Tag Archives: Dalston

The Mildmay Road and Wolsey Road Mural

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

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

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

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

Comments with any information would be greatly received.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The clock on the corner of the building:

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

Mops and brooms in the February sunshine on Kingsland Road:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Railway Tavern is now a café / antique store:

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

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

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

And Anna Walker is at lower right:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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