The Cally In The Eighties
Last chance to book for tonight’s free webinar with Brick Lane traders discussing the threat of the Truman Brewery shopping mall on the day before Tower Hamlets Council decides on the planning application. Click here to register
Today Alan Dein enjoys a stroll along the Caledonia Rd forty years ago.
40 Caledonian Rd, 1983
The fascia of a clock repair shop has a clockface without hands, a seller of second-hand television sets advertises ‘The Bent TV Shop’, a stagnant canal basin slumbers in a post-industrial haze and a shady-looking sauna calls itself ‘KINGS X’ – yes, this is King’s Cross forty years ago.
Last November, when I heard of the passing of Leo Giordani whose Italian delicatessen ‘KC Continental Stores’ had been a much-loved King’s Cross institution for half a century, I was reminded of a fascinating collection of photographs that had been taken in the neighbourhood during the early eighties.
I came across these images while working on King’s Cross Voices, an oral history study that was conducted between 2004 to 2008. During these years, myself, my colleague Leslie McCartney and a group of volunteers collected some three hundred interviews accompanied by photographs and ephemera – all now held at the Camden Local Studies & Archives Centre.
The first decade of the new millennium proved to be a significant moment to interview people about their memories of living and working in a place that was in the early throes of massive redevelopment. Up to that point, King’s Cross had been locked in a twilight zone as a series of ill-thought-out development proposals had been thwarted by local residents and campaigners.
So the physical landscape of ‘the Cross’ just stagnated and, during the eighties and nineties, King’s Cross’ became synonymous with vice, sleaze and decay. It was depicted in the press as a bleak post-industrial wasteland, complete with seedy sex shops, dingy backstreets, and peppered with boarded-up Victorian houses. Yet many businesses like Leo’s KC Continental Stores kept going through this time when King’s Cross also offered low-rent creative spaces, social housing and squats, as well as headquarters for charities, trades unions and community projects.
The photographs had been languishing in the files of the planning team at Islington Council which administered the eastern section of King’s Cross. These images document the southernmost part of the mile-and-a-half long Caledonian Rd, affectionally dubbed by locals as ‘The Cally’. It links the eastern slopes of Camden Rd with Pentonville Rd in the south and was originally known as Chalk Rd. The name changed after the ‘Royal Caledonian Asylum’ was built in 1828, schooling children of exiled Scots who had been orphaned in the Napoleonic Wars. The asylum moved to Bushey in 1902 but the Caledonian name stuck. Today its former site is occupied by the Caledonian Housing Estate that neighbours Pentonville Prison.
While I was gathering memories of working and community life around the Cally – especially the King’s Cross end – I became fascinated by the geography, architecture and social history of the area. Contributors included landlords and publicans, shopkeepers and artists, street workers and community activists, and residents both former and current.
These photographs taken by Islington Council forty years ago document a world that was preserved in people’s memories but mostly disappeared by the time I was doing my interviews. It was vital these pictures should be archived as an evocative legacy, taken at what was a difficult time for this beloved King’s Cross neighbourhood.
The Bent TV Shop is now a Tesco
At Battlebridge Basin, the stagnant canal slumbers in a post-industrial haze
At the junction of Northdown St, a shady-looking sauna calls itself ‘KINGS X’
Albion Yard
North end of Balfe St
South end of Balfe St
Corner of Balfe St
Looking south down Caledonian Rd
76 & 78 Caledonian Rd
32 York Way
Keystone Crescent
KC Continental Stores
Bravington Block and the Lighthouse Building
King’s Cross Cinema, 1980 – it reopened as the Scala a year later
Images courtesy Islington Local History Centre & Camden Archives
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Stephen Gill’s Trolley Women
When photographer Stephen Gill slipped a disc carrying heavy photographic equipment, he had no idea what the outcome would be. The physiotherapist advised him to buy a trolley for all his kit, and the world became different for Stephen – not only was his injured back able to recover but he found himself part of a select group of society, those who wheel trolleys around. And for someone with a creative imagination, like Stephen, this shift in perspective became the inspiration for a whole new vein of work, manifest in the fine East End Trolley Portraits you see here today.
Included now within the camaraderie of those who wheel trolleys – mostly women – Stephen learnt the significance of these humble devices as instruments of mobility, offering dominion of the pavement to their owners and permitting an independence which might otherwise be denied. More than this, Stephen found that the trolley as we know it was invented here in the East End, at Sholley Trolleys – a family business which started in the Roman Rd and is now based outside Clacton, they have been manufacturing trolleys for over thirty years.
In particular, the rich palette of Stephen Gill’s dignified portraits appeals to me, veritable symphonies of deep red and blue. Commonly, people choose their preferred colour of trolley and then co-ordinate or contrast their outfits to striking effect. All these individuals seem especially at home in their environment and, in many cases – such as the trolley lady outside Trinity Green in Whitechapel, pictured above – the colours of their clothing and their trolleys harmonise so beautifully with their surroundings, it is as if they are themselves extensions of the urban landscape.
Observe the hauteur of these noble women, how they grasp the handles of their trolleys with such a firm grip, indicating the strength of their connection to the world. Like eighteenth century aristocrats painted by Gainsborough, these women claim their right to existence and take possession of the place they inhabit with unquestionable authority. Monumental in stature, sentinels wheeling their trolleys through our streets, they are the spiritual guardians of the territory.
Photographs copyright © Stephen Gill
William Anthony, Last Of The Charlies
William Anthony 1789-1863
Behold the face of history! Photographed in 1863, the year of his death, but born in 1789, the year of the French Revolution, seventy-four-year-old William Anthony trudged the streets of Spitalfields and Norton Folgate through the darkest nights and thickest fogs for half a century, with his nose pointed into the wind and his jaw set in determination, successfully guided by a terrier-like instinct to seek out miscreants and prevent the outbreak of any unholy excesses of violence, such as erupted on the other side of the channel at the time of his nascence.
No wonder the Watch Book of Norton Folgate recorded an unbroken sequence of “All’s Well” for his entire tenure. No robbery was reported in fifty years. There was no nonsense with William Anthony. We need him at night on Brick Lane today.
The origin of the term ‘Charley’ for Watchman may originate in the time of Charles I when the monarch improved the watch system, although Jonathon Green, Spitalfields Life Contributing Lexicographer of Slang, who informed me of this possible derivation, can find no subsequent use in print for another one hundred and fifty years, when the term achieved currency in the early nineteenth century.
‘Charley’ as a derogatory term for a foolish person has survived into modern times, yet – as these photographs attest – William Anthony was unapologetic, quite content to be a ‘Charley.’ Behind him stand a long line of ‘Charlies’ stretching back through time for as long as London has existed and I think we may discern a certain dogged pride in William Anthony’s bearing, clutching his dark lantern in one hand and knobbly staff of office in the other, swaddled up in a great coat against the cold, wrapped in an apron against the filth, shod in sturdy boots against the damp and sheltered under his stout hat from the downpour.
Now I know his appearance, I will look out for William Anthony, lest our paths cross in the wintry dusk in Blossom St or Elder St – others might disregard him as another homeless old man walking all night but I shall hail him and pay my respects to the last of the ‘Charlies.’ He is the one of whom you could truly say you would be glad to meet him in a dark alley at night.
In Norton Folgate, the Watchman recorded an unbroken sequence of “All’s Well”
Tom & Jerry “getting the best of a Charley” at Temple Bar engraved by George Cruickshank, 1832
“Past one o’clock and a fine morning!” from Thomas Rowlandson’s ‘Lower Orders’
The Watchman, 1819 from ‘Pictures of Real Life for Children’
“Past Twelve O’Clock and A Cloudy Morning! & Patrol! Patrol!” from ‘Sam Syntax’s Cries of London’
“Past twelve o’clock and a misty morning! Past twelve o’clock and mind I give you warning!” published by Charles Hindley, Leadenhall Press, 1884
Watchman by John Thomas Smith, copied from a print prefixed to ‘Villanies discovered by Lanthorne and Candlelight’ by Thomas Dekker 1616. “The marching Watch contained in number two thousand men, part of them being old souldiers, of skill to be captaines, lieutenants, serjeants, corporals &c. The poore men taking wages, besides that every one had a strawne hat, with no badge painted, and his breakfast in the morning.”
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Curry Chefs of Brick Lane
At this time of crisis in Brick Lane, let us celebrate the curry chefs as immortalised by Jeremy Freedman‘s heroic portraits.
Join our free webinar on Monday 26th April at 7pm to hear GULJAR KHAN chair of Brick Lane Bangla Restaurants Association discussing the challenges for the Brick Lane traders in the light of the threat of the Truman Brewery development.
Click here to register for this event
Please note this webinar was originally announced for Tuesday but has been moved to Monday to avoid clashing with the Tower Hamlets Development Committee meeting to consider the Truman Brewery’s application to build a shopping mall with four floors of corporate offices above on Brick Lane.
I set out with photographer Jeremy Freedman to make the acquaintance of some of Brick Lane’s most celebrated Curry Chefs. We were privileged to be granted admission to the modest kitchens tucked away at the back or in the basement of the curry houses, where Head Chefs marshal whole teams of underchefs in a highly formalised hierarchy of responsibility.
In the heat of the kitchens, we discovered our excited subjects glistening with perspiration, all engaged in the midst of the collective drama that results in curry. We found that these were men who – for the most part – had worked their way up over many years from humble kitchen porters to enjoy their heroic leading roles, granting them the right to a degree of swagger in front of the lense.
We encountered the charismatic Zulen Ahmed, pictured above, standing over his clay-lined tandoori oven beneath the Saffron restaurant. Trained by the renowned Curry Chef, Ashik Miah, Zulen served eight years as a porter before ascending to run his own kitchen, now supervising a team consisting of two chefs who do the spicing and make the sauces, a tandoori chef, two cooks who cook rice and poppadums, a second chef who prepares side dishes and a porter who does the washing up. “The Head Chef listens to everybody,” he explained deferentially, with his staff standing around within earshot, and thereby revealing himself to be a natural leader.
Across the road at Masala, we met Head Chef, Shaiz Uddin, whose mother is a chef in Bangladesh. She taught him to cook when he was ten years old. Shaiz told me he worked in her kitchen as Curry Chef for seven years, before he came to London to bring the authentic style to Brick Lane, where today he is known for his constant invention in contriving new dishes for his eager customers.
It was quickly apparent that there is a daily routine common to all the curry kitchens of Brick Lane. At eleven each morning, the chefs come in and work until three to prepare the sauces and half cook the meat for the evening. At three they take a break until six, while the underchefs, who arrive at three, prepare the vegetables and salad. Then at six, when the chefs return, the rice is cooked and – now the kitchen is full – everyone works as a team until midnight, when it is time to throw out the leftovers and make the orders for the next day. This is the pattern that rules the lives of all involved. “I like to be busy,” Nurul Alam, Head Chef at Preem & Prithi, informed me blithely – he regularly cooks three hundred curries a night.
“When I started, I dreamed of being a chef,” confessed Jamal Uddin, Head Chef at Bengal Cuisine, referring to his ambition when he came here to Brick Lane from Bangladesh aged nineteen. Jamal now reigns supreme in his kitchen with a Tandoori Chef, a Cook and a Porter working under his supervision as he prepares as many as two hundred curries every day. “I love cooking,” he admitted to me as his gleaming face broke into a smile, though whether it was the intensity of his emotion or the humidity in the kitchen that was the cause of his glowing complexion, I never ascertained.
Syed Jahan Mir, Head Chef at Chillies Restaurant, told me he came to this country at the age of eighteen with his mother and father. Syed was able to learn from his father who was also a chef and they started out together at first, working side by side in the same restaurant. “He’s better than me, but now he is retired to Sunderland I am the best!” Syed asserted, placing a hand on his chest protectively. “Of course I like it,” he confirmed for me with fierce pride, “Twenty-four years, I’ve been doing this, just making curry – it’s my profession.” A poet with spices, Syed creates his own personal mixture for curry. “It’s all the blending,” he emphasised, running his fingers through the golden powder in a steel dish to demonstrate its special properties.
Mohammed Salik still remembers arriving in Britain at the age of seven. “It was quaint and nice here and the people so good, not overcrowded and dirty like my country,” he recalled with a sublime smile of reminiscence, “My dad used to work at the Savoy, but I wanted to be part of the community here in Brick Lane.” Starting as kitchen porter, Mohammed spent the first five years watching and learning and is now Head Chef at Eastern Eye Restaurant. Our brief conversation in the kitchen was eclipsed by the arrival of a bucket on a piece of string from the restaurant above and inside was a yellow slip of paper, occasioning a polite, apologetic glance from Syed as he turned away to study the handwriting and order his team to work, making up the order.
At Cinnamon, Head Chef and veteran of twenty-five years in the business, Daras Miya was keen to introduce me to the two smiley, hardworking young Kitchen Porters under his care, skinny twenty-four year old Belal Ahmed who has been there three months and also works as a waiter, and nineteen year old Mizanor Rahman who started a week ago. Recently married and with little English, wide-eyed Mizanor was new in London, after marrying his wife who came from Britain to Bangladesh find a husband.
Finally, at the Aladin we met Brick Lane’s most senior Curry Chef, the distinguished Rana Miah who started work in 1980 as a kitchen porter when he arrived from Bangladesh, graduating to chef in 1988. “At that time we served only Bengalis, but by 1995 the customers were all Europeans,” he recalled, describing his tenure as chef at one of Brick Lane’s oldest curry houses, which opened in 1985 and is second only to the Clifton in age. Rana explained that he runs his kitchen upon the system of “Handy Cooking,” based around the use of large stock pots to cook the food. “That’s the way it’s done in Bangladesh,” he confirmed, “This is a traditional restaurant.” As the longest serving Curry Chef, Rana gets frequent consultations from the other chefs on Brick Lane and, remains passionate about his vocation, arriving before everyone each day and leaving after everyone else too.
We never asked the Curry Chefs to cross their arms, but they all assumed this stance, independently and without prompting. It is a posture that proposes professionalism, dignity and self-respect, yet it also indicates a certain reticence, a reserved nature that prefers to let the culinary creations speak for themselves. So I ask you to spare a thought for these proud Curry Chefs, working away like those engineers slaving below deck on the great steam ships of old, they are the unseen and unsung heroes of Brick Lane’s Curry Mile.
Abdul Ahad Forhad, Curry Chef at Monsoon, 78 Brick Lane – “I’m the master of curry!”
Head Chef Shaiz Uddin with his colleague Monul Uddin, Tandoori Chef at Masala, 88 Brick Lane
Nurul Alam, Head Chef at Preem & Prithi, 124/6 Brick Lane, cooks three hundred curries a night
Abdul Tahid, Head Chef at Papadoms, 94 Brick Lane
Jamal Uddin, Head Chef at Bengal Cuisine, 12 Brick Lane
Syed Jahan Mir, Head Chef at Chillies Restaurant, 76 Brick Lane
Mohammed Salik, Head Chef at Eastern Eye Balti House, 63a Brick Lane
Daras Miya, Head Chef at Cinnamon, 134 Brick Lane
Belal Ahmed & Mizanur Rahman, porters at Cinnamon 134, Brick Lane
Rana Miah, Brick Lane’s longest serving Curry Chef stands centre, flanked by Kholilur Rahman and Mizanur Khan in the kitchen of the Aladin, 132 Brick Lane
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
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The Good News & The Bad News
The GOOD NEWS is we have only £3,168 left to raise of the £10,000 we need to pay for a top QC and barrister to represent us at the High Court on 5th & 6th May in our fight to save the 500-year-old Bethnal Green Mulberry. We are offering big pots of our homemade Mulberry sorbet or rooted cuttings of Shakespeare’s Mulberry in appreciation to our supporters. Click here to support us
The BAD NEWS is that – despite a record 7,057 individual letters of objection to the application to build an ugly shopping mall with corporate offices on top at the Truman Brewery – Tower Hamlets Planning Department is recommending approval. There is still time to object. Find instructions at www.battleforbricklane.com
Today I announce a new webinar, next Monday 26th April, focussing on the challenges for the Brick Lane traders in the light of the threat of the Truman Brewery development. Below you can also watch the film of this week’s webinar, Voices from Brick Lane’s Jewish Past.
THE CURRY HOUSES OF BRICK LANE
Monday 26th April 7:00pm
Members of East End Trades Guild and Bangla Restaurants Association discuss their fight for affordable rent on Brick Lane.
Curry restaurants in Brick Lane have decreased by 62% in the past fifteen years and the drop in footfall due to the pandemic is crippling businesses that were already struggling.
The proposed Truman Brewery development would compound this crisis, extracting wealth out of the community by increasing the land value and displacing East End cultural heritage. It will be the end of small independent businesses on Brick Lane.
GULJAR KHAN is chair of Brick Lane Bangla Restaurants Association and has been fighting for fair rents and rates for seven years. He owns four restaurants on Brick Lane including Masala and Gram Bangla.
RHEANNA LINGHAM is a co-founder of Luna & Curious. The shop opened on Brick Lane in 2006 before moving to Calvert Avenue. Rheanna is part of the East End Trades Guild, launching a new EETG Council Tenant’s Group to address the challenge of escalating rents.
The recent Runnymede Trust report highlights shocking levels of economic and racial inequality in which British Bangladeshi households have ten times less wealth than White British households.
In a joint survey conducted by Extended Ventures and Your Startup Your Story on the impact of COVID-19 upon ethnic minority businesses, 48% of respondents stated that they did not access or expect to qualify for any government support scheme.
Click here to register for free for THE CURRY HOUSES OF BRICK LANE
VOICES FROM BRICK LANE’S JEWISH PAST
Professor Nadia Valman and Rachel Lichtenstein investigate the Jewish history of Brick Lane.
From the late nineteenth century until the Second World War, Brick Lane and the surrounding streets were home to Britain’s largest Jewish population. Originating from towns and villages in Russian and Eastern Europe, Jews came to London in search of freedom and a better life. Crowded into dilapidated eighteenth-century houses, they built a rich and complex subculture over generations.
THE HOUSE OF ANNETTA, A SITE OF RESISTANCE
Louis Schulz of Assemble introduces Annetta’s House, a new centre for campaigning and resistance against exploitative development.
25 Princelet St in Spitalfields was the home of the architect, cybernetician, conservationist, builder, beekeeper, and campaigner Annetta Pedretti until her death in 2018. An obsessive polymath, her work has been all but forgotten.
Samuel Pepys At St Olave’s
Do you see Elizabeth Pepys, leaning out from her monument in the top left of this photograph and directing her gaze across the church to where Samuel sat in the gallery opposite? These days the gallery has long gone but, since her late husband became celebrated for his journal, a memorial to him was installed in 1883 where the gallery once was, which contains a portrait bust that peers back eternally at Elizabeth. They will always see eye-to-eye even if they are forever separated by the nave.
St Olave’s on the corner of Seething Lane has long been one of my favourite City churches. Dating from the eleventh century, it is a rare survivor of the Great Fire and the London Blitz. When you walk in from Hart St, three steps down into the nave immediately reveal you are entering an ancient building, where gothic vaults and medieval monuments conjure an atmosphere more reminiscent of a country church than one in the City of London.
Samuel Pepys moved into this parish when he was appointed Commissioner of the Navy Board and came to live next to the Navy Office at the rear of the church, noting his arrival at “my house in Seething Lane” in his journal on July 18th 1660. It was here that Pepys recorded the volatile events of the subsequent decade, the Plague and the Fire.
In Seething Lane, a gateway adorned with skulls as memento mori survives from that time. Pepys saw the gate from his house across the road and could walk out of the Navy Office and through it into the churchyard, where an external staircase led him straight into the private Navy Office pew in the gallery.
The churchyard itself is swollen above surrounding ground level by the vast number of bodies interred within and, even today, the gardeners constantly unearth human bones. When Elizabeth and the staff of the Navy Office took refuge from the Plague south of the river, Pepys stayed behind in the City. Countless times, he walked back and forth between his house and the Navy Office and St Olave’s as the body count escalated through the summer of 1665. “The sickness in general thickens round us, and particularly upon our neighbourhood,” he wrote to Sir William Coventry in grim resignation.
The following year, Pepys employed workers from the dockyard to pull down empty houses surrounding the Navy Office and his own home to create fire breaks. “About 2 in the morning my wife calls me up and tells me of new cries of fire, it being come to … the bottom of our lane,” he recorded on 6th September 1666.
In the seventeenth century vestry room where a plaster angel presides solemnly from the ceiling, I was able to open Samuel Pepys’ prayer book. It was heart-stopping to turn the pages. Dark leather covers embossed with intricate designs enfold the volume, which he embellished with religious engravings and an elaborate hand-drawn calligraphic title page.
Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys are buried in a vault beneath the nave. Within living memory, when the Victorian font was removed, a hole was exposed that led to a chamber with a passage that led to a hidden chapel where a tunnel was dug to reach the Pepys vault. Scholars would love to know if he was buried with his bladder stone upon its silver mount, but no investigation has yet been permitted.
If you seek Samuel Pepys, St Olave’s is undoubtedly where you can find him. Walk in beneath the gate laden with skulls, across the graveyard bulging with the bodies of the long dead, cast your eyes along the flower beds for any shards of human bone, and enter the church where Samuel and Elizabeth regard each other from either side of the nave eternally.
St Olave’s at the corner of Seething Lane
“To our own church, and at noon, by invitation, Sir W Pen dined with me and Mrs Hester, my Lady Betten’s kinswoman, to dinner from church with me, and we were very merry. So to church again, and heard a simple fellow upon the praise of Church musique, and exclaiming against men’s wearing their hats on in the church, but I slept part of the sermon, till latter prayer and blessing and all was done without waking which I never did in my life…” SAMUEL PEPYS, Sunday 17th November, 1661
Samuel Pepys’ memorial in the south aisle
Samuel Pepys’ prayerbook
Engraved nativity and fine calligraphy upon the title page of Pepys’ prayerbook
Door to the vestry
The oldest monument in the church, 1566
Memorial of Peter Capponi, a Florentine merchant & spy, 1582
Paul Bayning, 1616, was an Alderman of the City & member of the Levant company
A Norwegian flag hangs in honour of St Olave
The gate where Pepys walked in from the Navy Office across the street
Sculpture of Samuel Pepys in the churchyard
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Down A Well In Spitalfields
Thirty years ago, eighteen wooden plates and bowls were recovered from a silted-up well in Spitalfields. One of the largest discoveries of medieval wooden vessels ever made in this country, they are believed to be dishes belonging to the inmates of the long-gone Hospital of St Mary Spital, which gave its name to this place. After seven hundred years lying in mud at the bottom of the well, the thirteenth century plates were transferred to the Museum of London store in Hoxton where I went to visit them as a guest of Roy Stephenson, Head of Archaeological Collections.
Almost no trace remains above ground of the ancient Hospital of St Mary yet, in Spital Sq, the roads still follow the ground plan laid laid out by Walter Brune in 1197, with the current entrance from Bishopsgate coinciding to the gate of the Priory and Folgate St following the line of the northern perimeter wall. Stand in the middle of Spital Sq today, and you are surrounded by glass and steel corporate architecture, but seven hundred years ago this space was enclosed by the church of St Mary and then you would be standing in the centre of the aisle where the transepts crossed beneath the soaring vault with the lantern of the tower looming overhead. Stand in the middle of Spital Sq today, and the Hospital of St Mary is lost in time.
In his storehouse, Roy Stephenson had eleven miles of rolling shelves that contain all the finds excavated from old London in recent decades. He opened one box containing bricks in a plastic bag that originated from Pudding Lane and were caked with charcoal dust from the Fire of London. I leant in close and a faint cloud of soot rose in the air, with an unmistakable burnt smell persisting after four centuries. “I can open these at random,” said Roy, gesturing towards the infinitely receding shelves lined with boxes in every direction, “and every one will have a story inside.”
Removing the wooden plates and bowls from their boxes, Roy laid them upon the table for me to see. Finely turned and delicate, they still displayed ridges from the lathe, seven centuries after manufacture. Even distorted by water and pressure over time, it was apparent that, even if they were for the lowly inhabitants of the hospital, these were not crudely produced items. At hospitals, new arrivals were commonly issued with a plate or bowl, and drinking cup and a spoon. Ceramics and metalware survive but rarely wood, so Roy is especially proud of these humble platters. “They are a reminder that pottery is a small part of the kitchen assemblage and people ate off wood and also off bread which leaves no trace.” he explained. Turning over a plate, Roy showed me a cross upon the base made of two branded lines burnt into the wood. “Somebody wanted to eat off the same plate each day and made it their own,” he informed me, as each of the bowls and plates were revealed to have different symbols and simple marks upon them to distinguish their owners – crosses, squares and stars.
Contemporary with the plates, there were a number of ceramic jugs and flagons which Roy produced from boxes in another corner of his store. While the utilitarian quality of the dishes did not speak of any precise period, the rich glazes and flamboyant embossed designs, with studs and rosettes applied, possessed a distinctive aesthetic that placed them in another age. Some had protuberances created with the imprints of fingers around the base that permitted the jar to sit upon a hot surface and heat the liquid inside without cracking from direct contact with the source of heat, and these pots were still blackened from the fire.
The intimacy of objects that have seen so much use conjures the presence of the people who ate and drank with them. Many will have ended up in the graveyard attached to the hospital and then were exhumed in the nineties. It was the largest cemetery ever excavated and their remains are now stored in the tall brick rotunda where London Wall meets Goswell Rd outside the Museum of London. This curious architectural feature that serves as a roundabout is in fact a mausoleum for long dead Londoners and, of the seventeen thousand souls whose bones are there, twelve thousand came from Spitalfields.
The Priory of St Mary Spital stood for over four hundred years until it was dissolved by Henry VIII who turned its precincts into an artillery ground in 1539. Very little detail is recorded of the history though we do know that many thousands died in the great famine of 1258, which makes the survival of these dishes at the bottom of a well especially plangent.
Returning to Spitalfields, I walked again through Spital Sq. Yet, in spite of the prevailing synthetic quality of the architecture, the place had changed for me after I had seen and touched the bowls that once belonged to those who called this place home seven centuries ago – and thus the Hospital of St Mary Spital was no longer lost in time.
Sixteenth century drawing of St Mary Spital as Shakespeare may have known it, with gabled wooden houses lining Bishopsgate.
“Nere and within the citie of London be iij hospitalls or spytells, commonly called Seynt Maryes Spytell, Seynt Bartholomewes Spytell and Seynt Thomas Spytell, and the new abby of Tower Hyll, founded of good devocion by auncient ffaders, and endowed with great possessions and rents onley for the releffe, comfort, and helyng of the poore and impotent people not beyng able to help themselffes, and not to the mayntennance of chanins, preestes, and monks to lyve in pleasure, nothyng regardyng the miserable people liying in every strete, offendyng every clene person passyng by the way with theyre fylthy and nasty savours.” Sir Richard Gresham in a letter to Thomas Cromwell, August 1538
Finely turned ash bowl.
Fragment of a wooden plate
Turned wooden plate marked with a square on the base to indicate its owner.
Copper glazed white ware jug from St Mary Spital
Redware glazed flagon, used to heat liquid and still blackened from the fire seven hundred years later.
White ware flagon, decorated in the northern French style.
A pair of thirteenth century boots found at the bottom of the cesspit in Spital Sq.
The gatehouse of St Mary Spital coincides with the entrance to Spital Sq today and Folgate St follows the boundary of the northern perimeter .
Bruyne:
- My vowes fly up to heaven, that I would make
- Some pious work in the brass book of Fame
- That might till Doomesday lengthen out my name.
- Near Norton Folgate therefore have I bought
- Ground to erect His house, which I will call
- And dedicate St Marie’s Hospitall,
- And when ’tis finished, o’ r the gates shall stand
- In capitall letters, these words fairly graven
- For I have given the worke and house to heaven,
- And cal’d it, Domus Dei, God’s House,
- For in my zealous faith I now full well,
- Where goode deeds are, there heaven itself doth dwell.
(Walter Brune founding St Mary Spital from ‘A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vexed’ by William Rowley, 1623)
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