London: the last piece

This is yet another post inspired by Diamond Geezer.  On 19th January, the eponymous geezer blogged about the Tube Map jigsaw he’d got for Christmas.  I’ve also done that jigsaw, three times, encountering the same problem that a sizeable proportion of the pieces are just plain white.  On two occasions I lost a piece before finishing, and on the third I got bored and got a friend to finish it for me.

In the comments, someone mentioned the existence of the A–Z of London jigsaw.  I’d never heard of this; naturally, I ordered it.  A few days later Royal Mail failed to deliver it, and a few days after that, it came.  I then encountered a similar (if less utterly soul-destroying) problem to the one I faced with the Tube Map puzzle.  While all the pieces had an identifiable pattern, there’s nothing distinctive about them.  My attempt to finish the jigsaw without looking at the box was quickly abandoned, and I got bored; the jigsaw, for most of the last term, lay unfinished on my desk.  But with help from a couple of friends, the jigsaw was finally completed.  Here it is:

Returning to Diamond Geezer, on 20th January, the blog’s author, having finished the jigsaw, visited the location of the last piece.  I decided to do the same with my jigsaw.  Here’s the last piece I inserted:

And here it is on a map of London:

So that’s just south-east of Whitechapel station, in the East End.  It’s just to the east of the Royal London Hospital, but no part of the hospital is on the piece.  In fact, the piece misses almost every nearby feature of note, which probably, in part, explains why it was the last one.  Well, I went there anyway.

The area is dominated by the Sidney Street Estate—a housing complex, rather bleak in appearance, with huge unadorned brick walls and towers of long, narrow balconies.  The remainder of the area is mostly either warehouses or modern, with the only properly quaint old houses I found being on Raven Row, the little east-west street in the top-left of the square.  That’s rather extra, being cobbled and everything—although, just within the notch of the piece, a digger was digging up the road surface, so let’s hope that’s not a permanent change.

There are two specific buildings marked on the jigsaw piece: one is a school on Cavell Street, and the other a library within the estate.  The school (which I forgot to take a picture of) looks more like an office or warehouse, and that’s because it is: at least, above ground level, where numerous small businesses trade (including something behind a mysterious door labelled “The Beautiful Meme”).  The school itself is a private FE college founded in 2006, offering Higher National Diplomas fundable through Student Finance, with a complex of underground lecture theatres.  So, not a school.

The “library”, meanwhile, is not a library either, as you can see:

This one at least could claim to have been a library in the past, but it closed either “nearly” or “over” 15 years ago, depending on which part you read of the planning document that describes how it’s to be knocked down and replaced by affordable housing completely out-of-keeping with the surrounding buildings.  (Although I guess we should be pleased that it’s affordable housing at all.)  This happened because Tower Hamlets decided in the last decade to close all of its libraries and replace them with so-called “Idea Stores”.  So I decided to visit the nearest one, in Whitechapel—I reasoned that it was spiritually in the area of the jigsaw piece, even if not in the actual physical location.  Location is relative, anyway.

This is what it looks like:

Oh dear.  I’m not sure who decided that an escalator on the street in a city, not to be blocked off when the library is closed, was a good idea.  But the building itself is modern, if a little spartan.  Inside, despite the name, it’s essentially just a library, though it does have a well-used café on the top floor.  And being run by a modern council, it wants to keep the local populace fit when they go to use it, so it has little signs telling you how many calories you’ll burn per floor if you walk up the stairs.  I took the lift.

I went to the top floor myself because there was ostensibly a gallery.  It was quite small, but its current display was an interesting collection of historical and recent photographs of “Old Flo”.  More properly called Draped Seated Woman 1957–58, she’s a Henry Moore sculpture of a woman; her body is realistic, draped in cloth, though her facial features, in typical Moore style, are highly abstracted.  She’s one of seven identical casts; the six others (who only have the boring title) are on display in the UK, Germany, Belgium, the US, Australia and Jerusalem.¹  Old Flo’s story, meanwhile, is a bit complicated.

She was sold (at minimal price) by the artist in 1962 to the then London County Council, to go in their Stifford Estate, back when councils still had money to spend on making their affordable housing more than minimally functional.  There she remained until the 1990s, when the tower blocks, once seen as the future of housing, and a vast improvement on the slums they replaced, had become all but slums themselves, and were due to be demolished.  Her owner—Tower Hamlets Council, after two successive administrative reorganisations—loaned her to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (which, despite its being in my home county, I’ve managed never to visit).  And then Lutfur Rahman got in.

Rahman was the first directly elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets, and he decided he wanted to sell the sculpture to raise money for the borough.  There were protests, in light of which researchers from the Museum of London discovered that the statue might actually belong to the London Borough of Bromley.  I’ll spare you all the legal details, but if you’re interested in that sort of thing Wikipedia has a good summary.  It boils down to the fact that in fact Bromley should have owned Old Flo—which meant that, in loaning her to the YSP, Tower Hamlets council had acted unlawfully.  However, because Bromley did nothing about it for six years after that act, the statue was now owned by Tower Hamlets.  Dodgy af, you might say, but that’s where the law stood, and so there was nothing anyone could do to stop Rahman selling the statue.

Except—talking of acting unlawfully, in the interim Rahman had been found guilty of electoral fraud, and deposed.  The new mayor decided he didn’t want to sell the statue after all.  And so Old Flo was brought back to the borough.  Here she is:

The statue is still surrounded by tower blocks, but of a very different kind.  Far from enriching the lives of Tower Hamlets’ poorer inhabitants, Flo now stands in this divided borough’s richest portion, the Canary Wharf development.  Since she sits in Cabot Square, but, as most of the estate is connected underground to the stations, those most likely to see her are those lucky financial employees who are still able to have proper breaks, rather than eat lunch “al desko”.

And of course, this is all now very tenuously connected to a jigsaw piece.  But if I’d never been to the jigsaw piece, and if the library there hadn’t have closed, I’d never have gone to the Idea Store, and I’d never have tracked down Old Flo.  And Old Flo has a tenuous connection to my background, because Henry Moore, her sculptor, is from Leeds, and I’ve spent many hours in exhibitions at the Henry Moore Institute there.  Like in a jigsaw,  everything is connected.

¹ I’m pretty sure I’ll make somebody angry if I give any answer for which country Jerusalem is in.  The statue is in West Jerusalem, if that makes any difference to you.