Tunnels, Towers & Temples - London’s Strangest Places
Many cities are defined by their soaring towers - Manhattan, Shanghai, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur and the rest compete to outdo the next town with the latest shimmering shard of glass and steel. London’s different - our Gherkins and Canary Wharfs barely scratch the ankles of the world’s tallest buildings. Maybe that’s because a 2000-year-old city feels less need to show off. But also, with generation upon generation, layer upon layer of building, much of our most interesting stuff is in the little curiosities, in buildings that are hidden, or even underground.
David Long’s ‘Tunnels, Towers & Temples - London’s Strangest Places’, is a mini coffee table slab with some worthy mentions of East End and City places. This sideways look at London’s ‘built environment’ is a great way in to London and the East End. The best way to get to know a city is to get off the well-beaten tourist routes and into the grubby corners, and Long’s book has plenty of those. At the corner of Chance Street and Whitby Street, at the City end of Bethnal Green Road, you happen upon the ‘massive corner slab’ of the ‘Dirty House’. Architect David Adjaye’s remodelling of a Victorian brick terrace, as a live-work space for artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster is at the heart of Shoreditch’s reinvention as London’s artists’ quarter: neighbours include Antony Gormley, Michael Craig Martin and Rachel Whiteread (in that East End staple, the converted synagogue).
A little way south in Spitalfields lie the ‘elegant sweatshops’ of Wilkes Street in Spitalfields, the old weavers’ houses built for Huguenots who fled here following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Clustered around Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, the terraces were long in the shadow of demolition before being saved by campaigners (both private owners and the Spitalfields Housing Trust) from the 1980s onward. These are houses of such simple beauty that it is extraordinary to think they were ever threatened with redevelopment.
Head down to the river at Wapping Wall and you’ll find the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. Nowadays it’s the Wapping Project, a posh restaurant serving ’substantial modern Mediterranean food and an all Australian wine list’ but for more than a century it was home to the London Hydraulic Power Company. From the little brick building, a network of nearly 200 miles of tunnels radiated from Limehouse in the east to Earls Court Exhibition Centre in the west; from Pentonville Road in the north and south under the river to Southwark and Rotherhithe. The conduits carried water pressurised to 600lb per square inch, the power to drive hotel lifts, theatre curtains, dockyard cranes and presses for forging, flanging and hat-blocking around the capital. Heath Robinson it may sound, but such was the Victorian genius for invention before electricity came along to solve the problem. The station opened in 1890 and only closed in 1977, with its tunnels (one big enough to drive a car through) now used to carry fibre optic cables.
There’s another example of a new use for old tunnelling right next door - albeit on a much grander scale. Wapping Underground Station, currently closed during the extension of the East London Line, isn’t much to look at - the interesting stuff lies beneath. The Thames Foot Tunnel was constructed over 18 years by the Brunels, at heavy cost in both money and human life. An engineering miracle, it was also a white elephant, until taken over by the new East London Railway in 1865. At least it found a new use. Columbia Market was a laudable attempt by philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts to give East Enders a decent place to both shop and run market stalls, a full 400 of them. Opened in 1869, it struggled unsuccessfully along until 1886, and was finally demolished in 1958, despite protests from many including architecture historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner.
Older by far is the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which was a century and a half in business before it moved into its ‘new’ premises on Whitechapel Road in 1583. Shortly afterwards the foundry was casting the bells for Westminster Abbey. The business moved to its current home in 1670, and here they made the bells for Russia’s new capital of St Petersburg in 1747 and for Christ Church in Philadelphia in 1784. Most famously, the largest bell ever made in London was cast here. Big Ben first rang out in July 1859.
It’s well worth heading out from the East End, to oddities such as the ancient place of sanctuary in Ely Place in the City (technically part of Cambridgeshire); to London’s own aqueduct, which runs through Myddleton Square, EC1; the sewer-powered gas lamp in Carting Lane, WC2; and Coram’s Fields, where adults are only allowed in if accompanied by a child.
‘Tunnels, Towers & Temples - London’s Strangest Places’ by David Long, published by the History Press, £19.99 hardback, ISBN 9780750945097.