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.

You may also like to read about

An Afternoon with Roa, Street Artist

The Return of Roa, Street Artist

The Vermin of Spitalfields

The Squirrel & The Rat

(Captions by exhibition curator Emma Hunt.)

92 Whitechapel High St, 1988.

92 Whitechapel High St, 2012.

Mr Gelkoff stands in the doorway of his shop, imported chocolate meticulously arranged in the window case. His son Barry remembers the smell of chocolates, and the pride his family took in stocking the best and newest lines from all over Europe. Barry closed the shop in 1998, so his parents could retire.

65 Redchurch St, 1988.

65 Redchurch St, 2012.

J.Kay had been gone for at least fifteen years when Alan took this photo. Previously registered as various different furniture dealers, it even enjoyed a brief stint in the thirties as Vittora Ferrari’s Dining Rooms.

47 Quaker St, 1988.

47 Quaker St, 2012.

Leon Kuczynski is remembered fondly by his customers as a Polish or Russian Jew, sitting always on a stool at the counter, head in a newspaper, patiently waiting while local kids chose their sweets and ice creams. He had three of his own, a neighbour recalls, who all went into professions, left the neighbourhood and made their father proud.

30 Toynbee Sr, 1988.

30 Toynbee St, 2012.

Louis Simpson’s shop dates back to 1957 and continued trading until 1986. There had been a kosher butcher at this address since the building was erected at the beginning of the thirties. Frank Plaskowski and Harris Marks were both listed as proprietors at different times.

28a Goulston St, 1988.

Site of 28a Goulston St, 2012.

Schloss’ Woollens started trading in 1930 in Goulston St close to Petticoat Lane Market. By the time Alan took his picture in 1988, it was one of only two businesses still listed on the street. In 2004, the block was redeveloped to become part of the London Metropolitan University.

32 Hessel St, 1988.

32 Hessel St, 2012.

The East Enders Social Club has left no record.

205 Mile End Rd, 1988.

205 Mile End Rd, 2012.

Schwartz’s Shoes maintained a presence in the East End for most of the twentieth century. Samuel Schwartz, boot dealer, is listed at 127 White Horse Lane from the twenties to the mid-forties, before moving to 258-260, 250 and finally 205 Mile End Rd in 1972. The shop closed the year the picture was taken.

7 Toynbee St, 1988.

7 Toynbee St, 2012.

Conway stood at 7 Toynbee St from the early fifties until the late seventies. Originally listed as Frank Conway, warehouseman, the business later became Conway Automatics Ltd, and finally Conway Trading Ltd. By 1980, the shop had moved to 19 Toynbee St and an uncovered sign further down the street reveals another location at number 15.

111 Mile End Rd, 1988.

111 Mile End Rd, 2012.

Empty since 1973, Walter’s was one of four shops at 107-111 Mile End Rd, hiding the Georgian terrace houses behind for over a century. Nearly lost forever, the Grade II listed buildings were eventually bought by the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust and restored to their former glory.

34 Alderney Rd, 1988.

34 Alderney Rd, 2012.

Daniel Bliss was a secondhand furniture shop from the mid-forties until 1984. The name was originally Blitz, changed to Bliss after the bombing of World War II in which a member of the family was killed.

34 Alderney Rd 1979, painting by Geoffrey Fletcher.

1988 photographs copyright © Alan Dein

2012 photographs copyright © Ais Clafferty

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. Opening times for the exhibition are here. Alan Dein will give a talk on Saturday 9th June at 2.00pm.

Geoffrey Fletcher’s painting can be seen on the alongside other pictures in the Tower Hamlets Collection as part the National Archive of Paintings online here.

You may also like to see the original post

Alan Dein’s East End Shopfronts of 1988

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.”

You may also like to read my original profile

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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John Claridge’s East End

Along the Thames with John Claridge

At the Salvation Army with John Claridge

Flypaper seller.

Cats’ meat man.

Ice cream seller.

Chimney sweep.

Knife grinder.

Coalman.

Baked potato seller.

Dairyman.

Lavender seller.

Newspaper seller.

Novelties seller.

The muffin man.

You may like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London

William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders

London Melodies

Henry Mayhew’s Street Traders

H.W.Petherick’s London Characters

John Thomson’s Street Life in London

Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries

Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London

John Player’s Cries of London

More John Player’s Cries of London

William Nicholson’s London Types

John Leighton’s London Cries

Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III

Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders

More of Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders

Adam Dant’s  New Cries of Spittlefields

Behold the noble Crudgie!

I have been hoping for the opportunity to catch up with Crudgie ever since we were first introduced at the Fish Harvest Festival last year, so this week I was delighted to accept his invitation to meet at that legendary bikers’ rendezvous, the Ace Cafe on the North Circular.

Over six foot six in height, clad head to toe in black leather, with extravagant facial hair trained into straggling locks and carrying the unmistakable whiff of engine oil wherever he goes, Crudgie makes an unforgettable impression. Crudgie’s monumental stature, beady roving eyes and bold craggy features adorned with personal topiary, give him the presence of one from medieval mythology, like Merlin on a motorbike. Yet in spite of his awesome appearance and gruff voice, I found Crudgie a warm and friendly personality, even if he does not suffer fools gladly, issuing fearsome warnings to pedestrians not to get in his way.

“I’m only called by my surname, Crudgington. “Ington” means family living in an enclosed dwelling, and “crud” is a variation of curd, so they were probably cheesemakers. There’s a place in Shropshire named Crudgington, but there’s nobody buried in the church with that name, nobody living there with that name either and nobody that lives there has ever heard of anybody called Crudgington. The shortened version of my name came about when I went to play rugby and cricket where everyone gets a nickname ending in “ie.” I’ve swum for the county, and competed as an athlete in the four hundred metres and javelin, as well.

I grew up in Billericay, famous for being the first place to count the votes in the General Election. My father was builder called Henry but everyone knew him as Nobby. I went into banking for ten years in Essex but I couldn’t get on with it, even though I was the youngest person ever to pass the banking exam. So then I went to work in insurance in the City, I worked for Barclays for ten years and played for their rugby team until they couldn’t afford to fund it anymore. In the nineteen nineties, I felt I was getting nowhere in insurance so I started motorbicycle couriering. I got a motorbike from my parents for fifteenth birthday, so I’ve always been a biker and I do thousands of miles on it every year, going to sporting events, meet-ups and scrambles.

It’s the camaraderie of it that appeals to me, meeting up with your mates, but unfortunately you are perceived as an outlaw. I have been stopped eighty-nine times in twenty-one years by the police. Apparently, couriers are the second most-disliked Londoners after Estate Agents. It’s because people get scared out of their wits when they are not thinking where they are going and a courier brushes by and gives them the shock of their life. People should look where they are going. If you are going to hit a pedestrian, it’s best to hit them them straight on, that way they get thrown over the handlebars. A few cuts and bruises, but nobody gets killed by a motorbicycle. Whereas if you veer to either side to avoid them, the danger is you clip them with your handlebars and it sends you into a tailspin, and you fall off.

I’m a member of the most important biker club – The 59 Club, set up by Father Bill Shergold in 1959. He was a vicar who was a biker, and he wanted to bring the mods and rockers together,  so he opened up in a church hall in West London in 1961 and on the first day he had Cliff Richard & The Shadows performing there. Then in 1985, it moved to Yorkton St, Bethnal Green. It was open three days a week, and you could go in and have a cup of tea after work. They had a bike repair workshop for maintenance, two snooker tables and a stage where lots of bands performed. And once a year, you could go to a church service. They moved to Plaistow now, but everybody that was in it is still in it – it’s the largest bike club in the world.

There’s only a few British couriers left, most are Brazilians now. It used to be Polish until they earned enough money and all went back home. Once upon a time, there was a lot of money in it though it’s gone down thanks to technology, but the beauty is you can work when you like and you get to go interesting places that you’d never go otherwise. I’ve picked up the Queen’s hair products from SW3 and driven into Buckingham Palace to deliver them. I do a lot of deliveries for film companies and quite often I stay around on set to watch, especially if it’s in some interesting stately home that you wouldn’t normally get to visit. If I have to go somewhere on a journey out of London, I always take time to visit the museum or castle or whatever there is to see.

I’ve worked from nine until seven for years, but I’ve decided I’m only going to do nine thirty to six because I’m getting old. If I had independent funds, I wouldn’t be riding anymore. I haven’t missed a day in quite a few years and I’ve only ever had one week off in twenty years…”

When I arrived at the Ace Cafe, I saw Crudgie’s bike outside and I spotted him through the window, head and shoulders above his fellows. Inside, a long counter ran along one wall, facing a line of windows looking out on the North Circular, and the space in between was filled by tables, scattered with helmets to indicate those which were reserved by customers. Once Crudgie had greeted me with a firm bikers’ handshake, we settled by the window where he squeezed every drop from his teabag to achieve a beverage that was so strong it was almost black. A characteristic Crudgie brew.

Like the questing knight or the solitary cowboy, Crudgie has no choice but to follow his ordained path through the world, yet he is a law unto himself and the grime he acquires speeding through the traffic is his proud badge of independence. A loner riding the city streets with his magnificent nose faced into the wind, Crudgie is his own master.

Crudgie at the Ace Cafe on the North Circular. “- Like Merlin on a motorbike.”

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At the Fish Harvest Festival

Rodney with the birch tree he planted in Fournier St in 1985.

Rodney Archer is one of Spitalfields’ most popular long-term residents, and over the years he has seen many come and go as part of the transformation that has overcome the place since he came to live here in 1980. Among the the few occupants that is not a millionaire in Fournier St today, Rodney delights in the patina of ages’ past that dignifies his ramshackle old house, enhanced by all the glorious paraphernalia he has accumulated over the last thirty years, including – most famously – Oscar Wilde’s fireplace which is installed in his living room.

Yesterday, taking advantage of a brief respite of sunshine on a cloudy April afternoon, I asked Rodney to take me on a tour of his personal landmarks in Spitalfields yet, to my surprise, his modest realm did not extend beyond Fournier St. We commenced in Rodney’s shady back garden beneath the majestic silver birch which has become a well-known feature as the largest tree in this hidden space enclosed between the houses of Fournier St, Brick Lane, Princelet St and Wilkes St. “My mother and I planted this in 1985. We got it from the council for £15 when they were encouraging people to plant trees.” he said, slipping an arm round the trunk affectionately,“I was born in London, but it reminds me of the woods where I used to go camping in Ontario where I grew up.”

Across the street from his front door, Rodney showed me the former home of his friends Eric & Ricardo. “I came to Club Row in 1970 to buy kittens, but the first time I was invited over was in the mid-seventies when I came here for lunch. I asked Eric & Ricardo to let me know if a house came up in the street and the first one they called me about was the one I live in now. ” he recalled, “It changed my life. It was the beginning of being happy, and it was Spitalfields that did it. I had never felt comfortable where I lived before.” Rodney came to Spitalfields after his mother broke her hip and the doctor told her she had to live with her son, and so they shared the house in Fournier St. “All the basements were workshops for leather goods then, and there was Mr Lustig the tailor, and Solly at Gale Furs who’d been there since the thirties,” Rodney said, casting his eyes up and down street as he thought back over the years.

A few doors down, we came to another magnificent house where, remarkably, Rodney once mixed the plaster for the walls. “I worked as an unskilled labourer here for fifty hours a week for £67 in 1980, I was a plasterer’s mate and my boss was twenty years old. It was my venture into the working class,” he admitted, raising his eyebrows significantly with a shy smile, “Michael & Donald the couple who lived here were very polite and they never acknowledged me as a neighbour while I was working on site. The Times later described them as ‘a celibate couple’ in Donald’s obituary.” Yet there was another resident in this house who made the biggest impression on Rodney.“Nelly Foreman was a Jewish woman from the nineteen thirties, a sitting tenant who had survived into the nineteen eighties. She’d look out the top window at everybody and always called my mother ‘Violet’ rather than Phyllis. She was moved to the ground floor but she didn’t like looking out the window as much from there and she was very particular about disturbance during the building work, so she and I had a feisty relationship.” he confided to me fondly, “She was the last Jewish woman on Fournier St and she saw everything change.”

Across the street, we stood outside another grand eighteenth century house. “My friend Julian lived here,” Rodney explained gesturing towards the unyielding door with a smile, “He used to give elaborate dinner parties in the eighteenth century style with footmen. There were no lights and the place was painted in the original colours, so it was very dark and atmospheric. At one point, Dennis Severs, Julian and I spent a day scumbling the front room together – we were pretty close.” Today, Julian lives in a castle in Ireland, Rodney informed me.

Passing Wilkes St, as we walked westward, Rodney sat on the steps that previously led to the famous Market Cafe which operated here from 1947 until 1997, run by the brother and sister team of Phylis & Clyde (widely known as Clive). “They arrived around five in the morning, and began serving amazing puddings and roast beef meals from seven o’clock,” Rodney said, rolling his eyes hungrily, “Phylis was a colourful character, always fully made up at five in the  morning. If she didn’t like someone, she threw them out. Clyde worked down in the kitchen and, if you were one of the favoured few, you were able to walk past her and order directly from him.”

At the end of Fournier St, we reached The Ten Bells or “Jack the Ripper,” as Rodney knew it in the eighties when it was a strip pub. “I once spent a New Year’s Eve here with the strippers, prostitutes and taxi drivers, when I was feeling sorry for myself. There was part of me, in my loneliness, that identified with them.,” he confessed as we sat in the large tiled bar room, “There was always a certain bleakness here in Spitalfields and it hasn’t shaken it off entirely, even today.”

“In the eighties, property developers realised that, when gay people moved in here, it would go up in value and then straight people would come afterwards. ” he continued, “Yet I don’t understand why people who are drawn to a place for what it is then feel compelled to change it. They complained about the vegetables from the market in the street and they were looking forward to the gentrification, but there were those of us who came here because of the roughness and authenticity of the people and the place. “

As we returned up Fournier St, I was concerned that our walk had been a tour of things which had gone, so I asked Rodney what he had found here and his answer was immediate.“I found myself in Spitalfields,” he assured me, stopping in his tracks, “Until I came here I wasn’t happy in myself, but this place has become part of my being.”

Rodney outside the former home of his friends Eric & Ricardo.

Rodney outside the house where he mixed all the plaster for the walls.

Rodney outside the former home of his friend Julian.

Rodney outside the former Market Cafe, run by brother and sister Phylis & Clyde between 1947 and 1997.

Rodney at The Ten Bells where he once spent New Year’s Eve.

Rodney in his living room with Oscar Wilde’s fireplace.

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Rodney Archer, Aesthete

Woodgrainer, Ian Harper, with a rosewood door he painted in Elder St.

If you should ever require an excuse for a stroll around Spitalfields one Sunday, what could be a more relaxing and gently informative diversion than to take a tour of the doors painted by Ian Harper, the woodgrainer? Your journey commences at the ancient Bell Foundry in the Whitechapel Rd where Ian painted the entire facade with a spectacular mid-oak effect.

“I walked in one day, ten years ago,” Ian told me,“and they asked if I could restore the wood-graining because it was damaged, so I said, ‘Yes,’ and since then I’ve repainted it twice.” The graining here dates from the Victorian era with constant repair over the last century, yet such is Ian’s skill in achieving an authentic effect , you would never guess that any maintenance or repainting has been done.

Mid-oak was an effect commonly used by small businesses and trades that wanted to look solid, Ian revealed to me, whereas more ostentatious effects were the preserve of classy private houses such as you find on the next stop of your walking tour, in Princelet St. At number twenty-four, where Chris Dyson has reconstructed an eighteenth century facade to blend with the rest of the street, he commissioned Ian to paint a dark-oak effect on the wooden frontage, and burr walnut upon his front door and that of his neighbour John Alexander at  number twenty-two. In such close proximity to Brick Lane, Ian was wary that his work might get tagged but, a year later, it remains pristine. “Some of the roughnecks came along to watch me at work and I think I earned respect,” he confided to me with a relieved smile.

Round the corner at Marianna Kennedy‘s showroom and workshop  at three Fournier St, there are a pair of doors in old-oak that Ian has painted and repainted in recent years. “They are much repaired and much loved, patched in keeping with the battered exterior of the house,” Ian admitted, “So many tramps have slept against it and bookbinders battered against it.” Similarly, there is an interior door in mahogany in this house that has been frequently repaired by Ian and coated with multiple coats of Copal varnish to imbue a rich marmalade glow.

Across the marketplace, over in Elder St, you will encounter three beautiful wood-grained front doors displaying contrasting effects – mahogany, rosewood and walnut. Robin Waite, the owner of nine and eleven, commissioned Ian to grain both doors. In each case, Ian was lucky enough to uncover traces of original graining around the edges and regrained them based upon these discoveries, with number nine in mahogany and number eleven in rosewood.

The final stop on your tour in Elder St is Dan Cruickshank’s burr walnut front door, first grained when the house was part of the Isaac Tillard Estate in the early ninetenth century. “It is the most perfect example of traditional graining in Spitalfields” declared Ian, “I’ve repaired parts of it, and occasionally maintain it with new coats of Copal varnish. You can tell it’s early because the style is very loose, very painterly – it’s slightly mad!”

On your walk, you will have wondered at the realism and surrealism of wood graining, learnt to distinguish walnut from rosewood, and maybe you will have succumbed to the paradoxical charm of wood graining which derives from the delight in being deceived by it, even when you know it is fake?

“It’s seen as something expensive today, whereas the whole point of graining done in the past was to put a gloss on poor materials.” Ian explained to me, savouring the irony of the prestige now placed upon wood graining, when once it was a cheap option to fake a bit of class for those who could not afford true quality. Yet it is Ian’s bravura talent that makes his work so fascinating, and the parade of his lush glossy doors in Spitalfields is the public gallery of his mastery. “I’ve done miles of graining for grand interiors, but Spitalfields is where I have most exterior doors.” he assured me proudly.

The mid-oak wood graining on the front of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in the Whitechapel Rd dates from  the Victorian era with regular discreet maintenance and repainting by Ian.

Mark, manager at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, steps outside to admire the wood-graining.

At Chris Dyson’s house, number twenty-four Princelet St, Ian painted dark-oak upon the facade and burr walnut upon the front door.

At John Alexander’s house, number twenty-two Princelet St, Ian painted burr walnut.

At Marianna Kennedy’s showroom, three Fournier St, Ian has painted old-oak which has been patched up and acquired many coats of Copal varnish.

Three Fournier St in old-oak.

Interior door in Marianna Kennedy’s showroom in mahogany.

At nine Elder St, Ian painted a mahogany effect inspired by residual fragments of original graining.

At eleven Elder St, Ian painted rosewood in the loose early-nineteenth century style.

Dan Cruickshank steps out of his front door with original walnut wood graining believed to date from the 1840s when the house was part of the Isaac Tillard Estate.

Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman

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Ian Harper, Wood Grainer

It is a hundred years ago this week that C.A.Mathew visited Spitalfields in April 1912, but he was present once again as my invisible guide when I walked through the close-knit streets to take new pictures in the same locations, and make a photographic assessment of the changes that a century has brought. I had copies of his pictures with me, and in each instance I held them up to ascertain the correct alignment of buildings and other landmarks that told me I was in the same spot exactly.

Being in his footsteps revealed that C.A.Mathew composed his photographs to expose the most sympathetic play of light and shade, demonstrating a subtlety of tone that I dare not attempt to replicate in a different season at another time of day, in another age. Yet there was the delight of recognition when I knew I had found the right place and a sense of dislocation when there was no clue left. Disoriented, I found myself half in the world of a century ago and half in the present day.

When I discovered locations that cross-referenced precisely with the pictures, I felt a sense of elation because the street acquired a whole new dimension and the people in the old photographs took on a more tangible reality, as I contemplated the places where they stood. I relished being party to this secret knowledge and I knew C.A.Mathew was with me.  But equally, I recognised an emptiness in the areas that are unrecognisably changed, and recent buildings appeared mere transient constructions to my eyes that had grown accustomed to the world of 1912. C.A.Mathew forsook me in these places, and I refrained from taking photographs when I could find no visible connection. Yet I told myself to resist sentimentality, because the world that C.A.Mathew photographed two years before World War I was one of flux too, only in his pictures could it be fixed eternally.

All streets belong to cars today and we cannot linger on the roadway or step off the pavement without risking our lives. A fact that became vividly apparent to me when I stood momentarily in the middle of the Bishopsgate traffic, risking my safety in my attempt to discover C.A.Mathew’s vantage point upon Middlesex St, before following his path Eastward. I have always been fascinated by the change of scale and atmosphere, walking from the expanse of Bishopsgate through into the medieval streets at the edge of Spitalfields. And in C.A.Mathew’s pictures this change is also emphasised by social contrast, because he found these small streets full of people that lived there. There is a domestic quality that continues to draw me back to these streets, alleys and byways which still evoke their previous inhabitants through scale and form. A century ago, Bishopsgate was a major thoroughfare as it is now – and both my pictures and C.A.Mathew’s show people going somewhere. However in the alleys which are no longer inhabited as they once were, people do not occupy the space with the same sense of belonging as their predecessors in these photographs. They were more at home in these streets than we are today.

Unlike C.A.Mathew, my walk was on a working day and I found myself surrounded by suits, participants in the omnipresent corporate drama of the City, as hundreds of anxious business men took to the streets for a lunchtime walk in the September sunshine. They had escaped the office for a furtive cigarette, to make a private call or have confidential discussions about problems at work. Some passersby spied me with suspicious fleeting curiosity as I stood to take my pictures, very different from the people of a century ago who stood in groups to participate in the novelty of a photograph. Yet I delighted in the exotic drama of everyday life in the twenty-first century, seeing it from the perspective of C.A.Mathew.

In this photograph, only the bollard on the left hand side remains from the earlier picture.

C.A.Mathew’s photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute