Contents
Notes and News ............................................ p.1
Obituaries................................................ pp.2-3
Elspeth Veale
Ralph Hyde
Ken Gay
Events .......................................................... p.4
Exhibitions .................................................. p.4
Maps of London parishes: help needed .......... p.5
Circumspice.................................................. p.5
Photographs as historic records .................... p.6
Changing London: Art and the Underground
p.6
Some London novelties:
Apple Tree Yard and Kings Cross Pond........ p.7
On the fringe of the Square Mile.................. p.7
Changes at Sir John Soane’s Museum .......... p.8
The ‘lost’ private apartments at
Sir John Soane’s Museum by Sue Palmer...... p.8
London’s local libraries,
new proposals for Lambeth ........................ p.10
Old Lambeth: the Woolley Collection and
William Strudwick, by Laurence Marsh ...... p.10
Reviews ...................................................... p.14
Notes and News
The 115th AGM took place on Monday 6 July 2015
in the spacious premises of Cadogan Hall, the
former Christian Science church in Sloane Terrace,
Chelsea. Minutes will be printed in the May
Newsletter;
officers
and
Council
members
appointed are listed on the back page of this
Newsletter. The occasion was memorable for a
presentation to our long-serving retiring editor, Dr
Ann Saunders, who received a painting by one of
her favourite artists (a Norfolk scene which Ann
had chosen), a commemorative album compiled
by Roger Cline with contributions from members,
and a cheque thanks to the generosity of members.
She was also nominated a Vice President. Members
gathered from 6pm on the ground floor of Cadogan
Hall (formerly Sunday schools for the Christian
Science church above, now a concert hall). Owing
to the later time than usual, it was an occasion for
drinks rather than the customary LTS tea. There
was ample room for drinking and chatting, and
time to collect copies of Ann’s latest achievement,
volume 31 of the London Topographical Record,
packed with interesting contributions, as well as
the bonus of an attractive extra publication,
Richard Morris’s 1830 panorama of Regents Park.
After the business meeting in the grand concert
hall upstairs we were treated to an excellent talk by
the Chelsea historian and architect David de Lay.
His subject was the late eighteenth-century
development of the area of Chelsea to the north of
Sloane Square known as Hans Town, by the
architect Henry Holland; little known, because
most of it has been rebuilt, although the street
layout survives. Our thanks go to him, to the
Cadogan estate, to our chairman and secretary for
organising such a successful occasion and to all
those who manned the table and handed out our
new publications.
Work is already in hand by our new editor, Sheila
O’Connell, on next year’s publication, a collection of
plans of London buildings before 1720, culled from
many different sources by Dorian Gerhold.
Ann’s guiding hand will be much missed, but it is
good news that she will continue to be involved as a
Vice President. This year has seen some sad losses
to the Society; this Newsletter includes obituaries
both to Elspeth Veale, Vice President since ????
and to Ralph Hyde, for many years a much valued
Council member, who was closely involved with
many of the society’s publications. His sudden
death came as a great shock. The Council, aware of
its declining numbers, has proposed three new
members, Dorian Gerhold, Peter Guillery and
Geoffrey Tyack, and we are delighted to announce
that they have all expressed willingness to serve
and will be formally nominated at the next AGM.
Dorian Gerhold is well known for his numerous
Newsletter
Number 81
November 2015
publications on the history of Putney and
Wandsworth (this Newsletter has a review of his
latest work), and for his books on road transport;
he is the compiler of our next year’s publication of
early plans of London buildings.
Peter Guillery works for the Survey of London; he
edited the recent volume on Woolwich, has
contributed to its work on Marylebone, and recently
began a new project on Whitechapel; he has also
written on London’s seventeenth-century churches,
and is the author of the pioneering study, The
Small House in Eighteenth Century London (2004).
Geoffrey Tyack is an architectural historian with
a special interest in the earlier nineteenth century,
demonstrated by his books on James Pennethorne
and John Nash, and contributed most helpfully
(and at very short notice) to this year’s publication
on the Regent’s Park panoramas.
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Obituaries
Elspeth Veale 1916-2015
Elspeth Veale who died in April this year was
born on 6 May 1916 in the middle of the Great
War. Her father was a Methodist minister and she
and her sister went to Newland High School in
Hull which she remembered with affection. From
there she went on to King’s College London to
read history and was awarded her BA in 1937.
After a year’s training course Elspeth taught in
girls’ grammar schools in St Alban’s and West
Yorkshire but returned to London in 1946 when
she was appointed to a post at the Skinners’
Company’s School for Girls in Stamford Hill.
This
appointment
was
significant
in
determining Elspeth’s later career because she
became interested in the Skinners’ Company,
taught the girls about medieval skinners and
began herself to explore the rich archive of the
Skinners’
Company
kept
at
their
hall.
Encouraged by the award of a one-year research
fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research
in 1950, Elspeth developed her research on the
English fur trade in the medieval period into a
doctorate which she was awarded by London
University in 1953. Her ground-breaking book on
this topic (published by the Oxford University
Press) followed in 1971. Elspeth was one of the
first historians to write a company history which
looked not simply at the governing structures
and physical environs of the company but rather
at the ways in which medieval skinners actually
worked in importing, preparing and stitching the
furs. Her focus was on the craft and not the
company, but in spite of this the company
acknowledged her scholarship, paid her fee when
she took up the Freedom of the City, escorted
Elspeth to the Guildhall and gave her, she
recalled, ‘a splendid lunch’.
In 1953 Elspeth
had taken up a post
at City of London
School
for
Girls
where
she
is
remembered fondly
by those she taught
– not only for her
historical
insights
but also for her
stylish
outfits
in
bright
colours.
Elspeth’s final move
was to Goldsmiths’
College, University
of London, where
she became, in due course, the Dean of the
School of Humanities. She continued with her
scholarly
publications
which
included
an
Historical Association pamphlet on Teaching the
History of London. She always maintained her
interest in London history and in dress and
clothing, although after her retirement in 1977
she extended her scholarly work to include
studies on the history of Wimbledon where she
lived.
Elspeth was a great supporter of London
history, not only by her excellent scholarly
publications, but by serving as Treasurer of the
London Record Society for many years. She also
unobtrusively subsidised a number of London
research activities. She was a regular attender at
the medieval London seminars at the IHR. She
joined the London Topographical Society in 1957,
and in 1980 played an important part in
organising
the
Society’s
80th
anniversary
celebrations. In the same year she was elected to
the Council. She was made an honorary member
in 2008, and was also appointed a Vice President.
Her intellectual powers remained sharp until
the end of her life and she never lapsed into
sentimentality. On occasion she could be bracing,
or forthright, but she was always kind,
encouraged younger scholars and was willing to
share her knowledge, and to learn from them.
Elspeth had a wide circle of friends and a cluster
of cousins and godchildren many of who spoke
with warmth and humour about their friendships
with her at the service held in April to celebrate
her life. The study of medieval London history and
medieval London historians have benefitted
immeasurably
from
Elspeth’s
purposeful
scholarship and supportive friendship. She was
an admirable scholar and an admirable person.
– Caroline Barron
A copy of Elspeth Veale’s essay Matilda Penne:
Medieval London Skinner, including a short
autobiography and bibliography, was published in
2015, and is available from Skinners’ Hall, 8
Dowgate Hill, London EC4R 2SP for £3.
page 2
Ralph Hyde 1939-2015
The sudden death of our council member Ralph
Hyde on 5 June will have come as a considerable
shock both to those who knew him personally,
and to those who appreciated his considerable
range of publications on aspects of London maps,
panoramas and paintings. This account will
concentrate largely on his work for the Society
over almost 40 years.
Ralph joined St Marylebone Library in 1960,
which is where I first met him. On the
amalgamation of London boroughs in 1965,
Ralph moved to the Guildhall Library, initially as
a library assistant, before his appointment as
Assistant Keeper of Maps and Prints in 1970. He
succeeded James Howgego as Keeper in 1975,
and was elected to the Society’s Council two years
later.
From the outset, Ralph was active in the
Society’s publication programme, making his first
major impact with the discovery of the Rhinebeck
panorama in a New York suburb in 1980. Its
subsequent acquisition by the Museum of London
(it is not currently in display) was a sensation,
and Ralph steered it through for the Society to
publish. Felix Barker prepared a major feature for
The Times and the orders arrived by the sackload
from all over the world. It remains the Society’s
all-time best-seller.
Ralph is particularly associated with the series
of A-Zs of Historical London, beginning in 1979
with Elizabethan London. These were intended to
be more user-friendly working tools than the full
size facsimiles which the Society had been
publishing at intervals since the end of the
nineteenth century. Ralph worked on most of the
series to date, notably Georgian (1982), Victorian
(1987), Restoration (1992) and Charles II (2013).
Ralph’s interest in panoramas led to his
organisation
of
the
major
exhibition
‘Panoramania’ at the Barbican Art Gallery in
1988, with an excellent catalogue. This was a
sequel to one he had curated at New Haven’s Yale
Centre in 1985, ‘Gilded Scenes and Shining
Prospects’. He went on to publish ‘Barker’s
Panorama from the roof of the Albion Mills’ for the
Society, also in 1988, as well as a volume on the
eighteenth-century town panoramas of Samuel
and Nathaniel Buck (1994).
There was much more. Ralph edited Cecil
Brown’s bird’s eye view of bomb-damaged London
(2003), a catalogue of the ward maps of the City
of London (1999) and a catalogue of the London
views of the Stationers’ Almanacks (2010).
Meanwhile he was publishing other works
commercially or through the Corporation of
London, including the sequel to Howgego’s
catalogue of London maps to 1850, covering the
second half of the nineteenth century and based
on his Library Association thesis; a booklet on the
Regent’s Park Colosseum; a survey of London
watercolours of Henry Tidmarsh; and a history of
failed architectural schemes for London (London
as it might have been, with Felix Barker, 1982).
Still to come, for the Society, is a catalogue of
London parish maps (probably 2018) which Ralph
had helped to locate and coordinate (see p.5 of
this Newsletter).
Ralph’s energy was boundless (and I speak as
someone who was frequently called on to supply
research and references for his publications); his
retirement from the Guildhall Library just before
the Millennium enabled him to devote himself full
time to the cataloguing and research of the
Jonathan and Jaqueline Gestetner collection of
panoramas and optical toys. As is always the
case, the task took much longer than anticipated,
but it was gratifying that Ralph lived just long
enough to see its publication in the spring of
2015.
Appropriately, Ralph met his future wife, Ruth
Bollington, at Tooley’s map and print shop (now
Daunt’s Bookshop) in the Marylebone Road,
where she was working as an assistant. The
writer has happy memories of a reunion of former
Marylebone Library staff hosted by Ralph and
Ruth at their Woolwich home some 20 years ago.
Ruth tragically died from cancer not long after
Ralph’s retirement.
A fuller obituary will be published in due course
in the Society’s Record series.
– David Webb
Ken Gay 1923-2015
Kenneth David Gay, born in Stratford, West Ham,
spent 60 years of his life in north London, living
near Alexandra Palace. After a career working in
the Public Relations department of the National
Coal Board, he devoted his retirement to
campaigning for and writing about his local area,
while maintaining wider interests which included
both films and London topography. He led many
popular walks exploring his his home ground of
Muswell Hill. He succeeded Joan Schwitzer as
President of the Hornsey Historical Society and
for many years was Chair of that Society’s
Publications Committee; Hornsey’s impressive
publications
record
owes
much
to
his
involvement. In 2011 his efforts were recognised
by a Lifetime Achievement Award by the British
Association of Local History. Among his own
books are a succinct history of Hornsey, From
Forest to Suburb (1988), also Muswell Hill, A
History and Guide (2002), and Palace on the Hill
(3rd ed. 2005). His memoir, Hand in hand with
time (2009), recalled his experiences growing up
in an East London suburb.
– Bridget Cherry
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page 3
Events
2015 is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of
Michael Robbins, author of the invaluable
Middlesex (1953) written as part of the, alas never
completed, New Survey of England edited by Jack
Simmons. Middlesex, Our Lost County is the
subject of the 50th annual conference of the
London and Middlesex Archaeological Society,
Saturday 21 November 2015 at the Museum of
London. The day will start with a tribute to Michael
Robbins by the President of LAMAS, John Clark,
and will include talks on Middlesex before
Domesday (Pamela Taylor); Middlesex ceramics
(Jacqui Pearce); John Wilkes and Middlesex
elections (Robin Eagles); the Middlesex County
Council (Charlotte Scott) and the recording work of
the North Middlesex Photographic Society (John
Hinshelwood). This year’s publication awards will
be announced and there will be the usual displays
by local history societies (including the LTS) – an
admirable opportunity to explore work by local
groups throughout Greater London. For booking
and further details see the LAMAS website.
By the time this Newsletter is published there will
have been a chance to remember Michael Robbins
in a different way, as co-author of volume 1 of the
magisterial History of London Transport, at a
Centenary Symposium at The London Transport
Museum, Covent Garden on 3 October. (T. C.
Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London
Transport, vol. 1, The nineteenth century, 1963).
Other tempting activities at the Transport Museum
include a showing of the 1929 film Piccadilly, billed
as ‘a stylish evocation of jazz-age London’, on
Tuesday 1 December at 6.30. For details see
ltmuseum.co.uk
Gresham College Lectures. The article on Sir
Thomas Gresham in Newsletter 79 may have
awakened interest in the College which he founded,
which is still going strong, and has published its
lecture programme for 2015-6. These lectures, free
and open to all, usually on a first come basis, cover
a wide range of historical, cultural, economic and
scientific topics. They are held in a variety of
locations (mostly Museum of London, Royal College
of Surgeons and Barnards Inn Hall). For details see
www.gresham.ac.uk. Of special interest to London
historians: 18 November: Simon Thurley on ‘Envy
of Kings: the Guildhall of London and the power of
medieval corporations’, 6pm at the Museum of
London. And on 28 January 2016, a symposium:
‘London – the Global Maritime centre in a changing
World’, 6pm at the Guildhall (booking required).
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century British
Architecture, Saturday 23 January 2016. The
6th New Insights conference, organised by Claire
Gapper and Paula Henderson at the Society of
Antiquaries, Burlington House, ranges wide in its
subject matter with lectures by experts in their
fields. Definitely relevant for London will be
Anthony Wells-Cole on William Laud’s idolatrous
painted glass for Lambeth. Among other intriguing
subjects which may also be of interest to London
historians are: Yelda Nasifoglu, ‘Robert Hooke,
experimental philosophy of air, and architecture’;
Trevor
Cooper,
‘The
arrangement
of
post-
Reformation
parish
church
interiors,
from
contemporary plans’, and Jonathan Kewley,
‘Resurrection in the churchyard: the emergence of
a new culture of extramural memorialisation in the
seventeenth century’. The conference costs £50.
For
further
details
contact
claire.gapper@
btinternet.com or write to Dr Claire Gapper, 12
Officers’ Terrace, The Historic Dockyard, Chatham,
Kent ME4 4LJ.
Autumn Metropolitan History Seminars at the
Institute of Historical Research, Senate House,
Malet Street (Wednesdays at 5.30) include: 25
November: Tom Hulme, Civic Identity and the
Octopus’: historical pageants on the border of
London (at 26 Bedford Way); 9 December: Sarah
Ann Milne: the practice of property, the Drapers
Company
estate
1540-1640.
See
further:
events.history.ac.uk
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Exhibitions
Death and Memory, Soane and the Architecture
of Memory, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Lincoln’s
Inn Fields. This subject was a potent inspiration for
the architect Sir John Soane. 2014 was the 200th
anniversary of the death of Soane’s wife Eliza,
which affected him deeply. The exhibition includes
Soane’s designs for the family tomb at St Pancras,
his design for a monument to the Duke of
Wellington, and rarely exhibited drawings for
mausolea and funerary sculpture; also on display
will be drawings for monuments by other architects
such as Robert Adam, Piranesi, William Chambers,
Nicholas Hawksmoor, John Flaxman and George
Dance. Until 26 March 2016.
London Dust,
Museum of London. A free
exhibition of photographs and film by Blees
Luxemburg which contrast ‘the idealised computer-
generated visions of London that clad City building
sites with the gritty unpolished reality’. Until 10
January 2016.
Agincourt 600, Guildhall Art Gallery. A display
featuring the rarely seen Crystal Sceptre which,
according to recent research, was given by Henry V to
the City of London as a mark of his gratitude to the
City for providing the funds to fight the battle of
Agincourt in 1415. The exhibition also charts the
pilgrimage made by the king following his victory,
paying homage to his patron saints. Until 3 December.
Camden 50 (see the website Camden50.co.uk) is
the umbrella title of a series of arts and
‘engagement activities’ which have been taking
place over the last six months on the themes of
‘democracy, innovation and radical thinking’ over
the half a century that has passed since the
creation of the borough of Camden. Events include
an exhibition at Holborn Library.
page 4
page 5
Camden, as older members will remember, was
formed from the boroughs of Holborn, St Pancras
and Hampstead. The old boroughs within the
London County Council area in many cases simply
took over the boundaries of still older parishes, and
it is PARISH MAPS that are to be a focus of a future
LTS publication, as the following note explains.
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Maps of London Parishes –
help needed
There are catalogues of many different types of
London maps – from 1553 to 1850; from 1850 to
1900; and of City Wards. The last two are by the
esteemed Ralph Hyde, long-term member of our
Council and pre-eminent authority on London
mapping, who sadly died this summer.
Ralph had prepared the manuscript for a further
catalogue of London maps, this time of London
parishes within the old LCC area up to 1900. These
range from elaborate manuscript plans through
unique tithe redemption maps held at the National
Archives to the array of attractive printed and often
coloured parish maps of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
Most of the work has been done; Ralph was
utterly meticulous in his work and in the late
1960s and early 1970s visited all the local history
libraries to note their contents. Ralph entrusted us
with the publication of this catalogue, and had
planned to oversee a committee of volunteers who
would check the libraries for more recent
accessions, answer the few queries he noted in the
manuscript and possibly do some further research
on the internet (then uninvented) to find out more
about the individual maps. We have computerised
his manuscript and now need the help of our
members to bring this important work to fruition as
one of our annual publications, targeted for 2018.
All volunteers will be acknowledged in the
publication.
We have had a number of volunteers so far, and
Peter Barber, formerly Map Librarian at the British
Library, has agreed to write the introduction and
Laurence Worms, co-author of British Map
Engravers, will also assist. What we are looking for
are members who are prepared to do the following:
l Take responsibility for a single parish or
parishes within a borough;
l Visit the local history library to check it still
holds the maps that Ralph has noted, answer
any queries that Ralph has noted, and
catalogue any additions;
l Take a photograph (your mobile phone will
suffice, and we will pay any library fees) of two
or three of the larger or more important maps
in the library so we can assess which to select
for professional photography;
l If you have the energy, see if the library has
any information on the individual surveyors or
the patrons who commissioned the maps. You
might also like to do some internet research to
see what else you can come up with.
We need volunteers to cover all London from
Putney to Plumstead, Stamford Hill to Streatham;
one-third of the total are maps of the many minute
City parishes, and we need several members
interested in covering them. The holdings of the
National Archives at Kew, principally tithe maps,
also need to be checked. Please contact Simon
Morris if you would like to discuss participating (7
Barnsbury Terrace, N1 1HJ, email santiago
decompostela@btinternet.com).
Members
who
volunteered at the AGM have already (and
gratefully) been noted. We plan to convene a
meeting of prospective volunteers one Saturday in
the City over the next few weeks.
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Circumspice
What is the subject of this sculpture and where is
it?
Answer on p.13.
Photographs as historic records:
the ‘Red Boxes’
This Newsletter
highlights a fascinating local
collection of historic photographs of Lambeth
(pp.10-12). Photographs of all parts of London can
also be found in the national collection now in the
care of Historic England at their centre at Swindon.
Those with long memories will recall that the
famous ‘Red Boxes’ of mounted photographs
collected by the body which began as the National
Buildings Record used to be housed in Savile Row,
and in the more distant past at Great College
Street. Their move to Swindon was much lamented
by London historians. But now comes the welcome
news that 600,000 of the photographs in the Red
Boxes have been digitised and can be consulted on
line. Coverage of Greater London is arranged under
boroughs. It is patchy, but there are many
interesting older photographs including records of
threatened (and later demolished) buildings. To
search the collection, visit: historicengland.org.uk/
images-books/archive/archive-collections/
englands-places/
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Changing London
Art and the Underground
One of the most bewildering places in London at
the moment is the junction of Tottenham Court
Road and Oxford Circus, which is being remodelled
in connection with the creation of a new
interchange between Crossrail and the London
Underground. The new Crossrail station (three
football pitches long, five storeys deep, with an
additional entrance in Dean Street) will be served
by an enlarged entrance hall to both Crossrail and
the underground at Tottenham Court Road. The
transitional confusion is even generating its own
literature – a witty article by Andrew O’Hagan in
the London Review of Books (4 Septermber 2015)
describes the seemingly anarchic programming of
the crossing lights which frustrate pedestrians
attempting to traverse the present site. This will
one day become a new plaza at the foot of
Centrepoint, with an entrance to the stations,
where the footfall is estimated to increase by 30%.
When work was in progress earlier this year, it was
revealed that it entailed the removal of the mosaic
decoration on the arches above the escalators in
the present station. These were a part of the
striking and colourful decoration, drawing on
sources ranging from ancient art to modern
technology, by the Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi
(1924-2005), added in the 1980s to cheer the
hundred-year old building. Cries of protest led by
the Twentieth Century Society and a petition signed
by 8000 highlighted the inadequate protection
currently enjoyed by modern art works of this kind,
but failed to change the plans. However, there were
assurances from Transport for London that the
mosaics elsewhere in the station would be
preserved, and if necessary made good by 2016.
Recently it was announced that the arches mosaics
would be repaired and displayed in Edinburgh,
where there is already an important collection of
Paolozzi’s works. Previews of the vast, sleek new
entrance concourse (architects: Hawkins/Brown)
suggest an aesthetic very different from Paolozzi’s
forceful mosaics with their lively diversity of
historical and technological themes cheering the
passenger along the narrow tunnels. The new
building will have art work by Daniel Buren making
use of ‘emphatic abstractions using severely
simplified forms and arresting colours’ (Royal
Academy of Arts magazine 127, summer 2015). At
present the entrance to the Central Line is closed
but one can still access the Northern Line from the
SW corner of the crossroads, and view the Paolozzi
murals on the platforms.
TfL may be impatient with the recent past, but it
would be unfair to brand the organisation as
philistine, for since 2000, it has supported a varied
artistic programme, carrying on the tradition begun
under Frank Pick between the wars. Some of the
page 6
Labyrinth at Green Park
results are temporary displays, but there are also
permanent
installations,
for
example
the
‘labyrinths’ by Mark Wallinger, 270 different black
and white designs on vitreous enamel panels, one
for each station, installed in 2014 to celebrate 150
years of the underground. They neatly pay homage
to the circular motif of the underground‘s logo,
while offering the symbol of a journey, a
contemplative experience, and a special identity for
each station. Currently a new project, ‘Underline’
by the architectural collective Assemble, is focusing
on
improvements
to
enhance
commuters’
experience at the unappealing Victoria line station
at Seven Sisters. See further art.tfl.gov.uk
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Some London novelties
Apple Tree Yard, between Jermyn Street and St
James’s Square, Piccadilly, was the site of the office
of Sir Edgar Lutyens, and the place where he drew
up
designs
for
New
Delhi.
This
is
now
commemorated by an inscription on three Dolerite
blocks set in a recessed bay, and a grey basalt
sculpture, entitled ‘Relief Figure emerging to EL’, all
by the sculptor Stephen Cox. The group, with its
cultural allusions to both the East and West (Cox
has been much influenced by both Indian and
Egyptian sculpture), offers a change from the usual
commemorative portrait figure, and provides an
interesting counterpoint to the impeccably detailed
new office block behind by Eric Parry. This extends
to St James’s Square; although large, its mass is
cleverly broken up by a variety of materials and
elevations.
Kings Cross Pond is the latest excitement offered
by the grand development scheme transforming the
area north of King’s Cross. Advertised as ‘the UK’s
first public man-made, naturally purified outdoor
bathing pond’ and as ‘an art installation you can
swim in’, it is sited in the midst of building work at
20 Canal Reach, off York Way (£3.50 per session,
see kingscross pond.club). It is planned as a
centrepiece to the future Lewis Cubitt Park (it will
admit only limited numbers until the planting is
mature). A useful guide to all the new buildings of
the Kings Cross development can be found at
kingscross.co.uk/architects-journal-tour. Should
you
be
curious
about
other
swimming
opportunities today, you can find details of 50 sites
in Swimming London, by Jenny Landreth (Aurum
Press, £8.45). But London Swimming Pools are no
new phenomenon, as we are reminded by the
fascinating article by Todd Longstaffe Gowan in The
London Gardener vol. 18 (2013-4) on ‘Perilous Pond’
near Old Street. This existed in Stow’s time, was
restored and improved as ‘Peerless Pool’, a mid-
eighteenth century pleasure bath, and survived
until the later nineteenth century.
On the fringe of the square mile. Pressure for
profitable commercial development on the City
fringes, nibbling into the neighbouring boroughs,
continues to threaten the distinctive character of
areas surrounding the City. Historically these were
home to London’s varied industries, to its trading
infrastructure, and to the people who worked there.
Today the older buildings have often found new
uses, housing small scale enterprises and
developing their own cultural identity.
Redevelopment proposals have aroused strong
feelings. At West Smithfield the developers have
been held at bay (see Newsletter 80), and the latest
news is that an architectural competition will be
held, supported by £200,000 from the Mayor of
London, which will develop plans for the adaptation
of the historic market buildings as a new, more
spacious home for the Museum of London. But on
the opposite site of the City, the story is rather
different. Currently attention is focused on Norton
Folgate, the area north of Bishopsgate just outside
the City boundary. The land belonging to the
medieval hospital of St Mary Spital became a Liberty
after its Dissolution, and was later absorbed by
Borough of Stepney, which became part of Tower
Hamlets. Major redevelopment by British Land is
proposed for the area around Blossom Street, just
to the east of the main road, where the freehold
landowner is the City of London. Blossom Street has
an impressive array of late nineteenth-century
warehouses. On 21 July local campaigners,
expressing the view that opposing the destruction
was a battle for the identity of London, formed a
human chain around the site. Shortly afterwards
the proposal was rejected by Tower Hamlets
planning committee, but has now been called in by
page 7
Inscription and sculpture by Stephen Cox, Apple Tree Yard
the Mayor of London for further discussion. Today
the warehouses, complete with their cranes, loading
bays and Victorian street lights, stand empty, like a
deserted film set, ominously guarded by CCTV and
security men fiddling with their phones.
The warehouse character of Blossom Street,
distinct from the neighbouring weavers’ streets of
Spitalfields, is explained by the former existence
nearby of the vast Bishopsgate Goods Station. Most
of the station site has stood derelict since a fire in
1964, but part has been rebuilt for the new
Shoreditch High Street Station on the London
Overground, opened 2010. Remnants of Victorian
brick walls, like fragments of ancient Rome, appear
here and there beside the sleek concrete elevated
track. Radical redevelopment of the surrounding
10.3 acres is still under discussion. At present it is
a lively scene bursting with energy; colourful
graffiti, small enterprises in battered buildings
beside weed covered wasteland, all against a
backdrop of towering cranes which creep ever
closer. The latest scheme (by developers Ballymore
and Hammerson), published in June, is scaled
down from earlier ones in response to a Save
Shoreditch campaign led by the Mayor of Hackney:
the proposed towers are reduced to 46 storeys,
shops, studios and workplaces are included, with
an elevated public park along the historic listed
viaduct (built in 1840 by John Braithwaite for
Eastern Counties Railway). The objectors remain
unhappy about the scale, the loss of an informal,
inexpensive setting for small ‘tech’ businesses, and
that only 10% of the 1356 proposed homes will be
affordable housing. Explore this extraordinary area
before it changes – if you continue for a few
minutes further east you will reach the upper end
of Brick Lane and the treasure trove of No.166, the
Brick Lane Bookshop (on which see further p.19)
which began in the 1970s as a community
bookshop, the first bookshop in Tower Hamlets (for
its history see bricklanebookshop.org).
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
Changes at Sir John Soane’s
Museum
In contrast to the radical transformation of other
parts of London, No.13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields has been
preserved as a time capsule from 1837, following
the wishes of its owner, the architect Sir John
Soane. But while Soane’s ingeniously designed
public rooms and his incomparable art collection
have for long been a favourite destination for the
discerning visitor, there is now a whole extra floor to
explore, as Sue Palmer, the Soane archivist,
explains.
The ‘lost’ private apartments at
Sir John Soane’s Museum
Since mid-May 2015 visitors to Sir John Soane’s
Museum at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields have been able,
for the first time in more than 160 years, to visit
the second–floor ‘private apartments’ – Soane’s
Bedroom and Bathroom, the Oratory, Mrs Soane’s
Morning Room, the Model Room and the Book
Passage. These spaces, used as apartments for
successive Curators until 1945 and subsequently
as staff offices, have been painstakingly restored to
look exactly as they did on Soane’s death on 20
January 1837 – the culmination of years of
painstaking research by Deputy Director Helen
Dorey and others using the rich range of archival
and visual sources at the Museum. The project,
part of a wider three-phase restoration project –
Opening Up the Soane – was generously funded by
the Monument Trust, the Heritage Lottery Fund,
page 8
Shoreditch High Street station; Bishopsgate Viaduct beyond
Blossom Street warehouses, October 2015
page 9
the
Wolfson
Foundation
and
many
other
individuals and organisations.
A sizeable team of specialist craftsmen, among
them joiners, historic paint experts, wallpaper
historians, stained glass restorers and historic
textile and carpet experts, worked on the project
under the aegis of the conservation practice Julian
Harrap Architects.
Visitors to the house in Soane’s lifetime had
access to the second floor and today’s visitors
follow the same route that Soane prescribed, as
outlined in his 1835 Description of the House and
Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields…
Entering through an iron gate at the top of the
stairs one passes via a curved passage into Eliza
Soane’s Morning Room [Fig. 1]. After her death in
November 1815, her husband kept this room and
her adjacent bedroom intact until 1833. The
picture hang in this room thus primarily reflects
her tastes, with just one or two later interpolations
such as the view of the Smoking Room at Chelsea
Hospital (where Soane was Clerk of Works from
1807 until his death) which he commissioned from
George Jones in 1834.
From the Morning Room the visitor passes into
the large front room which Soane converted from
Eliza’s bedroom into a Model Room in 1833, to
replace a previous Model Room in the attic above
[Fig. 2]. The room is very much a museum of
architecture in miniature, with models of ruined
and reconstructed classical buildings in cork and
plaster of Paris intermingled with models of Soane’s
own buildings, many of them now lost, including
his Law Courts at Westminster (demolished 1883);
various parts of the Bank of England (interiors
demolished 1930s); the New State Paper Office,
precursor of the Public Record Office, now The
National Archives (demolished 1862) and Holy
Trinity, Marylebone, one of his three London
churches, now sadly an events venue.
From thence the visitor passes into Soane’s
Bathroom and Bedroom (visitors in his lifetime
were merely allowed a glimpse into these intimate
spaces). The Bathroom, dating in origin to 1820,
has excited considerable interest among domestic
historians, as the use of the words ‘Bath Room’ is
very early [Fig. 3]. The Bath itself (one of only two
pieces which had to be recreated, though the
wooden surrounds are original) was fed by hot
running water from a furnace in the attic above –
again a rare early example of this domestic comfort.
Another excitement of the Bathroom is the wall of
original wallpaper which was uncovered during the
course of the work. That it had darkened over time
was proved by the existence of a sample of the
original paper in the order book of Cowtan and
Son, who originally supplied it to Soane, in the
Victoria and Albert Museum. This sample enabled
the reproduction wallpaper to be accurately
recreated, hand block-printed and hung in the
traditional way over canvas.
Beyond the Bedroom can be glimpsed the
Oratory, a curious space formed out of closets at
one end of the Bedroom in 1833. It seems to be
intended as a shrine to Soane’s dead wife, and it is
probably no coincidence that he created it in the
same year that he dismantled her bedroom after 18
years. The space is illuminated by a large panel of
antique stained glass depicting St Arsenius, the
hermit – a reference perhaps to Soane’s lonely
widowed state, mirrored by the fictional alter ego
Padre Giovanni who is supposed to inhabit the
Monk’s Parlour in the basement of the Museum.
Finally, one exits via the Book Passage which has
a spectacular double-height light well piercing up
into the attic floor above, densely hung with
Fig.2 The Model Room, with two models for Soane’s Law Courts in
alternative neo-Palladian and Gothic styles visible on the base of
the Model Stand. Photograph: Gareth Gardner
Fig.1 Mrs Soane’s Morning Room, with George Jones’s
The Smoking Room at Chelsea Hospital visible on the east wall.
Photo: Gareth Gardner
Fig.3 View of the Bathroom in 1825 by C. J. Richardson
depictions of Soane’s own work, including the lost
Pitt Cenotaph in the National Debt Redemption
Office in Old Jewry which was demolished in 1900
[Fig.4]. Members of the London Topographical
Society will no doubt also be intrigued by the case
on top of one of the bookcases which displays two
mummified cats and a rat. One of them was ‘found
in a house in Lothbury taken down to make room
for the New Buildings of the Bank of England in
1803, between the wall and wainscoting of the
Room with the Rat in its mouth’. The other was
found at Walpole House, near the Royal Hospital in
Chelsea, ‘under similar circumstances’. Cats – dead
and alive – were quite commonly interred in
buildings
during
construction
work
by
superstitious builders, as primitive good-luck
charms, or possibly to scare away vermin.
Because of the constricted nature of the spaces
and the fragility of the surfaces, entrance to the
Private Apartments is by guided tour only. They are
included on the one-hour Highlights Tour (£10) at
11.00am and 12.00 midday on Tuesdays and
Saturdays and at 12.00 midday on Thursdays and
Fridays, bookable in advance on www.soane.org
through Eventbrite. Alternatively there are free
half-hour tours on Tuesdays to Saturdays at 1.00
and 2.00pm – first come, first served, sign up in the
South Drawing Room.
– Sue Palmer,
Archivist, Sir John Soane’s Museum
The opening of the private apartments is
celebrated by a new edition of the delightful book,
At Home with the Soanes, Upstairs, Downstairs in
nineteenth century London, by Susan Palmer
(Pimpernel Press, £12.99) which explores the
evidence for the daily life of the Soane family and
their servants at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Surviving
records provide fascinating details of water and
drains, food and drink, heating and lighting,
shopping and festivities, all brought to life by
contemporary drawings. Illuminating not only
about the Soane family, but for anyone interested
in daily life in the early nineteenth century.
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
London’s Local Libraries,
new proposals for Lambeth
The future of many of London’s local libraries is a
cause for concern. Reorganisation can put at risk
access
to
historically
valuable
archives.
Controversial plans considered at a recent Cabinet
meeting of Lambeth Council proposed closing one of
the borough’s libraries and converting three more to
gyms, including the Minet Library, Knatchbull
Road. This was purpose-built to house Lambeth
archives, for which a new home would need to be
created. At present the Lambeth Archives will
remain accessible at the Minet Library, pending an
options appraisal in 2016. Meanwhile we include
here an article which demonstrates just one facet of
the interest of this important collection.
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
Old Lambeth: the Woolley
Collection and William Strudwick
Photographs of old Lambeth by the pioneer
photographer, William Strudwick, form an important
part of the collections of Charles Woolley, now in
Lambeth Archives at the Minet Library, Knatchbull
Road, Lambeth.
It was the hope of Charles Woolley (1846–1922)
that his collection of photographs, prints, pottery
and other objects all associated with Lambeth
would be the kernel for a museum devoted to the
borough’s history. This year is the centenary of his
gift to the borough of his collection. Shortly before
his death Woolley was pressing Lambeth to make
use of Brockwell House, built in the 1860s in the
grounds of Brockwell Hall and recently vacated by
the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories.
However, the prospect of a museum died with him
and Brockwell House was demolished the following
year and the land incorporated within Brockwell
Park. The Woolley Collection remains in the care of
Lambeth Archives at the Minet Library near Myatt’s
Fields. The future of these archives, particularly
their accessibility to the public, is itself now a
serious cause for concern as Lambeth grapples
page 10
Fig.4 Looking into the light well in the Book Passage from the attic
storey towards Soane’s design for the Pitt Cenotaph in the
National Debt Redemption Office. Photograph: Gareth Gardner
with the effect of reduced resources. Sadly a
familiar story.
Although Woolley seems to have created the
impression that he came from a comfortable
background with a university education, the
evidence suggests more straitened circumstances;
he was already working as a clerk at the age of 14
and the records of King’s College London do not
support the suggestion that he was a graduate. But
there is no doubt that he had a deep attachment to
Lambeth, not least to its parish church, St Mary’s,
at the gates of Lambeth Palace. Woolley came to
pursue a successful career in the City as secretary
and director of many companies, only turning to
local politics on the formation of the Metropolitan
Borough of Lambeth in 1900, when he became a
Conservative councillor for the Tulse Hill ward and
in time an Alderman. By this time he had moved to
35 Dulwich Road, the house in Herne Hill that
would remain his home for the rest of his life. He
resigned from the Council because he disagreed
with the borough’s claim to the proceeds of sale of
the land known as Pedlar’s Acre. This had been
sold to the LCC in 1910 as part of the site for the
building of County Hall. Woolley, now a loyal
churchwarden at St Mary’s, supported the view
that the church was entitled to the proceeds, but a
case in the Chancery Division to decide the issues
of title went against the church.
In the catalogue of the Woolley Collection dated
May 1915 held by Lambeth Archives 310 items are
listed. The catalogue was compiled by Woolley
himself.
The
first
section
comprises
79
photographs; they mostly show the Lambeth river
frontage and adjacent streets shortly before the
building of the Albert Embankment in 1866–69.
The second section has 108 varied images with
‘views, engravings, portraits, etc.’ and the last
section lists 120 items of Lambeth stoneware,
pottery being one of the principal industries among
the many factories that grew up near the Thames.
The photographic collection is of especial interest in
the topographical context, comprising prints made
from the 12 by 10 inch glass negatives taken by the
photographer William Strudwick (1834–1910) and a
few prints produced by Strudwick himself.
Strudwick’s legacy is important, as one of the
early photographers who wanted to record the world
outside the studio. In the 1860s this was technically
no easy task. At that time photography had moved
on to the collodion process, which offered many
advantages, but which required the glass plate to be
wet-coated, sensitised, exposed and developed all
within about 15 minutes. This meant that the
photographer was burdened not only with a heavy
camera and tripod, but also a mobile darkroom and
the many materials needed for production of a
negative. Strudwick reminisced 30 years later: “In
this work I was assisted very much by a large dark
tent or house on wheels (a home-made one). It had
a boarded floor and carried all the working plant,
and was large enough for me to stand upright in,
with ample elbow room. This dark tent was drawn
by a man and, on arriving at a given point, I could
have a plate ready in ten minutes.” (The Process
Year Book, Penrose & Co. [1896], pp.78-81). He also
remembers it being sold years later for 14 shillings.
As an outdoor photographer Strudwick is unusual
because he did not concentrate on venerable
antiquities and fine architecture and scenery, as
many contemporaries were doing. He did take
photographs of Lambeth Palace and the Houses of
Parliament, but he also took many of the ordinary
houses and workplaces of Lambeth, however
insalubrious. Judging from what he wrote in 1896,
he was attracted both by the ‘picturesque’ nature of
these scenes and by an awareness that they were
disappearing. In this interest to record a ‘lost’
London he pre-dates the Society for Photographing
the Relics of Old London by some ten years.
Strudwick’s career was one of mixed fortunes. In
1860 he had published a book on photography that
went into three editions and the following year he is
recorded as a ‘photographic storekeeper’ at the V &
A. This probably lay behind the museum acquiring
some 50 ‘Old London’ views by Strudwick in 1869
(some the same as those held by Lambeth
Archives). There are isolated examples of later
photographs – of the old Half Moon Tavern in Herne
Hill before it was rebuilt in 1895 and of the Tulse
Hill Hotel, built in the 1840s and which survives
today. But it would seem that Strudwick
increasingly turned to other things. The British
Museum holds some well-executed topographical
water-colours. It is also said that he worked as an
architect and wrote comic poetry, though I have
seen no evidence of this. The location of his various
homes in South London show a steady decline in
prosperity. He died in the Croydon Workhouse
Infirmary in 1910 and received a pauper’s funeral.
In 1913 the Photographic Survey and Record of
Surrey released Strudwick’s photographic collection
– someone had had the wisdom to deposit it at
Croydon Town Hall – to Charles Woolley ‘for Record
work’. This enabled Woolley to have prints made,
though the original negatives have not survived.
Indeed, many were in poor condition when Woolley
had
access
to
them,
which
accounts
for
imperfections in the prints. These photographs make
an important contribution to Lambeth’s history.
Some were very recently on show at Morley College’s
excellent exhibition ‘Water Lambeth’, alongside
Doulton stoneware also from the Woolley Collection.
Like Henry Doulton, Woolley was buried at West
Norwood cemetery but, in contrast to Doulton’s fine
Grade II listed mausoleum, cemetery ‘maintenance’
by Lambeth resulted in the disappearance of
Woolley’s gravestone some years ago, surely a fate
that this benefactor of the borough did not deserve.
– Laurence Marsh
Laurence Marsh has developed a special interest in
the nineteenth-century history of Lambeth through
his research for the Herne Hill Society.
The following images are reproduced by kind
permission of Lambeth Archives department.
page 11
page 12
Church Street, later Lambeth Road, looking east. The houses, all demolished towards the end of the nineteenth century, faced St Mary’s
parish church, the wall of the graveyard being shown on the far left. Woolley noted that among the houses (with To Let in the upper
windows) was “Teetotal Hall of John Bunyan memory. This is the house with the open archway leading into Old Swan Yard. The figure in
the hat … is old Mr T. F. Leaver (deceased), father of Mr Leaver (still living) of Leaver & Goulty, and grandfather of Mr Leaver, of Leaver &
James, who are still carrying the business of the well-known mast, oar and scull makers, of High Street, Lambeth.” It seems that ‘Teetotal
Hall’ contained a pulpit from which it is said John Bunyan used to preach, the pulpit having been brought from the non-conformist
meeting-house in Zoar Street, Southwark.
Woolley’s describes this view as “An old Riverside Court, called York Wharf, Lambeth, with members of its resident fishing population in
their home scene.”
page 13
Prince’s Street, looking north. Woolley notes: “The roadway and the footways are noticeable in their primitive construction, and the
conditions were insanitary. The wall at the extreme right still stands. It was the boundary of the Phoenix Gas Works. The site of the old
Delft Lambeth Pottery was exactly opposite to the pottery shown on the front elevation top line, which was the land frontage of Cliff’s
Imperial potteries.” To the left of the nearer jar on the elevation is the top of a bottle kiln.
London required huge quantities of drain pipes and chimney pots as the city grew. Woolley notes that this view is taken “from the
Thames tidal way, on the foreshore in Prince’s Street, Lambeth Reach. The building … is in the most elementary form, but nevertheless, it
was a thriving Lambeth industry which well maintained its work-people. This is the riverside back view of Smith’s pottery and shows the
conditions of factory life, half a century ago. The men worked largely in the open air, and boys, as shown, of 11 and 12 years of age were
freely employed. This was afterwards largely rectified by Lord Shaftesbury and other philanthropists.”
Circumspice (see p.5)
So who is he? Officially he’s called The Architect in
Society. Unofficially, he’s surely the alter ego of the
man who commissioned him from sculptor Keith
Godwin. But Eric Lyons, designer of – for their
time – shockingly different homes for progressively-
minded young professionals, was never even close
to being crushed. He fought single-mindedly for
honest and elegant modern design against
planners, bureaucrats, preservationists, and
anyone who got in the way.
He had two key henchman: Geoffrey Townsend,
who resigned his RIBA membership when it
prevented him from acting as Lyons’s developer;
and Leslie Bilsby, builder to some of the pioneering
architects of the 1930s and enthusiast for modern
design. Bilsby lived in Blackheath and snapped up
houses with large gardens as the Victorian leases
on its leafy Cator Estate fell in. He was thus able to
provide Span – the company set up by Townsend –
with sites for a score of well-designed and
lusciously landscaped developments. The Architect
in Society is set in a cross wall of one of these,
Hallgate, where it provides an entrance to the low-
rise terraces of another Span development, The
Hall.
Lyons had not long before won planning
permission on appeal, against the combined forces
of the London County Council, Greenwich Council
and the Blackheath Society, for a block of flats in a
plum location. His South Row site – its buildings
wrecked by a WW2 bomb – was on the edge of the
heath and overlooked a picturesque tree-lined
pond. His opponents wanted pastiche infill; he was
having none of it. Godwin’s sculpture celebrated
that victory. Now the South Row flats are listed;
they are these days admired and defended by
conservationists. Is the load borne by The Architect
in Society for that reason any lighter? I really
wouldn’t bet on it.
– Tony Aldous
Reviews
Laurence Ward: The London County Council
Bomb Damage Maps 1939-1945, Thames &
Hudson 288pp. £48. ISBN 978 0 50051 825 0.
It is ten years since this Society and the London
Metropolitan Archives published the atlas of the
latter’s 110 large scale OS maps hand-coloured to
show the degree of bomb damage suffered by
virtually all properties across the 117 sq.mls of the
former County of London. So popular was that
2005 atlas with architects and surveyors, as well as
local historians and people who wanted to see just
how damaged their house or locality had been over
70 years ago, that the short print run was soon
exhausted. The LMA declined to reprint and the
asking price of a second-hand copy on the internet
eventually reached £1,300. Now, to mark the 75th
anniversary of the opening of the Blitz, the LMA
has relented and Laurence Ward, their principal
archivist (image, film and map collections) and
Thames & Hudson have published the maps
together with many impressive photographs.
The new digital photographic and printing
techniques certainly improve the clarity of detail
and, whereas ‘our’ maps tended to be rather dark,
the 2015 maps have a better whiter/bluish hue
while the reproduction of the hand-colouring
indicating the six degrees of damage severity is
much improved. There remains the problem of
accurately reproducing the often badly faded lighter
colours applied 75 years ago and the green and
now blue often differs across the original sheets.
The stronger black and purple maintain their
distinctness and, although it is sometimes difficult
to differentiate between the dark and light reds and
the orange, overall the colours are better.
The LMA hold two sets of the original hand-
coloured maps but there are differences to be seen
on a few of the sheets in both series. The author
has selected one set and occasional minor
differences can be seen when comparing them with
sheets in the 2005 atlas, e.g. the small detail
additions on the peripheral Sheets 134 and 142.
Almost all of the sheets in the new atlas are those
used in 2005, with the unfortunate exception of
Sheet 73 which has a major discrepancy. Here the
updating of damage appears to have stopped before
the V-1 offensive (and possibly that of the 1944
‘Baby Blitz’) and the resulting damage is not
shown. The 11 V-1 missile impacts on ‘our’ Sheet
73, five on the left-hand Hammersmith and
Shepherd’s Bush page and six on the right-hand
Olympia and Kensington page, with the extensive
damage they caused, are missing. Significantly the
word CANCELLED is written in red pencil in the
lower margin so readers researching damage in
those neighbourhoods should be aware that a more
complete Sheet 73 is in the 2005 atlas and that the
original is available at the LMA.
Trivial comments on the new publication include
the occasional difficulty in reading detail in the
page 14
The Newsletter Editor welcomes
suggestions from readers for items
in the Newsletter.
The deadline for contributions
to the May Newsletter is
16 April 2016.
For contact details see the back page.
binding at the centre of sheets – ‘our’ atlas had a
narrow white vertical margin separating the pages.
Also the 2015 maps have a wide lower margin for
page numbers – surely redundant as sheet
numbers are in the left-hand margin and this
results in the maps being reproduced at a slightly
smaller scale.
However, for general readers and researchers
these points are more than compensated for by the
inclusion of some 50 pages of quite astounding
black and white photographs of damage in the City
taken
by
official
City
of
London
Police
photographers PCs Arthur Cross and Fred Tibbs.
Many are reproduced as dramatic full-page
illustrations without margins; not only are these
invaluable records of the City’s damage but many
are themselves works of art. Here a small
annotated map of the City would have been useful,
but an A-Z answers most questions.
Laurence Ward and the LMA are to be
congratulated on this splendid book which both
acknowledges this Society’s earlier work and,
coincidentally on page 252, includes the Cross and
Tibbs photograph of the bombed remains of the
Dutch Church, Austin Friars. It was in that rebuilt
church that ‘our’ atlas was launched the evening
before the 7 July 2005 bombings again shook
London. At £31.20 from Amazon this can be on the
shelves of all interested in twentieth-century London.
– Robin Woolven
Space, Hope and Brutalism, English
Architecture 1945-1975 by Elain Harwood,
photographs by James O. Davies, Yale University
Press, 2015. 703pp, numerous illustrations,
ISBN 978 0 30020 446 9, £45.
This is a remarkable book, initially demanding
attention because of its size and weight, then for its
arresting photography, and thirdly but not least for
its comprehensive and meticulously researched text
which tells the story of the rebuilding of England
during the 30 years after the Second World War.
Those who attended the 2009 AGM at the Barbican
may remember Elain Harwood’s spirited talk on
that post-war section of the City. Here one can find
those buildings – and many other London ones –
set in their broader English context.
The subject matter is discussed by building type,
an arrangement which sprang from initial research
as part of English Heritage’s investigation of post-
war buildings worthy of listing. This is not a
descriptive account of those selected; for these, see
the same authors’ England’s Post-War Listed
Buildings (2015, Batsford, £40). The narrative
approach of Space, Hope and Brutalism considers
the human, social, economic and architectural
factors that contributed to their creation. There are
telling small details: building materials were in
short supply after the war: the flats at Woodberry
Down, Stoke Newington, had fencing made from
ARP stretchers, while the appearance of the
Barbican some 20 years later owes much to the
engineers, Ove Arup, who favoured deep edge-
beams of concrete which could be used as
parapets. We meet real people rather than faceless
architectural practices or council departments,
learn about where they trained and what interested
them. The book includes an invaluable 56 pages of
mini-biographies, and (as some compensation for
the absence of plans) there are nearly 50 pages of
notes with detailed references.
In the section on housing London buildings are
especially prominent. The dilemma was how to build
well and cheaply – and fast – not only to replace the
houses lost or damaged in the war, but to continue
the slum clearance programme that the war had
disrupted. Together with housing, the chapters on
schools, hospitals, civic buildings, transport and
industry add up to a built history of the post-war
welfare state, the ‘space and hope’ of the title.
Defining how ‘Brutalism’ fits is trickier; its meaning
has changed from its first use, suggesting honest
exposure of building materials and lack of fancy
detail, to the later assumption from the 1970s that it
is only about concrete. While there is plenty on
concrete in the book there is much else as well.
James Davies’s striking photographs bring out the
variety, the daring spaces, and the colour of post-
war architecture – this last a revelation to anyone
familiar only with black and white illustrations of the
buildings discussed. Unusual viewpoints offer new
insights, such as an amazing view from above of the
curving roof of the Commonwealth Institute.
The subject divisions make it easy to dip into the
book for some telling comparisons. On Libraries for
example: stately Kensington, designed by Vincent
Harris for councillors who did not want anything
modern, aroused ‘Anti-ugly Action’ protesters; the
light-filled, flexibly designed (and much cheaper)
Holborn was designed by the more progressive
borough architect Sydney Cook, with a formica-
lined staircase as a modern touch. Other chapters
have similarly intriguing contrasts: the stark,
forceful curves of the concrete arches of St James
Clapham, followed by the sharply angled roof
timbers of St Paul Lorrimore Square, both from the
late 50s. Hope and optimism did not always lead to
unmitigated triumphs; a thoughtful final chapter
sums up the changing political, social and
architectural ideals of the 70s but warns of the
danger of concentrating on the flaws rather than
the achievements of the previous decades.
– Bridget Cherry
Murder, Mayhem and Music Hall; the Dark Side
of Victorian London by Barry Anthony. I. B.
Tauris. 2015. 244pp. 29 illustrations.
ISBN 978 1 78076 634 8. £20.
This
extremely
readable,
and
often
very
entertaining, book takes a detailed look at the
seamier side of Victorian London, concentrating on
the Strand and its neighbouring streets. The Strand
page 15
was then, as it is now, home to theatres, shops,
hotels and bars of all sorts, but it also had a more
subversive atmosphere than it has today, with a
popular reputation for all sorts of wickedness. This
book tells the stories of actors, prostitutes, music-
hall stars, fraudsters and pornographers who
operated on or near the busy thoroughfare. For
much of the nineteenth century the Strand was
known as ‘the place for fun and noise, all amongst
the girls and boys’, as the song Let’s All Go Down
the Strand had it, but by the end of the century
legislation had begun to tame its excesses.
Among the many fascinating stories in the book
are the murder of the matinee idol William Terriss
outside the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre, and
the arrest and trial of Stella and Fanny (the cross-
dressing Ernest Bolton and Frederick Park), both of
which have been well documented elsewhere,
though that is no criticism, as the stories are well
told here. But there are plenty of less well-known
characters in this book, including Lottie Collins, the
music-hall star who was the first to sing Ta-ra-ra-
boom-de-ay, during which she danced energetically
around the stage in a combination of the rather
demure ‘skirt dance’ and the far more exotic and
scandalous cancan (though she never exposed her
thighs, apparently). Florence St John was a popular
and hugely successful actress and singer, often
performing at the Gaiety and Savoy Theatres, but
she had a very complicated private life, being
married four times, and involved in a celebrated
divorce case, a story told here with much relish.
There is also a chapter about ‘mug-hunting’ in
the Strand, as it was always full of people trying to
get passers-by to part with their money, especially
innocent visitors to London. Some, of course, such
as beggars, were genuine, but mostly they were
scams by organised criminals and prostitutes. It
was so bad that Dan Leno said he always took a
cab down the Strand to avoid them. The author
also deals with the development of the peepshow,
which offered the visitor to the Strand the first
experience of moving pictures, but also caused
considerable scandal. Surprisingly enough, the first
film studio was built in the Embankment Gardens.
The final chapter, called ‘The Backside of St
Clement’s’, looks at the pornography trade carried
on in Holywell Street, soon to disappear with the
development of Kingsway and the Aldwych.
The chapter I found most interesting describes the
colourful life of the impresario Renton Nicholson. He
started life working as a pawnbroker, and was
bankrupted several times, spending time in debtors’
prison, before becoming a journalist, writing columns
about London’s lowlife. Later he was famous as the
instigator of the popular Judge and Jury Society,
which offered mock trials at the Garrick’s Head Hotel
in Covent Garden, and later at the Cyder Cellars in
the Strand. He presided over the court as The Lord
Chief Baron, dealing with all sorts of cases, such as
divorce and adultery, with much humour. He wrote a
highly unreliable but entertaining autobiography
which, sadly, is now out of print.
The book is well researched and written in an
accessible style, and the illustrations are well
chosen. There is plenty of interesting information
here for anyone interested in the lowlife of Victorian
London.
– Peter Matthews
Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington
Street, the Print Culture of a Victorian Street
by Mary L. Shannon, Ashgate 2015, 261pp,
illustrated. ISBN 978 1 47244 204 8. £65.
The Street of Wonderful Possibilities, Whistler,
Wilde and Sargent in Tite Street by Devon Cox,
Frances Lincoln 2015, 287pp., numerous
illustrations. ISBN 978 0 71123 673 8. £25.
Where did they live? is a question that demands
cooperation of biographer and topographer. There
is nothing new in such an interest. The London
Blue Plaques are a familiar and much loved guide
to the homes of the famous in all fields, and there
is a long tradition of house museums honouring
birthplaces or residences of exceptional people (as
in the case of Sir John Soane, see the article on
p.8). But a current fashion is to look outside the
individual front door and explore the possible
interaction between neighbours. Who else lived
nearby? Who might meet in the street? Which
streets developed a particular character or
reputation from their residents?
Wellington Street, an unremarkable street running
north from the Strand, was notable in the mid-
nineteenth century as the address of a number of
well-known periodicals and newspapers, as well as
being the home of some of their owners. The radical
campaigner and editor, G. W. M. Reynolds and his
wife
(of
Reynolds
Newspapers
and
other
publications), on the west side, on the east, Charles
Dickens, who published Household Words from
1850 and All the Year Round from 1859; a little
further north was the office of Henry Mayhew, who
was working on London Labour and the London Poor
in 1850-1, next door to a house occupied
successively by Douglas Jerrold (of Jerrold’s Weekly
Newspaper) and G. A. Sala. Their interests all
overlapped and there was recognised rivalry in the
publicity courted by both Dickens and Reynolds,
who differed in their approaches to campaigning for
London’s poor. In 1848, the celebrated year of
revolt, Reynolds spoke at a rally at Trafalgar Square
and when a crowd followed him back to his office,
addressed them from the balcony. There is alas a
shortage of evidence of other exciting events of this
kind and although the author may be right in
suggesting that all these characters may have
passed each other in the street, the idea of a
significant network remains somewhat hypothetical.
However the topographical details have been
carefully researched; one gains a vivid sense of the
frenetic writing activity, and lively contemporary
illustrations help to reinforce how closely the
written word was bound up with the world of the
theatre just round the corner. Lay readers may be a
page 16
little bemused by references to academic theorists
on spatial structure and the like; specialists will
appreciate the ample bibliography.
Tite Street in Chelsea had a rather different
clientele. Devon Cox tells the interlocking stories of
the friendships, successes, jealousies and disasters
of its residents with lively enthusiasm, solidly
based
on
research
among
the
plentiful
contemporary accounts. For the controversial
artistic residents and designers of Tite Street were
often in the public eye. The story includes not only
the rise and fall of the writer Oscar Wilde and the
careers of the artists J. M. Whistler and J. S.
Sargent, but a host of other players: the architect
E. W. Godwin – whose radical White House for his
friend Whistler infuriated the Board of Works in
1878 – the Italian cartoonist Carlo Pellegrini, one of
Whistler’s devoted followers, the portrait painter
Frank Miles, who was a friend of Wilde as well as a
patron of Godwin, and many others.
Tite Street was laid out just to the east of Chelsea
Hospital after the building of the Chelsea
Embankment in 1875. Unlike so much of London’s
uniform terrace housing, and in contrast to the
slum of Paradise Walk immediately to its west, Tite
Street’s studio houses of the 1870s-80s reflected
individual personalities, but were also, as Devon
Cox observes, ‘a commentary on the nonconformist
ideology’ of the street as a whole. In 1879 the
artists even requested the Metropolitan Board of
Works
to
rename
the
street,
suggesting
(unsuccessfully) Holborn Walk, Turner’s Walk or
Prince of Wales Road. The Prince of Wales was a
visitor to Tite Street as were other members of high
society such as the friend of Frank Miles, the
fashionable beauty Lily Langtry.
Whistler’s comings and goings – he lived at Tite
Street only intermittently – and the much-told tale
of his spat with Ruskin, form a binding thread to
the narrative of the earlier years. The 1890s are
dominated by the dramatic story of Wilde, who
when at the height of his fame as a playwright was
sued by the notoriously unpleasant Marquess of
Queensbury for ‘corrupting’ his son; Wilde was sent
to prison, his shattered family departed from Tite
Street and, shockingly, his house was ransacked.
The career of Sargent ran more smoothly. In the
early twentieth century Tite Street became ‘a highly
respectable factory of faces’ as Sargent, the
gentleman bohemian, established himself as the
supreme portraitist of the Edwardian era. Less
socially acceptable characters emerge, including
several women artists: among them the suffragette
Edith Elizabeth Downing who helped to organise
processions and pageants, and in 1912 was
arrested for throwing stones at Somerset House,
and
Hannah
Gluckstein
(Gluck)
whose
‘androgenous’ paintings made a stir in the 1920s.
But by then the artistic traditions founded in the
nineteenth century were waning in the face of the
impressionist
and
post-impressionist
art
championed by Roger Fry, and the story of Tite
Street limps to an end with the brief residence and
death of the musician Peter Warlock, and the
declining Augustus John, who moved into Sargent’s
old studio in 1940 and stayed until 1950.
In following the artistic careers and the intricate
friendships of residents and visitors the narrative
sometimes loses sight of Tite Street itself, and it
would have been interesting to have had more
about the architecture. Fortunately one can turn to
a helpful chronology and a map with dates of who
lived where. The book is beautifully produced, with
illustrations which include an excellent range of
little known artistic works and old photographs.
– Bridget Cherry
A Victorian Street through 130 years:
Montserrat Road, Putney by Dorian Gerhold;
(paper 28 Wandsworth Historical Society, 2015),
£5. p&p £1.50. ISBN 978 0 90512 135 2.
Montserrat Road was built in the 1880s in the
grounds of a house that had been in one family for
250 years since its acquisition by a baker and
moneylender whose wealth was at least partly
based on mortgages that were not redeemed – a
reminder, as the building society advertisements
warn, that ‘your home may be repossessed if you
do not keep up payments’.
The story of the creation of one street in Putney
can stand for the development of a ring of
prosperous London suburbs. The impetus for the
move out of town of many families was not, as one
might expect, that improved public transport
allowed for easier commuting, but rather the desire
to escape from the grime of inner London. These
substantial family homes with their large gardens
undoubtedly appealed to the increasingly affluent
middle classes.
The rapid development of comfortable suburban
estates was facilitated by a system of leases and
sub-leases: the landowner granted 99-year building
leases to developers who took responsibility not
only for building the houses, but also for ensuring
the construction of roads, drains, and water
supply; builders took leases from the developers,
often borrowing from them in order to cover costs;
houses were let to tenants. The handsome three- or
four-bedroom red brick houses in Montserrat Road
were built in just three or four months. The
developers made fortunes and most of the builders
did well, although some succumbed to the building
slump of 1890 that followed the boom years.
Gerhold enlivens the account of legal arrangements
and construction procedures with insights into the
lives of the individuals concerned. Early residents of
Montserrat Road included the journalist, Henry
Richard Vizetelly, the popular novelist, Rosa
Nouchette Carey, and Henry Richard Tedder,
librarian of the Athenaeum. The Victorian landowner
Robert John Pettiward practised an ascetic regime
with cold-water baths and prayers every night at ten
when his family and servants were required to stand
facing the walls. Members of today’s Residents
page 17
Association are a more cheerful group. We also have
a glimpse of less affluent lives: lists of advertisements
for servants required for plain-cooking and child-care
during the first 20 years, and rooms to let with ‘use of
bath’ as houses began to be subdivided, a trend that
– as in other attractive residential areas of London –
has been reversed as the appeal of the Victorian
house has increased.
– Sheila O’Connell
The Centenary Book of St Jude-on-the-Hill,
Hampstead Garden Suburb by Alan Walker.
London: St Jude-on-the-Hill, 2011. 59pp, plates.
£30. ISBN 978 0 95695 180 9.
Walter P. Starmer, Artist 1877–1961 by Alan
Walker, London: St Jude-on-the-Hill, 2015. 127pp.
80 colour and 46 b/w plates.
ISBN 978 0 95695 181 6.
When
it
became
known
that
the
Northern tube line
was
to
reach
Golders Green and
beyond, Henrietta
Barnett
realised
that
suburban
housing would soon
cover the fields and
slopes to the north-
west of London so,
with
great
determination, she
formed a group of advisers, purchased land from
Eton College and decided to lay out a garden
suburb with Charles Parker and Barry Unwin as
her planners and architects. This the trio did most
successfully, but when it came to designing a
central square, to include churches and an
educational institute, something grander was
desired and the up and coming (Sir) Edwin
Lutyens – with whom Henrietta was to have a less
happy relationship – was appointed.
St Jude-on-the-Hill went up between 1909 and
1911, the first vicar, the Reverend Basil Bourchier,
having been appointed in 1907. Within weeks of
the start of World War I Bourchier left for Belgium
as chaplain with a women’s hospital unit, only to
be almost immediately arrested by the Germans as
a spy and sentenced to death. He was saved by the
intervention of a German officer who had visited
Hampstead Garden Suburb before the war and
could identify him. The present vicar, the Reverend
Alan Walker, took over in 1994, becoming the
eighth to serve at St Jude’s; and has now written
an account of the building and its astonishing
sequence of murals by Walter P. Starmer.
Designed in an unusually large format, the great
value of both volumes is the full-page reproduction
of the murals and of Starmer’s earlier and later
work. The first volume is a straightforward enough
account of the building, its history during the first
hundred years and the centenary service with the
present Bishop of London, the Very Reverend
Richard Chartres, as both celebrant and preacher.
The second volume is a different matter. It begins
with Starmer’s early life and training, his
experiences as a war artist (30 of his paintings are
in the Imperial War Museum) and his chance
acquaintance at the Front with Basil Bourchier,
from which the commission to paint the walls of St
Jude’s gradually developed. This book is valuable
for the volume and generosity of the author’s
research and every reader should be grateful for it.
One fascinating thread which runs throughout is
the emphasis on feminism. The prime mover was of
course Dame Henrietta Barnett, but the choice of
saints in the non-biblical murals is almost entirely
female, the leading figure being Joan of Arc. The
features given to each woman are those of
Henrietta’s friends and supporters; we must hope
that the author may have strength and tenacity
enough for a third volume.
When the work was finally completed after ten
years of hard labour up and down ladders, usually
continuing even during services, Starmer’s work met
mixed reactions. Many, rightly, praised it but others,
increasingly, pointed out how the church is
darkened by the paintings seeming to make the
great building draw in on worshippers and casual
viewers and, particularly in late afternoon or in
winter, making it seem unfriendly. Two of the
memorials should be mentioned and visited. The
first is to the horses in the 1914–18 war – compare
with the frieze round Charles Sargeant Jagger’s great
memorial at Hyde Park Corner. The second is that to
Michael Rennie, son of the third vicar, William
Maxwell Rennie. Michael volunteered to act as escort
to children being evacuated to Canada on SS City of
Benares, sunk by a German submarine on the night
of 17/18 September 1940. Michael exhausted
himself saving children from the stormy waters,
dying himself from fatigue; only one boy survived.
St Jude’s is worth a visit and I beg you to go
there, preferably on a fine, sunny day when you will
see it at its best.
– Ann Saunders
Editor’s postscript: There is a fascinating account of
the life of St Jude’s charismatic vicar, the Rev.
Basil Bourchier (1881-1934), on the church’s
website: StJudeonthehill.com
City Mission, The Story of London’s Welsh
Chapels by Huy Edwards, Y. Lolfa, 368pp,
illustrations, paperback, 2015.
ISBN 978 1 78461 174 3, £14.95.
How many Welsh chapels can you name in
London? A few buildings of architectural distinction
may come to mind – Jewin in the City, rebuilt after
the war, the spacious and imposing Victorian
Baptist chapel in Castle Street, Marylebone,
recently restored; the impressive building by James
Cubitt in Charing Cross Road, for long neglected
and disguised as night club and cafe but currently
page 18
St Jude Hampstead Garden Suburb,
Dome painting, Eminent Women,
by Walter Starmer
being refurbished as an arts centre. But they are
only a part of the story. Open this book and you are
confronted with a familiar underground map dotted
with no less than 39 sites spread over Greater
London – from Cockfosters to Morden, Ealing Green
to Leytonstone. Not all these buildings exist now,
and a number have other uses; this impressive
body of research teases out their stories and those
of the people who met and worshipped in them.
Welsh immigration to London can be traced back
to Tudor times, but the first evidence for Welsh
preaching in London dates from c.1740 with visits
from the revivalist preacher Howell Harris. Edwards
succeeds in identifying the likely place for one of
his visits, a farm near Kennington. It seems that
Lambeth became a centre for Welsh settlers, there
was even a fair on St David’s day, and the building
coincidentally illustrated on p.18 of this Newsletter
was recorded as a Welsh chapel in 1826. From the
1760s (earlier than was previously thought) there
was a congregation meeting in a room in Cock
Lane, West Smithfield, the origin of the group for
whom a purpose-built chapel was erected in Jewin
Crescent, Barbican, in 1823. By the 1830s it was
flourishing with increasing membership, no longer
an ‘Independent’ chapel within the Anglican
church, but following the split with the Methodists
in 1795, recognised as ‘Calvinist Methodist’ (later
known as the Presbyterian Church of Wales).
From the later eighteenth century cultural
identity was strengthened by the establishment of
Welsh literary societies, and during the nineteenth
century many chapel eisteddfodau furthered this
tradition. Numbers of the Welsh in London were
never huge: (0.74% of London’s population in 1851
were Welsh-born; 1.36% in 1931), yet Welsh chapel
congregations flourished as religious and social
centres through the nineteenth century and
continued to increase in the early twentieth,
creating a much valued sense of community among
their members. An appealingly photograph shows
dozens of children lined up in their Sunday best for
Jewin’s children’s anniversary service in 1935.
Decline began only after the Second World War,
and was then rapid.
Separate chapters on different parts of London
relate the history of individual chapels through
their successions of stubborn and energetic
ministers, not all likeable characters; the personal
details make for lively reading. Edwards laments
how lack of cooperation between chapels has not
helped their survival. But there were impressive
achievements: chapels for dockers at Deptford, a
floating chapel for sailors, and for workers in south
London an ambitious building of 1889 at Falmouth
Road, Elephant and Castle, which became a
significant centre of the eisteddfod tradition. The
majority of the congregations were Calvinistic
Methodists, but there were also chapels for
Independents, Wesleyan Methodists, Baptists, and
even churches for Welsh Anglicans, the common
feature being the use of the Welsh language. The
strict regime of the Calvinistic Methodists could
lead to difficulties, among these was the ban of
working on the Sabbath. This was a particular
problem for those involved in the dairy industry, an
occupation which came to be dominated by the
Welsh
during
the
nineteenth
century,
as
preparation for Monday deliveries had to be made
the day before.
The bibliography and acknowledgements reveal
the
extensive
research
underlying
this
comprehensive survey, which should fascinate
anyone interested in London’s social history and
topography.
– Bridget Cherry
Editor’s Corner
If you are looking for books about the changing
East End (and other aspects of London too), The
Brick Lane Bookshop (66 Brick Lane, E1) is the
place to explore. Among recent titles is the very
attractive picture book, Makers of East London by
Charlotte Schreiber and Katie Tregyiden (Hoxton
Minipress £30), which focuses on the wide range of
craftspeople working in the area. (LTS members
may enjoy the example of Bellerby & Co., Globe
makers at Stoke Newington.) From the same
publisher is Shoreditch Wild Life
by Douglas
Wallace (Book 4 in the series East London Photo
stories), £14, which has portraits not of plants and
animals as one might expect from the title, but of
people, with a challenging preface which begins ‘the
richness and the wrongness of it all’. The stories of
people of the area can be read in Spitalfields Life by
the Gentle Author (2013, Saltyard Book Co.
£14.99). Covering a much broader field – the whole
of Greater London – is Stephen Walter’s provocative
and individual The Island, London Mapped (Prestel,
£22.50) with hand drawn maps of every borough
reflecting the author’s personal interests. A
thoughtful introduction by Peter Barber points out
that maps at all periods have reflected the current
concerns and preoccupations of mapmakers and
the ruling classes, and that Walter’s contribution,
using technical mapping techniques, is both a work
of art and a form of democratisation.
page 19
Detail from the cover of The Island, London Mapped
The officers of the
London Topographical Society
Patron
His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh
Vice Presidents
Stephen Marks; Dr Ann Saunders MBE PhD FSA
Chairman
Mrs Penelope Hunting PhD FSA
40 Smith Street, London SW3 4EP Tel: 020 7352 8057
Hon. Treasurer
Publications Secretary
Roger Cline MA LLB FSA
Simon Morris MA PhD
Flat 13, 13 Tavistock Place
7 Barnsbury Terrace
London WC1H 9SH
London N1 1JH
Tel. 020 7388 9889
E-mail:
E-mail: roger.cline13@gmail.com
santiagodecompostela@btinternet.com
Hon. Editor
Newsletter Editor
Sheila O'Connell
Bridget Cherry OBE FSA
312 Russell Court
Bitterley House
Woburn Place
Bitterley
London WC1H 0NG
Nr Ludlow, Shropshire SY8 3HJ
sheilaoc@hotmail.co.uk
Tel. 01584 890 905
E-mail: bridgetcherry58@gmail.com
Hon. Secretary
Membership Secretary
Mike Wicksteed
Dr John Bowman
103 Harestone Valley Road
17 Park Road
Caterham, Surrey CR3 6HR
London W7 1EN
Tel. 01883 337813
Tel. 020 8840 4116
E-mail: mike.wicksteed@btinternet.com
E-mail: j.h.bowman@btinternet.com
Council members: Peter Barber; Robin Michaelson; Sheila O’Connell;
Professor Michael Port; Peter Ross; David Webb; Rosemary Weinstein; Laurence Worms.
New membership enquiries should be addressed to John Bowman.
Correspondence about existing membership including renewal payments, requests for
standing orders and gift-aid forms and the non-receipt of publications,
also any change of address, should be addressed to the Hon. Treasurer, Roger Cline.
Proposals for new publications should be passed, in writing, to the Editor.
Books for review and other material for the Newsletter should be sent to Bridget Cherry.
Registered charity no. 271590
The Society’s website address is: www.topsoc.org
ISSN 1369-7986
The Newsletter is published by the London Topographical Society twice a year, in May and
November, and issued by the Newsletter Editor: Bridget Cherry, Bitterley House, Bitterley,
near Ludlow, Shropshire SY8 3HJ.
Produced and printed by The Ludo Press Ltd, London SW17 0BA.
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