Upstairs Downstairs in The East End - 1680-1760: Episode Four

Having started our Upstairs Downstairs tour in the attic we finally find ourselves in the basement where Mrs. Bridges awaits us. The tea is brewing, there's cold game pie on the table and griddle cakes ready by the fire.

The kitchen is the beating heart of the house. From here the more presentable maid or manservant carries food and drink up two floors to the breakfast room and dining room.

Once the family upstairs has finished their meal the dirty crockery and cutlery will be brought back down here where the scullery maid waits by the stone sink to wash up (and snaffle any left-overs), admire the pictures on the Delft tiles in front of her and dream of a better life.

The clean crocks are then strictly arranged by Mrs. Bridges on her dresser, this example of which is actually part of the central wall of the building, dividing front from back.

This beautiful dresser is in the basement of the museum in Dennis Severs' House, home of the Spitalfields Trust and was where Dennis and his "man" cooked and ate right through until his tragically young death from AIDS at Christmas 1999.

The servants eat gathered around the kitchen table, home of the precious sugar mound and Mrs. Bridges' accounts ledger, scrupulously kept.

Above the table hangs a whale-oil lamp using spermaceti oil, which burns without the smoke of a candle lamp.

Prior to the petroleum boom of the early twentieth-century, the hunt for spermaceti oil (a wax taken from the heads of sperm whales) and whale blubber oil (rendered from the blubber of right whales [so named because they were the "right" whales to hunt, being friendly and non-aggressive] and just about any other species they could catch) saw vast fleets of whalers setting forth from Nantucket. Ahab ahoy! Take the oil and leave the meat to rot …

This is the reason we have so few whales left; not Inuit, Norwegians and Japanese people eating them (or indeed the Brits during post-war rationing when it was the only meat available until the Americans sold us Spam and Argentinian corned beef).

The household "help" - from Mrs. Bridges, keeper of the keys down to the scullery maid at the bottom of the heap - socialise here in the kitchen in any spare moment they can. Store and pantry doors hidden in the wall panelling lead to other basement rooms including the coal cellar and sleeping quarters for any not fortunate enough to get an attic room.

The least glamorous job in the household is that of scullery-maid. The rear basement behind the kitchen houses the scullery.

Here the poor girl cleans and prepares the vegetables to be used in the kitchen, does the laundry and any other jobs nobody else wants, hides from the unwanted attention of the older males upstairs and probably sits in that chair and weeps a lot.

This then was life in a Huguenot silk merchant's house. Not long afterwards the British Government removed their trade protection and ruined the silk-weavers, the area was bought up by private landlords and swiftly became slum housing.

By Dickens' time these houses were in a terrible state of disrepair with two or three destitute families crammed into every room. Most were lost in the Blitz to Nazi bombs and a lot of what was left was knocked down and redeveloped in the planning nightmare that was the 1960s.

The Spitalfields Trust (then the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust) was formed in 1977 to sally forth and battle the encroaching behemoth of London's City Financial District. With the Tories in government they fight a hopeless rearguard action so please visit it while it still remains and bring the Mighty Tourist Dollar in support.