Mention of C.R. Ashbee in connection with Trinity Green has made me want to know more about his time living and working in the east end.   He read history at King’s College, Cambridge from 1883 to 1886, where he was much influenced by Edward Carpenter and the writings of Morris and Ruskin.   He was then articled as a clerk in the firm of Bodley and Garner, the best of late Victorian gothicists, and lived in Toynbee Hall as a way of developing his socialist ideals.   On 23 June 1888 (ie when he was only 25), he established the Guild and School of Handicraft at 34, Commercial Street on the top floor of a warehouse next to Toynbee Hall.   In 1891, the Guild acquired workshops away from the densely built and poorest part of Whitechapel in Essex House at 401, Mile End Road, a fine brick eighteenth-century mansion with panelled rooms, a bachelor flat for Ashbee himself when he was not in Chelsea, and a garden with ‘a couple of good box trees, three or four pears and crabs, some cherry trees, laburnums and ash, and a number of vines’.   It was on the site of Onyx House opposite Mile End station.   There the Guild grew from a tiny operation to employing up to 40 people making furniture and other aesthetic products, mostly to Ashbee’s design.

We took a detour today to have a look at the Nature Study Museum in the grounds of St. George-in-the-East, the great Hawksmoor church on the Highway.   It’s an odd little building, nearly completely derelict, originally built as a mortuary chapel where coffins were put before transfer to a public cemetery.   In 1904, it was converted into a Nature Study Museum by an eager young curator, Miss. Kate Hall, to introduce the local poor to the world of nature, including tanks of frogs, toads, newts and salamanders and beehives outside.   When she died, the building was described as a ‘fairy house in an oasis’, but the monkey took to biting children and the Museum was closed during the second world war:

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When we lived in Limehouse, we inherited the architectural drawing for the Empire Memorial Sailor’s Hostel, which was designed by Thomas Brammall Daniel and Horace W. Parnacott and opened in 1924 with beds for 205 sailors in cabins.   It’s quite a fine building, with a grandiose frontispiece of stripped-down perpendicular and I hope the drawing survives in the Ragged School Museum to whom I donated it.   Rather amazingly, in 1960 the building was the location for the 4th. Conference of the Situationist International, a group of revolutionary Marxists led by Guy Debord, who pioneered the study of psychogeography:

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My attention has been called to the so-called ‘Moony Sipal’, the old Municipal Baths which were built before the war by the Stepney Borough engineer and converted in 1995 into the local centre for HIV.   I walk past it twice a day on the way to the underground station and have never stopped to examine what Pevsner (or Bridget Cherry) describes as ‘a likeable, hygienic faience façade, with central recessed bay and loggia at first floor behind a balustrade’.   Not a particularly distinguished building perhaps, but a relic of a pre-war era of civic improvement in the old east end, when you could buy a bar of soap for 1d. and have a bath for 6d:

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