Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tian style for a modern factory is a mystery, unless the huge cats at the entrance - emblems
alike of the brand manufactured there and of the Egyptian city of Bubastis - formed a link.
At all events, the building with its coloured reeded decoration and 'Egyptian' style letter-
emporiums influenced by Egyptian architecture and dating from the Regency period can
occasionally be found in country towns, and London had a precedent in the Egyptian Hall,
Piccadilly, a home of singular entertainments.
Another interesting Inwood church is the Greek church with a semicircular portico of
huge Ionic columns in Camden Street. This part of Camden Town has something of the
character of the Bloomsbury squares about it, in a humbler way, aided by the disused burial
ground of St Martin's, off Pratt Street. These disused burial grounds are a feature of Lon-
don, those in the City being much used by office workers and City sparrows. The Cam-
den burial ground has crumbling Gothic Revival tombs that have an attractive melancholy
about them when the irises are in bloom.
Back to the upper end of the High Street, at Parkway is one of the Rowton Houses, in
Arlington Street. This one, a giant brick and terracotta structure, dates from 1905. There
are six of these in London: the original one built under Lord Rowton's scheme in Vauxhall
and others in King's Cross Road, in Hammersmith, Whitechapel, and Newington Butts.
They all date from the period when London was full of shivering men selling penny toys in
the gutters of Holborn and Ludgate Hill, human flotsam and jetsam that snuffled its way,
eyes turned permanently downwards, along the London pavements, picking up fag-ends
or haunting the garbage bins of Covent Garden. The genuine down-and-outers always pre-
ferred the streets as a place to spend the night; generally speaking, only the upper grades
of deadbeats - hawkers, outcast clergymen, men on the run from their wives - found their
way to Salvation Army or Church Army Hostels or the Rowton Houses. Some slept under
the Arches and a few on the Embankment, though the latter was too damp and offered little
comfort except for the Silver Lady café, round which a weary queue used to form to col-
lect the mugs of tea, bread and butter, and gaspers. Rowton Houses were for the elite. The
original price was sixpence a night, and you could have a cubicle to yourself. The price
gradually increased up to a shilling and then three shillings and sixpence. The walls were
ornamented with prints and flyblown regulations; the smell was that of scrubbed boards
and yellow soap, and an air of broken-spirited listlessness hung about the inmates. This,
of course, applies to all lodging-houses in London, but my favourites are those of the Sal-
vation Army, where the beds have (or had) wonderful Victorian counterpanes in red and
white, embroidered with the motto, 'Blood and Fire'. The same slouching humanity lives
in them all, spectral and bleary-eyed and with a foxy smell, unable or unwilling to commu-
nicate with its fellow members. 'In His own likeness created He them' - words to ponder
on in a doss-house. However, things have changed in the deadbeat world, and the latest de-
