REGULARS A LONDON NOTEBOOK

A LONDON NOTEBOOK

By Geoff Tuffs

Sunday 19th January 1994

St Pancras Way ends at St Pancras Road by the Hospital for Tropical Diseases (formerly a workhouse, I believe). As a baptism is to take place shortly in St Pancras Old Church, it is my good fortune to find the church open. I have a brief chat with the priest and he tells me it has been broken into 14 times. The interior is essentially an oblong, simple and quite charming with many tablets and memorials, but not too many. On the walls there are small Stations of the Cross so evidently this is a high church - which the priest confirms, at the same time handing me a guide book. Culross Buildings is a large block of Victorian workers’ dwellings in Battle Bridge Road, opposite the gasworks, but these, like a similar block in Stanley Passage, have answerphones and I can see across an old area of former railway land that the long Culross block has a roof garden. They look slummy and possibly they are in part but not wholly so. I remember my Uncle Dick telling me that when he was a boy in his EC2 neighbourhood you had buildings - he lived in Allin’s Buildings in Leonard Street - that varied greatly in quality; some were quite decent while others were rough and had that reputation. I suppose the only word to describe the long rear view of Culross Buildings is grim. I suspect that some of the residents can well articulate their views on the likely disruption this area will suffer with the coming of the Channel Tunnel terminal. Behind me is Wellers Court, appropriately named after a man whose knowledge of London was extensive and peculiar.

My particular destination this afternoon is Gwynne Place - Riceyman Steps in Arnold Bennett’s novel. I’ve been here before but a long time ago; before the hotel on King’s Cross Road was built which damages the flinty quaintness of this corner. There’s no church in Granville Square above the steps. Was there one when Bennett wrote his novel?*

I can hardly believe it but Lloyd’s Dairy is still trading on the corner of Amwell Street and River Street; as much a survival as Daniels’ little shop in Moreton Terrace, Pimlico. Although tired and faded it is still entered between two Doric

columns. The stock is meagre: tins, crisps, cereals, that sort of staple, and notably, in the old fashioned windows a display of Lloyd’s original milk bottles. Again like Daniels’ dairy, there is no pretence of display; everything is of a departed social time. The elderly lady owner comes out to have a chat and tells me she married the original owner’s son and has been here for 44 years. Hanging high up inside are two framed posters from the 1940s: a young boy entitled ‘Milk makes Men’; and a girl with the maxim ‘Milk gives Health.’ *To answer my own question: yes, there was. Bennett’s novel was first published in 1923 and in the second volume of ‘Wonderful London,’ probably published about 100 years ago, there is a photograph of the steps with a few ragamuffins on them and a church in the square above with the week front prominent.

Geoff has been writing his London notebook for 45 years, excerpts first appeared in the Journal of the London Society in 1998