Felixstowe Martello Towers, Bawdsey Radar and Sutton Hoo

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For this week’s post, I am covering some of my father’s photos which were taken whilst cycling and youth hostelling around the country with friends from National Service.

On the 22nd of July, 1952, they were in the outskirts of Felixstowe, and encountered a couple of Martello Towers, along with a leading edge technology from the Second World War.

The Martello Tower on the Felixstowe Ferry golf course is the main building in the above photo, and if you look to the right, in the distance is a second Martello Tower.

Martello Towers date from the early years of the 19th century, and were built due to the perceived threat of invasion by the French forces of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Felixstowe Martello Towers are part of a chain along the southern and eastern coast of England. A chain of 74 towers were constructed between Felixstowe and Dover, and these were then extended further along the Essex and Suffolk coast with another 29 towers all the way to Aldeburgh.

The name Martello is not from the person who came up with the idea or design of a circular defensive tower, rather the place where the British Navy first saw the effectiveness of such a design.

On the 7th of February, 1794, the British Navy were attacking the French in Corsica, and were firing cannonballs at a circular gun tower at Mortella Point. The circular design, along with very thick walls resulted in the cannonballs deflecting, or bouncing off the gun tower

The design was then copied for the Martello Towers along the English Coast. (Martello seems to have been a misspelling of the word Mortella).

Martello Towers were frequently constructed to assist shore based gun batteries, and to defend the point where rivers entered the sea, to prevent enemy ships from sailing inland. The two Felixstowe Martello Towers are to the south of the River Deben which leads inland to Woodbridge.

A short distance to the south is where the Rivers Orwell and Stour reach the sea, and there were two large forts on either side of the combined channel of these two rivers.

A 24-pounder anti-ship gun was the usual armament mounted on the roof of the towers, and this gun had a range of about one mile out to sea, and would have fired on an invader attempting to reach the shore, or enter the nearby rivers.

Internally, the Martello Towers had rooms for the officers and men who were stationed at the tower, along with supplies for their weapons and roof mounted gun, as well as supplies of food and water.

The Martello Towers had a very short operational life, and they never fired a shot in anger at any attacking ships, as after the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the threat of invasion by the French disappeared.

Some Martello Towers were retained by the Navy, some were used by the Coastguard, used for anti-smuggling operations, some had additional defensive weapons installed during the First and Second World Wars, and some became wireless radio stations for ship to shore communications.

Now redundant, the surviving towers are now often converted to residential, owned by councils, used by the volunteer National Coast Watch organisation, open for public access, or, in the case of the first Felixstowe Martello Tower that I am visiting, apparently closed and surrounded by a golf course.

The main and distant Martello Towers in my father’s photo are both Grade II listed. Another view:

When I visited the tower, there were plenty of golfers on the course, so it would not have been popular with them, or perhaps safe from flying golf balls, to wander onto the course to take photos from the same angle as my father, but in the above photo he had no such problems, and as well as the tower, to the left and in the distance is another feature of defending the country from European attackers that I will explore later in the post.

To get close to the first Martello Tower, it was a walk along the sea wall, with a warning to keep to this route:

They really do not want you to wander onto the course:

I was able to get up a grass bank to get a wider view of the tower, the entrance to the River Deben, and the opposite bank of the river:

The Martello Tower up close:

A sketch from June the 28th, 1837 showing the Felixstowe Martello Tower:

Image: © 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 text below the sketch states that “The Martello Towers are used by Preventive Men”, and the following report issued by the Custom House, London on the 4th of April, 1825 illustrates the work of the Preventive Men:

“Whereas it has been represented to the Commissioners of his Majesty’s Customs, that on the night of the 23rd, Robert Wallis, Chief-boatman, and the Preventive Men belonging to the station at Newtown, Isle of Wight, were out on duty for the prevention of Smuggling, and towards Freshwater, fell in with a company of Smugglers, to the number of Forty-five or Fifty, who dropped their Tubs, and whilst the said Chief-boatman and some of the Preventive Men were endeavouring to secure one of the Smugglers, the whole company immediately fell upon them and severely beat and wounded the Chief-boatman, and broke his Cutlass, and also beat one of the Preventive Men, and took from him his Pistol, and the Smugglers having overpowered them, picked up their Tubs and escaped.”

A reward of £50 was then offered for any person who “shall discover, or cause to be discovered, any one or more of the said offenders.”.

The area of the east coast around Felixstowe would have offered numerous landing places for smugglers, along with the rivers Deben, Orwell and Stour offering routes to inland landing and hiding places, so smuggling would have been an ongoing problem for the authorities.

In one of my father’s photo, there is a second Martello Tower in the distance, so we continued along the sea wall to find this tower:

This second tower is on the side of the estuary of the River Deben, and appears to have been converted to residential:

The location of the two Martello Towers is shown in the following map, with tower 1 being the tower on the golf course and tower two being the one apparently now residential. The River Deben is running inland, and the map shows how these were positioned to defend the river entrance (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

To the south is Felixstowe, with the larger entrance to the Rivers Stour and Orwell. This river entrance continue to be important in the life of the country, as it provides access to the major container port of Felixstowe.

In the above map, I have marked Bawdsey, and the following is an extract from one of my father’s photos of Martello Towers, that shows the view across to the north bank of the River Deben, and large aerial towers at Bawdsey:

There is a fascinating parallel between the Martello Towers and these tall aerial towers across the River Deben. One is early 19th century and the other is a mid 20th century approach to defending the east coast from attack.

In the above photo, just below the second tower from the left, it is just possible to see Bawdsey Manor.

Grade II* listed Bawdsey Manor was built between 1886 and 1908 using a wide mix of architectural styles, originally as a holiday home for the family of Sir Cuthbert Quilter, but it soon became their main, family home.

The house and grounds passed through the Quilter family until 1937, when William Eley Cuthbert Quilter sold the estate to the Air Ministry, who were looking for a site to conduct research and development of the new technology of radar.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Bawdsey Manor became both a training school and an operational radar station, and the aerial towers we see in my father’s photo were part of the radar installation.

The story of the development of radar for wartime use starts in 1935 when it was demonstrated that a system where a pulsed radio signal enabled aircraft to be detected as the radio pulse was reflected by an aircraft back to a radio receiver.

The Government approved an initial £60,000 to build 5 stations, and by September 1939 a chain of 20 stations had been built along the east coast. The system could detect aircraft up to 120 miles distant, a distance which provided around 20 minutes warning – a remarkable achievement given that it was just four years since the concept had been demonstrated.

The system consisted of smaller 75 metre tall wooden towers which supported receiving aerials and 100 metre tall steel lattice towers for the transmitter aerials.

These two types of tower can both be seen in my father’s photo.

The system became known as “Chain Home” and by the end of 1945 there were over 100 Chain Home radar stations, primarily around the coast of England, Scotland and Wales.

Continuous technical development during the war resulted in considerable improvements both in the use of radio technology, and the interpretation of the reflected signal.

One technical innovation was the development of the Cavity Magnetron by Harry Boot and John Randall of the University of Birmingham, which allowed high power microwave radio systems to be built, and that resulted in much smaller, accurate and more compact radar units to be deployed around the coast and importantly in aircraft, where systems were able to detect a periscope from a submarine above the sea surface.

The Cavity Magnetron is basically the same technology that powers your Microwave oven today, and during the war, along with jet engine technology, the design of the Cavity Magnetron was given free to the US, in return for their production capabilities.

A close up view of the steel lattice towers at Bawdsey from the Imperial War Museum collection:

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN 1940 (CH 15337) The transmitter aerial towers at Bawdsey CH (Chain Home) radar station, Suffolk, May 1945. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205196697

The following work by William Thomas Rawlinson shows an unnamed radar station on the east coast of the country with the same two types of aerial towers as photographed by my father:

A CH (Chain Home) Radar Station on the East Coast (Art.IWM ART LD 5735) image: Standard steel transmitter towers in the foreground with wooden receiver towers in the background. In the foreground are piles of tires, some vegetation and a line of barbed wire fencing. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/22519

The above work was purchased by the War Artists Advisory Committee who were responsible for the purchase, and or commissioning of a comprehensive collection of artworks showing various aspects of the last war. See this post for London related images from the War Artists Advisory Committee collection.

One of the key factors in the success of radar, was the display equipment and the operators ability to interpret the signals being received by the radar system.

Bawdsey, as with many of the other Chain Home radar stations, had a local receiver room, where the signals received by the wooden receive aerial masts would be displayed and interpreted.

The next two photos show the receiver room at Bawdsey:

ROYAL AIR FORCE RADAR, 1939-145. (CH 15331) Chain Home: Flight Officer P M Wright supervises (right) as Sergeant K F Sperrin and WAAF operators Joan Lancaster, Elaine Miley, Gwen Arnold and Joyce Hollyoak work on the plotting map in the Receiver Room at Bawdsey CH, Suffolk. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205210716

Interpretation required some considerable skill, with the signal being displayed as a line moving across a Cathode Ray Screen. A returned signal would result in a dip in the line, with the distance being measured by how far along the line the dip occurred, and the size of the dip showing the strength of the returned signal, and therefore some indication of the type and number of aircraft being intercepted:

ROYAL AIR FORCE RADAR, 1939-1945 (CH 15332) Chain Home: WAAF radar operator Denise Miley plotting aircraft on the CRT (cathode ray tube) of an RF7 Receiver in the Receiver Room at Bawdsey CH. Her right hand has selected the direction or heightfinding and her left hand is ready to register the goniometer setting to the calculator. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205196699

The air ministry continued to use Bawdsey as a training school and radar station up to 1974, when the site closed for four years, and from 1979 to 1986 it reopened as an air defence unit, when it was home to Bloodhound air defence missiles – a missile system intended to hit soviet bombers attacking British nuclear bomber bases.

I have not been able to find a date for when the towers were demolished.

Since release by the air ministry, Bawdsey Manor has been empty for periods of time, has been an international language school, and now is a PGL residential adventure centre for schools and groups.

From the second Martello Tower, we can look across the River Stour to Bawdsey Manor:

A daily foot and bike ferry runs across the Stour to Bawdsey from May to September, and there is a museum dedicated to radar and Bawdsey history near the manor, which is open on Thursdays, Sundays and Bank Holidays.

The above photo shows a fishing boat returning as it enters the River Deben from the sea. It is fascinating to think of the thousands of ships and boats that have made the same journey, and a very short distance from the Felixstowe Martello Towers is a location where the remains of a ship that may have made this journey was discovered:

Sutton Hoo

As the radar towers were being built at Bawdsey, and the Second World War was about to break out, a remarkable discovery was being made a few miles to the north under one of the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo.

The Sutton Hoo estate had been purchased by Edith Pretty after her marriage to Frank Pretty. She was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and had spent much of her early life travelling.

In 1930 she gave birth to a son, however four years later, her husband died.

Tranmer House (originally Sutton Hoo House), Edith Pretty’s home on the Sutton Hoo estate:

The Sutton Hoo estate included a number of burial mounds, located along the higher ground of the estate, where it rises up from the River Deben.

Possibly because of her earlier experiences of archaeological excavations seen during her travels, she appears to have had an interested in the purpose of the burial mounds, and if there were any remaining objects and evidence of their original purpose, to be found inside.

In 1938 she commissioned Basil Brown, a local, Suffolk amateur archaeologist, to excavate three of the burial mounds.

These mounds had been “robbed” in the past – an activity where people would dig down to find and take anything of value that they could find.

Despite having been robbed, sufficient evidence was found to show that one of the mounds had contained a ship, that there had been cremation burials, and that a range of valuable and exotic items had been buried.

Basil Brown returned to Sutton Hoo the following year, 1939, and started work on the largest mound on the site, and it was here that he found the rivets of a ship and the complete outline of the wooden planks of a ship which had long rotted away.

The discovery of the intact outline of a large ship within a burial mound caused some excitement at both local and national museums and archaeological institutions, and the dig at Sutton Hoo was taken over by a team led by Charles Phillips of Cambridge University.

In what had been the middle of the ship, a collapsed burial chamber was found, which remarkably was still intact and had not been robbed over the previous centuries.

As the burial chamber was excavated, around 263 objects were found, including some remarkable gold jewellery, silver bowls, coins and the remains of a helmet.

An inquest to determine the status of the treasure found at Sutton Hoo was held soon after the discovery, where it was decided that it belonged to Edith Pretty, however she donated it the same year to the British Museum, where it can be seen today.

For many years, there was no mention of Basil Brown as the original finder of the ship burial, however the British Museum have now corrected this, and he is named as the original finder of this nationally important, Anglo-Saxon discovery.

Edith Pretty died in 1942, and her son went to live with an aunt. The house was taken over by the War Office to home Land Girls, before being sold to the Tranmer family (hence the current name of the house)_ and in 1998, the Trustees of the Annie Tranmer Trust (Annie was the last of the Tranmer family to live at Sutton Hoo), donated the house and estate to the National Trust.

The National Trust have done an excellent job at opening up the estate. There is an exhibition centre at the start, with replicas of many of the finds which are now at the British Museum.

The ground floor of Tranmere House is open, and there are various exhibits about the discovery, Basil Brown and Edith Pretty, and a short walk from the house is the area where the burial mounds can be found, and the National Trust have built a tower with viewing gallery where it is possible to appreciate the size of the site, which is not that clear when walking around the site, as shown in the following panorama from the viewing gallery (the mounds are much flatter today today when when they were created):

And in the following copy of the above photo, I have marked the location of the ship burial. The National Trust have put up markers at the two ends of the ship, so the yellow line shows the 27 metre length and the orientation of the ship discovered by Basil Brown:

A ground level view along the yellow line in the above photo, with one of the ship markers in the foreground, and the other end of the ship can be seen by the second marker on the horizon:

The ship buried at Sutton Hoo is believed to have been dragged up from the River Deben, a short distance from the burial site, although it must have required considerable effort to drag a large wooden ship up the steep slope from the river.

View from the top of the viewing tower, where the River Deben can be seen with the town of Woodbridge on the opposite bank:

The ship burial appears to date from the Anglo-Saxon period, somewhere around the early 7th century. This type of ship burial, along with the range and quality of goods buried in the ship imply that the burial was that of a very important person.

There is no firm evidence to identify who was buried under the mound, however the majority of evidence suggests that it was Raedwald, who was King of the East Angles, and who died somewhere around the years 624 and 625.

Among the finds which are now on display in the British Museum is the helmet, where the surviving pieces of iron and tinned copper alloy have been added onto a reconstruction of the helmet:

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

A gold belt buckle:

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

Many of the finds included silver bowls from Byzantium and precious stones from places as remote as Sri Lanka, showing that early 7th century, Anglo-Saxon England was not isolated, but was connected with global trade routes, and that some in Anglo-Saxon society were wealthy enough to afford not just the raw materials, but also the craftsmen to create the objects found at Sutton Hoo. Considerable expertise and specialist tools would have been needed to create these objects.

Another gold belt buckle, with inlaid garnet:

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

A number of coins were found within the burial, which helped with dating, one of which is the following gold coin:

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

There is a sort of connectedness between the Martello Towers, Bawdsey Radar and the Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon ship burial.

They are all to be found in this very small area due to their location close to the sea and the River Deben. The Anglo-Saxons used the river as a route to the sea, where many of the finds from the ship burial may well have arrived, either as raw materials and made in England, or as manufactured products.

The sea was also a route for invasion, and the area was defended firstly by gun emplacements on fortified Martello Towers, and then by radar detecting attacking enemy aircraft.

I always try and find a London connection when visiting the sites of my father’s photos from across the country, even though they may be very tenuous, and after Sutton Hoo, we crossed the River Deben into Woodbridge, where there is a rather nice milestone showing that we were 77 miles from London, on the main route from London to the east cost and Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth, a route now mainly replaced by the A12:

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Junes Ladies Hair Stylist, Durham Row, Stepney – 1986

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I have two new walks planned for this year, and they should be ready in June / July, however until then, if you have not been on one of my existing walks, I have just released three for May. They are, along with links for details and booking:

~~The Lost Streets of the Barbican on Sunday the 11th of May~~ (Sold Out)

~~The Lost Landscape and Transformation of Puddle Dock and Thames Street on Sunday the 18th of May~~ (Sold Out)

~~Limehouse – A Sink of Iniquity and Degradation on Saturday the 24th of May~~ (Sold Out)

Continuing the theme of last week’s post, looking at changes across the streets of London between the 1980s and today, I am now in Stepney, hunting for the location of Junes Ladies Hair Stylist, in Durham Row, as photographed by my father in 1986:

The same house in 2024:

Junes Ladies Hair Stylist is a reminder of when very small businesses were run out of 19th century terrace houses, when services were very local, and when shops or businesses selling essentials such as food and household goods were frequently owned and run by an individual.

I suspect the business dated from the 1960s, or perhaps earlier. The sign for Junes Ladies Hair Stylist provides a phone number of STE 4835:

The use of three letters plus four digits was used for telephone numbers when the British telephone network used the original director system, with the three letters representing the location, so STE was for Stepney.

The conversion to an all number system was made national policy in 1965, and the conversion of London’s telephone network was completed in 1969, so that would be the latest date for the sign.

The fact that it was still on the sign in 1986 means that either the business had gone out of business between the late 1960s and 1986, or that regular customers did not need the number, or were aware of the new number (790) that replaced the STE for Stepney.

Hair dressers are still found across the city, but are now usually larger premises with multiple employees. Food and household goods stores are now larger supermarkets, or the large corner store such as the Nisa on the site of the Boleyn Pet Stores featured in last week’s post.

As well as Junes Ladies Hair Stylist, Durham Row was once a street with multiple small shops housed in single bay terrace houses, as seen in this view along Durham Row:

The surviving early 19th century houses are along the south side of Durham Row, the houses along the north site were destroyed by bombing during the last war, and on the other side of the fence to the right are small gardens of houses which have been built to replace those destroyed.

This quiet street was once a bustling east London street of small shops. A look at the 1910 Post Office Street Directory shows the shops along the south side of the street, in the surviving buildings, when number 11, the location of Junes Ladies Hair Stylist was then occupied by Albert Schensul, Umbrella Maker:

The north side of Durham Row had more shops, as the buildings along the south stopped at St. Dunstan’s Churchyard, whilst those along the north continued, and as with the south side of the street, we have a comprehensive range of small businesses and shops:

Despite the small size of the businesses in Durham Row, many looked beyond their immediate area for customers and placed adverts in newspapers, for example on the 13th of August, 1886, Mr. Adolphe Michels was advertising his “Great Wonder Boot and Shoe Stores” in the East End News, where his products were “All Leather. No cardboard used. Therefore every boot will wear to the last. Give me one trial, and you will walk miles for my boots”.

Unfortunately, the advert does not mention the house number of his Boot and Shoe Stores, just the address Durham Row, side of Stepney church, however, looking at the above list of businesses in Durham Row, there was a Mrs. Mary Ann Michels listed as a boot maker at number 30 (on the bomb damaged and lost north side of the street), so probably Adoiphe had died, and his wife Mary Ann continued to run the business to at least 1910.

Just a small example of how you can build a picture of a street and those who lived and worked in the street, even small streets such as Durham Row.

View looking east along the street, from where Durham Row meets the churchyard of St. Dunstan, Stepney:

The houses along the south side of Durham Row are all Grade II listed. The Historic England listing dates the buildings to early 19th century, and remarks on their “Small simple C19 shop windows”.

The Grade II listing is probably why the shop fronts survive, although all the houses now seem to be residential.

This is number 5, which in 1910 was home to Edward Henderson, Butcher:

And next door to the above shop, was number 3, which in 1910 was home to the Fried Fish Shop of Edmund Rowe:

At the western end of the terrace there is an empty space, also seen as empty on the early 1950s and late 1890s editions of the OS maps, where it may have provided access to the cinema that remarkably was once housed in a building that ran along the rear of the terrace houses, and is shown in both the late 1890s and early 1950s OS maps:

There is currently a planning application to build two, three bedroom semi-detached houses within the above space.

Durham Row is located to the north east of St. Dunstan Stepney, and I have highlighted the street with a red arrow in the following extract from the 1890s OS map (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“:

The terrace houses on the south side of the street have survived, all the houses along the north side of the street, including where the street continues alongside the northern edge of the churchyard, were destroyed during the last war, but probably resembled those we can still see today in Durham Row.

A map of the same area today (© OpenStreetMap contributors)::

On the corner of Durham Row and White Horse Road, there is a closed pub. There was a pub here in the 19th century, but about half the size of the building we see today, which was the result of a 1936 rebuild. This is the Fish and Ring which closed in 1999 and is now residential:

The Fish and Ring is an unusual name for a pub, and I cannot find a direct link between the pub and a source of the name, however there is a story about a burial in St. Dunstan that may be the source. From the Eastern Post on the 3rd of January, 1914, which is a reprint of an article from the Morning Advertiser of 1805:

“STEPNEY’S ‘FISH AND RING’ – St. Dunstan’s church, Stepney possesses amongst its numerous interesting historical features, a curious story of medieval times.

On the outside of St. Dunstan’s Church, there is a monument inscribed to the memory of Dame Rebecca Berry, who departed this life April 26th, 1696, and over the inscription is a coat of arms representing a fish with a ring in its mouth.

It appeared that Dame Berry, in the early part of her life had been cruelly traduced by her enemies and accused of incontinence by her husband, who was a captain of the Royal Navy. On his return to his house on the banks of the Severn, his jealousy having been previously excited, he tore the wedding ring from his wife’s finger, and in his rage cast it into the river, bidding her never again to come into his presence if she valued her life, without producing that token of their ill-fated marriage, a thing he conceived utterly impossible. Mrs. Berry, distressed in the extreme at her husband’s groundless suspicions, yet dreading the violence of his temper, quitted her home and became a domestic in the house of a gentleman some miles distant.

A short time afterwards, while cleaning the inside of a salmon, she was going to cook for the family dinner, she found a wedding ring, and from the legend round it knew it to be her own, and the same her husband had thrown into the river. Overjoyed at her good fortune, she flew to her husband, and again protesting her innocence and the malevolence of her accusers, she laid before him the ring and informed him of the marvellous way in which she had regained it.

The husband, supposing the event to have been the interposition of Providence to prove his wife’s innocence, consented to her immediate return, and the parties, returning to London and from thence to Stratford, passed the remainder of their lives in peace and happiness.

The wife was the longest liver, and in her will directed that the monument and the device above described should be fixed up after her death to commemorate a fact which her gratitude taught her to believe was not altogether the effect of chance.”

This unusual story, and that the church and pub are very near each other must mean that the pub was named after the fish and ring on Dame Rebecca Berry’s monument, but whether there is any truth in the full story is difficult to confirm.

There is though an intriguing symbol on the side of the old pub:

With very limited time for research, I have not been able to find the meaning of the symbol. Whether it refers to a much earlier pub on the site, or a building of importance. I checked Rocque’s map from the decade before the 1757 date to see what was on the site.

I have marked the location of Durham Row with the red arrow, which seems to have been a passage along the northern side of a walled estate, and which led, as it continues to do, into St. Dunstan’s church yard.

There is a building in the top right corner, the current location of the pub, and a larger building to the south of the walled enclosure. Whether the castle and wings symbol seen on the old pub relates to a building within this enclosure, the owners, or something else entirely, I have no idea, but it is on the never ending list of things to try and follow-up.

After a look at Durham Row, I walked to Limehouse DLR station, and the following photos show just what can be discovered on almost any walk in London between two places.

A short distance south along Whitehorse Road we come to the ornate iron railings that form the boundary to St. Dunstan’s Churchyard, along with one of the gates into the churchyard:

The iron railings and gates that surround the churchyard are all Grade II listed, and are described as railings with “interlaced gothic arches and interval piers with gabled caps”.

A plaque alongside the gates detail the Rector, Church Wardens and the Surveyor at the time of their installation in 1844:

The spring weather was brilliant, which does always help, and St. Dunstan’s Church looked as if it was really a rural church, rather than in the heart of east London:

St. Dunstan’s is a fascinating, historic church. I wrote a blog post dedicated to the church back in 2018 during a visited on a much more dismal day. The post can be found here, (although when I visited, I did not see the fish and ring monument, I will have to return).

The long, tree lined walk up to the church from the southern corner of the churchyard:

Tree lined walk along the eastern side of the churchyard:

Along the southern side of the churchyard are some Mercers Almshouses. They can be seen in the extract from Rocque’s map shown earlier in the post:

Although as this plaque on the side of the building, under the eaves of the end of terrace house as seen in the photo above indicates, the current buildings date from 1856, replacing the row seen in Rocque’s map, which were built in 1691:

And in another example of how just walking the streets finds places that deserve their own blog post, on the corner of White Horse Road and Salmon Lane is the former site of the Stepney Meeting Burial Ground, Almshouses and School:

The Stepney Meeting was the first independent church in east London, dating from 1644, when it was set up by a group of Puritans called Independents. Their first Meeting House was built in 1674, and the Stepney Meeting opened this, their own burial ground in 1779, and built a row of small almshouses for women by the side of the burial ground.

The burial ground and the almshouses are shown in the following extract from Smith’s 1816 New Plan of London, although I think the almshouses were on the eastern edge of the burial ground, not on the western edge as shown in the map:

The burial ground was closed in 1853, but it remains as an example of one of the many non-conformist burial grounds in east London:

Google maps labels the burial ground as a Mercers Burial Ground – I suspect that this is a confusion between the Mercers Almshouses and those of the Stepney Meeting.

Terrace houses along Salmon Lane:

There are a couple of boundary markers on this terrace. The first is a boundary marker for the Hamlet of Ratcliff, a reminder of when east London was a collection of small hamlets surrounded by fields:

And some parish boundary markers:

Then there is York Square, a central garden surrounded by four sides of almost complete late 18th, early 19th century terrace houses, with many being Grade II listed:

Unusually for east London, York Square retains two pubs. On the north east corner is the Queen’s Head, which reopened in 2023 after a series of closures, and on the south western corner is the Old Ship:

I wrote last week that the Boleyn Pet Stores was an example of the many derelict buildings to be found across London in the 1980s. Whilst many derelict buildings and sites have been rebuilt, with the majority now residential, there are derelict buildings still to be found, and the following was on the northern side of Commercial Road – what was Callegari’s Restaurant:

Approaching Limehouse DLR station, and under the arches of the railway, there are the typical businesses that make good use of these spaces, one of which is Fast Lane Auto Repair:

The DLR railway viaduct and arches, were built for the London and Blackwall Railway which opened in 1840. The design of many of the arches where the railway crosses a road is interesting as the road is carried through a central arch, with separate pedestrian arches on either side:

And on reaching Limehouse DLR station, the bright spring sunshine was highlighting beer barrels from the nearby Craft Beer Company pub:

Junes Ladies Hair Stylist was an example of one of the many businesses and shops across London, that were usually run by an individual, and Durham Row was once a small shopping street serving Stepney with the majority of essentials needed for day to day life.

Whilst hairdressers continue to be found across London, they are now usually larger premises with multiple workers.

With the exception of shops used by specific ethnic communities, so many other small, individual shops have closed or are under threat by the major supermarkets who continue to open large, stand alone stores, or “local” stores such as the Nisa store shown in last week’s post.

I hope this post has also shown the pleasure of just walking the streets of London, that despite the considerable damage suffered by east London during the last war (and later developments), there is still much to be discovered and places that evoke the history and development of the area in so many streets.

alondoninheritance.com

Boleyn Pet Stores, Dalston – 1986

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The 1980s were a time of significant change across London. The city had been in decline since the end of the 2nd World War. Not only having to deal with extensive bomb damage, but also with the loss of a significant amount of industry, including the closure of all the London Docks (with the exception of Tilbury), the docks having been the drivers of much of London’s growth during the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.

There were large areas of derelict industrial land, including the extensive land in east London covered by the old docks. Much of the city’s 19th century housing stock was also in poor condition. A significant decline in population since 1939 had reduced demand, bomb damage had not been fully repaired, and buildings had been left derelict or had been poorly maintained.

The 1980s were the decade when the old London was disappearing, a new London was starting to emerge, and 40 years later, after significant demographic and population changes, considerable rebuilding, including the transformation of places such as the Isle of Dogs, Vauxhall etc. the almost exponential rise in house prices, change to a fully service based industrial model, changes to the way the city is governed etc. London is a very different place to the city that was disappearing in the 1980s.

We can see these changes in photos of individual places, and I will be featuring a number of these during the coming year, photos taken by my father on walks across the city, starting with the Boleyn Pet Stores at the junction of Boleyn Road and Bradbury Street in Dalston:

The same view today:

The London Picture Archive has a view of the pet stores in 1970, confirming that the business had been open for some years, but also showing that the building had decayed significantly during the 1970s and first half of the 1980s (this embedded image will probably not appear in email versions of this post. Go to the website by clicking here to see the image in the post):

By the mid 1980s, whilst the pet store was still open, the rest of the building appears unoccupied, the windows to the upper floor are broken, and the first floor is probably the home of some of the city’s pigeons.

In the 1970s and 1980s, this level of dereliction was quite common across many of the city’s street.

What the photo also shows is the benefit of random walking through the city. My father took many of these photos on random street walks, setting off to a specific area, then a random wander around the streets, particularly the side streets, and it is an approach which I have continued.

To get to the site of the Boleyn Pet Stores, I took the Windrush Line to Dalston Junction, crossed Kingsland High Street, headed north, where after a very short distance is Boleyn Road, and not far along is the junction with Bradbury Street. The location of the old pet stores is shown in the following map (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

In each post on 1980s location I will cover a different aspect of how the city has changed, and for this post I will look at overall population.

The London Data Store is a wonderful, free resource provided by the Greater London Authority. The website provides access to a wealth of data about the city, and to look at how population has changed. i used data from the London Data Store Historical Census Population data set to create the following graph which shows the population of Greater London:

The graph starts in 1801, where there is a population of just over one million.

During the 19th and first half of the 20th century, the population of the wider city continues rising at a rapid rate to reach a peak of 8.6 million in 1939.

For the previous 140 years London had industrialised, the large east London docks had been built, the City’s role in trade and finance expanded rapidly, government, West End entertainments, fruit, vegetable, fish, meat markets etc. there was hardly an aspect of life in London that had not expanded rapidly during this time.

The Second World War brought an end to the expansion of population. The loss to bombing of considerable amounts of housing, migration to new towns orbiting the city, the loss of industry, closure of the docks, all contributed to the decline in population, which reached a low of around 6.5 million in the 1980s.

By the end of the decade, a small increase heralded a change to London’s fortunes, which was visible in the 1991 Census data.

For the following decades, population would rise rapidly, returning to 1939 levels in the early 2020s, a change mainly driven by inward migration.

The rise in population increased demand for housing, which can be seen both in the rapid rise in the price of housing across the city, but also by the renovation, or demolition and rebuild, of almost any available space across the city, and as an example, the site of the Boleyn Pet Stores is now occupied by a new Nisa supermarket at ground level, within a new building of four floors rather than the previous three, allowing three floors of apartments to be built.

A change that can be seen across London, as well as the renovation of buildings of the type shown in the 1986 photo, which now sell at a price which must have seen unimaginable 40 years ago.

After finding the site of the Boleyn Pet Stores, I had a wander around the local streets, and found the following within a very small area, firstly this lovely, almost Gothic, building in Boleyn Road:

The building was built as the St. Mark’s Mission House, later the Cholmeley Boys Club, as still recorded above the door to the right:

The Mission House was built at the end of the 19th century, and was built as a result of the rapid rise in population in Dalston, along with the poverty and poor housing conditions to be found in the area.

In the Islington News and Hornsey Gazette on the 11th of June, 1898, we find one of the justifications during one of the fund raising bazaars for the Mission House (St. Marks, Dalston is on the eastern side of Kingsland High Street):

“As to the object of the bazaar, it might be a revelation to some of them to be told that there are over 8,000 people on the other side of Kingsland Hight-street in the parish of St. Mark’s, who have no room of suitable size wherein work in connection with the church might be carried on. Kingsland High-street acts as a sort of stone wall or barrier between the two sections of the parish, and the people on the other side of it will not cross over to them. Hence it became necessary for them to go to the 8,000 people living on the other side of the intersecting thoroughfare”.

The Arch Deacon of London was also at the fund raising bazaar and added that “Wherever a parish is intersected by a great thoroughfare, it was as if a river flowed between its two divisions”.

Interesting how major roads through a city can act as “a sort of stone wall or barrier” between the people on either side. Kingsland High Street is also now the A10, and is still a busy road through the district.

The foundation stone of the Mission Hall was laid when: “The Lord Mayor (who was accompanied by Miss Davies) and the Sheriffs of London paid a State visit to Kingsland yesterday afternoon, and laid the foundation stone of the new mission buildings of St. Mark’s Church, Dalston, which are to cost £3,600”:

Opposite the location of Boleyn Pet Stores is St. Jude Street, and along the street is an example of what can be achieved when buildings are renovated rather than demolished:

And at the end of St. Jude Street, at the junction with King Henry’s Walk is the Railway Tavern:

The first references I can find to the Railway Tavern are from the 1860s, when the pub was an operating business, so it must have been built somewhere around the mid 19th century, however it is a very different architectural style to the buildings to the left, and the two small, two storey houses to the right, which are up against the tall, flat wall of the pub. The buildings on either side all pre-date the Railway Tavern.

If such a building was planned today, there would probably be an outcry about how the design was not fit for its surroundings.

The Railway Tavern was named after the nearby North London Railway, and was close to Mildmay Park station in Mildmay Grove.

The station is shown on the 1927 edition of the Railway Clearing House, Official Railway Map of London:

The station closed in 1934, however the way the rail tracks part to provide space for the centre platform that was once between the tracks can still be seen on Google maps, at the following link:

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5484962,-0.0825652,242m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDQwMS4wIKXMDSoJLDEwMjExNDU1SAFQAw%3D%3D

The transformation from the Boleyn Pet Stores to the new Nisa supermarket and apartments is indicative of how much of London has transformed over the last 40 years, and the same applies to the streets close to the old pet stores, where as well as new builds, the majority of the surviving pre-war and 19th century houses have been really well restored.

I will be looking at more places, contrasting the 1980s with the 2020s, and the trends that have changed London in more posts throughout the year.

alondoninheritance.com

Noble Street – The Ruins of London’s Industry

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Walk around the City of London today, and the majority of working buildings are those in use as office space. Today, there is very little, if any, small manufacturing industry in the City, although once the streets would have been full of small businesses, manufacturing a wide range of products.

This was not “dirty” industry, this was relegated to the south of the river, to the north, and particularly, to east London.

Despite the multiple phases of rebuilding in the City since the last war, there is one place where we can still see the ruins of the buildings that once supported multiple small manufacturing business, buildings that followed the alignment, and had their foundations built on the original Roman city wall, and where extensive Roman remains were found after wartime destruction – all in Noble Street:

Walk to the western end of Gresham Street, and the last street on the right, next to the church of St. Anne and St. Agnes is Noble Street. On the western side of the street, just past the church, are the ruins of a bombed building, as seen in the above photo.

A quick look behind the building reveals the old surrounds of the church, now almost impossible to access:

The ruined walls still retain a small part of the interior decoration:

Next to the above building, we can look north along Noble Street. A narrow City street, today with new office blocks along the eastern side, with the remains of more late 18th to early 20th century buildings along the west:

Which we can see by looking over the wall in the above photo, down into the gardens and brick walls:

The whole area within the above photo is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. The Historic England listing states that the area includes “buried remains of part of London Wall, the Roman and medieval defences of London, and part of the west side of Cripplegate fort. Remains of property walls of the late 18th-20th centuries built using the London Wall as their foundations are also included”.

To understand more about the remains here, I turned to my go-to book about post war excavations across the City – The Excavation of Roman and Mediaeval London by Professor W.F. Grimes. There is a good amount of details about Noble Street in the book, which he sums up as “This consists of the double Roman wall, still carrying in one place at its northern end a mediaeval fragment; an internal-turret of the fort; and the south-west angle, with its turret, the junction of the Aldersgate length of the city wall and the surrounding portion of Bastion 15. Final consolidation of these remains awaits completion of redevelopment schemes in the area.”

The mention of a fort in the above extract from the book refers to one of the earliest substantial Roman features in the City of London, a fort built at the north west corner of the City over what would become Cripplegate.

The Roman wall under the remains of the bombed buildings in Noble Street formed part of the western wall of this fort, dating from between AD 120 and 150, and later strengthened by building a new interior wall up against the original external wall, when the fort was incorporated within the late 2nd century City wall.

At the southern end of the Noble Street is a key feature which helped to confirm this, along with the changes in direction of the wall.

Grimes excavations found below the basement of number 34 Noble Street, the foundations of a “small sub-rectangular turret, built against the inner face of the wall on the crest of the curve. Taken in conjunction with the rest, it was immediately recognisable as the quite typical corner turret of a Roman fort”.

The curve refers to the way Grimes found the wall unexpectedly curve eastwards below the cellar of number 33, but on digging down in number 34, this was found to be the wall of the turret, and within number 34, the turret was found to be on the corner, where the wall then turned westwards to run to Aldersgate.

Looking down today, we can see part of the remains of this rectangular turret:

Grimes book includes a couple of photos of the excavations along Noble Street. The caption to the first reads “Noble Street, the junction of the fort wall (A) and the City wall (B) with the culvert through the later overlying the fort ditch. The fort wall can be seen approaching the modern wall in the background, is broken by a modern concrete foundation”:

Also in the book is the following photo, which was taken from a height looking down into the remains at the southern corner of Noble Street. The caption to the photo reads: “the south-west corner turret of the Roman fort, with, to right, the double wall curving towards it from the north and Roman city wall going westwards from it”:

Most of these remains have been covered up today, but are still below the surface – hence the status of a Scheduled Ancient Monument, and there are only small parts, such as the south west corner, where some of these remains can be seen.

The street is probably of a very considerable age, as it runs along the front of buildings constructed up against the wall, however the name is not (in London terms) that old. Henry Harben, in a Dictionary of London (1918) provides the following “First mention: On a tradesman’s token, 1659. Perhaps in early times Foster Lane extended further north than at present and included the present Noble Street. It may have been renamed ‘Noble’ Street after an owner or builder”.

As usual, with features many centuries old, much is speculation. The comment about Foster Lane does make sense, as Foster Lane and Noble Street were once a continuous street, before the construction of Gresham Street which cut across the two and made a clear separation.

William Morgan’s map of 1682 shows Noble Street as a continuation of Foster Lane in the south. Note that in 1682, the City wall is still a substantial feature to include in a map. The way the wall runs south, then turns to the west, as confirmed by Grimes, can clearly be seen. Also, in 1682, there is still an Aldersgate. This is not the original gate, but a 1618 rebuild of the earlier medieval gate. Aldersgate would not be demolished, and the street cleared until 1761:

There are a few numbered references along Noble Street. These are:

420 – Lillypot Lane
421 – Oat Lane
422 – Scriveners Hall
423 – Fitz Court

The entrance to Scriveners Hall, or as it was by the time of the print (1854) Coachmakers Hall:

Image: © 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 following extract from an Aldersgate Ward map from William Maitland’s Survey of London (1755) again shows Noble Street and Foster Lane:

The 1914 revision of the OS map shows Noble Street much as it must have been prior to wartime bombing, with the buildings shown along the western side of the street, which today can still be seen as ruins.

I have marked a number of key features on the map (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“:

Fascinating that at the start of the 20th century, the alignment of the Roman fort and city wall can still be seen.

The wall continued north across Falcon Square, between Castle Street and Monkwell Street, where Grimes found more Roman and Medieval features, including the bastion shown on the map, and a second, hidden bastion. I wrote about this stretch of the wall in the post at this link.

Moving to the early 1950s, and we can see the considerable extent of wartime damage, with no buildings, and only a couple of ruins, shown along both sides of Noble Street. Much of this damage was caused by bombing during the night of the 29th December, 1940, when fires raged through the area surrounding and to the north of St. Paul’s Cathedral (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“:

The remains of the buildings along the western edge of Noble Street were not even considered worthy of marking as ruins in the OS map:

There is a parish boundary marker on the rear wall of the above photo. The marker states that the boundary of the parish of St, Botolph, Aldersgate, extends 20 feet southward of this wall. I have always wondered where the plaque was originally located, as it is currently on the internal side of an east / west facing wall:

Many of the ruins are of quite substantial structures:

The title of the post referred to Noble Street and the ruins of London’s industry, and we can get a very comprehensive picture of this industry and commerce by looking at some of the old street directories of London, and the 1910 Post Office directory provides a listing from a time when all the ruins we see today, were in use, starting at the south east corner of the street:

In the above listing, we can see that at numbers 2 and 3 was the Post Office Tavern. In 1848 this was known as the Post Office Hotel, as in the Morning Advertiser on the 6th December, 1848 there was an advert for: “The Post-Office Hotel, Noble Street, Cheapside. The Valuable Lease And Goodwill. Mr. Daniel Cronin is instructed by the Assignees of Mr. Jasper Taylor, a Bankrupt, to Sell by Auction, at Garraway’s on Tuesday December 27th at 12, with possession of the above very excellent property, eligibly situate in the immediate vicinity of the busiest part of London, and constructed for the conduct of a first rate trade ion all its branches; held for an unexpired term of 34 years from Christmas 1848, at the low rent of £100 per annum”.

The directory starts from the south eastern side of the street, at the junction with Gresham Street. These directories usually list the street junctions, making is easy to work out the numbering and locations of businesses listed, and the directory does include those along the eastern edge – Lilypot Lane, Oat Lane and Fitchett’s Court, however the map does not state where Falcon Square to the north is reached, and the numbers start along the western side.

Fortunately, the details in W.F. Grimes account of excavations helps.

He wrote that the turret at the very south of the open space we see today, was found under number 34, with number 33 next to the north, so using the listing, we can see that in 1910, number 34 was occupied by:

Alex Strauss & Co – Millinery, ornaments
Hemken & MacGeagh – Manufacturers agents
Glasser & Co – Ladies belt manufacturers

I wonder if they ever realised they were working on top of a key junction of the old Roman fort / wall and a Roman turret?

The building adjacent, on the north of the one with the turret, was number 33, which was occupied by:

Egisto Landi – Confectioner
Frederick Rolinson – Lace agent
Hugh Sleigh & Co – Sewing silk manufacturer
Richard Chas Burr – Manufacturers agent
Joseph Johnson – Manufacturers agent
Victor Wolf – Manufacturers agent
M. Bloch & Co – Cape merchants
Albert Edward Hondra – Manufacturers agent

And continuing with the numbers as they head below 33 and 34, we can see the occupants of the ruins that continue north along Noble Street:

There are a number of common factors across the listing, which show how Noble Street was occupied during the first half of the 20th century (and almost certianly for much of the 19th century):

Many of the buildings were of multiple occupancy. Where we see a name with the title of Manufacturers Agent, we can imagine one person occupying a room, buying and selling the finished products from the street, or buying and selling the raw materials used in many of the manufacturing businesses.
Almost every building had a manufacturer of some type. These were small manufactures, mostly connected to the clothing trade, for example making gloves, handkerchiefs, hats, needles and pins. There was a “Galloon Manufacturer” at number 31 – a galloon was a heavily decorated woven or braided trim, so a product which would be used as part of a larger item of clothing
The number of businesses show how busy this relatively small street would have been in the first half of the 20th century. People coming and going to the buildings, raw materials and finished products being moved
The type of manufacturing shows how this area was so badly damaged by incendiary bombs during the night of the 29th of December 1940. Nearly every building would have been storing inflammable materials, and this type of industry was very common in the streets to the north of Gresham Street, including across what is now the Barbican. A fire would have taken hold, and spread very quickly. Even without bombing, fires were still frequent ( see my post on the Great Fire of Cripplegate ).

The listing concludes with the businesses from the corner of the present day southern end of the ruins, down to the junction with Gresham Street:

Noible Street had been a place of industry and manufacturing for many years before the above 1910 Post Office directory. The British Museum have a collection of trade cards from businesses within the street, and the following are a sample of these, starting with the following dating from around 1800, of Ashworth, Ellis, Wilson & Hawksleys, Silversmiths & Platers from Sheffield; who had their London Warehouse at 28 Noble Street:

Next is the trade card of Joseph May, an engraver who worked at number 4 Noble Street in the 1780s:

George Yardley was a carver and gilder in Noble Street in the mid 18th century:

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

Many of the Noble Street manufacturers resorted to some unusual methods to sell their products. For example, in January 1897, J. Scott of the City Umbrella Company at 1 Noble Street ran a competition for Valentines Day offering cash prizes to those who purchased umbrellas.

To qualify they first had to complete the following words by finding the missing letters. These were all examples of articles of daily foods in the late 1890s:

You then had to send your answer, along with an order for an umbrella to stand a chance of winning a first prize of £50, second prize of £25, 4th of £15 and 5th prize of £10. There was also a prize of £50 to the person who ordered the most number of umbrellas.

The individual winnings cannot have been much, as the prize money was divided across all the correct entries, so everyone who got the answers correct, and ordered an umbrella, received a share of the over prize.

Towards the north end of the ruins:

At the northern end of Noble Street, at the junction with London Wall (the area which was Falcon Square, and opposite the location of St. Olave, see this post from a couple of weeks ago) is a stretch of surviving ragstone medieval wall which stands up to 4.5 metres in height:

This medieval wall survives because it was incorporated into the structure of the building which stood on the site.

Looking back along the garden and ruins along the eastern side of Noble Street:

The ruins are silent now, but they do act as a reminder of the trades that once occupied so many streets across the City of London, when industry and manufacturing worked alongside commerce and office work.

Noble Street is also a p[lace which may have nurtured my interest in history, and London history in particular. When we were children, Noble Street was where my father parked when he drove up to London for a weekend walk, and I do remember peering over at the ruins as a child. Noble Street was the starting point for many walks across London.

alondoninheritance.com

Lift 109 and the Transformation of Battersea Power Station

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A recent birthday present was some tickets to go up Lift 109, the lift that goes up one of the chimneys of Battersea Power Station to get a view from the top.

This blog is not usually about this type of place to visit, but I love a high view of London, and I have not been to Battersea Power Station since it opened following many years of reconstruction.

The blog is about how London changes and adapts, so that does give me an excuse to show the fantastic view from the top of the chimney, and to look at how the old power station has been transformed.

To start the sequence of change, here are a couple of photos taken by my father in the early 1950s showing the majority of the power station complete, with just the final south east chimney to be built (from this post back in 2015):

A 2014 image of the power station, from the same viewpoint as the above photo, with the gas holder still on the right, which would soon be demolished:

When the early 1950s photos was taken, the power station only had three chimneys. Power stations are frequently built using a modular approach so that the site can start generating electricity as soon as possible and capacity added when there is sufficient demand and an economic justification. This approach was used in the 1930’s and continues to this day.

Battersea “A”, the first phase of the power station consisted of the right hand side of the building as seen from the north bank. Construction of this part of the building started in 1929 and the station was operational soon after. The Sir Giles Gilbert Scott brick exterior work was finished in 1933.

Work on Battersea “B”, the left side of the building commenced in 1944 with the fourth chimney completed in 1955 when the power station reached the configuration that was to last until closure.

The same view in 2015:

In the above photo, the south west chimney has been demolished. The chimneys were considered unsafe and not easy to strengthen and repair, therefore all four chimneys would be demolished and rebuilt, using new materials, but to an identical design so the visual appearance of Battersea Power Station would be the same.

In 2016, the new south west chimney had been built, and the other three had been demolished:

In the above and below photos you can see the new apartment buildings under construction between the power station and the railway line to Victoria Station:

In the above and below photos, you can see through into the interior of the power station, which at the time was a hollow shell:

I have loads more photos showing Battersea Power Station as was, but cannot quickly find them. I have tens of thousands of photos, all stored in folders dated with when I copied or scanned the photos to the computer – not at all efficient for finding a specific place.

Fast forward though to March 2025, and this is Battersea Power Station today (taken from alongside the river at Battersea, the fourth chimney is there, just not from this perspective:

Time to head to the top of the chimney, and the viewing platform can just be seen at the very top of the chimney on the right of the front of the power station in the photo above.

The lift is branded as Lift 109 as it takes you 109 metres up. Passing through the ticketing area, there are several displays about the history of the power station along with a few relics from the control room where you can pretend to switch electricity to parts of London once served by the station.

Then up a lift and 39 steps to the base of the chimney, where you get in the glass circular lift that takes you to the top and just above the chimney:

At the top:

I had been waiting to book the visit for some guaranteed sunny weather, and when the sun was in the south and highest in the sky, and on reaching the top, the view really did not disappoint. Looking east along the Thames, with the edge of the chimney at the bottom of the photo:

I find high view points fascinating for a number of reasons:

They provide a view of the layout of the wider city that you cannot get a street level. The way the Thames curves on its route through the city and the way the Thames has created low ground occupied by the city, surrounded by high ground to the north and south.
The distance and relationship between landmarks looks very different when viewed from a height rather than at street level.
How the height of the city is changing. From ground level it is often hard to appreciate the number, clustering and relative height of the buildings that are springing up all the time – for example in the above photo the new apartment towers in Vauxhall can be seen along the Thames on the right.
Despite the height, small details can be seen, including their relationship with the surrounding landscape – there are some examples of this in the photos below

In the following photo, the eastern end of the Churchill Gardens estate is in the lower left corner, and up a bit on the left is the red brick Dolphin Square estate. The tower on the right of the photo is the St George Wharf Tower, the first apartment tower built in Vauxhall. This tower blocks the view of the towers on the Isle of Dogs around Canary Wharf, a few can just be seen to the left of the tower. On the left is the Walkie Talkie building, then the Shard and in the semi-foreground directly below the Shard is Millbank Tower:

A bit to the right, and more of the Vauxhall towers appear:

Then with more of the Vauxhall towers, we get the south west chimney. The American Embassy is in the left-middle of the photo, the building with the ornate decoration across the whole of the façade:

View to the west – a very different low-rise view. Chelsea Bridge crosses the Thames and Battersea Park is the open space on the left:

Royal Hospital Chelsea:

In the river in the above photo, just to the right of the barge with the crane, is one of the Thames Tideway (super-sewer) work spaces, built into the river. Work is now complete, and the work space has been transformed into an open space accessible from the path along the embankment.

The workspace covers the deep shaft that is below the surface down to the sewer, and it was one of the drive locations for tunnelling, and is now one of the combined sewer outflow interceptor points, where sewer flows will be diverted into the new tunnel.

The view from above shows an interesting relationship between this new space and the Royal Hospital, as it appears to be at the end of the wide drive up to the centre of the Royal Hospital, and terminates this drive, in the river (although the busy embankment roads are between).

This new space is now open, and according to the project’s website “Parts of the new space here will be ‘floodable’ at high tides, giving Londoners the first opportunity of its kind to dip their toe in a cleaner River Thames.” I think I will wait a while before dipping my toes in the river.

View to the south, with the southern two chimneys of the power station:

In the above photo, there is a glass roof in the middle of the core part of the power station. This is above an atrium which is part of the 500,000 sq. ft. of Apple’s London offices. Along with Apple, there is other office space, including flexible rent space. Surrounding the top are apartments.

There is currently a two bedroom apartment in the power station for rent at £7,000 per month.

To the south east of the power station, there is still open space, which will presumably be home to new apartment buildings in the coming years:

Views to the south were challenging for the camera, as the sun was very bright. I was looking for the 719 feet Crystal Palace transmitter tower, and by chance it appeared in the left of one photo. If you watch free to air TV or listen to VHF FM or DAB radio in London, your signal is almost certainly coming from this tower:

Looking back to the east in the following photo, the Barbican towers can be seen in the background on the left, in front of which is the Shell Centre tower on the Southbank, and just below the Shell tower is County Hall. In the middle is the Southbank Tower at 55 Upper Ground, and to the right of this is One Blackfriars, with its distinctive bulge half way up the tower:

Moving slightly to the right, and the old NatWest tower in the City appears to the right of the following photo. Slightly to the left of this tower, and between two smaller towers is the brick tower of Tate Modern, the old Bankside Power Station by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who was also the Consultant on the exterior design of Battersea Power Station – London’s two great brick cathedrals of power:

The London Eye and Palace of Westminster, with the Victoria Tower on the right and Elizabeth Tower on the left. Further to the left, part of Westminster Abbey can be seen, with the octagonal Chapter House:

New buildings at Victoria in the foreground, with the BT Tower in the background. To the left of the BT Tower is the 1970 Euston Tower, at the time London’s tallest office block, and from 1973 it was the home of Capital Radio:

Camden Council have just approved the plans for a £600 million redevelopment of Euston Tower, so this building will look very different in coming years.

The engine shed over Victoria Station, with one of the angular buildings which seem to be a design feature of recent Victoria developments:

The rail bridge over the river, tracks leading up to Victoria Station, and train depot / parking area:

Look to the right of the train depot area, and the benefit of a high view can be seen, with the view of the two parallel housing blocks of the Peabody Avenue estate – the 1870s estate with a length of 300 metres. The two long, parallel rows of this development are really clear from this perspective.

The Natural History Museum is in the centre, slightly to the right, of the following photo:

And moving slightly to the right, along the centre is the Victoria and Albert Museum, and just behind, covered in scaffolding, is the Queen’s Tower of Imperial College:

In the above photo, the Wembley Arch can be seen in the distance, the photo below shows a close up of Wembley, with the dome of the Royal Albert Hall to the lower right:

Across the Thames is an estate that had a key relationship with Battersea Power Station. In the lower part of the following photo are the light brown buildings of the Churchill Gardens Estate:

In the centre of the estate is a fascinating industrial relic of the link between Battersea Power Station, and the Churchill Gardens Estate:

The tower is the most visible part of a highly complex system, that took hot water from Battersea Power Station, pumped it under the Thames through specially constructed pipes, stored water in the tower, then distributed it across both the Churchill Gardens and Dolphin Square estates for heating and hot water.

The system is described in considerable detail in a book published in 1951 for the Festival of Britain by the Association of Consulting Engineers. A large book that celebrates the work of civil engineering and construction across a wide range of projects.

The introductory paragraph to the section on the Churchill Gardens project provides an excellent description:

“In the ancient City of Westminster, almost within the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, so severely damaged by German bombers in 1942, great blocks of new flats are rising to meet the needs of London’s teeming millions, thousands of whom are still living in bomb-shattered houses built a century ago.

It is perhaps indicative of Britain’s will to survive and to surmount her economic troubles, that this great new housing estate, together with, it is expected an existing group of flats – probably the largest in Europe – is to have complete space heating and water heating by means of a district heating plan, thus banishing the dust and drudgery of the open coal fire, and the nuisance caused by the delivery and removal of fuel and ash for each block of flats. This plant is unique in two respects: it’s the first public heat supply in London, and it is also London’s first district heating plant wherein the heat is the by product of electricity generation. By this means the thermal efficiency of electric generating stations may be raised from its present figure of 25 per cent, to a figure approaching 75 per cent, for stations generating both electricity and heat.”

The section in the book is titled “District Heating Scheme, Pimlico Housing Estate and Dolphin Square”, as at the time the book was put together, the estate had not yet been given the name of Churchill Gardens.

The water sent from Battersea Power Station was up to a maximum of 200 degrees Fahrenheit (93 degrees Celsius) and was stored in the tower, or to use its correct name, the “Hot Water Accumulator” before being distributed across the estate.

The following diagram shows the concept from power station on the left to estate on the right via the Thames, which from the diagram, looks a very trivial barrier to cross with pipes:

The accumulator tower and estate under construction (from a post dedicated to the system and the estate, which can be found here):

I did not measure the amount of time, but you get around 10 to 12 minutes at the top of the chimney – plenty of time to take a good look at the view, but at the end it was time to take a look inside the power station building:

The public areas are within the old turbine halls of the two halves of the station, with the central boiler house (again in two parts as the station was built in two halves at two different times) now office space with apartments at the top.

The space is basically a Westfield or Airport shopping centre, with the only industrial relics of the buildings’ purpose being found in the roof space:

As the power station was built in two different halves, there were also two separate Control Rooms – A and B.

Control Room B sort of remains, but is now a bar:

To get an impression of what the Control Room looked like, you need to walk to the back of the bar, and providing the tables lining the viewing space at the end are free, you can see some of the original equipment:

The “B” side of the station was built after the war, a time when money and materials were in short supply, so the decoration of Control Room B was very basic.

The pre-war Control Room A was much more ornate, but is now (inevitably) a private event space. You can see some photos of the space here.

I guess there is a certain industrial feel to the design, but this is really brand driven retail space:

And you need to look up to see any relics from the buildings past:

The view from the waiting area for Lift 109, which is in the pre-war “A” side of the power station, so the stone work along the walls is more ornate:

Looking down into the entrance of the building from the river side of the power station:

The large, green equipment in the centre of the floor is a 66 kilo volt circuit breaker dating from around 1955, which was part of the station switchgear – one of the very few items of equipment from the operational station left on display:

The purpose of the circuit breaker was to automatically cut of electricity if a fault in the circuit was detected, to prevent further damage to the electricity distribution network.

There were a number of these circuit breakers at Battersea, each built within a brick compartment with steel doors, so that if a circuit breaker caught fire, the fire would be prevented from spreading.

As we have seen at Heathrow in the last few days, electrical distribution equipment can at times catastrophically catch fire.

Outside the power station, there is a long walking / viewing , seating area on the top of the pier that coal barges once moored up against:

It was here that the distinctive cranes that once transferred coal between river and power station were located. These were removed when development work started, with the intention that they would be restored and replaced, however I believe they are currently in bits in an outside storage area – not in Battersea:

Reflection of the power station in an adjacent apartment block, with a randomly placed bit of equipment from the old power station:

My photos earlier in the post showed all the chimneys being replaced, and in the garden at the front of the power station is a small part of one of the original chimneys – a segment from the 1933 north west chimney:

Along the western side of the building, with on the right apartment blocks with shops and restaurants along ground level:

Towards the rear of the power station is Prospect Place, designed by the California based architectural practice of Gehry Partners, founded by Frank Gehry:

South east brick work and chimney:

It was interesting to see the transformation of Battersea Power Station. My preference would have been for alternative uses than just retail in the public space, however in reality there was no other option than funding the considerable reconstruction of the building – which had been out of use for decades – than by building apartments, offices and retail.

There had been many schemes before the current development, none of which had resulted in any work in restoring the building, and no public or private money was being made available to create a transformation such as has resulted at Bankside Tate Modern.

Whilst the chimneys are new, they are to the original design, and the good thing is that the shell of the building is fundamentally as it was – a temple to 20th century electricity generation – I just wish that there was more about this in the building, in addition to the small display at the start of Lift 109, and a couple of bits of switchgear. Control Room A should have public access rather than being a private event space, and the cranes should be restored and installed alongside the river as a starter.

Giving more prominence to the heritage of the building would help increase footfall across the site, which is probably part of the thinking behind Lift 109, as visitors to this will probably also use the restaurants and shops.

Lift 109 though is brilliant, the view from the top provides a very different perspective of London. Unless you can get to the top of one of the new apartment buildings around Vauxhall, there are no other high places to view the city from this part of London, and on a sunny day, London looks glorious – as does the brickwork of this temple to power:

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Late 20th Century Sculpture in the City of London

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In 1994, the Department of Planning of the Corporation of London published a small booklet with the title of “Late 20th Century Sculpture in the City of London”:

Whilst there has long been sculpture across the City, it was mainly statues, building decoration, and a number of drinking and decorative fountains, the late 20th century saw a significant increase in the number and diversity of sculpture, with many new works being abstract, rather than the typical “man on a plinth”.

It was the aim of the booklet to highlight this increase in number and diversity of type, and how public sculpture added to the interest and enjoyment of public spaces.

The late 20th century was also a time when large scale development became the norm with City transformation, and the use of sculpture across a development (such as at, in 1994, the recent Broadgate office complex), was part of a developers approach to selling a new development as an attractive place to work.

The City of London, as with much of the rest of London, has long been a rapidly changing and very transitory place. Buildings disappear to be replaced by new, shops, cafes and restaurants open and close, businesses move in then relocate, the 19th century building that was a bank is now a luxury hotel etc.

A work of sculpture has a visual as well as a financial value. Types of sculpture are fashionable when installed, and seem unfashionable just a few decades later. Some sculpture, such as that of Mary Wollstonecraft in Newington Green attract polar opposite views from the day they are unveiled.

Statues of (almost always) men, who were considered heroes at the time, are, many years later, considered either tainted or as villains.

I wondered whether any of these issues applied to the sculpture featured in the booklet, just 31 years later, so decided to trace all the works recorded in the booklet to see if they are still in place, or whether they have been moved, or lost.

Fortunately, to help with tracking them down, the booklet includes a list:

As well as a map:

Split between the two halves of the City. The maps shows that some areas are a desert for late 20th century sculpture, whilst in other areas, such as the new Broadgate development at the top of the following map, there is a large number of works, illustrating the relationship between new development and the installation of new sculpture:

So I set out to find them all, and today’s post is the first in a series over the coming months to locate all 38 works of late 20th century sculpture in the City of London, starting with:

1. Temple Gardens, Lamb Statue, Margaret Wrighton, 1971

The Lamb Statue is of a boy holding a book, and is to commemorate Charles Lamb.

Charles Lamb was a poet and essayist. Born in the Temple at 2 Crown Office Row in 1775 where his father worked in the legal profession. On the death of his father’s employer, the family consisting of Charles, his sister Mary and their mother and father had to leave the house tied with his father’s job and move into cramped lodgings nearby.

After a short spell at the South Sea Company, he moved to the East India Company in 1792, where he would spend the rest of his working life. He was employed as a clerk, a job he did not enjoy.

His first published work was a small collection of sonnets that he provided for a book of poems published by Coleridge in 1796.

But it was not until the 1820s that he achieved a degree of fame when he published a series of essays in the London Magazine under the name of Elia (a name he adopted, allegedly the last name of an Italian man that had also worked at the South Sea Company)

However in many ways he had quite a tragic life which probably influenced his writing.

After the death of his father’s employer, the family were forced to move to cramped lodgings, and Charles and his sister Mary seem to have been responsible for supporting the family, and it was the resulting pressure which probably led to his sister Mary, in a fit of insanity to kill their mother and badly wound their father.

Charles took Mary to an asylum, and to avoid her imprisonment, he agreed to look after her at home, which he did for the rest of his life.

Mary did suffer mental health problems for the rest of her life, but she also published works with Charles, including a retelling of Shakespeare for children, a book which is still published today.

He did not marry. His first proposal of marriage to one Ann Simmons was rejected which led to a short period of what at the time was called insanity, probably what we would now call depression.

His second attempt at marriage, with a proposal to an actress Fanny Kelly was rejected, probably because she could not contemplate a life which involved looking after Mary.

The boy is holding a book, with the quotation “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once”, taken from Lamb’s essay on the “Old Benchers of the Inner Temple”.

The statue was the work of Margaret Wrightson, who was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1877. She studied at the Royal College of Art, and the majority of her work was figurative sculpture, with works consisting of portrait busts and heads.

The statue was created and installed at the Temple in 1928, however it was stolen in 1970, perhaps because of the value of the lead of which the work was made. A fibreglass copy was made and placed in the gardens in 1971.

Given that the work dates from 1928, it seems strange that it is included in a listing of late 20th sculpture in the City of London, however the fibreglass replacement does fall within the late 20th century timings, although rather strange given that it is a copy.

It did though provide an excuse to visit Inner Temple Gardens on a lovely spring day.

The statue is within the hedged ring in the photo below, on the right hand side of the circle:

The long path running along the south of the gardens, between the gardens and the Embankment on the right:

At the eastern end of this long path is another work, which is not included in the listing, probably because this is a lead replica of the “Wrestlers”, with the first century original being found in the Uffizi in Florence:

Inner Temple Gardens are well worth a visit, and are usually open Monday to Friday, between 12:30 and 3 p.m.:

My next stop was at:

2. Fetter Lane / New Fetter Lane, John Wilkes, James Butler, 1988

John Wilkes was one of the major figures in 18th century political life, and he was also a Lord Mayor of the City of London.

He was active in so many ways that a book is needed to cover the breadth and depth of his life, and one was indeed published in June of last year: Champion of English Freedom: The Life of John Wilkes, MP and Lord Mayor of London.

A well as a Lord Mayor of the City where his statue now stands, he was also an MP, magistrate, author and soldier. He was a prisoner in the Kings Bench Prison after being found guilty on charges of libel.

Born in Clerkenwell in 1725, he died in 1797 in his house at Grovesnor Square. His reputation in later life had suffered due to his involvement in the Gordon Riots, where Wilkes was in charge of soldiers who were defending the Bank of England from the rioters, and as part of his defence of the Bank, he ordered the defending soldiers to fire into the crowd.

This action was seen as an act in support of the Government rather than the common people.

On the rear of the plinth are the following words: “This Memorial Statue Was Erected By Admirers And Unveiled in October 1988 by Dr James Cope”.

Dr James Cope commissioned the statue, and money for the statue was raised from present day supporters of Wilkes.

It was created by London born sculptor, James Butler, who died in 2022 at the age of 90., and there is a comprehensive website covering his life and work to be found, here.

3. 2 Dorset Rise, George and the serpent, Michael Sandle

The order in which the sculptures are numbered in the list is not always the best order to walk, and I found number 3 – George and the serpent – after leaving site number 1 – Temple Gardens.

Walking along Tudor Street, I caught a glimpse of the next work, a short distance up Dorset Rise:

This is George and the serpent, a rather stylised version of St. George, on a horse, about to strike a dragon which spirals around a vertical plinth of metal rods:

There is no date for this work in the City of London booklet, however it seems to date from 1988, and was commissioned by Mountleigh Group as part of the surrounding office development. It was the winning entry in a competition held by Unilever who at the time occupied the offices.

Unilever have long left these offices, and George and the serpent now sits in the courtyard of a Premier Inn:

George and the serpent is the work of Michael Sandle, who was born in Weymouth, Dorset in 1936.

Another of his London works is the Seafarers’ Memorial outside the offices of the International Maritime Organization on the Albert Embankment. This work has a similar bold style as George and the serpent:

International Seafarers Memorial, Albert Embankment, taken Friday, 6 March, 2020
cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Robin Sones – geograph.org.uk/p/6577613

The plinth sites within a circular well, and I beleive the George and the serpent operated as a water feature as well as a sculpture.

In the following photo you can see the circular well. Just visible is a pipe leading from below the interior of the plinth to one or more of the metal poles, some of which I believe are hollow to take water up into the sculpture. To the right in the photo are the brass tongues of the dragon, out of which poured water:

There cannot be that many Premier Inns with such an impressive work of art in the courtyard:

My next stop was in Fleet Place, where there were two sculptures in the listing and on the map. The first was:

4. Fleet Place, Man with pipe, Bruce McClean, 1993

However Man with pipe by Bruce McClean could not be found. Fleet Place has had some considerable redevelopment over the last few decades, so whether these changes resulted in the lost of the sculpture, I do not know?

I walked around the square and streets leading onto Fleet Place but could find no trace, and subsequently no record of where it could be, whether I missed the sculpture, or what may have happened to it.

Fleet Place on the day of my visit:

But I did have better luck with the second work listed as being in Fleet Place:

5. Fleet Place, Echo, Stephen Cox, 1993

Fleet Place consists of a central square and a pedestrianised route leading up to Holborn Viaduct, alongside the City Thameslink station. Along the route up to Holborn Viaduct, I found “Echo” by Stephen Cox:

Echo consists of two headless torsos facing each other, and the gender of each figure is rather vague.

As well as Great Britain, Stephen Cox works in India, Italy and Egypt, and the stone used for “Echo” was Indian Granite. A plaque set into the surround dates the work to 1993, and that it was commissioned by Broadgate Properties, if I remember correctly, this was soon after the City Thameslink station was completed, and as part of the redevelopment of the buildings surrounding the station.

6. Queen Victoria Street, Baynard House, Seven ages of man, Richard Kindersley, 1980

The “Seven Ages of Man” is a wonderful sculpture, but is now in a very dilapidated area, sitting within an open space, part of the public walkway between Blackfriars Station and Queen Victoria Street, above street level, and surrounded by British Telecom’s Baynard House:

The Seven Ages of Man is by Richard Kindersley, and as well as a sculptor of works such as that at Baynard House, he is also a typeface designer and stone letter carver, and if you have ever walked down the stairs at Canning Town Jubilee Line Station, you will see his lettering telling a local history story swirling along the concrete walls to the side of the stairs.

A plaque on the small brick wall opposite the sculpture tells us that the work was unveiled by Lord Miles of Blackfriars on the 23rd of April 1990. Lord Miles was the actor Bernard Miles, who. along with his wife Josephine Wilson, was the driving force behind the Mermaid Theatre which opened a short distance away alongside Puddle Dock (see this post for the story of the Mermaid).

The theme of the work, the Seven Ages of Man is taken from Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It” where the following extract tells the story of the seven ages:

Baynard House and the surrounding area, including the Mermaid Theatre are expected to be significantly redeveloped at some point in the coming years, so as well as the Seven Ages of Man, I think it would also be possible to put together the Seven Ages of City Sculpture (with apologies to Shakespeare):

The planned new development, the concept for a work of art, the design competition and commission
The design is complete and work starts
The new sculpture is installed in its new location, and heralded as a focal point for this new place in the City
The sculpture is now part of the day to day environment
The sculpture becomes so familiar to those who live and work in the area that it becomes almost invisible as they pass
The sculpture and / or the area in which it is located becomes dated, out of fashion, or lacks maintenance and falls into disrepair
The area around the sculpture is redeveloped, the sculpture disappears

The Seven Ages of Man is certainly at stage 6 in my list above, hopefully after redevelopment, it will still be part of the new area between Queen Victoria Street and the Thames.

7. Paternoster Square, Paternoster, Elizabeth Frink, 1975

I usually try and avoid having people in photos published on the blog, however this photo, taken on a warm spring day, shows how the placement of a work can become part of the life of a place, with people clustering around to meet. Paternoster is somewhere between ages 4 and 5 in my list above:

With the colour of the stone used for the plinth, Paternoster looks as if it is part of the latest development of the area north of St. Paul’s Cathedral, however it dates from the previous 1960s office development on the same site.

Trafalgar House commissioned the work from Elisabeth Frink, and it was installed on the northern side of the original development in 1975, and unveiled by Yehudi Menhuin.

When the 1960s development was demolished, Paternoster was moved in 1997 to a position on London Wall, near the Museum of London, and restored to its current location in 2003, on a new plinth to match the surrounding buildings.

The name Paternoster is curious. The work is in Paternoster Square, and prior to wartime bombing and post war site clearance, Paternoster Row once ran through the square, east to west, and the statue is just a few feet north of the original router of the street.

Paternoster Row in the late 19th century – hard to believe that this street once ran through Paternoster Square:

Harben in a Dictionary of London gives the source of the name Paternoster Row as from “Paternosters were turners of beads and lived here, hence the name of the street”.

So why is the sculpture of a shepherd and sheep rather than the traditional paternosters that Harben describes as turners of beads?

The Paternoster Square website gives a couple of explanations, including that Elizabeth Frink was inspired by a stay in Cervennes, a mountainous region in France, populated with sheep and their shepherds, alternatively inspiration from Picasso’s 1944 bronze, Man with Sheep, or perhaps the nearby cathedral inspired a deliberate confusion between pater of Paternoster (Our Father) and pastor (shepherd).

The Paternoster Square website gives the name of the sculpture as “Sheep and Shepherd”, and does not mention the name Paternoster, with the word Paternoster only used in the context given in the paragraph above.

What ever the true source of Frink’s inspiration for the work, it blends in really well in Paternoster Square, and provides a focal point for those who use the square.

Although the focus of this post is late 20th century sculpture, I did pass some new works on my walk between those listed in the City of London booklet, one of these was in the overall Paternoster Square development, where Paternoster Lane meets Ave Maria Lane:

This is “Paternoster Vents” by Thomas Heatherwick.

It was the result of a requirement to provide cooling for an electricity substation in the ground below. Surrounding the work are air vents embedded in the pavement, these draw in cool air.

The two parts of the overall work then support two tall warm air vents. Each of the parts of the overall work consists of sixty three identical isosceles triangles of glass bead blasted stainless steel.

Paternoster Vents was installed in 2002. It is surprising how many recent statues, sculpture etc. across London are there to provide cooling to infrastructure, car parks, underground stations and tunnels etc. and to do so in a way that enhances the streets above.

8. St. Paul’s Churchyard, Becket, E. Bainbridge Copnall, 1973

Enter St. Paul’s Churchyard from the south east, look to your left, and you will see Becket:

Becket, by E Bainbridge Copnall is Grade II listed, and shows Thomas à Becket, who was murdered at Canterbury Cathedral on the 29th of December 1170.

In Copnall’s work, he has fallen to the ground, as the four knights surrounding him are about to strike their fatal blows:

The work is of fibreglass resin and was originally installed in 1973, in the south west of the churchyard, having been commissioned by the City of London Corporation. The sculpture was damaged during the storm of 1987, restored, but then was vandalised in 2001, when it was moved to its current location, which is within a quieter part of the churchyard.

Edward Bainbridge Copnall was born in 1903 in South Africa and trained in London. More of his works can be seen in London where he was responsible for the relief sculptures on the Adelphi.

He died in 1973, so Becket was probably one of his last works, and he certainly captured the final moments of Thomas à Becket:

Not far from the Becket sculpture is another not listed in the City of London pamphlet, as it dates from 2012, a bust of John Donne:

John Donne was born in nearby Bread Street in around 1571and died in 1631.

He was a poet (and his works are still in print), an MP, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and many more roles in a complex life. It is from John Donne that we get the phrase “No Man is an Island”.

As with John Wilkes earlier in the post, John Donne requires a whole book to cover his life, and a couple of years ago Katherine Rundell published Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, and back in 2007 there was Donne: The Reformed Soul. Both excellent books that tell the story of a fascinating life that spanned the 16th and 17th centuries.

The work is by Nigel Boonham, and a clever part of the overall installation is within the stones surrounding the base of the plinth, which has been divided up into four segments for the four points of the compass, each highlighting a key part of John Donne’s life, for example to the east is his birth place in Bread Street, and to the west is Lincoln’s Inn where he was a Reader:

To the north of the cathedral, still in the churchyard is:

9. St. Paul’s Churchyard, John Wesley, J. Adams Acton, 1991

The statue of John Wesley dates from 1988 (although the City pamphlet gives a date of 1991 which may have been when it was unveiled), however in reality it is much older as it is a bronze cast from an early 19th century marble statue in Methodist Central Hall, Westminster.

John Wesley’s life spanned the whole of the 18th century, as he was born in 1703 and died in 1791. He was the main founder of the Methodist movement.

He also has a plaque in Aldersgate Street, recording a place and an event where he “Felt his heart strangely warmed”.

Apparently the statue is 5 foot 1 inches tall, mirroring Wesley’s real life height.

The statue is in St. Paul’s churchyard as, despite being at odds with the established Church of England, he did preach a few times in the cathedral.

As with a couple of others in this post, statues and sculptures do serve as a gateway into further research, by prompting more reading about the individual, and for Wesley, this book tells a good story.

10. Postman’s Park, Minotaur, Michael Ayrton, 1973

Michael Ayrton’s “Minotaur” was recorded in the City of London booklet as to be found in Postman’s Park, however despite a good walk around the park, I could not find the sculpture:

The reason being is that it is now just north of London Wall in the gardens between the ruins of the Elsyng Spital Church Tower and Salters’ Hall. I will cover the Minotaur when I walk through that area for the rest of the sculptures listed in the booklet.

11. Old Change Court, Fireman’s War Memorial, John W. Mills, 1991

The Fireman’s War Memorial was listed as being in Old Change Court, however today you will find it a very short distance to the west at the northern end of Sermon Lane:

The memorial was the work of the Firefighters Memorial Charitable Trust and was initially set up as a memorial to the firefighters who worked across the streets of London during the Blitz, and then extended nationally to cover the service of all firefighters during the Second World War.

It was unveiled by the Queen Mother on the 4th of May, 1991 at its original location at the northern end of Old Change Court.

The sculpture shows two firefighters working a hose, with their legs spread to the take the force of the water blasting from the hose, whilst a sub-officer is waving his arms, attracting others to assist.

The sub-officer is believed to be modelled on C.T. Demarne who was the Chief Fire Officer of West Ham Fire Station. Demarne had the original idea for a firefighters’ memorial, and this is located in the Hall of Remembrance at the Headquarters of the London Fire Brigade. Out of this memorial came the plan for the larger, public memorial to those who died in the Blitz.

It then become a memorial to all firefighters who died in the line of duty, the height of the plinth was increased, and the memorial was moved to its current location at the top of Sermon Lane and rededicated on the 16th of September 2003 by the Princess Royal.

There are currently a total of 1,192 names inscribed around the plinth of the memorial, which includes the a relief of two women firefighters (with the roles of Despatch Rider and Incident Recorder), and the names of 23 women who died:

The sculptor was John William Mills, who was also responsible for the Monument to the Women of World War II which can be found in Whitehall. The monument was originally commissioned by the Founder Master of the Guild of Firefighters and had the title “Blitz” and used a quote from Winston Churchill to describe firefighters of the war as “Heroes with grimy faces”:

The following photo is looking south along Old Change Court today. The most recent incarnation of the boarded up building was as the Old Change Bar and Restaurant, now closed, possibly as a result of the Covid period and post-covid working from home reducing the number of potential customers:

Old Change Court had a second entry in the City of London booklet, but there was no sign of the work, but I did find it close by.

12. Old Change Court, Icarus, Michael Ayrton, 1973

Walk down Old Change Court, turn left and you will find Distaff Lane Garden:

Distaff Lane Garden is a relatively new garden in the City, having opened in 2018. What I did find interesting is that it is the first time I have seen the use of What Three Words as a means of locating a City garden:

What Three Words in a really useful application for precisely specifying a location to within a few feet. What Three Words has divided the world into 3 metre squares, with each square being given a unique three word combination.

The idea being that it is easier to tell someone three simple words to tell them where you are, rather than trying to describe the location, remember street names, map references, longitude and latitude etc.

There is a mobile phone app and website, and it is also used by emergency and rescue services – it is a really useful service, and free to use.

Distaff Lane Gardens is at “memo.courier.showed”, and at this link is the What Three Words website showing the location based on these three words.

Michael Ayrton’s work Icarus can be seen through the gates into the garden, and this is the view of Icarus with the church of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey in the background:

As well as Icarus, Ayrton’s other work in the City was the Postman’s Park Minotaur, now relocated near London Wall.

He had a long running fascination with the story of Daedalus, Icarus, and the Minotaur, and these characters feature in a number of his works. Icarus was the son of Daedalus, and the myth of Icarus comes from his attempt to fly using wings made by his father out of bird’s feathers, leather straps and beeswax.

Before using the wings, Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly to close to the sea, otherwise the feathers would get wet, and not to fly to close to the sun, as the heat would melt the beeswax.

He ignored the warning flew too close to the sun, the beeswax melted and Icarus fell into the sea and drowned.

As well as a sculptor, Michael Ayrton was also an illustrator, painter and stage designer.

Born in London in 1921, he died relatively young in 1975 at the age of 54 – a year after Icarus was unveiled in Old Change Court.

There is another version of Icarus to be seen at the Royal Airforce Museum London at Colindale.

That is the first 12 out of the 38 listed in the City of London booklet on late 20th sculpture.

Out of these 12, it is only “Fleet Place, Man with pipe, Bruce McClean” that I could not find anything about. Whether it is hidden somewhere around Fleet Place that I missed, relocated, or lost, so a good survival record for the other 11, although the Seven Ages of Man is now in an unvisited, poorly maintained and dilapidated area, which if and when redeveloped, will hopefully be moved to a more prominent and long term location.

I will carry on working through the list in a future post.

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St. Olave and the Coopers Arms Pub, Falcon Square and Silver Street

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One of the pleasures of researching posts for the blog is finding new stuff about places I have already written about. It gives me a chance to learn more, and to look at a place from a different perspective.

Searching through the three volumes of Wonderful London for a photo of a location for a future post, I came across the following photo which I had not noticed before:

The photo dates from the 1920s, and the text below the photo reads:

“The Coopers’ Arms From The Churchyard of St. Olave’s, Silver Street – In 1604 Shakespeare moved from Southwark and lodged in Silver Street, Cheapside, with one Christopher Mountjoy, a Huguenot. On the same site now stands the Coopers’ Arms, Falcon Square: and though the original house has gone, at least the playwright must have contemplated the little churchyard opposite every time he looked out of the window. Now the churchyard has, as it were, become fossilised by the Great Fire, for the church, St. Olave’s was never rebuilt; hence this is a genuine piece of Shakespearean London.”

I have written about the Shakespeare connection in a previous post when I looked at the blue plaque recording Shakespeare’s short residence here. There is a link to that post, along with other posts about the area at the end of this post.

And in this post, I will first look at St. Olave and then at the Coopers’ Arms.

I could not get a photo from exactly the same viewpoint, as the above photo was taken from an upper floor of the building to the south of the churchyard, and today there are also bushes at the southern end of the garden. The following photo is as near as I can get:

In the original photo, there are steps with metal railings and a gate leading down to the street. The height of the street is different today, and the garden has been extended into what was Silver Street, but there are now small steps in the same position, and the grave in the above photo behind the steps must be the middle grave in the original photo.

St. Olave was an old church, but appears to have been rather plain, and I cannot find any prints of the church, which is not surprising given that they would have had to have been pre-1666.

I found the following description of the church in “London Churches before the Great Fire” by Wilberforce Jenkins (1917):

“With John Stow the monuments in a church were the chief feature of interest, and he is rather contemptuous of the little church of St. Olave in Silver Street: ‘A small thing and without any noteworthy monuments’. The date of the original church was earlier than 1291, the date of the ‘Taxatio’ of Pope Nicholas, in which the church is called ‘Olav de Mokewell’ (i.e. Monkwell). We are told of a certain priest or curate in charge, Roger de Shardelawe, in 1343. The church was rebuilt in 1609. The income was stated to be £83, including the vale of the parsonage. It was not rebuilt after the Fire, but the Parish was joined to that of St. Alban, Wood Street. A small piece of the churchyard may still be seen in Falcon Square, and is used as a public resting-place.”

The reference to “Olav de Mokewell” will become clear later in the post.

The loss of the church was the first of three waves of church losses, beginning with those not rebuilt after the Great Fire, then the demolitions of the late 19th century as the City’s population decreased, along with Victorian “improvements” to the City, and finally those not rebuilt after the Blitz.

When you consider how many churches remain in the City today, it is remarkable to think of how many more there were before 1666.

So where was St. Olave’s? I have circled the location of the remaining churchyard in the following map, showing that it is close to the old Museum of London roundabout, and to the south of London Wall, the post-war dual carriageway that was build over part of Silver Street, and Falcon Square (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The following photo shows the overall churchyard today, with London Wall to the left. The 1920s photo was taken from one of the upper floors of the building that was on the site of the building to the right:

In “London Churches before the Fire”, the churchyard was described in 1917 as a “public resting-place”, and that is still the same today, and I had to wait for a while to get a photo without anyone sitting on the seats – phone call and smoking refugees from the nearby offices:

The view to the right of the above photo:

St. Olave’s was one of about three in the City along with one in Southwark that were dedicated to St. Olave.

In the City, only St. Olave’s, Hart Street survives.

There are some very different interpretations of the story of Olave. He seems to have been baptised in the year 1010, in the Norman city of Rouen. He then helped the Anglo-Saxon King Æthelred II (also known as Æthelred the Unready) to regain his throne after the death of Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard.

Sweyn’s son was King Cnut, who took the thrones of England and Denmark in 1016, and would take the throne of Norway from Olave in 1028.

Olave was killed at the Battle of Stiklestad, when he was trying to retake his Norwegian throne.

He was declared a saint in 1031 by the English Bishop Grimketel who was working as a missionary in Norway at the time of Olave’s death.

Nidaros Cathedral, a wonderful Gothic cathedral, in Trondheim, Norway, which claims to be the world’s most northern mediaeval cathedral, is built over the site of Olave’s tomb.

St. Olave’s feast day is the 29th of July, and if you work in the Faroe Islands, it is a public holiday.

Back in the garden, in front of where the steps and gate were in the 1920s photo there is today, the following stone:

No idea whether this is a remnant from St. Olave, or from some other local building. It does not appear in the 1920s photo and post-war there was plenty of architectural stone available for uses such as this, and the water does provide a good reflection of Bastion House.

The City of London Corporation have approved demolition and redevelopment of Bastion House and the old Museum of London buildings, however their is currently a legal challenge to stop these plans, which would result in the loss of one of the two remaining towers built along London Wall completed between 1961 and 1976 (the remaining tower is Britannic House completed in 1964, refurbished in 1990 when it was renamed as City Tower).

Bastion House above the old Museum of London building:

On either side of the steps leading down from the churchyard to the small garden area alongside London Wall are two stone plaques. The first records that this was the parish church of St. Olave, Silver Street, and it was destroyed by the fire in 1666:

London Wall was a post-war, major new road to the north of the churchyard, however road changes have always taken place as the second plaque records that “St. Olave, Silver Street. This churchyard was thrown back and the road widened by eight feet by the Commissioners of Sewers at the request of the Vestry. Anno Domini 1865” and I think records the names of the churchwardens as Harris and Wilson:

Another view of the churchyard with the steps just visible between the bushes on the left, the grave seen in the 1920s photo on the right, and on the left is what appears to be the base of the grave on the left of the 1920s photo:

Before a look at the Coopers’ Arms pub, a quick look at how the area has changed. The following map is an extract from Rocque’s map of 1746. I have marked the site of the Coopers’ Arms with a red circle, and just below this, very slightly to the left is St. Olave’s Churchyard:

We can see Silver Street, and running north from Silver Street is Monkwell Street. The origins of the name Monkwell Street are the same as the 1291 name of the church mentioned earlier of ‘Olav de Mokewell’ .

Monkwell Street is a very historic street, now completely lost. I wrote a detailed post about the street at the link at the end of thios post.

Moving forward to the late 19th century, and this is an extract from the OS map, with the Coopers’ Arms ringed in red, and the churchyard ringed in orange (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“:

We can see that Silver Street runs into Falcon Square, which was a name mentioned earlier in the post in relation to the churchyard.

According to Henry Harben’s “A Dictionary of London”, the first mentions of Silver Street date from the start of the 14th century, when it was known as Selverstret (1306) and Silverstrete (1311). The source of the name is believed to come from silver smiths living and working around the street.

Harben does not give a source for the name Falcon Square, but gives an earliest reference as dating from 1799, which looks right, as the square does not appear in Rocque’s map of 1746.

Strangely, the Coopers’ Arms does not have the PH notation for a public house in the above map. The building I have ringed is definitely the pub, as the position on the map is the same as can be seen in the 1920s photo. There is though a pub to the left, on the corner of Castle Street and Falcon Square.

Now move forward to the post-war period, and we see the impact of bombing during the Blitz (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“:

The Coopers’ Arms has gone, the outline of the churchyard is still there, but so much of the buildings and streets shown only 50 years earlier in the previous map have been destroyed, and the area is now ready for redevelopment, with the dual carriageway of London Wall carving through Silver Street and Falcon Square, and the whole area being redeveloped with new office blocks, and to the north of the map would come the Barbican estate.

The outline of Monkwell Street can still be seen, but this street will also soon be gone.

I will now have a look at the Coopers’ Arms, and this is a photo of the pub I found a few years ago and used in the post on the link with Shakespeare:

The pub was destroyed during the Second World War, and not rebuilt as part of the post-war reconstruction of the area.

I cannot find when the pub was opened, the earliest references I can find to the pub date from the early 19th century. What I can be confident about is that the Coopers’ Arms shown in the above photo was the result of a rebuild after an 1828 fire destroyed the earlier pub building.

There is a very graphic account of the fire in the London Evening Standard on the 20th of September, 1828. The account is very graphic regarding the death of an occupant, and shows the almost casual approach to, and reporting of deaths, including violent death in London in the first part of the 19th century, when accidental and violent death was relatively common:

“LATE FIRE IN SILVER STREET – Yesterday an inquest was held in the vestry room of St. Alban’s Church, Wood-street, Cheapside on the body of Nathaniel Smith, aged 56 who perished in the above conflagration.

The jury first viewed the remains of the unfortunate deceased, which lay in one of the vaults under the church. The body was scorched to a cinder, and the whole of the limbs were burnt off. The following evidence was taken:

William Dix, landlord of the Coopers’ Arms, Silver Street, Falcon Square, deposed that the deceased, who had been a town traveller for many years, was a lodger in his house at the time of his death. On Wednesday night last, a little before twelve o’clock, witness locked up the house, and at that time considered everything safe.; before he and his wife left the bar to go upstairs to their bedroom, witness took off nearly all the coals in the grate, and only left a very small glimmer, which he had repeatedly done before; about 2 o’clock he was alarmed out of his sleep by cries of ‘fire’ which proceeded from the street.

He instantly got up, and could discern that the house was full of smoke, on looking out of the window, he saw a flare in the street, which seemed to be occasioned by the lower part of the house being in flames; witness, his wife, and two little girls made their escape up to the front garret, and got out of the window on the parapet of the house, before witness got on the house he ran to the whole of the lodgers rooms, and alarmed them. The deceased door was fastened, and he burst it open, and laid hold of him by the shoulder, and said ‘For God’s sake, get up, Mr. Smith, or else you will be burnt in your bed’.

The deceased, who seemed very drowsy, replied that he would put part of his cloths on and follow him to the garret window. Witness, in making his escape down the ladder, saw the deceased at a window on the second floor – he did not see him afterwards; the whole of the house was burnt down, with the exception of the outer walls.

The jury returned a verdict – That the deceased was accidentally burned to death.”

A horrific story, but so very common in London when almost every building in the city had a fire for either cooking, heating, or as part of an industrial process, when small businesses and factories sat within residential streets.

The Coopers’ Arms was back in business by 1833, as the pub was used as a mailing address for any business looking for men trained in paper-staining.

As with so many London pub’s, the Coopers’ Arms was also used as a meeting place for businesses, clubs and societies. One example was from 1857, when the City Coal Society held a meeting at the Coopers; Arms and advised that they would receive tenders at the pub for their quarterly supply of upwards of 160 tons of coal.

The following photo is looking east along London Wall. St. Olave’s churchyard is behind the greenery to the right, and Silver Street once ran into London Wall at this point, emerging from under the building to the right of the arch seen in the photo:

With a bit of changing the perspective of the photo of the Coopers’ Arms, I think I can get the positioning right, superimposed on the photo of the area today:

Not sure whether this will work, or appear in emails, but an animated GIF of the above photo:

Monkwell Street is the street running off to the left of the Coopers’ Arms, which is on the corner with Silver Street running off to the right. It does not follow the route of today’s London Wall, but heads to the right / south of the street, and disappears under the building on the right of the arch over London Wall.

St. Olave’s churchyard is the only part of an old streetscape that dates back to at least the 13th century, to remain. Silver Street and Monkwell Street were lost during redevelopment, and I doubt those who lived, worked, or simply walked along Silver Street could have imagined what the area would look like in the future – a recurring theme across the ever changing city.

I have written a number of posts about this area, and I find it fascinating to continue exploring to gain a fuller understanding of the place.

You may be interested in the following posts which also cover the area:

Monkwell Street, Barbican – Discovering A Lost Street

William Shakespeare and the Mountjoy Family, one of the plaques looked at in this post

London Wall – A Location Shifting Historic Street

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Covent Garden, Sunday Afternoon, 9th of August 1953

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The majority of my father’s photos were not dated. It is possible to work out the year that the photo was taken by looking at the notes that went with the negatives, and where an individual photo has been printed and dated from a film of 36 photos. Three photos I can date accurately are of Covent Garden, on Sunday the 9th of August, 1953:

I suspect these photos were possibly taken as competition entries at the St. Brides Institute Photographic Society, as my father was a member and did win a couple of their competitions. They seem to be more composed, and to focus on specific details rather than general photos of places.

The photos were taken around the northern side of the market building, and show piles of produce in sacks and boxes:

Along with the barrows used by market workers to move stock around:

Although my father had recorded that these photos were of Covent Garden market, I was rather unsure of the location.

In the background of the first photo the corner of a building with two street name signs can be seen.

The following extract shows the two street signs as a clip from the TIF 55MB image straight out of the scanner, so about the best I can get, given that this is from 72 year old film:

Even with the grainy image, it is possible to see the names James Street on the left and Covent Garden on the right, so I can locate the photo as being on the northern side of the market building.

In the following map, the building corner with the two street name signs is at the end of the red arrow, and the approximate location from where the photo was taken, is shown by the red circle (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The street names seemed to provide firm proof of the location of the photo, however one aspect of the 1953 photo still concerned me. Return to the photo at the top of the post, and the pillar is in sunlight, with the shade of a lamp being cast on the pillar. If the pillar was on the north-western side of the market (you can see the orientation of the market building in the above map), could it really have been in direct sunlight, sufficient for a distinct shadow to form on the pillar?

To resolve this, I used the Shademap App.

This application displays a street map, and allows you to adjust the date and time, and the map displays how the area in shadow changes.

Using Shademap, it looked as is the photo was taken just after 4pm. At this time, the angle of the shadow cast by the sun looks as if it would cast a shadow of an overhead lamp on the pillar, with the pillar and area where the boxes and sacks are located, in sunlight.

Shademap also shows that the corner building with the street name signs would be in slight shade, which seems to agree with the photo.

So if the photo was taken just after 4pm on Sunday the 9th of August, 1953, you may well be wondering why I am featuring it for the post on the 2nd of March. It is down to my lack of organisation with posts, and featuring posts in the order of scanning the photos and an opportunity to visit the site.

To find the location of the photo, I walked to the north-western side of the Covent Garden market building. This is the view along the open space between the market on the right and the surrounding buildings on the left. You can see the pillars which line the edge of the market, one of which featured in my father’s photo:

It is difficult to be sure exactly which pillar was in the photo. The first possibility is shown in the following photo:

Two street name signs can still be seen on the corner of the building opposite, however the building is not the same as the one in the 1953 photo. The building we see today is part of the late 1990s redevelopment of the large plot, part occupied by the Royal Opera House. The street running off to the left is James Street.

I moved to the next gap between two pillars to take the following photo, which could also include the pillar in the original photo. This photo shows one of the ornamental barrows around the market which are reproductions for decoration, rather than the original barrows shown in my father’s photo:

The shadow on the pillar in the 1953 photo was presumably a lamp, and today there are still lamps lining the edge of the building above the pillars, although comparing with the 1953 shadow, they do not appear to be the same:

I find it fascinating to explore some of the details within these old photos. The following is an extract from the second of the 1953 photos:

Firstly, the sacks have the numbers 1952 on them, which I assume is a year, which would have been the year before the photo was taken. Possibly the year that the sacks were made?

Both the sacks and the boxes to the right have the name W. Medlock, which seems to have been a company that operated at Covent Garden for many years.

The first reference I found to W. Medlock was in the Bedfordshire Times and Independent on the 5th of September, 1871, in an article about the Sandy Flower and Horticultural Show.

In the list of those who were judges of flower and agricultural exhibits, Mr. W. Medlock is a judge for the Market Garden produce, and he is listed as Mr. W. Medlock, Covent Garden.

As well as being a judge, W. Medlock also exhibited produce at the Sandy show. In the 1903 show, within the category for Market Gardeners, Medlock won a special prize for a “bushel of white or red Hebron potatoes”.

W. Medlock Ltd, were a firm of potato merchants, which explains the shape of the contents of the sacks in the above photo. There are many references to them in and around Sandy, Bedfordshire, which has long been an agricultural area, and there are still growers and merchants of potatoes listed in the area.

In the 19th century, Sandy was a small market town and in the 1924 revision of the Ordnance Survey map, much of the land surrounding the town is marked as being allotments, so this was an area of market gardens.

What must have helped with linking Sandy with Covent Garden was that the town was not far from the original A1 north road, and in 1850 Sandy railway station was built, providing a rail route to London, which must have been the main method for transporting W. Medlock’s potatoes from the town to Covent Garden.

Further confirmation that W. Medlock was a potato merchant was from a very condescending article in the Daily Herald on the 16th of June, 1931:

“POTATOES GET THE SACK – CROSSED OFF MENU BY SLIMMING GIRLS. Potato sales are dropping alarmingly. The homely ‘spud’ is being despised and rejected, and women are responsible.

Through the eyes of the potato, women see the great modern bogey, Fat, and they are as much afraid of the potato as they would have once have been of a mouse.

‘Our sales have dropped by a third in the past three years’ said the manager of Messrs. W. Medlock Ltd. wholesale potato merchants of Covent Garden, to a Daily Herald representative yesterday.

Restaurants are serving far fewer potatoes than they used to because women will not eat them. Even the women who are not definitely on a slimming diet have certain taboos, and the first of them is potatoes.

‘Women are behaving very foolishly about dieting, and this potato ban is one example of their folly’ a doctor said. They are doing harm by cutting out potatoes unless they substitute something equally starchy – which they don’t.

Potatoes are good food, and it is time women learned sense about them.”

However, the only person acting foolishly was the Daily Herald reporter, as soon after the above article, the paper had to print the following apology:

“POTATO FIRM’S SALES – In our issue of June 16 we stated that the sales of Messrs. W. Medlock Ltd. wholesale potato merchants of Covent Garden ‘have dropped by a third in the past three year’.

Messrs. Medlock inform us that this is not correct. Their sales have not diminished in any way, but on the contrary, are regularly and steadily increasing.

We gladly give publicity to this fact and offer our apologies to Messrs. W. Medlock Ltd. for any annoyance the misstatement may have caused them.”

Which just goes to show that back in 1931, stories in papers about diets were just as reliable as they are today.

The name of another Covent Garden merchant, and which also demonstrates a link with the agricultural areas surrounding London, can be found by looking at one of the other 1953 photos, where boxes with the name W.J. Soper can be seen:

W.J. Soper were agricultural merchants who seem to have brought in produce from Norfolk. They were regularly mentioned in lists of merchants in Norfolk newspapers, such as the Lynn News and Advertiser, based in King’s Lynn, to the north-west of Norfolk, just south of the Wash.

A typical mention from the 14th of March, 1958 reads:

“Large quantities of King Edward and Majestic Ware potatoes, Parsnips, Red Beet, and Cabbage – W.J. Soper, Ltd. Covent Garden, Spitalfields, Borough Market, Harlow. Cheques daily or weekly as required – Local rep. W. Edwards, Tel Wisbech 1769.”

Soper’s representative was based in Wiusbech, which is a short distance to the south-west of King’s Lynn. The advert tells us a bit about how Covent Garden market operated.

Firstly, along with W. Medlock, companies such as W.J. Soper, trading at Covent Garden were buying in produce from across the agricultural lands of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, and with the location of towns such as Wisbech, this probably included Lincolnshire.

The expansion of the rail network across these counties from the 1850s must have helped considerably with the transport of agricultural produce to help feed the ever growing population of London.

W.J. Soper’s newspaper listing also mentions other London markets at Spitalfields, and Borough Market, so many companies were probably not just operating at Covent Garden, but were bringing in produce to be sold across London. The mention of Harlow is rather strange, unless they also served a market in one of the first post-war new towns being built in London’s orbit.

One other point about the photos – they were taken on a Sunday afternoon, and there is lots of agricultral produce piled up outside the main market buildings.

The market must have been closed at that time, and unfortunately the photos do not show if there was anyone who worked at the market in the surrounding area. Was there any form of security to protect these sacks and boxes from theft? If not it seems remarkable that so much could be left around the market until it opened early on Monday morning.

There is a fascinating film of Covent Garden fruit, flower and vegetable markets in operation from 1957, just four years after my father’s photo. The film starts at a farm in Sussex where produce is being loaded onto a lorry for a late night drive into London so the produce can be sold at Covent Garden. The film can be watched here:

The film mentions potatoes from Norfolk, but also demonstrates the wide geographic area that supplied produce to be sold in the market, as well as the considerable distances that produce sold at the market were transported to, so as well as being a market to supply London, Covent Garden was also supplying many businesses across the country.

The film also implies that the market was almost a 24 hour operation, with produce arriving at all times, and being sold during a set number of hours. Perhaps this explains why the sacks and boxes in my father’s photo appear to have been left unattended on a Sunday afternoon. They may have just arrived, or were waiting to be moved.

I always find it rather poignant watching these old films, as those shown working across the market had no idea of just how much the market would change in the coming decades, with Covent Garden closing as a market and relocating to Nine Elms less than twenty years after the above film.

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Euston Station and HS2 – A 2025 Update

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Eight years ago, I started an annual post about the works around Euston Station for HS2. That first post was about St. James Gardens, which I photographed just before closure, as the area was part of the route for HS2 rail tracks and the station infrastructure.

Back in 2017, I thought it would be interesting to walk the same route each year, and watch as the new station develops, to see how such a major London infrastructure build transforms a relatively small area, and what a brand new Euston station would look like – a new station that was desperately needed.

Little did I know at the time, that eight years later there would still be very little of any new infrastructure to see (a full list of all the posts is at the end of today’s post).

Although this was intended to be an annual post, I did not do one in 2024, as there was virtually no change to see, and sadly, in early 2025, this is still the situation, but if anything, keeping up a regular almost annual post does highlight the issues around a construction project such as HS2, and how shockingly bad as a country, we have become at deciding on, planning, financing and building this type of large infrastructure project.

So, for 2025, prepare to be underwhelmed !!

I started at Euston Station – a station that is in desperate need of a rebuild. The current station buildings opened in 1968, and my first experience with Euston was in the late 1970s when taking the train to the BT apprentice training centre at Bletchley. Then, it seemed a very modern and efficient station when compared to the decaying Victorian stations of the major termini around London.

Today, the majority of those Victorian Stations have been preserved and really well redeveloped, whilst the late 1960s Euston station has become over crowded, inefficient, rather strange walking routes to connect between over and underground transport, and is in desperate need of a rebuild.

However, the major change across the whole walk I would take in 2025, was not as a result of HS2, rather the change of the horrendous, over-bright advertising screen that took over the original platform and train information boards, back to the function it should be doing – indicating platform and train details:

Not much can be seen of the HS2 works from the station, but walk up to the upper level, and by the stairs in the south-west corner of the station, we can look over the area between the station, Melton Street on the right, and the old taxi rank to the south. This should be part of the new station, but for now, and the last few years, it is just a hole in the ground:

Walking out of the station, across the open plaza, under the office blocks towards the south-east, and the Doric Arch pub is still open:

And this area is still busy with buses:

On the eastern side of the station there is a new taxi rank, with multi-coloured shelters, which appear to reflect a new colour scheme for Euston signs, which at the moment only appear in small parts of the area being redeveloped:

From Euston Road there is very little to be seen of any HS2 works. The Grade II listed lodges, which are the only survivors of the 1870 build of the original Euston station, and which stand either side of the road used by buses to access the bus station, still face onto Euston Road:

In the above photo, there are two lamp posts, one on either side of the entrance to the Euston bus station. They are of a really interesting design. They are not listed in the Historic England database, and following a brief search, I cannot find any information about them.

The design at the top includes a wreath, and what looks to be possibly a Roman helmet:

Crossing the road between the two lodges, and we can see the 1921. Grade II* listed war memorial, designed by Reginald Wynn Owen, with the bus station to the right, and the late 1970s low rise office block that was built between the station and Euston Road as part of a development of low and high rise office blocks in the late 1970s:

And when we get to the junction of Euston Road and Melton Street, we can look along what is left of Melton Street, with the hoardings that surround the HS2 works blocking the road, with just a pedestrian walkway to the left:

And walking through what was Melton Street, we get into an area of walkways running between hoardings that block off views of what should be construction sites:

And which have hardly changed for the last few years:

Until we get to the south-west corner access to the station:

We finally get to see some of the working area for the new station:

At the corner of where Drummond Street once met Melton Street is the original Euston station of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (I wrote about a visit to the station and tunnels in this post):

This is the walkway that follows the route of what was Drummond Street, where it led up to the junction with Melton Street and Cardington Street. Again, this has not changed for the last few years, and is the access route to the station from the streets to the west of the station:

There are very few places where you can look through the hoardings and see any of the construction site. There is one in the above photo, looking north to the area that at some point will see the new HS2 tracks arrive at the new part of Euston Station for HS2:

The old St. James Gardens and burial grounds were in the area roughly where the blue containers are in the above photo, including the area slightly in front, to the rear, and to the left.

For a mid-week view of a construction site, there is very little going on.

To the west of the construction site, several streets have been truncated – Drummond Street, Euston Street and Stephenson Way. Cobourg Street which ran north – south across these streets is today mainly a walkway, with hoarding lining the eastern side of the street, towards the station.

The following photo is at the end of Euston Street, looking north along what was Cobourg Street:

The HS2 website has a Media section which includes photos of the construction site. The following image shows what is behind the hoardings in the above photo:

Image source: https://mediacentre.hs2.org.uk/resources/aerial-view-of-hs2-s-london-euston-station-works-january-2023-7-2

At the junction of what was Cobourg Street and Starcross Street is the Exmouth Arms – still open:

And along Starcross Street is Camden Council’s Euston Skills Centre, set-up to provide a wide range of training and skills for trades in the construction industry:

If I remember rightly, when the Skills Centre was first planned, HS2 played a large part due to the expected demand for a considerable number of trained construction workers, however reading through the brochure for the skills centre (downloadable here), there is no mention of HS2, presumably due to the lack of any significant construction work along the route of the new railway through Camden and the build of a new station.

The public open space in front of the Skills Centre includes a few relics from the wider area, and in the following photo are four cast iron pillars which were salvaged from the King’s Cross development:

The old Maria Fidelis Catholic School, now part of the Skills Centre:

I have now reached Hampstead Road, and the former Saint Pancras Female Orphanage building, later an annex of the London Temperance Hospital and now an NHS facility, is still standing on the edge of the construction site:

Whilst there are hoardings lining the side of the construction site along Hampstead Road, there is a small open space which has taken a number of forms over the years.

This is the view of the space in 2025:

The structure in the above photo is called “Reflect” and was designed and built by 18 young people from Euston as part of an HS2 programme.

The structure serves as a stage for performance, play, gatherings and shelter. At the top of the structure are mirrors arranged at different angles to reflect the sun and provide alternative views of the open space.

View from the base of “Reflect”:

Within this open space there are a number of raised planters, some of wood, others of concrete.

Some of the planters have some very brief information cards, for example in the following, the tree is a Silver Birch, a native of the Himalayas, and one of the orange cards informs that it is “used for sweeping leaves off patios and for flying”.

The white card at the end informs “Limestone. Calcium Carbonate. Native to Lincolnshire among many other places in the UK”. It all seems rather hurriedly done:

Further along Hampstead Road, and this is the junction with what was Cardington Street – now an access road to the overall construction site:

There are plenty of works going on along Hampstead Road. These works, according to one of the HS2 Euston updates is to “complete ‘no regrets’ enabling works across the HS2 site and other activities to make the site safe while the main construction work is paused“:

I love the term “no regrets” for work that presumably will need to be done whatever the outcome, and is why there is relatively little going on around Euston as the majority of works have been paused, following the Government’s announcement in 2023 about changes to HS2 funding and programme of works.

At present, construction work is moving ahead on the route between Old Oak Common in London, and Birmingham.

The section between Old Oak Common and Euston Station is on pause whilst attempts are made to secure funding from the private sector to help with completion of this final leg of the route into central London, and a new station.

As far as I know, there is no final design for a new station to terminate the HS2 tracks, and no decision on how far the existing Euston station will be rebuilt and integrated with a new station for HS2.

Work preparing for the Euston Tunnel, part of the route between Old Oak Common and Euston seems to be going ahead, as the HS2 Media documents include images of the tunnel boring machines being prepared, for example, this is “Euston TBM Madeleine pushed into launch tunnel preparing to begin constructing the Euston Tunnel”:

Image source: https://mediacentre.hs2.org.uk/resources/rail-minister-and-new-ceo-at-old-oak-common-station-box-to-see-the-two-tbms-preparing-to-build-hs2-to-euston-7

However, this may be down to contractual commitments, and the tunnel boring machines for the Euston Tunnel will have been ordered long before the 2023 hold on the route between Old Oak Common and Euston, and what do you do with a tunnel boring machine that you have ordered, when it arrives on site?

HS2’s January 2025 Construction Update has a slide with all the tunnels and the progress of their tunnel boring machines.

Many of the tunnels are complete, and tunnels where construction is still underway are listed as being from 29% to 62% complete.

The two Euston tunnels are both listed as 0% complete, with their status as “Preparing for launch”.

Access into the works along the western edge of Hampstead Road:

More of the ‘no regrets’ enabling works” being completed along Hampstead Road:

Further along Hampstead Road, I turned west into Mornington Crescent, then to Clarkson Row, where there is a high wall running between the street and the railway, however it is just possible to lift the camera above the wall to take some random photos to show the construction works on the opposite side of the working rail tracks. This shows the route of the new HS2 tracks into Euston, parallel to the existing:

Looking further to the west:

Both views look very similar to 2023.

And with that, I am at the end of my 2025 walk around the HS2 Euston construction site, which, as I stated at the start of the post is rather underwhelming, with little having changed since my 2023 walk.

For years, HS2 has been a rather polarising, marmite project – you either love it or you hate it.

It is costing a vast sum of money, much of which has been wasted, for example with the ongoing changes and cancellations to parts of the route, the delays to the final stretch into Euston – which although major works have been delayed, just keeping the site secure and open is costing money, as are the activities presumably going on behind the scenes to try and secure funding for the Euston route.

Personally, I am in favour of HS2, although I have always thought that the name is wrong. Shaving minutes of a journey to Birmingham in no way justifies the expense. High speed only becomes relevant if the route is extended to the far north of the country and into Scotland.

Where HS2 will be very positive is by the provision of additional rail capacity, and taking trains off the existing tracks allowing additional local services to be implemented, however whether you support HS2 or not, it is a horrendous example of the country’s inability to plan, make a decision on, fund and build a major infrastructure project, and to be consistent during a long construction phase.

Will it look the same during a 2026 walk – I suspect it will, and I will bore you with that in a post next year.

The opportunities of new rail routes has recently been shown by a change in the agreement to operate HS1, the route that connects St. Pancras with the Channel Tunnel, which fully opened in 2007.

Under the changes just agreed, HS1 has been renamed London St Pancras Highspeed, and whilst up to now Eurostar has had an effective monopoly on the use of the route, it has left HS1 significantly under utilised, but now the route will open up to other operators, with the potential for a wider range of destinations across Europe.

And just imagine if HS1 was connected to HS2, so that high speed trains from Scotland and the north of England could have direct connectivity with destinations across Europe (which was once one of the selling points for the whole concept of HS2).

In the meantime, I will leave you with the concept designs from 2022, showing what should have been under construction at Euston. The station exterior:

Image source: https://mediacentre.hs2.org.uk/resources/hs2-euston-station-concept-design-exterior

The station interior:

Image source: https://mediacentre.hs2.org.uk/resources/ilokw-nye96-e9kz8-kj7l6-ro892

And if you would like to read about the last 8 years of progress (or lack of) around Euston, my previous posts are here (this will be an ever growing list over the years to come, until the opening of the station, which I hope to see at some point):

My first post was back in 2017 and covered St James Gardens, just before they were closed for excavation.

My second post in 2018 walked around the streets to the west of the station, as buildings began to close, and the extent of the works could be seen.

I then went back in 2019 as demolition started.

In 2020, demolition was well underway and St James Gardens had disappeared, and the associated archaeological excavation had finished

And in June 2021 I went back for another walk around the edge of the construction site.

A 2022 walk around the site is here.

And my last walk around the site was in 2023, which is here.

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Patrick Colquhoun and the Thames River Police

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In 1949, my father photographed the patrol boats of the Thames River Police, moored in the river next to the floating police station, which was located where the RNLI Lifeboat Station is today, next to Waterloo Bridge, which is the bridge seen in the background:

The boats of the river police, or to give them the correct name of today’s force, the Marine Policing Unit, have changed somewhat in the intervening 76 years:

The founding of the Thames River Police as a professional force goes back to the year 1800. The rapidly growing trade based along the river, the storage of valuable goods in warehouses and boats on the river and the resultant dramatic increase in theft resulted in an urgent need for a force that could protect commercial property.

Whilst a police force for the river had been formed in 1798, it lacked the supporting legislation, along with a more professional approach to policing, which the Port of London required.

One man, Patrick Colquhoun was instrumental in demonstrating the remarkable volume of theft, the commercial impact that this had, both on owners and the loss of tax revenue, and putting forward an argument for legislation to support a professional river police, and in 1800, he published a major work of some 676 pages with the title of “A Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames”:

It is a remarkable read, and before looking at the contents of the book, some back ground into the life of Patrick Colquhoun.

He was born in March 1745 and died at his house, 21 James Street, Buckingham Gate, in April 1820.

To try and find a detailed account of his life, I searched newspapers of the time to see if there was an obituary, however every paper published just a brief couple of lines, similar to the following from the New Times of London on the 3rd of May, 1820:

“On the 25th, at his house, No. 21 James-street, Buckingham-gate, Patrick Colquhoun, Esq. LL.D. aged 76. Author of the Treatises of the Police of the Metropolis and the River Thames, and of the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire.”

I eventually found a very comprehensive story of his life in the Barbados Mercury and Bridgetown Gazette on the 26th of September, 1820:

“We lately intimated the death of our Countryman Patrick Colquhoun, and we should not have again referred to this painful subject had we not felt that his was no ordinary merit, and that it was in some measure our duty to bestow upon his memory our tribute of respect for the patriotism of his public life.

Mr Colquhoun was descended from an ancient family settled in Dumbartonshire for many centuries. A younger son, he proceeded to Virginia, and there, although in the wilds of America, having access to a valuable library, he, by his own industry, completed his education. Returning to Scotland, he established himself in Glasgow. For three successive years he was elected Lord Provost of that City.

He regulated and improved the Forth and Clyde Navigation, so beneficial to the internal commerce of the Island.

He removed to London, and was nominated a Police Magistrate, but his was not a disposition to confine itself to the routine of mere official studies; or, seeing evils and imperfections in a system, to object, find fault with them, and leave them as they were. He felt it his duty to suggest remedies, and, as far as the means were afforded him, practically to prove the utility of his suggestions; with this feeling, he published ‘The Police of the Metropolis’ and soon after his assistance was solicited by the Duke of Portland to systematise and superintend the marine police of the River Thames.

Mr. Secretary Dundas estimated the increase to the Revenue from the system established at £30,000 annually on sugar alone, by the prevention of depredations on that article, and so expressed it in his speech on introducing the Thames Police Bill into the House.”

Patrick Colquhoun in 1818:

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

There is more to the obituary, which I will come onto later in the post, however the above couple of paragraphs bring us to Colquhoun’s book.

He had already written about the Police of the Metropolis, and his next book, Police of the Thames, focuses on the problem of theft across the Port of London, policing of the river, quays and warehouses, and the Acts of Parliament, laws and penalties needed to address what was a significant and growing problem at the end of the 18th century.

Patrick Colquhoun was into detail. The book is full of the history of the Port of London, how it had arrived as one of the major global trading centres by the end of the 18th century, how the port operated, trade through the port, those who work across the port etc. and Colquhoun used plenty of data and statistics to support his proposed approach.

His book really provides a very in depth understanding of the Port of London at the end of the 18th century, and for today’s post, I will look at the first couple of chapters which provide some background to the operation of the port, and the different methods of theft of goods whilst in boats on the rivers, whilst being transferred, and when stored in warehouses.

Indeed, at every part of the chain from when a ship arrived at the Port, to the time when goods where shipped to their final destination, there was a risk of theft.

At the end of the 18th century, the City of London had already long been a trading port, for as well as being a major crossing between the north and south banks of the Thames, the city’s role as a trading port was key to London’s existence, importance and growth.

It was not only English merchants though who were responsible foe trade. Some of the first records of trade through the city, show that in 1561, there were no Englishmen who had a sole occupation as an importer and exporter. The 327 people who were recorded as being merchants, consisted of:

In the 16th century, England was somewhat behind other European countries, such as the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal (for example, in my post a couple of weeks ago on William Adams, when he arrived in Japan in 1600, the Portuguese and Spanish had already established trading links, and the Dutch were also trading in the region).

Much of the early trading through the City was driven by trading companies, and merchant adventurers, who raised the funds needed to buy or build ships, raise crews and trade across the world, and the 16th century saw a growing number of these companies:

Hamburg Company – one of the earliest. Granted a charter by Henry IV in 1406, and renewed through to 1661
The Russia Company – Charter granted by Queen Mary in 1555
The Eastland, or North-Sea Company – Charter granted by Elizabeth I in 1579
The Turkey Company – Charter granted by Elizabeth I in 1581
The East-India Company – Charter granted by Elizabeth I in 1599
The American Company – Charter granted by Charles II in 1663
The Hudsons-Bay Company – Charter granted by Charles II in 1681

The impact on trade by companies such as the East-India and Hudson’s Bay can be seen in how trade through the Port of London was switching between Foreign and British owned ships. The following table shows the change between 1702 and 1751:

It was not just trade with foreign countries that was creating the rapid rise in the volume of trade through the Port of London, there was also a considerable amount of coastal trade, with ships trading between London and the various ports around the coast of the country.

The following table is one of very many from the book and shows the type of detailed information on the Port of London used by Colquhoun. The table shows the Coasting Trade between the Port of London and the ports across England and Wales in 1796:

The following table shows the increase in foreign trade throughout the 18th century, and the mix between British and Foreign ships. The table shows that foreign shipping expanded considerably during the later half of the century compared to the first half:

All these ships transported a vast array of valuable goods, and the book includes a large, fold out table detailing “Commerce and Shipping of the River Thames…..applicable to the year ending the 5th January 1798, with the true Valuation of the Merchandise Imported and Exported from and to Parts beyond Seas”. It was difficult to photograph this table due to the delicacy of this 225 year old book, and really not wanting to damage my copy. The following is my best attempt, click on the image for an enlarged version:

This was a colossal volume and variety of goods that at some point were on a ship in the Port of London, transferred between ship and quay, and stored in w warehouse.

I used the Bank of England inflation calculator to see what the equivalent value would be today, and the £30,957,421 of Imports would today be worth £3,375,071,706, with the £29,640,568 of exports being worth £3,231,504,408.

A number of caveats need to apply to these figures, for example the accuracy of inflation figures going back over 200 years, purchasing power, etc. but they do give an idea of value, and in today’s money, in 1798, £6,606,576,114 was being imported and exported through the Port of London

All these figures on trade in the Port of London were included in Colquhoun’s book to indicate the scale of the problem, as this vast array of valuable goods offered a considerable opportunity for theft, both by “professional” thieves, as well as organised and petty pilfering from those who worked across the Port of London.

Patrick Colquhoun believed that theft was endemic.

He believed that theft became a significant problem after the start of the 18th century, and attributes this to a decree of religious and moral decay, described in the following paragraphs:

“The progress of evil; propensities was slow, while a sense of Religion and Morality operated in a greater degree than at present; upon the minds of the lower orders of people. In the moral, as in the physical World. The change of habit is gradual, and often imperceptible. In contemplating the magnitude of the abuses which are to be developed in this Work, the mind is naturally led to an inquiry into the causes which have produced a system of matured delinquency; which is perhaps, unparalleled in the criminal history of any other country.

It is not unlikely, that the disposition to pillage Commercial Property while afloat, derived its origins in no considerable degree, from the habit of Smuggling, which has prevailed ever since Revenues were collected.”

Colquhoun treated the propensity for theft as a disease, which contaminated the minds of those working on the river. Those infected were seduced by motives of avarice, habits of pillage, and an impunity that came with the lack of appropriate laws, and the force to carry them out.

In describing how the disease spread, he states that: “New Converts to the System of Iniquity were rapidly made. The mass of Labourers on the River became gradually contaminated. A similar class upon the Quays, and in the Warehouses, caught the infection, and the evil expanded as Commerce increased.”

Colquhoun’s book provides very many detailed descriptions of daily life in the Port of London, and of those involved in the very many types of illegal activity in the port. These descriptions help us to understand what it was like in the Port, and the dangers faced by those transporting goods.

Colquhoun identified a number of “species of Depredation”, or “Classes” of those involved in theft across the Port of London, and I have summarised his descriptions of these as follows:

River Piracy – This was where organised gangs would attack a ship or lighter, and would take almost everything on board. Methods included cutting the anchor ropes or chains and letting the ship drift to a more suitable part of the river where it could be stripped, not just of cargo, but also of rigging, ropes, anchors, cables, anything that could be moved and had a value.
Night Plunderers – These were “chiefly composed of gangs of the most dissolute Watermen, who prefer idleness to labour”. Night plunders would look for, of be informed of, unattended lighters on the river, and would steal anything that was accessible and portable from the lighter. They would then take their plunder to a place agreed with a Receiver (another of the many criminal roles across the Port). Night plunders would often steal from the same place over a period of time, and Colquhoun gives an example of five boat loads of Hemp being stolen from a lighter over the course of a few weeks, and conveyed along the river, through London Bridge to Ranelaigh Creek where the stolen Hemp was sold.
Night Plunderers. denominated Light-Horsemen – Light-Horsemen were a type of Night Plunderer that focused on the West India Trade. Their pillage was “generally extensive and valuable”. They were organised, with Receivers on both sides of the river who were the chief leaders of individual gangs, The gangs of Light-Horsemen consisted of one or more Receivers, Coopers, Watermen and Lumpers, and they would board a boat fully prepared with Iron-crows, Adzes and the tools needed to open casks and shovels to take out Sugar. The Watermen procured as many boats as were needed, the Lumpers unstowed the casks in the hold and the Coopers took of the heads of the casks, and all hands assisted with filling bags and loading into their boats.
Heavy-Horsemen or Day Plunderer – These criminals would pilfer whatever they could from a ship or lighter, often while working on the transfer of cargo. They would often use an undergarment, called a “Jemmy, with pockets before and behind; also with long narrow bags or pouches, which, when filled were lashed to their legs and thighs, and concealed under wide trousers”. They would carry off vast amounts of Sugars, Coffee, Cocoa, Ginger, and Colquhoun quotes one instance where s single gang stole enough sugar, that, despite being sold for half of its actual value, made them £397.
Journeymen Coopers – These workers were employed to repair casks and packages, but in reality many used this work to thieve. For example, when leaving ships in the evening after a day of proper work, they would carry off Sugar, Coffee, and any other articles or goods that were easy to conceal and carry.
Watermen – For theft across the river, a boat would be needed, and unscrupulous Watermen would often provide the boats needed, and take those intent on stealing to their targets on the river. They would keep watch, and afterwards take the gangs and their stolen goods back to shore, and they would receive a payment for their services. Colquhoun provides an example of how a Waterman would work – “A Ship-Master who had been a stranger in the river, finding himself beset by a gang of audacious Lumpers, who insisted on carrying away Plunder in spite of all his exertions to prevent it, while he was engaged on deck in searching these miscreants, a barrel of Sugar which stood in his Cabin was in the course of a few minutes, emptied and removed in bags through the cabin windows, under which a Waterman with his boat lay to receive it, and got clear off without discovery, to the surprise of the Captain when he returned to his cabin.”
Mud-Larks – Where a vessel close to shore was being looted, the Mud-Lark would prowl about in the mud, under the Bow and would receive bags from those on board the vessel, and would carry the bags to shore. Mud-Larks would also prowl around Dock-Gates on the pretext of looking for nails, where their principal object was to receive sheets of Copper and bags of Nails which were thrown to them by dock labourers.
Rat-Catchers – Ships would often be infested with rats, so a Rat-Catcher would provide a valuable service, however many rat-catchers used their work to steal from ships. Rat-Catchers would often work at night to set traps, and at the same time take some of the cargo. They would also revisit the ship whenever they wanted on the pretext of checking and resetting the traps, but again used these opportunities to steal. Rat-catchers were also known to transfer live rats between ships in order to get more business, and to use the opportunity to steal from other ships.
Game-Lightermen – This class of criminal consisted of Lightermen who would steal from the lighters on which they worked. Lighters were used to transfer cargo between ship and land, and between ships, so for a period of time the cargo carried was under the control of one or more Lightermen, who would use the opportunity to take a proportion of the cargo being transferred. Much of this stolen cargo was transferred to a small boat, or skiff, and Colquhoun provides an example of a seizure of a Skiff loaded with a bag of Coffee and 109lb of Sugar whilst in the act of being stolen from a Lighter.
Scuffle-Hunters – These are described by Colquhoun as “literally the lowest class of the community, who are vulgarly denominated the Tag-Rag and Bobtail”. Scuffle-Hunters would hang around the places where goods are being landed on the Quays, and offer assistance as a porter. They would wear long aprons, which allowed them to conceal any goods that they could take, whilst apparently helping the loading or unloading of a ship.
The Warehouses – Whilst Colquhourn does not list a specific name for those who stole from warehouses, he does include warehouses in the list as a place from where individuals or gangs would steal. This included those who specifically entered a warehouse at anytime, day or night, with the intention to steal, as well as those who worked in a warehouse and used the opportunity to pilfer goods.

Based on the above descriptions, it seems amazing that any of the goods traded through the Port of London survived the process, and did not end up in the hands of a Receiver, however even if 5% of traded goods ended up as being stolen, this would still be a value of just over £3 Million in 1798 prices, being stolen every year.

The descriptions help us to understand what life was like on the river, and along the Quays where goods were being loaded and unloaded. It was a place where ship and cargo owners must have been forever on their guard, where boats with a gang of men passing along the river would have been viewed with suspicion by those on ships, and where many of the shops of London sold stolen goods.

As an example of how stolen goods were traded on, Colquhoun gives an example of Thames Street.

Today Thames Street (now Upper and Lower Thames Street) is a much widened street with dual carriageways taking traffic between the eastern and western sides of the City.

In the late 18th century, Thames Street ran along the back of the warehouses and quays that lined the river, and as with most of London at the time, there were many Pubs both along Thames Street and in the surrounding streets.

It was in these Pubs that stolen goods were sold. Journeymen Coopers would take their Boards of Sugar, and small Grocers would purchase this sugar with fictious Bills of Parcels used to cover the transfer of stolen property from the Pubs to their shops and houses.

Print from 1801, the year after Colquhoun’s book was published, showing the Thames, busy with shipping:

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

There is too much in Colquhourn’s book to cover in a single post, so I will explore the Port of London and Policing the Port in more detail in the coming months, but for now I return to the obituary published a few months after his death, to provide a summary of his other achievements:

He established a society at Lloyd’s, with some of the most respectable merchants, to assist the poor and the needy by the distribution of soup, potatoes, herrings etc.
In 1806, he proposed the establishment of Savings Banks “to lead the poor by gentle and practicable means into the way of bettering themselves”
He was “so highly esteemed in the dominions of His Majesty, as on the Continent of Europe, that the colonies of St. Vincent, Nevis, Dominica and the Virgin Islands, as also the Free Hanseatic Republics of Lubec, Bremen and Hamburg, nominated him their Representative and Consul General”
As well as his two books on policing, he also published a book on the “Power, Wealth, and Resources, of the British Empire”, along with other publications on Criminal Justice, Political Economy, and on Commerce and Manufacture of Great Britain
He was one of the first five who met and formed the Royal Institution (this was the meeting on the 7 March 1799 at the Soho Square house of Joseph Banks. I can not immediately find any confirmation of this)
He was a Member of the Society for bettering the condition of the Poor
The University of Glasgow conferred the distinction of Doctor of Law, and he was granted the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh

The obituary ended with a summary that he had “a mind fertile in conception, kind and benevolent in disposition, and bold and persevering in execution; ever ready to give his advice and assistance when his means enabled him to do so, and that his long and laborious life was honourable to himself and useful to his Country”.

There were some criticisms of his approach, that he was too much on the side of Commerce and Capitalism. His view on the poor also seems to have followed the 19th century view of the “deserving poor”, as Colquhoun in some of his publications appears to divide the poor into those who deserve help, and the criminal poor, who only deserve the full force of the law, and this can be seen earlier in the post with his use of “species of Depredation”, or “Classes”.

His book on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames does provide us with a very comprehensive view of the Port of London, at the end of the 18th century, a time when the London Docks were about to enter a period of rapid expansion.

I will explore this brief period of London’s history in more detail, using Colquhoun’s book in future posts.

alondoninheritance.com

A London Inheritance

A Private History of a Public City

Felixstowe Martello Towers, Bawdsey Radar and Sutton Hoo

Sutton Hoo

Junes Ladies Hair Stylist, Durham Row, Stepney – 1986

Boleyn Pet Stores, Dalston – 1986

Noble Street – The Ruins of London’s Industry

Lift 109 and the Transformation of Battersea Power Station

Late 20th Century Sculpture in the City of London

1. Temple Gardens, Lamb Statue, Margaret Wrighton, 1971

2. Fetter Lane / New Fetter Lane, John Wilkes, James Butler, 1988

3. 2 Dorset Rise, George and the serpent, Michael Sandle

4. Fleet Place, Man with pipe, Bruce McClean, 1993

5. Fleet Place, Echo, Stephen Cox, 1993

6. Queen Victoria Street, Baynard House, Seven ages of man, Richard Kindersley, 1980

7. Paternoster Square, Paternoster, Elizabeth Frink, 1975

8. St. Paul’s Churchyard, Becket, E. Bainbridge Copnall, 1973

9. St. Paul’s Churchyard, John Wesley, J. Adams Acton, 1991

10. Postman’s Park, Minotaur, Michael Ayrton, 1973

11. Old Change Court, Fireman’s War Memorial, John W. Mills, 1991

12. Old Change Court, Icarus, Michael Ayrton, 1973

St. Olave and the Coopers Arms Pub, Falcon Square and Silver Street

Covent Garden, Sunday Afternoon, 9th of August 1953

Euston Station and HS2 – A 2025 Update

Patrick Colquhoun and the Thames River Police

Sutton Hoo

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1. Temple Gardens, Lamb Statue, Margaret Wrighton, 1971

2. Fetter Lane / New Fetter Lane, John Wilkes, James Butler, 1988

3. 2 Dorset Rise, George and the serpent, Michael Sandle

4. Fleet Place, Man with pipe, Bruce McClean, 1993

5. Fleet Place, Echo, Stephen Cox, 1993

6. Queen Victoria Street, Baynard House, Seven ages of man, Richard Kindersley, 1980

7. Paternoster Square, Paternoster, Elizabeth Frink, 1975

8. St. Paul’s Churchyard, Becket, E. Bainbridge Copnall, 1973

9. St. Paul’s Churchyard, John Wesley, J. Adams Acton, 1991

10. Postman’s Park, Minotaur, Michael Ayrton, 1973

11. Old Change Court, Fireman’s War Memorial, John W. Mills, 1991

12. Old Change Court, Icarus, Michael Ayrton, 1973

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