Lizzie Flynn & Dolly Green
On Sunday November 16th at 4pm, I shall be introducing Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers and reading some of the biographies of the children in the pictures at the Whitechapel Idea Store – admission is free and tickets can booked at Write Idea Festival website. There will be sign language interpretation at this event.
I shall also be showing the photographs and telling the stories at Waterstones Piccadilly on Wednesday 19th November at 7pm. Admission is free to this event too but tickets must be reserved piccadilly@waterstones.com
Lizzie Flynn & Dolly Green
In Horace Warner’s portrait of 1901, Lizzie has equanimity but Dolly appears tremulous, clutching the hearth brush as if about to return to sweeping the grate. They both seem preoccupied, yet they gaze intensely at the lens, aware that photography is significant experience which requires attention. Since Horace Warner labelled his portrait with their names, we have been able to trace some of the primary events of their lives and now it is impossible not to see this photograph in the light of the futures that lay ahead for Lizzie and Dolly.
Lizzie Flynn was living at 19 Branch Place, Haggerston, when she was nine years old in 1901. Daughter of John and Isabella Flynn, she had two brothers and a sister. By 1911, the children were living with their widowed father at 89 Wilmer Gardens, Shoreditch. Their place of birth was listed as “Oxton” in the census. On 9th May 1915, Lizzie married Robert May at St. Andrew, Hoxton. He died at the age of just thirty-four in 1926 and they had no children. Lizzie died in Stepney in 1969, aged seventy-seven.
Dolly Green (Lydia Green) was living at 31 Hyde Rd, Hoxton, with her parents Edward and Selina in 1901 when she was twelve years old. Dolly had a brother and sister who had been born before her parents’ marriage in 1881. Dolly married Edward Moseley in 1909 at St Jude in Mildmay Grove and they had two children – Arthur born in 1912, who died in 1915, and Lydia born in 1914, who lived less than a year. In 1959, Edward Mosley remarried after his wife’s death.
Samuel Stevens, Lizzie Flynn, Dolly Green and three Compton girls
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On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 6
Adam Dant’s London Pocket Squares
Spitalfields Life Contributing Artist Adam Dant has designed these beautiful silk pocket squares for Drakes Of London, so I went over with him yesterday to the new Drakes’ factory in Haberdasher’s St, Hoxton, to take a look at his newly-realised designs which will be available from 13th November. Perfect for pulling from your top pocket when you wish to make a dramatic gesture, they are equally ideal framed upon the wall.
Museums of London
Where Money Dwells in London
Great Men of London
Club Land in London
Coming Soon – Writers of London
Adam Dant at Drakes of London
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On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 5
Award-Winning Mosaic Makers of Hackney
Tessa Hunkin
You recall my friends the Mosaic Makers, who I have been following over the past year, since their triumph with the murals at Shepherdess Walk and at Pitfield St in Hoxton, and more recently up on Hackney Downs, where they have just completed their magnum opus – covering the entire open air theatre with a vast lyrical tableau of wild creatures. Now their work has received just recognition with the award of Mosaic of the Year by the British Association for Modern Mosaic.
Yesterday, I went up to Hackney Downs to congratulate Tessa Hunkin, the inspirational designer and team leader of the project, while she applied the finishing touches of grouting in advance of the opening celebration from 2-4pm this afternoon. Refreshments will served in the Park Pavilion which functions as the Mosaic Makers’ workshop and there will be a chance to view individual works by members of the team. This will be followed by an official opening by Councillor Jonathan McShane, with a display of model parrots and a performance in the theatre by young people from the nearby Nightingale Estate.
“It suits us to have our workshop here in the Pavilion on Hackney Downs,” Tessa confided to me, “because the park attracts people from the local community who feel excluded through illness, loneliness or other problems – they see a friendly place and they come and join us making mosaics.”
Now the Mosaic Makers have developed their expertise and established their workshop, they are eagerly looking for their next project in the East End. “We like to do big mosaics, it inspires us to work on an epic scale,” Tessa admitted to me recklessly. So the burning question is – Who want to commission the Mosaic Makers next?
The first visitors arrive to admire the completed mosaics
The model for the design
All are invited to the opening celebration at the Pavilion on Hackney Downs today 2-4pm
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On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 4
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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