Gresham College Lecture at the Mansion House

Earlier this week, I had a chance to visit the home of the Lord Mayor of London, the magnificent Mansion House in the heart of the City, when he gave his annual lecture as President of Gresham College.

Gresham College is London's oldest Higher Education Institution and has been providing free public talks for over 400 years. Most of these take place at the Museum of London or at the college's own base in the City, Barnard's Inn Hall. However, in recent years there has also been an annual lecture by the Lord Mayor at Mansion House. The current Lord Mayor, Alderman Michael Bear, has been involved in many regeneration projects in his career as a property developer, including the one which was the subject of Tuesday's lecture - Spitalfields:Opportunity through Regeneration.

Having recently visited this area on a guided walk, it was very interesting to learn more about its recent history and the huge changes it has undergone since the process of redeveloping the market site began in the early 90s. Alderman Bear was Chief Executive of the Spitalfields Development Group and most of his lecture focused on the work of this group, describing the process of relocating the existing fruit and vegetable wholesale market, developing a number of different masterplans and the planning battles involved in removing the market which had been opened there as a temporary measure in 1991. As might be expected from a site with such a long history, alot of money had to be spent on archaeological digs. As well as the charnal house that I already knew about they also found the sarcophagus of a Roman princess.

There was a strong emphasis on involving the local community throughout the 20 year redevelopment and also, of securing community benefits through developer agreements and the Lord Mayor presented some impressive statistics on the impact that the changes have had on the deprivation indices for the area. So the project seems to have been successful in regeneration terms although of course, with any regeneration project, there is always the issue of whether the changes are due to improvements of the circumstances of those who lived in the area originally or changes in the population of the area. I was too polite/reticent to put my hand up to ask about this when there was a brief opportunity for questions at the end of the lecture.

As I'm never likely to be invited to the kind of dinners and banquets that are normally hosted at Mansion House, the event also offered a great opportunity to see inside this building. The hall where the lecture was held was full of gold leaf, stained windows and huge statues. And if all that wasn't enough we were even given a book about the Spitalfields redevelopment to take away with us afterwards.

Gresham College offers several lectures each week throughout the year (although none in August) on a wide range of topics including business, history, music and science - I particularly like the fact that they have a 'very unusual'category. You can just turn up for most of them although there are few like the Lord Mayor's one, that you need to book in advance. 

Film screenings at the London Metropolitan Archives

London Metropolitan Archives is part of the City of London library service but holds records and collections of historical material about the whole of London. It is the largest local authority archive in the UK with 'over 80km of research collections that document the capital's history from 1067 to the present day.

The collections include a number of documentary films about London and once a month (usually the third Friday) they organise free Reel London film screening events. For the past couple of months, these films have been on the theme of housing in London in a series entitled 'Somewhere decent to live - how city planners tried to solve London's housing crisis'.

I went on to the second of these last week which focused on Thamesmead, the new town built in the late sixties beside the Thames on the Greenwich/Bexley borders. Thamesmead is the setting for the 1996 film Beautiful Thing, features in A Clockwork Orange and is heavily dominated by concrete as illustrated in the picture above.

The first of the two films I saw, Living at Thamesmead (1974), followed a young couple called Tom and Sally as they went about their daily lives in the town and shows them making good use of all the modern facilities available and enjoying a community fun day in the sunshine.

The second film, Thamesmead, was made by the GLC in 1970, and shows how the settlement was planned and designed to include factories, schools and other services as well as a good mix of different types of housing. The idea was to make good use of the riverside location with much of the development focused around a yacht marina. The name Thamesmead was chosen by Londoners in a competition and the place was described as 'a town for the 21st century'.

Both these films clearly demonstrate the optimism that many people felt when Thamesmead was first built but sadly not all the plans came to fruition and the lack of good transport links means that this isn't a popular place to live now. The original plan was for the town to have up to 100,000 residents but it is now estimated that the final population will be around half that.

The final part of the housing themed screenings takes place on 19 August and focuses on the Barbican. The LMA also organises a number of other events many of which are free, including several aimed at those researching their family history. If you are interested in using the Archives, you can book to go on a free guided tour which will help you get the most out of the research facilities.

The LMA also has a small exhibition area which featured the Jewish East End when I visited (this exhibition finishes on 22 July) with lots of photographs of old synagogues, shops and schools in East London.

Finally, if you need some fresh air after submerging yourself in the archives, there is a peaceful little park, Spa Fields, just opposite the LMA - a rare patch of green space in that part of London.

Watch films for free at the BFI Mediatheque

This is a fantastic place. I've known about it for a while but only got round to visiting for the first time yesterday and will definitely be going back for more. The BFI Mediatheque is at the back of the BFI Southbank building (what used to be the National Film Theatre) and provides access to the thousands of films in the BFI national archive for free.

The place itself consists of a room with around a dozen viewing stations each with a screen and keyboard. Using it is very easy, you just turn up, register at the reception desk where you are allocated a station and given a unique login number and a set of headphones. Plug your headphones in, type in the login number and you're away. The only difficult bit is deciding what to watch!

As well as thousands of feature films, there are documentaries, short films, TV soaps operas, public information films, home movies and more covering all time periods since filming first began. Luckily, the BFI provide you with some ideas of where you might want to start such as their new collections which currently include 'Into the White: 100 Years of Polar Exploration on Screen' and 'Bogarde on the Box' featuring some of his small screen work.

The introductory suggestions also included 'Ten to try' which is where I started.  This included 'Heart of the Angel' which is the first thing I watched. It is a 40 minute documentary by Molly Dineen about the working life of the staff at Angel tube station, made in 1989, prior to the refurbishment that provided escalators and increased platform capacity at this busy underground station. It features disillusioned staff, grumpy customers, constant lift failures and an interesting insight into the work of those keeping the tube going after hours - the night-time cleaning and maintenance staff, doing dirty, unpleasant work in really grim conditions (the cleaning staff had such poor facilities they had to get changed on the platform).  The whole programme was a good reminder that the modern-day tube may not be perfect but some things have definitely improved. Molly Dineen has described it as her favourite of all the films that she's made and I can see why.

If you have something specific in mind, a search facility allows you to search for films by title, director, year, cast etc or to search for footage by genre or region. I didn't always find this very easy to use. I might just have failed to input the right information but when I tried searching for a film I was interested in ('The Go-Between' as I'd read and enjoyed L.P. Hartley's novel that it is based on) I was told there were no results found but I later found this same film just scanning through lists of the feature films available. I will have to go back to watch it another time.

That's a minor gripe though and overall I found it a great experience. My other highlights included:

• 'Ladies on Bicycles' (1899) - a very short (1 min) clip of Victorian ladies in long skirts demonstrating their slalom cycling skills.
• 'A Day in the Hayfields' (1904) - another short (3 mins) clip showing a long-changed rural way of life.
• 'The Battle of Kinder Scout' (1970) - a 20 minute documentary with Ewen McColl telling the story of the mass trespass in April 1932 which eventually paved the way for greater access for ramblers.
• 'Here's a Health to the Barley Mow' (1955) - showing the drinkers at the Ship Inn in Blaxhall in Suffolk enjoying a lively evening of folk singing and step dancing which concludes with everyone singing God Save the Queen at closing time (not something I expect you'd see nowadays).

One excellent feature is the 'Why not try?' section which appears at the end of the write-up of some of the films and leads you on to other similar clips you might also want to view. If you had the time (and there wasn't a 2 hour maximum booking) you could spend all day there following on from one clip to the next.

The BFI Southbank Mediatheque is open 12-8pm Tues-Sat and 12.30-8pm Sun (closed Mon except bank holidays) and is also available for school groups in the mornings. You can book a viewing session in advance if you want and that would probably be advisable if you're planning to visit in the evening or at week-ends. Three are also a number of other BFI Mediatheques around the UK. Happy Viewing!

A Walk through Spitalfields with the Bishopsgate Institute

The changing face of Spitalfields

The Bishopsgate Institute in Spitalfields has recently undergone a major refurbishment and to celebrate the re-launch of their new look building they organised a series of free events and courses last week. These were obviously very popular as the first couple of things I tried to book on to were already full but I did manage to get a place on the 'Explore Spitalfields' walking tour last Friday lunchtime. This was led by an excellent Blue Badge Guide, Rachel Kolsky, who regularly leads walking tours as part of the series of courses offered by the Institute.

 Rachel began by emphasising that it was only possible to give us a taster of what Spitalfields has to offer in the 30 minutes allotted for the tour but it was a fascinating insight into an area which has had many functions and occupants over the centuries. We started in Bishop Square, a place which is now surrounded by shiny modern office blocks and bustling shops and bars but which many years ago used to be a burial ground and the original charnal house in which bones were stored has been preserved for people to view. We moved on to the market which has also seen many changes over the years. I still have fond memories of the way it was in the mid-1990s when I first came to London but after seeing it now, I want to go back to explore it again one week-end.

The next stop was Princelet Street which, with neighbouring Wilkes Street and Fournier Street, contains a small enclave of eighteenth century housing which has survived all the changes and redevelopment that has taken place around them. Rachel gave us a potted history of the inhabitants of these houses, many of whom were associated with the cloth trade and lived and worked in these houses from the French Huguenot weavers who were the first inhabitants to the Jewish immigrants of the early twentieth century. For a time many of the houses became sweatshops rather than residences but now most of them are private homes and one (no.13) is even a holiday home for rent from the Landmark Trust (if you're feeling rich!). You can't tell from the street but apparently the houses have long back gardens and many, like this one, have been beautifully restored:

Elsewhere on Princelet Street at no. 19 is a house that has not yet been restored and that has a particularly fascinating history as it has a synagogue built over it's garden. A campaign has been launched to save this building which is occasionally open to the public.

Another building with an interesting history is the Brick Lane Jamma Masjid. Now a mosque, it was originally built as a chapel by the Huguenots and has also been used by baptists, Methodists and an ultra-orthodox synagogue. The mosque is at one end of Fournier Street and at the other is the impressive Christchurch Spitalfields, which is where our whistestop tour ended: