Mornington Crescent

Mornington Crescent was built as a sweep of houses with gardens and tennis courts in front. Tenants paid a garden tax each year for the right to use the gardens, which were railed off and maintained as a private space for key holders only. At the beginning of the twentieth century the area, with large rooms suitable for studios, became popular with artists. Sickert lived at No 6, while Gore had lodgings in the Crescent and Gilman, another of the Camden Town Group, lived nearby in Cumberland Market.

1864	Whole Map	Full Map	Full Size Map in New Window
1896	Whole Map	Full Map	Full Size Map in New Window
1915	Whole Map	Full Map	Full Size Map in New Window

++Insert piece about artists moving in.

When Walter Sickert came back to London in 1905, after seven years abroad, mostly based in Dieppe, he became the doyen of a group of young painters. ‘They took their inspiration from the dingy streets and lodgings houses of Camden Town’.¹ Indeed one of Sickert’s most famous paintings is ‘The Camden Town Murder’, a sordid, but pitiful affair. It was not the only one. Ford Madox Ford tells the story of ‘The Euston Square Murder’². Borschitzky, his violin teacher, ‘came home late at night and found his landlady murdered in the kitchen. Being nearly blind he fell over the body, got himself covered in blood and as a foreigner and a musician was at once arrested by the police. ’He was acquitted but the publicity caused Euston Square to be renamed as Endsleigh Gardens, a name we shall hear again later.

The Camden Town artists painted the streets, the cafes, the gardens behind their lodgings, the public parks and the music halls. The Bedford Music Hall, in its worn Victorian red and gilt, was a favourite subject, especially of Sickert. Over the years, Sickert ran several painting schools in the area, which drew in other artists. There were links with the Bloomsbury Group through Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who both painted with them. The artists varied in their subjects and palettes, but they exhibited together and became a very influential group. Mornington Crescent Gardens were the subject of several paintings and drawings.

Mornington Crescent Gardens, 1913-14 by Gilman, 1913-14 ³

When first laying out their estates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ground landlords had realised that houses with gardens behind and private squares in front, would be more attractive than dense rows of terraced streets. To attract a ‘good quality’ of tenant and to continue to hold them, landlords laid down the maximum number of houses to be built per acre, the value of the properties to be erected, insisted on householders repainting the properties at regular intervals and made annual maintenance inspections. In addition many landlords laid out private gardens in squares, crescents or circles to give fresh air and green spaces near the houses. Householders paid a Garden Tax and were given a key to the private, railed garden in front of their houses. Purchasers valued the healthy living conditions, the open sky and the attractive trees. By the time that house building slowed down at the start of the First World War, there were said to be 40,000 ‘squares’ in Greater London, of all shapes and sizes.

As Camden Town went down, houses were let in floors and rooms, often with cooking facilities on landings. Tenants and sub-tenants moved in and out frequently, making the garden tax difficult to collect. The gardens were no longer maintained, tennis courts fell into disrepair and the Crescent became a wasteland. One man remembers as a young boy, walking across this rough ground from his home in Delancey Street to the Tolmer Cinema, at the corner of Euston Road and Hampstead Road, where the Tolmer Estate now stands, to see Tom Mix or Rin Tin Tin for a penny. Sometimes a small fair was held in the Gardens, or a travelling circus appeared. It became a village green, untended but friendly. After some years the site was boarded all round with poster hoardings. Slowly the news filtered out that the land, long regarded as public open space, had been bought by some unknown developer. This caused a great public outcry and linked Mornington Crescent Gardens to the far wider campaign for public open spaces.

Building operations at Endsleigh Gardens, Euston Road, c. 1928.

St Pancras Church can be seen in the distance.⁴

Mornington Crescent was only one of the many squares and crescents under threat by developers in the 1920s. Another was Endsleigh Gardens, opposite Euston Station. It had been an open space full of trees, but was now lost to the public. This is the block which now contains the Friends’ Meeting House. Coram Fields and many other green lungs were under similar threat.

In April 1928, ‘New Health’, a periodical which fought for open spaces in cities and the health which they could bring, was up in arms about the planned loss of Mornington Crescent Gardens. Fresh air was the sole known cure for killer diseases such as tuberculosis. Streptomycin, which emptied our TB hospitals in the early sixties, was thirty years away. New Health contrasted the trees and open space with the effect of a new factory on the area.

Captions from ‘New Health’

Pictures of Mornington Crescent, with hoardings and during development

The New Health article went on to demand that all new factory building should be outside London as there was plenty of room in the countryside and London needed its open spaces to give the population fresh air and health. It was partly this thinking which would begin to empty Camden Town of manufacture thirty years later, well after Mornington Crescent Gardens had been built over and, incidentally, just when Streptomycin was beginning to solve the Tuberculosis problem.

The Carreras 'Black Cat' Factory

In 1927, when the factory was being designed, interest in Egyptian history was widespread. Lord Carnarvon had discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen a few years earlier and a number of 'Egyptian' buildings were being erected at this time, including the Hoover factory on the A40 into London and a cinema in Essex Road. The association with Black Cat cigarettes, then a popular brand, related to an earlier period in the Company history. A Spanish nobleman by the name of Carreras, banished from his country, set up in London's Wardour Street and began trading as a tobacconist/herbalist. He had a black cat which, on sunny days, sat in the window of his shop. Londoners wishing to buy tobacco used to ask cab drivers to take them to the tobacconist's shop in Wardour Street with the black cat in the window, because the name Carreras was difficult to pronounce. Thus the Black Cat name became famous. The combination of the Egyptian theme and the Black Cat, led to the Egyptian Cat Goddess, Bast and helped decide the system of decoration. Local people still call the building the Black Cat Factory.

The new factory was to be enormous - the largest reinforced-concrete factory in the country. Five floors would completely fill the gardens. Not an inch was to be left and everything green would disappear.

Five deep light wells were to penetrate the building, bringing light and air to the interior, while the top floor was to have north-facing lights, so that heat would not build up in strong sunshine.

The huge factory built over the valuable garden space of Mornington Crescent,
Camden Town, N. London.

Note, on left, the original houses overshadowed by its bulk

Pictures of the building under construction show three tall steel towers, the forerunners of our modern tower cranes, and huge walls of wooden shuttering for the concrete. Trams and buses with outside staircases pass along Hampstead Road. When built, the whole of the exterior (except the coloured parts) were rendered in white cement and sand to give a warm stone-coloured finish. The brilliant Egyptian decorations were produced by mixing ground glass with cement and grinding off. Thus the colours were permanent and, when dirty, could be washed.

Whole Plan	Full Plan	Full Size Plan in New Window

New Factory for Messrs, Carreras Ltd., Hampstead Road NW1
Architects, M.E. and O.H. Collins .Contractors, Sir Robert Mc Alpine & Sons.

The First Reactions

In 1928, the reviewer in 'Building' was very doubtful about the design of the factory. The idea of dressing up a modern factory as an Egyptian temple was disturbing, but the mass of the building, its form and general composition, were unexpectedly beautiful. He closed his eyes to the decoration and looked at the building beneath. The 'sense of beauty' given by the gentle inward slope of the walls, typical of  Egyptian building, is particularly satisfying.

Of course, the inside walls are vertical, as with Egyptian mud-brick building, but from the outside they slope inwards, gradually tapering in thickness to the top. An inward slope, or batter, is very rare in reinforced-concrete work, but when we see the factory today, with the Egyptian fancy dress gone, we see the building as the reviewer in Building imagined it and so can judge it on architectural merits alone. The reviewer too was very impressed with the beauty of the vast concrete interiors, 'unplastered and straight from the shuttering (just stoned down and white-washed over)’.  Although he did not know it, this as an early example of New Brutalism, but the coloured decoration protected it from that name at the time.

The new Carreras factory about 1929, in all its Egyptian finery

The History of the Rothman Tobacco Firm

The modern firm of Rothman had been founded by Bernhard Baron, who had come to England from Kiev, via the United States. There is an old news film about the opening of the Carreras factory which seems to be from another age. It records the opening ceremony and shows Baron being greeted by a vast crowd. Apparently almost all the 3,000 workers, mostly women, are waving at him. Other pictures show them crowding into the main doors on a working day in such numbers that the scene looks like Wembley five minutes before the kick off.
 
The original silver nitrate film has been transferred to video, silent and jerky. Short panels of text say:-