Steerforth's 'Photographs Found in Books' series returns with an enchanting record of a 1930s school trip ... This is another gem rescued from being thrown into a skip. It's a project book, compiled by a group of Middlesborough schoolgirls in 1935, describing their day trip to London. The book has no financial ... Read More...
London
How Methodism leads to Bedlam... misfortunes, troubles, disappointments, grief...206 family/heredity......................................................115 fevers......................................................................110 religion and methodism........................................90 childbed...................................................................79 love..........................................................................74 drink.........................................................................58 fright.........................................................................51 study.........................................................................90 These figures are for 'Lunacy by Cause' in a table published by the apothecary of the Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) towards the end of the 18th century. I came across it in The Air Loom Gang, Mike Jay's fascinating study of the ... Read More...
From football to fish and chips, from tabloids to faithlessness - a remarkable number of facets of modern British life can be traced to the 'Age of Equipoise', and specifically to the year 1860, argues Henry Jeffreys... In 1860 a Jewish man called Joseph Malin in the East of London had ... Read More...
Nige on the French artist whose largely inaccurate drawings fixed an idea of Victorian London in the popular consciousness... The dark, dramatic engravings of Gustave Doré have done a lot to fix our image of Victorian London, in all its murky squalor. But (as I learnt from an informative footnote in Bill Bryson's ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London with a trip to the 'specialist' bookshops of The Backside of St Clements... All gone now. What you’re looking at above is the Australian High Commission (though didn’t that get knocked down too a year ago or so?). Like Fred and Rose’s lair at ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London with a look at the chequered history of Black Mary's Hole... We have been to Clerkenwell before and here we are again. I shall forswear Pissing Alley, long bowdlerized as Passing Alley but still redolent of the odours that named it; I shall ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London by venturing into an area just off Bethnal Green Road known as the "worst street in London"... So which was the worst street in London? Marked in the most stygian black (‘lowest class...occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals’) on Charles Booth’s ... Read More...
From Fu Manchu to Fred Astaire this week, as Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London by venturing into the East End's Chinatown and the heady scents of opium and white slavery ... It's not so much the slang coinage, because Limehouse as such didn't generate any (other than the rhyming slang ... Read More...
Death-sweats, Paddington spectacles and gallows humour this week, as Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London with a trip to Tyburn... It is an old place. A crossroads where as we know wicked deeds assemble. It had a marker: Oswulf’s stone, seemingly pre-Roman and which may have been the meeting-place ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his eye-popping slang tour of London with a look at St Giles, once described as offering ‘the lowest conditions under which human life is possible’... The first time I saw the flaming mot, Was at the sign of the Porter Pot. I called for some purl, and we had it ... Read More...
