SW1H 9NE – Julia Webb-Harvey

Life is measured in time, the years passing. Events marked on a calendar, the photographs taken. They become the fabric of memories, laid in layers of the mind like sedimentary rocks. Fossil memories are excavated and examined – Do you remember when?

What happens to the buildings, the bricks, the stone, the dirt roads, the cobbled streets. Their imprints lie in archives, in documents, in maps. Who remembers them?

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Do you remember the day we moved to London? Two Dick Whittingtons embarking on a London life. It was the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, and we had no inkling that meant road closures. Somehow we sweet-talked our way to getting the Pickford’s van through a roadblock.

We were on 5^th and 6^th floors. A modern apartment block formed behind an Edwardian brick and terracotta façade on Matthew Parker Street. It was our home for eight years, a gap of census time in which we fell through. Except in deeds, there is no trace of us there.

We were eye-level to the back of Methodist Central Hall. Neither of us remember going in. It opened in 1908 as a memorial to John Wesleyan, credited with saving the souls of many an impoverished Cornish miner. Within the fabric of its building, community is woven in. It feels like a building greater than the sum of its parts. Funded by “the million guinea fund,” raising the money from a million investors. No single person was permitted to gift more than a guinea.

It wasn’t just a church but built for ‘great service for conferences on religious, educational, scientific, philanthropist and social questions.’

Meetings of the suffragette movement took place at Methodist Central Hall in 1914.

It housed the first meeting of the United Nations in 1946.

In 2006, we watched the mile long queue of wannabe Luna Lovegood’s line up along Tothill Street, emerging sobbing to their parents at the back door when they were deemed no good.

Methodist Central Hall erased the footprint of the Royal Aquarium, demolished in 1903 for being up to no good.

With hindsight it should have been obvious. The Aquarium was built as a place for amusement in 1876. A vast building; a Crystal Palace in the heart of London. It had a 100m long hall, roofed with iron and glass, with a theatre at one end, different rooms and large tanks that never held fish but once a housed a dead whale. The public didn’t subscribe to its lofty ideals, and instead of scientific lectures, art and classical concerts its directors veered to music hall, variety, the sensational, and exotic circus. By the 1890s the Aquarium was a place for unaccompanied ladies to promenade in search of male companionship. The Aquarium was deemed too risqué for Victorian morals and condemned.

Along the western edge of the Aquarium was Dartmouth Street, painted pink by Booth – mixed. Some comfortable others poor. At number 18 in 1860 a boy was born. Like us, his parents fell in the gap of the census; they were in Paddington when the census clerk came knocking. The boy’s father was a Park Constable, previously a soldier with the Scots Fusilier Guards. His mother is noted only for her name. Ten years later, aged 11, the boy would return to the area to enlist with the Scots Guards at Horseguards.

That boy was my Great Grandfather, William Vass.