The barrows of Spitalfields
When I saw the wooden carts and barrows in Mark Jackson & Huw Davies’ pictures of the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market, I realised that some of these old-style barrows have been sitting around in Sclater St for the past couple of years, used in the Sunday market and quietly rotting for the rest of the week. My eye was drawn to the wooden wheels, every spoke individually chamfered, an attention to detail that recalls those magnificent gipsy caravans of a century ago. There are still plenty of these barrows in use around London, from Portobello, Berwick St, Seven Dials, Leather Lane, Chapel Market to Roman Rd, though now they are relics of another age.
I asked Paul Gardner whose family have been trading as market sundriesman from the same building in Commercial St since 1870, if he could tell me anything about these carts. He recalled there was a company called Hiller Brothers that manufactured barrows in Bethnal Green and a wheelwright who repaired them in a workshop under the Bishopsgate Arches. And he had some phone numbers, which he called to seek further information but both numbers were discontinued.
You find these barrows and carts in museums and sometimes in gardens with Lobelia and Geraniums trailing out of them but I prefer to see them in use, though without wheelwrights to mend them their days are numbered as the makeshift repairs to the wheels of the Sclater St examples testify. These wheels are a smaller version of cartwheels that were once standard when all street transport was horsedrawn, sustaining the attendant wheelwrights’ and cartwrights’ trades.
That afternoon, I was walking through the empty Leather Lane Market where I came upon a couple of these barrows. Trading had ceased for the day, so I was able to squat down and take a closer look. I discovered incised lettering in an elegant italic hand that ran along all sides of the barrow and in some cases around the wheels too. The name and location of the market “Leather Lane, Holborn” plus the manufacturer and the status “On Hire.” To my surprise I came across the name “Hiller Bros” and an address in Bethnal Green, “64 Squirries St,” just as Paul Gardner told me.
I photographed a fine market porter’s hand cart in the Bethnal Green Rd Market, loaded with fruit and vegetables for sale. Paul Gardner remembered that all the local greengrocers had these to wheel down to the Spitalfields Market and collect their fresh stock daily. Years ago, he traded a trolley from his shop with an old man from the market in exchange for a huge handbarrow with heavy iron wheels that now sits in his back garden. Examining my photo of the hand barrow in Bethnal Green, I saw it was also incised with the name “Hiller Bros” and when I did a google search I even got a phone number though, to my disappointment, it no longer functioned.
So I decided to take a walk up to Squirries St, but first I took a detour to Hoxton where a friend lives in the former Lambert timber warehouse in Hoxton St and here I was able to photograph the cart which has been disassembled but stored safely under a lean-to in the yard. This one is remarkable for remaining in its premises and for its beautiful signwriting – and again I saw the incised italic script that is the standard means of identification for these carts. The script resembles the handwriting of a century ago and I wonder if once someone simply wrote in chalk along the side of each barrow and someone else followed along to carve it out. Returning to Sclater St and squatting down to read the inscriptions on these carts, I learnt one was a stray from London Fields, eternally “On Hire” from Leach Bros.
Arriving at 64 Squirries St, just off the Bethnal Green Rd, I found an unremarkable locked-up building without any signeage beyond its street number. It was padlocked from the outside, so there was no point in knocking and I could not discern any sign of recent activity. Like some frustrated detective, I was deliberating my next move when I noticed there was a small glass panel (no bigger than a postcard) in the tall steel shutter closing off the yard and I peeked through the dirty pane to discover the picture you can see at the end of this feature. I wiped the glass on the outside with my handkerchief and took a hazy photograph, filtered by grime, of broken carts in the abandoned workshop that was once the centre of a thriving trade. Please do not tell anyone about this glass panel in the steel shutter, because no-one wants lines forming on Squirries St to ogle the charnel house of carts and barrows.
Let us not collect all these carts and put them on display. It can be our secret. As long as they are around we can be gratified to see them disregarded on the street, demonstrating stubborn longevity. Injecting a little arcane poetry into any unremarkable cityscape, they are vestiges of when the world was driven by horse power.
Now I have made my discovery, I will take a closer look at each specimen I find and read the inscription to discover who constructed it and for which market – as a mark of respect to those craftsmen who were so skillful in making elegant functional things with their bare hands, still in use today when they are long gone.
I’ve heard of the mysterious elephants’ graveyard, but one for barrows? But maybe it is instead merely a way station, and those disassembled carts will one day, phoenix-like, rise again.
The history that lives on, but only now revealed by a keen eye and curious mind.
Again, I do thank you for acquainting me with a topic that I did not previously think about, but now, because of your post, will.
Form and function. It’s a pleasure to see designs that definitely did serve a function in the past, and still function now.
As our current history seems to thrive on speed, and sell by dates, I wonder who might be championing what’s new and around now … in say, fifty or one hundred years.
Cheers!
Growing up in Spitalfields there was a Mr Holt who worked (and lived) in Wheler Street making and mending barrows for the Spitalfields Market. The firm was called E.Howard & Sons (coster barrow manufacturers)and Mr Holt worked there for 30 years or so. The family lived over the workshop and as children we would sometimes play on the flat roof over where he made the barrows. The barrows were beautiful. Very simple but efficient for what was needed.
This is an inspiring piece of research.
As a direct decendent of George Hiller, a cabinet maker and my Great, Great Grandfather I can reviel the history of these hand carts. His sons where respectively one a wheelwright and the other a cartwright aprentices. To deliver the cabinets George made (one of which I am looking at right now in my Kitchen) George got his sons to build him a hand cart or two. The market traders of the London Markets were so impressed that they asked if they too could have hand carts of such quality. Well the Hiller Brothers were so shrewed they did not sell the carts but rented them out to the Market traders, and Hiller Bros was bourne. The family arms have lost contact, but I know until the 1990′s Hiller Btros were still in the business of leasing out market stalls to the london markets.
My Mother is the font of knowledge on this subject, so please ask if your interested and I’ll try to dig the detail out.
thanks for the inquisitive post,
i’ve been harrassing hiller’s lot to change the wheels on my barrow coz my back hurts, now you’ve got me thinking i’ll struggle along with it just for the sentimental value, you can see mine on my site: abzcomputers . com, scroll down to the bottom, it’s got one of those ancient discs on the bottom that weighs a ton.
Hi There
Does anybody know if these amazing barrows are availible to hire for the summer. Seems it would fit perfectly on our terrace in Westminster, by the thames
Please do not hesitate to contact me if so
Kindest Regards
I remember these carts in Surrey Street Market in Croydon when I was a child in the 50′s & 60s. I loved them, the wheels, the lettering, the colours they were painted and the lights, lots of light bulbs strung up and across the stalls making them and the market a magical place especially in Winter when it got dark early. The stallholders were full of character, and often made me laugh. I will always remember one, holding out a container of carrots and shouting ‘rhubarb, rhubarb, bootiful rhubarb’ . Tickled me when I was 10, tickles me now I am 62.
… and remember the copious amounts of artificial ‘grass’, showing between the boxes of fruit and veg and hanging down the front of the barrow. It all looked so exotic and tempting. Magical memories.
Pleased to see someone taking an interest in these relics …….. and I’m delighted that the two wheeled cart at Lambert’s is still there. I bought that building about 30 years ago from the Coronet Timber Co of Hoxton Street. Included in the purchase were their hand cart and their Bedford lorry both of which we used in our business.
I sold the hand cart together with the building in 1989.
We still have a costermonger’s barrow which occasionally goes for an outing round Vauxhall to the consternation of motorised road users.
Best Wishes
Adrian Amos
LASSCO
great site i thought i was the only annorak with an interest in these, i have restored about 8 of these, six 2 wheelers and 2 fourwheelers usualy its the wheels that have gone rotten , i use ash to replace the chassis, oak and ash for the wheels, most of these barrows have been bodged up with pine just to keep them going on the market ,does the job but its too soft to last you need hard wood to make them last,, i bought 6 fourwheelers from a garden centre near tower bridge about 3 years ago, one of these i built a half size bow top romany wagon, i paint them all romany gypsy style with the carvings, lining , and gold leaf, its great fun doing them up a bit of social history , i live in brighton and there is a street in the north lanes were years ago you could hire a barrow for the day for 5 shillings, people were realy skint no social security so you went out knocking on doors for rags ,scrap, or down the local fruit market for some gear that was on the turn that you could sell quickly and cheap, i have two barrows i am restoring now, i have definately have got the bug