Robson Cezar’s Solar-Powered Houses From Whitechapel Market
Over recent years, we have featured the evolution of Spitalfields artist Robson Cezar‘s wooden houses made from boxes collected for him by the stallholders at Whitechapel Market. This year, Robson has reached the ultimate realisation of his design by fitting his recycled houses with solar panels, which means they charge in daylight and light up automatically at dusk. And they will do this more or less indefinitely.
Robson has enjoyed employing the colours, printed lettering and images of fruit and vegetables on the boxes, and made windows from coloured mushroom crates. Each house is a day’s work and he has been working for months to create this spectacular new collection. Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie visited Robson’s studio in Bow to photograph the houses and take his portrait.
Robson has made two kinds of houses fitted with solar panels. He has made a collection of sturdy cardboard ones of similar design but each with different colours, lettering and images. These are £48 each. You can buy these from our online shop by clicking here
He has also made twenty larger wooden houses of unique design, photographed individually below. These are £140 each. We are selling them on a first-come-first-served basis, so if you would like one please email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com giving your first, second and third choice, and we will supply payment details.
These houses are sculptures not toys and we do not recommend them for children under the age of twelve.
If you place your house in a sunny spot it will light up every night automatically
Robson and his houses
The houses lit up by solar power
Robson Cezar’s cardboard houses
Sideways view of the cardboard houses showing the solar panels
Sideways view of the wooden houses showing the solar panels
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Robson Cezar in his studio
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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At The Bethnal Green Weightlifting Club
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Dominic Patmore, Powerlifter
In Turin St, there is a single-storey brick building so unassuming that even the locals do not know what it is, yet this is home to the celebrated Bethnal Green Weightlifting Club. The esteemed members believe their association dates from 1926, but a poster for the New Bethnal Green Weightlifting & Physical Culture Club on the wall inside the gym, dated 1931, suggests that its origin may be earlier.
Even the most senior member, Ron Whitton of Columbia Rd, is a relative newcomer who joined in 1946. He greeted Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I when we paid a visit, fresh from his twice-weekly swim in the Serpentine and preparing for his twice-weekly weightlifting session to follow. A sprightly octogenarian, Ron is a shining exemplar of the health benefits of body-building and weightlifting. “I’ve always been a keep fit guy,” he vouched, indicating the photos of his former glories upon the wall,“there’s not many guys of eighty-three still training.”
“In 1946, it was just an old shed in the playground with one or two bars and a set of dumbbells, where a couple of guys who’d come out of the forces started weight-training,” Ron recalled fondly, casting his eyes around the hallowed space, “Around 1948, Jack Brenda, Secretary of the Club, opened up this place but it was like something out of the Hammer House of Horrors then, it had been closed for years and there was no equipment, but we got it going and we’ve been here ever since.”
That Saturday morning, we encountered a mutually respectful crew of all sizes of male and female weightlifters absorbed in their training session, punctuated with intense cathartic moments when a major lift was ventured and one among them heaved and strained, channelling the support of their comrades egging them on, before throwing the weight down with a clang onto the mat. Although there were those who had the obvious advantage of size, most compelling in their lifts were those skinny individuals of diminutive stature who appeared to summon resources of strength from the ether in lifting weights that looked far beyond their apparent capacity.
“I started because I liked the idea of being strong,” powerlifter Laura Porter admitted to me, “but now I’m obsessed – it’s the satisfaction when you get a new personal best. I’m not super-duper strong yet, but I’m not bad and I like the feeling of being powerful.”
“It’s a good thing for women to do because it’s good for your bone strength, counteracting any tendency to brittle bones,” she revealed with a blush, “I’m approaching forty so I think about these things, but I hope to be weightlifting and competing in my sixties and beyond.”
A relaxed family atmosphere prevails at Bethnal Green Weightlifting Club, uniting enthusiasts of all ages and walks of life. “There was a time when every London borough had places like these but now there only two left in the entire capital,” Martin Bass, Club Secretary informed me, readily indicated pals that joined with him over forty years ago – and demonstrating the modest camaraderie among all those who seek transcendence of their physical and spiritual limits, here in confines of the gym, as a counterpoint to the external challenges of life’s journey beyond its walls.
Ron Whitton, still weighlifting at eighty-three
Ron is second from right at the Bethnal Green Physique Contest of 1952 – London’s first body-building contest. “all the other have passed away”
Laura Porter, Powerlifter
Laura – “I like the feeling of being powerful”
Martin Bass, Club Secretary and Member for forty-five years
At the Women’s Powerlifting Contest
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Bethnal Green Weightlifting Club, 229 Bethnal Green Rd, E2 6AB – entrance in Turin St
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Henrietta Keeper’s Photographs
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Henrietta Keeper, Singer
Henrietta Keeper (widely known as “Joan”), the vivacious octogenarian ballad singer who used to perform at E.Pellicci in the Bethnal Green Rd every Friday, once invited me to round to her tiny flat to show me her remarkable collection of photographs and meet her daughter Lesley, custodian of the family album.
These pictures show Henrietta’s life as it existed within a small corner of the East End on the boundary of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green in the nineteen fifties. On one side of Vallance Rd was Cranberry St where Henrietta’s mother-in-law Selina lived and took care of her daughters while the family waited for a house of their own. On the other side of Vallance Rd was Selby St where Henrietta’s husband Joe and his brother Jim ran Keeper & Co, making coal deliveries. And at the end of Vallance Rd was New Rd where Henrietta worked as a machinist at Bartman & Co making coats and jackets.
Having grown up in Bethnal Green during the war and brought her own family up though the austerity that followed, Henrietta was a woman of indefatigable spirit. Most remarkable of all, she sang throughout her life, winning innumerable singing competitions and giving free concerts.
Henrietta with fellow machinist Izzie. “When I was nineteen I started here and I became the top machinist,” she explained, “I think my hair looks a bit like Barbara Windsor’s in this picture.”
Henrietta with Mr Bartman at Bartman & Co.
“This is Selina Keeper, my mother-in-law at her house in Cranberry St. She was real Victorian lady. She used to whip the cup of tea off the table before you had finished it!” said Henrietta. And Lesley added, “She had a best front room that she kept under lock and key, and only once – when she unlocked it – did I go in, but she said ‘Get out!’ You couldn’t touch anything. It had to be kept perfect.”
“My husband Joe took this picture of his two best friends George Bastick and Leslie Herbert in Nelson Gardens next to St Peter’s Church, Bethnal Green. What a pity he isn’t in it?”
Coronation Day, 1953, celebrated at Hemming St, Bethnal Green. Lesley is in the blazer on the right hand side of the front row and Henrietta can be distinguished by her blonde hair beneath the Union Jack, peering round the lady in front of her.
“This is Jim Keeper, my brother-in-law, with his horse Trigger. My husband, Joe, worked with him and he had the biggest coal round in the East End – Keeper & Co. Joe was so strong he could carry a two hundredweight sack of coal on his back up the stairs of the buildings with ease. The brothers used to go home to lunch with their mum in Cranberry St and take Trigger with them. She always collected the horse manure for her roses while they were there and when the Queen Mother visited the East End, she leaned over the fence and said ‘This one should win best garden.'”
“Taken in 1947 at Southend, when I was twenty, this is Cathy Tyler, my sister Marie and me – I was known as Minxie at the time and we all sang together like the Andrews sisters. I was a bit shocked when I saw it because you can see I am pregnant. I thought, ‘Is that me?'”
Henrietta (far right) photographed with her workmates by a street photographer around Brick Lane during a lunch break in the fifties.
This is Henrietta’s daughter Lesley visiting Petticoat Lane with her grandfather James Keeper in 1953. “He was a delivery man with a horse and cart, they called it a ‘carman,'” Henrietta remembered, “he was also a cabinet-maker and he brought me beautiful polished wooden boxes that he made.”
Henrietta and her husband Joe with their daughter Lesley on a trip to Columbia Rd.
The two children on the right are Lesley and Linda Keeper playing at Cowboys and Indians with their friends in the nineteen fifties in Cranberry St while they lived with their grandmother. Lesley remembers Mrs Dexter across the road who called out “Play nicely on the debris!” to the children and you can see the bomb site where they played in the back of the photograph. Today Cranberry St no longer exists, just the stub of road beside Rinkoff’s bakery in Vallance Rd indicates where it once was.
Henrietta singing at a Holiday Camp at Selsey Bill in the nineteen sixties.
Henrietta singing at Pelliccis
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George Cruikshank’s Christmas In London
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As we brace ourselves for the forthcoming festive season, let us contemplate George Cruikshank‘s illustrations of yuletide in London 1838-53 from his Comic Almanack which remind us how much has changed and also how little has changed. (You can click on any of these images to enlarge)
A swallow at Christmas
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve
Christmas dining
Christmas bustle
Boxing day
Hard frost
A picture in the gallery
Theatrical dinner
The Parlour & the Cellar
New Year’s Eve
New Year’s birth
Twelfth Night – Drawing characters
January – Last year’s bills
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Burdekin’s London Nights
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East End Riverside
As you will have realised by now, I am a night bird. In the mornings, I stumble around in a bleary-eyed stupor of incomprehension and in the afternoons I wince at the sun. But as darkness falls my brain begins to focus and, by the time others are heading to their beds, then I am growing alert and settling down to write.
Once I used to go on night rambles – to the railway stations to watch them loading the mail, to the markets to gawp at the hullabaloo and to Fleet St to see the newspaper trucks rolling out with the early editions. These days, such nocturnal excursions are rare unless for the sake of writing a story, yet I still feel the magnetic pull of the dark city streets beckoning, and so it was with a deep pleasure of recognition that I first gazed upon this magnificent series of inky photogravures of “London Night” by Harold Burdekin from 1934 in the Bishopsgate Library.
For many years, it was a subject of wonder for me – as I lay awake in the small hours – to puzzle over the notion of whether the colours which the eye perceives in the night might be rendered in paint. This mystery was resolved when I saw Rembrandt’s “Rest on the Flight into Egypt” in the National Gallery of Ireland, perhaps finest nightscape in Western art.
Almost from the beginning of the medium, night became a subject for photography with John Adams Whipple taking a daguerrotype of the moon through a telescope in 1839, but it was not until the invention of the dry plate negative process in the eighteen eighties that night photography really became possible. Alfred Stieglitz was the first to attempt this in New York in the eighteen nineties, producing atmospheric nocturnal scenes of the city streets under snow.
In Europe, night photography as an idiom in its own right begins with George Brassaï who depicted the sleazy after-hours life of the Paris streets, publishing “Paris de Nuit” in 1932. These pictures influenced British photographers Harold Burdekin and Bill Brandt, creating “London Night” in 1934 and “A Night in London” in 1938, respectively. Harold Burdekin’s work is almost unknown today, though his total eclipse by Bill Brandt may in part be explained by the fact that Burdekin was killed by a flying bomb in Reigate in 1944 and never survived to contribute to the post-war movement in photography.
More painterly and romantic than Brandt, Burdekin’s nightscapes propose an irresistibly soulful vision of the mythic city enfolded within an eternal indigo night. How I long to wander into the frame and lose myself in these ravishing blue nocturnes.
Black Raven Alley, Upper Thames St
Street Corner
Temple Gardens
London Docks
From Villiers St
General Post Office, King Edward St
Leicester Sq
Middle Temple Hall
Regent St
St Helen’s Place, Bishopsgate
George St, Strand
St Botolph’s and the City
St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield
Images courtesy © Bishopsgate Institute
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At Two Temple Place
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If you were to take a turning off the Strand, walk down Essex St, then descend Milford Stairs to Milford Lane, emerging within the shadow of the nineteenth century edifice of Two Temple Place, then sneak between the ornate railings and slip in through a crack in the panelled door – you might find yourself alone, as I did, in the hallway of the extravagant mansion built for the reclusive William Waldorf Astor when he inherited a hundred million dollars in 1890, became the richest man in the United States and fled to London in exile.
“America is not a fit place for a gentleman to live,” he declared after receiving death threats and kidnap attempts upon his children. Yet even before you know the details or learn that Astor employed pre-eminent architect, John Loughborough Pearson – luring him with an unlimited budget – you sense that you are at the portal to a fantasy. The staircase is oak, the panelling is mahogany, the pillars are solid ebony and the marble floor is inlaid with jasper, porphyry and onyx. Twelve characters from Robin Hood sculpted by Thomas Nicholls upon the newel posts emerge from the gloom, harbingers of another world that awaits you at the head of the stair.
So frustrated was Astor that, in 1892, he released announcements of his own death in the vain hope of winning greater privacy, only compounding his personal enigma once they were revealed as false. After Astor’s wife died in 1894, he often retreated from his family home in the more fashionable Carlton House Terrace to sleep at Two Temple Place, built as the headquarters of his sprawling business empire. “There I am safe,” he confided to Lady Warwick and showed her a lever upon the first floor which locked every entrance to the building. Similiarly at Hever Castle, Astor’s primary country residence, he had a drawbridge constructed that could be raised each night.
Two Temple Place is the glorious product of an idiosyncratic and unfettered imagination. After Astor’s death in 1919, it was rented and then sold for use as offices, only opened to visitors in 2011 by the Bulldog Trust, when it was revealed to the wider public as a lost masterpiece of late nineteenth century architecture.
Standing at the foot of the staircase, you understand why Astor felt “safe,” in the sense that you are entirely enclosed by the wood-lined room which permits no window to the outside world. Comprising a square stairwell, the space rises to an enclosed gallery with arches similar to those in engravings by Esher.
The bitter aroma of pine from the Christmas tree rises in the soporific warmth of the central heating as you ascend in the shadows to the gallery, where the extent of the literary iconography which recurs throughout the building becomes apparent. At each corner of the stairwell stand Astor’s favourite protagonists from novels – Hester Prynne, Rip Van Winkle, The Pathfinder and The Last of the Mohicans – characteristically, all are outsiders who are misunderstood. Above them is a Shakespearian frieze with eighty-two identifiable characters from Anthony & Cleopatra, Henry VIII, Othello and Macbeth, significantly chosen as plays that dramatise the torments of power. Yet, remarkably, the proportion and order of the space, the lustre of the materials and the expertise of the workmanship place everything in perspective – the chaos of human endeavour is reconciled within this sanctuary of the imagination.
Unsurprisingly, Astor’s private office is equipped with both a secret door and discreet drawers for the storage of champagne, the latter hinting at a brighter side to his nature. Through the secret panel is the largest room in the building, known as The Great Hall or The Mediation Room, where Astor summoned those he chose to do business with. I was told that Pencil Cedar was chosen for the panelling in this room, emitting a relaxing aroma calculated to dispel any tension, yet such is the grandiose nature of the seventy-foot long hall, I doubt anyone would seek controversy in the face of its creator.
At either end, stained glass windows portray the rising and setting sun while the epic mahogany hammer-beam ceiling above is modelled upon the design of the roof in Middle Temple Hall, a wooden frieze depicts a mixture of personalities from history and myth, including Bismarck and Pocahontas, and characters from Ivanhoe perch upon the beams – gilded, just in case you might fail to notice them in the flurry of literary references. Once the time comes to leave, overwhelmed by the wealth of detail, your eye falls upon the Arthurian heroines by George Frampton languishing upon the rear of the door.
You stumble back into the vestibule, intoxicated by the decorative excess yet seduced by the dazzling assurance of your host. There are so many corners and doors within this intricate building, which retains the presence and personality of its creator so vividly, you half-expect William Waldorf Astor to appear at any moment and pull the lever to lock all exits. Yet who could object to spending Christmas holed up by the fire at Two Temple Place and letting the outside world recede far away?
Twelve characters from Robin Hood sculpted by Thomas Nicolls adorn the newel posts
The floor is inspired by the Cosmati pavement in Westminster Abbey
Scenes from Shakespeare with eighty-two identifiable characters filling the frieze above the stairwell
Frieze of a scene from Macbeth
The Great Hall
Gilt panels by George Frampton upon the door in the Great Hall depict heroines of Arthurian myth
The window by Clayton & Bell at the west end of the Great Hall depicts sunset in the Swiss Alps
Ground floor reception room overlooking the Thames
The entrance on Temple Place
Weathervane by J. Starkie Gardner depicts Columbus’ caravel in which he discovered America
In Milford Lane
Milford Stairs leading to Essex St
Winter Light In Spitalfields
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The inexorable descent into the winter darkness is upon us, even if just a couple of weeks from now we shall reach the equinox and days will start to lengthen. At this season, I am more aware of light than at any other – especially when the city languishes under an unremitting blanket of low cloud, filtering the daylight into a grey haze that casts no shadow.
Yet on some recent mornings I have woken to sunlight and it always lifts my spirits to walk out through the streets under a clear sky. On such days, the low-angled sunshine and its attendant deep shadow conjures an exhilarating drama.
In these particular conditions of light, walking from Brick Lane down Fournier St is like advancing through a cave towards the light, refracting around the vast sombre block of Christ Church that guards the entrance. The street runs from east to west and, as the sun declines, its rays enter through the churchyard gates next to Rectory illuminating the houses opposite and simultaneously passing between the pillars at the front of the church to deliver light at the western end where it meets Commercial St.
For a spell, the shadows of the stone balls upon the pillars at the churchyard gate fall upon the houses on the other side of the street and then the rectangle of light, admitted between the church and the Rectory, narrows from the width of a house to single line before it fades out. At the junction with Commercial St, the low-angled sun directed through the pillars in the portico of Christ Church casts tall parallel bars of light and shade that travel down Fournier St from the Ten Bells as far as number seven, reflecting off the window panes to to create a fleeting pattern like stars within the gloom of the old church wall.
As you can see from these photographs, I captured these transient effects of light with my camera to share with you as a keepsake of winter sunshine, for consolation when those clouds descend again.
The last ray
The shadow of the cornice of Christ Church upon the Rectory
The shadow of the pillars of Christ Church upon Fournier St
Windows in Fournier St reflecting upon the church wall
In Princelet St
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