Notes and News ............................................ p.2
Obituary: Stephen Croad .............................. p.3
The Parish Map Project by Simon Morris ...... p.3
Exhibitions and Events ................................ p.3
Awards.......................................................... p.4
The Visscher Panorama
by Jeremy Smith and Caroline de Stefani ...... p.6
Discovering the Lawrence Wright panorama
by Hubert Pragnell ........................................ p.7
Changing London.......................................... p.8
Copyhold tenure and the nature of the
development in the manor of Stepney
by Mark Ballard ............................................ p.9
A railway through eight millenia of London
by David Crawford ...................................... p.11
From red boxes to blogs
by Bridget Cherry........................................ p.12
Reviews ...................................................... p.13
Bookshop Corner ........................................ p.19
Newsletter
Number 85
November 2017
Contents
Panorama by Thomas Girtin – see p.2
Notes and News
The Society’s 117th Annual General Meeting was
held on 6 July 2017 at Queen Mary University, Mile
End Road, and attended by some 200 members.
Our meeting place, hidden in the heart of the
university campus, was the remarkable top-lit
octagonal library, a gothic version of the British
Library. It was designed for the University’s
forerunner, the People’s Palace, intended as a
beacon of culture in the Victorian East End.
Apart from the setting the meeting was notable
for the absence of the keenly anticipated annual
publication, London Prints and Drawings before
1800. We learned that the courier had arrived with
the books, was uncertain where to deliver them,
and had departed. The books were retrieved later;
500 copies were delivered by volunteers; the
remainder were posted; 300 were paid for by the
delivery firm, which agreed that it was at fault. If
anyone has not received their copy please contact
the Treasurer.
Apart from this unfortunate mishap, the AGM ran
smoothly. Professor Michael Port, who has retired
from the council, was thanked for his long service.
Andrew Thorp was elected as a new council
member; others were re-elected (for details see the
back page of this Newsletter). Minutes of the
meeting will be published in the May Newsletter.
Bernard Nurse spoke about the antiquarian,
Richard Gough and his collection of prints and
drawings now in the Bodleian Library, from which
he made a selection for this year’s publication.
Professor Alastair Owens gave an account of the
history of the university site, which encompasses a
Jewish burial ground among the many recent
buildings. After the meeting we were invited to
inspect the new graduate centre designed by
Wilkinson Eyre, and enjoy panoramic views of East
London from the top floor, with vistas of cranes and
towers in all directions.
Future Publications
Our editor, Sheila O’Connell has many treats in
preparation. For 2018 there will be two volumes
reproducing panoramas of London. Thomas Girtin’s
dates from 1801/02 (see our front cover). In
contrast there will be views of the city after the
Blitz, by Lawrence Wright. Hubert Pragnell writes
about his discovery of these on p.7. In addition
there will be a new edition of the Map of Tudor
London, to be published jointly with the Historic
Towns Trust. In 2019 or 2020 there will be a
catalogue of parish maps (see below) and in 2020 a
volume of the London Topographical Record.
Our front cover: This is from Thomas Girtin’s
panorama: Study for the ‘Eidometropolis’ Section 3:
Westminster and Lambeth, c.1801, which we will be
publishing in 2018. Gregory Smith comments that
although Girtin claimed that it was taken from the
British Plate Glass Warehouse, this is not possible
and the drawings must have been made from the
roof of the Albion Terrace facing the ruined Albion
Mills overlooking the Surrey end of Blackfriars
Bridge. It is fascinating to see so many red roofs; at
this time clay tiles of various kinds had not yet
been replaced by Welsh slate.
Subscriptions
These are due on 1 January 2018. Renewals are
being managed this year by our new Council
member Andrew Thorp (email andrew.thorp@
ramboll.co.uk, postal address 45 Stanton Road,
London SW20 8RW.) Standing order payers need
take no action unless you have changed bank
accounts since the beginning of the year. Our bank
statements make it difficult to distinguish between
standing order payments and individual payments
made using the BACS bank transfer, so if there is
no invoice attached to your Newsletter you may still
need to take action to renew your membership. If
you are not sure, ask
Andrew, preferably
by
email.
Your
January 2017 bank
statement
may
clarify matters.
Please ensure your
name is included in
any
direct
bank
transfer to help us
connect you to the
transfer.
page 2
City panorama from Queen Mary University of London, 2017
21st Century
Media!
The Society now
has a Twitter
account:
@LondonTopSoc.
You can follow it up
via the link from
the homepage on
the LTS website.
New Website
The Council has decided the time has come for the
Society to have a new website. The current one has
done us very well for many years but it has become
more and more difficult to maintain.
Following a tendering exercise in the summer a
company in Burton upon Trent, Plain Design, was
chosen to build the new website and they started
work in early October. It is hoped the website will
go ‘live’ early in 2018.
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
The Parish Map Project
The Society’s parish map project continues apace
and is now moving towards completion. The late
Ralph Hyde, formerly Keeper of Maps and Prints at
Guildhall Library and a member of the Society’s
Council until his death, compiled the standard
catalogue of London maps from 1850 to 1900. At
the same time he worked on a meticulous
manuscript catalogue of London parish maps from
the earliest up to 1900. This he passed to us for
completion, and a working group of members has
been engaged on this challenge for several years.
The work of completing Ralph’s catalogue has
entailed visiting each local history library in the
inner London area (including one we now discover
Ralph never reached) to check the few queries in
his entries and to record new acquisitions. This is
not as simple as it sounds since the libraries have
often been completely reorganised since Ralph
noted their holdings some 30 to 40 years ago, have
frequently re-catalogued their maps and discarded
the old references, and have occasionally misplaced
items. A further complication has been the
wholesale removal of Guildhall Library holdings to
the London Metropolitan Archive.
We have additionally checked the National
Archives, the University Libraries and the main
overseas libraries, and have traced London parish
maps as far afield as Staffordshire, Edinburgh and
Harvard; interestingly, maps of Hammersmith are
particularly peripatetic, turning up in a number of
far flung depositories. However, it is fair to say that
the overwhelming number of London parish maps
are to be found in London, including at the Church
of England Record Office, an important repository
we had overlooked until suggested by Dr Ann
Saunders.
In sum, we can confirm that Ralph catalogued the
great majority of London parish maps. However, we
have managed to trace a significant number of
additional maps; some through the internet (when
Ralph was cataloguing the maps, hi-tech meant an
electric typewriter) and others through simple
physical inspection. Islington Library, for instance,
has a filing cabinet stuffed full of uncatalogued
folding maps of the former Borough of Finsbury.
Other gems include perhaps the earliest map of
Whitechapel, spotted at Brasenose College Oxford
by Peter Guillery, an unrecorded cholera map of
Islington, and many other items.
Work is nearing completion in most boroughs;
there are one or two loose ends that will need
tidying up, but we are nearly there. The task is now
to check the drafts, arrange photography and hand
over to Roger Cline, who is sub-editing, and Peter
Barber, who is writing the introduction. Together
with Lawrence Worms’s bibliography of map-
makers, we hope that the book will make a
welcome addition to members’ libraries in 2019 or,
if we need a bit longer, 2020.
– Simon Morris
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
Events and exhibitions
London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton
Road EC1R OHB, to 6 December. Free. Life on the
London Stage. a glimpse of the challenges and joys
of theatrical life since the days of Elizabeth,
drawing on photographs, prints and documents in
the LMA’s collections.
Museum of London, to 2 Jan 2018. Free. The
City is Ours. An exhibition examining the
transformation of cities today, first shown in Paris.
Tate
Britain,
2
November
to
7
May:
Impressionists in London. An exciting range of
paintings has been borrowed for this exhibition
from galleries abroad, including six of the many
views of the Houses of Parliament painted by
Claude Monet. Other London views include
Pissarro’s Charing Cross bridge, and there are
varied subjects by Sisley, Derain, Tissot and other
French artists who spent time in England, some of
them to escape the disruption created by the
Franco-Prussian war in the 1870s.
Newcomen Society: Chang ing Waterscapes:
managing water in 18th-century London. A talk
by Dr Carry van Lieshout, Dana Studio, Wellcome
Wolfs building, 165 Queens Gate, London SW7
5HD, on 14 March 2018; 5.45pm, entry free; a
party usually goes to a restaurant in Gloucester
Road afterwards.
page 3
Obituary
We are sorry to report the death of our member
and former council member Stephen Croad on 12
September 2017. Stephen was head of the
architectural section of the National Monuments
Record (later part of RCHME) from 1981-94, a
Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and for many
years assistant editor for the Ancient Monuments
Society. Many members will be familiar with his
two excellent books, London’s Bridges 1983, and
Liquid History, the Thames through time, 2003
(reprinted 2016). There will be a fuller obituary in
the next volume of the Record.
Awards
Two recent awards draw attention to some of
London’s exceptional buildings.
The US-born social housing pioneer Neave Brown
has belatedly received the 2018 Royal Gold Medal of
the Royal Institute of British Architects for his
1960s/1970s work in the 1960s-70s, when, like
Walter Segal (see Reviews), he sought alternatives to
high-rise housing. He is the only living British
architect
so
honoured.
The
October
2017
presentation was private because of his poor health.
His best-known work is Camden’s Alexandra Road
Estate, now listed, together with his other major
schemes in the borough –
the prototypes at
Winscombe Street and Fleet Road. Alexandra Road
was the UK’s first public housing scheme to be given
Grade II* status and was a 2017 Open House
London venue. Its completion marked the end of
Brown’s UK career – following a three-year public
inquiry into cost and time overruns which eventually
exonerated him. He subsequently worked and taught
on the mainland of Europe.
Alexandra Road slots over 500 homes into its
curving, terraced concrete structures. It has
featured regularly in films and TV, mainly as a
backdrop for crime and spy dramas (sometimes
dirtied up to add atmosphere), music videos and
album covers. Once derided as a brutalist ‘concrete
crocodile’, it has won the affection of residents, who
collectively supported Brown’s medal nomination.
In 2010, they premiered a documentary in which
one contributor, who had originally compared it to
Alcatraz, now relented. For others, it was like ‘a big
family house’ or a ‘hill town’.
Other people like it too. Property agents The
Modern House have recently sold five flats that had
been bought by previous tenants, a typical price
being £499,000 for one with two bedrooms.
– David Crawford
Making its mark in a
very different way is the
‘new’ St Pancras church
(built 1822), the striking
neo-Grecian
landmark
built by the Euston Road
to serve the expanding
northern suburb. The
Society for the Protection
of Ancient Buildings has
selected the exceptional
conservation work carried
out on the portico for its
John Betjeman Award.
Time and heavy pollution
had
contributed
to
cracking and movement
of the lead roof, decay of
the terracotta decoration, erosion of the stonework
and damage from corroding iron cramps. The
meticulous cleaning and repair of all these
elements included the creation of a new terracotta
piece to match the old ones – recognising the value
of retaining the consistency of the crisp classical
design (in this case surely a sensible exception from
traditional SPAB practice of allowing repairs to be
visible).
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
The Visscher Panorama
It is a happy coincidence that in the year when two
later panoramas are being prepared for publication
by the LTS, it is also possible to celebrate the
conservation, with funding from the LTS, of one of
the most famous earlier examples owned by London
Metropolitan Archives. In this article Jeremy Smith,
Assistant Librarian of the LMA, considers its
changing
status,
and
Caroline
De
Stefani,
Conservation Studio Manager of LMA, writes about
its repair and repackaging.
A survey of the Visscher panorama in the context
of London historical writing is in preparation for a
future volume of the London Topographical Record
The Visscher panorama is an engraving by Claes
Jansz. Visscher first published in Amsterdam
around 1616 with the title ‘Londinum Florentissima
Britanniae
Urbs
Toto
Orbe
Celeberrimum
Emporiumque’. It is one of the most iconic images of
medieval London; a low-rise cityscape dominated
by the spires and steeples of its churches.
Published in the year of Shakespeare’s death,
Visscher’s engraving is one of the few visual records
of London before much of it was destroyed in the
Great Fire of 1666.
London Metropolitan Archives holds two copies of
the
Visscher
panorama.
One
copy
(ref.
SC/GL/PR/LBV/p7494086) was recently displayed
(2016) at Guildhall Art Gallery alongside artist
Robin Reynolds’s panorama of today’s metropolis.
page 4
Neave Brown wearing the Royal Gold Medal
St Pancras church
page 5
Views of Visscher
Robin Reynolds’s revelatory revisiting of Visscher’s
iconic London view marked its 400th anniversary
by drawing a dazzling new version1 and in doing so
prompts thoughts on the status of the original
image, and how attitudes to it have changed.
Today ‘Visscher’ (only the one word is needed) is
one of the best known and certainly most
frequently reproduced depictions of late medieval
London. It is an image, an almost unconscious or
subliminal one, carried in the minds of all London
historians, and those interested in the past of the
City. But it was only in the later twentieth century
that it reached this status and managed to shake
free of its earlier more equivocal position. It was a
work purporting to depict London, but originating
entirely from a desk in Amsterdam. With no clear
evidence of a ‘research trip’, or any obvious stylistic
references
being
traceable
to
contemporary
published works, its status has understandably
caused suspicion.
Early historians of London ignored Visscher’s
view. This is not surprising since they ignored all
graphic works in favour of the supposed authority
of the document. Later, especially in the nineteenth
century, when graphic works slowly enter the
literature of London history, Visscher makes
isolated
appearances.
This
is
normally
accompanied by awed references to its rarity but
with little or no analysis of content. Bernard
Adams2 cites a prominent example in Robert
Wilkinson’s successful Londina Illustrata of 1816
where the plates consist of ‘uncritically presented
and topographically useless details enlarged from
the long views of Visscher and Hollar’.
The evidential usefulness
of the panorama was, at
much
the
same
time,
recognised and utilised by
J. T. Smith – but he was an
historian with an unusually
open
mind
to
evidence,
especially graphic evidence.
For others the panorama was
to be held at arm’s length as
an
appealing
novelty,
tolerable
for
its
attractiveness. Writing in The
London Topographical Record
in 1904 T. Fairman Ordish,
in what is probably the first
text concentrating on the
panorama
(the
occasion
being the publication of the
LTS four-sheet facsimile),
commented as follows: “The
Visscher panorama is so
attractive as a picture that
we feel no surprise when we
find that it was frequently
reprinted.”
He refers of course to the
multiple copies and re-engravings of Visscher’s
panorama
which
quickly
followed
its
first
publication, and included a version published in
Venice in 1629. Ordish will also have been aware of
the Victorian facsimile editions of the view, without
a word of commentary and seemingly produced
with little intention of satisfying the historian, but
of providing decoration for many an office or tavern
wall in the City.3
The responsibility for the re-habilitation of
Visscher’s view is largely down to William
Shakespeare – or at least indirectly. Controversy
about the precise positioning of a plaque in
Southwark to mark the site that would have been
occupied by the Globe Theatre caused officials of
the London County Council (LCC) to take up
serious archival research. A number of publications
followed including that by W. W. Braines, The Site
of the Globe Playhouse, published in association
with the LCC in 1924. This and other texts
provided close contextual reading of Visscher’s
view, the fulfilment of their work, in a way, being
John Orrell’s The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe in
which Visscher is presented as one of the most
significant documentary sources for the topography
of ‘Shakespearean’ Bankside – and in a sense for
the outstandingly popular townscape that so many
people enjoy there today.
Visscher, by the mid-twentieth century, had at
last proved himself useful to historians, and was
then carried forward in the wave of popular, very
well-illustrated
London
history
books
that
proliferated in the 1970s and 80s4; and again by
the
massive
tide
of
historical
television
documentary of the past two decades.
– Jeremy Smith
Visscher panorama, page with Old St Paul’s and Bankside, engraved c.1616 ‘One of the most
iconic images of medieval London’
The conservation of the
Visscher Panorama
The copy of the Visscher panorama which was the
subject of the conservation project (ref. LMA
SC/PD/XX/01/04) is by far the better impression.
The panorama is made of four panels of handmade
paper measuring 535 x 422 mm. The quality of the
etching is very good, the black printing ink lines are
very sharp and the chiaro/scuro areas are well
defined.
The Condition of the print before treatment
Although the overall condition of the print was
generally good, inappropriate storage and extensive
handling in the past had caused damage to the
paper which now presented ingrained surface dirt
and long tears along the folds. The panels had been
repaired extensively in the past and lined on the
back with heavy white handmade paper cut to the
size of the print. The backing paper of one panel
had larger margins and therefore made the entire
panel bigger than the other three. The panels were
stiff and discoloured along the repairs probably due
to the deterioration of the adhesive used. Some
tears had been mended, but the edges were not
aligned accurately. Other tears had not being
joined, only stabilised leaving a gap between the
edges. Other losses around the print were present
especially along the edges. The infill repairs had
been made with western handmade paper that had
caused distortion and fraction of the original paper.
Some repairs had been retouched to complete the
missing etching. Other infills were made with paper
that replicated the original print.
In this state the panels could not be accessed and
displayed without the risk of increasing the
distortion and tears.
Conservation treatments
LMA’s paper conservator Hilary Ordman was in
charge of the conservation treatment of this print.
All four panels were thoroughly dry cleaned by
means of a soft brush on the printed side and a
vulcanised latex sponge on the edges and on the
back of the print. All the different media were
tested against fugitivity with distilled water. As all
the inks proved to be stable it was therefore
possible to wash the print to remove all the soluble
acidity and the stains. The print was washed in
three consecutive cold water baths until the water
was clean.
While the panels were still wet the paper lining of
the back was removed. It was decided to remove
also the old repairs that were causing fractures on
the print. All the other repairs that were stable and
made using a paper similar to the original print,
and the infills where hand drawing had been made
to replicate the missing images, were kept. The
panels were left to dry under light weight between
thick blotting paper.
The paper repairs and infills were done first on the
back of the print using Japanese paper of the
appropriate thickness and wheat starch paste. The
missing areas on the front of the print were then
repaired
using
Japanese
paper
toned
with
watercolours to match the colour of the original
paper. All four panels were interleaved with acid free
tissue and housed in an archival four flap folder.
Following conservation, the panorama has been
digitised and made available on LMA’s Collage: The
London Picture Archive alongside the other copy.
Hilary very much enjoyed working on this project
not only owing to its aesthetic value, but also
because it allowed her to discover and discuss
details of the history of the print with curatorial
staff in the Graphic Collections team.
LMA is grateful to the LTS for its generous
support of this project.
– Caroline De Stefani
1. Shown at an exhibition Visscher Redrawn, at Guildhall
Art Gallery, March to November 2016.
2. In London Illustrated (1983).
3. See Irene Scouloudi’s 1953 thesis Panoramic Views of
London or A. Hind’s: Engraving in England (volume 2,
1955).
4. Few were without an illustration of Visscher, quite
often on the cover: works such as London 2000 years
of a City and Its People (1974), a model of its genre by
Felix
Barker
and
(former
LTS
Chairman)
Peter
Jackson.
page 6
Visscher Panorama: Conservation work in progress
Discovering the Lawrence Wright
panorama of London
The panorama mentioned in this article will be one
of next year’s publications. LTS member Hubert
Pragnell, who suggested this, describes how he first
discovered it.
Hubert
was born in London and from earliest
childhood developed a fascination for London
architecture and history nurtured by visits to the
London Museum as it then was. He studied fine art
at Goldsmiths’ College and the Ruskin School of
Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford. He has an MA in
history from the University of Kent and a Ph.D from
the University of York on early Victorian railways.
He taught for 29 years at The King’s School
Canterbury, and since 2003 has been a part-time
tutor in history of architecture for the University of
Oxford, Department for Continuing Education. His
publications include books on architectural history
as well as the 1968 publication for the London
Topographical Society on the London Panoramas of
Robert Barker and Thomas Girtin.
Introduction
Why publish a panorama of a relatively recent
aspect
of
London’s
history?
The
London
Topographical Society was founded in 1880 which
was sixty years before the German blitz on London.
Go back sixty years from 1880 and one is in the
age of John Nash and the London maps of
Greenwood. A time which by the 1880s seemed
distant, when the West End was re-planned on
strict classical lines, gas was being introduced to
the streets, the southern suburbs were expanding
beyond the medieval London Bridge which was a
few years away from demolition, and the impact of
railways on London was still a decade or so away.
An age when the City housed a working population
‘over the shop’. Now the blitz and destruction by V
bombs is some seventy-five years away and the City
as depicted by Lawrence Wright is in some ways as
remote as Regency London from the 1880s. Then St
Paul’s Cathedral stood supreme on the London
skyline along with the towers and spires of
surviving Wren’s churches. The nearest recent
competitors in height were Faraday House and the
Bank of England. It was only in 1962 that a
modern building rose in height above that of St
Paul’s, the Vickers Building on Millbank, over a
mile to the west. The Barbican blocks on the
northern edge of the City to exceed the height of St
Paul’s rose between 1969 and 1976. However the
still-growing ‘forest’ of skyscrapers in the financial
centre around Lombard Street and Bishopsgate
were still thirty years away, and the vision of the
Shard towering over The Borough, and often lost in
the clouds was perhaps a dream on a level with
space travel experienced by readers of Dan Dare in
The Eagle.
When Lawrence Wright started to paint his
panorama the bombed sites in the vicinity of St
Paul’s had taken on a sense of permanence with
cellars covered by ragwort and inhabited by the
occasional stray cat. When things seemingly stand
still there seems little need to record them,
although fortunately visitors availed themselves of
the open view of St Paul’s from the east along
Cannon Street to take numerous photographs from
this hitherto obscured viewpoint of office blocks
and narrow streets. Ealing Film Studios availed
themselves of the area in 1946 to film their black
and white comedies, including Hue and Cry. As
colour film increasingly took over in the early 1950s
the British Travel Association featured the City as it
then was, so their promotional pictures also
provide a record of the open spaces in the vicinity
of St Paul’s.1
Since
the
London
Topographical
Society
published my study on the London panoramas of
Barker and Girtin in 1968, much has been
subsequently revealed on this once popular form of
art, part topographical, part entertainment. Could
there be still be one of London, little known to the
public at large? The publication of the Rhinebeck
panorama of about 1810, which had been
rediscovered in New York, suggests there still could
be works or evidence of works now lost. Lawrence
Wright’s panorama was not lost but simply put into
store in the Museum of London where it has been
rarely exhibited since its completion in 1956. It was
there as a child that I saw it that summer and was
fascinated even then by its artistic skill, and
Wright’s ability to convey the atmospheric quality of
London at that time. Like many things encountered
in childhood it was pushed to the back of the mind
but not forgotten.
Quite by chance in the following autumn,
having been sent by my parents to the local
barber for a haircut, and whilst waiting my turn
‘to be shorn’, I found beneath a pile of magazines
a copy of The Illustrated London News for the 10
November.2 I opened it and scanned the sepia
toned illustration of weekly world events, many
not terribly interesting to a fourteen year old, but
then to my delight and amazement I found a
double-page spread devoted to Lawrence Wright’s
Panorama from St Paul’s. Immediately the visit
earlier in the summer to the museum, then in
Kensington Palace, came back and my interest
was aroused. I gazed at the reproductions
transfixed, unusual perhaps for a boy of my age,
but then I was fascinated by London and its
history, and had been frequently walked round
the City by my parents and was familiar with its
buildings, some, especially Wren churches,
standing as gaunt ruins in a landscape of green
covered cellars. What should I do, could I ask to
take the journal home? Perhaps, better still as a
compromise, ask if I could take the pages home
by carefully removing them from the staples
holding the journal together. To my immense
relief and pleasure the manager allowed me to do
this and I have retained the pages to this day. On
subsequent visits to the museum over the years it
page 7
was not on display due to shortage of space.
Years later I happened to be talking about the
panorama with my daughter who revealed to my
amazement that Lawrence Wright’s granddaughter
was a close university friend. We subsequently met
as my interest in this neglected work was
rekindled. In 2004 I made an appointment with the
Museum of London to see the works which were
brought out from store. They allowed me to take
photographs of each sheet for my own interest. I
then approached the London Topographical Society
with the suggestion that it might make an
interesting subject for a study. At the time society
funds were limited and there was the question of
the cost of possible copyright, let alone costs of
quality reproduction? With the publication of the
London Bomb Damage Maps in 2005, I wrote again
suggesting Wright’s pictures would complement the
evidence of damage shown on the large-scale maps,
and would be of great interest with the City skyline
so dramatically changing year on year. In 2012
several members of the LTS committee visited the
museum to view the work, again brought out of
store, and agree that it would make suitable study
for publication. The Wright family and museum
have agreed to the publication rights, with the
result that this hitherto neglected work of Wright,
created over six years, will reach an appreciative
public and act as a visual record of the City, as
valuable as Hollar’s views in the seventeenth
century.
1. For
discussion
of
changing
appearance
of
surroundings of the Cathedral see: Simon Bradley,
“The Precincts and setting of St Paul’s from the
Nineteenth
Century”,
chap.41.
St
Paul’s:
The
Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004, ed. by Derek
Keene et.al. (Yale University Press, 2004).
2. The Illustrated London News, 10 November 1956, pp.
800-801. This feature was to mark the panorama’s
exhibition
in
the
London
Museum.
It
was
last
exhibited at the Museum of London in the Barbican in
1995. As far as I know it was not illustrated in any
other Journal.
page 8
Changing London
This is a picture of a new building which will have
disappeared by the time you read this. Starting in
2000, every year an eminent architect whose work
has not yet been seen in Britain is invited to create
a summer pavilion outside the Serpentine gallery in
Hyde Park. The variety of shapes and materials has
been huge, and have sometimes been self-
consciously showy.
This year’s calm circular timber pavilion, with an
ingenious roof which funnels rain into a central
waterfall, is something different. The architect is
the West-African-born Diébédo Francis Kéré,
principal architect at Kéré Architecture, based in
Berlin. Kéré was trained in Berlin but born in 1965
in Gando, Burkina Faso, and is celebrated for
innovative buildings in his home town influenced
by traditional architecture. His pavilion is inspired
by a tree, a traditional West African gathering place
in the centre of a village.
The sheltering walls of slatted timber in
triangular patterns, allowing air and light to
penetrate, are painted blue, which he explains is a
colour
traditionally
associated with special
occasions. These ideas
are skilfully integrated in
a creation which has a
crispness and reticence
that
reflects
the
influence on Kéré of his
hero Mies van der Rohe,
whose motto was ‘less is
more’, but has a relaxed
informality
as
appropriate to a London
park as to an African
village.
Although the pavilion
is a summer event there
are
two
permanent
galleries
nearby:
the
Serpentine, opened 1970
in a former tea house,
and
the
Serpentine
Sackler, in a former
gunpowder store. See
Serpentinegalleries.org .
Serpentine pavilion
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
page 9
Copyhold tenure and the nature of
development in the manor of
Stepney
Mark Ballard was the Archivist on Tower Hamlets
Local History Library and Archives’ Land and Lives
project, and a cataloguing assistant on the Manorial
Documents Register for Sussex and the Survey of
London’s Whitechapel project. He has now returned
to Maidstone as an archivist at the Kent History
Centre. This article is adapted from a blogpost on
the Survey of London’s Histories of Whitechapel
website.
There has been controversy between historians
seeking to account for the cheaper housing and
piecemeal nature of development in the East End
compared with more structured planning in the
eighteenth century further west. Since Dorothy
George’s London Life in the Eighteenth Century
(1925) they have sought to explain it in the context
of custom of the manors of Stepney and Hackney,
originating before the Reformation when the
bishops of London were the landlords. By one
particular custom, copyholders could lease their
land for a maximum of only 31 years, risking
forfeiture of their copyholds by the lord of Stepney
manor if they transgressed.1 Such short building
leases would dissuade tenants from building to
proper standards. This explanation was broadly
accepted by Alan Palmer, for instance, in his book
on the East End, though he pointed to areas such
as Wellclose Square and Swedenborg Gardens as
exceptions to the usual lack of pattern. “The
persistence of the ancient copyhold system of
tenure ruled out rich rewards for speculative
investment on a large scale… So curious a restraint
helped to make land cheaper, but it also favoured
the spread of small houses, haphazardly packed
into narrow streets.” 2 John Marriott also believes
the 31-year limit on lease terms accounts for
speculative
low-quality
house
building
in
seventeenth-century Stepney, yet apparently loses
sight of the fact that the restriction applied only to
copyhold land.3
Derek Morris, indeed, does not accept the
orthodoxy of Whitechapel property as the poorest
investment on the Monopoly board. He has used
sources such as land tax and insurance records to
portray it in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries not as a squalid den of poverty and vice
but instead as a respectable suburb, the home of
naval and professional men, and a thriving
industrial and trading centre. He has recently
argued that the 31-year leases could be renewed on
the payment of a fine to the lord of the manor.
What is more, “Local historians have known for
many years that while [short leases] may have been
the original intention of the lord of the manor, the
actual practice was very different. Leases were
granted of 66, 99 or 500 years in order to obtain
the fines.” 4 If this is so, the post-Reformation lords
of Stepney manor, first the Wentworths and then
the Colebrookes, were open to corruption, as they
could be induced to break their own rules to
authorise development.
Most of the area of the present-day Borough of
Tower
Hamlets,
including
the
parish
of
Whitechapel, lay within the manor of Stepney.
While working on two projects to revise the
catalogues of title deeds held at Tower Hamlets
Local History Library and Archives, I have certainly
found that long lease terms were not uncommon
within Stepney manor. But they would not have
been possible on copyhold land, which reverted to
the lord of the manor on the tenant’s surrender or
death. Tenants’ admissions to and surrenders of
copyhold land in the manor are recorded in its
court rolls and books, which survive with some
gaps from 1318, including an uninterrupted
sequence of 88 court books at London Metropolitan
Archives dating from 1654 to 1925. It would be
difficult to indicate on a map of Stepney which land
was copyhold at any particular date, because it was
so fragmented even by early modern times, and the
property descriptions in the court roll rarely precise
enough. But those deeds held at Tower Hamlets
Archives corresponding to copyhold transactions
are usually easily recognisable as they take the
form of copies from the court roll.
The cornerstone of Tower Hamlets Archives’
holdings of title deeds is those parts of the private
collections of J. Coleman and F. Marcham that
related to Stepney, which the Metropolitan Borough
purchased in 1909. Among these, I have
recatalogued 89 titles to land in Whitechapel parish
or in close proximity to it, whose deeds date from
1574 to 1838, and of them only nine are obviously
copyholds.5 In a further group of deeds of unofficial
origin, dating mostly from the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, either for land in Whitechapel
or described as Stepney (as they predate the
successive separation of Shadwell, Wapping, St
George in the East, Spitalfields, Limehouse, Bow,
Bethnal Green and Poplar from the ancient parish
of Stepney), the number of obvious copyhold titles
is 31 out of a total of 155. Although there are, in
addition, a number of short leases of 31 years or
less, some of which might within the rules have
been of copyhold land, the majority of the titles are
for freehold land, which could be bought and sold,
or leased for unlimited periods.
For instance, land at the east end of Whitechapel
High Street and on the Thames foreshore at
Limehouse was being leased in the 1580s for 500-
year terms by Henry lord Wentworth.6 As he was
lord of Stepney, this land might have been part of
the manorial desmesne or waste, and there seemed
to be no subsequent restriction on the leaseholders
assigning these leases for the remainder of the
term, nor about private individuals leasing freehold
property for even longer terms. Such long leases of
copyhold land would have been impossible, though
copyholders could express intentions in their wills
to keep it in their family, and even entail it. As for
the manorial fine, it was a customary payment to
the lord whenever a new manorial tenant was
admitted to copyhold land. It should not be
regarded as punitive, although elsewhere in the
country entry fines are known to have increased
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
especially if rents to the lord, set by custom,
remained unchanged.7
If the lords of Stepney wished or needed to raise
cash from copyholders willing to purchase, they
could enfranchise copyhold land, i.e. convert it to
freehold, long before the Copyhold Act of 1852
allowed tenants to demand this. One major
copyholder of the mid-eighteenth century was the
Reverend Edward Baynes of County Mayo, who
held about 60 plots on the south side of
Whitechapel Road and Mile End Road, including
the ‘Prince of Orange’s Head’ and the ‘Black Horse’.
On his death about 1765, his son was admitted to
them but soon disentailed and then surrendered
4½ acres to Sir George Colebrooke, lord of Stepney,
to which a ‘gentleman of the Tower of London’,
Anthony Forman, was then admitted. Colebrooke
then enfranchised it, allowing Forman to purchase
the freehold and then to develop the area of
Fieldgate Street and Greenfield Street in a
succession of leases to builders.8
The restrictions of copyhold, then, were generally
limited to relatively small pockets of Stepney and
could be overcome prior to development by legal
means. Other parts of Tower Hamlets’ deeds
collections indicate that copyhold tenure might be
more common in areas of the manor where
urbanisation
came
later,
such
as
Ratcliff,
Limehouse and Poplar. So while this has no claim
to be a representative survey, it suggests that Alan
Palmer’s and Derek Morris’s assumptions about the
persistence and generality of copyhold in urban
Stepney are misplaced. We must look to other
causes to explain the pattern of development in the
East End. The Survey of London is finding parallels
elsewhere, for example Clerkenwell, to indicate that
the East End’s development was not the result of
manorial constraints unique to Stepney. If we
suspect its lords were open to corruption, we need
more evidence, and probably comparisons with the
degree to which lords of the manor in other London
suburbs adhered to custom.
– Mark Ballard
1. M. D.George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century
(London, 1925), p.75.
2. Alan Palmer, The East End: Four Centuries of London
Life (London, 1989, rev. edn, 2000), pp.16-17.
3. John Marriott, Beyond the Tower: a
History of East London (New Haven
and London, 2011), pp.20-21.
4. Derek Morris, Whitechapel 1600-1800:
a social history of an early modern
London inner suburb (East London
History Society, 2011), p.5.
5. Now
recatalogued
within
Tower
Hamlets
Local
History
Library
and
Archives (THLHLA), P/SLC/1.
6. THLHLA,
P/SLC/1/17/3-4;
L/SMB/G/1/3.
7. Mark
Forrest,
Dorset
Manorial
Documents:
a
guide
for
local
and
family historians (Dorchester, 2011),
pp.16-17.
8. THLHLA,
P/SLC/2/16/16-17;
P/SLC/2/7/1-30.
page 10
Plan showing the Whitechapel Road property of Edward Baynes
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