This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781448164561

Version 1.0

Published by Random House Books 2016

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Dan Cruickshank 2016
Cover images © Alamy and Getty Images. Child with cat by Horace Warner © Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain.

Dan Cruickshank has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published by Random House Books in 2016

Random House Books
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

www.penguin.co.uk

Random House Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781847947079

PREFACE

THIS BOOK HAS been many years in its conception and nearly a decade in its execution. I first got to know Spitalfields well in the early 1970s, when I started to explore its then generally desolate and abandoned streets, and to photograph its decaying historic buildings that, it seemed at the time, stood very little chance of survival. In the mid 1970s a group of friends and I became involved in a campaign to attempt to stop what seemed its inevitable obliteration, forming the still-thriving Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust in 1976. The idea to write this book emerged gradually, partly as a result of research undertaken during many, often desperate and hard-fought conservation campaigns, and partly as a result of buying an early-eighteenth-century Spitalfields house nearly forty years ago, and then repairing and living in it. Also, strange as it might seem, my desire – indeed obsession – to explore in detail the history on my own doorstep has been stimulated by years of writing about architecture around the world. It’s easy to be entranced by remote and distant places, but it gradually dawned on me that the architectural, social and cultural history of Spitalfields is as rich and as extraordinary as that found in more apparently exotic locations.

There have been many detailed and very useful books written on the buildings of Spitalfields. But I still feel there is room for another, particularly one that seeks to tell the area’s extraordinary story in the wider context of the nation’s history. And relating that story seems especially urgent now, since Spitalfields is on the cusp of dramatic and speedy change that could result in its special character being erased and our ability to imagine its past vastly reduced.

I have been fortunate, over the years, to have met many remarkable, sometimes unlikely, people with Spitalfields stories to tell. I have also received generous assistance from a wide range of historians, archaeologists, librarians and London chroniclers who have proved endlessly willing to share their insights and discoveries. My friends and neighbours, too, have helped me, invariably indulging my curiosity by making their historic homes available – on an almost regular basis – for minute scrutiny.

I’d like to thank the following – some, sadly, no longer living – without whom this book would not have been possible in its published form. First there is the team from Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) – notably Chiz Harwood, Nigel Jeffries and Chris Thomas – whom I first met during the 1990s when they were excavating the site of the north precinct of the former Spitalfields Priory and the Old Artillery Ground and to whom I am most grateful for their generosity in sharing and explaining their discoveries. Their 2015 publication, The Spitalfields Suburb, 1539–c.1880, is a truly outstanding publication that, along with the 1957 Survey of London volume dealing with ‘Spitalfields and Mile End New Town’, has proved to be one of my ‘Bibles’ during the process of researching and writing this book. I also want to give special acknowledgement to the support and insights over the decades that I have received from my colleagues on the Spitalfields Trust, notably Colin Amery, Douglas Blain, Andrew Byrne, Francis Carnwath, John Chesshyre, Mark Girouard, Charles Gledhill, Gareth Harris, Marianna Kennedy (whom I’d also like to thank for her generosity in allowing me to reproduce Marshall Sisson’s 1920s photographs of long-lost houses on the Old Artillery Ground), Barra Little, Ian Lumley, Richard MacCormac, Elizabeth and Peter McKay, William Palin, Caroline Roughton, Patrick Streeter, Tim Whittaker and Oliver Leigh-Wood.

Special thanks also to Stefan Dickers at the Bishopsgate Institute for the help he has given me with my research; Sandra Esqulant for her tireless enthusiasm and generosity of spirit; Marenka Gabeler for her photographs and selfless support through the years; the ‘Gentle Author’, creator of the informative Spitalfields Life website, who has shared information with me in a most generous manner and guided me to fruitful areas of research; Gilbert and George – long-term residents of Fournier Street who have repaired two houses in exemplary manner and allowed me to benefit from their discoveries; Peter Guillery for his pioneering work on the humble Georgian buildings of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green; Robin Gwynn for information about Huguenot Spitalfields; James Howett, who has made – and shared – many remarkable discoveries about the history and buildings of Spitalfields; Phillip Lucas for information about the eighteenth-century home and its fittings; Jerry White, an old Spitalfields friend, whose extensive and scholarly writing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London – and on the Rothschild Buildings in particular – have provided me with insights and essential information; Sarah Wise to whom I am indebted for her pioneering work on life in the nineteenth-century East End; and Bella and Alexander Cruickshank who have given me the determination to complete what seemed, at times, a most daunting project.

Thanks also to: Ben Adler, Geoffrey Archer, Nick Barratt, Mary Bayliss, Jenny and Oliver Black, Neil Burton, Dave Chesterton, Kevan Collins, Basil Comely, Adam Dant, Paul Gazerwitz, Mariga Guinness, Julian Harrap, Nick Hedges, Julian Humphries, Jocasta Innes, Eleanor Jones, Theo Jones, Santokh Kaulder, Tarik Khan, Martin Lane, Chris Legg, Pat Llewellyn, David Milne, John Nicholson, Heloise Palin, Olga Pavlova, Marco Pensa, Hugh Petter, Lisa Reardon, Raphael Samuel, Dennis Severs, Susie Symes, Taylor Thomson, Christine Waite, Charlie de Wet, Jeanette Winterson, Donna de Wit, Peter Wyld, and Simon Young.

Finally I thank my agents Charles Walker and Christian Ogunbanjo, and my publisher Nigel Wilcockson for his unwavering and cheerful support and skilled transformation of a vast and unruly manuscript into a finished book, a task in which he has been ably assisted by Rowan Borchers and Lynn Curtis.

Dan Cruickshank

Elder Street, Spitalfields

September 2016

INTRODUCTION

THE HISTORY OF Spitalfields is a direct and dramatic echo of the history of London, even of England. Great and pivotal events and characters that have shaped the nation during the last 2,000 years have left their mark here, while the area’s strategic location next to one of the great roads – Roman in origin or earlier – which helped connect London to the rest of the country, ensured that it played a constant part in the history of the nation as a whole. Known as Ermine Street, the road passed along the route of what is now Bishopsgate to Lincoln and then York.

Spitalfields has witnessed such tumultuous events as the Reformation of the 1530s, the Civil War of the 1640s and the waves of immigration from the late seventeenth century onwards that transformed London’s character and its patterns of life, trade and manufacturing. Virtually everything of significance that happened in London in the centuries after 1530 had a profound influence upon life and architecture in Spitalfields – in some cases, indeed, these epoch-making events had their origin in the area.

Spitalfields possesses an extraordinary vitality. It is continually transforming and evolving. Walking its streets can be spellbinding – there is continuity but also change and ever present are the shades of the past. This means the streets of Spitalfields are full of ghosts – of houses, of people, of events – almost visible and tangible once you know their histories. Spitalfields is a place so poignant and evocative that even its least promising byways or alleys can prove unexpectedly moving, with the forms of long-lost buildings and those who worked and dwelt in them rearing up in the shadows of the imagination.

An astonishing number of people who played a key role in the development of British culture, and who helped to hone the nation’s distinct character, lived, worked or frolicked in or near Spitalfields. These include playwrights and actors such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn; writers Sir Francis Bacon and Mary Wollstonecraft; herbalist and astrologer Nicholas Culpeper; architects and developers Nicholas Hawksmoor and Nicholas Barbon; diarist Samuel Pepys; aristocrats including the 2nd Earl of Devonshire and the 3rd Earl of Bolingbroke; and the brewers Joseph and Benjamin Truman.

And then, as well as these familiar names, there were the industrious Huguenot business entrepreneurs and families – the Ogiers, Dalbiacs and Bourdons – who from the early 1680s started to make Spitalfields a thriving merchants’ quarter; the Irish journeymen who from the 1720s made Spitalfields their home; and the Jewish and Asian migrants who followed in their footsteps. In addition there were the less desirable denizens of Spitalfields, who made their names through dark and criminal activities, the early-eighteenth-century housebreaker Jack Sheppard and the late-nineteenth-century serial killer Jack the Ripper among them. Observing and chronicling so many of these people were a host of philanthropists, social reformers and novelists, who included among their number Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Charles Booth, Israel Zangwill and Jack London.

Spitalfields also saw the early stirrings of movements that have done much to shape modern Britain. In the 1760s the journeymen weavers of Spitalfields, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch organised themselves in well-disciplined ‘combinations’ to protect – in most militant manner – their employment and livelihoods. The protest movement related to trade and industry rather than to politics directly, but in its scale, management, determination, aims and Luddite tendencies, it was radical and potentially revolutionary. It can also be seen as an early prototype of the trade union movement.

Later, as Spitalfields slid into grinding poverty, philanthropists took the stage, helping those struggling at the bottom of the heap with such enterprises as the Quaker-organised Spitalfields Soup Society of 1797, and also establishing the principles by which concerned private individuals could, in the absence of adequate or appropriate parish or public aid, organise and fund ‘relief’ for the poor.

As well as sustenance for the body there was also, locally, a concern for sustaining the mind. Learned institutions – such as mathematical and ornithological societies – flourished among the weaving community throughout the eighteenth century and, in their encouragement of self-improvement through study, provided a model for the Mechanics’ Institute movement of the early decades of the following century. They also anticipated the arguments of Samuel Smiles – the great mid-nineteenth-century champion of ‘self-help’ – who said:

Today Spitalfields is not just a rich repository of memory and an epitome of London history, it is also a crucible within which a vision of the city of the future is being forged. As I write this book the fate of the area hangs in the balance. Despite its popular status as an historic quarter, with streets of houses listed as being of historic or architectural interest and large Conservation Areas, Spitalfields is now also viewed as a prime development opportunity. A series of large schemes are either proposed or else already under construction for sites within Spitalfields or on its fringes, and these will fundamentally transform its appearance and its ways of life, ushering in high-rise living and large slabs of commercial space. I set out to document a fascinating area, with a 2,000-year history that is, in a sense, characterised by change. But the scale and nature of the changes now proposed mean that Spitalfields could soon be transformed beyond recognition. This book, which I started nearly ten years ago as a celebration of Spitalfields, may well turn out to be its valediction.

WHERE AND WHAT IS SPITALFIELDS?

The physical boundaries of the area are strangely hard to define. Spitalfields was the name that by the mid sixteenth century had been bestowed on former monastic lands or fields on the north-east edge of London, near Bishopgate-without-the-wall. The area belonged from around 1197 until the Reformation of the 1530s to the Augustinian Priory or ‘Hospital’ of St Mary that marks, by tradition, the heart of Spitalfields. It is this that is designated ‘The Spitel’ on London’s earliest surviving map – the so-called ‘Copperplate’ map of c.1553 – and ‘The Spitel Fyeld’ on the ‘Agas’ map of c.1562, and ‘The Spitel Fields’ on Braun and Hogenberg’s map of 1572. And so, in colloquial manner, the fields around St Mary’s Hospital became known as Spital Fields.

In the late sixteenth century most of Spitalfields was in the huge parish of St Dunstan’s Stepney, but with key portions being administered by two small, self-governing Liberties. These, the Liberty of the Old Artillery Ground and the Liberty of Norton Folgate, seem – broadly – to have been formed after the Reformation to govern the former monastic land of St Mary’s Hospital that had been extra-parochial, that is to say outside the ecclesiastical parish system. Small, peripheral portions of Spitalfields also fell within the parishes bordering St Dunstan’s and the Liberties, with parts of north Spitalfields being in the parish of St Leonard’s Shoreditch, and portions of south Spitalfields in the parishes of St Botolph’s Bishopsgate, St Botolph’s Aldgate and St Mary Matfelon, Whitechapel. What’s clear is that, historically, Spitalfields was more a state of mind, an idea or perception, than a geographic locality. Its borders were permeable – expanding and contracting at different times – with further complexity added when in 1690 Mile End New Town was constituted a separate and largely self-governing hamlet of ‘handicraft tradesmen’ within the parish of St Dunstan’s. Daniel Defoe makes it clear that, at times, Spitalfields was the generic name for East London’s weaving and artisan quarter. In his Journal of the Plague Year of 1722 he writes of the ‘parishes of Shoreditch, Stepney, Whitechapel and Bishopsgate … that is to say … Spitalfields’.² Following this, in 1729 the parish of Christ Church Spitalfields and in 1743 the parish of St Matthew’s Bethnal Green were carved out of St Dunstan’s.³ Mile End New Town is the part of Spitalfields that stretches east from Brick Lane to Vallance Road and from Buxton Street in the north to Old Montague Street in the south. Its ancient heart was the High Street, now part of Greatorex Street.⁴ It is the stories of these districts, Liberties and parishes that form the heart of this book.

George Dodd, who in the 1850s worked with Charles Dickens on the weekly journal Household Words, confirmed the difficulty of defining the physical boundaries of Spitalfields and suggested its identity was, for most Londoners of his time, linked to the traditionally dominant trade of the area – silk weaving. As he put it in the 1842 book London, on which he collaborated with Charles Knight:

Dodd admitted that this conception of Spitalfields included ‘large portions of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Mile End New Town’. He also emphasised a fact that would have seemed strange to many Londoners in the 1840s. Despite the district’s then notorious overcrowding, poverty and squalor, ‘the larger portion of this extensive district was open fields until comparatively modern times. Bethnal Green was really a green and Spitalfields was covered with grassy sward in the last century.’

For most people today, Spitalfields is defined by Bishopsgate to the west, Bethnal Green Road to the north and Wentworth Street/Old Montague Street to the south, while to the east it has no firmly defined boundary but merges gradually with Bethnal Green and Whitechapel in the small streets and open spaces between Brick Lane and Vallance Road. I have taken a generous view of its precise extent, allowing myself on occasion to look beyond these somewhat arbitrary limits.

A close reading of the book will reveal the topographical complexities that can potentially lead to confusion on occasion. Over the centuries street names have changed – often more than once – and their spelling has frequently been fluid. White Lyon Yard, for example, became the west end of White Lyon Street, then became White Lyon Street and is now Folgate Street. The streets themselves have altered their physical form, many over time being entirely or almost entirely obliterated, others emerging quite late. And house numbers, which only came into use from the very late eighteenth century, were radically revised in the late nineteenth century. My policy has been to give both old and new versions of street names and house numbers when relevant, and to put old names and the names of streets that no longer exist in inverted commas.

Spitalfields in 2014.

PROLOGUE

THE GOLDEN HEART OF SPITALFIELDS

THE GOLDEN HEART stands on the corner of Hanbury Street and Commercial Street, not too far from the mighty Christ Church, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and completed in 1729 as the new parish church. The Golden Heart marks the physical heart of Spitalfields, but for many of the people who now live and work in the area it also marks something more difficult to define than the area’s boundaries. It is – like many pubs – a place where people’s lives overlap and where, on occasion, they mesh together in unexpected ways.

There has been a pub on this site since the portion of Commercial Street on which it stands was cut through Spitalfields between 1849 and 1857. But there could have been a tavern or pub here for centuries – or at least very nearby – because Commercial Street, when it was constructed, sliced through an already populated area, while Hanbury Street, known earlier as ‘Browns Lane’, is one of the most ancient streets in the East End.¹ At any rate, by 1821 an establishment known as the Golden Harp stood very near the site of the existing pub. It was presumably so named to attract the area’s Irish-born population. A few years later, in 1837, the Golden Harp became the Golden Heart.

Given the popularity since medieval times of the inn name the White Hart (after Richard II’s emblem), it’s not clear why this particular pub should have become the Golden Heart rather than the Golden Hart. Nor is it entirely clear why a change of name should have been decided upon in the first place. It is possible, though, that the renaming had something to do with the passing of the Beerhouse Act of 1830. Designed to improve the quality of beer through competition, and to reduce public drunkenness in the street or at disreputable, unlicensed drinking dens, the act introduced a new type of regulated premises where landlords, in return for a one-off payment of two guineas, could brew and sell beer and cider, both of which were regarded at that time as relatively harmless drinks – safer than water and less lethal than spirits such as gin (low-alcohol ‘small beer’ was thought suitable for children). Perhaps the then landlord of the Golden Harp, aiming for an air of respectability amid this new legislation, thought it best to move away from a name that, to many, might have suggested a premises full of carousing and boisterous Irish journeymen or market porters. The Golden Heart sounded safe, reassuring and welcoming.

By 1860 a new pub had been constructed on the recently created Commercial Street, set back a little from its predecessor and occupying what was now a prominent corner site. This building is recorded in old photographs. It was handsome, with a shallow quadrant front following the line of the street, with three closely spaced windows on the first and second floors and a ground floor with three doors – presumably leading to three separate bars – and two windows. The 1861 census reveals that the ‘victualler’ of this new ‘Golden Heart’ was sixty-year-old Joseph Jacobs, who occupied the pub with his wife, four children and a servant.

The Golden Heart that exists today was constructed by Truman, Hanbury and Buxton in 1934–6, almost adjacent to its Brick Lane-based Black Eagle Brewery. It was one of a new generation of ‘reformed’ pubs intended to be not just liquor saloons but convivial retreats that would attract a greater number and a wider mix of customers, including middle-class drinkers, families, and even respectable female customers unaccompanied by men. Such venues generally included restaurants, function rooms and – wherever possible – gardens. But the niceties of the class structure were also preserved. So these ‘reformed’ pubs continued to incorporate the fundamental division between the public bar, intended for working men, and the saloon bar where the bosses would drink and in which beer and spirits would be a few pence more expensive.

The preferred architectural styles for this new breed of pub were neo-Tudor and neo-Georgian, which of course expressed solid, old-world values; and the Golden Heart, despite its cramped urban site where a garden was simply not an option, epitomises the social and artistic aspirations of the ‘reformed’, inter-war public house. It was designed by Arthur Edward Sewell, Truman’s principal architect and surveyor throughout the inter-war period, in a somewhat idiosyncratic, but distinguished, neo-Georgian style. The importance of the pub, on a key and very visible site just across the road from the brewery, is made immediately apparent by its well-considered design and by the materials used in its construction.

The frontage – slightly wider than its 1860s predecessor’s – has an unusual and striking form. Its entrances and architectural features are set within a bevelled tripartite elevation, which is a spirited response to the curving or wedge-shaped site. The central portion of the elevation is clad with expensive Portland stone and with a pediment at first-floor level. All very imposing. Above the stone elevation is an early – perhaps original – neon sign proclaiming ‘Truman’s’, in splendid contrast to the stone-wrought classicism over which it presides. But the neon is not the elevation’s only Art Deco flourish. There is also faience tiling, originally cream-coloured but now over-painted, that incorporates typical Art Deco geometric fluting framing the doors. The pair of elevations flanking the stone centre are each faced with fine red brick, and in their details – such as keystones – are evidently a considered response by Sewell to the early-eighteenth-century silk merchants’ houses that, in the late 1930s, stood near the Golden Heart in Hanbury Street and Spital Square. Now most of these early buildings have gone, leaving the pub somewhat marooned in a sea of banal architecture and ever more intense traffic.

Inside the Golden Heart there are now currently two bars. The one entered from Hanbury Street is the more intimate. Still retaining its panelling and some original benches, it was the most exclusive of the pub’s original five rooms – the realm of the area’s leading citizens. Beyond it – separated by a now long-lost screen – was the saloon dining room or lounge, where families perhaps could have taken Sunday lunch or women could have relaxed in discreet and respectable isolation. This room would have been very small, and somewhat dark – the only natural light would have come through a roof lantern – and sitting within it could never have been very peaceful for the ladies’ and gentlemen’s lavatories are accessed from it. But it would have been genteel in appearance, with panelled walls and a large – and thankfully surviving – Arts and Crafts-style arched brick fireplace. Food cooked in the kitchen above was delivered via a dumb waiter. The saloon bar and dining room were united many years ago, but the room as it is now constituted feels like the heart of the Heart. On its walls hang photographs of people who live or work in Spitalfields, many of them artists of international repute – Gilbert and George, Tracey Emin, Michael Landy, Gillian Wearing.

The door on Commercial Street leads into what was the public bar. This room retains dado-rail-height panelling and advertising slogans extolling some of Truman’s more popular tipples in the 1930s – ‘Eagle Ale’ and ‘Eagle Stout’. Beyond it there would once have been the ‘tap’ or off-licence and the dining room for the pub’s less choosy customers. The door in the centre of the pub’s elevation – now blocked – led to a small ‘private bar’ or snug that, screened from the public bar by a baffle, would most likely have been used by women wanting a quiet half-pint of stout and a cigarette. All these spaces have now been subsumed into one, their former existence marked by three brick-made fireplaces (a couple of which are embellished with carvings of Truman’s Black Eagle emblem) – one for each room.²

I moved into my house in Spitalfields in 1977, the same year that Sandra and Dennis Esqulant took over the Golden Heart, and we soon became friends. Sadly Dennis died in 2009, but Sandra continues to run the Golden Heart with tremendous energy and enthusiasm. She is naturally generous, with a genuine belief in the beneficial power of friendship, and we sometimes sit in the heart of the Golden Heart, talking of Spitalfields past and present, of the living and the dead, of things that have been, that are and that might be.

We talk, for example, of the strange array of characters who occupied the area before the great watershed of 1991 when the ancient fruit, vegetable and flower retail market closed. While it was going strong the market transformed night into day, with pubs – granted special licences – and cafés thriving in the small hours, serving drinks and vast dinners to lorry drivers and market workers while wholesalers and shop owners arrived to buy their daily stocks. The Golden Heart was then a market pub and, like most market-related establishments, attracted not just local workers and visitors to the area but also society’s outsiders, who were drawn to the nocturnal life of Spitalfields and the sense of liberty that pervades all great markets. I remember the prostitutes who eased the lives of the hard-driving hauliers transporting fruit from Spain, flowers from the Netherlands or vegetables from the north. They gathered on the corners of streets leading to the market – at Fournier Street next to Christ Church, along Commercial Street – chatting to the lorry drivers with good humour, occasionally asking me, as I made my way home in the early hours of the morning, if I ‘wanted business, darlin’’. And I remember the piles of debris created by the market on a daily basis: the heaps of timber pallets, the abandoned crates of fruit and vegetables that seemed, to my inexpert eye, without blemish. I collected and burnt the pallets, which kept me warm as I repaired my house in Elder Street, and I ate the fruit and vegetables and took pleasure from bunches of discarded flowers. And I was not the only one.

The market helped to support a truly remarkable community of men and women. Once they would have been called ‘tramps’ (but most of them tramped nowhere) or ‘down and outs’ – certainly more accurate – or derelicts. I have no idea what they should be called – but I know their like no longer exists. Many were ragged, grimy, aged, eccentric, fiercely individual and independent – people who must have seen and suffered things beyond the comprehension or imagination of most. They gathered on corners at night, warming themselves in the early-morning light with huge fires, kindled from pallets, papers and any other available combustible debris. I remember they particularly favoured the corner of Brushfield Street and what had been Steward Street, in the heart of the market area, where they lingered against a backdrop of long-decayed or derelict late-eighteenth-century houses, like animations from the drawings of Hogarth. Such vivid images of outcast London were spellbinding and brought the mean streets of the past to life with an intensity and authenticity that it is now hard to imagine and impossible to see in the new, brittle, commercial and consumer-orientated Spitalfields, with its array of chain stores and ersatz ‘Victorian-style’ lamps and bollards. Much of the fabric and paraphernalia of life in the area is now fake, many of its historic houses ruthlessly ‘made-over’ and modernised. But – forty or so years ago – things were very different.

As far as I can remember Spitalfields’ destitute street characters never begged for money. Possibly they were too proud, or perhaps they just took the basics they needed – food and wood from the street, companionship from each other. Sandra too remembers many of these transient characters. Some would occasionally sneak into the pub for refuge, to watch television – she recalls the BBC’s current affairs programme Panorama was a favourite – and she of course would end up buying drinks for these penniless people. Sandra confirms that they never begged for money, but she recalls they would occasionally borrow £5 and then scrupulously pay it back, usually from the proceeds of erecting stalls in Petticoat Lane market. Some would offer to help out at the pub in lieu of repayment, collecting glasses and ashtrays, but unused to the niceties of civilised life they would as often as not cast the ash upon the floor and create more chaos than order.

There was ‘Big Jean’ who was – Sandra insists – given to drinking Esso Blue (something that seems hardly possible given that more than a few mouthfuls of this deadly paraffin would kill most people, or, at least, turn them blind). ‘Big Jean’ must have been made of heroic stuff. She was regularly purged by the Catholic nuns in the mid-nineteenth-century shelter in Crispin Street, a place that has seen many desperate cases through the years, and would just as regularly return to her inebriated and unpredictable ways. Then there was ‘Cat Woman’, a mesmerising prostitute, and Elaine, who ran the all-night food van outside Christ Church and who was famed for her massive bacon and egg rolls known as – no one can now say why – ‘cowboys’.

And Sandra remembers – as do I – the lost peoples of East End life. We recall, for example, the families of Irish tinkers who arrived in due season to sell Christmas trees in the market. They would gather in large and extended family groups in the Golden Heart – women in one bar and men in the other – and drink through the long hours of the night and early morning, enjoying the pub’s liberal market licence. We also cast our minds back to the last days of Spitalfields’ Jewish community that as recently as the 1930s had occupied nearly all the streets and courts around Wentworth Street and Old Montague Street. By the late 1970s almost all of them had gone, leaving the odd bakery or hardware shop in Brick Lane, a delicatessen in Petticoat Lane and Bloom’s Restaurant in Aldgate. Just two of Spitalfields’ once numerous synagogues – those in Fournier Street and in Sandys Row – remained open. Now only the Sandys Row synagogue continues in operation as a living reminder of a once vibrant community.

Sandra and I also consider the future, and try to imagine a neighbourhood that may soon be as remote from the Spitalfields of today as contemporary Spitalfields is from the East London of the Huguenot weavers. Spitalfields has always been a place of change, but in recent years the changes have been so great and rapid that it seems little of the old locality will be left: just a handful of early-Georgian buildings clustered around Christ Church and the junction of Folgate Street and Elder Street, and memories that are fast fading. Even as I write a block of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings between Blossom Street and the section of Ermine Street named Norton Folgate is threatened with demolition. If this happens yet one more portion of Spitalfields will have gone, and a rich mix of buildings – small-scale and on a site on which Londoners have lived and worked for at least 2,000 years – will have given way to corporate-style schemes, incorporating open-plan commercial space and rising as high as fourteen storeys behind some pathetic fragments of retained brick façades and a few interiors.

This book – among other things – celebrates lost and disappearing worlds.

PART ONE

A WORLD OF OUTSIDERS

From Roman Times to the Great Fire of London

ONE

THE LAND OF THE DEAD

Roman and Medieval Spitalfields

NEARLY 2,000 YEARS ago the area that became known as Spitalfields lay immediately to the north-east of Londinium, just outside the city wall and east of Ermine Street. Londinium had been founded, some time soon after AD 43, on high land rising just above the unpromising marshland bordering the wide and meandering Thames. The site was well suited to the ambitions of its Roman settlers – it lay next to a navigable river that formed a trade and military connection to the wider world at a place where that river could be bridged. It thus lay astride a waterway and a road that linked the useful harbour of Dover in the south to Roman settlements north of the Thames.

By the beginning of the first century AD, Londinium had become not just a trading and administrative settlement but the capital of the Roman province of Britannia, and by AD 250 or so the boundary that was to define the heart of London for the coming millennia had been drawn. The Roman wall – masonry built and moated magnificently – stretched from a hill in the east, later to be known as Tower Hill, to Ludgate Hill and the River Fleet in the west, and from the banks of the Thames inland for three-quarters of a kilometre or so. There was a substantial suburb south of the Thames, along the Dover Road, and some small scatterings of buildings on the north bank beyond the wall. The River Walbrook flowed through the heart of the city, from the north to the Thames, with the Temple of Mithras, built in the mid third century, and the Governor’s Palace on its east bank. To the west of the Walbrook was the early-second-century amphitheatre, a bath complex and the large Cripplegate Fort. Between the River Walbrook and Tower Hill there was the predictable orthogonal grid of streets – with the second-century forum and its vast basilica at their centre – which connected ultimately to the city’s six gates including one, later known as Bishopsgate, that stood astride Ermine Street.

Roman law prohibited the burial of bodies or funerary urns within towns and cities so the fields and roadsides outside the wall of Londinium became the land of the dead. Here remains could be interred decently and hygienically and the dead honoured through appropriate memorials. Roman London had four main cemeteries that remained in use until Rome abandoned Britain in AD 410: first, from the late first century AD, to the west (just beyond Newgate next to the road to Silchester); to the south in Southwark (next to the Dover road); to the east in Aldgate (next to what is now the Minories); and finally, from the mid third century AD, just beyond Londinium’s main north-east gate. This great north cemetery occupied fields to either side of Ermine Street, but with most burials being to the east of the road, perhaps because of associations with sunrise and rebirth. (Before this large cemetery was begun burial on the north edge of the city took place on the banks of the Walbrook from the late first century AD, on the site of what is now Finsbury Circus.)

As the north cemetery came into use Londinium was occupied by fewer people than 150 or so years previously, when the population of the rough and ready frontier trading town was probably as high as 50,000. By the end of the second century AD the population could have been as low as 20,000, but the residents were more cultured and wealthier.¹ The elevated status of the residents of second- and third-century Londinium is revealed by excavations of burials from the period.

Roman funerary monuments, like those that still survive beside the Via Appia outside Rome and along the roads leading from Pompeii, served to ensure that the names of the lofty dead would greet, inspire, and linger in the memories of the living as they thronged the great roads of the Empire. Londinium, too, would have had its fine funerary edifices, as is suggested by the 2013 discovery on the site of the eastern cemetery of a sixty-five-centimetre imperial eagle, carved out of Cotswold limestone in about AD 200, depicted clutching a serpent in its beak to symbolise immortality and power – clearly part of a large memorial to a once mighty man. Such exuberant funerary monuments must have lined Ermine Street, too, marking the final resting place for cremated ashes in urns or bodies placed in coffins and stone sarcophagi accompanied with grave-goods for use in the journey to the Underworld and afterlife.² Inhumation tended to become more common from the late first century, possibly in response to an increasing belief in an afterlife achieved through the resurrection of the body, inspired by Middle Eastern religions such as the Persian Mithraic mystery cult and then from the fourth century onward by Christianity. At the same time, inhumation offered an opportunity to honour the dead through rich offerings and, perhaps, burial ritual and the insulation of the body in sanctified earth was seen as a way to prevent the dead from haunting the living.

The landscape around Ermine Street was, it seems, sacred to the late Romans and Romano-British just as later it would be to Anglo-Norman Christians. Its location just outside the city wall made it a legitimate and convenient place for burial. But was there another reason why this was designated holy ground? There is evidence of local springs. Perhaps a small tributary of the Walbrook meandered through the fields around Ermine Street. This could have been enough to transform the terrain, in Roman imagination, into the marshy hinterland of the emblematic Acheron – the ‘River of Woe’ and source of the Styx – across which the newly dead were supposedly ferried by Charon to enter the Underworld.

During excavations in the late 1990s of part of the north cemetery, on the western edge of Spitalfields, around 150 Roman graves and two cremation urns were found. For the most part these were not particularly well preserved, and most contained people of humble status. But there was one notable exception that reveals the grandeur of late-Roman London. In a lead coffin set within a limestone sarcophagus – and perhaps once marked by a striking stone monument – was found the body of a wealthy young woman, whose burial shrouds included fabrics made of silk and gold thread. Artefacts found within the sarcophagus suggest that she died around AD 400, and she appears not to have been a Christian. Recent research has revealed lead content in her bones characteristic of a native of Rome. We know little else about her, but it is intriguing to think that only a decade or so before Roman legions were withdrawn from Britannia, Rome-born citizens of high birth were still coming to Londinium, perhaps to visit or oversee the estates that remained in their possession even as the empire receded. Or perhaps they were even still settling in the city. It suggests that the end – when it came – was dramatic and largely unexpected.

Tantalising brief and partial evocations of the Spitalfields Roman dead are offered by fragmentary memorials that have, over the decades, been found on the site of the cemetery. These give names, ages and sometimes occupations, but little else. For example in 1922 a slab measuring 34 x 26.5 centimetres was found off Bishopsgate. It commemorated ‘Sempronius Sempronianus, centurion of the [erased] Legion, aged fifty-one, and his brothers Sempronius … and Sempronius Secundus.’ The memorial, now in the Museum of London, was erected by Sempronius Sempronianus’s freedmen to honour their ‘well-deserving patrons’.

A more vivid portrait of the ritual and artefacts of Roman death is offered by John Stow, who described the first large-scale excavation, admittedly inadvertent and most brutal, of the great north cemetery. Stow, who was born in about 1525 in Cornhill in the City, was a merchant tailor but later kept a shop near Aldgate pump. An amateur topographer with a love of London – its customs, traditions and history – he was also a pioneering antiquarian who looked not just at documents, tombs, paintings, churches and great buildings but at everyday, humble, even mouldering objects. For him these were things of wonder and full of interest. He seemed to like nothing better than to visit demolition sites or excavations in and around London, to see what might turn up and to document what he saw. Even in the 1570s London was still small enough for one man, with energy and commitment, to walk all its streets and get to know them well, and that’s just what Stow did. His walks, explorations and discoveries formed the basis of his Survey of London, published first in 1598 and soon reissued in 1603. In the late 1570s his wanderings took him to Spitalfields where ancient and curious objects were being unearthed. To the east of the former priory churchyard, he noted in his Survey:

He observed that:

Interestingly, if Stow is correct about the coins, and if they date the burials with which they were associated, then they reveal that the north cemetery was in use from the mid first century AD – like the other city cemeteries – and well before the time suggested by more recent archaeological evidence. Stow also listed among the finds made in 1576:

He also revealed his collector’s instinct:

Stow came to the conclusion that not all the burials dated from Roman times:

Sadly Stow’s collection of antiquities – which must have been extensive and exceedingly interesting – has been lost without trace. His assumption that the cemetery continued to be used into the early Anglo-Saxon period, though, was probably correct. The north–south orientation of the buried would seem to suggest these were the bodies of non-Christians (this orientation was common in Roman burial grounds though; so too was an east–west orientation). Had Stow found remains with the head placed at the west end of the grave and looking east – towards sunrise, Jerusalem and Christ coming at the End of Days – then it would almost certainly have suggested the body was that of a Christian.

The history of Spitalfields after Rome withdrew its protection from Britain in AD 410 is frustratingly vague, and the next 600 years or so are shrouded in obscurity. It would seem that the Roman city was gradually and largely abandoned with, naturally, the great north cemetery rapidly falling into disuse and its graves and monuments left to decay or to the predations of robbers.

It is possible that the western part of the city might have contained administrative and religious areas: St Paul’s Cathedral is generally believed to have been established on or near its current site in AD