Denise Silvester-Carr .................................... p.2
Notes and News ............................................ p.2
Anniversaries; Events; Exhibitions ................ p.2
The Great Fire .......................................... p.2
John Gibson ............................................ p.3
The London Society .................................. p.3
How many houses were destroyed in the
Great Fire of London? by Ian Doolittle .......... p.4
Changing London.......................................... p.5
Circumspice ............................................ p.5/15
The Park Villages and HS2
by Geoffrey Tyack.......................................... p.6
The Survey of London in Whitechapel
by Peter Guillery .......................................... p.7
Town Vignettes on early maps and charts
by Peter Barber ............................................ p.9
Mayors of London by Henry Summerson .... p.11
Prizefighting in London – a request for help
by Tony Gee ................................................ p.12
Layers of London; Institute of Historical
Research .................................................... p.12
Restoring Tallis by Peter Ross...................... p.14
Reviews ...................................................... p.16
Bookshop Corner ........................................ p.19
Newsletter
Number 83
November 2016
Contents
Notes and News
The115th AGM of the Society was held on 6 July in
the splendid setting of the Great Hall of St
Bartholomew’s Hospital. Minutes will be circulated
in the next Newsletter. Officers and Council
members elected are listed on the back of this
newsletter. A large audience heard a fascinating
talk by Dorian Gerhold on his searches in a variety
of archives for early plans of London buildings,
which resulted in the Society’s publication this year
of London Plotted, Plans of London buildings up to
1720. It was interesting to hear that his interest in
urban plans had been sparked by Ralph Treswell’s
Tudor and Jacobean surveys, the subject of the
Society’s publication No.135 in 1987.
The magnificent London Plotted is the first volume
to be edited by Sheila O’Connell, who has bravely
taken on the task following her retirement from the
Prints and Drawings Department of the British
Museum. Work is now in hand on next year’s
publication, jointly with the Bodleian Library, a
selection of London views from the collections of the
eighteenth century antiquary Richard Gough,
introduced by Bernard Nurse.
Browsing through the Treswell volume, where
over three-quarters of the plans are reproduced in
black and white, and comparing it with the
colourful London Plotted, makes one aware how
much one gains from the use of colour. And so we
have applied the same principle to our newsletter,
and hope the new look will meet with members’
approval. We are very grateful to Ludo Press for
their constructive assistance over this.
You should now be in possession of London
Plotted, a book in a dark blue dustjacket, weighing
about 2lb. If not, please contact the Treasurer,
preferably by email.
You might like to give a copy of the book as a
Christmas present. Send £30 (special offer for
Christmas, expires 20 December) to the Treasurer
who will post it off to your donee within the UK
with any message you like to supply.
Subscriptions are due on 1 January. £20 for UK
addresses, £30 abroad. With the ‘improved’ service
from our bank it is 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 the Treasurer, again
preferably by email. Your January 2016 bank
statement may tell you how you paid this year.
Our
volunteer
project
on
parish
maps,
masterminded by Simon Morris, is making good
progress. The increasing number of requests for
help from LTS members from other organisations
and individuals demonstrates the respect in which
our membership is held. In a previous issue the
British Film Institute asked for help in identifying
London film locations. Their report on the first year
of their project ‘London on Film’ acknowledges our
financial help in cataloguing and digitising nine
diverse archival films on London, which formed a
centrepiece of their summer programme at
BFIsouthbank. For more details see bfi.org.uk/
Britain-on-film.
In this issue you are invited to contribute
information on research projects which range from
medieval London mayors to eighteenth century
prizefighting locations, and to participate in the
Survey
of
London’s
interactive
research
on
Whitechapel. Those interested in geo-referencing and
website testing will be welcomed by the ‘Layers of
London’ project of the Institute of Historical Research.
Members may like to know that our retired editor
Ann Saunders has successfully achieved her long-
planned move. Ann and Bruce’s address is now The
Barn, Mimms Lane, Shenley, Herts WD7 9AP, tel.
01923 857359. Ann writes that ‘members who feel
curious can come out to see me, but telephone first.’
We wish Ann and Bruce well in their new home.
Next year’s AGM will take place on Wednesday 5
July at Queen Mary College, Mile End Road. Details
will be in the May Newsletter.
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
Anniversaries; Events; Exhibitions
The autumn anniversary which has achieved much
publicity was 4 September, 350 years since the
Great Fire of London. Our illustration on p.1 is
from
the
Museum
of
London
which
is
commemorating 1666 with an ambitious interactive
display and a series of activities both on the ground
and
online.
For
details
see
Museumof
London.org.uk/fire . The handsome accompanying
book by Hazel Forsyth, senior curator at the
Museum,
Butcher,
Baker,
Candlestickmaker:
surviving the Great Fire will be reviewed in our next
page 2
London during the Great Fire, seen from across the Thames, from
B. Lambert, History and Survey of London and its Environs, 1806
Denise Silvester-Carr
We are sad to announce the death on 6
September of Denise Silvester-Carr, author and
journalist. Denise was a longstanding Council
member of the LTS and a former editor of the
Newsletter. There will be an obituary in the
next issue of the London Topographical Record.
issue. There have been related events elsewhere. A
week of imaginative spectacles, organised by the
arts group Artichoke, included giant dominoes
falling along the paths of the Fire, fiery light
projections on to St Paul’s and poetry readings
from the top of the Monument. The finale, managed
by Artichoke with the American burn artist David
Best, was the burning of ‘an artistic impression of
the seventeenth-century City’ on two 50ft barges on
the Thames. Its development involved numerous
projects in local schools, with the practical work of
creating the rather beautiful timber evocation of old
London being carried out by young unemployed
Londoners. If you missed this you can watch a
video with commentary on the Artichoke website.
For more on what really happened in the Great Fire
see Ian Doolittle’s article on p.4.
John Gibson. A British Sculptor in Rome, in
the private rooms of the Royal Academy, is where to
go if you are looking for a quiet corner in
Burlington House. This is a small exhibition of
sculpture and drawings recognising an almost
forgotten figure, a once eminent neo-classical
sculptor of the early ninteenth century who died
150 years ago. It is accompanied by an attractive
booklet with essays by Anna Frasca-Rath and
Annette Wickham (Royal Academy, £9.95). Gibson
was born in North Wales in 1790 and trained as a
cabinet-maker. Thanks to the patronage of the
banker William Roscoe and his circle, he travelled
to Rome, studied with Canova and set up his studio
there, which became a well-known attraction for
British grand tourists. He exhibited at the Great
Exhibition of 1851; Prince Albert was among his
admirers and it was due to him that Gibson created
the idealised sculpture of Queen Victoria with
figures of Justice and Clemency in the Palace of
Westminster. When Gibson died in 1866 he left the
contents of his Rome studio to the Royal Academy.
But Albert was dead and taste had changed.
Gibson’s plaster casts were damaged in transit and
badly repaired; the rather feeble ‘Gibson gallery’
which eventually opened in 1876 in Burlington
House was never popular, and was dismantled in
the 1960s. The exhibition brings together his
delicate drawings and some of the sculpture,
providing a context for his rather forlorn works
surviving outside the Sackler rooms on the top
floor. www Gibson-trail.uk has a map and details of
his other works in London.
Robert Adam’s London is the subject of an
exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum, 13
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from 30 November to 11 March.
London Parks and Garden Trust has a winter
lecture season with much to interest London
topographers. Lectures take place on Monday
evenings at 70-77 Cowcross Street EC1M 6EL; 7pm.
14 November: Brompton Cemetery by Sally
Prothero; 12 December: Capability Brown in London
by Steffie Shields; 9 January: New Jerusalem, the
Good City and the Good Society by Ken Worpole; 13
February, Post-war Sculpture by Roger Bowdler; 13
March: the London Skyline campaign by Barbara
Weiss. For season tickets see lectureseasonticket.
eventbrite.co.uk and for more about the LPGT see
their excellent website Londongardenstrust.org
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
A special offer from the London Society
Save 20% off membership and get a free copy of the
London Society Journal.
Founded in 1912, the London Society exists to
help promote the debate on the sort of city we want
to live and work in.
It arranges events and visits for its members to a
variety of places, buildings and institutions, some
not generally open to the public; holds debates and
lectures, including the annual Sir Banister Fletcher
Lecture, addressed by distinguished speakers, and
twice a year, the Society’s Journal, containing
writing and photo essays about different aspects of
the city, is sent free of charge to all members.
The Society’s motto is ‘antiqua tegenda, pulchra
petenda, futura rolenda’: ‘Protect the best of the
past; Strive for quality today; Plan properly for the
future’ – a mission that the Society still promotes
through its publications, events and lobbying.
London Topographical Society members can get
12 months’ membership of the London Society for
just £20 (it’s usually £25) and will also receive a
free copy of a recent Journal when they join. For
full details visit www.londonsociety.org.uk/society
page 3
Queen Victoria supported by Justice and Clemency, Palace of
Westminster, by John Gibson
How many houses were destroyed
in the Great Fire of London?
Our member Ian Doolittle explores the source of
some much repeated statements.
To readers familiar with the history of the Great
Fire this will seem an odd question to ask. The total
of 13,200 is inscribed on the Monument.1 It is
firmly set in all the histories, whether popular or
academic, and invariably features in descriptions of
the destruction. The most detailed account appears
in W. G. Bell’s Great Fire of London:
“373 acres burnt within the walls, and
63 acres 3 roods without the walls.
89 parish churches, besides chapels burnt.
13,200 houses burnt in over 400 streets and
courts.
75 acres 3 roods still standing within the walls
unburnt.
11 parishes without the walls yet standing”.2
Apart from attributing them to the surveyors Jonas
Moore and Ralph Gratrix (now usually Greatorex),
Bell gives no source for the figures and given their
importance I thought I would trace their origin. As
far as I could tell, subsequent historians have simply
taken the figures as fact. So I looked further.
I thought I had found the key clue in the scholarly
biography of Moore by Frances Willmoth, who states
that the survey only appears in Hollar’s Exact
Survey.3 That rehearses some but not all of the
analysis given in Bell and I thought that perhaps
Bell had simply embellished the figures. Then I
came across a fuller version in the controversial
pamphlet which purported to give A True and
Faithful [i.e. anti-Catholic] Account of the Several
Informations exhibited to the ... Committee appointed
... to inquire into the late dreadful burning of the City
of London (1667). This included the details in Bell’s
list (albeit in a different order) save for the reference
to 400 streets and courts. Perhaps that detail was
an addition by Bell? No: it was included in the
Monument inscription (i.e. in 1677).4 And then I
found the same certificate (with minor differences),
in manuscript, in the Verney archives:5
“Upon the second of September 1666 the fire
began in London, at one Farriner’s house, a baker
in Pudding Lane, between the hours of one and two
in the morning, and continued burning until the
sixth of September following; consuming, as by the
surveyors appears in print, three hundred [and]
seventy three acres within the walls of the City of
London, and sixty three acres three roods without
the walls. There remains seventy five acres three
roods yet standing within the walls un-burnt: eighty
nine parish churches, besides chapels, burnt:
eleven parishes within the walls yet standing:
houses burnt, thirteen thousand two hundred.
(Jonas Moore )
per ( ) Surveyors
(Ralph Gatrix)”6
The phrasing and indeed the meaning is odd:
what in particular does the phrase about appearing
in print signify? Was there an earlier fuller version
– the one Bell might have been using? But these
two ‘certificates’ at least made it clear that there
was
indeed
a
contemporary
survey
which
‘produced’ the 13,200 figure. So I then investigated
how the survey was carried out.
Moore and Greatorex together and separately had
successful surveying careers. Moore was also a
scientific instrument-maker and Greatorex an
engineer. The figures in their certificate have a
precision which suggests they are derived from
systematic, professional work.
Who then appointed them? They are described as
certifying their figures as simply ‘surveyors’. They
certainly do not appear to have been commissioned
by the City itself. Many historians follow Bell in
calling them Corporation Surveyors, but Dr
Willmoth found no record of their appointment in
the City’s archives; and T. F. Reddaway, who
studied the post-Fire City records more closely than
anyone else, makes no mention of them at all. He
refers to 13,200 as a fact requiring no attribution.7
It is more likely that Moore and Greatorex were
appointed by the Crown. They had already worked
for the Navy/Ordnance Board and had recently
worked together surveying the new fortified colony
of Tangier. It was this work that prompted Evelyn
to recommend Moore as a surveyor of the destroyed
City.8 I have not, however, found any reference to
the appointment in what I assume are the likeliest
page 4
A detail from the Monument erected to commemorate the Great
Fire, with sculpture by Caius Cibber. The distressed City of
London, with sword, resting on broken masonry, is revived by
Time and Industry. Behind are citizens in consternation
page 5
sources – the Privy Council Registers and the State
Papers. Perhaps the plain designation ‘surveyors’
indicates an informal appointment?
And when was the work carried out? No date is
attached to the Verney certificate,9 but a few of the
figures appear in the famous London Gazette for 3-
10 September. In a ‘list of buildings destroyed in
this terrible disaster [which] hath been taken’ there
appeared ‘13,200 houses’, ‘87 [not 89] churches’, ‘6
chapels’ and various public buildings and such like.
My current surmise is that immediately after the
Fire Moore and Greatorex were commissioned by
the King to give a basic assessment of the
damage.10 Some of their figures were reported
straightaway in the London Gazette.11 The full
printed version was as Bell rehearses (as witness
its stilted phrasing), while somewhat tailored
versions were circulated first in manuscript. The
latter version for some reason became the one
reproduced in post-Fire publications, though for
the Monument the full version was consulted.12 But
this is only my best guess from my findings so far
and much turns on Bell’s missing source. Can a
reader point me to it? I hope it’s not obvious.
Of course, the final step is to ‘test’ the 13,200
figure itself. What does it mean? Properties in the
City were then so sub-divided and intermingled
that the term ‘house’ had different meanings. I am
looking into the number of ‘houses’ in the City in
1666. I am planning to say something about it in
the next LTS Record.)
– Ian Doolittle
1. C. Welch, History of the Monument (1893), 29-30.
The use of Roman numerals for 13,200 went wrong!
2. (1920), 174. I have ignored Bell’s (entirely justified)
correction of 89 to 87.
3. Sir Jonas Moore (1993), 137.
4. Together with some new/different figures, referring to
wards not parishes.
5. Sue Baxter, archivist to the Claydon House Trust,
has been most helpful.
6. I have modernised spelling etc. but for obvious
reasons kept the odd phrasing. The signatures are in
the same (copyist’s) hand.
7. Rebuilding of London (1940), 26, (73), (75) and 270.
8. Willmoth, Moore, 136-7.
9. There is no clue in the document or the archive. The
fact that it is included in its natural chronological
place in Memoirs of the
Verney Family, eds. F. P.
and M. M. Verney
(2 vols., 3rd edn, 1925),
ii. 259
evidently does not signify.
10. Cf. S. Porter, The Great Fire of London (1996), 70-1.
11. The
total
of
12,000
given
in
Rege
Sincera’s
Observations (1667), 13, is unlikely to be an early
estimate, before the Moore and Greatorex figures
appeared (as Bell surmised: Fire, 223). In fact, it may
have been a total for houses within the walls: W.
Maitland, The History and Survey of London (2 vols,
1756), Ii. 837. The figure appears also in a foreigner’s
account dated 20 September: Bell, Fire, 330.
12. i.e. it includes the 400 streets; but in other respects it
departs from Moore and Greatorex.
Changing London
If you explore the confusion around the Crossrail
works near Tottenham Court Road, you may arrive
at the once quiet corner where Flitcroft’s elegant
Georgian church stands as successor to the
medieval leper hospital of St Giles-in-the-Fields.
Across the road some battered eighteenth-century
houses have been allowed to survive in Denmark
Street; round the corner there are only shored-up
façades facing the blocky forms of the lower parts of
Centrepoint (you can see the great hole behind from
Charing Cross Road). But press on south, past the
west front of St Giles down a little passageway, and
there is a surprising sight of greenery. The Phoenix
Garden (taking its appropriate name from the
Phoenix theatre in Charing Cross Road) was created
here in 1984 on a carpark made on a bombsite. It is
now the only survival from seven community
gardens established with the help of the Covent
Garden Open Spaces committee. After many
struggles the garden acquired a new 20 year lease
in 2015, and relandscaping is in progress, with a
smart new garden building at the southern end. For
more information see www.thephoenixgarden.org
where there is an excellently researched history of
the site by Jane Palm-Gold.
The Phoenix Garden, looking toward the tower of St Giles-in-the Fields
Circumspice
What is the subject of this sculpture and where is
it? For the answer see p.15.
The Park Villages and HS2
Geoffrey Tyack, whose books include studies of the
architects John Nash and James Pennethorne, tells
the story of Nash’s influential Park Villages on the
edge of Regent’s Park, and their decline due to the
coming of the railways. He highlights how the
planned fast railway line from Euston will further
undermine the character of Park Village East.
Park Village West has long been recognised as an
almost perfectly preserved prototype of the
nineteenth-century planned middle-class suburb.
Leafy, secluded and architecturally highly eclectic,
this attractive enclave was first conceived by Nash
in 1823 as part of a plan for developing a seven-
acre tract of Crown land beyond the north-eastern
corner of Regent’s Park, and was built in 1832-7
under the supervision of his pupil James
Pennethorne, who inherited the older architect’s
practice following his semi-retirement to the Isle of
Wight. Nash’s original project, designed ‘more for
amusement than profit’ (National Archives, Cres
2/778; MPE 911), envisaged the creation of a
‘village’ of picturesque cottages on either side of a
branch of the Regent’s Canal, completed in 1820, of
which he was a major promoter. One group of
houses would be built around the loop that now
constitutes Park Village West, leading off Albany
Street. Another, larger, group would be strung out
along a sinuous ‘village road’ (now Park Village
East) leading south-east from the present Parkway
to the canal basin and Cumberland Market, laid
out by Nash as the economic hub of a planned new
artisan quarter, now entirely redeveloped for
council flats. The first houses were built along the
canal side of the ‘village road’ in 1824-6, and were
illustrated in a pair of engravings by T. H. Shepherd
in James Elmes’s Metropolitan Improvements
(1827), one of them showing the curving street with
the York and Albany pub at the far end, almost as
it is today, the other the backs of the houses with
their gardens sloping down to the canal with its
traffic of barges. More houses followed in the late
1820s, most of them semi-detached but some
detached, their disparate architectural styles
contributing to the sense of ‘variety’ which was an
essential
characteristic
of
the
Picturesque
aesthetic. By 1829, when Philip Hardwick surveyed
the land (National Archives, MPE 907), Nos 1 to 28
had all been built on the canal side of the street, as
had a group on the far end of the other side,
bounded by a ‘Serpentine Road’.
It is highly unlikely that Nash, preoccupied at the
end of his career with the building of Buckingham
Palace, devoted much time or effort to the detailed
design of the Park Village East houses, but their
stuccoed exteriors (e.g. the Neo-Tudor Nos 2-4, and
No. 36 with its octagonal tower) echo the earlier
country houses and villas with which he had made
his reputation as an architect. Some were built by
William Smith, builder of Sussex Place, one of the
terraces on the western side of Regent’s Park;
others may have been designed by Charles James
Mathews, a pupil of Augustus Pugin, one of Nash’s
most important early collaborators, who later
retired from architectural practice to become an
actor. The leases were bought as investments by
businessmen and shopkeepers, some of them
based in Regent Street, completed to Nash’s
designs in 1823. They sub-let the houses to middle-
class occupants who included the brother of the
future Cardinal Newman, a Professor of Latin at the
newly-founded University College, London; he lived
at No. 14, a three-bay detached villa with a
projecting slate roof on eaves-brackets.
page 6
The Park Villages on Bacon’s map of London c.1912
Park Village West
Park Village East, No. 36
The far side of Park Village East, away from the
canal, was less attractive to investors and tenants,
and it became even less so when the London and
Birmingham Railway was driven through a cutting
at the bottom of the gardens in 1836-8 on its
approach to Euston Station. Building nevertheless
continued, and nearly all of the available plots were
shown as occupied in a rate-book of July 1837 (St
Pancras parish, London Borough of Camden
archives). But in 1900-6 the houses on the far
(eastern) side of the street were all demolished to
make way for new railway tracks, now hidden
behind a brick retaining wall (see the map above).
This led to the loss of the ‘Serpentine Road’ at the
southern end of the street, along with the attractive
round-towered Italianate villa at its northern end
shown in a watercolour of c.1840 (Camden
archives, Heal Collection). In 1941 a bomb hit Nos
18-20, a pretty Tudor-Gothic pair in the canal side
of the street, the site of which is now occupied by a
block of flats called Nash House, and the canal
itself was filled in with rubble after the end of the
Second World War. Since then the remaining
houses in both Park Village East and West have
been well-preserved by the Crown Estate and
cherished by their occupants, but the future of
those in the eastern part of Nash’s ‘village’ has now
been thrown into question. Under plans for the
approach of HS2 into Euston the roadway of Park
Village East will be dug up in order to construct a
steel and concrete structure for the high-speed
trains, a new retaining wall erected opposite the
houses, and, most damaging, ‘ground anchors’
inserted underneath the houses, potentially
damaging their foundations (see www.publications.
parliament.uk/pa/cmhs2/petitions/0834.pdf.). Not
only will the residents’ lives be disrupted by up to
seven years of engineering works; the very
existence of an integral part of one of the most
significant urban developments of the nineteenth
century – the ancestor of countless planned
suburbs throughout the world – may, assuming the
project goes ahead, be threatened. All lovers of
London’s urban landscape should hasten to see
and enjoy it while they still have the opportunity.
– Geoffrey Tyack
The Survey of London
in Whitechapel
Peter Guillery introduces a new approach to
research by The Survey of London – in which your
participation is invited – (see the website mentioned
below) – and sets it in the context of the Survey’s
past history.
East London is the Survey of London’s spiritual
home. C. R. Ashbee launched the project in 1894–6
for a monograph about Trinity Hospital on the Mile
End Road, followed up with the first Survey of
London parish volume, devoted to Bromley by Bow
and published in 1900. Since then eastern
dalliances have been at best occasional. It is 60
years since the Survey covered Spitalfields (volume
27, 1957), and 30 since we last embarked on the
study of an East End district – that was Poplar,
Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs, where work began
in 1986 (volumes 43 and 44, 1994). In recent years
the Survey has turned to south London, previously
long neglected, to investigate Woolwich and
Battersea (volumes 48 to 50, 2012 and 2013), and
to the West End for what we are calling South-East
Marylebone (volumes 51 and 52, forthcoming
2017), and Oxford Street (volume 53, forthcoming
2019). So it seems timely and appropriate that the
Survey is now beginning work on the parish of
Whitechapel, an East End place of great historical
interest in the throes of major change.
This will lead in due course and in the traditional
way to a book in the parish series (volume 54).
However, we are keen to make it known that the
Survey is following a new path to that end. Now
that we are housed within a university, in the
Bartlett School of Architecture at University College
London since 2013, the Survey is eligible to receive
research-council funding. This is important
because the kinds of innovations that we have long
wanted to introduce to the Survey’s methods have
not been possible heretofore for want of money. We
are delighted and fortunate that the Arts and
Humanities Research Council has approved a grant
proposal for a three-year experimental project to try
out in Whitechapel a reshaping of the way the
Survey conducts its research.
page 7
Park Village East, looking north
Whitechapel Road looking west in 2016 by Derek Kendall
In collaboration with the Bartlett’s Centre for
Advanced Spatial Analysis we have been able to
create a website – Survey of London, Histories of
Whitechapel (surveyoflondon.org), launched in
September 2016. This functions as a research base
as we accumulate information about Whitechapel.
Crucially,
the
map-based
website
will
be
participative up to the end of 2018, enabling any
and all with an interest in or experiences of
Whitechapel’s places and buildings (that very much
includes you, dear Top Soc newsletter reader) to
contribute knowledge, ranging from research
findings to reminiscences to photographs or
drawings. We are keen not only to engage our
existing readership, but also to extend it, both
locally and globally, and to widen our sources in a
way that we feel would have pleased Ashbee, for
whom the recording of London’s built fabric was
what would now be called a public-engagement
mission. The grant has also made possible the
cataloguing of Whitechapel archives (mainly deeds)
held by Tower Hamlets Local History Library and
Archives, material that will soon be accessible
through their online catalogue, the commissioning
of new photographs and drawings, and the hosting
of events, such as workshops, walks and
exhibitions (see the website).
Whitechapel’s history: a story of immigration
Whitechapel has a rich and complicated history in
which immigration has a central place. As
Elizabethan London expanded, many came from
the English countryside and John Stow famously
found Whitechapel ‘pestered with Cottages and
Allies’. There followed Irish, Huguenot and German
arrivals in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Sugar baking, based on Caribbean
imports into the Port of London, was a significant
local industry, largely handled by German
immigrants who possessed the secrets of the trade
– Whitechapel retains Lutheran and Catholic
German churches, though the former is no longer
in use as such. It is better known that large-scale
Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe followed
pogroms in the last decades of the nineteenth
century. Then in the post-war period there was
another major shift in the area’s population as
Bengali immigrants, largely Muslim, settled in
Whitechapel. The majority of the district’s
population now is of Bangladeshi origin, albeit
many at one or two generations remove, and there
are numerous other smaller groups of recent
immigrants. There is also much new purpose-built
student housing, and gentrification has taken hold
in the area’s remaining pre-Victorian houses and in
a slew of new tower blocks across the parts of the
parish nearest the City. This area is bisected by
Whitechapel High Street on which stands the
Whitechapel Gallery, though ‘placemakers’ are
spinning vigorously to re-designate it Aldgate –
Whitechapel
evidently
has
undesirable
connotations. On Commercial Street, directly
opposite Toynbee Hall, new apartment blocks
place-make with yet more absurd naming –
Kensington Apartments, Ladbroke House and
Sloane Apartments; they evidently do not expect
prospective purchasers to be local. Whatever it is
called, this inner district has been transformed in
the last few years by cliffs of glass.
Further east on Whitechapel Road the former
churchyard of St Mary Matfelon, the parish church
that replaced the eponymous medieval ‘white
chapel’, is now Altab Ali Park, renamed in memory
of a young man murdered in a racist attack in
1978. The park has a Shaheed Minar (martyrs’
monument) of 1999, a secular memorial copied
from a larger monument in
Dhaka that commemorates
those who died fighting for
Bangladeshi independence.
Beyond is the Whitechapel
Bell
Foundry,
an
extraordinary survival of
manufacturing given its
central
location,
which
retains
front
buildings
from when it moved to this
site in the 1740s from the
then densely built-up inner
part of the parish. Further
along is the East London
Mosque, London’s most
used mosque and a major
local presence. It moved
here from the Commercial
Road in the 1970s and into
its present main building
in the early 1980s. The
mosque
has
expanded
gradually since on to a
larger
site
that
now
page 8
Shaheed Minar, Altab Ali Park, Whitechapel, in 2015, photograph by Lucy Millson-Watkins
page 9
comprehends the former Great Synagogue on
Fieldgate Street, the last of many dozens of
synagogues in the parish, now fallen redundant
and possibly destined for use as a heritage centre
to encourage links between faiths.
Whitechapel highlights
The east end of Whitechapel Road is what all would
agree is Whitechapel. Here the tube station
(stations are the latter-day anchors for place names
more than high streets or parish churches) has
mutating entrances while it is reconstructed for
Crossrail, a change that will have a further
transformative effect. Across the road is another
landmark, the Royal London Hospital. Since 2012
the hospital has occupied new buildings, set back
from the road. The former roadside hospital, which
traces its origins to the 1750s, is to be converted to
be a civic centre for Tower Hamlets Council. That
seems an enlightened and hearteningly appropriate
reuse of an historic public building.
The parish of Whitechapel also extends south to
take in places not normally associated with the
place-name. Alie Street, Leman Street, Mansell
Street and Prescot Street form a near-square on the
map that was laid out around 1700 with good
houses, a handful of which survive. Also here are
notable reminders of the scale of the co-operative
movement in Co-operative Wholesale Society’s
buildings, now largely converted to residential use.
Finally, there is Wellclose Square, laid out by
Nicholas Barbon at the end of the seventeenth
century. A Danish church at its centre was
replaced by a charming Victorian school and early
houses were all cleared in the 1960s, while close by
Wilton’s Music Hall has been preserved.
The Survey of London has long since moved on
from cherry-picking major sites, so perhaps
mentioning
these
highlights is misleading as
to the nature of our work.
There is a great deal else to
be investigated, mostly of a
more quotidian character.
Our
interest
is
in
everything on the ground
and,
within
reason,
governed by pragmatism,
what
has
gone.
Our
interactive map is made up
of
1,395
vectorised
polygons,
each
representing a building,
behind which there are
historic maps for help in
reconstructing
vanished
topographies. Clicking on
any
site
opens
the
possibility
of
reading
content already present (in
many cases there is as yet
no more than an address
and a rough identifying
snapshot), and of contributing stories, facts, images
– anything historical about Whitechapel’s buildings
(though not too much please by way of Jack the
Ripper-ology, amply housed elsewhere on the
internet). Please do contribute. We are eagerly
looking forward to compiling this Survey of London
volume together with our readers.
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
Hidden in the corner of the map…:
town vignettes on early maps and
charts
Peter Barber, formerly head of the Map Department
in the British Library, reflects on how the views of
towns and buildings which can be discovered on
early maps may reveal the interests and priorities of
patrons or mapmakers.
Modern maps, whether digital or hard copy, are
generally intended to answer predictable questions
in a standardised way. Since the location of
features is considered a prime requirement, the
locations of towns and cities on small to medium-
scale maps are indicated by signs that have become
immediately recognisable to most users through
centuries of repetition.
This has not always been so, however. While
signs – of varying degrees of elaboration but
lacking individualised features – are to be seen on
maps from earliest times (for instance on medieval
copies of Roman maps of their empire, or on the
‘Gough’ map of the Great Britain now dated to
about 1400 in the Bodleian Library), early maps
and sea charts often contain miniaturised views
and, later, plans of town ultimately derived from
The former London Hospital, Whitechapel Road, in 2016. In the foreground the head of the figure of
Justice, W. S. Frith, sculptor, from Whitechapel Market’s drinking fountain of 1911, photograph by
Derek Kendall
direct observation or survey. ‘Ultimately’ is the key
word. While none seem to have been the product of
direct observation, neither are the vignettes on
maps necessarily unthinking copies of their
prototypes. Certain features may be exaggerated,
or specific buildings added in ways which throw
light on the values of the mapmaker or their
patron.
As has often been pointed out, the Hereford World
Map of about 1300 contains a realistic depiction of
Lincoln cathedral on top of a hill – a feature which
almost certainly appeared on the map’s model,
(which was created at Lincoln), while the
importance of Hereford is acknowledged on the
map through the depiction of nearby Clee Hill
rather than the town itself. The same map – and
most medieval world maps influenced by the
theories of an early twelfth-century German
theologian, Hugh, who taught in the Abbey of St
Victor near Paris – also has a realistic map of Paris
as an island in the Seine. The years that saw the
creation of the Hereford map, witnessed very
different, and more utilitarian sea charts being
created in Catalonia and Italy. The only decoration
on the Italian-style charts – mostly made in Venice
– are vignettes of Venice and its rival republic,
Genoa, as seen from the sea.
As Catherine Delano Smith has demonstrated in
the most thorough recent discussion of the
evolution of map signs in early modern Europe,1
the years between 1530 and 1560 were the golden
age of the town vignette on European maps.
England at that time had no map trade of its own
and virtually no maps were printed here either.
However it was close to Antwerp, which was
becoming a European mapping centre, and the
English were becoming increasingly adept at
mapmaking – most of which appeared in
manuscript. As a result, views of London appear
as vignettes on a number of these early maps,
such as one of the manuscript maps used by
Henry VIII in planning the journey to England of
Anne of Cleves in 1539 (British Library Cotton MS
Augustus I.ii.64), the map of the British Isles by
George Lily that was published in Rome in 1546
or an anonymous woodcut map of the British Isles
printed in the Netherlands in 1548-9, the unique
surviving example of which is now in a private
American collection.
Such
vignette
views
are
of
particular
importance to people with an interest in London
history because so few other views of medieval
and early modern London are now known. It is
generally assumed that only a minuscule fraction
of this early material – perhaps as little as 5% –
now survives. So the historian has to clutch at
straws – and these vignettes are one of them. As I
have argued elsewhere, though they are not
original works in themselves, they give as close
an idea as is now possible of the lost and much
larger prototype.2 These are likely to have been
much copied and well-known in their time and to
have formed the accepted image of early Tudor
London.
After 1560 the percentage of non-individualised
settlement signs on printed maps increased, and
from about 1590 the miniaturised views and town
plans tended to appear in the borders of printed
maps – particularly those published in Amsterdam.
But the particularised vignette on a map did not
disappear. There is, by way of an example, an
attractive miniature view of London on John
Norden’s map of Middlesex in the Middlesex volume
of his Speculum Britanniae, published in 1593.
Moreover, in this respect manuscript maps followed
their own trajectory. Some may have been no more
than rough sketches on paper or parchment, but
many – and a high percentage of those that survive
–
were
objects
of
exquisite
draftsmanship
commissioned by or intended for presentation to
the great and the good, including the monarch.
They often contain details which, while of little
relevance to the theme of the map, repay detailed
study.
page 10
Lincoln Cathedral on the Mappa Mundi
London on George Lily’s map of 1546