Westminster City Archives

Today we are being a little cheeky and sharing an image of schoolchildren in their classroom in the middle of the half-term holidays. In particular, this is a photograph of boys at Westminster City School in 1930.



Archive ref: E139 Westminster City School (002)



Image Description: Black and white photograph. Interior. Austere classroom viewed at angle to left rear corner. Plain painted, plastered walls, pale above, and dark below to ‘dado’ level. Single tall narrow window in rear corner. 20 boys of quite varied ages, maybe between 12 and 16 sit in 5 rows at wooden desks angled downwards towards them, probably acting as lids to the ‘box’ beneath them. The desks have metal legs and benches with basic board backs are attached. Each desk is designed to seat a pair of boys and most have two at them. The boys are quite formally dressed and some in the foreground have papers or books open on their desks and are holding a writing implement.

Among our business collections are the records of Waring and Gillow Ltd.

Gillows of Lancaster is one of the great names in the history of furniture-making, supplying high quality furniture to the richest families in the country.

In the 20th century, Gillows merged with Waring of Liverpool and together they forged an international reputation for fitting out luxury yachts and liners.

The Gillow archives contain invaluable information for furniture historians including:

estimate sketchbooks (1784 to 1905) with detailed illustrations and descriptions of custom-made furniture

pattern book (1775 to 1800) with colour illustrations

20th century scrapbooks and photograph albums with designs for ship, country house and palace interiors

The Gillow archive can be explored on microfilm in our Searchroom. A card catalogue of making numbers is available, assisting with research into specific pieces.

Susan E Stuart's 2 volume work Gillows of Lancaster and London, 1730 to 1840 and Lindsay Boynton's Gillow Furniture Designs, 1760 to 1800 are available in the Archives Searchroom.

Browse this archive in more detail by searching our online catalogue: https://archives.westminster.gov.uk/.

We can undertake searches for individual Gillow pieces if you are able to provide an image of the item and indicate an approximate date if possible. We will send you a copy of the sketch and specification if we find it.

We are unable to give valuations; an antique dealer or auction house should be able to help with this.

The cost of this service is £50 an hour with a maximum of three hours work.

Our image today is an advertising leaflet of Waring & Gillow from about 1905. It shows their Oxford Street store at no.s 164 – 182, which still stands and is Grade II listed.

Archive ref: T137 Waring & Gillow (002)

Image Description: Colour advertising flyer. Image in the top half; text below. The image is a view of the building from an elevated position slightly to the right-hand side to show a slanting view of the façade, and a side view down a side street. It appears to be a near-photo-realistic art image. The streets bustle with people and traffic (mostly motor buses). The building is in red brick and white stone and in a varied and elaborate French Renaissance style, with a red flag flying above. The text below is in green, with an elaborate initial, and relates the quality and variety of home furnishing wares available.

We're doing today something that we usually try to avoid doing - repeating content - but this post from several years ago now has quite topical relevance, because yesterday was the centenary of the last day of the British General Strike of 1926:

Today we’d like to highlight a rather neglected part of our collections. We have in our search room a cuttings collection. A lot of the material is simply relatively recent newspaper clippings, but there are some more unusual materials here as well, like the ones we are sharing today.

These two items illustrate two ‘sides’ of the general strike of 1926 from, as it were, an administrative angle (administrative records of one sort or another being, after all, the bread and butter of local government archives).

The first is a two-page circular from the Mayor of Marylebone to Councillors, dated the third of May 1926 and headed ‘National Emergency.’ It outlines the organisational measures being taken nationally, at a London-wide and Home Counties level, and at a local level to ensure the continuation of fuel and food supplies, transport, sanitation, and other essential services, and to co-ordinate volunteers.

The second is a receipt for a one shilling donation to the Central Strike Fund issued by the Cab Trade Committee of the Transport and General Workers’ Union.

Image Descriptions: (1) Sheet of white foolscap paper with printed Marylebone Town Hall letterhead in black, including the Borough crest. Black typescript text follows. (2) Second sheet of white foolscap with black typescript, signed by the Mayor at the bottom. The two sheets are stapled together at the top left. (3) A green-grey card about the size of a modern bank card. It has various black text printed on it in various fonts and sizes, some horizontal, other diagonally. Apart from the information already given, some other salient pieces of text are ‘Monday’ , ‘Daily Issue’ , ‘Support the men in dispute’ , and ‘GIVE SUPPORT – THEIR SUCCESS IS YOURS’.

Archive ref: MBN Envelopes 917

In partnership with the Westminster LGBT+ Forum, we are hosting this interesting event on Wednesday the 13th of May. It will explore the intersection of q***r and Chinese identities in London via the proximity of Chinatown and Soho. Here is a link for more information and to book tickets: https://www.outsavvy.com/event/34724/q***r-china-uk-at-the-intersection-q***ring-chinatown-rethinking-soho.

Q***r China UK: At the Intersection: Q***ring Chinatown, Rethinking Soho Tickets - London - OutSavvy Have you ever wondered why London’s Chinatown sits so close to Soho? As Chinese q***rs, we often find ourselves standing at this intersection, marginal and invisible on both sides. Q***r China UK will share how they engage with Chinese LGBTQ+ communities to reinterpret urban narratives and co-crea...

We’re sharing today, with the kind permission of the author, an online article based in part on research they carried out in the records we hold of the Church of St Saviour, Pimlico. It’s about the childhood of Laurence Olivier: https://www.westminster-abbey.org/about/abbey-review/stories/may-god-bless-and-guide-you-larry. We never know what people might uncover next in our records.

Our image today is of the interior of the church – a black and white postcard published by J H Collins in the early 20th century.

Archive ref: C131.1 St Saviour, Pimlico (003)

Image Description: Sepia, portrait-format postcard. We look from the west end of the church, from behind the last row of pews/benches. A fairly typical Victorian Gothic church interior. Mostly bare, pale stone, with some of the bottoms of the roof timbers visible. Wooden pulpit partly visible to the left, in front of the last column before the chancel arch. Elaborate rood screen made up of lancet ‘windows’, so that the chancel, altar, and large east window are visible behind. Screen surmounted by a large, ornate crucifix. The image is watermarked to show Westminster Archives copyright and there is white writing across the pews about a quarter of the way up the image, saying ‘St Saviour’s’ on one side of the aisle between the pews and ‘Pimlico’ on the other, in the style characteristic of postcards of a certain period.

Today we’re sharing a little quirk in documentation about someone’s birth date that one of us came across quite outside their work here, just the sort of thing that family historians might find in their research.



The Australian / New Zealand composer Alfred Hill (-1960) has been given a birth year of 1870 in many sources. But a long note in the CD liner (p.3) to the first volume of the Dominion Quartet’s complete recording of Hill’s string quartets (on the Naxos label, catalogue number 8.570491) makes it clear that this is wrong. The note is by the quartet’s viola player, Donald Maurice, and says in summary that the 16th of December 1870 is the date of birth on Hill’s birth certificate, but that this is a mistake for the 16th of December 1869. The birth was registered in March 1870, and the registration fits into a numerical sequence of reference numbers between two other registrations in March 1870, but a lot of other documentary evidence from Hill’s life (e.g. diary entries and his entry documents to a conservatoire) make it clear that he was born on the 12th of December 1869. It is clear that someone filling in the date of birth when it was being registered inadvertently wrote the then current year instead of the previous one because of the three-month delay in the registration.



Our images today are not directly related to the above but are Antipodean-related. One of us here stumbled across this interesting photograph in the strongrooms, when looking for something else, as so often happens. It’s large, framed and glazed, and has wire at the back for hanging on a wall. It shows The Rt Hon William Morris Hughes, Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia [that is the national government, as opposed to those of the individual states], visiting his old school, Burdett Coutts, on the 21st of March 1916. It was presented to the school by Mr Burdett Coutts MP.

The member of staff who found this told his Australian father about it, and his father told him the following story:

In my last year at primary school, I was responsible for raising the Australian flag on the school flagpole. The day Billy Hughes died, I put it at half-mast as everyone was making such a fuss, only to be rebuked by my teacher for exceeding my authority! Such was my introduction to politics!

Image Descriptions: (1) A large, mounted and framed, black-and-white photograph is propped up against a wall. Brown wooden frame, white mount, and gold label set back in mount at bottom with black text on it. (2) Close-up of the label. It reads: The Rt Hon. William Morris Hughes, Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia, visits his old school March 21st 1916. Presented by Mr Burdett-Coutts, M.P. (3) Close-up of the photograph. A crowd of people stand in front of a Victorian Gothic building, all more or less facing us. In the centre are a man and woman, both clasping their hands at waist height in front of them. The man wears a top hat and a long coat and suit, and has a folded umbrella hanging by its handle from his left arm. He holds a pair of gloves in his hands. The woman wears a hat with a large bow sticking up, a long fur coat, and a handbag hangs from over her left hand/wrist. The bottom of a long dress is visible, she has glasses with wire frames, and wears white gloves. A few other similarly dressed adults stand behind. At least fifty primary-school-aged children stand in rows facing towards the main figures on either side, mostly in hats and long coats.

Archive ref: 2217/61

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has recently ended its public hearings – a good time to share an image of the pest houses (isolation hospital for those with serious communicable diseases) at Tothill Fields. In 1665, Charles II ordered that every parish should have a house, shed, or tent designated to accommodate those with plague, though the Tothill Fields example originated in 1638. Tothill Fields lay south of St James’s Park and north of the river. A good brief article about pest houses in general is here: https://bshm.org.uk/plague-houses-and-pandemics-some-comparisons-between-1665-and-2020/. Todays’ image is titled ‘View of the Pest-Houses at Tothill Fields’, dated 6 Aug 1796, drawn by E Dayes, and engraved by C Pye. The article linked to above has another print image of ‘our’ pest houses, from another collection, done a little later and in a wintry landscape, but from exactly the same viewpoint.



Archive ref: Gardner Box 50 No 55



Image Description: Square sepia print. A row of slightly higgledy-piggledy buildings sits above and beyond the banks of a pool, with some trees and farm (?) buildings visible behind. Fences link to the buildings at either end. On the near bank of the pool a horse grazes, while a couple of cows stand in the pool. Two people are visible just outside the building with two more near the far bank of the pool. Another person appears to be hanging out washing by the building, while a couple of carts are parked under a wooden covering. The building has a few doors and very few windows, and those very small. The overall impression is wall coming in and out in small steps, various pitched roofs, and chimneystacks – with a broad overall ridge line running left to right. Construction seems to be stone and/or brick with tiles or slates on the roofs. The information given about the print above appears in captions in its lower margin.

We hope today’s bumper post will make amends for our months-long absence from Facebook until quite recently because of the cyber incident late last year. We’re sharing today something that, at least for the geekier end of our staff here, has been a really exciting find. A while ago a local estate agent emailed us to ask what the strange inscribed stone might be that seemed to be mortared in place inside the garage of a house that they had just been asked to sell - with, of course, a photograph of the stone attached. Our Tim was monitoring our communal inbox when the item arrived and leapt on it as an interesting enquiry. Over to Tim:

Quite rapidly I realised that, despite the fact the this was inside a private property, what it actually looked like was an historic parish boundary marker or pair of markers (From now on I will just say ‘stone’, though it looks as though we may have two things here, one each put in place co-operatively by the two parishes – this is a common pattern). These occur all over the country (mostly in accessible places) to mark on the ground the administrative boundaries of parishes as local government units, which they were more or less everywhere from roughly the Tudor period until relatively recently. Historic parish boundaries are often still local government boundaries. I live near that between Islington and Harringay, Islington and Hornsey as were, which runs along a road that follows the top of a southern ridge of the North London Heights. There is at least one parish boundary marker in the form of a metal plate affixed to a front garden wall, with text giving a figure in feet and inches, which I think is to be taken as meaning the boundary runs parallel with the face of the plate at that distance in front of it, which amounts to going down the middle of the road. During the first Covid lockdown, I had to go up from our flat, in a dell to the north of the ridge, onto this road, to get a mobile signal to accept secondary verification codes to get into work systems – a natural landscape feature used as a (probably originally) medieval boundary interacting with modern technology. Our signal has much improved since.

Back to the story at hand. The email did give a precise address for the house the stone was in (which we obviously can’t share), and it didn’t take me long to realise that, given where the stone was, the S MB on the right of the stone must mean Parish of St Marylebone – one of the medieval parishes that became ultimately the modern City of Westminster in administrative terms; but it took me a little longer to work out that the St JH meant Parish of St John Hampstead, one of the medieval parishes that ultimately became part of the modern London Borough of Camden. I got distracted by the fact that the stone is in St John’s Wood, and thought it might be a ward name perhaps. I only realised my mistake when I started to look at parish maps of Marylebone we have in the archives, where the adjacent parishes are named. From two parish maps of about a decade either side of the date on the stone (1859), I was able to determine: (1) where the boundary ran in this area in the middle decades of the nineteenth century; (2) that it has moved a little since - by comparison with modern maps (where it looks as though there has been a neatening exercise precisely to avoid the boundary going through buildings or splitting coherent groups of buildings); and (3) that the area was changing from open fields to urban exactly around the date of the stone. So presumably an effort was being made to (re)define the boundary on the ground as development proceeded and older features used to define it were being removed or altered, say significant trees, hedges, streams, farm buildings, etc. From the maps, the stone was clearly exactly on the line of the boundary at the date given on it.

Next I checked whether the stone was ‘known to science’, in the sense that it appeared in the database (with photographs) of London parish boundary markers put together by Mike Horne (http://www.metadyne.co.uk/Parishboundaries.html). (This website more generally is a fascinating resource of personal research, mostly at the nerdier end of London history.) Not that surprisingly it did not, given that the items on the database are usually in public places, such as open green spaces, or walls or pavements beside roads – there are plenty such on our territory, for instance in Regents Park. So this stone is a genuine find!

Obviously, I passed my findings on to the estate agent, who then invited me to view the stone in situ. We agreed a time and I took some systematic photographs with a view to adding them to our Local Studies collections. It was clear during the visit that the agent had worked out - from being able to see the stone in situ and what I had sent him - quite a lot of the detail that I give here which I had not yet worked out myself, showing the value of collaborative working in local studies research.

The number on the upper part of the St John Hampstead side of the stone (154) probably refers to a number that appeared in some paperwork created at the time the stone (and presumably lots of others as well) was installed. Documents will probably have had information about the location of each numbered stone, as a confirmatory text defining the boundary. Perhaps it is still extant in the collections of Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, though a cursory search of their catalogue did not bring up anything obvious. But I have found that we have something relevant in our Marylebone collections which our catalogue describes as 'a detailed account of a perambulation of the parish in 1852, with notes of all the boundary marks, drawings and plans, compiled in 1852, with notes of additions and alterations to 1892' (Archive ref: TV/96), though I have not had a chance to look at it.

Parish boundaries crossing a private plot of land, or even going through buildings, is not unheard of. In this case, from looking at the stone and at the parish maps, it does appear that the boundary is being defined as running somehow through the gap between the two inscriptions, roughly at right angles to their face. From visiting the site, it seems that the stone was originally installed on top of what was then a low boundary wall running between buildings or plots at right angles to those buildings’ or plots’ frontage onto the public road. So the boundary really is cutting through at least two buildings or plots in this area at the time the stone is installed. An issue this raises is how it was decided in cases like this to which local authority rates would be paid, etc. Maybe an investigation for another time . . .

Finally, some notes on broader context. When visiting the area to look at the stone, even though I had clocked roughly where the boundary now runs, it was striking to see that in a sense the modern equivalent of boundary stones in the area are street name signs, with the Council names Camden and Westminster and their distinctive styles, sometimes almost facing each other across a street.

Quite outside our territory, I’ve come across an even more striking example of continuity in marking of boundary or ownership by physical features placed by people in a landscape. On the South Downs in Sussex, above Bishopstone, near Seaford, there are the remains of a burial mound of Late Neolithic to Late Bronze Age type, known as Five Lords’ Burgh(s), sited on a ridge to dominate the surrounding landscape, clearly ‘saying’ something like ‘Our ancestor(s) is/are buried here; this is our land’ in relation to at least some of the land it overlooks. On top of it there is a boundary stone marking the point where three current parishes’ boundaries meet. There is a local tradition that in the past five parishes met here, hence the name. This Historic England webpage on the mound has more information and a photograph clearly showing the small, round, grassy mound, with a small, grey, stone pillar on top, lying in a wider, gently hilly landscape: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1003311.

If passion about parish boundaries has been aroused, then this book is a good place to start: Angus Wi******er, ‘Discovering Parish Boundaries’, Princes Risborough, Shire Publications, 2000. We have it on the shelves in our public search room. The author is Emeritus Professor at Lancaster University (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/humanities-arts-and-social-sciences/people/angus-winchester).

[Many thanks to the estate agent for having the curiosity to send us the enquiry in the first place, and for then allowing us to visit and photograph the stone, add information about it to our collections, and share this story with you. The photograph in today’s post is one taken by Tim, when he was on his ‘site visit.’]

Image Description: Contemporary colour photograph. Close-up of area of white-painted stonework and brickwork. Towards the front, what looks like the top of a brick garden wall – a top course of normally laid bricks, with a ‘coping’ layer above laid lengthways across the wall’s width; to the rear, more brick wall, and a structure to the left projecting from that wall forwards, almost to the front of the ‘garden wall.’ Mortared in place in the angle between these three structures is the stone. It’s cuboid and maybe about two conventional brick courses high and about two long brick sides long. The ‘Marylebone’ side takes up about half of the face with large, quite deeply incised capital letters, with the S slightly separate and the MB done with the last vertical of the M and the first of the B shared. Moving to the left, there is a space, about a fifth of the total face, that seems to be divided from the ‘Marylebone’ side by an incised line, and possibly separated from the ‘Hampstead’ side by a wide groove of mortar. The ‘Hampstead’ side is about two-thirds of the width of the other. Lettering is much more lightly incised and smaller. Above is 154, in the middle St JH, and at the bottom 1859. There is quite a large area of flaking of paint on one part of the ‘Marylebone’ face, and some staining and flaking scattered about in the view generally.

Did you detect yesterday’s April Fool? The thing is genuine but was stumbled across by one of us here among family materials. It’s on the flyleaf of a 19th-century Bible from Wales, printed in English. But everything we said directly about the MS text itself yesterday is true.

(Image courtesy Tim Reid)

Image Description: Contemporary colour photograph. The MS page is shown against a dark wooden desktop, going into its binding on the right. The page is white, creased, and slightly abraded along the left-hand edge, and there is quite a lot of what looks like pale-brown water damage to the left-hand side. Writing is faint, filling about the left-hand half to three-fifths of the width of the page, with a ragged right-hand edge, but in blackish ink. There is a lot of crossing out and revisions squeezed in towards the bottom of the text.

Today we’re sharing something quite exceptional that one of us found written on a flyleaf of one of our 19th-century rate books. To start with we had no idea what it was, but someone, who has a little Welsh, realised that this was in Welsh. On closer inspection, it turned out to be seven-syllable lines in rhyming couplets, and to have the additional in-line ornamentation, known as cynghanedd, characteristic of strict-metre Welsh poetry, involving in-line full rhyme and/or other in-line patterns of vowel and/or consonant correspondence. Poetry written in this mode makes the sonnet look like free verse. To boot, given there are extensive crossings out and other emendments, it may be that we have here an original composition, rather than a transcription of something. The thing is very difficult to read and we are going to have to get a Welsh-language specialist in at some point to help us with it. A surprising find, but there has been a substantial Welsh-speaking community in London ever since Tudor times. So who is to say that a clerk working for one of the parish vestries on our patch did not while away a lunch hour practising his cynghanedd?



Archive ref: D370



Image Description: Contemporary colour photograph. The MS page is shown against a dark wooden desktop, going into its binding on the right. The page is white, creased, and slightly abraded along the left-hand edge, and there is quite a lot of what looks like pale-brown water damage to the left-hand side. Writing is faint, filling about the left-hand half to three-fifths of the width of the page, with a ragged right-hand edge, but in blackish ink. There is a lot of crossing out and revisions squeezed in towards the bottom of the text.