London History

In a bid for ‘Britain’s Stupidest’ title for a TV show, UKTV has launched ‘Britain’s Best’. In the recent popular tradition of British telly, where list programmes crowd out proper documentaries, Britain’s Best invites viewers and visitors to its website to vote for ‘Best Castle’, ‘Best Palace’. ‘Top religious building’ when we looked was Stonehenge - does it count as a building if it doesn’t have a roof? Swiftly running out of steam and categories, the programme lumps poor old Clifton Suspension Bridge under ‘Best of the Rest’. Dumbing down? Hmmm, just maybe.

Bethnal Green’s Rational Rec is a monthly inter-art social occasion, incorporating sound, music, text, performance, film and psychological experiments. Come along and be artistically, intellectually and alcoholically stimulated.

Events at the Whitechapel Gallery

The Whitechapel Gallery is entering the most exciting phase of its 100-year history; an ambitious expansion into the former library next door. Whilst transformations take place the Gallery becomes the Whitechapel Laboratory with exciting exhibitions, live music, poetry, talks and film. www.eastlondonhistory.com has some background and stories on the Whitechapel.

A wander away from our usual beaten track of the East End to leafy Dulwich. Why? Because I live here - East Dulwich to be exact. This is a part of London that’s changed enormously in the last few years, from a rather shabby suburb in the early nineties (traditionally an Irish area, a presence that has visibly diminished in the meanwhile), very popular with teachers, who could afford the distressed Victorian dwellings in this ‘perfect example of the Victorian suburb’ as it has been described. They certainly couldn’t afford it anymore, and would probably be relegated to ‘key worker’ dwellings somewhere on the outskirts of Croydon. The Claphamisation of the area - with Range Rover buggies, organic sweet shops for the pre-schooler, and revamps of pub into gastropub - is almost complete. A useful starting guide to the area comes via the Dulwich Society, which explains the unusual geography of the area - Dulwich proper is now known as Dulwich Village, with East, West and North Dulwich much later additions. As ever, more to follow when I have time.

The world’s first hybrid diesel electric double-decker bus, built by WrightBus, entered service today (16 March) on route 141 in London. This inaugural service comes after the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, recently announced plans for an increased hybrid bus fleet for the capital. A leafy motif on the buses will help passengers recognise their environmentally-friendly status.

Ah, double deckers, good idea. What more efficient way to get a lot of passengers into a small road ‘footprint’. And yet Transport For London (TfL) have foisted the hated bendy bus onto London. 18 metres long, hated by drivers and cyclists, beloved by the large minority of passengers who don’t pay (because there are no inspectors and the rear door passengers are half a postcode away from the driver). My street (in East Dulwich SE22) is half full of parked bendy bus at any given time. Sometimes they even manage to park in two streets at once. Their one saving grace is that they no longer catch fire all the time. Is this really the only way to get wheelchair users onto buses?

The Mediatheque at the BFI Southbank has opened their vast archive to the public free of charge. BBC’s Kurt Barling examines the treasures on offer. The BFI Southbank has embarked on a huge project to digitise the National Film and Television Archive. It’s hoping that this will firstly preserve rare and volatile footage for future generations and just as importantly make it accessible to a much wider audience.

Pop careers have always been fleeting and all too often the stars find themselves out of the limelight without a penny to show for their brief taste of fame. But there can’t be too many people who find themselves labelled a has-been at 18, after many successful years in the music business. East End girl Helen Shapiro was always a precocious talent.

Sad to read of the death of John Inman this week, star of ‘Are You Being Served’ and a man who improbably claimed a few years back that ‘for 28 years he’d been living with a very nice woman’. The very nice woman turned out to be called Ron - happily the two tied the knot in a civil ceremony a year or so back. Critics of the extraordinarily camp entertainer’s duplicity should remember that until well into his thirties homosexuality in England was illegal and practising one’s art could lead to prison - a bit of lavender never hurt anyone. But back to ‘Are You Being Served’ and the fictional Grace Bros store. It was based by writer Jeremy Croft on his early experiences of working as a shop assistant in posh Piccadilly menswear store Simpsons, which had traded on the London thoroughfare since 1894. Croft, who made his mark playing posh twits in Brit movies from the early sixties onward, maintained that Grace Bros wasn’t so much a parody as a straight lift. Simpson’s, alas, closed its doors in 1999, an increasingly lumbering relic of London retail past. John Inman, meanwhile, had spent time shopfitting and window-dressing in the grand environs of Selfridges on Oxford Street. Coming soon, we feel, a piece on the grand days of the London retail emporium … Derry and Toms, Whiteleys, the Army and Navy. Watch this space.

Life wasn’t easy in the seventeenth century East End of London. ‘Nasty, brutish and short’ may be a cliche but it accurately described existence in the Tower Hamlets of the 1800s and after. Infant mortality, arcane illnesses, early death and the risk of ending your life at the end of a rope were just some of the hazards.

The ‘Bills of Mortality’ published by the various parishes, were begun in the early 1600s. In this era of continual epidemics, they were intended as an early warning system, the local clerks logging where and when each death had occurred and posting the results on a weekly basis. One wonders what effective action a casual worker in Wapping, living from day to day just above the poverty line, could have taken to escape the cholera in his parish in any case. But what it does do is provide a fascinating picture of what ailed and killed those East Enders of a couple of centuries back.

The information is fine up to a point. The problem was that the people listing the information were not doctors but parish clerks, whose ‘diagnosis’ of what had seen the unfortunates off was vague at best. Certainly, the greatest number of deceased were simply ‘aged’ (though ‘age’ not being an illness nobody actually dies of it). Likewise, ‘bedridden’ and ‘lethargy’ are barely adequate as symptoms let alone diagnoses.

Medical science was far more primitive than today of course, and some illnesses cover a multitude of ailments today. ‘Ague’ for instance, was a condition of alternating hot and cold sweats with fever: sounding very much like modern-day malaria. ‘Quinsy’ was simply an infection caused by untreated tonsilitis, while ‘apoplexy’ (still used metaphorically today) would nowadays be diagnosed as a stroke. ‘Dropsy’ meanwhile, referred to a collection of lymphatic fluid (the modern-day oedema).

And some of the diseases had spectacular titles. St Anthony’s Fire would later be known as Ergotism and was a spectacularly nasty disease caused by fungal contamination of the grains used in baking. Convulsive symptoms include painful seizures and spasms, diarrhoea, paralysis, itching, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and hallucinations similar to those of an LSD trip … followed of course by death. In earlier times, the illness might even have been seen as evidence of demonic possession. ‘Rising of the Lights’ would be a disease of the lungs, with ‘Headmouldshot’ a catch-all for illnesses of the brain, such as encephalitis or meningitis.

Entertaining to read (though certainly not to suffer) are entries over the years that include bladder in the throat, breakbone fever, canine madness, commotion, eel thing, frogg, gathering, grocer’s itch, hectic fever, kink, milk leg, screws, stranguary, stuffing, rag picker’s disease, tympany, worm fit, wolf, and being planet struck. The latter again emphasises the persisting belief that Man’s moods and even sanity were at the mercy of the planets (moon struck would be a variation).

Sad too to see how mundane were many of the illnesses that saw people off. Until recently we’ve complacently thought of measles and chicken pox as childhood diseases to be overcome with a few days off school. But then (as in many parts of the world today) they were real killers. Colds would see off many (especially the young and old of course). The London of the 1700s was not a city of old people, and many of the young didn’t reach maturity. In the 1700s, around 150 or every thousand infants born failed to reach a year old - and things had barely improved a century later. The table below shows just how many mothers died in childbirth too.

LONDON BILL OF MORTALITY 1775
Natural deaths
Abortive and stillborn 529
Aged 1297
Ague 5
Apoplexy, suddenly & planet struck 215
Asthma & tissick 286
Bedridden 6
Bleeding 9
Blood flux 3
Bursten & rupture 9
Cancer 54
Canker 9
Childbed 188
Chicken pox 1
Cold 18
Colick & Twisted gut 70
Consumption 4452
Convulsions 5177
Cough, chin & whooping 206
Diabetes 2
Dropsie 865
Evil 11
Falling sickness 1
Fever, scarlet, purple spotted 2244
Fistula 9
Flux 9
French pox 71
Gout 69
Gravel, stones 36
Grief 3
Griping in the guts 1
Horseshoe head, head made hot, water on the head 19
Headache 2
Jaundice 120
Impostume 11
Inflammation 114
Itch 1
Leprosie 1
Lethargy 6
Livergrown 2
Lunatick 52
Measles 283
Miscarriage 4
Mortification 169
Palsie 65
Quinsie 4
Rash 1
Rheumatism 6
Rickets 1
Rising of the lights 1
Scald head 4
Sciatica 1
Scurvy 2
Sore throat 4
Smallpox 2699
Sores & ulcers 9
St Anthony’s fire 2
Stoppage in the stomach 10
Surfeit 1
Swelling 1
Teeth 694
Thrush 77
Tympany 1
Vapours 1
Vomiting & looseness 5
Worms 1

Non-natural causes
Bite - mad dog 2
Broken limbs -
Bruised 1
Burnt 8
Choked 1
Drowned 104
Excessive drinking 2
Executed 24
Fools etc 64
Found dead 2
Frighted 1
Frozen 1
Murdered 3
Overlaid 4
Poisoned 1
Scalded 1
Shot 1
Smothered 1
Stabbed 1
Starved 2
Suffocated 4
Suicide 29

A battle over the future of London’s skyline began today at the start of a planning inquiry into a skyscraper that the government’s heritage advisers say would be the capital’s “ugliest and most oppressive building”.

Actually you know there’s some serious competition for this one, with the Barbican and the proposed extension to the Tate Modern (too bleeding modern if you look at the plans). We’re going to be following this up with a list soon.