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By coincidence, two readers – Christine Osborne & Janice Oliver – both sent me photographs of their ancestors who produced and sold soft drinks in the East End – Brandon’s Mineral Waters of Virginia Rd, Bethnal Green, and Moody’s Sarsaparilla of Rathbone St Market, Canning Town

William Brandon and his mineral water business, 112 Virginia Rd, Bethnal Green c.1887

“William Brandon is my great-great-great uncle, born 10th August 1840 in Bethnal Green as the youngest of seven children. In 1881, he was living with his wife Matilda and their nine children at 112 Virginia Rd where he was a Mineral Water Manufacturer.

I am fascinated by the large framed photographs hanging up on the outside of the building – the one in the centre might be an advertisement as it looks like it says ‘W. Brandon’ and I can even make out ‘Brandon’ stamped on the crates under the table. If you look at the sign at top right of photograph it shows a picture of a bow tie and I believe this is his trademark, as I have obtained an old bottle dug up from a Victorian dump in Stratford with the name ‘Brandon’ and a bow tie symbol.

When William died in 1905 he left £2,343 and Matilda took over the business. A newspaper obituary referred to “William Brandon, who was a mineral water manufacturer of note” and recorded his funeral “was of an imposing character.” He was a self-made man who lived all his life on the edge of the Old Nichol, but he must have had a good life compared to most people living there.” – Christine Osborne

Annie Moody of Moody’s of Rathbone St Market, Canning Town c.1910

“My grandfather, George Moody, was born in Ramsgate in 1879 into a long line of seafarers, and became an Officer in the Navy and travelled the world. After marrying my grandmother, Annie Andrews who was born in Broadstairs, they moved to Canning Town in 1909 where he opened a Herbalists in Rathbone St and started making potions for everyday ailments, using knowledge of herbal medicine he had acquired on his travels. He also offered Homeopathy and local people came for consultations. I remember as a child helping to put  ‘Rathbone’ skin ointment into tins, and there was also ‘Rathbone ‘ cough mixture and various other concoctions.

Soon he formulated a recipe for  making a Sarsaparilla drink – sarsaparilla is a medicinal root which is reputed to help purify the blood. This was sold outside the shop from a stall which was equipped with barrels of the cordial and a water urn. It was served hot in the winter and huge blocks of ice were put into the water barrel to chill it in summer.

As a girl I used to  ‘wash’ the glasses, which merely entailed dunking them into a bucket of cold water after use and leaving them upturned to drain. My mother told me that a famous drinks firm had offered money for the recipe but my grandfather would not part with it and I still have it until this day. So many people have requested it but it remains a family secret. My grandfather George died in 1945, but my mother and then an uncle continued with the business until the late seventies.” –  Janice Oliver

Vera Moody of Moody’s of Rathbone St Market, Canning Town

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At Syd’s Coffee Stall, Shoreditch High St

At Paul’s Tea Stall

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Near Battlebridge, Middlesex

As the equinox approaches and autumn closes in, I get the urge to go to ground, hiding myself away in some remote cabin and not straying from the fireside until spring shows again. With this in mind, John Thomas Smith’s twenty etchings of extravagantly rustic cottages published as Remarks On Rural Scenery Of Various Features & Specific Beauties In Cottage Scenery in 1797 suit my hibernatory fantasy ideally.

Born in the back of a Hackney carriage in 1766, Smith grew into an artist consumed by London, as his inspiration, his subject matter and his life. At first, he drew the old streets and buildings that were due for demolition at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Ancient Topography of London and Antiquities of London, savouring every detail of their shambolic architecture with loving attention. Later, he turned his attention to London streetlife, the hawkers and the outcast poor, portrayed in Vagabondiana and Remarkable Beggars, creating lively and sympathetic portraits of those who scraped a living out of nothing but resourcefulness. By contrast, these rural cottages were a rare excursion into the bucolic world for Smith, although you only have to look at the locations to see that he did not travel too far from the capital to find them.

“Of all the pictoresque subjects, the English cottage seems to have obtained the least share of particular notice,” wrote Smith in his introduction to these plates, which included John Constable and William Blake among the subscribers, “Palaces, castles, churches, monastic ruins and ecclesiastical structures have been elaborately and very interestingly described with all their characteristic distinctions while the objects comprehended by the term ‘cottage scenery’ have by no means been honoured with equal attention.”

While emphasising that beauty was equally to be found in humble as well as in stately homes, Smith also understood the irony that a well-kept dwelling offered less picturesque subject matter than a derelict hovel. “I am, however, by no means cottage-mad,” he admitted, acknowledging the poverty of the living conditions, “But the unrepaired accidents of wind and rain offer far greater allurements to the painter’s eye, than more neat, regular or formal arrangements could possibly have done.”

Some of these pastoral dwellings were in places now absorbed into Central London and others in outlying villages that lie beneath suburbs today. Yet the paradox is that these etchings are the origin of the romantic image of the English country cottage which has occupied such a cherished position in the collective imagination ever since, and thus many of the suburban homes that have now obliterated these rural locations were designed to evoke this potent rural fantasy.

On Scotland Green, Ponder’s End

Near Deptford, Kent

At Clandon, Surrey – formerly the residence of Mr John Woolderidge, the Clandon Poet

In Bury St, Edmonton

Near Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead Heath

In Green St, Enfield Highway

Near Palmer’s Green, Edmonton

Near Ranelagh, Chelsea

In Green St, Enfield Highway

At Ponder’s End, Near Enfield

On Merrow Common, Surrey

At Cobham, Surrey – in the hop gardens

Near Bull’s Cross, Enfield

In Bury St, Edmonton

On Millbank, Westminster

Near Edmonton Church

Near Chelsea Bridge

In Green St, Enfield Highway

Lady Plomer’s Place on the summit of Hawke’s Bill Wood, Epping Forest

You may also like to take a look at these other works by John Thomas Smith

John Thomas Smith’s Ancient Topography of London

John Thomas Smith’s Antiquities of London

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III

John Thomas Smith’s Remarkable Beggars

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Here is Tom Fellows at eighty-six years old, squinting into the light with a half-smile that betrays a circumspect nature honed by a lifetime driving a cab around London. Tom has seen all that existence has to show and he presents himself to the camera with a diplomatic restraint that could equally be deference or suspicion. Tom is looking out at us and making his own assessment of the situation.

I came upon ‘Old Tom’ in the pages of ‘London People’ by Rev F Howell Everson with photographs by William Whiffin among others, published in 1951 and, although this picture is uncredited, it makes sense that it is by Whiffin, the East End’s pre-eminent photographer of the first half of the twentieth century.

“Hidden away in the vast anonymity of the little streets of the East End there are many interesting characters,” wrote the Rev, making a bold foray beyond his usual stomping ground of New Barnet Methodist Church, “including the oldest surviving horse-cab driver in London.”

Directed to Old Tom’s house near the People’s Palace by a woman with a pram, as being the one with “the little dawg in front,” the Rev knocked but received no response. “Knock ‘ard,” insisted the woman.

“I do so – and presently the door opened and there stood Old Tom who, when I had explained my errand, invited me in. It was, to tell you the truth a rather shabby little dwelling, but when you are eighty-six and living by yourself with only a shaggy dog named Mick as your companion, the niceties of domestic life probably lose their importance,” wrote the Rev, already missing his cosy rectory in New Barnet.

“Tom Fellows took out a flat tin and rolled a cigarette of Royal Tartan Shag which he lit, and I noticed that his hand was steady,” noted the Rev, relieved that the old codger was not half-cut.

“He told me that his father, a navvy, had been a pugilist in the bad old days of the Birmingham Bull Ring, but had come to London before Tom was born” reported the Rev, “As a young man, Tom had ‘taken up with the ‘orses,’ and drove cabs – growlers and hansoms – as long as he could.”

“What do you do with yourself nowadays?” ventured the Rev with an empathetic smile.

“Old Tom looked out of the window at the high brick wall above which a patch of blue sky could just be seen and shook the ash off his cigarette,” observed the Rev, his thoughts turning towards his Sunday sermon.

“There’s not much you can do when you’re my age except wait. Me and Mick, we sort of look after each other, don’t we, Mick?” admitted Old Tom with dignified resignation.

“The canine hearthrug promptly sat up and begged, and looked through that curtain of untidy hair at his old master with eyes of melting innocence,” registered the Rev, recognising the work of the Almighty in the agency of the scruffy mutt.

“‘But there’s one thing, sir, I do like,” said Old Tom, a thought striking him spontaneously, “I like to go round to the Mission in Bow Rd. Been going a long time, I have, ever since a friend who was a publican took me along. The Mission people have been very good to me, and it’s nice when you’re my age to ‘ave a few friends like that.”

The heart of the Rev almost burst with joy at Old Tom’s statement and he knew that this was what he had come to hear.

“Thank God I’ve got the Mission, and old Mick – and me brains!” added Old Tom for good measure,”Yes sir, I’ve always kept me brains and that’s something to be thankful for isn’t it?”

After more than sixty years as a cabby, Old Tom knew instinctively how to find the right words to say to each of his customers – and the Rev J Howell Everson left the East End with his soul gladdened, eager to share this heart-warming experience with the congregation in New Barnet.

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Jack Corbett, London’s Oldest Fireman

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Roman London is still under construction

From Spitalfields, you have only to walk down Bishopsgate to find yourself in Londinium, since the line of Bishopsgate St follows that of Ermine St which was the major Roman road north from London Bridge. Tombs once lined the path as it approached the City, just as they did along the Appian Way in Rome.

The essential plan of the City of London was laid out by the Romans when they built their wall around Londinium at the end of the second century, after Boudica and her tribes burnt the settlement. Eighty years earlier, the Romans had constructed a fort where the Barbican stands today and, in their defensive plan, they extended its walls south to the Thames and in an easterly arc that met the river where the Tower of London stands now.

A fine eighteenth century statue of the Emperor Trajan touts to the tourists at Tower Hill, drawing their attention to the impressive stretch of wall that survives there, striped by the characteristic Roman feature of courses of red clay tiles, inserted between layers of shaped Kentish Ragstone  to ensure that the wall would be consistently level.

Just fifty yards from here at Cooper’s Row, round the back of the Grange City Hotel, is an equally spectacular stretch of wall that is off the tourist trail. Here you can see the marks of former staircases and medieval windows cut through to create a rugged monument of significant height.

Yet, in the mile between here and the Barbican, very little has survived from the centuries in which stone from the wall was pillaged for other buildings. It is possible to seek access to some corporate premises with lone fragments marooned in the basement, but instead I decided to walk over to All Hallows by the Tower which has a little museum of great charisma in its crypt. Here is part of the tessellated floor of a Roman dwelling of the second century and Captain Lowther’s splendid model of Roman London from 1928.

At the Barbican, a stretch of wall that was once part of the Roman fort is visible, punctuated by a string of monumental bastions which are currently under restoration. Walking up from St Paul’s, you come across the wall in Noble St first, still encrusted with the bricks of the buildings within which it was once embedded. Then you arrive at London Wall, an avenue of gleaming towers lining a windy boulevard of fast-moving traffic, which takes it name from the ancient edifice.

I was lucky enough to be permitted access to a secret concrete bunker, beneath the road surface yet above the level of the underground car park. Here was one of the gateways of Roman London and I saw where the wooden gate posts had worn grooves into the stone that supported them. At last, I could enter Roman London. In that underground room, I walked across the few metres of gravel chips that now cover the ground level of the former roadway between the gate posts, where the chariots passed through. Long ago, I should have been trampled by the traffic if I had stood there, just as I should be mown down if I stood in London Wall today. We switched out the light and locked the door on Roman London to emerge into the daylight again.

In the gardens of the Barbican, the presence of foliage and grass permits the bastions of the City wall to assert themselves, standing apart from the contemporary built environment that surrounds them. From here, I turned west to visit the cloister of St Vedast in Foster Lane, which has an intriguing panel of a tessellated floor mounted in a frame, and St Bride’s in Fleet St, where deep in the crypt, you can lean over a wall to see the floor of the Roman dwelling that once stood there, reflected in a mirror. The reality of these items stirs the imagination just as their fragmentary nature challenges it to envisage such a remote world.

By now, it was late afternoon. I was weary and the sunshine had faded, and it was time to make tracks quickly back to Spitalfields as the sky clouded over – yet I was inspired by my brief Roman holiday in London.

Eighteenth century bronze statue of Trajan at Tower Hill

Model of Roman London in the crypt of All Hallows by the Tower. Made by Captain Lowther in 1928, it shows London Bridge AD 400 – Spitalfields appears as a settlement of Britons beyond the wall.

Roman City Wall at Tower Hill

At Tower Hill

At Cooper’s Row

Lines of red clay tiles were inserted between the blocks of stone to keep the wall level

Tessellated floor in the crypt of All Hallows by the Tower

Timber from a Roman wharf preserved in the porch of St Magnus the Martyr

In the cloister of St Vedast Alias Foster

In the crypt of St Bride’s, Fleet St

Foundation of a Roman Guard Tower in Noble St

Outside 1 London Wall

Part of the entrance gate to Roman London in the underground chamber

Model of the north west entrance to Roman London

A fragment of wall in the underground chamber

Bastion at London Wall

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Detective Constable Tassell of the City of London Police Serious Fraud Squad magically escorts us forty-three years back in time and onto the roof of Britannic House in Ropemaker St to enjoy the view

“In the summer of 1983, I was part of the City of London Serious Fraud Squad, operating from Wood St Police Station. A friend and ex-colleague of mine became head of security at British Petroleum in Britannic House, Ropemaker St and he invited me to photograph the views of London from the rooftop, so I took the opportunity. I went along one June morning and took my pictures.

Britannic House was the first building in the City of London to be taller than St Paul’s Cathedral and remained the tallest until the NatWest Tower was built in 1976.  It is now known as City Point – since BP moved out some years ago – and has been refurbished with extra storeys, so it is even taller.” – Lew Tassell

Looking towards Christ Church, Spitalfields

Looking northeast towards the Bishopsgate Goodsyard with Bethnal Green beyond

Looking east to Old Broad St and Liverpool St Station with Spitalfields beyond.

Car park at Old Broad St Station where the Broadgate Estate is today

Looking east along Liverpool St towards Bishopgate and Dewhurst’s Butchers

Looking southeast to Finsbury Circus and the City of London

Looking southeast across the City of London towards Tower Bridge

Looking southwest along London Wall with St Paul’s Cathedral

The dome of St Paul’s with Westminster and Big Ben

Looking west towards Old Bailey and Trafalgar Sq

Looking northwest towards the Post Office Tower with the Barbican to the right

Looking northwest across Clerkenwell with St Pancras Station in the distance

Looking north to Whitecross St Market

Looking down onto the Barbican

St Giles Cripplegate

Looking down from the top of Britannic House

Looking down on Silk St

City of London mounted police in Fore St

Photographs copyright © Lew Tassell

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A Walk Around The Docks With Lew Tassell

Only two more Whitechapel tours remaining on Sunday 20th September and Sunday 18th October. Tours include tea and freshly baked apple strudel at the Whitechapel Gallery. Click here to book

I was passing Abbott & Holder, picture dealers in Museum St, on Thursday when I spied this splendid set of Thomas Rowlandson’s Cries of London from 1799 for sale in the window and – as I stood gazing – Tom Edwards, the proprietor, came out to say ‘hello’. For more than fifteen years I have been publishing sets of Cries of London in these pages but I had never seen this one before, so Tom agreed to let me show them to you here. With Rowlandson there is always more going on than first meets the eye and careful study of the background often reveals a wry commentary.

‘Buy a Trap, a Rat Trap, Buy My Trap’

‘Hot Cross Bunns, Two A Penny Bunns’

‘Do you want any Brick Dust?’

Brick dust was used for polishing pewter

‘All a growing, a growing, here’s Flowers for you’

‘Last dying speech and Confession’

‘Water Cress, come by my Water Cress’

The female water cress sellers from Shoreditch were celebrated fir their independence of spirit.

‘Old Cloaths any old Cloaths’

Old clothes men wearing multiple hats were first drawn my Marcellus Laroon in 1687  and persisted within living memory in London.

‘Buy my Goose, my fat Goose’

Images reproduced courtesy of Abbott & Holder

Click here to buy a signed copy of the CRIES OF LONDON

I got out of bed and climbed up onto the flat roof of the apartment. It was a beautiful day, clear and bright with a blue sky after days of rain and cloud, and the humidity which overwhelms Manhattan in July and August had cleared. Although most people try to avoid New York in the summer, and residents who have the option seek refuge in beach houses, it is my favourite time of year in the City. The one time when the pace slows, languor prevails, and there is peace in the shadowy air-conditioned buildings where people linger to avoid the baking temperature and blinding light outside in the streets.

Summer was drawing to an end and there would be no more of the trips to Long Island that had punctuated my time in the City. Just a week earlier, on Labor Day, which marks the change in the season, the beaches had closed for the year.

I stood on this same roof on July 4th and watched the fleet line up in the East River, admiring the firework display as I ate dinner with friends. Looking across Manhattan that morning, I could see the distant plume of smoke from the westerly of the towers. It did not mean anything to me then, but I was puzzled how it could have happened, so I went downstairs and switched on the television. The television was reporting a plane had crashed into the tower. It was an extraordinary event for which the news anchor had no explanation, and so I went back to bed and dozed again.

I was awoken by the return of my friend who had cycled back from his errand at the bank. People were getting really excited about this fire, he told me, and he switched on the television again. For the first time, I sensed the panic and helplessness which was to envelop the city that day, as the presenters struggled to find words and keep their cool in the face of inexplicable and unprecedented events.

Then came the strangest moment of television I ever saw. Upon the screen, a plane jetted out of nowhere and disappeared into one the towers. “That’s a re-run, you’re seeing here, of the plane hitting the tower that we reported earlier,” commented the news-anchor, only to swallow her words – almost choking – as she exclaimed, “Oh no! That’s not a re-run, that’s another plane.”

Exactly a week earlier, at eight-thirty in the morning, I visited the World Trade Centre accompanying my friend who was applying to an office there for a street traders’ licence. We came through the subway which opened up into a shopping mall and emerged onto the plaza directly beneath the towers. I recalled the first time I came to New York and stood at the top. Stretching my arms between those external struts and gazing down upon Manhattan from such a height, it was as if looking from the window of an aeroplane. My birthday was in a few days and we vowed to return to the top for a celebration, but we did not go back.

Once the second plane hit the towers, the tenor of events changed. Very quickly, reports came in of hijackings and other planes unaccounted for. I went back up onto the roof of the apartment and looked again to confirm the reality of the television news with my own eyes. Now there were two plumes of smoke in the sky, and sirens erupted through the streets as fire crews and police hurtled down the avenues of Manhattan. I returned to the television and stayed there, compelled. I had a pocket email machine and I was able to write messages to everyone in London to let them know I was alright, before the lines went dead.

A campaign was underway, something I could only comprehend through reference to science fiction such as The War of the Worlds. An attack had commenced that morning without indication how long it would last. As I sat there in shock at the accumulating reports of the plane hitting the Pentagon and the crash of United 93, a dread grew inside me. There was no reason to assume that this would not continue all day and it was impossible to know where and when it would end. It felt like the end of the world – there was no way to grasp the nature of what was happening. When I returned to the roof and looked again, the World Trade Centre had gone completely, replaced by a vast black tower of smoke billowing into the blue.

Twenty-one months earlier, I had been in Los Angeles at the time of the Millennium. Somehow, everybody expected a transformation and a new era to begin then. Nobody wanted to admit it was a non-event. But that morning, I realised that I was witnessing the actual moment when one century ended and a different world was born.

For a couple of years, I had been working with producers in Times Sq who were to present a play of mine on Broadway, opening on September 15th 2001. I loved being in New York in those days, it was a true metropolis of glamour and affluence – a world incarnated in the now over-familiar fiction of Sex & the City. Many times I enjoyed Cosmopolitans at the Bowery Bar, the location where Candice Bushnell’s novel, which was the origin of that series, began.

Walking out onto the street on that September day, several miles from the unfolding catastrophe at the World Trade Centre, the scene was not dissimilar from usual, except – as people went about their business – I knew what everyone was thinking. We were all looking at each other in fear and knowing that we could only enact the semblance of routine. I went to the grocery story and bought food for the next few days. On my way back to the apartment, I saw a postcard of the World Trade Centre on a rack and, without thinking, I took the entire stack in hand, went into the store and paid for them.

Back at the apartment, I addressed postcards to everybody in my address book in England and then I went to the Post Office and mailed them all. I still do not understand why I did this, because I never wrote any messages on the cards, yet I knew everyone would realise who sent them and why. In fact, half arrived within ten days and half arrived four months later, intercepted perhaps as suspicious material in the collective paranoia that ensued.

On the first day J.F.Kennedy Airport reopened, I flew back to London, peering from the window of the jet at the smoke still rising from the foot of Manhattan. At once, I went to see my parents in Devon and found them well, but within a week my father died unexpectedly. My mother had dementia and could no longer live alone, so I chose to move back into the family house to care for her. My play never opened on Broadway and I did not have the American career that I so longed for at that time, but after the events I had witnessed it no longer mattered to me.

Tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields this Saturday 12th September. Click here to book

In the sixties and seventies when these pictures were taken, every street corner in the East End that was not occupied by a pub was home to a shop offering groceries and general supplies to the residents of the immediate vicinity. The owners of these small shops took on mythic status as all-seeing custodians of local information, offering a counterpoint to the pub as a community meeting place for the exchange of everybody’s business. Shopkeepers were party to the smallest vacillations in the domestic economy of their customers and it was essential for children to curry their good favour if the regular chore of going to fetch a packet of butter or a tin of custard, or any other domestic essential, might be ameliorated by the possibility of reward in the form of sweets, whether  there was any change left over or not.

Yet, even in the time these photographs were taken, the small shops were in decline and Tony Hall knew he was capturing the end of a culture, erased by the rise of the chain-stores and the supermarkets. To the aficionado of small shops there are some prize examples here – of businesses that survived beyond their time, receptacles of a certain modest history of shopkeepers. It was a noble history of those who created lives for themselves by working long hours serving the needs of their customers. It was a familiar history of shopkeepers who made a living but not a fortune. Above all, it was a proud history of those who delighted in shopkeeping.

Photographs copyright © Estate of Libby Hall

Images courtesy of the Tony Hall Collection at the Bishopsgate Institute

Tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields this Saturday 12th September. Click here to book

There is little traffic on the road, children are at play, housewives linger in doorways, old men doze outside the library and, in the distance, a rag and bone man’s cart clatters down the street. This is the East End in the afternoon, as photographed by newspaper artist Tony Hall in the nineteen sixties while wandering with his camera in the quiet hours between shifts on The Evening News in Fleet St.

“Tony cared very much about the sense of community here.” Libby Hall, Tony’s wife, recalled, “He loved the warmth of the East End. And when he photographed buildings it was always for the human element, not just the aesthetic.”

Contemplating Tony’s clear-eyed photos – half a century after they were taken – raises questions about the changes enacted upon the East End in the intervening years. Most obviously, the loss of the pubs and corner shops which Tony portrayed with such affection in pictures that remind us of the importance of these meeting places, drawing people into a close relationship with their immediate environment.

“He photographed the pubs and little shops that he knew were on the edge of disappearing,” Libby Hall confirmed for me, ‘He loved the history of the East End, the Victorian overlap, and the sense that it was the last of Dickens’ London.”

In 1972, Tony Hall left The Evening News and with his new job came a new shift pattern which did not grant him afternoons off – thus drawing his East End photographic odyssey to a close. Yet for one who did not consider himself a photographer, Tony Hall’s opus comprises a tender vision of breathtaking clarity, constructed with purpose and insight as a social record. Speaking of her late husband, Libby Hall emphasises the prescience that lay behind Tony’s wanderings with his camera in the afternoon. “He knew what he was photographing and he recognised the significance of it.” she admitted.

These beautiful streetscapes are a selection of pictures from the legacy of approximately one thousand photographs by Tony Hall held in the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute.

Three Colts Lane

Gunthorpe St

Ridley Rd Market

Stepney Green

Photographs copyright © Libby Hall

Images Courtesy of the Tony Hall Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute

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When I arrived to meet David Mason in the bar at Wilton’s Music Hall, the only person sitting there was a man who looked so at home I imagined he must be the caretaker, not David. In fact, this was David, who grew up in the flat above Wilton’s when his father was caretaker in the nineteen fifties and – more than half a century after he moved out – he still feels comfortable in the old place.

Although it was known as the Old Mahogany Bar when David’s family moved into four rooms up above in 1951, the building was not a music hall then but a Methodist chapel. “My father knew it had been a music hall,” David explained to me, “The story we were told was that Wilton’s was thought to be a place of debauchery, and one day three Methodists walking past were so shocked they bought tickets and kneeled down in front of the stage and prayed that it would one day be a place of worship – and, lo and behold, eighty years later the Methodists got it!”

Even in this incarnation, the old music hall was a place of wonder for a small child, granted free run of the building. “When I was eight, my father had to spend ten nights away in hospital. He said, ‘You’re the man of the house.’ and I had to go round with a torch in the dark checking all the locks at night. It was scary, I thought every single noise was someone creeping up on me,” David recalled affectionately, as we walked through the atmospheric empty theatre yesterday.

In 1951 when David was three, his younger brother and sister, John and Jean, were born unexpectedly as twins and the family could no longer live in two rooms in the Peabody Buildings in John Fisher St. His father, Harry, was offered number three Grace’s Alley by Mr Willis the minister in return for care-taking duties, stoking and lighting the boiler, laying out tables and chairs for prayer meeting and some occasional do it yourself, which included knocking up the little wooden cross for the altar. “My parents were married here in the Old Mahogany Bar,” David told me, gesturing around the empty bar where we sat, “He worked for the Port of London Authority as a docker in St Katherine’s Dock and his nan’s  family were sugar bakers, they came from Ship Alley in Wellclose Sq – and my mother’s family came from Backchurch Lane.”

David went to St Paul’s opposite the music hall, a Church of England school presided over by Father Joe Williamson known as ‘Holy Joe.’ “He could walk into a fight in Cable St and kneel down and pray and they would stop brawling,” David assured me. The difference between the Methodism at the chapel and the Church of England practices at school was a source of bewilderment to David at an early age. “I was deeply confused, they covered their cross sometimes but we never did, and ours didn’t have a Jesus on it while theirs did. I asked one of the Methodist sisters why our cross did not have Jesus and she said, ‘We believe Jesus rose from the cross,’ but I think the real reason was that my dad made the cross and he couldn’t carve.”

In those days, the London Docks were still active and Wapping was scattered with bombsites where, as a child, David was free to wander. He remembers ships chandlers and mapmakers in the surrounding streets that were inhabited by a closely-knit community including significant numbers of Greek, Maltese and Turkish people. Before the slum clearance programme, Wellclose Sq and Swedenborg Sq stood lined with shambolic old houses and connected by a warren of alleys, in which was Roy’s sweet shop that David remembers as the last place he spent a farthing.

“My dad said that before the war they used to have a book appreciation club and I remember going with him to a Jewish-owned record shop in Aldgate where he reminisced about the record appreciation society. They had a Boys’ Brigade, Scouts, Magic Lantern Shows and there were Methodist Union meetings where ministers from other religions came to explain their beliefs. When we moved in, there was a still a youth club and there were always old ladies sitting knitting and chatting, but during the fifties they had fewer and fewer prayer meetings and my dad had to open up less and less, until it died.”

“In 1959, we were given fourteen days notice to leave by the Methodists and nobody was willing to help.” David confessed to me,”My dad wasn’t a bible-bashing type, he wasn’t overtly religious even, but he went to church all his life and he carried the soldier’s prayer in the pocket of his battledress jacket. So I think it hurt him after all this time to feel we were being thrown out. The upshoot was we ended up in three rooms belonging to the Port of London Authority near the Woolwich Ferry and that was the end of our contact with this place.”

At fourteen years old, David came back to get his eyes tested at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel and took a stroll alone down to Wapping to see what was going on at his former home, now owned by the GLC. “I rang the bell that said ‘Ring for caretaker’ but no-one answered so I turned to walk away and a gruff voice called, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I explained that I used to live there and I knew how many steps there were up to the flat, and he let me in, saying, ‘You really did live here, didn’t you?'” Since David left, the building had become a warehouse for rags, guarded by fierce dogs that were described to him by a friend as “all-stations.”

Returning in recent years to witness the re-opening of Wilton’s Music Hall and visit the space he once knew intimately has been an equivocal experience for David, as he confided to me, “The first time I came back there was a lot of strings being pulled in my heart. I never thought I’d stand in the Old Mahogany Bar in the Methodist chapel and have a glass of wine to drink!” These days, David teaches Painting and Decorating at Barking and Dagenham College and now hopes to bring his students along to Wilton’s to repaint the old place one day.

“I have only got happy memories here, we laughed all the time – but when I lived here there didn’t seem to be as much love for the place as there is now, even though it is in such a state” he concluded, “When I come back now it isn’t like the place I grew up in, it’s a foreign country. It wasn’t the best of places then, yet it did have something – you could call it soul.”

Wilton’s Music Hall was known as the Old Mahogany Bar when David grew up here in the fifties.

Davis’s parents, Anne & Harry Mason, were married in the Old Mahogany Bar at Wilton’s.

St Paul’s School Wellclose Sq where David went to school.

St Paul’s School viewed from the living room window at Wilton’s.

The infants class at St Paul’s photographed on the lawn outside Wilton’s – Miss Webb and Father Joe Williamson (known as Holy Joe) officiate. David sits in the front row directly to the right of the sign.

David’s mother and younger brother John on the roof of Wilton’s where they grew tomatoes and flowers.

David with his mother and the twins in the living room at Wilton’s.

David with his nan and the twins. “Her name was Elizer Wiegle and she was of German extraction, and used to attend the Lutheran Church in Alie St.”

David sits on the big staircase at Wilton’s.

Methodist activities at Wilton’s in the fifties.

David recalls reading the theatre’s foundation stone by torchlight with his father as a child.

John Claridge’s portrait of the caretaker at Wilton’s, 1964, after the theatre became a rag store.

Caretaker portrait copyright © Estate of John Claridge