A Brief History Of London Crypts
Celebrating the publication of his new book Crypts of London by History Press, Malcolm Johnson – formerly Rector of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, where he ran a homeless shelter in the crypt – offers this brief history of London crypts.
At St Clement, King Sq
After the Great Fire of 1666, it was decided not to replace thirty-two out of those churches destroyed in the Square Mile, yet St Paul’s Cathedral and fifty-one churches were rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and others, and almost all of these new buildings were given a crypt of the same extent as the ground floor. This was also true for churches in Westminster and those on the edges of the City such as in Spitalfields, Shoreditch and St Clement, King’s Sq.
What were these spaces intended for? Charity schools? Storage? Meeting rooms? There was no chance of any of these, because the clergy and their vestries soon realised that good money was to be made by charging wealthy parishioners to stack coffins containing their dead family members under the church.
In doing so, they went against the advice and opinions of both architects and others, who doubted the wisdom of burying the dead among the living. In 1552, Bishop Hugh Latimer thought it “an unwholesome thing to bury within the city,” considering that “it is the occasion of great sickness and disease.” Mainly for architectural reasons, Wren and Vanbrugh were also opposed to burial in or close to a church, although when Wren was interred beneath St Paul’s when he died.
In my research, I found that in the eighteenth century most parishes received around seven per cent of their income from interments, although at St James Garlickhythe the average was nearly twenty-seven per cent. All five Westminster parishes had a high burial income by the end of the eighteenth century – around thirty-five per cent of the wardens’ income at St Martin-in-the-Fields and twenty-five per cent at St James Piccadilly.
After the Reformation, burial within a church was seen as a mark of social distinction – the nobility regarding it as their right – but by the mid-seventeenth century the professional classes were also seeing it as a sign of a successful career. Over the next century, doctors, solicitors, high-ranking soldiers and ‘gentlefolk’ frequently left instructions in their wills for intra-mural burial, although some cautioned prudence and economy in arranging it, because fees could be high. Coffins of the clergy were placed in the vault below the altar and the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields allowed Nell Gwyn to be interred in his space there.
Why were families willing to pay large sums for a crypt burial when churchyard fees were much cheaper? Some hoped for an ‘eternal bedchamber’ because they knew that bodies in the churchyard would be dug up after thirty or so years and the bones placed in a charnel house when the space was needed for new burials. Others hoped the congregation worshipping above the crypt would continue to pray for them and many more were apprehensive that body-snatchers might plunder the churchyard. Yet, in crypts, bodies were sometimes tipped out of their coffins so that the lead could be sold together with the metal handles.
Rarely do published histories of our churches mention these undercrofts. Obviously it is possible to visit those churches that have survived and establish precise details of their crypts – where it is not possible to enter, burial registers can give details of size and layout. For the churches that have not survived, the best descriptions of their crypts are often found in the faculties which authorised their destruction, and in the Vestry minutes recording the process of emptying the remains and transferring them to a cemetery. Written accounts are rare, because few people visited these dark, dismal places apart from the sexton.
The lucrative burial income ended abruptly in 1852 when sanitation legislation forbade further interments in crypts and churchyards. Joint-stock cemeteries such as Kensal Green were opened to receive London’s dead and the clergy lost the links with parishioners although they were still financially recompensed, even if the vestries and sextons lost their burial dues. The removal of human remains from crypts began for a variety of reasons – such as demolition of the building, its sale to raise funds or road widening. If the building remained and a new use for the crypt was found, then an appeal for funds was made, such as at St Bride Fleet St in the nineteen-fifties when its museum was equipped from gifts of nearby publishing firms. Other churches have attracted grants from the Lottery fund, statutory bodies, charitable foundations, businesses and individual donors.
The first crypt to be cleared of human remains for use other than storage was in 1915 when the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Dick Sheppard, set up a canteen to welcome men returning from the Front. Two learned reports of the Council for British Archaeology describe the clearance of coffins and remains from the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields in 1984/5. Nearly one thousand bodies were carefully examined and researched. Interment in a crypt obviously preserves a corpse and coffin longer than if it was buried in a churchyard but the state of preservation of those in coffins in Spitalfields’crypt varied from virtually complete, including skin, hair and internal organs to a just sediment of crystal debris being all that remained of the bones. When lead was used, as it was in this crypt after 1813, this preserved the cadaver longer, but if air or water was allowed to penetrate then decomposition was much quicker.
Where were coffins and remains from crypts taken? A minority went to the East London Cemetery, Plaistow, or to the Great Northern London (now New Southgate) Cemetery. Some relatives were allowed to transfer the coffin of a family member to a burial ground of their choice, but most went to Brookwood or the City of London Cemetery, Ilford.
Some two thousand two hundred acres of land owned by Lord Onslow on Woking Common at Brookwood were purchased by the newly-formed London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company. Despite opposition, Royal Assent was given to the London Necropolis Bill on 30th June 1852, but the first funeral was not held until 13th November 1854. Soon afterwards, several Westminster parishes, including St Anne Soho, St Giles-in-the-Fields and St Margaret Westminster, reserved plots there. Coffins and mourners were transported by special trains from a private terminus near Waterloo to the cemetery’s two stations, one for Anglicans and one for others. The Bishop of London was apprehensive that the coffin of ‘some profligate spendthrift’ might be in the same compartment as a respectable member of the Church. A notice in the station refreshment room at Brookwood reads ‘Spirits served here.’
The City of London Cemetery, used by nearly all the City parishes, opened in 1856 and is approximately eight miles north-east of the City. Since then, over forty City parishes have removed their crypt remains to Ilford, which is today one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the country.
Today, around half of London’s crypts have been emptied. Some, such as that of St Martin-in-the-Fields house a restaurant, bookshop and meeting rooms which contribute a very large sum to the Parish Church Council. Others are chapels and columbaria, yet others are museums while – sadly – two which were once homeless centres are now empty. Those with coffins still in place await a use – as at St Clement, King Sq, where David Hoffman took the photographs which accompany this article.
Coffin plates from Holy Trinity, Minories – now demolished
At St Clement, King Sq
The entrance to the family vault of Mr Thomas Gall of King Sq
Crypts of London by Malcolm Johnson is published by the History Press
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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A Brief Survey Of East End Garden History
Celebrating the publication of her new book The Gardens of the British Working Class by Yale University Press, Margaret Willes offers this brief horticultural history of the East End.
Early twentieth century garden at the rear of WF Arber & C0 Ltd, Printing Works
Today Spitalfields and Shoreditch are intensely urban areas but, four centuries ago, the scene was very different. Maps of this era show that behind the main roads flanked by houses and cottages, there were fields of cattle and, close by the city walls, laundrywomen laying out their washing to dry.
Many craftsmen who needed to be near to the City of London, yet who did not wish to be liable to its trading restrictions, found a home here. At the end of the sixteenth century, Huguenot silk weavers fleeing from religious persecution in the Spanish Netherlands and France, and landing at ports such as Yarmouth, Colchester and Sandwich, made their way to the capital. Records of this first wave of Huguenots and their arrival in Spitalfields are sparse, but there are references to them in the rural village of Hackney for instance.
Just as these ‘strangers’ took up residence east of London, so too did actors and their theatres. William Shakespeare lodged just within the City walls in Silver St, in the fifteen-nineties, in the home of an immigrant family from Picardie, the Mountjoys, who were involved in silk and wire-twisting.
Tradition tells us that these refugees brought with them their love of flowers. Bulbs and seeds may easily be transported, so they could have brought their floral treasures in their pockets. The term ‘florist’ first appears in English in 1623 when Sir Henry Wotton, scholar, diplomat and observer of gardens wrote about them to an acquaintance. He was not using ‘florist’ in its modern sense as a retailer of cut flowers, but rather as a description of an enthusiast who nurtured and exhibited pot-grown flowers such as tulips and carnations. One flower that has been traditionally associated with the Spitalfields silk weavers is the auricula, with its clear-cut colours. Auricalas do not like rain, so those who worked at home were in an ideal position to be able to bring them under cover when inclement weather threatened.
Another ‘outsider’ living in Spitalfields in the mid-seventeenth century was the radical apothecary, Nicholas Culpeper. He set up home in the precincts of the former Priory of St Mary Spital with his wife Alice Ford in 1640, probably choosing to be outside the City in order to able to practise without a licence. A Nonconformist in every sense, he disliked the elitism of the medical profession and in his writings threw down a challenge by offering help to all, however poor they were. He develop his knowledge by gathering wild flowers and herbs, but it is likely he also cultivated them in his own garden. His English Physitian, later known as the Complete Herbal, is one of the most successful books published in the English language and is still available today.
Culpeper’s books are a reminder that the garden has been for centuries the vital source of all medicines and poultices in this country. As London expanded, and private gardens within the City walls were built over, so the supply of medicinal herbs for apothecaries and housewives became of vital importance. Some of the market herbwomen are mentioned by name in the records of 1739-40 of the Fleet Market along with their places of residence. Hannah Smith, for example, came from Grub Sin in Finsbury, but others from further afield, such as Bethnal Green and Stepney Green. The remedies of the period required large quantities of certain herbs, such as wormwood and pennyroyal, and these women cultivated these as market gardeners.
With the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by Louis XIV, a fresh wave of Huguenot refugees arrived, this time from France rather than the Lowlands. We know much more about these people, including their love of flowers, along with singing birds and linnets, which until quite recently could still be bought from Club Row Market. The French king made a mistake in divesting his realm of some of the most talented craftsmen: gunsmiths and silversmiths as well as silk weavers. The skill of the weavers was matched by their love of flowers in the exquisite silks they produced for court mantuas, the ornate dresses made for aristocratic ladies attending the court of St James. In these designs, a genuine attempt was made to produce botanical naturalism rather than purely conventional floral motifs and although today the most famous designer was Anna-Maria Garthwaite, there were others working alongside her in these streets.
As Spitalfields grew more developed in the eighteenth century, so the pressure on land increased and many of the gardens were built over with new houses. Some residents appear to have taken to their rooftops, creating gardens and building aviaries for their birds up there. Thomas Fairchild, who cultivated a famous nursery in Hoxton, recommended the kind of plants that could survive at this height, including currant trees. Others created gardens upon grounds along the Hackney and Mile End roads. A commissioner reporting on the conditions of the handloom weavers in the early nineteenth century described one such area, Saunderson’s Gardens in Bethnal Green.
“They may cover about six acres of ground. There is one general enclosure round the whole, and each separate garden is divided from the rest by small palings. The number of gardens was stated to be about one hundred and seventy: some are much larger than the rest. In almost every garden is a neat summer-house, where the weaver and his family may enjoy themselves on Sundays and holidays …. There are walks through the ground by which access is easy to the gardens.
The commissioner found that vegetables such as cabbages, lettuces and peas were cultivated, but pride of place was given to flowers. “There had been a contest for a silver medal amongst the tulip proprietors. There were many other flowers of a high order, and it was expected that in due time the show of dahlias for that season would not fail to bring glory to Spitalfields. In this neighbourhood are several dealers in dahlias.”
The competitions held for the finest florists’ flowers were fiercely fought. The Old Bailey sessions records include cases where thieves had broken into gardens not only to steal from the summer houses, but to take prize bulbs too. The Lord Mayor’s Day, 9th November, was traditionally the time to plant the bulbs and, in the spring, judges visited the gardens to make their decisions.
But these gardens were doomed, for the eastern parts of London – Bethnal Green, Stepney Green and Hackney – were being overwhelmed by street after street of new terraced houses. The handloom weavers of the area were likewise doomed, as the silk industry was threatened by competition from overseas and by looms powered by machinery in this country. Their love of flowers, however, was not to be dimmed, and a picture of a Spitalfields weaver in 1860 working alongside his daughters in a garret shows plants on the windowsill, while a contemporary account describes a fuchsia in pride of place near a loom, with its crimson pedants swinging to the motion of the treadles.
Root plants could be bought from sellers, especially along the Mile End Rd, and cut flowers from Spitalfields Market. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a market specifically for flowers and plants was established in Columbia Rd in Shoreditch. This followed the failure of an elaborate food market built by the philanthropist, Angela Burdett-Coutts in the nineteenth century. Her project had been based on a prospective railway line to deliver fish, which never materialised, while the traders preferred to sell outdoors and their customers, many of whom were Jewish immigrants, wanted to buy on Sunday. Originally, Columbia Market traded on Saturday but a parliamentary act moved it to Sunday, enabling Covent Garden and Spitalfields traders to sell their leftover stock, and this market flourishes still, attesting to the persistent love of flowers in the East End of London.
London Herb Woman, late sixteenth century from Samuel Pepys collection of Cries of London
Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654), the Spitalfields Herbalist
An auricula theatre
The tomb of Thomas Fairchild (1667-1729) the Hoxton gardener
Rue, Sage & Mint – a penny a bunch! Kendrew’s Cries of London
Buy my watercress, 1803
Buy my Ground Ivy, 1803
Chickweed seller of 1817 by John Thomas Smith
This is John Honeysuckle, the industrious gardener, with a myrtle in his hand, the produce of his garden. He is justly celebrated for his beautiful bowpots and nosegays, 1819
Here’s all a Blowing, Alive and Growing – Choice Shrubs and Plants, Alive and Growing, eighteen-twenties
Selling flowers on Columbia Rd in the nineteen seventies Photo by George Gladwell
Mick & Sylvia Grover, Herb Sellers in Columbia Rd – Portrait by Jeremy Freedman
Margaret Willes in her garden – Portrait by Sarah Ainslie
The Gardens of the British Working Class by Margaret Willes is published by Yale University Press
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Nicholas Culpeper, Herbalist of Spitalfields
Thomas Fairchild, Gardener of Hoxton
At 31 Fournier St
You may recall my account of meeting Rodney Archer the Aesthete in Fournier St who has Oscar Wilde’s fireplace installed in his first floor drawing room. Now you can visit and see it with your own eyes, because Rodney has entered into a collaboration with Trevor Newton, the Topographical Artist & Dealer in Decorative Arts, to open part of his beautiful old house as a gallery.
“We met quibbling over the price of first editions in the Spitalfields Market,” admitted Rodney, by way of introducing Trevor. “And Rodney said to me, ‘I want to declutter,'” added Trevor, modestly justifying his presence. “It’s as if I had a pack of cards and I’ve thrown up them up into the air,” declared Rodney, spreading his hands dramatically “And I’ve reshuffled them,” continued Trevor helpfully.
“I’ve let go!” shrieked Rodney in gleeful conclusion, turning and disappearing into the darkness of the hallway towards the front door as Trevor led me up to the first floor. “We’ve left a little dust and cobwebs,” he whispered to me, pointing out a fine cluster of grimy specimens on the stairwell lest I should judge him as too radical.
But, even on the stairs, the change was evident as Trevor – with his professional eye – had rehung Rodney’s pictures expertly. In the blue drawing room, the transformation was more pronounced. Oscar Wilde’s fireplace still held pride of place but all the paraphernalia had been swept away in anticipation of the exhibitions that are to come. “We want small numbers of people to look at small things carefully,” explained Trevor, leading me through double doors into the pink library. Here he showed me Rodney’s scrapbooks and collages, alongside his own illustrated Australian travel diaries, and Georgian and Victorian Scrapbooks. “We plan to display small charming things which suit a house like this,” he informed me, proffering a curious series of eighteen-fifties silk designs from Rouen.
With superhuman effort, Trevor has sorted through the archaeological layers of Rodney’s collecting from local markets, an activity for which he has a special talent and which he has pursued continuously since he moved here 1980. Over this last winter, an elaborate editing process has taken place, with the surplus sold online and Rodney’s most-favoured artefacts arranged in a pleasing order by Trevor that they may be better appreciated.
Growing enthusiastic, Trevor revealed their plan is for an exhibition every month from May, each accompanied by a publication illustrating the works on show, and visitors will be asked to book in advance so that the number of people in the gallery at any time may be limited to preserve the intimacy of the house. On this spring morning in March, the sun entered these magnificent chambers as it has done since 1726, with shafts of light illuminating the dust of ages suspended in the air. After forty years of living sequestered on Fournier St, Rodney is taking the bold step of opening his doors to the world – as long as they make an appointment first.
We retraced our steps downstairs to the hallway, where we met Rodney coming back from the antiques market, excited to show his new discoveries and thereby illustrating the necessity of items leaving at the same rate they arrive. Offering my congratulations and wishes of good luck to Rodney and Trevor in their fanciful endeavour, I left filled with eager anticipation for this new chapter in the story of 31 Fournier St.
If you would like to be informed of exhibitions and events at Rodney Archer’s house please email Trevor Newton newtonartist@hotmail.com
In Rodney’s Library
The Blue Room
Trevor Newton
Trevor Newton & Rodney Archer with Oscar Wilde’s fireplace
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The Foundling Of Shoreditch
Edward Waterson sent me this extraordinary story of his great-great-great-grandfather Henry Cooper, who went down in history as the man “left holding the baby”
Bishopsgate Station, photograph courtesy of National Rail Museum
This is the tale of a country doctor, a mystery woman and a baby with a fortune tucked in its nappy. It is a tale that riveted Victorian England in 1850, yet is all but forgotten today – save for its lasting contribution to the English language. Had it not been for the extraordinary events on Bishopsgate Station in Shoreditch that year, we would not have the pleasure of describing those facing an unwanted problem as being “left holding the baby.”
The doctor was Henry Cooper, a handsome thirty-six year old who ministered to the needs of his patients in the Suffolk village of Ixworth, near Bury St Edmunds. Recently widowed and bringing up three small children on his own, he was not a man to relish disruption in his busy life.
One January morning that year, he donned his best stovepipe hat and travelled into Bury to meet his friend Captain Lloyd with whom he was journeying on the Eastern Counties Railway to London. The train left at ten minutes past eight and they soon settled into their second class carriage for the four and a half hour journey to the terminus at Shoreditch.
They passed through Colchester without incident but ten minutes later, on stopping at Mark’s Tey station, their gentlemanly calm was broken as an elegantly dressed woman stumbled into the carriage. Along with the lady came a baby girl and a small trunk. Clearly unwell and close to collapse, the child’s mother explained that she had been travelling alone in first class but, feeling ill, she had made her way to a carriage where there were other passengers. She could not have chosen better.
Cooper introduced himself and tendered his professional services. Politely declining his offer, the lady explained that her condition was solely due to being unused to travelling on the railway and that she would soon recover. Indeed, by the time the train steamed into Bishopsgate Station she had rallied considerably.
Henry again proffered help but was reassured that she had ordered a carriage and servant to wait for her at the far end of the station. It would – however – be of immense help to her if he might assist by looking after the baby while she went to check if her transport had arrived. So the surgeon gladly took the baby, while the captain stood guard over her trunk, watching their new found acquaintance run down the platform and into the square below, never to be seen again.
Henry Cooper was left holding the baby.
Bewildered by their predicament, the pair gathered up baby and trunk and took a carriage to friends in the city. By the end of the journey, it was already clear that the baby’s nappy needed changing, so the unwilling guardians opened the trunk in hope of finding a replacement. They were delighted to find not only what they were looking for but also a wardrobe of expensive children’s clothing.
Off came the nappy and out dropped two ten pound notes, the equivalent of nearly two thousand pounds today. Attached to them was a letter stating that the child came from a respectable background and that if an advertisement was placed in the newspapers, the parents would make themselves known. Cooper’s friends in London offered to act as temporary foster parents while he returned to Suffolk to attend to his patients.
In the meantime, he placed two advertisements in The Times with inconclusive results. One reply came from a friend of Cooper who was anxious to adopt the baby while another, altogether more sinister, came from a man in Devon – the baby was his and the twenty pounds too. He claimed them both on behalf of the mother and would sue if the child was not handed over.
Henry Cooper was left struggling with an uncomfortable dilemma.
On the thirteenth of February he returned to London, this time to Worship St Magistrates Court, just a stone’s throw from Bishopsgate Station. What – pleaded the unhappy recipient of the baby – did the judge advise him to do with the child?
The Magistrate, Mr Justice Hammill, said it was a very unusual application and regretted that he could be of little assistance. He could only suggest that the baby be handed over to the Officers of the Parish in whose district it had been abandoned, in the hope the parents would be discovered. Cooper knew that to take such a course would mean the workhouse for the child and in the words of The Times reporter – “it was pretty manifest from his manner that he was disinclined to adopt the suggestion thrown out by the bench.” Meanwhile, Cooper’s friend William Makepeace Thackeray composed verse in celebration of the event and such was the fame of The Foundling of Shoreditch that Punch devoted a whole page to the story, complete with a sketch of the unlikely duo.
The child escaped the workhouse and was placed in an unspecified orphanage, supported in part by her hidden legacy, only to disappear later without trace just as her mother did. Henry Cooper, the country doctor, has also long been forgotten but his legacy lives on as the archetype of the one “left holding the baby.”
Henry Cooper – “left holding the baby”
Henry Cooper and the baby portrayed in Punch, February 1850
copyright © Edward Waterson
Long Forgotten London
Old House on Tower Hill
There is the London we know and the London we remember, and then there is the London that is lost to us but recalled by old photographs. Yet beyond all this lies another London which is long forgotten, composed of buildings and streets destroyed before the era of photography. Walter Thornbury’s ‘Old & New London – how it was and how it is‘ of 1873 offers a glimpse into this shadowy realm with engravings of the city which lies almost beyond recognition. It is a London that was forgotten generations ago and these images are like memories conjuring from a dream, strange apparitions that can barely be squared with the reality of the current metropolis we inhabit today.
“Writing the history of a vast city like London is like writing a history of the ocean – the area is so vast, its inhabitants are so multifarious, the treasures that lie in its depths so countless. … The houses of old London are encrusted as thick with anecdotes, legends and traditions as an old ship is with barnacles. Strange stories of strange men grow like moss in every crevice of the bricks … Old London is passing away even as we dip our pen in the ink…” – Walter Thornbury
The Four Swans Inn, Bishopsgate – shortly before demolition
Garraway’s Coffee House – shortly before demolition after 216 years in business
Roman wall at Tower Hill
Dyer’s Hall, College St, rebuilt 1857
Old house in Leadenhall St with Synagogue entrance
Yard of the Bull & Mouth, Aldergsgate 1820
The Old Fountain, Minories
Demolition of King’s Cross in 1845
Clerkenwell in 1820 before the railway came through
Middlesex House of Detention, Clerkenwell
In the Jerusalem Tavern above St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell
Cock Lane, Smithfield
Hand & Shears, Clothfair
Smithfield before the construction of the covered market
Last remnant of the the Fleet Prison demolished in 1846
The Fleet Ditch seen from the Red Lion
Back of the Red Lion seen from the Fleet Ditch
Field Lane 1840
Leather Lane
Exotic pet shop on the Ratcliffe Highway with creatures imported through the London Docks
Sir Paul Pindar’s Lodge, Spitalfields
Room in Sir Paul Pindar’s House, Bishopsgate – demolished for the building of Liverpool St Station
Kirkby Castle, Bethnal Green
Tudor gatehouse in Stepney
With grateful thanks to LIbby Hall for her assistance with this feature
New Season For Carters Steam Fair
Joby Carter
In Berkshire, the blossom is on the thorn and the chestnut buds are bursting – reliable indicators that it is the season for Carter’s Steam Fair to leave the yard in White Waltham on the outskirts of Maidenhead where they overwinter. Traditionally, the season for travelling fairs ends in November with Bonfire Night but now, after months of repair and recuperation, the members of the Carter family and their entourage are eager to set out again, for their thirty-eighth consecutive year on the road with the world’s largest vintage travelling funfair.
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I took a trip down to visit Carter’s Yard on Sunday to record the final preparations before the column of haulage trucks set out on Monday morning for Battersea where Britain’s only steam fair may be found for the next two weekends – 29th & 30th March, 5th & 6th April.
Arriving at the end of the village where the lane became a dirt track as it reached the fields, we discovered Carters Yard – an enclosure surrounded by tall fences of corrugated iron. Stepping through the gates, we entered another world. In a courtyard, surrounded by a diverse array of sheds, were innumerable trucks, wagons and mobile homes, all painted in differing tones of the Carters’ colours of Oxblood, Scarlet, Cardinal Red and Butter. Men ran in different directions carrying cables and signalling to lorries, as they manoeuvred vehicles from their parking spaces out into the lane where a column was lining up ready for departure.
Inside the paint shop, Anna Carter – who started the fair with her late husband John Carter when they bought the steam-powered gallopers in 1977 – was touching up Britannia’s breastplate with Chrome Yellow upon a decorative panel as a means to distract herself from the drama of heavy goods vehicles being shunted around the yard outside . “I like going,” she admitted to me with a open-hearted delight undimmed by four decades on the road,” but I am anxious about the weather – If it’s too hot you don’t get anyone because they all go to the beach, if it’s too wet they don’t come and if it’s too cold they don’t come.” Given the vagaries of the English climate, Anna’s comment filled me with concern and cast her act of setting out in defiance of meteorology as one of astonishing bravura.
Anna handles the organisation and paperwork while her sons Joby and Seth supervise the crew – transporting, setting up and taking down the rides. Struggling with ever-growing bureaucracy is Anna’s bugbear, along with escalating rents as councils try to earn more from their parks and open spaces. In one instance, Anna quotes a figure of £35,000 for a week’s rental in 2005, now increased to £100,000, which more than justifies her anxiety about the weather – since the fair needs to earn its week’s takings in around seventeen peak hours at the weekend.
Yet with a large extended family all involved and living in touring mobile homes, Carters Steam Fair has acquired an unstoppable momentum and it is Anna’s extraordinary achievement that through her strength of character she has kept the show on the road for all these years. “It seems like a lifetime,” she confessed to me, thinking back fondly over the epic journey.
Maintaining the steam fair with its nineteenth-century rides in tip-top condition requires constant maintenance and restoration. Consequently, the job of painting and repainting never stops, and the seductive aroma of gloss paint followed us around the yard as we explored. We discovered Frank, Carter’s mechanic of thirty years, preoccupied with welding in a shed. “He’s the only one who knows how it all works,” Anna whispered to me.
In the next yard, we met John Todd and his wife Shelley, just putting the finishing touches to the gleaming paintwork of the Dive Bombers and the Penny Arcade. “I’m really looking forward to going out again.” John confided, “We’ve got it all looking nice, and now we can’t wait to go out and show it off.”
Returning to the paint shop, where Anna was just completing Britannia’s breastplate, I asked her what sight would give her joy in the coming months and, “A really crowded fairground with everyone happy and enjoying it,” was her immediate reply. “I work with my daughter Rosie, running the candifloss stall and I see it all from there, in the middle of the candifloss,” she concluded with a blush, “That’s what I’ve come down to, and I quite like it.”
John Todd has been working in the fair since the age of fourteen – “I’m really looking forward to going out again. We’ve got it all looking nice and now we can’t wait to go out and show it off.”
Newly repainted pillars by John Todd and his wife Shelley
Frank has been working with Carters for thirty years as a mechanic
Anna & Frank –“He’s the only one who knows how it all works.”
Anna Carter prepares Chrome Yellow to repaint Britannia’s breastplate
Anna interrupts her painting to show us around the yard
Aaron paints a new set of hand rails in the traditional style
In the paint shop
Aaron repaints the front of a steam organ
Newly cast horses from the originals on the gallopers, awaiting painting
The open road awaits Carters Steam Fair
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Carters Steam Fair can be found in Battersea Park for the next two weekends – 29th & 30th March, 5th & 6th April. And you may expect Carters in Clissold Park this summer.
Learn about Joby Carter’s Fairground Signwriting Courses here
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Alan Cox, Master Printer
Alan works at his flatbed offsetting proofing press in Charlotte Rd, Shoreditch
When Master Printer Alan Cox came to Shoreditch more than thirty years ago, he was surrounded by other print trades and furniture manufacturing workshops, but today he is the last artisan still in business on Charlotte Rd. So – before Alan closes up his shop for good at the end of the summer – I took the opportunity of accompanying Adam Dant on a visit to watch him at work, printing the limited edition of Adam’s Map of the Coffee Houses.
You enter a small door in an unmarked shop front and walk into a huge room with a magnificent old worn brick floor and an elaborate wooden roof that has not been painted in a generation. Two tall Brunswick green doors open onto the street, where the cart once came in with deliveries of timber for the furniture factory and then carried the finished items off to showrooms in the West End.
In the centre of the studio sits Alan’s flatbed offsetting proofing press where he produces limited editions of prints for artists. It is a painstaking manual process as Alan rolls the machine back and forth, positioning each sheet carefully and then removing it to place upon a slowly-growing stack. Adam’s prints had already been through the press once to acquire the coffee-brown background tone and we came to witness the second plate which would apply the black lines of his drawing to complete the work.
With relaxed concentration, Alan rolled the press slowly back and forth, producing the last few prints as Adam watched. Then we convened around the stack and, once Adam had given his approval, we settled down in a quiet corner of the print shop upon a couple of bar stools from the Bricklayers Arms for a celebratory cuppa, as Alan told me his story.
“I came here in 1979. One day, I walked past and I saw this guy moving all this machinery out of here. He was selling up after fifty years, so I asked him to give me ring. It’s a strange triangular building, filling the corner space where Charlotte Rd meets Great Eastern St. Across the road was the National Front headquarters, and there was a lot of shouting and bottle smashing in those days. There were no bars, only the Barley Mow and the Bricklayers Arms which closed at the weekends, so it was pretty dire for night life.
I’ve been printing by lithography since the sixties. At first, I had a little print shop in Jubilee St, Whitechapel, and next door was a kosher chicken shop. We got woken to the sound of them slitting the chickens’ throats, but it was a friendly Jewish community even if the neighbourhood was run down. I moved to London in 1961 to study at Central School of Art and was only just setting up after leaving college in 1963. I taught at various colleges, but having a print shop was a way to do my own work and making a living, without getting drawn into the politics.
The print shop got me involved with lots of other artists. It’s interesting to work with other people, because you never work for them – they always ask your opinion as a printmaker and you work together. If John Hoyland asked my opinion, I used to say, ‘Cover it in black’ – I remember once he did that, and it looked fantastic because it wasn’t solid black and all the colours underneath came through in a subtle way. But some artists are very prima-donna-ish and can be bloody awkward.
I started doing lithography because I like working with colour and brushes in a painterly kind of way, and I found etching a little reductive. At Central, I did some screen-printing but everyone else wanted to do it too, so the studio was always busy whereas hardly anyone used the lithography studio – and it was always possible to get on a press and print my own work.
By the mid-seventies, I had moved down to Butler’s Wharf and was getting a lot of recognition, and I had four people working with me on five presses, so I invited different artists to do monotypes. Nobody did it then but now everybody does it! Degas had done small ones in brown but I encouraged artists to do large ones in colour – I worked with Stephen Buckley, John Hoyland and Jim Dine among others. Howard Hodgkin came and did some small ones and then some very big ones.
You can run off four hundred prints in a good hard day’s work on my flatbed offset proofing press but I’d rather do two hundred. I am on the cusp of closing up. It’s quite physically and mentally demanding, because you have to pay attention to every detail. It’s been interesting, but I’m going to to shut the studio down at the end of the summer. I’ll still continue to make work, I won’t be hibernating in the loft!”
Alan Cox & Adam Dant
Damping the plate
Placing the print with the brown tone awaiting the second plate with the black lines
Alan & Adam scrutinise the finished prints
Click on the map to enlarge and read the stories of the Coffee Houses
Copies of Adam Dant’s Limited Edition of his MAP OF THE COFFEE HOUSES printed by Alan Cox can be obtained direct from adamdant@gmail.com
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