Behold the wonders of commerce and retail over a century ago, courtesy of the Hackney Year Book 1906 from the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute!
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Thanks to all the letters written by you – the readers of Spitalfields Life – Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State, has stepped in and issued a Holding Direction to Tower Hamlet Council which prevents them proceeding with approving the Whitechapel Bell Foundry planning application for change of use to a boutique hotel while he considers what to do.
If you have not yet written to the Secretary of State, you should do so at once to PCU@communities.gsi.gov.uk
Emphasise the national and international significance of the bell foundry and point out that the planning application causes ‘substantial harm’ to an important heritage asset. Explain there is a viable scheme to continue the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a proper working foundry and ask him to hold a Public Inquiry.
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A Letter to the Secretary of State
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager
Four Hundred Years at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Pearl Binder at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Dorothy Rendell at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Fourteen Short Poems About The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
The King of the Bottletops has been making festive crowns (Photo by Sarah Ainslie)
Louise Lateur at E5 Bakehouse has been baking gingerbread figures (Photo by Patricia Niven)
Tim Mainstone of Mainstone Press, Joe Pearson of Design for Today, & I have been scurrying around London making last minute preparations for our BLOOMSBURY JAMBOREE, a festival of books and print, talks and merriment tomorrow SUNDAY 8th DECEMBER from 11am until 5pm at the ART WORKERS GUILD, 6 Queens Sq, WC1.
This is your last chance to book the few remaining tickets for Adam Dant’s lecture on MAPPING AN IMAGINARY LONDON & Eleanor Crow’s lecture on SHOPFRONTS OF LONDON.
We advise readers to come early to avoid the rush…
Click here for a talk on MAPPING AN IMAGINARY LONDON by Adam Dant at 3pm
Click here for a talk on SHOPFRONTS OF LONDON by Eleanor Crow at 2pm
Ever since I met Nicholas Borden painting at his easel in the midst of a blizzard in Bethnal Green in 2013, it has been my delight to follow his work and publish his new pictures here in the pages of Spitalfields Life. Over recent months, Nicholas has been extraordinarily productive out on the streets of London, creating all these new paintings that you see below.
Liverpool St Station
Petticoat Lane
City Rd
Waterloo Station
Thames Embankment
Jogger in the rain, E9
St John of Jerusalem Hackney, E9
St Leonard’s Shoreditch, E2
St Peter’s Bethnal Green, E2
Well St, E9
Terrace Rd, E9
Columbia Rd Market, E2
My back garden with washing drying, E9
Looking north towards Hackney Central, E8
Looking west towards Bethnal Green from the ninteenth floor, E3
Paintings copyright © Nicholas Borden
If you wish to enquire about any of these paintings, please contact Nicholas direct nicholasborden100@yahoo.co.uk
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Nicholas Borden’s East End View
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Nicholas Borden’s Spring Paintings
Robson Cezar, the King of the Bottletops has been making these ingenious bottletop crowns for the forthcoming festive season. Ideal for all celebrations, especially parties, dinners and carol singing.
They are suitable for men and woman who aspire to become bottletop kings and queens, and for younger folk who wish to be bottletop princes and princesses.
A satin ribbon tied at the back of the head means one size fits all.
CLICK HERE to order your bottletop crown and face the festive season with confidence!
Robson Cezar, The King of the Bottletops
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
A pair of bottletop princesses model Robson Cezar’s crowns
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This week, some of us who have been campaigning for the past three years to Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry met together to cast a bell as a symbol of our collective belief that the foundry has a viable future as a proper working foundry.
The event was a collaboration between Factum Foundation, who want to be the operators of the renewed Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and the Bartlett School of Architecture who opened their new workshops at UCL Here East in the Queen Elizabeth Park this year. Photographer Rachel Ferriman was there to capture the drama of the bell casting which took place under the expert supervision of Technical Director Peter Scully.
There was a celebratory atmosphere, after last week’s announcement of a Holding Order by the Secretary of State halting Tower Hamlets Council from granting permission for change of use to the developers who want to reopen the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a bell-themed boutique hotel. Yet a breathless hush fell upon the assembly as the crucible was opened and tilted, allowing molten bronze at 1200 degrees to flow in a narrow golden stream, as bright as the sun, into the ceramic mould to cast a 6 kg bell. There was silence as we witnessed the sacred alchemy of bell casting, a ritual that has been enacted in the East End for at least seven centuries. It is a magic that we will not give up because it is at the core of what defines this place and binds our community.
The Secretary of State’s Holding Order gives him time to consider whether to call in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry planning application and determine it himself by holding a Public Inquiry. While he is deciding what to do, we need as many people as possible to write and ask him to call it in.
If you have not yet done so, please write to the Secretary of State because the more letters we send the better our chance of saving the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
Use your own words and give your personal opinions but be sure to include these key points below. Read the guidance and write today, then forward this to your friends and family, encouraging them to do the same.
HOW TO WRITE EFFECTIVELY TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE
Anyone can write, wherever you are in the world, but be sure to include your postal address and send your letter by email to
PCU@communities.gsi.gov.uk
or by post to
National Planning Casework Unit
5 St Philips Place
Colmore Row
Birmingham BP3 2PW
Peter Scully adds an ingot of the raw material
Peter measures the temperature of the molten bronze
The ceramic bell mould is heated to 500 degrees to ensure no moisture remains
Once the mould is ready, the team must work fast
With the mould in place, Melis van den Berg begins to tip the crucible
As Melis begins to pour the metal from the crucible, Peter is ready to push any hardened metal aside from the flow
The molten bronze flows from the crucible into the mould
Melis and Peter chip away at the ceramic mould, revealing the form of the bell
A moment of reflection at the completion of the casting
The bronze bell, prior to finishing
Photographs copyright © Rachel Ferriman
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The Secretary of State Steps In
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager
Four Hundred Years at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Pearl Binder at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Dorothy Rendell at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Fourteen Short Poems About The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
I discovered this selection of old London trade cards by rummaging down the back of a hypothetical sofa and searching under a hypothetical bed. Especially noteworthy are the cards for Lacroix’s and Peter De la Fontaine which are the early work of William Hogarth.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to see my original selection
Julie Price is in thrall to the romance of old Spitalfields at Christmas and has painted a series of greetings cards on this theme
Dennis Severs House, Folgate St
A Gold, Brushfield St
Leadenhall Market
Wilkes St
Wiltons Music Hall
Dennis Severs’Door
Spitalfields Door Knocker
Elder St
Spitalfields Door Knocker
Christ Church, Spitalfields
Spitalfields Door Knocker
Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Paintings copyright @ Julie Price
Julie’s Christmas cards are available from Townhouse Spitalfields and her website www.passionforpaint.net
Last week, Tower Hamlets Council gave permission for the demolition of part of the Chamber St railway arches for a hotel extension, ignoring the fact that the best preserved wall of World War II shrapnel damage in the East End is part of the site.
An appeal has been made to the developers, Marldon, to consider integrating the wall into their new hotel. Meanwhile, I am including the link to apply for listing, in case any of my readers have the wherewithal to pursue this at Historicengland.org.uk
Next year is the eightieth anniversary of the Blitz and below I publish my photos of the few remaining examples of shrapnel damage still visible in Central London.
This wall of shrapnel damage at the junction of Mansell St & Chamber St from World War II is threatened by a hotel extension
Shrapnel pock-marks upon Southwark Cathedral from February 1941
Damage at St Bartholomew’s Hospital from zeppelin raids on 8th September 1915 and on 7th July 1917
Damage at St Bartholomew’s Hospital from zeppelin raids on 8th September 1915 and on 7th July 1917
Damage at Stone Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from a bomb dropped on Wednesday 18th December 1917 at 8pm
Damage at Stone Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from a bomb dropped on Wednesday 18th December 1917 at 8pm
Repair of shrapnel damage from September 194o at University College London, Zoology Museum, Gower St
Damage at St Clement Dane’s in the Strand from 10th May 1941 when the church was gutted
Damage at St Clement Dane’s in the Strand from 10th May 1941 when the church was gutted
Sphinx on the Embankment with damage from the first raid by German aeroplanes Tuesday 4th September 1917
Cleopatra’s Needle with damage from the first raid by German aeroplanes Tuesday 4th September 1917
Damage at Victoria & Albert Museum from two bombs in Exhibition Rd during World War II
Damage at Victoria & Albert Museum from two bombs in Exhibition Rd during World War II
Damage at Tate Britain from September 16th 1940
The hotel extension in Chamber St that will replace the wall of shrapnel damage with the location of the existing wall marked
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‘An imaginative planner, in fact anyone with any imagination seeing the possibilities here, could not possibly turn this down’ says Rory Stewart
Independent Mayorial Candidate for London, Rory Stewart, came to the East End on a damp wintry day this week to offer his support for our campaign to Save The Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a proper working foundry.
Last week Secretary of State, Robert Jenrick, issued a Holding Order preventing Tower Hamlets Council proceeding with granting permission for change of use to the developers who want to turn the Whitechapel Bell Foundry into a boutique hotel, while he decided what to do.
Now the election is over and Robert Jenrick is back as Secretary of State, we are waiting to hear if he is going to call in the planning application and hold a Public Inquiry. So Rory Stewart’s declaration of support for the campaign this week is opportune timing and we hope this will encourage the Secretary of State to call in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
At East London Mosque, Rory Stewart met Steven Musgrave of UK Historic Building Preservation Trust who outlined their plans to reopen the foundry as a proper working foundry and make it viable again, just as they did at Middleport Pottery in Stoke. Then Sufia Alam of the London Muslim Centre spoke on behalf of the mosque and the local community in support of the campaign, explaining Whitechapel Bell Foundry’s immense cultural significance in terms of local pride of place and the opportunity that a renewed foundry offered for apprenticeships, training and education.
Then it was time to head out from the Mosque into the rain where local campaigners had gathered outside the front door of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to greet Rory Stewart.
Speaking of his enthusiasm for the potential for a renewed bell foundry marrying old and new technology, and with a strong relationship to the local community, he declared, “All of this in one of the most interesting parts of our city – so an imaginative planner, in fact anyone with any imagination seeing the possibilities here, could not possibly turn this down. This is a challenge of courage, it’s a challenge of joyful imagination and of adventure, and we need to let the bells ring forth!”
Rory Stewart in conversation at East London Mosque with Sufia Alam of East London Mosque and Stephen Musgrave of UK Historic Building Preservation Trust
Charles Saumarez Smith welcomes Rory Stewart to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Rory Stewart declares his support for our campaign outside the foundry
“This is a challenge of courage, it’s a challenge of joyful imagination and of adventure, and we need to let the bells ring forth!” – Rory Stewart
Rory Stewart at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Photographs copyright © Andrew Baker
These are three key reasons why the Secretary of State should call in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and hold a Public Inquiry
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The Secretary of State steps in
A Letter to the Secretary of State
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager
Four Hundred Years at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Pearl Binder at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Dorothy Rendell at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Fourteen Short Poems About The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Today I recall a visit to the Whitechapel Mission with my friend the late photographer Colin O’Brien
Before dawn one Christmas Eve, Photographer Colin O’Brien & I ventured out in a rainstorm to visit our friends down at the Whitechapel Mission – established in 1876, which opens every day of the year to offer breakfasts, showers, clothes and access to mail and telephones, for those who are homeless or in need.
Many of those who go there are too scared to sleep rough but walk or ride public transport all night, arriving in Whitechapel at six in the morning when the Mission opens. We found the atmosphere subdued on Christmas Eve on account of the rain and the season. People were weary and shaken up by the traumatic experience of the night, and overcome with relief to be safe in the warm and dry. Feeling the soothing effect of a hot shower and breakfast, they sat immobile and withdrawn. For those shut out from family and social events which are the focus of festivities for the rest of us, and facing the onset of winter temperatures, this is the toughest time of the year.
Unlike most other hostels and day centres, Whitechapel Mission does not shut during Christmas. Tony Miller, who has run the Mission and lived and brought up his family in this building over the last thirty-five years, had summoned his three grown-up children out of bed at five that morning to cover in the kitchen when the day’s volunteers failed to show. Although his staff take a break over Christmas which means he and his wife Sue and their family have to pick up the slack, it is a moment in the year that Tony relishes. “40% of our successful reconnections happen at Christmas,” he explained enthusiastically, passionate to seize the opportunity to get people off the street, “If I can persuade someone to make the Christmas phone call home …”
Tony estimates there are around three thousand people living rough in London, whom he accounts as follows – approximately 15% Eastern Europeans, 15% Africans and 5% from the rest of the world, another 15% are ex-army while 30%, the largest proportion, are people who grew up in care and have never been able to establish a secure life for themselves.
Among those I spoke with on Christmas Eve were those who had homes but were dispossessed in other ways. There were several vulnerable people who lived alone and had no family, and were grateful for a place where they could come for breakfast and speak with others. Here in the Mission, I recognised a collective sense of refuge from the challenges of existence and the rigours of the weather outside, and it engendered a tacit human solidarity. “This is going to be the best Christmas of my life,” Andrew, an energetic skinny guy who I met for the first time that morning, assured me, “because it’s my first one free of drugs.” We shook hands and agreed this was something to celebrate.
Tony took Colin & me upstairs to show us the pile of non-perishable food donations that the Mission had received and explained that on Christmas Day each visitor would be given a gift of a pair of socks, a woollen hat, a scarf and pair of gloves, with a bar of chocolate wrapped inside. Tony told me that on Christmas Day he and his family always have a meal together, but his wife Sue also invites a dozen waifs and strays – so I asked him how he felt about the lack of privacy. “My kids were born here,” he replied with a shrug and a smile and an astonishing generosity of spirit, “after thirty years, I don’t have a problem with it.”
Food donations
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
Click here to donate to the work of the Whitechapel Mission
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Traditionally, Boxing Day is the occasion for a visit to the pantomime and so I choose this day to publish my theatrical memoir
Longer ago than I care to admit, fortune led me to an old theatre in the Highlands of Scotland. Only now am I able to reveal some of my experiences there and you will appreciate that discretion prevents me publishing any names lest those who are still alive may read my account.
It was a magnificent nineteenth century theatre, adorned with gilt and decorative plasterwork. Since this luxurious auditorium with boxes, red drapes and velvet seating was quite at odds with the austere stone buildings of the town, it held a cherished place in the affections of local theatregoers who crowded the foyers nightly, seeking drama and delight.
Although it is inexplicable to me now, at that time in my life I was stage struck and entirely in thrall to the romance of theatre. Perhaps it was because of my grandfather the conjurer who died before I was born? Or my love of puppets and toy theatres as a child? When I left college at the beginning of my twenties, I refused to return home again and I did not know how to make my way in London. So I was overjoyed when I landed a job at a theatre in the north of Scotland. I packed my possessions in cardboard boxes, took the overnight train and arrived in the frosty dawn to commence my adult life.
As soon as it was discovered I had a literary education, I was assigned the task of organising the script and writing the ‘poetry’ for the annual pantomime, which that year was Dick Whittington. In the theatre safe I found a stash of tattered typescripts dating back over a century, rewritten each time they were performed. These documents were fascinating yet barely intelligible, and filled with gaps where comedians would supply their own patter. I discovered that the immortals, in this case Fairy Bow Bells and Old King Rat, spoke in rhyming couplets. Yet to my heightened critical faculties, weaned on Shakespeare and Chaucer, these examples were lame. So I resolved to write better ones and set to work at once.
Fairy Bow Bells:
In the deepest, bleakest Wintertime,
I welcome you to Pantomime.
Here is Colour! Here is Magic!
Here is Love and naught that’s Tragic.
‘You are here to learn the art of compromise, and how to pour a decent gin and tonic, darling,’ the director informed me at commencement with a significant nod of amusement when I submitted my work. I tried to raise an amenable smile as I served the drinks, but it was a line delivered primarily for the benefit of the principals gathered in the tiny office for a production meeting. These were veterans of musical comedy and summer variety who played pantomime every year, forceful personalities who each brought demands and expectations in proportion to their place in the professional hierarchy, with the ageing comedian playing Dame Fitzwarren as the star. Next came the cabaret singer and dancer playing Dick Whittington and then the television personality playing Tommy the Cat.
It was my responsibility to manage auditions for the chorus of boy and girl dancers, sifting through thousands of curriculum vitae and head-shots to select the most promising candidates. Those granted the opportunity were given ten minutes to impress the musical director and the choreographer with a show tune and a short dance sequence. Shepherding them in and out of the room and handling their raw emotions proved a challenge when they lost their voices, broke into tears or forgot their routines – or all of these.
The cast convened for a read-through in the low-ceilinged rehearsal room in a portacabin in the theatre car park. Once everyone had shaken hands and a cloud of tobacco filled the room, the director wished everyone good luck and, turning to me before leaving the room, declared loudly ‘Don’t worry, darling, they know what to do!’, employing the same significant nod I had seen in the production meeting and catching the eye of each of the principals again.
We all sat down, I handed round the scripts and the cast turned to the first page. The principals gasped in horror, exchanging glances of disbelief and reaching for their cigarettes in alarm. Dame Fitzwarren blushed, tore out a handful of pages and spread them out on the table, muttering, ‘No, no, no,’ to himself in condemnation. I sat in humiliated silence as, in the ensuing half hour, my sequence of pages was entirely rearranged with some volatile horse trading and angry words. Was this the art of compromise the director had referred to? I had organised the scenes in order of the story – no-one had explained to me that in pantomime the sequence of opening scenes are a device to introduce the principals in order of status from the newcomers to the seasoned stars. Yet even if I had understood this, it would have made little difference since the cast were all unknown to me.
On the second day, the floor of the portacabin was marked with coloured tapes which indicated the placing of the scenery and it was my job to take the cast through their moves. Dame Fitzwarren was keen to teach his comedy kitchen sequence to the two young actors playing the broker’s men. Once he had walked them through, I suggested we should give it a go. ‘No,’ he said, ‘That was it, we did it.’ I understood that, in pantomime, comedians only rehearse their sequences once as a matter of honour.
The little theatre owed its existence to the wealth of the whisky distilleries which comprised the main industry in the town and many of the directors of these distilleries were members of the theatre board. In particular, I remember a diminutive fellow who made up for his lack of height with an abrasive nature. He confronted me on the opening night, asking ‘Is this going to be good, laddie?’ My timid reply was, ‘It’s not for me say, is it?’ ‘It had better be good because your career depends upon it,’ was his harsh response, poking me in the gut with his finger.
In fact, Dick Whittington – in common with all the pantomimes at that theatre – was a tremendous success, playing to packed houses from mid-December until the end of January. The frantic energy of the cast was winning and the production suited the mechanics of the building beautifully, with brightly coloured flying scenery, drop-cloths and gauzes. The audience gasped in wonder when Fairy Bow Bells waved her wand to conjure the transformation scene and booed in delight when Old King Rat popped up through a trap door in a puff of smoke. They loved the familiar faces of the comedians and laughed at their routines, even if they were not actually funny.
Given the punishing routine of three shows a day, the collective boredom of the run and the fact that they were away from home, the pantomime cast occupied themselves with a rollercoaster of affairs and liaisons which only drew to an end at the final curtain. Once Dick Whittington unexpectedly stuck her tongue down my throat in the backstage corridor on New Year’s Eve and Dame Fitzwarren locked the door of the star dressing room from the inside, subjecting me to his wandering hands when I came to discuss potential cuts in the light of the stage manager’s timings. I found myself entering and leaving the building through the warren of staircases and exit doors in order to avoid unwanted attention of this nature. The gender reversals and skimpy costumes contributed to an uncomfortably sexualised environment which found its expression on stage in the relentless innuendo and lewd references, all within an entertainment supposedly directed at children. ‘Thirty miles to London and no sign of Dick yet!’
I shall never forget the musical director rehearsing the little girls in tutus from a local stage school who supplied us with choruses of sylphs on a rota to accompany Fairy Bow Bells. ‘Come along, girls,’ he instructed the children, thrusting his chest forward and baring his dentures in a frozen smile of enthusiasm,’ Tits and teeth, tits and teeth,’ using the same exhortation he gave to the adult dancers.
Our version of Dick Whittington contained an underwater sequence, when Dick’s ship was wrecked, permitting the characters to ‘swim’ through a deep sea world which was given greater reality by the use of ultra-violet light and projecting an aquarium film onto a gauze. This was also the moment in the show when we undertook a chase through the audience, weaving along the rows. Drawing on the familiar tradition of pantomime cows and horses – and perhaps inspired by the predatory nature of the environment – I devised the notion of a pantomime shark in a foam rubber costume that could chase the characters through the front stalls and around the circle to the accompaniment of the theme from Jaws. I had no idea of the pandemonium that this would unleash but, each night, I made a point of popping in to stand at the back to enjoy the mass-hysteria engendered by my shark.
The actor playing Old King Rat had previously been cast as Adolphus Cousins in Major Barbara, so I decided to exploit his classical technique by writing a death speech for him. It was something that had never been done before and this is the speech I wrote.
Old King Rat:
This is the death of Old King Rat,
Foiled at last by Tommy the Cat.
No more nibbles, no more creeping,
No more fun now all is sleeping.
This is the instant at which I die,
Off to that rathole in the sky…
Naturally this was accompanied by extended death-throes, with King Rat expiring and getting up again several times. Later, I learnt my speech had been pirated by other productions of Dick Whittington, which is the greatest accolade in pantomime. Maybe it is even now being performed somewhere this season?
In subsequent years, I was involved in productions of Cinderella and Aladdin, but strangely I recall little of these. I did not realise I was participating in the final years of a continuous theatrical tradition which had survived over a century in that theatrical backwater. I did not keep copies of the scripts and the fragments above are all I can remember now. I do not know if I learnt the art of compromise but I certainly learnt how to pour a stiff gin and tonic. And I learnt that in any theatre there is always more drama offstage than onstage.
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I often wonder if those who visit the Christmas installation at Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St in spellbound silence today have any idea of what it was like when the creator of this time capsule interior was alive. The late Rodney Archer was a close friend of Dennis and, in this extract from his diary This Strange Re-collection of People (1980-88), Rodney spills the beans.
Christmas was for me the best time of the year to visit Dennis Severs in his house, which he shared with Mr & Mrs Jervis and their children in the Liberty of Norton Folgate. The hall was festooned with garlands of holly and ivy and mistletoe. No tinsel marred the scene! The smell of Christmas spices assaulted your nostrils as you entered the front door. Oranges stuck with cloves abounded and the warm hospitality of the Jervises’ was almost palpable. Young boys in velvet waistcoats and knee britches and enchanting young girls in Kate Greenaway muslin dresses would greet you as you entered, offering rum punch circa 1730. Steven, who was eventually to run a restaurant from the ground floor of his house in Church St, had found the recipe in an old eighteenth century cookbook and Dennis was delighted. These children bearing punch were the sons and daughters of neighbours, friends and guests. If you were among the favoured, invited to one of Dennis’ private parties, you had to be prepared to join in and not rock the boat. Everything and everyone was highly organised.
As midnight struck, we were all hurried out of the drawing room and upstairs in the dark to the attic. This was the room in which the sitting tenant, who died within minutes of Dennis signing the contract to secure the house, lived and so promptly perished. It was also the room in which Dorian, the most beautiful of Dennis’ footmen, had his lodging. Towards the end of his brief life, when he was dying of AIDS, Dorian was forced to step into the cupboard when the tours came round to see the room inhabited – in the fiction of it – by Tiny Tim and his father, Bob Cratchet. I am not sure how the Jervises were connected to the Cratchets but what with the arrival of the Spinning Jenny in the early nineteenth century, hard times overtook the silk weavers of Spitalfields and perhaps Mrs Jervis had to take in a lodger? Eventually, Dorian was to move to Church St, two doors away from where I lived with my mother.
“Shhh, don’t talk any of you, shhh… Steven, Arlecchino, Quiet!” Dennis ordered like the matron in charge of a hospital ward. Think Hattie Jacques in ‘Carry on Nurse.’ “Where are Beyond & Ken? Not behind again?!” he asked, wondering if the two performance artists who attended the Hornsey School of Art had lost their way.
Beyond & Ken had lingered too long in the front room on the first floor, called somewhat grandly the ‘piano nobile.’ They were duly fetched and fixed in Dennis’ disapproving eye. All ready and inspected, we followed faithfully and quietly behind as he pushed open the door to his bedroom where we saw the four poster bed covered in red velvet. The bed and canopy had been made from pallets and refuse rescued from the nearby fruit and vegetable market – Dennis was an early recycler.
“Nothing here is real,” he cautioned as Judy (Edgar-in-Elder-St’s first wife) dared to touch a papier mache wig stand. In real life, the bed was Dennis’ own but for the purpose of the pantomime had become… “The bed of Ebenezeer Scrooge, just imagine it,” he said in an almost conspiratorial whisper. Dennis took himself very seriously in these moments and woe betide anyone who did not share his enthusiasm. I wondered why I often felt the need to come out of the illusion he had spent so long in creating. Perhaps, even though I was not a ‘Guardian’ reader, there was something in me that felt too manipulated in these moments? A kind of scepticism mixed with jealousy perhaps? After these many years, now Dennis has departed to join the great Ebenezeer in the sky, I ask his pardon if I did not always share his vision. It was complete but unrelenting and did not allow for one’s own response.
“Imagine,” he continued, “the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future flying overhead.”
Being dyslexic, Dennis had probably never read ‘A Christmas Carol,’ although he would have seen and loved that most famous version with the peerless Alistair Sim as the old miser and, of course, he would have remembered his mother, in the years before she fell ill, reading it to him in the far-removed and warm and sunny clime of California, in the town of Escondido where he had been born.
“You must imagine the snow falling on the rooftops and the frost on the windowpanes of Scrooge’s London house,” she might embroider, delighting her enchanted son, who would one day bring back to the land of its origin the very tale that had been exported so far across the world.
The tape of ‘A Christmas Carol’ would be playing in the background as we all stood, unable to hear it clearly, while Dennis in headmistress mode kept us quiet and I suspect, if we were honest, slightly resentful. Or did the others just feel, “Dear Dennis, he’s so eccentric, how wonderful!” ?
Finally, we were ushered into the drawing room on the ‘piano nobile’ floor where wine glasses and Christmas punch awaited. Dennis proposed a toast to Christmas,
“To Christmas, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Queen and Spitalfields,”
to which we all added,
“And Dennis,”
“And Dennis,”
“And Dennis.”
Lionheart marred the occasion to my mind – I may have stood outside of it a bit but I never deliberately sabotaged the tale – Lionheart laughed and stabbed out with, “The Queen!” stressing Her Majesty in such a way that it was quite clear what queen he had in mind. There was little love lost between Lionheart and Dennis. There always existed between them that false bonhomie that just manages to control the very real dislike underneath.
Later on, I made moves to go. Phyllis, my mother, had already said goodnight amongst much gooing and gahing, cooing and cahing and was waiting for me downstairs. She was always a bit ambivalent about Dennis and the house he shared with the Jervis family. But she responded to his flattering ways and purred appropriately when stroked. Outside, on the way, home her tarter, or perhaps even her Tartar side, would emerge.
“Well, I’m glad that’s over for another year. I can’t bear those garlands made out of nuts. And, as for the Queen,” she added tetchily.
The garlands in question were draped across the panels in Mrs Jervis’ drawing-room and, from a distance, looked remarkably like the Grinling Gibbons’ carvings found in many a stately mansion and English country house. Up close, however, the illusion vanished and you saw that they were an ingenious hodgepodge of walnuts, almonds and brazil nuts sewn together of an evening by Dennis and his friends. Dennis would often have his most trusted fans around for a night in the smoking room. There, clad cap-a-pie in leather, they would celebrate the joys of friendship in a modern version of the eighteenth century Hellfire Club, sharing a pipe of marijuana and a working class lad or two.
“All is illusion and magic, that is the whole point,” he warned, his voice veering into a higher key as his eagle eyebeam struck the further side of the room, where Ian Gladly had been sighted examining a painting of Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy’ too closely. It looked real but how could it be?! Had Dennis raided the Tate Gallery? He was known for his daring.
“Do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold philosophy?” – our host amazed nearly everyone by quoting John Keats. I was not amazed, though I was amused, because I had given Dennis the Keats quotation only a week before when he was complaining about the people who had not “got it” because their reading of ‘The Guardian’ and their critical eye got in the way. Duly chastised, Ian scurried away to refill his empty glass with the Christmas punch circa 1730.
“Dennis, I must go now too. Thank you for a wonderful evening,” I ventured, not realising that I was skating on very thin ice. Dennis replied with suave charm,“Thank you, Rodney, thank you for sticking it out for so long.”
For a moment, I did not feel the pain. I genuinely thought he was thanking me and then I realised that his was as much an attack as Lionheart’s had been. Maybe I had sounded rather grand, rather condescending? – I have that effect occasionally but, on this occasion, I chose my words carefully and was genuinely grateful. Perhaps, and this is more likely, he had picked up on my attitude at a much deeper level? Dennis was not an intellectual in any way. He was very much a creature of instinct, emotion and intuition. And he would sniff out any insincerity on your part and snuff you out immediately like a candle in an eighteenth century wall sconce. When riled he was a veritable tiger. He himself was, however, notoriously insincere. He liked to think of himself as very American and straightforward, but he could smile and be a villain with the best of us. In short, he was a ‘character.’
A group of us had gathered in the hall on the ground floor, fumbling for our coats in the Victorian room which opened off the room in which the Christmas goose sat proudly on its big eighteenth century platter, awaiting consumption.
“The wonderful thing about Denny,” Edgar-in-Elder-St drawled, “is he is a confidence man, a trickster. He sold to the English what was already theirs. It’s better than bottled water – and what a swizz that is – And we fell for it completely. We bought it!”
“Very American, that,” Lionheart added, as he struggled to find Arlecchino’s opera cape which had somehow gone missing.
“Lionheart, where ees my cape, I can’t pass thee market porters dressed as a ‘macaroni’, a kind of Yankee Doodle Dandy! I will be a laughing stocking.”
At this point Arlecchino’s eyes met those of Whitechapel, Dennis’ black and white cat, sitting at the bottom of the stairs and enjoying the festivities. Finally, we found the cape and Arlecchino’s costume was hidden from the amused and even scornful eyes of the market porters, through whom he imagined himself moving so perplexingly.
I had confided to Lionheart earlier that I found the house too much of a museum and a bit too Hollywood for my taste. I can say this without doing Dennis any harm at all because, in all these years, I have only met two other people who felt the same as I did. Dennis prided himself on being the real thing. The ‘real thing’ in terms of taste and decoration was distinguished by him as the ‘Joan Collins School of Decoration’ versus the ‘Queen Mother’s School of Decoration.’ There was even a television programme on the area in which Dennis and William Candy, the architectural-historian-who-wore-a-kilt-and-sported-a-pigtail, were seen wandering around Spitalfields and Brick Lane, past the Jewish Soup Kitchen for the Poor, along the Moorish Arcade in Fashion St, examining different facades and door fronts, lintels and fanlights, approving or disapproving as the Queen Mother dictated.
Our door front had been a thing of beauty and a joy forever, until we had to have it taken away and repaired and, in that process, hundreds of years of paint was stripped off – O, God, forgive me – to reveal the original contours sleeping unsuspected beneath and then the door became a bad thing. In vain did I argue that mother and I had very little choice in the matter – the architect insisted – but Dennis would have none of it, and so Phyllis and I had the indignity of hearing Dennis and William Candy, the architectural-historian-who-wore-a-kilt-and-sported-a-pigtail, stop in front of our door and exclaim to the nation in a televised documentary, “This is very much an example of the Joan Collins School of Decoration! We prefer the Queen Mother’s School.” They both shook hands on it and that was that. Our fate was sealed.
My mother and I had been consigned to that uncomfortable circle of Dante’s Inferno shared by homosexuals and failed house restorers. Though he would have been mortally offended to hear it, Dennis’ house had a bit too much of the ‘Metro Goldwyn Mayer School of Decoration’ itself but God protect you if you ever hinted so much. He was not only very sensitive in these matters but also – and the two go together like a horse and eighteenth century carriage – deeply insecure.
I had previously joked with Lionheart about Dennis’ ordering us all about as if we were servants, “Now those of you who are sitting in them, bring the eighteenth century chairs up to the drawing room.”
“Dennis, which ones are they?” I asked.
“O, Rodney, really! The eighteenth century chairs have no arms, thereby enabling Mrs Jervis and her daughter, Sophia, to sit with their farthingales and hoopskirts unimpeded,” he emphasised, somewhat pedantically in his short quick trans-Atlantic accent.
Well, lah-di-bloody-dah, my dears, and God bless you all – Dennis, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Queen and Spitalfields!
Text copyright © Estate of Rodney Archer
Photographs copyright © Dennis Severs House
Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, Norton Folgate, E1 6BX
Rodney Archer’s diary is preserved in the archive at Bishopsgate Institute
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At this vertiginous moment of beginning the new year and new decade, I have no doubt that many readers will share my need for a dose of something strong in order to summon sufficient courage to face the proliferation of unknown challenges that lie ahead and so I present Adam Dant’s PERPETUAL DRINKING CALENDAR.
Click to enlarge
Showing occasions, events and individuals worthy of toasting either as an expression of goodwill or in respect for tragedy and loss.
“Some people never need an excuse to have a drink. For those less fortunate, my PERPETUAL DRINKING CALENDAR offers three hundred and sixty-five of them (plus a bonus leap year tipple). Traditional occasions such as the Queen’s Birthday, the Anniversary of Trafalgar and the invention of the drinking straw are supplemented by opportunities to toast the lives of the famously bibulous. Legendary devotees of the tap, bottle and jigger such as Dorothy Parker, Sultan Selim II and Arthur Rimbaud are each given their own day, colour-coded according to the cellar of libations. My calendar makes a fine and fitting practical adornment for all the best bars, cocktail lounges, dining rooms, offices, kitchens, bedrooms and any other places of worship.” – Adam Dant
Adam Dant’s Perpetual Drinking Calendar was originally commissioned by The Critic
CLICK TO ORDER A COPY OF MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND BY ADAM DANT
Adam Dant’s MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND is a mighty monograph collecting together all your favourite works by Spitalfields Life‘s Contributing Cartographer in a beautiful big hardback book.
Including a map of London riots, the locations of early coffee houses and a colourful depiction of slang through the centuries, Adam Dant’s vision of city life and our prevailing obsessions with money, power and the pursuit of pleasure may genuinely be described as ‘Hogarthian.’
Unparalleled in his draughtsmanship and inventiveness, Adam Dant explores the byways of London’s cultural history in his ingenious drawings, annotated with erudite commentary and offering hours of fascination for the curious.
The book includes an extensive interview with Adam Dant by The Gentle Author.
Adam Dant’s limited edition prints including the PERPETUAL DRINKING CALENDAR are available to purchase through TAG Fine Arts
William Webb, 49 Old St, 1857
These days, Old St is renowned for its digital industries but – for over a hundred years – this area was celebrated as the centre of toy theatre manufacture in London. Formerly, these narrow streets within walking distance of the City of London were home to highly skilled artisans who could turn their talents to the engraving, printing, jewellery, clock, gun and instrument-making trades which operated here – and it was in this environment that the culture of toy theatres flourished.
Between 1830 and 1945, at a handful of addresses within a half mile of the junction of Old St and City Rd, the modest art of publishing engraved plates of characters and scenery for Juvenile Dramas enjoyed its heyday. The names of the protagonists were William Webb and Benjamin Pollock. The overture was the opening of Archibald Park’s shop at 6 Old St Rd in 1830, and the drama was brought to the public eye by Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured in 1884, before meeting an ignominious end with the bombing of Benjamin Pollock’s shop in Hoxton St in 1945.
Responsibility for the origin of this vein of publishing belongs both to John Kilby Green of Lambeth and William West of Wych St in the Strand, with the earliest surviving sheets dated at 1811. Green was just an apprentice when he had the notion to produce sheets of theatrical characters but it was West who took the idea further, publishing plates of popular contemporary dramas. From the beginning, the engraved plates became currency in their own right and many of Green’s vast output were later acquired by Redington of Hoxton and eventually published there as Pollock’s. West is chiefly remembered for commissioning artists of acknowledged eminence to design plates, including the Cruickshank brothers, Henry Flaxman, Robert Dighton and – most notably – William Blake.
Green had briefly collaborated to open Green & Slee’s Theatrical Print Warehouse at 5 Artillery Lane, Spitalfields, in 1805 to produce ‘The Tiger’s Horde’ but the first major publishers of toy theatres in the East End were Archibald Park and his family, rising to prosperity with premises in Old St and then 47 Leonard St between 1830 until 1870.
Park’s apprentice from 1835-42, William Webb, set up on his own with shops in Cloth Fair and Bermondsey before eventually opening a quarter a mile from his master at 49 (renumbered as 146) Old St in 1857. Webb traded here until his death in 1898 when his son moved to 124 Old St where he was in business until 1931. Contrary to popular belief, it was William Webb who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous essay upon the subject of toy theatres. Yet a disagreement between the two men led to Stevenson approaching Webb’s rival Benjamin Pollock in Hoxton St, who became the subject of the story instead and whose name became the byword for toy theatres.
In 1876, at twenty-one years old, Benjamin Pollock had the good fortune to acquire by marriage the shop opened by his late father-in-law, John Redington in Hoxton in 1851. Redington had all the theatrical plates engraved JK Green and, in time, Benjamin Pollock altered these plates, erasing the name of ‘Redington’ and replacing it with his own just as Redington had once erased the name ‘Green’ before him. Although it was an unpromising business at the end of the nineteenth century, Pollock harnessed himself to the work, demonstrating flair and aptitude by producing high quality reproductions from the old plates, removing ‘modern’ lettering applied by Redington and commissioning new designs from the naive artist James Tofts.
In 1931, the writer AE Wilson had the forethought to visit Webb’s shop in Old St and Pollock’s in Hoxton St, talking to William Webb’s son Harry and to Benjamin Pollock, the last representatives of the two surviving dynasties in the arcane world of Juvenile Dramas. “In his heyday, his business was very flourishing,” admitted Harry Webb speaking of his father,” Why, I remember we employed four families to do the colouring. There must have been at least fifteen people engaged in the work. I could tell their work apart, no two of them coloured alike. Some of the work was beautifully done.”
Harry recalled visits by Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens to his father’s premises. “Up to the time of the quarrel, Stevenson was a frequent visitor to the shop, he was very fond of my father’s plays. Indeed it was my father who supplied the shop in Edinburgh from which he bought his prints as a boy,” he told Wilson.
Benjamin Pollock was seventy-five years old when Wilson met him and ‘spoke in strains not unmingled with melancholy.’ “Toy theatres are too slow for the modern boy and girl,” he confessed to Wilson, “even my own grandchildren aren’t interested. One Christmas, I didn’t sell a single stage.” Yet Pollock spoke passionately recalling visits by Ellen Terry and Charlie Chaplin to purchase theatres. “I still get a few elderly customers,” Pollock revealed, “Only the other day, a City gentleman drove up here in a car and bought a selection of plays. He said he had collected them as a boy. Practically all the stock has been here fifty years or so. There’s enough to last out my time, I reckon.”
Shortly after AE Wilson’s visit to Old St & Hoxton, Webb’s shop was demolished while Benjamin Pollock struggled to earn even the rent for his tiny premises until his death in 1937. Harry Webb lived on in Caslon St – named after the famous letter founder who set up there two centuries earlier – opposite the site of his father’s Old St shop until his death in 1962.
Robert Louis Stevenson visited 73 Hoxton St in 1884. “If you love art, folly or the bright eyes of children speed to Pollock’s” he wrote fondly afterwards. Stevenson was an only child who played with toy theatres to amuse himself in the frequent absences from school due to sickness when he was growing up in Edinburgh. I too was an only child enchanted by the magic of toy theatres, especially at Christmas, but I cannot quite put my finger on what still draws me to the romance of them.
Even Stevenson admitted “The purchase and the first half hour at home, that was the summit.” As a child, I think the making of them was the greater part of the pleasure, cutting out the figures and glueing it all together. “I cannot deny the joy that attended the illumination, nor can I quite forget that child, who forgoing pleasure, stoops to tuppence coloured,” Stevenson concluded wryly. I cannot imagine what he would have made of Old St’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ today.
Drawings for toy theatre characters by William Blake for William West
The sheet as published by William West, November 4th 1816 – note Blake’s initials, bottom right
Another sheet engraved after drawings by William Blake, 1814
124 Old St, 1931
73 Hoxton St (formerly 208 Hoxton Old Town) 1931
Benjamin Pollock at his shop on Hoxton St in 1931
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All are welcome at a party to celebrate Paul Gardner and one hundred and fifty years of Gardners Market Sundriesmen – his family business through four generations – at his old shop at 149 Commercial St this Monday 6th January from 6:00pm – 9:00pm.
Gardners Market Sundriesmen is moving to 78 Ruckholt Rd, Leyton, E10 5NP. Phone 0208 558 1289
After 150 years, Paul closes up in Spitalfields for the last time
Each day since Christmas, Paul Gardner, his wife Jane, and their sons have been clearing up the shop opened by Paul’s great-grandfather James in 1870 as the first tenant of the newly-constructed Peabody Building in Commercial St. By seven o’ clock on Friday night, three van loads of paper bags had already gone to the new shop in Leyton, and the family were exhausted, when the gang of volunteers arrived to assist with packing up.
Although depleted of stock, the shop looked pretty much as it had always done, yet an hour later it was almost empty. Without waiting for instructions, the well-wishers set to work stowing all the contents into boxes and stacking everything outside on the pavement before forming a human chain and passing the boxes into the van. Paul and his wife Jane stood in weary amazement at the centre of the whirlwind as the counter was disassembled and the cellar was emptied.
In between carrying boxes, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie managed to take enough photos to record the historic event. No-one complained about the dust of ages that was stirred up, coating Paul Gardner with a cobwebby layer which gave him the appearance of the old retainer who had been there for one hundred and fifty years, and rendering his face as grimy as a chimney sweep.
Once the van was full, Jane set off with the driver to supervise the unloading at the new shop in Leyton. In the meantime, we set to work on the final clear out. All kinds of old signs and mementos of past times were discovered, including Paul’s father’s receipt books dated up until the month in 1968 when he died. As the team of volunteers lifted the shop counter out onto the pavement, bank notes fluttered down Commercial St to delight of passersby.
By then, the shop looked like an empty theatre after the scenery had been removed. Paul lay down on the floor to make one last phone call to his wife on the spot where he had stood behind the counter for the past forty-seven years. Before long, the van returned and we loaded the counter and the remaining scales, trolleys and other paraphernalia.
By now, Paul was so tired he could hardly stand up but he sent me down the road to the off licence for some beers and we drank a toast together. Then he locked up his shop for the last time and this was how one hundred and fifty years ended in Spitalfields.
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may like to read my other stories about Gardners Market Sundriesmen
At Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
Paul Gardner Goes To Downing St
Paul Gardner Returns to Downing St
Joan Rose at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
James Brown at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
For the East End Preservation Society’s CR Ashbee Lecture 2020, Oliver Wainwright, Architecture Critic of The Guardian, introduces Architect Peter Barber. The lecture is at 7pm on Thursday 23rd January at The Wash Houses, The Cass, London Metropolitan University, 25 Old Castle St, E1 7NT.
Perhaps the most burning question in the capital now is how to provide enough good quality genuinely affordable housing? Peter Barber is an architect who is celebrated for designing humane high density council housing.
“One of the most original architects working today. Over the past decade he has built a reputation for his ingenious reinventions of traditional house types and his ability to craft characterful chunks of city out of unpromising sites.” – Oliver Wainwright
Peter Barber has entitled his lecture HUNDRED MILE CITY & OTHER STORIES. He will be discussing the ideas which underpin his work and showing images of built and theoretical projects for Donnybrook Quarter and Hundred Mile City. Peter is responsible for some of the best new social housing in Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets.
Each year, the East End Preservation Society presents the CR Ashbee Memorial Lecture. The inaugural lecture was delivered by Oliver Wainwright on the Seven Dark Arts of Developers, the second lecture was given by Rowan Moore on The Future of London, in the third lecture, Maria Brenton, Rachel Bagenal and Kareem Dayes spoke about Hope in the Housing Crisis, and in the fourth lecture The Gentle Author explored the activities of CR Ashbee in the East End.
This event is presented with the gracious support of The Cass, London Metropolitan University.
CLICK HERE TO RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKETS
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As soon as the landlord of The Bell in Petticoat Lane wrote to say he had discovered some neglected old models of Spitalfields in the cellar, I hurried over to take a look. Once upon a time, these beautiful dioramas enjoyed pride of place in the barroom but by then they had been consigned to oblivion.
Although hefty and dusty and in need of a little repair, nevertheless they were skilfully made and full of intriguing detail, and deserved to be seen. Thanks to the enlightened curatorial policy of Archivist Stefan Dickers, today they enjoy a permanent home in the reading room at the Bishopsgate Institute where they can visited during opening hours.
I am always curious to learn more of this southerly corner of Spitalfields closest to the City that gives up its history less readily than some other parts, but where the market dates from the twelfth century – much older than that on the northern side of the parish which was not granted its charter until the seventeenth century. The Bell, topped off by a grotesque brick relief of a bell with a human face and adorned with panels of six thousand bottle tops by Robson Cezar, King of the Bottletops, has always fascinated me. Once the only pub in Petticoat Lane, it can be dated back to 1842 and may be much earlier since a Black Bell Alley stood upon this site in the eighteenth century.
I first saw the dioramas in the cellar of The Bell, when the landlord dragged them out for me to examine, one by one, starting with the largest. There are four – three square boxes and one long box, depicting Petticoat Lane Market and The Bell around a hundred years ago. In the market diorama, stalls line up along Middlesex St selling books and rolls of cloth and provisions, while a priest and a policemen lecture a group of children outside the pub. In total, more than thirty individually modelled and painted clay figures are strategically arranged to convey the human drama of the market. By contrast, the square boxes are less panoramic in ambition, one portrays the barroom of The Bell, one the cellar of The Bell and another shows a drayman with his wagon outside the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, with a steam train crossing the railway bridge in the background.
A discreet plate on each diorama reveals the maker as Howard Kerslake’s model studio of Southend, a professional model maker’s pedigree that explains the sophisticated false perspectives and clever details such as the elaborate lamp outside The Bell – and the stuffed fish, the jar of pickled onions and the lettered mirror in the barroom – and the easy accomplishment of ambitious subjects such as the drayman’s cart with two horses in Brick Lane.
Nowadays, the dioramas have been dusted down and cleaned up and I recommend a visit to examine them for yourself.
Click on this picture to enlarge the diorama of Petticoat Lane
At the Truman Brewery Brick Lane, looking north
The barroom of The Bell
The cellar of The Bell
The Bell in the 1930s
You may like to read these other Petticoat Lane stories
Dennis Anthony’s Photographs of Petticoat Lane
Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane
Gardners Market Sundriesmen is moving to 78 Ruckholt Rd, Leyton, E10 5NP. Phone 0208 558 1289
“I am sure everyone here tonight will remember this little shop for years to come”
Twelfth Night is a traditional occasion for a party and in Spitalfields we celebrated it at Gardners Market Sundriesmen which moved to Leyton this week after one hundred and fifty years in Commercial St. It is not uncommon for parties to be held when shops open but few shopkeepers enjoy such a party when their shop closes. The volunteers who helped Paul Gardner pack up his shop on Friday returned on Monday night to join with his many friends and loyal customers in showing their appreciation.
Paul climbed onto a wooden crate, proudly wearing his paper hat and Metallica jacket, to make a speech to the assembled throng of well-wishers and old friends who crammed the shop that night.
“When I first came here in 1973, I wore a suit for two days and then I thought to myself ‘I don’t really like this very much,’ but it’s always been so interesting and brilliant being here because I get such a wide range of people in. Half the time, I don’t know if I am Basil Fawlty or Manuel…
It’s so inspiring to be here because I meet so many nice people. You get the odd one, but 99% of the people who come in to my shop are pleasant. They have all been enthusiastic, wanting me to carry on and I hope I have given them some inspiration too. If you have your own small business, it is very hard to survive.
I am a simpleton really yet I have managed to survive through hard work, so far. I am sure everyone here tonight will remember this little shop for years to come and hopefully I will see you all in the future. It’s absolutely great all of you coming here to see me off, but you ain’t seen the end of me yet. I’m not on the highway to hell!
I’d like to thank all the people who have helped me over the years, especially Krissie, Leila … the East End Trades Guild has been an inspiration to me and its getting bigger and stronger all the time … the Gentle Author has done some mind-blowing stories about my shop … and to Jane, my lovely wife, who has stuck by me through thick and thin, working seven days a week clearing everything out.
Cheers then, thanks very much and goodbye!”
At the conclusion of Paul’s speech the crowd sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,’ and so say all of us.
Jane Gardner welcomes guests to the party
Paul embraces his fans
Lucinda Douglas Menzies arrives in a magnificent hat
Paul with his son Robert
Paul and the curator of the Operating Theatre Museum
Fiona, the Spitalfields dog walker, and friend
Jane Gardner with Stanley Rondeau, the Huguenot
Paul Gardner with ‘Pickles’ a market stalwart
Paul and Samson Soboye
Paul’s breaks into an improvised song with harmonica accompaniment
‘I am a simpleton really yet I have managed to survive through hard work, so far’
Paul holds up his card made by Jill Wilson incorporating Eleanor Crow’s painting
Jane and Paul Gardner
The Paul Gardner doll in the pocket of Paul’s overcoat
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may like to read my other stories about Gardners Market Sundriesmen
At Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
Packing Up Gardners Market Sundriesmen
Paul Gardner Goes To Downing St
Paul Gardner Returns to Downing St
Joan Rose at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
James Brown at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
Taking advantage of the fleeting sunlight on Sunday morning, I set out to visit some of the exemplary examples of social housing designed by architect Peter Barber in the East End. Peter is giving this year’s East End Preservation Society CR Ashbee Lecture on 23rd January. His buildings complement the existing urban landscape and are fascinating for being entirely modern yet drawing upon historic forms of housing in the capital.
Beveridge Mews, off Hannibal Rd, Stepney.
Beveridge Mews, off Hannibal Rd, Stepney
Beveridge Mews, off Hannibal Rd, Stepney
McGrath Rd, Stratford
McGrath Rd, Stratford
McGrath Rd, Stratford
Donnybrook Quarter, corner of Parnell Rd and Old Ford Rd. The project was commissioned by Circle 33 Housing Trust in 2003
Donnybrook Quarter, corner of Parnell Rd and Old Ford Rd
Donnybrook Quarter, corner of Parnell Rd and Old Ford Rd
Donnybrook Quarter, corner of Parnell Rd and Old Ford Rd
Donnybrook Quarter, corner of Parnell Rd and Old Ford Rd
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