James Parkinson, Physician of Hoxton
James Parkinson delivers an alehouse sermon (Image courtesy of Wellcome Library)
Eighteenth century maps show Hoxton – like Tottenham Court – as a small village surrounded by fields. To the south, only a few houses stood between it and Moor Fields, while open fields lay north and west, and to the east beyond Shoreditch, all the way to Bethnal Green.
James Parkinson, the man who would describe the disease which was posthumously given his name, was born in this hamlet in 1755. He grew up in Hoxton and, like his father before him, worked there as a Surgeon and Apothecary. Subsequently, Parkinson was followed in the same calling by his son and grandson.
He practised as a General Practitioner from his family home on the south-west corner of Hoxton Sq, which survived until the early twentieth century. Its successor on the same corner bears a plaque commemorating the Square’s most famous inhabitant. Occupied by a busy restaurant today, 1 Hoxton Sq, the site of his surgery and the house where he and his wife Mary had their six children, is no longer recognisable.
Parkinson lived all his life in Hoxton but he was far from parochial. He trained at the London Hospital and became an early member of the Medical Society of London, then housed near Fleet St – an important forum which spanned disciplinary boundaries, with members drawn from the fields of surgery, physic and pharmacy. He was also an early member of the Humane Society, devoted to the resuscitation of people injured in accidents and drownings, and a founder member of the Geological Society.
In those days, a good doctor might be called far and wide. Parkinson’s professional catchment area had a wide radius, focused on Hoxton but perhaps extending as far west as Charterhouse, as far south as the City’s edge, and as far east as Whitechapel and the scattered farms and market gardens of Hackney and Mile End. His home patch probably included most of the neighbourhood of Shoreditch and Spitalfields, including the neighbourhood that would later become famous from Arthur Morrison’s novel as ‘The Jago’ – the great slum which once existed around New and Old Nichol Streets, now buried underneath the Boundary Estate.
Doctors see and learn a great deal about their patients’ predicaments as well as their illnesses. Like many in his profession, before and since, Parkinson was exercised by the politics of the day which favoured the rich and left the poor to suffer. Politically, he was a reformer and a member of the London Corresponding Society, an organisation which pressed for social improvement at a time when criticism of the government was a dangerous endeavour.
The British government was jittery for a generation after the French Revolution and their informers infiltrated every political meeting. Parkinson got caught up in the ‘Pop-Gun Plot’, a non-existent conspiracy to kill the King dreamed up by a spy to implicate a number of London Corresponding Society members. For a time, several of them were under threat of execution if convicted, but Parkinson gave evidence to the Privy Council and it became clear, during the legal process, that the spy had fabricated the story.
The inhabitants of streets like Shoreditch High St, Pitfield St, Elder St and Fournier St would have seen Parkinson’s familiar figure passing to and fro, visiting the sick in their homes. Historically, the area was clustered with City almshouses and madhouses, some of which Parkinson served. But of those people whose disease he described, and which bears his name, we know little other than they lived in the vicinity of his surgery at 1 Hoxton Sq.
Parkinson saw enormous changes in his lifetime. Before he died in 1824, he witnessed the disappearance of the fields surrounding Hoxton and the retreat of the open country northwards. Very little now survives of the Hoxton he knew. In present-day Old St, which has encroached upon the ancient road bearing the lovely name of St Agnes le Clare, it is difficult to visualise the rural nature of the area as it was then. But vestiges of his time do survive. One house still standing on the opposite side of Hoxton Sq was among those built when the square was laid out in the sixteen-eighties and the old parish pump still stands in St Leonard’s churchyard, while the eighteenth century girls’ school rebuilt in 1802 still boasts its presence on the facade of a building at the junction of Kingsland Rd and Old St.
Among the monuments in the lovely church of St Leonard’s Shoreditch, many commemorating those who were likely patients of Parkinson, is a modern stone commemorating his life. It was erected by nursing staff at the former St Leonard’s Hospital on the Kingsland Rd, which originated as the Shoreditch Workhouse where Parkinson once served as Parish Surgeon, Apothecary and Midwife. His tombstone in the churchyard has disappeared and the site of his grave is unknown, yet Parkinson was a Church Warden at St Leonard’s and he knew its stones well.
Hoxton of 1747 from John Roque’s Map
1 Hoxton Sq, today
1 Hoxton Sq, c. 1900 (courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London)
Parkinson’s memorial stone
St Leonard’s Shoreditch
Title page of James Parkinson’s ‘Villager’s Friend & Physician’ 1804 (courtesy of the Wellcome Library)
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The Hoxton Varieties Mosaic
Walter Bernadin, master mosaic fixer & Tessa Hunkin, mosaic designer
The Mosaic Makers of Hoxton have been busy again and on Sunday I had the privilege to see their latest masterpiece unveiled upon the corner of Pitfield St and Old St. Celebrating the former Varieties Music Hall that opened nearby in 1870, the mural designed by Tessa Hunkin and realised by members of Hackney Mosaic Project, illustrates the glory days of live popular entertainment in Hoxton with colourful images of acrobats and performing dogs.
When I arrived, Walter Bernadin, a sprightly white-haired Italian, was up a ladder sponging off the excess grout to reveal Tessa’s lively design in its full glory for the first time. “I am a master mosaic fixing specialist, I’ve been doing it for fifty years,” he admitted to me when I brought him a cup of hot tea to warm his cold hands, “My father Giovanni was a mosaic fixing specialist before me, so I just took on from him. We come from Sequals in Italy, most of the mosiac fixers in London are from there.”
“My father was in espionage and he had been here as a prisoner of war in Mildenhall. Then, in the sixties, there was a lot of terrazzo going on in London, so he came over in 1964. He ran a mosaic gang of forty men and I helped them out on Saturdays from the age of twelve and that’s how I learnt my trade. They put it on bridges and underpasses to cover the concrete. I could take you all over London and show you work my father done.”
Building upon the success of the Shepherdess Walk Murals, the Hoxton Varieties Mosaic is another aesthetic triumph – installing joyful artwork in unloved corners of the neighbourhood and drawing everyone back to consider the meaning of the place. Even on a grim Sunday in November, a small crowd gathered in delighted excitement to admire the exuberance of the conception as a blank wall acquired a new life in Hoxton.
Walter Bernadin, Master Mosaic Fixing Specialist – “I could take you all over London and show you work my father done.”
Walter still carries his deed of apprenticeship with him in the van
Walter sponges off the surplus grouting to reveal Tessa’s finished design
Visit the Hoxton Varieties Mosaic at the corner of Pitfield St & Old St, N1.
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The Loneliness Of Old London
Lost in Old London – Rose Alley, Southwark, c. 1910
When I first came to live in London, I had few friends, no job and little money, but I managed to rent a basement room in Portobello. For a year, I wandered the city on foot, exploring London without any bus fare. I think I never felt so alone as when I drifted aimlessly in the freezing fog in Hyde Park in 1983. As I walked, I used to puzzle how I could ever find my life in London. Then I went back and sat in my tiny room for countless hours and struggled to write, without success.
Today, I am often haunted by the spectre of my pitiful former self as I travel around London and, while examining the thousands of glass slides created by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for educational lectures at the Bishopsgate Institute a century ago, I am struck by the lone figures isolated in the cityscape. The photographers may have included these solitary people to give a sense of human scale – but my response to these pictures is emotional, I cannot resist seeing them as a catalogue of the loneliness of old London.
In celebration of the publication of The Gentle Author’s London Album I am undertaking a peregrination around London performing my magic lantern show at diverse venues. This week’s stop is at Waterstones Bookshop in Covent Garden and I look forward to seeing you there on Thursday night.
THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S MAGIC LANTERN SHOW
Thursday 21st November 6:00pm at Waterstones, Garrick St, Covent Garden, WC2
I will be showing 100 pictures – including selected glass slides from a century ago, telling the stories and counterpointing them with favourite photographs of the unexpected wonders of London today.
Alone outside Shepherd’s Bush Empire, c. 1920
Alone at the Chelsea Hospital, c. 1910
Alone at the Natural History Museum, c. 1890
Alone at the Tower of London, c. 1910
Alone at Leg of Mutton Pond, Hampstead, c. 1910
Alone in the Great Hall at Chelsea Hospital, c. 1920
Alone outside St Lawrence Jewry, 1908
Alone in Bunhill Fields, c. 1910
Alone in Hyde Park, c. 1910
Alone at the Guildhall, c. 1910
Alone at Brooke House, Hackney, 1920
Alone on Hampstead Heath, c. 1910
Alone in Thames St, 1920
Alone at the Orangery, Kensington Palace, c. 1910
Alone in the Deans Yard at Westminster Abbey, c. 1910
Alone at Hampton Court, c. 1910
Alone at the Houses of Parliament with the statue of Richard I, c. 1910
Alone in the tiltyard at Eltham Palace, c. 1910
Alone at Southwark Cathedral, c. 1910
Alone outside Carpenters’ Hall, c. 1920
Alone outside Jackson Provisions’ shop, Clothfair, c. 1910
Alone outside Blewcoat School, Caxton St, c. 1910
Alone on the Victoria Embankment, c. 1910
Alone outside All Saints Chelsea, c. 1910
Alone at the Albert Hall, c. 1910
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Take a look at
The Lantern Slides of Old London
The High Days & Holidays of Old London
The Fogs & Smogs of Old London
The Forgotten Corners of Old London
The Statues & Effigies of Old London
Lewis Lupton In Spitalfields
In the spring of 1968, artist Lewis Frederick Lupton came to Spitalfields and submitted this illustrated report on his visit to the Christ Church Spitalfields Crypt Newsletter.
Interior of Christ Church, Spitalfields, 1968 – without galleries or floor
On Ash Wednesday 1968, I set off at eleven for Spitalfields to see the Rev. Dennis Downham about his work among alcoholic vagrants. Walking up the road from the Underground Station, I saw a man very poorly dressed, his face a pearly white, obviously ill. Then came a tramp, as lean, dirty, unkempt, bearded and ragged as any I have seen. This was a district where there was real poverty.
The Rectory was a substantial Georgian house such as one sees in many a country village. The study overlooked a small garden and the east end of the church, where plane trees grew among old tombstones.
After lunch, we went out to see something of the parish. The first person we encountered was a fine-looking young American in search of his ancestors, who asked for the parish registers. After directing him to County Hall, we crossed over into a narrow street between tall old brick houses with carved and moulded eighteenth century doorways. Out of one of these popped a little Jewish man with a white beard, black hat and coat.
Round the corner in Hanbury St, the Rector unlocked (“You have to be careful about locks here”) the door of a building in which the church now worships ( “Christ Church itself needs a lot spending in restoration before it can be used again”). The building now employed once belonged to a Huguenot church, of which there were seven in the parish, and still has the coat of arms granted by Elizabeth I carved above the communion table.
Thousands of French Protestants found a refuge from persecution in this parish. The large attic windows belonging to the rooms where they kept their looms may still be seen in many streets and the street names bear record of the exiles – Fournier St, Calvin St etc
Crossing Commercial St, we came across a charming seventeenth century shop in a good state of preservation. Its fresh paint made it stand out like a jewel from the surrounding drabness.
A stone’s throw further on, photographs pasted in a window advertised the attractions of one of the many night clubs in the area.
Opposite a kosher chicken shop, one of a the staff – a Jewish man with a beard, black hat and white coat was throwing pieces of bread to the pigeons.
Round the corner, we plunged into an offshoot of the famous Petticoat Lane which forms the western boundary of Spitalfields.
Turning eastwards, we tramped along the broken pavements of a narrow lane running through the heart of the district. It seemed to contain the undiluted essence of the parish in its fullest flavour, a mixture of food shops, warehouses, prison-like blocks of flats, derelict houses and bomb-sites. “There are twenty-five thousand people living in my parish. It is the only borough in central London which has residential life of its own,” revealed the Rector.
Christ Church stands out like a temple of light in the surrounding squalor. Designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, its scale is much larger than life and the newly-gilded weathervane is as high as the Monument. “I climbed up the ladders to the top last year when steeplejacks were at work upon it,” commented the Rector.
Were it not for the brave work which has been begun in the cellars, the building would only be a proud symbol of the Faith, no more.
Down the steps, to the left of the porch, there is a reception area with an office and a clothes store.
One sleeping fellow had a tough expression. “False nose,” said the Rector, “he had his real one bitten off in a fight.” The central area is devoted to the work for which the crypt was opened. Except for a billiard table, it is like a hospital ward, mainly taken up with beds on which the patients rest and sleep.
Yet, a crypt is crypt and the lack of daylight is a handicap but, with air-conditioning throughout, spotless cleanliness and a colour scheme of cream and turqoise blue, the cellars of Christ Church have been turned into a refuge which offers help and hope to those of the homeless alcoholics who have a desire to be rescued from their predicament. – L.F.L.
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These are just a few letters I found in the archive at the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in Spital Sq, confirming that my own modest involvement in the successful campaign to save the Marquis of Lansdowne has many noble precedents, as over the last one hundred and thirty years, many writers and artists have sought to use their influence in a similar vein. Celebrating National Explore Your Archive Week, it is my pleasure to publish these letters for the first time – click on any one of the images below to enlarge and read the text.
William Morris wrote to the Reverend H. West of the church at North Fordingham to express the Society’s disapproval about proposed building works and the letter encapsulates the founding principles of the SPAB in Morris’s own hand. They strongly objected to the Victorian passion for ‘restoring’ medieval buildings to an imagined state of antiquity. Believing this work to be pastiche and worse, Morris understood that it injured historic fabric as the guilty parties stripped and destroyed to achieve their own, largely inaccurate vision of what the building should have looked like. The word ‘restore’ is particularly significant as it implies putting back things that weren’t necessarily there in the first place. ‘Repair’ is still the Society’s operative word.
Reports of destructive activities came to the Society from many famous correspondents – here George Gilbert Scott ( Architect of St Pancras Station) writes of damage to the church at Mells in Somerset.
Edward Burne Jones write to Thackeray Turner (one of the earliest SPAB Secretaries) regarding problems at Worcester Cathedral on February 9th, 1897
William Holman Hunt wrote with great passion to Morris about his concerns over proposed ‘extensive repairs’ to the Great Mosque in Jerusalem. He writes with dismay that the gates have been painted “a vivid pea green that would disgrace a Whitechapel Shop front.”
Thanks to the concern of Charles Robert Ashbee, designer & founder of the School of Handicraft in Bow, the magnificent seventeenth century Trinity Almshouses still stand in Whitechapel today..
Octavia Hill, social reformer and one of the founders of the National Trust, wrote this grief struck letter about proposed alterations to the West Front of Peterborough Cathedral.
In his professional guise as an architectural surveyor, Thomas Hardy was a committed SPAB caseworker protecting churches in the West Country. In these hastily scribbled cards he writes in anguish over Puddletown Church which featured in Tess of the D’Urbevilles.
George Bernard Shaw wrote to the Society on 15th July 1929, enquiring over the wisdom of restoration at the church in Ayot St Lawrence.
John Betjeman wrote to ask for SPAB’s advice on the Unitarian Chapel, Newbury, which was built in 1697. Three months previously, it was sold to the YWCA who were raising funds to ‘repair’ it.
As a SPAB council member, John Betjeman wrote this comic note signed pseudonymously – indicative of the humour that prevailed.
Letters courtesy of Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings
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Romilly Saumarez Smith & Lucie Gledhill, Jewellery Makers
Romilly Saumarez Smith & Lucie Gledhill
Sequestered in a cavernous old house in Stepney, two women work together to make jewellery under the name of Savage & Chong, combining their mothers’ maiden names to create a new identity for themselves. “We chose the names because they sound good together and it’s a bit of both of us.” revealed Lucie modestly, yet I discovered that the nature of their work reflects their different life histories in complex and unexpected ways.
“I used to make jewellery but I was no longer able to do it when I became paralysed,” confided Romilly with startling candour, “Yet, after a four or five year break, I was persuaded I should try to find someone I could work with closely and make jewellery again.”
We were sitting in an eighteenth century panelled room, painted in tones of red sandstone, as the Winter sunlight streamed in at a low angle and I realised I had entered a private world in which these two women pursued their activities with a quiet intensity, forged from a unique working relationship.
“We met two years ago,” continued Lucie helpfully, explaining how she began by remaking pieces of jewellery that Romilly had made as a way to advance their shared understanding.“What was exciting was that when Lucie made something and showed it to me, it felt like I had made it,” interposed Romilly, widening her eyes in wonder at this revelation. “We do things in the same way,” admitted Lucie simply, confirming the intimate rapport they discovered as jewellery makers and, consequently, as human beings.
“I still go through the process of making it in my head,” outlined Romilly, justifying her title as a jewellery maker,“Because I’ve done it myself, I understand a lot of techniques – but Lucie has refined my work and made it better.”
Lucie trained as a jewellery maker and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2009, whereas, for Romilly, the journey was more circuitous. “I never trained as a jeweller, I spent most of my life as a bookbinder, so I didn’t have any formal idea of how things should be done, I made it up,” Romilly confessed to me, “I was bookbinder for twenty-five years, then I started using metal as bosses and clasps, and I really enjoyed it. I learnt to solder and made a pair of copper earrings, and I was so excited, I decided to take a sabbatical from bookbinding – but once I started making jewellery, I didn’t want to go back.”
“We’ve set ourselves rules,” announced Lucie, introducing the jewellery they have created as Savage & Chong, “everything we do is handmade and everything we do is made here. Everything is silver or gold and it is not plated or cast.”
There is a subtle undemonstrative beauty to this work, which plays upon varied tones of silver and gold enhanced by oxidising or heat-treatment – while the forms evoke both the natural world, of seedpods and shells, and the paraphernalia of textiles, threads, buttons and lace bobbins. Rather than jewellery for display, these are pieces designed to give enduring pleasure to the wearer, discreet keepsakes to cherish.
Neither Lucie or Romilly would have made this work alone, it is the outcome of their combined sensibilities, abilities, judgement and experience. “I felt a great determination not to give up my life which I loved, and I still do,” Romilly assured me. Yet, in winning back her art, she has boldly ventured into a new creative territory with Lucie and it gives their work a distinctive quality that is unique and compelling.
Woven Ring
Lucie Gledhill
Buttoned-up ring
Cluster pendant
Tattoo Ring
Romilly Saumarez Smith
Portraits copyright © Lucinda Douglas Menzies
The East End Preservation Society
Paul Pindar’s House in Bishopsgate, demolished 1890
Old buildings have been going down like nine pins in the East End recently. They are the latest sad additions to a catalogue of loss that stretches back over more than a century, inducing sufficient grief among the populace to fill the Thames with tears. Yet it is not our nature to be defeated and, upon each occasion, there have been those who have stood up and objected. Many of the most-loved old buildings that survive today owe their existence to such brave souls.
Until now, small groups of people have come together to save a particular building – but the accelerating sequence of losses in recent years, combined with some monstrous developments looming in the immediate future and the failure of the public consultation process, calls for collective action.
Thus I write today to conjure into existence The East End Preservation Society as a means to bring together everyone that cares about the East End and is concerned about the future of its built environment. If we can work collectively in large numbers, we can have a stronger influence upon the culture of development that threatens old buildings and be more powerful in our individual campaigns to save them.
Less than a month ago, Mayor of London, Boris Johnson gave his approval to a plan that reduces the venerable structure of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney, which represents a noble history of philanthropic service, to a mere facade upon an overblown commercial housing development of questionable quality. A year ago, the Mayor of London overruled a unanimous vote by the elected members of Tower Hamlets Council to save the Spitalfields Fruit & Wool Exchange, and gave developers licence to replace the building with an office block and shopping mall of generic design, upon which the stone facade of the current building will sit as a painful reminder of the distinctive edifice that once stood there.
In this climate, where democratic decision-making is being undermined and public consultation reduced to a cynical public relations exercise, the rescue of The Marquis of Lansdowne from intended demolition by the Geffrye Museum was a joyful exception to the rule, proving that strength of public feeling can still be successful in saving an old building.
So I ask you to come to the Main Hall at the Bishopsgate Institute on Wednesday 27th November at 6:30pm for the launch of The East End Preservation Society.
Spitalfields resident, writer and campaigner, Dan Cruickshank has been invited to address the assembly. We will be showing images of notable buildings that have been lost and buildings that have been saved in the past. Will Palin, ex-secretary of Save Britain’s Heritage, will be assessing the recent history of destruction and introduce reports upon current developments at the Bishopsgate Goodsyard and in Whitechapel that threaten the East End.
Most importantly, we shall be suggesting ways that you can get involved and proposing how we can become organised to make an effective response to the current crisis. If the future of the East End is important to you, you need to be there.
Spital Sq – Within living memory, this was one of London’s most beautiful squares but it was sacrificed to road widening and commercial developments at the end of the last century, and only one eighteenth century house survives today.
The Jewish Maternity Hospital in Underwood Rd was designed by John Myers in 1911. This Arts & Crafts style cottage with its elegant crow-stepped gables was reminiscent of a streetscape by Vermeer and, athough it had lost its diamond-paned leaded windows, it retained its original doors and ironwork.
In January 2012, this is what became of the nursing home where Alma Cogan, Lionel Bart, Arnold Wesker and many thousands of Jewish East Enders were born.
Next year, this stone facade is all that will remain of Sydney Perk’s 1927 Spitalfields Fruit & Wool Exchange when the new office block and shopping mall are constructed behind it.
Magnificent staircases at the Fruit & Wool Exchange will be trashed in the forthcoming demolition.
Only the facade of the Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital on the Hackney Rd will survive if the current plan goes ahead.
The oldest part of the Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital in Goldsmith’s Row is slated for demolition.
After Hackney Council refused permission for demolition in response to a public campaign, The Marquis of Lansdowne is to be restored as an integral part of the Geffrye Museum’s proposed new extension.
Launch of The East End Preservation Society in the Main Hall at the Bishopsgate Institute, Wednesday 27th November 6:30pm
Follow The East End Preservation Society on twitter @EastEndPSociety
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Remembering The Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital
The Pub That Was Saved By Irony
So Long, Spitalfields Fruit & Wool Exchange
