Please make an entry in your 2019 diary to join us at the Private View of Doreen Fletcher’s RETROSPECTIVE at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, on 24th January from 6pm. All are welcome.

This will be a big celebration for the East End and we are seeking a local brewer or distiller to sponsor the event by providing complimentary drinks. If you can help, please get in touch.

I am IN CONVERSATION WITH DOREEN FLETCHER on Wednesday 30th January 7pm at Nunnery Gallery, showing the paintings and telling the stories. Click here for tickets

Salmon Lane in the Rain, Bow, 1987

“It seemed to rain a lot in the eighties. I used to go to Salmon Lane most days since there was a range of shops including a post office, a baker, an off-licence, a butcher, a greengrocers, a dry-cleaner, a laundrette, fruit and veg stall, a pub and two Chinese restaurants – one of which was world famous.

The Good Friends often had Rolls Royces parked outside. I am told Sean Connery, Barbara Streisand and Groucho Marx dined there. Known as The Local Friends, the other Chinese – run by the same family, the Cheungs – was a take-away and it is in my painting. This was excellent so I was never tempted to go to the restaurant, which was not only expensive but the interior was too austere for my taste.”

Corner Shop, Canning Town, 1994

“One Saturday afternoon in June 1991, I visiting an unrewarding jumble sale on the Aberfeldy estate in Poplar. So I decided to explore Canning Town on the other side of the River Lea, ‘the child of the Victoria Docks’ as Dickens termed it.

I followed a black and white collie down him down a street that had been cleared, awaiting redevelopment. The dog turned a corner and had vanished by the time I caught up but I assume he went into the newsagents’ open door. Smelling of firelighters and paraffin, it recalled the corner shops of my childhood in the Potteries,.

This image stayed in my mind so I returned in autumn to buy some sweets in order to view the interior and make some quick sketches, but I was already too late. It was boarded up and I never found out if the dog had gone into the shop.”

Doreen has produced a limited edition print of the Corner Shop available here

Laundrette, Ben Jonson Rd, 2003

“Between 1983 and 1990, when I bought a washing machine, I made the fortnightly trek to the launderette in Salmon Lane. I never had time to sit down and wait for the cycle to run through, so I sometimes paid for the luxury of a service wash. Usually this was when I visited my parents in Stoke.

Two ladies worked in the laundrette. One was more meticulous in her folding technique and I learned to go when she was on duty. Every time I dashed in and out, there was constant chit-chat and the air was blue with the mix of cigarette smoke and steam from the machines. Lil, the good folder, always had a ciggie dangling from the corner of her mouth although I never found any ash on my clothes.

For years I thought about doing a painting, but by the time I got round to it the launderette in Salmon Lane had a face-lift and lost its character. The ladies had retired and the smoky atmosphere had evaporated thanks to red ‘No Smoking’ signs. Then, on a Sunday morning foray to Ben Jonson Road to buy rolls from Wall’s bakery, I spied a couple of legs sticking out from a launderette situated in a parade of shops. I had my subject at last!”

Commercial Rd in the Snow, Limehouse, 2003

“Snow is rare in London and you need to be quick to capture the magic before it turns to slush. When snow fell in late February one year, I was out of the door by eight to survey the crisp, clean landscape. I wandered down the canal until I reached Limehouse Basin but nothing caught my attention. I decided to circle back through the empty streets and I came across this scene at the top of Rotherhithe Tunnel Approach. The sky was a brilliant blue and the snow had transformed the sooty drabness of the Georgian terraced houses to their former elegance.”

Fishmongers, Commercial Rd, Limehouse, 2003

“One clear autumn afternoon, as I was leaving Limehouse Station, I was struck by the sight of the derelict shops in Commercial Rd. I realised this was the site of one of my paintings from thirteen years earlier. I was astonished to find the same parade of shops still standing almost as they were when I depicted them. Back when I painted Brothers the Fishmongers, their sign was still visible and although the building next door was boarded up, the parade of shops was more or less intact. Over several years, squatters moved in and set up a community, making use of the empty space.

I recall painting ‘Fishmongers, Commercial Road’ very clearly because I completed it before I packed away my paints in 2003. I had been teaching part-time for twelve years on special needs and vocational art & design courses. By then, my paintings were no longer shown and, in the prevailing trend, it was difficult to get exposure for my work. When I was offered a full-time post, I decided to accept since I am good at organisation and I enjoyed working with others after so many years alone in my studio.

Two new paintings resulted from my return to Commercial Rd after thirteen years. Both contain the same intense blue sky as ‘Fishmongers,’ a mixture of cerulean and cobalt that you see occasionally in the East End on a fine day. Last year, the squatters were evicted, the parade of buildings was demolished and the site is now a heap of rubble.”

Commercial Rd, 2017

Condemned Shops, 2017

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF DOREEN FLETCHER’S BOOK FOR £20

Somehow, it came as no surprise to discover that he had been here. I always thought of Charlie Chaplin as the one who carried a certain culture of the penniless, the ragged and the downtrodden from Europe across the Atlantic, translating it into an infinite capacity for hope, humour and resourcefulness in America. For centuries, Spitalfields has offered a refuge to the homeless and the dispossessed, so it makes sense that the most famous tramp of all time should have known this place.

Vivian Betts who grew up in The Primrose in Bishopsgate gave me handful of playbills that had been in the pub as long as she remembered and which she took with her when they left before the building was demolished in 1974. These bills were for the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties in Commercial St. Opening in 1864, this vast two thousand seater theatre with a bar capacity of another thousand must have once presented a dramatic counterpoint to the church on the other side of the Spitalfields Market. Yet in the nineteenth century, it was one among many theatres in the immediate vicinity, in the days when the East End could match the West End for theatre and night life.

The ten-year-old Chaplin performed here as one of The Eight Lancashire Lads, a juvenile clog dance troupe, on Tuesday 24th October 1899 as part of the First Anniversary Benefit Performance, celebrating the reopening of the theatre a year earlier, after a fire that had destroyed it in 1896.

Before he died, Chaplin’s alcoholic father signed up his son at the age of eight, in November 1898, with his friend William Jackson who managed The Eight Lancashire Lads, in return for the boy’s board and lodgings and a payment of half a crown a week to Chaplin’s mother Hannah. The engagement took Chaplin away from his pitiful London childhood and from his mother who had struggled to support him and his elder brother Sydney on her own, existing at the edge of mental illness while moving the family in and out of a succession of rented rooms until her younger son ended up in the workhouse at seven.

“After practising for eight weeks, I was eligible to dance with the troupe. But now that I was past eight years old, I had lost my assurance and confronting the audience for the first time gave me stage fright. I could hardly move my legs. It was weeks before I could do a solo dance as the rest of them did.” Chaplin wrote of joining The Eight Lancashire Lads with whom he made his debut in Babes in the Wood, on Boxing Day 1898 at the Theatre Royal, Manchester.”My memory of this period goes in and out of focus,” he admitted later, “The outstanding impression was of a quagmire of miserable circumstances.”

Yet Chaplin’s experience touring Britain when Music Hall was at its peak of popularity proved both a great adventure and an unparalleled schooling in the method, technique and discipline that every performer requires to hold an audience. ”Audiences like The Eight Lancashire Lads because, as Mr Jackson said, we were so unlike theatrical children. It was his boast that we never wore grease paint and our rosy cheeks were natural. If some of us looked a little pale before going on, he would tell us to pinch our cheeks,” Chaplin recalled,”But in London, after working two or three Music Halls a night, we would occasionally forget and look a little weary and bored as we stood on the stage, until we caught sight of Mr Jackson in the wings, grinning emphatically and pointing to his face, which had an electrifying effect of making us break into sparkling grins.”

The handbills that Vivian Betts gave me for the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties date from 1900 and, significantly, one contains the announcement of Edisonograph Animated Pictures as part of the programme, advertising the new medium in which Chaplin was to become pre-eminent and that would eventually eclipse Music Hall itself.

As soon as he had mastered the dance act, Chaplin was impatient to move on to solo comedy. “I was not particularly enamoured with being just a clog dancer in a troupe of eight lads. Like the rest of them I was ambitious to do a single act, not only because it meant more money but because I instinctively felt it would be more gratifying than just dancing,” he wrote later of his precocious ten-year-old self, “I would like to have been a boy comedian – but that would have required nerve, to stand on the stage alone.”

It was in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1907 that the seventeen-year-old Chaplin made his solo comedy debut, at a Music Hall in the Cambridge Heath Rd. “I had obtained a trial week without pay at the Foresters’ Music Hall situated off the Mile End Rd in the centre of the Jewish quarter. My hopes and dreams depended on that trial week,” he declared. Yet the young Chaplin made a spectacular misjudgement. “At the time, Jewish comedians were all the rage in London, so I thought I would hide my youth under whiskers. I invested in musical arrangements for songs and funny dialogue taken from an American joke book, Madison’s Budget.” Chaplin was foolishly unaware that a Jewish satire might not play in the East End in front of a Jewish audience. “Although I was innocent of it, my comedy was most anti-Semitic and my jokes were not only old ones but very poor, like my Jewish accent.”

The disastrous consequences of Chaplin’s error in Whitechapel were to haunt him for the rest of his career. “After the first couple of jokes, the audience started throwing coins and orange peel and stamping their feet and booing. At first, I was not conscious of what was going on. Then the horror of it filtered into my mind. When I came off stage, I went straight to my dressing room, took off my make-up, left the theatre and never returned. I did my best to erase the night’s horror from my mind, but it left an indelible mark on my confidence,” he concluded in hindsight, conceding, “The ghastly experience taught me to see myself in a truer light.”

In 1908, Chaplin signed with Fred Karno’s comedy company in which he quickly became a rising star and, touring to America in 1913, he was talent spotted by the Keystone Film Studios and offered a contract at twenty-four years old for $150 a week. “What had happened? It seemed the world had suddenly changed, had taken me into its fond embrace and adopted me,” he wrote in astonishment and relief at his change of  fortune in a life that had previously comprised only struggle.

Now I shall always think of the ten-year-old Chaplin when I walk down Commercial St, on his way to the Cambridge Theatre of Varieties, pinching his sallow cheeks to make a show of good cheer and with his whole life in motion pictures awaiting him.

At the northern end of Commercial St is the site of The Theatre, the first purpose-built theatre, where William Shakespeare performed and his early plays were staged. At the southern end of Commercial St is the site of the Goodman’s Fields Theatre, where David Garrick made his debut in Richard III and initiated the Shakespeare revival. And in middle was the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties, where Charlie Chaplin played. Most that pass down it may be unaware, yet the line of Commercial St traces a major trajectory through our culture.

Charlie Chaplin performed with The Eight Yorkshire Lads at the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties in Commercial St on Tuesday 24th October 1899

The Godfrey & Phillips cigarette factory replaced the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties in 1936

The entrance of the Godfrey & Phillips building echoes the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties

Foresters Music Hall, 95 Cambridge Heath Rd – where Charlie Chaplin gave his disastrous first solo comedy performance in 1907 – demolished in 1965

My grateful thanks to David Robinson, Chaplin’s biographer, for his assistance with this article.

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Shakespeare in Spitalfields

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Simon Carter, Keeper of Collections at St Paul’s

In a hidden chamber within the roof of St Paul’s sits Christopher Wren’s 1:25 model of the cathedral, looking for all the world like the largest jelly mould you ever saw. When Charles II examined it in the Chapter House of old St Paul’s, he was so captivated by Wren’s imagination as manifest in this visionary prototype that he awarded him the job of constructing the new cathedral.

More than three hundred years later, Wren’s model still works its magic upon the spectator, as I discovered last week when I was granted the rare privilege of climbing inside to glimpse the view that held the King spellbound. While there is an austere splendour to the exterior of the model, I discovered the interior contains a heart-stopping visual device which was surely the coup that persuaded Charles II of Wren’s genius.

Yet when I entered the chamber in the triforium at St Paul’s to view the vast wooden model, I had no idea of the surprise that awaited me inside. Almost all the paint has gone from the exterior now, giving the dark wooden model the look of an absurdly-outsized piece of furniture but, originally, it was stone-coloured with a grey roof to represent the lead.

At once, you are aware of significant differences between this prototype and the cathedral that Wren built. To put it bluntly, the model looks like a dog’s dinner of pieces of Roman architecture, with a vast portico stuck on the front of the dome of St Peter’s in the manner of those neo-Georgian porches on Barratt Houses. Imagine a fervent hobbyist chopping up models of relics of classical antiquity and rearranging them, and this is the result. It is unlikely that this design would even have stood up if it had been built, so fanciful is the conception. Yet the long process of designing a viable structure, once he had been given instruction by Charles II, permitted Wren to reconcile all the architectural elements into the satisfying whole that we know today.

I had been tempted to visit the cathedral by an invitation to go inside the model but – studying it – I could not imagine how that could be possible. I could not see a way in. ’Perhaps one end has hinges and Charles II crawled in on his hands and knees like a child entering a Wendy House?,’ I was thinking, when Simon Carter, Keeper of Collections opened a door in the plinth and disappeared inside, gesturing me to follow. In blind faith, I dipped my head and walked inside.

When I stood up, I was beneath the dome with the floor of the cathedral at my chest height. There was just room for two people to stand together and I imagined the unexpected moment of intimacy between the Monarch and his architect, yet I believe Wren was quietly confident because he had a trick up his sleeve. From the inside, the drama of the architecture is palpable, with intersecting spaces leading off in different directions, and – as your eyes accustom to the gloom – you grow aware of the myriad refractions of light within this intricately-imagined interior.

Just as Wren directed Charles II, Simon Carter told me to walk to the far end of the model and sit on the bench placed there to bring my eye level down to the point of view of someone entering through the great west door. Then Simon left me there inside, just as I believe Wren left Charles II within the model, to appreciate the full effect.

I have no doubt the King was thrilled by this immersive experience, which quickly takes on a convincing reality of its own once you are alone. Charles II discovered himself confronted by a glorious vision of the future in which he was responsible for the first and greatest classically-designed church in this country, with the largest dome ever built. Such is the nature of the consciousness-filling reverie induced by sitting inside the model that the outside world recedes entirely.

How astonishing, once you have accustomed to the scale of the model, when a giant face appears filling the east window. I could not resist a gasp of wonder when I saw it and neither – I suggest – could Charles II when Christopher Wren’s smiling face appeared, grinning at him from the opposite end of the nave, apparently enlarged to twenty-five times its human scale.

In these unforgettable circumstances, the King could not avoid the realisation that Wren was a colossus among architects and – unquestionably – the man for the job of building the new St Paul’s Cathedral. The model had worked its spell.

Behold, the largest jelly mould in the world!

The belfry that was never built

The single portico that was replaced by a two storey version

Just a few fragments of paintwork remain upon the exterior

Original paintwork can be seen inside the model

Charles II’s point of view from inside the model

‘How astonishing, once you have accustomed to the scale of the model, when a giant face appears filling the east window.’

Click here to book for a tour of the Triforium at St Paul’s Cathedral

Click here for events commemorating the 350th Anniversary of the Great Fire

You may like to read my other stories of St Paul’s

Maurice Sills, Cathedral Treasure

The Broderers of St Paul’s

Relics of Old St Paul’s in New St Paul’s

I have published many pictures of renovations of old houses in Spitalfields but David O’Mara‘s candid photography reveals the other side of these stories, recording the back-breaking labour and human toil that is expended upon these endeavours

“For the past ten years I have worked as a painter & decorator in London, both as a means of surviving and also funding my artistic practice – but the roles of artist & decorator are not always easily reconciled, time demands and budgets often lead to a conflict of interests.

My work is described as ‘restoration,’ though I began to question the truth of this description. From the beginning, you strip back the layers of previous occupants. Cupboards, doors and walls that were later additions are all removed. At every turn and removal you notice the evidence of previous lives, all to be erased and replaced with freshly painted blank surfaces – everything is pared back to the tabula rasa.

This has a resonance with my own experience: the daily repetition of tasks erodes memory, time is distilled into but a few recollections. I started photographing my working life as a way of recording the disappearing history of the houses and also to combat the erosion of memory through the repetition of work.” – David O’Mara

Photographs copyright © David O’Mara

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A Renovation in Fournier St

Before & After in Fournier St

All Change At 15 & 17 Fournier St

Dave Thompson, Joiner

Jim Howett, Designer

A number forty bus took me from Aldgate to the House of Dreams and it only took half an hour to arrive at the front door. Once across the threshold, an alternative cosmos of colour and eye-popping surreal fantasy awaits, transporting you far from the London rain.

Perhaps one of the happiest people I have met, Stephen Wright delights to share the strange but joyous world of his personal subconscious, peopled with a universe of outlandish celestial beings – all made tangible within the interior of a modest Victorian terrace.

For this ever-growing endeavour is no random installation, but an endearingly intimate diary of Stephen’s emotional and spiritual life in sculptural form – as he was eager to explain when I dropped by last week.

“There is no plan – it’s just evolving, like life itself! My house is like a baby that needs constant feeding. It says, ‘Mama, I need more food!’ and I say, ‘Oh, give me a break.’

It began as a response to a series of programmes by Jarvis Cocker about ‘Outsider Art.’ When I saw those, I thought, ‘I’ve found my family, I’ve found where I fit in.’ So I visited a lot of Outsider Artists in France, they were mostly elderly, and then I began work on my House of Dreams in 1999/2000.

At first it was purely decorative, but then it became a response to the death of my partner Donald, and when – two years into it – both my parents died, I found that difficult to deal with. So my work changed and it became a way of grieving and dealing with loss – because I didn’t have a family this became my way of life. I want to leave something behind. Since then I met Michael, ten years ago, and he’s been very supportive. It’s important to have someone on your side.

I’m from the North and I found it difficult to put down roots in London, so I live in this safe house behind a high wall with a gate where I feel free to be me. All the objects in my house carry a meaning or memory for me and many are from places I consider sacred, like Cornwall, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid & Amsterdam.

The design has a South American style because I’m in touch with spirits from a former life when I was a grave digger in Oaxaca. I’ve been to Mexico to visit the place where I was born.

I’m always amazed that anybody wants to come to my House of Dreams but I love it. People come round all the time to visit and I’ve made a living out of being me. I get up and I’m me. I’m me everyday!”

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Viscountess Boudica’s Drawings

If any readers are feeling under the weather and in need of a tonic in these grim January days, look no further than Allen & Hanburys’ 1938 catalogue of Surgical Instruments & Appliances (courtesy of Rupert Blanchard of Styling & Salvage). Founded in 1715 in Plough Court, Lombard St by Silvanus Bevan, Allen & Hanburys moved to Bethnal Green in 1874 where they built a factory to manufacture surgical appliances and operating tables – producing an unparalleled array of medical equipment, until they were bought by Glaxo in 1958 and closed in the nineteen sixties. Today the factory still stands, incorporated into a new housing development.

Instrument Fitting

Machine Shop & Operation Table Erection

Tinsmiths’ Shop

Sheet Metal & Furniture Shops

Machine Shop

Location of Allen & Hanburys factory in Bethnal Green

You may also like to take a look at these other magnificent catalogues

Crowden & Keeves Hardware

Nicholls & Clarke’s Hardware

Warehouses in Blossom St drawn by Lucinda Rogers

In the opening sequence of MARY POPPINS RETURNS, the cheery lamplighter cycles round old London at dusk lighting up the lamps, including Blossom St in Norton Folgate, Spitalfields – an atmospheric example of the capital’s surviving nineteenth century streetscape. Too bad that British Land are set on demolishing most of it this year and replacing it with a hideous corporate plaza, granted permission in 2015 by the former Mayor of London Boris Johnson who employed his autocratic power in overturning Tower Hamlets Council’s rejection of the scheme. Before long, the scene in MARY POPPINS RETURNS will exist as a poignant record and reminder of the loss of the medieval liberty of Norton Folgate.

At this moment, we face a slew of exploitative new developments that threaten East End heritage without delivering significant benefits to the people of East London, so I thought I should outline some to you in order that we may prepare ourselves for the fights which are in store.

In 2016, we started a campaign with the Victorian Society to save The Still & Star in Aldgate, the City of London’s last remaining slum pub, and were successful in winning Asset of Community Value status for it. This was the first time the Corporation had granted an ACV and, in spite of an appeal by the developers to have this removed, it was upheld by the City. Now the developers have submitted an application for demolition of the pub for the sake of their vast corporate office block and they intend to maintain the ACV by reconstructing The Still & Star nearby using a surreal, Alice-in-Wonderland-style assemblage of casts of the exterior of the old building in green concrete. Readers are encouraged to register objections on the City of London planning website by clicking here.

We have learnt that Raycliff, the developer who bought The Whitechapel Bell Foundry has just submitted a planning application to Tower Hamlets Council seeking permission for change of use from foundry to bell-themed boutique hotel. We support the UK Historic Building Preservation Trust (founded by HRH The Prince of Wales) and Factum Foundation’s joint scheme to reopen the foundry as a state of the art operation for bells and art casting – marrying old and new technology, and with a strong element of apprenticeships and training. It will take a few weeks for Raycliff’s application to be processed by the Council planning department and became public. Once this happens, we will advise readers of the most effective way to object.

Meanwhile, we plan to stage a legal challenge to the Council’s decision last September granting Crest Nicholson permission to dig up the four hundred year old Bethnal Green Mulberry tree in the grounds of the former London Chest Hospital. We believe that the Council’s interpretation of the planning guidelines revised last July to extend further protection to Veteran & Ancient Trees, which can only be sacrificed in ‘wholly exceptional circumstances’ is questionable. We also consider it to be a poor development with too little social housing that will do irreparable damage to the Victoria Park Conservation Area. Currently the application is with the Mayor of London’s office and only when the decision is ratified can it be challenged.

We will be sure to keep you posted of this and other developments on the horizon.

‘A kind of authenticity’ – facadism to come in Norton Folgate according to British Land. The developer’s image is tactfully cropped at the top to conceal the full height.

The Still & Star, 1951 (Courtesy Heritage Assets/The National Brewery Centre)

The office block that is proposed to replace The Still & Star

Norman Foster’s proposal for a tower at the corner of Commercial St & Whitechapel High St, facading the current building. Again, the developer’s image is tactfully cropped at the top to conceal the full height. Fortunately, Historic England have objected to this monster in a Conservation Area, so it is unlikely to go ahead.

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On the Sunday before the opening of Doreen Fletcher’s RETROSPECTIVE next week, I thought I you would show you a few of Doreen’s paintings accompanied by the stories in her own words.

All are welcome at the Private View of Doreen Fletcher’s RETROSPECTIVE at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, on Thursday 24th January from 6pm. The exhibition runs until 24th March.

I am IN CONVERSATION WITH DOREEN FLETCHER on Wednesday 30th January 7pm at Nunnery Gallery, showing the paintings and telling the stories. Click here for tickets

Sheldon’s Dress Shop, Knutton, 1982

“It is my mother who is looking in the window of Sheldon’s hairdressers and dress shop. She went once a week to have her hair ‘set’. At that time, she was ten years younger than I am now but considered herself old at fifty-five and dressed accordingly. When I was a child, we used to take a walk each Sunday afternoon to places such as Knutton, a former mining village on the outskirts of Newcastle-under-Lyme. Even in such a small place, a shop like Sheldon’s could support its proprietors.”

Paddington Station at Night, 1992

“Between 1976 and 1983, when I moved to the East End, I lived in Paddington. Looking at this painting now, I am transported once more into that seventies world of tawdry glamour, medium priced hotels and run-down bedsits. The streets around the underground and mainline station all had a slightly seedy quality.”

Hairdresser, Ben Jonson Rd, 2001

“For my thirteenth birthday I was given a hair-do as a rite of passage. It was a horrifying experience and the chemical sprays that were applied to my hair resulted in a life-long aversion to the hairdresser. It was n0t just the discomfort, it was the atmosphere and ambience, and the ordeal of staring into a mirror for half an hour. This salon was part of a twenties parade of shops in Ben Jonson Rd that also contained the launderette I painted. It has been swept away.”

Ice Cream Van, Poplar, 1998

“One of the best remembered pleasures of my childhood was to hear the tinkling tune of the ice cream man that would have me running out into the street. My drawing of this parked van is waiting for the school exodus on the corner of Rhodeswell Rd and Dora St on the Lockesley Estate, Poplar.

Recently some friends visited with their five-year-old granddaughter and, at the sound of the jingle, her eyes lit up. I took her to buy an ice cream and watched with pleasure as she enjoyed the same focused delight in its consumption as I experienced decades before.”

Woodstock Terrace, Poplar, 2002

“When I was teaching at Tower Hamlets College in the nineties, I often used to walk to Chrisp St Market during my lunch break. I liked best taking the quiet road along Poplar High Street past St Matthias Church and down Woodstock Terrace. The most interesting building in the terrace was sandwiched between the end house and the betting shop on the corner of Poplar High St. It looked as if it might once have been a halt for travellers with horses, a staging post perhaps. In fact this building had been a stable and was now used as a haulage yard.

A little while after I completed my coloured pencil drawing, a ‘Dangerous Structure, Keep Off’ notice appeared. Then posters appeared heralding a campaign to save the ‘stables’  but in 2006 a demolition crew moved in and this characterful piece of Victorian architecture vanished into a pile of rubble.”

Roundabout, Turners Rd, Bow, 1990

“I started this drawing of Turners Rd as a record of the disappearance of the corner building in my painting ‘Turners Rd.’  We are looking at piecemeal demolition taking place in order to make way for the reconstruction of Turners Rd in its entirety during the nineties. Perhaps the elegant four storey houses to the rear of the drawing should have been renovated? Yet the intention was honourable – to build affordable housing for those unable to pay high private rents or get a mortgage, many of whom had large families.”

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF DOREEN FLETCHER’S BOOK FOR £20

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At the opening of Doreen Fletcher’s RETROSPECTIVE, I publish this interview in which Doreen tells her story in her own words.

All are welcome tonight at the Private View of Doreen Fletcher’s RETROSPECTIVE at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, Thursday 24th January from 6pm. The exhibition runs until 24th March.

I am IN CONVERSATION WITH DOREEN FLETCHER on Wednesday 30th January 7pm at Nunnery Gallery, showing the paintings and telling the stories. Click here for tickets

Portrait of Doreen Fletcher in her studio by Stuart Freedman

Doreen Fletcher - Looking back, I think I was attracted to painting even from the age of four or five. I loved colour and my dad used to take me to the local toy shop where I always insisted on the best quality paints. I was an only child, born into a working class family, and my parents were – as you might say these days – semi-literate. Consequently, from the age of about eight years old, I took responsibility for helping them out in dealing with officialdom, not unlike  – I suppose – immigrant children in the East End today whose parents have limited English.

My mum and dad were very loving, and keen for me to have the opportunities they had missed. When I was five, I was bought a set of encyclopaedias from a salesman selling door-to-door on the never-never. It had colour reproductions of famous paintings such as Constable’s  ‘The Hay Wain’ by Constable and Turner’s ‘The Fighting Téméraire’ and I thought they were wonderful.

I passed my eleven-plus exam but I had a very difficult time at grammar school because – although I was clever and always in the top six of the top stream – I came from the wrong side of the tracks. I felt I had to pretend I was from somewhere else, because most of the pupils came from professional middle-class families. Consequently, I could not invite school friends to our tiny terraced home. I did not speak with the right accent, have the social ease of the other children or possess their cultural knowledge.

The art room was a refuge for me because there I could express myself fluently under the expert tutelage of the art teacher Mr Hanford. He had trained at the Royal Academy School and was probably the only teacher of any influence I ever listened to. I loved Fridays when there was a two hour after-school art club. It was at one of these sessions that Mr Hanford advised against using black paint straight from the tube. To this day, I mix ultramarine and burnt umber for a warm black and raw umber and indigo for a cool black.

The Gentle Author - What work did your parents do?

Doreen Fletcher – Alice, my mother, worked in a munitions factory during the war and then became a domestic servant afterwards. It gave her ideas about not putting the newspaper or ketchup bottle on the table and she adopted ‘healthy eating,’ much to my irritation. She was also particular about keeping the front step, windows and net curtains clean. Colin, my dad, started off as a farm worker. He wanted to be a vet but due to illness he missed a year’s education at seven years old which meant that he left school hardly able to read or write.

After I was born, we moved from the village of Barlaston to Newcastle-Under-Lyme because my dad could earn more money in the town. In the late fifties, when the government erected pylons across the nation, he worked on the construction of these and later he found employment laying pipes for North Sea Gas. When my dad was fifty-seven, he had a brain haemorrhage at work, probably due at least in part to the vibrations of the pneumatic drill. He did not work again after that.

The Gentle Author - What was the first landscape that you knew?

Doreen Fletcher – It was composed of greys and browns – soot-streaked streets with sparrows and pigeons. I used to long for colour, for tinsel, for fairy lights and fairgrounds. Yet although I grew up in a two-up-two-down terrace in Stoke-on-Trent, every Sunday my parents took me on excursions by bus into the country, a different destination each time. This was rare at the time and I think it revealed their great sensitivity and care.

These trips were always accompanied by the purchase of a quarter pound of sweets and latterly, a brownie box camera that took tiny black and white photos. I liked going for long walks alone too. I was always looking and observing the variety of houses lining the streets I wandered through. Sometimes I roamed the countryside as well, walking along busy trunk roads. These days eyebrows might be raised, but there was nothing unusual in seeing unaccompanied children exploring back then. I loved my solitary walks.

The Gentle Author – What took you away from the Potteries?

Doreen Fletcher – I did not like living in a small town, it lacked cosmopolitanism. I hated the social constrictions and the pettiness I encountered. After A Levels, I decided I to study a subject that would earn me a living, so I enrolled on Bsc Sociology Course at North Staffordshire Polytechnic in Stoke. I have always been fascinated by other people’s lives, attitudes and behaviour.

However it proved a disastrous choice for me because the course dealt mostly with statistics and their interpretation. I did not even last two terms. So I went to work in a local tile factory – of which there were plenty in those days – where my job was sorting broken tiles. After six months I left, realising there was no future in it for me.

I knew my vocation was to be an artist. I spent a very happy year doing a foundation course in Newcastle-Under-Lyme. I felt at home there. I was comfortable and totally at ease in the chaotic atmosphere of the leaky portacabins that served as our studios. For the only time in my life, I did very little work. Instead I enjoyed making friends and formed a close relationship with a fellow student. Together we moved to London in 1972 where he attended Wimbledon School of Art and I worked as an art school model.

The Gentle Author - Did you apply to art school?

Doreen Fletcher – Yes, I applied to study at Croydon College. Even then, I was very independently minded and did not want a structured degree course where I might be expected to conform to a ‘house style’. At this point, I was painting quite a lot of self-portraits and still lifes.

One day in late 1973 I saw an exhibition of paintings of Mow Cop by Jack Simcock in Cork Street. Mow Cop was a hilltop village not far from my home. In Newcastle-under-Lyme, if I leaned out of my bedroom window at a dangerous angle, I could just see the Victorian folly on the summit of Mow Cop in the distance.

The houses were built out of Peak District sandstone and local millstone grit. The place was bleak and dour. I was captivated, deciding then that I wanted to be an urban landscape painter, recording my own environment.

The Gentle Author - Where did you live when you first came to London?

Doreen Fletcher – To begin with, I stayed around Wimbledon, then I spent seven years living in Paddington where my fascination with urban scenes escalated. Coming from a small town in the North, it was an exciting place to be. I was close to the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, Notting Hill Gate and Portobello Road. I started painting local landmarks, the Electric cinema and the Serpentine boathouse. Then I became interested in Underground stations at night, Bayswater and Paddington. This project continued when I moved to the East End.

The Gentle Author - What brought you to the East End?

Doreen Fletcher – At that time artists were attracted to live and work in the East End because of the cheap studio space that was available. It was easy to rent because the local population were moving out and and artists were happy to live in dilapidated accommodation if it gave them room to work. Before long, a mutually supportive community of artists developed around Bow, Stepney and Mile End.

The Gentle Author – How do you remember the East End then?

Doreen Fletcher – I noticed the skies first, open and dramatic as they advanced into Essex. There were corrugated fences everywhere, still bombsites where buddleia proliferated and a few prefabs inhabited by artists. There was an openness in the streets which has since gone, now every corner has been built up and every vacant space filled.

Yet the distinctive quality of light remains particular to this part of London, a luminescence generated by the proximity of the river. I loved it here because I had had enough of the West End. It felt to me as if I were returning home. Like Stoke, the East End was predominantly working class and also had once been an important centre for industry. Corner shops and tiny pubs proliferated among street markets.

The Gentle Author - Why did you start painting the East End?

Doreen Fletcher – I was excited visually by being somewhere new to me yet that also reminded me of where I grew up. In the Potteries, the town planners’ ethos was ‘If it’s old, let’s sweep it away’ – regardless of its cultural and historical significance. I saw the same fate awaiting the East End. The first painting I did here was the bus stop in Mile End in 1983 and then Rene’s Café next.

The Gentle Author – Was this your full time occupation?

Doreen Fletcher – I was working as an artists’ model in an art school. It was the most boring job you could imagine, but I stuck at it during term-time so I could have periods of full-time painting. I was able to keep myself by working three days a week as a model.

The Gentle Author - How central to your life were your paintings at that time?

Doreen Fletcher – Painting was the focal point of my life. My studio was a small room at the top of a run-down three-storey house in Clemence Street. It faced north so the light was good for painting.

I walked around the East End at different times of day and in different weathers. Eventually a particular scene imprinted itself on my mind that could have potential as a painting. I did thumbnail sketches and took a photograph. Once I had gathered this information, I made a detailed drawing as a basis for the painting. This might evolve over a period of months or even years, as the tension built up between my need to represent reality and the demands made by the painting itself. I always struggle to resolve a picture in an abstract way as well as portraying a subject. To this day,I follow this methodical process to make a painting.

I worked a minimum of twenty-eight hours a week, a target I still adhere to. I was determined not to become a Sunday painter.

The Gentle Author - Did you have ambition for this work?

Doreen Fletcher – Yes and I did have some limited success in the eighties showing within the borough, receiving a few grants and being accepted in open exhibitions such as the Whitechapel and the London Group. Companies bought work from time to time and local people appreciated my paintings, but there was little interest from any critics or commercial galleries.

The Gentle Author - Did you pursue other avenues to get recognition for your work?

Doreen Fletcher - Once a month, I used to send off slides in response to competitions and requests for submissions in Artists’ Newsletter. It was time-consuming and costly without reward.

The Gentle Author - How did you maintain morale through those twenty years?

Doreen Fletcher – I am an optimist and I remained optimistic up until the late nineties, when my work grew increasingly unfashionable due to the rise of conceptual art. It became more difficult to find any places where I could exhibit my work that would even accept representational painting. My work was simply out of fashion  My interest in the East End was waning too, as Canary Wharf transformed into a financial metropolis. I found I did not know what to paint any more. It felt as though a period of my life was coming to an end.

The Gentle Author - What made you feel that?

Doreen Fletcher - The East End was changing in a way that I could not understand or portray.  The new buildings were densely packed, destroying the distinctive sense of place and community. At first, I was interested in the construction – on the Isle of Dogs for instance – but once it was finished there were just too many people and too much architectural uniformity.

The Gentle Author - Were there changes in your life too?

Doreen Fletcher – I grew more involved in teaching art to youngsters with special needs, taking a part-time job in further education. I became more interested because I found I was good at it and my teaching work was appreciated. Gradually, I worked more in the administrative side of education, supporting other lecturers.

The Gentle Author - Did you find that satisfying?

Doreen Fletcher – Yes, I was earning a salary and contributing to the community. It was rewarding to be working with other people after my years of isolation. I enjoyed participating in the local community rather than being an observer.

The Gentle Author - Once you had completed nearly twenty years of painting the East End, what were your feelings about that series of work?

Doreen Fletcher – I did not realise that I was creating any kind of social document at the time because I was so absorbed with each painting, each one constituting such a lot of work. I had tried very hard to get my pictures out there and get them seen. I had hoped for some kind of recognition. I was never ambitious in terms of international recognition but I did feel that the work was good enough to be recognised more than it was.

The Gentle Author - Were you disappointed?

Doreen Fletcher – Yes. I remember the day I made a conscious decision to pack away my paints. It was November 16th 2004. I said, ‘That’s it! I am not going to paint again.’ I had no knowledge that I was undertaking a journey and enduring a struggle that other artists in the East End had already experienced. If I had been aware of the East London Group and their example, I might have had the heart to continue.

The Gentle Author - Do you think your project reached its culmination?

Doreen Fletcher – At the time I did not think so, I believed I had done all that work for nothing. But looking at the work again, I am very glad I did it. I think it was important that I recorded something which has now vanished.

The Gentle Author - Do you think you evolved as a painter by doing this work?

Doreen Fletcher – If I had I been taken on by a gallery, I might have developed more as a painter. Instead, I think I found a method of working that suited what I was doing and I stuck with it. Maybe with a bit more encouragement I would have done what I am doing now, since I have come back to painting.

The Gentle Author – How do you judge if one of your paintings is successful?

Doreen Fletcher – A painting is successful for me when I believe I have captured an essence of a place in a moment. A picture must sit comfortably and solidly on the canvas. My concern as an artist is with the pockets of life that we ignore.

Now I have started painting again and the series of pictures I have been working in the last two years are the result of having lived in East London for thirty-five years. I have been reflecting on how much remains from the early years and come to appreciate how those people who still live here have adapted to the changes.

In the early eighties, this part of London was run down and very few people chose to be here. Some streets and buildings remain as reminders of that era, left to compete with new concepts of London that have emerged since the closing of local industries and the rise of corporate culture. In representing their utilitarian quality, I envisage my subjects not only as reminders of the past but also as active survivors struggling positively to find a place in a world changing beyond recognition.

I am a painter concerned with environments that are or have been inhabited. I try to resolve the struggle between how I see things and with abstraction, where the pictorial demands of structure, organisation and balance hold sway. My work is carried out slowly and methodically using a range of techniques to communicate a place of quietude and serenity. The difference between the work I am making today and the work I was doing before is that now I am a participant, no longer only an observer of East End life.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF DOREEN FLETCHER’S BOOK FOR £20

William Smith & Charles Eaton – better known as Billy & Charley – were a couple of Thames mudlarks who sold artefacts they claimed to have found in the Thames in Shadwell and elsewhere. Yet this threadbare veil of fiction conceals the astonishing resourcefulness and creativity that these two illiterate East Enders demonstrated in designing and casting tens of thousands of cod-medieval trinkets – eventually referred to as “Shadwell Shams” – which had the nineteenth century archaeological establishment running around in circles of confusion and misdirection for decades.

“They were intelligent but without knowledge,” explained collector Philip Mernick, outlining the central mystery of Billy & Charley, “someone told them ‘If you can make these, you can get money for them.’ Yet someone must also have given them the designs, because I find it hard to believe they had the imagination to invent all these – but maybe they did?”

Working in Rosemary Lane, significantly placed close to the Royal Mint, Billy & Charley operated in an area where small workshops casting maritime fixtures and fittings for the docks were common. Between 1856 until 1870, they used lead alloy and cut into plaster of paris with nails and knives to create moulds, finishing their counterfeit antiquities with acid to simulate the effects of age. Formerly, they made money as mudlarks selling their Thames discoveries to a dealer, William Edwards, whom Billy first met in 1845. Edwards described Billy & Charley as “his boys” and became their fence, passing on their fakes to George Eastwood, a more established antiques dealer based in the City Rd.

Badges, such as these from Philip Mernick’s collection, were their commonest productions – costing less than tuppence to make, yet selling for half a crown. These items were eagerly acquired in a new market for antiquities among the middle class who had spare cash but not sufficient education to understand what they were buying. Yet many eminent figures were also duped, including the archaeologist, Charles Roach Smith, who was convinced the artefacts were from the sixteenth century, suggesting that they could not be forgeries if there was no original from which they were copied. Similarly, Rev Thomas Hugo, Vicar of St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, took an interest, believing them to be medieval pilgrims’ badges.

The question became a matter for the courts in August 1858 when the dealer George Eastwood sued The Athenaeum for accusing him of selling fakes. Eastwood testified he paid £296 to William Edwards for over a thousand objects that Edwards had originally bought for £200. Speaking both for himself and Charley, Billy Smith – described in the record as a “rough looking man” – assured the court that they had found the items in the Thames and earned £400 from the sale. Without further evidence, the judge returned a verdict of not guilty upon the publisher since Eastwood had not been named explicitly in print.

The publicity generated by the trial proved ideal for the opening of Eastwood’s new shop, moving his business from City Rd to Haymarket in 1859 and enjoying a boost in sales of Billy & Charley’s creations. Yet, two years later, the bottom fell out of the market when a sceptical member of the Society of Antiquaries visited Shadwell Dock and uncovered the truth from a sewer hunter who confirmed Billy & Charley’s covert means of production.

As they were losing credibility, Billy & Charley were becoming more accomplished and ambitious in their works, branching out into more elaborate designs and casting in brass. It led them to travel beyond the capital, in hope of escaping their reputation and selling their wares. They were arrested in Windsor in 1867 but, without sufficient ground for prosecution, they were released. By 1869, their designs could be bought for a penny each.

A year later, Charley died of consumption in a tenement in Wellclose Sq at thirty-five years old. The same year, Billy was forced to admit that he copied the design of a badge from a butter mould – and thus he vanishes from the historical record.

It is a wonder that the archaeological establishment were fooled for so long by Billy & Charley, when their pseudo-medieval designs include Arabic dates that were not used in Europe before the fifteenth century. Maybe the conviction and fluency of their work persuaded the original purchasers of its authenticity? Far from crude or cynical productions, Billy & Charley’s creations possess character, humour and even panache, suggesting they are the outcome of an ingenious delight – one which could even find inspiration for a pilgrim’s badge in a butter mould. Studying these works, it becomes apparent that there is a creative intelligence at work which, in another time, might be celebrated as the talent of an artist or designer, even if in Billy & Charley’s world it found its only outlet in semi-criminal activity.

Yet the final irony lies with Billy & Charley  - today their Shadwell Shams are commonly worth more than the genuine antiquities they forged.

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

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

‘Everyone advised me against it,’ Alasdair confessed with the helpless look of one infatuated, ‘The accountant said, ‘Don’t do it’ – but I just couldn’t bear to see it go…’ Then he pulled out an old accounts book and laid it on the table in his second floor office above the shop and showed me the signature of Ernest Shackleton upon an order for Alpine Club Rope, as used by Polar explorers and those heroic early mountaineers attempting the ascent of Everest. In that instant, I too was persuaded. Learning that Arthur Beale once installed the flag pole on Buckingham Palace and started the London Boat Show was just the icing on the cake. Prudently, Alasdair’s first act upon acquiring the business was to acquire a stock of good quality three-and-a-half metre ash barge poles to fend off any property developers who might have their eye on his premises.

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

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

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

Nineteenth century headed paper (click to enlarge)

Alasdair Flint’s office

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

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

Arthur Beale barometer and display case of Buckingham rope samples

Nineteenth century lino on the stairs

War emergency brass screws still in stock

More Breton shirts and Wellingtons than you ever saw

Rope store in the basement

Work bench with machines for twisting wire rope

Behind the counter

Jason Nolan, Shop Manager

James Dennis, Sales Assistant

Jason & James run the shop

Receipts on the spike

Arthur Beale, 194 Shaftesbury Avenue, WC2 8JP

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From hundreds in his magnificent collection, Ken Sequin kindly selected badges for me with a local connection – and they comprise an unexpected history of the East End.

Button badges were invented in 1896, when Benjamin Whitehead of Whitehead & Hoag in New York filed a patent for a celluloid-covered metal badge, swiftly opening offices in London, Toronto & Sydney as the craze went global.

Adopted first as a means of advertising by tobacco companies, button badges were quickly exploited for political, religious and fund-raising purposes by all kinds of clubs and organisations.

Kingsland Rd Costermongers Association manufactured by E. Simons, late nineteenth century – one of the rarest badges, possibly a unique survivor

Souvenir of Dirty Dick’s in Bishopsgate, twenties or thirties

St John at Hackney Parochial School founded in 1275 is one of the oldest in the country, early twentieth century

Woolwich Arsenal Football Club, 1907

Hackney Band Club, hat badge c1873, one of the most radical Working Men’s Clubs

Boer War, 1900 – one of the very earliest button badges in this country

Reverse of previous badge, note local manufacturer

Royal Eye Hospital, Moorfields – early twentieth century

Lea Bridge Speedway Supporters’ Club - 1928-32

Dartford Pageant, 1932

Possibly the Regal Edmonton, 1934

Bethnal Green Men’s Institute, Gymnastics, Turin St, early twentieth century

Temperance and Salvation Army buttons, early twentieth century

Dockers Trade Union Badge, established 1889

A cache of badges found in an allotment shed in Walthamstow

World War II propaganda badges

Salvage. Dulwich Council

St George’s Sunday School, Weslyan Mission House, in the eighteen-nineties it took over Wilton’s Music Hall

Reverse of previous badge

WWII National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee, dog’s identity badge

World War II badges for fundraising clubs to build airplanes

WWII Fundraising club to buy a destroyer

First Labour Mayor of Poplar, Will Crooks was elected MP for Woolwich in 1902

Reverse of buttons above

Dulwich & District Defence League, a Home Front battalion established in 1915

The Mildmay Hospital in Shoreditch was named after Francis Bingham Mildmay in 1890

Early twentieth century silver badge rewarding service in hospital ‘meals on wheels’ service

Barnado’s Young Helpers’ Badge with a portrait of the founder, early twentieth century

Tilbury Seamen’s Hospital, ‘For services rendered’ – possibly thirties

John Groom’s Crippleage & Flower Girls Mission, fund-raising rosettes, c 1900

Photographs copyright © Ken Sequin

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“Slovenliness is no part of Religion. Cleanliness is indeed close to Godliness” – John Wesley, 1791

Oftentimes, walking between Spitalfields and Covent Garden, I pass through Bunhill Fields where – in passing – I can pay my respects to William Blake, Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan who are buried there, and sometimes I also stop off at John Wesley’s Chapel’s in the City Rd to pay a visit to the underground shrine of Thomas Crapper – the champion of the flushing toilet and inventor of the ballcock.

It seems wholly appropriate that here, at the mother church of the Methodist movement, is preserved one of London’s finest historic toilets, still in a perfect working order today. Although installed in 1899, over a century after John Wesley’s death, I like to think that if he returned today Wesley would be proud to see such immaculate facilities provided to worshippers at his chapel – thereby catering to their mortal as well as their spiritual needs. The irony is that even those, such as myself, who come here primarily to fulfil a physical function cannot fail to be touched by the stillness of this peaceful refuge from the clamour of the City Rd.

There is a sepulchral light that glimmers as you descend beneath the chapel to enter the gleaming sanctum where, on the right hand side of the aisle, eight cedar cubicles present themselves, facing eight urinals to the left, with eight marble washbasins behind a screen at the far end. A harmonious arrangement that reminds us of the Christian symbolism of the number eight as the number of redemption – represented by baptism – which is why baptismal fonts are octagonal. Appropriately, eight was also the number of humans rescued from the deluge upon Noah’s Ark.

Never have I seen a more beautifully kept toilet than this, every wooden surface has been waxed, the marble and mosaics shine, and each cubicle has a generous supply of rolls of soft white paper. It is both a flawless illustration of the rigours of the Methodist temperament and an image of what a toilet might be like in heaven. The devout atmosphere of George Dance’s chapel built for John Wesley in 1778, and improved in 1891 for the centenary of Wesley’s death – when the original pillars made of ships’ masts were replaced with marble from each country in the world where Methodists preached the gospel – pervades, encouraging solemn thoughts, even down here in the toilet. And the extravagant display of exotic marble, some of it bearing an uncanny resemblance to dog meat, complements the marble pillars in the chapel above.

Sitting in a cubicle, you may contemplate your mortality and, when the moment comes, a text on the ceramic pull invites you to “Pull & Let Go.” It is a parable in itself – you put your trust in the Lord and your sins are flushed away in a tumultuous rush of water that recalls Moses parting the Red Sea. Then you may wash your hands in the marble basin and ascend to the chapel to join the congregation of the worthy.

Yet before you leave and enter Methodist paradise, a moment of silent remembrance for the genius of Thomas Crapper is appropriate. Contrary to schoolboy myth, he did not give his name to the colloquial term for bowel movements, which, as any etymologist will tell you, is at least of Anglo-Saxon origin. Should you lift the toilet seat, you will discover ”The Venerable” is revealed upon the rim, as the particular model of the chinaware, and it is an epithet that we may also apply to Thomas Crapper. Although born to humble origins in 1836 as the son of a sailor, Crapper rose to greatness as the evangelist of the flushing toilet, earning the first royal warrant for sanitary-ware from Prince Edward in the eighteen eighties and creating a business empire that lasted until 1963.

Should your attention be entirely absorbed by this matchless parade of eight Crapper’s Valveless Waste Preventers, do not neglect to admire the sparkling procession of urinals opposite by George Jennings (1810-1882) – celebrated as the inventor of the public toilet. 827,280 visitors paid a penny for the novelty of using his Monkey Closets in the retiring rooms at the Great Exhibition of 1851, giving rise to the popular euphemism, “spend a penny,” still in use today in overly polite circles.

Once composure and physical comfort are restored, you may wish to visit the chapel to say a prayer of thanks or, as I like to do, visit John Wesley’s house seeking inspiration in the life of the great preacher. Wesley preached a doctrine of love to those who might not enter a church, and campaigned for prison reform and the abolition of slavery, giving more than forty thousand sermons in his lifetime, often several a day and many in the open air – travelling between them on horseback. In his modest house, where he once ate at the same table as his servants, you can see the tiny travelling lamp that he carried with him to avoid falling off his horse (as he did frequently), his nightcap, his shoes, his spectacles, his robe believed to have been made out of a pair of old curtains, the teapot that Josiah Wedgwood designed for him, and the exercising chair that replicated the motion of horse-riding, enabling Wesley to keep his thigh muscles taut when not on the road.

A visit to the memorial garden at the rear of the chapel to examine Wesley’s tomb will reveal that familiar term from the toilet bowl “The Venerable” graven in stone in 1791 to describe John Wesley himself, which prompts the question whether this was where Thomas Crapper got the idea for the name of his contraption, honouring John Wesley in sanitary-ware.

Let us thank the Lord if we are ever caught short on the City Rd because, due to the good works of the venerable Thomas Crapper and the venerable John Wesley, relief and consolation for both body and soul are readily to hand at God’s convenience.

Nineteenth century fixtures by Thomas Crapper, still in perfect working order.

“The Venerable”

Put your trust in the Lord.

Cubicles for private worship.

Stalls for individual prayer.

In memoriam, George Jennings, inventor of the public toilet.

Upon John Wesley’s Tomb.

John Wesley’s Chapel

John Wesley’s exercise chair to simulate the motion of horseriding,

John Wesley excused himself unexpectedly from the table …

New wallpaper in John Wesley’s parlour from an eighteenth century design at Kew Palace.

The view from John Wesley’s window across to Bunhill Fields where, when there were no leaves upon the trees, he could see the white tombstone marking his mother’s grave.

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Visualisation of the hotel lobby, showing the pit where Big Ben was cast

Raycliff Capital, the developers who want to turn the historic Whitechapel Bell Foundry into a bell-themed boutique hotel, have submitted their application to Tower Hamlets council for change of use from foundry to hotel. Now you get to have your say. Would you rather have the Whitechapel Bell Foundry converted into an upmarket hotel or would you rather it was a foundry, continuing a tradition of casting bells in Whitechapel that dates back to 1363?

A choice has to be made and Tower Hamlets council must establish which is the OPTIMUM VIABLE USE – this is a term in planning law which means the ideal purpose for a building. Since the Whitechapel Bell Foundry was built as a foundry and worked as a foundry for centuries, it self-evident that this is the OPTIMUM VIABLE USE, not a boutique hotel.

United Kingdom Historic Building Preservation Trust (a charity with a distinguished track record in heritage-led regeneration) have announced a partnership with Factum Foundation (a global leader in the use of technology for the preservation of heritage and maker of sculptures for some of the world’s most famous artists). Together, they have the resources to buy the buildings off the developer at market value and re-open them as a foundry, re-equipped with up-to-date machinery, for the production of bells and art casting.

Bippy Siegal, the New York tycoon who owns Raycliff Capital often works with business associate Richard Caring in hotel projects and you can see photographs of them both below. Recognising that there is a viable alternative to their boutique hotel proposal, Raycliff Capital have appropriated the language of their rivals by claiming they are actually ‘reinstating a foundry,’ meaning that bell polishing will happen in the lobby of their hotel sometimes. The reality is they are reducing the foundry use by more than 90%. In spite of this attempt to muddy the waters, I think the difference between a boutique hotel and a bell foundry is quite obvious.

You can help save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a living foundry by submitting an objection to the boutique hotel proposal to Tower Hamlets council. Please take a moment this weekend to write your letter of objection. The more objections we can lodge the better, so please spread the word to your family and friends.

HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY

Use your own words and add your own personal reasons for opposing the development. Any letters which simply duplicate the same wording will count only as one objection.

1. Quote the application reference: PA/19/00008/A1

2. Give your full name and postal address. You do not need to be a resident of Tower Hamlets or of the United Kingdom to register a comment but unless you give your postal address your objection will be discounted.

3. Be sure to state clearly that you are OBJECTING to Raycliff Capital’s application.

4. Point out the ‘OPTIMUM VIABLE USE’ for the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is as a foundry not a boutique hotel.

5. Emphasise that you want it to continue as a foundry and there is a viable proposal to deliver this.

6. Request the council refuse Raycliff Capital’s application for change of use from foundry to hotel.

WHERE TO SEND YOUR OBJECTION

You can write an email to

planningandbuilding@towerhamlets.gov.uk

or

you can post your objection direct on the website by following this link to Planning and entering the application reference PA/19/00008/A1

or

you can send a letter to

Town Planning, Town Hall, Mulberry Place, 5 Clove Crescent, London, E14 2BG

New York tycoon Bippy Siegal, would-be developer of Whitechapel Bell Foundry into a boutique hotel, and his wife Jackie at a party in the Hamptons, Long Island

Richard Caring, Bippy’s Siegal’s business associate, with his wife Jacqueline at a ball in St Petersburg

Members of East End Preservation Society deliver their petition of 10,000 signatures to Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to Downing St in 2017  (photograph Sarah Ainslie)

“The world famous Whitechapel Foundry is a landmark – both for its splendid use and its fine historic buildings. Bells cast at the foundry have sounded in cities around the world for hundreds of years. For many, that sound represents the heart and soul of London, and in the case of Big Ben in the Palace of Westminster it is the sound of Freedom. The existing buildings deserve the highest level of recognition and protection as a unique and important part of our heritage.”

Dan Cruickshank

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John Thomas Smith also known as ‘Antiquary Smith’ (1766–1833)

My interest in the Cries of London originally stemmed from writing about market traders in Spitalfields and thus I was fascinated to discover that – two hundred years ago – John Thomas Smith drew the street hawkers in London and it led him to look back at images from earlier centuries too. Similarly, Samuel Pepys collected prints of the Cries of London of his own day and from the past, which makes me wonder about my illustrious predecessors in this particular cultural vein and whether they also shared my passion for these prints as the only historical record of the transient street life of our ancient city.

A colourful character who claimed to have been born in the back of a Hackney carriage, John Thomas Smith became keeper of prints at the British Museum and demonstrated a superlative draftsmanship in his vivid street portraits – with such keen likenesses that, on one famous occasion, his subjects became suspicious he was working for the police and chased him down the street in a mob. The prints shown here are Smith’s drawings of prints from the seventeenth century which especially appealed to him, and that he discovered in the course of his work as an archivist.

Bellman (Copied from a print prefixed to ‘Villanies discovered by Lanthorne and Candlelight’ by Thomas Dekker 1616)

“The Childe of Darkness, a common Night-walker, a man that had no man to wait upon him, but onely a dog, one that was a disordered person, and at midnight would beate at men’s doores, bidding them ( in mere mockerie) to look to their candles when they themselves were in their dead sleeps, and albeit he was an officer, yet he was but of light carriage, being known by the name of the Bellman of London.”

Watchman (Copied from a woodcut sheet engraved at the time of James I)

“The marching Watch contained in number two thousand men, part of them being old souldiers, of skill to be captaines, lieutenants, serjeants, corporals &c. The poore men taking wages, besides that every one had a strawne hat, with no badge painted, and his breakfast in the morning.”

Water Carrier (Copied from a set of Cries & Callings of London published by Overton)

“When the conduits first supplied the inhabitants, there were a number of men who for a fixed sum carried the water to the adjoining houses. The tankard was borne upon the shoulder and, to keep the carrier dry, two towels were fastened upon him, one to fall before him and the other to cover his back.”

Corpse-Bearer

“When the Plague was at its height, it was the business of the Corpse-Bearers to give directions to the Car-Men who went through the City with bells, which they rang at the same time crying, ‘Bring out your Dead.’”

Hackney Coachman (Copied from a print published by Overton in the reign of Charles II)

The early Hackney Coachman did not sit upon the box as the present drivers do, but upon the horse, like a postilion – his whip is short for that purpose, his boots which have large open broad tops, must have been much in the way when exposed to the weight of the rain. His hat was pretty broad and so far he was screened from the weather. In 1637, the number of Hackney Coaches in London was restricted to fifty but by 1802 it was eleven hundred.”

Jailor (Copied from Essayes & Characters of a Prison & Prisoners by Geffray Mynshul of Grays Inn, 1638)

“If marble-hearted Jaylors were so haplesse happy as to be mistaken and be made Kings, they would, instead of iron to their grates, have barres made of men’s ribs.”

Prison Basket Man (Copied from a print published by Overton in the reign of Charles II)

“One of those men who were sent out to beg broken meat for the poor prisoners. This custom which perhaps was as ancient as our Religious Houses has long been done away by an allowance of meat and bread having been made to those prisoners who are destitute of support. It was the business of such men to claim the attention of the public by their cry of ‘Some broken breade and meate for ye poore prisonors! For the Lord’s Sake, pitty the poore!’”

Rat Catcher (Copied from Cries of Bologna, etched by Simon Guillain from drawings by Annibal Carracci, 1646)

“There are two types of rats in this country, the black which was formerly very common but is now rarely seen, bring superseded by the large brown kind, called the Norway rat. The Rat Catcher had representations of rats and mice painted upon a square cloth fastened to a pole like a flag, which he carried across his shoulder.”

Marking Stones (Copied from a woodcut engraved in the time of James I)

“The marking stones were either of a red colour or comprised of black lead. They were used in the marking of linen so that washing could not take the mark out.”

Buy A Brush (Copied from a print published by Overton in the reign of Charles II)

“In those days, floors were not wetted but rubbed dry, even until they bore a very high polish, particularly when it was the fashion to to inlay staircases and floors of rooms with yellow, black and brown woods. These floors were rubbed by the servants who wore the brushes on their feet and they are in some instances so highly polished that they are dangerous to walk upon.”

Fire Screens (Copied from a print published by Overton in the reign of Charles II)

“It appears from the extreme neatness of this man and the goods which he exhibits for sale, that they were of a very superior quality, probably of foreign manufacture and possibly from Leghorn, from whence hats similar to those on his head were first brought into England”

Sausages (Copied from a print published by Overton in the reign of Charles II)

“The pork shops of Fetter Lane have been for upwards of one hundred and fifty years famous for their sausages, but those wretched vendors of sausages who cared not what they made them of in cellars in St Giles were continually persecuting their unfortunate neighbours, to whom they were as offensive as the melters of tallow, bone burners, soap boilers and cat gut cleaners.”

Take a look at John Thomas Smith’s drawings of nineteenth century street traders

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana I

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II

I was dismayed to learn that permission had been granted for demolition of this fine Georgian corner building at 116 Jubilee St which has been a popular landmark for almost two centuries. Yet research this week by members of the East End Preservation Society has revealed that – due to a technicality – a decision has not, in fact, been made and it is still possible to lodge objections which must be taken into account by the council. Read the Society’s letter below accompanied by instructions explaining how to write your own objection. There is no time to waste because this is the last chance to save Tadmans in Stepney.

Jubilee St was laid out when Commercial Rd was constructed at the beginning of the nineteenth century to bring traffic from the docks to Aldgate and this building is one of the few from the Mercers’ Estate that survived both the blitz and the post-war slum clearances. Terraces at the north end of Jubilee St give a clear idea of how the entire street once looked, before the cityscape was torn apart in the mid-twentieth century and inferior modern buildings replaced their dignified predecessors.

Occupying the street corner with Stepney Way, it was built as The Mercer’s Arms and records of landlords date back to 1830. It became a greengrocer after 1915 and then Tadmans the undertakers in the seventies, moving to Jubilee St from Cable St. Tadmans have overseen the safe journey of generations of East Enders from this world to the next. As well as Stepney, they have parlours in Bethnal Green and Walthamstow.

Recognising its distinctive quality, Geoffrey Fletcher drew Tadmans in Jubilee St and included it in his seminal book of neglected yet significant buildings in the capital, The London Nobody Knows in 1962. Many of those London landmarks Geoffrey Fletcher recorded in his book have been saved and there is still hope that Tadmans can be too.

The generic London spreadsheet architecture that is proposed to replace Tadmans, 116 Jubilee St, comprising luxury flats without any social or ‘affordable’ housing

LETTER OF OBJECTION BY THE EAST END PRESERVATION SOCIETY

To The Director of Planning
Tower Hamlets Council
Mulberry Place
5 Clove Crescent
E14 2BG

Dear Mr Weir

116 Jubilee Street. Refs: PA/18/01423 & PA/18/00104

We write to express our strong opposition to the demolition of No. 116 Jubilee Street. This building is the subject of the current, undecided application PA/18/01423 and the approved application PA/18/00104.

If you are accepting comments on PA/18/01423 we would like you to count this as an objection.

No. 116 Jubilee Street dates from the early nineteenth century and is a fragment of the Mercers’ estate which extended east to Jamaica Street. This building, together with the surviving group (Nos 175-93) at the north end of Jubilee Street, displays the modest but high-quality development undertaken by the Mercers in this area. Jubilee Street itself is named after Jubilee Place, a small alley which marked the Golden Jubilee of George III in 1810. It was the first street to be built north of Commercial Road.

No. 116 was clearly built as a public house and is marked on Ordinance Survey maps from the nineteenth century as such, though in recent decades it has housed a funeral directors. It is shown, together with adjoining terraced houses, on OS maps up until the sixties. This particular area largely survived the Blitz, but most of the historic housing stock was sadly demolished for new housing in the sixties and seventies. There can be no doubt that if these houses had survived they would be a cherished part of the East End townscape – as are the houses that do survive further north on Jubilee Street and elsewhere within the Borough.

During the sixties and seventies, when areas of historic housing were cleared, pubs and churches were often left standing. Unlike the churches however, most pubs nineteenth-century pubs are not listed. Furthermore, as with No. 116, they remain isolated in areas of dominated by modern estates, giving them little hope of being included within Conservation Areas. However, as corner buildings they have a particular architectural distinction, constituting important landmarks, often with curved corners. Corner pubs and were intended to give the adjoining terraces a visual ‘anchor’ and be visible from connecting streets.

No. 116 is modest but carefully designed, elegant and well preserved. It now stands alone as an evocative reminder of how attractive and well-cared for these streets were before demolition.

• The building is not and does not fall within a designated heritage asset and, in a desk-based assessment, is therefore more difficult to identify as heritage worthy of protection. However, there are general policies designed to protect buildings such as these and it is vitally important that your council employs them in instances such as this. The proposed replacement building is not commensurate with the quality of the building it proposes to replace and will therefore contravene Policy SP10 of your Core Strategy which promotes the conservation of historic buildings and promotes good new design. The proposed scheme clearly falls short of these aspirations.

• The National Planning Policy Framework states that planning authorities should require applicants to assess the impact on the significance of any affected heritage assets. This building is certainly a heritage asset and should therefore be assessed in any proposals.

• No.116 is an ideal candidate for Local (if not national) Listing. Local Listing is a tool which should be employed to protect historic buildings such as this. Unfortunately, Historic England cannot be relied upon to list worthy buildings proposed for demolition.

Your Council must protect the buildings that survived the Blitz and post-war clearance and not perpetuate a legacy of needless destruction of its historic environment.

Yours sincerely,

The East End Preservation Society

Geoffrey Fletcher’s drawing of Tadmans from The London Nobody Knows, 1962

HOW TO OBJECT TO THE DEMOLITION OF TADMANS

Read the East End Preservation Society’s letter, then use your own words and add your own personal reasons for opposing the demolition. Any letters which simply duplicate the same wording will count only as one objection.

1. Quote the application reference: PA/18/01423

2. Give your full name and postal address. You do not need to be a resident of Tower Hamlets or of the United Kingdom to register a comment but unless you give your postal address your objection will be discounted.

3. Be sure to state clearly that you are OBJECTING to the application.

4. Request the council refuse the application for the demolition of Tadmans.

WHERE TO SEND YOUR OBJECTION

You can write an email to

dr.developmentcontrol@towerhamlets.gov.uk

you can post a letter to

Town Planning, Town Hall, Mulberry Place, 5 Clove Crescent, London, E14 2BG

The symbol of the Mercers’ Company upon the wall of Tadmans, formerly The Mercers’ Arms

Fiona Atkins, gallerist at Townhouse Spitalfields, will be giving a lecture about Doreen Fletcher’s painting at the Nunnery Gallery on Wednesday 20th February as part of Doreen Fletcher’s Retrospective exhibition which runs until 24th March. In advance of her lecture, Fiona explores Doreen’s work as a response to the changing East End in the eighties. Click here to book

Mile End Park at Twilight, 1987

Many people in the East End in the eighties probably did not recognise the significance of the changes that were taking place. The development of Canary Wharf, sitting in detached isolation, appeared to have nothing to do with them and preoccupied by the day-to-day, they carried on as usual. When Doreen Fletcher arrived in 1982, she instantly warmed to the sense of community evident in the corner shops, and cafes – to the familiarity of the terraced streets with the small houses that reminded her of home.

Yet as an outsider, she could see what the locals could not see because it was too familiar: that those same shops, pubs and cafes were remnants of an earlier community that had been slowly disappearing since the end of the Second World War, and they were not going to survive much longer.

So Doreen began to paint: she was not documenting architecture or history, she was painting the everyday lives of people living in an ordinary community. Over the next twenty years, she created what we can now see are an extraordinary group of paintings of an East End that has all but disappeared, and which will themselves become a part of the cultural memory of the East End as we come to realise what has been lost.

People feature rarely in her paintings, although they are there. It is the places that were the focus of the community that caught her attention. She did not use many of the shops and cafes herself and they are viewed with the eye of an outsider, a status which facilitated a clear vision. Yet, although people are largely absent from her paintings, there is an underlying warmth, revealing life going on behind the scenes, often conveyed in the small details: a light on in a room, a discarded beer can in the gutter and the graffiti. The two women chatting at the bus stop, in the painting of the same name, are unusual but they are barely noticeable, screened by the barrier of the shelter.

John Cooper, artist, teacher and founder of the East London Group, wrote ‘You can spoil the humanity of a picture if you put figures in,’ and Doreen’s humanity shines through, despite the lack of figures in her work. Mile End Park at Twilight was an early East End painting of Doreen’s and her choice to paint it at dusk immediately imbues the scene with a warm glow.

The light shining from the windows, including from the illuminated sign, contradicts the message of the boarded-up terrace of houses: there is clearly still life in these buildings. Condemned House was painted in the same year and enlarges on the theme. The house appears to be inhabited, with no suggestion that it has been abandoned and the curtains reveal an owner who was once proud of their home. The tree, apparently a rare one, is painted with colourful vibrancy, yet the broken railings hint at the fate of both house and tree.

Doreen paints with feeling and her style is well ordered and harmonious with a strong sense of colour. The flat clarity of her scenes occasionally lends her work the air of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century folk art, as for example Mile End Park with Church, which could almost be an eighteenth-century view painted with the clear vision of a young Gainsborough. It is a style that suits her theme in depicting a world that is orderly and peaceful, where derelict buildings convey a sense of the past rather than urban decay and there is no suggestion of aggression or violence. It accords with our perception of the post-war East End as a time of close-knit communities when the world was perhaps a simpler place – a lost time.

Bus Stop, Mile End 1983

The Condemned House, Poplar 1985

Mile End Park With Church, 1988

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF DOREEN FLETCHER’S BOOK FOR £20

John Claridge first visited the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1982 to photograph the life of Britain’s oldest manufacturing company, founded in 1570 – and he returned 2016 to take another set of pictures. Remarkably, little changed in the intervening years.

‘When I got into the foundry all the work had finished, it was deserted,’ he told me, ‘it was like walking through a time portal or boarding the Mary Celeste. There was a very tactile feeling about the place, where craftsmanship held sway, and my pictures pay testament to that feeling.’

You can help save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a living foundry by submitting an objection to the boutique hotel proposal to Tower Hamlets council. Please take a moment this weekend to write your letter of objection. The more objections we can lodge the better, so please spread the word to your family and friends.

HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY

Use your own words and add your own personal reasons for opposing the development. Any letters which simply duplicate the same wording will count only as one objection.

1. Quote the application reference: PA/19/00008/A1

2. Give your full name and postal address. You do not need to be a resident of Tower Hamlets or of the United Kingdom to register a comment but unless you give your postal address your objection will be discounted.

3. Be sure to state clearly that you are OBJECTING to Raycliff Capital’s application.

4. Point out the ‘OPTIMUM VIABLE USE’ for the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is as a foundry not a boutique hotel.

5. Emphasise that you want it to continue as a foundry and there is a viable proposal to deliver this.

6. Request the council refuse Raycliff Capital’s application for change of use from foundry to hotel.

WHERE TO SEND YOUR OBJECTION

You can write an email to

planningandbuilding@towerhamlets.gov.uk

or

you can post your objection direct on the website by following this link to Planning and entering the application reference PA/19/00008/A1

or

you can send a letter to

Town Planning, Town Hall, Mulberry Place, 5 Clove Crescent, London, E14 2BG

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Click here to order a copy of John Claridge’s EAST END for £25

David – universally known as ‘Harry’ – Harrison came to Mile End in 1979 and liked it so much he has never left. An artist who became an architect, he has recently retired from his career in architecture and become an artist again.

Tom was a gentle, polite and humble soul. His patch was between Mile End Station and the Roman Road and could be found most days in that area. He told me he was fifty-three years old when I painted him in 2014.

He wore a camel coat over a sleeping bag, over a denim jacket, over a fleece, over a jumper. I last saw Tom a couple of years ago outside Mile End Station and he looked very poorly.

I would love to hear that he survives somewhere still but I fear it unlikely. I am moved by the depth of feeling in his forlorn expression. His obviously broken nose made me wonder if he may have once been a boxer?

Andrew inhabited a similar patch to Tom and, although seen as frequently, I never saw them together or at the same time. This painting also dates from 2014 and is in Mile End Park.

Unlike Tom, there was something defiant and angry about Andrew – even when offered money he could respond abusively. Yet he did once offer my wife a swig of his White Stripe, so he was not without chivalry.

Andrew would sometimes disappear for a few weeks and re-appear with a make-over, a haircut, clean shaven and with a set of new clothes. I was told that he was once a long distance lorry driver.

I saw Angus sitting on a bench in the evening sunshine in Old Street in 2017. What attracted me, apart from his extraordinary mane and facial hair was that he had a chess set set up on the pavement in front of him.

After striking up conversation, he challenged me to a game which I accepted. I am a poor player and out of practice, and I was hoping I may have stumbled upon an out of luck chess master.

I beat him rather quickly and easily, to my great disappointment and guilt – and Angus was gracious in defeat which made it even worse.

Anyone visiting Brick Lane in recent years could not fail to notice the stylish and urbane Mick Taylor. After completing this portrait I gave it to Mandi Martin who lives by Brick Lane and was a friend of Mick’s.

Mandi volunteers at St Joseph’s Hospice. In 2017, she spent some of Mick’s last few hours talking and reminiscing with him about their shared experiences of the East End.

In 2015, I met Tim sitting on a blanket and begging outside a cash machine in Shoreditch. He seemed young, sad and vulnerable, sitting eating crisps and surrounded by plastic bags of his belongings. Tim was reluctant to talk and seemed embarrassed by his situation. I have not seen him since.

This is my portrait of Gary Arber whose former printworks in the Roman Rd is a short walk from my home. Gary’s grandparents opened the shop in 1897 and Gary ran it for sixty years after after sacrificing a career as a flying ace in the Royal Air Force in 1954.

Paintings copyright ©Harry Harrison

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