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Ron uses a power press to form trays

Contributing Photographer Rachel Ferriman and I ventured a rare trip south of the river recently to visit the wondrous Kaymet factory in Bermondsey where snazzy trays and trolleys are hand made in aluminium.

We were delighted to be shown round by proprietor Mark Brearley who, as co-author of Made In London, knows a thing or two about the challenges and importance of manufacturing in the capital. Proving that he puts his money where his mouth is, thirteen years ago Mark came along to buy a tray for his wife’s birthday, discovered that the business was going into liquidation and agreed to take it on, without hesitation.

I had no idea how an aluminium tray could be hand made until I came here. Yet the processes of forming, punching, polishing, graining, anodising and assembly require significant human skill and painstaking craft at every stage. As well as preventing oxidisation, anodising introduces colour, while graining imparts an organic texture and, finally, polishing delivers the shine.

There are two kinds of trays made here. Pressed trays formed out of a single sheet of aluminium possess an elegant simplicity, while assembled trays offer an infinite variety of colour, texture and pattern contained within neatly ridged metal edges and handles. What could be more civilised for breakfast in bed or lunch in the garden than a stylish tray from Kaymet? The discreet royal warrant tells you all you need to know.

When Rachel & I sat down with Mark after our factory tour, he beguiled us with his lyrical tale of the origin of London’s top trays.

‘It all goes back to the nineteenth century, to the Schreiber family, who were immigrants of German origin with a history of metalwork and retail, and they were connected with another family, the Kahns. In fact, Sydney Schreiber who started Kaymet changed his surname to Kahn. By the early twentieth century, they had a few shops near the Elephant & Castle, one of which was a toy shop that carried on until the seventies. They had a radio shop when radios first became popular, also in Elephant & Castle, making the cases from sheet metal in the basement of the shop. And that’s the origin of what became the sheet metal and engineering business which moved to Kennington Lane and did very well during the Second World War making radio casings in aluminium. After the war, they had to decide what to do next, so in 1947 they decided to produce homewares in anodised aluminium. And that’s when Kaymet was founded – the ‘K’ of Kahn and ‘met’ from metal – making trays and trolleys.

No-one knows where the designs come from, they have emerged from production with no named designer. We just have a few old drawings and books with dimensions and instructions, and we know of some interventions by industrial designers. It was a process of huge inventiveness because they rapidly came up with a big product range. Somebody invented all those products and worked them out. 

They’re very practical objects. If you take the ribbed tray – as we call it – with the ribbed pattern on the extruded handles and edges, that ribbed-ness makes it look very fifties and it just so happens that design originates from then. Yet the story behind it is a practical one. The trays we were making before that were expensive because they were edged with a flat strip of aluminium which required a lot of polishing to remove imperfections. But once we made them ribbed they needed less polishing and less volume of aluminium so they were lighter. It wasn’t primarily a stylistic choice although maybe they were influenced by the moment they were in.

Who came up the idea of making trolleys that, instead of having legs to support the tiers and a separate handle, had a frame which combined the legs and the handle? It appeared in the late fifties or early sixties across lots of manufacturers and it’s drastically better. It looks better, it’s sturdier and it’s easier to make.

After 1947, Kaymet expanded dramatically with up to 200 employees. They took on a lot of contract work, casting handles and anodising for other companies, which magnified the scale of the company. They built an impressive factory for themselves off the Old Kent Rd. But then fashions changed, with competitors making pressed plastic trays and manufacturing them cheaply in other parts of the world.

The aspirational trend for drinks trolleys fell away and the business shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, losing their factory in the nineties and ending up in a series of smaller and smaller premises. I took it on in 2013 when it went into liquidation and agreed to give it a go in collaboration with the proprietor, taking on the staff of four, re-renting the building and rescuing what we could of the tools, reinvesting and pushing sales with a new business strategy.

I had no idea. I was in the right place at the right time because I had been researching manufacturing in London. I simply went along to the factory one day to buy a tray for my wife for her birthday but unfortunately they were liquidating the company and asked if I had any ideas, which turned into ‘Let’s do it together!’ I had to decide over the weekend and I knew everyone is enthusiastic about provenance, where things are made. And it’s a design classic, they are brilliant designs. ‘Surely I can make it work?’ I thought. My business strategy is if we don’t sell more trays, we’re dead, it will eat all my money, so I’d better sell more.

We focussed on refreshing the presentation and getting a decent website. We started doing trade shows. We re-approached old customers and we rebuilt the sales by giving it more energy. We have regrown it again and moved to significantly bigger premises to flourish.’

Ron places a blank into the press to make a tray

Ron takes the tray from the press

Ron examines the tray

Matt punches the holes in the trays

Matt uses the punch to make the holes

Matt examines a finished tray

James polishes tray edges

Junior trims the edge strips to size

Junior using the chop saw to cut the edges to size

Ken supervises orders on the factory floor

The factory

Mark Brearley

Photographs copyright © Rachel Ferriman

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Made in London

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Richard Ardagh, author of Type Archived, A visual journey through typographic history introduces the typefounders of East London

The Caslon tomb at St Luke’s, Old St

Typography can be thought of as the vehicle of words, giving them both form and voice. It is easy to take for granted how quickly we can compose and spread words today when, for centuries, type was manufactured as countless millions of individual physical components, a prerequisite for making the printed word possible.

East London played a huge part in the development of the typefounding industry, acting as a crucible (to use a relevant term) from which came many firsts: styles such as Sans-serif, Slab-serif (or Antique) and Clarendon were all the innovations of London typefounders. Even the screen typeface that you are reading (Georgia by Matthew Carter, 1993) was heavily inspired by the work of punchcutter Richard Austin, born in Finsbury, 1756.

England’s earliest typographer was Wynkyn de Worde, a German immigrant, who came to London around 1480 at the request of William Caxton to help improve his venture running the country’s first printing press. De Worde subsequently established his own press at Fleet St, which has forever after been synonymous with the print trade, and was buried there at St Bride’s Church. (The neighbouring St Bride Foundation is the custodian of much of the area’s rich printing heritage to this day.) But it was another 240 years before the skills necessary to produce original type designs were seen in London.

To create a new fount (font) required several significant stages: A punchcutter would painstakingly engrave master letters in steel, a craft demanding both an outstanding level of skill and artistic scrutiny. Every letter, numeral and symbol had to be cut individually, and replicated again for each size of type produced. Punches were used to strike a block of copper or brass, forming a matrix from which type could be cast. The matrix was fitted to a mould which was adjusted to match the width of the character. Casting could then begin by pouring molten typemetal (an alloy of lead, tin and antimony) into the cavity, which solidified on contact, then breaking the mould apart to release the sort (a single piece of type). In this way, repeated many times over, slowly an endless supply of type could be amassed.

Early English printers had relied on type imported from the Low Countries until, in 1722, an enterprising engraver transitioned into typefounding. A blue plaque at 22-23 Chiswell St marks the site of William Caslon’s pioneering foundry, run from this address for nearly 200 years. Caslon’s masterfully cut Roman and italic types established a uniquely English style for the first time and remain highly regarded – hence the adage, ‘when in doubt, use Caslon’. In the decade prior to Chiswell St, Caslon’s premises were at Ironmonger Row (now Helmet Row) opposite St Luke’s Church, where the family tomb can be seen, its raised stone chest clearly visible from Old St.

As the print trade flourished in the courts and alleys around Fleet St and spread beyond, typefounders situated their businesses nearby. The ward of Cripplegate had been home to early foundries such as Grover and Mitchell before Caslon. Later, the Bristol firm of Edmund Fry relocated there, giving the name Type St to an undeveloped lane, proudly listed on the title page of their specimen books (the street now forms part of Moor Lane).

A short walk away, the Fann St Foundry, established by Robert Thorne and later passing to William Thoroughgood and Robert Besley, occupied the premises at numbers 2, 4 and 6. This street name prevails and the site is now occupied by the Blake Tower. A plaque above the shopfronts opposite, where Aldersgate becomes Goswell Rd, records a now-absent drinking fountain erected in Besley’s memory but has no mention of the foundry.

As typefounding firms grew into more substantial enterprises their proprietors began to hold prominent positions within the City of London. Besley was an Alderman and went on to serve as Lord Mayor (1869-70). Typefounder Vincent Figgins, ‘an amiable and worthy character, and generally respected’, was a Common Councilman for the ward of Farringdon Without and his son James became an Alderman and MP. The ‘VJF’ monogram of their foundry is still visible on the iron railings in front of the Grade II listed building at Ray St in Clerkenwell.

Talbot Baines Reed, known as a writer of school stories for boys, is a figure that looms large in the world of typefounding. Reed inherited the Fann St Foundry in 1881 and went on to write a monumental account of the trade’s history. Whether or not he acquired the practical skills of casting type himself, we can certainly be grateful for his work cataloguing the foundry’s materials and identifying items of special historical interest in his ‘cabinet of curios’. Reed’s premature death at the age of forty-one is commemorated on the family tomb with a large Celtic cross close to the Church St entrance to Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington.

The completion of Regent’s Canal in 1820 meant an easily accessible supply of heavy materials and lumber. Furniture-makers and wood trades flourished in Hoxton, including ‘printer’s joiners’ such as Gould & Reeves. The firm operated from Wenlock St where, as well as producing large wooden type for posters, they made the cabinets to house it and other furniture required by printing offices. And by 1900, as light industry spread further eastwards, the heirs of the Caslon foundry would open a factory at Rothbury Rd in Hackney Wick that employed over a hundred workers.

By the turn of the twentieth century, typesetting was undergoing a revolution. Automated solutions were introduced that enabled printers to break their reliance on a huge workforce of compositors (who set the type cast by traditional foundries by hand) and replace them with new typecasting machinery.

The Monotype Corporation, pioneers of this technology, still chose to locate their headquarters in the time-honoured district (Monotype’s building was at 43 Fetter Lane, just off Fleet St, until it was destroyed by a bomb in 1941 during the Blitz). But the coming of this new way of servicing the print industry brought dramatic changes and rendered the practices of the traditional foundries archaic,  even though a small number continued trading for a few more decades. London’s last active typefoundry was Stevens, Shanks & Sons Ltd at 89 Southwark St, who were still casting type into the seventies.

Thankfully, unlike in many other countries, the materials of Britain’s preeminent typefounding industry were not lost forever when later technologies began to take hold. Having eventually all been absorbed by Stephenson Blake & Co of Sheffield, the artefacts of the traditional foundries mentioned here, along with the working hot-metal plant of the Monotype Corporation and Robert DeLittle’s York wood letter factory, were rescued in the nineties and held at the Type Archive in Stockwell. Unfortunately, although a hub of activity for over thirty years, it closed in 2023, following the death of its driving force, Sue Shaw (1932-2020).

The majority of the National Typefounding Collection is now in the care of the Science Museum. But before materials were removed from the Type Archive, where I was a volunteer, I managed to document some highlights which are presented in my book Type Archived.

M sort (piece of type) cast from a hand-mould

Stages of typefounding: punch, matrix

Stages of typefounding: mould, type

Caslon’s brass patterns for casting large type from sand, c.1770 (photograph copyright Andra Nelki)

Helmet Row, off Old St, where William Caslon established his first type foundry in 1727

Title page of Edmund Fry’s 1816 type specimen book showing the firm’s Type St address

Thorowgood’s Four-line Pica Ornamented matrices, 1821

Figgins’ Five Lines Pica, German Text, from the foundry’s 1815 type specimen

Figgins’ Letter Foundry in Ray St, Clerkenwell

Vincent Figgins’ initials are still to be seen upon the iron work on the front of the letter foundry

Monotype Gill Sans matrices (photograph copyright Andra Nelki)

Click here to buy a copy of Type Archived by Richard Ardagh

The definitive account of the legendary Type Archive provides a stunning visual tour of traditional typefounding, tracing the origins of typography and the printed word.

Founded in London in 1992, the Type Archive brought together some eight million artefacts that tell the story of typography and printing. Now, for the first time, a new book by long-serving Type Archive volunteer Richard Ardagh sheds light on the organisation’s extraordinary materials, celebrating their significance and importance to both the history of art and engineering.

Type Archived presents the typographic treasures that made this possible, from the engraved punches (master letters) and matrices (dies for casting), to the letterpress type and printing presses that put ink to paper. Inside the book, these items have been arranged into chapters by material: iron, steel, copper, brass, bronze, lead, wood, and paper.

Alongside specially commissioned photography, the book features a detailed summary of the trials and achievements of the Archive, an essay on the techniques of typefounding, a glossary of terms and detailed image captions describing the objects, their designers and uses.

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William Caslon, Letter Founder

At the Caslon Letter Foundry

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On the eve of the opening of her new exhibition at Townhouse, Fournier St, E1 6QE, here is my interview with Doreen Fletcher. Doreen will be at the gallery tomorrow to meet visitors. Her exhibition, CORNERS, runs from Saturday 13th June until Sunday 5th July.

Portrait of Doreen Fletcher in her studio by Stuart Freedman

Doreen Fletcher – Looking back, I think I was attracted to painting even from the age of four or five. I loved colour and my dad used to take me to the local toy shop where I always insisted on the best quality paints. I was an only child, born into a working class family, and my parents were – as you might say these days – semi-literate. Consequently, from the age of about eight years old, I took responsibility for helping them out in dealing with officialdom, not unlike  – I suppose – immigrant children in the East End today whose parents have limited English.

My mum and dad were very loving, and keen for me to have the opportunities they had missed. When I was five, I was bought a set of encyclopaedias from a salesman selling door-to-door on the never-never. It had colour reproductions of famous paintings such as Constable’s  ‘The Hay Wain’ by Constable and Turner’s ‘The Fighting Téméraire’ and I thought they were wonderful.

I passed my eleven-plus exam but I had a very difficult time at grammar school because – although I was clever and always in the top six of the top stream – I came from the wrong side of the tracks. I felt I had to pretend I was from somewhere else, because most of the pupils came from professional middle-class families. Consequently, I could not invite school friends to our tiny terraced home. I did not speak with the right accent, have the social ease of the other children or possess their cultural knowledge.

The art room was a refuge for me because there I could express myself fluently under the expert tutelage of the art teacher Mr Hanford. He had trained at the Royal Academy School and was probably the only teacher of any influence I ever listened to. I loved Fridays when there was a two hour after-school art club. It was at one of these sessions that Mr Hanford advised against using black paint straight from the tube. To this day, I mix ultramarine and burnt umber for a warm black and raw umber and indigo for a cool black.

The Gentle Author – What work did your parents do?

Doreen Fletcher – Alice, my mother, worked in a munitions factory during the war and then became a domestic servant afterwards. It gave her ideas about not putting the newspaper or ketchup bottle on the table and she adopted ‘healthy eating,’ much to my irritation. She was also particular about keeping the front step, windows and net curtains clean. Colin, my dad, started off as a farm worker. He wanted to be a vet but due to illness he missed a year’s education at seven years old which meant that he left school hardly able to read or write.

After I was born, we moved from the village of Barlaston to Newcastle-Under-Lyme because my dad could earn more money in the town. In the late fifties, when the government erected pylons across the nation, he worked on the construction of these and later he found employment laying pipes for North Sea Gas. When my dad was fifty-seven, he had a brain haemorrhage at work, probably due at least in part to the vibrations of the pneumatic drill. He did not work again after that.

The Gentle Author – What was the first landscape that you knew?

Doreen Fletcher – It was composed of greys and browns – soot-streaked streets with sparrows and pigeons. I used to long for colour, for tinsel, for fairy lights and fairgrounds. Yet although I grew up in a two-up-two-down terrace in Stoke-on-Trent, every Sunday my parents took me on excursions by bus into the country, a different destination each time. This was rare at the time and I think it revealed their great sensitivity and care.

These trips were always accompanied by the purchase of a quarter pound of sweets and latterly, a brownie box camera that took tiny black and white photos. I liked going for long walks alone too. I was always looking and observing the variety of houses lining the streets I wandered through. Sometimes I roamed the countryside as well, walking along busy trunk roads. These days eyebrows might be raised, but there was nothing unusual in seeing unaccompanied children exploring back then. I loved my solitary walks.

The Gentle Author – What took you away from the Potteries?

Doreen Fletcher – I did not like living in a small town, it lacked cosmopolitanism. I hated the social constrictions and the pettiness I encountered. After A Levels, I decided I to study a subject that would earn me a living, so I enrolled on Bsc Sociology Course at North Staffordshire Polytechnic in Stoke. I have always been fascinated by other people’s lives, attitudes and behaviour.

However it proved a disastrous choice for me because the course dealt mostly with statistics and their interpretation. I did not even last two terms. So I went to work in a local tile factory – of which there were plenty in those days – where my job was sorting broken tiles. After six months I left, realising there was no future in it for me.

I knew my vocation was to be an artist. I spent a very happy year doing a foundation course in Newcastle-Under-Lyme. I felt at home there. I was comfortable and totally at ease in the chaotic atmosphere of the leaky portacabins that served as our studios. For the only time in my life, I did very little work. Instead I enjoyed making friends and formed a close relationship with a fellow student. Together we moved to London in 1972 where he attended Wimbledon School of Art and I worked as an art school model.

The Gentle Author – Did you apply to art school?

Doreen Fletcher – Yes, I applied to study at Croydon College. Even then, I was very independently minded and did not want a structured degree course where I might be expected to conform to a ‘house style’. At this point, I was painting quite a lot of self-portraits and still lifes.

One day in late 1973 I saw an exhibition of paintings of Mow Cop by Jack Simcock in Cork Street. Mow Cop was a hilltop village not far from my home. In Newcastle-under-Lyme, if I leaned out of my bedroom window at a dangerous angle, I could just see the Victorian folly on the summit of Mow Cop in the distance.

The houses were built out of Peak District sandstone and local millstone grit. The place was bleak and dour. I was captivated, deciding then that I wanted to be an urban landscape painter, recording my own environment.

The Gentle Author – Where did you live when you first came to London?

Doreen Fletcher – To begin with, I stayed around Wimbledon, then I spent seven years living in Paddington where my fascination with urban scenes escalated. Coming from a small town in the North, it was an exciting place to be. I was close to the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, Notting Hill Gate and Portobello Road. I started painting local landmarks, the Electric cinema and the Serpentine boathouse. Then I became interested in Underground stations at night, Bayswater and Paddington. This project continued when I moved to the East End.

The Gentle Author – What brought you to the East End?

Doreen Fletcher – At that time artists were attracted to live and work in the East End because of the cheap studio space that was available. It was easy to rent because the local population were moving out and and artists were happy to live in dilapidated accommodation if it gave them room to work. Before long, a mutually supportive community of artists developed around Bow, Stepney and Mile End.

The Gentle Author – How do you remember the East End then?

Doreen Fletcher – I noticed the skies first, open and dramatic as they advanced into Essex. There were corrugated fences everywhere, still bombsites where buddleia proliferated and a few prefabs inhabited by artists. There was an openness in the streets which has since gone, now every corner has been built up and every vacant space filled.

Yet the distinctive quality of light remains particular to this part of London, a luminescence generated by the proximity of the river. I loved it here because I had had enough of the West End. It felt to me as if I were returning home. Like Stoke, the East End was predominantly working class and also had once been an important centre for industry. Corner shops and tiny pubs proliferated among street markets.

The Gentle Author – Why did you start painting the East End?

Doreen Fletcher – I was excited visually by being somewhere new to me yet that also reminded me of where I grew up. In the Potteries, the town planners’ ethos was ‘If it’s old, let’s sweep it away’ – regardless of its cultural and historical significance. I saw the same fate awaiting the East End. The first painting I did here was the bus stop in Mile End in 1983 and then Rene’s Café next.

The Gentle Author – Was this your full time occupation?

Doreen Fletcher – I was working as an artists’ model in an art school. It was the most boring job you could imagine, but I stuck at it during term-time so I could have periods of full-time painting. I was able to keep myself by working three days a week as a model.

The Gentle Author – How central to your life were your paintings at that time?

Doreen Fletcher – Painting was the focal point of my life. My studio was a small room at the top of a run-down three-storey house in Clemence Street. It faced north so the light was good for painting.

I walked around the East End at different times of day and in different weathers. Eventually a particular scene imprinted itself on my mind that could have potential as a painting. I did thumbnail sketches and took a photograph. Once I had gathered this information, I made a detailed drawing as a basis for the painting. This might evolve over a period of months or even years, as the tension built up between my need to represent reality and the demands made by the painting itself. I always struggle to resolve a picture in an abstract way as well as portraying a subject. To this day,I follow this methodical process to make a painting.

I worked a minimum of twenty-eight hours a week, a target I still adhere to. I was determined not to become a Sunday painter.

The Gentle Author – Did you have ambition for this work?

Doreen Fletcher – Yes and I did have some limited success in the eighties showing within the borough, receiving a few grants and being accepted in open exhibitions such as the Whitechapel and the London Group. Companies bought work from time to time and local people appreciated my paintings, but there was little interest from any critics or commercial galleries.

The Gentle Author – Did you pursue other avenues to get recognition for your work?

Doreen Fletcher – Once a month, I used to send off slides in response to competitions and requests for submissions in Artists’ Newsletter. It was time-consuming and costly without reward.

The Gentle Author – How did you maintain morale through those twenty years?

Doreen Fletcher – I am an optimist and I remained optimistic up until the late nineties, when my work grew increasingly unfashionable due to the rise of conceptual art. It became more difficult to find any places where I could exhibit my work that would even accept representational painting. My work was simply out of fashion  My interest in the East End was waning too, as Canary Wharf transformed into a financial metropolis. I found I did not know what to paint any more. It felt as though a period of my life was coming to an end.

The Gentle Author – What made you feel that?

Doreen Fletcher – The East End was changing in a way that I could not understand or portray.  The new buildings were densely packed, destroying the distinctive sense of place and community. At first, I was interested in the construction – on the Isle of Dogs for instance – but once it was finished there were just too many people and too much architectural uniformity.

The Gentle Author – Were there changes in your life too?

Doreen Fletcher – I grew more involved in teaching art to youngsters with special needs, taking a part-time job in further education. I became more interested because I found I was good at it and my teaching work was appreciated. Gradually, I worked more in the administrative side of education, supporting other lecturers.

The Gentle Author – Did you find that satisfying?

Doreen Fletcher – Yes, I was earning a salary and contributing to the community. It was rewarding to be working with other people after my years of isolation. I enjoyed participating in the local community rather than being an observer.

The Gentle Author – Once you had completed nearly twenty years of painting the East End, what were your feelings about that series of work?

Doreen Fletcher – I did not realise that I was creating any kind of social document at the time because I was so absorbed with each painting, each one constituting such a lot of work. I had tried very hard to get my pictures out there and get them seen. I had hoped for some kind of recognition. I was never ambitious in terms of international recognition but I did feel that the work was good enough to be recognised more than it was.

The Gentle Author – Were you disappointed?

Doreen Fletcher – Yes. I remember the day I made a conscious decision to pack away my paints. It was November 16th 2004. I said, ‘That’s it! I am not going to paint again.’ I had no knowledge that I was undertaking a journey and enduring a struggle that other artists in the East End had already experienced. If I had been aware of the East London Group and their example, I might have had the heart to continue.

The Gentle Author – Do you think your project reached its culmination?

Doreen Fletcher – At the time I did not think so, I believed I had done all that work for nothing. But looking at the work again, I am very glad I did it. I think it was important that I recorded something which has now vanished.

The Gentle Author – Do you think you evolved as a painter by doing this work?

Doreen Fletcher – If I had I been taken on by a gallery, I might have developed more as a painter. Instead, I think I found a method of working that suited what I was doing and I stuck with it. Maybe with a bit more encouragement I would have done what I am doing now, since I have come back to painting.

The Gentle Author – How do you judge if one of your paintings is successful?

Doreen Fletcher – A painting is successful for me when I believe I have captured an essence of a place in a moment. A picture must sit comfortably and solidly on the canvas. My concern as an artist is with the pockets of life that we ignore.

Now I have started painting again and the series of pictures I have been working in the last two years are the result of having lived in East London for thirty-five years. I have been reflecting on how much remains from the early years and come to appreciate how those people who still live here have adapted to the changes.

In the early eighties, this part of London was run down and very few people chose to be here. Some streets and buildings remain as reminders of that era, left to compete with new concepts of London that have emerged since the closing of local industries and the rise of corporate culture. In representing their utilitarian quality, I envisage my subjects not only as reminders of the past but also as active survivors struggling positively to find a place in a world changing beyond recognition.

I am a painter concerned with environments that are or have been inhabited. I try to resolve the struggle between how I see things and with abstraction, where the pictorial demands of structure, organisation and balance hold sway. My work is carried out slowly and methodically using a range of techniques to communicate a place of quietude and serenity. The difference between the work I am making today and the work I was doing before is that now I am a participant, no longer only an observer of East End life.

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Behold, the dusk is glimmering in this old house in Princelet St built in the seventeen-twenties for Benjamin Truman. A hundred years later, a huge factory was added on the back which more than doubled the size. In the twentieth century, this became the home of the extended Gernstein family from whom the last owners bought the house in the eighties. Notable as Lionel Bart’s childhood home, who once returned to have his portrait taken by Lord Snowden on the doorstep, in recent years it has served as the location for innumerable film and photo shoots. And now, as if to complete the circle, the house belongs the proprietors of the Old Truman Brewery.

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It is my delight to publish Doreen Fletcher‘s new paintings to be seen in her forthcoming exhibition CORNERS at Townhouse Fournier St, E1 6QE, from next Saturday 13th June until Sunday 5th July. Below Doreen introduces her paintings in her own words.

House on the Corner

‘This north-facing house is directly opposite Wanstead Flats, on the front line of the densely populated streets of Forest Gate. Built in the 1870s, it has seen horses and carriages trotting down the road, cows wandering past, then anti-aircraft gun emplacements on the Flats during World War Two, shaking the foundations of houses when they fired at the enemy planes. My painting captures the moment when the street lights come on and illuminated windows offer a tantalising glimpse of interiors, as inhabitants return and retreat into their homes.’

Look At Me!

‘A mother raises her hands encouragingly at her small child bravely tackling a ride for the first time. Three times a year, I am drawn to the bright lights of the fair on Wanstead Flats, unable to resist the temptation to bring order and permanence to the chaos and transience. Painting any fairground scene involves uniting a plethora of colours, light sources and interlocking shapes and forms that appear indistinguishable at first glance. For me, if the painting is to work, all these elements must hang together.’

Capel Moon

‘Snow is rare in London with a few exceptional years, 1979 being the most notable in my memory. I have not done many paintings depicting snow, although I have always been fascinated by the transformation and magic wrought by its fall. December 2024 was exceptionally cold and Wanstead Flats were transformed briefly into a wonderland, particularly at night – most magical just before darkness fell when the snow illuminating the Flats was balanced by the glow in the sky and the lights of surrounding houses.’

Maryland

‘My task here was to create a satisfying composition, encompassing the expanse of white-painted brickwork work on the right, and I sought to resolve this by placing a man seated on the wall. The warm blue and orange tones of the shop emphasise the contrast with the cool whites above and greys in the foreground.’

Nana Yaa

‘When I moved to London in 1972, I encountered fruit and vegetable stalls outside tube stations for the first time. On a wet January morning in Leytonstone, I saw this shop across the road where the produce glowed through the gloom like a beacon, a scene enhanced by the young man sitting in front, oblivious of the cold, concerned only with his phone.’

Shop on the Corner

‘I have been painting my immediate environment for decades now. For the majority of this time I have lived in East London, always with a small general grocery shop round the corner. On extended stays in the country, I find I forget to buy essential items on my weekly shopping trip, since in the city it really does not matter. This painting is of my corner shop in Forest Gate but it could be almost anywhere.’

Short Cut

‘I discovered this view of the petrol station on Aldersbrook Road in Wanstead by accident when my dog Charlie ran into the bushes chasing a squirrel. It made me think of my childhood when I loved looking at familiar sights from unusual angles. I remember once drawing our living room sitting from the top of a step ladder and the space was transformed into a place of mystery for me. So this is my new perspective on the petrol station, which I had passed on the main road hundreds of times without really looking.’

Stanley at the Duke

‘The neon sign of the Duke of Wellington in Spitalfields draws the eye as you cross Commercial Street. Yet even though the pub is situated on the corner of a busy road, it is a peaceful backwater, a station of calm.’

St Gabriel on the Flats

‘This is a well-known local landmark on Wanstead Flats. I have built the composition in horizontal bands to frame the silhouette of the church, just hinting at the lights of the garage on Alderbrook Road that appears in another painting in my exhibition. Set during the brief lull of twilight, the pale violet sky and a visible moon conjure a quiet moment of transition.’

Sunday Morning, Maryland

‘Maryland is usually clogged with cars, people hurrying to and from the nearby station, and noisy with the clamour of buses stopping and starting. Yet on an unusually sunny morning in winter, I found it deserted and was struck by the shapes made by this cluster of shops, and the shadows cast on the walls. My composition celebrates a rare moment of quiet in the midst of the busy metropolis.’

Venus Ascent

‘I chose an unusual perspective for this painting, focusing on the wall of steps leading to the bridge with yellow graffiti, rather than the barge moored alongside or the bridge itself, either of which would have been more obvious choices. This decision challenged me to unite the elements of the picture through use of light and colour. Though absent of figures, the scene records evidence of human activity, my aim was to capture a pause.’

Walk On By

‘This is Woodgrange Road, Forest Gate, on a freezing February night. I was impressed by the contrast between the cold glare of the seafood market and the deep tones of the winter sky. I employed the wet pavement, reflecting the competing blue neon and LED lights, to evoke the mood of an East London street in winter.’

Yellow House

‘Opposite these houses lies the beginning of Epping Forest in the form of Wanstead Flats. This yellow house and its companion caught my attention, while out walking one cold November evening, as a mecca of warmth and comfort just the other side of the road from the Flats.’

Donovans (Coloured pencil drawing)

Donovan Bros is the only evidence in Spitalfields of the thousands of Irish immigrants who came here in the nineteenth century. The two O’Donovan brothers, Jeremiah and Dennis, came to Liverpool from Dublin in the eighteen-thirties at the time of the potato famine. Dennis took a passage from Liverpool to seek his fortune with the Hudson Bay Trading Company, while Jeremiah came to the East End and founded Donovan Bros, still run by the family today.

Images copyright © Doreen Fletcher

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Phyllis Bray, Myth & Nature, a retrospective exhibition, runs until 21st June at Batsford Gallery, 266 Hackney Rd, E2 7SJ.

Detail of mural ‘The Drama’ by Phyllis Bray at the People’s Palace

Many artists enter a twilight period after death while their work is reassessed. Some recover and others do not, yet one enjoying a positive reassessment at present is the artist Phyllis Bray, with two events spotlighting her work.

The first is the refurbishment of the People’s Palace in Mile End, where part of her large mural The Drama has been restored and is on permanent display. The other is her current retrospective exhibition, at Batsford Gallery in Hackney Rd, where many of her finest paintings are on display.

Phyllis Bray was born in 1911 and, after studying at Queenwood, Eastbourne, attended the Slade School of Fine Art between 1927-31, where she was fortunate to catch the end of Henry Tonks’ distinguished professorship.  He had a reputation for acerbic comments upon the work of female students, occasionally reducing them to tears, but Bray was a gifted favourite. She won a string of awards and, at the strawberry tea honouring Tonks on the day of his departure in 1930, she was one of those chosen to wait on him.

Bray gained her fine art diploma in 1931 and that summer married John Cooper, who had been a teacher of evening classes since he left the Slade in 1922. It was his second marriage, after an unsuccessful one to another Slade student, Helen Taylor. By 1931, Cooper had established the East London Group through classes he taught at the Bow & Bromley Evening Institute in Coborn Rd from the mid-twenties onwards. The debut exhibition of work by the East London Art Club at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in December 1928, part of which was shown at what is now the Tate Britain in early 1929, led in November of that year to the first of eight annual East London Group exhibitions at Alex. Reid & Lefevre patronised by wealthy collectors.

The show was an astonishing success and had to be extended for several weeks, described by the Manchester Guardian as “one of the most interesting and significant things in the London art season.” It was there that Cooper and other East London Group stalwarts, including as William Coldstream, Murroe FitzGerald, Archibald Hattemore, Elwin Hawthorne, Harold and Walter Steggles, and Albert Turpin established their careers.

Phyllis Bray began her participation by showing two paintings at the second exhibition in December 1930, among a total of ninety catalogued works, and each year after that her paintings and drawings became important features of these shows.  She was also a valuable additional teacher at Bow, as Cooper struggled to cope with his commitment of three nights a week while also holding classes in Lambeth and Shoreditch and, eventually, at the Central School of Art too. By the 1937-38 academic season, Cooper was no longer at Bow and Bray took responsibility for overseeing the students with the support of another teacher.

But by then her marriage to the volatile Cooper had collapsed. The crisis came in 1936, the year of the last East London Group winter show at Alex Reid & Lefevre and Bray’s commission to paint murals for the New People’s Palace. It was during this work in Mile End that she formed an emotional attachment to the architect George Coles.

The old People’s Palace had long been a centre of East End cultural life. Its creation was due to the beneficence of painter, property owner and philanthropist John Barber Beaumont who donated money to found a Philosophical Institution in Mile End that would provide educational and recreational facilities for working men. In 1887, Queen Victoria opened the Queen’s Hall as part of her Golden Jubilee celebrations but a fire had destroyed the building in 1931. Construction of a New People’s Palace proceeded in 1936, with the front of the building enhanced by five sculpted reliefs by Eric Gill of Drama, Music, Fellowship, Dancing, Sport and Recreation.

Architect George Coles oversaw the interior and fellow architect Victor Kerr advocated the inclusion of Phyllis Bray’s murals. Coles was a master of the Art Deco style, and his works included the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn, the Carlton Cinema in Islington, the Troxy in Stepney and several Odeons.  At the Queen’s Hall, it was decided that instead of painting direct onto plaster as she originally proposed, Bray would undertake three panels on canvas, each twelve feet by ten feet, and the subjects would be The Dance, The Drama and The Music.

A contemporary photograph shows Bray, elegantly balanced upon a precarious stepladder, busy painting The Dance. She was always athletic, and later in life famously strode early in the morning to plunge at dawn into the ladies’ pool near her home in Hampstead and turned a cartwheel on the Heath in celebration of her sixtieth birthday.

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth performed the opening ceremony at the New Queen’s Hall on 13th February 1937. Previously, in November of 1936, Queen Mary had seen Bray at work and been impressed by her painting and, several months after the opening, the Queen returned again, requesting to view the completed murals. Yet, although the New People’s Palace enjoyed some success before the war, by 1953 it was put up for sale and Queen Mary University acquired it.

The fate of the murals was unknown until restoration began on the building and the mystery was uncovered by Eoin O’Maolalai, Senior Estates Project Manager at Queen Mary, after a researcher at Tate Britain inquired whether the paintings had survived. Although the lower half of the murals had been destroyed when the hall was converted to a lecture theatre, O’Maolalai realised that the top half still existed in a storeroom above the theatre.  “I found the wall and ran my fingers over the painted surface.  What I felt wasn’t plaster, it was more like fabric. I looked more closely, found a tear in the fabric, peeled off some of the paint and below it I could see the vague outlines of what could be one of the murals.” O’Maolalai told me,”I peeled off some more of the paint and realised that I had found the top half of the murals. It was clear that the bottom half had been removed, possibly in the 1950s when a suspended ceiling was installed in the Small Hall.”

Restoration concentrated on the central panel, The Drama. Paint specialist Catherine Hassall scraped flecks of the covering paint off with scalpel, millimetre by millimetre, to reveal Bray’s work underneath. Hassall also carried out paint analysis during restoration work in the Great Hall, to match the redecoration to its original colour scheme. Once the overpaint was scraped off, the Bray canvas was carefully removed from the wall, lined and stretched – and a decision was made not to touch up the picture, to avoid losing original paint. The fragment was put on display at the official reopening of the People’s Palace, after a £6.3 million renovation. Alongside it, are displayed photographs of the building and murals from the venue’s thirties heyday.

After her failed marriage to John Cooper, Bray married Eric Phillips, a top civil servant. She died in 1991 after a successful career as an artist, with multiple mixed and solo exhibitions. As well as commercial work, including a string of book illustrations, she employed her talents as a muralist in assisting Hans Feibusch, a collaboration lasting over forty years – creating paintings in Chichester Cathedral, Dudley Town Hall in Worcestershire, the Civic Centre in Monmouth and many parish churches. London examples are St Crispin’s in Bermondsey, with a fine ceiling by Bray, and St Alban the Martyr in Holborn.

Phyllis Bray, c. 1936

At work on the People’s Palace murals, 1936

The completed murals – The Dance, The Drama and The Music

The Dance, watercolour study

Elwin Hawthorne, Phyllis Bray, John Cooper and Brynhild Parker at the Lefevre Galleries, c. 1932

Temple of Juno Agrigento, gouache (courtesy of Louise Kosman, Edinburgh)

Selinunte, Sicily, gouache (courtesy of Louise Kosman, Edinburgh)

Landscape, gouache (courtesy of Louise Kosman, Edinburgh)

French Harbour, gouache (courtesy of Louise Kosman, Edinburgh)

Landscape near Brockweir, gouache (courtesy of Louise Kosman, Edinburgh)

The Mill, oil on canvas, 1933

The Lobster & The Lighthouse, oil on canvas

Phyllis Bray sketching in Bow by Hannah Cohen, c. 1932, crayon drawing

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A number forty bus took me from Aldgate to the House of Dreams and it only took half an hour to arrive at the front door. Once across the threshold, an alternative cosmos of colour and eye-popping surreal fantasy awaits, transporting you far from the London rain.

Perhaps one of the happiest people I have met, Stephen Wright delights to share the strange but joyous world of his personal subconscious, peopled with a universe of outlandish celestial beings – all made tangible within the interior of a modest Victorian terrace.

For this ever-growing endeavour is no random installation, but an endearingly intimate diary of Stephen’s emotional and spiritual life in sculptural form – as he was eager to explain when I dropped by.

“There is no plan – it’s just evolving, like life itself! My house is like a baby that needs constant feeding. It says, ‘Mama, I need more food!’ and I say, ‘Oh, give me a break.’

It began as a response to a series of programmes by Jarvis Cocker about ‘Outsider Art.’ When I saw those, I thought, ‘I’ve found my family, I’ve found where I fit in.’ So I visited a lot of Outsider Artists in France, they were mostly elderly, and then I began work on my House of Dreams in 1999/2000.

At first it was purely decorative, but then it became a response to the death of my partner Donald, and when – two years into it – both my parents died, I found that difficult to deal with. So my work changed and it became a way of grieving and dealing with loss – because I didn’t have a family this became my way of life. I want to leave something behind. Since then I met Michael, ten years ago, and he’s been very supportive. It’s important to have someone on your side.

I’m from the North and I found it difficult to put down roots in London, so I live in this safe house behind a high wall with a gate where I feel free to be me. All the objects in my house carry a meaning or memory for me and many are from places I consider sacred, like Cornwall, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid & Amsterdam.

The design has a South American style because I’m in touch with spirits from a former life when I was a grave digger in Oaxaca. I’ve been to Mexico to visit the place where I was born.

I’m always amazed that anybody wants to come to my House of Dreams but I love it. People come round all the time to visit and I’ve made a living out of being me. I get up and I’m me. I’m me everyday!”

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Remembering photographer John Claridge who died on Sunday aged eighty-one. In 2016, over lunch at The French House in Dean St, John told his story to The Gentle Author (Extract from the introduction to East End).

Len & Doll Claridge, 1964

“I was an only child so I asked my mum, ‘Will I have a sister or a brother?’ but she said ‘You’re enough.’ I was never quite sure if that was a compliment.

My father went to sea when he was thirteen and he was invited to go on the Scott expedition. He was a bare-knuckle fighter in the East End and sold booze in the States in the thirties during Prohibition. But my mum, she stayed a machinist most of her life in the Roman Road, Bow. On school holidays I used to go in the van, delivering shirts around the East End. By the time I was growing up, my father had stopped going to sea and was working down the docks as a rigger, testing the cranes and that type of stuff. When he took me down there, it was sheer wonderment.

I used to get up with my dad, before he went down the docks at five o’clock in the morning and I did my paper round. We got up an hour early so we so could talk over a bit of toast and a cup of tea, and he would tell me stories about the sea. That was my education in wonderment. I really wanted to go to sea and see the world, but I did it through people sending me around the world to take photographs, so that ambition was fulfilled in another way.

I used to go to the shops with my mum every Saturday morning, and she would meet people she knew and they would be chatting for maybe an hour, while I went off and played on a bomb site. We would go into these shops and markets and they all smelled different. They each had their distinctive character, it was wonderful. People had a pride in what they were selling or what they were doing.

As a child, from my bedroom in Plaistow, I could see the lights of the docks at night and I used to go to sleep listening to the sound of the horns on the Thames whenever there was fog, which was quite often. You could smell the river if the wind was blowing in the right direction. A lot of the men in my family worked down the docks. When my father worked for the New Zealand Shipping Company, he took me down to the dock gate and onto the wharves – and I used to go out with my camera at weekends, or any spare time I had, to take pictures. I went out to see what was going on, I reacted to what was there and, if I saw something, I photographed it. It was instinctive, I never thought I was documenting. I had a need to take pictures, it was as natural as breathing.

Bomb sites were my playground and I was very aware of the war because a lot of my family were in it, and they showed me the medals they came back with. At that age, what you understand is limited but you are aware. We had rationing yet people had faith that things were going to get better. The only luxury would be something that was knocked off from the docks, be it a lump of liver or a bit of cake or whatever. I remember the end of food rationing, we got more bananas.

When I was eleven, I started boxing at school. South West Ham Tech in Canning Town was an all-boys school and it was mandatory for all the kids to get into the ring. It was a big old gym and they were big on sport, but my mum did not want me to do it because she did not want me to spoil my face. All the family were boxing, and they said, ‘You should do it because you have the ability to do it,’ and I quite enjoyed it actually. It was good fun. If you met someone you had been in a ring with, you always bought them a drink or they bought you a drink. I had reasonable success but I have small hands. I have got my mum’s hands not my dad’s hands.

One day when I was eight or nine, I was at at fair on Wanstead Flats and there was this stall, throwing rings for prizes, and I wanted this plastic camera. I did not know why I wanted it, except I wanted to capture everything and take the memories back with me. You know, I already understood that if you have a camera, you can take it all back with you. But I did not win it. Instead, I did a paper round, saved up and bought an Ilford Sportsman. I do not really know why I needed a camera and I needed to take pictures. Photography was a natural language to me. I developed them myself which I thought was pretty cool. I got a little catalogue that said put developer in there and this in there and wash it in there. We only had an outside toilet, so at night, that was where I developed all my film. It was not difficult. It was magic.

I left school at fifteen and I went down to the West Ham Labour Exchange. There was this lovely bloke, a nice man. He said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I’m going to be a photographer and take pictures’ and I expected him to say, ‘Yeah, that’s really good.’ Instead he said, ‘It’s not that easy,’ so I replied ‘Yes it is, you just take photographs.’ ‘Ok,’ he said, ‘there’s a job up the West End, but you won’t get it, let me tell you now – you won’t get it.’ This was for an assistant in a photographic department at an advertising agency. He said, ‘They’re interviewing people with qualifications from universities and colleges, and you’re too young but I’m going to send you anyway, so you can see how these things work.’ That sounded all right to me. I wore a black four-button herringbone suit, a tab-collar shirt, a knitted tie and winkle-pickers – I thought I looked the business. How could I possibly fail?

It was at McCann Erickson and when I walked into the reception, there were about four, five or six blokes sitting around waiting. Obviously they were lot older than I was, they had tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows. I said ‘All right?’ and they totally blanked me. They had never seen style before. The interview was with Eddie Brown who had been a Captain in the Scottish Highlanders and had come up the hard way. I was the last person to be interviewed and when I walked in, he did not say anything, he just looked at me. He did not know what to say, so he asked, ‘What film do you use?’

I said, ‘I won’t use anything else but HPS and FP3, I think it’s the best around’. And he said, ‘So do I – you can have the job.’ I said, ‘Oh, the other thing is I take pictures.’ I had brought with me some small prints of the Thames and views of the East End that I had made at home on an old enlarger. Those posh boys had qualifications and no pictures, but I had pictures and no qualifications, so I got the job – that was it. And I loved every moment of it.

First of all, I started by mixing up the chemicals and doing general stuff in the darkroom, but very quickly I was asked to do some printing. Before long, I was getting art directors coming down and asking me to do their prints. Later, I made prints for for Jeanloup Sieff, Don McCullin and Saul Leiter, when I was still only seventeen. I remember Saul Leiter asked, ‘Can you do something with this?’ The film looked like someone had processed it in tomato sauce, so I worked on it to see what I could get out of it and, when I had finished, he was very pleased with it.

At McCann Erickson, I met Robert Brownjohn – who everyone knew as ‘BJ.’ He had just come over from New York. He was a brilliant designer who had worked with Moholy-Nagy and became famous for doing the title sequences for ‘From Russia With Love’ and ‘Goldfinger.’ I always remember BJ in an Ivy League jacket and buttoned-down shirt. He would come to the Photographic Department and ask, ‘Hey kid, hey kid, can you experiment with this?’ BJ introduced me to a different way of looking. We would look at pieces of type and everyday objects together, considering them as design in their own right. He taught me to appreciate their abstract quality by having me look at a face or a hand as a piece of sculpture, and lighting it accordingly. BJ opened my eyes and then he said, ‘Kid, you’re gonna have an exhibition whether you like it or not.’ I was sixteen then.

The show was in McCann’s gallery and the subject was the East End. What surprised me was the response. People really thought a lot of the pictures. Dennis Bailey, Art Director of Town Magazine said, ‘There’s shades of Walker Evans.’ I did not know who the fuck Walker Evans was, so I thought, ‘Is this a compliment or is he taking the piss?’ But then I saw Walker Evans’ work and it is some of the most beautiful photography you are ever going to see – in my opinion – ever.”

The house in Plaistow where John Claridge grew up

John Claridge (right)  with his mate Keith Horton (left), 1961

John Claridge takes a photograph in Spitalfields, 1964

Photographs copyright © John Claridge

The window on the top right of this photograph was John Claridge’s former bedroom when he took this astonishing portrait of his neighbours in Plaistow – Mr & Mrs Jones – in 1968, on a visit home in his early twenties.

Once, at the age of eight, John saw a plastic camera at an East End fun fair and knew he had to have it. And thus, in that intuitive moment of recognition, his lifelong passion for photography was born. Saving up money from his paper round in the London Docks, John bought a serious camera and recorded the world that he knew, capturing the plangent images you see here with a breathtaking clarity of vision. “Photography was a natural language,” he assured me, when I asked him about taking these pictures, “This was my life.”

“My father was a docker – everyone worked in the docks, did a bit of boxing or they were villains. My dad went to sea when he was thirteen, he did bare-knuckle boxing, he knew how to rig a ship from top to bottom, and he sold booze in the states during prohibition. I used to get up at five in the morning to talk to him before he went to work and he told me stories, that was my education. People say life was hard in the East End, but I found the living was easy and I loved it.”

With admirable self-assurance, John left school at fifteen and informed West Ham Labour Exchange of his chosen career. They sent him up to the McCann-Erickson advertising agency in the West End where he immediately acquired employment in the photographic department. Then, at seventeen years old, John bravely travelled from Plaistow to Hampstead to knock on the door of Bill Brandt to present one of his prints, and the legendary photographer invited him in, recognising his precocious talent and offering encouragement to the young man.

“I used to meet my mum after work in the Roman Rd where she was a machinist, and you couldn’t see the next street in the fog,” John recalled, when I enquired about the distinctive quality of light in these atmospheric images.

At the age of nineteen, John left the East End for good and at the same time opened his first studio near St Paul’s Cathedral. It was the precursor an heroic career in photography which saw John working at the top of his profession for decades, yet he still carried a deep affection for these eloquent haunting pictures that set him on his way.

“My East End’s gone, it doesn’t exist anymore,” he admitted to me frankly with unsentimental discernment, “These are pictures I could never do again, I don’t have that naivety and innocence anymore, but seeing them now is like looking at an old friend.”

Collecting firewood, 1960

1961

1963

1966

1972

1960

Ex-boxer, 1962

1974

1962

1961

Mass X-Ray, 1966

1962

1960

Flower Seller, 1959

1962

Shoe Rebuilders, 1965

London fog, 1959

Going to work, 1959

London Docks, 1964

Photographs copyright © John Claridge

Brushfield St 1990 by Philip Marriage

Next tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields on Saturday 6th June. Click here to book

As a major new exhibition of the work of James McNeill Whistler opens at Tate Britain, we consider the artist’s early work in Wapping

William Jones, Limeburner, Wapping High St

American-born artist, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, was the first artist to appreciate the utilitarian environment of the East End on its own terms, seeing the beauty in it and recognising the intimate relationship of the working people to the urban landscape they had constructed.

He was only twenty-five when he arrived in London from Paris in the summer of 1859 and, rejecting the opportunity of staying with his half-sister in Sloane St, he took up lodgings in Wapping instead. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire to pursue subjects from modern life and seek beauty among the working people of the teeming city, Whistler lived among the longshoremen, dockers, watermen and lightermen who inhabited the riverside, frequenting the pubs where they ate and drank.

The revelatory etchings that he created at this time, capturing an entire lost world of ramshackle wooden wharfs, jetties, warehouses, docks and yards. Rowing back and forth, the young artist spent weeks in August and September of 1859 upon the Thames capturing the minutiae of the riverside scene within expansive compositions, often featuring distinctive portraits of the men who worked there in the foreground.

The print of the Limeburner’s yard above frames a deep perspective looking from Wapping High St to the Thames, through a sequence of sheds and lean-tos with a light-filled yard between. A man in a cap and waistcoat with lapels stands in the pool of sunshine beside a large sieve while another figure sits in shadow beyond, outlined by the light upon the river. Such an intriguing combination of characters within an authentically-rendered dramatic environment evokes the writing of Charles Dickens, Whistler’s contemporary who shared an equal fascination with this riverside world east of the Tower.

Whistler was to make London his home, living for many years beside the Thames in Chelsea, and the river proved to be an enduring source of inspiration throughout a long career of aesthetic experimentation in painting and print-making. Yet these copper-plate etchings executed during his first months in the city remain my favourites among all his works. Each time I have returned to them over the years, they startle me with their clarity of vision, breathtaking quality of line and keen attention to modest detail.

Limehouse and The Grapes – the curved river frontage can be recognised today

The Pool of London

Eagle Wharf, Wapping

Billingsgate Market

Longshore Men

Thames Police, Wapping

Black Lion Wharf, Wapping

Looking towards Wapping from the Angel Inn, Bermondsey

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