Behind The Facade
Book designer, David Pearson
To launch THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM, I am giving an illustrated lecture behind one of the facades in my book, the former Whitechapel Public Baths of 1846, now part of London Metropolitan University.
It is at 7pm next Monday 4th November at The Wash Houses, The Cass, 25 Old Castle St, E1 7NT.
Click here to book your ticket
Presented with the gracious support of The Cass, London Metropolitan University.
12–13 Greek Street, Soho, W1
Built c.1683, this was originally the largest house in the street and known as Portland House. From 1774–97, it was Josiah Wedgwood’s London warehouse, showroom and enamelling rooms with five show- rooms on two floors, where a famous dinner service made for the Empress Catherine of Russia was displayed in July 1774. Repairs were carried out in 1786 by T.Freeman of Great Pulteney Street who made a valuation of the fixtures in 1790 – listing a hall, a counting house and a shop on the ground floor, and a great room, another room, a flowerpot room and a gallery on the first floor.
The White Hart, 121 Bishopsgate, EC2
‘Its history as an inn can be of little less antiquity than that of the Tabard, the lodging house of the feast-loving Chaucer and the Canterbury pilgrims, or the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, the rendezvous of Prince Henry and his lewd companions,’ wrote Charles Goss, Archivist at Bishopsgate Institute in 1930.
The White Hart was a coaching house and tavern dating from 1246, positioned on Bishopsgate just outside the gate of the City of London. Rebuilt in 1470 and 1827, it retained its medieval cellars and was constantly busy until it was bought by Sir Alan Sugar’s company, Amsprop, in 2010 and reduced to a façade with a cylindrical office block on top, creating a monument to one man’s ego.
Former Unitarian Chapel, Stamford Street, Blackfriars, SE1
Designed in 1821 by Charles Parker, architect of Hoare’s Bank in the Strand, the Chapel was demolished in the sixties apart from the portico and part of the ground floor, which stood in front of a car park for many years.
The Grade II listed Doric hexastyle portico has a triglyph frieze and a pediment over. Its central door has a shouldered architrave and iron gates. Each of the walls on either side has three blank windows with shouldered architraves.
465 Caledonian road, Islington, N7
Mallett, Porter & Dowd constructed this modest yet handsome utilitarian building for their warehousing, storage and removals business in 1874.
Redevelopment by University College London for student housing was turned down by Islington Council in 2010, citing ‘adverse visual impact’ and inadequate daylight, due to the windows of the new building not aligning with those in the façade. This judgement was overturned by the government’s Planning Inspectorate on the basis that ‘due to intensive daytime activities taking place at the university campus,’ the absence of both light and view ‘would not be unacceptably oppressive.’
The development was winner of Building Design’s Carbuncle Cup for 2013.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY FOR £15
“As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture which threatens to turn the city into the backlot of an abandoned movie studio.”
The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.
As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.
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George Wells, Able Seaman
To Able Seaman George Wells, the modest cluster of buildings next to St Anne’s Church, Limehouse, will always be his training ship, and even today it still sports a cheery enamelled British Sailors’ Society sign as evidence of its former identity.
In 1938, fourteen year old George – a former sea scout from Dover – became a temporary East Ender, training here at the Prince of Wales Sea Training Hostel for Boys for just six months. Yet such was the intensity of this formative experience that George recalls it vividly seventy-five years later, even as he approaches his ninetieth birthday. “I suppose there’s not so many of us chaps left that remembers it?” he suggested to me when I paid a call upon him this week.
“I was fourteen years and five months old when I went up to Limehouse on 3rd January 1938. I always wanted to be in the Merchant Navy. I wanted to see the world and I knew that merchant ships went to many more places than the navy.
You walked into the main entrance where there was a bell and an ensign that you always saluted. You didn’t linger there, you walked straight through. On the left was the secretary’s office and on the right was the Commodore’s office. The two instructors were called Jack Frost and Freddie Painter, Jack was on the port watch and Freddie was on the starboard. They taught us everything to do with boatwork and navigation – signalling, semaphore and morse code – and things you could do with ropes. You had to be able to recite all thirty-two points of the compass from N to NE and back again.Your life depended on it and, if you couldn’t do it, you’d get horrible jobs to do.
We lived in dormitories at the top of the building, sleeping in iron bunks. You were given a horsehair mattress but no sheet, two blankets, one pillow and a counterpane. We got up at six in the morning and you folded your blankets with the pillow on top and the counterpane over it, like a pudding in the middle of the bed. We wore white duck trousers and a blue sailor’s top, plimsolls in winter and bare feet in summer. We would have a mug of tea and then we had to go out onto the signal deck – as we called the yard – for muster, where we were allocated jobs and between us we did all the cleaning. I remember they found one boy had a dirty neck on parade and he was put on report. He was taken below deck and stripped and washed by his fellows, and his skin was pink when he came back. When “Rigging, up and over!” was called, we had to run up the rigging and down the other side. One of us was chosen to be the “button boy,” he had to stand upon the very top. It was scary but we were young and when I got to sea they said, “Go aloft, you’re used to it.” because they knew where I had trained. I was given two pounds and seventeen shillings per month when I started with the corps.
Instructions continued until five daily and then we had homework. Two sideboys were on duty all day to attend the door. Saturdays and Sundays were the only days we were allowed out, and I learnt about the East End. We took the tram down to Tower Bridge, you could pick up girls there, but you had to be back by five. There were no cooks on Sunday, so we ate cold meat, pickles and mashed potato, plus trifle made of bread and jam with jelly and custard on top. We went out into the West India Dock, where we had a whaling ship and a gig. We used to learn to row in the dock, but it was a bit much pulling against the tide in the Thames. We had to carry sixteen foot oars on our shoulders, they were heavy when you got there.
It was very competitive. We had boxing matches under the big tree. It was known as “Grudge Day.” If you had a disagreement with someone, you informed the instructor and they put you in the ring together. They were all different sizes. I remember this big chap Wellham from Norfolk, he caught me with a bad one and split my eye open. Since I was appointed Chief Petty Office, everyone wanted to have a go at me and I’ve still got the scar under my eye from it.
The most embarrassing thing was when you were sent to have baths in the basement and then jump into the cold swimming pool. Captain Faulkner and his wife used to come and supervise us, but then he left and his wife – the matron – she stayed to watch us. All of us young boys in the buff, we had to go and stand in front of her. I think she enjoyed it more than we did.
Most of us were under fifteen, at fifteen you could go to sea. You were sent. The shipping companies funded the school to provide them with boys. I was actually on board my first ship, the Capetown Castle when I had my fifteenth birthday. It was a new ship, one of the biggest cargo ships afloat at 22,000 tons. Of the eight deck boys, there were two of us from the school, me and Alf. It was exciting. We left Southampton, we were going along the Channel and the officer said, “You’ve done signals. Call that ship over there and ask what it is.” It was the SS Beacon Grange, and it sent back the message “Capetown Castle, Bon Voyage!” I’ll never forget the first ship I spoke to on my first night at sea.
We used to go round the Cape on the mail run, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, London. We carried wool, hides, chick peas, wine and fruit. And once we picked up crates of marmalade oranges from Madeira, so pungent they had to be kept stacked on deck. Next year – when the war came – we switched over to troop carrying. Starting as a deck boy, I became an ordinary seaman, then a sailor then an able seaman and a gunner. I stayed with the Capetown Castle until 1946, and I quit at twenty-three because, already, I could see the way the mercantile industry was going.
When I went to sea, I knew I could do it. You had responsibility at an early age in those days.”
Once the war began, the training school moved up to Norfolk, terminating its brief period in the East End. George married three times and enjoyed a very successful career as Supervisor of the three hundred workers at Newhaven Harbour, until he retired in 1986. After being empty and squatted for years, the buildings in Newell St were bought by the squatters and divided into homes with only minimal alteration to the buildings.
As you walk through these atmospheric rooms today, the worn floors and old staircases are reminders of the former life that was here. And if you go down to basement, an old sign that reads “British Sailors’ Society” greets you on the stairs. You will find the swimming pool in the cellar is still there too and was used by all the residents of the street until quite recently.
The Sea Training School in Newell St still stands largely unaltered today. The crown over the front door has gone, but the coloured enamel sign above advertising the British Sailors’ Society remains.
The Sea Training Hostel in Limehouse with St Anne’s in the background
Sea cadets show off their acrobatic skills in Limehouse
George’s membership card for the Old Boys’ Association as given on graduation in June 1938
Their motto was – “British boys for British ships.”
Daily Routine
6:30am Turn Out: wash down decks etc.
8:00am Breakfast: make up bunks.
9:00am Parade for inspection: daily prayers.
9:15 to 10:45am Instruction in signalling: physical jerks and organised games.
10:30 to 10:45am Stand easy: boys have bread and cheese, etc.
10:45 to 12:30pm Instruction in seamanship: boat pulling, washing clothes, etc.
12:45pm Dinner: boys have meat with two vegetables and pudding every day. One day each week fish instead of meat.
2:00pm Parade for kit inspection.
2:10 to 3:30pm Instruction in seamanship: making and mending kit, kitbag making and other useful subjects.
3:30 to 3:45pm Stand easy.
3:45 to 4:30pm Instruction as above.
4:45pm Tea.
6:30 to 7:30pm Instruction in swimming, lectures, gymnastics, etc.
9:00pm Turn in – 9:30pm Light out.
Sea cadets scale the rigging in Limehouse
George graduated as the top top student in June 1938 just before his fifteenth birthday.
The Duchess of York visits the Sea Training Hostel in 1934.
Candidates for admission to the hostel must –
1. Have excellent references as to character.
2. Be between the ages of fourteen and a half and sixteen, and be able to swim one hundred yards.
3. Obtain the Board of Trade Sight Certificate for both form and colour vision. This certificate can be obtained at the Board of Trade Mercantile Marine Offices in London and chief seaports.
4. Have passed a Medical Examination certifying that they are sound and strong and in all respects physically qualified for employment in the Merchant Navy.
5. Be at least five feet one inch in height
In the selection of boys for admission to the Hostel, the orphan sons of sailors have prior claim.
Fees –
Orphan sons of sailors will be trained free of charge.
Boys from Society’s Sea Cadets Units and sons of sailors at a minimum of five shillings per week, but they should pay more if possible.
Boys not from Units and who have no claim on the Society, not less than ten shillings per week.
On parade at Limehouse with the canal in the background
The pool in the basement at Newell St, Limehouse where George had the embarrassing experience
The Capetown Castle
Pals on the Capetown Castle. Front Row – George Wells, Monty Dolan, Alf Everett. Back Row – Jumbo Jingles, Paddy Crawte, Les Harman, Ted Lane, Will Amy.
The Capetown Castle
Alf Everett & George Wells, best pals – Southampton 1939. George later married Alf’s sister.
On Capetown Castle during World War II, George stands on the extreme right
George’s Sea Training Society Old Boys’ Association badge
George Wells, Able Seaman
With thanks to Cynthia Grant and Prince of Wales Sea Training School for their assistance with this feature.
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The Disappointment Of Historic England
Historic England had no objection to Smithfield General Market being demolished, now it is to become the new home to the Museum of London
Historic England were fine with the Marquis of Lansdowne being demolished, now it is being restored as part of the Geoffrye Museum’s renovations
Historic England are advocating the redevelopment of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry into a bell-themed boutique hotel
In recent years the government’s heritage agency, Historic England, has been on the wrong side of too many important planning battles in London. Of course, there are also cases where it has behaved laudably, notably in the listing of the eighteenth-century weaver’s houses in Club Row and in objecting to Sainsburys’ tower in Whitechapel that would have overshadowed the seventeenth-century Trinity Green Almshouses.
Yet these examples of Historic England doing its job properly make its failures to fulfil its declared responsibilities – ‘to protect, champion and save places that define who we are’ – appear especially capricious.
Perhaps most disappointing is Historic England’s advocacy of the redevelopment of the historic Whitechapel Bell Foundry into a boutique hotel. On the HE website there is a declaration dated 15th July 2019, announcing ‘We are supportive of the plans that the new owners of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry have submitted.’ This is justified by two statements, ‘Recognising there is no longer a market for large bells’ and ‘it closed as it was uneconomic to continue.’
What is astonishing about this is that Historic England has no remit to comment on business viability and there is no evidence that the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is no longer viable as a working foundry. They are simply restating the developer’s case.
No mention or recognition is made by Historic England of the viable proposal to reopen the Whitechapel Bell Foundry put forward by the UK Historic Building Preservation Trust in partnership with Factum Foundation, which would preserve the living heritage of the foundry for generations to come.
Most disappointing of all is that Raycliff, the would-be developers of the foundry into a hotel, paid Historic England for an ‘enhanced service.’ It begs the question of how much money Historic England received for their advocacy of the Raycliff scheme, conveniently restating the developer’s case without evidence.
On 14th November, Tower Hamlets Council Development Committee are due to make a decision on the developer’s planning application for change of use from bell foundry into boutique hotel and the opinion of Historic England will pay a major part in this judgement.
Meanwhile, Tower Hamlets Councillor Puru Miah has submitted a Freedom of Information request to Historic England requesting all communications with Raycliff and asking how much Historic England received for their ‘enhanced service.’ Until this information is forthcoming, I do not see how the planning meeting can go ahead or any just decision on the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is possible.
Here is the text of the letter –
FAO Duncan Wilson
Historic England
10th October 2019
Dear Historic England
Re. Freedom of Information Request: The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, 32-34 Whitechapel Road E1 1DY
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I would like to request the following information:
Confirm whether Raycliff and other owners of the site received advice from Historic England under the Enhanced Advisory Service Scheme for the redevelopment of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry site since January 2016, details of all the fee agreements and service advice by Historic England, amount of fees paid to date for the advice received, the date of the advice given, and the content of the advice given.
A full copy of the pre-application advice that Historic England has provided for this site in 2016, as referred to in your letter dated 1st March 2019 to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, your ref. P01028757
What evidence have you to support the demise statement that a single-use foundry is not viable, referred to in your letter of 1st March 2019 Ref. P01028757, please provide evidence of how this assessment has been reached.
What advice or discussions have you had with UKHBPT since 2016 (not referred to in your letter of 1st March).
Provide all correspondence between Raycliff and Historic England since the first contact
With Regards,
Cllr Puru Miah
Mile End
London Borough of Tower Hamlets
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Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager
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Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Henrietta Keeper, Singer
Friday is an especially good day to have lunch at E. Pellicci in the Bethnal Green Rd, because not only is Maria Pellicci’s delicious fried cod & chips with mushy peas likely to be on the menu, but also – if you are favoured – you may also get to hear Henrietta Keeper sing one of her soulful ballads. Celebrated for her extraordinary vitality, the venerable Henrietta (known widely as “Joan”) is naturally reticent about her age, a discretion which you will appreciate when I reveal that she is able to pass as one thirty years her junior.
Henrietta tucked into her customary fried egg & chips last Friday as the essential warm-up to her weekly performance while I sat across the table from her enjoying the cod & chips with mushy peas, and helping her out with her chips. “My husband died fourteen years ago, of emphysema from smoking and he ate a lot of hydrolized fat.” she admitted to me, her dark eyes shining with emotion,“When he died, I threw away the biscuits and I bought a book on nutrition and studied it, and now I’ve got strong. I only eat wholemeal bread, white bread’s a killer. I am keeping well, to stay alive for the sake of my children because I love them. I don’t want to go the same way my husband did.”
“Anna Pellicci makes me laugh, ‘She says, ‘Are you still here?”” continued Henrietta with affectionate irony, leaning closer and casting her eyes around the magnificent panelled cafe that is her second home,“I first came to Pelliccis in 1947 when I got married. No-one had washing machines then, so I used to take my washing to the laundrette and come here with my three babies, Lesley hanging onto the pram, Linda sitting on the front and Lorraine the baby inside.” Yet in spite of being around longer than anyone else, Henrietta possesses a youthful, almost childlike, energy and wears a jaunty bow in her hair. “I’m so tiny,” she declared to me batting her eyelids flirtatiously, “I’m just a little girl.”
As a prelude the afternoon’s performance, I asked Henrietta the origin of her singing and she grew playful, speaking with evident delight and invoking emotions from long ago. “It all started with my dad when I was a little girl, he had a beautiful voice.” she recalled fondly, “He was a road sweeper, but years ago there wasn’t much work – so, when he couldn’t get a job, he used to stand outside the pub singing. And people put money in his hat, and he took it home and gave to my mum. That was the only entertainment we had in those days. Everybody was poor, so the best thing was to go to the pub and make your own music. When I was sixteen years old, I used to sing duets with my dad in pubs. The first song I sang was “Sweet Sixteen – When I first saw the love light in your eyes, when you were sweet sixteen…”
Henrietta got lost in the sentiment, singing the opening line of Sweet Sixteen across the table in a whisper, before the choosing the moment to assure me,“I’m a ballad singer, I don’t like to sing ‘Hey, Big Spender!’ even though I think Shirley Basset’s marvellous – that suits her voice, not mine.” I nodded sagely in acknowledgement of the distinction, before she continued with a fresh thought, “But I like Country & Western. Have you heard of Patsy Cline and Lena Martell? I like that one, ‘I go to pieces each time I see you again…'”
Born in the old Bethnal Green Hospital in the Cambridge Heath Rd, Henrietta and all her family – even her great-grandparents – lived in Shetland St opposite. Evacuated at the age of ten to Little Saxham, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, Henrietta found herself with a devout Welsh family who worked on the land and went to church on Sundays. Here Henrietta excelled in the choir and “that’s how I learnt singing. I got to sing, ‘My Lord is Sweet,’ on my own and I loved it.” she confided to me with a tender smile.
Returning to the East End at the time of the doodlbugs, Henrietta was out playing with her friend Doris when they heard the sound of the Luftwaffe overhead followed by explosions. In the horror of the moment, Doris suggested they take refuge in Bethnal Green Tube Station, but Henrietta had the presence of mind to refuse and went instead to join her family sleeping under the railway arches. That night, one hundred and seventy three people were killed on the staircase as they crowded into the entrance of the tube, including Henrietta’s friend Doris. “It’s not for your eyes,” Henrietta’s father told her when they laid out the bodies on stretchers upon the pavements in lines, but she recalls it in vivid detail to this day.
We ate in silence for a while before Henrietta resumed her story.“When my children started school, I joined the Diamond “T” Concert Party,” she told me,”I had a friend who worked at Tate & Lyle in Silvertown and one of the things they did for the community was organise entertainments. We used to go to old people’s homes, churches and hospitals, and I became one of their singers for thirty years. We had quite a laugh. The only reason I left was that everyone else died.”
I understood something of Henrietta’s circumstance, her story, the origin of her singing and how she made use of her talent over all these years. I realised it was imperative that Henrietta continues singing, if she is to seek the longevity she desires, and for one born and bred in Bethnal Green, Pelliccis is the natural venue. Yet there was one mystery left – why does everyone know Henrietta as ‘Joan’ ?
“My mum was called Henrietta, and because I was the eldest I was called Henrietta, but I hated it so I when I went for my first job interview, as a machinist in Mare St making army denims, I told them I was called, “Joan.” she confessed, “They was more cockney there than I am, they said, ‘What’s your name, love?’ and I didn’t like calling out ‘Henrietta’ because it sounded so posh, I just said the first name that came into my head – ‘Joan.’ All my neighbours and my mother-in-law know me as Joan, but my family know me as Henrietta. And that’s how I told a little white lie, in case you might be wondering.”
As our conversation passed, we had completed our meals. Joan ordered a piece of bread pudding to take home to eat later and I polished off a syrup pudding with custard. And then, the moment arrived – Henrietta took her microphone from her bag and composed herself to sumon the spirit of the place, a hush fell upon the cafe and she sang…
“I’m a ballad singer, I don’t like to sing ‘Hey, Big Spender!”
Henrietta Keeper – “I’m so tiny, I’m just a little girl.”
You may like to read my other Pelliccis stories
Taverns of Long Forgotten London
Leafing through the fat volumes of Walter Thornbury’s London Old & New is the least energetic form of pub crawl I know and yet I found I was intoxicated merely by studying these tottering old taverns, lurching at strange angles like inebriated old men sat by the wayside. Published in the eighteen-seventies, these publications looked back to London and its rural outskirts in the early nineteenth century, evoking a city encircled by coaching inns where pigs roamed loose in Edgware Rd and shepherds drove sheep to market down Highgate Hill.
White Hart Tavern, Bishopsgate
Bell Tavern, Edmonton
Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead
Spaniards’ Hotel, Highgate
Old Crown Inn, Highgate
Gate House Tavern, Highgate
The Brill Tavern, Somers Town
The Castle Tavern, Kentish Town
Old Mother Red Cap Tavern, Camden
Queen’s Head & Artichoke, Edgware Rd
Bell Inn, Kilburn
Halfway House, Kensington
Black Lion Tavern, Chelsea
World’s End Tavern, Chelsea
Gun Tavern, Pimlico
Rose & Crown, Kensington
Tattersall’s, Knightsbridge
Three Cranes Tavern, Upper Thames St, City of London
The Old Queen’s Head, Islington
Old Red Lion, Upon the banks of the Fleet – prior to demolition
Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill – prior to demolition
Old Tabard Tavern, Southwark – prior to demolition
White Hart Tavern, Borough
Inns of the Borough
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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and more pubs
Burdekin’s London Nights
Continuing the nocturnal theme, here is Harold Burdekin’s photography of London nights from 1934
East End Riverside
As you will have realised by now, I am a night bird. In the mornings, I stumble around in a bleary-eyed stupor of incomprehension and in the afternoons I wince at the sun. But as darkness falls my brain begins to focus and, by the time others are heading to their beds, then I am growing alert and settling down to write.
Once I used to go on night rambles – to the railway stations to watch them loading the mail, to the markets to gawp at the hullabaloo and to Fleet St to see the newspaper trucks rolling out with the early editions. These days, such nocturnal excursions are rare unless for the sake of writing a story, yet I still feel the magnetic pull of the dark city streets beckoning, and so it was with a deep pleasure of recognition that I first gazed upon this magnificent series of inky photogravures of “London Night” by Harold Burdekin from 1934 in the Bishopsgate Library.
For many years, it was a subject of wonder for me – as I lay awake in the small hours – to puzzle over the notion of whether the colours which the eye perceives in the night might be rendered in paint. This mystery was resolved when I saw Rembrandt’s “Rest on the Flight into Egypt” in the National Gallery of Ireland, perhaps the finest nightscape in Western art.
Almost from the beginning of the medium, night became a subject for photography with John Adams Whipple taking a daguerrotype of the moon through a telescope in 1839, but it was not until the invention of the dry plate negative process in the eighteen eighties that night photography really became possible. Alfred Stieglitz was the first to attempt this in New York in the eighteen nineties, producing atmospheric nocturnal scenes of the city streets under snow.
In Europe, night photography as an idiom in its own right begins with George Brassaï who depicted the sleazy after-hours life of the Paris streets, publishing “Paris de Nuit” in 1932. These pictures influenced British photographers Harold Burdekin and Bill Brandt, creating “London Night” in 1934 and “A Night in London” in 1938, respectively. Harold Burdekin’s work is almost unknown today, though his total eclipse by Bill Brandt may in part be explained by the fact that Burdekin was killed by a flying bomb in Reigate in 1944 and never survived to contribute to the post-war movement in photography.
More painterly and romantic than Brandt, Burdekin’s nightscapes propose an irresistibly soulful vision of the mythic city enfolded within an eternal indigo night. How I long to wander into the frame and lose myself in these ravishing blue nocturnes.
Black Raven Alley, Upper Thames St
Street Corner
Temple Gardens
London Docks
From Villiers St
General Post Office, King Edward St
Leicester Sq
Middle Temple Hall
Regent St
St Helen’s Place, Bishopsgate
George St, Strand
St Botolph’s and the City
St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You might like to read these other nocturnal stories
On Christmas Night in the City
Night at the Brick Lane Beigel Bakery
Night at The Spitalfields Market, 1991
The Nights Of Old London
The clocks have gone back, next week the temperature is plunging, and I can feel the velvet darkness falling upon London. As dusk gathers in the ancient churches and the dusty old museums in the late afternoon, the distinction between past and present becomes almost permeable at this time of year. Then, once the daylight fades and the streetlights flicker into life, I feel the desire to go walking out in search of the dark nights of old London.
Examining hundreds of glass plates – many more than a century old – once used by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute, I am in thrall to these images of night long ago in London. They set my imagination racing with nocturnal visions of the gloom and the glamour of our city in darkness, where mist hangs in the air eternally, casting an aura round each lamp, where the full moon is always breaking through the clouds and where the recent downpour glistens upon every pavement – where old London has become an apparition that coalesced out of the fog.
Somewhere out there, they are loading the mail onto trains, and the presses are rolling in Fleet St, and the lorries are setting out with the early editions, and the barrows are rolling into Spitalfields and Covent Garden, and the Billingsgate porters are running helter-skelter down St Mary at Hill with crates of fish on their heads, and the horns are blaring along the river as Tower Bridge opens in the moonlight to admit another cargo vessel into the crowded pool of London. Meanwhile, across the empty city, Londoners slumber and dream while footsteps of lonely policemen on the beat echo in the dark deserted streets.
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Read my other nocturnal stories
On Christmas Night in the City
On the Rounds With the Spitalfields Milkman
Other stories of Old London
