Railway footbridge at Poplar

You have only just a week – until 9th February – to catch the revelatory exhibition of Noel Gibson’s East London Street Scenes at the Tower Hamlets Local History & Archives in Bancroft Rd, which rediscovers an important painter from the nineteen seventies whose work has not been displayed for twenty-five years. These large paintings need to be seen in the gallery to fully appreciate the quality of impasto, with vivid black lines standing out in relief from the canvas and vigorous textures created with a palette knife, imparting a dramatic presence to these soulful visions.

Noel Gibson lived in the East End from 1962 until 1974 and the paintings in this show are the outcome of this period. Born in 1928 in Glasgow, Gibson originally trained as an opera singer and then became House Manger at the London Opera Centre based in the Troxy Cinema in Commercial Rd where he lived in a flat at the top of the building. A self-taught artist, he painted in the evenings after work.

“I began as an abstract painter but when I came to Stepney, I found paintings on my doorstep. Though I think there’s still a quiet abstract quality to my paintings. I am trying to express the spirit of the buildings, the strength of them and the people who were there. This is why I don’t put people into my paintings. People turn them into an episode with a background – but I am painting the background! I love these buildings. I walk the dog and I look at them at different times of day and in different weathers, and I keep going back. In a way I am making a record of a changing, I wouldn’t say a dying area, but often I go back to check up on a detail, a colour and a whole street has gone.” Gibson said in an interview in the Times in 1972.

Immensely successful in his day, enjoying acclaim and sell-out shows – one of which at St Botolph’s in Bishopsgate  was opened by Tubby Isaac the jellied eel king – Noel Gibson was featured on BBC’s “Nationwide,” a popular current affairs programme in 1972. In 1974, he moved to South London, working at Morley College and appointed Provost’s Verger at Southwark Cathedral, yet in 1985 he admitted, “I regard Tower Hamlets as the area of inspiration for my work and I will always return to it.”

Noel Gibson died in 2006 and this collection of paintings, originally bought by Tower Hamlets Council in 1970 to be shown in public buildings, came to light when the borough’s art collection was being photographed – inspiring Anna Haward to curate this beautiful show that recovers a major painter of the recent, yet already distant, East End.

Hessel St - “If this street were in Paris, everyone would have wanted to paint it.”

Brick Lane, looking north towards the Truman Brewery

St Anne’s, Limehouse

St John’s Tower

Small Red House in Bow

Street Scene in Poplar

The Victory in Poplar

Chilton St, Spitalfields

Tower House, Fieldgate St, Whitechapel

Arbour Sq

Noel Gibson

Images courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives

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When Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien was growing up in a slum tenement in Clerkenwell in the nineteen forties, his mother used to give him a penny and send him out to buy a copy of the Evening Standard. Since 1827, the streets of London echoed to the cry of “Standodd! Midday Special! Standodd! Evening Special!” and, at its peak, there were over seven hundred distributors sending the paper as far afield as Liverpool and Brighton. Yet by the time the Evening Standard became a free paper two years ago, there were just one hundred and sixty distributors and today there are only sixty left. So when a handful of heroic distributors from the glory days of the Evening Standard gathered at the Bishopsgate Institute on Saturday for old times’ sake, I asked Colin to be there to take their portraits.

“I used to be a paper boy when I was at school in Catford in 1962.” recalled John Cato who worked for the Standard until 2008, “And when I left school at fifteen in 1965, the guy who delivered the Evening Standard asked me if I’d like to be his van boy. I had to be at the station to collect the papers at ten and I’d go off with him in the van to deliver and collect the money from the sellers. Then I’d go home for lunch and at two o’clock there’d be another driver I worked with to deliver the later editions. We got paid weekly, so on Friday I’d go back to Shoe Lane with the driver to collect my wages and I used to mix with the other van boys and we all made friends. Sometimes we used to socialise with the van boys from the Evening News, even though they were our competitors.”

It was a furious business, bundling up the papers and tying them up with string as they came off the printing presses in Shoe Lane, then sending them off continuously in the fleet of vans as the editions updated through the day. Years now after they retired, most of these men still have the ink-stained hands and backache that are marks of a lifetime in newspaper distribution.

Frank Webster started as a rounds boy, delivering papers to newsagents by bicycle four times a day.“I was thirty years old before I graduated to a driver,” he told me with shrug, “they said it was the longest apprenticeship – in fact, it was a bit of a closed shop, the families knew each other for generations. You needed a relative in the business to get a job and it was based on seniority, it was dead man’s shoes. Yet I always enjoyed going to work, being outdoors and meeting all the vendors, they were such characters.”

“Most of us took early retirement between 2007-2009 when they were trying to cut costs, before they sold the paper to Alexander Lebedev for £1 and it went free,” explained Rob Dickers with a philosophical grin. He started at fifteen and his father worked for thirty years as a compositor at the Standard since before World War II. “From the late sixties, there was a great sense of camaraderie but when the printing moved out from Shoe Lane to Rotherhithe and we were deunionised, the money dropped.” Rob and his pal John Cato were very active in the Chapel, as the branch of the union was termed. “I became Father of the Chapel, the shop steward,” revealed John, “The management de-recognised the union but I built it up again from three to eighty. That’s my claim to fame really.” John’s efforts ensured his members received better pensions and redundancy deals, crucial for the employees as the industry itself began to flag.

The retrospective irony is that while the newspaper managements enacted aggressive policies upon their workforce to drive costs down during the last decades of the twentieth century, in this century the entire newsprint industry finds itself eclipsed by electronic media. Yet these proud men are the last of a hardy breed who devoted their lives to keep the papers rolling and then fought fiercely against tyrannical employers to protect their livelihood as the world changed around them.

On this very day, the printing of the Evening Standard moves from Rotherhithe to Broxbourne and the first issue of  the London Evening Standard not printed in London hits the streets this morning. As a new chapter opens for the capital’s most famous paper, the implications of this new development are yet to be discovered. No longer is the cry of “Standodd! Midday Special! Standodd! Evening Special!” to be heard upon the streets of London, and the soul of the city is the lesser for it.

Victor Wilson, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 1972 – 2007.

Frank Webster, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 15th August 1966 – 30th September 2007.

Ron Chadwick, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 1963 – 2006.

Former Evening Standard headquarters at Shoe Lane.

David Patten, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 1966 – 2009.

John Cato, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 1965 -2008.

Peter Steward, Distributor at the Evening Standard from 1964.

Brian Eller, Distributor at the Evening Standard from 1970 -2008.

Rob Dickers’ Newspaper Distributor’s knife. The notch on the top knife was worn by winding string around the handle to tie the bundle. “They wouldn’t let you go to work without one of these and a union card,” said Rob.

Rob Dickers, Distributor at the Evening Standard, 1966 – 2010.

Barry Pach worked in the Bill Room at the Evening Standard from 1960 – 1989, writing the bills for the newspaper hoardings by hand.

Portraits and final photograph © Colin O’Brien

Archive images courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

One of the corners of the East End that intrigues me most is at the boundary of Bethnal Green and Hackney, where a narrow path bordered by crumbling old brick walls leads up from the Hackney Rd to the junction of Mare St and the Regent’s canal. Cutting through at an angle to the grid of streets, it has the air of a field track that was there before the roads and the railway. Looming overhead against the skyline is a tall ruinous structure with the square proportions of a medieval castle, London’s last unreconstructed bomb site, left to decay since an incendiary hit in World War II. Beyond this, you pass under the glistening railway arches to arrive at the canal where, to your left, a vista opens up with majestic gasometers reaching up the sky and a quaint old building with bay-fronted windows entirely overgrown with ivy, cowering beneath. This is the headquarters of Empress Coaches.

Yesterday there was ice on the canal, which made me all the more grateful for the generous welcome extended by Peter Stanton, third generation of the Stanton family at the coach yard and still operating from the extravagantly derelict premises purchased by his grandfather.

Edward Thomas Stanton was an enterprising bus driver who bought his bus in 1923 and created a fleet operating from a yard in Shrubland Rd, London Fields, whence he initiated several familiar bus routes – including the No 8 pictured above on the office wall – journeys that became part of the perception of the city for generations of Londoners. In 1927, he bought the property here in Corbridge Crescent but when the buses were nationalised  in 1933, he made £35,000 from the sale of the fleet, permitting him to retire and hand over to his son Edward George Stanton, changing the business from buses to coaches at the same time. “It was a bloody fortune then!” declared Peter, his grandson still presiding with jocularity over the vestiges of this empire today. Outside the fleet of coaches in their immaculate cream paintwork, adorned with understated traditional signwriting sat dignified and perfect as swans amidst the oily filth of the garage, ready to glide out over the cobbles and onto the East End streets.“A coach yard within two miles of the City of London, it will never happen again,” declared Peter in wonder at the arcane beauty of his inheritance.

“My father came here at sixteen with his sister Ivy who did all the accounts,” he explained, sitting proudly among framed black and white photographs that trace the evolving design of coaches through the last century. At first, the bodies of the vehicles were removed in the Winter to convert to flat trucks out of season and these early examples resemble extended horsedrawn coaches but, as the century wore on, heroically streamlined vehicles took over. And the story of Empress Coaches itself became interwoven with the history of the twentieth century when they were requisitioned during World War II to drive personnel around airfields in Norfolk, while the staff that remained in London took refuge in the repair pit in the coach yard as a bomb shelter during the blitz.

“My father didn’t encourage me to come into the business,” admitted Peter, who joined in 1960, “But after being brought up around coaches and coming up here every Saturday morning with your dad, it gets into your blood and I could think of nothing else but going into it. I started off at the bottom, I was crawling under the coaches greasing them up. I was a mechanic for twenty-two years but then me and my brother Trevor bought out the company from the rest of the family, and the two of us took it over.”

“In those days, people didn’t go on holidays, they had a day out to the sea on a coach. And they had what they called “beanos,” pub and work excursions going to Margate or Southend and stopping at a pub on the way back and arriving back around midnight. Those pubs used to lose their local trade because people didn’t want to go into a bar filled with a lot of drunken East Enders. They were very rowdy and the girls were as bad as the boys.” revealed Peter, able to take amusement now at this safe distance and pulling a face to indicate that there is little he has not seen on the buses. “Put it like this, I used to say that when you took a coachload of girls out on a beano and their boyfriends and husbands came to pick them up at one o’clock – if they knew what I knew these girls had been up to they wouldn’t be so welcoming. In other words, they were not so innocent in those days as people thought they were. But the police were the worst, they went bloody barmy and they did things they would nick anybody else for doing!”

“When I first started there were six beanos every Saturday in the Summer but in the whole of the last year we only did two.” he admitted with a private twinge of disappointment. As the beanos decreased in the sixties, Empress Coaches were called upon by the military for troop movements. “We used to do the Trooping of the Colour, we drove the troops from Caterham Barracks with a police escort. It was the time of the IRA and they had to check all the bins along the way and have a guy with a jammer sitting in the front of the bus, so if there was a remote-controlled bomb it wouldn’t go off. They told us, ‘Whatever you do, drive on. Even if you hit someone.’ There’d be twenty of our coaches full of soldiers plus an escort.”

These are now the twilight years at Empress Coaches, after the family sold the business and are simply employed to keep it ticking over, which explains why little maintenance is undertaken. Yet the textures of more than eighty years of use recall the presence of all those who passed through and imbue the place with a rare charmed atmosphere. I was not the first to recognise the appeal of its patina, as I discovered when Peter reeled off the list of film crews that had been there, most notably “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” who wallpapered his office with the gold wallpaper you see in the top picture. “We’ve had Michael Caine here,” he boasted, “Gary Oldman, Ray Winstone and Dennis Waterman too.”

“After I spent fifty-two years of my life here, I’ve got be here.” Peter assured to me, biting into a sandwich and chewing thoughfully,“It’s more than likely this place will be redeveloped before too long and that will be the end of it, but in the meantime – I’m just trying to keep this show on the road!”

Edward Thomas Stanton, the enterprising bus driver who invented the number eight bus route.

Edward George Stanton in his leather bus driver’s coat.

Brothers Peter and Trevor Stanton.

Mark Stanton, Trevor’s son.

Jason Stanton, Peter’s son.

Between the coaches.

A forgotten corner of the yard.

Empress Coaches, the office entrance.

Corbridge Crescent, with the canal to the right.

A narrow path leading from the Hackney Rd to the junction of Mare St and the Regent’s canal.

London’s last unreconstructed bomb site.

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I keep returning to the Bishopsgate Institute to look at John Thomas Smith’s “Vagabondiana” – the collection of his magnificent etchings of street people in London, drawn from life two hundred years ago. The delicate, vivid lines and vigorous hatching of this rare artist evoke an entire world for me, and the closer I examine his work, the more I become in thrall to his compassionate yet unsentimental vision of existence.

In Spitalfields, there is a ceaseless street pageant that is never less than engaging. You do not have to walk down a street many times for the leading characters to emerge and, oftentimes, I drift – as if in dream –  engrossed by the elaborate panoply of life, as familiar faces appear and disappear, emerging like figures from a mechanical clock and then passing by upon their business to vanish from my gaze. Looking at John Thomas Smith’s portraits, I know he had the same experience and became fascinated, as I have been, to speak with those whose paths he crossed frequently in the city and discover the stories of those who might otherwise remain strangers.

Among his work, I found plates of figures in the clothing of the early seventeenth century, where he had redrawn images of the lost street life of an earlier London. While I look back two centuries to his work at the beginning of the nineteenth century, speculating upon our contemporary street life as the echo of that former age, John Thomas Smith looked back two centuries to another London. And, for both of us, the street cries form a continuum.

Just as I am familiar with the presence of Tom the Sailor, Molly the Swagman, Mick Taylor, the peacock feather sellers, the Bengali trolley men (and the many others I have written of in these pages), as constant inhabitants of the street – always present somewhere in the edge of my consciousness while I am walking round Spitalfields – so, “Vagabondia” records those who impinged daily upon the attention of John Thomas Smith in London two hundred years ago. Thanks to him, those that he knew live for me to the degree that I would not be entirely surprised, glancing from my window upon an empty midnight street in Spitalfields, to see one of these people coming trudging out of the shadows.

Of all the calamities with which a great city is infected there can be none so truly awful as that of the plague, when the street doors of the houses that were visited with the dreadful pest were padlocked up and only accessible to surgeons and medical men, whose melancholy duty frequently exposes them even to death itself.

Ratcatcher – The bite of the rat is keen, and the wound it inflicts painful and difficult to heal, owing to the form of its teeth, which are long, sharp and irregular.

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

It appears from the extreme neatness of this man and the goods that he exhibits for sale that they are of a very superior quality, probably of foreign manufacture. England can boast of superiority in almost every description of manufacture but it never rivalled the basket-makers and willow-workers of France and Holland. They have a great selection of wood and the females are taught the art of twisting it at a very early age.

Saloop, the subject of this etching, has superseded almost every other midnight street refreshment, being a beverage easily made, and a long time considered as a sovereign cure for headache arising from drunkennesss. It is a celebrated restorative among the Turks, and with us it stands recommended in consumptions, bilious cholics and all disorders stemming from acrimony in the juices.

Smithfield Pudding – It would be almost criminal to proceed in my account without a due encomium on the subject of it. The good qualities of an English pudding, more especially when it happens to be enriched with the due portion of enticing plums, are well known to most of us. The places where this excellent commodity is chiefly exposed to sale, in the manner described in the engraving, are those of the greatest traffic such as Smithfield on a market morning, where waggoners, butchers and drovers are sure to find their pence for a slice of hot pudding. Fleet Market, Leadenhall, Honey Lane and Spitalfields have each their hot pudding men.

A journeyman Prickle-maker who works in a cellar on the western side of the Haymarket. A Prickle is a basket used by the wine merchants for their empty bottles, and it is made loose with open-work so that when it is filled with bottles, it may ride easily in the wine merchant’s caravan, and without the least risk of breaking them.

Daniel Clarey, an industrious Irishman, well known to the London schoolboy as a gingerbread-nut lottery office keeper. Every adventurer in his scheme is sure of having a prize from seven to one hundred nuts, and some of his gingerbread shot are so highly seasoned, they are as hot as the noble Nelson’s balls, when he last peppered the jackets of England’s foes.

A lad who occasionally sweeps the crossing at the end of Princes St, Hanover Sq, and wears a long waistcoat surmounted by a soldier’s jacket.

Images courtesy © Bishopsgate Institute

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“We never know the worth of water till the well is dry” -Thomas Fuller, 1732

Hardly anyone notices this venerable pump of 1832 in Shoreditch churchyard, yet this disregarded artifact may conceal the reason why everything that surrounds it is there. Reverend Turp of St Leonard’s explained to me that the very name of Shoreditch derives from the buried spring beneath this pump, “suer” being the Anglo-Saxon word for stream.

The Romans made their camp at this spot because of the secure water source and laid out four roads which allowed them to control the entire territory from there – one road led West to Bath, one North to York, one East to Colchester and one South to Chichester. In fact, this water source undermined the foundations of the medieval church and caused it to collapse, leading to the construction of the current building by George Dance but, even then, there were still problems with flooding and the land was built up to counteract this, burying the first seven steps out of ten at the front of the church. Later, human remains from the churchyard seeped into this supply (as in some other gruesome examples) and it was switched over to mains water. Today, the sad old pump in Shoreditch has lost its handle, had its nozzle broken and even its basin is filled with concrete, yet a lone primrose flowers – emblematic of the mystic quality that some associate with these wellsprings, as sources of life itself.

Before the introduction of the mains supply in London, the pumps were a defining element of the city, public water sources that permitted settlement and provided a social focus in each parish. Now, where they remain, they are redundant relics unused for generations, either tolerated for their picturesque qualities or ignored by those heedless of their existence. When I began to research this subject, I found that no attention had been paid to these valiant survivors of another age. So I set out West to seek those other pumps that had caught my attention in my walks around the city and make a gallery for you of the last ones standing.

Holborn is an especially good place to look for old pumps, there I found several fine examples contemporary with the stately Georgian squares, and the Inns of Court proved rewarding hunting ground too. At Lincoln’s Inn, the porter told me they still get their water supply untreated from the Fleet river, encouraging me to explore South of Fleet St at the Temple, although to my disappointment Pump Court no longer has a pump to justify its name.

Up in Soho, at Broadwick St, you will find London’s most notorious pump, the conduit that brought a cholera epidemic killing more than five hundred people in 1854. Now it has been resurrected as a monument to the physician who detected the origin of the infection and had the pump handle removed. Today, the nearest pub bears his name, John Snow. The East End’s most famous specimen, the Aldgate Pump – that I have written of elsewhere in these pages – was similarly responsible for a lethal epidemic, underlining the imperative to deliver a safe water supply, an imperative that ultimately rendered these pumps redundant.

Perhaps the most gracious examples I found were by St Paul’s Cathedral, “Erected by St Faith’s Parish, 1819,” and in Gray’s Inn Square. Both possess subtle expressive detail as sculptures that occupy their locations with presence, and in common with all their pitiful fellows they stand upright like tireless flunkies – ever hopeful and eager to serve – quite oblivious to our indifference.

In Shoreditch churchyard, this sad old pump of 1832 has lost its handle, had its nozzle broken and basin filled with concrete, and is attended by a lone primrose.

In Queen’s Sq, Holborn this pump of 1840 has the coats of arms of St Andrew and St George.

In Bedford Row, Holborn, this is contemporary with its colleague in Queens Sq.

In Gray’s Inn Sq – where, in haste, a passing lawyer mislaid a red elastic band.

This appealing old pump in Staple Inn is a pastiche dated 1937.

This is the previous pump in the location above, more utilitarian and less picturesque.

In New Square, Lincoln’s Inn.

Between Paternoster Sq and St Paul’s Churchyard.

Outside the Royal Exchange in Cornhill. The text on the pump reads, “On this spot a well was first made and a house of correction built thereon by Henry Wallis Mayor of London in the year 1282.” Designed by architect Nathaniel Wright and erected in 1799.

Aldgate Pump marks the boundary between the East End and the City of London. The faucet in the shape of a wolf commemorates the last of these beasts to be shot outside the walls of the City.

London’s most notorious pump in Broadwick St, Soho. Five hundred people died in the cholera epidemic occasioned by this pump in 1854. Reinstated in 1992 to commemorate medical research in the service of public health, the nearby pub is today named “John Snow” after the physician who traced the outbreak to this pump. A red granite kerbstone across the road marks the site of the original pump.

Archive image courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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Headquarters of RBS

Thomas Hugo, the nineteenth century historian of Bishopsgate, wrote a history of this thoroughfare prefaced with a quote from his predecessor, John Strype in 1754 -“The fire of London not coming unto these parts, the houses are old timber buildings where nothing is uniform.” While the rest of London had been rebuilt after 1666, Bishopsgate alone retained the character of the city before the fire and in 1857 Thomas Hugo was passionate that this quality not be destroyed – as he wrote in the strangely prescient introduction to his “Walks in the City: No 1. Bishopsgate Ward.”

“This quarter, so hallowed and glorified by olden memories, is unquestionably deserving of a foremost place in our affectionate regard. Our history, our literature and our art are associated with the charmed ground in closest and most indissoluble union. You can scarcely open a single volume illustrative of our national history which does not carry you in imagination to that still picturesque assemblage of edifices where, amid its overhanging Elizabethan gables and stately Caroline facades, its varied masses of pleasantly mingled light and shade, its frequent churches and sonorous bells, the greatest and best of Englishmen have successfully figured among their fellows, and to whose adorning and embellishment the noblest powers have in all ages been devoted. And yet, unhappily, this is the spot where alterations are most commonly made, and with perhaps least regard to the irreparable loss which they necessarily involve. Here, where, for all who are versed in our country’s literature, every stone can speak of its greatness, where the name of every street and lane is classical, where around multitudes of houses fair thoughts and pleasant memories congregate as their natural home and common ground, the demon of transformation rules almost unquestioned, lays its merciless finger on our valued treasures, and leaves them metamorphosed beyond recognition only to work a similar atrocity upon some other precious object. Special attention, therefore, on every account, as well as for beauty, the value, and the excellence of that which still remains, as for the insecurity and uncertainty of its tenure, is most urgently and imperatively demanded.”

John Keats was baptised in St Botolph’s Church, Bishopsgate.

The Bishop’s Gate was on the site of one of the gates to the Roman city of Londinium, from which led Ermine St, the main road North. First mentioned in 1210, Bishop’s Gate was rebuilt in 1479 and 1735, before it was removed in 1775. In 1600, Will Kemp undertook his jig from here to Norwich in nine days.

A mitre set into the wall marks the site of the former Bishop’s Gate today.

Crosby Hall, the half-timbered building at the centre of this picture was once Richard III’s palace. Other residents here included Thomas More, Walter Raleigh and Mary Sidney, the poet. Built by wool merchant John Crosby in 1466, it was removed to Cheyne Walk, Chelsea in 1910.

Elizabethan houses in Bishopsgate, 1857.

The Lodge, Half Moon St, Bishopsgate Without, 1857.

Paul Pindar’s House, Bishopsgate photographed by Henry Dixon for the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London in the eighteen eighties. Paul Pindar was James I’s envoy to Turkey and his house was moved to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1890.

A chef takes a break in White Hart Court.

Houses designed by Inigo Jones built in White Hart Court, Bishopsgate in 1610.

Bishopsgate in the aftermath of the IRA bomb in 1993.

The newly completed Heron Tower boasts Europe’s largest indoor fish tank.

Archive images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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Shakespeare in Spitalfields

“… furry faces peering incongruously from the jackets of hawkers.”

As a tribute to the graphic genius of Ronald Searle who died on New Year’s Eve aged ninety-one, I am republishing these drawings he made in Spitalfields in 1953 when he came here with his wife, Kaye Webb, to report upon the animal market in Club Row for their book, “Looking at London and People Worth Meeting.” A. R. J. Cruickshank wrote in the introduction, ”This book rediscovers for us some of the odd places and odd faces of London that most of us have forgotten, if we ever knew them. The warm-hearted humanity of Kaye Webb’s writing and the tender sympathy of Searle’s drawings are beautifully matched.”

Curious, considering our national reputation, that of all the street markets in London only one should sell dogs. This can be found any Sunday morning by taking a bus to Shoreditch High St and following your ears. a cacophony of whimpers, yaps, yelps and just plain barking will guide you to the spot where Bethnal Green Rd branches off to Sclater St.

There you may find them – the unclaimed pets of a hundred homes : new-born litters of puppies tumbling over each other in children’s cots ( the most popular form of window display) : “mixed bags” of less lively youngsters huddling docilely together in laundry baskets; lively-looking sheepdogs, greyhounds and bulldogs straining at the ends of leashes and furry little faces peering incongruously from the jackets of hawkers, who often look as if they’d be happier in the boxing ring.

The sales technique of their owners is almost as varied as the ware and almost always accompanied by much affectionate handling of the dogs. “It’s good for business and sometimes they mean it,” we were told by an impartial vendor of bird-seed who has been on the same pitch for twenty years. “Hi, mate, buy a dog to keep you warm!” said the man with the Chows to a pair of shivering Lascar seamen. “E’s worth double, lady, but I want ‘im to ‘ave a good ‘ome” or “Here’s a good dog, born between the sheets, got his pedigree in my pocket!” “Who’d care for a German sausage? – stretch him to make up the rations”, the salesman with the dachshund said, demonstrating too painfully for amusement.

R.S.P.C.A. interference is needed less often now. The days are gone when sores were covered with boot polish; when doubtful dogs were dyed with permanganate of potash; when, as tradition has it, you could enter the market at one end leading a dog, lose it half way, and buy it back at the other end. In fact the regular dog hawkers were never the ones to deal in stolen pets. “Stands to reason, this is the first place they’d come, and besides, look at the number of coppers there are about anyway.” But it is still possible to buy pedigree forms “at a shop down the road”, “just a matter of thinking up some good names and being able to write”.

The regular merchants, whose most frequent customers are the pet shops, are mostly old-timers ( some who have been coming for forty years and from as far away as Southend) and since a new law was passed insisting that all animal sellers should have licences, the ‘casuals’ are forbidden. But on the occasion of our visit the law had not yet been made and we passed quite a number of them. Most attractive was a red-cheeked lad with a spaniel puppy – “I call him Gyp; we’ve got his mother, but there’s no room for another, so my uncle said to come here.” Every  time he was asked: “How much do you want, son?” he stumbled over his answer and hugged the dog closer. And when the would-be buyer moved on, his eyes sparkled with relief.

That day the dog section of Club Row was not very busy; it was too cold. But the rest of the market waxed as usual. Unlike its near neighbour, Petticoat Lane, Club Row Market has a strong local flavour. The outsiders who make the long journey to its “specialised streets” are mostly purposeful men looking for that mysterious commodity known as Spare Parts.

In Club Row itself are to be found bicycles, tyres, an occasional motor bike or a superannuated taxi. The police are frequently seen about here looking for “unofficial goods”. Chance St sells furniture and “junk”, Sclater St is a nest of singing birds, rabbits, white mice, guinea pigs and their proper nourishment. In the Street of Wirelesses the air is heavy with crooning, and Cheshire St is clamorous with “Dutch auctions”, or demonstrating remarkable inventions like the World’s Smallest Darning Loom (“Stop your missus hating you … now you can say ‘you might darn this potato, dear, while I have shave’ … and she’ll do it before you’ve wiped the soap off!”).

We found one street devoted to firearms, chiefly historic, and another where secretive, urgent men offered us “a good watch or knife”, implying that it was “hot” and therefore going cheap. But we had learned that this was “duffing” and the watch was most probably exactly the same as those sold on the licenced stalls just up the street.

At ten to one the market reaches a crescendo. One o’clock is closing time and many of the stallholders won’t be back until next Sunday. This is the time when the regulars know where to find bargains, but it needs strong elbows. Our way out, along Wheler St, under the railway bridge and past the faded notice which says ‘Behold the Lamb of God Cometh”, brought us back to the dog market. It was surprisingly quiet. On the other side of the road we spotted a small figure hurrying off with the spaniel puppy. It looked as if Gyp was safe for another week anyway.

I hope you will not consider it vain if I reveal that Kaye Webb gave me this book and inscribed it under the title with my name and the text ” – also a person worth meeting!” It was my good fortune that Kaye, the legendary editor of Picture Post, Lilliput and Puffin Books, was the first person to recognise my work and encourage me in my writing. When I used to stay with her in her flat overlooking the canal in Little Venice, I remember she had some of Ronald Searle’s work framed on the wall in the spare room, and I spent many hours admiring both his Japanese prison camp drawings and his portraits of the bargees from the Paddington basin.

Kaye’s marriage to Ronald Searle ended in 1967 and she died in 1995. Today, I keep my copy of “Looking at London and People Worth Meeting” on the shelf as an inspiration to me now I am writing pen portraits myself, and I sometimes think of Kaye here in these streets over half a century ago and imagine Ronnie – as she referred to him – bringing out his sketchbook in Sclater St where I buy my fruit and vegetables each Sunday.

“…the rest of the market waxed as usual” – a bookseller in action on Brick Lane

Over a year ago, I featured Peter Hardwicke, the talented East End signwriter who may be the last in our metropolis working solely by eye. Yet since he continues, working all this time to enhance our streets, I decided that it was time for another survey, so he may receive due credit for his more recent designs that might otherwise pass as anonymous.

Here you see Peter in Puma Court outside Cleo’s Barber Shop where he was in the process of adorning the frontage with some handsome utilitarian lettering, celebrating this modest family business begun by Kyriacos Cleovoulou in 1962 and now carried on by his children Renée, George and Panayiotis. The capitals that Peter has used for “Cleo’s” are a font which is derived from the work of one of his nameless predecessors in the early twentieth century. In fact, the adjoining building has an old faded sign which reads “Jones Dairy” in this same lettering and the work of this unknown Spitalfields master is also to be seen fifty yards away, spelling out S. Schwartz at 33 Fournier St, and may still be discerned upon the facade of the former Market Cafe, now Townhouse at 5 Fournier St.

This style of elegant yet undecorated hand-painted lettering with its subtle detail and gothic idiosyncrasy sits naturally here in Spitalfields among the eighteenth and nineteenth century buildings, and is ideally suited to the independent traders which define the nature of this area at the edge of the City. In fact, this particular alphabet has proved so popular that Peter is now designing it as the “Spitalfields” font, a unique face that has its roots in the history of this neighbourhood and gives typographic expression to the specific quality of the place. As well as Cleo’s, you can see it locally on the English Restaurant in Brushfield St and in Columbia Rd on Angela Flanders perfumery and the Columbia Pottery. Most recently, Peter painted it in the front of Tracey Emin’s new shop in Crispin St, using a soft white tone upon a dark green ground to create the visual identity for this high profile commission, which has both a vibrant graphic quality and looks like it belongs too.

When I came upon Peter in Puma Court in the week before Christmas, he was shivering in the chill and admitted to me that he was waiting for the paint to dry. So I persuaded him to join me for a cup of tea, on the principle that the paint would dry just as quickly unsupervised.

“I work outside all year round and I can deal with the cold but the rain has stopped me in my tracks – it’s unprofessional to carry on because water and paint don’t get on very well. The customers get nervous and ask, ‘Will it come off?’” Peter confessed to me as he sipped from his steaming mug, ever conscientious to finish his work before Christmas.

“For ten years, I worked for a company of general signwriting contractors doing brewery work, church and builders’ boards and generic signwriting, but I wasn’t stimulated by it, working to graphic designers’ artwork.” he explained when I asked how he came to be working solo. “I am an old school signwriter that likes to talk directly to the client to select the fonts and the colours. I’ve found it a rewarding way to work, dealing with independent shopkeepers. I like to look at the built environment and choose fonts that are sympathetic to the architecture and the surrounding cityscape. I look at the other shops and I do research.”

This is Peter’s special quality, that he pays attention to the world around him and creates work which sits naturally in the street, occupying its location boldly while being sympathetic to its neighbours. He told me that he recognises the signature of around ten unnamed signwriters whose work is visible in the East End and who have been his predecessors over the last century. “When I look at Jones Dairy and S.Schwartz, I can tell it’s the same guy by the spacing and I feel sympathy with him,” he confided to me with a sentimental smile.

Yet Peter’s biggest influence was the signwriter he was apprenticed to, Ted Ambridge. “My boss, he was the champion,” Peter assured me, “He had very good contacts in Watney Combe Reid and Truman’s and he got the contracts for most of the pubs in the East End. He did the Ten Bells in Commercial St, and we painted The Gun in Brushfield St together. He did the board telling the history of the pub and I did the generic figure work.”

Peter Hardwicke understands the culture of East End signwriting. Working placidly, he paints his lettering straight onto the frontage with a fluency that is his alone. It is a kind of magic. Everything fits, the balance and rhythm of the work is perfect – this is Peter’s gift. His work becomes part of the building, rather than merely sitting upon the front, it completes the structure and the shop frontage looks properly dressed to face the world. In streets like Columbia Rd, where Peter did almost all the shops, the effect is tangible – Peter’s work improves the street.

The vindication of Peter’s talent is that he is in greater demand than ever before. “I think people are bored with computer generated artwork,” he said as stood up to return to his work, “even my younger clients, they’d rather have it  done professionally than use stick on letters – it shows they’ve got taste.”

Below you can see a selection of Peter’s work in the vicinity and you can view his archive here.

Peter paints the “Spitalfields” font – perfect without guidelines or templates.

Peter Hardwicke at work in Crispin St.

Emin International, Crispin St

Treacle, Columbia Rd

The English Restaurant, Brushfield St

Laxeiro, Columbia Rd

Jones Dairy, Ezra St

The Painted Lady, Redchurch St

Columbia Pottery, Columbia Rd

Glitterati, Columbia Rd

Val’s Sandwich Bar, Columbia Rd

Angela Flanders, Columbia Rd

Labour & Wait, Redchurch St

Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman

You may like to read my original story Peter Hardwicke, Signwriter

and take a look at The Signs of Old London

It is the season of rebirth and transformation, and – behold – the Brick Lane trendsetter formerly known as Mark Petty is no more – in his place, welcome Boudica Denvorgilla Veronica Scarlet Redd. It was solemnized by oath in November and now he asserts to the postman, “If they spell it wrong, I will summon an army.”

Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I paid a visit upon Boudica at his house in Bethnal Green last week to admire his Christmas decorations, before we set out to accompany him to Ridley Rd where each year at this time he distributes gifts to old friends in the market. Yet the first point of interest was his new identity, and Boudica produced the certificate to show us. “When I was a child, I never knew my name was Mark Petty for years,” he confessed to me with a beaming smile, as he flourished the piece of paper proudly, “It was always,’Hey you!’ or ‘Where are you?’” A situation that is happily resolved, now that no-one will ever be able to ignore his name again.

I knew that he chose the name “Boudica” because she stood up for the right to be different – a cause that Boudica himself espouses in every aspect of his life – but I was curious to understand the significance of his other choices. Denvorgilla is an old Irish name referring to Boudica’s Celtic roots, since he is descended from a long line of Irish aristocracy who fled when Elizabeth I sent the troops into Ireland, escaping to France before settling in Gloucestershire. In fact, Boudica is titled and although, with characteristic modesty of temperament, he chooses not to use it, I cannot deny a certain nobility in his bearing. On a contrasting note, Veronica drives from a cherished Go-Cat commercial in the nineteen eighties, while Scarlet Redd refers both to Boudica’s favourite colour and to Sharon Redd, the singer remembered for her album “Redd Hot.”

There was no time to dwell upon these notions of identity that morning. Once we had scrutinized the paperwork and applauded Boudica’s honeycomb bells, it was time for the three of us to hurry along to the bus stop. Snatching an umbrella, as we set out into the grim December rain, Boudica handed me the bags of mince pies, cards and gifts to carry and I was only too happy to follow along in his train, fulfilling the role of Boudica’s attendant Christmas elf. The bus quickly filled up with shoppers and I was puzzled, at first, by their curious indifference to Boudica’s magnificent ankle-length scarlet leather cloak and tall cat-in-the-hat style fluffy red bonnet, until I realised that at Christmas everyone expects to see people dressed in full-length red suits with a fur trim. Far from standing out, as Boudica’s usually does, on this occasion he was the one most appropriately dressed for the season, shaming the rest of us in our drab attire.

Yet, as we descended from the bus at the entrance to Ridley Rd Market, an excited frisson travelled through the crowd, busy about their festive errands in the rain, while applause and cheers arose from the stallholders in their lit booths, peering over piles of shining fruit and vegetables. “Boudica, you look lovely!” called one, drawing roars of approval from his colleagues and causing Boudica to assume that regal stillness which is the preserve of only the most dignified of public figures. Boudica has superlative aplomb, and in spite of the cold and the damp, everyone was euphoric to see him arriving bearing gifts and offering more than a passing resemblance to Spirit of Christmas Present.

Parcels, mince pies and cards were distributed – reciprocated with hugs and handshakes and generous embraces. Joy was incarnate in Ridley Rd Market thanks to one of the East End’s most beloved characters, Boudica Denvorgilla Veronica Scarlet Redd.

Boudica - “Next year, I’m going to get a chariot.”

John Leech’s original drawing of the Ghost of Christmas Present from “A Christmas Carol.”

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

Read my original profile of Mark Petty, Trendsetter

and take a look at Mark Petty’s Multicoloured Coats,

Mark Petty’s New Outfits,

and Mark Petty returns to Brick Lane.

I am delighted to resume my series of The East End Nobody Knows in collaboration with Spitalfields Life Contributing Artist Joanna Moore, by visiting Trinity Green Almshouses off the Mile End Rd. You only have to step through the emerald green gates to discover that this place has kept its age-old repose. Designed Sir William Ogbourne in 1695, as almshouses for retired and invalid mariners upon ground given Captain Henry Mudd of Ratcliffe, the conception was of fourteen cottages around a central chapel. Yet even though a bomb destroyed the rear half of this courtyard in 1943, the ship-shape sense of order is miraculously still intact. Look out for Basil, the old ginger tom who takes the role of master & commander now all the seafaring folk have departed.

Sculptor Roy Emmins lives in a tiny flat built upon the roof of a nineteen forties residential block at the rear of the Royal London Hospital, where he has created a wonderful sculpture garden to exhibit his works among plants and flowers. With a natural sensitivity to the anatomy of animals, Roy’s work is in a magical realist vein, evoking an entire of menagerie of creatures in stone, bronze, wood, paper mache and even tin foil. Six days a week, Roy walks from his flat in Whitechapel to his studio at the far end of Cable St where he has been working alone secretly for the past ten years, creating a vast body of superlative works, and up here in his sculpture garden among the chimney pots of Whitechapel, Roy’s sculpture exists in its own enchanted universe, known only to the lucky few.

These modest terraces in Walden St and Turner St – dating from 1809-15 – were derelict for fifteen years and would have been demolished if it had not been for the intiative of Tim Whittaker, Director of the Spitalfields Trust. He recognised the dignity of these self-effacing structures, built for the lower middle classes, their early residents included a surgeon, a sea captain, a plumber, a shopkeeper and a Chelsea pensioner. Completed two years ago, this award-winning restoration employs weatherboarded extensions in an historically appropriate vernacular aesthetic to win extra space and uses salvaged materials to subtle effect in preserving the shabby poetry of these old houses. As Tim put it to me, “I wanted to give Whitechapel back a bit of the romance it had lost.”

From Roy Emmins’ roof you can look down upon St Augustine with St Philip’s Church in Newark St, a soaring example of mid-nineteenth century red brick gothic that today houses the Royal London Hospital’s Library and Museum. If you walk into the ground floor you will encounter the sepulcral hush of medical students cramming for exams, while down in the crypt is the medical museum – open to the general public – where you can discover attractions as various as the Elephant Man’s hat, collections of gallstones preserved in specimen cases as if they were gulls’ eggs, Victorian autopsy sets and George Washington’s dentures.

Illustration copyright © Joanna Moore

You may also like to take a look at

The Spitalfields Nobody Knows (Part One)

The Spitalfields Nobody Knows (Part Two)

Be sure to seek out Joanna Moore (left) and her friends Helena Maratheftis (AKA Thefty) and Nhatt Nichols (AKA Nhattattack) at their stall in the Upmarket, Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane on Sunday where they will be selling their London-themed prints and Christmas cards.