Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London (18 page)

Eltham Palace

In 1931 Eltham Palace was purchased by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld, textile millionaires, who restored the hall, laid out the gardens and constructed a magnificent Art Deco mansion adjacent to the hall. Some of its features have been compared to those of an ocean liner of the period together with such characteristic Art Deco features as maple veneered walls, a shining aluminium leaf ceiling and an onyx bath. In 1995 the estate was acquired by English Heritage who restored the interiors and introduced additional furniture of the period.

New broom at Tesco

An even more astonishing site for an Art Deco building is to be found at Perivale, on Western Avenue, in the form of the Hoover Building. Built in 1932 as a factory with offices, the façade has white columns which frame long green-painted windows with bands of dark blue and red. The interior is also in the Art Deco style and, as demand for vacuum cleaners grew, the building gradually expanded up to the eve of World War II by which time it employed 600 people. During the war the factory manufactured components for aircraft and tanks. In 1986 it was closed and there were fears that it would suffer the fate of the nearby Firestone factory, also Art Deco, which had been demolished by developers a day before campaigners obtained a listed building order. In 1989 Tesco came to the rescue when they bought the Hoover site, built a supermarket at the rear in a style sympathetic to the Hoover building and restored the original building as offices.

L
ondon’s government struggled to provide decent housing for the sevenfold increase in its population which occurred in the 19th century but a significant contribution was made by individual philanthropists. The first of these was George Peabody (1795-1869) who was born in Massachusetts but moved to London in the 1830s where he founded a bank which was the ancestor of the JP Morgan bank. In 1862 he founded the Peabody Trust to provide improved housing for working-class people. The Trust insisted that all its residents be vaccinated, thus giving impetus to the controversial campaign to eradicate smallpox. The Fabian writer Beatrice Potter (later Beatrice Webb, 1858-1943), when writing in 1887 about the poor living conditions endured by casual workers in the London docks, commented that dockers chose to live at a distance in places like Hackney and Forest Gate unless they could find a ‘Peabody’ whose dwellings offered a refuge from the surrounding squalor. In the 21st century the Peabody Trust owns or manages nearly 20 thousand properties across 30 London boroughs, housing about 50 thousand people, including the new residences in Boxley Street, Canning Town. Upon his death in 1869 Peabody, with the consent of Queen Victoria, was temporarily interred in Westminster Abbey before his remains were taken to America by the Royal Navy where he was buried in the town of his birth, Danvers, Massachusetts, which changed its name to Peabody in his honour.

The Victoria Park fountain

The ornate drinking fountain in Victoria Park, Hackney, is one reminder of the work of Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906). She was the daughter of the radical politician Sir Frances Burdett (1770-1844) who had married Sophia Coutts of the wealthy banking family. In 1837, aged 23, Angela became the wealthiest woman in England when she inherited her grandfather’s fortune. The word ‘eccentric’ does little justice to one who, as a young woman, proposed (unsuccessfully) to the aged Duke of Wellington and who at the age of 66 married her 29-year-old secretary William Bartlett – a union described by Queen Victoria as ‘positively distressing and ridiculous’.

Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts

Angela used her St James’s Square home to entertain such figures as William Gladstone, Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage and Charles Dickens who dedicated his novel
Martin Chuzzlewit
to her memory and encouraged her to found many ‘ragged’ schools for poor children. Her main contributions to the welfare of the poor comprised the establishment of a hostel for homeless women, Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush (which she planned with Charles Dickens); and the construction of model dwellings at Nova Scotia Gardens, Bethnal Green, in place of the foul tenements that had existed before in this most notorious corner of London, a haunt of body-snatchers known as The Jago. She also paid for the creation of drinking fountains providing clean water, an important benefit for those who could not afford a piped supply. Of these the most prominent and spectacular is the one in Victoria Park, Hackney.

Out-of-step Jack

Montagu William Lowry-Corry (1838-1903) was a grandson of the Earl of Shaftesbury from whom he inherited his philanthropic genes. In 1880, after serving as private secretary to Benjamin Disraeli, Corry was created Baron Rowton and in 1890 he set up a trust to build and run decent common lodging houses for working men. The first Rowton House opened in Vauxhall in 1892 and in its first year over 140,000 beds were let at sixpence a night, offering such facilities as clean sheets, washrooms and hot water, the last a rare luxury. Five other Rowton houses followed, of which the best known was Tower House in Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel which housed some notable residents. Jack London (1876-1916) described Tower house as ‘the Monster Doss House’ in
The People of the Abyss
(1903) and recorded that it was ‘full of life that was degrading and unwholesome’ but other commentators were kinder. Thirty years later, in
Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell (1903-50) wrote of Tower House that: ‘The best lodging houses are the Rowton houses where the charge is a shilling, for which you get a cubicle to yourself and the use of excellent bathrooms. You can also pay half a crown for a special, which is practically hotel accommodation. The Rowton houses are splendid buildings and the only objection to them is the strict discipline with rules against cooking, card playing etc.’

T
he churches of Sir Christopher Wren – those that survived the Blitz – are familiar to most Londoners but those places of worship of other denominations and faiths are perhaps not as well known as they deserve. One of the most controversial in its day was the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral. The restoration of the Catholic hierarchy by the appointment of Cardinal Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster in 1850 (the first since the Reformation) was itself seen as a threat to the supremacy of the Church of England and it was not until 1884 that Cardinal Manning, Wiseman’s successor, bought the site for a new cathedral in Francis Street near Victoria Station. The building is striking, with contrasting bands of brick and Portland stone while the interior is ablaze with mosaics in the Byzantine style using 100 different kinds of marble. The eight dark green columns which form the widest nave in England were taken from the same quarry as provided the marble for the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul 1,300 years earlier. Less controversial was St Peter’s Italian church in Clerkenwell, built in 1863 at the request of the Italian statesman Mazzini to accommodate the growing Italian community in London. Its narrow but striking façade on the Clerkenwell Road arguably does less than justice to its beautiful interior decoration.

Westminster Cathedral

The Church of St Sophia

Another St Sophia, less grand than that of Istanbul, is to be found in Moscow Road, Bayswater. It was completed in 1882 by John Scott, the son of Sir George Gilbert Scott (architect of St Pancras Station and the Albert Memorial) to serve the Greek Orthodox community which grew in London after Greece gained its independence from Ottoman Turkey in 1832. Its richly furnished interior and icon paintings are striking.