"Stick a pony in me pocket/I'll fetch the suitcase from the van..."

If I ignore last night's third act tragedy -- oh, the washing machine -- then today's clock shifting shenanigans hopefully didn't auger some Wintry tragedy.

Anyway, to Columbia Road where Mr N. and Mr G. were selling their Banksy prints, manfully despite the fairly unwelcoming weather conditions.

Later, we repaired to the Royal Inn to see Alison and Martin, and always a pleasure to see Lady the Miss J.

Is it Winter now..?  Gosh, I surely hope not.

"If you call your dad he can stop it all..."

To Shoreditch, then, in London's fashionable East End.

On the junction of Commercial and Great Eastern Street, there's a massive billboard tethered to a building advertising Wrangler Jeans.  The picture features a semi-feral girl, emerging head first from some green, stagnant-looking water; the caption,  "We are all animals."  11am on a Saturday morning and there's people stumbling round the streets of Hoxton looking like victims from a bomb blast, all dazed expressions and slightly jerky movements.  Ha, they've just not been to bed yet.  Tsk, kids!

I'm pretty shocked by the state of Shoreditch these days.  When I lived here, there was a certain shabby chic about it, sure, that felt a bit cool; hey, urban, a bit edgy, yadda yadda.  And, yes, I didn't go to bed some nights either.  Now it's just gone beyond ironic and looks horrible.  I could smell the mould growing outside The Old Blue Last.  There's broken windows and boarded up buildings a hop, skip and a jump from Shoreditch House with its rooftop swimming pool.  Everything's covered in graffiti, some of which is quite good but mostly agonisingly arch:  naked women in gas masks, sub-Banksy stencil work, yawn.

It baffles me why people are prepared to live here.  It baffles me, also, why the bar staff in the Griffin think it's somehow cool to put a Swastika on a head of Guinness instead of a shamrock.  I did ask, once, but I just got shrugged at, ironically.  It's probably part of the same condition.

Walking down Curtain Road, towards Mr N. and co's old warehouse, I pass The Hoxton Pony.  Semantics suggest that with a name like that it'd be a down-at-heel old boozer, like The Owl & The Pussycat or The Pride Of Spitalfields.  But, no, this is all modern and stuff, with brushed grey steel and tinted windows.  Ha -- do you see what they've done there?  Their website promises "an individual and unconventional slant to the gang of venues in Shoreditch" and the music that greets me when I open their homepage is... electroclash!  It's a virtual 2002, and no mistake.  But are they being ironic..?

I am nearly 40.

"Now that I'm back in the light, so warm I feel it like a wave of love coming over me..."

Back in the swing of it, after, um, a few months off.  Lovely day, astonishing for the time of year, etc etc.  Wandered round Stokey with LaLa, including a trip to Abney Park cemetery, then Clissold Park for some full-on deer action and the Lion, for footballsport.  Anyways, Mr D., sadly, had to disappear early, but the redoubtable LaLa and I had a civilized steak dinner in the Three Crowns before a woozy, and resolutely non-committal, pint in Biddles.

A.  Fine.  Saturday.  By any standards.

Hello trees! Hello flowers!

Welcome back!  I do realise it's, ooh, about four months since last we met, but frankly there's little fun to be had wandering the streets of Hackney looking for Interesting Things To Take Photos Of in the frosty world of Winter.

Now, though, Spring is sprunging at a considerable rate, so I figured it time to dust down the camera and head out into the world once again.  And I thought I'd start off with my own garden, particularly as Mark and Uma's clematis from next door is doing such a good job of adding a splash of colour to the proceedings.

I have also found two new pubs, just off London Fields, so will aim to head out tomorrow as the BBC weather site is claiming it's going to be warm and sunny, and gather back photographic evidence.

Champagne and Benzedrine all round.

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.

Keeling House

The approach to Keeling House is down a series of tight, small roads.  The effect, then, when you turn a corner and come to it, is pretty startling.  It's just there, looming at you, rather like an alien spacecraft that's crashed to Earth and buried itself, nose-first, in the ground, its four wings seemingly more appropriate to interstellar travel than public housing.

Keeling House was designed in 1956 by Denys Lasdun.  He also designed the National Theatre, memorably described by Prince Charles as a "a nuclear power station in the middle of London" and part of the South Bank arts complex whose grim clutter of Brutalist buildings was used by Stanley Kubrick as the setting for one of the most unpleasant murder sequences in A Clockwork Orange.  Lasdun also designed the University of East Anglia, another Brutalist concrete space that doubled as the fictional Lowlands campus, "a swamp of fear and loathing", in Andrew Davies' bleak TV satire, A Very Peculiar Practice.

Brutalism came out of the modernist architectural movement; the term comes from the French, beton brut, or "raw concrete".  The modernist housing theory was to create functional, zoned urban living, to impose order on the organic sprawl of cities.  You can argue that part of the charm of cities is the cheek-by-jowl jostling of buildings of different size, shape and design.  I love walking through the City, for instance, and randomly coming across a tiny little c.15th church tucked away down a cobbled alleyway next to the gleaming glass and concrete offices of some international bank, or the way Leadenhall Market pokes cheekily through the franchised rows of Monsoon, Boots and Tesco.

The key problem with modernist housing theory, though, is it leads to sterile, isolated living spaces, the most pessimistic outcome of that being community breakdown.  Winston Churchill wrote "We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us," and it's a theme that's been employed frequently by the brilliant novelist JG Ballard, most pertinently in High Rise, where gangs of residents in a 40-storey tower block lead murderous skirmishes to "enemy" floors.

Lasdun, though, seems to be something of a humanist in all this, and if Keeling House is partly a reaction against the more stringent theories of modernist housing, it also attempts to embrace its more positive aspects.  Here, Lasdun set out to create a vertical equivalent to a typical East End community; each of the four wings, for instance, faces inward, and he designed communal "drying areas" where residents could meet and chat, the purpose of all this to encourage the kind of social interactivity he worried might otherwise be lost.

Certainly, compared to virtually any other example you'd care to mention of high rise housing built in the 1950s and Sixties, Keeling House is a masterpiece of far-sighted vision and an undoubted architectural highlight.  In 1993, the National Trust made it a Grade II listed building; the first council block ever awarded such a status, and the subject of much horror among blue rinse traditionalists.  It was bought by a private developer in 1999, who converted into private flats.  One of them, in fact, recently bought by my friends Neal and Laura.

Walking in through the security gates you come to a slatted bridge [pic 3] that runs over an external water feature [pic 4], only the absence of brightly coloured and exotic fish in the water dispelling a state of Zen-like calm.  Once through the main door, there's an imposing stone concierge's desk in the middle of a glass atrium, through which you can look up at the residential wings, everything very open, very transparent, a statement that this is not like any other council block around, no dark corners, nothing concealed here.  There's something of a sci-fi quality to it; it looks like the kind of place they might have used as the location for an episode of Blake's 7, the concierge desk manned by a masked Federation trooper, that kind of thing.

The apartments themselves run to 48 two bedroom maisonettes, eight penthouses (added by redevelopers Lincoln Holdings), eight one bedroom single-level flats and two garden level maisonettes.  Neal and Laura own one of the two bedroom maisonettes, the living room facing outwards, the view quite spectacularly stretching over to Canary Wharf and beyond.  The redevelopment has seen the addition of wooden floorings, stainless steel window frames and revamped kitchen units.

The whole things is pretty impressive, I have to say.  What interests me is how this building, originally designed to house council tenants, has been refurbished and sold on to what one estate agent describes as "the loft-buying market"; how apparently when it reopened in June 2000 300 people, mostly City folk, turned up for viewings, Keeling House now the subject of TV documentaries and broadsheet articles, the epitome of urban cool in the heart of Bethnal Green.

It seems to me that, perhaps inevitably, Lasdun's admirably humanistic design principles have been commodified.  Sure, it's improved the original building, but that's not the issue.  I just wonder where that leaves social housing.

The German Hospital

Amazingly, for an area that was so heavily bombed during the last war, there are still so many beautiful old buildings in Hackney.  Sure, there's streets of robust Victorian terrace houses that spool off from Lower Clapton Road, Mare Street and Graham Road.  But along with the Art Deco Strand Building, the German Hospital on Ritson Road offers something far more intriguing than your conventional residential housing.

When I was hunting for a new home at the end of 2006, I looked at a one bedroom flat in the Hospital.  The corridors still very much look like hospital corridors, which makes walking down them a rather strange experience -- you keep expecting to see doctors and nurses running hither and yon, racing to some emergency, a look of focussed intent on their faces.  It may be a false memory, but I swear the hallways still had that antiseptic, hospital smell.  The flat I looked at was, sadly, something of a disappointment -- it was pretty cramped, the bed on a mezzanine level, the whole place barely big enough to swing a mouse, let alone anything larger.

But I suppose it was pretty unlikely that anything inside was going to live up to the incredible Tudor Gothic facade.  The building dates from the mid-1800s.  There were around 30,000 Germans living in London by then, the capital's largest immigrant community.  At the suggestion of the Prussian Ambassador, Christian Karl Josias, baron von Bunsen, a hospital was opened in 1845, with 12 beds, on the site of the Dalston Infant Orphans Asylum, "to all who spoke the German tongue, without distinction as to religion and origin, from Switzerland to the banks of the Rhine and from the banks of the Rhine again to the Baltic and the North Sea."

Florence Nightingale visited the Hospital in June, 1846, and was so impressed by the example of the Protestant nursing staff, shipped in from the Kaiserwerth Institute near Dusseldorf, that she enrolled for a three month training course there in June, 1851.  In the first year, 10,000 patients came through the Hospital doors, so the site was developed [pic 1], in 1864, by Thomas Leverton Donaldson, the inaugural Professor of Architecture at UCL.  In the meantime, Nightingale had witnessed the appallingly high number of fatalities while stationed at Scutari during the Crimean War, and recommended that the Hospital deploy a pavilion plan to increase ventilation to reduce the mortality rate.

In 1936, the Hospital's Bauhaus-style East Wing [pic 2] was built in Fassett Square, designed by Burnet Tait & Lorne, riffing on Alvar Aalto's Paimio Sanitarium in Finland.  It was intended to house maternity and children's wards, the roof gardens apparently something to behold, views stretching as far as Crystal Palace.  A random fact for you:  the BBC shot the pilot for EastEnders in Fassett Square.

Anyway, what's interesting to me is the story of the Hospital, particularly how the staff were treated by the English during the two World Wars.  It seems that during the Great War, the younger doctors returned to Germany while the older ones stayed on.  At the risk of sounding trite, it clearly must have been a brave decision to make; to stay in the country against whom you're currently fighting a war in order to help your compatriots, particularly with the entire staff branded as "spies".  World War II, though, found the staff interned on the Isle of Man, their places taken by British doctors and nurses.  In 1948, the Hospital was taken over by the NHS to treat psychiatric and geriatric patients, then closed in 1987, finally redeveloped as flats.  It held 95 beds by the time it shut.

According to Foxtons website, you can currently expect to pay £535,000 for a "sumptuous, two bedroomed, lower ground floor flat that offers modern, well-presented living space" in what was once the German Hospital, now a Grade 2 listed building.  On a previous blog, I mentioned how the East End is a palimpsest of its past, that spaces are shuffled, remade and remodelled, but shadows and ghosts remain.  It's an observation, I suspect, I'll come to more than once here.  But I wonder, think about what once went on inside this extraordinary building, how the medical staff coped as cholera epidemics decimated great swathes of London's population in the 1860s and 70s, the Thames, according to Disraeli "a Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror", swarming with stink and disease, the noxious horror of London at its peak.  There is no God, or God is a devil.  What suffering was witnessed in that "sumptuous two bedroomed lower ground floor flat"?