‘Why no flowers for Nellie, orchid-painter extraordinaire?’ we asked in a previous post. In her 56 years as Royal Horticultural Society orchid artist Nellie Roberts captured an extraordinary amount of fugitive beauty. She worked in a room above the family shop in Loughborough Road, died, aged 86, in 1959, and rests in Grave No. 262 D3 […]
Why no flowers for Nellie, orchid-painter extraordinaire?
It’s a shame that orchid-lovers cannot leave a bouquet on the precise spot where rests Lambeth’s peerless watercolourist and illustrator Nellie Roberts. Flowers could and should be be left at Nellie’s grave in gratitude for all the beauty that this watercolorist’s brush captured during her 56-year career as an illustrator for the Royal Horticultural Society, […]
Brixton Market 1936: silk knickers 2½ pence a leg, streaky bacon 3½ pence per pound
‘She’s always here soon after 6.30 [a.m.],’ says Bertie of one customer, ‘to buy her own breakfast. And it’s always the same thing she wants, “One-pound-of-streaky-and-five-sausages.”‘ ‘Here’ is Brixton Street Market, in Mary Benedetta’s 1936 book Street Markets of London (London: John Miles Ltd). Benedetta’s book covers over 30 street markets in Lambeth and beyond, […]
Not even Good Queen Bess could barge up Brixton Hill from Vauxhall for a date with Sir Walter Raleigh – River Effra: London’s Secret Spine by Jon Newman
Jon Newman’s River Effra, South London’s Secret Spine is lavishly-illustrated, deeply-researched and, above all, grippingly-readable – a landmark work, the first detailed and comprehensive account of the Effra.
Anthony Eyton RA on the ‘lure of Brixton’
The 20-year-old Van Gogh lasted only a year in Stockwell before leaving his digs in 87 Hackford Road (1873), it’s said, because he was getting nowhere with Eugenie Loyer, the landlady’s daughter. The painter seems to have left behind just the one ‘Van Gogh’, a sketch of the house that was not accepted as by […]
Whatever became of hit-parader Winifred Atwell’s saucy murals?
Fifties hit-parading pianist Winifred Atwell opened a salon in Brixton that may have been the very first for black women in this country. Winifred and her salon are long gone, but what about its saucy murals?
