In City Churchyards
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In the churchyard of St Dunstan’s in the East, Idol Lane
If ever I should require a peaceful walk when the crowds are thronging in Brick Lane and Columbia Rd, then I simply wander over to the City of London where the streets are empty at weekends and the many secret green enclaves of the churches are likely to be at my sole disposal. For centuries the City was densely populated, yet the numberless dead in the ancient churchyards are almost the only residents these days.
Christopher Wren rebuilt most of the City churches after the Great Fire upon the irregularly shaped medieval churchyards and it proved the ideal challenge to develop his eloquent vocabulary of classical architecture. Remarkably, there are a couple of churches still standing which predate the Fire while a lot of Wren’s churches were destroyed in the Blitz, but for all those that are intact, there are many of which only the tower or an elegant ruin survives to grace the churchyard. And there are also yards where nothing remains of the church, save a few lone tombstones attesting to the centuries of human activity in that place. Many of these sites offer charismatic spaces for horticulture, rendered all the more appealing in contrast to the sterile architectural landscape of the modern City that surrounds them.
I often visit St Olave’s in Mincing Lane, a rare survivor of the Fire, and when you step down from the street, it as if you have entered a country church. Samuel Pepys lived across the road in Seething Lane and was a member of the congregation here, referring to it as “our own church.” He is buried in a vault beneath the communion table and there is a spectacular gate from 1658, topped off with skulls, which he walked through to enter the secluded yard. Charles Dickens also loved this place, describing it as “my best beloved churchyard”
“It is a small small churchyard, with a ferocious, strong, spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought in stone … the skulls grin aloft horribly, thrust through and through with iron spears. Hence, there is attraction of repulsion for me … and, having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a thunderstorm at midnight.” he wrote in “The Uncommercial Traveller.”
A particular favourite of mine is the churchyard of St Dunstan’s in the East in Idol Lane. The ruins of a Wren church have been overgrown with wisteria and creepers to create a garden of magnificent romance, where almost no-one goes. You can sit here within the nave surrounded by high walls on all sides, punctuated with soaring Gothic lancet windows hung with leafy vines which filter the sunlight in place of the stained glass that once was there.
Undertaking a circuit of the City, I always include the churchyard of St Mary Aldermanbury in Love Lane with its intricate knot garden and bust of William Shakespeare, commemorating John Hemminge and Henry Condell who published the First Folio and are buried there. The yard of the bombed Christchurch Greyfriars in Newgate St is another essential port of call for me, to admire the dense border planting that occupies the space where once the congregation sat within the shell of Wren’s finely proportioned architecture. In each case, the introduction of plants to fill the space and countermand the absence in the ruins of these former churches – where the parishioners have gone long ago – has created lush gardens of rich poetry.
There are so many churchyards in the City of London that there are always new discoveries to be made by the casual visitor, however many times you return. And anyone can enjoy the privilege of solitude in these special places, you only have to have the curiosity and desire to seek them out for yourself.
In the yard of St Michael, Cornhill.
In the yard of St Dunstan’s in the East, Idol Lane.
At St Dunstan’s in the East, leafy vines filter the sunlight in place of stained glass.
In the yard of St Olave’s, Mincing Lane.
This is the gate that Samuel Pepys walked through to enter St Olave’s and of which Charles Dickens wrote in The Uncommercial Traveller – “having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a thunderstorm at midnight.”
Dickens described this as ““my best beloved churchyard.”
In the yard of St Michael Paternoster Royal, College St.
In the yard of St Lawrence Jewry-next-Guildhall, Gresham St.
In the yard of St Mary Aldermanbury, Love Lane, this bust of William Shakespeare commemorates John Hemminge and Henry Condell who published the First Folio and are buried here.
In the yard of London City Presbyterian Church, Aldersgate St.
In the yard of Christchurch Greyfriars, Newgate St, the dense border planting occupies the space where once the congregation sat within the shell of Wren’s finely proportioned architecture.
In the yard of the Guildhall Church of St Benet, White Lion Hill.
In St Paul’s Churchyard.
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Victorian Tradesmen Scraps
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As my collection of the Cries of London grew through the years, I widened the scope of the endeavour to include images of all tradesmen and these die-cut Victorian scraps.
Enlarged here to several times their actual size, the detail and characterisation of these figures is revealed splendidly. Printed by rich-hued colour lithography, glossy and embossed, these appealing images celebrate the essential tradesmen and shopkeepers that were once commonplace but now are scarce.
In the course of my interviews, I have spoken with hundreds of shopkeepers and stallholders – and it is apparent that most only make just enough money to live, yet are primarily motivated by the satisfaction they get from their chosen trade and the appreciation of regular customers.
Here in the East End, these are the family businesses and independent traders who have created the identity of the place and carry the life of our streets. Consequently, I delight in these portraits of their predecessors, the tradesmen of the nineteenth century – rendered as giants by these monumental enlargements.
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
Women Of The Old East End
Tickets are available for my tour throughout September & October
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I have selected these portraits of magnificent women from Philip Mernick‘s fine collection of cartes de visite by nineteenth century East End photographers, arranged chronologically to show the evolving styles of dress and changing roles of female existence
1863
1863
1867
1860s
c. 1870
c.1870
c. 1870
1870s
1880
1880s
1880s
1884
1884
1886
1880s
1880s
1880s
1890s
c. 1890
1890s
1890s
c. 1900
c. 1910
c. 1910 Theatrical performer by William Whiffin
c. 1940 Driver
Photographs reproduced courtesy of Philip Mernick
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Old East End Letterheads & Receipts
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It is my delight to publish this selection of local examples from Philip Mernick‘s astonishing ephemera collection of East End. Many are remarkable for the beauty of their typographic design as well as revealing the wide range of industry and commerce.
The oldest slop shop in Wapping sold clothing for the slave trade. Click here to read about slave clothing
This advertisement was printed on a one million mark bank note from the German reich, giving it novelty value and also making a bold political statement to customers
All letterheads and receipts courtesy of Philip Mernick
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Ainsworth Broughton, Upholsterer
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My interview with master upholsterer Ainsworth Donovan Broughton of 14 Calvert Avenue (commonly known as Mike) was perforce a swift one because he had three sofas, four chairs, a day bed and a Chesterfield to upholster before the end of this week. Although I arrived at the beginning of the working day, Ainsworth had been in since seven, stealing a march on time, and, as you can see from the picture, he had already made swift work of the day bed. Once I arrived, he sat down on his work bench, crossed his arms and displaying his good-humoured accommodating smile, declared, “Right, let’s get this done!” – with the same workmanlike sense of purpose that he would approach a challenging piece of upholstery.
Not so long ago, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green were the home of a thriving furniture industry that has almost entirely disappeared now. While there are people in the neighbourhood who may call themselves upholsterers these days, Ainsworth is the only one that has done the full apprenticeship in traditional upholstery and qualified under the Association of Master Upholsterers. More than this, Ainsworth is the living connection to the time when furniture-making flourished here. Although he is not self-conscious about it, he carries that history on his shoulders, which enables him to carry it lightly – because as the factories closed down and the other traditional upholsterers retired, Ainsworth simply carried on resolutely upholstering chairs and making an honest living at it while the world, and the East End, transformed around him. It was the natural thing for him to do, and it is this ease with his work, and commitment to his craft which makes Ainsworth such a dignified figure today.
“I specialise in traditional upholstery, although I can do whatever people bring along. Traditional upholstery is the old way of doing it, with stuffing and stitching and horsehair. I love it. The modern stuff is just foam! When I found traditional upholstery, I knew I had found my vocation in life. At the London College of Furniture, they banned me from the workshop because I used to stay behind after hours, always stuffing and stitching. Traditional upholstery is just quality – you know it will last thirty years or more. Working out from a frame how to do everything, that’s the joy of it. I’ve always liked to build something up, take it from frame to finished job and see people appreciate my work. There’s pieces of mine I have done for interior designers at Liberty, Sketch and Manolo Blahnik but the people there don’t know my name.
At fifteen, I did a day release from school at the London College of Furniture, and the head of the department saw what I was doing and said, ‘You could be good at this.’ After college, I was apprenticed to furniture makers A&E Chapman of Crouch End for five years and then I had the opportunity to stay on for another couple of years and be an ‘improver’ – before that you were just prepping. One day they took me into the office and said, ‘We’re going to let you loose,’ and it didn’t take much longer before I was able to work at the bench, but I always wanted to be self-employed. So in 1981, I took a studio in the Cleve Workshops in Boundary St and I used to do a day’s work before coming here to do a few ‘copper jobs’ – on the side.
Then one day I took a chance and left, and for six months I had hardly any work but slowly it picked up. I had one customer and then another and it continued like that. Back in the day, every shop in Shoreditch was an upholsterer but they’ve all gone now. In 1984, when the Cleve Workshops were sold, I managed to get one of the derelict shops in Calvert Avenue. The whole area was completely desolate then, there wasn’t anybody living here, but it enabled me to have a workshop because it was cheap. I never took my shutters down until seven years ago, because there was no passing trade, but recently it’s been different, there’s people here who are into traditional upholstery and so I get work locally now.”
Ainsworth does not even have a sign outside his shop, yet customers come and go all the time. In the window you simply see a photocopy of his certificate presented to the most outstanding student at the London College of Furniture in 1976/77. Looking through the metal grille into the crowded workshop where Ainsworth works from seven until seven each day, you see a high shelf up above where bare frames of furniture await his attention, while the walls are lined with racks of tools, cloth swatches and innumerable calculations pencilled directly onto the plaster, and the lino tiles from the shop that Ainsworth superseded in 1984 still cover the floor. In front of the window is a shelf to display his finished handiwork – only Ainsworth is so inundated that it is always piled with incoming work. “I could do even more, if I had an assistant – but I never want to employ anyone.”, he said, shrugging his shoulders dispassionately and revealing the enviable self-reliance that is the source of his tranquil manner.
I did not want to take any more of his working day. So once he was assured that I was satisfied with his interview, I asked Ainsworth if he thought he would finish the three sofas, four chairs, day bed and Chesterfield this week. “We’ll give it a go!” he declared with a smirk as he stood up from the work bench with energy rising, eager to set to work again. Even if anyone that has done a course can claim to be an upholsterer nowadays, it seems that there are plenty who recognise that the noble Ainsworth Broughton is the genuine article – an artist whose technique is stitching and medium is horsehair, practicing a skill acquired through an apprenticeship of five years, with an expertise honed over thirty years, and executed with a satisfaction and delight that is his alone.
Ainsworth in 1973, when he first started at London College of Furniture.
Ainsworth at work on his graduation piece, London College of Furniture, 1976.
Ainsworth Broughton, Master Upholsterer of Calvert Avenue, commonly known as Mike.
Ainsworth’s most outstanding student award from 1977
At Kelmscott House, Hammersmith
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I have walked past William Morris’ former house on the river bank in Hammersmith many times and always wondered what it was like inside but, since it is now a private dwelling, I never expected to visit. However, the residents kindly open their doors to members of the William Morris Society once every two years and thus I was permitted the privilege of joining the tour.
William Morris was forty-three years old when he came to live here. It was to be his last house in a succession that began with his childhood home in Walthamstow and included the Red House in Bexleyheath, designed for him and Jane as their marital home by Philip Webb, and the sixteenth century Kelmscott Manor by the Thames in Lechlade. The rural idyll which William Morris hoped for at Kelmscott Manor had been sullied by the overbearing presence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti whose obsession with Jane Morris had led him to take up permanent residence.
“If you could be content to live no nearer London than that, I cannot help thinking we should do very well there and certainly the open river and the garden at the back are a great advantage,” William wrote tactfully to Jane in February 1877. “If the matter lay with me only, I should be setting about taking the house, for already I have become conscious of the difficulty of getting anything decent. As to such localities as Knightsbridge or Kensington Sq, they are quite beyond our means.”
Built in the seventeen-eighties, the house was known as The Retreat and had once been the home of Sir Francis Ronalds, inventor of the electric telegraph, who had filled the long garden, which stretched all the way back to King St then, with buried cables as part of his experiments. When William Morris came here and renamed it Kelmscott House, it had been the home of the novelist George MacDonald for a decade. However – somewhat ominously for Morris – they chose to leave since MacDonald believed that the proximity to the polluted river was responsible for his family’s ill-health. In those days, the riverfront at Hammersmith was heavily industrialised with factories and wharfs.
I realised that, in my imagination, I felt I had already visited Kelmscott House. Long ago, when I read Morris’ novel News From Nowhere, I was seduced by his vision of a homespun Utopia that had turned its back on industrialism. In my memory, as if in the moonlight of a dream, I joined the characters as they departed Kelmscott House and undertook the journey up the Thames from Hammersmith to Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, travelling a hundred years into the future.
When I paid my visit to Kelmscott House, there were compelling details which evoked that faraway world, even if time and change had wiped away almost all of the evidence of Morris’ occupation of the house. “Let us hope that we shall all grow younger there,” he wrote to Jane with forced optimism in October 1878, just before they moved in.
Walking through the narrow passage beside The Dove, you discover the wide expanse of the Thames on the left and Kelmscott House rising up on your right, presenting an implacable frontage to the river. You enter through the area stairs on the left of the house, leading down to the kitchen, and immediately you notice a wall of original trellis wallpaper, designed by Morris with birds drawn by Philip Webb. If no-one told you, you would assume it was a recent reprint since these papers remain in production today. The low-ceilinged basement rooms are now the headquarters of the William Morris Society, where you may admire his Albion Press before climbing stairs again into the former coach house. This long narrow room was employed by Morris as a workshop for knotting carpets, also lectures and meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist League were held here. During his final years at Kelmscott, Morris became increasingly involved with politics and the Socialist cause.
The garden no longer stretches to King St, just as far as M4, yet it is impressively generous for a London garden, with well-kept herbaceous borders and a wide lawn. Most fascinating to me, though, was the strawberry patch – since William Morris’ Strawberry Thief is one of his most celebrated textile designs, inspired by his experiences at Kelmscott Manor where the thrushes raided his soft fruit.
Approaching the house from the rear, it presents quite a different aspect than from the front, with assymetric projections and a bowed turret. The high-ceilinged dining room at the back was especially offensive to Morris with its Adam detailing and Venetian window. This seems a curious prejudice to the modern sensibility. Perhaps our equivalent might be those eighties post-modern buildings which have not aged well. Fortunately, Morris suspended a vast sixteenth century Islamic carpet across one wall and part of the ceiling, drawing the eye from the Georgian elements which he found so hideous.
Emery Walker photographed the interiors, capturing Morris’ personal sense of interior design, employing lush textiles and extravagant antiques, mixed with furniture painted by Philip Webb and fine oriental ceramics. Architecturally, the most impressive space is the first floor drawing room which spans the width of the house, created by George MacDonald by knocking two bedrooms into one. In this south-facing room, the views over Chiswick Reach are breathtaking. Morris lined it with a rich, bluish tapestry of birds in foliage that he designed for this location. A huge settle painted with sunflowers by Philip Webb once sat beside the fireplace, lined with blue and white tiles manufactured by Morris & Co and still in situ.
In 1881, seeing children from the nearby slum known as Little Wapping swinging on his garden gate, Morris recognised, “It was my good luck only of being born respectable and rich, that has put me on this side of the window among delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the other side, in the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor shops, the foul and degraded lodgings.”
Overlooking the garden at the back was Jane Morris’ room, somewhat detached from the rest of the house, granting her the independence she required as she withdrew from her marriage during the years at Hammersmith. The two front rooms on the ground floor, overlooking the river, comprised William Morris’ workroom and bedroom. It was in the workroom to the left of the front door that he supervised the creation of the Kelmscott Press, publishing fifty-two titles in five years. In his bedroom to the right, he installed a loom to undertake tapestry through the long hours of the night when he could not sleep. Here he died from tuberculosis on 3rd October 1896, aged just sixty-two, nursed by Emery Walker as his breath failed him. His last words were, “I want to get mumbo jumbo out of the world.”
I walked back along King St to the tube, past the Lyric Sq Market where William Morris once spoke. I thought about him taking the District Line back and forth to visit East London for public speaking – and I decided I should trace his footsteps in the East End next.
Basement stairs with original Morris ‘Trellis’ wallpaper
William Morris’ design for ‘Trellis’ wallpaper with birds drawn by Philip Webb
William Morris’ Albion Press
Hammersmith Socialist League gathering on the back lawn at Kelmscott House, 1885
William Morris’ workroom from which he ran the Kelmscott Press, with stairs leading up to the coach house where Hammersmith Socialist League meetings were held (Photograph by Emery Walker)
Strawberry patch in the garden at Kelmscott
William Morris’ ‘Strawberry Thief’ design
Sixteenth century Islamic carpet displayed by Morris in the dining room at Kelmscott (Photograph by Emery Walker)
‘William Morris’ rose blooms at Kelmscott
The drawing room at Kelmscott (Photograph by Emery Walker)
Tapestry designed for the drawing room at Kelmscott
The drawing room at Kelmscott (Photograph by Emery Walker)
William Morris spoke here – Lyric Sq Market, Hammersmith
Archive photographs courtesy William Morris Society
The lower floor and coach house of Kelmscott House are open on Thursday and Saturday afternoons. Visit the William Morris Society website for further details
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Thomas Bewick’s Dogs
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I consulted my copy of Thomas Bewick’s General History of Quadrupeds 1824 that I found in the Spitalfields Market recently to see what breeds were familiar two hundred years ago – and perhaps the major difference I discovered is that many breeds which were working dogs then are domestic now.
The Shepherd’s Dog
The Cur Dog
The Greenland Dog
The Bulldog
The Mastiff
The Ban Dog
The Dalmatian
The Irish Greyhound
The Greyhound
The Lurcher
The Terrier
The Beagle
The Harrier
The Fox Hound
The Old English Hound
The Spanish Pointer
The English Setter
The Newfoundland Dog
The Large Rough Water Dog
The Large Water Spaniel
The Small Water Spaniel
The Springer
The Comforter
The Turnspit
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