A Walk Through Walter Thornbury’s London
Golden Buildings off the Strand
There is the London we know and the London we remember, and then there is the London that is lost to us but recalled by old photographs. Yet beyond all this lies another London which is long forgotten, composed of buildings and streets destroyed before the era of photography. Walter Thornbury’s ‘Old & New London – how it was and how it is‘ of 1873 offers a glimpse into this shadowy realm with engravings of the city which lies almost beyond recognition. It is a London that was forgotten generations ago and these images are like memories conjuring from a dream, strange apparitions that can barely be squared with the reality of the current metropolis we inhabit today.
“Writing the history of a vast city like London is like writing a history of the ocean – the area is so vast, its inhabitants are so multifarious, the treasures that lie in its depths so countless. … The houses of old London are encrusted as thick with anecdotes, legends and traditions as an old ship is with barnacles. Strange stories of strange men grow like moss in every crevice of the bricks … Old London is passing away even as we dip our pen in the ink…” – Walter Thornbury
The Four Swans Inn, Bishopsgate – shortly before demolition
Garraway’s Coffee House – shortly before demolition after 216 years in business
Roman wall at Tower Hill
Dyer’s Hall, College St, rebuilt 1857
Old house in Leadenhall St with Synagogue entrance
Yard of the Bull & Mouth, Aldergsgate 1820
The Old Fountain, Minories
Demolition of King’s Cross in 1845
Clerkenwell in 1820 before the railway came through
Middlesex House of Detention, Clerkenwell
In the Jerusalem Tavern above St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell
Cock Lane, Smithfield
Hand & Shears, Clothfair
Smithfield before the construction of the covered market
Last remnant of the the Fleet Prison demolished in 1846
The Fleet Ditch seen from the Red Lion
Back of the Red Lion seen from the Fleet Ditch
Field Lane 1840
Leather Lane
Exotic pet shop on the Ratcliffe Highway with creatures imported through the London Docks
Sir Paul Pindar’s Lodge, Spitalfields
Room in Sir Paul Pindar’s House, Bishopsgate – demolished for the building of Liverpool St Station
Kirkby Castle, Bethnal Green
Tudor gatehouse in Stepney
Boar’s Head Yard, Borough High St
Jacob’s Island, Southwark
Floating Dock, Deptford
Painted Hall, Greenwich
Waterloo Bridge Rd
Balloon Ascent at Vauxhall Gardens, 1840
House in Westminster, believed to have been inhabited by Oliver Cromwell
Old shops in Holborn
Mammalia at the British Museum
Rookery, St Giles 1850
Manor House of Toten Hall, Tottenham Court Rd 1813
Marylebone Gardens, 1780
Turkish Baths, Jermyn St
Old house in Wych St
Butcher’s Row, Strand 1810
The Fox Under The Hill, Strand
Ivy Bridge Lane, Strand
Turner’s House, Maiden Lane
Covent Garden
Whistling Oyster, Covent Garden
Tothill St, Westminster
Old house on Tothill St
The Manor House at Dalston
Old Rectory, Stoke Newington 1856
Sights of Stoke Newington – 1. Rogers House 1877 2. Fleetwood House, 1750 3. St Mary’s Rectory 4. St Mary’s New Church 5, New River at Stoke Newington 6. Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, 1800 7. Old gateway
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Gentle Author’s Childhood Christmas
Over successive Christmases, as I was growing up, I witnessed the disintegration of my family until today I am the lone survivor of the entire clan, the custodian, charged with carrying the legacy of all their stories. Where once I was the innocent child in the midst of a family drama unknown to me, now I am a sober adult haunted by equivocal memories of a conflict that only met its resolution in death. Yet in spite of this, whenever I examine the piles of old photographs of happy people which are now the slim evidence of the existence of those generations which precede me, I cannot resist tender feelings towards them all.
I was an only child and, though I wished for playfellows occasionally, I do not regret it because the necessity to invent my own amusement gave me my life as a writer. Since there were just the three of us, I had quite separate relationships with my mother and my father, and I never perceived us as a family unit. My father’s parents and my mother’s father died before I was born, and so it was only when we went to visit my grandmother at Christmas that we were forced to confront our identity as part of a larger tribe.
Even the journey to my grandmother’s house, a forty minute drive over the hills, was fraught with hazard. As I lay in bed surrounded by my presents newly-unwrapped on Christmas morning, I could hear my parents in the kitchen discussing which was the greater risk – of skidding on black ice on the upland roads or getting washed away in floods surging down the valleys. Though, throughout my entire childhood, we never encountered any mishap on this journey, even if the emotional dangers of the visit were immense.
In the week before Christmas, my mother would have her hair “done” in hope of passing her mother’s inspection on Christmas Day and as we climbed into the car, even as she closed the door, she would be checking in the mirror and repeatedly asking, “Do you think my hair looks alright?” Complementing my mother’s worry over her hair was my father’s anxiety over his engine. As the owner of a series of secondhand wrecks bought on the cheap, he was reluctant to undertake any journey that involved an incline, which proved to be something of a problem in Devon. We would always arrive as late as my father could manage and, parking in the old yard in the back of grandmother’s house, pass through the wooden garden gate and walk slowly down the path in trepidation to arrive at the kitchen door.
Inside the house, my grandmother would be discovered at the scrubbed wooden table, beating something vigorously in a mixing bowl with a wooden spoon, still dressed in the fur coat and velvet turban she wore to church that morning. One memorable Christmas, she cast down the kitchen utensil as we entered. “You look a fright, Valerie! What have you done to your hair?” she exclaimed, advancing and running her fingers through my mother’s hair to dishevel it. My mother ran through the hallway, up the stairs and along the passage to lock herself into the bathroom, as she re-entered the emotional drama of her childhood in the house where she had grown up.
My grandmother had her reasons. The youngest daughter of an declining aristocratic family, without any inheritance, she married a bank manager yet hoped to reassert the fortunes of her noble line by marrying my mother off to local land-owning gentry. She felt it had been churlish of her daughter not to co-operate. Instead my mother escaped, climbing over a wall at night and fleeing from the typing and secretarial college where she had been sent when the possibility of university had been denied her. Running away to the nearest market town, my mother took a room in a lodging house, found employment at the local library and married my father, who was the centre-forward in the football team and worked as an engineer at a foundry.
My mother’s marriage was the death of my grandmother’s social aspirations. And since my grandfather gave up his position as a bank manager to go on the stage, pursuing an energetic career as a conjurer in vaudeville that led him to an early grave, she became a lone sentinel of her class. Naturally, she kept no photographs of my mother or my father or me in the house lest visiting Rotarians might see them, but once a year she invited us over as an act of Christian charity. The truth is that we were the poor relations. My father laid out the bills next to his pay packet each week and often wept in helpless anger when his meagre earnings were insufficient to cover even our modest expenses. Yet at Christmas, we wore the best clothes we had and, maintaining solidarity, did our best to keep up appearances and resist my grandmother’s insinuations.
Once emotions had subsided and I had persuaded my tearful mother from the bathroom, we convened in the drawing room for an aperitif. My uncle Richard would be arriving back from the pub full of cheery good humour after drinks with his friends in the amateur dramatics and the cricket club. Seizing this moment, “Would you like a glass of sherry?” my grandmother announced, filling with sudden enthusiasm, before adding with a tactful glance in my father’s direction, “I think I have bottle of beer for Peter.” Impoverished by the early death of my grandfather who indulged her aristocratic spending capacities, “We’ve had to cut back this year, I haven’t been able to do as much as I normally do,” my grandmother would inform us, catching my eye to indicate that I should not expect too much from her.
With saintly self-control, my father would take a seat by the fire and do his best to maintain silence in the face of this humiliation. It was only after his death that I discovered he had been born the illegitimate child of a house maid, a source of such shame that he never revealed the truth even to my mother. “None of these people have worked a day in their lives,” he would repeat to us in the car, every year on the way home, venting his vituperation and drawing further tears from my mother. In spite of the tensions of the day, she was always reluctant to leave her childhood home that held so many happy memories buried beneath the recent conflicts.
My grandmother’s house was a great source of wonder to me with its old silver, arts and crafts’ oak furniture and seventeenth century Dutch paintings, and the attics filled with stage properties and conjuring tricks. Once I could slip away upstairs, this was where I spent the hours after Christmas lunch, playing alone in the dusty chill until it was time to leave. My uncle never left his childhood home. He never worked, but lived for cricket scoring and collecting jazz records, and my grandmother waited upon him until she died, knocked over by a swinging coalhouse door one Winter night when she was eighty-four. He did not know how to make a bed or boil a kettle and, after she was gone, he grew so fat that he could not bend over to reach the floor, living ankle deep in rubbish. The last time I visited the drawing room, I discovered he had worn a path in the carpet through to the floorboards between his armchair and the television. In his room on the first floor, he had worn the mattress through to the springs and, entering the next room, I found he had done the same in there too and in the next. I remember telephoning him with the news that my father had died. “Well, I never did like Peter,” was his immediate response. Eventually, thieves broke in and stripped the house – when he could no longer get out of bed – and he lay there helpless as they carried the family heirlooms out to the truck.
There was only one childhood Christmas when we did not visit my grandmother. It was the year that a particularly virulent form of gastro-entiritis struck. My mother, my father and me, we were all afflicted with flu and lay in our beds on Christmas Day. Yet at three in the afternoon, we convened in the kitchen in our dressing gowns, clutching hot water bottles and we drank a cup of hot water together. I think it was the sweetest drink I ever tasted and I cherish the memory of that day, isolated together in our intimate cell of sickness, as my happiest childhood Christmas.
When I grew up and left home, I always returned for Christmas. Now that I live in the city and have no relatives left alive, I have no reason to go back. Yet I miss them all, I even feel nostalgic about their fights and their angry words and I cannot resist the feeling they are all still there – my parents in their house, and my grandmother and my uncle in their house – and I wonder if they are having Christmas without me this year.
Rodney Archer’s Christmas
Today it is my pleasure to publish this extract from Volume One of Rodney Archer’s Diary This Strange Re-collection of People (1980-88), in which he recounts a visit to his friend Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St at Christmas
Christmas was for me the best time of the year to visit Dennis Severs in his house, which he shared with Mr & Mrs Jervis and their children in the Liberty of Norton Folgate. The hall was festooned with garlands of holly and ivy and mistletoe. No tinsel marred the scene! The smell of Christmas spices assaulted your nostrils as you entered the front door. Oranges stuck with cloves abounded and the warm hospitality of the Jervises’ was almost palpable. Young boys in velvet waistcoats and knee britches and enchanting young girls in Kate Greenaway muslin dresses would greet you as you entered, offering rum punch circa 1730. Steven, who was eventually to run a restaurant from the ground floor of his house in Church St, had found the recipe in an old eighteenth century cookbook and Dennis was delighted. These children bearing punch were the sons and daughters of neighbours, friends and guests. If you were among the favoured, invited to one of Dennis’ private parties, you had to be prepared to join in and not rock the boat. Everything and everyone was highly organised.
As midnight struck, we were all hurried out of the drawing room and upstairs in the dark to the attic. This was the room in which the sitting tenant, who died within minutes of Dennis signing the contract to secure the house, lived and so promptly perished. It was also the room in which Dorian, the most beautiful of Dennis’ footmen, had his lodging. Towards the end of his brief life, when he was dying of AIDS, Dorian was forced to step into the cupboard when the tours came round to see the room inhabited – in the fiction of it – by Tiny Tim and his father, Bob Cratchet. I am not sure how the Jervises were connected to the Cratchets but what with the arrival of the Spinning Jenny in the early nineteenth century, hard times overtook the silk weavers of Spitalfields and perhaps Mrs Jervis had to take in a lodger? Eventually, Dorian was to move to Church St, two doors away from where I lived with my mother.
“Shhh, don’t talk any of you, shhh… Steven, Arlecchino, Quiet!” Dennis ordered like the matron in charge of a hospital ward. Think Hattie Jacques in ‘Carry on Nurse.’ “Where are Beyond & Ken? Not behind again?!” he asked, wondering if the two performance artists who attended the Hornsey School of Art had lost their way.
Beyond & Ken had lingered too long in the front room on the first floor, called somewhat grandly the ‘piano nobile.’ They were duly fetched and fixed in Dennis’ disapproving eye. All ready and inspected, we followed faithfully and quietly behind as he pushed open the door to his bedroom where we saw the four poster bed covered in red velvet. The bed and canopy had been made from pallets and refuse rescued from the nearby fruit and vegetable market – Dennis was an early recycler.
“Nothing here is real,” he cautioned as Judy (Edgar-in-Elder-St’s first wife) dared to touch a papier mache wig stand. In real life, the bed was Dennis’ own but for the purpose of the pantomime had become… “The bed of Ebenezeer Scrooge, just imagine it,” he said in an almost conspiratorial whisper. Dennis took himself very seriously in these moments and woe betide anyone who did not share his enthusiasm. I wondered why I often felt the need to come out of the illusion he had spent so long in creating. Perhaps, even though I was not a ‘Guardian’ reader, there was something in me that felt too manipulated in these moments? A kind of scepticism mixed with jealousy perhaps? After these many years, now Dennis has departed to join the great Ebenezeer in the sky, I ask his pardon if I did not always share his vision. It was complete but unrelenting and did not allow for one’s own response.
“Imagine,” he continued, “the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future flying overhead.”
Being dyslexic, Dennis had probably never read ‘A Christmas Carol,’ although he would have seen and loved that most famous version with the peerless Alistair Sim as the old miser and, of course, he would have remembered his mother, in the years before she fell ill, reading it to him in the far-removed and warm and sunny clime of California, in the town of Escondido where he had been born.
“You must imagine the snow falling on the rooftops and the frost on the windowpanes of Scrooge’s London house,” she might embroider, delighting her enchanted son, who would one day bring back to the land of its origin the very tale that had been exported so far across the world.
The tape of ‘A Christmas Carol’ would be playing in the background as we all stood, unable to hear it clearly, while Dennis in headmistress mode kept us quiet and I suspect, if we were honest, slightly resentful. Or did the others just feel, “Dear Dennis, he’s so eccentric, how wonderful!” ?
Finally, we were ushered into the drawing room on the ‘piano nobile’ floor where wine glasses and Christmas punch awaited. Dennis proposed a toast to Christmas,
“To Christmas, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Queen and Spitalfields,”
to which we all added,
“And Dennis,”
“And Dennis,”
“And Dennis.”
Lionheart marred the occasion to my mind – I may have stood outside of it a bit but I never deliberately sabotaged the tale – Lionheart laughed and stabbed out with, “The Queen!” stressing Her Majesty in such a way that it was quite clear what queen he had in mind. There was little love lost between Lionheart and Dennis. There always existed between them that false bonhomie that just manages to control the very real dislike underneath.
Later on, I made moves to go. Phyllis, my mother, had already said goodnight amongst much gooing and gahing, cooing and cahing and was waiting for me downstairs. She was always a bit ambivalent about Dennis and the house he shared with the Jervis family. But she responded to his flattering ways and purred appropriately when stroked. Outside, on the way, home her tarter, or perhaps even her Tartar side, would emerge.
“Well, I’m glad that’s over for another year. I can’t bear those garlands made out of nuts. And, as for the Queen,” she added tetchily.
The garlands in question were draped across the panels in Mrs Jervis’ drawing-room and, from a distance, looked remarkably like the Grinling Gibbons’ carvings found in many a stately mansion and English country house. Up close, however, the illusion vanished and you saw that they were an ingenious hodgepodge of walnuts, almonds and brazil nuts sewn together of an evening by Dennis and his friends. Dennis would often have his most trusted fans around for a night in the smoking room. There, clad cap-a-pie in leather, they would celebrate the joys of friendship in a modern version of the eighteenth century Hellfire Club, sharing a pipe of marijuana and a working class lad or two.
“All is illusion and magic, that is the whole point,” he warned, his voice veering into a higher key as his eagle eyebeam struck the further side of the room, where Ian Gladly had been sighted examining a painting of Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy’ too closely. It looked real but how could it be?! Had Dennis raided the Tate Gallery? He was known for his daring.
“Do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold philosophy?” – our host amazed nearly everyone by quoting John Keats. I was not amazed, though I was amused, because I had given Dennis the Keats quotation only a week before when he was complaining about the people who had not “got it” because their reading of ‘The Guardian’ and their critical eye got in the way. Duly chastised, Ian scurried away to refill his empty glass with the Christmas punch circa 1730.
“Dennis, I must go now too. Thank you for a wonderful evening,” I ventured, not realising that I was skating on very thin ice. Dennis replied with suave charm,“Thank you, Rodney, thank you for sticking it out for so long.”
For a moment, I did not feel the pain. I genuinely thought he was thanking me and then I realised that his was as much an attack as Lionheart’s had been. Maybe I had sounded rather grand, rather condescending? – I have that effect occasionally but, on this occasion, I chose my words carefully and was genuinely grateful. Perhaps, and this is more likely, he had picked up on my attitude at a much deeper level? Dennis was not an intellectual in any way. He was very much a creature of instinct, emotion and intuition. And he would sniff out any insincerity on your part and snuff you out immediately like a candle in an eighteenth century wall sconce. When riled he was a veritable tiger. He himself was, however, notoriously insincere. He liked to think of himself as very American and straightforward, but he could smile and be a villain with the best of us. In short, he was a ‘character.’
A group of us had gathered in the hall on the ground floor, fumbling for our coats in the Victorian room which opened off the room in which the Christmas goose sat proudly on its big eighteenth century platter, awaiting consumption.
“The wonderful thing about Denny,” Edgar-in-Elder-St drawled, “is he is a confidence man, a trickster. He sold to the English what was already theirs. It’s better than bottled water – and what a swizz that is – And we fell for it completely. We bought it!”
“Very American, that,” Lionheart added, as he struggled to find Arlecchino’s opera cape which had somehow gone missing.
“Lionheart, where ees my cape, I can’t pass thee market porters dressed as a ‘macaroni’, a kind of Yankee Doodle Dandy! I will be a laughing stocking.”
At this point Arlecchino’s eyes met those of Whitechapel, Dennis’ black and white cat, sitting at the bottom of the stairs and enjoying the festivities. Finally, we found the cape and Arlecchino’s costume was hidden from the amused and even scornful eyes of the market porters, through whom he imagined himself moving so perplexingly.
I had confided to Lionheart earlier that I found the house too much of a museum and a bit too Hollywood for my taste. I can say this without doing Dennis any harm at all because, in all these years, I have only met two other people who felt the same as I did. Dennis prided himself on being the real thing. The ‘real thing’ in terms of taste and decoration was distinguished by him as the ‘Joan Collins School of Decoration’ versus the ‘Queen Mother’s School of Decoration.’ There was even a television programme on the area in which Dennis and William Candy, the architectural-historian-who-wore-a-kilt-and-sported-a-pigtail, were seen wandering around Spitalfields and Brick Lane, past the Jewish Soup Kitchen for the Poor, along the Moorish Arcade in Fashion St, examining different facades and door fronts, lintels and fanlights, approving or disapproving as the Queen Mother dictated.
Our door front had been a thing of beauty and a joy forever, until we had to have it taken away and repaired and, in that process, hundreds of years of paint was stripped off – O, God, forgive me – to reveal the original contours sleeping unsuspected beneath and then the door became a bad thing. In vain did I argue that mother and I had very little choice in the matter – the architect insisted – but Dennis would have none of it, and so Phyllis and I had the indignity of hearing Dennis and William Candy, the architectural-historian-who-wore-a-kilt-and-sported-a-pigtail, stop in front of our door and exclaim to the nation in a televised documentary, “This is very much an example of the Joan Collins School of Decoration! We prefer the Queen Mother’s School.” They both shook hands on it and that was that. Our fate was sealed.
My mother and I had been consigned to that uncomfortable circle of Dante’s Inferno shared by homosexuals and failed house restorers. Though he would have been mortally offended to hear it, Dennis’ house had a bit too much of the ‘Metro Goldwyn Mayer School of Decoration’ itself but God protect you if you ever hinted so much. He was not only very sensitive in these matters but also – and the two go together like a horse and eighteenth century carriage – deeply insecure.
I had previously joked with Lionheart about Dennis’ ordering us all about as if we were servants, “Now those of you who are sitting in them, bring the eighteenth century chairs up to the drawing room.”
“Dennis, which ones are they?” I asked.
“O, Rodney, really! The eighteenth century chairs have no arms, thereby enabling Mrs Jervis and her daughter, Sophia, to sit with their farthingales and hoopskirts unimpeded,” he emphasised, somewhat pedantically in his short quick trans-Atlantic accent.
Well, lah-di-bloody-dah, my dears, and God bless you all – Dennis, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Queen and Spitalfields!
Text copyright © Estate of Rodney Archer
Photographs copyright © Dennis Severs House
Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, Norton Folgate, E1 6BX
Rodney Archer deposited his diary in the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute earlier this year
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On Christmas Eve In The City
Several years ago, when my last last relative died and I no longer had any family left alive, I decided to walk all night through the deserted streets of London on Christmas Eve – and this is my account
Fortified by a late supper of lamb cutlets, I set out after eleven through the streets of Spitalfields just as some of the residents were making their way to Christ Church for the midnight service, but I did not join them, instead I walked out into the City on Christmas Eve. As I passed through Brick Lane, the ever-optimistic curry touts were touting to an empty street and in Commercial St a few stragglers who had been out for the night loitered, but I left them all behind as I entered the streets of the City of London where there was no-one. Passing through the deserted Leadenhall Market, illuminated like a fairground, I slipped into the web of narrow alleys to emerge at the Bank of England. Here where the Bank, the Mansion House and the Royal Exchange face each other at this famous crossroads, the place was empty save a lonely policeman patrolling outside the Bank of England.
I headed down to the river and as I crossed the footbridge above the dark water with powerful currents churning in the depths below, I could enjoy the panorama of the vast city of empty rooms around me. Tonight, I was the sole rambler through its passages and byways, an explorer in the unknown territory of the familiar city, transformed by the complete absence of inhabitants. The sound of the gulls’ cry registered as it had not before and birdsong followed me throughout my journey into the dark streets, in which for the first time ever I heard the echo of my own footsteps in the centre of London.
Yet just as I had befriended the emptiness, I came round a corner in Southwark to see the cathedral glowing with light and the tune of a carol blowing on the breeze. I stepped down to the cathedral door and discovered a candlelit service in progress. An usher saw me through the glass door, and although I kept a respectful distance – imbued with the generosity of the season, he could not resist coming outside to lead me in. Before I knew it, I was in the midst of the service and it was overwhelming in contrast to the cold dark streets to which I had acclimatised. But once the bishop had led the choir in a procession through a haze of incense as the congregation sang “O Come all Ye Faithful,” the service was over. So as quickly as I arrived, I was able to return to my wandering.
Hastening Eastward along the Thames, I came to Tower Bridge where I crossed and skirted around the Tower of London. In the absence of floodlighting, its grim austerity came to the fore, yet even though all the gates were shut for the night I could see a few of the residents’ individual lights still burning within. From here I set out Westward, along Cheapside and Cannon St, where I came upon the fabled London Stone, built into an illuminated box in the wall, as I was passing on my way to St Pauls. Here also, the floodlighting was off, allowing Wren’s great cathedral to loom magnificently among the trees like some natural excrescence, a towering cliff of rock, eroded into pinnacles.
Winding my way onwards along the Strand through the courtyards and alleys, I found myself in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and I had it to myself. And in homage to the writer most famous for his walks by night through London, I visited the Old Curiosity Shop. Already, the night was drawing on and I discovered a sense of urgency, walking on purposefully even though I did not where I was going. At the Savoy, I turned down Carting Lane where I came upon one of just three people that I saw suffering the misfortune of sleeping out that night, though equally I was also aware of many bundled up in dark clothing with backpacks walking slowly and keeping to the shadows. I could only presume these people were walking all night in preference to sleeping in the frost.
I followed the Embankment along to Parliament Sq where there was no-one, apart from the antiwar protesters sleeping peacefully in their tents and statues of dead men standing around on plinths. Big Ben struck three in the morning and, without any traffic, I could sense the sound travelling around me, bouncing and reverberating off the stone buildings as I made my way up Whitehall. Coming to the end of Downing St, two policemen with machine guns on duty behind the fortifications spotted me, the lone figure in the street, and I realised they were focusing on me. Then, to my surprise, one waved, and so I returned the wave automatically and the atmosphere of unease was broken.
There were plenty of taxis for hire circling Trafalgar Square – they were the only traffic on the road by this time – but absurdly there were no customers to rent them. Looking through Admiralty Arch, I espied Buckingham Palace tempting me, and I wanted to go walking around St James’ Palace too, but weariness was also coming upon me. It was time to return home. I walked doggedly across Covent Garden, along Holborn and over Smithfield, then through the Barbican and so I found myself in Spitalfields again.
The city was as still as the grave and there was a keen edge to the wind, yet I had kept warm by walking continuously. It was as though I had travelled through a dream – a dream of an empty city. Although I delighted in the privilege of having London to myself, it is an alien place with nobody in it, so I was eager to renounce my monopoly and give the city back to everyone else again, because I longed for the reassurance of my warm bed. Already children were waking to unwrap parcels that appeared mysteriously in the night, although I must confess I saw no evidence of nocturnal deliveries upon my walk. It was now 4:30am on Christmas Morning and as I approached my front door, even before I took out the key to place it in the lock, a cry of a certain cat was heard from just inside, where he had been waiting upon my return for all this time.
Leadenhall Market at 11:50pm on Christmas Eve.
At the Bank at Midnight.
In Southwark Cathedral, 1:00am Christmas Morning.
Leaving Southwark Cathedral.
The London Stone in Cannon St.
At St Pauls, 2:00am Christmas Morning.
The Old Curiosity Shop, 2:30am.
At the Savoy, 2:45am.
In Carting Lane, next to the Savoy.
A lonely photographer at the London Eye, 2:55am
The Nativity scene in Trafalgar Square, 3:15am.
In Covent Garden, 3:30am.
At High Holborn, 3:45am.
At the Barbican, 4:00am on Christmas Morning.
At Smithfield On Christmas Eve
The eager carnivores of London converge upon the ancient Smithfield Market every year for the annual Christmas Eve meat auction at 11am staged by Harts the Butcher
At ten in the morning, the rainy streets were almost empty yet, as I came through Smithfield, butchers in white overalls were wheeling precarious trolleys top-heavy with meat and fowls over to the site of the auction where an expectant crowd of around a hundred had gathered, anxiously clutching wads of banknotes in one hand and bags to carry off their prospective haul in the other.
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien met me there. He grew up half a mile away in Clerkenwell during the nineteen forties and, although it was his first time at the auction, he remembered his father walking down to Smithfield to get a cheap turkey on Christmas Eve more than sixty years ago. Overhearing this reminiscence, a robust woman standing next to us in the crowd struck up a conversation as a means to relieve the growing tension before the start of the auction which is the highlight of the entire year for many of stalwarts that have been coming for decades.
“You can almost guarantee getting a turkey,” she reassured us with the authority of experience, revealing she had been in attendance for fifteen successive years. Then, growing visibly excited as a thought came into her mind, “Last year, I got thirty kilos of sirloin steak for free – I tossed for it!”, she confided to us, turning unexpectedly flirtatious. Colin and I stood in silent wonder at her good fortune with meat.“We start preparing in October by eating all the meat in the freezer,” she explained, to clarify the situation. “Last night we had steak,” she continued, rubbing her hands in gleeful anticipation, “and steak again tonight.”
Yet our acquaintance was terminated as quickly as it began when the caller appeared in a blood-stained white coat and red tie to introduce the auction. A stubby bullet-headed man, he raised his hands graciously to quell the crowd. “This is a proper English tradition,” he announced, “it has been going on for the last five hundred years. And I’m going to make sure everybody goes away with something and I’m here to take your money.”
His words drew an appreciative roar from the crowd as dozens of eager hands were thrust in the air waving banknotes, indicative of the collective blood lust that gripped the assembly. Standing there in the midst of the excitement, I realised that the sound I could hear was an echo. It was a reverberation of the famously uproarious Bartholomew Fair which flourished upon this site from the twelfth century until it was suppressed for public disorder in 1855. Yesterday, the simple word “Hush!” from the caller was enough to suppress the mob as he queried, “What are we going to start with?”
The answer to his question became manifest when several bright pink loins of pork appeared as if by magic in the hatch beside him, held by butchers beneath, and dancing jauntily above the heads of the delighted audience like hand puppets. These English loins of pork were soon dispatched into the crowd at twenty pounds each as the curtain warmer to the pantomime that was to come, followed by joints of beef for a tenner preceding the star attraction of day – the turkeys! – greeted with festive cheers by the hungry revellers. “Mind your heads, turkeys coming over…” warned the butcher as the turkeys in their red wrappers set out crowd-surfing to their grateful prospective owners as the cash was passed hand to hand back to the stand.
It would not be an understatement to say that mass hysteria had overtaken the crowd, yet there was another element to add to the chaos of the day. As the crowd had enlarged, it spilled over into the road with cars and vans weaving their through the overwrought gathering. “I love coming for the adventure of it,” declared one gentleman with hair awry, embracing a side of beef protectively as if it was the love of his life, “Everyone helps one another out here. You pass the money over and there’s no pickpockets.”
After the turkeys came the geese, the loins of lamb, the ribs of beef, the pork bellies, the racks of lamb, the fillet steaks and the green gammon to complete the bill of fare. As the energy rose, butchers began to throw pieces of red meat into the crowd to be caught by their purchasers and it was surreal to watch legs of lamb and even suckling pigs go flying into the tumultuous mass of people. Finally, came tossing for meat where customers had the chance of getting their steaks for free if they guessed the toss correctly, and each winning guess was greeted with an exultant cheer because by then the butchers and the crowd were as one, fellow participants in a boisterous party game.
Just ninety minutes after it began, the auction wrapped up, leaving the crowd to consolidate their proud purchases, tucking the meat and fowls up snugly in suitcases and backpacks to keep them safe until they could be stowed away in the freezer at home. In the disorder, I saw piles of bloody meat stacked on the muddy pavement where people were tripping over them. Yet a sense of fulfilment prevailed, everyone had stocked up for another year – their carnivorous appetites satiated – and they were going home to eat meat.
As I walked back through the narrow City streets, I contemplated the spectacle of the morning. It resembled a Bacchanale or some ancient pagan celebration in which people were liberated to pursue their animal instincts. But then I realised that my thinking was too complicated – it was Christmas I had witnessed.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
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David Hoffman & Crisis At Christmas
Almost by chance, at the end of the seventies, photographer David Hoffman found himself recording the formation of an organisation called Crisis at Christmas that opened up disused spaces and created temporary shelters staffed by volunteers to provide accommodation for the homeless through the holiday season when other shelters were shut.
As a participant rather than a visitor, David was able to take intimate photographs of those who sought refuge, capturing emotional images which are compassionate yet void of sentimentality.
There is a timeless quality to many of these pictures that could equally be of refugees from a war zone or in some apocalyptic dystopian vision of the future, yet this is London in the recent past and Crisis at Christmas is still with us and the work goes on.
“At the time, I was known for my photos of the homeless at St Botolph’s in Aldgate and I was going out with a girl named Peta Watts, who was working at Crisis at Christmas – so when she asked me to take pictures there, I leapt at the chance of becoming the Crisis photographer, and I did it for three years.
This was the early days of these shelters and they used derelict churches. One of them was St Philip & St Augustine in Whitechapel, round the corner from the squat where I lived in Fieldgate Mansions, and the next year it was at the Tradescant church of St Mary’s in Lambeth. So there were very little facilities – perhaps only a cold tap and one toilet for hundreds of people – and the whole thing was a chaotic feat of organisation, but somehow it all worked. They got donations of food and clothing and toys. And I remember some of the guys found an old bath tub in a skip and brought it in and filled it with water, so they could wash themselves. There was no regard to Health & Safety or regulation as we know it, but it all worked brilliantly and everyone was very well looked after. There was no hierarchy and the homeless people would be involved in the cooking and arranging the mattresses, and keeping the whole thing running.
I photographed it because it was a wonderful event and – like at St Botolph’s – some of the people were couples, and I took their pictures and brought them prints the next day. Many of these people had been living on the streets all year and the photographs helped them to have a more positive self-image.
Some would be shooting up and and others would be drinking, and an ambulance would come two or three times a day to pick people up. There were fights too, and I remember there was an unspoken rule that only one volunteer would approach to break it up by speaking softly – and it never failed. Many of the volunteers were middle class people who would work eighteen to twenty hours a day. What I liked about it was people coming together and doing things for themselves – and it just worked, and the homeless people looked after each other.”
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
Click here to donate to Crisis At Christmas
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Midwinter At Christ Church
Today is the shortest day of the year and, at eleven minutes past five this afternoon, we pass the solstice taking us back towards shorter nights and longer days. At this time when the sun is at its lowest angle, Christ Church Spitalfields can become an intricate light box with powerful rays of light entering almost horizontally from the south and illuminating Nicholas Hawksmoor’s baroque architecture in startling ways. Yesterday’s crystalline sunlight provided the ideal conditions for such phenomena and inspired me to attempt to capture of these fleeting effects of light.
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