Save Leila’s Shop

Leila’s Shop by Eleanor Crow

 

In common with five other shops in Calvert Avenue – leading up to Arnold Circus on the Boundary Estate – Leila’s Shop is being challenged by Tower Hamlets Council with eviction or 300% rent increase this October.

Over the past twenty-three years that Leila McAlister has run her shop and cafe it has become a beloved community hub, and – as a consequence – the Friends of Arnold Circus mustered residents to renovate the park, creating a popular public space where once there was only dereliction. There is no doubt that Leila’s Shop has been instrumental in the community-led regeneration of the Boundary Estate in recent decades.

It is pitiful irony that Tower Hamlets Council is opening a ‘community hub’ in one of the shops in Calvert Avenue this week, while simultaneously engineering the closure of Leila’s Shop and other independent business that line this small street.

We need as many people as possible – both local and far flung – to sign the petition which will be presented to the council at the Town Hall next week on Wednesday 16th July.

 

CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION

 

15 Calvert Avenue, c.1900

15 Calvert Avenue, 2010

 

The top photograph of 15 Calvert Avenue is believed to have been taken one Sunday in 1900 around the time Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra came to open the Boundary Estate, and I snapped the lower photograph in December 2010, more than a century later.

One day, Joan Rose visited Leila’s Cafe next door at 17 Calvert Avenue and brought out the old photograph (which she always carries in her purse) to show Leila McAlister, explaining that the little boy standing in the doorway was her father. A copy now hangs proudly in Leila’s Shop, and served as the inspiration for my project when a class from Virginia Rd School in Arnold Circus turned out to assist and we stopped the traffic to take the new picture.

Joan (unmarried name Raymond) told me that her father Alfred was born in 1896 and is approximately six years old in the picture. The woman beside him in the doorway is Phoebe Raymond his mother, Joan’s grandmother, and the man on the left is his father, Joan’s grandfather Albert Alfred Raymond  (known as Alf), the first proprietor of the newly built shop. They all lived in the flat up above and you can see their songbird in the cage, a cock linnet.

Phoebe has her smart apron with frills and everyone is wearing their Sunday best – remarkably for the time, everyone has good quality boots. I like the sacks with SPITALFIELDS printed on them, indicating produce from the fruit and vegetable market half a mile away, and the porters’ baskets which Leila still uses today. You can see the awning has been taken up to permit enough light for the photograph and then it has rained. We had the same problem with the weather, but were blessed with a few hours between a sleet shower and a blizzard to snatch our picture.

Joan Rose told me she believes her family are of French Huguenot origin and the original surname was Raymond de Foir, which means the people you see in the old photograph are probably descended from the Huguenot immigrants that came here in the eighteenth century. What touched me most was to learn from Joan that Alfred her father (pictured here eternally six years old in his Sunday best on the threshold of his father’s shop), went off to fight in the First World War and, aged twenty-two, was there at the battle of the Somme when so many died, but returned to run the shop in Calvert Avenue carrying on his father’s business in the same premises until his death in 1966.

 

Preparing for opening at Leila’s Shop