George Dodd came to Spitalfields to write this account for Charles Knight’s LONDON published in 1842. Dodds recalls the rural East End that still lingered in the collective memory and described the East End of weavers living in ramshackle timber and plaster dwellings which in his century would be “redeveloped” out of existence by the rising tide of brick terraces, erasing the history that existed before.

Spitalfields Market

It is not easy to express a general idea respecting Spitalfields as a district. There is a parish of that name but this parish contains a small portion only of the silk weavers and it is probable that most persons apply the term Spitalfields to the whole district where the weavers reside. In this enlarged acceptation, we will lay down something like a boundary in the following manner – begin at Shoreditch Church and proceed along the Hackney Rd till it is intersected by Regent’s Canal, follow the course of the canal to Mile End Rd and then proceed westward through Whitechapel to Aldgate, through Houndsditch to Bishopsgate, and thence northward to where the tour commenced.

This boundary encloses an irregularly-shaped district in which nearly the whole of the weavers reside and these weavers are universally known as “Spitalfields” weavers. Indeed, the entire district is frequently called Spitalfields although including large portions of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Mile End New Town. By far the larger portion of this extensive district was open fields until comparatively modern times. Bethnal Green was really a green and Spitalfields was covered with grassy sward in the last century.

It may now not unreasonably be asked, what is “Spitalfields”? A street called Crispin St on the western side of Spitalfields Market is nearly coincident in position with the eastern wall of the Old Artillery Ground and this wall separated the Ground from the Fields which stretched out far eastward. Great indeed is the change which this portion of the district has undergone. Rows of houses, inhabited by weavers and other humble persons, and pent up far too close for the maintenance of health, now cover the green spot now known as Spitalfields.

In the evidence taken before a Committee in the House of Commons on the silk trade in 1831-2, it was stated that the population of the district in which the Spitalfields weavers resided could be no less at that time than one hundred thousand, of whom fifty thousand were entirely dependent on the silk manufacture and remaining moiety more or less dependent indirectly. The number of looms seems to vary between about fourteen to seventeen thousand and, of these, four to five thousand are unemployed in times of depression. It seems probable, as far as the means exist of determining it, that the weavers are principally English or of English origin. To the masters, however the same remark does not apply, for the names of the partners in the firms now existing, point to the French origin of manufacture in that district.

A characteristic employment or amusement of the Spitalfields weavers is the catching of birds. This is principally carried on in the months of March and October. They train “call-birds” in the most peculiar manner and there is an odd sort of emulation between them as to which of their birds will sing the longest, and the bird-catchers frequently lay considerable wagers on this, as that determines their superiority. They place them opposite each other by the width of a candle and the bird who sings the oftenest before the candle is burnt out wins the wager.

If we have, on the one hand, to record the unthrifty habits and odd propensities of the weavers, let us not forget to do them justice in other matters. In passing through Crispin St, adjoining the Spitalfields Market, we see on the western side of the way a humble building, bearing much the appearance of a weaver’s house and having the words “Mathematical Society” written up in front. Lowly and inelegant the building may be but there is a pleasure in seeing Science rear her head in  a locality, even if it is humble one.

A ramble through Bethnal Green and Mile End New Town in which the weavers principally reside, presents us with many curious features illustrative of the peculiarities of the district. Proceeding through Crispin St to the Spitalfields Market, the visitor will find some of the usual arrangements of a vegetable market but potatoes, sold wholesale, form the staple commodity. He then proceeds eastwards to the Spitalfields Church, one of the “fifty new churches” built in the reign of Queen Anne and along Church St to Brick Lane. If he proceed northward up the latter, he will arrive, first, at the vast premises of Truman, Hanbury & Buxton’s brewery, and then at the Eastern Counties Railway which crosses the street at a considerable elevation. If he extends his steps eastwards, he will at once enter upon the districts inhabited by the weavers.

On passing through most of the streets, a visitor is conscious of a noiselessness, a dearth of bustle and activity. The clack of the looms is heard here and there, but not to a noisy degree. It is evident in a glance that many of the streets, all the houses were built expressly for weavers, and in walking through them we noticed the short and unhealthy appearance of the inhabitants. In one street, we met with a barber’s shop in which persons could have “a good wash for a farthing.” Here we espied a school at which children were taught “to read and work at tuppence a week.” There was a chandler’s shop at which shuttles, reeds and quills, and the smaller parts of weaving apparatus  were exposed for sale in a window in company with split-peas,  bundles of wood and red herrings. In one little shop, patchwork  was sold at 10d, 12d and 16d a pound. At another place was a bill from the parish authorities, warning the inhabitants that they were liable to a penalty if their dwelling were kept dirty and unwholesome, and in another – we regretted this more than anything else – astrological predictions, interpretations of dreams and nativities, were to be purchased “from three pence upwards.”

In very many of the houses, the windows numbered more sheets of paper than panes of glass and no considerable number of houses were shut up altogether. We would willingly present a brighter picture, but ours is a copy from the life.

Pelham St (now Woodseer St), Spitalfields

Booth St (now Princelet St), Spitalfields

Images courtesy © Bishopsgate Insitute

Discovering the sixteenth century figures of Old King Lud & his sons recently, that once stood upon Ludgate yet are now forgotten in an alley of Fleet St, made me think more closely of the gates that once surrounded the City of London.

So I was delighted to come upon this eighteenth century print in the Spitalfields Market for a couple of pounds with the plangent title “The City Gates As They Appeared Before They Were Torn Down.”

Printed in 1775, this plate recorded venerable edifices that had been demolished in recent decades and was reproduced in Harrison’s History of London, a publication notable for featuring Death and an Hourglass upon the title page as if to emphasise the mutable, ever-changing nature of the capital and the brief nature of our residence in it.

Moorgate (demolished 1761)

Aldgate (demolished 1761)

Bishopsgate (demolished 1760)

Cripplegate (demolished 1760)

Ludgate (demolished 1760)

Newgate (demolished 1767)

Aldersgate (demolished 1617)

Bridgegate (demolished 1762)

The City Gates As They Appeared Before They Were Torn Down, engraved for Harrison’s History of London 1775

Sixteenth century figures of King Lud and his sons that formerly stood upon Ludgate, and stowed ever since in an alley at the side of St Dunstan in the West, Fleet St

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The Gates of Old London

To pass the time while awaiting the arrival of Bob Mazzer’s Underground from the printers for next week’s launch on Thursday 12th June, I visited the Bishopsgate Institute yesterday to study the 1599 copy of John Stow‘s Survey Of London.

It was touching to see the edition that John Stow himself produced, with its delicate type resembling gothic script, and sobering to recognise what a great undertaking it was to publish a book four hundred years ago – requiring every page of type to be set and printed by hand.

Born into a family of tallow chandlers, John Stow became a tailor yet devoted his life to writing and publishing, including an early edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer who had lived nearby in Aldgate more than a century earlier. In Stow’s lifetime, the population of London quadrupled and much of the city he knew as a youth was demolished and rebuilt, inspiring him to write and publish his great work – a Survey  that would record this change for posterity. Consequently, on the title page of the Survey, Stow outlines his intention to include “the Originall, Antiquity, Increase, Modern estate and description of that citie.”

Yet in contrast to the dramatic changes he witnessed at first hand, John Stow also described his wonder at the history that was uncovered by the redevelopment, drawing consolation in setting his life’s experience against the great age of  the city and the generations who preceded him in London .

SPITTLE FIELDS

There is a large close called Tasell close sometime, for that there were Tasels planted for the vse of Clothworkers: since letten to the Crosse-bow-makers, wherein they vsed to shoote for games at the Popingey: now the same being inclosed with a bricke wall, serueth to be an Artillerieyard, wherevnto the Gunners of the Tower doe weekely repaire, namely euerie Thursday, and there leuelling certaine Brasse peeces of great Artillerie against a But of earth, made for that purpose, they discharge them for their exercise.

Then haue ye the late dissolued Priorie and Hospitall, commonly called Saint Marie Spittle, founded by Walter Brune, and Rosia his wife, for Canons regular, Walter Archdeacon of London laid the first stone, in the yeare 1197.

On the East side of this Churchyard lieth a large field, of olde time called Lolesworth, now Spittle field, which about the yeare 1576 was broken vp for Clay to make Bricke, in the digging whereof many earthen pots called Vrnae, were found full of Ashes, and burnt bones of men, to wit, of the Romanes that inhabited here: for it was the custome of the Romanes to burne their dead, to put their Ashes in an Vrna, and then burie the same with certaine ceremonies, in some field appoynted for that purpose, neare vnto their Citie: euerie of these pots had in them with the Ashes of the dead, one peece of Copper mony, with the inscription of the Emperour then raigning: some of them were of Claudius, some of Vespasian, some of Nero, of Anthonius Pius, of Traianus, and others: besides those Vrnas, many other pots were there found, made of a white earth with long necks, and handels, like to our stone Iugges: these were emptie, but seemed to be buried ful of some liquid matter long since consumed and soaked through: for there were found diuerse vials and other fashioned Glasses, some most cunningly wrought, such as I haue not seene the like, and some of Christall, all which had water in them, northing differing in clearnes, taste, or sauour from common spring water, what so euer it was at the first: some of these Glasses had Oyle in them verie thicke, and earthie in sauour, some were supposed to haue balme in them, but had lost the vertue: many of those pots and glasses were broken in cutting of the clay, so that few were taken vp whole.

There were also found diuerse dishes and cups of a fine red coloured earth, which shewed outwardly such a shining smoothnesse, as if they had beene of Currall, those had in the bottomes Romane letters printed, there were also lampes of white earth and red, artificially wrought with diuerse antiques about them, some three or foure Images made of white earth, about a span long each of them: one I remember was of Pallas, the rest I haue forgotten.I my selfe haue reserued a mongst diuerse of those antiquities there, one Vrna, with the Ashes and bones, and one pot of white earth very small, not exceeding the quantitie of a quarter of a wine pint, made in shape of a Hare, squatted vpon her legs, and betweene her eares is the mouth of the pot.

There hath also beene found in the same field diuers coffins of stone, containing the bones of men: these I suppose to bee the burials of some especiall persons, in time of the Brytons, or Saxons, after that the Romanes had left to gouerne here. Moreouer there were also found the sculs and bones of men without coffins, or rather whose coffins (being of great timber) were consumed. Diuerse great nailes of Iron were there found, such as are vsed in the wheeles of shod Carts, being each of them as bigge as a mans finger, and a quarter of a yard long, the heades two inches ouer, those nayles were more wondred at then the rest of thinges there found, and many opinions of men were there vttred of them, namely that the men there buried were murdered by driuing those nayles into their heads, a thing vnlikely, for a smaller naile would more aptly serue to so bad a purpose, and a more secret place would lightly be imployed for their buriall.

And thus much for this part of Bishopsgate warde, without the gate.

A copper coin from the Spitalfields Roman Cemetery that I wear around my neck

Bishopsgate Ward entry by John Stow in his Survey of London

Monument to John Stow in St Andrew Undershaft

Archive images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

Photograph of Stow’s monument copyright © Colin O’Brien

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A month ago, photographer Bob Mazzer, book designer Friedericke Huber & I visited the historic printing works of Butler & Tanner (Britain’s oldest established printer, in Frome since 1845) to see the printing of Bob’s book UNDERGROUND which I published yesterday.

No-one knew that a couple of days later the company would  go into administration and, on the day of our visit, we were told that it had been the longest factory tour ever – on account of Bob’s insistence upon photographing every aspect of  the production of his book. Yet now these photographs exist as a poignant tribute to those people who made Butler & Tanner one of the great names in British printing.

I have no doubt that there will be future editions of  UNDERGROUND and other books of Bob Mazzer’s photography, but the one to have will always be the legendary first edition which was also the last book ever printed by Butler & Tanner.

The Master Printer who printed UNDERGROUND

Bob Mazzer & Friedeicke Huber

Fred checks the cover

Checking the colour quality of the photographs

The covers roll off the press

Plates ready to print UNDERGROUND

Bob’s son Arthur gets into a discussion with a printer

Reject prints of the cover

Completed pages ready for collating

The binding department

Collated pages

The women of the binding department

Bob’s son Arthur sleeps all the way back to London

Back on the tube again!

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF BOB MAZZER’S UNDERGROUND FOR £20

Photographs copyright © Bob Mazzer

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The handsome terraces of silk merchants’ houses in the streets beside Christ Church and in Elder St declare their history readily, yet there are other more modest buildings of the same era in Spitalfields which exist as the last vestiges of the workshops and dwellings where the weavers pursued their trade. You might easily walk past without even noticing these undemonstrative structures, standing disregarded like silent old men in the crowd.

I am indebted to Peter Guillery and his book The Small House in Eighteenth Century London for highlighting these buildings where the weavers worked, which are equally significant historically as the more flamboyant homes of those who profited from their labour.

As part of the forthcoming Huguenot Threads festival, Peter Guillery is giving a lecture entitled Forgotten Weavers’ Houses of Spitalfields on Thursday 10th July and admission is free.

3 & 5 Club Row, two survivors of a terrace of six four-room houses built 1764-6

190 & 192 Brick Lane, weavers’ houses of 1778-9 built by James Laverdure (alias Green), Carpenter

113 & 115 Bethnal Green Rd, two five room houses of c.1735 probably built by William Farmer, Carpenter

70-74 Sclater St, three houses built for weavers c.1719

70-74 Sclater St, No 70 was refronted in 1777

97 & 99 Sclater St, built c 1720

46 Cheshire St, built in the sixteen-seventies

4a – 6a Padbury Court, probably built c. 1760

152 Brick Lane, shop and workshop tenement probably built in 1778 for Daniel Dellacort, a distiller

Click Adam Dant & Jean-Baptiste Marot’s map to spot Prince Charles, The Beatles, Jane Birkin, Barbara Cartland, Georges Meliès, Marcel Proust, The Montgolfier Brothers, Pepé le Pew, Gerard Depardieu, Marcel Marceau, Béccasine, Serge Gainsbourg, Catherine Deneuve, José Bové, Brigitte Bardot, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Ubu Roi & Femen

In the Centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Sir John Soane’s Museum celebrates the Bicentenary of the end of the Napoleonic Wars between Britain and France with an exhibition entitled Peace Breaks Out! which opens today.

Complementing the show, the Museum asked me to introduce them to some of the artists of Spitalfields Life, who have created new works to be shown alongside the historic artefacts and today I am publishing some of these creations with a few original items that inspired them.

Cartographer extraordinaire Adam Dant collaborated with his Gallic counterpart Jean-Baptiste Marot on a map in which each portrays the other’s culture. Alice Pattullo & Laura Knight have created prints inspired by objects in the exhibition, while Paul Bommer has made a series of themed Delft tiles. Romilly Saumarez Smith & Lucy Gledhill working as Savage & Chong are showing their jewellery and Bridie Hall is making a selection of decoupage using images from the show.

The English Family in Paris, Anon c. 1814

The English Family at the Museum in Paris, Anon c.1814

An Englishwoman tears her husband away from the attractions of Paris, Anon c.1818

The Englishman arrives in France, Godisart de Cari c.1814/5

The Englishman returns from France, Godisart de Cari c.1814/5

Frenchwoman after a meal in England, Anon c.1814

Frenchman after a meal in England, Anon c. 1814

Screenprint by Alice Pattullo, 2014 - “Many of the items in this exhibition are souvenirs celebrating the peace brought about at the end of the War. I thought it would be interesting to record these as a print, which in itself can become a souvenir of this exhibition, and commemorate the stylistic influences that crossed the newly-reopened channel from Paris.”

Peace of Paris jug, Bristol Pottery 1814

Mourning ring with lock of Napoleon’s hair presented to John Soane, 1822

Inscription on the ring by Elizabeth Balcombe who presented the ring to Soane

Plate from a Peace of Paris teaset, Coalport Pottery 1814

Brisé Opera Fan with a panel representing Peace, c. 1814 – made in China for European market

Purse given to Pugilist Gentleman John Jackson for sparring for the Emperor of Russia, 1814

Commemorative cup, transferware c. 1814

Screenprint by Laura Knight, 2014 – “The Napoleonic period is a huge subject of which I have only touched the surface,but the uniforms stood out immediately for me as highly decorative,theatrical and impractical,reflecting the many ways in which these wars were choreographed,staged and played out.”

Pages from Laura Knight’s sketchbook, 2014

Medal for the disbanding of the Bethnal Green Volunteers, 1814

John Fairburn’s illustration of the Grand National Jubilee, 1814

John Fairburn’s illustration of the Pagoda at the Grand National Jubilee, 1814

John Fairburn’s illustration of Sadler’s Balloon Ascent at the Grand National Jubilee, 1814

John Fairburn’s illustration of the Royal Booth at the Grand National Jubilee, 1814

John Fairburn’s illustration of the sham fight on the Serpentine at the Grand National Jubilee, 1814

John Fairburn’s illustration of the sea battle on the Serpentine at the Grand National Jubilee, 1814

Jubilee Trunk made in Hyde Park during the fair, 1814

View of the Excise Office as illuminated on 9th, 10th & 11th June 1814

Card by Laura Knight, 2014

PEACE BREAKS OUT! runs at Sir John Soane’s Museum, Lincoln’s Inn Fields from today until 13th September

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Today, it is my great delight to reveal these breathtaking photographs taken by Horace Warner in Spitalfields at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These pictures which have never been reproduced before, and have hardly been seen by anyone outside his immediate family, are published with the gracious permission of Horace Warner’s grandson, Ian McGilvray.

Previously, only a handful of Warner’s sympathetic portraits of the children who lived in the courtyards off Quaker St – known as the Spitalfields Nippers - were believed to exist, but through some assiduous detective work by researcher Vicky Stewart and a stroke of good luck upon my part, we were able to make contact with his grandson who keeps two albums comprising more than one hundred of his grandfather’s pictures of Spitalfields, from which the photographs published here are selected.

Many of the pictures in these albums are photographic masterpieces and I believe them to be the most significant set of photographs in existence of East Enders in this era. There is a rare clarity of vision in the tender photography of Horace Warner that brings us startling close to the Londoners of 1900 and permits us to look them in the eye for the first time. You can imagine my excitement when I met Ian McGilvray and opened Horace Warner’s albums to discover so many astonishing pictures. I experienced a sensation almost of vertigo, like looking down the dark well of time and being surprised by these faces in sharp focus, looking back at me.

It was no straightforward journey to get there. I first published a series of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers in these pages in 2011, reproduced from a booklet accompanying a 1975 exhibition of the handful of pictures once published in fund-raising leaflets by the Bedford Institute in 1912. Then last year, when I sought to reproduce these pictures in The Gentle Author’s London Album, Vicky Stewart established that the photographic prints were held in the Quaker archive at Friends House in the Euston Rd.

This discovery which permitted me to include those pictures in my Album was reward enough for our labours and I wrote an account of our quest entitled In Search of the Spitalfields Nippers last August.  The story might easily have ended there, if we had not been shown a 1988 letter from Horace Warner’s daughter Gwen McGilvray that accompanied the prints. In this letter, Gwen mentions the ‘albums’ which was the first tantalising evidence of the existence of more of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields photographs.

Even as our hopes of finding these other pictures were raised, we were disappointed to realise that Gwen was unlikely to be still alive. Yet through the research facility now available online and thanks to his unusual surname, Vicky was able to find an address for one of Gwen’s four children, her son Ian, in Norfolk. It was a few years out of date but there was a chance he was still there, so we waited until the Album was published in October and sent off a copy to Ian McGilvray.

Within weeks, Ian wrote back to ask if I would like to visit him and see the ‘albums.’ It was my good fortune that the one of Horace Warner’s grandchildren we had been able to reach was also the guardian of the photographic legacy. And so it was that on a bright winter’s day I made a journey to Norfolk to meet Ian and see the complete set of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers for the first time. My fear was that I had seen the most important images among those already known, but my shock was to recognise that the best pictures have not yet been seen.

These wonderful photographs have the power to revolutionise how we think about East Enders at the end of the nineteenth century since, in spite of their poverty, these are undeniably proud people who claim a right to existence which transcends their economic status. Unlike the degraded photographic images created by charitable campaigners or the familiar middle-class studio portraits, Horace Warner’s relaxed intimate pictures draw us into a personal relationship with his subjects whom we meet as our equals. The Spitalfields Nippers are a unique set of photographs, that witness a particular time, a specific place, a discrete society, and an entire lost world.

As a designer managing the family wallpaper-printing business, Horace Warner had the income and resources to explore photography in his spare time and produce images of the highest standard technically. As superintendent of the charitable Bedford Institute, he was brought into close contact over many years with the families who lived nearby in the yards and courts south of Quaker St. As a Quaker, he believed in the equality of all and he was disturbed by the poverty he met in the East End. In the Spitalfields Nippers these things came together for Horace Warner, creating compassionate images that gave dignity to his subjects and producing great photography that is without parallel in his time.

Ian McGilvray has granted his blessing to the publication of all Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers in a book for the first time so that everyone can see them and – with your help – we mean to do this on November 1st. As with our other titles, I need to gather a group of readers who are willing to invest £1000 each. Please email Spitalfieldslife@gmail.com if you would like to help bring this exciting project to fruition and I will send you further information.

Excerpt of 1988 letter from Horace Warner’s daughter Gwen McGilvray referring to the ‘albums’ and giving the name of his grandson, Ian McGilvray. (Reproduced courtesy of Friends House)

Sisters Wakefield

Walter Seabrook

Celia Compton

Photo referred to by Gwen McGilvray with headlines at the end of the Boer War, dating it to 1902

At the Whitechapel Gallery to see the Burne Jones exhibition 1901

In Pearl St (now Calvin St)

See the man looking over the wall in Union Place (off Wheler St)

Friedericke Huber’s cover design for the book to be published on November 1st

Publication Rights in these Photographs Reserved

Click here to pre-order a copy of SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS by Horace Warner

Yesterday, I revealed the astonishing discovery of the unknown albums of more than a hundred of Horace Warner’s photographs of the Spitalfields Nippers dating from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and today I trace a little of what is known about the photographer.

Horace Warner (1871-1939)

This is a self-portrait by Horace Warner taken when he was around thirty years old at the time he was photographing the Spitalfields Nippers, the pictures by which he is remembered and that establish his posthumous reputation as a photographer. If you look closely you can just see the bulb in his left hand to control the shutter, permitting him to capture this image of himself.

With his pale moon-like face, straggly moustache and shiny locks, Horace looks younger than his years and yet there is an intensity in his concentration matched by the poised energy of his right arm. This is how he chose to present himself – wielding a brush, indicative of his profession as a wallpaper designer in the family business of Jeffrey & Co, run by his father Metford Warner (1843-1930), where he and his brother Marcus worked. The company was established in 1836 and Metford was a junior partner who became proprietor by 1869 and, under his leadership, they became a leading manufacturer. He was committed to representing artists’ designs more accurately than had been done before and commissioned William Burges and Walter Crane, among other leading designers of the time – most famously, collaborating with William Morris.

Last week, I set out to visit three places that were familiar to Horace Warner in an attempt to better understand the connections between the different aspects of his life that found their expression in these locations. First, I took the train to Highbury and walked up the hill beside the long eighteenth century terrace bounding the fields, turning off into the quiet crescent of Aberdeen Park, a private estate laid out in the eighteen-fifties.

The turret of the former Warner family house stood out among the other comfortably-appointed villas, as testimony to the success of Jeffrey & Co, supplying wallpaper to the artistic classes in the growing capital at the end of the nineteenth century. A woman pushing a pram along the pavement in front of me turned out to be the nanny employed by the current residents and, when I explained the reason for my visit, she volunteered that there were a series of old photographs still hanging in an upper room, which also retains its turn of the century embossed wallpaper.

Leaving the ghosts of Aberdeen Park, I turned south, following Horace’s route to work by walking for half an hour down through Canonbury, past the Tower and along the route of the New River, to meet the Essex Rd where the Jeffrey & Co wallpaper factory stands. An elegant turn-of-the century utilitarian building with three well-lit floors above for manufacturing and a showroom on the ground floor, it is currently occupied by a wholefood chain. William Morris’ wallpaper designs were all printed here until the thirties when they were taken over by Sandersons and the factory closed in 1940 but, if you go round to the side street, the loading doors remain as if another delivery might arrive at any time.

From here, the East End is a couple of miles south. Now in her nineties, Horace Warner’s surviving daughter, Ruth Finken, still remembers accompanying her father on this journey as a small child to deliver Christmas presents in Quaker St, where he was Sunday School teacher.  She recalls how dark, dirty and frightening everything looked, and being told to hold her father’s hand and keep close. Ruth reports that her father was always one for getting the family to pose for his photos and that he spent ages getting everyone in exactly the right position. She also has a memory of one of his photographs of a pair of child’s boots upon the drawing room wall, along with a couple of his portraits of the Spitalfields Nippers, as reminders of those who were less fortunate.

Horace Warner’s participation as Superintendent at the Bedford Institute continued an involvement for his family in Spitalfields that stretched back to the seventeenth century when the Warner Bell Foundry was established. The Warner family were part of the Quaker movement too, almost since its inception, and the naming of Quaker St derives from the Friends Meeting House that opened there in 1656.

Yet the Quaker Mission at the Bedford Institute, that Horace Warner knew, owed its origin to a revival of Quakerism that happened a century later in Spitalfields – encouraged by Peter Bedford (1780-1864), a philanthropist silk merchant who devoted himself to alleviating poor social conditions. Rebuilt in 1893, the handsome red brick Bedford House that stands today would have been familiar to Warner.

In The Condition of The Working Class in England, Frederick Engels referred to the tragedy of a family living in the courtyards south of Quaker St as an example of the degradation of the poor in London and it was these people, living almost upon the doorstep of the Bedford Institute, that Horace Warner befriended and photographed. It was a small area, a narrow rectangle of shabby dwellings circumscribed by roads upon four sides, and no more than a hundred yards wide and five hundreds yards long. Today there is nothing left of it but Horace Warner’s photographs, yet since he annotated them with the names of his subjects we hope we can now discover more about the lives of these people through research into the records. Ultimately, what we can discover about Horace Warner exists in his response to others and their response to him, as manifest in his photographs.

“There isn’t a great deal of information we know about Horace,” his grandson Ian McGilvray admitted to me, “and, in any case, I imagine he would probably have been quite content to have it that way.”

Ruth Finken, Horace Warner’s daughter, is looking forward to seeing all of her father’s Spitalfields Nippers photographs in a book for the first time and – with your help – we mean to publish this on November 1st. As with our other titles, I need to gather a group of readers who are willing to invest £1000 each. Please email Spitalfieldslife@gmail.com if you would like to help bring this exciting project to fruition and I will send you further information.

The Warner family home in Aberdeen Park, Highbury

Jeffrey & Co, Wallpaper Factory & Showroom, 64 Essex Rd – the family business run by Metford Warner, where Horace worked with his brother Marcus

Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitafields, where Horace Warner was Sunday School Superintendent

Horace Warner’s photograph of one of the yards off Quaker St

Horace Warner’s photograph of Union Place off Quaker St

Horace Warner’s photograph of the children who lived in the yards beside Quaker St in 1900

Washing Day, Horace Warner’s photograph of children boiling up hot water for laundry

Little Adelaide’s Best & Only Boots - a photograph by Horace Warner that Ruth Finken, his daughter, remembers upon the drawing room wall as a child – the Bedford Institute distributed boots to children

Friedericke Huber’s cover design for the book to be published on November 1st

Publication Rights in these Photographs Reserved

Click here to pre-order a copy of SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS by Horace Warner

You can see more of Horace Warner’s photographs here

An Astonishing Photographic Discovery

Click to enlarge Adam Dant’s Map of Huguenots in Spitalfields

This week sees the inauguration of the Map of Huguenots in Spitalfields at Townhouse in Fournier St to which anyone with Huguenot ancestors in this neck of the works is invited to come along and add their forebears.

Cartographer extraordinaire Adam Dant has drawn a huge map as big as a wall and Stanley Rondeau, whose great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jean Rondeau arrived as an immigrant in 1685, put a pin in it to mark his ancestor. Undoubtedly, this was the first of many to come as the Huguenots converge upon Spitalfields again next week for the Huguenot Threads festival which runs from 9th until 20th July.

The plan is to collect as many stories of Spitalfields Huguenot ancestry onto the map as possible to create an archive, and the next steps will be an online version and a possible publication. In the meantime, if you are unable to come to Spitalfields in person to make your mark, you can follow the evolution of the map at the facebook page for Townhouse and submit stories of your Huguenot ancestors to be included. Later, everyone with forebears on the map will be invited to a party to meet each other and celebrate their shared history.

Spitalfields was the most concentrated Huguenot settlement in Britain of the twenty-five thousand French Protestants who fled across the Channel, to save their lives after the Revocation of the Act of Nantes, in 1685 – and who thereby introduced the word refugee into the English language.

Stanley places his ancestor Jean Rondeau on the map

Stanley Rondeau, Spitalfields’ most celebrated Huguenot

Stanley Rondeau congratulates Adam Dant on his Huguenot Map of Spitalfields

Stanley recounts the tale of the Rondeaus of Spitalfields for Adam

Photograph of map © Patricia Niven

Photographs of Stanley Rondeau & Adam Dant © Sarah Ainslie

The Map of Huguenots is at Townhouse, 5 Fournier St, until the end of August

Click here to learn more about the HUGUENOT THREADS festival

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Stanley Rondeau, Huguenot

Stanley Rondeau at the V&A

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Huguenot Portraits

Inspired by the report on The Dogs of Shoreditch this week, I consulted my copy of Thomas Bewick’s General History of Quadrupeds 1824 that I found in the Spitalfields Market recently to see what breeds were familiar two hundred years ago – and perhaps the major difference I discovered is that many breeds which were working dogs then are domestic now.

The Shepherd’s Dog

The Cur Dog

The Greenland Dog

The Bulldog

The Mastiff

The Ban Dog

The Dalmatian

The Irish Greyhound

The Greyhound

The Lurcher

The Terrier

The Beagle

The Harrier

The Fox Hound

The Old English Hound

The Spanish Pointer

The English Setter

The Newfoundland Dog

The Large Rough Water Dog

The Large Water Spaniel

The Small Water Spaniel

The Springer

The Comforter

The Turnspit

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Today I tell the strange story of the Aquarium, Menagerie & Wax Works that once stood in Spitalfields upon the site that British Land have earmarked for controversial redevelopment

Click to enlarge

You might walk past the Savoy Cafe opposite Worship St in Bishopsgate and not give it a second thought. Yet this building is a salient example of how an extraordinary history may be present without any indication. For here, in 1875, opened the East London Aquarium, Menagerie & Wax Works Exhibition.

You can read the accounts of this popular attraction in the press cuttings below, and marvel at the Victorians and their love of wonders. “The Aquarium was a small, popular pleasure resort on Bishopsgate and contained, amongst other exhibits, a number of zoological specimens including bears, lions, jackals, birds and monkeys,” explained ‘The Police News,’ “The building extended from High St Shoreditch to Blossom St, having a frontage of eleven feet in the former and eighty-four feet in the latter street. The premises were once occupied by a silk merchant and were a few years ago transformed into an Aquarium for the lower classes, the price of admission being only one penny.”

Yet in spite of the celebrity wax figures, the water tanks with seals, the cave with illuminated views, the rifle gallery with bird shows and the arena offering performances by tamed lions three times daily, what was most remarkable about the East London Aquarium, Managerie & Wax Work Exhibition was the bizarre manner of its demise. Early on the morning of 8th June 1884, a fire broke out in the wax exhibition which quickly grew beyond control and entirely gutted the building, destroying the animals. “It does seem somewhat odd that in an Aquarium, of all places in the world, there should not be water enough to put out a fire,” queried one correspondent vainly.

The exoticism of the captive creatures added a level of grotesque surrealism to news reports of the conflagration. “The animals made their appearance at an iron-barred window looking out upon the thoroughfare running at the rear of the menagerie,” reported ‘The Standard’ referring to Blossom St, “Now and again watchers saw a black muzzle appear at the window and soon the form of a huge black bear came into view. The spectators were then horrified by seeing the animal extend its paws and convey to its mouth the large jagged fragments of glass that were scattered before it, but an adventurous bystander left the excited crowd, clambered up the wall and threw down the broken pieces from the window sill.”

Another account reports that, in the area where the seals performed, the fire was less severe – permitting the rescue of some animals. “The fish were destroyed but through the exertions of the firemen, the seals, the ducks, the elk, the jackal and the three bears were saved,” confirmed ‘The Police News.’

“Nature sometimes provides the spectacle of bird, beast and reptile all brought together to one level of helplessness by the tyranny of fire, but in the prairie or in the jungle they could at least run for life,” concluded the Standard’s correspondent in grim resignation, “For very obvious reasons, they could not be released onto the streets of East London.”

Walk down Blossom St today and you will find that warehouses built upon the site of the aquarium – two years later in 1886 – still stand, giving a clear indication of its location. You can imagine the horrified crowd watching the poor black bear clawing at broken glass and you wonder if the caves with illuminated views still exist in the vaults below your feet.

Over coming weeks, I shall be telling more of the stories of these streets at the edge of Spitalfields, unravelling the complex history of an area which has been densely inhabited for more than a thousand years and is currently subject to redevelopment proposals – as you can read below.

Police News, Saturday June 14th 1884

20 Norton Folgate is the former location of the entrance to the East London Aquarium, Menagerie & Wax Work Exhibition

City Press, 13th February 1875

City Press, 17th September 1879

City Press, 3rd December 1881

City Press,  January 5th 1884

City Press, September 21st 1892

Sketch by Tim Whittaker of Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust’s proposal to rebuild the corner of Folgate St & Shoreditch High St, linking the surviving nineteenth century terraces and restoring the streetscape while providing an entrance to the new development in the courtyard

These warehouses in Blossom St were built in 1886 upon the site of the London Aquarium and may include the vaults of the earlier building, but British Land  proposes to reduce them to a facade as part of their redevelopment

Blossom St Photographs © Simon Mooney

Press cuttings courtesy Bishopsgate Insitute

Aquarium poster courtesy British Library

Animal engravings by Thomas Bewick

My grateful thanks to Matt Brown of the Londonist and Hannah Velten author of BEASTLY LONDON – A history of animals in the city for their contributions to this feature

Readers are encouraged to attend and record your comments in writing at the exhibition

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The Return of British Land

Now that the summer visitors are here and thronging in the capital’s streets and transport systems, I thought I would send you this fine set of postcards published by Charles Skilton, including my special favourites the escapologist and the pavement artist.

Looking at these monochrome images of the threadbare postwar years, you might easily imagine the photographs were earlier – but Margaret Rutherford in ‘Ring Round the Moon’ at The Globe in Shaftesbury Ave in number nine dates them to 1950. Celebrated in his day as publisher of the Billy Bunter stories, Charles Skilton won posthumous notoriety for his underground pornographic publishing empire, Luxor Press.

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On the second day of British Land’s public exhibition for their controversial redevelopment of Norton Folgate, I publish the story of Neville Turner whose family lived in Elder St before British Land partly demolished it in the seventies. The exhibition is open today from midday until 5pm, and readers are encouraged to go along and record their comments in writing – further details below.

This is Neville Turner sitting on the step of number seven Elder St, just as he used to when he was growing up in this house in the nineteen forties and fifties. Once upon a time, young Neville carved his name upon a brick on the left hand side of the door, but that has been replaced now that these are prized buildings of historic importance. Yet Neville counts himself lucky that the house he grew up in still stands, after it came close to demolition when half the street was swept away by British Land in the seventies.

At the time Neville lived here, the landlords did no maintenance and the buildings were dilapidated. But Neville’s Uncle Arthur wallpapered the living room with attractive wisteria wallpaper, which became the background to the happy family life they all enjoyed, in the midst of the close-knit community in Elder St during the war and afterwards. Subsequently, the same wisteria wallpaper appeared as a symbol of decay, hanging off the wall, in photographs taken to illustrate the dereliction of Elder St when members of the Spitalfields Trust squatted it to save the eighteenth century houses from demolition.

It was only when an artist appeared – one Sunday morning in Neville’s childhood – sketching the pair of weaver’s houses at number five and seven, that Neville first became aware that he was growing up in a dwelling of historic importance. Yet to this day, Neville protests he carries no sentiment about old houses. “This affection for the Dickensian past is no substitute for hot and cold running water,” he admitted to me frankly, explaining that the family had to go the bathhouse in Goulston St each week when he lived in Elder St.

However, in spite of his declaration, it soon became apparent that this building retains a deep personal significance for Neville on account of the emotional history it contains, as he revealed to me when he returned to Spitalfields this week.

“My parents moved from Lambeth into number seven Elder St in 1931 and lived there until they were rehoused in 1974. The roof leaked and the landlords let these houses fall into disrepair, I think they wanted the plots for redevelopment. But then, after my parents were rehoused in Bethnal Green, the Spitalfields Trust took them over in 1977.

I was born in 1939 just before the war began and my mother called me Neville after Neville Chamberlain, who she saw as the bringer of peace. I got a lot of stick for that at school. I had two elder brothers, Terry born in 1932 and Douglas born in 1936. My father was a firefighter and consequently we saw a lot of him. I felt quite well off, I never felt deprived. In the house, there was a total of six rooms plus a basement and an outside basement, and we lived in four rooms on the ground floor and on the first floor, and there was a docker and his wife who lived up on the top floor.

My earliest memory is of the basements of Elder St being reinforced as air raid shelters in case the buildings collapsed – and of going down there when the sirens sounded. Even people passing in the street took shelter there. Pedlars and knife-grinders, they would bang on the door and come on down to the basement. That was normal, we were all part and parcel of the same lot. I recall the searchlights, I found it interesting and I wondered what all the excitement was about. War seemed quite mad to me and, when it ended, I remember the street party with bonfires at each end of the street and everybody overjoyed, but I couldn’t understand why they were all so happy. None of the houses in Elder St were damaged.

We used to play out in the street, games like Hopscotch and Tin Can Copper. All the houses had a door where you could go up onto the roof and it was normal for people in the terrace to walk along the roof, visiting each other. You’d be sitting in your living room and there’d be a knock on the window from above, and it was your neighbours coming down the stairs. As children, we used to go wandering in the City of London, and I remember seeing typists typing and thinking that they did not actually make anything and wondering, ‘Who makes the cornflakes?’ Across Commercial St, it was all manufacturing, clothing, leather and some shoemaking – quite a contrast.

After the war, my father worked as a bookie’s runner in the Spitalfields Market, where the porters and traders were keen gamblers, and he operated from the Starting Price Office in Brushfield St. He never got up before ten but he worked late. They were not allowed to function legally and the police would often take them in for a charge – the betting slips had to be hidden if the police came round. At some parts of the year, we were well off but other parts were call the ‘Kipper Season’ which was when the horse-racing stopped and the show-jumping began, then we had very little. I knew this because my pocket money vanished.

I joined the Vallance Youth Club in Chicksand St run by Mickey Davis. He was only four foot tall but he was quite a strong character. He was attacked a few times in the street on account of being short and a few of us used to call up to his flat above the Fruit & Wool Exchange, so that he could walk with us to the club, but then he got ill and died. Tom Darby and Ashel Collis took over running the club, one was a silversmith and the other was a passer in the tailoring trade. We did boxing, table tennis and football, and they took us camping to Abridge in Essex. We got a bus all the way there and it only cost sixpence.

I moved on to the Brady Club in Hanbury St – it changed my outlook on life. They had a music society, a chess society, a drama society and we used to go to stay at Skeate House in Surrey at weekends. If you signed up to pay five shillings a week, you could go on a trip to Switzerland for £15. Yogi Mayer was the club captain. He called me in and said, ‘This is a private chat. We are asking every boy – If you can’t manage the £15, we will make up the shortfall. But this is between you and I, nobody else will know. I believe that everybody in the East End should be able to have an overseas holiday each year.’ It endeared him to me and made a big impression. When I woke in Switzerland, the sight of the lakes and the mountains was such a contrast to Elder St, and when we came back from our fortnight away I got very down – depressed, you would say now. I was the only non-Jewish person in the Brady Club, only I didn’t realise it. On one of the weekends at Skeate House, I did the washing up and dried it with the yellow towel on a Saturday. But Yogi Mayer said, ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

A friend of my brother’s worked in Savile Row and I thought it would be good for me too. I went to French & Stanley just behind Savile Row and they said they did need somebody but not just yet. So then I went to G.Ward & Co and asked if they wanted anybody, and there was this colonel type and he said, ‘Start tomorrow!’ I was fifteen and a bit, I had left school that Christmas-time. It lasted a couple of years and they were good to me. The cutter would give you the roll of work to be made up and say, ‘It’s for a friend of yours, Hugh Gaitskell.’ When I asked the manager what this meant, he said, ‘We’re Labour and they’re not.’

In 1964, I left Elder St for good, when I got married. I met my wife Margaret at work, she was the machinist and I was the cutter. She used to bring in Greek food and I liked it, and she said, ‘Would you like to come and have it where I live? You’ll have no excuse for forgetting the address because it’s Neville Rd!’

When I started in tailoring, the rateable value of the houses in Elder St was low because of the sitting tenants and low rents, and nobody ever moved. We thought it was good, it was a kind of security. The money people had they spent on decorating and, in my memory, it was always warm and brightly decorated. There was a good sense of well-being, that did seem generally to be the case. We were offered to buy both the houses, five and seven Elder St, for eighteen hundred quid but my father refused because we didn’t want them both.”

Neville with his grandmother.

Neville’s mother Ada Sims.

Neville’s father Charles Turner was in the fire service during the war (fourth from left in back row).

Neville as a schoolboy.

Neville’s ration book.

Coker’s Dairy in Fleur de Lis St used to take care of their regular customers - “If you were loyal to them, they’d give you an extra piece of cheese under the counter.”

Neville aged eleven in 1951, photographed by Griffiths of Bethnal Green.

Neville at Saville Row when he began his career as a pattern cutter at sixteen.

Neville’s father Charles owned the only car in Elder St - “We had a car in Elder St when nobody had a car in Elder St, but it vanished when we had no money.”

Neville as a young man.

A family Christmas in Elder St, 1968 – Neville sits next to his father at the dinner table.

Neville’s father, Charles.

Neville and Margaret.

Margaret and Minas.

Neville, Margaret and their son Minas.

Neville’s Uncle Arthur who hung the wisteria wallpaper.

Minas and Terry.

The living room of number seven photographed by the Spitalfields Trust in 1977 with Uncle Arthur’s wisteria wallpaper hanging off the walls.

Neville Turner outside number seven Elder St where he grew up

Readers are encouraged to attend and record your comments in writing at the exhibition

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The Return of British Land

The East London  Aquarium, Menagerie & Wax Works

On the final day of British Land’s public exhibition for their controversial redevelopment of Norton Folgate, I publish the story of James Frankcom and his quest to find the relics of this ancient Liberty, which British Land are seeking to rebrand as ‘Blossom St.’ The exhibition is open today from 4pm until 8pm. This could be your last chance to visit these fine old buildings, and readers are encouraged to go and record their comments in writing – further details below.

James Frankcom holds the Beadle’s staff of Norton Folgate from 1672

For years, Spitalfields resident James Frankcom was on a quest to find the lost relics of the Liberty of Norton Folgate and – when he found them – with true magnanimous spirit, he invited me and Contributing Photographer Alex Pink to share in his glorious moment of discovery.

First recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086, the nine acres north of Spitalfields known today as Norton Folgate were once the manor of Nortune Foldweg – ‘Nortune’ meaning ‘northern estate’ and “Folweig’ meaning ‘highway,’ referring to Ermine St, the Roman road north from the City of London that passed through the territory. Irrigated by the spring in Holywell St, this fertile land was within the precincts of the Priory of St Mary Spital until 1547 when, after the Reformation, it achieved autonomy as the Liberty of Norton Folgate, ruled by a court of ten officers described as the “Ancient Inhabitants.”

These elected representatives – including women – took their authority from the people and they asserted their right to self-government without connection to any church, maintaining the poor, performing marriages and burials, and superintending their own watchmen and street lighting. The officers of the Liberty were the Head Borough, the Constable who supervised the Beadles, the Scavenger who dealt with night soil, and Overseers of the Poor. And thus were the essentials of social organisation and waste disposal effectively accomplished for centuries in Norton Folgate.

When James Frankcom discovered that he lived within the former Liberty, he began to explore the history and found an article in Home Counties Magazine of 1905 which illustrated the relics of Norton Folgate including a beadle’s staff, a sixteenth century muniment chest and an almsbox, held at that time in Stepney Central Library.

James contacted Malcolm Barr-Hamilton, the Archivist, at Tower Hamlets Local History Library in Bancroft Rd which houses artifacts transferred from the Whitechapel Library in 2010. There he found the minute books of Norton Folgate from 1729 until 1900, detailing the activities of the court and nightly reports by the watchmen. Curiously, in spite of the rowdy reputation that this particular neighbourhood of theatres and alehouses enjoyed through the centuries, including the famous arrest of Christopher Marlowe in 1589, the nightwatchmen recorded an unbroken sequence of  “All’s well.”

In the penultimate entry of the minute book, dated October 1900, when the Liberty was abolished at the time of the foundation of the London County Council, James found mention of “certain relics of the Liberty of no use to the new Metropolitan Borough of Stepney” which the board of trustees gave to Whitechapel Museum for safe keeping. Searching among hundreds of index cards recording material transferred from Whitechapel to the archive, he found three beadle’s rods and an almsbox from Norton Folgate. Disappointingly, the muniment box had gone missing at some point in the last century, possibly when the collection was moved for safety to an unknown location during World War II.

When James put in a request to see the almsbox and the beadles’ rods, they could not be found at first but eventually they were located and, a year later, I met James outside the Bancroft Library, where the local history collection is held and we went inside together to see the relics. Upon a table in the vast library chamber was the battered seven-sided alms box cut from a single piece of oak in 1600 and secured by four separate locks. It was a relic from another world, the world of Shakespeare’s London, and three centuries of “alms for oblivion” had once been contained in this casket.

Yet equally remarkable was the staff of Norton Folgate with a tiny sculpture upon the top of a realistic four-bar gate complete with the pegs that held it together – an heraldic pun upon the name of Norton Folgate. Since the photograph of 1901, it had suffered some damage but the inscription “Norton Folgate 1672″ was still visible. Bearing the distinction of being London’s oldest staff of office, it represents the authority of the people.

James Frankcom could not resist wielding this staff that was once of such significance in the place where he lives and and savouring the sense of power it imparted. It was as if James were embodying the spirit of one of the “Ancient Inhabitants” and not difficult to imagine that, if he had dwelt in Norton Folgate in an earlier century, he might have brandished it for real – apparelled in a suitably dignified coat and hat of office, of course.

Dating from 1672, this is the oldest Beadle’s staff in London and it represents the authority of the people in opposition to the power of the church. The gate is an heraldic pun upon the name of Norton Folgate.

The painted Beadles’ staffs date from  the coronation of George IV in 1820.

Hewn from single piece of oak, the seven-sided almsbox of Norton Folgate made in 1600.

“This box was divised bi Frances Candell for THE pore 1600″ is inscribed upon the top and upon the lid is this text - “My sonne defrayde not the pore of hys allmes and turne not awaie they eies from him that hath nede. Lete not they hande be strecched owte to relaue and shut when thou sholdest gewe.”

Title page of the earliest minute book of Norton Folgate 1729

In Norton Folgate, the watchmen recorded an unbroken sequence of “all’s well” night after night.

In the last minute book, on 24th October 1900, the Liberty of Norton Folgate was abolished with the establishment of the London County Council.

The relics of the Liberty of Norton Folgate as illustrated in Home Counties Magazine, 1905 – including the lost sixteenth century muniment chest and the former courthouse in Folgate St.

Photographs copyright © Alex Pink

Readers are encouraged to attend and record your comments in writing at the exhibition

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The Return of British Land

The East London  Aquarium, Menagerie & Wax Works

Neville Turner of Elder St

When the summer heat hits the city and the streets get dusty and dry, I like to seek refuge in the green shade of a cemetery. Commonly, I visit Bow Cemetery – but last week I went along to explore Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington to find the graves of the Music Hall Artistes resting there.

John Baldock, Cemetery Keeper, led me through the undergrowth to show me the memorials newly restored by the Music Hall Guild and then left me to my own devices. Alone in the secluded leafy glades of the overgrown cemetery with the Music Hall Artistes, I swore I could hear distant singing accompanied by the tinkling of heavenly ivories.

George Leybourne, Songwriter, Vocalist and Comedian, also known as Champagne Charlie (1842 – 1884) & Albert Chevalier (1861- 1923), Coster Comedian and Actor. Chevalier married Leybourne’s daughter Florrie and they all rest together.

George Leybourne - “Champagne Charlie is my name, Champagne Charlie is my name ,There’s no drink as good as fizz, fizz, fizz, I’ll drink every drop there is, is, is!”

Albert Chevalier – “We’ve been together now for forty years, An’ it don’t seem a day too much, There ain’t a lady livin’ in the land, As I’d swop for my dear old Dutch.”

G W Hunt (1838 – 1904) Composer and Songwriter, his most famous works were “MacDermott’s War Song” (The Jingo Song), “Dear Old Pals” and “Up In A Balloon” for George Leybourne and Nelly Power.

G W Hunt

Fred Albert George Richard Howell (1843  - 1886) Songwriter and Extempore Vocalist

Fred Albert

Dan Crawley (1871 – 1912) Comedian, Vocalist, Dancer and Pantomime Dame rests with his wife Lilian Bishop, Actress and Male Impersonator. He made his London debut at nineteen at Royal Victor Theatre, Victoria Park, and for many years performed three shows a day on the sands at Yarmouth, where he met his wife.They married in Hackney in 1893 and had four children, and toured together as a family, including visiting Australia, before they both died at forty-one years old.

Dan Crawley

Herbert Campbell (1844 – 1904) Comedian and Pantomime Star. The memorial behind the tombstone was erected by a few of his friends. Herbert Campbell played the Dame in Pantomime at Drury Lane for forty years alongside Dan Leno, until his death at at sixty-one.

Herbert Campbell, famous comedian and dame of Drury Lane

Walter Laburnum George Walter Davis (1847 – 1902) Singer, Patter Vocalist and Songwriter

Walter Laburnum

Nelly Power Ellen Maria Langham (1854 – 1887) started her theatrical career at the age of eight, and was a gifted songstress and exponent of the art of male impersonation. Her most famous song was ‘The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery.” She died from pleurisy on 19th January 1887, aged just thirty-two.

Nelly Power - Vesta Tilley was once her understudy

The Music Hall Guild will be hosting a free guided walk through Abney Park Cemetery to visit the Music Hall Artistes next Sunday 27th July – meet at the cemetery gates at 2pm

Roy Reed took these pictures of Billingsgate Market when he was a twenty-three-year-old documentary photography student at the London College of Printing in 1975 and they are seeing the light of day for the first time now.

Roy’s enthusiasm for the subject was greater than the interest of the student-journalist who asked him to take the pictures for a project on London’s dying markets. “When I suggested we get there early, she said, ‘See you there at eight,’” Roy recalled, rolling his eyes significantly. In the event, Roy got there at seven-thirty on a February morning and took his pictures just here as business was winding up at the nocturnal market. Forty years later, any disappointment Roy might harbour that the project was never written up and published is outweighed by his satisfaction in having taken these rare photographs of a lost world.

“It was nice chatting with the porters,” Roy remembered fondly, “No-one seemed to mind having their photograph taken – except maybe the guy in the tweed hat, you can see him looking at me suspiciously in the picture.” Taken at the time the market was already due to leave its ancient location next to London Bridge, Roy’s lively photographs comprise a fascinating record of a seemingly recent era in market life that grows increasingly remote.

Photographs copyright © Roy Reed

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The Last Fish Porters of Billingsgate Market

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Charlie Caisey, Fishmonger

Around Billingsgate Market

The Markets of Old London

James McBarron

When I published Bob Mazzer’s Underground photographs from the seventies and eighties, I was astonished by how many readers got in touch to name people in the pictures, but I never expected it to happen when I published Horace Warner’s photographs of the Spitalfields Nippers from around 1900. Yet Lynne Ellis wrote to say her father James McBarron recognised Celia Compton whom Horace Warner photographed at the age of fifteen in 1901. By the time James knew Celia, as a child in the thirties, she was Mrs Hayday and he encountered her as a money-lender when he was sent to make the weekly repayments on his mother’s loans.

Intrigued by this unexpected connection to a photograph of more than a century ago, I took the train from Fenchurch St down to Stanford Le Hope recently to meet James McBarron and learn more of his story. This is what he told me.

“I am from Hoxton, Shoreditch, I was born in George Sq at the back of Hoxton Sq – it’s not there anymore. There were seven tenements and another building where Mrs Hayday lived, all around a yard with a lamppost in the middle. We attached a rope onto the lamppost and swung on it. We used to have a bonfire there in November and all the families came along. It was like a village and a lot of people were related, and everyone knew each other. We were clannish and there were quite a few families with members in different flats – my grandmother and grandfather lived there in one flat and I had two aunts in another.

Eighty years later I can still remember Mrs Hayday, even though I was only seven, eight or nine at the time. It was in 1936 or thereabouts. She was a money-lender and I was sent by my mother every Sunday to pay sixpence to her, but it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. To my eyes, as young boy, she was overwhelming. I was shown into the bedroom by her daughter and she was always lying there in bed. She took out a book from the bedside and made a note of the money.  I recall an impression of crisp white sheets and she had dyed blonde hair. She was a buxom woman, a little blowsy. She smelled of scent – Phul Nana by Grossmith – the only scent I knew as a young boy, the factory was in Newgate St. I was awestruck because she was so unlike any of the other people I knew. There was a never a man there or a Mr Hayday. She was a very nice lady, she said, ‘Hello’ and ‘Say ‘Hello’ to your mum and dad.’ And that was Mrs Hayday.

My father, George, was a carpenter from Sunderland and he served in the Great War. My mother worked at Tom Smith’s Cracker Factory in Old St. My parents met in London and my mother’s family already lived in George Sq. My grandfather, he was an inventor and I admired him very much. He made a little working steam engine, and he tapped the gas main and had a tube with a little flame, so he could light his roll-ups. He played the violin and read music, and he never went to work. My gran used to go round to the pub for a jug of beer and they’d all go upstairs to my grandparents’ flat and play darts, and he’d play the violin.

We kids used to chop firewood to make money. The boys and girls used to go around collecting tea-chests and packing-boxes from the back of all the furniture factories, and say ‘Can we take it away, Mister?’ We chopped it up into sticks and made bundles, and we’d sell them for a penny or a ha-penny. We used to go to Spitalfields Market and ask for ‘Any spunks?’ or ‘Spunky oranges and apples?’ and they’d chuck the fruit that was going bad to us.

We didn’t think we were poor, except there was a family called Laban who were better off than us. He was a bookmaker and had touts. I remember their son had a jacket with pleats in the back and I wanted one like it, but when my mum eventually got me one it wasn’t so good. My father had a blue serge suit and it was pawned each Monday to pay the rent and bought back each Friday when he got paid. On Sundays, we went down to Stephenson’s Bakery in Curtain Rd to get a penny loaf.

When you came out of George Sq, there was a little alleyway leading through to Hoxton Market. There was Marcus the Newsagent, and next to it was Pollock’s and they had toy theatres in the window and these glass bottles with coloured liquid – it was a tiny shop. Next to that was Neville’s where my father bought our boots and shoes. I can remember every shop in the Market. Hoxton St was different then, bustling with stalls and there were barrows selling roasted chestnuts and boiled sheep’s heads.

William was the eldest child in our family, then I was born, then Peter, then Johnny  and last of all Margaret. There was twenty-one years between us and she was born while I was away in the army, so she didn’t know me when I came back. I knocked them up at seven in the morning and called, ‘Here’s your boy, back again!’ We had three rooms – two bedrooms and a living room, and that’s why we had to move.

After the war, they moved us up to Haggerston to a new building in Stean St and George Sq was demolished because it was a slum. Everything broke up when people moved out. They took out all our furniture – including a table and chest of drawers my father made – and put it in a closed van and fumigated it because of the bugs. I’ve still got his tool box. It was a ragtag and bobtail existence, but I think we were a little better off than some. “

Celia Compton photographed at age fifteen by Horace Warner in 1901. Years later in 1936, a year after her husband died and when James McBarron was a child, she lived at 5e George Sq and he knew her by her married name of Celia Hayday.

James McBarron with his father’s carpentry box

Margaret & George McBarron in Haggerston

James and his brother Peter

As a boy, James visited Benjamin Pollock’s Toy Theatre shop at 208 Hoxton Old Town

James’ younger brother Johnny in the new flat when the family were rehoused in Stean St, Haggerston, in 1946

James’ elder brother William at the piano

James & June McBarron

James & June McBarron got married in St Leonard’s Shoreditch on 5th June 1954 and celebrated their diamond wedding this summer

James McBarron, 1965

James catches mackerel on holiday in Devon

James & June McBarron’s children, Lynne & Ian, in the sixties

You may also like to read these other Hoxton stories

Kitty Jennings, Dressmaker

Joseph Markovitch, I’ve live in Hoxton for eight-six and a half years

James Parkinson, Physician of Hoxton

AS Jasper, A Hoxton Childhood

Thomas Fairchild, Gardener of Hoxton

The most recent acquisition in my Cries of London collection is a second edition of Charles Hindley’s ‘History of the Cries of London, Ancient & Modern’ from 1884. My predecessor had the same idea to collect images of the Cries and trace their development over time and, in his book, he reprints many wood blocks from earlier chapbooks, including the set below. Originally just the size of a thumbnail, these anonymous finely-observed prints evoke the circumstance and demeanour and of hawkers and pedlars in early-nineteenth century London with startling economy of means.

The Rabbit Man - Buy my rabbits! Rabbits, who’ll buy? Rabbit! Rabbit Who will buy?

New Cockles - Buy my cockles! Fine new cockles! Cockles fine and cockles new!

Banbury Cakes - Buy my nice and new Banbury Cakes! Buy my nice new Banbury Cakes, O!

Mulberries - Mulberries, all ripe and fresh today! Only a groat a pottle – full to the bottom!

Capers, Anchovies - Buy my capers! Buy my nice capers! Buy my anchovies! Buy my nice anchovies!

Lavender - Buy my lavender! Sweet blooming lavender! Sweet blooming lavender! Blooming lavender!

Mackerel - Live mackerel! Three a-shilling, O! Le’ping alive, O! Three a-shilling,O!

Shirt Buttons - Buy my shirt buttons! Shirt buttons! Buy shirt buttons! Buttons!

The Herb Wife - Buy rue! Buy sage! Buy mint! Buy rue, sage and mint, a farthing a bunch!

The Tinker - Maids, I mend old pots and kettles! Mend old pots and kettles, O!

Buy fine flounders! Fine dabs! - All alive, O! Fine dabs! Fine live flounders, O!

You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London I have collected

John Player’s Cries of London

More John Player’s Cries of London

Faulkner’s Street Cries

Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London

More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London

Kendrew’s Cries of London

London Characters

Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders

William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders

London Melodies

Henry Mayhew’s Street 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

William Nicholson’s London Types

John Leighton’s London Cries

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

More of Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders

Victorian Tradesmen Scraps

Cries of London Scraps

New Cries of London 1803

Cries of London Snap Cards

Julius M Price’s London Types

Adam Dant’s  New Cries of Spittlefields

There is spot where my eyes fall as I enter the house between the front door and the foot of the stair, where I always felt there was something missing and it was only when I visited Bow Church this spring to admire C R Ashbee’s restoration work that I realised there would once have been floor tiles in my entrance way. It was a notion enforced when I noticed some medieval encaustic tiles at Charterhouse and began to research the possible nature of the missing tiles from my house.

In 1852, William Godwin began creating gothic tiles by the encaustic process century at his factory at Lugwardine in Herefordshire and became one of the leading manufacturers in the nineteenth century, supplying the demand for churches, railway stations, schools, municipal buildings and umpteen suburban villas. Inevitably, some of these tiles have broken over the time and millions have been thrown out as demolition and the desire for modernity have escalated.

So I decided to create a floor with the odd tiles that no-one else wants, bringing together tiles that once belonged to whole floors of matching design, now destroyed, and give them a new home in my house. Oftentimes, I bought broken or chipped ones and paid very little for each one – but I hope you will agree that together their effect is magnificent.

Encaustic tiled floor designed by C R Ashbee for Bow Church using Godwin tiles

Medieval encaustic tiles at the bricked-up entrance to Charterhouse in Smithfield

You may also like to read about

My Quilt

A Fireplace of Moyr Smith Tiles

The quaint timbered dwelling with gables and a roughcast exterior manifests the idyll of domesticity for many and, as testimony to its potency, suburban streets up and down the country are lined with approximations to this notion in varying degrees of authenticity. Yet in a suburb north of Cricklewood, among the acres of development which spread across the land during the twentieth century, stands just such a house that is the embodiment of the romantic retreat, only this example dates from 1465 and it is not the result of architectural whimsy but a rare survival from another age.

Five miles up the Edgware Rd, where it becomes a dual carriageway, you turn left and walk up Oxgate Lane through the light industrial estate built upon the Oxgate farmlands laid out in 1285. At the crossroads, you turn right into Coles Hill Rd, described by B W Dexter in ‘Cricklewood Old & New ‘ in 1908 as having “all the charm of an untouched rural pathway with luxurious hedgerows and many varieties of wild flowers.” These days, it might be characterised as unremitting suburbia if it were not for the presence of Oxgate Farm, still asserting itself, undeterred by the changes that time has wrought.

Still roofed with its handmade tiles and floored with ancient worn flags, this is the oldest house in the Borough. Originally one of the eight Prebendal manors of St Paul’s Cathedral, the surviving building is believed to be a wing of the fifteenth century manor house, which was occupied in 1465 by Bartholomew Willesden, collector of the King’s taxes, and in 1500 by Henry Frowk, Lord Mayor. Elizabeth I’s half-brother, Lord Chief Warden of the Cinque Ports, Sir John Parrott, also lived here – he is best remembered today as the prototype for Shakespeare’s character of Falstaff.

Over the centuries, the manor reduced in size from a thousand acres until just the house and back garden that are left today today. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was home to the painter Marie Burtwhistle and then Shakespearian actor John Dignam and his wife Virginia, who cherished the house for its romance. But now, two years after Virginia’s death, Oxgate Farm has reached an impasse in its existence. At the beginning of the twentieth century brick footings were installed that have subsided, removing support for the timber frame structure so that, in some cases, the joists no longer meet the exterior walls and bedroom floors lurch at alarming angles. Shored up with scaffolding props and recently refused support by English Heritage, the property is too costly for the current owners to repair.

Like a great old galleon cast up by a tidal wave to sit in the beach car park surrounded by modern vehicles, Oxgate Farm languishes today, yet it is an historically important and irresistibly charismatic building that cannot be allowed just to fall down.

Former residents Bartholomew Willesden of Oxgate and his wife portrayed in brasses of 1492

The humped ridge of the roof

Numbers upon the joists made by fifteenth century joiners to ensure the frame fits together correctly

An eighteenth indenture to lease Oxgang Farm

Thomas Powell bought the property in 1751

Holes in the door, so the farmer could check his livestock from the parlour when the kitchen was a byre

Nineteenth century residents at the south door

The south door today

The farm is to be seen on the left in this late nineteenth century photo

The south entrance photographed in 1968

Nineteenth century wallpaper revealed in the bathroom

Shakespearian actor John Dignam & his wife Virginia bought the house in 1968

John Dignam’s study, untouched since he died

The south side of the house is held up by scaffolding props at present

The brick wall is collapsing forward at the front of the house

Oxgate Farm and shop in 1968

Click here to visit the Oxgate Farm facebook page