A Garden For Thomas Fairchild
In her fifth story, Linda Wilkinson tells of a plan to create a garden in honour of Thomas Fairchild
Nineteenth century plate bought in Spitalfields
We almost certainly have the Huguenot immigrants of the seventeenth century to thank for the presence of Columbia Rd Flower Market. Their love of floriculture is legendary but what is perhaps not so well known is that wealthy Huguenot families built summer houses and hot houses upon the land that is now Columbia Rd. In 1795, market gardeners occupied 28% of Bethnal Green agricultural land. By 1800, many of these had developed into large gardens divided up like allotments, each with its own summer house, “where weavers and citizens grew flowers and vegetables and dined on Sundays.”
Eye witness reports are sparse from the period but an article from October 11th, 1827 in the London Standard Newspaper stated that “About three o’clock [in the morning] the South of Hackney Road was visited by one of the most destructive tempests witnessed in the vicinity of the metropolis for many years.” The wind was so fierce that it laid waste to the entire range of garden and orchard grounds on Crabtree Row (Columbia Rd). Hot houses were blown into fragments, chimney and window pots rained down, pigeon traps on the roofs were blown into the adjacent brick field, “and an old stable attached to the Birdcage Public House was thrown down with a frightful crash.”
It is difficult to imagine hot houses and orchards anywhere near the Birdcage Pub these days or, indeed, the pub standing in splendid isolation. The Gentle Author has previously told the story of Thomas Fairchild who had gardens in nearby Hoxton where he made history in 1717 when he took pollen from a Carnation and inserted it into a Sweet William, thereby producing a new variety that became known as ‘Fairchild’s Mule.’ It was the first reported instance of manual plant hybridisation.
Resisted in Fairchild’s era, when it was seen as interfering with creation, it took another century for his technique to be widely adopted. Yet he is also remembered for writing The London Gardener, the first guide book for gardening in the capital.
Fairchild’s local church was St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, and on his death in 1729 he was buried in what is currently Hackney Rd Recreation Ground, originally laid out in 1625. During Fairchild’s time, this was part of the church graveyard and in the nineteenth century was occupied by almshouses. These were converted from an engine and watch house in 1825, and were eventually demolished in 1904. Although there is a sparse monument to Fairchild in the grounds, he is actually interred as he directed, “In some corner of the furthest church yard belonging to the parish of St Leonard’s Shoreditch, where poore people are usually buried.”
Today it is a melancholy place, situated next to the splendid Grade II listed Ye Olde Axe public house, which presents “exotic dancers.” In 1892, the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, laid it out as a public space and latterly it housed a tennis court, ping-pong table and, more recently, art installations.
There are now plans afoot to rejuvenate the Ground, spearheaded by a group comprising the MPGA, Friends of Hackney Rd Recreational Grounds and Worshipful Company of Gardeners whose representative and former Master, Rex Thornborough, lives locally. Supported by the London Borough of Hackney and St Leonard’s Church, one of the ideas is to turn the ground into an education-based garden about Thomas Fairchild and the history of horticulture in the local area.
As Rex explained to me when we visited the Ground recently , the funding is not yet fully secured but the role of the MPGA and the Gardeners’ Company in this endeavour is to sprinkle the magic dust to make it happen. So let us hope they succeed, because too much of our history is lost to the bulldozer at the moment and it would be a sad travesty if this important man and his bones were consigned to oblivion.
Thomas Fairchild’s memorial in the Hackney Rd Recreation Ground
Thomas Fairchild, Gardener of Hoxton
An East Ender prepares for a Floral Competition around 1900
Rex Thornborough in his full regalia as Master of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners
Rex finds the last strawberry of summer in Hackney Rd Recreation Ground
Thomas Fairchild’s memorial in Hackney Rd Recreation Ground
Contact Metropolitan Public Gardens Association for more information on their Thomas Fairchild project
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On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 12
Notable & Lost Buildings Of Columbia Rd
In her fourth story, Linda Wilkinson traces Columbia Rd’s architectural heritage, notable & lost
Nineteenth century glass side of Columbia Market, courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was fashionable to send affluent young men to live in the East End as part of their societal duty. One suspects this was partly voyeurism of a class of people who were often regarded as sub-human, but no doubt it also had the effect of disseminating first-hand information about the prevailing conditions in the slums and rookeries. So it is no surprise that some of the newly self-made men of the Victorian middle classes pursued Philanthropy, nor that the poverty-ridden quarter which Columbia Rd became should have come to their attention.
The provision of social housing for the “deserving poor” was begun here by Angela Burdett-Coutts and Charles Dickens who, through the vision of architect Henry Darbishire, built an architectural masterpiece that few can believe ever existed in the East End. Photographs cannot do justice to the sweeping majesty of this series of buildings which rivalled any of that era. Part market complex and part housing scheme, this vast structure has been replaced today by Sivill House and the flats around it that comprise Market Sq.
As a market, it was a spectacular failure and the housing element hardly fared better. Purposely built with ill-fitting doors and no glass in the corridor windows, they were an icy, inhospitable series of dwellings. The basement and other parts of the structure were damaged by bombing in World War Two. It was certainly salvageable yet, despite protests at the time, the entire complex of buildings was demolished in the nineteen-sixties.
The next tenement block to be erected was Leopold Buildings in 1872, by the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company. Built upon land leased by Angela Burdett-Coutts, the block was run on similar lines to Columbia Sq with a strict selection and discipline regime, thus ensuring a healthy return on investment. It housed one hundred and twelve families and was of such individual design that, in 1994, the block received a Grade II listing. In 1997, the premises were upgraded and refurbished to a high standard, and today they enliven the otherwise architecturally bland west end of Columbia Rd.
The next tenement block to be built was in 1892 by the Guinness Trust. As theTtrust announced at the time, “The Guinness Trust … acquired a triangular site on the east side of Columbia Rd (formerly Birdcage Walk), north of the Barnet Chantry estate, in 1890. It replaced sixty-three houses with six blocks of mostly two-roomed tenements designed by Joseph & Smithem, completed in 1901.”
Finally, Ravenscroft Buildings, which stood where Ravenscroft Park sits today was built in 1897 and comprised one hundred and ninety-four flats. It was built around three sides of a rectangle to a height of five storeys. Designed in an ornate style by Davis & Emmanuel, it has not survived and the only extant photograph of the front is the one below, taken in 1898, probably from the Birdcage Public House.
Angela Burdett-Coutts (Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery)
Columbia Market Hall, 1914
These gateposts and railings are all that remain today of Columbia Market Hall
Leopold Buildngs, 1872
Architectural detail of Leopold Buildings
Leopold Buildings
Guinness Trust Buildings, 1892
The only extant shot of the frontage of Ravenscourt Buildings, taken in 1898 probably from the Birdcage Public House (Courtesy of English Heritage)
Joan resident of Ravenscroft Buildings, 1954 – her niece Carol is portrayed below
Hoardings after demolition of Ravenscourt Buildings in the eighties, on what is now Ravenscourt Park
Carol Court, long-term resident of Ravenscroft Buildings, in the park which replaces them today
Jesus Green, the Jesus Hospital Estate was built in the eighteen sixties
Nineteenth century furniture workshops on Columbia Rd
Nineteenth century shopfronts with dwellings above
Looking west down Columbia Rd towards the City of London
On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 11
Not Quite Murder Mile
In the third of her stories Linda Wilkinson recounts Columbia Rd’s history of violence and death
Angela Flanders, the perfumer of Columbia Rd, believes Zodiac signs are manifest upon the earth as well as in the stars. Her belief is that Columbia Rd represents Cancer the Crab and it draws people to its bosom in a fond embrace. This is as much to do with the shape of the road as the fact that, for centuries, half of Columbia Rd was called Crab Tree Row, much latterly being united with Birdcage Walk to become Columbia Rd as we know it today.
In total, the road is just eight-hundred and fifty yards long, far short of the traditional length of a ‘murder mile’ yet, even so, it seems that the cancerous motif signals not a welcome but something more akin to dark alchemies.
The overspill of the weaving industry from Spitalfields gave rise to the first recorded murders for – although the deaths were sanctioned by the powers that be – the hangings of John Doyle and John Valline in 1769 were murders nonetheless. They were weavers who had fought for a better wage and had the temerity to belong to a Union. They were hung in Bethnal Green outside the Salmon & Ball Pub.
With the collapse of the weaving trade, Cancer the Crab in the guise of Crab Tree Row, saw the affluent summer houses of the wealthy Huguenot weavers crumble in the late eighteenth century and fall into disrepair and squalor. In the early nineteenth century, law reform led to a dearth of hangings and it was this which, strangely, brought new murders to the Crab itself. In 1831, the ‘London Burkers’ murdered three – possibly more – people and sold them for dissection to the London medical schools when, quite simply, there were not enough stiffs for the students to study.
Living opposite the Birdcage Pub, on the infamous Nova Scotia Gardens and next to a dung heap of enormous proportions, John Bishop and accomplices moved on from ‘resurrecting’ corpses to drugging and drowning their victims in a well in the garden. Their crime became known as the ‘Italian Boy Murder,’ even though the boy in the case was not Italian and there was more than one death.
They too, hung for this but the murder – or worse – of a young girl in 1900 was never solved. As reported at the time, “A man dressed in ragged clothes and wearing a bowler hat took a girl of about five years, into a lavatory on Columbia Rd, Bethnal Green, stripped her of her clothing, leaving the clothing behind.” In spite of a report that a man was seen with a sack on his back with a young child’s leg sticking out of it, she was never found and what her fate might have been can only be surmised.
Just before this grim event, in 1898, two young women from Columbia Rd committed suicide together in a lake at Wanstead, leaving a note that they should be buried together.
Then, in the next century, on the 7th September 1940, literally on the site of the ‘Italian Boy Murder,’ a million-to-one-chance saw a fifty kilogramme bomb enter the air vent to a vast underground bomb shelter beneath old Columbia Rd market building where it exploded, killing fifty-three people and injured many more. This shelter had become a home to beleaguered East Enders – a place where marriages were performed, religious worship took place and a piano entertained locals and troops alike, until it became awash with their blood.
Times remained hard on Columbia Rd post-war. In the nineteen-sixties, there were at least two suicides of long-term residents and, of course, the Kray twins treated the street as their playground. Every Sunday, they held court in the Globe pub, collecting protection money and intimidating those who refused to pay. Firebombing was their preferred method of persuasion for recalcitrant business owners. Gang crime spiralled out of hand and a high-speed (for those days) car chase by the police saw the criminals’ car crash outside the Royal Oak pub where a gun was pulled on a curious passer-by.
Although the Krays went down for their crimes in 1969, the next year Mrs Beber, an old lady who ran a confectioners on Columbia Rd was murdered in her shop, leaving her ninety-year-old husband a widower, and the crime remains unsolved to this day.
Is the site of the ‘Italian Boy Murder’ cursed? In August 2007, a frenzied knife attack saw a girl of four years old, her mother and her uncle hacked to death in Sivill House, which is built on the site of Nova Scotia Gardens and the bomb shelter that saw so many deaths. Another murder of an old lady called Nora by a drug addict took place in the same building not long after.
All told, in eighty hundred and fifty yards, there have been ten murders, not counting the fifty-three bomb deaths, at least four suicides and five people hung as a consequence of local crime. Of the murders, three remain unsolved.
The crossroads at the Salmon & Ball pub where Doyle and Valline were hung in 1769
May, Bishop & Williams in the dock
John Bishop’s house in Nova Scotia Gardens
The huge dust heap that dominated Columbia Rd
The Birdcage pub, 1930
The Black Buildings of the Columbia Market Complex after a bombing raid in 1941
Now the Stringray, the Globe pub was once a Sunday haunt of the Kray Twins
Report on the still-unsolved murder of Mrs Beber in 1969
Sivill House was built on the site of the ‘Italian Boy Murder’ and has seen a few incidents itself
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Billy Frost, the Krays’ Driver
On Saturday 7th September 1940, the Columbia Market Bombing
A fundraising pub quiz for the Columbia Market War Memorial is taking place on Monday 24th November 8.30pm at Ye Olde Black Bull, 13 Broadway, Stratford. E15 4BQ. £3 per person entry with teams of up to six people accepted. There will be a prize for the winning team and a raffle. Donations to Treasurer, Columbia Market War Memorial Group, c/o Dorset Centre, Diss St, E2 7QX.
On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 10
Crinolines & Cholera
In her second story, Linda Wilkinson explores the Victorian origins of the Mildmay Mission
The first Mildmay Mission operated from a warehouse in Cabbage Court in the Old Nichol in 1866
One morning in 1866, a letter arrived at the table of the Rev William Pennefather who, in 1857 with his wife Caroline, had set up the Association of Female Workers based at Mildmay Park, Newington Green in North London. The Association provided an outlet for the energies and abilities of women who had a social conscience. Women were trained in a variety of subjects, one them being nursing. Known as the ‘Mildmay Deaconesses,’ they were self-funded women predominantly from the upper classes.
The letter that arrived that day was from James Trevitt, the Vicar of St Philip’s Church in Mount St (now Swanfield St), which lay at the edge of the infamous Nichol rookery, just west of Columbia Rd. He asked if the Deaconesses could come down and help in the terrible crisis being played out there. Death carts were rumbling all night, people were dying like flies and the stench was terrible – cholera was raging unchecked.
Mildmay Park may have been a little run down but Bethnal Green was the slums where thieves and robbers lived, an area in which the police would not venture alone. It was a place of prostitutes, drunkenness, violence, nefarious street urchins and filth – not quite what the young ladies had signed up for.
Later that year, two women – one Gertrude Villiers Stuart, the other anonymous to this day – emerged from Shoreditch Station wearing crinolines and bonnets to do their duty, as they believed their God wished.
It is unlikely that they had any influence upon the lives of the cholera sufferers for, although the water-borne transmission of the infection was known, any meaningful treatment remained unavailable. Eventually, the epidemic burnt itself out but the Deaconesses kept coming, every day, to Bethnal Green.
A base for their work was established in Cabbage Court (Little Bacon St), south of Bethnal Green Rd, where they set-up a Soup Kitchen, a Lads’ Institute, a Men’s Lodging House and a Mothers’ Meeting Club – offering a sewing class for factory girls and eighty meals a day for destitute children. Unsurprisingly, in a short while they were able to walk freely around the area without any fear of molestation.
In 1874, a Mildmay Medical Mission was established, moving around the corner in 1877 to a derelict warehouse in Turville Sq, in the heart of the Old Nichol. This was the first and, today, the only remaining Mission Hospital in London.
The appalling conditions which existed in the Old Nichol led to it being the first area cleared by the newly formed London County Council in 1891. In light of the impending demolition, it was decided that a new hospital should be built in a quieter situation. Austin St was chosen and, in 1892, a fifty-bed hospital was opened which served the local community until 1982.
Sadly, the ability of the Deaconesses to wander the streets alone dissipated. By the early nineteen-hundreds Kemp, the Head Porter, would be informed of the housebound sick by relatives and friends. It was he and his colleagues who would carry the patients to the hospital using blankets, bath chairs or even slung over their shoulders, if needs be.
Like the dispensaries of St Saviour’s Priory in Haggerston and Queen Adelaide’s Dispensary in nearby Pollard’s Row, the maladies treated at Out Patients were those of the poor – tuberculosis, typhoid, accidents at work and home, scabies, pneumonia, bronchitis. The dispensaries had little in their armoury to offer other than cough mixtures, cod liver oil and carbolic lotion for nits.
Yet the Mildmay offered a civilised way to die – in a clean bed, with the security of a warm meal and care from women who were referred to as ‘Angels’ right up until the nineteen-sixties. More recently, as an AIDS hospice, it has provided succour to those who contracted HIV and today a new hospital is being built on the site, ensuring that the Mildmay tradition of care goes on.
One of the original founding stones of the Mildmay
Emily Goodwin, the first matron at the new Mildmay Hospital, 1892
Sister Louise Blakeney, First Theatre Sister, 1909.
Miss Mulliner & Dr Gauld in the hospital pharmacy, 1909
Mildmay Outpatients
Mildmay Female Ward
Mildmay Casualty
In the hospital kitchens
Queen Mary mobbed by locals as she visits the Mildmay Hospital in the thirties
The Mildmay Hospital with extra wards in Nissen huts during World War II.
Mildmay staff in 1966.
Detail, showing the Milmay cat.
Miss Stockton, Elizabeth Willcocks (Matron), Sister Edwin and Dr Buxton at the Mildmay in 1964
Many famous faces visited the hospital during its time as an AIDS hospice. The young man with Liz Taylor died soon after this photograph was taken.
Find out more about the continuing work of the Mildmay International today
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