a shopfront in the eighteen-twenties. John chose to restore the facade as a domestic frontage, but elsewhere his work has been that of careful repair to create a home that retains its modest domesticity and humane proportions, honouring the qualities that make these Spitalfields houses distinctive.

The ancient wallpaper fragments are as delicate as butterfly wings now, but each one was once a backdrop to life as it was played out through the ages in this tottering old house. I can envisage the seventeenth century wallpaper with its golden lozenges framing dog roses would have gleamed by candlelight and brightened a dark drawing room through the Winter months with its images of Summer flowers, and I can also imagine the warm glow of the brown-hued Victorian designs under gaslight in the tiny rented rooms, a century later within the same house. When I think of the countless hours I have spent staring at the wallpaper in my brief existence, I can only wonder at the number of day dreams that were once projected upon these three centuries of wallpaper.

Flowers and foliage are the constant motifs throughout all these papers, confirming that the popular fashion for floral designs on the wall has extended for over three hundred years already. Sometimes the flowers are sparser, sometimes more stylised but, in general, I think we may surmise that, when it comes to choosing wallpaper, people like to surround themselves with flowers. Wallpaper offers an opportunity to inhabit an everlasting bower, a garden that never fades or requires maintenance. And maybe a pattern of flowers is more forgiving than a geometric design? When it comes to concealing the damp patches, or where the baby vomited, or where the young mistress threw the wine glass at the wall in a tantrum, floral is the perfect English compromise of the bucolic and the practical.

Two surprises in this collection of wallpaper contradict the assumed history of Spitalfields. One is a specimen from 1895 that has been traced through the Victoria & Albert Museum archive and discovered to be very expensive – sixpence a yard, equivalent to week’s salary – entirely at odds with the assumption that these rented rooms were inhabited exclusively by the poor at that time. It seems that then, as now, there were those prepared to scrimp for the sake of enjoying exhorbitant wallpaper. The other surprise is a modernist Scandanavian design by Eliel Saarinen from the nineteen twenties – we shall never know how this got there. John Nicolson likes to think that people who appreciate good design have always recognised the beauty of these exemplary old houses in Fournier St, which would account for the presence of both the expensive 1895 paper and the Saarinen pattern from 1920, and I see no reason to discount this noble theory.

I leave you to take a look at this selection of fragments from John’s archive and imagine for yourself the human dramas witnessed by these humble wallpapers of Spitalfields.

Fragments from the seventeen twenties.

Hand-painted wallpaper from the seventeen eighties.

Printed wallpaper from the seventeen eighties.

Eighteen twenties.

Eighteen forties.

Mid-nineteenth century fake wood panelling wallpaper, as papered over real wooden panelling.

Wallpaper by William Morris, 1880.

Expensive wallpaper at sixpence a yard from 1885.

1895

Late nineteenth century, in a lugubrious Arts & Crafts style.

A frieze dating from  1900.

In an Art Nouveau style c. 1900.

Modernist design by Finnish designer Eliel Saarinen from the nineteen twenties.

Nineteen sixties floral.

Vinyl wallpaper from the nineteen sixties.

Items that John Nicolson found under the floorboards of his eighteenth century house in Fournier St, including a wedding ring, pipes, buttons, coins, cotton reels, spinning tops, marbles, broken china and children’s toys. Note the child’s leather boot, the pair of jacks found under the front step, and the blue bottle of poison complete with syringe discovered in a sealed-up medicine cupboard which had been papered over. Horseshoes were found hidden throughout the fabric of the house to bring good luck, and the jacks and child’s shoe may also have been placed there for similar reasons.

You may also like to see the house these papers came from Before & After in Spitalfields