The Death of Dalston Lane.
Posted: February 13, 2014 Filed under: Architectural, Catastrophes, Conspiracies, Dereliction, Housing, Vanishings | Tags: Bill Parry-Davies, Dalston Lane, Death of London, hackney council, Iain Hamilton, Open Dalston Comments Off on The Death of Dalston Lane.
Dalston Lane, May 2010. © David Secombe.
From Open Dalston, 20 December & 11 February 2014:
Hackney to demolish sixteen Georgian houses in Dalston Lane
Dalston Lane, May 2010. © David Secombe.
From Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire* by Iain Sinclair:
Dalston Lane
Once a street is noticed it’s doomed. Endgame squatters, slogans. DALSTON! WHO ASKED U? PROTECTED BY OCCUPATION. Torched terraces. Overlapping, many-coloured tags. Aerosol signatures on silver roll-down shutters. Scrofulous rubble held up by flyers for weekend noise events. THIS WORLD IS RULED BY THOSE WHO LIE. They said, the ones who make it their business to investigate such things, that there was a direct relationship between properties that applied for conservation status and arson attacks, petrol bombs. Unexplained fires. Moscow methods arrived in town with the first sniff of post-Soviet money. Russian clubs were opening in the unlikeliest places. We no longer had much to offer in the way of oil and utilities, energy resources, but we had heritage to asset-strip: Georgian wrecks proud of their status.
* Hamish Hamilton, 2009.
Dalston Lane, May 2010. © David Secombe.
D.S.: The shameful saga of Dalston Lane is a microcosm of the fate of the East End as a whole: a sorry mash-up of corporate and council greed flying under the discredited banner of ‘regeneration’. The cynical, Blairite language of contemporary urban development expressed by developers and local authorities deserves a study in itself: ‘affordable housing’ (i.e. ‘unaffordable affordable housing’); councils ‘competing’ with other boroughs for resources (food? water? air?); ‘conservation-led schemes’ (wherein conservation is a synonym for demolition – along the lines of, ‘We had to demolish the terrace in order to conserve it.’). It is language that might have been invented by Orwell. The fact that a Labour council is responsible for such wanton cynicism towards its own residents is deeply depressing and makes one despair for the fate of the city. The death of Dalston Lane is the death of London.
For further reading on this long-festering matter, see Bill Parry-Davies’ site Open Dalston.
Dalston Lane, May 2010. © David Secombe.
A thought for the Undead.
Posted: October 31, 2013 Filed under: Catastrophes, Funereal, Parks, Tall Tales | Tags: adventure playground, buried alive, cholera, Halloween, Rotherhithe, The Not Really Dead, The Undead Comments Off on A thought for the Undead.
Playground, Rotherhithe. © David Secombe 1988.
From The Lancet, August 23, 1884:
Burying Cholera Patients Alive
It is not so much undue haste as inexcusable carelessness that must be blamed for the premature burying of persons who are not really dead. Such heedlessness as alone can lead to the commission of this crime is not a shade less black than manslaughter. We speak strongly, because this is a matter in regard to which measures ought to be at once taken to render the horrible act impossible, and to dismiss all fear from the public mind. If it be a fact, as would seem to be indisputable, that during the last few weeks there have been cases we will not attempt to say how many or how few of burying alive, a scandal and a horror, wholly unpardonable in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, have to be faced; and the sooner the full truth is known and rules of safety established the better.
Let it be once for all decided that measures shall be taken to ascertain the fact of death before burial. Why not revert to the old practice, and always open a vein in the arm after death, or pass a current of electricity through the body before the coffin is finally screwed down? It may be held that these unpleasant resorts are unnecessary. We do not think they are. In any case enough is known of the possibilities of ‘ suspended animation’ to render it unsafe to bury until the evidences of an actual extinction of life are unmistakable ; and, as it is impossible to wait until decomposition sets in in all cases of death from infectious diseases, it would be prudent to adopt what must certainly be the least of evils.
… our obligatory Halloween post. See also: London Gothic, Halloween, The Haunted House.
V2 Woolworths disaster, New Cross, 25 November 1944.
Posted: November 25, 2011 Filed under: Anniversaries, Catastrophes, Public Announcements, Vanishings, Wartime London | Tags: Apollo 11, Doodlebug Blitz, Eddie Chapman, V1, V2, Vengeance Weapon, Werner von Braun 1 Comment
Air raid shelter sign, Jerningham Road, New Cross, SE14. Photo © David Secombe 2010.
Today marks the 67th anniversary of the worst single bombing incident of the 2nd World War – when a V2 rocket scored a direct hit on a Woolworths store in New Cross. The V2 hit Woolworths when it was crowded with Saturday morning shoppers: the official death toll was 168, but it was often said that the real figure was much higher – although it seems unlikely that a significantly higher casualty number could have been withheld until now.
The V2 was unlike the earlier ‘Vengeance Weapon’, the V1 (A.K.A. ‘doodlebug’, a cruise missile) in that it was impossible to detect – let alone intercept – before it exploded. The first impact in Chiswick in September 1944 was first thought to have been caused by a gas explosion. Their sudden deployment was a source of grave concern to Churchill, and prompted the construction of deep-level air raid shelters in Bloomsbury, Clapham and Stockwell. South and east London received a disproportionately high number of V-strikes, largely because of a British intelligence coup: the double agent Eddie Chapman managed to convince his Nazi ‘handlers’ that V1s were overshooting the centre of London (they weren’t), hence the rocket launchers recalibrated and bombs began falling on Brockley, Woolwich, Deptford, Catford, Barking, Ilford, etc., and across Kent and Surrey.
The literal impact of these weapons may still be seen in London, where pockets of undeveloped bombsites remain – like the dead spot on Tottenham Court Road opposite Heals, final destination of a V2. South London is peppered with anomalous green spaces or abrupt changes in architectural style on a residential street, characteristic traces of Vengeance weapons. Perhaps the most bizarre legacy of the V2 campaign was the subsequent career of the project’s architect, Werner von Braun. The majestic Saturn V rocket which took Neil Armstrong towards the Moon was von Braun’s creation, the end result of his wartime experiments in rocketry and ballistics. As for Woolworths, they’ve put up a plaque. There is an Iceland store there now.
(The Londonist has a fascinating map of V2 bombsites on London; and further information may be found on the site flyingbombsandrockets.com.)
David Secombe.
London Monumental. Photos & text David Secombe (1/5)
Posted: September 5, 2011 Filed under: Catastrophes, Churches | Tags: caryatids, Elgin Marbles, Erectheum Comments Off on London Monumental. Photos & text David Secombe (1/5)
Caryatids, St. Pancras New Church, Euston. Photo © David Secombe, 2010.
From Georgian London, John Summerson, 1945/69:
St. Pancras is the queen of early nineteenth century churches; its architecture earns it the title, as much as its size and cost. Inwood’s flair for recapturing that nervous intensity of Greek architecture of the fifth century is very remarkable, and he seems to have had no difficulty in applying it to the commonplace objects of English practice.
The church stands on the corner of the Euston Road and Upper Woburn Place . It was consecrated in 1822, and was the most expensive church of its time – it was, in fact, the most expensive church in London since St. Paul’s. The father and son team of William and Henry Inwood won the competition to design the building and produced a church in the Greek revival manner, complete with a pair of pavilions modelled on the Acropolis’ Temple of the Erectheum. (Henry Inwood had travelled much in Greece and is generally considered to have been the dominant force in the design of the building.) The terracotta caryatids that guard the crypt are a clear echo of their ancient Greek forbears – one of which resides at the British Museum, part of that long-contested group known collectively as the Elgin Marbles. On July 7 2005, a suicide bomber detonated a bomb on board a number 30 bus which had just passed the church, proceeding down Upper Woburn Place before its destruction in Tavistock Square. The steps of St. Pancras were one of the sites for floral memorials to mark the tragedy.
© David Secombe 2011.
The London Column 