In Old Rotherhithe
St Mary Rotherhithe Free School founded 1613
To be candid, there is not a lot left of old Rotherhithe – yet what remains is still powerfully evocative of the centuries of thriving maritime industry that once defined the identity of this place. Most visitors today arrive by train – as I did – through the Brunel tunnel built between 1825 and 1843, constructed when the growth of the docks brought thousands of tall ships to the Thames and the traffic made river crossing by water almost impossible.
Just fifty yards from Rotherhithe Station is a narrow door through which you can descend into the 1825 shaft via a makeshift staircase. You find yourself inside a huge round cavern, smoke-blackened as if the former lair of a fiery dragon. Incredibly, Marc Brunel built this cylinder of brick at ground level – fifty feet high and twenty-five feet in diameter – and waited while it sank into the damp earth, digging out the mud from the core as it descended, to create the shaft which then became the access point for excavating the tunnel beneath the river.
It was the world’s first underwater tunnel. At a moment of optimism in 1826, a banquet for a thousand investors was held at the bottom of the shaft and then, at a moment of cataclysm in 1828, the Thames surged up from beneath filling it with water – and Marc’s twenty-two-year-old son Isambard was fished out, unconscious, from the swirling torrent. Envisaging this diabolic calamity, I was happy to leave the subterranean depths of the Brunels’ fierce imaginative ambition – still murky with soot from the steam trains that once ran through – and return to the sunlight of the riverside.
Leaning out precariously upon the Thames’ bank is an ancient tavern known as The Spread Eagle until 1957, when it was rechristened The Mayflower – in reference to the Pilgrims who sailed from Rotherhithe to Southampton in 1620, on the first leg of their journey to New England. Facing it across the other side of Rotherhithe St towers John James’ St Mary’s Rotherhithe of 1716 where an attractive monument of 1625 to Captain Anthony Wood, retrieved from the previous church, sports a fine galleon in full sail that some would like to believe is The Mayflower itself – whose skipper, Captain Christopher Jones, is buried in the churchyard.
Also in the churchyard, sits the handsome tomb of Prince Lee Boo. A native of the Pacific Islands, he befriended Captain Wilson of Rotherhithe and his two sons who were shipwrecked upon the shores of Ulong in 1783. Abba Thule, the ruler of the Islands, was so delighted when the Europeans used their firearms to subdue his enemies and impressed with their joinery skills in constructing a new vessel, that he asked them to take his second son, Lee Boo, with them to London to become an Englishman.
Arriving in Portsmouth in July 1784, Lee Boo travelled with Captain Wilson to Rotherhithe where he lived as one of the family, until December when it was discovered he had smallpox – the disease which claimed the lives of more Londoners than any other at that time. At just twenty years old, Lee Boo was buried inside the Wilson family vault in Rotherhithe churchyard, but – before he died – he sent a plaintive message home to tell his father “that the Captain and Mother very kind.”
Across the churchyard from The Mayflower is Rotherhithe Free School, founded by two Peter Hills and Robert Bell in 1613 to educate the sons of seafarers. Still displaying a pair of weathered figures of schoolchildren, the attractive schoolhouse of 1797 was vacated in 1939 yet the school may still be found close by in Salter Rd. Thus, the pub, the church and the schoolhouse define the centre of the former village of Rotherhithe with a line of converted old warehouses extending upon the river frontage for a just couple of hundred yards in either direction beyond this enclave.
Take a short walk to the west and you will discover The Angel overlooking the ruins of King Edward III’s manor house but – if you are a hardy walker and choose to set out eastward along the river – you will need to exercise the full extent of your imagination to envisage the vast vanished complex of wharfs, quays and stores that once filled this entire peninsular.
At the entrance to the Rotherhithe road tunnel stands the Norwegian Church with its ship weather vane
Chimney of the Brunel Engine House seen from the garden on top of the tunnel’s access shaft
Isambard Kingdom Brunel presides upon his audacious work
Visitors gawp in the diabolic cavern of Brunel’s smoke-blackened shaft descending to the Thames tunnel
John James’ St Mary’s Rotherhithe of 1716
The tomb of Prince Lee Boo, a native of the Pelew or Pallas Islands ( the Republic of Belau), who died in Rotherhithe of smallpox in 1784 aged twenty
Graffiti upon the church tower
Monument in St Mary’s, retrieved from the earlier church
Charles Hay & Sons Ltd, Barge Builders since 1789
Peeking through the window into the costume store of Sands Films
Inside The Mayflower
A lone survivor of the warehouses that once lined the river bank
Looking east towards Rotherhithe from The Angel
The Angel
The ruins of King Edward III’s manor house
Bascule bridge
Nelson House
Metropolitan Asylum Board china from the Smallpox Hospital Ships once moored here
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Music Hall Artistes Of Abney Park Cemetery
When the summer heat hits the city and the streets get dusty and dry, I like to seek refuge in the green shade of a cemetery. Commonly, I visit Bow Cemetery – but recently I went along to explore Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington to find the graves of the Music Hall Artistes resting there.
John Baldock, Cemetery Keeper, led me through the undergrowth to show me the memorials restored by the Music Hall Guild and then left me to my own devices. Alone in the secluded leafy glades of the overgrown cemetery with the Music Hall Artistes, I swore I could hear distant singing accompanied by the tinkling of heavenly ivories.
George Leybourne, Songwriter, Vocalist and Comedian, also known as Champagne Charlie (1842 – 1884) & Albert Chevalier (1861- 1923), Coster Comedian and Actor. Chevalier married Leybourne’s daughter Florrie and they all rest together.
George Leybourne – “Champagne Charlie is my name, Champagne Charlie is my name ,There’s no drink as good as fizz, fizz, fizz, I’ll drink every drop there is, is, is!”
Albert Chevalier – “We’ve been together now for forty years, An’ it don’t seem a day too much, There ain’t a lady livin’ in the land, As I’d swop for my dear old Dutch.”
G W Hunt (1838 – 1904) Composer and Songwriter, his most famous works were “MacDermott’s War Song” (The Jingo Song), “Dear Old Pals” and “Up In A Balloon” for George Leybourne and Nelly Power.
G W Hunt
Fred Albert George Richard Howell (1843 – 1886) Songwriter and Extempore Vocalist
Fred Albert
Dan Crawley (1871 – 1912) Comedian, Vocalist, Dancer and Pantomime Dame rests with his wife Lilian Bishop, Actress and Male Impersonator. He made his London debut at nineteen at Royal Victor Theatre, Victoria Park, and for many years performed three shows a day on the sands at Yarmouth, where he met his wife.They married in Hackney in 1893 and had four children, and toured together as a family, including visiting Australia, before they both died at forty-one years old.
Dan Crawley
Herbert Campbell (1844 – 1904) Comedian and Pantomime Star. The memorial behind the tombstone was erected by a few of his friends. Herbert Campbell played the Dame in Pantomime at Drury Lane for forty years alongside Dan Leno, until his death at at sixty-one.
Herbert Campbell, famous comedian and dame of Drury Lane
Walter Laburnum George Walter Davis (1847 – 1902) Singer, Patter Vocalist and Songwriter
Walter Laburnum
Nelly Power Ellen Maria Lingham (1854 – 1887) started her theatrical career at the age of eight, and was a gifted songstress and exponent of the art of male impersonation. Her most famous song was ‘The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery.” She died from pleurisy on 19th January 1887, aged just thirty-two.
Nelly Power – Vesta Tilley was once her understudy
Ron McCormick’s Spitalfields
Here is a selection of Ron McCormick’s splendid pictures from the seventies when he lived in Princelet St, Spitalfields.
Knifegrinder, Spitalfields
Fishman’s tobacconist & sweet shop, Flower & Dean St, Spitalfields
Entrance to Chevrah Shass Synagogue, Old Montague St
Clock seller, Sclater St
Dressed up for the Sunday market, Cheshire St
Maurice, Gents’ Hairdresser, Buxton St
Gunthorpe St
Club Row
Steps down to Black Lion Yard, Old Montague St
Old Castle St, Synagogue
Sunday market, Cheshire St
Corner of Gun St & Artillery Lane
Shopkeeper, Old Montague St
Inter-generational conflict on Princelet St
Goldstein’s Kosher Butcher & Poulterer, Old Montague St
Great Eastern Buildings, Quaker St
Convenience Store, Artillery Lane
Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor, Brune St
Alf’s Fish Bar, Brick Lane
Waiting for the night shelter to open, Christ Church Spitalfields
Resting, Spitalfields Market Barrows, Commercial St
Great Eastern Buildings, Quaker St
Rough sleeper, Spitalfields
Mother and her new-born baby in a one bedroom flat, Spitalfields
Photographs copyright © Ron McCormick
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At Billingsgate Roman Bath House
Tepidarium at Billingsgate Roman bathhouse
In Lower Thames St, where the traffic roars past old Billingsgate Market and around the Tower of London, there is an anonymous door that leads to the past. It is a piece of spine-tingling magic. You walk through a modern door into an unremarkable corporate building and descend a staircase to discover the best preserved piece of Roman archaeology in London.
Here is a second century riverside villa with an bathhouse of cruciform shape complete with an elaborate underfloor heating system. You can see the square frigidarium with its tessellated floor and then the smaller rooms with curved walls, the tepidarium and the caldarium, with tiled floors supported upon pilae permitting the hot air to travel underneath. In these rooms, water could be thrown upon the heated floor to create clouds of steam. For those who originated in warmer climes, the bathhouse provided a welcome antidote to the misery of cold winters in London.
The bathhouse was first uncovered in 1848 during the construction of the London Coal Exchange and drew a response of such wonder that – unlike many other ancient remains discovered in the City in that era – it was preserved. When the Coal Exchange was demolished in the last century for the widening of Lower Thames St, more of the Roman ruins were uncovered before being concealed in the basement of the block where they are housed today.
A century after the bathhouse was constructed, a six metre defensive wall was built along the water front, concealing the river view and blocking out the light. It was then that the bathhouse was expanded within the garden of the villa and perhaps the dwelling changed from a desirable private house to some form of temporary lodging, with the added attraction of a steam bath.
In use until the Romans departed London in the fifth century, the bathhouse then fell into disrepair and collapsed before being covered with a layer of silt, preserving the remains and preventing anyone carrying off the building materials for reuse. Tantalisingly, a Saxon brooch was found on top of the pile of collapsed roof tiles dating from a time when this part of the City of London was uninhabited. Did someone from the nearby Saxon settlements come to explore the Roman ruins one day and slip upon the rubble, dropping a brooch?
When you walk upon the metal gantries over the Roman walls, you feel you are a ghost from the future eavesdropping on another time. The scale of the rooms is apparent, the stone bench in the steam room is discernible and you can see the fragments of worn floor, smoothed with centuries of use by the long-dead. Square pipes, tiles and other details of the construction reveal the work of skilled craftsmen in ceramic and brick, and a single tile bears the imprint of a dog’s paw that wandered through the brick maker’s yard in London seventeen hundred years ago.
Explore Billingsgate Roman Bathhouse for yourself any Saturday until November. Tours run at 11am, 12noon and 1pm. Click here to book a tour.
The hot air from the furnace entered the building and circulated under the floor
The curved walls of the caldarium
Tiles supported on pilae as part of the underfloor heating system in the tepidarium
Tessellated floor in the frigidarium
Fragment of tessellated floor
The stone bench in the tepidarium
The paw print of a dog in London seventeen hundred years ago
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Ed Gray’s Streetlife Serenade
Ed Gray introduces his new exhibition, Streetlife Serenade: 30 Years of Painting City Life, which opens tomorrow at House of Annetta, 25 Princelet St, E1 6QH and runs until 20th July. Open Mondays & Tuesdays 11am-5pm, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays 11am-8pm.
Lucky Tiger, Whitechapel Market 2008
‘This exhibition Streetlife Serenade features my paintings of London life loaned from collectors from my thirty-year career as an artist, with street drawings and some prints of highlights from along the way. In addition, there are two large new paintings of London exhibited for the first time Remembrance, West Lane War Memorial Rotherhithe exploring the motionless silence of loss, tribalism, sacrifice, conflict and ritual and Triumph of Shoreditch, Shoreditch High St Station dramatising the vital call of the roaring city and the unrehearsed choreography of the street – the eternal dance of life that leads us onwards.
In 1995, I left art college in Cardiff to return to my home city of London. I knew I wanted to paint people, that was what I had always done. One day my dad showed me a book of William Hogarth’s work. I did not understand the narratives in Hogarth’s scenes back then but I recognised the Londoners romping, raving and roving through his clustered scenes. In Cardiff, I had begun to paint fish markets and caffs, learning to befriend and persuade fishmongers and caff owners that I would be no bother and keep out of their way as I drew.
In 1996, I left my studio in a squat on the Old Kent Rd, pacing self-consciously up and down the ancient highway, trying to find a way to draw what I thought I was seeing. It was another five years before I felt able to venture into the city with my sketchbook and pencils and really begin to sketch life of the city. I cast my net in different city streams and brought my haul back to a bedroom in Brixton, filleting my drawings to piece together moment, memory, echoes and rework all these elements into a canvas.
I tried to learn to be bold enough to stand in the street and draw faces, finding ways to record flitting and fleeting urbanites, to capture character in a few strokes with only a few seconds’ observation. I was learning to hold a stare, to avoid confrontation, to blend and be a part of the street, to be visibly invisible, but most of all I was learning to be present enough to really look.’
– Ed Gray, Rotherhithe 2025
Triumph Of Shoreditch, Shoreditch High St Station 2025
Adoration in the Lions Den, Milwall 2014
Blackfriars Skittles, 2008
Brockwell Kiss, Brockwell Lido 2005
Full English, Rock Steady Eddies, Camberwell 2005
Golden Day, Bar Italia, Soho 2010
I am Bacchanale, Notting Hill Carnival 2010
Let Me Eat My Wings On Camberwell Green, 2010
Night Bus, Old Kent Rd 2004
Nighthawks, Whitehall 2000
Nothing To See Here, 2007
Remembrance, West Lane, Rotherhithe 2024
Sledgers, Primrose Hill 2008
Tooting Lido, 2004
Xmas With The Camden Cat, Camden Town Station 2008
Ed Gray in his studio
Paintings copyright © Ed Gray
My Night On Liverpool St Station
If you have not yet objected to the monstrous block they want to plonk on top of Liverpool St St Station, the deadline is this Friday 4th July.
When I wrote ten days ago there were only 180 objections versus 613 comments in favour but – thanks to you the readers of Spitalfields Life – there are now 836 objections versus 680 comments in favour. This is astonishing progress.
Yet if we are to stop this appalling development, we have to far surpass those comments in favour and we have until the end of Friday to do this. Please encourage your friends, family, neighbours and colleagues to object.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY
Many of the comments in favour are in response to adverts placed by the developers on social media asking people to support more toilets and better handicapped access at the station – with barely any mention of the monster tower block. I would question whether these commentators were fully aware of the nature of the development that they were supporting. Consequently, it is arguable whether these single line comments are legally compliant and some readers have already chosen to refer the developers’ adverts to www.asa.org.uk as misleading.
When I was callow and new to London, I once arrived back on a train into Liverpool St Station after the last tube had gone and spent the night there waiting for the first tube next morning. With little money and unaware of the existence of night buses, I passed the long hours possessed by alternating fears of being abducted by a stranger or being arrested by the police for loitering. Liverpool St was quite a different place then, dark and sooty and diabolical – before it was rebuilt in 1990 to become the expansive glasshouse that we all know today – and I had such an intensely terrifying and exciting night then that I can remember it fondly now.
Old Liverpool St Station was both a labyrinth and the beast in the labyrinth too. There were so many tunnels twisting and turning that you felt you were entering the entrails of a monster and when you emerged onto the concourse it was as if you had arrived, like Jonah or Pinocchio, at the enormous ribbed belly.
I was travelling back from spending Saturday night in Cromer and stopped off at Norwich to explore, visiting the castle and studying its collection of watercolours by John Sell Cotman. It was only on the slow stopping-train between Norwich and London on Sunday evening that I realised my mistake and sat anxiously checking my wristwatch at each station, hoping that I would make it back in time. When the train pulled in to Liverpool St, I ran down the platform to the tube entrance only to discover the gates shut, closed early on Sunday night.
I was dressed for summer, and although it had been warm that day, the night was cold and I was ill-equipped for it. If there was a waiting room, in my shameful fear I was too intimidated to enter. Instead, I sat shivering on a bench in my thin white clothes clutching my bag, wide-eyed and timid as a mouse – alone in the centre of the empty dark station and with a wide berth of vacant space around me, so that I could, at least, see any potential threat approaching.
Dividing the station in two were huge ramps where postal lorries rattled up and down all night at great speed, driving right onto the platforms to deliver sacks of mail to the awaiting trains. In spite of the overarching vaulted roof, there was no sense of a single space as there is today, but rather a chaotic railway station criss-crossed by footbridges, extending beyond the corner of visibility with black arches receding indefinitely in the manner of Piranesi.
The night passed without any threat, although when the dawn came I felt as relieved as if I had experienced a spiritual ordeal, comparable to a night in a haunted house in the scary films that I loved so much at that time. It was my own vulnerability as an out-of-towner versus the terror of the unknowable Babylonian city, yet – if I had known then what I knew now – I could simply have walked down to the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market and passed the night in one of the cafes there, safe in the nocturnal cocoon of market life.
Guilty, and eager to preserve the secret of my foolish vigil, I took the first tube to the office in West London where I worked then and changed my clothes in a toilet cubicle, arriving at my desk hours before anyone else.
Only the vaulted roof and the Great Eastern Hotel were kept in the dramatic transformation that created the modern station and the dark cathedral where I spent the night is gone. Yet a magnetism constantly draws me back to Liverpool St, not simply to walk through, but to spend time wondering at the epic drama of life in this vast terminus where a flooding current of humanity courses through twice a day – one of the great spectacles of our extraordinary metropolis.
Shortly after my night on the station experience, I got a job at the Bishopsgate Institute – and Liverpool St and Spitalfields became familiar, accessed through the tunnels that extended beyond the station under the road, delivering me directly to my workplace. I noticed the other day that the entrance to the tunnel remains on the Spitalfields side of Bishopsgate, though bricked up now. And I wondered sentimentally, almost longingly, if I could get into it, could I emerge into the old Liverpool St Station, and visit the haunted memory of my own past?
A brick relief of a steam train upon the rear of the Great Eastern Hotel.
Liverpool St Station is built on the site of the Bethlehem Hospital, commonly known as “Bedlam.”
Archive images copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
Happy 100th Birthday, Peggy Metaxas!
Click here to book for my City of London Tour on 13th July and my Spitalfields Tour on 19th July
Join me in sending birthday greetings to this proud centenarian today
Portrait by Sarah Ainslie
There is a quiet cul-de-sac to the east of Vallance Rd, positioned half way between Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, where all the East End’s stray cats – and sometimes stray humans – end up. But, fortunately for them, Peggy Metaxas, is waiting to offer a plate of food or a cup of tea before putting them on the right path again. Peggy has been presiding here as long as anyone can remember, so I went along recently to enjoy a cuppa and slice of Victoria sponge and learn the extraordinary story of how she arrived in this benign spot.
‘I was born here in the East End in 1925. My parents already had one girl, my sister Gwendoline, who was three when I was born. My father Edward John Axton worked in the docks, he was from a bright family – a teacher, a swimming instructor, a shopkeeper, a dragoon and a musician – but he was the one who held family together. Being the eldest, he worked to get them all into education.
In 1922, when my sister was born, things were pretty bad because of the Depression and so my dad followed in his father’s footsteps to get a job in the docks. He was only twenty. Things got so bad financially he used to go round the streets to find wood and make dolls’ furniture, little prams and cots and blackboards. I remember him saying to me, ‘I learnt how to put the blacking on the board so it never came off when the children cleaned the board.’ He would go down Brick Lane and sell them. I was very proud of my dad.
He married my mum, Maud Agnes Elizabeth Hendall, in 1921. She was a very good cook and a very careful, correct person. I think she was born too late, she should have lived in the Victorian times because she did not fit in. The people in that area of Bow where we lived were working class but not low working class. Next door to us in Belhaven St was a man who was a sailor and, when he came home on leave, I went next door and sat on his knee while he told me stories of where he had been. It was the first time in my life I had seen tattoos and that fascinated me.
My father did not earn much money but they had enough for the rent – six shillings and eight pence a week – and the insurance – two shillings a month – which was so important, and coal money, you had to have that. A little pile of coins would go up on the mantelpiece and that you never touched. They insured us children, that was what people did, they insured their babies. I remember standing at the door when the insurance man came for his money and my mum gave him half a crown. And he put it between his teeth and bit it and broke it and said ‘I’m sorry ma’am.’ I have since thought that he did a switch and my mum knew. I remember it so well because to me it was a tragedy. It was a couple of weeks savings from my dad’s pay and without it we would be out on the street. My mother was crying, she went to see the neighbour who said, ‘Don’t worry Maud, it will sort itself out.’
My father did not have much overtime but, when he did, he put money by and once a year we went to Southend or Margate. This was before he became a ‘ganger’ which gave him regular employment. He had to go to the docks at five in the morning and wait to be called. He walked or jumped on a tram.
It was an enjoyable few years, which is amazing to me that I can recall because I was only two or three. We left when I was five because the owners of the houses where we were living wanted to sell them. It was only a small terraced house with two bedrooms for three of us and my mum and dad, so my parents jumped at the offer of a council house in Dagenham. It was still only two bedrooms but it was new and we had a bathroom.
I grew up there until 1939 when I was evacuated because Dagenham was one of the first places to be bombed. They were getting all the kids together to send them west of London and I went with my brother, who was three years younger than me, to Cirencester in Gloucestershire. There was no war yet but the the government was thinking to get the children out. Me and my brother were separated and placed with different families. I was about fourteen. It was not ideal, so my father came one day just before Christmas with a green leather overcoat and he said, ‘That’s for you.’ Then he said, ‘Let’s get your brother, we’re going home.’ My sister who was three years older than me was working by then, she had a job in a photographer’s studio in Fenchurch St.
At Dagenham, I sat for the scholarship exam and I won a scholarship to Brentwood. I stayed at home and my mum had another child. When the bombing started my father prepared, as most men did, by building an air shelter in the garden. He brought home some car seats from Brick Lane and made it really nice. He also joined the Home Guard, putting out incendiary bombs, and he got quite ill because he was working in the day and doing this at night. It was a really busy time.
One day when the bombings were really heavy, I was in the shelter with my dad. He said ‘This is ours’ and it was indeed. The bomb dropped in the garden next to ours, everything blew with the force and the windows were blown out. We had two chickens, Mary and Phoebe, they were blown sky high.
My dad said, ‘This is no good. Leave it to me.’ He did not now London at all, he only knew the East End. He got a train to Baker St and another to Uxbridge. He got off at Eastcote, he had no idea where he was. He turned left and he saw all these new house being built there. He saw a watchman sitting at a brazier and asked him, ‘Is there any chance…?’ ‘They are going to rent them out’ said the watchman. So my dad gave him ten bob and got a key. ‘I’m don’t know if I’m allowed to do this,’ said the watchman and probably he was not. My father went back and said to my mum, ‘We’re moving.’ He got a lorry for our things – the piano had to go – and my mum and I went in the lorry and my sister and my brother sat in the front with my dad. That’s how we moved to Middlesex and I left the East End, until I came back in the nineteen-nineties.
In 1957, I got married and emigrated to Canada. My sister and my brother had already gone to Toronto. They encouraged me and my husband George who was in the diplomatic service at the Greek embassy. We met when we worked in the same office at the embassy, I was a receptionist and dogsbody. George was at university in Athens, then he had to do his military service but his aunt who knew the naval attache arranged for him to come to London instead, decoding for the Admiralty. He learnt English and typed in English and Greek and he was a dear. We got to know the diplomats and the ship owners, and they got us a passage to Canada. We stayed thirty years and had a family there.
I do not know why I came back really. It was a long way from England and a long way from Greece. In Canada we moved so many times because George could not get a job. He did not have a profession because he had only worked in shipping for the Admiralty. Eventually he got several good jobs, working for Olivetti and Air Canada. He was a good man and he tried hard but I always wanted to settle down and have a dog. It took us ten years, until 1967, to get a house of our own and by then our kids were teenagers. We had three mortgages and we did not spend a penny, not even a newspaper, until we paid off all the mortgages. We made it. Then one day George said, ‘Let’s go back to England, where we are near Canada and Greece.’ He wanted to come back more than me. I was not unhappy but I wanted more. Yet my mother had died and my father remarried, so there was no house or mum and dad, it was starting all over again.
I stayed with my aunt in Bethnal Green, and put my name down for a council house and came and went to Toronto and Greece. In 1999, George died in Canada and then I came back for good because by that time I had been offered a council flat. It took me time but I love it here. I have family friends from years ago and here I am now. I feel attached to the East End, it is like family. I like it here. I think I will stay here now.
I have learnt during all these years that have got to love people. There is always another side to everything even when people say something bad, which they do, because that person is not like them. I am grown up now and I have learnt you cannot judge people. I found someone sleeping next to my bin, I did not call the police, I gave her a chair and a cup of tea. This poor old woman, she was somebody. I have thought of her since, ‘What happened to her?’ You can only do what you can do. I do not smoke but I used to keep a packet of cigarettes because passersby used to see me brushing the path and ask me for one. I would say, ‘Would you like to sit down for a cup of tea and I will find you one?’ I would never say, ‘No.’ The road ends here and sometimes people wander down this street and do not know where to go.’
Belhaven St, Bow, where Peggy was born (photograph by Tony Bock)
Peggy in 1925
Peggy as bridesmaid at her aunt’s wedding, 1928
Peggy with Aunt Beatrice, 1929
Peggy on the ferry, 1930
Peggy (centre) with her family at the seaside, 1939
Peggy, 1944
Peggy & George at the beach, 1948
Peggy & George’s wedding, 1949
Peggy with her children Peter & Kate, 1956
Peggy & George, 1996
Peggy and her daughter Kate, 2025
New portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie
