A New Quill For Old John Stow
Let me confess, I am a biro writer. I get through so many pens at such a rate that there really is no alternative. Yet in the case of my illustrious predecessor, John Stow, one the earliest historians of London, a quill is his preferred writing instrument and, every five years, a replacement is delivered upon a satin cushion to his monument in St Andrew Undershaft in the City of London.
This week it was time was for a new quill, so Photographer Colin O’Brien & I joined the excited crowds to witness the Lord Mayor of London put it into the hand of John Stow at a ceremony honouring the work of this celebrated antiquarian.
John Stow was a tailor born in 1525, who struggled to keep himself while writing, yet successfully undertook his epic Survey of London between 1560 and 1598, describing the streets, buildings, history, culture and people of his City. In Stow’s lifetime the population of the London quadrupled, going from 50,000 to 200,000, and he saw the churches ransacked of their medieval monuments and brasses with the names of the dead erased. As a parishioner of St Andrew Undershaft, he witnessed the great maypole taller than the tower – and from which the church takes its name – torn down and discarded as an idol.
In the Survey of London, John Stow recorded more than fifteen hundred names of Londoners who would otherwise have been condemned to oblivion, rescuing their identities in perpetuity while omitting the names of those did the damage, that they might be forgotten. Through his writing, Stow sought to preserve the memory of the world that he saw passing away and, in doing so, he created the most complete record we have of medieval and renaissance London.
John Stow’s monument was placed upon the wall in the corner of the church by his widow after his death in 1605, just six years after the publication of the great Survey by which we remember him and, thankfully, his memorial has avoided the fate of the medieval brasses and tombs which caused Stow such grief in his lifetime.
Thus, today and for eternity, John Stow sits snug in his marble cubicle in a quiet corner of St Andrew Undershaft, lost in thought, with a large book open in front of him on his desk and two other small volumes conveniently placed upon brackets on either side, for ease of reference. Old Stow writes in silence and no-one knows what he is working on. But now he has a new quill to keep him going for another few years and, after four centuries, we hope that he might complete another volume of his Survey one day – because the pace of change has not abated in London.
John Stow (1525-1605)
St Andrew Undershaft
Verger, Tom Wright, carries the quill
Lord Mayor of London, Fiona Woolf, with the Master of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, John Price, and Vicar of St Andrew Undershaft, William Taylor
St Andrew Undershaft takes its name from a great maypole that once stood here, taller than the tower
John Stow with his new quill
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
On Phil Maxwell’s Publication Day
Join me tonight from 6pm for a glass of Truman’s Beer to celebrate the publication of Phil Maxwell’s BRICK LANE at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green Rd. There will be an exhibition of the photos and Phil will be signing books. At 8pm, the films of Hazuan Hashim & Phil Maxwell will be screened with live piano accompaniment by Lola Perrin.
[vimeo 88003159 nolink]
CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR COPY OF PHIL MAXWELL’S BRICK LANE FOR £10
Posters at Rough Trade East in the Truman Brewery
We shall be giving away posters to all comers at Rich Mix this evening. After tonight, posters can be obtained free from Bishopsgate Library, Brick Lane Bookshop, Broadway Bookshop, Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen, The Golden Heart, Rough Trade, SCP, Labour & Wait, Leila’s Shop, Newham Bookshop & Townhouse. Each outlet has 50 posters to give away..
BRICK LANE is published with the generous investment of the following readers of Spitalfields Life – Fiona Atkins, Jill Browne, Robson Cezar, Stephane Derone, Charlie de Wet, Sandra Esqulant, David Ethier, Diana Fawcett, Lynda Finn, Susie Ford & Jonathon Green, Libby Hall, Carolyn Hirst (on behalf of Rowland Hirst), Michael Keating, Martin Ling, Julia Meadows, Jack Murphy, Colin O’Brien, Jan O’Brien, Kate Phillips, Sian Phillips & Rodney Archer, Jonathan Pryce & Kate Fahy, Honor Rhodes, John Ricketts, Corvin Roman, Tim Sayer, Elizabeth Scott and Zoe Woodward.
Click here to order a copy of THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S LONDON ALBUM
Click here to order a copy of TRAVELLERS CHILDREN IN LONDON FIELDS
Faber Factory Plus part of Faber & Faber are distributing BRICK LANE and other titles published by Spitalfields Life Books 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.
Thierry Noir, Street Artist
When I arrived to interview the celebrated street artist Thierry Noir, who won international fame and a place in history for his paintings on the Berlin Wall, I encountered an empty gallery apart from a man in construction worker’s clothing who answered the door. When I enquired if he knew where everyone was, he answered simply, “Hello, I am the artist.” Such is the unassuming nature of Monsieur Noir.
Within the gallery, several dozen canvasses were scattered, each painted in rich vibrant hues worthy of Matisse yet with sharp black lines defining the forms, which in some cases displayed an angular Cubist quality reminiscent of Braque at his most playful. These the were fruits of Noir’s labour over the past few weeks and the substance of his forthcoming exhibition that opens on April 4th at Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch High St. Noir’s vivid palette contradicts his name which I wrongly assumed to be an adopted one. “I had a lot of trouble at school because of that,” he admitted to me with a blush.
Noir’s gentle manner is unexpected in an artist who famously used art with such bold liberationist intent, defying the might of the Soviet Union with his childlike images in fairground colours. Yet when he told me his story – as he continued his work placidly – I discovered it was a joyful emotional impulse which motivated him to create and that evidently sustains him to this day.
“I am from Lyon and, when I left college in 1984, I couldn’t find my way so I decided to go to West Berlin where Nina Hagen, Iggy Pop and David Bowie were. I had no idea where West Berlin was because it was the end of the world at that time. It took me twenty-one hours to get there by train and I arrived on 22nd January, 1982. Everybody I met was an artist, whereas in France I never met any artists, so when people asked me if I was an artist I said, ‘Yes.’ Then I had to prove I was an artist.
Two years later, I was living very close to the Wall – there were two walls with fifty metres between known as the ‘death strip’ and border guards patrolling on either side. I was living in a squat in a abandoned hospital at the end of a dead end street with no traffic. Nothing happened. It was a black and white world. I was going crazy, there was no colour or life, so I painted on the Wall. It was a physical reaction, it wasn’t political at the beginning. But it became political really quickly because everyone asked, ‘Who’s paying you?’ Was I a spy from France or the CIA?
It was taboo for the Berliners but, as a foreigner, it was not a taboo for me. I got a lot of questions and I had to develop a painting style so I could talk as I worked. Then I found could sell my paintings and make murals under commission, and I was able to make a living. Wim Wenders came along, he was researching his film ‘Wings of Desire,’ and we decided to work together and I painted a section of the Wall for him. After that, Berliners came to think in a different way about the Wall. It was another time, and the world was no longer black and white.”
Thierry painting on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall in the eighties
Thierry’s paintings featured in Wim Wenders’ ‘Wings of Desire’
Thierry works on his exhibition
Thierry Noir & Keith Haring at the Berlin Wall
“This photo was taken in 1986 along Bethaniendamm in Berlin-Kreuzberg. It was taken by my first wife Gabi Noir. I was wearing a suit that day that I had found in a bag of old clothes on the street. At that time West Berliners often left furnishings and clothes on the streets. It was a recycling process. During this period, I would paint the Wall all day and then travel to the centre of West Berlin to sell canvases in restaurants. That is how I survived back then.”
Thierry Noir
New photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Thierry Noir’s retrospective is at Howard Griffin Gallery, Shoreditch High St, 4th April – 5th May
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More Long Forgotten London
After my first excursion to explore the sights of long forgotten London in the volumes of Walter Thornbury’s London Old & New, I could not resist returning to this shadowy realm, conjured as if from a dream or nightmare. This was how Londoners of the late nineteenth century looked back upon the city that had gone within living memory, a London that was already vanishing into reminiscence and anecdote in their time – a lost city, only recalled today in dark and dingy engravings such as these.
Golden Buildings, off the Strand
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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At The Blind Beggar
David Dobson, Landlord of the Blind Beggar
Henry VIII at the gaming machine – a rare image of this infamous monarch not recorded by Holbein yet a familiar sight in Whitechapel, where David Dobson landlord of The Blind Beggar delights to dress up in velvet robes and swan around like the ghost of the old king come back to haunt us.
The particular blind beggar in question is Henry de Montfort who lost his sight at the Battle of Evesham in 1265 and became the subject of a Tudor ballad recounting the myth of his salvation by a young woman of Bethnal Green – where he ended his years begging at the crossroads, cared for by his only daughter. Subsequently, the image of the beggar and his daughter became the seal of the Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green in 1900 and adorns the inn sign of The Blind Beggar in Whitechapel today.
Paradoxically, The Blind Beggar has become a site of pilgrimage for the devout, seeking the location of the founding of the Salvation Army by William Booth, who started his independent mission by preaching outside in 1865. Converted to housing now, the former Albion Brewery stands next door towering over the pub that served as its tap room, until it closed in 1979. In 1808, it was the enterprising landlord of The Blind Beggar who bought the small brewery next door and named it the Albion Brewery, which grew to be the third largest in Britain by 1880 and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the first Brown Ale was brewed here by Thomas Wells Thorpe.
In 1904, ‘Bulldog’ Wallace, a member of The Blind Beggar Gang of pickpockets who frequented the pub, stabbed another man in the eye with an umbrella – initiating the notoriety that coloured the reputation of the pub in the twentieth century, which reached its nadir with the shooting of Georgie Cornell by Ronnie Kray in March 1966, as recounted to me by Billy Frost, the Kray Twins’ driver.
“We don’t glorify it, we want to be famous for other things,” admitted David Dobson when Photographer Colin O’Brien & I joined him for a jar last week. “For example, I’ve got the finest collection of Japanese Carp in the East End,” he assured me, as he led us into the garden and leaned over the vast tank full of fish, each as fat as my leg, so that his beloved charges might lift their heads from the water and permit him to stroke them affectionately under the chin.
“I enjoy the diversity of my clientele,” David confided, when I enquired about the rewards of his job, “Every day, I meet people from all over the world. We’ve had Jerry Springer here, and Brad Pitt’s popped in.”
Yet in spite of the glamour and the attention, David’s motive for acquiring the Blind Beggar is refreshingly simple. “I like drinking, so I bought the pub,” he confessed to me with an eager grin, raising a glass as he revealed a lifelong commitment to his pub, “It’s not a job for me, it’s way of life. I’m live here and I’m in every night – I’ll be leaving here in a box.”
The Blind Beggar, mid-nineteenth century – there has been a pub on this site since 1673
The current building was constructed in 1894
The Albion Brewery
The Watney Mann Brewery with The Blind Beggar attached
The Blind Beggar and the former Albion Brewery today
David Dobson, Publican & Proprietor
David and his Koi Carp
David pets his not-so-coy carp
“I wore it for a fancy dress party years ago, but now it’s just a habit.”
David and a local wag
David waits to welcome the Olympic Torch to Whitechapel in 2008
David Dobson – “I like drinking, so I bought the pub”
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
The Blind Beggar, 337 Whitechapel Rd, London E1
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Sandra Esqulant, The Golden Heart
A Brief History Of London Crypts
Celebrating the publication of his new book Crypts of London by History Press, Malcolm Johnson – formerly Rector of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, where he ran a homeless shelter in the crypt – offers this brief history of London crypts.
At St Clement, King Sq
After the Great Fire of 1666, it was decided not to replace thirty-two out of those churches destroyed in the Square Mile, yet St Paul’s Cathedral and fifty-one churches were rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and others, and almost all of these new buildings were given a crypt of the same extent as the ground floor. This was also true for churches in Westminster and those on the edges of the City such as in Spitalfields, Shoreditch and St Clement, King’s Sq.
What were these spaces intended for? Charity schools? Storage? Meeting rooms? There was no chance of any of these, because the clergy and their vestries soon realised that good money was to be made by charging wealthy parishioners to stack coffins containing their dead family members under the church.
In doing so, they went against the advice and opinions of both architects and others, who doubted the wisdom of burying the dead among the living. In 1552, Bishop Hugh Latimer thought it “an unwholesome thing to bury within the city,” considering that “it is the occasion of great sickness and disease.” Mainly for architectural reasons, Wren and Vanbrugh were also opposed to burial in or close to a church, although when Wren was interred beneath St Paul’s when he died.
In my research, I found that in the eighteenth century most parishes received around seven per cent of their income from interments, although at St James Garlickhythe the average was nearly twenty-seven per cent. All five Westminster parishes had a high burial income by the end of the eighteenth century – around thirty-five per cent of the wardens’ income at St Martin-in-the-Fields and twenty-five per cent at St James Piccadilly.
After the Reformation, burial within a church was seen as a mark of social distinction – the nobility regarding it as their right – but by the mid-seventeenth century the professional classes were also seeing it as a sign of a successful career. Over the next century, doctors, solicitors, high-ranking soldiers and ‘gentlefolk’ frequently left instructions in their wills for intra-mural burial, although some cautioned prudence and economy in arranging it, because fees could be high. Coffins of the clergy were placed in the vault below the altar and the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields allowed Nell Gwyn to be interred in his space there.
Why were families willing to pay large sums for a crypt burial when churchyard fees were much cheaper? Some hoped for an ‘eternal bedchamber’ because they knew that bodies in the churchyard would be dug up after thirty or so years and the bones placed in a charnel house when the space was needed for new burials. Others hoped the congregation worshipping above the crypt would continue to pray for them and many more were apprehensive that body-snatchers might plunder the churchyard. Yet, in crypts, bodies were sometimes tipped out of their coffins so that the lead could be sold together with the metal handles.
Rarely do published histories of our churches mention these undercrofts. Obviously it is possible to visit those churches that have survived and establish precise details of their crypts – where it is not possible to enter, burial registers can give details of size and layout. For the churches that have not survived, the best descriptions of their crypts are often found in the faculties which authorised their destruction, and in the Vestry minutes recording the process of emptying the remains and transferring them to a cemetery. Written accounts are rare, because few people visited these dark, dismal places apart from the sexton.
The lucrative burial income ended abruptly in 1852 when sanitation legislation forbade further interments in crypts and churchyards. Joint-stock cemeteries such as Kensal Green were opened to receive London’s dead and the clergy lost the links with parishioners although they were still financially recompensed, even if the vestries and sextons lost their burial dues. The removal of human remains from crypts began for a variety of reasons – such as demolition of the building, its sale to raise funds or road widening. If the building remained and a new use for the crypt was found, then an appeal for funds was made, such as at St Bride Fleet St in the nineteen-fifties when its museum was equipped from gifts of nearby publishing firms. Other churches have attracted grants from the Lottery fund, statutory bodies, charitable foundations, businesses and individual donors.
The first crypt to be cleared of human remains for use other than storage was in 1915 when the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Dick Sheppard, set up a canteen to welcome men returning from the Front. Two learned reports of the Council for British Archaeology describe the clearance of coffins and remains from the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields in 1984/5. Nearly one thousand bodies were carefully examined and researched. Interment in a crypt obviously preserves a corpse and coffin longer than if it was buried in a churchyard but the state of preservation of those in coffins in Spitalfields’crypt varied from virtually complete, including skin, hair and internal organs to a just sediment of crystal debris being all that remained of the bones. When lead was used, as it was in this crypt after 1813, this preserved the cadaver longer, but if air or water was allowed to penetrate then decomposition was much quicker.
Where were coffins and remains from crypts taken? A minority went to the East London Cemetery, Plaistow, or to the Great Northern London (now New Southgate) Cemetery. Some relatives were allowed to transfer the coffin of a family member to a burial ground of their choice, but most went to Brookwood or the City of London Cemetery, Ilford.
Some two thousand two hundred acres of land owned by Lord Onslow on Woking Common at Brookwood were purchased by the newly-formed London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company. Despite opposition, Royal Assent was given to the London Necropolis Bill on 30th June 1852, but the first funeral was not held until 13th November 1854. Soon afterwards, several Westminster parishes, including St Anne Soho, St Giles-in-the-Fields and St Margaret Westminster, reserved plots there. Coffins and mourners were transported by special trains from a private terminus near Waterloo to the cemetery’s two stations, one for Anglicans and one for others. The Bishop of London was apprehensive that the coffin of ‘some profligate spendthrift’ might be in the same compartment as a respectable member of the Church. A notice in the station refreshment room at Brookwood reads ‘Spirits served here.’
The City of London Cemetery, used by nearly all the City parishes, opened in 1856 and is approximately eight miles north-east of the City. Since then, over forty City parishes have removed their crypt remains to Ilford, which is today one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the country.
Today, around half of London’s crypts have been emptied. Some, such as that of St Martin-in-the-Fields house a restaurant, bookshop and meeting rooms which contribute a very large sum to the Parish Church Council. Others are chapels and columbaria, yet others are museums while – sadly – two which were once homeless centres are now empty. Those with coffins still in place await a use – as at St Clement, King Sq, where David Hoffman took the photographs which accompany this article.
Coffin plates from Holy Trinity, Minories – now demolished
At St Clement, King Sq
The entrance to the family vault of Mr Thomas Gall of King Sq
Crypts of London by Malcolm Johnson is published by the History Press
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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A Brief Survey Of East End Garden History
Celebrating the publication of her new book The Gardens of the British Working Class by Yale University Press, Margaret Willes offers this brief horticultural history of the East End.
Early twentieth century garden at the rear of WF Arber & C0 Ltd, Printing Works
Today Spitalfields and Shoreditch are intensely urban areas but, four centuries ago, the scene was very different. Maps of this era show that behind the main roads flanked by houses and cottages, there were fields of cattle and, close by the city walls, laundrywomen laying out their washing to dry.
Many craftsmen who needed to be near to the City of London, yet who did not wish to be liable to its trading restrictions, found a home here. At the end of the sixteenth century, Huguenot silk weavers fleeing from religious persecution in the Spanish Netherlands and France, and landing at ports such as Yarmouth, Colchester and Sandwich, made their way to the capital. Records of this first wave of Huguenots and their arrival in Spitalfields are sparse, but there are references to them in the rural village of Hackney for instance.
Just as these ‘strangers’ took up residence east of London, so too did actors and their theatres. William Shakespeare lodged just within the City walls in Silver St, in the fifteen-nineties, in the home of an immigrant family from Picardie, the Mountjoys, who were involved in silk and wire-twisting.
Tradition tells us that these refugees brought with them their love of flowers. Bulbs and seeds may easily be transported, so they could have brought their floral treasures in their pockets. The term ‘florist’ first appears in English in 1623 when Sir Henry Wotton, scholar, diplomat and observer of gardens wrote about them to an acquaintance. He was not using ‘florist’ in its modern sense as a retailer of cut flowers, but rather as a description of an enthusiast who nurtured and exhibited pot-grown flowers such as tulips and carnations. One flower that has been traditionally associated with the Spitalfields silk weavers is the auricula, with its clear-cut colours. Auricalas do not like rain, so those who worked at home were in an ideal position to be able to bring them under cover when inclement weather threatened.
Another ‘outsider’ living in Spitalfields in the mid-seventeenth century was the radical apothecary, Nicholas Culpeper. He set up home in the precincts of the former Priory of St Mary Spital with his wife Alice Ford in 1640, probably choosing to be outside the City in order to able to practise without a licence. A Nonconformist in every sense, he disliked the elitism of the medical profession and in his writings threw down a challenge by offering help to all, however poor they were. He develop his knowledge by gathering wild flowers and herbs, but it is likely he also cultivated them in his own garden. His English Physitian, later known as the Complete Herbal, is one of the most successful books published in the English language and is still available today.
Culpeper’s books are a reminder that the garden has been for centuries the vital source of all medicines and poultices in this country. As London expanded, and private gardens within the City walls were built over, so the supply of medicinal herbs for apothecaries and housewives became of vital importance. Some of the market herbwomen are mentioned by name in the records of 1739-40 of the Fleet Market along with their places of residence. Hannah Smith, for example, came from Grub Sin in Finsbury, but others from further afield, such as Bethnal Green and Stepney Green. The remedies of the period required large quantities of certain herbs, such as wormwood and pennyroyal, and these women cultivated these as market gardeners.
With the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by Louis XIV, a fresh wave of Huguenot refugees arrived, this time from France rather than the Lowlands. We know much more about these people, including their love of flowers, along with singing birds and linnets, which until quite recently could still be bought from Club Row Market. The French king made a mistake in divesting his realm of some of the most talented craftsmen: gunsmiths and silversmiths as well as silk weavers. The skill of the weavers was matched by their love of flowers in the exquisite silks they produced for court mantuas, the ornate dresses made for aristocratic ladies attending the court of St James. In these designs, a genuine attempt was made to produce botanical naturalism rather than purely conventional floral motifs and although today the most famous designer was Anna-Maria Garthwaite, there were others working alongside her in these streets.
As Spitalfields grew more developed in the eighteenth century, so the pressure on land increased and many of the gardens were built over with new houses. Some residents appear to have taken to their rooftops, creating gardens and building aviaries for their birds up there. Thomas Fairchild, who cultivated a famous nursery in Hoxton, recommended the kind of plants that could survive at this height, including currant trees. Others created gardens upon grounds along the Hackney and Mile End roads. A commissioner reporting on the conditions of the handloom weavers in the early nineteenth century described one such area, Saunderson’s Gardens in Bethnal Green.
“They may cover about six acres of ground. There is one general enclosure round the whole, and each separate garden is divided from the rest by small palings. The number of gardens was stated to be about one hundred and seventy: some are much larger than the rest. In almost every garden is a neat summer-house, where the weaver and his family may enjoy themselves on Sundays and holidays …. There are walks through the ground by which access is easy to the gardens.
The commissioner found that vegetables such as cabbages, lettuces and peas were cultivated, but pride of place was given to flowers. “There had been a contest for a silver medal amongst the tulip proprietors. There were many other flowers of a high order, and it was expected that in due time the show of dahlias for that season would not fail to bring glory to Spitalfields. In this neighbourhood are several dealers in dahlias.”
The competitions held for the finest florists’ flowers were fiercely fought. The Old Bailey sessions records include cases where thieves had broken into gardens not only to steal from the summer houses, but to take prize bulbs too. The Lord Mayor’s Day, 9th November, was traditionally the time to plant the bulbs and, in the spring, judges visited the gardens to make their decisions.
But these gardens were doomed, for the eastern parts of London – Bethnal Green, Stepney Green and Hackney – were being overwhelmed by street after street of new terraced houses. The handloom weavers of the area were likewise doomed, as the silk industry was threatened by competition from overseas and by looms powered by machinery in this country. Their love of flowers, however, was not to be dimmed, and a picture of a Spitalfields weaver in 1860 working alongside his daughters in a garret shows plants on the windowsill, while a contemporary account describes a fuchsia in pride of place near a loom, with its crimson pedants swinging to the motion of the treadles.
Root plants could be bought from sellers, especially along the Mile End Rd, and cut flowers from Spitalfields Market. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a market specifically for flowers and plants was established in Columbia Rd in Shoreditch. This followed the failure of an elaborate food market built by the philanthropist, Angela Burdett-Coutts in the nineteenth century. Her project had been based on a prospective railway line to deliver fish, which never materialised, while the traders preferred to sell outdoors and their customers, many of whom were Jewish immigrants, wanted to buy on Sunday. Originally, Columbia Market traded on Saturday but a parliamentary act moved it to Sunday, enabling Covent Garden and Spitalfields traders to sell their leftover stock, and this market flourishes still, attesting to the persistent love of flowers in the East End of London.
London Herb Woman, late sixteenth century from Samuel Pepys collection of Cries of London
Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654), the Spitalfields Herbalist
An auricula theatre
The tomb of Thomas Fairchild (1667-1729) the Hoxton gardener
Rue, Sage & Mint – a penny a bunch! Kendrew’s Cries of London
Buy my watercress, 1803
Buy my Ground Ivy, 1803
Chickweed seller of 1817 by John Thomas Smith
This is John Honeysuckle, the industrious gardener, with a myrtle in his hand, the produce of his garden. He is justly celebrated for his beautiful bowpots and nosegays, 1819
Here’s all a Blowing, Alive and Growing – Choice Shrubs and Plants, Alive and Growing, eighteen-twenties
Selling flowers on Columbia Rd in the nineteen seventies Photo by George Gladwell
Mick & Sylvia Grover, Herb Sellers in Columbia Rd – Portrait by Jeremy Freedman
Margaret Willes in her garden – Portrait by Sarah Ainslie
The Gardens of the British Working Class by Margaret Willes is published by Yale University Press
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Nicholas Culpeper, Herbalist of Spitalfields
Thomas Fairchild, Gardener of Hoxton
