Before & After In Fournier St
1995, the sweatshop
2005, the music room
Ten years of renovation lies between these two photographs of the same room in Fournier St – between this snap of the abandoned sweatshop that John Nicolson purchased in 1995 and interior shot by lifestyle photographer Jan Baldwin, that was one of a set taken in 2005 to celebrate the completion of the endeavour. These “before” and “after” pictures which illustrate the breathtaking transformation of twenty years ago, bringing new life back to what was once a derelict pile.
The tailoring industry had found its home there from 1720, through successive owners, Huguenot silk weavers, then Jewish tailors, and subsequently Bengali clothing manufacturers, up until the nineteen nineties – when cheap manufacturing in the Far East made it no longer profitable to continue and the last owner went bankrupt, leaving the house in the ownership of the bank. No-one had lived there since the nineteen-thirties, and by 1995 it was one among an entire terrace of abandoned buildings.
After the Fruit & Vegetable Market closed in 1991, many properties used to store fruit and herbs became empty in Spitalfields. The one next to John’s house had been a banana store, which gave him pause for thought when he first explored the property and discovered the yard overrun with exotic spiders. Yet in spite of this discovery, John had the courage to put his arm through a hole in the cladding on the wall on the first floor, reaching through into the darkness and touching what he believed to be eighteenth century panelling.
Many more discoveries were to be made over the coming years, as well as all the wallpapers and the curios mislaid under the floorboards in the previous three centuries. There was the lost cellar which had entirely filled up with silt. Above the false ceilings, there were grand box cornices installed by William Taylor, the joiner who built the house in 1721. Every room but one had its Georgian fireplace which had been covered over, still thick with soot. There was a mysterious brick flue from the cellar that was revealed to be ventilation for the dying of silks.
And all the doors had been taken off their hinges in the nineteenth century and hung the opposite way round from the previous century – because while the Georgians preferred doors to open into a room, offering a moment of grace as someone entered, the Victorians preferred their doors to open against the wall and wall straight into a room. “I’ve restored it to the Georgian etiquette with the doors opening into the rooms,” John admitted to me with a gracious smile, “to give my guests time to prepare for my imminent arrival.”
The house underwent successive alterations, at first to the panelling in the seventeen-eighties, and then the front wall had entirely been rebuilt in the eighteen-twenties when a shopfront was added. John set about returned the house to its original proportions, removing partitions to create two rooms over each of the five floors and restoring missing panelling. He also demolished an outbuilding which filled the back garden and replaced the shopfront with a domestic facade consistent with the eighteen-twenties work, including a new door case which derived its proportion and design from the eighteen-twenties front door that survived. Elsewhere, John supplemented bead and butt boarding from 1900 and brought a sink back into use from this period, that had once served all the residents of the house when it was divided into tiny flats for Jewish refugees.
Today the house retains all its idiosyncratic appeal, a sympathetic amalgam of the successive alterations that speak of its different inhabitants in Fournier St over the last three centuries. Yet now it is a home again, and thanks to the conscientious and imaginative work by John Nicolson, an atmosphere of peace and domesticity reigns once more.
The house as John found it.
Reconstructing the domestic facade.
The rear elevation of 1720 with original windows flush with the level of the wall.
Alternating plain and barley twist spindles from 1720, as John discovered them.
The view from John’s bathroom to the spire of Christ Church, Spitalfields.
Original lead paintwork on this door, rehung in the nineteenth century to open towards the wall, in contrast to the eighteenth century etiquette, of doors always opening into the room – permitting a moment’s grace before someone entered.
The rear basement as John first saw it, once the silt had been dug out.
“Before” photographs copyright © John Nicolson
“After” photographs copyright © Jan Baldwin
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The Wallpapers of Spitalfields
A Brief History Of Smithfield Market
As the market faces up to the threat of closure, novelist & historian of London Gillian Tindall offers her account of Smithfield. Click here to sign the petition to Save Smithfield Market
Smithfield means ‘smooth field’ and, though the Romans called it by a different name, they recognised that this green expanse was too useful to be covered in houses.
By the twelfth century, there was a fair held on Smithfield every Friday for the buying and selling of horses, and a growing market for oxen, cows and – by-and-by – sheep as well. An annual fair was held every August around St Bartholmew’s Day, in front of Bartholomew’s Hospital which had been founded in 1123. This open ground was also much in demand for tournaments – sometimes involving royalty – as well as jousts and other sports, demonstrations, riots, and public entertainments, including executions.
Some of these uses survived into the nineteenth century, long after the walls enclosing the City were reduced to isolated fragments and London itself had swelled and swelled, crossing the river Fleet, covering Holborn, St Giles and Soho with streets, running up through Clerkenwell and swallowing Islington. Moo-ing, snorting and baa-ing herds were still driven on the hoof by men and dogs through these busy streets towards Smithfield, sometimes from hundred of miles away. Similarly, geese and ducks were hustled along in great flocks, their delicate feet encased in cloth for protection. They were all going to their deaths, though they did not know it – till the stench of blood and the sounds of other animals inspired noisy fear in them, as they were driven across the bridges over the Fleet and along lanes whose names already marked their destiny – Cow Lane, Cowcross, Chick Lane and Cock Lane. For seven hundred years, Smithfield was a place of open-air slaughter, ankle deep each market-day in mud, manure and blood. In Great Expectations (written in the eighteen-sixties but set back in time to Dickens’ youth in the eighteen-twenties) young Pip comes across the market and refers to it as ‘the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam [which] seemed to stick to me.’
Others besides Dickens were aware, by the early decades of the century, that this chaotic scene was out of place in up-to-date, heart-of-the-Empire, Victorian London. People wrote pamphlets, raised the matter in Parliament and wheels began to turn. By the eighteen-fifties, a modern slaughterhouse was established on one of the last remaining bits of open land between Kentish Town and Islington, and Smithfield was reconstructed as a wholesale meat depot of covered pavilions in iron and glass. This is the Market that is still in use today.
Yet it was not just beasts who were driven to their deaths in old London. For hundreds of years, until the late eighteenth century, London’s main place of execution was Tyburn, a lonely crossroads along the Oxford road, approximately where Marble Arch is today. At times, the cart carrying its load of manacled prisoners out to these gallows must have crossed paths with unruly crowds of cattle coming in. The main difference was that, unlike the beasts, the men and women in the cart knew what their journey’s end would be.
Long before it was decided to hold hangings in an isolated spot, the obvious place had always been Smithfield, with lots of room for crowds to watch the spectacle and learn the message that disobedience did not pay. One of the first to be made an example in Smithfield was the Scotsman William Wallace, who was hung, drawn and quartered there in 1305, before he was sent north in bits to be exhibited as if he were, indeed, meat from the market. Subsequently, Wallace has been elevated, on shaky evidence, into a national hero and a plangent memorial stands today in front of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Later in the same century, Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt marched his men to Smithfield to parley with the king, but after a quarrel he was stabbed and then decapitated.
Common criminals were routinely hanged at Smithfield, a little further to the west ‘under the elms,’ but the best remembered executions are of those who were burned alive for heresy in the Reformation. These are usually called the ‘Marian burnings’, since the great number were Protestants targeted by Queen Mary, the fervently Catholic daughter of Henry VIII’s first discarded wife. But, even before Mary came to the throne and started her crusade to return England to the Old Faith, a few paid the extreme penalty under Henry VIII and his son Edward VI for being too Protestant.
One of these was Joan Bocher, a devout Annabaptist from Kent, who was sent to the stake in Smithfield in 1550. The Vicar of nearby St Sepulcre church was one John Rogers, who was himself a follower of William Tyndale, translator of the Bible into English. Nevertheless, he found Bocher and several others too fanatical for his taste, condoning their burning by order of Edward with the remark that it was a punishment ‘sufficiently mild, for heresy.’ One wonders if he felt the same, five years later, when he was summarily rounded up and sent to the stake for preaching what the new Queen Mary thought was heresy. It is recorded that he went ‘almost gaily’ to his fate, accompanied on his way by his wife and ten children, one a babe in arms. The literal belief, held by almost all such victims of every religious persuasion, that heaven was very near and that their moment of extreme suffering would assure them a privileged place, was clearly an effective morale-booster – as it appears to be for suicide bombers in the our own time.
Burning alive as a punishment for having the wrong ideas died out early in the seventeenth century and the exact location of these deaths at Smithfield was forgotten until one day in March 1849, when a new sewer was being dug across the market not far from the church of St Bartholomew the Great. About three feet down, the workmen discovered stones blackened by fire, ashes, and fragments of charred human bones. Passersby gathered and some took away bits of bone as relics or mementoes, but quickly the site was covered and forgotten again in the reigning spirit of Victorian modernity and what was generally known as Progress.
Progress had its effect upon hangings, which were now restricted to murderers and moved from Tyburn back to the City, outside Newgate Gaol. On hanging days, the bell of St Sepulcre (‘the bell of Old Bailey’ in the traditional song) would toll and the condemned man or woman would be brought out to a crowd of spectators. But, by the mid-century, a number including Charles Dickens – who made sure of seeing several executions himself – declared that the spectacle was degrading and did not act as a deterrent. From 1868, a dozen years after the slaughter of animals had been moved off to the new premises in Islington, hangings took place only within Newgate. The riotous Bartholomew Fair was already a thing of the past and Smithfield’s centuries of bloody history were at an end too.
A burning at Smithfield
Archbishop Cranmer remonstrates with Joan Bocher, subsequently burnt at Smithfield for heresy
Momument to William Wallace outside Bart’s Hospital
Gateway to St Bartholomew the Great, once the entrance to the Augustinian priory
Poor box at Bart’s Hospital
Henry VIII gate to Bart’s Hospital
Golden boy on the corner of Cock Lane
Cupola at Smithfield Market by Horace Jones 1866
Arcade at Smithfield Market by Horace Jones 1866
Smithfield General Market of 1868 was saved from demolition
Bartholomew Fair by Augustus Pugin & Thomas Rowlandson, courtesy Bishopsgate Institute (Click to enlarge this image)
Gillian Tindall’s A Tunnel Through Time is available from Penguin
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Ten Years Of Novelty Automation
This week, Tim Hunkin’s Novelty Automation celebrates ten years in Bloomsbury, attaining the status of a popular London institution. Yet when I visited before it opened a decade ago even Tim had no idea what the outcome might be. Join the anniversary celebrations this Thursday February 6th from 5-9pm, with half-price tokens, drinks and entertainment hosted by Tim himself.
Tim Hunkin
I know I cannot be the only one who still has a cardboard file of copies of Tim Hunkin’s genius cartoon strip, ‘The Rudiments of Wisdom,’ clipped weekly from the Observer and cherished through all these years. So I hope hope you will appreciate my excitement when Tim invited me over to Bloomsbury to photograph the arrival of his automata and slot machines, prior to the opening of Novelty Automation, his personal amusement arcade, ten years ago.
There were a few anxious moments as Tim’s nuclear reactor lurched violently while being manhandled from the van. But you will be relieved to learn that all the machines fitted through the door and were safely installed inside his tiny premises in Princeton St off Red Lion Sq, where – for a small fee – Londoners can to practice money-laundering, witness a total eclipse, lose weight, get frisked, get divorced, get chiropody and – of course – operate a nuclear reactor.
The next day I went back to admire Tim’s machines, illuminated and humming with life in their new home, which gave me the opportunity to have a chat with the engineer while he tinkered with the works, making his final adjustments and ironing out a few last minute snags. “I started making things as a child and the cartoons were a distraction at university when I couldn’t have a workshop,” he revealed modestly, his hands deep inside a machine, “I started drawing for a student magazine and that led me to the Observer.”
Leaning in close with a puzzled frown, Tim tilted his gold spectacles upon his brow and narrowed his eyes in thought, peering into the forest of cogs and levers. I hope he will forgive me if I admit could not ignore the startling resemblance at that moment, in his posture and countenance, to Heath Robinson’s illustrations for Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm stories.
“It’s much easier to make a living by drawing than by making things, and it’s harder to make things that work,” he confessed, turning to catch my eye, “I often say, I spent the first half of my life making things badly.”
“I just like being in my workshop, I get itchy feet sitting at a desk. But if my body gives out before my mind, I plan to write a huge book about Electricity,” he continued, growing excited as the thought struck him.
“I plan to hang on as long as I can,” he reassured me, returning his concentration to the machine.
“The ingredient you need when you make things is to know it’s worthwhile,” Tim said, half to himself, “There needs to be a point to it – sometimes I leave my workshop and go down to the arcade in Southwold and I see people laughing at my machines there. You can’t imagine how addictive that is for me.” Casting my eyes around the room at Tim’s array of ingenious and playful machines, each conceived with a sharp edge of satirical humour, I could easily imagine it. “I’m quite a loner, so it’s my connection to the world and it gives me great pleasure,” he confided without taking his gaze from the work in hand.
“People underestimate slot machines,” he informed me, almost defensively, “Once they have paid, they pay attention, read the instructions and concentrate because they have invested and they want to get their money’s worth. So you’ve really captured your audience.”
“In the eighties, I had a brush with the Art world, but I prefer the notion that, rather than buy your work, people buy an experience,” he concluded, adding “and you don’t have to be sophisticated to enjoy it.”
All this time, Tim had been fiddling with an hydraulic system which caused the eyes to shoot out of a bust of Sigmund Freud but – at that moment – was failing to pull them back in again afterwards. Constructed of old timber, the device comprised an automated bedroom with dream figures popping up from inside the wardrobe and outside the window.
“The machines are the stars not me,” Tim declared when I exclaimed in wonder to see the mechanism spring into life, ” I’m looking forward to when I can get back to my workshop.” I left him there playing with the dream machine and I rather envied him.
Tim Hunkin and his team deliver their Nuclear Reactor in Bloomsbury
Tim Hunkin and the Dream Machine
Jack Corbett, London’s Oldest Fireman
Jack Corbett (1910 -2016)
“I like the life of a fireman,” boasted Jack Corbett, London’s oldest surviving fireman at one hundred and two years old. Based at Clerkenwell Fire Station for the duration of World War II, Jack and his team were fortunate enough to endure the onslaught of the London Blitz without any fatalities. “It was all coincidental because I happened to live within a mile of the station,” he announced dismissively, as if he just fell into it. Yet the same tenacious spirit that sustained him through the bombing also endowed him with exceptional longevity. “You want to go on living,” was what Jack told himself in the midst of the chaos.
“It’s not easy remembering what you did and didn’t do.” he confessed to me vaguely, casting his mind back over more than a century of personal experiences, “It all seems so bitty trying to put it all together, but it all went like clockwork. It was rather wonderful really.” Jack’s father was in the First World War and, after Jack witnessed the Second World War in London, he cannot escape disappointment now at the persistence of warfare. “It’s a shame after what we went through that people have learnt nothing,” he confided to me in regret. The closure of Clerkenwell Fire Station, the oldest in Britain, met with his disapproval too, “Modern life demands the police, fire service and ambulance yet, if you cut them, the longer it will take for these services to be applied – and that’s foolhardy.” he said, “Clerkenwell Fire Station is well-situated, in one direction is Kings Cross and in the other direction is the City of London.”
In wartime, as one of the firemen responsible for protecting St Paul’s Cathedral from falling bombs, Jack was given access to the entire structure and once he climbed up alone inside the gold cross upon the very top of the dome. Standing in that enclosed space so high over the city, with a single round glass panel to look out at either end of the cross-piece, was an experience of religious intensity for Jack. And now, at such a venerable age he is able to look back on his own life from an equally elevated perspective through time. “I don’t know what people think of me but I guess I’m a little on the starchy side. I try to be a man of principle but it’s not easy.” he admitted to me with a shy grin, “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke and I’ve always been a Christian.”
In 2000, Jack retired from London to live with his daughter Pamela in Maldon in an old house up above the river, surrounded by a luxuriant well-kept garden.”My parents were ordinary people but they produced a good commodity in me – my mother lived to ninety-three and my father to ninety-one.” he assured me in satisfaction, as we sat together admiring the herbaceous border from the comfort of his private sitting room. “Some people would have written their life, but I’m not that type. I’m not bothered,” Jack whispered, thinking out loud for my benefit – however, for the sake of the rest of us, I present this account of his story.
“When I left school at fourteen in Woking, I got a job as a guard boy. It was my first proper job, working for a gentleman. But in the thirties there was a financial crisis and quite a lot of people lost their property. So he said to me, ‘I’ll have to let you go.’ I didn’t realise it was the sack. Then, one wet day, I drove him to Woking Station and he said, ‘You probably realise I’ve got a business in London. Would you like to change your job?’ The business was a glass warehouse in Clerkenwell, Pugh Bros off St John St.
Isn’t it strange? I can’t remember the name of the man who gave me my job and brought me up from my lowly life in Woking to London, where I met my wife, and the story of my life proper began there.
I lived at 330 St John St, from my early twenties, when I first came to London and that’s where I met my wife Ivy. I was the lodger and she was the only daughter of the house, and we went to Sadlers’ Wells Theatre for our first date and we got married in 1935 in the Mission Church in Clerkenwell. She worked at a furrier and she was pregnant with our daughter Pamela when the war started. I was keen to get behind an ack-ack gun, but she reminded me I could get assigned anywhere and not to be so quick. My daughter was due in April 1939, not the best time to be born because of the situation with the war, but my baby, my wife and mother-in-law were evacuated to Woking where I had my original home, so that was alright. They couldn’t come back to London – they wanted to but I explained that bombs were dropping.
When I was enlisted, I joined the City of London Auxiliary Fire Service. They trained you up to a certain level but after the London Fire Brigade lost a lot of their men who were ex-army and ex-navy, when they were called back to the forces, they needed to replace them and I was accepted. So eventually I became a professional. We were always on duty, it was continuous duty during the Blitz, then they granted you four hours break, not every day but when circumstances allowed. Clerkenwell was one of eighty fire stations, so you can imagine the immensity of it. In London, there was a separate water system for the fire service but when that became broken, we had to pump water from the Thames.
I never thought about the danger – I just got on with it, like everybody else. You’d be a strange person if you didn’t know fear but in any situation, you go in and do your duty to the letter. Often, what I found exciting was that you didn’t know what kind of fire you were going to. The job consisted of extinguishing the fire and rescuing life, and rescuing life was the most important because a building can be rebuilt – your priority was saving lives.
We were being bombed in the docks where all the food storage was, so we had a job there and ,when we had to go further downstream to extinguish the oil depot, we had to go through the East End where there were lots of houses on fire, and they used to call us names. Once, we heard a group of five bombs approaching Clerkenwell and I thought one must surely be for us, but it hit the building next door. We couldn’t see inside the fire station for the dust and I really thought that one had my name on it.
When things were cooling off, you could take a weekend and I went down to Woking to see my family. Eventually when things quietened, my wife found a house in Finchley and that’s where we had our son and lived for the next sixty years and where my wife died twelve years ago. We’d been married sixty-seven years. We had a grand life if you come to think of it. I wonder what would have happened without the war – I would have continued working at the glassworks. I was moving up, after three years I was appointed manager of the guys who were going out making deliveries of glass.
After the war, I asked for a transfer nearer home, and they transferred me to Hornsey and I stayed in the fire service until 1965. The average person wanted to get back to ordinary life, but there’d been so much change it wasn’t that easy. You want to go on living and when you have two children, they want to have a life. Now I have eight great-grandchildren, it has all grown like a tree of life from Pamela’s mother.”
Jack Corbett – “I don’t know what people think of me but I guess I’m a little on the starchy side.”
Jack with Freda and Cousin Dot, 1923
Charles Corbett, Jack’s father
Charles and Ann Corbett, 1944
330 St John St where Jack lived when he came to London and met his wife Ivy. Ivy’s parents lived on the ground floor, and Jack and Ivy lived on the first floor after they married.
Jack aged twenty, 1930
Jack in his first car.
Jack and Ivy, 1934
Jack and Ivy’s marriage at Clerkenwell Mission Chapel, 18th May 1934
Jack (on the far left) joined the City of London Auxiliary Fire Service, 1939
Jack (with his back to the camera) pictured fighting a fire at St Bartholomew’s Hospital during the London Blitz.
High Jinks with the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, 1955
Jack returns to Clerkenwell Fire Station, January 2013
Jack with Green Watch at Clerkenwell Fire Station
Jack in his garden in Maldon, aged one hundred and two.
Jack and his daughter Pam
Clerkenwell Fire Station
Photograph of Clerkenwell Fire Station copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
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Alan Dein’s East End Shops
P.Lipman, Kosher Poultry Dealers, Hessel St
“In my twenties, I’d been doing a number of oral history recordings, working for the Museum of the Jewish East End which was very active recording stories of the life of Jewish people who had settled here.”explained Alan Dein, broadcaster and oral historian, outlining the background to his unique collection of more than a hundred photographs of East End shopfronts.
“My photographs of the derelict shopfronts record the last moments of the Jewish community in the area. The bustling world of the inter-war years had been moved into the suburbs, and the community that stayed behind was less identifiable. In the nineteen eighties they were just hanging on, some premises had been empty for more than five years. They were like a mouthful of broken teeth, a boxer’s mouth that had been thumped, with holes where teeth once were.”
Feeding his twin passions for photography and collecting, Alan took these pictures in 1988 while walking around the streets of the East End at a time when dereliction prevailed. Although his family came from the Jewish East End and his Uncle Lou was a waiter at Blooms, Alan was born elsewhere and first came to study. “As a student at the City of London Polytechnic in Old Castle St, I spent a lot of time hanging out here – though the heart of the area for me at that time was the student common room and bar.” he told me.
“Afterwards, in 1988, I moved back to live in a co-operative housing scheme in Whitehorse Rd in Stepney and then I had more time to walk around in this landscape that evoked the fragmentary tales I knew of my grandparents’ lives in the East End. The story I heard from their generation of the ‘monkey parade’, when once people walked up and down the Mile End Road to admire the gleaming shopfronts and goods on display. My family thought I was mad to move back because when they left the East End they put it behind them, and it didn’t reflect their aspirations for me.
The eighties were a terrible time for removing everything, comparable to what the Victorians had done a century earlier. But I have always loved peeling paint, paint that has been weathered and worn seafront textures, and this was just at the last moment before these buildings were going to be redeveloped, so I photographed the shopfronts because this landscape was not going to last.”
In many of these pictures, there is an uneasy contradiction between the proud facades and the tale of disappointment which time and humanity has written upon them. This is the source of the emotionalism in these photographs, seeing faded optimism still manifest in the confident choice of colours and the sprightly signwriting, becoming a palimpsest overwritten by the elements, human neglect and graffiti. In spite of the flatness of these impermeable surfaces, in each case we know a story has been enclosed that is now shut off from us for ever. Beyond their obvious importance as an architectural and a social record, Alan’s library of shopfronts are also a map of his exploration of his own cultural history – their cumulative heartbreak exposing an unlocated grief that is easily overlooked in the wider social narrative of the movement of people from the East End to better housing in the suburbs.
Yet Alan sees hope in these tantalising pictures too, in particular the photo at the top, of Lipman’s Kosher Poultry Dealers, in which the unknown painter ran out of paint while erasing the name of the business, leaving the word “Lip” visible. “A little bit of lip!” as Alan Dein terms it brightly, emblematic of an undying resilience in the face of turbulent social change.
Goulston St
In Whitechapel
Commercial Rd
Redchurch St
Stepney Green
Cheshire St
Alie St
Hessel St
Hackney Rd
Quaker St
Mile End Rd
Toynbee St
Alie St
In E2
Brick Lane
Great Eastern St
Commercial St
Hessel St
Mile End Rd
Relocated to Edgeware
Bow Common Lane
Brick Lane
Ben Jonson Rd
Wilkes St
Bow Rd
Ridley Rd
New Goulston St.
Whitechapel High St
Alderney Rd, Stepney
Photographs copyright © Alan Dein
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Clerkenwell Car Crashes
Accident, daytime 1957
When Colin O’Brien (1940-2016) was growing up in Victoria Dwellings on the corner of Clerkenwell Rd and Faringdon Rd, there was a very unfortunate recurring problem which caused all the traffic lights at the junction to turn green at once. In the living room of the top floor flat where Colin lived with his parents, an ominous “crunch” would regularly be heard, occasioning the young photographer to lean out of the window with his box brownie camera and take the spectacular car crash photographs that you see here. Unaware of Weegee’s car crash photography in New York and predating Warhol’s fascination with the car crash as a photographic motif, Colin O’Brien’s car crash pictures are masterpieces in their own right.
Yet, even though they possess an extraordinary classically composed beauty, these photographs do not glamorise the tragedy of these violent random events – seen, as if from God’s eye view, they expose the hopeless pathos of the situation. And, half a century later, whilst we all agree that these accidents were profoundly unfortunate for those involved, I hope it is not in poor taste to say that, in terms of photography they represent a fortuitous collision of subject matter and nascent photographic talent. I say this because I believe that the first duty of any artist is to witness what is in front of you, and this remarkable collection of pictures which Colin took from his window – dating from the late forties when he got his first camera at the age of eight until the early sixties when the family moved out – is precisely that.
I accompanied Colin when he returned to the junction of the Clerkenwell Rd and Faringdon Rd in the hope of visiting the modern buildings upon the site of the former Victoria Dwellings. To our good fortune, once we explained the story, Tomasz, the superintendent of Herbal Hill Buildings, welcomed Colin as if he were one of current residents who had simply been away for the weekend. Magnanimously, he handed over the keys of the top flat on the corner – which, by a stroke of luck, was vacant – so that Colin might take pictures from the same vantage point as his original photographs.
We found a split-level, four bedroom penthouse apartment with breathtaking views towards the City, complete with statues, chandeliers and gold light switches. It was very different to the poor, three room flat Colin lived in with his parents where his mother hung a curtain over the gas meter. Yet here in this luxury dwelling, the melancholy of the empty rooms was inescapable, lined with tired beige carpet and haunted with ghost outlines of furniture that had been taken away. However, we had not come to view the property but to look out of the window and after Colin had opened three different ones, he settled upon the perspective that most closely correlated to his parents’ living room and leaned out.
“The Guinness ad is no longer there,” he commented – almost surprised – as if, somehow, he expected the reality of the nineteen fifties might somehow be restored. Apart from the blocks on the horizon, little had changed, though. The building on the opposite corner was the same then, the tube embankment and bridge were unaltered, the Booth’s Distillery building in Turnmills St still stood, as does the Clerkenwell Court House where Dickens once served as cub reporter. I left Colin to his photography as he became drawn into his lens, looking back into the midst of the last century and upon the urban landscape that contained the emotional history of his youth.
“It was the most exciting day of my life, when we left,” admitted Colin, with a fond grin of reminiscence, “Canvassers from the Labour Party used to come round asking for our votes and my father would ask them to build us better homes, and eventually they did. They built Michael Cliffe House, a tower block in Clerkenwell, and offered us the choice of any flat. My parents wanted one in the middle but I said, ‘No, let’s get the top flat!’ and I have it to this day. I took a photo of lightning over St Paul’s from there, and then I ran down to Fleet St and sold it to the Evening Standard.”
Colin O’Brien’s car crash photographs fascinate me with their intense, macabre beauty. As bystanders, unless we have specialist training, car crashes only serve to emphasise the pain of our helplessness at the destructive intervention of larger forces, and there is something especially plangent about these forgotten car crashes of yesteryear. In a single violent event, each one dramatises the sense of loss that time itself engenders, as over the years our tenderest beloved are taken from us. And they charge the photographic space, so that even those images without crashes acquire an additional emotionalism, the poignancy of transience and the imminence of potential disaster. I can think of no more touching image of loneliness that the anonymous figure in Colin O’Brien’s photograph, crossing the Clerkenwell Rd in the snow on New Year’s Eve, 1961.
After he had seen the interior of Herbal Hill Buildings, Colin confided to me he would rather live in Victoria Dwellings that stood there before, and yet, as he returned the keys to Tomasz, the superintendent, he could not resist asking if he might return and take more pictures in different conditions, at a different time of day or when it was raining. And Tomasz graciously assented as long as the apartment remained vacant.
I understood that Colin needed the opportunity to come back again, once that the door to the past had been re-opened, and, I have to confess to you that, in spite of myself, I could not resist thinking, “Maybe there’ll be a car crash next time?” Yet Colin never did go back and now he is gone from this world too.
Accident in the rain.
Accident in the rain, 2.
Accident at night, 1959.
Snow on New Year’s Eve, 1961.
Trolley buses, nineteen fifties.
Clerkenwell Italian parade, nineteen fifties.
Firemen at Victoria Dwellings, nineteen fifties.
Have a Guinness when you’re tired.
Colin’s photograph of the junction of the Clerkenwell Rd and Faringdon Rd, taken from Herbal Hill Buildings on the site of the former Victoria Dwellings.
When Colin O’Brien saw his childhood view for the first time in fifty years.
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
Minor Stepney Disasters Of The Seventies
Photographer Philip Cunningham set me this series of minor Stepney disasters of the seventies
Milk spillage in Bancroft Rd
“In the seventies, when I was studying photography, I carried a camera with me most of the time. The East End was a very lively place in those days and all sorts of things happened, both good and bad, all the time. I never sought out disasters, I just stumbled upon them and the wonder is that, as far as I know, nobody was seriously harmed.
The Mile End Rd leads right into the city and it is straight and safe, but drivers took incredible risks. The car crash happened just at the end of Mile End Place where I lived.
The flat fire in Alderney Rd was tragic, I do not know how it started but everything inside was destroyed. The poor occupant was standing in her dressing gown, devastated. Many more people smoked then and fire-proofed furniture had not been heard of.
One day, after I had dropped my daughter off at school in Cephas St and was late for college, I heard a smash of breaking glass. I ran back to discover the milk disaster. I took a few photos but, curiously, the milkman had disappeared. When I returned in the afternoon to collect my daughter from school, everything had been cleared up, not a even a trace of any broken glass or spilt milk.
The dustcart fire was in Harford St. Like the other disasters, it something I just happened to stumble across. The engine had caught fire and the cart was a write-off, but no-one was hurt.”
Philip Cunningham
Fire in Alderney Rd
Car crash in Mile End Rd
Dustcart fire in Harford St
Milk spillage in Bancroft Rd
Photographs copyright © Philip Cunningham