I was trying to remember the reference in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz to the old Ashkenazi cemetery on Alderney Road – or Alderney Street as it is called in the novel. Jacques Austerlitz lived in the street ‘quite a long way out in the East End of London. It is a remarkably quiet street running parallel to the main road not far from the Mile End junction, where there are always traffic jams and, on such Saturdays, market traders set up their stalls of clothes’. Alderney Road is one of a group of streets of 1860s terrace housing tucked between Queen Mary and the railway tracks:-
The Ocean Estate
The Ocean Estate has a bad name, but I’ve always liked the low-rise houses, which are well maintained, with a great deal of highly individualistic styling and have an atmosphere redolent of the homes for heroes of 50s Britain:-
Mile End Place
I called in on Mile End Place on Christmas morning – one of those, curious, unexpected snickets of artisan housing, backing on to the Jewish cemetery, so with only trees beyond:-
A Christmas Blog
This is to wish my followers a Happy Christmas, together with scenes from around the house in the last couple of days:
Cable Street
Cable Street was the heartland of the old east end, bombed in the war, the Tarling estate erected after it, but still with good early nineteenth-century houses in a row just north of the church.
This is the Tarling estate:-
Niall McLaughlin
I went to see the new building which Niall McLaughlin has put up in amongst some classic Peabody buildings just short of the Tower of London on John Fisher Street (previously Glasshouse Street). The original estate consists of nine buildings, each one labelled according to a letter of the alphabet, designed by H.A. Darbishire and built in 1880. Niall McLaughlin has added a thin, free-standing block, in appropriately austere pale brick, not aping the surroundings, but in sympathy with them:-
Whitechapel
I spent the morning wandering round Whitechapel, so much more densely built than Stepney, still with its tight nineteenth-century street formation. I particularly admired the work that the Spitalfields Trust has done in regenerating the streets off New Road – Turner Street, Walden Street and Varden Street – where the small artisans’ houses have been spruced and gentrified:-
The Deli Downstairs
A quick excursion in search of Stilton and a Christmas pudding took me to the Deli Downstairs, the headquarters of the Lauriston Road revival, past the long queue for the Ginger Pig and an opportunity to stock up on local ale from the Bottle Apostle:-
St. Bartholomew’s, Brighton
A Christmas outing to Brighton gave us an opportunity to call in on St. Bartholomew’s, the huge, neo-Byzantine barn which dominates arrival on the railway line. Austere brick and drainpipes outside, it is huge and numinous within, high vaulted, with the dusk falling on Henry Wilson’s richly ornamented baldacchino and the mosaics on the wall behind. It was built for Father Wagner, a wealthy, old Etonian tractarian, a bachelor who spent his wealth building big churches for the poor:-
Cressy House
The east end is full of surprises. Yesterday morning I walked down a road I’ve walked down a thousand times not far from our house and wandered into a courtyard where I found myself in a time warp of 1890s communitarian social idealism: a well-cared-for courtyard full of plants, a small house for the caretaker, bicycles and beehives. It’s Cressy House, austere on the outside, designed by Davis & Emmanuel, architects of the West London Synagogue, for the East End Dwellings Company, with communal staircases leading off the internal courtyard:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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