More London Peculiars by Peter Ashley
Since the publication of Peter Ashley’s book ‘London Peculiars’ in 2004, much has changed in London. The Routemaster buses have left service, Wembley Stadium has been finished and, thanks to the Olympics, people outside the East End know where Stratford is. But a thousand tiny details remain, the ‘peculiars’ that make London unique.
Ashley and his camera go looking for the little oddities, not necessarily grand builldings (though there are several of those too in his new collection, ‘More London Peculiars’. For if London is rarely a spectacular or stunning city in the way of Manhattan, Florence or Paris, it has many centuries of idiosyncratic detail that make it far more interesting. Ashley focuses his lens on the council-flat railings made from World War II ARP stretchers, the tombstone of the pet Alsation of the last Weimar Republic ambassador to London, and the tobacco Indians of St James’s Street.
The East End, of course, features strongly. The east London churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor are discussed in some detail. Ashley quotes writer Ian Nairn who puts his finger on the strangeness yet cohesion of the great architect’s work: ‘in the maddest of Hawksmoor’s designs there is always architectural and religious logic’ There are so many extraordinary details: the pepper pot turrets of St-George-in-the-East; the massive tower of St Anne’s Limehouse, which gathers together bell openings, pilasters, columns and obelisks; the visual trick of Christ Church Spitalfields, where it appears the tower is balanced on stilts of stone. Such unusual churches are they that many have spectaculated and fantasised (not least Peter Ackroyd in his marvellous novel ‘Hawksmoor’) that the churches are giant masonic shrines, four pieces in a demonic puzzle. The author describes them as ‘white Portland stone codes still waiting to be deciphered’.
Hawksmoor was, of course, an East End boy during the Great Plague of 1665. That morbid time is echoed in another East End church, St Olave’s. In ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’, Charles Dickens enthuses about the little church between Hart Street and Seeting Lane, with its trio of skulls in the curved pediment of the entrance. ‘Such strange churchyards hide in the City of London’. St Olave’s was Dickens’s favourite ‘one of my best beloved, which I call the churchyard of Ghastly Grim’, with its ferocious iron gate spiked like a jail, the gate surmounted with a larger than life skull and crossbones, wrought in stone and then thrust through with iron spears. A no-nonsense sight for mourners going to visit their departed friends. This church survived the Great Fire of 1666, was blitzed in World War II but survives largely unscathed. Samuel Pepys and wife Elizabeth are buried there.
In Donovan Bros of Spitalfields, ‘the noted house for paper bags’, Ashley is delighted to find an antique Spitalfields shop front still more or less intact, having first snapped it in the late 1980s. Spitalfields, with the ever-encroaching City, has changed a lot in the intervening two decades, but Donovan Bros (which now does business in Essex) belongs to another world, when Spitalfields was a working fruit and veg market and little businesses thrived in its shadow. Strange to think now that there were once little cigarette and cigar ‘manufactories’ dotted all around the capital. Godfrey Phillips started trading as a cigar merchant in 1865 at the meeting of Commercial Street and Jerome Street, and 50 years later the company built a slimline Art Deco factory here, producing Ariston Plain and The Greys brands of cigarettes. Today, a gilded wall sign is all that remains.
In Bow, of course, they made the matches that lit the fags. Bryant and May stopped making their safety matches in Fairfield Road in 1979, now the Bow Quarter offers what the developers called ‘Manhattan-style loft living’ (though without the cockroaches obviously). Actually, Manhattan is quite wrong. Gaze at the Italianate water tower of the main building, built in red industrial brick to last centuries, and you could be gazing at a campanile in Florence or Siena. Size isn’t everything of course. Equally delightful is the little cast-iron chimney on Tower Bridge. Ornately disguised to blend in with the lamp standards on the bridge walkway, it in fact served the fireplace in the guardroom below the bridge. The ironfounder’s name and address is still clearly visible on the flue: Durham Brothers, 205 Bow Road, E.
Spitalfields features again with some lovely pictures of the old silk weavers houses of Fournier Street, Wilkes Street and Princelet Street. These were very nearly demolished a few decades back, and as recently as the 1980s ‘you could look through letterboxes at big empty and dusty hallways … staircases ascending into the gloom of upper floors’. Photos of the restored houses today show just how much has been saved, though the days of people picking up a distressed weavers’ house for a song have long gone - architectural salvage has now matured into unaffordable real estate.
The East End has some love-em-or-hate-em modern curiosities too. Fatboy’s Diner on Trinity Buoy Wharf, perhaps picked up from the American Midwest by a Kansas whirlwind and dropped in east London, is wonderfully incongruous, The same site sees the brightly coloured Container City, a giant child’s playset of a building. And then of course there are all the peculiars outside the East End … you’ll just have to read the book.
More London Peculiars by Peter Ashley, ISBN 9781850749998, £15.99