Just O'Meara Street in Southwark - no associations. Worcester Street in 1872, part of Mr. Rush's Vinegar yard in 1747.

Vauxhall sky and All Saints

Good sky coming west out of Waterloo yesterday afternoon. No photo, but scribbled it down in oils this morning. Bad day for photography - All Saints, Margaret Street is the only half-decent one. Nairn again:

" Here is the force of Wuthering Heights translated into dusky red and black bricks, put down in a mundane Marylebone street to rivet you, pluck you into the courtyard with its harsh welcoming wings and quivering steeple."

Five tense, shallow arches leap the Thames

Nairn: "it is effortless, making its small slam without a qualm... Six no trumps; it just misses the seventh because it is too self-absorbed"

One from Nairn

St, Martin's National School, Adelaide Street. George Ledwell Taylor, 1830. The incomparable Ian Nairn says:

"In mist or rain it will never let you down; and the glint of sunshine on the pilasters puts a dagger straight into your guts. This is the kernel of London, an epitome of what makes cockneys homesick."

Lime green in Nairn's day, correct and cream now (and ever since Gasson's revisiting in the 1980s). A difficult building to photograph properly...

Hat and Feathers

The Hat and Feathers, Goswell Road. Reference Fletcher's 'London Souvenirs'. "Engraved glass, classical figures in compo on the facade".

Some more photos

Ok - this seems easy enough. More photos. Crutched Friars earlier this year - French Ordinary Court is along on the left.

Such as this. Calvert's Buildings. In Fletcher's day, "a picturesque remnant of ancient Southwark - the medieval cottage enclosed by eighteenth-century houses in Calvert's Buildings. It reminds me always of a remark Dickens makes of an old house that seemed to have got itself in a corner, and got lost, when it was a young house and couldn't find its way out again.". A remnant of a remnant today, and a bit of a wound. The courtyard - now exposed to the West - is at the foot of Guy's tower in this picture.

Fletcher and Nairn.

Some of this organ will be used to publish photographs of the remaining and/or disappeared bits of the London of Ian Nairn and Geoffrey Fletcher. It's not a new idea.

Looking for Geoffrey Fletcher's lamppost in Park Street with no success.

First post. The past.

Thursday 27th November 2008, 10.54am.