Itchy Park Spitalfields

The first photo was taken in 1902 my photo was taken in March 2019 in the same spot as the original.  117 years apart.
The churchyard of Christ Church, Spitalfields, was once known as “Itchy Park,” a nickname that may derive from the long-term presence of the homeless sleeping there and the lice that afflicted them.
In 1902, at the age of twenty-six, the American novelist Jack London came to Itchy Park as part of seven weeks he spent wandering around the East End that Summer, talking to people and learning as much as he could of their lives.
The result was a masterpiece, “The People of the Abyss,” in which London used his talent as a novelist to draw his readers into sympathy with those he described, creating a humane portrayal of a world that had previously been the preserve of social campaigners.

The present garden is a fragment of the original burial ground for Christ Church, which altogether saw 68,000 burials, 67,000 of which were outside the church. Until the latter part of the C19th the churchyard extended east to Brick Lane; it had been enlarged in 1791 and in 1859 it was extended to Commercial Street to the west.
It was closed for burials and was converted into a public garden by the MPGA in 1892, the layout the work of Fanny Wilkinson, landscape gardener to the MPGA. It was later largely built over, partly by a children’s school/playgroup, and most of the monuments were removed in 1950. Harold Clunn remarked in 1945 that the 'churchyard is now a pleasant public garden'. Within the garden are notable London plane trees and it has C19th gates and piers, a drinking fountain and cattle trough installed by the Metropolitan Cattle Trough and Drinking Fountain Association.