A Walk With Mick Taylor
Today I remember a walk with my pal Mick Taylor who died on Friday at St Joseph’s Hospice
Almost every day, I exchanged greetings with Mick Taylor who had been sitting outside the Beigel Bakery – off and on – for nearly fifty years. Over all that time, Mick became famous for his personal style, emerging as a star player in the street life that he loved so much, celebrated as the Sartorialist of Brick Lane.
During a recent spell of fine weather – that Mick termed “a cockney summer” – we had been discussing taking a stroll together, and over two days, Mick and I enjoyed a ramble round those streets which held most meaning for him. Coming directly to the top of Brick Lane by bus each day, it was something of an adventure for Mick to walk south down the Lane to the familiar places of long ago. As he confessed to me, “When you have known an area so long, you begin to forget where you are.”
One afternoon, leaving the environs of the Beigel Bakery which was Mick’s customary habitat and spiritual home, we turned left just before the railway bridge into Grimsby St where the East London Line bridge of steel girders replaced the nineteenth century railway arches a few years ago. “You could find old things in the street and bring them down here and sell them, and people would always buy them and that way you were never without anything.” Mick assured me, casting his eyes affectionately over this former source of livelihood and screwing up his eyes in bewilderment as if somehow he could conjure it back into existence by focussing his attention. “They used to call me Mick the Finder.” he said, as we walked on.
Round the corner in Cheshire St, we paused outside the squat brick building that is Blackman’s, where the redoubtable Lee Knight sold shoes for years at rock bottom prices in a business continued now by his son Phil. This was a location of pleasure for Mick. He told me his beloved Gran bought him the pair of Italian pointed black shoes with cuban heels here, that he wanted for his seventh birthday, at a cost of two pounds, two shillings and sixpence. “My mother had twelve sons and two daughters, she didn’t have time to take care of us, she was too busy trying to find a husband,” he revealed, raising his eyebrows humorously, as partial explanation of why he came to be brought up by his grandparents.
Next day, we set out in the morning to venture further, walking down to the Truman Brewery where Mick worked as Drayman in 1963. “At half past seven in the morning it was busy here,” he recalled, rolling his eyes to evoke the chaotic drama as we passed the old iron gates. We turned the corner into Dray Walk where Mick arrived for work each day at quarter to seven. “You saw all the lorries backed up here,” he said gesturing to the invisible line of vehicles that once occupied the space where the shops are now,“We loaded them with barrels, hogsheads, firkins and crates.”
Yet before he started work Mick had to clock in and enjoy the two or three pints of maturing brown ale with his workmates, as was the custom in the brewery. “All the time I worked here I never saw any of the workers drunk,” Mick insisted,“You couldn’t afford to be drunk. You had to take it easy, because it was dangerous manhandling the kegs.” The foremen sent out the lorries making deliveries around London and by eleven o’ clock in the morning the draymen were finished. “We all met in the car park of the Ace Cafe on the North Circular. I’d be sat on the back of the lorry drinking pints from the keg.” Mick admitted to me with a delighted grin, “You lay the keg on its side and eased in the pointed handle of a file, and the beer poured out.”
“You had poor people here then, in those days most people wanted to get out of here,” he whispered to me as we moved on, pushing our way through the fashionable crowd,“Funny old world we live in isn’t it?” Glancing around conspiratorially as we passed the Spitalfields Market, “The villains used to come down here, and it wasn’t to buy fruit & vegetables,” he confided,“They used to do their business over a cup of tea and a sandwich, sit in a cafe and have a bit of a firm. They wore traditional gear, coat and scarf and a cheese cutter, and no-one paid any attention.”
Passing Burger King in Whitechapel High St, site of the legendary Blooms Restaurant, we arrived at the climax of our journey, Albert’s men’s clothing shop, still with its fascia of marble and red neon gothic lettering. A cut-price joint today, yet still charismatic for Mick as the place where he first cultivated his sartorial elegance. “I used to come down here when I had a bit of money, on Thursdays at three or four after I got paid. It was like going to the West End, I felt like I was famous.” he eulogised, “They sold cashmere suits and silk shirts. In those days, you had a lot of villains and benders came here, smart people. They all showed respect for each other.”
Walking back up the Lane towards the Beigel Bakery, Mick ruminated over the journey, thinking out loud, “It’s good that the young people are coming in and bringing money,” he suggested to me, “but I don’t think they care very much about the people who are here, they’re a bit selfish in that way.” And then he qualified the thought quickly, lest I think him ungenerous “People always treat me with respect and say nice things, they’re polite to me,” he confirmed with a weary smile. Both our energies were flagging now after this emotional odyssey through space and time, and we made for the nearest cafe to seek a perspective. “I haven’t had a walk like that in a long while, I think it’s done me good,” Mick concluded thoughtfully as we sat down together.
In his usual spot outside Brick Lane Beigel Bakery.
In Grimsby St – “You could find old things in the street and bring them down here and sell them, and people would always buy them and that way you were never without anything.”
At Blackman’s, Cheshire St – where Mick’s Gran bought him the pair of Italian pointed black shoes with Cuban heels that he wanted for his seventh birthday, at a cost of two pounds, two shillings and sixpence.
At Dray Walk, Truman Brewery – the doorway where Mick clocked in each morning and enjoyed two or three pints of maturing brown ale with his workmates at eight in the morning before commencing work.
At Albert’s, 88 Whitechapel High St – “I used to come down here when I had a bit of money, on Thursdays at three or four after I got paid. It was like going to the West End, I felt like I was famous.”
Mick Taylor – “You had poor people here then, in those days most people wanted to get out of here.”
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So Long, Mick Taylor
Over the past ten days, I visited Mick Taylor three times at St Joseph’s Hospice and I was off to visit him again this weekend, until I received the news that he died last night. An orphan of the Second World War, he was one of the great East End characters and Spitalfields will be the less for his passing.
Mick Taylor (1945-2017)
It was at the end of 2009 that I first interviewed Mick Taylor, known as the Sartorialist of Brick Lane, who spent half a century standing outside the Beigel Bakery and became renowned for his astonishing outfits. One Easter Sunday we sat and drank tea together on Brick Lane, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon and watching the passing show, while Mick spoke about his life’s journey that brought him there.
“If you come down here to Brick Lane somebody always helps you out with a sandwich or something. Sometimes I come here without a penny in my pocket but I get a cup of tea. All it takes is to ask nicely and people will help you out. People want to sell things and I tell them where they can sell it. Knowing how to make a shilling, that’s what it’s all about and I’ve sold anything you care to mention over the years here.
I was a war child, I had no father but I had a mother. On 9th November 1945, I was born in my grandmother’s bed in Maclaren St, Hackney. My mother couldn’t afford to keep me so my grandmother and grandfather, Florence and George Taylor brought me up. I never had anything new, only secondhand things, but they brought me up well. My grandfather was a lovely man, he never hit me. He only had one eye, he was blinded in World War I, and he worked on the barges on the River Lea. My grandmother used to pawn his suit every Monday, buy veg on Tuesday, and get it back again on Thursday when he got paid, so he could wear it at the weekend. She taught me how to cook, and I still cook dinner every Sunday.
One day, when I worked for Truman’s, I got up at seven thirty in the morning and my grandmother had a heart attack and died in front of me. I went to work but I couldn’t work because my mind was falling to bits. So I told the foreman, and then I went wandering all over the place for four days until the police picked me up and took me to Hackney Hospital and, while I was under observation, I cut my wrists. I wanted to die because my grandmother was dead.
The woman in the next bed there was Frances Shea, Reggie Kray’s wife, she had mental problems. It sent her a little crazy being married to one of the Krays, but she was a lovely girl. I dressed up smart for her. Sixteen weeks we were together, she needed a bit of company and I took care of her. Then, when they sent her home, she died at once of an overdose but I don’t believe it. I loved her, and she cured me of the loss of my grandmother.
After that, I worked for the council and I did various jobs, I started my life all over again. I’ve been married a couple of times. I’ve lived my life, I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve had some good times. I’ve two sons but I don’t know where they are. Me and their mother divorced and I’ve never seen them again.
I never had much money but I’ve always made myself smart with a few quid and a suit and shirt – buying the right clothes, the right colour, the right cut. I used to go to Albert’s in Whitechapel and pay seventy five pounds for a pair of shoes, a suit, and a shirt. For my birthday, when I was seven years old, I came down with my grandmother to buy Italian shoes in Cheshire St for two pounds, two shillings and sixpence – pointed black shoes with Cuban heels. I already knew what I wanted at seven years old – you’re born with it, your style.”
Sporting his cap at a calculated angle, dressed in his petrol blue slacks, with a singlet, silk scarf and chain, Mick was in his element that day, and even as we spoke, passers-by interrupted to request photographs with him. Like many others, Mick found a sympathetic community on Brick Lane, where he could present himself as he pleased and be celebrated for it. Neither cynical nor sentimental about his past, Mick was able to inhabit his present with equanimity. Once we had finished our cups of tea, the shadows were lengthening, the stalls were packing up and the market crowds were thinning out, so I asked Mick what his plans were for the rest of that day, and he rubbed his hands in hungry anticipation with a gleam of joy in his intense blue eyes.
“I’m going to buy a bit of lamb at the corner shop and boil it up with some potatoes and carrots and a few seasonal things. That’s cockney food – a bit of boiled veg and a bit of a joint and if you’ve got money left, something sweet like a Spotted Dick. I learnt to make it when I worked in a pie shop when I was a child. Whatever pies was left, I always took them home with me.“Give it to the family,” they used to say. That’s the cockney way of life.”
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William Fishman, Historian
Anne Kershen remembers William Fishman (1921-2014), distinguished historian of the East End
William Fishman in Whitechapel
The grandson of Jewish Eastern European immigrants, Bill walked the streets of the East End with his father as a young boy in the twenties and witnessed poverty little different to that of a hundred years before. As Bill described the experience in East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914, he ‘ate, laughed, wept and dreamed dreams with the immigrant poor.’ Seeing his tailor father giving coins to the needy in the street and his rabbi grandfather bringing home hungry strangers, whether Jew or Gentile, to the Friday night dinner table imbued Bill with two life-long guiding principles: compassion and charity – or in the Hebrew, rachamones and tzedakah.
As a teenager in the thirties, Bill was drawn to Labour and then to Communism, which at the time was seen as the only way to oppose men such as Oswald Mosley and Fascism in general. Bill was at Gardner’s Corner in Whitechapel on October 4th 1936, when Mosley attempted to march through the East End and ‘make it his own.’ Later, Bill admitted that, as a teenager, he was not quite sure why he was there, he ‘only knew I had to be.’ Those events of the thirties were to feature powerfully in his teaching, when he became a Professor at Queen Mary College, now Queen Mary University of London.
But the outbreak of the Second World War put Bill’s plans of becoming a teacher on hold. He served with the Essex Regiment in India and it was there he picked up the languages and dialects that he would use to greet South East Asian immigrants in Brick Lane forty years later. For a short while, Bill was seconded to Scotland and a Scottish regiment – the sight of William J. Fishman in a kilt was something to behold.
After demobilisation in 1946, Bill trained as a teacher and at the age of thirty-four became Principal of Bethnal Green Junior Commercial College. The College’s main activity was the provision of evening classes, enabling Bill – the ever hungry historian – to make up the study he had sacrificed at the outbreak of war. He enrolled as a student at the London School of Economics and combined a full-time job with being a full-time student.
A fluent French speaker, Bill was drawn to exploring theories of French anarchism. These studies resulted in his first book, which in subject matter was both geographically and temporally distant from the streets of Spitalfields and Whitechapel that were familiar to him. In The Insurrectionists (1970), he explored the lives and ideologies of French revolutionaries, including Marat and Robespierre, in order to identify their influence on Karl Marx, Lenin and the Russian Revolution. The writing demonstrated the originality, intellectual depth and lyricism that were to mark him out as a prize-winning historian.
Bill’s love of history and equal dislike of bureaucracy led to a Schoolmaster Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford, where he met a number of distinguished historians who stimulated his desire to research the area in which he had grown up, and bring its political and social history to a wider audience.
In 1972, awarded the Barnet Shine Fellowship, Bill was able to leave his college job with its demanding administrative work load and join the newly-formed Politics Department at Queen Mary College. There Bill completed East End Jewish Radicals, with whose gentle anarchist hero, Rudolf Rocker, he felt such empathy. After this, he embarked on other books which would take the study of the East End beyond the realms of academia and into the reach of a general readership, especially The Streets of East London (1979) and East End & Docklands (1980) which combined photography of the past and the present. At this time, Bill become celebrated for his walking tours of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and The Streets of East London included maps so readers could follow in his footsteps.
In his tour de force, East End 1888 (1988) Bill explored in minute detail the events of the decisive year in Victorian England. Poverty, criminality, immigration and overcrowded housing were all part of the East End landscape, but they resonated far beyond and the resolution of the consequent social problems became part of the national political agenda. East End 1888 was intended as a warning that these same issues were not to be ignored a hundred years later. In the words of George Santayana, which Bill quoted in the front of the book, ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ If we look around us today, it appears neither 1888 nor 1988 have been remembered, which makes East End 1888 a book for our time.
Colin Holmes and I have edited a book which celebrates Bill’s work, entitled An East End Legacy, Essays in Memory of William J. Fishman. It comprises a selection of writings which reflect not only the respect and love with which Bill Fishman was held, but also the extent to which his work has spoken to others.
William J. Fishman (Bill to all of us who knew and loved him) was a true child of the East End. Born and raised here, he spent his entire teaching and academic career in the area he captured so brilliantly in his writing. Whilst the sight of him striding down the streets of the East End is no more, his memory and impact live on.
William Fishman (1921- 2014)
Photographs courtesy © Bishopsgate Institute
The Launch Of EAST END VERNACULAR
Join me for the launch of my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow, E3 2SJ, on Tuesday 10th October from 6pm.
Courtesy of Bow Arts, there will be a special opening of their new exhibition THE WORKING ARTIST, The East London Group for Spitalfields Life readers.
At 6:30pm, I will be introducing my new book and then signing copies in the gallery where some of the paintings by Albert Turpin, Elwin Hawthorne, Harold Steggles, Walter Steggles and other East London Group artists featured in EAST END VERNACULAR will be on display. There will be drinks and live music.
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 Gentle Author’s Dead Pubs Crawl
As the darkness closes in, it delights me to go on a dead pubs crawl around Spitalfields to pay my respects at former hostelries and listen for the clinking glasses of the phantom regulars. Although I still mourn the loss of The Gun, I take consolation The Well & Bucket and The Crown & Shuttle have returned to vibrant life in recent years, which permits me to believe there may still be the possibility of life after death for other lost pubs in the neighbourhood.
The Ship & Blue Ball, Boundary Passage, where they planned the Great Train Robbery (1851-1994)
The Frying Pan, Brick Lane (1805-1991)
The Crown, Bethnal Green Rd (1869-1922)
The Britannia, Chilton St (1861-2000)
The Laurel Tree, Brick Lane (1813-1983)
The Well & Bucket, Bethnal Green Rd (1861-1989 & now resurrected)
The Dolphin, Redchurch St (1835-2002)
The Jolly Butchers, Brick Lane (1839- 1987)
Seven Stars, Brick Lane (1711-2002)
The Crown & Shuttle, Shoreditch High St (1861-2001 & now resurrected)
Sir Robert Peel, Bishopsgate Without (1871-1957)
The Queen Victoria, Barnet Grove (1856-1993)
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Remembering Stratford’s Lost Industries
Too often when the story of the Queen Elizabeth Park – site of the 2012 Olympics – is told, the place is referred to as a former ‘wasteland’ prior to the ‘regeneration’ that we see today. Yet the truth is that this was once the location of hundreds of thriving local industries, many established over generations. Most of these premises were compulsorily purchased and demolished by the Olympic Authority, and a great proportion of these businesses closed down with a consequent loss of employment, skills and community, all for the sake of three weeks of sports events.
I have selected this gallery of dignified portraits from DISPERSAL, Picturing urban change in East London by Marion Davies, Juliet Davies & Debra Rapp which is published today, documenting these important industries and asserting the existence of this ‘lost’ manufacturing district in Stratford that has been conveniently marginalised from history in less than a decade.
Engineer Joe Mahari with a stator at Dowding & Mills, an electro-mechanical company founded in 1913 and established in White Post Lane over forty years but closed in Hackney Wick in 2010.
Brian Paverley finishing a stained glass panel at Goddard & Gibbs Studios Ltd, established in 1868. They did work for Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal at St James Palace, moved to Cooks Rd in 2001 but closed down when the Olympics arrived.
Tim Bird at New Image Upholstery. Tim ra the company with his wife Valerie since the mid-nineties but decided not to renew the lease due a rent increase at the time of the Olympics and they closed down the company.
Ahmed Rafik checking glass firing at the kiln at Bowdens Glass Ltd. This company specialising in curved glass had been established on this site since before the 1820s but closed in 2007.
Mandeep Sandhu in the milk store at Capital Dairy. Established in Bishopsgate, the dairy moved to Carpenters Rd in 1993 and then to Barking in 2007.
Paul Alexander adding ink to a printing duct at Club Le Print Ltd. This printing business was established for twenty-three years in King’s Yard but moved out to Thurrock in 2007.
Harry West, rag trade waste and textile merchant, at A&S Trading Company, set up by grandfather in the forties by dismantling Anderson shelters. He moved to Stratford in 2001 and was forced out by the Olympics but now trades from Epping and has weekly market stall in Hackney.
In the cold store at H.Forman & Sons, Salmon Smokers. Formans were first established in the East End in 1905. They moved to Stratford in 2002 and moved again to Hackney Wick in 2006 when they were displaced.
Jenny Mann owned the Golden Dragon take-away in Barking and ran a mobile catering van offering congee, rice and noodles until she sold up in 2011.
Waheed Rahman owner at Jay J Autos Ltd traded for ten years offering recycled spare car parts and repair work, until 2007 when he moved to South Woodford but the cost of relocation caused his company to close in 2013.
Mechanics Ghazansar Hussain & Jamshed Khan at Jay J Autos Ltd
Amerjeet & Gurdeep Singh at Lucky Wholesale Company, established by their father who worked as a door-to-door salesman in 1955 when he arrived from Delhi. Beginning in Shepherds Bush Market, they were in Aldgate East for thirty years, before moving to Straford in 2001. Before the Olympics, the brothers closed down the company and retired.
Erdal Oyak (centre), son Kozan and Uncle Andy at M&M Taxis
Seamstress checks coats made for Hackett at the finishing station at Panache Outerwear Ltd in Marshgate Lane. They were forced out from their factory by the Olympics but continue to operate from another location nearby.
Steve Goodchild, Transport Manager at Parkes Galvanising Ltd, established in Marshgate Lane since the fifties but closed in 2007
Cutting cloth at Panache Outwear Ltd
Pentaluck Ltd, wholesale dealers in Chinese vegetables, was established by Chin Check in Camberwell in 1991, moved to Waterden Rd in 2001 and then to Leyton in 2007.
Martin Walrand packing boxes at Tyrone Textiles Ltd in Marsgate Lane. Founded in 1978, this family-owned wholesale cloth business was in Stratford for seventeen years before moving to Enfield in 2007
Bradlee Priest cutting bracket feet at Priest Brothers. Established by his grandfather Ron Priest in the fifties in Bethnal Green, they relocated to Marshgate Lane in 2000 and moved to Chelmsford in 2007
Bow Tyres occupied a site that had opened as a car mechanic in 1917 under the name W J Cearns
Photographs copyright © Debra Rapp
Click here to buy a copy of DISPERSAL, Picturing urban change in East London published by Historic England. Spitalfields Life readers get 20% discount by entering code DISPSL17
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At The Eagle Tavern
I wish you would take me out to the theatre. As the autumn nights draw in, I dream of leaving the gloomy old house one evening and joining the excited crowds, out in their best clothes to witness the spectacular entertainments that London has to offer. The particular theatre I have in mind is the Grecian Theatre attached to the Eagle Tavern in Shepherdess Walk, City Road between Angel and Old St.
The place seems to have developed quite a reputation, as I read yesterday, “The Grecian Saloon is really a hot house or a black hole, for the number of human beings packed in there every night would induce a supposition there was no other place of entertainment in London. At least two thousand persons were left unable to procure admission.” This was written in 1839, demonstrating that the popular art of having a good time – still pursued vigorously in the many pubs and clubs here today – is a noble tradition which has always thrived in the East End, outside the walls of the City of London.
“Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle, that’s the way the money goes…” The Eagle public house in the rhyme still exists to this day, though barely anything remains of the elaborate entertainment complex which developed there during the nineteenth century – apart from a single scrapbook that I found in the archive of the Bishopsgate Institute. All the balloon ascents, the stick fights, the operas, the wrestling and the wild parties may be over, and the thrill rides closed long ago, but there is enough in this album to evoke the extravagant drama of it all and fire my imagination with thoughts of glamorous nights out on the town.
You only have to walk through Brick Lane and up to Shoreditch on a Saturday night, through the hen parties and gangs of suburban boys out on a bevy, jostling among the crowds of the intoxicated, the drugged and the merely overexcited, to get a glimpse of what it might have been like two hundred years ago. With as many as six thousand attending events at the Eagle Tavern, we can assume that lines must have formed just as we see today outside nightclubs.
On the site of the eighteenth century Shepherd & Shepherdess Pleasure Garden, the Grecian Saloon developed at the Eagle Tavern to provide all kinds of entertainments, from religious events to conjuring and equestrian performances. There are only tantalising hints that survive of these bygone entertainments. Yet sentences like “We are glad to find that little Smith has recovered her hoarseness” and “We have little to find fault with save that the maniac was allowed to perambulate the gardens without his keeper” do set the imagination racing. There are many fine coloured playbills in the cherished album, crammed with enigmatic promises of exotic thrills. I wonder who exactly was the beautiful Giraffe Girl, or General Campbell, the smallest man in the world. Amongst so much hyperbole there is a disappointing modesty to learn that the central attractions are merely supported by the “artistes of acknowledged talent.”
Elaborate pavilions with all manner of special effects were constructed at the Grecian Saloon, which in turn became the Grecian Theatre in 1858 where Marie Lloyd made her stage debut aged fifteen. Eventually the building was acquired in 1882 by General William Booth of the Salvation Army and the parties came to an end. Yet this site saw the transition from eighteenth century pleasure garden to nineteenth century music hall. The many thousands of souls who experienced so much joy there over all those years impart a certain sacred quality to this location, even if it is now mostly occupied by Shoreditch Police Station.
Watercolours of the New Grecian Theatre in 1899, built during the management of George Augustus Oliver Conquest in 1858 and later purchased by General William Booth of the Salvation Army
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
