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Signals by Ian Scott Massie
Original Watercolour
12" x 10" Mounted size - 5" x 7" Image size
Available: unframed @ £215
To shop, please click here
12" x 10" Mounted size - 5" x 7" Image size
Available: unframed @ £215
To shop, please click here
CARLO GATTI
On the Regent’s Canal at Battle Bridge Basin, a stones throw from Kings Cross, is the London Canal Museum. It’s housed in a vast ice warehouse built by the man who brought the ice cream business to London - Carlo Gatti.
I love ice cream - few foodstuffs come close for me. I’ll travel a long way for a good bowl of gelato. So I’m forever grateful to Carlo when, in 1847, he arrived in England to make his fortune. He came from the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and established a business in Holborn selling waffles and chestnuts. He soon saw what London really needed, however, and graduated to running a restaurant specialising in chocolate and gelato. His was the first shop in London to sell ice cream.
But ice cream requires a product which was hard to find in Victorian London - ice. Initially he obtained supplies from the Regent’s Canal Company which sold ice cut from lakes in America and shipped all the way from Boston. Demand rose, however, so he built a large ice warehouse at Battle Bridge Basin near Kings Cross and filled it with ice shipped to London from Norway. The cargo crossed the North Sea, came along the River Thames and finally up the Regent’s Canal.
The warehouse had two ice “wells” for storage from which he supplied his ice cream outlets and also delivered ice to houses across London. Carlo went on to open a string of music halls and eventually retired to Switzerland a wealthy man.
I love ice cream - few foodstuffs come close for me. I’ll travel a long way for a good bowl of gelato. So I’m forever grateful to Carlo when, in 1847, he arrived in England to make his fortune. He came from the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and established a business in Holborn selling waffles and chestnuts. He soon saw what London really needed, however, and graduated to running a restaurant specialising in chocolate and gelato. His was the first shop in London to sell ice cream.
But ice cream requires a product which was hard to find in Victorian London - ice. Initially he obtained supplies from the Regent’s Canal Company which sold ice cut from lakes in America and shipped all the way from Boston. Demand rose, however, so he built a large ice warehouse at Battle Bridge Basin near Kings Cross and filled it with ice shipped to London from Norway. The cargo crossed the North Sea, came along the River Thames and finally up the Regent’s Canal.
The warehouse had two ice “wells” for storage from which he supplied his ice cream outlets and also delivered ice to houses across London. Carlo went on to open a string of music halls and eventually retired to Switzerland a wealthy man.
How it would look on your wall
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