The characters are:
Mari, a flower seller in her 60s. Mari has visions of a future world in which there does not always appear to be space for her or her friends. She is a widow, whose family go back many generations in North Lambeth/Waterloo.
Lizzie, a flower seller in her early 30s who works with Mari. She is from a Covent Garden family of flower sellers and has moved to the Lambeth side with her husband. He currently has a chest condition and cannot at the moment work. They have three young children.
Dirty Gertie, a rag seller from a long line of rag sellers. Like Mari - she is a long-time local resident.
Felicity Veracity, a charity worker from a university settlement charity.
George, a charity worker from a poverty survey.
A Doctor
A Policeman
The cast for the Performances at The Glitch are:
Mari - Carol Morgan
Carol has appeared in a number of indie films and at various London theatres: most recently - the Young Vic, the Park, and the Lion and the Unicorn.
Lizzie - Anne Hayward
Anne trained at the Drama Centre London and has appeared in various London Theatres, including The Questors Theatre, Southwark Playhouse and Park Theatre. Screen credits include the 13 Seconds in the Kent State series and the award-winning short film Meteque.
Dirty Gertie and Felicity Veracity - Barbara Mariposa
Barbara has performed at Glastonbury Festival, in various fringe theatre productions in Brighton and London and has appeared in several independent films and music videos. She was in the feature film, The Caged.
All the men - Chris Nilsson
Chris has performed in rep in Hungerford and in a number of independent films. He has a first in acting for stage and screen from the University of East London. Since graduating he has worked on a range of independent theatre shows.
The Creatives are:
Eliska van Lelyveld - Lighting
Eliska trained in lighting design at Rose Bruford College. Her productions include The Werewolf amongst others.
David Lashbrook - film making
David is a Senior Lecturer in film and media at the University of East London. He is studying towards a Professional Doctorate in Performing Arts researching 'AI filmmaking practice’ at UEL. His previous research interests have focused on representation in film and television. He is an independent filmmaker, focusing on micro-budget short film production.
Chris Nilsson - Assistant Stage Manager and Sound Creation
See above for biog notes. In addition - Chris works as a sound engineer and soundscape creator.
Jane O'Donnell
Jane has worked as a costume designer and assistant since 2006. Working in theatre, television and film. She has worked on Peaky Blinders, Downton Abbey at the Almeida and Royal Opera House amongst other places.
The Marsh - Programme Notes
Lower Marsh Market
Lower Marsh Market has a long history. It was one of London’s famous unregulated markets of the late 18th/19th centuries and at its height, the longest street market in London. That said, Lambeth Parish did appear to have had more ability to control aspects of its trading than some other London parishes did with their equivalent markets. They were able, for example, to restrict Sunday trading hours to before 10 a.m: enabling women to get their family food bought but be ready in time for church!
This is from the Vauxhall Society’s history website:
As a street, Lower Marsh pre-dates all the buildings now present. It is shown in the de la Feuille survey of 1690 as a lane lined with cottages and small holdings crossing Lambeth Marsh, on an almost identical alignment. It formed, with The Cut, a link between Westminster Bridge (1750) and Blackfriars Bridge (1769). The leisure activities like pleasure gardens, circuses, theatres, which characterised the south bank in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were present in and around Lower Marsh. The opening of Waterloo Bridge in 1817 brought cheap development land into easy reach of the expanding centre of London. The Marsh was drained, and soon covered with rows of small houses, wharves and workshops.
Lower Marsh and The Cut formed the commercial heart of the area from the early 19th century. The street market then established has operated almost continuously since that time. At its peak, the market stretched from Blackfriars to Vauxhall.
The building of Waterloo Station in 1848 and its subsequent expansion cut the street off from the riverside, and created a number of yards and cul de sacs from former streets. These fragments exist alongside surviving courts and alleyways characteristic of urban development in the 18th and early 19th century. (Vauxhall Society Website)
Me and The Marsh
I first arrived in the area in 1981. I had grown up beside the Portobello Road so was never going to not haunt a market. By 1981, the market was just the length of the street itself but it was busy and thriving. My favourite stalls were a second hand book stall that sold mostly best sellers and genre fiction (you could trade in ones you had read for money off your next purchases), a bedding and towel seller (I had just left home) and the stall that sold food products that were just past their sell by date and very cheap. There was little of the second hand goods that I loved the Portobello for - but between Bermondsey market and a few places close to the Elephant - interesting bits and pieces could be found, not to mention the frequent Jumble Sales.
My favourite thing about the Marsh was its atmosphere. There was a buzz that started at the Waterloo Action Centre. A regular weekly jumble sale at WAC on Tuesdays was not only a good source of trinkets and soft furnishings but was the haunt of a particularly interesting set of retired women. Women who were politically conscious and conscious of their own history. Some, such as Dolly Davey, had published their memoirs under the auspices of the SE1 People’s History group at Morley College. Others, such as Doreen Ramsey, were part of a movement for housing justice. She is remembered in the naming of the Doreen Ramsey Housing Co-operative and a meeting room in Coin Street Community Building - an organisation she helped to bring into being.
Degeneration/Regeneration
This generation were in their 80s in 1981. Some born in late Victorian Waterloo - some Edwardian. But, my impression of Lower Marsh in the 1890s comes from them. Later, when studying social history, I learnt that what they regarded as signs of good community and trust - ie an unlocked door, or even a permanently open door, were seen by housing managers and anti-poverty campaigners as signs of degeneration.
Degeneration! A strange word!
One dictionary definition of degeneration is that of a moral, intellectual and ‘artistic’ decline. So, those delightfully friendly ‘open’ doors were seen as the exact opposite by those making decisions or even attempting to influence decisions about how the slums should be viewed and interpreted. Perhaps they induced a slight fission of fear in those who had to cross these thresholds as outsiders; outsiders with a job to do, one which might not be as well received as it was intended.
I have read a reasonably large number of poverty surveys and reports from 1880s to 1910s in both my academic and general reading life, and have never seen any anti poverty campaigner, however radical in their thinking, argue that permanently open doors were a good thing. It seems to be only in the minds of those who lived with them - or at least many of their descendants, that this was the case.
Probably to the charity workers ‘degeneration’ just meant the opposite of regeneration (which of course, technically, it does). In housing language it’s about the disintegration of housing stock - of its progression from nice to slum! Octavia Hill had long argued that a proportion of all rents needed to be spent on the upkeep of property to prevent this - and that a sizeable proportion of those living in poverty would actively chose to pay a reasonably affordable rent if it meant that they lived in relative comfort. She had proved her point with her projects in Marylebone and Walworth (amongst others). Her final estate, just South of the Cut, was a decade off being built in 1890, along with her retirement.
Flower Sellers and Dirty Gertie
Flower sellers mostly worked in families. Although Lizzie and Mari are not related. Lizzie is from a family of flower sellers, from across the river in Covent Garden. Mari has come to the business relatively lately, having more of a background of general trading in the market. She is also a ‘local’ - something defined for my ears in the 1980s as a person who can trace their family in the area for at least three generations. Lizzie and Mari’s working relationship is grounded in that exchange: Lizzie has the flower wholesale contacts and Mari has good knowledge of local businesses and people.
Earlier in the 19th century, the term ‘flower seller’ had been synonymous with ‘prostitute’. Both Mayhew (1849) and Smith (1877) report speaking to teenage flower sellers who also sell sex to feed their families. By 1899, just one year before the play is set, The ‘Toilers in London’ report, stated that many flower sellers were young and single, with some in ‘unofficial’ marriages - where the man was ‘kept’ by a hard working young woman who was often out selling flowers for long hours. From oral history accounts in the early 1980s, and some archival evidence, it would seem that ‘respectability’ had begun to find its way into working class culture in North Lambeth by the end of the 19th century, perhaps via the influence of parish and locally based charities, even if its ‘progress’ was slower elsewhere in London. Although prostitution was still a busy industry around the station many people seemed aware of what ‘respectable’ was meant to mean and to what extent they could personally afford to flout it; striking that balance between going your own way and keeping neighbours onside. Although in 1890, women were frequent customers in pubs, in less than two decades they would usually only go on Mondays, part of the activities of ‘St Monday’, and as part of their laundry routine.
Dirty Gertie was a real person, she is mentioned as living in a courtyard off the Marsh, with her neighbours Pineapple Ada and Maisie from the Nile. The interviewee does not say who she is or why she is called ‘dirty’. Is it that she doesn’t wash or is she ‘morally lax’!? I decided that she doesn’t wash. Given most people’s contact with clean water in 1890 was less than it would be on average today, I decided to make Gertie extra dirty and give her a good reason for her revulsion of water. Being involved with rags, which always was an outsider trade, people who make a living off what even the poor throw away, helped with this. Some rag merchants - in our memories - were ‘rag and bone’ men. They collected large amounts of detritus and sold it on from heaped stable yards. Gertie just sells usable ragged clothing very cheaply from a box in the market. It is so cheap, she doesn't maintain it.
Social Change!
A lot of legislation had been passed in the late 19th century - and there was more to come - Lizzie’s children had to go to school, school attendance was compulsory to the age of 10. This legislation had come into being in 1880. During the 1890s it would gradually be raised to the age of 12, which until 1875 had been the age of consent - so the idea of what a child was and how they should live was changing dramatically. Public libraries began with the Public Libraries Act in 1855 but in Lambeth the first one was not opened until 1889, when the Durning Library opened in Kennington, hence Mari’s insistence that free public libraries are coming was not so much a premonition as an event in progress - Waterloo’s first library opened a year after the play setting - in 1891.