The London Daily Newsletter Wednesday 22 February

Mary Place Workhouse
Notting Dale Workhouse stood on the site of what is now Avondale Park Gardens,

The Mary Place Workhouse, as it was official known, was supposed to be the cruellest in London. To it were sent the difficult cases from all other workhouses and the threat to send inmates to it was an effective method of discipline to others. In 1870, Kensington Parish set up a labour yard and relief office at Mary Place, Notting Dale (now Avondale Park Gardens), where able-bodied men received out-relief in return for breaking stone. A dispensary was added in 1871 and a casual ward in 1878. In 1882, at the behest of the Local Government Board, the workhouse became an able-bodied test workhouse, accommodating able-bodied men from all London’s unions. For the next twenty-two years, able-bodied men at Mary Place performed tasks such as stone-breaking, corn-grinding, and oakum picking for 55 to 60 hours a week. The only hour of leisure, from 7-8pm, was filled with “lectures” from a “Mental Instructor”, at which attendance was obligatory. The diet was coarse and monotonous and smoking was forbidden. No inmate was ever allowed temporary leave to go out from the premises. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Mary Place workhouse appears to have some success in deterring able-bodied applicants for relief.

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.

Tube Rain (2015) John Duffin is a print maker and painter well-known for his striking prints focusing on great architecture, depictions of modern life in urban environments and city streets at different times of day.

John Duffin

Video: Flying into LCY
A simulated flight into LCY courtesy of Google Earth Studio.