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‘An unholy yoking of conservation and shopping’

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That phrase is not mine but The Gentle Author’s, writing in 2014. This has been a long story. His words are an accurate summary of what is now, yet again, being proposed for the publicly-owned site of the old Bishopsgate Goods Yard, whose superstructure burned down in 1964.

These two photographs of the undercroft of the Goods Yard are from a handful I took in 1999 (we were looking for a place to stage a local art fair). It was before the Overground trains arrived, and only a few years on from the early 1990s property slump, which as a benign side-effect enabled a variety of small-scale makers and doers to edge their way into abandoned spaces on the edge of the plutocratic City of London, and set themselves up in business. If they were not already locals they became so.

No camera-phones then, just a small basic digital camera, and the pictures were only wanted for reference. But I could envisage that resonant vaulted space as, perhaps, a museum of working London life and Londoners, full of  inexplicable machines and voices. Perhaps someone would make it happen. Twenty years on, an installation by Mike Nelson in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain evoked something of that sense of past lives and half-heard voices, except that his show was brutal, silent and devastating. It was called The Asset Strippers.

The streets on the eastern edge of the City have always been populated by incomers. They arrived, settled, made a living, moved on, over countless generations but at accelerating pace. The workshops and studios of 1990s Shoreditch became galleries, the galleries became fashion shops, then they were chain stores and restaurants, now it was a ‘destination’. The profits were extracted. The latest proposal for the 10-acre Bishopsgate Goods Yard site aims to win over the Greater London Authority’s planners with brick arches and a pacifier of just 90 low-cost homes, out of 500 altogether.

The galloping tide of shopping, faked-up heritage and nowhere to live might yet turn. Nothing is permanent. If this scheme were to get the go-ahead, and then crash in the rocky, unknowable landscape of our new post-2020 world, what then?

Objections to the planning application must be in by 7 September 2020. Details here: http://www.goodsyard.org/pdf/howtoobject.pdf)

Cabin fever

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The surgeon’s cabin on a Dutch East India Company ship in the 1780s, drawn by a passenger, Jan Brandes

You might be feeling a touch of cabin fever at the moment, especially if you’re stuck in one room self-shielding for 12 weeks. The voyage from Europe to the East Indies in the eighteenth century lasted longer than that, although the ship’s surgeon who occupied this cabin could keep company with the officers when not ministering to the sick.

The cabin was depicted by a young Dutch pastor named Jan Brandes, who was sent out to serve in Batavia. It was also the surgeon’s consulting-room, but his patients would remain outside it and poke their heads through the sliding window on the right, which probably opened onto a passageway. Tools of his trade are to hand. A shaving-basin on the wall was perhaps used for other clinical purposes; the flat red case on the bureau may contain his instruments.

The surgeon’s bunk looks small by our standards, but it has a window with a view of the sea (and of seamens’ legs as they climb the shrouds), a patterned counterpane and what might be his striped nightshirt neatly folded at the foot. On the left is a samovar with a tea-cup ready. You have the feeling that the most important thing in the cabin is the surgeon’s capacious armchair.

Brandes also observed this view on deck. There’s another chair, beside the helmsman, but not for him. A parrot in a cage is on the shady side of the ship, so this may be a westbound homeward passage. Also in the shade is a larder, from which a liveried servant extracts dishes of food. That would be for the captain or the superior passengers.

For the passengers, the boredom of endless ocean was a thing to contend with. Some wrote long letters (the historian Macaulay did that on a passage to Madras). Brandes also shows us a man who has found an airy spot to read a book. At his side is a bottle and above him hangs a bunch of bananas.

These images are from the the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the curator’s description suggest this one may be a self-portrait. I tend to think not, since his clothing suggests he is a mariner, if too old to be a midshipman. He was, though, someone who could stay still long enough to have his portrait taken.