Thames Barrier
The Thames Barrier is the world’s second-largest movable flood barrier (after the Oosterscheldekering in the Netherlands).

Operational since 1982, its purpose is to prevent the floodplain of all but the easternmost boroughs of Greater London from being flooded by exceptionally high tides and storm surges moving up from the North Sea. London is vulnerable to flooding and from heavy tides closing in. A storm surge generated by low pressure in the Atlantic Ocean sometimes tracks eastwards past the north of Scotland and may then be driven into the shallow waters of the North Sea. The surge tide is funnelled down the North Sea which narrows towards the English Channel and the Thames Estuary. If the storm surge coincides with a spring tide, dangerously high water levels can occur in the Thames Estuary. This situation combined with downstream flows in the Thames provides the triggers for flood defence operations. The report of Sir Hermann Bondi on the North Sea flood of 1953 affecting parts of the Thames Estuary and parts of London was instrumental in the building of the barrier. When needed, it is closed (raised) during high tide; at low tide it can be opened to enhance the river’s flow towards the sea. Built approximately 3 km due east of the Isle of Dogs, its northern bank is in Silvertown and its southern bank is in the New Charlton area of the Royal Borough of Greenwich. The concept of the rotating gates was devised by (Reginald) Charles Draper. In the 1950s, from his parents’ house in Pellatt Grove, Wood Green, London, he constructed a working model. The novel rotating cylinders were based on a small household appliance — a brass gas tap which could be found in most post-war houses in the UK. The barrier was designed by Rendel, Palmer and Tritton for the Greater London Council and tested at the Hydraulics Research Station, Wallingford. The site at New Charlton was chosen because of the relative straightness of the banks, and because the underlying river chalk was strong enough to support the barrier. Work began at the barrier site in 1974 and construction, which had been undertaken by a Costain/Hollandsche Beton Maatschappij/Tarmac Construction consortium, was largely complete by 1982. The gates of the barrier were made by Cleveland Bridge UK Ltd at Dent’s Wharf on the River Tees. In addition to the barrier, the flood defences for 11 miles down river were raised and strengthened. The barrier was officially opened on 8 May 1984 by Queen Elizabeth II. Total construction cost was around £534 million with an additional £100 million for river defences. Built across a 520-metre wide stretch of the river, the barrier divides the river into four 61-metre and two, approximately 30 metre (100 ft) navigable spans. There are also four smaller non-navigable channels between nine concrete piers and two abutments. The flood gates across the openings are circular segments in cross section, and they operate by rotating, raised to allow ’underspill’ to allow operators to control upstream levels and a complete 180 degree rotation for maintenance. All the gates are hollow and made of steel up to 40 millimetres thick. The gates fill with water when submerged and empty as they emerge from the river. The four large central gates are 20.1 metres high and weigh 3,700 tonnes. Four radial gates by the riverbanks, also about 30 metres wide, can be lowered. These gate openings, unlike the main six, are non-navigable.

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.

The Limehouse Barge-Builders (Narrow Street from the river). This painting can be seen in the South Shields Museum and Art Gallery.

Charles Napier Hemy (1841-1917)

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Dollis Hill House
Dollis Hill House was an early 19th-century farmhouse located on the modern-day northern boundary of Gladstone Park.

It was built as a farmhouse in 1825 by the Finch family and later occupied by Sir Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, who subsequently became Lord Tweedmouth. In 1881 Lord Tweedmouth’s daughter and her husband, Lord Aberdeen, took up residence. They often had Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone to stay as a guest. Other guests at the house included Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Rosebery, and Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston Churchill. In 1897 Lord Aberdeen was appointed Governor-General of Canada and the Aberdeens moved out. When Willesden Urban District Council acquired the house and land in 1899, they named the park Gladstone Park after the old Prime Minister who had died the previous year. Newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid occupied the house after the Aberdeens moved out, and his guests included the American author Mark Twain, who stayed at Dollis Hill house in the summer of 1900. Twain wrote that he had “never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit’s throw of the metropolis of the world.” “There is no suggestion of city here; it is country, pure and simple, and as still and reposeful as is the bottom of the sea.” He later wrote “Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever occupied”. The house was opened to the public in 1909, but it was used as a hospital during the First World War. In the Second World War, Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet met there during 1941. The original Red Cross Flag, that flew over the House, when it was being used as a hospital was laid up in the nearby St. Catherine’s Church, where it still hangs, together with a memorial plaque. From 1974 the house was used for training courses for catering students, until it was closed in 1989. Two major fires in 1995 and 1996 damaged the house badly, and from then onward it remained derelict. On February 20, 2011, a third fire broke out in the basement of Dollis Hill House. Dollis Hill House Trust worked to find a solution in accordance with Brent Council’s stipulations, teaming up briefly with social enterprise. When funding failed, the Council declared its intention to initiate an application for demolition. In April 2011 Brent Council announced that all attempts to save Dollis Hill House had failed, and that they had been given permission by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to demolish the building. In January 2012, Dollis Hill House was entirely demolished, leaving the historic site barren. In mid-2012 Brent council controversially undertook the building of a folly that followed the old floor plan of the house but utilizing none of the original house fabric or materials.

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.

Palace of Westminster (1859) Henry Pether’s view follows the River Thames from Millbank (slightly above Lambeth Palace on the opposite side of the river) and looks towards the Palace of Westminster, which was completed in 1859, the same year he made this work

Henry Pether

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Hodford Farm
Hodford Farm was part of an estate stretching from the Hampstead border to the site of Golders Green station.

The Hodford and Cowhouse estate consisted of a compact block stretching from the Hampstead border to a point north of Golders Green station and also from Cricklewood to Golders Hill. The estate totalled 434 acres in 1855 and was split into three farms known in 1889 as Hodford (or Golders Green) Farm, Cowhouse (or Avenue) Farm, and Westcroft Farm. There is no record or involvement of a manor house, although one may have stood on or near the site of the 18th-century Golders Hill House.

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.

’Under London Bridge’ (1920) Dora Meeson is best known for her many fine pictures of the River Thames. As a student at the Slade under Henry Tonks she studied with a number of well-known names including Ursula Tyrwhitt, Ida Nettleship and Gwen Salmond.

Dora Meeson

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A simulated flight into LCY courtesy of Google Earth Studio.

Foundling Hospital
The Foundling Hospital in London was founded in 1741 by the philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coram.

It was a children’s home established for the education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children. The word ’hospital’ was used in a more general sense than it is today, simply indicating the institution’s hospitality to those less fortunate. The first children were admitted to the Foundling Hospital on 25 March 1741, into a temporary house located in Hatton Garden. At first, no questions were asked about child or parent, but a distinguishing token was put on each child by the parent. These were often marked coins, trinkets, pieces of cotton or ribbon, verses written on scraps of paper. Clothes, if any, were carefully recorded. One entry in the record reads, Paper on the breast, clout on the head. The applications became too numerous, and a system of balloting with red, white and black balls was adopted. Children were seldom taken after they were twelve months old. On reception, children were sent to wet nurses in the countryside, where they stayed until they were about four or five years old. At sixteen girls were generally apprenticed as servants for four years; at fourteen, boys were apprenticed into variety of occupations, typically for seven years. There was a small benevolent fund for adults. In September 1742, the stone of the new Hospital was laid in the area known as Bloomsbury, lying north of Great Ormond Street and west of Gray’s Inn Lane. The Hospital was designed by Theodore Jacobsen as a plain brick building with two wings and a chapel, built around an open courtyard. The western wing was finished in October 1745. An eastern wing was added in 1752 ’in order that the girls might be kept separate from the boys’. The new Hospital was described as ’the most imposing single monument erected by eighteenth century benevolence’ and became London’s most popular charity. In 1756, the House of Commons resolved that all children offered should be received, that local receiving places should be appointed all over the country, and that the funds should be publicly guaranteed. A basket was accordingly hung outside the hospital; the maximum age for admission was raised from two months to twelve, and a flood of children poured in from country workhouses. In less than four years 14,934 children were presented, and a vile trade grew up among vagrants, who sometimes became known as Coram Men, of promising to carry children from the country to the hospital, an undertaking which they often did not perform or performed with great cruelty. Of these 15,000, only 4,400 survived to be apprenticed out. The total expense was about £500,000, which alarmed the House of Commons. After throwing out a bill which proposed to raise the necessary funds by fees from a general system of parochial registration, they came to the conclusion that the indiscriminate admission should be discontinued. The hospital, being thus thrown on its own resources, adopted a system of receiving children only with considerable sums (e.g., £100), which sometimes led to the children being reclaimed by the parent. This practice was finally stopped in 1801; and it henceforth became a fundamental rule that no money was to be received. The committee of inquiry had to be satisfied of the previous good character and present necessity of the mother, and that the father of the child had deserted both mother and child, and that the reception of the child would probably replace the mother in the course of virtue and in the way of an honest livelihood. At that time, illegitimacy carried deep stigma, especially for the mother but also for the child. All the children at the Foundling Hospital were those of unmarried women, and they were all first children of their mothers. The principle was in fact that laid down by Henry Fielding in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling: Too true I am afraid it is that many women have become abandoned and have sunk to the last degree of vice [i.e. prostitution] by being unable to retrieve the first slip. There were some unfortunate incidents, such as the case of Elizabeth Brownrigg (1720–1767), a severely abusive Fetters Lane midwife who mercilessly whipped and otherwise maltreated her adolescent female apprentice domestic servants, leading to the death of one, Mary Clifford, from her injuries, neglect and infected wounds. After the Foundling Hospital authorities investigated, Brownrigg was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang at Tyburn. Thereafter, the Foundling Hospital instituted more thorough investigation of its prospective apprentice masters and mistresses. The musical service, which was originally sung by the blind children only, was made fashionable by the generosity of George Frideric Handel, who frequently had Messiah performed there, and who bequeathed to the hospital a fair copy (full score) of his greatest oratorio. Handel’s involvement had begun on 1 May 1750 when he directed a performance of Messiah to mark the presentation of the organ to the chapel. That first performance was a great success and Handel was elected a Governor of the Hospital on the following day, a position he accepted. In 1774 Dr Charles Burney and a Signor Giardini made an unsuccessful attempt to form in connection with the hospital a public music school, in imitation of the Pio Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, Italy. In 1847, however, a successful juvenile band was started. The educational effects of music were found excellent, and the hospital supplied many musicians to the best army and navy bands. In the 1920s, the Hospital decided to move to a healthier location in the countryside. A proposal to turn the buildings over for university use fell through, and they were eventually sold to a property developer called James White in 1926. He hoped to transfer Covent Garden Market to the site, but the local residents successfully opposed that plan. In the end, the original Hospital building was demolished. The children were moved to Redhill, Surrey, where an old convent was used to lodge them, and then in 1935 to the new purpose-built Foundling Hospital in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. When, in the 1950s, British law moved away from institutionalisation of children toward more family-oriented solutions, such as adoption and foster care, the Foundling Hospital ceased most of its operations. The Berkhamsted buildings were sold to Hertfordshire County Council for use as a school and the Foundling Hospital changed its name to the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children and currently uses the working name Coram. The Foundling Hospital still has a legacy on the original site. Seven acres of it were purchased for use as a playground for children with financial support from the newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere. This area is now called Coram’s Fields and owned by an independent charity.

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.

Wartime Nocturne,’ (1943) is one of the finest and most proficient works of Claude Barry’s career. Famed for his wartime searchlight pictures, he created a varied body of work that although it differs in style and theme, always remains imbued with an individual poetic vision.

Claude Barry

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Uxendon Farm
Uxendon was once more important than Wembley.

Uxendon, first recorded in a transaction concerning Hugh of Woxindon in 1257, was a small settlement on the western slopes of Barn Hill. The first part of the name is the same as that in the name Uxbridge and stems either from the Wixan, a 7th century Anglo-Saxon tribe, or from the Celtic for ’water’. The second part is the Old English for hill. Medieval Uxendon was very small, but in the 14th or 15th centuries some local people, including the Uxendon family, moved south to form another small community at Forty Green, where the Sudbury to Kingsbury road crossed the Lidding at Forty Bridge. This settlement was known as Uxendon Forty, Wembley Forty or Preston Forty. The farm at Forty Green was at first called Pargrave’s, and later South Forty Farm. Uxendon became a submanor under the authority of Harrow Manor Court. Richard Brembre, a grocer and Lord Mayor of London, lived at Uxendon. In 1388 he executed 22 prisoners without trial and was later himself executed for this crime. In 1516 the Bellamy family acquired Uxendon through marriage. They remained staunchly Roman Catholic after the Reformation and sheltered Catholic priests. In 1586 Anthony Babington, a principal conspirator in the Babington plot against Elizabeth I, was arrested on their property. In 1592 Elizabeth’s security services tracked the fugitive Jesuit Robert Southwell to Uxendon. As a result of these arrests the Bellamys suffered considerably in the final years of the 16th century. By 1608 their land was in the hands of the Page family, who had become the leading landowners in the Wembley area. The Bellamys had already enclosed a small amount of open land. The Pages continued this process throughout the 17th century. In 1655 enclosure of open fields by Richard Page led to changes in the routing of the road east of Preston. This enclosure by the Pages encouraged the general move from arable to meadow in the area in the 18th century. Nonetheless a significant amount of common land remained to be enclosed at the time of the Enclosure Act of 1803. By 1732 a new farm, Barn Hill Farm, existed on the summit of Barn Hill. It was no longer there by 1850 and had probably gone by the late 18th century, when Richard Page began building a folly on Barn Hill as part of his improvements at Wembley Park. The folly was still standing in 1820. In 1829 many of the Page family lands, including Uxendon, went to Henry Young (d. 1869), the junior partner of the Page’s solicitor. There is good reason to suspect that Young obtained the lands fraudulently. In the decades that followed Young’s death numerous persons turned up claiming the ‘Page millions’, but no-one was successful. The district did not change significantly in the 19th century. This was due to an agricultural depression after the Napoleonic Wars and London’s growing need for hay; both Uxendon and Forty farms had converted to hay farming by 1852. The depression also led to an outbreak of violence in the area around 1828, when desperate agricultural labourers burnt haystacks and threatened local landowners, including the relatively benevolent Lord Northwick. 64 people lived in Preston in 1831 and 57 in 1851. In the same year Uxendon Farm housed 13 people and Forty Farm 10, while three more lived at the top of 302-foot high Barn Hill.In the mid-19th century Uxendon was the venue for steeplechases and well known for its ’sensational water jump’, while Forty Farm was famous for horses. The Metropolitan Railway was built in 1880. The railway had no effect on development, even after the opening of Wembley Park station in 1894. In 1896 the suggestion that a station should be built serving Preston was rejected because the local population was so small. Indeed even in the early 20th century the area was entirely rural, and the Wealdstone Brook could be described as "one of the most perfect little streams anywhere, abounding in dace and roach." By 1900 Uxendon Farm had become a shooting ground (the Lancaster Shooting Club). When the Olympic Games were held in London in 1908 the ground was sufficiently important to be used for Olympic clay pigeon shooting. Pressure from the shooting club, which was a two mile walk from the nearest station, played a part in the opening of Preston Road Halt in May 1908. Some houses had already been built at Uxendon by 1930. Then in 1932 Uxendon Farm, which was in a terrible condition, was destroyed to make way for the Metropolitan Railway extension from Wembley to Stanmore (later the Bakerloo and today the Jubilee Line). In the years that followed the whole of Uxendon was developed except for Barn Hill Open Space, which had been purchased by the Council from the owners of Preston Farm in 1927.

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.

’The Thames at Westminster’ Colin Burns grew up in a Norfolk seaside town. From the age of seven, he began to paint landscapes and sunsets and, as a nine year old, started winning art prizes at school. At the age of sixteen he left school and qualified as an accountant, painting in his spare time.

Colin W Burns (born 1944)

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Jago Hazzard went to the far reaches of the Central Line

Earl’s Court Farm
Earl’s Court Farm is pictured here as it was in 1867, before the opening of the underground station two years later.

There was no church or ancient nucleus in Earl’s Court, although a malthouse or brewhouse belonging to a Matthew Child had stood somewhere near the present No. 185 Earl’s Court Road in about 1683–1703. The Rocque map of 1741–6 shows little building in the locality. What it does show is three paths coming from the north-east and east, corresponding very roughly to Marloes Road and (still more roughly) Cromwell Road and the line of Harrington Road and Harrington Gardens. These converged towards the manor house and farm of the manor of Earl’s Court on the other side of Earl’s Court Road and in doing so brought potential customers past a well-placed tavern, the White Hart, which since at least 1722 had stood back from but facing Earl’s Court Lane, in what is now Hogarth Road, slightly forward and west of No. 2. It survived, not much modernised until 1869. It was one of the last areas of southern Kensington to be developed. The farm, under several generations of the Hutchins family, had been a very successful arable farm and market garden. Mr Alloway, a market gardener, took over in 1844 and can be seen here wearing a bowler hat with some of his workers including Mr Goddard and Mr Ives. The building in the background is the Manor House. The image dates from the mid 1860s. Urban influences were creeping down the lane from Kensington High Street although the men in the picture seem unconcerned. The Manor House and the farm were demolished in the mid-1860s when the first Earls Court Station was built. The last remnants of Earl’s Court Farm were removed in October 1878.

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.

An Omnibus Ride to Piccadilly Circus, Mr Gladstone Travelling with Ordinary Passengers (1885) Credit: Alfred Morgan (1862-1904) This painting shows Mr Gladstone, the British Prime Minister, travelling with ordinary passengers. The description of the painting also says that it includes a self portrait. Thus we can perhaps assume that the artist, Alfred Morgan, is seated next to the window on the left-hand side.

Alfred Morgan (1862-1904)

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Greenwich Foot Tunnel
The Greenwich Foot Tunnel crosses beneath the River Thames linking Greenwich on the south bank with Millwall (Island Gardens) on the north.

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel was designed by civil engineer Sir Alexander Binnie for London County Council and constructed by contractor John Cochrane & Company. The project started in June 1899 and the tunnel opened on 4 August 1902. Its creation owed much to the efforts of politician Will Crooks, who had worked in the docks and, after chairing the LCC’s Bridges Committee responsible for the tunnel, later served as Labour MP for Woolwich. Its purpose was the creation as a way for workers who lived in south London to get to work at the docks on the Isle of Dogs. It still offers 24 hour access to travellers who need to cross the Thames. The cast iron tunnel is 1215 feet long. Lifts, installed in 1904, were upgraded in 1992 and again in 2012, and helical staircases allow pedestrians to access the sloping tunnel – lined with around 200 000 white tiles. During the Second World War, the northern end of the tunnel was damaged in bombing. It is now reinforced with a concrete lining and thick steel.

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.

Battersea Power Station

Robert Lowry/Wandsworth Museum

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A simulated flight into LCY courtesy of Google Earth Studio.

New West End
New West End was created in the 1840s on the Finchley Road.

Four houses were built on a field of Platt’s estate which jutted westward south of Teil’s estate. The cluster were optimistically named New West End but eventually the name fell out of favour.

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.

Hampstead Garden Suburb from Willifield Way (1914) Golders Green crematorium can be seen in the background

William Whitehead Ratcliffe/Tate

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Treherne House
Treherne House was built in the mid eighteenth century,

The house had been built on Treherne Croft. a triangular shaped piece of land, four acres in extent. It was leased out as early as 1353 to Geoffrey le Fowler and then went through many hands until the eighteenth century. By 1704 Treherne Croft was associated with Hillfield, to its north, and was held by Charles Herriott who conveyed the estate, a house, garden, and nearly 17 acres to Henry Binfield in 1720. Treherne House was built sometime between 1720 and 1762. It was probably rebuilt in the late 18th or early 19th century when it became a grand house, having a seven-bayed main section with attics and central porch and a large b ay-windowed wing. By 1807, Thomas Kesteven occupied Treherne House. The sculptor Robert Shout was living at the house by 1835. In a letter to Sir Robert Peel (in which he fulminated against the high levels of land tax) he described himself as ‘possessed of independent property, consisting of land and houses’. Charles Shout, his son and also a plaster cast maker died at Treherne House in 1855. The adjacent Treherne and Canterbury Houses were evidently disposed of at the same time with Honeybourne, Fawley, and Lymington roads and Crediton Hill (originally Crediton Road) laid out on the combined estates about 1897.

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.

London from Greenwich Park (1720) From the Dutch school of painting in vogue at the time, notable features of this painting are the palace in central Greenwich (later demolished), St Paul’s as the tallest London building on the horizon and a very green Isle of Dogs

Peter Tillemans (Bank of England Museum)

Video: You Can’t Always Get What You Wanstead
Jago Hazzard went to the far reaches of the Central Line

Smithfield
Smithfield is a locality in the ward of Farringdon Without situated at the City of London’s northwest corner.

A number of City institutions are located in the area, such as St Bartholomew’s Hospital, the Charterhouse, and Livery Halls including those of the Butchers’ and Haberdashers’ Companies. Smithfield’s meat market dates from the 10th century, and is now London’s only remaining wholesale market in continuous operation since medieval times. The area also contains London’s oldest surviving church, St Bartholomew-the-Great, founded in 1123 AD. Smithfield has borne witness to many executions of heretics and political rebels over the centuries, including Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace, and Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, among many other religious reformers and dissenters. Smithfield Market, a Grade II listed-covered market building, was designed by Victorian architect Sir Horace Jones in the second half of the 19th century, and is the dominant architectural feature of the area. Some of its original market premises fell into disuse in the late 20th century and faced the prospect of demolition. The Corporation of London’s public enquiry in 2012 drew widespread support for an urban regeneration plan intent upon preserving Smithfield’s historical identity.

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.

View of a House and its Estate in Belsize, Middlesex (1696) London and its smoke is visible on the left horizon

Jan Siberechts/Tate Britain

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