In recent years, the Town House Gallery in Spitalfields has made a reputation for bringing unjustly neglected artists to recognition such as Doreen Fletcher and Peri Parkes. Now curator Fiona Atkins is launching Town House Open to which all artists are invited to submit work on an East End theme by 5th April for exhibition this summer. The selection committee will be Fiona Atkins, David Buckman, Doreen Fletcher & The Gentle Author. CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS
The Public Inquiry called by Secretary of State, Robert Jenrick, into the future of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry commences on Tuesday 5th May and runs until Friday 15th May, with eight days of hearings. It is being held at Tower Hamlets Town Hall, Mulberry Place, 5 Clove Crescent, E14 2BG, and is open to the public up to a capacity of two hundred.
Please put these dates in your diary now because we need as many people as possible to attend to demonstrate the massive strength of public feeling that exists to save the bell foundry.
You may also like to read about
The Secretary of State steps in
A Letter to the Secretary of State
Rory Stewart Supports Our Campaign
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
Illustrator Rebecca Wright sent me her fine portfolio of drawings of Dennis Severs’ House which it is my pleasure to publish for the first time publicly today
The Smoking Room
“When I first saw Dennis Severs’ House on television a few years ago I immediately wanted to visit, it looked beautiful and eccentric. I am an illustrator, and I was looking for a project. History, architecture and the curious have always interested me, so the house was a perfect fit.
Between jobs it has taken a year and a half to draw each of the main rooms, now I would like to draw the landings and staircases. I began with the front room on the ground floor and finished in the back cellar, and I found some rooms more complicated than others to draw.
The Ladies’ Drawing Room on the first floor took ages because of all the different fabrics and crockery. It has been a lovely experience, studying each room while practicing drawing and experimenting with lighting to get the atmosphere right. One of my favourites is the Smoking Room which has a lot of details like the bird cage and the knocked-over bottles, and the smoke drifting in the sunlight.
I placed Madge the cat is in each of my pictures because the house is her home and she is the presiding spirit.” – Rebecca Wright
The Kitchen
The Drawing Room
The Victorian Parlour decked for Christmas
The Ladies’ Room
The Blue Bedroom
The Regency Room
The Charles Dickens Room
The Paupers’ Attic
The Back Cellar
Illustrations copyright © Rebecca Wright
Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, Norton Folgate, E1 6BX
You might also like to read
Illustrator Sarah Tanat-Jones sent me her drawings of London’s old pubs, cafes, launderettes and chicken shops. Obviously these are subjects close to my heart, but I especially admire Sarah’s gleefully brash pop aesthetic and the levity of her quality of line.
Drawings copyright © Sarah Tanat-Jones
You may also like to read about
The Lost World of the Laundrettes
David Buckman profiles Barnett Freedman (1901–1958) who was born in Stepney. A major retrospective, Barnett Freedman – Designs for Modern Britain opens at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester on 14th March and runs until 14th June.
I am giving a lecture about the work of Barnett Freedman and other twentieth century artists, Street Life: Painting the East End , at Pallant House on 30th April Click here for tickets
Barnett raises his hat in Kensington Gardens to celebrate designing the Jubilee stamp for George V
Odds were heavily stacked against Barnett Freedman becoming a professional artist. Born in 1901 to a poor Jewish couple, living at 79 Lower Chapman St, Stepney, who had emigrated to the East End of London from Russia, Barnett’s childhood was scarred by ill-health and he was confined to bed between the ages of nine and thirteen. Yet he educated himself, learning to read, write, play music, draw and paint, all within a hospital ward. His nephew, Norman, recalled that “He played the violin for the king,” but that “When he acquired a bicycle his mother cut off the tyres as she considered it too dangerous for her son to ride.”
By sixteen, Barnett was earning his living as a draughtsman to a monumental mason for a few shillings a week. He made the best of this unexciting work in the day, spending his evenings at St Martin’s School of Art for five years from 1917. Eventually, he moved to an architect’s office, working up his employer’s rough sketches and, during a surge of war memorial work, honing his skills as a lettering artist.
For three successive years, Barnett failed to win a London County Council Senior Scholarship in Art that would enable him to study full time at the Royal College of Art under the direction of William Rothenstein. Finally, Barnett presented a portfolio of work to Rothenstein in person. Impressed, he put Barnett’s case to the London County Council Chief Inspector himself and a stipend of £120 a year was made, enabling Barnett to begin his studies in 1922. Under the direction of Rothenstein, Barnett’s talent flourished, taught by such fine draughtsmen as Randolph Schwabe and stimulated by fellow students Edward Bawden, Raymond Coxon, Henry Moore, Vivian Pitchforth and John Tunnard. Eight years after his entry, Rothenstein took Barnett onto the staff.
Although he could be prickly and even alarming on occasion, Barnett was revered by his former students. My late friends Leonard Appelbee and his wife Frances Macdonald, both artists, never stopped talking of his kindness. Burly Leonard used to help lift Barnett’s heavy lithographic stones when they were too much for the artist to manage alone, and when once Leonard and Frances considered moving to Hampstead, Barnett retorted – “You don’t want to go there. It’s an ‘orrible place!” According to Professor Rogerson, “He was a volatile character who did not respect authority and was always at war with the civil servants … yet I know people who were taught by him who say he was a very careful and punctilious teacher who paid a lot of attention to his students – though he could fire off if he was angry. At heart, I think he pretended to be a harsh kind of person but he was very good to a lot of people.”
After leaving the Royal College in 1925, Barnett had his share of problems. He painted prolifically but sold little – with his work only gradually being bought by collectors, although the Victoria and Albert Museum and Contemporary Art Society eventually bought drawings. In 1929, ill-health prevented him from working for a year. In 1930, he married Claudia Guercio whom he had met at art school, born in Lancashire of Sicilian ancestry. She also became a fine illustrator. Their son Vincent recalls that the home they created “was a warm place, vibrant with sound and brilliant colours, excitement darting from the music at night, the pictures on the walls, and the constant talking.”
Barnett enjoyed a long association with Faber and Faber, and his colour lithography and black-and-white illustrations for Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer,’ published in 1931, are outstanding. Works by the Brontë sisters, Walter de la Mare, Charles Dickens, Edith Sitwell, William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy benefited from his inspired illustration. Barnett believed that “the art of book illustration is native to this country … for the British are a literary nation.” He argued that “however good a descriptive text might be, illustrations which go with the writings add reality and significance to our understanding of the scene, for all becomes more vivid to us, and we can, with ease, conjure up the exact environment – it all stands clearly before us.”
He was also an outstanding commercial designer, producing a huge output of work for clients including Ealing Films, the General Post Office, Curwen Press, Shell-Mex and British Petroleum, Josiah Wedgwood and London Transport. The series of forty lithographs by notable artists for Lyons’ teashops was supervised by Barnett, including his famous and beautiful auto-lithographs ‘People’ and ‘The Window Box.’ Barnett wrote and broadcast on lithography and other aspects of art, with surviving scripts showing him to have been a natural talent at the microphone. When artists were being chosen for the series ‘English Masters of Black-and-White’ just after the Second World War, the editor, Graham Reynolds included Barnett among an illustrious band alongside George Cruikshank, Sir John Tenniel and Rex Whistler.
Barnett joined that select group who served as Official War Artists. Along with Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden, he accompanied the expeditionary force in the spring of 1940, before the retreat at Dunkirk, yet Barnett did not shed his iconoclasm and outspokenness when he donned khaki. Asked if he would paint a portrait of the legendary General Gort, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Barnett’s response was, “I am not interested in uniform … Oh well, perhaps I might if he’s got a good head?” On his return, Barnett continued to produce vivid, powerful pictures for the War Office and the Admiralty, gaining a CBE in 1946. But despite hobnobbing with military luminaries, Barnett never became posh, retaining his East End manner of speaking. Vincent Freeman recalls how Barnett once hailed a taxi-cab, “‘to the Athenaeum Club’, to which the incredulous driver retorted – ‘What, YOU?'”
After hostilities, Barnett remained busy with many commissions until in 1958, when he died peacefully in his chair at his Cornwall Gardens studio, near Gloucester Rd, aged only fifty-seven. Vincent recalls his final memory of his father, “discussing a pleasant lunch he had enjoyed with the family’s oldest friend [the artist] Anne Spalding.” Barnett was widely obituarized and his work was given an Arts Council memorial exhibition and tour. Subsequently, exhibitions such as that at Manchester Polytechnic Library in 1990 and new books have periodically enhanced his reputation.
Barnett Freedman is among my top candidates for a blue plaque, as one of the most distinguished British artists to emerge from the East End. There was a 2006 campaign to get him one in at 25 Stanhope St, off the Euston Rd, where he lived early in his career, but English Heritage rejected him, along with four others as of “insufficient stature or historical significance” – an unjust decision exposed by the Camden New Journal. The artist and Camden resident David Gentleman was one among many who supported the plaque, writing “He was a very good and original artist whose work deserves to be remembered. He influenced me in the sense of his meticulous workmanship. He was a real master of it.”
Professor Ian Rogerson, author of ‘The Graphic Work of Barnett Freedman’, considers Barnett “the world’s best auto-lithographer … A lot of people who do not seem to have contributed as much to the arts have managed to get blue plaques. Freedman’s work is being increasingly collected – and he is being recognised more and more as a major contributor to British art.” Of Barnett’s remarkable output, his son Vincent says – “A huge optimism and compassion shows itself to me in all his work and life. Humanity was his central driving force.”
Freedman family portrait with Barnett standing far left.
Barnett painting on the roof top as a war artist
Barnett shows his wife Claudia a mural he painted as the official Royal Marines artist.
Recording the BBC ‘Sight & Sound’ programme ‘Artists v Poets’ in February 1939, Sir Kenneth Clark master of ceremonies with scorer. Artists from left: Duncan Grant, Brynhild Parker, Barnett Freedman, Nicolas Bentley, and poets – W. J. Turner, Stephen Spender, Winifred Holmes and George Barker.
Barnett enjoys a successful afternoon fishing at Thame, Buckinghamshire, in the thirties.
Designs for the ‘London Ballet.’ (courtesy Fleece Press)
The Window Box, lithograph.
Advertisement for London Transport from the nineteen thirties.
Advertisement for the General Post Office rom the nineteen-forties.
Advertisement for Shell at the time of the Festival of Britain, 1951.
Design for Ealing Studios.
Cover for ‘Memoirs of a an Infantry Officer,’ Faber and Faber.
Cover for Walter de la Mare’s 75th Birthday Tribute, Faber and Faber.
Barnett Freedman’s ‘Claudia’ typeface.
Design for Dartington Hall, Devon.
Lithographs for ‘Oliver Twist,’ published by the Heritage Press in New York, 1939.
Barnett Freedman works courtesy Special Collections, Manchester Metropolitan University
Barnett Freedman is featured in my book East End Vernacular, Artists Who Painted London’s East End Streets in the 20th Century
Click here to order a copy of EAST END END VERNACULAR for £25
It is my pleasure to publish this piece by Sian Rees from her fascinating horticultural blog PLANTING DIARIES, Gardens, Planting Styles & Their Origins . I am proud that Sian is a graduate of my blog writing course.
There are only a few places available on my last ever Advanced Blog Writing Course on 28th & 29th March. You are eligible if you already have a blog or some experience in writing. Drop me a line if you would like to know more SpitalfieldsLife@gmail.com
The Gardener, 1814
Stories about the real world and real lives were considered as interesting and exciting as fiction in children’s books of Georgian England. Trades were a popular subject – what people did and how things were made were described and illustrated with woodcuts, bringing these occupations to life for the young reader.
One such example is Little Jack of all Trades (1814) from Darton & Harvey, publishers of many children’s books from the later eighteenth century into the Victorian era. Author William Darton begins by likening workers in the various trades to bees in a hive, where everyone has their specific role to play within a larger inter-connected structure:
‘all are employed – all live cheerfully and whilst each individual works for the general good, the whole community works for him. The baker supplies the bricklayer, the gardener and the tailor with bread; and they, in return, provide him with shelter, food and raiment: thus, though each person is dependent on the other, all are independent.’
I was delighted to see that the book includes a profile of a gardener, who appears alongside other practical tradespeople such as the carpenter, blacksmith, cabinet maker, mason, bookbinder, printer and hatter – to cite but a few.
The gardener is portrayed handing a large bouquet of flowers to a well-dressed woman – most probably the wife of his employer. Our gardener is a manager – his two assistants behind him are engaged in digging over the soil and watering a bed of plants – while we learn his specialist skills include grafting and pruning.
In the background, a heated greenhouse extends the season for the production of fruits and other crops. Smoke from the building’s stove is visible rising from the chimney on the right. All the tools of the gardeners’ trade remain familiar to us today:
‘the spade to dig with, the hoe to root out weeds, the dibble to make holes which receive the seed and plants, the rake to cover seeds with earth when sown, the pruning hook and watering pot.’
From a contemporary perspective, it is interesting that Darton’s description of the gardener makes the connection between gardening and well-being:
‘Working in a garden is a delightful and healthy occupation; it strengthens the body, enlivens the spirits, and infuses into the mind a pleasing tranquillity, and sensations of happy independence.’
William Darton (1755 – 1819) was an engraver, stationer and printer in London and with partner Joseph Harvey (1764 – 1841) published books for children and religious tracts. His sons Samuel & William Darton were later active in the business.
Darton & Harvey’s books for children always contain plentiful illustrations, packed with details of clothes, buildings and interiors, that convey a powerful sense of working life in the early nineteenth century.
More recently, the status of gardening as a skilled trade has been undermined and eroded – so it is pleasing to see the gardener in this book taking his place on equal terms alongside other tradesmen.
The Basket Maker
The Carpenter
The Black Smith
The Wheelwright
The Cabinet Maker
The Boatbuilder
The Tin Man
The Mason
Images from The Victorian Collection at the Brigham Young University courtesy of archive.org
Click here to see the entire contents of LITTLE JACK OF ALL TRADES
You may also like to read about
As RECLAIM OUR GOODSYARD put forward a community proposal for public housing to challenge the corporate development upon the Bishopsgate Goodsyard, I trace the story of this controversial site.
Mesolithic tranchet adze discovered at Bishopsgate Goodsyard
Bishopsgate Goodsyard c.1910
There are many continuities that run through time in Spitalfields, yet most disturbing is the history of brutal change which has been wreaked upon our neighbourhood over centuries.
The Hospital of the Priory of St Mary – from which the name Spitalfields is derived – was established in the eleventh century as a refuge for the homeless, conveniently one mile north from the City of London which sought to expel vagabonds and beggars. Then Henry VIII destroyed this Priory in the sixteenth century and seized the ‘Spital fields which he turned over to usage as his Artillery Ground.
In the eighteen-thirties, the Eastern Counties Railway, cut across the north of Spitalfields to construct Bishopsgate Station on Shoreditch High St, pushing families from their homes to seek new accommodation in the surrounding streets. The overcrowded area to the north became known as the Nichol, notorious for criminality. While to the south, in the courtyards beyond Quaker St, old houses built when the silk industry thrived in Spitalfields were rented out at one family per room. Clusters of black streets on Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty vividly illustrate the social consequences of this drastic redevelopment.
The situation was exacerbated in Spitalfields when the City of London objected to traffic from the London Docks congesting their streets and hundreds more homes were demolished when Commercial St was cut through to carry goods directly to the terminus in Shoreditch High St. Finally, in the eighteen-seventies when the railway was extended south to Liverpool St, an entire residential neighbourhood area to the west of Spitalfields was also obliterated.
It was only at the very end of the nineteenth century, when the Boundary Estate was constructed as Britain’s first social housing, that any attempt was made to ameliorate the human damage of this unbridled series of large-scale developments. Upon the cusp of the next imminent wave of violent change, in which a monster development threatens to put the Boundary Estate into permanent shadow, it is sobering to contemplate the earlier history of the area that is now known as the Bishopsgate Goodsyard.
The paradox of redevelopment is that it confronts us with our past, when excavations for new buildings uncover evidence of history – such as the Bishop’s Sq development that resurrected thousands of plague victims in Spitalfields. In Shoreditch, exploratory work for a forty storey tower uncovered the Shakespearian theatre where Henry V was first performed and, at the Bishopsgate Goodsyard, preparatory demolition drew attention to John Braithwaite’s elegant viaduct constructed in the eighteen-thirties. In both cases, the outcome is an unholy yoking of conservation and shopping, with Shakespeare’s theatre due to become a heritage feature in a mall and the Braithwaite’s arches set to provide retail units for brands, and both serving as undercrofts to gargantuan towers.
Recent excavations by Museum of London Archaeology Service discovered more than seventy pieces of Mesolithic struck flint, mostly to the west of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard site, suggesting early human occupation towards the banks of the River Walbrook. Ermine St, the Roman road north from the City of London followed the line of Bishopsgate and Shoreditch High St, and burials of this era have been uncovered upon either side of the roadway, just as along the Appian Way in Rome. While a medieval settlement grew up along Shoreditch High St and around Holywell Priory, the land further to the east lay open until the mid-seventeenth century. Yet prior to this, the brick quarries that gave the name to Brick Lane existed there as early as the fourteenth century.
Between 1652 and 1682, the Bishopsgate Goodsyard site was quickly built over a with a mixture of dwellings and small trades as the city expanded. The brick quarries that created the materials for development were eventually filled in with debris from the Fire of London, as streets were laid out and prosperous middle class suburban dwellings were constructed – coinciding with the rise of the lucrative silk industry locally. Discovery of delft tiles, marbles, wine bottles and clay pipes testify to the domestic life of the residents of this newly-built neighbourhood, while analysis of cesspits tells us they ate duck, chicken, mutton, herring, plaice, flounder and cod. Evidence of small-scale industry reveals the presence of sugar processing, glass and iron working, pottery, distillation and the textile trade.
Thus a whole world grew up with streets and yards, taverns, shops, warehouses and workshops – one that was wiped away nearly two centuries later. Today, it is too easy to look at the empty site of the former Bishopsgate Goodsyard and assume that there was never anything before the railway came through. Yet, as we contemplate the next wave of redevelopment, we should do well to contemplate the society that once flourished in this place and how the previous development erased it, that we may draw lessons from the long-term destructive outcomes of these great impositions upon Spitalfields.
Saxon antler and bone comb discovered at Holywell
Excavation of a brick quarry at the Bishopsgate Goods Yard, close to Brick Lane
On Faithorne & Newcourt’s map of 1658, the site of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard is open fields
By Morgan’s map of 1682, suburban development has filled the site
Pipe bowl depicting Admiral Vernon, who introduced the daily ration of grog to the navy
Pipe bowl depicting Don Blas de Leso, Portuguese governor of Panama kneeling in surrender to Admiral Vernon
Eighteenth century marbles from the Goodsyard
Eighteenth century tin-glazed tile made in London
Mid-seventeenth century Dutch tin-glazed tiles from Bishopsgate Goodsyard, showing a mounted military figure and a man with a cockerel
Eighteenth century tin-glazed tile made in London
Eighteenth century Dutch tile of crucifixion scene
Witch box – animal bones in a wooden box concealed in an eighteenth-century fireplace upon the Bishopsgate Goodsyard site
Unusual post-medieval bone crucifix with sun above, discovered at Bishopsgate Goodsyard, possibly the work of a Napoleonic prisoner of war
Copper plate inscribed ‘Thos Juchau Shoreditch’ – Juchau was a celebrated bare-knuckle boxer born in 1739, said to have been the ‘hero of a hundred fights,’ who became British champion until defeated by William ‘the dyer’ Darts of Spitalfields in the first ever outdoor heavyweight boxing match in 1777. He died in Bateman’s Row in 1806.
Bishopsgate Station, photograph courtesy of National Rail Museum
Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889 courtesy of LSE Library
“The Arches – a long street under a railway which carried the mainline to Liverpool St Station and ran from Commercial St to Club Row … there the pros would practise to mouth-organ acompaniment, night after night, until they had copied the Yanks most intricate steps.” Bud Flanagan, My Crazy Life 1961
Archaeological photographs copyright © MOLA
‘Tracks Through Time, Archaeology and History from the London Overground East London Line’ is available from Museum of London Shop
You may also like to read about
It is my delight to publish this selection of local examples from Philip Mernick‘s astonishing ephemera collection of East End letterheads and receipts. Many are remarkable for the beauty of their typographic design as well as revealing the wide range of industry and commerce.
The oldest slop shop in Wapping sold clothing for the slave trade. Click here to read about slave clothing
This advertisement was printed on a one million mark bank note from the German reich, giving it novelty value and also making a bold political statement to customers
All letterheads and receipts courtesy of Philip Mernick
You may also like to take a look at
Anyone who has ever visited Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St will recognise this spectacular chimneypiece in the bedroom with its idiosyncratic pediment designed to emulate the facade of Christ Church. The fireplace itself is lined with an exquisite array of Delft tiles which you may have admired, but very few know that these tiles were made by craftsman Simon Pettet in 1985, when he was twenty years old and living in the house with Dennis Severs. Simon was a gifted ceramicist who mastered the technique of tile-making with such expertise that he could create new Delft tiles in an authentic manner, which were almost indistinguishable from those manufactured in the seventeenth century.
In his tiles for this fireplace, Simon made a leap of the imagination, creating a satirical gallery of familiar Spitalfields personalities from the nineteen-eighties. Today his splendid fireplace of tiles exists as a portrait of the neighbourhood at that time, though so discreetly done that, unless someone pointed it out to you, it is unlikely you would ever notice amongst all the overwhelming detail of Dennis Severs’ house.
Simon Pettet died of AIDS in 1993, eight years after completing the fireplace and just before his twenty-eighth birthday, and today his ceramics, especially this fireplace in Dennis Severs’ house, comprise a poignant memorial of a short but productive life. Simon’s death imparts an additional resonance to the humour of his work now, which is touching in the skill he expended to conceal his ingenious achievement. As with so much in these beautiful old buildings, we admire the workmanship without ever knowing the names of the craftsmen who were responsible, and Simon aspired to this worthy tradition of anonymous artisans in Spitalfields.
When I squatted down to peer into the fireplace, I could not help smiling to recognise Gilbert & George on the very first tile I saw – Simon had created instantly recognisable likenesses that also recalled Tenniel’s illustrations of Tweedledum & Tweedledee. Most importantly, the spontaneity, colour, texture and sense of line were all exactly as you would expect of Delft tiles. Taking my camera and tripod in hand, I spent a couple of hours with my head in the fireplace before emerging sooty and triumphant with this selection of photographs.
When I finished photographing all the tiles, I noticed one placed at the top right-hand side that was almost entirely hidden from the viewer by the wooden surround on the front of the fireplace. It was completely covered in soot too. After I used a kitchen scourer to remove the grime, I discovered this most-discreetly placed tile was a portrait of Simon himself at work, making tiles. The modesty of the man was such that only someone who climbed into the fireplace, as I did, would ever find Simon’s own signature tile.
Gilbert & George
Raphael Samuel, Historian of the East End
Riccardo Cinelli, Artist
Jim Howett, Carpenter whom Dennis Severs considered to be the fly on the wall in Spitalfields
Ben Langlands & Nikki Bell, Artists who made extra money as housepainters
Simon de Courcy Wheeler, Photographer
Julian Humphreys who renovated his bathroom regularly – “Tomorrow is another day”
Scotsman, Paul Duncan, worked for the Spitalfields Trust
Douglas Blain, Director of the Spitalfields Trust, who was devoted to Hawksmoor
The person in this illustration of a famous event in Folgate St cannot be named for legal reasons
Keith & Jane Bowler of Wilkes St
Her Majesty the Cat, known as ‘Madge,’ watching ‘Come Dancing’
Marianna Kennedy & Ian Harper who were both students at the Slade
Phyllis & her son Rodney Archer
Anna Skrine, Secretary of the Spitalfields Trust
Simon Pettet, Designer & Craftman (1965-93)
Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, Spitalfields, E1 6BX
You may also like to read about
It is my delight to publish these old Whitechapel letterheads and receipts from Philip Mernick‘s astonishing ephemera collection. Many are remarkable for the beauty of their typographic design as well as revealing the wide range of industry and commerce.
Speigelhalters were in Whitechapel from 1928 until 1988
Gardiner’s Corner was a familiar landmark in East End for generations
This was the family business of the artist Nathaniel Kornbluth
All letterheads and receipts courtesy of Philip Mernick
You may also like to take a look at
The oldest surviving set of silk designs in the world, James Leman’s album contains ninety ravishingly beautiful patterns created in Steward St, Spitalfields between 1705 and 1710 when he was a young man. It was my delight to visit the Victoria & Albert Museum and study the pages of this unique artefact, which is the subject of an interdisciplinary research project under the auspices of the V&A Research Institute, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Leman Album offers a rare glimpse into an affluent and fashionable sphere of eighteenth century high society, as well as demonstrated the astonishing skill of the journeyman weavers in East London three hundred years ago.
James Leman (pronounced ‘lemon’ like Leman St in Aldgate) was born in London around 1688 as the second generation of a Huguenot family and apprenticed at fourteen to his father, Peter, a silk weaver. His earliest designs in the album, executed at eighteen years old, are signed ‘made by me, James Leman, for my father.’ In those days, when silk merchants customarily commissioned journeyman weavers, James was unusual in that he was both a maker and designer. In later life, he became celebrated for his bravura talent, rising to second in command of the Weavers’ Company in the City of London. A portrait of the seventeen-twenties in the V&A collection, which is believed to be of James Leman, displays a handsome man of assurance and bearing, arrayed in restrained yet sophisticated garments of subtly-toned chocolate brown silk and brocade.
His designs are annotated with the date and technical details of each pattern, while many of their colours are coded to indicate the use of metallic cloth and different types of weave. Yet beyond these aspects, it is the aesthetic brilliance of the designs which is most striking, mixing floral and architectural forms with breathtaking flair in a way that appears startling modern. The Essex Pink and Rosa Mundi are recognisable alongside whimsical architectural forms which playfully combine classical and oriental motifs within a single design. The breadth of James Leman’s knowledge of botany and architecture as revealed by his designs reflects a wide cultural interest that, in turn, reflected flatteringly upon the tastes of his wealthy customers.
Until recently, the only securely identified woven example of a James Leman pattern was a small piece of silk in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia. Miraculously, just as the V&A’s research project on the Leman Album was launched, a length of eighteenth-century silk woven to one of his designs was offered to the museum by a dealer in historical textiles, who recognised it from her knowledge of the album. The Museum purchased the silk and is now investigating the questions that arise now design and textile may be placed side by side for the first time. With colours as vibrant as the day they were woven three hundred years ago, the sensuous allure of this glorious piece of deep pink silk adorned with elements of lustrous green, blue, red and gold shimmers across the expanse of time and is irresistibly attractive to the eye. Such was the extravagant genius of James Leman, Silk Designer.
On the left is James Leman’s design and on the right is a piece of silk woven from it, revealing that colours of the design are not always indicative of the woven textile
The reverse of each design gives the date and details of the fabric and weave
Portrait of a Master Silk Weaver by Michael Dahl, 1720-5 – believed to be James Leman
All images copyright © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Click here to read about recent research into James Leman’s Album
With grateful thanks to: Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner, Senior Curator of Designs – Dr Victoria Button, Senior Paper Conservator – Clare Browne, Senior Curator of Textiles – Dr Lucia Burgio, Senior Scientist and Eileen Budd, V&A Research Institute Project Manager
You may also like to read about
The Principal Operations of Weaving
At Anna Maria Garthwaite’s House
Anna Maria Garthwaite, Silk Designer
Taking advantage of yesterday’s spring sunshine to escape the city and seek some fresh air, I wandered along the river bank from Bow as far as Tottenham Hale
At Cody Dock
Statue of Frederick Albert Winsor, founder of the Imperial Gas Light & Coke Company with two of his historic gasometers at Bow
At Bow Lock
Looking towards the tidal mill at Three Mills Island
At Three Mills Island
Who can identify this water fowl?
Old Ford Lock
Beneath the Eastway
Sculling on the Hackney Cut
At Lea Bridge
Barge cat
The Anchor & Hope
Looking towards Clapton
The Lea Rowing Club
At Tottenham Lock
Two Thames Barges at Tottenham Hale
Coal & diesel delivery barge
At Stonebridge Lock
You may also like to read about
I have selected these portraits of magnificent women from Philip Mernick‘s fine collection of cartes de visite by nineteenth century East End photographers, arranged chronologically to show the evolving styles of dress and changing roles of female existence
1863
1863
1867
1860s
c. 1870
c.1870
c. 1870
1870s
1880
1880s
1880s
1884
1884
1886
1880s
1880s
1880s
1890s
c. 1890
1890s
1890s
c. 1900
c. 1910
c. 1910 Theatrical performer by William Whiffin
c. 1940 Driver
Photographs reproduced courtesy of Philip Mernick
You may also like to take a look at
This boy is wearing Horace Warner’s hat
I often think of the lives of the Spitalfields Nippers. Around 1900 Photographer and Sunday School Teacher Horace Warner took portraits of children in Quaker St, who were some of the poorest in London at that time. When his personal album of these astonishing photographs came to light five years ago, we researched the lives of his subjects and published a book of all his portraits accompanied by biographies of the children.
Although we were shocked to discover that as many as a third did not reach adulthood, we were also surprised and heartened by the wide range of outcomes among the others. In spite of the deprivation they endured in their early years, many of these children survived to have long and fulfilled lives.
Walter Seabrook was born on 23rd May 1890 to William and Elizabeth Seabrook of Custance St, Hoxton. In 1901, when Walter’s portrait was taken by Horace Warner, the family were living at 24 & 1/2 Great Pearl St, Spitalfields, and Walter’s father worked as a printer’s labourer. At twenty-four years old, Walter was conscripted and fought in World War One but survived to marry Alice Noon on Christmas Day 1918 at St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green. By occupation, Walter was an electrician and lived at 2 Princes Court, Gibraltar Walk. He and Alice had three children – Walter born in 1919, Alice born in 1922 and Gladys born in 1924. Walter senior died in Ware, Hertfordshire, in 1971, aged eighty-one.
Sisters Wakefield
Jessica & Rosalie Wakefield. Jessica was born in Camden on January 16th 1891 and Rosalie at 47 Hamilton Buildings, Great Eastern St, Shoreditch on July 4th 1895. They were the second and last of four children born to William, a printer’s assistant, and Alice, a housewife. It seems likely they were living in Great Eastern St at the time Horace Warner photographed them, when Jessica was ten or eleven and Rosalie was five or six.
Jessica married Stanley Taylor in 1915 and they lived in Wandsworth, where she died in 1985, aged ninety-four. On July 31st 1918 at the age of twenty-three, Rosalie married Ewart Osborne, a typewriter dealer, who was also twenty-three years old, at St Mary, Balham. After five years of marriage, they had a son named Robert, in 1923, but Ewart left her and she was reported as being deaf. Eventually the couple divorced in 1927 and both married again. Rosalie died aged eighty-four in 1979, six years before her elder sister Jessica, in Waltham Forest.
Jerry Donovan, or ‘Dick Whittington & His Cat’
Jeremiah Donovan was born in 1895 in the City of London. His parents Daniel, news vendor, and Katherine Donovan originated in Ireland. They came to England and settled in Spitalfields at 14 Little Pearl St, Spitalfields. By 1901, the family were resident at Elizabeth Buildings, Boleyn Rd. Jeremiah volunteered for World War I in 1914 when he was nineteen and was stationed at first at City of London Barracks in Moorgate. He joined the Royal Artillery, looked after the horses for the gun carriages, but was gassed in France. In 1919, Jeremiah married Susan Nichols and they had one son, Bertram John Donovan, born in 1920. He died in Dalston in 1956 and is remembered by nine great grandchildren.
Adelaide Springett in all her best clothes
Adelaide Springett was born in February 1893 in the parish of St George-in-the-East, Wapping. Her father, William Springett came from Marylebone and her mother Margaret from St Lukes, Old St. Both parents were costermongers, although William was a dock labourer when he first married. Adelaide’s twin sisters, Ellen and Margaret, died at birth and another sister, Susannah, died aged four. Adelaide attended St Mary’s School and then St Joseph’s School. The addresses on her school admissions were 12 Miller’s Court, Dorset St, and then 26 Dorset St. In 1901, at eight years old, she was recorded as lodging with her mother at the Salvation Army Shelter in Hanbury St.
Adelaide Springett died in 1986 in Fulham aged ninety-three, without any traceable relatives, and the London Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Social Services Department was her executor.
Celia Compton was born in 11 Johnson St, Mile End, on April 28th 1886, to Charles – a wood chopper – and Mary Compton. Celia was one of nine children but only six survived into adulthood. Two elder brothers Charles, born in 1883, and William, born in 1884, both died without reaching their first birthdays, leaving Celia as the eldest. On January 25th 1904, she married George Hayday, a chairmaker who was ten years older than her. They lived at 5 George St, Hoxton, and had no children. After he died in 1933, she married Henry Wood the next year and they lived in George Sq until it was demolished in 1949. In later years, Celia became a moneylender and she died in Poplar in 1966 aged eighty years old.
Click here to order SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS by Horace Warner for £20
Distinguished historian Gillian Tindall sent me this fascinating history of the Plague in London from her self-isolation
‘Bring Out Your Dead,’ A Street in London 1665, by Edmund Evans, 1864
Inhabitants of modern developed countries too easily lose sight of the essential fragility of human life. If you are fortunate enough to live in a society with a decent health service, effective drugs readily available and an average life-expectancy well beyond the Biblical three-score years and ten, you may accept this state of affairs as normal. Until just recently …
Yet our ancestors, for centuries and centuries, knew better – or perhaps I should say ‘knew worse’ ? Their common experience was that life was fragile and easily destroyed. Epidemics of fatal sickness were not exceptional events of once a century but frequent scourges lasting years, better at one time then suddenly worse at another, and never really going away.
So much was made of the Black Death of the fourteenth century by chroniclers a generation later that their estimates of how many died, in London and elsewhere, are now believed to have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. What is more significant is that the Bubonic Plague stayed around for the next three centuries. Consequently, the history of London through the Tudor period and into the Stuarts’ had a great many ‘plague years’.
Nor was this plague the only major affliction. A ‘sweating sickness’ appeared which no one today has yet satisfactorily identified. Dean Colet, the founder of St Paul’s School, died of it in 1519 in the midst of an otherwise healthy life – though this might, in retrospect, have been a blessing. Colet’s younger friend Thomas More, sharing the same religious and political views, was beheaded fifteen years later for disagreeing with Henry VIII. The sweating sickness appears to have disappeared by the following century as mysteriously as it had come. Malaria which had been an endemic nuisance and destroyer of health, as it still is in some parts of the world today, also declined, probably because many of the mosquito-haunted marshes and fens were drained.
But Bubonic Plague returned to London, on a regular basis, in the troubled times of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, finally reaching its zenith in the Great Plague of 1665, which has become our bench-mark for all other epidemics.
Recently, a neighbour of mine, contemplating the notion of social isolation, emailed me, saying `Our niece has just brought us some soup! She never normally visits us. Do you think that if we painted “Lord have mercy upon us” on the front door other people would bring us free food?’
In the Great Plague, whole households were shut up to die together because the infection was believed to be airborne. There was indeed an airborne version of pastorella pestis and the earlier Black Death may have been that, but it is now evident that the Great Plague was a visitation of the common plague, passed by the fleas, lice, rats and mice that lived in close proximity with Londoners. The angry inhabitant who declared ‘As soon as any house is infected, all the sound people should be out of it and not shut up therein to be murdered,’ actually got it right.
The illusion that Plague was transmitted from person-to-person has created myths of heroism, in particular relating to the village of Eyam in Derbyshire. Although it was understood at the time that the Plague arrived in flea-infested cloth ordered from London by a tailor, the wrong conclusion was drawn. When the tailor’s assistant became ill, not only were his family shut up to die but the entire village as well. Encouraged by a high-minded Vicar, they incarcerated themselves, thinking to save the neighbouring villages. As a result, over half – or possibly more- of the population of Eyam died.
Yet almost everywhere else in country districts the Plague died out quickly – a natural consequence, as we now recognise, of people living in less-crowded and less-infested conditions. In the summer of 1665, a stonemason who had been working in London, rode home to his village in the Cotswolds with the Plague upon him. He died and so did the rest of his immediate household. Their deaths are marked ‘plague’ in the burial register but no one else died in the parish that August, except for one very old man.
Meanwhile in London, a few intelligent and observant people got the message. In the parish of St Giles in the Fields where the Plague first manifested itself (infested cloth again, from Rotterdam), William Boghurst, a local apothecary, stayed on duty throughout, ministering to his customers. As he wrote later in his book on the sickness (entitled Loimographia but actually quite readable), he had been at bedsides taking pulses and blood, holding up the choking and dying, even dressing sores. Like the doctors and surgeons far grander than he, he had no cure to administer yet he remained plague-free himself, having accurately recognised the conditions that exacerbated the problem as –
‘thickness of inhabitants, those living as many families in a house, living in cellars, want of fitting accommodations as good fires, good dyett, washing, want of all good conveyances of filth, standing and stinking waters, dung hills, excrements, dead bodies lying unburied and putrefying, churchyards too full crammed …’
He added, ‘exceptionally hot weather,’ and remarked how there had been, ‘such a multitude of flies that they lined the insides of the houses… and swarms of ants covered the highways.’
Boghurst’s remedy? He advocated keeping a clean house, disposing of human waste at a distance, consuming only the freshest meat and milk, and being particularly careful about clean water. More than two centuries before it was generally accepted that diseases came from microscopic organisms, he was already practising the correct methods. He was also in favour of eating fresh fruit and vegetables, of which many of his contemporaries were unaccountably wary. He was also, beyond any doubt, a great advocate of hand-washing.
(The Dance of Death that follows is by Luke Clennell 1825)
The Desolation
The Queen
The Pope
The Cardinal
The Elector
The Canon
The Canoness
The Priest
The Mendicant Friar
The Councillor or Magistrate
The Astrologer
The Physician
The Merchant
The Wreck
The Swiss Soldier
The Charioteer or Waggoner
The Porter
The Fool
The Miser
The Gamesters
The Drunkards
The Beggar
The Thief
The Newly Married Pair
The Husband
The Wife
The Child
The Old Man
The Old Woman
Gillian Tindall’s new book The Pulse Glass and the Beat of Other Hearts is published by Chatto & Windus
You may like to read these other stories by Gillian Tindall
Wenceslaus Hollar At Old St Paul’s
Memories of Ship Tavern Passage
Gillian Tindall’s Wartime Memories
At Captain Cook’s House in Mile End
These days, chemists have become the heroes of the High Street and what better way to celebrate them than with this gallery of paintings by Eleanor Crow, including examples as far apart as Belgravia and Woodford Green.
“Some of the most successful and long-lasting small shops are chemists. It is significant that strict rules govern location and competition, protecting an existing viable pharmacy business from the arrival of a new competitor. It is a policy that results in a chemist within a short distance of most residential areas and everyone benefit from this as well as the shopkeepers. Longevity is a marker of success in the world of shops and I was delighted by the large number of chemists retaining their historic frontages.” – Eleanor Crow
W & CK King, Amwell St, Clerkenwell
W & CK King has been on Amwell St since 1843, retaining its Victorian fascia and Edwardian fittings. Most of the shops in this row, known as Thompson’s Terrace, were purpose-built in the eighteen-twenties as part of the New River and Lloyd Baker estates. Like Lloyd & Son, just down the street, they are a rare survival.
Chrystall, The Broadway, Woodford Green
Chrystall has been a chemist for over a century. Situated close to the Edwardian Monkhams Estate in Woodford on the border with Essex, the surrounding suburb grew up as the railway extended from London in the nineteenth century. This is now the last Edwardian frontage left in a run that originally contained all the necessary small shops including a fishmonger and an ironmonger.
Walden Chymist, Elizabeth St, Belgravia
EstablIshed in 1846 and serving this quiet corner of Belgravia for over one hundred and fifty years, Walden Chymist is still an independently-run pharmacy. The shopfront is Grade II listed and Lata Patel, who has run the business since 1980, is proud of her splendid facade with its old gilded letters and original architectural detailing.
Allchin & Co, Englands Lane, Belsize Park
The shop was opened by Alfred Allchin, a nineteenth-century pharmaceutical chemist and creator of Allchin’s Smelling Salts. Still an independent pharmacy, the current owners retain the name of the business but have recently chosen to conceal the original signs with their elegant gilded lettering behind new plastic ones.
A Maitland & Co, Piccadilly, St James
Chemist, Vallance Rd, Whitechapel
ThIs curIous single-storey shop on the corner of Whitechapel Rd was the site of a three-storey building that housed an apothecary and a surgeon in the nineteenth century, reflecting the proximity of the Royal London Hospital. Rebuilt as a chemist after bomb damage in the Second World War, it acquired large shop windows on both sides in the fifties. Chemists J. Liff traded here until the sixties when another chemist, Beck & Sherman, took over. They boarded over the windows on the Vallance Rd side and installed the mosaic tiling that first caught my attention, creating a dynamic contrast with the bold type and arrow pointing around the corner to the Whitechapel Rd.
Click here to order a copy for £14.99
At a time of momentous change in the high street, Eleanor’s witty and fascinating personal survey champions the enduring culture of Britain’s small neighbourhood shops.
As our high streets decline into generic monotony, we cherish the independent shops and family businesses that enrich our city with their characterful frontages and distinctive typography.
Eleanor’s collection includes more than hundred of her watercolours of the capital’s bakers, cafés, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, chemists, launderettes, hardware stores, eel & pie shops, bookshops and stationers. Her pictures are accompanied by the stories of the shops, their history and their shopkeepers – stretching from Chelsea in the west to Bethnal Green and Walthamstow in the east.
I came across this set of the first hundred Penguin books in my attic when I was unpacking a box that has been sealed since I moved in. With their faded orange, indigo, green, violet and pink spines they make a fine display and I am fond of this collection that took me so many years to amass.
When I left college, I wrote to companies all over the country seeking work and asking if they would give me an interview if I came to see them. Then I travelled around on the cheap, through a combination of buses, trains and hitchhiking, to visit all these places – the industrial towns of the North and the Cathedral cities of the South – staying in bus stations, youth hostels and seedy B&Bs, and going along filled with hope to interviews that were almost all fruitless. It was the first time I encountered the distinctive regional qualities of Britain and in each city, to ameliorate the day of my interview, I took the opportunity to visit the museums, civic art galleries, cathedrals and castles that distinguish these places. Arriving at each destination, I would consult the directory and make a list of the second-hand booksellers, then mark them on a tourist map and, after the job interview, I would visit every one. There were hundreds of these scruffy dusty old shops with proprietors who were commonly more interested in the book they were reading behind the counter than in any customer. Many were simply junk shops with a few books piled in disorder on some shelves in the back or stacked in cardboard boxes on the pavement outside.
In these shabby old shops, I sometimes came upon Penguin books with a podgy penguin on the cover, quite in contrast to the streamlined bird familiar from modern editions. These early titles, dating from 1935 had a clean bold typography using Eric Gill’s classic sans typeface and could be bought for just twenty or thirty pence. So, in the manner of those cards you get in bubblegum packets, I began to collect any with numbers up to one hundred. In doing so, I discovered a whole library of novelists from the nineteen thirties and reading these copies passed the time pleasantly on my endless journeys. In particular, I liked the work of Eric Linklater whose playful novel “Poet’s Pub” was number two, Compton Mackenzie whose novel of the Edwardian vaudeville “Carnival” was ten, Vita Sackville-West whose novel “The Edwardians” was sixteen, T.F.Powys whose “Mr Weston’s Good Wine” was seventy-three and Sylvia Townsend Warner whose novel “Lolly Willowes” was eighty-four. After these, I read all the other works of these skillful and unjustly neglected novelists.
Eventually I found a job in Perthshire and then subsequently in Inverness, and from here I made frequent trips to Glasgow, which has the best second-hand bookshops in Scotland, to continue my collection. And whenever I made the long rail journey down South, I commonly stopped off to spend a day wandering round Liverpool or Durham or any of the places I had never been, all for the purpose of seeking old Penguins.
The collection was finally completed when I moved back to London and discovered that my next door neighbour Christine was the daughter of Allen Lane who founded Penguin books. She was astonished to see my collection and I was amazed to see the same editions scattered around her house. From Christine, I learnt how her father Allen was bored one day on Exeter St David’s Station (a place familiar to me), changing trains on the way to visit his godmother Agatha Christie. When he searched the bookstall, he could not find anything to read and decided to start his own company publishing cheap editions of good quality books. I presume he did not know that, if he had been there half a century earlier, he could have bought a copy of Thomas Hardy’s first published novel “Desperate Remedies”, because Exeter St David’s was where Hardy experienced that moment no writer can ever forget, of first seeing their book on sale.
I do not think my collection of Penguins is of any great value because they are of highly variable condition and not all are first editions, though every one predates World War II and they are of the uniform early design before the bird slimmed down. While I was collecting these, I thought that I was on a quest to build my career – a fancy that I walked away from, years later. Now these hundred Penguin books are the only evidence of my innocent tenacity to create a life for myself at that time.
Allen Lane’s idealistic conception, to use the mass market to promulgate good writing to the widest readership in cheap editions that anyone could afford, is one that I admire. And these first hundred are a fascinating range of titles, a snapshot of the British public’s reading tastes in the late thirties. Looking back, the search for all these books led me on a wonderful journey through Britain. If you bear in mind that I only found a couple in each city, then you will realise that my complete collection represents a ridiculously large number of failed job interviews in every corner of these islands. It was a job search than became a cultural tour and resulted in a stack of lovely old paperbacks. Now they sit on my shelf here in Spitalfields as souvenirs of all the curious places I never would have visited if it were not my wayward notion to scour the entire country to collect all the first hundred Penguins.
As an Easter treat we are offering 50% off all titles in the Spitalfields Life Bookshop with the discount code ‘EASTER’ until midnight on Easter Monday. Please click here to visit the bookshop
Contributing Artist ADAM DANT created this ingenious puzzle to amuse you while staying at home this Easter Monday. We will send a free Map of Spitalfields Life to everyone who submits the correct answers to spitalfieldslife@gmail.com before midnight tonight. Be sure to include your postal address.
While people are staying indoors, I have no doubt that some will be getting on each other’s nerves. So for anyone who is growing frustrated, this Pack of Knaves engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-77) might permit you to forgive your household. Count yourself lucky that you are not cooped up with this lot.
Images courtesy University of Toronto
You may like to read these stories about Wenceslaus Hollar
Artist Joanna Moore undertook this series of drawings of Spitalfields’ less well known landmarks
The Old St Patrick’s School in Buxton St, dating from the eighteen sixties, stands upon the grass of Allen Gardens beside the Georgian vicarage of the former All Saints church – the last survivors of the nineteenth century streets that once stood here, long before the park was laid out. Enfolded by its lofty garden wall, containing huge exotic shrubs and dripping with climbing plants, this finely proportioned cluster of buildings rises with tall attenuated chimneys, like some mysterious castle of romance. St Patrick’s School is a tantalising enigma to those who walk through here regularly and have heard tales of the secret tropical garden which is rumoured to exist behind these implacable walls.
The Watchhouse on the corner of St Matthew’s Churchyard in Wood St was built in 1754 and, with the growing trade in human corpses for dissection, in 1792 it was necessary to appoint a watchman who was paid ten shillings and sixpence a week to be on permanent guard against resurrectionists. A reward of two guineas was granted for the apprehension of any body-snatchers and the watchman was provided with a blunderbuss and permission to fire from an upper window, once a rattle had been sounded three times. The churchwarden who lives there today told me that, according to the terms of his lease, he still holds this right – and the blunderbuss and rattle are stored in the house to this day. The small structure at the rear originally housed the parish fire engine, in the days when it was just a narrow cart. In 1965, the Watchhouse gained notoriety of another kind when fascist leader Oswald Mosley stood upon the step to give his last open air public speech.
Gibraltar Walk off the Bethnal Green Rd is a handsome terrace of red brick nineteenth century artisans’ workshops that once served the furniture trade when it was the primary industry in this area. Of modest construction, yet designed with careful proportions, the terrace curls subtly along Gibraltar Walk, turning a corner and extending the length of Padbury Court, to create one long “L” shaped structure. These appealing back streets still retain their cobbles and there are even a couple of signs left from the days of furniture factories, but, most encouragingly, the majority of these premises are still in use today as workshops for small industries, keeping the place alive.
In Emanuel Litvinoff’s memoir, “Journey Through a Small Planet” describing his childhood in Cheshire St in the nineteen twenties, he recalls the feared Pedley St Arches where, “Couples grappled against the dripping walls and tramps lay around parcelled in old newspaper. The evil of the place was in its gloom, its putrid stench, in the industrial grime of half a century with which it was impregnated.” And today, with a gut-wrenching reek of urine, graced by a profusion of graffiti and scattered with piles of burnt rubbish, the place retains its authentic insalubrious atmosphere – a rare quality now, that is in demand by the numerous street fashion photo shoots, crime dramas and pop videos which regularly use this location. There is a scheme to turn the Great Eastern Railway Viaduct into a raised park – like the High Line in New York – but in the meantime wildlife flourishes peaceably upon these graceful decaying structures dating from the earliest days of the railway, constructed between 1836 and 1840 to bring the Eastern Counties Line from Romford to the terminus at Shoreditch High St.
Nestling at the base of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s monumental spire for Christ Church, Spitalfields, is the tiny private roof garden on the top of 3 Fournier St, where what was once planted as a camomile lawn has grown to become a wildflower meadow with pink campions, oxe-eye daisies and sorrel abounding. The pitched roofs on three sides entirely conceal this verdant arbor from the street and create a favoured climate where freesias, carnations, honeysuckle, wallflowers, foxgloves, wild strawberries and lettuces flourish, surrounded by espalier fruit trees and rambling roses, all unknown to those who tread the dusty pavements of Commercial St far below. Built in 1754 by Peter Le Keux, a silkweaver, this elegant old house follows the same Tuscan Order of architecture that was Hawksmoor’s guiding principle, and as you ascend the staircase endlessly winding up to the roof garden, you come upon subtle intricate details, like banisters with square capitals, that match those across the road at the church.
The Worrall House of 1720 is the quintessence of the Spitalfields nobody knows – built in a secret courtyard between Fournier St and Princelet St by Samuel Worrall, the builder responsible for many of the surrounding houses, it can only be approached through a narrow passage behind a heavily-encrusted door. When you step through this door, into the dark cobbled alley lined with ancient planks covered with paint and tar that has not been renewed in over a century, you feel – more than anywhere in Spitalfields – that you have stepped back in time. Here Samuel Worrall built a handsomely proportioned yet modest house for himself in his own builders’ yard. Just one room deep with a pedimented door and stone balls atop the gateposts, it resembles a perfect lifesize dolls’ house. Facing East and constructed of a single layer of bricks, it only receives sunlight in the morning and is not a warm building in Winter, yet there is an irresistible grace and mystery about this shadowy house of enchantment, presiding silently upon a quiet courtyard that is outside time.
Joanna Moore’s drawing of Victoria Cottages in Deal St was done upon the spot where Geoffrey Fletcher, author of “The London Nobody Knows,”sat and drew the same view in May 1977, when this terrace was threatened by bulldozers. Built in 1855 by the Metropolitan Association for Dwellings for Housing the Industrious Poor, after the design of Prince Albert’s Model Cottages for the Great Exhibition of 1851, these are one of the earliest examples of two storey cottage apartments. Scheduled for demolition in a slum clearance scheme, they were saved in 1978 through the intervention of Peter Shore who was both local MP and Environment Minister. If Geoffrey Fletcher came back today he would be delighted to step through the old iron gate and discover well-tended cottage gardens where the fragrance of flowers hangs in the air. Pairs of neat white front doors lead either to the ground or first floor dwellings, which, although designed as the minimum in the nineteenth century, appear generous and sympathetic by contemporary standards. To the rear is a peaceful flagged courtyard where residents hang their laundry and tend the shared garden.
Drawings copyright © Joanna Moore
You may also like to take a look at