The London Daily Newsletter Monday 20 March

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.

John Constable

Video: Oyster
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