My son recently gave me for my birthday a book which could be described as a tome Panoramas of Lost London by Philip Davies an extra large format copy containing over 200 black and white photographs of London before redevelopment.

It is heartbreaking to see how much of London remained untouched for centuries until the Victorians razed great swathes of the city in their quest for modernity.

[H]itler tried to finish the job, but it was during the 1960s that we destroyed far more than aerial bombardment had done and finished off the job of removing all traces of the medieval city.

One surprising survivor remains unknown to thousands of motorists as they drive past it each day little realising its importance, the fascinating story of a building’s survival and the present owner’s obsession for all things Tudor.

Crosby Hall has been described by Simon Thurley director of English Heritage as:

The most important surviving secular domestic medieval building in London, Sir John Crosby’s great hall has on several occasions been snatched from the brink of demolition, which after a 400-year gap, it is being incorporated back into a private house.

Forget Russian oligarchs and over-paid footballers, the property on Cheyne Walk almost opposite Battersea Bridge is probably the largest house in private ownership in London, a house whose nucleus started in the City of London.

Built in Bishopsgate between 1466 and 1475 for rich City merchant Sir John Crosby, it was later purchased by Sir Thomas More and now is located at the site of More’s Chelsea garden.

King Richard III and Sir Walter Ralegh both used it as their temporary home and it later was the head office of The Honourable East India Company. But eventually it was reduced to warehouses before scheduled for demolition (and no doubt inclusion in my book) in 1908.

Realising its importance as the most precious medieval survivor in the Square Mile the entire building was moved brick by brick to Chelsea and after much soul searching into what should become of its use it was leased to the British Federation of University Women who promptly built an Arts and Crafts residential block at right angles to the building’s Great Hall.

In 1988 the freehold was bought by Christopher Moran an enthusiastic – and rich – lover of all things Tudor who had already spent 20 years thinking about the Hall. Seven years were than consumed obtaining the relevant planning permissions and if you think your kitchen extension was a nightmare have a thought for Christopher Moran who has since 1995 employed up to 100 specialist builders with the help of dozens of Tudor scholars on his project creating an 85 room house, built exactly as Tudor craftsmen would have done over 500 years ago.

For the £50 million it is estimated to cost he gets a courtyard garden designed by the Marchioness of Salisbury based on her own garden at Hatfield House surrounding a Tudor fountain to the goddess Diana, that itself took more than three years to create. Facing the River are solid oak doors weighing 3 tonnes, The College of Arms have devised for him a coat of arms to surmount the doors. The lost art of double-struck pointing has been mastered in order to ensure that the new brickwork looks exactly as it would have done when Sir John Crosby moved in and a house – well fit for a king.

Simon Thurley, Director of English Heritage has written a more detailed account of Crosby Hall which originally was published in Country Life magazine.

A version of this post was published by CabbieBlog on 12th July 2013

Every month CabbieBlog hopes to show you a little gem of a building which you might have passed without noticing.

The building this month is passed unnoticed by thousands of cabbies every day.

[O]VERLOOKED AS IT IS BY ITS MORE FAMOUS SIBLING, there are not many buildings that have stood the test of time while remaining as useless as Cowford Lodge. When in 1913 Sir Aston Webb refaced Buckingham Palace in Portland Stone cleverly anticipating that the Red Arrows would one day fly down the Mall and therefore a balcony would be needed by the Royal Family to view the spectacle, it was a triumph of useful design. That cannot be said of Cowford Lodge which stands opposite in Spur Road.

In the Middle Ages, Buckingham Palace’s site formed part of the Manor of Ebury. The marshy ground was watered by the river Tyburn, which still flows below the courtyard and south wing of the palace. Where the river was fordable (at Cow Ford), the village of Eye Cross grew. Now standing at that crossing point of one of London’s lost rivers is our little gem of a building and it was only 10 years ago that the lodge was given a name by The Earl of Snowdon – Cow-ford Lodge.

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of lodge is:

Small house . . . Cottage at gates of park or grounds of large house occupied by gardener or other servant . . . porter’s room at gate of college, factory, or house of chambers or flats.

Thought to date about 1911 or 1912 it was probably thrown up with the leftover bricks from building Admiralty Arch. Compact yet massive, impressively monolithic, yet somehow apparently invisible to passers-by, it make little sense as an actual lodge for Buckingham Palace or St. James’s Park for it is in the wrong position. Any guard function seems similarly unlikely for it is just as clearly in the wrong place for the sentry box.

Grade II* listed and described by English Heritage as lodge (there is that name again), piers, gates and railings. 1900-01, by Sir Aston Webb as part of his Victoria Memorial-Mall-Buckingham Palace ‘rond point’ design. Portland stone lodge and piers with cast iron gates and railings. Ornate Beaux Arts detailing. Single storey, segmental pedimented lodge flanked by tall pairs of pedestrian gates and ball finialed panelled piers set on island at junction of Birdcage Walk and Buckingham Palace . . .

Suggestions have ranged from it once being a police post, prompting conspiracy theorists to propose a more sinister alternative as a hidden portal into the hidden network of secret escape tunnels, connecting the Palace to various government agencies.

Or it could be just a very ornate garden shed.

A version of this post was published by CabbieBlog on 2nd August 2013

In 1837 a young woman found herself the monarch of her country, she remained Queen during an unprecedented time of burgeoning industry and wealth creation, giving her name to the 64 years she reigned and a time Britain was at its zenith of influence and power. That same year a novel was printed which would change a country’s attitude to the most poor and venerable, that novel was the second major work by Charles Dickens.

[C]HARLES DICKENS was no stranger to poverty. In 1823 when his father lost his job and was sent to Marshalsea debtor’s prison 11-year-old Charles worked in a blacking factory pasting labels on shoe polish bottled for six shillings a week. At that time he also certainly worked alongside children from the workhouse, it was an experience that would remain with him all his life and be the subject of his novel Oliver Twist.

In 1834 a Poor Law was enacted, with the sole purpose of discouraging claiming relief in times of poverty and forcing individuals to take work offered to them however low the pay. Welfare assistance was only available inside the workhouse, once admitted the unfortunate inmates would be deloused and forced to wear uniforms, families were broken up and if individuals were capable of working they would be sent to labour for unscrupulous employers. The very young, ill or old who were unable to produce an income were in most cases refused admission to the workhouse and starved to death.

In a fascinating piece of research Dr. Ruth Richardson has established the source material for Oliver Twist which tells the story of the illegitimate orphan Oliver who endures a miserable time at the workhouse and during his parish apprenticeship with an undertaker, before running away and being taken in by a gang of juvenile pickpockets.

It was known that Charles Dickens lived in a certain Norfolk Street twice in his early life for a period of four years. Dr. Richardson has established that Norfolk Street once was the southern continuation of Cleveland Street which exists today and that Dickens lived only nine doors away from the Cleveland Street workhouse ending years of speculation by historians to the exact location of Dickens’s childhood home.

Cleveland Street Workhouse was constructed in about 1780 on what at that time was a burial ground. Starting life as the parish workhouse for St. Paul’s, Covent Garden in 1836 its functioned as an infirmary, maternity unit, insane asylum or a place to deposit those suffering from highly contagious diseases.

Even by workhouse standards 44 Cleveland Street was dreadful, a contemporary account by Dr. Joseph Rogers the chief medical officer at the workhouse from 1856-68, reported: a laundry in the basement filling the dining hall with foul-smelling steam; carpets regularly beaten directly outside the men’s infirmary; the nursery both damp and overcrowded; “nursing” provided only by elderly female inmates, many of whom were apparently habitually drunk; the brutal indifference of the Guardians of the workhouse; the “dead house” adjoins the main structure. This led him to campaign for better standards in the medical care available to workhouse inhabitants.

After the Poor Law was reformed the Cleveland Street Workhouse passed first into the control of the Central London Sick Asylums District, then to the Middlesex Hospital and thence to University College London Hospital complex. Closing in 2006 when UCLH have moved all their services onto a single unified site.

The building is believed to be London’s only existing purpose built Georgian workhouse, a rare example of social engineering from the 19th century; now after a five-year long campaign the most famous workhouse in the world has been saved thanks to its Grade II listing.

Without it would Charles Dickens have written so passionately his most successful novel and then spent a lifetime campaigning for better welfare to be given to the poor? Now 44 Cleveland Street has been given Heritage listing we have an opportunity to convert this rare Georgian building into flats whilst keeping its integrity, and use some of that income to provide a teaching and resource centre at the very heart of social and welfare reform that has benefitted us all today.

In an echo of Dachau with its sign “arbeit macht frei” (works brings freedom), above the gates of the Cleveland Street Workhouse was a statute of an old man pointing to the words: “Avoid idleness and intemperance”, as with Dachau, 22 Cleveland Street’s importance to our lives should not be forgotten.

A version of this post was published by CabbieBlog on 22nd April 2011

Every month CabbieBlog hopes to show you a little gem of a building that you might have passed without noticing, in the past, they have ranged from a modernist car park; a penguin pool; to a Hanoverian gatehouse.

You have probably seen this short row of houses as you sit in the interminable 24-hour traffic that travels along the Talgarth Road, the artery which connects Central London with Heathrow.

[J]UST NEAR TO Barons Court Underground Station is a row of eight Arts and Crafts-era artists’ studios that stand out majestically with their soaring chimneys and red-brick and terracotta exteriors, with their enormous windows they are simply breathtaking (in looks as well as price, with number 135 an end-terrace sold for £1.3 million).

The double-story windows are north facing to fill the rooms with constant diffused light, the quality of that light does not change as the sun moves, making painting and drawing considerably easier.

[B]uilt in 1891 for bachelor artists, St. Paul’s Studios are based on a house that once stood at number 151; it was here that Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones painted his last canvas.

The studio of these houses are on the first floor and measure a wapping 30ft. long x 22ft. wide with a 20ft. high ceiling, with a vast window dominating the room at the front of the house, it was this window which once overlooked the playing fields of St. Paul’s School, now moved to Barnes, it now looks on to the A4 dual carriageway. Beneath each property is a scullery, kitchen and a bedroom in the basement for the housekeeper.

Given a Grade II listing in 1970 a number of well known people from the arts have occupied these studios, including Dame Margot Fonteyn who lived at the end of this small block once known as Colet Gardens when the area was full of Bohemian artists and was very different from what it is now.

If you want a detailed look at these fascinating houses, which none other than Sir Roy Strong ex-director of the V&A and National Portrait Gallery once nominated as his favourite buildings in London, describing them as an “Eruption of joy”, Remember the Window has interior shots and a detailed description of the surrounding area.

http://www.rememberthewindow.com/

A version of this post was published by CabbieBlog on 4th December 2012