Reading Rowan Moore’s piece in the Observer this afternoon about the need for local authorities to start building again reminded me that this morning I spotted a tower block in the distance north of Victoria Park:-
Tag Archives: East London
St. Mary-of-Eton
I have several times admired the new housing development on either side of St. Mary-of-Eton, which is in no way deferential to Bodley’s 1892 original, but oddly enhances it by sandwiching it in between two exaggeratedly diapered brick blocks of flats. The original church and surrounding buildings were designed for Eton’s mission to East London. The new flats are purely commercial by Matthew Lloyd Architects and only completed last year:-
The Pavilion Café
I had breakfast in the Pavilion Café next door to the lake in Victoria Park. It’s strenuously organic, with meat from the Ginger Pig and eggs from West Sussex. I don’t normally like pictures of food which look like advertisements for a Chinese restaurant, but in honour of the quality of their smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, I am breaking my rule:-
Hall of Residence, Queen Mary
For some reason, I’ve never done a post about one of the more distinctive buildings in our neighbourhood – the big block of student flats designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley and completed in 2006, clad in copper sheathing which softens the Corbusian monumentality of the building:-
Novo Cemetery
The Novo Cemetery provided equality in death to the community of Sephardic Jews, who first migrated to England in the 1490s, following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal. More followed during the Commonwealth and the cemetery was established in 1733. It is strangely enclosed by Queen Mary and, like the Tower Hamlets Cemetery, is covered in bluebells:-
The New People’s Palace
We were walking along the Mile End Road this afternoon when we noticed some carvings inset into the building next to the Old People’s Palace. They looked reminiscent of work by Eric Gill. This is not surprising because they are indeed by Eric Gill, commissioned in 1936 after he had done similar work for the BBC. The building itself, combining theatre, cinema and music hall, was opened in 1937, designed by Campbell Jones & Smithers to provide popular entertainment to the east end.
The left hand Recreation is playing the pipes:-
Springtime in Stepney
On one of my occasional visits to Chelsea, I managed to leave my telephone behind so that, in spite of it being the most beautiful crisp morning, I was unable to take photographs of Argyle House or Paulton’s Square or the Moravian Burial Ground off the bend in the King’s Road, but instead am posting pictures of our garden instead:-
Tower Hamlets Cemetery
I have done posts on Tower Hamlets cemetery before, but never when it has been covered by bluebells, so that it is a curious mixture of the melancholy memorials of old East Enders, multicultural even in the nineteenth century, together with rampant spring:-
Bonner Primary School
I was walking through Mile End Park when I spotted in the distance what looked like unfamiliar turrets above the rows of standardised terrace housing to the east of the park. It turned out to be an early Board School at the junction of Ropery Street and Southern Grove, part of which was designed by E.R.Robson, but the bulk of it by T.J. Bailey, who had worked previously as Draughtsman and then as Assistant to Robson in the London Schools Board. A pretty grand piece of Edwardian Tudorbethan, it shows the ambition of the Schools Board:-
Queen Adelaide’s Dispensary
Just north of the Bethnal Green Road is Queen Adelaide’s Dispensary, which first opened in 1850 following a cholera epidemic in 1849 and acquired a grand new building in 1866 designed by Lee & Long in neo-Renaissance style with a bust of Queen Adelaide in the pediment:-
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