For anyone who is interested in the fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, I am attaching a link to the post I have written for the Apollo blog and which has just been published. It is similar to what I wrote at the weekend on my own blog, but with a touch more historical and other detail:-

What will become of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry?

I know I have written about Keeling House before, but I am posting some photographs I took of it on Monday which I hope demonstrate its utopian character (designed 1955) and crisp rectilinear geometry, a product of the care that Lasdun put into every aspect of its design to ensure a combination of privacy (every maisonette had its own balcony) and community.   Lasdun wrote, ‘These were people who came from little terraced houses or something with backyards.   I used to lunch with them and try and understand a bit more what mattered to them, and they were proud people’:-

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Following my post about Hoxton, I have been trying to figure out more accurately the precise division between Hoxton and Haggerston, which were created as separate parishes out of Shoreditch in 1830.   The problem seems to be that they are parishes, municipal neighbourhoods and, in the case of Hoxton, a state of mind.   I had thought that the boundary lay north-south down the Kingsland Road, as suggested by the location of Haggerston Park and Haggerston School, but I’ve realised it could be east-west along the Regent’s Canal, as suggested by the names of the stations on the new Overground.   Perhaps someone can enlighten me ?

To help confuse matters, I am adding (which I omitted from my previous post) the terracotta ornament on the building which was once the Shoreditch Electric Light Station, has the wonderful inscription E PULVERE LUX ET VIS on its façade, and is in Coronet Street, Hoxton:-

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The last of my posts from what turned out to be a long walk on the last day of the Christmas holiday concerns the two great gasholders on the bend of the Regent’s Canal, just near Broadway Market.   I received an email telling me – surprise, surprise – that they are likely to be demolished.   The smaller one is the earlier, dating from 1866, designed by Joseph Clark, the chief engineer of the gasworks.   The bigger one was added in 1889.   They supplied gas to the Shoreditch gasworks, which in turn supplied gas for the street lighting of east London:-

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I feel slightly badly that Hoxton has so few entries in my book – only one – whereas neighbouring Haggerston has seven.   So, I went to explore it.

I had never seen St. John the Baptist, Hoxton, a Commissioner’s Church built in 1826 to a design by Francis Edwards, a pupil of John Soane, with fantastic Ionic capitals and very good iron railings:-

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I walked past Norton Folgate today which still stands derelict, awaiting redevelopment after Boris gave the new scheme planning permission as one of his last acts as Mayor.   Like the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, it’s a reminder that London’s prosperity was once industrial as well as commercial and is the reason why Dan Cruickshank’s recent book about Spitalfields ends so pessimistically.   After forty years of fighting to save the historic character of Spitalfields, he feels the battle is now lost:-

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Since the weather was so fine, I walked up from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry into Spitalfields, passing the surviving entry to model dwellings constructed in 1886 by Nathaniel Rothschild’s Four per cent Industrial Dwellings Company:-

I had never actually walked down Fashion Street before, with its Moorish-style arcade of 1905:-

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Having spent the morning writing about the fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry which is due to be either closed or moved in May this year, I thought I should go and have a look at it, even though I knew it would be closed.   It’s always been said to be a building of 1738, owing to an entry in the company history, but recent research by the Survey of London has discovered that the lease on the so-called ‘Old Artichoke Alehouse’ was advertised in the Daily Advertiser on 31 August 1743 and it was only in 1747 that the site was described as ‘a new built messuage’.   It’s a remarkably well preserved piece of industrial architecture and good if it can be preserved as a working museum, as the SPAB apparently plan:-

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Stimulated by reading Roger Deakin’s Waterlogged, I remembered that I had friends who used to go swimming every morning in Victoria Park.   But where ?  The answer must have been in the Lido, designed in 1934 by H.A. Rowbotham and T.L. Smithson with a shingle beach and diving boards and opened in May 1936 by Herbert Morrison as part of a three-year ‘Labour Plan for Health for London’.   Re-opened after war damage in May 1952, with accommodation for a thousand swimmers, it was closed (dates vary) in 1989, demolished in 1990 and not re-instated when the Park was recently revived.

I have been trying to figure out the relationship between Paul Nash and John Nash, apart from the fact that they were brothers and exhibited together at the Dorien Leigh Gallery in Pelham Street in November 1913.   It is Paul who gets the retrospective at the Tate and John who, so far as I could see, goes unmentioned.   But it was John who lived longer, till 1977, became an RA, and had what is described as the first retrospective by a living RA in 1967.   I think the answer must lie in a photograph of the two brothers taken in 1937 by Lance Sieveking and now in the NPG, which has a large collection of photographs of John Nash, donated by Ronald Blythe, who now lives in Nash’s house, Bottengoms Farm, in the Stour valley.   John is dressed conventionally and looks a bit quizzical.   Paul has wide lapels, is wearing a bow tie and lives in Hampstead.   The only clue I can find to what they thought of one another is in Ronald Blythe’s obit. of John in which he says that they hated being described, as they were in their first exhibition, as ‘the brothers Nash’.

Happy New Year !