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It is my pleasure publish this piece by Julia Harrison, author of the fascinating literary blog THE SILVER LOCKET.

Portrait of Paul Rothe by Sarah Ainslie

I have known Paul Rothe’s Delicatessen & Cafe in Marylebone Lane for as long as I can remember. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, my mother used to travel up to town from Putney with me and my sister for a lunchtime treat at Paul Rothe’s before having our haircut by Mr John of ‘Charles, Bruno and John’ in their salon round the corner in Hinde St. I still have my hair cut by Andrew, who was a young apprentice in those days and now has his own salon, ‘Andrew K’, nearby on Marylebone St. He told me on my recent visit that during the salon’s heyday they used to cater for their clients and would often order sandwiches from Paul Rothe. I think it is these connections and the continuity they represent which make Paul Rothe so special to me.

Today, I work at Daunt Books on Marylebone High St and often, seeking a moment to myself at lunchtime, my footsteps lead me in Paul Rothe’s direction. Whether I am having a good day or a bad one, I know when I walk through the door a sense of inner peace will descend. Paul and his son Stephen will be there in their smart white grocer’s coats, lively smiles combined with looks of concentration on their faces as they deal expertly with the lunchtime rush. Office workers will be ordering take-aways, together with locals settling down for a bowl of homemade soup, while a happy customer chooses their favourite jam, chutney or sauce from the colourful range lining the shelves.

In the summer, snatches of music and occasionally operatic voices drift over from the rehearsal rooms across the road. Then I am drawn back to those innocent days long ago when my sister and I would look forward to window shopping at the Button Queen opposite, before ordering our homemade Liptauer and cucumber sandwiches at Paul Rothe, eating at the iconic fifties flip up seats and Formica tables where I sit today.

On a recent visit, in the company of Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie, I sat down with Paul to learn the story of his shop.

“Rothe is a German name.  I am named after my grandfather who came from Saxony and worked his way over on a coal barge in 1898. Most German people at the end of the nineteenth century thought that the streets of London were paved with gold. My father didn’t know a lot about his father’s early life in Germany, except he met my grandmother in London. There was a flower shop in Jason’s Court called Schillers, they were German, and they introduced my grandmother and grandfather to each other. They got married and my father was born in 1915.

Paul started in partnership in Soho. The reason he opened there was that the man he was in partnership with was meant to open early, then they overlapped in the middle of the day and my grandfather would stay open late. But a lot of the customers were saying that his partner wasn’t in the store until about two hours after he should have been, so my grandfather decided to come here to Marylebone Lane and open on his own instead.

In my grandfather’s day, it was purely a retail shop, much smaller than you see now. There was a parlour at the back with a fireplace. My grandmother didn’t want the shop made bigger but my dad was always moaning that it was too small. After my grandfather had passed away, when his mother was on holiday, my father knocked the wall down and made that area part of the shop.

The shop opened on August 2nd 1900. We traded as a German deli. In one of the old photographs of the shop, you can see the words ‘Deutsche Delicatessen.’ We still make Liptauer, which is an Austrian cheese, and my dad made a cheese of his own invention with caraway seeds called ‘Kummelkase.’ A lot was imported from Germany and most of the staff spoke German. My grandfather was in the German army before he came over here and then he served in the British army.

In the Second World War, my father was a conscientious objector, he worked in the Middlesex Hospital on Mortimer St. He never heard his parents speak to each other in German, they only spoke in English. There was quite a German community round here then and we used to get a lot of customers coming to us because they felt at home. Until the First World War, we had ‘Deutche Delicatessen’ on the windows but they took that off. Now we have evolved and trade as an ordinary deli but at Christmas time we still have stollen and lebkuchen. 

We lived in Harrow when I was a child and I will always remember coming in to the shop. We had the freestanding tables in those days. Dad had a pole attached to the ceiling which is still there, hidden behind the wooden beam where customers hang their coats, and we used to play ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush.’ I had a great time with my sisters dancing round the shop. 

After the Second World War, we started becoming what you see today. A lot of other food stores opened up nearby and we had to change the way we operate. There was a Europa food store in Marylebone High St and, in recent years, Waitrose. Rather than having a general store where you could buy cornflakes and self-raising flour, we reduced our stock but specialised a lot more, so now we do every single jam and marmalade that Tiptree makes, for example, and all the sauces too. The brands that we stock, we have every option available. ‘Cottage Delight’ from Staffordshire is another one and ‘Thursday Cottage,’ which is a separate entity within Tiptree. They’ve got their own little factory and their own manufacturing process.  We do well with Regent’s Park honey when it is in season in the summer. 

The biggest change in how we operate was when we had parking restrictions imposed. In my dad’s day, anyone could pull up their car and do a week’s grocery shop but, because of the lack of parking, we don’t have that trade now. At Christmas time, we provide stocking fillers, little gifts that people will take home on the train. We don’t do a vast range, we specialise in particular things. My son is very artistic and he gets the aesthetics of the displays just right. He is computer literate too, which I am not, and looks after the social media side of things, putting the soup of the day up so people know what it is.

My father was very fortunate to buy the freehold of the shop when it came up for sale.There was an auction and no one else was bidding that day. Apparently, someone else had been interested but they got caught in traffic!”

Quite reluctantly, I leave Paul and his son Stephen to go back to my late shift at the bookshop. I am captivated by the stories he has shared. In his breezy, good-natured way, he brought to life not just the history of his family but a century of shopkeeping. Our bookshop has been in existence since 1910 and still has its original fittings, so I like to imagine book lovers of the Edwardian era choosing the latest volume, before walking down Marylebone Lane to buy their groceries at the Deutsche Delicatessen.

A photograph from 1914 showing ‘Deutsche Delicatessen’ on the windows. The girls were from the newsagents next door.

Paul Rothe’s grandfather in the early twenties, with his assistant Ernie

Robert, Karoline, Helmut and Thomas, c.1956

‘We stayed open during the war – my aunt ran the shop with one other member of staff called Thomas. As a young boy I remember we had Helmut who was a German prisoner of war who stayed over here – he always wore a little bow tie and we had a German student here. I would have been about ten and my grandmother was serving behind the counter.’

Robert Rothe, 1961

‘My dad was full of adrenaline, trying to serve quickly at lunchtime, he didn’t like anything that slows things down, so he didn’t do toast, wouldn’t do lettuce, he wanted everyone served quickly, he didn’t want a long queue.’

Three generations of the Rothe family on the shop’s hundredth anniversary

Stephen & Paul Rothe today

Stephen & Paul Rothe

Stephen demonstrates the fine art of a pastrami sandwich

Adding the pickles

The complete sandwich

Wrapping the sandwich expertly

A magnificent sandwich

David prepares the soup of the day freshly in the kitchen

‘At some point after the Second World War, my father started doing catering on the premises and we had freestanding tables with four chairs round each table, but you would get a group of six in and they would move the chairs around. We were already getting long queues and dad would have to stop serving and put it all back to where they belonged. So he ordered these that were screwed down to the floor so that people couldn’t move them. They are very fifties with their Formica tops. We had two more put in in 1964 and they’ve been here ever since.’

Stephen & Paul Rothe

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

PAUL ROTHE & SON, 35 Marylebone Lane, W1U 2NN

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Only a couple of places left now for my course on 7th & 8th February. Click here for more information.

One summer’s day, I went for a walk in Greenwich Park and was uplifted to encounter the awe-inspiring host of ancient trees there. I promised myself I would return in the depths of winter to photograph these magnificent specimens on a clear day when they were bare of leaves. So that was what I did, braving the bitter wind and the plunging temperatures for an afternoon with my camera.

In the early 1660’s, Charles II commissioned Le Notre, gardener to Louis XIV, to design the layout of the landscape and the impressive avenues of sweet chestnuts remain, many now approaching four hundred years old. These ancient trees confront you, rising up in the winter sunlight to cast long shadows over the grass and dominating the lonely park with their powerful gnarly presences worthy of paintings by Arthur Rackham.

I have always been in thrall to the fairy tale allure cast by old trees. As a small child, I drew trees continuously once I discovered how easy they were to conjure into life upon paper, following the sinuous lines where I pleased. This delight persists and, even now, I cannot look at these venerable sweet chestnuts in Greenwich without seeing them in motion, as if my photographs captured frozen moments in their swirling dance.

Throughout my childhood, I delighted to climb trees, taking advantage of the facility of my lanky limbs and proximity of large specimens where I could ascend among the leafy boughs and spend an afternoon reading in seclusion, released from the the quotidian world into an arena of magic and possibility. Since the life span of great trees surpasses that of humans, they remind us of the time that passed before we were born and reassure us that the world will continue to exist when we are gone.

Secreted in a dell in the heart of the park, lies the Queen Elizabeth Oak, planted in the twelfth century. Legend has it, Henry VIII danced with Anne Boleyn beneath its branches and later their daughter, Elizabeth I, picnicked in its shade when this was a hunting ground for the royal palace at Greenwich. After flourishing for eight hundred years, the old oak died in the nineteenth century and then fell over a century later, in 1991, but still survives within a protective enclosure of iron railing for visitors to wonder at.

If any readers seek an excuse to venture out for a bracing walk in the frost, I recommend a pilgrimage to pay homage to the old trees in Greenwich Park. They are witnesses to centuries of history and offer a necessary corrective to restore a sense of proportion and hope in these strange times.

Queen Elizabeth’s Oak dating from the twelfth century

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The Oldest Mulberry in Britain

It was astonishing moment back in July when Tower Hamlets Council voted unanimously to reject the Truman Brewery’s planning application to build a corporate office plaza across the entire site.  This was an impressive result for the Save Brick Lane campaign which is advocating for housing in this crucial location that could offer over 600 homes to local people. There are 26,000 on the housing list in the borough, but the rejected Truman Brewery proposal offers just 6 social housing units.

Yet it does not end here because the Truman Brewery has referred their application to the government’s Planning Inspectorate in the hope of getting the rejection overturned. The outcome is a twelve day Public Inquiry commencing on 14th October. In response, the Save Brick Lane campaign will speak for the community, putting the forward the case for homes not offices robustly, and has secured legal representation from Goodenough Ring – the solicitors who worked on the successful Save the Bethnal Green Mulberry case – including a solicitor, barrister, and a KC.

Save Brick Lane has until 14th October to raise £20,000 in legal fees to ensure the Truman Brewery’s plans for a corporate plaza are halted – they have already raised £10,695.

Click here to contribute to Save Brick Lane’s legal fighting fund

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Serving Hatch

Only recently did I learn that there is an abbey and a wood at Abbey Wood. Stunned by my own obtuseness, I set out to discover what I have been missing all these years. Visiting ruins was a memorable feature of childhood holidays, leaving a residual affection for architectural dereliction that has persisted throughout my life.

There is a familiar style of presentation in which the broken fragments of wall are neatly cemented in place while the former internal spaces are replaced by manicured lawns. This is the case at Lesnes Abbey in Abbey Wood, augmented with simple metal signs indicating ‘kitchen’ or ‘garderobe’ which set the imagination racing.

On leaving Abbey Wood station, my enthusiasm was such that I headed straight up the hill into the woods where I was overjoyed to discover myself entirely alone in an ancient forest of chestnut trees, filled with squirrels busily harvesting the chestnuts and burying them in anticipation of winter. Descending by a woodland path was perhaps the best way to discover the old abbey, situated upon a sheltered plateau beneath the hills yet raised up from the Thames and commanding a splendid view towards London.

Lesnes Abbey of St Mary & St Thomas the Martyr was founded in 1178 by Richard de Lucy, Chief Justice of England, as penance for the murder of Thomas A Becket. Richard retired here once the abbey was complete but died within three months. For centuries, the abbey struggled with the cost of maintaining the river banks and maintaining the marshlands productively. As a measure of how far it declined, it was closed by Cardinal Wolsey in 1525 as part of programme of shutting monasteries of less than seven residents, before the abbey was eventually destroyed in 1542 as one of the first to be subjected to the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

After demolition, the building materials were salvaged and the abbey was forgotten until Woolwich & District Antiquarian Society  rediscovered it, excavated the ruins in 1909 and the site became a park in 1930.

I stood to gaze upon the ancient ruins and lifted my eyes in contemplation of the distant towers of contemporary London, wondering where the events of our time will lead. Then I walked back up into the forest and it crossed my mind that I if I followed the woodland paths long enough and far enough, maybe I could come back down the hill and enter the time when the abbey flourished and witness it as it was once, full of life.

Stairs to dormitory

The burial place of the heart of Roesia of Dover, great great granddaughter of the founder of this abbey, Richard de Lucy

West door of the church

Four hundred year old Mulberry tree, dating from the reign of James I

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Cliff, HMS Gannett – Deeds not words.

Behold the ancient mariner I met at Chatham Dockyard. After a long career navigating the seven seas, he now guides visitors around HMS Gannett permanently berthed in a dry dock on the Medway.

Over three hundred years, more than four hundred warships were constructed here and, during the eighteenth century, Chatham became one of this country’s largest industrial sites. Even today – thirty years after it ceased to be a working dockyard – the legacy of this endeavour over such a long period and on such a scale is awe-inspiring.

The vast wooden vault of the covered slipway, dating from 1834, is something akin to a cathedral or an aircraft hangar, and climbing up into the roof is a spatial experience of vertiginous amazement. At the other end of the dockyard, a ropewalk contains a room that is a quarter of a mile long for spinning yarn into cables. Midway between these two, I discovered the Commissioner’s Garden, offering a horticultural oasis in the midst of all this industry with a seventeenth century Mulberry at its heart.

Yet as my feet grew weary, my sense of wonder grew troubled by more complicated thoughts and emotions. The countless thousands that laboured long and hard in this dockyard through the centuries produced the maritime might which permitted Britain to wrestle control of the Atlantic from the French and the Spanish, and build its global empire, delivering incalculable wealth at the expense of the people in its colonial territories.

For better or worse, to see the machinery of this history made manifest at Chatham is an experience of wonder tinged with horror which cannot be easily reconciled, yet it is an inescapable part of this country’s identity that compels our attention if we are to understand our own past.

Horatio Nelson

HMS Gannet (1878)

The covered slipway (1838)

The covered slip was designed by Sir Robert Sebbings, Surveyor to the Navy Board & former Shipwright

HMS Ocelot (1962)

HMS Cavalier (1944)

Threads of yarn are twisted to make twine

Rope continues to be manufactured today in the ropewalk

Machinery from 1811 is still in use

The rope walk dates from 1729

Women were employed from 1864 when mechanisation was introduced

Officers’ houses (1722-33)

The Cashier’s Office where Charles Dickens’ father John Dickens worked as a clerk, 1817-22

Figures and coat of arms from HMS Chatham (1911) on the Admiral’s Offices

Sail & Colour Loft (1734) where the sails for HMS Victory were made

Admiral’s Offices (1808) with George III’s coat of arms

Entrance to the Commissioner’s Garden

Seventeenth century Mulberry tree in the Commissioner’s Garden

Richard Wellesley, brother of the Duke of Wellington, and Royal Dockyard Church (1755)

Main Gate (1720) with arms of George I

Visit CHATHAM HISTORIC DOCKYARD, open every day from February until November

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The scourging

There is a fine house in Fournier St with an old fireplace lined with manganese Delft tiles of an attractive mulberry hue illustrating lurid Biblical scenes. Installed when the house was built in the seventeen fifties by Peter Lekeux – a wealthy silk weaver who supervised two hundred and fifty looms and commissioned designs from Anna Maria Garthwaite – these lively tiles have survived through the centuries to educate, delight and inspire the residents of Spitalfields.

Tiles were prized for their value and their decorative qualities, and in this instance as devotional illustrations too. Yet although Peter Lekeux was a protestant of Huguenot descent, a certain emotionalism is present in these fascinating tiles, venturing into regions of surrealism in the violent imaginative excess of their pictorial imagery. The scourging of Jesus, Judith with the decapitated head of Holofernes, the Devil appearing with cloven feet and bovine features, and Jonah vomited forth by the whale are just four examples of the strangeness of the imaginative universe that is incarnated in this fireplace. Arranged in apparent random order, the tiles divide between scenes from the life of Jesus and Old Testament saints, many set in a recognisable Northern European landscape and commonly populated by people in contemporary dress.

It is possible that the tiles may date from the seventeenth century and originate from continental Europe. Their manufacture developed in Delft when, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Chinese ceramics were imported from Portuguese ships captured by the Dutch, and because these were in demand local potters tried to copy them, starting a new industry in its own right. The earthenware tiles were covered with a tin glaze to create a white ground upon which the design was pricked out from a stencil, and then the artist simply had to join up the dots, producing the images quickly and to a relatively standard design.

“I’m not sure what this is supposed to illustrate!” exclaimed Sister Elizabeth at St Saviour’s Priory in Bethnal Green, colouring slightly when I showed her the tile of the topless woman dragging a bemused man towards a bed, “Maybe the woman taken in adultery?” Yet she was able to identify all the other stories for me, graciously assenting to my request when I called round to the priory seeking interpretation of the scenes in my photographs  – after I had spent a morning in Fournier St crouching in the soot with my camera.

Upon closer examination, several hands are at work in these tiles – with the artist who drew Jesus confronting the Devil in the wilderness and Jonah thrown up by the whale, setting the dominant tone. This individual’s work is distinguished by the particular rubbery lips and fat round noses that recall the features of the Simpsons drawn by Matt Groenig, while the half-human figures are reminiscent of Brueghel’s drawings illustrating the nightmare world of apocalypse. More economic of line is the artist who drew Jesus clearing out the temple and Pilate washing his hands – these drawings have a spontaneous cartoon-like energy, although unfortunately he manages to make Jesus resemble an old lady with her hair in a bun.

There is an ambivalence which makes these tiles compelling. You wonder if they served as devout remembrances of the suffering of biblical figures, or whether a voyeuristic entertainment and perverse pleasure was derived from such bizarre illustrations. Or whether perhaps there are ambiguous shades of feeling in the human psyche that combine elements of each? A certain crossover between physical pain and spiritual ecstasy is a commonplace of religious art. It depends how you like your religion, and in these tiles it is magical and grotesque – yet here and now.

My head spins, imagining the phantasmagoria engendered in viewers’ imaginations over the centuries, as their eyes fell upon these startling scenes in the glimmering half-light, before dozing off beside this fireplace in a weary intoxicated haze, in the quiet first floor room at the back of the old house in Fournier St.

In the wilderness, the Devil challenges Jesus to turn stones into bread.

Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.

St Jerome with the lion in the wilderness.

Jesus drives the traders from the temple.

Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well.

Sampson and Delilah, cutting Sampson’s hair

Noah’s flood.

The woman who touched Jesus’ robes secretly and was instantly cured of her haemorrhage.

Judith with the head of Holofernes

Pilate washes his hands after Jesus is bound and led away.

Jesus and the fishermen

Jonah sits under the broom tree outside Nineveh.

The soldiers bring purple robes to Jesus to rebuke him when he claims to be an emperor.

Jonah is cast up by the whale upon the shore of Nineveh.

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Sir William Pickering, St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, 1574.

Ever since the discovery of the site of  William Shakespeare’s first theatre in Shoreditch, I have found myself thinking about where else in London I could locate Shakespeare. The city has changed so much that very little remains from his time and even though I might discover his whereabouts – such as his lodging in Silver St in 1612 – usually the terrain is unrecognisable. Silver St is lost beneath the Barbican now.

Yet, in spite of everything, there are buildings in London that Shakespeare would have known, and, in each case, there are greater or lesser reasons to believe he was there. As the mental list of places where I could enter the same air space as Shakespeare grew, so did my desire to visit them all and discover what remains to meet my eyes that he would also have seen.

Thus it was that I set out under a moody sky in search of Shakespeare’s London – walking first over to St Helen’s Bishopsgate where Shakespeare was a parishioner, according to the parish tax inspector who recorded his failure to pay tax on 15th November 1597. This ancient church is a miraculous survivor of the Fire of London, the Blitz and the terrorist bombings of the nineteen nineties, and contains spectacular monuments that Shakespeare could have seen if he came here, including the eerie somnolent figure of Sir William Pickering of 1574 illustrated above. There is great charm in the diverse collection of melancholic Elizabethan statuary residing here in this quaint medieval church with two naves, now surrounded by modernist towers upon all sides, and there is a colourful Shakespeare window of 1884, the first of several images of him that I encountered upon my walk.

From here, I followed the route that Shakespeare would have known, walking directly South over London Bridge to Southwark Cathedral, where he buried his younger brother Edmund, an actor aged just twenty-seven in 1607, at the cost of twenty shillings “with a forenoone knell of the great bell.” Again there is a Shakespeare window, with scenes from the plays, put up in 1964, and a memorial with an alabaster figure from 1912, yet neither is as touching as the simple stone to poor Edmund in the floor of the choir. I was fascinated by the medieval roof bosses, preserved at the rear of the nave since the Victorians replaced the wooden roof with stone. If Shakespeare had raised his bald pate during a service here, his eye might have caught sight of the appealingly grotesque imagery of these spirited medieval carvings. Most striking is Judas being devoured by Satan, with only a pair of legs protruding from the Devil’s hungry mouth, though I also like the sad face of the old king with icicles for a beard.

Crossing the river again, I looked out for the cormorants that I delight to see as one of the living remnants of Shakespeare’s London, which he saw when he walked out from the theatre onto the river bank, and wrote of so often, employing these agile creatures that can swallow fish whole as as eloquent metaphors of all-consuming Time. My destination was St Giles Cripplegate, where Edmund’s sons who did not live beyond infancy were baptised and William Shakespeare was the witness. Marooned at the centre of the Barbican today like a galleon shipwrecked upon a beach, I did not linger long here because most of the cargo of history this church carried was swept overboard in a fire storm in nineteen forty, when it was bombed and then later rebuilt from a shell. Just as in that searching game where someone advises you if you are getting warmer, I began to feel my trail had started warm but was turning cold.

Yet, resolutely, I walked on through St John’s Gate in Clerkenwell where Shakespeare once brought the manuscripts of his plays for the approval by the Lord Chamberlain before they could be performed. And, from there, I directed my feet along the Strand to the Middle Temple, where, in one of my favourite corners of the city, there is a sense – as you step through the gates – of entering an earlier London, comprised of small squares and alleys arched over by old buildings. Here in Fountain Court, where venerable Mulberry trees supported by iron props surround the pool, stands the magnificent Middle Temple Hall where the first performance of “Twelfth Night” took place in 1602, with Shakespeare playing in the acting company. At last, I had a building where I could be certain that Shakespeare had been present – but it was closed.

I sat in the shade by the fountain and took stock, and questioned my own sentiment now my feet were weary. Yet I could not leave, my curiosity would not let me. Summoning my courage, I walked past all the signs, until I came to the porter’s lodge and asked the gentleman politely if I might see the hall. He stood up, introducing himself as John and assented with a smile, graciously leading me from the sunlight into the cavernous hundred-foot-long hall, with its great black double hammer-beam roof, like the hand of God with its fingers outstretched or the darkest stormcloud lowering overhead. It was overwhelming.

“You see this table,” said John, pointing to an old dining table at the centre of the hall, “We call this the ‘cup board’ and the top of it is made of the hatch from Sir Francis Drake’s ship ‘The Golden Hind’ that circumnavigated the globe” And then, before I could venture a comment, he continued, “You see that long table at the end – the one that’s the width of the room, twenty-nine feet long – that’s made from a single oak tree which was a gift from Elizabeth I, it was cut at Windsor Great Park, floated down the Thames and constructed in this hall while it was being built. It has never left this room.”

And then John left me alone in the finest Elizabethan hall in Britain. Looking back at the great carved screen, I realised this had served as the backdrop to the performance of ‘”Twelfth Night” and the gallery above was where the musicians played at the opening when Orsino says, “If music be the food of love, play on.” The hall was charged and resonant. Occasioned by the clouds outside, sunlight moved in dappled patterns across the floor from the tall windows above.

I walked back behind the screen where the actors, including Shakespeare, waited, and I walked again into the hall, absorbing the wonder of the scene, emphasised by the extraordinary intricate roof that appeared to defy gravity. It was a place for public display and the show of power, but its elegant proportion and fine detail also permitted it to be a place for quiet focus and poetry. I sat on my own at the head of the twenty-nine foot long table in the only surviving building where one of William Shakespeare’s plays was done in his lifetime, and it was a marvel. I could imagine him there.

Judas swallowed by Satan

An old king at Southwark

St Giles Cripplegate where Edmund’s sons were baptised and William Shakespeare was the witness.

St John’s Gate where William Shakespeare brought the manuscripts of his plays to the Lord Chamberlain’s office to seek approval.

The Middle Temple Hall where “Twelfth Night” was first performed in 1602.

The twenty-nine foot long table made from a single oak from Windsor Great Park.

The wooden screen that served as the backdrop to the first production of” Twelfth Night.”

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The Royal Oak

The presence of great trees in the city has always been a source of fascination to me as one born in the countryside. I often think of the nineteenth century rural writer Richard Jefferies who, while struggling to make a career in London, took lonely walks in the parks for consolation and once, to ameliorate his home-sickness for the West Country, spontaneously wrapped his arms around a tree. Thus he originated the notion of’ tree-hugging,’ a phrase that is now used to embrace the deep affection which many people feel for trees. It is a tendency I recognise in myself, as I came to realise last week, while prowling around Richmond Park in the frost in search of ancient trees.

Yet I did not have to look very far, since this Royal Park has more than nine hundred oaks which are over five hundred years old – thus qualifying as ‘ancient’ – many of which are over seven hundred years in age. In fact, it is claimed that Richmond Park has more ancient trees than in the whole of France and Germany.

As I came upon more and more of them, the wonder of these tottering specimens filled me with such an accumulating sense of awe and delight that I could not understand how I could be entirely alone in the great empty park, enjoying them all to myself. It seemed incredible to me that the place was not teeming with visitors paying adoring homage to these gnarly old time-travellers, although I was equally grateful for their absence because my pleasure in communing with these ancient oaks was greater for being an intimate, solitary experience.

The ultimate object of my quest was the celebrated Royal Oak at the heart of the park. Since it is not marked on any map, I had no choice but to stop the few people I did meet and ask directions. Yet all of those of whom I enquired simply replied with a shrug and a polite grin, and consequently I could not avoid a certain absurdity in asking my question of unwary visitors while in a park surrounded by ancient trees. Eventually I had no choice but to retreat to a lodge where, after several phone calls among the park wardens, I was offered directions.

Returning to the woodland, I wondered how I might distinguish the wood for trees or rather – in this case – the Royal Oak from its fellows. The low-angled sunshine emerged at intervals from the passing clouds, casting a transient light upon the forest. As I reached the edge of the tree line and the landscape opened up, declining towards Pen Ponds, the clouds separated permitting a shaft of afternoon sunlight to illuminate a tree standing apart from the rest. A massive trunk, twisted and split, testified to seven centuries of growth, while the whirling crown of branches spreading in all directions was a product of more recent time, when the tree was no longer pollarded for the supply of oak staffs. I stood and contemplated its implacable presence in silent awe, confronting the aged monarch among an army of elderly cohorts in a forest of ancient trees. This was the Royal Oak.

The Royal Oak is over seven hundred years old

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SOME TICKETS AVAILABLE FOR SATURDAY 18th MAY

“Much more comfortable than a dull room upstairs, where one gets tired of the pattern of the bed curtains” – Keats was moved to this room on 8th February 1820 at the onset of tuberculosis

I set out with the intention to photograph the morning sunshine in John Keats’ study at his house in Hampstead. Upon my arrival, the sky turned occluded yet I realised this overcast day was perhaps better suited to the literary history that passed between these walls two centuries ago. The property was never Keats’ House in any real sense but, rather, where he had a couple of rooms for eighteen months as a sub-let in a shared dwelling.

Born in a tavern in Moorgate in 1795, where the Globe stands today, and baptised at St Botolph’s Bishopsgate, John Keats was ridiculed by John Gibson Lockhart in Blackwood’s magazine in 1817 for being of the ‘Cockney School,’ implying his rhymes suggested working class speech. Qualifying at first as an Apothecary and then studying to be a Surgeon, in 1816 John Keats sacrificed both these professions in favour of poetry. “It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved Apothecary than a starved Poet, so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,” wrote Lockhart condescendingly, but Keats was not dissuaded from his chosen path.

Early on the morning of 1st December 1818, after passing the night nursing his brother Tom through the terminal stage of tuberculosis at 1 Well Walk, Hampstead, John Keats walked down the hill to the semi-detached villas known as Wentworth Place to visit his friend Charles Armitage Brown. He invited Keats to move in with him, sharing his half of the house and contributing to the household expenses.

John Keats’ arrival at Wentworth Place was also the entry to a time when he found love with Fanny Brawne, who moved in with her mother to the other half of the villa, as well as his arrival at the period of his greatest creativity as a poet. It was a brief interlude that was brought to an end in early 1820 when Keats discovered he had tuberculosis like his brother, from whom he had almost certainly contracted the infection.

Within three weeks of moving in, Keats suffered from a severe sore throat and worried for his own health as he struggled to complete his epic ‘Hyperion,’ yet his spirits were raised by an invitation for Christmas from Mrs Brawne at Elm Cottage and the growing attachment to her daughter Fanny, whom he had previously described as “animated, lively and even witty.”

In April, the tenants vacated the other part of Wentworth Place and Mrs Brawne moved in with her daughters, which meant that John Keats met the eighteen-year-old Fanny Brawne continuously in the gardens that surround the house. At any moment, he might glance her from the window and thus their affection grew, leading to the understanding of an engagement for marriage between them. This romance coincided with a flowering of  creativity on Keats’ part, including the composition of of his celebrated ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ inspired by hearing the nightingale sing while on a walk across Hampstead Heath

Yet Keats spent the summer away from Hampstead, visiting the Isle of Wight, Winchester and Bath, while engaging in an emotionally-conflicted correspondence with Fanny and pursuing the flow of poetic composition that had begun in the spring. Although Keats wrote to Brown of his attraction to return to Fanny,  admitting “I like and cannot help it,” perversely he took rooms in Great College St rather than moving back to Wentworth Place. But on Keats’ return to Hampstead to collect his possessions on 10th October, Fanny Brawne opened the door to him and he was smitten by her generosity and confidence, and his hesitation dissolved. He moved back to Wentworth Place almost at once and presented Fanny with a garnet ring, even though he could not afford to marry.

Living in such close proximity to the object of his affection led Keats to adopt a vegetarian diet in the hope of lessening his physical desire. During the long harsh winter that followed, Keats was often isolated at Wentworth Place by heavy snow and freezing fog, making only occasional trips down to London to visit literary friends. Catching a late coach back to Hampstead, Keats had left his new warm coat behind at Wentworth Place and sat on the top of the coach to save money. Descending in Pond St, Keats felt feverish but, by the time he reached Wentworth Place, he was coughing blood and realised he had suffered a lung haermorrhage. Yet he wrote that all he could think of was, “the love that has been my pleasure and torment.” He was twenty-four years old.

At first Mrs Brawne tried to keep Fanny and John Keats apart in the tiny house and he wrote her twenty-two letters in six weeks, but it proved impossible to sustain the separation and she permitted her daughter to visit him every day while he was recuperating. Keats could not see her without recognising that death would separate them and he wrote a poem entitled ‘To Fanny’ in recrimination against himself.

The tragedy of the situation was compounded when Brown, Keats’ landlord, decided to lease his part of Wentworth Place, forcing Keats to leave in the spring. At the beginning of May, he moved to cheaper lodgings in Kentish Town, still within a mile of Fanny Brawne. In July, ‘Hyperion’ was published but by then he realised was living in the shadow of death and told a friend he was suffering from a broken heart.

In August, Keats went to Wentworth Place in distress and laid himself upon the mercy of Mrs Brawne, who took him in and permitted him to live under the same roof as her daughter for a few weeks before he travelled to Italy for his health. On Wednesday 13th September 1820, John Keats walked with Fanny Brawne from Wentworth Place to the coach stop in Pond Place and they said their last farewells. Fanny went home and wrote  “Mr Keats left Hampstead” in her copy of the Literary Pocket Book that he gave her for Christmas 1818. They did not meet again and Keats never returned to Wentworth Place, dying in Rome on 23rd February 1821.

Within  decades, the railway came to Hampstead and then the tube train, and the village became a suburb. An actress bought Wentworth Place, redeveloping it by combining the two houses into one and adding a large dining room on the side.  In 1920, the house was threatened with demolition to make way for a block of flats. However, funds were raised to restore the house as a memorial to Keats. Thus you may visit it today and enter the place John Keats and Fanny Brawne fell in love, and where he wrote some of the greatest poems in our language.

John Keats in 1819 when he lived at Wentworth Place

Wentworth Place, completed 1816 as one of the first houses to be built in Lower Hampstead Heath

John Keats lived here

In John Keats’ study

The right hand room on the ground floor was John Keats’ study and the room above was his bedroom

Keats’ room where he learnt he had tuberculosis which had killed his brother Tom a year earlier

“Dearest Fanny … They say I must remain confined to this room for some time. The consciousness that you love me will make a pleasant prison of the house next to yours.” 4th February, 1820

In Fanny Brawne’s room

The boiler for hot water. The house had no running water which had to be brought from the pump.

The Mulberry tree is believed to have been planted in the seventeenth century and predates the house.

The death mask in John Keats’ bedroom at Wentworth Place

The font at St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, where John Keats was baptised in 1795

Visit Keats House, Keats Grove, Hampstead, NW3 2RR

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Mrs Johnson walks past 19 Mile End Place

Whenever I walk down the Mile End Rd, I always take a moment to step in through the archway and visit Mile End Place. This tiny enclave of early nineteenth century cottages sandwiched between the Velho and the Alderney Cemeteries harbours a quiet atmosphere that recalls an earlier, more rural East End and I have become intrigued to discover its history. So I was fascinated when Philip Cunningham sent me his pictures of Mile End Place from the seventies together with this poignant account of an unspoken grief from the First World War, still lingering more than fifty years later, which he encountered unexpectedly when he moved into his great-grandparents’ house.

“In 1971, my girlfriend – Sally – & I moved from East Dulwich to Mile End Place. It was number 19, the house where my maternal grandfather – Jack – had been born into a family of nine, and we purchased it from my grandfather’s nephew Denny Witt. The house was very cheap because it was on the slum clearance list but it was a lot better than the rooms we had been living in, even with an outside toilet and no bath.

There were just two small bedrooms upstairs and two small rooms downstairs. In my grandfather’s time, the front room was kept immaculate in case there might be a visitor and the sleeping was segregated, until Uncle Harry came back from the Boer War when he was not allowed to sleep with the other boys. For reasons left unexplained, he was banished to the front room and told he had better get married sharpish – which he did.

I first met my neighbour Mrs Johnson when gardening in the front of the house. I said ‘Morning,’ but there came no reply.‘What a nasty woman’ I thought, yet worse was to come. Mrs Johnson lived at the end of the street and two doors away lived a vague relative of hers who was married to an alcoholic. ‘She picked ‘im up in Jersey,’ I was told. He drank half bottles of whisky and rum, and threw the empties into the graveyard at the back of our houses – sometimes when they were half full.

I would often go to our outside toilet in socks and, on one occasion, nearly stepped upon pieces of broken glass that had been thrown into our backyard. At first, I assumed it was Paul – the graveyard keeper – and went straight round to his house in Alderney St. I nearly knocked his door down and was ready to flatten him, until he became very apologetic and explained that Mrs Johnson had told him we were students and always having parties. True in the first count, lies in the second. Mrs Johnson knew quite well who the culprit was, as did the everyone else in street. I was still angry, so I threw the glass back where it came from  – which must have been a real chore to clear up on the other side

Sometime after all these events, Jane Plumtree – a barrister – moved into the street. She said ‘We must have street parties!’ and so we did. At the first of these, the longest established families in the street all had to sit together and – unfortunately – I was sat next to Mrs Johnson. She hissed and fumed, and turned her back on me as much as she could, until suddenly she turned to face me and said, ‘I knew your grandfather J-a–c—k, he came b-a–c—k!’ She spat the words out. I did not know what she was talking about so I just said, ‘Yes, he was a drayman.’

Later, I reported it over the phone to my Auntie Ethel. ‘Oh yes,’ she explained, ‘Mrs Johnson had three brothers and, when the First World War broke out, they thought it was going to be a splendid jolly. They signed up at once, even though two were under-age, and they were all dead in three months.’ Unlike my grandfather Jack, who came back.

Jack was married and living in Ewing St with his five children, but he was called up immediately war was declared because had been in the Territorial Army. He was present at almost every major piece of action throughout the First World War and, at some point, while driving an ammunition lorry, he got into the back and rolled a cigarette when there was no one around. He got caught and was sentenced to be shot, but – fortunately – someone piped up and declared they did not have enough drivers, so his punishment was reduced to six weeks loss of pay, which made my grandmother – to whom the money was due – furious!

When Jack and the other troops with him came under fire in a French village, he and an Irish soldier broke into a music shop for cover. On the wall was a silver trumpet which Jack grabbed at once, but his Irish companion grabbed the mouthpiece and would not let Jack have it unless he went into the street, amid the falling shells, to play. Reluctantly, Jack did this – playing extremely fast – and he brought the trumpet home with him to the East End.”

19 Mile End Place

Philip’s grandfather Jack was born at 19 Mile End Place

View from 19 Mile End Place

Philip purchased 19 Mile End Place from his cousin Danny Witt, photographed during World War II

Outside toilet at 19 Mile End Place

Backyard at 19 Mile End Place

View towards the Alderney Cemetery with the keeper’s house in the distance

Paul Campkin, the Cemetery Keeper

The Alderney Cemetery

Looking out towards Mile End Rd

Entrance to Mile End Place from Mile End Rd

Photographs copyright © Philip Cunningham

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