A Brief History Of London’s Mulberries
Several readers who visited the exhibition of proposals for the site of the former London Chest Hospital by Crest Nicholson & Circle Homes contacted me in alarm when they discovered the developer planned to construct a new building which appears to be upon the site of the Oldest Mulberry in the East End, even though it is subject to a Tree Protection Order.
The London Chest Hospital developers’ website makes no mention of the historic Mulberry.
Outlining the cultural significance of this celebrated species, it is my pleasure to publish this metropolitan arboreal history by Peter Coles who is currently undertaking a Survey of Mulberries in the capital.
Jacobean Mulberry at the site of the former London Chest Hospital in Bethnal Green
At the last count, a survey being carried out by the Conservation Foundation’s new Morus Londinium project has identified over one hundred and thirty-five sites with Mulberry trees in London – and there are likely to be many more, with new trees coming to light every week.
As The Gentle Author discovered, it is fairly straightforward to trace the history of some veteran Mulberries, like those at Syon House and Charlton House, back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But others, like those hiding anonymously in East End gardens or beside the recycle bins on a street corner in Belsize Park, might be described in the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, as “Lost angels of a ruined paradise.” Yet what was the nature of the horticultural paradise they have fallen from?
A common assumption is that these old Mulberry trees dotted around the city are left over from the failed attempt by James I to start a home-grown silk industry in the seventeenth century. His plan was to rival the lucrative monopolies of France and Italy in silk production and get rich, as they already had. Silkworms feed exclusively on Mulberry leaves – a secret the Chinese managed to keep for over two and a half thousand years – but these trees are not native to Britain.
In 1609, James wrote letters to all his Lord Lieutenants. Appealing to their patriotism, he offered them Mulberry saplings “at the rate of three farthings a plant, or at six shillings the hundred containing five score plants,” or more affordable packets of Mulberry seeds for the less well-off, so that they could establish plantations to feed thousands of silkworms. Around a hundred thousand saplings were imported for this project.
James created his own four-acre Mulberry Garden in the grounds of St James’ Palace – now the north-west corner of the garden behind Buckingham Palace – and an adjacent corner of Green Park. His consort, Queen Anne of Denmark, shared his enthusiasm and also established a Mulberry plantation, complete with silkworm nursery, at Greenwich Palace and another at the Royal Palace at Oatlands in Surrey. The Mulberry in the Queen’s Orchard in Greenwich Park is quite likely a Jacobean survivor, as is the tree at Charlton House.
The surviving Mulberries – and over ninety per cent of those in the Morus Londinium database – are black Mulberries (Morus nigra), a species that is native to what used to be the Persian Empire including present-day Iran, Turkey & Syria, where they are grown for their fruit not their leaves. Yet it was the white Mulberry (Morus alba) that underpinned China’s silk industry, a lesson the Italians and French also learned. Even though the black Mulberry was known to the Romans and grew around the Mediterranean, it was the white Mulberry that the Huguenot French king, Henry IV of France, had been planting in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris to encourage silk production.
Terraces of white Mulberries still survive in the Ardèche, Cevennes & Provence regions of France today, often next to disused or converted magnaneries (silkworm houses) where they supplied the silk industry around Lyons. And it was precisely from these regions that Huguenot weavers fled to England – notably Spitalfields – when the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, unleashing persecution against Protestants.
So why did James I, apparently, import and plant thousands of black Mulberries? As silk historian John Feltwell, points out, mature white Mulberries in England can be counted on the fingers of one hand and none can be traced back to the silk industry. James’ advisers knew very well that silkworms thrive on the leaves of white Mulberries.
In 1607, Nicholas Gesse published his The Perfect Use of Silk-wormes, which was a translation of the definitive French textbook on silk & Mulberries, written by horticulturalist, D’Olivier de Serres. This and a book published in 1609 by William Stallenge (who became Keeper of the King’s Mulberry Gardens), entitled Instructions for the Increasing of Mulberrie Trees, clearly explain that, while both black and white Mulberries can be used to feed silkworms, the white should be chosen if possible. These texts also say that silkworms will eat the leaves of the black Mulberry but that the silk is coarser and the thread breaks more easily.
Despite efforts lasting into the reign of Charles II, England’s home-grown silk industry never took off. This is often blamed on the choice of the ‘wrong’ Mulberry but the truth is probably more complex. The English climate does not suit the white Mulberry, which is used to much warmer weather, so it may have been a deliberate choice to plant the black species. After all, this was the height of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Britain, when the first Frost Fair was held on the Thames in 1607. Perhaps the climactic conditions made it harder to get the timing right to match the supply of Mulberry leaves – even those of the black Mulberry – with the hatching of silkworm larvae?
At the same time, James I was also trying to get a silk industry off the ground at Jamestown, in his North American colony of Virginia. Shiploads of white Mulberries were sent over, although the silkworm was found to be happy with the native red Mulberry (Morus rubra). Another theory is that this discovery may have led English silk producers to underestimate the silkworms’ dislike for leaves of the black Mulberry.
A few decades later, the English Civil War took minds away from what was proving to be a marginal industry. Mulberry plantations were eventually grubbed out, although the Mulberry Garden at St James’ Palace did enjoy success as a Pleasure Garden late into the seventeenth century. John Evelyn & Samuel Pepys both mention visiting it. Today, Buckingham Palace garden houses part of the National Mulberry Collection but Gardens Manager, Mark Lane who started the collection in the nineties, confirms that none are James I’s plantings. When he showed me around, Mark could point out thirty-five named varieties held in the collection, mostly white Mulberries and just a few decades old. The oldest specimen is a cutting from Shakespeare’s Mulberry, taken long after the Bard’s death.
There was a last-ditch attempt to revive London’s silk industry around 1718, when the Raw Silk Company established a plantation of two thousand Mulberry trees and a silkworm nursery in Chelsea Park, between Fulham Rd and King’s Rd – which may have been upon the initiative of Huguenot weavers in Spitalfields. But this only lasted for a few years and, by 1724, the trees and the silkworm house were sold off. Interestingly, Chelsea still has several old Mulberry trees and one is in Mulberry Walk on the site of the original plantation.
It is a mystery why there should be black Mulberries in and around the East End today. While this was the heart of silk weaving, it was never a place where Mulberries were grown on a scale required to produce silk commercially. Around 50,000 cocoons are needed to produce 1 kg of silk thread. That is a lot of silkworms and a lot of leaves, even though silk is very light and 1 kg would make many yards of silk ribbons. Perhaps people planted Mulberries out of nostalgia? It would be interesting to discover if there is any evidence for raising silkworms in the East End. Yet, with their understanding of silk production, why would they have planted black Mulberries?
Although attempts to produce raw silk in England petered out, the country developed a thriving silk industry in the eighteenth century, based upon raw silk imported from Italy, Persia, Bengal & China. This was the heyday of weavers in Shoreditch & Bethnal Green, until the industrial revolution saw the processes of throwing and weaving silk thread mechanised.
Yet there is another strand of the capital’s Mulberry heritage which goes back much further than James I and has nothing to do with silk. Excavations of water-logged Roman sites in London in the seventies found well-preserved Mulberry pips, revealing that Mulberry trees were introduced and cultivated in London as early as the first century AD. They would have been grown for their fruit, which the Romans appreciated in their feasting and its medicinal properties – Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, writes of its value as a mouthwash.
These were also the reasons why black Mulberries were planted in medieval gardens of manor houses and monasteries – particularly the ‘physic gardens’ associated with infirmaries. John Gerard, in his Herball of 1597, writes – “The barke of the root is bitter, hot and drie, and hath a scouring faculty: the decoction hereof doth open the stoppings of the liver and spleen, it purgeth the belly and driveth forth worms.”
Like Spitalfields, much of Central London is built upon the ruins of medieval monasteries, razed after Henry VIII dissolved them. Part of Bartholomew Close, adjacent to the infirmary of the priory church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, was once a Mulberry garden. A very old Mulberry stump was found and grubbed out in the eighteen hundreds but there is a much more recent black Mulberry there today, next to the Lady Chapel of the church.
The Mulberry planted in 1548 at Syon House – formerly a Brigettine monastery founded in 1415 – pre-dates any interest in a silk industry. The Tudor Lambeth Palace has fine old black Mulberries and there is one next door, in what is now the home of the Garden Museum, near to the tomb of landscape gardener, John Tradescant. There is both a black and a white Mulberry in the grounds of the Tudor Fulham Palace, former home of the Bishops of London. And we must not forget the venerable – and threatened – black Mulberry on the site of the London Chest Hospital is on the site of Bishop Bonner’s manor house.
Finally, there was a fad for including black Mulberry trees when public parks were laid out at the end of the nineteenth century. Often these parks – like Brockwell Park – were created in the grounds of much earlier mansions. Vauxhall Park has a young Mulberry trunk sprouting from a much older bole, probably planted when it was laid out in the eighteen-eighties by Fanny Wilkinson, Britain’s first celebrated woman landscape gardener, who also designed Myatt’s Fields Park where there is an old black Mulberry tree to be discovered.
The Morus Londinium project sets out to record and research London’s mulberry trees to raise public awareness and protect them. If you know of a Mulberry or wish to find out more about London’s Mulberries, visit www.moruslondinium.org.
The Tower of London Mulberry
The Haggerston Mulberry
The Dalston Mulberry
The Whitechapel Mulberry
The Stoke Newington Mulberry
The Deptford Mulberry
The Charlton Mulberry
The Charterhouse Mulberry
The Middle Temple Mulberry
The King’s Bench Walk Mulberry
The Oldest Mulberry Tree in Britain at Syon Park
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The Oldest Mulberry in the East End
Israel Zangwill’s Spitalfields
Literary historian Nadia Valman introduces the work of nineteenth century novelist Israel Zangwill, author of Children of the Ghetto and subject of a newly-launched app Zangwill’s Spitalfields, which delivers an immersive audio-visual journey through Spitalfields in the eighteen-nineties, using his forgotten novel as a walking guide. Click here to download the app for free
Israel Zangwill, 1890
Of the many Victorian bestsellers doomed to oblivion over the course of the twentieth century, one that little deserves its obscurity is Israel Zangwill’s 1892 Spitalfields novel Children of the Ghetto. It is a big, baggy monster of a book, brimming with vitality and jangling with questions and arguments about the destiny of Jewish immigrants in Britain. What is more, it has an acute sense of place. Zangwill’s intimacy with the institutions, streets and interiors of Jewish Spitalfields makes the novel a fascinating exploration of what this densely packed neighbourhood meant to the people who came at the turn of the twentieth century to build new lives here.
Israel Zangwill was born in 1864 in a small square near Petticoat Lane market, the son of a Russian-Jewish peddler. From these humble origins, he went on to become a star pupil at the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane, later staying on to teach while he studied in the evenings for a degree at London University and began to publish satirical sketches. It was during his years as a schoolteacher in Spitalfields that Zangwill became witness to the dramatic changes sweeping the area during the eighteen-eighties and nineties: the huge influx of Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms, persecution and economic hardships in the Russian empire and settling in their tens of thousands in east London. What a great subject for a young aspiring novelist! The ‘London ghetto’ was much talked about but very little understood. As a graduate with literary ambitions who had also lived and worked in Spitalfields for most of his life, Zangwill was able to write for a wide Victorian readership with unique credibility and authority.
Children of the Ghetto offers a panoramic account of Jewish lives in Spitalfields. In the background, Zangwill observes the changes that were reshaping east London’s landscape: dilapidated housing being demolished as part of new urban improvement schemes and austere new blocks of model dwellings springing up. In the foreground, the author’s eye surveys tailors and teachers, sweatshop masters and trades unionists, rabbis and Yiddish actors, immigrant parents and their English-born children. He reveals a community riven with divisions, struggling over its many possible futures.
Zangwill’s is an unconventional voice in Victorian literature. There is a good measure of untranslated Yiddish words in the novel, so that even if you happen to know some Yiddish you still feel as if you are eavesdropping on a subculture you will never fully grasp. And while many of his contemporaries were troubled by the noise, the mess and the muddle of the Jewish East End, Zangwill glories in it. He relishes the eclecticism of the Jewish liturgy, which he describes as ‘like an old cathedral in all styles of architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side-shows and overgrown with moss and lichen,’ as much as the disorderly multilingual babble of the costers in Petticoat Lane. His prose has an idiosyncratic exuberance, evident here in his description of the morning rush hour outside the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane.
“It was the bell of the great Ghetto school, summoning its pupils from the reeking courts and alleys, from the garrets and the cellars, calling them to come and be Anglicized. And they came in a great straggling procession recruited from every land and by-way, big children and little children, boys in blackening corduroy, and girls in washed-out cotton; tidy children and ragged children; children in great shapeless boots gaping at the toes; sickly children, and sturdy children, and diseased children; quaint sallow foreign-looking children, and fresh-coloured English-looking children; with great pumpkin heads, with oval heads, with pear-shaped heads; with old men’s faces, with cherub’s faces, with monkeys’ faces; cold and famished children, and warm and well-fed children; children conning their lessons and children romping carelessly; the demure and the anaemic; the boisterous and the blackguardly, the insolent, the idiotic, the vicious, the intelligent, the exemplary, the dull – spawn of all countries – all hastening at the inexorable clang of the big school-bell to be ground in the same great, blind, inexorable Governmental machine.”
Here, Zangwill’s love of crazily proliferating lists produces a vivid tableau, but it is also a sharp commentary on the process of transformation that is already shaping the future of Spitalfields’ Jews.
If you stand today at the site of the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane, now an immense blue and grey skyscraper, it is hard to imagine the teeming life that once flowed through these narrow streets. The school was equally gargantuan for its day: by the late nineteenth century, when Zangwill was teaching there, it was the largest school in England and accommodated four thousand pupils. Founded in 1817 by the wealthy Rothschild family to try to help the children of local Jewish street peddlers into more respectable trades, by the time Zangwill was working there, and elementary education was compulsory, it was partially funded by the local education authority. The school stood on this site from 1822 until bombing destroyed it in 1939. Throughout the nineteenth century it cast its stern Gothic eye over the poor of Spitalfields and over the slaughterhouses and butcher’s shops with which it incongruously shared the street. This more miserable aspect to Bell Lane is also part of Zangwill’s portrait:
“…the crowd was swollen by anxious parents seeing tiny or truant offspring safe within the school-gates. The women were bare-headed or be-shawled, with infants at their breasts and little ones toddling at their sides, the men were greasy, and musty, and squalid. Here a bright earnest little girl held her vagrant big brother by the hand, not to let go till she had seen him in the bosom of his class-mates. There a sullen wild-eyed mite in petticoats was being dragged along, screaming, towards distasteful durance. It was a drab picture – bleak, leaden sky above, the sloppy, miry stones below, the frowsy mothers and fathers, the motley children.”
Even as he revels in the vitality of the children swarming through the alleys, Zangwill does not flinch from the humiliation and ugliness of their poverty. And that one sullen little girl squirming at the school gate hints at how Bell Lane was also in many ways a battleground. Founded as a philanthropic venture, the Jews’ Free School maintained and intensified its Anglicizing mission as the immigrant population expanded. In particular, the school dedicated itself to the eradication of Yiddish — the vernacular mix of German, Russian and Hebrew spoken by Jewish immigrants and considered an obstacle to their integration. Using Yiddish got Zangwill into trouble with the school authorities when he was working as a teacher and published a small section of Children of the Ghetto, peppered with Yiddish words, as a stand-alone essay. But that attitude towards Yiddish as the language of the past was widespread. Zangwill himself probably recognized that it was alienating for his wider readership, and with each edition of Children of the Ghetto he included fewer and fewer Yiddish words.
As Zangwill learned, the Jews’ Free School was a Victorian temple to aspiration through strict discipline. Unlike the cramped, dark homes that the pupils came from, its corridors were wide and open to light and air. With its huge courtyard for drill and its large arched windows it looked like a giant factory for reassembling children or a warehouse for storing them. That is how the school represented its pupils, as I discovered in a series of photographs in a late-Victorian album in the archives of the Jewish Museum, London. One image, of girls in the first class, is titled ‘As They Enter School’, and captioned underneath ‘Raw Material: Children arriving from Roumania, Russia, Germany etc, unable to speak English’. A second photograph, showing girls from the top class, is titled ‘As They Leave School’, and captioned ‘Finished Article: After several years training in Hebrew, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, History, Geography, Literature, Science, Drill, Gymnastics, Needlework, Cookery, Laundry and Sports’. The images resemble Dr Barnardo’s ‘Before & After’ photographs of the destitute street children he rescued, and proudly present Jews’ Free School leavers, similarly, as fully trained and accomplished modern British citizens.
It is this production line that Zangwill writes of in his sketch of the motley mob of kids piling into school. He takes particular pleasure in the great diversity of the children, these are kids from all kinds of families, who have all kinds of destinies ahead of them. But Zangwill’s description of the chaotic variety of the ghetto school also has a particular poignancy as a reflection on the process that aims to reduce it to order and uniformity. The school bell in Bell Lane calls the children to come and be Anglicized, ‘to be,’ Zangwill says, ‘ground in the same great, blind, inexorable Governmental machine’. It summons them to their future but it also tolls for their old life. And as the novel unfolds, we see the everyday tragedies that result: parents no longer able to communicate in their mother tongue with their children and young people embarrassed by the foreignness of their elders. In Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill explored the tension between his conviction that Jewish immigrants needed to join the modern world, and his attachment to the unruly energy of their distinctive culture. It was a paradox that was to preoccupy him throughout his writing life.
Jews’ Free School Entrance, Bell Lane
Chemistry Laboratory, 1908
Playground Assembly, 1908
Choir, 1905
Hebrew Class, 1908
Celebration Tea in the Great Hall
Lesson on Measurement
Football Team, 1907
Photographs copyright © Jewish Museum
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Under The Arches At Three Colts Lane
Situated midway between Spitalfields and Bethnal Green lies Three Colts Lane. Although many years have passed since there were colts here, today there are many other attractions to make this a compelling destination, especially if you are having problems with your car – because Three Colts Lane is where all the motor repair garages are to be found, gathered together in dozens and snuggled up close together in ramshackle order. Who can say how many repair shops there are in Three Colts Lane? – since they inhabit the railway arches in the manner of interconnected troglodyte dwellings carved into a mountain, no-one can tell where one garage begins and another ends.
Three Colts Lane is where the lines from the East and the North converge as they approach Liverpool St Station, providing a deep warren of vaulted spaces, extended by shambolic tin shacks and bordered with scruffy yards fenced off with corrugated iron. Here in this forgotten niche, while more fences and signs are added, few have ever been removed, creating a dense visual patchwork to fascinate the eye. Yet even before I arrived in Three Colts Lane, the commingled scents of engine oil and spray paint were drawing me closer with their intoxicating fragrance, because, although I have no car, I love to come here to explore this distinct corner of the East End that is a world of its own.
Each body shop presents a cavernous entrance, from which the sounds of banging and clanging and shouting emanate, every one attended by the employees, distinguished by their boiler suits and oily hands, happily enjoying cigarettes in the sun. Yet standing in the daylight and peering into the gloom, it is impossible to discern the relative size and shape of these garages that all appear to recede infinitely into the darkness beneath the railway arches. An investigation was necessary, and so I invited Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie to join me in my quest to explore this mysterious parallel universe that goes by the name of Three Colts Lane. And many delights awaited us, because at each garage we were welcomed by the mechanics, eager to have their pictures taken and show us the manifold splendours of their manor.
There is a cheerful spirit of anarchy that presides in Three Colts Lane, incarnated by the senior mechanic with his upper body under a taxicab, who, when we asked gingerly if we might take pictures of the extravagantly vaulted narrow old repair shop deep beneath the arches, declared,“It’s not my garage. Do as you please! Make yourself at home!” To outsiders, these dark grimy spaces might appear alien, but to those who work here it is a zone where everyone knows everyone else, and where you can spend your working life in a society with its own codes, hierarchy and respect – only encountering the outside world through the motorists and cabbies that arrive needing repairs. My father was a mechanic, and I recognise the liberation of filth, how being dirty in your work sets you apart from others’ expectations. The layers of grime and dirt here – in an environment comprised almost exclusively of small businesses where no-one wears a white collar – speak eloquently of a place that is a law unto itself.
Starting at the Eastern end of Three Colts Lane, the first person we met was Lofty, proprietor of the A1 Car Centre, who proved to be a gracious ambassador for the territory. “Some garages, they just want to take the money,” Lofty declared in wonder, his chestnut-brown eyes glinting with righteous ire at the injustice – like a sheriff denouncing outlaws – before he pledged his own personal doctrine of decency, “But I believe it’s how you treat the customers that’s the most important thing, that’s why we are still here after twenty-five years.” And proof that Lofty is as good as his word was evident recently when seven hundred customers signed a petition saving the garage from developers who threatened to build student housing on the site.
We crossed the road to shake hands with Nicky at the Coborn Garage, admiring the fresh and gaudy patriotic colour scheme of red, white and blue, and his decorative signwriting that would not be out-of-place on a gipsy caravan. Under the railway bridge and down the road, we encountered Erdal and his nephew at Repairs R Us, where we marvelled at the monster engine from a Volvo truck that Erdal rebuilt and today keeps as a trophy by the entrance of his tiny arch. Further down, we met Ahmed, a native of Cyprus who grew up above the synagogue in Heneage St and has run his garage here for twenty-eight years. At the corner, across from Bethnal Green Station, we were greeted by Ian & Trevor, two softly spoken brothers who have been here twenty years repairing taxis in a former a scrap yard, still retaining its old weighbridge. We all squinted together at the drain pipe head dated 1870 with the initials of the Great Eastern Railway upon it, declaring the history of the site in gothic capitals, before Ian extracted a promise from me to come back once I had discovered the origin of the name Three Colts Lane.
Apart from calendar girls adorning the walls, the only women we glimpsed were those who restricted themselves to answering the telephone – barely visible in tiny cabins of domestic comfort, sheltering their femininity against the barbaric male chaos of the machine shops. But then, strolling down a back lane and passing one of the governors in a heated altercation with a quivering cabbie who had innocently scraped his Daimler, thereby providing the catalyst for an arresting display of bullish masculinity, we encountered Ilfet. With a triumphant mixture of self-assurance and sharp humour, Ilfet has won the respect of her male colleagues in the body shop, wielding a spanner as well as the next man. A bold pioneer in her field and stirling example to others, I was proud to shake the hand of Ilfet, the only – or rather – the first female mechanic in Three Colts Lane.
Growing bolder, we ventured deeper to discover the paint shops and frames where taxis were hoisted up for major surgery. We left daylight behind us to explore the furthest recesses of the dripping vaults, lined with corrugated iron, where a fluorescent glow pervaded the scene of lurid-coloured motors crouching in the gloom. We had arrived at the heart of Three Colts Lane, vibrating to the diabolic roar of the high speed trains passing overhead, whisking passengers in and out of London, oblivious to the hidden world beneath the tracks.
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Stuart Goodman At Broadway Market
John Sims
Take a walk through Broadway Market in March 1982 with Photographer Stuart Goodman, when it was quite a different place to the fashionable destination of today.
A former Fleet St Photographer & Picture Editor, Stuart sent me these pictures last week. “They were first shown in 1983 at an exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall, organised by the Greater London Council,” he explained, “which was ironic really because the GLC had a massive 1000-property compulsory purchase scheme to construct a nightmare version of the Westway through East London, that included the market.”
“I first found Broadway Market by mistake in 1976 and fell in love with the place, the cobbles, the people and the Cat & Mutton pub. By 1977, I was a partner in Hot Shots, a short-lived screen printing extravaganza, and I lived in an exceptionally squalid flat above and below the shop at number 52. I met both my wives there too, though – thankfully – not at the same time.
Although I lived in Broadway Market for a few years, I only photographed it once, wandering around for a couple of hours. Now I live in Norwich but I still have connections with the place, my sister-in-law was the ladybird book lady, running a stall opposite where I once lived, and my brother sells vinyl in the upmarket bit up the road.
I miss the place, not the squalor, the outside loo, the cold – but the people, the community and, somehow, the optimism. In those days, there was not a gastro pub in sight and no-one had ever heard of a buffalo burger. ”
Photographs copyright © Stuart Goodman
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Cockney Beano Time
A beano from Stepney in the twenties (courtesy Irene Sheath)
It is Midsummer, and we have reached that time of year when a certain clamminess prevails in the city and East Enders turn restless, yearning for a trip to the sea or at the very least an excursion to glimpse some green fields. In the last century, pubs, workplaces and clubs organised annual summer beanos, which gave everyone the opportunity to pile into a coach and enjoy a day out, usually with liberal opportunity for refreshment and sing-songs on the way home.
Ladies’ beano from The Globe in Hartley St, Bethnal Green, in the fifties. Chris Dixon, who submitted the picture, recognises his grandmother, Flo Beazley, furthest left in the front row beside her next door neighbour Flo Wheeler, who had a fruit and vegetable stall on Green St. (courtesy Chris Dixon)
Another beano from the fifties – eighth from the left is Jim Tyrrell (1908-1991) who worked at Stepney Power Station in Limehouse and drank at the Rainbow on the Highway in Ratcliff.
Mid-twentieth century beano from the archive of Britton’s Coaches in Cable St. (courtesy Martin Harris)
Beano from the Rhodeswell Stores, Rhodeswell Rd, Limehouse in the mid-twenties.
Taken on the way to Southend, this is a ladies’ beano from The Beehive in the Roman Rd during the fifties or sixties in a coach from Empress Coaches. The only men in the photo are the driver and the accordionist. Joan Lord (née Collins) who submitted the photo is the daughter of the publicans of The Beehive. (Courtesy Joan Lord)
Terrie Conway Driver, who submitted this picture of a beano from The Duke of Gloucester, Seabright St, Bethnal Green, points out that her grandfather is seventh from the left in the back row. (Courtesy Terrie Conway Driver)
Taken on the way to Southend, this is a men’s beano from The Beehive in the Roman Rd in the fifties or sixties in a coach from Empress Coaches. (Courtesy Joan Lord)
Beano in the twenties from the Victory Public House in Ben Jonson Rd, on the corner with Carr St. Note the charabanc – the name derives from the French char à bancs (“carriage with wooden benches”) and they were originally horse-drawn.
A crowd gathers before a beano from The Queens’ Head in Chicksand St in the early fifties. John Charlton who submitted the photograph pointed out his grandfather George standing in the flat cap holding a bottle of beer on the right with John’s father Bill on the left of him, while John stands directly in front of the man in the straw hat. (Courtesy John Charlton)
Beano for Stepney Borough Council workers in the mid-twentieth century. (Courtesy Susan Armstrong)
Martin Harris, who submitted this picture, indicated that the driver, standing second from the left, is Teddy Britton, his second cousin. (Courtesy Martin Harris)
In the Panama hat is Ted Marks who owned the fish place at the side of the Martin Frobisher School, and is seen here taking his staff out on their annual beano.
George, the father of Colin Watson who submitted this photo, is among those who went on this beano from the Taylor Walker brewery in Limehouse. (Courtesy Colin Watson)
Pub beano setting out for Margate or Southend. (Courtesy John McCarthy)
Men’s beano from c. 1960 (courtesy Cathy Cocline)
Late sixties or early seventies ladies’ beano organised by the Locksley Estate Tenants Association in Limehouse, leaving from outside The Prince Alfred in Locksley St.
The father of John McCarthy, who submitted this photo, is on the far right squatting down with a beer in his hand, in this beano photo taken in the early sixties, which may be from his local, The Shakespeare in Bethnal Green Rd. Equally, it could be a works’ outing, as he was a dustman working for Bethnal Green Council. Typically, the men are wearing button holes and an accordionist accompanies them. Accordionists earned a fortune every summer weekend, playing at beanos. (courtesy John McCarthy)
John Sheehan, who submitted this picture, remembers it was taken on a beano to Clacton in the sixties. From left to right, you can seee John Driscoll who lived in Grosvenor Buildings, Dan Daley of Constant House, outsider Johnny Gamm from Hackney, alongside his cousin, John Sheehan from Constant House and Bill Britton from Holmsdale House. (Courtesy John Sheehan)
Photographs courtesy Tower Hamlets Community Homes
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East End Pubs, Then & Now
It is my pleasure to publish this collaboration with Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archive in which Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Alex Pink selected photographs of pubs from the collection, and then set out with his camera to discover which ones were still serving…
The Golden Heart, Spitalfields 1953
The Golden Heart, Spitalfields
The Artful Dodger, Royal Mint St 1989
The Artful Dodger, Royal Mint
The Star & Garter, Whitechapel 1982
The Star & Garter, Whitechapel
The Wentworth Arms, Mile End 1966
The Wentworth Arms, Mile End
The Prince Alfred, Limehouse 1978
The Prince Alfred, Limehouse
The Star of the East, Limehouse 1981
The Star of the East, Limehouse
The British Oak, Poplar 1981
The British Oak, Poplar
Galloway Arms, Limehouse 1981
Galloway Arms, Limehouse
The New Globe, Mile End 1954
The New Globe, Mile End
The Prospect of Whitby, Wapping c.1900
The Prospect of Whitby, Wapping
The Experienced Fowler, Limehouse 1931
The Experienced Fowler, Limehouse
The Jubilee, Limehouse 1978
The White Swan, Limehouse
The Ship, Cable St 1981
The Ship, Cable St
The City Pride, Isle of Dogs 1990
The City Pride, Isle of Dogs
The Vine Tavern, Whitechapel 1903
The Vine Tavern, Whitechapel
The White Hart, Whitechapel 1960
The White Hart, Whitechapel
The Dover Castle, Shadwell 1992
The Dover Castle, Shadwell
The Londoner, Limehouse 1974
The Londoner, Limehouse
The Kings Arms, Cable St 1994
The Kings Arms, Cable St
The Grapes, Limehouse 1975
The Grapes, Limehouse
Duke of Norfolk, Globe Rd 1985
Duke of Norfolk, Globe Rd
The Artichoke, Whitechapel 1990
The Artichoke, Whitechapel
The Old Blue Anchor, Whitechapel 1973
The Old Blue Anchor, Whitechapel
Bromley Arms, Bow 1981
Bromley Arms, Bow
The Morgan Arms, Bow 1961
The Morgan Arms, Bow
The Dickens Inn, St Katharine Docks, 1975
The Dickens Inn, St Katharine Docks
The Alma, Spitalfields 1989
The Alma, Spitalfields
Prospect of Whitby, Wapping nineteen-eighties
Prospect of Whitby, Wapping
The Black Horse,Leman St nineteen-eighties
The Black Horse, Leman St
The Dean Swift, nineteen-eighties
The Dean Swift
Archive images courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
New photographs copyright © Alex Pink
Visit Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives for opening times, collections & events.
You may also like to take a look at
Viscountess Boudica’s Open House
Rally round our beloved Viscountess in her hour of need!
This coming weekend, Saturday 25th & Sunday 26th June, Viscountess Boudica is opening her home to the public from 1-5pm daily for an exhibition and sale of her drawings at £30 each.
In common with thousands of people this year, Viscountess Boudica had her disability benefit suspended pending reassessment. Meanwhile, the powers-that-be have mislaid her papers and the outcome is that Viscountess Boudica faces a court summons in July for non-payment of £788.17 Council Tax.
As if this were not bad enough, burglars recently broke into the Viscountess’ home and trashed the place, leaving her without a bed and since then she has no choice but to sleep in an armchair each night.
Yet, undeterred by these calamities, Viscountess Boudica has decorated her home to conjure a visual spectacle and made a new outfit to greet guests this weekend.
Viscountess Boudica lives just five minutes from Columbia Rd Flower Market and I do hope as many of my readers as possible will take this opportunity to pay her a visit, admire her outfit and decor, and consider buying one of her wonderful drawings for £30 – so the Viscountess can raise enough cash to stop the court case and get a bed to sleep on.
She is awaiting your arrival.
Drawings copyright © Viscountess Boudica
Be sure to follow Viscountess Boudica’s blog There’s More To Life Than Heaven & Earth
Take a look at
Viscountess Boudica’s Domestic Appliances
Viscountess Boudica’s Drawings
Viscountess Boudica’s Halloween
Viscountess Boudica’s Christmas
Viscountess Boudica’s Valentine’s Day
Read my original profile of Mark Petty, Trendsetter
and take a look at Mark Petty’s Multicoloured Coats
Mark Petty returns to Brick Lane
