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Please keep your eyes open for my old friend George Parrin, the Ice Cream Seller, who is cycling around the East End now and, if you see George, stop him and buy one – and he will tell you his story.

‘I’ve been on a bike since I was two’

I first encountered Ice Cream Seller, George Parrin, coming through Whitechapel Market on his bicycle. Even before I met him, his cry of ‘Lovely ice cream, home made ice cream – stop me and buy one!’ announced his imminent arrival and then I saw his red and white umbrella bobbing through the crowd towards us. George told me that Whitechapel is the best place to sell ice cream in the East End and, observing the looks of delight spreading through the crowd, I witnessed the immediate evidence of this.

Such was the demand on that hot summer afternoon that George had to cycle off to get more supplies, so it was not possible for me to do an interview. Instead, we agreed to meet next day outside the Beigel Bakery on Brick Lane where trade was a little quieter. On arrival, George popped into the bakery and asked if they would like some ice cream and, once he had delivered a cup of vanilla ice, he emerged triumphant with a cup of tea and a salt beef beigel. ‘Fair exchange is no robbery!’ he declared with a hungry grin as he took a bite into his lunch.

“I first came down here with my dad when I was eight years old. He was a strongman and a fighter, known as ‘Kid Parry.’ Twice, he fought Bombardier Billy Wells, the man who struck the gong for Rank Films. Once he beat him and once he was beaten, but then he beat two others who beat Billy, so indirectly my father beat him.

In those days you needed to be an actor or entertainer if you were in the markets.  My dad would tip a sack of sand in the floor and pour liquid carbolic soap all over it. Then he got a piece of rotten meat with flies all over it and dragged it through the sand. The flies would fly away and then he sold the sand by the bag as a fly repellent.

I was born in Hampstead, one of thirteen children. My mum worked all her life to keep us going. She was a market trader, selling all kinds of stuff, and she collected scrap metal, rags, woollens and women’s clothes in an old pram and sold it wholesale. My dad was to and fro with my mum, but he used to come and pick me up sometimes, and I worked with him. When I was nine, just before my dad died, we moved down to Queens Rd, Peckham.

I’ve been on a bike since I was two, and at three years old I had my own three-wheeler. I’ve always been on a bike. On my fifteenth birthday, I left school and started work. At first, I had a job for a couple of months delivering meat around Wandsworth by bicycle for Brushweilers the Butcher, but then I worked for Charles, Greengrocers of Belgravia delivering around Chelsea, and I delivered fruit and vegetables to the Beatles and Mick Jagger.

At sixteen years old, I started selling hot chestnuts outside Earls Court with Tony Calefano, known as ‘Tony Chestnuts.’ I lived in Wandsworth then, so I used to cycle over the river each day. I worked for him for four years and then I made my own chestnut can. In the summer, Tony used to sell ice cream and he was the one that got me into it.

I do enjoy it but it’s hard work. A ten litre tub of ice cream weighs 40lbs and I might carry eight tubs in hot weather plus the weight of the freezer and two batteries. I had thirteen ice cream barrows up the West End but it got so difficult with the police. They were having a purge, so they upset all my barrows and spoilt the ice cream. After that, Margaret Thatcher changed the law and street traders are now the responsibility of the council. The police here in Brick Lane are as sweet as a nut to me.

I bought a pair of crocodiles in the Club Row animal market once. They’re docile as long as you keep them in the water but when they’re out of it they feel vulnerable and they’re dangerous. I can’t remember what I did with mine when they got large. I sell watches sometimes. If anybody wants a watch, I can go and get it for them. In winter, I make jewellery with shells from the beach in Spain, matching earrings with ‘Hello’ and ‘Hola’ carved into them. I’m thinking of opening a pie and mash shop in Spain.

I am happy to give out ice creams to people who haven’t got any money and I only charge pensioners a pound. Whitechapel is best for me. I find the Asian people are very generous when it comes to spending money on their children, so I make a good living off them. They love me and I love them.”

Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien

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In 2012, Sarah Ainslie and I set out to explore the culture of chicken shops, entirely unaware that this would become the most controversial post ever with responses polarised between those who love and hate them.

Al-Halal Fried Chicken, 63 Brick Lane

While the rest of humanity may strive towards perfection as an ever-unattainable goal, in the world of Fried Chicken perfection has already been achieved and is omnipresent – or so it appears from the number of Perfect Fried Chicken shops that line our East End streets. In fact, such is the familiarity of Perfect Fried Chicken that the acronym “PFC” is widely used and recognised among the cognoscenti. Yet, beyond this, several of the more ambitious Fried Chicken shops even claim to have surpassed perfection by advertising “PFC plus” upon their hoardings.

“What is this Fried Chicken that is beyond perfection?” I wondered as a mere PFC neophyte. And so I asked Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie to join me on a PFC safari to explore this fascinating phenomenon of the ubiquitous Perfect Fried Chicken shops.

My presumption was that the pace of fast food precluded the opportunity of any conversation, but at Perfect Fried Chicken Express in the Bethnal Green Rd, where we commenced our journey, we received the first of a series of friendly welcomes that were to characterise our itinerary. Sarah & I began mid-morning so that we could observe the accumulation of the lunchtime rush upon our tour and in Bethnal Green we found the staff wiping down the counters and making their final preparations for the day’s trading.

With so many mirrors, reflective surfaces and shiny plastic panels, interspersed by gaudy advertisements illustrating meal deals in graphic colour photography, all cast within a glimmering fluorescent glow, it is difficult to resist the fairground glamour of the Fried Chicken Shops. Yet circumstances are far from perfection in the trade, as Saba Kuru who has been manager of Favorite Fried Chicken for the past six years outlined to me. “The council used to decide how many chicken shops there could be in an area,” he revealed with distain, ” but now anyone can get a licence and you even have chicken shops next to one another. It means the price goes down and the chicken hangs around and gets dried out.” But at Favorite Fried Chicken, customers have no fear of dried-out chicken because Saba and his assistant Shakala keep the Fried Chicken moving fast, thereby ensuring its succulent consistency and maintaining the proud reputation of this jewel of a shop at the western end of Bethnal Green Rd.

Popping in briefly to shake hands with Moshin, who has been manager of Chicken Hut further down the Bethnal Green Rd for eight years, we crossed over to Brick Lane where, on the corner of Bacon St, we encountered the East End’s newest Chicken Shop. Operating under the unconventional name of Peppers and promising “Fresh and Healthy” Fried Chicken, there we were greeted by Junaig behind the counter who was keen to promote the opening offer of twenty-two halal chicken wings for just five pounds.

At 63 Brick Lane, we visited Spitalfields’ original Fried Chicken shop, Al-Halal Fried Chicken run by Mr Suhel for the past fifteen years. In this tiny sparkly shop, a team of  four led by Mr Suhel were waiting, eager to serve. “The prices have not gone up in all the time I have been here,” Mr Suhel assured me, gesturing with a wry grin to his gleaming display of photographs of Fried Chicken meals each individually priced, “Competitiveness is the problem, because someone is always going to sell it 1p cheaper, meanwhile the wholesale price of chicken has gone from £20 to £30 a box.” And that was the limit of our conversation because there was now a constant stream of hungry customers ordering meals.

The lunchtime rush was in full flood and crowds prevented us venturing into the Al-Badar Fried Chicken & Curry Restaurant further down the Lane, in spite of the enticing smells that were drawing us there. In Osborn St, arriving at the south end of Brick Lane we paid a visit to Southern Fried Chicken, a tiny operation run by Abdul Basith for the last twelve years. The entire shop is no bigger than a domestic dining room and here we found the customers eager advocates for Mr Basith’s culinary skills. While Toufix Alam tucked into his Fried Chicken burger in delighted silence, his colleague at the next table extolled the superlative efficiency of the swift service which allowed her to make the most of her short lunchbreak. “Do you come here every day?” I asked, only to be met with a grin of amazement. “Only once a week,” was her reply and I realised that – much as she would like to come here each day – the need to watch her waistline precluded it.

Turning the corner into the Whitechapel Rd, we entered a region where seemingly every other shop was a Chicken Shop, but unfortunately by now we had already eaten so much Fried Chicken that we could only walk past them all in wonder, admiring their permutations of design, their colourful posters and ingenious names. We had arrived at the culmination of our journey, in Chicken City. Everywhere, happy people were to be seen eating Fried Chicken.

Far from being the transitory anonymous spaces offered by fast food chains, the independently run Chicken Shops are safe havens from the clamour of the city, where anyone can eat for as little as one pound and be assured of a welcome too. No wonder people feel comfortable in Chicken Shops. No wonder people love them.

Mahee Abbasi at PFC Plus in Whitechapel.

Junaig at Peppers in Brick Lane  – “Twenty-two spicy wings for five pounds!”

Toufix Alam with his Fried Chicken Burger.

Saba Kuru – “Everybody likes chicken and chips.”

At Peppers, Spitalfields’ newest Fried Chicken Shop.

Shakala, customer assistant at Favorite Fried Chicken.

In Whitechapel’s Chicken City.

Mr Suhel and his team at Al-Halal Fried Chicken in Brick Lane.

Afzol Miah at Perfect Fried Chicken Express.

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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The recipe is old but the cakes are fresh

This is Harry Thomas, baker at Townhouse, who makes all the cakes for our walking tours. His Queen Cakes from a recipe of 1721, served in the drawing room of the three hundred year house overlooking Christ Church, Spitalfields, have proved to be the ideal restorative for guests when they put their feet up and relax after a ramble round the neighbourhood.

Yet Harry has another string to his bow, since he matches his superlative flair in baking with an equal talent in music and songwriting – as Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I discovered when we joined him in the basement kitchen to hear the full story and observe the culinary spectacle of baking in progress.

“I would describe myself as a baker by trade and a musician in the rest of my time. Music has always been my passion and I played in a band for seven years when I was at school, growing up in Maidenhead, and then again at Goldsmith’s College where I studied Media & Communications. I graduated five years ago and started baking at Townhouse when I was twenty-one years old.

By then I was already in The Jacques. We are a touring band with more of an audience in France and continental Europe than here, so for the first couple of years, before Covid, we toured extensively. We are working on our second album now – I am a singer and we all write our songs together.

I have always been passionate about cooking and especially baking. My mother is a nursery school teacher, and we baked together and she took me to music lessons. As a child, I did not like reading fiction, instead I read cook books – that was what people bought me at Christmas.

At first, I read children’s cook books but then I graduated to adult ones at school, supplemented by Youtube cookery shows and the Food Network. As a consequence, I am not afraid of creating aggregates by taking parts of one recipe and the combining it with another. My parents will follow a recipe by the book exactly whereas  I do not. The more batches of cakes I have baked, the more I have come to understand the variables which gives me leeway in terms of how I want a cake to turn out.

Since I came to work here, I have introduced more cakes into the repertoire although I still make a lot of those that were being baked before I arrived. But the more I have baked them, and by listening to customers’ preferences, I have evolved the recipes.

Flavour-wise, I just play around with things until I am happy. I bake cakes the way I like them and I will not bake something that I would not be interested in eating myself. I like old recipes and cakes that remind me of the cakes that my mum would have baked or those I remember at bake sales at village fairs.

I want my cakes to make people feel special. When I introduced the Bakewell cake, I liked it because it was very crumbly, and I dust it with icing sugar and it feels special without being pretentious. It is very simple, equal measurements of everything in the cake and it just needs to be done correctly, with care.

I have a great balance in my life of baking and music. I could not have dreamt of a better balance of my passions in life. Obviously, I would like my music to advance and we have a record deal and a publishing deal. I am very uncompromising in that I always wanted my job to be rewarding and it is instantly gratifying. I get to cook all day and regularly go and play music all evening. Sometimes I get up early and go to the gym, bake cakes all day, and go and play music until midnight. Then I go to bed and come back and do it all over again!”

At the foot of the page in Mary Stockdale’s recipe book of 1721 is the recipe for Queen Cakes

Harry and his celebrated Queen Cakes, laced with mace and nutmeg

Photographs of Harry Thomas copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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Today I thought you might take inspiration from these recipes – culinary and medicinal – from Thomas Newington‘s book that he wrote in 1715 while in domestic service in Brighton, illustrated with wood engravings by Reynolds Stone. Do let me know how you get on.

Madam, Perhaps you may wonder to see your Receipts thus increased in Bulk and Number, Especily when you consider that they come from me who cannot make pretentions to things of thy nature, but haveing in my hands some Excelent Manuscripts of Phisick, Cookery, Preserves &c which were the Palladium of Many Noble Familyes, I did imagine that by blending them together, which in themselves were so choice and valuable, they woud magnifie and Illustrate each other.

Madam, I might well fear lest these rude and unpolished lines should offend you but that I hope your goodness will rather smile at the faults commited than censure them.

However I desire your Ladyships pardon for presenting things so unworthy to your View and except the goodwill of him who in all Duty is bound to be.

Your Ladyships Most Humble & most Obeiant Sarvant,

Thomas Newington

Brighthelmstone, May the 20: 1719

HOW TO KILL & ROAST A PIGG

Take your Pigg and hold the head down in a Payle of cold Watter untill strangeled, then hang him up buy the heals and fley him, then open him, then chine him down the back as you doe a porker first cuting of his head, then cut him in fower quarters, then lard two of the quarters with lemon peele and other two with tops of Time, then spit and roast them. The head requeares more roasting than the braines with a little Sage and grave for sauce.

TO SPITCHCOCK EELS

Pull of the skins to the taile, then strow on them a little cloves, Mace, peper & salt, a little time and savory and parsly shred very fine. Then draw up the skinn and turn them up in the shape of S, and some round. Run a skure through them, then frye or boyle them and lay them round other fish.

TO PRESERVE GREENE WALNUTS

Take your wallnuts when they be so young that a pin will go through them, then set them on fire and let them boyle in fair Watter till the bitterness go out, shifting it once or twice. Then take to every pound of Walnuts a pound of lofe sugar, half a pint of watter, boyleing till they be tender in this surrupe. Then let them stand to soak in this surrupe 3 or 4 dayes, then take them out and prick 3 or 4 holes in each sticking half a Clove and a little Cynament in each, but if you fear it will be to strong of the spice omit some of them. Then set on your surrupe and skim it, adding a pound more of sugar. Boyle them therein to thick syrrupe and let them stand for a fortnight or three Weekes, then boyle them up and add more sugar if you see Occasion. They are Cordial to take in a Morning, good for the stomach and Loosen the Body.

A REMEDY FOR THE PLAGUE

Among the excelent and aproved medecines for the Pestilence, there is none worthy and avaylable when the sore appeareth. Then take a Cock Pullet and pluck of the fethers of the taile or hinderpart till the rump be bare, then hold the bare of the said Pullet to the sore and the pullet will gape and labour for life and in the end he will dye. Then take another Pullet and doe the like and so another as the Pullets do dye, for when the Poyson is Drawn out the last Pullet that is offered therto will live. The sore Presently is assuaged and the party recovereth.

A SURRUP FOR THE PRESERVATION OF LONG LIFE RECOMMENDD TO THE RIGHT HONBLE MARY COUNTESS OF FEVERSHAM BY DR PETER DUMOULIN OF CANTERBURY JUNE YE 2, 1682

An Eminent Officer in the great Army with the Emperour Charles the 5th sent into Barbary had his quarters there Assigned him in an Old Gentlemans House with whom by mutall offices of Humanity he soone contracted a singular Freindship. Seeing him looke very Old yet very Fresh and Vigourous he asked him how old he was – he answerd he was 132 years old, that till Sixty Yeares of Age he had been a good Fellow takeing little care of his health but that then he had begun to take a spoonfull of surrup every morning fasting, which ever since has keept him in health. Being Desired to impart that receipt to his Guest he freely granted it and the Officer being returned to his Cuntry made use of that surrup and with it Preserved himself and many more, yet kept the Receipt secret till haveing attained by this surrupe ninety two years of Age, he made a scruple to keep it secret any longer and publisht for the Common good.

Take of the juices of mercurial eight pounds, of the juice of Burridg two pounds, of the juice of Buglosse two pounds. Mingle these with twelve pounds of clarrified Honey, the whitest you can gett, let them boyle together aboyling and paas them through a Hypocras Bag of new flannell. Infuse in three pints of White Wine, a quarter of a pound Gentian Root and half a pound of Irish root or blew Flower de Lis. Let them be infused twenty fower houers then straind without squeezing, put the liquor to that of the herbs and Hony, boyle them well together to constistence of a surrup. You must order the matter so that one thing stays not for the other but that all be ready together. A spoonfull of this surrup is to be taken every morning Fasting.

TO MAKE SURRUPE OF CLOVE GILY FLOWERS

Take a pound of the flowers when they are cleane cut from their white bottom and beat them into a stone Mortar till they be very fine all. Then haveing Fair watter very well boyled, take a quart of it boyling hott and pour it to them in the Mortar, then cover it close and let it stand all night, and the next dat streyne them out and to every pint of this Liquor take a pound and a half of Duble Refine Lofe Sugar beaten, then put your sugar and set it on the fire and boyle it and, when it is clean scimed, take it of and pour it into a silver or Earthen Bason and so let it stand uncovered till the next day, then glass it up and stop it close and set it not but where it may stand coole & it will keep the better.

A SNAYLE WATTER IS GOOD IN A CONSUMPTION OR JAUNDICE TO CLEAR THE SKIN OR REVIVE YE SPIRRITS

Take a Peck of Garden Snayles in their Shells. Gather them as near as you can out of lavender or Rosemary and not in trees or grass. Wash them in a Tubb three times in Beere, then make your Chimney very clean and power out a bushall of charcole and, when they are well kindled, make a great hole with a fire shovell and put in your Snayles and Put in some of your cleane burnt coals among them and let roast till they leave makeing a noise. Then you must take them forth with a knife and clean them with a cleane Cloathpick and wipe away the coales and green froth that will be upon them. Then beat them in a mortar shells and all.

Take also a Quart of Earthworms, slitt and scower them with salt, then wash them in whitewine till you have taken away all the filth from them, and put them into a stone Mortar and beat them to peices. Then take a sweet, clean Iron pott which you will sett your limbeck on, then take 2 Ms. of Angellica and lay it in the bottome of your Pott and 2 Ms. of Sallendine, on the top of that putt in 2 quarts of Rosemary Flowers, Bearsfoot, Egrimony, the redest Dock roots you can get, the barbery bark, Wood Sorrell, bettony, of each three handfulls, 1 handfull of Rue, of Flengreek and Turmerick, of each one ounce well beaten.

Then lay your Snayles and wormes on top of your herbs and flowers and power upon them the strongest Ale you can gett fower gallons, and two gallons of the best sack and let it stand all night or longer, stirring Divers times. In the morning put in two ounces of Cloves, twelve ounces of hartshorne, six ounces of ivory, the waight of two shillings of Saffron. The Cloves must be bruised. You must not stir it after these last things are in.

Then set it on your limbeck and close it fast with Rye Past and receive your water in Pintes. The first is the strongest and so smaller, the smallest may be mended by puting in some of the strongest. When you use it, take three spoonfulls of beere or Ale to two spoonfulls of the strongest and to this three quarts of cowslips flowers, one quart of Buglose and buridg flowers and 3 Ms. of liverworth.

If you will, you should feed your Snayles with sallendine and barbery leaves and bough, and the wash them in new milk fower times and then in a Tubb of strong Ale so that they may be very cleane, and then burn them.

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It is my pleasure publish this piece by Julia Harrison, author of the fascinating literary blog THE SILVER LOCKET.

Portrait of Paul Rothe by Sarah Ainslie

I have known Paul Rothe’s Delicatessen & Cafe in Marylebone Lane for as long as I can remember. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, my mother used to travel up to town from Putney with me and my sister for a lunchtime treat at Paul Rothe’s before having our haircut by Mr John of ‘Charles, Bruno and John’ in their salon round the corner in Hinde St. I still have my hair cut by Andrew, who was a young apprentice in those days and now has his own salon, ‘Andrew K’, nearby on Marylebone St. He told me on my recent visit that during the salon’s heyday they used to cater for their clients and would often order sandwiches from Paul Rothe. I think it is these connections and the continuity they represent which make Paul Rothe so special to me.

Today, I work at Daunt Books on Marylebone High St and often, seeking a moment to myself at lunchtime, my footsteps lead me in Paul Rothe’s direction. Whether I am having a good day or a bad one, I know when I walk through the door a sense of inner peace will descend. Paul and his son Stephen will be there in their smart white grocer’s coats, lively smiles combined with looks of concentration on their faces as they deal expertly with the lunchtime rush. Office workers will be ordering take-aways, together with locals settling down for a bowl of homemade soup, while a happy customer chooses their favourite jam, chutney or sauce from the colourful range lining the shelves.

In the summer, snatches of music and occasionally operatic voices drift over from the rehearsal rooms across the road. Then I am drawn back to those innocent days long ago when my sister and I would look forward to window shopping at the Button Queen opposite, before ordering our homemade Liptauer and cucumber sandwiches at Paul Rothe, eating at the iconic fifties flip up seats and Formica tables where I sit today.

On a recent visit, in the company of Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie, I sat down with Paul to learn the story of his shop.

“Rothe is a German name.  I am named after my grandfather who came from Saxony and worked his way over on a coal barge in 1898. Most German people at the end of the nineteenth century thought that the streets of London were paved with gold. My father didn’t know a lot about his father’s early life in Germany, except he met my grandmother in London. There was a flower shop in Jason’s Court called Schillers, they were German, and they introduced my grandmother and grandfather to each other. They got married and my father was born in 1915.

Paul started in partnership in Soho. The reason he opened there was that the man he was in partnership with was meant to open early, then they overlapped in the middle of the day and my grandfather would stay open late. But a lot of the customers were saying that his partner wasn’t in the store until about two hours after he should have been, so my grandfather decided to come here to Marylebone Lane and open on his own instead.

In my grandfather’s day, it was purely a retail shop, much smaller than you see now. There was a parlour at the back with a fireplace. My grandmother didn’t want the shop made bigger but my dad was always moaning that it was too small. After my grandfather had passed away, when his mother was on holiday, my father knocked the wall down and made that area part of the shop.

The shop opened on August 2nd 1900. We traded as a German deli. In one of the old photographs of the shop, you can see the words ‘Deutsche Delicatessen.’ We still make Liptauer, which is an Austrian cheese, and my dad made a cheese of his own invention with caraway seeds called ‘Kummelkase.’ A lot was imported from Germany and most of the staff spoke German. My grandfather was in the German army before he came over here and then he served in the British army.

In the Second World War, my father was a conscientious objector, he worked in the Middlesex Hospital on Mortimer St. He never heard his parents speak to each other in German, they only spoke in English. There was quite a German community round here then and we used to get a lot of customers coming to us because they felt at home. Until the First World War, we had ‘Deutche Delicatessen’ on the windows but they took that off. Now we have evolved and trade as an ordinary deli but at Christmas time we still have stollen and lebkuchen. 

We lived in Harrow when I was a child and I will always remember coming in to the shop. We had the freestanding tables in those days. Dad had a pole attached to the ceiling which is still there, hidden behind the wooden beam where customers hang their coats, and we used to play ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush.’ I had a great time with my sisters dancing round the shop. 

After the Second World War, we started becoming what you see today. A lot of other food stores opened up nearby and we had to change the way we operate. There was a Europa food store in Marylebone High St and, in recent years, Waitrose. Rather than having a general store where you could buy cornflakes and self-raising flour, we reduced our stock but specialised a lot more, so now we do every single jam and marmalade that Tiptree makes, for example, and all the sauces too. The brands that we stock, we have every option available. ‘Cottage Delight’ from Staffordshire is another one and ‘Thursday Cottage,’ which is a separate entity within Tiptree. They’ve got their own little factory and their own manufacturing process.  We do well with Regent’s Park honey when it is in season in the summer. 

The biggest change in how we operate was when we had parking restrictions imposed. In my dad’s day, anyone could pull up their car and do a week’s grocery shop but, because of the lack of parking, we don’t have that trade now. At Christmas time, we provide stocking fillers, little gifts that people will take home on the train. We don’t do a vast range, we specialise in particular things. My son is very artistic and he gets the aesthetics of the displays just right. He is computer literate too, which I am not, and looks after the social media side of things, putting the soup of the day up so people know what it is.

My father was very fortunate to buy the freehold of the shop when it came up for sale.There was an auction and no one else was bidding that day. Apparently, someone else had been interested but they got caught in traffic!”

Quite reluctantly, I leave Paul and his son Stephen to go back to my late shift at the bookshop. I am captivated by the stories he has shared. In his breezy, good-natured way, he brought to life not just the history of his family but a century of shopkeeping. Our bookshop has been in existence since 1910 and still has its original fittings, so I like to imagine book lovers of the Edwardian era choosing the latest volume, before walking down Marylebone Lane to buy their groceries at the Deutsche Delicatessen.

A photograph from 1914 showing ‘Deutsche Delicatessen’ on the windows. The girls were from the newsagents next door.

Paul Rothe’s grandfather in the early twenties, with his assistant Ernie

Robert, Karoline, Helmut and Thomas, c.1956

‘We stayed open during the war – my aunt ran the shop with one other member of staff called Thomas. As a young boy I remember we had Helmut who was a German prisoner of war who stayed over here – he always wore a little bow tie and we had a German student here. I would have been about ten and my grandmother was serving behind the counter.’

Robert Rothe, 1961

‘My dad was full of adrenaline, trying to serve quickly at lunchtime, he didn’t like anything that slows things down, so he didn’t do toast, wouldn’t do lettuce, he wanted everyone served quickly, he didn’t want a long queue.’

Three generations of the Rothe family on the shop’s hundredth anniversary

Stephen & Paul Rothe today

Stephen & Paul Rothe

Stephen demonstrates the fine art of a pastrami sandwich

Adding the pickles

The complete sandwich

Wrapping the sandwich expertly

A magnificent sandwich

David prepares the soup of the day freshly in the kitchen

‘At some point after the Second World War, my father started doing catering on the premises and we had freestanding tables with four chairs round each table, but you would get a group of six in and they would move the chairs around. We were already getting long queues and dad would have to stop serving and put it all back to where they belonged. So he ordered these that were screwed down to the floor so that people couldn’t move them. They are very fifties with their Formica tops. We had two more put in in 1964 and they’ve been here ever since.’

Stephen & Paul Rothe

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

PAUL ROTHE & SON, 35 Marylebone Lane, W1U 2NN

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Last weekend we launched our crowdfund and have raised £3,814 towards our target so far.

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‘We want to celebrate the work that the women do’

People often ask where they can find authentic Bengali food in Spitalfields and I have found the answer in Oitij-jo Kitchen, a women’s collective who run the catering operation at Rich Mix Arts Centre in the Bethnal Green Rd.

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie spent a morning recording the activity in the kitchen while I sat down with co-founder Maher Anjum who explained to me what it is all about, before we all reconvened for a taste test.

“Four of us set up the Oitij-jo collective in 2013 straight after the 2012 London Olympics. We had Akram Khan in the opening ceremony but nothing else. We were all creatives, so we asked ourselves ‘Where are we in this scenario?’

We set up Oitij-jo to be a platform for creative practitioners from the Bangladeshi disapora, representing them, supporting them, especially emerging artists, but also showcasing our rich cultural heritage and translating it into what is happening now. Oitij-jo in bangla means heritage. It was important to us to take it to the future, so that the next generation have an understanding and can interpret it in their own way, because it is only at that point that it is alive.

In 2016, we did a year’s residency at the Gram Bangla restaurant in Brick Lane displaying art works with a new exhibition every three months.  It was the first restaurant which served traditional Bengali food, and that was when food became part of our project. We had a lot of conversations with the restauranteurs about the nature of our food. And we realised that food was such an important part our cultural identity, it was something we wanted to work with. There was a visible lack of women in the restaurant sector and in catering in general, so we decided to focus on bringing in Bangladeshi women. It’s culture that people carry, even if may not pay attention to it, we simply say ‘Have some food.’

One of the things that women who work with us tell us is, ‘People say ‘thank you’ for the food I prepare for them. That’s really nice because at home it’s taken for granted. No-one’s going to thank you for the food you put on the table, it’s come-eat-go.’ For a lot of these women, the recognition of what they are doing is a recognition of themselves and food becomes an intrinsic part of who they are, part of their identity.

British Bangladeshi women are some of the least economically active of the population this country, three times less likely to be paid the same wages as anyone else. What are we doing about it? The creative sector is one of the most productive, but the involvement of black, Asian and people from other ethnic minorities is one of the least.

We see Otijo-jo kitchen as the means of giving women the pathway to self-discovery and self-esteem, while exploring the question of what is food for the British Bangladeshi community.

The so-called colonial curry – and what is seen to be ‘curry’ – has a complicated lineage, but there is a place for it and it has made a huge contribution to the community where employment was not available. It was a way for people to establish themselves and be their own bosses, rather than waiting for a job that might never come. We need to acknowledge that but it gets complicated when we ask, ‘What is the food? Who does it? And how does it happen?’

What we want to do is something quite different. We want to celebrate the work that the women do and the food which we consider is traditional Bengali food that people eat at home.

We could not get any funding, so we did a crowdfund in 2018 and raised a tiny amount of money, and started in 2019. Since then we have worked with about sixty women. We do not expect them to stay with us because we want them to gain the ability and self-confidence, get the skills and experience, and move on to do what they want to do.

Many women who come to us have never been in paid employment, they have very little experience of being outside the home or being in a working environment. We want them to build up the confidence to say ‘I can be here’ and be able to talk to people.

We have around a dozen women working with us at present. Once the women have finished their training period, they can stay on working with us and earn the London Living Wage. While they are training with us, they get a daily bursary.

We are a charity and a social enterprise, so we have to make sure we earn money to continue this work. Over the years, we have developed menus and recipes that are our style of cooking. The women who join us learn to cook our recipes the way we cook them.

We serve food at Rich Mix each Thursday to Sunday from 3pm to 9pm. The rest of the time, we use the kitchen here to do catering. We do conferences, seminars, weddings, any kind of occasion. We provide a hundred student lunches for a university twice a week, that’s a very different kind of catering. We did a conference for the Serpentine Gallery at Somerset House for one hundred and twenty people, breakfast, tea, lunch and something in the afternoon too.

Most of the women find us through word of mouth and we are having people contacting us all the time. We have a wide range of ages from around twenty to over sixty and we feel that’s really important because they brings different skills, experiences and abilities. Women come from across Tower Hamlets and the East End.

When we first started, someone asked, ‘If people want vegan food, what shall we give?’ If you have plain rice and dhal which is a standard Bengali meal, that is vegan. Bangladesh is a nation of rivers, so our heritage is that we eat vegetarian and vegan food all the time. You could say that we are going with the trend, except that is normal traditional food for us.”

Surma Khanom, Maher Anjum, Hajira Bibi & Rohema Begum

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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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)

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Fifteen years ago on a cold Good Friday, I attended the ceremony of the widow’s buns at Bow. The ceremony will taking place at 2pm today.

Baked by Mr Bunn’s Bakery in Chadwell Heath

On Good Friday, what could be more appropriate to the equivocal nature of the day than an event which involves both celebration of Hot Cross Buns and the remembrance of the departed in a single custom – such is the ceremony of the Widow’s Buns at Bow.

A net of Hot Cross Buns hangs above the bar at The Widow’s Son in Bromley by Bow, and each year a sailor comes to add another bun to the collection. And this year I was there to witness it for myself, though – before you make any assumption based on your knowledge of my passion for buns  – I must clarify that no Hot Cross Buns are eaten in the ceremony, they are purely for symbolic purposes. Left to dry out and gather dust and hang in the net for eternity, London’s oldest buns exist as metaphors to represent the passing years and talismans to bring good luck but, more than this, they tell a story.

The Widow’s Son was built in 1848 upon the former site of an old widow’s cottage, so the tale goes. When her only son left to be a sailor, she promised to bake him a Hot Cross Bun and keep it for his return. But although he drowned at sea, the widow refused to give up hope, preserving the bun upon his return and making a fresh one each year to add to the collection. This annual tradition has been continued in the pub as a remembrance of the widow and her son, and of the bond between all those on land and sea, with sailors of the Royal Navy coming to place the bun in the net every year.

Behind this custom lies the belief that Hot Cross Buns baked on Good Friday will never decay, reflected in the tradition of nailing a Hot Cross Bun to the wall so that the cross may bring good luck to the household – though what appeals to me about the story of the widow is the notion of baking as an act of faith, incarnating a mother’s hope that her son lives. I interpret the widow’s persistence in making the bun each year as a beautiful gesture, not of self-deception but of longing for wish-fulfilment, manifesting her love for her son. So I especially like the clever image upon the inn sign outside the Widow’s Son, illustrating an apocryphal scene in the story when the son returns from the sea many years later to discover a huge net of buns hanging behind the door, demonstrating that his mother always expected him back.

When I arrived at the Widow’s Son, I had the good fortune to meet Frederick Beckett who first came here for the ceremony in 1958 when his brother Alan placed the Hot Cross Bun in the net, and he had the treasured photo in his hand to show me. Frederick moved out from Bow to Dagenham fifteen years ago, but he still comes back each year to visit the Widow’s Son, one of many in this community and further afield who delight to converge here on Good Friday for old times’ sake. Already, there was a tangible sense of anticipation, with spirits uplifted by the sunshine and the flags hung outside, ready to celebrate St George next day.

The landlady proudly showed me the handsome fresh 2011 Hot Cross Bun, baked by Mr Bunn of Mr Bunn’s Bakery in Chadwell Heath who always makes the special bun each year  -” fabulous buns!” declared Kathy, almost succumbing to a swoon, as he she held up her newest sweetest darling that would shortly join its fellows in the net over the bar. There were many more ancient buns, she explained, until a fire destroyed most of them fifteen years ago, and those burnt ones in the net today are merely those few which were salvaged by the firemen from the wreckage of the pub. Remarkably, having opened their hearts to the emotional poetry of Hot Cross Buns, at the Widow’s Son they even cherish those cinders which the rest of the world would consign to a bin.

The effect of the beer and the unseasonal warm temperatures upon a pub full of sailors and thirsty locals rapidly induced a pervasive atmosphere of collective euphoria, heightened by a soundtrack of pounding rock, and, in the thick of it, I was delighted to meet my old pal Lenny Hamilton, the jewel thief. “I’m not here for the buns, I’m here for the bums!” he confided to me with a sip of his Corvoisier and lemonade, making a lewd gesture and breaking in to a wide grin of salacious enjoyment as various Bow belles, in off-the-shoulder dresses, with flowing locks and wearing festive corsages, came over enthusiastically to shower this legendary rascal with kisses.

I stood beside Lenny as three o’ clock approached, enjoying the high-spirited gathering as the sailors came together in front of the bar. The landlord handed over the Hot Cross Bun to widespread applause and the sailors lifted up their smallest recruit. Then, with a mighty cheer from the crowd and multiple camera flashes, the recruit placed the bun in the net.  Once this heroic task was accomplished, and the landlady had removed the tinfoil covers from the dishes of food laid out upon the billiard table, all the elements were in place for a knees-up to last the rest of the day. As they like to say in Bromley by Bow, it was “Another year, another Good Friday, another bun.”

Peter Gracey, Nick Edelshain and Roddy Urquhart raise a pint to the Widow’s Buns.

Tony Scott and Debbie Willis of HMS President with Frederick Beckett holding the photograph of his brother placing the bun in the net in 1958.

Alan Beckett places the bun on Good Friday, 4th April 1958.

3 pm, Good Friday, 22nd April 2011.

The Widow’s Son was the local for my pal Lenny Hamilton, the jewel thief.

A Widow’s Son of Bromley by Bow

by Harold Adshead

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Next time you pass through Widegate St, walking from Bishopsgate towards Artillery Passage on your way to Spitalfields, lift up your eyes to see the four splendid sculptures of bakers by Philip Lindsey Clark (1889 – 1977) upon the former premises of Nordheim Model Bakery at numbers twelve and thirteen. Pause to take in the subtle proportions of this appealing yet modest building of 1926 by George Val Myers, the architect of Broadcasting House.

Born in Brixton, son of Scots architectural sculptor Robert Lindsey Clark, Philip trained in his father’s studio in Cheltenham and then returned to London to study at the City & Guilds School in Kennington. Enlisted in 1914, he was severely wounded in action and received a Distinguished Service Order for conspicuous gallantry. Then, after completing his training at the Royal Academy Schools, he designed a number of war memorials including those in Southwark and in Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow.

The form of these ceramic reliefs of bakers – with their white glaze and sparing use of blue as a background – recalls religious sculpture, especially stations of the cross, and there is something deeply engaging about such handsome, austerely-modelled figures with their self-absorbed presence, preoccupied by their work. The dignity of labour and the poetic narrative of transformation in the baking of bread is made tangible by these finely judged sculptures. My own favourite is the figure of the baker with his tray of loaves upon his shoulder in triumph, a satisfaction which anyone who makes anything will recognise, borne of the work, skill and application that is entailed in creation.

These reliefs were fired by Carters of Poole, the company that became Poole Pottery, notable for their luminous white glazes, elegant sculptural forms and spare decoration using clear natural colours. They created many of the tiles for the London Underground and their relief tiles from the 1930s can still be seen on Bethnal Green Station.

Philip Lindsey Clark’s sculptures are those of a man who grew up in the artists’ studio, yet witnessed the carnage of First World War at first hand, carrying on fighting for two days even with a piece of shrapnel buried in his head, and then turned his talents to memorialise those of his generation that were gone. After that, it is no wonder that he saw the sublime in the commonplace activity of bakers yet, from 1930 onwards, his sculpture was exclusively of religious subjects. Eventually Lindsey Clark entered a Carmelite order, leaving London and retiring to the West Country where he lived until the age of eighty-eight.

So take a moment next time you pass through Widegate St – named after the wide gate leading to the ‘spital fields that once were there – and contemplate the sculptures by Philip Lindsey Clark, embodying his vision of the holiness of bakers.

George Val Myer’s former Nordheim Model Bakery with sculptures by Philip Lindsey Clark

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This is Lucinda Rogers‘ drawing of E.Pellicci in the Bethnal Green Rd, London’s most celebrated family-run cafe, into the third generation now and in business for over a century – and continuing to welcome East Enders who have been coming for generations to sit in the cosy marquetry-lined interior and enjoy the honest, keenly-priced meals prepared every day from fresh ingredients.

E.Pellicci is a marvel. It is so beautiful it is listed, the food is always exemplary and I every time I come here I leave heartened to have met someone new.

I found Lucinda Rogers’ drawing on the wall in one of the small upper rooms that now serves as an informal museum of the history of the cafe, curated by Maria Pellicci’s nephew – Toni, a bright-eyed Neapolitan, who has been working here since he left school in Lucca in Tuscany and came to London in 1970. He led me up the narrow staircase, opened the door of the low-ceilinged room and with a single shy gesture of his arm indicated the family museum. Toni has lined the walls with press cuttings, photographs and all kinds of memorabilia, which tell the story of the ascendancy of Pellicci’s, attended by a few statues of saints to give the pleasing aura of a shrine to this cherished collection.

Primo Pellici began working in the cafe in 1900 and it was here in these two rooms that his wife Elide brought up his seven children single-handedly, whilst running the cafe below to keep the family after her husband’s death in 1931. Elide is the E.Pellicci whose initial is still emblazoned in chrome upon the primrose-hued vitroglass fascia and her portrait remains, she and her husband counterbalance each other eternally on either side of the serving hatch in the cafe. In 1921, Nevio senior was born in the front room here. He ran the cafe until his death in 2008, superceded as head of the family business today by his wife Maria who possesses a natural authority and charisma that makes her a worthy successor to Elide.

As I sat alone in the quiet of the room, leafing through the albums, surrounded by the walls of press coverage, Maria came upstairs from the kitchen to join me. She pointed out the flat roof at the rear where her former husband Nevio played as a child. “He was very happy here,” she assured me with a tender smile, standing silently and casting her eyes between the two empty rooms – sensing the emotional presence of the crowded family life that once filled in this space that is now a modest store room and an office. Maria and Nevio brought up their children in a terraced house around the corner in Derbyshire St, and these days Toni goes round each morning early to pick her up from there, before they start work around six at the cafe she runs with her son Nevio and daughter Anna.

Pellicci’s collection tells a very particular history of the twentieth century and beyond – of immigration, of wars, of coronations and gangsters too. But, more than this, it is a history of wonderful meals, a history of very hard work, a history of great family pride, and a history of happiness and love.

Primo Pellicci still presides upon the cafe where he started work in 1900

Primo’s children, Nevio and Mary Pellicci, 1930

Pellicci’s wartime licence issued to Elide Pellicci in 1939 by the Ministry of Food

Pellicci’s paper bag issued to celebrate the Coronation of Elizabeth II  in 1953 – note the phone number, Bishopsgate 1542

Mary and Maria Pellicci, Trafalgar Sq, 1963

Nevio junior, aged seven, skylarking outside the house in Derbyshire St with pals Claudio and Alfie

Nevio senior and Toni, 1980

Pellicci’s customers in 1980

Nevio senior, 1980

Nevio and Toni

Christmas card from Charlie Kray, 1980

Nevio junior and Nevio senior

George Flay’s montage of the world of Pellicci’s

Nevio Senior, 2005

Salvatore Zaccaria, known as Toni, curator of the Pellicci Museum

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Originally established in 1854 in Leman St, the Jewish Soup Kitchen opened in Brune St in 1902 and, even though it closed in 1992, the building in Spitalfields still proclaims its purpose to the world in bold ceramic lettering across the fascia. These days few remember when it was supplying groceries to fifteen hundred people weekly, which makes Photographer Stuart Freedman’s pictures especially interesting as a glimpse of one of the last vestiges of the Jewish East End.

“After I finished studying Politics at university, I decided I wanted to be a photographer but I didn’t know how to do it,” Stuart recalled, contemplating these pictures taken in 1990 at the very beginning of his career. “Although I was brought up in Dalston, my father had grown up in Stepney in the thirties and, invariably, when we used to go walking together we always ended up in Petticoat Lane, which seemed to have a talismanic quality for him. So I think I was following in his footsteps.”

“I used to wander with my camera and, one day, I was just walking around taking pictures, when I moseyed in to the Soup Kitchen and said ‘Can I take photographs?’ and they said, ‘Yes.’ “I didn’t realise what I was doing because now they seem to be the only pictures of this place in existence. You could smell that area then – the smell of damp in old men’s coats and the poverty.”

For the past twenty-five years Stuart Freedman has worked internationally as a photojournalist, yet he was surprised to come upon new soup kitchens recently while on assignment in the north of England. “The poverty is back,” he revealed to me in regret,“which makes these pictures relevant all over again.”

Groceries awaiting collection

A volunteer offers a second hand coat to an old lady

An old woman collects her grocery allowance

A volunteer distributes donated groceries

View from behind the hatch

A couple await their food parcel

An ex-boxer arrives to collect his weekly rations

An old boxer’s portrait, taken while waiting to collect his groceries

An elderly man leaves the soup kitchen with his supplies

Photographs copyright © Stuart Freedman

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