We heard much about the demise of Greenwich Playhouse over the past few months. Apparently Galleon Theatre are looking at the stables at Charlton House as a new home, which could be an interesting proposition (though less convenient for people coming from London – it’s close to Charlton station but we all know what people who don’t come to South East London are like when it comes to not wanting to venture into places they’ve not heard of…)

Which means that now, there is a space free. And, as you can see, it’s very free. All mention of Greenwich Playhouse has been painted out, the posters are gone, there’s nothing to say there was ever a theatre there.

The reason I didn’t go absolutely ballistic over the ending of the lease with Galleon was this article in The Wharf where the landlord of Beds and Bars who own the building says that they are not looking to pack the place full of extra bunks to cash in on the Olympics. In the words of Edmund Passey, Group Operations Director:

“We’re looking at what we can do with it and have made no application to change the space.

“The only difference is we’re now the landowners of the site and we’re not looking to have one theatre company running it.”

I took that as being a multi-theatre company venture, perhaps a theatre space for hire, like so many of the fringe theatres in the centre of London.

So, Edmund Passey, when are we going to see this happen, then? Certainly the first phase, that of obliterating the former occupants of the theatre, seems complete (albeit harsh, they are as much a part of the place’s history as any other). The next few months will show the real colours of Beds and Bars but I have faith.

I look forward to sitting in the front (read ‘only’) row of the next production at the space formerly known as the Greenwich Playhouse as a lovely diversion for all the occupants of other hotels during the Olympics.

Thanks to Tom the Rigger for this frankly rather creepy time-lapse video (to me it looks a bit like ants over a picnic) of those crazy guys (and gals ) who decorated the Cutty Sark’s masts for the Queen’s visit. I’m not wild about heights, but despite the weather I did find myself almost wishing I could have had a go (almost, mark you…)

The main joyous thing about this post for me is that if this particular embeddery works, it will mean I have finally solved the long-running problem of putting video on the Phantom Website all by myself (the Phantom Webmaster who could make it work remotely when I couldn’t – the classic intermittent fault – is in forn parts – hope you’re having a sunnier time than we are TPW…)

I’ve been shying away from this rather wonderful series of photographs, important not only to the history of Greenwich but to the history of Victorian London as a whole, largely because so many of them are so famous they seem almost ubiquitous.

A couple of them, like this rabbit seller (complete with a piece of sacking round his waist to catch the blood…) crop up all over the place – in museums, libraries, books, TV, you name it, which made me think that people already knew what they needed to about the Reverend Charles Spurgeon and the bright idea he had in 1884 to create a magic lantern show of street scenes of everyday Greenwich.

But the other day Alison asked me about it, and it occurred to me that perhaps they’re not as well-known as I’d thought. This is probably down to the usual problem of the only dedicated book about the subject that I’m aware of, a re-working of a 1950s volume by the fine local historian Alan Glencross, being out of print. It is relatively easily found – look to paying about £12 on Abe Books and between a fiver and £15 on Amazon or finding it for a quick snoop free in the reference section of local libraries, but you have to know about books to be able to look.

Our Reverend Spurgeon is quite hard to find on the net because he is the (twin) son of the much more famous “Prince of Preachers,”  Rev. Charles Spurgeon, who founded the Metropolitan Tabenacle. He wasn’t supposed to become a preacher – he’d been intended for a career in commerce, but I guess having a hell, fire and brimstone dad, and a brother destined to follow his father into the family business, coupled with training at his Spurgeon College it was only a matter of time before Charles wanted a pastoral look-in.

He became preacher at the South Street Baptist Church in 1879 (I’m embarrassed that I don’t have a photo of that place to hand; I’ve passed it so many times, but don’t you think that it sounds like it should be in the Deep South of America with a name like that?) and remained there for 24  years.

Like so many middle class Greenwichians then, Spurgeon was fascinated by technology and in particular photography. I don’t have any proof that he was mates with the inventor of The Incredible Noakesoscope but since they were virtual contemporaries and lived a stone’s throw from each other I like to think that D.W. Noakes and Chas Spurgeon used to enjoy a (non alcoholic for Mr. S, of course) drink together over lengthy discussions on dry-plate technique.

Chas started his Grand Project in 1884, with a couple of pals, Mr OJ Morris and (possibly) Mr Sims, a professional photographer from King Street (now King William Walk). The three of them went around Greenwich photographing the all the street scenes that were fit to print.

As Alan Glencross is at pains to point out, the exercise was extremely subjective. He reminds us that these were photos taken for a nice, clean churchgoers’  evening’s entertainment, so don’t expect to see any street walkers, dope sellers, layabouts or other undesirables though I’ll eat my tricorn if they weren’t hanging around Greenwich just as much as ‘nice’ ice cream sellers, jolly crock-sellers or the police showing off their latest ambulance technology:

To me, that just makes the pictures even more shocking. Nice, well-fed, middle class Greenwich folk were quite used to seeing small, shoeless children selling matches or illegally shining shoes in Straightsmouth, and even if it moved them to open their wallets, as Spurgeon intended it certainly didn’t shock them.

Similarly, Alan Glencross reminds us that these photos are in no way ‘candid.’ The exposure time needed in the late-nineteenth century meant that every photo was carefully posed. Some worked rather better than others – this ‘action shot’ of a copper apprehending a small herbert nabbing bricks isn’t going to win any prizes for authenticity:

and ‘extras’ make return visits in photgraphs, over and over again. However fascinating the people are, I love the backgrounds as well – look at this old street car outside the King Billy in Trafalgar Road:

This image of a ‘growler’ (a taxicab, presumably named for the racket it made as it went along?), although it looks as though it was taken at Westcombe Park, is, apparently, more likely to have been at Maze Hill.

I find myself imagining what it must have been like to attend the Good Reverend’s Magic Lantern Show. I’m getting myself all togged up in my tricorn with the cherries on top and my best tweed cape to see the amazing magic lantern show. What am I going to see? The Crystal Palace? Queen Victoria? A nice picture of a kitten? No – just a bunch of  local toughs doing what I see them doing every day.

I mean it’s fascinating for us, seeing a world of more than a hundred years ago that exists only in tiny spits and spots these days, but for the burghers of Greenwich might it have been a bit of a let down? Of course not.  In a time before cinema, the process itself was the draw. What was in the pictures was still relatively unimportant.

Nevertheless Spurgeon was, Alan Glencross suggests, a pioneer. Although not the first to use Magic Lantern as propaganda, no one had commissioned a set of images of ordinary street life before. And as such he is important, not just to Greenwich, but to British social history. 

(Nearly) all human life is here – but what of Spurgeon himself? Well, who is that dapper chap in the boater having his shoes shone in Straighstmouth? What about the guy leaning on the hokey-pokey cart above? In true Hitchcockian style Spurgeon liked to appear in his own shots. Is it just me or does he not look quite like you’d imagine a Victorian Baptist preacher to be?

The series of photographs were presented to Greenwich Libraries in 1955, so my best guess is that they are now housed in the Heritage Centre – one of these days I must go and check them out. In the meanwhile it’s well worth tracking down a copy of Grandfather’s Greenwich. I can’t see a reprint happening any time soon…

Just out of interest – I wonder – does anyone know whether this particular Spurgeon and the very fine Darrell Spurgeon, whose histories of Greenwich, Charlton and Woolwich I refer to again and again, are any relation?

Every time I walk around whatever part of the Thames Path is available on the Peninsula at any one time (precious little at the moment) I’m reminds of The Long Good Friday, the movie that catapulted Bob Hoskins from adult literacy info-dramas to megastar.  Perhaps less so now that the satanic old factories, warehouses and wharves are being razed to erect bland steel and glass apartments whose clones already adorn one-building’s depth along most of the Thames Path between Waterloo and Putney, but there are still one or two creepy places that bring John McKenzie’s terrifying 1980 East End gangster movie to the edge of my teeth.

I always thought it was just a feeling I got – that South East London dockside was much the same as North East London dockside and that it was coincidence that it reminded me of it so much.

But then I discovered something. Guess where Barrie Keeffe, the movie’s scriptwriter, was living when he wrote it? East Greenwich, that’s where. Admittedly, in a Guardian article he says he was a journalist in the ‘real’ East End, where he met a load of gangsters, and that from his place in Greenwich he could watch the new developments at Docklands, but surely no one could live that close to the docks in the Peninsula and not be just a tiny bit influenced by them?

He doesn’t mention in the article which pub he met the Irish Republican who gave him the idea for the terrorism-meets-mob story, but it could well have been any of the East Greenwich pubs, most of which have gone now, just as much as it could have been an East-End pub.

I’m not sure how cool it is to claim the Greenwich could have been the grubby inspiration for a film as gruesome as The Long Good Friday, but hey. I’ve just done it.

I don’t know exactly which house or street that Keeffe lived in, but it’s been done up since, as this article from the Guide last year explains.

It’s hard to work out quite what I’d describe Christopher Brown’s Alphabet of London as. Memoir? Puzzle? Art? Design manual? Commentary? Reportage? It’s a bit of all of those things, and although it will probably just be filed under ‘London’ in bookshops it could easily be described as any of the above.

Artist Christopher Brown works with linocut – the sort of thing most of us do in primary school then forget exists. He must have got through entire kitchens’ worth of lino over the years but, as he tells us in a sort of ‘how-to’ at the end, he’s brought the medium up to date by combining Photoshop and Pantone colours with the more traditional gouging tools and tracing paper.

He’s exhibited all over the place, from the RA to the V&A, but An Alphabet of London is clearly a labour of love. He has poured his life and personal experiences into its creation, juxtaposing obvious things with stuff you need to spend a little time to work out and  although the cover (and the title) make it look like a hip kids’ book, but it takes an adult to get all the references.

It starts out as a charming little memoir – Brown lived much of his early life in Putney and gradually learned to explore and love the rest of the city. But just as you get into the swing of the memoir format, the alphabet-proper begins.

Each letter gets a double-page spread, with one landmark and an array of things beginning with that letter which sum up London to Brown. I turned immediately to ‘G’ of course:

but although the Gherkin, Great Fire and Gilbert and George were there, I needed to turn to ‘O’ for ‘Observatory’, ‘Q’ for Queens House and ‘R’ for Royal Naval College to find Greenwich. It takes a while to work out what some of the entries stand for, which makes it a charming book to read snuggled up by the fire with someone else, perhaps a child, perhaps a lover.

An Alphabet of London is not the sort of book you buy for yourself – well, not the sort of thing I can usually buy for myself. It’s not a ‘must-have’ reference volume. It’s the sort of book you want to have; the sort of thing you purchase as a gift and hope someone buys for you in return.

We’ve talked about son et lumiere shows before – Greenwich was the first British place to host such an event – in 1957. An idea born in France in 1952, it’s still a really popular summer thing to do across the channel; even in more northern (and therefore British-weather-ish) places like Amiens, where they have the most amazing light show over the cathedral entrance, showing the carved stone statues as they would have looked in medieval times. But over here, they tend to be sporadic events if they happen at all.

We had one a couple of years ago, and it was brilliant – with the light show projected off the Queen’s House:

and I really hoped that it would be the start of a new interest, but nothing else has happened since. Fireworks, nice though they are, are not the same. And if they come with music, they never seem to be connected with it – the bangs come at all the wrong moments.

I came across this old brochure for the 1958 Son et Lumiere, the year after the triumphant first British outing, which implies that they were hoping it would become an annual event. Charles Laughton is back on narration duty and the London Philharmonic is doing the strings thing again. Even the script is much the same – the history of Greenwich, with marching Romans, ravishing Danes and taxing Normans – it’s just expanded.

It cost a fairly hefty 5/- to get in, and I can’t help thinking it must have been hard to keep the local urchins from climbing railings etc. and get a free view, but it must have been quite a show. I wonder if anyone took any pictures?

Technology has advanced so far now that we are used to seeing mega-screens and outdoor cinema. But son et lumiere is different. It’s a piece of created, site-specific art, and I think it’s not been yet been exhausted as a form.

I guess in these days of cuts it’s not something we’re likely to see again soon, even in this year of all manner of celebration, but I rather wish someone would give Greenwich son et lumiere another run for its money.

Many of the places you might expect to have elaborate classical sculptures in the Old Royal Naval College tend to be rather forlorn – though when you do get a carved pediment, it’s usually a real humdinger.

Apart from the obvious, the other three buildings of the ORNC are plain but King Charles Building actually has several carved pediments. Thing is, I can find virtually nothing about them. Even the usually-highly-detailed John Bold doesn’t seem to mention the building of the King’s House very much at all, and I certainly haven’t found any explanation of these figures. Here’s the pediment on the east front of the building:

Okay. So the coat of arms doesn’t take much working out. It’s Charles II’s badge, including the garter, but with a couple of cornucopias instead of the Lion and the Unicorn.

I’m even cool with the guy on the right. I’m assuming, given the whole beardy-bloke-with-sea-monster deal, it’s Neptune – all very maritime.

But who’s the woman? And what the hell is she holding? A spike? Some kind of navigational instrument? An obelisk? Something Masonic?

Answers on a virtual postcard, please…

This sort of thing normally goes in the Parish News, but I thought I’d ask here, just for the hell of it, because it’s my blog and I get to choose. Mwahahaha.

Stephen asked me (yes, yet another Stephen – there are so many here…) if I know of a local writer who’s looking to collaborate on an idea he has for a Greenwich-based film/novel. He tells me it’s a strong idea, with ‘lots of hooks’ though I know nothing else about it – blimey – someone more cloaked than me….

He has a treatment ‘of sorts’ but confesses he’s not a writer and he’s now looking for someone  to polish the treatment and write the script. In true artistic tradition there’s no cash up front, you’re looking at a partnership against future gains but hey – it might suit someone who’s going through the dreaded block just now.

If you’re interested, pop me an email and I’ll pass you on.

Regular readers will remember the strange situation the delightful little film studios just down the road in Rotherhithe found themselves in a few months ago, when the landlord of the 19th Century warehouse containing the studios, costume ateliers and picture library, not to mention Olivier’s little screening room where he shares unusual movies for free to all comers every Tuesday, decided to turn the whole lot into luxury flats and a supermarket.

Olivier took the brave decision to try to buy the building’s freehold so that this thriving local business could survive, and set about raising the money via individual shares through the government’s Enterprise Investment Scheme. Originally he thought that it would just be major investors and City boys buying the shares, but he was both surprised and delighted when he realised that it was local folk and people who actually used the studios – actors, producers, directors – who invested.

He deliberately pitched the shares at low-ish minimum investment so that it was available to as many people as possible, made it easy to invest without brokers and held open days throughout the summer where he took anyone interested round the extraordinary building, showing them what he and his team do – the tiny studios, sound-stages and workshops – and then explained the deal over a cup of tea and cake that he’d made himself.

I was entranced, but I shared Olivier’s worry that the landlord knew damn well that he had Sands over a barrel – that they wanted to buy the freehold and he could charge whatever he liked. They always feared that they’d get enough money then the landlord would demand more – in Olivier’s own words – they lived with ‘the ghost of a price increase’ or that he might just refuse to sell and go for the flats/supermarket option after all. I suspect this may have put off potential investors, though frankly the worst that would have happened is that Olivier would have had to give all the money back.

But I’m delighted to announce that the landlord has accepted the purchase offer. Olivier tells me “we have a contract, we have certainty over the price of the property and therefore the feasibility of the whole scheme.”

Now all they have to do is raise the rest of the cash they need before the completion date – 2nd April, 2012. Of course that will mean that City people will be interested as it will be somewhere they can offload tax liability before the end of the financial year, but Olivier is still keen to get ordinary people who have a love of film, but not multi-millions to spend because this is a labour of love, not a dull make-cash-quick-and-sod-anyone-else deal.

Ever-tireless, Olivier and his gang are once again inviting potential investors to visit the studio and ask all the questions they need to about the EIS scheme and the Sands Films business. Those informal events are great for the him too: giving him the chance to meet with investors and understand them better.

This is a genuine, local business, employing local people, often across generations and it is IMHO A Good Thing.

If you’ve never seen the inside of this extraordinary place, I suggest you hop on a 177, visit a fabulous historic warehouse full of amazing things, meet Olivier, drink tea, eat his home-made pear and almond cake, watch a film that has strong associations with the studio and think about this deal. It’s obligation-free – but if you’re not charmed by the passion of – and the work done by – Olivier and his team, I’ll be surprised.

He’ll be opening his doors every Saturday from 17th Jan – if memory serves, at 4.00pm (though I’m sure he’ll put me right if I’m wrong.) And though I shouldn’t say it, even if you’re not planning to invest you really should go along anyway and see this building /business. It is unique.

Fourth in a short series of turn-of-the-20th-Century Greenwich Christmas postcards from the Phantom Collection.

I’ve chosen this one as my Actual The Day card because it amuses me that it’s just a bog-standard postcard that’s had a greeting hurriedly plonked on it, presumably by some local printer to meet the Christmas rush. I know the feeling…

I’ll not be around much (if at all) for the next week or so, so for now, have a happy one, folks…