A Recording Angel

From the long shelf of books about London that I keep (and keep adding to) the one I most cherish is The London Nobody Knows. Published sixty years ago, it is part whimsical vade mecum, part urban elegy, a book that celebrates the lesser-known nooks and cor­ners of a capital that was in drastic transition. Knocked about by German bombing twenty years earlier, London had then come under sustained assault from planners and developers largely inimical to the architectural quirks and anomalies of the Victorian age. The author, Geoffrey Fletcher (1923–2004), was working against the clock: the ‘tawdry, extravagant and eccentric’ place he loved was fast disappear­ing, and a recording angel like himself needed his wits about him if he was to preserve its memory. The year of the book’s appearance, 1962, had already seen the destruction of two major landmarks, the Euston Arch and the Coal Exchange. More were bound to follow.

Fletcher had a learned eye for architecture, and a fine instinct for comedy. ‘I have always been a keen connoisseur of Victorian lavatories,’ he declares, and focuses on one such convenience in Star Yard, Holborn, dating from 1897 and still in operation. He discovers from the attendant that a previous incumbent used the cast-iron water tanks to keep his pet fish; each time the stalls were flushed the fish found themselves suddenly coming down in the world – a ‘delight­fully rococo’ idea. He wonders what the men using the place thought of the fish, and ‘more importantly, what the fish thought of the men’. He is startled to learn that these conveniences are known in the trade as ‘Queen Victorias’, instancing further examples in the Strand and Trafalgar Square, though Holborn remains a favourite, ‘for the gas jets are still intact over the water closets, and there are electric bulbs of Edwardian date which bend over like white tulips’. From low he would go high, to Butterfield’s church of All Saints in Margaret Street, with its ‘soaring, green-slated spire’, or to William Burges’s magnificent Tower House in Melbury Road, Kensington, with its stained-glass windows and Virginia creeper ‘mantling the conical tower in red, gold and amber’. He is too late to catch the strange and imposing Columbia Market, Victorian Gothic in excelsis and yet redolent of ‘a medieval cloth hall, with a gatehouse and clois­ters’. It came down in the 1950s, a loss he calls ‘incalculable’. And yet, against the odds, some of the buildings he hymns survive to this day. Only last week I went down to Eastcheap to behold the 1870s office buildings that stand proud among the steel and glass moderns of the City. They actually look more ecclesiastical than anything to do with commerce. ‘Fantastic Victorian Gothic at its most assured’, he calls it, a beautiful riot of coloured brick, stone and ironwork – and a sight to make the heart sing. If Fletcher had been only a writer his achievement would resonate. But, being a former student of the Slade, he also drew, and his illustrations (that Holborn loo included) enliven the pages of The London Nobody Knows. His drawings first appeared in the Manchester Guardian in 1950 before he became a long-term contributor to the Daily Telegraph. Better perhaps to think of him as a latter-day Max Beerbohm, although his drawing style is closer to that of Ronald Searle, minus the ludic spikiness. From both his prose and his pictures we may form an impression of the man, on the stroll through his beloved city, eye always on the alert. He favours what were then the less fashionable districts – Hoxton, Stepney, Shoreditch – investigating the doss-houses and dining-rooms, the obscure pubs and old curiosity shops. If you ever wondered what it might be like to eat in an eel pie saloon, where the tiled walls are lined with mirrors and the mashed potato comes stained with liquor ‘like verdigris’, this is your guide. In his foreword to a 2011 reprint of the book the historian Dan Cruickshank calls Fletcher ‘an outsider . . . unclubbable’, and yet it might be just this solitariness which attracts him to the market por­ters, the street vendors, the itinerant musicians and pavement artists whose presence lend the city its particular character. Most of them have since gone the way of the muffin men and crossing sweeps of the Victorian age, but Fletcher catches them for posterity here and in later volumes such as London’s Pavement Pounders (1967). The most poignant ghosts, however, are those of the music halls and their performers – Marie Lloyd, Dan Leno, George Leybourne (aka Champagne Charlie), and the rest. Fletcher was especially devoted to the New Bedford on Camden High Street, immortalized in etchings and paintings by Sickert. In the 1967 film adapted from The London Nobody Knows the narrator – a mournful James Mason – stands inside the blackened ruins of the theatre, awaiting demolition, and muses on its happier days. It will soon become part of the London Nobody Remembers, and aftercomers will have to guess at how it was. Not quite yet, though – a 90-year-old friend of mine still recalls visits to the Bedford in her student youth, when Donald Wolfit and his company did Shakespeare there at ‘popular prices’. Camden is one of two districts that merit their own chapter. The other is Islington, another favourite haunt of Sickert, where the rack­ety, tumbledown life of old is fleetingly visible in dining-rooms and shops: ‘What they sold originally is impossible to say, but they belong to the time when apprentices slept under the shop counter and had to take down the shutters for their first job of the day.’ As ever one catches at the corner of Fletcher’s eye little dabs of Dickens and Henry Mayhew in the throwback to street life, in the drama of buy­ing and selling. The 1960s momentarily carry the whiff of the 1860s. Chapel Market is a gift to his artist’s sense of colour: ‘the blue-pink of plucked chicken, partridges, and pheasants touched with dull reds and Prussian blue and occasionally a black and white hare . . .’. Across Upper Street, the bustle of Camden Passage is apparently trading up to the genteel, for ‘the antique dealers have moved in’ and the junk shops sent packing. The toy shop and the ‘dolls’ hospital’ have gone the same way. Islington also boasted a famous music hall, the Collins’s, by 1962 a burnt-out shell; only the walls of the pub next door tell of its former life in pasted playbills, ‘like messages from a lost world – near in time but as defunct as the baked clay tablets from Babylon’. Now the pub has vanished too. And there is the melancholy double-vision of this book. Fletcher’s gaze surveyed a pre-1914 London that was ‘essentially a domestic city’ in which the unconsidered trifles of architectural invention were sim­ply part of the fabric. Now we look back on Fletcher’s own time as one of innocence tinged with ominous warnings. In 1962 Britain was just emerging from the austerity years, the Beatles were about to release their first single and a new spirit of liberation flourished in the wake of the Lady Chatterley trial. But the desire to sweep away the old tragically brought doom upon the environment: buildings and streetscapes still serviceable, and often irreplaceable, were torn down in the name of modernization. The Victorian Society, led by Nikolaus Pevsner, was battling to save St Pancras Station from the wrecking ball, having failed to stop it up the road at Euston. Dan Cruickshank wonders why Fletcher was so ‘fatalistic’ about change, arguing that he could have used his book ‘not just to stimulate people to look before all was lost but also to fight to save what was left’. This was, he notes, in marked contrast to John Betjeman, who wrote and campaigned on behalf of conser­vation. While one can understand Cruickshank’s disappointment, it might be argued in Fletcher’s defence that he was already in the fight: the very publication of The London Nobody Knows constituted an act of protest, if not of actual engagement. In a later volume, London Souvenirs (1973), he wrote, ‘We may not have much hope of saving London and its adjoining areas, but at least we ought not to let them get away with it, without reasoned protest, without thought.’ His words and drawings were the arms of his crusade, an alternative to placards, marches and open letters to The Times. No one could accuse him of slacking, either. As well as painting and teaching he wrote around thirty books in his lifetime, some of them still to be found online. Geoffrey Fletcher’s drawings are themselves now ‘messages from a lost world’, but in their modest, intricate way they have res­cued London’s bygone beauty from the darkness of forgetting.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 76 © Anthony Quinn 2022