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No Dove Lost

Emery Walker House   During the First World War, if you’d been walking across Hammersmith Bridge at night you might have spotted a shifty looking gentleman surreptitiously throwing bits of metal off the bridge and into the River Thames. This mysterious dumper was a disgruntled bookbinder by the name of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, who died 100 years ago this year. As for the metal, they were his collection of Doves Type, a beautifully designed font created with his partner Emery Walker.   In the last years of the 19th century Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922) decided to abandon his life as a barrister and become a bookbinder.  With his wif...

Track the Vintners' plaques

The Grapes, Lime Street  As you turn right out of Mansion House Station and walk down Garlick Hill, look up to your left and you’ll see two Vintners’ plaques positioned high up on a redbrick building. The property is no longer in the Company’s possession but it reminds us that across the centuries, throughout the City, several addresses were acquired by the Vintners’ Company.  Despite a change of ownership, and indeed in most cases a complete rebuild, you can still find clear signs of our previous extensive involvement in real estate.    Just to the east of Leadenhall Market is Lime Street, a curving street that leads up to the Lloyds building...

The Chiswick V2

  Chiswick may be more famous for its eponymous Palladian house, arts and crafts Bedford Park and Fuller's Brewery but it’s also the site of the first recorded V2 rocket attack during the Second World War. On the evening of 8 September 1944, a rocket exploded in the middle of Staveley Road, Chiswick, outside number 5. Staveley Road lies just south of Chiswick House, the elegant mansion built in the 1720s for the 2nd Earl of Burlington by William Kent, and comprises a series of smart family houses constructed in the 1920s and 1930s. The explosion created a crater 9m in diameter and 2.5m deep. Three people were killed, including a 3 year-old...

The door, the statue and the City of London

200 miles north of London, near the cathedral city of Ripon, lies Newby Hall. It’s a handsome house, originally built by Sir Christopher Wren and enlarged and improved by John Carr of York and Robert Adam. It was once owned by the Weddell family, and later became the home of the Marquesses of Ripon. Today it’s owned by the Compton family, who are descendants of the family and who have maintained its beautiful gardens. They’ve even installed a miniature railway (and Gyles Brandreth’s collection of teddy bears). Walk around the extensive grounds and aside from the herbaceous borders, an enchanting rock garden and the gentle River Ure, you’ll find a weat...

Join the Kew: a short history of Kew Green

Kew Green is one of the delights of west London. Around its picturesque cricket field lie a number of very attractive 18th- and 19th-century houses, where a number of famous people made their homes. Its history goes back to the medieval period, not least because there was a ferry crossing where the bridge now lies. Kew Pond, whose history may well date as far back as 996, was used as a fish pond for centuries. We know Kew was a hamlet in the 1300s, then called ‘Cayho’, which was derived from the Old English word ‘hoh’, meaning spur. In the 16th century Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and brother-in-law of Henry VIII held estates here but it...

A whiff of Bauhaus

The City of London is not well-known for its 1930s buildings. Between the Daily Express and Daily Telegraph buildings on Fleet Street, the impressive Ibex House in the Minories and the delightful Fox Fine Wines shop in Moorgate (formerly the Fox umbrella shop) you could be stumped trying to think of any more modernist monuments within the Square Mile. Walk out of Cannon Street Station, however, and look for the small Nii Haw sushi bar straight ahead of you. Before it fed local office workers with dim sum this cute and curvaceous outlet was a branch of TM Lewin. But 80 years ago 115 Cannon Street - to give its correct address - was the Mortimer Gall...