The London Daily Newsletter Monday 27 March The St Agnes soup kitchen was situated on the corner of Bangor Street that this photo was taken from. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute.
The London Daily Newsletter Friday 24 March St Mary-le-Bow is an historic church rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666 by Sir Christopher Wren. According to tradition a true Cockney must be born within earshot of the sound of Bow Bells.
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.
The London Daily Newsletter Friday 24 March Tothill Fields Bridewell (also known as Tothill Fields Prison and Westminster Bridewell) was a prison located in Westminster between 1618 and 1884. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute.
The London Daily Newsletter Thursday 23 March Looking northwest along the Edgware Road at the junction with Colindale Avenue. The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.
The London Daily Newsletter Thursday 23 March The Fazl Mosque, also known as The London Mosque is a mosque in Southfields. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute.
Bangor Street (turn of 20th century) The St Agnes soup kitchen was situated on the corner of Bangor Street that this photo was taken from. The precise date of the image is unknown.
TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.
“Bridge in London” (1908)
Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky or Dobužinskis (1875-1957) was a Lithuanian/Russian artist noted for his cityscapes conveying the explosive growth and decay of the early twentieth-century city.
St Mary-le-Bow St Mary-le-Bow is an historic church rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666 by Sir Christopher Wren. According to tradition a true Cockney must be born within earshot of the sound of Bow Bells.
Archaeological evidence indicates that a church existed on this site in Saxon times. A medieval version of the church had been destroyed by the London Tornado of 1091, one of the earliest recorded (and one of the most violent) tornadoes in Britain, although the newly completed arched crypt survived.
During the later Norman period the church, known as ’St Mary de Arcubus’, was rebuilt and was famed for its stone arches. At that period the 12 feet 6 inches high vaulted crypt although only accessible from within the church had windows and buttresses visible from the street.
From at least the 13th century, the church was a peculier of the Diocese of Canterbury and the seat of the Court of Arches, to which it gave the name. The ’bow bells’, which could be heard as far away as Hackney Marshes, were once used to order a curfew in the City of London. This building burned in the Great Fire of London of 1666.
The church with its steeple had been a landmark of London. Considered the second most important church in the City of London after St Paul’s Cathedral, St-Mary-le-Bow was one of the first churches to be rebuilt after the fire by Christopher Wren and his office. The current structure was built to the designs of Wren between 1671 and 1673; the 223-foot steeple was completed in 1680. The mason-contractor was Thomas Cartwright, one of the leading London mason-contractors and carvers of his generation.
Much of the current building was destroyed by a German bomb during the Blitz on 10 May 1941, during which fire the bells crashed to the ground. Restoration under the direction of Laurence King began in 1956. The bells as listed above, cast in 1956, were eventually installed to resume ringing in 1961. The church was formally reconsecrated in 1964, having achieved designation as a Grade I listed building on 4 January 1950.
In the church is a memorial to members of the Norwegian resistance who died in the Second World War.
St Mary-le-Bow ministers to the financial industry and livery companies of the City of London. Consequently, services feature weekday morning and evening led prayers lasting just a quarter of an hour generally at 08:15 (except Tuesdays) and 17:45. There is a memorial in the church to the first Governor in Australia, Admiral Arthur Phillip, who was born in the parish.
It is still home to the Court of Arches today.
The previous “great bell at Bow”, the tenor bell of the ring of bells installed in 1762 and destroyed in an air raid of 1941, weighed 58 hundredweight, with six tons of ironwork braces cut into the inside walls of the tower as reinforcement. Earlier still, the first great bell was a byword for having a sonorous tone as, in 1588, pamphleteer Robert Greene sarcastically likens the verse of Christopher Marlowe to the bell’s “mouth-filling” resonance.
Ordinarily, distances by road from London are now measured from Charing Cross but, before the late 18th century, they were measured from the London Stone in Cannon Street, or the Standard in Cornhill. However, on the road from London to Lewes, the mileage is taken from the church door of St Mary-le-Bow. To note the reference point used, mileposts along the way are marked with the rebus in cast-iron of a bow and four bells.
TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.
Monet’s ’Le Parlement, soleil couchant,’ (The Houses of Parliament, at Sunset) (1900)
Claude Monet painted a series of impressionist oil paintings of the Palace of Westminster, home of the British Parliament, in the autumn of 1899 and the early months of 1900 and 1901 during stays in London. All of the series’ paintings share the same viewpoint from Monet’s window or a terrace at St Thomas’ Hospital overlooking the Thames.
By the time of the Houses of Parliament series, Monet had abandoned his earlier practice of completing a painting on the spot in front of the motif. He carried on refining the images back home in Giverny, France, and sent to London for photographs to help in this. This caused some adverse reaction, but Monet’s reply was that his means of creating a work was his own business and it was up to the viewer to judge the final result.
Tothill Fields Bridewell Tothill Fields Bridewell (also known as Tothill Fields Prison and Westminster Bridewell) was a prison located in Westminster between 1618 and 1884. It was named ’Bridewell’ after the Bridewell Palace, which during the 16th century had become one of the City of London’s most important prisons. Tothill Fields later became the Westminster House of Correction.
Like its City counterpart, the Westminster Bridewell was intended as a “house of correction” for the compulsory employment of able-bodied but indolent paupers. It was enlarged in 1655, and during the reign of Queen Anne, its regime was extended to cover the incarceration of criminals.
In 1834 the original Bridewell was replaced by a larger prison, on a different site, 8 acres in area, south of Victoria Street and close to Vauxhall Bridge Road. The new prison, designed by Robert Abraham and costing £186,000, was circular in plan (following Jeremy Bentham’s ’panopticon’) so that warders could supervise prisoners from a central point, and had a capacity of 900 prisoners. After it was completed, the old prison was demolished.
At the back of Middlesex Guildhall in Little Sanctuary is the 17th century ’The Stone Gateway’, positioned there by the Greater London Council in 1969. This is the only visible remnant of the prison.
Originally the Bridewell comprised three separate gaols for untried male prisoners and debtors, male convicts, and women. Inmates were put to work oakum-picking and treading the treadmill, and it operated on a silent/separate system. However, due to poor management, the regime was changed in 1850 and the Bridewell then housed only women and convicted boys under the age of seventeen.
The second prison was closed in 1877, when prisoners were transferred to Millbank Prison, and was demolished in 1885. Westminster Cathedral, started in 1895, now stands on the site. The prison’s foundations were re-used for the cathedral.
TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.
“Some High, Lonely Tow’r”
Woolwich-based artist Gail Brodholt creates striking linocuts of her city. “I suppose what I’m really interested in is those unconsidered and unnoticed places that people pass through,” says Brodholt, “They are on their way to somewhere else, presumably more important — on the escalators, on the tube, train station platforms, motorways..”
Gail Brodholt
Video: Flying into LCY A simulated flight into LCY courtesy of Google Earth Studio.
Edgware Road, Colindale Looking northwest along the Edgware Road at the junction with Colindale Avenue. All names used describing the photo in the postcard have changed.
The Hyde now generally refers to a part of the Edgware Road further south. Red Hill, originally the name of a Burnt Oak farm has fallen out of use. Hendon was the local borough at the time.
TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.
St Paul’s Cathedral from Ludgate Circus, London c 1885
John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 – 1893) was a Victorian-era painter, notable for his landscapes.
In 1861, at the age of 24, to the dismay of his parents, he departed from his first job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway to pursue a career in art. He began exhibiting in 1862, under the patronage of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society.
Fazl Mosque The Fazl Mosque, also known as The London Mosque is a mosque in Southfields. Inaugurated on 23 October 1926, it was the first purpose built mosque in London. At a cost of £6,223, the construction of the mosque and the purchase of the land on which it sits, was financed entirely by the donations of Ahmadi Muslim women in Qadian, India.
Since 1984, the mosque and its surrounding buildings have been the residence of the caliphs of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and therefore, the international headquarters of the Community.
TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.
Paddington Station at Night (1992)
Since Doreen Fletcher (born 1952) was a teenager, she has been committed to drawing and painting what might be termed, ‘the almost gone’ – her immediate external environment and the traces left by people on the surface of things, in city and landscape, urban and rural
Decca Studios Decca Studios was a recording facility in Broadhurst Gardens. The Beatles failed their audition with Decca Records here on 1 January 1962, and subsequently signed with Parlophone.
The site being the Town Hall originally, the building in Broadhurst Gardens London NW6 started off as The Falcon Works, an engineering company and was converted to a recording studios in 1933 for Crystalate Records. In 1937 the company was bought out by Decca and Broadhurst Gardens became the company’s third and final home base. The building housed three main studios.
Many popular songs and albums were recorded at Decca Studios (for example, John Mayall’s 1968 Blues from Laurel Canyon and five albums by the Moody Blues). Britain’s leading Big Band, Ted Heath (bandleader) and his Orchestra recorded a succession of outstanding big band jazz records at Broadhurst Gardens for Decca during the band’s peak years from 1945 until Heath’s death in 1969. David Bowie recorded his first single, Liza Jane, at the studio in 1964. The studios also saw the formation of the original Fleetwood Mac, under the aegis of then-Bluesbreakers guitarist Peter Green, after John Mayall bought him studio time as a birthday present.
Marmalade recorded most of their Decca hits in Studio 2, including Reflections of My Life.
The Zombies recorded She’s Not There at the facility.
TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.
Ladbroke Grove looking north (1900) This early 1900s image was taken just south of the junction of Ladbroke Grove and Treverton Street. Looking north, the “Cowshed pub” can be seen on the left, further ahead.
TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.
“Zoot Suits, London” (1948)
Edward John Burra was an English painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, best known for his depictions of postwar black culture in London.
Edward Burra (1905-1976)
Video: Flying into LCY A simulated flight into LCY courtesy of Google Earth Studio.
Kensington Hippodrome The Kensington Hippodrome was a racecourse built in Notting Hill, London, in 1837, by entrepreneur John Whyte. The year of Queen Victoria’s accession, 1837, saw the inauguration of a new venture in West London – an attempt to establish a race-course which would rival Epsom and Ascot in its attractions. The prospectus, issued in 1836, stated that ’an extensive range of land, in a secluded situation, has been taken and thrown into one great Park, and is being fenced in all round by a strong, close, high paling. This Park affords the facilities of a STEEPLE-CHASE COURSE, intersected by banks and every description of fence; and also of a RACE-COURSE distinct from the Steeple-Chase Course; and each Course is capable of being suited to a Four Mile Race for Horses of the first class.’
The founder of this enterprise was a Mr John Whyte of Brace Cottage, Notting Hill, who had leased about 200 acres of ground from Mr James Weller Ladbroke, the ground landlord. The course as originally laid out was bounded approximately by Portobello Road, Elgin Crescent, Clarendon Road and the south side of Ladbroke Square. The main entrance was through an arch at the junction of Kensington Park Road with Pembridge Road. It was also intended to provide facilities for all forms of equestrian exercise and for other out-door sports on non-racing days.
The first meeting was held on 3rd June, 1837, with three races for a total prize list of £250 and was followed by a second meeting on the 19th. Although it was agreed that the company was brilliant and that many ’splendid equipages’ were present, the quality of the racing met with a mixed reception, one writer calling the horses entered ’animated dogs’ meat’. Furthermore, Mr Whyte, in his enthusiasm to enclose the course, had blocked up a right-of-way that crossed its centre and which enabled local residents to avoid the Potteries, a notorious slum. Some local inhabitants took the law into their own hands and cut the paling down at the point where the footpath entered the grounds of the race-course. As a result, the crowds on the first and subsequent days’ racing were increased by the presence of unruly persons who, taking advantage of the footpath dispute, entered without paying for admission.
The next two years saw all attempts by Mr Whyte to close the footpath frustrated. There were summonses, counter summons, assaults, petitions to Parliament by the local inhabitants and the parochial authorities together with a wordy and scurrilous warfare in the columns of the press. There was even a plan at one time to make a subway under the race-course, but in 1839 Mr Whyte abandoned the unequal struggle and relinquished the eastern half of the ground.
The new course, renamed Victoria Park in honour of the young Queen, was extended northward to the vicinity of the present St Helen’s Church, St Quintin’s Avenue, and, as the prospectus pointed out, ’the race-course [was] lengthened, and much improved; and without interfering with the rights of the public, the footpath, which intersected the old ground, will now run at the outside of the Park…’ A management committee composed of noblemen and gentlemen was formed and £50,000 capital was raised by the sale of £10 shares, the holder of two shares being entitled to a transferable ticket of admission.
Although the footpath question had been resolved, a more serious obstacle to the success of the venture soon became apparent. The soil was clay which made for heavy going and required extensive drainage. The nature of the ground made the course unusable at certain times of the year and this fault proved impossible to overcome. At the meeting held on June 2nd and 4th, 1841, the last race, a steeple-chase, was run. A set of four coloured lithographs, from paintings by Henry Aiken Junior, commemorate this event. In all, thirteen meetings had been held during the four years of the course’s history.
In 1840 a Mr Jacob Connop had been granted building leases for the eastern part of the race- course relinquished by Whyte and by March 1841 he seems to have become the proprietor of the race-course as well. By the following year Connop, in conjunction with another builder, John Duncan, was developing the estate for the ground landlord, James Ladbroke. Houses were built in what is now Kensington Park Road and Ladbroke Square but in 1845 Connop was declared bankrupt and the work had to be taken over by others. Thus it would seem that no one closely involved in the Hippodrome venture gained much from it and today the names Hippodrome Mews and Hippodrome Place remain to remind people that Notting Hill might under other circumstances have become another Epsom or Ascot.
The land was being developed soon afterwards, as James Weller Ladbroke began building crescents of houses on Whyte’s former race course. The circular shape of Stanley and Landsdowne Crescents follows part of the track.
Taken from the Kensington and Chelsea Public Libraries Occasional Notes no 2, January 1969, by Brian Curie, then the Local History Librarian. These notes were compiled from contemporary news-cuttings, prints and plans together with the following accounts, all of which may be seen in the Kensington Local History Collection at the Central Library.
TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.
Camberwell Flats by Night (1983)
David Hepher (b.1935) is best known for his paintings of buildings, mainly tower blocks, which he refers to as “urban landscapes”.
‘Camberwell Flats’ is part of a series of paintings, two of which can be found at the Museum of London and another at the Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art. They reflect Hepher’s sustained focus on residential architecture, and details of ordinary, everyday life, sometimes pushing it to the brink of abstraction.
Sandwell House Sandwell House was owned by three generations of the Wachter family. In 1655 William Hitchcock, merchant tailor, built a ’mansion house’ to the south of what was later known as Sandwell.
Sandwell was held by three generations of Wachters, London merchants, possibly Jews, from c. 1649 to 1686.
By 1762, a Mr Armine Snoxell owned the house and stabling.
As West Hampstead developed at the turn of the 20th century, the house was demolished and Sandwell Mansions constructed on the site.
TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.
Dewhurst Road, Hammersmith
Artist: Adam Raven (1952–2006)
Blythe House Blythe House is a listed building located at 23 Blythe Road. Blythe House was built between 1899 and 1903 as the main office of the Post Office Savings Bank, which had outgrown its previous headquarter in Queen Victoria Street. By 1902 the Bank had 12,000 branches and more than 9 million accounts.
Blythe House included a post office intended to deal with the official correspondence involved in the work of the Savings Bank. The post office handled about 100,000 letters every working day.
In 1963 the government announced that the Bank’s main centre of operations would be moved to Glasgow. A small headquarters staff remained in London, moving to Charles House on Kensington High Street. The Bank finally left Blythe House in the early 1970s.
TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.
Child’s Hill: Harrow in the Distance – (1825)
The painting shows the view northwest along what is now Cricklewood Lane, with Harrow on the Hill visible beyond.
Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum.
