Marie Iles, Machinist
Apart from memorable excursions outside London as an evacuee, Marie Iles has lived her entire life within a quarter mile of Stepney and it suits her very well. Those wartime experiences taught her the meaning and importance of home, yet living close to Stepney City Farm today she still enjoys a reminder of the rural world she grew to love as a child.
A natural storyteller, Marie laid out the tale of her formative years for me with confidence and eloquent precision. Blessed with independent thought from an early age, Marie quickly learnt to stand up for herself and to appreciate the moral quality of people’s actions, whilst she was suffering enforced exile from her beloved Stepney amidst the tumultuous events of a world war.
It was the meeting with her husband Fred Iles that provided the sympathetic resolution of Marie’s dislocated early years and resulted in an enduring relationship which has sustained them both for the last sixty-five years.
“I was born on 9th August 1930 in Fair St, Stepney, while we were living upstairs in two rooms in my nan’s house, and when I was four or five we moved to Garden St. But I usually lived with my nan – whom everyone knew as Aunt Kit – because I loved her so much. I had a happy childhood playing in the streets, games like Hopscotch and Knocking Down Ginger. We was always running around and the police would pick us up and take us to Arbour Sq Police Station and give us bread and jam.
One day, I came indoors and my mum and dad had the wireless going and there was a quiet atmosphere, which was very unusual in our house, and I heard the voice of a man saying, ‘And England is at war with Germany.’ So I says to my mum, ‘Are we at war?’ and she says, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Are the Germans coming?’ and she said, ‘Yes, but not to Garden St.’
The siren went when I was out shopping with my nan in the old street at the side of St Dunstan’s church and, all of a sudden, there was bombs dropping and aeroplanes. My nan said, ‘You run home to your mum quick,’ but I wouldn’t leave her. So she said, ‘Run!’ and I ran on the spot to show I was running. Eventually, we got home to Garden St and my mum, who had a phobia that she might be taken ill or die with dirty feet, was saying, ‘Get a bowl of water, I’ve got to wash my feet.’ When the bombing eased up, my nan said, “I’ll take the two girls home where there is an Anderson shelter,’ and, as we came out, it was a terrifying sight – where there had been houses, there was just piles of bricks and rubble, and there was a horrible smell of smoke and, that night, the sky was red with the light of the fires.
We stayed at my nan’s a few weeks after that, until one day I was at my mother’s and she said, ‘You’re going on a holiday, you, Kitty and Johnny.’ We was excited! My mum pinned a label onto each of us with our name and address on it, and filled a carrier bag for each of us with our belongings. We went to school and there was a couple of coaches waiting, and my nan said, ‘Write to us and always say your prayers every night,’ and she put three sixpences in my hand. I thought, ‘I’ve got money and I’m going on holiday,’ and I was pleased. We all got on the coach together, me and Kitty and Johnny. Then, as we were going, I dropped my three sixpences in the excitement and it felt like the end of the world – not because of the money, but because my nan had given them to me.
We arrived at what I later found out was Denham. We was dropped at the corner of the street, and ladies came over and picked who they fancied. Johnny went with a Mrs Burrell, a lovely little country lady with red cheeks. Kitty and me, we went with Mrs Rook. She had a nice house, that was what we would call ‘posh,’ and she had a grown up son and daughter, Ken and Joyce, and her husband Mr Rook. Yet I hated it, I was so homesick and cried every night for a fortnight but my sister loved it. I asked her, ‘Why don’t you get homesick?’ She said, ‘Because you are here. Wherever you are, I am alright.’ I was her elder sister.
One morning, Mrs Rook said, ‘Why don’t you put on your coats and go out for a walk?’ And the first person we met was Mr Goddard, my headmaster from school in Stepney. He took hold of my hand and asked, ‘Have you got a nice place to stay?’ I said, ‘Yes, but I hate it I miss my home.’ So he said, ‘Look Marie, do you want me to tell your mother what you said and have her worrying about you?’ And I said, ‘ No, don’t tell her,’ and, after that, I was alright and I had a happy time. And that was when I first noticed flowers and the trees opening up. Once there was snow, and Mrs Rook sent me to Denham village for an errand, and I saw these flowers peeking up through the snow – crocuses – and I thought it was a little miracle, that flowers grew in the snow.
Then it seemed the bombing stopped and they took us back to London, and we was there for a while until they sent us off again. They put us on a train at Paddington and we stopped overnight at an army barracks and slept on the floor, and me and Kitty cuddled up under a blanket. Other kids were crying but I wasn’t homesick. In the morning, the soldiers gave us breakfast of ham and hard-boiled eggs and tea and bread and jam. We travelled on and we came to this little village near Rugby called ‘Crick.’ A Mrs Watts picked us out and she lived in Cromwell Cottage, a nice house, and she gave us three meals a day but this lady had no compassion whatsoever. She took us because she didn’t want to do war work. She turned us out at seven-thirty to go to school, and she used to go to the pictures in Rugby twice each week and we had to wait outside in the bitter cold until she came home.
When the summer comes and you’re playing outside, it doesn’t seem so bad. But, one day, we’d had our dinner and were going back to school, and I knew she had a basket of apples in the larder, so I decided to pinch one. We each took bites of the apple, sharing it between the two of us on the way to school. When we got in that evening, she says to me, ‘You thieving Cockney! You come from the slums of London and you don’t appreciate a good home.’ Now I was always a bit of a rebel – I think it was because of growing up with so many brothers – so I thought, ‘I won’t stand for this.’ So I said to Kitty, ‘We’re not going to stay here with this wicked lady.’
Down at the bottom of the hill, lived an old lady and her husband – they must have been seventy. I went there and knocked on the door and asked, ‘Could you take two evacuees?’ She said, ‘Who are they?’ I said, ‘It’s my sister and me.’ She said, ‘Alright, take the old pram and go and get all your things.’ So we went back to Mrs Watts. I said, ‘I’m leaving, I’m going somewhere else to live.’ And her husband, Jack Watts – he was one of the kindest men I ever met – he said, ‘Marie, stop and think what you are doing.’ But I never did, and that night we went down to the old lady and the old man. Talk about ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’! She never cooked, she just gave us a bit of toast sometimes. Then she decided to visit her son and daughter for a holiday, and left us alone there with the old man, her husband. He used to go into the woods all day and cut willow branches and make clothes pegs. Meanwhile, Micky – my little brother – came down because my mother was having another baby up in London. We never had a thing to eat, so we used to go to people’s allotments and pull up raw vegetables and eat them, carrots and even turnips.
There was this plum tree in the garden with this big green plum hanging on it, and before she went the old lady said, ‘I expect to see that big green plum still hanging there when I return.’ But as time went on it got riper and riper, and the day before she was due to return I couldn’t stand it no more. I picked the plum and we all had bites of it – me, Kitty and Micky. Unfortunately, when he knew the owner was due to come home, Micky wet the bed. I took the sheet off and tried to wash it myself but I left it on the line and, when she came home, she asked, ‘What’s this sheet doing on the line?’ And Micky said, ‘I wet the bed,’ and she beat him unmercifully and he hung onto my legs crying, ‘Marie, Marie.’
Once again, rebellion came to the fore, and I said to my brother and sister, ‘Come on, I’m going to walk back to London.’ It was only eighty miles. So, with what money we had, we bought some pears and we were walking up the road and we came to this little bridge and I thought, ‘I can’t walk all that way with these kids, they’re too little.’ I always had a little bag with me and I looked inside and found a stamped addressed envelope that my nan had sent me. It was a Monday, the first day of the school holidays, and I sat down and wrote my tale of woe to my nan, and I posted it and said, ‘Let’s go back.’ And, as the week went on, we seemed to forget about things.
On Friday morning, it was pouring with rain and we got up and came downstairs, and she’d cooked us a big bowl of porridge. She says to me, ‘You’ve written to your granny. You’ve got a letter, your brother’s coming down to pick you up and take you home.‘ I don’t think I ever felt as happy in all my life as I did that morning. Next morning was Saturday. We all got up, didn’t wash, and got all our things together and sat on the grass verge outside the cottage. Jimmy wasn’t on the first bus that came or the second and, by one o’ clock, I was beginning to think, ‘He’s not coming.’ We waited there all this time, and the old woman and old man never called us in to give us a drink or anything.
The four o’ clock bus came and, all of a sudden, I looked up and there was Jimmy coming down the hill. He had a navy blue suit and a red shirt and his tie was blowing in the wind. I said, ‘We’re ready! We’re ready!’ He said, ‘I’ve got to let the lady know that I’m taking you.’ So he went inside and she said, ‘I’ve had a terrible time with those children.’ And he brought us back to London, and back to my dad and my mum who was in hospital having a new baby, Paul. So I went round to stay with my nan ’til my mum came home and I was beside myself with joy.
Garden St had got bombed and my mum and dad moved to Albert Gardens but my mum never liked it because it was number thirteen, so they moved again to an eight bedroom house – because by then I had seven brothers and one sister – at forty-six Stepney Green. Jimmy went into the army and got wounded in Normandy, Bobby went to Scotland in the army, Johnny was sent to Germany and Micky was sent to Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Then we got the rockets – the doodlebugs – and that was almost as terrifying as the bombs. You’d hear the engine of a plane and then it stopped and you’d sit there in deathly silence and suddenly there’d be a big explosion. I know it’s a wicked thing to say but you’d think, ‘Thank God it’s not us.’
Then gradually, everyone came back home again to live in Stepney Green and, after everything settled down, I went to work in the rag trade as a machinist. And when I was nineteen, I met my lovely Fred. I was coming home from Victoria Park with my friend Betty and, as we walked past The Fountain pub in the Mile End Rd, there was a coach outside. My friend said, ‘Would you like a ride in a coach?’ And, all of a sudden, Fred appeared in the door of the pub with a pint of beer in his hand and called out to the driver, ‘These two girls are looking for a ride.’ I had never been in a pub but Fred said to me, ‘Hang on, wait ’til I’ve finished this pint and I’ll walk along with you.’ So I said to my friend, ‘Who does he think he is? We don’t know him.’ We carried on walking and I heard footsteps running behind us and I knew it was Freddie and his mate. He came alongside me and said, ‘I’ve got a camera. Would you like me to come round and take your photo?’ And my friend said, ‘Take no notice of him, he’s just making it up. He hasn’t got a camera.’ Freddie said, ‘Do you mind? I’m not speaking to you. I’m speaking to her.’
And when I turned and looked at him, I fell in love with him. They say there’s no such thing as love at first sight but there is. I arranged to meet him the next night on the corner but, when I arrived, he wasn’t there – I didn’t realise he was on the other side of the road, waiting to see if I’d turn up. So I went back home and my mum was looking out the window, and she saw what happened and she said to him, ‘You’re late, young man!’ And we courted for four years because we couldn’t get anywhere to live and then we got married at St Dunstan’s, Stepney, on 1st August 1953. We got two rooms at the top of a block of flats, Dunstan House, Stepney Green. The toilet was on the landing and the sink too, but we thought it was our little paradise.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t have children, our only regret in life. But my sister Kitty, and her son Alan and his wife Susan, they’ve always shared everything with us, and looked after us through thick and thin. And every year, we go to stay with Kitty and we have a really lovely old traditional Christmas. There’s nothing we like better than to go down memory lane together, it helps to keep us all close.”
Marie & Fred in their kitchen in Rectory Sq, Stepney.
Marie, Johnny and Kitty at Denham with Mrs Rook – “I loved the country life, especially when it was conker season and there were ripe apples. If my family had been there, I’d never have left.”
Marie’s sister Kitty, hop-picking with her grandfather after the war.
Marie hits a hole in one.
Marie & Fred’s wedding, 1st August 1953
On honeymoon in Ramsgate August 1953
Marie & Fred go Flamenco.
Kitty with her children, Marie and her mother in the fifties.
Marie and her dog Rufus when they lived in the prefab in Ashfield St.
Marie & Fred at a family wedding in the eighties.
Marie & Fred enjoy an adventure on the river.
The three evacuees grown-up – Johnny, Marie and Kitty.
Fred & Marie celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary on 1st August 2013
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One of the most popular posts of recent years has been THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM, my gallery of notorious London facades. Since then I gave a lecture at RIBA and contributed articles on the subject to Architectural Review and Design Exchange. Now I have written a book which I hope to publish with your kind assistance in October.
There are two ways you can help me publish the book.
1. I am seeking readers who are willing to invest £1000 in THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM. In return, we will publish your name in the book and invite you to a celebratory dinner hosted by yours truly. If you would like to know more, please write to me at spitalfieldslife@gmail.com
2. Preorder a copy of THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM and you will receive a signed and inscribed copy in October when the book is published. Click here to preorder your copy
Below you can see the cover design by David Pearson and a gallery of my photographs. In coming days, I will be publishing further excerpts from the book.
Please suggest other facades I should include.
The exterior cover of the book…
…which opens to reveal the title.
“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 everything apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why this 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 that inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.
An affront in Spitalfields – the former Fruit & Wool Exchange
The former Cock A Hoop in Artillery Lane dating from 1805
The former horse stables in Quaker St
The White Hart in Bishopsgate dating from 1240
At St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield
The Duke of Cambridge in Bethnal Green, dating from 1823
Former Unitarian Chapel in Waterloo dating from 1821
In Bartholomew Close, Smithfield
In Broadwick St, Soho
The former Pykes Cinematograph Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush dating from 1910
In Greek St, Soho
The veneer of luxury in Oxford St
A prize-winning abomination on the Caledonian Rd
In Gracechurch St, City of London
St Giles High St, Off Tottenham Court Rd
A stonker at Borough Market
Facade at Toynbee Hall
In Knightsbridge
In Brooke St, Mayfair
In Smithfield, where the new building and the old facade do not fit
The Spotted Dog in Willesden dating from 1762
British Land’s forthcoming development in Norton Folgate – ‘A kind of authenticity’
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM
Alexander Baron’s East End
Contributing Writer Nadia Valman explores novelist Alexander Baron’s return to his grandparents’ home in Cheshire St in his novel King Dido which was first published in 1969. One of the East End’s greatest writers, Baron is celebrated in a new publication, So We Live: The Novels of Alexander Baron, from Five Leaves Press.
Cheshire St by Philip Marriage, 1967
Alexander Baron (1917-99) grew up in a secular Jewish family in Dalston and Stoke Newington, and during the twenties his Saturday afternoons were spent visiting his grandparents in the East End. His mother, Fanny Levinson, was born in 1896 in Corbet’s Court, in the precincts of the Truman & Hanbury brewery. And, during Alexander’s childhood, his maternal grandparents lived in the Dutch Tenterground near Bell Lane, where he adored the noise and human warmth he experienced in the streets crowded with hawkers, itinerant musicians and chattering neighbours.
Yet it was his father’s dour family home in Spitalfields that sparked Alexander Baron’s literary imagination. His paternal grandfather, Simon Bernstein, born in a small village in Poland, had been conscripted into the Russian army as a young man, leaving his family in poverty. In 1904 after several years’ service, he deserted, fleeing to England where his wife and children followed with the aid of smugglers. Simon rented a shop at 24 Hare St (now Cheshire St) where he spent the rest of his life working as a cobbler, living in the two rooms behind and above the shop.
Hare St loomed large in the early life of Alexander Baron (or Alec Bernstein, as he was born). His first year was spent there and, during First World War bombing, he was taken as a baby to shelter under the railway arches in Brick Lane. A thin cobbled street running east off Brick Lane, parallel to the Great Eastern railway track, Hare St was close to the Bishopsgate Goodsyard and cacophonous with the sound of horse-drawn railway wagons all day long.
Baron recalled the cobbler’s shop as a dark, grimy cavern with huge hides stacked against the walls and a battered counter behind where shelves were packed with nails, shoemaker’s knives and iron lasts. It was a gathering place for carters who often worked in their old army uniforms and hung about reminiscing about the trenches. In his memoir, Baron described the characteristic reek of tanning, iron and Woodbines that filled the shop. His grandmother Leah sat quietly at the back, gaunt and sorrowful. It was not a joyful home, his grandparents had been introduced in Poland by a matchmaker and married out of duty.
Despite the severe domestic atmosphere, the young Baron relished the opportunity to participate in street life. It was the greatest treat for him to help on Sunday mornings when his grandfather ran a stall in Hare St market. His job was to stand at the corner of the stall and watch for thieves. Yet he never caught one because – as he learned from overheard snatches of adult conversation – Simon Bernstein’s business was under the protection of a family of racketeers who had taken a liking to the Jewish cobbler.
From this small detail, Baron built his masterful novel King Dido published in 1969. The novel, set in 1912, relates the rise and fall of a Bethnal Green gangster, Dido Peach and his nemesis, the ambitious detective inspector William Merry. Baron had first heard the local legend from his grandfather, telling how a policeman and a gangster once fought all the way through a house and into the yards and backlands. He set King Dido around the Hare St of his childhood, renamed ‘Rabbit Marsh’ to recall the days when town houses were built by Huguenot weavers on formerly agricultural land.
Baron’s twentieth-century Rabbit Marsh, however, is unrecognisable from these rural origins. He describes it as ‘a narrow ravine whose floor consists of worn cobbles running between pavements of uneven flags.’ The walls of the buildings on either side of the street are blackened by soot from the railway and interrupted by bare windows ‘which stared blind, black and grimy against the sunlight.’ They are ‘dark cliffs…leaning forward with age, cleft by an alley here and there or pierced at the base by a porch leading into a yard.’
Baron’s description of Rabbit Marsh draws on his early impressions of Hare St, seen from a child’s perspective in which three-storey buildings appear as giant cliffs hanging over a deep ravine. It is a gothic setting: an oppressive landscape inscribed with menace. This is the environment that he employs for the story of Dido, a man drawn reluctantly into the world of organised crime, who struggles valiantly against a destiny that awaits him in the streets.
In King Dido, Baron captured every detail of the interior and public spaces, the alleys, yards, pubs, markets and railway lands around Hare St in the early twentieth century. He evokes a parochial social world bonded by ritual and codes of honour, and shaped by cultural traditions of independence. This ethos is embodied in the novel’s protagonist – inflexible, emotionally repressed and conservative – who is nonetheless a figure of undaunted resilience. Dido defies the forces of social control, whether manifest in the bullying neighbourhood gangsters or the institutional power of the police.
The strange claustrophobia of a street plan interrupted by railway lines also provides Baron with his dramatic stage. He makes resourceful use of this for the novel’s climax, the final battle between Dido and his adversary Merry. Dido commits a burglary in the last hope of acquiring enough money to escape the cycle of violence and is lying low. But Merry has stationed watchers behind Rabbit Marsh’s opaque sooty windows and Dido’s fate arrives from the street. When Merry confronts Dido, their fight extends cinematically across all the terrain around Hare St: in the street, behind the houses, against the wall along the railway embankment and up the steep steps to the bridge over the track. At the climax, Dido falls from the bridge and into the alley off Rabbit Marsh.
King Dido also recalls the mix of Jewish and gentile neighbours who lived side by side in the East End at that time. One of the novel’s most powerful scenes occurs when Dido, awaiting the outcome of a challenge to a rival, lurks in the yard behind the houses in Rabbit Marsh. He finds himself gazing into the kitchen window of his Jewish neighbour, Barsky, a cobbler, who is celebrating the Sabbath eve with his family. Their kitchen table is transformed by candlelight, a white cloth and the gleaming loaves of challah. ‘It disturbed him’, Baron wrote. ‘It awakened in him drifts of longing which he could not follow. It made him feel lost and sad, something that drew him but was infinitely out of reach behind the panes of glass’.
For this brief moment, Baron brings Simon Bernstein into the novel. He gives the reader a glimpse into his own past: his memories of Friday nights spent at his grandparents’ house in the twenties. I find it poignant that Baron represented this scene at one remove, through the eyes of Dido Peach, a man who feels he will always be an outsider to familial warmth and spiritual striving. Perhaps this was also the perspective of Baron himself, looking back through the years to his grandfather’s home in Hare St as a place out of reach.
In the eighties, Baron returned to the street now universally known as Cheshire St. His grandparents’ house was still there, but boarded up like most of the other buildings. It was fire-damaged and covered with corrugated iron, and he could not enter. So Baron crossed the road and, like Dido peering through Barsky’s window, found himself gazing into the Bernsteins’ house. He wrote that ‘from the other side of the street I could see into the first-floor front room … The faded wallpaper was the same that I had known as a child, with diagonal rows of light blue rosettes enclosing chains of pink roses’. It is clear from the way he writes that Baron’s last glance through a window into a scene from his childhood is not nostalgic. Rather, the persistence of the blue and pink wallpaper, which has endured despite the Blitz and arson, arouses a faint sense of wonder in him.
Although Alexander Baron believed that the house was destined for demolition, like his steely hero King Dido, 24 Cheshire St did in fact survive.
24 Cheshire St – formerly Hare St – today
24 Cheshire St is on the far right in this photograph by Phil Maxwell, c. 1984
Cheshire St in the eighties by Colin O’Brien
Cheshire St Railway Bridge by John Claridge, 1968
At the beginning of the twentieth century
Alexander Baron (1917-99)
Archive images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
King Dido and So We Live: The Novels of Alexander Baron are both published by Five Leaves Press
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The Stranger’s Guide To London
Any readers from out of town who are preparing a visit to the capital this summer might like to read these excerpts from The Stranger’s Guide, exposing all the frauds of London, that I found in the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute.
The Countryman arrived in London.
Beaten by bullies & robbed.
Escaped & chased by watchmen.
Returned home gives a queer account of London.
BAWDS – Beware, young women, of those who, without any knowledge, pretend to be acquainted with you, your families and friends. This is an old bait to entice young women to their den to be devoured by the ravenous wolves to whom the bawd is a provider. Beware, ye unthinking young men, of receiving letters of assignation to meet at her house, for such letters are calculated to ensnare you and bring you to misery and destroy your health, fame and fortune. Avoid, ye countrymen and women, the pretended friendships of strangers that welcome you to town upon the arrival of the coach and that accost you at the inns, as they generally attend there for that purpose. If you once permit them to converse with you, they will by their artful speeches, so far ingratiate themselves into your good graces as the engage your belief, get the better of your resolutions and at length bring you, by listening to their stories, to ruin and destruction.
BULLIES – Are dependent upon bawds & whores, sometimes the bully pretends to be the husband of the whore, whose bread he eats, whose quarrel he fights, and at whose call he is ready to do as commanded. It is very common for these women to bring home a gentleman and on entering the house ask the maid in a whisper if her master is at home. The maid according to former instructions replies, “No, he is gone out of town and will not return until tomorrow.” Upon which the gentleman is invited in and entertained with a story of the bully’s jealousy and the whore’s constancy. When the gentleman expresses a desire to leave and the bill being called for, he finds fault with the change, then the maid enters and says her master is below and immediately the bully appears and demands to know the gentleman’s business there – if means to debauch his wife? He then blusters and talks about bringing an action but at length is pacified by the bill being discharged.
DUFFERS – These are a set of men that play upon the credulity of both sexes, by plying at the corner of streets, courts and alleys, their contraband wares, which generally consist of silk handkerchiefs made in Spitalfields, remnants of silk purchased at the piece brokers, which they tell you are true India, and stockings from Rag Fair or Field Lane, sometimes stolen, sometimes bought at very low prices, which they declare are just smuggled in from France, and therefore can afford to give you a bargain, if you will become the purchaser. On the other hand, should you not purchase, you will get abused and your pocket picked, at which they are very dexterous. Or, should you give them money to change, they tell you they will step to the public house to get it changed and come again in an instant. Then you see them enter the house and discover later, upon enquiry, they have escaped by the back door, to your great loss and mortification.
FORTUNE TELLERS & CONJURERS – Almost all countries abound with these vermin. In London, we have several very famous in the Astrological Science, who pretend to a knowledge of future events by observations of the celestial signs of the zodiac. The better to carry on their delusions, they can tell you whether your life will be happy or miserable, rich or poor, fruitful or barren, and thousand incidents to please your fancy and raise your curiosity, insinuating at the same time (if they think you have money about you) that much good awaits you, therefore they must have a greater price for their intelligence. Who would not give or guinea, nay two – say they for the completion of their wishes, be it wisdom or wealth, rather than a half a crown to learn that they might live in folly and poverty the rest of their lives?
FOOTPADS – Are so numerous and so often described in the public papers that little new light can be thrown upon them and their practices. Daring insolence and known-down arguments are generally their first salute, after which they rifle your pockets and, if you have but little of value about you, they often maim or violently bruise you for want of that you are not in possession of. These shocking acts of these rapacious sons of plunder call for the interference of the magistracy to put a stop to their daring and consummate impudence as they exhibit, in and about the metropolis, skulking in bye-lanes, desolate places, hedges and commons, in order to waylay the unsuspecting stranger or countryman.
GAMBLERS – There are so many methods of gambling as there are trades and they move in so many spheres, from the most noble dukes and duchesses to the most abandoned chimney-sweeper, pretenders to honour and honesty, versed in various tricks and arts, by which many among the nobility and the gentry have squandered away their fortunes for the occupation of a Complete Gambler or in the true sense of the word, an Expert Gambler. The better to put you on guard against this villainy, I will mention several of the most fashionable and alluring passtimes at which various methods of deluding and cheating are practiced with some success, viz. gaming houses and horse races, cock-fighting, bowling, billiards, tennis, pharo, rouge et noir, hazard &c. together with routs, assemblies, masquerades and concerts, of a particular or private nature. In the latter of these, you will find notorious gamblers of the female sex, who deal in art and deception, as well as some more notorious male cheats who barter one commodity for another without a reference of credit or making it a debt of honour.
HANGERS-ON – These are a set of men of an indolent life, who rather than labour to gain a livelihood, will submit to any meanness that they may eat the bread of idleness. There are many kinds, some pretending to understand the sciences, others the arts, some set up for authors, others wits and the like. Hangers-on will eat or drink with you wherever you stay but will never offer to pay a farthing, however in lieu thereof, they will tell you an indecent story or sing you the latest lewd song. These you will easily find out and may easily get rid of by not treating or encouraging them upon your arrival.
HIGHWAYMEN – Are desperate and resolute persons who having spent their patrimony or lavished their substance upon whores and gamesters, take to the road, in order to retrieve their broken fortunes and either recoup them by meeting with good booty or end their lives in Newgate. The best means to avoid highwaymen is not to travel by night and in be cautious in displaying money, banknotes or other valuables at the inns you put up at, and be careful what company you join for fear they learn of whither you are going and for what purpose – if to pay or receive money, they will almost certainly waylay and rob, if not murder you.
JILTS – Are ladies of easy virtue, who, through an hypocritical sanctity of manners, and pretensions to virtue and religion, draw the countryman and inexperienced cit into their clutches. Of all whores, the jilt is the most to be avoided – for knowing more than others, she is capable of doing more mischief.
KIDNAPPERS or CRIMPS – A set of men of abandoned principles, who having lavished away their fortunes enter into the pay of the East India Company, in order to recruit their army – and, in time of war, when a guinea or two is advertised to be given to any person that brings a proper man, of five feet eight or nine inches high, these kidnappers lie in wait in different places of rendezvous, in order to entrap men for money.
RING-DROPPERS – These are a set of cheats, who frequently cheat simple people, both from the country and in London, out of their money, but most commonly practice their villainous arts upon young women. Their method is to drop a ring just before such persons come up, when they accost them thus, “Young woman, I have found a ring and I believe it is gold for it has a stamp upon it.” Immediately, an accomplice joins in, who being asked the question replies, “It is gold.” “Well” says the formers, “As this young woman saw me pick it up, she has the right to half of it.” As it often happens that the young person has but a few shillings in her pocket, the dropper says, “If you have a mind for the ring, you shall have it for what you have got in your pocket and whatever else you can give me,” which sometimes turns out to be a good handkerchief, cloak or other article. The deluded creature then shows the ring to another person in the street who informs her she is cheated by sharpers and the ring is not worth tuppence, being only brass gilt with a false stamp put on the deceive the unwary.
PICK-POCKETS – There are more pick-pockets in and about London than in all Europe besides, that make a trade and what they call a good living by their employment. The opera, playhouses, capital auctions, public gardens &c swarm with them. And, of late years, they have introduced themselves into our very churches and more particularly Methodist meetings. Therefore it would be prudent, when in a crowd, to keep one hand on your money and the other on your watch, when you find anyone push against you. Pocket books are only secure in the inside pocket with the coat buttoned and watch chains should be run through a small loop contrived for the purpose of securing the watch in the fob.
QUACKS – These are a set of vile wretches who pretend to be versed in physic and surgery, without education, or even knowledge of a common recipe. If they think the patient is able to pay handsomely, they make them believe their case is desperate and generally turn them out worse than they find them.
SETTERS – These are a dangerous set of wretches who are capable of committing any villainy, as well by trapping a rich heir into matrimony with a cast-off mistress as by coupling a young heiress to a notorious sharper, down to the lowest scene of setting debtors for the bailiff and his followers. Smitten at the first glance of a lady, you resign your heart and hand at discretion, which she immediately accepts, on a presumption that delays are dangerous. The conjugal knot being tied, you find the promised and wished-for land, houses and furniture, the property of another and not of yourself.
SMUGGLERS – These are a numerous race of people that have no other way of living than following the illegal practice of smuggling. Two different gangs are concerted in carrying on this wicked business, the first to import the goods from abroad and the other to dispose of them when landed, but if the first were taken and punished as they deserve, the latter would fall of course.
WAGON HUNTERS – These are errant thieves, that ply in the dusk of the evening to rob the wagons upon their arrival. They are equally skillful in cutting away portmanteaus, trunks and boxes from behind chaises &c, if not thoroughly watched, which is the duty of every driver to take care of, by attending to the vehicle under his charge and giving a good look-out.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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At Bevis Marks Synagogue
You can visit Bevis Marks Synagogue and Dennis Severs House on the same day as part of the Spitalfields Journey 2019 on selected dates between 1st August and 10th September (Click here for tickets)
Built in 1701, Bevis Marks Synagogue is the oldest synagogue in this country and it has been continuously in use for over three hundred years, making it – according to Rabbi Shalom Morris – the oldest working synagogue in the world.
Its origin lies with Spanish and Portuguese Jews who came to London in the seventeenth century, escaping persecution of the Catholic Church and taking advantage of a greater religious tolerance in this country under Oliver Cromwell’s rule. When war broke out between England and Spain in 1654, Antonio Robles, a wealthy merchant, went to court to prove that he was Jewish rather than Spanish – establishing a legal precedent which permitted Jewish people to live freely in this country for the first time since their expulsion by Edward I in 1290.
By 1657, a house in Creechurch Lane in the City of London had been converted into a synagogue and the site of Bevis Marks was acquired in 1699. Constructed by Joseph Avis, a Quaker builder who is said to have refused any profit from the work, and with an oak beam presented by Queen Anne, the synagogue was completed in 1701.
Remarkably, the synagogue has seen almost no significant alteration in the last three centuries and there are members of the current congregation who can trace their ancestors back to those who worshipped here when it first opened – even to the degree of knowing where their forebears sat.
On the sunlit morning I visited, my prevailing impression was of the dramatic contrast between the darkness of the ancient oak panelling and the pale white-washed walls illuminated by the tall clear-glass windows, framing a space hung with enormous brass chandeliers comprising a gleaming forest of baubles suspended low over the congregation. You sense that you follow in the footsteps of innumerable Londoners who came there before you and it makes your heart leap.
The lowest bench for the smallest children at the end of the orphans’ pew
Rabbi Shalom Morris turns the huge key in the original lock at Bevis Marks
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Adam Dant’s West End Squares
Cartographer Extraordinaire Adam Dant has been making forays from his home in Shoreditch up to the West End and this pair of characteristically ingenious maps of St James’s Sq and Berkeley Sq are the most recent outcomes of his explorations and discoveries in this unknown land
Click to enlarge and explore St James’ s Square
Unlike many other public squares in London, St James’s Square is in possession of a certain aloof, upper crust aura in keeping with the private finance offices and gentlemen’s clubs that hide behind its well attended facades.
Dirty, smelly dogs are no more permitted into the gardens here than they would be in The London Library, The East India Club or the headquarters of British Petroleum, although my own dog is welcomed as a regular visitor at the nearby Christie’s auction house, possibly by dint of his diminutive size, impeccable manners and Scottish heritage.
Whilst sketching from a bench in the square beneath the statue of King William III, I noticed that not very much appeared to be going on in this square. Such an atmosphere of restraint in a public arena prompts all manner of fanciful notions as to the real identities, activities and motivations of passers-by. Much in the same vein as a novel by London Library habitué Grahame Greene, visitors to St James’s square assume the mantle of the Russian spy visiting a dead letterbox, the covert couple conducting an illicit love affair or the minor royal jogging incognito. The real action here has to be invented as nobody is giving anything away.
Secrecy is the order of the day at The Royal Institute of International Affairs, better known as Chatham House whose famous ‘Chatham House Rules’ guarantee speakers at their events the requisite anonymity to encourage the sharing of sensitive information. Until recently, the church of Rome managed to keep their ownership of a handsome townhouse in the square under wraps, having purchased it with money from Mussolini.
It is in the same spirit that this topographical depiction of the square prompts the viewer to speculate as to the general goings-on of the characters portrayed and animate their stories, according to the roster of St James’s ‘types’ shown around the border.
Click to enlarge and explore Berkeley Square
The salubrious plains of Berkeley Square are viewed in this panorama from south to north, as if from Lansdowne House, whose gardens would have provided the original prospect of this perennially desirable London address.
On the west side, a ‘nameless thing’ closely resembling some kind of octopus by those who have had the misfortune of encountering this resident of London’s most haunted building, slithers from the doorway of the former HQ of Maggs’ bookshop. Young rakes who have accepted the challenge of staying in the house overnight as a wager have been discovered in the morning, dead from heart failure.
Further north, the latest incarnation of Annabel’s, the super-trendy hangout for the nouveaux riche, Ukranian asset managers wives, the O.P.M wranglers and the generally ‘leisured louche,’ is guarded by liveried doormen in ‘peaky blinder’ flat caps and the lurid tweeds of celebrity ‘ratters.’
Speeding round the corner to Farm St is an e-type jag from the recent ‘Man from Uncle,’ no doubt en route to Guy Ritchie’s pub ‘The Punchbowl.’ Shops on Mount St are indicated by their products on the street corner, such as a Porsche outside their dealership and a fountain pen and envelope for ‘Mount Street Stationers’ .
On the north side is Phillip’s auction house who are hosting a sale of Barry Flanagan’s hare sculptures, which a couple of porters are having trouble coaxing through the big glass doors. Next door is Morton’s, the private club most famously patronised by the dashing early lovers of speed and the internal combustion engine, where two ‘Bentley Boys’ vehicles are parked outside.
The south end of the square is where the locals leave their rubbish for collection, this is comprised of a skip full of unwanted banknotes and a couple of wheelie bins labelled for surplus sushi.
Inside the square, care-worn by retail therapy on Bond St or striving for wealth creation in the Georgian townhouses of Curzon St, the Berkeley Square types depicted in the border of the map relax and enjoy the arts committee’s sculptural offerings, including the return of the equine statue of George lll as Marcus Aurelius. It had been removed when, due to faulty bronze casting, the legs of the horse started to bow.
The two elegantly-clad ladies from the thirties entering the gates on the south side have stepped straight out of a painting of the square by Stanislawa De Karlowska. Their presence is redolent of more genteel times in Mayfair as captured in the song which made it famous throughout the world and, hanging on the railings is a poster for “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ as performed tonight by Judy Campbell” (muse of Noel Coward and mother of Jane Birkin).
CLICK TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND BY ADAM DANT
Adam Dant’s MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND is a mighty monograph collecting together all your favourite works by Spitalfields Life‘s Contributing Cartographer in a beautiful big hardback book.
Including a map of London riots, the locations of early coffee houses and a colourful depiction of slang through the centuries, Adam Dant’s vision of city life and our prevailing obsessions with money, power and the pursuit of pleasure may genuinely be described as ‘Hogarthian.’
Unparalleled in his draughtsmanship and inventiveness, Adam Dant explores the byways of London’s cultural history in his ingenious drawings, annotated with erudite commentary and offering hours of fascination for the curious.
The book includes an extensive interview with Adam Dant by The Gentle Author.
Adam Dant’s limited edition prints are available to purchase through TAG Fine Arts
The Club Row Weavers Houses Are Listed!
A pair of weavers’ houses at 3-5 Club Row dating from 1764/66
I am overjoyed to announce that – thanks in no small part to the campaign waged by you the readers of Spitalfields Life – yesterday the Minister for Culture, Media & Sport announced that the pair of Journeyman Weavers Houses at 3/5 Club Row have been designated as Grade II listed by Historic England. This new protected status invalidates the owners’ current application for demolition and redevelopment.
You will recall that the owners sought to destroy 3 Club Row and replace it with a new building in generic spreadsheet architecture, claiming in their planning application that “3 Club Row has little architectural merit and partly due to the emergence of ever larger buildings surrounding it, doesn’t contribute to the appearance of the area.” and “The proposed replacement scheme will be of a suitably high quality that will enhance the Redchurch St Conservation Area.”
Yet when it came to realising the value of 3 Club Row as rental property, a different language was required. Simultaneously, the owners were advertising the building for rent with Winkworth Estate Agents in Shoreditch, who boasted of its “abundance of period features” as a selling point.
Credit is due to Tower Hamlets Planning Department who – in response to the huge number of letters of objection to the proposed demolition – issued a Building Preservation Notice to ensure the safety of 3 Club Row while Historic England made a survey and undertook the process of assessing the listing designation.
The significance of this pair of houses was outlined by Peter Guillery, Senior Historian at the Survey of London, in his definitive book The Small House in Eighteenth Century London. “In few, if any, other London districts would the provision of new housing have been so clearly and directly associated with the needs of a single industry,” he wrote. They were “a local solution to a local problem,” built specifically for journeymen silk weavers of Bethnal Green. These were the first buildings in London constructed specifically to fulfil the requirements of both living and working.
While the grand terraces of silk merchants’ houses in Spitalfields declare their history readily, these more modest buildings of the same era survive as the last vestiges of the workshops and dwellings where the journeyman weavers pursued their trade. You might easily walk past without even noticing these undemonstrative structures, standing disregarded like silent old men in the crowd.
The importance of this listing by Historic England is that it acknowledges these houses where the silk weavers worked are equally as significant as the mansions of the merchants who profited from their labour. We cherish them as part of our collective history.
There are still a few places left for the guided walk to learn more about the journeyman weavers and discover their surviving houses this Saturday 15th June hosted by Julian Woodford, author of The Boss of Bethnal Green (Click here for tickets)
“An abundance of period features” for £895 per week
Note the developer’s Porsche in this elevation of their proposed replacement building
3-5 Club Row, 1953
These houses were built between 1764 and 1766, specifically for the journeymen silk weavers of Bethnal Green and the related trades of silk throwsters, winders and dyers.
These are single depth, one-room-plan houses with a rear window, so light could permeate from front and back. The wide top-floor windows, built into the main body of the house rather than into the attics, were for maximum light, essential for colour-matching fine silk threads. The brick frontages allowed the construction of the staircases while the rear walls were often of wood.
They were constructed as multi-occupant, single-room, workshop-homes, with one family per floor and silk weaving at the top. A journeyman family could only afford one room and work dominated their lives, so no space was provided for much else, with the size of looms dictating the size of the rooms.
CLICK HERE TO READ HISTORIC ENGLAND’S FULL LISTING DESIGNATION
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