Even More Delft Tiles by Paul Bommer
For those who missed Paul Bommer‘s exhibition in Wilkes St last month, it my pleasure to publish the fourth and last batch of his faux delft tiles from that show, many inspired by stories here in the pages of Spitafields Life. Subsequently, Paul has been inundated with commissions to design new delft tile fireplaces for old houses in Spitalfields – I will keep you posted of developments.
The Auriculas of Spitalfields.
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.
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
More of Paul Bommer’s Delft Tiles
Yet More of Paul Bommer’s Delft Tiles
and also read about
In a Lonely Place
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
Tif Hunter’s Maltby St Portraits (Part Two)
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
The Auriculas of Spitalfields
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
Faulkner’s Street Cries
These cards produced by W. & F. Faulkner Ltd and issued with Grenadier Cigarettes in 1902 are the latest discovery in my ongoing exploration of the myriad versions of the Cries of London created down through the ages. Even the most sentimental images can reveal something of the reality of the working lives of hawkers, and I especially like this precisely observed set of surly, cantankerous portraits which convey the relentless nature of street trading with a rare mixture of wit and affection.
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
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
More John Player’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
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
