Mary Burd, Clinical Psychologist
‘You cannot overestimate sitting down quietly with someone and listening to what they have to say’
Mary Burd worked as Clinical Psychologist at the Jubilee St Practice in Stepney between 1979 and 2009, beginning as a mental health trainee and eventually becoming Head of Mental Health Services in Tower Hamlets. Over this time, she saw great changes both in the nature of the East End and in the health service itself. In thirty years of work, Mary grew deeply engaged with the lives of those that she served and, when I interviewed her recently, she spoke to me with deep affection for the people and the place.
“When I was twenty and first came to London in the sixties, a friend of mine said to me on a spare evening, ‘Why don’t you come to the East End? I work in a youth club there.’ That visit to Dame Colet House was my very first time working in Tower Hamlets, I helped out in the youth club and I can remember it was pretty tough. I had to guard the cash box from Les whose main interest was to raid it.
Ultimately, it was chance that brought me to work in the East End. In my early thirties, I decided that I needed to change career – I had been working in publishing – so I went and did a psychology degree at Brunel University and then studied Clinical Psychology at the University of East London. It was a three year course with placements and I was based at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. In my final year I could chose, and I always wanted to work in General Practice, so I went to the Jubilee St Practice in 1977 which was operating in portacabins then.
I remember sitting around the table with the group of GPs. A rather elderly gentleman asked me, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I’ve come because I would like to provide psychological help within practices, rather for everybody to have to go to the Outpatients Department.’ And he said, ‘I think you’d be better off working in John Lewis.’
In spite of this, I had an amazing time and I did a lot of work with Health Visitors, helping them with babies and toddlers who had behavioural problems. Often, they couldn’t sleep or didn’t eat properly. I used to accompany the Health Visitors and help them think about what was going on. I got a research grant to look at the application of psychology in Primary Care, but it was really just an excuse to stay on at the Jubilee St Practice. At the end of that, the Director of Nursing said, ‘We really like the work you have done with Health Visitors and we are creating a psychology post for someone to do that sort of work.’ So that was how I started off.
I had a job that I loved working in General Practice in the East End. In those days, there was very little mental health provision and I was lucky enough to go into a practice which was forward thinking. It comprised three doctor’s practices that had come together and, when one of those GPs died, his relationship with his patients was so strong they all joined his funeral cortege.
When I first came to the East End, there were only a few practices that had more than one doctor and a few helpers. There were a lot of elderly doctors operating out of converted shops. I remember going to a practice to talk about the service and the only examination couch was in the kitchen, and it was propped up on old medical journals. There was so much dust you could write your name in it and there were files scattered about the place without any proper confidentiality. It was completely archaic and that was in the early eighties, not so very long ago. Because healthcare was so prized by people in the East End, who had never been used to decent medical services, I think they put up with things that people in other areas of London might not have done.
Jubilee St Practice became my home in the East End. I was always ambitious and I used every attempt to get funding for my work, and I taught on the East London Vocational Training Scheme, training GPs. I found that GPs who came onto the East London Scheme tended to stay in Tower Hamlets, so I got to know them all. It meant that, when they came to practice, they were receptive to the things I was doing and it gave me easy access into the world of General Practice.
As the doctors practicing in High St shops retired, the Family Practitioner Council invested in new practices. The new GPs coming in were of a high calibre and they wanted to practice in decent surroundings to give the best possible care. They were keen on the idea of a multi-disciplinary team, so they worked with nurses and Heath Visitors. By the time, I left every practice in Tower Hamlets had onsite psychological support.
In the early days, I set up a referral service. So a GP could come to me and say, ‘I’ve Mrs X and she’s terribly depressed at the moment, do you think you could see her?’ I would not work with a practice unless they would give a minimum of an hour a month to discuss the patients. There was a tremendous sense of partnership. We worked so closely and it was a fantastic time.
I was very often asked to write housing letters but in all my time I only wrote two, because I knew there was absolutely no point. Instead, I can remember writing the the local authority saying, ‘What is the point of me providing a service to a young woman with four children living on the fourteenth floor of a tower block?’ By then, many families were moving out but there were still many extended families. I remember asking a young mother, ‘How often do you see your ma?’ and she said, ‘Oh not very often, only three times a week.’ I think living cheek by jowl brought pressures. The positive was stronger than the negative but, even so, some people were oppressed, not the young children but the mothers. Their own mothers used to go round and do the washing for them, and there was a real dependency.
I was in Jubilee St during the big influx of Sylheti people and we had a big problem in that General Practices did not refer people with mental health problems from that community. In the eighties, we were the very first to set up a Bangladeshi counselling service and we trained somebody who spoke the language to run it, and then we did the same for the Somali community. There is a difficulty because some people think that a service by their own community is not as good as one provided by white healthcare professionals. We used the insights of the Bangladeshi and Somali counsellors to help us to work with those populations.
Patients would sometimes talk to me about ‘those Paki bastards’ and I would always point out that this language was not acceptable. In my time, I saw a lot of people from the Bangladeshi community. I can remember one woman whose husband was a complete nightmare but culturally there was no way she could leave him. It was very hard to work with her because it was absolutely clear where her distress was coming from – it was from her relationship with her husband – but she could not alter that in any way. I could only offer her a place to talk about it and a place to consider other things that she might be able to do to improve her life, so that she understood she was not totally alone with her problem.
I did a lot of teaching of young doctors and medical students and I think – wherever in the world you are – you cannot overestimate sitting down quietly with someone and listening to what they have to say. Doctors who are always trained to do things find that very difficult to understand.
I joined the Jubilee St Practice in 1979 and I retired in 2009. I also worked in St Stephen’s Rd, Bow, in an all women practice which was unique in the East End at the time, when most doctors were older men. The working atmosphere at the practice was collegiate and they were very interested in the emotional life of their patients, which I think was unusual then. They looked after their staff very well.
I also worked in Wapping, where the GP had a bed with a pink quilt. I thought, ‘What’s this doing in the General Practice?’ In fact, it was where the GP slept when he was on call at night. He had his own bedroom at work. I observed the changing nature of the Wapping population. When the City people started to move in, they had much higher expectations and demanded to be seen when they needed to be seen.
There are a lot more children now with mental problems than when I started. There are multiple reasons. Not all children are in families where they get the nurturing that they need. Diet has a bit to do with it too. We could talk about air pollution. A lid used to be kept on by quite severe discipline. In general, children are much more disturbed now than twenty years ago. Families are much more disconnected with less extended families.
Over thirty years in the East End, I saw a major improvement in health services. District nursing and health visiting was of a very high quality in Tower Hamlets. The great thing about the East End was that it attracted people who are creative and want to improve health care. Every healthcare professional who has worked in Tower Hamlets and moved on still talks about working in the East End because there was a tremendous sense of collaboration and the patients were inspiring – because life was not easy for them.
I had a fantastic career, I was so lucky. Every year, the Bengali services had a Disability Awareness Day at Swanlea School in Whitechapel. The Bengali Disability Council set it up and they presented me a wonderful plaque for my services to the Bengali people of Tower Hamlets. That was the most moving occasion I have ever experienced. I got the MBE for services to healthcare in East London too, but the other award meant more to me because it meant I had been accepted by the community.”
Mary with former colleagues at the Jubilee St Practice
Mary Burd, Clinical Psychologist
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may also like to read about
Jeffery Johnson’s Favourite Signs
Enigmatic Photographer Jeffrey Johnson deposited a stack of his pictures from the seventies and eighties with Archivist Stefan Dickers at the Bishopsgate Institute, including these photos of signs and ghost signs. Sharing Jeffrey’s relish at this magnificent array, I cannot resist the feeling that he is one after my own heart in savouring both the poetry and aesthetics of London’s old signage.
Win her affections with A1 Confections
Temporary office staff urgently required
Permanent waving clubs held here
More news than in any other daily paper
English clock system
Barry Lampert – Your choice for Hackney
The best food for the whole family sold here
Home cured haddocks & bloaters
The noted house for paper bags
£40 worth for four shillings weekly
Families and dealers supplied
Harris the sign king
Headache draughts
Progressive working class catering
For that natural just combed look
Radio London wireless said ‘The cosy fish bar in Whitecross St serves the best quality fish & chips in London.’
See the light…taste the light
We specialies in suits, donkey coats, officers uniforms, belts & braces, sailors clothing…
Laying out & measuring up undertaken
Photographs copyright © Jeffrey Johnson
In William Blake’s Lambeth
Glad Day in Lambeth
If you wish to visit William Blake’s Lambeth, just turn left outside Waterloo Station, walk through the market in Lower Marsh, cross Westminster Bridge Rd and follow Carlisle Lane under the railway arches. Here beneath the main line into London was once the house and garden, where William & Catherine Blake were pleased to sit naked in their apple tree.
Yet in recent years, William Blake has returned to Lambeth. Within the railway arches leading off Carlisle Lane, a large gallery of mosaics based upon his designs has been installed, evoking his fiery visions in the place where he conjured them. Ten years work by hundreds of local people have resulted in dozens of finely-wrought mosaics bringing Blake’s images into the public realm, among the warehouses and factories where they may be discovered by the passerby, just as he might have wished. Trains rumble overhead with a thunderous clamour that shakes the ancient brickwork and cars roar through these dripping arches, creating a dramatic and atmospheric environment in which to contemplate his extraordinary imagination.
On the south side of the arches is Hercules Rd, site of the William Blake Estate today, where he lived between 1790 and 1800 at 13 Hercules Buildings, a three-storey terrace house demolished in 1917. Blake passed ten productive and formative years on the south bank, that he recalled as ‘Lambeth’s vale where Jerusalem’s foundations began.’ By contrast with Westminster where he grew up, Lambeth was almost rural two hundred years ago and he enjoyed a garden with a fig tree that overlooked the grounds of the bishop’s palace. This natural element persists in the attractively secluded Archbishop’s Park on the north side of the arches in the former palace grounds.
To enter these sonorous old arches that span the urban and pastoral is to discover the resonant echo chamber of one of the greatest English poetic imaginations. When I visited I found myself alone at the heart of Lambeth yet in the presence of William Blake, and it is an experience I recommend to my readers.
‘There is a grain of sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find”
These mosaics were created by South Bank Mosaics which is now The London School of Mosaic
You may also like to take a look
James Mackinnon, Artist
The Gentle Author will be giving an illustrated lecture, showing David Hoffman’s photos from ENDURANCE & JOY IN TE EAST END 1971 -1987 and telling the stories behind them next Thursday 7th November 7:30pm at Wanstead Tap, 352 Winchelsea Rd, E7 0AQ
Twilight at London Fields, 2012
The streetscapes of James Mackinnon (born 1968), especially those of the East End and of London Fields in particular, captivate the viewer with their powerful atmosphere and magical sense of possibility – an effect compounded by the breathtaking accomplishment of their masterly execution.
“I grew up in South London in Lee Green, so I used to go to the Isle of Dogs through the foot tunnel under the Thames and I was mystified by the area north of the river. Sometimes I would bunk off school with a sketchbook and go wandering there. It seemed a mysterious land.
Later on, having left home and gone through college, there was a big recession and it was tough, all the students were scrabbling around for work, I had an epiphany. I was sat next to the Thames and I realised I just wanted to look at buildings and paint them.
In the early nineties, I moved to the East End because it was affordable and I had always wanted to explore there. I was slowly drawn to where my heart was guiding me, I would go round the back streets and explore the hinterlands. There is something compelling about going somewhere you do not really know about – the mysterious world of places. The atmosphere of places is born of people and their residue, it’s about people living there.
I lived near London Fields and there is this little terrace of Georgian houses with a railway line and overhead electric wires, and there are some tower blocks in the distance. It was such an interesting juxtaposition. A lot of East London landscapes have that, you might get a church sitting next to a railway line, next to tower block, next to the canal and a bit of old railing and some graffiti. That funny mixture. So I would just go and paint what I wanted. It was an act of faith, I knew it was what I had to do.
I tried having a studio but I was always a struggling artist so, when it came to rent day, it got tricky. There was a lot of signing on the dole and I lived in my studio for a bit to save money on the rent but the landlord found out and it was a cat and mouse game.
By the time I left, I think I had found myself. There is something in the painting that says it is by me rather than anyone else and that has evolved from having done it for twenty years. I just about managed to survive. I learned I have got the tenacity and self belief, that this is what I love. You find your path after a lot of struggle but it only comes by doing it.
You realise that a great painting can come from something very ordinary, you can go for a walk and there might be something round the corner that knocks you out. There was a lot of that in the East End and I am still obsessed by it though it is changing hugely. Some of the landscapes have altered already and some of the shops have gone.
I miss Hackney in many ways but I do not miss struggling and rents going up. I was there until around 2013, I had a great time and made some good friends. So now I have moved to Hastings. I had a little boy and it became untenable to carry on living in the East End. I had no choice.”
Homage to James Pryde, 2009 (The Mole Man’s House)
Broadway Market
Shops in Morning Lane, 2014
Hackney Canal near Mare St, 2012
Canal, Rosemary Works 2014
Savoy Cafe, Hackney, 2012
James Tower, London Fields, 2012
Alphabeat, 2007
Paintings copyright © James Mackinnon
Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular
Booker T. Washington In Petticoat Lane
Cover price is £35 but you can buy it from Spitalfields Life for £30
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
The Gentle Author will be giving an illustrated lecture, showing David Hoffman’s photos and telling the stories behind them next Thursday 7th November 7:30pm at Wanstead Tap, 352 Winchelsea Rd, E7 0AQ
Portrait by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1895
Spokesman and leader of African American people in the USA, Booker T. Washington came to London in 1910 to study the living conditions of the poor on this side of the Atlantic by comparison with his own country. On arrival in London, his first destination was Petticoat Lane Market, as he described in his book The Man Farthest Down, The Struggle of European Toilers, written with the collaboration of sociologist Robert E. Park and published in 1912.
‘The first thing about London that impressed me was its size, the second was the wide division between the different elements in the population.
London is not only the largest city in the world, it is also the city in which the segregation of the classes has gone farthest. The West End, for example, is the home of the King and the Court. Here are the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the British Museum, most of the historical monuments, the art galleries, and nearly everything that is interesting, refined, and beautiful in the lives of seven millions of people who make up the inhabitants of the city.
If you take a cab at Trafalgar Square, however, and ride eastward down the Strand through Fleet Street, where all the principal newspapers of London are published, past the Bank of England, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the interesting sights and scenes of the older part of the city, you come, all of a sudden, into a very different region, the centre of which is the famous Whitechapel.
The difference between the East End and the West End of London is that East London has no monuments, no banks, no hotels, theatres, art galleries; no history – nothing that is interesting and attractive but its poverty and its problems. Everything else is drab and commonplace.
It is, however, a mistake, as I soon learned, to assume that East London is a slum. It is, in fact, a city by itself, and a very remarkable city, for it has, including what you may call its suburbs, East Ham and West Ham, a population of something over two millions, made up for the most part of hard-working, thrifty labouring people. It has its dark places, also, but I visited several parts of London during my stay in the city which were considerably worse in every respect than anything I saw in the East End.
Nevertheless, it is said that more than one hundred thousand of the people in this part of the city, in spite of all the efforts that have been made to help them, are living on the verge of starvation. So poor and so helpless are these people that it was, at one time, seriously proposed to separate them from the rest of the population and set them off in a city by themselves, where they could live and work entirely under the direction of the state. It was proposed to put this hundred thousand of the very poor under the direction and care of the state because they were not able to take care of themselves, and because it was declared that all the service which they rendered the community could be performed by the remaining portion of the population in their leisure moments, so that they were, in fact, not a help but a hindrance to the life of the city as a whole.
I got my first view of one of the characteristic sights of the East End life at Middlesex Street, or Petticoat Lane, as it was formerly called. Petticoat Lane is in the centre of the Jewish quarter, and on Sunday morning there is a famous market in this street. On both sides of the thoroughfare, running northward from Whitechapel Road until they lose themselves in some of the side streets, one sees a double line of pushcarts, upon which every imaginable sort of ware, from wedding rings to eels in jelly, is exposed for sale. On both sides of these carts and in the middle of the street a motley throng of bargain-hunters are pushing their way through the crowds, stopping to look over the curious wares in the carts or to listen to the shrill cries of some hawker selling painkiller or some other sort of magic cure-all.
Nearly all of the merchants are Jews, but the majority of their customers belong to the tribes of the Gentiles. Among others I noticed a class of professional customers. They were evidently artisans of some sort or other who had come to pick out from the goods exposed for sale a plane or a saw or some other sort of second-hand tool, there were others searching for useful bits of old iron, bolts, brass, springs, keys, and other things of that sort which they would be able to turn to some use in their trades.
I spent an hour or more wandering through this street and the neighbouring lane into which this petty pushcart traffic had overflowed. Secondhand clothing, secondhand household articles, the waste meats of the Saturday market, all kinds of worn-out and cast-off articles which had been fished out of the junk heaps of the city or thrust out of the regular channels of trade, find here a ready market.
I think that the thing which impressed me most was not the poverty, which was evident enough, but the sombre tone of the crowd and the whole proceeding. It was not a happy crowd, there were no bright colours, and very little laughter. It was an ill-dressed crowd, made up of people who had long been accustomed to live, as it were, at second-hand and in close relations with the pawnbroker.
In the Southern States it would be hard to find a coloured man who did not make some change in his appearance on Sunday. The Negro labourer is never so poor that he forgets to put on a clean collar or a bright necktie or something out of the ordinary out of respect for the Sabbath. In the midst of this busy, pushing throng it was hard for me to remember that I was in England and that it was Sunday. Somehow or other I had got a very different notion of the English Sabbath.
Petticoat Lane is in the midst of the “sweating” district, where most of the cheap clothing in London is made. Through windows and open doors I could see the pale faces of the garment-makers bent over their work. There is much furniture made in this region, also, I understand. Looking down into some of the cellars as I passed, I saw men working at the lathes. Down at the end of the street was a barroom, which was doing a rushing business. The law in London is, as I understand, that travellers may be served at a public bar on Sunday, but not others. To be a traveller, a bona-fide traveller, you must have come from a distance of at least three miles. There were a great many travellers in Petticoat Lane on the Sunday morning that I was there.
This same morning I visited Bethnal Green, another and a quite different quarter of the East End. There are a number of these different quarters of the East End, like Stepney, Poplar, St. George’s in the East, and so forth. Each of these has its peculiar type of population and its own peculiar conditions. Whitechapel is Jewish, St. George’s in the East is Jewish at one end and Irish at the other, but Bethnal Green is English. For nearly half a mile along Bethnal Green Road I found another Sunday market in full swing, and it was, if anything, louder and more picturesque than the one in Petticoat Lane.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning; the housewives of Bethnal Green were out on the street hunting bargains in meat and vegetables for the Sunday dinner. One of the most interesting groups I passed was crowded about a pushcart where three sturdy old women, shouting at the top of their lungs, were reeling off bolt after bolt of cheap cotton cloth to a crowd of women gathered about their cart.
At another point a man was “knocking down” at auction cheap cuts of frozen beef from Australia at prices ranging from 4 to 8 cents a pound. Another was selling fish, another crockery, and a third tinware, and so through the whole list of household staples.
The market on Bethnal Green Road extends across a street called Brick Lane and branches off again from that into other and narrower streets. In one of these there is a market exclusively for birds, and another for various sorts of fancy articles not of the first necessity. The interesting thing about all this traffic was that, although no one seemed to exercise any sort of control over it, somehow the different classes of trade had managed to organize themselves so that all the wares of one particular sort were displayed in one place and all the wares of another sort in another, everything in regular and systematic order. The streets were so busy and crowded that I wondered if there were any people left in that part of the town to attend the churches.
One of the marvels of London is the number of handsome and stately churches. One meets these beautiful edifices everywhere, not merely in the West End, where there is wealth sufficient to build and support them, but in the crowded streets of the business part of the city, where there are no longer any people to attend them. Even in the grimiest precincts of the East End, where all is dirt and squalor, one is likely to come unexpectedly upon one of these beautiful old churches, with its quiet churchyard and little space of green, recalling the time when the region, which is now crowded with endless rows of squalid city dwellings, was, perhaps, dotted with pleasant country villages. These churches are beautiful, but as far as I could see they were, for the most part, silent and empty. The masses of the people enjoy the green spaces outside, but do not as a rule, I fear, attend the services on the inside. They are too busy.
It is not because the churches are not making an effort to reach the people that the masses do not go to them. One has only to read the notices posted outside of any of the church buildings in regard to night schools, lectures, men’s clubs and women’s clubs, and many other organizations of various sorts, to know that there is much earnestness and effort on the part of the churches to reach down and help the people. The trouble seems to be that the people are not at the same time reaching up to the church. It is one of the results of the distance between the classes that rule and the classes that work. It is too far from Whitechapel to St. James’s Park.’
Petticoat Lane by Charles Chusseau-Flaviens, 1911. Photograph courtesy George Eastman House
Booker T. Washington speaking in Atlanta in 1895
Click here to read ‘The Man Farthest Down, The Struggle of European Toilers’
You may also like to take a look at
Dennis Anthony’s Petticoat Lane
Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane
The Wax Sellers of Wentworth St
David Hoffman At St Botolph’s
Cover price is £35 but you can buy it from Spitalfields Life for £30
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
The Gentle Author will be giving an illustrated lecture, showing David Hoffman’s photos and telling the stories behind them next Thursday 7th November 7:30pm at Wanstead Tap, 352 Winchelsea Rd, E7 0AQ
Bobbie Beecroft cuts Mr Sheridan’s hair, 1976
When photographer David Hoffman was squatting in Fieldgate Mansions in Whitechapel in the seventies, he was asked to do fund-raising shots for the shelter in the crypt of St Botolph’s in Aldgate which offered refuge to all homeless people without distinction. Yet this commission turned into a photographic project that extended over many years and resulted in a distinguished body of work documenting the lives of the dispossessed in hundreds of intimate and unsentimental images.
Initially, David found the volatile conditions of the crypt challenging but, over months and years, he became accepted by those at the shelter who adopted him as their own photographer. Rev Malcolm Johnson was the enlightened priest responsible for opening the crypt but, once he moved on, his brave endeavour was closed down. More than thirty years later, most of the people in David’s pictures are dead and forgotten, and his soulful photographs are now the only record of their existence and of the strange camaraderie they discovered in the crypt at St Botolph’s.
“St Botolph’s in Aldgate had a ‘wet shelter,’ an evening shelter for damaged or lost souls where alcohol and drugs were permitted. It was run by Rev Malcolm Johnson and Terry Drummond, who were very generous and accepting, and the purpose was a Christian one, based on the notion that you are accepted whoever you are. I’m not keen on organised religion, but here they were doing something that needed to be done.
I was asked if I could do some photographs to raise funds for the work and I remember arriving at the top of the steps outside the crypt and standing there for five minutes because I didn’t dare to go down. The noise was deafening and it really stank of piss and unwashed bodies. I was frightened I’d get attacked and my camera smashed but, equally, I thought it needed documenting, it was a part of life I’d never seen before. It was very noisy, very smelly, chaotic, and there was a lot of violence.
It was a place to get something to eat, get washed and get clean clothing. Not everybody was on drink or drugs but ninety per cent were. A lot were ex-servicemen who had travelled the world and would reminisce about bars in Cairo or Baghdad. It was amazing what they would talk about.
When I returned, I gave them eighth-size A4 prints so they could put them in their pockets. They gave me permission to take their pictures and, on each visit, I’d bring them prints from the previous evening. So I became their photographer.
Over six or seven years, I’d go every night for two or three months at a stretch. It was important to be regular while you were doing it. You needed to come frequently, so people relaxed and accepted you as part of the scene. I’d go every night for a couple of months. It was a place where nobody else goes, it was a humble part of life.”
Washing a shirt at St Botolph’s, 1978
A volunteer serves tea and sandwiches
Azella, a regular at St Botolph’s, makes herself up before heading to the pub with a pal in 1977. Later that year, Azella was killed when a lorry drove over the cardboard box where she slept in Spitalfields Market.
At St Botolph’s, 1978
At St Botolph’s, 1976
At St Botolph’s, 1978
At St Botolph’s, 1978
At St Botolph’s, 1978
At St Botolph’s, 1978
Leo, eighty-two years old and a non-drinker at St Botolph’s, 1976
At St Botolph’s, 1978
Percy & Jane, non-drinkers, at St Botolph’s, 1978
At St Botolph’s, 1978
At St Botolph’s, 1977
At St Botolph’s, 1978
At St Botolph’s, 1978
At St Botolph’s, 1978
At St Botolph’s, 1978
At St Botolph’s, 1978
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
You may also like to take a look at
Peter Bellerby, Globe Maker
Peter Bellerby is speaking about his work next Thursday 7th November at 6pm at Sandys Row Synagogue, E1 7HW. Click here for tickets
Just a couple of years ago, Peter Bellerby of Bellerby & Co was unable find a proper globe to buy his father for an eightieth birthday present. Now Peter is to be found in his very own globe factory in Stoke Newington and hatching plans to set up another in New York – to meet the growing international demand for globes which he expects to exceed ten times his current output within five years. A man with global ambitions, you might say.
Yet Peter is quietly spoken with deferential good manners and obviously commands great respect from his handful of employees, who also share his enthusiasm and delight in these strange metaphysical baubles which serve as pertinent reminders of our true insignificance in the grand scheme of things.
A concentrated hush prevailed as Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I ascended the old staircase in the former warehouse where we discovered the globemakers at work on the top floor, painstakingly glueing the long strips of paper in the shape of slices of orange peel (or gores as they are properly known) onto the the spheres and tinting them with fine paintbrushes to achieve an immaculate result.
“I get bored easily,” Peter confessed to me, revealing the true source of his compulsion, “But making globes is really the best job you can have, because you have to get into the zone and slow your mind down.”
“Back in the old days, they were incredibly good at making globes but that had been lost,” he continued, “I had nothing to go by.” Disappointed by the degradation of his chosen art over the last century, Peter revealed that, as globes became decorative features rather than functional objects, accuracy was lost – citing an example in which overlapping gores wiped out half of Iceland. “What’s the point of that?,” he queried rhetorically, rolling his eyes in weary disdain.
“People want something that will be with them for life,” he assured me, reaching out his arms around a huge globe as if he were going to embrace it but setting it spinning instead with a beautiful motion, that turned and turned seemingly of its own volition, thanks to the advanced technology of modern bearings.
Even more remarkable are his table-top globes which sit upon a ring with bearings set into it, these spin with a satisfying whirr that evokes the music of the spheres. Through successfully pursuing his unlikely inspiration, Peter Bellerby has established himself as the world leader in the manufacture of globes and brought a new industry to the East End serving a growing export market.
To demonstrate the strength of his plaster of paris casting – yet to my great alarm – Peter placed one on the floor and leapt upon it. Once I had peeled my fingers from my eyes and observed him, balancing there playfully, I thought, “This is a man that bestrides the globe.”
Isis Linguanotto, Globepainter
John Wright, Globemaker
Chloe Dalrymple, Globemaker
Peter Bellerby, on top of the globe
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
