Hoxton
By JAMES POPE-HENNESSY SOME sixteen years ago, when I was first working in a publishing house in Paternoster Row, I began to make a systematic lunch-hour exploration of the streets and churches of the City of London, and of some of the great boroughs sprawling to its east. At that time it was pure pedantry to remind oneself that three centuries before most of these latter had been little rustic communities, standing amid meadowlands studded with elm-trees and birch-copses, far outside the distant city wall. Waiting for a bus at the terminal by Dance's elegant early Georgian church of Saint Leonard, Shoreditch, it would have seemed not credible and thus automatically not interesting to learn that John Stow had regretted the early ribbon development which already in his lifetime was beginning to link the hamlet of Hoxton to the squalid suburbs that crouched along the Essex Road beyond the city gate, or that in his 1598 Herball Gerard the botanist had cited " a small village near London named Hogsden " as a favourite place to hunt for wild horse-radishes. Today it does not seem odd at all.
In the last decade—that is to say, in the period between the worst of the London blitzes and the rebuilding which is at last in many places under way—the fact that London stands on ancient fields and open spaces has become not only accept- able but painfully obvious. Tho whole devastated area round St. Paul's Cathedral, and away northward over a flat horizon where St. Giles, Cripplegate, and other gaunt skeleton churches lie marooned like stranded galleons in a sea of rubble, has been seized on with a quite tropical avidity by the usually harmless vegetation of the English countryside. Coarse bracken, willow-herb, the yellow wallflower, and many other plants so numerous that it would require a modern Gerard to catalogue them all have sprouted up amongst the ruins until there are corners of the City and of East London which have a kind of humble, false air of trying to imitate some engraving of eighteenth-century Rome. In Hoxton Square, where the narrow Charles the Second house's are a good deal blotched and crumbled by bombing, and in the adjacent streets where vacant lots are lush with summer grass, it no longer seems inappropriate that Ralph in The Knight of the Burning Pestle should have urged London citizens on May Day to : " March out, and show your willing minds by twenty and by twenty, To Hogsden and to Newington, where ale and cakes are plenty."
The war, which endowed us with an entirely new attitude towards the solidity of buildings and sharply revised our assumptions on the native substantiality of stones and bricks and 'mortar, has shown that whole tracts of old or modern cities can revert to their pre-urban state with an independent and a disconcerting ease. We could even go one further and wonder whether the current condition of, parts of East London and of the City does not, in its tufted foliage and its uncom- pleted demolitions, slightly resemble the appearance of London during the Stuart expansion which preceded the Great Fire.
Another more prosaic and less subjective effect of the bomb- ing in the East End is the number of rehousing schemes (of which the splendid example at Poplar seems quite inadequately publicised) and the redistribution of the inhabitants, leading to depopulation of some boroughs. The Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch is a case in point, and the effects of the post= war period are here symbolised by the gradual, regrettable decay of the Hoxton Street Market. Hoxton Market was formerly as thriving and as noisy as that in the Mile End - Waste (where the good old art of " pitching " is still wittily practised by the wise-cracking sales- men of shoes or lino) or as the smaller but excessively lively, jostling market which on Saturdays throngs the roadway and bombed lots of Rathbone Street, West Ham. Today Hoxton IV ...rket is subsiding into a rather mild, unexciting concern, with a diminished clientele served by a diminished body of stall-holders, emptier public houses, and pie- and eel-shops which no longer do a roaring trade. With Charles Square and Hoxton Square, formerly dominated by an incinerator chimney which loomed above the tree-tops but is now being pulled down, Hoxton. Street is the chief topographical feature of the district, and it is here that the Saturday market ekes out its somewhat moribund existence. Not that the actual inhabitants or stall-holders of Hoxton Street are in any way lacking in vitality : there is the old white-haired sweet-seller, who lives in Ivy Lane and has been selling sweets to children since long before anyone can remember. There are cheerful youths crying up their fruit and fish. There are scrubby little boys with responsible faces minding vegetable stalls while the old lady in charge boils up the beetroots. There are jellied eel and mussel stalls, those thirst-giving establishments which publicans encourage to take a pitch outside their pub. As at every London market, there are children who run errands, who fetch the street-sellers cups of tea, or who beg for wooden crates and boxes to make into trolleys or to sell. And the street itself is full of old-established shops and houses : dark, cool public-houses with curved counters, and geraniums' at the windows; Hayes and English, the undertakers who have buried many Hoxtonian generations; the shoe-maker who still makes some of the best shoes in London; a draper's shop which clings to that fine old system of an overhead railway line to carry your money to the cashier's desk. The Britannia Theatre, one of the earliest in this part of London, has dis- appeared, and is only to be evoked by the shadowy traces on the walls of the houses which flank its empty site, and which still bear the ghostly marks of its old galleries. Pollocks, the toy theatre maker to whom generations of rich little West End children were brought by protective fathers and uncles to choose the cut-outs for some Christmas play, i now nothing but a blasted shop-front, with broken, boarded' windows, tattered blinds and a blackened name just legible above.
Cabinet-making, formerly the pride of Hoxton, has during the present century tended to move westward and, northward away from the district and towards Tottenham and Edmonton, and no do'ibt old Hoxton itself is now living on sufferance. At some not far distant date the whole small, historical region will be pulled down and replaced by the kind of airy, com- fortable blocks of council flats of which there are already several examples in Hoxton and its neighbourhood. Ivy Lane and Ivy Place will go, and perhaps even. Hoxton Square may not be spared. " I can hardly find my way about Hoxton as it is," a lady who has spent a lifetime doing distinguished social and judicial work in Shoreditch remarked to me the other day. " It's all completely changed." And indeed what remains of old Hoxton has a resigned air of regretting the good old days—those days at the turn of the century when every form of crime flourished in Hoxton with a positively Elizabethan vigour and no policeman would go singly down the " Nile."
Many factors have contributed to convert Hoxton into a cheerful, respectable, peaceable part of the East End, and he would be a courageous man who would dare publicly to regret the change. But emerging again last week into Old Street, and so into Shoreditch High Street, and stopping at the ' Jane Shore,' that public house which by its name and its large picture in encaustic tiling of the first meeting of Edward IV and his future mistress boldly perpetuates the legend which connects that famous courtesan with the name of the borough, I could not help feeling a little sad. Yet, I thought, only the inhumane or the inveterate sentimentalist would regret the change of character by which a violent and dangerous fraction of London has' become a healthy, law-abiding one. But how often do we not see sentimentality and inhumanity go hand in hand? And how seldom do reformation and improvement seem as mysteriously, romantically interesting as crime.
This is the second article of a series in which Mr. Pope-Hennessy, a former Literary Editor of the " Spectator," re-explores the by-ways of post-war London.
Previous page
