u/WhatsDownThatStreet

I’m sure most people here know about Croydon Airport: Britain’s first proper airport, and for a while the most important one in the country.

(If you don't know about it, it's really cool - home to the first air traffic control tower, first departure board, first airport hotel. The word “mayday” was invented there from the French m’aidez, because of all the Paris flights. Churchill took flying lessons there and nearly died in a crash during take off)

The bit I didn’t know until recently is its link to the start of the Spanish Civil War.

In July 1936 Franco, then one of the most senior figures in the Spanish military, was stuck in the Canary Islands. The Spanish government had sent him there deliberately, because they knew a coup was coming and wanted him out of the way, and they were watching him.

So the military needed a way to get him back to Spain for the coup to succeed. A plane flying out from Spain would have been obvious, so they needed it to be inconspicuous.

A right wing Spanish journalist was enlisted to organise it, and he met a British journalist with links to the intelligence services at Simpson’s in the Strand. Apparently he asked for a plane with “two blondes and a trustworthy fellow”, to help it go under the radar.

They enlisted a man named Major Hugh Pollard, MI6, who was more than happy to help and brought along his own daughter and her friend to make it look like a family trip.

They flew out of Croydon on 11 July 1936, early morning, four passengers. They dropped the women in the Canaries, waited a few days, then picked up Franco on the 18th and flew him to Spanish Morocco, where he took command of the Army of Africa.

The uprising had technically kicked off the day before, so it’s not quite true that Croydon started the war, but Franco getting out of the Canaries is what turned it into what it became.

Within three years Franco would be dictator of Spain, and he'd remain so for nearly four decades.

The control tower’s still there, a heritage centre now, though only open once a month because it’s volunteer run. The old terminal Airport House next door is Grade II* listed and basically set the template for what airports look like.

As for Pollard and the pilot: both accepted medals from Franco afterwards. The pilot described the whole thing as a great adventure when he was interviewed decades later.

Wrote it up properly here if anyone wants the longer version - How Croydon started the Spanish Civil War

Letchworth is the first garden city in the world: Ebenezer Howard's attempt to take the best of the city (work, opportunity, sociability) and combine it with the best of the country (space, fresh air, quality of life), and leave the slums behind for good. But for that to work it couldn't just be a commuter town. It needed its own industry, and industry that treated people decently.

The Spirella Corset Company is the best example of what that looked like. One of its founders had taken an interest in the garden city movement, came to see Letchworth for himself and met Howard in person. He wanted a firm that genuinely put its workers first, and in Letchworth he found the perfect match. The instruction he gave his architect says it all: design it so the whole space is illuminated, and anyone working there is working in the light.

Around 90% of the workforce were women. Baths and showers, regular breaks, a gymnasium, free eye tests and bicycle repairs, at a time when most factories meant long days bent over a bench in cramped, badly lit rooms. Most employers of the era wouldn't hire a married woman, but Spirella was happy to. It was known as the "factory of beauty."

The factory also has an incredible wartime story.

Spirella's neighbour, the British Tabulating Machine Company, was chosen to build the Bombe, the machine devised by Alan Turing to speed up cracking Enigma. Each one used rotating drums containing over 100 wire brushes, which had to be made with real finesse and skill. The Spirella women had spent years shaping the fine wire stays in corsets, so they knew exactly how to work with it. They were the perfect match.

Over 200 Bombes were built in Letchworth and driven down the road to Bletchley Park.

The building closed in 1989, and was saved by an £11m restoration reopened by the Prince of Wales in 1999. It's offices, a cafe and a gym now, with a bronze of Ebenezer Howard outside.

If you're interested in reading more, I wrote about the Spirella Building for my Building of the Week blog: https://open.substack.com/pub/whatsdownthatstreet/p/corsets-cracking-the-enigma-code?r=4tw6xf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Roupell Street and the surrounding conservation area, just a few minutes from Waterloo.

The land was seven acres of Lambeth marshland, bought in 1792 by John Roupell, a Londoner who'd made his money in metal.

The streets were finally laid out in 1824 and named after his family - John Street (after himself), Catherine Street (his wife) and Richard Street (his son). But London already had streets with those names, so they were quickly renamed Theed and Whittlesey. Only Roupell Street kept the family connection.

The name 'Roupell' became quite famous in Victorian times for its connection to a notorious fraud case. As a young man, John Roupell's son Richard fell in love with one Sarah Crane - the daughter of a carpenter, far below the Roupells burgeoning social status.

He knew that if his dad ever found out, there’d be hell to pay. Perhaps he’d even be locked out of the family fortune. So Richard and Sarah kept their relationship secret. They had four children, without John ever finding out. Then when John died, they got married and had another.

This created an unusual dynamic. Five children with the same parents but only one - the youngest - was legitimate, and therefore the heir to the family fortune.

One of those illegitimate children, William, was especially entwined with the business, helping to develop land like the Roupell Park estate, around Streatham Hill (now the Roupell Park housing estate).

So he started forging paperwork to mortgage plots of land to genuine buyers. He took around £100,000 that way. When his father died, he destroyed the will and replaced it with a forged one. While doing all this he got himself elected as an MP, campaigning partly on his working-class credentials via schemes like Roupell Street.

It collapsed in 1862. He fled to Spain, which had no extradition treaty with the UK, and then, for reasons nobody has ever fully explained, came back, confessed at the Old Bailey and served several years in Portland Prison.

The best detail: at trial he admitted that if he'd simply left his father's real will alone, he would have inherited Roupell Street itself, land whose value was climbing fast with the arrival of the railway.

More than 200 years on it's still there, having survived the Blitz, Waterloo station, the IMAX roundabout and the Southbank complex. Lambeth Council calls it a historic enclave in a district that has otherwise seen large scale redevelopment. You'll have seen it on TV without realising: Doctor Who, the Kray twins film Legend, and Peggy Mitchell's final EastEnders scene.

In medieval times, Lincoln had England's largest Jewish community outside London. The community largely settled around Steep Hill, and some grew  very wealthy - most notably a man called Aaron of Lincoln, a prolific financier who counted King Henry II among many in his debt.

Jew's House, built in the 12th century, formed part of this community, and is one of the oldest homes in the country. The person most associated with the building is a woman named Belaset of Wallingford.

Like many of Lincoln’s Jews, Belaset worked and grew wealthy as a money lender. But sadly, as with many medieval women, we don’t know much about her life, or who she was as a person.

Belaset’s story has a tragic end. She was executed in the late 13th century, accused of the crime of ‘coin-clipping’ - shaving the edges off of silver coins, to collect the precious metal. In the climate of the time, the charge may have been little more than a pretext to seize her wealth.

This was also a period of deep suspicion towards Jews, and they were heavily persecuted. In the years after Belaset's death, Jews saw their rights further cut back. In 1290, King Edward I issued the edict of expulsion. All jews in England had no choice but to leave.

Jews were finally readmitted to England in 1656, after 366 years of exclusion. Lincoln has a small Jewish community again today. The Jew’s House still stands as one of the oldest buildings still in everyday use: people eat there almost every night of the week. It’s a visible reminder of a part of our history that has too often been pushed out of view.

If you're interested in learning more, I wrote about Jew's House as part of my Building of the Week series, with photos: Jew's House, Lincoln: a story of wealth and persecution

I've always loved Leeds for its Victorian arcades, and long wondered about the history behind them.

They're part of one of the most stunning concentrations of Victorian architecture in the country, and the centrepiece, the elegant County and Cross Arcades, is breathtaking.

They were born out of Leeds rapidly expanding in the 19th century. As the city grew, overcrowded slums built up in the centre.

Over the latter half of the 19th century, grand arcades began to be built over some of the most tightly packed streets. For County and Cross Arcades, some of these streets East of Briggate were bought up, the residents moved out, and the arcades built in their place.

But this was a private development. Unlike the council slum clearances that came later, there was no obligation to rehouse the people who were displaced. The families living on the footprint of the arcades in the 1890s simply had to find somewhere else, at market rent.

I'm really into social history, so I wanted to know what that actually meant for the people living there. So I traced them through the census records. I found a real mix of situations: better off residents who were able to move upwards, but most of all families moved to neighbouring slums, which were themselves cleared just a few decades later.

If you're interested in finding out more, I wrote up the full story here - Leeds' Victorian Arcades: A Story of Beauty and Displacement

The UK's first council estate, opened in Shoreditch in 1900. It was built on the site of the Old Nichol, one of the most notorious slums in Victorian London.

The London County Council appointed a remarkably young architect to lead the project - Owen Fleming, just 23.

Largely unknown now, his legacy lives on in council estates all over the country. He designed rows of mid-rise blocks, centred around a shared green space. For decades, this became a template for council housing replicated all over.

Sadly, something that wasn’t replicated was another core part of Fleming’s vision - this was built at the high point of the Arts and Crafts movement, which emphasised highly skilled craftsmanship for the public good. Fleming brought different architects in to design the different blocks.

As a result, the blocks all have slightly different styles - you’ll find Dutch gables, conical towers, steep roofs evoking medieval barns, and bands of yellow on redbrick, known as ‘streaky bacon’ banding.

But the estate has a complicated legacy. Of the thousands of people cleared from the Old Nichol, only 11 were rehoused in the new flats. The homes went to the "deserving" poor: police officers, nurses, teachers. The former residents weren’t given any help to find new homes. Instead, they were just forced further East into neighbouring slums.

If you're interested, I wrote more about its history here - Boundary Estate, London: the complicated legacy of the UK's first council estate

One of the most recognisable British seaside sights: the Art Deco façade of Dreamland, proudly presiding over Margate's seafront, with the hulking mass of Arlington House towering behind it.

Dreamland is one of the UK's earliest amusement parks. In 1935 it got its iconic Art Deco cinema façade, directly influenced by German cinema design of the 1920s. It was the first building of its type in Britain, mimicked in Odeon's house cinema style and inspiring the picture palaces that appeared all over the country.

Arlington House came three decades later, eighteen storeys of brutalist concrete flats meant to save a declining seaside town. It was almost entirely empty within a year of opening.

Two buildings, two radically different visions of the future in intimate conversation with each other. Both buildings are now grade II listed.

If you're interested, I wrote more about the history of the two buildings here - https://whatsdownthatstreet.com/2026/04/24/building-of-the-week-dreamland/

One of the most recognisable British seaside sights: the Art Deco façade of Dreamland, proudly presiding over Margate's seafront, with the hulking mass of Arlington House towering behind it.

Dreamland is one of the UK's earliest amusement parks. In 1935 it got its iconic Art Deco cinema façade, directly influenced by German cinema design of the 1920s. It was the first building of its type in Britain, mimicked in Odeon's house cinema style and inspiring the picture palaces that appeared all over the country.

Arlington House came three decades later, eighteen storeys of brutalist concrete flats meant to save a declining seaside town. It was almost entirely empty within a year of opening.

Two buildings, two radically different visions of the future in intimate conversation with each other. Both buildings are now grade II listed.

If you're interested, I wrote more about the history of the two buildings here - https://whatsdownthatstreet.com/2026/04/24/building-of-the-week-dreamland/

Córdoba's synagogue was built in 1314-1315. From the street it's deliberately modest - a previous, grander synagogue had been demolished after Pope Innocent IV ordered action against the Jews for building one of "unacceptable height."

On the inside, it's covered in intricate carvings, designed in the Mudéjar style - which used Islamic decorative techniques.

In 1492 all Jews were expelled from Spain. Synagogues across the country were seized and, almost without exception, destroyed.

Córdoba's survived because it kept being useful. Over the centuries it went through a series of long, strange reinventions - a rabies hospital, a chapel for the city's cobblers' guild, a nursery school.

By the 1800s, all the Hebrew inscriptions and intricate decorations had long been covered up. Nobody knew what it was.

Then a local priest found the inscriptions by accident during repair work. In 1884 it was confirmed as a medieval, pre-Inquisition synagogue.

If you're interested in finding out more, I wrote up the full history for my Building of the Week blog: Córdoba Synagogue: Modest Survivor of the Spanish Inquisition