London faces losing a vital link to its history

The history of a great city can be charted in its architecture and London is conspicuously fortunate to be awash with revered sites, to which thousands of tourists flock every year and which we can cherish as signs of the grand sweep and the incidental details of our history.

It isn’t just monuments like St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey or the Tower of London – occupied and dominated across centuries by monarchs, power and wealth – which are crucial to understanding London’s long history; so too are smaller buildings and spaces, those of a domestic scale which reveal how people lived and the layers of society and which map the evolution of our social, economic and cultural lives. Market squares, cottages built for manual workers, weavers, servants and the growing population; alleyways, pubs, churches, chapels, hidden archways, riverside staircases, canals, docks:  all offer the corner of a veil which can be lifted, revealing how the common man and woman existed. More often than not, we can see aspects of our own lives in theirs and reflect how we might have struggled facing the every-day challenges in the environment of a huge, growing, turbulent capital city.

And it is these, perhaps less immediately appreciable, sometimes more anonymous, features which are confronted with the greatest threats to their existence.  As London grows into an ever bigger global city, inviting investors with big ambitions and bigger wallets from across the world, we sometimes fail to notice what we are losing before it is too late. A cursory glimpse of the City of London and one might still be able to delineate the pattern of alleyways that illuminates something  of an ancient past, but its buildings increasingly do not; skyscrapers grow higher and in ever more bold, unsympathetic, shapes.

In Spitalfields, despite a battle lasting years, the British Land development of Norton Folgate is going ahead – a result of then mayor of London, Boris Johnson, overturning a local planning decision – demolishing ‘more than 80% of the fabric’ of the site, despite being in a Conservation Area. Moreover, Mr Johnson’s decision appears to have alerted other developers that such a status offers little protection to the modest, but beautiful.

And now, planners are seeking to demolish an 18^th century weavers’ cottage, No. 3 Club Row.

No. 3 Club Row

In his magisterial ‘Spitalfields’, published in 2017, Dan Cruickshank describes the legible history of the, ‘handful of streets that constitute’ the area, the, ‘religious strife, civil conflict, waves of immigration, the rise and fall of industry, great prosperity and grinding poverty.’   

In particular, Cruickshank highlights the survival of a pair of houses, ‘3 and 5 Club Row, dating from 1764-5’, describing them as ‘remarkable’. He adds: 

‘They are three storeys high above a basement, each presenting to the street one wide window per floor… they are little altered examples of the humble houses in which Georgian journeymen silk weavers lived and worked… The very few early buildings that survive on these small estates in north Spitalfields – notably the pairs of houses in Club Row and in [nearby] Redchurch Street – are the fragmentary remains of a lost Georgian Spitalfields.’

He says that these buildings were once in their thousands around Spitalfields, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. And he adds:

‘Their architecture was humble and unglamorous – so in consequence unappreciated, undervalued and unprotected. Yet they were also fascinating social documents …. Now there are barely two dozen such buildings left in Spitalfields.’

One would have thought that the purpose of a Conservation Area designation would be to protect these rare insights into our past and into such a crucial London trade, but faced with powerful investors resistance can be difficult.

The backers of the redevelopment of 3 Club Row claim, in their heritage statement, that the building is ‘innocuous’ (whatever that means) and the ‘growing vacancy and derelict appearance of the building has made the corner site detrimental to the quality and character of the area’. Indeed, it argues that the building detracts from the Conservation Area itself and the setting of a nearby listed building, thus apparently pandering to the specious notion that ‘conservation’ should be concerned only with the great and showily glorious. It is further claimed that, the current building is ‘not suited to the uses of existing and forecast requirements of users/the community’ and the replacement, 5-storey building, will see the ‘active regeneration of this site’.

The local community, however, appears not to agree. Already the application has received 140 comments and a vigorous campaign against the development has been launched. And their campaigning has been noticed locally, at least, as the local council, Tower Hamlets, has issued a temporary Building Preservation Notice for six months as Historic England decides whether or not to list the building.

As Historic England loudly proclaims ‘We protect, champion and save places that define who we are’; one hopes that local feelings will be heard.

What can be done to save what little is left of Chaucer’s London, huddled in the streets near Southwark Cathedral, Borough High Street and London Bridge, is less clear. Once the only crossing point into the City, the roads around Borough High Street became something of a wild border town; rowdy hostelries, brothels, inns and theatres emerged, offering entertainments and attractions forbidden on the other side of the Thames.

Spur Inn Yard today

Just one of London’s great gallery inns survives In Borough High Street, The George, now managed by the National Trust (Pete Brown’s excellent ‘Shakespeare’s Pub:  A BarstoolHistory of London’ offers a biography of the pub and a fascinating history of the surrounding area), but the memory of others lingers on in the names of alleyways. There’s Kings Head Yard, which weaves round into White Hart Yard, Spur Inn Yard and Talbot Yard, once home to the Tabard Inn, where Chaucer’s Pilgrims gathered on their way to Canterbury

In a recent article for ‘Country Life’, architect Ptolemy Dean appealed for the protection of the area as developers erase its character. He wrote:

‘Preserved by a mixture of decline and neglect, the distinctive character of this area has not been extinguished by the Great Southwark Fire of 1676, the imposition of Victorian railways and roads or later bomb damage… As a consequence Borough High Street has been a designated Conservation Area since 1968’.

But it seems that we can, today, wreak damage that none of our predecessors has managed.  King’s College London recently, ‘destroyed the intimate character of the former Spur Inn Yard’, despite its protective designation, with a development that included a supermarket and a hotel, with ‘the total loss of the old covered arch entrance to Spur Inn’.

Mr. Dean notes that the destruction does not stop here:

‘Now, KCL has further applied for permission to create a four-block “student village”. The tallest “village” building will rise 12 storeys. These will overshadow The George and destroy the neighbouring Talbot Yard where two 19^th-century hop warehouses, much mutilated, but potentially recoverable, will be demolished in the process.’

And Mr Dean fears worse is to come. He notes that the, ‘enclosed intimacy of Kings Head Yard is one of the best surviving alleyways that also still contains an inn’. But, ambitious plans are being laid.

Great Portland Estates is planning ‘New City Court’, a 373,900 sq ft redevelopment that wants to ‘provide generous and accessible new public spaces and routes’ and a 139m purpose-built office block, ‘equivalent height to Guy’s Tower adjacent to our site’.  It will be the latest high rise building now dwarfing the low level heritage, The Shard being the most conspicuous example.

While an environmental impact assessment was put to planning last year, a full planning application has yet to be submitted though it is, reportedly, hoped that building will start in 2022.

To this development, Kings Head Yard is ‘little more than a service route for the site and other buildings along it…. Our proposal for the site includes reinstating the yard arrangement and to improve accessibility and journeys through the site’.

But for Mr Dean – and surely, for so many of us – the ‘street pattern of Southwark is intrinsic to its particular character and it’s sad to see it ignorantly, greedily and ineptly destroyed’.  Dean concludes, ruefully:

‘With such forces raised against it, however, only a miracle can save it now.’

The richness of our collective history owes so much to places and spaces such as 3 Club Row, The George and Kings Head Yard. It is crucial that Conservation Areas are enforced and organisations like Historic England must reflect and act upon their responsibilities and it remains up to society to remember and treasure these artefacts while we still can.  Whilst it might be much easier to recognise and enjoy ever-more ambitious – and often coarse – skyscrapers and showy developments, do we really want to efface, clean up, make more ‘useful’ – and otherwise destroy – all the history of our multifarious, picturesque, highly distinctive and complicated capital city?  There are powerful stories embodied in its modest buildings, streets and inconvenient corners.  We should relish them.