The Marquis of Lansdowne is not my name-dropping of a personal friend, but a former London pub, fortunately still standing in Hoxton, but not in ale since around 2000 (and possibly not a place I would have cared to frequent since it had a make-over as ‘Partners’ around ten years earlier.) Recently it has been threatened with demolition by plans for a £13.2m expansion of the neighbouring Geffrye Museum.
Back in the 1980s I began over a project to photograph the whole fabric of London, wandering in a fairly systematic manner through the capital rather than the rather freer approach of earlier years that you can see in my recently published ‘London Dérives‘, (and the images on this post come from it and the accompanying web site.) Most if not all of the pubs and many of the shops in this earlier work were derelict.
But my ‘Buildings of London‘ project, which began long before Google’s ‘Streetview’ made it somewhat redundant, was more conceptual than literal. Although I intended to look at most of London and went about it in a fairly systematic way, I had a clear focus on photographing not everything, but the interesting and the typical. You can still see a few images from it in the web site I built in 1996, itself now a rather decrepit relic – seventeen years is a long time on the web (though I had to make a few changes to keep it working, and added a few pictures, it still retains the essentials of its 1996 design.)
I’m not sure if I ever photographed The Marquis of Lansdowne, though I will have looked at it, and at the now demolished ‘The Flying Scud‘ nearby on my walks in the area. It would probably take an hour or two of searching through my files to be sure. It isn’t an outstanding building, but one that is very much typical of its age and certainly that I would be sorry to see demolished. You can see what it looks like now in an article in Building.co.uk by William Palin, a trustee of the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust and former Secretary of SAVE Britain’s Heritage.
So I was very pleased to see in Spitalfields Life that a long campaign which has included a feature in ‘Country Life’ (not a publication usually concerned with Hoxton) as well as a series of articles in Spitalfields Life and work by the Spitalfields Trust and others has resulted in the building being saved, with Hackney Council Planning Committee telling the Geffrye Museum to rethink their development plans to include this building.
I hope the Museum will see it as an opportunity to enhance its display of period rooms (well worth a visit) to include that of a genuine neighbourhood Victorian (though the building is a little older) pub, truly a part of the living room of many among the working class of the era in overcrowded neighbourhoods such as these. Hopefully too it will be realistic enough to have some genuine beer on tap, although the current London price per pint is at least a month’s Victorian wage.