If any of the Summerstown182 fancied an apple strudel, a viennese whirl or perhaps a slice of battenberg cake, they would very likely have frequented…
Patriotism and Pillage
Patriotism and Pillage
Welcome
Broadway Palace development – Tooting
From the London Remembers website:
“SW17, MITCHAM ROAD, 22, (26, 28), 30, ALL ON WEST SIDE
This 1940-67 NLS map shows a ‘picture theatre (disused)’ at number 24 (now flat-fronted post-war shops), and at Cinema Treasures we found two postcard images of The Broadway Cinematograph Palace, opened in 1912. In these you can just see, either side of the cinema, the roof arches of numbers 22 and 26-30, looking very much as they do now. Other maps c.1895 show this section of road without continuous, flush, shopfronts. So it seems a fair assumption that the Palace and the 4 flanking shops were all designed and built at the same time. You can see that, as Cinema Treasures says, the cinema’s “facade was highly decorated in white stone” so we can believe that the developers decided to spend a little bit extra on some unusual decorations for the shops too.
What is now known as White City had hosted a number of exhibitions 1908 – 1912 so concepts such as Industry and Travel were in the air.
Travel is on the left side of number 30
with Commerce on the right;
Agriculture on the left of number 22
with ‘Industry’ on the right.”
“A ‘captivating’ Tooting has joined the ranks of the coolest city areas in the world with the likes of Rio and Seattle.”
From kennedyslondon.co.uk:
“Our friendly and cost effective fish and chips restaurants in central London is inspired by the Kennedy’s brand established 150 years ago as a traditional delicatessen butcher’s originally renowned for their sausages, we have maintained their tradition whilst expanding our menu with British food. We serve fresh fish from British waters and as such our seafood is of the utmost quality. Our traditional freshly baked pies are made from fine ingredients and are a popular choice with our diners.
A ‘captivating’ Tooting has joined the ranks of the coolest city areas in the world with the likes of Rio and Seattle. In the mist of its originality and multiculturalism, blends in our traditional take away Kennedy’s Fish and Chips. A short stroll away from Tooting Broadway station, it lines the start of this high street making it great for a spot to eat, a night out or in! We welcome large cooperate orders and regular home deliveries of all sizes.”
Clerkenwell Design Week
The former Haggerston Baths, 151 Whiston Road, Hackney, London E2
From Wikipedia:
“Haggerston Baths in Hackney, London, was opened in 1904 as public baths. The baths were built at a cost of £60,000. There was a single pool, 91 slipper baths and a 60 stall wash house.
The Grade II listed Haggerston Pool was designed by Alfred Cross. It was closed in 2000 with an uncertain future. In June 2009 after a long community campaign, a £5m grant was announced from the Department for Children, Schools and Families to refurbish and re-open the pool. The building would also contain community facilities and a GP surgery. Heavily involved in the re-opening of the pool was Michael Gallie, who was instrumental in surveying the building, creating 3D model sketches and more.
Due to the 2009 financial downturn the council had to remove funding for the re-opening of the baths. The Haggerston baths campaign restarted efforts to find financial backing and public support in an effort to re-open the pool.
As of January 2023 it appears that any restoration of the building will no longer include restoring the swimming baths.”
Iain Sinclair wrote the Diary column for the London Review of Books of 24 September 2015:
“…The old gutters that framed public swimming pools were known as ‘scum troughs’. The architect Alfred W.S. Cross, in Public Baths and Wash-Houses: A Treatise on Their Planning, Design, Arrangement and Fitting, published in 1906, described how a glazed stoneware scum trough could double as a grab-rail at the end of a length and a device for collecting all the ‘floating impurities’ from the agitated surface. The trough at the deep end should be a few inches lower than at the sides and the shallow end. I remembered those impurities, sodden cigarette stubs and corn plasters seesawing gently in a tired yellow wash…
…A few days before my encounter with the mysteries of Shangri-La, I was invited to inspect another swimming pool, a little closer to home. In February 2000, a notice of temporary closure, for reasons of health and safety, was fixed to the padlocked doors of Haggerston Baths. I remember my annoyance, towel roll under arm, clutch of ice at the heart, after too many previous experiences of how elastic that ‘temporary’ qualification could be. Schoolchildren arriving for their weekly session were turned away. They would never return. The site of their school, Laburnum, would be translated into the hardnosed contemporary world as a launch platform for the Bridge Academy, which opened for business in 2007. The academy, like the Shard, is an alien bristling with intent…
…In the meantime, health and safety issues kept Haggerston Baths in limbo for 15 years, adrift in a fairy-tale suspension of cobwebs, rust showers, slipper baths dressed with a tilth of fine grey dust. Through dim corridors, ghosts search for the prewar EXIT sign and a pointing finger stencilled on cold white tiles. When I came east in 1968 and moved into a terraced house on the other side of the canal, Haggerston Baths became a feature of my life. Our new home had an outside lavatory and a tin bath hanging on the wall. Neighbourhood loyalties evolved around certain pubs and convenient bathhouses. On weeks when there were no opportunities to visit the flat of a better-provided friend, we luxuriated in the deep tubs at Whiston Road. Soap and towel supplied. There were 91 individual slipper baths and a 60-stall washhouse. But there was no topping up the bathwater, no time to read a book. You hauled yourself out before the attendant rapped on your door. Suicides in Hackney tubs were not unknown. Haggerston Baths, with its soft red brick laid in English bonds, its Portland stone dressing, was a marker for the territory, from the 90-foot chimney stack for coal-fired boilers to the golden galleon that caught the wind as a weathervane. This craft was a symbol of locality by which those staggering home from a cluster of pubs could safely navigate. Ships on weathervanes and pub signs confirmed London’s self-confidence as a world port. But the tarnished galleon on Whiston Road was empty, its immigrants dispersed.
Alfred Cross, who argued in his 1906 treatise for the employment of specialist architects rather than borough engineers, had earlier won the commission for Haggerston Baths. The foundation stone was laid on 18 March 1903. The official opening was on 25 June 1904. Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis’s book Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain tells us that E.J. Wakeling, vice chairman of the Shoreditch Baths and Washhouses Committee, animated the occasion by plunging into the pool and swimming a 100-foot length underwater. Alderman Wakeling’s name, along with those of the builders and the architect, can still be read, in chipped and partly erased form, on a stone tablet.
But Haggerston Baths, this prime specimen of Edwardian baroque, is suffering, windows sealed with black panels, points of potential access lurid with razor wire and surveillance cameras. Warnings have been placed in half a dozen languages. The furnace-bright orange of the brickwork, in its pomp like the confident colour of London Overground, is dirty, dulled by neglect. The swagger of heraldic carvings – lions and unicorns above the separate entrances for males and females – is diminished. Between a set of twinned Ionic columns there is still a recessed central loggia from which dignitaries can acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. But no crowds are coming.
Purple fuses of buddleia burst through the protective fence on the mockingly named Swimmers Lane (private road).
The schoolchildren who were turned away at the time of the temporary closure are now in their mid-twenties. They never swam another stroke in this building. The Bridge Academy has no pool.
At the time of the Haggerston Baths closure, the estimated cost of renovation was £300,000. Small change in the light of future projects, but Hackney didn’t have it. The council was in a hole and looking for deals with private developers. So they did what they have always done best: they obfuscated. They allowed pool campaigners to take the heat out of protest by putting their energies into proposals and alternative solutions. Promises were dangled and withdrawn. There was a lottery-heavy grand project on the horizon in Stoke Newington, the catastrophically mismanaged Clissold Leisure Centre. ‘The wrong building at the wrong time in the wrong place,’ Ken Worpole, of the Clissold Users Group, told the critic Jonathan Glancey. The architects were based in Manchester. It was a pattern repeated so many times, through Hackney education and social services: the appointment of high-salaried advisers from elsewhere, shadowy corporate multi-taskers on maxi salaries. There was a bias towards smothering the nuisance of locality in public meetings and consultations. The proposed Clissold Leisure Centre, a smart-looking CGI pitch in the generic airport style that fits hospital, swimming pool or new university, didn’t work. The building leaked: from fancy roof, from glass walls retaining fetid water, from cracks in the squash courts, from warped floors. The budget was haemophiliac. It bled out. Clissold Leisure Centre opened, closed for major repairs, opened again. While the millions stacked up. And Haggerston paid the price. By the time health and safety issues had been sufficiently resolved to allow Hackney to hand the former civic amenity over to an estate agent – who solicited expressions of interest from a range of developers ‘for uses including: leisure, hotel, office, educational, institutional, retail, restaurant (subject to planning)’ – the estimated cost of reopening was £30 million and counting.
A rare opportunity to investigate the long-sealed interior presented itself when a late-morning call offered me the chance – ‘right now, leave the house immediately’ – to join a party of dark suits and hardhats who were weighing up the commercial possibilities. Bill Parry-Davies, local solicitor, jazzman, fisherman, activist and keen swimmer, was labouring to restore the Haggerston pool to life. He put together a consortium. He contacted the richest people he knew, the ones with collections they might need space to exhibit, and the ones with dreams of adventurous bars and restaurants. Anyone with a streak of enlightened altruism prepared to dig deep to ‘burnish their reputation’. He told me they had calculated that it would take the redevelopment of the laundry area as a 36-storey tower block of offices and private residences to pay for the pool. It wasn’t about profit, vanity, tapping the zeitgeist: the plotters were determined to make the pool available to all. It wasn’t enough to swoon over architectural detail: glazed bricks, brass handrails, teak changing cubicles, boxed-in steel arches separated by curved plaster panels. The revived pool would have to pay its way in the real world. The customer base would come, beyond surviving sentimentalists, from colonies of new-build blocks along railway and canal; the bicycle tribes of Santander, the early morning contortionists of Haggerston Park with their personal trainers. Parry-Davies appreciated that the original pool and its coal-fired Lancashire boilers occupied too much space. Plans were drawn up to drop the pool to a lower level, to do clever things to make it as adaptable as a post-Olympic stadium. One way or another, if the proposal succeeded, the pool would be reopened to the public. To those committed individuals who had carried on the fight for 15 years.
It’s like breaking into an Egyptian tomb, labyrinthine corridors insinuate in every direction, stairs snake towards unfamiliar offices and storage spaces, into sinister chambers where utilitarian grey tubs, the remnants of the second-class female baths, look more suited to archive footage of cold-hosed lunatics. The swimming pool is drained and the three churchy windows towards which I used to swim, as through a flooded cathedral, in my laboured choppy crawl, before breaststroking back again, were covered over. The natural light that used to flood the high-ceilinged hangar is excluded, in favour of sanctioned entropy. Haggerston Baths is another of those decommissioned non-places kept in a persistent vegetative state, like the Gothic mass of the neighbouring Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney Road, until the right development package comes along. And meanwhile spiders knit their spectral nets. Shivering phantoms stand before empty mirrors in white-tiled washrooms where the taps leak coal dust.
Location-promiscuous film crews exploit the creep of suspended animation, the unreachable lives, the loud emptiness of cellars and toilet stalls, for arty bits invoking Tarkovsky, for fashion shoots and music promos. It is only reasonable that tribes of squatters, sensitive to the spirit of abandoned places, should occupy buildings dedicated to social improvement from which society has been ruthlessly excluded. Haggerston Baths, on this hardhat tour, is so far from the way it struck me on my last visit before the padlocked doors and the fateful announcement that I began to mistrust my own memory. Did I ever bathe here? Am I confusing those episodes with other bathhouses in other parts of London or Dublin? Research suggests that the male slipper baths were removed between 1962 and 1964 to make way for a gym.
We never entered through the twinned doors, male and female, on Whiston Road. The front elevation, in a style known as Wren Revival, was too grand for the rat-run traffic ditch the road had become. Paying customers climbed a few steps to a new entrance on the west side, aware of the hissing laundry steam, the minatory chimney stack. I came with my children. They learned to swim, with bribes for achieved distances, and years of self-confident feats of diving and underwater retrieval ahead. The clapped-out changing rooms and dribbling showers took nothing away from the experience of a community asset within a short stroll of our house. On wet afternoons, when I didn’t fancy walking, I detoured to Haggerston Baths for an equally valid immersion in the matter of London. I met people I hadn’t seen in years, time-stealers between tasks and episodes of childcare, enthusiasts with relish for a resource that had outlasted its permissions. Those meandering lengths, before the era of roped-off fast lanes, were a chlorine meditation, puckering the skin and opening the swimmer to an enhanced connection with locality. This building, along with associated libraries, hospitals and street markets, struggled to justify its continued existence in the coming era of leisure as a billable outcome.
It was immediately evident to the Parry-Davies reconnaissance party that Edwardian Gothic had been improved by 21st-century cave-art defacements, the work of the expelled squatters. The drained pool, some of its tiles chipped out, was rimmed with comic-book skulls, acid signatures, tribal tags and sub-political slogans. Knots of hardhats, fingers to lips, contemplated the scale of renovation needed. Graphic-novel speech bubbles leaked from their mouths, street codes of the vanished occupants. Windows were veiled in gauze. Furniture and machine parts from the earlier regime had been adapted for use by the non-paying clients of this ghost hotel. The public baths were now a cancelled set. Dark passages snowed in white powder, and cellars with massive, rusting boilers, offered a covert terrain as an alternative to the conspicuous visibility of the Shard…
…I’ve rarely been inside a building in which it was so easy to get lost.
The party of potential hardhat rescuers split up. In hushed groups, they approved some relic of another era. They whispered through the heavy silence and left their footprints in the dust. It would be a great thing to bring the pool back to life, they agreed, but it would not be this pool. The outcry for new housing was the necessity of keeping builders and property developers in business. I wondered if the economic dip in China would have some benefit for the London property market, all those empty tower blocks in Stratford, the speculative purchases. Parry-Davies explained that it would have the opposite effect. With the stock market in trouble, the Chinese would want more bricks and mortar in a safe and welcoming city…”
Exiled by Hollywood, castigated on the floor of Congress
Above: Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith, still known as the Gaumont Palace in 1958.
From: Cary Grant – a Brilliant Disguise (2020), by Scott Eyman:
“INGRID BERGMAN HAD BEEN EXILED by Hollywood and castigated on the floor of Congress when she had twins out of wedlock with Roberto Rossellini. She was Ilsa in Casablanca, she was Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, she was Joan of Arc, she was a nun in The Bells of St. Mary’s, for God’s sake- literally.
Despite the stiff wind of public and political disapproval, Grant had sent her letters and cables of support, as had Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Helen Hayes. More importantly, he spoke out for her in public…
In 1929, when Bergman was around 14, her father died of stomach cancer. On 10 July 1937, at the age of 21, in Stöde, Bergman married a dentist, Petter Aron Lindström (1 March 1907 – 24 May 2000), who later became a neurosurgeon. The couple had one child, a daughter, Friedel Pia Lindström (born 20 September 1938). Bergman returned to Europe after the scandalous publicity surrounding her affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini during the filming of Stromboli in 1950. She begged Lindström for a divorce and contact with their daughter Pia, but he refused.
In the same month Stromboli was released, she gave birth to a boy, Renato Roberto Ranaldo Giusto Giuseppe (“Robin”) Rossellini (born 2 February 1950). A week after her son was born, and according to Mexican law, she divorced Lindström, and on 24 May 1950 married Rossellini by proxy. On 18 June 1952, she gave birth to twin daughters Isotta Ingrid Rossellini and Isabella Rossellini. Isabella became an actress and model, and Isotta became a professor of Italian literature. It was not until 1957 that Bergman was reunited with Pia, in Rome. Lindström, however, remained bitter towards Bergman.” (Wikipedia)
Indiscreet (1958) was the beginning of Grant’s career as a producer…
Indiscreet is an unusually intense romantic comedy because it’s about two middle-aged people, both of whom are aware that this may be their last chance at the brass ring. The plot involves Grant as an unmarried diplomat who tells women he’s married because he prefers nonbinding relationships. He meets an actress (Bergman), who is weary of her life and ready for something else. It’s well directed by Donen, especially during a scene in an elevator taking them to their adjacent rooms. Grant simply stares at Bergman as she makes up her mind. Will she or won’t she? It’s one of the most thrilling seduction scenes in movies, and nobody says a word…
(Stanley) Donen believed that it was Indiscreet that taught him how to direct actors. He was used to creating emotion through movement, either by the camera or actors or dancers. But there was a scene with Grant and Bergman over a breakfast table, where he tells her he’s moving to London to be closer to her. “That’s the event in the scene,” remembered Donen. “And they don’t talk much, and she’s fixing him breakfast, and she sits him at a little table in the kitchen and [positions] the plates and the juice and the eggs. It’s all about what they’re feeling about each other. And I realized I had to get that; I couldn’t just stage the physical places. I had to stage it completely differently.”…
As before, Grant and Bergman meshed beautifully, the love story bringing out their shared gravity. Donen believed that Bergman “was so good on camera because she had a completely rooted quality … she was completely at ease. She never seized up while acting. Her concentration was complete. She was in her element.” Grant’s take was similar -Bergman was the ideal screen partner of his later years: mature and good-humored, without temperament, incandescent on-screen. “We had a wonderful time making the film. I found her a joy to be with.”
But one day Bergman turned to Grant with an indecent amount of amusement and said, “Do you realize that together you and I are one hundred years old?” She was exaggerating, but not by much; Grant was fifty-three when they shot the film, and Bergman was forty-three.
Grant was not delighted by the remark, but she would occasionally repeat it anyway.
At the end of the picture, Grant gave his costar a gift: the key she had held in Notorious as Hitchcock’s camera plummeted to a close-up of it in her hand. Grant had taken the key after the scene, and kept it for more than ten years. He put it in her hand and said, “I’ve kept this long enough. Now it’s for you. For good luck.”…
Since he had a large investment in Indiscreet, Grant went on the road to promote the film, speaking in theaters in nine cities in the U.K. and Ireland- Kingston, Hammersmith, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, and Belfast. He was petrified the entire time. His ability to quickly get up to performance speed in front of a movie camera vanished when he was out of that milieu.
It took him years to get over his stage fright, and he finally figured it out.
“It finally came to me that the audience wasn’t making me nervous. I was making myself nervous. Nobody ever buys a ticket hoping to see a lousy show. Or to hear a terrible speech. Or to see any performers fail. They want every actor to be Olivier. They want every ballplayer to hit home runs and make impossible catches. That way they can tell their friends they were in the theater or the ball park when it happened.””
“No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.”*
*from Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art (1967), by Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980), English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields.
“Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are-objective pictures. He mumbled that he wasn’t quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, “There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is.” Picasso looked at it and said, “She is rather small, isn’t she? And flat?”” Gregory Bateson
Peter Fonagy & Chloe Campbell (2017) What touch can communicate: Commentary on “Mentalizing homeostasis: the social origins of interoceptive inference” by Fotopoulou and Tsakiris, Neuropsychoanalysis, 19:1, 39-42:
“Abstract
The commentary begins by briefly summarizing some of the key ideas of the target paper and locates them within the context of the theories of attachment and mentalization, emphasizing how the idea of mentalizing homeostasis adds to the richness of these theories, and counters some of their possible weaknesses by reaffirming the highly physical nature and imperatives of early relationships. The authors go on to discuss physical touch as a form of communication, and of meta-communication, and speculate that responsive physical interaction constitutes the infant’s first affirmation of their knowledge of the world as valid, and as such it indicates to the infant the value of opening epistemic trust with trusted caregivers.”
Wendy LEEDS-HURWITZ, Director of the Center for Intercultural Dialogue, posted on the OUPblog on October 28th 2018:
“…(Gregory) Bateson linked framing to metacommunication, usually defined as communication about communication. In both cases, what’s at stake is stepping outside the current interaction in order to ask a larger question about what’s happening, and how it is being understood. Both are used to convey information about a message: a frame shapes the way something makes sense to participants (teasing vs. serious behavior, for example) whereas metacommunication refers to the behaviors specifically used to shape that understanding (so that a change in vocal pitch may indicate teasing).
(Erving) Goffman expanded the concept of framing from Bateson’s initial concern with animals to social interaction among humans, suggesting that people use frames to help them answer the basic question of “What’s going on here?” He also introduced a highly elaborated set of related technical vocabulary (primary framework, keying, track, breaking frame, lamination, transformation, fabrication, etc.), and many of these terms have been adopted by later authors. The example of teasing vs. serious behavior given earlier would be a matter of what Goffman calls shifting “key,” referring to basic assumptions about the way in which behavior is to be understood. At the same time, people are complex, and so Goffman proposed multiple “tracks” occur simultaneously. For example, the “disattend track” includes backstage activities designed to facilitate interaction and maintain a frame, but which are rarely the focus of attention. The cooks in a restaurant or the photographer at a wedding serve as obvious examples. Similarly, “directional signals” provide critical information while rarely becoming the focus of attention. An obvious example here would be punctuation marks in writing, or an audience member calling out “speak up” when the speaker cannot be heard. “Breaking frame” is when one participant unexpectedly leaves the frame while others still inhabit it – as when laughing at someone who intended to be serious (or the reverse, taking someone seriously when they intended only to tease)…
…Goffman is of course primarily recognized as an interaction scholar, known for being the person who called attention to small moments of everyday interaction as organized and worthy of study…media scholars mostly consider frames to be cognitive structures rather than social constructions, and they mostly emphasize primary frames rather than taking advantage of Goffman’s vocabulary, instead inventing new terms: frame alignment, amplification, bridging, etc…
…Goffman and his concept of framing as adopted by media scholars provides an alternative possibility: perhaps when your ideas are fully absorbed into the culture they are no longer acknowledged; perhaps that is the greatest sign of influence…”
Frame, an Epistle
Most of the things you made for me—blanket-
chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker—I gave
away to friends who could use them and not
be reminded of the hours lost there,
not having been witness to those designs,
the tedious finishes. But I did keep
the mirror, perhaps because like all mirrors,
most of these years it has been invisible,
part of the wall, or defined by reflection—
safe—because reflection, after all, does change.
I hung it here in the front, dark hallway
of this house you will never see, so that
it might magnify the meager light,
become a lesser, backward window. No one
pauses long before it. But this morning,
as I put on my overcoat, then straightened
my hair, I saw outside my face its frame
you made for me, admiring for the first
time the way the cherry you cut and planed
yourself had darkened, just as you said it would.
Dom Jacobs in Mayfair, Chelsea, Fitzrovia
Above: The George, 55 Great Portland St, Fitzrovia, London W1.
22-Oct-2013 By Emma Eversham
Chase Distillery owner James Chase and Dominic Jacobs, a former bars manager at Harvey Nichols and bar director at Sketch, have joined forces to re-open Mayfair pub The Running Horse.
The pub will also be the first alongside a selection of seas
https://WWW.RESTAURANTONLINE.CO.UK/ARTICLE/2013/10/22/JAMES-CHASE-AND-EX-HARVEY-NICHOLS-BAR-MANAGER-JOIN-FORCES-TO-LAUNCH-THE-RUNNING-HORSE-PUB https://www.thegentlemansjournal.com/running-horse-oldest-pub-mayfair
The project is being led by Dominic Jacobs of the Running Horse pub in Mayfair, with James Knappett of the two-Michelin-starred Kitchen Table in London’s Fitzrovia overseeing the menu as culinary director.
Knappett will work alongside executive chef Alex Harper, who formerly headed up the kitchen at the capital’s Michelin-starred Harwood Arms and was executive head chef at Neo Bistro.
The menu will celebrate “best-in-class British produce” with the drinks list showcasing exclusive beers, cask and craft ales alongside wines and cocktails.
Jacobs said: “Dating back to the 1700s, the Cadogan Arms is one of Chelsea’s most enduring public houses. The team are excited to once again be able to open the doors to the local community and deliver a gold standard public house experience that honours the rich history of the venue.”” (06 May 2021 by Sophie Witts for The Caterer)
(See main image) 23 November 2021 by Emma Lake for The Caterer:
“Chef James Knappett of two-Michelin-starred Kitchen Table, esteemed operators JKS and publican Dominic Jacobs have reunited to reopen the George pub in Fitzrovia.
The three-storey, 18th century, Grade II-listed pub will welcome guests on the ground floor from Thursday (25 November), offering a quintessential British pub experience.
In February 2022 the first floor of the building will be unveiled as Upstairs at the George, offering a dining experience led by culinary director Knappett.
Downstairs guests will be served cask ales, craft beers, seasonal cocktails and tapped wines alongside a considerable whiskey collection that nods to the pub’s historical patrons, including Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan. Traditional dishes will include a classic ploughman’s; pheasant and pistachio terrine; scampi with chips, mushy peas and tartare sauce; and rhubarb crumble with custard.
Managing director Jacobs said: “The sympathetic restoration of the ground floor has focused on enhancing the venue’s rich listed architecture, paying homage to its 18th century roots through art, design and architectural features.
“Further to this, a more extensive renovation of the former living quarters will create a brand-new dining space for Fitzrovia. We’re excited to be opening our doors in time for Christmas and revealing Upstairs at the George in the new year.”
The project will be the second partnership for the group, having also relaunched the Cadogan Arms pub in London’s Chelsea earlier this year.”
The Bloomsbury Tavern, 236 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2
“Said to date from 1856 and Grade II listed, it was called the Black Lion until rebuilt in 1905 to the design of C Fitzroy Doll.” (Whatpub.com)
Its restaurant, which was originally named after the architect but is now called Neptune, is said to be almost identical to the RMS Titanic’s dining room, which he designed. Also in the hotel is “Lucky George”, a bronze dragon on the second floor stairs. An identical copy was on the Titanic.
Known for its palatial design, the hotel’s fixtures and fittings included an ornate Pyrenean marble staircase and an interior sunken garden. Each room was fitted with an en-suite bathroom, a great innovation at the time. A sister hotel by the same architect, the Imperial Hotel, was also built on Russell Square, but it was demolished in the late 1960s.
The life-size statues of four Queens – Elizabeth I, Mary II, Anne and Victoria – above the main entrance were the work of the sculptor Henry Charles Fehr. The façade, by Doll, incorporates the coats of arms of the world’s nations (as they were in 1898) in the spandrels of the first floor.
The hotel was one of the few that were not taken over by the War Office during the Second World War. It survived the war largely intact, but the magnificent dome that stood on the roof was badly damaged in an air raid of 1941 and not replaced.
The Russell Group of universities is named after Hotel Russell, where the first informal meetings took place.” (Wikipedia)
From the Historic England entry:
“Public house. 1904. By C Fitzroy Doll, surveyor to the Bedford Estate and the local District Surveyor. Red brick with white terracotta decoration, slate roof hidden behind parapet and with massive banded stacks.
EXTERIOR: 4 storeys and cellars. Prominent corner site dominated by 2-storey oriel with copper dome over entrance, with single window to Shaftesbury Avenue
and 4 to West Central Street.
Oriel of white terracotta with hefty mouldings and decorated panels; other windows above ground floor mullion and transom, those to first floor in continuous white surround; the upper windows linked by bands and those in centre of West Central Street composition lowered. Restored ground floor with late C20 fenestration having heraldic glass set in black polished granite surrounds featuring columns with lion capitals.
INTERIOR retains 1904 Arts and Crafts style fireplaces to ground and first floors.
Open-well staircase with turned timber balustrades and panelled walls.
Some panelling to first floor bar and to rear of ground floor bar, which has original cornice behind later bar back but where the bar counter and the fixed seating has been renewed in historicist style.”
https://queensquare.org.uk/archives/record/QSA/15224#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&xywh=0%2C-281%2C2999%2C3022
Columbia Primary School, Columbia Road, London E2
https://www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk/zoom-item?i=188371&WINID=1684517377096
From: A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 11, Stepney, Bethnal Green. Originally published by Victoria County History (1998):
“Columbia Primary, Columbia Rd. Opened 1875 as Barnet St. bd. between Barnet St. (later Columbia Rd.), Ravenscroft St., and James (later Ezra) St. for 245 B, 237 G, 266 I. Enlarged 1879, 1881, and 1893. Renamed Columbia Rd. 1888. Accn. 1908: 458 B, 458 G, 463 I; a.a. 415 B, 405 G, 437 I. Reorg. 1931 for 355 JB, 453 JG, 390 I, a.a. 339 JB, 337 JG, 338 I. Roll 1944: 600 M & I. Reorg. by 1951 as Columbia primary for JM, I. Roll 1988: 338.”
Julia Upton 