Wonderful London’s East End
It is my pleasure to publish these evocative pictures of the East End (with some occasionally facetious original captions) selected from the popular magazine Wonderful London edited by St John Adcock and produced by The Fleetway House in the nineteen-twenties. Most photographers were not credited – though many were distinguished talents of the day, including East End photographer William Whiffin (1879-1957).
Boys are often seen without boots or stockings, and football barefoot under such conditions has grave risks from glass or old tin cans, but there are many urchins who would rather run about barefoot.
When this narrow little dwelling in St John’s Hill, Shadwell, was first built in 1753, its inhabitants could walk in a few minutes to the meadows round Stepney or, venture further afield, to hear the cuckoo in the orchards of Poplar.
Middlesex St is still known by its old name of Petticoat Lane. Some of the goods on offer at amazingly low prices on a Sunday morning are not above suspicion of being stolen, and you may buy a watch at one end of the street and see it for sale again by the time you reach reach the other.
A vanished theatre on the borders of Hoxton, just before demolition, photographed by William Whiffin. In 1838, a tea garden by the name of ‘the Eagle Tavern’ was put up in Shepherdess Walk in the City Rd near the ‘Shepherd & Shepherdess,’ a similar establishment founded at the beginning of the same century. Melodramas such as ‘The Lights ‘O London’ and entertainments like ‘The Secrets of the Harem,’ were also given. In 1882, General Booth turned the place into a Meeting Hall for his Salvation Army. There is little suggestion of the pastoral about Shepherdess Walk now.
In the East End and all over the poorer parts of London, a strange kind of establishment, half booth, half shop, is common and particularly popular with greengrocers. Old packing cases are the foundation of a slope of fruit which begins unpleasantly near the level of the pavement and ends in the recess behind the dingy awning. At night, the buttresses of vegetables are withdrawn into shelter.
Old shop front in Bow photographed by William Whiffin. Pawnbroking, once as decorous as banking, has fallen from the high estate in the vicinity of Lombard St. Now, combined instead with the sale of secondhand jewellery, furniture and hundred other commodities, it is apt to seek the corners of the meaner streets.
A water tank covered by a plank in a backyard among the slums is an unlikely place for a stage, but an undaunted admirer of that great Cockney humorist, Charlie Chaplin, is holding his audience with an imitation of the well-known gestures with which the famous comic actor indicates the care-free-though-down-and-out view of life which he has immortalised.
Old shop front in Poplar photographed by William Whiffin
An old charity school for girl and boy down at Wapping founded in 1704. The present building dates from 1760 and the school is supported by voluntary subscriptions. The school provided for the ‘putting out of apprentices’ and for clothing the pupils.
The hunt for bargains in Shoreditch. A glamour surrounds the rickety coster’s barrow which supports a few dozens of books. But, to tell the truth, the organisation of the big shops is now so efficient that the chances of finding anything good at these open air book markets may have long odds laid against it.
The landsman’s conception of a sailing vessel, with all its complex of standing and running rigging that serves mast and sail with ordered efficiency, is apt for a shock when he sees a Thames barge by a dockside. The endless coils and loops of rope of different thickness, the length of chain and the litter of brooms, buckets, fenders and pieces of canvas, seem to be in the most insuperable confusion.
Gloom and grime in Chinatown. Pennyfields runs from West India Dock Rd to Poplar High St. A Chinese restaurant on the corner and a few Chinese and European clothes are all that is to be seen in the daytime.
The gem of Cornhill, Birches, where it stood for two hundred years. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the brothers Adam erected its beautiful shop front. Within were old bills of fare printed on satin, a silver tureen fashioned to the likeness of a turtle and many other curious odd-flavoured things. Birches have catered for the inspired feasting of the City Companies and Guilds for two centuries but now this shop has moved to Old Broad St and, instead of Adam, we are to have Art Nouveau ferro-concrete.
It is doubtful if the Borough Council of Poplar had any notion, when they supplied the district with water carts, that the supplementary use pictured in this photograph by William Whiffin would be made of them. Given a complacent driver, there is no reason why these children should not go on for miles.
Grime and gloom in St George’s St photographed by William Whiffin. St George’s St used to be the famous Ratcliff Highway and runs from East Smithfield to Shadwell High St. It is a maritime street and contains various establishments, religious and otherwise, which cater for the sailor.
River Lea at Bow Bridge photographed by William Whiffin. On the right are Bow flour mills, while to the left, beyond the bridge, a large brewery is seen.
A view of Curtain Rd photographed by William Whiffin, famed for its cabinet makers. It runs from Worship St – a turning to the left when walking along Norton Folgate towards Shoreditch High St – to Old St. Curtain Rd got its name from a curtain wall, once part of the outworks of the city’s fortifications.
Fish porters of Billingsgate gathered around consignments lately arrived from the coast. At one time, smacks brought all the fish sold in the market and were unloaded at Billingsgate Wharf, said to be the oldest in London.
Crosby Hall as it stood in Bishopsgate. Alderman Sir John Crosby, a wealthy grocer, got the lease of some ground off Bishopsgate in 1466 from Alice Ashfield, Prioress of St Helen’s, at a rent of eleven pounds, six shillings and eightpence per annum, and built Crosby Hall there. It came into the possession of Sir Thomas More around 1518 and by 1638 it was in the hands of the East India Company, but in 1910 it was taken down and re-erected in Cheyne Walk.
Whatever their relations with the Constable may come to be in later life, the children of the East End, in their early days, are quite willing to use his protection at wide street crossings.
There is no more important work in the great cities than the amelioration of the slum child’s lot. Many East End children have never been beyond their own disease-ridden courts and dingy streets that form their playground.
Photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
John Claridge’s French House Portraits
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Today’s Bastille Day celebrations at The French House, Dean St (1-5pm) are dedicated to the memory of photographer John Claridge who was a long-term regular at this beloved Soho institution where many of his pictures are displayed.
“I started taking portraits of people at The French House in the seventies when I took a picture of Gaston Berlemont. Then, while taking Spike Milligan’s portrait, we got to talking about Soho. At the time, I was living in Frith St, so Ronnie Scott’s and The French were both very familiar to us and, even then, both of us voiced our sadness at changes we saw – lovely delicatessens, independent restaurants and specialists shops closing down, all of which had been there for years.
In 2004, I decided to document the customers at The French in earnest. For me, it was the one place in Soho that still held its Bohemian character, where people truly chose to share time and conversation, and I became aware that many I had once chinked glasses with were no longer around.
These portraits of the regulars are a cross-section of those who sat for me, but there is no rhyme or reason to my selection.”
– John Claridge
Spike Milligan, Comedian & Writer
Molly Parkin, Painter & Novelist
Gaz Mayall, Musician
Lisa Stansfield, Simger & Songwriter
Eddie Gray, Jazz Violinist
Lesley Lewis, Owner of The French House
Kenny Clayton, Jazz Pianist
Fergus Henderson, Chef & Restauranteur
Georgina Sutcliffe, Actor
John Phillips, Journalist
Norman Balon, Landlord of the Coach & Horses
Millie Laws, Reflexologist
George Baker, Actor
Oliver Bernard, Poet
Clare Shenstone, Artist
Peter Boizot, Founder of Pizza Express
Peter Owen, Publisher
Vanessa Fenton, Dancer at the Royal Ballet & Choreographer
Sebastian Horsley, Artist
Burt Kwouk, Actor
Kevin Petillo, Television Producer
Pinkietessa, Costume maker
James Birch, Art Dealer
Jay Landesman, Nightclub Owner, Writer & Publisher
Anna Lujan Sanchez, Dancer with Ballet Rambert
Freddie Jones, Actor
Paul Lawford, of The Rubbishmen of Soho
Alison Steadman, Actor
Gaston Berlemont, Former Publican at The French House
Paul Barlow, Cyclist
Photographs copyright © Estate of John Claridge
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John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Six)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Seven)
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John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Nine)
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Signs, Posters, Typography & Graphics
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Sheila Bell Of Great Eastern Buildings
(Click on this photograph to enlarge it)
Can you spot Sheila Bell in this photograph of the residents of Great Eastern Buildings celebrating Victory in Europe Day at the Grey Eagle in Quaker St on 2nd May 1945? Look more closely, there she is sitting in the front row, to the left of the girl in a floppy hat. Sheila has a bow in her hair for this special occasion.
Unfortunately, this picture was not too much use when I met Sheila at Victoria Station recently to hear about her life at Great Eastern Buildings on the corner of Brick Lane and Quaker St. Yet, as Sheila began to tell her story, I quickly recognised the little girl in this photograph of a lifetime ago.
“My grandparents, George & Sarah Keppel, lived in Great Eastern Buildings and my great-grandparents, Emma & Frederic Lewis lived in the same flat before them – before that I do not know. My nan never went out to work, she stayed at home, cooked the dinner and kept the house, and my granddad worked down Spitalfields Market. He started off as a porter but he was a carpenter by trade, so he made the ladders for the guys in the market. He hired two rooms in the next block at the Buildings and did all his carpentry work there. I used walk in there and smell the fresh wood shavings. He had a black iron glue pot and he made me stir it. It looked like toffee but it did not smell like toffee, I can assure you.
My parents lived in the Buildings as well and, as soon as I was born, I was taken to the Buildings, as the fourth generation of my family there. My mother worked in Truman’s Brewery as a bottling girl, she wore a green overall, a white apron and clogs, and my father was a smoked salmon curer in Frying Pan Alley, opposite Liverpool St Station. We lived in flat number sixty-eight Great Eastern Buildings, on the second floor. I was brought up in those Buildings with Jewish, Irish and Maltese, and we all rubbed along very nicely.
There always used to be a lot of workmen in and out of the Buildings, fixing things, and my first memory was of playing with a load of sand and water. Me and my cousins used to make sandcastles in the builders’ sand. That was our life! We lived in two rooms. We shared a wash house with a mangle and three sinks, two normal-sized and one butler’s sink with two taps. There was no hot water and each of the four flats on the landing shared the wash house. If you wanted a bath you had to boil a kettle. We had a tin bath like everybody else and an outside toilet that we shared with the three other families. We took it in turns to clean the toilet on a weekly rota system.
I do not remember a gas stove but I do remember a black range. You could lift the lid with a poker and put coal in. The kettle was always on the hob and there was an oven to the side. On Sunday, my nan would black-lead the range and it used to gleam. It had a white hearth and she used to whiten it, that was her pride and joy. It was always done, and our two rooms were kept clean. One room doubled as a front-room-come-kitchen, -come-everything really. We had old armchairs in there and a settee made of Rexine, that looked like leather but it was plastic and, in the summer, it used to stick to your legs, so we had to put a blanket on it. We had an old piano, I think everybody in those days had a piano. There was a little sink in the corner for the bowl and jug which we kept in the bedroom. That was all you had plus a table and a cupboard.
In the bedroom, we had a double bed and a single bed, if you had more than one child or if anybody came to stay. Unfortunately, that was how it was. We put up with because we did not know any different. I was the eldest and I had a younger brother. Now my nan had two rooms and my mum had two rooms, so my brother slept in the front room which meant mum and dad had the bedroom, my nan and grandad had the other bedroom and I slept in the other front room on a made-up bed. I used to lie on the floor and listen to the trains shunting in the goodsyard. Both flats were opposite each other across the same landing.
When I was fourteen, the flats were modernised by combining two, so then we had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a lounge. They put in electricity. It was amazing because I had only known gaslight since childhood. We did not know we were born! It was like a palace. I had my own room and my brother had his own room. It was our home and they did not move us out while they modernised, they just worked around us.
As children, we used to love to run through Wheler St Arch because it was always dark and gloomy with gas lamps – it was a dare really. We liked to go down Spitalfields Market and pick up the specks – the damaged fruit – and we used to bring them home. We did not have any other fruit. At Christmas time, my granddad came home with a sack full of specks. All the family would get together round the piano. My Auntie used to play the piano fantastically, sitting on a crate of brown ale. My nan never went out all week but on a Saturday night she went with out her friend and they would go either to the Two Brewers on the corner or the Grey Eagle. On a Saturday night, when she did not go out, my nan and I, we would get our pillow and put it on the window sill, and sit with our cups of tea and wait for the pubs to turn out. There would be fights and it was entertainment for us.
My granddad used to have a stall at the top of Brick Lane on Sundays and sell nuts and bolts, and I took tea to him in a white enamel flask. The market was packed in those days and, by the time I got there, the tea would be splashed everywhere, so he only got one cup out of it.
My first job was for Durrants the printers opposite Mount Pleasant Post Office in Clerkenwell and I absolutely hated it. I was sixteen or seventeen and I used to come home black with ink. Then I went into the rag trade, machining at Universal Underwear – it was very highbrow, we made it for Marks & Spencers – just off Shoreditch High St. I loved it and stayed there for ten years. I did an apprenticeship and my first week’s pay was four pounds, nineteen shillings and eleven pence. I thought I was rich!
After three months, they put you on piecework and I used to earn a fortune. Twenty or thirty pounds a week was a lot of money in those days. I was a saver and there would be times when I only had a shilling and sixpence in my purse but that was fine. I have always put a bit by because you never know what might happen. My parents did the same and they taught me not to spend money on non-essentials. Then, if you really need that money you do not have to go to anybody, you have got it there. My mother was very independent and my parents never owed anybody any money. I only ever wanted to pay the rent and put food on the table.
When I was twenty-five, I left Great Eastern Buildings to get married. I met my husband Riaz at Queen’s Ice Skating Rink in Bayswater. It was a ritual, I used to go there every Friday. Every Saturday, we went to the cinema and, every Sunday, we went to the Mecca Ballroom in Leicester Sq. We had a fantastic social life. We moved to a rented two bedroom flat in Hackney Downs when we got married and my daughter was born in Lower Clapton Rd at the Salvation Army Hospital. My husband was an aircraft engineer at Gatwick and the travelling was too much for him, so they offered us a flat down there and we stayed thirty years.
I still miss the community spirit of Great Eastern Buildings. Nobody went without, the people in those Buildings would give you their last ha’penny even if they had nothing.”
The Grey Eagle photographed by Philip Marriage in 1967
Corner of Grey Eagle St today
Steven Harris, who also grew up in Great Eastern Buildings, managed to identify these people:
Little girl at front, right of centre, with floppy white hat is Joyce Gibbons (my Aunty Joyce).
Next to floppy white hat, toddler with bow in hair is Sheila Bell herself.
The lady to the left, with her arm up, may well be Franny Vigas.
Behind Franny, with the dark hair is Sarah Keppel (Sheila’s grandmother)
The shorter of the two men, just to Sarah’s right, is Sheila’s granddad, George Keppel.
To George’s right, with her back against the pub wall is Lily Bell (Sheila’s mother)
Further to the right, holding two children (you can just see her head against the pub window) is Bessie Lee, sister to Lily Bell. The two children were Lorraine and Ronnie Lee.
Staying at the back and just along from Bessie Lee and her children, are two dark haired women – they were sisters, Celia and Sarah Bawes.
One forward and three along to the right from Lily Bell is a blond girl with roundish face – that was Betty Wright (who was long standing friends with my Aunty Pat)
Third row back, a little to the left of the roll of honour, with her beret pulled down at a sharp angle and standing slightly alone, is Phyllis Greenslade.
To the extreme right of the photo, sitting next to the honours roll, is Pat Green.
Third row back, to the left of the central line of children, is George Hall (with finger in mouth).
To the left of George is, I believe, my very own nine-year-old dad – Eddie Harris!
George’s sister, Rosie, is the blond girl with big smile, one row forward and three along to the right of George.
Sheila Butt (nee Bell)
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Dragan Novaković’s Club Row
Fifty years ago, Dragan Novaković took these pictures of the ancient Club Row animal and bird market which closed in 1983 when street trading in live animals became outlawed
Photographs copyright © Dragan Novaković
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David Carpenter, Maker Of Glass Eyes
David Carpenter
In the nineteenth century, artificial eyes were sometimes made of lead-based glass, so if the owner were to walk in extreme cold temperatures and then enter a warm room with a blazing fire, there was always a danger their eye might explode – a risk that, thankfully, has been overcome these days through the prudent use of crystallite rather than glass.
This was just one of many memorable pieces of information upon the esoteric subject of glass eyes that I garnered when Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I visited David Carpenter, Chief Ocularist, at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in the City Rd. David and his team of four produce more than thirteen hundred eyes annually – each one hand-crafted and individually-painted – to replace those that get lost in the capital.
It may sound like an awful lot of eyes but David and his colleagues are so skilful that, if you were not looking for it, you would not notice the results of their handiwork. Such is their success in creating life-like eyes – David assured me – that you probably know people with artificial eyes but you do not even realise.
Yet there is far more to the work of an ocularist is than just technical expertise. “If people have to have an eye removed because they’ve had a tumour or a cancer, it’s akin to losing a limb,” David admitted to me quietly, “They put their life on hold – then, after surgery and the healing process, they come to me and I make the prosthetics. You give them an eye, but really you are giving them their life back. It can be a great moment when you give them their glass eye – often, they cry with joy and, sometimes, they give you a hug.”
As one who has wrought such transformations for the better in so many people’s lives – simultaneously a technician, an artist and a counsellor – David certainly carries his role lightly. “I make little model tanks, I made them as a kid and I’ve never stopped,” he confessed with a blush, revealing the early manifestation of his distinctive talent, “and when I applied for this job, I was able to show them to prove I could do modelling.”
“Let me get out my box of bits to show you,” David suggested enthusiastically, pulling a container from a cabinet that looked it might contain a sponge cake, only it actually contained a selection of glass eyes and pieces of rubber prosthetics attached to spectacles.
Glass eyes are not round like marbles – as I had naively assumed – but curved like sea shells, so they fit neatly under the lid and can move in tandem with their living partner. David makes a cast to ensure that the eye fits its owner perfectly and then paints the pupil with the patient in front of him, using his expert judgement to match it exactly. “An eye is more than just one colour, you’ll need to use two or three colours to get the effect you want,” he informed me, “You start with a little black disc and you paint lines outwards from the centre and these striations of different tones blend to create the colour of the pupil. In the States, they have tried to do this digitally but the effect is flat whereas building up the layers of paint creates a more three dimensional effect.” Then David pointed out how unravelled strands of red embroidery thread are used to create the impression of veins upon the white of the eye and grinned with pleasure as he studied the convincingly life-like result.
It was surreal to stand in the workroom surrounded by lone eyes of every hue peering at us, yet this was David’s normal environment and the place where he is at home. “I just fell into it really,” he informed me with shrug and a gauche smile, picking up an eye and polishing it tenderly with his finger, “I was training as a dental technician, making teeth at a college in Hastings – because I planned to emigrate to Australia and work in dentistry – when I saw an advert for an apprenticeship on ocularistry. Once you have trained as a dental technician, the next step is to become maxillofacial technician – I can make noses, ears, fingers – in fact, any part of the body that might get accidentally severed.”
“I can’t make arms and legs though, there are other people who do that,” he qualified modestly, acknowledging his own limitations, “but I can reconstruct any part of the face that is missing including the eye.” And then he picked up the pairs of spectacles with realistic parts of facial anatomy, noses and eyebrows, attached and proudly explained they were particularly useful for older people who might otherwise mislay their replacement facial features.
“I’ve worked here for sixteen and a half years,” he said, turning contemplative suddenly and speaking as if to himself, “I’ve got patients that I first saw when they were little babies who are now grown up and still come back to see me – there’s some that are almost friends.”
Painting artificial eyes
David scrutinises his handiwork critically
A selection of prosthetic eyes
The white of the eye before the pupil is attached
A pupil before painting
The pupil in place
The finished eye emerging from the mould
Prosthetic attached to a spectacle frame
Polishing the eye
David Carpenter, Chief Ocularist at the London Eye Hospital
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
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Lost Spitalfields
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Looking towards Spitalfields from Aldgate East
London can be a grief-inducing city. Everyone loves the London they first knew, whether as the place they grew up or the city they arrived in. As the years pass, this city bound with your formative experience changes, bearing less and less resemblance to the place you discovered. Your London is taken from you. Your sense of loss grows until eventually your memory of the London you remember becomes more vivid than the London you see before you and you become a stranger in the place that you know best. This is what London can do to you.
In Spitalfields, the experience has been especially poignant in recent years with the redevelopment of the Fruit & Vegetable Market, the Fruit & Wool Exchange and Norton Folgate. Yet these photographs reveal another Spitalfields that only a few remember, this is lost Spitalfields.
Spital Sq was an eighteenth century square linking Bishopsgate with the market that was destroyed within living memory, existing now only as a phantom presence in these murky old photographs and in the fond remembrance of senior East Enders. On the eastern side of Spitalfields, the nineteenth century terraces of Mile End New Town were erased in ‘slum clearances’ and replaced with blocks of social housing while, to the north, the vast Bishopsgate Goodsyard was burned to the ground in a fire that lasted for days in 1964.
Yet contemplating the history of loss in Spitalfields sets even these events within a sobering perspective. Only a feint pencil sketch of the tower records the Priory of St Mary which stood upon the site of Spital Sq until Henry VIII ‘dissolved’ it and turned the land into his artillery ground. Constructing the Eastern Counties Railway in the eighteen-thirties destroyed hundreds of homes and those residents who were displaced moved into Shoreditch, creating the overcrowded neighbourhood which became known as the Old Nichol. And it was a process that was repeated when the line was extended down to Liverpool St. Meanwhile, Commercial St was cut through Spitalfields from Aldgate to Shoreditch to transport traffic more swiftly from the docks, wreaking destruction through densely inhabited streets in the mid-nineteenth century.
So look back at these elegiac photos of what was lost in Spitalfields before your time, reconcile yourself to the loss of the past and brace yourself for the future that is arriving.
Spital Sq, only St Botolph’s Hall on the right survives today
Spital Sq photographed in 1909
Church Passage, Spital Sq, 1733, photographed in 1909 – only the market buildings survive.
17 Spital Sq, 1725
25 Spital Sq, 1733
23 Spital Sq, 1733
20 Spital Sq, 1723
20 Spital Sq, 1723
20 Spital Sq, 1732
32 Spital Sq, 1739
32 Spital Sq, 1739
5 Whites Row, 1714
6/7 Spring Walk, 1819
Buxton St, 1850
Buxton St, 1850
Former King Edward Institution, 1864, Deal St
36 Crispin St, 1713
7 Wilkes St, 1722
10 & 11 Norton Folgate, 1810 – photographed in 1909
Norton Folgate Court House, Folgate St, photographed in 1909
52 & 9a Artillery Passage, 1680s
Bishopsgate Goods Station, 1881
Shepherd’s Place arch, 1820, leading to Tenter St – photographed 1909
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Phillip Lucas, Collector
‘I think I have a pronounced hunter-gatherer instinct’
portrait by Lucinda Douglas Menzies
When I visited Phillip Lucas in his 1725 house in Spitalfields that he has been renovating for more than a decade, we sat on two threadbare wing chairs, conversing over a sea of objects and piles of books which filled the room. In its profusion, the scene rivalled the opening sequence of Citizen Kane. Imagine my incredulity when Phillip confessed that he had just sent off most of the contents of his house to the sale room, testing my imagination to conceive how it had been before.
By profession, Phillip is a barrister but in his soul he is a collector. He bought his house to hold his collection of 1680-1730 furniture which he put in store ten years ago while he repaired the building, only to fill it from floor to ceiling with a whole new collection. I was quite overwhelmed when I considered that as well as the three hundred items Phillip sent for auction, he had enough the fill the house all over again in storage on top of what he already has in the house, which seemed more than sufficiently furnished to me.
Such is the true nature of a consummate collector like Phillip, who credibly rationalised his situation to me as an opportunity to edit and select his favourite items. While the afternoon flew away, I nodded my head in a mixture of sympathy, wonder and bewilderment as Phillip explained how it all came about.
“The first consciousness I had of the eighteenth century was through a school trip to 1 Royal Crescent in Bath and Wookey Hole Caves. The caves made no impression on me whatsoever but the drawing room at the Royal Crescent made a big impact and I bought a postcard of it which I still have.
I spent my teenage years going to antique fairs, buying eighteenth century tea caddies, and fell in with some antique dealers in Winchester. My parents were concerned that this might have an adverse effect. I spent my time hanging onto the coattails of these dealers, trying to sell them things and going around with them when they were buying.
At the age of five I had decided I wanted to be a lawyer and I could not be deflected from it, but the antique dealing side did not arise until the age of twelve. I realised then that the Law would have to take priority.
Around the age of sixteen, I grew very concerned about old buildings and I had a book of derelict houses in Scotland. So I spent a couple of summers going round these places, studying them and despairing for their future. Then I spent a summer visiting derelict buildings in Wales. It is disheartening to see what has happened to some of those places now. At this time, the idea crystallised that I what wanted to do was to save a Georgian house, restore it and formulate a collection as an experience for me, both to gather it and also live in those surroundings.
When I went to university, I had a modest grant which I spent on eighteenth century furniture and a blue sherpa van. While other students were going clubbing, I was driving to Shepton Mallet Fair and standing in the rain at five in the morning, buying and selling from the back of my van – at the same time as studying for a Law degree.
When I moved to London, I had a bedsit in Shepherds Bush and I started going to the big auctions and the antique shops. I was escorted around some of the most glamorous shops because I think they thought I was going to steal something. I must have looked about twelve even though I was in my early twenties.
I was seeing better quality objects in the London sale rooms. I ran out of space in my bedsit and the van became an overshoot for storage. I had a Georgian pianoforte in my bedsit at one point that took up most of the room. At Christies, South Kensington, I had a choice of either a painting by Wright of Derby or a portrait by Arthur Devis. So that was quite an exciting time.
My collecting started in the eighties with Neo-Classicism, inspired by the postcard of 1 Royal Crescent. I began with late eighteenth century tea caddies and I progressed to the early nineteenth century and Regency, which was very hot in the eighties. Then I discovered oak furniture and jumped back to early oak before moving through mahogany to walnut, where I settled. My current speciality is furniture between 1680 and 1730, the golden age of walnut. But I am still buying Regency things because I cannot resist them. I have had a recent revelation with Renaissance bronzes and I also collect early Georgian portraiture, particularly conversation pieces.
I am especially interested in domestic items that tell a story about an individual. I love personal inscriptions and things that might not have been intended to survive. Dennis Severs House is an inspiration to me and David Milne, the curator, introduced me to English Delft -which was an expensive day.
My collection pulls me in different directions and I can unexpectedly discover a new area t any point. For years I have been trying to understand early bronzes but you generally look at them behind glass in poorly-lit museum cabinets. I always wondered what all the fuss was about and it was only when I stumbled across two early bronzes recently that I could handle them and look at properly. It was a light bulb moment and now I am reading as many books as I can on the subject.
I think I have a pronounced hunter-gatherer instinct. As well as enjoying these objects themselves, understanding and handling them, I love the excitement of the chase and a new discovery. A lot of it is the thrill of finding things. That is enough. It does not matter to me, if after a while, I sell them on.”
Interior photographs copyright © Charlie Hopkinson
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