Bethnal Green Library
The ‘green’ in Bethnal Green might long since have been buried beneath buildings had it not been for the charitable instincts of the local people, and the urge to have their own little bit of ‘green belt’ in the East End. It is also home to a building that legend insists has one of the most diverse and extraordinary histories of any you’ll find.
By 1678, the little hamlet of Bethnal Green was losing its status as a country retreat from the city. This had been the rural haven for the legendary Blind Beggar (supposedly young Simon de Montford, blinded at the Battle of Evesham in 1265). And as recently as 1666, Samuel Pepys had come to the ‘countryside’ of Bethnal Green to seek shelter from the Great Fire of London in the mansion of his friend William Ryder. Pepys claimed that this was the very same house built by Montford, and in the 1660s it still sat in lovely gardens bearing ‘the greatest quantity of strawberries I ever saw’.
But by the late 1670s the area was swiftly becoming built up - the Plague and the Great Fire had played a large part, forcing people outside of the old city walls. The locals around the green purchased the 11.5 acres of land from the lady of the manor. In 1690, the farmland was established as a trust, with the income from the leases funding a charity for the ‘yearly relief of the poor’. The green and the charity that administered it was dubbed the Green and Poor’s Land, and it soon became a necessary support for local people fallen on hard times. The funds were further augmented when Thomas Parmiter, one of the trustees, contributed money of his own, from the sale of his Suffolk estate. This allowed for a school and six almshouses to be built ‘on the waste of Bethnal Green’. Parmiter’s School is probably the most enduring legacy of the Green and Poor’s charity, successively moving to larger premises in Bethnal Green (it began with ten pupils), before moving out to Hertfordshire in 1977.
The building of the almshouses and schoolhouse wouldn’t come about until the early 1700s, but in the meantime the trustees began disbursing their income, and from 1685, 24 poor families got a yearly supply of coal plus £12 in cash.
The main house on the green was still the manor visited by Pepys, though it’s impossible to tell now whether the building variously known as Bethnal House and Kirby’s Castle was one edifice or various structures that have become combined in the confusion of history. If it was a single structure, it had an extraordinary succession of occupants. Prior to Pepys’ friend Ryder, the house is supposed to have been home to Sir Hugh Platt, an Elizabethan farmer and inventors who developed the science of pickling and preserving food, in response to the problem of keeping the Navy in fresh supplies. He was knighted by James I for his work. But to muddy the waters, some stories have Platt’s ‘fine country house’ in Bethnal Green being called the ‘Bishop’s House’, and it’s likely that a number of manors on the green have had their histories intertwined.
But certainly Pepys’s visits saw the end of Bethnal Green as a fashionable area. In 1727, Kirby’s Castle was leased to Matthew Wright, as a lunatic asylum. Among the most celebrated patients were the poet Christopher Smart and Alexander Cruden (whose ‘Concordance’, an exhaustive index to the Bible, has been a standard reference work, in continuous print since 1737). The old mansion, also confusingly known as ‘the White House’ was finally demolished and a new asylum built on the spot in 1896. The building stands to this day … as Bethnal Green Library.
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The Ballad of the Blind Beggar
The poem, ballard or song, alternatively known as ‘The Blind Beggar’ or ‘The Beggar’s Daughter of Bednall Green’ became a favourite down the centuries, existing in several versions and added to by various writeers including Robert Dodsley. As it runs to some 64 four-line stanzas, each in the same AA-BB rhyming scheme it can be a bit heavy-going for modern readers. We don’t propose to reprint it all here (we’d need an extra page or two), but there is a copy online at http://theotherpages.org/poems/ballad02.html.