From the Chairman:

The winter weather emphasised how great a difference there is between central London and its suburbs. Suburban dwellers like me struggled on icy pavements to a local station and found, if the trains were running, that the streets of the City and Westminster were virtually clear of snow. My local park, when the schools were closed, was fuller and more animated than I can ever remember. My mind went back to those prints from the 17th and 18th centuries which showed the frost fairs on the Thames with entertainments on a river on which oxen were roasted, coaches plied for hire, Charles II hunted a fox and printing presses produced souvenir cards. The embanked and faster flowing Thames seems unlikely to freeze again, but there was a festive atmosphere in central London, too, when I took a walk from Covent Garden across Hungerford Bridge to make an evening turn on the London Eye. Other recent trips south of the river – to the Festival Hall, Tate Modern, Southwark Cathedral, Hays Galleria, Borough Market, Young Vic – have shown how the post-1945 concept of the South Bank Cultural Centre has now borne extended fruit in one of the most exciting and diverse quarters of our city.

I was pleased to see a good turn out for our Banister Fletcher lecture in December when Emily Cole told us about the London blue plaque scheme. She could have gone on answering our questions for a very long time because of the interest her talk had generated. There will be an account of the lecture in our next Journal. I must apologise to a handful of members who faced a closed door shortly after the lecture began. This was because of a misunderstanding between the Society and our hosts at the Geological Society; we will try to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

My last Newsletter noted that we had objected to the revised plans for the north west extension of the British Museum, but this has now been approved by Camden Council and central government had decided not to intervene. The same can be said also about the extensive Bishops Place scheme, on Shoreditch High Street north of Liverpool Street Station, to which we had also objected. The only saving grace on this is that the revised scheme means the preservation of The Light, the wine bar/restaurant housed in the former Great Eastern Railway electricity generating station; we had given our support to the campaign to save this. This seems to be another case, like Columbus Tower mentioned in my last Newsletter, where the Mayor seems eager to push through a scheme because of a financial contribution towards Crossrail; in addition the planning authority, Hackney Council, owns much of the site and stands to benefit financially from the development.

Recent mailings from a sister Society, the City Heritage Society, have noted that that the Society’s award for excellence in building conservation was given to the remodelling of Britannic House, No 1 Finsbury Pavement, one of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ finest commercial buildings. Let us hope that similar skills will be employed at Lutyens’ former Midland Bank headquarters in Poultry where planning permission has been granted for conversion into a hotel. The City Heritage Society has also produced a paper noting that within the last decade the number of city hotels has risen dramatically. A short while ago only the Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool Street represented the survival of a tradition which in the early 19th century had seen some twenty-four major coaching inns in the city. Now there are eleven hotels and no fewer than sixteen more with planning permission or projected, plus nine sets of serviced apartments. This transformation follows the retailing revolution which has made Cheapside and Bow Lane, Gracechurch Street/Bishopsgate/Leadenhall Market and Moorgate rivals to better known West End shopping streets. The City is a better place for the wider range of uses it now supports even if we don’t always like the new buildings which provide for them.

My Christmas stocking would have had to be a big one to contain a copy of Philip Davies’ book Lost London 1870-1945, published at the end of last year. With a title shamelessly cribbed from Hermione Hobhouse’s book of the same title in 1971 it is in no way a shameless copy, making use of a wide range of hitherto unpublished photographs, many of them taken by the London County Council whose photographers became principal recorders of the city which the council’s policies were rapidly changing. An exhibition of many of the photographs used will be on at Kenwood House until Easter Monday. Included in the exhibition will be two of the massive bell jacks from Columbia Market, Baroness Burdett-Coutts’ idealistic development in Bethnal Green, built in 1866-68 and demolished in 1958, the date when the future of the building was discussed (in an uncomplimentary way) by the architect H S Goodhart-Rendel in a lecture to the London Society called Victorian Conservanda, celebrating the then recent foundation of the Victorian Society.

Gresham College, founded in the 16th century by the builder of the Royal Exchange, Sir Thomas Gresham, still maintains its tradition of free public lectures, sometimes in its own charming premises at Barnard’s Inn, Holborn, where we had our own Banister Fletcher lecture a few years ago, but also at other venues, including the Museum of London. Included in the present programme are lectures by Simon Thurley on The Politics of Architecture in Tudor and Stuart London (11 February) and by Tarnya Cooper on Foreign Artists in 16th century London (1 March). Information on times, venues and other lectures can be found at www.gresham.ac.uk.

The Society is usually privileged to receive an invitation for members to attend a Buckingham Palace Garden Party in the summer though invitations for 2010 have not yet been issued. We should be represented by one or more members who have not previously been to a Palace Garden Party. If you would like your name to be included in a ballot to represent the Society in this way please let us know on the attached visits and events list. We will notify those chosen by ballot at the appropriate time if and when an invitation is received.

With best wishes for 2010,
Frank Kelsall

TheLondonSociety

From the Chairman:

The
London
Society