Newsletter No 77 November 2013_20pp

Notes and News 2013

The Society’s AGM was held on Tuesday 9 July in

the impressive setting of St Clement Danes church

(minutes will be published in the May 2014

Newsletter). It was followed by talks by Robert

Thompson on the index to this year’s publication,

by Peter Anderson on the history of the building,

and by Elizabeth Williamson on recent research on

the parish by the Victoria County History. Unlike

our previous annual publication, this year’s

offering, The A-Z of Charles II’s London, was happily

available for members to take home, and also,

unlike last year, there was plenty of tea, as well as

a copious supply of sandwiches. Plans are already

in hand for the 2014 AGM, which will be extra

special as it will take place in the Egyptian room in

the Mansion House in the City, the Lord Mayor’s

official residence; the Lord Mayor, Fiona Woolf,

hopes to be able to welcome us. The date is Monday

7 July; further details will be in the May Newsletter.

Council members for 2013-4 are listed on the

back page of this Newsletter. They include our new

Membership Secretary, John Bowman. He takes

over from Patrick Frazer, who was thanked for his

many years of hard work for the Society.

If you are not yet in possession of your

publication for the year, The A-Z of Charles II’s

London, contact the Treasurer.

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Exhibitions

A diverse range of London’s archives, art,

architecture and artefacts are displayed in special

exhibitions this autumn.

The Parish, London Metropolitan Archives, 40

Northampton Road EC1. 14 October 2013 – 13

February 2014. Free. The lives of Londoners and

their local communities revealed by registers,

documents, photos, maps and other sources, from

earliest records to the present day. (NB The LMA is

closed for stocktaking 31 October – 18 November).

The Cheapside Hoard, London’s Lost Jewels.

Museum of London. 11 October – 27 April. New

examination of a cache of late sixteenth and early

seventeenth century jewels and gemstones discovered

in 1912 – displayed in its entirety for the first time in

over a century. Daily 10-6. See further p.2.

Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the

Making of Modern Britain. British Library. 8

November – 11 March. With accompanying book

‘exploring the everyday lives of people in Georgian

Britain’ (hardback £30 paperback £20). Also guided

walks on Sunday 17 November (booking needed;

see boxoffice.bl.uk

An American in London: Whistler and the

Thames, Dulwich Picture Gallery 16 October 2013

– 12 January 2014. The first major London

exhibition to explore the American-born artist’s

radical new aesthetic approach to the city and river.

Take the Tube. London Underground in

Camden. Camden Local Studies & Archives

Centre. From 11 June 2013 – 31 December 2013,

2nd Floor, Holborn Library, 32-38 Theobalds Road,

London WC1X 8PA. Monday 10-6, Tuesday 10-6,

Thursday 10-7, Friday 10-5, alternate Saturday

11-5.

Celebrating the 1913 Ancient Monuments Act.

Wellington Arch, Hyde Park Corner. A series of

small exhibitions through the year examining the

movement to protect England’s heritage are

completed by Brutal and Beautiful: Saving the

Twentieth century, 25 September – 24 November,

and Almost Lost: London’s Buildings Loved and

Loathed. 4 December – 2 February. These

complement

English

Heritage’s

permanent

exhibition telling the chequered story of the

Wellington Arch and its sculpture. Wednesday –

Sunday 10-4.

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Lecture

NEW CITY, Contemporary Architecture in the

City of London, by Alec Forshaw. Tuesday 10

December, at the Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace

Road SE1 7RB. Drinks at 6.30pm, Lecture at 7pm.

£20. This is the annual Banister Fletcher lecture of

the London Society, which has recently merged

with the Heritage of London Trust. For further

details contact info@heritageoflondontrust.com

Alec Forshaw’s book on the same subject,

published by Merrell, will be reviewed in the next

Newsletter.

Newsletter

Number 77

November 2013

Miscellanea

London Maps online. Our thanks go to our

member David Gaylard, who has alerted us to the

useful online material available from the National

Library of Scotland (maps.nls.uk). This includes the

very detailed Ordnance Survey five-foot-to-a-mile

London Survey of 1891-5, printed on 729 sheets,

now

very

easily

accessed

at

maps.nls.uk/

os/london-1890s/index.html . The maps have also

been georeferenced so that they can be viewed as a

seamless layer on top of present day maps and

satellite images.

SALE! LTS members may already be aware that

our member Hawk Norton is selling his large

collection of London maps, books and prints. The

bulk of the collection is still available for sale, and a

catalogue is being prepared. If you would like a pdf

copy of the catalogue, send an email to

Hawk@btinternet.com .

SPECIAL OFFER to LTS members. The ideal

Christmas present! A 20% discount on London: A

View from the Streets (see review p.14), please visit

britishmuseum.org/shop and enter code LTS2013

at checkout. This offer is valid until 31 January

2014. It is limited to one purchase per person and

is not valid with any other promotion.

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The Cheapside Hoard

The display of the Cheapside Hoard at the Museum

of London has attracted much attention (including a

television programme on BBC4 on 15 October). Two

of our Council members share their enthusiasm.

Enamelled chains set with lapis lazuli and pearls,

earrings with carved amethysts, a small watch in

an emerald case and a collection of precious and

semi-precious stones are among the 500 items that

comprise the Cheapside Hoard. It was discovered

by workmen in 1912 buried beneath a demolished

building in Cheapside, a few hundred yards from

where they can now be seen in an exhibition at the

Museum of London.

London’s Lost Jewels are an amazing treasure

chest of gems, the biggest cache of its kind in the

world. They were probably a jeweller’s stock and

were buried between 1640 and 1666, a few

hundred yards from the modern museum. They lay

there for almost 300 years, and the builders who

found them took the gems, not to the Goldsmiths’

Company but to a Wandsworth pawnbroker and

antique dealer called George Fabian Lawrence.

‘Stony Jack’, as he was known, was also employed

by new London Museum and he was keen to secure

the treasure for it. The navvies were rewarded for

their find and the hoard was eventually granted to

the museum. Apart from a showing in 1914, it has

not been seen in its entirety since then.

The jewels are delicate and light. There are chains

set with garnets or turquoises, some long and worn

in great loops around the neck. Chandelier earrings

with emerald grapes or rubies are hung from thin

wires. Rings in a rosette setting of garnets or

sapphires and reliquary pendants of gold and

enamel are among the many items on display. They

are not jewels of the aristocracy but for the rich

middle-class merchants who aspired to great

wealth. Rarely seen portraits of Elizabethan and

early Stuart figures have been placed alongside the

cabinets to show how the jewellery was worn. It is a

truly magnificent hoard.

– Denise Silvester-Carr

The Cheapside Hoard: London’s Lost Jewels,

by Hazel Forsyth. Museum of London 20-13,

248pp. ISBN 978 1 78130 920 6. £19.95.

Hazel Forsyth, the exhibition organiser, has spent

more than 20 years studying the history and

mystery of the Cheapside Hoard. She is a good and

dedicated historian with an excellent eye for a

striking display. Using previously unknown

documents this magnificently illustrated book tells

of

the

stonecutters,

lapidaries,

enamellers,

merchants and goldsmiths who fashioned or sold

the gems, and of the ships – some of them manned

by pirates – who brought the raw stones to London.

The book is more exciting than any detective novel,

yet at the same time amazingly instructive, and

reasonably priced.

– Ann Saunders

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Changing London: West Smithfield

– and Holborn Viaduct

West Smithfield began as a medieval livestock

market NW of the City, on open land just outside

the walls. The site was also used annually for the

notoriously rowdy Bartholomew Fair, right up to

1855, when the City Corporation moved the live

meat market north to the fringe of built-up London

at Copenhagen Fields, Islington. The City Surveyor

page 2

Smithfield Market buildings from Holborn Viaduct

Horace Jones then replanned the enlarged site

with covered markets above an underground

railway linked to the Metropolitan line. After much

debate on whether a meat market should continue

in the centre of London, the impressive building of

1868 housing London Central Meat Market was

refurbished in 1992-5 to satisfy modern hygiene

requirements. But the other market buildings have

been gradually abandoned and are now the

subject of fierce controversy. Directly under threat

are the three blocks of the Smithfield General

Market buildings of 1879-99, which lie west of the

Meat Market. They comprise the General Market,

the Annex (formerly the fish market) joined to the

‘Red House’ (a cold store) and a small lavatory

block. In 2004 the Corporation planned to

redevelop the site with offices, but the scheme was

rejected at a Public Enquiry in 2007-8 on the

grounds that the buildings made a valuable

contribution to the Conservation Area (despite the

fact that they were unlisted). A new scheme has

been put forward (architects John McAslan+

Partners) which retains the frontages around part

of the site but imposes behind them a series of

obtrusive office towers. The Secretary of State has

now called in the application for a Public Enquiry.

Opposition to the proposals has been led by SAVE

Britain’s Heritage, which has put forward an

alternative scheme (architect John Burrell)

retaining the buildings whole, demonstrating that

the existing spaces on four levels are capable of a

variety of beneficial uses. SAVE points to the long

tradition of the site as public space, and

champions the heritage value of the entire market

complex, arguing that it should be treated as an

ensemble, with a complete roofscape which can

form ‘a fantastic canopy for a thriving new cultural

and retail hub’. For more information see

www.savebritainsheritage.org .

A good view of the market buildings fronting

Farringdon Road can be obtained from the recently

refurbished Holborn Viaduct. When the bridge

over the Fleet valley was built in 1863-9 by the City

Surveyor William Hayward, this lavishly decorated

Victorian showpiece was book-ended by Thomas

Blashill’s

Italian-Gothic

corner

buildings,

containing stairs down to the Farringdon Road

level. The north-east block was destroyed in World

War II, but has now been replicated as a façade in

front of vast new commercial premises for AXIA real

estate, the gleaming white stonework of 2013 acting

as a buffer between the colourful ironwork of the

bridge and the steel and glass upper floors rearing

up behind.

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House Museum ups and downs

Sandycombe Lodge, the rural retreat built at

Twickenham by the artist J.M.W. Turner for

himself and his father, has been described as ‘a

little known historical gem, being the only surviving

residence in the country designed and built by a

major artist for his own use’. The Heritage Lottery

Fund has recently granted the Turner’s House

Trust a First Round pass and development grant.

The Trust now needs to raise £2m to restore the

building, which is suffering from damp and neglect.

For more details about this unusual building and

how to arrange to visit, see turnerintwickenham

.org.uk

7 Hammersmith Terrace, the home of the

printer Emery Walker, and described as ‘the last

authentic Arts and Crafts interior’, has also been

successful in obtaining a First Round Lottery grant

from the HLF of £91,800, in partnership with the

William Morris Society, for the joint project ‘Arts

and Crafts Hammersmith: Developing the Legacy of

William Morris and Emery Walker’. The project is

concentrated on the remarkable survival of Morris

and Walker’s two homes, a quarter of a mile apart

on a stretch of the Thames where many members of

the Arts and Crafts movement lived and worked,

particularly those concerned with printing, an

aspect of Hammersmith’s heritage of international

significance, which deserves to be better known.

The project involves essential conservation work to

the collections of both organisations with online

public access through a single web portal, and new

joint programmes of education, interpretation and

outreach.

For further details see emerywalker.org.uk

Church Farm House Museum, Hendon. A past

LTS Newsletter reported the deplorable decision of

Barnet Council in 2011 to close this delightful

museum of rural life, return loans to their owners

and sell the rest of the contents. Proposals to run

the building by volunteers have come to nothing.

The Grade II* building is boarded up and has not

found a buyer, and is said to be costing the council

£2,500 pa on security. The only bright spot in this

sad story is that the volunteer-run Barnet Museum

(which also has suffered cuts but fortunately owns

its own collection) was able to acquire some of the

contents at the auction.

page 3

Holborn Viaduct, looking North-East

Circumspice

What is this sinister interloper pushing up its

three-eyed head between Southwark Cathedral

tower and that better-than-most riverside office

block Minerva House? See p.19.

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Indexing William Morgan’s

London &c. Actually Survey’d

Morgan’s map (London Topographical Society

Publication no. 174 (2013): The A to Z of Charles

II’s London 1682) packs in an enormous amount of

information. Robert Thompson reveals here how his

index of places has tackled the confusing complexity

of seventeenth century London.

The place-name index to Morgan’s map, created for

LTS publication 174 (pp.119-46) combines the

names engraved on the 50 numbered Plans with

lesser names in four numbered lists. Those four

lists are identified by the following letters, in order

of appearance in the volume: W. ‘Westminster, etc.’

[p.100]; S. ‘Southwark and Lambeth’ [p.101]; K. ‘St

Katherine’s, Wapping, Shadwell and Ratcliffe’ [p.

101; ’St Katharines’ and ‘Ratcliff’ in the index] L.

‘London: City and Liberties’ [pp.102-3]. After each

name is a reference to a square, identified first by

the number of the Plan, then (after a dash) by a

letter from the vertical axis of that Plan, and a

number from the horizontal axis; e.g. Ainger Street,

Piccadilly, 18-D3, is on Plan 18 in the square

identified by the letter D on the right, and the

number 3 above. This much may be familiar from

other A-Zs, but whereas multiple references for a

single name were previously separated by commas,

here those in adjacent rows or columns are more

economically combined by means of a slash,

solidus, or shilling-mark. For example, Abchurch

Lane, 23-B2/C2, is on Plan 23, stretching across

row B in column 2 and row C, also in column 2.

Within the grid pattern there are not only place-

names, but also small numbers referring to the

four lists mentioned above. These small numbers

(where they occur) are placed in brackets at the end

of each reference. Large numbers on the Plans

along coloured boundaries identify wards, parishes

or precincts, as detailed on page 94. Reading

seventeenth-century

characters

(especially

numerals) needs concentration: what looks at first

sight like ‘July Staires’ [Plan 35-A2] is actually Tuly

[Tooley] Stairs. Spellings are standardised so far as

possible; an authoritative form for Simballs Courts

and Simballs Rents in Soho [19-B1] eluded me

until too late, when I noticed that an Isaac Symball

(spelled with a ‘y’) was a building speculator there.

A Salter of the same name issued a token in

Piccadilly bearing date 1663, and wife’s initial I/J.1

The King and Queen appear on Plan 7 for the

presentation of John Ogilby’s Survey, and they

were further recognised in at least some of the six

places called Charles Street, the seven Queen

Streets, New Queen Street, and Catherine Street.

Charles II’s London, indeed, needed the sort of

regulation that the London County Council would

provide. Then we might not have been faced with

14 Crown Courts, none a law court; 14 George

Yards; 13 Bell Inns; 13 Cock Alleys; 12 Bell Alleys;

12 George Alleys; 11 Angel Alleys; 9 King Streets; 8

yards called Ship Yard, and so on.

These may stand as a warning for any

assumptions that a mere name is sufficient for

identification. Even the addition of a larger

thoroughfare, from Edward Hatton’s anonymous

New View of London, may not be enough.2 There

was a Whites Alley on the south side of Holborn to

the east of Fetter Lane [10-D2], and another Whites

Alley to the west of Fetter Lane [10-C1]; a Windmill

Alley in Southwark on the east side of St Margarets

Hill [35-C1], and another Windmill Alley on the

west side of St Margarets Hill [35-B1/C1]. Castle

Street, Long Acre [19-A3/B3], was close to another

Castle Street stretching from Newport Street to The

Mews Yard [19-C2/C3/D3].

As these indicate, in the absence of the closer

positioning that street numbers would provide from

the eighteenth century, the side of the street is

given, and both ends for a short thoroughfare

where neither end is obviously more important.

On a personal note, I needed Morgan’s map in

order to publish a token in the Norweb Collection of

Cleveland, Ohio, which reads MARGRET RANDELL

on one side, reverse the mystifying SHIPBRVER

FEILD, which I pursued to Chipperfield (Herts.)

and beyond without finding a solution. Eventually

Morgan’s maps yielded Ship Brew-house Yard [37-

A1 (K.121)], presumably a yard and former field

associated with the Ship Brew-house in St

Katharine’s precinct. The token-issuer would have

been Margaret Zouch, who married John Randall,

mariner, in 1637; the birth of their second son

John was registered in St Katharine’s in 1656.3

Amid the labour of indexing one may be allowed a

little light relief. Bear Foot Alley relates to the Bear

page 4

page 5

Inn at Bridge Foot, and not to Bare Feet. Little

Sword-bearers Alley may produce a mental picture

of a diminutive sword-bearer marching with a great

sword of state. What, though, is the origin of

Powder Beef Court, in Cabbage Lane, Westminster?

My experience of Morgan’s map is that the

copper-plate engravers generally were very accurate

(and had long arms), but around St Martin’s

Lane/Long Acre numbers 136-137 were omitted

from the lists; to judge from Rocque’s map4,

number 137 was Angel Alley, Long Acre. For certain

other names (asterisked) the number is not visible,

at least on the British Library copy reproduced.

Sadly, Rose Alley on Bankside, the site of the Rose

Theatre, was incorrectly engraved as Rore Alley [34-

A2/A3], and so printed by Hatton, p.70, just as

Pruson otherwise Sprusens Island, a small elevated

tract of land in Wapping Marsh, was recorded at

K.184, and misprinted by Hatton, p.78, as Sprucers

island.5

– Robert Thompson

1.  LCC/GLC Survey of London, Vol. XXXIII: The Parish of St

Anne Soho (London, 1966), 34 n., 128, 192-93, 202; British

Academy, Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles, 62: The

Norweb... Tokens... Part viii (London, 2011), s.v. Middlesex

I: Westminster: Piccadilly. The token was lost on its return

journey across the Atlantic.

2.  A New View of London [by Edward Hatton], (London, 1708),

2 vols.

3.  Thompson, R. ‘The attribution of the “Brewer Field” token,

Dickinson London 408A’, Spink Numismatic Circular 116.4

(Aug. 2008), 183-84; SCBI Norweb... Tokens... viii. 8446.

4.  John Rocque [A Plan of the Cities of London and

Westminster and Borough of Southwark, 1747]. The A to Z

of Georgian London; introductory notes by Ralph Hyde

(Lympne, 1981; London, 1982), 11Aa.

5.  English Place-Name Society, The Place-names of

Middlesex..., by J. E. B. Gover [et al.], (Cambridge, 1942), p.

151.

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Mapping slave-ownership on to

London and its districts: the

Portman estate as a case study

The impact of colonial slavery on the development of

London has tended to be obscured by the complexity

and variety of the forces that shaped the modern

city. A new resource developed by the Legacies of

British Slave-ownership (‘LBS’) project at University

College London now offers the opportunity to begin

to map colonial slavery on to London and its

districts, and to re-inscribe slavery in the history of

the city. Dr Nicholas Draper and Rachel Evans, UCL,

introduce the evidence they have discovered about

residents on the Portman estate.

The LBS team has digitised the records of the

Commissioners of Slave Compensation, the body

established to administer the distribution of £20

million paid to the slave-owners under the 1833

Abolition Act, which freed the enslaved people

subject to a further four to six years of coerced

unpaid labour known as ‘Apprenticeship’. The

enslaved people received nothing, but the former

slave-owners, mortgagees, annuitants, legatees and

others with financial links to slave-ownership

participated in a feeding frenzy in which they

advanced

claims

to

entitlement

to

the

compensation provided by the British government.

In dealing with these claims, the small body of

Commissioners in London created an extraordinary

series of records (now stored at The National

Archives in Kew), which have allowed the LBS team

to research and collate the details of some 45,000

individual awards for the British Caribbean, the

Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius. The results have

been made available to all through a searchable

public database, which can be found online at

www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs . It is important to acknowledge

that by the nature of the underlying records, this is

a database that focuses on the slave-owners, on the

enslavers rather than the enslaved. In addition,

although

all

slave-owners

found

in

the

compensation records are included in the database,

biographical

detail

has

been

systematically

provided only for those slave-owners identified as

absentees, i.e. known to have been living in Britain

at the time of Emancipation.

One of the dimensions by which the data is

searchable is by address, and the database can be

used as a resource through which to identify

individuals in specific streets or areas of London,

and to understand their often complex ties to slave-

ownership. Attribution of addresses has been made

primarily on the basis of those given in the

compensation records themselves, supplemented

by probate records, Court directories such as

Boyle’s Blue books and (for later decades as a

cross-check) by the censuses, which from 1851

onwards provide meaningful detail. There were

Map of the Portman estate with markers showing locations of

slave-owners claiming compensation in the 1830s. Dark tones

indicate precise addresses, light tones indicate streets where the

house number has not been identified.

cases in which the addresses given by claimants or

correspondents were purely temporary: we have

picked those up where there is evidence to suggest

such a poste restante relationship, but there will be

some such cases we have missed. It is also true

that many slave-owners had dual or even triple

addresses, one in the country and one in town, and

we have not evaluated the ‘real’ address in these

cases. Finally, some ‘absentees’ with addresses in

London or elsewhere in Britain were clearly

engaged in elaborate patterns of transatlantic

movement and cannot be said to have been

resident either in the colonies or in Britain: their

identity was truly hybrid.

Among the key districts in London in the context

of slave-ownership is the Portman estate, the focus

of the remainder of this article. In the late-

eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, on both

sides of the east-west axis of the New Road (now the

Marylebone Road), but especially to the south as far

as Oxford Street, congregated ‘West Indians’ – slave-

owners, merchants and others with financial and

family ties to slavery – drawn by new forms of

genteel urban living in a community of like-minded

and sociable neighbours with whom in many cases

they were linked by marriage or shared experience

of the slave-colonies. The project has previous

mapping exercises for both Bloomsbury and the

immediate area of Harley Street and Wimpole

Street.* In developing the map for this article, we

identified over 100 individuals in the slave

compensation process within the modern bounds of

the Portman estate. This density is comparable to

the patterns we discovered in our earlier work for

the successive areas immediately to the east of the

Portman

estate.

Together

with

Bloomsbury,

Fitzrovia and Marylebone, the Portman estate forms

a band of residential areas with the highest

occurrence of slave-ownership of any district in

London or indeed in Britain as a whole.

The slave-owners of the Portman estate appear to

reflect the variety of absentee slave-owners as a

whole. Perhaps predictably, Portman Square itself

was home to some of the very richest slave-owners.

James Blair ‘of Portman Square’, an MP for three

different constituencies between 1818 and 1830

and a fourth between 1837 and 1841, was the

recipient of the single largest slave compensation

award, a staggering £83,530 8s 11d for 1598

enslaved people on Blairmont in British Guiana: on

his death in 1841, Blair left £300,000 in

personalty, making him by this measure the single

richest man in Britain dying that year. Slave-

owners were not simply rentiers, passive recipients

of flows from the slave-economy like Blair, but

included merchants. Russell Ellice, a banker and

merchant, partner with his brother of the Whig

powerbroker Edward Ellice (himself a major

recipient of compensation) and a mortgagee of

‘slave property’ in Grenada and Tobago, was living

at 5 Portman Square in 1841.

The extent and intensity of the role of women

among slave-owners is one of the most noteworthy

discoveries from the slave-compensation process.

About 40 per cent of the slave-owners named as

awardees of slave compensation were women: to this

must be added an unknown further number of

beneficiaries whose ownership was obscured in the

records by the existence of legal mechanisms to

protect women’s property (such as marriage

settlements) or by the legal principle of couverture by

which property passed to the husband on

marriage – such latter cases are often but not

invariably identified as ‘in right of wife’ in the

compensation records. Trustees for Emily Arabella

Brome of Upper Seymour Street (who married the

public health reformer Dr Charles Aldis) sought

£3500 for her from the compensation for Bromefield

in Barbados, where she had been born. While men

were often speaking for women, women also spoke

for themselves. Temperance Sophia Udny, the widow

of the East India Co. servant George Udny from

whom she had inherited the Caliveny estate on

Grenada, wrote to Lord Glenelg on 11 August 1835

from 10 Upper Berkeley Street, Portman Square,

London, “Being interested in the West India question

as Proprietress of an Estate called Calaviny [sic] in

the Island of Grenada”, to ask when her

compensation would be paid as there were no

counterclaims lodged against the estate: she

received almost £8000 for 310 enslaved people.

Elizabeth Montgomerie of Baker Street successfully

pursued a legacy of £200 left to her (by Penelope

Tomlinson,

after

whom

one

of

Elizabeth

Montgomerie’s sons was named), under a will proved

in 1806 and secured on an estate in Antigua.

Most of the people awarded compensation for

slave-ownership were white but there were a very

small minority of people of colour. For example,

Sabina Eleanor Tierney, of 32 Upper Berkeley

Street when she died in 1844, was the illegitimate

daughter of James Tierney (a barrister in Jamaica

whose brother and brother-in-law were both British

MPs) and Margaret Dunbar (his housekeeper,

described in Jamaican records as ‘a free Quadroon

woman’). She was awarded the compensation for

six enslaved people in Kingston, Jamaica in 1836.

St Mary’s Bryanston Square, just beyond the

boundary of the Portman estate, formed a social

hub for the West Indians, although not on the same

scale as St Marylebone or St George’s Bloomsbury

in neighbouring parishes. Harry Hackshaw of 47

Gloucester Place, the owner of the Three Rivers

estate with 213 enslaved people on St Vincent,

baptised two of his daughters, Harriet and

Georgina, at St Mary’s in 1828 and 1831. John

Roach Bovell, from a Barbados family but himself a

slave-owner in British Guiana, and his wife Sarah

Louisa were living at 29 and 34 Montagu Square

and then at 105 Gloucester Place between 1838

and 1841 when they baptised three children at St

Mary’s church, including their daughter Emily, one

of the first women to study medicine in Britain (at

Edinburgh) who later married William Allen Sturge,

from the distinguished abolitionist and Quaker

family. Sophia Scarlett Ashman, a slave-owner in

page 6

Jamaica until Emancipation, married another

former slave-owner, William Kellett Hewitt, at the

church in 1837, when their addresses were both

given as 52 George Street. Sir Robert Charles

Dallas, who had owned enslaved people in

Grenada, married the Hon. Frances Henrietta des

Voeux (nee Law) at St Mary’s in 1841; Sir Robert,

‘formerly of Gloucester Place but late of 55 Montagu

Square’, died at Montagu Square in 1874.

This map shows the addresses of individual slave-

owners in the Portman estate who appear as

recipients, beneficiaries or unsuccessful claimants

of slave compensation in the 1830s. We have used

directories of the period to place people according to

the street numbering of the time. It is not possible to

assume that addresses from the 1830s automatically

correspond to modern street addresses. In addition to

disruption to street plans produced by urban

development, there has in some cases been

renumbering, especially of the main streets such as

Gloucester Place, to reflect the change to current

practice of grouping even numbers on one side of the

street and odd numbers on the opposite side.

Nevertheless, in surviving side streets such as the

west side of Montague Street and above all in the

squares the old pattern of sequential numbering

persists. The darker markers on the map denote

individuals at the site of their houses and the light

markers show the addresses for which we have a

street name but not a house number. You can view

the map online at mapsengine.google.com/map/

viewer?mid=z3xjAjqzNby4.keXRaWTZPFnU where

clicking on each marker will reveal the name,

address and a short biography of each person.

Where possible we have traced each individual

from the 1830s until the time of their death so not

all

residents

were

living

as

neighbours

concurrently. Indeed, it is surprising how many

people were present for short periods, not being

found in London directories or the census at these

addresses in 1829, 1835, 1841 or 1846.

In some ways the map is difficult to interpret and

raises more questions than it answers. It is often

unclear what influence neighbours had upon each

other, if they had any at all. John Brown Osborn

and his wife Alicia, living at 24 Bryanston Street in

1834, lodged a counterclaim for compensation for

enslaved people on Tomlinson’s estate in Antigua

on the basis of an unpaid annuity but the

compensation was awarded, among others, to

Elizabeth Montgomerie of 50 Baker Street in a

competing counterclaim. Ann and Charles Latham

of 8 Montagu Place were likewise contesting a claim

for Zetland estate in Nevis with Millicent Mary

Reeve of 104 Gloucester Place.

It is important to note that the LBS material

currently available online deals with slave-owners

as of the 1830s: in many cases there are

recognisable continuities of ownership covering the

previous century and sometime even two centuries,

but in other cases slave-owners of the eighteenth

century will have disappeared from the records by

the 1830s. Our material deals at present with those

individuals living in what was a relatively mature

estate by the 1830s. Development and physical

construction of the streets of the Portman estate

dated from the building of Portman Square itself

from 1764, followed by Manchester Square c.1770

and Bryanston and Montagu Squares around 1810.

Direct connections between the development of the

Portman Estate and slavery in the eighteenth

century have been previously remarked upon,

notably in the case of Home House in Portman

Square, built by Elizabeth Countess of Home,

formerly Lawes, nee Gibbons, born in Jamaica and

heiress to considerable ‘slave-property.’ Her

contingent heir, Peter Matthew Dixon, inherited the

Jamaican estates on the death of William Gage,

and received compensation for the enslaved people

upon them in the 1830s. In her case, there is a line

traceable between the slave compensation records

and the period of urban development half a century

prior. But in other cases, the continuity has been

lost between slave-owners in the critical period of

the Portman estates’ development and the slave-

owners of the 1830s. One of our purposes in now

extending our project back to the 1760s to trace

the ownership of estates between the 1760s and

the 1830s is to pick up the connections between

slavery and the acceleration of change in Britain

over that period, not simply in urban development

but in other physical developments and in

commerce, finance, philanthropy and culture. At

the same time, we are eager, where readers have

detailed knowledge of individuals about whom we

know relatively little, to learn more about the

corpus of slave-owners in the database, and we

welcome contributions from correspondents: the

website carries details of how new information can

best be submitted to us.

– NIcholas Draper and Rachel Evans,

University College London

*  The results of the earlier comparable mapping project,

for Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, can be seen at www.ucl.ac.uk/

lbs/project/fitzroviamap .

page 7

The deadline for contributions

to the next Newsletter is

16 April 2014.

Suggestions of books for review

should be sent to the Newsletter Editor;

contact details are on the back page.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions for 2014 are at the same rates as

for 2013: £20 for UK addresses and £30 for

those abroad. If you do not have a standing

order set up, then you will need to pay by the

due date of 1 January. A cheque to the

Treasurer is preferred, but you can pay through

the website if you wish. Payment by cheque for

up to five years in advance will be accepted as a

hedge against inflation.

The Guildhall Improvement

Project

LTS members will be familiar with the saga of the

removal of archives from the Guildhall to the

premises of the London Metropolitan Archives. The

context of these changes, the major alterations to the

Guildhall buildings, are described here by the

architectural historian Dr Sally Jeffery.

The City of London has recently undertaken a very

extensive programme of improvement to its

headquarters grouped around the Guildhall. This

ambitious project encompassed nearly all the

buildings surrounding the Great Hall. It included

major remodelling of the North Wing and piazza,

updating the West Wing, and major conservation

and repair work to the Old Library on the east. The

main aims were to provide a more welcoming,

modern and energy-efficient environment, and to

increase available space within the existing

buildings for both offices and events. The work was

completed in stages between 2002 and 2012, and

was commissioned by the Guildhall Improvement

Committee, chaired by Sir Michael Snyder. The

lead architects were T. P. Bennett, with project

management by Trench Farrow, and contract work

by Wates (West Wing and Justice Rooms) and Bovis

Lend Lease.

The West Wing

The West Wing was completed in 1974 to the

designs of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and his son

Richard, including a distinctive canopied walk or

ambulatory on the Guildhall Yard façade which

provided a covered route into the Great Hall. Apart

from general refurbishment and updating, and the

creation of more flexible committee rooms and

office spaces, it was considered particularly

important to improve the entrance. Glazed canopies

on each side now lead visitors in, and a glazed

three-metre

wide

extension

along

the

Aldermanbury façade houses a large reception

area. This work was carried out as the first element

of the Guildhall Improvement Project between 2003

and 2005. At the same time, a partly-demountable

glazed coach house was constructed in the

southernmost arch, which could be used to display

the Lord Mayor’s State Coach in the week prior to

the Lord Mayor’s Show.

The North Wing and Piazza

The main focus of the work was on the offices and

piazza to the north of the Great Hall. Work there

began in 2006, and the North Wing was re-opened

in 2008. It was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott

in the 1930s, but built after the war in 1955-8.

Although it was a handsome and significant

building architecturally, which the City of London

wished to retain, it was separated from the

surrounding streets on a raised piazza, accessible

only up flights of steps, the entrances were poorly

defined, and the offices inside were small, dark

and impractical. An ingenious transformation has

now taken place. The entrance level has been

lowered in front of the building to give step-free

access through central doors from a landscaped

piazza. The brick and stone of the façade have

been cleaned. The two upper storeys have been

replaced by a new glazed sixth floor and a seventh

floor set back above it, which houses plant. On the

south side, the brick wall has been completely

removed, the building extended by two metres

along its length and a glazed façade with scenic

lifts built. The original windows to the north have

been retained, and have secondary glazing, while

the triple-glazed south façade gives spectacular

views over a courtyard garden towards the north

flank of the Great Hall, which the removal of plant

and other obstructions has now revealed. The

building is designed to give a pleasant, well-lit

working environment and to conserve energy

wherever possible, with efficient cooling and

heating systems.

The internal divisions have been removed, and

the interiors completely replanned, giving more

flexible spaces for open-plan offices and communal

facilities for the staff. On the ground floor, there is

a glazed entrance lobby and reception area,

meeting rooms, and the Chamberlain’s Court

Room, where ceremonies granting the freedom of

the City of London take place.

The Old Library Building

The Old Library and the Museum to the east of the

Guildhall were built in 1868-72 to the designs of

Sir Horace Jones, the City Architect, in the

fashionable Gothic style, and opened in 1863.

There was a main library hall, a librarian’s office, a

print room, and a large and impressive basement

below which was occupied by the Guildhall

Museum. The library moved to new accommodation

in the West Wing in 1974. The museum was moved

away at the outbreak of the Second World War and

page 8

Guildhall North Wing and Garden

never moved back. The whole building is listed

Grade II*. The library space had been used for

functions, but was in very poor repair and the steps

to the dais inhibited flexibility. There were a few

remaining museum objects attached to the walls in

the basement, which had been subdivided and was

used for storage. The whole building needed careful

refurbishment.

Previously, events had been held in the Great Hall

itself and its two crypts. The repair and

conservation of the library hall and adjacent rooms

and the opening up of the old museum area (now

known as the Livery Hall) provided handsome

additional accommodation, equipped with modern

lighting and audio-visual systems.

New Circulation Routes

In order for the new events spaces to function

efficiently, either singly or in combination, extra

toilets, cloakroom and catering facilities were

needed, and access from the outside had to be

improved. Entrances from the Art Gallery, the

West Wing, the North Wing and Basinghall Street

can now all be used. The Basinghall Street

entrance, built to serve the Old Library building,

has been reopened, and one of the objects

surviving from the old Guildhall Museum – a

Stuart coat-of-arms from St Michael Bassishaw –

is displayed there. The handsome stone staircase

has been cleaned and is ornamented with three

seventeenth century stone figures from the old

Guildhall chapel.

In this irregular complex of buildings, new step-

free circulation routes were needed to connect them

and make them more accessible both inside and

out. A passage now leads from the Basinghall

entrance to the crypts of the Guildhall. A lift serves

both upper and lower levels and links to the

existing passage running along the south side of

the Great Hall, known as the South Ambulatory. A

new glazed, two-storey passage –

the East

Ambulatory – has been built on the east end of the

Great Hall which also connects with the lift and

stairs to the Old Library, the Livery Hall, the crypts

and the North Wing. Its glazed roof permits views of

the east end of the Guildhall which were previously

screened. Another improved route has been

provided for visitors to the Great Hall. Some of the

canopies were taken down to allow a step-free

approach ramp to be built to the west door, with a

glazed roof to permit views of the west façade of the

hall.

This programme has transformed the way the

buildings encircling the Guildhall are used,

creating a more modern and pleasant environment

for staff and visitors in the offices, and opening up

some spectacular spaces for events. While the new

piazza and modified façade of the North Wing, and

the improved approaches to the Great Hall, are

visible to the public, much of this very extensive

transformation is unseen from the outside.

– Sally Jeffery

London Explorations – 4: Osterley

– Grand Union Canal – Boston

Manor – and (perhaps) Pitshanger

From Osterley to Boston Manor on the tube is one

stop and takes three minutes. Between the same

two points, this walk takes upwards of three hours,

depending on your pace and the degree to which

you linger to savour topographical goodies. It takes

in three houses of note, all listed Grade I: Boston

Manor (C17); Osterley Park (C18); and – for those

with enough staying power – Pitshanger Manor

(early C19). It also includes the impressive Hanwell

flight of locks on the Grand Union Canal and

brushes the wall (an ancient monument) of the

former Middlesex County Asylum, a pioneer of its

kind.

We start at Osterley tube station (1) (Piccadilly

Line, Heathrow branch). Turn right outside, walk

along pavement ignoring subway, take footpath to

right which leads over the railway. Turn right, then

left (Bassett Gardens), at the end of which cross

Jersey Road to gap in the wall of Osterley Park (2).

Before they gave it to the National Trust in 1949,

Osterley Park belonged to the Earls of Jersey to

whom it came by marriage from the Child banking

family who acquired it in 1711. Turn right on a

footpath through fields and sometimes grazing

horses to reach the main drive to the house; turn

left up the drive and through a barrier to the

Garden Lake, which we leave to our left. And here

in front of us is Osterley Park, the house (3), as

remodelled for the Childs in the 1760s by Robert

Adam. It is a striking but somewhat curious

mixture: in the centre, grand steps up to a two-

storey high Ionic portico with open courtyard

behind; but the building on either side is brick with

end towers with more than a touch of the Jacobean

about them. The stable block (4) to the right

speaks a similar language and, incidentally, houses

a rather good café. (The house is open daily 16

February – 1 November; weekends in winter.

National Trust.)

From here head diagonally across the front lawn

to reach the Middle Lake (5), left along the lake’s

edge, then following a grassy track to a lodge (6)

and gate into a tranquil, traffic-free stretch of

Osterley Lane. Turn left into this lane and follow on

past a second lodge. By this time you begin to

appreciate how successful the National Trust and

the highway engineers were in screening the house

and its immediate surroundings from full aural and

visual assault of the M4 motorway. As we press on,

traffic noise grows louder and eventually the ‘lane’

rises up and crosses the motorway. On the other

side, round a bend with the noise already

decreasing, is a stile on our right and, at the

bottom of a few wooden steps, a clear-cut path

straight across a field to the beginnings of Norwood

Green. The path now runs between gardens and

houses, with cottages and a pub, The Plough (7),

page 9

which hint at the original rural village. (Both the

pub and nearby St Mary’s Church have C14 or

earlier origins.) But today Norwood Green is a trim

suburb of superior white rendered semis, and one

is as likely to see a turbaned Sikh emerging from

his well-kept garden as a house-proud white.

Norwood has a Sikh temple, Sikh school and

perhaps a quarter of the population is Sikh.

At the pub, turn right along Tentelow Lane, left

into Minterne Avenue, then right into Melbury

Avenue. At its end the road becomes Poplar Lane

and brings us to Norwood Top Lock (8) on the

Grand Union Canal, with its fine brick arch bridge.

The Grand Union (engineer William Jessop) dates

from around 1800 and was built to cut the distance

by canal between the manufacturing Midlands and

the Thames at Brentford. Turn left and then back

under the bridge to head north-east. (That may

seem the wrong direction for getting to Brentford,

but canals need to hug contours.) Continue past

the next lock to reach ‘Three Bridges’ (9) – where

the road goes over the canal but a railway runs

under it. The road is Windmill Lane and existed

before the canal; a problem arose when the Great

Western Railway proposed to build a branch line to

serve Brentford Dock. It engaged Isambard

Kingdom Brunel to solve the problem and he

designed this three-level crossing, with the railway

in deep cutting, the canal carried over it in a cast-

iron trough, and a cast-iron road bridge on top. It

was one of his last big jobs. But, of course, it isn’t

three bridges, only two.

In front of us now is one of the Grand Union’s

set-pieces, the Hanwell flight of locks (10),

opened in 1794. The six locks raise the level of the

canal by 16.2m (53ft). They are a scheduled

monument, as is the high brick wall to your left,

built to enclose the Middlesex County Asylum

(11). Also known as Hanwell Pauper and Lunatic

Asylum and opened in 1831, this was one of the

first such institution to be built under the powers

of the County Asylums Act of 1808. The original

buildings, designed by William Alderson, were both

impressive and humane, and pioneering medical

superintendents used them to revolutionise

treatment of mentally ill people – notably Dr

William Ellis with his regime of ‘therapeutic

employment’. The asylum (later St Bernard’s

Hospital) operated behind these walls as a self-

s u f f i c i e n t

community which

had its own farm,

bakery,

brewery

and

carpenter’s

shop. It exported

surplus produce

via its canal dock;

an arch filled in

with

brighter

yellow

brick

marks the dock

entrance.

St

Bernard’s is now

part of the larger

Ealing

Hospital

complex.

Along

this

stretch of canal

you may notice

little

ramps

running into the

canal. These were

provided so that

horses which took

a wrong step and

landed

in

the

water could be the

more

easily

extricated.

After

page 10

Drawn by Ivor Kamlish

Osterley Park

Hanwell Locks we soon reach the canal’s junction

with the River Brent, which from here to the

Thames runs with or alongside it. Like this stretch,

much of today’s canal system is held in place by

steel

piling:

note

plaque

on

your

left

commemorating a prize length which won the Kerr

Cup in 1959. Shortly after this we come to a weir

letting surplus water from the canal flow over into

the Brent. A footway takes us across the weir to

Osterley Lock (12); then after a footbridge over a

side stream, we go under the M4 motorway, then

the Piccadilly Line railway. This brings us to

Gallows Bridge (13), a graceful black and white

cast-iron structure of 1820, by which we cross the

canal to a right-hand towpath. Nearby a nasty little

building on our right adds a surreal touch: ‘Space

Station Self Storage,’ it says. What a fate: to shunt

oneself off by rocket and to be stored in orbit!

After Clitheroe’s Lock, with the M4 still striding

along on viaduct to our left, we see GSK House (14)

on the left of the canal. Completed in 2001 to

designs by Hiller/RHWL, it has a central 14-storey

tower flanked by three five-storey wings with main

entrance to the north on to that great avenue of

C20 industrial architecture, the Great West Road.

On our side (south) it looks out on Boston Manor

Park. The world headquarters of GlaxoSmithKline,

it houses 4000 staff engaged in research and

admin. Still on the towpath, we cross under a road

bridge, then take a timber footbridge across to the

canal’s left bank and Boston Manor Park. Follow a

path alongside GSK’s perimeter fence, then cross a

grassed area diagonally to go under the M4 viaduct

and through a line of trees beyond. Here turn left

into the walled garden section of the park and

arrive at Boston Manor House (15). This pretty

Jacobean house, like Osterley, was the country

refuge of City of London merchants and their

families escaping an overcrowded and unhealthy

Square Mile. It was built by a City widow, Mary

Lady Reade, but for three centuries owned by the

Clitherows; James Clitherow, an East India

merchant, extended and altered it to its present

shape. It was divided into flats in 1963 and quite

recently was in scaffolding following signs of

collapse at its south-west corner. Now the Grade I

building is restored and open to the public.

(Weekends and public holidays from April to

October; London Borough of Hounslow.)

From its garden front head on north through the

park and right of a lake to exit the park into Boston

Manor Road, which takes us to Boston Manor

tube station (16).

Here you have a choice:

(A) Give up and go home by tube

(B) If weary but still interested, take the tube

one stop east to Northfields; thence bus E2 from

opposite the station to Ealing. Alight at the New

Broadway/Bond Street stop and walk along Bond

Street to Ealing Green and Pitshanger Manor.

(C) – the best option – Take the tube one stop

east to Northfields station (17), turn right out of

the station, then right into Lammas Park (18) and

on into Walpole Park (19) with the Ealing film

studios (where the famed Ealing comedies were

made) on the right towards the far end. Ahead at

the far end is Pitshanger Manor (21). This is

another ‘manor house’ built as a country home by a

Londoner – not a city merchant but a leading

architect with the Bank of England in his client list.

The son of a bricklayer, John Soane rose to be one

of the leading architects of his day, with ground-

breaking work including the Dulwich Picture

Gallery with its top-lit spaces. He bought

Pitshanger as a country retreat and in 1801-3

largely rebuilt it to his own design, retaining only a

south wing of 1768 which had been built by George

Dance when Soane was his assistant. Soane sold

the house in 1811 amid growing disappointment at

his two sons’ wayward behaviour and total lack of

interest in architecture. The Grade I house is now a

museum with art gallery alongside. (Open Tuesday-

Friday 1-5pm, Saturday 11am-5pm, Summer

Sundays 1-5pm; London Borough of Ealing.)

Some good places to eat just across Ealing Green,

including Carluccio’s and the atmospheric Hosteria

del Portico. Ealing Broadway station has fast trains

into

Paddington

and

Central

and

District

underground lines.

– Tony Aldous

page 11

Boston Manor House

Pitshanger Manor

Review Article

Eighteenth Century London is a perennially popular

subject. Simon Morris assesses what we can learn

from three recent publications.

London, a Social and Cultural History 1550 –

1750, by R. Bucholz & J. Ward; Cambridge

University Press, 2012. 367 pages plus notes &

index. ISBN 978 0 52189 652 8, £16.99.

The Secret History of Georgian London,

how the wages of sin shaped the capital,

by Dan Cruickshank, Random House; 568 pages

plus notes & index. ISBN 978 1 84794 537 2, £25.

London in the Eighteenth Century, a great and

monstrous thing, by Jerry White, Bodley Head,

2012. 559 pages plus notes & index.

ISBN 978 1 84792 180 2, £25.

London in the eighteenth century – to its

contemporaries incomparably vast and to us

unattainably distant in time; the London created by

the Georgians resonates to this day throughout

much of inner London and out towards the

suburbs. The Georgians started the paving,

metalled the turnpikes and built the bridges, made

Mayfair and Marylebone, Hampstead and Highgate,

Kennington and Lambeth and much more. Stating

the scope is simple; the challenge is getting to grips

with the century that arches over the chronological

abyss between the antique Stuarts and the

recognisably modern Victorians. Put simply, how

do you produce a coherent account of the

Hanoverian century during which London rose from

merely local importance to become Europe’s if not

the world’s greatest city? What to include, and

what to omit?

In fact, do we need another history at all? With a

plethora of first rate general London histories –

Sheppard, Ackroyd and Inwood to name but three,

and an increasing number of works that examine a

specialised aspect of eighteenth century London,

such as commerce, courtiers, everyday life or

satire, one is tempted to think that the subject has

been exhausted. But no – the further the period

recedes into the past the closer we are able to get

thanks to new scholarship, new sources and, above

all, new technology. Many years ago records were

locked in archives, and the intermediation of

professional historians was required to search them

out and construct a narrative from carefully chosen

extracts. Nowadays every man can be his own

historian with direct access to copious material

from newspapers, pamphlets and – a source used

by Cruickshank and White – the Old Bailey

sessions papers. Never before has the low life of

eighteenth century London been so freely available

for the edification of the twenty-first century

Londoner, and this is itself a justification for the

profession of history because an experienced eye is

required to evaluate and contextualise the

evidence, and a skilful pen is needed to make it

accessible to the interested reader.

What, then, do these three volumes tell us about

London in the eighteenth century? Do they benefit

from

that

most

necessary

combination

of

meticulous eye and mellifluous pen? Let us begin

with the most ambitious, London, A Social &

Cultural History 1550 – 1750, a single volume

covering the entire social and cultural history of

London over two centuries – a period of spectacular

change from the Marian burnings to the elegance

(and brutality) of mid-Georgian London.

The authors introduce sixteenth century London

as seen from the tower of St Mary Overy, an urban

panorama framed by Westminster Abbey to the

west and the Tower to the east. The book itself

replicates this approach, flanking the seven central

chapters with perambulations marking the opening

and closing years. The core chapters commence

with a social overview and descend from the Court

through arts and culture to the marginalised and

end with riot, plague and fire.

The introduction is perceptive, reminding us that

London was in 1550 a provincial city writ large,

capital of a peripheral northern European kingdom.

There was no inevitability about its rise over the

next two centuries to be the world’s greatest

metropolis that, for the authors, represents the

catalyst of modernity through its contribution to

the development of personal liberty, freedom of

speech and secularism. A recurrent theme is how

the medieval concept of the ‘great chain of being’,

ordained by God and fixing all from monarch to serf

in an immutable chain of dominance and

deference, could not withstand the forces of social

mobility at work in early modern London – City air

makes free – and yet how men sought to replicate

this chain in the microcosms of the patriarchal

merchant’s house and the paternal City guild.

The social chapters are engaging, informing us

that London was not an especially dangerous place,

with the impression of danger created by the

Augustan press; that as the rich moved west so too

did the slums of the poor; how the eighteenth

century public could exalt a notorious criminal as

folk hero; and how riot can be seen as a form of

communication, a legitimate enforcement of

community standards and a form of petition for

redress. The chapter on fine and performing arts

describes how the Court supplanted the Church as

a major patron but how the destruction of

Whitehall Palace in 1698 came to symbolise the

retrenchment of the Crown and rise of private

patronage. We also hear how development of a

paying audience at the public theatre was a

significant advance in English public life through

creating a medium for social intercommunication.

A later chapter offers an animated discourse on

censorship and the early London press, and how it

developed from a mouthpiece of the state to a

platform for independent views.

There

are,

however,

three

pervasive

characteristics, disappointing in a book from the

page 12

Cambridge University Press. The first is an absence

of freshness – neither new facts nor a novel

approach. This may result from the book having

being compiled from readily available secondary

sources without fresh research. Second, the text is

predominantly descriptive rather than analytical –

there are, beyond those mentioned, few insights

and certainly no new conclusions. Lastly, the

narrative is largely a sequence of generalities

relieved by a few examples, occasionally striking,

but which merely draw attention to the blandness

of the remainder. By seeking to cover so broad a

theme in a single volume the authors are

constantly skimming the surface. The central

commercial and financial revolutions are disposed

of in 15 pages; a discussion is begun on the

different approach to the poor under Catholicism

and Protestantism but this tails off with a single

paragraph on economic stress in Elizabethan

times. The result is consequently superficial and

uninspiring and makes for a dull book. The authors

leave it to the last page to argue for the uniqueness

of the period 1550 – 1750 with London at the

zenith of uniqueness – but by then the reader’s

interest has long been lost.

Jerry White is an historian who writes history

backwards, at least so far as London is concerned,

since his first history dealt with London in the

twentieth century, followed by London in the

nineteenth

century,

and

now

London

the

eighteenth; perhaps we can look forward to his

Roman London around 2030. In the meantime his

latest offering is London in the Eighteenth Century:

A Great and Monstrous Thing. John Bancks’s

celebrated poem, which covers all London life in

barely 100 words, is the opening stanza and

perhaps the model for the book. White marshals

London life into five sections comprising 13

chapters, each personalised through linkage to an

individual who is emblematic of the theme. White

thus creates his pantheon of eighteenth century

London, but does it work?

A brief introduction sets the scene and thrusts us

immediately into the ‘size, complexities and dense

obscurities’ of its people, prosperity, poverty and

overwhelming

lack

of

organisation.

Filthy,

magnificent, immense, London was the largest city

in Europe but still sufficiently compact for no part

to be further than one or two miles away from the

countryside, so that in 1782 a German visitor could

climb the dome of St Paul’s and behold “clad in

smiles, those beautiful green hills that skirt the

environs of Paddington and Islington.”

Each chapter is approached through the

experience of an individual selected to represent

the subject matter, a device that adds interest to

the text and also brings coherence to the work as a

whole. Development is described through the eyes

of James Gibbs and Robert Adam, the two Scots

who did much to shape it. Gibbs is best

remembered for St Martins in the Fields, St Barts’

and the development of the Harley Estate, so

striking to contemporaries that Prime Minister

Robert Walpole proclaimed he was quite lost when

visiting it for the first time. The Adam brothers

created Portland Place, Fitzroy Square and the

bottomless pit of loss that was the Adelphi. This

was the age when civic development began in

earnest, with the proliferation of commissioners of

sewers and paving, cleaning and turnpikes but

progress was slow owing to their narrow and

localised powers. The Georgians could also be

myopic; a new hospital might adjoin a sewer and St

James’s Square was graced with a central dunghill.

A city, however finely built, must be peopled and

the following chapters focus on two more

immigrants, Samuel Johnson and Ignatius Sancho.

Blacks, Jews, Europeans, Irish and Scots are fully

and sympathetically treated. London was to a

remarkable extent a city of immigrants, and we

learn how networks and associations grew out of

this diversity. Next, work, and Alderman Beckford

represents commerce which opens up a discussion

of the Port and commerce generally, with the Royal

Exchange ‘buzzing like a hive’. We pass by the

facilitators of commerce – banks, insurers, stock

jobbers – and meet the retailers, centred all over

town from Finsbury Square to Oxford Street where

one observer noted people swimming into shops

‘like shoals’. Industry and labour follow closely.

So far, we have only heard half the story; what

about women? They are present in strength. Eliza

Haywood, the popular novelist, symbolises print,

pictures and, oddly since participation was so

restricted, the professions. Teresa Cornelys, an

early impresario, leads the discussion of London’s

masquerades, pleasure gardens, theatre and opera.

The section on prostitution is, inevitably, focused

on another woman, Martha Stracey, while Mary

Young, known to us only through the Old Bailey

papers, is central to the chapter on crime and

violence, both plebeian and genteel. All this

disorder naturally leads us to police, prisons and

punishment which were then exclusively male

territory. We meet the forceful Fieldings of Bow

Street fame, and we finish our tour with religion

and

charity

(John

Hanway),

politics

and

government (John Wilkes). The author ponders in

the afterword how all the progress during the

eighteenth century yielded deep physical and social

divisions that persisted throughout the nineteenth

century. We thus cover fabric, people, commerce,

arts, civics and charity in a logical yet engaging

order, and by illustrating the parts we gain a fuller

picture of the whole. Altogether a most successful

history, combining a sharp eye for detail with

insight and effective storytelling.

The last offering is Dan Cruickshank’s Secret

History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin

Shaped the Capital. Dan Cruickshank is a well-

known architectural historian and this work, a

study of how the Georgian sex industry shaped

London, can be described as architectural history

meets the low life. This could be an uneasy if not

impossible combination, but Cruickshank knows

his subject and seeks to advance the thesis that

page 13

large chunks of Georgian London were financed by

the proceeds of the sex industry. There are three

parts to this remarkable argument. The first is to

tell us about the Georgian sex industry, and

Cruickshank offers us six chapters on Sex in the

City. This is followed by five chapters on the

architecture of sin, alluringly titled ‘Building on

Vice’ which argue that much of Georgian London

was built or used for vice. This much is persuasive,

and we are introduced to masquerades, coffee

houses and bagnios as well as their sorry

consequences: the lock hospitals, the workhouses

and the burying grounds. However, the author’s

thesis that the riches earned in brothels built large

stretches of Georgian London, most notably

Marylebone, is to put it mildly somewhat far-

fetched. There can be little doubt that much of

eighteenth century Covent Garden, Soho and

Marylebone comprised smart new houses with even

smarter occupants, but it is surely fairer to say that

London was a theatre for sex rather than built on

its proceeds. The flow of finance from trade,

commerce, industry and the professions (no, not

the oldest one) surely accounted for the great bulk

of money that spurred the building of eighteenth

century London. But even if the author only carries

us part way towards his destination we have

enjoyed a voluptuous journey, and learnt a good

deal along the route.

So where does this leave us as we part sadly from

the further shores of this fascinating century? Well,

A Social & Cultural History is dull and didactic but

its initial and social chapters are worth a read. Try

your

library.

White

and

Cruickshank

are

commendable, and in some ways complementary.

Cruickshank’s

approach

in

Secret

History

resembles White’s in London in the Eighteenth

Century in a number of respects. They both convey

the authors’ enthusiasm for the subject and both

authors write with elegance and erudition. Both

histories are centred as much on personalities as

places but also discuss the physical development of

London and explain how it resulted from a number

of disparate factors. They don’t agree on what those

factors were, but we are listening to a learned

dispute and can only gain from this. Cruickshank

is recommended for those who require an entire

book on vice rather than White’s single chapter

although White, whose theme is broader, produces

a more complete portrait. Buy both!

– Simon Morris

l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l

Reviews

London: A View from the Streets, by Anna

Maude, British Museum, 112 pp, 74 illus, 2013,

ISBN 978 0 71412 687 6. £9.99.

Whilst it goes against the grain to mention the

festive season so early, this beautifully produced

little book should be on everyone’s Christmas

present list this year. Published to mark the end of

a three-year project, which was assisted by the

LTS, to catalogue the British Museum’s Crace

collection of London topographical views, the book

aims to provide a glimpse of the changing face of

London between the Great Fire of London in 1666

and the Great Exhibition in 1851.

It is divided into seven sections or themes:

Celebration; Eating and drinking; Shopping;

Pleasure; Traffic and transport; Construction; and

Fire, crime and punishment, each illustrated by

around ten prints or watercolours from the

collection,

occasionally

and

delightfully

supplemented

by

relevant

three-dimensional

objects such as admission tickets, theatre tokens

or ferry tickets. Each illustration is accompanied by

a concise but informative statement of context,

besides the technical details of author, medium,

date, dimensions and BM call number.

Whilst the reader will undoubtedly encounter old

friends, such as Hogarth’s ‘Beer Street’ and ‘Gin

Lane’ or several views by George Scharf or Thomas

Shotter Boys, there is much here that will be new

and unfamiliar to the majority who peruse it, such

as, perhaps, Richard Gilson Reeve’s 1828-30

aquatint after James Pollard of ‘The Royal Mails at

the Angel Inn Islington’ on the birthday of George

IV, celebrated by an illumination on the front

façade of the inn; or an ephemeral etching printed

in situ on the iced-over Thames during the last

ever Thames frost fair in 1814, or Charles

Greville’s 1784 ink and watercolour sketch of ‘Mr

Sheldon’s Ballon on Fire’ or James McNeill

Whistler’s 1878 etching entitled ‘Fish Shop,

Chelsea’ – each reader will have their own

discoveries and favourites.

At a cursory glance it would be possible to

dismiss this as a picture book, but in fact it

delivers a great deal of information in a small

compass. Besides the succinct but very informative

descriptions accompanying each illustration, there

is a four-page introduction that perceptively

summarises the shift in what is depicted over the

two centuries between 1666 and 1851. There is

also a short but carefully chosen list of suggested

further reading at the end of the book, ensuring

that for the newcomer to the subject this attractive

publication can lead on to a greater appreciation

and understanding of the changing face of London

over time.

– Sue Palmer

For a special offer to LTS members of London,

A View from the Streets see p.2

page 14

The Battle for London, by Stephen Porter &

Simon Marsh. Amberley, 2011. 160pp, 43 illus, PB,

ISBN 978 1 44560 574 6. £12.99.

This is a history of the English Civil War as it

affected London, indeed Greater London, for it

touches

Chenies

in

Buckinghamshire,

and

Chilworth in Surrey. It is firmly based on original

sources, so as to notice omissions from Clarendon’s

History of the Rebellion, and of the battle of

Turnham Green from royalist accounts, when

Londoners prevented ‘the sack of London’. It is

informed by a knowledge of military command

structure and tactics, the importance of Kingston

Bridge, and the lie of the land needed for set-piece

battles.Those who have grown up in times of peace

are reminded of the scourge of war, when the White

Tower had 16 cannon trained upon the City, and

London armourers provided 275 sets of armour,

while ten times as many were imported from

Amsterdam.

A maypole in East Smithfield was pulled down

because ‘tumultuous assemblies’ threatened the

security of the Tower. Regiments assembled in

Chelsea heard volleys of musket fire six miles away

in Brentford. Other nuggets of interest are (p.98)

the description of royalist cavalry ‘flurting out’

(making a sudden darting movement to unnerve

the parliamentarian foot). So all told, a very good

account of dramatic times when the monarch was

excluded from his capital.

– Robert Thompson

Life in an Eighteenth Century Country House:

Letters from The Grove. Edited by Peter &

Caroline Hammond. Amberley, 2012. 158pp.

33 b&w and colour illus. ISBN 978 1 44560 865 5.

£12.99.

In 1975-6 the LTS published a facsimile of Thomas

Milne’s land-use map of London of 1800. In the

neighbourhood of Chiswick it shows an unnamed

and not particularly large riverside building

surrounded by a mixture of parkland and paddock,

meadows and enclosed arable land, with market

gardens a little further north. The building was

The Grove. But how rural in feel really were the

surroundings which even then lay only a short

drive away from the urban sprawl of London?

This book provides the answer. Its constituent

parts – dutiful letters from a groom to the absent

owner of the villa, property details and a will –

sound tedious. And yet collectively they provide a

marvellously intimate view of late eighteenth

century life in the vicinity of London. They also,

incidentally, shed light on artistic circles in

England and on the personality represented in one

of the greatest portraits ever to be created of an

English grand tourist: Pompeo Batoni’s portrait of

Humphrey Morice.

The book consists of three parts: the letters of

Will Bishop to his master Morice, whose bad health

had forced him to leave for Italy, written between

August 1783 and Morice’s death almost exactly two

years later; a life of Morice and an account of The

Grove, from its origins to the time of its demolition

in 1929. Appendices are devoted to short notes on

Morice’s associates and friends, on the Batoni

portraits, on Morice’s animals and their medical

treatments, and a transcript of Morice’s will. The

book is embellished with colour and black-and-

white illustrations, genealogical tables and tables

illustrating Morice’s social networks.

Bishop was evidently much more than a mere

groom. He seems to have had responsibility for the

welfare of his master’s animals but also for supplies

for the house, sales of its produce and at least a

say in negotiating the level of parish rates. The

letters deal with the welfare of and incidents

experienced by Morice’s horses and dogs and the

labile relationships between Morice’s outdoor

servants and his kitchen staff; with negotiations

with suppliers (Morice continued to keep a close

eye on the household accounts despite distance

and bad health) and for the settling and payment of

local taxes. The amount of space Morice expected

Bishop to devote to the animals in his letters must

reflect the same preoccupation that had led him to

insist on being painted by Batoni in the company of

one of his hunting dogs a couple of decades earlier.

His will illustrates Morice’s close links with the

Sussex squire, lawyer and antiquary Sir William

Burrell, who was to become his executor and who

in these very years was one of the leading patrons

of

the

Swiss-born

watercolourist,

Samuel

Hieronymous Grimm.

The letters and the will are meticulously edited

with abundant information being provided about

most of the people mentioned and the treatments

for animals that are alluded to. The book as a

whole demonstrates the rural feel of Chiswick and

the rural mentality of at least its working

population in the 1780s, despite its vicinity to

London. It also presents a marvellous picture of life

on a country estate, when its owner and pulsing

heart was absent. There must have been the same

atmosphere for much of the year in greater houses

such as Syon, Osterley or Kenwood. The book is

strongly to be recommended as a way of bringing to

life

Georgian

county

maps,

topographical

watercolours, landscape prints and painted

portraits.

– Peter Barber, British Library

Mainburg-London: Der Altbayer Johann Georg

Scharf (1788-1860) als Bildchronist der

englischen Hauptstadt, by Brigitte Huber.

Schnell & Steiner. 102pp. 65 col. ills. 2012.

ISBN 978 3 79542 567 8. 29.95 euros.

It was the Chairman of this Society, the late Peter

Jackson, who brought the Bavarian artist, George

Scharf, to the notice of the English-speaking world

with his George Scharf’s London: Sketches and

Watercolours of a Changing City, 1820-50 (London:

John Murray 1987). More recently in 2009 interest

page 15

in Scharf was heightened by the Sir John Soane’s

Museum’s exhibition, curated by Jerzy J. Kierkuc-

Bielinski. It was accompanied by an excellent

catalogue, George Scharf: From the Regency Street

to the Modern Metropolis.

In consequence many of us now are wonderfully

familiar with the magical drawings of this

immigrant artist for whom everything was fresh –

peripatetic advertisers, travelling shows, organ

grinders, bakers’ carts and one-man bands. London

was rapidly changing. Scharf produced spirited

views of gas mains and sewers being laid, and the

London & Birmingham Railway and the British

Museum being built. He recorded the Lord Mayor’s

Banquet being eaten and the procession at the

Coronation of George IV. After the destruction by

fire of the Palace of Westminster he drew a

panorama of the ruins.

Scharf had left Bavaria illegally, it seems. In

October 1845, however, he learnt of his brother’s

illness and resolved to return to Bavaria. By the

time he arrived in Mainburg his brother had died.

He decided to stay for a spell and organised an

exhibition of his London lithographs and drawings

in the Munich Art Union. There was plenty of

interest but no-one bought. He made drawings of

people in the streets in Munich, and drew a long

panorama of the city. He also produced a

panorama of Ratisbon/Regensburg taken from the

top of the tower of the Golden Cross Inn where he

was staying. I borrowed it for the Barbican’s

Panoramania! show in 1988, and the staff of the

local archive in Regensburg gallantly helped me

produce a key to it (re-drawn for us by Peter

Jackson). Scharf’s long panoramic watercolour

drawing of the ‘Donaustauf mit der Walhalla’ was a

sensation. He would try to sell it at auction when

back in London. It was bought by a private person

for £3.00. Scharf died in poverty in November 1860.

Until last year most Bavarians were blissfully and

shamelessly unaware of their artist, George Scharf.

The Scharf exhibition that was held at the

Mainburger Heimat und Hopfenmuseum between

May and December 2012 was therefore an eye-

opener. The author of the meticulously-researched

catalogue reviewed here is Dr Brigitte Huber, a

Munich art historian specialising in the nineteenth

century who works at the Munich City Archives.

– Ralph Hyde

The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’

London, by Judith Flanders, Atlantic Books, 2012.

ISBN 978 1 84887 795 5, hbk 424 pages, £25.

Some ten years ago Judith Flanders treated us to

The Victorian House, which walked us through

nineteenth-century domestic life from basement to

attic; now she takes us through the front door to

view the wider world. The bicentenary of the Great

Scribbler’s birth calls for, if not compels, a Dickens

theme to catch the eye and command space in the

booksellers’ shop windows. But does it work, and is

Dickens an appropriate filter through which to

examine

nineteenth

century London in all its

variety? Dickens is a

rich sauce, and a book

that draws on his plots

and characters risks

drowning any freshness

of

thought

in

an

outpouring of sentiment

and whimsy.

The

Victorian

City

deftly avoids this pitfall;

it

is

a

convincing

narrative of mid-century

London

that

successfully

uses

Dickens,

and

other

authors, as points of reference and always with a

light touch. Judith Flanders employs Dickens’

characters to illustrate her points and his pungent

descriptions as mise en scene while making sure

they never dominate the text. In short, this is

Dickens without the Dickensian.

The book is engaging and well written; the author

draws on a remarkably wide range of sources to tell

us, as the title promises, about everyday life in

mid-Victorian London. It comprises 15 chapters

marshalled under four broad headings of Waking,

Staying Alive, Enjoyment and what might be

termed the Darker Side. The individual chapters

take it in turn to acquaint us with topics such as

travel, markets and street selling, theatre and

violence. There is the inevitable chapter on

slumming but no wallowing in low life; if the book

has one theme it is not poverty but the prevalence

of mass industriousness at a time when all must

work or else starve. This is no compilation of

commonplaces and almost every page contains

something unfamiliar or startling while each

chapter is perceptive and informative, offering an

overview or making connections such as between

the decline of street selling and the growth of

transport.

There are, however, rather too many points where

you wish the editor had paid a bit more attention.

The period from 7am to midnight is 17 not 15

hours (unless Victorian clocks worked differently).

Holborn Hill used not to be in Islington and

Smithfield does not lie half a mile northeast of St

Paul’s. The illustrations are all misnumbered or

worse; Plate 17 does not show calico oversleeves

unless worn by horses, nor is there a milkmaid in

Plate 1. And the Scharf illustrations are reproduced

so small as to be useless.

This is a shame – the author probably does not

want her readers to squint at well-chosen

illustrations or to burst out laughing at the wrong

places. But this does not detract from the fact that

Judith Flanders has written The Victorian City as

well as her favourite illustrator, George Scharf,

drew – accurate, observant, with an eye for detail

and immensely evocatively.

– Simon Morris

page 16

Victorian Bloomsbury, by Rosemary Ashton, Yale

University Press, 2012. ISBN 978 0 30015 447 4,

380pp, £25.

This is a marvellous read. I would recommend

Rosemary Ashton’s Victorian Bloomsbury to anyone

interested in the history of nineteenth-century

London – in fact to anyone interested in nineteenth

century Britain. Professor Ashton was the director

of the Bloomsbury Project at University College

London from 2007-11 and the author of several

highly respected biographies of Victorian writers.

She knows her subject intimately and provides a

lengthy bibliography and numerous footnotes for

those who wish to pursue aspects of her story in

more detail, but her scholarship is lightly worn and

her enthusiasm for the men and women who made

Bloomsbury is infectious.

The title of the book is slightly misleading for this

story begins in the reign of George IV with the

creation of University College. This great institution

was an important element of the reform of British

society that characterised the period. At last young

men who were not members of the Church of

England could experience higher education; from

1878 women too could take degrees. The battles of

the early years of UCL –

derided by the

establishment, struggling for funds, fighting

internally over doctrinal matters – were echoed in

the histories of a whole series of smaller

institutions over the following decades. Bloomsbury

was the home of the first university medical school,

the first hospital for sick children, the first

university college for women (Bedford College), the

Working Men’s College, the Female School of

Design; it also saw the creation of the utilitarian

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and

the growth of many religious groups seeking

spiritual reform – the Catholic Apostolic Church in

Gordon Square and the Swedenborgian Society in

Bloomsbury Square are two contrasting examples.

The people who poured their energy into such

projects

were

charismatic

figures

like

the

millenarian preacher Edward Irving whose church

in Regent Square attracted a congregation of

thousands in the 1820s, Elizabeth Garrett

Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in

Britain, who battled to establish training for female

medical students and to set up a hospital for

women staffed by women, and William Morris

whose passions for socialism and art were

combined in ‘The Firm’ that operated first in Red

Lion Square and then in Queen Square.

Is the topography of London relevant to this

history? Rosemary Ashton thinks it is. She points

out how strict regulation by the Bedford Estate,

freeholders of most of Bloomsbury, preserved its

essentially residential character for most of the

century and maintained the architectural quality of

those institutional buildings that it allowed. The

streets in eastern Bloomsbury, however, were

owned by the Skinners’ Company, the Foundling

Estate and other landowners, and their character is

far more varied. In the Victorian period this area

saw much desperate poverty and the reform-

minded

individuals

who

clustered

around

University College and the British Museum

(founded in the 1750s but revitalised from the

1820s onwards) were inspired to create institutions

to help those whom they saw in need. Among the

most energetic was Mary Ward, a highly popular

novelist, whose ‘settlement’ in Tavistock Place – a

fine Arts and Crafts building – offered after-school

and Saturday classes for children, free lectures on

practical subjects for adults and teaching for

disabled children. The success of this venture led

eventually to such facilities becoming part of the

education system nationally.

– Sheila O’Connell

Jonathan Carr’s Bedford Park, by D. W.

Budworth, Bedford Park Society 2012.

ISBN 978 0 95707 023 3, 172pp.

This admirable volume is the product of meticulous

research principally in the Metropolitan Deeds

Registry, local authority archives (excepting

reclusive Hounslow) and those of the Ecclesiastical

Commissioners. Inspired by the need to correct and

augment T. and A. Harper Smith’s The Building of

Bedford Park, and based on T. A. Greeves’s

classification of house types in Bedford Park, Dr

Budworth has produced a definitive study of the

sequence of building in this early garden suburb,

sorting out the changes of street names and

numbering of houses, and giving all his original

sources.

In a brief history of the estate, Budworth stresses

the importance of the opening of the London and

South Western Railway’s line to Richmond, with a

station at Turnham Green opened in 1869, and

traces the rise to fashionability of Bedford Park; its

slow decline – with its large houses sub-divided in

the 1920s and ’30s; its suffering at the hands of a

very left-wing regime ruling Acton Council after the

Second World War, determined to maximise

housing provision; and the recent revival of its

fortunes, stimulated by the sterling work of the

Bedford Park Society. Among factors contributing

to its decline, Budworth comments on the advent of

the motor car on roads designed for light horse-

driven traffic. He examines the importance of

Jonathan Carr’s role in the design and construction

of the suburb, consciously conceived as a

community with church, club, pub and stores at

the hub of a radial layout. He notes Carr’s skill in

piecing together some 113 acres spread over four

parishes with their variety of later nineteenth

century administrative bodies (for which he

displayed a certain contempt), and his management

of complex financial arrangements, with several

layers of mortgages not unusual.

Though Carr’s Bedford Park Limited was wound

up in 1886, there were subsequent developments,

including the introduction of mansion flats in 1900,

and the building up of another 13 acres, including

page 17

Esmond and Ramilies Roads, by the unusually

successful Turnham Green Estate Company 1897-

1903, of which the share capital was fully repaid

and a profit of nine shillings a share paid out when

the company was wound up in 1908.

Among the important tables of houses and streets

that Budworth has compiled, invaluable tools for

further studies, his illustrated listing of houses by

the types distinguished by Tom Greeves is of the

greatest general interest; though essentially for the

reference shelf, the book, while not of pocket size,

is not too heavy to carry, and is an invaluable

companion for a walk around Bedford Park.

– M. H. Port

Anglican Church-Building in London 1946-2012,

by Michael Yelton and John Salmon, Reading,

Spire Books, 2013. ISBN 978 1 90496 544 2.

329pp, many illustrations.

The fascination of Iain Sinclair’s work, and among

its many irritations, is that he explores parts of

London you always meant to visit and never have.

Similarly, Yelton and Salmon have achieved the

almost impossible in charting every Anglican church

built in Greater London since 1945, following an

earlier book on those of the inter-war years. They

survey 253 churches, many reconstructed after war

damage and others built in new housing suburbs.

Some have already themselves been demolished and

replaced. The project’s scale is a reminder that only

the 1850s and 1860s exceeded the 1950s and

1960s for church building. Yet, sadly, what could

have been a fascinating study is dissipated in a

tepid writing style and Spire’s characteristically

dispiriting production values. There is no reason

why the book should be so appallingly edited and

designed despite funding from the Anglo-Catholic

History Society.

In

a

valuable

but

confusingly

organised

introduction, Yelton highlights the exceptional

number of churches built in these years by the

Diocese of Southwark. The borough of Southwark

itself is perhaps the single most rewarding area for

an investigation out of the armchair, with 23 new

churches

built

despite

central

London’s

depopulation in these years. This over-provision

has since proved extremely problematic. St

Crispin’s, Bermondsey, by Thomas F. Ford had a

single incumbent through its life and closed in

1999. Curiously, Yelton gives scant information on

listing, which saved this building from demolition;

it is now a nursery, with its sanctuary fittings and

a mural by Hans Feibusch surviving if marooned by

the new use.

St Crispin’s typifies the large number of

unexceptional churches by a few experienced

church specialists, including not only Ford but also

Ralph Covell, David Nye, J. J. Crowe and Romilly

Craze, architects only slowly being re-appraised

and who had close links with particular dioceses.

These are Yelton’s heroes, for this is a book above

all about buildings from the 1950s when the new

liturgy bringing celebrant and congregation closer

together was being explored only cautiously, most

notably by N. F. Cachemaille-Day. Yelton is critical

of the acclaim afforded Maguire and Murray’s St

Paul, Bow Common, work of a younger generation,

but whose centralised plan had relatively little

influence in London as few new churches were built

here thereafter.

There is a vast amount of information here, most

of it drawn from the Buildings of England.

Regrettably, there are also inaccuracies. Visiting St

Mary, Isleworth, for the first time in many years, I

looked for an update. The text identifies the key

features, though it does not recognise the

importance of the rounded arch in the work of its

architect, H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, and it helpfully

warned that there had been a reordering. But

imagine my horror to find photographs of the wrong

church. John Salmon is a decent photographer,

and better reproduction would reward the more

architecturally ambitious churches; a larger format

suddenly appears in the entries for Tower Hamlets,

seemingly randomly.

The book’s strength is in recording the modest

brick boxes of London’s furthest outskirts, and

revealing interiors that are seldom open. Yet Yelton

rarely allows himself to enjoy a building, exceptions

being Ford’s All Saints, Shooters Hill; Covell’s St

Alban, Mottingham; the quiet dignity of Curtis

Green, Son and Lloyd’s All Saints, Spring Park, and

Sebastian Comper’s St Helen, North Kensington, an

interior of considerable scale and ambition for

1954-6 by an architect doomed to live in the

shadow of his remarkable father. Sadly, this is a

reference book for the shelves of the converted; it

will do little to expand greater interest in a

surprisingly rewarding subject.

– Elain Harwood

The Tower of London, the biography,

by Stephen Porter, Stroud, Amberley, 2012.

ISBN 978 1 44560 381 0, £20.

Can there really be a need for yet another history of

the Tower? Nigel Jones’s substantial volume was

published only 18 months ago, while Edward Impey

and Geoffrey Parnell’s definitive history appeared at

the

Millennium.

Porter

gallops

through

chronological account of the Tower, with an

attractive collection of colour and black and white

illustrations, in a bid for the popular market. The

early periods are covered fairly thoroughly, with the

last 150 years crammed into the final 20 pages,

leaving a rather breathless overall effect.

The traditions and folklore of the Tower are

covered briefly at various points – beefeaters,

ravens, menagerie, ghosts, executions, escapes,

torture implements and Crown Jewels. Porter even

manages to squeeze in some brief passages on the

Tower in historical fiction. The price is steep for the

potential readership – better wait for the

paperback.

– David Webb

page 18

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom:

History, Art, Architecture, edited by Chris Miele.

Merrell, 2010. ISBN 978 1 85894 508 8. 223pp,

£19.95 (paperback) & £35 (hardback).

Since 2009 the old Middlesex Guildhall in

Parliament Square has been home to one of the

three ‘pillars of state’ – the Supreme Court of the

United Kingdom, appropriately close to the other

two pillars, Parliament and the Executive. The book

is a mine of information about the physical

development of this centre of English, British and

Empire governance, with excellent photographs and

a fascinating array of maps and planning concept

drawings. It includes chapters by acknowledged

experts: the late Lord Bingham of Cornhill, on Law

Lords and Justice; Dr Alex Bremner on Supreme

Court building in other Common Law countries;

Peter Cormack on the building’s sculpture and

decorative art; Fabyan Evans on his memories of

working in the building when it was a Crown Court

centre; Hugh Feilden (of Feilden+Mawson) on the

design of the court; Dame Brenda Hale on the

development of the site from its days as a county

hall; and Jeremy Musson on the architecture. Chris

Miele, the editor, writes on the development of

Parliament Square over the centuries.

Coffee table-sized books sometimes receive rather

dismissive comments, as if size abrogates content.

But this one is well produced and should prove of

great interest to all LTS members. The Supreme

Court is open to the public, free, between 9.30am

and 4.30pm daily on weekdays (for further

information

see

www.supremecourt.gov.uk).

Visitors can take refreshments in the three-storyed,

glass-ceilinged cafeteria, where copies of this

publication are currently available at reduced

prices (£10 and £25 for the hardback edition).

– Mike Wicksteed

Transforming King’s Cross, Various Authors,

Merrell, 2012. ISBN 978 1 85894 587 3, 160pp,

£40.

Change at King’s Cross, published in 1990, took

stock of what had happened to the array of historic

railway buildings that covered the enormous site

straddling the Regent’s Canal and running nearly a

mile north from Pentonville Road. Twenty years

later much of the change has happened: the line to

Paris has arrived, St Pancras is renewed and the

railway lands are being transformed, a vast

building site for houses, offices and hotels. King’s

Cross, together with St Pancras and Euston

stations, is the nearest London ever came to a

continental Hauptbahnhof. Of this great Victorian

triumvirate, Euston fell to the Macmillan winds of

change while St Pancras and King’s Cross survive,

rejuvenated and resplendent.

Transforming King’s Cross is a handsome study of

just one part of this massive work in the heart of

London, the restoration of Lewis Cubitt’s King’s

Cross station. There is a little history, well penned

by Peter Hall, but the weight of the work is in the

building process, with the focus on the design and

construction of the magnificent new Western

Concourse along with the restoration of the train

shed and the flanking Eastern and Western

Ranges. Anyone who has ever made their way to

the Edinburgh train will recall the disagreeable

experience of elbowing through the cramped and

crowded Sixties excrescence that fronted the

station. This is now swept away and King’s Cross

has acquired a magnificent new entrance in the

form of the wonderfully airy Western Concourse,

whose massive curved canopy combines the height

and light of New York’s Grand Central station with

the sinuous structural lines of the new terminals at

Madrid’s Barajas airport.

Principally a photographic record, this book

shows how adequate funding can achieve the all-

but-impossible – a fine restoration of a Victorian

building and the addition of startling yet functional

modern architecture. King’s Cross is, as the

authors assert, now ‘unmasked’ with later and

unsympathetic additions stripped away and the

true character of the building revealed and, indeed,

enhanced.

– Simon Morris

l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l

page 19

Circumspice (see p.4)

In this view, from halfway across London Bridge, it

looks threatening and imminent, but in fact it’s a

mile and a quarter away to the south on the

further side of the Elephant. Any move advancing

triffid-like to engulf Bankside can be ruled out for

the present.

The building – the 43-storey Strata tower by

architects BFLS – is regarded by many as, if not a

threat to public safety, then certainly a blot on the

south London skyline. It won Building Design’s

Carbuncle Cup in 2010 against strong competition,

“for services to greenwash, urban impropriety and

sheer breakfast-extracting ugliness”. It was, said

the judges, “the ugliest tall building yet constructed

in London”. One nominator said he moved away

from south London because he couldn’t stand

looking at it.

But it has its supporters, including many who

live in its 408 flats with their floor to ceiling

windows and dramatic views. The judges’ reference

to ‘greenwash’ alludes to the distinctive wind

turbines (the three eyes) at the top of the building

which potentially satisfy 8% of its energy needs.

But what about all the carbon resources used to

provide its inessential exterior trim? they asked.

Nonetheless, Strata is an undoubted landmark,

recognised if not yet loved by passengers stuck on

trains approaching London Bridge station – itself

now

the

subject

of

huge

and

unsettling

redevelopment. By the time that is finished in

2018, maybe the 2010 carbuncle will be taken for

granted.

– Tony Aldous

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