I tried to visit St. Mary Woolnoth between Christmas and the New Year.   But it was closed.   So, I slipped in instead at lunchtime  today.   It’s the Hawksmoor church I know least well, just behind the Mansion House, above Bank Station (one of the ticket halls is immediately underneath) and the survivor of several nineteenth-century attempts to demolish it.   It’s quite intense, grandiose on a very confined site, cuboid, with huge Corinthian columns which press in on the space for the congregation and a fine pulpit, with an elaborate sounding board which feels redundant:-

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I took a minor deviation from my normal Sunday morning route and spotted that an old Board School on the far side of Shandy Park had been converted into luxury flats.   It is described in the sales particulars as ‘dating back to the second world war’ which shows how much estate agents know of architectural history as it so obviously dates back to the Queen Anne Revival.   It is the surviving wing of the original Ben Jonson School, constructed in 1872 on the Prussian model, and contained the original Cookery and Laundry Centre added in 1895, as well as the local School Board’s Divisional Offices:-

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I have never previously walked past Chris Dyson’s architectural practice in Princelet Street when it has been closed, so have not had an opportunity of admiring its fine shop lettering, nor its fine fire insurance plaques (first introduced by Sun Fire Office in 1710), nor the poster recording its history:-

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I had read about the shop in Brick Lane which sells nothing but Kelloggs’ breakfast cereals and thought that it was nothing but a modern urban myth until I passed it, looked through the window, and saw people enjoying their morning breakfast cereal.   I was told recently that Kelloggs cornflakes were invented by religious fundamentalists to suppress the libido and have discovered to my amazement that this is true:  that John Harvey Kellogg was a virulent anti-masturbator.   But I can’t see why anyone would want to masturbate at breakfast:-

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Having had a rather sedentary Christmas, I decided to get out early on New Year’s Day.   I walked eastwards along the Hertford Union Canal not quite sure which direction to go and then headed northwards up the River Lea beyond the Olympic Park to where the landscape resumes its character of industrial wastelands.   There were not many people about, only the woodsmoke from the canal boats, the occasional swan, debris in the pubs, and a lone sculler.   I went as far as Tottenham Hale.   Next time I must go to Broxbourne:-

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I have seldom seen Wickham’s look so magnificent as it did this morning in the winter sun, its tower seen from a distance alongside the line of plane trees planted in 1910 on Mile End Waste:-

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There are good surviving nineteenth-century terrace houses on Jubilee Street, as well as being the former site of the New Alexandra Hall, where Lenin spoke on 21 March 1903 at a meeting to celebrate the 32nd. anniversary of the Paris Commune and which was then leased by an anarchist club.   No.193 was lived in, according to the 1881 Census, by John Abbott, a cowkeeper and owner of Abbott’s Yard behind with a dairy which supplied fresh milk to the City:-

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I have managed to acquire a second-hand copy of a Central Stepney History Walk, written by Tom Ridge and published by the so-called Central Stepney Regeneration Board in 1998.   It has a usefully concise account of the previous owners of 37, Stepney Green, the grandest of the houses in the neighbourhood.   It was built for Dormer Sheppard, a London merchant and slave owner who twice advertised for the return of ‘a black Boy named Lewis, about 15 years old, in a Fustian Frock with Brass Buttons, Leather Breeches and blue stockings’.   In 1714, it was bought by Lady Mary Gayer, the widow of General Sir John Gayer who had been Governor of Bombay.   From 1757 to 1763, it was owned by Lawrence Sulivan, a Director and Chairman of the East India Company, from 1764 to 1811 by Isaac Lefevre, a banker and distiller, and, from 1812 to 1819, by Nicholas Charrington, proprietor of the local brewery.   It ended up as a Jewish Home, then The Craft School, and finally Council Offices before being sold to the Spitalfields Trust in the mid-1990s:-

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I know I’ve done blogs on Fournier Street before, but I still can’t resist photographing its beautiful, still surviving door surrounds and remembering that this part of Spitalfields, now as lush and prosperous as a New England village, wasn’t necessarily going to survive forty years ago:-

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I spent part of Christmas reading Owen Hopkins’s admirable short monograph From the Shadows:  The Architecture and Afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor, which made me look afresh at Christ Church, Spitalfields in the light of his very clear account of the way that Hawksmoor was influenced by the interest of his eccelesiastical contemporaries in the churches of the Primitive Christians, which may have given Hawksmoor some of his characteristics of bold, unornamented, structural clarity:-

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