Newsletter No 79 November 2014_20pp

Contents

Notes and News ................................................p.1

Exhibitions and events ......................................p.2

Circumpice..............................................p.2 & p11

Miscellanea........................................................p.3

Sir Thomas Gresham: Tudor, Trader, Shipper, Spy,

by Michael Mainelli and Valerie Shrimpton ....p.3

Emery Walker’s Mercers’ Chapell,

by Charlotte Dew ..........................................p.6

Hope for Forgotten London,

by David Crawford ........................................p.7

Changing London: around King’s Cross..............p.9

The Heritage of London Trust ............................p.9

Reviews............................................................p.12

Notes and News

The Society held its very successful 114th AGM on

7 July, in the luxurious premises of Mansion

House, the Lord Mayor’s official home in the heart

of the City. Despite the complications of advance

booking, security and disabled parking, all went

smoothly, thanks to the careful preparations by our

secretary Mike Wicksteed, and the helpfulness of

the administrative and catering staff. 285 members

and 40 guests were able to wander with their cups

of tea through the spacious reception rooms, before

we were made welcome in the Egyptian Hall by the

Lord Mayor, Fiona Woolf, who had so kindly made

this event possible. Following the business of the

meeting, a screen was available for the Secretary to

demonstrate the latest developments to the

Society’s website, where one is now able to access

back

numbers

of

the

Newsletter.

Further

improvements to the website are in progress, so

keep an eye on topsoc.org; Mike Wicksteed will

welcome comments and suggestions. Officers and

Council elected at the AGM are listed on the back

cover of the Newsletter. (Please note the Newsletter

editor’s new email.)

We were fortunate to hear a lively and most

enlightening talk on Mansion House by Sally

Jeffery, author of the definitive work on the

subject, all the more impressive because she spoke

without notes (having found she had left them

behind). The history of the building is complex.

The interiors need some explaining because,

confusingly, one now enters through a modest side

door in the basement before arriving upstairs in

the central space where we had our tea. This was

formerly an open central courtyard (oddly, at first

floor level), which linked the entrance range, with

its now unused grand portico, to the Vitruvius-

inspired Egyptian Hall at the back of the building.

It was amazing to sit in the Egyptian Hall gazing

up at the coffered barrel vault built by the younger

George Dance in 1795 and realise that in his

father’s scheme, begun in 1739, this colossal hall

was originally crowned by an even taller

clerestorey.

Discussion at the AGM raised the issue of

whether the Newsletter should be published more

frequently, or changed in other ways. After

consideration, your Council has decided to retain

twice yearly publication but agreed that when

necessary the Newsletter could occasionally be

extended by some extra pages (even though the

extra weight would mean higher postage costs). We

will also be investigating alternative types of paper,

and the possibility of using colour.

Our recent annual publications

Our latest publication The Singularities of London,

1578, an exceptional account of sixteenth-century

London

by

Frenchman, has been

well received, with a

favourable review in the

Newsletter of Archives

for London – see p.19.

All

fully

paid-up

members

who

have

kept us up-to-date with

changes

of

address

should by now have

received

their

copy.

Report any non-receipts

to the Treasurer.

Newsletter

Number 79

November 2014

We are delighted to report that our 2013

publication, The A to Z of Charles II’s London 1682,

was shortlisted for

the annual award for an

Outstanding Work of Reference by the Information

Services Group of CILIP (Chartered Institute of

Library and Information Professionals). The decision

announced at the event on 8 October was that it was

‘Highly Commended’, the winner being the Thames

& Hudson publication, The Library: a world history,

by James W. P. Campbell and Will Pryce.

Data Protection Act

As long-standing members of the Society will know,

each volume of the London Topographical Record

contains a list of members and their addresses. If

you do not wish your name and/or address to

appear in the next volume which is the Society

publication

for

2015,

please

inform

the

Membership Secretary before 1 January 2015.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions (£20 for UK addresses, £30

elsewhere) are due 1 January 2015. Most members

pay by standing order (and get a discount for doing

so) and need take no action unless they have

changed their bank account in 2014. Others

should make their payment to the Treasurer by

cheque, by card through the website or direct to

our bank account whose details can be had from

the Treasurer. He can also supply standing order

forms to those members wishing to start paying

this way, but such completed forms must reach

your bank before Christmas.

Topographical interests can seriously

prolong your life

One of the perks of delivering society publications is

that you get to know the membership better. I learnt

this year that we have at least one centenarian

member, Miss Alison Kelly, of whom I have fond

memories when she taught me about London History

and Architecture at evening classes at The City Lit in

the 1970s. Her major work was Mrs Coade’s Stone

(1990), about the stone which embellishes much of

the Bedford Estate and forms the lion sculpture on

the east end of Westminster Bridge. Another member

who narrowly missed reaching his century (he died

earlier this year) was Jack Whitehead whose books

on the development of Marylebone and Paddington,

Camden Railway Lands and Muswell Hill will be in

many of your libraries. (He taught at a secondary

school in Paddington and the books developed from

projects he set his pupils.) He put his good visual

sense and a delight in drawing to excellent use in all

his books, so amply illustrated with line drawings.

My weekend cycle rides in leafy Surrey are enlivened

by the occasional visit to our Vice-President Dr

Elspeth Veale who I am sure will not mind me

passing on the information that she is pushing 99.

She is busy on her laptop editing her latest local

history book but has to get The Times crossword

finished each day before coffee-time.

– Roger Cline

Circumspice

Where and what is this building? Answer on p.11.

G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G

Exhibitions and Events

The City of London Heritage Gallery opened to

the public on 12 September. The new gallery,

located within Guildhall Art Gallery, is curated by

London Metropolitan Archives, and will showcase

treasures held by the City of London Corporation.

The first exhibition, which runs until 29 January,

includes the City’s copy of Magna Carta, significant

medieval statutes and charters, portraits of City

Aldermen and – topically – some documents

relating to the First World War.

There is an

accompanying book: London 1000 Years: Treasures

of the Collections of the City of London, edited by

David Pearson; Scala Publishers, 2011. ISBN 978 1

85759 699 1;160pp. £29.95.

The winter exhibition of the Museum of London

is Sherlock Holmes, the man who never lived and

will never die (17 October –12 April). For further

details, also of many associated events, see

museumoflondon.org.uk A new acquisition for the

museum now on display is the great cauldron,

symbol of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic

Games, designed by Thomas Heatherwick.

The current exhibition at Tate Britain: Late

Turner, painting set free (to 30 November) includes

two memorably atmospheric London scenes: the

Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons,

painted in 1835, the year after the fire; (lent by the

Philadelphia Museum of Art), and the Tate’s own

Thames above Waterloo Bridge (1835-40). The latter

shows Turner fascinated by the steam from the

new-fangled river steamers just visible beyond the

old wherries in the foreground.

Terror and Wonder, the Gothic Imagination, at the

British Library (3 October – 20 January). Gothic

page 2

Photo Bill Tyler

fantasies from Horace Walpole onwards drew their

inspiration chiefly from the middle ages, but in the

nineteenth century the industrialised urban

landscape was a new source of terror and wonder;

Charles Dickens’s novels, Gustav Doré’s views, and

the horrors of urban crime reported in the Police

News

are among the topics covered in this

fascinating exhibition exploring the wealth of

‘Gothic’ material in the British Library.

Kensington Palace has been focusing on the

lives of George II and Queen Caroline, in The

Glorious Georges, one a of a series of exhibitions

presented by Historic Royal Palaces (to 30

November) to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the

Hanoverian accession (for more, see hrp.org.uk).

The Geffrye Museum, Shoreditch is celebrating

its centenary with two free exhibitions: a garden

display (to 4 January) with sculpture, audio trail

and digital stories, and inside, Geffrye 100, a brief

history of the museum. The building began as

almshouses in 1714, was sold to the LCC in 1911

and with encouragement from members of the Arts

and Crafts movement was opened as a museum in

1914 to provide inspiration for those involved in the

local furniture industry. As this declined it

broadened its scope to appeal to families and

children, with the old almshouse accommodation

adapted as a delightful series of period rooms. An

example of a sparsely furnished original interior is

also on show – timed tickets to see this are

available on special days, see the website for

further details: geffrye-museum.org.uk .

The Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road has

a special exhibition, Gardens and War (to 5

January) exploring how gardens have been created

in the most unlikely circumstances, from trenches

to prisoner of war camps. For further details see

gardenmuseum.org.uk .

History Libraries and Research Open Day at

Senate House, University of London, 20 January

2015: an open history fair, with clinics on practical

research skills. Contact Kate Wilcox and Jordan

Landes, ihr.library@sas.ac.uk .

Miscellanea

St Paul’s Cathedral

A recent addition to online research material is the

collection of Wren office drawings at St Paul’s

cathedral, with an excellent introduction by Gordon

Higgott. It is part of an impressively thorough and

well organised documentation of the building and its

treasures which can be found at stpauls.co.uk/

cathedral-history . This also includes, among much

else, an illustrated record of objects, including no

less than 598 monuments and memorials, which

can be searched for under name or artist.

Saving Smithfield

We are reminded, in our new publication The

Singularities of London, of the changing role of

Smithfield in the history of the City; in the sixteenth

century it was known not only for the annual

Bartholomew Fair and the weekly horsemarket, but

as a place of execution of criminals and religious

martyrs. The wholesale food markets developed

during the nineteenth century and the covered meat

market still continues, but for the last ten years the

future of the disused general market buildings of

West Smithfield, built 1879-99, has been in the

balance (see Newsletter 77). There is now hope for

their survival, as in July the Secretary of State, Eric

Pickles, announced that he had rejected the proposed

development which would have destroyed 75% of

their fabric. SAVE Britain’s Heritage campaigned for

an alternative regeneration scheme, reusing and

adapting what has been described as ‘one of the

grandest processions of market buildings in Europe’,

and this was found by the Secretary of State to be

‘possible, viable and deliverable’. This is not only a

great triumph for SAVE (for more on their campaign

see savebritainsheritage.org) but also an important

landmark in securing protection for unlisted

buildings in a conservation area. West Smithfield,

strategically placed on the edge of City, close to the

busy areas of Clerkenwell, Hatton Garden and

Holborn Circus, may be able to adapt for today while

retaining its distinctive historic character.

G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G

Sir Thomas Gresham:

Tudor, Trader, Shipper, Spy

Professor Michael Mainelli and Dr Valerie Shrimplin,

from Gresham College, who are working on a project

for a new biography of Sir Thomas Gresham,

introduce this key character in the history of the

City.

Good Tales Drive Out Bad

Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-79) is one of the most

over-looked sixteenth-century merchants and

financiers. Gresham served four Tudor monarchs,

managed to keep his head, and all the while made

money. His Will of 1575 established his most

enduring legacy, Gresham College:

I Will and Dispose that one Moiety… shall be

unto the Mayor and Commonalty and Citizens

of London… and the other to the Mercers… for

the sustenation, maintenance and Finding

Four persons, from Tyme to Tyme to be

chosen, nominated and appointed…. And their

successors to read the Lectures of Divinity,

Astronomy, Musick and Geometry… and

distribute to… Three Persons… and their

successors from Time to Time, to be chosen

and appointed meete to reade the Lectures of

law, Physick and Rhetorick, within myne now

dwelling House in Bishopsgate Street…

Sir Thomas made London a great international

financial centre by importing from Antwerp the idea

page 3

of a ‘bourse’ or ‘exchange’ for intangible items such

as ship voyages and insurance. He installed the

first English shopping mall or bazaar as the first

floor in the Royal Exchange. From a base within St

Martin’s

Goldsmiths

he

experimented

with

fractional reserve gold stores, cornering markets,

and insider trading. His Will challenged the

‘Oxbridge’ oligopoly in higher education.

But there is no thorough biography. J. W. Burgon

published the largest work, The Life and Times of

Sir Thomas Gresham in 1839, and F. R. Salter a

shorter work in 1925. Sir Thomas is a tough

subject for biographers used to focusing on

monarchs, their families and their wars. He traded

in several lands and worked in several languages.

The purposes behind many commercial dealings

are not self-evident from the paperwork, even when

fragments exist. To some he was austere, to others

manipulative, to others ruthless. How did he really

make his fortune? How rich was he in modern

terms? Was his support for ‘new learning’ in his

Will a commitment that education should be

available to merchants, tradesmen, and navigators,

rather than gentlemen scholars, or a throw-away

bequest? The Trustees of Gresham College are

working on a modern biography, hopefully to be

published on the quincentenary of his birth in

2019.

To those outside the City, he is remembered for

‘Gresham’s Law’. Colloquially expressed as ‘bad

money drives out good’, the law was attributed to

Gresham in 1858 by Scottish economist Henry

Dunning Macleod. But Gresham’s Law was not his;

it was noted much earlier by Aristophanes, the

medieval philosopher Oresme, and Copernicus. In

fact, the Law is the reverse, ‘good money drives out

bad’. If someone offers a debased coin or a real

coin, people

take

the

real

coin

u n l e s s

m o n a r c h

insists

on

the debased

c u r r e n c y .

The

Nobel

economist

R o b e r t

M u n d e l l

rephrased

Gresham’s

Law

more

properly as

‘ c h e a p

m o n e y

drives

out

dear money

only if they

must

be

exchanged

for

the

same price’.

Gresham’s imprint on the City

Gresham left many marks on the topography of the

City. The grasshopper, his family badge, can be

spotted around the City, as weathervanes at the top

of his major commercial contribution, the Royal

Exchange, and in many crests, seals, and stained

glass windows. A large grasshopper hangs at 68

Lombard Street, site of St Martin’s Goldsmiths. His

major philanthropic contribution, Gresham College,

thrives four centuries on at Barnard’s Inn Hall by

Holborn. Its former location on Basinghall Street

still exists, on the corner with Gresham Street

itself, a street before the Guildhall commemorating

the family. His grave is prominent in one corner of

St Helen’s Bishopsgate. At least two statues of Sir

Thomas stand in the City, one in a north-facing

alcove of the Royal Exchange, the other on Holborn

Viaduct. A portrait by Holbein in Mercers Hall,

where Gresham was Master Mercer three times, is

possibly the first full length painting of a commoner

in Britain.

The grasshopper

According to family legend, the founder of the

family, Roger de Gresham, was abandoned as a

baby in long grass in North Norfolk in the

thriteenth-century. A woman’s attention was drawn

to the foundling by a grasshopper, hence the family

badge. While a beautiful story, it is more likely that

the grasshopper is simply a heraldic rebus on the

name Gresham, with gres being a Middle English

form of grass (Old English grœs), and ‘gressop’ a

grasshopper. James Gresham from the Norfolk

village of Holt became a London legal agent working

for Sir William Paston, a prominent judge. The

grasshopper

emblem

first

appears

in

correspondence from London to the Pastons in

Norfolk in the mid-1400s.

Gresham’s career in the Low Countries

Thomas Gresham was a cockney, born within the

sound of Bow Bells on Cheapside, around 1519.

He attended St Paul’s School and Gonville College

(later to become Gonville and Caius), Cambridge.

In 1543 the Mercers’ Company admitted the 24-

year-old Gresham as a liveryman dealing in cloth.

page 4

Sir Thomas Gresham. 1544 (aged 26) by Holbein

Grasshopper, 68 Lombard Street

page 5

In the same year he went to Antwerp to make his

fortune. Antwerp was then a very cosmopolitan

city, with a population approaching 100,000,

double London or Rome. The growth of the cloth

trade between London and Antwerp was the single

most important factor in the City’s expansion. Just

25 merchants accounted for half of London’s cloth

exports, and the two biggest exporters were the

brothers John Gresham and Richard Gresham,

Thomas’s father. On his own account and on that

of his father and uncle, Thomas carried on

business as a merchant and acted in various

matters as an agent for King Henry VIII. He was

clearly a ‘merchant adventurer’ with a network of

agents, though the sobriquets ‘arms-dealer’ or ‘gun-

runner’ might apply too. He procured armaments

and munitions for defence of the realm, particularly

against Spain (as Philip of Spain attempted to

regain a foothold on the grounds of his marriage to

Mary Tudor) and France (supportive of the claim of

Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne). There

are tales of bullion concealed in bales of pepper or

armour. Interestingly, one of Sir Thomas’s ships

from 1570 was re-discovered in the Thames in

2003 with cannons inscribed with grasshoppers

and marked ‘TG’.

In 1544, Thomas Gresham married Anne Read

(née Ferneley), the widow of William Read, a

London merchant, who already had two sons. The

Gresham’s son, Richard, was born about 1544-5.

In spite of his London marriage, Thomas Gresham

still continued to reside principally in the Low

Countries. Later, in 1559 he bought a large

mansion on 43 Lange Nieuwstraat, as well as a

Flemish country mansion.

Monarchs, such as Emperor Charles V and his son

Philip II, and big trading firms, such as the Fuggers,

raised funds on the Antwerp Bourse. The

extravagancies of Henry VIII and mismanagement of

trade by the king’s merchant in the Low Countries,

Sir William Dansell, financially embarrassed the

English monarchy. By late 1551, Edward VI

appointed Thomas as Royal Agent in Antwerp. A

clever and shrewd dealer, Gresham’s advice was to

manage actively the value of the pound sterling by

buying low and selling high on the bourse of

Antwerp. This proved so successful that in a few

years King Edward VI discharged most of his debts.

On the accession of Queen Mary in 1553 Gresham

fell from favour, perhaps due to his Protestant

leanings, and was relieved of office. Alderman

William Dauntsey replaced him, but Dauntsey

quickly proved unsuccessful at finance and Gresham

was reinstated. Instructions in 1558 under Mary

Tudor said, ‘Gresham shall with all diligence repair to

Antwerp... for the speedy receipt to our use of

100,000 pound bargained for by [a German banker]

and for the borrowing to our use of 100,000 pound

more... at such favourable interest as he may [obtain]’.

Not only were his services retained throughout

Mary’s reign (1553–1558), but besides his salary of

twenty shillings per diem he received grants

of church lands to the yearly value of 200 pounds.

High Finance

By Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, Gresham was a

royal favourite. He may not have invented

Gresham’s Law, but Thomas understood it well,

explaining to Elizabeth that because her father and

brother, Henry VIII and Edward VI, had replaced

40% of the silver in shilling coins with base metal,

‘all your fyne gold was conveyed out of this your

realm.’ William Cecil put Gresham in charge of

recoinage. To his, Elizabeth, and Cecil’s credit,

within a year (1560–61) debased money was

withdrawn, melted, and replaced, with a profit to

the Crown estimated at £50,000. The restoration of

the coinage improved commerce and positioned

London nicely to profit from increasing turmoil on

the Continent.

And it wasn’t just money and trade. Gresham

acted temporarily as ambassador at the court

of Margaret of Parma, for which he received his

knighthood in 1559. He passed intelligence to

William Cecil (Lord Burghley, Secretary of State for

Elizabeth) – such as King Philip’s plans to ally with

the French King at one stage. Throughout the

1550s and 60s Sir Thomas continued to acquire

significant properties in several counties, Outside

London his various properties extended well beyond

his Norfolk origins to include estates such as

Mayfield House, Sussex, and Osterley Park and

Boston Manor in Middlesex. He built his City

mansion in Bishopsgate around 1563 on the site

now occupied by Tower 42. The unsettled times

preceding the Dutch Revolt compelled him to leave

Antwerp for good in 1567. Elizabeth then found

Gresham useful in other ways, including acting as

jailer to Lady Mary Grey (sister of Lady Jane Grey)

for three years.

The Royal Exchange

The Royal Exchange began as his father’s idea.

Before the Royal Exchange opened in 1571,

merchants traded around Lombard Street in a

chained off area. When 750 good citizens had

subscribed the £4,000 necessary to acquire the

various pieces of land required, Sir Thomas paid for

the Exchange to be built, but arranged to receive all

the

rents

himself.

The

Exchange

brought

Gresham’s house in Bishopsgate, with entrance in Old Broad Street

merchants together regularly to deal in intangible

products such as voyages. Incorporated into the

design, at ground and first floor levels, were 150

small shops, called The Pawn, London’s first

shopping centre. After a visit hosted by Sir Thomas,

Elizabeth designated the Exchange ‘Royal’.

Living Legacy; Gresham College

Sir Thomas Gresham died suddenly of apoplexy

on 21 November 1579. His son Richard, his only

legitimate child, had died in 1564 at the age of 19

from ‘a fever’, and his illegitimate daughter also

predeceased him, as did his sister. Gresham’s wife

contested his Will in favour of her own sons for 17

years. After she died in 1597, College lectures

began in the Bishopsgate mansion. The first

professor

of

geometry

was

Henry

Brigg,

populariser of the logarithm. Other notables

include Edmund Gunter, with his ‘Gunter’s Chain’

for

surveying,

John

Greaves,

setting

up

observation posts in the Middle East in 1638 to

observe the Moon’s eclipse, and John Bull, widely

regarded as one of the founders of the modern

keyboard repertory.

An intellectual high point followed a lecture by

the Professor of Astronomy, Christopher Wren, on

28 November 1660. Thirteen men formed a ‘College

for

the

Promoting

of

Physico-Mathematicall

Experimentall Learning’. A Royal Charter of 1663

named it ‘The Royal Society of London for

Improving Natural Knowledge’. Many Gresham

notables played a part in the Royal Society,

perhaps none more so than Robert Hooke, a

Gresham professor from 1664 to 1703, and Curator

of the Royal Society from 1661 to 1703.

In 1710 the Royal Society acquired its own home,

two houses in Crane Court, off the Strand.

Gresham College fell into disrepair. In 1767 an Act

of Parliament required the City Corporation and the

Mercers to sell the ground to the Crown. After a

peripatetic period of lecturing, a purpose-built

Gresham College opened in 1842. Following a

second period of wandering during the 1980s the

College was re-established at Barnard’s Inn Hall in

1991. This Tudor Open University today hosts over

130 physical events per year, distributes extensive

recordings under a Creative Commons licence, and

provides millions of people with lecture transcripts

and recordings via the internet.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies Gresham’s legacy as

well as Samuel Pepys frequently writing about

shopping in the Royal Exchange and attending

College lectures, “To Gresham College, where Mr.

Hooke read a second very curious lecture about the

late Comet” [1 March 1664]. After the Great Fire –

“The Exchange a sad sight, nothing standing there,

of all the statues or pillars, but Sir Thomas’s

picture in the corner” [5 September 1666]. Today,

people can continue to enjoy Gresham’s legacies,

listening to one of the professors ‘sufficiently

learned to reade the lectures’ reinterpreting the ‘new

learning’ in Barnard’s Inn Hall, and then strolling

through the modern shops which now occupy the

Royal Exchange.

About the Authors

Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli is Emeritus

Professor of Gresham College, Trustee of Gresham

College, and Executive Chairman of Z/Yen Group.

His third book, The Price of Fish: A New Approach

to Wicked Economics and Better Decisions, co-

written with Ian Harris, is based on his Gresham

College lecture series from 2005 to 2009 and won

the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards

Finance, Investment & Economics Gold Prize.

Dr Valerie Shrimplin is Academic Registrar of

Gresham College.

G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G

Emery Walker’s ‘Mercers Chappel’

Charlotte Dew is making some exciting discoveries

in her work on the Mercers’ Company Collections,

about which we hope to hear more in future. Here

she shares an intriguing puzzle posed by two

prints.

Whilst working on a comprehensive catalogue of

the works on paper in the Mercers’ Company

Collection over the past year, two insignificant

seeming prints, depicting the entrance to Mercers’

Hall or ‘Chapell’, have raised questions about the

circumstances of their production, and provide

amusement in their prudish Victorian sensibility.

The prints, from the same plate, reinterpret a

1680s engraving. The original shows the Mercers’

carved stone frontage, on Cheapside, designed by

Edward Jarman, topped by a Madonna and

cherubs, sandwiched closely between shops leased

by the Mercers’ Company. The stone façade depicted

now frames the entrance to Swanage Town Hall,

Dorset, following the remodelling of the Mercers’

Hall in the late 1870s. The detailed representation

of goods, proprietors and customers in the shops,

hint at the bustle of trade the street would have

seen following its rebuilding after the Great Fire.

Of the later reinterpretation, one impression is

inscribed ‘Emery Walker’ – advocate of the private

page 6

Gresham’s College, before being taken down to build an Excise Office

press – placing it in the later decades of the

nineteenth century. The other is not inscribed, but

the

paper

bears

the

distinctive

primrose

watermark, combined with the letters ‘W’ and ‘M’,

of the linen paper produced for William Morris’s

Kelmscott Press, by Joseph Batchelor & Son Ltd of

Little Chart, Kent. The Kelmscott Press was

founded by Morris in 1891, inspired by and with

the support of Walker as adviser, and was

publishing until 1888, two years after Morris’s

death.

The work signed by Walker credits the source

from which it has been copied: ‘a Prospect of

London and Westminster by Robt. Morden and

Phil. Lea’; a map of London first published by

Morden and Lea in 1682, with a banner illustrating

key London landmarks, including ‘Westminster

Abbey’, ‘Banqueting Hall’ and ‘Mercers Chappel’

[British Library, Shelfmark: Maps Crace Port. 2.64,

Item number: 74].

There are few differences between the original and

later version, save the removal of two half shops,

one on each end of the block, and the modesty with

which the Mercer Maiden is redrawn, or it could be

said censored. The many ways in which the Mercer

Maiden has been represented over the years have

seen the proportion of her bosom enlarged and

reduced, but unusually Walker has seen fit to cover

her breasts entirely. In drawing the carving of her

above the entrance, and four sculpted versions

above the first floor windows of each shop, her

modesty is entirely preserved; only the Madonna is

shown with bosom revealed.

Research to date has failed to reveal any further

examples of the Walker print. We do not know why

he chose to reinterpret the view. As a well-known

post fire building it would certainly be reflective of

his interest in the City and period as a standalone

work, but could also have been part of a project –

realised or not. In terms of the version on

Kelmscott paper – is it simply an example of

Walker using up a scrap of Morris’s stock? It has

the appearance of a test, as it does not include the

inscription. Or did Morris borrow one of Walker’s

plates? Was Morris learning from Walker? Or

testing

the

Kelmscott

Press paper, when first in

production? The lengths to

which

Morris

laboured

over the quality and finish

of the paper ordered from

Little Chart are outlined in

Barry Watson’s essay ‘William Morris and Paper’1.

We have no record of how the pair of prints came

to be in the Mercers’ Company Collection, so for

now they remain a curious example of Victorian

attitudes to nudity.

– Charlotte Dew, Assistant Curator,

The Mercers’ Company

1. ‘William Morris and Paper’, Barry Watson, in The

Quarterly 43 (British Association of Paper Historians),

July 2002, page 15-20.

G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G

Hope for Forgotten London

Topographical interests can embrace not only how

London has been depicted in the past, but how it

might look in the future. LTS member David Crawford,

a contributor to the October 1973 special issue of the

Architectural Review on SLOAP, and author of British

Building Firsts, writes about the opportunities in

London for imaginative uses of wasted spaces.

SLOAP (space left over after planning) is as much of

a challenge now as when the late Leslie Ginsburg1

coined the term in his role as founder head, from

1957, of the Birmingham School of Planning. Then

used to castigate the amount of unusable land in

1960s and 1970s conventional urban housing

layouts, its message inspired a lively spectrum of

ingenious solutions for a rather wider range of

opportunities in the 2013 Forgotten Spaces ideas

competition.

Run by the RIBA London Region and the Greater

London

Authority

Regeneration

Team,

this

attracted nearly 150 teams of architects, planners,

designers and landscapists, who responded with

imaginative concepts for the creative reuse of

unloved structures and parcels of land lying

abandoned across the capital. One of the problems

with such competitions, of course, is that – all too

often – the ideas they generate stay just that.

Some of these entries have already gained forward

momentum as well as fleeting acclaim. Second

prizewinner Studio Pink’s Aquadocks, for example,

took as its challenge the stark ‘undercroft’ of the

Silvertown Way Flyover in Newham’s Royal Docks

regeneration zone – the earliest built in England

For the site, owned by the Greater London

Authority and put forward by Newham Borough

Council, the team proposed a public swimming pool

and spa. This would lie within a few minutes’ walk

of the Siemens Crystal permanent sustainable

cities exhibition and the northern terminus of the

Emirates Airline Cable Car system, both designed

page 7

Mercers Hall Detail

Mercers Hall and Chapel, Emery Walker, late nineteenth century,

Mercers Company Collection, COLL.0515.

by Wilkinson Eyre; and the waterfront of the Royal

Victoria Dock. This hosted the Great London Swim

until it failed a 2013 water quality test, and

Aquadocks aimed to restore the connection on a

smaller

scale.

Newham

Council

has

been

sufficiently impressed to meet the team, and invite

them to develop the concept and seek financial

backing. Studio Pink are now in discussions with

leisure and health club operators.

Other suggestions for the site, which proved very

popular

with

competitors,

included

third

prizewinners Chris Allen, Marcus Andren and

Michael Gyi’s planned microbrewery and bowling

venue; Landlayers Design’s urban climbing centre

and natural play area; and Gary Nash and Barry

Walsh’s exhibition of historic posters mounted on

the flyover’s structural concrete columns.

Another London Borough to put forward a

regeneration area site was Croydon, which is

concerned about the disjointed public realm of its

Valley Park retail and leisure complex on the A23.

The design brief highlighted the problem of the

spaces between the metal retail, distribution and

industrial sheds and wanted to see whether there

was ‘scope to override this traffic-dominated, fence-

ridden hinterland with a genuine attempt at place

making’. Colour Urban Design’s Shed ZED proposal

takes full advantage of the recent deculverting of

the River Wandle, which flows through the site, to

transform the shedland by greening its swathes of

macadam. (Apart from being unsightly, senior

landscape architect Amanda Redman stresses that

these ‘contribute to urban heat gain and prevent

water following its natural course, putting pressure

on traditional drainage systems’). The council has

congratulated the firm on reimagining the gaps

between the buildings in a way that has

‘successfully articulated’ an approach that could

improve the landscape of this part of Croydon.

Meanwhile, the exercise – while ‘steeped in

relevance to Croydon’ – has stimulated Redman to

start her own research into the environmental

surrounding retail parks, in London and elsewhere.

She wants to champion an overhaul of ‘big boxes’

to see whether ‘they can ever contribute anything

in terms of townscape and urban design’.

The overall competition winner was 4orm’s

Fleeting Memories plan to deculvert the Fleet River

in St Pancras’ Gardens and make it the centrepiece

of a more attractive public open space and part of a

green route for walkers and cyclists. (Google – who

plan to move their entire operation into a new HQ

in the King’s Cross regeneration zone by 2017 –

have, unfortunately, not yet proved amenable to

sponsorship – though a current pause while they

rework their building designs with architects

Allford Hall Monaghan Morris may still offer an

opportunity.)

One commendation went to proposals by OMMX

for reclaiming the decommissioned high-level

platforms of the Grade II-listed BT tower and

cladding them in curtain walling to create a new

civic space. (Plans to reopen the rotating restaurant

in time for the 2012 London Olympics were quietly

dropped.) Another went to Patrick Judd and Ash

Bonham, working for architects BDP. They planned

to give the Boord Street gasholder on the

Greenwich peninsula a new role as a cultural and

community centre for future communities growing

in the hinterland of the O2 arena.

Railway relics featured in three short-listed

entries. Charlotte Tamplin, Charlotte Marshall and

Kate Stevens suggested creating an underground

public swimming pool within the tunnels of the

disused Grade II-listed Aldwych station, which have

featured in film and TV productions ranging from

The Krays in 1990 to Mr Selfridge in 2013 and

Sherlock in 2014.

Claire Moody envisaged a Museum of Memories

on the site of the former London Necropolis Railway

terminus near Waterloo Station. Gunton Works’

Royal Pavilion scheme saw a new leisure

destination, commemorating the Royal Pavilion pub

that once stood nearby, rising on the plinth of a

disused platform of the former North Woolwich

station in Newham, with a new riverside terrace.

page 8

Colour Urban Design’s reimagining of Croydon’s Valley Park shedland

page 9

The next edition of Forgotten Spaces is scheduled

for 2015. If it generates as wide and imaginative

slew of ideas as 2013’s, it will make yet another

worthwhile contribution to the continuing challenge

of SLOAP.

– David Crawford

1. The term arose during a ‘crit’ (critical review of

students’ work) on housing layouts, when Ginsburg

pointed to a layout full of unusable pieces of open

space and said, off-the-cuff: ‘Look at all this space left

over after planning’, writing SLOAP across the

drawings with a thick pencil.

G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G

Changing London:

around King’s Cross

King’s Cross Square was completed this year. Gone

is the undistinguished covered hall which masked

the two powerful brick arches of Lewis Cubitt’s

station frontage. In its place are sleek stripes of

paving, an anonymous bronze sculpture and some

stark stone benches below a group of trees, all in

the tough uncluttered manner typical of Stanton

Williams, winner of the competition for landscaping

the square. A considerable improvement – though

regrettably, a view of the lower arches is still

interrupted –

by a new narrow porch which

provides a covered route to a glass box housing the

escalators to the Underground.

Walk through the magnificent curving Western

Concourse to its exit on the north, and there is

much more to see. This is an area of continuing

change, but considerable efforts are being made to

make the temporary aspects visually interesting.

The

Victorian

German

gymnasium,

under

conversion to a restaurant, is wrapped in a vast

hoarding, carrying a striking black and white

temporary art work (790 square metres) by the

Barcelona-born Gregory Saavedra, Its spirited

medley depicting youthful city life is ironic contrast

to damp empty paving and scattered umbrellas on

an October morning.

Behind,

the

famous

working

class

tenements,

beloved

by

film

producers,

have

been reduced to a

single

block

embedded

in

much larger new

building (part of a

new empire owned

by Google). The

slightly contrived

a t m o s p h e r i c

approach is down

a narrow cul-de-

sac

–

worth

exploring

to

appreciate the handsome repainted ironwork.

Curving round to the north the new pedestrian

‘Boulevard’ is still defined by hoardings but now

fringed by an avenue of real plane trees. Looking

back as one approaches the canal, the St Pancras

clock tower rises romantically above their leafy

crowns (will this vista disappear as the trees

grow?). Across the canal we are again in a

rigorously

hard

geometric

world,

with

performance of regimented little fountains in front

of the huge Granary building now occupied by

University of the Arts London. It may seem bleak

on a wet day, but the lighting at night is

spectacular. The austere landscaping is again,

unmistakeably, by Stanton Williams, who are also

busy building a ‘canalside pavilion’ nearby (another

restaurant) in support of the use of this large area

as a lively outdoor space. Should you be enticed by

the numerous advertisements drawing attention to

the ‘House of Illustration’ at 2 Granary Square,

which opened in July, be warned that this

interesting-sounding gallery is closed on Mondays.

This is a pioneer in the area – there is much more

to come, as one realises as one looks at the still

derelict buildings of the goods yard to the west of

the Granary. Watch this space!

Detail of mural by Gregory Saavedra on the German Gymnasium

King’s Cross tenements

The Heritage of London Trust

Discovering the variety of London’s architecture,

both new and old, is one of the delights of exploring

the lesser known parts of the capital. But how do

hard-pressed

owners

of

worthwhile

historic

buildings cope when funds are needed for repairs or

alterations?

The Heritage of London Trust was set up in 1980 to

provide a source of funding for London buildings in

need of conservation help. HOLT operates on a very

modest level in comparison with such giants as the

Heritage Lottery Fund, but its provision of ‘seed

funding’ – generally a few thousand pounds – can

make an enormous difference to organisations

struggling to gain credibility for their fundraising

efforts and can be used as matched funding to

encourage other donors. HOLT works closely with

English Heritage in selecting worthwhile causes

and ensuring that conservation work is carried out

to appropriate standards. The grants are often

specifically directed toward individually costed

items in a larger repair programme, ensuring that

real progress is made, and that important features,

which might otherwise be omitted on cost grounds,

are not forgotten. The many small improvements do

much to help to maintain the rich diversity and

detail of London’s architectural heritage, as just a

few recent examples can demonstrate.

HOLT ranges widely over the suburbs, where

lesser

known

buildings

make

distinctive

contributions to their neighbourhoods but where

local groups struggle to find support. Recent grants

for secular buildings include Hoxton Hall Hackney,

which was built as a Music Hall in 1863, later

became a temperance mission and is now a

community

arts

centre

undergoing

major

refurbishment. HOLT contributed to the restoration

of the sunburner lighting. Recently HOLT made a

grant to the Friends of the Crystal Palace Subway

to restore the entrance gate and railings of the

subway surviving from the Upper Station of 1856.

The subway is notable for its striking decorative

brickwork and it is hoped to open it as an events

space.

Many places of worship in use – of all styles and

dates – benefit. HOLT also helps with the London

‘Ride and Stride’ fundraising campaign for faith

buildings which takes place each autumn. Several

church clocks have been refurbished as a result of

HOLT grants, among those at Sir John Soane’s St

John at Bethnal Green and Sir Gilbert Scott’s

Christ Church at Turnham Green. Victorian

churches are focal points in many suburbs, but

their congregations often cannot afford to repair the

details that give them character. At St Thomas the

Apostle, Islington, HOLT grants helped with stone

gable crosses and stained glass repairs, at St Mary

with St James, Kilburn, with restoration of the west

window carved angels, at St Peter, Ealing, with

repair of the unusual stone arches on the roof and

at Putney Community Church, with repair of the

windows. More recent buildings can also qualify.

An interesting case was Greenside School in

Hammersmith, a post-war building by Erno

Goldfinger, where a decorative mural by the artist

and urban designer Gordon Cullen had been

covered up, and was restored with the help of a

HOLT grant.

HOLT has a sister organisation, HOLT Operations

(HOLTOPS), the regenerational arm of the charity

which takes on individual abandoned buildings and

gives them new life, a tough assignment but one

which has had some spectacular successes. The

Concrete House, 549 Lordship Lane, Southwark, of

1873, is a remarkable example of an experimental

concrete construction which had been allowed to

fall into serious disrepair by an owner who wished

to demolish it. With the help of the London

Borough of Southwark, HOLTOPS took over; it has

been restored and converted to five shared-

ownership flats and this year won a conservation

award. Another HOLTOPS rescue enterprise has

been the once splendid St George’s Garrison

Church at Woolwich, left a ruin after the war. The

erection of a new tensile roof to protect the mosaics

surviving at the east end is shortly to be completed.

Diana Beattie, the indefatigable director of HOLT,

retires this year after over 30 years of involvement

in the organisation. Here she expresses her

passionate belief in the need to conserve London’s

architectural heritage.

“Untold millions of people come to London to live,

work or as visitors and there is an overwhelming

page 10

Diana Beattie, director of the Heritage of London Trust, inspects

the Crystal Palace subway

range of things to see and to do but it all takes place

within our built environment and that is changing

amazingly fast – aided and abetted by the

relaxation of the planning regime. Parts of London

are almost unrecognisable to anybody who has

been away for even a few years. But we must not

let this hectic rate of construction and destruction

obliterate our history. London has been for centuries

and remains today a hub for world trade,

technological innovation, financial conjuring and

artistic endeavour but the physical record of all this

is not just in our famous and iconic tourist

attractions – there’s more to London than Tower

Bridge and Buckingham Palace! London is a huge

collection of local communities and ancient villages –

all over the 33 boroughs there are buildings and

monuments which reflect local history as well as

London’s contribution to the world. Let’s make sure

they can survive.”

HOLT raises funds from a variety of organisations

and individuals including subscriptions from its

supporters, for whom it provides an interesting

programme of lectures and visits. For more

information on becoming a Friend of the Heritage of

London Trust visit www.heritageoflondon.com or

contact Heritage of London Trust, 34 Grosvenor

Gardens, London SW1W 0DH or telephone: 020

7730 9472.

Circumspice: Forty Hall (see p.3)

London’s green belt includes everything from the

grotty to the sublime. The grotty may be green belt

for strategic reasons; the sublime needs no

justification, only vigilance and tender care.

Enfield’s Forty Hall estate, with its four-square

Jacobean mansion and tree-lined vista down to the

Turkey Brook, lies closer to sublime than grotty;

though until recently the house itself was in a

desperate condition and kept open to the public

only by the effortsof local volunteers and the

Enfield Society.Now, thanks to campaigning by the

society, a change of heart by Enfield Council, and

a whopping £2m grant from the Heritage Lottery

Fund, the house is almost as it was when Nicholas

Rainton, City of London haberdasher and soon-to-

be lord mayor, welcomed his first guests there in

1632. “Almost as it was” because the rooms need

more furniture and the disconcertingly new main

staircase (replacing a C19 one which replaced the

original and making room for a lift) looks a little

too much like pastiche. But all in all Sir Nicholas

(as he became) would surely be pleased with the

restoration.The more so since the hall’s historic

landscape is currently getting a Lottery makeover,

with workers in hard hats and large earth-moving

machines at work in fenced off areas. This HLF-

funded project will recreate the garden mound

which gave long views over Rainton’s grounds and

adjacent countryside. It will also provide a new

footbridge over the Turkey Brook and thus open up

access to the nearby Georgian mansion, Myddelton

House and its grounds. Also across the bridge are

the remains of Elsyng, a C15 palace where Henry

VIII

was

a

frequent

visitor

and

where

archaeologists are again at work. After all that, a

quick trot back up the lime avenue to Forty Hall’s

tables-turned-café, where they do an acceptable

Americano and scrumptious-looking home-made

cakes.

– Tony Aldous

G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G

Book Request

A member is seeking a copy of T. F. Ordish’s Notes

on Visscher and his views of London, London

Topographical

Society

General

Report

and

Handbook... 1896 pp 19-22

If

you

have

one

available

please

contact

Peter.ross@cityofLondon.org.uk

G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G

Guildhall Library hosts London history

lectures throughout the year; for more

information and to book your place visit

the websitewww.ghlevents. eventbrite.co.uk

page 11

The Concrete House, Lordship Lane, before and after restoration

Reviews

James Raven, Bookscape: Geographies of

Printing and Publishing in London before 1800.

London: The British Library, 2014. (xvi), 208pp.

Plates. Illustrations. Maps. £50.

ISBN 978 0 71235 733 3.

It is always good for our sense of well-being to

catch up on the latest modes of expression in

higher academic thought. We can now enjoy ‘actor-

network theory’ (already just ‘ANT’ to initiates),

reified distinctions between ‘space’ and ‘place’ in

the urban landscape, and the charming notion of

the inanimate features of the environment – streets,

buildings, presses, paper – as ‘actants’ if not

‘actors’ in the history. Even so, I suspect we should

be grateful to Professor Raven for sparing us what

he calls the “wilder excesses of ‘thing theory’” – but

then I am not altogether sure that I knew that

‘thing theory’ was, well – a ‘thing’.

This is to be unduly flippant: James Raven has

long since proved himself one of the best, most

innovative and most interesting historians of the

book trade. The current work, based on his

invigorating Panizzi Lectures given in 2010, builds

further on that reputation. This is a history and a

topography of the London book trade built on the

most solid of foundations. As the author remarks,

in words which should be etched on the bathroom-

mirror of every historian: “The starting point, before

application

of

theoretical

or

imaginative

perspectives, is substantial empirical research.”

The research in this case derives in large part

from Professor Raven’s fascinating ‘Mapping the

Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century London’

project, a painstaking trawl of surviving archival

records intended to establish and map the realities

of the book trade and to rebuild a whole

infrastructure of London history. The story

commences with an illuminating survey of what

records there are and what they can tell us. Just as

important (and rather less obvious) are the caveats

on what they can’t tell us and how they can deceive

and confuse.

The net has been cast wide and the work

assiduous. With the extensive use of maps and the

evidence of land-tax records, whole areas of

bookselling London are brought back to life, with

telling detail of street frontages, building heights,

depths, and rental values. Booksellers, publishers

and printers are summoned before us, their

businesses examined in accurate contexts of time

and space, with the occasional illuminating flash of

personal history. The chief colonies of the trade and

their inherent memories are examined in turn – St

Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row, the

‘knowing and conversible men’ of Little Britain, the

more commercial style of the bookshops clustered

in and around the Royal Exchange, the growing

importance of Fleet Street to the west and the

eighteenth-century Scottish invasion of the trade.

This dense, detailed and forensic examination of a

recaptured

past

is

stimulating vision of what

is achievable. Barring a

tinge of disappointment

that no place is found in

the Fleet Street section for

the great John Senex, my

only real complaint is that

it left me wanting more,

much

more

–

and

suppose

more

is

increasingly

possible.

Already

now

online

resources can reveal, for

example, which they could not in 2010, that the

partwork publisher Alexander Hogg of Paternoster

Row, much mentioned in the text and ostensibly

active until 1819, was in fact buried at St Faith

early in 1809, while the engraver Sutton Nicholls of

the Weavers’ Company (unindexed but mentioned

in passing on p.52 as active in 1731), was buried at

St Dunstan in the East in 1729.

This is a major contribution to our understanding

of the realities and possibilities of the historic

London book-trade. Anyone with an interest in the

subject will have to acquire it. It is a pity then that

the design of a book devoted to book-trade history

should so completely ignore the book-trade’s

traditional courtesies to its readers. It is

exceedingly poorly designed: the printed line too

broad for ready comprehension; the paper shines

and glares by the light of a reading-lamp and it is

also far too heavy for the book easily to be handled

or posted; and the binding unpleasant. The only

proper place for footnotes in a scholarly text is at

the foot of the page and there is little point in

numbering illustrations in a sequence not then

followed through the text. And, while on the

illustrations – interesting and well-chosen as they

are, the research maps excellent – it is perhaps

worth pointing out that the dust-jacket watercolour

of Paternoster Row attributed (in text, caption and

on jacket) to Thomas Colman Dibdin, and ascribed

a date of 1851, is patently nothing of the sort. It is

actually the 1854 watercolour by Thomas Hosmer

Shepherd from the Crace Collection in the British

Museum (the signature is a clue). Similarly, the

map of the environs of London by John Rocque

(Map 1.1) is surely not the map of central London

by Rocque alluded to in the text – and there are

further issues with further captions. This is a fine

piece of work, but poorly served in production.

– Laurence Worms

‘Hidden Histories and Records of Antiquity’,

Essays on Saxon and Medieval London for John

Clark, Curator Emeritus, Museum of London

edited by Jonathan Cotton et al, London and

Middlesex Archaeological Society, special paper 17,

2014 194pp ISBN 978 0 90329 068 5.

John Clark’s extensive research has explored not

page 12

only the history and archaeology of Saxon and

medieval London (subjects to which he switched

because there were too many Romanists) but the

myths and legends of London, displaying a

fascination with the arcane which he shares with

John

Stow.

The

range

of

this

Festschrift

appropriately reflects the breadth of his interests.

Essays are divided into three sections: Archaeology

and Infrastructure, Death and Devotion, and Arts

and Crafts. Only a few can be singled out here to

indicate the variety. In part 1, essays which may

intrigue London topographers are Harvey Sheldon’s

‘Roman London, early myths and modern realities’,

and Derek Renn, ‘The other towers of London’

which maps no less than 22 medieval towers of

various kinds other than churches. Dave Sankey

explains the discovery and display of the evidence

for the medieval chapter house of St Paul’s, now

outlined in the garden south of the present

cathedral. Nick Holder, ‘Mapping medieval and

early modern London: the use of cartographic,

documentary

and

archaeological

evidence’

considers the challenges and opportunities offered

by modern technology. Part 2 ranges from the

intriguing legend of St Erkenwald and the righteous

heathen (Jeremy Harte) to the health of London

monasteries deduced from bone analysis (Rebecca

Redfern and Jelena Bekvalek); among objects and

their contexts, ‘Here be monsters: fabled beasts

from London’ by Martin Henig, considers the

famous Viking tombstone in the broader picture of

classical and medieval depictions of strange

creatures.

Among the ‘arts and crafts’ of section 3, the essay

not to be missed is the intriguingly titled ‘From

Whirlecole to the world on wheels: episodes in the

early history of London Transport’, by Julian

Munby. He traces the extensive documentary

evidence for the elaborately decorated ‘cars’ and

litters used in the great medieval processions.

Among them was the ‘whirlecole’ (one described in

1377 was covered in velvet and pearls); its exact

character is alas unclear. These showpieces were

superseded by the coach, first introduced to

England in the 1550s and rapidly adopted by the

aristocracy. This transport revolution had many

consequences for London topography: by 1621

there were nine coachmakers in St Sepulchre’s

parish, and the planning of new suburbs was

dictated by the need to accommodate coaches as

well as people.

The book is published in the A4 format now

customary for archaeological publications, which

gives scope for good illustrations, but the contents

deserve better than the unsatisfactory floppy

cover.

– Bridget Cherry

A Jacobean Company, and its Playhouse; the

Queen’s Servants and the Red Bull Theatre

(c.1605–1619), by Eva Griffith. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2013. xiii + 291pp,

13 illus. ISBN 978 1 10704 188 2. £60.00.

Shakespeare’s London Theatreland:

Archaeology, history and drama

by Julian Bowsher. London: Museum of London

Archaeology, 2012. 256pp, illus. throughout.

ISBN 978 1 90758 612 5. £20.00.

Eva Griffith has written a well-researched and

thoughtful book. First, in the Introduction and

initial chapter (59pp) she establishes that the Red

Bull Playhouse grew up in part of an inn yard of a

public house, the Red Bull, which stood in St

John’s Street, leading into the heart of the City and

along which cattle were driven to market and to

slaughter in Smithfield. Next, she sets out the

complicated ownership of the land. Finally, from

Chapter 2 onwards, she deals with the Company,

the Queen’s Servants, the plays which they

performed and the influence of the Queen and her

circle of friends. That queen was Anna of Denmark,

James I’s wife, who had been brought up in much

greater freedom of thought and action than that

allowed by the Scottish and English courts into

which she had married and against which she

rebelled.

Queen Anna’s circle of friends consisted chiefly of

ladies whose independent views coincided with her

own and which found their expression in the plays

performed. For example, in Thomas Heywood’s

Rape of Lucrece, the heroine argues with Tarquin

with a firmness and cogency that seem of the

twenty-first century rather than the seventeenth.

This is a book for historians of the theatre rather

than those whose interests lie in London’s

topography but, for the right person, it is a book

well worth reading.

Julian

Bowsher’s

Shakespeare’s

London

Theatreland is the complete opposite of Dr Griffith’s

book. Whereas she devotes a whole volume to a

single theatre, he covers the administrative, social

and economic life of the capital, the development of

the theatre and the playing companies, the City

inns, and the playhouses. He lists 13 of these,

seven theatres and six animal-baiting arenas. He

goes on to consider the staging of a play and the

players themselves. The volume ends triumphantly

with eight walks provided with maps. There are

notes, a bibliography and information about

reconstructions in Canada and other countries.

Altogether it is a book which anyone interested in

Shakespeare, the theatre or English literature

needs to own.

This is not to decry Dr Griffith’s volume. The two

books have completely different objectives. Whereas

the former aims to give a complete account of the

Red Bull and its place in society, Dr Bowsher takes

his readers by the hand and marches them briskly

in and out of the streets of London, pointing

energetically to right and left along the way. Both

approaches are needed and, if one proves more

successful than the other, we should look at the

respective prices and realise the economics of

publishing.

– Ann Saunders

page 13

Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on

Shipbuilding on the Thames edited by

Chris Ellmers, Docklands History Group, 2013,

162 pages, 75 illustrations. £20 plus postage

(£5 for 1 to 3 copies UK only. Other postage on

application).

The Thames Valley has had over 2,000 years of

association with shipbuilding, ship repairs and

ship-breaking. Since 2000 five Symposia have

covered recent research on all aspects of the

industry. The volume under review, edited by Chris

Ellmers, founder-director of the Museum of London

Docklands, was the first to be organised by the

Docklands History Group.

The very well-attended Fifth Symposium covered

a wide range of topics. Gustav Milne of University

College and Project Director of the Thames

Discovery Programme (TDP) will be known to many.

The

TDP

is

a

community-based

long-term

monitoring project that looks at sites as they

become exposed by erosion. His paper reminds us

that at the end of its life a ship still contained

valuable items that could be re-cycled either into

new ships or perhaps to create foreshore slipways.

Captain Rodney Brown’s paper covers the long-

lasting conflict between the City-based Worshipful

Company of Shipwrights and the Company of

Shipwrights, of Redrith. The paper by Chris Ellmers

on the London dockyard of Gordon and Company

in Deptford, uncovers in great detail a ‘lost London

shipyard’ and is a reminder of the importance of

‘very entrepreneurial London business families’ and

of the continuing need to record today’s rapidly

changing London for the benefit of future

historians.

Dr Pieter van der Merwe, on the staff of the

National Maritime Museum, offers a tour de force

looking at Thames shipyards through the work of

artists; the first in-depth coverage of this important

aspect. The paper includes 15 informative, striking

or otherwise unusual images; very usefully, further

images are available on the BBC/Public Catalogue

Foundation ‘Your Paintings’ site. The paper by

Richard Perks, who has 40 years’ experience on

Thames sailing barges, reflects his detailed

knowledge of these barges and their builders, and

their importance to London’s economy when road

transport was slow and unreliable. He also

introduces us to sprit-riggs, gaff rigs, swim-heads

and budget sterns. Tables reveal that 539 barges

were built between 1753 and 1807 on the Thames,

Medway, Swale, and in East Essex and Suffolk,

numbers that may be increased by further

research. Professor Andrew Lambert’s presentation

on John Scott Russell (1808-1882) and the

construction of HMS Warrior is a timely reminder of

the contributions to scientific shipbuilding of a

neglected engineer who was engaged in the

advanced design processes needed to build the first

ironclad warship, launched in 1861. Mary Mills’s

research discovers that two big sailing ships were

being built in the 1870s at Maudslay, Sons and

Field’s Greenwich shipyard, close to the site of the

Cutty Sark, even though Greenwich was never an

important shipbuilding area. Henry Maudslay

(1771-1831), after time at Joseph Bramah’s Soho

workshops, established his own company in

Lambeth in 1810, and moved to Greenwich in the

1860s. Her paper explores many aspects of this

period but particularly striking was that many of

the sites were owned by the Blackheath-based

charity Morden College, which had taken a decision

to develop the area for industry in the late 1830s.

How many other London estate owners followed

similar ideas? The final paper by James Wisdom is

an interesting attempt to explore the social and

economic impact of the closure of Thornycroft’s

Yard, Chiswick, in 1909. Testing the truth of ‘two

scraps of oral history evidence’ revealed them as

‘myths but perhaps suffused with truth’, and

similar stories can undoubtedly be discovered all

over London linking social and industrial history.

– Derek Morris

Hospitals of London by Veronika and Fred

Chambers and Rob Higgins. Amberley

Publishing, 2014. 128 pp. 100 photographs.

ISBN 978 1 44563 809 6. £14.99.

A great opportunity has been lost. London hospitals

present a lake of unfathomable depth whose ripples

extend to medical, social and architectural history.

Think of the pioneering doctors who established the

reputation of the National Hospital for Neurology and

Neurosurgery, the high-minded philanthropists and

benefactors who founded the Royal Marsden and the

buildings

James

Gibbs

designed

for

St

Bartholomew’s. There is enough printed material and

untapped archives to warrant an encyclopaedia on

London hospitals but here we have yet another

‘pictorial history’: a few paragraphs of text

accompanied by an illustration and an inadequate

caption, at best. The Royal Marsden, London’s

famous cancer hospital, is given three lines. The

Royal Brompton, Britain’s leading cardiothoracic

hospital, has three cursory references. Great Ormond

Street Hospital for Sick Children deserves more than

16 words. The authors include hospitals for the

mentally ill at Epsom, Ilford and Coulsdon but neglect

Bethlem Royal Hospital, the oldest psychiatric

hospital in the world, formerly in central London, now

at Beckenham (Bethlem is listed in the index with a

reference to page 1 but there is no page 1).

Unbelievable. So is the date cited for Henry VIII’s

dissolution of the monasteries, 1546.

– Penelope Hunting

London’s Rubbish Two Centuries of Dirt, Dust

and Disease in the Metropolis by Peter Hounsell

(Amberley Publishing, 2013, £15.99), 192pp, PB.

ISBN 978 1 44560 227 1.

This Amberley book has solid pages of text with

the illustrations, small-scale and all monochrome,

collected in 22 central pages and over 20 pages of

page 14

notes and a bibliography. The author was a

library officer at Ealing in West London (childhood

home of this reviewer and long-time home of our

former Chairman) where the borough surveyor in

the 1890s Charles Jones improved the dust

incinerator by dealing with the pollution from its

chimney.

The book tells you all you might want to know

about dealing with rubbish and probably far more

than that – the only subject I missed was the effect

of waste disposal units in kitchen sinks which were

fashionable in the 1960s. Sorting recycled rubbish

is nothing new – dust heaps with their surrounding

pickers (usually female) were a feature of Dickens’s

London. Local authorities found that one year they

could sell the rubbish they collected and the next

year they would have to pay to have it taken away

due to the economic swings. Burning rubbish to

generate electricity was a good theoretical idea, but

in practice the calorific value of the rubbish often

required the addition of expensive coal to achieve

efficiency. All the developments are covered, from

strikes of local authority dustmen leading to

privatisation, to recycling and landfill tax (not

indexed – a minor quibble). If you have any interest

in what happens after your black or green bag is

slung out, then this should make a satisfying read.

– Roger Cline

London Underground at War by Nick Cooper

(Amberley Publishing, 2014, £12.99). 158pp. PB.

ISBN 978 1 44562 201 9, also available as an

e-book.

The copious illustrations comprise images similar

to those we have seen in publications such as

Charles Graves’s London Transport Carried On of

1947 and its later edition London Transport at War

of 1978, but the current book has its uses in listing

all the serious World War II incidents and those

with civilian fatalities and giving details of the deep

level shelter locations with plentiful photographs of

their surface buildings. There are extensive pages

of text and one chapter describes the pre-war plans

for shelters including those more adventurous ones

which were not built, very similar to the

underground car parks which have been built

since, and another chapter covers the building of

the floodgates for closing off the stretches of tunnel

below the Thames.

A useful book and cheaper per page than the

volumes in the ‘Through Time’ series.

– Roger Cline

The King’s England, London, the Classic Guide

by Arthur Mee, first published 1937, this edition

published 2014. Amberley Publishing, 350pp,

ISBN 978 1 44564 217 8, £9.99. Paperback.

This book needs a health warning. Readers will be

familiar with the variable quality of Amberley

publications – some are very worthwhile, but this is

not. It is not a reprint of Mee’s original King’s

England volume of 1937, but a bowdlerised and

abbreviated version, without any explanations of

what is omitted and no reference to Ann Saunders’s

revised editions of 1972 and 1975. In theory it

covers the old LCC area, although with only 12 of

the old boroughs which were included in Mee’s

original volume (among those omitted are Stepney,

Poplar, Hackney, Hammersmith…). Mee’s flowery

patriotic introductory paragraphs have been cut,

which is not surprising – but so has much other

detail, making nonsense of parts of the text. A few

murky illustrations are claimed to be the original

photographs, but they are far inferior to the inset of

evocative sepia views in the original edition; the

level of editorial incompetence is demonstrated by a

view of the interior of St Bartholomew the Great

opposite text referring to the ’dull-looking church of

St Bartholomew‘ in Gray’s Inn Road. There is no

index, and nothing to indicate to the novice that a

vast number of buildings mentioned (such as the

dull St Bartholomew) no longer exist. (‘Dull’ is a not

untypical example of Mee’s rather uninspired

vocabulary.)

All this is a pity, because Arthur Mee (1875-1943)

is a character of considerable interest, well worth an

introductory explanatory essay. Mee was a self-made

journalist from a Baptist background, who worked

for the Harmsworth Press, a keen royalist and

patriot, and a supporter of the Temperance

movement. Older readers may recall his Children’s

Encyclopedia (begun 1908), and perhaps with less

fondness his Children’s Newspaper (1919-65) which

continued after his death, worthy but excruciatingly

boring in its latter years. These were sidelines to his

major achievement, the county by county volumes of

the King’s England, with their individual mix of

topographical description, historical anecdote and

somewhat sentimental personal appreciation. His

lively account of the appearance of the pre-war City

is a fascinating period piece and well worth reading.

But don’t buy this book. Look for a second-hand

copy of the original.

– Bridget Cherry

London: Portrait of a City 1950-1962

by Allan Hailstone. Amberley Publishing.

ISBN 978 1 44563 587 3. £20. Over 120 black and

white photographs.

The majority of these photographs were taken in

the mid-1950s when Allan Hailstone was still a

teenager. They show London’s streets with a

proliferation of people going about their daily

business. Each picture has a caption which mostly

describes the whereabouts of the buildings and

what they were for. Some pictures are not as sharp

as they could be, while others show the darker side

of London with sites that attracted the neon lights

of the advertisers. What the book gives is a

nostalgic look at times gone by for the older

generation who remember the city with much less

traffic than now.

– Denise Silvester-Carr

page 15

Medieval settlement to 18th/19th century

rookery. Excavations at central St Giles, London

Borough of Camden, 2006-8 by Sian Anthony.

Museum of London, Archaeology Studies series 23,

73pp, 2011. ISBN 978 1 90758 603 3, £9.

The cover illustration shows a view of 1858, with

market women outside a dingy lodging house in

Carrier Street, St Giles. This study set out with the

deliberate

aim

of

investigating

whether

archaeological reality tallies with the reputation of

St Giles as the notorious slum familiar from written

sources. The findings are set in context by a lucid

‘historical perspective’ of London slums by David R.

Green. Within the standard A4 shaped excavation

report

presented

in

the

usual

numbered

paragraphs there is much to interest the non-

archaeologist.

The microscopic investigation of a small area to

the north of St Giles High Street was possible after

the demolition of the post-war St Giles’s Court.

Evidence of plants, seeds and food confirmed the

evidence of early maps that this was a once rural

area built up from the sixteenth century, with

gardens

and

yards

behind

the

houses.

Documentary evidence of ownership by the Dyot

estate show these spaces became increasingly

congested, with much casual rebuilding during the

eighteenth century. But a general pattern of

poverty, though supported by some of the finds, is

contradicted by the greater variety of pottery

(datable to before c.1810) found in a cesspit

associated with the Kirkman family, owners of a

brewery built in the yard of the Eagle and Child in

1787, suggesting that at this time the comfortably

off were living here as well as the poor. The

brewery survived the bankruptcy of the Kirkmans

in 1815, but in the 1820s was replaced by

tenements

called

Clark’s

buildings,

where

excavations revealed cellars, with fireplaces, but lit

only by light wells, typical of the poor quality

housing of the time. The sparse finds from the

period of the 1820s-50 seem to confirm that this

was the nadir; from the 1850s, with the

introduction

of

better

sewerage,

conditions

improved, although the effect of clearances for New

Oxford Street, just to the north, created further

problems in an already overcrowded area. The story

deduced from documents and maps remains

broadly

accurate,

but

the

fragmentary

archaeological evidence has been teased out to add

intriguing detail and intricacy.

– Bridget Cherry

Around Hayes through time by Philip Sherwood

(Amberley Publishing, 2013, £14.99) 96pp pb ISBN

978 1 44561 444 1, also available as an e-book.

This is Hayes in Middlesex; the book follows the

usual format of the Through Time series and, being

written by a local historian, gives adequate

information in the photographic captions. The

photographs

are

arranged

under

different

categories of building types but the changes that

have occurred between the sepia views of the old

village with a population of around 2000 and

modern times are so great that there are few views

containing buildings which are recognisable

‘through time’. The modern views are in colour but

one cannot say that any of the modern architecture

is inspired. The ecclesiologists will find the first

chapter on the various places of worship of interest

for the variety of styles; for those readers with only

a vague knowledge of the local scene, the final

chapter on the industries which were serviced by

the railway and canal is interesting, covering

gramophone records, chocolate, and of course

Fairey Aviation. There was an X–Chair factory in

Silverdale Road and a picture shows a display of

furniture from 1934, which probably gives the

basis for my parents’ picnic table which I still

possess which our family has always called ‘the

Silverdale’.

– Roger Cline

Lambeth Architecture, a brave new world 1945-

65 by Edmund Bird and Fiona Price, photographer

John East. London Borough of Lambeth and the

Lambeth Local History Forum, 2014. 172pp,

ISBN 9 780 992 66952 2, £10.

This attractive book in a bold square format follows

Edmund Bird’s two previous records of Lambeth

architecture of the earlier twentieth century. In this

one he is joined by the Lambeth archivist Fiona

Price.

The

well-

researched

record

is

supported by numerous

older views as well as

excellent new photos. As

in the previous volumes

the

historical

introduction is followed

by chapters on different

building types, with a

final section on lost

buildings.

Lambeth

page 16

could be described as an epicentre of the new post-

war Britain. The Festival of 1951 focused national

attention on its revitalised riverside, and extensive

war damage coupled with pre-war slum clearance

plans encouraged radical reconstruction of housing

throughout the borough, the need increasing as

Lambeth became a destination for Commonwealth

immigrants.

Eighty pages of the book are devoted to housing;

half of these new homes were constructed by the

borough, half by the LCC, at first on pre-war lines

but increasingly in forms displaying the ‘gentle’

modernism (the word in Elain Harwood’s foreword)

of those early post-war years. The surprise is the

absence of uniformity, the result of the employment

of numerous outside architects (their backgrounds

are usefully given) as neither Lambeth nor the LCC

has sufficient in-house staff to cope with the

workload. Balconies, for example, which were a

standard feature in the council flats of the new

welfare state, were treated in a host of different

ways, enlivening the exteriors as well as providing

an amenity for the tenants. The photos show that

many of these buildings have worn well. Much of

the housing at this time was still of the five storey

walk-up variety: tower blocks of modest height (up

to 12 storeys) begin to appear in the mid 50s, the

most

radical

being

the

LCC’s

Corbusian

Loughborough estate, but for the full story of high

rise we must wait for the next volume. The

inclusion of occasional photos of lost earlier

buildings, sometimes, but by no means always, war

damaged, demonstrate the ruthlessness of the

rebuilding programme. It would have been

interesting to have had a few maps to demonstrate

how the new layouts were imposed on the old street

patterns.

Shorter sections include commercial buildings,

schools, entertainment and public buildings; new

uses and demolitions demonstrate various social

trends. The modest Lambeth Bathhouse of 1955,

which replaced the bombed Victorian baths, is now

a medical centre, the plain curtain-walled offices of

the Albert Embankment, once a 1950s period piece,

have mostly been swept away for larger, slicker

buildings, and the tough brick and concrete

Beaufoy school built to match the surrounding

Lambeth Walk estate has been converted to

housing. No less than three comprehensive schools

appear in the lost buildings section.

Amidst the rectangularity of most of the subjects

a few exceptions stand out: the swelling curves of

the magnificent Stockwell bus garage of 1951-4

(needed when trams were abandoned), and the

striking concrete vaulting of St James, Clapham, by

N. F. Cachemaille Day – (who may indeed have had

an ‘extraordinary name and great talent’, but his

first name was Nugent, not Nungent).

A map shows 133 numbered sites scattered over

the modern borough, including the parts of

Clapham

and

Streatham

which

were

in

Wandsworth until 1965. Explorers will need an A-Z

map, and it is a pity that the numbers do not

appear in the text, but there is a good index. A

most rewarding book, of interest not just to those

concerned with Lambeth but to anyone curious

about the architecture and social history of this

period.

– Bridget Cherry

A Hamlet in Hendon. The Archaeology and

History of Church End, from Excavations at

Church Terrace, 1973–74 by HADAS Finds

Group. xi + 216 pp., 147 figs, 21 tables.

A History of Bassishaw Ward, c.1200–c.1600 by

Christine M. Fox. 2014. 122 pp., 31 figs.

E-book. Available from Amazon and Apple at

£3.00–£6.00. Proceeds to the Ward Club.

These books have landed, almost simultaneously,

on my desk; each is concerned with a small, very

specific, plot of land over a long period.

A Hamlet in Hendon is the outcome of the work

of Hendon and District Archaeological Society

(HADAS) from its establishment in 1961. The

Society’s

founder

was

Themistocles

Constantinides, and one of his objectives was to

discover evidence for the Saxon origins of Hendon

which at last began to emerge in 1973 on a site

located next to the parish church, St Mary’s; the

site is known as Church Terrace. Excavation work

continued until 1973–74 and reports were

published at intervals until 1986. A ‘finds

processing course’ was set up in 2001 and is still

running under the tuition of Jacqui Pearce; this

book is the culmination of their findings. There are

chapters

covering

documentary

research,

ceramics, Roman pottery, ceramic petrology, clay

tobacco types, glass, geology, worked flint, faunal

and human remains, and coins and metal finds.

With photography, maps and graphics, as well as

17 other contributors (unless I have miscounted),

the chief editors, Jacqui Pearce and Christopher

Willey, deserve congratulations. This is an

important book.

A History of Bassishaw Ward, c.1200–c.1600 was

generously commissioned by Alderman Timothy

Hailes, JP, and executed by Dr Christine Fox in

three months. Histories of single City of London

wards are rare, and this one should be valued. It

covers the ward’s changing boundaries, its

administration, its relationships with the City, its

sole parish church, St Michael’s — a rarity in itself

— and the inhabitants of the ward and parish.

Fluctuations in population are noted and an

analysis of wills by craft or trade is given. The

interdependency of the Crown and City is

discussed, and finally there are biographies for the

leading families and individuals. To have achieved

so much in so short a time takes my breath away.

It would be a happy addition to London’s already

bulging bibliography if other Aldermen would be so

generous, allowing, perhaps, more time to youthful

historians.

– Ann Saunders

page 17

The Rookfield Esate, Muswell Hill’s Garden

Suburb by David Frith, Hornsey Historical Society

2013. 56pp. £9.99.

This recent publication by the Hornsey Historical

Society is devoted to the small cluster of roads at

the foot of Muswell Hill, one of

the many developments carried

out in Hornsey by the Collins

family. W. J. Collins bought

the Rookfield estate in 1898

(then consisting of Rookfield

House

and

a

few

other

buildings; 23 acres in all). The

new

housing

took

shape

principally between 1906 and

1934 and its character owed

much to his two sons, Herbert, an architect, and

William B. Collins, a skilled designer (as is shown

by the drawing on the front cover), although never

officially registered as an architect. The two

brothers were fired by the Arts and Crafts

aesthetics then finding expression in Hampstead

Garden Suburb and in the Town Planning Act of

1909. They pleaded – unsuccessfully – with the

strait-laced borough council to relax the byelaws

which insisted on party walls disrupting the roof

lines of terrace houses. Frustrated by their failure

to carry out their designs, Herbert departed to

Southampton, but William remained, and despite

the byelaws, succeeded in creating delightful

groups of red brick houses given appealing variety

by different plans forms, gables, and roofs.

(Prominent front gables helped to conceal the

compulsory party walls.) David Frith, for many

years closely involved with protecting the estate

from unsympathetic development, not only tells the

story of the Rookfield estate’s creation and

preservation, but explores the history of the area in

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the

help of contemporary maps, and provides a

sympathetic account of the Collins family. Excellent

illustrations add to the value of this attractive book.

– Bridget Cherry

Brockwell Park’s Clock Tower

Here is another conservation story about the details

that matter; a cheering example of local initiative.

‘Little Ben’ in Brockwell

Park, Lambeth, was given by

the

local

Member

of

Parliament Charles Edward

Tritton, to celebrate Queen

Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee

in 1897. It is a smaller

version of the clock outside

Victoria Station, made by

the

well-known

firm

of

Gillett

&

Johnson.

An

attractive

booklet,

Celebrating the restoration of Brockwell Park’s clock

tower 2014, tells its story and lists the several

hundred local individuals and organisations who

raised £20.000 to restore the clock to working

order, coinciding with Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond

Jubilee and with major work on the park landscape

G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G

Editor’s Christmas stocking

Diamond Street, the hidden world of Hatton

Garden by Rachel Lichtenstein. We missed

reviewing this sparkling treasure when it was

published a couple of years ago. It is now even

more accessible as a Penguin paperback, modestly

priced at £9.99. ISBN 978 0 14101 852 2. This is a

skilful and highly readable mixture of oral history

and topography, presented in alternating chapters.

The author, who has previously written about her

exploration of the East End, here turns her

attention to the area around Hatton Garden, home

of the diamond trade and of her family’s business.

Gradually the changing character of the place

unfolds, as she recounts the information gleaned

from both professional historians and memorably

described local characters. The early history will be

well known to topographers – the Bishop of Ely’s

mansion, Christopher Hatton’s garden, the smart

new suburban houses of the later seventeenth

century – but much less familiar is the story of how

the jewellery business developed in the nineteenth

century on the back of the Johnson Matthey gold

assaying and refinery works. The diamond trade

followed from the 1880s with the opening of the

South African diamond mines; by 1895 Hatton

Garden had over 100 diamond merchants and

brokers. Through numerous interviews and with

great sensitivity Rachel Lichtenstein explores the

rituals and complexities of this mysterious, largely

Jewish, world of craftsmen and ealers, even

penetrating the secretive Diamond Bourse. It is a

world that is changing fast; the gathering of older

memories in this way is timely.

G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G

Exploring your neighbourhood

It is difficult to catch up with the publications by

local organisations which provide new insights into

what is special in their home patch. Here are two

examples, from opposte sides of the river, of guides

to areas of greater London which

have

hitherto

been

little

researched. The well illustrated

revised edition of the Herne Hill

Heritage

Trail

covers

the

attractively hilly area of south

Lambeth. Once scatterered with

rural villas, it now has a

pleasing variety of Victorian

housing and local amenities

page 18

which invite exploration. (2014, 168 pages, ISBN

978 1 87352 091 8) £8 +£1.50 p&p. available from

the Herne Hill Society, (hernehillsociety.org.uk).

The Society also publishes a very good illustrated

quarterly magazine full of topical information on

local landmarks.

Bounds Green, an interesting corner of

Haringey, a History and a Walk by Albert

Pinching, published by the Hornsey Historical

Society, (2014, 60pp ISBN 978 0 90579 450 1,

60pp, £8.99) is devoted to an area on the edge of

Haringey and Enfield. As its name suggests, it

began as a forest clearing. Its story includes the

nineteenth century brick and tile and pottery

works which survived to the 1920s. Its site

became a scout park, one of the amenities

accompanying the rapid development between the

wars, when Bounds Green was put on the map by

its own smartly progressive station on the

Piccadilly line.

We are pleased to able to include a review by Peter

Jackson of this year’s publication, reproduced with

permission from AfL Newsletter 28 © Archives for

London

On the day the Tour de France came to London,

it was most appropriate that this year’s LTS

volume was entitled The Singularities of London, or

to be more accurate Les Singularitez de Londres,

as the original text, reproduced in the volume,

was in French. The book was written by one L.

Grenade about whom nothing seems to be known,

not even his first name, or indeed if the author

was a man, although that would be most likely, as

the book was first published in 1578. That was a

full 20 years before John Stow’s better-known

survey. However, Stow had printed his ‘Summary

of English Chronicles’ in 1565, and, according to

the editors of the present text, Grenade had

consulted some of these. Grenade was probably a

protestant,

and

writes

favourably

of

English bonnes Loix et coustumes (good laws and

customs): was he persecuted abroad for his faith?

The introduction to the book mentions that a

family bearing surname Granado, with several

variants, is documented in London in 1539: the

name may refer to an origin in Spain, in Granada,

a strictly Catholic country at that time (this is not

long after the Inquisition and expulsion of the

Jews), whence the family went to Antwerp.

Antwerp was in the early 1530s tolerant of

Protestantism, but it was suppressed under

Charles V, so the family moved again, to England.

The family is traced in detail through several

generations on the edge of royal service as spies,

horseman and soldiers.

Grenade’s book itself has an interesting history,

as the copy from which this edition was prepared

is in the Vatican Library, where it was part of the

library of Queen Christina of Sweden: she died in

Rome in 1689, after abdicating in 1654 and

converting to Catholicism.

The LTS edition has an extensive introduction,

followed by an illustrated, annotated translation

(the illustrations not from the original volume, but

from books on London contemporary with it), then

notes (which run to 46 pages). Finally comes the

original French text, which itself is interesting as,

being sixteenth century French, it shows

differences from the modern French most of us

will have learnt as school. The introduction points

out that the word Singularitez means ‘particular or

noteworthy’ things, not oddities or singularities as

the French word might suggest.

Grenade’s introduction repeats the well-known

myth that London was founded by Brutus,

Grenade says in 1188 BC, when it was given the

name New Troy: it was renamed Ludunum after

King Lud in 68BC. He describes a view from

Highgate in which he includes some items which

would not have been visible from there, leading

the editors to surmise that he augmented a visit

with information gleaned from a map. The

following chapters of the book, more factually

accurate, describe first the suburbs outside the

walls, working clockwise from Ludgate to

Southwark, then four major street across the

centre. The final two chapters describe the

election of the Lord Mayor, and the laws of the

city. Of the latter he writes they are “so well

ordered than nothing better is possible”. So

sycophantic that one wonders what he wanted.

The notes to the translation are very informative,

not only pointing out Grenade’s errors, but

providing much information about London at the

time, almost as it were en passant.

page 19

Les Singularitez de Londres

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ISSN 1369-7986

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