Sally Flood, Poet
“I think my life is more in poetry than anything else”
“I had always written, as a child,” admitted Sally Flood with a shrug, “but it wasn’t stuff you showed.” In the years when her thoughts wandered whilst working in the factory in Princelet St, Sally wrote poems on the paper that backed the embroidery in the machine she operated – but she always tore up her compositions when her boss appeared.
Then, when she was fifty years old, Sally took some of her poems along to the Basement Writers in Cable St and achieved unexpected recognition, giving her the confidence to call herself a poet for the first time. Since then, Sally’s verse has been widely published, studied in schools and universities, and she has become an experienced performer of her own poetry. “At work, I used to write things to make people laugh,” she explained, “I used to say, ‘Embroidery is my trade, but writing is my hobby.'”
“I’ve got drawers full of poems,” she confided to me with a blush, unable to keep track of her prolific writing, now that poetry is her primary occupation and she no longer tears up her compositions. “I’ve got so much here, I don’t know what I’ve got,” she said, rolling her eyes at the craziness of it.
Ambulance helicopters whirl over Sally’s house, night and day, the last in a Georgian terrace which is so close to the hospital in Whitechapel that if you got out of bed on the wrong side you might find yourself in surgery. Sally moved there more than half a century ago with her young family, and now she has three grandchildren and five great grandchildren. Framed pictures attest to the family life which filled this house for so many years, while today boxes of toys lie around awaiting visits by the youngest members of her clan.
“In 1975, when my children were growing up and the youngest was fifteen, I decided that I need to do something else, because I didn’t want to be one of those mothers who held onto her children too much.” Sally recalled, “So I joined the Bethnal Green Institute, and it was all ballroom dancing and keep fit, but I found a leaflet Chris Searle had put there for the Basement Writers, so I decided to write a poem and send it along to them. Then I got a letter back asking me to send more – and I was amazed because the poem I sent was one I would otherwise have torn up. Of your own work, you’ve got no real opinion.”
“On my first visit, I went along with my daughter, but there were children of school age and I was turning fifty. I wasn’t sure if I should be there until I met Gladys McGee who was ten years older than me. She was so funny, I learnt so much from her – she had been an unmarried mother in the Land Army. I started going regular, and the first poem I read was published.”
“I think my life is more in poetry than anything else. I sometimes think my writing is like a diary. Chris Searle of the basement writers made such an impression on my life, he gave me the confidence to do this. And when I did my writing, my life took off in a certain direction and I met so many fantastic people.”
Sally’s house is full of cupboards and cabinets filled of files of poems and pictures and embroidery, and the former yard at the back has become a garden with luscious fuchias that are Sally’s favourites. After all these years of activity, it has become her private space for reflection. Sally can now get up when she pleases and enjoy a jam sandwich for breakfast. She can make paintings and tend her garden, and write more poems. The house is full with her thoughts and her memories.
“My grandparents were from Russia and they brought my father over when he was four years old.” Sally told me, taking down the photograph to remind herself, “He became cabinet maker and he was one of the best. In those days, they used to work from six until ten at night, so they knew what work was. I was born in Chambord St, Brick Lane, in 1925, and I grew up there. From there we moved to a two-up two-down in Chicksand St and from there to Bethnal Green, just before the war broke out. We had a bath in the kitchen with a tabletop. It was the first time we had a bath, before that we went to bathhouse. I’m telling you the history of the East End here!
I was evacuated to Norfolk at first. We took the surname Morris from father’s first name, so that people wouldn’t know we were Jewish. The people up there had a suspicion against Londoners and they thought we were all the same. But I was lucky, we ended up in a hotel on the river in Torbay in Devon. Life was fantastic, we used to go fishing. It was a different experience from my life in London. I joined the girl guides, I could never have done that otherwise. Where I was evacuated, they wanted to train me to be a teacher, but my mother came and took me back and said, “They’re going to exploit you, you’re going to be a machinist.”
“Being evacuated meant I went outside my culture, and I saw that English people were nice. I think that’s why I married outside my religion. We were together fifty-five years and I always say it wasn’t enough. If I hadn’t been evacuated I wouldn’t have done that.”
Sally put the photograph of her parents back on the shelf carefully, and turned her head to the pictures of her husband, her children, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, on different sides of the room. I watched her looking back and forth through time, and the room she inhabited became a charged space in between the past and the future. This is the space where she does her writing. And then Sally brought out a book to show me, opening it to reveal it short poems in her handwriting accompanied by lively drawings of people, reminiscent of the sketches of L. S. Lowry or the doodles of Stevie Smith.
Sally is a paradoxical person. A natural writer who resists complacency, she continues to be surprised by her own work, yet she is knowledgeable of literature and an experienced teacher of writing. Appearing at the door in her apron and talking in her tender sing-song voice, Sally wears her erudition lightly, but it does not mean that she is not serious. With innate dignity and a vast repertoire of stories to tell, Sally Flood is a writer who always speaks from the truth of her experience.
Maurice Grodinsky, Sally’s father is on the left with Sally’s mother, Annie Grodinsky, on the right, and Freda, Maurice’s mother, in between. At four years old, Maurice was brought to Spitalfields from Bessarabia at the end of the nineteenth century. The two children are Marie and Joey – when this picture was taken in 1925, Sally was yet to be born.
Sally with her first child Danny in the early nineteen fifties.
Sally’s children, Maureen, Jimmy, Pat and Theresa in the yard in Whitechapel in 1962.
Sally’s husband, Joseph Flood.
Sally in Whitechapel, early sixties.
Sally with her children, Danny, Theresa, Jimmy, Maureen, Pat and Michael.
Sitting by the canal in the nineteen seventies.
Sally with Gladys McGee at the Basement Writers.
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Linda Carney, Machinist
This is the lovely Linda Carney working at her machine in Spitalfields in 1963 and looking glamorous in the same way Lynn Redgrave, Julie Christie, Rita Tushingham and Barbara Windsor did playing happy-go-lucky girls in those films of London in the sixties. Linda’s combination of kooky glasses, stylish outfit and optimistic humorous attitude in a mundane workplace was an act of youthful defiance in itself.
Linda worked in factories making clothes all over Spitalfields, in Brune St above the Jewish soup kitchen, in Fournier St in what is now Gilbert & George’s studio and in Fleur de Lys St. It was at the latter address, she once spotted the long-haired seventeen-year-old Dan Cruickshank giving an interview to reporters on the doorstep, explaining why he was squatting an old building in Elder St, “I’m saving our heritage,” he declared. But Linda, with irrepressible anarchic ebullience, wagged her finger and called out, “You just don’t want to pay rent!” It was a scene worthy of a whimsical sixties comedy and I can imagine Linda, tottering off, arm in arm with her girlfriends, all laughing like drains.
When I met Linda outside the Jewish soup kitchen on Brune St, she described the neighbourhood in her time. “It still is busy here, but it was much more busy then because people started out earlier and worked longer hours,” said Linda, excited to return to her former workplace.”If you worked all night, you never felt on your own because you had all-night cafes servicing the market.” Looking up and down Brune St, Linda got quite carried away describing the characters among those coming to the soup kitchen from the surrounding streets of derelict tenements.
In those days – she told me – bales of cotton were carried in and out of the warehouse next door, supplies were delivered to the food warehouses in Tenterground, trucks caused chaos around Spitalfields Market at night, pubs opened at dawn, furriers in Whites Row compared pelts by daylight, Coles’ poulterers in Leyden St slaughtered fowls to order, hatters and button makers and purveyors of ribbons and trimmings worked frantically, while – further afield – the shoemakers of Hoxton and the furniture makers of Bethnal Green were all busy too. Obviously this was only a fraction of the activity but I think you can understand what Linda meant by saying Spitalfields was busier then.
Linda earned three pounds a week doing piecework for companies in Cutler St who provided the cloth, cut ready to sew. She and her co-workers made a hundred pairs of trousers in a day in the factory on the top floor of the soup kitchen. Assembling the clothes, one would sew the seams, another the buttonholes, another the buttons, the zipper and so on. “You couldn’t let anybody down. You couldn’t even go to the toilet” admitted Linda with a frown, showing me the scar where she caught her finger in a machine once and recalling in wry amusement that, in spite of her injury, the others were reluctant to stop the belt that drove all the machines, crying out, “Don’t turn it off! I haven’t finished my piecework yet!” “And that’s what made you a machinist” said Linda, in robust summary of her occupation.
“My mother was a seamstress for Savile Row, a tailoress from home, collecting her work from the West End. My grandmother rolled cigars at home, there was a big industry. It was a skill. Those skills are coming back, I think, because you see the girls today that are making their own clothes and selling them in the market. We used to make our own clothes too, because you need to have something a little different.”
Although Linda’s father worked in the Truman Brewery, his family were all dockers. She told me about the two floors of vaults beneath Wapping High St that stretch as far as Tobacco Dock, built by French prisoners of war imprisoned at the Tower of London. Apparently these cellars were sealed up just as they were when the docks closed and remain untouched to this day, full of a vast stock of the best wine and champagne waiting to be discovered. “We’d go down to the lock-ups,” said Linda with a rapturous grin, “All the best stuff was there, cinnamon, paprika, saffron, rum, ivory, tea and champagne. I’ve drunk all the best teas in the world. If some spilt from a broken chest, you could get a handful for yourself.”
At this point in our pavement chat, an African-American gentleman, who lived in the ground floor flat of the converted soup kitchen, came outside for a cigarette and joined the conversation – which prompted Linda to raise the subject of race. “We always had mixed race here because it was a port,” she declared audaciously, producing a photo of her multiracial school netball team from 1959. “So we all got brought up together. I used to go to clubs to listen to ska and reggae, where coloured groups like the Stylistics were playing to a mixed audience, which the musicians liked because they couldn’t do it in America. We mixed a lot more than our parents thought, because we were enjoying life and we didn’t have any money. We had stop-overs, and a lot of us married Afro-Carribeans, Asians and Chinese. We were a melting pot.”
Touched by Linda’s monologue, our new friend generously invited us into his flat to take a look. We entered the central door that once led to the factory floors up above, rented out to support the soup kitchen. This was the door Linda passed through when she came to work every day. She was entranced, “It feels strange but homely, because it is so familiar” she said. Clasping her hands in delight and raising her eyes to explore the space, Linda explained that, when it was the soup kitchen, one side of his flat was used for distributing clothes and the other side for food.
To my surprise, Linda recalled the smell of bacon here in the early mornings, as the Jewish workers in the kitchen used to enjoy making themselves illicit bacon sandwiches. Then before we left, completing the sentimental pilgrimage, Linda revealed that she last walked through this hallway in 1968. Mesmerised by each other, as Linda and the bemused contemporary resident shook hands in farewell, two worlds met for a fleeting moment, distant by birth yet united in sympathy and mutual curiousity.
Linda Carney in Brune St
Portraits © Sarah Ainslie
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Jimmy Huddart, Spitalfields Market Porter
A market porter of forty years standing, Jimmy Huddart is proud to display the clothing of his trade. He keeps this apron pristine for ceremonial occasions now, but it is of the traditional design made of the full width of strong canvas, with leather straps and reinforcement across the front where the boxes cause most wear. In use, an apron like this would quickly acquire a brown tinge yet provide its owner with at least two years of wear, with prudent repairs. In the pocket, Jimmy always kept his porter’s knife and string to sew up broken sacks. And the offcuts from these aprons were used to make “cotchel” bags, which held all the fruit and vegetables that the porter might acquire for his own use, gathering it in the lining of his coat as he went about his work. “Cotchelling up,” they called it – and today, although employees in the market now get a vegetable box to take home, it is still referred to as a “cotchel.”
The most significant item in the outfit is the porter’s licence, indicated by the enamel badge. Throughout Jimmy’s time in the market, you could only work as a porter if you had one of these and it was a badge of office, denoting its own rights and privileges which had to be earned. At first, young men entered the market as “empty boys,” collecting and sorting empty wooden boxes and claiming the deposits, until they had earned the right to become licenced porters. Before the introduction of fork-lift trucks, this was intense physical work, manhandling crates of fruit and sacks of vegetables, and manoeuvring the heavy wooden barrows piled high with produce which had a life of their own once you set them going.
“I grew up in Bethnal Green, Brady St, and, at the age of twelve, I used to go to the market to watch all the tussle and bustle, and all the porters with their barrows. At school, I was very much interested in carpentry but I couldn’t get an apprenticeship, although by then I had already been introduced to the market. I loved to go up the Spitalfields with my Uncle Bill, he worked for a haulage company and we used to go around the farms in Kent to collect the English plums and apples and deliver them to the market. There was something about it, the atmosphere and the characters – a love of it developed inside me – and I wanted to become a porter. If you worked in the market or the docks you earned better than the average salary.
When I was fifteen, my uncle got me a job with Percy Dalton at the corner of Crispin St and Brushfield St. He was a well-dressed Jewish man, softly spoken, who had started his business with a barrow selling roast peanuts and he took me under his wing. The first day I started working for Percy Dalton, he showed me how to sweep the shop. He was that sort of person, hands on. He had a fruit shop at the front and in the warehouse there’d be eight people roasting peanuts. The peanut factory backed onto the alley where the lorries came, he had these red vans with Percy Dalton on the side that you always saw outside dog meetings and football matches. He was a likeable man, very popular, and people often came to him for advice. If you were in trouble you could go and speak to him, he would lend you money if you needed it. He always said, get a corner shop and you get two premises for the price of one.
I used to go out with the drivers all around the London Docks to pick up the fruit and make deliveries. I looked forward to it among my duties – being a boy, they took care of me and bought me breakfast, and they taught me how to stack a lorry. But I wanted to be a porter, so I asked in the market if I could work as an empty boy until I came of age. A job come up as a banana boy for Ruby Mollison, helping him to ripen the bananas, hanging them up in the ripening room. I used to wear a leather glove when I had to put my hand under the banana stalk because I was frightened of the spiders. When you cut a bunch of bananas, you cut a “v” shape and they come away from the stalk, and that’s where your spider might be. They could be very dangerous, especially if they were pregnant, and if you were bitten you’d have to go to hospital because your arm could get paralysed by the poison.
Then a chance came up at Gibson Pardoe as an empty boy with the view of getting a licence, and I worked with them for a year until Alf Hayes of the porters’ union came to me and said, “There’s an opportunity to work in the flower market as a porter, would you be interested?” and I was issued a porter’s licence at twenty-one. But there was decline in the fruit trade in the nineteen seventies and they brought in fork-lift trucks. The job changed, it became less physical and where you once needed four porters now you only needed two. I can recall the first time I was given an electric truck. It was one of two milk floats all sprayed up without a scratch on them and they said to me, “treat it like it was new-born baby.” My first trip with it was to go over to Commercial St, and I was making a delivery there when a forty-ton truck came past and clipped it, taking half the fibre-glass roof with it. Luckily, I wasn’t seriously injured, only shaken up. I explained to governor what happened, that it was an accident and he said, “Did you get the number plate ?” He never asked if I was hurt or injured in any way. I suppose you could say, that’s the market sense of humour.
I became elected to the union. In life, I always believed in fairness and I recognise there has to be give and take. I had to build up trust from my members and in dealing with the traders too, yet most of the problems were solved over a cup of tea and a handshake. I was the porters’ representative for ten years but Alf Hayes, who was my inspiration, he had been porters’ representative for forty years before me. The porters’ union was founded in the depression of the twenties and thirties. Although they had to keep it a secret, they invented a form of recognition so they could discuss it – it was “union” backwards, “you’ve got none.” It was lost on those who weren’t in the know, and the union became fully recognised in the late nineteen thirties.
My sport was road running and thirty-five of us formed the Spitalfields Market Runners. Celebrating the tercentenary of the market in 1982, we were supported by the traders and greengrocers and porters in a relay from the Spitalfields Market to Southend Pier and back. We each ran ten miles and the whole of the market came together to do something for charity.“
Jimmy remembers when unemployed porters once waited for work under the clock at the centre of the Spitalfields Market and how the union acquired an office so that traders seeking a porter could telephone, thereby saving the humiliation of the porters. Yet now, in common with the other London markets, the porters are deregulated, losing their licences as the balance in the labour market has shifted again. However, after forty years as a porter, Jimmy chooses to remain positive – because experience has granted him a broad perspective upon the endlessly shifting culture and politics of communal endeavour in market life.
Jimmy’s Huddart’s porter’s licence.
The final year of the licenced porters.
Jimmy’s first year as a porter at twenty-one years old.
Jimmy (right) with his predecessor in the porter’s union Alf Hayes, photographed in the 1980s.
Jimmy Huddart, Honorary Fruit Porter to the Worshipful Society of Fruiterers
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Peter Thomas, Fruit & Vegetable Supplier
Ivor Robins, Fruit & Vegetable Purveyor
John Olney, Donovan Brothers Ltd
Jim Heppel, New Spitalfields Market
Blackie, the Last Spitalfields Market Cat
and take a look at these galleries of pictures
Malcolm Tremain’s Spitalfields In The Seventies
In Liverpool St Station
Goulston St
Brushfield St
Brushfield St
Crispin St
Railing of the night shelter in Crispin St
Brune St
Holland Estate
Artillery Lane
Looking towards the city from the Spitalfields Market car park
Looking south towards Brushfield St
Looking north towards Spital Sq
Goulston St
Goulston St
Middlesex St
Middlesex St
Alley at Liverpool St Station
Sun Passage
Tunnel at Liverpool St Station
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station under demoliton
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station
Abandoned cafeteria at Old Broad St Station
Pedley St Bridge looking towards Cheshire St
Pedley St Bridge
Pedley St
Pedley St
Photographs copyright © Malcolm Tremain
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Malcom Tremain’s Spitalfields Then & Now
Malcolm Tremain’s City & East End
Hugh Wedderburn, Master Woodcarver
Hugh Wedderburn works every day carving wood in the window of an old shop in the Borough at the meeting point of two Roman roads, Stane St and Watling St. “The ancient approach to London,” Hugh delights to call it, aware that the nature of the work he does has not changed significantly in all the time these roads have been there. Fifty yards behind Hugh’s workshop, a fourth century Roman tablet was found that includes the usage of the name “London.” It gives Huw pleasure to contemplate these things, savouring his position at the centre of this age-old neighbourhood.
While the world races by Hugh’s window, and as the acorns in pots on his bench grow up to become trees, he patiently shaves away superfluous pieces of wood to reveal elegant forms of creatures and foliage, that were just waiting to be uncovered by his keen tools. Or rather, that is the way it seems, because the quality of Hugh’s carving has such natural veracity and grace that it belies the immense skill and laborious application it takes to bring it into existence.
“The chisel makes the shape,” said Hugh, as if his involvement as woodcarver were merely incidental. “So you have to have the right chisel to make the form, and you need to have them in various bent shapes to do the awkward bits,” he added, referring to a handsome array of fifty diverse old chisels laid out in a crescent upon his bench surrounding the current piece of work, all perfectly-sharpened and interlaced with shavings. With these, Hugh can create the extraordinary intricate relief carving of baroque swags, flourishes and foliage that stands proud of the surface and defies the imagination to comprehend how mere mortals could carve it.
“I felt like I was coming home when I moved here to the Borough in 1996,” confessed Hugh brightly, peering out the window at the passersby in Tabard St, “because I was born in Nigeria and there are quite a lot people in Southwark from Nigeria.” In 2001, Hugh was contacted by Margaret Wedderburn Evans who told him they had a common ancestor in Robert Wedderburn, born in the West Indies in 1762 to a Scots’ father and a Jamaican mother. A campaigner against slavery, he came to London and joined the Spencerians, an English radical group that united the working men’s cause.
Today, Hugh’s ancestor is remembered for slogans such as,”It’s demeaning for the oppressed to petition the oppressor,” and “You can take away my weapons but I can still spit.” Sentiments that Huw quotes with relish and a gleeful smile. “I am the answer to the question of what happened to the first Afro-Caribbeans that came to London,” he said, holding up a lithe forearm to display his pale flesh. “Look, that’s what happened to them,” Hugh declared enigmatically, indicating that his perception of the world has a depth and complexity comparable to his work.
Hugh is at the top of his profession, yet in spite of his superlative skill the rewards are ultimately those of esteem rather than wealth. “It would be lovely to earn a fortune, but I get the satisfaction,” he admitted quietly, with a self-possessed grin, turning to the window again, “And I’m here in the middle of London. Office workers pass by on the way to their jobs and tell me how contented I look.”
When Hugh moved into his current workshop it had been a betting shop, but when he pulled out the shopfittings he found old matchboarding, now covered with organised lines of tools that form the background to his crowded yet harmonious work space. Sunlight pours in through the shop window, and filtered through the saplings in pots on Hugh’s work bench, it casts a soft light upon all the bits and pieces of work in progress, souvenirs of past works, cases of books and catalogues, working drawings, sculptures, driftwood and twigs.
“I wanted to be a sculptor but I didn’t want to go to art school,” explained Hugh, casting his eyes upon all the objects disappearing into shade at the rear of the shop. “So I found the City & Guilds School that teaches restoration” he continued, leading me purposefully to a table in a shadowy corner of the workshop, “and after that I became an antiques restorer. Then I made this table in the Queen Anne style and put it in an exhibition. It was shown in a magazine and that brought in a few private clients. And I realised how much more pleasure it was working for them than the antiques trade in general. The most interesting work is when an interior designer commissions a piece and gives you the freedom to be creative.”
I was fascinated to examine Hugh’s first table and see the marks of the chisel still fresh upon this bravura work. Without the varnish, staining and gilding that you expect of old furniture, it had another quality, and the clarity of the expressive wood carving came into relief. “There’s a snobbery about whether you’re an artist or not, as a woodcarver, because it’s a collaborative art,” mused Hugh, while I squatted down to admire the details of his extraordinary table, “but a musician interprets a composer’s work and that’s collaborative, yet it is not seen to compromise their integrity as a fine artist.” It was an interesting question, but not one to trouble Hugh very long because it was time to return to the bench and his current work.
Hugh started carving, making deliberate, slow confident strokes with a sharp chisel in absolute physical concentration, and a transformation came upon him. The man who had been so upbeat in conversation – flashing his startling grey eyes – was gone, and different, quieter, energy filled him. The clamour of the city retreated, the sound of Hugh Wedderburn’s wood carving was the only sound, and peace reigned.
This was Hugh’s first table.
Hugh’s current work-in-progress, these acorns are a detail from a larger composition.
A mirror carved by Hugh Wedderburn to a design by Marianna Kennedy
The title panel for the Cadfael television series, carved by Hugh in oak.
Work in progress upon a mirror frame by Marianna Kennedy sits upon the bench in Hugh’s workshop.
In Jeffrey Johnson’s Footsteps
A few years ago, I published Jeffrey Johnson’s photographs of his favourite pubs from the seventies now held in the archive at Bishopsgate Institute. The author known as Rescue Dog Dexter – a graduate of my blog writing course – set out to discover what had become of Jeffrey Johnson’s pubs and this is what he found. Follow RESCUE DOG DEXTER, Every dog has their day and this is mine
I am now taking bookings for the next courses, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on May 11th/12th and November 9th/10th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches from Leila’s Cafe, eat cakes baked to historic recipes by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details
If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.
Knave of Clubs, Bethnal Green Rd
Present before 1735, the pub became a restaurant around 1994 before closing in 2001 and reopening as a bar called Dirty Bones
Crown & Woolpack, St John St, Clerkenwell
Believed to date from around 1851, the pub was open until 1990, then closed but has undergone refurbishment and is currently The Chapel, a hairdresser
Dericote St, Broadway Market
This building appears unchanged however it is clearly a private residence now. The history is obscure, although we understand that it was once part of the Guinness empire
Brunswick Arms, Macdonald Rd, Archway
Demolished in the early eighties, there is no trace of the pub today
Old Bell Tavern, St Pancras
The same view today
Horn Tavern, Knightrider St, City of London (now known as The Centrepage)
Originally known as the Horn Tavern, the pub can be seen when crossing the foot bridge from Tate Modern to St Pauls. A grade II listed building, built in the mid-nineteenth century – the area around the pub has changed significantly
Magpie & Stump, Old Bailey
Opposite the Old Bailey, the Magpie & Stump was apparently nicknamed ‘Court Number 10’ as it was regularly filled with detectives and reporters
The Bull’s Head (Landlords fight to save City pub)
The Bull’s Head was demolished in 1990 to make way for this office development
Marquis of Anglesey, Ashmill St
The pub closed around 2009 and became offices
The White Horse, Little Britain
There seems to have been a pub on this site since 1765, it was rebuilt in 1892 but closed around 1971 and converted to offices
The Olde Wine Shades, City of London
This establishment was built in 1663, predating the Great Fire by three years. Due to the architectural and historical significance, it is grade II listed
Original photographs © Jeffrey Johnson
New photographs copyright © Rescue Dog Dexter
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Ernest George’s Old London
Aldgate
Stefan Dickers, Archivist at Bishopsgate Institute, brought out these fine copper plate etchings by Ernest George (1839-1922) to show me this week. In the eighteen-eighties, George set out to immortalise those fragments of London which spoke of times gone by and Londoners long dead, recording buildings and views which have for the most part now disappeared.
I realise that my affection for these images sets me in line with the generations of chroniclers who have made it their business to document the transience of the city, starting with John Stow who wrote the very first Survey of London between 1560 and 1598 to describe the streets of his childhood that were vanishing before his eyes.
Ernest George’s etchings were published by the Fine Art Society in New Bond St in 1884, a magnificent temple of culture designed by Edward William Godwin which survived through the twentieth century only to close in August 2018.
Bishopsgate
Wych St, Strand
Fouberts Place, Soho
Crown Court, Pall Mall
St Bartholomew, Smithfield
Warwick Lane, City
Tower of London
London Bridge
Staple Inn, Holborn
Drury Lane
St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell
Limehouse
Shadwell
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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