Jim Howett, Designer
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In my opinion, Jim Howett is the best dressed man in Spitalfields. Here he is with a characteristically shy smile, sitting on a seventeen-twenties staircase in a houses in Fournier St he was restoring for the Spitalfields Trust. Jim was entirely at home in this shabby yet elegantly proportioned old house, a specifically localised environment that over time has become his natural habitat and is now the place you are most likely to find him.
For years, I admired Jim’s artisan clothing whenever I caught glimpses of him, always crossing Commercial St and disappearing through the market or off down Folgate St preoccupied with some enigmatic intent. When we were introduced, I discovered that Jim sleeps each night in the attic at Dennis Severs’ House and crosses the market every day to work in Fournier St with Marianna Kennedy, designing the furniture and lamps that have become ubiquitous in the houses around Spitalfields. I also learnt Jim is responsible for a significant number of the most appealing shopfronts in the neighbourhood.
At first, I assumed Jim was Irish on account of his soft vowels and quietly spoken manner, almost whispering sometimes, even swallowing his words before he utters them, and thereby drawing your attention to listen, concentrating to gather both what is said and what is unspoken. Such is the nature of his mind that Jim will begin a sentence and then pursue a digression that leads to another and yet another – though such is the intelligence of the man, that when he leads you back to the resolution of the original thought, it acquires a more precise import on account of all the qualifications and counter arguments. Without a doubt, Jim is a consummate prose talker.
Jim’s origins lie in Ohio in the foothills of the Appalachians, where he grew up in Salem. But Jim’s father worked in international development and in the nineteen-sixties the family moved to the Congo and then his father was transferred Vietnam, with the family ending up in London in 1967. Jim studied at the Architectural Association under the tutelage of Dan Cruickshank, subsequently working for a few years in prehistoric archaeology, before deciding to study at the London College of Furniture which was then in Commercial Rd.
Renting a room on Brick Lane, Jim dropped a card to his former tutor who wrote back to say he had just bought a house in Elder St full of broken furniture, so Jim set up a workbench in Dan’s basement to undertake the repairs.
“Dennis Severs knocked upon the door one day, looking for Dan,” Jim told me. “He said he’d just bought a house round the corner and wanted to do tours, and we thought he was crazy but we helped him set it up. I made the shutters, the partition with the arch in the dining room and I copied the fireplace from one in Princelet St.” he added, revealing the origin of his own involvement with 18 Folgate St, where today he is the sole resident. Before long, Jim was sharing a workshop with Marianna Kennedy and ceramicist Simon Pettet in Gibraltar Walk, sharing aspirations to create new work inspired by historical models by applying traditional craft skills. They found themselves amidst a community centred around the restoration of the eighteenth century houses, dubbed ‘Neo-Georgians’ by the media – a moment recorded today in the collection of magazines and photo features, illustrating the renaissance of Spitalfields, that Jim keeps in a box in his workshop.
Jim taught himself furniture making by copying a Hepplewhite chair – constructing four versions until he could get the proportion right – before he discovered that there was no market for them because dealers considered them too dangerously close to the originals as to approach fakes. Yet this irony, which was to hamper Jim’s early career as a furniture maker, served as a lesson in the significance of proportion in engaging with historical designs.
When Jim won a commission to design an armoire for Julie Christie, he thought he had found the path to success. “She gave me tip of half the value of my commission fee and I thought ‘This is as good as it gets’, but she remains the best client I ever had.” admits Jim, wistfully recognising the severely limited market for custom-built new furniture in antique styles. “I used to make these pieces and have no money left over to buy coffee afterwards,” he declared with a shrug.
The renovation of Spitalfields gave Jim the opportunity to become one of those who has created the visual language of our streets, through his subtle approach to restoring the integrity of old shopfronts that have been damaged or altered. Perhaps the most famous are A.Gold and Verdes in Brushfields St, 1 & 3 Fournier St and 86 Commercial St. In these and numerous other examples, through conscientious research, Jim has been responsible for retaining the quality of vernacular detail and proportion that makes this Spitalfields, rather than any other place. The beauty of Jim’s work is that these buildings now look as if they had always been like they are today.
Yet Jim is quick to emphasise that he is not an architect, explaining that his work requires both more detailed knowledge of traditional building techniques and less ego, resisting the urge to add personal embellishments. “The difference between me and architects, working on historic buildings is that I restrict myself to organising the space. I believe if a building has survived for two hundred years, it has survived because it has certain qualities. The reason, I don’t put my finger in the pie is because I can express myself in other things.”
While Jim spoke, he produced file after file of photographs, plans and maps, spreading them out upon the table in his workshop to create a huge collage, whilst maintaining an extraordinary monologue of interwoven stories about the people, the place and the buildings. I was fascinated by Jim’s collection of maps, spanning the last five hundred years in Spitalfields and I realised that he carries in his mind a concrete picture of how the place has evolved. When I have seen him walking around, he is walking in awareness of all the incarnations of this small parish, the buildings that have come and gone through past centuries.
It fired my imagination when Jim took me into the cellar of 15 Fournier St and pointed out the path across the yard belonging to the sixteenth century building that stood there before the eighteenth century house was built, telling me about the pieces of charred wood they found, because this was where debris was dumped after the Fire of London in 1666.
Simon Pettet portrayed Jim on one of his tiles as a fly on the wall, reflecting Jim’s omnipresence in Spitalfields. “I think if my father had not taken us to the Congo, I should still be there in Salem, Ohio,” confessed Jim with a weary smile, “because at heart I am a localist.” Jim showed me the missing finger on his left hand, sliced off while cutting a mitre from left to right, a mark that today he regards as the proud badge of his carpenter’s trade. In his work and through his modest personal presence, Jim has become an inextricable part of the identity of Spitalfields – after more than forty years, I hope we may now describe him as a local.
Jim at Jocasta Innes’ house in Heneage St, 1990
Jim with Dennis Severs and Simon Pettet, pictured in a magazine feature of 1991
Jim modelling his calfskin apron, 1991
Jim pictured in the penurious weavers’ garret at Dennis Severs’ House that today is his bedroom
In the Victorian Parlour at Dennis Severs’ House
Hoisting up the new cornice in Commercial St
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In The Secret Garret At Brunswick House
Readers may recall that I visited Brunswick House in Vauxhall to interview Adrian Amos, the founder of London Architectural Salvage & Supply Company (LASSCO), earlier this year. It was my pleasure to return later in the summer to write a feature about his secret garret in this astonishing eighteenth-century Palladian mansion, marooned today amidst a forest of towers, for The World of Interiors with photographs by Rachel Ferriman.
Click here to read my feature about Brunswick House in The World of Interiors
Adrian Amos
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The Lantern Slides Of Old London
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Years ago, I became enraptured by a hundred-year-old collection of four thousand lantern slides. They were once used for educational lectures by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute in Spitalfields. When Stefan Dickers became archivist there, he discovered the slides in dusty old boxes – abandoned and forgotten since they became obselete. Yet over the last decade, it has become apparent that these slides, which were ignored for so long, are one of the greatest treasures in the collection.
When I was first offered the opportunity of publishing these lantern slides which have been unseen for generations, I was overwhelmed by the number of pictures and did not know where to start. The first to catch my fancy were the ancient signs and symbols, dating from an era before street numbering located addresses and lettered signs advertised trades to Londoners.
Before long, I grew spellbound by the slide collection because, alongside the famous landmarks and grand occasions of state, there were pictures of forgotten corners and of ordinary people going about their business. It was a delight to discover hundreds of images of things that people do not usually photograph and I was charmed to realise that the anonymous photographers of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society were as interested in pubs as they were in churches.
The more I studied the glass slides, the more joy I found in these arcane pictures, since every one contained the rich potential of hidden stories, seducing the imagination to flights of fancy regarding the ever-interesting subject of Old London. Once I had published The Signs of Old London, I realised there were many other such sets to be found among the slides, as a result of the systematic recording of London which underscored the original project by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, a hundred years ago.
I do not chose not to clean them up or remove imperfections and dirt, or standardise the colour to black or a uniform sepia, either. Instead, I cherish the subtle variations of hues present in these slides and savour the beautiful colour contrasts between them, when laid side by side. There is a melancholic poetry in these shabby images, in which their damage and their imperfections speak of their history, and I have come to glory in the patina and murk.
In the Inns of Court
At Eltham Palace
At Euston Station
The Anchor at Bankside
Crocodiles at the Natural History Museum
Reading Room at the British Museum
Chelsea Pensioner
In Fleet St
In Fleet St
St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell
Between the inner & outer dome of St Paul’s
Along the Embankment
The Old Dick Whittington, Clothfair, Smithfield
Firemen take a tea break
Lightermen on the Thames
Flood in Water St, Tower of London
The White Tower, London’s oldest building
Glass slides courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
Take a look at these sets of the glass slides of Old London
Hairdressers Of The Eighties
I am delighted to publish these photos from A London Inheritance – written by a graduate of my blog course.
A few places are available for my course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches from Richard Fuest, eat cakes baked to historic recipes by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details
Dennis Gents Hair Stylist, note the razor blade sign
Ron’s Gents Hairdressers, Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, is still there but has changed from ‘Hairdresser’ to ‘Barber.’
His & Hers, ‘Executive Mood’ and ‘Avant Garde Mood’ hairstyles offered
June’s Ladies Hair Stylist. STE was the code for Stepney Green, letters were replaced by numbers around 1966.
Dave & Syd Strong, Gent’s Hairdresser
Gent’s Hairdresser moving into Ladies’ Hairdressing
Gent’s Hair Stylist, Puma Court, Spitalfields, run by Kyriacos Cleovoulou from 1962 until 2005.
Apples, Hair Stylist
Peter, Individual Gents Hair Stylist
The Saloon, customers peering out from the left of the window
Gentlemen’s Hairdressing Salon, Carter Lane, City of London
Mario’s Men’s Hairstylist
Hairdresser at 10 Laystall Street, Clerkenwell, with a plaque commemorating Giuseppe Mazzini as ‘the apostle of modern democracy inspired young Italy with the ideal of independence, unity and regeneration of his country.’
The Pleasant Gent’s Hairdresser is still going in Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell
Photographs copyright © A London Inheritance
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HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 6th & 7th February 2027
This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.
“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author
COURSE STRUCTURE
1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.
SALIENT DETAILS
The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 6-7th February, running from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.
Lunch will be catered by Richard Fuest and tea, coffee & cakes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £350.
Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.
A Whitechapel Childhood
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The poet Andy Stroman sent me these reminiscences of his childhood in Whitechapel in the nineteen-fifties
Andy Stroman aged four on the doorstep in Milward St
My brothers Paul, Howard and myself occupied one bedroom at 17 Milward St, Whitechapel, behind the London Hospital. We had three single beds and Paul was the furthest away from the door while Howard was in the middle. I was nearest to the door.
On Saturday, we would have a lie-in while Howard went to work at Burlington Cameras in Burlington Arcade up in the West End. Paul used to sleep with his head almost upside down so his nose was pointing in the air. I would wake up and lob a pillow at Paul shouting, ‘Wake up coconut shy!’ Paul’s head was pointing just like a coconut at the fairground. By this time it was half past twelve in the afternoon. Then we would both get up and have our cereal and make our way to the municipal public baths on the Mile End Rd not far from Stepney Green Station.
I used to look forward to our once-a-week hot bath where I could have a sing-song and talk to Paul who was in the next cubicle. As you might have gathered we had no bath at home just a little sink in the scullery, and our only source of heating was one coal fire in the television room. The latter was our main source of evening entertainment and, if cowboy films were on and the cowboys shooting their guns off, the large mice would come out of their holes and frantically dance round the room. In that little telly room on a Friday night we used to each have our little tray of five or six monkey nuts in the shells.
There was my Mum, Auntie Rae, Paul and myself. My dad being a cab driver was out working and my oldest brother Howard out having fun up in the West End. An outside toilet in the backyard was a haven for peace, although I got frightened going out there at night so used to run out the back door and into the toilet and vice versa.
I kept getting repeated sickness, particularly in the chest, and you can guess how cold our house was in the wintertime. It used to be freezing in our bedroom and we had a bucket in the centre of the room to catch the drips that came from the ceiling.
Once, my Uncle Davey came to visit us when I was in bed. He entered with my Mum, looked concerned and said something in a quiet voice to my Mum. I heard a little bit of it. He said, ‘His feet are sticking out towards the door and the angel will come along and pull him out towards Heaven. We need to move his bed so his feet don’t point out like this.’ All three beds in the room were rearranged so my feet were pointing inwards and my head was near the window so I could breathe fresh air.
I do remember my Baba (my grandmother Milka from Vilna in Lithuania) singing to me before sleep when I was nervous. Sadly, she died before I was two and my mother took the death very badly, as all of us did. Milka was a social worker for women of the street who came to see her with their problems.
I used to wake up in winter to see ice had formed on the window panes and in summer I heard the fights coming from the pub on the corner, the Oxford Arms. My favourite was hearing ‘I’m a better man than you are, Paddy.’ Bang! ‘Oh no, you’re not.’ Bang! It was there my Mum would send me as a boy with an empty bottle and some money to get a full bottle of Guinness. A man would lift me up in the air, and I would pass the money and the empty bottle to the barmaid, and in return be given a new bottle and then run home.
When I used to visit my grandmother’s best friend Byla at 15 Milward St at the behest of my Mum, it felt even colder in there, though I loved to go and listen to her stories about Poland. How she washed clothes in the river for her grandparents and herself. There were many poor peasants in the village.
We used to sit in the scullery, the same type of scullery we all had. When Byla had finished talking she would slowly open a drawer and give me a Cadbury’s bar of Dairy Milk chocolate. I still remember the sound of her Big Ben clock with its black face and yellow numbers and hands, loudly ticking on the mantelpiece.
Byla was so thin but so clever. She lived alone and walked with a stick. She spoke with a wobbly voice and both her eyes were bloodshot. Her house was the last house in Milward St to be demolished. The social worker came from the Jewish Hospital in Stepney Green to make her sign the papers so she ended up in care. She was put in a North London care home where I pleaded with the manager to return her to Whitechapel. Byla was not pleased with me and made me say ‘sorry’ to the manager, which I did, though I only saw her one more time because after six weeks she had died.
Mum and Dad, Howard, Paul and myself on holiday. I am the baby.
With Mrs Gerson at Alice Model Nursery, Stepney Green 1956. I am holding the flowers which I presented to the Queen Mother.
My elder brother Howard took this of me when he grew obsessed with photography and developing pictures at home
My Auntie Rae on the left and my Mum on the right
My dear Baba – May she rest in peace – Milka Cohen, one of the cleverest and kindest women I ever met. She was a social worker for women of the street who came to see her with their problems.
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Lucinda Douglas-Menzies’ Portraits
Photographer Lucinda Douglas-Menzies has published a limited edition monograph of her portraits taken between 1978 and 2025, including some distinguished cultural luminaries alongside Spitalfields stalwarts. An accompanying exhibition opens at House of Annetta in Princelet St on Thursday 15th October and runs until Tuesday 20th October.
With more than seventy of her portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, we are proud to count Lucinda as a Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer.
Self portrait by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies, 1987
Stephen Calloway, Art Historian 1989
Dame Wendy Hiller, Actor 1988
Edward Greenfield, Music Critic 2004
Emma Witter, Artist 2025
Delwar Hussein, Anthropologist 2013
Sandra Esqulant, Landlady of The Golden Heart 2000
Des De Silva, Joiner 2021
Howard Morgan, Artist 1987
Eileen Agar, Painter & Photographer 1987
Sir Ben Okri, Novelist, & Sir Derek Walcott, Poet 2004
Dame Sian Phillips, Actor 2013
Sir Solly Zuckerman, Scientist 1990
Imtiaz Dharker, Poet 2015
Jack ‘Kid’ Berg, Boxer 1988
Marianna Kennedy, Artist 2011
Sir Isaiah Berlin, Philosopher 1988
Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
My Cousin, Ned Despard – Hero Or Traitor?
I am proud to publish these excerpts from CHERRY’S CACHE by Cherry Gilchrist, a graduate of my writing course. Cherry set out to research and bring alive the lives of her forebears and her account of Ned Despard is a fascinating example of this. Ned was a man who through his sense of decency found himself fatally at odds with the spirit of his age.
I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes, and learn how to write your own blog.
If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.
Ned Despard by George Romney
I wanted to learn all that I could about my cousin Colonel Edward Marcus Despard (1751-1803), an Irishman of Huguenot descent whom I shall call ‘Ned’. My role here is to draw your attention to his story and celebrate my discovery of him as a relative. I will begin with the end.
On Monday February 21st, 1803, Ned was executed. A crowd of some twenty thousand people gathered to watch him go to his death on a scaffold erected on what is now the South Bank, condemned as a conspirator against King and Country. He asked permission to make a final speech and spoke passionately on the subject of justice and equality. He was then executed, by hanging and decapitation, on a charge of treason.
The evidence against him was flimsy at best and false at worst. He received small mercy in that his sentence of being ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’ – the last man in legal history to receive this sentence – was repealed at short notice to remove the barbaric ‘drawing and quartering’. Even though he had loyal friends, such as his old comrade-in-arms Horatio Nelson, they could not commute his sentence further.
Ned was condemned as a dangerous revolutionary, the charge against him being that he was planning to kill the King and overthrow the government. Yet this was a man who had been loyal to the British Crown through thick and thin, though since returning to London, he had kept company with radicals and was certainly interested in ideals of equality and reform. And in those days, that proved enough to hang him.
He was singled out for infamy at a time when Britain was gripped with paranoia about a possible revolution. The government feared that the French Revolution of 1789 might be replicated on British soil. Youthful idealism for revolution, embraced by the Romantic poets Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, was no longer acceptable.
Ned had served the British Government faithfully, fighting bravely as a comrade alongside Nelson in campaigns in the Caribbean and Central America, where they managed to recapture Fort Immaculada from the Spanish. Both men suffered disease and hardship in the process.
Afterwards, Ned proved himself as a responsible and conscientious governor in Honduras, and only came back to England when he was completely out of funds, trying to reclaim the expenses owed to him, which he had subsidised out of his own pocket, including providing hurricane relief to the population.
He married Catherine Gordon, a black woman from Jamaica, a bold act at the time, especially when he returned to London with her. Mixed marriages, as opposed to concubinage, were certainly not the norm at the turn of the nineteenth century. One of the reports against him sneered that when Ned was seized from home to be taken to court, he had been ‘found in bed with a black woman’ without mention that she was his lawful wife. Even some of the Despard family and their descendants spoke of her being a housekeeper rather than acknowledging her true position.
In fact, Catherine was an educated woman, her mother had been a ‘free woman’, so neither she nor her daughter was a slave. And Catherine was capable of mixing in upper circles of society. She petitioned for her husband tirelessly during the years he was kept in prison pending his final trial. One of her letters survives, a plea that he should be kept in better conditions.
During his time as First Commissioner & Governor in what is now Honduras, Ned insisted on fairness for all the peoples of his colony, irrespective of their status or colour. He had some awkward folk to deal with – Baymen guarding their plantations and Shoremen with semi-legal trade. There were Maroons, who were runaway slaves, plus Irish convicts and people of assorted ethnicities, including indigenous peoples, all with their different desires and objectives.
Ned’s insistence that there should be equality between people of different colour and race did not go down well with everyone in the colonies. Ironically, when challenged about this, he said that as British law did not discriminate between races, neither would he in its territories.
So were these his Huguenot values coming to the fore, carried through the generations? And did these values later inform Ned’s gallows speech with which I leave you?
‘Fellow Citizens, I come here as you see, after having served my country, faithfully, honourably, and usefully served it, for thirty years and upwards, to suffer death upon a scaffold for a crime of which I protest l am not guilty. I solemnly declare that I am no more guilty of it than any of you who may be now hearing me. But, though His Majesty’s Ministers know as well as I do, that I am not guilty, yet they avail themselves of a legal pretext to destroy a man, because he has been a friend to truth, to Liberty, and to Justice. Because I have been a friend to the poor, and the oppressed. But, Citizens, I hope and trust, notwithstanding, my fate, and the fate of those, who no doubt will soon follow me, that the principle of Freedom, of Humanity, and of Justice, will finally triumph over Falsehood, Tyranny, and Delusion, and every principle hostile to the interests of the human race.’
A mahogany plantation in Honduras
Published account of the trial of Ned Despard
Account from the Aberdeen Press & Journal of Catherine Despard being refused admission to visit her husband
Ned Despard at the gallows
The execution of Ned Despard
