Last week we left off at Ladbroke Grove station. This is the dark looking entrance on the north side of the bridge in the shadow of the Westway.

Note the tiny branch of the record shop Dub Vendor right next to the entrance.

This is the W10 section of Ladbroke Grove. The tall houses of the southern end of the street have been left behind. The 19th century housing at this end of the road was built to accommodate local workers and commuters after the district line came to the area.The major part of the growth of the area took place in the 1870s.

Nevertheless this was still an area of desirable housing and in the period I worked around here it was ripe for the process of gentrification. There are a few shops but Ladbroke Grove was and still is a road of houses, although the Victorian town houses in this part of the road had mostly been converted into flats.

Below, the bus stop by Chesterton road.

Opposite that, the Earl Percy, no longer a pub but a hotel /bistro called the Portobello House.

The buildings here were solid but a little run down, awaiting that wave of improvement.

I don’t have as many anecdotes for the w10 section of Ladbroke Grove. But my wife and I did have an encounter with the angriest taxi driver in the world after spending the evening with some friends who had a flat along the eastern side of the road. It was late at night and we’d had a couple of drinks. The driver was one of those who abhored stopping at traffic lights so was forever turning into side streets, flinging us from side to side, causing a fit of giggling which just seemed to make him drive faster. A tour of obscure streets between Ladbroke Grove and Beaufort Street ensued which served to improve my growing knowledge of the Borough.

This picture puzzled me for a while and I briefly wondered whether it had been mis-labelled as 240 Ladbroke Grove.

I showed it to a local expert, we zoomed in on the door and she identified the Raymede Clinic, a welfare centre for mothers and children which stood where the new fire brigade station is now located on the corner of Telford Road. (Not the only street in the vicinity named after a scientist/engineer.)

It feels like a long road at this point. On the western side there is some postwar housing in front of the gothic tower of St Charles’ Hospital but the photo survey doesn’t have many pictures of that side from this period

Moving north we cross a railway line. North of that was one of the big industrial structures in the area, the Gas Works. For more on that see this post. The Works originally stood in isolation but was surrounded by the northward development of housing. In 1936 the Gas Company itself moved into housing with the construction of Kensal House

We won’t linger here. I’m going to give Kensal House a post to itself shortly.

The final northernmost section of Ladbroke Grove has seen the most changes, The area looks completely different now from pictures in the 1970s and 1980s. The most dramatic change was the building of the large branch of Sainsburys on the gas works site. But other features have changed too as you can see in these planning photos from the 1980/90s.

A row of shops and houses on the eastern side of the road.

A closer look shows a then well known establishment.

Hamrax Motors (their motto, as I recall it on the side of their van: “You bend’em, we mend’em”), a crowded room where owners of Japanese motorcycles could go to be patronised by scornful middle aged men who preferred Triumphs and other British bikes.. There was a workshop below it accessible around the back where I took one of my bikes was repaired after my most damaging accident.

On the other side of the road the gas works site, cleared in this picture.

The building just visible on the right is Canalside House, almost the sole survivor.

Below the edge of Kensal Green cemetery, the Dissenter’s Chapel over the wall.

Behind that gate is a path to the canal.

The path is just about visible here in this photograph of 1961 from a private collection.

Note the water tower which  has also survived and been convertrd for residential use. On the left a building I was particularly glad to see – a pub called the Narrow Boat which was a stopping off point for people like me heading north towards the pub desert of Kensal Rise.

There was another pub right at the end of Ladbroke Grove seen here, the Plough. Another one I never entered, now gone. These pictures come from the 80s or 90s.

The narrow entrance onto the Harrow Road by the Plough. This takes us out of the Borough. But I’ve one more motoring story for you. On that bike ride I began with in the last post I would cross the Harrow Road and head up Kilburn Lane/ Chamberlayne Road to Kensal Rise. On one weekday afternoon, ascending the hill of one of the bridges over the railway I was caught in slow moving traffic. A yappy dog who must have had a particular dislike of motorcycles launched himself at me and sank his teeth into my leg piercing the boot on one side (quite a nice pair of boots from Lewis Leathers of Great Portland Street). Imagine me attempting to accelerate away while trying to shake the dog off my leg. When I got home it was decided I needed a tetanus shot so I was off again back down Ladbroke Grove to St Charles’s Hospital. So a set of photographic shots ends with another kind of shot.

(One final picture. One the right you can see the roof of the stone mason’s showroom, the only structure left from this 1981 picture.)

Postscript

Thanks to Maggie for clearing a few matters up, and Barbara for unearthing some of the pictures. Also to Mr Peter Dixon for the canal photograph.

Wide awake, the cold cold light of day
Realize my taste
My taste just slips away
I say my taste just slips away

Song by Bob Stanley, Peter Stewart Wiggs and Sarah Jane Cracknell.

This post is an  appendix to the journey up Ladbroke Grove I’ve been on in the last two weeks. I won’t bother you with many more of my personal reminiscences but I do remember being struck by Kensal House in the time when I was working in North Kensington and taking the 52 bus home every night to Kensal Rise. Looking down from the upper deck of a bus I recognized the unique character of Kensal House sitting below the level of the road next to the railway. I wasn’t any kind of expert on the architecture of the area then but I could see it came from a more optimistic time than the late 1970s and had seen better days.

[Ladbroke Grove 1936]

In the 1930s planners and architects were enthused with the possibilities of new forms of housing, and possibly were no longer in thrall to paternalistic Victorian notions of raising up the working classes by improving their living conditions. Le Corbusier’s description of a house as a machine for living in was a fresh idea. (from 1923) It was a brave new world of course as of 1931 (although Aldous Huxley’s phrase was ironic). The housing scheme which utilised a no longer needed corner of the Gas Works site was sponsored by the Gas, Light and Coke Company. There was a team of architects headed by Maxwell Fry, with Robert Atkinson, C H James and Grey Wornum (whose work has been on the blog before). They were joined by a housing consultant, Elizabeth Denby.

In 1938 Ascot Water Heaters Ltd published a survey of recent developments called “Flats: Municipal and Private Enterprise” which featured the new estate.

In the introduction Bernard Friedman says: “To the Greeks physical fitness, beauty of form, and congenial environment were essential to the harmony of life.”

[On the left, the school]

Maxwell Fry goes on to describe the thinking behind the scheme. Although he sounds a bit patronizing (“The idea that animated both sides of the work was the desire to build a group of homes where people whose incomes allow them little above sheer necessity could experience as full a life as can be”.) it is also clear that he was concerned with the lives of future residents – ” hardship centres around the lack of practical things, such as space, sun, air hot water, cooking facilities and so on. If these things are not remedies in the new home…then it is no great change for the better.” He goes on to explain that a “type plan” for three and two bedroom flats. The bedrooms would be all on one side of the flats allowing them to be smaller and the living rooms bigger with light on the bedrooms in the morning and the living rooms in the afternoon. Above the ground floor the flats all had balconies with built-in flower boxes. The kitchens were equipped with “drying balconies” and of course Ascot Water Heaters provided constant hot water. (Fry emphasizes these, but then they were the publishers.). Fry also emphasizes the “more civilised” internal staircases (“a nice feeling of going up your own staircase.”)

[1936. Note the balconies]

The consultant to the project, Elizabeth Denby describes it as “the first urban village to be built in Britain“. The design committee also had responsibility for ensuring the new residents settled in and that rent and fuel costs remained reasonable. She remained on the new estate for a while in her consulting role. She reports on the success of the Club Rooms and the social club which took in members from the surrounding area, and took particular pleasure in the enthusiastic take-up of the gardening facilities. “On a sunny evening or at the weekend each balcony was its tenants leaning elbows on the rail, smoking, gossiping,  happy, like a group of cottagers perched above each other on a steep cliff. The possession of canaries by some of the tenants intensifies the country illusion.” Again, you can see a degree of condescension in her surprise that working class people responded to improved living conditions by looking after their new homes but the scheme was well-intentioned and did succeed in showing the way forward for planners.

Both Denby and Fry mention the light available in the new flats – big windows, airy spaces, the feeling of a garden. This was an idea that was taking hold in the sun-worshiping 1930s. Sun lounges, gymnasiums, fresh air and exercise. I’ve encountered that enthusiasm for the outdoors in various spheres such as the Bauhaus houses in Chelsea and the dancing philosophy of Margaret Morris.

As it grew older Kensal House got a little worn down, as I saw it in the 1970s but its fortune revived and the atmosphere of pleasant living in a garden-like environment is still visible in a set of photographs from 1992.

This one and the one below show the same walkway between blocks, possibly even the same trees.

So that little pocket of 1930s optimism remained.

The gas lamps have been replaced as in this view of a grassy knoll, but the sense of separateness is still intact.

Behind this picture you can see the same water tower from last week and the site of the Sainsbury’s super store as it was.

The fenced gardens and the curved facade.

The shaded lane between the blocks.

Kensal House (a Grade II* listed building) is still in the architectural text books, still praised as an example of well designed urban development. So Fry and Denby and their committee could claim to have done something useful and interesting on a small slice of industrial land.

Postscript

A little while ago I worked with the SPID Theatre Company on a project they were doing with residents of Kensal House so thanks to them and the residents’ group who visited the library during the course of their project. Read more at their website: spidtheatre.com/wordpress where you can download a brochure about Kensal House.

This post starts with someone we’ve encountered before: the art collector and patron Edmund Davis.

As we learned in the post about a room decorated for Davis by Charles Conder this picture shows Davis and his wife in 18th century dress, dancing at a musical soiree in their house in Lansdowne Road. But there are others in the picture: the Davis’s niece, Clare Atwood is sitting on the sofa dressed as a clergyman or scholar. Behind her stand the artists Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. We assume the dog has come as himself although the Davises had attended other costume parties in animal guise. (A pair of poodles if you recall). In the chairs on the left are Elsa Dulac and  Davis’s sister-in-law Mrs Halford. We don’t know who the comedy soldiers are, or the lady at the harpsichord but the gentleman in the right corner at the front who is looking out of the picture is the artist who painted it. The year is 1912.

As we saw in the other post about Conder, costume balls were very popular at this time. We’ve seen other examples of dressing up en masse in the pre-War period – see the many posts on the Chelsea Pageant – and I’ve suggested in the past it amounted to a kind of obsession. Edmund Dulac seems to have had a bit of a gift for it. Here he is on horseback in a tableau vivant.

Dulac and his wife were living nearby in Ladbroke Road at number 72, a house owned by Davis who had created studios there and  in several other houses in the area where other artists lived. Dulac was born and educated in France but had come to London in 1905 and lived and worked in Britain for the rest of his life.

You can see the tall windows suitable for studio use in this 1968 picture. An estate agent’s picture of the rear in 1988 shows the large garden.

I’ve spent a lot of blog time this year hovering around a series of artists and illustrators, some of whom like Charles Conder were closely associated with Kensington or Chelsea,and some like Hugh Thomson whose connection was much looser, in the subject matter or collaborator. Many of them were artists I had never heard of before. But Dulac, like Arthur Rackham, who appeared in a post about this time last year is someone whose reputation has lingered into modern times. He was another of those artists/ illustrators whose work was published in large format paperbacks in the 1970s  – Rackham himself, Sidney Sime, Harry Clarke, Aubrey Beardsley, Heath Robinson – most of whom had some element of the fantastic about them which fitted in with the boom in fantasy literature of the time (and with fantastical prog rock album covers, but let’s draw a veil over those.)

By 1912 Dulac was known for his illustrations to the Arabian Nights as well as books of his like My Days with the Fairies (1910) . This is an illustration from Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tales (1910).

Dulac’s pictures are exotic and glamorous, exactly right for his subject matter, fairy tales and folklore.

His faeries are colourful and benign (unlike those of say Rackham).

His treatment of stories like the Little Mermaid contain just the the right amount of grotesque elements.

He even tackles one of Hugh Thomson’s favourite subjects, young women lounging around. (See the post on the Admirable Crichton )

After his early success with the Arabian Nights he often depicted European stories such Bluebeard’s Castle and Beauty and the Beast in an “Arabian” setting.

In October 1916 Dulac watched a Zeppelin being shot down above west London. This is possibly the same incident that Herbert Hoover and his family saw from the nearby roof of the Red House (link) although Dulac was alarmed rather than excited by the event and Elsa was badly shaken. There were more heavy raids the following year with aircraft visible over Holland Park which unnerved them both. Edmund Davis arranged for them to live on an estate in Surrey where there were others escaping from the bombing.

They were back in London in 1918. The era of the big illustrated book seemed to have gone so Dulac diversified into costume and theatre design and commissioned work. In 1919 they moved across the road (almost literally ) to the slightly larger 117 Ladbroke Road

The Dulacs lived on the upper floors.(The artist Glyn Philpott lived on the lower floors).Oddly, in 1988 the building was still organised into two separate residences.

Elsa never really recovered from her nervous condition exacerbated by the war years and in 1923 she and Dulac separated. Apparently not one to let the grass grow under his feet it was not long before Dulac was joined by a young woman who was already a frequent visitor, Helen de Beauclerk . She shared his interest in astrology, Jungian psychoanalysis , meditation and fringe philosophies  like those of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

The Dulacs had the upper two floors which included a large studio and a verandah.

You can see that Helen looked quite like a typical Dulac character. The picture below shows her in 18th century dress in one of his illustrations to her novel, The Green Lacquer Pavilion.

This was appropriate of course, but here she is in a folk tale illustration.

Possibly he liked to paint a certain kind of woman. This earlier image shows a woman just like Helen, before he even met her.

In later life he worked on designs for stamps and medals and adopted other styles for certain projects like Treasure Island (1927) and A Fairy Garland (1929)

Here he is in 1937 with his great friend W B Yeats who shared many of his interests. He died in 1953.

Dulac is another example of an artist who is perhaps not as well thought of as he might be because he is associated with book illustration. One of my continuing interests on this blog is to look at artists like him whose work is preserved in library books rather than in galleries.

Postscript

This post was conceived as a companion piece to the posts about Conder, but who knows where it will lead. I’ve drawn heavily on Colin White’s excellent book on Dulac for biographical detail and pictures, but also used one of those 1970s picture books published by Coronet in 1975. An expert on printing could probably write an interesting post about the difference in printed colours between then and now, but I’m not such an expert so I’ll simply note that it is interesting how these things change. I’m looking forward to handling an original illustrated book by Dulac.

Edmund Dulac by Colin White. Studio Vista 1976.

Dulac edited by David Larkin. Coronet/Hodder and Stoughton  1975

Both out of print but still available through online retailers.

The approach to Christmas is also traditionally the time for ghost stories. The most famous of British writers of ghost stories, M R James, often gathered together friends or students at  this time of year to read one of his latest offerings to them. You can picture them in in an ancient university city, in an old academic’s study, lined with bookshelves and lit by candles or gaslights. You can imagine a small group of like minded men in comfortable chairs gathered round the storyteller. Perhaps the only light is the one illuminating the reader’s manuscript.

It’s always gatherings of men in these things isn’t it?  So wipe some of them from your mind and insert some academic women in their place, perhaps in evening dress after some college function. The reader is an equal opportunity teller of scary tales. You can insert a clergyman if you like, and a nun,or even a woman dressed as a nun as in a gothic novel, or a couple of actual goths with black dresses and white faces, shifted in time to a suitable milieu.

I’m not going to tell you a supernatural story. (I do that at Halloween) We’re unfortunately not sitting in a cosy dark room. (Or perhaps you are.) I’m going to entertain you with some illustrations, to a book called the Haunted House. The book is a long poem by Thomas Hood written in 1843, the year of his untimely death. Although it was strongly admired by that other poet of the unearthly, Edgar Allen Poe, the poem is curious rather than scary. It’s the illustrations, created long after Hood’s death, that do the trick.

Unhinged the iron gates half open hung,
Jarr’d by the gusty gales of many winters,
That from its crumbled pedestal had flung
One marbled globe in splinters.

The pictures are by Herbert Railton from an illustrated edition of 1896 (introduction by Austin Dobson of course.) We’ve met Mr Railton once before . I told you then that there was something mysterious, wild and unsettling in his work, even when he was apparently simply depicting ordinary buildings. In the Haunted House he lets himself go, and this time he does want to scare you.

O’er all there hung a shadow and a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted

The haunted house, a “colossal wreck” (to quote another poet) is often desolate, ruined, abandoned. The final member of a long lived family died here, the last of the line and lingers on, unable to rest. Or a gifted young man, (or woman remember) discovered dark philosophies and delved into hidden and perverse arts, ended up raising something which could not be put down.

The lone heron is the demoralized soul or familiar of the dead sorcerer standing guard over the scene of its downfall. The waters of the moat both protect outsiders from the influence of the place and keep the forces within imprisoned. Well, you could say that if you were a travel writer wandering the country looking for interesting stories and local colour (like the author of Moated Houses in the previous post).

You could be one of those invented sources used by writers of supernatural stories to lend a sense of authority to their creations. They write about the horrors at second or third hand, safe in their warm studies. Someone always ends up ignoring all the warnings and entering the haunted place. There’s often a handy path (secretly intended for this purpose) free from the undergrowth.

Inside there’s a courtyard or what remains of an ornamental garden with a handy sundial. It will probably have some cryptic and oblique words carved on it in an obscure language. If you happen to read that language, don’t read the words aloud. So many do, and come to regret it.

The statue, fallen from its marble base
Amidst the refuse leaves, and herbage rotten
Lay like the idol of some bygone race
Its name and rites forgotten

When you get inside there should be no shortage of detritus from another age. It looks like the former inhabitants left in a hurry. If they left at all?

Some kind of trail will lead you, through small pools of water dripping in, or scraps of clothing or holes in the floor,  up the dark staircase to the final location. Mr Railton has a gift for making you not quite sure what you’re seeing.

At last, the haunted bedroom. Think of the thing in the corner (or the whistling room) in William Hope Hodgsons’s collection about Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Nothing is more terrifying than an unwanted presence in a bed chamber as several unwary sleepers in M R James stories discovered to their cost. (“Casting the runes” springs to mind). A bed is usually a sanctuary from the world not a source of terror.

The unquiet sleeper might prefer not to hang around and wait for what is coming but to throw on a gown or coat and retrace their steps out of the house.

Even if they have to walk out into the moonlit courtyards and navigate gloomy passages to escape. Better to be off the premises altogether and out into the forgiving night. Will there be any pursuit? Maybe it’s not that kind of story.

Sometimes the spirits too slip away, bound for their final destinations, or the beginning of their adventures. Farewell to them, and back to that academic’s study, where the storyteller closes his book and the guests gather up their coats or cloaks so they too can venture out into the night back to their own places of refuge. The storyteller wishes them well. Happy Christmas, he says to Mr Railton and Mr Hood, to Mr Reid, Mrs Hernandez and Ms Smith, and all the others.

Postscript

More whimsical stuff. Next week I’m doing some short daily posts like last year. I’ve done four out of the five so we’ll have to see if I can come up with another one pretty soon. After the holidays we’ll have to get back to some proper history.

A vaguely related anecdote: do you recall the photographs of Simon Marsden, who published several books of pictures of disturbing houses taken using his own special techniques? He was a master at showing haunted houses (or houses that looked like they should be haunted) in desolate spots. One example was Plas Pren, in Denbighshire, now practically a ruin and nothing like it was when Mr Marsden took his picture, and coincidentally when someone took me there with a group of friends, parking just off the road and walking across a classic desolate moor to the empty house around which rumours of hauntings had grown. We actually ventured inside, although as I recall we were more concerned with the state of the floor than any possible ghosts. But of course we were there on a sunny afternoon, not after dark. And nobody recited any incantations. (we were on our way back from Portmerion, a place which had cast a different kind of spell over us.) There had better be another dedication, to Mr Hughes and Mr McLennan and Mr Paxton.

(Incidentally, in the unlikely event that Mr Hughes is a regular reader, I’ve lost his address. Email me, Steve)

I know one old friend of mine who lives in a city of dark and splendour is a regular reader so best wishes to Graham once again.

My first post featuring the Cherub hasn’t proved to be one of my most popular pieces. Possibly too whimsical, or just a bit weird. But the search never really ends and when I found him again twice in as many weeks it seemed that I couldn’t avoid laying him before you again in one of these short posts for Christmas.

This is the usual idea of a cherub:

As drawn by Bernard Partridge for a volume of poetry by Austin Dobson. A chubby little chap with wings and a toy bow and arrow, doing Cupid’s work.

My cherub looked like this:

The portrait of William Cecil, Elizabeth’s spymaster is not for me the point of this engraving. The amoral child clutching his caduceus and his demon dog grasping a key are the real subject matter.

I looked for further occurences and found this:

The same sinister boy sitting underneath the bland features of Sir John Pym up to no good at all with his flashes of lightning and his new friend the predatory goose. He is about to make a magical gesture of some sort I’m sure.

And as I say I’ve found him again so I can bring together all four of his appearances in this post.

There he is, skulking beneath Ann of Cleeves (a Chelsea resident – the Flanders mare as Henry VIII called her), his hand on the crown while he looks to see who is watching him. His insect wings are like those of Partridge’s cherub but instead of helping him with Love’s work they give him the power of flight so he can make off with the crown.

There is a final metamorphosis to see.

This is possibly the most sinister verision yet. His lower limbs have become tentacles and he has acquired a tail, along with a trident for further mischief. He reaches for another crown as if about to imitate the Deep Ones and snatch it away, heading for the abyssal depths.

I’ve referenced Lovecraft, but we could also be reminded of Robert Aickman and the inhabitants of the dark church in his story the Cicerones. You could imagine the engravings as actual sculptures hiding in the dark corners of an ecclesiastically dubious place of worship awaiting the unwary traveller.

But I’ve read a lot of that sort of thing and now my mind makes me lean in that direction. No doubt there are perfectly rational explanations for all of the Cherub’s manifestations.

Further Christmas reading:

M R James – Lost hearts / Casting the runes (to name but two, in Collected Ghost Stories and many others)

H P Lovecraft – The shadow over Innsmouth (in several Lovecraft collections)

Robert Aickman – The Cicerones (currently in print in the collection The Unsettled Dust. Also made into an unsettling short film by Jeremy Dyson starring Mark Gatiss – find it on YouTube)

Clive Barker – Anything from the Books of Blood (still the most startling debut in horror fiction)

Clark Ashton Smith – Anything you can find really.

To re-inforce the Christmas spirit, these short posts will be accompanied by seasonal greetings from a number of soft toys. Today with HP Lovecraft in mind Happy Christmas from the Great Cthulhu and the less well known Great Old One, Little Cthulhu.

See you tomorrow.

If you know South Kensington you’ll have seen this car park on the corner of Queen’s Gate and Harrington Road. it’s basically a patch of land gradually sloping down into a depression with a hut at the entrance and cars parked at various angles. The current owners have made some efforts with the boards that surround the site, commissioning an artist to paint cryptic phrases on them, which are mildly diverting as you pass them on the  bus. The site has been a car park since before 1989. I recently had a conversation with a customer who had been researching Queen’s Gate who asked the rhetorical question why had it never been developed in the last 25 years? Since 1989 we’ve had the  fall of the Soviet Union, the entire Prime Ministerial career of Tony Blair and the entire vampire killing career of Buffy Summers, but no-one has built on this site.

I said that although it wasn’t a reason, the clearing of the site has given us a side view of St Augustine’s Church, an interesting building which would previously have been obscured.

I’ve used this picture before in another context but it does illustrate the point.

The church looks quite hemmed in by the block on the left which includes the Hotel Imperial. The view below shows the church frontage. The church occupies a narrow site which aligns with the street behind it, Reece Mews, rather than Queen’s Gate. it looks a little squeezed in early pictures.

The clearing of the site behind the Hotel Imperial was the first step to visibility. These pictures from 1989 show the hotel closed and boarded up. The the lower floors are covered in corrugated iron.

We must have sent our photographer John Rogers down there especially for these images.

An NCP car park already occupied part of the site.

Quite why the Hotel Imperial was demolished I can’t say. It doesn’t quite qualify as a “forgotten building” in the way I use the term on this blog, but it is certainly a vanished building, and therefore worth noting here. And, as I noted, its absence shows us the decorative (Byzantine?) style of the full length of St Augustine’s

Along with a number of enigmatic statements constituting a form of graffiti. My personal favourite:

But I’m a Talking Heads fan.

There is no particular connection with the church or the parking space and our soft toy picture of the day:

But Happy Christmas from three gorillas all called Tumba. See you tomorrow.

Today’s short post  is a small installment of pictures by an old friend of the blog, the Japanese artist who lived in London, Yoshio Markino. This one is simple called Autumn:

The woman wrestling with her umbrella has a stylized expression of sadness (or merely exasperation) on her face. Behind her the rest of the scene is indistinct ,in a traditional Markino mist.

Below, some images from a biography which was illustrated by Markino. In a Japanese setting a causeway vanishes into a lake of  lillies floating on barely glimpsed water.

A monochrome temple.

London. A stone lion couches in the wet square. Although this image is also in damp fog, the location is unmistakable.

A house in south London. There are lights on the ground floor but above a single light blazes from a bedroom.

This would have been one of Markino’s early London residences, in Brixton.

This picture, from the Studio magazine is another monochrome view of a familiar London sight.

A small group of people take a walk along the embankment. The night is dark but the woman in the foreground is carrying her coat so it must be a warm evening.

The final image is the most characteristic work. It has Markino’s favourite subject, well dressed women in London on an overcast day.

Two women window shopping in Bond Street, one looking towards the artist. Markino liked to compare London’s women with insects wrapped in carapaces of fur and thick coats.

Behind them yet another mist.

Today’s soft toy is also characteristically Japanese.

Happy Christmas from the goth Hello Kitty. HK is also an appropriate companion for the anglophile Markino since it emerged that Kitty’s surname is White and that she and her family live just outside London. Markino would have approved.

See you tomorrow.

This year I spent a little time doing some research at Chelsea Library in bound copies of the Studio magazine from the early 1900s. As well as finding what I was looking for I also came across a number of pictures which were both unfamiliar and fascinating. The pictures in in today’s post are a selection of the images that appealed to me, beginning with one of young artists at work.

This view of a corridor at Glasgow School of Art was one of a group showing students working on pictures. They’ve obviously been told to act natural but the two closest to us can’t resist looking at the camera.

Below, a drawing by Arthur Rackham. In the past I’ve said how Rackham often places faeries and other supernatural beings in the world of insects and pests. This is an example.

The Rescue – the rescuers are not much larger than insects as they are seen pulling a fly out of a spider’s web. Perhaps the spider preys on faeries too.

The picture below by Alberto Martini is even more grotesque.

A group of villagers discover the remains of a man pulling a wagon (or was he tied to it?), caught in the night and frozen to death.

A rather more pleasant image:

The cello player, a drawing by C H Shannon. A group of young women musicians literally lying around. Their dresses are billowed out around them creating a continuous surface which they are half-absorbed into. It reminds me, inevitably perhaps, of the inner image on a LP’s gatefold sleeve. The pencil technique makes the scene fuzzy and langorous. I would like to see this recreated with a modern band. (I’d also like to see the picture coloured in, which would be relaxing for someone.)

The picture below by J R Weguelin reminded me of Charles Conder. In a villa by a lagoon another group of women relax while a maid covers them in veils, presumably to protect them for the heat of the sun.

I can feel the sense of heat in the air and the sleepy postures of the women.

The Studio also featured architectural drawings like this one by Dan Gibson and TH Mawson.

Finally a picture distinctly reminiscent for me of the work of Aubrey Beardsley.

The artist, Annie French was a student at GSA, one of the so called “Glasgow girls”. The GSA’s website has a number of pictures of students at work. There is one showing Annie French herself, which brings us back to where we began. I don’t know  if any of the women in the corridor was Miss French.

I hope these picture fit with an atmosphere of stillness as Christmas Day arrives and some of the frantic activity is done.

Today’s soft toy greeting is another Japanese character. From the Studio Ghibli animation the gentle and mysterious My Neighbour Totoro, that engaging character the many legged Cat Bus seen here in many sizes. A Happy Christmas from the hybrid creature.

And all the characters featured on the blog. See you tomorrow.

Only the second year of short posts for Christmas week and I’m already breaking my own rules. I had intended these posts to cover subjects where there wasn’t much to say or where we only had a few pictures. But this one is purely because I don’t have time to write a long post about the pictures of Estella Canziani. I can come back to her in the new year and try to give you a fuller picture of a Kensington resident whose first memory was being held up by her nursemaid to see Queen Victoria pass by in a procession, and who lived until the mid 1960s.

Christmas for me is a time for being at home. So it’s appropriate that these pictures from our collection feature the house she lived in all her life in Palace Green.

I love this image of fiery plants glimpsed out of the back door from the corridor.

Estella had a particular liking for domestic interiors, and the garden outside.

(The family also kept pigeons.)

Trees in the garden can also be seen through the skylight in this view from the studio.

Below a picture I had to scan on our book scanner. Images copied this way are often a bit pale so I did some post production in Photoshop.

It restores the blue elements of the orginal, particularly Florence’s dress. Another brightly coloured dress is featured in this painting of a friend of Estella’s playing the piano.

We’ll come back to this Kensington house on another occasion and I can tell you how I identified a picture by Estella’s mother.

That’s the last of these short posts for Christmas week. I hope you had a good day and that your friends and family appreciated all the presents you gave them. The final soft toy Happy Christmas is from a group of animals.

The 12 monkeys of Christmas obviously.

And a happy new year to you all.

Next week, party season, there will be another visit to that perennial blog favourite the Duchess of Devonshire’s costume ball of 1897.

We’re back, possibly for the last time, at the Duchess of Devonshire’s Jubilee Costume Ball of 1897. Although we’ve seen many of the best pictures there are still a few of interest worth looking at if you’re fond of this sort of thing. (I know many of you are, and so am I)

There are even a few famous names left, like this one.

Joan of Arc, played by Countess (or Lady) Helena Gleichen, later a well known painter of landscapes and animals. We have a copy of her memoirs Contacts and Contrasts (John Murray, 1940) in our biographies collection at Kensington Library and she has this to say about the ball:

” I must have been about twenty when the celebrated Devonshire House fancy-dress ball took place…..(it was) settled that I, as the youngest should go. My mother went dressed as an ancestress, the Margravine of Anspach only discovering to her horror afterwards that the lady was not at all respectable… The first idea was that I should go as St Elisabeth of Hungary, the Queen who spent all her money feeding the poor of her realm much to the annoyance of her husband…Unfortunately the head dress did not suit me and when it was adjusted round my face I looked….disreputable.. so it was decided that I should go as Joan of Arc.. I was fitted with a tabard made of white cloth sprinkled wit gold fleur-de-lis. Sir Guy Laking lent me a small suit of real armour which was too heavy to wear in its entirety so I wore only the jambs and sollerets with spurs and the brassards. These last were agony as whenever I bent my arm they took pieces of flesh out. I should have had on a leather jerkin underneath as a protection but I wore only imitation leather which helped not at all. One of the Peels and Victor Corkran were my esquires and they walked behind me in full armour carrying my banner and big two-handed sword. My helmet was carried in front by Sir Arthur Sullivan and we made a very imposing cortege clattering up the marble stairs.

It shows how completely occupied I was with my own importance on that occasion that I remember no one else , only the general effect of brilliance and magnificence, which I have never seen equalled in any other function that I have attended.”

Helena’s mother:

Princess Victor Hohenlohe as the Margravine of Anspach. (“a lovely red velvet gown with hoops and powdered hair… I wore part of the same gown at the jubilee of King George V and the material looked as fresh as it did forty years before.”)

Maybe you could never be sure what you got with ancestors. At least with scandalous fictional characters you knew what you were taking on.

The Honourable Mrs Brett as Manon Lescaut, the title character of a notorious 18th century French novel by the Abbe Prevost. It was turned into an opera by both Massenet and Puccini, has twice been adapted as a ballet and has been filmed several times.

Next, Lady Hilda Keith-Falconer in a relatively simple dress.

She was photographed several times in this costume, in her role as Lady Susan Gordon, Duchess of Manchester. (Who apparently ran off with her footman before separating from her husband the Duke – another scandal) She was taken standing and sitting and even with another guest, the Countess of Kintore (her mother, who was the daughter of the 6th Duke of Manchester and grand daughter of the same Lady Susan I think.)

They don’t make it easy for the modern blogger although this information would have been well known to celebrity devotees of 1897.

Another duo as The Duchess de Lavis and the Marquise de Vintimille.

The two young women are Lady Cardross and the Hon.Miss Muriel Erskine, another mother and daughter as far as I can work it out from the string of titles they have between them. (I expect someone can correct me on this one if I’m wrong.)

To further complicate matters we now have a trio:

The Rt Hon Sir W V Harcourt MP (then Leader of the Opposition) as Simon Lord Harcourt, a Lord Chancellor of 1710 (possibly a relative of his), another MP, A J Balfour as “a gentleman of Holland” (pleasingly vague), and a Mrs Grenfell as Marie de Medici. It could be that the photographer herded three random guests together for this composition but perhaps they too were relatives. A J Balfour, of course was only five years away from being a Conservative Prime Minister. (Harcourt was a Liberal.)

Here is a less complicated trio. The Empress Josephine played by  The Marshioness of Tweedale simply has a couple of willing attendants by her side. The dress is a representation of Josephine’s coronation robes.

At this point I long for some simplicity. Below, Emilia Yznaga plays Cydalise, a character in the Comedie Italienne at the time of Louis XIV. Miss Yznaga does not have a complicated back story.

Of course that’s easy for me to say. Everybody has a complicated back story if you dig deep enough.

Valentina Visconit was the wife of the Duke of Orleans (brother of King Charles V of France).  Lady Mary Curzon looks commanding in this recreation of a costume of 1447. Are you convinced of its historical accuracy? The dress below only goes back to the 17th century.

The classical background  seems to place it somewhere else. My mind wonders off to Westeros a little. But for the record Mabel, Lady St Oswald plays the role of a Venetian noblewoman, the Duchessa de Caluria.

Mrs Lyttleton, according to the caption is simply wearing a dress from a Romney painting, something we’ve seen before. Dame Edith Sophie Lyttleton was a novelist, a political campaigner and a spiritualist, who lived until 1948. I haven’t stressed that aspect of these pictures but it is odd to think that many of these guests were to live through two world wars and witness unprecedented changes in the world they inhabited.

The stern looking Lady Margaret Spicer, below, as another Russian aristocrat Countess Zinotriff, lived till 1949.

She was also painted by John Singer Sargent.

It’s time to  end this visit to the costume ball. I’m not so sure now that this was the final visit. When I went looking for Helena Gleichen’s mother I spotted a few more pictures I liked, so I can’t say that we won’t be back here again this time next year. Helena’s account spurred me on – surely some of the other guests must have written about “the brilliance and magnificence” of the event?

I can’t leave you with 13 pictures so let’s have just one more.

The Hon Mrs Algernon Grosvenor as Marie Louise, looking just a bit tired of the whole business.

Postscript

Helena’s mention of Elisabeth of Hungary brought me back to another favourite subject, the Whitelands May Queens. The story of the saint, which was unfamiliar to me was evidently popular in this period and she features as a character in performances at the May Queen Festival. That’s another angle for my annual post on the May Queens. But here’s a taster for you, showing a slightly less magnificent and brilliant (but possibly more entertaining) performance.

I’m a bit late publishing this post as there were a few things I wanted to chase first. I nearly kept it till the early hours of the new year but in the end perhaps it’s better as the final post of 2015. Next year another year of searching for and waiting for ideas begins. A happy new year to you all.

Okay, I made the name up. Nobody ever called a few streets in North Kensington by that term. You’ll see what I did by their names: Faraday, Telford, Murchison (named after scientists and engineers in 1868) They’re all much altered since 1969 when most of these pictures were taken, especially Murchison Road which has pretty much ceased to be. (There’s another one, Wheatstone Road which is now little more than a stub). After identifying the former home of the Raymede Clinic in the post on Ladbroke Grove I was looking at some pictures of the streets  running east off Ladbroke Grove with some interested parties and we started talking about the streets named for scientists.

The clinic is on the left and the picture is looking down Faraday Road. The tower you can see above the lush foliage belongs to the old fire station. Can you see the small vehicle on the left at the end of the row of parked cars? I believe it’s an invalid carriage, an example of the small, three-wheeled, under-powered “cars” which disabled people could get at the time. I don’t know much about the arrangements involved in the issuing of these institutional looking vehicles (they were the same all over the country). I can remember from my brief time in the motor trade that some people regarded them as death traps, especially when it was possible to adapt regular cars for disabled users. However some users must have liked them.

Before we go any further, and see some more curious vehicles, let’s have a look on a map.

As you can see both Telford and Faraday Roads were longer in 1971 (the approximate date of this Ordnance Survey map) and Murchison actually existed.

At this point the rough photo itinerary I had worked out called upon me to work my way up Faraday Road but I had to stop to work this picture out.

It took me a while to workout from the description “looking west from Portobello” that this picture shows the rest of the fire station (see the glimpse of the tower on the right) and that the buildings visible in the centre at the end of the  street are on the other side of Ladbroke Grove and according to the map must be part of the Church of St Pius X.

I’ve let myself get sidetracked so now let’s get back to the plan and carry on east up Faraday Road.

I can’t resist this view of what I think is a 50s or 60s Volkswagen sports car with a wary boy peeking out at the photographer. As usual I would welcome extra information from motoring buffs about any of the cars  in the pictures. Is this a Volvo?

The cars may be flash but there’s a general air of dilapidation about the houses. In 1969 W10 had not even begun the process of gentrification. The building below, Christchurch Hall was described as “disused” by the photographer.

The actual Christchurch had already been demolished. The empty lot became one of the incarnations of the Notting Hill Adventure Playground. You can see the fence in the picture below.

A couple of boys are playing in the street, a sign that this end of the street where it met Wornington Road was a relatively quiet area.

If we walk round the playground we’re looking down Telford Road.

Once again there’s a certain amount of confusion as the picture is captioned “looking east” but with the playground on the left I think we’re looking west.

This is the corner of Portobello Road and Telford Road.

J A Cook are listed in Kelly’s Directory for 1969 at number 373 Portobello Road. You can see the number 371 next door along with some excellent billboards. (Another ad for Harp lager which must have been ubiquitous at the time)

Kelly’s also lists at number 1 Telford Road the London Transport Canteen. Hence the buses and their crew in this picture.

It was taken in June 1970. You can see Trellick Tower under construction in the distance rising above the remaining terraced housing. Note that truck with a long pole or plank in the back, and then here it is looking in the other direction, parked next to the Eagle public house.

The canteen is in the building next to the pub.  I can’t quite make out the manufacturer’s name on the back of the convertible The little car in motion looks rather older than 1970 too. Any ideas?

Incidentally. Kelly’s tells us that next door to the canteen, at 3 Telford Road was Hy Soloway, ladies tailor (you can just make out some photos by the door and also on the premises (basement or upper floors) was Hauer and Co, doll’s wig makers. A niche service if ever there was one. I have cropped a larger version of the image. The lettering on the canteen door is just visible.

Having satisfied my idle curiosity we have to make our way back up Telford Road and then up to Murchison Road.

The bundle of material on the cart could indicate the presence of a rag and bone man working the street. Murchison Road was shorter than the other two and ran between Portobello Road and Wornington Road as they converged and met in an intersection with Ladbroke Grove. There were only about 20 houses in the street.

A line of old British cars headed by a bug-eyed Ford Anglia, not one of Ford’s cooler models.  I haven’t cropped out the detritus in the foreground  because it could be more evidence of the rag and bone man, or his horse at least.

This is a view looking west.

That’s the same shop and line of cars but we can now see on the other side a Triumph Spitfire (I think) and a truck telling us that we need Pink. Pink what?

Here is a final view of Murchison Road.

A clean looking Volkwagen camper and two people either just leaving or just arriving at their homes, a young girl and a man (or just his arm). She must be in her 50s by now. I did once meet a customer who appeared in one of these survey pictures as a child so I’m always hoping another person will come along and say “it’s me”. It’s not as unlikely as you might think.

Postscript

I was pulling pictures and information together as I wrote so I’m quite surprised that it was reasonably coherent in the end. My thanks to Sue Snyder who asked me to scan some of these and to Maggie Tyler for starting me off at the Raymede Clinic. I don’t think the Science District will ever catch on as a name unless an estate agent takes it up.  As I mentioned the street names were all adopted in 1868 by the Kensington Vestry.

For the record:

Michael Faraday (1791-1867), physicist,chemist and pioneer in the study of electricity

Thomas Telford (1757-1834), civil engineer

Sir Roderick Murchison (1792-1871), geologist

Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) scientist and inventor

`In 1965 a woman died in an old house in Palace Green, a house she had lived in all her life. The house had once been the laundry of Kensington Palace but her parents had just been looking for a pleasant family dwelling. The houses around it had become grander (and more valuable) over the course of the 20th century but for Estella Canziani her house was the family home and garden she had always known.

Estella had done many things in her life. She was a writer on travel and folklore (and local history), a campaigner for the RSPCA and RSPB,  a book illustrator and painter. She painted landscapes, portraits, animals and costumes but what we’re looking at today are paintings of her home and the places around it. What Estella saw were gardens, trees, small animals and rooms full of objects.  She wrote a memoir of her life in the house, her travels and her charity work called  Round about 3 Palace Green (Methuen, 1938)

Here is her garden:

Estella, encouraged by her parents had a fondness for birds, particularly pigeons and had several as pets. She also had many friends among the birds which visited the garden including pheasants and a parrot.

The rear view of Mr Clementi’s house in nearby Kensington Church Street.

The colours of the plants and flowers are what immediately caught my attention. “Flowers on walls have always fascinated me and some of my earliest memories are associated with them.”

Estella’s mother was also a painter.

Louisa Starr, who was born in Liverpool of American descent married an Italian engineer called Frederico Enrico Canziani. Estella reports that her mother dreamed of an ideal house and recognized it while driving in Kensington Gardens, seeing a board up advertising it to let. She telegraphed to her husband to come back from Paris and they secured the property just five minutes ahead of a gentleman who was also waiting for the office to open. Estella was born there two years later.

The photograph of Louisa in the studio she had built in the courtyard comes from a feature in the Ladies Field of about 1900. This photograph from the same feature shows the garden in Estella’s picture.

Is that Louisa on the stepladder with Estella beside her? Estella is said to be aged 13 in the article which describes her as inheriting her mother’s talent. The young Estella was often around artists. She remembers being kissed while in her pram by Lord Leighton and of visiting him at “his beautiful house in Holland Park Road.” “He gave me rides on his shoulders about his studio to the Arab Hall and fountain…He showed me the stuffed peacock at the foot of the stairs and also the beautiful tiles on the staircase…”

Estella also knew Val Princep and his family who lived next door to Leighton as well as G F Watts, Holman Hunt, Luke Fildes and John Everett Millais. She also recalls visiting the studios of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and W P Frith, and attending fancy dress parties at Walter Crane’s house.

Louisa often signed her paintings with a little pictogram of a star. Estella adopted this motif with the addition of a C. You can see this in the picture of a window at the house below.

More plants on walls. The Ladies Field describes the house as ivy-covered. Below Estella is a little older than in the previous picture, seen with her father.

She is wearing her artist’s smock and carrying a plaette so the picture is posed but the affection between them is quite apparent. The identity of the superflous man standing by them is unknown. The precision of her work can be seen in this line drawing entitled Mulberry trees in the garden at Palace Green.

Estella had been told that Queen Victoria had picked mulberries from the two trees in the garden.

Here’s another view from the garden showing the houses beyond the fence and a lone pigeon

Animals and birds, particularly pigeons frequently feature in Estella’s pictures. This one shows the Paddock in Kensington Gardens.

This view at dusk is looking  from Kensington Gardens, westwards I think.

The distant light of the setting sun, and the frantic activity of the squirrels recalling Rackham’s furtive faeries. Estella painted several fairy pictures influenced by European folklore. Her picture the Piper of Dreams of 1915 was much reprinted and became very popular during the war. In her memoir she recalls being told by Philip Lee Warner of the Medici Society that they had sold 250,00 copies in the first year. There was a signed edition of a thousand (at 2 guineas each) – “the old man who looked after me while I autographed them sat me at a table and passed one to me at a time…he watched carefully to see that I was not getting tired and writing badly and after every hundred gave me a rest…He had worked for Leighton, Burne-Jones and many other artists and explained how he had watched each on to see that their signature was perfect.”

The picture below, of the sunken garden in Kensington Gardens also has an unearthly quality, like an illustration to an Edwardian fantasy.

Postscript

We’ll be back at Estella’s house again soon I think. There are many more things to see.

On an unrelated matter:

On Sunday, a courier handed me a package containing David Bowie’s new album Blackstar. Thanks to the practices of a certain online retailer the album’s tracks were already on my MP3 player although I hadn’t heard any of them yet. This is a contrast with the arrival of the first Bowie album I received in the post, The Man who sold the World which came to me in a large cardboard packet from the first incarnation of the Virgin empire back in the early 70s. I had heard all the tracks on the album on a late night programme on Radio Luxembourg. After listening to it I remember walking down the wide road near our house feeling…. something, not quite realising that the world had changed and that David Bowie would be with me for the rest of my life.

You get more emotional as you grow older I’ve found and quite banal things can move me to tears these days but I was surprised on Monday morning at quite how upsetting the news of Bowie’s death was. I was sad when I heard the news of John Lennon’s death but I was still young and cynical then so I got over it quite soon. I don’t know how long it will take me to regain my equanimity this time. I didn’t play Blackstar on Sunday, there was too much to do. Now I wish I had, so the first time I do play it, it won’t be with the realisation that this is the last word.

Bowie was one of the cleverest pop stars. It’s so like him to deliver one final surprise.

Gimme your hands.

This post starts just off Ladbroke Grove, like we have before, and with a request for further information from a friend of Local Studies who wanted to know when this picture was taken.

This is the rear of a tenement style block called either Victoria Buildings or Western Dwellings. The blocks are tall because Ladbroke Grove was raised at this point having crossed the railway and being about to cross the canal, after which it could slope down to the Harrow Road as we saw in the second post about the long road heading north from Holland Park Avenue. As we saw, at street level there were retail outlets, one of which was Hamrax Motors, hence the group of motor cycles, scooters and mopeds parked here. That open yard might lead to the Hamrax workshop. The set of steps you can see leads up to the main road. Brick staircases like that one remind me of an older London, not West London in the cool days of the late 1960s.

(The question arises in my mind as to whether the staircase was covered like a tunnel as I remember it or was it in a narrow gap between buildings? In this picture you might think the latter but there’s an answer in a later picture)

In 1969, Southern Row, the street that ran west to east from the northern end of Ladbroke Grove (stay with me here) was an old street in the area near the railway and the road to Paddington that had been originally settled by light industry and the people who worked here before the housing on Ladbroke Grove bridged the gap between the underground line and the Harrow Road. In 1969 it looks like a street on the brink of decay.

Octavia House, on the south side of Southern Row, the most modern building in the street, had its own shop.

With a delivery bicycle parked outside. The picture below is looking east showing the flats and the shop. You can also see the first pub going in this direction at number 78.

This view moves further east showing  the modern housing block in the distance (Adair Tower, probably – a modern view would include Trellick Tower just behind the block but it wasn’t on the skyline in 1969), and on the right the then derelict Davis’s laundry.

This view looks back towards Octavia House on the south side of the road

Note the Car Hood Company (“trimmers” according to Kelly’s Directory) at number 73.

Below a partially cleared site on the south side of the road showing the rear of some industrial buildings.

This is a closer view of the Davis building (“Davis the Cleaners”). By this time virtually all the windows were broken.

This view looks west, showing Victoria Buildings again and one of the gasometers on the other side of Ladbroke Grove.

I think the car in the foreground has some trade plates on. These were used by garages to drive unregistered vehicles around legally.Is that a Sprite facing us on the other side of the road?

The view below is also looking west and features the pub we saw above, one of several pubs on Southern Row.

The Forester’s Arms. Pub buildings often remained when the houses next to them had been demolished as seems to have happened her.The car in the foreground is a Daimler I think, not characteristic of the neighbourhood. A little way behind it a woman seems to be brushing soap or detergent into the gutter. Had she been scrubbing the pavement in front of a shop?

Below two large dogs patrol the north side of the street next to a pub building from which the signs have been removed.

The Prince of Wales was still a going concern in this picture, also on the north side.

The next picture shows a different angle on the Forester’s Arms.

I’ve jumped about from the north to the south side of the street because I wanted to lead you to a final picture with an intriguing detail. This is another pub, the Earl Derby.

Can you see the man standing on some kind of balcony at first floor level? Look closely.

There he is again on the right in another westward view. And he’s been joined by a dog (an Alsatian, as we used to call German Shepherds in 1969) looking back at the photographer. Details like this, and the woman pushing a pram, narrowly skirting round the tall van, are what enliven these documentary images for me, and bring the tired looking back street to life.

If you look at a couple of these westward views in close-up (the one with the Daimler and the one with the trade-plated Ford ) you can just see the stairs featured in the first picture.  And they do appear to be covered over by the smaller buildings which seem to lean against Victoria Buildings. This answers my question at least.

Postscript

As always comments and reminiscences about Southern Row are welcome. (And any corrections.) The street has changed considerably since 1969 although some of the buildings from that period are still standing. Octavia House survives, and there is still a set of steps up to Ladbroke Grove, which are at least partially covered over according to Kim who was there last year. Look at it on Google Maps and you see a street very far from urban decay.

The cars in this post are possibly not as notable as those in some recent posts but identifications are also encouraged. By way of contrast we’ll be back at Estella’s house next week.

In the previous post  about Estella Canziani I showed you some  of the pictures she painted or drew of the garden and the area around the house she lived in for her whole life. This week we’re continuing the story with more pictures inside the house in Palace Green. In 1967, shortly after her death a newspaper described her as the Bird Lady, an eccentric old woman still wearing the fashions of her youth and the house as a shambles infested by birds and other small animals. It seems a shame that people are often judged by how they were (or might have been) at the end of their lives. When a life is finished we are free to look at the whole story, see the whole pattern  and pick the greatest hits. No doubt the house in Palace Green was a bit of a mess but you could also choose to view it as a collection of wonders, mundane and exotic and a kind of wonderland. A lively little girl grew up to be a talented artist. She filled the house with mementos of her life and travels. Given her interest in folklore and fairies and the proximity of faery-infested Kensington Gardens you could imagine her house as a gateway into a world of wonders.

The corridor at the rear of the house looking out onto the garden. Estella painted it more than once.

In this version, taken from her memoirs she has included Mrs Squeaky, a companion of hers for thirteen years. Estella was encouraged in her love of animals by her mother and the family pets included dogs, cat and rats but above all birds. Mrs Squeaky, an Indian Tumbler actually came from a shop where Estella found her in a tiny cage too small to turn around in: “I bought her for one-and-sixpence, and in three months she was a different bird, flying after me up the long corridor and then walking into the studio. She was called Mrs Squeaky because she invented a special squeaky coo for me.”

This is a photo of that same long corridor.

So too, I think is this.

But who’s that at the end of the corridor glimpsed like a secret inhabitant of the maze? We’ve met her before in the preview post where we saw her in a painting looking out of a room.

Here she is taking centre stage.

Florence, the housemaid again, probably well used to Estella’s ways by now.

As was Mrs Squeaky.

Posing on the sofa.

I think this is the same window. The house seems to have been full of objects, vases, glassware and ornaments collected from a wide variety of sources across Europe.

And paintings, on the wall and stacked up on the floor.

Paintings Estelal collected, and her own work, scattered about the place.

It must sometimes have been a relief to relax in the conservatory.

Or just sit in front of the fire.

Estella’s memoirs also feature a few family photographs. Here she is in the garden with her father.

One of the items donated to the Library by the trustees of Estella’s estate was a small family album featuring a series of pictures taken when she was very young. As we started with Estella as an old woman let’s finish with her as that lively little girl whose imagination encompassed the house and the whole world outside it.

Postscript

This is another bookplate, probably a little earlier than the one in the previous post.

As a professional hoarder I imagine that those who come after me might be appalled by the accumulation of stuff I left behind. But I like to think some of it might be just as interesting as the contents of Estella’s house.

I was juggling with ideas about edge lands and terminal wastelands and that kind of thing when I was trying to find a title for this post, which is a kind of prelude to something coming up in a couple of weeks when I made the connection with another post featuring the photographs of Bernard Selwyn which I called On the border. That was set in the south west tip of the Borough in the area next to Fulham where Chelsea Harbour was built. This week, we’re right at the border with Hammersmith looking at an area in the throes of development in 1971.

I should explain that the man who took the pictures which make up this photo collage, Bernard Selwyn, was a professional surveyor with an abiding interest in the history and development of west London. A few years ago he left the Library in his will a mass of material – notes, photocopies, maps and above all photographs. One of our volunteers spent a couple of months or more combing through this material and arranging it by subject in a set of boxes and plastic crates. Since then I (and Isabel) been able to draw on it for a variety of purpose including a few posts on this blog.

In this case Selwyn is standing near the top of Frinstead House looking south. The road on the right is the West Cross Route. (which I imagined would have changed its name by now, but that name still appears on maps.) At the centre rear you can see one of the towers of the Edward Wood estate. We’ll fill in the gaps with some later pictures, but first look at the foreground where you can see the elevated railway line and what remains of a spur line which went into Hammersmith. You can see it better in this picture.And again in this close up view.

Note how light the traffic is on a major road to Shepherd’s Bush. Some of these colour prints are tiny by modern standards but the colour has lasted well and they give us a detailed view of these spaces between roads and rails and industrial sites.

The Patent Steam Carpet Beating Company, right up against the railway arches in July 1971.

Let’s just go off on a tangent for a moment and look at at a close up from one of the pictures above.

On the Hammersmith side of the border just in front of those two towers you can see a pair of walkways which (I am informed by a local expert) were once an entrance way to the Franco British Exhibition at White City which remained in use for some time afterwards. But I won’t stray too far into someone else’s territory. Let’s get back on our own side of the border. About that truncated section of railway….

The end of the spur sat in an empty space. Selwyn’s job got him inside the fence.

The concrete niches on the left are where the spur was blocked off. The tall building just off centre is the Phoenix Brewery towering above the just visible roof of the former Bramley Arms.

If Selwyn turns around and looks in another direction (he’s marked them on the card the photos are glued to), this is what he sees.

The gap in the fence where two men are walking is Bard Road and the industrial buildings beyond. The narrow chimney is on the other side of the motorway in Hammersmith.

Selwyn visited the area two or three times  in 1971, sometimes with monochrome film in his camera.

Another view south, from May this time, with the practically empty motorway.

Looking north, back at the Brewery, and next to it, a then relatively new inhabitant of the west London skyline.

Trellick Tower, barely visible next to the brewery buidling but one of the tallest buildings in the area.

Selwyn took more tiny prints of the area and taped them together to make larger images, a technique surveyors and planners made considerable use of in those days.

I’ve left some of these images uncompressed so you can see more detail when you click on them.

Selwyn hovered around that building on the left like an obsessed stalker.

Waste paper blowing around in a deserted street in front of the locked gates.

And now we’re skulking in the hidden spaces ourselves, the fence marking the edge of the new road.

I have to admit that I was always prone to this mild form of urban exploration, as a teenager and even later. The interstices of the city.

This is the area that later became known as Frestonia. I’ve touched on its history before and used some post-Selwyn views which add to the story in this post so forgive me for a bit of repetition.

This shows a similar view to the first, with the spaces more crowded but relatively little change in the overall scene. 1980s?

The view below, 1990s I think,  shows a more developed, tidier area with some extra housing and more office buildings. Selwyn would have lived to see this view but he never recorded his thoughts. I would like to go back to Frinstead House and take some pictures myself but that’s not as easy as it used to be.

For a moment let’s go back to Selwyn in June 1971 looking down from his perch.

Focus on that irregularly shaped block of houses just off centre near the top of the picture. Can you see a shop at the junction of two roads? We’ll be down there soon.

Postscript

If you can spot any errors in locations or directions please point them out. I’ve gone over them with a couple of local residents but you can never be completely sure you’ve got everything right.  The follow-up post to this one which will come in a couple of weeks stays in the same area but goes down to street level. Thanks to Barbara and Maggie for their invaluable local expertise.

Postscript to the postscript – a vaguely related matter

There’s been some fuss about reactions to the recent death of Glenn Frey, formerly of the Eagles. After David Bowie was praised to the skies (by me also) why was Frey derided by some people? So I thought it only fair to say that although I was over the Eagles by the time of Hotel California I loved their first three albums (one of which was called On the Border) particularly Desperado, a definite country rock classic. And who could say bad things about a man who wrote one of the great lyrics in pop history: “Standing on the corner in Winslow Arizona / Such a fine sight to see / It’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford / Slowing down to take a look at me” (Take it easy – Jackson Browne gave the song to Frey for the Eagles and he wrote many fine lyrics but Frey himself wrote those crucial lines. ) So thank you, and rest in peace Glenn Frey.

The first two decades of the twentieth century are sometimes referred to as the golden age of book illustration. It was a combination of skilled artists, advances in printing techniques and a book loving public willing to buy prestige or gift editions of classic books. We’ve already featured examples of this in posts about the artist Hugh Thomson who tried to produce one “big” book a year in the pre-WW1 period. Hodder and Stoughton were one of the publishers who embraced this trend, and one of their lines was a series of new versions of Shakespeareare plays. Thomson himself did As you like it for Hodder and later the Merry Wives of Windsor for Heinemann. W. Heath Robinson did Twelfth Night. And our new friend Edmund Dulac did one of the best illustrated editions, the Tempest.

Prospero in his magical laboratory when he was still Duke of Milan. I have read that Dulac tended to depict not so much the action of the play as scenes implied or referred to such as the “rotten carcass of a butt” in which Prospero and the infant Miranda were set adrift which was nevertheless  equipped with “rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries” courtesy of the noble Gonzalo, not to mention volumes “from my own library that I prize above my dukedom” (grimoires etc, perhaps, or something on child rearing).

Another is these Dulac mermaids presiding over a line which was echoed in another famous work by T S Eliot. (A Kensington and Chelsea resident we haven’t got around to yet.)

“Full fathom five thy father lies /of his bones are corals made / those are the pearls that were his eyes”

On the apparently deserted island Miranda had to be home schooled, and when the play starts is a teenage girl.

“No woman’s face remember but my own” The only other inhabitant of the island is the monstrous Caliban the half-human son of a witch who had also been exiled to the island. Caliban is Prospero’s unwilling servant.

Propero uses his magical powers and those of his faery servant Ariel to capture a ship and move some of its passengers and his former associates into his sphere of influence.

Caliban refers to other non-human residents: “the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”

On the other hand the scene below does occur on stage with Ariel in the guise of a harpy.

He/she harangues them: “You are three men of sin, whom Destiny, / that hath to instrument this lower world /and what is in’t, the never surfeited sea / hath caused to belch up you, and on this island / where man doth not inhabit – you ‘mongst men / being most unfit to love. I have made you mad.”

On another part of the island Miranda has met Ferdinand and they have rapidly become a couple. After a stern warning about making sure his daughter remains a virgin Propero entertains the couple with a pageant of spirits. The Goddess Iris speaks of “turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep”

She calls for: “you sunburned sickle-men, of August weary / come hither from the furrow and be merry;/ make holiday; you rye-straw hats put on, / and these flesh nymphs encounter every one / in country footing.”

After the fun Prospero dismisses the spirits and prepares to face Caliban and some of the hostile visitors to the island. There are mant famous phrases in the play but at this point Prospero utters the most well known: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on...

These much quoted words were featured quite effectively in that Ikea advert for beds. Do you remember that one? “…and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

Propsero and Ariel prepare for more magic

“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves….

…..you demi-puppets that by moonshine do the green sour ringlets make..”

Prospero speaks of the darker side of his powers: “…Graves at my command / have waked their sleepers, oped and let ’em forth/ by my so potent art”

But at the conclusion of the play he promises: “But this rough magic I here abjure….I’ll break my staff….. I’ll drown my book….”  and vows to set Ariel free.

“On the bat’s back I do fly

While Prospero concludes his magical business Miranda and Ferdinand play chess.

And finally, returning his visitors to their ship Prospero promises “calm seas, auspicious gales, and sail so expeditious that shall catch your royal fleet far off.”

Dulac picks up on that image for a final picture.

There have been many versions of The Tempest, on stage, as an opera and as a general influence. I happened upon this one:

Elsa Lanchester as Ariel, with Charles Laughton as Prospero in 1934. Elsa Lanchester went on of course to play her most famous role the following year in one of the most fantastical of Universal’s horror films, the Bride Of Frankenstein. As well as the Bride she also played Mary Shelley in the film’s prologue.

But naturally this film is the most memorable later version of the story for me.

But you already knew that I’m sure. Forbidden Planet (1956) featuring Robby the Robot as himself/ Ariel, Walter Pidgeon as Morbius/Prospero, the young Leslie Nielsen as Commander Adams, a kind of Ferdinand (not to mention an early model for James T Kirk) and Anne Francis as Altaira / Miranda. Caliban came in at the end as the monster from the Id.

Or there’s this one:

[Neal Gaiman’s Tempest, from the Sandman series, the Wake. What would Dulac have made of graphic novels?]

Postscript

I’ve looked at some other illustrated Shakespeare volumes from the Hodder series – W G  Simmonds’s version of Hamlet, Sir James D Linton’s Merchant of Venice, but they looked rather conventional after Dulac’s Tempest.I’m going to keep looking.

As well as tying in with the previous post on Dulac this one also occurs in a Shakespeare anniversary year. In November one of our London History Festival author events will be Shakespeare related. But before then I’ll be featuring a couple of those special editions. Look out for them.

This post has a companion piece on our WW1 website where you can see some pictures from Dulac’s book in support of the French Red Cross.

Thanks to Peter Collins for loaning the Dulac volumes and Kim for transportation.

I said we would come down to street level for this next installment of Bernard Selwyn pictures, so here you are:

Tidy’s, for toys, hardware, confectionery and many other items I suspect, located at 20-22 Bramley Road at an intersection with Treadgold Street which no longer exists (the intersection no longer exists – Treadgold Street has been truncated since 1971 but still goes on). You can also see St Ann’s Road on the far left of the picture. We’ll go for a bit of a walk around here.

I said we’d come down to earth but it might help if we look at another of Selwyn’s bird’s eye views from Frinstead House.

You can make out Tidy’s on the left side of the picture two thirds up from the bottom. Bramley Road runs diagonally past it and St Ann’s Road heads south. The main road running under the railway was called Latimer Road in 1971 but now this section is called Freston Road.

This map also dates from 1971 and shows the layout of the streets.

Across the road from Tidy’s a man in shirtsleeves stands near Leone, the hairdressers.

Further up the road the Bramley Arms which we first saw along the roofline a couple  of weeks ago in front of the brewery building.

Looking back at Latimer Road, the Zenith Cafe.

In close up Gene and Pearl, button manufacturers. A woman looks back as she walks.

A view further back, showing the Trafalgar pub. Do you see the building on the left, in the foreground?

Here it is looking south.

From Kelly’s Directory: M Gold and Co (Rags) Ltd non-ferrous scrap metal merchants 119-121 Latimer Road. Take another look back up Latimer Road.

I know some people will be interested to see the Champion Dining Rooms.

At the end of this stretch of road:

The Enterprise, an off-license rather than a pub was on the corner of Mortimer Square. This is where we turn off.

This view of Mortimer Square looks north again. Many of the buildings in these pictures no longer exist but that double fronted resturant is still there under a new name. The street on the right is St Ann’s Road and it will take us back to where we started.

There were some gaps in the rows of house where there were yards and small businesses, and an MGB for those of us who like such things. (As always identifications of vehicles featured are welcome.There are no spectacular cars here but they’re alll of interest.)

This view includes the other side of the street.

There’s some roadside activity by the post box. (What is happening there?) and in the distance, one of those towers is Frinstead House, from which Selwyn took many of his pictures.

Closer to the top of the road, another gap in the row of houses, another view of the towers and painted on the back of a building on Treadgold Street …a couple of words.

That phrase was painted on other walls around this time I think. There’s a new edition of Roger Perry’s book about graffitti, the Writing on the Wall in which you can find other examples (and see my post on graffitti in K&C).

We’re back now facing Bramley Road. Peggs and Dolls. a boutique at number 11, next to Curtiss and Sons, furniture removers. And finally:

At Tidy’s, “for your entertainment” posters for White City Stadium – stock car racing. The stadium hosted speedway, greyhound racing and even football and rugby, not to mention events in the 1908 Olympics. But that’s a Hammersmith and Fulham matter, so let’s stop here.

Postscript

Of course as historians of local government know although all the streets in this week’s posts are in Kensington and Chelsea today, back in 1971 they were in Hammersmith (the Borough had yet to add the “and Fulham”). Which is why our libarary photographer never got there and we have to be grateful to Bernard Selwyn whose work and interests crossed Borough boundaries. There will be more from him in the future. (He also went over this ground in some colour pictures).

This post is dedicated to my friend Cy, who knows the area as it is now well.

Some of you may recall one of the early roles played by Aidan “Poldark” Turner, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a lively version of the story of the Pre-Raphaelites called Desperate Romantics.  As I recall it (and I apologise for any inaccuracy in my recollection) Rossetti and his friends had a few scenes hanging out and picking up girls at Cremorne Gardens, the celebrated / notorious pleasure gardens which was located at the western end of Chelsea, from the 1840s until its sudden demise in the 1870s.

It’s been a long while since we were at Cremorne for blogging purposes. I concentrated back then on the sensational entertainments – the balloons, the high wire acts and other death-defying feats hyped on the posters and handbills. But along with the big events, the most regular and consistent activity at Cremorne was dancing. Pepper’s Ghost, the learned dogs and monkeys, the prestidigitation, the necromancy (really?), the double-sighted boy and the Italian Salamander were all very well but for most of its young visitors the biggest lure was the dancing platform.

Any activity at Cremorne was a bit of a high wire act. It is said that during the day there were the verdant gardens, the edifying displays and exhibits, theatrical performances and ballets. All quite respectable stuff.

Respectable ladies and gentlemen, strolling, sitting and taking refreshement. And there were perfectly acceptable entertainments.

Who could deny the allure of the demure Viennese Female Orchestra?

But in the evening, its critics insisted, Cremorne took a dive into immorality. Not that dancing itself was immoral of course. But some of those young people were taking the pleasure of the pleasure gardens just a little too far.

Because this wasn’t your staid middle class drawing room dancing. These were wild polkas and even a dance called the gallop.

And as far as I can tell the Gallop consisted of couples running clasped together from one side of the famous Chinese Pagoda dancing platform to the other.

And when the clerks and assistants, the shop girls and the parlour maids took a breather from the dancing they could just hang around just like any of the toffs.

There were plenty of those too, slumming it at the edge of London.

See those three gents at the front holding each other up in a last ditch effort to look sober and respectable. Then look over at the couple on the left – he with his excessively long mustaches, her with her neat little veil. They could be off to one of the many little cubicles located around the dancing platform.

Where mixed parties could have a little privacy, take some rest after their exertions on the dance floor, and spy on each other. Rumour had it that there were even more secluded spots in the exuberant foliage which filled the gardens, where depravity could ensue, if you were so inclined. But obviously we won’t be following anyone there. On with the dance..

There are stories to be told of the nights at Cremorne.

A sad tale of a servant at a great house forced to wait at tables:

The Broken ‘arted butler hof Bel-grave- yer – A pathetic ballad dedicated to the Duke of Smother’em, Commander of the Fire Brigade (Words and music by T Blewit Pearce)

Or there was the fate of the Aristocratic Fete, an attempt to raise the tone of the evening at Cremorne.

Unfortunately washed out by a fearsome downpour. In July as well.

Face it, “Royal” Cremorne (as it was sometimes styled by optimistic proprietors) was never going to be an upmarket palace of fun.

The pleasure seekers raise their glasses. Even the guy under the table resting his weary head against the frills and flounces barely covering the lady’s leg.

[Trivia lovers. Where have you seen this image before? You’ll need to remember when Ted Danson was a young chap… the picture was used in the opening credits of Cheers. If you knew it does that date both of us?]

Cremorne was a byword for illicit pleasure by the end of its tenure, as demonstrated in this cartoon.

The young swell has a damn good time mooching around and carousing, but in the centre picture it’s all swirling around him in a phantasmagoria of regret. He’ll probably be back for more though.

The forces of morality (and falling profits) eventually closed Cremorne and with indecent haste the property developers moved in to clear there site and start building. But we’ve time for one more story.

Oh, I met her on a steamer as I journey’d to Cremorne
Crinoline, a pork-pie hat her figure did adorn
Our glances met, she smil’d at me, then as if unawares
My arm it slipp’d around her waist, whilst on the cabin stairs
I ask’d her if she’s go with me, she said yes if I’d let her.
T’was just as good as going home.
Yes as good and a great deal better.

So we went into the Gardens, dan’d the Polka and Quadrille
From nine till half past eleven at night
Stood not ten minutes still
Then to the supper rooms we went and had a first-rate spread
With lots of wine, Oh t’was very fine, but it got into my head.
For after when I tried to dance I tumbled and upset her.
I really felt as good as tight
Yes as good and a great deal better.

The young gentleman proposes the same evening. Having been told she lives in Belgravia, he imagines she is an heiress. But when he turns up on the steps of the church, she is there accompanied by a personable young policeman. She, a servant in Belgravia as it happens, tells him that she would rather marry the policeman and that he should pay out fifty pounds or face a claim for breach of promise. (this all sounds very unlikely, but let Mr Burnot have some artistic licence. )

So mind all fast young gentlemen who journey to Cremorne
Or any other gardens, or where crinoline is worn
Do not propose to wed strange girls, however well they dress
Or else like me you perhaps may get in such another mess
Be sure you know her station well before you say you’ll wed her
A little care is good enough, as good and a great deal better.

Personally I think he deserved it. This is an example of a moment when the lower orders could get one over on their betters by the simple expedient of  dressing well. There would be a lot more of that in the years to come in the arenas of mass entertainment and  elsewhere.

Postscript

I’ve used the final picture before I know but I think it deserved a second outing in a more detailed context. (It was back in the early days of the blog). There’s an excellent book which covers Cremorne and other entertainments of the age – Victorian Babylon by Lynda Nead (Yale University Press 2005). And I can also recommend The Last Pleasure Garden by Lee Jackson (Arrow 2007),  a crime story set partly at Cremorne . (Lee also does serious history as well of course like Dirty Old London: the Victorian fight against filth (2015) also worth reading.)

Many people have researched Cremorne at the Library, but I’m dedicating this post to the most assiduous researcher I know, Gill Best.

There were a couple of false launches this week, for which my apologies. They were nothing to do with the author of this post, my co-blogger Isabel Hernandez. To make up for the errors this  is one of her epic posts, on a subject close to both our hearts.

“It is in the hope that such treasures may be found within these walls that I have now great pleasure in declaring this library open” ~ Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

There has been much debate in recent years about the future of libraries and sadly the news has been far from positive. I think most people will have set foot in a public library at some point in their lives – if not regularly, then certainly in passing. They have always been a part of our communities and something of a constant for many decades. This blog is a celebration of a building I have worked in for many years and am especially partial to. In finding these images I was reminded of why that is and the pride we have for libraries and fundamentally what they represent and can provide in a constantly changing world.
Kensington and Chelsea’s purpose built Central Library was officially opened on Wednesday 13th July 1960 with the pomp and circumstance befitting a great institution. It took five years to build and a good deal of planning before the first brick was laid over its formidable steel and concrete frame. It was a building conceived in the mind of architect, Mr E. Vincent Harris and approved by the Kensington Council who were looking to create a new civic centre for the Borough, including a new town hall, municipal offices and assembly halls, grouped around a quadrangle with lawns. This initial drawing, showing the library front, shows a traditional, English, renaissance-style building, which was not quite the architectural fashion icon people expected it to be. A striking modern design it was not, but it more than made up for this apparent lack by instead becoming a solid ‘building of good manners’.

Not everybody was happy about the new plans. A protest was staged against plans for the new design, which was considered old-fashioned and derisive. Not progressive at all. I suppose calling it “a manly type of building, an example of dignified architecture” couldn’t have helped to convince the local residents it was money well spent:
“Renaissance means rebirth not rehash!”
“Kensington, where is your sense of beauty!” shout the placards.
The first Central Library was opened in the old Vestry Hall, Kensington High Street in 1889 by the Princess Louise, Marchioness of Lorne. It served as a library for many years despite the increasing storage problems until it became apparent that a bigger building had to be commissioned. In 1938 the Council approved a scheme for building a new Central Library on a site in Kensington Church Walk which had gone as far as basement level before the outbreak of war brought work to a standstill. The work was never recommenced and Ingelow House today occupies the site.

In 1946 the Council purchased the block of land bounded by Campden Hill Road, Holland Street, Hornton Street and Phillimore Walk for the future development of new municipal buildings. An ambitious project that it was hoped would dispel some of the criticism local authorities garnered for lack of enterprise and imagination.
Preliminary work on the (new) Kensington Library began in 1954 when approval in principle was received from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. By April 1955 Mr E. Vincent Harris was appointed architect for the building, and by 1957 the Council accepted the tender of William Moss and Sons Ltd to construct the foundations of the building and work was begun on June 17th 1957.
Construction was in three stages: foundation work, the steel framework – as seen in the image below – and the main superstructure. The undertaking attracted a lot of attention and a couple of the national newspapers reported on the ‘architectural curiosity’ that it was. The Times compared the building to The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which was opened by the Queen on the same day her mother opened the library, reporting that, “the library is aesthetically the more remarkable”.
Looking at this steel frame it is hard to envision such a thing, the bare bones of the library.

Once the foundation and steel frame were in place the superstructure soon took shape with a central block and wings to the east and west. This is the west wing looking towards Hornton Street.

Below is the finished facade. The building comprises six floors and is faced with hand-made red bricks from Reading, Berkshire. Not something one can appreciate in black and white, but it fits in well with the Royal Borough’s décor, if one is inclined to compare and contrast with the rest of the buildings in the area. Reinforced concrete floors for the lending and reference sections were specially strengthened to carry heavy book loads. Indeed, the ultimate capacity of the building was for 600,000 volumes with a sub-basement and basement holding 100,000 in storage – a library considered to be one of the largest municipal buildings in the London area at the time of completion, and in my view, an attractive receptacle of knowledge.

Looking through the arch from beneath the west wing portico:

The side and rear of the library from Hornton Street shows a unicorn mounted on a high stone pillar designed by notable sculptor, William McMillan, who had a studio in Glebe Place, Chelsea, and was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club. His public sculptures were his defining feature, with many subjects on display: “from war memorials to medals, from statues of royalty and generals to works for garden and architectural decoration.” (Dictionary of National Biography)

On the other side you see a lion. Both sculptures are symbolic of the Borough’s royal status, emblems of the United Kingdom. The pillars have since been removed and the sculptures are now placed on plinths just outside of the staff entrances. The two pillars had become obstacles to traffic.

Below are more of William McMillan’s creations: two sculptures in decorated roundels over the doors in the porches, depicting Caxton…

…and Chaucer.

We sometimes get asked about the curious bronze, gilded statue on the roof known as Genius, posing in balletic form, holding what looks like a star. Neither male nor female, Genius is a lightning conductor, forever reaching upward.

If we can marvel at the grand exterior of the Kensington Central Library, what of its interior?
On arrival at the Central Library, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother was received by the Mayor, Councillor J. Gordon Rawle and the Town Clerk. She was invited to cut a tape across the main entrance to the Issue Hall before entering. Interestingly, the spacious building had officials worried that people would wander off and get lost, so a notice was placed by the entrance. Anyone with a penchant for library wanderlust will have been duly warned:
“Guests inspecting the library are requested to remain in groups. Individuals without guidance may become lost.”
I too was hopelessly lost on my first day working as a fresh-faced Saturday Assistant, so it is not as far-fetched as it would seem.

Below is an image of the issue and returns counter – the first thing you would have seen upon entering the library. It was much altered by the time I began working at the Central Library: the glass partitions were no longer present and security barriers had been installed. As an anecdote, I do remember being asked seriously by a member of the public if they could open a bank account with us. You can see why.

And here it is as a working counter a couple of years later, with a flurry of activity around issues, returns and memberships.
One memory I have, when I first started working at the Central Library, was the fines chart. In those days we had to do the arithmetic in our heads, maybe a pen and piece of paper if it was overly complicated. Reader’s with a query on their ticket were ‘trapped’ by the Plessy System and a red button would ping. It replaced the Brown Issue System, where one of the reader’s borrowing cards would be used to place the book card in, and organised in a tray by date of issue. Having been trapped, the reader would then be ‘investigated’. It rather makes librarians sound like a forbidding library squad. You can imagine the disapproving eyes over spectacle rims. That inimitable stereotype library staff are often still stuck with, even after all these years.
With Plessy came the introduction of barcodes and light pen technology, but it still wasn’t ideal. If fines were pending, or a message needed to be conveyed to the reader, we would still have to check the draws alphabetically for their details to see what the message was. A rather convoluted and time-consuming way of doing things, but it worked in as much as complex things do sometimes. Many, many months were spent barcoding every single book we had in our entire collection across the Borough. In the end I was so glad when the computer system Dynix came to our rescue and the reader’s too. It facilitated so much, we wondered at how it was never invented before.

The interior of the library was no less impressive than its exterior. Here we see the lending library. State of the art at the time, you can see a strange fusion of the conservative 1950’s, meshed with the beginnings of a less restrictive, creative 1960’s: stripes and squares to contrast with walls lined in Doulting stone. It may seem an odd combination, but there’s no denying it’s a very bold statement for a ‘well mannered’ building.

The furniture was constructed of brass inlaid Ghana mahogany, with cork display panels running the whole length of the shelves. The card catalogues are now, of course, affectionately thought of as the prehistoric Google. With the advance of technology many of the old archaic systems are now obsolete, although some departments, like Local Studies, still have a use for the old card catalogue systems and it’s not the first time we have had people tell us how delighted they are we still use them. Every generation has an affection for a past they recognise and cling on to as they reminisce a time gone by. Equally, the demand for independent research via the internet and alternative mediums are on the rise and libraries have adapted as best they can given the constraints of current funding.

The public on the look-out for a good read:

At the far end of the lending library is the children’s library which had its own entrance at the west wing. It was comprised of 5,000 books and had space for tables and chairs where children could sit and read; seek information or do their homework, much like they do today.

Pocket-type tickets were introduced to RBKC libraries in 1968 to replace the numbered slips in books. Three tickets were issued per membership application and each ticket was to be handed in for every book borrowed. As a child I remember feeling a little hard done by only being allowed three books at a time from my local library. But this did change over time as new, more sophisticated systems came into being and borrowing allowances were increased.

Another librarian assisting a child in 1973. Perhaps a book on coalmining at Dewey number J622.33? How times have changed!

A group of children gathered together looking at what is possibly a crossword. Libraries are often involved in events and activities for children during the school holidays. One of the children in this photograph went on to become the Central and Notting Hill Area Librarian, so we are especially fond of this image.

A young boy reading one of the books on display:

A gramophone and music library with space for 6,000 records was provided in the area between the adult lending library and children’s library. Over time the collection grew and was later given a larger space in the basement with public access from the front entrance. Librarians with particular specialisations were usually appointed to specific departments for their expertise, the music and reference libraries being two examples. I remember feeling a little terrified of working in the music department, wondering if it would be a Rachmaninov or a Rachmaninoff day. Music lovers will know their composers and expected you to know too.
Popular culture was also a demand: The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols, Bowie….you had to have some idea what you were being asked or else it was a disapproving glare for your lack of cultural knowledge. I was mostly a fish out of water in many respects – young and inexperienced – the library was my training ground. No amount of study quite prepares you for the real world and certainly not the public at large.

The acoustic booth that strangely resembles a confessional box.
And to think we now have tiny iPods or mobile phones that will play music at the press of a button. The mysterious cloud on the internet stores so much information it makes this music library appear ancient by comparison. Music libraries barely touch on the many gigabytes in the ether. But there is something about physical media that people either feel a genuine nostalgia for, or the younger generations find novel, which has spurred a quiet revival of certain media, such as vinyl.

Two lifts were provided for the building: one at either end of the building for passengers as well as the trolleys of books being transported to different levels. It is useful to note that the Central Library boasted a very efficient communication system for its time. Some features still exist today, although very dated by today’s standards:
“Very full telephonic communication has been installed, with a large G.P.O, switchboard and an automatic external exchange. Loudspeakers are installed in the bookstacks in addition to telephones in order to overcome the absorption of sound by books“. (The Library Association Record)
Technical equipment was not scrimped on. Everything was done in-house: micro-filming, processing, photography, cataloguing. Every room and every section had a place in the working of the library with room for expansion.

The staircase leading up to the first floor:

The glass doors on the first floor.

The whole of the first floor was, and still is, devoted to a reference service with study sections among the bookshelves and a local history section in the west wing. Designed to hold around 300,000 volumes, it is panelled throughout in walnut and provides comfortable seating for readers. The shelves, fitments and desks are all constructed of hardy walnut. Good quality material recently refurbished to a very good standard, which in my view, you cannot compare to the flimsy constructs of today’s replacement furniture often seen in modern or refurbished libraries. It is solid and it is durable.
It is interesting to note (and I never knew this) that the aluminium ceiling panels provided convection heating throughout the building. The building itself was self-sufficient with a large boiler and intricate piping throughout – something we came to discover when the recent refurbishment took place, with strange doorways leading into strange rooms and secondary walls. A real inspiration for our urban legend. We have one you know….a ghost…a lady who would appear in the basement stacks that houses the biographical, special collection to unsuspecting staff. I have never seen her myself and I do wonder when she took up residence, as the building is fairly modern. On the other hand, the site is not so modern and The Abbey once existed here. Before that, I believe terraced housing existed on the site. Dave has written a post about The Abbey.

The quick reference and periodical section of the library now devoted to computer and internet access. A modern necessity that has divided people down the middle as to what libraries should be about. Most enquiries now are usually computer related and it is to the staff’s credit that adapting to these changes has meant that they are just as efficient in assisting with these new challenges as they are with other forms of deconstructing knowledge. People are much more self-sufficient these days, but we do still get the ever asked question: “I’m looking for a book. I don’t know the title, the author, but it’s blue, so-big and has a picture of a mythological beast on it”.
Well, you have come to the right place! We get this a lot and not just with books; everything from articles, visual media, places, buildings in the area, and so forth. We are true detectives at heart, amongst many other things. Being all things to all people has forever been our designated challenge working in public libraries.

A young lady at a study desk makes good use of library material. With the pressure of online search engines pushing these physical sources into second place it is a wonder we still see books stacked on tables. But we do and we know that not everything is interpreted correctly on the internet when searches are made. So much exists it can seem daunting. Sometimes you still need guidance on how to disseminate the right information and that’s where libraries excel.

An alcove in the reference section where on a good day you can study bathed in natural light. The Central Library has the advantage of many large windows to provide external light and this is particularly lovely on a sunny day.

And so to the final image…
This section of the library on the first floor is the Royal Borough’s Local Studies & Archives department, home of The Library Time Machine. The public room today remains largely unchanged, and although it looks Spartan and clinical in this black and white image, it is actually a lot warmer and welcoming in reality. The archive comprises of both the Kensington and Chelsea collections, amalgamated around 2004. A temperature controlled room in the sub-basement holds the bulk of the material. A collection both inherited and subsequently added to over the years, mostly through donations and deposits. I’m still learning the collection even after all these years and something tells me I will never quite scrape the barrel. Whether we are dealing with genealogy, or history or sewer plans, the work is never dull, especially with some of the quirky enquiries we receive occasionally. One of my favourites being the story of the ghostly number 7 bus in North Kensington and could I prove it happened. Are there secret tunnels beneath Kensington Palace? And did sheep really get shepherded down Kensington High Street so that they could graze in Kensington Gardens? We do not always have an answer, but I can say that at least one of those is true.

Postscript
I realise this is a lengthy blog and perhaps I should have made it a little more concise, but I think I got carried away with the enjoyment of seeing the library back in its heyday and it was hard to be selective in my enthusiasm. Short of writing pages and pages I had to restrain myself. There are things I have missed out and images that were not included, so this is as comprehensive as I was able to make this piece. I have a deep affection for libraries and I have been fortunate to have worked in several, so in my sincerest hope that they will not one day be gone for good, or altered so much they barely touch on the proud buildings that do their very best to serve within our communities, I offer this quote, often missed, and found finely-carved on the wall immediately to your right as you enter the Central Library:
“Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom and with all thy getting, get understanding…” Proverbs 4
If you are stumped for inspiration one day and are at a loose end, pop into your local library. You never know what you might find.

Postscript to the postscript (DW)

Phew! Isabel can now go and lie down for a while. And so will I. until next week.

As promised in the last post featuring photographs by Bernard Selwyn this week there are some colour pictures. I frequently feature monochrome images of this period on the blog, which sit in the space between living memory and the historical past. The overall effect is of  anchoring those places in the past, especially if you’re looking at streets or buildings which no longer exist.

Colour prints, especially those which have survived the years with their colour tone intact have the opposite effect, making those same places look modern, as if you just looked through a car window speeding past. Even if the cars and buildings are distinctively from another era you still feel closer to them.

Selwyn has a number of these colour prints, tiny by modern standards which capture that feeling of nearly being back there.

This is Latimer Road in 1971 looking north. The brick building with the vans parked in front of it is M-Gold & Co, the scrap metal merchants, at number 119. The other interesting features are the two-tone Triumph Herald, the dilapidated house whose first floor windows are covered by a billboard announcing the nearby location of the Fidelity Radio works (Selwyn took a special interest in that building). And of course, the rag and bone man’s horse taking some well-earned refreshment in the right foreground.

The edge of the M Gold building, on the corner of Evesham Street. A Rover saloon is parked there, a classic managing director’s car. But what’s that on the next corner?

A two tone pick up truck, quite a large vehicle. American? That estate car in front of it looks interesting too. Can any of our regular car identifiers name them?

Let’s move on to that red sign.

The Ament Engineering Company, sheet metal workers and engineers of 131 Latimer Road. That extended section of pavement can be seen on the map below.

This is a slightly different deatil from the 1971 map I used in a previous post from the detail we used before.It shows a little more of the area north of the railway bridge. It shows Frinstead House, the vantage point from where Selwyn took some of his pictures

I’ve also used this picture before but it does help locate the ground level photos in relation to each other. If you look closely you can see the M Gold building and the white fronted buildings north of Evesham Street. The next intersection is Bard Road with the long narrow building on the corner.

The Flexaire Ltd section of the Ament Company.

The view north towards the bridge:

A closer look at that corner.

Do you see that boy sitting on the pavement at the corner? Where did he come from?

Let’s go back up into Frinstead House.

We’re looking down at The Patent Steam Carpet Beating Company, just north of the bridge. (I’ve used this image before as well but it does fit with this week’s journey.) Let’s sneak a peak at their rear yard.

Just a little untidy.

And here’s the building at ground level:

There’s another one of those managers’ cars, a Rover 3.5. It looks like the so called coupe version, which unlike most coupes had four doors. they were distingushed by a slightly more sloping rear window. Or so my friend Steve told me back in the 70s.

The building which looks a little like a church beyond the works building was I think the home of the Harrow Club, one of two youth clubs in the area run by publics schools. (The other was the Rugby Club in Walmer Road.)

We’re going no further north this time but there are a couple more pictures to see.

This is Olaf Street, which came off Latimer Road south of Evesham Street almost opposite Mortimer Square. The building on the corner is the People’s Hall and has since been restored.

This is further down Olaf Street. This section is much changed nowadays.

You can see a sign for Dein Brothers (Food importers) Ltd, and some signs of life.

Finally:

We’re back almost where we started, with a design classic and some colourful houses, at the beginning of what would be a colourful decade.

Postscript

There are some more colour pictures by Selwyn in our collection, further north, and even further west, although they may be outside my usual borders. Expect to see some more of them in the future.