Monday, March 18, 2013
Green Dragons, Black Lions, Red Lions
Green Dragon Yard reads like something from a fantasy work
by Lord Dunsany. But such a yard exists in London. Green Dragon Yard, like Kings
Arms Court, and the now demolished Black Lion Yard, owes its name to the various
inns that stood along the road eastwards from London , running directly from
Aldgate High Street to Whitechapel High Street and then Whitechapel Road and
Mile End Road. These inns stood outside the city walls and the yards and courts
run north to join Old Montague Street.
The Black Lion Inn is mentioned in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge in
1840 , it had been there from at least 1746. Later Black Lion Yard became a
centre for jewellers and became known as the Hatton Garden of the East End. At
that time of the 21 shops in the yard, twelve were jewellers. Every Jewish young
woman about to marry went there with their mothers to buy Sabbath candles. Despite
petitions to save it, it was demolished between 1972 and 1975. The horrible
concrete building, Black Lion House, with Habibson’s Bank at ground level, now
stands on its site at Whitechapel Road. Strangely perhaps, the Red Lion pub
stood at 2a Black Lion Yard and was there from at least 1831 to the 1890s.
If you walk eastwards from there you will see an arched
doorway that is the entrance to Green Dragon Yard. Unfortunately, where one you
were able to walk through from Whitechapel road to Old Montague street,
property developers have one again conducted a land grab and stopped up what
was once a public thoroughfare at both ends. There is no street sign at the
Whitechapel Road end and the only indication that this is the entry to Green Dragon
Yard is a sign on the intercom next to the gate. The Yard is still listed in
the A-Z.
What now appears to be a gated byway for the relatively well
-off once was the home of the impoverished working class. Writing about this in his book The Battle with
The Slum (1902) Jacob A.Riis says:
“I photographed Green Dragon Yard as typical of what I saw
about me. Compare the court and the yard and see the difference between our
slum problem and that of Old World cities…The population of Green Dragon Yard was greater than the sight of it would
lead you to expect, for in Whitechapel one-room flats were the rule”.
Phyllis Etchells in her memories
of living in the East End recalls:
“Green Dragon Yard-1906
By the time my sister was about 2 years old we had moved to a two
roomed house in Green Dragon Yard. ..
The interesting thing about Green Dragon Yard was that it was a quiet
street between two busy thoroughfares.
The square at the entrance to the street was
obviously where the coach and horses turned to arrive at the old inn.
At the Whitechapel Road end of the yard there was a very narrow
entrance to
the main thoroughfare. At that entrance there was a
bollard - no doubt to
stop men with barrows from using it as a short cut.
.....There was great poverty
in Green Dragon Yard.
Green Dragon Yard
was a taste of Victorian England. The
houses had
wooden shutters at the windows.....It was a sheltered and happy place
to
play. However, there was another more exciting life
to be seen when you
went through the narrow
alleyway on to the Whitechapel Road. Suddenly
you were in a very bright, noisy and busy thoroughfare."
You can read in more detail about her memories of the East End here:
Labels: Black Lion Yard, East End, East London, Green Dragon Yard, Jacob A. Riis, Kings Arms Court
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Whenever I hear the words East Side...
Whenever i hear the words East Side I reach for my trusty Mauser. Yes, I was looking through some material on my shelves on East London when I came across the following brochure produced by Time Out entitled Eastside- A Guide to Spitalfields, Brick Lane and Columbia Road. I noticed that I had angrily written across it "The East End, you ponce!" The East End is Tower Hamlets and some parts of Hackney. It does not need a renaming by some glib and vacuous marketing consultant. It is not some area of Chicago or New York. Fortunately these asinine attempts to rob us of the history and traditions of the past that are summed up in the words East End have come to nothing, in spite of the drive towards increasing gentrification and social cleansing on the western edge of the East End and further afield. Thousands of throats are opened and pour forth the complaint: "The East End , you ponce!"
Labels: East End, East London, East Side
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Fortress Olympics
Reproducing the statement below
Fortress Olympics
looms over London
Residents on in Tower Hamlets and Leytonstone were horrified
when they learnt that surface to air missiles were to be positioned on their
estates. The positioning of missiles is only part of the story. As many as 16,200
security forces will be deployed in London, in addition to 17,000 troops (more
troops than the British Army have in Afghanistan). A sonic weapon designed to
disperse crowds by administering “head splitting pain” is ready to be deployed.
Unmanned drones will be patrolling the skies over London. An aircraft carrier
will be anchored nearby on the Thames in addition to other warships.
A “safe zone” will be put in place with eleven miles of
electrified fence, patrolled by 55 teams of attack dogs.
This is not North Korea or the Soviet Union but London
today. During the Olympics in Peking,
not even the Chinese government put up such a fence or drone planes.
The 2006 Olympic Games Act means that not only the police
and armed forces can use physical force to “protect the Olympics but also
private security forces. This covers anything from peaceful demonstrations,
strikes, and the sale of bootleg Olympic products on the street that are not
officially approved. “Brand protection teams” will patrol inside the Games to
make sure that only clothes or accessories with commercial messages officially
approved can be worn.
In addition people congregating on the street, a normal occurrence
particularly in summer months, will be harassed, in particular local working
class youth. In fact this is already happening with increased surveillance and
harassment in the boroughs bordering the Olympics. Rough sleepers will be
removed. The police can remove anyone “deemed in any way to be causing a nuisance”.
There is no sign that this will disappear with the end of
the Olympics. The police will end up more armed and arrogant than before,
London and Britain will be saddled with enormous debt as a result of exorbitant
Olympics spending, whole neighbourhoods will be socially cleansed and
gentrified, taxes will be increased and all the security devices and cameras
installed will stay in place.
The Games are not about sport. They are about phony
patriotism, brand placing, profiteering for estate agents and landlords. They
are there to boost the push towards neo-liberalism, to destroy our working
class neighbourhoods, to boost the power of a state that is increasingly a
police state. Who is the enemy in this new Britain? It is us, the majority of
the population.
The Anarchist Federation (London) will be supporting the
march and events organised by the Counter Olympics Network (CON) on July 28th
See here: counterolympicsnetwork.wordpress.com/
We urge everyone concerned by the impact of the
Olympics to support the events and the
CON.
Labels: East London, Fortress Olympics, Olympic
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Bow Flyover
The concrete diplodocus of the Bow Flyover hunkers down over the A11 and the Bow Bridge. It has taken away some of the powers of the old bridge and bridges so they used to say needed sacrifices, whether human or animal to propitiate the gods of rivers and passage. When the old bridge at Bremen in Germany was demolished in the 19th century a skeleton of a child was discovered in the foundations. Similarly in 1867 an assortment of human and animal bones were found in the foundations of Blackfriars Bridge when it was being replaced by a new one. The original bridge had been built one hundred years before.When work began on Hammersmith Bridge in 1825 there was a Masonic ceremony with the Duke of Sussex officiating. With the participation of the Grand Lodge and a large crowd he performed a ritual that involved the fixing of a brass plate (praising the builders and over one of the coffer dams into which had been placed gold coins and a silver trowel. The Duke poured corn over it saying: 'I have poured the corn, the oil and the wine, emblems of wealth, plenty and comfort, so may the bridge tend to communicate prosperity and wealth.' Sometimes a cat or dog was walled up alive in bridges. At the very least money and precious objects were entered as witness the Hammersmith ritual. There was a sacrifice to the Bow Flyover so it was rumoured, not one at its inauguration but a little later when the remains of Jack the Hat McVitie and /or Frankie the Mad Axeman Mitchell were meant to have been enterred in cement in its foundations. This persistent rumour is probably untrue as the Krays had one of their henchmen, Freddie Foreman, dump the bodies into the sea from a boat off of Newhaven according to Foreman himself.. Similar rumours about the bodies of people who had vanished without explanation being buried in the foundations of Brooklyn Bridge also circulated.
The old nursery rhyme “London Bridge has fallen down” is sometimes alluded to as disguising the practice of sacrifice to a bridge. After various verses describe failure after failure to construct the bridge the final verse which at first appears to have no connection with the preceding verses talks about the arrest of a prisoner:
“What has this poor prisoner done? ...
Off to prison she must go.
My fair lady!”
The Flyover and roundabout beneath it have disguised the presence of the Bow Bridge which is the fourth one built over the Lea. And here we may have the origin of another nursery rhyme. Many people know about the story of Queen Matilda who is supposed to have ordered the construction of a bridge here in 1110 after she nearly drowned at the ford a little to the north. This incident is alleged to be contained in the rhyme “Skip to the Lea My Lady” which became a favourite banjo tune in the southern United States as Skip To My Lou. There is a fine version of Skip to My Lou by the bluesman Sonny Terry playing jaw’s harp backed by Brownie McGhee on guitar and J. C. Burris on bones.
The Bow Flyover was designed by Andrei Tchernavin. Tchernavin was born in Russia. His father Vladimir was a university lecturer and his mother Tatiana was a curator at the Hermitage in Leningrad. Vladimir was a zoologist and in autumn 1930 he was sent to the gulag for five years. Two years later with Tatiana and 14-year old Andrei, he was one of the few to escape from Stalin’s concentration camps to Finland. It took 22 days to make the crossing over the border. Two years followed living in Finland. Vladimir and Tatiana’s description of Soviet Russia and the scarcities there were of course derided by Western apologists of the Soviets like the Webbs who dismissed most of the content of their books as “hearsay gossip”.
The Tchernavins moved to London and Andrei went to school in Streatham. He eventually became a civil engineer and his greatest work was the Flyover started in 1963 and cost £1,784,500. The Bow Flyover was not the first flyover in London. Further to the south the Silvertown Way became London’s and indeed Britain’s first flyover in 1934.
Fine photo of the Bow Flyover from Diamond Geezer at his blog
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgeezer/2785271306/
The old nursery rhyme “London Bridge has fallen down” is sometimes alluded to as disguising the practice of sacrifice to a bridge. After various verses describe failure after failure to construct the bridge the final verse which at first appears to have no connection with the preceding verses talks about the arrest of a prisoner:
“What has this poor prisoner done? ...
Off to prison she must go.
My fair lady!”
The Flyover and roundabout beneath it have disguised the presence of the Bow Bridge which is the fourth one built over the Lea. And here we may have the origin of another nursery rhyme. Many people know about the story of Queen Matilda who is supposed to have ordered the construction of a bridge here in 1110 after she nearly drowned at the ford a little to the north. This incident is alleged to be contained in the rhyme “Skip to the Lea My Lady” which became a favourite banjo tune in the southern United States as Skip To My Lou. There is a fine version of Skip to My Lou by the bluesman Sonny Terry playing jaw’s harp backed by Brownie McGhee on guitar and J. C. Burris on bones.
The Bow Flyover was designed by Andrei Tchernavin. Tchernavin was born in Russia. His father Vladimir was a university lecturer and his mother Tatiana was a curator at the Hermitage in Leningrad. Vladimir was a zoologist and in autumn 1930 he was sent to the gulag for five years. Two years later with Tatiana and 14-year old Andrei, he was one of the few to escape from Stalin’s concentration camps to Finland. It took 22 days to make the crossing over the border. Two years followed living in Finland. Vladimir and Tatiana’s description of Soviet Russia and the scarcities there were of course derided by Western apologists of the Soviets like the Webbs who dismissed most of the content of their books as “hearsay gossip”.
The Tchernavins moved to London and Andrei went to school in Streatham. He eventually became a civil engineer and his greatest work was the Flyover started in 1963 and cost £1,784,500. The Bow Flyover was not the first flyover in London. Further to the south the Silvertown Way became London’s and indeed Britain’s first flyover in 1934.
Fine photo of the Bow Flyover from Diamond Geezer at his blog
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgeezer/2785271306/
Labels: Bow, Bow Flyover, East London
