The Gentle Author’s Marylebone Pub Crawl
While in Marylebone preparing for my MAGIC LANTERN SHOW at the beautiful Daunt Books, Marylebone High St, on Thursday 20th March, I could not resist the resist the selfless task of visiting all the pubs on behalf of my readers – & I hope you will join me for a drink at the Dover Castle, Weymouth Mews, next Thursday after the show.
Angel in the Fields, Thayer St since 1852
Tudor Rose, Blandford St since 1848
Barley Mow, Dorset St since 1791
At the Barley Mow
Old coach booths at the Barley Mow
At Angel in the Fields
Angel in the Fields, Thayer St
Angel in the Fields
Angel in the Fields
Angel in the Fields
Angel in the Fields
Angel in the Fields
The Queens Head, Marylebone High St since 1863 – now The Marylebone
Angel in the Fields
Lord Tyrawley, Marylebone High St since 1869 – now Prince Regent
Dover Castle, Weymouth Mews since 1807
The Old Rising Sun, Marylebone High St 1866 – now Coco Moco
Gunmakers, Aybrook St
Gunmakers
The Beehive, Homer St since 1848
Pair of regulars at The Harcourt Arms, since 1869 in Harcourt St
Golden Eagle, in Marylebone Lane since 1891
The Dover Castle
You may like to read about my previous pub crawls
The Gentle Author’s Next Pub Crawl
The Gentle Author’s Spitalfields Pub Crawl
The Gentle Author’s Dead Pubs Crawl
The Gentle Author’s Next Dead Pubs Crawl
An Afternoon In Old Marylebone
With the recent change in the weather, I thought I could risk a trip beyond Spitalfields and so I took the Metropolitan Line from Liverpool St Station over to Baker St and spent a pleasant afternoon exploring the wonders of Marylebone.
It was a reconnaissance in advance of my MAGIC LANTERN SHOW at the beautiful Daunt Books, Marylebone High St, next Thursday 20th March, where I shall be showing one hundred of my favourite photographs and lantern slides of London, old and new, and telling the stories of the people and the places.
Peeling off from the teeming crowds heading for Madame Tussauds and the Planetarium, I crossed Euston Rd to the parish church of St Mary, that once stood upon the banks of the bourne which gives the place its name and flowed south from here towards Oxford St where it became the Tyburn. Thomas Hardwick’s cool classicism of 1813 promised a welcome respite from the clamour of the traffic racing past outside, an effect only marginally undermined by the array of gruesome Lentern sculptures of the Crucifixion including a skeleton carrying a cross.
From here, I took the shortcut through the cobbled churchyard, beside St Marylebone School founded as the Day School of Industry in 1791, and turned right past the obelisk commemorating Charles & Sarah Wesley that commands a tiny yard, offered now as a garden of ease and reflection for exhausted shoppers struggling up from Oxford St. Lest I should get distracted by the fancy shops in the High St myself, I turned right again into Paddington St to peer into James Taylor & Sons, Shoemakers since 1857, when the founder walked from Norwich to start the business.
Crossing the road, I entered the narrow Grotto Passage which offers a portal to another Marylebone than the affluence which prevails elsewhere. Through the passage, you discover the Grotto Ragged & Industrial School beside a huge Laundry House at the centre of Ossington Buildings, a nineteenth-century complex of social housing dating from 1888. These narrow streets lead you through to the seclusion of Paddington St Gardens, a former burial ground, bordered by iron bollards with St Mary Le Bone 1828 in relief. Here in the gardens, school children at play and mothers with their tots attest to the domestic life of Marylebone, while in Chiltern St I discovered Webster’s Ironmongers in business since 1870, a rare survivor of the traditional businesses that once lined these streets before the chain stores of Oxford St ventured northwards. The current owner has been behind the counter for thirty years, cherishing Websters as a temple to the glories of hardware and household goods.
Turning another corner into Manchester St, with its magnificent early nineteenth century terraces, delivered my return to the London of wealth, ascending in architectural grandeur as I strolled down towards Manchester Sq, commanded by The Wallace yet fascinating to me for the elaborate drinking fountain given by the Citizens of Shoreditch and the wrought iron curlicules of the decorative lamps upon the stucco villas. Turning east across Thayer St and into Marylebone Lane, the Golden Hind Fish Bar has long been a personal landmark with its immaculate fascia of 1914, perfect save the loss of the letter ‘D,’ spelling “Golden Hin…”
A different urban landscape opens up beyond the charismatic meander of Marylebone Lane, it is that of wide boulevards and tall mansions comprising Wimpole St and Harley St, interwoven by cobbled mews in which you can wander, as if behind the scenes at the theatre, observing the scenery from the reverse – where the mish-mash of accreted structures concealed by those impermeable facades are revealed. Leaving these exposed thoroughfares where the traffic hurtles through and the pavement grants no shelter to the lone pedestrian, I set out to walk west as the shadows lengthened, crossing Marylebone High St again and following Paddington St as it became Crawford St where the neighbourhood declines towards Edgeware Rd.
My destination was Robert Smirke’s St Mary’s Bryanston Sq of 1823, defining a favourite corner of Marylebone where, bordered by the Euston Rd, Edgeware Rd and Oxford St, a quiet enclave of old London persists.
Marylebone Parish Church by Thomas Hardwick 1813
Inside Marylebone Parish Church
Staircase by Thomas Hardwick
Memorial to Charles & Sarah Wesley in Marylebone High St
James Taylor & Sons Ltd, shoes made since 1857
The late Lord Butler’s lasts
Industrial dwellings in Grotto Passage
The Grotto Ragged & Industrial School, Established 1846
Looking through Grotto Passage towards Paddington St Gardens
Old mausoleum in Paddington St Gardens
Websters of Chiltern St since 1870
In Manchester St
Drinking fountain from Shoreditch now in the grounds of The Wallace
Decorative lamps in Manchester Sq
The Golden Hind Fish Bar of 1914 in Marylebone Lane
44 Wimpole St
“cobbled mews in which you can wander, as if behind the scenes at the theatre”
90 Harley St, London’s oldest dental practice established 1924
“the mish-mash of accreted structures concealed by those impermeable facades”
Daunt Books, Marylebone High St
Meacher, Higgins & Thomas, chemist since 1814 – Purveyors of photographic chemicals
St Mary’s, Bryanston Sq, by Robert Smirke
At Baker St, the return to Whitechapel
Melvyn Reeves At The Troxy
It is a source of great joy to Melvyn Reeves that he has always lived within a few streets of where he was born in Stepney and that, at the centre of his personal universe in the East End, stands a gleaming Art Deco palace known as The Troxy.
In 1953, Melvyn’s mother took him at the tender age of three to see ‘Calamity Jane’ featuring Doris Day and for Melvyn it was love at first sight – encountering both The Troxy itself, with its extravagant modernist architecture, and the glamorous Hollywood stars, whose portraits line its halls today.“We used to come to The Troxy every fortnight,” Melvyn recalled fondly,“But I’ve only been in here three times since 1960 when it closed as a cinema.”
In recent years, the magnificent Troxy has been restored as a flexible events space and its ceramic frontage cleaned, so that once more it presents a shining face to Commercial Rd, creating an unmissable opportunity for Melvyn to risk a return visit to the fabled world of his childhood delight – and he generously took Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & me along too.
The Troxy opened in 1933 with a screening of ‘King Kong.’ Built at the cost of £250,000 and seating more than three and a half thousand, it offered a luxurious and sophisticated venue where all the staff wore evening dress and sprayed perfume during screenings.“If you wanted to go somewhere then The Troxy was always the place to go, it was the posh cinema compared to the other East End fleapits,” Melyvn assured me, speaking from experience and brimming with anticipation when I met him in the foyer, “My mother used to talk about how The Andrews Sisters once performed here.”
“I first came to The Troxy sixty years ago, yet I am still gobsmacked by it,” he confessed, as we entered the vast auditorium with its triumphantly-engineered curved circle that spans the width of the building without a single pillar to impede the view, “It was fifteen minutes walk from my home in Jane St, two minutes past Watney Market, and in those days there were toy shops and shops selling sweets in Commercial Rd. At half-term and school holidays, this was where you came.”
Feeling as small as ants, we walked forward beneath the balcony to reach the front of the stalls where the full height of the space became apparent, flanked with elaborate plasterwork motifs of waterfalls soaring on either side and theatrical sweeping staircases leading up towards the circle. “I’ve never been up there,” Melvyn admitted to me in a whisper, peering up into the gloom where rows of seats receded seemingly to infinity, “I’ve always been afraid of heights.” Emboldened to overcome this aversion, Melvyn and I scaled the stairs, ascending carefully like mountaineers to the top, so that Melvyn might survey the totality of his beloved Troxy and appreciate details of the plasterwork close up – such as the dense golden floral border, encrusted with daises and sunflowers, and the lisson figure of Terpsichore frolicking.
Melvyn remembers the years of decline when the Troxy operated as a bingo hall in the eighties. “My mother used to see all her neighbours coming here and say to me, ‘They’ll be short of rent money next week,” he confided to me, rolling his eyes in disapproval. Despite feeling more than a little proprietorial, Melvyn gave his blessing to the restoration including a colour scheme that casts the auditorium in tones of pale blue and lilac, highlighted with gold, conjuring the effect of a tropical undersea world.
“Whenever there is a fight night, I always see the boxers and their entourages come out of Limehouse Station at lunchtime and march down to the Troxy,” Melvyn informed me, ever-observant of all activity in the neighbourhood that he knows better than anyone else. It is not often in life that you can go back to a childhood location and not be disappointed, but Melvyn’s comment was indicative to me that now he has made his personal inspection of The Troxy and found it to his liking, he will return regularly.
Melvyn in the foyer
“it was the posh cinema…”
Golden floral border, encrusted with daises and sunflowers
Melvyn resplendent in the pink haze of the auditorium
Terpsichore
Melvyn Reeves and Clark Gable
Melvyn outside the Troxy today
The Troxy when it first opened in 1933
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
You may like to read my original portrait of Melvyn
Bob Rogers At Speakers’ Corner
“I’m old enough to know better and young enough not to care”
Despite the timbre of the message he has been wearing around his neck each Sunday at Speakers’ Corner for decades, Bob Rogers is not the lugubrious fellow you might imagine. Contrary to expectation, he wears it to cheer people up – as he explained to me when Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I joined him in the park on Sunday.
“It was the winter when British Rail reported ‘The Wrong Kind of Snow’ on the line and that became an Evening Standard headline. The next day, I saw ‘It’s Going to Get Worse,’ on the newsstand as I went through Piccadilly on a bus. So I jumped off and took it from the hoarding and put in my bag because I like the prose style of newspaper headlines,” he explained. “Then I came here on a Sunday in February and everyone looked so miserable that I took it out of my bag and held it up, and it made them all smile. It caught on to such an extent that I am pictured wearing it in guidebooks to London.”
A stalwart of more than half a century at Speakers’ Corner, always in his faded brown corduroy suit with a beret in winter or a bucket hat in summer, and the celebrated notice round his neck, Bob Rogers is an erudite historian and a self-appointed custodian of this celebrated British institution.“Unless I am very unwell, I always come here because it retains its function as a meeting place and you encounter people from all around the world,” he revealed to me, “I keep coming back because I know people here and they know me, so it has a social content as well as a social purpose.”
As if to illustrate this, one of Bob’s pals joined us and, realising I was doing an interview, he took the opportunity to make some points.”These days people are frightened of saying the wrong thing,” he assured me, rolling his eyes contemptuously, “It’s no longer about politics, it’s just a circus of religion – fifty seven varieties of Christianity and fifty-seven varieties of Islam and they all disagree with each other.”
The 1873 reform of the Parks Regulation Act of 1872 conferred legitimacy upon Speakers’ Corner, enshrining the right to give an address though not – as some assume – the right to free speech since speakers are still subject to the law.“I enjoy the weekly privilege of visiting the only place where people can gather without police permission,” Bob confided to me, lowering his voice and casting his gaze around,“When people ask me how many police undercover agents are in the park, I say, ‘Every third man.'”
“Over fifty years ago, I missed a connection on my bus and I looked over the railings and I saw all these people and what got me was the babble of their voices,” he continued, as we stood against the railings watching the excited crowds gathered around the speakers and the hecklers adding drama with their interruptions.“The Catholic Evidence Guild were here one hundred years ago and are here this week and that’s because this is the site of of Tyburn, the place of public executions,” Bob added, gazing through the perspective of time,“Even as we speak they are praying for the Catholic Martyrs.”
Then, swinging his arms wildly and intoning like a priest, Bob enacted the bizarre yet compelling performance style of Nutty Norman, the ‘arms-up’ man, one of the past legends of Speakers’ Corner. “You’d never know he was homeless, he carried all his possessions in a shoulder bag,” Bob revealed, protective of his mentor, “He inducted me to the night buses and sometimes he passed the night at Heathrow.” Gesturing to a charismatic speaker surrounded by an attentive gathering, Bob pointed out Heiko Khoo, a part-German-part-Icelandic ex-bus conductor who famously threw Sir Michael Joseph off his bus, declaring, “I’m not having any Tories on my bus!”
Even as Bob and I chatted, bystanders came over and formed an audience around us, in expectation of a colourful debate and making tangible the rare quality of this special place where we are free to speak with each other as humans, without the need to be introduced.
“Religious people talk about the power of God, I talk about Horse power!”
Omid Mankoo – “People’s lives are really fixated on the sex stuff and they’re neglecting everything else. I’ve written this book and I want to share my secrets.”
Matthew from St Albans – “Jesus told me to come here because the years of his blessing our nation are at an end.”
Christians praying
Christians spreading the Word
Thai people protesting against their corrupt government
Celebrating the Thai Royal Family
Proclaiming the Nigerian Messiah
“If that frightens you, give Jesus a call”
“Don’t be late like the foolish virgins”
Bob re-enacts the gestures of Nutty Norman the ‘arms-up’ man
Heiko Khoo – “I’m not having any Tories on my bus!”
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Sounds from the Park, an exhibition of the history of Speakers’ Corner runs at Bishopsgate Institute until 30th April
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Malcolm Johnson At St Botolph’s
Dan Jones’ painting of Malcolm Johnson at Botolph’s, Aldgate 1982
These days, with his gentle blue eyes and white locks, Reverend Dr Malcolm Johnson is one of the most even-tempered radicals that you could meet, yet the work he did at St Botolph’s in Aldgate was truly extraordinary in its bold and compassionate nature. From 1974 until 1992, Malcolm was responsible for the ‘wet’ shelter that operated in the crypt, offering sustenance, showers and moral support to those that everyone else turned away. While other shelters refused admission to homeless people with alcohol or drugs in their possession, St Botolph’s did not and when I sought further, asking Malcolm to explain the origin of this decision, he simply said, “I believe you have to accept people as they are.”
The project at St Botolph’s was eminently pragmatic, working with people individually to find long-term accommodation in hostels and providing support in establishing a life beyond their homelessness and addiction. But shortly after Malcolm left St Botolph’s in 1992, the shelter was closed by his successor and it has sat unused for the past twenty years, making it a disappointing experience for Malcolm to return and be confronted with the shadow of his former works.
“I can’t tell you how upsetting it is, seeing it like this – it used to be such a wonderful place, full of energy and life, and now its just a store” he admitted to me when Photographer David Hoffman & I accompanied him on a visit to the disused crypt last week. Yet it proved to be a pertinent moment for reflection, as Malcolm told me the story of how it all happened.
“I had been Chaplain at Queen Mary University for seven years and specialised in counselling gay and lesbian people, so the Bishop thought I needed a quiet City parish where I could get on with my writing next. But, when I arrived. the crypt had been operating for five years and was catering for seventy homeless people each night, and I felt that wasn’t enough. I realised that we were here in the City of London surrounded by big companies, so I went to ask their assistance and I was lucky because they helped me, and I persuaded the City of London Corporation to give us seventy-thousand pounds a year too. The volunteers were all sorts, housewives, city workers after a day at the office and students from the polytechnic. I decided that it would be a wet crypt and we wouldn’t charge for food.
I was the rector upstairs and the director down here in the crypt – I believed the church had to be one outfit, upstairs and down. I went to Eddy Stride at Christ Church Spitalfields to ask what I should do, I had no experience so I had to learn. Over time, we expanded the shelter, we had quite a lot of full-time workers and we established four long-term hostels in Hackney. We were getting about two to three hundred people a night and it was quite an experience, but I was never frightened. Only once did a man take a swing at me, and all the others gathered round and grabbed him.
I missed this place so desperately when I left because you never knew what was going to happen when you walked through the door, it was wonderful, but I felt eighteen years was enough. Then, quite suddenly after I left in 1992, my successor closed the crypt and they said it went bankrupt, although I never understood what happened because we’d done a benefit at the Bank of England shortly before and, if there had been problems, I know my City friends would have come in to save it.”
The crypt of St Botolph’s is still equipped as a homeless shelter, functional but abandoned, pretty much as Malcolm left it and still harbouring emotive memories of those who passed through, many of whom are now dead. Encouragingly, Malcolm told me the current rector is considering whether it could be reopened.
This would itself be sufficient story and achievement for one man, yet there was another side to Malcolm Johnson’s ministry. As one of the first in the Church of England to come out as gay in 1969, he established the office of the Gay & Lesbian Christian Movement at St Botolph’s and even became known as the Pink Bishop for his campaigning work.
“I had always thought that if clergy can bless battleships and budgerigars, we could bless two people in love,” was his eloquent justification for his blessing of gay couples. Unsurprisingly, it was a subject that met opposition within the Church of England but, by the mid-eighties, the subject of AIDS became an unavoidable one and St Botolph’s was the first church to appoint a full-time minister to care for those affected by the HIV virus, as well as opening a dedicated hostel for this purpose.
In spite of his sadness at the closure of his shelter in the crypt, it was inspiring to meet Malcolm Johnson, a man with an open heart and a keen intelligence, who had the moral courage to recognise the truth of his own experience and apply that knowledge to better the lives of others.
“If clergy can bless battleships and budgerigars, we could bless two people in love…”
At St Botolph’s, 1978
Malcolm Johnson recalls the wet shelter in the crypt, now disused
At St Botolph’s, 1978
“I believe you have to accept people as they are.”
At St Botolph’s, 1978
“I can’t tell you how upsetting it is seeing it like this, it used to be such a wonderful place full of energy and life, and now it’s just a store”
Malcolm Johnson stands left at this midnight mass for the homeless at St Dunstan’s Stepney in 1978
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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and the work of another heroic campaigner
Antony Cairns’ Dead Pubs
The Duke of Cambridge, Felix St E2, 1839 – 1998
Slowly and without anyone hardly noticing, pubs are being snuffed out like candle flames. As a connoisseur of quiet and neglected places, it cuts me to the quick to see this gallery that Antony Cairns had the prescience to photograph between 2001- 2003 (and subsequently) just as his subjects were taking their last gasp – or should that be gulp? Yet – even in this final degraded state, boarded up and shut down – these pubs still retain their presence as receptacles of collective memory, and their aristocratic names and architectural flourishes declare their former glory with undiminished pride.
Can readers name the unidentified pubs and provide locations where I have none?
Marquis of Salisbury, Hermit Rd, Canning Town E16, 1881 – 1995
Durham Arms, Harleyford Rd SE11, 1869 – 2002
The New Concorde, Webster Rd SE16 – note concorde image upon sign
The Arundel Arms, Boleyn Rd N16, 1881 – 2007
Earl Derby, London Rd E13, 1870 -2010
The Royal Duke, Commercial Rd E1, 1971 – 1995
The Orange Tree Tavern, Stonebridge, NW10, 1881 – 2001 – now demolished
The Lord Napier, White Post Lane, Hackney Wick, 1874- 1996
Westbury Arms, Ripple Rd, Barking, 1650 -2008
The Star, Wellington St, Woolwich SE18
The Willow Tree, Balls Pond Rd, 1869 – 2007
Lovat Arms, Burdett Rd, Limehouse, 1862 – 2004 – now demolished
The Lord Cecil, Median Rd E5, 1872 – 2005
The Cowshed (formerly The Admiral Blake), Ladbroke Grove W10, 1881 – 2013 – now demolished
Red Cow, The Grange, Bermondsey, 1869 – 2010 – now demolished
Unknown pub
The Angel, Church St, West Ham, E15
Prince & Princess of Wales, Bagshot St, Walworth, 1881 – now a shop
Clarence Arms, Kentish Town Rd, NW1
Camden Falcon, Royal College St, NW1, 1869 -2010
The Globe, Tollington Rd N7, 1874 – 2007 – now demolished
The Star, Snowshill Rd, Manor Park, E12
The Duke of Clarence, Borough Rd SE1, 1856 – 2007 – now demolished
The Crown & Cushion, Bell Water Gate, SE18, 1840 – 2008
The Royal Oak, Loampit Vale, Lewisham SE13
Old Metropolitan, Southwark Bridge Rd
The Mitre, Downham Rd N1, 1864 – 2006
The Bricklayers Arms, Hannibal Rd E1, 1891 – 2004
The Prince Arthur, Forest Rd, Dalston, 1861 – 2008 – & open again!
The Lee Arms, Marlborough Rd, E2, 1856 – 2003
Photographs copyright © Antony Cairns
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and these other pub pictures
The Gentle Author’s Dead Pubs Crawl
Charles Spurgeon’s Londoners
Charles Spurgeon the Younger, son of the Evangelist Charles Haddon Spurgeon, took over the South St Baptist Chapel in Greenwich in the eighteen-eighties and commissioned an unknown photographer to make lantern slides of the working people of Greenwich that he could use in his preaching. We shall never know exactly how Spurgeon showed these pictures, taken between 1884 and 1887, but – inadvertently – he was responsible for the creation of one of the earliest series of documentary portraits of Londoners.
Champion Pie Man – W.Thompson, Pie Maker of fifty years, outside his shop in the alley behind Greenwich Church
Hokey-Pokey Boy – August Bank Holiday, Stockwell St, Greenwich
Knife Grinder – posed cutting out a kettle bottom from a tin sheet
Rabbit Seller
Toy Seller – King William St outside Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Ginger Cakes Seller – King St, near Greenwich Park
Sweep
Shrimp Sellers – outside Greenwich Park
Crossing Sweeper (& News Boy) – Clarence St, Greenwich
Sherbert Seller – outside Greenwich Park
Third Class Milkman – carrying two four-gallon cans on a yoke, King William’s Walk, Greenwich
Second Class Milkman – with a hand cart and seventeen-gallon churn
Master Milkman – in his uniform, outside Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Chairmender – Corner of Prince Orange Lane, Greenwich
Kentish Herb Woman – Greenwich High Rd
Muffin Man
Fishmongers
Try Your Weight – outside Greenwich Park
Glazier
News Boy (& Crossing Sweeper) – delivering The Daily News at 7:30am near Greenwich Pier
Old Clo’ Man – it was a crime to dispose of infected clothing during the Smallpox epidemics of the eighteen-eighties and the Old Clo’ Man plied a risky trade.
Blind Fiddler – outside Crowders’ Music Hall Greenwich
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