My East End Vernacular Lecture
I shall giving an illustrated lecture on EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists Who Painted London’s East End Streets in the 20th Century, including all the artists whose works are below, at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, E3 2SJ next Thursday March at 7pm. Click here for tickets
Click here to order a copy of EAST END END VERNACULAR for £25
John Allin – Spitalfields Market, 1972
S.R Badmin – Wapping Pier Head, 1935
Pearl Binder – Aldgate, 1932 (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
Dorothy Bishop – Looking towards the City of London from Morpeth School, 1961
James Boswell – Petticoat Lane (Courtesy of David Buckman)
Roland Collins – Brushfield St, Spitalfields, 1951-60 (Courtesy of Museum of London)
Alfred Daniels – Gramophone Man on Wentworth St
Anthony Eyton , Christ Church Spitalfields, 1980
Doreen Fletcher – Turner’s Rd, 1998
Geoffrey Fletcher – D.Bliss, Alderney Rd 1979 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Barnett Freedman– Street Scene. 1933-39 (Courtesy of Tate Gallery)
Noel Gibson – Hessel St (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Charles Ginner – Bethnal Green Allotment, 1947 (Courtesy of Manchester City Art Gallery)
Lawrence Gowing – Mare St, 1937
Harry T. Harmer – St Botolph’s Without Aldgate, 1963 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Elwin Hawthorne – Trinity Green Almshouses, 1935
Rose Henriques – Coronation Celebrations in Challis Court, 1937 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Nathaniel Kornbluth – Butcher’s Row, Aldgate 1934 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Dan Jones – Brick Lane, 1977
Leon Kossoff – Christ Church Spitalfields, 1987
James Mackinnon – Twilight at London Fields
Cyril Mann – Christ Church seen over bombsites from Redchurch St, 1946 (Courtesy of Piano Nobile Gallery)
Jock McFadyen – Aldgate East
Ronald Morgan – Salvation Army Band Bow, 1978 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Grace Oscroft – Old Houses in Bow, 1934
Peri Parkes – House in the East, 1980-81
Henry Silk – Snow, Rounton Rd, Bow
Harold Steggles – Old Ford Rd c.1932
Walter Steggles – Old Houses, Bethnal Green 1929
Albert Turpin, Columbia Market, Bethnal Green
Take a look at some of the artists featured in East End Vernacular
The Departure Of Empress Coaches
Empress Coaches who drove East Enders on beanos for generations have departed their historic garages at Corbridge Crescent next to the canal in Hackney after ninety years and now operate from Silvertown. Meanwhile, after a lengthy planning battle, the old garages have been levelled and the Georgian bow-fronted cottages facing the canal will be reduced to mere facades. Below you can read my account of a visit to Empress Coaches before the redevelopment.
Peter Stanton
One of the corners of the East End that intrigues me most is at the boundary of Bethnal Green and Hackney, where a narrow path bordered by crumbling old brick walls leads up from the Hackney Rd to the junction of Mare St and the Regent’s canal. Cutting through at an angle to the grid of streets, it has the air of a field track that was there before the roads and the railway. Looming overhead against the skyline is a tall ruinous structure with the square proportions of a medieval castle, London’s last unreconstructed bomb site, left to decay since an incendiary hit in World War II. Beyond this, you pass under the glistening railway arches to arrive at the canal where, to your left, a vista opens up with majestic gasometers reaching up the sky and a quaint old building with bay-fronted windows entirely overgrown with ivy, cowering beneath. This was the headquarters of Empress Coaches.
Here I received a generous welcome from Peter Stanton, third generation of the Stanton family at the coach yard and still operating from the extravagantly derelict premises purchased by his grandfather.
Edward Thomas Stanton was an enterprising bus driver who bought his bus in 1923 and created a fleet operating from a yard in Shrubland Rd, London Fields, whence he initiated several familiar bus routes – including the No 8 pictured above on the office wall – journeys that became part of the perception of the city for generations of Londoners. In 1927, he bought the property here in Corbridge Crescent but when the buses were nationalised in 1933, he made £35,000 from the sale of the fleet, permitting him to retire and hand over to his son Edward George Stanton, changing the business from buses to coaches at the same time. “It was a bloody fortune then!” declared Peter, his grandson still presiding with jocularity over the vestiges of this empire today. Outside the fleet of coaches in their immaculate cream paintwork, adorned with understated traditional signwriting sat dignified and perfect as swans amidst the oily filth of the garage, ready to glide out over the cobbles and onto the East End streets.“A coach yard within two miles of the City of London, it will never happen again,” declared Peter in wonder at the arcane beauty of his inheritance.
“My father came here at sixteen with his sister Ivy who did all the accounts,” he explained, sitting proudly among framed black and white photographs that trace the evolving design of coaches through the last century. At first, the bodies of the vehicles were removed in the winter to convert to flat trucks out of season and these early examples resemble extended horsedrawn coaches but, as the century wore on, heroically streamlined vehicles took over. And the story of Empress Coaches itself became interwoven with the history of the twentieth century when they were requisitioned during World War II to drive personnel around airfields in Norfolk, while the staff that remained in London took refuge in the repair pit in the coach yard as a bomb shelter during the blitz.
“My father didn’t encourage me to come into the business,” admitted Peter, who joined in 1960, “But after being brought up around coaches and coming up here every Saturday morning with your dad, it gets into your blood and I could think of nothing else but going into it. I started off at the bottom, I was crawling under the coaches greasing them up. I was a mechanic for twenty-two years but then me and my brother Trevor bought out the company from the rest of the family, and the two of us took it over.”
“In those days, people didn’t go on holidays, they had a day out to the sea on a coach. And they had what they called “beanos,” pub and work excursions going to Margate or Southend and stopping at a pub on the way back and arriving back around midnight. Those pubs used to lose their local trade because people didn’t want to go into a bar filled with a lot of drunken East Enders. They were very rowdy and the girls were as bad as the boys.” revealed Peter, able to take amusement now at this safe distance and pulling a face to indicate that there is little he has not seen on the buses. “Put it like this, I used to say that when you took a coachload of girls out on a beano and their boyfriends and husbands came to pick them up at one o’clock – if they knew what I knew these girls had been up to they wouldn’t be so welcoming. In other words, they were not so innocent in those days as people thought they were. But the police were the worst, they went bloody barmy and they did things they would nick anybody else for doing!”
“When I first started there were six beanos every Saturday in the Summer but in the whole of the last year we only did two.” he admitted with a private twinge of disappointment. As the beanos decreased in the sixties, Empress Coaches were called upon by the military for troop movements. “We used to do the Trooping of the Colour, we drove the troops from Caterham Barracks with a police escort. It was the time of the IRA and they had to check all the bins along the way and have a guy with a jammer sitting in the front of the bus, so if there was a remote-controlled bomb it wouldn’t go off. They told us, ‘Whatever you do, drive on. Even if you hit someone.’ There’d be twenty of our coaches full of soldiers plus an escort.”
These were the twilight years at Empress Coaches at Corbridge Crescent, after the family sold the business and were simply employed to keep it ticking over, which explains why little maintenance was undertaken. Yet the textures of more than ninety years of use recalled the presence of all those who passed through and imbued the place with a rare charmed atmosphere. I was not the first to recognise the appeal of its patina, as I discovered when Peter reeled off the list of film crews that had been there, most notably “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” who wallpapered his office with the gold wallpaper you see in the top picture. “We’ve had Michael Caine here,” he boasted, “Gary Oldman, Ray Winstone and Dennis Waterman too.”
“After I spent fifty-two years of my life here, I’ve got be here.” Peter assured to me, biting into a sandwich and chewing thoughfully,“It’s more than likely this place will be redeveloped before too long and that will be the end of it, but in the meantime – I’m just trying to keep this show on the road!”
Edward Thomas Stanton, the enterprising bus driver who invented the number eight bus route.
Edward George Stanton in his leather bus driver’s coat.
Brothers Peter and Trevor Stanton.
Mark Stanton, Trevor’s son.
Jason Stanton, Peter’s son.
Between the coaches.
A forgotten corner of the yard.
Empress Coaches, the office entrance.
Corbridge Crescent, with the canal to the right
The distinctive red Empress Coaches sign is gone from Corbridge Crescent
These Georgian bow-fronted cottages are all that is left standing now, but soon they will be reduced to facades.
You may also like to read about two nearby industries still going strong
Denton Welch’s Dolls House
I was thrilled when Jojo Tulloh offered to write this piece about the dolls house in the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green which was restored in the forties by one of my favourite authors, Denton Welch
Upstairs in the ‘Home’ gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green is an eighteenth century dolls house. The outside is painted to resemble pale stone-colour bricks and it has a low dark wood stand. It is just one of many dolls houses displayed in the gallery’s large glass cases. The front is closed and the house quite plain looking, after a quick glance you might be tempted to go on to the next exhibit. However this dolls house is unlike any other in the museum. It is a physical link to a highly original human being, the artist and writer Denton Welch, who restored this house.
In his journal, Welch describes the moment he first saw the dolls house, a gift from Mildred Bosanquet whose mother’s family were the original owners.
26th March seven o’clock 1945
‘For the last few weeks I have been mending the mid-eighteenth century doll’s house (which Mrs Bosanquet of Seal handed over to me in 1941). It has been in her mother’s family (Littedale of Yorkshire) since it was made. Mrs B said glibly, “I suppose it was made by the estate carpenter.”
I first saw it in B’s cellar on a winter afternoon. She said, “Here’s something that might interest you, Denton,” and shined a torch into a grey oblong box, amazingly dilapidated, on a stand. There were windows out in it, but I hardly would have believed it was old, until she opened the doors and showed me the charming mantelpiece in each room, every one subtly different, with perfect mouldings. Then I saw that the tiny doors were two-panelled and that each room was wainscoted halfway up, just as eighteenth century rooms should be.
But it was all daubed and coated with so much thick paint and there were so many sordid remains of Edwardian doll’s furniture, together with moth eaten curtains and pieces of felt that it had clearly become something to be avoided and forgotten.”
Denton Welch is not well known and many of his books are out of print but he is the kind of writer that you discover and take to your heart as you would a new, fascinating and sometimes alarming friend. You quickly find yourself reading all of his works. He is a writer much loved by other writers for the vivid and intimate way he is able to narrate the circumstances of his adolescence and later his painful convalescence. The circumstances of his life were tragic but they combined to produce a writer with a singular voice.
Welch was born in Shanghai to an English father and American mother but from the age of eleven he was educated in England. His mother died around this time. After running away from school at sixteen, he took a journey with his father in China and then enrolled in art school at aged seventeen. When still a student at Goldsmith’s Art School, Welch was knocked down by a motorist while cycling to his uncle’s house. He was badly injured, his spine was fractured and he spent three years recovering in a nursing home. His fractured spine, caused inflammation of the bladder and kidney failure, which left him partly impotent.
The effects of the injury would greatly curtail his life, leading eventually to tuberculosis of the spine and frequent and severe headaches and high temperatures. He was often confined to bed, but it was during this time that he also produced his intense and arresting works of autobiographical fiction. His first two books In Youth is Pleasure and Maiden Voyage both recall his teenage years when he was in full health but beset by terrible anxiety about his inability to fit in with school and his conventional family. He had a great ear for dialogue and an ability to create a distinctive sense of place. Despite his frequent bouts of extreme ill health, before his premature death at the age of thirty-three, he managed to produce a significant amount of work. Several of his books and his journals were published posthumously. His last journal entry, written just a few months before his death is a detailed and very funny account of tea with Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicholson at Sissinghurst.
Because of his accident Denton Welch was isolated and lived in a world of memory and imagination, recreating past events both painful and pleasurable. The writer is often miserable but the books are far from that. Sometimes his books are painful to read but whatever he is writing about whether it is food, architecture, sexuality, churches, antiques, the behaviour of his relatives, his own impulsive and sometimes selfish actions, he makes it compelling.
The writer Edmund White has said of Welch that he is:
“one of those writers who is always interesting. The more his world is reduced to a hospital room and a handful of human contacts the more fascinating he becomes. Is it the precision of his observations, the fierce but gentle strangeness of his personality or his love of nature that captivates the reader? Like Colette and Jean Rhys, Welch has the power to generate interest out of even the most meagre materials. He had this gift from the beginning but suffering and illness refined it into a white hot flame.”
Welch’s novels are compressed pieces of recalled life. His journals are more discursive, during the times he was well he would cycle or walk to churches and ruins, visit antique shops and picnic. He often recalls conversations with those he meets along the way. He also writes at length about the restoration of the dolls house. Writing in March 1945, he recalls the acquisition of the house four years earlier.
“At last it arrived one morning when I was still in bed, having written Maiden Voyage for several hours. My head and eyes were tired, and I was almost trembling with excitement as the men climbed up the outside staircase with it and plumped it down in the middle of the studio. In my pyjamas I began to poke and peer and examine it.
First I tore away all the repulsive curtains and carpets which had been nailed on. The moths’ eggs were thick as fish roe and the dust was like bat’s fur. Gradually I emptied every room (dining, drawing, bed and kitchen). There were only two bits of Georgian furniture left. A charming dark mahogany Pembroke table with one flap, and two tapering legs missing, and a little chest, also very dark mahogany, but quite plain, with little brass knobs. I forgot the little oak stool for the kitchen. There was a tiny, perfect old brass saucepan, two good little pewter platters and some little Victorian dish covers.
The rest was muck, except perhaps for the curious little chair and chiffonier, perhaps 1880-90.
When I had stripped the rooms I saw how coated with ugly pink and green paint each delicate moulding was. Even the floors were painted pink and green. Perhaps by some child with two pots of bright enamel.)”
With great care Welch restores the exterior paintwork.
“As I looked closer at the body of the dolls’ house, I saw that under the grim unfeeling coat of battleship-grey was a lighter fawn paint, and on this paint were the signs of bricks painted in black.
This excited me and I began to scrape. I soon found that under the fawn were two other coats of yellower, bigger bricks with white outlines, and that right at the bottom the original coat was tiny red bricks. I longed to get down to this first coat, but it was impossible without ruining it in the process, so I contented myself with the first beige bricks, which by the texture and the quality of the paint seemed to date from at least the early nineteenth century.”
After many months work he strips off the different patterned wallpapers and uncovers the original colours of the rooms that you can see in the dolls house now (drawing, pink – dining, white – bed, blue – and kitchen, white and ochre).
“I painfully scraped down to these, stripped the floor to its original plain wood, and found that the doors were meant to be bare mahogany and white surrounds.”
He also discovers that the draws of the stand were originally painted with a Chinese Chippendale fret design, “very pretty but quite ruined by age and stripping. I carefully ruled out the shape of it, then painted nearly all of that in to preserve it.”
He makes a new handle out of odd bits of an old brass handle, but a bomb landed in the garden of his rented cottage in Kent and later on it caught fire, destroying many of his treasures and so he has to move. This time to damp, cramped rooms above a garage. The dolls house languishes for three years before he takes it up again in 1945.
“Then came the awful stupid scenes and troubles before I left Pond Farm, and again the dolls’ house had to go, this time to Mays’ outhouse studio where it was stored from 1942 until last month, when I suddenly had a passion for it again, unaccountable, unless it was just looking at it in its ruined condition and seeing again how lovely it could be.
And with May’s tools I started on it, never having done any carpentry since the age of eleven.”
He remakes the stand and repairs the big doors, and then turns to remaking the tiny tapered legs of the Pemroke table, the missing windows, front door steps and the pediment and tops of the columns, “The fanlight I made all of matches and putty, and it was good.”
He carves a tiny cedar newel post and remakes the chimneys, the balustrade he finds (part of a bracket) in a junkshop in Tonbridge.
“Nothing will look grander than the dolls’ house, with its perfect classical door, window proportions, heavy Palladian coigning, cornice, and then the pediment and the reconstructed balustrade, all standing on the stand with the fret pattern revived.
All these weeks I have been doing it every afternoon (after writing) in May’s garden. One has the feeling that slowly the house is coming to life again.”
Denton Welch never owned a home. He lived precariously in rented rooms but he always longed to restore a ruin, perhaps a grotto or a medieval chapel and live in it. He had a great love of old and beautiful things and a horror of poor restoration or alteration. The contemplation of ancient and fine things gave him great comfort. In his journal dated 21st of January 1945, a page or two before the entry about the dolls house, he recalls the eighteenth century house in which he rented a room at 34 Croom’s Hill, Greenwich whilst he an art student. He thinks back to the time when he was young and lonely, waiting for something to happen but still in perfect health.
“And the old eighteenth century room with everything just thicker, wider, more generous than absolutely necessary, seemed to hold me within its walls as if I were valuable, worth taking care of.”
It is tempting to believe that in restoring this eighteenth century home to its original, elegant beauty he was able to fulfill his ambition to make a permanent home of his own, even if only in miniature.
Drawing Room
Bedroom
Dining Room
Kitchen
Ovens
MJD, 1783
Photographs copyright © Victoria & Albert Museum
Portrait copyright © National Portrait Gallery
Self Portrait by (Maurice) Denton Welch (29th March 1915 – 30th December 1948)
Jojo Tulloh’s books include The Modern Peasant and East End Paradise
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Anthony Cairns’ Small Shops
Complementing Antony Cairn’s elegaic series of East End Pubs, today I present his ethereal portfolio of small shops, created using the same nineteenth century Vandyke Brown process, and evoking those commercial premises which exist as receptacles of collective memory for the communities they served.
The first picture is of The Handy Shop, Tony’s first local shop when growing up in Plaistow, and the last picture is W.F.Arber & Co Ltd in Roman Rd, of which my friend Gary Arber was the proprietor.
The Handy Shop, Ruskin Ave, E12
M.J. Evans, Warren St, W1
Unknown shop, Mile End, E1
Unknown shop, Bonsor St, SE5
Unknown shops, unknown street
Unknown shop, Copenhagen St N.1
Unknown shops, Morning Lane, E8
Unknown shop, Oswin St, SE11
Unknown shops, Hackney Rd, E2
Fishmonger, Commercial Rd, E1
Unknown shop, St Pancras Way, NW5
Printworks, Blackfriars Rd, SE1
Gari’s, Northwold Rd, N16
George Harvey, Bougourd Chemist & Droys, Rochester Row, SW1
Gricks Jellied Eels, Rosebery Ave, Manor Park, E12
Arber & Co Ltd, 459 Roman Rd, E3
Photographs copyright © Antony Cairns
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and these other photographs of shops
Harry Harrison’s East End Portraits
David – universally known as ‘Harry’ – Harrison came to Mile End in 1979 and liked it so much he has never left. An artist who became an architect, he has recently retired from his career in architecture and become an artist again.
Tom was a gentle, polite and humble soul. His patch was between Mile End Station and the Roman Road and could be found most days in that area. He told me he was fifty-three years old when I painted him in 2014.
He wore a camel coat over a sleeping bag, over a denim jacket, over a fleece, over a jumper. I last saw Tom a couple of years ago outside Mile End Station and he looked very poorly.
I would love to hear that he survives somewhere still but I fear it is unlikely. I am moved by the depth of feeling in his forlorn expression. His obviously broken nose made me wonder if he may have once been a boxer?
Andrew inhabited a similar patch to Tom and, although seen as frequently, I never saw them together or at the same time. This painting also dates from 2014 and is in Mile End Park.
Unlike Tom, there was something defiant and angry about Andrew – even when offered money he could respond abusively. Yet he did once offer my wife a swig of his White Stripe, so he was not without chivalry.
Andrew would sometimes disappear for a few weeks and re-appear with a make-over, a haircut, clean shaven and with a set of new clothes. I was told that he was once a long distance lorry driver.
I saw Angus sitting on a bench in the evening sunshine in Old Street in 2017. What attracted me, apart from his extraordinary mane and facial hair was that he had a chess set set up on the pavement in front of him.
After striking up conversation, he challenged me to a game which I accepted. I am a poor player and out of practice, and I was hoping I may have stumbled upon an out of luck chess master.
I beat him rather quickly and easily, to my great disappointment and guilt – and Angus was gracious in defeat which made it even worse.
Anyone visiting Brick Lane in recent years could not fail to notice the stylish and urbane Mick Taylor. After completing this portrait I gave it to Mandi Martin who lives by Brick Lane and was a friend of Mick’s.
Mandi volunteers at St Joseph’s Hospice. In 2017, she spent some of Mick’s last few hours talking and reminiscing with him about their shared experiences of the East End.
In 2015, I met Tim sitting on a blanket and begging outside a cash machine in Shoreditch. He seemed young, sad and vulnerable, sitting eating crisps and surrounded by plastic bags of his belongings. Tim was reluctant to talk and seemed embarrassed by his situation. I have not seen him since.
This is my portrait of Gary Arber whose former printworks in the Roman Rd is a short walk from my home. Gary’s grandparents opened the shop in 1897 and Gary ran it for sixty years after after sacrificing a career as a flying ace in the Royal Air Force in 1954.
Paintings copyright © Harry Harrison
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In The Charnel House
I wonder if those who work in the corporate financial industries in Bishop’s Sq today ever cast their eyes down to the cavernous medieval Charnel House of c. 1320 beneath their feet, once used to store the dis-articulated bones of many thousands of those who died here of the Great Famine in the fourteenth century.
Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Jane Siddell, believes starving people flooded into London from Essex seeking food after successive crop failures and reached the Priory of St Mary Spital where they died of hunger and were buried here. It was a dark vision of apocalyptic proportions on such a bright day, yet I held it in in mind as we descended beneath the contemporary building to the stone chapel below.
At first, you notice the knapped flints set into the wall as a decorative device, like those at Southwark Cathedral and St Bartholomew the Great. London does not have its own stone and Jane pointed out the different varieties within the masonry and their origins, indicating that this building was a sophisticated and expensive piece of construction subsidised by wealthy benefactors. A line of small windows admitted light and air to the Charnel House below, and low walls that contain them survive which would once have extended up to the full height of the chapel.
When you stand down in the cool of the Charnel House, several metres below modern ground level, and survey the neatly-faced stone walls and the finely-carved buttresses, it is not difficult to complete the vault over your head and imagine the chapel above. Behind you are the footings of the steps that led down and there is an immediate sense of familiarity conveyed by the human proportion and architectural detailing, as if you had just descended the staircase into it.
This entire space would once have been packed with bones, in particular skulls and leg bones – which we recognise in the symbol of the skull & crossbones – the essential parts to be preserved so that the dead might be able to walk and talk when they were resurrected on Judgement Day. Yet they were rudely expelled and disposed of piecemeal at the Reformation when the Priory of St Mary Spital was dissolved in 1540.
Brick work and the remains of a beaten earth floor indicate that the Charnel House may have become a storeroom and basement kitchen for a dwelling above in the sixteenth century. Later, it was filled with rubble from the Fire of London and levelled-off as houses were built across Spitalfields in the eighteenth century. Thus the Charnel House lay forgotten and undisturbed as a rare survival of fourteenth century architecture, until 1999 when it was unexpectedly discovered by the builders constructing the current office block. Yet it might have been lost then if the developers had not – showing unexpected grace – reconfigured their building in order to let it stand.
Around the site lie stray pieces of masonry individually marked by the masons – essential if they were to receive the correct payment from their labours. Thus our oldest building bears witness to the human paradox of economic reality, which has always co-existed uneasily with a belief in the spiritual world, since it was a yearning for redemption in the afterlife that inspired the benefactors who paid for this chapel in Spitalfields more than seven centuries ago
The exterior walls are decorated with knapped flints, faced in Kentish Ragstone upon a base of Caen Stone with use of green Reigate Stone for corner stones
Window bricked up in the sixteenth century
Inside the Charnel House once packed with bones
Twelfth century denticulated Romanesque buttress brought from an earlier building and installed in the Charnel House c.1320 – traces of red and black paint were discovered upon this.
Fine facing stonework within the Charnel House
Fourteenth century masons’ marks
The Charnel House is to be seen in the foreground of this illustration from the fifteen-fifties
The Charnel House during excavations
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John Claridge At Whitechapel Bell Foundry
John Claridge first visited the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1982 to photograph the life of Britain’s oldest manufacturing company, founded in 1570 – and he returned 2016 to take another set of pictures. Remarkably, little changed in the intervening years.
‘When I got into the foundry all the work had finished, it was deserted,’ he told me, ‘it was like walking through a time portal or boarding the Mary Celeste. There was a very tactile feeling about the place, where craftsmanship held sway, and my pictures pay testament to that feeling.’
You can help save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a living foundry by submitting an objection to the boutique hotel proposal to Tower Hamlets council. Please take a moment this weekend to write your letter of objection. The more objections we can lodge the better, so please spread the word to your family and friends.
HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY
Use your own words and add your own personal reasons for opposing the development. Any letters which simply duplicate the same wording will count only as one objection.
1. Quote the application reference: PA/19/00008/A1
2. Give your full name and postal address. You do not need to be a resident of Tower Hamlets or of the United Kingdom to register a comment but unless you give your postal address your objection will be discounted.
3. Be sure to state clearly that you are OBJECTING to Raycliff Capital’s application.
4. Point out the ‘OPTIMUM VIABLE USE’ for the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is as a foundry not a boutique hotel.
5. Emphasise that you want it to continue as a foundry and there is a viable proposal to deliver this.
6. Request the council refuse Raycliff Capital’s application for change of use from foundry to hotel.
WHERE TO SEND YOUR OBJECTION
You can write an email to
planningandbuilding@towerhamlets.gov.uk
or
you can post your objection direct on the website by following this link to Planning and entering the application reference PA/19/00008/A1
or
you can send a letter to
Town Planning, Town Hall, Mulberry Place, 5 Clove Crescent, London, E14 2BG
You may also like to read about
Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Click here to order a copy of John Claridge’s EAST END for £25
