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| Christ Church, Spitalfields |
Spitalfields has played an important part in the history of London. After the Great Fire in 1666, traders began operating outside the inner City's walls, and in 1682 King Charles granted permission by royal decree for a market to be held on Thursdays and Saturdays near Spital Square. The market became a huge sucess and people began to settle in this formerly rural area of fields and streams - among them French Hugenots, fleeing France as anti-Protestant feeling grew in that country towards the end of the seventeenth century. Hugenot master silk-weavers were attracted by the new commercial area of Spitalfields and some settled in elegant houses there, followed by poorer Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine, Spitalfields has played an important part in the history of London. After the Great Fire in 1666, traders began operating outside the inner City's walls, and in 1682 King Charles granted permission by royal decree for a market to be held on Thursdays and Saturdays near Spital Square. The market became a huge sucess and people began to settle in this formerly rural area of fields and streams - among them French Hugenots, fleeing France as anti-Protestant feeling grew in that country towards the end of the seventeenth century. Hugenot master silk-weavers were attracted by the new commercial area of Spitalfields and some settled in elegant and later still by Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe and the Netherlands. At one time predominantly Jewish, in the twentieth century Spitalfields became the heart of the Bangladeshi community in London, and today the best bagel bars in London rub shoulders with the best curry houses.
Traces of this historical pedigree remain, and one of the most enchanting is Dennis Severs' house in Folgate Street. This house, which dates from around 1724, was rescued from dereliction by Dennis Severs, who spent years restoring it and turning it into - not so much a museum as a piece of living history, or performance art. Visitors wander through each of the ten rooms (in silence, please, phones switched off and NO cameras!), observing minutiae from the lives of the imaginary Jervis family who have, seemingly, just popped out: a snatch of conversation from the hall, a wig thrown over the chair, a letter half-read at the breakfast table, the smell of food wafting up from the basement kitchen. Up the four floors we climb, to the shabby rooms at the top which are rented out to a weaver's family, and where the recorded tolling of a bell announces the death of King William IV and Queen Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837.
A short walk from the steel and glass of Liverpool Street Station along a busy road lined with office blocks, Dennis Severs' house is a wonderful time capsule in the midst of this modernity. The rooms are lit only by the flickering of open log fires and candles dotted here and there, and walking through them gives a wonderful sense of what it must have been like to live in one of these narrow townhouses. Down in the basement kitchen, the wooden ceiling planks only inches above your head make you feel trapped, desperate for fresh air and a glimpse of the outside world beyond the street grating. Up in the draughty attic rooms, with their plaster and lathe ceilings open to the roof space, a whole family poor as church mice must somehow scratch out a living. And in between, the lavish drawing and music rooms, elaborately decorated and crammed with china, furniture and nick-nacks, create an entirely different atmosphere of leisure and refinement.
Anyone in search of inspiration need look no further! That's one of the things I love most about London: the (occasionally eccentric) pockets of history you can stumble across, around the corner from a gleaming tower block...
