Charles Booth’s Spitalfields
In the recently published East London volume of Charles Booth’s notebooks of research for his Survey into Life & Labour of the People of London (1886-1903), I came upon an account of a visit to Spitalfields in spring 1898. when he walked through many of the streets and locations of the Spitalfields Nippers around the same time Horace Warner took his photographs. So I thought I would select descriptions from Booth’s notebooks and place Warner’s pictures alongside, comparing their views of the same subject. Click here to order a copy of The Streets Of London: The Booth Notebooks, East for £12
March 18th Friday 1898 – Walk with Sergeant French
Walked round a district bounded to the North by Quaker St, on the East by Brick Lane and on the West by Commercial St, being part of the parish of Christ Church, Spitalfields.
Back of big house, Quaker St
Starting at the Police Station in Commercial St, East past St Stephen’s Church into Quaker St. Rough, Irish.Brothels on the south side of the street past the Court called New Square. Also a Salvation Army ‘Lighthouse’ which encourages the disreputable to come this way. The railway has now absorbed all the houses on the North side as far as opposite Pool Square. Wheler St also Rough Irish, does not look bad, shops underneath.
Courts South of Quaker St – Pope’s Head Court, lately done up and repaired, and a new class in them since the repairs, poor not rough. One or two old houses remaining with long weavers’ windows in the higher storeys.
New Square, Rough, one one storey house, dogs chained in back garden…
Pool Sq
Pool Square, three storeyed houses, rough women about, Irish. One house with a wooden top storey, windows broken. This is the last of an Irish colony, the Jews begin to predominate when Grey Eagle St is reached. These courts belong to small owners who generally themselves occupy one of the houses in the courts themselves.
Isaac Levy
Grey Eagle St Jews on East side, poor. Gentiles, rough on West side, mixture of criminal men in street. Looks very poor, even the Jewish side but children booted, fairly clean, well clothed and well fed. Truman’s Brewery to the East side. To Corbet’s Court, storeyed rough Irish, brothels on either side of North end.
Washing Day
Children booted but with some very bad boots, by no means respectable….
Pearl St
Great Pearl St Common lodging houses with double beds – thieves and prostitutes.
South into Little Pearl St and Vine Court, old houses with long small-paned weavers windows to top storeys, some boarded up in the middle. On the West side, lives T Grainger ‘Barrows to Let’
Parsley Season in Crown Court
Crown Court, two strong men packing up sacks of parsley…
Carriage Folk of Crown Court – Tommy Nail & Willie Dellow
The Great Pearl St District remains as black as it was ten years ago, common lodging houses for men, women and doubles which are little better than brothels. Thieves, bullies and prostitutes are their inhabitants. A thoroughly vicious quarter – the presence of the Cambridge Music Hall in Commercial St makes it a focussing point for prostitutes
Detail of Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889
Clennell’s London Melodies
Of all the dozens of woodcuts of CRIES OF LONDON I have come across, this anonymously-published set is my favourite – so I am very grateful to historian Dr Ruth Richardson who identified them for me as the work of Thomas Bewick’s apprentice Luke Clennell.
I will be speaking about the Cries of London and showing favourite pictures on Tuesday 21st August at the meeting of London Historians at Sir Christopher Hatton in Leather Lane, EC1. The theme of the evening is London Retail and includes Tina Baxter on Leadenhall Market, Jane Young on Co-operative Stores, Dave Whittaker on Gamages, Andrea Tanner on Fortnum & Mason and Diane Burstein on St James’s – Locke & Co, Lobb and Floris. Click here to book a ticket
Self-portrait by Luke Clennell (1781–1840)
The hawkers in Luke Clennell’s woodcuts look filthy, with bad skin and teeth, dressed in ragged clothes, either skinny as cadavers or fat as thieves, and with hands as scrawny as rats’ claws.You can almost smell their bad breath and sweaty unwashed bodies, pushing themselves up against you in the crowd to make a hard sell.
Luke Clennell was apprenticed as an engraver to Thomas Bewick and then moved to London in 1804 as a young man, seeking a career as a painter and winning a major commission in 1816 from the Earl of Bridgewater to do portraits of more than four hundred guests at dinner in the Guildhall. The impossibility of getting all these subjects to sit for him drove Clennell to a nervous breakdown and he was committed to Salisbury Asylum. Although he recovered sufficiently to continue his career, he was afflicted with mental illness for the rest of his life and died in Newcastle Asylum in 1840.
The distinctive quality of Clennell’s Cries, first published as ‘London Melodies & Cries of the Seasons’ in 1812, stands out among the hundreds of anonymous woodcuts published in chapbooks in the early nineteenth century by virtue of their lively texture and unapologetic, unsentimental portraiture.
Clennell’s hawkers are never going to be framed on the parlour wall and they do not give a toss. They own their defiant uncouth spirit. They are a rough bunch with ready fists that you would not wish to encounter in a narrow byway on a dark night. Yet they are survivors who know the lore of the streets, how to scratch a living out of little more than resourcefulness, and how to turn a shilling as easily as a groat.
With unrivalled spirit, savage humour, profane vocabulary and a rapacious appetite, Luke Clennell’s woodcuts are the most street-wise of all the Cries. He gloried in the grotesque features and unrestrained personalities of hawkers, while also permitting them an unbridled humanity that we can only regard with esteem. They call to me across the centuries, crying, “Sweet and Pretty Beau-Pots – One a-Penny” and “Buy my Live Scate.”
It is wonderful to learn the name of this artist who captured the vigorous life of these loud characters with such art. For a contemporary eye these are portraits that sit naturally alongside the work of Ronald Searle and Quentin Blake. Luke Clennell gloried in the grotesque features and unrestrained personalities of street people, while also permitting them a humanity which we can recognise and respect. Now at long last, I can publish them with the artist’s name beside them.
Rabbit, Rabbit – Nice fat Rabbit
All Round & Sound, Full Weight, Threepence a Pound, my Ripe Kentish Cherries.
Buy my Fresh Herrings, Fresh Herrings, O! Three a Groat, Herrings, O!
Buy a Nice Wax Doll – Rosy and Fresh.
The King’s Speech, The King’s Speech to both Houses of Parliament.
Here’s all a Blowing, Alive and Growing – Choice Shrubs and Plants, Alive and Growing.
Hot Spice Gingerbread, Hot – Come buy my Spice Gingerbread, Smoaking Hot – Hot Spice Gingerbread, All Hot.
Any Earthen Ware, Plates, Dishes, or Jugs, today – any Clothes to Exchange, Madam?
Hot Mutton Dumplings – Nice Dumplings, All Hot.
Buy a Hat Box, Cap Box, or Bonnet Box.
Buy my Baskets, a Work, Fruit, or a Bread Basket.
Chickens, a Nice Fat Chicken – Chicken, or a Young Fowl.
Sweet and Pretty Beau-Pots, One a-Penny – Chickweed and Groundsel for your Birds.
Buy my Wooden Ware – a Bowl, Dish, Spoon or Platter.
Six Bunches a-Penny, Sweet Lavender – Six Bunches a-Penny, Sweet Blooming Lavender.
Here’s One a-Penny – Here’s Two a-Penny, Hot Cross Buns.
Lilies of the Valley, Sweet Lilies of the Valley.
Cats Meat, Dogs Meat – Any Cat’s or Dog’s Meat Today?
Buy my Live Scate, Live Scate – Buy my Dainty Fresh Salmon.
Mackerel, O! Four for shilling, Mackerel, O!
Hastings Green and Young Hastings. Here’s Young Peas, Tenpence a Peck, Marrow-fat Peas.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Receipts From London’s Oldest Ironmongers
As any accountant will tell you – you must always keep your receipts. It was a dictum adopted religiously by the staff at London oldest ironmongers R. M. Presland & Sons in the Hackney Rd from 1797-2013, where this cache of receipts from the eighteen-eighties and nineties was discovered. All these years later, they may no longer be of interest to the tax man, but they serve to illustrate the utilitarian beauty of nineteenth-century typographic design and tell us a lot about the diverse interrelated trades which once filled this particular corner of the East End.
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Tony Hall, Photographer
Bonner St, Bethnal Green
Tony Hall (1936-2008) would not have described himself as a photographer – his life’s work was that of a graphic designer, political cartoonist and illustrator. Yet, on the basis of the legacy of around a thousand photographs that he took, he was unquestionably a photographer, blessed with a natural empathy for his subjects and possessing a bold aesthetic sensibility too.
Tony’s wife Libby Hall, known as a collector of dog photography, revisited her husband’s photographs before giving them to the Bishopsgate Institute where they are held in the archive permanently. “It was an extraordinary experience because there were many that I had never seen before and I wanted to ask him about them.” Libby confessed to me, “I noticed Tony reflected in the glass of J.Barker, the butcher’s shop, and then to my surprise I saw myself standing next to him.”
“I was often with him but, from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, he worked shifts and wandered around taking photographs on weekday afternoons,” she reflected, “He loved roaming in the East End and photographing it.”
Born in Ealing, Tony Hall studied painting at the Royal College of Art under Ruskin Spear. But although he quickly acquired a reputation as a talented portrait painter, he chose to reject the medium, deciding that he did not want to create pictures which could only be afforded by the wealthy, turning his abilities instead towards graphic works that could be mass-produced for a wider audience.
Originally from New York, Libby met Tony when she went to work at a printers in Cowcross St, Clerkenwell, where he was employed as a graphic artist. “The boss was member of the Communist Party yet he resented it when we tried to start a union and he was always running out of money to pay our wages, giving us ‘subs’ bit by bit.” she recalled with fond indignation, “I was supposed to manage the office and type things, but the place was such a mess that the typewriter was on top of a filing cabinet and they expected me to type standing up. There were twelve of us working there and we did mail order catalogues. Tony and the others used to compete to see who could get the most appalling designs into the catalogues.”
“Then Tony went to work for the Evening News as a newspaper artist on Fleet St and I joined the Morning Star as a press photographer.” Libby continued,” I remember he refused to draw a graphic of a black man as a mugger and, when the High Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan came to London, Tony draw a little ice cream badge onto his uniform on the photograph and it was published!” After the Evening News, Tony worked at The Sun until the move to Wapping, using this opportunity of short shifts to develop his career as a graphic artist by drawing weekly cartoons for the Labour Herald.
This was the moment when Tony also had the time to pursue his photography, recording an affectionate chronicle of the daily life of the East End where he lived from 1960 until the end of his life – first in Barbauld Rd, Stoke Newington, then in Nevill Rd above a butchers shop, before making a home with Libby in 1967 at Ickburgh Rd, Clapton. “It is the England I first loved …” Libby confided, surveying Tony’s pictures that record his tender personal vision for perpetuity,”… the smell of tobacco, wet tweed and coal fires.”
“He’d say to me sometimes, ‘I must do something with those photographs,'” Libby told me, which makes it a special delight to publish Tony Hall’s pictures
Click this picture to enlarge and see the reflection of Tony & Libby Hall in the window of J. Barker.
Children with their bonfire for Guy Fawkes
In the Hackney Rd
“I love the way these women are looking at Tony in this picture, they’re looking at him with such trust – it’s the way he’s made them feel. He would have been in his early thirties then.”
On the Regent’s Canal near Grove Rd
On Globe Rd
In Old Montague St
In Old Montague St
In Club Row Market
On the Roman Rd
In Ridley Rd Market
In Ridley Rd Market
In Artillery Lane, Spitalfields
Tony & Libby Hall in Cheshire St
Photographs copyright © Libby Hall
Images Courtesy of the Tony Hall Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute
Libby Hall & I would be delighted if any readers can assist in identifying the locations and subjects of Tony Hall’s photographs.
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A New Tombstone For William Blake
Today is the one-hundred-and-ninety-first anniversary of William Blake’s death on 12th August 1827 and this afternoon at three o’clock a new tombstone will be unveiled in Bunhill Fields in City Rd, marking his last resting place. All are welcome to attend this free event which has been organised by the Blake Society.
For many years, a tombstone commemorating William and Catherine Blake with the phrase ‘near by lie the remains’ has stood in the burial ground but this new stone marks the exact spot of his interment. The slab is incised by Lida Cardozo with Blake’s text: ‘I give you the end of a golden string / Only wind it into a ball / It will lead you in at Heavens gate / Built in Jerusalems wall.’
At the unveiling, Philip Pullman and Rowan Williams will speak and a newly commissioned choral work will be performed. Guests will be invited to place one of one-hundred-and-ninety-one candles around the grave, commemorating the years since Blake’s death.
Click here to read about how the exact location of William Blake’s grave was established
“He who binds himself to a Joy, Does the winged life destroy. He who kisses the Joy as it flies, Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.”
Robson Cezar, King of the Bottletops‘ tribute to William Blake in Bunhill Fields
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In The Company Of Mr Pussy
With your help, I am producing a handsome collection of stories of my old cat, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY, A Memoir Of A Favourite Cat to be published by Spitalfields Life Books on 20th September. Below you can read an excerpt.
Support publication by preordering THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY and you will receive a signed copy when the book is published.
Click here to preorder your copy
Unless I am out on the streets pursuing the subjects of my interviews, I spend most days of the week alone in the house with my old cat, Mr Pussy. When I am sitting writing, he likes to doze and thus offers undemanding company, savouring the quietude that reigns while I am composing my sentences. If I am working in bed, he will curl up on the covers so that I can just feel his weight pressing against my leg. If I am writing at my desk, he will perch upon an old stool with a seat woven of straw, attendant like a loyal secretary. If I am sitting beside the stove for warmth late at night, he will stretch out upon the bare floor to his greatest extent, until he resembles an animal skin rug.
A modest creature, he draws pleasure from my company and I am always flattered that he seeks me out to rest nearby. He does not draw attention to himself – just the occasional shrill exclamation upon entering the house to announce his return and sometimes a gentle tap of the paw upon my leg, as a reminder, should I neglect to fill his dish. At mealtimes, he commonly positions himself at my feet as I settle in the wing chair to eat my dinner, tracing the air with his nose to ascertain the menu. Yet he is rarely insistent and, if I grant him a morsel or permit him to lick the plate, he will do no more than taste, since he is curious rather than greedy and his concern is not to satiate his appetite but to feel included.
Even if others are around, it is in the nature of writing that it is a solitary activity. A connoisseur of stillness and a creature of tact, Mr Pussy understands this instinctively. He lounges in a silent reverie while I am working, before falling asleep and snuffling quietly to himself. During these long afternoons of contemplation, if I should lose concentration upon the task in hand, my thoughts often turn to my mother and how the pattern of my day has come to reflect hers. Once she had finished the housework, she delighted to sit for hours reading a novel just as I settle down to write once the day’s errands are accomplished – each of us enjoying the company of a cat.
I remember vividly how, when she was dying, she sought to make a reckoning of her life. My mother was insistent that I must have no doubt of her love for me and of my father, forgiving his volatile nature that had coloured the happiness of their marriage. “He couldn’t help it,” she admitted to me with a distracted frown. And then, quite unexpectedly, referring to the grey tabby that was my childhood pet, she said, “And the cat, she helped me, she was always with me.” In that moment, I recalled how the creature followed her around each day as she did the housework which caused her such anxiety and I remembered how, returning from school, I found her once cradling it as she wept for her loneliness. When the beloved animal expired, she vowed never to have another, such was the depth of her attachment.
Yet, after my father died, I acquired a black kitten in Mile End and presented it to her as a distraction from her grief. And thus, in my mother’s company, Mr Pussy grew accustomed to the afternoon routine, the empty house and the presence of one silently absorbed. Thus, when the cat and I are all alone now in the stillness of the middle of the day, it is as if time stops. My mother’s placid nature moulded his behaviour and, years after she died, his habits are the same. Mr Pussy seeks me out each afternoon to share the passage of the hours before nightfall and I acquiesce, thankful for the peace that prevails in his company.
With your help, I am producing a handsome collection of stories of my old cat, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY, A Memoir Of A Favourite Cat to be published by Spitalfields Life Books on 20th September.
Support publication by preordering THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY and you will receive a signed and inscribed copy when the book is published.
In Old Holborn
Holborn Bars
Even before I knew Holborn, I knew Old Holborn from the drawing of half-timbered houses upon the tobacco tins in which my father used to store his rusty nails. These days, I walk through Holborn once a week on my way between Spitalfields and the West End, and I always cast my eyes up in wonder at this familiar fragment of old London.
Yet, apart from Leather Lane and the International Magic Shop on Clerkenwell Rd, I rarely have reason to pause in Holborn. It is a mysterious, implacable district of offices, administrative headquarters and professional institutions that you might never visit, unless you have business with a lawyer, or seek a magic trick or a diamond ring. So I resolved to wander in Holborn with my camera and present you with some of the under-appreciated sights to be discovered there.
Crossing the bed of the Fleet River at Holborn Viaduct, I took a detour into Shoe Lane. A curious ravine of a street traversed by a bridge and overshadowed between tall edifices, where the cycle-taxis have their garage in the cavernous vaults receding deep into the brick wall. John Stow attributed the name of Holborn to the ‘Old Bourne’ or stream that ran through this narrow valley into the Fleet here and, even today, it is not hard to envisage Shoe Lane with a river flowing through.
Up above sits Christopher Wren’s St Andrew’s, Holborn, that was founded upon the bank of the Fleet and stood opposite the entrance to the Bishop of Ely’s London residence, latterly refashioned as Christopher Hatton’s mansion. A stone mitre upon the front of the Mitre Tavern in Hatton Garden, dated 1546, is the most visible reminder of the former medieval palace that existed here, of which the thirteenth century Church of St Etheldreda’s in Ely Place was formerly the chapel. It presents a modest frontage to the street, but you enter through a stone passage way and climb a staircase to discover an unexpectedly large church where richly-coloured stained glass glows in the liturgical gloom.
Outside in Ely Place, inebriate lawyers in well-cut suits knocked upon a wooden door in a blank wall at the end of the street and brayed in delight to be admitted by this secret entrance to Bleeding Heart Yard, where they might discreetly pass the afternoon in further indulgence. Barely a hundred yards away across Hatton Garden where wistful loners eyed engagement rings, Leather Lane Market was winding down. The line at Boom Burger was petering out and the shoe seller was resting his feet, while the cheap dresses and imported fancy goods were packed away for another day.
Just across the road, both Staple Inn and Gray’s Inn offer a respite from the clamour of Holborn, with magnificent tranquil squares and well-kept gardens, where they were already raking leaves from immaculate lawns yesterday. But the casual visitor may not relax within these precincts and, when the Gray’s Inn Garden shuts at two-thirty precisely, you are reminded that your presence is that of an interloper, at the gracious discretion of the residents of these grand old buildings.
Beyond lies Red Lion Sq, laid out in 1684 by the notorious Nicholas Barbon who, at the same time, was putting up cheap speculative housing in Spitalfields and outpaced the rapacious developers of our own day by commencing construction in disregard of any restriction. Quiet benches and a tea stall in this leafy yet amiably scruffy square offer an ideal place to contemplate the afternoon’s stroll.
Then you join the crowds milling outside Holborn tube station, which is situated at the centre of a such a chaotic series of junctions, it prompted Virginia Woolf to suggest that only the condition of marriage has more turnings than are to be found in Holborn.
The One Tun in Saffron Hill. reputed to be the origin of the Three Tuns in ‘Oliver Twist’
In Shoe Lane
St Andrew Holborn seen from Shoe Lane
On Holborn Viaduct
Christopher Wren’s St Andrew Holborn
In St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place
Staircase at St Etheldreda’s
The Mitre, Hatton Garden
Charity School of 1696 In Hatton Garden by Christopher Wren
Choosing a ring in Hatton Garden
In Leather Lane
Seeking sustenance in Leather Lane
Shoe Seller, Leather Lane
Barber in Lamb’s Conduit Passage
Staple Inn, 1900
In Staple Inn
In Staple Inn
In Gray’s Inn
In Gray’s Inn Gardens
In Gray’s Inn
Chaos at Holborn Station
Rush hour at Holborn Station
Fusiliers memorial in High Holborn
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