Late 20th Century Sculpture in the City of London – The Final Part

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I am not very good at completing a series of posts on a specific subject, but today I have managed to complete the series on the 1994, Department of Planning of the Corporation of London booklet with the title of “Late 20th Century Sculpture in the City of London”.

You can find the first post which looks at the booklet here, and the second post by clicking here.

The aim of the booklet was to highlight the increase in number and diversity of type, and how public sculpture added to the interest and enjoyment of public spaces, and I started the series of posts to see if I could find all those listed in 1994, or whether some had been lost in the past 32 years.

I completed the majority of sites in the first two posts, but I still had those in the east of the City and around the Broadgate development left to find, so on a day with some lovely sunny weather, I set out to find sites 26 to 38 as shown in the following map from the booklet:

In this post, they are in the order I walked rather than the numerical order as in the map, but I have given the numbers for each sculpture so you can find the location on the map, and I am starting with:

35. Mincing Lane, Minster Court, Three Bronze Horses, Althea Wynne, 1991

Minster Court is a rather distinctive office complex, and becoming more unique as surrounding offices are rebuilt as glass and steel.

Minster Court consists of three interconnected office block, built between 1987 and 1993 and designed by architects Gollins, Melvin and Ward Partnership.

As well as their overall design, a distinctive feature is the rose coloured Brazilian marble which covers the buildings, giving them a dark pinkish colour.

The main entrance from Mincing Lane is up a flight of steps to a wide open space, where the three bronze horses stand on plinths looking down the steps.

The sculpture, Althea Kathleen Wynne was born in 1936 and died in 2012. The three horses at Minster Court demonstrate her claim that she had been “deeply influenced by my love of early classical sculpture”, and that the “Greeks also had an understanding of animals from which I draw some of my inspiration”, which can clearly be seen in her Minster Court horses:

A plaque on one of the plinths records the name of the sculptor and also the layout of the three buildings, with arrows which I assume point to the entrances, although it may be a challenge to find those entrances given that there are no other reference points such as streets:

The Three Bronze Horses by Althea Wynne are a stand out feature of Minster Court, and hopefully the three buildings have a long term future, although the size of the land they occupy must be a tempting opportunity for another large, tall City tower.

The next location is:

36. Seething Lane Gardens, Samuel Pepys, Karin Jonzen, 1983

Seething Lane Gardens are the latest iteration of gardens that have stood on this space. The original gardens were closed in 2012 as part of the redevelopment of 10 Trinity Square, and reopened in 2018 as an enlarged garden following the inclusion of a closed service road into the re-landscaped space.

The bust of Samuel Pepys was moved to the centre of the garden as part of the redevelopment, and he can be seen on a pillar, at the centre and end of the path leading from Seething Lane:

The bust of Pepys is by Karin Jonzen, who has a Swedish name as she was born in London in 1914 to Swedish parents:

A sculptor all her life, although during the Second World War, she worked in Civil Defence as an ambulance driver based in Spitalfields.

The link between Samuel Pepys and Seething Lane Gardens is that in July 1660, the Pepys household moved into a house which was part of the Navy office buildings in Seething Lane, roughly on the spot of the gardens.

As part of the redesign and redevelopment of the gardens, sculptor Alan Lamb designed a number of stones which are set in the walkways throughout the gardens, with each stone depicting something relevant to Pepys life in London.

The following photos show just a few of these brilliant stones, starting with a map of London, including St. Paul’s Cathedral as it was before the 1666 Great Fire of London:

And the Great Fire is also illustrated on one of the stones:

One of Pepys’s responses to the Great Fire is shown in a rather brilliant paving slab.

As the fire raged across the City, Pepys recorded in his diary “And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.”, and the Parmazan cheese, wine bottles and some papers are shown in a box on a paving slab:

As well as the Great Fire, the other significant event in both Pepys and the life of London in the 1660s was the Plaque of 1665, and this is also illustrated in a couple of the paving slabs:

In the above illustration, a plaque doctor is shown wearing what at the time was believed to be a protective form of clothing. He is carrying an hour glass, which I assume is a reference to time. Next to him is a skull and crossbones on top of a spade, which could refer to the burial of the dead, and at his feet is a rat, which carried the fleas that transmitted the plaque, and a detailed illustration of one of the fleas is shown in another paving slab:

The Navy Office building:

Trinitas and the illustration of a ship is probably a reference to Pepys involvement with Trinity House:

As you walk out of the gardens towards the south, there is a paving stone that looks as if a large part of the top layer of the stone has been worn away, however the image is meant to be viewed as you enter the gardens, so turning round reveals a profile of Pepys in stone:

When you look north along Seething Lane, with the gardens to your right, it is hard to imagine just how much redevelopment took place before the new gardens opened.

In 2015, Museum of London Archaeology carried out a major excavation of the site, and their finds included “chalk-walled cellars, cess pits, animal remains and a well, perhaps the well that Pepys himself used.”.

Their news release about the excavation included a photo showing the site excavation below street level, with the extensive brick walls of the cellars of the buildings that once occupied the site.

Compare the photo on the MOLA website at https://www.mola.org.uk/discoveries/news/chalk-and-cheese-samuel-pepys-ten-trinity-square with the following photo of the street today with the gardens on the right.

I have no idea if they are, however I really do hope that those brick walls shown in the MOLA photo were left in place and are still below Seething Lane Gardens for future generations to discover.

To find the next sculpture, I headed south to try and find:

37. Tower Place, Bowring Building, The Hammer Thrower, John Robinson, 1973

After a look around Tower Place, I could not find any evidence of the Hammer Thrower.

The Hammer Thrower dates from 1973 and was part of the previous office development across the site which stands to the south of All Hallows by the Tower, and to the west of the Tower of London.

This is Tower Place today:

The 1994 booklet “Late 20th Century Sculpture in the City of London” includes the following image of the Hammer Thrower:

I cannot find out what happened to the Tower Place Hammer Thrower, but assume it was moved or lost when the previous development was demolished to make way for the new, although I doubt the sculpture would have been destroyed.

There is another Hammer Thrower by John Robinson, in Melbourne, Australia, which looks to be identical to the copy that was in Tower Place. The Melbourne sculpture can be seen by clicking here. There is another copy of the work in the atrium of the United States Sports Academy in Daphne, Alabama.

From Tower Place, I headed to:

38. Goodman’s Yard, Vortex

The listing in the booklet does not include the name of the sculptor or the date of commission / installation, just the location of Goodman’s Yard and the name of the work, Vortex.

Goodman’s Yard is the street that runs between the Minories and the junction of Mansell Street and Prescot Street, just north of the railway viaduct from Fenchurch Street Station.

Vortex is rather well hidden, but in the centre of the following photo, there is a round feature, filled with bushes:

Once you get up close, a small part of Votex can be seen between the bushes:

The best view of Vortex is from the side away from the street, where there is a gap in the bushes, and Vortex can be seen with the rather wonderful Ibex House in the background:

The City of London Corporation does not have any information on the sculptor or the date of Vortex, and I cannot find anything online.

To illustrate my concerns about the errors and hallucinations of AI, I put the following into Google’s search box “who created the vortex sculpture in goodman’s yard London” as I was trying to find any information on the work. At the top of the search results was Google’s AI overview, pasted below:

Google’s AI has confused the Goodman’s Yard Vortex with another work of the same name.

You will see in the answer that Google is referencing IanVisits website, but if you look at the page, it is about a totally different work, but with the same name, and in IanVisits page (click here to visit), there is no reference to Goodman’s Yard, so Google’s AI has incorrectly joined the other Vortex with the one in Goodman’s Yard.

I did wonder whether there was a Goodman’s Yard north of Spitalfield’s Market, but could not find one, and the other Vortex is in Lamb Street.

What make this worse is that Google’s AI attributes this answer to IanVisits, which is a really good, accurate website, so if you just read the AI answer rather than dig a little deeper, and check the page, you would assume it to be true.

Anyway, AI rant over, and from Goodman’s Yard, I headed to the next location, and walked through Aldgate Square, next to St. Botolph Without, which illustrated just how good the City can look on a sunny day in the spring:

From Aldgate Square, I continued north to find:

34. Cutlers Gardens, The Cnihtengild, Denys Mitchell, 1990

The Cnihtengild is a magnificent work in Devonshire Square, and although it has moved around the local area since 1990, it is now in a very prominent position:

The work was unveiled on the 21st November 1990 by Sir Alexander Graham, the Lord Mayor of London at the time, and was created by blacksmith Denys Mitchell, who worked in Kelso, Scotland.

It was commissioned by Standard Life who originally had offices next to the work.

The Cnihtengild from the side:

The coat that is draped over the horse has blue glass roundels which were made by glass artist Bibi Smit.

To the rear, at the base of the horse is a plaque:

The plaque reads:

“King Edgar (959-75) granted this derelict land to thirteen knights on condition that they each perform three duels, one on land, one below ground, one on the water. These feats having been achieved the King gave the knights, or cnihtengild, certain rights over a piece of land from Aldgate to the place where the bars now are, towards the east, on both sides of the lane, and extended it towards the gate now known as Bishopsgate in the north to the house of William the First, and in the south to the Thames as far as a horseman riding into the river at low tide can throw a lance.”

This story comes from what appears to have been a grant of land in the 10th century to a guild of English “cnihtas”, a middle English word , with several possible meanings including a boy, a servant or attendant, or a male of high military rank.

The land that the guild held rights over was roughly the area of Portsoken ward, which John Noorthouck in “A New History of London Including Westminster and Southwark”, (1773) wrote that:

“This ward is recorded to have been a guild granted by King Edgar, between 7 and 800 years ago, to 13 valiant knights; and was then named Knighten guild: which grant was afterward confirmed by a charter or deed of Edward the confessor.”

The guild held the land until 1115, when the descendants of the knights gave the land to the priory of the Holy Trinity within Aldgate, which was located around St. James’ Passage which is just to the east of St. Botolph without Aldgate.

The Cnihtengild is a wonderful sculpture, and the story behind the sculpture provides a link back to London in the late Anglo-Saxon period.

Continuing a little further north to the very modern development of Broadgate to find:

33. Broadgate, Bishopsgate, Woman’s Head, Bruce McClean, 1993

This work is alongside Bishopsgate by bus stop H, and is formed from bent metal rods, and painted in multiple colours.

It is the work of Bruce McClean, a London based Scottish sculptor who was born in 1944, and it was made by the company Welding Mobility Ltd in West Drayton from a scaled down plastic model.

What is strange about this work is that the name has changed. The 1994 booklet refers to the work as “Woman’s Head”, and it is a forms a modernist outline of a woman’s face, however the stone set below the work confirms the date and the sculptor, but uses the name EYE-I which is the name that every other reference to the work also uses:

Image from the booklet showing the sculpture and confirming the name used in the list:

Whether the name used in the booklet was just a working name when the sculpture was being created, and it was not updated when installed with the final name, or whether there was a name change, I have no idea.

It is an interesting and colourful work, in a very different style to the majority of other works of sculpture across the City of London, which adds interest to the City’s streets.

The remaining works from the list are within the Broadgate development, so from Bishopsgate, I headed in between the office blocks.

32. Broadgate, Exchange Square, Broadgate Venus, Fernando Botero, 1989

You cannot miss this large work, which can be found in the Exchange Square – a unique City square as it is at the end of the Liverpool Street train shed, and provides an elevated look down onto the station’s platforms.

I have photographed this sculpture before, but when I arrived in March 2026, Broadgate Venus had gone, with hoardings and fencing lining the area where she was to have been found:

I photographed Broadgate Venus a couple of years ago as part of a post about Liverpool Street Station, which you can find here. The photo is below:

Broadgate Venus is a 5 tonne patinated bronze, created for Broadgate in 1989 by the Columbian artist and sculptor Fernando Botero, who specialises in large, exaggerated figures.

As with so much of the City, there is a considerable amount of building and refurbishment work going on around Broadgate, and I hope that Broadgate Venus has just been moved temporarily, whilst work along the eastern side of Exchange Square takes place.

Exchange Square on a sunny, March day:

From Exchange Square you can view the work being carried out on the roof of Liverpool Street Station, which includes replacing all the glass panels, and restoring the wooden valance, which is the decorative wooden panels hanging down from the roof of the station at the Exchange Square end of the sheds.

As can be seen in the following photo of the roof from a couple of years ago, it certainly does need a clean up and should look much better when the new glass panels are fully installed:

26. Broadgate, 1 Finsbury Avenue, Rush Hour, George Segal, 1983 – 87

This is where the number sequence gets out of order, as in the 1994 booklet, Rush Hour is listed as being at 1 Finsbury Avenue, however it is now in Exchange Square.

The title of the work, and its appearance should be self explanatory and is appropriate given its location, as it shows a group of City workers hurrying home after work.

It was created by the American Sculptor, George Segal, who appears to have created similiar works for other cities.

31. Broadgate, Exchange Square, Family Group, Xavier Corbero

Family Group on the map, is shown to the west of Exchange Square, but this area was also protected by hoardings, and from Exchange Square there was no view of this work.

To get to the next location, I walked along Appold Street which runs along the western side of Broadgate, and I found Family Group peering just above a blue hoarding:

Whilst the booklet does not provide a date, Family Group appears to date from 1991, and is made from basalt stone by the Catalan artist Xavier Corbero, who was an important Spanish sculptor, working until his death in 2017, and was known for monumental public sculpture.

The booklet shows Family Group as it will hopefully be seen again when surrounding building works are complete:

28. Broadgate, Bellerophon taming Pegasus, Jacques Lipchitz, 1966

This work should be somewhere withing the Broadgate complex, however the location shown on the map is within the large area of building works on the western side of Broadgate, so I did not have any luck in finding the sculpture, which is probably somewhere within or around the building shown in the following photo:

The following photo from the booklet shows what Bellerophon taming Pegasus looked like in the early 1990s:

Whst is unusual about this work is that the booklet dates it to 1966, much older than the other works around Broadgate, and older than the Broadgate development, so it was at another location.

Hopefully it will reappear within Broadgate.

30. Broadgate, Hare and Bell, Barry Flanagan

Hare and Bell is in the centre of the Broadgate Complex, and a leaping hare, frequently above a bell, was a common theme of many of Welsh sculptor Barry Flanagan’s work.

In most of the hare and bell works, a bell is sitting on three posts, with the open end of the bell facing the ground, with a hare leaping over the top. In the Broadgate example, the bell is on its side, with the hare flying above.

The work is in an interesting location, sitting within a square of office buildings , opposite the almost brutalist semi-circle of restaurants and bars:

The City of London Corporation booklet does not include a date for Hare and Bell, however there is an excellent website on the work of Barry Flanagan run by his estate, and the website provides the date of 1988 for Broadgate’s Hare and Bell:

Close to the Hare and Bell is the following:

27. Broadgate, Fulcrum, Richard Serra

Fulcrum is probably the largest of the 38 sculptures listed in the 1994 booklet. It looks big from ground level, but much of this area has two walking levels among the office blocks, and walking to the edge and looking down the steps reveals the size of this sculpture:

The sculpture is 55 feet tall, and is the work of American sculptor Richard Serra, who seems to have specialised in large works consisting of sheets or blocks of steel.

The booklet does not include a date for Fulcrum, but it seems to have been installed in 1987, and has changed position very slightly since the original installation, which included lowering the work as surrounding offices were being redeveloped.

29. Broadgate, Ganapathi and Davi, Stephen Cox

This is the one that got away.

As can be seen in the map from the booklet, number 29, Ganapathi and Davi, is shown as being to the south of Exchange Square, and after as much walking as possible given building works in the area, I could not find it.

It seems to have been relocated to the north of Exchange Square, on the opposite side of Primrose Street in Broadgate Plaza.

If you click here, you should go to street view on Google Maps with a view of Ganapathi and Davi.

The stone for this work came from Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu, India, and the name comes from the Indian elephant god Ganesha, and Devi, a female Hindu goddess.

Note that in the booklet, the last part of the name is spelt Davi, whilst the correct spelling is Devi, as confirmed on the sculptor’s, Stephen Cox website, which also states that the work dates from 1988.

When I am next in the area, I will photograph the work and add to the post.

Near Liverpool Street Station, Infinite Accumulation, Yayoi Kusama, 2024

The purpose of this post has been to revisit the snapshot of sculpture in the City of London, as it was in 1994.

It has been good that the majority of works are still to be found, over 30 years later, and what is also encouraging is that whilst walking the streets of the City, other works have been added since the 1994 publication.

One of the recent additions is Infinite Accumulation by Yayoi Kusama, which was installed in 2024 after works for the Elizabeth Line had completed outside Liverpool Street Station, a short distance away from the Fulcrum sculpture. The work was commissioned as part of the Crossrail Art Foundation’s public art programme:

Yayoi Kusam is a Japanese artist who is known for her works consisting of massed, repeated polka dots, and Infinite Accumulation is 10 metres high, 12 metres wide and 100 metres in length, so is one of the largest works in the City.

Completing the List

There are three I have so far missed from previous posts:

23. London Wall, The Gardener, Karin Jonzen, 1972

The Gardener is in the space between Brewers Hall and London Wall, and was commissioned by the Trees, Gardens and City Open Spaces Committee of the Corporation of London.

The Gardener is shown kneeling down on the ground, with one hand on his knee and the other is smoothing the ground having planted a bulb.

This is the third work by Karin Jonzen in the 1994 booklet, as she was also responsible for the bust of Pepys in Seething Lane as well as Beyond Tomorrow in Guildhall Plaza.

24, Cornhill, James Henry Greathead, James Butler, 1993 – I wrote about this sculpture in my post on the Bank Junction, which you can find here.

25. Royal Exchange Buildings, Paul Julius Reuter, M. Black, 1976

The statue of Paul Julius Reuter is appropriate for the centre of the City of London, as the company he founded was instrumental in providing the City with what was needed to grow into a global finance and trading centre – news and information.

The wording on the plinth reads:

“Paul Julius Reuter. Born 1816 Kassel, Germany. Died 1899 Nice, France. Founded the world news organisation that bears his name in No. 1 Royal Exchange Buildings in the City of London, near this site, on 14 October 1851”.

Paul Julius Reuter was a German immigrant to London. In Germany he had been running an early form of financial news service which relied on the telegraph and even carrier pigeons, to distribute financial information such as the prices of stocks.

In 1851, he set-up an office in the City of London, and using a new telegraph cable between London and Paris, started transmitting stock market quotations and news between the two cities.

Reuter established the company known as Reuters, and as submarine cables and radio services allowed global communication, Reuters built a global network of journalists providing news and financial information, so as the plaque states, he was “First to spread world news worldwide”.

Reuters struggled somewhat in the early years of the 21st century, and in 2008, Reuters merged with the Canadian media organisation Thompson, to form Thomson Reuters.

Reuters had a presence close to St Bride’s, with offices at 85 Fleet Street, in the building designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, and completed in 1938 for the Press Association.

Summary

It has been an interesting exercise to walk the City to find the 38 works, to see what has survived, what has been lost or moved.

Many works are still in prominent positions, however some, such as Vortex in Goodman’s Yard are semi-concealed and do not look as if they are cared for, or in a location which attracts any attention

The City of London Corporation booklet is a unique record and the Corporation does not appear to still be publishing such booklets. They do have a Sculpture in the City Family Trial, which is a multi-media app that can be downloaded to a smart phone.

There is also the Sculpture in the City initiative which is an annual event that installs sculpture across the City, but these tend to be temporary works rather than permanent, which were the type featured in the 1994 booklet.

To summarise my three posts, tracing the works listed in 1994, the following table lists all 38. If there is nothing in the Comments column, then the work is still in the location in the original booklet, otherwise I have added a comment:

If you want a theme for a walk, then locating these works makes a really enjoyable walk around the City.

The View from the Garden at 120

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Back in October, in a post on two London churches and a Battersea Gas Holder (no connection between them – just some random features of London), I wrote about All Hallows Staining and the 50 Fenchurch development. I was rather frustrated that you could not get a view of the tower of the church on stilts as the main development went on around the ancient remains of All Hallows Staining.

A comment from a reader (thanks Brian J) informed that a view of the building site and the church was available from the viewing area at 120 Fenchurch Street – one of the new public viewing spaces on top of a recent City development.

The Garden at 120, to give the space its correct name, has been on my list of places to visit, but stupidly I had not made the connection between the viewing area and the building site directly in front.

I fixed that last week, with a visit to explore another view across the City.

The Garden at 120 is free, does not require a ticket and following a very brief wait in a small queue, the inevitable security check, then the lift took me to the 15th floor, which leads directly out to the viewing area:

The above view is of the south facing part of the viewing area, which also runs around all four sides.

The weather was superb, however I immediately found some problems with taking photos through glass panels looking south, with the sun shining directly into the panels – lots of reflections and strange optical effects, which can be seen in the following photo looking directly down onto the tower of All Hallows Staining:

It is just possible to see the tower, standing isolated in the middle of an extensive building site, with the large round metal excavation support struts supporting the retaining walls around the excavation. A view from another angle:

The development in front of 120 Fenchurch Street is Fifty Fenchurch, and when complete will be a 36-storey building, so will be much taller than 120 Fenchurch Street and will block part of the view to the south from the 15th floor garden.

As with almost all new towers in the City, Fifty Fenchurch will also include a public viewing gallery, but strangely this will be at level 10 rather than the roof or upper floors of the building, so the viewing gallery will be lower than the Garden at 120.

The current upper level of Fifty Fenchurch – the inner concrete core, which still has someway to go:

If you have a head for heights, then a job as a crane operator must provide some fascinating views of both construction sites and the wider area, although I would not fancy the climb up the ladders within the central frame to reach the cabin:

Tower Bridge:

Immediately to the west of 120 Fenchurch Street is Fountain House:

Fountain House was built between 1954 and 1958 to a design by W.H.Rogers and Sir Howard Robertson (Consulting). It was the first London building constructed to the tower and podium formula where a large podium occupies the full area of the plot of land, with a much small central space occupied by a tower block. I have written about the building in this post.

It will probably not be there for much longer, as the City of London Corporation has approved a new development with two new towers, one of 31 storeys and the other with 34, and on the 17th floor there will be a publicly accessible external garden terrace, so there will be three public viewing terraces all next to each other, so visitors to one, will be able to look across to visitors at the other two.

The development replacing Fountain House will also be much taller than 120 Fenchurch Street, so with Fifty Fenchurch to the south, Garden at 120 will be slowly surrounded by higher blocks.

Another building, also with a public viewing gallery is the Walkie Talkie, or more officially. 20 Fenchurch Street. The plan for the replacement of Fountain House implies that the following view of the Walkie Talkie will be obscured from the Garden at 120:

In a few years, you will be able to spend an entire day out visiting the four public viewing terraces all within a short distance along Fenchurch Street.

View towards the west with a small stretch of the Thames from Blackfriars Railway Bridge up to Waterloo Bridge:

There is another viewing gallery in the above photo, just to the left of the yellow crane, is the Blavatnik Building of Tate Modern, and on the 10th floor is a viewing gallery:

The following photo illustrates how the scale of the modern City has grown exponentially from the historic City, and how historic buildings are reduced to filling in the ever decreasing gaps.

The Lloyd’s of London building is on the right, with the blue cranes along the roof, and the tall tower in the centre is the recently completed One Leadenhall:

If you look to the lower left of One Leadenhall and the Lloyd’s of London building, you will see a very different structure – the roof of Leadenhall Market:

Although a market has been at the site for centuries, the current market buildings date from 1881, and the height and footprint of buildings in the City has grown so much in the following 145 years, at a scale that, whilst Victorian architects and builders were ambitious, would probably have been beyond their imagining.

There is a brief sequence early on in the 2013 Star Trek film – Into Darkness, where a bomb explodes in an underground facility in the City, and the CGI generated view of the City still shows St. Paul’s Cathedral, but it is surrounded by incredibly tall towers, much higher than we see in the City today.

The film is based in 2259, in 233 years time, and based on the rate of growth since the current Leadenhall Market buildings were completed, the CGI in Star Trek will probably be an accurate vision of the future London.

More of the Lloyd’s of London building – watching the blue crane along the top slowly moving along the roof line was interesting:

St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Post Office / BT Tower:

St. Paul’s Cathedral also has a couple of viewing galleries, including the Golden Gallery at the top of the dome, and from the Garden at 120 you can look across at other people enjoying the view of the city:

Because The Garden at 120 is on the 15th floor of, by recent standards, a relatively modest building, as you walk to the north of the garden you are looking between gaps in much taller buildings, although this does provide some interesting compositions, where other buildings are framed between towers, including this view of the Gherkin – 30 St. Mary Axe, a building which does not have a viewing gallery at the top, although it did have a bar at the top, which offered good views across London. The bar closed at the start of the year for renovations:

Through another gap we can see Christ Church Spitalfields and the chimney of the old Truman brewery:

The Whitechapel building stands out on the corner of Whitechapel High Street (the road to the left of the building), and Mansell Street:

Looking down to a very small part of Fenchurch Street, at the junction with Fenchurch Place, we can see a small part of a terrace of 19th / early 20th century offices, with the distinctive brick built East India Arms pub on the corner:

View to the east:

The office and residential towers of Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs:

On the horizon, looking to the south, there are two tall radio masts. The one on the left is at Crystal Palace. The mast to the right is at Beaulieu Heights, next to South Norwood Hill:

I find it fascinating to see how far you can see from height, and zooming in between these two masts is the following view:

I have no idea what the shadows are on the distant horizon. I did wonder if it was Croydon, however checking on a map, and Croydon is further to the right, and following the line between the two masts from Fenchurch Street, there are no significant clusters of buildings, so I have idea what they are.

I have not mentioned the Garden part of the name of the Garden at 120.

The garden is around the central core of the roof space, with a walkway around the perimeter.

The garden was designed by landscape architects Latz+Partner, and does consist of a good amount and variety of plants. View along the walkway on the eastern side of the roof, with planting on the left:

Having various forms of planting seems to be a core part of the majority of proposals for new towers in the City.

Fifty Fenchurch will include a public roof garden and winter garden at level 10, whilst the Fountain House replacement will have an external garden terrace.

Whilst this may be viewed as greenwashing, it does follow the approach of Fred Cleary, who campaigned and worked for much more planting, flowers and gardens as part of the post war redevelopment of the City, and as described in his 1969 book “The Flowering City”.

The southern side of the Garden at 120, with the main viewing area looking south and planting to the right:

Back on ground level, I walked across to the east of the Fifty Fenchurch building site, next to the tower of All Hallows Staining and looked back at the building with the Garden at 120 on the roof:

There are a growing number of places across London to look across the city from above, and each offers a different perspective of an ever changing city.

It is also interesting to visit these places across the years to see the rapid change taking place, and the view from the Garden at 120 will change significantly in the coming years when Fifty Fenchurch and the Fountain House site developments are completed.

The Nobody Inn and Radical and Dissenting Newington Green

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Firstly, thanks to the comments to last week’s post regarding the artist who created the mural, along with some additional background. In this week’s post, I am walking the very short distance along Mildmay Road from the mural featured in last Sunday’s post, to Newington Green, to find the site of another of my father’s 1980s photo’s, this time, the Nobody Inn:

The Nobody Inn was the name of the pub at the south eastern corner of Newington Green, between Mildmay Road and Mildmay Park.

The pub was built in the 1850s and was called the Clarendon, until the name change to the Nobody Inn, which I believe occurred in the early 1980s, but cannot find firm confirmation of this. The Nobody Inn reverted back to the Clarendon around 2012, then had the name the Dissenting Academy, which was in use in 2014, but is now the Lady Mildmay.

One of the first records of the pub I can find is from 1858, when it was referenced in an advert for a house to let, with the Clarendon being given as the point of contact for further information.

The pub then has occasional references in the London press, with the pub being for sale in 1866, and is advertised with the benefit that “The premises are on the high road from the City to the Green Lanes, and are passed by throngs of pedestrians and others, whose numbers no doubt will be considerably increased by the opening of the new Alexandra and Finsbury Parks”.

In 1902, Mrs Sarah Courtin, the landlady of the Clarendon (which in this report was also called a Hotel), had reported a preacher of the Mildmay Mission to police for playing or causing to be played an instrument in the street, to her annoyance.

And throughout 1971, the Clarendon had a regular advert in the London Evening News, that “The Clarendon, Newington Green, offers the finest varied family entertainment each night from Tuesday to Sunday at normal pub prices”.

The 1980s Nobody Inn:

The pub as it is today, but now called the Lady Mildmay. The large panel on the side of the pub which had the image of the man knocking on a door, with the Nobody Inn name is still on the side of the pub – it would be interesting to know if the 1980s image is still there, and it was just painted over:

It is interesting as to why pubs change names. Sometimes it is to change the image of a pub that had problems under previous owners, or to make the image of a pub more contemporary, or to make the pub more relevant to the local area, which I assume is the reason for the current name of Lady Mildmay.

The Mildmay name comes from Henry Mildmay, who became the owner of a large estate at Newington Green which had been owned by the Halliday family. There were no sons to act as an heir to the Halliday family, and the daughter married Henry Mildmay. taking the estate with her.

The Mildmay name is still to be found in the area including street names of Mildmay Road, Mildmay Grove and Mildmay Park, built over the old Mildmay estate.

I cannot find any origin to the Nobody Inn name. It could just be a joke with the joining of two words Nobody and Inn. There is another pub with the same name, the rather excellent Nobody Inn in Devon, however they do not give any origin of their pub’s name.

Newington Green is a fascinating, historic area, and with a number of surrounding streets, is part of the Newington Green Conservation Area.

The following photo is looking south across the central space, and the pub can be seen at the south east corner, just to the left of centre:

In the following map of the area today, Newington Green is the green space at the centre, surrounded by the dense housing that covered the fields during the 19th century  (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

Newington Green seems to have been formed from a small clearance in the forests that once occupied this part of north London. The first reference to Newington Green dates to 1480, when the sides of the space were occupied by small cottages.

Henry VIII may have had a hunting lodge alongside the green, and in the 16th century a large house called Bishop’s Palace was built at the north east corner of the green, and was probably owned by the Earl of Northumberland after receiving the land from Henry VIII.

Too much “may” and “probably” in the last paragraph, but what is clear is that by the middle of the 18th century, Newington Green was a well defined square, with roads along each side, and seven roads / tracks leading into the green.

Houses and small holdings / gardens also surrounded the green on all four sides, and the forests that once surrounded Newington Green had been cleared with fields covering the wider area. The New River was also to be found just to the west, as shown in this extract from Rocque’s 1746 map of London:

This small hamlet offered a place of sanctuary to religious dissenters after the Restoration of the Monarchy when Charles II became king.

Charles II had initially tried to accommodate those who had different religious views to the Church of England, however the Bishops and Parliament were trying to push through legislation that would outlaw any dissenting religious practices, and later small rebellions hardened Charles II views towards those outside of the established church.

The 1662 “Act for the Uniformity of Publique Prayers and Administration of Sacrements” was passed on the 19th of May, when Charles II was travelling to Portsmouth to meet Catherine of Braganza, his new Portuguese, Catholic bride.

When the Act came into force on the 24th of August 1662, 936 parish ministers, which included a third of the clergy in London, left their parishes, in the so called “Great Ejection”, as they could not follow the religious practices detailed in the Act.

Another act aimed at dissenters in 1662 was the “Act for Preventing the Frequent Abuses in Printing Seditious, Treasonable and Unlicensed Books and Pamphlets, and for Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses”. This act made the printing and distribution of any publication supporting dissenters or against the king and the church, a criminal offence, up to the level of treason.

As the Monarch was head of the Church of England, any dissent or rebellion against the church was also seen as being against the Monarchy.

A small hamlet, surrounded by fields just outside London would therefore have been a rather attractive place for those who did not conform to the practices and beliefs of the Church of England,

A number of Dissenters went to Newington Green, where they could practice in secret, and in 1667, Charles Morton set up a school for Dissenters in Newington Green, one of the pupils being Daniel Defoe, the writer and Presbyterian.

Morton’s school survived to 1686, but with mounting legal actions, mainly due to teachings at the school, Morton left Newington Green and moved to America, where he taught at Harvard, and became the school’s first vice-president.

There is plenty of evidence of Newington Green’s association with Dissenters, and one that is still in use today is the Meeting House on the north side of the green:

Whilst Newington Green had been a centre for Dissenters during the Civil War and Commonwealth, and in the years following the restoration of the monarchy, from 1660 dissenting religious practice was mainly carried out in secret, however towards the end of the 17th century, Parliament and the Monarchy started to adopt a slightly more tolerant approach.

The 1688 Toleration Act, which was “An Act for Exempting their Majestyes Protestant Subjects dissenting from the Church of England from the Penalties of certaine Lawes” made it easier for Dissenters to practice more openly, and in 1708 the Newington Green Meeting House was built.

There are reminders of two other prominent dissenters who attended the Meeting House in Newington Green, and I will find them as I walk around the square.

Along part of the western side of the square there is a terrace of houses, believed to be the oldest terrace in London.

The terrace of brick houses in the following photo are all Grade I listed, and the Historic England listing states that “These houses are extremely rare survivals of pre-Restoration and pre-Great Fire town houses, and are thus one of the most remarkable groups of seventeenth-century buildings in London”:

They are dated to 1658, the same year in which Oliver Cromwell died, so only just pre-restoration as detailed in the listing.

There is a blue plaque on the wall towards the left of the terrace. This is to Dr Richard Price who lived in the terrace:

Dr Richard Price was a prominent dissenting minister, who had been born in Llangeinor, Wales. His father had also been a dissenting minister.

He moved to London after the death of his parents, where he attended a dissenting academy in Moorfields.

His association with the Newington area came in 1744, when Price became family chaplain to George Streatfield at Stoke Newington.

Richard Price married Sarah Blundell in June 1757, and shortly after, they moved into the terrace in Newington Green, where he became a minister at the meeting house, a role he continued with for much of the rest of his life.

It is easy to see why both Parliament and the Monarchy were always concerned about Dissenters. Richard Price was a supporter of both the American and French revolutions, with a 1789 sermon titled A Discourse on the Love of our Country, which defended the French Revolution. He was also friends with some of the leading figures involved with the founding of America, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

One of his religious objections to many of the practices and teachings of the Church of England included a rejection of the Trinity (the concept that God exists as three distinct identities – the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ) and the Holy Spirit).

Outside of religion, he also worked on, and wrote about statistics, including an Essay on the Population of England, and in 1771, concerned by the actions of successive governments which continued to increase the national debt, he published an “Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt“.

Richard Price died in 1791. He wife Sarah had died five years earlier in 1786. They are both buried in Bunhill Fields. The sermon at the funeral was given by another prominent dissenter and natural philosopher (an 18th century version of a scientist), Joseph Priestly.

Further along the western side of Newington Green is another interesting building. This was the home of the China Inland Mission:

The name still visible through the trees, just above the arch of the main entrance:

The China Inland Mission was formed in 1865 by James Hudson Taylor, and as the name implies was formed to send missionaries to China so they could spread the gospel and Christianity, and convert the Chinese.

An 1866 newspaper account of the organisation provides a good impression of their approach and challenges:

“The tidings received from China during the past year have been somewhat chequered. Some of our friends there have had serious attacks of illness; but the Lord has graciously restored them to health. Among the native converts, some have caused sorrow rather than joy, and a few have had to be excluded from the privileges of church fellowship. Others, however, who have backslidden, have been restored through the Lord’s goodness; and from time to time, we have had the great jot of hearing of the conversion of heathen Chinese – male and female, young and old – and of their admission into the ranks of the Lord’s redeemed people.

One sign of great promise is the love and zeal prompting some members of the church to spend almost all their spare time in evangelistic efforts. Support for three of these for one year, to enable them to devote all their time to the work, has been kindly sent out by the Foreign Evangelist Society, which has thus rendered us important aid, and the labours of one of them, Fong Nong-kwe, in a village called K’ong-p’o, have been followed by marked encouragement.

Nine persons have, through his efforts, professed to receive the Lord Jesus, and four of them have already been baptized. Another of these evangelists, Vaen Kyiseng, appears to be a very dear and earnest Christian man, his young wife is also spoken of as a very devoted Christian, and a valuable helper among her own sex.”

It was not easy work for the China Inland Mission. The organisation lost 58 missionaries, who were killed during the Boxer rebellion of 1900. A 1935 report illustrates more of the significant challenges they faced:

“CHINA INLAND MISSION – With the loss of missionary lives and the recent kidnapping of the British ship in the China Seas with so many children returning to the Chefoo Schools, the name ‘China Inland Mission’ has been more prominent than usual in the public eye.”

By the start of the Second World War in 1939, the organisation had 1,300 missionaries working in China and approaching 200,000 Chinese had been baptized.

The aftermath of the war, and the communist take over of China in 1949 made it increasingly difficult for the China Inland Mission to operate, and all missionaries were recalled from the country in 1950.

The focus of the organisation changed to other countries in the region, including Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Philippines and Indonesia, and this change in direction resulted in the name being changed in 1964 to the Overseas Missionary Fellowship.

In 1994, the name was updated to Overseas Missionary Fellowship International.

Today, their UK offices are in Manchester, and the building on Newington Green provides student accommodation, operated by Sanctuary Students, who, on their website state that the building is Grade II listed, however on the Historic England listing database, I cannot find any reference to the building being listed. It is though an interesting building, and with a history that shows how 19th century British Christians tried to spread the religion across the distant regions of the world.

From the streets around Newington Green, we need to head into the central green space to see a sculpture, that, for a brief period after it was unveiled in 2020, was probably the most talked about work of art in London.

This is the sculpture commemorating Mary Wollstonecraft by Maggi Hambling:

Despite only living to the age of 38 (she died from badly managed complications after child birth), Mary Wollstonecraft’s achievements and challenges were many, and she had a remarkable life.

Mary was born in Spitalfields in April 1759. Her father was reasonably prosperous, but he squandered their money and was also abusive. Mary also had a very limited education, with her brother being given a much more comprehensive education. An attitude towards the education of girls that resulted in her first publication “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters”.

Her links to Newington Green only lasted a few years. Sometime around April 1784 she moved to Newington Green and set up a small children’s day school, along with her sisters Everina Wollstonecraft and Eliza Bishop, and her friend Frances Blood. Mary had helped Eliza separate from her disastrous marriage to Meredith Bishop.

Mary had help from Hannah Burgh, the wife of the prominent dissenter James Burgh, who ran an academy for dissenters, and who also had an extensive library to which Mary had access.

The school took up to 20 children, and along with taking in lodgers, provided just enough funding for the women to survive.

Not long after the establishing the school Frances Blood moved to Lisbon with her husband Hugh Skeys, and soon after Mary visited Frances in Lisbon to support her during child birth,. Frances died a short time after through complications.

Returning to Newington Green, the school soon closed, and her sisters moved away, leaving Mary alone and with significant financial challenges.

With very few options open to her, Mary then took a job as a Governess for Lord and Lady Kingsborough in Cork, Ireland, a role she appears to have hated, found frivolous, and she was fired within a year.

Returning to London, she turned her skills towards writing and it was in 1787 that her book “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters” was published by the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, and it was at dinners arranged by Johnson that Mary was to meet many other radical thinkers.

Mary saw the French Revolution as a way of establishing a more equal society. The author Edmund Burke published in 1790 “Reflections on the Revolution in France” which condemned the social changes resulting from the revolution, and to oppose Burke’s views, Mary published “A Vindication of the Rights of Men” in support of the ideals of the revolution, although she did change her mind after witnessing the corruption and guillotining of so many people after the initial revolution.

After arguing for a more egalitarian society in her book on the Rights of Men, Mary’s next step was to argue for equality of the sexes, with the 1792 publication of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, which argued for the same education and opportunities for women as given to men, and that women should have the opportunity to contribute equally to society.

The plinth supporting the sculpture has a quote from the book on the Rights of Women: “I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves”.

Mary Wollstonecraft:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

In 1793, Mary had a relationship with the American Gilbert Imlay, and in the following year gave birth to her first child.

Imlay was unfaithful throughout their brief relationship, which drove Mary to an attempted suicide by throwing herself off Putney Bridge, fortunately being rescued by a Thames Waterman.

During her relationship with Imlay, he had also sent her to Scandinavia to try and recover a ship that had been stolen from him by a Norwegian sea captain (and Imlay had another affair whilst Mary was trying to do this for him). She used her experiences in Scandinavia to publish “Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark”.

Leaving Imlay, Mary then developed a relationship with the radical philosopher, William Godwin, who was opposed to marriage, but did marry Mary when she fell pregnant with his child.

After a long labour, Mary gave birth to her daughter also called Mary, on the 30th of August 1797, who would go one to write the novel Frankenstein, under the name of Mary Shelley, after her marriage to Percy Shelley.

Mary should have had a midwife, however a surgeon badly managed minor complications following childbirth resulting in acute haemorrhaging and infection, and Mary died on the 10th of September 1797, at the young age of 38.

The sculpture commemorating Mary Wollstonecraft seems to have generated very polarising views from the day it was unveiled.

The artist Maggi Hambling said that the work is intended to personify a spirit, the naked everywoman emerging from a swirl of female forms, and that if the figure at the toped were clothed then it would have given her an identity:

Throughout her 38 years, Mary experienced so many challenges, but maintained her belief in an egalitarian society, and in equality of the sexes.

Her dissenting beliefs make Newington Green a good place for the sculpture and whatever your views on the sculpture, the good thing is that it has brought the name of this remarkable woman to much greater public awareness.

There is a final building associated with dissenting views to be found at Newington Green. As you leave the square at the north east corner, along Matthias Road, you will find the Grade II listed Mildmay Club:

The building dates from 1900 to 1901, and was constructed for the Mildmay Radical Club, which had been founded in August 1888, and was located in Newington Green Road.

The club, like many similar clubs aimed at the working class, was a place of radical politics and social campaigns, and also ran an extensive range of social activities for members, which at their peak, reached around 3,000.

Meetings at the club tended to be based around a lecture or talk on a subject related to the politics of the club, so, for example, on the 29th of January 1903 it was reported that “Last night a public meeting in favour of taxing land values was held in the large hall of the Mildmay Radical Club. The meeting was convened by the Political and Educational Council of the Club in conjunction with the English League for the Taxation of Land Values”.

The concern was that “To all who lived in suburban districts in London, the simple justice of it appealed to all occupiers quite independent of party. It seemed an elementary principle of justice that when public improvements were being made that were going to benefit all, that all should to some extent contribute towards those improvements, But here they had landowners who, especially in London more than anywhere else, got the benefit of these improvements in the increased value of property, and yet as local ratepayers they did not contribute one farthing towards the expenses. The whole cost was thrown on the occupiers of the houses.”

An example of the social events arranged by the club was on the 1st of May 1907, when the Political and Educational Council of the Mildmay Radical Club and Institute arranged an evening “Soiree and Dance” to celebrate the completion of their winter programme of events.

The event was attended by 150 “members, friends, with their wives, sweethearts, sons and daughters”. and dancing was led by “Mr. J. Pennell, the popular and respected instructor to the Mildmay Elementary Dancing Class, who had been invited by the Political and Educational Council to undertake the duties of M.C. and thanks to his energy several extra dances were added to the programme, to the delight of the company”.

The singing and dancing went on till midnight when the evening broke up “with many regrets at its termination”.

The club also arranged many educational visits, not just to radical events, but across London so that members could learn more about the history of the city, and how the city operated. Visits included lecturers at Westminster Abbey and tours to many of the halls of the City Livery Companies.

The radical aspect of working men’s clubs lasted until the First World War, following which their influence and involvement in political causes started to decline, and they became more places for social and entertainment events.

In 1930, the Mildmay Radical Club dropped the radical to become the Mildmay Club to emphasise the non-political status of the club, and the club continues to operate to this day, with a members bar, pool and TV room, and two large halls where entertainment events are regularly hosted.

Newington Green is a small square in north London, but it has a long and fascinating place in the history of religious dissent and radical politics in London and the country, and evidence of this can be found with a walk around the green, as well as a view of the oldest terrace of houses in London.

The Mildmay Road and Wolsey Road Mural

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A couple of weeks ago, my post was about His and Hers Hairdressers in Middleton Road, Hackney. After finding the location of my father’s mid 1980s photo of the hairdresser, I continued on towards Newington Green, where one of the approach roads is Mildmay Road, and at the junction of Mildmay and Wolsey Roads, is the location of another of my father’s 1980s photos, this time of a rather wonderful mural:

The mural is remarkable, not just for the subject, the colour and the detail, but also for the three dimensional affect the mural achieves, and that it extends not just along the end wall of the two storey house, but continues across to the third storey of the adjacent house.

The forty years between the above photo and the mural today, have not been kind to this wonderful artwork, and in 2026 we see a very faded mural, with much of the colour and detail gradually disappearing:

I cannot find any information as to the exact date of the mural, who created the work, and any meaning behind the image, and why on this particular building.

Comments with any information would be greatly received.

In the 1980s photo, we can see details which raise questions, for example there is a green door reached by some stairs leading up from the grass. The door is partly open, and a woman carrying two bags is going through the doorway.

Why is the woman there, who is she, was she a resident of the house, creator or sponsor of the mural?

There is also a man at the base of the stairs, and a girl stands on the edge of the grass, holding a bunch of flowers, and looks out towards Mildmay Road. Were they also part of the same family?:

My father’s second photo of the mural was a close up of the part of the mural on the upper floor of the adjacent house, where a woman is looking out of an open window. I wonder if she is the same woman who was going in through the green door?

Forty years later, and this section of the mural exists in outline only, with just some of the blue sky in the upper part of the window remaining:

In Wolsey Road we can see that the three dimensional aspect of the mural is still clear. The mural covers a flat wall, and as well as the individual elements of the mural, the two sets of stairs, and the column, the two windows on the right of the mural are painted in such as way as to give the impression that they are on an angled wall:

After forty years, the mural is faded, flaking and losing colour, but enough remains to show what it was like when created, as my father’s 198o’s photos confirm.

The mural is an example of what can be found whilst walking the streets of London, and the pleasure of wandering along London’s ordinary streets is a message I hope I have been able to get across in the last couple of posts on my search for some 1980s photos – The Flower Sellers and London Fields and His & Hers Hairdressers, Middleton Road, Hackney, and is a theme I want to continue in this week’s post, with no deep historical insights, just some views of the streets as I walked up from Middleton Road to Mildmay Road.

The route took me along Kingsland Road, where at the junction with Englefield Road is KTS DIY, a family run business, which according to their website has been there since 1973:

The clock on the corner of the building:

The store stocks a phenomenal range of DIY, building and household maintenance and cleaning equipment. The window display is just a very small part of what can be found inside:

Mops and brooms in the February sunshine on Kingsland Road:

Opposite KTS DIY is the Haggeston, a pub which also has regular live music:

The current name of the pub dates from around 2009, and the original name of the pub was the Swan, as still displayed along the top of the building:

The Swan probably dates to the late 18th century. It was mentioned in an advert in the Morning Advertiser on the 15th of August 1807, an advert for the lease of a house, which gives a good impression of what this now densely built up area was like at the start of the 19th century:

“A neat, genteel brick-built detached dwelling house, with garden, and most pleasantly situated in the fields, near the Swan, Kingsland Road, an easy and pleasant walk from the Royal Exchange, and completely screened from the dust of the public road.”

It is good to know that back in 1807, advertisers of property used the same underestimates of distances in their adverts, as I am not sure the two and a third miles from the Swan to the Royal Exchange could be called and “easy and pleasant walk” for all.

The advert also demonstrates how pubs were used as a local reference points for many forms of public notice.

Further along Kingsland Road, and I am not sure what has happened to the windows on the first floor of this building:

As with the mural on Mildmay Road, along Kingsland Road is the gradually fading sign of the Prince of Wales:

Despite closing around 26 years ago and converted to residential, the Prince of Wales name is still displayed at the tope of the building, a 1930 rebuild of the previous pub on the site:

A short distance further along Kingsland Road is another closed pub, the Lamb, which dates from the early 19th century. The building is now a nightclub:

There were many pubs along Kingsland Road, reflecting both the importance of the road and density of the housing that was built in the fields to east and west of the road in the 19th century.

Kingsland Road is also home to terrace houses built during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These were fine houses at the time, and frequently ground floor shops were added at a later date, built over the gardens that separated the house from the street:

The two semi-detached houses in the centre of the following photo are late 18th / early 19th century and are Grade II listed. At the time of the listing (1975), the building housed a factory, but now looks to ne residential, with shops taking up the space in front of the ground floor of the building:

The two larger buildings behind the shops in the following photo are also Grade II listed and date from the late 18th century. One can imagine how impressive these buildings appeared, before the shops and when the whole façade was visible from the street:

A slight detour down Dalston Lane from Kingsland Road is the old Railway Tavern, so named because it was almost opposite the original Dalston Junction station building, which has been rebuilt as part of a residential development.

The Railway Tavern is now a café / antique store:

The reason for the slight detour down Dalston Lane is to find another 1980s mural, however unlike the mural in Mildmay Road, this one is in a far better condition:

This is the Hackney Peace Carnival mural. The design dates from 1983 when it was created by Ray Walker to celebrate the Greater London Council’s Peace Year, and it was completed in 1985 after being finished by Ray Walker’s wife Anna Walker along with Mike Jones, following the death of Ray Walker in 1984.

Ray Walker is shown in the mural to the lower left:

And Anna Walker is at lower right:

The excellent condition of the Dalston Lane mural compared to the Mildmay Road mural, when they are around the same age, is mainly down to the significant 2014 restoration of the Hackney Peace Carnival mural.

The 1980s seemed to be a prolific period for murals across the streets of London and GLC initiatives such as the 1983 Peace Year were responsible for a number of these, another of which was in Greenwich and was the Wind of Peace mural in Creek Road:

The Wind of Peace was commissioned by the London Muralists for Peace initiative, and painted by artists Stephen Lobb and Carol Kenna. It replaced an earlier mural showing the river and the land alongside the river in Greenwich.

The Wind of Peace has been lost as the building has been demolished. I wrote about the mural, along with another Greenwich mural in this post on the sad fate of two Greenwich murals.

From Dalston Lane, I then returned to Kingsland Road, and headed up to Mildmay Road via Boleyn Road, to find the mural at the start of today’s post.

A short post, with no maps, no deep dive into the area’s history, but I hope it demonstrates why walking the streets of London can be such as pleasure.

The Treachery of Sir George Downing

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Along with streets and places such as Piccadilly, Leicester Square, and Oxford Street, Downing Street is probably one of the more recognisable London street names, not just in the United Kingdom, but across the world, given the number of tourists who peer through the gates that separate Downing Street from Whitehall.

Number 10 Downing Street has been home to the Prime Minister (or more correctly the First Lord of the Treasury) since 1735, when the house was given to Sir Robert Walpole.

There have been many gaps in occupancy by Prime Minsters, however a central London house was considered a benefit of the role. It was only in the early 20th century that it became a full time residence of Prime Ministers.

Security has long been an issue. It was not so long ago that the public could walk down the street, with the street finally being closed to the public in 1982, and in response to ever growing threats, security measures such as physical defences and armed police have been added and enhanced.

So today, this is the best view of the street for tourists and members of the public who do not have official business in any of the buildings and institutions that line Downing Street:

The street has seen so many Prime Ministers, newly elected, arrive in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and expectation, only to leave having been rejected either by the electorate, or through the actions of their former colleagues.

For a rejected Prime Minister, perhaps the most difficult way to leave is when you have been rejected by former colleagues. Those who once supported and worked with you, and with whom you had a shared vision of the future.

Whilst this must be incredibility frustrating, it is not as bad as the treachery of the person who was once the land owner and who gave his name to the street, who through his treachery, condemned former colleagues to the worst death penalty that the State could impose, convicted of being a traitor and being hung, drawn and quartered.

For this, we have to go back to the Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration of the 1640s, 1650s and early 1660s to explore the work of Sir George Downing:

The source of the above paining is from the Harvard Art Museum, and the image title is “Portrait of a Man, probably Sir George Downing (1624-1684)”. It is often difficult to be absolutely certain of those depicted in paintings of some age (see my recent post on the Gresham’s).

The record for the painting states that on the stretcher is written “Sir George Downing Bart./ born August 1623–Embassador [sic]/ to the States General 1659-Son of/ Emmanuel Downing & Lucy Winthrop/ 4th daughter of Adam Winthrop-/ The nephew of John Winthrop/ Governor of Massachusetts–His/ diplomatic services…[illegible]… are well known to history.”, which does add some confidence that this is Sir George Downing.

George Downing was born in Dublin around 1623 or 1624, His father was Emanual Downing, a Barrister and Puritan, and his mother was Lucy Winthrop, the sister of John Winthrope who was the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an English settlement on the east coast of America which had been founded in 1628.

This family relationship with Massachusetts resulted in the family moving to the colony in 1638, where they settled in Salem.

Harvard College had been founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the 18th of October 1636, and was the first college set-up in the American colonies.

The name Harvard comes from John Harvard who was an English Puritan minister and benefactor of the college, which included leaving his library of 400 books and half of his estate to the new college.

George Downing attended Harvard College, and was one of the first group of nine who graduated from the college in 1642.

After Harvard, Downing moved to the West Indies where he became a preacher, and in the early 1640s he returned to England, where he found the country in the middle of a Civil War, and he quickly aligned with the forces opposing King Charles I, joining the regiment of Colonel John Okey as a chaplain.

Downing was fully supportive of the actions of Cromwell and the New Model Army in the defeat of the Royalist cause, and he was recognised and promoted quickly to become Cromwell’s Scoutmaster General in Scotland, a role that was basically the head of a spying and intelligence operation, attempts to infiltrate Royalist plots and to turn Royalist supporters to the Republican cause.

During the years of the Commonwealth in the 1650’s, Downing’s skills became valuable in the diplomatic service, and he became the Commonwealth’s ambassador to the Netherlands, where he also developed a network of spies, and passed information on Royalist plots back to John Thurloe, who was Cromwell’s main spymaster.

The later part of the 1650s were a difficult time for the Commonwealth, the main issue being what would happen to the Commonwealth after the death of Oliver Cromwell. Who would succeed Cromwell, how would such a decision be made, could Cromwell take on the role of a monarch and make the head of the Commonwealth a hereditary title?

Downing supported and urged Cromwell to take on the role of a monarch along the lines of the old constitution that had existed before the execution of King Charles I.

To those holding senior positions in the army and the Commonwealth, it must have seemed that the Commonwealth was in a strong position, the country would remain a Republic. Monarchist plots and uprisings had been supressed, and the future King Charles II seemed to be in a weak position in exile on the Continent.

It was then surprising how quickly after Cromwell’s death, that the whole structure of the Commonwealth collapsed so rapidly, and King Charles II was restored as the monarch of the United Kingdom in 1661, just three years after the death of Oliver Cromwell.

George Downing had been watching how sentiments towards the monarchy were changing and started to plan how he would survive and prosper after the restoration.

This involved actions such as ingratiating himself within the court of the future Charles II, passing information on to the Royalists and claiming that he had been drawn in to the Republican cause rather than being an active initiator of the Civil War and the execution of King Charles I.

Whilst Downing had supported the trial and execution of the former king, he was not a judge or participant in the trial, and did not sign the execution warrant of the king:

Source: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Which is an important lesson if you are involved in any plotting or support of a controversial cause – never leave anything in writing.

Despite his involvement and support of the Republican cause, Downing’s efforts to show support for the monarchy were such that after the restoration of the monarchy, he was knighted, and continued in his role as the ambassador to the Netherlands, and it was in the following couple of years that he was to really show his ruthless streak and what he would do to further his own power, position and wealth.

Regicides

After the restoration, the monarchy turned their anger on those who had been involved in the trial of King Charles I, who had signed his execution warrant, or who had had a significant role in his execution.

Known as the Regicides, those who had been responsible in some way for the execution of the King were exempted from the Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660, an act that gave a general pardon for all those who had committed a crime during the Civil War and the Commonwealth (other than crimes such as murder, unless covered by a licence from the king, witchcraft and piracy were also not covered by the general pardon).

A number of the Regicides had already died, including Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton. Others gave themselves up in the hope of a fair trial and avoidance of a traitors death, whilst others fled abroad in fear of their lives.

Three of those who fled, and who would meet their deaths through the actions of George Downing, were:

John Okey

Creative Commons Licence – after Unknown artist, published by John Thane line engraving, published 1794 NPG D27161© National Portrait Gallery, London

John Okey had been born in St. Giles, and like many others who were part of the Parliamentary / Republican / New Model Army forces opposing the king during the Civil war, Okey had enlisted in the army, rising through the ranks to become a major, then a colonel, of a regiment of dragoons (mounted infantry).

George Downing had joined Okey’s regiment as a chaplain, and was well known to Okey.

When Charles I was brought to trial, Okey was one of the 80 who were actively involved in the trial, and attended on most days, and the action that would infuriate the restored monarchy was that he was one of the 59 who had signed the warrant for the execution of the king.

Miles Corbet

Creative Commons Licence – after Unknown artist, published by William Richardson
line engraving, published 1810 NPG D30024© National Portrait Gallery, London

Miles Cobet was the MP for Yarmouth and also a Lawyer.

The print of Corbet shown above has the abbreviation Coll. in front of his last name. This may have been an honorary titles, as he did not serve during any military actions during the Civil War. He was though one of the founders of the Eastern Association, which was a military alliance formed to defend East Anglia on behalf of the Parliamentary forces, and he also served as an army commissioner in Ireland, responsible for overseeing the affairs of the army, and with allocation of land within Ireland to soldiers as reward for their service, and often in lieu of wages.

His role in the trial of Charles I was as part of the High Court of Justice, and as one of those who signed the execution warrant.

John Barkstead

Creative Commons Licence – after Unknown artist line engraving, published 1810 NPG D9319© National Portrait Gallery, London

John Barkstead was originally a goldsmith in the Strand, but who joined the Parliamentary forces, becoming a captain of a foot company in the regiment of Colonel Venn. He was Governor of Reading for a short time, commanded a regiment at the siege of Colchester, and was appointed as one of the judges at the trial of Charles I.

He also signed the Warrant for the Execution of Charles I.

He was appointed Lieutenant of the Tower of London, but used this position to further his own wealth by extorting money from prisoners and generally running a cruel regime.

He was rumoured to have hidden a large sum of money in the Tower of London, and in 1662, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he was busy in a discovery for Lord Sandwich and Sir H. Bennett of the cellars of the Tower for this hidden money.

By signing the warrant for the execution of the King, Okey, Corbet and Barkstead had also signed their own death warrants, as this would be their fate – a public traitors death in London.

Escape and Capture

In fear of their lives, with the restoration of the monarchy, Okey, Corbet and Barkstead fled to Europe, with Okey and Barkstead making their way to Hanau in Germany, where they were accepted by the town and given a level of protection. Corbet had made his way to the Netherlands where he was in hiding.

For Barkstead, Hanau seemed a natural, long term home, as the town was well known for the manufacture of jewellery, and Barkstead’s background as a goldsmith in the Strand would come in use.

As Hanau seemed to be a long term home for Okey and Barkstead, they wanted their wives to join them, and a plan was put together for them to meet their wives in the Netherlands, from where they would all travel back to Hanau.

They believed that they would be safe in the Netherlands and had assurances that Downing had not been given any instructions to hunt for them. The Netherlands was also known for tolerance and for putting commerce before any other concern.

They travelled to Delft, and met up with Corbet, who was keen to meet with some friends after his time in hiding.

Downing meanwhile had been putting together plans for how he would find and capture any regicides that were living or passing through the Netherlands. He was worried about the repercussions of capturing any regicides and transporting them back to London without the approval of the Dutch, and he had problems with getting an arrest warrant from the Dutch authorities.

After much persuasion, Downing received a blank arrest warrant, which he would be able to use against any of the regicides that he could discover in the Netherlands, and it would soon be put into use.

Through Downing’s network of spies, he discovered that Okey, Corbet and Barkstead were all in Delft, and just as they were about to split up, Downing and his men pounced on the house, and found the three sitting around a fire, smoking pipes. and they quickly rounded up the three regicides. They had their hands and feet manacled and were thrown in a damp prison cell, whilst Downing finalised their transport back to England.

Whilst they were in captivity, the three were visited by Dutch politicians who assured the three that they would be freed, however Downing used his skills to threaten and bully the Dutch on the possible consequences of such actions, and the Dutch conceded, and let Downing continue to hold the three and arrange their transport.

Another challenge was the Bailiff of Delft who was not cooperative and threatened to derail Downing’s plans. Downing’s response to this was another indication that he would do anything to have his way. He made inquiries about the bailiff and learnt that “he was one who would do nothing without money”, so Downing offered him a bribe – a reward if he would keep the prisoners safe until they were finally in Downing’s hands.

There were other problems. The magistrates of Amsterdam sent a message to the authorities in Delft that they should “let the Gates of the prison be opened and so let them escape “.

The bailiff warned Downing that the “common people might go about to force the prison and let them out”, and the authorities in Delft made efforts to provide counsel for the regicides.

Downing finally received an order from the Dutch authorities addressed to the bailiff in Delft to release the prisoners to Downing. The bailiff was concerned that there would be a rising “if there were but the least notice of an intention to carry them away”.

Downing had already arranged for an English frigate to be available, and with the aid of some sailors from the frigate, and a small boat, he:

“resolved in the dead of the night to get a boate into a litle channell which came neare behinde the prison, and at the very first dawning of the day without so much as giving any notice to the seamen I had pro
vided . . . forthwith to slip them downe the backstaires . . . and so accordingly we did, and there was not the least notice in the Towne thereof, and before 5 in the morning the boate was without the Porto of
Delft, where I delivered them to Mr. Armerer . . . giving him direction not to put them a shoare in any place, but to go the whole way by water to the Blackamore Frigat at Helverdsluice.”

The Frigate Blackamore carried the three prisoners back to England, where they were imprisoned in the Tower awaiting a trial, which was not really a trial as in the view of Parliament and the Monarchy, they had demonstrated their guilt by fleeing the country. The trial was a formality to confirm they had the right people.

Having been found guilty of treason, on the 19th of April 1662, the three men were transported from the Tower to Tyburn, each tied to a separate sledge as they were drawn through the crowds, with much mocking abuse from Royalists. Barkstead left the Tower first, a place where he had once been the Lieutenant, and raised his hat to his wife who was waving from a window.

On arriving at Tyburn, each man gave a speech to the crowd, and were then put on a cart under the gallows. When they were ready, the cart was pulled away, and they hung for 15 minutes, before being taken down, and were then drawn and quartered, all in front of a large crowd.

Barkstead’s head was placed on a spike overlooking the Tower of London, mocking his former role at the Tower.

Before his death, Okey had sent a message of obedience to the restored monarchy, and as a reward for this, his family were allowed to bury his mutilated body in a vault in Stepney, however a large crowd gathered around Newgate where his body was being held, and fearing that this was a show of support for a traitor, the King swiftly changed his mind, and Okey’s body was hastily buried in the grounds of the Tower of London.

After the Regicides

Downing appears to have shown very little if any remorse or regret for his actions in the capture and execution of his three former colleagues, especially Okey, in whose regiment Downing had once served during the Civil War.

He acquired large estates and properties across the country and in London. He was one of the four Tellers of the Receipts of the Exchequer. He inspired the Navigation Act: “the foundation of our mercantile marine, and consequently of our navy, and consequently of our colonies and spheres of influence. He was also the direct cause of the Appropriation Act, an Act indispensable in every session, for government at home and one which has been appointed by all our self-governing colonies,” and he was instrumental in persuading the Dutch to exchange New Amsterdam, their colony on Long Island, for the British colony of Surinam in South America. New Amsterdam was then renamed as New York.

George Downing owned land near Westminster, and when the leaseholder died in 1682, Downing developed a cul-de-sac of more than twenty plain, brick built, three storey terrace houses, and he petitioned Charles II for permission to name this new street Downing Street.

Royal approval was granted, but he did not live to see the completion of the street as he died in July 1684 when he was 60, two years prior to work was finished.

The general view of Sir George Downing was that whilst clever, quick to action, ambitious and a very hard worker, he was also self serving, would shift his allegiance depending on changes in political and royal power, and as demonstrated with Okey, Corbet and Barkstead, this would also include the betrayal of his former friends and colleagues.

After the restoration, there were many who recognised Downing’s true character. After the capture of the regicides, Samuel Pepys’s wrote in his diary:

“This morning we had news from Mr. Coventry, that Sir G. Downing (like a perfidious rogue, though the action is good and of service to the King, yet he cannot with any good conscience do it) hath taken Okey, Corbet, and Barkestead at Delfe, in Holland, and sent them home in the Blackmore.”

Downing – a name associated with self perseveration to the extent that former colleagues and the cause for which they all worked, were betrayed, and now recorded in the name of the street where the Prime Minister resides.

Sources: I have been reading a number of books about the Civil War recently which I will list in a future post. My main source for the actions of Downing in the Netherlands and the capture of Okey, Corbet and Barkstead is from “Sir George Downing and the Regicides by Ralph C. H. Catterall in The American Historical Review, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Jan., 1912), and published by the Oxford University Press“.

Resources – The World Turned Upside Down

As today’s post is the first of a new month, it is a post where I cover some of the resources available if you are interested in discovering more about the history of London.

As today’s post has been about the fate of three of the regicides involved with the trial and execution of King Charles I, and George Downing, who supported both the Parliamentary cause and then swiftly converted to support the monarchy, today’s resource is a brilliant website full of resources covering everything Civil War, and events in London played a very significant role, not just during the Civil War, but the lead up to, the causes of the war, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, the people, politics and religion, the restoration and later impact.

The website is The World Turned Upside Down:

The name of the website comes from the title of an English ballad published in the mid 1640s, when Parliament was implementing policies that tried to ban the more traditional celebrations of Christmas that the more Puritan and to an extent Baptist members of Parliament believed were associated with the Catholic religion, and that Christmas should be a more solemn event, without the drinking, feasting and joyous elements of the traditional Christmas:

Source: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The standout feature of the website are the podcasts. There are currently 112 on the site with more being gradually added (you can sign up for alerts). Each podcast explores a different aspect of the Civil War and is by an expert in the subject.

For each podcast there is also a transcript, glossary, timeline, maps and further reading.

The first four podcasts in the list are shown in the screenshot below:

There is so much in the news about the destructive elements of social media, AI and the Internet, but the World Turned Upside Down is one of those sites that restores your faith in what the Internet can deliver when a community of real experts put together such a resource – which is freely available.

Even if you have only a passing interest in the mid 17th century and the Civil War, the site and podcasts are well worth a visit, and again, the link to click for the site is: The World Turned Upside Down

A Microscopic Examination of the Water Supplied to the Inhabitants of London

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The level of pollution in the River Thames has long been a problem, even in 2026, decades of under investment in sewage treatment has resulted in effluent being dumped in the river. Hopefully something the Tideway Tunnel will help resolve.

The state of the river in the 19th century was far worse than it is today. The rapid rise of London’s population and industry resulted in large quantities of effluent being dumped, untreated in the river.

Similar to the Tideway Tunnel, Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer system and pumping works of the 1860s and 1870s acted as an interceptor, catching sewage before it was dumped in the river, and routing it to new treatment works.

Before construction of this new system, the condition of the river was an open sewer, and what was worse, the river was used as a source of water by the water companies that supplied the city. Even the companies that relied on other sources were frequently drawing on heavily polluted water.

In April 1850, Arthur Hill Hassall published “A Microscopic Examination of the Water Supplied to the Inhabitants of London and the Suburban Districts”, where he reported on an investigation into the sources of water used by the London water companies, and examined the condition of their water supplies using a microscope to see what material the water contained.

Arthur Hill Hassell was the son of a Doctor and was born in Teddington in 1817. He was a student in Dublin and apprenticed to his uncle, Sir James Murray, a Dublin physician, and whilst in Dublin he published his first work “A Catalogue of Irish Zoophytes”, where he used a microscope to examine microscopic organisms, which at the time were believed to be somewhere between plants and animals.

After graduating, he returned to London and setup in general practice in Notting Hill, but he continued to be fascinated in what could be revealed by the microscope, and his next publications were “A History of British Freshwater Algae” (1845), and “The Microscopic Anatomy of the Human Body” (1849).

His 1850 publication would reveal the horrendous state of the water supplied to the residents of London.

In his description of the method used, he states that he collected a wine bottle full of water from the output of the different water companies, the river, and the sewer system, and examined samples of this water under a microscope.

Arthur Hill Hassall:

Licence: Public Domain Mark, Credit: Arthur Hill Hassall. Photograph. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

In 1850, there were a number of privately owned water companies that supplied different areas of London. These were, along with the main source of their water as listed in Hassall’s book:

  • New River Company (source – springs around Ware in Hertfordshire and the River Lea)
  • East London Company (source – the River Lea near Old Ford, Stratford, below Lea Bridge)
  • Hampstead Company (source – several large ponds near to Hampstead Heath)
  • Kent Company (source – the River Ravensbourne)
  • Lambeth Company (source – the River Thames at Lambeth)
  • Vauxhall Company (source – the River Thames at Vauxhall)
  • Southwark Company (source – the River Thames, also at Vauxhall)
  • Chelsea Company (source – the River Thames, near Battersea)
  • West Middlesex Company (source – the River Thames at Barnes)
  • Grand Junction Company (source – the River Thames at Brentford)

In his examination of the water under the microscope, he was looking for organic and inorganic matter, including specific organic material that he described as “complex in organisation, endowed with life, and in many cases possessed of active powers of locomotion”.

Using the scientific understanding and terminology of the time, he described this type of organic material as:

  • Infusoria – animal productions, and include a great variety of singularly organized atoms, most of which are invisible to the common eye
  • Entomostraca – constitute a well defined division of Crustacea, or the Crab tribe and are remarkable for having their bodies enclosed in shell-like cases
  • Conferveae – vegetable productions of very simple organisation, consisting of cells or utricles, placed end to end and joined together, forming, by their union, threads often of extreme fineness
  • Desmideae – also vegetable productions, exhibiting however, some affinities to animals, so that, for a long time, it was a matter of doubt and dispute to which of the kings of the organic world they really belonged.
  • Diatomaceae – unite in their organization the characters of both plants and animals, insomuch that it is still uncertain which they really are. They are readily distinguished from all other organisms by their colour, which is brown, and by the fact that they are furnished with skeletons of Silex, or flint; it is this which renders them so durable – indeed, almost indestructible.

These are rather dry descriptions of what could be found in samples of water, so in a perfect example of a picture is worth a thousand words, Hassall included colour illustrations of what he saw whilst looking through the microscope at the samples of water collected in a wine bottle from across London.

Firstly, the Thames at Brentford and at Hungerford (near where the railway bridge is located today between the South Bank and Charing Cross):

Comparing these two illustrations shows that whilst the Thames at Brentford was bad enough, in central London there was a dense collection of both organic and inorganic matter.

Hassell adds little notes to show how he collected the water, and for Hungerford he added that the water was collected “two hours after the steam-boats ceased to ply”. Presumably, then as now, powered boats on the river churn up the sediment and prevent it from settling, and Hassall wanted to collect his samples in as near a natural state as possible.

As well as the view through the microscope, he added that the water from Hungerford presented a dirty and opaque appearance, and also contained dead organic matter, very considerable, both animal and vegetable, ochreous substance; down of wheat.

Hassall was surprised by the amount of living matter that he found in the water at Brentford, and he conducted further tests along the river, and came to the conclusion that “these have brought to light the singular and important fact, that Thames water, from Brentford in one direction, to Woolwich in the opposite, warms with living productions”, and that they are met with the greatest abundance near to central London and in the neighbourhood of the bridges.

He also added the following description of what a walker alongside the Thames in the mid 19th century would see:

“In one spot he will notice the carcases of dead animals, rotting, festering, swarming with flies and maggots, and from which a pestilential odour proceeds, contaminating the air around; in another he will see a variety of refuse borne along by the lazy current of the stream – decaying vegetables, the leaves and stalks of cabbages, grass from a recently mown lawn, excrement; in another he will remark on the commotion of the water, occasioned by the bubbling up of some noxious gas; and still further on, he will perceive some sewer; discharging its corrupt and filthy contents into the bed of the river, and causing the water around to assume an inky blackness.

Should the tide be out, the observer should now abandon the towing path, take a boat, and row to some of the shallower parts of the stream, If here he plunges his hand into the water, he will bring up a dirty and slimy mass. Entire acres (I might say without exaggeration) of a substance similar to the above may frequently noticed on the recession of the tide.”

To show what was being put into the Thames, he included a picture and description of sewer water, which contained large amounts of both organic and inorganic matter, much dead and decomposing matter, a black carbonaceous matter on which the inky colour of many sewer waters depend, and large quantities of sulphated hydrogen.

All this was being pumped into the river, frequently not that far from where a water company was drawing water to supply the residents and industries of the city.

Drawings of the view through the microscope of sewer water, and the first of the water companies examined- the Grand Junction Company:

The Grand Junction Company took their water from the Thames at Brentford, at a place which Hassall described as being “within reach of the sewage of that large and dirty town”.

Next came the West Middlesex Company, which took water from the Thames at Barnes, along with a sample of Cistern water:

The lower image shows Cistern Water, and the text explains that this was water from a cistern supplied by the Hampstead Water Company.

Cisterns were tanks where water was temporarily stored as part of the overall distribution system, between the source / reservoir, and the end user.

Hassall found numerous problems with the quality of the water in cisterns across London, and he had the follow general comment about cistern water “It may be observed, in general. that these waters contain the same forms of organic life as those encountered in the waters of several companies, with this important difference, however, that their numbers, for equal quantities of fluid, are usually much greater in the former than in the later”.

He goes on to explain that the samples he took from cisterns contained much greater quantities of living organisms, than the source water, for example:

  • The Chelsea Company is remarkable for its bunches of Ova cases
  • That of the Lambeth Company for its immense numbers of Bursaria and Paramecia
  • That of the Vauxhall Company for its hirsute worms or Annelida

Hassall makes the observation that the amount of life found in cisterns was dependent on the time of year (more growth when the weather was mild or warm) and also on whether the cisterns were frequently cleaned.

The Chelsea Company, who took their water from the Thames, near Battersea, and the Southwark Company, who took their water from the Thames near Vauxhall:

The water of the Southwark Company was described as being in the “worst condition in which it is conceivable any water to be, as regards its animalcular contents, in a worse state even than Thames water itself, as taken from the bed of the river”. Quite some achievement for the Southwark company to have their water described as being worse than the river water.

In the mid 19th century, the Southwark and Vauxhall Water Companies had combined. Most of the water companies had moved their supply sources to beyond the expanding city of London, looking for sources which did not have the same level of contamination as the Thames, along with methods of purification such as increased use of, and more complex design, of filtration beds, however the Southwark and Vauxhall Company still had their works in Battersea, as shown in the following map from 1894 (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

The site of the Southwark & Vauxhall Water Works would later become the site of Battersea Power Station, and if you walk through the power station building today, you are walking over the space once occupied by the central reservoir.

The Lambeth and New River Company’s water:

The Lambeth Company’s water “is procured from the river at Lambeth, and not far from a large sewer”.

In looking at the samples of water Hassall concluded that “the water of the Companies on the Surrey side of London, viz. the Southwark, Vauxhall, and Lambeth, is by far the worst of all those who take their supply from the Thames. They are demonstrably contaminated with more or less of the organic and decomposing matters, animal and vegetable, derived from sewer-water”.

In the above drawings, the lower is from the New River Company, who took water from the springs around the Hertfordshire town of Ware, along with the River Lea in Hertfordshire. This water was transported along a man-made river to the reservoir of the New River Company in northern Clerkenwell, from where it was distributed to consumers across the city.

See this post on New River Head and London’s Water Industry.

Hassall described that in the New River Company’s water, “living animalcules were not very numerous, but that it contained great numbers of Diatomaceous”, and that it also held abundant filaments of Fungi, dead organic matter, and much earthy matter, so even using a source well away from the polluted city did not mean that you had a clean supply to distribute to your consumers.

The water of the Hampstead Water Company was described as being generally bright and clear, but did contain numbers of Entomostraca and Infusoria.

The East London Company took their water supplies from the River Lea, and it was described as being similar to the water of the New River Company.

The Kent Company took their water from the Ravensbourne, and this water contained numerous species of the organic life that Hassall listed, along with much dead organic matter, and for good measure, quantities of grit.

Arthur Hassall was rather innovative in his thinking about sources of pollution in the Thames. He did not just look at the sources within central London, but considered the Thames as an overall system, comprising the core river, along with all the tributaries and the towns along the river and tributaries, as the inhabitants of all these towns were also putting all their rubbish, industrial waste and sewage indirectly into the Thames, and all this would eventually find its way to where the central London water companies were extracting their water.

Hassall used the 1841 census to illustrate the problem, and in the following table, he had added up the population of the towns along the Thames and tributaries above the town of Henley (Hassall used the name Isis for the river for its length from source to where it joins the River Thame by the village of Dorchester in Oxfordshire):

The following table shows the population along the Thames from Henley to London, as well as the towns along the tributaries that join along this section of the Thames:

This gave a total population of 2,316,273 living within the system of the Thames and its tributaries up to and including the city of London, according to the 1841 census (although it was higher than this as Hassall admits that there were some small towns where he had not been able to find the population).

It was not just the population along the river, but also the rapid growth of industry in London, and major towns in the river and tributary area, also produced polluted water as an industrial by-product, and frequently dumped this into the river system.

The state of the river was such that there were many cartoons emphasising the appalling state of the river, and the impact that it had on the health of the city’s residents, such as the following from Punch magazine in 1858:

Source and attribution: Punch Magazine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the book, Hassall included a section on Remedial Considerations, where he offered suggestions for improving the quality of water supplied to Londoners.

In doing so, he does not consider cleaning up the river, rather by seeking cleaner supplies of source water. His reasons for assuming the state of the river will not change are:

“It has been shown, and the fact is established by incontrovertible evidence, that all those companies who take their water from the Thames draw it from a polluted source, and, as long as this river is employed as the outlet of all the sewage of so vast a city as London, so long must its water used by so many of the metropolitan companies be bad at its sources, it can scarcely be otherwise than impure when delivered to the public.”

The challenge was in finding new, clean sources of water. Hassall looked at the River Wandle, which had a source in springs near Croydon, along with a large pond, however he finds that the refuse of a gas-works, a tan yard. a slaughter house and the sewage of the town is poured into the pond, and hence the Wandle.

Similar issues are found with all the small rivers around the wider area, people, industry, and even cross contamination between streams and canals.

In the mid-19th century, it seems almost every possible source of water in the counties around London was polluted to a greater or lesser degree.

Artesian Wells were a possibility, as these draw water from deep below ground, however Hassall considers the “operation of boring deep into the bowels of the earth” as expensive, uncertain and unnecessary, and that we should really be using the abundant supplies of water that nature provides on the surface of the earth.

Hassall recommended that open reservoirs be covered up, that cisterns should be cleaned regularly, and that water in cisterns should be refreshed, being stored in a cistern for no longer than 24 hours. At the time, many of these cisterns were made of lead, which was not recognised as a problem in the mid 19th century.

Filtration was identified as a major way of cleaning water between source and distribution, and Hassall conducted a series of experiments to determine the best method of filtration, using different types of charcoal, patent filters, loam, mild and strong clays, to see which individual or combination of materials would provide the cleanest water, and he identified a combination of charcoal, and clay mixed with sand as the best approach, and that three consecutive filtering operations should be carried out.

His summary recommendations are that a proper water supply to a populous city such as London, requires:

  • An unpolluted source
  • An unlimited supply
  • Perpetual renewal
  • Filtration
  • The abolition or modification of reservoirs and cisterns
  • Moderate cost

It would take many decades for the changes to be implemented that were needed to provide London with a clean supply of water. Investment, engineering, technical improvements, new sources, storage methods, distribution networks etc. were all needed, and today, on the whole, we have a very clean supply of water.

The Thames is today, cleaner than it was in the mid 19th century, but there is no way that I would want to drink water straight from the river, and I find it worrying when I see children playing on the foreshore, who, being children, will put their fingers in their mouth.

The Tideway Tunnel will prevent many of the overflows into the river from the wider London area, however as Hassall described back in 1850, it is the whole catchment area of the river and tributaries that need to be clean, as these contribute to the waters that flow through central London.

Perhaps we need another Arthur Hassall to graphically describe the contents of the water that flows through the city.

He seems to have been widely respected for his knowledge of water contamination. In July 1850, the same year as the publication of his book on the water companies of London, he was speaking at the Botanical Society of London “On the colouration of the water of the Serpentine”, where he described the cause of the vivid green colouration of the Serpentine that had taken place that year.

In the same year he also published a report on the “Adulteration of Coffee”, which apparently was a problem at the time, as he reported that roasted wheat, beans and potatoes had all been used.

As well as the pictures shown earlier in the post, Arthur Hassall’s writing was always very descriptive, and I will leave you with this graphic sentence from his summary, back in 1850:

“It is thus beyond dispute that, according to the present system of London water supply, a portion of the inhabitants of the metropolis are made to consume, in some form or other, a portion of their own excrement, and, moreover, to pay for the privilege.”

His & Hers Hairdressers, Middleton Road, Hackney

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Following last week’s post on London Fields, for this week’s post I am again in search of another of my father’s 1980s photos, also in Hackney, but this one, judging by other photos on the same strip of negatives, seems to be from 1986.

This is His & Hers Hairdressers at the Kingsland Road end of Middleton Road:

The photo is typical of the many small businesses that occupied run down Victorian shops in the 1980s, and for a hairdressers of that decade, the shop has the obligatory display of hair style photos.

This is the same shop, forty years later in 2026:

With photos of hairdressers, you can normally tell the decade of when the photo was taken by the photos in the windows, and His & Hers had photos of 1980s big hair:

Small details in the photo, such as the person inside, probably wondering why my father is taking a photo:

On the wall to the left of the shop, something that was once a common sight:

And there are details in the 2026 photo, where an earlier shop sign has been exposed:

If you go back to the 1986 photo, there is wooden boarding across the location of the above sign, so I suspect this was covered up in 1986 and dates from an earlier business.

M. Matthews is the central name. There does appear to be a shadow name, but this also looks like M. Matthews, so perhaps an earlier version of the same name. To the right is the word Tobacco, and a bit hard to make out, but to the left the letters do seem to form Newsagent.

I cannot find a reference to an M. Matthews, but the ground floor of the building has always been a shop, and searching through Post Office directories, I found that in 1899 the shop was a Confectioner, run by Miss Elizabeth Winstone, and in 1910 it was still a confectioner, but now run by Mrs Matilda Watkins.

A jump from being a Confectioner, to a Newsagent and Tobacconist, but who also probably continued to sell confectionary does seem like a natural evolution of the shop.

I have no idea when the shop changed to a hairdressers, or when His & Hers closed. In the 1986, the ground floor occupied by the hairdresser does seem to have undergone some structural alteration, as above the windows and doors, there is the full width of the panel over the name sign, and this can also be seen in my 2026 photo, where the name sign extends over the windows and two doors.

The ornate carvings typical of the sign endings on Victorian shops can also be seen in the 1986 photo, although the one of the left had been removed by 2026.

This is probably the result of the building being converted from a shop occupying the full width of the ground floor, to a building where the first and second floors became separate residential accommodation, hence the door on the left, and the door to the shop being the one on the right.

Today, the old shop on the ground floor also appears to be residential.

The shop was built in the mid 19th century as the fields and nurseries of Hackney were covered in new homes.

In the following map, I have marked the location of the shop with the red arrow on the left. The darker road running vertically just to the left is Kingsland Road, and to the right of the map is the edge of London Fields. Middleton Road is the street with the Hairdressers, and which runs from Kingsland Road to London Fields.

Nearly all of the straight streets in the map are Victorian housing, serving the growing numbers of middle class workers of London with aspirational new homes.

The shop was part of a street design where small businesses were distributed across new residential developments, so that people who moved out to these new homes would have access to the necessities of life within local walking distance, and this included pubs.

On the corner of Middleton Road and Kingsland Road is the Fox – a rare example of a London pub that closed in around 2018, but has recently reopened (I believe with the upper floors converted to residential):

At the very top of the corner of the building is the date 1881, and this is from when the current building dates, although there has been a pub on the site for a number of centuries.

The earliest written refence I can find to the Fox is from 1809, when on the 21st of July, there was an advert in the Morning Advertiser for the auction of five, neat, brick built dwelling houses between Kingsland Green and Newington Green. Details about the properties to be auctioned could be had from Mr. Taylor at the Fox, Kingsland Road.

When the 1809 advert appeared, much of the area surrounding the Fox was still farm land and nurseries, but the pub was here because Kingsland Road was an important road to the north from the City and would have been busy, with many of those using the road in need of refreshment.

Search the Internet for stories about the Fox, and a story about the pub being used to stash part of a £6 Million Security Express robbery in 1983, by Clifford Saxe, one of the robbers and landlord of the Fox is one of the common stories from recent years.

I cannot find a firm reference from the time that it was the Fox, an account of the robbery from the Sunday Mirror on the 1st of July 1984 on wanted criminals who were living in Spain referenced that “It claimed Saxe, 57, formerly landlord of an east London pub was the brains of the gang”. Presumably that east London pub was the Fox, but again I cannot find a direct reference from the time.

In the following extract from Rocque’s 1746 map, I have marked the location of the Fox with a red arrow. The yellow dotted line shows the route of the future Middleton Road, running from Kingsland Road to the edge of London Fields, over what was nursery land, and by 1823 would be known as Grange’s Nursery:

The 1881 rebuild of the pub must have been to transform the premises that had once been surrounded by fields, to an establishment suitable for the large population who occupied the terrace streets by then covering the fields.

The population growth of Hackney mirrors this housing development. In 1801 the population was 12,730, and a century later in 1901, Hackney’s population had grown to 219,110, and this new population needed local shops, and the confectioners / newsagents and tobacconists / hairdresser shop was part of a terrace of shops at the end of Middleton Road, with the following photo being today’s view of this terrace:

In 1899, this terrace consisted of (number 11 in bold is the shop that is the subject of today’s post):

  • Number 1: John Biddle – Fishmonger
  • Number 3: Mrs Stark – Baby Linen
  • Number 5: John Edward Stark – Tobacconist
  • Number 7&9; Benjamin Wilkinson – Chemist
  • Number 11; Miss Elizabeth Winstone – Confectioner
  • Number 13: Robinson Locklison – Laundry

By 1910, the terrace consisted of:

  • Number 1: Walter Hart – Fried Fish Shop
  • Number 3: James Arthur Mullett – Grocer
  • Number 5: William Leigh – Hairdresser
  • Number 7&9: Benjamin Wilkinson – Chemist
  • Number 11: Mrs Matilda Watkins – Confectioner
  • Number 13: John Hart – Bootmaker

The above two lists shows that in the eleven years between the two, there was a high turnover in owners and types of shop. Number 1 had changed from a Fishmonger to a Fried Fish Shop, illustrating the rapid expansion of this type of take away food across London, from what is believed to be the first such shop in east London in 1860.

Number 1 is still supplying food, as today it is the Tin Café.

The only business that is the same is the Chemist of Benjamin Wilkinson. At number 13 in 1910 was John Hart, a Bootmaker. In 1986 it was a shoe repair shop, just visible to the right of the photo at the start of the post, so in the same type of business.

Another view of the terrace, number 3 to 13:

Just visible to the right of the above photo, and in an earlier photo with a train, is a bridge, which adds an unusual feature to this end of Middleton Road.

Walking along Middleton Road, under the bridge and looking back, this is the view:

The bridge carries what is now the Windrush Line over Middleton Road, and the reason for the large dip in the road is because the railway is carried on a viaduct, which runs parallel to Kingsland Road, and needs to run as a level structure, so where the railway carried by the viaduct runs across a road, the runs needs to be lowered to pass under the viaduct.

This railway was built as part of the North London extension of the London and North Western Railway, and the following extract from Railway News on the 3rd of December 1864, when the viaduct was nearing completion, explains the benefits and route of this railway:

“The London and North Western reaches the City by means of the North London extension, but the undertaking may be considered as that of the North Western.

The City extension runs from Kingsland to Liverpool Street, Bishopsgate, and is now rapidly approaching completion. The advantages of this line are very considerable.

The station is within a short distance of the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England and many offices in which the chief monetary transactions of the City are conducted. Five or seven minutes walk will bring you to Threadneedle-street, Moorgate-street, or Gracechurch-street, and all the other busy thoroughfares, lanes and courts hard by – no small consideration to the thousands of railway travellers who come from the North daily within that important radius who are anxious to economise time.

Further, this line shortens the distance between all the stations on the North London line, from Camden to Kingsland and the City by no less than five miles. At present time the North London, on leaving Kingsland, goes by Hackney, Bow, and Stepney, describing nearly three-quarters of a circle before it reaches Fenchurch Street. This detour, with its super abundant traffic and crowded junctions, with therefore be avoided by all coming west of Kingsland to the City.

The extension is about 2.5 miles in length, and proceeds almost in a direct line from its junction with the North London proper to Bishopsgate, With the exception of a cutting near the starting point it passes all the way on a brick arch viaduct which has all but been finished. Running parallel with the Kingsland-road.”

The line would go on to terminate at Broad Street Station, next to Liverpool Street.

This railway helped with the construction of the houses across the fields of Hackney, as for workers to move to Hackney, they needed an easy form of transport to their place of work, and the new railway extension was ideal. For the residents of Middleton Road, Haggerston Station was a short walk south along Kingsland Road. The station opened on the 2nd of September 1867.

Bells Weekly Messenger on the 9th of September 1867 described the new station: “NEW STATION, NORTH LONDON RAILWAY – A large and commodious new station was opened on Monday on the North London Railway, in Lee-street, Kingsland Road. The new Haggerston Station commands the neighbourhood, and also the Downham-road and De Beauvoir Town, which places are situated too far from the Dalston Junction to profit by the latter.”

The line closed in 1986 (Haggerston Station had closed in 1940 due to a number of factors including wartime economy measures and bomb damage to the station).

The station and railway along the viaduct reopened in 2010 as part of London Overground, and in 2024 the railway was renamed as the Windrush Line.

So this small part of London had shops, a pub and a station connected to the City. The other important attribute of a Victorian city was a church, and In Middleton Road is the 1847 Middleton Road Congregational Church, now the Hackney Pentecostal Apostolic Church:

Middleton Road is mainly comprised of terrace houses, but there are some interesting exceptions, such as the building in the middle of the following photo:

Which has an entry to the rear of the building named Ropewalk Mews:

I cannot find the reason for this name, and why the building is very different to the terrace houses that occupy the street.

A ropewalk was / is a long length of land or covered space, where the individual strands of a rope could be laid out and then twisted to form a continuous length of rope.

London had plenty of ropewalks, but these were usually close to the Thames, as the main customer for the ropes produced would have been the thousands of ships that were once to be found on the river.

Rocque’s map of 1747 does not show a ropewalk, although the map does identify ropewalks in other parts of London. In 18th and early 19th century maps of the area, the land is shown as agricultural and a nursery, no mention of a ropewalk.

It may have been that there was a small ropewalk here to produce rope to be used in the bundling of produce from the nursery, but I cannot find any confirmation of this.

One of the architectural developments that was seen in Victorian houses of the mid 19th century was the bay window, which was a way of breaking up a terrace, and a change from the Georgian emphasis on an unbroken terrace of flat, uniform walls facing onto the street. We can see this development in the terrace houses of Middleton Street:

Another change was the semi-basement, where the ground floor is slightly raised, and reached from the streets by steps, allowing the upper part of the basement to just poke above ground level, with a space between basement window and the retaining wall to the street. This development allowed natural light into the basement, and again we can see this in the above terrace.

The 1881 census provides a view of the employment of those who moved into Middleton Road. There were a very wide range of jobs, including: Bank Clerks, Decorators, Commercial Travellers, Commercial Clerks, Boot Makers, Locksmiths, Plumbers, Stock Brokers Clerks, Stationers Assistant, Printers, Teachers, Newspaper Advertising Agents, Drapers, Draughtsmen, Watchmakers, etc. All the vast range of trades and employment types to be found in the rapidly expanding Victorian London of the late 19th century.

Where a job was listed such as a Bootmaker, these were frequently not an individual worker, rather an employer, for example at number 33 Middleton Road was George Clarke, a Bootmaker who was listed as employing 25 men and two boys.

Some of the residents had private means, for example at Oxford Cottage in Middleton Road was Fanny Smyth, listed as a widow, with her occupation as “income from interest of money”. What is fascinating about the 19th century census is how frequently people would marry later in life, and in Fanny Smyth’s household were three children, two daughters aged 31 and 21 and a son of 28, all listed as single.

Many of the houses in Middleton Road also had a Domestic Servant, again confirming that these new streets were occupied by the new middle class.

Whilst in 1881, the majority of people who lived in Middleton Road were listed a being born in Middlesex, (the historic county that from 1965 is now mainly part of Greater London), there were a very significant number of people from the rest of the country, and a small percentage from Ireland. Throughout much of the 19th century, London was expanding both in terms of employment and residents, by attracting people from the rest of the country.

More of the homes in Middleton Street in which the Bank Clerks, Decorators, Commercial Travellers etc. of 1881 would live:

Middleton Road is a perfect example of the mid 19th expansion of London, as the fields of Hackney were taken over by the houses of the growing middle class.

The shops and pub at the Kingsland Road end of the street are a perfect example of how local shops were planned as part of this expansion, and for decades served the needs of the local community.

One can imagine the early morning being busy with the working residents heading to the train station to travel into the City for their work, and in the evening, a busy pub, with the option of a stop off for fish and chips after the pub, then heading back to your terrace home in Middleton Road.

When writing these posts, I often have music on in the background, and for this post it was YouTube, as it has a random playlist based on what I have listened to before, and a track I have not heard for many years came up, the 1982 Lucifer’s Friend by the Rotherham / Sheffield band Vision.

The His & Hers Hairdressers was photographed in 1986, and the track by Vision is a perfect example of brilliant 1980s music, including the type of hair styles that you may have been able to get in His & Hers:

David Bowie Centre and V&A East Storehouse

Last week, we went to have a look at the small David Bowie exhibition, which forms part of the David Bowie archive held by the V&A. It is located at the new V&A East Storehouse at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park:

It is a small, but interesting exhibition of some of the costumes worn by Bowie, photos, song lyrics, ideas for films, plays etc.

The Bowie exhibition and archive is a small part of the Storehouse, which is home to a vast collection of items not on display in the main museums.

You are free to wander around the walkways on several levels between racks of items collected over very many years:

There were a number of London related items on display, for example a London County Council plaque recording that Emma Cons and Lilian Baylis lived here:

The plaque dates from 1952 and was installed on the house at 6 Morton Place, Stockwell. The house was demolished in 1971 and the plaque was saved with the intention that it would go on display in the V&A Covent Garden Theatre Museum. The Theatre Museum closed in 2007, and the plaque is now on display the V&A East Storehouse.

The V&A also has a number of items relating to Robin Hood Gardens, the social housing estate in Poplar, east London, including a section of the west block, to preserve the architectural vision.

One of the items on display is a collage from the Robin Hood Gardens Project:

And some of the fittings from Robin Hood Gardens:

The V&A East Storehouse is a fascinating way to display part of the collection that would not normally be on display in the V&A museums, and is well worth a visit.

The Flower Sellers and London Fields

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The Flower Sellers is a statue (not sure if that is the correct word to describe this large artwork), in London Fields, Hackney. My father photographed the statue in 1989:

Last Wednesday, the first day without any rain, and with sun forecast, I went to find the Flower Sellers, and this is how they look today (unfortunately with a bright sun behind):

Most descriptions about the statue describe the installation as being in the 1980s, which I think I can narrow down to 1988.

The two figures are holding baskets possibly of flowers (which makes sense given the name of the work), but may also contain other produce. Around the base of the work, and in the surroundings of the Flower Sellers there are a number of sheep. I will come onto the reasons for these later in the post.

London Fields is a large area of open space in Hackney, just to the west of the Weaver line station, also called London Fields. I have circled London Fields in the following map (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

Surrounding the main statue, there are a number of stone seats, each with the top made up of colourful mosaics, depicting everyday items, such as scissors, threads of cotton, and bottles in the following example:

The name of the work is the Flower Sellers, and presumably it is flowers that are meant to be represented within the baskets held by the two people. I am not so sure. There are very few direct references to the baskets holding flowers, some references are to “different produce” sold in the nearby Broadway Market.

In 2018, after 30 years of being exposed to the elements, the work was in need of some repair, and the council commissioned local mosaic artist Tamara Froud from MosaicAllsorts to carry out the work. Today, the items in the baskets do look a bit like colourful flowers, but this could have been the result of the restoration emphasising the patterns and colours:

In my father’s 1989 photo, the items in the baskets were very plain and lacking any colour. The photo was only a year or less, after the work was installed, so perhaps the contents of the baskets were still to be finished.

The work does have a direct reference to a previous use of London Fields. The work consists of a number of seats in the immediate area of the central figures, and these follow the designs at the base of the figures, with colourful mosaic topped seating, and sheep:

These sheep, around the seating and at the base of the central work represent the time when London Fields were used as a stopping off place for animals being taken to the markets of London.

Rocque’s map of 1746 shows London Field as an area of open space (in the centre of the following map) to the west of Church Street (today Mare Street). Ribbon development along Mare Street of the village of Hackney, with the village surrounded by fields:

The following larger extract from Rocque’s map shows where London Fields is located (red circle) with respect to the main routes from the north of the city down to Smithfield Market. The yellow arrow points to the main route, now the A10, Kingsland Road, and the green arrows point to a detour from this road that passes through Hackney, where sheep could be rested at London Fields, before re-joining the main route to head to the market:

Volume 10 covering Hackney from “A History of the County of Middlesex”, describes London Fields being first record in 1540, with the singular use of the name, with Fields seeming to become more frequent in later centuries.

There are references to the area being worn bare by the grazing of sheep.

Other references to this activity were, and some still are, to be found surrounding London Fields. There was a Mutton Lane (look to the lower left of London Fields in the first extract from Rocque’s map above), and there was, and still is a Sheep Lane, as seen in the following map (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

There is also a Cat and Mutton pub at the London Fields end of Broadway Market, and crossing the Regent’s Canal is the Cat and Mutton Bridge.

As could probably be expected in an open area, with lots of travellers passing through, there was a significant amount of crime in and around London Fields.

The following is a small sample of newspaper reports mentioning London Fields from the decades in the mid 18th century around the time of Rocque’s map:

7th of October 1741: “On Thursday Night, between Seven and Eight o’clock, five Persons, singly, were robbed between the Goldsmiths Alms houses and London Field, going to Hackney, by three Footpads, who have for some time infested those Parts.”

30th of July 1730: “Monday afternoon the following acts were committed by a man with one arm, very genteelly dressed – with his sword he wounded two ladies in London Field, Hackney; and a short time afterwards, with the same weapon, he twice stabbed a gentleman upon Dalton Downs.”

17th of October 1750: “Yesterday as a Servant of a Mercer in Cheapside, who had been to deliver some Good’s at a Lady’s at Hackney, was returning home about Five o’clock in the Evening, he was stopt between London Field and the Road by a Man genteelly dressed in a light coloured Coat and black Waistcoat, who seized him by the Collar, and presenting a Pistol to him, threatened to blow his Brains out if he did not deliver his Money, which he did, to the Amount of Twenty Shillings and Three-pence, and the Fellow was going away; but on the Servant’s desiring him to return the Half-pence for a Pint of Beer, he gave him three Half pence, then took of his Hat and Wig and tripped up the man’s heels and pushed him into a Ditch, and then made off across the Field.”

4th of December 1753: “On Tuesday Night, between Seven and Eight o’clock, Mr, Cornelius Mussell was robbed in London Field, Hackney, of twenty five shillings, by five men armed with Pistols and Cutlasses; and last Night, two Gentlemen in a Coach coming to Town from Hackney, were robbed on Cambridge Heath supposed to be the same Gang.”

13th of November 1770: “Last Night an out door Clerk belonging to Mr. Pearson, Wine and Brandy Merchant, in Spitalfields, who had been at a Public House in Hackney, receiving cash to the amount of £30, was stopped by two Footpads in London Field, who robbed him of all the Money he had received.”

On the 25th of February 1773, Thomas Bond was convicted at the Old Bailey for robbing Thomas Sayville of his watch and money in London Field, Hackney – he was initially sentenced to death, but this was commuted to transportation.

The threat of a death sentence, or transportation seems to have been very little deterrent to these types of crimes given the very high number of robberies that were reported across London.

There were other strange events in London Fields, including:

31st July 1789: “Monday evening a battle was fought in London Fields, Hackney, between two butchers of Bishopsgate Street, which, according to the connoisseurs of the pugilistic art, was the choicest ever known. The combatants behaved with uncommon resolution during an hour and ten minutes, when it was ended by the least being carried off the field for dead. The bets ran 5 to 3 in favour of the loser – many knock-down blows were given and received on both sides, and on the close of the contest, neither was able to stand alone.”

Almost 80 years after Rocque’s map, in 1823, Hackney was still a village surrounded by fields, with London Field continuing to be an open area to the west, and still being used to graze sheep on their way to market:

In Rocque’s map of 1746, the land to the west of London Fields is shown with horizontal and vertical dashed lines, rather than the symbols used to indicate normal grass fields. In the above 1823 map, this area is now marked as Grange’s Nursery, a large area of space almost running up to Kingsland Road, with what must have been the owners, and or nursery buildings in the centre of the space.

Another comparison between the 1746 and 1823 maps shows that there had not be that much additional development around London Fields. Some additional building, but mainly along Mare Street.

This would all change in the following decades, with the period from 1840 being one of considerable change, with rows of Victorian housing, industrial buildings and streets being developed between Hackney and Kingsland Road, with London Fields surviving as an area of public open space.

There were many challenges by developers to London Fields, with small bits of the space being taken for housing, and there was also digging for gravel at places across the space.

A campaign by those concerned with preserving London Fields as a public open space helped to make the Metropolitan Commons Act of 1866 reach Parliament and become law, with London Fields becoming the responsibility of the Metropolitan Board of Works.

There were continuing issues with gravel digging and fences encroaching onto the space, but these were always challenged and fences torn down. When the London County Council came into being, London Fields was levelled and seeded with grass, paths were created, and Plane trees planted, with a bandstand being built in the centre of the fields.

Looking towards the south of London Fields from the Flower Sellers:

Looking north along London Fields:

In the above photo, the space looks very empty, however it was busy with people, just not on the grass, which was rather muddy after many days of rain.

The main footpath to the right had a continuous stream of walkers and runners, and to the north, the play areas were full of groups of small children in high-vis jackets being shepherded by nursery school teachers, although the play area to the south was empty:

The above photo shows some of the houses that lined the eastern, Hackney side of London Fields, the first side of the fields to be developed.

As with many open spaces in London, London Fields has seen a number of political meetings. One such was reported in the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette on the 15th of March 1886:

“MEETING OF SOCIALISTS ON LONDON FIELDS – On Saturday afternoon, a mass meeting of the employed and unemployed took place on London Fields, convened under the auspices of the Hackney and Shoreditch Branch of the Social Democratic Federation, to consider what was best to be done to alleviate the distress that now prevails to such a terrible extent in the district. A large crowd , numbering some two thousand persons, gathered round a cart in the centre of the fields, from which speeches were delivered.

A large body of police, some 300 on foot and 50 mounted, were on duty. The mounted men were placed at the entrance of the streets abutting the fields, and the other constables paraded the footpaths in pairs. Most of the shops in the immediate vicinity were closed.

The Chairman referred to the rapid growth of the Mansion House Fund since the Trafalgar Square riots as indicating the re-awakening of the well-to-do classes on the subject of the increasing amount of distress in the country, whereat he was interrupted by cries of ‘No charity’, and ‘We don’t want it’. It was not the relief funds that they wanted, but the right to live and to labour guaranteed by the State. If they had justice they would enjoy the wealth they created.”

Charles Booth’s poverty maps created towards the end of the 19th century, shows the contrasting levels of wealth and poverty around London Fields from the dark blues of “Very poor, casual. Chronic want”, up to the reds of “Middle Class, Well-to-do”, with this later grouping occupying the new terrace houses that had been built in the previous couple of decades:

On the north eastern edge of London Fields, there is a pub – the Pub on the Park:

The Pub on the Park is a survivor of the 19th century buildings surrounding the north east of the park.

On the night of the 21st of September, 1940, the area around London Fields suffered considerable bomb damage, resulting in the post-war demolition of the buildings around the pub, which was restored and survived.

The pub was originally called the Queen Eleanor and renamed to the Pub on the Park in 1992.

The pub seems to date from the mid 19th century development of the area, and the first references I can find to the Queen Eleanor date from the 1850s. There may have been a pub on the site prior to the current building, as a place where people travelling through the area, and grazing their sheep in the fields, would have also attracted businesses such as pubs, although I can find no evidence of the predecessor to the current building, although I suspect it was part of the mid 19th century development.

The sign of the Pub on the Park:

From the photo of the pub, it is clear that it was once a corner pub, and a look at the other side of the pub shows that it was once joined to another house. This side is also now decorated:

The reason for the original name of the pub is clear in the following extract from the 1893 OS revision. The pub is circled and Eleanor Road runs upwards from the left of the pub (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

What is remarkable about the above map is that Eleanor Road, and the houses along the left hand side of Tower Street were not rebuilt after the war, and the area was taken into London Fields, grassed over, and is now part of that open space.

The pub is now isolated on the edge of the fields.

Follow Eleanor Road to the north and the road meets Richmond Road. The houses along the southern side of Richmond Road, at the northern end of the park, were also not rebuilt and London Fields now extends to border Richmond Road, with the exception of a small stretch of housing to right and left.

Tower Street in the above map is now Martello Street. It is always interesting to walk the side streets as there is frequently so much to see, for example just before where Martello Street dives under the railway viaduct:

At the north western corner of London Fields is the London Fields Lido:

The Lido was one of many opened across London during the 1920s and 1930s (see here for a bit about the Parliament Hill Lido), although all the news reports from the time refer to it as an open air swimming bath rather than a Lido.

The Lido was opened in 1932, and was advanced for its time, having an advanced filtration plant as well as a water aerator in the form of a fountain. As well as the pool, there was a sunbathing area, first aid room and a refreshment kiosk, and the Lido was designed and built by the London County Council.

The Lido closed for the war, opening in 1951, the same year as the Festival of Britain. I do not know if these events were connected, but the Festival did act as a catalyst for other post war improvements and renovations to public infrastructure and facilities.

The Lido remained open until 1988, after which there were proposals to demolish the Lido and return the area to grass within the overall London Fields grassland, as had happened with the post war demolition of the bomb damaged housing at Eleanor Street..

The London Fields User Group were concerned about the threats to the Lido, and the loss of such a facility, so a sub-committee was established to campaign for the reopening of the Lido.

The condition of the Lido deteriorated rapidly, with the Lido sub-committee arranging work to try and stop too much deterioration, whilst continuing to campaign for restoration and reopening.

Funding and designs were finally available in 2005 when work started, with the Lido reopening in October 2006 for a few months for testing. More work was needed over winter, and the Lido fully reopened for Easter 2007.

The Lido seemed busy on the day of my visit to London Fields, and, despite being a February day there were plenty of swimmers in the open air pool, although having the water at 24 degrees centigrade must help.

From sheep grazing to a Lido, London Fields has been a key part in the development of Hackney for centuries, and continues to be a valuable area of open space surrounded by dense streets of 19th century development, as London engulfed the small villages surrounding the city.

Watermen’s Rates, The Shock of America and a 19th Century Street View

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Three different subjects in this week’s post, but they all have a common theme of time – change over time, how centuries old data can be interpreted in modern ways, and how the future always develops in a way we can never foresee, starting with:

The 1803 Table of Watermen’s Rates

In last week post on Pageant’s Stairs, one of the references I included to the stairs, was the Watermen’s rates for taking you from London Bridge to the stairs in 1803, according to the “Correct Table of the Fares of Watermen, which has recently been made out by the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen”, as published in the Evening Mail on Monday the 16th of May, 1803..

The table included the rates for a long length of the Thames, from Windsor to Gravesend, and in my nerdy way of looking at stuff like this, I thought it would be interesting to interpret this data in a way we are familer with now, if we travel on London’s underground and rail network, where basic charging is by zone.

So taking the starting point of London Bridge, in the City of London, I mapped the rates in 1803 on to a map of the Thames, with each zone defining a specific Watermen’s price to row you from London Bridge.

If you walked down to the river in 1803 to take a Watermen’s boat to your destination, then, as with an Underground station today, we can imagine the following maps pinned to the wall of the alley leading down to the stairs, the first map starting with the zones from London Bridge out to Blackwall (the actual zone pricing is after the maps). All base maps are © OpenStreetMap contributors:

London Bridge is the bridge on the left edge of Zone 1, and this is the starting point for a journey east along the river, and as with Transport for London’s (TfL), charging today, the price increases as the length of journey increases.

There are some strange charges, for example the whole of the Isle of Dogs appears to be in a higher priced zone (6), whilst Deptford has it’s own little zone (5), which is a lower price to the Isle of Dogs.

Displaying data in this way does make some huge assumptions. For example, with the Isle of Dogs, the 1803 table does not specify where on the Isle of Dogs the priced journey would end, so as stated in the table it looks to cover a large distance of river, from Limehouse round to Blackwall.

In the next map, we continue along the river to Gravesend, which, as Zone 13 is the final easterly zone, and priced destination in the 1803 table:

There seems to be no standard length of journey, so as can be seen in the above map, the length along the river of zone 9 is much more than zones 11 or 12.

The pricing and sample locations within each zone is shown in the following table:

The best description of the difference between Oars and Sculler that I can find, is that with Oars, a rower is holding a single Oar in two hands, whilst with a Sculler, a rower is holding a pair of Oars in both hands.

I assume this explains the difference in pricing and why the price for a Sculler ends at the Isle of Dogs / Greenwich, as a boat could be rowed by a single person, using two oars, where with Oars, at least two people would be needed, each holding one oar on either side of the boat.

If this is wrong, comments are always appreciated.

The price for a Sculler ending at the Isle of Dogs / Greenwich is probably due to this being the physical limit that a single person could row along the river.

Regarding my earlier comment about the difference in length of the zones, the pricing table helps to explain this, with the jump in rates roughly rises in line with the distance travelled.

The above maps and table cover the east of the river. If you wanted to travel west, then there is a similar zone map hanging on the wall at London Bridge.

This is the first seven zones, from London Bridge up to Wandsworth:

Zone 6 covers the rate to Chelsea, and the following print from 1799 shows a party being rowed along Chelsea Reach. The boat is being rowed by Oars, as there are six rowers and three oars either side, so each rower is holding a single oar with both hands:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

The above print shows several people being rowed by a team of six, and an obvious question is whether the rates apply to any number of passengers and number of rowers, and the answer is that there is an additional charge.

The 1803 Table of Watermen’s rates states that for the journey from London Bridge to Chelsea, for every additional passenger, there is an additional charge of 4d on top of the base rate, so in the above print there are ten passengers, plus two playing instruments who I assume also incur a charge as they are not Watermen.

The man at the back is wearing a Watermen’s badge on his arm, so presumably comes with the boat, so if the above boat had been rowed from London Bridge to Chelsea, the charge (see table after the next two maps) would have been 2s 6d base rate plus 12 times 4d (passengers plus musicians), so a total charge of 5 shillings and 10 pence.

Continuing along to Zone 18, Shepperton, Chertsey and Weybridge:

The final two zones, 19 and 20 run all the way to Windsor:

The table of rates travelling west from London Bridge:

The final five zones from Hampton Court / Town up to Datchet and Windsor:

The journey out to Windsor is considerable, and is way beyond the area of Port of London Authority’s responsibility, which ends at Teddington, the last westerly point on the tidal Thames.

Including Windsor in the Waterman’s rates must have meant there was demand for travel this far west, and is probably due to the times when the Monarch was based at Windsor Castle, so there would have been a need for travel from central London out to Windsor.

The price is also considerable for 1803 at 21 shillings, and on top of this there was a 3 shilling charge for additional passengers. Assuming the traveller from London to Windsor required a return trip, then the price would have been double, so not a journey that the average Londoner would have taken. Only one for the rich, and those on state business.

As well as listing charges for additional passengers, there were a number of other additional charges:

  • If the journey is not a direct journey between places on the river, for example, if the journey is taking or collecting passengers from a ship, which may include waiting at the ship whilst passengers and luggage transfer, then the Waterman has the option of charging either the standard distance rate, or a time rate of 6d for every half hour for oars, and 3d for scullers.
  • If the Waterman is detained at a stop by the passenger, for example having to wait at the destination stop whilst the passengers wait to disembark, wait to be met etc. then the Waterman can charge an additional 6d per half hour of waiting for oars and 3d for scullers.
  • A journey directly across the river is charged at the standard rate of 2d, or if more than one person, 1d per person
  • There were also standard rates between different stairs or landing places on the river, these were roughly the difference between the zones in which the different places were located. As an example, Wapping (Zone 3) to Greenwich (Zone 7), was 1 shilling 6 pence. The difference of the London Bridge standard rates of 2s 6d (to Greenwich) minus 1s (to Wapping, Zone 3).
  • No more than six persons are to be carried in a wherry (the standard Watermen’s boat), and up to Windsor and Greenwich, up to eight in a passage boat (which I believe is a larger boat than the basic wherry).

One surprising omission is any reference to the state of the tide, as for a rowed or sculled boat, it would have been considerably harder rowing against the tide than rowing with the ride. It may be that this is expected to average out over a series of journeys with half being against the tide and half with the tide.

It would also be interesting to add a time column to the listing of rates, as the journey to the furthest reaches to the east and the west must have been considerable. This was reflected in the rates for the watermen, however it must have taken many hours to reach the furthest places in the table, and time of the journey would have been variable, depending on tide, weather, other river traffic etc.

Despite what seems to be well regulated pricing, there were challenges for the passenger who used the river to travel through London.

The following print dated 1816 from the Miseries of London series shows a woman walking down the steps at Wapping Old Stairs, presumably wanting a boat to travel to her destination, and being “assailed by a group of watermen, holding out their hands and calling Oars, Sculls, Sculls, Oars, Oars”:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

The Watermen are wearing their badge on their arms to signify that they are a Waterman, and the following is an example of such a badge:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

Not adhering to the rates would often result in being brought to court, for example in 1847, waterman John Thomas Jones was in court on a charge of overcharging a passenger 12s 6d for a fare that should have been 4s 3d. The Waterman was fined 20s.

Watermen also were at a number of risks, as well as the daily danger of rowing along a congested river, they were also valued for their skills, and were prized as recruits for the Navy.

A report in the London Magazine in 1738 on the need to crew several new naval ships, states that a “press” took place on the river, with 2,370 men taken and enrolled in the Navy, the majority of them being Watermen.

The 19th century saw a gradual decline in the need for a Watermen to row passengers along the river.

The growth of steam ships on the river, the growth of the railways, underground, improved roads, bridges etc. all made it easier to travel without the need to be rowed.

Steam powered boats started ferrying passengers along the river, although initially this method of transport was not always safe and reliable. The following print from 1817 titled “Travelling by Steam” shows two Watermen watching a steam packet boat exploding and throwing the boat’s passengers across the river:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

The newspapers listing of the Watermen’s Rates were always dense columns of text, and showing these visually on a map, in a similar way in which TfL display underground and rail fares helps with understanding part of the rich life of London’s river.

One big difference between 1803 Watermen charges and today’s TfL charging is that in 1803 there was no capping of the daily charge, so in 1803, you would have been charged for each journey you would have taken on the river.

The Sunbeam Weekly and the Pilgrim’s Pocket – Shock and Outrage at the Evolution of the United States of America

There is a wonderful statue at Cumberland Wharf in Rotherhithe, which is today a small area of open space alongside the river at the place indicated by the arrow in the following map:

Once a wharf between Rotherhithe Street and the Thames, servicing a large granary across the street via conveyors which ran across the street in the photo below, and which shows the area occupied by Cumberland Wharf:

If you look to the left of the space, there is a walkway with a statue at the end, which is alongside the river:

The statue consists of a taller figure – William Bradford, who was Governor of the New Plymouth colony in the United States for a number of periods between the years 1621 and 1657. The boy is in 1930s clothes, and represents a local boy reading a comic of the time:

The work by Peter McLean dates from 1991 and is titled “Sunshine Weekly and the Pilgrims Pocket”:

William Bradford was one the Pilgrims who left Rotherhithe on the Mayflower in 1620. The ship sailed from Rotherhithe from the area around Cumberland Wharf, although not their last port of call in England, as they stopped off at Plymouth before crossing the Atlantic on a two month journey.

Bradford is looking over the boy’s shoulder at his comic with, as described in the adjacent information board, “a look of shock and outrage” as he turns the pages of the comic:

The Sunbeam Weekly was a comic from the 1930s:

Why was the Pilgrim William Bradford, who had a long career as the Governor of the Plymouth Colony at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, looking at a 1930s comic with a look of shock and outrage?

The reason is that the pages of the comic are showing how the United States of America has evolved since the Pilgrims landed in 1620.

(Sorry, the photo is slightly out of focus. It was grey, overcast, raining, breezy and cold).

The pages of the comic show the Statue of Liberty, an aeroplane, cars, a train, skyscrapers, the Space Shuttle and King Kong:

William Bradford was a Puritan, the strand of English Protestantism that believed that the Reformation had not gone far enough in ridding the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices. Puritans, and the clash between reformers. separatists and the established church would play a major part in the English Civil War and the Protectorate which would take place during the 1640s and 1650s.

I am sure Bradford would be absolutely shocked how the United States has developed in the 400 years since he was part of Plymouth Colony. I am not sure about the outrage, as Puritans were against Roman Catholicism rather than what can loosely be described as technical progress, however they were strict religious adherents (which is where stories about Christmas festivities being banned during the Protectorate, although in reality the vast majority of the population continued to celebrate).

The pocket of William Bradford includes some key symbols.

A 1620 A to Z of the New World, a lobster claw and fish to show the seafood that was key to the Pilgrims survival in the early years of the colony, and a cross which is symbolic of the religion that the Pilgrims carried to the new colony. There is a small US badge at the base of the cross:

The artist’s tools are shown at the feet of the statue:

And along the edge of the base is the sculptors name and year the work was created:

I think this is a wonderful work of art.

I often wonder when looking at old photos, what the people in the photo would think about how the future has developed, as it is always in a different way to that expected at the time.

My father mainly photographed scenes rather than focusing on people, however whilst it is a gap of only 73 years, compared with the almost 400 years in the Rotherhithe statue, it would be interesting to see how those waiting for the 1953 Coronation procession in one of his photos, would look at the London of today:

If you walk the Thames path in Rotherhithe, or along Rotherhithe Street, stop at Cumberland Wharf to take a look at “Sunshine Weekly and the Pilgrims Pocket” and also consider that whatever we expect the future to be – it will almost certainly be very different.

And for the final look at a different aspect of time hopping, another of my first post of the month looks at the resources available if you are interested in discovering more about the history of London:

Resources – Tallis’s London Street Views

Today, if you want to look at a street and see the buildings and businesses along the street you can use Google Street View.

Imagine if it was possible to do this for the years long before photography and Google made this possible, well for the years between the late 1830s and early 1840s there is a Street View available, which whilst being drawn, and not as comprehensive as Google still provides the opportunity to take a virtual walk along a London street.

This is Tallis’s London Street Views.

(Before going further, the version of Tallis’s Street Views available on line is the 2002 reprint of a London Topographical Society (LTS) print of the street views. The copy was held by the University of Michigan and digitised by Google, and is made available online by the HathiTrust, a US organisation who describe themselves as:

“HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 19+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. We offer reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. and international copyright law, text and data mining tools for the entire corpus, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.”

The HathiTrust have made the work available under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives.

It is difficult to know the true copyright status of documents such as this, when you have very large organisations such as Google digitising vast amounts of works and many, often US based organisations making these fully available online, a situation which I expect is going to get more problematic in years to come).

John Tallis was the publisher of the Street Views. He was based at 15 St. John’s Lane, near St. John’s Gate.

Tallis was a prolific publisher of prints covering people (real and fictional), actors, landscape scenes, buildings, places etc. As well as multiple prints of London, he published images of other places, for example the following print of Margate Pier and Harbour:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

Initially, Street Views was published in parts before being published as a complete set.

The following, from the Gloucester Journal on the 21st of July 1838 is typical of advertising for the Street Views:

“TALLIS’S LONDON STREET VIEWS. For the sum of Three-half-pence, you can purchase a correct View, beautifully engraved on steel, and drawn by an artist of great talent, of upwards of One Hundred Houses, with a Street Directory, or a Key to the Name and Trade of every occupier to which is added a Map of the District, and an Historical account of such Streets, Courts, or public Buildings worth recording.”

The Street Views obviously does not cover all the streets of London, but does provide comprehensive coverage of the major thoroughfares of central London, along with many of the smaller streets, particularly in the City.

An example of the way that streets are illustrated is the following view of part of Hatton Garden:

As well as an illustration of the building, where a business occupies a building, the name and trade is also provided, so at number 109 Hatton Garden there is a Pianoforte Maker and Music Publisher who presumably goes by the name of Hart.

Next door at 108 there is Schonberg, Engraver and Printer, along with a Taylor and Draper in the same building, and at 106 there is Battistessa & Co, Looking Glass and Artificial Flower Maker.

What is fascinating is being able to find more about these business, and in the British Museum collection is a trade card for the above mentioned L. Schonberg of 108 Hatton Garden:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

Tallis’s London Street View is a fascinating way of walking the streets of London in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and a reminder that John Tallis came up with this format of recording a city long before Google Street View.

The Tallis’s Street View can be found at the HathiTrust, by clicking here, where you can scroll through the pages or download a copy.

Google Street View is a brilliant equivalent resource of today. Imagine being interested in London’s history in a couple of centuries time, and being able to walk through a photographic view of the City’s streets, however continuing the theme of the future is always very different to that we expect, and that services such as Street View are digital, will they survive that length of time given the magnitude of change that can occur over such a period of time.

Pageant Stairs, Pageant’s Wharf, a Fire Station, Obelisk, and Bus Stop, Rotherhithe

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I am in Rotherhithe this week, to visit another of the Thames Stairs that have lined the river for centuries, and to explore the history of the stair’s surroundings. This is Pageant or Pageant’s Stairs, back in January 2024, when the concrete floor at the top of the stairs, as well as the stairs leading down to the foreshore, were all covered in a layer of ice:

I have marked the location of the stairs with a red arrow in the following map, on the southern side of the river, opposite Limehouse  (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

Pageant Stairs are shown in the 1914 revision of the Ordnance Survey map, at the end of an alley that leads between a fire station (yellow oval), and a public house (red arrow) from Rotherhithe Street (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

I was pleased to find there was a public house at the entry to the alley, as this confirms my theory that almost every Thame’s stairs, east of the City, had an associated pub, most alongside the stairs, others directly opposite or adjacent. I will come onto the pub and the fire station later in the post.

Pageant Stairs are listed in the Port of London Authority list of Steps, Stairs and Landing Places on the Tidal Thames, where they are described as “Concrete steps then wood steps, concrete apron”, and the listing states that they were in use as a landing place in 1708 (although the list does not identify the source of the 1708 reference, which is a standard date throughout the list for all stairs).

The earliest written reference I can find to the stairs is from the Oracle and Daily Advertiser on the 23rd of September, 1802, where business premises at or adjacent to the stairs are for sale and listed in the following advert:

“EXTENSIVE PREMISES, NEARLY OPPOSITE THE WEST-INDIA DOCKS, ROTHERHITHE, By Mr. SMITH.

At Garraway’s, tomorrow at twelve o-clock, in one Lot. THE CAPITAL and DESIRABLE LEASEHOLD PREMISES, conveniently situate for stores, in front of the Thames, at Pageant’s Stairs, Rotherhithe, late in the occupation of Messrs. Giorgi and Co. Chemists and Refiners; comprising a substantial dwelling house, garden, and small paddock, wharf and extensive warehouses for trade and merchandise; coach-house and stabling for three horses, well planned laboratory, drug, camphor and saltpetre-room; also a large warehouse, adjoining, in front of the Thames.”

So at the very start of the 19th century, the area around Pageant’s Stairs was already industrialised, with one of the many companies working in the chemicals industry that occupied the banks of the river, east of the City.

The 1802 advert mentions that the extensive premises included a substantial dwelling house, garden and small paddock. This is indicative of the semi-rural and small scale nature of the businesses along this stretch of the river as they developed during the late 18th century. Throughout the 19th century, the scale of industrial development would increase considerably.

A year later, Pageant’s Stairs are mentioned in the Evening Mail on the 18th of May, 1803 where the stairs are included in a listing of “Table of the New Rates of the Fares of Watermen”, with a rate “from Iron Gate to Duke-Shore stairs or Pageants, Oars 1s, Sculler 6d”.

Iron Gate Stairs were where Tower Bridge is today, and the stairs were rebuilt under the bridge (see this post). Duke Shore Stairs were on the northern side of the river, almost directly opposite Pageant Stairs.

Pageant’s Stairs were also frequently mentioned when recording events on the river, such as an 1870 report on the discovery of a body in the river by four young men who were rowing a boat. The location was given as being near Pagent’s Stairs, Rotherhithe.

In this article, the name was spelt Pagent, rather than Pageant, and this different spelling also seems to have been in use, but not as much as the far more frequent Pageant, sometimes with an ‘s.

The current build of the stairs, is, I assume, from the late 1980s / early 1990s redevelopment of the area when the residential buildings that now line this stretch of the river were built.

The approach to Pageant Stairs is up a series of steps, which form part of the river wall, and give an indication of the potential for high tides along this stretch of the river:

Alongside the stairs, we can see how they have been built within a walled surround, a way of continuing the river wall around the stairs:

It is not clear where the name Pageant originates. There was a wharf to the side of the stairs called Pageant’s Wharf, so the name may have come from the wharf, or the wharf took the name of the stairs.

The earliest written references I can find to the wharf date to around the same few years as the first written references to the stairs. This first reference to the wharf comes from the Morning Chronicle on the 17th of December 1804, and includes a possible alternative name of George’s Wharf:

“Twenty New Gun Carriages and Beds, nearly completed, to carry 18-pounders, Stock of Wrought Iron, Oak ad Elm Timber, Fire Wood, &c. Pageant’s Wharf, Rotherhithe. By Mr. Hindle, on the premises known by Pagent’s or George’s Wharf near the Board of Ordnance, Rotherhithe, tomorrow at 11.”

The stairs, wharf and name are almost certainly older than the above newspaper references, and it is probable that there was a wharf here in the late 1600s.

Rocque’s map from 1746 shows some short lines indicating stairs, leading down onto the foreshore, along with the name, The Pageants (in the centre of the following extract):

It is interesting that in the above map, to the east of the Pageants, we can see a plot of land almost as described in the 1802 advert, where there are buildings and open space that almost exactly correspond to the description as “comprising a substantial dwelling house, garden, and small paddock, wharf and extensive warehouses for trade and merchandise; coach-house and stabling for three horses, well planned laboratory, drug, camphor and saltpetre-room; also a large warehouse, adjoining, in front of the Thames“.

The plural – the Pageants – in Rocque’s map is the same form as used in the 1803 table of Watermen’s rates so it is probable that this was the version of the name used during the 18th and into the early 19th century.

Whether the name refers to a person, perhaps the owner of the wharf or land at some point, it is impossible to say, but it must have been in use for at least 300 years.

I also found one reference where the name used was Little Pageant’s Wharf.

The main industry along this stretch of the river was ship building, and a wider view of the Rocque map shows that in 1746, the area between what is now Rotherhithe Street (then Lavender Street) was full of shipwrights and timber yards, whilst inland of Rotherhithe / Lavender Street, it was all agricultural. It was proximity to the river which drove the early development of Rotherhithe:

There is a brilliant little booklet by Stuart Rankin published in 1996 as the Rotherhithe Local History Paper No. 1 which has a single comment about the Pageants, that they were at one time occupied by the business of Punnett & Sindrey, who were ship breakers.

In the early 20th century, the site was occupied by a firm of timber merchants, however the site would soon been transformed, as detailed in the following extract from the Southwark and Bermondsey Recorder on the 2nd of April 1926:

“BERMONDSEY BOROUGH COUNCIL – NEW DUST DESTRUCTOR TO BE PROVIDED IN BERMONDSEY AT A COST OF £19,327.

In the connection with the decision of the Bermondsey Borough Council to purchase Pageant’s Wharf, Rotherhithe Street, for the purpose of erecting a dust destructor, a specially convened meeting of the Council was held at the Town Hall on Monday evening.

The meeting was called as a matter of urgency in order to expedite the work, and it was decided that, subject to the submission of the necessary estimate by the Finance Committee, the tender of Meldrum’s Ltd of Timperley, near Manchester, should be accepted for the construction of the top-feed destructor, furnaces, boilers etc. in accordance with their specification, as modified by the amended drawings as approved by the Borough Surveyor, at a sum of £11,241, and that the tender of the Building Works Manager be accepted for the erection at Pageants Wharf of a steel framed, brick filled building and a brick chimney shaft, 120 feet high, at a sum of £8,086.”

The dust destructor, or incinerator, was needed as a result of the significant growth in Bermondsey’s population, and the waste they created.

It was opened in January 1927, and was capable of handling 100 tons of household waste a day.

Waste was collected from vehicles at the entrance and carried by an overhead railway, to where the waste was dropped into steel-lined hoppers, it was then delivered to three top-feed furnaces. Steam was generated in boilers from the heat generated by burning the waste, and the steam was used to generate a “steam blast”, which created a draught through the furnaces to get the fire to the high temperatures need to burn the waste.

The dust destructor was a major construction, and included concrete piles, 28feet in length, driven down into the hard ballast below the river bed. Fascinating to think that these piles are probably still there, beneath the river bed.

In the following 1939 image from the Britain from Above archive, I have marked the location of the chimney of the dust destructor. The image also shows how the agricultural land in Rocque’s map had been transformed into a large dock complex:

The dust destructor was to the east of Pageant Stairs , and occupied the space in the following 2024 photo:

In the above photo, there is a stone obelisk, and as far as I can tell, it serves absolutely no purpose, apart from decorative.

I have read stories about an alignment with Canary Wharf, and that the obelisk is on an alignment through the centre of the original development and the One Canada Square office tower.

I tried this on a map, and the obelisk is indeed on a perfect alignment (obelisk at the left hand end of the blue line, which then passes through the centre of Westferry Circus, then between North and South Colonnade, and passing through the centre of One Canada Square, which I have circled in blue) (© OpenStreetMap contributors:

This is almost getting into Ley Lines, or something from the excellent Rivers of London series of books, but I extended the line to the west, and it passes very close to the Bank Junction, and touches the northern edge of St. Paul’s Cathedral – two historic parts of the City of London.

No idea why the colonnade was built on an alignment with Canary Wharf, or whether it was intentional. Both developments were under the overall control of the London Docklands Development Corporation, so perhaps it was their idea to add some integration between the north and south of the river.

The view during my recent January 2026 visit, to take a look at Horn Stairs which are a short distance away:

The walkway in the above photo runs between Pageant Stairs and Horn Stairs. This was the view looking back from close to Horn Stairs. Note the name of the walk on the right given as Pageant Crescent (a bit hard to see in the gloom of a January day). Good that the name of the stairs and the wharf is still recorded here (although there is no name at the actual stairs):

During my visit in January 2024, the sky was clear, bright sunshine and very cold, with ice on the steps of Pageant Stairs. In January 2026, it was very wet, but above freezing, although a strong breeze along the river made it feel cold.

The weather has always had an impact on life on the Thames. We are familiar with the stories of ice fairs on the Thames in central London, but the river also froze, with ice and snow accumulating along many parts of the river.

In searching for stories about Pageant Stairs, I found a reference in the Morning Herald on the 20th of January 1838, which reported that “The state of the river is getting worse, and yesterday there was a continued freezing of the waters, in fact the accumulation of ice on the banks and in the stream itself, might be seen to hourly increase”.

The report went on to talk about the problems a ship’s captain had reaching his boat from Globe Stairs in Rotherhithe, due to the amount of snow and “enormous icebergs” on the river. He had to be rescued by a Thames police waterman, who cleared the snow overlaying the ice on the river and laid planks, so the captain could reach his ship.

Pageant Stairs was mentioned in the article as being the only place on the river, from Pageant’s Stairs, Rotherhithe, to Limehouse Hole on the opposite shore, which was pretty clear.

Looking down the stairs in January 2026, with only a small part of the foreshore visible:

The newspaper report about ice and snow on the river mentioned Limehouse Hole, and Pageant’s Stairs are directly opposite Limehouse, with the following photo looking across the houses in the far bank which face onto Narrow Street in Limehouse. Limehouse Hole is continuing round to the right:

The view was far better during my 2024 visit (the Grapes pub is roughly in the centre):

The following photo is of the view looking from Pageant Stairs down to Rotherhithe Street. The Public House marked by the PH in the Ordinance Survey map shown earlier in the post was at the end of the walkway, on the left and facing onto the walkway and Rotherhithe Street:

The pub was the Queen’s Head, one of two pubs with the same name in Rotherhithe, the other being in Paradise Street.

The Queen’s Head closed in 1928, shortly after the dust destructor, or incinerator was completed. This dirty, noisy industrial plant would have been to the rear and side of the pub, which was left in a small south-west corner of the plot of land with the rest being occupied by the dust destructor.

Not the best place to run a business such as a pub, although the river stairs were still in use.

Finding the Queen’s Head continues to confirm my theory that to the east of London, whether north or south of the river, there seems to have been a pub next to almost all the Thames stairs.

The Queen’s Head seems to have been a typical London pub, with all the appearances in local newspapers that you would expect, for example, from the Southwark and Bermondsey Recorder on the 22nd of October 1926: “DRINKS DURING PROOHIBITED HOURS. At Tower Bridge Court, before Mr. Pope, Alexander Glencross, licensee of the Queen’s Head, 243 Rotherhithe Street, was summoned for selling by his agent, Emily Newman, intoxicating liquors during prohibited hours to Jas. Quillan and Abraham Hill”.

Inquests were held in the pub, which also provide a view of the dangers of being on the river, and the complacent way in which deaths on the river seem to have been treated,. On the 18th of July 1835 “An inquest was held on Monday night at the Queen’s Head, Rotherhithe, on the body of Edward Evan Jones, aged 27, who was drowned on Friday evening by the boat which he was in being run down by a steamer. Mr. Cumberland, warehouseman of Cheapside, who was in the boat with the deceased and three others stated that as they were coming up the river they saw the Red Rover steamer about 60 yards behind them; the people on board called to them to get out of the way; they endeavoured to do so, but the off-set of the tide forced them into the middle of the stream. The Red Rover continued her course, and her bow struck the boat nearly midship, and sunk her. Witness was thrown out of the boat, and seeing the paddle-wheel coming against him, he dived under it and escaped injury. He believed that the collision might have been avoided had not the steamer been going so fast, although the off-set of the tide appeared to be the cause of the accident. The Jury returned a verdict of Accidental Death.”

On the 23rd of July 1898, William Cummings of Francis Street, Canning Town and Hugh Lane of Alphic Street Canning Tower were in court charged with stealing from the Queen’s Head a bottle of gin, a bottle of brandy, a box of cigars, quantity of cigarettes, gold brooch, silver scarfpin. money and other articles to the value of £3.

All normal for a pub by a set of Thames Stairs.

Pageant Stairs are unusual in that there is a bus stop with almost their correct name.

On Rotherhithe Street, just opposite the walkway up to the stairs is a bus stop that goes by the name of Pageant Steps:

Although in reality, I suspect the bus stop is named after the stone steps that are part of the early 1990s residential development around Pageant Stairs and Wharf. These new stone steps lead up from Rotherhithe Street between the flats, up to the obelisk.

A real shame, as whilst Pageant is in use to name this part of the walkway along the river, the stairs from street to walkway, and the obelisk seems to be called Pageant’s Obelisk, there is no plaque at the stairs naming them. Changing the Steps to Stairs for the bus stop name would also be a fitting reminder of a place where people once took a boat to travel, and now take a bus (although the use of either Steps and Stairs seems to have been relatively common) .

Whilst the majority of buildings and landscape around Pageant’s Stairs are the result of late 1980s / early 1990s development, there is a significant building that remains from the time before the dust destructor, and is there because of Rotherhithe’s industrial past.

This is the Pageant’s Wharf Fire Station, which can still be seen to the left of the walkway leading up to the stairs, still with the large distinctive doors leading to the space where fire appliances would be stored:

There is a plaque on the wall of the fire station, which for some reason is on the first floor, just visible in the above photo between the second and third windows on the right.

The height of the plaque and size of the lettering makes the plaque rather difficult to read, but a close up view shows that the building was restored by Barratt (the developers of the new residential buildings around Pageant’s Wharf), in memory of the crews who served at the fire station. The building, also now residential, was opened on the 25th of November, 1993:

The plaque refers to the station as “The Old Fire Station Rotherhithe”, which is a shame, as all the reports I have read about the station, from the time when it was in operation, call it either Pageant’s Wharf Fire Station, or the fire station at Pageant’s Wharf.

The foundation stone for the fire station was laid in March 1903, and news report stated that the new fire station was the result of the lack of fire stations in this part of Rotherhithe, and a recent large fire in the docks which expedited the funding and construction of the new station.

It opened in October 1903, and reports of the opening again mentioned the docks, “and the large numbers of wharves, where valuable property is frequently stored in large quantities and necessitating such protection”.

The fire station was equipped with a steam fire engine, owing to the fact that the water supply in the neighbourhood was poor. This was down to the area being mainly docks and industrial and “the amount of water required for domestic purposes is small, and consequently the pipe laid down Rotherhithe Street is of small diameter”.

The staff of the station consisted of an officer, six firemen and one coachman.

The coachman was part of the staff as fire appliances were still drawn by horses, and the fire station also had a two stall stable along with a fodder store. The first and second floors of the building consisted of living rooms for some of the staff (the earlier report when the foundation stone was laid also stated that the Coachman had married quarters at the fire station – presumably because the horses needed someone on site for their care at all times of the day).

An incident in the run up to the opening ceremony illustrates one of the problems of travelling in Rotherhithe.

Captain Hamilton, Chief of the Fire Brigade, with Mr Gamble, his second officer, along with a number of representatives and officials of the London County Council were travelling in carriages to the opening, but were delayed when they reached the Surrey Dock Bridge, as this had opened to allow a dredger to pass through.

This highlighted why a fire station was needed in the area around Pageant’s Wharf, as there were a number of lifting and swing bridges across Rotherhithe that could turn parts of the area into an island when they were lifted, thereby causing a delay to a fire engine trying to reach a fire.

I have marked the location of the lifting and swing bridges in the following map (in red) and the Pageant’s Wharf fire station (in black) in the following map (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“:

A report by Captain Hamilton, chief of the London Fire Brigade on fires in London during the year 1905, implies that the Pageant’s Wharf fire station was not that busy:

“The principal cause of fires where lives were lost was ‘children playing with fire’. Other causes are smouldering matches and other lights which are thrown down by people leaving buildings. Carelessly fitted electric circuits, temporary and inefficient fitting to gas cooking stoves and gas rings for heating glue etc. are grave sources of danger, as are also swinging gas brackets, particularly in warehouses and stables.

The busiest force station as regards calls in 1905 was the Euston Station, being turned out no fewer than 323 times. The smallest number of calls, viz. nine, was received at Sydenham, the same number being also received at Pageant’s Wharf, Rotherhithe.”

The report also stated that in 1905, across London, there had been 3,511 fires reported to the London fire brigade, and that 100 people had lost their lives in fires.

Despite the low number of calls, the station was doing important work, as in 1911 Pageant’s Wharf fire station won the Wells Cup, which was awarded to the London Fire Brigade Station which performs the “smartest job of the year”, won for the prompt way in which the station dealt with a fire which broke out in a big granary in their local district.

Another example of their work was in 1931 when firemen from the station rescued a thirteen year old boy who fell into the river and was at risk of being carried away by the tide. Firemen from Pageant’s Wharf got out on the river in a skiff and recovered the boy, who was taken to hospital.

The number of call outs at Pageant’s Wharf fire station seems to have continued to be relatively small compared to other stations across London, and there were occasional attempts to close the station, but these were successfully resisted.

The fire station was busy during the Second World War as the docks around Rotherhithe took heavy damage during bombing raids, but after the war there was a gradual reduction in call outs as both industry and the docks declined.

Closure of the Pageant’s Wharf fire station came at the end of the 1960s, although there were still attempts to keep the station open, with the swing bridges still given as a key justification, as in the following from the London Evening News on the 12th of September 1967:

“DOCKS BID TO SAVE FIRE STATION – Trade unionists in dockland are calling on the aid of their MP, Mr. Bob Melish, in a fight against a GLC plan to close a fire station in Rotherhithe. They are also writing to Home Secretary Mr. Roy Jenkins asking him to halt the closure when the council submits it for his approval. The GLC say the area can be adequately covered by existing stations and the one at Pageant’s Wharf is unnecessary.

The union men are worried that the area – a virtual island linked to the rest of Bermondsey by a swing bridge – could become cut off in an emergency. ‘If fire engines could not get to a blaze or flood quickly there could be serious damage or loss of life’, said a Bermondsey Trades Council spokesman. The unionists want the Home Secretary to order test runs of fire engines from neighbouring stations in peak traffic.”

No idea if the test runs were carried but, but Pageant’s Wharf fire station closed at the end of the 1960s, and the building is now residential, but thanks to the retention of the large doors on the ground floor clearly was once was a fire station.

It always amazes me how much there is to find in one small part of London, and the location of some Thames stairs always adds an additional layer of history.

The name Pageant remains in use, now covering the walkway along the river, the concrete steps from Rotherhithe Street to walkway as part of the recent redevelopment and a bus stop as well as the stairs, and the obelisk that has a strange alignment with Canary Wharf.

It is a quiet residential area, so different from the centuries of ship building, ship breaking, timber trading, an active fire station, and a place where the area’s household waste was incinerated.