IT IS instantly recognisable. Our much-loved Black Lubyanka, created by a modern artist. It has walked through a turbulent history since 1932 and here it is today as seen by the creative eye of artisan Peter Luty who compares the curves and lines of our art deco Daily Express building to a London bus.

But as our old friend, former Expressman Nick Pigott laments the passing of the old ways with his sad picture of the demolished back of the building in the Daily Drone last week looking a shadow of her former self, it seems the heart and spirit of this news monument that once housed the biggest selling newspaper in the world, has died.

Shock, horror ... a photographer dared set up his cameras in Shoe Lane and the old van way of history and legend. He was banned. A scandal. Who would have thought that a photographer would not be allowed to stand proudly with his cameras in Shoe Lane, as he adjusted his lens to take pictures. Editor Christiansen would turn in his grave.  And the Beaver would demand answers in parliament. Shoe Lane is as synonymous with photographers as gin is with tonic.

But these are new times and the building’s new owners, Goldman’s Sachs, are one of the biggest investment banks in the world. They deal in money not stories of heartbreak and crime; wars and strikes and the everyday things that affect our country and its people. But they should remember that they are now the guardians of a huge slice of Fleet Street history, like it or not.

Artist Peter always takes photos of his subjects before working on his linocuts, etchings and watercolours that are his artistic interpretations and historic recordings of buildings in our skyline. But when he set up his camera in Shoe Lane, he was cornered by Goldman security men and seen off.

“I was warned off photographing in the lane next to the Daily Express building by the security people, because it’s private property,” he said. “I think they thought I was a professional photographer!” What’s wrong with that, we may ask?

Being warned off has happened to him before. He told a magazine: “I was stopped by police once while I was photographing Art Deco factories on the Great West Road. I obviously looked like a suspicious character. ‘Can I ask what you’re doing, Sir?’ they said.

“Yes, I’m photographing these wonderful buildings. I’ve been doing it all day, I’ve hundreds of photos of them. Would you like to see them all?”

‘No, Sir, that’ll be fine. There’s no point in getting cross, it makes the situation worse.”

Peter has also been stopped by security in Paddington Basin from photographing Thomas Heatherwick’s Rolling Bridge (private property). He was videoing ships passing through the Thames Barrier and security believed he was a terrorist risk.

Another time, he was told he couldn’t photograph Inspector Montalbano (a fictional Sicilian detective,) when an episode was being filmed, despite lots of people photographing him with their mobile phones. “I had my DSLR camera with a long lens and must have been mistaken for a paparazzo,” he said.

Artist Peter Luty: Different style

Peter, a former architect, told how he braved the Fleet Street traffic to take pictures of the Express building. Weaving in and out of the buses and taxis. 

“I couldn’t draw in the middle of Fleet Street; I’d have been mown down!” he added. “So, I did some sketches for character and setting and took quite a lot of photographs — some of them while dashing on and off the pavement.

“I’m very interested in Art Deco. I like the stylishness of it. It represents a bridge between the more flamboyant styles of the past and the stripped-down look of modern architecture.

“The Daily Express Building is a very good example of this, almost ‘modern’ but retaining some more decorative features, like the curved corners and the stepping back on the upper storeys.”

Perhaps though, Peter should have made a formal request to take pictures in the old van way, after all, Goldman Sachs is a bank, and someone could be casing the joint.

His framed prints of the Express can be found for sale on the internet and go for around £250 for a limited edition of 100, the Drone Editor and I are considering ordering one each, they are so different. 

*****    

A TUBE RIDE TO HELL BENEATH THE GRAVES

Daily Express Editor Ralph Blumenfeld, who was American, hated the London Tube and tried to avoid it if possible. In his well-kept diary he describes travelling on it in the early 1900s as hell and felt sorry for his staff who used it.

He wrote: “I had my first experience of Hades today, and if the real thing is to be like that, I shall never again do anything wrong. I got into the Underground railway at Baker Street after visiting a friend. I wanted to go to Moorgate in the City.

“It was very warm — for London, a least. The crowded compartment in which I sat was filled with passengers who were smoking pipes, as is the British habit, and as the smoke and sulphur from the engine filled the tunnel, all the windows had to be closed.

“The atmosphere was a mixture of sulphur, coal dust and foul fumes from the oil lamps above us, so that by the time we reached Moorgate, I was near dead of asphyxiation and heat.

“I think these underground railways must soon be discontinued for they are a menace to health. A better way I could have chosen can be considered since Hansom cabs and omnibuses, carried by the swiftest horses I have seen anywhere, do the work most satisfactorily.”



Artist’s impression of Tube late 1800s

The first London Tube train ran on the Metropolitan Line in 1863 but in the early 1900s some people still feared that the system tunnels, which expanded every year, would collapse under the weight of traffic and houses above. It was just a conventional Victorian railway placed underground.

As Blumenfeld described at the time, roads were a chaotic mix of horse-drawn carriages and cabs jostling for space with pedestrians, while London’s population jumped from one million in 1800 to 2.5million by 1851. With no space above the ground, the solution was to dig deeper than the graves.

Most of the Express staff in Tudor Street and Shoe Lane, like Blumenfeld, used the system but few enjoyed travelling on it, according to archives. Some newspapers and politicians said that the prospect of travelling underground was so awful criminals should be “condemned to round trips”.

A mining engineer wrote to The Times saying he had “almost suffocated” in a carriage, and had to be taken to a nearby chemist who gave him a “Metropolitan Mixture”. The chemist saw about 20 cases a day, he said.

Other Victorian complaints included overcrowding and annoyance when the class divide at that time was not maintained.

One reader complained to the Pall Mall Gazette that: “A lady without a bonnet and with an infant in her arms in my carriage was not a first-class passenger.”

*****

     

EXPERIENCING THE PEACE AND SERENITY OF OUR LITTLE PATCH

Fleet Street from The Strand with Micks Cafe on the left

I came across a wonderful website the other day. Packed with nostalgia, memories and history and telling of the lives of people who lived and died just down the road from our patch in Fleet Street.

One of the features that caught my eye was about a copper who must have walked by our doors on his beat in the 1970s many times as we scribbled away.

On patrol in the early hours one December night in 1972, the year I joined the Express, PC Lew Tassell took his camera and snapped pictures of the deserted streets in the drizzle.

PHOTOS: PC Lew Tassell

PC Tassell takes us for a walk through his camera eye of Fleet Street. What he captured was a side of the city that most people never see, a peaceful, almost spiritual tapestry of streets and monuments away from the madding crowd. A time of peace and serenity not experienced by those who rise in the daylight and sleep in the darkness.

PC Tassell, of the City of London Police, told Spitalfields Life: “Normally, I would be on beat patrol from Bishopsgate Police Station between 11pm-7am. But that week I was on the utility van which operated between 10pm-6am, so there would be cover during the changeover times for the three City of London Police divisions — Bishopsgate, Wood Street and Snow Hill. One constable from each division would be on the van with a sergeant and a driver from the garage.

Looking down Fleet Street from Ludgate Bridge, demolished in 1990

“That night, I was dropped off on the Embankment during a break to allow me to take some photographs and I walked back to Wood Street Police Station to rejoin the van crew. You can follow the route in my photographs.”

PC Tassell goes on to tell us that he found London at night a peaceful place to walk, apart from the parts that operated twenty-four hours a day — the newspaper print shops in Fleet Street, Smithfield Meat Market, Billingsgate Fish Market and Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market.

Micks Cafe in Fleet Street, that many of us remember, never had an apostrophe on the sign or acute accent on the ‘e.’ It is in the picture of Fleet Street taken from the West Side looking towards St Paul’s.

“It was a cramped greasy spoon that opened twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “During the night and early morning, it served print-workers, drunks returning from the West End and the occasional vagrant.

“Generally, we police didn’t use it. We would not have been welcome because we would have stood out like a sore thumb. But I did observation in plain clothes sometimes. Micks Cafe was a place where virtually anything could be sourced, especially at night when nowhere else was open.”

Micks was a basic cafe with an upstairs where some shady-looking characters used to go, and downstairs for quick passing trade. I remember in my early days on the Express, they served a cracking steak and kidney pie if you were hungry.

*****

FANCY A WALK? MAIDS WHO RENTED A LIFE GUARD

Editor Ralph Blumenfeld kept fascinating diaries of the people he met from Prime Ministers and theatre stars to authors and even vagrants in London during his days in the Chair.

One day, at a lunch in the Savoy he noticed a tall, extremely well-dressed young man and shared a Hansom cab back to Fleet Street with him. He noticed that part of his forehead was sunburned but one part, from the hair to the nose above the right eye was a different colour. 

This, Blumenfeld was told, was the ‘swagger mark’ from wearing  a Pillbox hat, indicating he was a soldier, and it was a much-coveted distinction.

“On the way he said he was a private in the 2nd Life Guards, and that the Gentlemen of the Guards were permitted to go off duty mufti,” Blumenfeld wrote.

“Many Guardsmen preferred to go out in uniform however, a shell jacket, very tight overalls and Pillbox askew on their heads, ready to be hired for the afternoon or evening by housemaids to ‘walk out’ in the park.”

Blumenfeld was told the charges were: “Household Cavalry: half-a-crown and beer for an afternoon; Brigade of Foot Guards: 18 pence and beer; Royal Horse Artillery, two shillings; Other services: a shilling.”

He wrote: “There was a big demand for this, judging by the large number of females at the barrack gates early in the afternoon and evening.”  

TERRY MANNERS   

16 September 2024