The London Journal

Volume 29 No.1 2004

ABSTRACTS

It has long been claimed that the first coffee-house in London was that of Pasqua Rosee in St Michael's Alley, Cornhill, in 1652. This essay surveys the hitherto available sources for this claim, and observes that the claim derives from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarian evidence, all of it recorded some decades after the events described, as an act of recollection. When the coffee-house first became an object of historical interest in the 1690s, this antiquarian construction of Rosee's Coffee-house was established as authoritative, and has been widely repeated since in the twentieth century. Using archival evidence from vestry minutes and other parish and city records (primarily in the Guildhall Library and the Corporation of London Records Office), this essay establishes on firmer foundations the history of the first London coffee-house. Vestry minutes record the granting of leases to Rosee and his partner Christopher Bowman, from which the particular location of the coffee-house can be established. The essay argues that the early coffee-house was closely associated with the coffee-drinking culture of the London merchant elite, especially those associated with the Levant Company. By the Restoration, Bowman's coffee-house was one of many, and a celebrated part of the social life of London in the 1660s. Nonetheless, by the time Bowman's coffee-house was destroyed in the Fire, its importance had been eclipsed by the Elford's Coffee-house in Exchange Alley.

The rapid expansion of areas south of the Thames over the course of the Victorian period was paralleled by the construction of new urban identities for 'South London'. Drawing primarily upon newspaper and other written sources, this article explores emerging representations of Victorian south London. It focuses on two key periods: from the mid-1850s to the mid-1860s, when it is possible to trace the birth of a local consciousness of 'South London' as a distinct entity, with its own significant shared challenges and interests over and against the rest of the city; and the 1890s, when south London was 'discovered' and constituted as a particular problem by social investigators and external agencies eager to differentiate it from competing arenas of intervention in the metropolis. The article suggests that a 'South London consciousness' failed to emerge as a suffieciently cohesive force to reshape urban development in the 1850s and 1860s and to wrestle resources from the remainder of London. It is argued that the consequences of this were central to representations of south London in the 1890s and that they continued to haunt depictions of London 'across the bridges' well into the twentieth century.

The development of the ready-made clothing industry has been assumed to be a consequence of the invention of the sewing machine in the 1850s, and the spread of multiple retailing to follow from that. This article focuses on the innovating entrepreneurs in this branch of the textile industry, Elias Moses & Son of Aldgate, London, to show how mass-marketing of men's wear grew vigorously during the previous decade. The firm's enterprise was presaged by some external developments in the early decades of the nineteenth century, notably the standardisation of tailors' cutting systems, the decline in cloth prices with the rise of cut-price drapers, growing demand for basic clothing for the forces, emigrants and institutional uniforms, badly-paid immigrant workers and rising real incomes of the population at large.

The favourable circumstances allowed the innovators to prosper on low labour costs, high turnover linked to long runs and modest margins, and all the razzmatazz of high-pressure selling, above all saturation of the market with advertising material and spectacular buildings and displays. It appears that quality was maintained within the segmented production lines and that Moses and several of their rivals sold wholesale as well as retail. Moses were quickly copied not only in London but also in a number of provincial cities.

Elias Moses was sure that his enterprise amounted to a revolution in the clothing industry and in conclusion his claim is examined as an historical proposition. Jewish entrepreneurs were more willing to break the mould of long-established restrictive practices in the London industry. The economies introduced by the sewing machine were much less significant than has been assumed because sewing was only a small part of production costs. The larger cost was marketing, which Moses reduced before proceeding to the new techology.

This case study identifies the contribution to the regeneration of late 19th and early 20th century London made by the brothers Davis. Originating in Whitechapel, six sons of Wolf Davis, a self-made furrier, prospered by building flats and workshops primarily designed for the Jewish community over a wide swathe of the inner East End.Working singly or in partnerships of two, they pooled expertise and financial and other resources, enabling Abraham Davis to transcend the failure of an ill-conceived market project in Spitalfields. He shared the interest of his brother Israel Davis in cinema construction, but was the only one of the brothers to continue in the promotion of residential building beyond c.1909, frequently acting as his own architect. Of the brothers he has made the greatest impact on the continuing London streetscape, with projects originating after this time. From about 1908 he initiated a web of companies and public utility societies (including the London Housing Society and the Lady Workers' Homes) which promoted soundly-built blocks of flats in St Pancras, Maida Vale and St John's Wood and exploited subsidised government housing finance, especially post-1919. A borough councillor in St Pancras, up to the time of his death he took a leading part in post-1919 public housing construction in the borough. Whereas his brothers were speculative builders and no more, Abraham Davis's career is unusual among builders in adding a dimension of public benefit.


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