Spitalfields Life

Edith Tudor-Hart, Photographer

July 2, 2026

by the gentle author

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Mark Richards explores the controversial work of photographer Edith Tudor-Hart and her secret life as a Soviet agent in London during the Cold War

Child staring into a bakery window, Whitechapel, 1935 (Courtesy of National Gallery of Scotland)

On a wall in a flat in Maida Vale hangs this small photograph. It is a window into a world of social unrest, poverty, espionage and insurrection. The photograph and the story behind it add weight to the view that there is often little truth in photography. What we see is what the photographer wants us to see.

I saw the photograph when I visited the late photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky for an interview and portrait session in 2016. It was not taken by him, but by his sister Edith Tudor-Hart (1908–1973). The picture had pride of place on a wall of well-known photographs just inside the entrance. Edith Tudor-Hart was one of the most talented documentary photographers of her time, but has now faded into obscurity after being being blacklisted for her Communist activity.

For me, it is one of the strongest photographs of its era. One of those pictures that all photographers hope to be able to capture one day. Its ability to tug the heartstrings and generate strong emotion remains even ninety years after it was taken. On face value, it is a photograph of a poor child staring into a bakery window in Whitechapel in 1935. The disparity between the hungry child and the plentiful display has an enduring poignancy, inspiring a futile desire to intervene.

This photograph was first published next to another of a baby chimp in a zoo, which was much better fed than this girl. The message was clear, as was Edith’s ability to use her camera as a weapon for social justice. The picture was subsequently reproduced widely in Communist leaflets, representing a call to action. Yet to grasp the nature of this phenomenon and understand the other photographs that Edith took of the East End, we need to appreciate both the social context and her personal motives. None of the photographs that she took at that time can be taken at face value.

There is no doubt that this photograph was staged – the bundle clutched tightly in the girl’s left hand is evidence of that. We shall never know who the girl was or how she became to the subject. Edith destroyed her photographic records in 1951 for fear of prosecution, so the background to most of her work is now lost. She used photography to highlight social inequality and deprivation, realising early on – while studying at the Bauhaus – that photographs have the power to alter people’s beliefs and change the world. In her time, photography had become a medium for social change, ideal for the promotion of political views to a large audience, affecting them through the impact of the visual image more powerfully than by the written word.

Edith was acutely aware of the potential to use photography to break down social barriers and influence an audience like never before. For her, photography represented a move of the locus of control into the hands of the people, offering the possibility of self-representation for everyone. She understood that those who press the camera shutter can control the story that a picture tells.

As well as being an accomplished photographer, Edith was also a committed Communist and a Soviet agent who used her power to further her hidden agenda. Born in Vienna in 1908, she had grown up during a period of unprecedented political and social upheaval which shaped her beliefs. Her radical views are probably best summed up in Das Eland Wiens by the Marxist writer Bruno Frei, which attacks the inequality of capitalism and demands a commitment to revolutionary activism and change. Unusually, the book contained photographs and this was probably a decisive influence in Edith’s choice to become a photographer.

Edith’s father ran a Socialist bookshop which stocked Bruno Frei’s work and she mixed in radical Jewish circles in Vienna. In 1927, she trained as a Montessori teacher in England until she was deported to Austria in 1931 after being photographed at a Communist rally. Once in Austria again, she worked as a photojournalist for the Soviet news agency TASS, but in 1933 she was arrested there, again for being a Communist activist. At this point, Edith fled from Austria with her husband and was exiled in England.

Back in England, she continued her affiliation with the Communist party, both as an activist and a Soviet agent. It is likely that she had been recruited by the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) as early as 1927. Edith is often portrayed as a low-level agent yet she spotted and recruited Kim Philby. He was one of the Cambridge spy ring with Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who caused damage to British interests and threatened its intelligence relationship with America during the Cold War. Edith knew Kim Philby’s wife Litzi Friedmann and was the one who introduced Philby to Arnold Deutsch, the Soviet Agent who managed the Cambridge spy ring. Her recruitment of Kim Philby was a seminal moment in her espionage activities.

In 1964, Anthony Blunt described Edith in his confession as being ‘the grandmother of us all.’ Yet, although she continued to be monitored by the security services until her death in 1973, she was never prosecuted for spying due to lack of evidence.

She had planned to produce a book of her photographs called Rich Man, Poor Man, after the nursery rhyme:

Daisy, daisy, who shall it be?

Who shall it be who will marry me?

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,

Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…

The ambition of the book was to highlight the contrast between rich and poor in British society and it would have featured her photographs of the East End, together with a series she took of mining communities in Wales. The shocking juxtaposition of her ‘Poodle Parlour’ photograph with the picture of the Clerkenwell slums at Gee Street in Lilliput in 1939 demonstrated he power of her approach. However, the book was never published. Eventually, the difficulty of being a woman photographer as well as being blacklisted for her Soviet connections led Edith to abandon photography altogether at the end of the fifties.

Some of the images that were intended for this book are incredibly powerful and reveal the nature of her talent as a photographer. Her method included talking to her subjects instead of photographing them from a distance and she showed a real ability for putting people at their ease.

Bakery Window was to have been the cover photograph of Rich Man, Poor Man and what a book it might have been. Today it lies unconstructed among the negatives of her photographic archives held by the National Gallery of Scotland which were given to them by her brother Wolfgang in 2004.

Slums at Gee St, Clerkenwell 1936

Poodle Parlour, West End, 1935

Family Group, Stepney, 1932

No Home, No Dole, London 1931

Communist Party demonstration, Hyde Park, c.1934

In Total Darkness, London 1935

Caledonian Market, 1931

Self portrait with unknown man, Caledonian Market c.1935

Edith Tudor-Hart, self portrait 1936

Photographs courtesy National Gallery of Scotland

The Markets Of Old London

July 1, 2026

by the gentle author

Next tickets available 18th July for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields

Clare Market c.1900

I never knew there was a picture of the legendary and long-vanished Clare Market – where Joseph Grimaldi was born – until I came upon this old glass slide among many thousands in the collection of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, housed at the Bishopsgate Institute. Scrutinising this picture, the market does not feel remote at all, as if I could take a stroll over there to Holborn in person as easily as I can browse the details of the photograph. Yet the Clare Market slum, as it became known, was swept away in 1905 to create the grand civic gestures of Kingsway and Aldwych.

Searching through this curious collection of glass slides, left-overs from the days of educational magic lantern shows – comprising many multiple shots of famous landmarks and grim old church interiors – I was able to piece together this set of evocative photographs portraying the markets of old London. Of those included here only Smithfield, London’s oldest wholesale market, continues trading from the same building, though Leather Lane, Hoxton Market and East St Market still operate as street markets, but Clare Market, Whitechapel Hay Market and the Caledonian Rd Market have gone forever. Meanwhile, Billingsgate, Covent Garden and Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market have moved to new premises, and Leadenhall’s last butcher – once the stock-in-trade of all the shops in this former cathedral of poultry – closed last year.

Markets fascinate me as theatres of commercial and cultural endeavour in which a myriad strands of human activity meet. If you are seeking life, there is no better place to look than in a market. Wherever I travelled, I always visited the markets, the black-markets of Moscow in 1991, the junk markets of Beijing in 1999, the Chelsea Market in Manhattan, the central market in Havana, the street markets of Rio, the farmers’ markets of Transylvania and the flea market in Tblisi – where, memorably, I bought a sixteenth century silver Dutch sixpence and then absent-mindedly gave it away to a beggar by mistake ten minutes later. I often wonder if he cast the rare coin away in disgust.

Similarly in London, I cannot resist markets as places where society becomes public performance, each one with its own social code, language, and collective personality – depending upon the nature of the merchandise, the location, the time of day and the amount of money changing hands. Living in Spitalfields, the presence of the markets defines the quickening atmosphere through the week, from the Thursday antiques market to the Brick Lane traders, fly-pitchers and flower market in Bethnal Green every Sunday. I am always seduced by the sense of infinite possibility when I enter a market, which makes it a great delight to live surrounded by markets.

These old glass slides, many of a hundred years ago, capture the mass spectacle of purposeful activity that markets offer and the sense of self-respect of those – especially porters – for whom the market was their life, winning status within an elaborate hierarchy that had evolved over centuries. Nowadays, the term “marketplace” is sometimes reduced to mean mere economic transaction, but these photographs reveal that in London it has always meant so much more.

Billingsgate Market, c.1910

Whitechapel Hay Market c.1920 (looking towards Aldgate)

Whitechapel Hay Market, c.1920 (looking east towards Whitechapel)

Porters at Smithfield Market, c.1910

Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910

Book sale at Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910

Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910

Covent Garden Market, c.1920

Covent Garden Market, c.1910

Covent Garden, c.1910

Covent Garden Market, 1925

Covent Garden Market, Floral Hall, c.1910

Leadenhall Market, Christmas 1935

Leadenhall Market, c.1910

East St Market, c.1910

Leather Lane Market, 1936

Hoxton Market, Shoreditch, 1910

Spitalfields Market, c.1930

Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

You may like to look at these old photographs of the Spitalfields Market by Mark Jackson & Huw Davies

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At Cranbrook Community Food Garden

June 30, 2026

by the gentle author

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Laura Buckley

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I were delighted to shelter under a tree and share a cuppa with Head Gardener Laura Buckley at the Cranbrook Community Food Garden in Bethnal Green during a recent downpour.

Surrounded on all sides by the modernist towers of the Cranbrook Estate designed by Francis Skinner, Douglas Bailey & Berthold Lubetkin in 1963, the Garden is an unlikely and welcome enclave of rural greenery where residents grow vegetables, fruit and flowers, and cultivate community.

Laura was one of the pioneers of the garden and we were curious to hear of its origins seventeen years ago, and learn of her love of horticulture which took root in her childhood in the sixties in Watney Market.

‘I have lived on the Cranbrook Estate for thirty years but at first I did not have much involvement – I live on the outskirts, in one of the blocks facing out onto the main road. Then, one day, I was convalescing at home after a big operation and I saw a notice pinned up in the lobby of the flats, inviting residents to get involved in some guerrilla gardening around the Estate. My mobility was restricted so I thought, ‘A bit of gentle gardening, that’d be lovely.’ So I got together with some others, planting bulbs, a couple of times. Then the council got in touch and asked ‘Since you’ve already formed a group, would you be interested in starting a garden?’ So they offered us this space and we had a chit-chat.

That was 2009, but before that there was a family that organised open days from the community centre on the Estate with races up and down the avenue and there was entertainment on the greens. I remember thinking, ‘It’s really lovely to see that in this day and age.’ So when I saw the sign about guerrilla gardening, I realised there was a bit of a community here.

When we started, the garden was just a brown triangle of wood chips with a fence round it and a set of climbing bars. It was supposed to be a play area but it was completely empty. So a little band of seven of us from the guerrilla gardening group, we got on our computers and we sourced materials. We put up a banner – ‘Come and help us transform this dead land into a garden’ and I reckon maybe eighty people turned up. They didn’t all live in the Estate, quite a few people came from the more gentrified areas around Victoria Park – they showed up with their tools, forks for digging and suchlike. They just wanted to help us get started, improving the view down the avenue, and then they said ‘Good Luck’ and off they went.

We got a lot of inquiries about making it into allotments but obviously only a few people would benefit from this precious space. So me and a few others decided, ‘Let’s make it a community garden.’ I think we envisioned it would work a lot like allotments except that we would share what we grew in all of the beds and it would be a consistent group of gardeners. But we have found a lot of the participants are transient. We have also had a lot of students studying environmentalism. There is a core of gardeners now but the membership does change from year to year and we constantly get new people joining. Even though people may return to their home country or another part of Britain that is their home, they are always reluctant to leave the membership list. Out of our total membership of eighty, there are probably thirty who we see very regularly. Once we realised that most people cannot come every day to look after their beds, we started to do Saturday drop-in sessions when anyone can come by for an hour during the day. And we invite people with skills and pair them up with newcomers.

My job is coming up with ideas to keep the garden interesting and safe, working out the lists of tasks that members are recommended to do while they are here. After being a member for a while, gardeners get the code to the gate and are free to come and go as they please out of hours. The gate is open most days and anyone passing is welcome to come in and look around. Our gardeners are very happy to give tours. We’d like to see more families. We give children a watering can or a magnifying glass and off they go. We are proud to show off our garden.

Over time, the garden has matured. This massive bay tree overshadowing us was in a five inch pot when we got it. We got a small grant a few years ago and planted berries – blackcurrants, blueberries and raspberries – along the exterior fence under the poplars, so children can pick berries as they pass by and then drag their parents into the garden.

I live on the fourth floor and sometimes – as I have got older and infirm – I can’t get here if the lift is broken. For me this is my access to the outdoors and fulfils my desire to grow things and create a garden. This is my social life and I have made lots of friendships, acquaintances too. We drink tea together and we organise outings. There is a strong social element to the garden. I take a lot of pride in how the garden has come along. It inspires my artwork, I go home and make paintings of it.

I was one of the few here that had a garden as a child and practised a bit of gardening with my parents. I was born in the London Hospital as were most of my siblings. I am one of eight children. My mum’s from Birmingham and my dad was Irish, from Dublin. They set up home in Chapman St near Watney St Market in the fifties, surrounded by bomb sites. Originally, we lived in tenement blocks in Brady St but then we got offered a brand new maisonette in Chapman St, it had four bedrooms, an upstairs and a downstairs, and a small garden. We had pets, and I remember we grew chrysanthemums and we had lots of attempts at growing lettuces and suchlike. So lots of flowers but also lots of children. We pitched tents and had a swing that my grandma sent down from Birmingham. Of course, we played out on the street and we spent most of our time digging on bomb sites and smashing windows of derelict buildings. A few years later, Dan Jones set up Betts St adventure playground and we spent a massive amount of time there. He also set up the E1 Festival which was really exciting.

There was community. Our school was fifty yards from home and everybody played out on the street. All the dads drank together and all the mums went to the community centre in the church hall. We used to go on lots of outings, beanos. Everybody you knew piled into coaches and went to Southend for the day. Everyone seemed to know each other. Lots of parties and the hokey-cokey and all kinds of silly things. It seems such a long time ago now.’

Laura dancing at the E1 Festival, Bigland Green 1975, photo by David Hoffman

David Johnson’s Cafes

June 29, 2026

by the gentle author

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Fredson’s Cafe, Alie St

David Johnson took these magnificent photographs of cafes in Kodachrome around 1980.

“When I lived in East London, I started this project to photograph some classic cafes, mainly in the East End – but also elsewhere as I came across them in my travels. I think it was the sign-writing and eclectic typography which were the main attractions. I realised that they were not going to be around much longer. Many were run by Italian families who started up in the post-war period. Annoyingly, I did not make a note of the locations – so if you can help, please leave a comment.”

David Johnson

Aeron Cafe

Bridge Cafe

Corner Parlour

Alfredo’s Cafe, Islington

Sign at Alfredo’s Cafe

Flock-In

Gee’s Cafe

George’s Cafe, Whitechapel

The Happy Fillet

Jim’s Cafe, Islington

Jubilee Cafe

Moon & Sixpence Cafe

Norman’s Nosh Bar

Phyllis’s Cafe

Silvio Cafe

The Ninety Eight

The Village Rest

Viking Cafe

Magno Cafe

Leslie’s Cafe

Crawford Cafe

Cafe

Empire Cafe

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Remembering Mr Pussy In the Dog Days

June 28, 2026

by the gentle author

Remembering my old cat Mr Pussy who died in 2017

The sagacious Mr Pussy

There is an exceptional hush upon the East End, with with the heat and the football conspiring to empty the streets of locals and tourists alike. The clouds hang heavy and the atmosphere is quiet, and my cat Mr Pussy divides his time between dozing on the bed and dozing under a bush. The pace of the city is stilled and Mr Pussy finds the climate conducive to resting.

Mr Pussy observes me with doleful eyes as I go about my daily tasks, too gracious to be overtly critical, yet he hopes that I might one day learn to appreciate the virtue of sitting peacefully for extended periods of time without other occupation, as he does. To this end, Mr Pussy waits patiently until a suitable opportunity when I am settled at my work before he approaches me. Arriving silently like a ghost, Mr Pussy reaches out a soft paw to stroke my forearm gently while I am writing, as a discreet gesture of companionship, drawing my attention without interrupting my activity.

Settling at my side and savouring the tranquillity of the hour, a purr of contentment emanates from him. And if my concentration should wander from my page, searching for a word or casting around to seek the direction of my thought, then I chance upon his hypnotic golden eyes, meeting my gaze with their fathomless depth and opalescent gleam. He has my attention. He has an infinite capacity for staring. He knows I am a novice and he is an expert at it. He knows I cannot resist succumbing to his superior mesmeric powers. He has me spellbound and I share his stillness. The house is empty and we are alone. We look at each other eye to eye, without blinking, to see who flinches first.

Almost imperceptibly, Mr Pussy begins to lower his lids and I do the same. I follow along, as his supplicant. Our eyelids move in sync and we are nodding off to sleep, it seems. I might enter the feline realm, if I did not open my lids again momentarily – only to discover that his eyes are open too. It is a moment of mutual recognition. Mr Pussy was testing the quality of my will, exploring my susceptibility to mental control. Mr Pussy observes me. Mr Pussy is implacable, yet he wants me to follow his example. Mr Pussy knows how to be. Mr Pussy keeps himself. Mr Pussy seeks to be calm. Mr Pussy is always present in the moment. Mr Pussy is sufficient.

Equally, Mr Pussy is curious of me and the intriguing nature of my existence that revolves around things other than eating and sleeping. I am the object of his scrutiny, Mr Pussy is studying me. Mr Pussy is an anthropologist, living among those who are subject of his fascination. Mr Pussy’s research methods are unconventional, he thinks he may gain knowledge by osmosis if he sleeps close to me or he may imbibe understanding by lapping up my bathwater.

Not always an entirely conscientious student, Mr Pussy likes to contemplate his findings at length. Mr Pussy likes to sleep on it, and he is a grand master in the art of somnolence. Mr Pussy knows how to behave in these dog days.

CLICK HERE TO BUY A COPY OF THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY

“I was always disparaging of those who dote over their pets, as if this apparent sentimentality were an indicator of some character flaw. That changed when I bought a cat, just a couple of weeks after the death of my father. “

THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY is a literary hymn to the intimate relationship between humans and animals, filled with sentiment without becoming sentimental.

At Kaymet, Tray & Trolley Makers

June 27, 2026

by the gentle author

Click here to book for my tour through July, August & September

Ron uses a power press to form trays

Contributing Photographer Rachel Ferriman and I ventured a rare trip south of the river recently to visit the wondrous Kaymet factory in Bermondsey where snazzy trays and trolleys are hand made in aluminium.

We were delighted to be shown round by proprietor Mark Brearley who, as co-author of Made In London, knows a thing or two about the challenges and importance of manufacturing in the capital. Proving that he puts his money where his mouth is, thirteen years ago Mark came along to buy a tray for his wife’s birthday, discovered that the business was going into liquidation and agreed to take it on, without hesitation.

I had no idea how an aluminium tray could be hand made until I came here. Yet the processes of forming, punching, polishing, graining, anodising and assembly require significant human skill and painstaking craft at every stage. As well as preventing oxidisation, anodising introduces colour, while graining imparts an organic texture and, finally, polishing delivers the shine.

There are two kinds of trays made here. Pressed trays formed out of a single sheet of aluminium possess an elegant simplicity, while assembled trays offer an infinite variety of colour, texture and pattern contained within neatly ridged metal edges and handles. What could be more civilised for breakfast in bed or lunch in the garden than a stylish tray from Kaymet? The discreet royal warrant tells you all you need to know.

When Rachel & I sat down with Mark after our factory tour, he beguiled us with his lyrical tale of the origin of London’s top trays.

‘It all goes back to the nineteenth century, to the Schreiber family, who were immigrants of German origin with a history of metalwork and retail, and they were connected with another family, the Kahns. In fact, Sydney Schreiber who started Kaymet changed his surname to Kahn. By the early twentieth century, they had a few shops near the Elephant & Castle, one of which was a toy shop that carried on until the seventies. They had a radio shop when radios first became popular, also in Elephant & Castle, making the cases from sheet metal in the basement of the shop. And that’s the origin of what became the sheet metal and engineering business which moved to Kennington Lane and did very well during the Second World War making radio casings in aluminium. After the war, they had to decide what to do next, so in 1947 they decided to produce homewares in anodised aluminium. And that’s when Kaymet was founded – the ‘K’ of Kahn and ‘met’ from metal – making trays and trolleys.

No-one knows where the designs come from, they have emerged from production with no named designer. We just have a few old drawings and books with dimensions and instructions, and we know of some interventions by industrial designers. It was a process of huge inventiveness because they rapidly came up with a big product range. Somebody invented all those products and worked them out.

They’re very practical objects. If you take the ribbed tray – as we call it – with the ribbed pattern on the extruded handles and edges, that ribbed-ness makes it look very fifties and it just so happens that design originates from then. Yet the story behind it is a practical one. The trays we were making before that were expensive because they were edged with a flat strip of aluminium which required a lot of polishing to remove imperfections. But once we made them ribbed they needed less polishing and less volume of aluminium so they were lighter. It wasn’t primarily a stylistic choice although maybe they were influenced by the moment they were in.

Who came up the idea of making trolleys that, instead of having legs to support the tiers and a separate handle, had a frame which combined the legs and the handle? It appeared in the late fifties or early sixties across lots of manufacturers and it’s drastically better. It looks better, it’s sturdier and it’s easier to make.

After 1947, Kaymet expanded dramatically with up to 200 employees. They took on a lot of contract work, casting handles and anodising for other companies, which magnified the scale of the company. They built an impressive factory for themselves off the Old Kent Rd. But then fashions changed, with competitors making pressed plastic trays and manufacturing them cheaply in other parts of the world.

The aspirational trend for drinks trolleys fell away and the business shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, losing their factory in the nineties and ending up in a series of smaller and smaller premises. I took it on in 2013 when it went into liquidation and agreed to give it a go in collaboration with the proprietor, taking on the staff of four, re-renting the building and rescuing what we could of the tools, reinvesting and pushing sales with a new business strategy.

I had no idea. I was in the right place at the right time because I had been researching manufacturing in London. I simply went along to the factory one day to buy a tray for my wife for her birthday but unfortunately they were liquidating the company and asked if I had any ideas, which turned into ‘Let’s do it together!’ I had to decide over the weekend and I knew everyone is enthusiastic about provenance, where things are made. And it’s a design classic, they are brilliant designs. ‘Surely I can make it work?’ I thought. My business strategy is if we don’t sell more trays, we’re dead, it will eat all my money, so I’d better sell more.

We focussed on refreshing the presentation and getting a decent website. We started doing trade shows. We re-approached old customers and we rebuilt the sales by giving it more energy. We have regrown it again and moved to significantly bigger premises to flourish.’

Ron places a blank into the press to make a tray

Ron takes the tray from the press

Ron examines the tray

Matt punches the holes in the trays

Matt uses the punch to make the holes

Matt examines a finished tray

James polishes tray edges

Junior trims the edge strips to size

Junior using the chop saw to cut the edges to size

Ken supervises orders on the factory floor

The factory

Mark Brearley

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In The Lavender Fields Of Surrey

June 26, 2026

by the gentle author

Click here to book for my tour through July, August & September

I cannot imagine a more relaxing way to enjoy a sunny English summer afternoon than a walk through a field of lavender. Observe the subtle tones of blue, extending like a mist to the horizon and rippling like the surface of the sea as the wind passes over. Inhale the pungent fragrance carried on the breeze. Delight in the orange butterflies dancing over the plants. Spot the pheasants scuttling away and – if you are as lucky as I was – encounter a red fox stalking the game birds through the forest of lavender. What an astonishing colour contrast his glossy russet pelt made as he disappeared into the haze of blue and green plants.

Lavender has been grown on the Surrey Downs for centuries and sold in summer upon the streets of the capital by itinerant traders. The aromatic properties and medicinal applications of lavender have always been appreciated, with each year’s new crop signalling the arrival of summer in London.

The lavender growing tradition in Surrey is kept alive by Mayfield Lavender in Banstead where visitors may stroll through fields of different varieties and then enjoy lavender ice cream or a cream tea with a lavender scone afterwards, before returning home laden with lavender pillows, soap, honey and oil.

Let me confess, I had given up on lavender – it had become the smell most redolent of sanitary cleaning products. But now I have learnt to distinguish between the different varieties and found a preference for a delicately-fragranced English lavender by the name of Folgate, I have rediscovered it again. My entire house is scented with it and the soporific qualities are evident. At the end of that sunny afternoon, when I returned from my excursion to the lavender fields of Surrey, I sat down in my armchair and did not awake again until supper time.

‘Six bunches a penny, sweet lavender!’ is the cry that invites in the street the purchasers of this cheap and pleasant perfume. A considerable quantity of the shrub is sold to the middling-classes of the inhabitants, who are fond of placing lavender among their linen – the scent of which conquers that of the soap used in washing. – William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders, 1804