Patrick Comerford
I was discussing yesterday a recent visit to the Whitefield Memorial Church and the American International Church on Tottenham Court Road, London, with the colourful food stalls lining the footpaths in front of the church.
On the south side of the church, the Fitzrovia Mural is a huge mural that fills the gable end of a building at the east end of Whitefield Road, off Tottenham Court Road and faces onto the Whitefield Gardens.
The former graveyard the Whitefield Memorial Church is now an open plaza, and has been left as an open space for the past 80 years, ever since the last V2 bomb in World War II destroyed many buildings in the area on Palm Sunday, 25 March 1945.
Today, Whitefield Gardens is a popular place to sit and relax on these sunny summer days for shoppers strolling between Euston Road and Oxford Street or between Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia and Soho and for people enjoying the fast food stalls that line the stretch of Tottenham Court Road in front of the church.
The Fitzrovia Mural was commissioned by Camden Council for the Fitzrovia community and was painted in 1980 by Mick Jones and Simon Barber, working together as the Art-Workers Co-Op. It was financed by the Greater London Artists’ Association and Camden Town Council.
The two split the work between them, with Mick Jones working on the top half and Simon Barber creating the images lower down. Inspired by local life and people, as well as wider themes in the area, they took six months to plan out the mural, and another 10 weeks to execute.
They used highly-figurative, narrative, cartoon-style humour, and acknowledge the influence of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957). Their work comes together as one whole cohesive work of art, with a montage of scenes frozen in time, all telling the story of this part of Central London half a century ago. All of Fitzrovia life is there, from bars and restaurants to local market workers.
There to be seen are building sites, the Post Office Tower, now the BT Tower, an angry cat, a television ad for cigarettes, footballers, and people around a table, others ironing, reading a newspaper named Tower, reading a book or writing. Here too is the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who lived in Fitzrovia and drank regularly in the pubs. He died in 1953, long before the mural was painted, and is seen with his wife Caitlin Macnamara (1913-1994), whose family were from Ennistymon, Co Clare.
Horace Cutler was the leader of the Greater London Council (1977-1981) before it was abolished when Ken Livingstone was in office. The mural depicts Cutler dressed like Dracula, as though he was a vampire sucking the life out of London, dangling from a crane, pointing at Council Hall plans for skyscrapers and clutching blueprints for even more tower blocks.
There are many references to people with money riding roughshod over the common people: a greedy developer is worshipping his pile of money, which looks like a tower block; a clockwork architect on roller-skates at a drawing board churns out new plans; and a man in a fur coat reaches for a stack of bank notes with dice and cards nearby.
Office workers using early computer-like machines may be council workers or civil servants, churning out bills, rent demands and final notices.
There are scenes that refer to the Middlesex Hospital, where Peter Sellers died in 1980, the same year the mural was painted, and there is a nurse holding an umbrella for a pregnant woman as she gets into an ambulance.
For 260 years, the Middlesex Hospital was part of life in central Fitzrovia, and in 1747 it was the first hospital in England to provide maternity beds. The hospital was closed in 2005, and the site has been redeveloped as office and hospitality complex, with the former hospital chapel, the Fitzrovia Chapel, at its heart.
There is an array of men and women in non-European clothes such as saris: Fitzrovia and neighbouring parts of Camden have long been home to a thriving South Asian community and some of the best Indian and Bangladeshi restaurants in London.
Fitzrovia is known for its restaurants, especially around Charlotte Street and Goodge Street. Food is well represented on the mural with diners and waiting staff. The bow-tied epicure to the right of the mural shows how the area was increasingly attracting a more affluent clientele.
There some drinkers in a pub, there is a man mixing cocktails, and there is a central section of rush-hour traffic in the rain with taxis, buses, motorbikes and a cyclist.
If you click on my images, they come up in full-screen size. See if you can spot Simone the charismatic Italian waiter, an ace window-cleaner behaving like a Peeping Tom as he catches a glimpse of a woman in the shower, the disk jockey, the innocent-looking boy, or the tailor who is part of a trade that has long been part of life in the area.
Over time, the mural suffered damage and had problems with mould, bleaching from the sun, peeling paint peeling and graffiti on parts of the lower section. But the mural has been rescued and restored recently, with help from Global Street Art, and its vivid colours have been refreshed.
The Fitzrovia Mural at Whitefield Gardens on Tottenham Court Road is a short walk from Goodge Street station and it continues to offer a window onto life in the area in 1980s and earlier decades.
