David Hoffman At St Hildas
We are in the third week of our month’s crowdfund campaign and I am grateful to the 139 people who have contributed so far, and touched by your messages of encouragement. I am hoping that we can reach the target in the next 10 days.
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Contributing Photographer David Hoffman sent me these glorious pictures of a party he attended at St Hilda’s Community Centre, Club Row, in 1975.
‘St Hilda’s East was established in 1889 by former pupils of Cheltenham Ladies College as ‘a community of people bound together in the service of the poor’. I came across it by chance in 1975. I was twenty-nine, just starting out as a photographer and this window into an East End from long ago immediately fascinated me.
I just walked in, asked if it would be OK to take some photos and got an immediate easy invitation to help myself. Quickly followed by offers of a cup of tea, a sandwich, a slice of cake… I think this was early December and I saw posters for the Christmas party so I invited myself along.
I found the spirit and the energy of what seemed to me to be such aged pensioners hard to believe. When one of the dancers flashed her knickers and winked at me, I wondered if my tea had been spiked and it was all a delirium. These photos, some unseen since I took them, not only prove that this was no hallucination but, rather disconcertingly, that those seemingly ancient people I photographed were all younger than I am now.’
David Hoffman
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
The Hoxton Varieties Mosaic
We are in the third week of our month’s crowdfund campaign and I am grateful to the 132 people who have contributed so far, and touched by your messages of encouragement. I am hoping that we can reach the target in the next 2 weeks.
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Walter Bernadin, master mosaic fixer & Tessa Hunkin, mosaic designer
I had the privilege to see the Hoxton Varieties Mosaic by Hackney Mosaic Project unveiled upon the corner of Pitfield St and Old St. Celebrating the former Varieties Music Hall that opened nearby in 1870, the mural designed by Tessa Hunkin and realised by members of the project, illustrates the glory days of live popular entertainment in Hoxton with colourful images of acrobats and performing dogs.
When I arrived, Walter Bernadin, a sprightly white-haired Italian, was up a ladder sponging off the excess grout to reveal Tessa’s lively design in its full glory for the first time. “I am a master mosaic fixing specialist, I’ve been doing it for fifty years,” he admitted to me when I brought him a cup of hot tea to warm his cold hands, “My father Giovanni was a mosaic fixing specialist before me, so I just took on from him. We come from Sequals in Italy, most of the mosiac fixers in London are from there.”
“My father was in espionage and he had been here as a prisoner of war in Mildenhall. Then, in the sixties, there was a lot of terrazzo going on in London, so he came over in 1964. He ran a mosaic gang of forty men and I helped them out on Saturdays from the age of twelve and that’s how I learnt my trade. They put it on bridges and underpasses to cover the concrete. I could take you all over London and show you work my father done.”
The Hoxton Varieties Mosaic was another aesthetic triumph for the Hackney Mosaic Project who have spent the last ten years installing joyful artworks in unloved corners of the neighbourhood and drawing everyone back to consider the meaning of the place. Even on a cloudy day in midweek, a small crowd gathered in delighted excitement to admire the exuberance of the conception as a blank wall acquired a new life in Hoxton.
Walter Bernadin, Master Mosaic Fixing Specialist – “I could take you all over London and show you work my father done.”
Walter still carries his deed of apprenticeship with him in the van
Walter sponges off the surplus grouting to reveal Tessa’s finished design
Visit the Hoxton Varieties Mosaic at the corner of Pitfield St & Old St, N1.
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Gillian Tindall At St Brides
We are in the third week of our month’s crowdfund campaign and I am grateful to the 108 people who have contributed so far, and touched by your messages of encouragement. I am hoping that we can reach the target in the next 2 weeks.
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St Brides
Contributing Writer, Gillian Tindall, visits St Brides Church in Fleet St
This year is the three hundredth anniversary of Sir Christopher Wren’s death in 1723 at the age – very advanced for those days – of ninety. This anniversary is being celebrated in many of the City of London churches that he was responsible for redesigning, after eighty-seven of them had been ravaged by the Great Fire of 1666. But he is given special prominence at St Brides which is situated without the old City walls.
Even after suffering another firey destruction in the Blitz of World War II, St Brides still stands today just down the hill from the site of the old Lud Gate, on the west side of the Fleet valley where Fleet St leads towards Charing Cross and Westminster, and to everywhere else that is now Central London.
When the Great Fire took hold on the other side of the City, in Pudding Lane not far from the Tower, on 2nd September 1666, the wind was blowing from the east. So, four days later, when the devastated Londoners returned to survey the blackened wreckage of their homes and businesses, churches and storehouses, they found that much of the Aldgate and Bishopsgate area to the north-east of the walled City had been spared, but – in defiance of all hopes and prayers – the wind-driven blaze had jumped the stream in the Fleet Valley and devoured St Brides.
It just spared St Andrew, Holborn, a little to the north, and was about to consume the buildings of the Temple when fortunately it was quelled. Perhaps the wind dropped or possibly the energies and organisation of King Charles II, who had taken matters over from the desperate City Mayor, had something to do with it.
So Wren’s triumphant rebuilding of St Brides in the 1670s is being celebrated this autumn with a recital and a dramatic performance. But this is not in the actual St Brides, brick for brick, that was built by Wren, but rather, in the careful simulacrum of it that was a post-World-War II rebuilding. The design followed Wren’s faithfully, though leaving out the gallery seating and bits of late-Victorian décor. So what you see today is very much what Wren’s contemporaries, in their periwigs and cumbersome great-coats, would have see in the exciting modernity of the early 1700s. Except that the church is now nicely heated: no thick coats needed.
What the Blitz of 1940 also revealed were not merely extensive graveyards, spreading to the south-east right across where Farringdon Rd now runs, but – beneath everything else – the ruins of Roman mosaics. Evidently this site was a holy place well before an obscure `St Bridget’ lived and died – indeed before the first emissaries of the Christian faith landed on our shores. Relics and fragments of these distant times are now displayed beneath the church in the old crypt. This was sealed up, along with its bodies and coffins, when it came to be understood in the Victorian era that putting rotting remains beneath a church floor is hardly an hygienic method of disposal.
After the War, these and all the other newly-found bones were taken off to the Museum of London, but some of them were later returned to the church for storage in neatly labelled cardboard boxes. A previous Rector once opened a box to show me the tiny fragmented skull bones of Wynken de Worde, the man credited with the invention of print in the late fifteeth century. Though Fleet St is no longer the heart of newspaper production, the association of the church with print flourishes to this day. St Brides is where editors and journalists, including those who lose their lives in foreign wars, are celebrated and commemorated.
Samuel Pepys was baptised here, in the old pre-Great Fire St Brides while the poet John Dryden was a regular attender in the post-Great Fire one. But in recent times more obscure yet equally interesting members of the congregation have featured on wall-plaques on the west porch. Who has heard of Denis Papin? Very few, I guess, although he was a remarkable man, extraordinarily ahead of his time. A Huguenot from the Loire, he came to London in the 1670s and managed to interest several members of the newly-founded Royal Society in his ideas about steam. It could, he argued, be utilised to power devices, and he managed to invent a kind of pressure cooker.
Later, back in France and then on the far side of the Rhine, he created the first model of a piston steam-engine, a whole century before steam-power became the driver of the Industrial Revolution.
But when he returned in 1707 his old acquaintances in London had forgotten him or were dead, and several years later he was destitute. His lonely death in August 1713 went unremarked, and it was not until three hundred years later that a researcher in the Metropolitan Archive came upon the record of his burial in St Brides’ lower ground. Now he is commemorated in stone.
A nearby memorial similarly bestows dignity on a forgotten individual of a different kind. The current Rector of St Brides, Canon Alison Joyce, became interested in one of the victims of the over-publicised Whitechapel murders – one who evidently did not conform to the stereotypical assumption that the women were all sex workers. Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was not only born in St Brides parish, she was also married there in 1864 to a printer. She could read and write, and she had five children. But the marriage broke up and there is evidence that she chose to live instead with the man she would have preferred to marry in her teens but was not allowed to. When this relationship ended too, she seems to have taken to drink and the addresses recorded for her were workhouses and the lowest sort of lodging houses.
A plaque in St Brides reads ‘Remember her life, not its end.’ Given the uncertainties, pains and regrets that accompany too many people’s last days, that might serve as a kindly epitaph for many of us.
In St Brides Churchyard
Gillian Tindall’s The House by the Thames is available from Pimlico
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Memories of Ship Tavern Passage
At Captain Cook’s House in Mile End
Eleanor Crow’s Everyday
Yesterday, we passed the midway point of our month’s crowdfund campaign and I am grateful to the 99 people who have contributed £10,755, and touched by your messages of encouragement. I am hoping that we can reach the target in the next 2 weeks.
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A Corner of the Kitchen at Dennis Severs’ House
I am delighted to publish this gallery of favourites from Contributing Artist Eleanor Crow‘s forthcoming exhibition of paintings entitled EVERYDAY at Townhouse Spitalfields, opening next Saturday 7th and running until 22nd October.
The Kitchen of Jagir Kaur and Suresh Singh
A Plate of Greengages
A North London Kitchen, Summer Light
A Dorset Kitchen in Summer
A Plate with Fruit
At The Quality Chop House
The Kitchen at Leila’s Cafe
Bread on a Delft Plate
A Corner of a Stockwell Kitchen
Bird How Still Life
Tomatoes and Garlic
Still Life in Dinah’s Kitchen
The Little Dutch Kitchen
St. John Bread & Wine, Morning Light
Paintings copyright © Eleanor Crow
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The Midway Point
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After two weeks, we have now reached the midway point of our month’s crowdfund campaign and I am grateful to the 84 people who have contributed a total of £10,405, and touched by your messages of encouragement. I am hoping that we can reach the target in the next two weeks, by 14th October.
Please consider helping us take a big step by becoming a patron and receiving a signed fine art print by Doreen Fletcher, signed photographic prints by David Hoffman and Sarah Ainslie, plus an inscribed copy of my forthcoming book.
Although I write on the internet, I still believe in the primacy of books. The world wide web could get wiped out tomorrow but history teaches us that books endure. Publishing books is not an easy task, yet I am passionate to do it when I find stories that I want to cherish, that I know people will love, and that I believe deserve to be dignified in our time and for posterity.
A good example of such a story is Suresh Singh’s ‘A Modest Living, Memoirs of a Cockney Sikh.’ But equally, a collection of photography such as Horace Warner’s ‘Spitalfields Nippers’ or a collection of artworks such Doreen Fletcher’s ‘Paintings’ comprise incredibly important stories that needed to be published.
In different ways, each of the three new books I want to publish is a witness of our times and I am committed to publish them so you can have copies and we can share them with everyone, and they can be a legacy and record of our era.
Fieldgate Mansions, Whitechapel, 1981
David Hoffman’s A Place to Live, Endurance & Joy in the East End 1971-87 is the outcome of more than ten years work in which he photographed the lives of the people around him in Whitechapel. No-other photographer did this with such candour and compassion as David. We have already worked for more than three years to organise this brilliant photography with David’s testimony to create the best possible book. I am publishing David’s work because I believe it is an invaluable social record.
For over ten years now, Hackney Mosaic Project led by Tessa Hunkin has created breathtakingly beautiful and witty public mosaics across the East End. People are astonished when they come upon one, but once they are all collected into a book the monumental scale of the achievement will become evident. I want this to be celebrated and I want people in the future to know that – even in a time of austerity – local people worked together as volunteers to create artworks of enduring beauty to enhance their neighbourhoods.
Anna & Maria Pellicci at their restaurant founded by Elide Pellicci in 1900
Sarah Ainslie’s Women at Work in the East End, 1992 – 2023, collects a unique gallery of exuberant portraits that capture the passion and struggle of the working life. What began as Sarah’s personal project drawing on her archive over thirty years and her work as Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer, has become a panoramic survey of social change and is destined to be the historic record of women’s working lives in London through the past three decades.
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Best wishes for getting the publishing going again! I lived in Fieldgate Mansions in the early 80’s, towards the end of David Hoffman’s time there. I don’t think I ever met him, but it was very moving to see his photos and I look forward to the book being published.
Garth Maeer
Your blog is the first thing I read every morning. It is a joy. I admire all that you do in the community. Thank you.
Christine Chinnery
Best of luck Gentle Author! From your biggest Nuevo México fan!
Melissa Delano
The three publications look fantastic. Particularly looking forward to reading Sarah Ainslie’s Women at Work in the East End
Madeleine Ruggi
Good luck!
Simon Costin
In honour of Tessa Hunkin and her team and their magical work.
Michael Zilkha
Good luck, wish you success
Vivienne Ritchie
Delighted owner of many of your titles and looking forward to buying the Mosaics book. Your blog a constant source of delight for many years now. Thank you
Raymond Golland
Supporting because we’d love to see Sarah Ainslie’s book published, alongside all the other great projects
Maya Corry
Brilliant projects! Amie and Jason x
Amie Corry
Living in Wisconsin, USA, your words and images transport me to a different time and place that need to be known and are impossible to see without you. Thank you for your dedication to history.
Maria Rogers
David Hoffman’s East End
Starting in 2013, Spitalfields Life Books published 15 books over 6 years until the pandemic shut us down. Now we are ready to begin again and are crowdfunding to raise enough money to cover production of our next 3 books. We have raised £10,005 so far.
CLICK HERE TO VISIT OUR CROWDFUND PAGE AND CONTRIBUTE
Thank you for all you do to document and celebrate the human history of the East End. Hugh Valentine
I am so looking forward to the publication of these books – I always read your blog and really enjoy your writing. Good luck! Sarah Lewington
All the very best of luck with this venture. Dina Fawcett
To support GA, the authors, artists, illustrators & photographers in the production of more beautiful books. Hellen Martin
May you and Spitalfields life, blog, community and books continue to inspire, flourish, stir and resist..thank you. Silvervanwoman
Good luck. I’ve got quite a few of your books and will look forward to more. Alison Pilkington
I have great admiration for The Gentle Author. TGA works incredibly hard and deserves all the support that we can give. Tim Sayer
Valuable historically and personally memorable for different aspects of the East End to be recorded, visually and orally so the streetscape, cultural vitality and diversity of voices are not lost. Jude Bloomfield
The daily blog from Spitalfields Life is life affirming. Best wishes with the publishing venture. Kate Amis
The Gentle Author brings great enjoyment to me every morning. Lynn MacKay
Looking forward to all three books – especially the mosaics, scattered like stardust, and free for all to enjoy…as all great art should be. Josephine Eglin
Dear Gentle Author, I am a great admirer of Tessa Hunkin’s work and would like to support the publication of your book about her and her mosaics. Many thanks for the work you do for so many and the interesting stories you share with all of us readers. Best of luck with this and warm crispy autumn wishes, Matilda Moreton
Good luck with the publication fund raiser. I loved working with Sarah Ainslie on various Spitalfields Life pieces, and I’m excited for her work, and the others, to be published in book form. Rosie Dastgir
I love the books! Good luck! Mary Winch
Love the books – hope the funding project succeeds. Edward Gillman
Good luck with your worthy venture. Keith Brennan
Amazing books … keep going. Sophie Alderson
Precious publications from a very special place … Oh here’s to Spitalfields lives ! Sophie Thompson
I am a great-granddaughter of man born in Bethnal Green. Proud to be an East Ender! Pamela Henning
Wonderful projects. Sensorinet
Cracking beautiful relevant stuff !! Bonne chance xx Oliver Lazarus
I love your books, which would not be published anywhere else. Long may you continue. Melanie McGrath
Books open worlds, make great companions, are lovely gifts, and keep our minds from growing stale. And they ask for little in return! Long live books! Jennifer Newbold
So pleased you’re re-launching SL Books, which are all beautifully produced and feature the work of such excellent photographers, artists and writers. Julia Meadows
Good luck – your books are brilliant. Joan Isaac
Today we preview David Hoffman’s book:
A PLACE TO LIVE: ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END 1971-87
David Hoffman’s bold, humane photography records a lost decade, speaking vividly to our own times. Living in Whitechapel through the 70s, David documented homelessness, racism, the incursion of developers and the rise of protest in startlingly intimate and compassionate pictures to compose a vital photographic testimony of resilience.
“The old East End was disappearing as I took these photographs, being able to bring back a glimpse of its spirit in this book means a lot to me.”
David Hoffman
“I moved to the dilapidated slums of Whitechapel from the dilapidated slums of North Kensington in 1970. First to 19a Chicksand St which was soon demolished, then to 17 Black Lion Yard. When that was predictably demolished in 1973, I squatted one of the tinned-up tenement flats in Fieldgate Mansions, replacing the council concrete-filled loo and building a darkroom.
With a Nikon F and 35mm lens hanging from my wrist, I wandered the strange, chaotic time-slipped streets trying to work out what photography was about. I never did find out. These photos ended up as contact sheets buried and forgotten beneath the protest photography that became my specialism in the late seventies.
As I now digitise forty years’ work, they’ve floated back into sight. I think they’ve matured nicely over the decades.”
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
The Mosaic Makers Of Hackney Downs
Starting in 2013, Spitalfields Life Books published 15 books over 6 years until the pandemic shut us down. Now we are ready to begin again and are crowdfunding to raise enough money to cover production of our next 3 books. So far we have raised £9,900 but we still have a way to go.
CLICK HERE TO VISIT OUR CROWDFUND PAGE AND CONTRIBUTE
Today we preview Tessa Hunkin’s book
TESSA HUNKIN & HACKNEY MOSAIC PROJECT
Tessa Hunkin and Hackney Mosaic Project have created breathtakingly beautiful and witty mosaics in locations all across the East End over the past ten years. In the process, Tessa has won the reputation as the pre-eminent mosaic designer in this country while leading a community endeavour that has elevated the lives of hundreds of participants.
“A beautiful book about Hackney Mosaic Project will be the best reward for all the people who have worked on the mosaics, bringing their achievement to a wider public and giving them the recognition they so well deserve.”
Tessa Hunkin
You may recall my friends the Mosaic Makers of Hoxton led by artist Tessa Hunkin. When they have moved up to Hackney Downs and established their workshop in the pavilion, they applied their magical talents to decorating an open air theatre in the children’s playground.
I discovered Tessa and her team hard at work to fulfil their ambition of covering the entire theatre with mosaic. Inspired by a trip to Jordan, Tessa revealed to me that her design is “loosely based upon Roman hunting scenes, but without the blood.” Each of the mosaic makers undertook to create one of the animals and Tessa’s role was to unify their contributions into a harmonious whole. Up here at the top of Hackney, upon what was once an ancient piece of common land, it makes complete sense to come upon these fearsome wild creatures rendered in such magnificent timeless style.
Stalwarts from Hoxton, Nikky Turner and Ken Edwards were there to greet me as I entered the workshop where the mosaic makers sat around a large table, joined by new members as the enthusiastic band has grown. A hush of concentration prevailed, broken only by the incessant snapping of terrazzo being cut to size, rather like that of a band of squirrels cracking nuts. Two days a week you will find them there in the pavilion on Hackney Downs, and every other Saturday afternoon when anyone is welcome to lend a hand. “Being here in the park, we’ve had a quite a lot of local people come to join us,” Tessa admitted, “people between jobs or off work for some reason – and lots of Italians, mosaic is a magnet for Italians.”
Even as I sat with the mosaic makers, a man on a bicycle leaned in to deliver his verdict on the work so far. “If that mosaic was a meal, it’d be from a Michelin starred restaurant,” he declared authoritatively and cycled off down the path, leaving the makers to continue with their work in placid silence.
It has been inspiring to see Tessa Hunkin’s skilfully wrought mosaics come to fruition in recent years, enriching the environment of the East End with their lyrical imagery – and rare to come across works of art that successfully combine such a sophisticated aesthetic flair with a genuine popular appeal.
Ken Edwards made the lion
Design for a side panel
Gabi made the leopard
Design for a side panel
Nikky Turner made the monkey
Design for the back wall by Tessa Hunkin
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