Chrisp Street—And Miss Coutts
By JAMES POPE-HENNESSY AHAPPY contrast to the decadence of the Hoxton Street Market and of the sad bombed houses in Hoxton Square and Charles Square, may be found by a Saturday visit to East London's newest market—the Chrisp Street Market, opened in 1951 in the Lansbury Neighbourhood of Poplar, off the East India Dock Road. Lansbury, an area of 124 acres housing 42 per cent. of its pre-war population, is one of eleven East End districts scheduled for total recon- struction on lines laid down in the Abercrombie-Forshaw County of London Plan. If the other ten areas are dealt with in a manner as imaginative as that applied to Lansbury, it would seem that the East End of London will soon be in serious danger of becoming a more delectable residence than the West. In any other country, we may fancy that the Lans- bury project would have received a searchlight of constant publicity. In Oslo or in Amsterdam foreign tourists would have been rushed to see it by omnibus. But in London, sensibly enough, the Lansbury Neighbourhood is left to those for whom it was constructed, and who are busy filling out the new setting with their own immemorial ways of life.
Lansbury was first opened in the summer of 1951 as the site of the Festival of Britain Live Architecture exhibition, a feature which, unlike its singularly atrophied counterpart on the South Bank, seemed full of purpose : not a sketchy record of past British achievement, but a clear and vital demonstration of what can and must be achieved in the worst of the London slums. Lacking both the sophistication and the pert facetious- ness which made the South Bank seem like a rather tired intel- lectual joke, the lay-out and the architecture of the Lansbury Neighbourhood are serious but pleasing, practical and—for want of a better word—cosy. The architects responsible had few limitations, beyond that of cost, imposed upon them. They were told merely that if they wanted brick, it must be the traditional East London yellow stock brick; if they wanted pitched roofs, these must be pitched low. One of the most encouraging results of this treatment is to be seen in Mr. Frederick Gibberd's market square.
The stalls of the old Chrisp Street Market, which has been shunted name and all to Lansbury, followed the normal London habit of lining both sides of a crowded roadway. In their new home they fill a paved market-place, as though in a country town, and there is a permanent building for the sale of meat and fish. Two sides of the market square at Lansbury consist of low arcades, supported by circular blue-tiled pillars and protecting the entrances to shops. Above the shops are airy-looking, two-floored flats with great light bow-windows and balconies. An arcaded shopping street leads off from one corner of the market-square, while a brick-and-iron- work clock tower, which is illuminated at night, gives the whole place the look of some small town upon the Issel Meer. At night the empty market square, lit by those new chrome- yellow street-lamps which drain all colour from the human face and make it look like putty, takes on the aspect of some mysterious stage-set, the familiar London types moving as though in a ballet in the shadows cast by 'the lamplight, or sitting on benches beneath the clock-tower or outside the two new pubs. These pubs, the ' Festive Briton ' and the ' Festival Arms,' are in themselves admirable examples of post-war public-house design—sensible, gay, with scarlet rubber flooring, good lighting, plenty of space, and plenty of tables and seats. Although a number of the shops are still unlet (and one or two of the flats temptingly empty), it is evident that the Lansbury experiment is being an outstanding success. On Saturdays the market square is, for its scale, as thronged as that of Bruges.
The thriving condition of the Lansbury Neighbourhood market recalls the sorry failure of an equally bold, equally careful experiment of eighty years ago—the great Columbia Market, which still stands as a monument to thwarted generosity and Gothic Revival taste in Bethnal Green. Rightly known when it was opened in 1869 as " Miss Coutts's Market," the Columbia was one of the most ambitious and most expensive of the philanthropic efforts of Angela Burdett-Coutts, " the richest heiress in England," who spent a lifetime and a large part of her fabulous fortune in welfare projects in the East End of. London. This intensely Christian lady, who re- built slum areas wholesale, moved populations, founded societies, schools and fellowships, raised new churches, and was never known to refuse any charity, determined to try to provide " wholesome food at a fair rate " for the population of Shoreditch and of Bethnal Green. In 1857 the editor of The Builder, that excellent Victorian architectural journal, drew attention to the ghastly conditions in Crab Tree Row, Bethnal Green, in an article illustrated by an engraved view of " a mighty mound of refuse " which occupied most of nearby Nova Scotia Gardens. Miss Coutts promptly purchased a great part of this property and built what would now be called blocks of flats, which she let cheaply to working people. In the eighteen-sixties she followed this up by a project for a gigantic market-hall and market square, designed by the architect Darbishire and carried out by Cubitt and Co. This unwieldy Gothic structure, which cost its creator two hundred thousand pounds, occupies over two acres of land in Bethnal Green. Darbishire prided himself on the detail, which he considered the purest English Gothic of the earlier part of the fourteenth century : and, indeed, this formidable building, complete with lofty archways shielding Gothic grilles, with clock-tower and belfry, with groined 'vaults and mullioned windows, is like a Viollet-le-Duc nightmare. The children of Bethnal Green cower towards evening in its Gothic recesses, small, pale-faced victims waiting for the portcullis to be raised and the giant ogre to step out and take a meal.
Part of Miss Coutts's plan for providing better food was to abolish the middleman, and in this her whole project was foredoomed. Only wholesalers with proved good records at other markets were to be admitted to the precincts of the Columbia; only selected stall-holders might take their pitch on the blue and red granite paving of the central court, where " a large lamp, surrounded by four granite washing-basins and hydrants " formed the centre-piece. Shopkeepers could pur- chase premises under the Gothic arcades, where polished slabs of Irish granite waited optimistically for the fish and meat which never came; for it was also stipulated that shopkeepers were really, to be farmers or their agents, who would sell direct to the consumer. On either side of the great building staircases rather like those in some Oxford colleges curled up interior turrets to sets of rooms designed for a hitherto-neglected portion of the London population—City clerks, who had loudly complained that Miss Coutts was doing everything for the artisan, but nothing for the clerk who had to live in some distant suburb and rise at an unearthly hour to get to work. It was felt that London firms would be delighted to take whole floors or turrets for their office staff, just as brewers and wine, merchants were expected to vie with one another to store their merchandise in the great vaults beneath the paving of the central court.
That so many good intentions, so much imagination and such quantities of money should have been wasted was tragic but inevitable. The greedy middle-man had no intention of being done out of his profits by Miss Coutts. Hardly used for meat and fish, for which it was designed, the Columbia Market dragged along in the 'eighties as a small vegetable market. It now serves as a store-house for the LCC. Angela Gardens and Georgina Gardens are inhabited, but not by clerks. Like these gardens, Baroness Road perpetuates in its name the noble intentions of its founder. But after you have seen Lansbury, the Columbia Market seems to epitomise one deeply unattractive aspect of the mid-Victorian approach to social problems—the didactic aspect. What was to be improving must also be imposing and self-conscious : it is the kind of sentiment which knocks us back ore our heels in Hoxton High Street when we read, cut into the stone façade of St. Leonard's Hospital, a huge, not-to-be-obliterated in- scription : " Offices for the Relief of the Poor."
Looking round Lansbury, we feel that at least we have come some way since that.
This is the third of a series of articles In which Mr. Pope-Hennessy re-explores post-war London. The two previous articles appeared is the "Spectator " dated August 14th and 21st.
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