Welcome to the London History Podcast.
I am Hazel Baker from londonguidedwalks.co.uk.
Step back in time with us as we journey into the heart of
London's 7 Dials in the 1920s and 1930s, a neighborhood unlike
any other, bursting with colour, diversity and drama.
In this episode, we uncover the untold stories and simmering
tensions that define 7 Dials, as it became a crossroads for
migrant communities, working class families and bohemian
nightlife. Here, vibrant cafes rubbed
shoulders with jazz clubs and market stalls, while the spectre
of urban improvement threatened to reshape everything familiar.
I am thrilled to be joined by Professor Matt Holbrook, a
leading authority in cultural history and professor at
University of Birmingham. Today, we're here to dive into
his latest work, Songs of Seven Dials, an intimate history of
1920s and 1930s London. Drawing on vibrant archival
research, the book explores the untold history of Seven dials
through the lens of remarkable residents and the turbulent
events that shape their lives. Professor Holbrook guides us
through the struggles over race, class, identity, and the
contested making of modern London.
Welcome, Matt. Thank you very much for having
me. It's a pleasure to be here.
And this is one of the eras that we don't very often cover in
London History Podcast, mainly because I think it's one of
those areas that we don't really consider it history.
It was 100 years ago, but it still doesn't feel mentally that
long. Yeah, I think that's really
interesting. We've perhaps, it feels very
familiar to us that a lot of the things, a lot of the things that
we take for granted today, from Britain's state to the mass
democracy through to different kinds of nightlife and mass
culture came into being in the 1920s and the 1930s.
And when we look at pictures, colour pictures, moving
pictures, even of the period, it all just looks, It looks closer
than perhaps it is. In lots of ways that's what got
me interested in the period. I think it's been overlooked by
historians, like popular histories until very recently,
misunderstood as well, if it hasn't been overlooked.
And I think there's one of the things that I'm trying to, one
of the things that I've tried to do in my career in this book is
just another example of that is to try and think about how try
and think about how so much of what we take for granted about
modern Britain actually came into being in the 20s and 30s.
That if it looks familiar, it doesn't really seem 100 years
ago. That's because it's the moment
at which our world started to come into being and be
recognisably modern in many ways.
And what drew you particular to the area of Seven Dials?
There are different ways that to answer that question.
I think the book songs of seven Dials is about it takes as its
starting point a libel trial in which Sierra Leonean Cafiona
called Jim Kitten and his wife Amy Kitten.
He's born in the very very poor neighborhood in the East End of
London. Do a unemployment right wing
newspaper called John Bull for libel after the newspaper
published in a series of really horrible racist articles about
their cafe 1920s. And I think what struck me the
case is on the one hand, it's really the presence of a couple
like Jim and Emily Kitten in a place like 7 Dials is completely
normal. It's ordinary in the 1920s and
the 1930s. But there's an extraordinary
part story, which is that they, which is that they do take that
kind of unusual step pursuing a national newspaper for Libor.
And then the case, their cafe generates questions in the
housing of the Parliament, questions to the Home Secretary,
Sir William Johnson Hicks, about the regulation of London's
nightlife, but also crucially about whether or not there is a
kind of a colour bar at work in Britain and the British Empire.
And so I suppose I came to 7 Dials from a roundabout route.
I wanted to understand the cafe. I wanted to understand how
something mundane ended up becoming so remarkable and
turned out after kind of many years of working and thinking
about the case. It turned out that understanding
the libel trial and understanding why this cafe and
not others generate questions in Parliament actually takes you to
a very local history about urban improvement by gentrification,
about the clash between rich and poor and this sort of battle to
define what modern London will be.
How did 7 dials differ from other parts of London at the
time then with in terms of diversity and community spirit?
7 tiles is really interesting it's one of the running jokes
amongst authors of various sort of Agatha Christie and people
like that in the 20s is that no one really knows where 7 tiles
is. They often there's a kind of a
line in Agatha Christie's novel The Seven Tiles Mystery, where a
character just assumes or thinks that 7 darted in the East End.
I think that's revealing. The Seven darts is clearly they
in the heart, the West End sandwich between Covent Garden,
Soho and Bloomsbury. But in many ways in the 1920s
and the 1930s, its population, its kind of character is much
more like Limehouse or somewhere like that.
It's mostly working class. Its population is exceptionally
diverse. It has residents and small
business owners from across Britain and Ireland and France
or Belgium or Eastern Europe across the British Empire.
It's a place of small workshop shops and ET houses and cafes
and actually quite big factories are making metal pipework or
boxes or bents or glues. I think in the context of London
as a whole isn't necessarily that distinctive.
What makes it stand out and what in many ways makes it I think,
feel and appear like an island in the middle of the West End.
If all of these things are taking place so close to the
centre of kind of mass culture and consumerism in London.
And that I think is what makes it quite distinctive.
Crime writers often talk about often talk about how they can
ace the change in the air as they cross into 7 Diles
precincts. And that's that's OSD license,
of course, and people and goods objects move in and out of seven
dials all the time. But I think it does does hint a
bigger truth that by the time of the 1910s and the 1920s, seven
Dials is it's almost the kind of an island in the heart of a
stand. It's the place where it's like
the backstage to the front stage of Theatre land.
It's the place where the porters who work at Covent Garden Market
live rather than work. I think that's what makes it
interesting. Now you mentioned this libel
trial in 1927 with the cafe owner.
Why was it such a turning point for the neighborhood?
Yeah, I don't think it's a turning point in a good way.
It's a but I think the best way of thinking about the libel
trial is as a moment at which a lot of conflicts, simmering
conflicts and bubble over and come to a head.
So 7 dials at the start, at the end of the First World War, 7
dials poor, it's working class and it's declining.
So it's an area which is still carrying the legacies of its
reputation as a Victorian slum. At the same time, in that kind
of giddy period after the First World War, the kind of the West
End is expanding. So property developers,
theatrical entrepreneurs are looking for places to build new
theatres, new office blocks, new department stores.
And at the same time also Covent Garden Market had run out of
space. And so market traders looking
for warehousing and wholesale space and they start to Look
North at 7 dials. So what begins to happen, and I
think the kind of the conflict around Jim and Emily Kitten's
Cafe is, is as property developers and politicians start
to get big ideas about what 7 tiles might become.
Property is cheap, it's close to the West End, it's close to
Covent Garden as it just looks like a really good opportunity
to develop this working class area in ways that would
transform it, a kind of Plaza to rival Piccadilly Circus for
example. So that's the kind of, I think
the underlying conflict, the sort of desire of property
developers and politicians to turn a place of work and home
into a kind of space of upscale consumerism or office work.
I think. What happens in the libel trial
is that these kind of tensions become bound up with kind of
particular local conflicts within the neighborhood.
And the series of articles published by the newspaper John
Bull are really part of a bigger campaign to push working class
community, particularly black working class communities, out.
Seven dials. And I think one way of reading
the libel trial, partly Jim and Emily Kitten are trying to
protect their reputation than their business, though the
articles in John Bull just destroyed their takings over the
course of 1926. But they're also in many ways
trying to stand up or or to protect a really important black
social, black and Asian social hub in the central London.
So how did issues of race and mention the colour bar shape
everyday life in seven dials during this period?
That's a really good question. I think there are two different
ways of answering that question about the colour.
Part 1 is when Jim and Emily couldn't set up the Cafe and
begin to cater for a clientele, a really diverse clientele that
includes loads of people who live and work in $7.00 itself,
but also back an Asian sailors or students or jazz music
students from across London. What they're doing is trying to
create a sort of social space in the context of kind of a
commercial nightlife where things are increasingly
difficult for black and aging. There's a kind of moment during
the race World War where to fight the war, Britain summons
up the kind of the people and the resource of the empire, and
many thousands of black and Asian people respond to that
call, serving in the Merchant Navy, for example.
But there's also then really virulent post war reaction, a
racist reaction against the black.
And as you present in Britain, the most obvious example of that
are the kind of the violent race riots.
What are called race riots in 1919, which take place in port
towns and cities across Britain. Normally started by white
sailors, normally to do with sort of competition over over
jobs in the shipping industry. But in the aftermath of those
riots, there's a growing effort by the government and also a
whole range of media entrepreneurs to to define black
and Asian Britons as somehow alien or unwanted or other an
alien presence in a land where they don't belong.
Now that's true. The black and Asian British
citizen, the vampire, have the right to live and work in
Britain. But there's a growing effort
here in the 1920s to push them out, to exclude them from
Britain, both legally and also through the kind of newspaper
articles that's sort of really virulent newspaper rhetoric that
you see in the newspaper John Ball.
So I think the cafe in a way is the kind of commercial, cultural
response to political change and legislative change in a period
when it's increasingly difficult for black and Asian Britain is
to find somewhere to socialize, to gather, to stay or to drink
or to eat. This is a kind of home from
home. And it's quite clear from, it's
quite clear from reading the testimony of the cafe's
customers. That's how they experience it.
There's nowhere else that will let them relax in quite the same
way, and that's why you become so popular.
But the cafe itself is a response to the colour bar.
At the same time. I think the way that the cafe is
greeted, it very quickly becomes the focus of why intrusive
patrolling from police officers based the Bay Street police
station a few minutes away. It attracts hostile attention of
newspapers like John Ball who see it as a den of vice and an
iniquity that should be removed from the heart of London.
So the kind of the focus on the cafe is a problem as a centre of
crime and vice reflects the kind of wider rhetoric, the wider
moral panic around race nationality in Britain in the
1920s. Continuing on from what you were
saying about the cafe creating cultural hub, how did the clubs,
cafes or the nightlife influence the culture and reputation of
Seven Dials? Yeah, 7 dials in the context of
seven dials. The cafe, it's one of the few
venues that run by a black business owner, but it's it's
alongside cafes, restaurants, ET houses, butchers and other shops
run by Eastern European Jewish migrants, by recent migrants
from across Italy, increasingly from people who have left Greece
and Cyprus in the 1930s. But it's a neighborhood cafe.
These are all neighborhood eating places.
They never really make it into the pages of urban guidebooks or
by Decker. You don't get restaurant critics
or even intrepid urban slummers going to the cafes and eating
houses of $7.00 in the way that they do to Soho.
But these are all places that that cater for their local
community. Be that people from the Italian
community coming to gather and exchange news and gossip with
their compatriots, be they black or Asian sailors and students
passing through Britain, coming for Jim and Emily kittens, rice
and Curry and afternoon tea. This is just this is part of the
hustle and bustle of everyday life in the working class area.
They do have an effect on how the neighborhood is understood.
I think the important thing about $7.00 in the 20s and 30s
is that the way that people talk about it and think about it,
from newspaper proprietors, journalists to police and
politicians, is defined by $7.00 of history of the Victorian
slum, one of the poorest parts of London, associated with crime
and vice and poverty and depravity from the 18th century
through the end of the 19th century.
Now 7 Darts isn't quite like that.
By the 1910s and the 1920s, it's becoming increasingly
respectable, even the same time as all the buildings begin to
decay and fall apart. But the way that people look at
it is still shaped by this, the idea that it's somehow, it's
somehow a dark spot at the centre of London.
And that's really important. I think what the raids on the
Kittens Cafe do, what the raids on clubs run by Russian or
Italian entrepreneurs do, is slowly reinforce the sense that
7 tiles is a dodgy, disreputable neighborhood on the edges of the
West End. So every time there's a raid on
a nightclub on Great Saint Andrews St., every time there's
a prosecution that relates to somebody, one of Jim and Emily
Kitten's customers, it's reported in the news.
And they kind of the effect of these of this drip RIP of
newspaper reporting is to cement a particular image of Seven
Dials. There's a problem that needs to
be fixed. And in lots of ways that
reporting and the prosecution of the night life sort of it, it
plays into the hands of property developers and politicians.
Like they see an opportunity in Seven Dials, an opportunity for
gentrification, opportunity for to make money in Seven Dials.
And the more that it's defined as a problem by newspaper
reporting and court cases, the stronger the case they can make
for either redeveloping the whole area or demolishing the
whole thing and rebuilding it from scratch.
Yeah, when you were mentioning about that drip, drip, it's
about the history of Seven Dials and how it reveals about what it
reveals about the early forms of gentrification in London.
Everything seemed to be pointing in one particular direction.
By 1910 it was tidying itself up, Communities were being
created and yet there's a big clash now from existing and then
this gentrification that's going to be forced upon them by
eradicating certain problems. Yeah, exactly.
The big moment, I think one of the defining moments is around
19191920 when politicians and planners from Holborn Borough
Council put forward these grand plans to demolish 7 dials and
build it again. And the idea is that out of this
sort of tangle of courts and yards and streets that it will
create a grand Plaza that will rival Piccadilly Circus and
there will be 5 dials. There will be these big
thoroughfares where cars can speed through.
There will be these monumental island blocks where there will
be offices, department stores. That $7.00 will become what
Kingsway became a decade or so earlier.
And these are these clans are launched a great fanfare in
1920. Now, of course, they come to
nothing. They quickly run up against the
problem that there's very little money local government in London
at the start of the 1920s. There's not enough funding to
make the plants happen. They get bogged down in the sort
of the Byzantine conflicts between the London County
Council, Westminster Borough Council to the South and Hobart,
and then they fizzle away. But there's a period between
1920 and still in the late 1920s when everyone just assumes that
Seven Dots is going to be demolished and go completely.
And I think that's the really important context for for what
happens around the cafe. That's a sort of signal for
theatrical entrepreneurs or property developers or hotel
owners to look at $7.00 as a place where they can make money,
that they know it's going to be redeveloped.
There are these grand plans that do something with it.
So that is a place where it makes sense for them to invest.
And you can see that playing out for a period of several years
when estate agents advert every time they advertise one of the
corner blocks on the $7.00 itself for sale.
They will talk quite explicitly about how this is a big
development opportunity, particularly because of the
grand plans for changing the area.
When those are, those plans collapse by the late 1920s and
Holborn Council becomes more interested in Bloomsbury, the
area around the founding hospital, as a kind of a site
for preservation and redevelopment.
I think what happens is 7 Doors is quietly forgotten, but
there's no sense, no vision for what it should be.
It just becomes a problem to manage through public health
intervention by looking at the state of buildings by police, so
on. And so it just continues to
decline gradually all the way through to the 1960s and the
1970s, where there's another grand plan to redevelop Covent
Garden and Severn Dials, another moment when politicians want to
demolish the whole area and start again, but at that point,
a successful campaign to preserve this sort of historic
quarter of central London. So what were some of the biggest
myths about 7 dials in popular imagination and and also how
does your research challenge them?
When historians think about 7 Dials, they might think about
two things. Either that moment between its
17th century foundation and the late 19th century where a ground
land development turns into a notorious slum.
Or they might skip forward to the period since the 1970s when
housing activists, preservationists, local
communities fought a successful campaign to preserve 7 dials
from the attention of the Greater London Council.
And then seven dials became the kind of gentrified, upscale
consumerist paradise that it is today.
And what I wanted to do? Guess in the book was to look at
the bit in between those two moments and think about what's
going on in seven dials in the 1920s and the 1930s, because
it's not really something that's a part of popular history, the
area. But I think if we start to look
closely at 7 dials in the 20s and 30s, it gives us a way of
understanding dangers that are taking place across London in
this period. And I think that was the main
thing for me writing this book about 7 dials, not so much the
challenge myths about the area itself, but to challenge some of
the pervasive myths that still govern how we think about the
1920s and 30s and their place in modern British history.
How did the local and national newspapers shape the perception
of Seven dials, both within London and beyond?
Because I know whenever I look at history, I always jump on to
what the newspapers were saying, but that doesn't necessarily
give me an overall viewpoint. Yeah, if you look at newspaper
reports of seven dials in the period that I've looked at it,
you would very much get the the sense that it was a declining
slum. A lot of reports of court cases,
some attention to the grand plans to redevelop the era in
the early 1920s, but then not very much actually after that.
I suppose one of the interesting things I talked before about how
often 7 dials was disappeared from view in 1920s and 30s.
And that happens in newspapers to quite a striking degree.
It's often the kind of shorthand labels that people used to do
that journalists used to describe it.
They often treat it as part of Soho, part of Covent Garden, as
sort of part of the fringes of Blues Gray.
And I think one of the things that I wanted to do in the book
is to show how it is a very distinctive area that that it
seeps into all of these better known neighborhoods around it.
But there's something very distinctive about 7 Dials in
terms of its population, in terms of the balance between
residential community and the kind of the businesses, the
manufacturing business that are taking place there.
And also it's cosmopolitan of them.
I think that isn't necessarily something you get a sense of
from really contemporary newspapers.
Are they any personal stories or characters from your research
that really particularly struck you or stayed with you?
Yeah, there's one place actually, and the people who
inhabit it that really stick with mate.
So the place is Small Tenement 5, Lumber Court, which is just
tucked away behind the main streets in Seven Dials.
And Lumber Court is probably one of the poorest areas of Seven
Dials from the 19th century onwards.
When Child's Booth session investigated passed through
there in the 1890s, they're struck by the presence of what
they describe as prostitutes and bullies and thieves.
And it's poor. It's rundown and it's a sort of
tiny alleyway in lots of ways. And I think in the book I've
got, I got really interested in, like I said #5 lumber court in
the 1920s. It's rented by a woman called
Nellie Reggiani, who's born in South London and then is married
and then remarries, remarries Victor Reggiani, who's from the
Italian speaking part of Switzerland.
And they lived together in this house for maybe, perhaps 2
decades. And in the 1921 census, which
Nellie Reggiani completes the return, it's clear that she's
running this as a boarding house.
And it's a boarding house where almost all of the people living
there on the sort of three or four floors are young women.
They're young women who have either up to 7 dials from each
suburban London or Ireland or the north thing in the beyond.
And they've come to do the kind of low paying service industry
or manufacturing jobs that sort of that keep London going, that
actually that in many ways make the mass culture of the 1920s.
They there are a couple of young women who work in the Lambert
and Butler cigarette factory just to the southeast of Seven
Dials. There's the dancing structures.
Connie A2 in her early 20s, who works at Brett Dancing Club on
Shaftesbury Avenue. There are millionaires and
seamstresses and all of these kind of jobs.
The unseen work of the 1920s is in this house at 5 Lumber Court.
I think it's really interesting because it gives us another way
of thinking about the modern woman or the flapper of the
1920s, that when we think of this period, our temptation is
to think straight away of the kind of brittle glamour and
hedonism of the scantily dressed jazzy flapper.
It has silk stockings and short dresses and Clash hats and all
the rest of it. And in some ways you can find
that version of the modern woman of the 1920s in five Lumber
courts. 2018 is a nightclub Hostess.
She's employed at one point in the venue run by Mrs. Kate
Merrick, one of the most famous nightclub Hostess, nightclub
owners of the 1920s and the inspiration.
For the BBC. OK, yes, yeah, yes.
So the inspiration for the BBCTV show Dope Girls.
So Connie 18, she fits with that story, right?
Her job is to look glamorous, to charm look glamorous, to teach
men to dance and to charm them out of their hard earned income.
And there are other, there are other some of our other friends
who live in the audience and limbo are clearly part of that
world as well. But I think when you look at the
census records, you get a sense of how the 1920s isn't just
about glamour and fashion and nightlife.
It's also about new economic opportunities for young working
class women, new industries. And crucially, it's about work.
So the story of the 20s, if you start from lumber court, it's
not about hedonism or glamorism, glamour.
It's about expropriation and exploitation of young women's
labour. And I think that story is much
more challenging in lots of ways.
The two, two women who worked in lumber and bought a cigarette
factory that I talked about when the 1921 census is taken that
June, they're both out of work. And they're out of work because
of the National economic slump that has rippled across mostly
northern England and Wales and Scotland.
But it's also rippled across central London and leaves a huge
number of men and women working in precarious roles in the
service industry or manufacturing out at work in
that time. So there's a story there about
economic hardship, a story about making ends meet and finding
somewhere to live as an independent woman in a strange
city. There's also a story in five
Lumber Corps about the dangers or the tragedy of the nightlife
of central London. A year after the 1921 census was
taken one of Nelly Ruggiani's borders, a young woman called
called Lilian Mae Davis is found dead in her room by by one of by
her roommate after taking an overdose of cocaine.
And the story becomes one of these sort of moral panics.
He's called Celebra about the dangers of seven dials, the
dangers of black men selling drugs to young white women, of
moral corruption and contagion. But it's a reminder, I think, of
the darker side of the nightlife of the 1920s.
So I think that's probably that. It's that sort of example.
It's the really droving maybe interested in #5 number court.
I think I could talk about this for ages if you let me go on.
I think the other interesting thing about this address and
about Nelly Reggiani is that she appears in the autobiography of
a remarkable woman called Mabel Lethbridge, written in the
1930s. Mabel Lethbridge goes on to be a
fairly well known writer, Britain's first female estate
agent. But she's also born in 1900.
In 19, at the end of the Great War, she's involved in a
horrific accident, explosion in a munitions factory that leaves
her. And that means that she loses
the leg and her hearing and is in just excruciating pain,
chronic pain for the rest of her life.
But in the early 1920s, after this accident, Mabel Lethbridge
finds her way to 7 Dials and finds her way at one point to
Nelly Reggiani's boarding house. So you can see through
Lethbridge's autobiography that she's aware of Seven Dials
reputation, that it's supposed to be this sort of den of vice
and iniquity and a terrible slum.
But for her, the way that she experiences it is a kind of
place of warmth, of community, of a kind of an authentic
welcome that she doesn't find anywhere else in her life in
this period. And so she's got these amazing
accounts of sitting in Nellie Ruggiani's kitchen looking out
for the rate collector, but also of just the kind of the welcome
that she finds in $7.00 in this period.
I think that too, if you put these different things together,
1921 census, this remarkable autobiographical account, you
just really start to get a different sense of what $7.00
was like, also what the 1920s and 1930s were like.
Fantastic. So listeners, if that has
whetted your appetite to learn more about 7 dials in the 1920s
and 30s, then Matt Holbrooke's book Songs of Seven Dials, An
Intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London, is out now.
Thank you very much, Matt. It's been brilliant.
Oh, thank you for having me.