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

Click here to book

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

‘I’ve been on a bike since I was two’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien

You might also like to read about

Crudgie, Motorbicycle Courier

Matyas Selmeczi, Silhouette Artist

Mr Gil, Street Preacher

Matt Walters, Human Statue

Jason Cornelius John, Street Musician

Graham Kennedy, Directions Man

Adrian Amos with his son Harry

Anyone who ever goes through Vauxhall cannot fail to notice Brunswick House, the eighteenth century pile that was the former home of the exiled Duke of Brunswick in 1811, still holding firm with dignity despite the incursion of cheap and nasty towers that overwhelm the place these days.

It is the last fragment of old Vauxhall, when this was the location of pleasure gardens and fine country houses with estates stretching down to the river. Here Contributing Photographer Rachel Ferriman and I visited Adrian Amos, the current resident of this Palladian mansion which serves as showroom for London Architectural Salvage & Supply Company (LASSCO) that he founded fifty years ago.

As if Brunswick House were not wonder enough, it is crammed now with precious architectural artefacts enjoying safe harbour until they find new permanent homes. In the seventies, Adrian was a pioneer of recycling who saw a way to rescue and repurpose the fabric of condemned buildings when almost on-one else cared. I found him sitting happily in his magnificent study surrounded by a trove of gleaming antiquities – at the the heart of the empire he has built over the past half century – upon which he presides today with his two sons, George and Harry, the royal family of salvage.

Through all these years, Adrian has acquired stories and knowledge as enthusiastically as he has collected architectural artefacts, making him a wily and charismatic raconteur on the subject of old London with an infinite repertoire of tales – which I discovered when I sat down with him.

“George Amos, my grandfather, had a furniture factory in Bow, Old Ford Rd. It wasn’t really a factory, it was just four brothers who were forced to work for their father. A lot happened between the demise of that business around 1963 and my starting this in 1979.

I was brought up in Colchester surrounded by an awareness of the age of the town and the built environment, so I developed an interest in antiquarian stuff but I also inherited some sort of business acumen or drive from my grandfather, I’m assuming.

It’s very difficult to separate out the cheeky anecdotes that one uses to justify things, but I found in North London, Hampstead particularly, there were skips at one end of the street and stuff going into the skips, being torn out of houses, and within walking distance there’d be someone anxious to acquire these original materials, like sash windows and shutters and what have you. So between the two there was a business to be made, taking things out of skips and selling them to the neighbour ten houses away.

I became part of the antiques trade, that was the closest activity to which you could nail it. On the other hand, it was a lot to do with the scrap metal business too, and what we would now call ‘recycling’. Dan Cruickshank coined the term ‘architectural salvage’ in an article in the Architects Journal. That was 1976. I hung around demi-monde of NW1 and before that I’d been running a joinery shop in Hampstead. I was steeped in my father Sydney Amos’ involvement with cabinet making. When I was a boy, I remember him straightening nails out, he was very economical as a lot of people were in those days. After George Amos & Son closed when the East London furniture industry died, he worked in Covent Garden and Spitalfields Market. So I was given a wide choice of careers because I couldn’t go back into cabinet making.

In the seventies, people were encouraged to simply go in and rescue artefacts from buildings irrespective of title of ownership. It’s radically different today. Sometimes people sell us things and we return them to the owners at a loss. Two of our favourite family of street operators came round with some old panelling in the back of their van one day. I asked them where they got it from, there were only two places it could have come from in East London, one was Sutton House and the other was Walthamstow old village. They said it wasn’t Walthamstow so it had to be Sutton House. At that point you have to be careful what you say because if you say the wrong thing, they take fright and take it away and sell it to some utter scoundrel. So I said, ‘You leave it with us and we’ll let the dust settle.’ Then I got on the phone to the National Trust and they discovered that their contractors had whipped it off the wall because they had no idea of its value or significance. Thus we saw that it went back to them. Virtue emanates from every pore when I tell that story.

One day, we got a call to Holy Trinity Church, Finchley Rd, to clear it out before it was demolished. That’s what the business was then, you got called out to places before they were pulled down. We met a chap there who was redundant furnishings officer for the Church of England. ‘Oh jolly good,’ he said, ‘Is this what you do?’ He wasn’t interested in the material, he simply wanted a solution to his problems. He gave me a list of churches that he was keen to see cleared out, pews and all sorts, usually staffed by a single rector who was verging on a nervous breakdown – no congregation. I said, ‘We are going to need a bit of assistance with somewhere to put this stuff.’ So he said, ‘I’ve got this giant church in Shoreditch, St Michael & All Angels. Here’s the key, let yourself in and fill it up with all the bits you are pulling out.’

We were there for forty years. I thought it was too big a prospect for me to handle by myself so I approached Geoff Westland. He was involved in Fine Art transport, so we each used half of the church, a great cavernous unheated place. It gradually filled up and chaps came from the City of London. I suppose they get a bit bored dealing stocks and bonds, they like tangible things. Quite often they’d turn up smoking a cigar after lunch which meant they were in a good mood and they’d see something and get seized with imagination, buying a marble fireplace or a fountain.

We got the job to clear Willesden Cemetery because they had too many marble memorials. So we loaded them up onto the back of our ancient Bedford lorry from 1947 and placed them in the park at the back of the church in Shoreditch where they still are today. The York paving there came from a pepper warehouse near Borough Market. We did the church up piece by piece over the years.

Eventually, we ran out of space because the nature of architectural salvage then was that the supply overwhelmed demand, we had acres of doors that people were pulling out of old houses. So we occupied a yard in Pitfield St on the site of Raymond’s Music Hall where Laurel & Hardy once performed. It was demolished before our eyes, in those days there was a pathological tendency to destroy things and replace them with NCP car parks.

There are thankfully fewer large-scale demolitions these days, although there was a period of facade retentions when we received a glut of decent stuff, floorboards, joinery and other building materials. Today we can drive around London and there isn’t a street without a building that has gone that we were involved with. We have a vast archive of photographs.

Yesterday, I was down in Wapping in Scandrett St, near the Bluecoat School, and I was asked to come there by a Mr Scandrett who has an old yard there, and I thought, ‘That’s remarkable. Here is a true relic, the street is named after the family.’

Twenty years ago, we happening to be passing through Vauxhall and there was a ‘For Sale’ sign outside this place, Brunswick House. It used to be the British Railwaymen’s Staff Association Club, when all the railway lines were cut through Vauxhall they kept it as their club house. The place was due to be disassembled brick by brick and moved to Camberwell so a developer could put a tower on this spot but Historic England said, ‘Over our dead bodies,’ because it is grade II* listed. Instead they got consent for covering the building with enormous advertising hoardings. We came along at the time the developers were getting fed up, we saw that it was for sale and asked, ‘What do you want?’ They gave us quite a reasonable price. After forty years wallowing around in gothic gloom in Shoreditch, we were delighted to be offered a south-facing Palladian mansion.

I couldn’t wished for a better career with my inclinations and upbringing. If you are excited by the aesthetic aspects what could be better than to be surrounded by stuff that fascinates you. Now I live here up on the top floor, it has wonderful light.”

George Amos and family of Bow

George Amos & Son, Old Ford Rd, Bow 1917

Adrian Amos’ first shop in New End Sq, Hampstead

Adrian Amos in his showroom ‘a favourite of the Spitalfields set’

St Michael & All Angels, Shoreditch

Adrian Amos in Shoreditch

St Michael & All Angels

Staff photo by Harry Diamond, 1978 (Adrian Amos is second from left in back row)

Adrian Amos (left) with John Cousans, Shoreditch

The gardens of Brunswick House in Vauxhall no longer extend to the Thames

‘I couldn’t wished for a better career with my inclinations and upbringing’

The framing workshop up in the roof

Brunswick House photographs copyright © Rachel Ferriman

London Architectural Salvage & Supply Company, Brunswick House, 30 Wandsworth Rd, SW8 2LG

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

Quaker St 1967 by Philip Marriage

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields

In Weavers’ Fields

Who can resist the appeal of the path worn solely by footsteps? I was never convinced by John Bunyan’s pilgrim who believed salvation lay in sticking exclusively to the straight path – detours and byways always held greater attraction for me. My experience of life has been that there is more to be discovered by stepping from the tarmac and meandering off down the dusty track, and so I delight in the possibility of liberation offered by these paths which appear year after year, in complete disregard to those official routes laid out by the parks department.

It is commonly believed that the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard invented the notion of “desire paths” (lignes de désir) to describe these pathways eroded by footfall in his book “The Poetics of Space,” in 1958, although, just like the mysterious provenance of these paths themselves, this origin is questioned by others. What is certain is that the green spaces of the East End are scored with them. Sometimes, it is because people would rather cut a corner than walk around a right angle, at other times it is because walkers lack patience with elegantly contrived curved paths when they would prefer to walk in a straight line and occasionally it is because there is simply no other path leading where they want to go.

Resisting any suggestion that these paths are by their nature subversive to authority or indicative of moral decline, I prefer to appreciate them as evidence of  human accommodation, coming into existence where the given paths fail and the multitude of walkers reveal the footpath which best takes them where they need to go. Yet landscape architects and the parks department refuse to be cowed by the collective authority of those who vote with their feet and, from time to time, little fences appear in a vain attempt to redirect pedestrians back on the straight and narrow.

I find a beauty in these desire paths which are expressions of collective will and serve as indicators of the memory of repeated human actions inscribed upon the landscape. They recur like an annual ritual, reiterated over and over like a popular rhyme, and asserting ownership of the space by those who walk across it every day. It would be an indication of the loss of independent thought if desire paths were no longer created and everyone chose to conform to the allotted pathways instead.

You only have to look at a map of the East End to see that former desire paths have been incorporated into the modern road network. The curved line of Broadway Market joins up with Columbia Rd cutting a swathe through the grid of streets, along an ancient drover’s track herding the cattle from London Fields down towards Smithfield Market, and the aptly named Fieldgate St indicates the beginning of what was once a footpath over the fields down to St Dunstan’s when it was the parish church for the whole of Tower Hamlets.

Each desire path tells a story, whether of those who cut a corner hurrying for the tube through Museum Gardens or of those who walk parallel to the tarmac for fear of being hit by cyclists in London Fields or of the strange compromise enacted in Whitechapel Waste where an attempt has been made to incorporate desire paths into the landscape design. I am told that in Denmark landscape architects and planners go out after newly-fallen snow to trace the routes of pedestrians as an indicator of where the paths should be. Yet I do not believe that desire paths are a problem which can be solved because desire paths are not a problem, they are a heartening reminder of the irreducible nature of the human spirit that can never be contained and will always be wandering.

The parting of the ways in Museum Gardens

The allure of the path through the trees

In Bethnal Green, hungry for literature, residents cut across the rose bed to get to the library

A cheeky little short cut

An inviting avenue of plane trees in Weavers’ Fields

A detour in Florida St

A byway in Bethnal Green

Legitimised by mowing in Allen Gardens, Spitalfields

A pointless intervention in Shadwell

Which path would you choose?

Over the hills and faraway in Stepney

The triumph of common sense in Stepney Green

Half-hearted appropriation by landscape architects on Whitechapel Waste

A joggers path in London Fields

A dog-eared corner in Stepney

The beginning of something in Bethnal Green

Artillery Passage 1984 by Philip Marriage

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields

Photographer Chris Kelly returned to Cable St Community Gardens to take these vibrant portraits of the gardeners in 2012. Previously, Chris made a set of portraits in black and white which became an exhibition and a book back in 2005.

Jane Sill – I hope to grow more vegetables in future. Other plants have taken over the space, especially poppies. They remind me of my grandfather who was wounded and left for dead of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1st July, 1916. He survived, was nursed in France and eventually brought back to this country. The Tibetan prayer flags were brought back from Lhasa by a friend.

Anwara Begum – I’m growing more varieties of vegetables now. I have Bangladeshi pumpkins and different types of Bangladeshi cucumbers. I grow aubergines and chillies in my greenhouse – one of them is too hot even for me.

Manda Helal – Manda’s vines, pretty and delicious.

Marian Monas – I’ve been coming to the gardens for a few months. I live just around the corner. Eventually I hope to have a plot or to share one, but in the meantime I’m growing things in a raised planter. I’m happy with anything that grows really. I’ve got herbs, chard, rhubarb, lavender – and there are visits from a friendly rat.

Ron Osborne – I was one of the original gardeners here back in the seventies and I had a plot for about ten years. Then I started the Shadwell Basin Project for local youth and became involved with other things. I came back when Gina got this plot and we both spend time on it, but it’s basically hers.

Anne Herbert –  Anne moved out of the area in 2005 but always comes back to the gardens on Open Day and keeps in touch with some of the other gardeners. Part of Anne’s former plot is now a well stocked pond.

Ann Ahern – I moved to Tower Hamlets from Notting Hill in 1999 and I’ve had my plot here since 2005. I live just eight minutes away. I’m growing mixed flowers, a few vegetables and I have a pond. My nephew has a seed bed on part of the plot. I’m not so good with seeds.

Monir Uddin – My latest project is to specialise in roses. I’m transplanting them, but they are quite tricky to grow and it takes at least a year for the roots to become established. I’m a photographer and I hope to photograph the roses for cards and calendars.

Helen Keep

Emir Hasham – Emir’s plot houses one of two beehives introduced to the gardens recently.

Hasan Chowdhury – I’m twelve and I’m the youngest gardener here. I first came with our neighbour Angel, who has a cat, and then Jane let me take over these raised planters. I’m growing spinach and potatoes, three different types of pumpkins, peas and coriander. I first learned about gardening from my mum and I like it because gardening is fun.

Suzanne & Mark Lancaster – We started gardening here fairly recently. It’s lovely to come to this beautiful oasis of flowers, birds and greenness in the heart of the East End. We live on busy Brick Lane, so it’s a joy to have somewhere so pretty and tranquil for a break. We hope to grow french beans, rhubarb and herbs in our raised planters.

Devika Jeetun – I’ve been coming to the gardens for a long time. I had to give up my plot when I was caring for my brother and I’m on the waiting list now. I’m growing herbs and vegetables in raised planters – potatoes, tomatoes, runner beans, spring onions and coriander. And I’m looking forward to having a plot again.

Balkis Karim

Annemarie Cooper – I’ve been gardening here for sixteen years and I don’t bother so much with vegetables now, my garden is basically a wildlife area. Those of us who encourage frogs have been using lion poo to keep the cats away from the ponds and it seems to work.

Sheila McQuaid – My gardening is more organised now. I come here at least twice a week. I’m growing different types of vegetables such as squashes and courgettes and I use the greenhouse for tomatoes. But the fruit has not been so good this year, so I’m growing more herbs, especially varieties of mint – I’m into mint tea in quite a big way.

Photographs copyright © Chris Kelly

Take a look at these other pictures by Chris Kelly

Chris Kelly’s Columbia School Portraits 1996

Chris Kelly & Dan Jones in the Playground

Brushfield St 1984 by Philip Marriage

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields

A few years ago, photographer Chris Kelly was invited to the open day of Cable Street Community Gardens and the result was a year-long project which culminated in an exhibition and a book. Fifty-two plot holders took part, aged from seven to eighty and originating from a dozen different countries, yet all unified by a love of gardening and the need for a haven where they could cultivate flowers, grow vegetables, chat to neighbours or enjoy solitude. Today, it is my delight to publish a selection of Chris Kelly’s beautiful portraits of the Cable St Gardeners. “Some of the old faces are no longer there,” Chris told me,“but the gardens thrive, new people have joined and it is still a magical place.”

Bill Wren – I was born in Wapping and I moved to Shadwell nine years ago. I’ve had the plot for about fifteen years. We never had a garden when I was young. The nearest I came to gardening was picking hops in Kent. Later I had a friend in Burgess Hill and I used to grow things in her garden. That’s where the greenhouse came from, I put it on the roof of the car and brought it up from Sussex. I’ve built a shed here and a pond. There are plenty of frogs and newts, and I’ve planted a bank next to the road. It’s a wildlife haven now.

Jane Sill – I was born in Liverpool. My grandfather had an allotment in County Durham and my father was a very good gardener. I helped with weeding and cultivated sunflowers. I was living in Cable Street in the late seventies in a top floor flat with no balcony. One day I went to a community festival and Friends of the Earth were offering plots here. I was given one in 1980 and I knew straight away how important it was to establish ourselves as an organisation. We’ve had a two year waiting list since 1981. At one time I was working in a Job Centre and people used to come in and put their names down for a plot.

Mohammed Rahmat Ali Pathni – I have always been a gardener. I started on my father’s land in Bangladesh and when I came to live in Birmingham in 1978 I had a garden behind the back yard. I have lived in Wapping since 1983 and started gardening in Cable Street ten years ago. I’m enjoying myself and it helps my frozen shoulder. I taught my children to garden and my wife often works here too. Many gardeners provide food for other people and I regularly give vegetables to friends. I also write poetry which is printed in the Eurobangla News Weekly, and I am a member of a writers’ group.

Alison Cochran – I moved to Shadwell five years ago because of the allotments and I live just across the road. I noticed them when I was living in Bethnal Green. I was born in Salisbury on a hill fort. I was keen on gardening when I was a child but when I came here I hadn’t gardened for years. I knew I wanted lots of flowers, but now I also grow salad vegetables and leeks, tomatoes, carrots and radishes. The soil is wonderful, everything seems to thrive here. I’ve used Victorian bricks for the paths because I wanted my plot to be in keeping with nearby housing.

Monir Uddin – I’ve lived in the borough for twenty years and I’ve gardened here for eight or nine years. The plot was completely wild at first. I had to uproot everything and it took about two years to get the soil right. I used to grow about sixty different plants and vegetables, including huge pumpkins. I love experimenting with plants and growing them for their medicinal properties. I’m a photographer and I also wanted to produce plants to photograph. I’ve done many different types of work including weddings and portraits. I was involved in the Bollywood film industry, I’ve photographed celebrities and at one time I had a restaurant.

Agatha Athanaze – I’ve been gardening here for twelve years. I was born in Dominica and came to Tower Hamlets in 1961. I’ve done different jobs. I’ve been a machinist and a cleaner. I live in Wapping now. I had a garden in Dominica so I did have some experience. The vegetables came first – I grow cabbages, onions, spring onions, runner beans, carrots, tomatoes, rhubarb and kidney beans. I like flowers too. I’ve ordered roses from Holland and from Spalding. I just like to come here and grow things. There are two benches but I haven’t time to sit down.

John Kelly – I was born in Cork City and I wasn’t a gardener. I came to this country in 1943 to work in the construction industry and started gardening as a hobby and to feed the family. I’ve had the plot here for seventeen years. I didn’t know much but I picked it up as I went along. I’ve always grown vegetables, never flowers. I can’t spend too much time here because I have to look after my wife and I have health problems too. I hate the sight of weeds but I don’t throw them out. I leave them on the ground to let them rot and they form green manure.

Manda Helal – I’m from Hertfordshire and I’ve lived in Tower Hamlets for twenty-six years. I’ve always been keen on gardening. We had a big garden when I was a child and I was given a section of my own. I’ve had my plot here for three years. My flat in Whitechapel is small and dark, so it’s wonderful to come here. The wheels are a frame for pumpkins. Squashes and pumpkins are so versatile. I grow artichokes and rocket, garlic, kale, cabbage, cauliflower, spinach and climbing purple beans. I’ve taught pottery in the borough for years and more recently I became a compost educator for the Women’s Environmental Network.

John Stokes – I’ve been gardening at Cable Street since I retired six years ago. I asked one of the nuns in the convent across the road and she said the allotments were for local people. I had no experience but I was brought up on a farm and I found I had an instinct for gardening. I came over from Ireland fifty years ago. I worked for London Transport for thirty-six years and missed only nine days. Now I’m at the gardens almost every day in summer and twice a week in winter. I grow vegetables for myself and my cousin and an aunt.

Anna Gaudion – I was born in Guernsey. I’ve lived in Stepney for the last ten years and I work as a midwife in Peckham. I was brought up in the country and I love being outside, hearing birds and growing things. I like allotments too, even just seeing them from trains. I’ve had this plot for three years now. My shed is made from a packing case used to take an object abroad from the British Museum where I was a curator. I enjoy cultivating flowers so I planted a nature garden. I share my plot with Claire who grows vegetables. Mine is the higgledy-piggledy part.

Andy Pickin – I grew up in Finchley and we moved to Shadwell twenty years ago. We spent eight years in Huntingdon when the firm moved there but most of us came back to London. I wanted an allotment because I’d always had great fun sharing one with my dad. I’ve had the plot for fourteen years. I grew vegetables because money was tight and the first year’s crop was fantastic. Our thirteen children all liked coming here when they were young. The older ones grow their own vegetables now. My wife likes the gardens too, she knows I sometimes come here to get away from the telly or the kids arguing.

Robin & Maria Albert – Robin was in catering before becoming a gardener eight years ago. He was born in Mile End and he’s lived in London all his life. I was born in London too and brought up in Margate. My family is always trying to persuade us to move out to Kent but we like living in Bethnal Green. We grow flowers at home but we wanted somewhere separate for vegetables. The fact that everything is organic is part of the appeal. Producing your own pure food is very satisfying. We have some flowers too and a pond that attracts frogs. I can’t do so much now but I still find gardening very therapeutic.

Ray Newton – I’ve always grown things. I share this plot with Agatha. We grow about a dozen different types of vegetables. It’s all organic. We don’t use pesticides. I retired last year from teaching business studies at Tower Hamlets College. Before that I worked in industry and at one time I was manager of a betting shop. I studied for O and A levels at evening classes and then took a degree course. I became a teacher and taught for twenty-five years. My other interests are local history and football. I’m the secretary of the History of Wapping Trust and a lifelong Millwall supporter.

Will Daly – I was a founder member of the gardens. I was in a nearby pub when Jane came in with another Irish chap and they persuaded me to have a plot. I’ve been in the borough for twenty-seven years. I was born in Ireland and I made a living salmon fishing on a tributary of the Shannon. I came to this country in 1951 and did building work. One of my brothers came over too but he missed the river and went home after a while. I still go back to Ireland but only for weddings and funerals. I can’t do very much gardening now but I love the peace of it.

Raymond Hussey – This is my second year. I live in one of the flats nearby. I’m growing vegetables and learning as I go along. What I’m most proud of is the brussels. And my runner beans were unbelievable. I don’t know whether it’s the soil or me talking to them. Weeds are a problem. Sometimes I’d like to use gallons of weedkiller but we’re not allowed. So I come in and have a chat. I call them everything but weeds. I was born on one of the estates off Brick Lane. I’ve done lots of things including acting. In my last job I was a dustman but I got trapped by the lorry. I still can’t do heavy work so the plot’s a bit of a mess but it’s my little world and I love it.

Robin, Yvonne and Katie Guess – We live at the other end of Cable Street. There’s a small courtyard garden but Yvonne and I were used to growing fruit and vegetables before we lived in London. We love soft fruit, we had a huge crop last year. We grow several vegetables and Yvonne has planted a mixed flower and herb bed. Our daughter Katie likes planting and picking but not weeding. We’re both from the south-east. I’ve been in the East End since 1968 and I worked on the Isle of Dogs as a quality control chemist. Now I’m with the Music Alliance in Oxford Street dealing with composer copyright.

Carl Vella – I came to Tower Hamlets from Malta in 1950 and worked for the NHS, mostly as a fitter and stoker. I’m retired and since I took over the plot four years ago I like to come here every day. I grow mostly vegetables –  potatoes and cabbages. I’m on my own now so I give a lot of produce away to an elderly neighbour. I live in the flats nearby and there’s no garden. Coming here stops me getting fed up. I take my dog for a walk, go to the bookie’s and come here. I’d like to bring Pedro more often but he won’t stay in one place.

Sister Elizabeth O’Connor – Our Order has been part of the local community since 1859 and I came to the convent in 1949. After the houses here were demolished the site became a dumping ground until Friends of the Earth initiated the gardens project. When I retired from teaching in 1991, I started gardening here. All the sisters appreciate home grown vegetables and having fresh flowers for the chapel. As a child in County Clare I enjoyed helping my father in our kitchen garden. Apart from the practical use, the gardens are a great place for breaking down barriers and it’s especially good that women can feel safe here on their own.

Graham Kenlin – I was born in Bermuda. My father was a navy chef and had a land-based job working for an admiral. We came back to England when I was four and I grew up in Hackney. I’ve lived in Wapping for thirty-eight years and I’ve had a plot here for about fifteen years. My family have always had allotments. It’s very relaxing but I’m a lazy gardener. I’m an archaeologist and I work abroad sometimes so the plot gets neglected. I’ve had the odd good year but normally I do just enough to stay credible. I like growing large weeds, anything that’s interesting.

Sheila McQuaid – I came across the gardens at an open day. It was such an oasis of green and calm that I put my name down on the spot. Gardening is in the family. My parents were horticulturalists and I grew plants as a child but I’ve only become really interested in the last ten years. We decided on fruit because it’s expensive, especially if you want organic, and it doesn’t need constant attention. I was born and brought up in Cornwall and I’ve lived in Tower Hamlets for twenty-five years. I’m a housing adviser for Camden Council and I work for Stitches in Time on community textile projects.

Anna Girvan and John Griemsman – We’ve had the plot for about ten years. We’re in a 10th floor flat in Limehouse and we wanted somewhere to spend time outside and to grow vegetables. I’m from Belfast and I’ve lived in Limehouse for twenty-five years. John is from Wisconsin and he’s been here for almost thirty years. I work as a librarian in the West End and John is a special needs assistant. I’m more pleased by the flowers in the end than the vegetables. My favourite is a dahlia that Annemarie gave me. It’s a beautiful purple pink and it flowers for such a long time.

Mary Laurencin – I’ve been gardening here for about ten years. A cousin asked me to help then passed the plot on to me. I’d never gardened before but I was suffering from depression and sometimes it was the only place I felt comfortable. I learned to garden mainly by watching television. I’m from St Lucia and I’ve lived in Tower Hamlets for forty years. I came to England in 1962 and at one time I did four jobs every day – I worked in a cafe, had a job at Sainsbury’s, I was a machinist and I did some cleaning. I grow vegetables here. I love flowers but you can’t eat flowers.

Conrad, Donald and James Korek – I garden here with my wife Catherine and our two younger sons, Donald, ten, and James, six. Our eldest boy isn’t interested now. We’ve lived in the borough for fourteen years and started gardening at Cable Street about a year after we arrived. We have a flat nearby and we like to spend time outdoors. I was born in North London and Catherine was brought up on a farm in Scotland, so she has more experience of growing food. James likes weeding and he supports Arsenal. Donald is a West Ham supporter and he’s good at picking up stones and chatting to the other gardeners.

Annemarie Cooper – I’m a supply teacher and I write poetry. I’ve had a plot since 1986. I didn’t know anything about gardening but I love nature and being close to the earth. My dad was a very good vegetable gardener. He and my grandfather shared a plot and they were always arguing about it. I’ve lived in Tower Hamlets for twenty years. When I started here I thought I wanted to grow flowers then I got into vegetables. I love growing sweet peas and big flashy dahlias. Really I like anything that deigns to grow. I enjoy growing tomatoes and digging up potatoes.

Emir Hasham – I’m on the waiting list and until I have a plot I’ll be working on the communal area. My work is computer based graphics and special effects for television and what I like about gardening is the real honest labour and getting my hands dirty. It will be great to grow my own fruit and vegetables My parents used to garden and I helped as a child. I was born in Sheffield. My mum is a Yorkshire lass and my dad is mainly Asian. I’ve lived in Tower Hamlets for twelve years now. I haven’t a garden at home and there’s only so much you can grow on a balcony.

Anwara Begum – I was born in Bangladesh. My father was a businessman and had some land. My seven sisters and I helped mother with the farming. We never had to buy food from the market and we sold bamboo and bananas. When I was sixteen I came to live in Tower Hamlets and ten years ago I started gardening at Cable Street. The four children helped when they were younger but now they are busy with other things. They have to study and help with the housework. I’m studying too – IT, Childcare, Maths and English. And I’m taking Bengali GCSE as well as doing voluntary work in a nursery school.

Joseph Micallef – I first came to the borough from Malta in 1955 and settled here permanently in 1961. I’ve had the plot for ten years. I didn’t know anything about gardening but my father had a farm in Malta so I knew something about agriculture. The vegetables came first and my wife likes the flowers, but I just enjoy seeing things grow and passing the time here. A lot of the produce is given away. You do tend to get too much at once. People look at the plot and think I’m an expert but I’m not, I just plant things and they grow.

Photographs copyright © Chris Kelly

You may also like to take a look at Chris Kelly’s Columbia School Portraits 1996

WITH 3 DAYS TO GO, thanks to the generosity of 10 more donors since yesterday, we have now raised £19,526 with £5,474 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

Sajia Nessa harvesting tomatoes at Stepney City Farm

Historically, the East End was the centre of food production for London, abounding in market gardens and small holdings. Today, a new wave of food producers has arisen to challenge the dominance of fast-food and supermarkets. Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie has documented this movement in a series of portraits, celebrating community and food culture, and showcasing local projects building fairer, more sustainable food systems.

Alani Shafiq, mushroom grower for MadLeap, cultivating oyster mushrooms in a converted car garage turned controlled environment studio at R-Urban eco-civic hub in Poplar. ‘I hope to leave a legacy of the fungi, diverse, resilient, adaptable, detoxifying, mutualistic, dramatic, beautiful, complex.’

Rokiah Yaman, co-founder of MadLeap, likes working with power tools on site when she is not fundraising, project managing or developing partnerships. ‘We want to share our enthusiasm for microbes and fungi. We hope to give people a better understanding of how they play a key role in supporting our digestion, health, and breaking down our biopresources – there is no such thing as waste in nature!’

Jim Ford & Genia Leontowitsch, custodians of a Swedenborg Square Orchard, a community orchard that is part of E1 Community Gardeners. Genia: ‘I’m really proud of it, this is the difference I’ve made.’

Liam Williams & Laura Buckley, co-ordinators at Cranbrook Community Food Garden, working to engage people on the Cranbrook Estate in Bethnal Green with food growing. Laura: ‘It’s attracted a lot more people to the garden, people feel more likely to come in, it’s really added to our estate.’

Fawzi Rahman, Aska Welford & Anna Corf Isehayek, stewards of House of Annetta, a spatial justice project in Princelet St, learning about localised and diverse approaches to surplus food. Anna: ‘Here it always starts with food, so it also makes it more accessible, and more relaxed, more welcoming.’

Rebecca Evans-Merritt , operations manager at Limborough Hub in Poplar, a garden and cooking space that offers the resources to cook, grow, learn about all things food and climate related, as well as social gatherings and celebrations. ‘We’re able to have that flow – growing food, cooking food, eating food.’

Shazna Hussain & Sajna Miah are the Food Lives team, a research group running a podcast looking into communities’ eating choices. Shazna: ‘It’s giving a voice to those women that have never been asked, or never really thought of, being able to share their knowledge and expertise around food.’

Melly, Shamima, Sabina, Marisa of Teviot Food Co-op, providing subsided organic produce with support from Alexandra Rose Charity and the Bridging the Gap initiative, making shopping for healthy and affordable food easier.

Katrina Wright, a local food grower who is part of the Right to Grow campaign in Tower Hamlets has lots of horticultural knowledge at her disposal, a gardening and growing expert. ‘It has a kind of ripple effect, so you are impacting people’s lives and creating a legacy’

Aleya Taher, cook and community organiser, heads Teviot People’s Kitchen, bringing together local residents for regular meals, run from the R-Urban community garden in Poplar.

Cameron Bray, Angharad Davies & Andy Belfield are part of the R-Urban/Public Works team, operating an eco-civic hub that explores sustainable ways of working with food waste from tower blocks, turning it into nutrient rich soil – as well as running workshops, gardening sessions, foraging walks and more. Cameron: ‘It’s a space for learning, sometimes in a traditional sense, but also learning from each other, listening to each other, learning the stuff people already know.’

Rita Attille, local grower interested in the connection between mental wellbeing and nature, works with health services to get local people gardening.

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

WITH 4 DAYS TO GO, thanks to the generosity of 14 more donors since yesterday, we have now raised £17,766 with £7,234 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

Kyri demonstrates a pattern for a circular pleat

In a remote corner of Tottenham, in the midst of an industrial estate, sandwiched between a kosher butcher and a panel beater, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I found Rosamanda Pleaters. We dipped our heads and stepped through a low door to enter a crowded factory. As our eyes accustomed to the gloom, we peered into the depths where lines of machines filled the space, appearing to recede into the infinite distance. We expected a horde of ghostly workers shrouded in cobwebs, but on closer examination the machines were all idle.

Yet, in a pool of bright light, one man worked alone, wrestling cloth, cardboard, sticks and string, subjecting them to his will with expert control. This was the legendary pleater Kyriacos Hadjikyriacou, universally known as Kyri. He removed a piece of silk from between a pair of cardboard patterns that were folded into an intricate design which they imparted to the cloth, as delicate as a butterfly wing and as richly coloured as the plumage of an exotic bird. We were entranced.

The magic of pleating is to take diaphanous fabric and give it volume and structure through a geometric series of creases. These pleats move, amplifying the gesture and motion of the wearer in unexpected and sensuous ways. This is the spell that pleating can impart to clothes. Kyri is the grand master of it.

He has contrived hundreds of unique designs for pleats, spending months conjuring his intricate notions. Pleating is his imaginative world. ‘This one is stars on one side and squares on the other,’ he explained unrolling an elaborately folded piece of cardboard that quivered as if it had a life of its own. ‘I call it ‘Crown Pleat,” he confided to me in a proud conspiratorial whisper. ‘I have never used it yet.’ Kyri finds inspiration for new designs in pantiles, scallop shells and hieroglyphics.

All day the phone rings and breathless fashion assistants arrive from London’s top designers – Christopher Kane, Alexander McQueen, Jasper Conran, among others so fancy we are not permitted to mention – bringing lengths of cloth for Kyri to work his transformative wizardry upon.

A tall slim man with pale grey hair and straggling white moustache set off by his mediterranean colouring, Kyri cuts a handsome figure. Of philosophical nature, he is untroubled by the endless to and fro, delighting in the attention and maintaining a confident equanimity throughout. He may serve the capricious world of fashion, but his is the realm of geometry and chemistry. Cardboard, sticks and string are his tools, and steam is the alchemical essence that enables him to work his sorcery upon the cloth, subjecting it to his desire.

“As a pleater, you are always learning. Even after forty-three years of pleating, I am learning. It is not just a question of mastering three or five styles, you have to use your imagination. You have know engineering and about how machines work, you have to know geometry to understand how the patterns function, you have to know chemistry to predict how the material will react.

There’s a lot of things you have to know to be a pleater. It’s a talent. I create new things everyday. I design my own patterns. If I see something I like, I work how it is done and I design my own version. At the beginning, I used to come in every Saturday just to experiment with styles. I tried different ways to use the machines to find new styles. I have two hundred different designs of my own.

Hand pleating is done by placing the cloth between two paper patterns, known as ‘pleating crafts.’ They are made of a special paper that is water resistant and does not get wet. You open the craft, stretch the two papers and lay down the material, sandwiched between the two papers. Then you tie them tight and put them in the steam.

The easiest fabric for pleating is polyester. It holds the pleats well, you can even put it in a washing machine. In hand-pleating, you use only steam but in machine-pleating you use the heat of the machine and steam too, so it is more powerful and will resist washing. I have all these machines. One can do fifteen hundred different styles, another is a fancy one that do a couple of thousand different styles.

I don’t need to advertise, people come and find me, and they keep coming back. I tell them,’If you need me, you find me!’ If I make something, it has to be of the standard that I would like to buy – which means it is good to give to a customer.

My work is perfect pleating. It is rare. There are some patterns, I am the only person in England who can do them. Other pleaters do standard pleats and they think that’s everything but it is not. It can take six months to design a pattern. I might start work on it at Christmas and finish in June. I did not  know how to do it, but slowly I work it out. I enjoy pleating because I am always creating things. When I started, I didn’t know anything about this.

I have an Msc in Agriculture. I finished my studies in Athens in 1975 and, because of the war in which Turkey invaded Cyprus, I came to England as a refugee. I married my wife Eleni and in the beginning I worked in a knitting factory, Sharon Fabrics in Holloway. After they closed down, I worked at a water plant, analysing water in  Crews Hill in Enfield for bacteria. But somebody told me to push a wheelbarrow and I didn’t like it so I left.

After that, I was asked to work for a pleater in Hackney and that was how I started. In 1980, me and two other people, we opened a knitting factory in Clerkenwell near Smithfield Market. My wife worked in Holborn as a bookkeeper then. She asked me, ‘How much does it cost to set up a pleating factory? I told her, ‘Maybe two or three thousand pounds.’ So that’s what we did, we started in business together and we employed two boys. Eighteen months later, we had a fire and all the others left but I carried on.

I have been here in this workshop in Tottenham for twenty-six years. I had a pleater who passed away before my wife eighteen months ago, so I am on my own. There’s just me now but in the past I used to have seven pleaters working for me. All these machines I have are from factories that closed and nobody else wants them There is no business any more for volume. All the High St shops manufacture in the Far East, my business is just with designers now.

I used to work on Sundays, I arrived at eight o’clock every morning and worked until seven. Now I arrive at nine o’clock and work until five, just weekdays. I will carry on as long as I can. I said to my children, ‘I am not going to retire because – for me – if somebody retires they are waiting for death.’ It’s true! If you put your car outside for six months and don’t use it, the tyres and battery go flat. The human being is like that I think.”

Kyri lays a pattern on the table

Kyri has over two hundred patterns for pleating that he has designed

Kyri shows off a favourite pleating pattern

‘I call this ‘Crown Pleat”

‘Craft pleats’ ready for use

Kyri places weights upon the patterns to make sure the fabric is tightly sandwiched

Kyri removes the weights once the pattern is compressed

Kyri rolls the patterns to squeeze the fabric into the form of the patterns

Kyri places the patterns between two splints

Kyri ties the splints together

Kyri concertinas the patterns as tight as possible between the splints

The completed ‘pleating craft’ is ready for the steam oven

Kyri’s steam ovens where the pleats are baked

Kyri shows off his pleating machine

Last minute maintenance to the steamer

A pleated silk shirt ready to be steamed flat

Kyri the pleater

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

You may also like to read about

Maurice Franklin, Wood Turner

Frank Foster, Shirtmaker

With seven days to go, thanks to generosity of 132 donors, we have raised £14,081 towards our target of £25,000 to publish Women at Work, Sarah Ainslie’s East End Portraits 1992-2025. If you have not contributed please consider doing so at this crucial moment. If you have contributed please help us by persuading your friends, family and workmates  to do so too. Click here to visit the crowdfund

Curator of Human Osteology, Rebecca Redfern watches over her charge (Portrait by Sarah Ainslie)

In his Survey of London 1589, John Stow wrote about the discovery of pots of Roman gold coins buried in Spitalfields and it had long been understood that ancient tombs once lined the road approaching London, just as they did along the Appian Way in Rome. Yet it was only in the nineteen-nineties, when large scale excavations took place prior to the redevelopment of the Spitalfields Market, that the full extent of the Roman cemetery was uncovered.

In March 1999, a Roman stone sarcophagus containing a rare lead coffin decorated with scallop shells came to light, indicating the burial of someone of great wealth and high status. Grave goods of fine glass and jet were buried between the coffin and the sarcophagus. It was the first unopened sarcophagus to be found in London for over a century and when the entire assemblage was removed to the London Museum, the coffin was opened to reveal the body of a young woman in her early twenties, buried in ceremonial fashion. In the week after the opening of the coffin, ten thousand Londoners came to pay their respects to the Spitalfields Roman woman. She was the most astonishing discovery of the excavations yet, as the years have passed and more has been learnt about her, the enigma of her identity has become the subject of increasing fascination.

Analysis of residue in the coffin revealed that her head lay upon a pillow of bay leaves, her body was embalmed with oils from the Arab world and the Mediterranean, and wrapped in silk which had been interwoven with fine gold thread. Traces of Tyrian purple were also found, perhaps from a blanket laid over the coffin. Such an elaborate presentation suggests she may have been displayed to her family and friends seventeen hundred years ago as part of funeral rites.

The sarcophagus and grave goods are on public exhibition at the Museum but, thanks to Rebecca Redfern, Curator of Human Osteology, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I had the privilege to visit the Rotunda where the human remains are stored and view the skeleton of the Spitalfields Roman woman. Deep in a windowless concrete bunker filled with metal shelving stacked with cardboard boxes, containing the remains of thousands of Londoners from the past, lay the bones of the woman. We stood in silent reverence with just the sound of distant traffic echoing.

Rebecca is the informal guardian of the Spitalfields woman and remembers switching  on the television to watch news of the discovery as a student. Today, she has a four-year-old daughter of her own. “The work went on for so many years that a lot of couples met working in Spitalfields,” Rebecca admitted to me, “and there is now a whole generation of ‘Spital babies’ born to those archaeologists.”

“She’s five foot three and delicately built, petite like a ballet dancer,” Rebecca continued, turning her attention swiftly from the living to the dead and gesturing protectively to the bones laid out upon the table. While some might objectify the skeleton as a specimen, Rebecca relates to the Spitalfields Roman woman and all the other twenty thousand remains in her care as human beings. “They’re able to tell us so much about themselves, it’s impossible not to regard them as people,” she assured me.

Recent research into the isotopes present in the teeth of the Spitalfields Roman woman have revealed an exact match with those found in Imperial Rome, which means that her origin can be traced not just to Italy but to Rome itself. “I find it very sad that she came so far and then died so young,” Rebecca confided, recognising the lack of any indication of the cause of death or whether the woman had given birth. Contemplating the presence of the skeleton with its delicate bones dyed brown by lead, it is apparent that the Spitalfields Roman woman holds her secrets and has many stories yet to tell.

More than seventy-five Roman burials were uncovered at the same time as the sarcophagus, many interred within wooden coffins and some only in shrouds. You might say these represented the earliest wave of immigration to arrive in Spitalfields.

“People were so mobile,” Rebecca explained to me, “We found a fourteen-year-old girl from North Africa whose mother was European. A legion from North Africa was sent to guard Hadrian’s Wall and we have found tagine cooking pots that may been theirs. I pity those men – how they must have suffered in the cold.”

The only Roman sarcophagus discovered in London in our time was uncovered in Spitalfields in 1999

Inside the stone sarcophagus an elaborately decorated lead coffin was discovered

At the Museum of London, the debris was removed to uncover the pattern of scallop shells

The lead coffin was opened to reveal the body of a young woman

Photographs of coffin & excavations copyright © London Museum

Portrait of Rebecca Redfern & photographs of skeletal details copyright © Sarah Ainslie

You may also like to read about

In Search Of Roman London

Inside the Rotunda At The London Museum