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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

You may also like to read about

Dickens in Shadwell & Limehouse

The Grapes in Limehouse

Madge Darby, Historian of  Wapping

Views from a Dinghy by John Claridge

Among the Lightermen

Steve Brooker, Mudlark

THANK YOU Carol Addis, Liz Aitken, The Alcove Library, Fatima Ali, Monica Allen, Deborah Andrews, Geraldine Anslow, Alice Audsley, Elizabeth Aumeer, Kate Bacon, Stephen Ball, Betsy Barker, Graham Barker, Sarah Bates, Roxy Beaujolais, Niamh Bermingham, Millie Bird, Catherine Burd, Karolina Brodnicka, Jill Browne, Yvonne Cheyney, Karen Chung, Jackie Connor, Esther Conway, Wendy Cook, Sarah Correia, Clarice Corell, Valerie Cottle, Mary Dalton, Rachel Darnley-Smith, Rosie Dastgir, Jill Day, Lucinda De Jasay, Luke Dixon, James Douglas, Josephine Eglin, Marion Elliot, Rachel Ferriman, Linda Florio, Jillian Foley, Lisa Forkas, Gillian Forrester, Nancy Franklin, Emma Grace, Carol Grantham, Judy Greenway, Karen Greenwood, Polly Grylls, Stephen Guy, Keith Hagan, Jayne Hamilton, Mark Hamsher, Siri Hansen, Julia Harrison, David Heath, Carolyn Hirst, David Hoffman, Anne Holland, Melissa Horn, Emma Howard Boyd, Susan Hoyal, Robin Huffman, Richard Humm, Diana Fawcett, Lisa Ferguson, Doreen Fletcher, Jane James, Annie Johns, Andrew Jones, Barbara Jones, Rachel Jowitt, Tom Kavanagh, Hilda Kean, Michael Keating, Colette Khan, Mark King, Lin Lee, Martin Ling, Pauline Lord, John Patrick Lowe, Jaime Rory Lucy, Sarah Ludford, Alison Lynch, Mirela Mardare, Anabel Marsh, Sarah Mason, Frances Mayhew, Jill Mead, Julia Meadows, Carolyn Meunier, Jennifer Michael, Susan Miles, Janet Mohler, Stephen Moran, Annie Moreton, Robert Moye, Lee Murphy, Jeremy Musson, Ros Niblett, Krissie Nicolson, Thomas Nowacki, Sarah Nuttall, Frances Oakley, Janet O’Brien, Vivienne Palmer, Peter Parker, Tanya Peixoto, Pamela Percy, Fiona Pettitt, Caroline Pick, Alison Pilkington, Jeffrey Press, Elizabeth Prochaska, Tony Quinn, Alice Rawsthorn, Caz Richards, Ruth Richardson, Madeleine Ruggi, Anne Sally, Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, Tim Sayer, Christine Sibley, Marie Sleigh, Robert Small, Annie Sparks, Henrietta M Startup, Carrie Supple, Gilane Tawadros, Pen Thompson, Sophie Thompson, Jane Trethewey, Olivia Horsfall Turner, Sukhin Tye, Roel Van Der List, Nicola Von Velsen, Elizabeth Walker, Arabella Warner, Nicky Webb, Lianne Weidmann, Patricia Wenz, Gilda Williams, Jane Williamson, Jill Wilson, Sarah Winman, Jenny Wiseman, Robert Zeigler and many others who choose to be anonymous.

This graph shows the progress of our crowdfund. The blue columns indicate the number of contributors each day and the green line traces The Gentle Author’s emotional state over the past month.

WITH 2 DAYS TO GO, thanks to the generosity of 12 more donors since yesterday, we have now raised £21,021 with £3,979 left to find to reach our target of £25,000 to publish WOMEN AT WORK, Sarah Ainslie’s East End Portraits 1992-2025. CLICK HERE TO VISIT OUR CROWDFUND

In 2010, Sarah Ainslie & I visited the taxi garages in Three Colts Lane as one of our first assignments together. Little did we know then that this world would be mostly swept away and redeveloped for co-working spaces and dark kitchens, yet this was also the place where we met Iflet, the motor mechanic, who would become the cover star of Women at Work.

Situated midway between Spitalfields and Bethnal Green lies Three Colts Lane. Although many years have passed since there were colts here, today there are many other attractions to make this a compelling destination, especially if you are having problems with your car – because Three Colts Lane is where all the motor repair garages are to be found, gathered together in dozens and snuggled up close together in ramshackle order. Who can say how many repair shops there are in Three Colts Lane, since they inhabit the railway arches in the manner of interconnected troglodyte dwellings carved into a mountain, meaning no-one can ever tell where one garage begins and another ends.

Three Colts Lane is where the lines from the East and the North converge as they approach Liverpool St Station, providing a deep warren of vaulted spaces, extended by shambolic tin shacks and bordered with scruffy yards fenced off with corrugated iron. Here in this forgotten niche, while more fences and signs are added, few have ever been removed, creating a dense visual patchwork to fascinate the eye. Yet even before I arrived in Three Colts Lane, the commingled scents of engine oil and spray paint were drawing me closer with their intoxicating fragrance, because, although I have no car, I love to come here to explore this distinct corner of the East End that is a world of its own.

Each body shop presents a cavernous entrance, from which the sounds of banging and clanging and shouting emanate, every one attended by the employees, distinguished by their boiler suits and oily hands, happily enjoying cigarettes in the sun. Yet standing in the daylight and peering into the gloom, it is impossible to discern the relative size and shape of these garages that all appear to recede infinitely into the darkness beneath the railway arches. An investigation was necessary, and so I invited Sarah Ainslie, Spitalfields Life contributing photographer, to join me in my quest to explore this mysterious parallel universe that goes by the name of Three Colts Lane. And many delights awaited us, because at each garage we were welcomed by the mechanics, eager to have their pictures taken and show us the manifold splendours of their manor.

There is a cheerful spirit of anarchy that presides in Three Colts Lane, incarnated by the senior mechanic with his upper body under a taxicab, who, when we asked gingerly if we might take pictures of the extravagantly vaulted narrow old repair shop deep beneath the arches, declared,“It’s not my garage. Do as you please! Make yourself at home!”  To outsiders, these dark grimy spaces might appear alien, but to those who work here it is a zone where everyone knows everyone else, and where you can spend your working life in a society with its own codes, hierarchy and respect – only encountering the outside world through the motorists and cabbies that arrive needing repairs. My father was a mechanic, and I recognise the liberation of filth, how being dirty in your work sets you apart from others’ expectations. The layers of grime and dirt here – in an environment comprised almost exclusively of small businesses where no-one wears a white collar – speak eloquently of a place that is a law unto itself.

Starting at the Eastern end of Three Colts Lane, the first person we met was Lofty, proprietor of the A1 Car Centre, who proved to be a gracious ambassador for the territory. “Some garages, they just want to take the money,” Lofty declared in wonder, his chestnut-brown eyes glinting with righteous ire at the injustice – like a sheriff denouncing outlaws – before he pledged his own personal doctrine of decency, “But I believe it’s how you treat the customers that’s the most important thing, that’s why we are still here after twenty-five years.” And proof that Lofty is as good as his word was evident recently when seven hundred customers signed a petition saving the garage from developers who threatened to build student housing on the site.

We crossed the road to shake hands with Nicky at the Coborn Garage, admiring the fresh and gaudy patriotic colour scheme of red, white and blue, and his decorative signwriting that would not be out-of-place on a gipsy caravan. Under the railway bridge and down the road, we encountered Erdal and his nephew at Repairs R Us, where we marvelled at the monster engine from a Volvo truck that Erdal rebuilt and today keeps as a trophy by the entrance of his tiny arch.  Further down, we met Ahmed, a native of Cyprus who grew up above the synagogue in Heneage St and has run his garage here for twenty-eight years. At the corner, across from Bethnal Green Station, we were greeted by Ian & Trevor, two softly spoken brothers who have been here twenty years repairing taxis in a former a scrap yard, still retaining its old weigh bridge. We all squinted together at the drain pipe head dated 1870 with the initials of the Great Eastern Railway upon it, declaring the history of the site in gothic capitals, before Ian extracted a promise from me to come back once I had discovered the origin of the name Three Colts Lane.

Apart from calendar girls adorning the walls, the only women we glimpsed were those who restricted themselves to answering the telephone – barely visible in tiny cabins of domestic comfort, sheltering their femininity against the barbaric male chaos of the machine shops. But then, strolling down a back lane and passing one of the governors in a heated altercation with a quivering cabbie who had innocently scraped his Daimler, thereby providing the catalyst for an arresting display of bullish masculinity, we encountered Iflet. With a triumphant mixture of self-assurance and sharp humour, Iflet has won the respect of her male colleagues in the body shop, wielding a spanner as well as the next man. A bold pioneer in her field and sterling example to others, I was proud to shake the hand of Iflet, the only – or rather – the first female mechanic in Three Colts Lane.

Growing bolder, we ventured deeper to discover the paint shops and frames where taxis were hoisted up for major surgery. We left daylight behind us to explore the furthest recesses of the dripping vaults, lined with corrugated iron, where a fluorescent glow pervaded the scene of lurid-coloured motors crouching in the gloom. We had arrived at the heart of Three Colts Lane, vibrating to the diabolic roar of the high speed trains passing overhead, whisking passengers in and out of London, oblivious to the hidden world beneath the tracks.

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

Merle Curtis, Sultana Begum, Armagan Middlemast & Husna Begum, Food Bank Volunteers, Bethnal Green, 2022

Since the end of last week, our crowdfund to publish Sarah Ainslie’s WOMEN AT WORK, East End Portraits 1992-2025 has nearly doubled, surging from £8,054 to more than £15,500 thanks to the additional support of over fifty more readers.

I must confess there has been some handwringing behind the scenes over the past three weeks, because – of all the books we have published – this could not be the one that we fail to deliver. Hopefully, we are in the home stretch with less than £9,500 left to raise now and 6 days left.

I believe we can do it.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE CROWDFUND

Here are some more extracts from the book with commentary by Sarah Ainslie.

It was a journey finding, meeting and photographing these women and each workplace was a completely different experience and some were more dramatic than others. This was especially true when I was invited to go out on the beat with WPC Helen Taylor in her car. I was sitting in the back seat when we went into an emergency response mode with the blue light flashing and siren blaring, hurtling through the streets at breakneck speed. It was absolutely terrifying and hard to focus and take photographs. In what seemed ages, but was probably about five minutes, we reached the estate where I had to wait in the car whilst she and her colleague went to investigate, and when they returned I was able to take some pictures.

At Tesco, everyone knows Anita Patel who is often to be found helping customers at the check-out or stacking shelves with the rest of the staff and always happy to show you where a product is. Photographing with her was so much fun as there was much laughter with her colleagues when they wanted to join in. Anita is also very involved in helping to raise money for charities in the community.

Nikki Brewer was someone I located through an agency for tradeswomen, she was working independently and with Amy’s Electric a company of women electricians. I took photographs of her whilst she was working in this very small bathroom, standing on the bath and backed up against the wall as there was hardly any space in the room but she just carried on working. She is very passionate about sharing her skills and knowledge with younger women to encourage them to become electricians. She has since become my electrician.

After three weeks of crowdfunding – thanks to the generosity of  87 supporters – we have raised £11,304, which is close to half of our target of £25,000 to publish the book of Sarah Ainslie’s photographs, accompanied by an exhibition of the pictures.

We have just a week to go now and I call upon my readers to help us at this crucial moment. If every reader of Spitalfields Life gave even a small donation, we could reach our total today. Additionally, if you are able to contribute now, this will build momentum and encourage others.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE CROWDFUND

I believe Sarah Ainslie’s book is important. Firstly, because these are seriously good photographs. Secondly, because our world is shaped by the work done by women who are too often unseen and this project is a means to give them visibility and celebrate them. Thirdly, because – by documenting working women through four decades – Sarah has created a vital record of social change.

Below you can read some of the things supporters have been saying and see some pages from the book.

‘Sarah Ainslie’s portraits are always wonderful, and it will be a joy to see these pictures of women gathered together in what will I know be the be the beautiful trademark hardback of a Spitalfields Life publication.’ Arbabella Warner

‘Wonderful to see this compelling visual testimony to women’s work. Thank you for bringing it to light.’ Olivia Horsfall Turner

‘Thank you for your work recognising and celebrating women’s lives.’ Caz Richards

‘Lived in the East End for 40+ years. An inspired book Sarah.’ LisaFerguson

‘Good luck with the book. It sounds great.’ Alice Rawsthorn

‘This is an amazing project. Good luck with the crowdfund and looking forward to the publication. Best, Fatima’

‘Looking forward to seeing this in print. Well done Sarah!’ David Hoffman

‘This will be a wonderful, inspiring and fascinating book. So looking forward to seeing it published.’ Mary Norden

‘Bravo for the women doing the work, and Sarah for celebrating them!’ Robin Huffman

‘The Alcove in Rhode Island is one of the only publicly accessible libraries in the world focused entirely on women at work. We are thrilled to support this book, and to someday boast a copy on our shelves.’

‘Lovely portraits of terrific women. It’s so nice to see ordinary people and their work photographed with such skill.’ Mary Dalton

‘What an amazing project! So happy to support it.’ Vivienne Palmer

‘A wonderful celebration of the work of women in the East End. For my 3rd great great grandmother Isabella Hirst and her four daughters Isabella, Charlotte, Elizabeth and Harriett.’ Carolyn Hirst

Here are a few excerpts from the pages of the book.

Bow food bank volunteers

‘There are number of women who work in teams like the rubbish collectors and street sweepers. When I went out on the dustcart in Hackney it was interesting to experience at first-hand what their work entails and how much we don’t think about the services that are seemingly unseen, it also gave me an insight into how important it was for them to be able to create their own systems of working as a team, to be in charge of their own patch in their own way. Often the smell would become overwhelming as we drove around the streets, stopping periodically to collect and empty the bins. I really enjoyed the moments during their tea breaks whilst sitting in the back of the truck chatting, laughing and sharing snippets of their lives with each other as they did crosswords.’ Sarah Ainslie

‘I think one of the most fascinating places in the East End is C. E. Burns in Bacon St, a second-hand furniture and bric-a-brac store, and finding Carol Burns within her personal domain of a garden shed that is her office, she is a woman in charge sitting gloriously in the midst of the office paraphernalia, filing boxes filled with receipts spilling everywhere, memorabilia and family photos especially those of her dad Charlie Burns who was an East End waste paper merchant and boxing entrepreneur. I loved all these details that told a story about her and the family and the life that they had lived and whose business she now runs.’ Sarah Ainslie

‘The labour force in the area of health, well-being and caring is predominantly made up of women who are often unrecognised for their work, their capacity for care is so vital to each of our lives. It was a great experience to have access to so many different hospital departments at Homerton Hospital where everyone gave me their precious time and a greater understanding of how a hospital works, especially as I had been a patient there only the year before. As I photographed I very quickly realized that everyone from consultants, doctors, nurses, midwives and admin staff to cleaners, physios, chaplains, and porters are interdependent and all equally important to each other and the patients, and without any one of those elements the hospital would cease to function properly.’ Sarah Ainslie

‘I discovered Shirif Izzet one morning when I walked into Solis Launderette (owned by her brother) where she is the manager. She was so welcoming to me and everyone who came in, and as we were chatting, she kept going off to make mugs of tea and biscuits for the elders who were waiting for their washing. On the walls there were photographs of customers and postcards that they had sent from their holidays, revealing a genuine feeling of warmth and care for the community. When I asked about coming to photograph her, she immediately said she would and was happy to do it right there and then, so that’s what we did. Launderettes are part of the wonderful places to have around us, not just to get your washing done or a service wash but a place that is warm and friendly to hang out in, they are a hub like cafes, chicken shops, libraries and community centres.’ Sarah Ainslie

I love to visit dark old houses on bright sunny days. There is something delicious about stepping from the light of the day into the dark of the interior, almost as if the transition from one zone to another was that of time travel, from the present into another era.

I wonder if this notion is a residue of my childhood, when my parents took me on holiday trips to visit stately homes, so that now I associate these charismatically crumbling old piles of architecture with bright English afternoons.

Such were my feelings when visiting Sutton House, the oldest house in the East End, recently. It made me think of the country mansions of city burghers that once filled Spitalfields before the streets were laid out and the terraces built up.

Built between 1534-5 by Ralph Sadleir, an associate of Thomas Cromwell, Sutton House employed oak beams from the royal forest of Enfield given to Cromwell by Henry VIII. In 1550, Sadleir sold his house to John Machell who became Sheriff Of London, acquiring wealth as a City merchant. Overreaching himself in debt, the house was repossessed by Sir James Deane, a money-lender.

By 1627, it was in the ownership of Captain John Milward, a silk merchant and member of the East India Company, who furnished it with oriental carpets and commissioned elaborate strapwork murals upon the staircase that survive in fragments to this day.

Sarah Freeman leased the house in 1657 for a girls’ school which ran for nearly a century until it was divided into two dwellings in the mid-eighteenth century, Ivy House and Milford House. Only at the end of the nineteenth century were the two halves reunited when Canon Evelyn Gardner created St John’s Institute as a recreational club for ‘men of all classes.’ Within ten years the building was condemned as unsafe, but thanks to a public appeal which raised £3000 it was extensively renovated with additions in the Arts & Crafts style.

After the Institute left, a failed attempt was made to buy Sutton House for the nation before the National Trust stepped in to save it in 1938. For decades, rooms were let as offices to voluntary organisations until squatters occupied the house in the eighties. Then developers were prevented from converting it into luxury flats by a successful local campaign to Save Sutton House which eventually opened to the public in 1991.

Thus history passed through Sutton House like a whirlwind yet, despite all the changes, the atmosphere of past ages still lingers, especially in the shadowy panelled rooms that enfold the overwhelming mystery of numberless untold stories.

Tudor door and Georgian fanlight

Original transom window dating from the Tudor era

In the Linenfold Parlour

Looking downstairs from the Great Chamber

Looking from the Little Chamber into the Great Chamber

The Great Chamber

Cabinet in the Little Chamber

Tudor kitchen

Cellar stairs

Looking through the courtyard

Looking up from the courtyard

Known as the ‘Armada Window,’ this is the oldest window in the East End

Sutton House can be visited as part of a guided tour. Tickets go on sale every Friday for tours on the following Wednesday, Friday & Sunday.

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At Eastbury Manor

Tessa Hunkin and the members of Hackney Mosaic Project never stop creating. Their latest masterpiece, Birds of Hoxton, was installed in the residents’ garden at Follingham Court this week, where it can be seen by passers-by walking south down Hoxton St.

Three years in the making, this ambitious diptych illustrates the ornithology of the neighbourhood with each species created by a different mosaic maker, imparting diverse personalities to each of the birds and vivid life to the completed mosaic.

Further up in Hoxton Market, decorative mosaic roundels have been installed outside Shoreditch Library, Hoxton Hall and Hoxton Garden, while just round the corner where Pitfield St meets Old St, you will find the Hoxton Varieties Mosaic from 2013. These new projects mark a return to their roots for the project, since this is where it all began with the Shepherdess Walk Mosaics back in 2012.

Tessa Hunkin is giving an illustrated talk, showing the mosaics and telling the story of the project, this Sunday 10th May at 4pm at Sutton House, Homerton High St, E9 6JQ, as part of Hackney History Festival.

Click here to buy a ticket for £3

Sutton House is the oldest house in Hackney and one of London’s few remaining Tudor mansions, built in 1535, so this is a great opportunity to pay a visit.

Roundel outside Hoxton Garden

Roundel outside Hoxton Hall

Roundel outside Shoreditch Library

Tessa Hunkin with two local councillors on the eve of the local election

The Hoxton Varieties mosaic was installed in Pitfield St in 2013

Click here to order a copy of Tessa Hunkin’s Hackney Mosaic Project