Alex Pink’s Fournier St, Then & Now
No street in the East End has seen a greater transformation than Fournier St, where once were shabby clothing factories, sweatshops and furriers, are now immaculately appointed mansions. In this final part of the collaboration with Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archive, Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Alex Pink selected photographs from the collection and then took a stroll from Christ Church to Brick Lane to review the changes that conservation has brought.
19 Fournier St, 1975
19 Fournier St, 2013
20 Fournier St, 1975
20 Fournier St, 2013
21 Fournier St, 1975
21 Fournier St, 2013
27 Fournier St, 1975
27 Fournier St, 2013
29 Fournier St, 1975
29 Fournier St, 2013
33 Fournier St, 1975
33 Fournier St, 2013
37 Fournier St, 1975
37 Fournier St, 2013
39 Fournier St, 1975
39 Fournier St, 2013
Archive images courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
New photographs copyright © Alex Pink
Visit Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives for opening times, collections & events.
You may also like to read these other Fournier St stories
Jonathan Miller in Fournier St
All Change at 15 & 17 Fournier St
A Tourist in Whitechapel
Now that the visitor season is upon us again, I discovered this comic pamphlet of 1859 in the Bishopsgate Institute which gives a fictional account of the experiences of a French tourist in Whitechapel yet permits us a rare glimpse of East End street life in that era too.
Monsieur Theophile Jean Baptiste Schmidt was a great observer of human nature. He was a great traveller too, for he had been across the Atlantic. But he had never been to London, so to London he determined to come.
When he arrived at London Bridge, to which he came in his Boulogne steamboat, he was met by his friend and countryman, Monsieur Hippolyte Lilly, who had resided some years in the city and knew all about its ways. Now Monsieur Lilly was a bit of a wag, so he determined to play Monsieur Schmidt a practical joke. Instead of taking his friend to the West End of London, when he landed, he led him to Whitechapel, and lodged him in a small public house called the Pig & Whistle.
“Baptiste, my friend,” said Hippolyte, “The English are a very strange people and you must not offend them – if they ask you for anything, you must give it at once.”
The Lost Child
No sooner therefore were the friends in Whitechapel, than they sallied out to see London. The stranger was very much astonished at the throng of people and vehicles, and they had not gone far before they saw a little crowd assembled on the pathway, so they at once stopped to see what was going on. Looking over the shoulders of a couple of young ladies they discovered a little child being questioned by a policeman.
“What is the matter?” asked Hippolyte. “Child lost,” replied the policeman. “Better give the man a shilling,” said Hippolyte to his friend. Baptiste therefore put his hand in his pocket and drew out a long silk purse, and taking from it a franc presented it to the policeman, who received it with a nod and a knowing wink.
The Benefits of a Long Purse
The action of the foreigner was not lost upon the crowd, and in a few minutes the friends found themselves surrounded by eager applicants. A little boy with a broom tumbled head over heels for their diversion, a Jew offered them a knife with twenty blades. an Indian begged them to buy a tract, a cabman wished to have the honour of drinking their healths, a boy offered them apples at three a penny, a woman with a child in her arms asked them to treat her to glass of gin, a man with a board requested them to fit themselves with a suit of clothes and a little girl wished to sell them a string of onions. To all of these people Monsieur Baptiste gave some piece of money, so that he was soon a very popular character. The policeman, however, cleared the way and they walked on.
The Conductors of the London Press
Presently they came to the outside of a newspaper dealers, where they saw a crowd of boys and men, laughing, talking, and playing. “These are the conductors of the London Press,” said Hippolyte.
The Disputed Fare
Soon afterwards they witnessed, and took part in, a dispute between a gentleman with a great moustache, a policeman, and a cab driver assisted by a variety of little boys. Baptiste soon settled the dispute by giving the cabman a shilling.
The Great Market
“I will now take you to the Great Market,” said Hippolyte, leading him through the dense crowd assembled round the butchers’ shambles in Whitechapel.
Monsieur Baptiste wondered very much at all he saw, thought the flaming gaslight, streaming over the heads of the people, “a very fine sight,” allowed himself to be pushed and hustled to and fro in the throng with perfect good humour, and was not in the least offended when one stall keeper offered him five bundles of firewood for a penny, or when another recommended him to invest sixpence in the purchase of a dog collar, or when a third – stroking his upper lip – politely asked him whether she should show him the way to the half-penny shaving shop.
Nor did he doubt for a moment what his friend told him was true when he was informed that this was the principal market for the supply of London with fresh meat. At last however, he expressed a desire to get out of the hot, unwholesome throng of poor people, which became every moment more dense, more noisy, and more bewildering.
The English Aristocracy
“Let us have one little glass of wine,” said Hippolyte, and forthwith they found themselves in the centre of a throng in a low gin shop.
The space in front of the counter was crowded with people of the poorest sort – an Irish labourer, in a smock frock and trousers tied below the knee with a hay band, was treating a miserable-looking woman to a glass of gin – a poor, half-starved girl was trying to persuade her tipsy father to go home, while another child was staggering under the weight of a baby on one arm and a gin bottle under the other – a miserable hag of a woman was crying ballads in a cracked voice – while a dirty-faced man was selling shrimps and pickled eels from a basket on his arm – and a Whitechapel dandy was joking with the smart barmaid – whose master stood at the door of his private parlour and smoked his cigar with the air of a lord.
A very hot, disagreeable odour filled the place, so that Monsieur Baptiste was obliged he must go home to his hotel. But just before he reached the door of the gin shop, he turned to his friend and asked, “What sort of people are these?”
“These are the aristocracy of England,” said Hippolyte. “These?” exclaimed Baptiste, beginning to see his friend’s joke, “then take me to see the poor.”
How many other places the friends visited that evening, how many jokes Hippolyte played upon Baptiste, and how many other shillings the foreigner spent on his first day in London, I cannot tell you. But I know that he laughed a good deal at the idea of seeing the wrong end of London first.
“Nevertheless, ” Baptiste exclaimed the next morning, “London is a very fine, great, big wonderful city.”
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Kendrew’s Cries of London
The latest discovery at the Bishopsgate Institute in my ever-growing collection of The Cries of London is this set of woodcuts printed by J. Kendrew of Colliergate, York, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The popularity of the series was such that even publishers in York and Banbury produced their own versions of the Cries of London. Unusually, in an age when hawkers were often considered vagabonds, this chapbook for children illustrates the street sellers as paragons of virtue, as expressed by their industriousness. Yet, for me, the most exciting phrase in this volume is the text ‘from the life’ which allows the possibility that some of these evocative and characterful cuts may be portraits of individual traders from the streets of London two centuries ago.
Come buy my fine Writing Ink!
Green large Cucumbers twelve a penny!
Dainty Sweet Briar!
Mary, Mary, where are you now, Mary? Tiddy dol, tol drol, tiddy dol.
Rue, Sage and Mint, a farthing a bunch!
Diddle, diddle ,Dumplings, Oh!
Buy a fine Bread Basket or Work Basket!
Oars, Sir! Oars or Scullers, Madam, do you want a Boat?
Black your Shoes, your Honour?
Nice Yorkshire Muffins!
Buy a Broom! Buy a Birch Broom!
Come, but my little Jemmies, my little Tartars, but half-penny a piece!
Twelve pence a peck, Oysters!
My good soul, will you buy a Bowl?
Buy a young Chicken or Fowl!
Ripe Strawberries!
Rabbit! Rabbit!
One a penny, Two a penny, Hot Cross Buns!
Pretty Maid, Pretty Pins!
Maids, buy a Mop!
Old Chairs to mend, Old Chairs to Mend!
Buy my Flounders!
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London down through the ages
More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
On the Thames Sailing Barge ‘Repertor’
David Pollock, skipper of S B Repertor
“It’s all my wife’s fault,” admitted David Pollock of the Thames Sailing Barge Repertor with a grin of pure delight, when I asked how he came to be the owner of such a fine vessel. “She was an avid reader of the property pages and small ads, and one day she said, ‘There’s a Thames Barge for sale in The Times, let’s go and take a look.'” David continued, rolling his eyes, “I said, ‘You don’t know anything about Thames Barges,’ and she said, ‘I’ve been to a party on one!’ Well, one thing led to another and we bought it, and here we are twenty-seven years later.”
Our conversation took place in the engine room of Repertor, currently moored in St Katharine Docks for a few days in the midst of a busy summer of charter trips and races. Looking trim with its green, yellow and red paintwork, ropes coiled and russet sail neatly furled – the barge welcomes you with an appealing mixed aroma of engine oil and yacht varnish, as you step below deck. In the hold, where once the cargo was stored, there is now a large panelled galley with small cabins leading off a narrow passage. In its working days, Repertor was manned by a skipper and mate, with the skipper sleeping in the stern and the mate in the foc’sle next to the engine room.
“My twin brothers, Ben and Leo, and me, we’d shimmy up the rigging to the crosstrees to show off,” admitted Amy, David’s daughter, fondly recalling childhood summers on the barge, “People were horrified, but nothing terrible ever happened to us.” As a child, Amy spent every weekend and holiday on the boat, at first on the Isle of Dogs where it was repaired and then on extended coastal cruises. “My parents had three children in a tiny two bedroom flat in North London yet when they got a little money, rather than investing in it bricks and mortar, they invested it in steel and sail – and it was well worthwhile,” Amy confirmed to me, as she sat cradling her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter Rosa, who is herself now being introduced to the ways of maritime life.
The Repertor was one of the last Thames Sailing Barges, built in 1924 by the famous barge-masters Horlocks, based in Mistley on the River Stour in Essex. Such barges were the workhorses of coastal transport, making deliveries up and down the Thames and along the East Coast, their flat hulls enabling them to navigate the shallow creeks where larger vessels could not go.
“I’ve always sailed and my father was in the navy, he was a keen sailor,” David confided, revealing that he was not quite the dilettante he had first implied, “We did most of the work repairing the barge ourselves.” These days, David enters many of the nine barge races that happen at locations around the Thames estuary each summer from the River Medway at Chatham in May until the River Colne at Brightlingsea in September, and he has a reputation for winning a significant number, as the lines of trophies in the galley testify.
“It’s a way to refine the rigging as well as a test of skill – traditionally, barges had to race to get the ports to be the the first to get work delivering cargo, so it was a commercial imperative,” David explained, “The matches were begun in 1863 by Henry Dodds, a barge owner from Hackney who became known as The Golden Dustman by making a fortune transporting rubbish from London to Kent, where it was used in manufacture of bricks that were transported back again.”
Readers will be interested to learn that David Pollock has invited me to join his crew for one of these matches next month. Involving as many as twenty-five traditional sailing barges over a day-long course, they can be dramatic races and it will be my pleasure to report to you from the deck of the S B Repertor, which has won the annually-awarded title of ‘Champion Barge’ five times.
Amy Pollock
Repertor moored in St Katharine Docks
Amy brings her baby daughter on board.
Amy Pollock and her daughter Rosa
Click here if you would like to take a trip on Thames Sailing Barge ‘Repertor’
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More East End Pubs, Then & Now
I am spending the whole weekend in the pub – publishing this second instalment of the collaboration with Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archive in which Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Alex Pink selected photographs of public houses from the collection, and then set out with his camera to pay them a visit and see what he discovered.
The Vine Tavern, Whitechapel 1903
The Vine Tavern, Whitechapel 2013
The White Hart, Whitechapel 1960
The White Hart, Whitechapel 2013
The Dover Castle, Shadwell 1992
The Dover Castle, Shadwell 2013
The Londoner, Limehouse 1974
The Londoner, Limehouse 2013
The Kings Arms, Cable St 1994
The Kings Arms, Cable St 2013
The Grapes, Limehouse 1975
The Grapes, Limehouse 2013
Duke of Norfolk, Globe Rd 1985
Duke of Norfolk, Globe Rd 2013
The Artichoke, Whitechapel 1990
The Artichoke, Whitechapel 2013
The Old Blue Anchor, Whitechapel 1973
The Old Blue Anchor, Whitechapel 2013
Bromley Arms, Bow 1981
Bromley Arms, Bow 2013
The Morgan Arms, Bow 1961
The Morgan Arms, Bow 2013
The Dickens Inn, St Katharine Docks, 1975
The Dickens Inn, St Katharine Docks 2013
The Alma, Spitalfields 1989
The Alma, Spitalfields 2013
Prospect of Whitby, Wapping nineteen-eighties
Prospect of Whitby, Wapping 2013
The Black Horse,Leman St nineteen-eighties
The Black Horse, Leman St 2013
The Dean Swift, nineteen-eighties
The Dean Swift, 2013
Archive images courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
New photographs copyright © Alex Pink
Visit Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives for opening times, collections & events.
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Alex Pink’s East End Pubs, Then & Now
It is my pleasure to publish this second collaboration with Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archive in which Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Alex Pink selected photographs of pubs from the collection, and then set out with his camera to discover which ones were still serving.
The Golden Heart, Spitalfields 1953
The Golden Heart, Spitalfields 2013
The Artful Dodger, Royal Mint St 1989
The Artful Dodger, Royal Mint St 2013
The Star & Garter, Whitechapel 1982
The Star & Garter, Whitechapel 2013
The Wentworth Arms, Mile End 1966
The Wentworth Arms, Mile End 2013
The Prince Alfred, Limehouse 1978
The Prince Alfred, Limehouse 2013
The Star of the East, Limehouse 1981
The Star of the East, Limehouse 2013
The British Oak, Poplar 1981
The British Oak, Poplar 2013
The Aberfeldy, Canary Wharf 1941
The Aberfeldy, Canary Wharf 2013
Galloway Arms, Limehouse 1981
Galloway Arms, Limehouse 2013
The New Globe, Mile End 1954
The New Globe, Mile End 2013
The Prospect of Whitby, Wapping c.1900
The Prospect of Whitby, Wapping 2013
The Experienced Fowler, Limehouse 1931
The Experienced Fowler, Limehouse 2013
The Jubilee, Limehouse 1978
The White Swan, Limehouse 2013
The Ship, Cable St 1981
The Ship, Cable St 2013
The City Pride, Isle of Dogs 1990
The City Pride, Isle of Dogs 2013
Archive images courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
New photographs copyright © Alex Pink
Visit Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives for opening times, collections & events.
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Cockney Beanos
A beano from Stepney in the twenties (courtesy Irene Sheath)
It is Midsummer, and we have reached that time of year when a certain clamminess prevails in the city and East Enders turn restless, yearning for a trip to the sea or at the very least an excursion to glimpse some green fields. In the last century, pubs, workplaces and clubs organised annual summer beanos, which gave everyone the opportunity to pile into a coach and enjoy a day out, usually with liberal opportunity for refreshment and sing-songs on the way home.
Tower Hamlets Community Housing is celebrating this joyous phenomenon by gathering a collection of beano photographs of which a selection is published here. All the pictures will be displayed in an exhibition from 18th until 27th July at 285 Commercial Rd, as part of next month’s Cockney Festival. To contribute a photograph, please email it to michael.tyrrell@thch.org.uk with details of who it is, when it was taken and where they are going – and, if there are enough, we will publish another set.
Ladies’ beano from The Globe in Hartley St, Bethnal Green, in the fifties. Chris Dixon, who submitted the picture, recognises his grandmother, Flo Beazley, furthest left in the front row beside her next door neighbour Flo Wheeler, who had a fruit and vegetable stall on Green St. (courtesy Chris Dixon)
Another beano from the fifties – eighth from the left is Jim Tyrrell (1908-1991) who worked at Stepney Power Station in Limehouse and drank at the Rainbow on the Highway in Ratcliff.
Mid-twentieth century beano from the archive of Britton’s Coaches in Cable St. (courtesy Martin Harris)
Beano from the Rhodeswell Stores, Rhodeswell Rd, Limehouse in the mid-twenties.
Taken on the way to Southend, this is a ladies’ beano from The Beehive in the Roman Rd during the fifties or sixties in a coach from Empress Coaches. The only men in the photo are the driver and the accordionist. Joan Lord (née Collins) who submitted the photo is the daughter of the publicans of The Beehive. (Courtesy Joan Lord)
Terrie Conway Driver, who submitted this picture of a beano from The Duke of Gloucester, Seabright St, Bethnal Green, points out that her grandfather is seventh from the left in the back row. (Courtesy Terrie Conway Driver)
Taken on the way to Southend, this is a men’s beano from The Beehive in the Roman Rd in the fifties or sixties in a coach from Empress Coaches. (Courtesy Joan Lord)
Beano in the twenties from the Victory Public House in Ben Jonson Rd, on the corner with Carr St. Note the charabanc – the name derives from the French char à bancs (“carriage with wooden benches”) and they were originally horse-drawn.
A crowd gathers before a beano from The Queens’ Head in Chicksand St in the early fifties. John Charlton who submitted the photograph pointed out his grandfather George standing in the flat cap holding a bottle of beer on the right with John’s father Bill on the left of him, while John stands directly in front of the man in the straw hat. (Courtesy John Charlton)
Beano for Stepney Borough Council workers in the mid-twentieth century. (Courtesy Susan Armstrong)
Martin Harris, who submitted this picture, indicated that the driver, standing second from the left, is Teddy Britton, his second cousin. (Courtesy Martin Harris)
In the Panama hat is Ted Marks who owned the fish place at the side of the Martin Frobisher School, and is seen here taking his staff out on their annual beano.
George, the father of Colin Watson who submitted this photo, is among those who went on this beano from the Taylor Walker brewery in Limehouse. (Courtesy Colin Watson)
Pub beano setting out for Margate or Southend. (Courtesy John McCarthy)
Men’s beano from c. 1960 (courtesy Cathy Cocline)
Late sixties or early seventies ladies’ beano organised by the Locksley Estate Tenants Association in Limehouse, leaving from outside The Prince Alfred in Locksley St.
The father of John McCarthy, who submitted this photo, is on the far right squatting down with a beer in his hand, in this beano photo taken in the early sixties, which may be from his local, The Shakespeare in Bethnal Green Rd. Equally, it could be a works’ outing, as he was a dustman working for Bethnal Green Council. Typically, the men are wearing button holes and an accordionist accompanies them. Accordionists earned a fortune every summer weekend, playing at beanos. (courtesy John McCarthy)
John Sheehan, who submitted this picture, remembers it was taken on a beano to Clacton in the sixties. From left to right, you can seee John Driscoll who lived in Grosvenor Buildings, Dan Daley of Constant House, outsider Johnny Gamm from Hackney, alongside his cousin, John Sheehan from Constant House and Bill Britton from Holmsdale House. (Courtesy John Sheehan)
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