Family history and national portraits

One of the things we really wanted to do in London was an East End walk to see where my great grandparents, Woolf and Sarah Shineberg lived in the 1880s. The walk we had chosen was the Sunday morning 'Old Jewish Quarter' walk with London Walks so, despite quite heavy rain, we took the Underground to meet our guide, Shaughan at Tower Bridge station. Shaughan was our guide on a 'Jack the Ripper' walk on our 2004 trip to London so we were looking forward to seeing him in action again.

There were about ten of us on the walk, everyone with umbrellas but for two hardy Aussies with only Rainbird jackets and kangaroo skin 'sundowner' hats to keep off the rain. As we made our way to the East End, Shaughan told us about the history of the Jewish community in London, including the massacre of Jews who fled to the Tower of London in 1189 and the expulsion of Jews from England by Edward I in 1290. Our first stop was a visit to the Bevis Marks synagogue, built in 1701 by the Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese) Jewish community.

We continued on to Spitalfields where the Petticoat Market stallholders were packing up early because of the rain. Shaughan showed us several streets of tenement buildings which were originally built in the early eighteenth century for French Huguenot silk weavers who were fleeing persecution, then taken over by poor Irish immigrants, followed by Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews in the mid-nineteenth century and now by Bangladeshi immigrants.

We walked down Brick Lane, which was once full of Jewish traders but has now become known as 'Bangla Town' although there are still some Jewish names above shops. The former synagogue on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street may be where Woolf and Sarah were married in 1886 but it is now a mosque, complete with a minaret.

The silver minaret at the corner of the mosque
extends well beyond the top of this photo.

Detail of the former synagogue 

   

   Some statues, one at Spitalfields Market and the other in Trafalgar Square,
that I couldn't resist photographing!

Ian and I stayed on for a while in Brick Lane, taking photos and imagining what it would have been like when Woolf and Sarah lived there, before taking the Underground to Trafalgar Square to visit the National Portrait Gallery. We had a very relaxed lunch in the Portrait Restaurant with a great view over London, before spending an hour or two looking at portraits of Tudors, Stuarts and Victorians.

The view from our table at lunch

Some highlights were the portrait of the Bronte sisters painted by their brother Bramwell, a portrait of Charles Dickens as a young man suddenly famous after the publication of 'Pickwick Papers', a portrait of Samuel Pepys and a section on how portrait photography developed in the nineteenth century.

We walked home via the theatre district of Leicester Square and enjoyed the excitement of the crowds and the neon lights. We were also pleased to find a sign on the wall of 84 Charing Cross Road, referring to its renown as the site of the bookseller, Marks & Co and the subject of a book.