The London Orphans Asylum

The East End is full of such refuges.  Since the early 1700s, Hackney has seen hospitals built to support the immigrant work force; refuges for destitute women established; almshouses; even an institution for Indian women.  The dreadful choke of the "stink industries" and appalling levels of overcrowding had, by the mid 1800s, turned the East End toxic -- little wonder, then, the inhabitants needed some form of shelter from their hardships.  Jack London, visiting England in the early 1900s, asked for a tour of the East End and was told by a travel agent:  "We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place."

Sure, it's impossible for us now to imagine quite how bad it was in the East End back then.  But if you look at book titles from the time, you might get some glimpse, certainly, of how the area was perceived:  The People Of The Abyss, The Nether World, Tales Of Mean Streets.  One account claims "A mind is needed -- black, misanthropic in its view of things, used to fearful visions of the night, to look with comprehensive and unflinching eye upon these scenes of sickly horror and despair."

Anyone who's read Dickens will certainly be familiar with the deprivations of East End life, not too far from the truth, more social commentary than fiction; outcast children, men driven mad in the Inferno, disease, murder, not much in the way of chinks of light you'd assume.  A few months after Thomas Barnardo arrived in London in 1866, a cholera epidemic in the East End claimed 3,000 lives.  He found children sleeping on roofs and in the gutters, dressed in ragged clothes, maimed in the factories, malnourished, covered in filth, scrabbling around in the kind of semi-existence you'd expect more suited to life in a warzone.

Barnardo opened his first orphanage in 1870, in Stepney, but the London Orphans Asylum, a few streets along from me, was built by the social reformer Rev Andrew Reed in 1813, on the site of Hackney School, a large 18th century private school, and afforded maintenance and education to 430 orphan children between the ages of 7 and 15.  In the late 1800s it was taken over by the Salvation Army, who used it as their headquarters until the 1970s, when it was demolished, all that's left being the Tuscan portico you can see in the top two pictures.  You can find prints online of the Asylum in its prime -- a grand, imposing neo-classical building situated in what appear to be impressive grounds.

I first became aware of it in the days immediately following 9/11, when I found myself wandering round Hackney, only recently moved to the area, replaying in my head the images of United Airlines Flight 175 flying into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, pretty much the only thing then being shown on television those past few days, wondering whether this was, in fact, it and we were all heading to hell in the first available handcart.  I turned off Lower Clapton Road onto Linscott Road and there was the Asylum portico, at that point the home of Martin Creed's installation, Work No 203 [pic 3], "Everything's Going To Be Alright" traced in neon lettering across the 13 ft entablature.

I've since learned that Creed's exhibited that text installation again, its message of indiscriminate reassurance decorating buildings in New York, Chicago, Rome and on the Palazzo Dell'Arengario in Milan.  But I think it had a peculiar kind of resonance here; if it's not too fanciful to imagine the ghosts of all those poor kids crowding the street, looking up at and finding some modicum of comfort in those words, some kind of bliss.