Adam Dant’s Map Of Thames Shipwrecks
CLICK THIS MAP to enlarge it and explore Cartographer Extraordinaire Adam Dant’s Map of Shipwrecks in the Thames Estuary, which he calls THE MUSEUM OF THE DEEP. This vast chart will be displayed in a decorated sea container on Southend seafront along with nautical curiosities and other items of interests selected by Adam from local museums and collections, opening this Saturday September 17th and running until Sunday October 12th. Click here for more details
Adam Dant’s Museum of the Deep in preparation
You can buy prints of Adam’s maps from TAG FINE ARTS
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Bob Mazzer Goes To The Dogs
Over the holidays, Contributing Photographer Bob Mazzer & I enjoyed a memorable day out among our friends, both human and canine, at the Romford Greyhound Owners’ Association attending their Annual Greyhound Show. RGOA undertake invaluable work finding homes for retired racing greyhounds and they have rehomed forty dogs so far this year and 2210 in total since 1977. Click here to pick which greyhound you will choose. As the persuasive Julie Coney, long-term stalwart of RGOA, suggested to me, ‘Why stop at just one?’
Colin O’Brien & I had planned to visit Romford dog track together but, since this was not to be, Bob Mazzer very graciously offered to stand in, undertaking the assignment on Colin’s behalf as a fellow-photographer’s affectionate tribute to a good friend.
Photographs copyright © Bob Mazzer
You may also like to take a look at these other photographs by Bob Mazzer
At Gravesend
At this season, The Gentle Author always enjoys an annual late summer excursion beyond Spitalfields in the form of a day trip to the sea and this year’s holiday destination was Gravesend
There is an undeniable romance about arriving by boat at a place you have never been before. This was how I arrived at Gravesend. Certainly, the vast terminal for cruise liners at Tilbury encourages a sense of expectation, even if your voyage is not across the ocean but simply over the Thames.
Yet as we approached Gravesend, it was a journey of a more melancholy nature that filled my mind. Since it was here that Pocahontas, one of the very first Americans to visit Europe, landed when illness forced her to abandon her return journey on March 21st 1617. The ship turned from its course before it left the Thames estuary and sought harbour at Gravesend where Pocahontas died just a few hours after coming ashore. Only twenty-one, she experienced much in her short life and left a young son, Thomas. He was taken back to London and completed her aborted journey home in adulthood, while his mother was buried at St George’s church, where today a handsome bronze figure embodies her presence to greet the pilgrims.
My arrival in Gravesend and a brisk walk up the steep High St were sufficient to displace these thoughts, replacing them with astonishment at the number of tattoo parlours and nail bars in such a small stretch of shops. Well-tended hanging baskets of flowers at every turn spoke eloquently of civic pride, while the many high quality buildings from earlier centuries evidenced the former wealth of Gravesend.
The appealing architectural vernacular of this shambolic medieval High St, interspersed by the Victorian grandeur of the Market Hall and the Carnegie Library, enticed me up the hill to the square where a group of senior Sikh gentlemen sat, happily passing the time of day and looking dapper in their turbans of multiple hues of blue.
Before long, hunger beckoned and I set off past Bawley Bay, where families once emigrated to the Antipodes, and St Andrew’s Mission church, built out over the water in 1871, and the Clarendon Royal Hotel, conceived as a palace for James II, and the Customs House of 1812, and the fourteenth century Milton Chantry, the oldest building in Gravesend, and the New Tavern Fort, constructed in expectation of an invasion by the French.
My point of arrival was the Promenade Cafe, an elegant thirties pavilion set back from the sea behind a wide lawn, thronging with customers, young and old, and everyone quite at home. This eastern stretch of Gravesend is where local residents, especially families, come to enjoy their leisure, offering paddling, feeding the swans, dog-walking and the quiet spectacle of passing traffic in the estuary. Among other hungry customers, I sat patiently at my table until a waiter should call out the number of my dinner ticket and deliver my plate of fish and chips.
‘Number Six!’ called the waiter, wielding a tray laden with two steaming fish dinners and inspiring everyone to turn their heads to see who was to be the lucky recipient. ‘Number Six?’ the waiter bawled at the top of his voice. Mystified by lack of any response, ‘Number Six?’ he queried, before returning inside shaking his head in disappointment. Puzzled glances passed between the dinners until a senior gentleman in a corner perked up. ‘Did he say Number Six?’ he asked, speaking his thoughts out loud. Observing nods of assent from neighbouring tables, he leapt to his feet clutching his ticket and hurried inside declaiming, ‘He didn’t speak loud enough, did he?’ and ‘What’s wrong with you, can’t you speak up?’
East of the promenade and over the canal, an atmosphere of extravagant post-industrial decay prevails. I walked for a mile along an overgrown narrow path between huge abandoned factories to emerge in a light industrial estate where small businesses still thrive, mostly in maritime related trades. At the very end, where the Higham Marshes begin sits the Ship & Lobster, occupying a position as the first and last pub on the Thames. Of significant history and in a breathtaking location, it was refreshing to encounter this friendly unpretentious local pub that serves the community of workers from the industrial estate, and has successfully evaded tourism or tarting up.
Before I returned to the ferry and the train back to Fenchurch St, I had one more landmark to discover. Sitting on the hill above Gravesend, the Guru Nanak Darbar Gurdwara Sikh Temple looks for all the world as if had been magically transported there by a genie from the Arabian Nights. Built entirely of gleaming white marble, on an equal scale to a European cathedral, this a compelling piece of architecture rendered even more remarkable by its unexpected location. Approaching through the elaborate gatehouse pavilion, I could not resist crossing the car park and walking right up to it – I should not have been surprised if it had vanished like a mirage.
A woman in long coloured robes hurried towards me. Immediately, I felt that I had trespassed and prepared my apology, but instead she welcomed me openly and invited me inside, explaining where I could find a cloth to cover my head and where I could leave my shoes if I wanted to attend a service. The interior of the temple with its enormous blue dome, lined with mosaic, and ceremonial staircase was no less impressive than the exterior. Yet the atmosphere was relaxed and I found myself reciprocating polite nods with worshippers passing in the hallway. My first foray into the world of the Sikhs.
The shadows were lengthening and my feet were sore when I climbed aboard Tilbury ferry at the end of a memorable excursion, crammed with wonders. I was enchanted by my day trip to Gravesend. Gravesend has so much to recommend it, I thought.
The Gravesend ferry ready to leave from Tilbury
Cruise ship at Tilbury seen from the Gravesend ferry
On the ferry
Looking back to Tilbury from Gravesend
Gravesend has the oldest cast iron pier in Britain
Arrival at Gravesend
St George’s where Pocahontas, one of the first Americans to visit Europe, is buried
Gravesend Market
Former manufacturers
Traditional Undertaker at Gravesend
Customs House
At the Promenade Cafe
Along Wharf Rd
In Mark Lane
The Ship & Lobster, the first and last pub on the Thames. Featured in Great Expectations, this pub was supposedly founded when Charles II and his brother James raced barges here.
Guru Nanak Darbar Gurdwara, Sikh Temple
Plan your trip at www.visitgravesend.co.uk
You may like to read about my previous trips beyond Spitalfields at this time of year
A Walk from Shoeburyness to Chalkwell, 2013
In Old Deptford
This is the final story this week by Novelist & Historian of London Gillian Tindall as guest author in celebration of the publication of her new book, A Tunnel Through Time, A New Route for an Old London Journey by Chatto & Windus.
In Albury St
It is rather a shame Crossrail will not reach Deptford, for the lucky break of a brand new Underground station on a fast route to Central London is something Deptford could have done with. Rotherhithe, on the next bulge of the shore, has acquired the new ‘Ginger’ line straight into the City with handsome stations at Canada Water and Surrey Quays. Admittedly, the Docklands Light Railway now comes down through Deptford Bridge on its way to Lewisham, but it by-passes much of central Deptford which continues to be a poor relation by comparison with the glittering Isle of Dogs on the far side of the river.
In my distant childhood, Deptford, with its unfair resonance of ‘debt,’ figured to the outside world as a place of sinister poverty. On that south side of the Thames, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe sounded faintly exciting, with overtones of putting out to sea. Greenwich, just downriver, with its park, Palace and College, was a different world. But Deptford, lost in between, lodged in many people’s minds, and in children’s stories, as a classic London slum. Nor, of course, was this image helped by the severe bombing it suffered in World War Two nor by the dreary estates built by post-war planners.
Yet Deptford, long ago, was a place of fertile green water-meadows, facing the Thames and adjacent to a creek. Here Henry VIII established his Royal Dockyard, in the days when he was a popular young sovereign rather than an obese tyrant. Ships built in Deptford went out all over the world for the next three-and-a-half centuries. By Shakespeare’s time, the scattered country village that had been medieval Deptford had expanded into a riverside settlement. Well-to-do Londoners came down by river to drink there on summer evenings. The fact that one such evening ended in the mysterious death of Shakespeare’s fellow playwright ‘Kit’ Marlow gives a false impression – Deptford was the Maidenhead or Henley of that time, a gentlemanly place to reside, and remained so for the next two centuries.
Marlowe lies buried somewhere in the flowery churchyard of the ancient parish church of St Nicholas. Two generations later, a regular attender at the church was John Evelyn, land owner, man of letters, diarist and courtier (the equivalent of a modern high-ranking civil servant). Through marriage, Evelyn had acquired Sayes Court Manor House, the largest house in Deptford, and from here he went back and forth to visit Charles II in Whitehall palace, often on naval business. Yet wealth and privilege could not protect against an all-too-common grief, also buried in St Nicholas churchyard are three of Evelyn’s children who died young, including one particularly bright little boy over whom his father mourned much. Evelyn wrote in his diary of ‘our extreme sorrow,’ and that ‘This evening, after the service, was my baby buried near the tower with his brothers. All my dear children.’
Evelyn, a great horticulturalist, laid out a splendid garden at Sayes Court, with evergreen and hawthorn hedges and new tree-species imported from abroad. He was one of the first to understand the role of trees in keeping the environment clean and he advised a mass planting operation across London – advice which, unfortunately, was not taken. Late in life, when he and his wife had retired to the Evelyn family country seat at Wootton, in Surrey, he rented his house and gardens at Deptford to a series of tenants, most notably to Peter the Great, the Russian Czar, who wanted to study English ship-building in particular and English life in general. Peter the Great, in spite of some brutally medieval habits towards his enemies, real or supposed, saw himself as a great innovator and the one who was going to drag Russia into the West and the modern age. He was responsible for founding St Petersburg on the western edge of his vast country, and employed European architects to design its palaces.
A statue of Peter the Great, looking oddly elongated in a heavy European coat and a tricorn hat, stands today on an elevated platform on the Thames path not far from the site of Sayes Court, beside a new estate overlooking the river and Deptford creek. Inexplicably, he is flanked by a dwarf and an ornate empty chair in which passing walkers love to sit. The inscription states that he arrived in England in January 1698 and stayed in Evelyn’s house for four months – ‘This monument is erected near the Royal ship-yard where Peter the Great studied English science of ship-building. The monument is a gift from the Russian people and commemorates the visit of Peter the Great to this country in search of knowledge and experience.’
But exactly what experience? It is not mentioned that, during the months he was at Sayes Court, Peter confirmed the common British perception of Russians as a barbaric, backward people by doing a great deal of damage both to the house and the garden. In particular, it is recorded he trashed a number of Evelyn’s carefully tended hedgerows by driving through them for fun in a barrow. The Russian oligarch as hate-figure is clearly not a new phenomenon in this country.
The Royal Dockyard declined in importance in the nineteenth century with the advent of large new warships too big for the Thames, and was closed in 1869. Various uses were found for it and by the twentieth century, when its Tudor vestiges were gradually destroyed or buried, its final use was as a paper-wharf for International Newspapers. Today, under the name ‘Convoys Wharf,’ it is scheduled for redevelopment with high tower blocks, in which few of the flats will be ‘affordable’ in any real sense.
A vestige of the Sayes Court garden does remain. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Deptford was being covered in small terrace houses for dockers, the Evelyn family, who still owned the land, gave a piece of it to the local authority to create a public garden. It survives today, though a refuge for drunks now. Better tended than it was a few years back when I first discovered it, the garden is currently on the World Monument Fund’s list of endangered spaces – presumably because of the looming Wharf development. In the centre of the garden, surrounded by railings, stands a giant mulberry tree, its knotted limbs trailing on the ground. I am sure it dates from John Evelyn’s own high summer of planting, and is another for the Gentle Author’s short list of ancient London mulberries.
Towards the end of Evelyn’s life, the old church was substantially rebuilt, and a new, more elegant one, St Paul’s, just off Deptford High St, offered extra space for the district’s expanding population. A few rows of fine town houses went up also, including Albury St which was built on land belonging to the Evelyn family and was called after their country retreat. Fine brick, and an elegant variety of porches decorated with cherubs, angels, fruit and flowers, made these houses fit homes for the sea-captains, ship-builders and Honourable Company men who were the new affluent middle class of Deptford.
One side of Albury St alone remains as a precious survival in a district that has seen so much destruction through war and bone-headed planning decisions. This enclave at least is now being carefully looked after, while what were once the wastelands of abandoned dockside uses are filling up with tall buildings. Like it or not, regret it or not, Deptford is being hauled into twenty-first century London.
Deptford Dockyard, 1775
Albury St
Entrance to the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford, where Christopher Marlowe is buried
St Nicholas, Deptford, dates from the twelfth century
Door to St Nicholas
Charnel House at St Nicholas
Graves at St Nicholas
St Paul’s church by Thomas Archer, c.1720
Manze’s in Deptford High St
Wellbeloved, Butcher & Grazier
In Deptford High St
In Deptford High St
In Deptford High St
In Deptford Market
In Deptford Market
In Deptford Market
Peter the Great by Sir Godfrey Kneller
Peter the Great at Deptford Creek by Mikhail Shemyakin
John Evelyn, engraving by T. Bragg after Sir Godfrey Kneller (Courtesy Wellcome Library)
John Evelyn’s Mulberry at Sayes Court Garden
On Thursday 15th September at 8pm, Gillian Tindall discusses her work and reads from ‘The Tunnel Through Time’ at Libreria, 65 Hanbury St, E1 5JP, which is positioned – appropriately enough – directly over a Crossrail tunnel. In her new book, Gillian explores the history of the new Crossrail route which turns out to be only the latest scheme to traverse an ancient path across London’s buried secrets and former fields. Click here to book your free ticket
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Livesaving In Limehouse
Novelist & Historian of London Gillian Tindall takes over as guest author this week in celebration of the publication of her new book, A Tunnel Through Time, A New Route for an Old London Journey by Chatto & Windus.
Limehouse Cut
In its unbroken run underground from the edge of the City of London at Whitechapel to the alternative City that has risen on the former docks, now called ‘Canary Wharf,’ Crossrail passes beneath two canals which were there well before the railways came. These canals were the first pieces of substantial engineering to be carved laboriously by huge teams of labourers with just picks and shovels out of the open pastures and market gardens between Stepney and the River Lea.
Regents Canal is well-known and loved, for in its old age it seems almost like a natural river bringing a breath of country air into the heart of the town. Built around the edge of London in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, it was designed to create a goods route between the new Grand Junction Canal at Paddington and the equally new docks to the east.
Yet when it arrived there in 1820, it met the already established Limehouse Basin, a harbour that had been constructed to receive barges from the Limehouse Cut. The Cut was the first canal for shipping to the capital and one of the oldest in England. It had opened fifty years before to link the River Lea, and hence the eastern counties, with the Thames. It bypassed the twisting loops of Bow Creek and the horseshoe bends of the Thames en route the Pool of London, turning a difficult journey of many miles into a short, straight one of less than two.
For most of its life, the Limehouse Cut has been heavily industrial. A few isolated lime-kilns operated in the area since the Middle Ages, converting chalk into building material and bestowing the name ‘Limehouse’ on the place. After the canal arrived, there were added manufacturies fuelled by the coal that the barges brought – soap boilers, potash works, cable making, presently a gas works and further chemical works making tar, varnish, ammonia and other reeking commodities of civilisation. Bones were ground down and fish heads were converted at what became the largest dog-biscuit factory in the world. It was all jobs for local people. A far cry from the Limehouse of nineteenth century tradition and myth, populated by sinister Chinese seamen off ships reputedly visiting opium dens.
Yet smelly local trades and opium dens are both now in the past. Even if the buildings fronting the canal had not suffered so much in the blitz, heavy industry is no longer to be found in the capital. The surviving warehouses and workshops are today much sought after by small companies, particularly in the media, though more and more workspaces have to compete with large development companies seeking to build ‘Luxury Waterside Homes.’
It was to reconnoitre one of these old buildings that I and my husband went walking along the towpath, one day at the end of June five years ago. A Conservation Society signalled to me that a good Victorian warehouse was being eyed-up by a developer and what did I think? I cannot retrieve exactly which building it was or the outcome – but what I recall vividly was the little deer in the stream.
We had checked the building, taken some photos, and were walking slowly on from Burdett Rd, under Commercial Rd bridge, in the direction of Limehouse Basin. The East End traffic roared over the bridges, but along the canal it was peaceful – stumpy traces of one-time barge apparatus slept in the sun, water dripped from the remnants of quay shoring, and from self-sown willows and buddleias that trailed from old walls, while ducks and moorhens went about their rural business. This summer, revisiting the place, I found barges moored along this stretch but five years ago it seemed more or less deserted.
As we neared the ancient railway bridge that carries the Docklands Light Railway, we met a young man standing on the towpath, gazing across to the other side, looking anxious and trying to call someone on his mobile. What was up, we wondered? He pointed to some quay shoring opposite which had collapsed into the water – there was no towpath that side. Willow saplings were sprouting out of leafy débris that had collected there forming a small island. Just discernible through the branches was what we discerned – when it shifted slightly – was a tiny deer, apparently a fawn.
The young man explained that he had been alerted to its presence by ‘a foreign lady’ who lived in the flats opposite, right on the canal but high above. She had spotted the fawn there the evening before, was worried about it and had eventually accosted this passerby to ask him if he could do something? – her own English was extremely limited. He had taken up the challenge and was trying to raise some responsible service, but was being passed from one number to another.
However, as we hung about – helpful if useless – and other interested passersby gradually joined us, the system did gradually begin to swing into action. Eventually, seven or eight fireman with special water-rescue equipment turned up Their clumping feet, as they moved and down the towpath discussing the best move, alarmed the fawn who had been shifting around in its eyrie from time to time. It jumped out and took to the water, swimming swiftly in the direction of the Basin. The fireman pounded heavily after it on the opposite side. It took fright again, swam back to its hiding place and, in a quick flurry of delicate legs, concealed itself still further behind the greenery.
Soon after this, a vanload of policemen turned up on the Commercial Rd bridge, where by now there was also an audience of walkers and locals. Then, at last, a posse of River Police who specialised in animal rescues appeared – it was said they had been summoned from down-river in Kent. Including them, there must now have been a good fifteen official persons in high-viz jackets trying to achieve the rescue of one small creature.
The River Police set off gently in a rubber dinghy for the fawn’s eyrie, reached it and almost managed to grab it. That is to say, one man, parting the willows, actually got his hands on its sleek sides – when, with a scream like a terrified child, it slithered out of his grasp, and regained the water. Once more, it swam frantically back and forth, pursued now by the dinghy which, with its load of two would-be helpful men, was much slower than this fleet animal. Up and down it went – we expected that at any moment it might have a heart attack. Do deer die of fright? Finally, leaving its pursuers paddling frantically behind, it swam out into Limehouse Basin.
There was a collective intake of breath from the by-now-quite-large crowd – because the Basin has an outlet to the Thames, and once the tiny animal got involved in the locks and out into the swift, rolling water it might not stand a chance. But, by great good fortune, the fawn veered not left towards the Thames but right, to an inlet where there was a lock that is now blocked off. The dinghy followed it and the fawn was finally cornered. Hands were laid on it again – more heart-rending screams – before it was quickly enveloped it a thick, dark bag brought for the purpose. Screams and struggles ceased as the deer lay quiet, evidently believing now that it had found a safe hiding place.
It was brought back into the Cut, to general applause, delivered to the towpath side and carried carefully in its bag up some steps to where the police van was parked. Where would they take it, we asked? ‘An animal sanctuary in Kent’ was the answer – ‘Pending enquiries.’
Two hours had passed since we first encountered the man on his phone. We and the rest of the audience dispersed, with views exchanged on where the young deer could possibly have come from? The favoured theory was that it, no doubt with its mother, had strayed out from Epping Forest, across the open country still to be found north of Chingford, and there had encountered the River Lea at the beginning of its long and winding route down to the East End. Had they meant to go swimming? Where had it lost its mother? Had they been swept apart? Had something frightened the creature to make it swim so far downstream before turning into the relatively safety of Limehouse Cut?
An alternative view was that it might not be a fawn at all but a muntjac, one of those miniature decorative deer from South Asia, and that it could have escaped from the Zoo and swum all the way down the Regents Canal. But this seems to me even less likely – all through the long tunnel from the Caledonian Rd to the Angel, Islington? I never did find out. But what we carried away with us from that day’s entertainment was a sense that we are still, with all our stupidities, a fundamentally decent country, to expend resources unquestioningly on such an enterprise rather than abandoning one small animal to slow starvation in a derelict corner of a canal.
The fawn swims for its life (Photograph by Richard Lansdown)
The fawn is captured in a cloth bag and rescued at Limehouse Basin (Photograph by Richard Lansdown)
On Thursday 15th September at 8pm, Gillian Tindall discusses her work and reads from ‘The Tunnel Through Time’ at Libreria, 65 Hanbury St, E1 5JP, which is positioned – appropriately enough – directly over a Crossrail tunnel. In her new book, Gillian explores the history of the new Crossrail route which turns out to be only the latest scheme to traverse an ancient path across London’s buried secrets and former fields. Click here to book your free ticket
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Stepney’s Lost Mansions
Novelist & Historian of London Gillian Tindall takes over as guest author this week in celebration of the publication of her new book, A Tunnel Through Time, A New Route for an Old London Journey by Chatto & Windus.
With the Crossrail station already taking shape in Whitechapel, you may feel that it is drawing the East End into Central London. Yet beyond Farringdon, after stops at Moorgate, Liverpool St and Whitechapel, the new sleek Crossrail trains will accelerate and pass the rest of the East End by. From Whitechapel, the Crossrail line splits with one branch running without pause all the way to Stratford and the other to Canary Wharf.
The dividing of the ways is at Stepney Green – not the tube station on the Mile End Rd but the old roadway running down to Stepney Green Park and the Stepney City Farm. The line actually divides just before it reaches St Dunstan’s, Stepney’s ancient parish church, with the up and the down lines for the Stratford branch passing neatly on either side of its walls. Fear not – Crossrail runs thirty metres deep and it will not disturb the church, nor its graveyard where thousands of dead Londoners, including victims of the Great Plague, lie packed beneath its verdant turf.
Only a mile from Aldgate, Stepney was still green fields three hundred years ago, with just a frill of ribbon-development along the main road and around St Dunstan’s. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, though terraces of neat Regency houses were spreading fast, there was pasture land beyond. The Stepney of Cockney tradition only arrived with the expansion of the docks, the laying of railway lines to service them, and the rapid in-filling of the fields with rows and rows of small houses for the population that provided the work force.
But what was Stepney like before – much longer ago – when London was still contained within its medieval walls whose gates shut at night? By one of those flukes of time and chance, it is the construction of Crossrail which has helped literally to bring to light what Stepney once was. Near the church, where the line divides in two, a big access and ventilation shaft is in course of construction, and this happens to be the site of one of the area’s oldest recorded buildings. From early Victorian times until the Second World War, streets covered this acre of land and there was no possibility of recovering the lost big house that only existed as a vague folk memory. Yet bombs and planners between them have so devastated this area that archaeological excavation has now become possible. By this means, the foundations of long ago, cess-pits, animal bones, shards of pottery and glass and even the seeds of plants that once grew round a moat, have again been revealed.
The archaeologists of the Museum of London, who have undertaken the excavation, knew from local lore and earlier, partial digs that something important had stood there. Maps as late as the nineteenth century record ‘King John’s Palace’ – or, at least, the towered gateway to it. In fact, there is no evidence that King John (reigning from 1199 to 1216) had a house in Stepney. It has been said that whenever the origins of a venerable building passed from the memory of man, it is ascribed to the wicked King John because there was only one, making him easier to distinguish from the bevy of royal Henries, Edwards and Richards.
The gateway, which survived till 1858 when it was witlessly demolished by the non-conformist institution occupying the site, appears to have belonged to a Tudor edifice dating from after 1450, well over two hundred years later than John’s reign, though it may have been constructed upon the foundations of an earlier building. It is this Tudor house, complete with a moat, that the archaeologists have been excavating – thought to be the ‘Great Place’ belonging to a John Fenne, that was rented to a Lord Darcy when Henry VIII was a young and popular monarch, and the divorces, the beheadings and the Reformation lay in the future.
This was not the only grand house set in these fields at that time. Stepney, an easy walk or ride from London proper, was becoming popular as a dormitory suburb for prominent courtiers and men of the City. There were several big houses not far from St Dunstan’s church, including one where the City Farm is now that was owned by Henry Colet, a leading member of the Mercers Company. This appears to have been a traditional timbered courtyard house, not quite as grand as Lord Darcy’s home even if the Colets turned it into a meeting place for the great and good of their day.
Only one of the twenty-two children that Dame Colet bore survived, a tragic record even for those times of high infant mortality, but John Colet, the sole survivor, was to become famous. As Dean of St Paul’s, he founded the school that still bears that name in west London today. Upon his father’s death he acquired his acquired a large, timbered house for himself near by, set among orchards at the corner of today’s Salmon Lane. Here he entertained the leading European thinkers of his generation, including the reformist scholar Erasmus.
Dean Colet died of ‘the sweating sickness’ in 1519 which may have been just as well, for if he had lived fifteen years longer he – with his radical views on religion – might well have lost his head to Henry VIII, like his younger friend and protegé, Thomas More. During the chaos of the Reformation, it was probably at the former Colet house that Thomas Cromwell, the King’s right-hand man, lived in state. He sent his neighbour Darcy to the gallows for opposing the King – with Darcy angrily prophesying that one day Cromwell’s head would be cut off too. And so it was.
Two generations later, after Elizabeth had been Queen for many years, life was more settled and new money flowed from overseas. The moated Place with a gatehouse in Stepney was acquired by Henry Somerset, later Marquis of Worcester. He undertook works to smarten and modernise the property, and his name became permanently attached to it. Somerset came near to losing his own head in the next round of mayhem – the Civil War and the execution of Charles I – and, after him, the supposed ‘King John’s Palace’ became used by as series of non-conformist religious groups. A Meeting House, assorted chapels and then terraced houses were built on the gardens.
A new gentry replaced the old in Stepney. These were men who made fortunes in foreign trade and Stepney, near to where their ships were berthed, was well-recognised as ‘a convenient spot for the habitation of mariners.’ Some lived in the old, courtyard houses of earlier generations, while others built themselves modern gentlemen’s residences in classical brick. In the late eighteenth century, the old Colet house became the ‘Spring Gardens Coffee House.’ Then, in the nineteenth century it, like Dean Colet’s house, Worcester House was destroyed when these ancient mansions were pulled down to be replaced by narrow streets, as Stepney was swallowed up by London.
Now those streets are gone, the greater part of them needlessly demolished not by World War II bombs but by post-war planners dreaming of ‘green spaces’ and ‘radiant towers.’ Yet incendiary bombs did fall close to St Dunstan’s church onto the site of Worcester House. They destroyed a Baptist chapel which, when it was built in the eighteen forties, had been only a few yards along the road from the then-just-surviving gate-house to ‘King John’s Palace’. The chapel’s mock-Tudor doorway alone still stands (carefully preserved on the edge of the Crossrail excavation area). I suspect that increasing numbers of people may think this nineteenth century remnant is a legacy from medieval times – King John lives!
A similar illusion is also available in the heart of the City Farm just down the road, on what was once the south side of Worcester House’s grounds, near the Colets’ home. Here, in the eighteen sixties, a grand, Congregationalist church was built in the fashionable Gothic style. It too fell to firebombs early in the War. Today, sacks and seed boxes are piled up and free-range chickens peck round the stone wall and arched doorway that is all that remains. So battered have these not-very-ancient structures been, by misfortune, abandonment and the weather, that it is quite possible to believe that you are gazing at something far older – and the long-ago grand people of Stepney do not seem so far away.
Old stone wall at Stepney City Farm
Reconstruction of the Stepney Moated Manor by Faith Vardy (Copyright © MOLA from “Stepney Green: Moated Manor House to City Farm” published by TfL)
Dean Colet by Hans Holbein the younger
Dean Colet’s house, c.1790
The Baptist College, 1840
Gloomy Sunday by John Claridge (Stepney in the sixties)
St Dunstan’s church
On Thursday 15th September at 8pm, Gillian Tindall discusses her work and reads from ‘The Tunnel Through Time’ at Libreria, 65 Hanbury St, E1 5JP, which is positioned – appropriately enough – directly over a Crossrail tunnel. In her new book, Gillian explores the history of the new Crossrail route which turns out to be only the latest scheme to traverse an ancient path across London’s buried secrets and former fields. Click here to book your free ticket
You may also like to read about
Where The White Chapel Once Stood
Novelist & Historian of London Gillian Tindall takes over as guest author this week in celebration of the publication of her new book, A Tunnel Through Time, A New Route for an Old London Journey by Chatto & Windus.
Altab Ali Park, Whitechapel
- “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clements,
- You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martins.
- When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey.
- When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch…”
- “Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
- And here comes a chopper to chop off your head…”
- “Sticks and an apple, say the bells of Whitechapel…”
These lines may have been first written down in the eighteenth century, but it has been suggested that their origins lie in the tit-for-tat executions which accompanied the Reformation in the sixteenth century:
Like church bells calling from one parish to the next, Crossrail travels eastwards from Liverpool St Station to Whitechapel:
May I suggest that if Whitechapel could only suggest sticks and an apple, it was not a very salubrious neighbourhood even then?
From Aldgate, the eastern gate of the City, Whitechapel High St runs for a mile to the point where Mile End Rd starts and was long known as ‘the back door to London.’ In the fifteenth century, when a group of young noblemen on a night out in Whitechapel got into an argument with local lads which became a mass brawl, three commoners ended up dead. At that time, gentlemen usually carried daggers and no nobleman got punished.
A century later, in the Elizabethan era, there were taverns all along Whitechapel High St and in Aldgate stood the Red Lion playhouse where Shakespeare appeared early in his career. The London commentator, John Stow, complained that the street was ‘pestered with cottages and alleys’ and the fields where he had played as a child were being built over.
Three hundred years more and these dense, squalid side streets became notorious as locations of the Whitechapel Murders. In the mid-twentieth century, Whitechapel acquired new notoriety in the form of the nefarious activities of the Kray twins at The Blind Beggar, even though neither of these sensation narratives, endlessly milked today for tourists, have much to do with the reality of life in the East End.
Whitechapel has a history of mixed fortunes. Its location near both the City and the Docks, ensured that, thanks to expanding trade, many people were making a good living there in the eighteenth century. In the Georgian era, sugar refiners, rope and sail-makers, timber merchants, gun-makers, bell-founders and skilled engineers lived and worked in Whitechapel, and they were well-to-do people. Among them were Fellows of the Royal Society and authors of books on navigation for the expanding world. Captain Cook and his family had a house just beyond Mile End in the seventy-seventies, disgracefully demolished by the local authority in 1958.
Where, you may ask, did these respectable folk attend church, as they surely must have done? For centuries, the church for the huge parish of the’Tower Hamlets,’ when it contained little more than small farming settlements and a few isolated grand houses, was St Dunstan’s at Stepney. Yet already, in the Middle Ages, there were a significant number of people living just outside the City gate who did not want to trek through the mud to Stepney in winter. It was to accommodate them that a small chapel of ease was built of stone-rubble near Aldgate in the thirteenth century, rebuilt a hundred years later, given a coat of white limewash and dedicated to ‘St Mary Matfelon.’ This was the long-enduring White Chapel, which, standing out from afar, was to give its unofficial description to the place.
By the late seventeenth century, with Charles II on the throne and the old City recently burnt out in the Great Fire, it was obvious that the population of the Tower Hamlets was growing fast and one church was not enough. The parish of St Dunstan’s was divided into nine, with new churches built and St Mary’s rebuilt again, in red brick this time, to provide space for the by-now very substantial population of Whitechapel. The land round the chapel, which had unofficially received hundreds of bodies already – including probably that of Charles I’s executioner, Richard Brandon – now became a prestigious local graveyard. Sir John Cass, founder of the Stepney school that still bears his name was buried there, and so were members of the Cooke family, a distinguished clan with governmental connections and a coat of arms.
The Maddocks, another armigerous local family who were prosperous timber merchants just off Cable St, also paid for an elegant tomb of their own. Into it, between 1774 and 1810, went Nathan Maddock and his wife Elizabeth, both only in middle life, a daughter of thirteen, a sister-in-law of twenty-five, and her son when he was seventeen. It is a relief to find that Richard Maddock (who did not actually live in Whitechapel any longer but grandly in St James) was seventy when he died, and his sister seventy-nine. A James Maddock died aged nineteen, but that same year another James in the same family was negotiating the deeds of land in the area on which he intended to build and he appears to have lived so long that the tomb was full before it could accommodate him.
How do I know all this? Because the tomb, complete with a worn crest of stone feathers and a ‘demi lion rampant,’ is to be found on the site of the old churchyard to this day. It is one of only two sarcophagus tombs that have survived the clearances which took place when the ground was shut for burials in the eighteen-fifties, when the church was rebuilt for the third time in 1877, redone again after a fire in 1880, and when bombs destroyed it in 1940. With its button-lidded top, the tomb looks exactly like an enormous soup-tureen for a family of giants with a rather pretentious taste in crockery.
On seats nearby, on a grassy bank that conceals a mountain of blitz rubble, and vestigial stone walls marking the outlines of two by-gone churches, City workers eat takeaway lunches, young men smoke and look bored, while heavily-shrouded young women confer over pushchairs. Whether they admire the tomb, realise what it is or simply ignore it, I cannot say.
The seventeenth century incarnation of the St Mary Matfelon, the White Chapel
White Chapel seen from Aldgate in the early twentieth century
St Mary Matfelon, the White Chapel, seen from Green Dragon Yard in the nineteenth century.
White Chapel seen from the east in the early twentieth century
The site of the White Chapel in Altab Ali Park
In Altab Ali Park
Tureen Tomb for the Maddock family in Altab Ali Park
Whitechapel Art Gallery
Whitechapel Bell Foundry
East London Mosque
Whitechapel Market
On Thursday 15th September at 8pm, Gillian Tindall discusses her work and reads from ‘The Tunnel Through Time’ at Libreria, 65 Hanbury St, E1 5JP, which is positioned – appropriately enough – directly over a Crossrail tunnel. In her new book, Gillian explores the history of the new Crossrail route which turns out to be only the latest scheme to traverse an ancient path across London’s buried secrets and former fields. Click here to book your free ticket
You may also like to read about
Phil Maxwell at the Royal London Hospital
Phil Maxwell’s Whitechapel Market
Sir George’s Home for Respectable Girls
