The Modest Wonders Of Hackney Wick
As you descend from the Greenway into Dace Rd, leaving Victoria Park behind you and with the Olympic Park looming up ahead, you are aware of entering another territory altogether. In this atmospheric corner of Hackney Wick, a few narrow streets lined with dignified Victorian and early-twentieth century brick structures survive to tell the story of East End industry, revealing a hidden heritage of rubber clothing, fancy chocolate, dry-cleaning, spectacles and more.
Although these buildings are protected within the Fish Island & White Post Lane Conservation Area, the Swan Wharf Stable Block is currently under threat from developers, challenging the nature of the entire Conservation Area. So I took this opportune moment to make a photographic survey of some of the modest wonders of Hackney Wick, and historian Tom Ridge kindly agreed to supply background architectural and industrial information.
Main entrance to the courtyard in eastern part of Bernard Birnbaum’s Wick Lane Rubber Works built 1886-89 on Smeed Rd with adjacent four-storey waterproof clothing factory which is the now Bridget Riley Studios. This building is London’s and possibly England’s only surviving nineteenth century rubber works.
Smeed Rd
Dace Rd
Bernie Birnbaum’s rubber works started off in Spitalfields and, at first, he was getting his rubber solution from other countries to spread onto the fabric. But here, in this huge factory in Hackney Wick, raw rubber could have come by canal to Old Ford Lock and then been hand-carted to the back of works where they processed it, turning balls of raw rubber into a solution to spread on fabric.
Former of Percy Dalton Peanuts, Dace Rd – another company that began in Spitalfields. The building beside the gate was 1898-99 gatehouse for Britannia Works which extends westwards in matching cottage style 1902, 1907 and 1910. Four storey building on right built 1882 as a waterproof clothing factory as part of Bernard Birnbaum’s Wick Lane Rubber Works.
Britannia Works, Dace Rd, seen from the west with surviving eastern part built 1898-99 for the Britannia Folding Box Company Limited (formerly of Leonard St, Finsbury). The company were also printers and lithographers, and moved to Hackney Wick when they needed space for steam-powered print works.
Algha Works at corner of Smeed Rd and Stour Rd, built 1908 as a printing works for Waterlow & Sons Ltd of Shoreditch, taken over in 1932 by Max Wiseman & Co as a spectacle factory, where gold-rimmed glasses were manufactured for the National Heath Service, including those worn by John Lennon and Mahatma Ghandi.
Swan Wharf multi-storey stable block, 60 Dace Rd, was built 1906-12 by and for cartage contractors trading as Henry Crane, while the loading doorways were probably inserted around 1929 for twine manufacturers.
Swan Wharf
Crown Wharf was formerly engineering workshops and a forge built in 1904 for Safety Tread Syndicate Ltd
Bream St
Bream St
Surviving western part of Broadwood’s Piano Works built 1902 with tapering square stock stock-brick chimney shaft with blue-brick ornamental cap. This end of the works included a saw mill for imported timber brought by barge to the company’s timber yard on the nearby Hackney Cut.
1899-1900 circular red-brick chimney shaft with blue-brick cornice on Roach Rd, built by J Chessum & Sons for their builder’s yard on west bank of the Hackney Cut. Subsequently occupied by the timber yard and cabinet works of Abraham Younger. The shaft bore the name Younger until 2000.
Clarnico’s 1913-14 six storey chocolate factory, now Mother Studios and The White Building from the east side of White Post Lane bridge. The steel plate girder bridge over the Hackney Cut was built 1899-1901 but the original stone capped piers were replaced in 2013. The two storey white building was built by Clarnico circa 1897 for the roasting and processing of imported cocoa beans, brought from the docks by barge.
Clarnico’s from the west with White Post Lane rising up to cross the bridge over the Hackney Cut. It has yellow stock brick walls with a blue brick base and curtailed blue-brick piers. The south-west corner was rebuilt following damage in World War II as was the roof of the cocoa factory but all the other Clarnico buildings in Queen’s Yard were damaged beyond repair.
Former Achille Serre Ltd dyeing & dry-cleaning works, 92 White Post Lane. This photograph shows the back part of the 1904-05 building on White Post Lane seen from the south. Both buildings here have transverse pitched roofs between parapetted gables, but the southern buildings’ roofs also have lanterns for extra daylight on the top floor ‘spotting room,’ where dry-cleaned and pressed clothes were inspected before being sent back to the shops for collection by customers.
Doorway at Achille Serre, White Post Lane
Everett House, 43 White Post Lane built in 1911 as offices for Achille Serre with transverse pitched roofs between parapetted gables. This western part of Queen’s Yard was the first of Achille Serre’s three works and was established in the mid-eighteen seventies as the first dry-cleaning works in England.
Achille Serre, Britain’s first dry-cleaning works
Central Books, 99 Wallace Rd. Clarnico’s printing works and cardboard box factory built around 1900. Chocolate boxes were probably made here for the Clarnico chocolates manufactured in Queen’s Yard.
The former Lord Napier public house built circa 1865 on the corner of White Post Lane and Hepscott Rd – is to be restored and reused under the London Legacy Development Corporation’s Hackney Wick Central Area Masterplan.
Portrait of Tom Ridge by Lucinda Douglas Menzies
TOM RIDGE WRITES
The Fish Island & White Post Lane Conservation Area was designated in 2014 by the London Legacy Development Corporation, who also identified thirty-two non-designated heritage assets in the Conservation Area – mostly late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century industrial buildings which according to its Local Plan are to be “restored and reused.”
These are now the only large group of historic industrial buildings surviving in the Lower Lea Valley, which is the capital’s largest waterside industrial area, dating from when London was the both largest industrial city in the world and the greatest port.
Between 1880 and 1920, the best multi-storey industrial building were being built there, with brick load-bearing walls and internal metal frames of cast iron columns and steel beams or steel stanchions and steel beams. There are thirteen industrial buildings with such ‘transitional structures’ in the Conservation Area, which is probably the largest group of these buildings in London.
Should the London Legacy Development Corporation allow Constable Homes to simply retain the Swan Wharf stable block’s three-storey walls facing on Dace Rd and build a five-storey building on the site behind, a planning precedent will be established. In time, this precedent would almost certainly result in the loss of all the other historic industrial buildings in the Conservation Area, replaced by new buildings with just a few retained facades.
Please help me fight to save this unique industrial Conservation Area and ensure that the London Legacy Development Corporation and developers observe the relevant local and national policies.
Click here to sign the petition to Save Swan Wharf in Fish Island, Hackney Wick
You may like to read my profile of Tom Ridge
Delft Tiles In Fournier St
The scourging
There is a fine house in Fournier St with an old fireplace lined with manganese Delft tiles of an attractive mulberry hue illustrating lurid Biblical scenes. Installed when the house was built in the seventeen fifties by Peter Lekeux – a wealthy silk weaver who supervised two hundred and fifty looms and commissioned designs from Anna Maria Garthwaite – these lively tiles have survived through the centuries to educate, delight and inspire the residents of Spitalfields.
Tiles were prized for their value and their decorative qualities, and in this instance as devotional illustrations too. Yet although Peter Lekeux was a protestant of Huguenot descent, a certain emotionalism is present in these fascinating tiles, venturing into regions of surrealism in the violent imaginative excess of their pictorial imagery.
The scourging of Jesus, Judith with the decapitated head of Holofernes, the Devil appearing with cloven feet and bovine features, and Jonah vomited forth by the whale are just four examples of the strangeness of the imaginative universe that is incarnated in this fireplace. Arranged in apparent random order, the tiles divide between scenes from the life of Jesus and Old Testament saints, many set in a recognisable Northern European landscape and commonly populated by people in contemporary dress.
It is possible that the tiles may date from the seventeenth century and originate from continental Europe. Their manufacture developed in Delft when, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Chinese ceramics were imported from Portuguese ships captured by the Dutch, and because these were in demand local potters tried to copy them, starting a new industry in its own right. The earthenware tiles were covered with a tin glaze to create a white ground upon which the design was pricked out from a stencil, and then the artist simply had to join up the dots, producing the images quickly and to a relatively standard design.
“I’m not sure what this is supposed to illustrate!” exclaimed Sister Elizabeth at St Saviour’s Priory when I consulted her, colouring slightly when I showed the tile of the topless woman dragging a bemused man towards a bed, “Maybe the woman taken in adultery?” Yet she was able to identify all the other stories for me, graciously assenting to my request when I called round to the Priory in Bethnal Green seeking interpretation of the scenes in my photographs – after I had spent a morning in Fournier St crouching in the soot with my camera.
Upon closer examination, several hands are at work in these tiles – with the artist who drew Jesus confronting the Devil in the wilderness and Jonah thrown up by the whale, setting the dominant tone. This individual’s work is distinguished by the particular rubbery lips and fat round noses that recall the features of the Simpsons drawn by Matt Groenig, while the half-human figures are reminiscent of Brueghel’s drawings illustrating the nightmare world of apocalypse. More economic of line is the artist who drew Jesus clearing out the temple and Pilate washing his hands – these drawings have a spontaneous cartoon-like energy, although unfortunately he or she manages to make Jesus resemble an old lady with her hair in a bun.
There is an ambivalence which makes these tiles compelling. You wonder if they served as devout remembrances of the suffering of biblical figures, or whether a voyeuristic entertainment and perverse pleasure was derived from such bizarre illustrations. Or whether perhaps there are ambiguous shades of feeling in the human psyche that combine elements of each? A certain crossover between physical pain and spiritual ecstasy is a commonplace of religious art. It depends how you like your religion, and in these tiles it is magical and grotesque – yet here and now.
My head spins to imagine the phantasmagoria engendered in viewers’ imaginations over the centuries, as their eyes fell upon these startling scenes in the glimmering half-light, before dozing off beside this fireplace in a weary intoxicated haze, in the quiet first floor room at the back of the old house in Fournier St.
In the wilderness, the Devil challenges Jesus to turn stones into bread.
Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.
St Jerome with the lion in the wilderness.
Jesus drives the traders from the temple.
Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well.
Sampson and Delilah, cutting Sampson’s hair
Noah’s flood.
The woman who touched Jesus’ robes secretly and was instantly cured of her haemorrhage.
Judith with the head of Holofernes
Pilate washes his hands after Jesus is bound and led away.
Jesus and the fishermen
Jonah sits under the broom tree outside Nineveh.
The soldiers bring purple robes to Jesus to rebuke him when he claims to be an emperor.
Jonah is cast up by the whale upon the shore of Nineveh.
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Joan Lauder, Cat Lady Of Spitalfields
Today I publish Rodney Archer’s memories, with Phil Maxwell’s black and white photos from the eighties and Clive Murphy’s colour pictures from the nineties, of Joan Lauder, Cat Lady of Spitalfields.
Recently, Clive Murphy revealed to me he is working on a book entitled ‘Angel of the Shadows’ about Joan, whom he interviewed for over twenty years until her death in 2011, so I am looking forward to learning more about the life of an extraordinary woman who has become an enduring enigma in the East End.
In my imagination, Joan Lauder is a mysterious feline spirit in human form that prowls the alleys and back streets – a self-appointed guardian of the stray cats and a lonely sentinel embodying the melancholy soul of the place.
One day, when I went round to enjoy a cup of tea and shot of rum with Rodney in his cosy basement kitchen in Fournier St, he told me about Joan, the Cat Lady, who made it her business to befriend all the felines in Spitalfields during the nineteen eighties.
Rodney: Joan went all around the neighbourhood feeding the cats regularly and she had names for them. You’d see her crouching, looking through the corrugated iron surrounding Truman’s Brewery, waiting for the cats to come and then they suddenly all appeared. I think once I saw her there and I asked her what she was doing, and she said ‘I’m waiting for the cats to appear.’
‘My darlings,’ she really did call them, ‘My darlings,’ and it was wonderful in a way that she had this love of cats and spent her life encouraging them and feeding them and keeping them alive. I could never quite work it out, but she had a bag, like one of those trolleys you carry, full of cat food. Now, either she’d taken the tops off the tins or something, since I noticed – because she had a kind of witchlike aspect – that although she put her hands right into the tin to feed them and then just threw it down, I never saw any cat food on her hands. It was like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Over the years, I would chat to her but she was someone that you had to have some time for, because once she began she went on and on. The Cat Lady was strange – she spent all her money on the cats – she was like a character out of Dickens. She was almost a street person, except she had a place to live. And she did get benefits and she wasn’t an alcoholic or anything, she was very doughty, she had a bit of a moustache.
She was the kind of woman that, a hundred years ago, people would have been fearful of in a way. There was something awesome about her, because she had her own aura and she was there to feed the cats, and the cats were much more important to her than people. I’d talk about my cat to her and I think once she stopped by my door, and I opened it, and my cat sat looking at her.
The Gentle Author: I’ve heard she had this mantra, “Cats are better than rats.” Were there a lot of rats at that time?
Rodney: I think there were. When the market was still going and you had all the fruit and vegetables, the rats would come out to feed. I never saw that myself, but you might see a rat running along the curb. A lot of people said they were looking forward to the market closing because the area would be cleaner and neater, but I regretted that the market left and there weren’t cabbages everywhere.
The Gentle Author: Can you remember when you first saw the Cat Lady?
Rodney: I think I first saw her on the corner of Fournier St and Brick Lane. She had a huge physical endurance, but I think she must have been exhausted by her journey every day, because she would often stop for quite a long time, and she’d just be there looking around. I suppose she might have been looking for the cats. That’s why you could catch up with her and ask her how she was doing.
One day I just spoke to her, maybe I’d seen her around, and I said, ‘Are you feeding the cats?’ And she told me, and I said had a cat and so we talked about cats and the wisdom of cats and that kind of thing. And afterwards, I’d see her quite often. She didn’t talk much to me about her life – but she was the Great Mother of all the cats in Spitalfields.
Phil Maxwell photographed Joan, the Cat Lady, in the eighties
The cat lady on Brick Lane in the late nineteen eighties.
Phil: The woman in this photograph was always dressed in a head scarf and large coat. Usually she would pull a shopping bag on wheels behind her. She was the Cat Lady of Spitalfields. She knew where every cat and kitten lived in the wild and made it her task to feed them every day. Her bag was full of cat food which she would serve on newspaper at designated spots around Spitalfields.
Phil: The Cat Lady pauses for a second beside the Seven Stars pub on Brick Lane. She has just left some food in the ‘private road’ for some cats.
Phil: The Cat Lady floats past Christchurch School on Brick Lane – with her eyes closed, she contemplates the next cat awaiting a delivery.
Phil: The Cat Lady waits outside her favourite cafe in Cheshire St. Now a trendy boutique, in the nineteen-eighties you could buy a cup of tea and a sandwich for less than a pound at this establishment.
Phil: The Cat Lady ‘kept herself to herself’ and avoided the company of others
Phil: It must be about twenty years since I last saw the Cat Lady of Spitalfields. She devoted her life to feeding the stray cats of the area. I have no idea where she lived and I never saw her talking to another person. She seemed to live in her own separate cat world. Even though I was sitting opposite her when I took this photograph, I felt that she had created a barrier and would be reluctant to engage in conversation. It was impossible to make eye contact. I’m pleased I photographed her on the streets and in her Cheshire St cafe. She would not recognise Cheshire St and Brick Lane today.
Joan Lauder, The Cat Lady of Spitalfields (1924-2011) by Clive Murphy
At Angel Alley, Whitechapel, 5th March 1992
Feeding the cat from The White Hart in Angel Alley, 5th March 1992
In Gunthorpe St, 5th March 1992
Buying cat food at Taj Stores, Brick Lane, 3rd August 1992
In Wentworth St, 3rd August 1992
Calling a cat, Bacon St, 3rd August 1992
The cat arrives, Bacon St, 3rd August 1992
Alley off Hanbury St, 2nd August 1992
Hanbury St, 26th November 1995
At Aldgate East, 3rd August 1992
At Lloyds, Leadenhall St, 3rd August 1992
Walking from Angel Alley into Whitechapel High St, 3rd August 1992
Beware Of The Pussy, 132 Brick Lane, 26th November 1995
Clive visits Joan in her Nursing Home, 1995
Clive: The women I have loved you could count upon the digits of one hand – my mother, her mother, our loyal companion Maureen McDonnell, the poet Patricia Doubell and the demented, incontinent Joan Lauder, the Cat Lady of Spitalfields who, in 1991, when I first spoke to her was already my heroine, a day-and-night-in-all-weathers Trojan, doggedly devoting herself to cats because human beings had for too long failed her.
She looked at me with suspicion when I suggested we tape record a book. Only my bribe that half of any proceeds of publication would fall to her or her favoured charities and enable the purchase of extra tins of cat food persuaded her at least to humour me. I could swear I saw those azure eyes, set in that pretty face, dilate.
I had entrapped her with the best of intentions as she, I was to learn, often entrapped, also with the best of intentions, the denizens of the feral world to have them spayed or neutered in the interests of control. But to the end, her end, I don’t think she ever trusted or respected me. I once found her surreptitiously laying down Whiskas in my hallway for my own newly-adopted cat which I named Joan in her honour. And she once spat the expletive ‘t***’ at me in a tone of total dismissal. To be called a foolish and obnoxious person was hardly comforting, given that I believe my own adage ‘in dementia veritas’ holds all too often true.
Black & white photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
Colour photographs copyright © Clive Murphy
Colin O’Brien’s Children On The Street
Colin O’Brien will be showing his pictures and talking about photographing London through seven decades at The Wanstead Tap next Tuesday 12th April. Click here for tickets
Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien has been photographing children playing on the street since 1948 when, at eight years old, he snapped his pals in the markets of Hatton Garden and the bombsites of Clerkenwell.
For Colin in his childhood – as for many others – the bombed-out ruins of London proved the largest adventure playground in the world and the streets of the city and its markets offered as much drama, distraction and delight as any child could wish for.
Colin’s pictures show how children once inhabited the city and made it their own, exploring and discovering the world that they would inherit, learning to respect it dangers and savour its pleasures. Colin was especially fascinated by the age-old pastimes such as hopscotch and skipping games, and the ingenuity that children displayed in making their own amusement, turning any space into a playground.
Little did Colin know he was photographing the end of a certain street culture, as the age in which children could run freely passed away, and the television and then the computer encouraged them indoors. In the current climate of anxiety over perceived threats, today’s children have lost the freedom of previous generations and consequently are denied the opportunity to become streetwise at an early age.
Yet Colin’s superlative photographs exist to remind us that the city belongs to children, as much as to everyone else, and removing their right to the streets sacrifices an important part of the urban experience of childhood.
Colin’s photograph of his pals, taken in 1948 at the age of eight in Hatton Garden.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Take a look at more pictures by Colin O’Brien
Travellers’ Children in London Fields
This Is The Modern World
In this extract from the forthcoming Issue 6 of FALLON’S ANGLER (a medley of piscatorial prose), John Andrews contemplates Colin O’Brien’s photographs of Burgess Park.
Colin O’Brien will be showing his pictures and talking about photographing London through seven decades at The Wanstead Tap on 12th April. Click here for tickets
Where were you in 1984? On Sunday 17th June of that year, photographer Colin O’Brien was in Burgess Park just off the Old Kent Rd. In recalling it, he says ‘The weather was dry and warm and the park buzzed with activity’.
I first saw one of the photos Colin took that day when he held a slideshow to celebrate the launch of his book London Life, a collection spanning seven decades, published last year. Amongst the shots of London landscapes lost to us now – including an array of bomb sites, proto-Teds, street markets, public bars without carpet or television, fun fairs, fly-pitchers, men and women in everyday hats, streets devoid of motor traffic, gangs outside junkyard gates, prefabs, football coaches called ‘Mick the Fruit,’ Ford Populars, a portrait of an English World-Cup-Winning Captain, dustmen with handcarts, shops selling Rover Biscuits, nuns sweeping the streets and the last day of the Routemaster – an angler suddenly looked directly at me from a new slide that had just lit up the room.
There he sat on a folding aluminium stool on the banks of Burgess Park Lake his rod across his knees the rim of his hat pulled down, his hands busy baiting up. In his slacks and trainers like everyone else and yet in his gaze an angler apart. All the other fishermen watch the water, but he stares straight at the camera from several tens of yards away.
Like many subjects in Colin’s photographs, he is not speaking but his look, his expression, his stance speaks volumes. There is the look of an angler drawn to their local water only a few miles from the centre of the city and suddenly called back into the ‘real’ world by an outside distraction.
In June 1984, a lot of photographers were travelling north to record the daily battles on the picket lines of the Miners’ Strike. But Colin O’Brien stayed in London and went to Burgess Park – a place which had been under construction as an open space since the war and where the lake had only been dug two years earlier, in 1982, close to the site of the old R. White’s Ginger Beer Factory.
When finished, it was filled with twelve million gallons of water and stocked with 11,000 fish many of them taken from other municipal ponds such as Highgate. The park, named in 1973 after local councillor and former Camberwell Mayor Jessie Burgess in recognition for her work during the Blitz, was an evolving social project called by some a social experiment so perhaps it is no surprise it should attract a photographer like O’Brien as a chronicler of Londoners’ lives?
But he was also a lapsed fisherman too. ‘When I was younger I was a really keen angler and used to go to various venues in and around London. I remember catching my very first fish in the Kennet and still remember the excitement and thrill of it all. I would take pictures and send them into Angling Times.’
Published above is the shot I saw on the night of the launch of London Life, accompanied below by a number of others not previously published from the same roll of film. They tell the story of the day after the season opened in 1984. You may recognise a younger self in one of the pictures. Every angler will recognise the sheer fervour of the opening days of a new season, still preserved on most of London’s municipal park lakes. The tackle will be familiar to many too. An Olympic match rod, most likely in blue and white glass with a gold foil trim, a Pegley-Davies visor pulled down over an H-Blocker’s haircut and a nylon fishing umbrella – we nearly all had one – eleven quid from Argos.
‘I can’t believe that it is more than thirty years ago’ said Colin and yet it is, it is almost another age and it is most definitely last century. These were the days before angling changed into what it has now become. There is no specific angling clothing, there are no chairs other than the ubiquitous press-ganged nylon deckchair and the odd picnic stool or seat box. Any trolley here would have been submerged in the lake not parked on the bank.
Oh yes, what were you doing on 17th June 1984? Colin O’Brien – who had been born in May 1940 and had grown up in ‘The Dwellings’ on the corner of Farringdon Rd and Clerkenwell Road and who began shooting film on a Box Brownie and later went on to shoot the dust jacket for the First Hard-Backed Edition of Bill Naughton’s ‘Alfie’ – has his own record.
I wonder what happened to the people in these shots. ‘The girls would now be in their forties probably with families of their own’. Yes, I wonder who they were and how many of them would have ended up on the production line at R. Whites had it still stood? We are fortunate through these shots to have known them for a brief moment in their lives, preserved in the hours of grace after the season had opened in the year 1984, three days before the summer solstice where even this virgin lake acted as a magnet to everyone despite the warning posters about the water quality put up around the park by the GLC. ‘Everyone was having a good time and there was great excitement when the Ice Cream Van turned up with its chimes ringing out to complete what was almost the perfect South London Day.’
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Click here to buy a copy of LONDON LIFE by Colin O’Brien for £25
LONDON LIFE is also available in bookshops. Alfie (1st Ed. Hardback) by Bill Naughton with cover photograph by Colin O’Brien is now out of print but you may find it in street markets and second hand bookshops. Burgess Park Lake is now London’s largest Post-War water standing in parkland of 135 acres. The fishing is controlled by Burgess Park Lake Angling Club who regularly catch the carp that were stocked at 3-4lbs when the lake was built but which are now much bigger. Read more at www.thewonderer.co.uk
A Concert To Save Norton Folgate
History will be made on 26th April when The Spitalfields Trust takes the Mayor of London to the High Court for a Judicial Review of his mishandling of British Land‘s application to destroy Norton Folgate in Spitalfields, when he overturned the decision of Tower Hamlets Council to reject this development. There are four grounds for the review and this hearing will be the first time in Boris Johnson‘s eight year tenure that anyone has succeeded in summoning him to a Judicial Review of his behaviour as Mayor.
To raise a fighting fund, The Spitalfields Trust is staging a benefit concert on Monday 18th April 7:30pm at Shoreditch Church, featuring Suggs of Madness and other guests to be announced …
CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR TICKETS. Those who are unable to attend can click here to donate directly.
Norton Folgate is an historic neighbourhood that has evolved into a complex web of streets, alleyways, courtyards and warehouses which tell the story of our capital. Developers British Land, backed by the City of London, want to destroy Norton Folgate with wholesale demolition, constructing tall office blocks up to 14 stories with large floor plates – all within a designated Conservation Area. Founded in 1977 to fight the destruction of Spitalfields, the Spitalfields Trust has taken on both British Land and the City of London to stop this wanton destruction, and is offering instead to repair the old buildings in a Conservation-led Scheme. Taking on the big boys with bottomless pockets has cost a small building preservation charity hard, but we need to raise £30,000 to pursue this fight to its successful conclusion through the courts. If we do not succeed, a terrible precedent is set for the future protection of all Conservation Areas throughout the country.
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
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An Offer to Buy Norton Folgate
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Dan Cruickshank in Norton Folgate
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Passmore Edwards’ East End Libraries
At this time of library cuts and the occupation of the Carnegie Library in Lambeth, Dean Evans author of Funding The Ladder – The Passmore Edwards Legacy takes a look at the forgotten benefactor who shaped the culture of the East End through his enlightened philanthropy.
“It is a distinguished privilege, lightening the lot of our fellow East End citizens.” wrote John Passmore Edwards in 1892, in response to a request from Canon Barnett for a contribution towards a free library he was building in Whitechapel.
Canon Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta moved to St Jude’s Parish, Whitechapel, in the eighteen seventies when it was an over-crowded area of appalling poverty and poor housing, mostly endured by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Barnetts set about to improve the conditions of their parishioners with missionary zeal, believing that “the social problem is at root an educational one” and that Free Libraries were the best means of education. Barnet had recently showed Edwards the half-finished library for which there was a shortfall in funding and was surprised to receive such a quick and welcoming response – since included with Edwards’ agreement to help was a cheque for £6,454 to cover the total construction cost and an offer of one thousand books to populate the shelves.
When the Whitechapel Library was formally opened in October 1892, there were already more than two and a half thousand people making use of the reading room on a daily basis and one thousand on Sundays. It had taken Barnett fourteen years to see his dream materialise of the first rate-supported library in the East End. For Passmore Edwards it was the beginning of a relationship with the East End that was to last until the end of his days and result in more than a dozen public buildings, libraries, hospitals, technical institutes, art galleries, boys clubs and a home for foreign sailors, all freely given to help those less fortunate.
John Passmore Edwards had been born in Blackwater, a small mining village near Truro, Cornwall, in 1823. Educated at the local dame school at a cost of tuppence a week, he had developed an ambition to be useful, an ambition that was to stay with him for all of his eighty-eight years. Asquith said that Edwards had done “more than any single Englishman to help the people to equip and educate themselves for civic and social duty.” Edwards simply said that if he could fund the ladder, the poor would climb.
As a young boy, he helped his father both in the family brewery attached to the cottage in which they lived and also in the market garden that was cultivated around the cottage, tending and picking fruit to be sold in the local markets. Saving up the few pennies he earned, he walked the seven miles into Truro to buy a single second-hand book, reading anything and everything he could lay his hands upon. After sending for leaflets on the work of the Anti-Corn Law League, he was persuaded to help deliver these throughout West Cornwall – to the chagrin of the Mayor of Penzance, a magistrate, who threatened him with prison for sedition. But Passmore Edwards’ zeal was not to be deflected, not then, nor at any time over the next seventy years.
After working briefly as a solicitor’s clerk in Truro, he travelled, first to Manchester as representative of the radical newspaper, The Sentinel, and then to London, arriving in Holborn in 1845. There he learnt a trade as a publisher’s clerk, but earned his living through freelance writing and lecturing, and found time to continue his education at the Mechanics Institute, while becoming actively involved in many of the social and political reform groups of the time. He was a member of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, The Political and Financial Reform Association, The Society for the Abolition of Tax on Knowledge, The Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, The Peace Society, and many more.
In 1850, then twenty-seven years old and with fifty pounds in savings, he launched a small publication of his own, The Public Good, obtaining paper and printing on credit and living and working in a single room in Paternoster Row, where he became editor, publisher, advertising clerk, as well as packing and sending off orders. But with a low cover price in order to be affordable to the working classes, neither this nor subsequent publications were profitable and, after a serious illness, he was declared bankrupt. Yet, though legally cleared of his remaining debts, he determined to pay back what he owed and did so a decade later. By hard work and frugal living, he clawed his way to success – obtaining first The Building News, then The English Mechanic magazine and in 1876, the London Echo.
Now a wealthy and influential man, Edwards turned his thoughts to Parliament and served for a short but disappointing spell as Liberal Member for Salisbury, before finding he could more better satisfy his ambitions outside Westminster. From 1890 to his death in 1911, he funded the construction of seventy-one public buildings. Twenty-one were in his home county of Cornwall, but the majority were to serve the inhabitants of London. His philanthropy was unique in that while his work was spread over diverse areas of social improvement – libraries, education, the arts, hospitals, convalescent homes, orphans and the disabled – he maintained a long-term relationship with all the organisations and institutions that he helped.
His gift of the Whitechapel Library in 1892 was followed in 1893 by the Haggerston Branch Library, a Cottage Hospital in Willesdon, a Lecture Hall for the new South London Art Gallery, and a hundred acre farm at Chalfont St Peters as the base for what was to become the National Society for Epilepsy. 1894 saw the opening of a Convalescent Home at Pegwell Bay, the following year a new wing at the West Ham Hospital, a Cottage Hospital at Wood Green, and the creation of a Printers’ Library at St Bride’s – while in 1896, the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, no less than ten opening ceremonies took place.
After laying the foundation stone at the Pitsfield St Library, Shoreditch, he went on to open an extension to the Haggerston Library and after opening the Shepherds Bush Library he walked to Hamersmith Broadway to unveil a drinking fountain, dedicated to the memory of his brother Richard who had been a vestryman there. Remaining a successful newspaper owner and publisher, he was as economical with his time as he was with his money, combining the laying of the foundation stones of the Limehouse Library and the Roman Road Library in a single day, and later similarly opening them on the same day. In 1895, he travelled down to Cornwall to lay foundation stones or open five of his buildings in a single week, only to return to London on the Friday, to open another library.
His wife, Eleanor, was also closely involved with his philanthropic work, helping to raise funds as a member of the Ladies’ Guild of the Charing Cross Hospital and arranging the furnishings for the Falmouth Cottage Hospital and the Perranporth Convalescent Home among others. She organised outings to Epping Forrest for children from the East End. Two hundred at a time would be taken there by train and treated to a tea and organised games, all funded by The Echo.
It was the gift of the Perranporth Convalescent Home that persuaded the Truro City Council to grant Edwards the Honorary Freedom of the Borough, which was followed by the Freedom of the Boroughs of Falmouth and Liskeard. In London he was equally honoured, by the Boroughs of both East and West Ham, yet he refused a Knighthood offered by both Queen Victoria and later, King Edwards VII, preferring, he said, to remain as he was.
Over the years the perceived need for convalescent homes has diminished, hospitals have become larger, orphanages have closed, and many of the Passmore Edwards buildings are no longer used for the original purpose. It was a German bomb that destroyed the St George-in-the-East Library, but the Limehouse Library has been left empty and decaying ever since it shut in 2004. Many others of his buildings have been fortunate to acquire other uses. The Whitechapel Library is now a splendidly restored annexe to the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The Borough Rd Library, the West Ham Museum, and the Camberwell School of Arts are all now used by London universities. The Haggerston Library, Canning Town Boys Club and Sailors Palace at Limehouse, built for the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society, are converted into housing. Of the London hospitals, only the Willesdon and East Ham buildings remain in use and of the London Libraries, only those at Plaistow, Nunhead, Dulwich and Acton remain open. With the current threat to library provision, the future of even these must be uncertain.
In 1850, Edwards campaigned with William Ewart for the Free Libraries Act but the progress with provision of libraries, even in London, was slow mainly due to resistance of the ratepayers – at the time only the more wealthy and better educated – to paying a penny rate to support them. Yet by then Edwards’ belief in the need for libraries was widely evident from his name over so many doors and upon foundation stones across London, and his offer of one thousand books to any new library opening in London.
Bernard Kops, East End poet and playwright, famously wrote of the Whitechapel Library that “the door of the library, was the door into me.” The name over that door was Passmore Edwards.
Plashet Library
Haggerston Library
Bow Library
Limehouse Library
Stratford Museum
Sailors’ Palace, East India Dock Rd
Plaistow Library
Hoxton Library
John Passmore Edwards (1823-1911)
FUNDING THE LADDER – The Passmore Edwards Legacy by Dean Evans can be ordered direct from the publisher Francis Boutle and copies are on sale in bookshops including Brick Lane Bookshop, Broadway Books, Newham Bookshop, Stoke Newington Bookshop and London Review Bookshop.
