At Paul Kirby’s Foam Shop
Near the top of Brick Lane, where it peters out into Bethnal Green, stands a lone house of mystery – accompanied by the gnarled stump of an old plane tree. Entirely at odds with the bland redevelopment that surrounds it, this edifice is unapologetic in its utilitarian idiosyncrasy and, when the windows glow at dusk on a rainy night, it possesses a magical allure which fascinates me. This is Paul Kirby’s foam shop.
For years, Paul Kirby has held out bravely against the “regeneration” that razed every other building in sight, and has emerged triumphant as the proud custodian of the last weaver’s house in the neighbourhood – built in the eighteenth century and incorporating a ship’s window into the frontage. “There’s been quite a lot of pressure to knock it down, but I took the council to court and won the case!” declared Paul in jubilant satisfaction, clasping his hands as he rocked back and forth in his easy chair.
You walk right in off the street into Paul’s workshop which occupies the entire ground floor of 74 Swanfield St, and is crammed with foam of every colour and description. On the left of this foam-lover’s paradise is the well-worn cutting board and, on the right, the tethered rolls of foam wait eager to spring into spongy life, while the space between is stacked with foam cushions – including a cherished Charles & Diana wedding souvenir foam cushion which, in astonishing testimony to Paul’s foam shop, has kept its bounce far longer than the ill-fated marriage ever did. And at the centre of all this foam sits Paul in his pork pie hat, a proud Englishman at home in his castle.
“I wouldn’t ever leave the East End now,” confided Paul, whose origins are in Mauritius, “I’ve got used to living in the bustling of Bethnal Green with all the cosmopolitans here. They looked down on foreigners when I first came to London in 1953 and it was hard to get a job or a room. Those were the darkest days, but I had some Jewish friends round here. It was a nice place to live, I loved it. It was elegant. I got a room in Code St off Brick Lane for fifty pence a week, from there I bought a lorry and started my own transport business.
Paul was conscripted into the British Army at eighteen years old from his home in Mauritius in 1950. When his mother died unexpectedly while he was in the forces, Paul was adopted by his commanding officer, who subsequently became Brigadier Kirby, and he returned to live in Britain with his new stepfather.
“I stayed with them in Hastings but it was difficult to get a job there, so he wrote me a letter which I took to a company in London and I got a job right away. Then he retired to St Austell in Cornwall and bought a Tudor house, where I used to visit at weekends. Although I was the only black man in St Austell, I had a lovely time. How people treated me there – it was unbelievable! When I got on the bus, they wouldn’t take money off me. They said, ‘Soldiers don’t pay!’
When I first came from Mauritius I was very fascinated by English furniture, especially Chesterfields, and I thought, ‘I’d like to make one of those.’ I’ve always been interested in furniture, so I studied upholstery. Since 1958 until now, I have been involved with upholstery, mostly lounge suites and I’ve made many Chesterfields.
In the sixties, I worked for the owner of this place. They manufactured reproduction furniture and I was their driver. There were scraps of fabric left over and they gave them to me. I asked the two machinists to make up cushion covers which I filled with scrap foam from the floor. And I took them down the market in Brick Lane on a Sunday and sold them for fifty pence each. And I made £20 each weekend and we shared it between us, which was pretty good when you realise that wages were only £8 a week.
I bought a two up/two down house in Bethnal Green, with no bathroom and an outside toilet, for £300. Then, in 1968, the furniture business moved to bigger premises so the boss asked me to run the shop for £8 a week. To start with, I sold secondhand furniture, wardrobes and things, and I just opened on Sunday because that was the only day people were walking about.
In the nineteen-seventies, we had a lot of problems with the National Front. Every weekend, there’d be marches and so on. I used to open up my house for the police to use the toilet because there’d be six bus loads of them waiting outside in case of trouble. I was in the middle of it because I was selling Union Jack cushions and some people asked me to stop selling them as it was a symbol adopted by the National Front, but I am an ex-army man and proud to be a citizen of the United Kingdom. It was not a nice time.
Around 1976, I started repairing furniture, recovering old three piece suites and reselling them, then in 1988 I took the place over and moved in and stayed ever since – but now I can’t compete with the big furniture warehouses, so I just do a bit of repair and sell foam, cushions and suchlike to local people. I have another home but I often stay here when I am working late, and most of my neighbours know me by my first name.”
Actively employed at eighty-three, Paul Kirby is now among the few who remember when Bethnal Green and Shoreditch were full of cabinet and furniture makers. And Paul has such a relaxed nature that his foam shop is an attractive place to linger to enjoy the peace and quiet, as if the very fabric of the building has now absorbed his personality – or as if the vast amount of foam insulates against the outer world, absorbing discord.
The recipient of kindness, Paul greets everyone who comes through the threshold with an equal generosity of spirit. You can be guaranteed of a welcome and a smile, as long as you have not come to knock down this venerable weaver’s house in the name of “regeneration” – because, after half a century, Paul and his building are one.
Paul Kirby
The mysterious allure of Paul Kirby’s foam shop at dusk
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Spring Flowers At Bow
Seduced by promises of an early spring, I decided to return to Bow Cemetery to see if the bulbs were showing yet. Already I have some snowdrops, hellebores and a few primroses in flower in my Spitalfields garden, but at Bow I was welcomed by thousands of crocuses of every colour and variety spangling the graveyard with their gleaming flowers. Beaten and bowed, grey-faced and sneezing, coughing and shivering, the harsh winter has taken it out of me, but seeing these sprouting bulbs in such profusion restored my hope that benign weather will come before too long.
Some of my earliest crayon drawings are of snowdrops, and the annual miracle of bulbs erupting out of the barren earth never ceases to touch my heart – an emotionalism amplified in a cemetery to see life spring abundant and graceful in the landscape of death. The numberless dead of East London – the poor buried for the most part in unmarked communal graves – are coming back to us as perfect tiny flowers of white, purple and yellow, and the sober background of grey tombs and stones serves to emphasis the curious delicate life of these vibrant blooms, glowing in the sunshine.
Here within the shelter of the old walls, the bulbs are further ahead than elsewhere the East End and I arrived at Bow Cemetery just as the snowdrops were coming to an end, the crocuses were in full flower and the daffodils were beginning. Thus a sequence of flowers is set in motion, with bulbs continuing through until April when the bluebells will come leading us through to the acceleration of summer growth, blanketing the cemetery in lush foliage again.
As before, I found myself alone in the vast cemetery save a few Magpies, Crows and some errant squirrels, chasing each other around. Walking further into the woodland, I found yellow winter aconites gleaming bright against the grey tombstones and, crouching down, I discovered wild Violets in flower too. Beneath an intense blue sky, to the chorus of birdsong echoing among the trees, spring was making a showing.
Stepping into a clearing, I came upon a Red Admiral butterfly basking upon a broken tombstone, as if to draw my attention to the text upon it, “Sadly Missed,” commenting upon this precious day of sunshine. Butterflies are rare in the city in any season, but to see a Red Admiral, which is a sight of high summer, in February is extraordinary. My first assumption was that I was witnessing the single day in the tenuous life of this vulnerable creature, but in fact the hardy Red Admiral is one of the last to be seen before the onset of frost and can emerge from months of hibernation to enjoy single days of sunlight. Such is the solemn poetry of a lone butterfly in winter.
The spring bulbs are awakening from their winter sleep.
Snowdrops
Crocuses
Dwarf Iris
Winter Aconites
Daffodils will be in flower next week.
A single Red Admiral butterfly, out of season in mid-February – “sadly missed”
Find out more at Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park
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At 45 Hanbury St
This is 45 Hanbury St in 1919, an address which hardly exists anymore – today these premises serve as the back end of a chocolate shop, one of more than six such establishments in Spitalfields. Yet a century ago it was home to the family business of JH Fisher, making and repairing umbrellas and parasols. In this photograph, taken on 19th November 1919, we see Juda Hersz Fiszer and his wife Malka standing outside their shop. They came to London from Warsaw at the beginning of the twentieth century and, although the family anglicised their name to ‘Fisher,’ Juda and his wife kept their Polish nationality.
Juda Fiszer was a skilled umbrella-maker and established his umbrella business in Spitalfields in 1907. During the First World War, the family moved to the more desirable area of Hackney and set up home at 123 Victoria Park Rd. Their son Morris Fisher continued the family business but, by the thirties, the Hanbury St shop was taken over by a tailor and Morris had a stall in the Whitechapel Rd, selling rather than manufacturing umbrellas.
Spitalfields has good reason to be seen as the place of origin of the umbrella-making industry in this country on account of the local availability of silk and whalebones from the London Docks at the end of the eighteenth century when these popular accessories first became readily available. James Ince & Sons is the longest established company of umbrella manufacturers in Britain and Richard Ince, the current incumbent, can trace origin of his business back to White’s Row in 1815, though he believes it was in existence before that. Today Inces’ Umbrellas trade from Vyner St but they were in Spitalfields for over two hundred and fifty years before moving to Hackney in the eighties.
The last remnant of this former industry in Spitalfields was E Olive Ltd, an umbrella shop and manufacturer at 10 Hanbury St which closed in the late eighties yet, such is the cyclical nature of history, the recent revival in quality British-made umbrellas has the occasioned the arrival of newcomer London Undercover which has traded successfully from 20 Hanbury St since 2013 – selling umbrellas less than fifty yards from JH Fisher a century ago.
45 Hanbury St today
E Olive Ltd, Umbrella Manufacturers, 10 Hanbury St, 1985 (Photograph by Philip Marriage)
E. Olive Ltd Umbrella Manufacturers, 10 Hanbury St, 1985 (Photograph by Philip Marriage)
Read my stories about umbrellas
Phil Maxwell At Whitechapel Car Boot Sale
Some readers may be puzzled by the ghost sign which has recently been uncovered next to the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel, advertising the weekly car boot sale that ceased functioning more than twenty years ago when the land at the rear of the tube station – known as Whitechapel Waste – was redeveloped. Fortunately, Contributing Photographer Phil Maxwell lived in Pauline House overlooking Whitechapel for thirty years and documented the life of this lost market and its thriving community during the eighties.
View looking west from the top of Durward St School
View looking east across Whitechapel from Phil Maxwell’s flat in Pauline House, Hanbury St
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
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An East End Murder & A West End Grave
Contributing Writer Ruth Richardson tells the pitiful tale of Carlo Ferrier or ‘The Italian Boy’ and the current threat to his last resting place in a paupers’ graveyard next to the Cleveland St Workhouse
Click image to enlarge (With kind permission of the British Library)
London is a big place, yet its neighbourhoods and boundaries are permeable and people move between them all the time. This is the story of a child murder that took place in the East End in 1831, but where the victim was buried in the West End. It is a sorry tale, made even sorrier by the fact that the old paupers’ graveyard in which the boy was buried is currently being eyed-up by developers.
In 1829, a couple of years before this poor boy’s death, William Burke had been hanged and dissected in Edinburgh. The Burke & Hare murders for dissection had spread a ripple of fear and horror – known as ‘Burkophobia’ – across the nation.
This particular London murder was a copy-cat crime. It took place in an East End slum called ‘Nova Scotia Gardens.’ The perpetrators were two ruffians who usually worked as body-snatchers but who had devised a clever method of murdering new victims for sale to the medical schools. Like Burke & Hare, Bishop & Williams chose people who would not be missed. They selected vulnerable individuals who were part of the drifting population of London. The metropolis was full of migrants from all parts of Britain and from abroad, many of them lone children begging for a living on London’s streets.
Food and warmth were probably sufficient to entice victims into their cottage. Their technique left no marks. They would ply their visitors with spirits or drug them into insensibility, then suspend them head first down a small well in their garden. There was no way the poor souls could save themselves. Their last victim was never satisfactorily identified but he became known Carlo Ferrier or the Italian Boy. He had made a thin living by displaying a little cage with white mice.
The murderers were caught by an astute anatomist at King’s College Medical School who was offered the boy’s corpse for his students to dissect. He noticed that the body was unaccountably fresh, and that it had not been laid out for burial. There was nothing to suggest the body had ever been buried and he found blood in the child’s mouth. Body-snatchers regularly extracted good teeth from their victims’ mouths for sale to dentists for authentic-looking dentures, yet a dead body should not bleed. The anatomist was quick-thinking enough to say to the men that he had only a large bank-note, but could break it by the afternoon if they would return to collect their fee. He preserved the evidence and had the police waiting.
Professor of Anatomy at King’s College, Herbert Mayo, wrote at the time:
“ Two incidents trifling in themselves concur to strengthen in my mind the suspicion resulting from the facts detailed in the report that the boy was intentionally destroyed. The first is that no less than six boys have recently disappeared, as we learn through those, who have visited the station house to identify the body. The second is, that ten days ago, an offer was made by a resurrection man of bringing to us the body of a boy, which was described as remarkably fresh: this offer was refused at the time, as it happened that a body was not then required in the dissecting room: this body was not brought to King’s College. It is perhaps too horrible to suppose that there are villains in London, who kill people to order; but the preceding circumstances point frightfully to this conclusion. For my own part I entertain little doubt that from time to time murder is perpetrated in London for the value of the body of the victim.”
After Bishop & Williams were caught, it was rumoured that they had confessed to sixty murders. Sixty. Other people’s clothes were found buried in the garden at Nova Scotia Gardens, and the discovery of the murder of the Italian Boy and the subsequent trial at the Old Bailey received very wide publicity. Both murderers were hanged and publicly dissected.
It was this terrible case which brought about the passage of the infamous Anatomy Act of 1832 which requisitioned for dissection the bodies of the very poor dying in workhouses and other institutions, instead of hanged murderers. It effectively transferred what had been a most loathed and feared punishment for murder, onto poverty. The politicians that enacted it also passed the 1834 New Poor Law which so successfully established the hated regime of the Victorian Workhouse as a place of privation and punishment.
The Italian Boy had been lodging in the parish of Covent Garden, so that parish undertook the murder prosecution against the brutes who had killed him and his poor body was carried to the burial ground that surrounds the eighteenth century Covent Garden Workhouse in Cleveland St.
This is the same Workhouse which was saved from demolition in 2011 by my discovery that Charles Dickens had lived a few doors away as a child and again, as a teenager. In 1831, when the Italian Boy’s coffin was carried up the street to the Workhouse graveyard, Dickens knew the Italian boy’s destination. Dickens had renewed his Reader’s Ticket for the British Museum Reading Room from the same street that year and he may even have been the reporter of the case as published by John Fairburn of Ludgate Hill in an anonymous pamphlet with illustrations created by the members of the Cruikshank family.
Later in life, in the eighteen-forties, Dickens visited a charitable school for Italian Boys established in Clerkenwell several times: “I was among the Italian Boys from twelve to two this morning… ” he wrote in a letter to his best pal. And when his wealthy friend Angela Burdett Coutts was searching for a site in the East End for her great philanthropic project, Columbia Market, Dickens was very happy to help her identify and acquire the insanitary slum of Nova Scotia Gardens.
The Columbia Market building, a magnificent piece of Victorian architecture, was shamefully demolished in the twentieth century. Fortunately, the same fate has so far been prevented for the Workhouse in Cleveland St because of its association with Dickens and it is now widely accepted that this Workhouse is likely to have been inspirational for his famous novel Oliver Twist. The oppressive regime inside the Cleveland St Workhouse was very like the one he portrayed in the novel: Oliver’s uniform was the same regulation brown and there was a reiterated ban on second helpings of food. Crucially, it has been proved that while Dickens was actually writing the novel, a tallow chandler’s shop opposite the Workhouse was run by a man called Bill Sykes!
The Cleveland St Workhouse later became part of the Middlesex Hospital and it has been eyed by developers since the main Middlesex Hospital building was closed and demolished. Now two new planning applications have been made to gut the Cleveland St Workhouse for luxury apartments and demolish everything else behind it, including its two fine Nightingale wards. A building twice the height of the Workhouse and a car park will occupy almost the entire graveyard, and destroy nearly 250 years of history on this unique site which embodies the story of health care in the capital since the seventeen-seventies.
Swift opposition from numbers of people who care about London’s history will make the planners and developers think more carefully about the historical importance of the entire site, including the consecrated burial ground where so many Londoners still lie. If you are willing to email the planners, please go to www.workhouses.org.uk/ClevelandStreet/ and follow the links.
The case of The Italian Boy is believed to have reported by Charles Dickens as cub reporter, published anonymously (With kind permission of the British Library)
Provenance for Dickens’ authorship of the report of case of the The Italian Boy (With kind permission of the British Library)
Entry in the Burials Register for St Paul Covent Garden showing the last resting place of the Italian Boy
The Cleveland St Workhouse dates from the seventeen-eighties
Charles Dickens’ calling card while resident in Fitzrovia (reproduced courtesy of Dan Calinescu)
Nineteenth century glass side of Columbia Market built over Novia Scotia Gardens and demolished in the sixties (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
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The Return of Sebastian Harding
Over the last five years, Illustrator Sebastian Harding has been constructing intricate models in paper and card of London’s vanished and vanishing buildings, and recently he has turned his attention to the much-loved Foyles Building in the Charing Cross Rd which is slated for imminent demolition in spite of a campaign of over 5,000 signatures to save it. Now Sebastian is seeking to collect memories of those who worked in or used this building, so please email him at seb.harding1@googlemail.com if you can help or click here to read more about his project.
Foyles Building, 113-119 Charing Cross Rd
In just a few months, we will see the demolition of 113-119 Charing Cross Rd, better known as the former home of Foyles Bookshop. In 1929 William Foyles opened his newly expanded bookshop here after trading on the same street since 1906 and it soon became known as one of the largest of its kind in Europe.
The Charing Cross Rd facade dates from the early nineteen-hundreds and boasts a simple asymmetric design built of plum red brick with classical columns. The building runs back the length of Manette St with a bolder Art Deco facade dating from 1929 and these two facades are charmingly interrupted on the corner of the building by an early Victorian stuccoed facade.
Regrettably, this major London cultural landmark will soon be demolished to make way for another luxury office development and although SAVE Britain’s Heritage submitted a petition with over 5,000 signatures to the Secretary of State in July, demanding a public enquiry, it was to no avail.
For generations of book lovers, this huge building provided a haven of tranquility in the noisy and chaotic hub of central London. For over eighty years Foyles, with its labyrinthine layout, sprawling floors and large cafe was far more than just a bookshop. Full of oddly-shaped spaces and quiet corners, the place exuded an irresistibly-inviting atmosphere.
The building’s demise stands as a warning of the current wave of short-sighted decision making by the City of Westminster. Over the past ten years, numerous buildings of historical interest in this area have gone. On Charing Cross Rd alone there has been the demolition of The Astoria and neighbouring buildings 157–167 in 2009. This was followed soon after by the block running 135–155 and, in 2014, numbers 140–148 were also razed to the ground.
The Marquis of Lansdowne, Cremer St, Hoxton
Opening before 1838, The Marquis of Lansdowne was a typical East End pub which became the focus for workers in the cabinet-making trades which filled the surrounding streets for over a century. After drastic slum clearance and redevelopment in Hoxton in the mid-twentieth century, the pub fell into decline and closed. In 2013 David Dewing, Director of the Geffrye Museum announced the demolition of the pub for the sake of a concrete cube restaurant as part of a multi-million pound revelopment of the museum designed by Sir David Chipperfield. However, largely thanks to a campaign by readers of Spitalfields Life, Hackney Council refused permission for demolition of the historic pub. Subsequently, the Heritage Lottery Fund supported a new scheme by Wright & Wright which requires no demolition, expanding the museum’s galleries by opening up unused spaces in the existing buildings and restores the Marquis of Lansdowne.
The Saracen’s Head, 4-7 Aldgate High St
The Saracen’s Head public house was demolished in 1913. Even in the late nineteenth century, Aldgate survived as a slice of sixteenth and seventeenth century London until the developers moved in from the eighteen eighties to modernise these streets. It was one of the few places to avoid the Great Fire of 1666, where the locals gathered to watch the conflagration. This makes the Saracen’s Head all the more important to the area’s history and, though long gone, there is a plaque at No. 88 Aldgate High St commemorating its existence.
It operated as a coaching inn with a service that departed from the yard at the back, transporting Londoners to East Anglia – hence the building’s location on the main road eastward out of the city. The frontage holds wonderful early examples of Baroque decoration and the ornate moulding echoes the decoration seen on the Baroque post-Fire churches – including St Paul’s – that emerged throughout London at the time. When the building was demolished, it was functioning as the Metropole Restaurant with the Ladies Select Dining Room housed on the first floor. After its destruction, the Guildhall Museum bought the intricate wooden pilaster capitals for their collection, confirming its aesthetic importance.
Nicholas Culpeper’s House, Red Lion Field, Spitalfields
In 1640, when Nicholas Culpeper, the herbalist, married Alice Field, aged fifteen, he was able to build a substantial wooden house in Red Lion Field, Spitalfields, with her dowry. Here, he conducted his practice, treating as many as forty citizens in a morning, and in the land attached he cultivated herbs – collecting those growing wild in the fields beyond. Since Culpeper never finished his apprenticeship, he could not practise in the City of London but chose instead to offer free healthcare to the citizens of Spitalfields, much to the ire of the Royal College of Physicians. In this house, Nicholas Culpeper wrote his masterwork known as Culpeper’s Herbal which is still in print today.
After Culpeper’s death, the building became the Red Lion public house, surviving into the nineteenth century when it was demolished, as part of the road widening for the creation of Commercial St to carry traffic from the London Docks.
186 & 184 Fleet St
If you were to take a stroll down Fleet St today, you might like to take a closer look at the buildings that stand at 186 & 184. They perch immediately to the right of St-Dunstan-in-the-West on the north side of the Street in a row of inconspicuous turn-of-the-century buildings. On closer inspection each appears distinct, but all three are somewhat tall and somewhat narrow. Their cramped proportions are explained by the fact they were built, like much of London, on the site of two ancient pre-fire buildings.
The history of the nineteenth century buildings that occupy the site today relates directly to the rise of the newspaper trade that proliferated in the area. Indeed, Fleet St is still synonymous with British journalism despite all major publications now being headquartered elsewhere.
Today the site of 184 & 186 is home to the Scottish firm D.C. Thomson & Co., who claim to be the last newspaper group to retain a base on Fleet St, and the titles of their publications, The Sunday Post and The Dundee Courier, are still proclaimed in mosaic on the façade of their neighbour at 188.
Part of Rothschild Buildings, Spitalfields
Before their demolition in the seventies, the Rothschild Dwellings were visited by historian Jerry White whose first impression of the buildings was that he had “never seen tenements, so starkly repulsive” and “so much without one redeeming feature” in his whole life.
The Rothschild Dwellings were erected in 1888 by the ‘Four percent Industrial Dwellings Company’ and stood on the sight of what had once been respectable middle class residences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had degenerated into lodging houses and slums. In the mid-nineteenth century, the old filthy streets with their myriad alleyways and courts were swept away. In their place, came the wide thoroughfare of Commercial St and large housing blocks such as the Nathaniel Dwellings (1892), the Lolesworth Buildings (1885) and, of course, the Charlotte De Rothschild Dwellings (1887). The tenants of these buildings were respectable working class tradesmen and craft workers able to pay the slightly higher rent.
The Fortunes Of War Public Tavern, Cock Lane, Smithfield
Smithfield Market’s proximity to St Bartholomew’s Hospital betrays a lot about the British public’s distrust of the medical trade. It is fitting therefore to focus on one building that catered to both trades – The Fortunes Of War Public Tavern.
Let us place ourselves in the eighteenth century as we watch a student of anatomy making his way into the tavern. He is here, not as you would expect for his leisure, but for his studies. He is led by the landlord down dank mouldering stairs to the cellar. Rows of sacks give off a pungent smell of rotting meat, yet these are not the carcasses of swine or cattle but the bodies of recently dead Smithfield residents.
This was the secret trade of the Body Snatchers or Resurrectionists that supplied students and professors of anatomy with fresh corpses. For a God-fearing public, it was immoral and barbarous in the extreme, for this was a time when many believed a soul would only be granted into heaven if their corporeal body was intact, while being dissected meant an eternity in purgatory.
John Aston’s House, Charterhouse Lane
John Aston was a priest in the parish of Smithfield, arrested at the same time as the influential protestant leader John Rogers. Queen Mary’s secret police randomly inspected any priests who had been advocates of protestantism before her ascension to the throne in 1553.
Unsurprisingly, the inspections would usually find a protestant bible or a mass being held. Typically, the raids were held on Sundays and John Aston’s misfortune was to be found eating meat in one of these raids. The tyrannical catholic religion of the sixteenth century forbade any consumption of meat on Sunday and he was burnt at the stake for this trifling pretence.
20 Cock Lane, Smithfield
The name of this street can be traced to its proximity to the market, where poultry would once have been traded, but it also serves also as a risqué innuendo, since for hundreds of years it was the preferred haunt of prostitutes. It was on this street that fraud, haunting, murder and sex were all intertwined in one story.
Late one November night in 1760,William Kent was away on business in Norfolk. His wife Fanny, wishing to alleviate the loneliness of her nights alone, invited Betty the youngest daughter of the Parsons – the landlord’s family – to sleep in her bed. In the night, Fanny was disturbed by scratching sounds like claws on wood and lay frozen with fear. On appealing to Mr & Mrs Parsons, she was told a shoemaker lived next door and her fears were assuaged. But the next night was Sunday when no good Christian would ever work, yet the scratching came again, brought to a terrifying end by a loud bang.
After William Kent returned the next night the sounds were not heard again. Then, two months’ later, after a furious row, Mr Parsons threw the Kents’ possessions out onto the street, even though William had not received a penny of the money he had loaned to his landlord the previous year. Subsequently, Fanny succumbed to smallpox and died on February 2nd 1761.
Some time later, the Parsons family began to hear the same scratching again and made sure it became a talking point for superstitious members of the community. The methodist preacher John Moore held a séance and ,when he asked if a spirit was present, a knock rang out. A second question followed – “Was the spirit that of the late Fanny?” Another knock. “Was Fanny murdered by her husband?” the reverend asked and then followed the loudest banging the party had heard.
Subsequently, William Kent was hanged, but afterwards the events were revealed as a fraud motivated by the feud between Mr Parsons and his tenant over the loan. Parsons was sentenced to three years in prison and three days in pillory, but later became regarded as something of a celebrity.
Mother Clapp’s Molly House, Field Lane
This was not a coffee house as we would know it, but rather a private club for gay gentlemen, where they could meet and form relationships without fear of discovery. The discretion of fellow members was crucial and entry was only permitted to those who knew a password. There were even gay marriage ceremonies conducted in locked rooms between men, with one donning a bride’s dress and the other a groom’s jacket. Mother Clapp herself presided over all, only leaving to get refreshments from the pub across the street.
Everything we know about this secret sub-culture stems from the raid by The Society For The Reformation Of Manners which had placed secret police inside the house. One man, a milkman, was hung for being found in the act of sodomy and Mother Clapp was sentenced to a day in the pillory. The crowd was so furious that they ripped the pillory from the ground and trampled it, and Mother Clapp died from the injuries sustained.
Sebastian Harding
Illustrations copyright © Sebastian Harding
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Yet More Philip Cunningham Portraits
In the seventies and eighties, Photographer Philip Cunningham took these portraits of his friends and colleagues while living in his grandfather’s house in Mile End Place, and employed as a Youth Worker at Oxford House in Bethnal Green and then as a Probationary Teacher at Brooke House School in Clapton.
Paul Rutishauser ran the print workshop in the basement of St George’s Town Hall in Cable St
‘We don’t want to live in Southend’ – Housing demonstration on the steps of the old Town Hall
Kids from Stepping Stones Farm in Stepney c.1980
“Kingsley Hall was a Charles Voysey designed building off Devons Rd, Bow, that had fallen into disrepair and which we were trying to turn into a community centre.”
Kids from Kingsley Hall
In the pub with Geoff Cade and Helen Jefferies (centre and right) who worked at Kingsley Hall
“Geoffrey Cade worked at Kingsley Hall from about 1982. He fought injustice all his life and was a founding member of Campaign for Police Accountability, a good friend and colleague.”
East London Advertiser reporters strike in Bethnal Green, long before the paper moved to Romford c.1979
National Association of Local Government Officers on strike at the Ocean Estate
Teachers on strike c. 1984
Policing the Teacher’s Strike c. 1984
Teachers of George Green’s School, Isle of Dogs, in support of Ambulance Crews c. 1983
Kevin Courtney was my National Union of Teachers Representative when I began my teaching career
Lollipop Lady in Devons Rd, Bow
“Our first play scheme was in the summer of 1979. One of the workers was a musician called Lesley and her boyfriend was forming a band, so they asked me to photograph them and, as they lived on the Ocean Estate, we went into Mile End Park to do the shoot.”
Does anyone remember the name of this band?
Busker in Cheshire St c. 1979
“We bought our fruit and vegetables every Saturday from John the greengrocer in Globe Rd who did all his business in old money.” c.1980
Photographs copyright © Philip Cunningham
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