English Heritage has developed a new online resource for anyone studying women’s history where it has gathered together pictures and information about buildings that reflect women’s lives from the mid-nineteenth century, at work, at play and campaigning for better housing, education, wages and employment opportunities.
The Visible in Stone website draws on the collections of the Women’s Library and the TUC Library Collections, as well as the collections of English Heritage, and it is hoped that users of the site will add further material from their own collections.
Among the buildings featured is Mary Sumner House, 24 Tufton Street, in the heart of Westminster, the Grade-II listed headquarters of the Mothers’ Union, completed in 1925 with funds raised by its members; the Unitarian Chapel, 39 Newington Green, London N16, home of the radical intellectual group to which Mary Wollstonecraft (1759—97) belonged and where she founded her own school in 1784; and model housing built by the housing pioneer (and National Trust co-founder) Octavia Hill (1838—1912).
On a lighter note, the section on shopping and fashion makes the point that the rise of the department store gave women their first taste of independence: stores such as Bainbridge, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, and Kendal, Milne & Co, in Manchester were established, while Marshall & Snelgrove, in London, Leeds and Scarborough, and Harrods in London were deliberately designed to create public spaces where women could appear alone in public with propriety. Even so, when William Whiteley applied for a licence to open a restaurant in his Bayswater store in the late 1870s the local magistrate refused on the grounds of its potential for immoral ‘assignations’ — hence the rise of tea shops such as Lyons, with their uniformed waitresses re-creating the atmosphere of the ultra-respectable middle-class home.
English Heritage also suggests that public conveniences result from the emergence of women into the public from the domestic sphere, and it illustrates the point with a photograph of the Grade-II listed public lavatories with tiled cubicles and ornate ironwork at the junction of Guildford Street and Lambs Conduit Street in Camden (not, as claimed by the caption, in Hampstead’s West End Lane).
What the website does not tell you is that these Grade-II listed lavatories have been locked and disused for many years, and in this they suffer the fate of similar Victorian conveniences in cities all over the UK, including those in the island in the middle of Holborn, right outside the head office of English Heritage. So English Heritage: how about a buildings at risk campaign (with the Vic Soc) to bring back into use the UK’s many handsome conveniences (and the drinking fountains that are often associated with them).
