John Burton: lighthouse keeper
Everyone has a story. Meet the London lighthouse keeper with Islington links
Everyone has a story. Over the years Islington Faces has interviewed a crocodile tamer, clown and even a Death Café coordinator. Turns out that it was even more exciting to discover there’s a London lighthouse keeper with links to the borough. Meet John Burton who works at Trinity Buoy Wharf. Interview by Nicola Baird
London’s only lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, near Canning Town in Tower Hamlets, isn’t just a lighthouse, it’s an experimental lighthouse built in 1864 by Sir James Nicholas Douglass, FRS, who was born in Bow in 1826. Douglass also designed the Eddystone lighthouse in Cornwall.
This was the time when super famous scientist, Michael Faraday, was trying to solve the problem of how to make lighthouse light cleaner, and brighter, through a cunning system of making light arc (at this stage there were no light bulbs). If we’re being honest, it’s probable that many of Faraday’s experiments were trialled in this iconic lighthouse’s twin, built 30 metres away 10 years earlier (but demolished in 1922) because Faraday died in 1867 aged 75. Whatever, Faraday’s optical arcing prototype worked and was used at three of the company’s lighthouses for a few years, until it was decided it was just too expensive.
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“This place is really, really special,” says John Burton, one of the site managers, as we settle down to an interview in the lighthouse’s domed lightroom. It’s good of him to take time for Islington Faces as it is a busy day with hundreds of artists bringing their work to the TBW Drawing Prize; a routine fire engine visit; people milling around the popular local café in a container (it’s got a black London cab on the roof) and all this despite a slurry of wet summer rain. But the magic happens to whoever visits in this place at Leamouth perhaps because it is surrounded by history, dedicated to creativity and with views of the cable car, Millennium Dome and Canary Wharf. John has been so happily busy with his work that he’s been at Trinity Buoy Wharf for 25 years.
He’s not just a lighthouse keeper. Trinity Buoy Wharf, whose remit is to be a place devoted to creative and arts activity on the River Thames is run by Urban Space Management, a regeneration specialist set up by Eric Reynolds (who started Camden Lock Market in the mid 1970s, built Gabriels’ Wharf in the late 1980s and set up Spitalfields Market in the early 1990s), so John’s wider remit is as a project manager. He’s a trained chartered surveyor, specialising in regeneration projects and has responsibility for Trinity Buoy Wharf’s letting, leases and tenant relations, for the whole Trinity Buoy Wharf – more than three acres and with about 14 different buildings on it including the buildings made of recycled shipping containers.
Big tenants at Trinity Buoy Wharf include English National Opera (it’s where they have their prop making studio), Uber Boat by Thames Clippers, the Faraday School (a private primary), and the Prince’s Foundation who have a Foundation Year art school. There is also a recording studio on a red retired lightboat and many artist tenants including the charity The Big Draw.
Islington Faces tracked John down via Instagram where he posts as @lighthousekeeper64 after noting that he was clearly sorry to see the closing of the Sylvanian Shop on Mountgrove Road, N4. Turns out this born and bred Londoner actually lived off Holloway Road, N7 for two years in the mid 1980s. He also lived in De Beauvoir, N1.
“It was post university (John’s first degree was at LSE in social anthropology) and I was sharing with a guy who owned a house on Arthur Road, N7 near the Sobell Centre,” says John. “We became firm friends. Islington was quite different then. I remember skip diving in 1987 outside what was the former telephone exchange (or post sorting office) before it became the shopping centre (Safeways – now Morrisons) and found two great Utility sideboards they had thrown out before the demolition. I managed to get my friend to help me haul one back to his house. This sideboard is still in use in my home now.”
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Places John Burton loves in Islington
I live in Stamford Hill and enjoy cycling through the back parts of Islington – past Sadler’s Wells and down Theobald’s Row (my dentist is in Farringdon). There’s been a lot of cycling improvements. One day a week I cycle to west London and go through Drayton Park which is great. There have been lots of good improvements from a cycling point of view along that route.
Kings Crescent Estate on Brownswood Road on the Hackney/Islington border is a great looking scheme by Karakusevic Carson Architects, leading onto the nicely human scale Mountgrove Road past the old Sylvanian shop, 68 Mountgrove Road, and the guy who runs Sargent & Co bikes at 74 Mountgrove Road.
I love the beautiful squares and lovely Regency feel. Of all the London boroughs Islington has the best squares. I love the physicality and architectural feeling on the streets. It really sets it apart.
Upper Street – it’s a really good street which has managed to keep independent and interesting shops on it and side streets off it. It’s always fun to walk up there. It’s not dominated by tall buildings.
Angel Central shopping centre in Upper Street works well, giving a connection between Upper Street and Liverpool Road. That link is so beneficial for the community and feels such a natural thing, but it took the developer and their design team to realise it.
Highbury Corner – it took years to do the work, but it’s really improved for pedestrians and more fun. The cycling has improved too. And I do drive round it occasionally as well.
Camden Passage – my Dad was into modern furniture but also old stuff, so as a child my parents took us to Camden Passage which had loads of antiques and secondhand goods. It was one of those places that you could rock up to and find the most intriguing things.
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How to be a London lighthouse keeper
“In my mid 30s I was working in regeneration related work and realised that surveyors are the gatekeepers to property owners, so I went back to college to be a surveyor. It made sense at the time!” laughs John who will celebrate 30 years with Urban Space Management in 2024.
For years the Chain and Buoy Store attached to the lighthouse was used to store buoys and was then split into workshops. One of those produced glass beads (the size of marbles) used in lighthouse beam timing devices (a bit like an egg timer). Since 31 December 1999 the Lighthouse has had an even more unusual role as the home to the Longplayer, conceived and composed by Jem Finer.
“It’s a sound installation designed to play for 1,000 years and never repeat itself,” says John. He turns the volume down a little using controls on the floor below, tucked behind a massive array of singing bowls.
Sitting at the very top of the lighthouse, with a view of the Millennium Dome, Canary Wharf and East India Docks this eerie sound of reverberating chimes, a little like a gong bath, has been playing non-stop for 23 years. Take that Alexa.
It’s clear that John is incredibly proud of this lighthouse just 15 metres from the River Thames. It’s not just the time he’s been working with Trinity Buoy Wharf – all the while seeing the London skyline change – or his admiration of the engineering “look at those diamonds, you have something similar on the Gherkin,” he says pointing to the steel dome structure. It’s also his creative appreciation of the lighthouse hosting Longplayer – “a world class piece of art.” That’s why every birthday he makes a personal donation of £100 to the Buying Time project - the amount it costs to run the Longplayer per day. This astonishing project is set to run until 2099 and is administered by the Longplayer Trust which has put in place strategies to find funding, replace trustees (as few people live more than 100 years!), update the computer programme and even have contingency plans to move the singing bowls to another country if the climate crisis causes sea levels to rise making its lighthouse home untenable.
History layers
You’d think this riverside spot would be packed with ghosts, but John is firm, “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he says. But he has a curious mind’s eye that means he can look at a place and see the layers of history. “I still come to work and see two-storey industrial blocks every time I cycle down Orchard Place,” he says. As it happens that’s how I remember arriving at Trinity Buoy Wharf the last time I visited after completing the 53mile-walk from the source in Luton to the mouth of the River Lea.
Seven years on there is a lot more building here. But it wasn’t that long ago this was a working dock employing 150 people making buoys and replenishing lightships (against the roughly 700 based there, now). In 1965 London’s Docks employed around 109,000 people. Then along came shipping containers which completely transformed the way goods moved around the world and impacted on all ports. The Port of London became an industrial graveyard that in 1973 employed about 9,000 people. The big changes only happened to this stretch of the Thames and its banks, stretching from the Royal Docks and North at Greenwich to London Bridge when London Docklands Development Corporation (LLDC) was greenlighted in 1981 by politicians Michael Heseltine and Margaret Thatcher with the right to compulsory purchase, make plans and give tax breaks for development as well as forward fund large elements of infrastructure. That’s what has brought the Docklands light railway; Canary Wharf and so much of the riverscape we can now see.
“I feel a real sense of history in this stretch of the river. The East India Company was based just 300 yards away. That took British imperialism from zero to full on over a period of 270 years of pirating, strong arming and then dealing in tea, spices and silk – all of it was brought by boat to their dock close to here. It never ceases to amaze me how busy this tiny little bit of London was,” he says adding that docks are big places, taking up considerable acreage. Much of this is now built on, often with residential accommodation. “There is always building going on,” he adds as we admire the skyline through the sheeting rain as it slips off the lighthouse dome.
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Trinity Buoy Wharf might well have ended up being soulless, expensive housing if it hadn’t been for the officers of the LLDC who persuaded their board to have a competition to turn the site into a centre for artistic and creative activity, which took place in 1996. John’s employer USM had the idea to use all the land for creative uses and take a small scale organic approach to developing the site, with a charity owing the land. USM would pay the charity 25% the rental income it received from renting out spaces and the charity would use those funds for arts uses at Trinity Buoy Wharf and local boroughs.
“It’s a funny story. Our proposal was on a table, one of about nine shortlisted projects. Someone threw it into the bin as they thought we were too left field. But one of the people in the meeting rescued it and put it back on the table saying, “no, these people are good”. That was based on what she had seen of our work at Spitalfields Market. We eventually won the competition and took over the site on the 1 April 1998. We have the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust as our landlord and we have achieved everything (and much more) that we set out in our original proposal.”
“We took it on and have turned it into a thriving place and an interesting place to be,” says John proudly.
If you haven’t already visited, then definitely make a trip – it’s about 55 minutes cycling from Islington if you use Regent’s Canal to Poplar. There’s also the DLR at Canning Town. Or just flip to Netflix and watch a film where the Trinity Buoy Wharf, and its lighthouse, stars, such as Polite Society (2023) or Rogue Agent (2022) which has James Norton as the baddie.
Find out more
Trinity Buoy Wharf is open year round – 7 days a week (except Christmas day) from 7am to 7pm. Visit the lighthouse from April-October (only at weekends) and hear Longplayer for yourself. Even if the lighthouse doors are locked there is a story box of audio visual material that helps explain more about what’s going on in a container parked at the foot of the lighthouse. There’s also a cute wooden shed that helps explain Michael Faraday’s work.
Trinity Buoy Wharf is a place devoted to creative and arts activity on the River Thames in London’s docklands. See more here
More about the Longplayer, including how to keep it playing until 2099 is here.
Over to you
If you’d like to nominate someone to be interviewed who grew up, lives or works in Islington, or suggest yourself, please let me know, via nicolabaird dot green at gmail dot com. If you enjoyed this post you might like to look at the A-Z index, or search by interviewee’s roles or Meet Islingtonians to find friends, neighbours and inspiration. Thanks for stopping by. Nicola
Trinity Buoy Wharf is one of my favourite hidden away stops when I’m out cycling. It is nice to sit in one of their deck chairs and enjoy the view of the O2, Canary Wharf and the river.