It's like collecting blue plaques in Nazi Germany part II

So we find our guide outside the Bishopsgate entrance to Liverpool Street station and soon our motley band is assembled and we debarked across the road through a maze of what were once East India Company warehouses, mute witnesses to the trade that made the city great and of course one of the driving imperatives of the immigrant communities.

We found ourselves on Middlesex Street otherwise known as Petticoat Lane, not that there was an awful lot of activity at 11a.m. on Saturday and spotted the Blue Plaque dedicated to the Jewish Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor again a reminder not only of the Immigrant community but also to the immense poverty in the area. Which is of course why Petticoat Lane market and its schmutter is there. We also spotted a discarded Pilsner Urquell half pint glass which made its way mysteriously inside M's carrier bag. Next stop on the trail was the discreetly hidden Sandy's Row Synagogue which looked so damnedly intriguing. But it being a Saturady and a high holiday as well there was no chance of gaining entry. We found our way down past a couple of the best preserved Hugenot shops around Gun Street and Artillery Lane so called for the Tudor armshouses created by Henry VIII to an old Almshouse used by many of the working girls of the area - Not least Mary Kelly the last of the canonical Ripper victims and across the way a soulless carpark on the site of a warren of old streets including Millers Court where Jack has his way with her... and she was his final victim. The culmination of a long hot summer of mounting insanity. London Walks has a couple of Ripper Walks which Id like to go on but there was a bit of crossover on this walk the alleys of Whitechapel and its teeming hordes providing Jack with his choice of victims. We turn from BellLane and its faded adverts for businesses long closed and turn East past Spitalfields Market. On either side of the entrance to Fournier Street are gorgeous Christchuch Spitalfields a Hawksmoor church saved from the demolition and on the other The Ten Bells which again has Ripper connections. "It was widely rumoured that Annie Chapman had been seen in a pub near Spitalfields Market at c.5.00 A.M. on the morning of her murder" and Mary Kelly's pitch was outside the pub and Mary Kelly was also reported to have been drinking there the night before her death...

It's like collecting blue plaques in Nazi Germany

As Eddie would say...
We had a really good Saturday taking the Liverpool St. train a little before 9 and arrived in 10.15 in good time for the Immigrants London walk which started from the Bishopsgate entrance to Liverpool Street station. Fortunately we found our guide in good time. Theres a blue plaque actually on Liverpool Street station dedicated to the first Bethlehem hospital (1247-1676). It's recognised as the worlds first institute for psychiatric disorders. Its also where we get the word Bedlam from whhich speaks volumes as to the conditions that the unfortunates there undewent. It started as a religious institute, a priory run by the Order of the Star of Bethlehem. It firsat became a hospital in 1337 and first admitted psychiatric patients in 1357. Early sixteenth century maps show the hospital as a few stone buildings grouped around a courtyard, a church and a garden. The "care" provided there was shall we say minimal. Patients were routinely manacled to the floor, the lucky ones were licenced to beg . It was a royal hospital but administered by the corporation of London and managed by the governor of Bridewell. The other plaque in Liverpool Street station is rather more recent and depicts five children surrounded by parcels and bags at ground level. Behind them are the train tracks that have brought them to this point. Train tracks that began in Berlin, Leipzig, Mannheim, Hamburg, Vienna, Prague.
The story continues soon

Dissolution

On the eve of Pope Bendicts visit to these shores I'm glad to report that my magnificent octopus is finished (at least for the time being) The map of visited blue plaques is pretty much up to date. I'm missing a few which I think are on Marie's camera but it will do as a start. Were off to London at the weekend for the London Open House day so hopefully will be able to get a few more sorted out.

Last years Open House we spent around Fleet St and I was placing last years Blue Plaques and there are a couple which seemed in the light of the book that I've just began - Dissolution by C.J.Sansom. They are both very central (Newgate Street and Ludgate Broadway) and both are dedicated to monastic institutions - Grey Friars and Blackfriars. Blackfriars was a Dominican Monastery which was moved from Holborn in 1276 and was destroyed by Henry VIII in 1538 and Grey friars refers to a Franciscan house set up between 1306 and 1348 which grew into quite the institution being the second largest church in London (300 ft long and 89 feet across) featuring 11 alters. Big Hal also put an end to the monastery and donated Christ's Church to the city which underwent a bit of a reverse with materials being half-inched and monuments being defaced. The church was destroyed in the Great Fire and was rebuilt by Wren.

Im enjoying Dissolution. Ive got quite the thing for geographical/historical moiders. Im still making my way through the Cetin Ikmen back catalogue. Its quite the recreation of Tudor times and the reforming zeal that lead to the religious background of modern Britain.
And so we return to the Popes visit. There have been a couple of interesting pieces on the TV - most notably Peter Tatchell's take on the visit which was pretty close to my own. There were some nutbar interviewees most notably a Filipino lawyer who so no merits in contraception as they had a failiure rate and the home counties loon who insisted that stem cell research was murder because the most miniscule collection of cells are due human rights. Now I'm not saying that science has all the answers, I'm not saying that modern society is perfect. What I am saying is that when dogma trumps common sense its time to take stock.

Der meisterwerke

Its been a while. This is partly but in no way entirely because of Google Maps. I'm creating a map of located blue plaques on Google Maps. There are clusters at the moment in London (mostly it has to be said around Central London - Kings Cross and Picadilly) Cambridge and Wisbech. I'm hoping to expand a little. I have one to place in Bristol and one in Oxford and am looking at the list of Blue Plaque towns in the UK and there are it has to be said there are a few. I spotted a couple in Marlborough a couple of weeks back when we journeyed back from Bristol. The Bristol is a corker I have to say. Its suspended above a public toilet just round the corner from Dave's old stamping ground of Durdham Park. We came across it rather by accident on the way back from the Bristol Balloon Fiesta and a lovely evening watching gasbags hanging suspended over the Avon gorge from across the river in Clifton. We were on our way back from Westbury-on-Trym where we were staying with M's hardcore Christian friend Helen when we passed the red brick institution on Stoke Road.
Victoria Hughes was named for the widow of Windsor, being born as she was on the day of the Queen-Empresses jubilee and led a life of service...actually I think that that should be Service with a capital S. She supported her family by earning 4/6 for a couple of days work a week working as a toilet attendant for 30 years. She also provided a rather different service to the working girls who frequented the nearby "Ladies Mile". She keep a series of notebooks and so bacame a social documentrian for a section of society often overlooked and distained (sometimes by those same people using the services of the aforementioned working girls) She was far from a disinterested observer though providing money, advice and the occasional intervention to those who frequented her toilet at a time when social services were of the cap in hand variety she gave succor to those that needed it most.
A blue plaque richly deserved.

Blue Plaque Wisbech

I was I will admit a little surprised on visiting Wisbech at the weekend to find a couple of blue plaques awaiting me. Wed gone hoping (well Marie had gone hoping) to watch the new A-Team film at the lovely little Luxe cinema. Sadly the cinema was sold out, even sadder the one at Peterborough wasnt; cue two hours of lack of plot, intellegence, wit and charactorization. A film with absolutely no redeeming points is a rare thing indeed, but this was one of them.
However I digress, Wisbech was after the draining of the Fens a major inland port transporting produce from the area. Its still an incredibly fertile area and has some lovely Georgian architecture which has featured in a couple of recent costume dramas. The blue plaque opposite the Luxe is dedicated to William Godwin (1756-1836) a proto-anarchist and father of Mary Wollstonecraft who I must confess I'd never heard of. He was born and rasied as a strict Calvinist and went into the priesthood and wrote An enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness in 1793 at the full flood of the French Revolution in part as a response to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Godwin saw government and social institutions such as property monopoly, marriage and monarchy as restraining the progress of mankind. He however did not advocate violence believing change would come gradually and that violence was unnecessary. A deserved blue plaque to my way of thinking...

Harold Abrahams (1899-1978)

I guess that most people know of Harold Abrahams through Chariots of Fire, Hugh Hudson's 1981 film of two contrasting athletes part in the 1924 Olympics. I think that Chariots of Fire was maybe the first video along with Kagemusha that I rented, we were staying with the O'Learys in Kettleborough and as a special treat had a visit to Woodbridge and a video rental shop.
One exchange from the film sttays with me. Its between Harold and his wife to be, Sybil.

Harold: I'm what I call semi-deprived.
Sybil: That sounds clever what does it mean?
Harold:It means they lead me to water but they won't let me drink.

Harold was Jewish and his sense of frustration and the need to fight against the restrictions that bound him runbs through the film. His plaque is in Hodford Road in Golders Green still a very Jewish area, cosy and middle class. He went up to Cambridge and read law at Gonville and Caius (again battling the status quo) and there his athletic potential came to the fore and was part of the British Team for the 1924 Paris Olympics. He ran the 100 metres which he won in a time of 10.6 seconds, the 200 metres where he placed 6th and the 4x100 metre relay where the British came 2nd. He broke his leg in 1925 competing in the long jump and his career came to a close. He was a sports journalist for 40 years and commentated on Athletics for the BBC, including the Berlin Olympics and was chairman of the Amateur Athletics Association and the Jewish Athletic Association.

Its these little plots of surburbia throwing up extraordinary people that I love and I genuinely think that I got an insight into what inspired Harold Abrahams to "run them off their feet"

Harvey Pekar 1939-2010

To some the word comicbook will always be a perjurative term. A synonym for near illiteracy, juvenile, immature trash. And theres a reason for that - many comic books are juvenile, many are immature. There are however, books out there, books that just happen to be written in the graphic medium. Books that make you think, books that make you feel. And those are the books that I tend to go for. I'm Spandex intolerant and thanks to Harvey Pekar there are plenty of books out there that don't feature Men of Iron or Dark Knights but rather books that deal with everyday lives. Harvey's work features his trials and tribulations told in an utterly honest way, exposing his curmudgeonly take on life , his tales of the means streets of Cleveland and his frustrations at his wife, his fans, the system that we all have to endure - books written by authors like - Adrian Tomine, Daniel Clowes, Andi Watson, Art Spiegalman, Joe Sacco and The Hernandez Brothers. He came to wider attention with the release of the movie American Splendor (2003) based on his book which garnered awards at Cannes and the Sundance Festival and also an Oscar nomination.

Thanks Harve.