The 114th Annual General Meeting of the
London Topographical Society will be held on
Monday 7 July 2014 at the Mansion House,
Walbrook, EC4N 8NH. Please note that members
need to advise in advance – by Friday 20 June –
if they wish to attend
The AGM will be held in the Egyptian Hall at the
Mansion House. This is only the second time the
Society has had an opportunity to meet in the
building which is the home and office of the Lord
Mayor of London, the previous occasion being
the inaugural meeting of the Society in 1880.
Our chairman writes about this on p.2. The Lord
Mayor, Fiona Woolf (only the second woman to
hold this office), is hoping to be able to welcome
us.
Agenda
1.
Minutes of the 113th AGM.
2.
Annual Report of the Council for 2013.
3.
Accounts for 2013.
4.
Hon. Editor’s Report.
5.
Election of Council Officers and Members.
6.
Proposals by Members.
7.
Any other business.
Item 1 can be found on the Society’s website; for
items 2 and 3 see pp.18-19.
Following the AGM, Ian Archer will give a short
talk about the 2014 publication, Les Singularitez de
Londres, and Sally Jeffrey will give a talk on the
history of the Mansion House.
Please note that we are limited to 350 seats so,
due to the anticipated interest in this venue, the
Council has decided to make this a ‘Members Only’
meeting,
but
members
who
need
mobility
assistance may bring a guest. Seats will be
allocated on a first-come first-served basis. Unlike
most of our earlier AGMs, this year, due to the
Mansion House’s security needs, we need to know
in advance, by 20 June, who will be coming. If
you wish to attend please let our Secretary, Mike
Wicksteed, know as soon as possible (including the
name of your mobility guest where applicable).
Your name(s) will be ticked off on arrival.
In case we end up with fewer than 350
applications and you would like to bring a guest,
please let Mike know when you apply for your seat
and he will make a note of your wish. Any extra
seating allocation will, again, be on a first-come
first-served basis and Mike will advise closer to the
date if guests may attend.
Mike’s
address
is:
mike.wicksteed@
btinternet.com (preferred); his postal address is:
103 Harestone Valley Road, Caterham, Surrey CR3
6HR (if you use this, please enclose a SAE if you
would like to bring a guest, in case a seat becomes
available).
Arrival Admittance to the Mansion House will
start at 4.45pm. On arrival please enter by the door
at street level on Walbrook Street where your name
will be ticked off. You will then pass through a
security barrier and bags will be x-rayed.
Refreshments Due to high catering costs at the
Mansion House, refeshments will be tea and
biscuits, served from 5.00pm. The meeting will
start at 6.00pm. We hope to provide our usual
ample tea next year.
Disabled Parking
The Egyptian Room has
wheelchair access and a limited number of disabled
parking spaces are available. If required, please
contact
Mike
Wicksteed
(mike.wicksteed@
btinternet.com).
How to get there
Tube: Closest – Bank (DLR, Central, Northern,
Waterloo & City lines)
Mansion House Station, a quarter of a mile away
on Queen Victoria Street (District and Circle lines)
Bus: King William Street: 21, 43, 133, 501; Bank:
D9, 11, 15B, 21, 23, 26; Cheapside: 8, 22B, 25,
501; Threadneedle Street: 149
Train:
Liverpool
Street;
Cannon
Street;
Fenchurch Street; Moorgate; Blackfriars; City
Thameslink
More information on the Mansion House is
available
at:
www.cityoflondon.gov.uk
(type
’Mansion House‘ into the search engine).
Newsletter
Number 78
May 2014
Contents
Annual General Meeting............................................p.1
The Mansion House revisited
by Penelope Hunting..............................................p.2
Notes and News............................................................p.2
Circumspice .......................................................p.3, p.10
Exhibitions ................................................................p.3-4
Changing London: New River Head........................p.4
The Crace Collection of Maps
by Peter Barber........................................................p.5
The Kerbstone Conundrum by Sarah Day...........p.5
Stockbridge Terrace RIP: demolition and
change in Victoria and Westminster,
1959-2013 by Oliver Bradbury...........................p.6
Recreating London in 1666 by Ian Doolittle ........p.9
Reviews.........................................................................p.11
Annual Report and accounts for 2013 .........p.18-19
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The Mansion House revisited
On 28 October 1880 the inaugural meeting of the
London Topographical Society took place at the
Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s official residence.
134 years later we are privileged to be invited to return.
The birth pangs of the Society were protracted
and distant. Major General J. Baillie wrote from
India in 1873 to suggest that a topographical
society might take its place as a learned society
alongside the Geological and Genealogical Societies.
The man who picked up the ball and ran with it
was Henry B. Wheatley, whose London Past and
Present (1891) is now a classic. Wheatley focused
on topography as the essence of the new society
but the London and Middlesex Archaeological
Society deplored the idea: ‘the proposed society is
(to say the least) unnecessary’.
Fortunately, the formation of the LTS appealed to
the Lord Mayor, hence the inaugural meeting at the
Mansion House. Wheatley was put in charge of future
publications and he was supported by a committee
that included the civil engineer, Sir Joseph
Bazalgette; the architect and editor of The Builder,
George Godwin; the Clerk to the London County
Council, Laurence Gomme; the author Edward
Walford and John G. Crace, decorator and designer.
It is not recorded whether or not those present at
the meeting were entertained to tea but it is
recorded that 139 founder members enrolled. In
2014 we boast a record number of members
(approaching
1,200).
In
1880
the
annual
membership fee was one guinea; it is now £18 by
UK standing order, for which modest sum members
receive the Newsletters, the annual publication(s)
and enjoy a convivial AGM – this year’s meeting
being more splendid than any other since 1880.
– Penelope Hunting
Note Stephen Marks wrote an account of the
Society’s foundation and early years for the London
Topographical Record vol xxiv (1980). We plan to
reprint this in the Record for 2015.
Notes and News
The Society’s website, www.topsoc.org
Following members’ suggestions, as a result of
some hard work by our secretary and our printers,
The Ludo Press Ltd, we are placing a copy of the
Newsletter on-line six months after the paper
edition is circulated to our members, starting with
the May 2013 edition (No 76). Hover over the
‘Newsletters’ box at the left to select the edition; the
contents page contains links to the relevant
articles. Weblinks mentioned are live, and you can
also locate references to people and places through
the search facility. We are investigating the
possibility of including earlier back numbers of the
Newsletter on-line as well.
The reorganisation of English Heritage into two
slimmer organisations, one to deal with the
portfolio of properties, the other, to be named
Historic England, concerned with designation,
grant and planning issues, has involved shedding
of the Survey of London. The good news is that the
Survey has found a new home, within the Faculty
of the Built Environment at University College
London. Following the publication of two areas
south of the river, Woolwich (reviewed in the last
Newsletter) and Battersea (see p.14) its current
concern is with St Marylebone, the fascinatingly
complex area of central London between Oxford
Street and Regent’s Park. The other news from
English Heritage which caused widespread concern
was a threat to the future of the very popular Blue
Plaques scheme. But largely thanks to a generous
donation, the scheme will continue with a reduced
staff; it is planned to erect twelve new plaques a
year. For more details see www.english-heritage.
org.uk/discover/blue-plaques
Latest news from the Postal Museum. Islington
Borough Council have approved a planning
application to develop a stretch of the old Post
Office Underground Railway – Mail Rail – into a
subterranean ride as part of a visit to The Postal
Museum, due to open in 2016. Visitors will be able
to explore the hidden world of Mail Rail under
Mount Pleasant through an interactive exhibition
and a ride through 1km of the original tunnels,
following the same route that much of the nation’s
mail took for nearly 80 years from 1927-2003.
St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster is the subject
of a research project being undertaken by the
University of York. For details of programme and
events see the website virtualststephens.org.uk
Martin Williams 1943-2014
The Council was well represented at Martin’s
cremation and the subsequent wake in the Nash
Conservatory in Kew Gardens. Although busy on a
variety of projects during his retirement, including
treasurership of LAMAS, Martin had been a
stalwart volunteer for delivering LTS publications in
the past two years. Many members sending in their
page 2
subscription cheques had remarked to me on the
delivery ‘by your charming assistant’. Martin had
planned to do a piece for the Newsletter on the
enjoyable time he had had in meeting fellow
members and discussing their various interests,
but his sudden illness brought that to a halt.
We understand that the Society may be receiving
a bequest from Martin’s estate and we shall find a
suitably commemorative project.
– Roger Cline
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Circumspice
Where is this cascade? See p.13.
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Exhibitions
London’s Growing Up, The Building Centre, 26
Store Street, London WC1 7BT. Until 12 June
2014. The free exhibition has two publications by
New London Architecture: Insight Study, and
Project Showcase, which cost £10 together.
These are essential viewing and reading for
anyone who wants to understand what is
happening in London now and what the future
may hold. The exhibition is not intended as a plug
for the greedy developer, but is an objective
investigation of the 236 buildings over 20 storeys
which have recently been completed, are already in
the pipeline, or for which planning permission is
being sought, with the aim of encouraging further
discussion. ‘Key areas of growth’ include a wide
swathe of south London; do not miss the
photomontages demonstrating the staggering
transformations likely at Vauxhall Nine Elms and
Blackfriars Road. ‘Densification’ may affect areas
in Greater London as well. Proposals for towers are
most numerous in the south and east, but the
‘Opportunity areas’ in the Mayor’s London Plan
also include Brent Cross and Old Oak Common.
Open Garden Squares weekend. This wonderful
opportunity to explore London’s open spaces is on
14-15 June 2014, organised by London Parks and
Gardens Trust in association with the National
Trust. For details see www.opensquares.org
William Kent, Designing Georgian Britain,
Victoria and Albert Museum. Until 13 July.
William Kent, Designing Georgian Britain, edited
by Susan Weber, Bard Graduate Centre New York
and Victoria and Albert Museum, Yale University
Press 2013. ISBN 0300196180. Special price at
exhibition: £45.
William Kent was an aspiring artist from a
humble background, who travelled to Italy and
attracted a succession of noble patrons, chief
among them the young Lord Burlington, keen to
establish
a
new
correct
style
of
classical
architecture in reaction to the baroque of the
Stuart Court. Kent switched from painting to
furniture
and
interior
design,
inspired
by
contemporary work in Rome, and then to
architecture and landscape gardening. His lively
and sensitive response to his clients’ requirements,
ranged from appropriately small but luxurious
furnishings for Burlington’s miniature Chiswick
House, to theatrical interiors for aristocratic
mansions (the extreme example in London is 44
Berkeley Square). Less well known are his
monuments in Westminster Abbey, and some
precocious excursions in the Gothick taste. He was
clearly a likeable chap who endeared himself to his
patrons, as one can guess from two informal
reciprocal portrait sketches by Kent and Lady
Burlington.
Had
the
Hanoverian
monarchy
and
the
government been so minded, Westminster might
have been transformed into a new Rome, with court
and parliament housed in classical palazzi by this
versatile designer. A promising start was made in
the 1730s with Kent’s new Royal Mews at Charing
Cross for George II (on the site of the National
Gallery), his magnificent barge for Prince Frederick
(now in the National Maritime Museum), and his
stately Treasury in Whitehall. But the Treasury was
built without its intended wings, and next door,
Kent’s Horseguards, a landmark on the King’s
ceremonial route from St James’s to the Palace of
Westminster, was completed by the Office of Works
only after the architect’s death. Kent designed new
royal interiors, but no new royal palace.
In the excellent exhibition, drawings and a huge
model of a projected summer palace at Richmond
demonstrate what might have been, but also Kent’s
remarkable achievements. Within the tight space
available, small vistas ingeniously remind one of
his interest in the distant view. From lavishly
carved and gilded furniture, one passes through a
display of drawings for royal and public works, to a
selection of the great mansions and landscapes,
revealed by photos and videos. For a full discussion
of Kent’s range one can turn to the book of the
exhibition, but alas, this handsome but unwieldy
breeze block is neither cheap nor easy to handle. It
includes essays by a galaxy of leading experts;
chapters
of
special
interest
for
London
topographers include Public Commissions by Frank
page 3
Salmon, Royal Commissions by Steven Brindle and
Garden Buildings by John Harris.
The First Georgians; Art and Monarchy 1714-
1760, The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace.
Until 12 October 2014, with an accompanying
book, The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy 1714-
1760, £49.50 (exhibition price £29.95).
An apt partner for the Kent exhibition is this
celebration honouring the 300th anniversary of the
Hanoverian succession. It explores the different
types of art popular in the earlier eighteenth
century, and their connections with members of the
royal family, with due attention to their cultural
roots in northern Europe. The well-known royal
portraits and busts are complemented by a
distinguished collection of oil paintings, and by
some engaging Tudor memorabilia and miniatures,
a special interest of Queen Caroline, wife of George
II. One room is devoted to the innovative
cartography encouraged by the military campaigns
against the Jacobites in Scotland, highlighting the
role of the artist Paul Sandby (who was present at
the battle of Culloden). Contrasts of high and low
life in London are demonstrated through Hogarth
prints, and London topographers will especially
enjoy the room dominated by the vast Kip
panorama showing the formal avenues of the royal
Park of St James, the new suburban expansion
beyond, and the City on the skyline. The book
develops these themes further, including the
patronage of Queen Caroline and her son Prince
Frederick, and a discussion of the Hanoverian
palaces
in
Germany.
Royal
accommodation
available in London must have appeared a poor
substitute.
Bridge. Museum of London Docklands, West India
Quay E14 4AL. 27 June – 2 November 2014. A major
exhibition of photographs and paintings, exploring
how bridges shape our experience of London.
Peace Breaks Out! London and Paris in the
summer of 1814, 20 June – October. Sir John
Soane’s Museum, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Kenwood House. Not a temporary exhibition, but
a permanent display. Kenwood House on the fringe
of Hampstead Heath, with a panoramic view of
London from its grounds, and an exceptional
collection of pictures inside, reopened in late 2013
after refurbishment by English Heritage. The
exquisite Adam Library has been redecorated in its
original colours of pink, green and blue, without
the gilding added later. The entrance front has been
repainted with a textured paint finish which
replicates the original. Analysis of earlier layers
showed that sand was strewn on the stone-
coloured lead oil paint when still wet, to create the
impression that the surfaces were of stone, not
plaster and timber. (In reproducing this it was
found more efficient to use quick-drying modern
masonry paint and a compressed airgun rather
than laborious and time-consuming strewing by
hand!) The softer colour of the repainted entrance
portico has the extra merit of harmonising with the
flanking wings added in 1780. An added bonus is
that the long neglected model dairy in the grounds
has been repaired; the area around it will be
cleared to restore the originally open views planned
by Repton, but retaining three fine copper beeches
after consultation with Kenwood’s tree lovers.
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Changing London: New River Head
2013 was the 400th anniversary of the opening of
the New River, that remarkable piece of early
seventeenth-century engineering, crucial for the
development of London, that created a canal to
bring fresh water from Hertfordshire to the fringe of
the City at New River Head, north Clerkenwell. The
anniversary was celebrated by numerous walks and
lectures; an account of the route, with pictorial
maps, can be found online at shelford.org/
walks/newriver.pdf . But, although the significance
of the structures at New River Head has been the
subject of a reappraisal by Islington Council, the
future of this important historic site is uncertain.
Recent years have seen piecemeal conversion of
some of the New River Company buildings to
residential use (including the former Headquarters
building on Rosebery Avenue, of 1915-20, which
houses the splendid Oak Room of 1693 from the
Company’s Water House). Currently, planning
permission for further housing has been granted,
but is opposed by local amenity bodies (the
Islington Buildings Preservation Trust, the Islington
Society and the Amwell Society) together with the
Heritage of London Trust, who have asked for a
page 4
New River Head in 1730
Kenwood Dairy before conservation
page 5
government review by the Minister for Planning.
The site is owned by a property company
(Turnhold, Islington). The buildings at risk are the
Engine Pump House built c.1768, partly still in use
for a pumping plant, the base of the Windmill
(which provided the energy for pumping water
before steam power), and a nineteenth-century
store building. Islington’s updated planning brief
stressed the historic importance of the group as a
whole, urged upgrading of the buildings to II*
because of their significance both nationally and for
the development of London, and recommended
future use as a ‘heritage and community facility’
with public access through the site. Let us hope
that that the government review will support this
imaginative approach.
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The Crace Collection of Maps
Peter Barber, head of the British Library Map
collection, introduces the newly digitised Crace
Collection
The British Library is immensely grateful to the
LTS for having financed the recataloguing and
digitisation of the maps in its part of the Crace
Collection. The re-cataloguing has now been
completed. As a result all the maps are now
included in the BL’s on-line catalogue, ‘Explore the
British
Library’
http://explore.bl.uk/primo_
library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=1&dstmp=
1391363018055&vid=BLVU1&fromLogin=true
where previously only a handful had been available.
The cataloguing also meets the latest standards.
Particular maps can be searched under a wide
variety of headings (though be aware that searching
for the ‘Fitzroy’ family’s estates will not pick up
those where the name appears as ‘Fitz Roy’). The
descriptions of the printed items have succinct
cross-references,
where
appropriate,
to
bibliographies and other works of reference and to
related maps in the Crace Collection. In the case of
manuscript maps – such as the large hidden
archive of eighteenth-century plans of properties
owned by the Mercers’ Company – there are
references to related plans in other archives and,
where possible, information on provenance. A
glance at the old printed catalogue will reveal how
much more information is now available.
The situation regarding the digitised images is
more complicated. Many are only going to be
digitised in the next financial year, because of the
pressures on our imaging department, but digitised
they will all be by March 2015. At the moment the
BL is re-modelling its website. This complex task
will take some time to complete, but until it
happens the existing website has, in effect, been
frozen, so that no additional items are being added
to our extremely popular Crace Maps website
[www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/crace/]. There
are therefore two ways in which to view the images
of Crace Maps.
One is to go direct to the Crace Maps website,
where you will be able to zoom in to the smallest
details on your chosen maps and will find an
extensive descriptive text.
The alternative – particularly useful for those
maps that have been digitised but are not to be
found on the Crace Maps website – is to go to
‘Explore the British Library’, using Google Chrome
or Firefox but not Explorer. Once there, the best
strategy is as follows:
1. Click on ‘Advanced Search’.
2. In the boxes on the left, enter your search term
and in the box beneath, ‘Crace’.
3. Click the red box marked ‘search’.
4. You should then get a list of hits with a
summary description in blue. Some contain a
thumbnail image to the left. If there is such an
image, a digital image is now available.
5. Select the map that interests you and click on
the summary catalogue description that is
printed in blue.
6. Once you have done so, you will be presented
with a list of options, the first of which is ‘View
online’. Underneath you will see a red box with
‘Go’.
7. Click on this.
8. Once you have done this you will find yourself
either on the appropriate page of the Crace
Maps website or looking at a jpeg image of the
map which you want but which is not included
on the Crace Maps website.
9. You will then, finally, be able to view the image.
If you are viewing a map which is not on the
Crace website, you will be able to see what the map
looks like but will have difficulty, if the map is
large, in viewing all the inscriptions and the detail.
The map has, in fact, been scanned to a high
resolution, but these high definition images will
only go on-line, once the BL’s website has been
completely redesigned. If you want a high
resolution image, the BL will be happy to supply
you with one on a CD at a relatively low cost
(currently £10).
We apologise for that, but beg for a little patience.
Once the problems associated with making the BL’s
vast holdings of digital imagery available have been
overcome, the world at large will be able to enjoy
the whole of the BL’s fantastic holdings of Crace
maps online – thanks to the LTS.
– Peter Barber
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The Kerbstone Conundrum
Sarah Day, from the Geological Society, invites your
observations
Last year, an article published in Geoscientist
Magazine
(www.geolsoc.org.uk/Geoscientist/
Archive/June-2013/Kerbstone-conundrum) drew
attention to the mysterious markings which can be
seen on Victorian kerbstones up and down the
country. You’ve probably seen them many times,
but perhaps haven’t considered their meaning or
origin.
There
are
numerous
theories,
but
no
comprehensive
explanation
for
what
these
markings mean, or why they were etched into the
rocks – mostly granites and sandstones – used as
kerbstones. Theories range from the practical – the
markings indicate the presence of utilities like gas
pipes, hydrants and electricity couplings – to the
more outlandish suggestion that they are coded
indications of the presence of Masonic Lodges.
Perhaps they indicate the quarry or craftsman
behind the stones – but if so, why are similar
markings seen in varying locations, and on
different rock types? And if they mark out utilities,
why are there large stretches of kerbstones in
London without any, in a city which, when the
stones were laid, would have enjoyed all the mod
cons?
As part of Earth Science Week 2013, we asked
readers to send in pictures of kerbstone markings,
in an attempt to find out more about them. We
received submissions from across the country – you
can see some of them on our Flickr account
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/99330142@N05/
sets/72157635581521476/).
The marks vary widely in type and quality – from
meticulously chiselled Maltese crosses and letters
with serifs, to poorly shaped symbols and letters.
We found symbols and numbers in Plymouth, faint
crosses in Canterbury and sequences of letters in
Bloomsbury. We even received images of kerbstone
markings in Pompeii.
Peter
Dolan,
the
author
of
the
original
Geoscientist
article, has been compiling the
submissions and drawing his own conclusions, but
there is still no comprehensive answer to what they
mean. We’d love to receive more images from across
the country – visit www.geolsoc.org.uk/kerbsurvey
to find out how you can submit them.
And if you have any suggestions as to what the
markings mean, we’d love to hear from you – email
sarah.day@geolsoc.org.uk with your suggestions.
Earth Science Week 2014 is taking place on 13 –
19 October, with a theme of ‘Our Geo-Heritage’. To
find
out
more
about
taking
part,
visit
www.geolsoc.org.uk/Earthscienceweek
– Sarah Day
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Stockbridge Terrace RIP:
demolition and change in Victoria
and Westminster, 1959-2013
Oliver Bradbury explores the history of the rapidly
changing area close to Victoria Station
The recent demolition of a sizeable portion of
prime real estate in the form of two blocks at the
bottom of Victoria Street prompted this writer to
research the history of the older block, amongst the
oldest surviving development in Victoria. This scale
of demolition in central London is perhaps an
unusual sight these days but alas is part of the
ongoing
incremental
demolition
of
historic
Westminster.
Beneath all the chopping and changing was the
remains of a Regency domestic terrace on Victoria
Street; the only trace now remaining is the gutted
The Duke of York pub. This locality was once
Pimlico, before Victoria was christened. There was
nothing here in the eighteenth century, just fields,
but there was a rough plot outline by 1815. The
site to the immediate north – Brewer Street (now or
what was Allington Street) and Warwick Row – was
developed earlier, by 1813, probably because of the
proximity to Buckingham Palace. The southern
block was fully built around the perimeter by 1827.
The Duke of York public house was part of
Stockbridge Terrace, which originally marked the
bottom end of Vauxhall Bridge Road before Victoria
Street was cut through in 1847-51. It was also the
southern and western perimeter of the block that
has recently been demolished at the bottom of
Victoria Street. This block was bound by Victoria
Street to the south, Allington Street to the north
and east and Buckingham Palace Road to the west.
Allington Street formed a dog leg connecting
Buckingham Palace Road to Victoria Street [Fig. 1].
Stockbridge Terrace was on the Victoria Street
side of the block and was probably built in 1816. In
1825, when Thomas Cubitt, the developer of the
block, applied for some ground in and behind
Stockbridge Terrace, it was part of Vauxhall Bridge
Road. The terrace was certainly built by 1821 for it
is clear from Greenwood’s Map of London that
page 6
Stockbridge Terrace continued, interrupted by
Allington Street going north, beyond our block in
an easterly direction incorporating The Duke of
York pub, which dates from 1821, with later stucco
dressings. With the proximity to Belgravia, it
appears that Cubitt was developing Grosvenor
Estate land for Stockbridge Terrace and the rest of
the block. Is it coincidental that the 1st Marquess
of Westminster acquired the Stockbridge Estate in
Hampshire in 1831? The Victoria Palace Theatre
marks the easterly end of Stockbridge Terrace and
the former No. 124 Victoria Street marked the
cutting through of Victoria Street and was the
westernmost pavilion of Philip B. Lee’s Albert
Mansions of 1867-69, a composition 500 feet long.
The level of recent destruction – two blocks
worth – is vandalism on a heroic scale, reflecting a
complete loss of nerve on the part of Westminster
Council. The current temporary open sightlines
reveal Victoria to be the architectural dog’s dinner
it is; a complete mess of architectural styles or non-
styles, all the coherence of the Regency and
Victorian town planning destroyed by twentieth-
century avarice. The loss of the Stockbridge Terrace
block is another nail in the coffin of what was once
a very grand and proud thoroughfare lined with
magnificent Victorian buildings. The only survivals
now are Nos 77-95 Victoria Street, the red brick
block of 1885, and Artillery Mansions, No. 75
Victoria Street.
In the 1820s and 1830s there were two pubs in
Stockbridge Terrace, The Duke of York and The
Kings Arms, as well as private residences and every
business you would ever need: a builder, stationer,
cheesemonger,
grocer
and
tallow
chandler,
poulterer and baker, piano forte maker and organ
builder, butcher, print seller, a milliner and
dressmaker; the insurance records go back to
1824. Although the Stockbridge Terrace block was
fully built around the perimeter by 1827, the first
edition OS map of 1867 indicates that there had
been a gradual process of infilling of the interior
into a dense matrix of interlocking properties. Until
at least 1920 the 1820s character of Stockbridge
Terrace was well preserved, that is a domestic
terrace of four storey, two bay-wide stucco-fronted
town houses. Around the corner, Nos 81-85
Buckingham Palace Road [Fig. 2] was given the
upwardly mobile Belgravia treatment and appears
to have been updated in the 1840s, perhaps to
make respectable opposite neighbours for the
charming Victoria Square speculation by Matthew
Wyatt built in 1838-1842.
The block to the north of Stockbridge Terrace was
redeveloped early on with the splendidly High
Victorian Gorringe’s Stores on the site of Cubitt
houses, c.1879. This building in Warwick Row and
on Buckingham Palace Road was demolished in
1961-63 and replaced with a building that no one
will miss, Lakeview Court (old Thistle Hotel). Cubitt
housing in Warwick Row itself was demolished in
1959 and although replaced with the ghastly
Carrier House (designed in 1960 by The City of
London Real Property Company Ltd [CLRP
Architects], and built in 1961), the actual street –
itself of considerable age – survived the complete
redevelopment of the immediate area.
The 1820s appearance of Stockbridge Terrace and
the rest of the block was degraded from the 1930s
onwards when parts of the block were completely
rebuilt, or at least refronted, but this cumulative
redevelopment actually gave the block great
character, albeit in a haphazard way. Sutton
House, Nos 156-58 Victoria Street, was a 1930s
interloper and Listed as recently as 2009; its 2013
demolition making a complete mockery of our
valuable national Listing system [Fig. 3]. This was a
decent Art Deco building of 1935 with beautiful
page 7
Fig. 1 Greenwood’s Map of London, second edition (1830), with
Stockbridge Terrace bottom right. (© Motco Enterprises Limited)
Fig. 2 Nos 81-85 Buckingham Palace Road, photographed in 2012
before demolition in 2013. © Oliver Bradbury
original interior fittings. The planned re-use of the
Sutton House façade within a much taller, glassy
monolith on the approximate site would be absurd.
Equally if not more deplorable is the demolition of
the splendid 1926 Classical Midland (latterly
HSBC) Bank by Whinney, Son and Austen Hall on
the corner of Victoria Street and Buckingham
Palace Road [Fig. 4]. The building on the adjacent
site was an empty plot in 1951 – perhaps because
of war damage – and therefore the undemonstrative
edifice here that was recently demolished was a
1950s infill. This block continued to be spliced up
with later development including the crudely
Postmodern Allington Towers of 1985-86 on the site
of the auditoria for a cinema of 1928-1930 by
George Coles. This was the Metropole Cinema
(latterly the Ask restaurant), an elegant Neo-
Georgian/Art Deco building that had its foyer block
on Victoria Street at Nos 160-162, next to Sutton
House; it was marble-faced, with a glazed barrel-
vaulted former tearoom behind the upper window,
although painting had superficially spoiled its
pilastered front [Fig. 5]. There was also another
cinema (‘Cameo’), a mere three doors away, using
the very narrow frontage of a rebuilt Stockbridge
Terrace Regency townhouse, leading to a free-
standing auditiorium within the Stockbridge
Terrace block. Art Deco in style, it opened in 1936
and closed in 1980. Allington Towers was then
built on the combined site of both cinemas.
The Stockbridge Terrace block was a classic inner
London block with two named yards deep within,
Watling’s Yard and Allington Place (1906-19 OS
map). Although always heavily populated by
businesses, any vestige of domestic occupation was
probably lost when commercial Victoria Street was
cut through. The Stockbridge Terrace name had gone
by the time of the 1906-1919 map, if not long before.
Amazingly, there are still pockets of 1820s houses
on Vauxhall Bridge Road that allow us to gain an
impression of what the original Stockbridge Terrace
looked like. Trellick Terrace and Pembroke Place, both
by Cubitt, dated from c.1822-1827 [Fig. 6]. The rump
of Pembroke Place remains, as does Belvoir Terrace,
but the names have gone, as have those of Bedford
Place, Howick Terrace and Gloucester Terrace.
The Duke of York pub is all that remains of
Stockbridge Terrace. Although it has been
mercifully spared from the recent scorched earth
policy, even here the interior has been gutted. At
the bottom of Victoria Street decent shops have
been demolished just for replacement shops. The
former bank on the corner could have been
retained as a visual anchor for the new
page 8
Fig. 3 Sutton House (with roofline flagpole), Nos. 156-58 Victoria
Street, was a 1930s interloper and Listed as recently as 2009. Here
photographed in 2012 before demolition in 2013
Fig 4. Midland Bank (latterly HSBC), 1926, on the corner of Victoria
Street and Buckingham Palace Road, photographed in 2012
before demolition in 2013
Fig. 5 The rump of Regency Stockbridge Terrace, Victoria Street,
still survived until 2013, despite much twentieth-century
rebuilding. The former Metropole Cinema is on the right. Here
photographed in 2012 before demolition in 2013
development – but the developers, Land Securities,
are not interested in continuity, nor can they be
concerned about environmental impact, as they
have demolished a decent building on the corner of
the Stockbridge Terrace block, Allington House,
atrium offices which were only sixteen years old.
This building had replaced Nos 136-50 Victoria
Street (Allington and Ebury Houses), a late classical
commercial block built by J. Stanley Beard in
1925-6 and 1929-30 (records in Westminster City
Archives). As a token memory of the locality’s
brewing past, at least we have the façade retention
of the Duke of York. Chin up, that’s something
worth drinking to!
– Oliver Bradbury
Research for this article was undertaken at
Westminster City Archives from maps and limited
historic photographs. For understanding the nature
of the businesses in Stockbridge Terrace during the
1820s, insurance records going back to 1824 can
be consulted online with the Records of Sun Fire
Office, held at London Metropolitan Archives. On
the cinemas (with thanks to Simon Sheridan): Allen
Eyles and Keith Skone, London’s West End
Cinemas (Keytone Publications 1991).
Oliver Bradbury is an independent researcher,
involved with The Thorney Island Society in trying to
resist loss of historic Westminster. He is author of
The Lost Mansions of Mayfair (2008); his book on
the long-term influence of Sir John Soane will be
published by Ashgate in late 2014.
Recreating London in 1666
LTS Member Ian Doolittle looks at challenges offered
by the wealth of information available on London
before and after the Great Fire
I wonder if readers of the Newsletter have seen
the
prize-winning
video
by
Pudding
Lane
Productions? It is a marvellously evocative ‘fly-
through’ recreation of the London which was
devastated by the Fire in 1666. It is not of course
the first attempt to give us a chance to ‘touch and
feel’ those dramatic days, getting Pepys’ celebrated
account to leap off the pages of his Diary. Visitors
to the Museum of London – or its website – have
long been treated to imaginative ‘experiences’ of
this kind. Nevertheless the video spurred me to
articulate a long-held belief that the historical
records produced by the dramatic events of 1666
provide a wonderful opportunity to create a
topographical platform for the study of London not
just in that year but for decades before and after
the Fire.
A comprehensive, reliable reconstruction of
London in 1666 would help answer a number of
important questions. First there are the dynamics
of change. What actually happened after the Fire?
How many people were displaced, where from and
for how long? How were their properties and their
neighbourhoods affected? What difference did the
street widening and public building work make?
And, over the longer term, was the Fire the catalyst
for the transformation of the Square Mile from a
cheek-by-jowl living-and-trading community to a
commercial-and-business ’space’ – or was that a
much later phenomenon? Then there are the
important details of occupation and ownership.
Who lived where – was this determined by trade or
location? Who owned what – whether as freeholder
or long leaseholder, as ‘institution’ or individual?
Who were the ‘mere’ occupiers and who comprised
their households? If we can get documented
answers to these questions we would have a solid
basis for pursuing a wide range of historical
enquiries – some serious academic ones but also
many not-so-grand ones, which will interest
individual researchers and readers.
The available records are rich indeed. At their
core are those generated by the Fire itself. The LTS
itself published some of the key documents at the
time of the Fire’s tercentenary. There are facsimiles
of the building site surveys carried out by Peter
Mills and John Oliver. (Sadly, Robert Hooke’s
surveys are lost.) The LTS also printed a list of
‘foundations’, i.e. permissions to rebuild. The City
Corporation printed two calendars of the decrees
issued by the so-called Fire Court, established to
settle disputes between landlords and tenants.
(There are some 1600 decrees in all and I am at
work calendaring the remainder.) Then there are
the maps, not the grand and abortive plans for
redesigning the City (nor even Wenceslaus Hollar’s
beautiful efforts) but rather John Ogilby and
William Morgan’s astonishingly detailed and
page 9
Fig. 6 The rump of Pembroke Place, Vauxhall Bridge Road, dating
from c.1822 to 1827, photographed in 2013. © Oliver Bradbury
The deadline for contributions
to the next Newsletter is
16 October 2014.
Suggestions of books for review
should be sent to the Newsletter Editor;
contact details are on the back page.
surprisingly reliable map of 1676, printed as The A
to Z of Restoration London (not to mention the LTS’s
recent edition of Morgan’s 1682 map). All this
might be enough on its own but the Fire occurred
in the middle of the series of Hearth Tax returns.
Data for London and Middlesex is already available
through ‘British History On-line’ but a critical
edition is about to be published by the Centre for
Hearth Tax Research. Further, supplementary
sources abound. The London Metropolitan Archives
has ward and parish listings aplenty and through
the internet-based ‘ROLLCO’ (londonroll.org.) there
is now ready (and expanding) access to details of
apprentices and others who appear in the Livery
Companies’ archives. Mention should also be made
of the long series of detailed orphans’ inventories
(recording room-by-room possessions). The list
could go on.
Drawing this material together in a reliable,
consistent way would require careful planning and
co-ordination. Fortunately, there is plenty of
experience and expertise out there. The Centre for
Metropolitan History has run many substantial
projects and through its current Director, Matthew
Davies, and in collaboration with Sheffield and
Hertfordshire Universities, has developed ways of
generating inter-active maps of London in an
initiative
called
‘Locating
London’s
Past’
(locatinglondon.org). (CMH and partners have
exciting plans to apply similar techniques over
longer timescales to reveal ‘London’s layers’.) Many
other well-known London historians and their
institutions are helping to make sources accessible
to all who may be interested. Vanessa Harding
(Birkbeck) wrote a helpful piece in History Today
recently. There is also some good work already
under way, notably Jacob Field’s subtle use of the
Hearth Tax data to show how Londoners
experienced and responded to the Fire.
The post-Fire surveys offer only partial coverage.
Quite apart from the small matter of Hooke’s
missing surveys, many landowners resolved their
disputes without recourse to the City Surveyors –
and of course the Fire did not touch – and certainly
did not destroy – all of the Square Mile. In other
words, there are plenty of missing or ‘un-placeable’
pieces of the jigsaw. In coordinating information, an
iterative, parallel approach would be vital, building
a honey-comb structure from the surveys where
possible and using the other data where not – and
all the while testing the results against whatever
evidence comes to hand.
If any readers think this a worthwhile endeavour I
should be very pleased to hear from members by
email to idoolittlehistory@hotmail.com (the joke is
intentional!).
– Ian Doolittle
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
Circumspice (see p.3)
If you enter Bushey Park in the London Borough of
Richmond from the north-west, and strike out
boldly across the grass towards the Waterhouse
and Pheasantry plantations, you may soon find
yourself in soggy ground, or having to negotiate
ditches and other watercourses. You may also miss
one of the park’s hidden treasures: the water
gardens laid out by Charles Montagu, Earl of
Halifax, in the second decade of the eighteenth
century.
They consist of an octagonal upper basin spilling
over a fine, wide cascade of five steps into a smaller
but more exquisitely shaped lower basin. Halifax
was Ranger of Bushey Park and set about
rebuilding his official residence, the Upper Lodge,
and its grounds. In 1719 he wrote to his uncle
John Montagu asking for details of an ornamental
basin
at
his
home,
Boughton
House
in
Northamptonshire, whose unusual three-lobed
shape Halifax had it in mind to copy at Bushey. To
supply his upper basin with water, he tapped into
the existing Longford River, a 12-mile-long artificial
waterway built for Charles I in 1638–39 as a water
supply for Hampton Court.
After serving the water garden the Longford River
heads south across the park to feed the line of
wildlife-friendly plantations already mentioned,
then goes on to supply a series of ornamental
ponds to the east of the main Chestnut Avenue,
and the avenue’s unmissable vista stopper, the
Diana or Arethusa Fountain. Halifax’s water garden
is, by contrast, easy to miss. Immaculately restored
in 2009 after years of neglect, it is hidden away
behind the Upper Lodge and its associated
buildings, and guarded by formidable-looking gates
to keep not you but the park’s deer out. It is open
to the public – a tranquil place to sit in the sun and
see and hear the Longford River’s water gently
splashing over its cascade.
– Tony Aldous
page 10
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Reviews
Lundenwic. Excavations in Middle Saxon
London, 1987-2000 (MOLA Monograph 63). By
Robert Cowie and Lyn Blackmore, with Anne Davis,
Jackie Keily and Kevin Rielly. London, 2012,
ISBN 978 1 90758 614 9. HB 361pp + CD-ROM.
187 ills, £34.
Lundenwic, literally the vicus of London, is the
Anglo-Saxon name for what Bede, writing in the
early eighth century, described as ‘an emporium for
many nations who come to it by land and sea’. The
name is first recorded in 673-85, in a Kentish law-
code, but in its Latin version appears on Anglo-
Saxon gold coins of the 630s and in a royal charter
dating to c.672/4, which refers to the ‘port’ of
London. For years, this great Middle Saxon
emporium was assumed to have been located
within the old Roman walled city, despite the
dearth of archaeological evidence. However,
following Biddle and Vince’s hypothesis proposed in
1984, its location within the Strand area was
confirmed beyond doubt in the following year, when
extensive evidence for Middle Saxon occupation
was found on the site of Covent Garden’s Jubilee
Hall.
Further
excavations
followed,
most
spectacularly at the large Royal Opera House site,
where Anglo-Saxon levels survived remarkably well,
and on a large scale.
This splendidly illustrated monograph, published
by Museum of London Archaeology, provides a
fascinating new guide to this major port, its
beginnings, and its decline. Based on eighteen
separate investigations carried out between 1987
and 2000 within the area to the north of the
Strand, it greatly extends the picture given in the
2003 publication of the Royal Opera House site
with a wealth of detail, including an invaluable
gazetteer of all sites producing evidence of Early-
Middle Anglo-Saxon activity within central London.
The important 2005-6 excavations under the
portico of St Martin-in-the-Fields, and other sites
not yet published, have also been assessed in the
discussions here. All fieldwork took place in
advance of development, on sites of all sizes, and
sometimes in extremely difficult conditions. The
resultant piecing together of Lundenwic’s story
from many complex and truncated fragments –
rubbish pits, wells, latrines, burials and elements
of structures – is a heroic achievement, which
transforms our understanding of the Anglo-Saxon
town.
A
series
of
elegant
maps
plotting
the
archaeological evidence give shape to the Anglo-
Saxon wic. It had three zones; south of the Strand,
where a Roman road remained in use, the land
sloped steeply down to an embanked waterfront,
dated by dendro-chronology to AD 679; the Middle
Saxon shoreline ran across Charing Cross station.
A core zone of dense activity lay to the north in
current Covent Garden; while at its fringes, the
settlement fades into gravel quarries, horticulture
and husbandry. To the north, it petered out in
boggy ground south of the Roman road running
along High Holborn/New Oxford Street. Its western
limit was in Trafalgar Square, and confined
upstream by marshy land; on the east side, the
limit may extend to the Fleet valley, though this is
less certain. Covering an area from Trafalgar
Square to Aldwych (at least) and from the Middle
Saxon waterfront to Shorts Gardens in the north,
this was a substantial area; smaller than Roman
London, but significantly larger than the other
Anglo-Saxon
emporia
at
York,
Hamwic
(Southampton) and Ipswich.
Why the trading centre was located here, rather
than in the walled Roman town, remains unclear;
abandoned in the early fifth century, Roman
London remained unoccupied until the foundation
of St Paul’s in 604; Anglo-Saxon activity in the
walled city appears slight in this period, and was
probably confined to ecclesiastical and royal
functions, until systematic reoccupation took place
towards the end of the ninth century. Lundenwic
probably began as a seasonal beach market along
the waterfront; though evidence of fifth- to seventh-
century activity is found in central London, there
are no signs of organised settlement there until the
later seventh century. Radio-carbon dates reveal
that at that point things took off rapidly across the
area. A cemetery in Covent Garden – including
richly
furnished
burials
–
was
built
over
immediately after its abandonment in the last third
of the seventh century. Temporary structures such
as tents and fences were superseded by signs of
more structured layout, especially at the Royal
Opera House site, where a regular and well-
maintained street system suggest a degree of
planning. The speed and organisation of this
development has suggested that it was set up
under a central, presumably royal, authority, to
facilitate the levying of tolls on trade and
transactions on commodities entering the port. A
date in the 670s fits with the early documentary
evidence, and suggests that it was in the reign of
the Mercian king Wulfhere (658-75), whose
successors continued to control London throughout
the eighth century. Regional and foreign trade are
well-represented in the evidence; imports such as
pottery and quernstones suggest that this trade
was largely with the Low Countries, northern
France, and the Rhineland, though the occasional
presence of dried figs and grapes may indicate more
far-flung contacts. Craft activities, such as iron-
working
and
textile
production,
are
well-
represented, and animal bones provide a rich
source of evidence for husbandry and butchering,
as well as diet.
Between the late seventh and the early-mid ninth
century, Lundenwic belonged to an international
network of similar trading centres; though shifting
patterns of activity are evident over this period, its
heyday lasted up to the middle of the eighth
century. At its height it occupied an area of around
page 11
60 hectares, with a population estimated at 6,000.
Thereafter, it shrank in size and gradually declined
until the focus of the Anglo-Saxon town shifted
back to the defensible walled city, under King
Alfred. The authors suggest that this was probably
due to several separate factors – the threat of
Viking attacks, certainly, but also a series of fires
in Lundenwic itself, and unrest both in England
and in the Carolingian kingdoms.
No doubt future fieldwork will shed more light on
this and many other tantalising questions
concerning the development of Anglo-Saxon
London; but this book will remain a landmark in
our understanding of the history and topography of
the Anglo-Saxon town. The authors are to be
congratulated on a fascinating synthesis of the rich
archaeological data, which provides a very
readable, and richly detailed account of Lundenwic,
as we can now at last begin to see it.
– Leslie Webster
The City and the King: Architecture and Politics
in Restoration London by Christine Stevenson,
Yale University Press, 2013. 304 pages, 23 colour
images + 115 b&w ills. ISBN: 978 0 30019 022 9,
£45.
In 1674 the City poet Thomas Jordan invoked the
national benefits of a harmonious capital:
‘If City and Court together Consort
This Nation cannot be undon[e]
Then let the Hall ring, with God prosper the King
And bless the Lord Mayor of London’
This vision was far from the brutal realities of late
unhappy times. Yet Jordan’s words were delivered
at a celebration during which Charles II became the
first king ever to accept the freedom of the City of
London,
acknowledging
not
only
their
interdependence, but also some small measure of
submission on his part. The City and the King
examines the role that architecture played in the
construction
and
re-construction
of
the
relationship between City and King during the
Restoration, and explores the political, financial
and rhetorical dimensions of buildings that made
them powerful conveyors of meaning.
Stevenson’s focus is how the relationship between
London and Charles II was negotiated through
architectural form and civic space. Specifically she
is interested in ‘the ways that alongside other
objects... buildings were made to serve as political
instruments, in part by being construed as displays
of authority, homage or wealth’. Charles II’s post-
Fire rebuilding of the Custom House, for example,
is interpreted as a gift to the City, albeit one that
also ensured the Crown’s revenue, and New
Bethlem Hospital is characterised as ‘a claim for
civic sanity’ not least because the events of the
1640s and 1650s were repeatedly explained by
contemporaries as the consequence of political and
religious madness.
Equally importantly, Stevenson is concerned with
the philosophical question of how architecture and
space can be given and can generate meaning. She
also admits, however, that there are limits to the
power of interpretation in establishing either what
architects intended or what viewers perceived,
referring to ‘architecture’s sheer incalculability in this
context of retrospection and reading’. Her approach is
empirical and theoretical with equal rigour.
Stevenson works from the assumption that how
architecture was experienced and understood at
the time is fundamental to our comprehension of it
as an historical expression and agent. This is
therefore a book about architectural embodiment –
what architecture embodies and how bodies
(individual or corporate) experience architecture. To
establish this, she draws on a range of evidence
‘wide enough to match architecture’s resonance for
my protagonists’, employing not only the buildings,
their design and materials, their architects and
patrons, but also pageant books, the popular press
of broadsheets and ballads, songs and satires,
building encomia, prints and paintings.
As one would imagine and hope, central subjects
of this study are the City Gates, London Wall and
the triumphal arches erected for royal entries. As
well as fresh discussion of these and other familiar
sites, readers will value new research on the
architectural patronage of the City’s Lord Mayors
and guilds. The book is structured much like one of
the processions it analyses; entering through the
temporary erections in honour of Charles II,
Stevenson guides the reader past the City Gates to
the rebuilt Guildhall and the Royal Exchange, then
to New Bethlem Hospital, St Paul’s, the Monument
and the parish churches, before offering a bird’s-
eye view over the whole city. At the same time as
creating this topographical framework, Stevenson
has succeeded in giving her analysis both a
thematic and a chronological structure, discussing
different types of building and patronage while
proceeding through the decades of the mid-century.
En route, one also encounters more intangible
questions, for instance, how architecture, so often
associated with durability and therefore memory,
negotiated the relationship between past and
present at a time when the intention of the Act of
Oblivion in 1660 was to erase the past twenty-three
years. The introduction of Classicism and the
persistence of Gothic are undercurrents, and there
are insights into the relationship between meaning
and style, in which values that surpass stylistic
categories
often
emerge
as
more
relevant:
magnificence, nobility and conformity.
It must be admitted that certain passages are not
a
light
read.
Like
her
subjects
and
her
interpretation, Stevenson’s prose style is subtle,
nuanced and allusive, sometimes even elusive. But,
like the procession of the book’s structure, which
the strong authorial voice sustains, the analysis
gathers momentum and compels the reader
forward. The journey is enhanced by the elegant
design and judicious illustration that one expects
as standard from Yale University Press but should
not for that reason pass unmentioned.
page 12
Meanings, as Stevenson makes so manifest, are
always mutable – as early as 1680, for example, the
splendour of rebuilt London, generally so praised,
could be used as an admonition against moral
laxity in a City congregation. It is no surprise,
therefore, that the book draws to a close with
clouds of change gathering over London’s skyline:
in 1683, Charles II brought quo warranto
proceedings against the City and confiscated its
charter, thereby reducing the City’s legal status to
that of a country village. And thus it remained until
1688, by which point it was time for another King;
and another entry.
– Olivia Horsfall-Turner
Landscapes of London: The City, The Country
and The Suburbs 1660-1840 by Elizabeth
McKellar. Yale University Press, 2013. 260pp,
195 ills. ISBN 978 0 30010 913 9. £45.00.
This
is
an
erudite,
enlightening
and
entertaining book. And
as we have come to
expect from Yale it is a
handsome one. Its topic
is
that
eternal
conundrum, where does
London end and the
country begin? Since
the formation of the
Metropolitan
Police
District in 1829 there
has been at least some administrative recognition
of a Greater London but the limits created in law in
1965 (when the GLC came into existence) and in
concrete by the M25 have a much older existence
in the minds of both residents and visitors. The
book is subtitled ‘the city, the country and the
suburbs’; there is relatively little about the city,
more about the country and most about the
suburbs. It is rich in visual imagery and
contemporary quotation, many of the sources
unfamiliar, apposite and thought-provoking.
The book is structured by topic rather than by
place. After a short preface – ‘Beyond the Fringe’ –
putting the study into a mixed academic genre of
architecture, urbanism and cultural history, and a
longer introduction outlining the development of
London in concentric rings, absorbing places which
had long histories less connected with the centre,
the book has two parts. The first –
‘Paper
Landscapes’ –
devotes three chapters to a
discussion of how the expanding metropolis was
being perceived in maps, in literature and in
pictures. This has invaluable information on the
exploitation and marketing of those items now
much loved by TopSoc members and I suspect that
many of us will wish to see the Society add
reproductions of some of the illustrations as items
for our publications list. The second – ‘Inhabited
Landscapes’ – takes four topics illustrated by
selected places which exhibit those characteristics
which McKellar identifies as defining the expanding
metropolis. These are landscapes of pleasure
(recreational suburbia, exemplified in Islington,
Hampstead and Marylebone), landscapes of mobility
(early commuting, exemplified by Highgate),
landscapes of selectivity (the increased number of
architects’ designs for suburban retreats, ending
with the gentrification of cottages), and landscapes
of transition (exemplified in literature by Lysons’
Environs of 1800 and its Supplement of 1811, and
topographically especially in Regent’s Park).
I’m never sure about using ‘transitions’ as
defining characteristics. Most historians spend
their time identifying and explaining change
(‘Without change there is no history’ as English
Heritage at one time put it). But McKellar is right to
identify Regent's Park not just as the place where
urban architecture and green landscape were
combined in a single composition of outstanding
beauty, but also as the place where metropolitan
man tried to get the best of both worlds. In many
ways what was most significant at Regent’s Park
was the incorporation of the Park Villages, a
specific reference to that city/country contrast
which has been in the English psychological make-
up for at least four centuries and which leads many
city dwellers to have a romantic view of the
countryside, debunked but not destroyed in George
Mingay’s Rural Idyll
in 1989. The Pinner
Association has published The Villager almost since
it was founded in 1932, perhaps in defence of their
local heritage as Metroland encroached, and we
have long got used to the idea of Blackheath or
Highgate ‘Villages’ though both are to some extent
artificial creations, straddling parish boundaries.
But is Chelsea Village quite the right term to
describe a property development based round a
now Russian-owned football club?
This book is a major contribution to our
knowledge of how London has become what
McKellar
concludes
is
'the
first
suburban
metropolis' (a nice phrase) and (less happily) 'a
modern-style multivalent spatially discontinuous
conurbation'. Perhaps those two terms will satisfy
both those more casual readers, who will browse
this book for the visual pleasure of its illustrations
or use its index to see what McKellar says about
their particular bit of London, and those more
academic readers, who will devour this well
documented discussion of the growth of London
both on the ground and in the landscape of our
consciousness of what it is to be a Londoner. A large
format book, not easily read in bed, but a most
welcome and valuable addition to the bookshelf.
– Frank Kelsall
Samuel Hieronymus Grimm (1733-1794): A Very
English Swiss by William Hauptman. Bern: Kunst
Museum, 2014/ Milan: 5 Continents 2014. 224pp.,
159 illus. ISBN 978 8 87439 662 7 Exhibition
catalogue.
Last year the London artist George Scharf was
celebrated with an exhibition in his native Bavaria
page 13
(LTS Newsletter, Nov. 2013, pp.15-16). From
January to April this year it was the turn of the
Swiss artist, Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, to be
celebrated with an exhibition at the Kunst
Museum, Bern, in his native Switzerland. Both of
these artists, much appreciated nowadays in
Britain, till this point had been woefully neglected
in their own countries.
S. H. Grimm was born in Burgdorf in the canton
of Bern. He was a pupil of the painter Johann L.
Aberli in the 1750s. In 1765 he moved to Paris and
in 1768 he moved on from Paris to London, taking
lodgings
in
Covent
Garden
with
a
minor
printmaker, Mrs Susanna Sledge, at 1 Henrietta
Street. Within months he was exhibiting at the
Society of Artists and the Royal Academy. He
produced satirical prints, one of the Middlesex
Election for example, and another showing posh
people in Hyde Park skating on the ice. Two
satirical images, showing monstrous hair-styles of
the moment, were published by Grimm’s landlady.
He also produced a long series of drawings to
illustrate Shakespeare’s plays. Prints after them
were surely intended but never appeared. Towards
the end of his life the Society of Antiquaries
commissioned him to make copies of its Tudor
paintings. These included ‘The Wedding Feast at
Bermondsey’
by
Joris
Hoefnagel
and
‘The
Coronation Procession of Edward VI’.
Grimm’s principal preoccupation, however, was
to
make
pen
and
wash
and
occasionally
watercolour drawings of ‘every thing curious’ as his
clerical patron, Sir Richard Kaye, put it – towers,
houses, churches, ruined castles, gateways, houses
of correction, cascades and wells. The very
extensive series of drawings he made for Sir
William Burrell to illustrate his intended history of
Sussex are held in the Manuscript Department of
the British Library. Over one thousand drawings
were made on excursions through over half the
counties of England in the company of Kaye, and
hundreds more were made in connection with
Henry Penruddocke Wyndham’s A Gentleman’s
Tour through Monmouthshire and Wales. Where
London is concerned the LMA have several pen and
wash drawings that he made of St Marylebone, and
Camden Local History Collection have several of
Kentish Town, Camden Town and St Pancras. In
1780 Grimm recorded the military encampment set
up outside Montagu House following the Gordon
Riots. Grimm’s most finished images, however, are
those of ‘The Distribution of His Majesty’s Maundy’
in 1773, which were engraved in 1777 by the
Society of Antiquaries’ engraver, James Basire.
Grimm’s very fine drawings for them are in the
British Library’s King’s Topographical Collection.
Grimm died of ‘a mortification of the bowels’ on
14 April 1794. He was interred at St Paul’s Covent
Garden. Kaye conducted the service. One strongly
suspects he made far more London drawings than
we know about. Let us hope one day they will come
to light. Meanwhile do read this excellent catalogue.
– Ralph Hyde
New City, Contemporary Architecture in the
City of London by Alec Forsaw, Merrell, 224pp,
numerous col. ills. ISBN 978 1 85894 598 9. £19.95.
This is the book to guide you around the diverse
buildings which have appeared in the City of
London since 1986 (following the Big Bang). They
are considered area by area in twelve chapters,
usefully accompanied by plans which highlight how
the maintenance of the City’s quirky ancient street
pattern has often dictated irregular building
footprints.
The
well-informed
critical
text,
refreshingly free of jargon, by the former chief
Conservation Officer of Islington, discusses
planning issues, different styles and the variety of
building materials. Numerous excellent photos
bring out contrasting shapes and surfaces, and
show the buildings mostly as the pedestrian sees
them, that is obliquely from the street, rather than
as architects’ visions seen by pigeons in mid-air.
References to public art and open spaces reinforce
the message that the view from the street matters.
The introduction includes a revealing account of
the role of the City Corporation in encouraging the
growth of London as a world financial centre, but
notes that since 2007 employment in the City has
fallen. So can the historic City retain its prime
position? (See p.3 London’s Growing Up
for
alternatives.) A most useful reference book for the
last twenty-five years, which have seen the
replacement of almost all the buildings put up in
the preceding quarter century. How long will the
new ones last?
– Bridget Cherry
Survey of London, volume 49: Battersea Part 1:
Public, Commercial and Cultural. Edited by
Andrew Saint. 480 pages, 468 illustrations;
indexed.
Survey of London, volume 50: Battersea Part 2:
Houses and Housing. Edited by Colin Thom. 500
pages, 445 illustrations; indexed.
Yale University Press for Paul Mellon Centre for
Studies in British Art. Two volume set.
ISBN 978 0 30019 813 3. £135 (or £75 each).
When one thinks of the huge upsurge in Britain’s
population in the ninteenth century, associated
with the industrial revolution, it is of the great
northern and midland manufacturing cities we
page 14
tend to think first. But that is to overlook London’s
centuries-old role as the powerhouse of the British
economy, then as now. The Survey of London’s two
volumes on Battersea, however, bring home to us
how considerable that role has been. A parish of
2,164 acres, larger than any surveyed for years
past, the diversity, and since the 1840s intensity
and ever-changing forms, of its development have
presented the Survey’s team with serious problems
of presentation, tackled under the masterly
editorships of Andrew Saint and Colin Thom in
their characteristic innovative spirit. We have two
volumes
thematic
rather
than
customarily
topographic in character, even if Volume 2, devoted
to Housing, can follow the more familiar model. The
inconvenience is, that to follow through the history
of a particular area, one has to turn from one
volume to the other.
It is Volume 1 that presents the greater challenge
in grasping the nature of Battersea. Just up river
from Vauxhall, it was ideally placed to provide
London with a range of essential services not
desirably located in fashionable quarters, and also
free of regulations imposed by more active north
bank local authorities. Further inland, bisecting
both Clapham and Wandsworth Commons, by the
eighteenth century it was sufficiently close to the
City in terms of travelling time, yet sufficiently rural
to be a desirable suburb for wealthy merchants. So
already we can see emerging the character of the
two volumes.
The manor, long the property of the St Johns,
later ennobled as Bolingbrokes, was sold in 1763 to
the Spencers. Much of the land was held in strips,
so that after an 1827 enclosure bill failed, Lord
Spencer sold much of his holding piecemeal, as
developers saw opportunities facilitated by the
construction of Thames bridges: Chelsea, 1858,
Albert, 1873, and wooden Battersea rebuilt 1885;
and even more by railways. The London & South
Western to Southampton, from Nine Elms (1840)
and then Waterloo, with a branch to Richmond
(1844); a line to link Sydenham’s rebuilt Crystal
Palace with the West End (1855-8); the London,
Brighton and South Coast from London Bridge and
then from Victoria; finally the notoriously corrupt
London, Chatham [Cheat’m] & Dover from
Blackfriars and Victoria (1859-62), so that lines
crossed over each other in an amazing tangle, a
complex tale, recounted in Chapter 7. The nexus of
lines at Clapham Junction is likened to ‘a great
river broadening and breaking up into a delta’.
Furthermore, the LSWR and the LCDR established
here their main railway works (described in detail),
ensuring the future of Battersea as a railway town.
The railways both facilitated the influx of armies of
workers already drawn in by riverine industries and
added to the demand for their labour.
Thus the population increased exponentially,
multiplying twenty-five times in 60 years from
1841 to 1901 – quite as fast as any northern
industrial town. ‘Nowhere was London’s Victorian
growth more dramatic and transformative than in
Battersea.’ A parish involved primarily in
supplying cash crops for London (Battersea
asparagus was renowned for its size) was
converted into an industrial powerhouse, notable
for supplying range of services. Most evident, with
the railway works, was lighting: Price’s candles,
from the 1850s, originally made from coconut;
gas, manufactured from coal supplied to a wharf
with capacity from 1882 for sea-going colliers, and
an automated conveyor that ensured survival of
the works until 1970, with gasholders culminating
in the 295ft high MAN holder with its seven
million cu.ft capacity; and then electricity,
produced in ‘London’s most contentious historic
building’, that requires a chapter to itself.
Battersea Power Station was an essential element
in the new electric national grid designed in the
late 1920s, its enormous appetite for coal met by
river and rail. The analysis of the development of
its design is one of the outstanding features of
Volume 1.
Giles Gilbert Scott was called in at the last
moment to dress up a design determined by
technical considerations (assessed by the engineer
S. L. Pearce) because of his ‘rare ability for handling
massive wall surfaces’, already exhibited by
Liverpool
Cathedral.
His
‘bold
revision’
of
proportions and ornament created a pattern for
power stations. However, the overwhelming Art Deco
interiors of Turbine Hall (475x85ft), its steel gantry-
runner forming an architrave, and the Control
Room with walls lined in grey Italian marble,
decorative trim in black Belgian, its polished teak
parquet floor, a steel and glass ceiling light running
its whole length, were designed by J. Halliday. This
‘great symbol of the electrical age’, obsolete by 1975,
closed in 1983; the sorry story of its subsequent
vicissitudes (yet to be completed) is also recounted;
more than any other, ‘it represents the impotence of
the heritage lobby and planning system when faced
with big business at its most repressive’.
Already by 1700 Battersea’s convenient location
had attracted mills and breweries, sugar-houses
and lime kilns. Subsequently came chemical
manufacturing, cement works, foundries and
sawmills – Marc Brunel setting up steam-powered
mills here in 1806. The Morgan Crucible Company
established huge riverside works to supply an
international market. Waterworks, too, found
ample spaces for ‘depositing’ reservoirs and slow
sand filter beds, until 1903 when a power station
was built on the site. A London Transport bus
garage succeeded a cab depot, stables and grain
store. Flour milling was important from the
eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth. But from
that period the old industrial base of Battersea was
in decline. A new Battersea was beginning to
emerge. The great Covent Garden Market was re-
located at Nine Elms in 1971-4, as recounted in
Chapter
11;
new
commercial
developments
appeared, often to vanish a few decades later. What
was very apparent from the river was new luxury
housing. Battersea was being gentrified.
page 15
While many workers had travelled in on workers’
trains, tens of thousands had sought homes in
Battersea itself. The story of Battersea housing is
told in admirable detail, numerous plans and
illustrations, interiors and exteriors, conveniently
adjoining the text, in Volume 2, edited by that
Master of London Housing, Colin Thom. This is the
aspect of Battersea most accessible to us
physically, though much of the described fabric has
vanished. Important in the history of suburban
development is the City merchants’ community
gathered around Clapham and Wandsworth
Commons by the early nineteenth century,
including Wilberforce, and wealthy bankers, the
evangelical Thorntons and ‘Dog’ Dent, MP (proposer
of a tax on dogs, thereafter greeted with barking) in
their capacious villas, now demolished.
Their sites yielded to the speculator. Victorian
suburban housing was ‘one of the defining
elements in Battersea’s character, and nowhere is
it found in greater concentration’ than between the
Commons. One of the larger Battersea developers,
Alfred Heaver, ‘cut his teeth as a developer here’
with two-storey houses in long terraces with
recesses for service doors, suggesting pairs of semi-
detached houses. Later, somewhat to the north, he
used contrasting bricks to provide a more
decorative product. This area has become ‘the core
of modern, upwardly mobile, child-rearing south
Battersea … “Nappy Valley”’.
Keith
Bailey’s
researches
into
Battersea’s
developers (see LTS Newsletter, 76, pp.13-14) are
acknowledged as a base for this very detailed
analysis of housing past and present, in which the
identity of the actual builders is often ascertained,
as well as of architects ranging from familiar names
like E. R. Robson, the London School Board
architect, to the obscure W. H. Stanbury, ‘trained
as an architect to assist his self-taught [builder]
father’ – like a number of sons of developers and
builders. Nor are the inhabitants neglected: both
the social character of a particular street or area is
discussed, and also specific notable individuals –
enlivened by a delightful photograph of a rather
cross-looking knickerbockered G. K. Chesterton in
Overstrand Mansions (one of the late-nineteenth-
century blocks of mansion flats overlooking
Battersea Park), which proved quite a focus of
artistic talent, from Sean O’Casey to Francis Bacon.
Expected to attract middle-class residents,
Battersea Park itself was proposed in 1841 as part
of a parliamentary attempt to provide healthy
family recreation to keep Londoners from the pub.
A plan for some 200 acres immediately south of the
river was devised by Pennethorne, Nash’s heir,
inspired by Regent’s Park, set about with villas to
make it self-financing, a concept killed by the
railways taking part of the housing site. The long-
drawn out project was revived by Sir Benjamin Hall
when Works minister, on the pattern of Bethnal
Green’s Victoria Park, creating vistas and screening
parts. The LCC took over the Park in 1889, under
which it was essentially a lung for the local
labouring poor. The success of a sculpture
exhibition in 1948 was followed by another for the
1951 Festival of Britain, and others in the 1960s.
Since Wandsworth Borough took it over in 1986
new buildings and plantings have been executed.
The early history of another area, similarly
harmed by the railways, that ‘never lived up to
expectations’, Park Town, planned by James
Knowles jnr, was elucidated in Priscilla Metcalf’s
Park Town Estate and the Battersea Tangle (LTS
121, 1978). The post-Knowles phase of that area is
explored in Chapter 5. In other streets, too, we find
that developers’ expectations ran ahead of the
market, so houses were frequently divided into flats
or fell into multi-occupation. Designed specifically
for the working classes however was the 42-acre
Shaftesbury
Park
Estate
(named
after
the
philanthropic peer) of the Artizans’, Labourers’ and
General Dwellings Company of 1866-7. This
commercial enterprise, derived from a French cité
ouvrière, ‘the most assiduously publicised and
widely discussed housing experiment of its day’,
proved corrupt and mis-managed, but in 1872-5
built a thousand two-storey small houses of four
classes in stock brick, with red brick and artificial
stone
trim,
and
fitted
with
all
ordinary
requirements, at low rents. But by 1901 half of
these contained two households. Today they attract
middle-class owners, though most of the estate has
been acquired by the Peabody Trust.
What emerges strongly from these two volumes is
the sense of constant renewal of Battersea’s fabric.
The later nineteenth century saw 17 Anglican
churches built here; eight have been demolished.
Most of more than 20 Nonconformist foundations
have closed. Schools offer a similar record:
Robson’s Sleaford Street school, of 1873-4, was
extended, rebuilt a century later, closed in 2004
and replaced by housing; Latchmere, Robson’s last,
closed in 1994 and was converted into flats.
Mountford’s Battersea Polytechnic of 1892-4 was
converted into housing in 2006-8. Plumbe’s
Latchmere Baths (1881) just failed to last its
century, replaced by a modern business centre. The
vast Morgan Crucible Company that progressively
swallowed up much of the river front departed in
the 1970s for more ample fields, making way for
private housing, ‘a harbinger of the area’s
gentrification’. The Stationery Office Building in
Nine Elms Lane (Henocq, 1980-2) went in 2010.
Even the distinguished, post-modern office block,
listed Marco Polo House (1987) in Queenstown
Road, by Ian Pollard, is to be demolished, currently
for luxury flats, offices and shops. The New Covent
Garden Flower Market with its space-frame ‘waffle’
roof, built on the site of railway yards in 1971-4
(Sir R. McAlpine & Sons) is to be merged with the
Fruit and Vegetable Market and its site redeveloped
for 1,750 homes in blocks by Foster & Partners.
The laborious research required to record so
amply Battersea’s constant state of flux excites
one’s admiration for the tiny staff of the Survey,
discarded by English Heritage but now given a
page 16
resting-place in the academic life of University
College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture. Is
it believable that there are government departments
of ‘Culture’ and ‘The Environment’? Let us thank
Heaven for the transatlantic generosity of the Paul
Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art that has
secured the publication of the two magnificent
volumes.
– M. H. Port
Highgate From Old Photographs by Michael
Hammerson, Stroud, Amberley, 2013. 96 pp. 180
ills and map. ISBN 978 1 44561 838 8 (print)
ISBN 978 1 44561 845 6 (ebook), £14.99 (print).
Michael Hammerson is the longstanding chairman
of Highgate Society’s environmental committee. He
points out in the introduction that this is the first
book of old photographs to be devoted solely to
Highgate (though several have taken in Highgate
with one or more of its neighbouring areas). The
plentiful illustrations are taken from the author’s
extensive collection of local postcards and represent
his image of an area that he has spent decades and
immense effort in defending against what the
Highgate
Society
judges
to
be
unsuitable
development. The introduction is worth reading as
a veteran campaigner’s lament on the threats
currently facing Highgate Village.
The book takes the form of a leisurely stroll
through the Village and, to a much lesser extent, its
surroundings as they were between 1870 and 1930.
The point is made in almost every caption that the
scene is little changed since the photographs were
taken. This alone is a tribute – albeit self-bestowed –
to Mr Hammerson’s achievement.
The images have charm. Though very many have
been reproduced before, they are likely to be fresh
to the non-specialist reader. The captions contain
few comments on anything other than the
architecture in the photographs and in the
introduction Mr Hammerson explains that the word
limit left little room for historical explanation.
Nevertheless when the author strays into the field
of history, a note of caution has to be sounded.
There are several errors of historical fact –
Baroness Burdett Coutts, an extremely important
figure in Highgate history, is wrongly stated to have
died in 1896 not 1906, Lauderdale House was
remodelled in its present form not in 1645 but in
around 1760 and Queen’s Wood was opened to the
public not in 1890 but in 1898. Moreover when he
moves beyond the heart of Highgate, his
topographical grasp weakens as when identifying
what is to be seen in a view of what are now the
Crouch End Playing Fields dating from 1878. It is
difficult to compare some views of the same place
over time because they are placed back-to-back.
These slips suggest that Mr Hammerson was
working to a tight deadline and did not have time to
double-check his facts or the lay-out. This is a pity,
since they mar a pleasant book.
– Peter Barber
Greenwich Revealed. An investigation into some
early line drawings of Greenwich by Neil Rhind
and Julian Watson, 2013, ISBN 978 0 95653 274
2, £10 including P&P (see below).
This
is
an
investigation of three
sheets
of
most
intriguing drawings
from the collections
of
the
Earl
of
Pembroke that have
only recently come to
light. They show a series of Greenwich street
elevations, Tallis-style, with what appears to be
accurate detail of c.250 buildings in some of the
most significant streets: the riverfront, Church
Street, Crooms Hill and some of the streets of east
Greenwich. The remarkable thing is that the
drawings are dateable to c.1705-9 (they show St
Alphege before the fall of the nave in 1710). As
Peter Guillery says in the foreword, this is an
extremely rare type of record for this date. The
small line-drawings of haphazardly grouped large
and small houses, some with fashionable shaped
gables, show us the character of the unplanned
town that had expanded rapidly in the seventeenth
century around the royal palace. The authors are
tempted to associate the drawings with a
draughtsman working for Hawksmoor, then busy at
Greenwich, but the reasons for their creation
remain unclear. The subject matter is explored with
the meticulous thoroughness associated with the
authors, both longstanding experts on the history
of the area, and the material is presented very
attractively,
enhanced
by
supplementary
illustrations and by bird’s-eye reconstruction
drawings by Peter Kent. After discussion of the
character of the drawings, individual buildings are
examined in detail, related to owners and
occupants and to those buildings which survive
today. An exemplary piece of private publishing, of
more than local interest. The book is available from
the Warwick Leadley Gallery, 1-2 Nelson Arcade
Greenwich SE10 9JB, or by post from Julian
Watson (to whom cheques should be made out),
100 Embleton Road, Lewisham SE13 7DG.
– Bridget Cherry
Camden Goods Station through Time
by Peter Darley. Amberley Publishing, 2013. 96pp,
numerous ills, PB. ISBN 978 1 44562 204 0.
£14.99.
It appears that Amberley leaves
the text and illustrations of
their books to the author, with
very little editorial input. This
has worked well with this
book, in that Peter Darley has
been running the Camden
Railway Heritage Trust and so
has accumulated knowledge
page 17
and records of this area from the Regents Canal to
the Primrose Hill Tunnel on the main line out of
Euston. His book has a marvellous collection of
pictures old and new, besides plans and maps of
the extensive goods yard which has now been
regenerated
in
Camden
Lock
market,
the
Roundhouse arts centre besides a supermarket and
housing in the old warehouses. The captions are
full and informative and there is a page of text at
the beginning of eight chapters.
Fellow members of Subterranea Britannica will
delight in the pictures and plans of the vaults and
tunnels where ash was collected from steam
locomotives, goods were transferred from railway to
canal, the winding engines were housed for pulling
early trains up the incline from Euston and horses
were transferred in safety from one side of the yard
to the other. There are pictures of the yard working
in the days of horses and steam, some with
pictures from the same viewpoint today. No
mention of HS2 but its line will be in tunnel beside
the site and its potentially destructive link line to
HS1 is currently cancelled. This is a worthy
successor and update to our member Jack
Whitehead’s 2000 book on the same area.
The Trust needs money to pay for the extensive
illustrations in the book and will make a better
profit from direct sales. A cheque for at least £12
payable to the Trust sent to 21 Oppidans Road
NW3 3AG will bring UK readers a copy of the book
post free.
– Roger Cline
Magnificent Marble Statues: British sculpture in
the Mansion House by Julius Bryant; 144pp. ISBN
978 1 90737 255 1; Paul Holberton, 2013, £20.
Here is a publication
directly relevant to the
meeting place of our
AGM this summer. The
seventeen
statues
celebrating
heroic
English
history
and
poetry which are the
subject of this study
were part of the original
1753 scheme for the
Egyptian Hall in the
Mansion House, but were commissioned only in
1853 and installed in 1864, giving rise to many
misunderstandings of their history. The book tells
the story of their creation and sets them in the
context of the Mansion House interiors.
– Bridget Cherry
Owing to shortage of space some reviews
are being held over for the next Newsletter.
114th Annual Report of the
Council of the London
Topographical Society for 2013
Our 2013 Annual General Meeting was held in St
Clement Danes Church on the Strand and it was
well attended.* Following the formalities Robert
Thompson spoke of the challenges in preparing the
detailed Index to the annual publication, Peter
Anderson, a City guide, gave a talk on the history of
St
Clement
Danes
Church,
and
Elizabeth
Williamson, Editor of the Victoria County History,
spoke about the research by her team on the
registers of St Clement Danes.
The Society’s 2013 annual publication (No. 174)
was The A to Z of Charles II’s London 1682, based
on William Morgan’s map: Robert Thompson
produced the publication’s Index.
Patrick Frazer resigned as Membership Secretary
having
served
previously,
since
1978,
as
Publications Secretary and as our Hon. Secretary.
John Bowman took over Membership Secretary
duties. At the AGM, Ann Saunders announced her
decision to retire from the post of Honorary Editor
in 2015. Her successor will be Council Member
Sheila O’Connell who is Curator of British prints
before 1880 at the British Museum's Department of
Prints and Drawings.
We made the second of three grants, this year for
£11,000, to the British Library in connection with
cataloguing their Crace Collection London items.
During the year 82 new members joined the
Society. At the end of 2013 there were 1208 paid-
up members and five honorary members.
The Society’s total income for 2013 was £42,848
while expenditure came to £32,258.
As usual, Council meetings were held in January,
April and September to discuss the Society’s
publications programme, membership, finances
and general administration.
Our Newsletter
was published in May and
November. Articles included: London Explorations
3: Hampstead Heath –
east to west; London
Explorations 4: Osterley – Grand Union Canal –
Boston Manor – and (perhaps) Pitshanger both by
Tony Aldous; Why 99 years? (on the length of
London leases) by Frank Kelsall; Mapping slave-
ownership on to London and its districts: the
Portman estate as a case study by Dr Nicholas
Draper and Rachel Evans; and, as always, many
excellent book reviews.
During the year work progressed successfully on
producing the Society’s Newsletter in an electronic,
fully-searchable format suitable for posting on the
Society’s website. The Council decided that each
web edition would be published six months after
the paper version of the current edition was sent to
members, and so the first e-edition posted on the
website was No. 76 (May 2013) followed, with the
publication of this edition of the Newsletter, by the
November 2013 edition (No. 77).
* Minutes of the 2012 Annual General Meeting are available on
the Society’s website.
page 18
page 19
Assets
2013
2012
£
£
Money in Bank & National Savings
165,004
173,325
Advance payments
25,612
534
Value of Society’s stock of publications
Stock at end of previous year
8,917
13,659
Additions to stock
1,625
3,064
Less Value of publications sold
-7,453
-7,806
Value of stock at year end
3,089
8,917
Total assets
193,705
182,776
Liabilities
2013
2012
£
£
Overseas members’ postage
180
225
Subscriptions paid in advance
4,882
4,942
Total Liabilities
5,062
5,157
Net Worth of the Society
188,643
177,619
Change in net worth
Previous year’s net worth
177,619
181,667
Surplus (Deficit) for the year
11,024
(4,048)
End of year net worth
188,643
177,619
Income
2013
2012
£
£
Subscriptions paid by members
22,901
21,456
Subscriptions from earlier years
30
20
Income Tax from Covenants/Gift Aid
3,895
3,886
Total subscription income
26,826
25,362
Profit from sales of Publications
7,453
7,806
Interest received
945
735
Grant: Scouloudi Foundation
1,250
1,250
Royalties received
6,526
–
Sundry donations
282
1,071
Total Income for the year
43,282
36,224
Surplus for the year
11,024
(4,048)
Expenditure
2013
2012
£
£
Members’ subscription publications
Cost of Printing (see note)
11,386
3,152
Cost of Distribution
1,525
6,579
Total cost of members’ publications
12,911
9,731
Newsletter
4,444
4,184
Website, updated in 2013
320
120
AGM
977
1,210
Administration
61
–
Publications Storage and Service
2,545
2,463
Total Administration Costs
8,347
7,977
Grant to British Museum (2009-12)
–
10,000
Grant to British Library (2012-14)
11,000
11,684
Grant to LMA
–
880
Total expenditure for the year
32,258
40,272
LONDON TOPOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
INCOME & EXPENDITURE ACCOUNT 2013
BALANCE SHEET 31 December 2013
The accounts are with our examiner and, assuming they are approved, they will be presented at the AGM.
Please address any serious concerns to the Treasurer before the AGM.
The officers of the
London Topographical Society
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
Mrs Ann Saunders MBE PhD FSA
Bridget Cherry OBE FSA
3 Meadway Gate
Bitterley House
London NW11 7LA
Bitterley
Tel. 020 8455 2171
Nr Ludlow, Shropshire SY8 3HJ
Tel. 01584 890 905
E-mail:
bridgetcherry58@yahoo.co.uk
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; Ralph Hyde; Robin Michaelson; Sheila O’Connell;
Professor Michael Port; Peter Ross; Denise Silvester-Carr; 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 Hon. Editor, Mrs Ann Saunders.
Books for review and other material for the Newsletter should be sent to Bridget Cherry.
Registered charity no. 271590
The Society’s web site 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.
Tel. 020 8879 1881 www.ludo.co.uk