The Lost Squares Of Stepney
William Palin evokes the lost glories of two of the East End’s forgotten architectural wonders, Wellclose Sq and Swedenborg Sq.
In Wellclose Sq – “This unfortunate and ignored locality”
“The devastation of the square was pitiful to see. I only saw one man all the time I paced the square, and he had one foot in the grave. The April evening was chill and the sky overcast, but a blackbird warbled in the plane trees, introducing impromptu variations and evidently trying to keep his courage up. The half dozen Georgian terraced houses left on the north side looked indescribably weary and exhausted, their bricks crumbling and their stucco returning to sand. Grass was coming up on the pavement.”
When Geoffrey Fletcher ventured off Cable St into Wellclose Sq in the spring of 1968, he stumbled upon an eerie scene. Earmarked for redevelopment and languishing under a Compulsory Purchase Order, the entire square – the oldest and most historically important in East London – was about to disappear. Its destruction, together with Swedenborg (originally Princes) Sq, a smaller neighbour to the east, erased two and a half centuries of history and ripped the heart out of this remarkable enclave of forgotten London.
The growth of the eastern suburb of London during the seventeenth century was a phenomenon. Even before the development boom which followed the Great Fire, busy hamlets had grown up outside the City’s eastern boundary and along the northern banks of the Thames where thriving communities serviced, and profited from, growing river trade.
Detail of John Rocque’s Map of London (1746) showing Wellclose Sq and Princes Sq.
One speculator who recognised the potential for profit east of the City was the notorious Nicholas Barbon who is said to have laid out a staggering £200,000 in building in London after the Great Fire. In 1682, Barbon leased the Liberty of Wellclose (or Well Close) – a parcel of land north of Wapping – from the Crown. Barbon intended his new development on the Wellclose to appeal to the well-to-do members of the East End’s maritime community. Following the Great Fire, the riverside neighbourhoods had been swelled by the influx of new immigrants profiting from the rebuilding of the city.
The huge demand for timber created a lucrative trade for the Scandinavians, and the Norwegians (Danish subjects until 1814) were said to have “warmed them selves comfortably by the Fire of London.” Anglo-Danish connections had been strengthened by the marriage in 1683 of Princess Anne (later Queen Anne) to Prince Georg of Denmark and it was Georg’s father, King Christian V, who supplied the most of the funds for the construction of the new Danish Church at Wellclose Sq.
Danish-Norwegian Church in Wellclose Sq engraved by Johannes Kip in 1796.
The architect was the Danish sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber. Cibber (the son of the King of Denmark’s cabinet-maker) had trained in Italy and had worked for Wren at St Paul’s. He is perhaps best known for his figures of ‘Raving’ and ‘Melancholy Madness’ made for the entrance to Bethlehem Hospital. Cibber’s new Danish Church at Wellclose Sq was completed in 1696. It was baroque in style, in the manner of Wren’s City churches and, its interior was distinguished by a vaulted ceiling with a distinctive circular central boss fringed with ornament.
The Old Court House, Wellclose Sq (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
A number of the original seventeenth-century houses on the south side of the square survived until the nineteen sixties and photographs show them to be of good quality, with well-proportioned panelled rooms, and staircases with twisted balusters. Yet, other than the church, the most important and beautiful building in the square was the Old Court House, on the corner of Neptune St, built after 1687 as the seat of Justice for the four Tower Liberties. Its fine staircase and rooms of bolection panelling, identify it as part of Barbon’s first development. One of the prison cells from the building was later re-assembled and is now on display at the Museum of London.
The former Danish Embassy, c.1930. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Other buildings of note in the square included Nos 20 & 21 on the west side which once housed the Danish Embassy. The two charming sculpted reliefs featuring putti practising the arts and sciences were removed to the Norwegian Embassy in Belgravia in the nineteen sixties. Also on the west side, stood two extraordinary relics of eighteenth-century maritime London. At the corner of Stable Yard was No.26, a timber framed weather-boarded house, complete with Venetian window, and, in the yard behind, there was a five-bay boarded house which in appearance recalled a North American East Coast colonial mansion.
At the corner of Stable Yard, Wellclose Sq. (London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, Bishopsgate Institute)
By the early nineteenth-century, the square was losing its respectability as a consequence of its proximity to the docks and the gradual industrialisation of the East End. The enclosure of the docks meant that seamen could leave ship during the unloading and loading of cargo. “Houses of ill-fame are swarming,” complained a contemporary Wesleyan missionary, “the neighbourhood teems with lazy, idle, drunken lustful men, and degraded, brutalised hell-branded women, some alas! girls in their early teens.”
As the numbers of lodging houses, pawn shops, pubs, and music halls multiplied, so did the sugar refineries. These refineries (or ‘bakeries’) had first appeared in the area in the seventeen-sixties. Manned mainly by poor German immigrants and belching sickly fumes into air, they did not help to improve the desirability of the neighbourhood. By the eighteen-fifties, there were at least five refineries operating around the square.
In 1816, the church was handed to trustees for charitable uses in aid of Danish and Norwegian seamen in London and, in 1856, the church became a mission under the control of St George-in-the-East only to be demolished and replaced by the new St Paul’s School in 1870.
The early success of Wellclose Sq inspired another Scandinavian community to undertake a similar development. Princes Sq (renamed Swedenborg Sq in 1938 after Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was interred there in 1772) was laid out in the seventeen-twenties by the Swedish community. It featured a plainer version of the Danish church, also positioned at the centre of the square inside a railed burial enclosure with high gates.
The Swedish Lutheran Church in Swedenborg Sq in December 1908. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
The Swedish congregation abandoned the building in 1911, moving west to Harcourt St in Marylebone, and the church, stripped and empty, deteriorated quickly. Photographs from 1919 show the windows broken and the railings torn down. Finally, in 1923, the site was purchased by the council, cleared, and replaced by a children’s playground. The east, west and south sides of the square had gone up in the seventeen-twenties and the north side a century later. Like Wellclose Sq, the south side contained some larger houses and most of these survived until the nineteen sixties.
South side of Swedenborg Sq, 1945. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
The seventeen-twenties terrace on the west side of the square was particularly fine, with handsome Doric doorcases and high basements. After World War II, the square was surveyed by the borough architect who concluded that the houses were in good order “excepting for want of attention due to the war” and “worthy of preservation on architectural grounds.” Subsequent repair work was carried out and a comparison of the photographs taken in 1945 with those of the late fifties and early sixties show that many of the buildings have been carefully rehabilitated.
Houses on the west side of Swedenborg Sq in 1945. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Houses in Swenborg Sq after Post-War repair in 1961. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
This revival was short-lived however. In March 1959, a chilling memo from the LCC Valuer recorded that seventeen Grade II and twelve Grade III buildings in the square have been declared a “SLUM.” This change in the way the buildings were perceived must be seen against a background of political change and pressure for removal of the older London neighbourhoods in favour of modern, planned estates. A Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) is set in motion and, at an inquiry in 1961, the Inspector concluded that the buildings were not capable of preservation.
Within a decade Swedenborg Sq had disappeared completely beneath the Swedenborg Gardens and St Georges Housing Estate – the area was simply erased from history. At Wellclose Sq, the houses came down too but the street pattern was retained, creating a strange non-place. Forty years on, the south side of the square remains empty and, on the site of the Old Court House, a sad wasteland stretches down to the busy Highway beyond.
Visiting in 1966, with the squares on their last legs, the historian and journalist Ian Nairn, who wrote so perceptively about the “soft-spoken this-is-good-for-you castration of the East End,” summed up the terrible plight of these two architectural jewels.
“Embedded in it (Cable St) are the hopeless fragments of two once splendid squares, Wellclose and Swedenborg, built for the shipmasters of Wapping when London began to move east. Those who could care about the buildings don’t care about the people, those who care about the people regard the decrepit buildings rather as John Knox regarded women: unforgivable blindness. Nobody cares enough, and the whole place will soon be a memory.”
Danish and Norwegian Church in Wellclose Sq, c.1845, by unknown artist.
Liberties of the Tower 1720, including Marine Sq, Spittle Fields and Little Minories.
Interior of the Danish-Norwegian church engraved by Kip in 1796.
Geoffrey Fletcher’s drawing of Wellclose Sq, 1968.
Wellclose Sq looking east from the steps of No.5 (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Wellclose Sq, south side, 1961. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Old Court House, view to first floor landing showing the fine Barbon staircase, 1911 (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Watch House, Wellclose Sq, 1935. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Interior of Swedish church, 1908. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Swedish church, 1919. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
Swedenborg Sq, south side looking east, 1921 (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
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In the Debtors’ Cell, Wellclose Sq
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My Coin Collection
Around twenty years ago, I bought this coin from a street trader at the time of the excavation of the Roman cemetery in Spitalfields. In 1576, John Stow wrote about the Roman coins that were dug up here in Spitalfields and I suspect mine came from the same source. A visit to the British Museum confirmed that the coin had been minted in London and the piercing was done in the Roman era when it was the custom to wear coins as amulets. So somebody wore this coin in London all those centuries ago and today I wear it on a string around my neck to give me a sense of perspective.
As you can see, my collection has grown as I have discovered that coin collectors are eager to dispose of pierced coins at low prices and I have taken on the responsibility of wearing them on behalf of their previous owners. It was only when the string broke in Princelet St one dark night in the rain and I found myself scrabbling in the gutter to retrieve them all that I realised how much they meant to me.
Coin of the Emperor Arcadius minted in London
Figure of Minerva upon the reverse
Silver sixpence minted at the Tower of London, 1569
Head of Queen Elizabeth and Tudor rose
Silver sixpence minted at the Tower of London, 1602
Head of Elizabeth
Silver sixpence, 1676
Head of Charles II
Farthing, 1749
Head of George II
Silver sixpence, 1758
Head of George II
Young Queen Victoria
Half Farthing, 1844
Head of Queen Victoria
Silver sixpence, 1896
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Colin Thubron Remembers Gillian Tindall
This is the eulogy for writer and historian Gillian Tindall by travel writer Colin Thubron which he read at her memorial gathering held at Cecil Sharp House in Regent’s Park on Friday last. Gillian died aged eighty-seven on 1st October and we are proud to have published her final work Journal of a Man Unknown. She was a Contributing Writer to Spitalfields Life for many years.
Gillian Tindall used to say with some amusement that her literary life was split into different regions. Whereas in England she was known for her urban studies such as The Fields Beneath or The House by the Thames, in France she was recognised as the author of Celestine, and in India as the writer of Bombay: City of Gold. In fact her Indian obituary recorded that ‘she had a huge impact on Indian readers and writers, and strongly influenced Mumbai’s urban heritage movement.’ Whereas a recent article in the journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects writes that her work on London ‘helped forge a way of seeing cities and places that is integral to most architects’ education’.
While hallmark interests run through all Gillian’s work, its range across genres is extraordinary. Beside those books of so-called micro-history for which she is celebrated, she wrote nine distinguished novels – Fly Away Home won the Somerset Maugham Award – three collections of short stories, biographies of George Gissing and of Wenceslaus Holler, (whose etchings are a crucial guide to seventeenth century London), an appreciation of Rosamund Lehmann, radio plays, a study of London’s future Elizabeth Line, and a poignant reflection, partly autobiographical, on the memories evoked by leftover objects: The Pulse Glass, and the Beat of Other Hearts.
She also wrote an affecting survey called Countries of the Mind: the Meaning of Place to Writers. And place – the observation of a street, a house, even of chance artefacts – was the wellspring of her non-fiction. ‘Houses and barns,’ she wrote, ‘gate posts, hedgerows, field slopes and the lie of paths, persist and persist, even when people that created them are earth themselves’. In effect cities and buildings become, in her work, a palimpsest, in which the past lingers beneath the surface of things, and continues to shape them.
We think not only of The Fields Beneath but of The House by the Thames, which breathes life into forgotten individuals, from traders in coal and iron to a motley middle class, over more than four centuries. Of Three Houses, Many Lives, with their changing medley of uses: a girls’ boarding school, a vicarage, a lorry drivers’ drinking club; and of her Footsteps in Paris which illuminates the Latin Quarter through six past, transient inhabitants, including, obliquely, herself.
Memory, in Gillian’s work, seems almost to be embodied in the buildings and objects that elicit it. In her novels, too, the past presses up beneath the present, but here as a corrective to the illusions or evasions of the living. In her novel Spirit Weddings the past reasserts itself with shocking revelations. The protagonists of two other novels, Give Them all my Love and To the City become overwhelmed by memories that fracture their lives. And Gillian’s sixth novel Looking Forword might be read as a reflection on memory itself, and on loss.
France, in whose heartland in the Indre she and her husband bought a village house, was an abiding love. ‘In my teens,’ she wrote, ‘my personal England seemed a dark, ramshackle, threatening place… Lacking any internalised Paradise derived from my actual childhood, I have apparently worked in a back-to-front manner from my youthful attachment to French urban life and culture, accreting round myself the compost of an older France….In central France, I have found the mythic house of childhood simplicity.’
It was here, in an abandoned home near her own, that she came by chance on a sheaf of letters addressed in the mid-nineteenth century by five different suitors to the local innkeeper’s daughter, and from which, with Gillian’s intimate knowledge of French rural history, she was able to resurrect a world on the brink of change in her celebrated Celestine. ‘A narrative of enigmatic beauty,’ wrote the poet W.S.Merwin in the New York Times, ‘a glimpse of time and mortality.’
It was typical of Gillian that the lives she resurrected were not those of the so-called great but of the overlooked and unremembered, who seem, in her work, to stand in for the great mass of those forgotten, who have nevertheless shaped our own world. For instance, her The Journey of Martin Nadaud, based on unpublished papers, traces the career of a nineteenth-century French stone mason. Her last novel, published earlier this month, is the vividly imagined life-story of a Sussex-born ironmonger, Journal of a Man Unknown. In The Pulse Glass she remarks that in the recreating of family trees those who don’t procreate are sidelined, and she affectionately resurrects, from a wide and convoluted family history, a distant relative, a benign Aunt Bess, who died almost two centuries ago.
Gillian’s research was meticulous, excited and focused, and crucially productive of the telling detail and anecdote. Besides the regular volumes of history and sociology, the archives of her choice were multiple: town and parish records, local newspapers, chance letters, the memories of the old. ‘To sit all day in a newspaper library’ she wrote, ‘with a succession of leather-bound broadsheet volumes before you, turning pages through the weeks, months and years, is to feel both the copious existence of daily life and its transience…. You could write a complete social history of the twentieth century simply out of the pages of the Hornsey Journal’.
When she and her husband had finally to leave their beloved house in France, she compiled, in French, a history of its previous owners – poor farmers, for the most part – which she was able to give to people in parting. ‘Both I and those who received my account’, she wrote, ‘were pleased that another handful of such people had been brought back from the quiet darkness of forgetting.’
Gillian’s was a richly distinctive mind and voice, and in her conviction that the death of the past impoverishes the present, she created books that will surely stand the test of time.
But typically she was conscious of the vulnerability of all communication. ‘No one has yet invented a better storage and retrieval system than the book,’ she wrote. ‘Our current digital methods of record are, by comparison, laughably ephemeral, vulnerable to time, error and the obsolescence of technology…. even now wiping out vast potential areas of paper record that have been the staple of research for centuries. Time will show,’ she continued, ‘whether this change is just another version of the casually brutal but necessary wastage and winnowing that have always occurred….’ But ‘I don’t somehow think that in thirteen centuries’ time some future archivist will be lovingly cradling a preserved hard disc in his hand and produce the means to decode its secrets.’
But we may be confident that, in whatever form it takes, Gillian’s own work, with its rare combination of scholarly rigour and imaginative sympathy, will endure into the uncertain future.
Click here to order a copy of Journal of a Man Unknown
Gustave Doré’s East End
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I have been thinking about Gustave Doré lately, as the freezing miasma of winter descends upon the city and I struggle to negotiate the excited crowds thronging in the busy streets. Gazing upon the teeming masses in the flickering half-light outside Liverpool St Station, I see his world where deep shadows recede into infinite gloom and I succumb to its terrible beauty.
Doré signed a contract to spend three months in London each year for five years and the completed book of one hundred and eighty engravings with text by Blanchard Jerrold was published in 1872, entitled London – A Pilgrimage. Although he illustrated life in the West End and as well as in the East End, it is Doré’s images of the East End that have always drawn the most attention with their overwhelming sense of diabolic horror and epic drama, in which his figures drift like spectres coalesced from the ether.
In Bishopsgate
In Wentworth St, Spitalfields
Riverside St
In Bluegate Fields
A City Thoroughfare
Inside the Docks
In Houndsditch
Turn Him Out, Ratcliff
Warehousing in the City
Billingsgate Early Morning
Off Billingsgate
Refuge – Applying For Admittance
Brewer’s Men
Hay Boats On The Thames
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Charles W Cushman’s London
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American Photographer Charles Weaver Cushman (1896-1972) visited London only a couple of times and yet, alongside shots of landmarks such as Big Ben & Trafalgar Sq, he recorded these rare and unexpected images of markets and street vendors in Kodachrome. He bequeathed over 14,000 of his images to Indiana University, where the entire range of his work may be explored in the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection.
Aldgate huckster, April 30th 1961
Bell Lane, April 30th 1961
Petticoat Lane, April 30th 1961
Petticoat Lane, April 30th 1961
Petticoat Lane, April 30th 1961
New Goulston St, April 30th 1961
At St Botolph’s Bishopsgate, April 30th 1961
Liverpool St Station, June 26th 1960
Liverpool St Station, Sunday May 30th 1965
Liverpool St Station, Sunday May 30th 1965
Finsbury Sq, May 30th 1965
St Giles Cripplegate, June 26th 1960
Moorgate, April 30th 1961
Sunday morning on London Bridge, June 26th 1960
Gas lamp cleaners London Bridge, May 29th 1965
Looking east from London Bridge, May 29th 1965
Smithfield Market, May 2nd 1961
Leather Lane, April 28th 1961
Leather Lane, April 28th 1961
Leather Lane, April 28th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Buskers, Leicester Sq, May 14th 1961
St. Martin in the Fields, Trafalgar Sq, June 19th 1960
Photographs copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University
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George Cruikshank’s London In Winter
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As the temperatures plunge this week, there will be no denying that winter has its grip upon London – which offers the ideal premise to look back at winters long ago in the capital, as witnessed by George Cruikshank in the LONDON ALMANAC published between 1835 & 1838 (Click on any of these images to enlarge)
Everybody freezes
Penny for the guy!
St Cecilia’s Day
Lord Mayor’s Show
Ice skating on the Serpentine
Christmas Eve
Christmas Ball
Christmas Dinner
Frost Fair on the Thames
January – New Year’s bills arrive
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At Stationers’ Hall
Meet me on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral at Christmas for a walking tour of storytelling and sightseeing through the alleys and byways of the Square Mile to London Bridge in search of the wonders and wickedness of the City of London. CLICK HERE TO BOOK
‘The Word of the Lord Endures Forever’
Next time you walk up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul’s, turn left down the narrow passage just beyond the church of St Martin Within Ludgate and you will find yourself in a quiet courtyard where Stationers’ Hall has stood since the sixteen-seventies.
For centuries, this whole district was the heart of the printing and publishing, with publishers lining Ludgate Hill, St Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row, while newspapers operated from Fleet St. Today, only Stationers’ Hall and St Bride Printing Library, down behind Ludgate Circus, remain as evidence of this lost endeavour that once flourished here.
Yet the Stationers’ Company was founded in 1403, predating printing. At first it was a guild of scriveners, illuminators, bookbinders, booksellers and suppliers of parchment, ink and paper. Even the term ‘stationer’ originates here with the stalls in St Paul’s Churchyard where they traded, which were immovable – in other words, ‘stationary’ stalls selling ‘stationery.’
No-one whose life is bound up with writing and words can fail to be touched by a visit to Stationers’ Hall. From 1557, when Mary Tudor granted the Stationers their Charter and for the next three hundred years, members had the monopoly upon publishing and once one member had published a text no-one else could publish it, thus the phrase ‘Entered at Stationers’ Hall’ became a guarantee of copyright.
Built in the decade following the Fire of London, the Great Hall was panelled by Stephen College ‘the protestant joiner’ at price of £300 in 1674. In spite of damage in the London Blitz and extensive alterations to other buildings, this central space retains its integrity as an historic interior. At one end, an ornate Victorian window shows William Caxton presenting his printing to Edward IV while an intricate and darkly detailed wooden Restoration screen faces it from the other. Wooden cases display ancient plate, colourful banners hang overhead, ranks of serried crests line the walls, stained glass panels of Shakespeare and Tyndale filter daylight while – all around – books are to be spied, carved into the architectural design.
A hidden enclave cloistered from the hubbub of the modern City, where illustrious portraits of former gentlemen publishers – including Samuel Richardson – peer down silently at you from the walls, Stationers’ Hall quietly overwhelms you with the history and origins of print in London through six centuries.
The Stock Room
The Stock Room c. 1910
The Stock Room door, c.1910
Panel of Stationers that became Lord Mayor includes JJ Baddeley, 1921
The Great Hall, where Purcell’s Hymn to St Cecilia was first performed in 1692
The Great Hall c. 1910
Stained glass window of 1888 showing Caxton presenting his printing to Edward IV
The vestibule to Great Hall
The Stationers’ Garden
The Court Room with a painting by Benjamin West
Looking out from the Court Room to the garden with the Master’s chair on the right
The Court Room
The Court Room, c 1910
Exterior of Stationer’s Hall, c. 1910
Archive photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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