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 4QD. Opening times for the exhibition are here. Alan Dein will give a talk on Saturday 9th June at 2.30pm.

The Gentle Author.

The Auriculas of Spitalfields.

At the Vintner’s Hall.

At the Cross Bones Cemetery.

The Pear Tree where John Williams, suspect in the Ratcliffe Highway Murders was arrested.

Rhyming slang.

From The Signs of Old London.

A Night in the Bakery at St John.

According to legend, Brutus came from Troy to found London.

Catherine Wheel Alley, Spitalfields.

From The Signs of Old London.

Old Father Thames.

William Shakespeare in Spitalfields.

Grasshopper, symbol of Thomas Gresham, from The Signs of Old London.

“Three for a girl  and four for a …”

Garnet St, Wapping.

Rhyming slang.

The Gun, Brushfield St.

Half Moon, Holywell St, from The Signs of Old London.

Columbia Rd Market.

Quaker St, Spitalfields.

The Fox, Lombard St, from The Signs of Old London.

Images copyright © Paul Bommer

You may like to see the earlier selections of

Paul Bommer’s Delft Tiles

More of Paul Bommer’s Delft Tiles

Yet More of Paul Bommer’s Delft Tiles

and also read about

Simon Pettet’s Tiles at Dennis Severs’ House

A Fireplace in Fournier St

John Moyr Smith’s Tiles

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

You may also like to take a look at

John Claridge’s East End

Along the Thames with John Claridge

At the Salvation Army with John Claridge

Steve Benbow, London Honey Company

Once upon a time, Steve Benbow, the urban beekeeper, sold honey from the back of an old Morris Traveller in Brushfield St at the entrance to the Spitalfields Market. You may recall when Steve was first introduced in these pages, seeking homes for bees, and then – through the intervention of one of our readers – he was granted the roof of the Tate Gallery to keep his hives. These days, Steve has a railway arch in Maltby St, Bermondsey, and it was here that Tif Hunter took this portrait as part of his series recording the community of those who have created this flourishing endeavour, selling honestly produced food and drawing customers from across the London every Saturday morning.

Yet even as Tif completed his set of portraits, other railway arches opened up just a little further down the line at Spa Terminus, and some of the traders from Maltby St transferred to these larger spaces while new companies moved into those which had been vacated – confirming the contingent  nature of all markets, endlessly shifting and evolving as street commerce ebbs and flows in the city.

Taken with a 5×4 nineteenth-century-style camera using just a single exposure for each portrait, Tif’s pictures are remarkable for their spontaneity, emphasising the ephemeral quality of the image. But when he set out to take these luminous photographs, he did not realise that Maltby St itself would change so quickly, granting them an extra level of transient poetry. Fortuitously, Tif Hunter’s set of portraits exists now as the record of a critical moment at Maltby St – the time before this current metamorphosis began.

Philip – Jacob’s Ladder Farms

Lucie – The Ham & Cheese Company

Archie – Coleman Coffee Roasters

Kitty – La Grotta Ices

Roy – Neal’s Yard Dairy

Paul – Tayshaw Limited

Flori – Monmouth Coffee Company

Archie – The Ham & Cheese Company

Claire – Violet Bakery

Roberto – Monmouth Coffee Company

Alaena – Kase Swiss

Harry – 40 Maltby St

Barbara – Kernel Brewery

Harry – Fern Verrow

Georgia – St John Bakery

Tristan – Fern Verrow

Lucy – St John Bakery

Nathan – The Butchery Ltd

Tania – Kernel Brewery

Photographs copyright © Tif Hunter

You may also like to see

Tif Hunter’s Maltby St Portraits (Part One)

and  read about

Steve Benbow, Beekeeper at Tate Modern

An auricula theatre

In horticultural lore, auriculas have always been associated with Spitalfields and writer Patricia Cleveland-Peck has a mission to bring them back again. She believes that the Huguenots brought them here more than three centuries ago, perhaps snatching a twist of seeds as they fled their homeland and then cultivating them in the enclosed gardens of the merchants’ grand houses, and in the weavers’ yards and allotments, thus initiating a passionate culture of domestic horticulture among the working people of the East End which endures to this day.

You only have to cast your eyes upon the wonder of an auricula theatre filled with specimens in bloom – as I did in Patricia’s Sussex garden last week – to understand why these most artificial of flowers can hold you in thrall with the infinite variety of their colour and form. “They are much more like pets than plants,” Patricia admitted to me as we stood in her greenhouse surrounded by seedlings,“because you have to look after them daily, feed them twice a week in the growing season, remove offshoots and repot them once a year. Yet they’re not hard to grow and it’s very relaxing, the perfect antidote to writing, because when you are stuck for an idea you can always tend your auriculas.” Patricia taught herself old French and Latin to research the history of the auricula, but the summit of her investigation was when she reached the top of the Kitzbüheler Horn, high in the Austrian Alps where the ancestor plants of the cultivated varieties are to be found.

Auriculas were first recorded in England in the Elizabethan period as a passtime of the elite but it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that they became a widespread passion amongst horticulturalists of all classes. In 1795, John Thelwall, son of a Spitalfields silk mercer wrote, “I remember the time myself when a man who was a tolerable workman in the fields had generally beside the apartment in which he carried on his vocation, a small summer house and a narrow slip of a garden at the outskirts of the town where he spent his Monday either in flying his pigeons or raising his tulips.” Auriculas were included alongside tulips among those prized species known as the “Floristry Flowers,” plants renowned for their status, which were grown for competition by flower fanciers at “Florists’ Feasts,” the precursors of the modern flower show. These events were recorded as taking place in Spitalfields with prizes such as a copper kettle or a ladle and, after the day’s judging, the plants were all placed upon a long table where the contests sat to enjoy a meal together known as “a shilling ordinary.”

In the nineteenth century, Henry Mayhew wrote of the weavers of Spitalfields that “their love of flowers to this day is a strongly marked characteristic of the class.” and, in 1840, Edward Church who lived in Spital Sq recorded that “the weavers were almost the only botanists of their day in the metropolis.” It was this enthusiasm that maintained a regular flower market in Bethnal Green which eventually segued into the Columbia Rd Flower Market of our day.

Known variously in the past as ricklers, painted ladies and bears’ ears, auriculas come in different classes, show auriculas, alpines, doubles, stripes and borders – each class containing a vast diversity of variants. Beyond their aesthetic appeal, Patricia is interested in the political, religious, cultural and economic history of the auricula, but the best starting point to commence your relationship with this fascinating plant is to feast your eyes upon the dizzying collective spectacle of star performers gathered in an auricula theatre. As Sacheverell Sitwell once wrote, “The perfection of a stage auricula is that of the most exquisite Meissen porcelain or of the most lovely silk stuffs of Isfahan and yet it is a living growing thing.”

Mrs Cairns Old Blue – a border auricula

Glenelg – a show-fancy green-edged auricula

Piers Telford – a gold-centred alpine auricula

Taffetta – a show-self auricula

Seen a Ghost – a show-striped auricula

Sirius – gold-centred alpine auricula

Coventry St – a show-self auricula

M. L. King – show-self auricula

Mrs Herne – gold-centred alpine auricula

Dales Red – border auricula

Pink Gem – double auricula

Summer Wine – gold-centred alpine auricula

McWatt’s Blue – border auricula

Rajah – show-fancy auricula

Cornmeal – show-green-edged auricula

Fanny Meerbeek – show-fancy auricula

Piglet – double auricula

Basuto – gold-centred alpine auricula

Blue Velvet – border auricula

Patricia Cleveland-Peck in her greenhouse.

Next year, I hope to arrange to bring Patricia Cleveland-Peck’s auricula theatre to display in Spitalfields and invite you all to see it, but in the meantime I recommend her magnificent and authoritative work  Auriculas Through the Ages, available here

You may also like to take a look at

My Auriculas from Columbia Rd Market

Thomas Fairchild, Gardener of Hoxton

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

Tickets are £3, available from LVX Books 020 8983 2087 or email admin@lxvbooks.com. Wine will be served and books signed afterwards.

Gary Arber, printer

Roy Emmins, sculptor

Stanley Rondeau, Huguenot

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.”

You may also like to read

At the Fish Harvest Festival

John Schofield, porter for thirty years

The fish porters of Billingsgate Market have been abolished. On 28th April this year, a centuries-old way of life came to an end as the porters who have been in existence since Billingsgate started trading in 1699 had their licences withdrawn by the City of London Corporation. Long-established rights and working practises – and a vibrant culture possessing its own language and code of behaviour handed down for generations – were all swept away overnight to be replaced by cheaper casual labour.

Thus, a cut in economic cost was achieved through an increase in human cost by degrading the workforce at the market. The City recognised the potential value of the land occupied by the Billingsgate fish market at the foot of the Canary Wharf towers, and the abolition of the porters was their first step towards moving it out and redeveloping the site.

While the news media all but passed this story by, photographer Claudia Leisinger took the brave initiative herself to be down at the market continuously throughout the last winter, documenting the last days of this historic endeavour, and taking these tender portraits of the porters in the dawn, which record the plain human dignity they have shown as their livelihood and identity were taken from them .

“My interest in the Billingsgate porters’ story stems from a fascination with the disappearance of manual labour, work generally considered menial by our society, yet carried out with a great deal of pride and passion by those small communities involved.” Claudia told me, and it is to her credit that in a moment of such vulnerability these men trusted her to be their witness for posterity.

Bradley Holmes, porter for twenty years.

Nick Wilson, porter for twelve years.

Micky Durrell, porter for forty-five years.

Jeff Willis, porter for twenty-five years.

Gary Simmons, porter for thirty-three years.

Dave Bates, porter for twenty-two years.

Conor Olroyd, apprentice porter.

Three generations – Edwin Singers, porter for fifty-three years, with his son, Leigh Singers, porter, and grandson, Brett Singers, porter.

Steven Black, porter for twenty years.

Tony Mitchell & Steve Martin, both porters for over  thirty-two years.

Martin Bicker, porter for twenty-four years.

Andy Clarke, porter for two years.

Laurie Bellamy, porter for thirty-one years.

Alfie Sands, shopboy.

Gary Durden, porter for thirty-one years.

Jack Preston, porter for two years.

Dicky Barrott, porter for twenty years.

Alan Downing, porter for forty-five years, with his grandson Sam who comes down on Saturdays.

Dave Auldis, porter for six years.

Colin Walker, porter for forty-six years.

Brett Singers, shopboy for three years.

Bobby Jones, porter for thirty years.

Basil Wraite, porter for thirty-one years.

Steve Sheet, porter for fifteen years.

Steve Jones, porter for thirty years.

Greg Jacobs, porter for thirty-two years.

Chris Gill, porter for thirty-two years.

Photographs copyright © Claudia Leisinger

See more of Claudia Leisinger’s Billingsgate pictures and hear the voices of the porters by clicking here

You may like to read these other Billingsgate stories

Charlie Caisey, Fishmonger

Albert Hafize, Fish Merchant

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.

You may also like to read my original profile

Rodney Archer, Aesthete