Spitalfields Life

In my opinion, Jim Howett is the best dressed man in Spitalfields. Here he is with a characteristically shy smile, sitting on a seventeen-twenties staircase in a houses in Fournier St he was restoring for the Spitalfields Trust. Jim was entirely at home in this shabby yet elegantly proportioned old house, a specifically localised environment that over time has become his natural habitat and is now the place you are most likely to find him.

For years, I admired Jim’s artisan clothing whenever I caught glimpses of him, always crossing Commercial St and disappearing through the market or off down Folgate St preoccupied with some enigmatic intent. When we were introduced, I discovered that Jim sleeps each night in the four poster bed at Dennis Severs’ House and crosses the market every day to work in Wentworth St with Marianna Kennedy, designing the furniture and lamps that have become ubiquitous in the houses around Spitalfields. I also learnt Jim is responsible for a significant number of the most appealing shopfronts in the neighbourhood.

At first, I assumed Jim was Irish on account of his soft vowels and quietly spoken manner, almost whispering sometimes, even swallowing his words before he utters them, and thereby drawing your attention to listen, concentrating to gather both what is said and what is unspoken. Such is the nature of his mind that Jim will begin a sentence and then pursue a digression that leads to another and yet another – though such is the intelligence of the man, that when he leads you back to the resolution of the original thought, it acquires a more precise import on account of all the qualifications and counter arguments. Without a doubt, Jim is a consummate prose talker.

Jim’s origins lie in Ohio in the foothills of the Appalachians, where he grew up in Salem. But Jim’s father worked in international development and in the nineteen-sixties the family moved to the Congo and then his father was transferred Vietnam, with the family ending up in London in 1967. Jim studied at the Architectural Association under the tutelage of Dan Cruickshank, subsequently working for a few years in prehistoric archaeology, before deciding to study at the London College of Furniture which was then in Commercial Rd.

Renting a room on Brick Lane, Jim dropped a card to his former tutor who wrote back to say he had just bought a house in Elder St full of broken furniture, so Jim set up a workbench in Dan’s basement to undertake the repairs.

“Dennis Severs knocked upon the door one day, looking for Dan,” Jim told me. “He said he’d just bought a house round the corner and wanted to do tours, and we thought he was crazy but we helped him set it up. I made the shutters, the partition with the arch in the dining room and I copied the fireplace from one in Princelet St.” he added, revealing the origin of his own involvement with 18 Folgate St, where today he is the sole resident. Before long, Jim was sharing a workshop with Marianna Kennedy and ceramicist Simon Pettet in Gibraltar Walk, sharing aspirations to create new work inspired by historical models by applying traditional craft skills. They found themselves amidst a community centred around the restoration of the eighteenth century houses, dubbed ‘Neo-Georgians’ by the media –  a moment recorded today in the collection of magazines and photo features, illustrating the renaissance of Spitalfields, that Jim keeps in a box in his workshop.

Jim taught himself furniture making by copying a Hepplewhite chair – constructing four versions until he could get the proportion right – before he discovered that there was no market for them because dealers considered them too dangerously close to the originals as to approach fakes. Yet this irony, which was to hamper Jim’s early career as a furniture maker, served as a lesson in the significance of proportion in engaging with historical designs.

When Jim won a commission to design an armoire for Julie Christie, he thought he had found the path to success. “She gave me tip of half the value of my commission fee and I thought ‘This is as good as it gets’, but she remains the best client I ever had.” admits Jim, wistfully recognising the severely limited market for custom-built new furniture in antique styles. “I used to make these pieces and have no money left over to buy coffee afterwards,” he declared with a shrug.

The renovation of Spitalfields gave Jim the opportunity to become one of those who has created the visual language of our streets, through his subtle approach to restoring the integrity of old shopfronts that have been damaged or altered. Perhaps the most famous are A.Gold and Verdes in Brushfields St, 1 & 3 Fournier St and 86 Commercial St. In these and numerous other examples, through conscientious research, Jim has been responsible for retaining the quality of vernacular detail and proportion that makes this Spitalfields, rather than any other place. The beauty of Jim’s work is that these buildings now look as if they had always been like they are today.

Yet Jim is quick to emphasise that he is not an architect, explaining that his work requires both more detailed knowledge of traditional building techniques and less ego, resisting the urge to add personal embellishments. “The difference between me and architects, working on historic buildings is that I restrict myself to organising the space. I believe if a building has survived for two hundred years, it has survived because it has certain qualities. The reason, I don’t put my finger in the pie is because I can express myself in other things.”

While Jim spoke, he produced file after file of photographs, plans and maps, spreading them out upon the table in his workshop to create a huge collage, whilst maintaining an extraordinary monologue of interwoven stories about the people, the place and the buildings. I was fascinated by Jim’s collection of maps, spanning the last five hundred years in Spitalfields and I realised that he carries in his mind a concrete picture of how the place has evolved. When I have seen him walking around, he is walking in awareness of all the incarnations of this small parish, the buildings that have come and gone through past centuries.

It fired my imagination when Jim took me into the cellar of 15 Fournier St and pointed out the path across the yard belonging to the sixteenth century building that stood there before the eighteenth century house was built, telling me about the pieces of charred wood they found, because this was where debris was dumped after the Fire of London in 1666.

Simon Pettet portrayed Jim on one of his tiles as a fly on the wall, reflecting Jim’s omnipresence in Spitalfields. “I think if my father had not taken us to the Congo, I should still be there in Salem, Ohio,” confessed Jim with a weary smile, “because at heart I am a localist.” Jim showed me the missing finger on his left hand, sliced off while cutting a mitre from left to right, a mark that today he regards as the proud badge of his carpenter’s trade. In his work and through his modest personal presence, Jim has become an inextricable part of the identity of Spitalfields –  after more than fifty years, I hope we may now describe him as a local.

Jim at Jocasta Innes’ house in Heneage St, 1990

Jim with Dennis Severs and Simon Pettet, pictured in a magazine feature of 1991

Jim modelling his calfskin apron, 1991

Jim pictured in the penurious weavers’ garret at Dennis Severs’ House that today is his bedroom

In the Victorian Parlour at Dennis Severs’ House

Hoisting up the new cornice in Commercial St

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Marianna Kennedy, Designer

I am delighted to announce that JULIE BEGUM is giving an illustrated lecture in which she explores her own East End roots and outlines the long history of the presence of Bengali people on this side of London. IMAGES OF THE BENGALI EAST END is at 7pm on Tuesday 5th March at the Hanbury Hall at part of the Spitalfields series.

Click here to book your ticket

Portrait of Julie Begum by Sarah Ainslie

In the course of my work, I often discover that the people I meet are connected to others I have interviewed. This is especially true of Julie Begum, a woman of magnanimous spirit and moral courage who is widely respected for her involvement in many diverse threads of culture and community in the East End. When I asked Julie how I should describe her, she replied ‘As someone who is still evolving.’

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I met Julie in the cafe on the top of the Idea Store in Whitechapel where a wall of glass affords magnificent views down onto the market and eastwards towards Spitalfields. Here at the heart of the East London, with all the different currents of life flowing around us, proved the ideal location for Julie to speak to us of her life and experiences in the surrounding streets.

“I was born in Mile End Hospital, Stepney, in 1968 and I grew up on the Digby Estate in Globe Town, but before that my parents lived in one room in a flat belonging to my uncle on the Chicksand Estate in Spitalfields. I have my mum and dad and two brothers, and Globe Town is my manor.

My dad came to London in 1962 as part of the voucher system to attract immigrants from Commonwealth countries. His father died when my dad was ten and he went to work in a rickshaw workshop in Sylhet. He was the second son of a large family and the eldest brother chose not to come, so the family funded my dad to go overseas to earn money and send it back. He did that for a long time and he paid for his siblings’ education. He worked as a machinist in the East End rag trade in Jewish and Turkish factories, whatever he could find. It was a dying trade then.

When immigration laws changed and it was more difficult to come and go, he decided that if he was going to stay here he would get married. So he went back to Sylhet and married my mum who was the eldest daughter in her family. She took care of her brothers and sisters at home, she did not go to school. She went once and saw a child getting beaten and decided she was not going to go back. She is a non-literate person and my dad did not even finish primary school. They were not the most educated people.

My mother was only a teenager when she arrived in London and then she had me and my two brothers. For both my parents, coming here was not something they had not anticipated in their lives but they did it because it was expected of them by their families. They made a home for themselves here but it was quite a hostile environment. There were other migrants – not just Bengalis, Irish, Caribbean and from other parts of the the world – and they clung to those relationships. They were all sorts and they were all in it together. I remember my mum used to leave me with her Irish neighbour when she needed to go off and do things. It was informal and friendly in the early days.

We lived on a mostly white council estate with a few black families and just a couple of other Bengalis. The atmosphere in Globe Town was quite nasty at the time. We were careful about not hanging about in public and going to school could be a challenge. If we were with adults, we would be safe. We had a neighbour, Pauline, who worked in the school and sometimes she took us and, if my mum could go, we would be fine.

If there was an incident, we would leg it. We had to go past this dry-cleaner’s shop that had an alsation and they would set dogs on us, on the way there and back, as a way of scaring us. That sort of thing happened on a daily basis, hostility in the street. There was quite a lot of ‘paki-bashing’ going on, not just for children but for adults as well. People were being assaulted and they would go out in groups for security if they could. Sometimes you just had to get on with life and face it. We continued to play outside.

We had a very nasty family on the estate of known troublemakers who were always in trouble with the police and were known racists. I remember when my dad got arrested after Philip the son made me eat some dog shit because he thought that was what we ate. I went running home to my parents and my dad came out and challenged him. Then Philip’s dad came out and they got into an altercation. And the police arrested my dad for getting in a fight. I remember having to go to a phone box to get hold of someone to come and see my dad in the police cell in Bethnal Green. I was seven, eight or nine at the time. Things like that did not happen all the time but it created an atmosphere. You realised that the world was not a friendly place. Yet we also had neighbours who were very kind and supportive, and I was sad to leave the estate because it was where I grew up.

What I have drawn from those experiences is I want the world to be a better place and I am really pleased that those things don’t really happen any more in the same way. It has made me aware of social justice and the need for a fairer society, which is regardless of peoples’ backgrounds. My family were very keen to lead a certain kind of life, to be acknowledged and taken seriously, and not to be judged for what people think you might be.

My parents did not talk much about anything. As children, we did not know why they had come to this country or anything about what had happened to their families in Bangladesh. We did not know there had been a war there.

Globe School was really lovely. I loved it. It’s why I wanted to become a teacher. We had some really good teachers there, inspirational in lots of ways. Morpeth School, where I went next, was the opposite – it was more like being in a prison. There was lots of fighting in the corridors, a pupil took an overdose in the toilets and teachers were being assaulted by the kids. I became part of it, it was very nasty bullying environment. I adapted to being in a difficult place. I did not acknowledge my brothers in the playground because you did not want anyone to know who you were. We pretended we did not know each other. It was a horrible place.

That was the East End at that time. The boys came out of school and went to prison and the girls ended up having babies. There was no expectation of anybody, whether black, white or brown. School was merely a containment space for lots of young people.

Quite early on, I knew I did not want to get married or have children, so I realised I needed to earn a living. I thought, ‘What can I do that I can earn a living by? Maybe I can get a job doing something?’ I did not have a clue but I realised I needed to get some qualifications because I did not get any at Morpeth School, so I went to a sixth form centre to get some. After that, I did some A Levels and I decided it was time to think about getting a job. I was walking down the Holloway Rd with a friend and we saw an advert for a teaching training course in the window of the North London Polytechnic so I went in to have a look and ended up signing up for a B Ed and spent four years there.

I think my parents would been really happy if I had simply got married and had kids. They did not expect me to do very much. They did not understand my need to do something else, but my father would listen to a reasoned argument. We were brought up to reason. When the news was on we might not agree on the issues but we were encouraged to argue why. So I was able to persuade my father that getting an education would be something worthwhile and he agreed.

He had very particular ideas about life and what people should do. He said ‘If you live in my house, you live by my rules,’ and I accepted that until I realised, ‘I can’t live by your rules, so I am leaving’  and that was what I did. It wasn’t pleasant, it created quite a rift yet I respected his standards. I was eighteen.

I was lucky, I had good friends and I was introduced me to someone who lived in a shared women’s house that was short-life housing in Turner’s Rd, Bow. The place was falling apart but there was a spare room, so I moved in. There were women from different backgrounds, all sorts. It was eclectic. I ended up being the housing officer for that house because all my friends ended up living there too. If there was a spare room and a friend needed somewhere to live, and as long as they paid the rent, it was fine. We had a really nice time and it became quite normal for me as I had grown up in a family household. At home, we always had somebody staying over. In Bengali culture, people are not possessive about where they sleep, having your own bedroom or your own things.

During my last teaching practice, I was at a school where I saw a lot of racial discrimination and inequality. What disheartened me the most was it was coming from the head teacher who was African-Asian. The black and white staff were not working together and there was a bad attitude towards the kids. It made me think, ‘I don’t want to be a teacher if this is the case.’ So I nearly gave up, but my lecturer at North London Polytechnic, who was one of the few black women there, she gave me a good talking-to. She convinced me to finish the course. ‘Even if you don’t want to teach,’ she said, ‘you need to finish.’ That was good on her part and I did qualify but I didn’t end up teaching in a primary school as I had planned. I re-qualified to teach adults in further education. At least adults know their own minds and, teaching them, there is a sense of equality whereas I saw things were being done to children.

I taught in Tower Hamlets College and met some amazing people. I think it is really important to teach skills that people can use to improve their lives and have a good life. But after a few years, they were enforcing new terms and conditions, and I realised I did’t want to spend the rest of my life as a teacher. I was still in my twenties so I thought, ‘I’ll try to have an adventure.’ So I interviewed for Voluntary Service Overseas and I was posted to the Orange Free State in South Africa but it wasn’t possible under segregation because I was Asian. Then I was offered Pakistan, also not ideal for a person of Bengali heritage considering our recent history.

Instead they sent me to Nepal in the foothills of the Himalayas, as remote as you can be from East London. My job was to train teachers in the villages to interact with their pupils not just teach by rote. It made me very aware that I did not know very much about these people and I wanted to learn about them for a year first. I was completely clueless and I needed to learn what it was like to be hungry, be cold and without family or friends – to test myself. It taught me to take life more seriously and appreciate it better.

I hated it when I came back. I walked into a supermarket and walked out again because I couldn’t bear it. It was so stark, coming from a place where there was only six items in a shop. We have so much stuff that we do not need. I do not enjoy being a consumer of material culture.

After that I worked with Praxis Community Projects, for refugees and asylum seekers in Bethnal Green as a basic skills co-ordinator, teaching English and IT, whatever they needed to survive here. It was tough work because of the hostility those people face and I had to leave when the funding ran out. So eventually I joined the Museum of Childhood and then the Geffrye Museum, collecting oral histories of the experience of growing up in the East End. It is quite a rarified world, museums and galleries.

In 2000, I started Swadhinata Trust with Ansar Ahmed Ullah, and a few other like-minded people, to provide answers for young Bengali people who were wondering about their identities and history. When I was growing up there was nowhere to find out about why my parents came here.

My mother has been diagnosed with dementia and now I am preparing myself and my family for old age and what that it is going to mean for us. I volunteer for the Youth Offending Team working with young people and supporting families dealing with the situation where a member of their family has committed a crime, after they have gone to court, pleaded guilty, shown remorse and want to make good. They need to show they are going to learn from the experience, by making better choices and making amends.

I think I was lucky when I was a child that, even though things were being done to me that weren’t very pleasant, I had positive people around me, parents and teachers, who made me realise that there are other ways of living.”

Julie cooking at home (Photo by Sarah Ainslie)

Julie in Brick Lane at the time of the anti-fascist marches (Photo by Phil Maxwell)

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