Once when I was about 12 years old, an American, who claimed to be related to my mother, came to dinner at our family home in north London. I had the impression that my parents had no idea who he was. He brought with him a file filled with papers, which he looked at while we were eating. During dinner, he turned to my mother, and said:
“You know you are related to Dr Albert Einstein.”
My mother thought he was pulling her leg, but the event remained in my mind.
Several decades later, I was researching my family tree. One of my mother’s ancestors, her grandmother was Hedwig Ginsberg (née Rieser). Hedwig’s grandmother was one Sarah Rieser, whose maiden name was Sarah Einstein. When I spotted this, along with her dates of birth, marriage, and death, I contacted two leading Einstein genealogists. Both were certain that Sarah Einstein was a blood relative of the famous physicist Albert Einstein. To cut a long story short, my mother was Albert Einstein’s third cousin three times removed – a relative, but not a close one.
Some years later, I was looking into whether Albert Einstein had ever applied to Albania for a visa so that he could emigrate from Nazi Germany. As part of my enquiries, I contacted an Einstein archive in Israel, mentioning en passant the nature of my relationship with the great man.
I received an email that confirmed what I had suspected. Namely, that Einstein never approached Albania for a visa.
Then came a blow to my ego. The lady who wrote to me from Israel pointed out that at the very most I shared only 1% of my genes with those of Albert Einstein.
Still, even 1% of such a genius’s genetic material must be worth having! What do you think?
Naturism used to be popular in the former Yugoslavia – a country I visited frequently during the 1970s and 1980s. In those years, I had many friends in Belgrade. In summer, many of them migrated to the Adriatic coast, particularly to Dubrovnik. I used to join them.
During one visit to Dubrovnik, my friends and I took a ferry to the island of Lokrum, which is less than a mile south of the centre of the historic part of the city.
After disembarking and climbing a short slope, we stopped at a direction sign with two panels, each pointing towards a different path. One bore the words “Ne nudismo”, and the other had only one word “nudismo”.
We followed the path indicated by the ‘nudismo’ sign. The path wound gently downhill through a shady forest, and reached a sandy beach in a small cove. We were about to spend some time bathing nude. My friend, who must have understood my apprehension, reassured me by saying:
“Don’t worry, Adam, there is always someone on the beach who looks uglier than you.”
Though a novelty, I enjoyed bathing without the encumbrance of swimming trunks and so on.
Another year, we spent a pleasant few days on the island of Mljet, which is about 38 miles northwest of Dubrovnik. In those days, the 1980s, no motor vehicles were allowed in the northern part of the island around the port of Polace, where we stayed. Mljet has a lake within it, and within the lake there is an island. Every day, we spent much time wandering around the lake, taking occasional dips, and hiring rowing boats. And all of this activity was carried out without clothes apart from sunglasses and sun hats.
In May 1984, I joined a tour to visit the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, which was then highly secretive and completely repressed, under the control of its dictator Enver Hoxha, an admirer of Josef Stalin. We flew from London to Belgrade, and then changed ‘plane to fly from Yugoslavia’s capital to Titograd (now Podgorica) in Montenegro. We spent the night in a comfortable, modern hotel that overlooked a fast-flowing river. In each bedroom, the Montenegro tourist office had placed several coloured brochures that extolled the virtues of visiting that part of Yugoslavia.
One of the brochures contained a grainy coloured photograph of people on a beach – Montenegro has a long Adriatic coastline. If one examined this photograph carefully, it could be seen that it was a ‘nudismo’ beach. None of the holidaymakers were wearing any form of clothing. As the brochures did not interest me, I did not bother to keep them, but most of the others on the tour did.
The next morning, after a brief tour of Titograd in a Yugoslav coach, we were driven to the nearby border that separates Yugoslavia from Albania. The border post is next to Lake Scutari (Skadarsko Jezero/Liqeni i Shkodrës). We were asked to disembark as the coach could not enter Albania. Carrying our luggage we walked a short distance, and passed an Albanian soldier standing stock still, looking like a statue, and holding a gun.
Then we entered the Albanian frontier post, a spacious building containing comfortable armchairs, each with a lacy anti-macassar, and we were invited to sit down. On one wall, were the words in English that read:
“Even if we have to go without bread, we Albanians do not violate principles. We will not betray Marxism – Leninism.”
It was written in capitals using faded red letters that looked like those used to advertise films on the canopies above the entrances to cinemas. All of the letters were firmly attached to the wall except one. This was detachable as it had been glued onto a removable hatch cover, which must have provided access to services – plumbing or wiring – hidden within the wall.
We sat down, and then filled in the detailed custom declaration form that needed to know whether we would be importing, amongst a variety of other items, any ‘magnétophones’ or ‘frigidaires’. As I filled in my form, I wondered who, apart from diplomats, visited the country laden with goods such as these. Two by two, we were summoned up to be interviewed by the customs officers standing behind tables.
The customs officials were not particularly thorough, but there was one thing that they wanted to see, and confiscate. That thing was the brochure with the picture of a nudist beach in Montenegro. It was this poorly reproduced image that the Albanian officials were seeking in their attempt to prevent pornographic material from entering the Motherland. Whenever they found one, they confiscated it, but not before labelling it with its owner’s name.
When our tour of Albania reached its end, we returned to the same border post. To my surprise, each of the confiscated Montenegrin tourist brochures was returned to the person whose name was on it.
Sadly, Yugoslavia no longer exists, and happily, Enver Hoxha’s repressive regime that made Albania and the Albanians at least as isolated from the rest of the world as is North Korea today. As for nudist beaches, I have not been to one since my visit to Mljet in the 1980s. This is not because I am averse to nudism and naturism, but I do not enjoy spending time in the sun on beaches.
From the second half of the 1920s until 1945, Albania became very much under the influence of Mussolini’s fascist Italy, and in April 1939 the country was invaded by Italy. Mussolini’s son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903-1944) built a hunting lodge in the Albanian countryside. This was still standing when I visited the country in 1984, and then again in 2016. Here is what I saw.
1984 – During a guided tour in which all the tourists were closely watched by Albanian security officials.
A short distance away from Lezhë, we left the main road and entered a wooded reservation. We stopped outside a building, which we were told was once Mussolini’s hunting lodge. In fact, it was the lodge designed by his son-in-law, Italy’s former Foreign Minister, Count Ciano. The Italians had had a very dominating influence on Albania during the 1930s. They invaded it at the end of that decade. As hunting lodges go, I cannot recall it being particularly exceptional. However, as we were walking away from it across the spongy soil through the pleasantly wooded grounds, a memorable incident occurred. One member of our group, a middle-aged lady who never made much impression on me, suddenly felt unwell. Almost immediately, two medical personnel dressed in white coats, appeared from out of the blue, and escorted her back to the lodge, where they did something to help her. I have no idea whether these medics just happened to be present by chance, or whether the authorities had arranged for our group to be shadowed by a medical team just in case an incident like this should occur. As there were no further medical emergencies during our trip, except when the young couple, who were, like our English tour guide Julian, Marxist-Leninist sympathisers, got food poisoning, I was unable to ascertain whether we were being trailed by a medical team all of the time. It would not have surprised me if we had been.
2016 – During a driving trip my wife and I made on our own
In 1984, our tour group had been taken to see what was described as Mussolini’s hunting lodge. It was in fact his son-in-law Count Ciano who built it. I knew that it was somewhere near to Lezhë, but it was not easy for us to locate. To begin our search, we drove to the seaside resort of Shëngjin.
From Shëngjin, we followed the shoreline of the Adriatic southwards along a road that ran between the sea and backwater lagoons. It was lined with Mediterranean pine trees, but there was no sign of Ciano’s lodge. We stopped to ask the way several times. Everyone knew what we were talking about, but were a bit vague as to where it is.
Eventually, someone told us to head for the villages of Ishul-Lezhë and Vainn. Suddenly, I spotted an old metal sign bearing the words “Filiali Albturist, Hoteli Gjuetisi, Lezhe” (gjuetise means ‘hunter’, and Albturist was Communist Albania’s state tourist organization). We drove along the drive through a garden full of trees and parked outside what looked to me like what I saw in 1984, but it was much more run-down than I recalled. The place seemed to be dead, but eventually a waiter came to meet us. He showed us the dining room and bar, which looked as if it had been left unchanged since it was built. At first known as L’Albergo di Caccia (Italian for: Hunting lodge), this rustic-looking complex was constructed for Ciano in 1940 after the Italians had invaded Albania. The waiter told us that there were rooms to rent, and unlocked one to show us. The room looked comfortable but neglected. It had a damp musty smell. It might have been a peaceful place to stay, but rather spooky. We left this evocatively melancholic, rural spot and drove towards Lezhë.
I was pleased that we managed to find the hunting lodge that I had seen in 1984, but had not been able to enter. Entering it in 2016 was a treat. Its somewhat unkempt appearance did nothing to spoil my enjoyment of knowing that I had stepped into a building that was once used for rest and relaxation by Mussolini’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Ciano.
Today, 26 August 2026, a Tuesday, we ate lunch in a Kurdish/Iraqi restaurant, Arbil City, in north London’s Kilburn district. While perusing the menu, I noticed that included “Pachaa”, which was described as:
“Specially cooked lamb, head, legs, and tongue, served with tandoori bread.”
We could not order it because it is only available on Friday and Saturday.
Seeing its name reminded me of a breakfast we enjoyed in 2016 at a restaurant in Tirana, Albania – a city about 1300 miles away from the Kurdish city of Erbil. We were hosted by an Albanian friend, Shemsi. Here is an account of that breakfast as I recorded it in my book “Rediscovering Albania”:
We woke at the beginning of a hot sunny day. Promptly at the time we had agreed, Shemsi picked us up from our hotel, and drove us to a suburb close to the centre of Tirana. The day before, we had asked him what comprises a typical traditional Albanian breakfast. The restaurant to which he took us, which had no name visible on its frontage, was where we discovered the answer to our question. The 3 of us seemed to be the youngest customers in the eatery that morning.
The centrepiece of the breakfast was paçe soup. This is a breakfast soup (‘khash’ in Armenian, ‘pache’ in Persian) made from meat, in fact from just about every part of an animal, in our case veal. It had a slightly gelatinous texture, but was delicious. It was served with pilaf, a rice and meat dish. The soup was accompanied by bowls of condiments such as red chilli grains, sliced garlic marinated in vinegar, and wonderful thick ‘homemade’ yoghurt. Bread was also available, and we washed the breakfast down with glasses of raki. Albanian raki, made from fruit not grain, is not at all like the aniseed flavoured Turkish raki; it is more like the Italian Grappa or some of the Yugoslav hard spirits. We were also served wine with this filling meal.
I do not know for certain, but I imagine that the Albanian word ‘paçe’ is both etymologically and gastronomically related to the word ‘pachaa’ on the menu at Arbil City.
THIS MORNING WE ate chaats (spicy South Asian snacks): dahi vada (aka: ‘curd vada’ or ‘dahi balla’) and pani puri (aka: ‘puchka’ or ‘gol gappa’). We were not in Mumbai nor in Kolkata nor in Lahore nor in Karachi. We were sitting in a small restaurant 4389 miles northwest of Mumbai’s Churchgate Station. But we were only 20 miles west of London’s Trafalgar Square.
Falooda
We were eating our chaats in Slough, which is not far from London’s Heathrow Airport. This rather unexceptional town on the edge of London has a large South Asian population, and many shops and eateries that cater to its tastes. We visit Slough occasionally to carry out certain errands, and usually have a coffee or snacks at places on Slough’s Farnham Road. The English man with whom we deal in Slough seems to be, as far we can judge from what he says, knowledgeable about South Asian cuisine and able to cook it well. He pointed out a new Asian restaurant near his office, and we decided to try it.
Today, 12 August 2026, we visited the place he mentioned. With its garish pink façade, it is called Falooda & Co. It serves a wide variety of Indian and Pakistani dishes including the snacks we ate. As the place’s name suggests, the eatery specialises in falooda. In case you have no idea to what I am referring, let me explain.
Named after a Persian dessert called ‘faloodeh’, falooda (or sometimes transliterated as ‘faluda’) is traditionally made with rose syrup, vermicelli, sweet basil seeds, sometimes kulfi (an Indian icecream made with boiled down milk), and milk. Since mediaeval times, when this dessert was introduced to the Indian Subcontinent, many variations have been developed. For example, Falooda & Co offers ‘The Salted Sunset’, which contains “Salted caramel and butterscotch paired with vanilla ice cream, finished with a sweet-salty crunch” and ‘The Royal Heritage’, which contains “Rooh Afza [a syrup made with rose, flowers, fruits], and cooling herbs blended into chilled milk, layered with rich kulfi and finished with royal dust”, as well as the more traditional version.
Most faloodas contain seeds, mentioned above. Because of the presence of these particles, I do not enjoy falooda. But as this type of drink is only one of the many things on Falooda & Co’s menu, there is plenty of other choice for a ‘falooda-phobe’ like me. We ate two of the chaats on the menu, and followed them by espresso coffees, which were expertly made, and remarkably good value.
In addition to South Asian offerings, Falooda & Co serves non-Asian dishes including club sandwiches, fish and chips, full English breakfast (with lamb, not pork, bacon), and also lemon posset.
We noticed several food offerings in the glass-fronted refrigerated cabinets, and recognised a few of them, but there were several that looked unfamiliar. We asked the young lady, who was serving behind the counter and had made our coffee so well, about the items we could not identify. She replied:
“I am sorry I don’t know. I am unfamiliar with Asian food.”
We inquired about the restaurant’s cooks, and she told us that the food was prepared by a team that included both Indian and Pakistani cooks.
As she did not look Anglo-Saxon, but not typically South Asian, and knew little or nothing about the food she was serving, we asked her about her background.
She replied:
“I am Albanian.”
Because I have had a great interest in Albania and the Albanians, we began chatting. She was born in England, but her parents had migrated to Britain over 30 years ago.
UNTIL EARLY IN THE 1990s, Albania, the small state on the western side of the Balkan peninsular, was at least as tightly sealed-off from the eyes of the outside world as is North Korea today. It was a maverick socialist state, which, under the leadership of its dictator Enver Hoxha, regarded first the USSR and then later the People’s Republic of China, as being too reactionary to be its allies. Few visited it, the only country in Europe where Stalin was publicly revered long after his death, and even fewer escaped from it. And, not many people shared my long fascination with the country.
Central Tirana in 1984
In 1984, when solo travel was forbidden in the country, I joined a group tour to Albania. 28 years later, I was chatting about my experiences on the trip with a dental patient who had migrated from his native land, Albania, to the UK. After telling him some of the strange things that had occurred during my fortnight in Stalinist Albania, he told me that what I had noticed was indeed the case during Hoxha’s dictatorship. He said to me that if he were to relate the conditions that prevailed, nobody would believe him. However, he said, that if I, an outsider, told what I had seen, I would more likely be believed. This conversation led to me writing and publishing an account of what I could recall of my brief sojourn in Albania. This book is called “Albania on my Mind”. It includes my 1984 travelogue as well as what made me become interested in that then almost impenetrable country from the age of about 15. When I published it in 2012, I thought that I had lost the many photographs I took in Hoxha’s Albania, and I illustrated the book with images from out-of-print literature. A few years later, I found the colour pictures I had taken on the trip. Maybe, one day I will bring out a new edition that incorporates my photographs rather than the other images.
During my 1984 trip, our group was watched carefully by our Albanian guides, the coach driver (a party member), and members of the Sigurimi – Albania’s highly effective secret police. And everything we were shown was carefully stage managed so that we were likely to regard Albania as a perfect Socialist paradise. One day, a group of us decided that we would like to hire a taxi in Tirana (the capital) to visit a local beauty spot, Mount Dajti. This is what I wrote about it in my book:–
After we had eaten lunch at the hotel, a group of us went into the square outside it. We saw a long line of taxis, which were waiting vacantly by a booking booth. We wondered how often these were hired and by whom; there was not a soul in sight taking the slightest interest in them. One of us walked up to the booth and asked the man sitting inside whether we could hire a taxi to take us up to Mount Dajti, some way outside Tirana. Just when it seemed that we had succeeded in hiring a cab, another person inside the booth lifted a telephone receiver, listened for a moment, and then whispered something to the man with whom we had just negotiated. He beckoned to us, and pointed at the hotel. Somehow, he made it clear to us that we needed to book the taxi not from him, but from the hotel reception desk.
We trooped back into the hotel’s lobby and made a beeline for the reception desk. Two suited men, sitting on a sofa nearby, looked at us over the tops of their newspapers. As we reached the desk, I noticed that the doors of one of the hotel’s two lifts were opening. Our (Albanian guide) Eduart hurried through them and towards the receptionist, who was beginning to attend to us.
“What do you need?” Eduart asked us, out of breath.
“We want to hire a taxi.”
“Why?”
“We want to visit Mount Dajti?”
“Why should you do that?”
“We need some fresh country air. We’ve been in the city for too long.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Eduart protested. “You have already spent many days in the countryside.”
“But, that’s what we want, and we believe that the views from Mount Dajti are magnificent.”
“You cannot go.”
“Why ever not?” we asked.
“There is a lot of traffic. The roads are crowded.” We looked at Eduart disbelievingly. Traffic congestion was certainly not a problem in Albania in 1984.
“You know that there’s a big national cycle race on at the moment.”
“That was over long ago,” one of us objected. “We saw the posters announcing it along the roads.”
“You can visit Mother Albania, but no further.”
We had already visited the Mother Albania monument, which was located in the outskirts of the town. However, as we were determined to not to give in to our obstreperous guide, we agreed to his compromise.
“Alright,” we said.
Then, Eduart said menacingly:
“You may take the taxi to Mother Albania, but remember that if anything happens to you, we cannot take any responsibility for your safety. You will not be protected by your group visa.”
“We’ll risk it,” one of us said.
I did not like the threatening sound of Eduart’s voice, but followed the rest of our small group back to the taxi rank. When we arrived there no more that ten minutes after we had left it, we found that all of the taxis had disappeared, and also there was an extremely long line of people waiting in a queue outside the booth.
It seems that while we were arguing with Eduart, a queue had been hastily assembled next to the taxi rank, and it was long enough to put us off the idea of hiring a vehicle.
If you enjoyed this extract and want to read more, “Albania on My Mind” is available from Amazon:
MARY EDITH DURHAM (1863-1944), usually known as ‘Edith Durham’, who is well-known to many Albanians but little-known amongst British people, was a remarkable woman. Trained at Bedford College and the Royal College of Art, she was an accomplished artist, a prolific writer, a skilled anthropologist, and a formidable political lobbyist. On the evening of 14 March 2025, the Embassy of Kosovo in London hosted an event to celebrate the life and achievements of this lady, whose work was of great importance in the Balkans, especially in what is now Albania and Kosovo. It was organised by the Anglo Albanian Association led by its Chairman Stephen Nash and members of the association’s committee. Several speakers gave interesting talks about different aspects of Edith’s life. Between the speakers, the actress and presenter Joanna Lumley read short excerpts from some of the books written by Edith Durham.
In 1900, Edith’s medical advisor suggested that for the good of her health, she should take a break from her busy life in England. She travelled to Montenegro, and thus began her many years of arduous travelling around the Western Balkans, learning about the people who lived there, their traditions and ways of life, their problems, and the complex political situation in the region. The Oxford historian Noel Malcolm was the first speaker. Briefly and succinctly, he gave a comprehensive outline of the complex political situation prevailing in the Balkans when Edith worked there. In a nutshell, the region was the epicentre of the struggle to determine how the Balkan territory was to be divided up as the Ottoman Empire was suffering its death throes. The translator (of Albanian novels including those of Ismail Kadare, who died in 2024) John Hodgson gave a fascinating talk about his first visits to Kosovo in the early 1980s when many country people were still living the way that they were when Edith Durham visited them before WW1, and then wrote about them in her books.
James Hickson, who is the grand nephew of Edith Durham, gave a fascinating talk about Edith’s family: her parents and her eight siblings, many of whom, like Edith, went on to do remarkable things. Edith was the oldest child, and after her father died, she was left to care for some of the family as well as continuing her work as a successful artist. It was the stress of this overworking that caused her to become so unwell that her doctor recommended she took the holiday, which led to her involvement with the Balkans and the Albanian people, in particular. Wherever she travelled in the Balkans, Edith was welcomed by local people. While staying with them, she observed their customs and all aspects of their daily lives. She was given and purchased many items (clothing, domestic tools, fabrics, and much more), which she brought back to England. Many of these precious mementoes of her trips are housed in two museums: one in the Bankfield Museum in Halifax (Yorkshire), and the other, the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill (London). Rachel Terry of the Bankfield and Peronel Craddock of the Horniman both spoke, and explained how their museums obtained the exhibits collected by Edith Durham, and what items their collections house. Hearing them has made me want to revisit the Horniman, and to pay a first visit to the Bankfield.
Elizabeth Gowing, who has written a very personal account of her ‘discovery’ of Edith Durham after she first visited Kosovo in 2006, also spoke (via a Zoom link from Prishtina) briefly about Edith and how she came across this extraordinary woman. Another speaker was David Oakley-Hill, whose father Dayrell R. Oakley-Hill (1898-1985) played a leading role in running the Gendarmerie of Albania during the reign of King Zog. He lived and worked in the country between 1929 and 1938. His son related that his father and Edith Durham communicated with each other. David is currently completing a book about another formidable English woman, who worked in Albania: Margaret Hasluck (1885-1948). Edith and Margaret wrote letters to each other, and David will be including some of them in his forthcoming book.
I wrote earlier that Edith is far from well-known in Britain. Brian Ferris, another speaker, is valiantly trying to remedy this situation by attempting to get a commemorative plaque attached to a house where Edith lived in London (36 Glenloch Road in Belsize Park). He related the frustrating difficulties that he is facing in trying to achieve this. I have discovered that she also lived, albeit briefly, at two other addresses around Belsize Park (see: https://historywiki.therai.org.uk/index.php?title=Mary_Edith_Durham).
Joanna Lumley read extracts from some of Edith’s books in between the various speakers’ presentations. Most of them came from “High Albania” (first published in 1909), which is, so far, one of the best books that has been written about Albania in English. Before reading the first extract of the evening, she explained that after her first brief visit to Albania, she fell in love with the country. With her readings and the excellent presentations by the various speakers, all introduced by Stephen Nash, the event hosted by His Excellency the Ambassador of Kosova, Ilir Kapiti, was both enjoyable and highly informative. It was a fine appreciation of the woman whose empathy with the Albanians, observations, and political lobbying saved what is now the country of Albania from being carved up by the countries around it and becoming incorporated into them.
JUST AS THE ALBANIAN Skanderbeg (Gjergj Kastrioti: c1405-1468) heroically resisted the invasion of his country by the Ottomans in the 15th century, Khwaja Safar, also an Albanian, bravely led forces opposed to the Portuguese, who were attacking his adopted country India during the 16th century. Both were forcibly converted to Islam. One remained a Muslim, and the other returned to Christianity.
Khwaja Safar was a soldier; a merchant; the treasurer of Cairo; advisor to the Sultans of Egypt and Gujarat; and the Governor of the city of Surat. His parents were Albanian, yet he is remembered by a name which is not Albanian. You can discover why this is when reading my book about his extraordinarily fascinating life. “An Albanian in India” is available both as a paperback and a Kindle (eBook) from Amazon:
IN THE 1980s, there was a shop that sold a variety of products imported from Communist Albania, which was then ruled by the Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha and, after 1985, by his successor Ramiz Alia. I visited it once or twice. Although it had a few items of interest, it was quite expensive. The shop, which had closed by 1990, was in Betterton Street, which leads from Drury Lane to Endell Street, which is not far from the Seven Dials.
Yesterday (20th of June 2024), we walked along a part of Endell Street and then into Betterton Street, on our way to the Garden Cinema (in Parker Street). We watched a completely weird, arthouse film called “Daisies”, which was made in Communist Czechoslovakia in 1966. Despite being awarded a Czech film prize in 1966, it was banned by the censors in 1967.
Returning to Endell Street, we spotted three buildings of interest. The first of these is on the southeast corner of Endell Street and Shorts Gardens. It bears a commemorative plaque that reads:
“Zepherina Veitch (1836 -1894) Dame Rosalind Paget (1855 – 1948) Pioneering midwives trained at the British Lying-in Hospital, founded 1739 and sited here, 1849 – 1913.”
The tall Victorian building, to which this plaque is attached, is red brick with white stone facings. Between 1849 and 1913, this place housed a hospital for married women in the last month of pregnancy. A website concerned with former hospitals (https://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/britishlyingin.html) related:
“The staff consisted of two physicians and two surgeons who practiced midwifery, a Matron skilled in the same, a chaplain, an apothecary, nurses and ‘other inferior servants’. Women were admitted in the last month of their pregnancy – they were only permitted to stay for three weeks – and needed a letter of recommendation from a subscriber (patients were not charged by the Hospital) and an affidavit of their marriage and their husband’s settlement.”
Adjoining the former lying-in hospital, there is an edifice made with layers of bricks that vary in colour and white stone trimmings. It has Victorian gothic features, and its Endell Street facade bears an inscription, which reads:
“Lavers and Barraud Stained Glass Works”
This firm was founded in 1858 by Nathaniel Wood Lavers (1828–1911) and Francis Philip Barraud (1824–1900). When Barraud (of Huguenot descent) became dissatisfied with the firm’s designs, he was recommended to hire Nathaniel Westlake (1833-1921) as a designer. Westlake’s knowledge of mediaeval art and skills in the pre-Raphaelite style of art brought fame and fortune to the firm in the 1860s. In 1858. He became one of the firm’s partners, and in 1880, he became the firm’s sole owner.
A building on the corner of Betterton Street and Endell Street, across the road from the former stained glass works bears a plaque that informs the viewer that in this house, number 20 Endell Street, Westlake resided in the 1880s. His firm continued in business until his death.
So, today, neither the lying-in hospital nor the stained-glass works are still operating, and the Albanian shop has long gone. However, one place that would have been in business when those two places were functioning, is still in business: The Cross Keys Pub. Established in 1848, this pub has a baroque Victorian façade. The interior of this long narrow hostelry is most people’s idea of a real old-fashioned pub. A long bar with brass fittings runs along one side of the saloon, The walls are covered with numerous paintings and prints and several glass cases containing stuffed (taxidermy) fish. All manner of things, including a brass instrument and an archaic diver’s helmet, are suspended from the ceiling. Yet, despite this great amount of assorted ‘clutter’, the pub has a cosy atmosphere. When we dropped in for some mid-afternoon refreshment, there were a few other customers – mostly elderly local people. Although in the heart of the city, the pub has a rustic feeling about it. I suspect that workers and other staff from the stained-glass factory used to pop into the Cross Keys for liquid refreshment. But I wonder if many of those associated with the lying-in hospital -staff or patients – were patrons.
After dallying in Endell Street, we walked the short distance to the Garden Cinema in Parker Street to see the Czech film. If you have not been to this cinema, you are missing a treat – it is a truly independent, art-house cinema (see www.thegardencinema.co.uk).
THE ALBANIAN EMBASSY is on St Georges Drive in London’s Pimlico. On our way there we passed a statue that stands on a triangular plot where St Georges Drive meets Denbigh Street at an acute angle. The statue commemorates Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855), who was born in Norfolk and died in Surrey. It was created in 1995 by William Fawke (1948-2018).
The metal sculpture depicts Cubitt standing on a platform facing a pile of building bricks. In his left hand, he holds a long, notched stick – a brick measure. The platform upon which he stands is supported by balustrade bottles (‘balusters’) that are used to support the railing that rests upon them. The bottles supporting Cubitt are the type found on the houses built by Cubitt.
Cubitt was the son of a carpenter. During his trip to India as a ship’s carpenter, Thomas earned sufficient money to be able to establish a building business in London’s Holborn. In cooperation with his younger brothers, William and Lewis (who designed Kings Cross station), his firm took off. He was an excellent organiser, and created teams of builders that included every branch of the trade. Some of his projects are listed in an interesting web page (https://victorianweb.org/art/architecture/cubitt/bio.html):
“By now he was a close friend of the royal family, having collaborated with Prince Albert on the design for Osborne House, which he then built for him. He also won the contract to extend Buckingham Palace, and it was Cubitt as well who orchestrated the dismantling of Nash’s Marble Arch there, and its reassembly at Hyde Park, ready for the Great Exhibition. The Exhibition itself was a project suggested to Prince Albert by Cubitt, after a conversation with a friend who had recently visited an exhibition in Paris. From 1839 Cubitt was an active member of the Institution of Civil Engineers; he was a leading figure in the campaigns for a main drainage system and a more extensive Thames Embankment, and rooted for limiting smoke emissions and conserving open space: Battersea Park owes its existence largely to him.”
In addition to this and other major projects, he built much of Tavistock Square and great swathes of housing in Pimlico. So, it is fitting that his statue has placed in the midst of the houses which his firm created in Pimlico. It was interesting to ‘discover’ the statue of Cubitt shortly before we entered the embassy which is housed in one of the houses he built in Pimlico.
