‘The Word of the Lord Endures Forever’

Next time you walk up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul’s, turn left down the narrow passage just beyond the church of St Martin Within Ludgate and you will find yourself in a quiet courtyard where Stationers’ Hall has stood since the sixteen-seventies.

For centuries, this whole district was the heart of the printing and publishing, with publishers lining Ludgate Hill, St Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row, while newspapers operated from Fleet St. Today, only Stationers’ Hall and St Bride Printing Library, down behind Ludgate Circus, remain as evidence of this lost endeavour that once flourished here.

Yet the Stationers’ Company was founded in 1403, predating printing. At first it was a guild of scriveners, illuminators, bookbinders, booksellers and suppliers of parchment, ink and paper. Even the term ‘stationer’ originates here with the stalls in St Paul’s Churchyard where they traded, which were immovable – in other words, ‘stationary’ stalls selling ‘stationery.’

No-one whose life is bound up with writing and words can fail to be touched by a visit to Stationers’ Hall. From 1557, when Mary Stewart granted the Stationers their Charter and for the next three hundred years, members had the monopoly upon publishing and once one member had published a text no-one else could publish it, thus the phrase ‘Entered at Stationers’ Hall’ became a guarantee of copyright.

Built in the decade following the Fire of London, the Great Hall was panelled by Stephen College ‘the protestant joiner’ at price of £300 in 1674. In spite of damage in the London Blitz and extensive alterations to other buildings, this central space retains its integrity as an historic interior. At one end, an ornate Victorian window shows William Caxton presenting his printing to Edward IV while an intricate and darkly detailed wooden Restoration screen faces it from the other. Wooden cases display ancient plate, colourful flags hang overhead, ranks of serried crests line the walls, stained glass panels of Shakespeare and Tyndale filter daylight while – all around – books are to be spied, carved into the architectural design.

A hidden enclave cloistered from the hubbub of the modern City, where illustrious portraits of former gentlemen publishers – including Samuel Richardson – peer down silently at you from the walls, Stationers’ Hall quietly overwhelms you with the history and origins of print in London through six centuries.

The Stock Room

The Stock Room c. 1910

The Stock Room door, c.1910

Panel of Stationers that became Lord Mayor includes JJ Baddeley, 1921

The Great Hall, where Purcell’s Hymn to St Cecilia was first performed in 1692

The Great Hall c. 1910

Stained glass window of 1888 showing Caxton presenting his printing to Edward IV

The vestibule to Great Hall

The Stationers’ Garden

The Court Room with a painting by Benjamin West

Looking out from the Court Room to the garden with the Master’s chair on the right

The Court Room

The Court Room, c 1910

Exterior of Stationer’s Hall, c. 1910

Archive photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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At Drapers’ Hall

At Goldsmiths’ Hall

At Vintners’ Hall

No-one was more surprised by the scale and enthusiasm of the reaction than Doreen Fletcher when I published her paintings of the East End a few weeks ago. Painted between 1983 and 2003, Doreen’s pictures had been stored away in the attic for ten years until I persuaded her to let me photograph and present them in these pages.

Readers will be pleased to learn that, as a result of publication, discussions are now afoot for an exhibition next year. In the meantime I present another ten paintings, seen publicly for the first time, that Doreen no longer has in her possession but which are reproduced from transparencies.

Turner’s Rd, E3

Palaseum Cinema, Commercial Rd

Salmon Lane in the Rain, 1987

Mile End Park, 1987

Wintry Park, 1987

Limehouse Churchyard, 1987

Stepney Snooker Club, 1987

Stepney Snooker Club, Evening, 1987

Commercial Rd, 1989

Railway Arch, Bow

Images copyright © Doreen Fletcher

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Doreen Fletcher’s East End Paintings

In recent years, Photographer Jenny Lewis has been undertaking a project capturing portraits of artists and makers in their workshops and studios in Hackney, but what was initially intended as a gallery of thriving endeavour became an unintended elegy.

“I thought I was working on a series celebrating the creatives of my community, giving the opportunity to build up a family tree of like-minded spirits, as each subject nominating the next to create an authentic bloodline. Yet before long, every conversation seemed to lead to ‘Glad you caught us now, we’ve been here twenty years and the building’s being flattened next month.’ As the series has evolved, the landscape changed before my eyes and more than half of those I photographed have either sold up and moved on or – increasingly – been evicted. Many now work from home as they can no longer afford a studio and people are struggling.” – Jenny Lewis

Matthew Snow, Screen Printer

Kirsty Harris, Artist

Martino Gamper, Furniture Designer

Anna Stephenson, Fashion Designer

Dan Holiday, Artist

Cressida Bell, Textile Designer

Felix de Pass, Designer

Edwina Orr & David Trayner, Holographic Artists

Archie Proudfoot, Sign Writer

Lu Flux, Fashion Designer

Michael Marriott, Furniture Designer

Mary Stephenson, Artist

Miles Glynn, Jeweller

Minnie- Mae Scott, Textile Designer

Oliver Fowles, Watch Maker

Rose de Borman, Textile Designer

Graham Rawle, Artist & Writer

Noemi Klein, Jeweller

Paul Reynolds, Curator

Romilly Saumerez-Smith, Jeweller

Piers Atkinson, Milliner

Katy Hackney, Jeweller

Kevin Francis Gray, Sculptor

Photographs copyright © Jenny Lewis

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Makers of East London

Proposed Goodsyard Towers seen from Elder St, Spitalfields

As many readers will already know, Boris Johnson, Mayor of London has chosen to bypass the democratic process by ‘calling in’ Hammerson & Ballymore’s Goodsyard development proposals to determine the planning application himself, before the elected councillors of either Tower Hamlets or Hackney even had the chance to vote on them.

In boroughs with a combined total of more than forty thousand on the housing list, widespread concerns have been raised over the scale and nature of these plans which will see monster blocks of luxury flats as tall as Canary Wharf lined up from Shoreditch High St to Brick Lane, casting the Boundary Estate into permanent shadow.

On Monday 16th November at 7pm, The Hackney Society & More Light More Power have organised a debate at St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch at which John Biggs, Mayor of Tower Hamlets & Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney will speak discussing how the proposed development can be challenged. Click here to book a ticket

Meanwhile, this is the largest ‘brown field’ site in Central London and, at this moment of crisis in housing for Londoners, there is an opportunity for the Mayors to champion a ‘model’ social housing scheme on the Goodsyard designed as a complement to the Boundary Estate. Such an endeavour could give hope to those who are struggling and supply the real needs of Londoners who require genuinely affordable homes and work spaces.

Rather than Hammerson & Ballymore’s overblown development which threatens to blight the East End for generations to come, we need to prove that we can match the aspirations of a century ago and leave a legacy which can inspire those who come after us, just as the architects of Arnold Circus have done.

Looking from Boundary Estate looking towards the City

Looking from Boundary Estate looking towards the City with Goodsyard towers

Visualisation of Goodsyard towers

Nature of proposed Goodsyard towers

Shadows over Boundary Estate caused by proposed Goodsyard towers

Shoreditch High St

Shoreditch High St in future

Bethnal Green Rd

Bethnal Green Rd in future

Commercial St & Wheler St

Commercial St & Wheler St in future

Great Eastern St

Great Eastern St in future

Commercial St

Commercial St in future

Bethnal Green Rd in future

The Goodsyard

Click here to sign the petition against the Goodsyard development

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Towers Over The Goodsyard

A Brief History of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard

Ancient Arches

In 1733, when William Hogarth heard that the governors of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield were considering commissioning the Venetian artist, Jocopo Amigoni, to paint a mural in the newly constructed North Wing of the hospital, he offered his own services free. Always insecure about his social status, it was a gesture of largesse that made him look good and provided the opportunity for Hogarth to prove that an English artist could excel in the grand historical style. Yet such was the mistaken nature of Hogarth’s ambition that his “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” is a curious hybrid at best. Illustrating Christ healing the sick, each of the figures in the painting illustrate different ailments, a bizarre notion that undermines Hogarth’s aspiration to the sublime classical style and results in a surreal vision of a dystopian arcadia instead. In plain words, it is a mighty piece of kitsch.

Let me take you through this gallery of maladies. Be warned, it is not a pretty picture, definitely not something you would choose to look at if you were unwell. In the detail below, on the extreme left we begin with two poor women. Some art historians believe the first represents Cretinism, or Down’s Syndrome to use the contemporary description. Another opinion suggests that the forearms of the two women, side by side, one fat and one thin, illustrate two forms of Consumption or Tuberculosis – whereby the thin woman has Phthisis which causes the body to waste, while the fat woman has the Scrofulous form that causes weight gain. The man with the stick is undeniably Blind. The fourth figure, with the anxious yellowish face may have Jaundice, or alternatively this could represent Melancholia, or Depression as we would call it. The bearded man with the red complexion has Gout, while the sling may be on account of a Septic Elbow Joint. The distressed woman beside him has an injured breast which may be Mastitis or an Abscess. Meanwhile, the child on the ground below this group has a curved spine and holds a crutch to indicate Rickets.

At the centre of the composition is Christ reaching out to the crippled man at the Pool of Bethesda, as described in the Gospel of St John. The bible tells us this man had been incapacitated by the pool for thirty-eight years, which makes the muscular physique that Hogarth gave him a little far fetched. It owes more to the requirements of the classical style than to veracity, although Hogarth did choose to portray him with a Chronic Leg Ulcer to introduce an element of authenticity to the figure.

In the background, a man is accepting a bribe from the servant of the naked woman with the wanton attitude on the right of the composition, this is to push the mother with the sick baby out of the way so that his mistress can get to the healing water of the pool first. The reason for her unscrupulous haste is that she has a Sexually Transmitted Disease, most likely Gonorrhea, indicated by the rashes upon her knees and elbows. Finally, we complete the sorry catalogue with the pitiful man with the swollen abdomen on the extreme right of the canvas, he has Liver Cancer.

Hogarth painted “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” in his studio in St Martin’s Lane in early 1737 and it was put in place at Bart’s in April. Although it is a huge painting, approximately thirty feet across, its position on the stairwell means that you see just a portion of the picture from the foot of the stairs, then you pass close by it as you ascend the staircase and only achieve a vision of the entire work from the head of the stairs. Let me say that this arrangement does the painting no service. When you see it close up, the broad theatrical brushstrokes of the framing scrolls and of the background, which were painted by George Lambert, scenery painter at Covent Garden, become crudely apparent.

Perhaps these ungainly miscalculations in “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” were what led Hogarth to paint the companion piece “The Good Samaritan” in situ, from a scaffolding frame. Did he get seduced by the desire for monumentalism while painting the “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” in his studio and forget that it would be seen close to, as well as from a distance? Time has done the picture no favours either. With innumerable cleanings and restorations, the canvas has buckled and now daylight prevents you from seeing the painting without reflections, blanking out whole areas of the image. Maybe this was the reason for Hogarth’s instruction that the picture should never be varnished? It was ignored.

I cannot avoid the conclusion that “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” was a misdirection for Hogarth. It has more bathos than pathos. He aspired to be an artist in the high classical style, yet we love Hogarth for his satires and his portraits. We love his humanity, recording the teeming society that flourished in the filth of eighteenth century London. These pictures speak more of life than any idealised visions of nymphs and swains frolicking in a bucolic paradise. And, even in this, his attempt at a classical composition, Hogarth’s natural sympathy is with the figures at the margins. Far from proving that an English artist could excel at the grand historical style,”Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” illustrates why this mode never suited the native temperament. All the qualities that make this painting interesting, the human drama and pitiful ironies, are out of place in the idealised landscape that suited the tastes of our continental cousins.

Hogarth was born in Bartholomew Close and baptised around the corner from the hospital at St Bartholomew’s Church. At the time of “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda,” Hogarth’s mother still lived nearby and she must have been proud to see her son’s painting installed in the fine new hospital buildings. It was symbol of how far he had come. Yet, for obvious reasons, the painting is mostly ignored in books of Hogarth’s work today, so the next time you are in Smithfield, go in and take a look, and savour its bizarre pleasures for yourself.

This woman has a sexually transmitted disease.

This man has cancer of the liver.

The poor box at the entrance to the North wing.

The new entrance to St Bartholomew’s Hospital built in 1702, with the North wing containing Hogarth’s mural just visible through the gate

St Batholomew’s Church in Smithfield where William Hogarth was baptised.

Photographs of the mural © Patricia Niven

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At Bart’s Pathology Museum

The Redchurch St Rake’s Progress

As you can see, Artist Liam O’Farrell loves markets of all kinds – old and new, large and small – so it is my pleasure to publish this gallery of his recent watercolour paintings celebrating this essential element of the identity of London

Broadway Market

Columbia Rd Market

Brick Lane Market

Bacon St Market

Sclater St Market

Whitechapel Market

Spitalfields Market

Borough Market

Covent Garden Market

Camden Market

Portobello Rd Market

South Bank Market

Liam O’Farrell pictured in Fournier St

Images copyright © Liam O’Farrell

Next Tuesday 24th November, Julian Dobson author of How To Save Our Town Centres will be giving a lecture at Bishopsgate Institute entitled Is the Market Killing our Markets? as part of the Cries of London season. Click here to book a ticket

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The Markets of Old London

In Praise of Stench

Frank Foster, a legend in shirting

There is an anonymous door in Pall Mall on the opposite side of the road from the line of grandiose clubs of St James. Go through this door, walk down to the low-ceilinged basement and you will discover Frank Foster and his wife Mary, who have been working since 1958 in two small rooms that barely add up to any space at all. Yet this modest workshop contains Frank’s entire world of experience as a cosmopolitan conjurer of cotton and silk, who made shirts for anyone-who-was-anyone in the latter half of the twentieth century and is now in his ninety-third year.

Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I found Frank parked behind a crowded desk of presidential scale in the front room, overlooked by a line of large brass scissors mounted upon the wall, gleaming like badges of office. This is where Frank clasps his nimble fingers and ruminates upon the changing world, cogitating his long life and the insights granted to him uniquely as shirt maker to the rich and famous.

‘When I look at my hand, the fourth finger is like mum’s and other fingers are like dad,’ Frank admitted to me in tender recollection, ‘The way the nails grow, I can see their hands even though they are dead.’

Born in Shadwell in 1923 into a family where his father struggled even to raise three shillings a week rent, as a boy Frank was the last person in the East End to catch typhoid in forty-seven years – which he ascribes to eating food scraped off the pavement in Watney St Market. ‘I know it’s true because they came to find me forty-seven years later to see if I was a carrier,’ he confessed to me, ‘Which I’m not.’

‘You have to remember, poor people never had shirts years ago and that’s also why tails were put on shirts because they never wore pants. I didn’t have shirts growing up until some discarded ones came from uncles. I had discarded trousers from uncles too, but when you had grown-ups’ trousers altered, the legs were very wide so you had to be careful not show your three piece when wearing them. We were very poor and I was always embarrassed about that, especially wearing altered shirts that looked ghastly.

I was a youngster when war broke and they evacuated me from Shadwell because the Docks were badly bombed – it was set alight. As a consequence, I went to live with an aunt in Brent, Hendon, which I thought was the country. That’s how I broke away from Shadwell. I was a natural artist. When I was at school, I used to draw and the other kids gathered round to watch. It’s in my soul. I had some success and exhibited portraits in five galleries when I was fourteen  - including The Whitechapel Gallery, East End Academy and Coolings Gallery in Bond St. My paintings were sent to Moscow as an aid to Russia and never came back. But, being a young lad, I had to get a measly job with Bernstein, a printing company in Aldersgate. They produced rubbish – they weren’t fine lithographers. I was a printers’ boy, I earned the princely sum of seventeen shillings and sixpence a week, and I was there on one occasion when Aldersgate St was set alight.

At the same time, I was learning to be a cartographer with the Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries, but it was very boring and I didn’t like it. I was only about seventeen at the time, so after three weeks I just left. Then, like an idiot, I volunteered for the RAF in the Euston Rd for a lovely job which was to be a rear gunner. The life expectancy was about three weeks. When I told my dad, I said, ‘I’m going to be called up so I volunteered.’ I shan’t tell you what he called me. He said, ‘ You f**king mug!’ He went to Euston Rd and told them my real age and they cancelled it all, but nevertheless I did have to go into the army. They called me up as a driver with the Royal Army Service Corps. I was rubbish at all that stuff!

I made my first shirt over sixty years ago, I was art school trained as a textile printer at Central, which was in Kingsway. At first, I made ties and I thought of looking up the Huguenot silk weavers in Spitalfields. So I went there and I found one Huguenot – I couldn’t pronounce his name – who wove some silk for me for ties. He introduced me to what is called ‘crying’ or ‘weeping’ silk. I said, ‘I don’t quite understand what that is,’ so he showed me silk that he had woven and when you squashed it together it made a beautiful noise of sobbing, the yarn was so fine. I bought that silk and made ties of it. A little while after, that stopped and you won’t hear anything of it because it is something specifically done by Huguenots.

I first had a new shirt of my own when I was eighteen. I got it because I had already started printing the scarves and I was earning a great deal of money. I went to Hilditch & Key in Jermyn St. They were a French company then, so my shirt was made in Paris. It was a silk shirt and I paid fifteen guineas which I could hardly afford. It was striped, nothing plain – fancy, trying to show off!

I’m not an expensive shirt maker although I am a good shirt maker. When I first went into business as a young lad, I was making silk squares for scarves that were printed by me by with rubber blocks. The silks I printed were picked up by people who loved the stuff including the royal family and, when I was discovered by them, it gave me a very good income for a while. You’ve heard of Princess Marina? This was 1947, just after the war. I supplied my scarves to Harrods and all the other stores and, while I was out selling, people were asking me if I could supply them with other things.

In those days, I had the Carmelite nuns working for me. They are a closed order but I was in contact with these people. You have to treat them fairly and not exploit them. If you are not honest they will find out. If they think you are making too much profit on their labour, that is also not allowed. Anyway, I conformed and we got on very well. Consequently, I was able to provide other things that the Carmelites could make for me and one of those things was ladies’ underwear, but they wouldn’t make ladies underwear that was black because they considered it not a nice thing, although men think it is a nice thing nuns don’t. Making other things, I discovered they were able to make shirts all by hand with hand-finished button holes. So that’s how I became a scarf maker, an underwear maker and a shirt maker. Not a very good title, is it?

My price when I started making shirts was four pounds, four shillings and that was tough, so I started doing shirt recutting and recollaring for laundries. My first place was 37 Bond St next to Sotheby’s – I make shirts now for the boss. In those days, I was sharing premises with a tailor and paid seven pounds a week, that was in 1956. But I didn’t get on with the tailor so I found a place of my own at 10 Clifford St.

An old boy I made shirts for, he financed me. He asked me, ‘Where do you live?’ and I said, ‘I live a long way out, I can’t afford a flat.’ So he said, ‘Can you afford £12 a week?’ I said, ‘Yes, I think so but I’d also like a workplace.’ So he said,’ Have you £5 a week?’ and he introduced me here in Pall Mall and I signed a lease for twenty-one years for five pounds a week – now it’s four hundred a week, it’s not easy.

I’ve made shirts for almost everybody you can think about. All the Shakespearian actors – John Gielgud, the Redgraves, Lawrence Olivier, everybody. You mention a name and I’ll tell you if I’ve made shirts for them – Marlon Brando and Orson Welles, when they were still slim, Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Junior, Cary Grant, Ray Milland, I could go on and on. I’ve done the Bond films for over thirty years.

It is with a heavy heart that I announce the death of Rodney Archer – one of Spitalfields best-loved residents – yesterday morning at St Bartholomew’s Hospital where he was admitted on Friday

Rodney Archer, the Aesthete of Fournier St

When I first met him, Rodney Archer kindly took me to lunch at E.Pellicci, but – before we set out – I went round to his eighteenth century house in Fournier St to take this portrait of him in front of his cherished fireplace that once belonged to Oscar Wilde.

One day in 1970, Rodney was visiting an old friend who lived in Tite St next to Wilde’s house and saw the builders were doing renovations, so he seized the opportunity to walk through the door of the house that had once been the great writer’s dwelling. The fireplace had been torn out of the wall in Wilde’s living room as part of a modernisation of the property and the workmen were about to carry it away, so Rodney offered to buy it on the spot.

For ten pounds he acquired a literary relic of the highest order, the fine pilastered fireplace with tall overmantle that you see above, and which become a shrine to Wilde in Rodney’s first floor living room in Fournier St. You can see Spy’s famous caricature of Wilde up on the chimneypiece, but the gem of Rodney’s Wilde collection was a copy of Lord Alfred Douglas’ poems with pencil annotations by Douglas himself. Encountering these artifacts in this environment – that already possess such a potent poetry of their own, amplified by their proximity to each other – was especially enchanting.

Rodney allowed the patina of ages to remain in his house, enhanced by his sensational collection of pictures, carpets, furniture, books, china and god-knows-what, accumulated over all the years he lived in it, which transformed the house into three-dimensional map of his vigorous mind, crammed with images, stories and all manner of cultural enthusiasms. In Rodney’s house, anyone would feel at home the minute they walked in the door because the result of all these accretions was that everything arrived in its natural place, yet nothing felt arranged. It was a relaxing place, with reflected light everywhere, and although there was so much to look at and so many stories to learn, it was peaceful and benign, like Rodney himself. Rodney’s style can never be replicated by anyone else, unless you became Rodney and you could live through those years again.

Rodney made his home in London’s most magical street in 1980. It came about after his mother fell down a well at The Roundhouse and broke her hip while visiting a performance of “The Homosexual (or The Difficulty of Sexpressing Yourself)” by Copi in which Rodney was starring. It was the culmination of Rodney’s distinguished career of just eight years as an actor, that included playing the Player Queen in Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic in a production with Richard Pasco in the title role and featuring Patrick Stewart as Horatio.

After she broke her hip, Rodney’s mother told him that her doctor insisted she live with her son, much to Rodney’s surprise. Gamely, Rodney agreed, on the condition they find somewhere large enough to live their own lives with some degree of independence, and rang up his friends Riccardo and Eric who lived in Fournier St, asking them to keep their eyes open for any house that went on sale. Within three months, a house came up. It was the only one they looked at and Rodney lived there happily ever after.

Thirty years ago, Spitalfields was not the desirable location it is today, “My mother thought I was joking when I told her where I wanted live,” declared Rodney to me, raising his eyebrows, “Now it would nice if there were more people living here who were not millionaires. I visit people in houses today where there are ghosts of people I used to know and the new people don’t know who they were, it’s sad.”

Rodney’s roots were in East London, he was born in Gidea Park, but once his father (a flying officer in the RAF) was killed in action over Malta in 1943, his mother took Rodney and his sister away to Toronto when they were tiny children and brought them up there on her own. Rodney came back to London in 1962 with the rich Canadian accent (which sounded almost Scottish to me) that he retained his whole life, in spite of the actor’s voice training he received at LAMDA which imparted such a mellifluous tone to his speech. After his brief years treading the boards, Rodney became a teacher of drama at the City Lit and ran the Operating Theatre Company, staging his own play “The Harlot’s Curse” (co-authored with Powell Jones) in the Princelet St Synagogue with great success.

“When I retired, I decided to do whatever I wanted to do,“ announced Rodney with a twinkly smile, at that point in his life story. “Now I am having a wonderful third act. Writing about that time, my mother, the cats and me…” he said, introducing the long-awaited trilogy of autobiographical fiction that he was working on, in which the first volume would cover his first eight years in Spitalfields concluding with the death of his mother in 1988, the second volume would conclude with the death of  his friend Dennis Severs in 1999 and the third with the death of Eric Elstob. (Elstob was a banker who loved architecture and left a fortune for the refurbishment of Christ Church, Spitalfields.) “There is something about the nature of Spitalfields, that fact becomes fiction – as you become involved with the lives of people here, it gets you telling stories,” explained Rodney, expressing a sentiment that is close to my own heart too.

Then it was time for lunch and, as we walked hungrily up Brick Lane that day towards Bethnal Green in the Spring sunshine, the postman saluted Rodney and, on cue, the owner of the eel and pie shop leaned out of the doorway to give him a cheery wave too, then, as if to mark the occasion as auspicious, we saw the first shiny new train run along the recently-completed East London Line, gliding across the newly-constructed bridge, glinting in the sunlight as it passed over our heads and sliding away across Allen Gardens towards Whitechapel. “This is the elegant world of Rodney Archer,” I thought.

Turning the corner into Bethnal Green Rd, I asked Rodney about the origin of his passion for Wilde and when he revealed he once played Algernon in “The Importance of Being Earnest” at school, his intense grey-blue eyes shone with excitement. It made perfect sense, because I felt as if I was meeting a senior version of Algernon who retained all the wit, charm and sagacity of his earlier years, now having “a wonderful third act” in an apocryphal lost manuscript by Oscar Wilde, recently discovered amongst all the glorious clutter in a beautiful old house in Fournier St, Spitalfields.

Rodney in his study

Rodney and his cat Fitzroy (portrait by Chris Kelly)

Rodney played Edward II for the Save Norton Folgate Campaign

Rodney sings ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ at Pellicci’s Christmas Party (portrait by Colin O’Brien)

Rodney - “I come to Pelliccis every Wednesday and Saturday. On Wednesday I am the gay mascot for the Repton Boxers and on Saturday we bet on the horses.” (portrait by Colin O’Brien)

You might also like to read these other stories about Rodney Archer

A Walk With Rodney Archer

Rodney Archer’s Scraps

The Seven Ages of Rodney Archer

At 31 Fournier St

It has been five years in the making but – thanks to the generous support of the readers of Spitalfields Life - I am almost ready to publish the first full-colour illustrated history of the CRIES OF LONDON, just in time for Christmas.

This ambitious book sets out to reclaim an entire cultural tradition which I believe is an essential part of the identity of London as a city founded upon its markets. In the capital, those who had no means of income could always sell wares in the street and, by turning their presence into performance through song, they won the hearts of generations and came to embody the spirit of London itself.

Designed by David Pearson, recently acclaimed as Britain’s most-influential book designer, CRIES OF LONDON is a handsome cloth-bound green hardback with a gilded cover containing hundreds of beautiful illustrations of London street traders spanning four centuries, together with stories of the artists and the hawkers, and an extended introduction by yours truly.

I am celebrating with a LAUNCH at Waterstones Piccadilly on 3rd December, a CONCERT at Shoreditch Church on 4th December, a PEDLARS CONFERENCE on 5th December and ILLUSTRATED LECTURES on 10th & 11th December at Bishopsgate Institute – you will find all the information and booking details below. I look forward to welcoming you to these events, where I shall be signing books and giving away prints of CRIES OF LONDON to all comers.

Peepshow in Piccadilly, 1804

I am proud to be launching CRIES OF LONDON at WATERSTONES PICCADILLY on THURSDAY 3rd DECEMBER from 6:30pm with cakes, cocktails, live music, dancing & a host of famous authors. There is no need to book, please come along to join the party!

Hair Brooms outside Shoreditch Church, 1804

I am delighted to be introducing a concert of CRIES OF LONDON by Orlando Gibbons & others, performed by Fretwork & Red Byrd, presented by Spitalfields Music on FRIDAY 4th DECEMBER at ST LEONARD’S CHURCH, SHOREDITCH. Click here to book for the concert & pre-concert talk.

Cats & Dogs’ Meat in Bishopsgate, 1804

I am thrilled to be hosting a PEDLARS CONFERENCE  on SATURDAY 5th DECEMBER at 2pm and giving ILLUSTRATED LECTURES on THURSDAY 10th & FRIDAY 11th DECEMBER at 7:30pm at BISHOPSGATE INSTITUTE. Please click here to book.

CLICK TO BUY A SIGNED COPY OF CRIES OF LONDON FOR £20

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You may like to explore these sets of Cries of London

John Player’s Cries of London

More John Player’s Cries of London

Faulkner’s Street Cries

Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London

More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London

Kendrew’s Cries of London

London Characters

Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders

William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders

London Melodies

Henry Mayhew’s Street Traders

H.W.Petherick’s London Characters

John Thomson’s Street Life in London

Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries

William Nicholson’s London Types

John Leighton’s London Cries

Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III

Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders

More of Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders

Victorian Tradesmen Scraps

Cries of London Scraps

New Cries of London 1803

Cries of London Snap Cards

Julius M Price’s London Types

In anticipation of publication of CRIES OF LONDON, it is my pleasure to present this extract from the book. I hope you can join me for the LAUNCH next Thursday at Waterstones Piccadilly or the CONCERT next Friday at Shoreditch Church or the PEDLARS CONFERENCE next Saturday at Bishopsgate Insitute. We shall be giving away posters of this drawing by George Scharf of London boardmen & women in the eighteen-thirties to all at these events.

London boardmen & women by George Scharf  © British Museum (Click this image to enlarge)

The dispossessed and those with no other income were always able to cry their wares for sale in London. By turning their presence into performance with their Cries, they claimed the streets as their theatre – winning the lasting affections of generations of Londoners and embodying the soul of the city in the popular imagination. Thus, through time, the culture of the capital’s street Cries became integral to the distinctive identity of London.

Undertaking interviews with stallholders in Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Columbia Road and other East End markets in recent years led me to consider the cultural legacy of urban street trading. While this phenomenon might appear transitory and fleeting, I discovered a venerable tradition in the Cries of London. Yet even this genre of popular illustrated prints, which began in the seventeenth century, was itself preceded by verse such as London Lackpenny attributed to the fifteenth century poet John Lydgate that drew upon an earlier oral culture of hawkers’ Cries. From medieval times, the great number of Cries in London became recognised by travellers throughout Europe as indicative of the infinite variety of life in the British capital.

Given the former ubiquity of the Cries of London, the sophistication of many of the images, their significance as social history, and their existence as almost the only portraits of working people in London through four centuries, it astonishes me that there has been little attention paid to this subject and so I have set out to reclaim this devalued cultural tradition.

I take my cue from Samuel Pepys who pasted three sets of Cries into his albums of London & Westminster in a chronological sequence spanning a century, thereby permitting an assessment of the evolution of the style of the prints as well as social change in the capital in his era. In my book, I have supplemented these with another dozen series published over the following centuries which trace the development of the Cries right into our own time. My policy has been to collate a personal selection of those that delight me, those that speak most eloquently of the life of the street and those created by artists who demonstrated an affinity with the Criers.

Through the narrow urban thoroughfares and byways, hawkers announced their wares by calling out a repeated phrase that grew familiar to their customers, who learned to recognise the Cries of those from whom they bought regularly. By nature of repetition, these Cries acquired a musical quality as hawkers improvised upon the sounds of the words, evolving phrases into songs. Commonly, Cries also became unintelligible to those who did not already know what was being sold. Sometimes the outcome was melodic and lyrical, drawing the appreciation of bystanders, and at other times discordant and raucous as hawkers strained their voices to be heard across the longest distance.

Over time, certain Cries became widely adopted, and it is in written accounts and songbooks that we find the earliest records. Print collections of pictures of Criers also became known as ‘Cries’ and although the oldest set in London dates from around 1600, there are those from Paris which predate these by a century. Characteristically, the Cries represented peripatetic street traders or pedlars, yet other street characters were also included from the start. At first, the Cries were supplemented by the bellman and the town crier, but then preachers, beggars, musicians, performers were added as the notion of the Cries of London became expanded by artists and print sellers seeking greater novelty through elaborating upon the original premise.

Before the age of traffic, the streets of London offered a common public space for all manner of activity, trading, commerce, sport, entertainment and political rallies. Yet this arena of possibility, which is the primary source of the capital’s cultural vitality has also invited the consistent attention of those who seek policing and social control upon the premise of protecting citizens from each other, guarding against crime and preventing civil unrest. It suits the interest of those who would rule the city that, in London, street traders have always been perceived as equivocal characters with an identity barely distinguished from vagrants. Thus the suspicion that their itinerant nature facilitated thieving and illicit dealing, or that women might be selling their bodies as as well as their legitimate wares has never been dispelled.

Like the internet, the notion of the street as a space where people may communicate and do business freely can be profoundly threatening to some. It is a tension institutionalised in this country through the issuing of licences to traders, criminalising those denied such official endorsement, while on the continent of Europe the right to sell in the street is automatically granted to every citizen. Depending upon your point of view, the itinerants are those who bring life to the city through their occupation of its streets or they are outcasts who have no place in a developed modern urban environment.

When I interviewed Tony Purser on his last afternoon after fifty-two years selling flowers outside Fenchurch Street Station in the City of London, he admitted to me that as a boy he assisted his father Alfie, and, before licences were granted in 1962, they were both regularly arrested. Their stock was confiscated, they were charged three shillings and spent the night in the cells at Bishopsgate Police Station, before going back to trade again next day.

I was told that in Brick Lane, until recently, it was possible for casual traders to buy five pounds’ worth of parking tickets from a machine as a day’s licence but, when this was withdrawn those who had always sold their possessions on the pavement on Sunday mornings found themselves on the wrong side of the regulations. Prior to the opening of a shopping mall of sea containers for international brands on the former Bishopsgate Goods Yard, I witnessed fly-pitchers in their eighties and nineties turfed off the pavement by dubious enforcement officers who pilfered the best of their wares.

Yet in this part of London, the heartland of markets and street trading, there is a long-held understanding, that those who have no job, no shop, or stall have always been able to sell things in the street and make a living for themselves. I know several people who spend their days searching dustbins in the East End and make a living by selling their finds on Brick Lane each Sunday, and students who sell off their clothes and textbooks each week to buy groceries. I met a man who sold baked potatoes outside the Tower of London and opened a restaurant that became a chain. I know a spoon carver who sat on the pavement carving spoons until he saved the deposit to rent a shop. Last year, I interviewed a recently-divorced electrician who had his tools taken away and became a Directions Man, making an income by standing outside Liverpool Street Station and showing visitors the way.

Street trading proposes an interpretation of the ancient myth of London as a city paved with gold that is not without truth. Many large British corporate retailers including Tesco, started by Jack Cohen in 1919, Marks & Spencer, started by Michael Marks in 1884, owe their origin to single stalls in markets – emphasising the value of street trading to wider economic development. Meanwhile, Oxford Street Association seeks to rid the pavement of souvenir sellers between the large department stores and the current trend towards the privatisation of public spaces sees the increasing introduction of bylaws restricting trading solely to those legitimised by the property owners.

In particular, it was the story of Tony Hawkins, a licensed pedlar who was arrested eighty-seven times for legally selling caramelised peanuts in the West End of London that inspired me to pursue the history and politics of London street trading. Tony told me that on each occasion he was beaten up and had his stock confiscated even though he had the right to trade under the Pedlars Act of 1871. I recognise his experience as a snapshot of the contemporary situation for hawkers and also as testimony to the ongoing struggle of street traders, who have been consistently marginalised by the authorities in London through the centuries yet managed to thrive and endure regardless, through heroic tenacity and strength of will.

In the twentieth century, the Cries of London found their way onto cigarette cards, chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, tea towels, silk scarves, dinner services and, famously, tins of Yardley talcum powder from 1912 onwards, becoming divorced from the reality they once represented as time went by, copied and recopied by different artists.

Yet the sentimentally cheerful tones applied by hand to prints that were contrived to appeal to the casual purchaser, chime with the resilience required by traders selling in the street. And it is our respect for their spirit and resourcefulness which may account for the long lasting popularity of these poignant images of the self-respecting poor who turned their trades into performances. Even now, it is impossible to hear the cries of market traders and newspaper sellers without succumbing to their spell, as the last reverberations of a great cacophonous symphony echoing across time and through the streets of London.

Surely none can resist the romance of the Cries of London and the raffish appeal of the liberty of vagabondage, of those who had no indenture or task master, and who travelled wide throughout the city, witnessing the spectacle of its streets, speaking with a wide variety of customers, and seeing life. In the densely-populated neighbourhoods, it was the itinerants’ cries that marked the times of day and announced the changing seasons of the year. Before the motorcar, their calls were a constant of street life in London. Before advertising, their songs were the jingles that announced of the latest, freshest produce or appealing gimcrack. Before radio, television and internet, they were the harbingers of news, and gossip, and novelty ballads. These itinerants had nothing but they had possession of the city.

I write these words just a stone’s throw from Brick Lane, where Lionel Begleiter grew up in a first floor flat on the corner of Princelet Street in the nineteen-thirties. Although I do not know on which corner he lived, there is one building with a small window where I can imagine Lionel, as a little boy, leaning out to wonder at the Cries in Brick Lane. For, as ‘Lionel Bart’ in 1960, he wrote Oliver!, the only enduring theatrical dramatisation of Charles Dickens’ work, integrating both music hall and folk song into the stage musical with spectacular success. His setting of Cries of London, as “Who will buy this wonderful morning?” remains the most evocative musical manifestation in the collective consciousness.

I leave you with the words of most celebrated Crier in our own century – Muhammad Shahid Nazir, the ‘One Pound Fish Man’ of Queen’s Market in Upton Park – as an example of the acclaim and status that Criers can win in London through their wit, ingenuity and performance skill. Nazir became an internet sensation with fourteen million views on Youtube, won a recording contract and is now a pop star in Pakistan.

“Come on ladies, come on ladies

One pound fish

Have-a, have-a look

One pound fish

Very, very good, very, very cheap

One pound fish

Six for five pound

One pound each”

The Cries of London have taught me the essential truth of London street traders down through the centuries, and it is one that still holds today – they do not need your sympathy, they only want your respect, and your money.

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CLICK TO BUY A SIGNED COPY OF CRIES OF LONDON FOR £20

Richard Boothby of Fretwork introduces next Friday’s concert in Shoreditch Church

“In 1530 London’s population was around 50,000, yet by 1605 it had swelled nearly five times to 230,000 souls, becoming one of the largest cities in the world and a thriving hub of commerce and wealth. If you wanted to sell your stuff, then London was the place to do it. But most people could not afford a shop, so they sold their wares on the street and the way they attracted passing customers was to shout out – loudly – what it was they were offering.

The Cries were as old as London itself but, by the end of the sixteenth century, they reached a deafening cacophony. As composers recognised the potential, a brief yet wonderful fashion arose for writing music where the rise and fall of these distinctive Cries were set for voices against the backdrop of a viol consort. Several composers joined in this Cries-fest – including Richard Deering, William Cobbold, Thomas Ravenscroft and, most famously, Orlando Gibbons.”

The Gentle Author introduces a concert of music from the songbooks of the Cries next Friday 4th December at Shoreditch Church, presented by SPITALFIELDS MUSIC and performed by Fretwork and Red Byrd. CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS

Cries of London 1600, reproduced from Samuel Pepys’ Album © Magdalene College, Cambridge (Click this image to enlarge)

Marian Monas has been painting her neighbours in Cable St, inspiring Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie to visit the subjects and photograph them with their pictures. You can see these paintings in a joint exhibition alongside recent pictures of France by Doreen Fletcher displayed for two days in a floating gallery at Hermitage Moorings, Wapping, this Wednesday 2nd December 10:30-5:30pm & Thursday December 3rd 10:30-7.30pm

Peter Duggan, Waterman & Lighterman

Terry Duncan, Compositor - ‘I lived in Glamis Rd as a child then I grew up and went to live in Dagenham but now I’ve come back to Cable St’

Mary Flanagan, Home Carer - ‘I was born in Wapping and have lived nine years in Cable St. I cared for my mother at home until she was ninety-five.’

Terry Page, West Ham Supporter - ‘I’ve lived forty years in Cable St. I was an electrician at Royal London Hospital then Watney Mann Brewery in Whitechapel and now I do bulk clearance.’

Joe Parker, ex-landlord of the Old House At Home in Watney St

Alicia Morrison, Housekeeper in the West End - ‘I came here from the Philippines thirty years ago and I’ve done a lot of jobs in hospitals and hotels, anything that’s legal’

Harry Parlour - ‘I’m from Bow’

Peter Duggan, Lighterman & Waterman

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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Today sees the annual Boar’s Head Parade in the City of London – leaving Butcher’s Hall in Bartholomew Close, Smithfield at 3pm – to mark the beginning of the Christmas Season

Drawing by Paul Bommer

Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I were greeted by Neil Hunt, Beadle of The Worshipful Company of Butchers, when we arrived at their Hall in St Bartholomew’s Close, Smithfield, to join a small crowd eagerly awaiting the annual appearance of the celebrated Boar’s Head in the first week of Advent, marking the beginning on the Christmas season in London.

This arcane tradition has its origin in 1343 when the Lord Mayor, John Hamond, granted the Butchers of the City of London use of a piece of land by the Fleet River, where they could slaughter and clean their beasts, for the token yearly payment of a Boar’s Head at Christmas.

To pass the time in the drizzle, the Beadle showed us his magnificent staff of office dating from 1716, upon which may be discerned a Boar’s Head. “Years ago, they had a robbery and this was the only thing that wasn’t stolen,” he confided to me helpfully, ” – it had a cover and the thieves mistook it for a mop.”

Before another word was spoken, a posse of members of the Butcher’s Company emerged triumphant from the Hall in blue robes and velvet hats, with a livid red Boar’s Head carried aloft at shoulder height, to the delighted applause of those waiting in the street. Behind us, drummers of the Royal Logistics Corps in red uniforms gathered and  City of London Police motorcyclists in fluorescent garb lined up to receive instructions from Ian Kelly, the Master of the Company.

Everyone assembled to pose for official photographs with the perky red ears of the Boar sticking up above the crowd, providing the opportunity for a closer examination of this gloss-painted paper mache creation, sitting upon a base of Covent Garden grass and surrounded by plastic fruit. As recently as 1968, a real Boar’s Head was paraded but these days Health & Safety concerns about hygiene require the use of this colourful replica for ceremonial purposes.

The drummers set a brisk pace and before we knew it, the parade was off down Little Britain, preceded by the police motorcyclists halting the traffic. For a couple of minutes, the City stopped – astonished passengers leaned out of buses and taxis, and office workers reached for their phones to capture the moment. It made a fine spectacle advancing down Cheapside, past St Mary Le Bow, with the sound of drums echoing and reverberating off the tall buildings.

The rhythmic clamour accompanying the procession of men in their dark robes, with the Boar’s Head bobbing above, evoked the ancient drama of the City of London and, as they paraded through the gathering dusk towards the Mansion House looming in the east on that occluded December afternoon, I could not resist the feeling that they were marching through time as well as space.

Neil Hunt, Beadle of The Worshipful Company of Butchers

The Beadle’s staff dates from 1716

Leaving St Bartholomew’s Close

Advancing through Little Britain

Passing St Paul’s

Entering Cheapside

Passing St Mary Le Bow

In Cheapside

Approaching the Mansion House

The Boar’s Head arrives at the Mansion House

Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien

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Swan Upping With The Vintners Company

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Jenny Williamson as the Virgin Mary

Ever since my stint as the Innkeeper, turning the Holy Family away when they knocked without reading the ‘No Vacancies’ sign, I have been in thrall to the curious literal magic of the ancient Mystery Plays. So you can imagine my delight to discover the Players of St Peter performing at St George-in-the-East, Wapping this week, still carrying the torch for fifteenth century English drama after seventy years.

The Players were originally founded in 1946 in St Peter’s Cornhill in the first week of Advent, as a celebration of the return of Peace at the end of the Second World War, before moving to Holy Trinity, Sloane St in 1988 and then arriving at St-George-in-the-East in 2012. Jock Longstaff supervised most performances during the first twenty-five years, suceeded by Olive Stubbs, a member of the acting company who became director and has overseen every production for the last thirty years.

When Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I slipped into the back of the darkened church to watch the dress rehearsal, we were astonished by the glowing Biblical visions that arose before our eyes and even more amazed when a shining Angel drifted up the aisle to deliver us cups of tea and homemade spice cake, from a recipe adopted by the Players years ago and baked annually ever since.

Dazzled by God’s radiance and raptured by the sight of the Virgin Mary, we were puzzled by the presumed invisibility of Mary Magdalene in scenes where the Players appeared to address a presence composed only of thin air – until the friendly Angel bearing tea and cake helpfully explained that, ‘Mary Magdalene can’t be here this evening, she’s doing shift work.’

Robert Hayward as the Holy Lamb of God from the Coventry Shearmen & Taylors’ play

Mike Harding as King Herod and his lackeys from the Coventry Weavers’ play

Steve Brett as Jesus in the York Carpenters’ play

Stephen Wright, Anthony Sullivan & Robert Hayward as the three soldiers at the Crucifixion

Brian David as Almighty God and his Angels, Anthea Wormington & Jackie Withnail

Gill Taylor as Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness from the Chester Tanners’ Play

Olive Stubbs, Director of the Players of St Peter for thirty years in the role of Delight

Herod’s Lackey

Vicky Bettelheim, Judith Elbourne & Deborah Pollard as the three Marys

Pharisee

God in Splendour

The Players of St Peter

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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British Land’s original proposed demolition of Norton Folgate

British Land’s revised proposed demolition of Norton Folgate

Can you spot the difference between the two pictures above? One is the level of demolition proposed in British Land’s previous scheme for Norton Folgate and one is their recently revised version.

Back in March, I reported on British Land’s proposal to demolish the attractive old warehouses in Blossom St, preserving only piers of bricks on the facade and recycling an unspecified amount of the fabric in their new building, an approach which Historic England dignified with the phrase ‘sensitive restoration.’

When Spitalfields Trust challenged this destruction of the warehouses, British Land claimed they were preserving them – which makes it paradoxical that now British Land have announced they are ‘retaining’ the warehouses as a concession to those who objected to their scheme.

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London has ‘called in’ the British Land Norton Folgate scheme which was rejected unanimously by Tower Hamlets Strategic Development Committee in July. On 18th January, the Mayor will stage a public hearing at City Hall at which he will determine the decision upon the application himself. This will be the thirteenth such ‘call in’ and the previous twelve have all been determined in favour of the developer.

Meanwhile, the Spitalfields Trust have launched a Judicial Review into the legitimacy of the ‘call in’ and billionaire Troels Povlson has offered to buy the site so that the Trust may implement their alternative scheme by Burrell Foley Fisher, which is based upon the principal of minimal architectural intervention, utilising Norton Folgate to serve the needs of local people by providing genuinely affordable workspaces and housing.

British Land’s amended proposal for Norton Folgate is still an overblown development that will destroy an historic neighbourhood to replace it with a hideous corporate plaza. We need you to help us stop this, by writing letters of objection to point out that it remains unacceptable. You will find a simple guide to how to object below.

You can read Alec Forshaw’s full assessment of British Land’s revised scheme on Save Norton Folgate facebook page

Norton Folgate as it is today

Massing of the British Land development

The Spitalfields Trust scheme by John Burrell of Burrell Foley Fisher

Spitalfields Trust scheme looking from Norton Folgate – drawn  by Lucinda Rogers

Spitalfields Trust Scheme, looking along Fleur de Lis St – drawn by Lucinda Rogers

Spitalfields Trust Scheme, looking down Elder St from Commercial St – drawn by Lucinda Rogers

This is a simple guide to how to write to the Greater London Authority objecting to British Land’s amended scheme for Norton Folgate.

You can write by email to james.keogh@london.gov.uk (please also provide your postal address in the email) or by post to James Keogh, Greater London Authority, City Hall, The Queen’s Walk, London, SE1 2AA. Please copy your email to Tower Hamlets Council  beth.eite@towerhamlets.gov.uk

Your email or letter needs to arrive before 14th December.

It is important that you use your own words but here are a few relevant points to consider when objecting:

1. Tower Hamlets Council refused the application unanimously on three grounds – harm to the character and appearance of the Conservation Area, the low level of housing and the low level of Affordable Housing. These objections still stand.

2. The amendments, although welcome, are very small in comparison with the overall scale of the development.

3. The level of destruction within this important Conservation Area is still huge.

4. The historic layout of courtyards and lanes, the fine grain of the area, will still be destroyed.

5. Our original objection to the scheme criticised the treatment of a dozen buildings, of which this amendment addresses only one.  For instance, the two eighteenth-century buildings still standing on Norton Folgate itself are being removed – number 14 in its entirety and all of number 15 except its front elevation.  Numbers 16-19 Norton Folgate will still have the ground floor hollowed out to provide a passage entrance way to the new development.

6. Just as originally proposed, the scheme remains an overblown megastructure with large office floor plates, still rising to as many as fourteen storeys. All within a Conservation Area, where the prevailing height is four storeys, and where heritage should be protected.

7. Norton Folgate is worth fighting for.  It is a fine example of the lesser-known areas of historic London which make our capital city the wonderful place it is, but which will destroyed forever if this development goes ahead.

8. Please be sure to include your postal address otherwise your objection will be invalid. Over seven hundred people wrote to Tower Hamlets Council to object to the previous scheme but two hundred letters were discounted through lack of address.

Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate

Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT

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Owen Hopkins, Curator of Architecture at the Royal Academy & author of FROM THE SHADOWS, The Architecture & Afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor, published today, considers the enduring charisma of Christ Church, Spitalfields.

A shadow appearing on a great expanse of stone, the early morning light pouring through a dirty window, a brass door handle worn smooth by centuries of use, the musty smell of an old room, the faint echo of steps climbing a staircase – we experience architecture everyday. Yet most of the time we do not notice it.

In some ways, we should be glad of this. The buildings around us, even those we work or even live in, need to blend quickly into the background to allow us to go about our daily business. The last thing we need is a building constantly reminding us of its presence through bling-bling cladding, a gratuitously curving façade or its dumb oversized hulk. Fortunately, for the moment at least, most architecture is essentially background architecture. Rarely does a building stop you in your tracks and demand your attention. Rarely does a building hit you in the gut. Rarely does a building change how you see the world around you. That Christ Church, Spitalfields by Nicholas Hawksmoor does all these things – and more – marks it out for me as truly special.

Over the course of writing my book about Hawksmoor and the various ways he and his buildings have been neglected, abused and celebrated since in his death in 1736, I have probably exhausted the vocabulary of words that can be used to describe the oddly affecting power of his architecture. Words simply cannot do justice to the raw essence of his gigantic compositions in stone. I always imagine the sensation of being confronted by Christ Church at the end of Brushfield St to be a little like how the first Grand Tourists must have felt encountering the Parthenon or the Pantheon, or even the Pyramids – monuments of antiquity that they might have heard about and even seen depictions, but of which the effect in reality is of a rather different nature.

So, in a way Christ Church is akin to our own Roman ruin standing in Spitalfields, though now in a far from ruinous state. If the mausoleum that Hawksmoor designed atop a lonely Yorkshire hill at Castle Howard is the equivalent of the great Greek Doric temples at Paestum, then Christ Church is perhaps redolent of the Forum Romanum – the Temple of Saturn or perhaps the Temple of Castor & Pollux. Christ Church appears as if it was always there, before history and before time. It holds its own with the great buildings of Baroque neoclassical Europe, those of Fischer von Erlach, Boullée, Ledoux and Bernini. But it is another master that Hawksmoor probably bears closest comparison: the enigmatic Francesco Borromini, like Hawksmoor a creator of buildings that strike the mind and the emotions, and an inspirer of dark tales and mystery.

Born in the mid nineteen-eighties, I never saw Christ Church in its legendary ruined state, when its powers were arguably even more intense. Growing up, I knew nothing of Hawksmoor and only a little of Sir Christopher Wren, having once made that startling ascent to the dome of St Paul’s and then the corresponding one to the top of the Monument. Studying History of Art at university, I was by chance assigned to a course on English Baroque architecture. Looking at black and white photographs of Hawksmoor’s churches in books, I could not believe these buildings were here in London, so I immediately set off in search of them. Christ Church, the great gateway to the East End, was the first I encountered and the one I became the most familiar with, always making a point of stopping by on my regular visits to Brick Lane market, then and now a pilgrimage for the young and new in London. The longer I looked at it, the more I became mesmerised by its stark geometric plainness, the striking power of its composition and the extraordinary way, nearly three centuries after its completion, it still dominates its surroundings, physically and psychologically.

It is easy to forget that a building like Christ Church is the product of a particular time and place, and – dare I say it – a particular architectural brief. It represents one of the finest examples of what since the nineteen-fifties has been known as the English Baroque – the brief flowering, around the turn of the eighteenth century, of an architecture conceived in terms of mass, of architecture almost as a sculptural entity. Along with Sir John Vanbrugh, Thomas Archer, and to some degree Wren and James Gibbs, Hawksmoor was one the English Baroque’s main protagonists, and the one – it is often considered – who pushed its ideals the furthest.

Despite the name, the English Baroque really had nothing really to do with the Italian Baroque of Bernini and Borromini, and only very little with developments in Paris. England was a Protestant country and, to some degree, isolated from the cultural developments of Catholic Europe. The English Baroque was, therefore, sui generis, and directly traceable to Wren’s office in the sixteen-nineties – a relatively large and cosmopolitan melting pot of architectural ideas and invention to which Hawksmoor was absolutely integral. Almost nothing is known of Hawksmoor’s life before he entered Wren’s office around 1680 – a fact or lack of facts, made all the more tantalising by his meteoric rise in just over a decade to become Wren’s leading draughtsman and designer, and executor of buildings in his own right.

By 1711, when he was working with Vanbrugh at Castle Howard and then Blenheim Palace, Hawksmoor was arguably the best trained architect Britain had ever produced and one of its more accomplished. It was natural for him to become involved with the Commission founded in that year, charged with building fifty new churches in London’s new suburbs. The backdrop to this was London’s expansion since the Great Fire beyond its old medieval walls into Bloomsbury and the West End, Bermondsey and Deptford to the south, and Spitalfields and along the river through Wapping and Limehouse to the east. The existing churches in these areas were unable to cope with the huge increases in population and many residents were falling into the arms of dissenting groups: Presbyterians, Anabaptists and the like. Parts of these new suburbs were smart and well-to-do, but the majority – particularly to the east – were poor, with some streets consisting of little more than a series of hovels leant up against one another. Some centuries were to pass before London was to lose its reputation for disease, poverty and vice.

Looking back, it is no surprise that London’s expansion was a source of considerable anxiety for the city’s political and religious authorities, an anxiety they believed could be assuaged by a string of new churches. The brief was twofold: buildings that could accommodate large numbers of worshippers and, at the same time, act as beacons in the cityscape, signifying social and moral control over all they surveyed. In my analysis, it is this latter stipulation, which gets us to the core of why Hawksmoor’s churches, Christ Church included, look the way they do.

The London that burnt in 1666 was largely a city of timber and thatch. The city that re-emerged in the following decades was one of brick, and even the houses of immigrant Huguenot cloth-weavers that survive around Spitalfields were adorned with classical columns and pilasters and elaborate, classically-inspired door-cases. While the lavish funding provided by the 1711 Commission would allow the churches to stand out in terms of scale and materials, utilising white Portland stone rather than brick, Hawksmoor’s role was to ensure they would do so in their design too, as an architecture of authority.

Straightforward classical architecture was not an option. Instead, Hawksmoor looked to architectural history, to his own native Gothic and to the architecture of the early Christians and the Middle East, which he knew from engravings and written accounts. It was Hawksmoor’s genius to combine these disparate sources and references in single compositions that have coherence and integrity, while also being rich and resonant. At Christ Church, he took these influences – and architecture itself – back to first principles, punching windows through smooth masonry walls, enlarging the usually domestic-scaled, three-part Palladian window form into the Roman triumphal gateway of the west front and topping the whole arrangement with a variation on a medieval broach spire. Standing at the base of the west end tower, it is hard to know if the tower appears to be falling away from you or more worryingly falling towards you, an effect I have not experienced with any other building.

None of Hawksmoor’s contemporaries and only a few architects since have achieved this feat of imbuing a static structure with such energy and dynamism. Looking across Hawksmoor’s work, we see an innate sculptural feel for form and mass, and for the capacity of stone to carry meaning and metaphor. His churches are often said to appear Gothic or medieval, yet he conjured these allusions without resorting to a single pointed arch or buttress. Their Gothic-ness emerges through their massing, just as, to our modern eyes, they allude to the concrete constructions of post-war sculptural Brutalism, such as those by Denys Lasdun, Gottfried Böhm or Louis Kahn. It is striking that after all this time Christ Church is still defying our expectations and forcing us to re-think how we see the architectural world around us.

Despite the genius of his work, after his death Hawksmoor was overlooked and largely forgotten until recent decades. This was mirrored in the fate of his buildings, which for most of their history have rarely been understood, let alone admired. Tragically for Hawksmoor, this began even before his death, as the English Baroque was superseded by the Palladian style, and for the final years of his life he became the last, lonely figure of a generation the Palladians sought to erase.

During the mid eighteen-sixties Christ Church underwent substantial alterations under the direction of Ewan Christian, the architect best known for designing the National Portrait Gallery. Christian ripped out the galleries and pews, and changed the window configurations on the sides of the church. By the nineteen-fifties, with the congregation dwindled, the church was shut. Demolition became a real risk and the Hawksmoor Committee, which had formed to raise awareness of the plight of Hawksmoor’s works, managed to raise funds to repair the roof, largely through the sale of St John, Smith Square. The mantle was then taken on by the Friends of Christ Church, Spitalfields in 1976, who, working with the architect Red Mason, drove the near thirty-year restoration campaign that returned the church to its original configuration, including the dramatic reinstatement of the galleries.

The restored interior, perhaps, lacks the romance of the earlier ruinous space where evocative classical concerts were held in the nineteen-seventies, but it more than makes up for it in splendour. Since the completion of the main restoration in 2004, work has continued to restore the organ (reinstalled earlier this year) and to renovate the crypt. The latter project, led by Dow Jones Architects, stripped out the numerous accretions in a space which has been used for everything from an air-raid shelter to a dormitory for alcoholic men, before sensitively inserting a cafe, events kitchen, lounge space and small chapel, taking architectural cues from Hawksmoor’s nave above. With the public opening of the crypt this month, the entire building is now modernised and fully restored. However, unlike other buildings that have undergone such restorations, I sense that Christ Church’s history is far from over and it will continue to perplex and inspire whoever cuts across its path for centuries to come.

John Scott gives the inaugural concert on the restored Richard Bridge organ June 3oth 2015

Work in progress on the restoration of the crypt

The completed restoration of the crypt

Christ Church viewed through the ruins of the London Fruit & Wool Exchange

Click here to order a copy of FROM THE SHADOWS, The Architecture & Afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor by Owen Hopkins direct from the publisher with 20% discount for readers of Spitalfields Life – Enter code HAWK20

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“I only come here to make your lives happier, I don’t enjoy it”

I was delighted to be invited along to Simpsons Chop House, the oldest tavern in the City of London established 1757, to join the members of the “What Pub Next?” Club. Believed to have been founded in the nineteen-fifties, this venerable society of wags once had a membership of over three hundred who used to visit all the bars in the City one after another, encouraged by the cry of “What Pub Next?”

Yet, even though the “What Pub Next?” Club was officially disbanded a couple of years ago – even though there are only a handful of members left alive – even though there are no new members, no junior members, only senior members in their eighties and nineties – even though they no longer stray to any other pubs, adopting Simpsons Chop House (thirty seven and a half, Cornhill) as their headquarters – even though the question “What Pub Next?” is no longer asked –  such is the intoxicating nature of this fellowship, these rebel diehards continue to put on their club ties and gather for old time’s sake.

Escaping the icy gusts in Cornhill, I walked through Ball Court and discovered the eighteenth century edifice of Simpsons looming overhead, then I climbed down a windy stair to join the members of the “What Pub Next?” Club, who were merrily clinking tankards and celebrating as if Christmas had come already. So pervasive was the sense of mischief and fun, that whilst I could enjoy the experience offered by the “What Pub Next?” Club at once, appreciating the exact the nature of the organisation proved to be more elusive. Several original members squinted and strained when I asked them if they could remember when they first came along or if they could recall how it started. The genesis of the “What Pub Next?” Club is lost, it seems, in a haze of conviviality.

“I’m not sure anyone knows when it began,” queried ninety-one-year-old Douglas, whose daughters had dropped him off while they did their Christmas shopping. “It had to be a Bass pub, they had to serve draft beer,” interposed his friend “Ginger” helpfully, gesticulating with a sausage. “And we had to drink a spoonful of Worcestershire sauce as an initiation,” contributed Brian with a chuckle.

“By Jingo, let us have what we are here for!” exclaimed Pat authoritatively, the most senior member at ninety-two, reaching out for a mustard smothered sausage on a stick.“I know everyone here but don’t for a minute think that I can recall their names,” he informed me, “because somewhere along the way, I lost my memory – I can remember their name as long as as it’s Brian.” A comment which was the catalyst for general hilarity. “I only come here to make your lives happier, I don’t enjoy it,” he continued, adopting a stern tone, waving his hands around and asking rhetorically, “Can you enjoy life without laughing? Life’s far too serious not to be taken lightly.” It was a maxim that could easily be the Club motto.

Originating among employees of the Australia & New Zealand Bank who wanted to learn about British culture whilst posted to London before they returned to the antipodes, the “What Pub Next?” Club quickly became a social focus for hundreds of City workers in the nineteen-sixties. All that was required for membership was a tie – a tie that was ceremonially cut off with giant shears belonging to Mr True, the tailor at the Bell in Cannon St, if members left to return to their country of origin. These stumps of ties were nailed to wall in the cellar of Simpsons along with pairs of knickers acquired by undisclosed means, I was assured. A fact that was the cue to recall Sid Cumberland, who had his little finger cut off by mistake during the tie ceremony – though fortunately the surgeons at Barts were able to sew it on again and Sid returned safely to New Zealand with only a crooked digit as evidence of his misadventures in London. The late Ken Wickes is commemorated as president and founder of the “What Pub Next?” Club by a brass plate over the bar. “Every year he resigned and every year he was re-elected,” they told me affectionately.

By now, the port was being passed around in a pewter tankard and – with so few members of the Club left – it was circulating like a horse on a merry-go-round. As a consequence, the momentum and eloquence of the conversation accelerated too, so that the story of the WPNC trip to the Bass brewery and the account of the WPNC Morris dancing on the banks of the Stour passed me by. Yet I had grasped enough of an impression of the glorious history of the noble Club, enough to understand why they should all wish to keep meeting and celebrating for ever.

“I worked fifty years in the City and I’ve still got my bowler hat and brolly at home. I remember the first thing I did when I started work at the insurance exchange in 1962 was go and buy a bowler, “ Brian confided to me with a sentimental smile as he passed the Port back and forth  - turning contemplative and pausing for a moment to ask, “Do they still wear bowler hats?”

Jean - “I have a garter made of a club tie, it only goes to my knee now but it used to go all the way up!”

The WPN club tie with its discreet logo is de rigeur on these occasions.

Jean Churcher, the celebrated raconteuse of Simpsons Chop House.

Quaffing the Port from a pewter tankard.

Happy Christmas from the members of the “What Pub Next?” Club!

Cheese on toast with Worcestershire Sauce is the traditional conclusion of proceedings at the WPN Club.

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Spitalfields Life Contributing Artist & Cartographer Extraordinaire, Adam Dant has been working through the night in the former Huguenot fish & chip shop which serves as his studio to conjure this extraordinary vision of William Shakespeare’s Shordiche, collating the scraps of information and myth about the landscape of London’s lost theatreland of five hundred years ago. Here Shakespeare arrived as a young actor in 1585, treading the boards at London’s earliest custom-built theatre, The Theatre at New Inn Yard where subsequently his first ventures as a playwright saw the light of day.

Adam Dant by Jeremy Freedman

Archaeologist raises a Shakespearian wine goblet to celebrate the excavation of The Theatre, 2011

Staffordshire figure of Shakespeare on my dresser

TAG Fine Arts are offering Spitalfields Life readers £100 discount upon the first ten prints of the edition of a hundred of Shakespeare’s Shordiche by Adam Dant

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Today it is my pleasure to introduce the fourth of five stories by the distinguished Criminologist Professor Dick Hobbs, Author of Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK

Joe Baden

Growing up in Bermondsey, Joe’s childhood ambition was to be an armed robber. Even a stint as one of the ‘working class aristocracy’ in the print trade never deterred him from dreams of banditry.

Eventually, Joe found himself on remand in Belmarsh Prison charged with armed robbery and violent affray. Fortunately for Joe, the armed robbery charges were dropped because a witness could not pick him out at an identity parade, so he was given a two-year community service order for violent affray and possession of a firearm. Alongside Joe’s history with drugs and mental health problems, you might consider these unusual qualifications to find in the Director of the country’s most innovative higher education scheme, but these are the experiences that Joe Baden brings to Goldsmiths’ Open Book project.

Although Joe “thought education was for people from another world,” he agreed to join a basic skills programme in order to placate his probation officer and discovered, to his surprise, that academic work could be enjoyable. This was followed by an access course at Greenwich University and in 1998 he graduated with a BA in History from Goldsmiths College.

Joe worked as a tutor for the probation service and then on a number of projects aimed at encouraging ex-offenders to get into education, before Goldsmiths’Open Book projectwas launched in 2002 with the aim of helping ex-offenders and those with addiction and mental health problems to get into education. The project provides both practical and emotional support, offering mentoring, drop-in and study sessions, and an outreach programme that includes visits to prisons, hospitals and residential units. Open Book has helped more than two hundred students to find places on undergraduate courses and has five hundred people on its books, with students studying a range of degree subjects from foundation to postgraduate level.

Azra is about to commence his degree course in Anthropology, and is excited at the prospect of being a student, a status that stands in remarkable contrast to the chaos of his last twenty years – “Drugs, homelessness, prison, lots of crime, lots of drugs. In prison a drugs rehab course opened up my eyes where things were going wrong. Next stop – fix my life. I knew I needed education and Open Book was introduced by another prisoner. He gave me a brochure and said ‘check this out.’ I came here with no background in college or school. I got lots of help in coming to terms with who I am. They made me believe. I am positive what I can achieve. Joe is an inspiration.”

However, not everybody shared the belief that Joe Baden was an inspiration from the start, indeed Neil Bradley, a clerk at Goldsmiths College thought he was,“a spiv, too good to be true, selling me a timeshare. Joe knew that I wrote for The Lion Roars (Millwall fanzine), and he asked me to teach a two hour session on creative writing. I didn’t fancy it. I had always wanted to be a writer but from my background you were just told to get a proper job. I came from a Trade Union background, old school socialist. I thought that criminals should be locked up, and that drug addicts got what they deserved. But he went on about it and I gave it a go. They were a really nice group of people, and within three to four weeks I had bought into it totally.”

With Joe’s support, and despite the fact that he did not have an undergraduate degree, Neil registered for a part-time Masters, and on completing his MA degree took up a full-time post as an Open Book tutor. Last year he published his first book entitled Four Funerals and a Wedding. “Joe is the most generous person I have ever met.” Neil confided to me,

When Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I visited Goldsmiths College, the other Open Book tutors we met were Fiona Taylor, James Carney and Sue Hallisey. Fiona, from the Pepys Estate in Deptford worked alongside Joe from the beginning of the project. While struggling with her course at Goldsmiths, she was told about someone running a scheme at the college who “speaks just like you.” That was Joe, and Fiona has been Open Book mainstay ever since – and along the way, she has gained a Masters degree in Art History.

James arrived at Open Book through an addiction project. Now a History graduate, he is a trained Dyslexia Specialist and works for the project as a Dyslexia Development Worker. Inspired by their personal experiences and their immersion in the often-unruly lives of their students, the Open Book team are united by a powerful shared belief in the transformative power of education

Marguerita, a vital Liverpuddlian woman, is equally enthusiastic, “My life was carnage, total chaos. Seven kids, ten years in temporary accommodation, drink, drugs. Most of us at Open Book are working class people from bad spaces, but here everybody is a mentor, everybody is like your brother and sister.” Marguerita is shortly to fulfil her ambition to be an actor, in Gimme Shelter at the Omnibus Theatre, Clapham. The play is produced by Open Stage which was established in 2008 to further Open Book’s ethos of introducing Arts to its members. This aspect of their work is typified by the experience of Sue Hallissey who, before coming to Open Book, told me she “had a good drinking career, I felt at home with the chaos. I had never been to an art gallery or ever felt that I had an opinion.” But Open Book is about encouraging confidence in people who feel excluded from the mainstream and so, with the encouragement of tutors and fellow students alike, Sue has become an Open Book tutor, a qualified teacher, and a playwright with a successful production under her belt.

Open Book manifests an approach to working class education that has been bypassed by the market-led academic production lines for whom the notion of widening participation can be little more than a badge of convenience. Joe and his team studiously avoid patronising the often-vulnerable individuals who come to them. “We don’t make excuses for people or try to forgive people. No one has the right to forgive me or to say they are ‘empowering’ me. People can only empower themselves,” he admitted.

Remarkably, after years of struggle, the prospects of future funding look good. Open Book has opened a branch in Chatham and plans to extend the reach of the project through ambitious collaborations with a wide range of academic partners and community organisations. “We’re not trying to reform people or turn them into middle-class clones. The strength of the Open Book project is that we all share similar experiences,” says Joe.

Empathy, expertise and the determination to instil confidence into people who can render the cliché of “non-traditional student” as an understatement are what Open Book is about. For instance, one student telephoned Joe in the middle of the night recently after a serious shooting incident at her home, yet her concern was not the horrendous violence that had been inflicted on her family, but rather the prospect that the shooting and its aftermath might result in late submission of her essay.

Fiona Taylor, Open Book Tutor

Azra, Open Book Student

Sue Hallisey, Open Book Tutor

Neil Bradley, Open Book Tutor

Marguerita, Open Book Student

James Carney, Open Book Tutor

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

OPEN BOOK, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW

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Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien

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Today it is my pleasure to publish this extract from Volume One of Rodney Archer’s Diary This Strange Re-collection of People (1980-88), in which he recounts a visit to his friend Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St at Christmas

Christmas was for me the best time of the year to visit Dennis Severs in his house, which he shared with Mr & Mrs Jervis and their children in the Liberty of Norton Folgate. The hall was festooned with garlands of holly and ivy and mistletoe. No tinsel marred the scene! The smell of Christmas spices assaulted your nostrils as you entered the front door. Oranges stuck with cloves abounded and the warm hospitality of the Jervises’ was almost palpable. Young boys in velvet waistcoats and knee britches and enchanting young girls in Kate Greenaway muslin dresses would greet you as you entered, offering rum punch circa 1730. Steven, who was eventually to run a restaurant from the ground floor of his house in Church St, had found the recipe in an old eighteenth century cookbook and Dennis was delighted. These children bearing punch were the sons and daughters of neighbours, friends and guests. If you were among the favoured, invited to one of Dennis’ private parties, you had to be prepared to join in and not rock the boat. Everything and everyone was highly organised.

As midnight struck, we were all hurried out of the drawing room and upstairs in the dark to the attic. This was the room in which the sitting tenant, who died within minutes of Dennis signing the contract to secure the house, lived and so promptly perished. It was also the room in which Dorian, the most beautiful of Dennis’ footmen, had his lodging. Towards the end of his brief life, when he was dying of AIDS, Dorian was forced to step into the cupboard when the tours came round to see the room inhabited – in the fiction of it – by Tiny Tim and his father, Bob Cratchet. I am not sure how the Jervises were connected to the Cratchets but what with the arrival of the Spinning Jenny in the early nineteenth century, hard times overtook the silk weavers of Spitalfields and perhaps Mrs Jervis had to take in a lodger? Eventually, Dorian was to move to Church St, two doors away from where I lived with my mother.

“Shhh, don’t talk any of you, shhh… Steven, Arlecchino, Quiet!” Dennis ordered like the matron in charge of a hospital ward. Think Hattie Jacques in ‘Carry on Nurse.’ “Where are Beyond & Ken? Not behind again?!” he asked, wondering if the two performance artists who attended the Hornsey School of Art had lost their way.

Beyond & Ken had lingered too long in the front room on the first floor, called somewhat grandly the ‘piano nobile.’ They were duly fetched and fixed in Dennis’ disapproving eye. All ready and inspected, we followed faithfully and quietly behind as he pushed open the door to his bedroom where we saw the four poster bed covered in red velvet. The bed and canopy had been made from pallets and refuse rescued from the nearby fruit and vegetable market – Dennis was an early recycler.

“Nothing here is real,” he cautioned as Judy (Edgar-in-Elder-St’s first wife) dared to touch a papier mache wig stand. In real life, the bed was Dennis’ own but for the purpose of the pantomime had become… “The bed of Ebenezeer Scrooge, just imagine it,” he said in an almost conspiratorial whisper. Dennis took himself very seriously in these moments and woe betide anyone who did not share his enthusiasm. I wondered why I often felt the need to come out of the illusion he had spent so long in creating. Perhaps, even though I was not a ‘Guardian’ reader, there was something in me that felt too manipulated in these moments? A kind of scepticism mixed with jealousy perhaps? After these many years, now Dennis has departed to join the great Ebenezeer in the sky, I ask his pardon if I did not always share his vision. It was complete but unrelenting and did not allow for one’s own response.

“Imagine,” he continued, “the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future flying overhead.”

Being dyslexic, Dennis had probably never read ‘A Christmas Carol,’ although he would have seen and loved that most famous version with the peerless Alistair Sim as the old miser and, of course, he would have remembered his mother, in the years before she fell ill, reading it to him in the far-removed and warm and sunny clime of California, in the town of Escondido where he had been born.

“You must imagine the snow falling on the rooftops and the frost on the windowpanes of Scrooge’s London house,” she might embroider, delighting her enchanted son, who would one day bring back to the land of its origin the very tale that had been exported so far across the world.

The tape of ‘A Christmas Carol’ would be playing in the background as we all stood, unable to hear it clearly, while Dennis in headmistress mode kept us quiet and I suspect, if we were honest, slightly resentful. Or did the others just feel, “Dear Dennis, he’s so eccentric, how wonderful!” ?

Finally, we were ushered into the drawing room on the ‘piano nobile’ floor where wine glasses and Christmas punch awaited. Dennis proposed a toast to Christmas,

“To Christmas, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Queen and Spitalfields,”

to which we all added,

“And Dennis,”

“And Dennis,”

“And Dennis.”

Lionheart marred the occasion to my mind – I may have stood outside of it a bit but I never deliberately sabotaged the tale – Lionheart laughed and stabbed out with, “The Queen!” stressing Her Majesty in such a way that it was quite clear what queen he had in mind. There was little love lost between Lionheart and Dennis. There always existed between them that false bonhomie that just manages to control the very real dislike underneath.

Later on, I made moves to go. Phyllis, my mother, had already said goodnight amongst much gooing and gahing, cooing and cahing and was waiting for me downstairs. She was always a bit ambivalent about Dennis and the house he shared with the Jervis family. But she responded to his flattering ways and purred appropriately when stroked. Outside, on the way, home her tarter, or perhaps even her Tartar side, would emerge.

“Well, I’m glad that’s over for another year. I can’t bear those garlands made out of nuts. And, as for the Queen,” she added tetchily.

The garlands in question were draped across the panels in Mrs Jervis’ drawing-room and, from a distance, looked remarkably like the Grinling Gibbons’ carvings found in many a stately mansion and English country house. Up close, however, the illusion vanished and you saw that they were an ingenious hodgepodge of walnuts, almonds and brazil nuts sewn together of an evening by Dennis and his friends. Dennis would often have his most trusted fans around for a night in the smoking room. There, clad cap-a-pie in leather, they would celebrate the joys of friendship in a modern version of the eighteenth century Hellfire Club, sharing a pipe of marijuana and a working class lad or two.

“All is illusion and magic, that is the whole point,” he warned, his voice veering into a higher key as his eagle eyebeam struck the further side of the room, where Ian Gladly had been sighted examining a painting of Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy’ too closely. It looked real but how could it be?! Had Dennis raided the Tate Gallery? He was known for his daring.

“Do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold philosophy?” – our host amazed nearly everyone by quoting John Keats. I was not amazed, though I was amused, because I had given Dennis the Keats quotation only a week before when he was complaining about the people who had not “got it” because their reading of ‘The Guardian’ and their critical eye got in the way. Duly chastised, Ian scurried away to refill his empty glass with the Christmas punch circa 1730.

“Dennis, I must go now too. Thank you for a wonderful evening,” I ventured, not realising that I was skating on very thin ice. Dennis replied with suave charm,“Thank you, Rodney, thank you for sticking it out for so long.”

For a moment, I did not feel the pain. I genuinely thought he was thanking me and then I realised that his was as much an attack as Lionheart’s had been. Maybe I had sounded rather grand, rather condescending? – I have that effect occasionally but, on this occasion, I chose my words carefully and was genuinely grateful. Perhaps, and this is more likely, he had picked up on my attitude at a much deeper level? Dennis was not an intellectual in any way. He was very much a creature of instinct, emotion and intuition. And he would sniff out any insincerity on your part and snuff you out immediately like a candle in an eighteenth century wall sconce. When riled he was a veritable tiger. He himself was, however, notoriously insincere. He liked to think of himself as very American and straightforward, but he could smile and be a villain with the best of us. In short, he was a ‘character.’

A group of us had gathered in the hall on the ground floor, fumbling for our coats in the Victorian room which opened off the room in which the Christmas goose sat proudly on its big eighteenth century platter, awaiting consumption.

“The wonderful thing about Denny,” Edgar-in-Elder-St drawled, “is he is a confidence man, a trickster. He sold to the English what was already theirs. It’s better than bottled water – and what a swizz that is – And we fell for it completely. We bought it!”

“Very American, that,” Lionheart added, as he struggled to find Arlecchino’s opera cape which had somehow gone missing.

“Lionheart, where ees my cape, I can’t pass thee market porters dressed as a ‘macaroni’, a kind of Yankee Doodle Dandy! I will be a laughing stocking.”

At this point Arlecchino’s eyes met those of Whitechapel, Dennis’ black and white cat, sitting at the bottom of the stairs and enjoying the festivities. Finally, we found the cape and Arlecchino’s costume was hidden from the amused and even scornful eyes of the market porters, through whom he imagined himself moving so perplexingly.

I had confided to Lionheart earlier that I found the house too much of a museum and a bit too Hollywood for my taste. I can say this without doing Dennis any harm at all because, in all these years, I have only met two other people who felt the same as I did. Dennis prided himself on being the real thing. The ‘real thing’ in terms of taste and decoration was distinguished by him as the ‘Joan Collins School of Decoration’ versus the ‘Queen Mother’s School of Decoration.’ There was even a television programme on the area in which Dennis and William Candy, the architectural-historian-who-wore-a-kilt-and-sported-a-pigtail, were seen wandering around Spitalfields and Brick Lane, past the Jewish Soup Kitchen for the Poor, along the Moorish Arcade in Fashion St, examining different facades and door fronts, lintels and fanlights, approving or disapproving as the Queen Mother dictated.

Our door front had been a thing of beauty and a joy forever, until we had to have it taken away and repaired and, in that process, hundreds of years of paint was stripped off – O, God, forgive me – to reveal the original contours sleeping unsuspected beneath and then the door became a bad thing. In vain did I argue that mother and I had very little choice in the matter – the architect insisted  - but Dennis would have none of it, and so Phyllis and I had the indignity of hearing Dennis and William Candy, the architectural-historian-who-wore-a-kilt-and-sported-a-pigtail, stop in front of our door and exclaim to the nation in a televised documentary, “This is very much an example of the Joan Collins School of Decoration! We prefer the Queen Mother’s School.” They both shook hands on it and that was that. Our fate was sealed.

My mother and I had been consigned to that uncomfortable circle of Dante’s Inferno shared by homosexuals and failed house restorers. Though he would have been mortally offended to hear it, Dennis’ house had a bit too much of the ‘Metro Goldwyn Mayer School of Decoration’ itself but God protect you if you ever hinted so much. He was not only very sensitive in these matters but also – and the two go together like a horse and eighteenth century carriage – deeply insecure.

I had previously joked with Lionheart about Dennis’ ordering us all about as if we were servants, “Now those of you who are sitting in them, bring the eighteenth century chairs up to the drawing room.”

“Dennis, which ones are they?” I asked.

“O, Rodney, really! The eighteenth century chairs have no arms, thereby enabling Mrs Jervis and her  daughter, Sophia, to sit with their farthingales and hoopskirts unimpeded,” he emphasised, somewhat pedantically in his short quick trans-Atlantic accent.

Well, lah-di-bloody-dah, my dears, and God bless you all – Dennis, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Queen and Spitalfields!

Text copyright © Estate of Rodney Archer

Photographs copyright © Dennis Severs House

Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, Norton Folgate, E1 6BX

Rodney Archer deposited his diary in the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute earlier this year

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