Last summer, I was asked if I would meet Mike Henbrey, Collector of Books, Ephemera & Tools, to create a portrait of him in the last few weeks of his life. In the event, we struck up a brief friendship in which I visited Mike over successive Saturdays for more than a month and he survived until November. Now, as the year draws to a close, I remember Mike and his beloved collections.

Mike Henbrey

On the outside, Mike Henbrey’s council flat looked like any other – but once you stepped inside and glimpsed the shelves of fine eighteenth century leather bindings, you realised you were in the home of an extraordinarily knowledgeable collector. High up in the building, Mike sat peacefully in his nest of books, brooding and gazing out at the surrounding tree tops through his large round steel glasses and looking for all the world like a wise old owl.

Walls lined with diverse pairs of steel dividers and shelves of fat albums testified to his collections of tools and ephemera. It was all the outcome of a trained eye and a lifetime of curiosity, seeking out wonders in the barrows, markets and salerooms of London, enabling Mike to amass a collection far greater than his means through persistence and knowledge.

“Of all my collections, the Vinegar Valentines are the one that gives me the most pleasure,” he assured me with characteristic singularity, despite his obviously kind nature. ‘Vinegar Valentines’ were grotesque insults couched in humorous style,  sent to enemies and unwanted suitors, and to bad tradesmen by workmates and dissatisfied customers. Unsurprisingly, very few have survived which makes them incredibly rare and renders Mike’s collection all the more astonishing. Immensely knowledgeable yet almost entirely self-educated, Mike was drawn to neglected things that no-one else cared for and this was the genius of his collecting instinct.

Of course, I wanted to pore through all of Mike’s books and albums, but I had to resist this impulse in order to discover his own story and learn how it was that he came to gather his wonderful collection.

“I was born in Chingford in 1943 but, unfortunately, we moved to Norfolk when I was eight. I never liked it there, it was a lonely, cold and draughty place. My father James was a furrier and his father – who was also James – had been a furrier before him in the East End, but they moved out. My mother, Laura Lewis, was a machinist who worked for my father and I think she came from the East End too. I grew up playing in the furriers because my father had his factory in the back garden and the machinists gave me sweets. I think that’s where I got my love of tools.

There was quite a lot of bombing in Chingford during the war and the house next to us got a direct hit which left a great big crack in our wall. I played on bomb sites even though I was told not to, and somehow my mother always seemed to know. I think it must have been the mixture of brick dust and soot on my clothes.

It was a filthy dirty job, being a furrier, and, although my father was a good furrier, he wasn’t a good businessman and he ended up in bankruptcy when I was eight. So that’s how we ended up in Mundesley by the sea in North Norfolk in the early fifties.

As soon as I left school at sixteen, I headed back to London. Ostensibly, it was to complete my training in the catering trade but I hated it, I had already done a year at catering college in Norwich. In reality, I was taking lots of drugs – dope and speed mostly – and working at a night club. I got a job on the door of club called The Bedsitter in Holland Park Avenue. I actually had a bedsitter off Holland Park itself for five pounds a week with a gas ring in the corner. That was a good time.

I worked at a hotel in Park Lane for a few months. The chef used to throw things at me. They fired me in the end for turning up late. I drifted through life by signing on and working on the side, and the club gave me a good social life. I’m a vicarious hedonist. I’ve always read a lot, I taught myself to read by reading my brother’s copies of Dandy and Beano. He was ten years older than me and he died in his early thirties.

A hippy friend of mine was a packer at a West End bookshop in Grafton St and he got me a job there. I worked for Mr Sawyer, he was a nice man. He employed hippies because they didn’t mind his cigar smoke and he never noticed the smell of pot in the packing room. He employed me as a porter but he told me to buy a suit and I got a job in the bookshop itself. I learnt such a lot while I was there. It was nice to be around books, so much better than working for a living.

Mr Gibbs was the shop manager, he taught me how to catalogue. He couldn’t understand why he kept finding more money in his pay packet. It was because we youngsters kept asking for a pay rise and Mr Sawyer couldn’t give it to us without giving it to Mr Gibbs too.

Mr Gibbs taught me not to speak to Mr Sawyer until he’d been around to Brown’s Hotel for his ‘breakfast’ and I presume this was because ‘breakfast’ consisted of at least three gin and tonics. He was a kind employer, he didn’t pay much but you learnt a lot. He had a tiny desk hidden behind a bookcase with two old spindly chairs that were permanently on the brink of collapse. The place was a university of sorts. I learnt so much so quickly. You can’t always recognise good stuff until you’ve had it pass through your hands.

Mr Sawyer would go through the auction catalogue of books and mark how much you were to bid and send you off to Sotheby’s. You had to stay on the ball, because sometimes he’d make an agreement with other booksellers not to let him get a lot below a certain price, because he’d be bidding for a customer and he’d be on commission. In those days, it was possible to make living by frequenting Sotheby’s and buying books. You learn a lot about the peculiarities of the bookselling trade. I think I was earning fourteen pounds a week. It was positively Dickensian.

By then I had met my wife Jeanna. We got married in 1965 and moved around between lots of flats we couldn’t afford. Jeanna & I started a book stall in Camden Passage called Icarus. I love the street markets like Portobello and Brick Lane. We made a lot of sales and I bought some wonderful stuff in street markets when you could discover things, and I’ve still got some of it.

We had two daughters, Samantha & Natasha, but Jeanna died young. We were living in Islington in Highbury Fields and I was left on my own to bring up the kids, who were eight and three years old at the time. That’s when I got this council flat, on account of being  a single parent, and I’ve been here thirty-eight years. I lived on benefits with bookselling on the side to bring in some extra money and brought up my kids with the help of girlfriends.

A friend of mine had a secondhand tool shop and I worked there for a while. You could buy old tools from the sixteenth and seventeenth century for not very much money then, and we had some that no-one ever wanted to buy, so I brought them home. I am fascinated by tools for specialist professions, each one opens a door to a particular world. I still have my father’s furriers’ tools and they pack into such a small box.

From then on I’ve been a book dealer. Once you fall out of having a regular job, it’s difficult to go back. I think my kids regard me with mixture of mild disappointment and tolerance. On occasion, they have generously put up with me spending money on books instead of dinner.

I’ve always been a collector, reference books mainly, and from there I’ve become a dealer. I’m not interested in fiction but I do love a good reference book.”

Sawyer, the bookseller in Grafton St where Mike Henbrey once worked

Mr Gibbs, bookshop manager

GLOSSARY

by Spitalfields Life Contributing Slang Lexicographer Jonathon Green

Mike Henbrey, Collector of books, ephemera and tools

Mike Henbrey’s Vinegar Valentines have been purchased by Bishopsgate Institute where they are preserved in the archive as the Mike Henbrey Collection

You may like to take a closer look at some of Mike Henbrey’s collections

Mike Henbrey’s Vinegar Valentines

Vinegar Valentines for Bad Tradesmen

Mike Henbrey’s Collection of Dividers

Kirkby’s Eccentric Museum

The Antiquarian Bookshops of Old London

Today, I published blogs by two alumni of the Spitalfields blog course, A London Inheritance and Bug Woman London. If you are contemplating starting your own blog in 2016, there is still time to sign up for the course on 30th & 31st January. Scroll down for further information.

A LONDON INHERITANCE

http://alondoninheritance.com

My father was born in London in 1928, lived in the city throughout World War II and took photographs of the capital from 1946 to 1954. These show a city which has changed dramatically and, through A London Inheritance, I document my exploration of London, using his photographs as a starting point, trying to identify the original locations and show how the buildings, streets and topography of the capital have developed.

I walked down to the Tower one Sunday to see how much had changed. The majority of the cannon have been removed, although a couple remain, looking rather sad up against the approach to Tower Bridge at the far end of the photo. I do not know when they were removed or why, I can only guess. Perhaps Health & Safety considerations? Although falling was an accepted risk of climbing anything as a boy. An understandable reason could have been damage to the cannon. Making more space in this area is possible, as it really does get crowded at the peak of the tourist season. Or perhaps the fact that they all seemed to be pointing directly at City Hall on the south bank of the river may have made certain occupants rather nervous?

Whilst the majority of my father’s photos came to me as negatives, a number were printed, and of these some had the location written on the back. On this photo, my father had written the simple title “Autumn in Finsbury Circus.” Taken early in the morning, it shows autumnal light shining through the trees with the first fallen leaves on the path. I suspect that he had taken this photo for a competition at the St. Brides Institute Photographic Society as it has a more composed quality than the straight-forward recording of buildings and streets. To try and find the location of this photo, a day off from work provided the opportunity for a walk around London. Finsbury Circus is much the same today, with one significant exception being that it is a site for Crossrail, however parts that remain open show that not too much has changed (if you ignore the major construction to your left).

My father’s photo of the Lamb & Flag in Rose St, Covent Garden, was taken in 1948. Barclay, Perkins & Co. Ltd operated from the Anchor Brewery in Park St, Southwark, originally founded in 1616, and becoming Barclay, Perkins in 1781 when John Perkins & Robert Barclay took over. Barclay, Perkins & Co merged with Courage in 1955 and the brewery closed in the early seventies.

The Lamb & Flag occupies one of London’s older buildings. It was originally built at the same time as Rose Street in 1623 and much of the original timber frame survives, although the front was rebuilt in 1958 as can be seen in my photo. The rebuild lost many of the original architectural features including what appears to be a parapet running the width of the building with a carving of the Lamb and Flag at the centre. The ‘lamb’ is from St John, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world” while the flag is that of St George. The pub was also once known as the ‘Bucket of Blood’ due to links with prize fighting.

BUG WOMAN LONDON

http://bugwomanlondon.com

Bug Woman is a slightly scruffy middle-aged woman who enjoys nothing more than finding a large spider in the bathroom. She plans to spend the next five years exploring the parks, woods and pavements within a half-mile radius of her North London home, and reporting on the animals, plants and people that she finds there. She will also be paying close attention to the creatures that turn up in the garden and the house. She promises to post every week on a Saturday, and more often if she can tear herself away from the marmalade making. She looks forward to finding out what’s happening in your half-mile.

Although I usually write about the wildlife outside my house, today I would like to share some tales with you about the creatures that we actually select as our companions. My husband and I began to foster cats for the Cats Protection League back in 2008, because for me a house without a pet is not a home.

During our five years of fostering, we looked after nearly eighty cats and learned a lot about non-attachment, about how every cat is different, and how tolerant it was possible to be in the face of feline bodily fluids. We also developed a clear idea of the kind of cat that we would want to adopt. So here, in no particular order, are some of the cats that were in our care, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months.

We looked after Rosie when her owners went away on holiday. She was a cat with quite severe disabilities – she could not stand up, and had to be helped to her litter tray a couple of times a day. She would always let you know when she wanted to go, which was generally at the human-friendly times of 8:00am and 6:00pm. She was a very perky cat, interested in everything that was going on, and loved to sit on the sofa next to you or to be picked up for a cuddle. She also loved other cats, but they generally knew that there was something wrong with her and would avoid her. Until, that is, her owner adopted another little cat who had been through the most horrific abuse I had ever heard of. He loved Rosie on sight, and would cuddle up with her in her basket – maybe she reminded him of his mother, or maybe he just recognised another cat that wasnot able to deal with the world around her on her own. At any rate, the two of them were a comfort to one another throughout their lives.

Rosa was the only cat who gave birth to her kittens in our house. And what an event it was! We had prepared several places for the big event, but of course she had her babies squeezed between the bookshelf and the radiator, on the 4th November. On the 5th November there was a Guy Fawkes party in the street, with deafening explosions and shouting and general carry-on, but she stayed firm despite it all. When the kittens first came out from their hiding place after a few weeks, she spent a lot of time trying to corral them by tapping them with her front feet, like a footballer trying to dribble the ball, but eventually she gave up and let them start to explore. We felt like proud parents!

Tabby was a lynx in miniature. Look at the size of those paws! He grew to be enormous, and was the gentlest kitten we ever looked after, happy to lie in your arms like a baby.

Colette was rescued from a house fire – in fact, the cat carrier in which she was saved was melted like a Salvador Dali painting. She smelled of smoke for days and also had a brutal flea infection. She made a quick recovery – however – and was soon off to her new home, where – hopefully – they had made sure the wiring was not a death-trap.

Galaxy came to us with a terrible throat lesions, an allergic reaction to his vaccinations and a general air of depression. Mother cats who are not vaccinated can pass calicivirus onto their kittens, which leaves them with a lifelong tendency to throat and mouth inflammation. Galaxy’s throat was so painful that there was some talk of putting him to sleep if the situation did not improve, and so we spoilt him horribly. We let him slept on our bed, in spite of his snoring. He got all the best food. We put up with his outrageous flatulence. And, lo and behold, he gradually improved, and was finally (after a year) re-homed with a wonderful lady who gave him venison and wild boar at Christmas, and did not mind him sleeping in her potted plants on the patio. He lived for another five years, and was so cherished that he was frequently featured on his owner’s Christmas cards.

Honey was a most unfortunate-looking cat. She was as round as a beach ball and had a most disapproving expression (not helped by her moustache). However, she was an affectionate cat, and would sit beside you, purring like an idling engine. If you did not stroke her, she would reach out with one paw and place it on your arm until you produced the desired caresses. If they stopped, she would pause for a moment and then apologetically reach out again. Eventually, she found a home with someone who could see past her unfortunate looks to the characterful creature beneath.

Mocha & Latte were described to us by the people at the cat shelter as ‘the Cappuccino Kits’ but they arrived as two lively adolescent lunks, with all the social graces of a troop of teddy boys. One afternoon, Latte decided to run up our full-length sitting room curtains, and, before I could stop him, Mocha tried to do the same. Unfortunately, Mocha was twice the weight of Latte and so the entire curtain rail, complete with an enormous chunk of plaster, came out of the wall, leaving a cloud of dust. Suffice to say that they were both in hiding for at least five minutes before they ventured out to inspect the damage.

Talking of adolescent lunks, Lee was our first teenager, and were a whole heap of trouble. Lee was forever jumping out of open windows, hiding on the top of bookcases and, on one occasion, getting into the washing machine.

So what do you think happened when we finally decided to adopt? Was it a big tough tomcat, full of personality and affection? Umm, no.

Our last two foster cats were a brother and sister: a big tough tom, and an extremely shy little female cat. The big tough tom was adopted out to Gerrard’s Cross, to a man who owned a stable full of show jumpers and who did not mind if his cat wanted to sleep on the bed. This just left the female, who, up to then, had spent her whole time hiding behind the sofa.

John and I wondered who, on earth, would ever adopt a cat who never showed herself. The months went on. Nobody wanted a very ordinary little black and white scaredy cat. And yet, we had started to notice that she was not such a scaredy cat any more. She liked to be brushed, for just a minute or so at first. Eventually, she would demand to be brushed, and complain when you stopped.

We stopped thinking about her in terms of “Who else will adopt this cat if we don’t?” and started to realise that, for us, she was ideal. She did not hunt and kill the creatures in my garden. She respected our sleep time. She did not have any strange problems with food. She did rip the sofa to shreds. So, Gentle Reader, we adopted her, and put away all notions of the cats that we thought we wanted, in favour of the one that we actually did.

Every animal has a personality. If we can understand this with our pets, I wonder why we find it so hard to acknowledge that wild animals might be the same?

COMMENTS BY STUDENTS FROM PREVIOUS SPITALFIELDS BLOG COURSES

“I highly recommend this creative, challenging and most inspiring course. The Gentle Author gave me the confidence to find my voice and just go for it!”

“Do join The Gentle Author on this Blogging Course in Spitalfields. It’s as much about learning/ appreciating Storytelling as Blogging. About developing how to write or talk to your readers in your own unique way. It’s also an opportunity to “test” your ideas in an encouraging and inspirational environment. Go and enjoy – I’d happily do it all again!”

“The Gentle Author’s writing course strikes the right balance between addressing the creative act of blogging and the practical tips needed to turn a concept into reality. During the course the participants are encouraged to share and develop their ideas in a safe yet stimulating environment. A great course for those who need that final (gentle) push!”

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“I gladly traveled from the States to Spitalfields for the How to Write a Blog Course. The unique setting and quality of the Gentle Author’s own writing persuaded me and I was not disappointed. The weekend provided ample inspiration, like-minded fellowship, and practical steps to immediately launch a blog that one could be proud of. I’m so thankful to have attended.”

“I took part in The Gentle Author’s blogging course for a variety of reasons: I’ve followed Spitalfields Life for a long time now, and find it one of the most engaging blogs that I know; I also wanted to develop my own personal blog in a way that people will actually read, and that genuinely represents my own voice. The course was wonderful. Challenging, certainly, but I came away with new confidence that I can write in an engaging way, and to a self-imposed schedule. The setting in Fournier St was both lovely and sympathetic to the purpose of the course. A further unexpected pleasure was the variety of other bloggers who attended: each one had a very personal take on where they wanted their blogs to go, and brought with them an amazing range and depth of personal experience. “

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“The course was great fun and very informative, digging into the nuts and bolts of writing a blog.   There was an encouraging and nurturing atmosphere that made me think that I too could learn to write a blog that people might want to read.  - There’s a blurb, but of course what I really want to say is that my blog changed my life, without sounding like an idiot.   The people that I met in the course were all interesting people, including yourself.   So thanks for everything.”

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“This course was what inspired me to dare to blog. Two years on, and blogging has changed the way I look at London.”

HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ  - 30th & 31st JANUARY

Spend a weekend in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Spitalfields and learn how to write a blog with The Gentle Author.

This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.

“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” - The Gentle Author

COURSE STRUCTURE

1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.

SALIENT DETAILS

The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 30th & 31st January from 10am -5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday. Lunch will be catered by Leila’s Cafe of Arnold Circus and tea, coffee & cakes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £300.

Accomodation at 5 Fournier St is available upon enquiry to Fiona Atkins fiona@townhousewindow.com

Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.

These are the dead cats that once hung behind the counter of the celebrated “Dustbin Bar” at Dirty Dick’s Old Port Wine & Spirit House in Bishopsgate. It is a location that holds a special place in my affections as the first pub I ever went into in London, one day after work at the Bishopsgate Institute.

Although this was longer ago than I care to admit and regrettably the cats in this picture had already gone by then, yet I still recall the sense of expectation, entering the narrow frontage and walking back, and back, and back through the warren of rooms with sawdust on the floor – descending ever deeper into the bowels of the city, it seemed. And I can only imagine how this strange drama might have been enhanced by the presence of umpteen dead cats suspended from the ceiling.

This was how it was described in 1866 – “A small public house or rather a tap of a wholesale wine and spirit business…a warehouse or barn without floorboards – a low ceiling, with cobweb festoons dangling from the black rafters – a pewter bar battered and dirty, floating with beer – numberless gas pipes tied anyhow along the struts and posts to conduct the spirits from the barrels to the taps – sample phials and labelled bottles of wine and spirits on shelves – everything covered with virgin dust and cobwebs.”

Yet all was not as it might seem, because the presence of these curious artefacts was not due to unselfconscious eccentricity, it was an early and highly successful example of what we should call a “theme pub.” Established in 1745 as The Old Jerusalem, the drinking house took the name of Dirty Dick’s in 1814 and adopted his story along with it. The original of Dirty Dick was Nathaniel Bentley, a successful merchant with a hardware shop and warehouse in Leadenhall St in the mid-eighteenth century. After his bride-to-be died on their wedding day – so the legend goes – he never cleaned up again, never washed or changed his clothes. “It’s of no use, if I wash my hands today, they will be dirty again tomorrow,” he declared. Bentley died in 1809, and the Bishopsgate Distillers appropriated this story of the notorious dirty hardware merchant, adorning their bar with dead cats and cobwebs to perpetuate the legend.

Charles Dickens knew Dirty Dick’s and was fascinated with this myth of one who sealed up the door on the wedding breakfast and left the cake and table decorations to acquire dust eternally. In a letter to the printer of his weekly publication “Household Words” dated 30th December 1852, he wrote “Don’t leave out the Dirty Old Man, he is capital.” And it has been suggested that Nathaniel Bentley was the inspiration for the character of Miss Havisham in “Great Expectations.”

Dirty Dick’s was rebuilt in the eighteen seventies, though the cellars are of an earlier date, and now the bizarre artefacts are banished to a glass case, yet it is still worth a visit. Explore the wonky half-timbered spaces and seek out the secluded panelled rooms at the rear, where you can enjoy a quiet drink away from the commotion of Bishopsgate to contemplate the ancient coaching inns that once lined this street, long before the age of the train and the motor car.

Nathaniel Richard Bentley – the origin of the myth of Dirty Dick.

Dirty Dick by William Allingham

A Lay of Leadenhall

In a dirty old house lived a Dirty Old Man.
Soap, towels or brushes were not in his plan;
For forty long years as the neighbours declared,
His house never once had been cleaned or repaired.

‘Twas a scandal and a shame to the business-like street,
One terrible blot in a ledger so neat;
The old shop with its glasses,black bottles and vats,
And the rest of the mansion a run for the rats.

Outside, the old plaster, all splatter and stain,
Looked spotty in sunshine, and streaky in rain;
The window-sills sprouted with mildewy grass,
And the panes being broken, were known to be glass.

On a rickety signboard no learning could spell,
The merchant who sold, or the goods he’d to sell;
But for house and for man, a new title took growth,
Like a fungus the dirt gave a name to them both.

Within these there were carpets and cushions of dust,
The wood was half rot, and the metal half rust;
Old curtains—half cobwebs—hung grimly aloof;
‘Twas a spiders’ elysium from cellar to roof.

There, king of the spiders, the Dirty Old man,
Lives busy, and dirty, as ever he can;
With dirt on his fingers and dirt on his face,
The dirty old man thinks the dirt no disgrace.

From his wig to his shoes, from his coat to his shirt,
His clothes are a proverb—a marvel of dirt;
The dirt is prevading, unfading, exceeding,
Yet the Dirty Old Man has learning and breeding.

Fine folks from their carriages, noble and fair,
Have entered his shop, less to buy than to stare,
And afterwards said, though the dirt was so frightful,
The Dirty Man’s manners were truly delightful.

But they pried not upstairs thro’ the dirt and the gloom,
Nor peeped at the door of the wonderful room
That gossips made much of in accents subdued,
But whose inside no one might brag to have viewed.

That room, forty years since, folks settled and decked it,
The luncheon’s prepared, and the guests are expected,
The handsome young host he is gallant and gay,
For his love and her friends are expected today.

With solid and dainty the table is dressed—
The wine beams its brightest—flowers bloom their best;
Yet the host will not smile, and no guest will appear,
For his sweetheart is dead, as he shortly shall hear.

Full forty years since turned the key in that door,
‘Tis a room deaf and dumb ’mid the city’s uproar;
The guests for whose joyance that table was spread,
May now enter as ghosts, for they’re everyone dead.

Though a chink in the shutter dim lights come and go,
The seats are in order, the dishes a row;
But the luncheon was wealth to the rat and the mouse,
Whose descendants have long left the dirty old house.

Cup and platter are masked in thick layers of dust,
The flowers fallen to powder, the wine swath’d in crust,
A nosegay was laid before one special chair,
And the faded blue ribbon that bound it is there.

The old man has played out his part in the scene
Wherever he now is let’s hope he’s more clean;
Yet give we a thought, free of scoffing or ban,
To that Dirty Old House and that Dirty Old Man.

(First published by Charles Dickens in Household Words, 1853)

Nathaniel Bentley, Eccentric Character & Hardwareman of Leadenhall St – the well-known Dirty Dick

Archive pictures courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

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Harry Nicholls cuts the Baddeley Cake with the cast of ‘Babes in the Wood’ in 1908

Tonight, an excited throng at Drury Lane will celebrate London’s oldest theatrical tradition, the cutting of the Baddeley Cake, which has been taking place on Twelfth Night since 1795.

After the performance, members of the cast will gather for the ceremony in the palatial neo-classical theatre bar dating from 1821, in front of a large party of fellow actors and actresses who have trod the boards of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in former years, and Alex Jennings – who currently stars as Willy Wonka – will cut the cake. Liberal servings of strong punch containing wine, brandy and gin, concocted by the Theatre Manager to a secret recipe handed down through the centuries, always ensure that the evening goes with a swing. In recent years, the cake has been themed to the show running at the theatre and this year a huge chocolate cake will be cunningly baked in the shape of a Wonka bar by a Master Chocolatier.

It is an occasion coloured with sentiment as the performers, still flushed from the night’s performance, recognise their part in this theatre’s long history while retired actors fill with nostalgic emotion to be reunited with old friends and recall happy past times at Drury Lane. This splendid event is organised annually by the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund which was founded by the great actor-manager David Garrick in 1766 to provide pensions to performers from Drury Lane and still functions today, for this notoriously most-uncertain of professions, offering support to senior actors down on their luck.

Twelfth Cake was a medieval tradition that is the origin of our contemporary Christmas Cake. Originally part of the feast of Epiphany, the cake was baked with a bean inside and whoever got the slice with the bean was crowned King of Misrule. The Baddeley Cake is the last surviving example of this ancient custom of the Twelfth Cake and – appropriately enough – owes its name to Robert Baddeley, a pastry chef who became a famous actor, and left a legacy to the Drury Lane Fund to “provide cake and wine for the performers in the green room of Drury Lane Theatre on Twelfth Night.”

A Cockney by origin, Robert Baddeley was pastry chef to the actor Samuel Foote when he grew stage-struck and asked his employer, who was performing at Drury Lane, if he could join him on the stage. “You are a good cook, why do you want to be a bad actor?” queried Foote, dismissing the request, but offering to find him a role on the stage if Baddeley was still keen in a year’s time.

With theatrical daring, Baddeley left his employer, travelled the continent for a year and returned to marry Sophia Snow, the glamorous daughter of George III’s State Trumpeter. On the anniversary of his original request, he presented himself at the Stage Door of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and asked Foote for the job which he had been promised. In fact, Baddeley turned out to be a talented actor and quickly made a name for himself in comic roles, playing foreigners. The attractive Sophia Baddeley was also offered roles, exploiting her musical abilities and natural charms, and her husband arranged with the management to pocket both their salaries himself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it proved to be a volatile marriage, especially when she took revenge on her husband by working her way through all the male members of the company.

The situation came to crisis in a duel over Sophia Baddeley’s honour between George Garrick (David’s brother) and Robert Baddeley in Hyde Park, yet she managed to reconcile the opponents with a suitably theatrical demonstration of her astonishing powers of persuasion. It appears that the constant tide of marital scandal published in the newspapers did no harm to the careers of either Mr & Mrs Baddeley.

Eventually, Robert Baddeley became a permanent member of His Majesties Company of Comedians at Drury Lane at a salary of twelve pounds a week. He was best known for originating the role of Moses in ‘The School for Scandal’ which premiered at Drury Lane in 1777, and it was in costume for this character that he collapsed on stage on November 19th 1794 and died at home in Store St next morning.

Baddeley’s will extended to seventy pages, including the legacy of his house in Moulsey as an asylum for decayed actors and a three pound annuity for the provision of an annual Twelfth Cake and punch for the performers at Drury Lane. The asylum failed because the old actors did not like being labelled as decayed, so the property was sold and his estate merged with the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund – but the annual ceremony of the cake which bears his name lives on.

Each year before the Baddeley Cake is cut, the Master of the Fund proposes a toast to Robert Baddeley and everyone raises their glasses of punch in celebration of London’s oldest living theatrical tradition and in remembrance of the Cockney pastry chef who fulfilled his dream of becoming an actor.

Robert Baddeley (1733-1794) The pastry chef who became a famous actor

Painted by Zoffany, Robert Baddeley as Moses in Sheridan’s “The School for Scandal,” which premiered at Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1777

Robert Baddeley “I have taken my last draught in this world” Henry IV Part II

Baddeley’s Twelfth Cake

William Terriss cuts the Baddeley cake in 1883

Cutting the Baddeley Cake on the stage of Drury Lane in 1890

Alex Jennings (currently starring as Willie Wonka) cuts the Baddeley Cake, accompanied by the cast of “Charlie & The Chocolate Factory”

Theatre Royal Drury Lane

New photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

Click here to learn more about the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund

Nicholson & Griffin, Hairdresser & Barber

The reasons why people go the hairdresser are various and complex – but this week Jane Sidell, Inspector of Ancient Monuments, and I visited a salon in the City of London for a purpose quite beyond the usual.

There is a hairdresser in Gracechurch St at the entrance to Leadenhall Market that is like no other. It appears unremarkable until you step through the tiny salon with room only for one customer and descend the staircase to find yourself in an enormous basement lined with mirrors and chairs, where busy hairdressers tend their clients’ coiffure.

At the far corner of this chamber, there is a discreet glass door which leads to another space entirely. Upon first sight, there is undefined darkness on the other side of the door, as if it opened upon the infinite universe of space and time. At the centre, sits an ancient structure of stone and brick. You are standing at ground level of Roman London and purpose of the visit is to inspect this fragmentary ruin of the basilica and forum built here in the first century and uncovered in 1881.

Once the largest building in Europe north of the Alps, the structure originally extended as far west as Cornhill, as far north as Leadenhall St, as far east as Lime St and as far south as Lombard St. The basilica was the location of judicial and financial administration while the forum served as a public meeting place and market. With astonishing continuity, two millennia later, the Roman ruins lie beneath Leadenhall Market and the surrounding offices of today’s legal and financial industries.

In the dark vault beneath the salon, you confront a neatly-constructed piece of wall consisting of fifteen courses of locally-made square clay bricks sitting upon a footing of shaped sandstone. Clay bricks were commonly included to mark string courses, such as you may find in the Roman City wall but this usage as an architectural feature is unusual, suggesting it is a piece of design rather than mere utility.

Once upon a time, countless people walked from the forum into the basilica and noticed this layer of bricks at the base of the wall which eventually became so familiar as to be invisible. They did not expect anyone in future to gaze in awe at this fragment from the deep recess of the past, any more than we might imagine a random section of the city of our own time being scrutinised by those yet to come, when we have long departed and London has been erased.

Yet there will have been hairdressers in the Roman forum and this essential human requirement is unlikely ever to be redundant, which left me wondering if, in this instance, the continuum of history resides in the human activity in the salon as much as in the ruin beneath it.

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Anyone who has ever visited Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St will recognise this spectacular chimneypiece in the bedroom with its idiosyncratic pediment designed to emulate the facade of Christ Church. The fireplace itself is lined with an exquisite array of Delft tiles which you may have admired, but very few know that these tiles were made by craftsman Simon Pettet in 1985, when he was twenty years old and living in the house with Dennis Severs. Simon was a gifted ceramicist who mastered the technique of tile-making with such expertise that he could create new Delft tiles in an authentic manner, which were almost indistinguishable from those manufactured in the seventeenth century.

In his tiles for this fireplace, Simon made a leap of the imagination, creating a satirical gallery of familiar Spitalfields personalities from the nineteen-eighties. Today his splendid fireplace of tiles exists as a portrait of the neighbourhood at that time, though so discreetly done that, unless someone pointed it out to you, it is unlikely you would ever notice amongst all the overwhelming detail of Dennis Severs’ house.

Simon Pettet died of Aids in 1993, eight years after completing the fireplace and just before his twenty-eighth birthday, and today his ceramics, especially this fireplace in Dennis Severs’ house, comprise a poignant memorial of a short but productive life. Simon’s death imparts an additional resonance to the humour of his work now, which is touching in the skill he expended to conceal his ingenious achievement. As with so much in these beautiful old buildings, we admire the workmanship without ever knowing the names of the craftsmen who were responsible, and Simon aspired to this worthy tradition of anonymous artisans in Spitalfields.

When I squatted down to peer into the fireplace, I could not help smiling to recognise Gilbert & George on the very first tile I saw – Simon had created instantly recognisable likenesses that also recalled Tenniel’s illustrations of Tweedledum & Tweedledee. Most importantly, the spontaneity, colour, texture and sense of line were all exactly as you would expect of Delft tiles. Taking my camera and tripod in hand, I spent a couple of hours with my head in the fireplace before emerging sooty and triumphant with this selection of photographs.

When I finished photographing all the tiles, I noticed one placed at the top right-hand side that was almost entirely hidden from the viewer by the wooden surround on the front of the fireplace. It was completely covered in soot too. After I used a kitchen scourer to remove the grime, I discovered this most-discreetly placed tile was a portrait of Simon himself at work, making tiles. The modesty of the man was such that only someone who climbed into the fireplace, as I did, would ever find Simon’s own signature tile.

Gilbert & George

Raphael Samuel, Historian of the East End

Riccardo Cinelli, Artist

Jim Howett, Carpenter whom Dennis Severs considered to be the fly on the wall in Spitalfields

Ben Langlands & Nikki Bell, Artists who made extra money as housepainters

Simon de Courcy Wheeler, Photographer

Julian Humphreys who renovated his bathroom regularly - “Tomorrow is another day”

Scotsman, Paul Duncan, worked for the Spitalfields Trust

Douglas Blain, Director of the Spitalfields Trust, who was devoted to Hawksmoor

The person in this illustration of a famous event in Folgate St cannot be named for legal reasons

Keith & Jane Bowler of Wilkes St

Her Majesty the Cat, known as ‘Madge,’ watching ‘Come Dancing’

Marianna Kennedy & Ian Harper who were both students at the Slade

Phyllis & her son Rodney Archer

Anna Skrine, Secretary of the Spitalfields Trust

Simon Pettet, Designer & Craftman (1965-93)

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

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This week, in response to a triumphant campaign by residents of Holland Estate, they have received letters from East End Homes revoking the demolition notices that were served upon them last year.

In 2015,  social landlord East End Homes submitted a pre-planning application for demolition of the Estate next to Petticoat Lane prior to any consultation with the people who live there and a member of the staff of East End Homes told residents their homes were “unfit for human habitation.” So Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I visited flats on the Estate to take these portraits and assess the accommodation for ourselves. We found the gracious brick structures are built of better quality materials than most modern developments and are humanely conceived, offering hospitable living spaces which are cherished and well-maintained by the occupants.

Working in partnership with Telford Homes, social landlord East End Homes proposed demolishing the Estate and replacing it with a high-rise development mixing private and social housing but, for the meantime, this plan is dismissed.

Ali Sahed Goyas &  Jahnara Choudhury have lived on the Holland Estate for twenty-five years

Alex Rhys-Taylor & Natasha Polyviou, residents for thirteen years, with their son Odysseus

Pascha Singh has lived on the Holland Estate for more than thirty years

Mahjdiyat, Shammi, Manveen & Arshan Ahmed at home

Yolanda De Los Buies has lived on the Holland Estate for seventeen years

Saleha Khanam with her son Shamsur Rahman and his wife Rushna Begum and their children Yaseen and Hamza – Four generations of this family have lived on the Holland Estate

Azar Ali has lived on the Holland Estate for thirty-one years

Nessa Aifun cares for her husband Rustum at home

Saleh Ahmed & Rusnobun Bibi and their grandchildren Aakifah & Ismael

Kabir Ahmed & Nasrin Rob with their children Aakifah & Ismael

Murtata Choudhury has lived on the Holland Estate for fifty years

Shikiko Aoyama Sanderson & Jarrod Sanderson have lived on the Estate for six years

Samirun Chowdhury  with Saima Chowdhury and Taher Uddin outside Samirun & Saima’s home

Enrico Bonadio has lived on the Holland Estate for three years

Rob Ali, Ali Sayed Goyas, Asab Miah, Murtata Choudhury, Saleh Ahmed with Aakifah Ahmed & Mohammed Ismael Ali

Photographs copyright @ Sarah Ainslie

You can follow the Residents Against Demolition campaign on

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This winter, Spitalfields has become a battleground and – thanks to the intervention of the Mayor of London – this is Christ Church seen from across the muddy waste where the Fruit & Wool Exchange used to be. Historically, only Henry VIII has been responsible for a greater degree of destruction, when he ‘dissolved’ the Priory of St Mary Spital with its large public hospital in the fifteen-thirties and took the fields to create an artillery ground for his soldiers to practise.

If Boris Johnson gets his way by approving the overblown developments in Norton Folgate next week and upon the Bishopsgate Goods Yard in March, he will surpass Henry VIII to become the single most destructive influence upon Spitalfields. Yet, in common with other tyrants, there is a degree of arrogance involved and in Boris’ haste to determine these building schemes before he is out of office in the spring, mistakes have been made which present the opportunity to stop him.

In his tenure, the Mayor has exercised his authority to over-rule local authorities and give his approval to a dozen development schemes in London, which makes the outcome of his forthcoming call-ins for Norton Folgate and Bishopsgate Goods Yard appear predetermined. As if – in the case of Norton Folgate – the designation of the site as a Conservation Area, more than seven hundred letters of objection (two hundred discounted for lack of postal address), a unanimous rejection by the Tower Hamlets Development Committee and five hundred people joining hands around the site, count for nothing in face of the wishes of one man.

Through a Freedom of Information request, the Spitalfields Trust has uncovered procedural irregularities in the handling of the Norton Folgate case which amount to the Mayor erring in law. Consequently, they have launched a Judicial Review challenging the legitimacy of the call-in and rendering next Monday’s hearing a charade in which the Mayor’s decision will be worthless pending the Judicial Review.

The Mayor and the officers of the Greater London Authority are obligated to read planning applications and assess them objectively and neutrally, yet a member of staff at GLA sent an email to British Land’s consultants DP9 at 10:48am on 10th September – the morning the application arrived at City Hall – confirming the Mayor’s intention to call in the application. Although the GLA had already been consulting with developer British Land, they did not take time to examine application in any depth even though they had fourteen days to do so.

Text of email to British Land’s Planning Consultants DP9 from Greater London Authority sent at 10:38am on 10th September the day of receipt of the Norton Folgate Application.

“Hi [name redacted], Yes the report will advise that the application has a significant impact on the implementation of the London Plan and a significant effect on more than one borough and there are therefore sound planning reasons for the Mayor to intervene in this case, as per the powers of the Mayor’s Order 2008. The Mayor will make a final decision on this following the meeting on the 23rd.[name redacted]”

Additionally, the Spitalfields Trust asserts that the Mayor’s decision to call in the application was unlawful on several other grounds. They question his claim the Norton Folgate development would have any significant impact on the London Plan because it is relatively small and they reject his statement that the Norton Folgate development will have an impact on the adjoining boroughs of Hackney and City of London when the site is entirely within Tower Hamlets.

Eventually, someone was going to challenge the Mayor’s belligerent style and it is happening in Spitalfields because no less than the future of our neighbourhood is at stake, and we will not let it go to serve the whim of one capricious individual.

Click here to read the full text of the Judicial Review documentation

Demolition of the Fruit & Wool Exchange

Future devastation in the Norton Folgate Conservation Area if the Mayor gets his way

Readers are encouraged to attend the Norton Folgate hearing in the chamber at City Hall on Monday 18th January at 2pm. Click here for further information

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Photographer Philippe Debeerst sent me his splendid photographs which are published for the first time here today, and accompanied by my own account of a visit to Malplaquet House in Mile End Rd

Walking East from Spitalfields down the Mile End Rd, I arrived at the gateway surmounted by two stone eagles and reached through the iron gate to pull on a tenuous bell cord, before casting my eyes up at Malplaquet House.

Hovering nervously on the dusty pavement with the traffic roaring around my ears, I looked through the railings into the overgrown garden and beyond to the dark windows enclosing the secrets of this majestic four storey mansion (completed in 1742 by Thomas Andrews). Here I recognised a moment of anticipation comparable to that experienced by Pip, standing at the gate of Satis House before being admitted to meet Miss Havisham. Let me admit, for years I have paused to peek through the railings, but I never had the courage to ring the bell at Malplaquet House before.

Ushered through the gate, up the garden path and through the door, I was not disappointed to enter the hallway that I had dreamed of, discovering it thickly lined with stags’ heads, reliefs, and antiquarian fragments, including a cast of the hieroglyphic inscription from between the front paws of the sphinx. Here my bright-eyed host, Tim Knox, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, introduced me to landscape gardener Todd Longstaffe-Gowan with whom he restored the house. In 1998, when they bought Malplaquet House from the Spitalfields Trust, the edifice had not been inhabited in over a century, and there were two shops,“F.W. Woodruff & Co Ltd, Printers Engineers” and “Instant Typewriter Repairs,” extending through the current front garden to the street.

Yet this single-minded pair recklessly embraced the opportunity of living in a building site for the next five years, repairing the ancient fabric, removing modern accretions and tactfully reinstating missing elements – all for the sake of bringing one of London’s long-forgotten mansions back. Today their interventions are barely apparent, and when Tim led me into his Regency dining room, as created in the seventeen-nineties by the brewer Henry Charrington and painted an appetising arsenic green, I found it difficult to believe this had once been a typewriter repair shop. Everywhere, original paintwork and worn surfaces have been preserved, idiosyncratic details and textures which record the passage of people through the house and ensure the soul of the place lingers on. The success of the restoration is that every space feels natural and, as you walk from one room to another, each has its own identity and proportion, as if it were always like this.

By December 1999, the shops had been almost entirely removed leaving just their facades standing on the street, concealing the garden which had already been planted and the front wall of the house which was repaired, with windows and front door in place. Then, on Christmas Eve an exceptionally powerful wind blew down the Mile End Rd, and Tim woke in the night to an almighty “bang,” to discover that in a transformation worthy of pantomime, some passing yuletide spirit had thrown the shopfronts down into the street to reveal Malplaquet House restored. It was a suitably dramatic coup, because today the house more than lives up to its spectacular theatrical debut – it is some kind of curious masterpiece.

I hope Tim will forgive me if I confess that while he outlined the engaging history of the house with professional eloquence – as we sipped tea in the first floor drawing-room – my eyes wandered to the mountain goat under the table eyeing me suspiciously. Similarly, in the drawing-room, my attention strayed from the finer points of the architectural detail towards the ostrich skeleton in the corner.

As even a cursory glance at the photos will reveal, Tim & Todd are ferocious collectors, a compulsion that can be traced back to childhoods spent in Fiji and the West Indies. They have delighted in the opportunities Malplaquet House provides to display and expand their vast collection of ethnographic, historical, architectural and religious artefacts, natural history specimens and old master paintings. Consequently, as Tim kindly led me from one room to another, up and down stairs, through closets, opening cupboards in passing, directing my gaze this way and that, while continuously explaining the renovation, pointing out the features and giving historical context, I could do little but nod and exclaim in superlatives that grew increasingly feeble in the face of the overwhelming phantasmagoric detail of his collection.

Yet he confessed how fascinated he is by the everyday life of the Mile End Rd and the taxi office across the road that has remained open night and day since he first came to live here, before we walked into the walled yard at the rear, canopied by three-hundred-year-old tree ferns, and wondered at the echoing sound of a large community of sparrows that have made their home in this green oasis. It is a paradox of submitting to the spell of this remarkable house that the familiar external world is rendered exotic by comparison.

I have been in older houses and grander houses, but Malplaquet House has something beyond history and style, it has pervasive atmosphere. It has mystery. It has romance. You could get lost in there. When I came to leave, I shook hands with Tim and lingered, reluctant to move,  because Malplaquet House held me spellbound. Even after my brief visit, I did not want to leave, so Tim walked with me through the garden into the street to say farewell, in a private rehearsal for his own eventual departure from Malplaquet House one day.

(Click this image to enlarge)

Trinity Green Almshouses in Mile End only survive because some illustrious friends saved these distinguished and benign examples of social housing, which were built at the end of the seventeenth century under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren.

CR Ashbee, founder of the Guild of Handicrafts at Essex House, was so dismayed to see the destruction of a palace in Bow which once belonged to James I, he launched a campaign in 1895 to rescue Trinity Green Almshouses when demolition and redevelopment were suggested upon the implausible premise that it would be too expensive to repair the drains.

With the vocal support of William Morris, Octavia Hill, Lord Leighton, Walter Besant and many others, Ashbee succeeded in his goal and Trinity Green became the first historic building in the East End to be saved for posterity. As part of his campaign, he published a handsome monograph, surveying and recording the building in detail, from which the drawings here are reproduced. This monograph became the origin of the Survey of London which continues to this day.

Today, Trinity Green needs friends again to counter the neglect of the fabric of recent years and to challenge the development by Sainsbury’s which proposes a tower of luxury flats the height of Centrepoint overshadowing the almshouses. So please click here and sign up to become a Friend of Trinity Green and – by doing so – continue the work of CR Ashbee, William Morris, Octavia Hill, Lord Leighton, Walter Besant and all those involved at this crucial site for the Conservation Movement.

Already, as a consequence of the influence of the newly-formed Friends of Trinity Green, Historic England have written a letter of support which condemns the height of the Sainsbury’s luxury block and challenges Tower Hamlets Council with a Public Enquiry if they approve the current plan.

CR Ashbee, saviour of Trinity Green – drawing by William Strang in 1903

Trinity Green seen from the Master’s House

Retired naval gentlemen in the club room at Trinity Green

Statue of Captain Richard Naples

Elevation on Mile End Rd

A game of draughts

Model ship from the frontage on Mile End Rd

Cat at the foot of the statue of Captain Maples

The current Master & Commander at Trinity Green

Sainsbury’s proposed tower of luxury flats

Click here to learn more about the FRIENDS OF TRINITY GREEN

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Roger Mills, author of Everything Happens in Cable Street, is currently researching the life of Lilian Bowes Lyon, a forgotten and barely-documented woman from an aristocratic background who committed herself to the East End in the Second World War. Some would describe her as ‘The Queen of the Slums,’ but Roger prefers to call her ‘The Queen Mother’s Rebel Cousin.’

This house at 141 Bow Rd is not remarkable other than because it survived Hitler’s Blitz and the ravages of post-war demolition, which saw traditional housing stock replaced with imposing tower blocks and maze-like estates. What is remarkable is the story of the woman who occupied this house during East London’s darkest hour. There is no plaque on the wall to tell her story to passers-by on the busy highway. There is no book to be read or documentary to be viewed. There is – in fact – very little of her story to be found anywhere. This is surprising, given her background, her voluntary and literary work, and her close connections to the Royal family.

One autumn day while wandering along the Charing Cross Rd, I noticed a slim volume of poetry in one of the second-hand bookshops. On seeing the cover I realised that the author, Lilian Bowes Lyon, must be part of the illustrious and well-known family of that name. What intrigued me was the title, Evening in Stepney. Stepney is my part of town. Why, I wondered, had the high-born poet chosen to write about East London? What I uncovered gave me some of the answers, none of which I expected.

Lilian was a first cousin of the Queen Consort of King George VI – better remembered today as that much-loved matriarch, the Queen Mother. Lilian was a novelist, poet and, at one point in her life, the mistress of the man who would go on to become Prince Charles’ personal guru-in-chief. Yet during the Second World War, despite being born into a wealthy and aristocratic family, she chose to work and live in the desperate, bombed-out streets of East London. Here, she befriended dock-workers and dustmen. Some would describe her as ‘The Queen of the Slums’ or ‘The Florence Nightingale of the East End.’ Yet today, she is totally forgotten. Over several decades of research into the history of East London, I have not found a single reference to her in many hundreds of histories, autobiographies and studies that I have read. Apart from one brief account, she appears only as a footnote in the histories of men. Am I alone in being curious that she remains an unknown figure?

Lilian Bowes Lyon was born, the youngest of seven, just before Christmas in 1895. Her parents were the Honourable Francis Bowes Lyon and Lady Anne Lindsay. As a child, she was waited on by servants at Ridley Hall in Northumberland and free to roam through acre upon acre of the estate’s dense woodland and landscaped gardens. She was five years older than her cousin, Elizabeth. Lilian joined the future Queen in Scotland’s Glamis Castle to help nurse injured servicemen when it was used as a convalescent home during the First World War. She later studied in London and at Oxford. She travelled extensively, spoke several languages and between the wars wrote two novels, the second under an assumed name. ‘Not because it was libellous or indecent or politically tendentious,’ her friend, William Plomer, wrote, ‘but because it did not conform to [her family’s] conventions either that she should write, or that she should write fiction, or that, if she did, she should write fiction suggesting that life was not a wholly comfortable proceeding.’

The books are those of a modern freethinker, with hints of taboo sexuality, and in The Spreading Tree, outright condemnation of a class-ridden England. Plomer wrote, ‘I used to tease her and call her a Bolshevik, but I am not sure that she was a political being at all… She was a poet with an acute response to the creative stirrings, however blind and dumb, of every human being.’ Lilian was ahead of her time – William Plomer’s homosexuality was fully accepted by her in a time of anti-gay prejudice, to the extent that she helped him financially to buy presents for his lovers. Bohemians’ begat beatniks begat Beatles and hippies. She never lived to see the sixties and the flowering of freedoms that she championed. But if she had, I like to imagine her, an eccentric old dame, turning up to do readings at basement jazz clubs, ‘happenings’ and Pop Art exhibitions. She was to be cheated out of that by a premature and tragic death.

The thirties saw her reputation as a poet grow with publications such as The White Hare, and Bright Feather Fading. That decade also saw her conduct an affair with the white South African adventurer, Laurens van der Post, nine years her junior and already married. Laurens would become a household name in later years, beguiling the Prince of Wales and the television viewing public with his tales of encounters with the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and his wartime experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war.

Lilian became a member of the Women’s Voluntary Service before the outbreak of war and assisted in the evacuation of the capital’s children to the countryside. She also guided bombed-out and traumatised Stepney children to the Hampstead War Nursery, partly run by Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund. But her main association with the East End was to begin in a most unlikely place.

The Tilbury Shelter was formed from the arches, vaults and cellars of the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway goods station and an adjacent eight-story warehouse. Not being fully underground, it made a strange refuge from the bombs of the Luftwaffe. Yet every night it was bursting at the seams with East Enders desperate to escape the raids. At the start of the Blitz, the Tilbury was run by two separate bodies. On one side, vaults requisitioned by the borough council were authorised for shelter use. The connected warehouse site, however, was still being used as storage space. When bombing began it became clear that the vaults would not contain the numbers trying to get into them, and consequently the desperate crowd – aided by members of the local Communist Party – broke into the restricted area. Evidence indicates that it was occupied by up to 16,000 people every evening.

In all the shelters there was concern about the spreading of disease – scabies, impetigo, tuberculosis, diphtheria – and there were reports of lice. But anecdotal and official sources indicate that the Tilbury was the most filthy and disgusting of them all. ‘Hell Hole’ was a common description for it. There were just twelve chemical toilets in a curtained-off area, with some overflowing buckets for the children. As cold as the night might be, the temperature would rise, bringing about a foul stench from thousands of bodies who lacked any washing facilities. And at the heart of it, a mountain of rancid margarine, abandoned when the warehouse was overrun.

Lilian was a regular in the shelter, probably taking refuge when carrying out her work and, given her position in the WVS, almost certainly assuming a supportive role there. Eventually, the soiled margarine was removed and a clean-up operation begun when the situation – and the stench – could no longer be tolerated. So notorious was the Tilbury that it became a sort of subterranean cause celèbre, with artists such as Henry Moore and Edward Ardizzone joining the crowds. Also documenting the scene was the self-taught Rose L. Henriques, wife of Basil Henriques, founder of the local Oxford & St George’s Jewish Boys’ Club. Although she is known for philanthropic work, Rose’s paintings are less well remembered.

During 1942, Lilian Bowes Lyon came to live in Bow and composed her epic poem, Evening in Stepney. A brief entry about Lilian’s time here appears in The Queen Mother’s Family Story, written by James Wentworth Day and published in the sixties. It contains an interview with Lilian’s wartime housekeeper, Ellen Beckwith. Ellen recalls a royal visit – ‘The Queen Mother came one day. No fuss. She had a cup of tea with Lilian in the flat, and Lilian told her just what we needed down here,’ Other anecdotes feature the Duke of Kent dropping by and Lilian summoning Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, to Bow Rd to ‘give him a good talking-to and just show him what Bow needs.’ Lilian supposedly obtained a direct line to the Queen’s rooms at Buckingham Palace to berate one of the ladies-in-waiting for lack of free food and hot drinks during the VE Day celebrations. Ellen also recounts an incident of how during a bomb blast, Lilian was kicked in the leg by a hysterical woman. The inference is that the injury exacerbated a long-term diabetic condition. Lilian was resident in Bow until at least February 1945, but when her physical condition deteriorated she found herself swept back into the world of privilege she had attempted to escape.

I tracked the locations of Lilian’s life – the site of Tilbury Shelter, 141 Bow Rd, the series of West London houses where she spent her last days recovering from a series of grisly operations and her final dwelling in luxurious Brompton Sq. In constant pain, with both legs amputated, Lilian passed away there in the summer of 1949, yet continued to write her poetry until the end.

Later, I made a pilgrimage to the place of her birth in Northumberland and her final resting place. I was granted access by Durham University Library to her handwritten letters to William Plomer. Perhaps the most significant discovery I made was an article – she refers to it as a ‘letter’ – that William urged her to write about her time in, as she calls it, ‘dock-back-street-canal-and-sewer-land.’ The piece remains unpublished since it appeared in 1945. In it, she writes passionately about the lie of the ingrained class system in the ‘Two Nations’ of England and how social change could come swiftly, ‘if the whole lot of us faced the lie as we have faced the War.’

Her focus was the hardship faced by ordinary working class people, especially women and children. ‘The synthesis Marx had in mind, the social re-organisation on a higher level … depends on children,’ she wrote. ‘In one district here, where the Great North Sewer comes out, a district of gluey canals, of grinding machinery, of smells that are sour or sweetish according to which factory’s boilers were last cleaned, there is a children’s play-centre, where I often go, because it helps me believe that even the grimiest cocoon can’t kill the spirit of man. Except for this little centre … the children have nowhere to play, except the street. No room at home, often two large families divide the home between them, rents being high and the shortage of accommodation acute.’

The ‘letter’ tantalisingly refers to a diary kept by Lilian. It would be a fascinating read, possibly containing more of her views on politics, her local contacts and of another affair that she conducted with a married Jewish doctor while in East London. What happened to the diary on her death? Enquiries made to the highest family in the British social scale have brought about the reply that no archive relating to Lilian Bowes Lyon exists. The Royal circle tend to keep their secrets. I wonder if because of her left-leaning views, her romances, her circle of outsiders and her questioning of the accepted social order, Lilian is one of those secrets?

Lilian Bowes Lyon remembered outside the house where she lived 1942-45

Roger Mills at 141 Bow Rd

An extract from

EVENING IN STEPNEY

by Lilian Bowes Lyon

The circle of greensward evening-lit,
And each house taciturn to its neighbour.
The destruction of a city is not caused by fire;
What many have lost begets a ghostlier heritage
Or hails the unknown horizon; workaday street
A travel-ordained encounter, the breakable family
Fortified in defeat by the soldering air.
The destruction is in the rejection of a common weal;
Agony’s open abyss or the fate of an orphanage,
Mass-festering, mass-freezing or mass-burial,
Crime’s worm is in ourselves
Who crumble and are the destroyer.

Time to repair the infirmary soon, for tissue torn;
To plan the adroit, repetitive memorial.

The Tilbury Shelter, bombed second time, by Rose Henriques, 1941

The Tilbury Shelter in Stepney by Edward Ardizzone, 1941

The Tilbury Shelter in Stepney by Henry Moore, 1941

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Plans for the future of the former London Chest Hospital next to Victoria Park are revealed at an exhibition which opens 3-8pm today and 10-2pm on Saturday at the Methodist Church in Approach Rd, Bethnal Green. Circle Housing bought the site from the National Health Service for forty-seven million pounds and we wait to see what their scheme will offer to the 22,000 families on the housing list in the borough – and whether the ancient Mulberry which bears the distinction of being the oldest tree in the East End will survive the redevelopment.

Thanks to an invitation from a reader last year, I had the opportunity of making the acquaintance of the oldest tree in the East End, a dignified tottering specimen known as the Bethnal Green Mulberry. Imported from Persia by James I in the sixteenth century, it is more than five hundred years old and once served to feed the silkworms cultivated by local weavers.

The Mulberry originally grew in the grounds of Bishop Bonner’s Palace that stood on this site and an inkwell in the museum of the Royal London Hospital, carved from a bough in 1915, has a brass plate engraved with the sardonic yarn that the Bishop sat beneath it to enjoy shelter in the cool of the evening while deciding which heretics to execute.

My visit was a poignant occasion since the Mulberry stands today in the grounds of the London Chest Hospital which opened in 1855 and closed forever last April prior to being put up for sale by the National Health Service in advance of redevelopment. My only previous visit to the Hospital was as a patient struggling with pneumonia, when I was grateful to come here for treatment and feel reassured by its gracious architecture surrounded by trees. Of palatial design, the London Chest Hospital is a magnificent Victorian philanthropic institution where the successful campaign to rid the East End of tuberculosis in the last century was masterminded.

It was a sombre spectacle to see workmen carrying out desks and stripping the Hospital of its furniture, and when a security guard informed me that building had been sold for millions and would be demolished since “it’s not listed,” I was shocked at the potential loss of this beloved structure and the threat to the historic tree too. So now we await the developers’ plans for this much-loved East End institution and, since the Mulberry is subject to a Tree Preservation Order, we hope this will be sufficient to save it.

Gainly supported by struts that have become absorbed into the fibre of the tree over the years, it was heartening to see this ancient organism renewing itself again after five centuries. The Bethnal Green Mulberry has seen palaces and hospitals come and go, but it continues to bear fruit every summer regardless.

The Mulberry narrowly escaped destruction in World War II and charring from a bomb is still visible

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Click on Adam Dant’s map to enlarge

After Henry VIII destroyed the Priory of St Mary Spital, the Spanish Mystic, Dona Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza who resided in Spital Sq, placed a curse upon anyone who might seek to despoil Norton Folgate in future and this week the ancient curse is making itself felt.

Ever since Boris Johnson waved through British Land’s proposal to obliterate Norton Folgate under a hideous corporate plaza last week, there has been a cloud of gloom hanging over Spitalfields, as downcast residents trudge the streets with their eyes to the pavement and hands deep in pockets.

No-one was surprised when the Mayor overturned the Council’s unanimous decision in favour of the developer, since he has done it a dozen times before, yet everyone was sickened by his vanity and the British Land executives high-fiving each other in the chamber once they got their desired result.

But yesterday there was a sudden break in the cloud, as the joyous news circulated that The Spitalfields Trust has been granted a Judicial Review to challenge Boris Johnson on of each of the four grounds upon which they believe the Mayor erred in law by intervening in the Norton Folgate case in favour of British Land’s plans to destroy more than 70% of the fabric of their site in a Conservation Area.

As our shameless Mayor approaches the end of his tenure, we await the full hearing at the High Court in the Spring – but in the meantime you can read the full text of the Judicial Review documentation by clicking here.

Boris Johnson & British Land, Beware the Curse of Norton Folgate!

Adam Dant is producing a limited edition of thirty copies of his Map of Norton Folgate at £500 each – sized 30” x 22” and all hand-tinted by the artist. Contact AdamDant@gmail.com for purchase enquiries.

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My CRIES OF LONDON exhibition designed by Adam Tuck at Bishopsgate Institute closed yesterday, so I am publishing some of the panels from the show today for those who were unable to visit. Meanwhile, there are just a few tickets left for my illustrated lecture at Wanstead Tap on Tuesday 9th February – click here to book your ticket.

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

As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture which threatens to turn the city into the backlot of an abandoned movie studio. If walls could speak, these would tell tales of bad compromises and angry developers who, dissatisfied with the meagre notion of repair and reuse, are driven solely by remorseless greed.

Meanwhile, bullied into sacrificing historic buildings of merit, cowed planning authorities take consolation in the small mercy of retaining a facade. The result is that architects are humiliated into creating passive-aggressive structures, like the examples you see below – gross hybrids of conflicted intentions that scream ‘Look what you made me do!’ in bitter petulant resentment.

‘A kind of authenticity’ is British Land’s oxymoronical attempt to sell this approach in their Norton Folgate publicity, as if there were fifty-seven varieties of authenticity, when ‘authentic’ is not a relative term – something is either authentic or it is phoney.

An affront in Spitalfields

Shameless in Artillery Lane

Not even pretending in Gun St either

A sham marriage in Chiswell St

Lonely and full of dread in Smithfield

Can you spot the join in Fitzrovia?

Looming intimations of ugliness in Oxford St

A fracture in Hanway St

A hollow excuse in Central London

The veneer of luxury in the West End

A prize-winning abomination on the Caledonian Rd

Barely keeping up appearances at UCL Student Housing

A facelift that went wrong in Goulston St

‘A kind of authenticity’ – the shape of things to come in Norton Folgate according to British Land

Please suggest more examples so I may extend my galley of ghastly facadism

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Last year, Islington Council rejected an application for an eleven storey development in City Rd that would overshadow Bunhill Fields, the seventeenth century Dissenters’ burial ground that is the last resting place of William Blake, Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan and 120,000 other Londoners. The burial ground is a Grade I Registered Park & Garden of Special Historic Interest, and has seventy-five listed tombs within its boundary.

Subsequently, the Mayor of London called in the application to determine it himself at a hearing which takes place at City Hall this Monday 8th February. Disappointingly, Boris Johnson has decided all cases in favour of the developer over the past eight years, which makes next week’s outcome look predetermined. Read more about this case here

Novelist Sarah Winman & Photographer Patricia Niven visited Bunhill Fields to create this feature

As I walk through the familiar black metal gates, the moss on the headstones looks vivid green in the dull, wet gloom of February light. The sodden earth, fragrant and rich, is punctuated by thick clusters of daffodil stems – that precious moment when spring meets at the boundary of winter, the moment when we sigh, knowing the worst has passed, the short days have passed, and we, like nature, head towards the light.

I have always come to Bunhill Fields, since my early days of living in the City of London. But about three years ago I made a pact to come here every day for a year – my antidote to my father’s rampaging illness and those days spent on hospital wards – my need to understand the cyclical nature of life. And walking through these black iron gates, the markers of lives and stories past on either side, I breathe in the constancy and honesty of nature.

Over that year, I watched this small space adapt and change with the seasons. I went sometimes simply to listen out for the delicate drilling of a woodpecker. I watched the fig tree, once energised by encroaching spring and gloriously laden in the sweetness of summer, wilt heavily as autumn whispered across its branches, as its leaves drooped like shoulders, before falling to a frosty floor. I noted the multiple textures of light – the late evening buttery light of a summer day, the metallic light of a frost-covered morning, when my misted breath led me over to the graves of Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan, and to the uniquely cherished grave of William Blake, where trinkets and offerings and earrings and flowers lay beside, in front of, and on top – all in tribute and memory to a poet, artist and visionary, a man who continues to touch lives, and never more so than in this great City of ours.

“To see the world in a grain of sand/And heaven in a wild flower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour – This is what sums up Blake for me,” says Tom the Gardener, as he joins me on a bench for a quiet chat.

Tom has worked in Bunhill Fields for the last ten years, and he talks about the environment with passion, pride and wit – qualities all the best Irish storytellers share.

“You know this is supposed to be the most haunted graveyard in London. I haven’t seen anything yet, but I know people who have. Lots of women with big hats suddenly emerging,” he says, wryly smiling. “I love this place. I love the peace and tranquillity and because I am surrounded by history. I know it’s a graveyard but it’s all about people and their stories. All these histories add to what little knowledge we have.

The graves here are very simple, as you can see. Nonconformists are buried here so the stones are not really elaborate. These men and women were free thinkers, radical thinkers, seeking liberty away from church and government. Look over there,” says Tom, “the grave of Thomas Bayes. Statisticians from all over the world come to the grave to honour the man’s theories of probability.

Bunhill – Bonehill – This place is also known as God’s Acre because of the amount of preachers buried here. Lots of Americans make a pilgrimage here – Wesleyans, Baptists, Methodists. They all try and convert me!”

We wander through the stones. We pass thick layers of moss blanketing tombs like table cloths, and fox dens dug deep by the sides, their entrances curtained by hanging roots and an occasional spider’s web.

“I find lots of clay pipes in the dirt the foxes excavate, oysters too: the poor man’s food. I haven’t found anything Anglo Saxon yet. One day,” he says, with a glint in his eye.

“One of my favourite graves is over here – the grave of Thomas Miller – it has carved cherubs and skulls, and the face of the cherub really stands out” And as we approach, I can see that it does – the face peers through the dingy gloom like the serene face of a child, and I wonder if a moment like this has enhanced imagination and brought the realm of improbable into the realm of the real.

“The skulls too have an eerie feel,” continues Tom. “Skulls in the early eighteenth century were the symbol of mortality. This is another favourite,” he says, and leads me over to a grey slate stone – that of the departed Wheatlys from Ave Maria Lane –  a carved tale featuring a globe, a cross, an anchor, and the words ashes to ashes, dust to dust. “People lived with death all the time then, early death, children’s deaths, they walked hand in hand with it. There was an acceptance of it. Not like today. We’re so scared of it,” he says, and his voice trails off into the fading light.

And we sit silently once again, as the City stills. There is no hush of breeze to stir the bare branches of the old plane trees, so self-consciously naked. And I look over the lawn as tufts of newly-seeded grass take hold, and the crocuses erupt in shuddering yellows and mauves: new life amidst this gentle setting of earthly departure, and I feel all is well. And all is just so.

A squirrel poses by a puddle before taking a drink. The sound of a faint siren draws us back to the present. Tom leans over towards me.

“Apparently Churchill came here during the war. A bomb had dropped just over there and the trees were on fire and he was fighting the flames with his hat…”

The stories continue.

Tom the Gardener.

Upon the wall in Tom’s hut.

The fox den under a tomb.

Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven

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Marcia believes that Clapton Beauty Parlour, opened by her parents in 1930, is London’s oldest family-run salon and I have no reason to doubt her. For me, it was the perfect excuse to take another trip to the hairdresser and the ideal opportunity to learn more of Hackney’s hidden hairdressing heritage. And Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie came along to capture Clapton’s celebrated coiffeuses.

“Both my grandparents’ families lived in Chatsworth Rd, my mother’s family lived in 104 and my father’s family lived at 83. He had his eye on my mother for a year until he got his opportunity to speak to her when the Prince of Wales visited Hackney. The route took him along Chatsworth Rd, so my father positioned himself behind my mother in the crowd and tapped her on the shoulder and asked to take her to the cinema. My aunt went as a chaperone, that’s what good class people did that in those days. My mother was maybe sixteen or seventeen and they started a courtship, and got married when mother was twenty-one in 1930. She was five months older than my father so, when they took the lease on this salon, it had to be in her name. She was already twenty-one but he was still twenty and they opened at Easter to catch the business.

My father’s family were all barbers. They lived above the shop at 83 Chatsworth Rd and the younger four brothers were all taught barbering by the eldest. Originally, the family came over from Russia where they were lumberjacks – none of them were barbers, it started here with the eldest brother. My father began when he left school at twelve and had to go out to work, he was a natural hairdresser. I recall him saying that hairdressing is a young man’s trade, because physically you cannot stand all day after the age of forty or fifty and because it’s the youngsters who dictate fashion.

When they opened this salon, it was ladies’ hairdressing. It was men’s barbering in Chatsworth Rd but when they opened this shop it was ladies only. He switched because he was a very futuristic man and he saw the future was in ladies’ hairdressing. After my parents opened up the salon, they were very often short of money and they would go to my grandmother in Chatsworth Rd who gave them money to keep them going.  She would pawn her rings and reclaim them later. They used to worked until midnight. My mother made sandwiches for the girls who were working all day until 10:00 or 11:00pm. I remember them telling me that customers queued up outside from 6.30 or  7:00am to have their hair done before work.

My father was the hairdresser and my mother was very good at beauty and make up. Father took in fancy goods like gloves, handbags and they sold a lot of jewellery. He bought it and she sold it. Father sent her to Revlon and Max Factor to learn to do make up, so she knew all about that, and we sold all Max Factor and Revlon products here and also Leichner theatrical make up.

They lived above the salon at first and used Hackney Baths to wash. In 1936, when they had enough money, they bought a house in Upper Clapton. Father was a very advanced man. He learnt to drive and they were the first amongst their friends to have a fridge and a freezer and a mangle for wringing the washing. I loved using the mangle!

In the thirties, Vidal Sassoon was working in Whitechapel where he did his apprenticeship and then had his salon. He was only seventeen but in those days, you left school earlier – you were a man at fifteen or sixteen. His life was disrupted by the war when his salon was bombed out. The Sassoon family knew my parents and he came to see my father and asked, ‘I’ve got a few customers and I don’t want to lose them, can I work in your salon?’ My father replied, ‘Yes you can, here are the keys.’ Our salon was closed during the war because my father was in the fire service and he was injured and, after he recovered, he was stationed in Victoria Park on the anti-aircaft guns in the Home Guard. So he said to Vidal, ‘Here are the keys. Keep the salon clean. Use any products. Make sure you lock up.’

I first came here in 1974. I was never going into hairdressing. I went to Woodberry Down school in the year it opened and, when we had a careers evening, the headmistress said to my father ‘Well now Mr Manning, we’ve got to discuss Marcia’s future.’ She saw me as a model pupil. Although I had failed the scholarship exam, it was my luck that Woodberry Down opened that year so I became a model pupil and got six O levels and three A levels. Yet my father told her that I would be going into the family business. Well, that was all I needed to hear and I gritted my teeth against it. I went on to become a linguist and I studied at Holborn College of Languages but – low and behold – here I am today.

I’ve never done hairdressing but I’ve been running the place. The fact that I never learnt hairdressing has held me back, so I took myself off to Weller to do some short courses, even though you can’t just ‘do hairdressing,’ it’s a four-to-five year apprenticeship. I did colouring and that gave me a certain respect here among the staff. Before that, it was like running a plumbing business without being a plumber yourself, you can’t do it. Here, I’ve been a secretary with languages trying to keep these girls in order. My brother gave me a pat on the back and said, ‘Mum and dad would be really proud of you.’ I’ve managed to bring the salon into its eighty-fifth year.

About thirty years ago, there was a big thing about sunbeds, so I decided to go the Hair & Beauty Show at Olympia where they were displaying them. I had some empty rooms upstairs and I got a loan from the bank, and – my goodness it took off – I repaid the loan very quickly. You had to wait for an appointment, it was that busy, and I think this is also what my father found when he started, it took off.

We have one customer who is a hundred years old, Mrs Goodman. She is so alert, she comes on Wednesdays and we have lovely chats about the early days. She remembers my father and he has been dead for forty-two years. She must have been coming here for between fifty to sixty years. I have many customers who remember my father doing their hair for their weddings.

From the age of three or four, I was put on the counter and told that I had an important job, to watch. As far as I can remember, I’ve always been here. I love being here because this is where Mother and Father are, I feel the closeness. I just feel a bond with this place – this is my home.”

Once Marcia had told her story and given me a tour of the premises, from the former basement kitchen to the water tank in the roof, it was time for a word with Dawn Hammond, Marcia’s protégé and proud successor.

“It was my Saturday day job and I am the owner now. I took over seven years ago but Marcia still comes in two days a week and helps out. I lived just across the road when I was fifteen or sixteen and I saw there was a Saturday girl wanted. My mum used to do our neighbours’ hair and her own hair at home, she wanted to be a hairdresser but became a machinist. It was convenient for me, I didn’t have to fork out for bus fares and then Marcia took me on as an apprentice. I wanted to be an architect, but I haven’t got the brains for that. In architecture, you have to draw lines but in hair you have to draw angles, 180 and 360 degrees. If you hold the hair up, you just get a short back and side but, if you do an inverted bob. It’s all to do with angles.

Customers are different today. They see these models in the papers with black hair one week and blonde the next, they might be wigs. They say, ‘I want my hair like this’ – they have got black hair and they want it blonde, it ain’t gonna happen! When customers come in we turn into psychologists and, once we get to know them, they tell us their problems. I’ve got a customer who used to live near Victoria Park and now she has moved to Hove, but she still comes back to get her hair done. I ask her about her children and she asks about mine. With customers that we have been doing for years, we have a strong bond.”

Dawn Hammond

Marcia enjoys a blow dry

The shrine to Clapton Beauty Parlour’s history

Marcia in the seventies

Marcia stands on the left and her mother sits in the centre at the salon in the eighties

Customers and coiffeuses in Clapton

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

Transcript by Simon Scott

Book your appointment at CLAPTON BEAUTY PARLOUR, 21 Lower Clapton Rd, Hackney, E5 0NS

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Today, a new chapter opens in the story of our campaign to Save Norton Folgate with the publication of this letter in the The Times. Already a Judicial Review is scheduled in April to scrutinise the mishandling of British Land’s application by Boris Johnson and the Greater London Authority, now this letter asks Greg Clark, Secretary of State, to stage a Public Inquiry that can determine the best outcome for Norton Folgate.

To the Editor of The Times

We urge the Secretary of State, Greg Clark, to call in for his own determination – and hold a planning inquiry into – the British Land planning applications that are threatening the future of Norton Folgate in historic Spitalfields. This precious Conservation Area on the fringes of the City of London is under threat from plans by developer British Land to demolish a swathe of buildings for a banal office-led scheme. The plans were rejected by the democratically elected local Council, but this decision has been shamefully overruled by the Mayor of London, one of a string of permissions he has handed to developers against the will of local people and the mandate of local democracy.

Only a thorough public inquiry can determine the best outcome for this sensitive historic area. The Spitalfields Trust has commissioned its own scheme for the site from Burrell, Foley, Fischer Architects. This repairs and reuses the historic fabric, provides sensitive in-fill in keeping with the scale and character of the area as well as serving the interests of local businesses, particularly SMEs and micro enterprises, and the need for housing in the Borough.  It has been independently costed, is viable, and could be delivered immediately and speedily, for a fraction of the development cost.

Signed

David Bailey CBE, Photographer

Alan Bennett, Writer

Clem Cecil, Director of SAVE Britain’s Heritage

Julie Christie, Actress

Dan Cruickshank, Architectural Historian

Ralph Fiennes, Actor

Mark Girouard, Architectural Historian

Tim Knox, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, Garden Designer

Miriam Margolyes OBE, Actress

Suggs McPherson, Madness

John Nicolson MP, SNP spokesman on Culture, Media & Sport

Dame Sian Phillips, Actress

Jonathan Pryce, Actor

Charles Saumarez Smith, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy

Rohan Silva, Second Home

Rupert Thomas, Editor of World of Interiors

Jeanette Winterson, Writer

Please add your name to the illustrious list of those calling for a Public Inquiry by writing direct to the Secretary of State. The Spitalfields Trust suggest you include the following points in your letter which you can email to greg.clark.mp@parliament.uk or post to House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA

• This is not just a very important case for London, it is also of national importance and has serious implications for Conservation Areas across the country.
• This fragile Conservation Area is protected by local Conservation Guidelines, which this application disregards.
• The vitality of the City does not depend upon demolishing some warehouses in Spitalfields.
• The democratic decision at a local level has been over-ruled by the centralised intervention of the Mayor of London.
• The Spitalfields Trust’s Conservation Scheme for Norton Folgate is independently costed and is viable.  It could be delivered more quickly and far more cheaply than that proposed by British Land. It is based upon the repair of the existing historic buildings, with sensitive infill of empty sites in keeping with the Conservation Area.
• The Spitalfields Trust’s scheme would provide more affordable business accommodation, particularly for small businesses and provide more housing, both low cost and private, for the local borough.
• This case has given rise to substantial local and national controversy, and has been widely covered in the media.
• The whole-scale demolition of heritage assets in the Conservation Area conflicts fundamentally with national policies as set out in the National Planning Policy Framework in section 12 in relation to conserving and enhancing the historic environment.

Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate

Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT

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Save Norton Folgate

Did you ever wonder why there is a ship’s chandler at the top of Neal St where it meets Shaftesbury Avenue in Covent Garden. It is a question that Alasdair Flint proprietor of Arthur Beale gets asked all the time. ‘We were here first, before the West End,’ he explains with discreet pride,‘and the West End wrapped itself around us.’

At a closer look, you will discover the phrase ‘Established over 400 years’ on the exterior in navy blue signwriting upon an elegant aquamarine ground, as confirmed by a listing in Grace’s Guide c. 1500. Naturally, there have been a few changes of proprietor over the years, from John Buckingham who left the engraved copper plate for his trade card behind in 1791, to his successors Beale & Clove (late Buckingham) taken over by Arthur Beale in 1903, and in turn purchased by Alasdair Flint of Flints Theatrical Chandlers in 2014.

‘Everyone advised me against it,’ Alasdair confessed with the helpless look of one infatuated, ‘The accountant said, ‘Don’t do it’ – but I just couldn’t bear to see it go…’

Then he pulled out an old accounts book and laid it on the table in his second floor office above the shop and showed me the signature of Ernest Shackleton upon an order for Alpine Club Rope, as used by Polar explorers and those heroic early mountaineers attempting the ascent of Everest. In that instant, I too was persuaded. Learning that Arthur Beale once installed the flag pole on Buckingham Palace and started the London Boat Show was just the icing on the cake. Prudently, Alasdair’s first act upon acquiring the business was to acquire a stock of good quality three-and-a-half metre ash barge poles to fend off any property developers who might have their eye on his premises.

For centuries – as the street name changed from St Giles to Broad St to Shaftesbury Avenue – the business was flax dressing, supplying sacks and mattresses, and twine and ropes for every use – including to the theatres that line Shaftesbury Avenue today. It was only in the sixties that the fashion for yachting offered Arthur Beale the opportunity to specialise in nautical hardware.

The patina of ages still prevails here, from the ancient hidden yard at the rear to the stone-flagged basement below, from the staircase encased in nineteenth century lino above, to the boxes of War Emergency brass screws secreted in the attic. Alasdair Flint cherishes it all and so do his customers. ‘We haven’t got to the bottom of the history yet,’ he admitted to me with visible delight.

Arthur Beale’s predecessor John Buckingham’s trade card from 1791

Nineteenth century headed paper (click to enlarge)

Alasdair Flint’s office

Account book with Shackleton’s signature on his order for four sixty-foot lengths of Alpine Club Rope

Drawers full of printing blocks from Arthur Beale and John Buckingham’s use over past centuries

Arthur Beale barometer and display case of Buckingham rope samples

Nineteenth century lino on the stairs

War emergency brass screws still in stock

More Breton shirts and Wellingtons than you ever saw

Rope store in the basement

Work bench with machines for twisting wire rope

Behind the counter

Jason Nolan, Shop Manager

James Dennis, Sales Assistant

Jason & James run the shop

Receipts on the spike

Arthur Beale, 194 Shaftesbury Avenue, WC2 8JP

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