Jocasta Innes Diary

I love those old prints of London where Wren`s church spires float like ships masts above the dark flood of grimy rooftops. The spires are less visible now, hemmed in by concrete and glass commercial towers, but standing in a tangle of old streets and alleys, they create oases of tranquillity only a stones throw from main roads humming with traffic. I do a walk with Bella, my Staffy bitch, cutting through backwaters of Clerkenwell, Finsbury, Shoreditch, on our way back from a visit to the vet, in Islington. Originally I followed my nose, or rather the leafiest streets and these led unerringly to old churches buttressed by giant plane trees and standing in romantically overgrown plots of green where shrubs outnumber gravestones. The street names are musical and evocative, Sans Walk, Jerusalem Passage, Ironmonger Row, Worship Street. We head first to St James ,Clerkenwell, passing along a demure row of I8th century houses in St James Walk which could have been transplanted from Canterbury, Chichester.or any well mannered small provincial town. Bella tugs at the lead intent on chasing pigeons.The most imposing house in Clerkenwell Square, cosmopolitan with coffee drinking, newspaper reading folk at outdoor tables, was lived in by Karl Marx. Odd to think of the Jewish social philosopher waking, in his handsome residence, to the sound of the bells of St James just round the corner. Next landmark is St Luke`s Old Street, reached through a zigzag of backstreets where greasy spoons nudge up against trendy glass fronted art galleries. Till a few years ago St Lukes was a dismal ruin, near roofless, broken windowed, but it is now the home of the London Symphony Orchestra, stonework Persil white, roof slated, tall windows sparkling. A tree hung walk separates St Lukes from its former churchyard. Bella freaks out, scenting and spotting squirrels. We nip through a low rise, red brick 6Os housing estate, well kept and handsome and cross Old Street to Bunhill Row. Bunhill Fields, past the starling chatter of a primary school in recess, is the most atmospheric of Burial Grounds, a pool of silence scooped from the racket of City traffic. Here are Daniel Defoe`s obelisk monument, and William Blake`s modest granite headstone. A grander momument, topped by a recumbent figure, catches my eye. I find it is the last resting place of John Bunyan, no less, author of that sonorous devotional work, The Pilgrim`s Progress.If Bunyan`s effigy could sit up he could look across to Wesley`s Methodist Chapel and house ( now a museum) which seems somehow appropriate. City workers hurry through Bunhill Fields where the gravestones are now railed off, annoying because I long to investigate a headstone carrying a bas relief of the dear departed just out of eye range. Down Worship Street, where a range of winsome Arts & Crafts shops have become solicitors offices or sandwich bars, across Bishopsgate, and the finest example of English baroque, Christ Church, Spitalfields, Nicholas Hawksmoor`s masterpiece, pricks up its snowy obelisk spire, topped by a gilded ball and weathervane.
We trot past St Botolph`s Church Hall, a begrimed but charming Victorian brick building now backing onto Norman Foster`s latest glass and steel colossus, against which it is as
tiny as a giant`s slipper. In an earlier incarnation it was the gymnasium of the Central Foundation School for Girls. I joined a sit-in in the early 8Os to protest against its threatened demolition, a chilly but rewarding experience since the Hall survives, now listed and about to be swept up into Lord Foster`s dizzyingly modern ambit as - what? A neo-Gothic sandwich bar ? The bottom of Fournier Street is thronged with tourists, a gaggle of grey-hairs enthralled by their guide ( a pigtailed rascal with the gift of the gab) holding forth about how the Huguenot Chapel became a synagogue, and now - hey presto- a mosque ! But the huge wooden gates leading to Spitalfield`s most enticing secret were
ajar- this is so unusual Bella and I venture inside. Faded gilt lettering above the gate says S. Schwartz, suggesting this was once `schmutter' or rag-trade territory. Not now. This is a different kind of oasis,hard rather than leafy, a miniature Georgian manor house sitting plump as a cat in a cobbled yard ringed first, by low outbuildings, then by the taller rooftops of our I8th century Huguenot village. Much gentrification has been at work since I last saw the place - the low brick `dairy' now sports Gothick windows, water trickles into a lead cistern from a satyrs`s mask, walls are a torrent of ivy. The little grand house looks just the same, not so little really, three floors high, though the brick gate piers are now swamped by creepers. This is the first property for sale I saw in Spitalfields and of course I fell in love with it, the charm and mystery above all of its location. It was and is the pearl in the Spitalfields oyster. But it was way outside my price range. I bought instead the bargain no one else would touch - a Regency box with boarded up windows and not much roof, dossed in for eight years, only vestiges of gentility remaining, a mahogany handrail swinging loose, scraps of cornice, one complete sash window. Repairing - never mind restoring - it was not the first but certainly the most challenging project of my life. But we have lived here for two decades whereas the pearl of Spitalfields has changed hands, from banker to head hunter, every few years. The grey hairs smile kindly on Bella as we pass. As she bounds through my little gate into the leafy slot we call `the yard' I realise that I no longer feel even a tinge of envy for the lost pearl. This is home.
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