Adam Dant’s Stories Of Hackney Old & New
Contributing Artist Adam Dant presents this map of Hackney that he has created as a complement to his maps of Shoreditch & Clerkenwell
1. In the sixteenth century, Hackney is the first village near London accommodated with coaches for occasional passengers, hence the name of Hackney carriages.
2. 1521 – Thomas More’s third daughter Cecilia marries Giles Herond in ‘Shackelwell’ & resides at an ancient manor there.
3. 1536 – Henry VIII is reconciled with his daughter Mary at Brook House, Hackney. Mary had not spoken to her father in five years.
4. 1559 – London’s last case of leprosy is recorded at St Bart’s isolation house, ‘The Lock Hospital.’ Established in 1280, it was Hackney’s first hospital.
5. 1598 – Playwright Ben Jonson kills fellow actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in the fields at Shoreditch and receives a felon’s brand on this thumb.
6. 1647 – The presence of Elizabeth of Bohemia & The Elector Palatine at an entertainment at ‘The Black & White house’ is commemorated in a window bearing their arms.
7. 1654 – Diarist John Evelyn visits Lady Brook’s celebrated garden at Brook’s House, Hackney.
8. 1682 – Prince Rupert discovers a new and excellent method of boring guns at his watermill in Homerton, but the secret of Prince Rupert’s metal dies with him.
9. 1701 – A bull baited by twelve dogs breaks loose at Temple Mills. Confusion and uproar ensue amongst the crowd of three thousand and a nine year old girl barely survives being tossed by the enraged animal.
10. 1750 – Legislature obliges people not to keep any other dogs but ‘such that are really useful’ after Charles Issacs at Hackney is bit by a dog and dies raving mad.
11. In the seventeenth century, the noted ‘Hackeny Buns’ of Goldsmith’s Row are as well regarded as those of ‘The Bun House’ at Chelsea.
12. 1665 – To be seen at Cooper’s Gardens for sixpence a person, the greatest curiosity that was ever seen, a white Dutch radish two feet and two inches round.
13. 1667 – In the church of St Augustine, Samuel Pepys eyes Abigail Vyner ‘a lady rich in Jewels but mostly in beauty, almost the finest woman that I ever saw.’
14. 1788 – In Cat & Mutton fields is seen the inhuman sport where any contestant catching ‘a soapy pig by the tail & holding it over his head’ wins a gold laced hat.
15. 1797 – The Hackney Militia gain a reputation for bumbling incompetence during the Napoleonic Wars.
16. 1811 – At The Mermaid Tavern pleasure gardens James Sadler & Captain Paget Royal Navy ascend in a balloon decorated in honour of The Prince Regent on his birthday.
17. 1787 – Plants from ‘Loddige’s Gardens’, originally owned by John Busch, gardener to Catherine the Great, are transferred to Crystal Palace.
18. 1805 – A stagecoach is broken to pieces and two ladies suffer severely when the vehicle overturns on the edge of a precipice at Hackney Wick.
19. 1816 – Brooke House, former home of Lady Brookes and Balmes House at Hoxton are opened as private lunatic asylums.
20. 1821 – Repairs are made at Hackney’s oldest brewery, Mrs Addison’s Woolpack Brewery on the Hackney Brook.
21. 1848 – Prince Albert opens The Hospital for Diseases of the Chest and in 1867 Princess Louise opens the North-Eastern Hospital for Sick Children in the Hackney Rd
22. 1850 – The construction of Victoria Park sweeps way hovels, formerly known as‘Botany Bay,’ and the inhabitants who are sent to another place bearing the same name.
23. 1866 – At the Parkesine Works in Wallis Rd and Berkshire Rd, Alexander Parkes manufactures the world’s first plastic.
24. 1880. – Hackney Wick firm Carless Capel & Leonard claim to have invented the term ‘petrol’ (St Peter’s Oil).
25. 1902 – Smallpox re-surfaces in Hackney with contagion found in a family of costermongers living in filthy conditions in Sanford Lane.
26. 1959 – Richard Burton films a scene for John Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’ at Dalston Junction Railway Station.
27. 1952 – The great fog causes death and chaos in Hackney when a motor-cyclist collides with a bus, a man dies on a railway line and crime has a little hey-day.
28. 1964 – Teenagers at The Dalston Dance Hall adopt the ‘purple heart’ pill popping craze.
29. 1970 – M.O.D investigates the sighting of a U.F.O over Hackney by Mr Douglas Lockhart, gliding across a clear sky at 11.35pm on a Saturday night.
30. 2007 – Terry Castle and volunteers at Bethune Rd unearth a hoard of Nazi twenty dollar gold coins whilst digging a frog pond.
31. 2011 – Grandmother Pauline Pearce ‘Hero of Hackney’ bravely stands up to a gang of looting rioters at the Pembury Estate.
32. Thousands of ‘booze fuelled revellers’ leave a trail of destruction along the Regents Canal ‘Canalival’ floating party.
The map of Hackney Old & New was commissioned from Adam Dant by James Goff who has been a patron of artists in Hackney since the eighties and you may see the original displayed in the Hackney office of Stirling Ackroyd in Mare St.
You may also like to take a look at
Adam Dant’s Stories of Shoreditch Old & New
Adam Dant’s Stories of Clerkenwell Old & New
Rodney Archer Plays Edward II
Rodney Archer as Edward II
I am proud to announce that I have persuaded Rodney Archer, the Aesthete of Fournier St, to take the title role of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II in a public reading of the play next Sunday 8th March at 6:30pm at The Water Poet in Folgate St, cast with a mixture of local people and luminaries of the theatrical profession, as part of the SAVE NORTON FOLGATE Cultural Festival.
We know Christopher Marlowe lived in Norton Folgate in 1589 and it seems likely that he wrote many of his most famous plays there including Edward II, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and The Massacre of Paris, some of which may have been performed at The Theatre and The Curtain nearby. Recent research into Elizabethan sewers and textual analysis of Edward II, published by the Journal of Early Modern Literary Studies – focussing upon the multiplicity of images of watercourses and drains in Marlowe’s script – suggests that it was written for The Theatre in Shoreditch and makes play upon the watery topography surrounding the building, as illustrated in the map below.
Click here to book your free ticket to see Rodney Archer in Marlowe’s Edward II
Christopher Marlowe lived in Norton Folgate
Map showing the position of The Theatre and the Soerditch by Joseph Quincy Adams, 1917
You may also like to read about
Dan Cruickshank In Norton Folgate
On Sunday, Contributing Film-Maker Sebastian Sharples took a walk around Norton Folgate with Architectural Historian and Local Resident Dan Cruickshank, and this film is the result
[youtube UMQBhsJCU7Y nolink]
Click here for a simple guide to HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY prepared by The Spitalfields Trust
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
The Spitalfields Trust’s SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition curated by The Gentle Author is open today at Dennis Severs House and runs until March 15th
The Hackney Yearbook 1906
Behold the wonders of commerce and retail over a century ago, courtesy of the Hackney Year Book 1906 from the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute!
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to take a look at
Adverts from Shoreditch Borough Guide
Taking Liberties In Norton Folgate
Dan Cruickshank at the launch of the Norton Folgate campaign – photograph by Simon Mooney
Last year at a Public Inquiry, SAVE Britain’s Heritage & The Victorian Society fought against the redevelopment of Smithfield General Market and won a comprehensive victory when Eric Pickles, Secretary of State, confirmed the Planning Inspector’s verdict and threw out the plans. Bizarrely, English Heritage who are the government’s advisers on – and supposed champions for – historic buildings, took the side of the developer. They maintained that the gutting of Horace’s Jones’s great late nineteenth-century market for the insertion of an office block was acceptable.
At one point in the Inquiry, the developers even tried to convince the Inspector that the reuse in the new building of salvaged bits of the distinctive Phoenix columns from the original building which they were demolishing was a ‘sensitive restoration.’ Unsurprisingly, it was an argument that failed to impress the Inspector.
Yet, despite that landmark victory at Smithfield and the emphasis it placed upon the importance of protecting Conservation Areas, it appears English Heritage have not taken on board its implications. A year later in Norton Folgate, we find ourselves fighting another scheme threatening a Conservation Area in London with English Heritage on the developers’ side. Astonishingly, they have given their approval to the British Land scheme just as they gave their blessing to the Geffrye Museum’s proposal to demolish The Marquis of Lansdowne two years ago.
There are many echoes of the Smithfield case in the current battle for Norton Folgate. Like Henderson’s scheme at Smithfield, British Land’s proposal involves extensive demolition – in this case over 70% of all the existing fabric. It also involves mutilation of the sound historic buildings upon the site, including the fine warehouses on Blossom St, to allow the creation of large floor plates extending the entire length of the street. These will suit the requirements of the corporate financial industries of the City of London but will be of no use to the small businesses and tech companies that thrive in the East End.
At Smithfield Market, Henderson’s proposed keeping only a ‘crust’ of the old building and inserting offices behind it. Similarly, in Norton Folgate, British Land intend to retain a few facades and – just as at Smithfield – they propose, in one new building, to reuse some material salvaged from the old building they want to demolish. This is an approach that – bewilderingly – English Heritage describes as ‘sensitive restoration’ in their letter of advice to Tower Hamlets approving the scheme, which makes you wonder what ‘insensitive restoration’ could look like.
The folly of English Heritage’s position is exposed publicly in a new report by Alec Forshaw, an Independent Planning Consultant who was one of the heroes of the Smithfield victory. A universally-respected former Head of Conservation at Islington Council, Alec Forshaw has the insight and depth of experience to turn a case on its head through his quiet reasoning and brilliant analysis.
When the Spitalfields Trust approached Alec Forsaw, he recognised the injustice of British Land’s proposal and agreed to produce his own Appraisal for publication. His report examines the Norton Folgate scheme in light of Policy Guidance both nationally and locally, including Tower Hamlets’ own Conservation Area Appraisal. It is a devastating critique, dismantling the scheme point by point and exposing its dire shortcomings.
He rejects British Land’s argument, that the presence of tall buildings in Norton Folgate would mediate between the high-rise blocks in the City of London and the low-rise area to the east, as ‘dreadful and fatuous’ – and he condemns British Land’s stated aim of recycling salvaged fabric from demolition of the warehouses for reuse in one of their new office buildings as ‘vague …impossible to enforce’ and ‘meaningless.’
Alec Forshaw concludes –
“At the heart of this scheme are the aspirations of the land owners and their development partners for large floor-plate offices. It is an ambitious and expensive scheme to construct, and will require high rents from tenants to pay for it. It is the opposite of a light touch … A scheme with less intervention, which retained existing buildings, incorporated smaller scale infill, and provided a wider mix of uses in smaller units, would be cheaper to implement and more flexible for the future.”
“Measured against up-to-date national and local policy the current proposals are unacceptable and should be refused. They are contrary to Tower Hamlets’ planning and conservation policies and the Management Guidelines for the Elder Street Conservation Area …To approve the current scheme would be to threaten the very survival of not only the small Elder Street Conservation Area, but would put the wider Spitalfields and Shoreditch areas under further and greater threat.”
Alec Forshaw’s devastating report demonstrates that the Norton Folgate proposal – like the rejected Smithfield Market scheme – would result in an historic area of London being robbed of its distinctive spirit and sense of place which has evolved over centuries to reach its current atmospheric form.
British Land’s proposals ignore the successful genuinely conservation-led revitalisation of neighbouring areas which has been based on principles of repair and reuse. Instead, they set out to exploit the achievements of those who fought in recent decades to preserve the intimacy, complexity and meaning of one of London’s most fascinating and fragile historic enclaves. British Land have no scruple in sacrificing the neighbourhood to make money at the expense of local people.
Click here to read Alec Forshaw’s Appraisal of British Land’s Proposal in full
Norton Folgate as it is today
British Land want to remove over 70% of the fabric on their site in the Elder St Conservation Area
British Land want to increase the mass of the buildings by more than 50%
Diagram showing degree of facade retention on part of British Land’s site. Although the Norton Folgate and Folgate Street buildings are to be partially retained, the Blossom Street warehouses are reduced to a facade of brick piers, an approach that English Heritage describes as ‘sensitive restoration.’
Architectural graphics by John Burrell of Burrell Foley Fischer
Click here for a simple guide to HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY prepared by The Spitalfields Trust
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
The Spitalfields Trust’s SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition curated by The Gentle Author is open today at Dennis Severs House and runs until March 15th
So Long, Baldacci’s Of Petticoat Lane
Yesterday, I went over to Petticoat Lane to offer my commiserations to Peter Baldacci on the last day of trading for his family on Petticoat Lane after eighty-five years. He told me that, as tenants of the Corporation of the City of London, he and his son Matthew are both reduced to leases of six months’ tenure and the threat of 100% rent increases which makes it impossible for them to continue.
They will be greatly missed – both by the office workers who bought freshly-made sandwiches from MB’s Sandwich Bar in Harrow Place each day and by long-term members of the local community who cherished MB’s Cafe in Middlesex St as a popular meeting place for hot meals at affordable prices.
Matthew Baldacci, June 2014 – “This is what I do and this is what I will be doing”
Since 1830, Petticoat Lane has been known as Middlesex St and yet it is still widely referred to by its earlier name. Such is the enigma of this ancient thoroughfare and market that is recognised more by what it was than what it is. Yet the enduring life of Petticoat Lane is still there to be found, if you look close enough.
Behind a curious concrete staircase that leads nowhere on Middlesex St, I sought out MB’s Cafe with faded old photographs upon the walls of the former Baldacci’s Cafe. M B stood for Matthew Baldacci who ran this cafe and another of the same name round the corner in Harrow Place with his father Peter. Together they were the second and third generations in this family business, begun here by Matthew’s grandfather Umberto.
The original cafes and the street in the photographs where Umberto lived and worked have long gone, lost beneath a brutalist concrete development – the one with the staircase leading nowhere. Yet in spite of this architectural transformation, the Baldacci family and their cafe remained as one of the last family businesses to carry the story of the Lane.
Reflecting the nature of this border territory where the City of London meets the East End, the two Baldacci cafes were oriented to serve customers from both directions. MB’s in Harrow Place was where Matthew greeted the City workers by name as they picked up their sandwiches and rolls daily, while MB’s in Middlesex St was where you found the stalwarts of Petticoat Lane tucking in to their cooked lunches. It was at the latter establishment, hidden discreetly under the stairs, that I met with Peter a year ago and he told me the Baldacci family history.
“It all started with my father Umberto Baldacci, he came over from Italy at fourteen years old and worked in a cafe. He lived in the buildings in Stoney Lane and he opened up his first cafe there in 1932 and they did quite well because he got a second one in the late forties on Petticoat Lane. The one in Stoney Lane was more cooked meals while the one in Petticoat Lane was sandwiches and rolls.
My father was born in 1905 and worked until the end, when he died at seventy-three in 1979. My mother Maria, she worked in the kitchen all day long from early morning and then she cooked his dinner afterwards, that’s how things were in those days – a man expected everything. She worked until three years before she died. When you look back, it wasn’t easy for an Italian woman but I don’t think she’d have wanted anything else. She had come over from Italy at an early age and lived in Kings Cross. I don’t know how they met. My father never went back, he made his home here. I can’t even understand Italian. It’s my one regret that I never learnt Italian.
They built a nice business and he was very happy. The Jewish people made him welcome and it really helped a lot. In school holidays, I used to come and work from the age of thirteen in 1962, maybe earlier, and when I was sixteen I started full time. I started washing up and filing rolls. I loved it. The East End was a very different place then and Petticoat Lane was alive with all different kinds of traders. It was fantastic.
I get up around four-thirty each morning and get down here by five-thirty, I like to be open by six. Then I close by four and I’m home by four-thirty. I can cook, I do everything, if anyone can’t come in I cover for them. I’ve worked in this cafe for twenty-nine years, but I’ve been full time for fifty-three years in total. We’ve got one customer Benny, he’s been coming for seventy years. He lives in Petticoat Tower and comes in each morning for his breakfast. My son Matthew joined me twenty-five years ago and we changed the name to ‘MB’s’.”
At the conclusion of Peter’s tale, Matthew Baldacci arrived fresh from completing the busy lunch service round the corner in Harrow Place. “I started working Sundays when I was fourteen, it was expected but I didn’t not want to do it. I started full time at sixteen, twenty-five years ago.” he revealed, meeting his father’s eyes with a protective smile, “My dad does the book work and I do the running of it. We’re very close.”
Matthew told me there was a sense of change in the air around Petticoat Lane and he hoped that it was only a matter of time before the escalating life of Spitalfields and the City would spill over into this backwater bringing increased trade.
At that time, after all the transformations that the Baldcaccis had seen through three generations, Matthew remained ebullient for the future. “This is what I do and this is what I will be doing,” he assured me confidently, “I have two sons and it’s a probability that one of them will go into it.”
Yet after eighty-five years of service by the Baldacci family, running cafes on Petticoat Lane, it is now a matter of widespread regret that the story ends here and we shall never see Matthew’s prediction come to pass.
Peter Baldacci
Umberto Baldacci
Umberto Baldacci’s Cafe in Stoney Lane
The letter from the City of London beginning Baldacci’s tenancy that ended this week
Peter outside MB’s Cafe in Harrow Place
MB’s Cafe under the stairs on Middlesex St
Matthew Baldacci
Peter & Matthew Baldacci
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
You may also like to read about
Ebbe Sadolin’s London
Danish Illustrator Ebbe Sadolin (1900-82) visited London in the years following the War to capture the character of the capital, just recovering from the Blitz, in a series of lyrical drawings executed in elegant spidery lines. Remarkably, he included as many images of the East End as the West End and I publish a selection of favourites here from the forties.
George & Dragon, Shoreditch
St Katherine’s Way, Wapping
The Prospect of Whitby, Wapping
Stocks, Shoreditch
Petticoat Lane
Tower Green, Tower of London
The Olde Cheshire Cheese, Fleet St
Rough Sleeper, Shoreditch
Islington Green
Nightingale Lane, Wapping
Fleet St
Wapping churchyard
Tower of London
Commercial Rd, Stepney
St Pancras Station
High St, Plaistow
Bride of Denmark, Queen Anne’s Gate
Liverpool St Station
You may also like to look at
