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Laurence Fox. The twat.

LeytonCatLady said:
I love local London facts! Feel free to share them.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure any of it's fascinating online, TBH and I always just sort of ramble and point at things and ask what people know then build on that.

The name is obvious - moreso now, obvs - but the reason there were so many weavers in the area was basically because it was just outside the city. That's where a lot of businesses that were noisy or smelly had to be done - hence tons of leatherworking businesses. Those could still sorta be seen until just ten years ago by the immense number of wholesale leather good sellers in the area; Hackney Rd and Brick Lane had about every third shop as a show, bag or general leather goods retailer - they weren't making the goods any more, but it's not a massive coincidence that an area that had a lot of tanneries had a lot of shoe wholesalers, and they continued for centuries after the tanneries were gone.

Weaving came centuries later, but it was connected. Weaving uses urine, not as much as leatherworking does, but it still uses it, mostly dying cloth, which was sometimes done towards the end stages of the process. Although weaving was practiced across the country, there were advantages to having some be near the City of London, ad on the east side near the old docks, especially expensive fabrics like silk. It reduced the odds of it being stolen on the way to or from other locations, and cut out some of the middlemen. It also favoured areas where it was fairly easy (legally and in terms of underlying geography) to build up rather than out.

I think everyone knows that weavers' cottages have high windows to get more light - which is why people still like them now, and why they can be excellent for filming. But the light - as film-makers also know - isn't the same throughout the day.

One time, at a National Trust event at a weaver's cottage on Fournier Street, I accidentally experience it first hand by taking my daughter early in the day and friends later in the day. It didn't just change how much light you got, but what colours you would choose to work with, because the differing amounts of UV light meant that a thread chosen at break of day would not look the same as at the end of the day. People would pay higher rates for clothing made with thread bought and used in one batch to minimise the chances of a weaver selecting the wrong colour.

Brewing, tanning and weaving generally went together as a trade, in cities at least. The brewers would use the good water, then the weavers, then the leatherworkers, then the people who lived there. That is a simplification, but not by much. It's one of the reason the East End and similar area had such high infant mortality rates - not just the lack of food, overcrowding, but the water. That's extra ironic since the source water was often relatively clean, and the assumption is it became dirty due to the insanitary conditions, but it's also partly because the clean water they had was being used for industry.

Anyway... so it's not a huge surprise that there are many historic breweries in the area around Weavers' Fields - a good ten minutes' walk, so not next door, but close enough to share resources. Everyone knows the brewery on Brick Lane, which was still a working brewery till 1989. If you ever go to the Asda on Mile End Rd ten minutes' walk awa, that's also on the grounds of a former brewery (which has a number of standing buildings, including my own home). If you go to the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel ten minutes in the other direction, it's next to the former Albion Brewery, where you can go for a GP appt in a capsuled room inside a building whose shell is mostly intact, but hidden - you can see the timber-frame and impressive woodwork as you lean down to the gap in the plastic to speak to the receptionist. You can have your liver tested in a place designed to destroy it.

So the people you sit with there might still be working in weaving - not just the hipsters: there are a lot of small Bengali-run clothes factories (my GF's Dad works in one), or breweries (trying to run a small brewery, or just working in Wetherspoons) or leatherworking (well, the other meaning of "leather" - the sex trade has also always been big here. But that's a different tour).

And they're all accidentally part of a history that goes back further than the park or the train station or the very idea of trains.

(Apologies for any typos. I think it's fairly obvious this is me doing my pointing and rambling, just online - I never wrote anything down, never had time to).
 
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scifisam said:
I'm not sure any of it's fascinating online, TBH and I always just sort of ramble and point at things and ask what people know then build on that.

The name is obvious - moreso now, obvs - but the reason there were so many weavers in the area was basically because it was just outside the city. That's where a lot of businesses that were noisy or smelly had to be done - hence tons of leatherworking businesses. Those could still sorta be seen until just ten years ago by the immense number of wholesale leather good sellers in the area; Hackney Rd and Brick Lane had about every third shop as a show, bag or general leather goods retailer - they weren't making the goods any more, but it's not a massive coincidence that an area that had a lot of tanneries had a lot of shoe wholesalers, and they continued for centuries after the tanneries were gone.

Weaving came centuries later, but it was connected. Weaving uses urine, not as much as leatherworking does, but it still uses it, mostly dying cloth, which was sometimes done towards the end stages of the process. Although weaving was practiced across the country, there were advantages to having some be near the City of London, ad on the east side near the old docks, especially expensive fabrics like silk. It reduced the odds of it being stolen on the way to or from other locations, and cut out some of the middlemen. It also favoured areas where it was fairly easy (legally and in terms of underlying geography) to build up rather than out.

I think everyone knows that weavers' cottages have high windows to get more light - which is why people still like them now, and why they can be excellent for filming. But the light - as film-makers also know - isn't the same throughout the day.

One time, at a National Trust event at a weaver's cottage on Fournier Street, I accidentally experience it first hand by taking my daughter early in the day and friends later in the day. It didn't just change how much light you got, but what colours you would choose to work with, because the differing amounts of UV light meant that a thread chosen at break of day would not look the same as at the end of the day. People would pay higher rates for clothing made with thread bought and used in one batch to minimise the chances of a weaver selecting the wrong colour.

Brewing, tanning and weaving generally went together as a trade, in cities at least. The brewers would use the good water, then the weavers, then the leatherworkers, then the people who lived there. That is a simplification, but not by much. It's one of the reason the East End and similar area had such high infant mortality rates - not just the lack of food, overcrowding, but the water. That's extra ironic since the source water was often relatively clean, and the assumption is it became dirty due to the insanitary conditions, but it's also partly because the clean water they had was being used for industry.

Anyway... so it's not a huge surprise that there are many historic breweries in the area around Weavers' Fields - a good ten minutes' walk, so not next door, but close enough to share resources. Everyone knows the brewery on Brick Lane, which was still a working brewery till 1989. If you ever go to the Asda on Mile End Rd ten minutes' walk awa, that's also on the grounds of a former brewery (which has a number of standing buildings, including my own home). If you go to the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel ten minutes in the other direction, it's next to the former Albion Brewery, where you can go for a GP appt in a capsuled room inside a building whose shell is mostly intact, but hidden - you can see the timber-frame and impressive woodwork as you lean down to the gap in the plastic to speak to the receptionist. You can have your liver tested in a place designed to destroy it.

So the people you sit with there might still be working in weaving - not just the hipsters: there are a lot of small Bengali-run clothes factories (my GF's Dad works in one), or breweries (trying to run a small brewery, or just working in Wetherspoons) or leatherworking (well, the other meaning of "leather" - the sex trade has also always been big here. But that's a different tour).

And they're all accidentally part of a history that goes back further than the park or the train station or the very idea of trains.

(Apologies for any typos. I think it's fairly obvious this is me doing my pointing and rambling, just online - I never wrote anything down, never had time to).
Click to expand...


That's well interesting scifisam, thanks!

We were taught that a reason for smelly work such as tanning to be in the east was the prevailing winds come from the west, which is why the posh houses are all to the west of The City, a pattern you see repeated across cities in the UK. Dunno what came first, the posh houses or smelly work, probably grew up together..?
 
Bahnhof Strasse said:
That's well interesting scifisam, thanks!

We were taught that a reason for smelly work such as tanning to be in the east was the prevailing winds come from the west, which is why the posh houses are all to the west of The City, a pattern you see repeated across cities in the UK. Dunno what came first, the posh houses or smelly work, probably grew up together..?
Click to expand...

That's interesting, the posh houses tend to be to the west in Worthing, and the sewage treatment works is in the east of the borough.
 
Bahnhof Strasse said:
That's well interesting scifisam, thanks!

We were taught that a reason for smelly work such as tanning to be in the east was the prevailing winds come from the west, which is why the posh houses are all to the west of The City, a pattern you see repeated across cities in the UK. Dunno what came first, the posh houses or smelly work, probably grew up together..?
Click to expand...
Someone was paying attention at the back of the Geogo class that day, then? :D
 
Bahnhof Strasse said:
That's well interesting scifisam, thanks!

We were taught that a reason for smelly work such as tanning to be in the east was the prevailing winds come from the west, which is why the posh houses are all to the west of The City, a pattern you see repeated across cities in the UK. Dunno what came first, the posh houses or smelly work, probably grew up together..?
Click to expand...
Glasgow is the same. The West End is posh the East End working class. The expansion of the West End was Victorian, and a response to industrialisation.
 
Favourite geographer:
%C3%89lis%C3%A9e_Reclus%2C_by_Nadar%2C_retouched.jpg
 
Oxbow lake fun fact; they form when a bend (meander) in a river gets tight and the river cuts through the neck, leading to the entrance and exit of the meander to silt up, leaving the oxbow lake. Eventually the lake will dry out as it has no way to replenish the water except precipitation, which isn't enough to sustain it. Once it dries out it is called a dead-lake, the French word for dead being mort is how they came to name the area between Putney and North Sheen in London. Having been taught this we all got on a bus from Clapham to go an have a look at it, it looked just like Clapham, Putney, Barnes, North Sheen and everywhere else in the area of course, no sign of a dead oxbow lake at all. Teachers in the 80's were fucking odd.
 
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Bahnhof Strasse said:
Favourite subject, by miles. Love an oxbow lake, me.
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Part of my childhood was watching one form in Rumney River, I am drawn to Rivers and it depresses the fuck out of me that after seeing the River I grew up next to clean up from a point where only eels and flatfish survived to being filled with trout and actually being able to see the bottom to now watching it get polluted by water companies and farmers who give no fuck
 
Bahnhof Strasse said:
. Teachers in the 80's were fucking odd.
Click to expand...

Well they were certainly shit at teaching you about apostrophes.

A personal bugbear. I'm about to teach you something that'll mean you never write 80's again.

Imagine if you were writing the word out. You wouldn't write eightie's. If you were writing 60s you wouldn't write sixtie's. Coz it's wrong and looks stupid.

Lesson over. You're welcome.
 
planetgeli said:
Well they were certainly shit at teaching you about apostrophes.

A personal bugbear. I'm about to teach you something that'll mean you never write 80's again.

Imagine if you were writing the word out. You wouldn't write eightie's. If you were writing 60s you wouldn't write sixtie's. Coz it's wrong and looks stupid.

Lesson over. You're welcome.
Click to expand...
Did you not notice the lack of commas in my previous post?....I feel left out
 
planetgeli said:
A personal bugbear. I'm about to teach you something that'll mean you never write 80's again.

Imagine if you were writing the word out. You wouldn't write eightie's. If you were writing 60s you wouldn't write sixtie's. Coz it's wrong and looks stupid.

Lesson over. You're welcome.
Click to expand...
I’ve worked in further education long enough to know that many people come out of secondary education into college and do indeed write things like “eightie’s”. In fact, in my experience the majority of people think apostrophes are just random ornamentation and up to the writer.
 
danny la rouge said:
Glasgow is the same. The West End is posh the East End working class. The expansion of the West End was Victorian, and a response to industrialisation.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I grew up in Ladywood near Edgbaston, widely considered the posh part of Birmingham, even though I was brought up in a three-bedroomed council house on an estate full of working-class families. I didn't think of that east/west explanation, but it makes sense.
 
planetgeli said:
Well they were certainly shit at teaching you about apostrophes.

A personal bugbear. I'm about to teach you something that'll mean you never write 80's again.

Imagine if you were writing the word out. You wouldn't write eightie's. If you were writing 60s you wouldn't write sixtie's. Coz it's wrong and looks stupid.

Lesson over. You're welcome.
Click to expand...


80 = eighty
80's= eighties

The apostrophe denoting the missing I & E.

Is my story and I'm sticking to it :hmm:
 
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SoMe oF ThE CoOl KiDs WrItE iN CaMel CaSe As WeLl!

Also The Ones Who Capitalise Every Sentence.

and those for whom capitalisation and even punctuation is an art that has sadly eluded them

(Also speaking as someone who works in FE)
 
danny la rouge said:
I’ve worked in further education long enough to know that many people come out of secondary education into college and do indeed write things like “eightie’s”. In fact, in my experience the majority of people think apostrophes are just random ornamentation and up to the writer.
Click to expand...

You can lead a horse to water an' all that.
 
planetgeli said:
You can lead a horse to water an' all that.
Click to expand...
Another one that amazes me is the number of people who don’t know what the letters after the numerals in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc are. Nobody has told them they correspond to the words firST, secoND etc. They think they’re random and probably there to cause confusion and trick them. So they’ll write 1th even when their mind is saying “first”. Seriously, it’s rife.
 
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