David Hoffman’s Easter In Stepney
The Gentle Author’s Tour of the City of London: Meet me at 2pm on EASTER MONDAY on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral for a tour of sightseeing and storytelling, rambling through the alleys and byways of the Square Mile in search of the wonders and the wickedness of the City. (Also booking for Spring Bank Holiday Monday 4th May)
A costume fitting
In the late seventies, Contributing Photographer David Hoffman documented the religious drama enacted upon the streets of Stepney around Easter time, recording astonishing images of magical realist intensity which feel closer to the medieval world than to our own day.
Gordon Kendall who played Jesus wrote this memory of his experience.
‘On a cold wet and depressing evening in April 1980, well over 100 actors, production crew and 2000 people lived through the experience of Our Lord’s Way Of The Cross enacted in the streets and estates of Stepney.
The excitement and challenge of playing Jesus really began on the Sunday before the event. Some of the actors were trying out their costumes and they looked very impressive.
Half way through the rehearsal, I needed to visit the toilet and so excused myself from the bodyguard of soldiers in costume. I knocked at the door of a flat. A lady came out and I requested the use of her toilet. She looked at me very oddly – she was a elderly lady – and she asked me who I was. I replied I was playing the part of Jesus and she flashed me a look which revealed she did not believe me, but she said ‘Come in.’
As I went through the flat I could see someone sleeping on the sofa in the lounge. When I closed the bathroom door, I could hear the woman waking up her friend and saying, ‘Nell, there’s a man in the toilet who says he’s Jesus.’ Then I heard some rapid movement and I could only wonder at the thoughts of this woman, struggling to her feet.
There was a knocking at the front door as I came out of the toilet and the two women opened it to be confronted by a fierce Roman Centurion in full regalia, asking if Jesus was in the flat. Fortunately, they relaxed into joyous smiles and it was kisses and handshakes all round as we departed.’
Roman soldiers
Jesus in flares
The arrest of the two thieves
Preparing for the crucifixion
A Roman legion marching
Pilate speaks
Roman soldiers at St Dunstan’s
Jesus consoles Mary
Bespectacled Jesus
Roman Centurion in regalia
Jesus gives himself up
The march to the crucifixion
The soldiers stripping Jesus of his raiments
Crucifixion courtesy of Whitbread
Behold, Jesus is risen in St Dunstan’s Church!
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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David Hoffman at Fieldgate Mansions
Click here to order a copy of David Hoffman’s Endurance & Joy in the East End 1971-1987
Arful Nessa’s Sewing Machine
The Gentle Author’s Tour of the City of London: Meet me at 2pm on EASTER MONDAY on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral for a tour of sightseeing and storytelling, rambling through the alleys and byways of the Square Mile in search of the wonders and the wickedness of the City. (Also booking for Spring Bank Holiday Monday 4th May)
Contributing Writer Delwar Hussain writes a memoir of his mother and her sewing machine
Arful Nessa with her sewing machine table
Rather than the sound of Bow bells, I was born to the whirring of sewing machines in my ear. Throughout most of my childhood, my mother did piecework while my father worked in a sweatshop opposite the beigel shop on Brick Lane, stitching together leather jackets for Mark & Spencer. The factory closed down long ago.
Initially my mother’s industrial-grade Brother sewing machine was in the kitchen, in between the sink and the pine wood table. But it took up too much space there and was also considered dangerous, once ambulatory children started populating the house. It was decided that it would be moved to one of the attic rooms on the top floor of our home, following the custom of the Huguenot silk weavers of the past. There the machine lived and there my mother would be found hunched over it, during all hours of the day and often late into the night. She says it was most hard on her back and shoulders, which would ache from the work.
“The men used to work in the factories. I preferred to do it at home because it was less work compared to what they did. They had to work harder,” she explains, “I began before the children were born. I wasn’t doing much at home, so I thought I should try it and earn a little money. Other women were working as machinists then and an old neighbour who had lived on Parfett St taught me how to operate the machine. I couldn’t do pockets, but I did pleats, belts and hems on skirts for women who worked in offices. I took in work for a factory on Cannon St Rd that made suits and another on New Rd that made blouses.”
For a while my mother sewed the lining into jackets and winter coats, working for a short Sikh man who had a clothes shop on Fournier St. He had quick steps and a bunch of heavy keys dangling from the belt on his trousers. The man still owes her money, she recalls. He would give her wages in arrears, promising to pay, but it never materialised. Following him, she worked for another man, who also did not pay. “Where would you go looking for them today?” my mother asks, “Everyone we used to know around here has left. So much has changed.”
I remember the almost-sweet smell of the machine oil, the thick needles, bundles of colourful nylon yarn, piles and piles of skirts in all shades and sizes, the metal bobbin cases and the sound of the sewing machine. When the foot peddle was down, the vibration could be felt throughout the house. Strangely, this provided a sense of comfort – the knowledge that my mother was upstairs and everything in the world was as it should be.
When I was around twenty, my brothers and sisters and I colluded with each other to get rid of the sewing machine. It had lain dormant in the attic room ever since my mother gave up taking in piecework some years previously. The work had slowly become more irregular and less financially rewarding. “When I first started, I was able to earn around seventy-five pence per skirt, then towards the end, when there were many more women working, it dropped to around ten pence per coat.” These were also the days when much of the manufacturing in East London was being shipped out to parts of the world where there was cheaper labour, including Bangladesh and Turkey.
With my mother’s working paraphernalia left as it was, the space resembled Rodinsky’s room – he was the mythical recluse who once lived a few doors down from us in the attic of 19 Princelet St and who had disappeared one day, leaving everything intact. I had an idea to turn our attic into a study, installing my PC which my mother had bought for me from the money she had saved from sewing. With a separate monitor, keyboard and large hard drive, it was almost as big as her Brother sewing machine.
She had always been a hoarder, so we knew that getting rid of it was going to be a delicate and difficult matter. We had given her prior warnings, but these had fallen on deaf ears. Then one night, when she had gone to bed, my siblings and I crept upstairs and, with a lot of effort, detached the head of the sewing machine from the table. Huffing and puffing, we carried it down three flights of stairs and delicately dumped it at the end of our street. We did the same with the table base.
Of course, she discovered the machine was missing the next day and was incredibly upset. She had “spent one hundred and forty pounds on it,” she said. “It still worked,” she said, “why had we not told her, she could have given it to someone at least, instead of it being thrown away” and “what had she done to deserve children who were so wasteful.” After that, I forgot all about the Brother sewing machine that once lived in our attic.
Recently, I returned from a research trip to Dhaka. I am currently writing a book about the people of that city and had interviewed garment workers about their lives and fears. I came home and was speaking to my mother about it when the subject of her earlier life as a machinist came up. And then she announced her revelation.
My mother and our Somali neighbour had managed to rescue the sewing machine from where my brothers, sisters and I had thought we had discarded the thing. The two women had somehow managed to shuffle the table base along, scraping hard along the pavement. But instead of bringing it back to the house, they took it to the neighbour’s, where it was to stay in the garden until they decided what to do with it. The machine head on the other hand was far too heavy for them to carry and they abandoned it.
This disclosure had to be investigated. My mother and I immediately knocked on our neighbour’s door, and asked if it was still there. The neighbour led us to the garden where, hidden behind wooden boarding and tendrils of ivy, we found the sewing machine my mother had spent so many years working on.
Considering it had endured years outdoors, it looked like it was still in relatively good health. Bits of it, such as the bobbin winder and the spool base were slightly rusty, but the address of the showroom on Cambridge Heath Rd where my mother bought it was clearly labelled and the motor looked in working condition.
She is still upset with my brothers and sisters and me for throwing it away. This confused me. “Why would you want to hold onto something that is a source of oppression?” I asked, high-mindedly. “The machine helped to feed and educate my family,” she answered quietly.
My mother then reminded me that my aunt, her sister, also had a Brother sewing machine and made skirts for many years from her kitchen in Bethnal Green. We went to speak to her. She no longer works as a seamstress and has resorted to keeping her dismembered machine on the veranda of her ground floor flat. The table now stores pots and pans, baskets containing seeds and drying leaves. The head was in the bottom drawer of a metal cabinet next to it, wrapped up in a Sainsbury’s shopping bag. My aunt still has some of the cloth which she would make into skirts and she showed me the pleats on a piece of salmon-coloured material.
“Most of the women in this block worked for different factories and one of them taught me how to do it. I worked for a Turkish man on Mare St for around seven years. I would get started around 7am after the morning prayer at 6am. I can’t remember where the skirts were being sold, but they were for well known shops in the West End. In one day, I could work on fifty or sixty pieces. Some days I made around a hundred. I received around forty or fifty pence per piece and could earn around three hundred pounds per week. But it was all irregular, nothing was fixed. My children would help by cutting the loops off when they got home after school. There is no work anymore, but I kept the machine in case I needed to fix things. It still works.”
While I took notes, sitting on the chair she would sit on whilst working, I could hear dregs of conversation between the two sisters, comparing the quality of oranges in Bethnal Green market to Asda and Iceland, as well as recalling what happened to other women whom they both knew that had worked as seamstresses. This industry, now gone, is a piece of the thread that joins the past with the present in the East End and, in turn, unites the people who have come to make this part of London their home.
My aunt with her sewing machine in Bethnal Green
Arful Nessa
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may like to read Delwar Hussain’s other story about his mother
The Auriculas Of Spitalfields
An Auricula Theatre
In horticultural lore, auriculas have always been associated with Spitalfields and writer Patricia Cleveland-Peck has a mission to bring them back again. She believes that the Huguenots brought them here more than three centuries ago, perhaps snatching a twist of seeds as they fled their homeland and then cultivating them in the enclosed gardens of the merchants’ grand houses, and in the weavers’ yards and allotments, thus initiating a passionate culture of domestic horticulture among the working people of the East End which endures to this day.
You only have to cast your eyes upon the wonder of an auricula theatre filled with specimens in bloom – as I did in Patricia’s Sussex garden – to understand why these most artificial of flowers can hold you in thrall with the infinite variety of their colour and form. “They are much more like pets than plants,” Patricia admitted to me as we stood in her greenhouse surrounded by seedlings,“because you have to look after them daily, feed them twice a week in the growing season, remove offshoots and repot them once a year. Yet they’re not hard to grow and it’s very relaxing, the perfect antidote to writing, because when you are stuck for an idea you can always tend your auriculas.” Patricia taught herself old French and Latin to research the history of the auricula, but the summit of her investigation was when she reached the top of the Kitzbüheler Horn, high in the Austrian Alps where the ancestor plants of the cultivated varieties are to be found.
Auriculas were first recorded in England in the Elizabethan period as a passtime of the elite but it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that they became a widespread passion amongst horticulturalists of all classes. In 1795, John Thelwall, son of a Spitalfields silk mercer wrote, “I remember the time myself when a man who was a tolerable workman in the fields had generally beside the apartment in which he carried on his vocation, a small summer house and a narrow slip of a garden at the outskirts of the town where he spent his Monday either in flying his pigeons or raising his tulips.” Auriculas were included alongside tulips among those prized species known as the “Floristry Flowers,” plants renowned for their status, which were grown for competition by flower fanciers at “Florists’ Feasts,” the precursors of the modern flower show. These events were recorded as taking place in Spitalfields with prizes such as a copper kettle or a ladle and, after the day’s judging, the plants were all placed upon a long table where the contests sat to enjoy a meal together known as “a shilling ordinary.”
In the nineteenth century, Henry Mayhew wrote of the weavers of Spitalfields that “their love of flowers to this day is a strongly marked characteristic of the class.” and, in 1840, Edward Church who lived in Spital Sq recorded that “the weavers were almost the only botanists of their day in the metropolis.” It was this enthusiasm that maintained a regular flower market in Bethnal Green which evolved into the Columbia Rd Flower Market of our day.
Known variously in the past as ricklers, painted ladies and bears’ ears, auriculas come in different classes, show auriculas, alpines, doubles, stripes and borders – each class containing a vast diversity of variants. Beyond their aesthetic appeal, Patricia is interested in the political, religious, cultural and economic history of the auricula, but the best starting point to commence your relationship with this fascinating plant is to feast your eyes upon the dizzying collective spectacle of star performers gathered in an auricula theatre. As Sacheverell Sitwell once wrote, “The perfection of a stage auricula is that of the most exquisite Meissen porcelain or of the most lovely silk stuffs of Isfahan and yet it is a living growing thing.”
Mrs Cairns Old Blue – a border auricula
Glenelg – a show-fancy green-edged auricula
Piers Telford – a gold-centred alpine auricula
Taffetta – a show-self auricula
Seen a Ghost – a show-striped auricula
Sirius – gold-centred alpine auricula
Coventry St – a show-self auricula
M. L. King – show-self auricula
Mrs Herne – gold-centred alpine auricula
Dales Red – border auricula
Pink Gem – double auricula
Summer Wine – gold-centred alpine auricula
McWatt’s Blue – border auricula
Rajah – show-fancy auricula
Cornmeal – show-green-edged auricula
Fanny Meerbeek – show-fancy auricula
Piglet – double auricula
Basuto – gold-centred alpine auricula
Blue Velvet – border auricula
Patricia Cleveland-Peck in her greenhouse.
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The Pied Wagtails Of Bishopsgate
Today’s tour is sold out and those on Saturday 11th and Saturday 25th April only have a few tickets left, so I have added an extra Spitalfields tour on Saturday 18th April. Click here to book
Today music writer, Mat Smith, contemplates the pied wagtails of Bishopsgate. Please leave a message in the comments below if you have also observed these tenacious creatures
Bishopsgate
During the dark days of the recently-departed winter, I would see two pied wagtails fluttering and strutting their way playfully along Bishopsgate. They were usually to be found between the corner of Liverpool St Station and the entrance to Brushfield St.
Spotting them became an important part of my walk to the office each morning, just after 7am. Seeing them flying across the road or scurrying comedically along the pavement among the sleepy pedestrians was something I depended on to ensure my day started off on the right foot. They were as much a part of the street scene of my morning as Alleynaut’s poetry stickers placed mischievously on street furniture, or weary travellers being deposited from a bus bringing them in from Stansted, or the caffeine-fixated people waiting in line at Store St Espresso, or the construction workers attending to the remodelling of one of the Broadgate office buildings. These two birds were, during winter, part of my London.
Without them, London did not feel right. If I had not seen them by the time I reached the revolving doors of our office, I would begin to panic. I often worried about them flying across Bishopsgate into the path of a bus. Or getting squashed by an angry, over-tired traveller with a wonky trolley bag. Or becoming trapped inside the mechanism of the service lift clinging to the outside of the Broadgate building remodel. And yet, the next day, they were still there and I would breathe a quiet sigh of relief. All was right in my London and all was right in my world.
I noticed that people did not quite know what to make of these two plucky avian characters. One day, I passed a bus stop where a teenage girl in school uniform was idly watching noisy TikTok videos on her phone while sitting on the bench under the shelter. She had one eye on her phone screen and the other on the wagtail that was pecking occasionally at the strap of her rucksack, its long fan tail moving in concert with its inquisitive beak. It was as if the bird was trying to get her attention, and ever-so-slightly failing to do so. Another day, a guy in a suit stopped dead in his tracks as the two birds chased each other along the pavement in front of him. Another day, a street-sweeper in a yellow City of London high-visibility jacket was pushing his cart along when one of the birds landed on the edge of the cart furthest from him. The wagtail cocked its head to one side and allowed the street-sweeper to give it a breather from expending the energy it would have otherwise used tearing along the uneven paving stones outside the Bishopsgate Institute.
I have always loved pied wagtails. I think it is their tiny stature, their diminutive faces and short beaks, their ridiculously long legs and their monochrome colours. I attribute the latter to being a lover of minimalism but also because colour blindness has left me perpetually unsure of what colours I am seeing. Black and white things are, figuratively and literally, much more certain and solid for me. They inspire a sense of confidence that I can – occasionally – see the world in the same way that others are able to.
Whenever I saw this pair of pied wagtails, I would be reminded of two things. The first was a small book that my maternal grandmother gave me, a hardback volume from The Observer’s Pocket Series which surveyed the British avian population, devoting a page to each bird. I still have that book, and each page is often accompanied by sumptuous illustrations. Like most people, I have seen very few of the birds it describes. The wagtail, however, was one that I had seen. We had a regular visitor to our back garden where I grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon and it felt like a privilege to see it exploring the lawn. I do not remember seeing one anywhere else while I was growing up and that is why it felt special.
Much more than that book, seeing the Bishopsgate pied wagtails reminds me of my father, who passed away two years ago. As I come to terms with a world without him, I have begun to reflect on precisely what legacy he left me with. He never taught me how to hammer a nail into a wall, how to change a tyre, how to wire a plug, how to paint a skirting board, or how to wash a car. In fact, there are lots of things I wished he had taught me, but which he chose not to, for reasons I will now never understand.
He did, however, leave me with a solid work ethic, which explains why I can be found walking along Bishopsgate just after 7am each day to start my job, despite me living almost fifty miles away from London. The other thing he gave me was an ability to identify certain birds. He was born in a Warwickshire village after his mother had moved from her beloved East End during the Second World War. He had an undying love and passion for the East End – the area around Bell Lane, where she had gone to school in particular – and the kinetic hustle and bustle of London, all because of his mother.
But while his heart may have been forever yearning after the London he was never able to live or work in, his feet were very much planted on the ground of the Warwickshire countryside. He accumulated an enviable knowledge of wildlife, including birds, and this is undoubtedly one thing he left with me. It was my father who told me what the tiny black and white bird was when it landed in our Stratford-upon-Avon back garden. I am fairly certain I would not be able to name this species of bird today if it was not for him telling me.
And thus, whenever I would see this pair of pied wagtails on Bishopsgate, I felt a mix of emotions. I would feel joy and a lightness of spirit, the kind of uplifting, energising feeling that I needed in order to carry me through my day at work. It was like a shot of espresso carried to my lips on the monochrome wings of these funny little creatures.
For all that levity, the sighting of these two birds was also filled with a sense of enduring, poignant sadness at my father’s absence. They were a reminder that he will never again be able to excitedly identify a species of bird for me, that making my way in this complicated world is now all up to me, that I have reached the terminal limit of the knowledge he could impart to me.
As spring fought and then won its battle against the preceding season, I began to see the two birds less and less, until finally sporadic sightings gave way to a permanent absence. I assumed they were still there and still nesting nearby, and it was merely that the timing of my walk to the office from Liverpool St, and their morning routine, had become less synchronised. I did not want to think it was because of the myriad other fates that could have befallen them.
It occurred to me that their presence during the winter months, when the melancholy at my father’s absence was often at its heaviest, might indicate a sort of impending closure, that their disappearance might imply that the grieving process for my father was now complete. Maybe it is. Maybe it is not. I cannot tell. I will wait for the dark mornings on Bishopsgate to return when another autumn gives way to another winter and perhaps then I will know for certain.
From The Observer’s Book of Birds
James & Mathew Smith
Mat Smith is a music writer for Electronic Sound, Clash, Further. Pooleyville.city and Documentary Evidence. Mat has written sleeve notes for Mute, Cherry Red, BMG and Our Silent Canvas. Since 2019 he has overseen the collaborative arts project Mortality Tables
Charles Spurgeon’s Street Traders
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Champion Pie Man – W.Thompson, Pie Maker of fifty years, outside his shop in the alley behind Greenwich Church
Charles Spurgeon the Younger, son of the Evangelist Charles Haddon Spurgeon, took over the South St Baptist Chapel in Greenwich in the eighteen-eighties and commissioned an unknown photographer to make lantern slides of the street traders of Greenwich that he could use in his preaching. We shall never know exactly how Spurgeon showed these pictures, taken between 1884 and 1887, but – perhaps inadvertently – they became responsible for the creation of one of the earliest series of documentary portraits of Londoners.
Hokey-Pokey Boy – August Bank Holiday, Stockwell St, Greenwich
Knife Grinder – posed cutting out a kettle bottom from a tin sheet
Rabbit Seller
Toy Seller – King William St outside Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Ginger Cakes Seller – King St, near Greenwich Park
Sweep
Shrimp Sellers – outside Greenwich Park
Crossing Sweeper (& News Boy) – Clarence St, Greenwich
Sherbert Seller – outside Greenwich Park
Third Class Milkman – carrying two four-gallon cans on a yoke, King William’s Walk, Greenwich
Second Class Milkman – with a hand cart and seventeen-gallon churn
Master Milkman – in his uniform, outside Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Chairmender – Corner of Prince Orange Lane, Greenwich
Kentish Herb Woman – Greenwich High Rd
Muffin Man
Fishmongers
Try Your Weight – outside Greenwich Park
Glazier
News Boy (& Crossing Sweeper) – delivering The Daily News at 7:30am near Greenwich Pier
Old Clo’ Man – it was a crime to dispose of infected clothing during the Smallpox epidemics of the eighteen-eighties and the Old Clo’ Man plied a risky trade.
Blind Fiddler – outside Crowders’ Music Hall Greenwich
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East End Blossom Time
Join me for ramble through 2000 years of culture and history in SPITALFIELDS followed by tea and cakes freshly baked to recipe of 1720 served in a 300 year old house. This Saturday is sold out but tickets are available on Saturday 11th, Saturday 18th and Saturday 25th April, and through the spring.
Some tickets also available for my TOUR OF THE CITY OF LONDON on EASTER MONDAY.
In Bethnal Green
Let me admit, this is my favourite moment in the year – when the new leaves are opening fresh and green, and the streets are full of trees in flower. Several times, in recent days, I have been halted in my tracks by the shimmering intensity of the blossom. And so, each spring, I enact my own version of the eighth-century Japanese custom of hanami or flower viewing, setting out on a pilgrimage through the East End with my camera to record the wonders of this fleeting season that marks the end of winter incontrovertibly.
In his last interview, Dennis Potter famously eulogised the glory of cherry blossom as an incarnation of the overwhelming vividness of human experience. “The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous … The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.” he said and, standing in front of these trees, I succumbed to the same rapture at the excess of nature.
In the post-war period, cherry trees became a fashionable option for town planners and it seemed that the brightness of pink increased over the years as more colourful varieties were propagated. “Look at it, it’s so beautiful, just like at an advert,” I overheard someone say yesterday, in admiration of a tree in blossom, and I could not resist the thought that it would be an advertisement for sanitary products, since the colour of the tree in question was the exact familiar tone of pink toilet paper.
Yet I do not want my blossom muted, I want it bright and heavy and shining and full. I love to be awestruck by the incomprehensible detail of a million flower petals, each one a marvel of freshly-opened perfection and glowing in a technicolour hue.
In Whitechapel
In Spitalfields
In Weavers’ Fields
In Haggerston
In Weavers’ Fields
In Bethnal Green
In Pott St
Outside Bethnal Green Library
In Spitalfields
In Bethnal Green Gardens
In Museum Gardens
In Museum Gardens
In Paradise Gardens
In Old Bethnal Green Rd
In Pollard Row
In Nelson Gardens
In Canrobert St
In the Hackney Rd
In Haggerston Park
In Shipton St
In Bethnal Green Gardens
In Haggerston
At Spitalfields City Farm
In Columbia Rd
In London Fields
Once upon a time …. Syd’s Coffee Stall, Calvert Avenue
The Hackney Yearbook, 1906
Meet me on the steps of St Paul’s for a tour of sightseeing and storytelling, rambling through the alleys and byways of the Square Mile in search of the wonders and the wickedness of the City of London.
Behold the wonders of commerce and retail over a century ago, courtesy of the Hackney Year Book 1906 from the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute!
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Adverts from Shoreditch Borough Guide
