Vanishing London
Four Swans, Bishopsgate, photographed by William Strudwick & demolished 1873
In 1906, F G Hilton Price, Vice President of the London Topographical Society opened his speech to the members at the annual meeting with these words – ‘We are all familiar with the hackneyed expression ‘Vanishing London’ but it is nevertheless an appropriate one for – as a matter of fact – there is very little remaining in the City which might be called old London … During the last sixty years or more there have been enormous changes, the topography has been altered to a considerable extent, and London has been practically rebuilt.’
These photographs are selected from volumes of the Society’s ‘London Topographic Record,’ published between 1900 and 1939, which adopted the melancholy duty of recording notable old buildings as they were demolished in the capital. Yet even this lamentable catalogue of loss exists in blithe innocence of the London Blitz that was to come.
Bell Yard, Fleet St, photographed by William Strudwick
Pope’s House, Plough Court, Lombard St, photographed by William Strudwick
Lambeth High St photographed by William Strudwick
Peter’s Lane, Smithfield, photographed by William Strudwick
Millbank Suspension Bridge & Wharves, August 1906, photographed by Walter L Spiers
54 & 55 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the archway leading into Sardinia St, demolished 1912, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Sardinian Chapel, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, August 1906, demolished 1908, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Archway leading into Great Scotland Yard and 1 Whitehall, September 1903, photographed by Walter L Spiers
New Inn, Strand, June 1889, photographed by Ernest G Spiers
Nevill’s Court’s, Fetter Lane, March 1910, demolished 1911, photographed by Walter L Spiers
14 & 15 Nevill’s Court, Fetter Lane, demolished 1911
The Old Dick Whittington, Cloth Fair, April 1898, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Bartholomew Close, August 1904, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Williamson’s Hotel, New Court, City of London
Raquet Court, Fleet St
Collingwood St, Blackfriars Rd
Old Houses, North side of the Strand
Courtyard of 32 Botolph Lane, April 1905, demolished 1906, photographed by Walter L Spiers
32 Botolph Lane, April 1905, demolished 1906, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Bird in Hand, Long Acre
Houses in Millbank St, September 1903, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Door to Cardinal Wolsey’s Wine Cellar, Board of Trade Offices, 7 Whitehall Gardens
Old Smithy, Bell St, Edgware Rd, demolished by Baker St & Edgware Railway
Architectural Museum, Cannon Row, Westminster
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Insitute
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Happy Days At The Queen’s Head
As regular readers will know, there is a campaign underway to Save The Queen’s Head in Limehouse, which was declared as an Asset of Community Value this spring. Supporters have until the end of August to buy the pub from its current owners and prevent it falling into the hands of developers. Pledges can be made here. Today, I publish an interview by ‘The Returning Native’ with Tony Minehane, whose family kept the pub open through two world wars.
John Driscoll at The Queen’s Head, 1926
To the locals downing their pints at The Queen’s Head today, Tony Minehane is an unfamiliar face – but this grand old East End boozer on Limehouse’s verdant York Sq was once home for Tony, whose family ran the pub from 1926 until 1961.
“My father found this tucked away under the counter the day he left The Queens Head in 1961,” he said, placing an unopened bottle of Young’s Coronation Ale in my hand. “This may well be the only one in existence.”
As a schoolboy, Tony earned pocket money delivering bottles of gin and advocaat to a house of upmarket prostitutes on Cable St. “These girls used to drink in the saloon bar here and they’d take drink back with them,” he recalled.“But once a month, usually about midnight, they’d phone up and say, if Tony’s available, could he drop something down to us? So I’d jump on my bike and take it there.”
Tony’s grandfather, John Driscoll, was the first in the family to take charge behind the bar, securing the tenancy in 1926 after a career as a sailor in the merchant navy.
“At that time this place had more mice than it had customers,” Tony claimed, rifling through his folder stuffed with sepia photographs of the pub and documents he has gathered from his family’s history.
“Fortunately it had the beer, which was good. My grandparents came in for a drink and the landlord said he was getting out. So my granddad thought, ‘Well, I’ll get in touch with the brewery.’”
In the early part of the twentieth century, it was not uncommon for former seaman to retire to run East End pubs, not least because there were so many of both dotted around London’s docks at the time. But Tony’s grandfather went to the front of the queue when he discovered an unlikely connection with the executive at Young’s brewery who was picking between the candidates.
“They were shown into this guy’s office, and my grandfather thought he recognised him, but didn’t say any more because he wasn’t sure. They talked about his career in the Merchant Navy and my grandfather mentioned that he worked on a ship called the ‘Omrah’, going backwards and forwards to Australia.
The guy said, ‘Do you remember anything a bit strange in such-and-such a year?’ My grandfather thought about it and said, ‘Oh, yes, we had a fire in the bunker that took two days to put it out and we had a stowaway that we dumped off in Sydney.’ The guy then said, ‘Well, I was the stowaway.’”
The pub was extended around the time that Tony’s father, James Minehane, agreed to take over as manager from his parents in 1938.
“At the time, this place was packed, but there was this great big yard out there at the back,” Tony explains. “My dad had this thing about going to Australia, and he said to the brewery, ‘Either you’ve got to make the pub bigger or I’m going to emigrate.’ So the brewery said, ‘Right, we’ll extend’. The new bar opened about twelve weeks before the Second World War started.”
Although the smart frontage of The Queen’s Head is much as Tony remembers it from his childhood, some things have disappeared, like the pewter counter top that once ran the length of the bar. Tony’s father also used to keep a revolver under the bar, taking it with him for protection when he and a couple of other local landlords together the takings to the local Midland Bank each Friday morning by hand, carrying the silver and copper coins in large sacks with ‘money’ written on them.
“They used to go into the bank, dump it all on the counter, which at that time was just a four-foot-wide oak table. They would put the paying-in book in the sacks for the cashier to sort out, while they went off to a cafe and had breakfast.”
Tony has a detailed knowledge of the firearm since cleaning it was one of his weekly chores as a child, something – he admits – might lead to a call from Social Services today.
As the evening progressed we attract a large crowd of regulars to our table, eager to hear more about the pub’s colourful past. The carpets at The Queen’s Head might be a little more faded and the bar top a little less grand than in Tony’s youth, but the place still offers a warm welcome to both old and new East Enders and has a loyal cohort of local customers.
Their hope is that the story of The Queen’s Head will continue, but this is currently in doubt. In 2013, under former mayor Lutfur Rahman, Tower Hamlets council sold the pub’s 125-year lease to a charity called Unity Welfare Foundation. This organisation decided to sell off the venue after a group of locals this year successfully applied for the Queen’s Head to gain protections from redevelopment as an Asset of Community Value.
The challenge supporters now face is trying to raise more than £500,000, which will be needed to meet the asking price. Let us hope that this latest chapter in The Queen’s Head’s long history has a happy ending.
The Queen’s Head, 1926
Pub dogs in the yard, 1928
New Saloon Bar, 1939
Public Bar, 1939
James Minehane, landlord 1939-1961
The Queen’s Head Beano in the late forties with James Minehane second from left in front row
High jinks in the Saloon Bar in the fifties
Christmas party, c.1954
Customers in the Public Bar in the fifties
Darts in the Saloon Bar in the fifties
The Queen’s Head Beano in the fifties
James Minehane’s retirement in 1961
The Queen’s Head – photography by Sarah Ainslie
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Malcolm Tremain’s East End In Colour
Complementing Malcolm Tremain’s colour photographs of Spitalfields in the early eighties, here are those taken around the East End and the City in the same era published for the very first time – as always, identifications of precise locations from readers are welcomed.
‘Games & Viewing Lounge Upstairs’
Wapping
The Turk’s Head, Wapping
Wapping
Wapping
Wapping
Wapping
Wapping
Wapping
Brewhouse Lane, Wapping
King Henry’s Wharf, Wapping
Wapping
Smithfield General Market
London Wall
Entrance to Museum of London at London Wall
London Wall
Spitalfields Market
Admissions line at Crispin St Night Shelter
Dusk in Allen Gardens
Photographs copyright © Malcolm Tremain
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Norton Folgate, The Fight Is On Again!
Hundreds joined hands to encircle Norton Folgate last summer
At a meeting on Tuesday night, the Spitalfields Trust decided to go to the Court of Appeal to challenge the verdict delivered by Justice Gilbart on Monday in favour of the Mayor of London and against the Trust in their campaign to prevent British Land destroying Norton Folgate.
There is a consensus that the Judge’s confirmation of the mishandling of the Mayor’s call-in of the Norton Folgate planning application cannot be squared with his conclusion that the Mayor’s decision to approve the development is legitimate. What kind of justice is it to confirm that powerful people can break the rules and get away with it? You have to ask yourself at which point such mishandling becomes abuse of power.
In their official statement (issued yesterday and published below) the Spitalfields Trust chose to widen their challenge by questioning the partial nature of the Mayor’s call-in whereby the GLA planning officers wrote their recommendations to suit the predetermined decision, emphasising the supposed benefits of the development and neglecting other factors. This is termed the ‘poisoning of the well’ issue and it brings the entire process into disrepute.
The notion that a Mayor of London who calls himself the ‘friend of developers’ should have the power to overrule planning decisions made democratically by local authorities is questionable. When this same Mayor stages a hearing and planning officers write reports to confirm his predetermined outcome this is highly questionable. When Justice Gilbart chose the opportunity of delivering his verdict to declare that it ‘warmed the cockles of his heart’ to read Boris Johnson’s words in the transcript of the hearing, this suggests a cosy level of flippant complacency which is also questionable.
The fight is on!
STATEMENT BY THE SPITALFIELDS TRUST, 12th May 2016
The Spitalfields Trust is naturally disappointed at the outcome of the Judicial Review. However there is more to this than the simple ruling: there is the full text of Mr Justice Gilbart’s judgment to consider.
This reveals that, in significant respects, the position taken by the Trust has been advanced. It is now definitively established that errors were made by the GLA on all four of the the Trust’s grounds – on the impact of Crossrail, on the cross-boundary effects of Crossrail, on the failure to take account of the Trust’s representations on the statutory criteria for Mayoral intervention, on the premature sending of an email confirming the planning officer’s recommendation.
The judgment establishes that a series of errors were made, with wider implications for the Mayor of London’s handling of planning applications. There is the matter of the weight that should be given to these mistakes – and the judge considered that each of these errors would not have made a difference to the take-over decision.
The Trust disagrees. It contends that the errors need to be considered in their totality, and their significance tested by the Court of Appeal.
The Court of Appeal may consider that the errors go further…
- That the misunderstanding of the criteria which has been identified in respect of Crossrail point to mistakes in identifying economic impacts and effects.
- That significant impacts needed to be addressed across the London Plan as a whole and that the Mayor failed to do so.
- That, having told the developer what the recommendation would be before reading statutorily relevant material, officers then wrote a report which was relentlessly supportive of the recommendation, omitting any arguments that the first two statutory criteria were not met.
- That officers who proceed on the basis of ‘recommendation first, evidence second’ and who privately tell the developer what they will – not might – say cannot be relied upon when they misreport the contrary view and make substantive errors. The judge did not grapple with this ‘poisoning of the well’ issue.
PLEASE CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO THE SPITALFIELDS TRUST’S
SAVE NORTON FOLGATE FIGHTING FUND
Photograph of Joining Hands To Save Norton Folgate by Morley Von Sternberg
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
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Malcolm Tremain’s Spitalfields In Colour
A few weeks ago, I published Malcolm Tremain’s evocative black and white photographs of Spitalfields in the early eighties and today it is my pleasure to complement these with a selection of his colour pictures, seen here for the first time
In Liverpool St Station
Goulston St
Brushfield St
Brushfield St
Crispin St
Railing of the night shelter in Crispin St
Brune St
Holland Estate
Artillery Lane
Looking towards the city from the Spitalfields Market car park
Looking south towards Brushfield St
Looking north towards Spital Sq
Goulston St
Goulston St
Middlesex St
Middlesex St
Alley at Liverpool St Station
Sun Passage
Tunnel at Liverpool St Station
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station under demoliton
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station
Abandoned cafeteria at Old Broad St Station
Pedley St Bridge looking towards Cheshire St
Pedley St Bridge
Pedley St
Pedley St
Photographs copyright © Malcolm Tremain
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The Gentle Author’s Verdict
Yesterday a dark cloud burst over the East End and enough tears fell from the sky to engulf Spitalfields, entirely coincidental with the Judge’s verdict at the High Court in favour of the Mayor of London and against the Spitalfields Trust in their campaign to halt British Land’s destruction of Norton Folgate. Read the full details here
A fortnight ago, at the hearing, Justice Gilbart warned the Mayor’s lawyer that a defence based upon the Mayor’s planning ‘expertise’ was a risk, when an email revealed the Mayor had decided to determine the Norton Folgate application even before he had received it. The Judge questioned what kind of ‘expertise’ permitted the Mayor to ignore over five hundred letters of objection accompanying the application when he had an obligation to public consultation.
Yet, although Justice Gilbart confirmed in his verdict that the Mayor’s call-in of the planning application had been mishandled, he concluded that this was not sufficient to invalidate the Mayor’s approval of the scheme. In plain words, powerful people can break the rules and get away with it.
The pathos of the moment was overwhelming, as another episode in the history of violence in Spitalfields unfurled. Before long we may expect to see a vast ugly hole in Norton Folgate just as we are currently witnessing upon the site of the Fruit & Wool Exchange, another development waved through by Boris Johnson in his eagerness to bypass democracy to keep property developers happy. Thus Old Spitalfields is being disembowelled simultaneously at either end for the insertion of steel monoliths.
Spitalfields owes its origin to the Priory of St Mary Spital founded 1197 by Walter & Roisia Brunus. I often wonder if this was a convenient means for the City of London to banish street people, homeless and beggars from their territory by sending them a mile up the road. This complex was destroyed in the sixteenth century by Henry VIII in his ‘dissolution’ of the monasteries, when he turned the precincts into his Artillery Ground and granted apartments in the priory buildings to a few of his favoured people.
In more recent centuries, enforced redevelopment saw thousands evicted from their homes to permit the arrival of the railway in Shoreditch, the construction of Liverpool St Station and the cutting-through of Commercial St, bisecting Spitalfields from north to south, so that traffic from the Docks might not congest the City of London.
Over the last thousand years, Spitalfields has repeatedly proven a testing ground between the interests of the financial might of the City and the human needs of those who seek to make their living outside the walls. Recent events offer an eloquent testimony of the balance of power in our own time, setting contemporary institutionalised violence against the perspective of a brutal history.
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East End Cobblers
“When I left school at sixteen, I told the careers officer I didn’t want an office job, I wanted to do something creative, so he set up appointments for me with a shoe repairer and a watch repairer,” Gary Parsons, the proprietor of Shoe Key in the Liverpool St Arcade, told me.“The interview with the shoe repairer was on a Friday and I started work on the Monday, so I never went to the other interview,” he explained with the alacrity of one who now describes himself not as a shoe repairer but “the shoe repairer.”
Shoe repairmen have long been my heroes, the last craftsmen on the high street – where you can still walk into a workshop, inhale the intoxicating fragrance of glue and watch them work their magic on your worn out shoes. Even better than new shoes, there is something endearing about old shoes beautifully repaired. And so, in the heartfelt belief that – although it is commonplace – the modest art of shoe repair should not be underestimated, I persuaded Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie to accompany me on a sentimental pilgrimage to pay homage to some of my favourite East End cobblers.
When the crash happened in the City, news crews descended upon Gary at Shoe Key in Liverpool St to learn the true state of affairs from the authority. They wanted to know if city gents were getting more repairs rather than buying new shoes, or if the crisis was so deep that they could not even afford to mend the holes in their soles. Yet Gary dismissed such scaremongering, taking the global banking crisis in his stride. “There was a slump in the winter of 2008, but since July 2009 business has been steady,” he informed me with a phlegmatic understatement that his City clients would appreciate.
Twenty-two years ago, Gary built this narrow bar at the entrance to the Liverpool St Arcade where he and his colleague Mike Holding work fifty-four hours a week, mending shoes with all the flamboyant theatrics of cocktail waiters. They felt the blast of the Aldgate bomb here in 2005 and each winter they suffer the snow landing upon their backs, so every autumn they hang up a new tarpaulin to afford themselves some shelter from the future whims of fortune.
Round the corner from Shoe Key, I visited Dave Williams, a gentleman with time for everyone, comfortable in his enclosed booth in Liverpool St directly opposite the station. Dave told me he was the third generation in his trade,“My grandfather Henry Alexander and my father Norman were both saddlers and harness makers, my father he’s a Freeman of the City of London now. They were from an Irish immigrant family in Stepney. In those days, if people had trouble with their boots they took them along to the harness maker and gradually the trade in repairs took over. My training was at my father’s knee. I left school at sixteen and I have been doing this twenty-seven years. I think this trade is pretty much recession proof. It’s always been a good trade and I do very well thankyou.” In contrast to Gary at Shoe Key, Dave was full of self-deprecatory humour. Passing bags of shoes over to a couple of girls, “That’s two satisfied customers this year!” he declared to me with a cheeky smirk, the ceaseless repartee of a man who is sole trader and star turn in his own personal shoe repair theatre.
On the other side of Liverpool St Station, at the foot of the Broadgate Building, Kiri and George, the energetic double act at Michael’s Shoe Care, enjoy the privilege of having a door on their neat little shop, where everything is arranged with exquisite precision. The additional service at Michael’s Shoe Care is the engraving of trophies, cups, plaques and statuettes which – as George explained to me enthusiastically – are in big demand as rewards by corporate customers focussed upon hitting targets and setting employees in competition against each other. George, who has been here more than twenty years, leaned across with eyes gleaming in anticipation and confided his hopes to me, “Many places closed down round here recently and thousands of people were moved out, but the new builds will bring a lot of extra office space to rent. It’s just a question of waiting and more people will come to us.” I glanced up at the gleaming monoliths and thought of all the engraved trophies that will be required to reward all the corporate striving within. Yet in spite of the pathos of this bizarre appropriation of sports day trophies, I was happy in the knowledge that Kiri & George will be secure in their jobs for years to come.
Up at Well Heeled in Bethnal Green, Ken Hines – a veteran of fifty-two years of shoe repair – had a different angle which he delighted to outline.“I was going to be a blacksmith but there was no work in it, so I did shoe repair instead. I like doing it, I’ve always enjoyed doing it. My father was a docker and my family were all butchers in Wapping, my brother still has the butchers down the street. When I started here twenty-seven years ago, there were four shoe repairs in Bethnal Green now I am the only one. We don’t want to modernise. We don’t want to go modern, we’re not a heel bar. We’re going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. There’s a lot of people bringing vintage shoes and we can take them apart and put them back together again. There’s nothing we can’t do to a pair of shoes here.”
Ken invited me into his workshop, crowded with magnificent well-oiled old machines, prized hand tools and shelves piled with dusty bags of shoes that no-one ever collected.“This stitching machine is over a hundred years old, we use it more than ever.” he said placing a hand affectionately on the trusty device. “Soles should always be stitched on. You buy a pair of shoes and the soles aren’t stitched on, they’re no good.” he declared, pulling huge sheets of leather from a shelf to demonstrate that every sole is cut by hand here. While Ken stands sentinel over the traditions of the trade, training up an apprentice at the old shop in Bethnal Green, his enterprising son Paul has opened four more branches of Well Heeled in shopping centres. But such ambition is of little interest to Ken,“There’s a lot of knowledge you pick up, being around older men,” he informed me, getting lost in tender reminiscence as he lifted his cherished shoe repair hammer,“This was given to me by an old boy thirty five years ago. It was over eighty years old then and I still use it every day.”
Our final destination was Shoe Care at the top of Mare St in Hackney where John Veitch, a magnanimous Scotsman, welcomed us. “I done it since I left school.” he revealed proudly, speaking as he worked, hammering resolutely upon a sole,“I saw one of the boys doing it and I thought,’That’s the thing for me!’ and I’m still happy in it twenty-four years later. It’s the challenge I like, it’s something different every day. Stiletto heels are our bread and butter, the cracks in the pavements have been good for us. And the recession has been helping too, we get a lot more quality shoes in for repair when in the past people would just throw them away.”
At the end of our pilgrimage we had worn out plenty of shoe leather, yet it had been more than worth it to encounter all these celebrated cobblers, and be party to some of the unique insights into human life and society which shoe repair brings. It is a profession that affords opportunity for contemplation as well as the engaged observation of humanity, which may explain why each cobbler I met was both a poet and a showman to a different degree. I admired them all for their independence of spirit and ingenious talent, devoted to the mundane yet essential task of putting us back on our feet when we come unstuck and our soles wear thin.
Opposite Liverpool St Station
David Williams at Liverpool St Shoe Repair, third generation from a family of saddlers.
In the Arcade, Liverpool St Station
Gary at Shoe Key, “Time wounds all heels.”
Mike Harding at Shoe Key
Michael’s Shoe Care sells trophies given as rewards for hitting corporate targets
George at Michael’s Shoe Care
Kiri & George are a mean shoe repair team. “It’s total football,“ says Kiri
At Shoe Care in Hackney, “We got a lot more quality shoes in for repair these days.”
John Veitch of Shoe Care
Ken Hines at Well Heeled in Bethnal Green
Old Charlie’s hammer, “It was eighty years old when he gave it to me thirty five years ago.” said Ken
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
