At Ben Truman’s House
Behold the shadows glimmering in this old house in Princelet St built in the seventeen-twenties for Benjamin Truman. A hundred years later, a huge factory was added on the back which more than doubled the size. In the twentieth century, this became the home of the extended Gernstein family who left the house in the eighties. Notable as Lionel Bart’s childhood home, who once returned to have his portrait taken by Lord Snowden on the doorstep, in recent years it has served as the location for innumerable film and photo shoots. Then, as if to complete the circle, the house was acquired by the proprietors of the Old Truman Brewery.
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The Spitalfields Roman Woman
Curator of Human Osteology, Rebecca Redfern watches over her charge
In his Survey of London 1589, John Stow wrote about the discovery of pots of Roman gold coins buried in Spitalfields and it had long been understood that ancient tombs once lined the road approaching London, just as they did along the Appian Way in Rome. Yet it was only in the nineteen-nineties, when large scale excavations took place prior to the redevelopment of the Spitalfields Market, that the full extent of the Roman cemetery was uncovered.
In March 1999, a Roman stone sarcophagus containing a rare lead coffin decorated with scallop shells came to light, indicating the burial of someone of great wealth and high status. Grave goods of fine glass and jet were buried between the coffin and the sarcophagus. It was the first unopened sarcophagus to be found in London for over a century and when the entire assemblage was removed to the Museum of London, the coffin was opened to reveal the body of a young woman in her early twenties, buried in ceremonial fashion. In the week after the opening of the coffin, ten thousand Londoners came to pay their respects to the Spitalfields Roman woman. She was the most astonishing discovery of the excavations yet, as the years have passed and more has been learnt about her, the enigma of her identity has become the subject of increasing fascination.
Analysis of residue in the coffin revealed that her head lay upon a pillow of bay leaves, her body was embalmed with oils from the Arab world and the Mediterranean, and wrapped in silk which had been interwoven with fine gold thread. Traces of Tyrian purple were also found, perhaps from a blanket laid over the coffin. Such an elaborate presentation suggests she may have been displayed to her family and friends seventeen hundred years ago as part of funeral rites.
The sarcophagus and grave goods are on public exhibition at the Museum but, thanks to Rebecca Redfern, Curator of Human Osteology, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I had the privilege to visit the Rotunda where the human remains are stored and view the skeleton of the Spitalfields Roman woman. Deep in a windowless concrete bunker filled with metal shelving stacked with cardboard boxes, containing the remains of thousands of Londoners from the past, lay the bones of the woman. We stood in silent reverence with just the sound of distant traffic echoing.
Rebecca is the informal guardian of the Spitalfields woman and remembers switching on the television to watch news of the discovery as a student. Today, she has a four-year-old daughter of her own. “The work went on for so many years that a lot of couples met working in Spitalfields,” Rebecca admitted to me, “and there is now a whole generation of ‘Spital babies’ born to those archaeologists.”
“She’s five foot three and delicately built, petite like a ballet dancer,” Rebecca continued, turning her attention swiftly from the living to the dead and gesturing protectively to the bones laid out upon the table. While some might objectify the skeleton as a specimen, Rebecca relates to the Spitalfields Roman woman and all the other twenty thousand remains in her care as human beings. “They’re able to tell us so much about themselves, it’s impossible not to regard them as people,” she assured me.
Recent research into the isotopes present in the teeth of the Spitalfields Roman woman have revealed an exact match with those found in Imperial Rome, which means that her origin can be traced not just to Italy but to Rome itself. “I find it very sad that she came so far and then died so young,” Rebecca confided, recognising the lack of any indication of the cause of death or whether the woman had given birth. Contemplating the presence of the skeleton with its delicate bones dyed brown by lead, it is apparent that the Spitalfields Roman woman holds her secrets and has many stories yet to tell.
More than seventy-five Roman burials were uncovered at the same time as the sarcophagus, many interred within wooden coffins and some only in shrouds. You might say these represented the earliest wave of immigration to arrive in Spitalfields.
“People were so mobile,” Rebecca explained to me, “We found a fourteen-year-old girl from North Africa whose mother was European. A legion from North Africa was sent to guard Hadrian’s Wall and we have found tagine cooking pots that may been theirs. I pity those men – how they must have suffered in the cold.”
The only Roman sarcophagus discovered in London in our time was uncovered in Spitalfields in 1999
Inside the stone sarcophagus an elaborately decorated lead coffin was discovered
At the Museum of London, the debris was removed to uncover the pattern of scallop shells
The lead coffin was opened to reveal the body of a young woman
Photographs of coffin & excavations copyright © Museum of London
Portrait of Rebecca Redfern & photographs of skeletal details copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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The Animals Of Georgian London
Tom Almeroth Williams introduces CITY OF BEASTS, How Animals Shaped Georgian London
Old Smithfield Market by Jacques-Laurent Agasse, 1824 (courtesy of Yale Centre for British Art)
My ancestor, Herman Almeroth, emigrated to London from Germany in the late eighteenth century and established a sugar refinery in Whitechapel. As a teenager, I grew obsessed with Herman and my fascination with the working world of Georgian London began with him. Yet the catalyst for CITY OF BEASTS was a surprise encounter early one morning with thirty army horses in Kentish Town. When I searched for historical evidence of Georgian London’s animals, I was surprised to find that historians have written so little about horses, cows, sheep, pigs and dogs – the city’s most useful animals.
Herman does not appear in my book – his surviving records do not offer the excuse I require – but he almost certainly kept a cart horse and a guard dog, both of which are featured. My interest is in the relationship between working Londoners and their animals. I do not shy away from animal cruelty but, rather than depicting animals as victims, I explore what they contributed and how their existence was interwoven with human lives.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, an estimated 31,000 horses (double that if you include riding and carriage horses) were at work in the capital. Around the same number of sheep and cattle were driven through the streets every week. No other city in Europe or North America has ever accommodated so many large four-legged animals or felt their influence so profoundly.
The Georgian city of beasts was remarkable because of the astonishing diversity of the interactions between humans and animals. The world’s largest livestock trade was embedded at the heart of the city and both pig-keeping and cow-keeping thrived. While Victorian London employed more draught horses, its Georgian predecessor relied on mill horses to power machinery. In this earlier era, London was the centre of Britain’s equestrian culture, offering park riding and riding houses, as well as hunts and racecourses, before this was lost in the mid-nineteenth century.
Let us take a ride into the Georgian East End. We are setting out from Marylebone in the seventeen-eighties. Terraced houses are covering up fields where dairy cows once grazed. These animals are a vanishing sight in this part of town (where renting pasture is becoming too expensive) and multiplying in less wealthy, more urbanised areas such as Whitechapel and Bethnal Green.
Increasingly, these animals were kept in yards and fed on grain, hay and vegetables. Across Britain, cow-keepers experimented with feeding regimes designed to boost milk and meat yields. In London, a distinctly urban solution was found in the city’s colossal alcohol industry. After extracting liquid wort from grains, brewers and distillers sold their industrial waste – ‘spent grain’ – to local cow-keepers. In the early eighteen-hundreds, William Clement was purchasing grain from Charrington’s Brewery in Mile End and hired carters to make regular deliveries to his yard on the Hackney Rd. Smaller cow-keepers could not afford these cartage costs so they clustered around breweries, distilleries and associated businesses. In 1782, for example, the Gazetteer advertised the sale of a plot in Bethnal Green where the ‘farmer and cow-keeper’ Pearce Dunn kept cows on premises which he shared with a dealer in yeast and stale beer. In common with many other operators, Dunn also maintained a pigsty, recycling the protein-rich whey from his herd’s milk.
The Minories, Whitechapel, Mile End and Stepney housed many of the pigs kept in Georgian London. Although we have come to associate urban sties with poverty and disease, pig-keeping offered a profitable and relatively respectable side-line for entrepreneurial Londoners. In 1776, the Whitechapel distiller Samuel Liptrap contracted with the Navy (which had victualling yards at Tower Hill and Deptford) for £8,200 to supply two thousand hogs, which he delivered in six batches of around three hundred animals.
The East End teemed with inns, taverns, chop houses, pie shops and bakeries, and each of these businesses provided an opportunity for pigs to serve as live recycling plants. In the seventeen-nineties, you find the keepers of a chandler’s shop in East Smithfield and a ‘cook-shop’ in Brick Lane each fattening four pigs. Meanwhile, many victuallers took advantage of substantial yards to erect sties and fed their animals with stale beer and scraps. We know this because these well-fed pigs attracted so much unwanted attention – in 1794, William Goodall of the Ram Inn, West Smithfield, apprehended a man stealing a pregnant sow which, as he proudly informed the Old Bailey, he had bred himself.
To accelerate our progress from Marylebone, we have joined the New Rd or, as you may know it, the Euston Rd. Apologies for the stench and dust – the Paddington to Islington New Rd was created in the 1750s as a bypass to divert livestock droves and waggons out of the West End and Holborn. We have just overtaken a large drove of rather tired black cattle who have walked all the way from Devon to be sold at Smithfield Market.
Located just outside the City walls, Smithfield has been in use as a suburban cattle market since 950 AD. In 1300, it was set in open countryside but, by 1700, it lay at the heart of a heavily populated commercial district. In the Georgian period, the sale of bullocks, sheep, lambs, calves and hogs took place on Mondays and Fridays. By 1822, the market was processing an astonishing 1.7 million animals per year (1,507,096 sheep, 149,885 cattle, 24,609 calves and 20,020 pigs), all transported on the hoof through the city. Cattle sales at Smithfield only reached their peak of 277,000 in 1853, just two years before the trade was moved to Islington.
London’s expansion not only increased demand for meat, it meant livestock had to be driven greater distances through more congested streets. On the night preceding market day, cattle and sheep were collected from suburban pens which encircled the metropolis. From outposts at Islington, Holloway, Mile End, Knightsbridge, Paddington and Newington, drovers converged on the city like swarm. Once their charges were sold, drovers led some animals directly to Smithfield’s slaughterhouses but many more beasts were forced to walk as far as St James’s to meet their demise.
The Smithfield trade inflicted suffering on Londoners as well as their animals. Cattle regularly tossed, gored and trampled people in the streets, leaving them with broken ribs and limbs, fractured skulls, severe bruising and deep puncture wounds. In October 1820, the London Chronicle reported that a bullock running down the Minories from Whitechapel had charged at several women stallholders, leaving them badly injured. Then the enraged animal ran through a court into Rosemary Lane, where it plunged its horns into a cart horse’s belly. Finally, as the horse fell backwards, a porter was crushed to death.
In spite of this chaos, Smithfield remained an economic powerhouse and an awe-inspiring showcase of Britain’s agricultural progress. Its profitability and close relationship with neighbouring banks, inns and other businesses explain why it has resisted attempts to remove it for so long.
Weary of the New Rd, we turn south into Islington passing the fields and barns of some of the city’s most successful dairy farmers, Charles Laycock among them. Keen to avoid Smithfield’s droves and Holborn’s waggon traffic, we turn east to join Old St. One of London’s most frenetic and pungent industrial zones extends between here and Whitechapel, including breweries to paint manufacturers, both of which rely on horse-powered machinery.
By the eighteen-twenties, there were at least forty-two ‘colour-makers’ trading in the capital, mostly in Old St, Whitechapel and Southwark. The eighteenth century witnessed an explosion in the market for house paint, driven by metropolitan building booms and a growing taste for multi-coloured interiors. By the seventeen-forties, some manufacturers were using horse mills to grind up minerals, plants, shells and bone to extract pigments. Substituting horses for human hands saved huge amounts of money which vendors passed on to consumers. This was the origin of Britain’s do-it-yourself culture. London’s paint manufacturers rendered many house painters redundant because their pigments could be mixed with oil at home and applied by a servant. Some became big businesses in the same league as brewers, London’s leading industrialists.
Traditionally, brewing’s most energy-intensive processes – grinding malt, pumping water and drawing liquid wort from the mash ton into the copper – had been powered by man power as well as horse power. This all changed in the first half of the eighteenth century when breweries installed mill wheels driven by horses which, when linked to a gearing system, enabled them to mill and pump simultaneously. By increasing efficiency and cutting the cost of human labour, mill horses facilitated a revolution in brewing. Brewers had to expand their haulage operations to deliver beer to the pubs which were springing up across an expanding metropolis. It was for this reason that the Black Eagle’s dray horse stable almost doubled from 57 to 103 between 1810 and 1835.
These were some of the finest heavy horses in the country, admired for their strength and stamina but also for their intelligence. Visitors to the capital were astonished to observe that dray horses could raise and lower barrels without instruction. These animals were worked extremely hard. In 1764, a brewer in Hackney confirmed that his stables were never locked ‘because we are fetching the horses out almost all hours of the night’. Although this created suffering, equally brewing was at the forefront of improvements in horse breeding, stabling, feeding and farriery. In 1837, Truman’s unveiled a state-of-the-art stable for one hundred and fourteen, costing almost the same as Lambeth’s Church of St Andrew.
Virtually every business relied on cart horses, not least London’s construction trades. One of the most important in the East End was brick-making. In this period, bricks were made using horse-powered pugging mills and transported to building sites in carts. As an Old Bailey trial from 1809 reveals, this created heavy work for both men and horses.
On 20th September, Benjamin Hall set off from a brickmaker’s yard at Whitechapel Mount with a horse and cart crammed with five hundred bricks. After unloading at Wentworth Street in Spitalfields, the co-workers delivered a thousand bricks in two outings to the Swan Tavern in Bethnal Green. By then, Hall’s horse had hauled more than four tons of bricks over a total distance of eleven kilometres and this only amounted to half a day’s work. In the afternoon, the pair headed to Truman’s with another load. Hall claimed that, on arrival, he left his horse and cart in the care of a boy, went for a beer, and when he returned the bricks had gone. Hall was publicly whipped though Whitechapel and put to hard labour for six months. We cannot be sure of his guilt but carters lived tough lives, so I would not put it past or hold it against him.
Hurrying to catch a train a few weeks ago, I ended up retracing part of Hall’s fateful delivery route. I cannot walk anywhere in London now without thinking about what animal-related activity took place there. The survival of Georgian and Victorian architecture obviously makes this imaginative leap easier and more thrilling which is why I feel the loss when buildings like Tadmans on Jubilee St are destroyed. My ancestor’s sugar refinery has been gone for much longer but I still visit where it used to be and try, in vain, to picture it.
I hope my book offers new insights into the lives of Georgian Londoners and the workings and character of their city. I have found that even the most utilitarian old buildings, including stables and workshops, have extraordinary stories to tell.
The Second Stage of Cruelty by William Hogarth, 1751 (courtesy of Yale Centre for British Art)
(click on image to enlarge) The London Hospital Whitechapel, seen from the northern side of Whitechapel Rd, showing dozens of cattle being goaded by drovers, surrounded by waggons, carriages, riders and pedestrians. c. 1753 (courtesy of the Wellcome Collection)
Smithfield Drover from Pyne’s Costume of Great Britain, 1804 (courtesy of Yale Centre for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
Brick maker from Pyne’s Costume of Great Britain, 1804 (courtesy of Yale Centre for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
Truman’s dray horses in the twentieth century (courtesy of Truman’s Beer)
Geoffrey Fletcher’s drawing of Tadmans from ‘The London Nobody Knows,’ 1962 shows a horse-drawn funeral hearse
Click here to order a copy of Thomas Almeroth Williams’ CITY OF BEASTS
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In Search Of Culpeper’s Spitalfields
Ragwort in Hanbury St
(The concoction of the herb is good to wash the mouth, and also against the quinsy and the king’s evil)
Taking the opportunity to view the plaque upon the hairdresser at the corner of Puma Court and Commercial St, commemorating where Nicholas Culpeper lived and wrote The English Herbal, the celebrated seventeenth century Herbalist returned to his old neighbourhood for a visit and I was designated to be his guide.
Naturally, he was a little disoriented by the changes that time has wrought to Red Lion Fields where he once cultivated herbs and gathered wild plants for his remedies. Disinterested in new developments, instead he implored me to show him what wild plants were left and thus we set out together upon a strange quest, seeking weeds that have survived the urbanisation. You might say we were searching for the fields in Spitalfields since these were plants that were here before everything else.
Let me admit, I did feel a responsibility not to disappoint the old man, as we searched the barren streets around his former garden. But I discovered he was more astonished that anything at all had survived and thus I photographed the hardy specimens we found as a record, published below with Culpeper’s own annotations.
Honeysuckle in Buxton St (I know of no better cure for asthma than this, besides it takes away the evil of the spleen, provokes urine, procures speedy delivery of women in travail, helps cramps, convulsions and palsies and whatsoever griefs come of cold or stopping.)
Dandelion in Fournier St (Vulgarly called Piss-a-beds, very effective for obstructions of the liver, gall and spleen, powerful cleans imposthumes. Effectual to drink in pestilential fevers and to wash the sores. The juice is good to be applied to freckles, pimples and spots.)
Campion in Bishop’s Sq (Purges the body of choleric humours and helps those that are stung by Scorpions and other venomous beasts and may be as effectual for the plague.)
Pellitory of the Wall in Hanbury St (For an old or dry cough, the shortness of breath, and wheezing in the throat. Wonderfully helps stoppings of the urine.)
Herb Robert in Folgate St (Commended not only against the stone, but to stay blood, where or howsoever flowing, and it speedily heals all green wounds and is effectual in old ulcers in the privy parts.)
Sow Thistle in Princelet St (Stops fluxes, bleeding, takes away cold swellings and eases the pains of the teeth)
Groundsel off Brick Lane (Represses the heat caused by motions of the internal parts in purges and vomits, expels gravel in the veins or kidneys, helps also against the sciatica, griping of the belly, the colic, defects of the liver and provokes women’s courses.)
Ferns and Campanula and in Elder St (Ferns eaten purge the body of choleric and waterish humours that trouble the stomach. The smoke thereof drives away serpents, gnats and other noisome creatures which in fenny countries do trouble and molest people lying their beds.)
Sow Thistle and Herb Robert in Elder St
Yellow Wood Sorrel and Sow Thistle in Puma Court (The roots of Sorrel are held to be profitable against the jaundice.)
Comfrey in Code St (Helps those that spit blood or make a bloody urine, being outwardly applied is specially good for ruptures and broken bones, and to be applied to women’s breasts that grow sore by the abundance of milk coming into them.)
Sow Thistle in Fournier St
Field Poppy in Allen Gardens (A syrup is given with very good effect to those that have the pleurisy and is effectual in hot agues, frenzies and other inflammations either inward or outward.)
Fleabane at Victoria Cottages (Very good to heal the nipples and sore breasts of women.)
Sage and Wild Strawberries in Commercial St (The juice of Sage drank hath been of good use at time of plagues and it is commended against the stitch and pains coming of wind. Strawberries are excellent to cool the liver, the blood and the spleen, or an hot choleric stomach, to refresh and comfort the fainting spirits and quench thirst.)
Hairy Bittercress in Fournier St (Powerful against the scurvy and to cleanse the blood and humours, very good for those that are dull or drowsy.)
Oxe Eye Daisies in Allen Gardens (The leaves bruised and applied reduce swellings, and a decoction thereof, with wall-wort and agrimony, and places fomented or bathed therewith warm, giveth great ease in palsy, sciatica or gout. An ointment made thereof heals all wounds that have inflammation about them.)
Herb Robert in Fournier St
Camomile in Commercial St (Profitable for all sorts of agues, melancholy and inflammation of the bowels, takes away weariness, eases pains, comforts the sinews, and mollifies all swellings.)
Unidentified herb in Commercial St
Buddleia in Toynbee St (Aids in the treatment of gonorrhea, hepatitis and hernia by reducing the fragility of skin and small intestine’s blood vessel.)
Hedge Mustard in Fleur de Lys St (Good for all diseases of the chest and lungs, hoarseness of voice, and for all other coughs, wheezing and shortness of breath.)
Buttercup at Spitalfields City Farm (A tincture with spirit of wine will cure shingles very expeditiously, both the outbreak of small watery pimples clustered together at the side, and the accompanying sharp pains between the ribs. Also this tincture will promptly relieve neuralgic side ache, and pleurisy which is of a passive sort.)
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Wonderful London’s East End
It is my pleasure to publish these evocative pictures of the East End (with some occasionally facetious original captions) selected from the popular magazine Wonderful London edited by St John Adcock and produced by The Fleetway House in the nineteen-twenties. Most photographers were not credited – though many were distinguished talents of the day, including East End photographer William Whiffin (1879-1957).
Boys are often seen without boots or stockings, and football barefoot under such conditions has grave risks from glass or old tin cans, but there are many urchins who would rather run about barefoot.
When this narrow little dwelling in St John’s Hill, Shadwell, was first built in 1753, its inhabitants could walk in a few minutes to the meadows round Stepney or, venture further afield, to hear the cuckoo in the orchards of Poplar.
Middlesex St is still known by its old name of Petticoat Lane. Some of the goods on offer at amazingly low prices on a Sunday morning are not above suspicion of being stolen, and you may buy a watch at one end of the street and see it for sale again by the time you reach reach the other.
A vanished theatre on the borders of Hoxton, just before demolition, photographed by William Whiffin. In 1838, a tea garden by the name of ‘the Eagle Tavern’ was put up in Shepherdess Walk in the City Rd near the ‘Shepherd & Shepherdess,’ a similar establishment founded at the beginning of the same century. Melodramas such as ‘The Lights ‘O London’ and entertainments like ‘The Secrets of the Harem,’ were also given. In 1882, General Booth turned the place into a Meeting Hall for his Salvation Army. There is little suggestion of the pastoral about Shepherdess Walk now.
In the East End and all over the poorer parts of London, a strange kind of establishment, half booth, half shop, is common and particularly popular with greengrocers. Old packing cases are the foundation of a slope of fruit which begins unpleasantly near the level of the pavement and ends in the recess behind the dingy awning. At night, the buttresses of vegetables are withdrawn into shelter.
Old shop front in Bow photographed by William Whiffin. Pawnbroking, once as decorous as banking, has fallen from the high estate in the vicinity of Lombard St. Now, combined instead with the sale of secondhand jewellery, furniture and hundred other commodities, it is apt to seek the corners of the meaner streets.
A water tank covered by a plank in a backyard among the slums is an unlikely place for a stage, but an undaunted admirer of that great Cockney humorist, Charlie Chaplin, is holding his audience with an imitation of the well-known gestures with which the famous comic actor indicates the care-free-though-down-and-out view of life which he has immortalised.
Old shop front in Poplar photographed by William Whiffin
An old charity school for girl and boy down at Wapping founded in 1704. The present building dates from 1760 and the school is supported by voluntary subscriptions. The school provided for the ‘putting out of apprentices’ and for clothing the pupils.
The hunt for bargains in Shoreditch. A glamour surrounds the rickety coster’s barrow which supports a few dozens of books. But, to tell the truth, the organisation of the big shops is now so efficient that the chances of finding anything good at these open air book markets may have long odds laid against it.
The landsman’s conception of a sailing vessel, with all its complex of standing and running rigging that serves mast and sail with ordered efficiency, is apt for a shock when he sees a Thames barge by a dockside. The endless coils and loops of rope of different thickness, the length of chain and the litter of brooms, buckets, fenders and pieces of canvas, seem to be in the most insuperable confusion.
Gloom and grime in Chinatown. Pennyfields runs from West India Dock Rd to Poplar High St. A Chinese restaurant on the corner and a few Chinese and European clothes are all that is to be seen in the daytime.
The gem of Cornhill, Birches, where it stood for two hundred years. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the brothers Adam erected its beautiful shop front. Within were old bills of fare printed on satin, a silver tureen fashioned to the likeness of a turtle and many other curious odd-flavoured things. Birches have catered for the inspired feasting of the City Companies and Guilds for two centuries but now this shop has moved to Old Broad St and, instead of Adam, we are to have Art Nouveau ferro-concrete.
It is doubtful if the Borough Council of Poplar had any notion, when they supplied the district with water carts, that the supplementary use pictured in this photograph by William Whiffin would be made of them. Given a complacent driver, there is no reason why these children should not go on for miles.
Grime and gloom in St George’s St photographed by William Whiffin. St George’s St used to be the famous Ratcliff Highway and runs from East Smithfield to Shadwell High St. It is a maritime street and contains various establishments, religious and otherwise, which cater for the sailor.
River Lea at Bow Bridge photographed by William Whiffin. On the right are Bow flour mills, while to the left, beyond the bridge, a large brewery is seen.
A view of Curtain Rd photographed by William Whiffin, famed for its cabinet makers. It runs from Worship St – a turning to the left when walking along Norton Folgate towards Shoreditch High St – to Old St. Curtain Rd got its name from a curtain wall, once part of the outworks of the city’s fortifications.
Fish porters of Billingsgate gathered around consignments lately arrived from the coast. At one time, smacks brought all the fish sold in the market and were unloaded at Billingsgate Wharf, said to be the oldest in London.
Crosby Hall as it stood in Bishopsgate. Alderman Sir John Crosby, a wealthy grocer, got the lease of some ground off Bishopsgate in 1466 from Alice Ashfield, Prioress of St Helen’s, at a rent of eleven pounds, six shillings and eightpence per annum, and built Crosby Hall there. It came into the possession of Sir Thomas More around 1518 and by 1638 it was in the hands of the East India Company, but in 1910 it was taken down and re-erected in Cheyne Walk.
Whatever their relations with the Constable may come to be in later life, the children of the East End, in their early days, are quite willing to use his protection at wide street crossings.
There is no more important work in the great cities than the amelioration of the slum child’s lot. Many East End children have never been beyond their own disease-ridden courts and dingy streets that form their playground.
Photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Hilary Haydon, Brother At The Charterhouse
Unlike the hermit monks of the medieval priory that once stood upon this site, the current Brothers at the Charterhouse are a sociable bunch and thus I was able to pay a visit upon Hilary Haydon, the third-most senior Brother, who took me on a tour of the accommodation.
Seniority – in this instance – is based upon how long a Brother has been resident at the Charterhouse, not age. Yet Hilary has a rather more vivid way of expressing it. Gesturing to the pigeon holes for mail, he explained that as residents die the labels of those remaining get moved up. “You start here and then you move along, until you drop off the end,” he informed me with startling alacrity.
It made me realise that residence in the Charterhouse affects the Brothers’ sense of time – inhabiting these ancient stone walls induces a certain philosophical perspective upon mortality, setting the span of an individual’s life against the centuries of history that have passed here. It is both a consolation and an encouragement to recognise the beauty of the fleeting moment, as manifest in the immaculately-tended gardens alive with bluebells and tulips, and as illustrated upon the tomb of Thomas Sutton – the benefactor – by bubbles, symbolising the transitory nature of fame.
I crossed the wide lawn that sets the Charterhouse apart from the clamour of Smithfield, aware that my diagonal path, bisecting the velvet greensward, passed over the largest plague pit in the City of London in which sixty-thousand victims of the Black Death were interred. Arriving at the entrance, I cast my eyes up to the fifteenth century gatehouse of the former Carthusian Priory. Henry VIII met with greater resistance from the monks here than any other religious order and thus he had John Houghton, the prior, cut in four and his right arm nailed to the door.
Yet this grim history seemed an insubstantial dream, as I entered to discover Hilary Haydon waiting in the gatehouse to greet me. He led me along stone passages and into hidden courtyards, through the cloisters and the Great Hall and the chapel, with its flamboyant monument of fairground showiness for Thomas Sutton.
My wonder at the quality, age and proportion of the architecture was compounded by my delight at the finely-conceived planting schemes of the gardens and it was not difficult to envisage this elaborate complex as a Renaissance palace, which it became for the Howard family through three generations until they sold it to Sutton in 1611. The wealthiest commoner in England, he endowed his fortune upon a school and almshouses here, entitled ‘King James’ Hospital in Charterhouse.’ Daniel Defoe described it as “the noblest gift that ever was given for charity, bu any one man, public or private, in this nation.”
Four centuries later, the school has moved out to Goldalming, leaving Smithfield in 1872, yet the almshouses still flourish – offering sheltered accommodation to forty Brothers. Formerly a barrister in the City, Hilary came here twenty years ago when he became a widower. “I have never regretted it,” he assured me with an emphatic grin, “Meals appear, your room is cleaned and the community is supportive.” Hilary revealed to me that among the Brothers, there are solicitors, barristers and priests, as well as an actor currently understudying for ‘The Woman in Black,’ the stage manager of the original production of ‘Oliver!’ and – as we entered the refectory – he introduced a distinguished-looking gentleman as the ballet critic of The Sunday Times.
Each morning, the Brothers are woken by the chapel bell at ten to eight. “I use it as an alarm clock,” confessed Hilary in a whisper, “I attend chapel only for funerals and when I read the lesson.” Breakfast follows in the Great Hall at eight-twenty, succeeded by morning coffee at eleven, lunch at one and afternoon tea at three – and thus time is measured out in the benign conditions of the Charterhouse. “A very silent brother who sat next to me came into lunch one day and died beside me,” Hilary admitted, “As it happens, there was a doctor who was only at the other side of the table and he was across the table like lightning – it was a beautiful way to go.”
The fifteenth century gate to the monastery is encompassed by an eighteenth century structure
Doorway and cubby hole for passing food through at the entrance to the former priory, dissolved in the fifteen-forties and bricked up ever since.
Graffiti from the days this was the refectory for Charterhouse School
Chimney piece of the three graces and a chest that may have belonged to Thomas Sutton
The Great Hall
Bluebells and an ancient fig tree at the entrance to the Charterhouse
Looking through to the chapel, with the relic of a door damaged an incendiary bomb
Thomas Sutton, the founder, has lain here for four centuries
Bubbles symbolise the futility of wordly fame
Vestments await the priest in the chapel
Graffiti carved by the bored schoolboys of the eighteen-fifties in the chapel
Note the spelling of “Clarkenwell” upon the memorial stone set into the floor
In the chapel
Eighteenth century dwelling built over the ancient gatehouse
Hilary Haydon in the cloister at the Charterhouse – “It’s always cool in here”
Visit The Charterhouse, Charterhouse Square, EC1M 6AN
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At The Canal Club
Novelist Sarah Winman visited the Canal Club in Bethnal Green recently with Photographer Rachel Ferriman to report on the threat to the community spaces at the Wellington Estate
Toslima Rahman with her daughter Saima & son Ayaan at the Canal Club
The Canal Club sits at the corner of Waterloo Gardens and Sewardstone Rd in Bethnal Green. It consists of a playground, a ball park, a community centre and community garden between the vast Wellington Estate to the east, of which it is part, and the Grand Union Housing Coop to the west. At the southern border is Belmont Wharf, a small boating community established by Sally and Dominique who were granted permission by the council nine years ago to have moorings along this stretch of Regent’s Canal and to create a sustainable garden for boat dwellers and land dwellers alike.
The garden is incredibly beautiful, a biodiverse haven. The sound of children playing carries across the water from Victoria Park and faded bunting flutters in the breeze. Flowers of every colour bloom and bees are plenty and go about with purpose. Butterflies delight around the nettles and even bats have found a home here. This garden has been created with care and thought and, more importantly, time. The air is sweet and clean, far removed from the fug of Cambridge Heath Rd and Hackney Rd that pollute nearby.
I met residents Sally, Dominique, Alex, Ricardo, Helga, Erdoo, Mr & Mrs Ali, and Toslima to learn that this beloved site has been selected by Tower Hamlets Council for a housing infill scheme. These schemes are becoming common practise by councils, who target sites – usually recreational – on existing estates and build further.
The proposal for the Wellington Estate is to demolish the Canal Club and remove the open space and community asset it provides. This is to construct a further twenty-two flats on an already densely populated estate which was built in the thirties as an answer to slum clearance – basically, it is taking space from those who have little to start with.
It is a complex situation that is the outcome of thirty years of right-to-buy, money held by central government and the chronic need for housing. However, what is inexcusable to the residents of the estate and the boating community and supportive locals, is the opaque nature of the dealings – the council’s lack of transparency and openness to discussion. Two years ago, they thought they were simply looking at the refurbishment of their community centre, until they later found out that the decision to demolish the Canal Club site was already under way.
Alex explains that the Canal Club land was given by the GLC to the people of the Wellington Estate in the late seventies and early eighties to offset the overcrowding and the lack of balconies and gardens. It was their land and she believes the present council had a responsibility to share their ideas with the residents. The irony is not lost on her too, that Tower Hamlets say they are an Climate Emergency Council and yet are taking away the only green public space on the estate.
Everyone talks about the eighties and nineties when the community centre was thriving. It was hired out for weddings and birthdays then. There was a youth club, opportunities to learn a second language and for recent immigrants to learn English, space for pensioners to get together, and for the residents association to meet and share ideas. Dwight tells us he was a member of the youth club and it was the only chance for kids to have day trips out of London. He remembers camping in Tunbridge Wells. The chance to ride horses and canoe – see a different life, be a different person.
There is nothing for kids now, someone says. So much has already gone. And if you take away the ball park, then what? Looting across the generations, another says. Building slums of the future, says another. Erdoo, who has lived on the state all her life, tells me that her dad Joseph looked after the Community Centre for years before the council took away his key and barred the local residents from using it anymore. Then the Community Centre was offered up to private use for private rents. The popular Scallywags nursery is the present tenant, but ill-feeling from that time remains.
This engaging group of people care so much about their environment and improving the lives of others. Yet what is apparent is how the agency of council tenants is being eroded in the widening chasm of inequality.
The right to space and light and clean air can never only be for the rich.
I stand on the old wharf where the custodians, Sally and Dominique, repaired it with two-hundred-year-old bricks. Wildflowers grow here now and nature has reclaimed an area once used for the dumping of waste. Kick the soil and a filament of plastic is revealed, hidden by knapweed or evening primrose, or large swathes of hemp-agrimony. Over the years, composting has built up the fertility of the soil, attracting a diversity of insects and bird population. Dominique explains that the principle of permaculture is to work in sympathy with nature and harness its natural energy. A wild colony of bees appear every year for a few weeks when the cherry tree blossoms and then disappear again to their unknown world. Dominique keeps a daily diary of the changes and visitations. The secret life that we do not see, either because we move too fast or because the insects are too small.
The license for this garden expires next year, and Dominique and Sally fear the council will not renew it if the demolition goes ahead. I find it unbelievable that such a necessary and beautiful urban green space could be sacrificed especially in a time of declining mental health. The benefits that access to nature provides are irrefutable. This community garden is more than a garden, it is a destination for the carers and patients who come down from the Mission Practise or readers looking for solitude. It is a resource for artists seeking inspiration and children who want to know how the natural world works – or simply those who need to be reminded that they are more than their circumstance.
As I leave this corner of East London, I am reminded of a speech delivered by Robert Kennedy back in the sixties about how the value of a country is measured – “It does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry… It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion… it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Please help save the Canal Club: CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE RESIDENTS’ PETITION
The Wellington Estate
Save Our Community Spaces – Refurbish Not Demolish
In the Community Garden
Dominique Cornault at the Canal Club
Sally Hone at the Canal Club
Mr & Mrs Ali outside the Canal Club
Helga Lang at the Canal Club
Dwight James at Belmont Wharf
Erdoo Yongo outside her mum’s house on Wellington Estate
Barbara, resident of the Estate, and Bonny her dog
Photographs copyright © Rachel Ferriman
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