Ludgate Circus in Illustration and Postcard

This unsigned illustration comes from an Ernest Nister illustrated children’s book, The Scrapbook of Trains (c.1900). An atmospheric rendering of a busy Victorian street scene populated by some unconvincing rigid figures. When the railway bridge in these views was constructed in 1865 there was a storm of protest from the Victorian public angry at losing the view of St Paul’s up Ludgate Hill. All to enable the London, Chatham & Dover Railway to extend its services into the City of London. The line formed a link with the Metropolitan Railway near Farringdon and much later was used by Thameslink for cross-London services. Ludgate was one of the 6 gates in Roman London’s city wall. The bridge came down in 1990 when the Thameslink tunnel was completed, thus restoring the lost view of St. Paul’s after 125 years.

The King Lud pub (left) opened in 1870 and would finally close after various changes of identity in 2005 - the building remains and the ground floor is occupied by a Leon restaurant. Among a number of reminiscences on the Closed Pubs website is a recollection of a lively performance by the famous Blues piano player Champion Jack Dupree. A minority of the many postcard views have chosen to capture the scene at ground level but most opted for an aerial view from the upper floors of neighbouring buildings - a few waited for a train to pass over the bridge. Businesses come and go, advertising signs are repainted while horse drawn buses are replaced by petrol driven vehicles. An archive search of commercial and property directories might enable them to be assembled in chronological order. To nobody’s surprise, when the bridge was demolished, for every voice greeting the newly restored sightline to St. Pauls, another was deploring the loss of a ‘much loved’ bridge.

There’s a fine contemporary diatribe quoted below that John Ruskin would have been proud of.

Of all the eyesores of modern London, surely the most hideous is the Ludgate Hill Viaduct– that enormous flat iron that lies across the chest of Ludgate Hill like a bar of metal on the breast of a wretch in a torture-chamber.

Let us hope that a time will come when all designs for City improvements will be compelled to endure the scrutiny and win the approval of a committee of taste. The useful and the beautiful must not for ever be divorced. The railway bridge lies flat across the street, only eighteen feet above the roadway, and is a miracle of clumsy and stubborn ugliness, entirely spoiling the approach to one of the finest buildings in London.

The five girders of wrought iron cross the street, here only forty-two feet wide, and the span is sixty feet, in order to allow of future enlargement of the street. Absurd lattice-work, decorative brackets, bronze armorial medallions, and gas lanterns and standards, form a combination that only the unsettled and imitative art of the ruthless nineteenth century could have put together. Think of what the Egyptians in the times of the Pharaohs did with granite! and observe what we Englishmen of the present day do with iron. Observe this vulgar daubing of brown paint and barbaric gilding, and think of what the Moors did with colour in the courts of the Alhambra!

A viaduct was necessary, we allow, but such a viaduct even the architect of the National Gallery would have shuddered at. The difficulties, we however allow, were great. The London, Chatham, and Dover, eager for dividends, was bent on wedding the Metropolitan Railway near Smithfield; but how could the hands of the affianced couple be joined? If there was no viaduct, there must be a tunnel.

Now, the bank of the river being a very short distance from Smithfield, a very steep and dangerous gradient would have been required to effect the junction. Moreover, had the line been carried under Ludgate Hill, there must have been a slight detour to ease the ascent, the cost of which detour would have been enormous. The tunnel proposed would have involved the destruction of a few trifles –such, for instance, as Apothecaries' Hall, the churchyard adjoining, the Times printing office– besides doing injury to the foundations of St. Martin's Church, the Old Bailey Sessions House, and Newgate.

Moreover, no station would have been possible between the Thames and Smithfield. The puzzled inhabitants, therefore, ended in despair by giving evidence in favour of the viaduct. The stolid hammermen went to work, and the iron nightmare was set up in all its Babylonian hideousness."

 

Postcard of the Day No. 110, Regent Circus

There’s no Regent Circus on today’s map of London but, according to Hermione Hobhouse in her History of Regent Street the intersection with Oxford Street was confusingly known as both Oxford Circus and Regent Circus in the first decade of the 20th. century.  It’s no surprise that in later years the name Oxford Circus would prevail, given that Oxford Street has its origin in medieval times whereas Regent Street was a product of more recent city planning.  Indeed the plans of John Nash included a grandiose Regent Circus far to the north of Oxford Street of which only a single quadrant was ever built.

The ornate shopfronts in the first postcard display a Victorian passion for embellishment in the pursuit of customers. Prominent among them are the premises of Peter Robinson, a department store that later expanded into a chain of more than 20 with a flagship store at Oxford Circus. Unusually, the card shows what would then be called a public convenience in an animated street scene including horse-drawn omnibuses and flower girls selling their blooms on traffic island. These itinerant traders made a popular subject for postcard publishers, often under the label of “London Life”. It wouldn’t have been an occupation for the faint-hearted, finding and securing a pitch, resisting extortioners and local bureaucracy alike.  Wherever they gathered the photographer wasn’t far away, even under the railway arches in Brixton.

 

Brussels Midwinter

Scenes from the wintry streets of the Belgian capital just after the war, part of a batch of found photographs taken by a British serviceman on duty in Northern Europe.  They make an interesting record of the city in painful transition from war into peace.  Powdery snow gathers between the cobblestones and freezes in the gutters while pedestrians hunch up against the cold. The swastikas have been burned and the streets are free of the emblems of occupation. Commercial life is returning and the trams are running.  There are posters on display in the Place de Brouckère for Un Bal Surréaliste at the Academie du Beaux Arts (Salle de la Madeleine) on February 8th. - a frivolity that could never have happened under occupation. With privately owned vehicles in short supply, traffic is light and there are long queues at the tram stop. Some landmark buildings can be identified including the Monumental Palais de Justice and the Hotel Metropole (which closed in 2020). The photographer has composed with care and discovered unexpected poetry in the near deserted cobbled streets dusted with snow.

 

Motor Wonders

This Thomas Nelson gift book for children dates from 1924 and has a remarkably vibrant set of colour illustrations. The definition of a motor is extended to include any form of transport from motor cycles to zeppelins or battleships to fire appliances, that involves internal combustion.  They are pictures from a perfect world from which all the random untidiness of the streetscene has been removed.  While the sun shines on every scene the technology on display is the most advanced of its time.  It was a time when there was a much less complicated relationship with the idea of progress and continuous improvement.  Calculating the full environmental costs of new technologies has undermined public expectations of a future of endless advance to the frontiers of science.  On the cover is an illustration signed by Hugh Williams and some of those inside are signed by T W Holmes (1872-1929) - an illustrator of children’s annuals and magazines for boys, specialising in transport subjects.

 

Great Railway Stations No. 18: Bahnhof Friedrichstraße

Friedrichstrasse is a major north-south corridor in Central Berlin.  At the point where it’s crossed by the Stadtbahn Viaduct there’s an elevated train station - Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse. Under a steel truss, double arched train shed are 8 platforms serving mainline, regional and S-Bahn trains which extend westwards across the river Spee on a bridge.  Many postcard views feature the bridge over Friedrichstrasse capturing the visual drama of muscular Prussian steam locomotives pressing forwards over a traffic-choked street.  With the exception of the Admiralspalast theatre very few of the grand commercial buildings that lined the street survived the destruction of the last war. No trace remains of lost landmarks such as the Panopticum waxwork museum or the opulent Kaisergalerie shopping arcade.  Most of Friedrichstrasse has been rebuilt since reunification in 1990 - a task that included demolition of a number of projects completed by the East German regime.  The pre-war vitality of a busy shopping street (as seen in the postcards) has given way to broad pavements and the bland facades of corporate edifices.

During the Cold War partition of the city, Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse was a frontier crossing point. While the station was in the Eastern Sector, trains ran through from West Berlin, passing through East Berlin before returning to the west. Station platforms and buildings were partitioned and all the infrastructure of customs and immigration checks was installed. Fully armed Border Troops and Stasi officers patrolled a maze of station corridors on multiple levels, making full use of their holding cells and interrogation suites. Three separate checks were required to complete a border crossing although agents of the DDR had their own secret entrance and exit. It became a building where the full power of an authoritarian state was brought to bear upon its own citizens, depriving them of dignity and autonomy.  To prevent it mutating into an unwanted memorial to the trauma of a divided nation would take 12 years of reconstruction on the part of the newly unified German authorities before all traces of the ancien régime were eradicated.