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60 Farri ngdon Road Wheelwrights’ Workshop to Free Word Centre Philippa Lewis
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Previous page: Monogram TCR of wheelwright Thomas Charles Robins, who commissioned the building of 60 Farringdon Road.
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Sign at the front entrance designed by David Mills and erected in August 2009.
p r e fac e
This booklet tells the story of just one building in the vast metropolis of London – 60 Farringdon Road. Neither particularly distinguished nor particularly old, the building’s past – and that of the immediate neighbourhood of Clerkenwell – illustrates the ebb and flow of city life and commerce, the arriving technologies, fortunes and fashions. A building is a physical space and the backdrop to what has gone on there over the years. Number 60 was built in 1875 as a wheelwright’s workshop for a family business. The Robsons demonstrated characteristic Victorian energy and entrepreneurship, and successfully adapted their craft from its eighteenth-century roots to a place in the twentiethcentury motor industry, working in the building for almost a hundred years. They left in 1971, when the gloss of what had been an area of bright new Victorian commercialism
and social improvement had worn off. The building, partly appropriated as a builder’s yard, lay empty for several years, neglected like much of its semi-derelict neighbourhood. AKA Film & Television and then the Community Music House, when they occupied the building, were just as typical of late twentieth-century Clerkenwell as Robsons had been of the late nineteenth. The complete transformation of the building by The Guardian was a model of twentyfirst century re-invention: a light clean space with a clear purpose but set still within its recognisably original shell. The Newsroom, like the Community Music House before it, was engaging with, educating and improving the local community as well as the wider world. The establishment of Free Word Centre promoting free expression, literacy and literature is the perfect progression.
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A bird’s eye view looking eastwards to St Paul’s with sweeping new Farringdon Street in the foreground. Farringdon Road would be built to continue this fast route northwards. Coloured engraving after Thomas Allom, c.1840.
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Clerkenwell and t h e E n v i rons of Fa r r i ngdon Roa d The name Farringdon comes from the Farindon or Farndone or de Farendone family. William Farindon was a goldsmith, and Prime Warden of the Goldsmiths’ Company, who bought a ward in the city of London in 1279, thus becoming the alderman. It was subsequently known as the ward of Farringdon Without (the city boundary being implied). He was an MP and several times Lord Mayor of London. His son Nicholas followed in his footsteps and bought another ward that included Fleet Street. The name Clerkenwell originates with the name of a spring that by the end of the twelfth century had become known as the Clerks’ Well. This was because the parish clerks of London performed their plays on the themes of mysteries, miracles and morality beside the well. A stone tank and early nineteenth-century metal plaque formalised its location near the west end of the outer wall of St James’s Clerkenwell.
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The Fleet and its tributaries have done much to shape the area of Clerkenwell in which Farringdon Road is situated. The river rises in the ponds below Kenwood on Hampstead Heath and flows down through Kentish Town and King’s Cross to merge with the Thames at what is now New Bridge Street. Although no streams, springs or wells are now visible, place and street names reveal their presence: in addition to Clerkenwell, there is Cold Bath Fields, Spa Fields, Turnmill Street and Sadler’s Wells. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the upper reaches of the Fleet were a place of rural retreat, with tea gardens, amusements and health-giving spas: Cold Bath Fields advertised itself in 1697 as curing ‘Dizziness, Drowsiness, Lethargies, Palsies, Convulsions, all Hectical Creeping Fevers’. The lower part of the Fleet was often referred to as the Fleet Ditch – with good reason. It was considered disgusting even in the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), and a description in the Tatler of 17 October 1710 describes it as full of ‘sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drench’d in mud. Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.’ After the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the wharves and riverside buildings, an attempt was made to turn the lower part of the Fleet into a navigable canal. It was a failure, though, and the simplest solution was taken, which was to build over the top of it. The first section to disappear underground was between Holborn Bridge and Fleet Bridge, in 1733. This became the site for the new Fleet Market for meat, fish and vegetables. However, once the fine new Blackfriars Bridge designed
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Sketch of the Fleet Ditch when the ground was being cleared for the building of Farringdon Road, March 1855.
by Robert Mylne was built in the 1760s, a correspondingly grand street was needed for the northern approach and to take the traffic north to Middlesex. So in the 1830s Fleet Market was swept away and Farringdon Street was built. An Act was passed in 1840 to take another new road, originally to be called Victoria Street but eventually named Farringdon Road, further north towards King’s Cross from Charterhouse Street. The appeal of this was not only to eliminate impassable narrow streets and improve communications but also to do away with the remainder of the Fleet Ditch that was still an uncovered open sewer, ‘productive of fever and epidemics, and prejudicial to the general health of the neighbourhood’. The new road would obliterate the slums, with their verminous tenements and lodging houses, particularly in West Street and Field Lane, two notoriously crime-ridden areas.
Charles Dickens wrote an article in 1852 describing the boys at the Field Lane Ragged School: sellers of fruit, herbs, lucifer-matches, flints; sleepers under the dry arches of bridges; young thieves and beggars – with nothing natural to youth about them: with nothing frank, ingenuous, or pleasant in their faces. Henry Mayhew, writing a year earlier, in London Labour and the London Poor, interviewed an eight-year-old girl who had been selling watercress since the age of 7. She bought it from Farringdon Market and hawked it around the streets. He described her dressed in a thin cotton gown on a severely cold day: with a threadbare shawl around her shoulders. She wore no covering to her head, and the long rusty hair stood out in all directions. When she walked she shuffled 9
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‘Sunday Morning on the ground of the Farringdon Street extension, Field Lane’. Lithograph by Percy Cruikshank, c.1855.
railway between King’s Cross and the City: the Metropolitan Railway. North of Ray Street (where number 60 was shortly to be built), Coppice Row and Bagnigge Wells Road disappeared and the underground railway line and the road were constructed simultaneously, one on top of the other. The excavations were spectacular, at one point ending in disaster when the Fleet sewer burst and floods backed up all the way from Ray Street to Exmouth Market. However, by 1868 Farringdon Road was finally completed up to its northernmost point at Lloyd Baker Street. The new Farringdon Road, with its convenient passenger and freight depot at Farringdon Road station, offered ideal sites for new commercial enterprise; however the clearances and demolition had exacerbated overcrowding and homelessness among the local population. Clerkenwell Workhouse, a place of last resort, was one of the worst in London, described in Parliament as being a place of ‘intolerable evil’. It closed in 1879, to be replaced by the warehouses of numbers 143–157 Farringdon Road. Eventually some large-scale housing was built. In 1865 the City Corporation erected Corporation Buildings (demolished in 1970), opposite what would become 60 Farringdon Road. Built by the City for local people, this can in effect claim to be the first ‘council housing’ provision in England. Six storeys high with space for 168 families, each tenement had its own scullery, WC, fireplaces in the rooms, coal store and access to a rubbish chute, and it was possible for children to play on the flat roof and for clothes to be hung out to dry.
along, for fear that the large carpet slippers that served for shoes should slip off her feet. ‘It’s very cold before winter comes on reg’lar – specially getting up of a morning. I get up in the dark by the light of the lamp in the court. When the snow is on the ground there’s no creases [cresses]. I bears the cold – you must. So I puts my hands under my shawl, though it hurts ’em to take hold of the creses, especially when we take them to the pump to wash ’em.’ Progress in building the road was slow. There was a shortage of money and outbreaks of cholera caused delays. Clearances left swathes of ground empty; known as the Farringdon Ruins and Wastes, they became a favourite gathering ground for illegal betting. A major engineering obstacle came with the decision to build an underground 10
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Excavations during the construction of the Metropolitan Railway and the covering over of the Fleet Ditch, recorded in 1862.
The Corporation made a conscious decision to give the building’s exterior some decorative twists – at a price – such as a balustrade at roof level and segmental pediments over the windows. The intention was to attract developers to the empty stretch of road, though is difficult to imagine that this was a factor in Thomas Charles Robson’s decision to build on the opposite side of the road ten years later. Farringdon Road Buildings (now the site of the multistorey car park north of Bowling Green Lane), built by the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, opened in 1874. Here was space for 265 families. Each flat had a balcony and its own washhouse and WC. The lack of individuality and the regimentation was irksome to some. George Gissing’s 1889 novel The Nether World is set in the immediate area of Farringdon Road and the living quarters of various households in the vicinity are described. He tells of the squalor of the old courts such as nearby Shooter’s Gardens. The leases had all but run out; the middle men were garnering their latest profits, in the spring there would come a wholesale demolition and model-lodgings would thereafter occupy the site. Meanwhile the Gardens looked their surliest; the walls stood in a perpetual black sweat; a mouldy reek came from the open doorways; the beings that passed in and out seemed soaked with grimy moisture, puffed into distortions, hung about with rotting garments. Here lives the fictitious Mrs Candy in a house with seven rooms, each with a family; in total twenty-five people, men, 11
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The first building along the new Farringdon Road was Corporation Buildings designed by architects Alfred Allen and Horace Jones. This engraving from the Illustrated Times, published shortly after completion, shows shops at street level.
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Detail of Charles Booth’s social map of London, including Farringdon Road and Myddelton Square, where William Robson lived. The colour coding here ranges from black, ‘semi-criminal’,up to red, which was ‘well-to-do’.
women and children. In contrast, the Hewett family, who have been living in similar abysmal poverty, move to share a tenement with Mr and Mrs Eagles on the fifth storey of Farringdon Road Buildings. Gissing describes it with some passion: ‘Barracks, in truth; housing for the army of industrialism’. Clara Hewett (whose life is pretty unbearable anyhow) ‘hated the place from her first hour in it. It seemed to her that the air was poisoned with the odour of an unclean crowd. The yells of children at play in the courtyard tortured her nerves; the regular sounds on the staircase, day after day repeated at the same hours, incidents of the life of poverty.’ There can be no doubt however that Farringdon Road Buildings was a vast improvement for many. It took slightly less than 100 years for the building to be condemned as unfit for human habitation. In 1881 the slum housing called Yates’s Rents and the ‘ruins’ round Pear Tree Court were bought for £12,923 from the Metropolitan Board of Works by The Peabody Donation Fund. By 1884 they had built eleven blocks of 227 tenements. The fund had been established by the American banker George Peabody in 1862, to ‘ameliorate the condition and augment the comforts of the poor, who either by birth or established residence, form a recognised portion of the population of London’. In 1940 a bomb destroyed two of the blocks and twelve people were killed. Modernised and renovated, these model dwellings survive. The nine-volume Labour and Life of the People of London (1892–97), edited by Charles Booth, gives a more precise analytical view of the state of each section of
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Looking south to St Paul’s from outside 60 Farringdon Road, c.1935. The tram-lines are evident and the large chimney was originally part of the works of Alex. Galloway, engineers.
Photograph for a Picture Post feature in April 1950, entitled ‘Under London’ showing an inspection of the tunnel containing the Fleet under Farringdon Road.
Farringdon Road. The block between Bowling Green Lane down to Clerkenwell Green was described thus: ‘A thickly populated little block extending round Clerkenwell Close. People are fairly comfortable in the Peabody Models, and the better streets, but there are several old courts whose rickety old courts cover a large amount of poverty.’ Of the block north he wrote: ‘some decent streets filled with comfortable tradesmen, artisans, warehousemen, etc. who may also be found in the large block of models in Farringdon Road with many poorer neighbours. Good deal of struggle and migratory habits, partly caused by drink.’ Booth noted that ‘few of the workers dwell in the parish, and few of the dwellers work in it’. While new transport systems, such as underground railways and trams, were increasing the commercial attractions of the area, it was also enabling people who worked there to live outside it. At the centre of a web of communications, Mount Pleasant was the ideal site for the Post Office to develop a vast new sorting office from the 1890s onwards. It replaced the grim and outdated Coldbath Fields Prison with its treadmill. The local population declined dramatically during the twentieth century and reached its lowest point after the bombing of the Second World War. Conditions improved from the 1930s through to the post-war period as Finsbury Council instigated its socially progressive building programme, which included Tecton’s modernist Finsbury Health Centre and flats at Spa Green and Priory Green. During the last two decades the population has been rising and the nature of the area has changed. The era of 14
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Farringdon Road on 8 March 1945, after one of the last V-2 rockets of the war had been dropped on Farringdon Market. Image from Fox Photos, a leading Fleet Street photo agency whose office was further up the road.
Bessie Mariani in the original Italian food shop at 167 Farringdon Road, c.1912. In 1954, when Bessie’s daughter married and took over the shop it became Gazzano’s, now run by the fourth generation of the family.
cheap rents in the 1970s and 1980s, which allowed ventures such as AKA and Community Music to occupy 60 Farringdon Road, came to an end. It is pointed out in the Clerkenwell volume of the Survey of London that what made a difference was a ruling by Islington Council in 1989 that new developments should be limited in size and height and of mixed use. Warehouses were converted into flats and New York-style loft conversions, and new housing was
built. Bars and restaurants began to take over the groundfloor premises replacing traditional businesses. The Eagle pub at number 159 can claim to be the first gastro pub in the country; in 1991 David Eyre and Mike Belben threw out the standard pub furnishings, let in the light and began to serve freshly cooked food including sausages bought from Gazzano & Son next door.
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V. & J.Figgins’s centenary specimen book, 1895; the new premises gold-blocked on the back cover.
T h e P r i n t e d a n d S pok e n Wor d
There could not be a more appropriate place to establish Free Word since this area of London has associations with the written word that date back to the Middle Ages. Literacy was then virtually a monopoly of the clergy, and scriveners and clerks clustered round St Paul’s Churchyard copying texts to order. Specializing in religious and spiritual books, Wynken de Worde, who took over Caxton’s press at the end of the fifteenth century, set himself up in nearby Fleet Street by St Bride’s, and so began the long tradition of printing and publishing there. Alongside the printers were the booksellers, whose booths selling prints, pamphlets and books proliferated in the neighbourhood of St Paul’s. In Fleet Street’s shadow were hundreds of associated businesses and trades. A street directory for Farringdon Road in 1890 lists a type-founder, second-hand bookseller, bookbinder – Orrin & Geer were next door to number 60 at number 58 – bookbinders’ tool-cutter, wood engraver, chromolithographer, brass-type maker, paper makers, printers’ ink makers, engravers, four printers and printingpress makers. To the south, in Farringdon Street, there was a publishers’ agent as well as more printing-machine makers and ink manufacturers. Farringdon Road, apart from the model dwellings, was essentially commercial in character, with firms such as Robson’s establishing their presence with impressive buildings in eye-catchingly eclectic styles. The 1860s to 1880s were the boom years for industrial Clerkenwell. Among the premises connected to the thriving printing and publishing industry were the warehouse and machinery rooms of
the engraver and chromolithographer William Dickes at number 109–111, with its richly detailed Venetian Gothic façade, and, dating from the same year, 1865, the foundry and warehouse built by the type-founders V. & J. Figgins on the corner of Ray Street and Farringdon Road. This firm was founded in 1792 by Vincent Figgins, who famously devised the first Egyptian (or slab serif) typeface that was popular for advertisements and posters. He was succeeded by his sons and grandsons, and their specimen typeface book of 1895 demonstrates the extent of their enterprise: they sold type for Hindustani, German, Greek, Hebrew, Gaelic, Arabic, Sindhi, Malayan, Persian, Turkish, Pushtu, Mahrathi, Sanskrit, Panjabi and Syriac scripts. At nearby number 83, albeit only for a short time in the 1870s, was the pioneering Victoria Press, founded by Emily Faithfull specifically to train and employ women as com-
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Figgins’s Syriac typeface, from their 1895 specimen book.
Advertisement in The British and Colonial Printer and Stationer, February 1892.
The business of printing words continued to be a key activity of the area. The Clerkenwell Survey of London notes that it was recorded in 1946 that at least half the premises around Clerkenwell Green were occupied by the printing trade. The design and graphic studios that succeed them today are in many ways their natural successors. In tandem with this, and in many ways related, is the fact that Clerkenwell has long been a centre for political agitation, radical activity and reform. Peter Ackroyd in London: The Biography (2000) refers to the Lollards (followers of John Wyclif), the Catholics, the Quakers and the Freemasons; and major rallies by the Chartists, for the Reform Bill and by the National Union of Working Classes. There were demonstrations for John Wilkes and
positors. The printer’s union attempted to sabotage the press: ‘tricks of a most unmanly nature were resorted to, their frames and stools were covered with ink to destroy their dresses unawares, the letters were mixed up in their boxes, and the cases were emptied of “sorts”.’ Despite this, the press continued in existence for twenty years, and Emily Faithfull was appointed ‘Printer and Publisher to Her Majesty’. Backing onto number 60 in Bowling Green Lane was the firm of William Notting, manufacturer of printing presses, and next door are the works built in the late 1870s for James Johnstone, proprietor of the increasingly successful Evening Standard. Appropriately, the winged helmet of Mercury, herald to the gods – and god of eloquence and the mythic inventor of the alphabet – decorates the pediment. The birth of the Hogarth Press is described in Victorian Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf. He and Virginia went to Farringdon Street one afternoon in March 1917 and bought from the Excelsior Printing Supply Co. ‘a small hand-press, some Old Face type, and attendant implements and materials, for £19. 5s. 6d’. This they set up in the diningroom of Hogarth House and with the aid of a sixteen-page instruction booklet taught themselves how to use it. 19
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Female compositors working at Emily Faithfull’s Victoria Press, which for twenty years published the Victoria Magazine was a strong advocate of the right of women to gainful employment.
Liberty in 1768; the Gordon Rioters released prisoners from the Bridewell in 1780; Spa Fields was where in 1816 unemployed tradesmen and manufacturers petitioned for relief; and when the first of the Tolpuddle Martyrs returned from transportation in 1838, it was in Clerkenwell that they were welcomed. Two buildings were of particular significance. Number 37a Clerkenwell Green was established as the permanent base of the radical London Patriotic Club in 1872, when magistrates began to suspend the licences of publicans who allowed their premises to be used for political meetings. John Stuart Mill contributed to the fund for the building’s purchase. It became a focus for popular causes and many of their campaigns spilled out onto the Green: Eleanor Marx
Aveling and her husband spoke from a wagon in October 1887 to protest against the behaviour of the police during unemployment demonstrations. On Sundays it had become a forum for people who wanted to air their views to the crowds that would regularly gather. The first London May Day rally was held on 4 May 1890. In 1893 The Twentieth Century Press, publishing and printing arm of the Social-Democratic Federation run by Harry Quelch, took over 37a Clerkenwell Green, with William Morris guaranteeing the first year’s rent. From here they published not only the weekly Justice – priced at 1d., it was sold in the street since wholesale newsagents would not take the paper – but also innumerable pamphlets and leaflets by leading socialist writers, as well as works by Marx and translations of the work of continental socialists. The Russian Social-Democratic newspaper Iskra (The Spark) edited by Lenin was printed for a short while at The Twentieth Century Press, Harry Quelch having boarded up a special small office for him to work in. This remains intact as part of the Marx Memorial Library, which was founded in 1933 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death and in response to the burning in Nazi Germany of Marxist and other radical publications. In the summer of 1885, funded largely by William Morris, the newly formed Socialist League took the lease of 13 Farringdon Road. There was a reading room, a lecture room and space for their printing and publishing activities. It was from here that Morris published the political broadsheet Commonweal, himself contributing articles, poems 20
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The Commonweal masthead, ornamented with a William Morris design of willow leaves.
Sunday afternoon in Clerkenwell Green, c.1890. The drinking fountain providing a platform for speakers was presented to the parish of St James by the Good Samaritan Temperance Society in 1862.
and essays over five years, including in July 1886 ‘Free Speech in the Streets’. ‘The police war against the openair speaking of the socialists is being carried on with much vigour this year,’ he wrote. ‘We appeal to all reasonable people not to allow the streets to be deprived of all life or pleasure at the dictation of wealthy pedants and pleasureseekers . . . It may be questionable whether setting their [workers] brains to thinking over “dangerous” doctrines is really so dangerous as driving them back into brutality by constant repression.’ Morris wrote a play called The Tables Turned; or Nupkins Awakened that was performed as a fundraiser for the Commonweal in November 1887. As recorded by Fiona MacCarthy in her biography of William Morris, George Bernard Shaw wrote: I can see quite clearly the long top floor of that warehouse in the Farringdon Road as I saw it in glimpses between my paroxysms, with Morris gravely on the stage . . . Mrs Stillman, a tall beautiful figure, rising like a delicate spire above a skyline of city chimney pots at the other; and a motley sea of rolling, wallowing, guffawing socialists between. Newspapers too have a history in Farringdon Road. The Daily Worker was re-launched after the war in an old bombed-out brush factory at number 75, rebuilt for them
by Ernö Goldfinger in the late 1940s and since demolished. The Guardian and The Observer were published at number 119. And it should not perhaps be whitewashed out that just nearby in Back Hill the less high-minded forces’ favourite Reveille was printed, from May 1940 until it merged with Tit-Bits in 1979. 21
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‘Oliver amazed at the Dodger’s mode of going to work’. Illustration by George Cruikshank for the 1846 edition of Oliver Twist.
T h e Fa r r i ngdon Roa d Book s e l l e r s
Farringdon Road was famous for its bookstalls. A comment in the 1926 volume Wonderful London was that it might seem romantic to compare them to the ones on Paris’s Left Bank; in truth, ‘both contain the very flotsam of literature, both have the appearance of extreme impermanence’. The London stalls seem to have first materialized around 1869, shortly after Farringdon Road was completed, enlivening and filling the space in front of the blank wall backing onto the railway line, south of Cowcross Street. One of the original dealers was James Dabbs, ‘a very intelligent man who started in the hot chestnut line’ (W. Roberts, The Book-Hunter in London, 1895) and was well known for his stock of the several thousand books he displayed daily on four or five barrows. Dabbs’s starting price was two books for a penny; he claimed that he made the greatest profit from theological titles. The market was thriving up to the Second World War. In The Street Markets of London published in 1938, Mary Benedetta describes the scene: the same little group stands there side by side for hours, searching, reading, their eyes appraising all the different qualities of each volume. The rain drips on their shoulders off the canvas roof, soaking them to the skin, but they never notice. Time means nothing to them. It is forgotten. They are all under the same spell – the romance and glamour of old books. It was this same spell that gets Oliver Twist into trouble when just off Clerkenwell Green the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates steal Mr Brownlow’s handkerchief: 22
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A two-penny stall on one of the Farringdon Road bookstalls, 1929.
He had taken up a book from the stall, and there he stood, reading away, as hard as if he were in his elbowchair, in his own study . . . for it was plain, from his abstraction, that he saw not the book-stall, nor the street, nor the boys, nor, in short, anything but the book itself: which he was reading straight through. No descriptions of the stalls are without accompanying tales of some great finds, of rare books and first editions. C. A. Prance wrote in 1964, ‘from the barrows I have almost completed my set of The Yellow Book ’ (John Lane’s literary periodical founded in 1894, famous for its ‘decadent’ illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley). Prints, newspapers and magazines were among the stock, and Hilary and Mary Evans would frequently visit on Saturdays in the 1960s and ’70s scouring the stalls for images for their growing picture library. By the 1990s the bookstalls had shrunk to a handful, all run by George Jeffery, the third generation of his family to trade there. Jeffery when opening up in the morning would slowly peel back the tarpaulin, tantalizing the customers and causing fierce competition among them. Drif’s Guide to Second-hand Books noted in 1992, the year the bookstalls finally disappeared, that Farringdon Road was, ‘For Gladiators only, but worth seeing for the Saturday morning fights.’
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Details of the indenture document for Thomas Charles Robson’s lease from the Metropolitan Railway Company with a plan of the ‘boundaries, dimensions and abuttals’ of the building as erected.
T h e Rob sons
At Christmas 1874 Thomas Charles Robson, wheelwright, of 2 Hadleigh Villas, Wood Lane, Highgate, must have been feeling confident of the future of his firm: he had taken a building lease from the Metropolitan Railway Company which owned that strip of land on the eastern side of Farringdon Road and was planning a grand new workshop. The lease was for 80 years at £160 per annum, though no money was to be paid for the first year to allow the tenant time to put up his building. Thomas Charles Robson came from a family of wheelwrights and coachbuilders.His grandfather, George Robson, lived in Great Amwell in Hertfordshire, where a son, Thomas, was born in 1789. Leaving there to come to London, Thomas was clearly well established by 1839 when he was listed in Pigot & Co.’s Directory of London and its Suburbs as a wheelwright at 29 Liquorpond Street and 40 Laystall
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Early nineteenth-century aquatint of a wheelwright at work by W. H. Pyne. The construction techniques remained virtually unchanged.
Street, in an area busy with related trades: a street directory of 1840 lists a coach builder, coach painter, ironmonger, hardwood turner and japanner. Some of Thomas Robson’s relations worked in the same line of business: there was George Robson of Redcross Street in Borough, and Thomas Charles’s sister Ann would marry Henry Mulliner, whose family firm was regarded as one of the finest coach and carriage builders of the period. The work of a wheelwright is described in The Young Tradesman; or, Book of English Trades, published in 1839 when Thomas Charles Robson would have been a 14 year-old apprentice in his father’s firm: ‘This business is a very laborious one, and requires that no lad should be bought up to it who does not possess a strong constitution: a journeyman will earn from a guinea to thirty shillings a week.’ There were two kinds of work, one the making of heavy wheels for wagons, carts and large coaches, and the other, involving greater precision, the elegant finishing of carriages. Wheelwrights had to be skilled in working with both wood and iron, since the wooden wheels were bound with an iron tire forged on site. An accompanying wood engraving represents the wheelwright: putting on the tire of the wheel; and the smoke is made to pour forth from the burning wood. The large pincers at his feet enable him to bring the red-hot iron from the fire, and place it on the wheel. The axe, resting against the other wheel, has a bended blade, and is used for hollowing out the fellies. (Felloes, ‘fellies’, are the curved sections of the rim supported by spokes.)
Thomas Charles Robson probably took over his father’s firm and premises in the 1850s; by the time of the 1871 census he could describe himself as an employer of 40 men. He would have been aware by then that the family’s works at narrow, cramped 29 Liquorpond Street was about to disappear with the widening of Clerkenwell Road, and Laystall Street was soon to be cut in half by the building of Rosebery Avenue. The vacant building plots alongside the new Farringdon Road would have caught his eye as a perfect place to expand into a new building. Imposing new warehouses and commercial properties were springing up beside the road; it was a promising place to be, with the new wide thoroughfare making it a fast and popular route from the Surrey side of the river up through to the north. Once built, he marked his substantial new premises facing onto the busy frontage of Farringdon Road as his own by commissioning an ornamental monogram of his intertwined initials, TCR , and the date 1875. With its wide entrance and big yard, it must have been in sharp contrast to his old workplace. 25
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As a young married man in 1841 Thomas Charles lived in nearby Holborn with his wife Mary and his two small children; in the Clerkenwell area craftsmen traditionally worked at home alongside their families or in the vicinity, a pattern that persisted until the mid-nineteenth century. The drift of fashionable life westwards and the decline of some of the local trades such as clock-making had left the area poor, crowded and polluted. Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist (1838) describes Oliver walking with the Artful Dodger from Coppice Row to Field Lane – a stone’s throw from the Robsons in Liquorpond Street. A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy odours. There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside . . . Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses, where drunken men and women were positively wallowing in filth; and from several of the doorways, great ill-looking fellows were cautiously emerging, bound, to all appearance, on no very welldisposed or harmless errands. Families with the means to do so moved to the suburbs, among them the Victorian Robsons. Transport was rapidly improving and it became possible by horse tram (and after 1900 by electric tram) to make the journey from home to work relatively quickly. With a rapidly growing family,
Thomas Charles made the classic trajectory of a successful man and moved out to the newly built suburbs, in his case to the clean air of rural Highgate. Number 2 Hadleigh Villas, far removed from crowded Clerkenwell terraces and streets, was a four storey semi-detached house that stood within a large garden on the edge of Queen’s Wood, with a prospect of Muswell Hill. Here there was ample room for Thomas Charles, his wife Mary, the five unmarried daughters who ranged in age from 32 down to 10 and their servant Maria Scott, all listed in the 1871 census; William and Thomas had already left home. In 1876 Thomas Charles added the names of his sons to the lease of the property in Farringdon Road and by 1880 the company was in their hands, thereafter to be known as W. & T. Robson. It was these two that took the firm into the twentieth century and made the transition from horsedrawn to horsepower. The social investigator Charles Booth included the firm of Robsons as one of two companies representative of the van and coach-building trade in his Labour and Life of the People in London. One of Booth’s researchers visited the premises twice in 1893 armed with a printed questionnaire to look at the difference between a ‘busy week’ – March – and a ‘slack week’ – November. The company was no longer in business as just wheelwrights but also as van builders. This Booth described as ‘an important and growing industry in London, the heavy vans being made by large and oldestablished firms, while the lighter sort, for which there is a less regular demand, are left to a great extent to the small 26
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The original questionnaire taken to 60 Farringdon Road by one of Charles Booth’s researchers for his report on wages and conditions of the London labour force.
Diagram submitted to the Patent Office by Frank Robson showing the van body structure accepted and listed as Patent number 253,628.
employers’. Every company needed its goods to be transported and van building was a steady business. The workers’ wages are listed as ranging from up to 42 shillings for smiths and skilled wood workers down to 22 shillings for hammermen or ‘ordinary brush-hands [painters]’. The usual hours were 54 a week from 6am to 5pm or 7am to 6pm, with half an hour allowed for breakfast and an hour for dinner, though sometimes the hours were longer in summer when trade was at its busiest and there was light to work by. Both William and Thomas had large families and each produced a son to succeed him. In the 1901 census, William is listed as living with his second wife, three daughters and three stepchildren, at 40 Myddelton Square, a short walk away from the works in Farringdon Road. Two of the girls were Post Office clerks, maybe down the road at Mount Pleasant, and of the two stepsons one was a grocer and one a commercial traveller. It was Frank William, William’s son from his first marriage, who went into the family business. He was evidently a craftsman who still knew how to make a wheel, for in 1894 he is recorded as being the first instructor to a class for wheelwrights established by the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights in conjunction with the Carpenters’ Company. In 1922 he was elected Master of the Wheelwrights: ‘Mr. Robson is a member of the old firm of W. & T. Robson Ltd., Farringdon Road, E.C. He is a much respected and popular figure in the trade, and an active member on the Councils of the Trade Associations.’
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Robsons’ advertising leaflet, c.1927. The reverse side states that the company has been ‘established for over a century’ and illustrates vans manufactured for Lyons Tea, Evening News, Hyde Model Laundry and London & Westminster Stores.
Frank clearly thought about securing the future of Robsons with new initiatives; they had transferred the company’s wood-working expertise from making wheels to building commercial vehicle bodies onto standard chassis. In 1925 he submitted three patent applications for ‘Improvements in the Construction of Road Vehicles’ to make them lighter in weight by using plywood and aluminium. He also worked out a system for providing vans with a racking system for transporting ‘articles in trays as are
commonly employed by purveyors of food’ – useful no doubt for Fitch of Bishopsgate, the provision merchant whose van is illustrated in their advertising brochure with the catchy slogan ‘Carry Freight not Body-weight’. The Robson stand at the Commercial Motor Exhibition at Olympia in 1931 caught the eye of a reporter from The Automobile Engineer magazine and a picture appeared of a van with increased headroom (another of Frank’s patents) intended as a mobile showroom for travelling salesmen. 28
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Illustrations from The Automobile Engineer demonstrating (left) van with Frank Robson’s patent expandable roof section, 1931. Right: Van made for Collars Ltd, shown by Robsons at the 1933 Commercial Motor Show.
It was noted that Robsons now incorporated the firm of W. Parkyn & Sons Ltd, formerly in Kentish Town. At the 1933 show they featured a spectacular new design. Its streamline shape – emphasised by a broad chromium plated moulding – attracted the attention of the manufacturers of Dinky Toys, who used the van as a model. This was not one of Frank’s designs, but that of a Scotsman named William Holland, and made for the laundry firm of Collars Ltd. Thomas, ten years younger than William had, like his father, retreated to the suburbs, to 11 Overton Road, Brixton. He and his Scottish wife Christine had seven children, and it was his second son, Alfred, born in 1884, who followed his father into the business. Described as a wheelwright’s clerk in 1901, Alfred is listed as Managing Director of the firm in a 1950s edition of Who’s Who of the Motoring Industry; he is credited with being ‘first connected with the Motor Industry on its inception. Previously employed on Commercial Horse-drawn Road Vehicles.’
In 1950 the company exhibited at the Commercial Motor Show – now at Earl’s Court – an aluminium-panelled 2-ton bread van with a special extra space over the driver’s compartment. In the 1954 Directory of Bodybuilders it advertised itself as producers of all types of goods vehicles, insulated vans, horseboxes and cattle trucks. Then, in 1971, for the first time in ninety-six years, the name of Robson at 60 Farringdon Road, E.C., is absent from the Post Office Directory. It is easy to see that, although by the 1950s they were offering to do motor body repairs, it would have been impossible for them to compete with the mass manufacture of vehicles. Their time was over.
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Allan King, founder and guiding spirit of AKA Film Services.
AKA
Post Office Directories reveal that after W. & T. Robson left 60 Farringdon Road the building was left empty until a camera business called Photomarkets took it over in 1978. They left shortly afterwards leaving a remarkably efficient security system and a façade modernised with a wide glass entrance to the left of the old central arch, out of which the Robsons would have driven carts and shiny new commercial vans. Two years later the building was bought by AKA Film Services, which was at that point managed by Stephen Mellor; he had noticed it because he lived nearby in Wilmington Square. AKA stands for Allan King Associates. King was a well-known Canadian film-maker, who, using lightweight hand-held cameras and little direction to the participants, excelled at spontaneous fly-on-the-wall documentaries. He came to Britain in 1961 and established AKA in Soho. This, to quote from his colleague Mike Dodds’s obituary in The Guardian (King died in June 2009): became a base for freelance filmmakers and assorted arts and media people who could be seen to represent the creative powerhouse of London in the 1960s and ’70s. It was no surprise to come into the office in Broadwick Street to find the likes of Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jonathan Miller or Kenneth Anger. Allan King and his group of freelance film-makers worked as a co-operative and although King returned to Canada in the 1970s the company continued in existence. The film-maker Christian Wangler, who had been an associate since 1964, describes the firm’s move in 1980 as
being a time of rapid expansion in the television industry. They were in the right place at the right time. In Britain the BBC, ITV, Granada and ATV were buying films and the launch of Channel 4 was on the horizon. AKA also made films for CBS and ABC in America. When they moved into 60 Farringdon Road the building was adapted to fit its new role providing services for the film industry. At the back of the ground floor were two studios: one small, for filming interviews or taking pack shots, and the larger studio, for making commercials. Drawbacks included a large brick pillar near the centre of the space, and the rumbling of the Metropolitan Railway, but its advantage was that vans could be driven right into the building from Farringdon Road. The rental from these studios was to provide the bread and butter for AKA’s more creative endeavours. Also on the ground floor was a division of the company hiring out cameras and film equipment. This was run for several years by Simon Clark, who remembers the many
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Top:Simon Clark in the camera and equipment hire store, early 1980s Bottom: Stills from Juno and Avos, a Russian rock opera composed by Alexei Rybnikov, filmed in the Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Moscow, and produced by Christian Wangler at AKA for Channel 4.
people, some of them now established and admired, who wandered in to hire cameras, among them Nick Broomfield and Christian Wangler. Upstairs were cutting and editing rooms. Mellor recalled the top floor as being a hive of activity, with independent film-makers such as Penumbra, Broadside and 51%, working away in small offices striving to get projects off the ground. Also in the building was a separate company called Independent Camera and Equipment Co. (Ice Co), that sold and serviced 16mm cinema equipment. This was the British agent for Aaton, a make of innovative lightweight camera and one that was for the first time light enough for women to use. Joan Churchill, who worked at AKA and was the first woman with an ACTT union card, used one, describing herself as a ‘cameramam’. New management in 1984 – and a change of name to AKA Film & Television Services – led to an erosion of the old co-operative spirit and changes in personnel. The business foundered at the beginning of the 1990s.
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A dingy 60 Farringdon Road. Next door, number 58 is on the point of demolition. The pub, now the Betsey Trotwood, was then called the Butchers Arms in recognition of the nearby meat trade at Smithfield.
T h e Com m u n i t y M us ic Hous e
In 1992 Community Music, now known as CM, moved into its first permanent home, a fairly crumbly 60 Farringdon Road which they rented for £5 a square foot from a property company called Lyndhurst Estates. The organisation was then nine years old, an inspired collaboration between the jazz drummer and composer John Stevens and Dave O’Donnell, who guided it through the first 25 years of its life. Together they were committed to the idea of making music available to those who might have slipped through the net in terms of a formal musical education: children, youth, minority groups, the disabled. They broke new ground by not limiting themselves to Western European music, but including music from all cultures. They were in the vanguard in offering a serious professional training for the music industry. These were the early days of digital music: creating sound had became possible for anyone with access to relatively simple equipment. What Community Music sought to do was to raise the bar and ensure that musicians were given the skill and knowledge to use new technology with maximum creativity and to high artistic standards. Number 60 Farringdon Road gave Community Music, led by John Stevens, the space to provide the crucial training to community music workers. Dave O’Donnell describes the Farringdon Road years as being the organisation’s golden age: each day four vans left, taking musicians to run 20 to 30 training programmes a week. In addition the warren of small empty rooms on the upper floor could be let rent free, or for a peppercorn rent, to start-up businesses in the music 32
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John Stevens on stage in a London primary school leading a music workshop, part of the Community Music outreach programme.
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A frame grab from Identical Beat. Aniruddha Das demonstrates the multi-track tape recorder, Alesis hardware sequencer and Akai sampler.
industry. The large ex-film studio space on the ground floor of the Community Music House became a music venue (unlicensed but thriving). Two or three times a week many of the newly formed bands progressed to performance. Asian Dub Foundation was the most high-profile band to come out of the Community Music House. In the summer of 1993 music tutor Aniruddha Das together with youth worker and DJ John Pandit ran summer workshops particularly aimed at local Asian children; one was recorded in a documentary called Identical Beat, funded by the Black Arts Video Project and the Arts Council. The film recorded the work they were doing with 15-year-old rapper Deedar Zaman, 17-year-old Pavan Verma and 14-year-old Deepali Patel (who tellingly made the point that girls should not be shy of the music technology). Asian Dub Foundation was
formed as a result. The teachers, Das, Pandit and student Zaman, continued to write new material and rehearse together and, joined by Steve Chandra Savale on guitar and Sun-J who worked with live technology, they subsequently played live, in particular a series of anti-racist benefits. The band crucially provided a positive leading voice for those fighting the racism and anti-Asian violence of the early 1990s. They were signed by Nation Records and released their first EP, Conscious, in 1994, followed by an album, Facts and Fictions, in 1995. Its most famous track ‘Rebel Warrior’ was influenced by one of the best-known poems of Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poet of Bangladesh, which ends for a call for unity amongst the Hindu and Muslim communities. John Pandit pointed out that what made 60 Farringdon Road special was that unlike many similar projects it was not hidden away on the edge of an industrial estate but right in the centre of town, easily accessible to all. He remembers the exhilaration of walking round the building and hearing differing strains of music emerging from all the rooms. This hothouse of activity was something that he went on to replicate in other schemes, and members of Asian Dub Foundation later set up an educational wing, ADFED, to continue their work with minority groups. Community Music left the building in 1997. The Arts Council required a long-term lease before it would release funds to provide much-needed cash to maintain and restore the building. Clerkenwell was an area clearly on the rise and the building’s owner was reluctant to commit to 34
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Talvin Singh playing the drums, Militant Science night at the Community Music House, May 1996.
One page from Search and Reflect, John Stevens’s Music Workshop handbook, first published in 1985. This encapsulated the ethos of disciplined but highly creative improvisation central to the Community Music House.
its future and close off his options; no lease was forthcoming. Eventually the owner made a substantial donation to the charity and Community Music moved on to Borough – another developing cultural quarter. O’Donnell described letting himself back into number 60 with his old key some time later: squatters and squalor had taken over. They ran all-night raves and the police were constantly being called to the building. O’Donnell said their offence was not these disturbances, but the fact that whereas 60 Farringdon Road had previously been a beacon of musical excellence, the squatters had produced nothing but ‘a load of poor techno rubbish’. 35
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Snapshot of 60 Farringdon Road just before work started on its conversion to The Newsroom by architects Allies & Morrison.
T h e gua r dia n N e ws room
Number 60 Farringdon Road was in a sense lucky to survive into the twenty-first century. Zeppelin air-raids in the First World War had destroyed numbers 61 and 91–93 across the road and worse destruction came with the bombing during the Second World War; two blocks of the Peabody Buildings in Pear Tree Court received a hit and twelve people died. During the 1960s and 1970s, roughly a century after its creation, much of the surrounding Victorian cityscape was demolished. The millennium found 60 Farringdon Road empty, neglected and in a fairly derelict state – and up for sale. It was the sight of a For Sale sign on a building conveniently opposite The Guardian offices that led the newspaper’s eleventh editor, Alan Rusbridger, to think that it was an ideal site for a purpose-built archive and visitor centre. He persuaded the Scott Trust, which owned both The Guardian and The Observer, to buy the building as a repository for the histories of the two papers as well as a venue for exhibition and educational programmes. The Scott Trust had been set up in 1936 to preserve the financial and editorial independence of the newspapers by the family of C. P. Scott, whose legendary editorship had spanned 57 years. Both papers possessed rich archives of material relating to their past, dating back to 1821 and 1791 respectively, at the time still stored in Manchester. Allies & Morrison was the firm of architects that transformed the building from an old industrial space into an elegant modern venue and workspace, to be known as The Newsroom. The graphic designer Simon Esterson worked
for both the newspaper and the architects and was the link between the two. It was a single telephone phone call to the firm’s partner Paul Appleton from Alan Rusbridger that led to the commission. Appleton has described entering the empty building through a roughly covered courtyard. Beyond that, at the back, was a makeshift music studio, a dark and cavernous space with sound-absorbent foam-covered walls. Upstairs was a jumble of cubby-hole rooms filled with dispiriting ’70s office paraphernalia. Once these accretions were stripped out, the qualities of the building could be appreciated and the new building could take shape for the clients, 36
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Plan for the alterations of the front elevation, showing the creation of a colonnade and the elimination of the central entrance from the road.
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Pupils from Lenzie Academy in Scotland in the schoolroom during a one-day workshop. The school won a trip to The Newsroom as prize in the Guardian Young Critics Competition, 2007.
Central exhibition space of The Newsroom, looking through to the back of the building.
whom Appleton regarded as ‘impeccable’. There were three fundamental sets of changes: the façade was opened up to the outside world with a glazed screen behind a colonnade so that passing street life could be watched from the entrance and the café; light was let into the central exhibition space (once a courtyard full of wagon wheels); and the back of the building was reduced to create a thin garden, both providing a green space and allowing natural light and ventilation to enter. This block became the education centre and schoolroom. In the heart of the building moveable partitions and retractable seating created a space that could function either as a lecture theatre or for temporary exhibitions.
The director of The Newsroom, Luke Dodd, thought that alongside the archive they should display the latest technology to demonstrate how print media had been revolutionised and indicate what might evolve in the future. The education department pioneered a range of activities for pupils from primary to sixth-form level, as well as conferences for teachers. The most popular involved oneday workshops at which students created their own front pages using state of the art technology and learnt how to choose, research, write and edit stories and use pictures to best effect. Dodd arranged a continuous flow of varied and powerful exhibitions, some in association with other organisations, 38
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Gareth James and Luke Dodd preparing the exhibition of the Thames whale skeleton, January 2007.
bringing the public into the heart of the building. The opening exhibition focused on the history and values of The Guardian and The Observer. Other themes included a centenary exhibition on George Orwell, with seminars and film screenings, genocide in Rwanda, illustrators’ perspectives on the Palestine-Israel conflict, Magnum stories and the World Trade Centre tragedy. There were retrospective exhibitions of work by leading photographers such as Jane Bown, Graham Finlayson and Howard Davies, and cartoonists who included Papas, David Austin, Chris Riddell, Martin Rowson and Steve Bell, as well as work from the Middle East. The café became a providential local link with the Gazzano family, which had been running an Italian food store in Farringdon Road since 1901 for the thriving Italian community. Dodd offered them the retail space on the ground floor while they redeveloped their own premises. This new premises for the shop combined with flats above won the A J First Building Award in 2009 for the architectural practice of Amin Taha – a proper family affair since the idea for the design came from a Gazzano cousin, Louise Polledri, who had just started working for the firm. Gazzano’s was run out of 60 Farringdon Road from 2002 to 2004. The Newsroom’s part in the building’s history raised its profile and made it a well-known, much-visited landmark; at the end of 2008 the activities of The Newsroom moved up to the new Guardian Media Group’s headquarters at King’s Place. 40
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Invitation to the opening of Free Word Centre, September 2009.
F REE WORD CENTRE
The opening of Free Word Centre in September 2009 as a centre for literature, literacy and free expression represents the culmination of a project worked on for five years. The Centre is many things: a venue, a meeting place, an office space, a thinking space, a place for debate, a window to the world, a robust voice for the word. It faces outwards to the world as well as bringing together the resident organisations – a national and an international centre. The idea for Free Word emerged when literature and free expression organisations met in 2004 to discuss ways of working together. They realised that the benefits to be had from collaboration were exciting as well as practical, and that by linking up they would become more influential
than the sum of their parts. The Arts Council gave funding for exploring the possibility of an international centre. Eight founder organisations – Apples & Snakes, Article 19, Booktrust, English PEN, Index on Censorship, The Arvon Foundation, The Literary Consultancy and The Reading Agency – worked on this over several years with project director Ursula Owen, a former chief executive of the magazine Index on Censorship, and project managers Virginia Barry and Penny Mayes. In 2006 Ursula Owen contacted Erik Rudeng at the Norwegian foundation Fritt Ord (Free Word) asking whether they would be interested in supporting the project. She said that 60 Farringdon Road was to become available.
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Ursula Owen and Erik Rudeng at the Norwegian foundation Fritt Ord (Free Word), Oslo, 2009.
Shreela Ghosh first director of Free Word Centre.
Fritt Ord’s board, which had supported free expression organisations since the 1970s, was inspired by the vision, and after negotiations bought The Newsroom in 2007. At 60 Farringdon Road, Free Word could realise its stated mission ‘to be an international centre for innovation and collaboration, pushing boundaries to promote, protect and democratise the power of the written and spoken word for creative and free expression, bringing together organisations across literature, literacy and free expression to enhance their work.’ In June 2009 nine resident organisations moved into the building. In July 2009 Shreela Ghosh was appointed the first director. Free Word Centre is where media meets literature and people work collaboratively. It brings together people interested in literature, literacy and free expression, with
unique programmes and events and attractive facilities that include a theatre, meeting rooms and a café. At the Centre you will hear familiar and unknown voices, the expected and the unexpected, and will be encouraged to engage in debate and controversy. There is an international associates scheme whereby members are able to use the facilities of the building and participate in the programme of events, performances, conferences, debates, readings and workshops. For the first time organisations from the three areas of interest will be working under one roof, a unique international venture that, with collaboration, innovation and risk-taking at its core, will widen and deepen understanding of the crucial connections between literature, literacy and free expression. 42
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f r e e wor d R e s i de n ts Apples & Snakes is England’s leading organisation for
Booktrust is an independent charity dedicated to encour-
performance poetry. It has worked as part of the Free Word consortium from the very beginning, developing the ideas for working together, and it is already starting to collaborate with the other organisations. In 2008 it worked in partnership with the British Council to commission new work on the theme of freedom of expression from five Southeast Asian and four UK artists. The show toured the UK in association with English PEN. The office has hot desks, and training and events are held there.
aging people of all ages and cultures to engage with books. ‘The written word underpins all our activity and enables us to fulfill our vision of inspiring a lifelong love of books for all.’ Through universal free bookgifting programmes, literary prizes, education projects and many campaigns, Booktrust ensures that everyone has access to books, highquality resources and a wealth of other information about reading via our websites. It works closely in partnership with others to deliver our vision and mission, and being part of Free Word Centre offers a wealth of opportunities.
is an independent human rights organisation that works around the world to protect and promote the right to freedom of expression. Since its inception in 1987, ARTICLE 19 has been at the forefront of advocacy, research and legal analysis in defence of free expression. With headquarters in London, at Free Word Centre, ARTICLE 19 also has offices in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. ARTICLE 19 combats censorship, defends dissenting voices and campaigns against repressive laws and practices. The organisation takes its name from Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees free speech. ARTICLE 19
English PEN has been promoting international literature and campaigning for free speech since 1921. English PEN is the founding centre of International PEN the worldwide
writers’ association, which has centres in more than one hundred countries. English PEN aims to strengthen this world community of writers, whilst also using literature to foster dialogue and understanding between different groups in Britain. With a membership of more than one thousand writers, English PEN runs a thriving events programme, which finds its home in Free Word Centre. English PEN is also holding a range of meetings and seminars at the Centre, drawing together international experts in the fields of literature, literacy and free speech.
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Shreela Ghosh with staff of Free Word, 2009.
Index on Censorship first published its magazine in 1972. In the words of Stuart Hampshire, the first editor, its purpose was to ensure that ‘the tyrant's concealment of oppression . . . should always be challenged’. Index on Censorship advances that ambition today, working to develop a global profile to match its historic record in a world where the free speech agenda is constantly changing. To this end Index on Censorship promotes free expression in the media and arts, through its quarterly magazine and website, publishes up-to-the-minute news analysis online, leads campaigns on the most pertinent issues affecting free speech and supports a dynamic calendar of events.
The Literary Consultancy (TLC), the UK’s leading
manuscript assessment service, was founded in 1996 by Rebecca Swift and Hannah Griffiths to provide expert, market-aware editorial advice to writers at all levels writing in English. TLC gained Arts Council core funding in 2000 to fund a quota of free assessments alongside a commercial service, and also with their help launched Chapter & Verse, an on-line mentoring service. Rebecca Swift, Director of TLC, has been programmed at numerous venues, from Suzhou Literary Festival in China to the London Book Fair, to take part in talks and panel discussions about writers’ relationship with the publishing industry. 44
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The Reading Agency. ‘What’s the best thing you’ve ever read? A biography, a short story, a new blog? What did it do for you? Whatever it was, do you remember the words roaring right through you, and the feeling that you’d been changed forever? Now imagine that you had never read those things because nobody showed you the great wide world of reading, or helped you understand the raw power of great writing – and the power it can give you. That’s why we set up The Reading Agency (www.readingagency.org. uk) seven years ago. We’re an independent charity working with anybody who wants to get more people to read more.’
The Arvon Foundation for over 40 years has been wel-
coming writers – at every stage of their writing lives – to their four beautiful and historic writing houses around the UK . Led by professional, published authors, poets and playwrights, Arvon’s courses are intensive, transformative weeks where people come together to write. Alongside plentiful private writing time, there are group workshops, tutorials, readings in the evenings and shared cooking as part of a collaborative and creative experience. As well as a programme of almost 100 courses a year for adults, Arvon also runs an innovative education and partnership programme to extend the magic to groups that would not ordinarily be able to take part. Being at Free Word Centre means Arvon now has an opportunity to involve more people in its important work with words.
Dalkey Archive Press, founded in 1980 to establish
an international context for the appreciation of modern and contemporary literature, publishes about 50 books per year, mainly fiction, with a special emphasis on fiction in translation. The Press also publishes two critical magazines, The Review of Contemporary Fiction and con te xt. Dalkey Archive’s authors have been honoured with major awards, including the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer, the Goncourt and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Beginning in 2010, Dalkey will publish annual anthologies of fiction from throughout the world, inaugurated by The Best of European Fiction, which will showcase writing from 35 countries and regions, forming a platform for literary exchange across the continent and beyond.
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Ac k now l e dge m e n ts
It would have been impossible to have completed this without the two Clerkenwell volumes of the Survey of London published for English Heritage by Yale University Press in 2008, and I am particularly grateful to Colin Thom who gave me his additional research on 60 Farringdon Road. Jeremy Smith at the London Metropolitan Archive, Nigel Roche at the St Bride Library, Malcolm Palfreyman at the Marx Memorial Library and Christine Wagg of the Peabody Trust, together with Gillian Darley, John Finn, Joe Gazzano Jr. and Gavin Weightman, all pointed me in the right directions for aspects of local history, and I could not have managed to compile this without their help. I would have found very little on the Robson business without Will Morrison, who very generously shared research from his ongoing Mulliner Project, and provided additional material found by Andrew Minney and Mark Bailey. A Robson descendant, Carol Walsh, passed on the
knowledge that the firm had been included in Charles Booth’s survey of the 1890s. These connections both came about as a result of letters to the Islington Gazette and the Ham and High. Simon Clark, Jonathan Curling, Stephen Mellor and Christian Wangler all worked at AKA and kindly took the time to describe it to me. Similarly, I am grateful to Dave O’Donnell, John Pandit and Alison Tickell who described their time at the Community Music House. David Curtis of the British Artists Film & Video Study Collection at Central St Martins tracked down Identical Beat and kindly made me a reproduceable image. Paul Appleton and Karen Bates of Allies & Morrison gave me information and help on the conversion to The Newsroom while Luke Dodd, Margaret Holborn and Mariam Yamin explained the work there. Philippa Lewis
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Illustrations appear by kind permission of the following: Allan King Films, p.30; Allies & Morrison, pp.36, 37, 39, photo Paul Smoothy; Edifice, p.3; Getty Images, pp.15, 16, 20, 21 (right), 23, 25; Islington Local History Library, pp.8, 21, 32 and both inside covers; Jak Kilby, p.33; London Library, pp.13, 22; London Metropolitan Archive, pp.9, 10, 12, 24 and cover; LSE , p.27; Museum of London, p.6/7; National Monuments Record, p.14; PYMCA , photo Martin Le Santo-Smith, p.35; St Bride Library, pp.18, 19; Sophie Baker, pp.41, 44; The Guardian, pp.38, 40; Topfoto, p.11; William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, p.21 (left); Will Morrison Collection, pp.28, 29; View, photo Dennis Gilbert, p.1 And thanks to Simon Clark, Joe Gazzano Jr., Alison Tickell and Christian Wangler, who lent material.
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Published for Free Word Centre 60 Farringdon Road, London EC 1 A 1BB by Fritt Ord, Oslo Text Š copyright Philippa Lewis 2009 Editor: Elizabeth Drury Design: Richard Hollis Assistant designer: Ana Estrougo Text typeset in Miller (the font formerly used by The Guardian), headings in Egiziano, (based on Figgins’s Egyptian) Printed by Butler Tanner & Dennis Frome, Somerset
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