A Heartwarming Response
Merle Curtis, Sultana Begum, Armagan Middlemast & Husna Begum, Food Bank Volunteers, Bethnal Green, 2022
Since the end of last week, our crowdfund to publish Sarah Ainslie’s WOMEN AT WORK, East End Portraits 1992-2025 has nearly doubled, surging from £8,054 to more than £15,500 thanks to the additional support of over fifty more readers.
I must confess there has been some handwringing behind the scenes over the past three weeks, because – of all the books we have published – this could not be the one that we fail to deliver. Hopefully, we are in the home stretch with less than £9,500 left to raise now and 6 days left.
I believe we can do it.
CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE CROWDFUND
Here are some more extracts from the book with commentary by Sarah Ainslie.
It was a journey finding, meeting and photographing these women and each workplace was a completely different experience and some were more dramatic than others. This was especially true when I was invited to go out on the beat with WPC Helen Taylor in her car. I was sitting in the back seat when we went into an emergency response mode with the blue light flashing and siren blaring, hurtling through the streets at breakneck speed. It was absolutely terrifying and hard to focus and take photographs. In what seemed ages, but was probably about five minutes, we reached the estate where I had to wait in the car whilst she and her colleague went to investigate, and when they returned I was able to take some pictures.
At Tesco, everyone knows Anita Patel who is often to be found helping customers at the check-out or stacking shelves with the rest of the staff and always happy to show you where a product is. Photographing with her was so much fun as there was much laughter with her colleagues when they wanted to join in. Anita is also very involved in helping to raise money for charities in the community.
Nikki Brewer was someone I located through an agency for tradeswomen, she was working independently and with Amy’s Electric a company of women electricians. I took photographs of her whilst she was working in this very small bathroom, standing on the bath and backed up against the wall as there was hardly any space in the room but she just carried on working. She is very passionate about sharing her skills and knowledge with younger women to encourage them to become electricians. She has since become my electrician.
The Spitalfields Roman Woman
With seven days to go, thanks to generosity of 132 donors, we have raised £14,081 towards our target of £25,000 to publish Women at Work, Sarah Ainslie’s East End Portraits 1992-2025. If you have not contributed please consider doing so at this crucial moment. If you have contributed please help us by persuading your friends, family and workmates to do so too. Click here to visit the crowdfund
Curator of Human Osteology, Rebecca Redfern watches over her charge (Portrait by Sarah Ainslie)
In his Survey of London 1589, John Stow wrote about the discovery of pots of Roman gold coins buried in Spitalfields and it had long been understood that ancient tombs once lined the road approaching London, just as they did along the Appian Way in Rome. Yet it was only in the nineteen-nineties, when large scale excavations took place prior to the redevelopment of the Spitalfields Market, that the full extent of the Roman cemetery was uncovered.
In March 1999, a Roman stone sarcophagus containing a rare lead coffin decorated with scallop shells came to light, indicating the burial of someone of great wealth and high status. Grave goods of fine glass and jet were buried between the coffin and the sarcophagus. It was the first unopened sarcophagus to be found in London for over a century and when the entire assemblage was removed to the London Museum, the coffin was opened to reveal the body of a young woman in her early twenties, buried in ceremonial fashion. In the week after the opening of the coffin, ten thousand Londoners came to pay their respects to the Spitalfields Roman woman. She was the most astonishing discovery of the excavations yet, as the years have passed and more has been learnt about her, the enigma of her identity has become the subject of increasing fascination.
Analysis of residue in the coffin revealed that her head lay upon a pillow of bay leaves, her body was embalmed with oils from the Arab world and the Mediterranean, and wrapped in silk which had been interwoven with fine gold thread. Traces of Tyrian purple were also found, perhaps from a blanket laid over the coffin. Such an elaborate presentation suggests she may have been displayed to her family and friends seventeen hundred years ago as part of funeral rites.
The sarcophagus and grave goods are on public exhibition at the Museum but, thanks to Rebecca Redfern, Curator of Human Osteology, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I had the privilege to visit the Rotunda where the human remains are stored and view the skeleton of the Spitalfields Roman woman. Deep in a windowless concrete bunker filled with metal shelving stacked with cardboard boxes, containing the remains of thousands of Londoners from the past, lay the bones of the woman. We stood in silent reverence with just the sound of distant traffic echoing.
Rebecca is the informal guardian of the Spitalfields woman and remembers switching on the television to watch news of the discovery as a student. Today, she has a four-year-old daughter of her own. “The work went on for so many years that a lot of couples met working in Spitalfields,” Rebecca admitted to me, “and there is now a whole generation of ‘Spital babies’ born to those archaeologists.”
“She’s five foot three and delicately built, petite like a ballet dancer,” Rebecca continued, turning her attention swiftly from the living to the dead and gesturing protectively to the bones laid out upon the table. While some might objectify the skeleton as a specimen, Rebecca relates to the Spitalfields Roman woman and all the other twenty thousand remains in her care as human beings. “They’re able to tell us so much about themselves, it’s impossible not to regard them as people,” she assured me.
Recent research into the isotopes present in the teeth of the Spitalfields Roman woman have revealed an exact match with those found in Imperial Rome, which means that her origin can be traced not just to Italy but to Rome itself. “I find it very sad that she came so far and then died so young,” Rebecca confided, recognising the lack of any indication of the cause of death or whether the woman had given birth. Contemplating the presence of the skeleton with its delicate bones dyed brown by lead, it is apparent that the Spitalfields Roman woman holds her secrets and has many stories yet to tell.
More than seventy-five Roman burials were uncovered at the same time as the sarcophagus, many interred within wooden coffins and some only in shrouds. You might say these represented the earliest wave of immigration to arrive in Spitalfields.
“People were so mobile,” Rebecca explained to me, “We found a fourteen-year-old girl from North Africa whose mother was European. A legion from North Africa was sent to guard Hadrian’s Wall and we have found tagine cooking pots that may been theirs. I pity those men – how they must have suffered in the cold.”
The only Roman sarcophagus discovered in London in our time was uncovered in Spitalfields in 1999
Inside the stone sarcophagus an elaborately decorated lead coffin was discovered
At the Museum of London, the debris was removed to uncover the pattern of scallop shells
The lead coffin was opened to reveal the body of a young woman
Photographs of coffin & excavations copyright © London Museum
Portrait of Rebecca Redfern & photographs of skeletal details copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Harry Thomas, Baker & Musician
WOMEN AT WORK CROWDFUND REPORT: We have now raised £13,701 out of £25,000, contributed by 126 people, and we have 7 days to go. Click here to contribute
Next tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields on Saturday 16th May. Click here to book
The recipe is old but the cakes are fresh
This is Harry Thomas, baker at Townhouse, who makes all the cakes for our walking tours. His Queen Cakes from a recipe of 1721, served in the drawing room of the three hundred year house overlooking Christ Church, Spitalfields, have proved to be the ideal restorative for guests when they put their feet up and relax after a ramble round the neighbourhood.
Yet Harry has another string to his bow, since he matches his superlative flair in baking with an equal talent in music and songwriting – as Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I discovered when we joined him in the basement kitchen to hear the full story and observe the culinary spectacle of baking in progress.
“I would describe myself as a baker by trade and a musician in the rest of my time. Music has always been my passion and I played in a band for seven years when I was at school, growing up in Maidenhead, and then again at Goldsmith’s College where I studied Media & Communications. I graduated five years ago and started baking at Townhouse when I was twenty-one years old.
By then I was already in The Jacques. We are a touring band with more of an audience in France and continental Europe than here, so for the first couple of years, before Covid, we toured extensively. We are working on our second album now – I am a singer and we all write our songs together.
I have always been passionate about cooking and especially baking. My mother is a nursery school teacher, and we baked together and she took me to music lessons. As a child, I did not like reading fiction, instead I read cook books – that was what people bought me at Christmas.
At first, I read children’s cook books but then I graduated to adult ones at school, supplemented by Youtube cookery shows and the Food Network. As a consequence, I am not afraid of creating aggregates by taking parts of one recipe and the combining it with another. My parents will follow a recipe by the book exactly whereas I do not. The more batches of cakes I have baked, the more I have come to understand the variables which gives me leeway in terms of how I want a cake to turn out.
Since I came to work here, I have introduced more cakes into the repertoire although I still make a lot of those that were being baked before I arrived. But the more I have baked them, and by listening to customers’ preferences, I have evolved the recipes.
Flavour-wise, I just play around with things until I am happy. I bake cakes the way I like them and I will not bake something that I would not be interested in eating myself. I like old recipes and cakes that remind me of the cakes that my mum would have baked or those I remember at bake sales at village fairs.
I want my cakes to make people feel special. When I introduced the Bakewell cake, I liked it because it was very crumbly, and I dust it with icing sugar and it feels special without being pretentious. It is very simple, equal measurements of everything in the cake and it just needs to be done correctly, with care.
I have a great balance in my life of baking and music. I could not have dreamt of a better balance of my passions in life. Obviously, I would like my music to advance and we have a record deal and a publishing deal. I am very uncompromising in that I always wanted my job to be rewarding and it is instantly gratifying. I get to cook all day and regularly go and play music all evening. Sometimes I get up early and go to the gym, bake cakes all day, and go and play music until midnight. Then I go to bed and come back and do it all over again!”
At the foot of the page in Mary Stockdale’s recipe book of 1721 is the recipe for Queen Cakes
Harry and his celebrated Queen Cakes, laced with mace and nutmeg
Photographs of Harry Thomas copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Final Week Of Our Crowdfund
After three weeks of crowdfunding – thanks to the generosity of 87 supporters – we have raised £11,304, which is close to half of our target of £25,000 to publish the book of Sarah Ainslie’s photographs, accompanied by an exhibition of the pictures.
We have just a week to go now and I call upon my readers to help us at this crucial moment. If every reader of Spitalfields Life gave even a small donation, we could reach our total today. Additionally, if you are able to contribute now, this will build momentum and encourage others.
CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE CROWDFUND
I believe Sarah Ainslie’s book is important. Firstly, because these are seriously good photographs. Secondly, because our world is shaped by the work done by women who are too often unseen and this project is a means to give them visibility and celebrate them. Thirdly, because – by documenting working women through four decades – Sarah has created a vital record of social change.
Below you can read some of the things supporters have been saying and see some pages from the book.
‘Sarah Ainslie’s portraits are always wonderful, and it will be a joy to see these pictures of women gathered together in what will I know be the be the beautiful trademark hardback of a Spitalfields Life publication.’ Arbabella Warner
‘Wonderful to see this compelling visual testimony to women’s work. Thank you for bringing it to light.’ Olivia Horsfall Turner
‘Thank you for your work recognising and celebrating women’s lives.’ Caz Richards
‘Lived in the East End for 40+ years. An inspired book Sarah.’ LisaFerguson
‘Good luck with the book. It sounds great.’ Alice Rawsthorn
‘This is an amazing project. Good luck with the crowdfund and looking forward to the publication. Best, Fatima’
‘Looking forward to seeing this in print. Well done Sarah!’ David Hoffman
‘This will be a wonderful, inspiring and fascinating book. So looking forward to seeing it published.’ Mary Norden
‘Bravo for the women doing the work, and Sarah for celebrating them!’ Robin Huffman
‘The Alcove in Rhode Island is one of the only publicly accessible libraries in the world focused entirely on women at work. We are thrilled to support this book, and to someday boast a copy on our shelves.’
‘Lovely portraits of terrific women. It’s so nice to see ordinary people and their work photographed with such skill.’ Mary Dalton
‘What an amazing project! So happy to support it.’ Vivienne Palmer
‘A wonderful celebration of the work of women in the East End. For my 3rd great great grandmother Isabella Hirst and her four daughters Isabella, Charlotte, Elizabeth and Harriett.’ Carolyn Hirst
Here are a few excerpts from the pages of the book.
Bow food bank volunteers
‘There are number of women who work in teams like the rubbish collectors and street sweepers. When I went out on the dustcart in Hackney it was interesting to experience at first-hand what their work entails and how much we don’t think about the services that are seemingly unseen, it also gave me an insight into how important it was for them to be able to create their own systems of working as a team, to be in charge of their own patch in their own way. Often the smell would become overwhelming as we drove around the streets, stopping periodically to collect and empty the bins. I really enjoyed the moments during their tea breaks whilst sitting in the back of the truck chatting, laughing and sharing snippets of their lives with each other as they did crosswords.’ Sarah Ainslie
‘I think one of the most fascinating places in the East End is C. E. Burns in Bacon St, a second-hand furniture and bric-a-brac store, and finding Carol Burns within her personal domain of a garden shed that is her office, she is a woman in charge sitting gloriously in the midst of the office paraphernalia, filing boxes filled with receipts spilling everywhere, memorabilia and family photos especially those of her dad Charlie Burns who was an East End waste paper merchant and boxing entrepreneur. I loved all these details that told a story about her and the family and the life that they had lived and whose business she now runs.’ Sarah Ainslie
‘The labour force in the area of health, well-being and caring is predominantly made up of women who are often unrecognised for their work, their capacity for care is so vital to each of our lives. It was a great experience to have access to so many different hospital departments at Homerton Hospital where everyone gave me their precious time and a greater understanding of how a hospital works, especially as I had been a patient there only the year before. As I photographed I very quickly realized that everyone from consultants, doctors, nurses, midwives and admin staff to cleaners, physios, chaplains, and porters are interdependent and all equally important to each other and the patients, and without any one of those elements the hospital would cease to function properly.’ Sarah Ainslie
‘I discovered Shirif Izzet one morning when I walked into Solis Launderette (owned by her brother) where she is the manager. She was so welcoming to me and everyone who came in, and as we were chatting, she kept going off to make mugs of tea and biscuits for the elders who were waiting for their washing. On the walls there were photographs of customers and postcards that they had sent from their holidays, revealing a genuine feeling of warmth and care for the community. When I asked about coming to photograph her, she immediately said she would and was happy to do it right there and then, so that’s what we did. Launderettes are part of the wonderful places to have around us, not just to get your washing done or a service wash but a place that is warm and friendly to hang out in, they are a hub like cafes, chicken shops, libraries and community centres.’ Sarah Ainslie
At Sutton House
This Sunday 10th May, you can visit Sutton House as part of Hackney History Festival. There is a whole day of lectures on subjects of local interest including a talk by Tessa Hunkin about Hackney Mosaic Project at 4pm. Click here for all tickets
I love to visit dark old houses on bright sunny days. There is something delicious about stepping from the light of the day into the dark of the interior, almost as if the transition from one zone to another was that of time travel, from the present into another era.
I wonder if this notion is a residue of my childhood, when my parents took me on holiday trips to visit stately homes, so that now I associate these charismatically crumbling old piles of architecture with bright English afternoons.
Such were my feelings when visiting Sutton House, the oldest house in the East End, recently. It made me think of the country mansions of city burghers that once filled Spitalfields before the streets were laid out and the terraces built up.
Built between 1534-5 by Ralph Sadleir, an associate of Thomas Cromwell, Sutton House employed oak beams from the royal forest of Enfield given to Cromwell by Henry VIII. In 1550, Sadleir sold his house to John Machell who became Sheriff Of London, acquiring wealth as a City merchant. Overreaching himself in debt, the house was repossessed by Sir James Deane, a money-lender.
By 1627, it was in the ownership of Captain John Milward, a silk merchant and member of the East India Company, who furnished it with oriental carpets and commissioned elaborate strapwork murals upon the staircase that survive in fragments to this day.
Sarah Freeman leased the house in 1657 for a girls’ school which ran for nearly a century until it was divided into two dwellings in the mid-eighteenth century, Ivy House and Milford House. Only at the end of the nineteenth century were the two halves reunited when Canon Evelyn Gardner created St John’s Institute as a recreational club for ‘men of all classes.’ Within ten years the building was condemned as unsafe, but thanks to a public appeal which raised £3000 it was extensively renovated with additions in the Arts & Crafts style.
After the Institute left, a failed attempt was made to buy Sutton House for the nation before the National Trust stepped in to save it in 1938. For decades, rooms were let as offices to voluntary organisations until squatters occupied the house in the eighties. Then developers were prevented from converting it into luxury flats by a successful local campaign to Save Sutton House which eventually opened to the public in 1991.
Thus history passed through Sutton House like a whirlwind yet, despite all the changes, the atmosphere of past ages still lingers, especially in the shadowy panelled rooms that enfold the overwhelming mystery of numberless untold stories.
Tudor door and Georgian fanlight
Original transom window dating from the Tudor era
In the Linenfold Parlour
Looking downstairs from the Great Chamber
Looking from the Little Chamber into the Great Chamber
The Great Chamber
Cabinet in the Little Chamber
Tudor kitchen
Cellar stairs
Looking through the courtyard
Looking up from the courtyard
Known as the ‘Armada Window,’ this is the oldest window in the East End
Sutton House can be visited as part of a guided tour. Tickets go on sale every Friday for tours on the following Wednesday, Friday & Sunday.
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Birds Of Hoxton
Tessa Hunkin and the members of Hackney Mosaic Project never stop creating. Their latest masterpiece, Birds of Hoxton, was installed in the residents’ garden at Follingham Court this week, where it can be seen by passers-by walking south down Hoxton St.
Three years in the making, this ambitious diptych illustrates the ornithology of the neighbourhood with each species created by a different mosaic maker, imparting diverse personalities to each of the birds and vivid life to the completed mosaic.
Further up in Hoxton Market, decorative mosaic roundels have been installed outside Shoreditch Library, Hoxton Hall and Hoxton Garden, while just round the corner where Pitfield St meets Old St, you will find the Hoxton Varieties Mosaic from 2013. These new projects mark a return to their roots for the project, since this is where it all began with the Shepherdess Walk Mosaics back in 2012.
Tessa Hunkin is giving an illustrated talk, showing the mosaics and telling the story of the project, this Sunday 10th May at 4pm at Sutton House, Homerton High St, E9 6JQ, as part of Hackney History Festival.
Click here to buy a ticket for £3
Sutton House is the oldest house in Hackney and one of London’s few remaining Tudor mansions, built in 1535, so this is a great opportunity to pay a visit.
Roundel outside Hoxton Garden
Roundel outside Hoxton Hall
Roundel outside Shoreditch Library
Tessa Hunkin with two local councillors on the eve of the local election
The Hoxton Varieties mosaic was installed in Pitfield St in 2013
Click here to order a copy of Tessa Hunkin’s Hackney Mosaic Project
Piotr Frac, Stained Glass Artist
We are in the third week of our crowdfund and have raised £7,479 towards our target of £25,000, so we still have a way to go. Please check in the pockets of your winter coat and down the back of the sofa to see if you can help us get there.
Click here to support our crowdfund to publish Sarah Ainslie’s WOMEN AT WORK
Happy in the crypt beneath John Soane’s St John on Bethnal Green of 1828, Piotr Frac works peacefully making beautiful stained glass while the world passes by at this busiest of East End crossroads. Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I visited Piotr in his subterranean workshop and were delighted to observe his dexterity in action and admire some of his recent creations.
Piotr’s appealingly modest demeanour and soft spoken manner belie the moral courage and determination it has cost him to succeed in this rare occupation. This is to say nothing of his extraordinary skill in the cutting of glass and the melding of lead to fashion such accomplished work, or his creative talent in contriving designs that draw upon the age-old traditions of stained glass but are unmistakably of our own time.
Gripped by a passion for the magic of stained glass at an early age, Piotr always knew this what what he had to do. Yet even to begin to make his way in his chosen profession, Piotr had to leave his home country and find a whole new life, speaking another language in another country.
It is our gain that Piotr brought his talent and capacity for work to London. That he found his spiritual home in the East End is no accident, since he follows in the footsteps of centuries of skilled migrants, starting with the Huguenots in the sixteenth century, who have immeasurably enriched our culture with their creative energies.
“I am from a working class family in Byton, Silesia, in the south of Poland. My interest in stained glass began when I was ten or eleven years old and I went with my school to see Krakow Cathedral. The stained glass was something beautiful and that was the first time in my life I saw it. I was inspired by the colours and the light, it still excites me.
I always had an interest in drawing and painting – so, after high school, I went to a school of sculpture where they taught stained glass restoration. This was more than twenty years ago, but it was the start of my journey with stained glass. After I got my diploma in the restoration of stained glass, I worked on a project at a church for a few weeks before university. I studied art education in Silesia and I learnt painting, sculpture and calligraphy. I believe every artist needs a background in drawing and painting.
My ambition was to do stained glass, but there were hardly any jobs of any kind – I sold fish in the market in winter and I worked in a hospital, I took whatever I could get. Around 2005, I decided to leave the country. I had some Polish friends who had come to London and they helped me find a place to stay in Brixton. In the beginning, it was very difficult for me because of the language barrier. Without English, it was hard for me to communicate and find a job here. I worked on building sites. Every morning I got up at five and I walked around with this piece of paper which told me how to ask for a job. Someone wrote down a phonetic version of the words for me and I asked at building sites. After two weeks, I got a labouring job.
I lived in many places south of the river but seven years ago I moved to East London and I have stayed here ever since. At first I lived in the Hackney Rd near Victoria Park and I am still in that area, close the Roman Rd. I visited stained glass workshops but I could not get a job because I could not communicate. I did not want to work as a labourer forever so I decided to go to language school to learn English and this helped me a lot. At the English school here in the crypt of St John’s Bethnal Green, my teacher asked us to prepare a talk about myself and my interests. So I talked about my profession as a stained glass artist and my teacher introduced me to a stone carver in the crypt workshop. He told me, ‘If you are willing to teach stained glass classes, you are welcome to use the workshop.’ I started eight years ago with one student.
My first commission was to repair a Victorian glass door. Most of my work has been Victorian and Edwardian windows and doors, which has allowed me to survive because there are plenty that need repair or replacement. There are not a lot of creative commissions on offer but sometimes people want something different.
Two years ago, I won a competition to design a window for St John’s Hackney. It took a year for them to approve the design and I am in the middle of working on it now. I need to finish and install it. Also the London Museum bought a piece of mine. It is gorilla from a triptych of gorillas and it will be displayed there next year.
Once I moved to East London, I felt I belonged to here – not only because I started my workshop but because I met my wife, Akiko, here. In 2016, I become a British citizen so now I am a permanent member of the community.
Stained glass is a wonderful medium to work with and always looks fantastic because it changes all the time with the light, in different times of the day and seasons of the year. I believe there is a great potential for stained glass in modern architecture.
These days I am able to make a living and I would like to become more recognised as a stained glass artist. I am seeking more ambitious commissions.”
Constructing a nineteenth century door panel
A panel from Piotr’s triptych of gorillas
Piotr’s first panel designed and made in London
Piotr with one of his stained glass classes in the crypt of St John’s Bethnal Green
Repairing a Victorian glass door
Restoring nineteenth century church glass
Before repair
After repair
Piotr Frac, Stained Glass Artist
Studio portraits © Sarah Ainslie
Contact Piotr Frac direct to commission stained glass
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