Ancient Arches
Writer & Historian Sarah Wise, author of The Italian Boy, The Blackest Streets & Inconvenient People – Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England, explores the recent cultural history of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard and outlines the background to the current proposals.
Braithwaite Arches
Bishopsgate Goodsyard vanished in the summer of 2003 – when a ten-acre railway city became a very large pile of rubble, and an empty space was to be found where once stood three tiers of stations, twenty-three tracks, hydraulic lifts to heave locomotives between the three levels, engineering workshops, offices, its own dedicated police station, and over one hundred brick and steel arches.
The long atmospheric Wheler St tunnel that ran beneath the Yard down into Spitalfields from Bethnal Green Rd was, for the most part, laid open to the skies. The only survivors of the complex are its perimeter wall and grade II-listed Braithwaite Viaduct built in 1839.
A fire in 1964 wrecked the superstructure buildings and, in the thirty-nine years that followed, the area was home only to a coach park, a car-breaking business and a wilderness of vegetation. But, from 1998, a regeneration scheme saw the arrival of football pitches, tennis courts, a swimming pool, a night club, a performance and exhibition space, artists’ studios, a go-kart track and large Sunday market. These were, in turn, supplanted by the arrival of the new Shoreditch High St Station in 2010 and the Boxpark outdoor shopping mall for designer brands in 2011.
The Yard has a murky and poignant history. The Wheler St tunnel was one of the largest of East London’s informal doss-houses in the eighteen-eighties and nineties. The pavement on the western side of Wheler St would fill up with those with nowhere else to sleep, while the police patrolled the eastern pavement, ignoring them. From 5am, dockers and porters began to pass on their way to work, and some would throw coins and even their lunches to the neediest-looking children.
Open air preaching by various evangelical groups focused on Wheler St, nearby Sclater St and Bethnal Green Rd on Sunday morning market days. Miss Annie Macpherson took her followers, a portable harmonium and hymn books and began loudly singing beneath the arches. The arches were also, at this time, the site of a child labour market – not illegal then – where boys and girls would wait to be hired by the day, or even the hour.
When the complex first came into being in the late eighteen-thirties, it obliterated medieval streets and courts. Peering through a magnifying glass at a map of the area in 1746, we learn that the station’s construction eradicated such tiny thoroughfares as Peacock Yard, Buttermilk Alley, Farthing St, Swan Yard, and Cock Hill – which was (no word of a lie) contiguous to Balls Alley .
The Yard station was an industrial age megalith that brought massive upheaval, noise, filth and crime into Shoreditch. So why should anyone mourn its destruction? The answer is that a characterful corner of London – darkly beautiful, awesome and with its own peculiar personality – was lost for ever. To pulverise this was an act of Philistinism, and it gave a powerful indication of how London was to change in the coming years.
The Yard’s history is not the sort of tale that would ever be served up in a consultation document for planners and developers. This is not the kind of history that would have held sway over Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, Mayor Ken Livingstone (who described the yard as “a load of old crap”), the Corporation of London, London Underground, Railtrack and the planning departments of Hackney and Tower Hamlets – who between them brought about the destruction of the Yard.
The red herring in this dismal tale is the new East London Line. None of the seventy-five local groups who fought to save the Yard ever wanted to prevent, or even to delay, the building of the Line linking New Cross to Highbury, yet that was the accusation made by those determined to send in the bulldozers. In fact, independent structural surveys proved that the Yard would support not just the new Line, but also a building of at least four storeys. It was the insistence on total demolition and rebuilding, rather than retention, that caused the delay.
So why did the Yard have to come down? Because developers prefer to work with a completely cleared site and, in their determination that London will remain a pre-eminent financial centre, the Mayor and the Corporation are doing all they can to ensure that generic large buildings with as little local idiosyncrasy as possible are erected, in order to appeal to corporate multi-nationals looking for headquarters. The City of London is keen to outdo Canary Wharf as a home for business, and Tower Hamlets and Hackney councils need to welcome big money into their boroughs and – hey presto! – the past is reduced to dust.
A cleared site means that architects do not have to design around existing elements, seeing little merit in retaining older structures as part of a new design, which is a shame since the interplay of old with new is popular with the mere mortals who use buildings and has won critical acclaim for projects such as Tate Modern.
For many in the development game, the past is something to be conquered – it should have no role in the present and certainly not in the future, and anyone who says otherwise is declared to be an enemy of ‘progress.’
Bishopsgate Goodsyard with Spitalfields and the City beyond, drawn by Lucinda Rogers
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On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 3
Annie & Nellie Lyons by Horace Warner
I am looking forward to welcoming readers to my SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS lecture in the Great Hall at the Bishopsgate Institute tonight at 7:30pm, with complimentary refreshment courtesy of Truman’s Beer. I shall be introducing the photographs and reading some biographies of the children portrayed by Horace Warner.
This event is sold out. If you have a ticket and are unable to come please call the Box Office 020 7392 9200 and let them know, so that it can be released for someone else. Due to popular demand, an additional date on Friday December 5th is now booking.
Is this Joseph or William at the window?
I am haunted by Horace Warner’s tender and intense portrait of Annie Lyons with her arm round her vulnerable little sister Nellie, unaware of the mysterious face at the window. Once we researched these children’s lives, we uncovered an interview with their mother, which gives an explicit account of the family circumstances that lie behind this photograph.
Annie and Nellie Lyons, born 1895 and 1901 respectively, were the sixth and ninth of ten children of Annie Daniels. Only half of Annie’s children survived to adulthood. Their mother’s words are recorded in the Bethnal Green Poor Law document of 1901.
“My name is Annie Daniels, I am thirty-five years old. My occupation is a street seller. I was born in Thrawl St to Samuel Daniels and Bridget Corfield. Around fifteen or sixteen years ago, I met William Lyons who is thirty-eight years old, at this time he was living at 4 Winfield St. He is a street hawker. The last known address for William is Margaret’s Place. I have had eight children: Margaret born 1888 in Beauvoir Sq. William born 1889 in Tyssen Place. Joseph born 1891 in Whiston St. William born in Tyssen Place died. James died in Haggerston Infirmary. Annie born in 1895 at Hoxton Infirmary. Lily born April, one year and four months ago at Baker’s Row. Ellen born April, one month ago at Baker’s Row. About ten or eleven years ago, I had a son called John. He was sent away around seven years ago to the Hackney Union House. My eldest daughter Margaret is living with my sister Sarah and her husband Cornelius Haggerty. My son Joseph is living with my other sister Caroline and her husband Charles Johnson. I have moved from various addresses over the last ten years and have been lodging with my sister Mary for three years in Dorset St previous to Lily’s birth.”
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On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 2
Rodney Archer’s Scraps
Rodney & his Scrap Books
This is Rodney Archer sitting in his artfully shambolic house in Fournier St with one of his beloved scrapbooks, which he compiled growing up the fifties in Toronto. Collecting cuttings of Hollywood movies was an expression of Rodney’s love of acting that eventually brought him back to London, where he had been born, to go to drama school in 1962.
“We went twice a week, my sister and I, we had to persuade an adult in the queue to take us in because we were underage,” Rodney confessed to me with a gleam in his eye, shuffling through the yellowed pages of an album fondly. “At eleven years old, I knew I was different from other boys because they all had pictures of John Wayne on their walls while I had Hollywood Goddesses on mine,” he confided with a grin,“but then, at fourteen years old, we swapped and they had the screen goddesses and I had John Wayne.”
Rodney has lived in his old house in Spitalfields since 1980 and been collecting omnivorously through the decades, taking advantage of all the trifles to be discovered in East End markets. It is a compulsion that led to his return to making scrapbooks again in recent years and, now that he has started opening his house as a gallery in collaboration with Trevor Newton, the Topographical Artist & Dealer in Decorative Arts, they are planning to let the scraps spread, meld and mingle across the panelling of the first floor drawing room, where Oscar Wilde’s fireplace is the centrepiece.
All are invited to visit one of London’s most atmospheric eighteenth century houses and explore Rodney & Trevor’s extravagant assemblage of Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian prints, advertisements and ephemera arranged in surreal groupings. They promise a plethora of hand-tinted mid-Victorian fashion plates, intricate eighteenth century engravings of toads and walruses, and decorative Art Nouveau menu cards, all arranged create a visual journey through time.
And, although Rodney will never part with his beloved albums, the scraps on the wall will be for sale at modest prices, which gives you the chance to create a little space for Rodney to go out and acquire new wonders…
In Rodney’s library
Rodney’s screen goddesses
Rodney’s teenage scrapbook
Rodney Archer’s first pay cheque as an actor in 1973, preserved uncashed in his scrapbook
Victorian hand-coloured scrapbook
Edwardian photographic collage in an album
Royalty
Architectural Engravings
Scraps
Portraits
Original artworks
Illustrations of the natural world
Celebrities
Topographic prints
Trevor Newton & Rodney Archer with Oscar Wilde’s fireplace
Rodney’s house will be open for visitors on Tuesday 9th, Thursday 11th, Tuesday 16th & Thursday 18th December from 10am until 8pm. Numbers are limited and visits are by appointment only.
To receive an invitation, please email 31Fournierstreet@gmail.com saying when exactly you would like to visit and how many will be in your party.
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On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard
As many readers are painfully aware, a monster development is proposed for the Bishopsgate Goodsyard which threatens to blight the East End for generations to come – already described by one commentator as “the biggest thing to hit Shoreditch since the plague.” Today, I publish this guide to how to object effectively which has been prepared by the East End Preservation Society.
THE BISHOPSGATE GOODSYARD PROPOSALS – HOW TO OBJECT
This is intended as a clear and simple guide on how to object to the Bishopsgate Goodsyard Proposals.
The formal deadline for comments is 8th November and it is best to submit your letters and emails by this date. However, we understand that objections will be accepted until the New Year.
It is important that you use your own words because if Tower Hamlets and Hackney councils receive lots of identical responses, they will treat these objections as one in their report, devaluing the number of objections received. It is therefore just as important that you add your own, personal reasons for opposing this development.
At some point in your response state clearly that you are objecting to the application, so there can be no doubt that they should take your correspondence as opposition.
The following are known as material considerations and are valid reasons for Councils to refuse applications:
1. HEIGHT
This is one of the key points to make. Two of the proposed buildings are 48 and 46 storeys tall (plus service equipment on the top which roughly equates to another 4 storeys).
Two of the other towers are 30 and 34 storeys tall (plus service equipment on the top).
The height is dramatically out of scale with the surrounding area.
It will harm the setting of the surrounding 5 conservation areas and their many listed buildings.
Even a 20 storey building in this area would be a ‘tall building’.
2. DESIGN
The new buildings do not respond to the character of the surrounding areas and, as generic modern tower blocks, will appear out of place.
3. MASSING
The massing of the proposed development is overwhelming.
The surrounding areas are defined by comparatively small plot sizes and have much lower buildings.
The proposed buildings will not integrate with the existing urban grain because of their disproportionate massing.
4. LEVEL OF DEMOLITION
A large amount of 19th-century historic fabric surviving on the site will be demolished including many of the brick arches (labelled in the application as vaults V1-V11) and the handsome Victorian wall that runs along Commercial Street.
5. IMPACT ON THE SURROUNDING AREA
Light levels in surrounding areas will be seriously compromised. Casting much of the area to the north into shadow.
43% of the existing surrounding buildings surveyed by the developer’s consultants will suffer major loss of sunlight. Obviously, this is not an acceptable level of impact.
The development will also affect the character of East London around the Bishopsgate Goodsyard site. This is a colourful area, of markets, small businesses, creativity and innovation that only exists because the existing urban grain is small scale and historic.
Hackney and Tower Hamlets councils have published their own planning guidance for the Goodsyard site. This sets out key requirements for the new development, one of which is that it should ‘integrate with the surrounding area, taking into account the local character.’ On page 99 of the Design and Access Statement the applicant duly agrees that the first principle of their development is to ‘ensure the site integrates with the surrounding area, taking into account the local character.’ However, in section 3.1.20 of the same document the applicant says ‘It [the proposed development] will be a new place with its own distinct scale, identity and character; it will not attempt to become a seamless part of the existing neighbourhood.’
This is a direct contradiction of their earlier statement and a rejection of the planning guidance to which they should adhere.
HOUSING MIX
We cannot find any details of affordable housing provision in this outline application. However, should you find any more details within these documents please alert us – and we can pass it on!
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
There are seven ‘Townscape Character Areas’ [areas of distinct architectural identity] outlined by the applicant which are listed below. We have summarised what they say about how each area will be affected by the development. If you live in any of these areas, you might want to comment on whether you think they are correct!
1. The Bishopsgate Goodsyard Site is described by the developer as having ‘low sensitivity to change’ (i.e. they consider that its townscape is of little value) and that the Grade II listed structures are ‘remnants of utilitarian structures in an immediate context of poor urban townscape quality.’
2. Shoreditch is characterised by the developers as having ‘moderate sensitivity to change’ because ‘The townscape settings of the grade I and II listed buildings [here] have a densely developed urban setting on the City fringe.’
3. Bethnal Green Road is defined by the applicants as having ‘moderate sensitivity to change’ – this is a way of saying that it will not be greatly affected by the proposed massive new development.
4. Spitalfields is described, surprisingly, as having ‘moderate sensitivity to change’ despite the fact that this is an area with an extraordinarily high concentration of listed buildings – and one of the most important historic districts of London.
5. The City (Liverpool Street Station, Spitalfields Market) again is described as having ‘moderate sensitivity to change.’
6. Boundary Estate (Arnold Circus) – one of the most interesting, complete, important and revered late 19th/ early 20th century philanthropic housing schemes is lumped into the category of having ‘moderate sensitivity to change.’
7. Eastern Fringe (towards Bethnal Green) is dismissed as having ‘low sensitivity to change’ due to the fact that it is further away from the site and is an ‘overall piecemeal townscape.’
WHERE TO SEND YOUR OBJECTION
The planning officers to send your objection to are:
Nasser Farooq
Nasser.Farooq@towerhamlets.gov.uk
Quoting application numbers: PA/14/02011 and PA/14/02096
http://bit.ly/1E9RMs8
and
Russell Smith
planningconsultation@hackney.gov.uk
Quoting application numbers: 2014/2425 and 2014/2427
http://bit.ly/1wnMCGL
Both Tower Hamlets and Hackney Council will potentially be deciding the applications.
COPY IN THE SECRETARY OF STATE
This application is so potentially damaging to East London, both in scale and impact, that we believe strongly it should be decided by the Secretary of State at a public inquiry, not by the local planning authorities. Anyone can ask for an application to be decided by the Secretary of State (it is called a ‘call in’ request) so we recommend you email Eric Pickles and voice your concerns:
eric.pickles@communities.gsi.gov.uk
Elder St, before
Elder St, after
Boundary Estate, before
Boundary Estate, after
Great Eastern St, before
Great Eastern St, after
Commercial St, before
Commercial St, after
Commercial St, before
Commercial St, after
Commercial St at night, after
Overview of the development with Spitalfields in the foreground
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On Publication Day For Spitalfields Nippers
My SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS lecture in the Great Hall at Bishopsgate Institute this Tuesday 4th November is sold out. If you have a ticket and are unable to come, please call the Box Office 020 7392 9200 and let them know so that it can be released for someone else. Due to popular demand, an additional date on Friday December 5th is now booking.
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This book is published with the generous investment of the following readers of Spitalfields Life:
Rose Ades, Alison Anderson (in memory of Christina Docherty), Fiona Atkins, Jill Browne, Beata Bishop, Peter Cameron, David Cantor, Tamara Cartwright-Loebl, Shirley Collier, Mary Clarke, Will Clayton, Peter Dixon, Sandra Esqulant, Hilary Everett, Bob Gladding, Alex Graham & Maeve Haran, Ed Griffiths, Libby Hall, Siri Fischer Hansen & Roger Way, Stella Herbert, Christoph Heyl, Martin Ling & Sophie Sparrow, Michael Keating, Irene Mcfarlane, Julia Meadows, Shirley Moodie, Carl Moss, Colin O’Brien, Jan O’Brien, John Ricketts, Tim Sayer, Benjamin Shapiro, Mark Stephens, Vicky Stewart, David Sweetland, Penelope Thompson, Reginald Webb, Julian Woodford, Zoe Woodward and Erminia Yardley.
Click here to order a copy of SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS by Horace Warner
In the East End, the following shops are selling copies and giving away free Nippers posters: Brick Lane Bookshop, Brick Lane, Broadway Bookshop, Broadway Market Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen, Commercial St, Labour & Wait, Redchurch St, Leila’s Shop, Calvert Ave, Mason & Painter, Columbia Rd, Newham Bookshop, Barking Rd, & Townhouse, Fournier St.
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Faber Factory Plus part of Faber & Faber are distributing SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS nationwide – so if you are a retailer and would like to sell copies in your shop, please contact bridgetlj@faber.co.uk who deals with trade orders.
