|
Settings for No Cure for Love |
Warehouses in Wapping High Street
 Old Warehouses in Wapping High Street.
This is a picture of one of the old warehouses that lined Wapping high street. Ships would draw up along side and offload their cargo straight into the warehouse. As you can see, they have been converted into smart apartments but when Ellen and Josie O'Casey walked home passed these wharfs they wouldn't have been able to see the river other than through the narrow alley ways that ran between the buildings. The air too would have been full of the smells, of spices, fresh cut timber and tea brought from all around the world. I remember as a child that as you walked down the High Street you could still smell the spices that must have impregnated themselves into the joist and beams of the old warehouses.
|
The type of shops that would have lined Ratcliffe Highway
 The type of shops that would have lined Ratcliffe Highway
This picture I actually took in Spitalfield some two miles north of the dock area but it shows the type of houses and shops that lined the notorious Radcliffe Highway. Ellen and Josie would have shop here, Watney Street or maybe up by ‘the Waste’, an old open market on the main road into London, for their daily food. The Greek style porticos of the London hospital stood just to the east of the old market and Robert would have walked under it when he met Ellen buying vegetables in the market.
|
The London Hospital
 The Front of the London Hospital
This is the front of the London Hospital it appears much the same today as it would have done to Robert as he approached the hospital. The London Hospital sat on the main road to Essex that ran right past the front of the hospital now the A11.
|
What's left of Anthony Street.
 What's left of Anthony Street.
In No Cure for Love, Ellen, Josie and Bridget live at 2 Anthony Street. This is the actual house where I was born and it is just as I described it, a one up and one down, corner cottage with a minute back yard. I'm sad to say that, as you can see from the picture to the right, this is all that is left of Anthony Street, it hasn't even got it's name on the wall now and it is now cut across as are the adjoining street by an new development.
|
The Site of Paddy's Goose.
 The Site of Paddy's Goose.
From studying old maps and accounts this is as near as I can get to the place where the White Swan, Paddy’s Goose stood. It is no more, although ironically, a large off license trades there now. This was a notorious public house and Henry Mayhew mentions it in his London Labour and The Labouring Poor. In No Cure for Love, Paddy’s Goose is owned and frequented by Danny Donavan. This is riotous public house where Robert rescued Ellen from the drunken audience.
|
One of the Old Alleyways
 One of the Old Alleyways
This is an example of the narrow alleyways that threaded their way across the whole area. Just wide enough for a cart to pass through. This one is just off the Mile End Road at Stepney Green. Although it looks quite airy now, in Robert's day, when he was inspecting it for the water supplies and sewage it would have had houses rising on both sides.
|
Not all of the East London residents lived in poverty.
 No all of the East London residents lived in poverty.
Finally, in contrast to where Ellen and her family lived, these are the large, four and five story family houses in Stepney Green. It was to these houses that Ellen and Bridget trudged each day to collect dirty laundry. They will also feature in the sequel to No Cure for Love, A Glimpse at Happiness.
|
|
