Hanbury St, May 2010.

Hanbury St, May 2012.

I shall never forget how my heart leapt with delight when I saw Roa, the Belgian street artist, painting his forty-foot crane in Hanbury St two years ago. Originally intended as a heron, Roa changed his design while it was still a work-in-progress after Bengali people asked if it was a crane, a bird that is sacred to them and to many other cultures around the world. Since then, Roa’s crane has presided benignly over Brick Lane, becoming a landmark, an embodiment of the soul of the place and an object of pilgrimage, as thousands have come to photograph it.

Yet my moment of delight was countered this week by a moment of dismay to see a man installing a huge banner of ugly corporate-style design announcing “Banglatown, Brick Lane, Curry Capital 2012,” obliterating the heron save for the tip of its beak and its tail. The banner is spectacularly pointless, since once you can see it you are already in the midst of the curry restaurants, and it reflects shamefully upon the currymongers that they should demonstrate such hubris as to sacrifice the celebrated work of an internationally famous artist in this way.

As he always does, Roa was conscientious in seeking the consent of the owner of the building before he undertook his painting, which has proved itself to be an exemplary piece of street art by enlivening its immediate environment and bringing poetry to this neglected corner of Spitalfields. By contrast, those who installed the obnoxious banner did not obtain approval from the owner of the building. But – worse than this – in their haste, they put it up without waiting until planning permission had been given or any public consultation undertaken, showing no respect for due process or the wishes of the inhabitants of Spitalfields who are paying for the offending banner through their council tax.

Meanwhile, an online petition to remove the banner and uncover the crane has reached over a thousand signatures in just two days, as some measure of the widespread affection in which this painting is held. And, given that the planning decision on this banner is not due until after May 29th, there are likely to be more than a few objections before then. With painful irony, a covering letter attached to the planning application for the miserable banner proposes that it will “encourage footfall” and informs us that it was “designed by the council’s in-house team with a knowledge and understanding of the local community.” It took two thousand signatures on a petition to persuade Hackney Council to grant a reprieve for Roa’s Rabbit in the Hackney Rd and I suspect we shall see a similar scenario played out in Spitalfields over coming weeks.

This spring, Roa returned to undertake two new paintings in the neighbourhood, a flayed pig on Buxton St and a mighty hedgehog on Chance St. The hedgehog takes the place of the squirrel one hundred yards away in Club Row, the first of his finely-drawn creatures Roa painted in the East End in the autumn of 2009. Such is the popularity of this work that locals now refer to photographers as “squirrel snappers” And, even though the squirrel has been damaged by a series of tags painted across it, the new hedgehog more than makes up for this loss in terms of scale and presence. At the end of Chance St where it meets the Bethnal Green Rd, the hedgehog waits eternally poised to cross the road.

The genius of Roa’s work is to evoke creatures possessing such febrile life that they confront us with our relationship to the natural world, which we can easily forget in the city. His huge animals become the familiar spirits of the places they inhabit and we love them for the ambivalent natures, simultaneously appealing and threatening, yet always drawing our respect.

The flayed pig on Buxton St.

The mighty hedgehog on Chance St.

A little dog crosses the road to see the hedgehog.

Two thousand people signed the petition to prevent Hackney Council painting over Roa’s rabbit in the Hackney Rd in 2010.

Roa’s squirrel on Club Row in autumn 2009, sadly covered by tags today.

You can sign the petition to remove the banner covering Roa’s crane here.

The planning application for the banner is on the Tower Hamlets Council website here.

You can register formal objections to the planning application for the banner by leaving your comments here.

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Mavis Bullwinkle

Today we are celebrating the birthday of one of Spitalfields’ best-loved residents, Mavis Bullwinkle. We count ourselves favoured that, apart from her six years enforced exile as an evacuee in Aylesbury during World War Two, Mavis has shown the good sense to spend her entire eighty years here. In this picture, you can see her standing at the door of the church house in Buxton St where her grandfather Richard Pugh lived when he came from North Wales as a lay preacher in 1898 to minister to the people of the East End, and it was here that Mavis’ mother Gwen was born in 1904. I regret that we cannot turn back the wheels of time, so that Richard could step through this door to wish his granddaughter a happy birthday, but the unfortunate reality is that he died of pneumonia in 1905 and left Mavis’ grandmother to bring up seven children alone – an event which created repercussions that resonate to this day for Mavis.

Yet Mavis displayed her characteristic good humour, amplified by her bright red ankle-length raincoat, when I met her outside Christ Church after morning prayers on an especially grey and cloudy morning this week. And it was my privilege to take a stroll around the neighbourhood with Mavis, as she pointed out some of the landmarks on her personal landscape, because after her eighty years, there are few who know Spitalfields as well as Mavis.

Although Mavis remembers Christ Church (or “Spitalfields Church” as she knew it) when her Uncle Alf Bullwinkle was caretaker at during the nineteen thirties, she did not come here regularly until 1951 when her local church All Saints in Buxton St was shut. “I found it very gaunt with all that dark masonry,” she recalled, rolling her eyes dramatically and casting her gaze up to the tall spire looming over us. Then, in 1958, death watch beetle was discovered at Christ Church and this was shut too. “They found it on the Thursday and it was closed by the weekend,” Mavis revealed in a disappointed tone, “My sister Margaret was due to be married on the Sunday and she had to make do with the horrible hall in Hanbury St.”

Already the rain was setting in, so we set off briskly towards the Hanbury Hall and Mavis ameliorated her opinion of the place by the time we got there. “My uncle and his family lived here on the ground floor,” she explained, “the bedroom was on the right of the entrance and the living room and kitchen to left.” Mavis told me there was so much unemployment in the nineteen twenties that young men were encouraged to go to Australia and, eager to relieve the burden on his mother, Alf emigrated at nineteen, only to have an accident in the Outback that left him with a curvature of the spine. On his return, he found it even harder to get work until the rector of Christ Church appointed him caretaker. And when he died young in 1943, leaving a wife and children, the Rector arranged for them to have a flat in the market building at the corner of Brushfield St. Mavis ran the Sunday School here at the Hanbury Hall from 1951 until 1981, while the congregation was in exile, and she stood in the rain looking up at the building in disbelief that so much time could have passed.

Then we set off towards the the north-easterly quarter of Spitalfields, once known as Mile End New Town, to the small web of streets which Mavis counts as home and that remains the focus of her existence. Taking a minor detour down Brick Lane to visit the former Mayfair Cinema – once an Odeon and now Cafe Naz – where Mavis came in her teens with her mother during the nineteen forties, “We didn’t come down here much otherwise,” she admitted with a shrug, “We did our shopping in Whitechapel or Bethnal Green.”

The nature of our odyssey caused Mavis to peer in wonder at her familiar streets. “When you live in a place so long you take it for granted, until it’s not there anymore and then you can’t even remember what was there before.” she confessed as we turned from Brick Lane into Buxton St, approaching Allen Gardens. Before the green field that we know today, Mavis recalls a warren of little streets here surrounding All Saints Church, the centre of her emotional and social universe growing up in Albert Family Dwellings in Deal St. This was the block her grandmother moved into in 1905 and Mavis moved out of in 1979 when it was demolished.

“The Reverend Holdstock used to give wonderful Christmas parties, and I had some of the happiest times of my life in here,” she confided to me as we stood outside the square rectory, one of the few old buildings remaining in the street today. “Around 1913, when my aunt Esther was young, she remembered meeting the cows coming up Buxton St to be milked, each morning as she was on her way to work at a factory in Shoreditch.” Mavis informed me, gesturing back towards the Lane and conjuring an image of the herd. When Mavis’ grandfather died, her Aunt Esther had to give up her training to be a teacher, working first as a nanny in the rectory and then at a clothing factory. “She never got over it that she never got to be a teacher,” recalled Mavis tenderly, “and when she used to go on about it, I’d remind her that if she’d never gone to work in the factory she’d never have met her husband, Uncle Jack.”

Then we reached the patch of green where the church of All Saints once stood. “It was a very pretty church, late Victorian,” she told me, “built at the same time as the terraces round here. In those days people wouldn’t live somewhere unless there was a church. It was damaged by the bombing and once, when the rain came in the roof, the vicar made a hole in the floor with his umbrella so that it could drain away.”

From here, we walked down Deal St where Albert Family Dwellings formerly stood on the south corner of Underwood Rd. Only the the iron bollards labelled M. E. N. T. remain today to indicate that this was once Mile End New Town. Yet in Mavis’ mind it all still exists – the Prince of Wales pub on the corner of Buxton St, Davis’ Welsh Dairy on the north corner of Underwood Rd and Mrs Finkelstein’s sweetshop opposite, where for penny you could put your hand in a bran tub and get a little thing to put in your dolls’ house. Standing outside the former entrance of  Albert Family Dwellings, Mavis recalled the evening of 2nd September 1939 when she and her sister Margaret were summoned to the school to be evacuated without being told where, and Mavis’ mother went home alone clutching a card with her daughters’ address in Aylesbury. Today, Mavis is probably the only witness to the former life of these streets that still resides in this location and the empty pavements are crowded with memories for her.

Mavis gave up a career in the City in preference to a lower paid job as a secretary at the Royal London Hospital because she wanted to be of service to people, and she worked there for forty years. Her grandfather Richard Pugh, the lay preacher from Wales, would have been proud of Mavis, following his example. The last of the Bullwinkles, she fills with delight to speak of Spitalfields, and more than a century of striving and thriving in her family in this corner of the East End. Out of almost everyone I know, Mavis could most be said to be of this place. With a self-effacing nature, she has shown moral courage and selflessness in her work at the hospital, and in caring for her mother and aunt until they both died at ripe old ages. After eighty years, Mavis Bullwinkle knows what it means to live, and we salute her example and applaud her spirit.

Gwen Bullwinkle holds up Mavis in Hanbury St in 1933. “Every time my mother saw this picture, she would say, ‘Fancy taking us outside a pub!’”

Mavis by the War Memorial at Christ Church which her father tended. “He used to grow flowers around it and keep it tidy.”

All Saints Sunday School in 1939 – seven year old Mavis is in the second row on the extreme right and her sister Margaret has her hands upon her shoulders.

Mavis outside the former rectory of All Saints Church. “I had some of the happiest times of my life here.”

Mavis & Margaret’s evacuation card, 1939.

Mavis stands on the spot where All Saints Church used to be in Buxton St until 1951.

Spitalfields’ celebrations for the coronation of King George VI, 1937.

Mavis in Vallance Rd outside the house of Quaker philanthropist Mary Hughes, daughter of Thomas Hughes. “Mary Hughes came up to my mother pushing me in a pram in the Whitechapel Rd in 1932 and exclaimed ‘Oh you wonderful mother!’ She was a little old lady dressed in black silk, from the nineteenth century, and my mother pulled away in fear. Only later did she learn who it was.”

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Mavis Bullwinkle, Secretary

and

When Mavis Bullwinkle met Norah Pam

and

Mavis, Henrietta & Joan Chit Chat

PLEASE LEAVE YOUR BIRTHDAY MESSAGES BELOW FOR MAVIS

P.Lipman, Kosher Poultry Dealers, Hessel St

“In my twenties, I’d been doing a number of oral history recordings, working for the Museum of the Jewish East End which was very active recording stories of the life of Jewish people who had settled here.” explained Alan Dein, broadcaster and oral historian, outlining the background to his unique collection of more than a hundred photographs of East End shopfronts.

“My photographs of the derelict shopfronts record the last moments of the Jewish community in the area. The bustling world of the inter-war years had been moved into the suburbs, and the community that stayed behind was less identifiable. In the nineteen eighties they were just hanging on, some premises had been empty for more than five years. They were like a mouthful of broken teeth, a boxer’s mouth that had been thumped, with holes where teeth once were.”

Feeding his twin passions for photography and collecting, Alan took these pictures in 1988 while walking around the streets of the East End at a time when dereliction prevailed. Although his family came from the Jewish East End and his Uncle Lou was a waiter at Blooms, Alan was born elsewhere and first came to study . “As a student at the City of London Polytechnic in Old Castle St, I spent a lot of time hanging out here – though the heart of the area for me at that time was the student common room and bar.” he told me.

“Afterwards, in 1988, I moved back to live in a co-operative housing scheme in Whitehorse Rd in Stepney and then I had more time to walk around in this landscape that evoked the fragmentary tales I knew of my grandparents’ lives in the East End. The story I heard from their generation of the ‘monkey parade’, when once people walked up and down the Mile End Road to admire the gleaming shopfronts and goods on display. My family thought I was mad to move back because when they left the East End they put it behind them, and it didn’t reflect their aspirations for me.

The eighties were a terrible time for removing everything, comparable to what the Victorians had done a century earlier. But I have always loved peeling paint, paint that has been weathered and worn seafront textures, and this was just at the last moment before these buildings were going to be redeveloped, so I photographed the shopfronts because this landscape was not going to last.”

In many of these pictures, there is an uneasy contradiction between the proud facades and the tale of disappointment which time and humanity has written upon them. This is the source of the emotionalism in these photographs, seeing faded optimism still manifest in the confident choice of colours and the sprightly signwriting, becoming a palimpsest overwritten by the elements, human neglect and graffiti. In spite of the flatness of these impermeable surfaces, in each case we know a story has been enclosed that is now shut off from us for ever. Beyond their obvious importance as an architectural and a social record, Alan’s library of shopfronts are also a map of his exploration of his own cultural history – their cumulative heartbreak exposing an unlocated grief that is easily overlooked in the wider social narrative of the movement of people from the East End to better housing in the suburbs.

Yet Alan sees hope in these tantalising pictures too, in particular the photo at the top, of Lipman’s Kosher Poultry Dealers, in which the unknown painter ran out of paint while erasing the name of the business, leaving the word “Lip” visible. “A little bit of lip!” as Alan Dein terms it brightly, emblematic of an undying resilience in the face of turbulent social change.

Goulston St

In Whitechapel

Commercial Rd

Redchurch St

Stepney Green

Cheshire St

Alie St

Hessel St

Hackney Rd

Quaker St

Mile End Rd

Toynbee St

Alie St

In E2

Brick Lane

Great Eastern St

Commercial St

Hessel St

Mile End Rd

Relocated to Edgeware

Bow Common Lane

Brick Lane

Ben Jonson Rd

Wilkes St

Bow Rd

Ridley Rd

New Goulston St.

Whitechapel High St

Alderney Rd, Stepney

Photographs copyright © Alan Dein

After You’ve Gone: East End Shopfronts 1988 by Alan Dein runs from Thursday 17th May until Thursday 12th July at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives, 277 Bancroft Road, E1. You must email localhistory@towerhamlets.gov.uk if you want to attend tonight’s launch. Opening times for the exhibition are here. Alan Dein will give a talk on Saturday 9th June at 2.00pm.

Pedley St Arch, Spitalfields, 1987

Photographer John Claridge told me that he enjoys his own company, which casts an equivocation upon the title he gave this set of pictures – published here for the first time – that he took in the East End between 1960 and 1987. As a kid photographer from Plaistow, succumbing to the thrall of Film Noir and Italian Neo-Realism, John set out with his camera to look at his own territory in the light of these inspirations. And the result is a collection of intriguingly moody images that reveal unexpected beauty, humanity, and even humour, in locations devoid of figures, yet tense with dramatic potential.

Two themes are emergent in these depopulated pictures of the East End in eternal half-light. One theme is the unlikely placing of familiar objects in locations that propose hidden narratives and the other theme is spaces that contain the anticipation of a human presence. Both are strategies inviting the viewer to ask questions, investigate the nature of the photograph and draw their own conclusion.

When John photographs a pair of shoes in the street, or a pram, or a pair of sofas, or an armchair, or even a clapped-out old car, there is always a sense that these things have been put there deliberately as part of a mysterious scenario, not abandoned but awaiting their owners’ return. Similarly, mannequins in a window or a picture of a girl used to repair a pane of glass, also appear meaningful in an unexplained way, asking us to do our own detective work. And the old sign announcing “News of the World” above a door unopened in years makes its own statement of existential significance. Scrutinise John’s picture of Upton Park station disappearing into the dawn mist, or the receding columns of E16, or the pictures of the Pedley St arch, each ripe with suspense. Would you be surprised to see a hoodlum in a fedora with a gun step from the shadows, or an amorous femme fatale in a trench coat come strolling to a rendezvous?

While many left the East End after the war to seek new lives in the suburbs, there were others who stayed and were comfortable living among the bombsites and empty houses, and in his youth John counted himself in the latter category. “I didn’t find it depressing,” he assured me, “because there was still a kind of community. I loved it. There was destruction everywhere yet you couldn’t destroy people’s spirits. But when they took their gardens away and put people in towers where they didn’t know their neighbours, that was destruction of another kind.”

John is keenly aware that outsiders may project their own tragic interpretations upon these pictures of dereliction but, as one who is not ashamed to call himself a Romantic, he asks – “Is it really a lonely place, or is it all in the mind?”

Mannequins, E1, 1968.

Pylon in Early Morning, E3, 1968.

News of the World, E1, 1968.

Shoes, E2, 1963.

Armchair, E1, 1965.

Lamp, E16, 1982.

Pram, E14, 1968.

Upton Park at Dawn, E13, 1966.

Circus Poster, E7, 1975.

Columns, E15, 1982.

Sewer Bank, E13, 1963.

Girl in the Window, E2, 1966.

End of the Street, E1, 1982

Ford, E13, 1961.

Beckton Gas Works, E6, 1987.

Volkswagon, E14, 1970.

Half a Building, E13, 1962.

Gravestones, E7, 1960.

Pedley St Arch, Spitalfields, 1987.

Photographs copyright © John Claridge

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Strange & Terrible News From Spittle-Fields

With a few bluebells in flower in my garden in Spitalfields, I was inspired make a visit to Bow Cemetery and view the display of bluebells sprouting under the tall forest canopy that has grown over the graves of the numberless East Enders buried there. In each season of the the year, this hallowed ground offers me an arcadian refuge from the city streets and my spirits always lift as I pass between the ancient brick walls that enclose it, setting out to lose myself among the winding paths, lined by tombstones and overarched with trees.

Equivocal weather rendered the timing of my trip as a gamble, and I was at the mercy of chance whether I should get there and back in sunshine. Yet I tried to hedge my bets by setting out after a shower and walking quickly down the Whitechapel Rd beneath a blue sky of small fast-moving clouds – though, even as I reached Mile End, a dark thunderhead came eastwards from the City casting gloom upon the land. It was too late to retrace my steps and instead I unfurled my umbrella in the cemetery as the first raindrops fell, taking shelter under a horse chestnut, newly in leaf, as the shower became a downpour.

Standing beneath the dripping tree in the half-light of the storm, I took a survey of the wildflowers around me, primroses spangling the green, the white star-like stitchwort adorning graves, a scattering of palest pink ladies smock highlighting the ground cover, yellow celandines sharp and bright against the dark green leaves, violets and wild strawberries nestling close to the earth and may blossom and cherry blossom up above – and, of course, the bluebells’ hazy azure mist shimmering between the lines of stones tilting at irregular angles. Alone beneath the umbrella under the tree in the heart of the vast graveyard, I waited. It was the place of death, but all around me there was new growth.

Once the rain relented sufficiently for me to leave my shelter, I turned towards the entrance in acceptance that my visit was curtailed. The pungent aroma of wild garlic filled the damp air. But then – demonstrating the quick-changing weather that is characteristic of April – the clouds were gone and dazzling sunshine descended in shafts through the forest canopy turning the wet leaves into a million tiny mirrors, reflecting light in a vision of phantasmagoric luminosity. Each fresh leaf and petal and branch glowed with intense colour after the rain. I stood still and cast my eyes around to absorb every detail in this sacred place. It was a moment of recognition that has recurred throughout my life, the awe-inspiring rush of growth of plant life in England in spring.

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Find out more at www.towerhamletscemetery.org

Every seat in St Matthew’s Bethnal Green was filled by East Enders who had come to give Charlie Burns a big send-off, while overhead, the clouds gathered in equally dark attire as the coffin of the grand old man was carried into the church. Born as one of thirteen children in Butler’s Buildings off Brick Lane, Charlie was carried from the house at one day old to escape a bomb dropped by a Zeppelin in 1915. And between these two events – the carrying-in and the carrying-out – he was a living presence in Bacon St for ninety-six years.

The exceptional nature of Charlie’s longevity was indicative of the strength of the life force in one who at the age of six was put in a halter by his father, to pull a barrow as they went around the City collecting waste paper. Yet the halter never held him back, it served to steel Charlie’s determination to make his way in life. “We went broke, but we still carried on because it was what we did.” he confided to me once, speaking of the grind he endured to make a success of the waste paper business started by his grandfather John Burns in Bacon St in 1864.

Through perseverance, Charlie came out of the poverty and the struggle of the Dickensian East End to achieve glamorous success and universal respect as the patriarch of the Burns family, celebrated for their endeavours in boxing. “All of the notorious people used to come to our shows at the York Hall. We had the Kray brothers and Judy Garland and Liberace. I remember the first time I met Tom Mix, the famous cowboy from the silent films. We met all the top people because this was the place to be. I had a private audience with the Pope and he gave me a gold medal because of all the work we did for charity.” Charlie told me, “We were young people and we were business people and we had money to burn.”

In spite of Charlie’s declaration that money was his religion, the man had a quality that transcended the material and, as we all stood in silence in the church, brought together by our connection to this remarkable figure, his presence was tangible. His children were there, his grandchildren were there and his great-grandchildren were there. His employees and customers were there, his neighbours and relations were there, his boxers were there, his friends were there and maybe his enemies were there too. The audacity of Charlie’s ripe age filled us all with humility and encouraged modest reflection on how we had spent our meagre years. By living so long, Charlie became the last representative of a distant world and through the depth of his perspective in time, recalling his parents and grandparents, he was our living link to the nineteenth century.

At the culmination of the short service, the heavens opened and the dark clouds let their tears fall in a heavy shower upon St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green, as Charlie Burns’ coffin was carried from the church into the waiting hearse from W. English & Sons. “Goodbye Charlie!” called one of a cluster of women lingering outside in the rain, speaking in a plaintive tone as if she expected to be heard by him. The congregation reached the church door and stood there prevented from leaving by the shower, waiting and looking ahead to where Charlie had gone before. They paused and gazed skyward and frowned and recognised the solidarity of the bereaved, isolated together in the moment of loss.

Soon enough, the rain eased off, tempered by April sunshine and the crowd surged forward in collective relief, greeting each other and appreciating the brief conviviality of the moment before they climbed into the cars decked with elaborate wreaths, spelling out “CHARLIE” and “GRANDAD.” Then the procession set off as the clouds broke up to reveal the sky, and the cortege entered Bacon St with the priest and the mourner walking in front. They passed the building where Charlie grew up. They crossed Brick Lane, and they came into the part of Bacon St where C.E. Burns & Sons is located.

Here, where for years and years, he sat every day in the car, observing all those coming and going from his premises, Charlie had taken possession of the place. The hearse with Charlie’s coffin slowed down at the spot where he used to sit at the kerb each day, where recently a street artist painted his portrait upon the wall. For a moment it seemed as if the hearse might park – in strange re-enactment of the daily ritual – allowing Charlie to occupy the position in death that he had occupied in life. But then the hearse pulled away, leading the line of cars onwards to the City of London Cemetery where Charlie was to be interred alongside his wife Sarah. And finally, after ninety-six years, Charlie Burns left Bacon St forever.

Carol Burns

After ninety-six years, Charlie Burns’ farewell to Bacon St as he is driven through in the hearse.

Apple blossom in Bacon St.

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So Long, Charlie Burns

Sarah Edwards, Vera Hullyer & Maureen Gilbert, the flower ladies of St Dunstans

Last year, when Vera Hullyer told me about the Easter display which is the climax of the year in floral arrangement at St Dunstans, Stepney, I knew I had to return and see it for myself. And, arriving in the octagonal parish room at the rear of the church on Maundy Thursday, I discovered Vera and her long-time collaborators, Sarah Edwards and Maureen Gilbert, surrounded by fresh cut flowers and greenery, rather in the manner of those three nymphs frolicking in Botticelli’s painting of the harbingers of Spring.

“I used to help Joyce Graham, until she got too old to do it, and then it was handed over to me,” admitted with Vera with a self-deprecatory laugh and wielding a sprig of Hornbeam freshly picked in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park that morning, confessing, “I’ve been doing it at least twenty years.” Although Vera, Sarah and Maureen do Christmas decorations and regular displays every Friday in the church for forty weeks of the year, they were in agreement that Easter was “the big thing,” and a sense of excitement pervaded.

Reflecting the season, the colours were green and white with highlights of pale yellow, with cut flowers supplied by Joanne the florist of the Roman Rd and greenery from the gardens ands parks of the East End. “The lilies are donated in memory of people and the list of names is placed on the altar.” explained Vera, to underline the gravity of the conception and lifting yet another vase to carry through to add to the epic display at the Altar of Repose in the south aisle. As we stood in front of the magnificent array of flowers, the vividness of their living quality emphasised by the ancient stonework of the church, Vera explained the iconography of her display which represents the Garden of Gethsemane and is complemented by candles, lit to burn through the night watch by parishioners until Good Friday, when the flowers are removed from the church to be brought back on Easter Day as a representation of the Garden of Remembrance.

Begun by St Dunstan himself in 952, St Dunstans is the second oldest building in Tower Hamlets after the Tower of London and was once the parish church for entire borough, standing today both as a reminder of the East End’s distant rural past and of its relationship with the sea – as the mariners’ church, it still flies the red ensign today. Whilst I had been admiring the ladies’ handiwork. the dignified churchwarden Julian Cass hovered in the background and he took this moment, while the floral display received its finishing touches, to suggest I might like to accompany him up the tower.

Through an ancient lancet wooden door and up a narrowing stone staircase, we climbed. First, we came to the loft looking down onto the nave where the nineteenth century nativity figures spend the year, awaiting the next advent. Then we entered the cosy den that is the ringers’ room where Julian and his colleagues convene each Thursday for bell practice. Here were the painted boards recording peals of old. Here was a working model of a bell in its frame made by an apprentice at the bell foundry. Here were portraits of nineteenth century bell ringers. Here was a sign that read, “Do not swing the bells until the clock hammers been barred off and chiming mechanism released.”

Above, we entered a dusty chamber with an ancient lapboarded shed which contained the clock of 1805, now powered by electricity. As a reminder of when it was wound weekly, another arcane sign remains here, “Albert? Make sure you take the winding handle off the clock before leaving.” On the top floor, Julian and I clambered like spiders within the metal web of the bell frame where the legendary bells of Stepney hang, – cast in Whitechapel in the era of the Napoleonic Wars – before we emerged onto the tower roof, with views through the haze across the expanse of the East End to Canary Wharf in one direction and the City in the other, where once there was just fields.

For over a thousand years, Easter has been celebrated here at this modestly proportioned old stone church, and when I returned  around midnight, I found it in darkness, save the candles illuminating the display at the Altar of Repose with a pale glow, in contrast to the rays of the full moon casting the nave in a cool blue light. Spring flowers glowed by candlelight that burned through the small hours while parishioners undertook their silent watch and the dawn rose over the East End on another Easter, welcoming the change of season after the long winter.

These nineteenth century nativity figures are stored away in the loft until next Christmas.

Julian Cass, church warden, in the ringers’ chamber in the tower.

The clock cupboard in the tower.

The church clock was made in Clerkenwell in 1805.

This graffiti on the door of the clock cupboard was written so long ago that no-one knows who Albert and Lawrie were.

The famous bells of Stepney were cast in Whitechapel during the era of the Napoleonic wars.

Looking towards Canary Wharf from the tower.

The finished display, with lilies paid for by parishioners in memory of their loved ones.

During the night’s vigil from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday.

Paschal candle ring by Maureen Gilbert.

Vera Hullyer

Full moon over St Dunstans on Maundy Thursday.

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Vera Hullyer, Parishioner of St Dunstans

At the National Association of Flower Arranging Societies

Baked by Mr Bunn’s Bakery in Chadwell Heath

On Good Friday, what could be more appropriate to the equivocal nature of the day than an event which involves both celebration of Hot Cross Buns and the remembrance of the departed in a single custom – such is the ceremony of the Widow’s Buns at Bow.

A net of Hot Cross Buns hangs above the bar at The Widow’s Son in Bromley by Bow, and each year a sailor comes to add another bun to the collection. And this year I was there to witness it for myself, though – before you make any assumption based on your knowledge of my passion for buns  - I must clarify that no Hot Cross Buns are eaten in the ceremony, they are purely for symbolic purposes. Left to dry out and gather dust and hang in the net for eternity, London’s oldest buns exist as metaphors to represent the passing years and talismans to bring good luck but, more than this, they tell a story.

The Widow’s Son was built in 1848 upon the former site of an old widow’s cottage, so the tale goes. When her only son left to be a sailor, she promised to bake him a Hot Cross Bun and keep it for his return. But although he drowned at sea, the widow refused to give up hope, preserving the bun upon his return and making a fresh one each year to add to the collection. This annual tradition has been continued in the pub as a remembrance of the widow and her son, and of the bond between all those on land and sea, with sailors of the Royal Navy coming to place the bun in the net every year.

Behind this custom lies the belief that Hot Cross Buns baked on Good Friday will never decay, reflected in the tradition of nailing a Hot Cross Bun to the wall so that the cross may bring good luck to the household – though what appeals to me about the story of the widow is the notion of baking as an act of faith, incarnating a mother’s hope that her son lives. I interpret the widow’s persistence in making the bun each year as a beautiful gesture, not of self-deception but of longing for wish-fulfilment, manifesting her love for her son. So I especially like the clever image upon the inn sign outside the Widow’s Son, illustrating an apocryphal scene in the story when the son returns from the sea many years later to discover a huge net of buns hanging behind the door, demonstrating that his mother always expected him back.

When I arrived at the Widow’s Son, I had the good fortune to meet Frederick Beckett who first came here for the ceremony in 1958 when his brother Alan placed the Hot Cross Bun in the net, and he had the treasured photo in his hand to show me. Frederick moved out from Bow to Dagenham fifteen years ago, but he still comes back each year to visit the Widow’s Son, one of many in this community and further afield who delight to converge here on Good Friday for old times’ sake. Already, there was a tangible sense of anticipation, with spirits uplifted by the sunshine and the flags hung outside, ready to celebrate St George next day.

The landlady proudly showed me the handsome fresh 2011 Hot Cross Bun, baked by Mr Bunn of Mr Bunn’s Bakery in Chadwell Heath who always makes the special bun each year  -” fabulous buns!”declared Kathy, almost succumbing to a swoon, as he she held up her newest sweetest darling that would shortly join its fellows in the net over the bar. There were many more ancient buns, she explained, until a fire destroyed most of them fifteen years ago, and those burnt ones in the net today are merely those few which were salvaged by the firemen from the wreckage of the pub. Remarkably, having opened their hearts to the emotional poetry of Hot Cross Buns, at the Widow’s Son they even cherish those cinders which the rest of the world would consign to a bin.

The effect of the beer and the unseasonal warm temperatures upon a pub full of sailors and thirsty locals rapidly induced a pervasive atmosphere of collective euphoria, heightened by a soundtrack of pounding rock, and, in the thick of it, I was delighted to meet my old pal Lenny Hamilton, the jewel thief. “I’m not here for the buns, I’m here for the bums!” he confided to me with a sip of his Corvoisier and lemonade, making a lewd gesture and breaking in to a wide grin of salacious enjoyment as various Bow belles, in off-the-shoulder dresses, with flowing locks and wearing festive corsages, came over enthusiastically to shower this legendary rascal with kisses.

I stood beside Lenny as three o’ clock approached, enjoying the high-spirited gathering as the sailors came together in front of the bar. The landlord handed over the Hot Cross Bun to widespread applause and the sailors lifted up their smallest recruit. Then, with a mighty cheer from the crowd and multiple camera flashes, the recruit placed the bun in the net.  Once this heroic task was accomplished, and the landlady had removed the tinfoil covers from the dishes of food laid out upon the billiard table, all the elements were in place for a knees-up to last the rest of the day. As they like to say in Bromley by Bow, it was “Another year, another Good Friday, another bun.”

Peter Gracey, Nick Edelshain and Roddy Urquhart raise a pint to the Widow’s Buns.

Tony Scott and Debbie Willis of HMS President with Frederick Beckett holding the photograph of his brother placing the bun in the net in 1958.

Alan Beckett places the bun on Good Friday, 4th April 1958.

3 pm, Good Friday, 22nd April 2011.

The Widow’s Son is the local for my pal Lenny Hamilton, the jewel thief.

A Widow’s Son of Bromley by Bow

by Harold Adshead

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When Leon Silver opened the golden shutter of the ark at the East London Central Synagogue in Nelson St for me, a stash of Torah scrolls were revealed shrouded in ancient velvet with embroidered texts in silver thread gleaming through the gloom, caught by last rays of afternoon sunlight.

Leon told me that no-one any longer knows the origin of all these scrolls, which were acquired as synagogues closed or amalgamated with the departure of Jewish people from the East End since World War II. Many scrolls were brought over in the nineteenth century from all across Eastern Europe, and some are of the eighteenth century or earlier, originating from communities that no longer exist and places that vanished from the map generations ago.

Yet the scrolls are safe in Nelson St under the remarkable stewardship of Leon Silver, President, Senior Warden & Treasurer, who has selflessly devoted himself to keeping this beautiful synagogue open for the small yet devoted congregation – mostly in their eighties and nineties – for whom it fulfils a vital function. An earlier world still glimmers here in this beautiful synagogue that may not have seen a coat of new paint in a while, but is well tended by Leon and kept perfectly clean with freshly hoovered carpet and polished wood by a diligent cleaner of ninety years old.

As the sunlight faded, Leon and I sat at the long table at the back of the lofty synagogue where refreshments are enjoyed after the service, and Leon’s cool grey eyes sparkled as he spoke of this synagogue that means so much to him, and of its place in the lives of his congregation.

“I grew up in the East End, in Albert Gardens, half a mile from here. I first came to the synagogue as a little boy of four years old and I’ve been coming here all my life. Three generations of my family have been involved here, my maternal grandfather was the vice-president and my late uncle’s mother’s brother was the last president, he was still taking sacrament at ninety-five. My father used to come here to every service in the days when it was twice daily. And when I was twenty-nine, I came here to recite the mourner’s prayer after my father died. I remember when it was so crowded on the Sabbath, we had to put benches in front of the bimmah to accommodate everyone, now it is a much smaller congregation but we always get the ten you need to hold a service.

I’m a professional actor, so it gives me plenty of free time. I was asked to be the Honorary Treasurer and told that it entailed no responsibility – which was entirely untrue – and I’ve done it ever since. As people have died or moved away, I have taken on more responsibility. It means a lot to me. There was talk of closing us down or moving to smaller premises, but I’ve fought battles and we are still here. I spend quite a lot of hours at the end of the week. We have refreshments after the service, cake, crisps and whisky. I do the shopping and put out the drinks. The majority here are quite elderly and they are very friendly, everyone gets on well, especially when they have had a few drinks. In the main, they are East Enders. We don’t ask how they come because strictly speaking you shouldn’t ride the bus on the Sabbath. Now, even if young Jewish people wanted to come to return to the East End there are no facilities for them. No kosher butcher or baker, just the kosher counter at Sainsburys.

My father’s family came here at the end of the nineteenth century, and my maternal grandfather Lewis (who I’m named after) came at the outbreak of the First World War. As a resident alien, he had to report to Leman St Police Station every day. He came from part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and he came on an Austrian passport, but when my mother came in 1920, she came on a Polish passport. Then in 1940, my grandfather and his brothers were arrested and my grandmother was put in Holloway Prison, before they were all interned on the Isle of Man. Then my uncle joined the British army and was told on his way to the camp that his parents had been released. My grandparents’ families on both sides died in the Holocaust. My mother once tried to write a list of all the names but she gave up after fifty because it was too upsetting. And this story is true for most of the congregation at the synagogue. One man of ninety from Alsace, he won’t talk about it. A lot of them won’t talk about it. These people carry a lot of history and that’s why it’s important for them to come together.

When Jewish people first came here, they took comfort from being with their compatriots who spoke the same style of Yiddish, the same style of pronunciation, the same style of worship. It was their security in a strange new world, a self-help society to help with unemployment and funeral expenses.”

Thanks to Leon, I understood the imperative for this shul to exist as a sacred meeting place for these first generation immigrants – now in their senior years – who share a common need to be among others with comparable experiences. Polite and softly spoken yet resolute in his purpose, Leon Silver is custodian of a synagogue that is a secure home for ancient scrolls and a safe harbour for those whose lives are shaped by their shared histories.

Photographs 2 & 3 © Mike Tsang

Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Mike Tsang is researching the Jewish East End, taking portraits and recording stories. If you would like to participate personally or by suggesting someone contact info@miketsangphotography.com