The Haggerston Nobody Knows
Today William Palin recalls the lost wonders of Haggerston, once a coherent and distinctive nineteenth century neighbourhood.
Tudor Gothic Villas in Nichols Sq, 1945
Haggerston, in the Borough of Hackney, remains one of those ‘lost’ districts of London’s inner suburbs. Even the boundaries of this elusive locale have fluctuated, yet although the current electoral ward extends deep into Shoreditch, I would draw the borders of Haggerston at Hackney Rd to the south, Queensbridge Rd to the east, Kingsland Rd to the west and Regent’s Canal to the north.
Just a few important public buildings remain in Haggerston, including the old Haggerston Library – which was left to rot in the seventies before being facaded in the nineties – and the magnificent Haggerston Baths on Whiston St with its gilded Golden Hind weather vane. Poignant indicators of the glories that once were here.
Although Haggerston suffered some bomb damage – St Mary’s Church by John Nash was completely destroyed in 1941 – it was the post-war planners who erased most of the superior nineteenth century terraces, with streets of sound houses succumbing to the bulldozers as late as 1978. While the estates that replaced them may have provided superior accommodation and new amenities, they were brutal and uncompromising in their disregard for the intimacy, cohesion, humanity and community spirit of the old streets – attributes embraced in other similar London neighbourhoods wherever the terraces were retained.
As London’s population grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, Haggerston became a densely populated industrial suburb. In many eastern districts, land ownership tended to be fragmented, resulting in a series of relatively small-scale building speculations that eventually came together to form a coherent if quirky network of streets with pubs, shops and small industry, all adding to the diverse character of the streetscape. Although individual speculators – whether a few houses or a whole street – imposed a uniformity of design, there was surprising and delightful variation between streets with even modest houses exhibiting decorative flourishes in their brickwork, fanlights, shutters and front doors. Where streets met, the junctions were resolved with an effortless dexterity which was one of the striking characteristics of the London speculative builder and, on the rare occasion a pub was absent, a corner house was built with a side entrance.
In common with most of south Hackney and Shoreditch, the dominant industries of the area were the furniture and finishing trades. An insurance map of 1930 shows timber yards, French polishers, enamellers, cabinet factories, mirror frame factories, wood carvers and a plethora of other related trades. Interestingly, the legacy of these industries is still evident today in the Hackney Rd, where D.J.Simons maintain their thriving business supplying mouldings for picture framing after more than a century, as well as in the handful of second hand shops trading in the furniture once made locally.
Unquestionably, the centrepiece of Haggerston’s nineteenth century development was Nichols Sq, situated east of the Museum of the Home beyond the railway viaduct. Built in 1841 and featuring two outward facing rows of picturesque Tudor gothic villas at its centre, Nichols Sq was further enhanced in 1867-9 by a splendid church and vicarage – St Chad’s – by the architect James Brooks. Surviving in good condition until blighted by a Compulsory Purchase Order, the square was swept away in 1963 for the Fellows Court Estate. Geoffrey Fletcher, author of ‘The London Nobody Knows,’ lamented the impending loss in 1962 by illustrating the houses in the Daily Telegraph, and describing “the delightful Gothic villas … in excellent condition [which] if they were in Chelsea would fetch anything from £10,000 to £15,000.” Savouring the architectural detail, he comments “Typical of the finesse of the period is that, while the terrace railings have a Classic flavour, the similar ones of the cottages have a Tudor outline. But after next year none of this will matter any more.”
The London County Council planning files record no evidence of any robust defence of Nichols Sq. The principal concern was the effect of the new tower blocks upon the setting of the Museum of the Home. Nichols Sq had only one entrance, which led from Hackney Rd at the south east corner, and this was guarded by a Tudor lodge. The secluded location had helped it retain an isolated respectability until the very end, despite the incursion of the railway viaduct across its western extremity just a few years after completion.
To the south of Fellows Court Estate is Cremer St, the only direct link between Hackney Rd and Kingsland Rd, which was once graced by a series of modest but elegant semi-detached villas (a building type that became a defining characteristic of Hackney). These villas are captured in a beautiful series of LCC photographs of 1946, which also show a double-fronted detached house with a wide fanlight, where an old man perches on the high front steps, lighting a pipe. In Cremer St, The Flying Scud pub, with its distinctive blue Truman’s livery survived until only a few years ago, while running south from there – now reached via a rubbish-strewn alley – is Long St, whose distinctive yellow brick houses are also illustrated in the LLC old photographs. Of these, only a few paving stones survive.
To the north of the Fellows Court Estate is Dunloe Street, once lined by neat terraces, now bleak save for St Chad’s Church – the last fragment of Nichols Sq. Dunloe St linked into a network of small streets, including Appleby St and Ormsby St, where well-maintained and well-loved terraces endured until 1978 when they were controversially emptied of their occupants and demolished. A handful of houses on the west end of Pearson St are now the only reminders we have of this once vibrant and homogenous neighbourhood.
In 1966, architectural critic Ian Nairn spoke eloquently of the lost opportunities of the rebuilding of the East End, in words that perfectly describe the fate of old Haggerston – “All the raucous, homely places go and are replaced by well-designed estates which would fit a New Town but are hopelessly out of place here. This is a hive of individualists, and the last place to be subjected to this kind of large-scale planning. Fragments survive, and the East Enders are irrepressible …but they could have had so much more, so easily.”
Nichols Sq by Geoffrey Fletcher, 1963
Plan and perspective of Nichols Sq, 1845 – not really a square at all but highly picturesque. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
North side of Nichols Sq, 1960.
Washing the doorstep in Shap St with the Fellows Court Estate beyond, 1974. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
A rich and coherent cityscape – Shap St, looking north, 1974. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
Elegant dark-painted sashes and immaculately maintained shutters in Ormsby St, 1965. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
Hows St, c.1960. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
Whiston St in the hot summer of 1976, just before demolition. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
Intimate streetscape – Ormsby St, 1965. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
Weymouth Terrace shortly before demolition, 1964. Note the stuccoed ground floor facade. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
Geffrye St, 1960s (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
“All the homely places have gone”– Sitting room at 50 Shap St c.1959. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
Fellows Rd, 1959. Neat terraces with blank panels at parapet level. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
A perfect corner, courtesy of the London speculative builder. Pearson St and Fellows St, 1951. (Copyright Hackney Archives Department)
Ormsby St before demolition, 1978 – note the photographer’s blackboard on the window ledge. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Cremer St, 1946. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Cremer St, 1946. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Detail – Man lights a pipe in Cremer St, 1946. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Cremer St, 1946. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Tudor Gothic villas in Nichols Sq, 1950. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Tudor Gothic villas in Nichols Sq with fleur de lis railings, 1950. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Iain Nairn described the East End as “a hive of individualists” – this applied to the builders too, as shown in the delightfully quirky design of these houses in Long St, photographed in 1951. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Fine eighteenth century doorcase at 171 Kingsland Road. The house and its neighbours came down in the late sixties. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Christmas At St Hilda’s, 1975
Contributing Photographer David Hoffman sent me these glorious pictures of a Christmas party he attended at St Hilda’s Community Centre, Club Row, in 1975.
They are just a fraction of a significant body of photography David undertook documenting the East End in the seventies and eighties that I plan to publish as a book next year entitled, A PLACE TO LIVE, Endurance & Joy in Whitechapel, accompanied by a major photographic exhibition at House of Annetta in Spitalfields.
Times have been so volatile recently that I have been tentative to embark on this project but I believe David’s work is so immensely important as a social document, distinguished by its generous humanity and aesthetic flair, that I must do it next year.
If you share my appreciation of David’s photography and might consider supporting this endeavour, please drop me a line at spitalfieldslife@gmail.com
‘St Hilda’s East was established in 1889 by former pupils of Cheltenham Ladies College as ‘a community of people bound together in the service of the poor’. I came across it by chance in 1975. I was twenty-nine, just starting out as a photographer and this window into an East End from long ago immediately fascinated me.
I just walked in, asked if it would be OK to take some photos and got an immediate easy invitation to help myself. Quickly followed by offers of a cup of tea, a sandwich, a slice of cake… I think this was early December and I saw posters for the Christmas party so I invited myself along.
I found the spirit and the energy of what seemed to me to be such aged pensioners hard to believe. When one of the dancers flashed her knickers and winked at me, I wondered if my tea had been spiked and it was all a delirium. These photos, some unseen since I took them, not only prove that this was no hallucination but, rather disconcertingly, that those seemingly ancient people I photographed were all younger than I am now.’
David Hoffman
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
Christmas Baubles
I do not know when my grandmother bought this glass decoration and I cannot ask her because she died more than twenty years ago. All I can do is hang it on my tree and admire it gleaming amongst the deep green boughs, along with all the others that were once hers, or were bought by my parents, or that I have acquired myself, which together form the collection I bring out each year – accepting that not knowing or no longer remembering their origin is part of their charm.
Although I have many that are more elaborate, I especially admire this golden one for its simplicity of form and I like to think its ridged profile derives from the nineteen thirties when my mother was a child, because my grandmother took the art of Christmas decoration very seriously. She would be standing beech leaves in water laced with glycerine in October, pressing them under the carpet in November and then in December arranging the preserved leaves in copper jugs with teazles sprayed gold and branches of larch, as one of many contrivances that she pursued each year to celebrate the season in fastidious style.
Given the fragility of these glass ornaments, it is extraordinary that this particular decoration has survived, since every year there are a few casualties resulting in silvery shards among the needles under the tree. Recognising that a Christmas tree is a tremendous source of amusement for a cat – making great sport out of knocking the baubles to the ground and kicking them around like footballs – I hang the most cherished decorations upon the higher branches. Yet since it is in the natural course of things that some get broken every year and, as I should not wish to inhibit the curiosity of children wishing to handle them, I always buy a couple more each Christmas to preserve the equilibrium of my collection.
Everlasting baubles are available – they do not smash, they bounce – but this shatterproof technological advance entirely lacks the poetry of these fragile beauties that can survive for generations as vessels of emotional memory and then be lost in a moment. In widespread recognition of this essential frailty of existence, there has been a welcome revival of glass ornaments in recent years.
They owe their origins to the glassblowers of the Thuringian Forest on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic where, in Lauscha, glass beads, drinking glasses, flasks, bowls and even glass eyes were manufactured since the twelfth century. The town is favoured to lie in a wooded river valley, providing both the sand and timber required for making glass and in 1847 Hans Greiner – a descendant of his namesake Hans Greiner who set up the glassworks in 1597 with Christoph Muller – began producing ornaments by blowing glass into wooden moulds. The inside of these ornaments was at first coloured to appear silvery with mercury or lead and then later by using a compound of silver nitrate and sugar water. In 1863, when a gas supply became available to the town, glass could be blown thinner without bursting and by the eighteen seventies the factory at Lauscha was exporting tree ornaments throughout Europe and America, signing a deal with F.W.Woolworth in the eighteen eighties, after he discovered them on a trip to Germany.
Bauble is a byword for the inconsequential, so I do not quite know why these small glass decorations inspire so much passion in me, keeping their romance even as other illusions have dissolved. Maybe it is because I collect images that resonate personally? As well as Father Christmas and Snowmen, I have the Sun, Moon and Stars, Clocks and even a Demon to create a shining poem about time, mortality and joy upon my Christmas tree. I cannot resist the allure of these exquisite glass sculptures in old-fashioned designs glinting at dusk amongst the dark needles of fir, because they still retain the power to evoke the rich unassailable magic of Christmas for me.
This pierrot dates from the nineteen eighties
Three of my grandmother’s decorations. The basket on the left has a piece of florists’ wire that she placed there in the nineteen fifties
This snowman is one of the oldest of my grandmother’s collection
Bought in the nineteen eighties, but from a much older mould
Baubles enhanced with painted stripes and glitter
The moon, sun and stars were acquired from a shop in Greenwich Avenue on my first visit to New York in 1990, amazingly they survived the flight home intact
These two from my grandmother’s collection make a fine contrast of colour
Even Christmas has its dark side, this demon usually hangs at the back of the tree
It is always going to be nine o’clock on Christmas Eve
Three new decorations purchased at Columbia Rd
A stash of glittering beauties, stored like rare eggs in cardboard trays
Russian cosmonauts from the sixties that I bought in Spitalfields Market
My first bicycle, that I found under the tree one Christmas and still keep in my attic
The Robin’s Christmas
This extract is from ‘Aunt Louisa’s Keepsake’ published by Frederick Warne which was given to me by Libby Hall. The copy is inscribed ‘Christmas 1896’ inside the front cover.
‘Twas Christmas-time, a dreary night,
The snow fell thick and fast,
And o’er the country swept the wind,
A keen and wintry blast.
The Robin early went to bed,
Puffed up just like a ball,
He slept all night on one small leg,
Yet managed not to fall.
No food had touched his beak,
And not a chance had he
Of ever touching food again,
As far as he could see.
The stove had not burnt very low,
But still was warm and bright,
And round the spot whereon it stood,
Threw forth a cheerful light.
Now Robin from a corner hopped,
Within the fire’s light.
Shivering and cold, it was to him
A most enchanting sight.
But he is almost starved, poor bird!
Food he must have, or die,
Unless it seems, alas! for that
Within these walls to try.
Perhaps ‘t is thought by those who read
To doubtful to be true,
That just when they were wanted so
Some hand should bread crumbs strew.
But this is how it came to pass,
An ancient dame had said,
Her legacy unto the poor
Should all be spent on bread.
Enough there was for quite a feast,
Robin was glad to find.
The hungry fellow ate them all,
Nor left one crumb behind.
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Midwinter At Christ Church, Spitalfields
The shortest day of the year approaches on Wednesday 21st December, when at forty-seven minutes past nine we pass the solstice taking us back towards shorter nights and longer days. At this time when the sun is at its lowest angle, Christ Church Spitalfields can become an intricate light box with powerful rays of light entering almost horizontally from the south and illuminating Nicholas Hawksmoor’s baroque architecture in startling ways. Yesterday’s crystalline sunlight provided the ideal conditions for such phenomena and inspired me to attempt to capture of these fleeting effects of light.
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Robson Cezar’s Whitechapel Houses, 2022
Spitalfields artist Robson Cezar has been collecting wooden fruit crates in Whitechapel Market on the way to his studio in Bow again, and making them into little wooden houses.
Each one is a day’s work for Robson and many are recognisable as inspired by buildings around the East End. Photographer Sarah Ainslie visited him in his studio this week to document his creations. Every one is different and each comes with an LED light and battery.
We are selling them on a first-come-first-served basis, so if you would like one please email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com giving your first, second and third choice, and we will supply payment details. We can only post these within the United Kingdom.
ALL ROBSON’S HOUSES ARE SOLD BUT HE WILL MAKE YOU ONE TO ORDER IF YOU DROP US A LINE!
These houses are sculptures not toys and we do not recommend them for children under the age of twelve.
Robson Cezar – ‘These empty boxes are full of the good and true things of life …’
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Charles Goss’ Vanishing City
This Thursday 15th December at 6:30pm, I shall be giving a reading in company with my good friends, the novelist Sarah Winman and the poet Stephen Watts at Burley Fisher Books in Dalston, 400 Kingsland Rd, E8 4AA. Tickets are free – click here to book
33 Lime St
A man gazed from the second floor window of 33 Lime St in the City of London on February 10th 1911 at an unknown photographer on the pavement below. He did not know the skinny man with the camera and wispy moustache was Charles Goss, archivist at the Bishopsgate Institute, who made it part of his work to record the transient city which surrounded him.
Around fifty albumen silver prints exist in the archive – from which these pictures are selected and published for the first time today – each annotated in Goss’ meticulous handwriting upon the reverse and most including the phrase “now demolished.” Two words that resonate through time like the tolling of a knell.
It was Charles Goss who laid the foundation of the London collection at the Institute, spending his days searching street markets, bookshops and sale rooms to acquire documentation of all kinds – from Cries of London prints to chapbooks, from street maps to tavern tokens – each manifesting different aspects of the history of the great city.
Such was his passion that more than once he was reprimanded by the governors for exceeding his acquisition budget and, such was his generosity, he gathered a private collection in parallel to the one at the library and bequeathed it to the Institute on his death. Collecting the city became Goss’ life and his modest script is to be discovered everywhere in the archive he created, just as his guiding intelligence is apparent in the selection of material that he chose to collect.
It is a logical progression from collecting documents to taking photographs as a means to record aspects of the changing world and maybe Goss was inspired by the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London in the eighteen-eighties, who set out to photograph historic buildings that were soon to be destroyed. Yet Goss’ choice of subject is intriguing, including as many shabby alleys and old yards as major thoroughfares with overtly significant edifices – and almost everything he photographed is gone now.
It is a curious side-effect of becoming immersed in the study of the past that the present day itself grows more transient and ephemeral once set against the perspective of history. In Goss’ mind, he was never merely taking photographs, he was capturing images as fleeting as ghosts, of subjects that were about to vanish from the world. The people in his pictures are not party to his internal drama yet their presence is even more fleeting than the buildings he was recording – like that unknown man gazing from that second floor window in Lime St on 10th February 1911.
To judge what of the present day might be of interest or importance to our successors is a subject of perennial fascination, and these subtle and melancholic photographs illustrate Charles Goss’ answer to that question.
14 Cullum St, 10th February 1910
3, 4 & 5 Fenchurch Buildings, Aldgate, 28th October 1911
71-75 Gracechurch St, 1910
Botolph’s Alley showing 7 Love Lane, 16th December 1911
6 Catherine Court looking east, 8th October 1911
Bury St looking east, 3rd July 1911
Corporation Chambers, Church Passage, Cripplegate, 31st January 1911 – now demolished
Fresh Wharf. Lower Thames St, 28th January 1912
Gravel Lane, looking south-west, 11th October 1910
1 Muscovy Court, 5th June 1911
3 New London St, 28th January 1912
4 Devonshire Sq
52 Gresham St, 17th September 1911
9-11 Honey Lane Market, Cheapside, 16th October 1910
Crutched Friars looking east from 37, 11th February 1911
Crutched Friars looking east, 28th October 1911
35 & 36 Crutched Friars, 28th January 1912
Yard of 36 Crutched Friars looking north, 11th February 1912
Yard of 36 Crutched Friars looking south, February 11th 1912
Old Broad St looking south, 24th July 1911
Charles Goss (1864-1946)
Photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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