eastlondonhistory.com

Ancient history and the latest technology have been working impressively together at two East End sites. The first site is the Prescot Street dig in Aldgate, where archaeologists are steadily unearthing a cornucopia of artefacts from Roman London.The second is in cyberspace, the www.lparchaeology.com website, which in superb detail shows the background to and the progress of the excavations. There are features about the Prescot Street area in Roman, medieval and early modern times. There is a comprehensive glossary so you can establish the difference between your crematoria and charnel houses. And there are some marvellous pictures, video clips and Google maps putting you right at the heart of the dig. Best of all, the website is updated ‘blog’ style, so

But why is it all so important? Most of all because this is where London started. Established in the first century AD, after Britain had been invaded and absorbed by the mighty Roman empire, Londonium was from the first a place of trade, business and commerce. For nearly 2000 years it would be the main gateway into Britain and thus of enormous strategic and commercial importance. Roman historian Tacitus leaves us the first surviving reference to London, though he was a bit sniffy about the upstart place. ‘London, a place not dignified with the name of a colony, but the chief residence of merchants, and the great mart of trade and commerce.’

This great city’s burial place is a fascinating research lab for the scientists, trying to find out how the Romans lived, how they died and what of, what they ate, and how they dealt with death. The picture that emerges is far from the tidy Roman town of stone bath houses and piped hot water (though the incidence of lead poisoning in the fragmentary remains suggests they could have suffered badly from their state of the art lead water pipes). Roman London was a rough frontier town, with people descending from all over the Empire to work and trade. Even back then, London was multicultural and some bodies were cremated and some buried. There is a surprisingly low number of children and women in the grave - archaeologists speculate that the large number of young (male) soldiers and civil servants may have skewed this figure, though it’s possible that women and children were buried elsewhere. As more and more is uncovered, you realise just how much we still have to learn.

It’s not just the Romans of course. One particularly damp trench had allowed the preservation of a leather shoe ‘vamp’ (upper) from the turn of the 15th century. Shoemaking was an important trade in medieval London, with the Cordwainers Company surviving to this day in Mincing Lane, EC3. And getting away from the dig itself, from the Middle Ages we have much more documentary evidence of how the area developed. By Medieval times, the Prescot Street site was under farmed fields. By the time of the 1665 Great Plague (and Great Fire the following year) maps still show it as open land, though with buildings encroaching around the edges. In William Morgan’s 1681 map, Goodman’s Fields is still a field. Interestingly, the maps of the time also show large houses with gardens - the area was apparently moneyed at the time. Come the 1873 Ordnance Survey map, and we see warehouses, goods yards and an increase in smaller (and thus poorer) housing, apparently built to accommodate the new and growing army of workers.

It all comes back to the Romans of course. And the dig and its website is a superb way to understand the London of 2000 or more years ago. Archaeologists running the dig are keen to encourage organised visits, through adult and community groups in projects at the Prescot Street site. Schools too can get involved, and the team are producing educational resources aimed at primary pupils. The dig will also take part in National Archaeology Week in July 2008. Check out the website at www.lparchaeology.com or contact Lorna Richardson at l.richardson@lparchaeology.com.

Tags: London history, Ancient Romans

An interesting little book wings its way to us for review this week, in Paul Talling’s ‘Derelict London’. We become used to new towers of glass and steel soaring above the East End, while scarcely a day seems to go by without earth being broken on a new development of luxury flats. But what about the bits in between, the buildings that get forgotten.

For years now, Paul Talling has been photographing ‘Derelict London’ on his website of the same name. What he finds isn’t the picturesque London of the guidebooks - though the buildings are often very beautiful if sadly decayed. Now Derelict London has gone into print and, sadly perhaps, the East End has more than its share of entries.

There are houses, flats, docks, factories and shops. Pubs and cafes rub shoulders with public baths and cinemas, schools, hospitals and the odd fire station. There are boats and trains and the grand Victorian cemeteries of London.

Some of the structures are hidden and easy to miss though. A pillbox in Bow, next to the River Lea, is one memento of World War II. The Lea itself is, of course, as a mystery to many East Enders - just part of the labyrinth of waterways that snakes around the eastern edge of the borough. Bow Creek too is a mess of derelict factories. The Pura vegetable oil works is captured in the book, but is now gone. Sitting on the fringes of the Olympic site, the area is to go under concrete with the building of 2500 new homes. And Pudding Mill River, one of the Bow Backs, is a sad sight, chockful of old car tyres. It is though a habitat for swans, pike, eel and the black redstart, one of Britain’s rarest birds.

Other buildings have gone through changes before eventually becoming redundant. The VIP Garage in Limehouse was originally built in 1869 as a sailmaker and ship chandler’s warehouse. From 1889 it was the home to Caird & Rayner, who built boilers for Royal Navy ships, before ending its days as a garage. An attractive building, with cast iron window frames and double loading doors, it will nonetheless be demolished to make way for flats.

And some buildings are failed ventures in the last great wave of East End regeneration. Tobacco Dock is a beautiful brick building with fine ironwork, built in 1812 to store tobacco coming off the ships in Wapping. The moribund building was converted into a shopping centre but never took off and today stands eerily empty. Outside, meanwhile, are two defunct red telephone boxes. Removed by BT, then brought out of mothballs, and finally killed off by the ubiquitous mobile phone. A public toilet in Poplar is another reminder of a utility that once seemed to be everywhere … but now is very hard to find!

The docks, canals and rivers of the East End, which played such a vital role in trade and manufacturing, appear over and over again. There is the Chisenhale Works in Bow, built by Morris Cohen in 1943 to produce parts for Spitfire and Mosquito aircraft. There is the Tate Institute in Silvertown, founded by Sir Henry Tate to allow the workers in his sugar factory to enjoy some leisure and self improvement time.

Pubs are closing all over the country of course, but there’s still something plaintive about a blacked-out London boozer, especially when it’s a building as fine as The Crown and Shuttle in Shoreditch. Brick Lane’s last pub, the Seven Stars, is now boarded up too, perhaps a casualty of the changing population of the area. And the marvellously named Flying Scud now stands empty, the ubiquitous flyposters papering every available surface.

You can’t help but mourn the passing of certain buildings. Couldn’t Poplar well do with a public baths … Poplar Baths has stood empty for 23 years now.

Sometimes the buildings are saved, though often only a facade remains. The result can be seamless though occasionally it can be bizarre, as in the Providence Row Refuge and Convent in Spitalfields. A swift double take of the Victorian facade reveals new, yellow brick offices lurking behind the empty window frames. And the irony of the regeneration of Tower House, one of the original Rowton House hostels built to provide decent accommodation for working men, is striking. The derelict building is accommodation for London workers again, though this time luxury flats at hundreds of pounds a week.

Just a taster. Paul Talling has hundreds more on his website, and from the rest of London too, with new photos being added all the time. Check it out at www.derelictlondon.com.

In the late 1500s, the Isle of Dogs was a marshy wasteland, rather given to flooding and more commonly known as ‘Stepney Marsh’. But in 1597 the name gained infamy, as the title of an early play by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe. So scandalous was the content that the play was immediately banned and Jonson and his actors imprisoned. But what could have been so terrible about words on a stage that the whole force of the state had to suppress them?

Jonson, born in London in 1572, was one of the great writers of the English Renaissance, and one of England’s greatest dramatists and poets. He was also a contemporary of William Shakespeare, being one of the coterie of writers who would gather, drink and talk in the Mermaid Tavern, among them Ford, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Chapman and Marston. Like most of them, including Shakespeare, he was an actor first (if not a very successful one). He had been apprenticed as a bricklayer in his Westminster youth, and became a soldier in the Netherlands, by his own account killing an opponent in single combat. Jonson had far more life experience than many of the young playwrights, he was also ferociously well read though not universally liked - colleagues and opponents found him arrogant and prickly, and he was notoriously quick to take offence. Indeed his plays, political satires and comedies, were peopled with two-timers, financial tricksters, and had Byzantine plots in which Jonson’s private scores were settled.

His plays were often set in London (though like Shakespeare he would occasionally stray abroad) and he wasn’t frightened about putting the boot into the foibles of his fellows. And his targets were often all too recognisable. In ‘Isle of Dogs’ he may have struck too close to home. The first theatre in London had only been established 20 years before, and a nervous Government saw Shoreditch playhouses The Theatre and The Curtain, and Bankside’s Globe as dangerous places of mockery and dissent … they were watching the activities of Shakespeare, Jonson and the rest very carefully.

So, in 1597, ‘Isle of Dogs’ came to the attention of RIchard Topcliffe. Topcliffe was an extraordinarily unpleasant character during this bloody and turbulent period of English history. Trained as a lawyer at Gray’s Inn he led a peaceful life into his early forties, managing his estates in Yorkshire. But promoted to the Privy Council in the 1570s, he launched enthusiatically into his role of pursuing ‘Recusants’. These were those who refused to accept the primacy of the state religion, the Church of England. That meant Catholics largely, who lived under constant suspicion (not entirely unfounded) that they were plotting to overthrow England’s Protestant Crown and Government. Topcliffe nursed a fanatical loathing of Catholics and their Church. So fond was Topcliffe of torturing his suspects that he had a private torture chamber built in his home in London. He also personally supervised the hanging, drawing and quartering of victims, and was known to have raped one of his prisoners, Anne Bellamy.

Little wonder that Jonson and Nashe were horrified to find themselves on the wrong side of the psychopathic and perverted Topcliffe. Nashe already had plenty of previous with the authorities. He was a friend of Kit Marlowe, wrote pornographic poems and his works freely poured petrol on the religio-political rows of the day. The duo’s new work, a satirical comedy, was first performed by Pembroke’s Men at the Swan Theatre in Bankside in July or August of 1597. It was immediately reported to the authorities as ‘a lewd play full of slanderous matter’, and the location of the Isle of Dogs, opposite the Greenwich palace where the Privy Council sat (the Cabinet of its day), may have been a deliberate provocation. Contemporaries suggest that the Queen and her court was being satirised. Among the many legends surrounding the name of the peninsula is that the Isle of Dogs had been King Edward III’s kennels - perhaps the pair were drawing a parallel between the sycophantic courtiers and a pack of kept dogs. Certainly Nashed had already used the metaphor for his ‘Summer’s Last Will’: “Here’s a coyle about dogges without wit. If I had thought the ship of fooles would have stayed to take in fresh water at the Ile of dogges I would have furnished it with a whole kennel of collections to the purpose.”

Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury, chief spy for the Queen, and member of the Privy Council, acted swiftly. Jonson was sent to Marshalsea gaol in Southwark, along with actors Gabriel Spencer and Robert Shaa. Nashe fled home to Yarmouth, writing later that he had given birth to a monster and ‘It was no sooner borne but I was glad to runne from it.’ The nervous playwright tried to distance himself from the piece, claiming he had written mere fragments.

Job done, the authorities let the matter drop, and Jonson was out of jail in weeks. He would go on to write his great satirical comedies in the early years of the 17th century, with ‘Volpone’, ‘The Alchemist’, ‘Bartholomew Fair’ and a clutch more, as well as some of the finest poetry in the English language. Nowhere near as prolific as Shakespeare he was, during the 1600s, arguably more influential on English drama. If Jonson’s career was only beginning with ‘Isle of Dogs’, the young Nashe’s was already drawing to a close. Though he had written numerous poems and 11 plays in the decade leading up to ‘Isle of Dogs’, he would produce only one piece of work after it. The year and circumstances of his death are a mystery - though he was certainly dead by 1601. He was just 34 and his most famous work is lost forever.

Big Ben celebrated its 150th anniversary last week, its distinctive cracked tone ringing out on April the tenth, and giving the world’s most famous bell a character that some more perfect instruments lack. Big Ben and Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell are only the best known products of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, Britain’s oldest manufacturing company and in continuous business since 1570, with the roots of the company going back to 1420.

But Big Ben might not have that slightly off-key sound had it not been for the persistent meddling of the man put in charge of the project. Edmund Beckett Denison QC was a man who didn’t like to admit he was wrong - although in his opinion the occasion didn’t arise. It was an arrogance that would see him the lawyer end up in court himself, sued twice for libel by the Whitechapel firm.

Big Ben was the job nobody wanted. The old Palace of Westminster, which had stood for hundreds of years and survived plotting by Guy Fawkes and his pals, was razed by fire on 16 October 1834. A new Houses of Parliament was needed, and the members decided a new clock tower, with mighty bell, should cap the project. Charles Barry, the architect building the new Parliament, in 1844 invited a single clockmaker to submit a proposal for the tower clock but there were howls of protest from rival clockmakers and the job went out to tender. Astronomer Royal, George Airey drew up a specification that was fiendishly exacting. Among his demands that ‘ the first stroke of the hour bell should register the time, correct to within one second per day, and furthermore that it should telegraph its performance twice a day to Greenwich Observatory, where a record would be kept.’

The clockmakers suddenly fell silent. The spec Airey had given was impossible in the eyes of the experts, but the Astronomer Royal wouldn’t back down. Parliament broke the deadlock by appointing Sir Edmund. The first Baron Grimthorpe was “zealous but unpopular, self-accredited expert on clocks, locks, bells, buildings, as well as many branches of law, Denison was one of those people who are almost impossible as colleagues, being perfectly convinced that they know more than anybody about everything - as unhappily they often do.”

And he did in this case, though progress was slow. In 1851 he came up with a design of his own. The timepiece, meeting Airey’s strict demands was built by Messrs EJ Dent & Co. These master clockmakers are still in business incidentally, producing the station platform clock for the revitalised St Pancras Station. Dents finished the clock in 1854 and it was held at their works for the next five years … the tower wouldn’t be ready until 1859.

Now Beckett, newly made Sir Edmund, moved to the bells. The brilliant Barry had been ambitious but vague in his demands. A 14-ton bell was specified with four smaller quarter chime bells, but that was as far as he went. Sir Edmund’s clock researches had brought him into contact with bells too, and he was confident he could design the things. The problem was, the biggest bell ever cast in Britain had been less than 11 tons, Great Peter at York Minster. This time it was the bell founders of Britain who fell silent. Adding to their concern, Sir Edmund had designed the bell, giving it an unconventional shape and a new recipe for the bell metal. John Warner & Sons at Stockton-on-Tees came up with a 16-ton answer on 6 August 1856, but it cracked beyond repair while being tested at Palace Yard in Westminster.

Denison sacked Warners and gave the broken bell to George Mears, master founder and owner of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Mears quoted £2401, but knocked off £1829 as he was able to melt down the broken bell - a job that took a week and three furnaces. The finished bell, which took 20 days to cool, was then ceremonially carried on a trolley from Whitechapel to Westminster. 16 beribboned horses processed over London Bridge, through Borough and back over Westminster Bridge, cheered all the way by crowds.

And two months after it had been hauled into place, Big Ben cracked again. Denison had demanded an over-heavy hammer. The bell went out of action for three years and was eventually spun a quarter turn and a lighter hammer fitted. The crack remained, giving Big Ben the slightly off tone for which it is famous.

But Sir Edmund wasn’t done. In an extraordinary twist he befriended one of the Whitechapel moulders, got him drunk and had him swear that the Whitechapel Foundry had cast the bell badly and bodged it with filler. The Foundry sued and Denison lost. Still he wouldn’t let it go. Twenty years later he repeated the libel in print. Whitechapel, now under a new founder, Robert Stainbank sued again. Again they won. But were they right? Experts examined Big Ben in 2002 to see if there had been a cover up. Not a trace of filler was found. Whitechapel Foundry had produced the best bell they could to Sir Edmund’s recipe, and 150 years later it’s still ringing out … if a little off key.

With many thanks to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which is at 32/34 Whitchapel Road, London E1 !DY, UK. www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk. You can visit the museum and shop, though note that you can’t actually watch the bells being cast … much too dangerous!