In glorious summer weather the tenth Amwell street fete on Sunday Ist July was a roaring success with more stalls, events, musical variety and visitors than ever before – a tribute to the hard work of the organisers.

The Amwell society ran a window box competition, and had plenty of excellent entries.  Joanna Ward, Camilla Jenssen and Sally Hull snapped all the entries and there were generous donations of prizes from Brownings Garage, The Hairdressers and Ground Control.

First, second and third prizes went to David & Ella Nazar of 45 Wilmington Square, Bozana Vesilinoska of 32 Amwell Street and Geoffrey Thomas of 44 Great Percy Street respectively.  The communal entry was won by the residents of 15-19 Percy Circus.  Warm congratulations to all the winners.

Alec Forshaw, former conservation officer with London Borough of Islington, has a deep knowledge of buildings and the local area. He gave us a masterly overview of the history of Smithfield from the beginning of the meat market –described in 1174 as

“A smooth field where every Friday ….. are placed vendibles of the peasant, swine with deep flanks and cows and oxen of immense bulk”

through the successful battle to prevent the demolition of the Western General Market for city offices, and continue the renewal of Smithfield by moving the Museum of London to this site.

The live meat market became an unmanageable nuisance as the population of London grew and in 1855 a Royal Commission required it to move, finding a new home in Copenhagen fields in the north of Islington. But it was railway development which truly secured the future of the new Central Market, designed by Horace Jones and opened in 1868. The glorious glass and iron extravaganza we see above ground is only the tip of the iceberg.  Below ground vast excavations provided for underground railway sidings where meat was delivered from all parts of the country and raised to the market with powerful hydraulic lifts.

 

In 1945 one of the last V-2 rockets of the second world war to hit London landed at Harts corner destroying the iconic tower at the junction of Farringdon Road and Charterhouse Street.

The rebuilding after the war, and after the 1958 fire in the poultry market, was only a temporary reprieve in what appeared to be a gradual decline of the market and the surrounding neighbourhood.

In Alec Forshaw’s first (1980) edition of ‘Smithfield: past present and future’ he somewhat gloomily predicted that the market might die. His 2015 edition is more upbeat about the future.  The Corporation of London completed a major modernization of the central market in 1997, but the outlying buildings including Horace Jones’ General Market, Fish Market and the Red House cold store were left to decay. Two public inquiries later and a massive amount of lobbying has saved the western markets for the future. This is a decision which challenges the hegemony of the financial market as sole solution, and endorses conservation led regeneration.

9-10 year olds at CPS have been working with Little Architects, a scheme run by the Architectural Association and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Children examined the historical townscape of our area and then focused their attention on Lubetkin and Bevin Court. John Allan, architect and author of Lubetkin visited the children to tell them about his friendship with the man himself. The extended project concluded with a design by children for a new playground on the carpark at Bevin Court. Now there’s an idea. A playground designed by the users in the style of Lubetkin.

A slide show on the children’s work can be seen here

David Rosenberg, author and radical walker, gave a colourful talk on Clerkenwell’s left leaning past at the Annual General Meeting on May 16. In past times this was an area with London’s most abject slums, and during the nineteenth century had London’s highest murder rate.

The radical tradition started in the area’s coffee houses in the eighteenth century. These were meeting places for groups such as the London Corresponding Society – described as ”a motely crew of housebreakers and revolutionaries” – which met in Jerusalem passage.

But it was in the 1860s that Clerkenwell Green became almost synonymous with radicalism. Between the 1870s and 1890s, working-class meetings and marches attracted large numbers of local artisans. In 1887 William Morris addressed a crowd on the Green about the evil of unemployment, then led the procession to Trafalgar Square where they were attacked by police in what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

In 1902 the exiled Vladimir Lenin shared the office of Harry Quelch, editor of the British Social Democrat weekly, Justice, at 37A Clerkenwell Green. From this address he printed the radical journal ISKRA (The Spark) to be smuggled back into Russia. In 1933 the building became the Marx Memorial Library and Workers School

You can read more about the radical history of London in Rebel Footprints by David Rosenberg published by Pluto Press 2015, or by joining one of his walks: www.eastendwalks.com

At the 2016 Amwell Society AGM Alex Smith from the Islington museum gave us a fascinating talk on Bevin Court, and the restoration of the Peter Yates mural ‘Day and Night, Winged Bulls’ which stands in the entrance hall.

Holford Square, built in 1841 with a bowling green in the central gardens, suffered major bomb damage in the second world war and was bought by Finsbury in 1948 to provide local housing. The commission went to Tecton Group architects and Berthold Lubetkin designed the building. Famous for the dramatic, single, central staircase which formed the social hub of the flats, with the Finsbury coat of arms proudly displayed at the top of the stair shaft, the original name was “Lenin court”, as Lenin lived in Holford Square in 1902.

The Peter Yates mural at the entrance represents an abstracted form of the Finsbury crest.  Over time it suffered water damage, vandalism with graffiti and was repaired by overpainting on at least two occasions.
The restoration, funded by a lottery grant, is described in detail on the Bevin court website.  The team used old photos taken before the building was opened – showing that at one stage the Bull had two wings! Painstaking work on paint samples has allowed the subtle, dusky 1950’s blue to shine again