Alan Shipp, Hyacinth Grower
‘I could not imagine what my life would have been like without hyacinths’
One blustery day, I took the train up to Waterbeach outside Cambridge to visit Alan Shipp, Hyacinth Grower who cultivates two hundred and forty-three different varieties of this favourite flower, which are coming into bloom now. I stood in the rain, inhaling the fragrance of the gentle breeze wafting over Alan’s field of hyacinths, flourishing in the rich soil of the silted water-meadows of the River Cam.
Alan Shipp is Britain’s only Hyacinth Grower and is also the Custodian of the National Collection of Hyacinths. He has the world’s largest collection of varieties and knows more about this intriguing plant than anyone else alive. In other years, Alan has opened his hyacinth nursery to the public at peak flowering time, drawing international press attention to the tiny village of Waterbeach for this celebrated event in the horticultural calendar, which can attract over a thousand enthusiasts – travelling from far and wide to gawp at this incomparable hyacinth spectacle.
The lines of multicoloured hyacinths stretch to horizon. They seem to sing against the black soil. The rain makes them shine and then the sun makes them glow, luminous with light beneath a dark East Anglian sky. Alan Shipp & I stood alone together in the field contemplating the hyacinths in silent pleasure – until the storm broke, when we took shelter in Alan’s greenhouse where he told me the astonishing story of his life in hyacinths, as the rain hammered on the glass and the wind rattled the panes around us.
“In the eighteen-eighties my grandfather, Thomas Shipp, won a pony and whip in a raffle. To put it to some use, he managed to borrow a harness and cart, and went round door to door selling vegetables. Then he bought a piece of ground and started growing his own, and that is this piece of ground. That was how it all started, growing fruit and vegetables.
Eventually when my father, Kenneth Shipp, got involved, he started wholesaling the produce we grew ourselves. In the fifties, we started selling imported fruit too which we used to bring up from Spitalfields Market on Monday and Wednesday each week.
At the entrance to the Floral Market on Lamb St in Spitalfields was the Floral Cafe and I can still remember the bacon sarnies. It was a whole slice of fried gammon between two pieces of bread. We used to try and get there at four-thirty or five – it was a wonderful atmosphere. The owner was a chap called Leonard Swindley. I said to him once, ‘I’ve seen the porters just walk behind the counter, make themselves a jug of tea and disappear. You can’t carry on like that, you’re being robbed!’ He replied, ‘Can you think of a happier way of losing money?’ I left the argument defeated.
We stopped selling produce after one of our salesmen left and set up on his own in opposition. We had been growing acres and acres ourselves but the method of vegetable production changed out of all recognition. We would have a little plot of a couple of hundred square metres of leeks that we would plant by hand but today, two miles away, there is a field of one hundred and forty-five acres of leeks. To get a reasonable living, we needed a larger farm but I know of no land that has come up for rent in Waterbeach in the last thirty years.
So in 1985, I decided I could best increase the output per acre by becoming a hyacinth grower. It was just sheer chance. There was a clearance sale at a bulb nursery at the the other side of Cambridge, including hyacinth bulbs. So I bought one hundred, twenty each of five different varieties, and planted them because I had always been a very keen gardener. After the leaves died down, I dug them up and moved them elsewhere but there was one that I missed. It had rolled under a shrub. When I found it next summer, it had put its roots down but the rest of the bulb had been eaten away where it was exposed and, upon this surface, small bulbs had formed. The slugs had actually illustrated for me the method of propagating hyacinths.
I thought, ‘I wouldn’t mind doing this,’ so I got a planting stock from Taylors Bulbs of Holbeach. Their general manager gave me advice, he said, ‘Alan, don’t grow many varieties.’ I didn’t really heed his advice because I now have two hundred and forty-three. And that’s how I got started!
I discovered there was a National Collection of Hyacinths at Barnard Castle and I got in touch to say that, as I was the only hyacinth grower in the country, I was willing to propagate for them free of charge. They brought me two bulbs each of fifty varieties that I propagated and which became the nucleus of my collection. I seemed to come up against a wall, regarding getting more varieties, after one hundred and eight varieties. Then I got a letter from a lady in Lithuania who had a collection of hyacinths that she had assembled from all over the former Soviet Union – things I’ve never heard of, things that we thought were extinct! She’d got the names but knew nothing but about them so I sent her my research and we exchanged bulbs.
I thought I had missed double-flowered yellow hyacinths by one hundred years but lo-and-behold she had got two – one with a name and one unidentified. The one with the name was in catalogues from 1897 and the other I grew as ‘unidentified double-yellow hyacinth.’ Then in 2013, by sheer chance, a friend of mine came across an illustration of it by Mary Delany in the British Library. That was the world’s first double-yellow hyacinth, introduced in 1770! When it was introduced, it was £800 a bulb yet Mary Delany had painted it, so I wondered how she got access. But it was reported she had contact with Court and it was George III’s bulb that she illustrated at the time he was at Kew Palace in Kew Gardens. So that was a breakthrough.
I am on the Royal Horticultural Society’s Bulb Committee. It was the ‘Daffodil & Tulip Committee’ but, in 2012, the remit embraced all bulbs and we had an intake of other specialists. One of them was Alan Street from Avon Bulbs who regularly wins a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show. ‘Alan,’ he said, ‘I’ve got an unusual hyacinth, it’s red and white. I can tell you’ve heard of it by the look on your face.’ It was Gloria Mundi.
Hyacinth Mania was a hundred years after Tulip Mania. It was started by the Scottish Horticulturalist Peter Voorhelm who found a white double hyacinth with a rosy coloured centre in 1708. Previously, all double hyacinths had been discarded as inferior because they are deformed by extra petals in the middle, but he so liked this one that he propagated it and called it Konig Van Groot-Brettanje in honour of William of Orange – and that started Hyacinth Mania for white doubles with coloured centres.
Gloria Mundi was a lost variety of white double with a coloured centre in the catalogues in 1767. Alan Street had a friend in Switzerland called Ingrid Dingwell and Ingrid had a gardening friend who was a lorry driver called Theo, who took a load of humanitarian aid to Romania during the Ceaucescu era to remote village with a population of three hundred and seventy-odd souls. Theo’s friend fell in love with a local girl and married her, and Theo was given hospitality by the bride’s father at the wedding. To show his gratitude, Theo gave the bride’s father a pocket watch and the old man asked Theo to help himself to any plant growing in the garden, including bulbs of a hyacinth called Gloria Mundi. Theo gave them to Ingrid who sent them to Alan Street who grew them for fifteen years, oblivious of what he had. The year after I identified them, Alan took a pot to the RHS and they were given an award, two hundred and fifty years after the variety had been lost.
I cannot say that what I do is much of a business, it is more a hobby that gives a little bit of income and the selling of the bulbs has financed the conservation scheme. Without my work, the National Collection of Hyacinths would have just disappeared. I have saved well over a hundred varieties of hyacinths from extinction. At eighty-one years old, the next problem I have is who is going to carry it on after me? I am looking for someone.
I love hyacinths. There is their fragrance, there is their beauty. There is no other flower that can give you this range of colours at the end of March. If someone gave me a paint chart, I could match every colour on it with hyacinths. I would have a job to get black but I could get pretty close to it.
They are so fascinating. They are all evolved from just the one wild species growing from eight hundred to a thousand metres in the hills at the border of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. It is believed that the Romans may have brought them to Europe because there is a sub-species which grows on the Mediterranean coast of France. How did hyacinths get from the Levant to there, unless they were taken as bulbs by the Romans and gone feral?
The first recorded introduction of hyacinths to Europe was by the Flemish Botanist Carolus Clusius who was appointed Prefect of the imperial gardens in Vienna in 1573 by Ferdinand II. Ferdinand’s ambassador to Turkey was Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq and he brought back tulips, crocuses, cyclamen and hyacinths to the palace gardens – all the bulbs from the Levant. Unfortunately, Ferdinand died that year but Clusius got a job at the botanic garden in Leyden and took the bulbs with him. That was the start of the Dutch bulb industry.
Clusius may have introduced hyacinths to Britain when he visited in 1590 and John Gerard records growing them in his garden in London in 1597. Hyacinths would undoubtably have been included among the ‘florists’ flowers,’ along with tulips, carnations, auriculas and roses, grown competitively in the East End during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Victorian era, florists’ competitions were rampant up and down the country, and hyacinths always featured.
Hyacinths have formed my life. They have got me onto the RHS Bulb Committee, brought me lots of friends and won me worldwide recognition – probably got me into the Rotary Club too. To be honest, I could not imagine what my life would have been like without hyacinths. How did I ever live without them?”
Alan Shipp, National Hyacinth Collection, Waterbeach, Cambridge, CB25 9NB.
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In the Cherry Orchards of Kent
In A Dinghy With John Claridge
Ship maintenance, 1964
Take a trip down the Thames at a relaxed pace with Photographer John Claridge, in his tiny inflatable dinghy with outboard motor attached. The journey begins in 1961 when the London Docks were still working and ends in the nineteen eighties once they were closed for ever. This set of photographs are some of the views to be seen on that voyage.
Setting out at dawn, John’s photographic adventures led him through smog and smoke, through early morning mist, through winter fog and haze upon the river, all filtering and refracting the light to create infinite luminous effects upon the water. In the previous century, Joseph Mallord William Turner and James McNeill Whistler had attempted to evoke the distinctive quality of Thames light upon canvas, but in the mid-twentieth century it was John Claridge, kid photographer from Plaistow, who came drifting out of the London fog, alone in his dinghy with camera and long lens in hand to capture his visions of the river on film.
Look, there is a man scraping an entire boat by hand, balanced precariously over the water. Listen, there is the sound of the gulls echoing in the lonely dock. “It smells like it should,” said John, contemplating these pictures and reliving his escapades on the Thames, half a century later, “it has the atmosphere and feeling of what it was like.”
“You still had industry which created a lot of pollution, even after the Clean Air Act,” he recalled, “People still put their washing out and the dirt was hanging in the air. My mum used to say, ‘Bloody soot on my clean clothes again!'” But in a location characterised by industry, John was fascinated by the calm and quiet of the Thames. “I was in the drink, right in the middle of the river,” John remembered fondly, speaking of his trips in the dinghy, “it was somewhere you’d like to be.” John climbed onto bridges and into cranes to photograph the dock lands from every angle, and he did it all with an insider’s eye.
Generations of men in John’s family were dock workers or sailors, so John’s journey down the Thames in his dinghy became a voyage into a world of collective memory, where big ships always waited inviting him to depart for distant shores. Yet John’s little dinghy became his personal lifeboat, sailing on beyond Tower Bridge where in 1964, at nineteen years old, he opened his first photographic studio near St Paul’s Cathedral. John found a way to fulfil his wanderlust through a professional career that included photographic assignments in every corner of the globe, but these early pictures exist as a record of his maiden voyage on the Thames.
Across the River, 1965
Gulls, 1961
Quiet Evening, 1963
Smog, 1964
At Berth, 1962 – “It wills you to get on board and go somewhere.”
Three Cranes, 1968
Skyline, 1966 – “I climbed up into a crane and there was a ghostly noise that came out of it, from the pigeons roosting there.”
Steps, 1967
Crane & Chimney Stack, 1962
Spars, 1964
Barges, 1969
After the Rain, 1961
Capstan, 1968
From the Bridge, 1962
Across the River, 1965
Wapping Shoreline, 1961 – “I got terribly muddy, covered in it, sinking into it, and it smelled bad.”
Thames Barrier, 1982
At Daybreak, 1982
Warehouses, 1972
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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A Walk Through Dickens’ London
An occluded winter’s day when sunlight barely glimmered offered the ideal opportunity for a ramble through Charles Dickens’ London. Employing a set of cigarette cards from 1927 which Libby Hall kindly once gave me as my guide, I set out on a circular walk from Spitalfields through the City to Holborn, returning along Bankside, to photograph those locations which remain today.
Dean’s Court, EC4
Staple Inn, WC1
2 South Square, Gray’s Inn, WC1
48 Doughty St, WC1
57-58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, WC2
13-14 Portsmouth St, WC2
Water Gate, Essex St, WC2
London Bridge Steps, Montague Close, SE1
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Raju Vaidyanathan’s Brick Lane
JULIE BEGUM is giving an illustrated lecture outlining 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 as part of the Spitalfields series.
Click here to book your ticket
Back of Cheshire St, 1986
“I used to climb up on the railway bridge and take photos,” explained photographer Raju Vaidyanathan when he showed me this picture which he has seen for the first time only recently even though he took it thirty years ago. A prolific taker of photos around Spitalfields, Raju possesses over forty thousand negatives of people and personalities in the neighbourhood which, after all this time, he is now beginning to print.
“I was born in Brick Lane above the shop that is now called ‘This Shop Rocks,’ and I still live on the Lane. My father, Vaithy came to this country in 1949, he was brought over as one of the very first chefs to introduce Indian cooking and our family lineage is all chefs. They brought him over to be chef at the Indian embassy and the day he arrived he discovered they had already arranged a room for him and that room was on Brick Lane, and he lived there until he died.
In 1983, I managed to get hold of an old camera that someone gave me and I started taking photos. As a kid I was very poor and I knew that I was not going to be able to afford take photos, but someone said to me, ‘Instead of taking colour photos, why don’t you take black and white?’ I went to the Montefiore Centre in Hanbury St and the tutor said he would teach me how to process black and white film. So that is what I did, I am a local kid and I just started taking photos of what was happening around me, the people, the football team, the youth club – anything in Brick Lane, where I knew all the people.
Photography is my passion but I also like local history and learning about people’s lives. Sometime in the late eighties, I realised I was not just taking photographs for myself but making a visual diary of my area. I have been taking photos ever since and I always have a camera with me. I am a history collector, I have got all the Asian political leaflets and posters over the years. In the Asian community everyone knows me as the history guy and photographer
Until a few years ago, I had been working until nine or ten o’clock every night and seven days a week at the Watney Market Idea Store but then they restructured my hours and insisted I had to work here full time. Before, I was only working here part-time and working as a youth worker the rest of the time. Suddenly, I had time off in the evenings.
People started saying, ‘You’ve got to do something with all these photos.’ So I thought, ‘Let me see if I can start sorting out my negatives.’ I started finding lots put away in boxes and I took a course learning how to print. For a couple of years, I went in once a week to print my photos and see what I had got. I bought a negative scanner and I started scanning the first boxes of negatives. I had never seen these photos because I never had the money to print them. I just used to take the photos and process the film. So far, I have scanned about eight thousand negatives and maybe, once I have sorted these out, I will start scanning all the others.”
Junk on Brick Lane, 1985
Outside Ali Brothers’ grocery shop, Fashion St 1986. His daughter saw the photo and was so happy that his picture was taken at that time.
Modern Saree Centre 1985. It moved around a lot in Brick Lane before closing three years ago.
BYM ‘B’ football team at Chicksand Estate football pitch known as the ‘Ghat’ locally, 1986
108 Brick Lane, 1985. Unable to decide whether to be a café or video store, it is now a pizza shop.
‘Joi Bangla Krew’ around the Pedley Street arches. The BBC recently honoured Haroun Shamsher from Joi (third from left) and Sam Zaman from ‘State of Bengal (far left) with a music plaque on Brick Lane
Myrdle Street, 1984. Washing was hung between flats until the late nineties.
Chacha at Seven Stars pub 1985. Chacha was a Bangladeshi spiv and a good friend of my father. Seven Stars was the local for the Asian community until it closed down in 2000.
Teacher Sarah Larcombe and local youths (Zia with the two fingers) on top of the old Shoreditch Goods Station, which was the most amazing playground
Halal Meat Man on Brick Lane, 1986
Filming of ‘Revolution’ in Fournier St, 1986. The man tapping for cash was killed by some boys a few months later.
Mayor Paul Beaseley and Rajah Miah (later Councillor) open the Mela on Hanbury Street, 1985
The Queen Mother arrives at the reopening of the Whitechapel Gallery, 1986
Photographs copyright © Raju Vaidyanathan
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Lew Tassell’s Day Trip
Lew Tassell sent me these pictures that he took on a trip to London at fifteen years old in 1966
Old London Bridge
‘These pictures were taken in March 1966 with my first proper camera, albeit only a Zeiss Ikon Ikonette with a 35mm fixed lens viewfinder that cost me £7 secondhand. I loved that camera and wish I still had it, it had no metering or any features so it taught me a lot.
Film and developing were very expensive, so I had to be frugal with my picture-taking and then wait for them to be developed to see if I had judged the exposure correctly.
I was fifteen years old, living with my parents in South London and just about to leave school. I used to catch a train from Elmers End to Charing Cross – returning via London Bridge – and explore, usually taking in a visit to the National Gallery.’
‘My school friend, Paul, on one of Landseer’s Lions in Trafalgar Sq, he was instantly told to ‘get orf’ by a policeman’
‘I always found Piccadilly Circus magical and ever-changing. There was not much neon during the sixties and the buildings were generally dirty and grey, but the West End was a place with lively streets, especially this spot with the cinemas and theatres.’
The classic Coca-Cola sign
‘Carnaby St was a tremendously exciting place for a teenager to wander about. I didn’t have the money to buy anything but just to be there was enough’
John Stephen’s celebrated menswear shop in Carnaby St, clothes worn by The Who, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones and The Small Faces
‘Spot the Rolls Royce coming round the corner’
‘Spot the sandwich man for ‘Champagne Temps”
Looking across Carnaby St to Foubert’s Place
Lord Kitchener’s Valet sold military uniform as fashion, customers included Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Mick Jagger
Crowded pavements in Carnaby St
Old Cannon St Railway Station from Southwark Bridge
Eastcheap corner of Pudding Lane
Guy’s Hospital under construction by London Bridge Station
Tower of London in the mist
Old men sitting by the Tower
Cannons on the waterfront at the Tower
A foggy, soot-stained Tower Bridge
‘In the Pool Of London – one of my earliest memories is standing in this spot with my father, watching the ships being unloaded in the centre of the City’
‘Police launch on the Thames – four years later I joined the City of London Police’
Photographs copyright © Lew Tassell
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Roy Gardner’s Sales Tickets
One shilling by Roy Gardner
Paul Gardner, the current incumbent and fourth generation in Spitalfields oldest family business (Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen in Commercial St since 1870 and now at Ruckholt Rd) was just thirteen when his father Roy died in 1968. So Paul’s mother ran the shop for four years until 1972 when Paul left school and he took over next day – running the business until now without a day off.
In the shop, Paul found these intricate designs of numbers and lettering that his father made for sales tickets and grocers’ signs which, in their accomplishment, express something of his father’s well-balanced and painstaking nature.
At one time, Roy bought small blackboard signs, that were used by greengrocers to price their stock in chalk, from Mr Patson in Artillery Lane. Mr Patson sliced the tickets out of hardboard, cut up motorcycle spokes to make the pins and then riveted the pins to the boards before painting them with blackboard paint.
In the same practical spirit of do-it-yourself, Roy bought a machine for silk-screen printing his own sales tickets from designs that he worked up in the shop in his spare time, while waiting for customers. Numbers were drawn freehand onto pencil grids and words were carefully stencilled onto card. From these original designs, Roy made screens and printed onto blank “Ivorine” plastic tickets from Norman Pendred Ltd who also supplied more elaborate styles of sales tickets if customers required.
Blessed with a strong sense of design, Roy was self-critical – cutting the over-statement of his one shilling and its flourish down to size to create the perfectly balanced numeral. The exuberant curves of his five and nine are particular favourites of mine. Elsewhere, Roy was inspired to more ambitious effects, such as the curved text for “Golden Glory Toffee Apples,” and to humour, savouring the innuendo of “Don’t squeeze me until I’m yours.” Today, Paul keeps these designs along with the incomplete invoice book for 1968 which is dated to when Roy died.
No doubt knocking up these sales tickets was all in day’s work to Roy Gardner – just one of the myriad skills required by a Market Sundriesman – yet a close examination of his elegant graphic designs reveals he was also a discriminating and creative typographer.
Designs for silk-screen by Roy Gardner
The finished silk-screened signs by Roy Gardner
Pages from the Ivorine products catalogue who could supply Roy’s customers with more complex designs of sales tickets than he was able to produce.
Roy Gardner stands outside Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen in the nineteen forties – note the sales tickets on display inside the shop.
Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen, 78 Ruckholt Road, Leyton, E10 5NP
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Jim Howett, Designer
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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