Cherry Gilchrist On Cheshire St

 

I am proud to publish this edited extract from CHERRY’S CACHE by Cherry Gilchrist, a graduate of my writing course. The author ran Tigerlily, a vintage clothes shop in Cambridge for seven years in the seventies, and has vivid memories of her weekly trips to Cheshire St in search of new stock. I have published Cherry’s text alongside photographs by Colin O’Brien.

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‘The East End was where my serious buying began, in terms of sourcing ‘period clothing’ as we called it then. I drove down almost every Sunday morning, leaving Cambridge in the dark, and often getting there before daybreak. Often my business partner Helen would accompany me or meet me there. It was she who had introduced me to this extraordinary collection of stalls and sellers, with their treasures and junk, rubbish and bric-a-brac.

The sprawling ragamuffin of a market was held around Sclater St and Cheshire St. They were lined with stalls, which also edged into the dilapidated old warehouses plus improvised sales pitches anywhere there was space. Piles of old clothes, shoes, bicycle parts and knick-knacks would be spread out along the walls and the pavements. Some were only fit for the dustbin and may even have come from there. Others could be treasures, retrieved from attics and forgotten places of storage. I had to be quick off the mark to decided which was which.

The first buyers would arrive before the day had dawned, flashing their torches onto the jumble of goods They were dealers, expertly picking out what was desirable for their own particular sales niche. It could be antiques, second-hand modern clothes, vintage radios, old machinery, watches and clocks, collectable books, or anything else potentially specialist and desirable. And we were not the only ones looking for textiles and clothes. Some of the upmarket and expensive London vintage stores had buyers on the prowl, it was a relatively new type of business but sellers in Portobello Rd and the Kensington Antiques Market were already cashing in.

I made these trips to London for a year or two before we opened our shop Tigerlily and we carried on after we began trading. It was not all straightforward – I remember when my car broke down at about 4:00am on a solo trip to London. I had to try and hitch a lift home in the dark. I was picked up by a car full of male partygoers on their way home. Luckily, they were all shattered by then, the driver was sober, and they were courteously silent for the half an hour or so that it took to drop me off in Cambridge.

I did a lot of these trips while pregnant – my daughter was born just before the shop began trading – and the nausea I felt in early pregnancy was intensified by the ripe smells of Brick Lane, the rotting fruit left over from weekday trading and the smell of mould and decay from some of the ancient bundles of fabric piled up at the back of the derelict warehouses. It was not always a pleasant task, sorting through what was on offer.

After Jessica was born, I sometimes brought her with me on these trips, perfectly content in her carrycot-on-wheels. Sometimes I met with East End disapproval – the custom there was for enormous, shiny prams. So our progress was greeted with shrieks of horror from Cockney mothers and grandmothers.

We did find marvellous things in Cheshire St. One day, I had finished my buying and was sitting waiting in the car for Helen to re-appear so that we could start the drive back to Cambridge, when she finally arrived, puffing under a load of blue velvet tailcoats. ‘I was on my way back, when I saw these. Some guy had just put them out.’ Apparently, they had been worn by the Parliamentary Whips, in the style of the eighteenth century and were now being scrapped for something more modern.

Once, I picked up a full-length hand-embroidered dress, draped over some railings with a few pitiful items, on sale for next to nothing. It was made of heavy hand-woven cream cotton. That I did keep, and wear, for a while. Like Helen’s tailcoats, it appeared just at the last moment in the morning. Although most of the good things went very early, you never knew what you might spot later on. It was difficult, sometimes, to drag ourselves away.

We would turn for home about 11:00am – Cambridge was not a long drive away. I emptied my flask of coffee while on the prowl and, on return, I made myself a large fried brunch and went back to bed for a few hours. The baby could share my nap, and I hoped that my husband would look after both children and make our tea! The sorting, washing, and pricing could wait until the Monday.

Those finds were never quite enough though, especially when it came to stocking a shop, so eventually my forays led to the bigger rag mills, where I made links with the sorters and sellers. Planned, longer trips, took over from the frenzied excitement of Brick Lane in the early dawn of a Sunday morning. But Cheshire St and Sclater St remain as my essential memory of hunting for treasures in the debris of the past.’

Coming and goings at the corner of Brick Lane.

At the time of the miners’ strike.

Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien

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