In the fifth of my series of profiles of artists featured in EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October, I present the paintings of Rose Henriques. Click here to learn how you can support the publication of EAST END VERNACULAR

Portrait of Rose Henriques (1889- 1972) © Ian Berry

Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Stoke Newington, Rose devoted herself to life of altruistic endeavour, serving as a nurse at Liverpool St Station in the First World War and then as an ambulance driver based in Cannon St Rd in the Second World War.

In 1917, she married Basil Henriques and together they established and ran the settlement in Berners St (later known as Henriques St) pursuing philanthropic work among the  Jewish community in the East End for more than half a century.

Yet somehow Rose also managed to produce a stream of paintings that document the times she lived in intimate human detail, exhibiting her work at the Whitechapel Gallery from 1934 onwards and holding two solo shows there,’Stepney in War & Peace’ in 1947 and ‘Vanishing Stepney’ in 1961.

Coronation Celebrations in Challis Court, 1937

Nine O’Clock News, The Outbreak of War

The New Driver, Ambulance Station, Cannon St Rd

Next Day, Watney St Market, 1941

Bombed Second Time, The Foothills, Tilbury & Southend Railway Warehouses, 1941

Dual Purpose, School Yard in Fairclough St, Tilbury & Southend Railway Warehouses, forties

Line outside Civil Defence Shelter, Turner St, 1942

Stepney Green Synagogue, forties

The Brick Dump, Exmouth St, forties

Club Row Animal Market Carries On, 1943

Fait Accompli, Berner St, 1951

Workrooms for the Elderly, 1954

Archive images courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives

In the seventh of my series of profiles of artists featured in EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October, I present David Buckman‘s profile of Elwin Hawthorne. Click here to learn how you can support the publication of EAST END VERNACULAR

Elwin Hawthorne with his painting of the Bryant & May Factory, 1929

In November 2008, when Sotheby’s auctioned pictures assembled by Sir David and Lady Scott, there was keen bidding for oils by Elwin Hawthorne. Sir David acquired a taste for the artist’s work in the early nineteen thirties when Hawthorne was a star exhibitor at Alex Reid & Lefevre’s galleries of work by the emerging East London Group.

Yet by the time of that Sotheby’s sale, Hawthorne was a forgotten name to all but a tiny group of enthusiasts who, like Scott, had been seduced by his melancholy, rather surreal views of London suburbs. The artist died in 1954, unremarked apart from family and friends, when he ought to have been in his prime as a creative artist. Instead, disheartened by the lack of opportunities to exhibit, he had lost heart in his work.

While researching my book From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group, I was lucky to meet Elwin Hawthorne’s widow, Lilian, then living in Vicarage Lane, East Ham. She had also exhibited with the Group, and provided invaluable memories of the triumphs and disappointments of her late husband’s career. Finally, when Lilian died in 1996, so unregarded was Elwin’s output that rescue work had to be carried out to save several pictures – two of these are among his paintings in my book.

Elwin and Lilian moved into a newly-built block of flats in September 1953, only thirteen months before he died.  Since the coal bunker had no shelf, Elwin used  one of his fine oil paintings on board “Trinity Almshouses, Mile End Rd,” shown at Lefevre in 1935.  After Elwin died, Lilian rescued it, filling in two screw holes with wood filler and painting over the damage.  A canvas entitled “Ilfracombe” was also discovered in the coal bunker, rolled up and flattened like an old rag under a pile of rubbish – this has recently been professionally de-creased and mounted on a panel.

By the time of his death, Hawthorne had become a versatile artist, competent in oils, watercolour and printmaking, though his career as a painter in oils, his main achievement, was concentrated in just fifteen years, 1925-40.

Born in the Bromley sub-district of Poplar in 1905, to a father who was house painter and decorator, his background was not auspicious for what he wanted to do. Elwin, his parents, five brothers and a sister and a basket-maker uncle, Henry Silk ( another member of the East London Group), lived hugger-mugger in a small, crowded two-storey building.

When Elwin left elementary school at fourteen with no qualifications, he became an errand boy. While unemployed he developed an interest in painting which led to classes at the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute and then the Bow & Bromley Evening Institute where the teacher was the inspirational John Cooper who was trained at the Slade School of Art.

Although he originally showed under his correctly spelled surname of “Hawthorn,” when his work was chosen for the 1928 Whitechapel Art Gallery East London Art Club exhibition, the forerunner of the East London Group Lefevre series at in the West End in the nineteen thirties, he was catalogued as “Hawthorne” and urged to retain that spelling.

He became a prolific exhibitor at Lefevre Galleries’ annual exhibitions and elsewhere, and attracted widespread press attention.  When the first East London Group show was held late in 1929, R R Tatlock, writing in the Daily Telegraph, devoted three paragraphs of a large review to Hawthorne, praising the subdued palette that would become an abiding characteristic of his work.  At the second Lefevre exhibition in 1930, The Times judged Hawthorne, “the most original artist of the group, producing pictures of East London which are the English equivalents – though more matter of fact – of what Utrillo is doing for Paris.” In fact, Hawthorne was compared to Utrillo several times .

In 1930, Lefevre signed a contract with Hawthorne to pay him a modest salary of eight pounds monthly in return for a first-refusal option on his work, with financial adjustments to be made as pictures sold. At this time. Elwin was about two years into a three-year period as assistant to Walter Sickert, who had lectured to Cooper’s Bow classes and exhibited with the East London Group for a short period. Sickert had taken an interest in Hawthorne, who supported the veteran artist on several important works.

Hawthorne was a full-time artist of great professionalism and some of his meticulous work sheets survive, including details such as each painting’s title and size, descriptions of the subjects, prices and whether sold or returned, or – in a few cases – destroyed when they did not fulfil his high standards. In the case of one work, there is the inscription, “Returned to me, now in the possession of Steggles, by exchange.” His fellow in the East London Group, Walter Steggles, thought highly of Elwin, commenting to me, “It is my opinion that Elwin was the best painter of London in the Twentieth Century. I am not alone in this view as a number of important collectors have expressed similar opinions to me.”

Notable collectors of Elwin’s work were abundant. In 1938, as well as Sir David Scott and his Foreign Office colleague Montague Shearman, Hawthorne was able to list among his buyers the “Contemporary Art Society, Earl of Sandwich, Viscount D’Abernon, Earl of Radnor, Earl of Rutland, Sir Edward Marsh, Gerald Kelly RA, J B Priestley, Charles Laughton, James Agate and numerous others.” Today, eight public collections in Britain hold Hawthorne paintings.

After signed the contract with Hawthorne which would continue for most of the nineteen thirties, Lefevre realised they had a star whose pictures were not restricted to the annual East London Group exhibitions. He was included in mixed shows both in Britain and overseas, and was given two Lefevre solo exhibitions.

His first was in 1934, coinciding with one by Vanessa Bell of the Bloomsbury Group, with her work accompanied by a foreword by Virginia Woolf in the catalogue. Hawthorne’s was well received, The Times critic commenting on his “discovery of artistic meaning in the commonplace.” Meanwhile, the Sunday Referee’s writer, who contended that “Mrs. Woolf’s mystical flutings on the theme of her sister’s paintings simply bewilder” yet found Bell’s work, “essentially commonplace.” The critic judged Hawthorne “an outstanding, possibly great artist in the making” and praised his display as “easily the best one-man show in town.”

In 1938, a second solo exhibition followed, but this time in tandem with one by Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse Lessore. Leading critics covered it, including T W Earp, Jan Gordon and Eric Newton. Again, Hawthorne’s work was generally favoured, with the critic of The Scotsman – who had liked his first solo show – seeing in his small pictures, “an impression of complete sincerity that is rare and inspiring.”

By this time, Hawthorne’s figure painting was developing yet even in one of his early works from 1929 – the picture of the Bryant & May Match Factory which proved a favoured subject for East London Group artists – the handling of the figures is assured.  For his fellow East London Group member Cecil Osborne, the absence of figures in Hawthorne’s work, gave them “a ‘Sunday Morning look” with the sparsely populated streets contributing to their surreal quality.  John Cooper was keen that his students visited exhibitions and it is possible that Hawthorne may have viewed the controversial 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, although a surreal atmosphere had already permeated Hawthorne’s work years earlier.

Hawthorne had other preoccupations in 1936.  Along with Walter Steggles, he had a painting chosen for the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with a contribution entitled “Una Via Di Londra.” It was a great accomplishment for a former errand boy to have his work shown alongside professional artists such as Sir Alfred Gilbert, Duncan Grant, Dame Barbara Hepworth and Philip Wilson Steer. Also in 1936, The Artist included a lengthy, illustrated profile of him as the twelfth in its “Artists of Note” series, beginning by extending “our special gratitude” to John Cooper, since “it is the East London Group that has given us Elwin Hawthorne”.

Although the final East London Group exhibition at Lefevre was in 1936, the gallery continued to promote individual artists’ works until World War II brought disarray to the art market.  The hostilities effectively ended Hawthorne’s exhibiting career. After Army service, for which he was temperamentally unsuited, he returned to Lefevre, but they had nothing for him and suggested he take a job.  He handled wages for radio and electronics firm Plessey, teaching art in schools part-time. Then, in 1954, he was taken ill on a bus to Woodberry Down School and died soon after in hospital. Elwin Hawthorne was only forty-nine, and he left a widow and two children – and he created a body of atmospheric paintings that survive to be acknowledged and appreciated now for their distinctive vision.

Cumberland Market, 1931 (Private collection)

Grove Park Rd W4, 1935 (Private collection)

Whipps Cross, 1933 (Gabriel Summers)

The Mitford Castle, 1931 (Private collection)

Bow Rd, 1931

Victoria Memorial Buckingham Palace, 1938 (Private collection)

Demolition of Bow Brewery, 1931 (Private collection)

The Guardian Angels, 1931 (Louise Kosman, Edinburgh

Trinity Almshouses, Mile End Rd, 1935 (Private collection) - rescued from use as a shelf in a coal bunker.

Ilfracombe, c.1931 (Private collection) – discovered rolled up in the coal bunker.

Walter and Harold Steggles, Lilian and Elwin Hawthorne (right), c.1937 (Walter Steggles Bequest)

In the eighth of my series of profiles of artists featured in EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October, I present the work of Anthony Eyton. Click here to learn how you can support the publication of EAST END VERNACULAR

I took the 133 bus from Liverpool St Station, travelling down south of the river to visit the ninety-six year old painter Anthony Eyton at the elegant terrace in the Brixton Rd where has lived since 1960 – apart from a creative sojourn in Spitalfields, where he kept a studio from 1968 until 1982. It was the 133 bus that stops outside his house which brought Anthony to Spitalfields, and at first he took it every day to get to his studio. But then later, he forsook home comforts to live a bohemian existence in his garret in Hanbury St and the result was an inspired collection of paintings which exist today as testament to the particular vision Anthony found in Spitalfields.

A tall man with of mane of wiry white hair and gentle curious eyes, possessing a benign manner and natural lightness of tone, Anthony still carries a buoyant energy and enthusiasm for painting. I found him working to finish a new picture for submission to the Royal Academy before five o’clock that afternoon. Yet once I arrived off the 133, he took little persuasion to lay aside his preoccupation of the moment and talk to me about that significant destination at the other end of the bus route.

“That biggest strangest world, that whirlpool at Spitalfields, and all the several colours of the sweatshops, and the other colours of the degradation and of the beautiful antique houses derelict – I think the quality of colour was what struck me most.” replied Anthony almost in a whisper, when I asked him what drew him to Spitalfields, before he launched into a spontaneous flowing monologue evoking the imaginative universe that he found so magnetically appealing.

“From Brick Lane to Wilkes St and in between was special because it’s a kind of sanctuary.” he continued, “And looking down Wilkes St, Piero della Francesca would have liked it because it has a kind of perfection. The people going about their business are perfectly in size to the buildings. You see people carrying ladders and City girls and Jack the Ripper tours, and actors in costume outside that house in Princelet St where they make those period films, and they are all in proportion. And the market was still in use then which gave it a rough quality before the City came spilling over and building its new buildings. Always a Mecca on a Sunday. I used to think they were all coming for a religious ceremony, but it’s pure commerce, and it’s still there and it’s so large. It’s very strange to me that people give up Sunday to do that… – It’s a very vibrant area , and when Christ Church opens up for singing, the theatre of it is wonderful.”

Many years before he took a studio in Spitalfields, Anthony came to the Whitechapel Gallery to visit the memorial exhibition for Mark Gertler in 1949, another artist who also once had a studio in an old house in one of the streets leading off the market place. “Synagogues, warehouses, and Hawksmoor’s huge Christ Church, locked but standing out mightily in Commercial St, tramps eating by the gravestones in the damp church yard. “Touch” was the word that recurred,” wrote Anthony in his diary at that time, revealing the early fascination that was eventually to lead him back, to rent a loft in an eighteenth century house in Wilkes St and then subsequently to a weavers’ attic round the corner in Hanbury St where the paintings you see below were painted.

Each of these modest spaces were built as workplaces with lines of casements on either side to permit maximum light, required for weaving. Affording vertiginous views down into the quiet haven of yards between the streets where daylight bounces and reflects among high walls, these unique circumstances create the unmistakable quality of light that both infuses and characterises Anthony Eyton’s pictures which he painted in his years there. But while the light articulates the visual vocabulary of these paintings, in their subtle tones drawn from the buildings, they record elusive moments of change within a mutable space, whether the instant when a model warms herself at the fire or workmen swarm onto the roof, or simply the pregnant moment incarnated by so many open windows beneath an English sky.

Anthony’s youngest daughter, Sarah, remembers coming to visit her father as a child. “It was a bit like camping, visiting daddy’s studio,” she recalled fondly, “There were no amenities and you had to go all the way downstairs, past the door of the man below who always left a rotten fish outside, to visit the privy in the yard that was full of spiders which were so large they had faces. But it was exciting, an adventure, and I used to love drawing and doing sketches on scraps of paper that I found in his studio.”

For a few years in the midst of his long career, Spitalfields gave Anthony Eyton a refuge where he could find peace and a place packed with visual stimuli – and then eight years ago, a quarter of a century after he left, Anthony returned. Frances Milat who was born and lived in the house in Hanbury St came back from Australia to stage a reunion of all the tenants from long ago. It was the catalyst for a set of circumstances which prompted Anthony to revisit and do new drawings in these narrow streets which, over all this time, have become inextricable with his identity as an artist.

Christine, 1976/8 - “She was very keen that the cigarette smoke and grotty ashtray should be in the picture to bring me down to earth.”

Liverpool St Station, mid-seventies

Studio interior, 1977

Back of Princelet St, 1980

Girl by the fire, 1978

Workers on the roof, 1980

Open window, Spitalfields, 1976-81 (Courtesy of Tate Gallery)

Open window, Spitalfields, 1976

Anthony Eyton working in his Hanbury St studio, a still from a television documentary of 1980

Wilkes St, 2011

Fournier St from Banglatown, 2011

Pictures copyright © Anthony Eyton

Paintings by Anthony Eyton are currently on display at Eleven Spitalfields, 11 Princelet St, E1 6QH, as part of the exhibition SUBSTANCE & LIGHT until 5th July

In the ninth of my series of profiles of artists featured in EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October, I present the work of Pearl Binder. Click here to learn how you can support the publication of EAST END VERNACULAR

“City and East End meet here, and between five and six o’clock it is a tempest of people.”

This is Aldgate pictured in a lithograph of 1932 by Pearl Binder, as one of a series that she drew to illustrate The Real East End by Thomas Burke, a popular writer who ran a pub in Poplar at the time. Among the many details of this rainy East End night that she evokes so atmospherically with such economy of means, notice the number fifteen bus which still runs through Aldgate today. In her lithographs, Pearl Binder found the ideal medium to portray London in the days when it was a grimy city, permanently overcast with smoke and smog, and her eloquent visual observations were based upon first hand experience.

This book was brought to my attention by Pearl Binder’s son Dan Jones who is also an artist. He explained that his mother came from Salford to study at the Central School of Art and lived in Spread Eagle Yard, Whitechapel in the nineteen twenties and thirties. It was an especially creative period in her life and an exciting time to be in London, when one of as the first generation after the First World War, she took the opportunity of the new freedoms that were available to her sex.

In Thomas Burke’s description, Pearl Binder’s corner of Whitechapel sounds unrecognisably exotic today, “It is in one of the old Yards that Pearl Binder has made her home, and she has chosen well. She enjoys a rural atmosphere in the centre of the town. Her cottage windows face directly onto a barn filled with hay-wains and fragrant with hay, and a stable, complete with clock and weather-vane; and they give a view of metropolitan Whitechapel. One realises here how small London is, how close it still is to the fields and farms of Essex and Cambridgeshire.” From Spread Eagle Yard, Pearl Binder set out to explore the East End, and these modest black and white images illustrate the life of its people as she found it.

Her best friend was Aniuta Barr (known to Dan as Aunt Nuta), a Russian interpreter, who remembered Lenin, Kalinin and Trotsky coming to tea at their family home in Aldgate when she was a child. Dan described Aunt Nuta announcing proudly, “Treat this bottom with respect, this has sat upon the knee of father Lenin!” He called her his fairy godmother, because she did not believe in god and at his christening when the priest said, “In the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost…”, she added, “…and Lenin”.

Pearl Binder’s origins were on the border of Russia and the Ukraine in the town of Swonim, which her father Jacob Binderevski, who kept Eider ducks there, left to come to Britain in 1890 with a sack of feathers over his shoulder. After fighting bravely in the Boer War, he received a letter of congratulation from Churchill inviting him to become English. Pearl lived until 1990 and Nuta until 2003, both travelling to Russia and participating in cultural exchange between the two countries through all the ups and downs, living long enough to see the Soviet Union from beginning to end in their lifetimes.

Pearl left the East End when she married Dan’s father Elwyn Jones, a young lawyer (later Lord Elwyn Jones and member of parliament for Poplar), and when they were first wed they lived at 1 Pump Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, yet she always maintained her connections with this part of London. “Mum was trying to fry an egg and dad came to rescue her,” was how Dan fondly described his parents’ meeting, adding,“I think the egg left the pan in the process,” and revealing that his mother never learnt to cook. Instead he has memories of her writing and painting, while surrounded by her young children Dan, Josephine and Lou. “She was amazingly energetic,” recalled Dan,“Writing articles for Lilliput about the difficulties of writing while we were crawling all over the place.”

Pearl Binder’s achievements were manifold. In the pursuit of her enormous range of interests, her output as a writer and illustrator was phenomenal – fiction as well as journalism – including a remarkable book of pen portraits Odd Jobs (that included a West End prostitute and an East End ostler), and picture books with Alan Lomax and A.L.Lloyd, the folk song collectors. In 1937, she was involved in children’s programmes in the very earliest days of television broadcasting. She was fascinated by Pocahontas, designing a musical on the subject for Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. She was an adventurous traveller, travelling and writing about China in particular. She was an advocate of the pearly kings & queens, designing a pearly mug for Wedgwood, and an accomplished sculptor and stained glass artist, who created a series of windows for the House of Lords. The explosion of creative energy that characterised London in the nineteen twenties carried Pearl Binder through her whole life.

“She was always very busy with all her projects, some of which came about and some of which didn’t.” said Dan quietly, as we leafed through a portfolio, admiring paintings and drawings from his mother’s long career. Then as he closed the portfolio and stacked up all her books and pictures that he had brought out to show me – just a fraction of all of those his mother created – I opened the copy of The Real East End to look at the pictures you can see below and Dan summed it up for me. “I think it was a very important part of her life, her time in the East End. She was really looking at things and using her own eyes and getting a feel of the place and the people – and  I think the best work of her life was done during those years.”

A Jewish restaurant in Brick Lane.

A beigel seller in Whitechapel High St.

A Jewish bookshop in Wentworth St.

A slop shop in the East India Dock Rd.Pearl Binder’s self-portrait

Pearl Binder ( 1904-1990)

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Bill the Ostler of Spread Eagle Yard

In the tenth of my series of profiles of artists featured in EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October, I present David Buckman‘s profile of Henry Silk. Click here to learn how you can support the publication of EAST END VERNACULAR

At his Uncle Abraham’s basket shop in Bow

Which of the members of the members of the East London Group of painters most closely embodied what the Group stood for ? There are many advocates for Archibald Hattemore, Elwin Hawthorne, Cecil Osborne, Harold & Walter Steggles, and Albert Turpin – all painters from backgrounds that were not arty in any conventional sense who became inspired by their teacher John Cooper, the founder of the Group. Yet for some, the shadowy figure of Henry Silk, creator of highly personal and poetically understated images, is pre-eminent.

Silk’s talent was quickly recognised as far away as America, even while the Group was just establishing itself in the early thirties. In December 1930, when the second Group show was held in the West End at Alex. Reid & Lefevre, the national press reported that over two-thirds of pictures were sold, listing a batch of works bought by public collections. The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times revealed that, in addition to British purchases, the far-away Public Gallery of Toledo in Ohio had bought Silk’s ‘Still Life’ for six guineas.

American links continued when, early in 1933, Helen McCloy filing an insightful survey of the group’s achievements for the Boston Evening Transcript, judged Silk to have “the keenest technical sense of all the limitations and possibilities of paint.” Coincident with McCloy’s article, Hope Christie Skillman in the College Art Association’s publication Parnassus, distinguished Silk as “perhaps the most original and personal of the Group,” finding in his works such as The Railway Track, The Platelayers, The Tyre Dump and The Wireless Set, “beauty where we were taught not to see it.”

Silk’s early life is obscure.  He was an East Ender, born on Christmas Day 1883, who worked as a basket maker for an uncle, Abraham Silk, at his workshop and shop in the Bow Rd.  Fruit baskets were in great demand then and men making baskets became features of Silk’s pictures. “He used to work for three weeks at basket-making and spend the fourth in the pub,” Group member Walter Steggles remembered, describing Silk’s erratic work and drink habits. Yet Steggles also spoke of Silk with affection, admitting “He was a kind-hearted man who always looked older than his years.”

Silk was the uncle of Elwin Hawthorne, one of the leading members of the group, and lived for a time with that family at 11 Rounton Rd in Bow. Elwin’s widow Lilian – who, as Lilian Leahy, also showed with the group – remembered Silk as “generous to others but mean to himself.  He would use an old canvas if someone gave it to him rather than buy a new one.” This make-do-and-mend ethos was common among the often-hard-up Group members when it came to framing too. Cooper directed them to E. R. Skillen & Co, in Lamb’s Conduit St, where Walter Steggles used to buy old frames that could be cut to size.

During the First World War, the young Silk was already sketching.  Even on military service in his early thirties, during which he was gassed, he would draw on whatever he could find to hand. By the mid-twenties, he was attending classes at the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute and exhibited when the Art Club had its debut show at Bethnal Green Museum early in 1924. The Daily Chronicle ran a substantial account of the spring 1927 exhibition, highlighting Henry Silk, the basket maker, whose paintings depicted “Zeppelins and were bought by an officer ‘for a bob.’”

Yorkshireman, John Cooper, who had trained at The Slade, taught at Bethnal Green and, when he moved to evening classes at the Bow & Bromley Evening Institute, he took many students with him including George Board, Archibald Hattemore, Elwin Hawthorne, Henry Silk, the Steggles brothers and Albert Turpin. They were members of the East London Art Club that had its exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the winter of 1928, part of which transferred to what is now the Tate Britain early in 1929.  These activities prompted the series of Lefevre Galleries annual East London Group shows throughout the thirties, with their sales to many notable private collectors and public galleries, and huge media coverage.

Henry Silk was a prolific artist. He contributed a significant number of works to the Whitechapel show in 1928, remained a significant exhibitor at the East London Group-associated appearances, showed with the Toynbee Art Club and at Thos Agnew & Sons.  Among his prestigious buyers were the eminent dealer Sir Joseph Duveen, Tate director Charles Aitken and the poet and artist Laurence Binyon. Another was the writer J. B. Priestley, Cooper’s friend, who over the years garnered an impressive and well-chosen modern picture collection. Silk was also regarded highly by his East London Group peers, Murroe FitzGerald, Hawthorne’s wife Lilian and Walter Steggles, who all acquired works of his.

As each of the East London Group artists acquired individual followings as a result of the annual and mixed exhibitions, the Lefevre Galleries astutely organised solo shows for several of them. Elwin Hawthorne, Brynhild Parker and the brothers Harold & Walter Steggles all benefited.  Yet, in advance of these, in 1931 Silk had a solo show of watercolours at the recently established gallery Walter Bull & Sanders Ltd, in Cork St.  The small exhibition was characterised by an array of still lifes and interiors. Writing in The Studio magazine two years earlier, having visited Cooper’s Bow classe, F. G. Stone noted that Silk often saw “a perfect design from an unusual angle, and he has a Van Goghian love of chairs and all simple things.”

Cooper urged his students to paint the world around them and Silk met the challenge by depicting landscapes near his home in the East End, also sketching while on holiday in Southend and as far away as Edinburgh. Writing the foreword to the catalogue of the second group exhibition at Lefevre in December 1930, the critic R. H. Wilenski said that French artists were fascinated by the “cool, frail London light.” and many asked him “what English artists have made these aspects of London the essential subject of their work.” He responded, “The next time a French artist talks to me in this manner I shall tell him of the East London Group, and the members’ names that I shall mention first in this connection will be Elwin Hawthorne, W. J. Steggles and Henry Silk.”

Even after the East London Group held its final show at Lefevre in 1936, Henry Silk continued to show in the East End, until his death of cancer aged only sixty-four on September 24th 1948.

Thorpe Bay

St James’ Rd, Old Ford

Old Houses, Bow (Walter Steggles Bequest)

My Lady Nicotine

Snow (Walter Steggles Bequest)

Still Life (Walter Steggles Bequest)

Basket Makers (Courtesy of Dorian Osborne)

Boots, Polish and Brushes

The Bedroom

Bedside chair (Courtesy of Dorian Osborne)

Hat on table, 1932 (courtesy of Doncaster Museum)

Henry Silk and his sister

Click here to preorder a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR for £25

In the twelfth of my series of profiles of artists featured in EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October, I present Roland Collins’ paintings. Click here to learn how you can support the publication of EAST END VERNACULAR

Roland Collins

Ninety-seven year old artist Roland Collins lived with his wife Connie in a converted sweetshop south of the river that he crammed with singular confections, both his own works and a lifetime’s collection of ill-considered trifles. Curious that I had come from Spitalfields to see him, Roland reached over to a cabinet and pulled out the relevant file of press cuttings, beginning with his clipping from the Telegraph entitled ‘The Romance of the Weavers,’ dated 1935.

“Some time in the forties, I had a job to design a lamp for a company at 37  Spital Sq” he revealed, as if he had just remembered something that happened last week,“They were clearing out the cellar and they said, ‘Would you like this big old table?’ so I took it to my studio in Percy St and had it there forty years, but I don’t think they ever produced my lamp. I followed that house for a while and I remember when it came up for sale at £70,000, but I didn’t have the money or I’d be living there now.”

As early as the thirties, Roland visited the East End in the footsteps of James McNeill Whistler, drawing the riverside, then, returning after the war, he followed the Hawksmoor churches to paint the scenes below. “I’ve always been interested in that area,” he admitted wistfully, “I remember one of my first excursions to see the French Synagogue in Fournier St.”

Of prodigious talent yet modest demeanour, Roland Collins was an artist who quietly followed his personal enthusiasms, especially in architecture and all aspects of London lore, creating a significant body of paintings while supporting himself as designer throughout his working life. “I was designing everything,” he assured me, searching his mind and seizing upon a random example, “I did record sleeves, I did the sleeve for Decca for the first Long-Playing record ever produced.”

From his painting accepted at the Royal Academy in 1937 at the age of nineteen, Roland’s pictures were distinguished by a bold use of colour and dramatic asymmetric compositions that revealed a strong sense of abstract design. Absorbing the diverse currents of British art in the mid-twentieth century, he refined his own distinctive style at his studio in Percy St – at the heart of the artistic and cultural milieu that defined Fitzrovia in the fifties. “I used to take my painting bag and stool, and go down to Bankside.” he recalled fondly, “It was a favourite place to paint, especially the Old Red Lion Brewery and the Shot Tower before it was pulled down for the Festival of Britain – they called it the ‘Shot Tower’ because they used to drop lead shot from the top into water at the bottom to harden them.”

Looking back over his nine decades, surrounded by the evidence of his achievements, Roland was not complacent about the long journey he had undertaken to reach his point of arrival – the glorious equilibrium of his life when I met him.

“I come from Kensal Rise and I was brought up through Maida Vale.” he told me, “On my father’s side, they were cheesemakers from Cambridgeshire and he came to London to work as a clerk for the Great Central Railway at Marylebone. Because I was good at Art at Kilburn Grammar School, I went to St Martin’s School of Art in the Charing Cross Rd studying life drawing, modelling, design and lettering. My father was always very supportive. Then I got a job in the studio at the London Press Exchange and I worked there for a number of years, until the war came along and spoiled everything.

I registered as a Conscientious Objector and was given light agricultural work, but I had a doubtful lung so nothing much materialised out of it. Back in London, I was doing a painting of the Nash terraces in Regent’s Park when a policeman came along and I was taken back to the station for questioning. I discovered that there were military people based in those terraces and they wanted to know why I was interested in it.

Eventually, my love of architecture led me to a studio at 29 Percy Studio where I painted for the next forty years, after work and at weekends. I freelanced for a while until I got a job at the Scientific Publicity Agency in Fleet St and that was the beginnings of my career in advertising, I obviously didn’t make much money and it was difficult work to like.”

Yet Roland never let go of his personal work and, once he retired, he devoted himself full-time to his painting, submitting regularly to group shows but reluctant to launch out into solo exhibitions – until reaching the age of ninety.

In the next two years, he enjoyed a sell-out show at a gallery in Sussex at Mascalls Gallery and an equally successful one in Cork St at Browse & Darby. Suddenly, after a lifetime of tenacious creativity, his long-awaited and well-deserved moment arrived, and I consider my self privileged to have witnessed the glorious apotheosis of Roland Collins.

Brushfield St, Spitalfields, 1951-60 (Courtesy of Museum of London)

Columbia Market, Columbia Rd (Courtesy of Browse & Darby)

St George in the East, Wapping, 1958 (Courtesy of Electric Egg)

Mechanical Path, Deptford (Courtesy of Browse & Darby)

Fish Barrow, Canning Town (Courtesy of Browse & Darby)

St Michael Paternoster Royal, City of London (Courtesy of Browse & Darby)

St Anne’s, Limehouse (Courtesy of Browse & Darby)

St John, Wapping, 1938

St John, Wapping, 1938

Spark’s Yard, Limehouse

Images copyright © Roland Collins

Click here to preorder a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR for £25

In this first of an occasional series of features celebrating the work of former employees of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, I present my interview with Benjamin Kipling the Bell Tuner, who now works for Matthew Higby & Co, Church Bell Engineers.

You can experience a virtual reality film of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, The Final Bell created by VISUALISE, as part of ART NIGHT 2017 on Saturday 1st July 6-11pm in Spitalfields Market.

Benjamin Kipling

On a recent Sunday morning, I joined Benjamin Kipling and his bellringing pals for a congenial breakfast in Waterloo Station after they had rung the bells before the service at St John’s church across the road. Once we had finished our chat, I accompanied Benjamin who could not resist returning to Francis Octavius Bedford’s handsome bell tower of 1822 to ring again after the service. With a new job in Somerset from Monday to Friday, Benjamin commutes back and forth by car each weekend to fulfil his bellringing commitments in the capital. Even when we shook hands to say goodbye and he climbed into his car, Benjamin was setting off to judge a ringing contest in Cranford as a detour on his journey to the West Country – such is the passion of the man for bells.

The Gentle Author – How should a bell sound?

Benjamin Kipling – A nice bell should have a crisp, clear strike note, followed by the hum coming through underneath, and the hum should be stable and long-lasting.

The Gentle Author - What does the job of a bell tuner consist of?

Benjamin Kipling - Well, the basics involve mounting the bell, mouth upwards, on a very big vertical lathe and taking metal out of different areas inside to alter the partial tones within the mouth. A bell does not just produce a single frequency, a bell has lots and lots of different modes of vibration, and each mode of vibration produces a different frequency and therefore a different note. The standard for bell tuning for the last century has been to aim towards what we refer to as Simpson tuning, so the five lowest notes in the bell strike a minor chord.

The Gentle Author – Why cannot a bell be cast to make the right sound?

Benjamin Kipling – The thickness of the wall of a bell has to be precise to get exactly the right note and – to be perfectly honest – casting techniques just are not that good, they never have been. So to get a bell absolutely precise, the only way is to cast it deliberately too thick and scratch a bit off.

The Gentle Author – Once a bell has been cast, are you the next person to work on it?

Benjamin Kipling - The people in the loam shop dig the newly cast bell out from the mould, removing the core of bricks and loam, and doing a little bit of tidying up on the inscription. Then the bell is passed to me and I do a bit more work to the inscription just to make it looks as nice as possible. I start by putting the bell mouth down on the lathe and skimming across it to give a flat surface on the top before I turn the bell over, bolt it to the machine, and tune it.

The Gentle Author – How do you assess a bell in order to tune it?

Benjamin Kipling - This has been one of the limiting factors in the development of bell tuning. It was only in late Victorian times with the advent of the calibrated tuning fork that it became possible to accurately record the frequencies within a bell. Calibrated tuning forks were the normal way of doing things up until the nineteen seventies and Whitechapel’s tuning forks were still in use until the end – we used them sometimes to double check.

Today, we have other ways of doing it. An electronic stroboscope tuner employs a microphone attached to a light which shines through a spinning wheel, and you can adjust the speed so that if there is a frequency in the sound that corresponds to the spinning wheel, it will appear to stand still. This is the method I use for finishing tuning bells because it is reliably accurate, but there is also quicker – if slightly less accurate way – of pitching bells using a laptop computer and Fourier Transform software which instantly reads the main partial tones.

The Gentle Author – So it is a question of striking the bell and then bridging the difference between what it is and what you want it to sound like, do you expect to get there immediately or is it a long process?

Benjamin Kipling – Bell tuning is a job of many stages. Calculating what I am aiming for in a particular bell gives me the size of the gap. Usually, I try and make a series of cuts that will get me halfway between where I was and where I need to be, so I can check the bell is responding as I expect it to. Then I will go half as far again, and half as far again, and gradually close in, which theoretically means I never get there. Yet, in practice, this is engineering not mathematics and if I overshoot by a fraction of a semitone then nobody is going to notice. I try and tune a bell to within a cent, which is 1/100 of a semitone, but nobody is going to hear if it is two or three cents out.

The Gentle Author – Are there different kinds of cuts you make to a bell?

Benjamin Kipling – Only in terms of shallow cuts or deep cuts, but they are in different areas of the bell. For instance, if you cut metal out of the shoulder of the bell, the second partial tone flattens more quickly. In the middle of the bell, it is the hum note, the lowest one, that flattens the most quickly. Towards the lip, it is the nominal tone which flattens most quickly. Generally, wherever you take metal off a bell all of the partial tones will move – so it is a juggling act.

The Gentle Author – What is the minimum number of cuts?

Benjamin Kipling – One! But if you are tuning a bell and you are getting very close, you might make one little scratch and test it again, and make another scratch and test it again – it could take dozens.

The Gentle Author – Do you rely upon your ears or instruments?

Benjamin Kipling - The ear is always the final arbiter as to whether a bell sounds good or not. The instruments are there to tell me what is wrong and by how much. I can hear if something is wrong with a bell but I may not necessarily be able to tell exactly what is wrong or by how much, and that is where the instrumentation comes in.

The Gentle Author – Tell me some bells that you are proud to have tuned.

Benjamin Kipling - Absolutely. The five largest at St James Garlickhythe and also all ten of the new bells at St Dunstan-in-the-West on Fleet Street. The tenor bell there is the only bell where I have ever managed to get it to exactly where I want within a fraction of a 100th of a semitone. On paper, that is the best bell I have ever cut. In practice, bigger bells always sound better than little bells. They have more presence and more power, and so the best of all would probably be the largest bell I have tuned, which was for a carillon in the United States. It was cast at 43 hundredweight – a little over two tonnes – and finished at 37 hundredweight, after I tuned six hundredweight out of it. You could hit the bell, walk away, come back a couple of minutes later and you still hear it humming.

The Gentle Author – Is there an element of subjectivity in this work?

Benjamin Kipling – There is more than one way to skin a cat. You get differences in character of bells and that can be down to how the tuner approaches the bell. Also, the shape of a bell varies according to who cast it. There are subtle differences between the profile of a Whitechapel Bell, the profile of a Taylor bell or a Gillett & Johnson bell.

The Gentle Author – How did you become a bell tuner?

Benjamin Kipling – At school, I did not like music very much which was maybe because I did not want to learn to play an instrument. I had an interest in music theory, but the teachers did not think it was worthwhile teaching me music theory if I was not going to be learning an instrument. So I dropped music at the earliest opportunity.

Then, in sixth form, a friend of mine who was a bell ringer said, ‘Why don’t you come along on Wednesday night and learn to ring bells?’ So I did and I found it very addictive, and bell ringing became my hobby and I did a lot of bell ringing at university. I studied Physics, then I dropped out and started Computer Science, until I dropped out of that as well. I spent quite a long time at Nottingham University without getting a degree. Possibly, that was because I was spending too much of my time ringing bells rather than getting any work done.

The Gentle Author – Yet you have managed to fit all those things together in your career, how did you enter the industry of bell making?

Benjamin Kipling – There was a bell hanging company in Nottingham at the time, Hayward Mills. I got a holiday job with them and stayed for a couple of years. However, I discovered I was not keen on site work but I did like the theory behind the tuning of bells and, although Hayward Mills did not have a bell tuning machine, they were considering getting one. So when I dropped out from university, they took me on full time, doing admin and occasional bell hanging, with a view to me being the one who would do the tuning when they got a bell tuning machine which – a couple of years later – they did.

The Gentle Author – Are you a self-taught bell tuner?

Benjamin Kipling – Partly. I found some tuning graphs on the internet showing how the different partial tones respond according to where you take metal off a bell. But I had to teach myself how to drive the machine and how much metal to take off, which obviously is nerve-wracking and involves taking off tiny amounts to begin with and checking. Then you find the sound of the bell has hardly changed and so you take off a bit more, until you realise you actually have to take quite a bit of metal off to make any significant difference.

The Gentle Author – Did you ever take too much off?

Benjamin Kipling - The simple answer is ‘No.’ If you are gradually homing in on what you want, that should not be a problem. In practice, with four of the five partial tones, it is possible to go back up again if necessary. Generally, you are thinning the wall of the bell and making it more flexible so it vibrates at a lower frequency. Each time you take a little off, the notes go down. However, by taking more metal off the lip of the bell, it is possible to get four of those five to come back up. So there are usually ways of sorting these things out.

The Gentle Author – Do you find this rewarding work?

Benjamin Kipling - Oh absolutely, it is a lasting legacy. Hopefully my handiwork will be there for centuries because bells do not go out of tune. A lot of old bells were never in tune to begin with, they would just try and cast a bell as close as they could to the right note and, if it was a long way out, they would take out a hammer and chisel and try and chip bits off until it was bearable. That is the reason why old bells are retuned.

The Gentle Author – Is retuning a major part of your work?

Benjamin Kipling – Oh yes. At Whitechapel, probably half of the bells I tuned were old ones that came in for retuning.

The Gentle Author – How is that different?

Benjamin Kipling – The difference is that, whereas a new bell has been cast with enough metal in the right places to be able to do what you want, in an old bell the chances are there may not be enough metal in the places you need. You just have to try and push it in the right direction as much as you can. In the last few years, we tended to do more tuning of old bells on the outsides as well as on the insides and I found you can get much better results by doing that.

The Gentle Author – What are the oldest bells you have retuned?

Benjamin Kipling – Bells over a certain age tend to be listed for preservation.

The Gentle Author – They cannot be retuned?

Benjamin Kipling - It means there is a presumption against tuning, but different dioceses have a different interpretation of what that means. In some dioceses, you will never get permission to tune a listed bell, while in other dioceses – as long as you put a sensible case forward – they have no problem with you retuning anything of any age. The diocese that I have found which is most likely to give permission for tuning old bells is Bath & Wells. There were some bells in Bath & Wells diocese from the fourteenth, if not the thirteenth century, that I have tuned. The profile of bells and the composition of the bell metal has changed remarkably little in all those years.

The Gentle Author – Does bell tuning make you happy?

Benjamin Kipling – Absolutely, when people ask me what my job is, I like to see the expressions on their faces, ranging from disbelief that there could be such a job to complete fascination.

The Gentle Author – Tell me about the Royal Jubilee bells.

Benjamin Kipling – These were cast for St James Garlickhythe but first they were installed in a barge to go down the Thames as part of the Royal Jubilee pageant in 2012.

The Gentle Author – Where were you on that day?

Benjamin Kipling – I was close to St James Garlickhythe, struggling to get to the water’s edge to catch a view of them going past from the bank of the Thames, along with umpteen thousand other people, but the crowds were so deep that I missed them. The framework was fabricated at an engineering company in Edenbridge, so I did hear them and got to ring on the frame in the works but I never got to hear them on the river or see them in the barge. The sound of bells tends to bounce off water in a pleasing way. Certainly, I know the bells at St Magnus the Martyr at the northern end of London Bridge sound at their best if you stand just the other side of the river and I think the same is probably true of the Southwark Cathedral bells if you stand on the north bank. So I gather my bells did sound very nice on the river.

Transcript by Rachel Blaylock

Benjamin Kipling, Bell Tuner

You may also like to read about

Alan Hughes, Bell Founder

Royal Jubilee Bells at Garlickhythe

An Old Whitechapel Bell

A Visit To Great Tom At St Paul’s

The Most Famous Bells in the World

John Claridge at Whitechapel Bell Foundry

You leave Putney Bridge Station, cross the road, enter the park by the river and go through a gate in a high wall to find yourself in a beautiful vegetable garden with an elaborate tudor gate. Beyond the tudor gate lies Fulham Palace, presenting an implacable classically-proportioned facade to you across a wide expanse of lawn bordered by tall old trees. You dare to walk across the grass and sneak around to the back of the stately home where you discover a massive tudor gateway with ancient doors, leading to a courtyard with a fountain dancing and a grand entrance where Queen Elizabeth I once walked in. It was only a short walk from the tube but already you are in another world.

For over a thousand years the Bishops of London lived here until 1975 when it was handed over to the public. But even when Bishop Waldhere (693-c.705) acquired Fulham Manor around the year 700, it was just the most recent dwelling upon a site beside the Thames that had already been in constant habitation since Neolithic times. Our own St Dunstan, who built the first church in Stepney in 952, became Bishop of London in 957 and lived here. By 1392, a document recorded the great ditch that enclosed the thirty-six acres of Britain’s largest medieval moated dwelling.

Time has accreted innumerable layers and the visitor encounters a rich palimpsest of history, here at one of London’s earliest powerhouses. You stand in the tudor courtyard admiring its rich diamond-patterned brickwork and the lofty tower entrance, all girded with a fragrant border of lavender at this time of year. Behind this sits the Georgian extension, presenting another face to the wide lawn. Yet even this addition evolved from Palladian in 1752 to Strawberry Hill Gothick in 1766, before losing its fanciful crenellations and towers devised by Stiff Leadbetter to arrive at a piously austere elevation, which it maintains to this day, in 1818.

Among the ecclesiastical incumbents were a number of botanically-inclined bishops whose legacy lives on in the grounds, manifest in noteworthy trees and the restored glasshouses where exotic fruits were grown for presentation to the monarch. In the sixteenth century, Bishop Grindal (1559-1570) sent grapes annually to Elizabeth I, and “The vines at Fulham were of that goodness and perfection beyond others” wrote John Strype. As Head of the Church in the American Colonies, Bishop Henry Compton (1675-1753), sent missionaries to collect seeds and cuttings and, in his thirty-eight tenure, he cultivated a greater variety of trees and shrubs than had previously been seen in any garden in England – including the first magnolia in Europe.

At this time of year, the newly-planted walled garden proposes the focus of popular attention with its lush vegetable beds interwoven with cosmos, nasturtiums, sweet peas and french marigolds. A magnificent wisteria of more than a century’s growth shelters an intricate knot garden facing a curved glasshouse, following the line of a mellow old wall, where cucumber, melons and tomatoes and aubergines are ripening.

The place is a sheer wonder and a rare peaceful green refuge at the heart of the city – and everyone can visit for free .

Cucumbers in the glasshouse

Melon in the glasshouse

Five hundred year old Holme Oak

Coachman’s House by William Butterfield

Lodge House in the Gothick style believed to have been designed by Lady Hooley c. 1815

Tudor buildings in the foreground with nineteenth century additions towards the rear.

Sixteenth century gate with original oak doors

The courtyard entrance

Looking back to the fountain

Entrance to the medieval hall where Elizabeth I dined

Chapel by William Butterfield

Tudor gables

All Saints, Fulham seen from the walled garden

Freshly harvested carrots and vegetable marrows

Ancient yews preside at All Saints Fulham

Visit Fulham Palace website for opening times and details of events – admission is free

One of the great joys of compiling my new book East End Vernacular, artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published in October, has been the discovery of forgotten paintings and painters – thanks to suggestions sent in by you, the readers of Spitalfields Life. Yet perhaps the most spectacular discovery of all has been the paintings of Peri Parkes (1952-2009) which had entirely slipped from the public eye, and of which I am delighted to publish a selection for the very first time here today.

Thanks to your generous support, we have now almost raised enough money to publish East End Vernacular and we only need a couple more investors. Click here for more information about how you can help.

House in the East, 1980-81

Just over a week ago, the artist Doreen Fletcher, who is celebrated for her paintings of the East End which were first seen in theses pages wrote to me about Peri Parkes.

Doreen wrote, ‘My good friend Peri Parkes was perhaps the artist with the most integrity I have ever met. His standards were so high that he was reluctant to exhibit anything he produced, always finding the outcome lacking somehow. Fellow artists tried hard to persuade him to have a one man show to no avail. He painted the East End assiduously during the eighties until he took a teaching post in Cornwall in 1992, however he continued to revisit to Bow right up until his death too soon at the age of fifty-six.’

On Doreen’s recommendation, I took the train to Hertford last weekend to meet Peri’s daughters, Lucie & Zoe who showed me fifty of their father’s paintings which have been mostly stored in a cupboard since he died in 2009. The quality and significance of this work was immediately apparent and I knew at once that I must devote a chapter in East End Vernacular to celebrate the rare talent and rigorous vision of Peri Parkes.

Out of the tragedy of a broken relationship, Peri Parkes created a transcendent series of paintings and it is impossible not to touched by the self portraits that he included in his work, of the lonely man walking in the park or climbing onto his bike.

Today, Lucie & Zoe are the custodians of this legacy and they spoke affectionately to me about their father as we sat surrounded by his wonderful paintings.

Zoe – My father was from Hampstead Garden Suburb in Finchley. He had a Greek mother – who named him Pericles, she came from quite a well-to-do family and his father was a solicitor. Dad was born and grew up there but he left home very young, about sixteen. Then he met Lindsey, my mum, and they had me when he was just eighteen. My grandmother bought a house in Ridge Rd Crouch End and we all lived there.

Lucie - When he was nineteen, he got a scholarship to the Slade. I should add that when he was sixteen, he went off to Afghanistan, back-packing. He and mum first met at the railway station, just before he was about to leave and there was obviously a spark. Once he came back, they met up again and married when he was eighteen and mum was seventeen.

Zoe - When I was a baby, he used to take me off to college with him. He put me on his back and off we would go to the Slade.

Lucie - Mum had agoraphobia after she had Zoe, so he had to take her with him – a nineteen-year-old with his baby.

Zoe – They split up when I was six and Lucie was three, around 1979. He went to stay with his friend Martin Ives in a prefab in Condor St, Stepney and we stayed with our mum in her mum’s house. After that he got a housing association flat next to Bow Rd Station and then he moved just around the corner to Mornington Grove.

Lucie – He never had a studio, he just painted in the flat where he lived. He was completely unmaterialistic and his whole flat was his studio with bare floors, bare walls, furniture that he picked up from skips or off the street, boxes and then piles and piles of paints. All over the furniture there was paint splatters and full ashtrays. He did not really ever think about comfort.

Zoe – He was so driven by painting. He had a one track mind. He did not really want anything else in life but to be able to paint and to go to the pub.

Lucie – We used to go and stay with him every other weekend in the prefabs and hang around in the back yard, I remember doing snail races and counting slugs while he painted.

Zoe – He took us round galleries quite a lot, which as children was quite boring to us – but he used to get very enthusiastic about things he wanted to see.

Lucie – To say he was very self-absorbed is only half the picture because he was not egotistical, he was actually quite a humble person, and a loving and affectionate dad. I remember lying in bed in the prefabs when it was freezing cold and he used to tell us stories, and they were brilliant. We loved him and loved being with him, but he was not really able to give to his relationships because everything was about painting.

Zoe – I think he struggled with depression a lot, whether it was to do rejection as an artist or with not getting things right. He was a real perfectionist and he had massive temper flare ups if he was not satisfied with his work. Yet he had a real community in London. He used to go to the Coborn Arms every night and he had a crew of friends there.

Lucie – Nothing he did was ever right or good enough for him. He was always striving to be better. He could not give his paintings away let alone sell them but, if he did give one away to a family member, he took it back because it was not quite good enough. If he was here now, he would be looking at his paintings, very dissatisfied, and he would want to make changes.

He was driven to paint what he saw in front of him. I do not think he was driven to tell the story of the East End, it was just that, wherever he was, he painted obsessively to capture what he was seeing. Most of them are from his window in his living room or the back of his prefab.

Zoe – He was always submitting pictures for exhibitions and competitions, and he took the rejection quite personally.

Lucie - When his relationship broke down with mum he was deeply hurt. I think the more things went wrong in his life, the more he channelled everything into painting. I can remember him taking us home on the tube once and him looking at us and tears pouring down his face. That sticks with me because I knew then that he really cared and was hurt by the whole thing, but he could not express any of that – it all went into his painting.

Zoe – I look at these paintings and I see them as dad’s life at the time, from the time arrived in the East End in 1977 until he left in 1992. The style at the beginning is quite different from the later ones. He went on holiday to the tiny town of St Just on the farmost westerly point of Cornwall and fell in love with it. The day after returning from holiday he saw a job for a part time art teacher there in the newspaper, it was like an act of fate. He had taught Art at the Blessed John Roche School in Poplar and he wanted out of London. He loved it in Cornwall and lived in the most remote place. He said Cornwall was as close as he could get to Greece in this country.

Arnold Circus, 1990-92

The Dinner Ladies, c.1986-9 (Wellington Way School, Bow E3)

Wellington Way School E3, 1985-6

Bow Triangle in Winter, 1990-92

The Departure, c.1992-4 (Mornington Grove, Bow E3)

Bow Church, c.1987-92

Condor St, Stepney, 1977-80

Condor St, Stepney, c.1980

City view from St Bernard’s School, St Matthew’s Row, E2, c.1987  (Click on this image to enlarge)

Paintings copyright © Estate of Peri Parkes

Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular

Pearl Binder, Artist

Roland Collins, Artist

Anthony Eyton, Artist

Doreen Fletcher, Artist

Elwin Hawthorn, Artist

Rose Henriques, Artist

Dan Jones,  Artist

Jock McFadyen, Artist

Cyril Mann, Artist

Henry Silk, Artist

Albert Turpin, Artist

Click here to preorder a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR for £25

The distinguished historian Ruth Richardson makes a last-minute plea for the complex of historic buildings on the site of the listed eighteenth century Cleveland St Workhouse, revealing the participation of Florence Nightingale in the creation of the Nightingale Pavilion Wards added when the Workhouse became a hospital in the nineteenth century.

This Thursday evening, 6th July, the Planning Committee for the Borough of Camden will meet at Camden Town Hall to discuss an application for the redevelopment of the Dickens Workhouse, the Nightingale Pavilion Wards and their attendant buildings in Cleveland St, Fitzrovia, W1.

Readers of Spitalfields Life will already be familiar with the discovery that Charles Dickens lived in the same street and the knowledge that, while he was writing Oliver Twist, there was a shop opposite the Workhouse run by a certain Bill Sykes. The story of the poor murdered Italian Boy has also been told in the pages of Spitalfields Life and through him we remember the thousands of Covent Garden parishioners buried in the consecrated burial ground surrounding the Cleveland St Workhouse. Yet the Nightingale Pavilion Wards tell an equally important story of Florence Nightingale’s involvement in the evolution of compassionate medical care in this country towards the National Health Service that we cherish today.

I photographed the site recently and discovered the buildings entirely populated by property guardians, as illustration – if such were needed – of the suitability of all these properties for conversion to residential use rather than the needless and wanton destruction proposed by the developers.

We hope that Camden Council will make a good decision and we want to see the Workhouse, the Nightingale Pavilions, and the other buildings refurbished as housing for local people, because this historic site deserves preservation.

You can see the relevant Planning Applications here:

2017/0415/L - The gutting of the Workhouse at 44 Cleveland St and redevelopment into flats

2017/0414/P - The obliteration of everything else on the site and the erection of an eight-storey tower at 44 Cleveland St

Comments are still being accepted by the Planning Officer (who is recommending the developer’s plans to the Planning Committee for approval). PLEASE CLICK HERE TO MAKE YOUR COMMENT. Quote the numbers of the Planning Applications and be sure to make it clear if you are objecting.

ALTERNATIVELY, you can write direct to Kate.Henry@camden.gov.uk – be sure to quote the numbers of the Planning Applications and your postal address and make it clear if you are objecting

Click here to read the Council for British Archaeology’s letter of objection

The Workhouse

The Workhouse was built in the seventeen-seventies as an ‘H’ shaped block fronting onto Cleveland St with wings at front and rear. Originally the poorhouse for the parish of Covent Garden, it became the Strand Union Workhouse in the eighteen-thirties, serving a union of parishes in the Strand district under the hated New Poor Law. Charles Dickens was aware of the changing regime and wrote about it in Oliver Twist. As a closed institution, the wider public had only fearful knowledge of what went on inside. For the next forty years, Cleveland St Workhouse was among the worst of London workhouses, ameliorated only in the eighteen-fifties by the kindly ministrations of Dr Joseph Rogers, and the flowers and prayers of Miss Louisa Twining, founder of the Workhouse Visiting movement.

When the Strand Union Workhouse was investigated by The Lancet Sanitary Commission in the eighteen-sixties, they found more than five hundred people were sharing around three hundred beds, crammed together so tightly that access was often only from the foot of each bed. There was one medic, and no paid or trained nurses and over 90% of the inmates were sick, dying, disabled, infirm, elderly, mentally handicapped, nursing mothers or children. Fewer than 10% of the inhabitants were ‘able-bodied’ and it was they who nursed everybody else. The food was poor, cleanliness objectionable, latrines insanitary, and so on.

The Plans

The current developer’s plans for the Workhouse site – which they call the “Middlesex Hospital Annex ” – make little improvement on their last attempt, an abominable design with two new blocks covered in a bright green cladding flanking the eighteenth century workhouse. Only a few concessions have been granted: the frontages of the Victorian Masters’ and Matrons’ houses, which have stood either side of the main Workhouse frontage for around one hundred and fifty years, are to remain. Also a portion of the elegant front wall built in the early twentieth century will survive, though unfortunately in an asymmetric form. Anyone looking at these new plans would be forgiven for thinking it is the same scheme in a new guise.

These plans reduce the Workhouse building to a shell, destroying its interior, its roof, its back wall, every window and everything attached to it. The plan proposes the entire destruction of the rest of the site, including the two fine Nightingale Pavilions attached to the rear of the Workhouse, all the hospital staff accommodation, the mortuary and its chapel. All this for a generic eight storey block.

The Singing Soil

The developers deflect any criticism of their current plans from historians by employing an ex-employee of English Heritage to write a report emphasising the lack of destructive potential in their projected ‘development.’ So it is no surprise to read that, apparently, nothing on the site is worth saving. By suggesting that burials were confined to a small area on the north side, the report also argues that few remain. Yet we know burials were made all over the site. Human remains have been encountered whenever building work has been undertaken and, in the nineteenth century, Dr Rogers described deep graves going down more than twenty feet.

The precise dimensions of the Workhouse site are known from a vellum map dated 1790. It records the area dedicated to the eternal rest of the dead at an outdoor service of consecration led by the Anglican Bishop of London, Beilby Porteous, who promised the parishioners of Covent Garden buried there they would be free from all indignity “for ever.” Unfortunately, this sacred map and the promise it contains have been treated by the developer’s heritage consultant as if it were of no more significance than an estate agent’s record of property ownership.

Since the publication of my piece on the Italian Boy in these pages, the ominous silence concerning the presence of the dead has been addressed by an archaeological report which appeared on the Camden Planning website. Rather than entertain the likelihood that this graveyard offers a rare opportunity for archaeologists to excavate an eighteenth century extra-mural parish burial ground for the poor, this report suggests that if the remains buried there are found to be disarticulated (ie jumbled) then it is suggested that a ‘watching brief’ would be a sufficient role for archaeologists. Consequently, despite Bishop Beilby’s promise, merely an archaeological ‘oversight’ of the excavation of the dead is intended and the de-sacralizing of this consecrated site by means of a contractor’s JCB is contemplated with disquieting equanimity.

Some might suggest this treatment is entirely consistent with a burial ground run for decades by Mr Bumble and his kind, that was situated conveniently opposite a medical school connected to the Workhouse by a tunnel under the road. The glazed pavers which remain to this day in the pavement outside the Master’s house reveal the route. The 1832 Anatomy Act, directing that any pauper might be dissected before burial, is apparently of no material consideration in this case. Those archaeological experts employed by the developer appear blissfully unaware of the sardonic moment in Oliver Twist when the parish undertaker offers Mr Bumble a pinch of snuff from his own patent-coffin-shaped snuffbox.

The Nightingale Pavilions

Most curiously, no-one within the developer’s extensive payroll seems to have made any serious effort to examine the history of the Nightingale Pavilions which replaced the rear wings of the Workhouse, preserving the building’s original footprint on a larger scale. Yet they carry an important history, even if in the current plans they are to be obliterated.

The pair of Nightingale Pavilions are good quality buildings which have plenty of life in them yet. Each contains three floors of Nightingale wards, their solid walls punctuated by tall windows and sanitation towers placed midway along their external flanks. Between these Pavilions lies an unexpectedly large open space which was the principal part of the graveyard, probably still largely undisturbed and currently occupied by portacabins and glazed structures with shallow foundations. The Pavilions are robustly built of good brick, with contrasting darker red-brick string-courses and neatly matching window arches in the characteristic Victorian manner.

Although the developer’s heritage consultant insists that the Pavilion wards must not be referred to as “Nightingale” wards and denies strenuously that Florence Nightingale had anything to do with them, he is mistaken. This fine pair of structures are most certainly Nightingale Pavilions containing Nightingale Wards and they deserve to be accurately recognised as unique examples of such before Camden Council’s Planning Committee contemplates their obliteration.

These buildings can legitimately be called “Nightingale Pavilion Wards” because they were built to accord with Florence Nightingale’s specifications by an architect known to her and she made her own personal proposals for their use.

Florence Nightingale & the Transformation of Cleveland St

To understand Florence Nightingale’s involvement with Cleveland St, we have to look back to the eighteen-fifties, which saw the Great Exhibition, a cholera epidemic, and war in the Crimea. The first of these provided a national self-image of social cohesion and peaceful co-existence after the unsuccessful push for greater democracy by the Chartists and the disruptive impact of the revolutions across Europe in 1848. The Crimean War was a watershed in the home territory – the sheer incompetence of the army to provide for its own sick and wounded exposed repugnant attitudes towards ordinary soldiery. Lord William Paulet told Florence Nightingale that she was ‘pampering the brutes’ and she never forgot it.

Florence Nightingale was a deeply religious woman who pondered long and hard upon the nature of Charity and why God had caused Jesus Christ to be born into the working classes. For her, every life was sacred and, although she had been groomed for a high society marriage, she chose a different destiny for herself. Successfully battling her family’s opposition to becoming a nurse, she became superintendent of a hospital for ladies in Harley St. During the notorious John Snow cholera epidemic of August and September 1854, the huge influx of desperately ill and dying poor to the hospitals became the catalyst for her to leave the Harley St ladies’ institution in the hands of her well-trained subordinates in order to nurse those in far greater need – cholera patients at the Middlesex Hospital.

She found this experience of nursing in the Middlesex Hospital invaluable in her later work on hospital design. Not long afterwards, Florence Nightingale was called to serve in the Crimea and she returned from this searing experience with a determination not to forget the thousands of servicemen who had needlessly died there, not of wounds but of infections and epidemic diseases. She was intolerant of official obfuscation after witnessing the sanitary improvements at Scutari which had saved so many lives and she fought for the rest of her life for improvements in hospital provision and nursing care. Her designs for and advocacy of Pavilion plan hospitals emerged directly from her personal nursing experience.

After her return from the War, she wrote three important editorials in the most influential architectural journal of the day, The Builder. Initially a critique of a poorly designed new military hospital at Netley, Florence Nightingale laid out the arguments for improved hospital design. These anonymously published editorials were reprinted in her Notes on Hospitals, which famously opens with the words: ‘The first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm’. This book consolidated her ideas about hospitals organised to promote health, rather than merely to contain the sick. She realised many hospitals fostered illness and death among patients and staff. Alongside good diet and professional nursing, her fundamental lessons for hospital design were ventilation, cleanliness, light, air and space for every patient, including ventilated plumbing facilities in every ward. Tall windows were key to her vision, as they provided both good light and high-level ventilation, and served to space beds apart, providing access for nursing care, and helping to prevent the spread of disease. These ideas were enormously influential. Architects scrambled to have their work endorsed by her and charitable hospitals were swift to adopt her Pavilions in their plans.

Next, Florence Nightingale turned her sights on the moribund Poor Law workhouse system. To her, a patient was anyone requiring nursing care and she argued that if the sick and children were taken out of the workhouses, the Poor Law could operate better for those for whom it was intended – the healthy poor, which was less than 10% of the total workhouse population.

Her ideas and practical recommendations for hospitals assisted the efforts of workhouse reformers, such as those of the Cleveland St doctor Dr Joseph Rogers, the Lancet Sanitary Commission, and the nationwide workhouse-visiting pioneer Louisa Twining, whose work began at Cleveland St. Eventually, administration of the Poor Law was transferred to a new body, the Local Government Board and, once the separation of the sick from the healthy became official policy, a new building programme began. The poor from Cleveland St were transferred to a new building at Edmonton and the Workhouse itself upgraded with the addition of two new Nightingale Pavilions.

The architect of these Nightingale Pavilion Wards was John Giles, who corresponded with Florence Nightingale concerning his designs for the new Poor Law Infirmary at Highgate, which he built according to her principles. He had read her Notes on Hospitals and letters survive which confirm that he invited her to look over his drawings and suggest improvements.

Yet Florence Nightingale had plans of her own for the upgraded Cleveland St Workhouse. Using the Nightingale Fund, collected for her own use after the Crimean War, she had established a training school for nurses at the new St Thomas’s Hospital and planned to do the same for workhouse nursing at Cleveland St. She and Sir Sidney Waterlow conferred over the appointment of a Nightingale-trained nurse as Matron of the new Asylum, which would have enabled the establishment of a Nightingale training school at Cleveland St. Unfortunately, the parish Guardians swiftly appointed a non-Nightingale nurse to avoid any challenge to their governance.

Thus Florence Nightingale’s association with Cleveland St and its Nightingale Pavilion Wards is five-fold:

1. Her Builder editorials, consolidated in Notes on Hospitals, laid out the fundamental design criteria for Pavilion wings and wards, to which those in Cleveland St conform.

2. Florence Nightingale was a key figure in the post-Crimean War Poor Law amelioration movement, which emerged from Cleveland St Workhouse, led by its Medical Officer Dr Joseph Rogers and by Miss Louisa Twining.

3. Florence Nightingale’s argument that class should not be a consideration in the care of the sick brought about the separation of the infirm and dying from the healthy in workhouses, which led directly to the creation of the Central London Sick Asylum in Cleveland St.

4. The architect of the new Pavilion wings, John Giles, knew Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Hospitals and conferred directly with her concerning the design of Pavilion Wards.

5. Florence Nightingale had well-developed plans for a nursing school in the new infirmary at Cleveland St, but was stymied by what she called “Poor Law Mindedness.”

The Nightingale Pavilions are perhaps unique in England in being attached to an eighteenth century poorhouse. Historic England know of no other instance while Jeremy Taylor, leading historian of Pavilion Plan hospitals, thinks the Cleveland St assemblage is highly unusual and Peter Higginbotham, the author of the workhouses.org believes its configuration is unique.

The Euston Arch and St Pancras Station are precedents in this case – two Camden buildings, the one controversially destroyed and the other preserved for magnificent new use. These Nightingale Pavilion Wards are an important monument to Florence Nightingale and to what she called her ‘children’ – the thousands of working-class soldiers who died needlessly in the Crimea. These buildings deserve to be preserved as witness to this history and re-used to provide much-needed good quality housing for Londoners.

Nightingale Pavilion Ward

Rear view of the Workhouse with Nightingale Pavilion wings on either side

Windows on the south wing of the Workhouse

Window on the front of the Workhouse

Stone bollard on the side of the Workhouse

Sanitation tower attached to the south Nightingale Pavilion

The Matrons’ House

Eastern extent of the south Nightingale Pavilion

Bow windows where the Nightingale Pavilions meet the Workhouse building

Architectural integration of the Workhouse and the north Nightingale Pavilion

Looking from the Workhouse towards the north Nightingale Pavilion ward

Elevation of the north Nightingale Pavilion

The south Nightingale Pavilion

End wall of south Nightingale Pavilion

Looking back towards the Workhouse across the burial ground occupied by one storey modern buildings

View east from the Workhouse

Gallery linking the Nightingale Pavilions

Staircase at rear of the Workhouse

Eighteenth century staircase in the Workhouse

Cantilevered stone steps

Looking up the stairwell

Decorative cast iron newel post

Chimney pot details

Sanitary tower attached to the Workhouse

Elevation of the Masters’ House

Detail of the Masters’ House

The Masters’ House

Entrance to the Masters’ House

The Masters’ House seen from Cleveland St with the glass pavers just visible in the pavement beneath the end wall, indicating the tunnel used for carting the corpses of paupers under the road to the medical school opposite for dissection

The presiding spirit of Cleveland St

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At The Cleveland St Workhouse

At Charles Dickens’ Childhood Home

The Italian Boy

St Mary Rotherhithe Free School founded 1613

To be candid, there is not a lot left of old Rotherhithe – yet what remains is still powerfully evocative of the centuries of thriving maritime industry that once defined the identity of this place. Most visitors today arrive by train – as I did – through the Brunel tunnel built between 1825 and 1843, constructed when the growth of the docks brought thousands of tall ships to the Thames and the traffic made river crossing by water almost impossible.

Just fifty yards from Rotherhithe Station is a narrow door through which you can descend into the 1825 shaft via a makeshift staircase. You find yourself inside a huge round cavern, smoke-blackened as if the former lair of a fiery dragon. Incredibly, Marc Brunel built this cylinder of brick at ground level – fifty feet high and twenty-five feet in diameter – and waited while it sank into the damp earth, digging out the mud from the core as it descended, to create the shaft which then became the access point for excavating the tunnel beneath the river.

It was the world’s first underwater tunnel. At a moment of optimism in 1826, a banquet for a thousand investors was held at the bottom of the shaft and then, at a moment of cataclysm in 1828, the Thames surged up from beneath filling it with water – and Marc’s twenty-two-year-old son Isambard was fished out, unconscious, from the swirling torrent. Envisaging this diabolic calamity, I was happy to leave the subterranean depths of the Brunels’ fierce imaginative ambition – still murky with soot from the steam trains that once ran through – and return to the sunlight of the riverside.

Leaning out precariously upon the Thames’ bank is an ancient tavern known as The Spread Eagle until 1957, when it was rechristened The Mayflower – in reference to the Pilgrims who sailed from Rotherhithe to Southampton in 1620, on the first leg of their journey to New England. Facing it across the other side of Rotherhithe St towers John James’ St Mary’s Rotherhithe of 1716 where an attractive monument of 1625 to Captain Anthony Wood, retrieved from the previous church, sports a fine galleon in full sail that some would like to believe is The Mayflower itself – whose skipper, Captain Christopher Jones, is buried in the churchyard.

Also in the churchyard, sits the handsome tomb of Prince Lee Boo. A native of the Pacific Islands, he befriended Captain Wilson of Rotherhithe and his two sons who were shipwrecked upon the shores of Ulong in 1783. Abba Thule, the ruler of the Islands, was so delighted when the Europeans used their firearms to subdue his enemies and impressed with their joinery skills in constructing a new vessel, that he asked them to take his second son, Lee Boo, with them to London to become an Englishman.

Arriving in Portsmouth in July 1784, Lee Boo travelled with Captain Wilson to Rotherhithe where he lived as one of the family, until December when it was discovered he had smallpox – the disease which claimed the lives of more Londoners than any other at that time. At just twenty years old, Lee Boo was buried inside the Wilson family vault in Rotherhithe churchyard, but - before he died – he sent a plaintive message home to tell his father “that the Captain and Mother very kind.”

Across the churchyard from The Mayflower is Rotherhithe Free School, founded by two Peter Hills and Robert Bell in 1613 to educate the sons of seafarers. Still displaying a pair of weathered figures of schoolchildren, the attractive schoolhouse of 1797 was vacated in 1939 yet the school may still be found close by in Salter Rd. Thus, the pub, the church and the schoolhouse define the centre of the former village of Rotherhithe with a line of converted old warehouses extending upon the river frontage for a just couple of hundred yards in either direction beyond this enclave.

Take a short walk to the west and you will discover The Angel overlooking the ruins of King Edward III’s manor house but – if you are a hardy walker and choose to set out eastward along the river – you will need to exercise the full extent of your imagination to envisage the vast vanished complex of wharfs, quays and stores that once filled this entire peninsular.

At the entrance to the Rotherhithe road tunnel stands the Norwegian Church with its ship weather vane

Chimney of the Brunel Engine House seen from the garden on top of the tunnel’s access shaft

Isambard Kingdom Brunel presides upon his audacious work

Visitors gawp in the diabolic cavern of Brunel’s smoke-blackened shaft descending to the Thames tunnel

John James’ St Mary’s Rotherhithe of 1716

The tomb of Prince Lee Boo, a native of the Pelew or Pallas Islands ( the Republic of Belau), who died in Rotherhithe of smallpox in  1784 aged twenty

Graffiti upon the church tower

Monument in St Mary’s, retrieved from the earlier church

Charles Hay & Sons Ltd, Barge Builders since 1789

Peeking through the window into the costume store of Sands Films

Inside The Mayflower

A lone survivor of the warehouses that once lined the river bank

Looking east towards Rotherhithe from The Angel

The Angel

The ruins of King Edward III’s manor house

Bascule bridge

Nelson House

Metropolitan Asylum Board china from the Smallpox Hospital Ships once moored here

Looking across towards the Isle of Dogs from Surrey Docks Farm

Take a look at

Adam Dant’s Map of Stories from the History of Rotherhithe

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Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. We still need a couple more investors, so please click here to learn how you can support the publication of EAST END VERNACULAR

Street Scene by Barnett Freedman (Click this image to enlarge)

When I first saw Street Scene by Barnett Freedman (Reproduced courtesy of the Tate Gallery), I thought I half-recognised the location as either Whitechapel or Bethnal Green and I delighted in the painting as an evocation of the streetlife of the Jewish East End in the early twentieth century.

Surely that is The George in Bethnal Green Road in the background? In particular, the two ostentatiously dressed woman in their contrasting outfits recalled for me the custom of people to promenade along Aldgate to Whitechapel at weekends in their finery, window shopping and greeting friends, enjoying their social life in public. Indeed, Pearl Binder included a similar pair of young women togged up to the nines in one of her lithographs of Aldgate in the twenties. I also wondered if the shabby old street musician with his violin was a Russian immigrant who had arrived like Barnett Freedman’s parents at the end of the nineteenth century.

Barnett Freedman was born in Lower Chapman St, Stepney Green in 1901. A sickly child who endured extended hospital stays, he was confined to bed between the ages of nine and thirteen, yet managed to educate himself, learning to read, write, play music and draw and paint while sequestered in a hospital ward.

By the age of sixteen, Barnett was earning his living as a draughtsman to a monumental mason for a few shillings a week, while for the next five years he spent his evenings undertaking classes at St Martin’s School of Art. Before long, he moved to an architect’s office, creating attractive drawings from his employer’s rough sketches and, taking the opportunity offered by a surge in demand for the war memorials to hone his skill as a letteringh artist.

With remarkable tenacity and self-belief, Barnett applied over three successive years for a London County Council Scholarship that would enable him to study at the Royal College of Art under the direction of Sir William Rothenstein. Experiencing rejection on each occasion, Barnett summoned the courage to present his portfolio in person to Rothenstein who recognised his talent and applied to the London County Council Chief Inspector himself on behalf of the young artist. As a consequence, a stipend of £120 a year was granted, enabling Barnett to begin his studies full time in 1922.

At the Royal College of Art, Barnett’s talent flourished among fellow students including Edward Bawden, Raymond Coxon, Henry Moore, Vivian Pitchforth and John Tunnard. Yet even after graduating in 1925, he continued to struggle to support himself and in 1929, ill-health prevented him working for a year. This situation as resolved when William Rothenstein took Barnett onto the staff of the Royal College in 1930. In the same year, he married fellow illustrator, Claudia Guercio, and, during the thirties, enjoyed an increasingly  successful career as an illustrator and commercial artist.

Barnett’s lithographs for Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, published in 1931, were one of many highlights during his long association with Faber and Faber, for whom he also illustrated works by the Brontës, Walter de la Mare, Charles Dickens, Edith Sitwell, William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy. As a commercial artist, he undertook prestigious commissions for Ealing Films, the General Post Office, Curwen Press, Shell-Mex, British Petroleum, Josiah Wedgwood and London Transport, earning popular success.

Appointed as an official War Artist, along with Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden, Barnett accompanied the expeditionary force in the spring of 1940 before the retreat at Dunkirk, and was awarded a CBE for this work in 1946. Yet Barnett always retained his East End accent and once, when he hailed a taxi to the Athenaeum Club, the incredulous cabbie famously retorted, “What, you?”

Street Scene was painted between 1933 and 1939, and subsequently he reworked the image as a lithograph for Lyons Corner House. Barnett’s son Vince, who was born in 1934, recalled his father working on the picture in the first floor studio of the family home in a back street of Gloucester Rd, West London. Vince revealed to me that the building on the right of the painting was based their house, 11 Canning Place. “The fiddler was to be found at the Gloucester Road end of Canning Place just about every day, and was a figure of some threat to me at the age of four!” he recalled, “The small person on the right, with his nanny Miss Wiggle, is a reference to me!”

No wonder that I was unable to place the location of this painting precisely in the East End because it is not a literal scene at all but a composite of Bethnal Green and Gloucester Road. I often wonder if the East End itself is actually a place or a culture, and this painting proposes an answer to my quandary. Barnett Freedman employed diverse topographic elements create a portrait of a society he knew intimately, constructing an entirely subjective portrayal of his environment and personal heritage. Look in the left top corner of the painting and you will see the artist raising his hat to you, ambling happily along the pavement and eternally at home in his own East End  universe. Vincent Barnett summed up his father’s achievement in these words, “A huge optimism and compassion shows itself to me in all his work and life. Humanity was his central driving force.”

The Old George in Bethnal Green

Barnett Freedman’s house at 11 Canning Place, Gloucester Rd

Barnett Freedman in Hyde Park

Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular

Pearl Binder, Artist

Roland Collins, Artist

Anthony Eyton, Artist

Doreen Fletcher, Artist

Elwin Hawthorn, Artist

Rose Henriques, Artist

Dan Jones,  Artist

Jock McFadyen, Artist

Cyril Mann, Artist

Peri Parkes, Artist

Henry Silk, Artist

Albert Turpin, Artist

Click here to preorder a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR for £25

The horse’s head upon the fascia reveals that RW Autos was once a farrier

Twenty-five years ago I had reason to visit Bermondsey St frequently but I have hardly been there since, so I thought it was time to walk down across the river and take a look. Leaving the crowds teeming like ants upon the chaotic mound that is London Bridge Station in the midst of reconstruction, I ventured into Guy’s Hospital passing the statue of Thomas Guy, who founded it in 1721, to sit with John Keats in a stone alcove from old London Bridge now installed in a courtyard at the back.

From here, I turned east through the narrow streets into Snowsfields, passing the evocatively named Ship & Mermaid Row, and Arthur’s Mission of 1865 annotated with “Feed my Lambs” upon a plaque. An instruction that has evidently not been forgotten, as the building adjoins the Manna Day Centre which offers refuge and sustenance to more than two hundred homeless people each day.

At the end of Snowsfields is the crossroads where Bermondsey St meets the viaduct carrying the railway to and from London Bridge, and the sonorous intensity  of the traffic roaring through, combined with the vibration from the trains rattling overhead, can be quite overwhelming. Yet the long narrow street beckons you south, as it has done for more than a thousand years – serving as the path from the Thames to the precincts of Bermondsey Abbey, a mile away, since the eleventh century. When I first came here, I never ventured beyond Bermondsey Sq. Only when I learned of the remains of the medieval gatehouse in Grange Walk beyond, with the iron hinges still protruding from the wall today, did I understand that Bermondsey St was the approach to the precincts of the Abbey destroyed by Henry VIII in 1536.

There is an engaging drama to Bermondsey St with its narrow frontages of shops and tall old warehouses crowded upon either side, punctuated by overhanging yards and blind alleys. A quarter of a century ago, everything appeared closed down, apart from The Stage newspaper with its gaudy playbill sign, a couple of attractively gloomy pubs and some secondhand furniture warehouses. I was fascinated by the mysteries withheld and Bermondsey St lodged in my mind as a compelling vestige of another time. Nowadays it appears everything has been opened up in Bermondsey St, and the shabbiness that once prevailed has been dispelled by restoration and adaptation of the old buildings, and the addition of fancy new structures for the Fashion & Textile Museum and the White Cube Gallery.

Yet, in spite of the changes, I was pleased to discover RW Autos still in business in Morocco St with the horses’ heads upon the fascia, indicating the origin of the premises as a farrier. Nearby, the massive buildings of the former London Leather Exchange, now housing dozens of small businesses, stand as a reminder of the tanning industry which occupied Bermondsey for centuries, filling the air with foul smells and noxious fumes, and poisoning the water courses with filth.

The distinctive pattern of streets and survival of so many utilitarian nineteenth and eighteenth century structures ensure the working character of this part of Bermondsey persists, and you do not have to wander far to come upon blocks of nineteenth century housing and old terraces of brick cottages, interspersed by charity schools and former institutes of altruistic endeavour, which carry the attendant social history. Thus Bermondsey may still be appreciated as an urban landscape where the past is visibly manifest to the attentive visitor, who cares to spend a quiet afternoon exploring on foot.

John Keats at Guy’s Hospital

Arthur’s Mission in Snow’s Fields seen from Guinness Buildings 1897

In Bermondsey St

At the Woolpack

Old warehouses in Bermondsey St

St Mary Magdalen Bermondsey – the medieval tower is the last remnant of the Abbey founded in the eleventh century

In St Mary’s Bermondsey St

In St Mary Magdalen Graveyard

This plaque marks the site of the abbey church

Old houses in Grange Walk – the house on the right is claimed to be the Abbey gatehouse with hinges of the gates still visible

Bermondsey United Charity School for Girls in Grange Walk, 1830

In Grange Walk

Bermondsey Sq Antiques Market every Friday

A cottage garden in Bermondsey

The Victoria, a magnificent tiled nineteenth century pub with its original spittoon, in Pages Walk

London Leather, Hide & Wool Exchange built 1878 by George Elkington & Sons, next to the 1833 Leather Market, it remained active until 1912.

At the entrance to St Thomas’ Church

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Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. Click here to preorder your copy

(Click on this image to enlarge)

Presiding over Spitalfields for three hundred years, Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church in Commercial Street is the East End’s most enduring landmark and it has caught the imagination of many artists. Yet perhaps Leon Kossoff (born 1926) has captured its awe-inspiring scale more effectively than anyone else in a recurrent series of paintings and drawings executed over the past half century.

Born just half a mile up the road in Shoreditch, Leon grew up on the Boundary Estate where his family ran a bakery but, at the age of nine, a trip to the National Gallery inspired him with a love of painting which was to become the consuming passion of a lifetime. When his school was evacuated to Norfolk in 1939, Leon had the good fortune to stay with the Bishop family in Kings Lynn who encouraged his interest in art, which led him to make his first paintings and, on his return to London in 1943, he enrolled for art classes at Toynbee Hall.

Even before he ever drew it, Christ Church was a landmark on Leon’s landscape, both culturally and literally. Built with the proceeds of a coal tax in the early eighteenth century, Christ Church was constructed as an emblem of power to impress the Huguenot immigrants of Spitalfields and encourage their conversion to Anglicanism. Its overbearing scale makes the onlooker feel small, yet equally it offers the converse experience to those leaving the church, to whom, elevated upon the steps of the portico, the world appears spread out below. For the child of first generation immigrants, such as Leon, the building was a constant reminder of his place in the continuum of successive waves of immigration which have come to define the East End.

Leon first drew Christ Church in the fifties when he was living in Bethnal Green and the building was derelict, returning to the subject again in the seventies when it was under threat of demolition. But it was not until the eighties, when he had moved from the East End to Willesden, that he undertook drawings which became the basis for his series of paintings of this monumental subject beginning in 1987.

This densely wrought painting completed in 2000 embodies both the complex emotionalism of Leon’s personal response to everything that Christ Church represents and the struggle of the onlooker to contain such titanic architecture.

“In the dusty sunlight of this August day, when this part of London still looks and feels like the London of William Blake’s Jerusalem, I find myself involved again in making drawings, and the idea of a painting begins to emerge. The urgency that drives me to work is not only to do with the pressures of the accumulation of memories and the unique quality of the subject on this particular day but also with the awareness that time is short, that soon the mass of this building will be dwarfed by more looming office blocks and overshadowed, the character of the building will be lost forever, for it is by its monumental flight into unimpeded space that we remember this building.” Leon Kossoff, March 1989

After serving in the Second World War, Leon studied commercial art at St Martin’s and then painting at the Royal College of Art. Despite winning international acclaim for his work in recent decades, Leon Kossoff remains a modest, reclusive figure and he has returned to Arnold Circus and the Boundary Estate in the last few years undertaking a series of affectionate, intimate drawings of the urban landscape of his childhood.

Prints of Leon Kossoff’s drawing of Saturday Afternoon, Arnold Circus are on sale at Leila’s Shop in Calvert Avenue in aid of the Friends of Arnold Circus.

Images copyright © Leon Kossoff

Reproduced courtesy of Annely Juda Gallery, London

Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular

Pearl Binder, Artist

Roland Collins, Artist

Anthony Eyton, Artist

Doreen Fletcher, Artist

Barnett Freedman, Artist

Elwin Hawthorn, Artist

Rose Henriques, Artist

Dan Jones,  Artist

Jock McFadyen, Artist

Cyril Mann, Artist

Peri Parkes, Artist

Henry Silk, Artist

Albert Turpin, Artist

Click here to preorder a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR for £25

With Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman – better known as Old Flo – due to return to the East End for a temporary stay at Canary Wharf prior to being permanently installed at the new Town Hall in Whitechapel in 2020, Mark Richards tells the story behind her troubled exile and explores London’s orphaned art, a legacy of post-war regeneration

Old Flo in happier days

In 2012, when Lutfur Rahman, then Mayor of Tower Hamlets, proposed to sell Henry Moore’s sculpture Draped Seated Woman, he was widely condemned by the media and the art establishment alike, and a public campaign was launched to prevent the sale, generating a great deal of publicity. What most people do not know is that this public campaign had no impact and was not a factor in the decision to abandon the sale, which happened due to work done by a small team behind the scenes. Most importantly, the wider implications of this attempted sale appear to have passed everyone by.

To understand the context and the scale of the issue we must go back to post-war London, when much of the city lay in ruins and the capital was a patchwork of bomb sites and partially demolished buildings.  The country’s finances were in ruins also and the London Olympics of 1948 were known as the ‘austerity games’ due to the shoestring budget. As one of the associated cultural events, the London County Council held the first of a series of outdoor sculpture exhibitions.  The first exhibition in 1948 was the precursor to the Patronage of the Arts Scheme, by which the LCC purchased sculptures to enrich the lives of Londoners as part of the post-war regeneration of the capital.

The driving force behind these exhibitions and the subsequent scheme for purchasing art was the LCC Parks Committee which announced, “…this is almost certainly the first time a municipal authority in this country has embarked on such a venture. It is, however, fitting that the Council as the largest municipal authority in the Empire, if not in the world, should take a share in the encouragement of visual arts both for the sake of the artists, whose work is part of our national heritage, and also to give Londoners an increased opportunity to enjoy art.” (Mrs Patricia Strauss, Chair of the Parks Committee, Open Air Exhibition of Sculpture, 1948)

This exhibition was a milestone of public art in London, representing a move away from the display of traditional statuary into the open air display of contemporary public art for the enrichment of the lives of Londoners, and it planted the seeds that would grow into the Patronage of the Arts Scheme over the following decade.

Following the exhibition, the Contemporary Art Society donated Henry Moore’s Three Standing Figures, 1947 to the LCC for permanent display at Battersea Park and this almost certainly triggered the scheme that resulted in the purchase of Draped Seated Woman some fourteen years later. Like Draped Seated Woman, this sculpture was abandoned when the Greater London Council was closed in 1986 and is an orphan artwork.

In 1956, a committee was formed to advise the LCC on the purchase of public art for London.  Sir Alan Bowness, Director of the Tate Gallery from 1980–88, was a member and knew both Henry Moore and Sir Isaac Hayward, then leader of the LCC, who encouraged the siting of works of art on new housing estates, schools and in parks, so that they could be enjoyed by the people of London.

Over the life of the Patronage of the Arts Scheme around seventy pieces of public art were purchased for London, including five by Henry Moore, as well as works by leading artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Elizabeth Frink, Lynn Chadwick and others.

You will no doubt have seen some of them dotted around London and perhaps never made the connection to the LCC.  As became evident later, all of them are now orphans with no clear title of ownership.  Their abandonment by the GLC, and subsequently the Department of the Environment, represents a staggering failure of governance during the closure of the GLC in 1986. A report was produced by GLC staff in 1983 recommending that the sculptures be put in trust for London but this was never followed through.

After the GLC was closed, only the late Tony Banks MP pursued the matter in the House of Commons but with little success.  Hansard records a series of exchanges that imply the government of the day knew about the sculptures and intended selling them to offset the cost of closing the GLC. Either way, when other artworks were transferred into and out of the London Residuary Body through a series of statutory instruments these sculptures were mysteriously left out.  They were not sold or transferred, and instead were simply allowed to drift into ambiguity of ownership to the detriment of London.

Since 1986, many of the sculptures have been stolen, mislaid, damaged or destroyed.  In a period of austerity, they remain at grave risk of being lost, stolen by metal thieves or sold to bolster failing local authority budgets.  Nobody has overall responsibility for this public collection which is worth tens of millions, and the various local authorities, schools and colleges where the sculptures stand appear to have no idea that they do not have clear title of ownership to the works in their possession.

When I heard about the proposed sale of Old Flo by Tower Hamlets, I was determined to stop it. I had some knowledge of the sculpture – it was an important work that was based on Henry Moore’s shelter drawings and so had a particular resonance for London, given that Stepney where it had been based was one of the most heavily-bombed areas of the city.  The drapery allowed Moore to create tension in the figure and, when you examine the shelter drawings, you can see the connection between those poignant drawings and this colossal sculpture.

I always thought of this sculpture as being of a mother listening to the fall of bombs outside the shelter and wondering whether her children, her friends or her house would survive the bombardment.  She represented for me a stoic figure full of resolve mixed with a sense of alertness, tension and vulnerability belied by her immense scale.

In the end, Old Flo was saved by the actions of a small group of people. Working with the support of the Art Fund and Farrer & Co solicitors, who provided pro bono advice, five of us went to the London Metropolitan Archives to do the research into the original purchase of Old Flo. It proved to be an exciting journey into the murky history of art acquisition and the regeneration of post-war London.

The story of this work of art began to reveal itself in the dusty, and often crumbling, minutes of the long defunct London County Council.  The original idea that the sculpture had been a gift to London by Henry Moore and was therefore held in trust turned out to be false, documentation showed it was purchased for a fair market rate by the LCC.

We discovered that Old Flo had been bought for the Stifford Estate in Stepney by the London County Council. Then I tried to find out how it ended up in the hands of Tower Hamlets Council, which did not exist at that time. I followed the trail through the files, minutes, transfer documents and statutes, showing the demise of the LCC, the rise and fall of the GLC and the creation and closure of the London Residuary Body. Eventually, I discovered that title of ownership to the sculpture had never been transferred to Tower Hamlets at any time in its history. Consequently, they were not the owner and therefore had no right to sell it.

The sculpture had gone from the LCC to the GLC and then, when the GLC was closed, had been transferred to the London Residuary Body. Subsequently, on the closure of the LRB, title of ownership to all seventy sculptures was accidentally transferred to the London Borough of Bromley via a ‘sweep-up’ order in 1997, even though Bromley had no knowledge of this.

Working with the Art Fund we persuaded the London Borough of Bromley to lodge a legal challenge to the sale acting in their capacity as successor to the LRB.  Bromley’s position was that the sculpture was a cultural asset and needed to be saved for London, and I have nothing but praise for their approach – they are the unacknowledged heroes of this case.  As a result of their intervention, Tower Hamlets was forced to remove the sculpture from auction after it had been listed for sale by Christie’s for January 2013. The case then became like Jarndyce & Jarndyce in Bleak House, with both sides arguing that the sculpture was theirs.

A long legal case ensued at which I was a witness in the Court of Chancery in 2015. Lutfur Rahman was removed from office for electoral irregularities. Meanwhile, the whole focus of the campaign behind the scenes had been to delay any sale until he was gone, since the vast majority of councillors at Tower Hamlets were opposed to the sale.

Following Rahman’s removal, the outcome of the legal case was largely academic when it comes to Old Flo but, in the end, title of ownership was determined to sit with Tower Hamlets due to a legal technicality. They had ‘converted’ the sculpture by lending it to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park without Bromley’s permission and six years later it had become theirs under the rules on limitation. The judge in the case supported all aspects of Bromley’s claim to title of ownership except on the single issue of ‘conversion,’ and rejected Tower Hamlets’ other claims in their entirety.  The judgment is a matter of public record and can be found by clicking here.

What is not recorded is that the late Norman Palmer QC, the world’s leading authority on the law of bailment, believed that the Tower Hamlets case on conversion was flawed and could be defeated by an argument that Old Flo was held in bailment which is not covered by limitation. But this argument was never pleaded in the case, so we will never know if he was correct.

John Biggs, the new Mayor of Tower Hamlets, gave me his personal assurance that Old Flo would not be sold and she was therefore saved for the nation. My involvement ended in 2015 and, at that time, the plans were that the sculpture would be returned to London and displayed outside of the Museum in Docklands. This never happened and it is now destined for Canary Wharf instead, prior to installation at the new Town Hall in Whitechapel in 2020  As it stands, Old Flo remains in public ownership but her future is far from secure – as she is not held in trust, she could be sold at any time at the whim of a politician. If this was to happen, there are now no grounds to challenge the decision.

The future of the remaining sculptures is also less than rosy – their title of ownership remains uncertain and the failure to address this or put them into trust has left them with no clear owner. Had Bromley won the Old Flo case then all of the sculptures would have been put into trust and protected in perpetuity, but this is unlikely to happen now and no public bodies seem willing to pick up the baton and protect this remarkable series of sculptures, some of which are falling into disrepair.

They include many works of which you may be familiar such as The Watchers by Lynn Chadwick at Roehampton College (stolen in 2006 but now recast), Single Form Memorial and Monolith-Empyrean by Barbara Hepworth, Two-Piece Reclining Figures No. 1 and No. 3 by Henry Moore, The Lesson by Franta Belsky in Satchwell Rd, Robert Clatworthy’s The Bull in Danebury Avenue, opposite Portswood Place in Wandsworth, and many more.

Others have not fared so well and the list of important works which have been stolen includes like Elisabeth Frink’s Birdman from Sedgehill School in Lewisham and Georg Ehrlich’s Drinking Calf from Garratt Green School in Wandsworth, while sculptures like the Henry Moore on the Brandon Estate remain at serious risk of metal theft.

Someone needs to take the initiative and protect these sculptures as a legacy for London, but who is up to the task?

Old Flo at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (Photo by Mark Richards)

Poster for the 1948 open air art exhibition at Battersea Park

Programme for the 1948 exhibition with an introduction by Patricia Strauss

Three Standing Figures by Henry Moore, Battersea Park (Photo by Mark Richards)

Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 by Henry Moore, Brandon Estate (Photo by Mark Richards)

Old Flo on the Stifford Estate c.1964

Monolith-Empyrean by Barbara Hepworth, Kenwood House (Photo by Mark Richards)

Single Form Memorial by Barbara Hepworth, Battersea Park (Photo by Mark Richards)

Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 1 by Henry Moore, Chelsea School of Art (Photo by Mark Richards)

Woman Seated in the Underground, 1941 by Henry Moore

LCC report 19 March 1964 listing Draped Seated Woman and Single Form Memorial

CC minutes 27 July 1961 recording the decision to buy the sculpture

The Stifford Estate c.1965 showing the location of Draped Seated Woman

Mark Richards is the Chief Executive Officer at the Museum of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada

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Frank Dobson’s Sculpture in Whitechapel

Franta Belsky’s Sculpture in Bethnal Green

Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. Click here to preorder your copy

Twilight at London Fields, 2012

Recently, I met with the artist James Mackinnon (born 1968) whose streetscapes of the East End in general and London Fields in particular have captivated me for years. The seductive sense of atmosphere and magical sense of possibility in these pictures is matched by the breathtaking accomplishment of their painterly execution to powerful effect.

Remarkably, James is a third generation artist, with his father Jake and grandfather Hugh before him – which perhaps accounts for the classical nature of his technique even if his sensibility is undeniably contemporary.

We sat outside Christ Church, Spitalfields and chatted about the enduring allure of the East End for artists. I was sorry learn that James has been forced to leave due to a combination of the rising rents and lack of recognition for his work.

Like several others I have met while researching my book, he is an artist who is genuinely deserving of appreciation by a much wider audience. It is very disappointing that the rewards for such a prodigiously talented painter as James Mackinnon are so little that he can no longer afford to be in the East End, and the East End is lesser for it.

“I grew up in South London in Lee Green and I used to go to the Isle of Dogs through the foot tunnel under the Thames and I was mystified by the area north of the river. Sometimes I would bunk off school with a sketchbook and go wandering there. It seemed a mysterious land, so I thought ‘What’s further up from the Isle of Dogs?’ I was a kid and I had been taken up to the West End, but I had never been to the East End and I sensed there was something extraordinary over that way.

I had always loved drawing and I got a scholarship in art to Dulwich College when I was eleven. The art department was wonderful and I got massive support, so I used be in the art block most of the time.

Later on, having left home and gone through college, there was a big recession and it was tough, all the students were scrabbling around for work, I had an epiphany. I was sat next to the Thames and I realised I just wanted to look at buildings and paint them. Since I was a child, buildings and their atmosphere, the feeling of buildings always had this resonance that I could not put my finger on.

As a kid, I was painting with poster paint and drawing with felt tips, and I was obsessed with the Post Office Tower. There was an art deco Odeon in Deptford that was derelict for years and it was demolished at the end of the eighties, and that had a huge effect on me. I sat in the back of my dad’s car and we drove past on the way up to London, and I would see this building and almost have a heart attack, I had such strong feelings about it. My God this thing is extraordinary, I am in love with it! It was falling to bits, it had pigeons sitting in the roof and it had wonderful art deco streamlining but it had this atmosphere, an elegance and a sadness. Even with the Post Office Tower, I felt it had this presence as though it were a person. That comes to the fore when you paint and you feel the place. You are not just concentrating on the architecture, it’s an emotional thing.

So with painting and drawing skills, I wanted to explore the landscape and often the hinterland. There is something compelling about going to a place you do not really know about – the mysterious world of places. The atmosphere of places is borne out of people and their residue, it’s about people living in a place.

By exploring, I was slowly drawn to where my heart was guiding me. In the early nineties, I moved to the East End because it was affordable and I had always wanted to explore there. And I was there until around 2013. I lived in Hackney and had a great time there, and made some great friends.

I was struggling as an artist, there was a lot of signing on the dole, but it was an act of faith, I knew it was what I had to do. I had always painted buildings.

I lived near London Fields and there is this little terrace of Georgian houses with a railway line and overhead electric wires, and there are some tower blocks in the distance, and you have all this grass. That was at the bottom of my road, it was such an interesting juxtaposition. A lot of East London landscapes have that, you might get a church sitting next to a railway line, next to tower block, next to the canal and a bit of old railing and some graffiti. That funny mixture. So I would just go and paint what I wanted. I painted what I was drawn to. For a long time, I was obsessed with Stratford. No-one had done anything to it at that time and I would go round the back streets and I roamed the hinterlands. I walked through to Plaistow and it is all part of a certain landscape that you find in the East End. To make a picture, you have got to find something that moves you and it can be something at the bottom of your road that resonates for you and makes the right composition for a painting. It’s hard to explain.

I had a go at having a studio but I was always a struggling artist so, when it came to rent day, it got tricky. It’s lovely having a studio but I could not afford it. I tried living in my studio for a bit to save money on the rent but the landlord found out and there was a cat and mouse game.

By the time I left, I think I had found myself. There is something in the painting that says it is me rather than anyone else and that has evolved from having done it for twenty years. I just about managed to survive. I realised I have got the tenacity and self belief. This is what I love. You find your path after a lot of struggle but it only comes by doing it. You realise that a great painting can come from something very ordinary, you can go for a walk and there might be something round the corner that knocks you out. There was a lot of that in the East End and I am still obsessed by it though it is changing hugely. Some of the landscapes have changed and some of the shops have gone. I miss Hackney in many ways but I do not miss struggling and rents going up. The area has changed.

So now I have moved to Hastings. I had a little boy and it became untenable to carry on living in the East End. I had no choice.”

Homage to James Pryde, 2009 (The Mole Man’s House)

Broadway Market

Shops in Morning Lane, 2014

Hackney Canal near Mare St, 2012

Canal, Rosemary Works 2014

Savoy Cafe, Hackney, 2012

James Tower, London Fields, 2012

Alphabeat, 2007

Paintings copyright © James Mackinnon

James Mackinnon’s paintings are available from the Millinery Works

Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular

Pearl Binder, Artist

Roland Collins, Artist

Anthony Eyton, Artist

Doreen Fletcher, Artist

Barnett Freedman, Artist

Elwin Hawthorn, Artist

Rose Henriques, Artist

Dan Jones,  Artist

Leon Kossoff, Artist

Jock McFadyen, Artist

Cyril Mann, Artist

Peri Parkes, Artist

Henry Silk, Artist

Albert Turpin, Artist

I am sorry to report that after thirty seven years on Denmark St, Tim Marten is being evicted and has had his lease revoked by the developers currently redeveloping this corner of Soho

Tim Marten by Colin O’Brien

Guitars have been manufactured in Denmark St since the days of Queen Anne but now – thanks to the redevelopment of the neighbourhood - Tim Marten is one of the very last to make and repair instruments in this corner of Soho. I visited Tim in the tiny panelled workshop in the beautiful sixteen-nineties house where he pursues his trade, pending three months’ notice to quit at any time.

“When I was a teenager I wanted to learn to play guitar, and I couldn’t afford to buy one and I was reasonably good at woodwork, so I made one. It was horrible! As soon as I’d finished it, I began to understand where I’d gone wrong, so I embarked on my second one and I cured some of the mistakes I’d made the first time round. After about eighteen months – maybe longer – with the help of various other people, I’d finished my third, curing the mistakes I’d made the second time round. I refined it down and down, until I had a guitar I could actually go out and play. It held its own against factory-made bought guitars. That was quite a reasonable instrument, and I went from there!

I came from an engineering background. My father and my uncle were both very good engineers and I used to build Airfix kits and fly model aeroplanes. I was always interested in mechanics and quite good at understanding how things worked. I was one of those small boys whose immediate reaction after Christmas lunch was to start taking their toys apart to see how they worked.

I spent my late teens and early twenties playing in bands round London and Bristol and, if anyone had problems, I’d fix their guitars. It just escalated from there. I was fortunate to meet someone who worked behind the counter at Andy’s Guitar Workshop in Denmark St, just across the road from where I am now. It was the first specific guitar repair workshop in Central London. That was in 1979.

It was run by Andy Preston but it was called ‘Andy’s‘ because that was the name of the Greek greengrocers on the ground floor and we were in the basement. There were quite a few music shops in the street but Andy’s had flats above and a greengrocer at street level. Our customers had to go round the back and down the stairs to our workshop below. I was twenty-two and I had some ideas I was working on for designs for guitars, and my friend who was the counter hand said, ‘Why don’t you come down and speak to the guys I work with?’ So I did and we had a long chat, and I was offered my first job and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Then I joined Led Zeppelin as a guitar technician and went off touring for ten years. I worked for various other bands and had a shop of my own up in Church Lane, Hornsey, just underneath The Kinks‘ studio. So I got to know Ray Davies and did a lot of touring with The Kinks. I played guitar professionally and found I earned more money gigging three nights a week than I did mending guitars in my little workshop, so it became a necessity to go out each Thursday, Friday and Saturday and play. Back in those days, it was quite a lucrative thing to do.

Things went spectacularly wrong in 2000, and I lost the shop and my business. But within a couple of days of realising that was going to happen and wondering what on earth I was going to do with myself, Andy Preston rang up from his hugely-expanded guitar shop which had become internationally known and taken over the whole building. He asked me to come back and run his repair department because they needed somebody with experience. So the door opened and I walked into it.

I stayed there until Andy went bust and sold his shop onto Rick Harrison, when I started working independently and I’ve been independent ever since. I’ve had my workshop in this room for about six years, before that it was Central Sound recording studios. I have no proof but I have been told that David Gray recorded Babylon in this very room. The building has listed status and is as it was constructed after the Great Fire of London, one of four remaining buildings in Denmark St from that time.  This was originally intended as housing and it is slated to be returned to housing. I am going to be booted out and this is going to be turned into luxury flats.  I am on two months’ notice, so that could happen as soon as six months from now.

I don’t think the ethos of Denmark St has changed very much at all since I first came here in 1979. Up until four or five years ago, when Cliff Cooper sold out the leases to the current owners who are property developers, there was very little change in the street apart from the signs above the shops as businesses came and went. Denmark St has always been a bit of a shabby sideshow in very nice way.

From the fifties, it was always the centre for music, when the music publishers started moving in and then the recording studios followed. There were three recording studios here in the sixties. From the eighties, shops came and went but they were always music shops, and the place was in need of a lick of paint. It has always been like that and, to a certain extent, that is its charm. Now restaurants are moving in, the developers are taking over and we are being moved out. It’s coming to an end despite our loudest protests.

We got hit very hard by the internet and it took the industry a while to adapt. I think that was one of the reasons Andy got into financial difficulties. For the repair side of the business, the internet helps no end. I get a lot of work from people who have bought guitars online. They come in the door, I take one look at it and say, ‘You just got this on ebay, didn’t you?’ and they ask, ‘Yes, how did you know?’ and I say, ‘Because if you’d played it before you bought it, you’ never have bought it!’ I tell them, ‘Yes I can fix it for you but it’s going to cost more money than if you had bought it properly from a shop in the first place.’ So I view the internet as a mixed blessing, although I do make a lot of money out of people who buy stuff  and find that it is not as described. I end up sorting it out.

It’s the tinkering side of things, the satisfaction of getting things right, that I like. I do mostly repairs now and only a little design work. There’s a lot of satisfaction in getting something working properly and you give it back to the customer, and a big smile comes over them. ‘Oh wow, that’s brilliant! I’ve been fighting this thing for years – if only I’d known you ten years ago!’

Like any job, it can become repetitive. There are certain repairs you do in your sleep. That’s what I call the bread-and-butter work. It’s well paid, so – if I spend three days a week doing that – I know that I’ve made enough to sit down and do something a bit more creative.

In this industry, it’s a great way to spend a day but it’s a lousy way to make a living. Especially making guitars, because it is so time-consuming and you can’t compete with the guys who have got all the machinery and industrial spraying facilities. The quality of the stuff coming out of the far east now is so good that you have to be able to charge a disproportionate amount of money for a guitar because it is handmade. Or you do bespoke work, I enjoy making things that you couldn’t buy in a shop.

If you look around my workshop, you will see that I am surrounded by projects that I have got halfway through but never got around to finishing. It’s what I do in the quiet periods, but I’ve acquired a reputation for being good at repairs and it’s getting to the point where I have more work than I can do. If you look around, there’s thirty guitars here waiting to be repaired. They are numbered up to fifty-seven and I am working on number twenty-six at the moment. Some of them will take five minutes but others will take me three weeks to fix.

I’ve always got three or four jobs on the go at once and, as you can see, there there are guitars lying around in various stages of repair. While I am waiting for glue or lacquer to dry, I will put it on one side and return to it tomorrow. Repairing instruments is a job where you don’t work on one at a time and finish it.

When I was running the repair department at Andy’s Guitar Workshop, I had four people working under my supervision and I enjoyed the responsibility and the teaching and the social life as well. Now it’s just me yet I am not alone because I have a constant stream of customers and the phone never stops ringing.”

Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien

Tim Marten, Guitar Repairs, 9 Denmark Street, London, WC2H 8LS

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At Denmark St

Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. Click here to preorder your copy

Schoolyard, 1968 (Click to enlarge this image)

I thought you might like to see these three fascinating paintings by John Allin (1934-1991) which have just come to light recently and which will be displayed at Townhouse gallery in Spitalfields in October, when East End Vernacular is published. All are dated 1968, yet there is wide divergence of styles between these pictures. The painting of an East End laundry with customers delivering their sacks of dirty washing is characteristic John Allin territory, but the paintings of the schoolyard and the park stray into a different, more painterly realm.

John Allin is celebrated for his paintings of familiar East End streets, yet he also portrayed imaginary scenes that dramatised states of being, such as the school yard which resembles a prison yard above. These emotive, less literal pictures are painted in a freer style, suggesting that there is a greater complexity and creative depth to the work of John Allin than is commonly assumed, when the appreciation of his painting is burdened with the reductive label of ‘primitive’ or ‘outsider’ art.

Recently, as part of my research for East End Vernacular, I travelled up to Walthamstow to meet John Allin’s mentor, the artist Sotirakis Charalambou, who remembered his former friend and colleague with great affection, and spoke about the particular struggles encountered by an artist from the East End half a century ago.

“In the East End at that time, there were not many of us who were doing ‘alternative’ things and so we gravitated to each other. We came together on the street. I met John and we became fast friends. He had just got out of prison but it was not for theft, as is generally believed, it was for receiving. John had begun to paint in prison and wanted to continue and I encouraged him to do that. He would paint at home and the come and paint at my place. I’d wake up in the morning and  he’d be painting on the wall in my bedroom. I never taught him because I don’t believe in teaching but I encouraged him, I thought he was extremely talented and it was just a question of finding the confidence in his talent. He had a great passion for painting and wanted to paint his life and his environment, and the people in the East End, and how he felt about it all.

Eventually, he thought he should show his work to a gallery, so he went along to the Portal Gallery and they were very enthusiastic. He had several show there and, for a short time, he took a studio in Space Studios at Fish Island, Hackney Wick, where I was, and he did some good work there but he was uncomfortable. He painted the studio red because he did not like the clinical white.

Success did not affect John’s personality, he was just happy that he could buy a decent car and have a bit more money. He got better at painting and, as his processes and techniques evolved, he became more ambitious with the work and was able to realise his visions more confidently. He worked very hard, I’ve got a painting he did on a plastic tablecloth because in the beginning money was a real problem. He was like Paul Gauguin, forced to paint on sackcloth!

As his technique improved, he used better materials. As you know, he used a lot of flat colour so, at first, he would use a lot of turps almost turning the oil paint into tempera which worried me because I thought the paint might fall off. But his technique improved incredibly and he began to use the oil paint more freely.

I think he was pretty angry about the way the council and the government were treating the working class, he felt very strongly about that. He was sent to prison for receiving some shirts but the reason he got such a long sentence was because he was a cockney working class kid. They were making an example of an East End lout, as they thought.

With John, I think painting was something he discovered that he could do and he could express himself, talk through his paintings about the things he enjoyed and the things that concerned him about the social and political reality that he experienced, the injustice of it. And the value of the people in the East End that he loved and admired. It was very personal. He was a warm, loving man and he loved the people he painted. He treated everybody equally and he wanted to say, ‘Here we are!’

He was a visionary artist and the fact that was not trained academically was to his advantage. He would have been completely destroyed at art school, his vision would have been crushed. He would not finish or even start a painting unless he had a very strong feeling or vision for it. He was complete in that sense. His vision was clear.

I think what happens to people who live in less privileged circumstances, if they cannot project themselves in any other way, they try to find a vehicle by which they can express themselves independently. In the East End, schools were set up so they fed local industry and the level of education was to prepare people for that. But what happens is that, if there is no outlet, people turn inwards and they might by accident come across a book of paintings or be inspired by a teacher and think, ‘Well, I can do that.’ It was an independent means of development which was out of the critical eyes of their peers or even their family, the could disappear into a room and do it independently, and it became a vehicle to grow and make association beyond the social limitations they found themselves living within.”

Park, 1968

Laundry, 1968

Paintings copyright © Estate of John Allin

Click here to see more paintings by John Allin

Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular

Pearl Binder, Artist

Roland Collins, Artist

Anthony Eyton, Artist

Doreen Fletcher, Artist

Barnett Freedman, Artist

Elwin Hawthorn, Artist

Rose Henriques, Artist

Dan Jones,  Artist

Leon Kossoff, Artist

Jock McFadyen, Artist

Cyril Mann, Artist

Peri Parkes, Artist

Henry Silk, Artist

Albert Turpin, Artist

Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. Click here to preorder your copy

‘I like the East End, it has a nice feel to it’

This is my portrait of Ronald Morgan in the studio at his flat in Bow where I visited him recently. Ronald has lived the batchelor life in an attractive art deco block of flats in Bow for forty years and it is furnished as if he had only just moved in, yet the piles of discarded sketches which litter the floor of his quiet studio at the rear of the building more than testify to his prodigious output in this time.

I discovered Ronald Morgan’s work through his painting of a Salvation Army band standing in the rain at the junction of Parnell and Tredegar Rd in Tower Hamlets’ art collection and I was fascinated to discover that he is a long time resident of the borough, even though leads a quiet life devoted to painting and keeps a resolutely low profile in the East End.

“I was born in 1936 near Cannock in Staffordshire. When I was about twelve my parents bought me some watercolours and I dabbled about in an amateurish way. When I was fifteen, I went to Walsall School of Art and I was there doing graphic design, we called it ‘commercial art’ in those days. I left the School at eighteen and couldn’t get a job as a graphic designer, so I had to work in an industrial drawing office, drawing machinery, that sort of thing. I was a junior draftsman.

The principal of the School of Art invited me to join the Walsall Society of Artists of which he was the secretary, so I became a junior member when I was eighteen. I mentioned to him one day that I was going to submit some work to the Royal Academy Summer Show. ‘My boy, you’ll be wasting your time and money,’ he informed me, ‘I am a graduate of the Royal College of Art and a close friend of Henry Moore – he was the best man at my wedding – and I’ve been submitting pictures for forty years, but never had one accepted.’ What an idiot! Anyway, I was undaunted so I sent in two drawings and they were both accepted, and one got shown in the exhibition. When he found this out, he was so annoyed. Instead of saying, ‘Congratulations!’ he didn’t speak to me again for a whole year, and next year I sent in three pictures and got two in the show. I was showing there every year after that.

After working in the drawing office, I got a job in a local government planning department – doing illustrations, that sort of work. As I was exhibiting so many times in London, coming down by train all the time, I thought, ‘I might as well live there.’ So I applied for several jobs and eventually I got one working for the London Borough of Haringey. The chap in charge saw my watercolours and said, ‘Could you do something like that for us?’ So I said, ‘Yes, certainly,’ and I moved down here. I got digs in Hornsey and, after four years, I moved to Hammersmith Council. It was a similar sort of thing, the boss saw my work and said, ‘We’d like you to do some work like that for us.’

All these years, I was painting in every available moment of my own time. I paint on location, so I’d go out with my easel and I took trips abroad around Europe. Now it is more difficult because I am eighty-one, and carrying an easel and paint box around is quite heavy. I still work very hard and I’d never give it up, even though I feel very tired sometimes. I do a lot of walking though and I still paint out of doors, I was painting the other week in Richmond by the Thames. Turner painted there, he was a great painter – one of my favourites.

I won quite a few awards including the Lord Mayor’s Art Award in 1974, for a street scene in Islington. It is nice to sell pictures – it gives you confidence, you know. I sell on the internet occasionally through the Royal Society of British Artists. I sold a picture of Venice to a woman in Hong Kong a few weeks ago!

From Hammersmith, I applied for a job at the drawing office in Tower Hamlets when the Town Hall  was here in Bow. I became the senior draftsman and I thought, ‘I’d love to live in the East End.’ I like the East End, it has a nice feel to it. So I came and painted a lot in the streets around here. I painted several Salvation Army bands including one in Whitechapel, where it all started. I have painted kids playing football in the street in the East End. I painted all along the Regent’s Canal and the River Lea. I was painting down by the River Lea twenty years ago on a very windy day. A gust of wind almost blew my easel over and I grabbed hold of it, but my picture had gone – into the river – three hours work wasted! It just floated away.

I have lived in this flat for about forty years. I paint full time now, every day of the week. I just love painting streets, I put my easel up and paint. When you see a subject under certain lighting conditions – bright light or evening light – it’s so exciting. I have even got people to pose for me in the street. I say, ‘Madame or Sir, could you stand there for about ten minutes while I paint you?’ and they’ve done it.

The worst thing is when someone gets out of their Porsche with a cigar and says, ‘I’d love to buy your painting.’ This happened to me at Putney, the man said, ‘I live just down the road and I’ve always wanted a picture of this stretch of the river.’ So I said, ‘As a favour, you can have it unframed for £300.’ He said, ‘£300 for a small painting like that!’ I wanted to say, ‘If you can afford a Porsche, you can afford three hundred quid for a painting.’

I have lived in London for about fifty years and I have seen a tremendous amount of change. When I first came, there were all these lovely old buildings. They were ancient and falling apart some of them but marvellous to paint, whereas now they have been replaced by modern developments which are not so attractive. I still enjoy the East End and I love to paint the river, I think I have painted whole of this end of the river right down to the coast.”

Salvation Army Band at the junction of Parnell and Tredegar Rd in Bow, 1978. Painted from sketches made a few years earlier, before the houses were demolished.

Painting copyright © Ronald Morgan

Reproduced courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives

Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular

John Allin, Artist

Pearl Binder, Artist

Roland Collins, Artist

Anthony Eyton, Artist

Doreen Fletcher, Artist

Barnett Freedman, Artist

Elwin Hawthorn, Artist

Rose Henriques, Artist

Dan Jones,  Artist

Leon Kossoff, Artist

Jock McFadyen, Artist

Cyril Mann, Artist

Peri Parkes, Artist

Henry Silk, Artist

Albert Turpin, Artist

Click here to preorder a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR for £25

Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. Click here to preorder your copy

Bryant & May Factory, Bow

The Oscroft family ran a cycle shop opposite the church in Bow and lived nearby. As the only daughter, Grace Oscroft (1903-72) was expected to keep house for her parents and three brothers upon leaving school at fourteen.

Two of Grace’s brothers were considered to have artistic talent and when, in her early twenties, she accompanied her younger brother John to classes at Bow & Bromley Institute, tutor John Cooper recognised her natural ability.

In later years, John Oscroft recalled that his sister Grace always had an inclination to draw but worked on pictures infrequently. Fellow artist Cecil Osborne offered a simple explanation for this, recalling that Grace would only ever “bring along a painting from time to time” and complained that her domestic duties granted her little opportunity for creative work.

As a consequence, Grace’s street scenes were of locations around Bow and she specialised in rooftop pictures that she could paint from the bedroom windows of the family home. In those days, Bow was heavily industrialised and John recalled that ‘the only blade of grass being in the churchyard.” Grace painted the factories and foundries that surrounded her. The most notable of these was the huge red brick Bryant & May factory that dominated Bow and it is impossible that Grace was unaware of the matchgirls’ 1888 strike which challenged the exploitative working conditions and suffering they endured from working with phosphorus

Although John did not show any pictures, remarkably Grace had five paintings in the East London Art Club exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1928 and, to further this success, her picture Garden in Bow was hung at the Tate Gallery the following year. The Evening Standard ran an article featuring Grace entitled, ‘East End Shopgirl Artists’ and the Westminster Gazette reported “Miss Oscroft, who in every day life sells bicycle parts, was surprised when she heard that Sir Joseph Duveen had bought her painting for £5 5s.” – although John denied Grace ever served in the cycle shop in Bow.

“It was my first original effort and I am greatly pleased. Mr Cooper had advised me to try something on my own,” declared Grace with understated pride. Subsequently, she contributed paintings to the East London Group shows at the Lefevere Galleries in 1930, 1931 and 1932. As evidence of Grace’s self-assurance and articulacy as an artist, Walter Steggles remembered her earning “sixpence a week pocket money by lecturing on pictures”

In 1935, the Oscrofts took over another cycle business in New Southgate. Grace lived independently there above the shop and although the family’s house in Bow was destroyed in the blitz, fortunately no-one was at home at the time.

After her brothers married and left home, Grace committed to caring for her mother who suffered with rheumatism. After the death of her mother, she took a variety of employment to support herself, as housekeeper to a doctor, despatch clerk at the Co-operative store in Edmonton and then in a glove factory. Grace remained single throughout her life, confessing in 1954, “I only ever had one sweetheart, but he was taken from me,” referring to Elwin Hawthorne who married Lilian Leahy.

She died in St Joseph’s Hospice, Hackney in 1972 and her death certificate recorded her occupation as ‘warehouse clerk (retired),’ yet the authority and accomplishment of Grace Oscroft’s few works testify to a significant artistic talent that might have discovered fuller expression in different circumstances.

Grace Oscroft (bottom left), 1929

St Clement’s Hospital, Bow

Old Houses, Bow

The same view today

Paintings copyright © Estate of Grace Oscroft

With grateful thanks to David Buckman for the use of his research

Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular

John Allin, Artist

Pearl Binder, Artist

Roland Collins, Artist

Anthony Eyton, Artist

Doreen Fletcher, Artist

Barnett Freedman, Artist

Elwin Hawthorn, Artist

Rose Henriques, Artist

Dan Jones,  Artist

Leon Kossoff, Artist

Jock McFadyen, Artist

Cyril Mann, Artist

Ronald Morgan, Artist

Peri Parkes, Artist

Henry Silk, Artist

Albert Turpin, Artist