Spitalfields Life

Stanley Rondeau died on 13th January aged ninety-two. His funeral will be on Wednesday 25th February at Edmonton Cemetery, 11.30am

Stanley Rondeau (1933-2026)

If you visited Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields on any given Tuesday, you would find Stanley Rondeau – where he volunteered one day each week – welcoming visitors and handing out guide books. The architecture is of such magnificence, arresting your attention, that you might not even have noticed this quietly spoken white-haired gentleman sitting behind a small table just to the right of the entrance, who came here weekly on the train from Enfield.

But if you were interested in local history, then Stanley was one of the most remarkable people you could hope to meet, because his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jean Rondeau was a Huguenot immigrant who came to Spitalfields in 1685.

“When visiting a friend in Suffolk in 1980, I was introduced to the local vicar who became curious about my name and asked me ‘Are you a Huguenot?'” explained Stanley with a quizzical grin. “I didn’t even know what he meant,” he added, revealing the origin of his life-changing discovery, “So I went to Workers’ Educational Association evening classes in Genealogy and that was how it started. I’ve been at it now for thirty years. My own family history came first, but when I learnt that Jean Rondeau’s son John Rondeau was Sexton of Christ Church, I got involved in Spitalfields. And now I come every Tuesday as a volunteer and I like being here in the same building where he was. They refer to me as ‘a piece of living history’, which is what I am really. Although I have never lived here, I feel I am so much part of the area.”

Jean Rondeau was a serge weaver born in 1666 in Paris into a family that had been involved in weaving for three generations. Escaping persecution for his Protestant faith, he came to London and settled in Brick Lane, fathering twelve children. Jean had such success as weaver in London that in 1723 he built a fine house, number four Wilkes St, in the style that remains familiar to this day in Spitalfields. It is a indicator of Jean’s integration into British society that his name is to be discovered on a document of 1728 ensuring the building of Christ Church, alongside that of Edward Peck who laid the foundation stone. Peck is commemorated today by the elaborate marble monument next to the altar, where I took Stanley’s portrait which you can see above.

Jean’s son John Rondeau was a master silk weaver and in 1741 he commissioned textile designs from Anna Maria Garthwaite, the famous designer of Spitalfields silks, who lived at the corner of Princelet St adjoining Wilkes St. As a measure of John’s status, in 1745 he sent forty-seven of his employees to join the fight against Bonnie Prince Charlie. Appointed Sexton of the church in 1761 until his death in 1790, when he was buried in the crypt in a lead coffin labelled John Rondeau, Sexton of this Parish, his remains were exhumed at the end of twentieth century and transported to the Natural History Museum for study.

“Once I found that the crypt was cleared, I made an appointment at the Natural History Museum, where Dr Molleson showed his bones to me,” admitted Stanley, widening his eyes in wonder. “She told me he was eighty-five, a big fellow – a bit on the chubby side, yet with no curvature of the spine, which meant he stood upright. It was strange to be able to hold his bones, because I know so much about his history,” Stanley told me in a whisper of amazement, as we sat together, alone in the vast empty church that would have been equally familiar to John the Sexton.

In 1936, a carpenter removing a window sill from an old warehouse in Cutler St that was being refurbished was surprised when a scrap of paper fell out. When unfolded, this long strip was revealed to be a ballad in support of the weavers, demanding an Act of Parliament to prevent the cheap imports that were destroying their industry. It was written by James Rondeau, the grandson of John the Sexton who was recorded in directories as doing business in Cutler St between 1809 and 1816. Bringing us two generations closer to the present day, James Rondeau author of the ballad was Stanley’s great-great-great-grandfather. It was three generations later, in 1882, that Stanley’s grandfather left Sclater St and the East End for good, moving to Edmonton when the railway opened. And subsequently Stanley grew up without any knowledge of Huguenots or the Spitalfields connection, until that chance meeting in 1980 leading to the discovery that he was an eighth generation British Huguenot.

“When I retired, it gave me a new purpose,” said Stanley, cradling the slender pamphlet he has written entitled The Rondeaus of Spitalfields. “It’s a story that must not be forgotten because we were the originals, the first wave of immigrants that came to Spitalfields,” he declared. Turning the pages slowly, as he contemplated the sense of connection that the discovery of his ancestry has given him, he admitted, “It has made a big difference to my life, and when I walk around in Christ Church today I can imagine my ancestor John the Sexton walking about in here, and his father Jean who built the house in Wilkes St. I can see the same things he did, and when I am able to hear the great eighteenth century organ, once it is restored, I can know that my ancestor played it and heard the same sound.”

There is no such thing as an old family, just those whose histories are recorded. We all have ancestors – although few of us know who they were, or have undertaken the years of research Stanley Rondeau had done, bringing him into such vivid relationship with his ancestors. It granted him an enviably broad sense of perspective, seeing himself against a wider timescale than his own life. History became personal for Stanley Rondeau in Spitalfields.

The silk design at the top was commissioned from Anna Maria Garthwaite by Stanley’s ancestor, Jean Rondeau, in 1742. (courtesy of V&A)

4 Wilkes St built by Jean Rondeau in 1723. Pictured here seen from Puma Court in the nineteen twenties, it was destroyed by a bomb in World War II and is today the site of Suskin’s Textiles.

The copy of James Rondeau’s song discovered under a window sill in Cutler St in 1936.

Stanley Rondeau standing in the churchyard near his home in Enfield, at the foot of the grave of John the Sexton’s son and grandson (the author of the song) both called James Rondeau, and who coincidentally also settled in Enfield.

Cabaret producer and stripper, Lara Clifton, interviewed Maedb Joy, a poet of extraordinary moral courage who has created Sexquisite, a cabaret of performers with lived experience of sex work.

Portrait of Maedb Joy by Sarah Ainslie

Maedb Joy is a woman in her twenties who is on a mission to resist the simultaneous silencing of sex workers and appropriation of their culture. At Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, as part of the campaign against the threat of closure, I attended what was potentially one of the last events, Sexquisite, a sex-worker-run cabaret. It was the best audience I had stood amongst for a long time. The crowd was mixed in age, class, bodies and genders, giddy with the pleasure of being in a sex-positive, shame-free, celebratory space.

Fifteen years ago, I was interviewed by Spitalfields Life about my work as a stripper. At that time, there were few public spaces where sex workers could speak with nuance, pride and political clarity. What strikes me most is not how much has changed but how much organising, creativity and solidarity it still takes to claim space.

So when The Gentle Author invited me to interview Maedb, founder of Sexquisite, I was chuffed and this is her story, in her own words.

“When I was sixteen, I had a road accident where I almost lost my right foot. But it ended up being a blessing because I started writing while I was in hospital. At first, I rewrote poems I found online, pretending they were my own. I was desperate for approval. Then I started writing about what had happened to me and the secrets that I had long buried.

My mum, who is a feminist and an ex-music-journalist, started arranging gigs for me. They were punk gigs. I’d be the only teenager on a line-up with feminist punk bands, performing angry poetry pretending the stories came from a friend’s experience.

After the accident, I went back to college and studied performing arts because I’d left school without GCSEs. We had to create a play and there wasn’t room for another main character, so I wrote a monologue about being a girl in a hostel who’d been groomed. That was the first time I told a couple of hundred people about what had actually happened to me, but I was playing a character. That’s how I started performing, to talk about my experiences without naming myself.

I got into Guildhall School of Music & Drama. In the second year, we had to put on an event. The event I put on was Sexquisite. That was the beginning of 2019.

At that point, I had no sex worker friends. People told me not to say anything about my past, that this was a fresh start. I was really scared. I was making art about my life but no one knew it was my own story. I didn’t even know what cabaret was. I put out a call asking for multidisciplinary artists who were sex workers – poetry, comedy, burlesque, theatre. Through Sexquisite I started meeting people like me.

People don’t understand what it’s like, having family angry at you, friends who won’t speak to you, partners who call you names. Performance was how I could show the complexity of it. Through a monologue you can explain what it actually feels like.

People think the stigma is disappearing but I don’t think it is. In sex-positive scenes – such as at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Social Club – it feels easier, but outside that bubble it’s still dangerous. I know sex workers who have had their children taken away. People can’t rent homes. They can’t explain gaps in their CVs. Even legal work like web-camming is treated as immoral earnings.

Sex worker is the only marginalised identity people believe you choose. That alone says a lot. You’re never allowed to say you had a bad day at work, people tell you you shouldn’t be doing it at all. Even within families it becomes a source of shame. This is why the law matters. The Online Safety Act came into full force with age verification requirements in 2025 and it’s had huge consequences. Platforms are deleting adult content, closing accounts, wiping out years of work overnight. Websites face massive fines if they don’t comply, so many are just cutting off adult material entirely.

It’s sold as protection but it’s collecting people’s data, pushing sex workers off safer platforms and into more dangerous situations. It’s also erased support spaces such as forums, harm-reduction networks and community archives. That’s not accidental. There are also ongoing attempts to expand criminalisation through policing and crime bills and to push versions of the Nordic Model, which claims to protect workers but actually makes screening clients harder and working conditions less safe. These laws don’t remove sex work, they remove safety for sex workers.

Meanwhile there’s a weird contradiction happening culturally. Sex worker aesthetics are everywhere. Some people dress like strippers, use the language and take the imagery, but they don’t work shifts or deal with the consequences, or support the sex worker community. At the same time, actual sex workers are being de-platformed and legislated against. That contradiction is exhausting but it’s also why my work has to keep going.

We have been building a UK Sex Worker Pride, so sex workers have a date in the pride calendar to come together and celebrate ourselves in the face of stigma and shame.”

Maedb performing one of her poems at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Social Club

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie