Recent Articles
Showing posts with label Londonist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Londonist. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
- 0 Comments
The idea of a ‘secret’ London is a seductive one. Who knows what lurks behind dilapidated Victorian facades, at the end of sinister winding alleyways or tucked away in church crypts? You hear tales of abandoned tube stations, nuclear bunkers under roundsabouts, warrens of government tunnels in Whitehall; another London, off limits and subterranean. Our guide to this mysterious world was Matt Brown, editor of The Londonist, the single most useful website for anyone wanting to know what’s going on in London.
 |
| 55 Broadway |
Appropriately given the subject matter, the talk was in a secret location: the 10th floor of the Grade I listed headquarters of the London Underground, 55 Broadway. Built in 1929 and designed by architect Charles Holden it sits directly on top of St James Park underground station. There’s an aura of importance to the building, the art deco detailing brings to mind streamlined and retro aerodynamic design, the dawning of the age of mechanised speed. The lobby is filled with awards won by London Underground and there’s a fantastic ticking machine wired into the tube network showing the frequency of the trains rumbling below us. Up on the tenth floor we’re allowed out onto the roof gardens and even though it’s a drizzly winter night the view is pretty stunning. The landmarks of London are laid out like a postcard in front of us: the London Eye, Westminster Cathedral, the BT Tower, St Paul’s Cathedral and their newest sibling, the brightly lit Shard.
 |
| The new concourse at Kings Cross. |
I was initially a little apprehensive that this talk would essentially be a long list of trivia, a mound of interesting yet disconnected facts. Very quickly I realised this wasn’t going to be the case; Matt’s perspective on the city is that of London as process. This philosophy doesn’t treat the past as simply something to be memorised in a vacuum, but as the fuel that powers and shapes our modern city. He began with a great example of this, explaining how the curve of the new concourse at King’s Cross Station was directly influenced by glacial movements during the last ice age. To summarise; the curve of the concourse derives from the curve of the Great Northern Hotel (in the top right of the image); the curve of the hotel followed the path of Pancras Road; Pancras Road was built to follow the now buried River Fleet and the River Fleet’s course was influenced by glacial movements 10,000 years ago. At this point we should note that the brand new concourse resembles… a glacier!
 |
| Tranquil. |
During this section of the talk Matt shows us an image of a pastoral St Pancras Old Church. Absolutely nothing about this image screams ‘London’. We see open fields, clear skies, wild woodland – there are men lazily paddling their feet in the River Fleet. Without context you might expect it to be a representation of some sleepy countryside hamlet. But it’s not. I cycle through this pastoral landscape on my way to gigs in Camden. The church is still there, marooned like a galleon frozen in ice, but the city has swallowed up the tranquillity around it. Red bricked tower blocks have replaced the woods and the clear waters of the Fleet are now buried deep underground, a conduit for North London’s excrement. Knowledge like this is a real secret London, landscapes that only exist in the mind, anchored in reality by survivors like the Old Church.
But what of the London that’s been utterly obliterated? Matt shows us his research into the defensive fortifications built to protect London during the Civil War. These were an enormously complex and large-scale construction project of which there is little or no trace. There’s not even any definitive maps of where they might have been, only guesses based on topology, slightly unreliable history books and street names. It’s disconcerting to think that huge things like these forts can not only vanish physically, but mentally too. It’s not like the Civil War was that long ago, relatively speaking. I can walk from my house and look at a city wall the Romans built, so you’d expect there to be some evidence around. Invisible forgotten structures like this are a great reminder of the transience of the city. What appears permanent can be wiped away very quickly by disaster, bombs or the simple and steady march of progress.
 |
| Where archaeologists think the wall and forts might have been. |
The contrast between what survives and what becomes hopelessly obscure is an interesting and seemingly illogical one. Matt outlines a series of secret disasters and tragedies that pepper the history of London, yet haven’t entered popular consciousness and don’t crop up in history books. These include a great fire on London Bridge in 1212. The bridge at this time had houses on it and when a fire began burning down the great cathedral at Southwark people rushed across to the south side of the bridge to rubberneck. Unfortunately winds carried embers across to the north side, setting the houses aflame there. Everyone on the bridge was now caught between two advancing infernos. An estimated 2,000 people died, the worst single disaster in the history of London. You won’t see any plaques in memorial to this or view any dramatic paintings of it in art galleries. Apparently even in history books about London Bridge there is scarcely a mention.
In a similar, and far more recent vein is a fire in Denmark Street in 1980, where 37 burned to death. Again no marker or memorial, the incident has almost completely disappeared from public consciousness, perhaps due to the fact that those who died were immigrants with few to publically mourn their deaths.
This is pretty miserable stuff, why would events like these be forgotten so readily? It’s hard to ascribe any kind of malice to this amnesia, yet in some cases it’s clear certain people would rather things be forgotten. In 1903 the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum caught fire. 52 female patients died in horrifying circumstances, their charred bodies found huddled together, pressed into corners as they futilely tried to escape the flames. So what of these dank rooms where terrified women gasped their last, desperate, smoke filled breaths? Nowadays you’re likely to find an IKEA sofa, or a huge flatscreen TV in that spot. Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum is now the charmingly named ‘Princess Park Manor’, luxury flats for discerning high flying Londoners. Matt tells us about the ‘history’ section on their (pretty crappy) website, explaining that they have the vaguest possible description of the place, not even bothering to mention that it was once a hospital let alone that it was the site of the worst peacetime fire in London since medieval times. These housing developers would just prefer we all forgot about that nasty business and focus on what’s important about the history of the place, namely that “the corridor that once ran across the width of the building was at one time the longest in Europe”. Wow. Now that’s history you can use!
The contrast to this crushing sense of doom is what’s unexpectedly remembered rather than forgotten. It’s 750AD, and a beautiful sunny day in the countryside that will eventually be north east London. Deep within a field a man looks wearily up from the sun and wipes the sweat from his brow. He thinks for a moment about the flagon of beer waiting for him back home, a reward for a hard day’s work. Buoyed with anticipation he cheerily whips his oxen on; the fields must be ploughed. He doesn’t live a particularly extravagant life, but he’s got his own hard won bit of land to farm and a family to feed. Life is good. There are men like him dotted all over Anglo-Saxon England, all of them fated to be lost to history. But not Mr Wemba.
 |
| An Anglo-Saxon farmer working his lea. Much like I imagine Mr Wemba may well have done. |
1,250 years later, the same spot. Thousands of drunken England fans stream across the concrete, flags waving, horns tooting, a riot of white and red. As one they chant ‘Wemba-ley Wemba-ley, Wemba-ley!”. This Anglo-Saxon farmer’s name has been passed down through the years, being immortalised in the globally famous ‘Wembley Stadium’. The etymology of place names is always fascinating, but particularly when it reaches back this far. Knowing the secret origins of these places lets you inhabit the past. A bus ride between Peckham and Brixton becomes a quest from a tiny village on the River Peck that ends at the ancient stone of the Saxon Lord Brixi. And then you can pop into the Ritzy for a pint. Reading about the distant past can feel impossibly alien, but secret and obscure knowledge like this underlines the fact that although conditions may be vastly different, we also have much in common with our ancestors.
After Matt had finished his talk he opened the floor to questions, with the caveat that we must all outline our idea of a secret part of London. Everyone had their own favourite spot and it’s uplifting that even in a city that occasionally feels full to bursting point there are still personal and private places. What I realised during this talk is that ‘secret London’ is not about pointing out obscure buildings or being able to list off trivia. It’s about the way that you apply your knowledge of the past to your present. Everyone has their own truly secret London mapped out in their heads. The park bench where you first kissed your partner, the Soho alleyway in which you gracelessly collapsed in a pile of your own vomit or simply the nicest place to get a drink. This concept is perhaps best visualised in Stephen Walter’s “The Island”, an immensely detailed personal map of the city. We all have one of these maps of London in our heads, a patchwork blanket of memories, practical knowledge, romance, history and drama. That’s a real secret London.
 |
| Stephen Walter's 'The Island' Click for bigger, but not quite big enough. Go and see it somewhere! |
Big thanks to Matt Brown for putting on such a great talk, for the London Transport Museum for helping organise it and to TFL for opening up the 10th floor of 55 Broadway as a venue.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
- 0 Comments
 |
| The Bell Pub (in diorama form) |
‘History in the Pub’ is the fourth in a series of events put on by the lovely people at London Historians, a club that organises visits, talks and social events for people interested in the history of London. I’ve managed to attend every one of these evenings, even stepping up myself to give a brief talk about bizarre Georgian erotic performances during an open-mic session. Over the course of these evenings I’ve heard talks about subjects like the Gordon Riots and escapes from the Tower of London, songs about colourful characters from the East End and seen demonstrations of early wax cylinder music players. I take to this stuff like a duck to water.
This evening’s theme was East End history, the speakers were Neil Fraser, author of ‘Over the Border: the Other East End’ and Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, authors of ‘The Sugar Girls’. Providing a musical interlude was Fiona-Jane Weston, a cabaret artist with an upcoming London-themed musical show 'Loving London: The Cabaret Capital'. The compere was Matt Brown, editor of the popular (and excellent) Londonist website.
I consider myself fairly on-the-ball about the history of London, but the further I stray from Zones 1 and 2, the less I tend to know. As far as the East End goes, I’m pretty up on Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Bethnal Green’s history, but further east than that? “Here be dragons.” Compared to the City and Westminster, the history of the further out parts of London is relatively calm. Many of these places were once country manor houses with a small village surrounding them, but as the population of London exploded in the 18th and 19thcenturies the rural calm was swept away to be replaced by industrial suburbia. The recent history of areas like Newham, Barking and Dagenham is that of the working class, of factories and docks, of the economic and physical hardships they suffered. Historians can fall into an all too familiar trap of concentrating too much on royalty and the wealthy, ignoring the common man and woman. This is a myopic view of history, and this is why examining the historical geography of these places is important.
First up was Neil Fraser, talking about Plaistow. This is very much a grey area for me – a place I know only as a distant marker on the District Line. It’s the kind of place you wake up at having fallen asleep on a tube train – mumbling “w-where the hell am I?” Well, it’s in the London Borough of Newham, it's generally residential, contains several large council estates and was named the “6th most deprived borough in the UK” in 2007. From the pictures Mr Fraser showed us, it doesn’t look like the most inviting of places.
R0ws of quickly thrown up 1950s and 60s brick boxes dot the landscape, which seems to sit under a perpetual slate-grey Victorian sky. It looks, quite frankly, very grim - it’s hard to believe these were once verdant pastures. As Fraser put it, “London obliterated Plaistow Village”. The way he phrases it makes you envisage London as a giant, unstoppable steamroller, flattening everything in its path – and in many ways that’s not too far from the truth. For a period the rural landowners tried to fight against this urban tide, and Fraser tells us a fairly humorous anecdote of a small and chaotic clash with police. The landowners didn’t want their new, working-class neighbours to have a carnival day, where there’d be donkey races and gurning competitions and so on. The police were called in to quell this gathering, and the situation seems to have degenerated into a chaotic milieu of police beatings with people trying to race donkeys in the middle of it. One thing I thought was notable about this was that afterwards there was a complete blanket denial of police brutality during this riot – some things never change.
It's an entertaining tale, but it's easily the high point of this talk. I’ve always held that the best thing a lecturer can do is speak interestingly about something interesting. This might not always be possible, but you can easily get away with talking interestingly about something boring, or even talking boringly about something interesting. What you should never do is talk boringly about something that’s boring. That, unfortunately, is the area that Fraser finds himself in. Plaistow seems to be an area that inspires little enthusiasm, even from someone that’s written a book about it (among other things). A telling moment is when he talks about the Black Lion pub and says there are lots of interesting stories about it. “But I don’t have time to tell you them.” Oh. Oh well.
Next up was Fiona-Jane Weston singing about the history of London. Her show covers Roman London up until the present day – and we were treated to a few songs from this catalogue. Firstly she told us the story of her (very interesting) life. She’s travelled around the world, living in China, Australia, going to Yale University and has settled here. Her performance tonight was entertaining, but a little bit technically marred. Throughout the night the microphone was acting up, and both the volume of that and the pre-recorded soundtrack were quite low. Despite this, we got a nice taste of her sharp lyrical talents, with the highlight a jaunty song about the ghost of Anne Boleyn haunting Henry VIII. I was particularly taken with the lyric where Henry couldn’t tell which of his dead wives were haunting him, as she was carrying her head under her arm. If nothing else it’s a nice, authentically London feeling to be sitting in an East End pub listening to someone sing bawdy and happy songs.
The last speakers, Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, rank among the best I've seen at these nights. They’ve recently released a book called ‘The Sugar Girls’ about the experiences of young women working in the Tate and Lyle sugar factories during WW2. It’s perhaps not the most immediately arresting sounding subject, but proves to be a fascinating microcosm of both progressive gender politics and of conscientious treatment of workers.
They begin by outlining the formation of the Tate & Lyle corporation. The business began as two corporations in an intense rivalry. The owners: Henry Tate and Abram Lyle – two men who despised each other so much that they not only refused to talk to each other, not only to never to share a train carriage – but to the extent that they never even met in person, which is faintly impressive if you think about it. Mr Lyle in particular seems like a particularly joyless individual, being pro-temperance to such an extent that he said he’d rather see his son brought home dead than drunk. The two had twin factories in the docks of East London, and once the two founders had died it was realised that this rivalry between the companies was causing them both financial harm – so they merged into the company we know today.
‘The Sugar Girls’ was the nickname given to the young workers at these factories over the course of the war. With London going through the Blitz, rationing underway and Britain’s men off to war, thousands of girls left school at the age of fourteen to work in the factories of the East End. And the most popular and well-regarded factories to work at were the Tate and Lyle sugar refineries.
The picture that Barrett and Calvi paint is less that of an indentured workforce, and more of a dynamic, feminine, supportive community. The bosses of the factories were particularly progressive in their treatment of the workforce, giving them accommodation if their houses had been destroyed, holidays to the seaside if they were feeling stressed or over-worked, e free medical checkups, facilities including a barbers and even a bar on site. This treatment seems to have fostered intense loyalty among their employees, loyalty that lasts to this day.
Even though the Tate and Lyle factories were under the same roof, the girls were encouraged to view themselves as either a Tate girl, or a Lyle girl, wearing a blue or a green uniform respectively. This sense of competition was supported by events like the ‘Inter-Refinery Shield’, a sports day where the girls would compete against each other for the trophy. The notion of this workforce as a miniature community within the East End is very compelling, romance was common among the workers, to the extent that the factories were known as ‘the knocking shop’; inter-company marriages were recorded and celebrated in the company magazine.
It all seems very rosy – even though this is all going on to the backdrop of London being bombarded by German bombs. There is a slight undercurrent that maybe things weren’t quite utopian, mention is made of girl’s fingers bleeding from working so fast, or the deafening noise of the machines forcing them to learn to lipread, but on the whole people seem to have nothing but positive things to say about their time there – with interview subjects describing it as “the happiest time of their life”.
It is glimpses into a past that I never knew existed that I like about these ‘History in the Pub’ nights. Without them, I might never have learnt about this community and this fairly unique example of how to treat a workforce fairly and with dignity. It is also one of the few historical talks that I've seen elicit an "awwwww'" reaction of sweetness from a largely academic audience.
Aside from the speakers, the attendees and organisers are as friendly as ever. The quiz, is, as usual, devilishly difficult, yet even though my team frequently gets maybe 3 or 4 out of 10, it’s a great way to learn interesting bits of trivia about London. I’ve run past the shelters in Victoria Park countless times, and had never realised that they were once part of old London Bridge! I always look forward to these nights, and wish they were more frequent. Big thank-yous to the Mike Paterson and the rest of the organisers for what is consistently a fascinating evening.
One day soon I will sign up and be an official 'London Historian', I promise!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)