The Tale Of Old Flo & Her Orphans
With Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman – better known as Old Flo – due to return to the East End for a temporary stay at Canary Wharf prior to being permanently installed at the new Town Hall in Whitechapel in 2020, Mark Richards tells the story behind her troubled exile and explores London’s orphaned art, a legacy of post-war regeneration
Old Flo in happier days
In 2012, when Lutfur Rahman, then Mayor of Tower Hamlets, proposed to sell Henry Moore’s sculpture Draped Seated Woman, he was widely condemned by the media and the art establishment alike, and a public campaign was launched to prevent the sale, generating a great deal of publicity. What most people do not know is that this public campaign had no impact and was not a factor in the decision to abandon the sale, which happened due to work done by a small team behind the scenes. Most importantly, the wider implications of this attempted sale appear to have passed everyone by.
To understand the context and the scale of the issue we must go back to post-war London, when much of the city lay in ruins and the capital was a patchwork of bomb sites and partially demolished buildings. The country’s finances were in ruins also and the London Olympics of 1948 were known as the ‘austerity games’ due to the shoestring budget. As one of the associated cultural events, the London County Council held the first of a series of outdoor sculpture exhibitions. The first exhibition in 1948 was the precursor to the Patronage of the Arts Scheme, by which the LCC purchased sculptures to enrich the lives of Londoners as part of the post-war regeneration of the capital.
The driving force behind these exhibitions and the subsequent scheme for purchasing art was the LCC Parks Committee which announced, “…this is almost certainly the first time a municipal authority in this country has embarked on such a venture. It is, however, fitting that the Council as the largest municipal authority in the Empire, if not in the world, should take a share in the encouragement of visual arts both for the sake of the artists, whose work is part of our national heritage, and also to give Londoners an increased opportunity to enjoy art.” (Mrs Patricia Strauss, Chair of the Parks Committee, Open Air Exhibition of Sculpture, 1948)
This exhibition was a milestone of public art in London, representing a move away from the display of traditional statuary into the open air display of contemporary public art for the enrichment of the lives of Londoners, and it planted the seeds that would grow into the Patronage of the Arts Scheme over the following decade.
Following the exhibition, the Contemporary Art Society donated Henry Moore’s Three Standing Figures, 1947 to the LCC for permanent display at Battersea Park and this almost certainly triggered the scheme that resulted in the purchase of Draped Seated Woman some fourteen years later. Like Draped Seated Woman, this sculpture was abandoned when the Greater London Council was closed in 1986 and is an orphan artwork.
In 1956, a committee was formed to advise the LCC on the purchase of public art for London. Sir Alan Bowness, Director of the Tate Gallery from 1980–88, was a member and knew both Henry Moore and Sir Isaac Hayward, then leader of the LCC, who encouraged the siting of works of art on new housing estates, schools and in parks, so that they could be enjoyed by the people of London.
Over the life of the Patronage of the Arts Scheme around seventy pieces of public art were purchased for London, including five by Henry Moore, as well as works by leading artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Elizabeth Frink, Lynn Chadwick and others.
You will no doubt have seen some of them dotted around London and perhaps never made the connection to the LCC. As became evident later, all of them are now orphans with no clear title of ownership. Their abandonment by the GLC, and subsequently the Department of the Environment, represents a staggering failure of governance during the closure of the GLC in 1986. A report was produced by GLC staff in 1983 recommending that the sculptures be put in trust for London but this was never followed through.
After the GLC was closed, only the late Tony Banks MP pursued the matter in the House of Commons but with little success. Hansard records a series of exchanges that imply the government of the day knew about the sculptures and intended selling them to offset the cost of closing the GLC. Either way, when other artworks were transferred into and out of the London Residuary Body through a series of statutory instruments these sculptures were mysteriously left out. They were not sold or transferred, and instead were simply allowed to drift into ambiguity of ownership to the detriment of London.
Since 1986, many of the sculptures have been stolen, mislaid, damaged or destroyed. In a period of austerity, they remain at grave risk of being lost, stolen by metal thieves or sold to bolster failing local authority budgets. Nobody has overall responsibility for this public collection which is worth tens of millions, and the various local authorities, schools and colleges where the sculptures stand appear to have no idea that they do not have clear title of ownership to the works in their possession.
When I heard about the proposed sale of Old Flo by Tower Hamlets, I was determined to stop it. I had some knowledge of the sculpture – it was an important work that was based on Henry Moore’s shelter drawings and so had a particular resonance for London, given that Stepney where it had been based was one of the most heavily-bombed areas of the city. The drapery allowed Moore to create tension in the figure and, when you examine the shelter drawings, you can see the connection between those poignant drawings and this colossal sculpture.
I always thought of this sculpture as being of a mother listening to the fall of bombs outside the shelter and wondering whether her children, her friends or her house would survive the bombardment. She represented for me a stoic figure full of resolve mixed with a sense of alertness, tension and vulnerability belied by her immense scale.
In the end, Old Flo was saved by the actions of a small group of people. Working with the support of the Art Fund and Farrer & Co solicitors, who provided pro bono advice, five of us went to the London Metropolitan Archives to do the research into the original purchase of Old Flo. It proved to be an exciting journey into the murky history of art acquisition and the regeneration of post-war London.
The story of this work of art began to reveal itself in the dusty, and often crumbling, minutes of the long defunct London County Council. The original idea that the sculpture had been a gift to London by Henry Moore and was therefore held in trust turned out to be false, documentation showed it was purchased for a fair market rate by the LCC.
We discovered that Old Flo had been bought for the Stifford Estate in Stepney by the London County Council. Then I tried to find out how it ended up in the hands of Tower Hamlets Council, which did not exist at that time. I followed the trail through the files, minutes, transfer documents and statutes, showing the demise of the LCC, the rise and fall of the GLC and the creation and closure of the London Residuary Body. Eventually, I discovered that title of ownership to the sculpture had never been transferred to Tower Hamlets at any time in its history. Consequently, they were not the owner and therefore had no right to sell it.
The sculpture had gone from the LCC to the GLC and then, when the GLC was closed, had been transferred to the London Residuary Body. Subsequently, on the closure of the LRB, title of ownership to all seventy sculptures was accidentally transferred to the London Borough of Bromley via a ‘sweep-up’ order in 1997, even though Bromley had no knowledge of this.
Working with the Art Fund we persuaded the London Borough of Bromley to lodge a legal challenge to the sale acting in their capacity as successor to the LRB. Bromley’s position was that the sculpture was a cultural asset and needed to be saved for London, and I have nothing but praise for their approach – they are the unacknowledged heroes of this case. As a result of their intervention, Tower Hamlets was forced to remove the sculpture from auction after it had been listed for sale by Christie’s for January 2013. The case then became like Jarndyce & Jarndyce in Bleak House, with both sides arguing that the sculpture was theirs.
A long legal case ensued at which I was a witness in the Court of Chancery in 2015. Lutfur Rahman was removed from office for electoral irregularities. Meanwhile, the whole focus of the campaign behind the scenes had been to delay any sale until he was gone, since the vast majority of councillors at Tower Hamlets were opposed to the sale.
Following Rahman’s removal, the outcome of the legal case was largely academic when it comes to Old Flo but, in the end, title of ownership was determined to sit with Tower Hamlets due to a legal technicality. They had ‘converted’ the sculpture by lending it to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park without Bromley’s permission and six years later it had become theirs under the rules on limitation. The judge in the case supported all aspects of Bromley’s claim to title of ownership except on the single issue of ‘conversion,’ and rejected Tower Hamlets’ other claims in their entirety. The judgment is a matter of public record and can be found by clicking here.
What is not recorded is that the late Norman Palmer QC, the world’s leading authority on the law of bailment, believed that the Tower Hamlets case on conversion was flawed and could be defeated by an argument that Old Flo was held in bailment which is not covered by limitation. But this argument was never pleaded in the case, so we will never know if he was correct.
John Biggs, the new Mayor of Tower Hamlets, gave me his personal assurance that Old Flo would not be sold and she was therefore saved for the nation. My involvement ended in 2015 and, at that time, the plans were that the sculpture would be returned to London and displayed outside of the Museum in Docklands. This never happened and it is now destined for Canary Wharf instead, prior to installation at the new Town Hall in Whitechapel in 2020 As it stands, Old Flo remains in public ownership but her future is far from secure – as she is not held in trust, she could be sold at any time at the whim of a politician. If this was to happen, there are now no grounds to challenge the decision.
The future of the remaining sculptures is also less than rosy – their title of ownership remains uncertain and the failure to address this or put them into trust has left them with no clear owner. Had Bromley won the Old Flo case then all of the sculptures would have been put into trust and protected in perpetuity, but this is unlikely to happen now and no public bodies seem willing to pick up the baton and protect this remarkable series of sculptures, some of which are falling into disrepair.
They include many works of which you may be familiar such as The Watchers by Lynn Chadwick at Roehampton College (stolen in 2006 but now recast), Single Form Memorial and Monolith-Empyrean by Barbara Hepworth, Two-Piece Reclining Figures No. 1 and No. 3 by Henry Moore, The Lesson by Franta Belsky in Satchwell Rd, Robert Clatworthy’s The Bull in Danebury Avenue, opposite Portswood Place in Wandsworth, and many more.
Others have not fared so well and the list of important works which have been stolen includes like Elisabeth Frink’s Birdman from Sedgehill School in Lewisham and Georg Ehrlich’s Drinking Calf from Garratt Green School in Wandsworth, while sculptures like the Henry Moore on the Brandon Estate remain at serious risk of metal theft.
Someone needs to take the initiative and protect these sculptures as a legacy for London, but who is up to the task?
Old Flo at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (Photo by Mark Richards)
Poster for the 1948 open air art exhibition at Battersea Park
Programme for the 1948 exhibition with an introduction by Patricia Strauss
Three Standing Figures by Henry Moore, Battersea Park (Photo by Mark Richards)
Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 by Henry Moore, Brandon Estate (Photo by Mark Richards)
Old Flo on the Stifford Estate c.1964
Monolith-Empyrean by Barbara Hepworth, Kenwood House (Photo by Mark Richards)
Single Form Memorial by Barbara Hepworth, Battersea Park (Photo by Mark Richards)
Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 1 by Henry Moore, Chelsea School of Art (Photo by Mark Richards)
Woman Seated in the Underground, 1941 by Henry Moore
LCC report 19 March 1964 listing Draped Seated Woman and Single Form Memorial
CC minutes 27 July 1961 recording the decision to buy the sculpture
The Stifford Estate c.1965 showing the location of Draped Seated Woman
Mark Richards is the Chief Executive Officer at the Museum of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada
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Christ Church Spitalfields by Leon Kossoff
Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. Click here to preorder your copy
(Click on this image to enlarge)
Presiding over Spitalfields for three hundred years, Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church in Commercial Street is the East End’s most enduring landmark and it has caught the imagination of many artists. Yet perhaps Leon Kossoff (born 1926) has captured its awe-inspiring scale more effectively than anyone else in a recurrent series of paintings and drawings executed over the past half century.
Born just half a mile up the road in Shoreditch, Leon grew up on the Boundary Estate where his family ran a bakery but, at the age of nine, a trip to the National Gallery inspired him with a love of painting which was to become the consuming passion of a lifetime. When his school was evacuated to Norfolk in 1939, Leon had the good fortune to stay with the Bishop family in Kings Lynn who encouraged his interest in art, which led him to make his first paintings and, on his return to London in 1943, he enrolled for art classes at Toynbee Hall.
Even before he ever drew it, Christ Church was a landmark on Leon’s landscape, both culturally and literally. Built with the proceeds of a coal tax in the early eighteenth century, Christ Church was constructed as an emblem of power to impress the Huguenot immigrants of Spitalfields and encourage their conversion to Anglicanism. Its overbearing scale makes the onlooker feel small, yet equally it offers the converse experience to those leaving the church, to whom, elevated upon the steps of the portico, the world appears spread out below. For the child of first generation immigrants, such as Leon, the building was a constant reminder of his place in the continuum of successive waves of immigration which have come to define the East End.
Leon first drew Christ Church in the fifties when he was living in Bethnal Green and the building was derelict, returning to the subject again in the seventies when it was under threat of demolition. But it was not until the eighties, when he had moved from the East End to Willesden, that he undertook drawings which became the basis for his series of paintings of this monumental subject beginning in 1987.
This densely wrought painting completed in 2000 embodies both the complex emotionalism of Leon’s personal response to everything that Christ Church represents and the struggle of the onlooker to contain such titanic architecture.
“In the dusty sunlight of this August day, when this part of London still looks and feels like the London of William Blake’s Jerusalem, I find myself involved again in making drawings, and the idea of a painting begins to emerge. The urgency that drives me to work is not only to do with the pressures of the accumulation of memories and the unique quality of the subject on this particular day but also with the awareness that time is short, that soon the mass of this building will be dwarfed by more looming office blocks and overshadowed, the character of the building will be lost forever, for it is by its monumental flight into unimpeded space that we remember this building.” Leon Kossoff, March 1989
After serving in the Second World War, Leon studied commercial art at St Martin’s and then painting at the Royal College of Art. Despite winning international acclaim for his work in recent decades, Leon Kossoff remains a modest, reclusive figure and he has returned to Arnold Circus and the Boundary Estate in the last few years undertaking a series of affectionate, intimate drawings of the urban landscape of his childhood.
Prints of Leon Kossoff’s drawing of Saturday Afternoon, Arnold Circus are on sale at Leila’s Shop in Calvert Avenue in aid of the Friends of Arnold Circus.
Images copyright © Leon Kossoff
Reproduced courtesy of Annely Juda Gallery, London
Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular
Click here to preorder a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR for £25
In City Churchyards
In the churchyard of St Dunstan’s in the East, Idol Lane
If ever I should require a peaceful walk when the crowds are thronging in Brick Lane and Columbia Rd, then I simply wander over to the City of London where the streets are empty at weekends and the many secret green enclaves of the churches are likely to be at my sole disposal. For centuries the City was densely populated, yet the numberless dead in the ancient churchyards are almost the only residents these days.
Christopher Wren rebuilt most of the City churches after the Great Fire upon the irregularly shaped medieval churchyards and it proved the ideal challenge to develop his eloquent vocabulary of classical architecture. Remarkably, there are a couple of churches still standing which predate the Fire while a lot of Wren’s churches were destroyed in the Blitz, but for all those that are intact, there are many of which only the tower or an elegant ruin survives to grace the churchyard. And there are also yards where nothing remains of the church, save a few lone tombstones attesting to the centuries of human activity in that place. Many of these sites offer charismatic spaces for horticulture, rendered all the more appealing in contrast to the sterile architectural landscape of the modern City that surrounds them.
I often visit St Olave’s in Mincing Lane, a rare survivor of the Fire, and when you step down from the street, it as if you have entered a country church. Samuel Pepys lived across the road in Seething Lane and was a member of the congregation here, referring to it as “our own church.” He is buried in a vault beneath the communion table and there is a spectacular gate from 1658, topped off with skulls, which he walked through to enter the secluded yard. Charles Dickens also loved this place, describing it as “my best beloved churchyard”
“It is a small small churchyard, with a ferocious, strong, spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought in stone … the skulls grin aloft horribly, thrust through and through with iron spears. Hence, there is attraction of repulsion for me … and, having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a thunderstorm at midnight.” he wrote in “The Uncommercial Traveller.”
A particular favourite of mine is the churchyard of St Dunstan’s in the East in Idol Lane. The ruins of a Wren church have been overgrown with wisteria and creepers to create a garden of magnificent romance, where almost no-one goes. You can sit here within the nave surrounded by high walls on all sides, punctuated with soaring Gothic lancet windows hung with leafy vines which filter the sunlight in place of the stained glass that once was there.
Undertaking a circuit of the City, I always include the churchyard of St Mary Aldermanbury in Love Lane with its intricate knot garden and bust of William Shakespeare, commemorating John Hemminge and Henry Condell who published the First Folio and are buried there. The yard of the bombed Christchurch Greyfriars in Newgate St is another essential port of call for me, to admire the dense border planting that occupies the space where once the congregation sat within the shell of Wren’s finely proportioned architecture. In each case, the introduction of plants to fill the space and countermand the absence in the ruins of these former churches – where the parishioners have gone long ago – has created lush gardens of rich poetry.
There are so many churchyards in the City of London that there are always new discoveries to be made by the casual visitor, however many times you return. And anyone can enjoy the privilege of solitude in these special places, you only have to have the curiosity and desire to seek them out for yourself.
In the yard of St Michael, Cornhill.
In the yard of St Dunstan’s in the East, Idol Lane.
At St Dunstan’s in the East, leafy vines filter the sunlight in place of stained glass.
In the yard of St Olave’s, Mincing Lane.
This is the gate that Samuel Pepys walked through to enter St Olave’s and of which Charles Dickens wrote in The Uncommercial Traveller – “having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a thunderstorm at midnight.”
Dickens described this as ““my best beloved churchyard.”
In the yard of St Michael Paternoster Royal, College St.
In the yard of St Lawrence Jewry-next-Guildhall, Gresham St.
In the yard of St Mary Aldermanbury, Love Lane, this bust of William Shakespeare commemorates John Hemminge and Henry Condell who published the First Folio and are buried here.
In the yard of London City Presbyterian Church, Aldersgate St.
In the yard of Christchurch Greyfriars, Newgate St, the dense border planting occupies the space where once the congregation sat within the shell of Wren’s finely proportioned architecture.
In the yard of the Guildhall Church of St Benet, White Lion Hill.
In St Paul’s Churchyard.
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Libby Hall, Collector of Dog Photography
Libby Hall
Between 1966 and 2006, Libby Hall collected old photographs of dogs, amassing many thousands to assemble what is possibly the largest number of canine pictures ever gathered by any single person. Libby began collecting casually when the photographs were of negligible value, but by the end she had published four books and been priced out of the market. Yet through her actions Libby rescued an entire canon of photography from the scrap heap, seeing the poetry and sophistication in images that were previously dismissed as merely sentimental. And today, we are the beneficiaries of her visionary endeavour.
A joyful iconoclast by nature who has recently had, “Stop! Do not resuscitate, living will extant,” tattooed on her chest – Libby Hall is a born and bred New Yorker originating from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who moved into her house in Clapton in 1967 with her husband the newspaper cartoonist, Tony Hall, and has stayed ever since.
“My husband Tony and I used to go to Kingsland Waste, where we had a friend who did house clearances, and in those days they sold old photo albums and threw away the pictures. So I used to rescue them and I began sorting out the dogs – because I always liked dogs – and it became a collection. Then I started collecting properly, looking for them at car boot sales and auctions. And eventually a publisher offered me an advance of two thousand pounds for a book of them, which was fantastic, and when each of my books was published I just used the royalties to buy more and more photographs. I had a network of dealers looking out for things for me and they would send me pictures on approval. They were nineteenth century mostly and I only collected up until 1940, because I didn’t want to invade anyone’s privacy. Noboby was interested until my first book was published in 2000, and afterwards people said I had shot myself in the foot because everybody started collecting them and they became very expensive, but by then I had between five and six thousand photographs of dogs.
Dogs have always been powerfully important to me, I’ve lived with dogs since the beginning of my days. There’s a photo of my father holding me as baby in one arm and a dog in the other – dog’s faces were imprinted upon my consciousness as early as humans, and I’ve always lived with dogs until six weeks ago when my dog Pembury died. For the last month, friends have been ringing my bell and there’s only silence because he doesn’t come and I open the door to find them in tears. It was an intense relationship because it was just the two of us, Pembury and me, and as he got older he depended on me greatly. So it is good to have my freedom now but only for a little while. At one point, we had three dogs and four cats in this house. We even had a dog and a cat that used to sleep together, during the day they’d do all the usual challenging and chasing but at night they’d curl up in a basket.
When I was eleven, I wanted a dog of my own desperately, I’d been campaigning for five years and I wanted a cocker spaniel. My father contacted a dog rescue shelter in Chester, Connecticut, and they said they had one. But as we walked past the chain link fence, there was a dog barking and we were told that it was going to be put down the next morning. Of course, we took that dog, even though he wasn’t a cocker spaniel. We wondered if they always told people this, but Chester and I were inseparable ever after.”
With touching generosity of spirit, Libby confided to me that her greatest delight is to share her collection of pictures. “What matters to me is others seeing them, I never made any money from my books because I spent it all on buying more photographs.” she said.
These photographs grow ever more compelling upon contemplation because there is always a tension between the dog and the human in each picture. The presence of the animal can unlock the emotional quality of an image of people who might otherwise appear withheld, and the evocation of such intimacy in pictures of the long dead, who are mostly un-named, carries a soulful poetry that is all its own. Bridging the gap of time in a way that photographs solely of humans do not, Libby’s extraordinary collection constitutes an extended mediation upon mortality and the fragility of tender emotions.
“I put my heart and soul into it, and it was very hard giving up collecting, but my fourth book was the ultimate book, and it coincided with the realisation that my husband Tony was dying, so I realised that it was the end of a period of my life.” Libby concluded with a melancholy smile, sitting upon the couch where Pembury expired and casting her eyes thoughtfully around the pictures of dogs lining the walls. I asked Libby how she felt now that her collection is housed elsewhere. “I’ve got the books,” she reminded me, placing her hand upon them protectively, “I have no visual memory at all, so I keep going back to look at them.”
The two stripes on this soldier’s sleeve meant he had been wounded twice and was probably on leave recovering from the second wound when this photograph was taken.
HRH the Princess of Wales with her favourite dogs on board the royal yacht Osborne.
John Brown 1871. The dogs are Corran, Dacho, Rochie and Sharp, who was Queen Victoria’s favourite.
George Alexander, Actor/Manager, with his wife Florence.
This photograph of Mick came with the collar he is wearing.
Queen Victoria and Sharp (pictured above with John Brown) at Balmoral in 1867.
Ellen Terry.
Charles Dickens with his devoted dog Turk.
Libby’s recently deceased dog Pembury wearing the vest that was essential in his last days.
Libby on the couch where Pembury died six weeks ago.
One of Libby’s six dog dolls’ houses. – “I think dolls’ houses with dolls are rather scary but dolls’ houses with dogs are ok.”
Libby Hall – “I put my heart and soul into it.”
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Portraits of Libby Hall copyright © Martin Usborne
Dog photographs copyright © The Libby Hall Collection at the Bishopsgate Institute
Libby Hall selected these favourite dog photographs from her books – Prince and Others, Prince and Other Dogs II, Postcard Dogs, Postcard Cats and These Were Our Dogs, all published by Bloomsbury.
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The Dogs of Spitalfields in Spring
The Dogs of Spitalfields in Winter
Spitalfields In Kodachrome
Photographer Philip Marriage rediscovered these colourful images recently, taken on 11th July 1984
Brushfield St
Crispin St
Widegate St
White’s Row
Artillery Passage
Brushfield St
Artillery Passage
Brushfield St
Fashion St
Widegate St
Artillery Passage
Gun St
Brushfield St
Gun St
Brushfield St
Parliament Court
Leyden St
Fort St
Commercial St
Brushfield St
Photographs copyright © Philip Marriage
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In Old Bermondsey
The horse’s head upon the fascia reveals that RW Autos was once a farrier
Twenty-five years ago I had reason to visit Bermondsey St frequently but I have hardly been there since, so I thought it was time to walk down across the river and take a look. Leaving the crowds teeming like ants upon the chaotic mound that is London Bridge Station in the midst of reconstruction, I ventured into Guy’s Hospital passing the statue of Thomas Guy, who founded it in 1721, to sit with John Keats in a stone alcove from old London Bridge now installed in a courtyard at the back.
From here, I turned east through the narrow streets into Snowsfields, passing the evocatively named Ship & Mermaid Row, and Arthur’s Mission of 1865 annotated with “Feed my Lambs” upon a plaque. An instruction that has evidently not been forgotten, as the building adjoins the Manna Day Centre which offers refuge and sustenance to more than two hundred homeless people each day.
At the end of Snowsfields is the crossroads where Bermondsey St meets the viaduct carrying the railway to and from London Bridge, and the sonorous intensity of the traffic roaring through, combined with the vibration from the trains rattling overhead, can be quite overwhelming. Yet the long narrow street beckons you south, as it has done for more than a thousand years – serving as the path from the Thames to the precincts of Bermondsey Abbey, a mile away, since the eleventh century. When I first came here, I never ventured beyond Bermondsey Sq. Only when I learned of the remains of the medieval gatehouse in Grange Walk beyond, with the iron hinges still protruding from the wall today, did I understand that Bermondsey St was the approach to the precincts of the Abbey destroyed by Henry VIII in 1536.
There is an engaging drama to Bermondsey St with its narrow frontages of shops and tall old warehouses crowded upon either side, punctuated by overhanging yards and blind alleys. A quarter of a century ago, everything appeared closed down, apart from The Stage newspaper with its gaudy playbill sign, a couple of attractively gloomy pubs and some secondhand furniture warehouses. I was fascinated by the mysteries withheld and Bermondsey St lodged in my mind as a compelling vestige of another time. Nowadays it appears everything has been opened up in Bermondsey St, and the shabbiness that once prevailed has been dispelled by restoration and adaptation of the old buildings, and the addition of fancy new structures for the Fashion & Textile Museum and the White Cube Gallery.
Yet, in spite of the changes, I was pleased to discover RW Autos still in business in Morocco St with the horses’ heads upon the fascia, indicating the origin of the premises as a farrier. Nearby, the massive buildings of the former London Leather Exchange, now housing dozens of small businesses, stand as a reminder of the tanning industry which occupied Bermondsey for centuries, filling the air with foul smells and noxious fumes, and poisoning the water courses with filth.
The distinctive pattern of streets and survival of so many utilitarian nineteenth and eighteenth century structures ensure the working character of this part of Bermondsey persists, and you do not have to wander far to come upon blocks of nineteenth century housing and old terraces of brick cottages, interspersed by charity schools and former institutes of altruistic endeavour, which carry the attendant social history. Thus Bermondsey may still be appreciated as an urban landscape where the past is visibly manifest to the attentive visitor, who cares to spend a quiet afternoon exploring on foot.
John Keats at Guy’s Hospital
Arthur’s Mission in Snow’s Fields seen from Guinness Buildings 1897
In Bermondsey St
At the Woolpack
Old warehouses in Bermondsey St
St Mary Magdalen Bermondsey – the medieval tower is the last remnant of the Abbey founded in the eleventh century
In St Mary’s Bermondsey St
In St Mary Magdalen Graveyard
This plaque marks the site of the abbey church
Old houses in Grange Walk – the house on the right is claimed to be the Abbey gatehouse with hinges of the gates still visible
Bermondsey United Charity School for Girls in Grange Walk, 1830
In Grange Walk
Bermondsey Sq Antiques Market every Friday
A cottage garden in Bermondsey
The Victoria, a magnificent tiled nineteenth century pub with its original spittoon, in Pages Walk
London Leather, Hide & Wool Exchange built 1878 by George Elkington & Sons, next to the 1833 Leather Market, it remained active until 1912.
At the entrance to St Thomas’ Church
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Street Scene by Barnett Freedman
Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. We still need a couple more investors, so please click here to learn how you can support the publication of EAST END VERNACULAR
Street Scene by Barnett Freedman (Click this image to enlarge)
When I first saw Street Scene by Barnett Freedman (Reproduced courtesy of the Tate Gallery), I thought I half-recognised the location as either Whitechapel or Bethnal Green and I delighted in the painting as an evocation of the streetlife of the Jewish East End in the early twentieth century.
Surely that is The George in Bethnal Green Road in the background? In particular, the two ostentatiously dressed woman in their contrasting outfits recalled for me the custom of people to promenade along Aldgate to Whitechapel at weekends in their finery, window shopping and greeting friends, enjoying their social life in public. Indeed, Pearl Binder included a similar pair of young women togged up to the nines in one of her lithographs of Aldgate in the twenties. I also wondered if the shabby old street musician with his violin was a Russian immigrant who had arrived like Barnett Freedman’s parents at the end of the nineteenth century.
Barnett Freedman was born in Lower Chapman St, Stepney Green in 1901. A sickly child who endured extended hospital stays, he was confined to bed between the ages of nine and thirteen, yet managed to educate himself, learning to read, write, play music and draw and paint while sequestered in a hospital ward.
By the age of sixteen, Barnett was earning his living as a draughtsman to a monumental mason for a few shillings a week, while for the next five years he spent his evenings undertaking classes at St Martin’s School of Art. Before long, he moved to an architect’s office, creating attractive drawings from his employer’s rough sketches and, taking the opportunity offered by a surge in demand for the war memorials to hone his skill as a letteringh artist.
With remarkable tenacity and self-belief, Barnett applied over three successive years for a London County Council Scholarship that would enable him to study at the Royal College of Art under the direction of Sir William Rothenstein. Experiencing rejection on each occasion, Barnett summoned the courage to present his portfolio in person to Rothenstein who recognised his talent and applied to the London County Council Chief Inspector himself on behalf of the young artist. As a consequence, a stipend of £120 a year was granted, enabling Barnett to begin his studies full time in 1922.
At the Royal College of Art, Barnett’s talent flourished among fellow students including Edward Bawden, Raymond Coxon, Henry Moore, Vivian Pitchforth and John Tunnard. Yet even after graduating in 1925, he continued to struggle to support himself and in 1929, ill-health prevented him working for a year. This situation as resolved when William Rothenstein took Barnett onto the staff of the Royal College in 1930. In the same year, he married fellow illustrator, Claudia Guercio, and, during the thirties, enjoyed an increasingly successful career as an illustrator and commercial artist.
Barnett’s lithographs for Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, published in 1931, were one of many highlights during his long association with Faber and Faber, for whom he also illustrated works by the Brontës, Walter de la Mare, Charles Dickens, Edith Sitwell, William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy. As a commercial artist, he undertook prestigious commissions for Ealing Films, the General Post Office, Curwen Press, Shell-Mex, British Petroleum, Josiah Wedgwood and London Transport, earning popular success.
Appointed as an official War Artist, along with Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden, Barnett accompanied the expeditionary force in the spring of 1940 before the retreat at Dunkirk, and was awarded a CBE for this work in 1946. Yet Barnett always retained his East End accent and once, when he hailed a taxi to the Athenaeum Club, the incredulous cabbie famously retorted, “What, you?”
Street Scene was painted between 1933 and 1939, and subsequently he reworked the image as a lithograph for Lyons Corner House. Barnett’s son Vince, who was born in 1934, recalled his father working on the picture in the first floor studio of the family home in a back street of Gloucester Rd, West London. Vince revealed to me that the building on the right of the painting was based their house, 11 Canning Place. “The fiddler was to be found at the Gloucester Road end of Canning Place just about every day, and was a figure of some threat to me at the age of four!” he recalled, “The small person on the right, with his nanny Miss Wiggle, is a reference to me!”
No wonder that I was unable to place the location of this painting precisely in the East End because it is not a literal scene at all but a composite of Bethnal Green and Gloucester Road. I often wonder if the East End itself is actually a place or a culture, and this painting proposes an answer to my quandary. Barnett Freedman employed diverse topographic elements create a portrait of a society he knew intimately, constructing an entirely subjective portrayal of his environment and personal heritage. Look in the left top corner of the painting and you will see the artist raising his hat to you, ambling happily along the pavement and eternally at home in his own East End universe. Vincent Freedman summed up his father’s achievement in these words, “A huge optimism and compassion shows itself to me in all his work and life. Humanity was his central driving force.”
The Old George in Bethnal Green
Barnett Freedman’s house at 11 Canning Place, Gloucester Rd
Barnett Freedman in Hyde Park
Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular
