Sarah Ainslie’s Somali Portraits
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Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie undertook this fine series of Somali portraits, accompanied with eloquent testimonies dictated by her subjects
Adan Jama Mohammed – Seaman
“I came to this country when I was twenty years old in 1958. Before than I was in Aden, working on a small passenger boat, but when I came here I was thirty years as a seaman and living in Middlesbrough. I started on 8th April 1959 as a merchant seaman, earning £21.50 a month. Until 1980 it was my job, then I worked on big container ships. We didn’t have much to do. I married in 1987 and I had a family in Middlesbrough, but we had to leave because they closed the docks and the factories. I had a house and a family, and a mortgage I couldn’t pay. The building society said if I didn’t pay £70 a month, they would take the house back. I had to sell the house at half price, and now my children are grown up and don’t want to know me. I live on my own in a flat at the Seamen’s Mission in West Ferry Rd, Isle of Dogs, and my family live on the other side of London. I don’t like living here in this city, there’s too many people – but you can’t help it, if you don’t have a choice. I do have some friends at the Mission. It was a hard life as a seaman.”
Ahmed Hassan Sulieman – Seaman
“I was born in Aden, when I was a schoolboy everyone over sixteen joined the army. My father was in the First World War and he was killed fighting for the British in Egypt in 1918, when I was four. So my brother and I, we wanted to join the army and take revenge on the people who killed him. All my family were in the army. All the army, they treated us very good – white and black together, no colour bar.
In 1944, I was shot in the leg while I was on a British ship that was sunk by two German U-boats off Durban. We were at sea on a raft for two days and two nights before we were marooned on land without food. I went inland and walked for six days to search for help before the British found us and took us to Durban, and when we recovered they sent us back to fight. In Egypt, four thousand people were being killed a day at that time.
I was also in Germany and Japan, the kamikaze pilots crashed into our ship. It was a very bad war, but we wanted to win – losing was nothing. I am brave because I wanted to beat the Germans and I fought for myself, I didn’t want to be captured. I was happy when we won the war and I’m happy that I’m still alive. I had four medals but I lost two recently, I never asked for them.
At the end of the war, they gave us a passport and a suit of clothes, and they brought us here to the Seamen’s Mission where I live today. So we were quite happy. I’ve been here seventy years. They said you are fit to work and I joined the Merchant Navy. I got £200 a month, before that I only got £24 a month and I had to shovel coal but the food was free. I worked as a merchant seaman until I got too old and I have lived in the Seamen’s Mission for the last forty years. I and my brother we used to go back to Somalia every year, until he was killed in a car crash in Poplar in 1980.
They told me I could bring my family over, but there’s nowhere here for them to stay. I had eight children, all grown up. Now haven’t seen them for over a year and I feel sick, and I want to go home for good. I’m too old and I want to see my children.”
Shamsa Hersi – Manager of Somali Elders Day Centre
“I was born in a town called Burao in Somaliland and I came to UK as a refugee in 1990 when I was a child. From an early age, I wanted to work for UNICEF and in those days my great uncle used to work for the United Nations, he talked to me about his work when I was eight. I cared for my family for many years in Somalia – it is second nature to me, but you have to train to be a Social Worker. I believe that if you can work with people to help them, then it gives you a more rewarding life. I studied at university in the UK and I have a qualification in psycho-therapy and a diploma in working with people who have had traumatic life experiences. It’s about giving something back for the support I received when I came to this country. It takes a lot of guts and hard work and skills to build relationships, but it’s a privilege to work with these people – they are survivors.”
Ali Mohammad – Day Care Officer
“In 1988, there was a civil war in Somalia and I fled to my brother Isaac who was a senior official at the Ministry of Education in Mogadishu. Then, in 1989, there was a massacre – fifty-six people in my tribe were shot. They dug a mass grave and shovelled them in, but there was boy who was not shot and fell in the grave too. He managed to get out and spread the news. My brother told me to go to South Africa or India, anywhere away from Somalia, and he gave me 200,000 Somali shillings and $100. I went to India and then to Bangladesh where I studied at Dhaka University, hoping to come to Europe. My grandfather Uma Hassan sent me some money from London and my visa came through before I graduated, so he told me to come at once and I arrived at Heathrow on August 21st 1992. Because I had a family address, I decided to surprise them. I took a minicab to Poplar and they couldn’t believe it was me when I arrived!
I shared a two bedroom flat with another guy in Woolwich. The country was in recession at that time and there were no jobs. Some of the Somalis who came before me didn’t try to find work, they were so negative. They said, ‘As a black guy, you haven’t got a chance.’ But I tried and, after a month, I got a job as a kitchen porter at Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital in Woolwich, all the kitchen staff and cleaners were employed by a contractor. At first, I found it hard to get all the work completed on time but it got easier after a while. I got £2.85 an hour. Language was a problem and it was a very physical job, I found it exhausting. I couldn’t understand the people I worked with because they spoke colloquially – innit? – whereas I spoke more formal English.
I enrolled at Greenwich University and while I was working seven until seven for five days, on the other two days I did my part-time course. What I earned, I sent home but there wasn’t much left after I paid the bills. I lost my job when the contract ended after one year and eight months but by the time I finished I was earning £4.50 an hour. After three years at university, I left with a diploma in computing but I was unemployed for three months. I could only get work one day a week, doing cleaning and security in the City, I couldn’t find a decent job – they were all shut to me.
Someone told me there was an apprenticeship in Social Care available for a resident of the Ocean Estate. I was still living in Woolwich but I thought, ‘I could move to the Ocean Estate.’ A Somali landlord had a four bedroom flat with an empty room, so I took it and I got the job. They paid £500 a month and I did six months working in Social Care with disabled people, seniors and children. I did well and, in 1995, I spotted a job for a Day Care Officer advertised. By then I had my certificate, so I applied and I won that one. And this is the job I do now here at the Somali Elders Day Centre. I got married in 1997 and I have three daughters and I live in Bethnal Green, five minutes walk from my work. I know everyone in this area.”
Ahmed Yunis – Seaman
“I came here in 1956 when I was a sailor in the Royal Navy. I felt comfortable in London because at that time my country was a British colony. I came on a Saturday and I left on the Monday. I was only here two days, I went to the Merchant Navy office and they gave me a job which lasted until 1982, when I retired. I lived in Liverpool for twenty-eight years but I consider London my home.
I am ninety-three years old. I have two wives, one here and one in Somalia. My London wife is forty-five and I have four children under eleven, the youngest is six. I am a grateful father. I am also a great-grandfather. If you don’t smoke or drink or kiss women, you stay healthy.”
Kinsi Abdulleh – Artist
“When I got off the plane in the eighties as an eighteen-year-old refugee, I had an older family of relations to go to in Cable St. I remember thinking, ‘We’re going to England.’ and we passed Westminster and the Tower, and we ended up in this run-down, dark little side street. I thought, ‘God, what have we come to? This is really poor, like being in Africa. I’m jumping from the frying pan into the fire!’ But, on the other hand, I fell in love with the place. I went to college and it was exciting that I could get up and go without supervision. I watched the Jackson 5 on TV and bought jeans, even though the older generation expected me to be more conventional. They said, ‘You’ve only been in the city two days and you’re going ice skating!’ They had a false outdated view of my country that I was supposed to believe. I came from the city not the village. People imagine you’ve come from Zululand and you live up a tree. I spent the formative years of my life being displaced, so I should be the one longing for tribal culture, but I am frustrated by the patriarchal tribal culture. I’ve been fortunate to end up in a place where people have extended a hand to me. I can go anywhere in Tower Hamlets, and that’s why I’ve stayed because I can walk down the street here and make my own history.”
Ali Mohammed Adan – Seaman
“I first came to London by ship in March 1958. I stayed in Aldgate for a night and went to Newport where my cousin had a house. There are many Somalis there. From that day until I retired in 1990, I was in the Merchant Navy, and I brought my family over from Somaliland. In 1970, I moved back to London to Bethnal Green but my wife and daughters chose to stay in Newport.
In Somaliland, I owned over a hundred camels and sheep. Nobody keeps camels anymore, everyone sold them and moved to the city. They say, ‘It’s too much work.’ But keeping camels and sheep and living on a farm, it’s a good life because you eat every day. Everybody wants to do it again now.”
Ismail Ibrahim – Seaman
“I came to this country in 1958 from the South Yemen which was a British colony. I was born a British subject and I am still a British subject. They say to me, ‘Why do you like it so much?’ I say, ‘I don’t know any other government.’ I joined the Merchant Navy in 1960. After we fought in the Falkland Islands in 1982, I came back and joined the Ministry of Defence from 1983 until 2000. I was in Czechoslovakia with the United Nation Forces from 1984-89, then I was in Georgia. I was in Cyprus but when they were going into Iraq, I said, ‘I’m not going.’ I retired four years ago. In the Navy, I worked in the engine room and in the Merchant Navy, I was coxswain.
I was born in British Somaliland, in the city of Berbera, one of six brothers and four sisters. In 1960, we got independence and they joined British Somaliland to Somalia which had been an Italian colony and was run by the mafia – they rape, they kill. So we decided to get our land back and have self-government, and we fought for twelve years. They killed my father, they killed my brother and they killed my children.
In 1991, we got independence again, and we settled down and all was ok in Somaliland. The country needs European help because there are no roads and no facilities. So what can I do now? – I’m ok but a bit old. I’ve got four boys and two girls, and an ex-wife in Somlia that my brother took on, and a wife here in the City Rd that I don’t live with. I was away on a ship while my children were being born, I was always at sea not here with my children as they grew up. They don’t know me. My life was sea, sea, sea.”
Ahmed Esa – Seaman
“I joined the Navy in 1953 in Aden, I was a young guy and I just wanted to work and visit other countries. I came to Plymouth in 1953 and stayed with the Navy until 1969 when I joined the Merchant Navy. I retired in 1988 after thirty-nine years. My brother was in the Merchant Navy too, he was younger than me. He came to London and enlisted, but I never worked in London. All that time, my family was at home, so I fetched them here and they live in London now. I haven’t been back to Somalia since 1996, I can’t afford to cost of the trip. Being in the Navy, it was a hard life – all that time at sea, even if you got to different countries. I’ve have no home, I’m living here in the Seaman’s Mission and waiting for flat of my own. I’m a single man again, now my children have grown up. My brother caught a virus and died in Forest Gate. Life in London is solitary, though I have a few friends at the Mission from the Merchant Navy. I was a deck hand, a carpenter and an able-bodied seaman, an odd-jobs man.”
Yurub Qalib Farah – Day Care Officer
“I came to this country on my own as an asylum seeker in 2001. I had friends here to stay with and I went to college in Haringey, studying English Language and Computers – before I came this country I was working as a secretary. In 2002, I started searching for work, and people said Tower Hamlets is the best place to find a job and I learned that Mayfield House was advertising for a Day Care Worker. I called up the number and came for an interview with the manager at 2pm on November 11th 2002, and I have worked here ever since. My ambition is to help people and be a good care worker, and in this job I am using the experience I have had to help others. I got married in February 2004, and we don’t have children but my sister came to join us. I went back to visit my family in Somalia for the first time in ten years last Christmas. There had been some changes and my friends had moved to a different area, so it was like another country to the one I knew. It was safe but so hot. I think I have two homes, here and there – and I’m glad to have that. When I said to my friends, ‘I’m going home,’ they say,‘Which home?’ And then they say, ‘Can we come with you?'”
Ahmed Awad Yusuf – Seaman
“I first came here in 1959 at nineteen years old. At that time Somalia was a British colony and I had a British passport. Seven of us, we took a ship to Marseilles and caught a train to Dover and then arrived at Liverpool St. There were a couple of Somali coffee shops in Leman St and I stayed at one for three days. A friend of mine lived in Newport so I took a train from Paddington and stayed with him for four weeks, and then I lived in Cardiff for three years. First of all, I went to the Social Security and they gave me £2.10 a week, while I was looking for a job. I worked three years in Cardiff Dock. The Merchant Navy were looking for seamen and they gave me a job for twenty six and a half years. I moved back over here to London in 1965, and I lived in Leman St, Cable St and at the Seamen’s Mission in East India Dock Rd, and in 1984, I returned to Somaliland. But in 1990, I came back here with my wife and children. I live in Leman St, it’s the place I first came and it’s where the people I know are. I’ve been all over the world, Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Gulf States, China, Japan – all the places the British ruled.”
Ruquiya Egeh – Housing Association Manager
“I came here in 1988 as refugee from Somalia at the age of fourteen. I came speaking not a word of English. I was one of twelve children, but both of my parents were teachers and my father was able to send money to support us. Fortunately, my elder sister who I came with was nineteen, that’s why we weren’t fostered, she was old enough to be my guardian. At first, we were taken to the Home Office and then sent to a refugees’ hostel somewhere in London, before being taken to temporary accommodation in Forest Gate. We met some Saudi people at the mosque and I was able to go to Swanley School in Whitechapel. But the other pupils treated me as a stupid person because I couldn’t speak the language and I had playground fights because I thought they were swearing at me. Within a space of two years, I managed to learn enough English to pass seven GCSEs. I came from a good educational background and I wanted to prove I knew something.
I found college much more difficult because there was less support yet I managed to pass Health & Social Care, but I hated it and my sister went through depression at that time too. In the second year of college, I changed courses so that I could use my strengths and I did Arabic, Maths, Chemistry, Biology and Physics, and I did well and applied to University. Getting into University was a big deal and I studied Biomedical Science at Greenwich University. I got married in my second year of college and became pregnant with my first child, which let me down because I was so exhausted I fell asleep in classes. But my husband supported me and his parents looked after the baby so I could work. By the third year of University, I had three children. It made me want to achieve, I was the first person in my family to get a University degree and, when I rang my father, he said, ‘Well done, you made me proud. You were my first child to go University, now I can hold my head up.’
When I work with people who have got language problems, I know their frustration. Now I’m pushing my children. I say,‘You’ve got to be first in the class,’ just like my father said to me. I tell them, ‘If you have a good education, you can get a good job and earn good money. Knowledge is power.'”
Mahoumed Ali Mohammed – Seaman
“I came to London in 1948 and I stayed here at Seaman’s Mission for a while and for four months at the Strand Palace Hotel. I worked for the British railways for twenty years, as a porter, as an assistant lorry driver and in signalling in the Underground. Then, in the seventies, I joined the Merchant Navy and the Royal Navy for another twenty years until I retired in 1992. I was based in Cardiff but I came back to London in 1996. I have a girl and boy and my wife lives in Cardiff. When I called and said,‘I’m going to London,’ she said, ‘I’m staying here with my kids.’ I’m eighty-eight now and I live in Bethnal Green.”
Ibrahim Abdullah – Surveyor of Works
“I first came to London in 1956 and studied at the Brixton School of Building for a Diploma in Civil Engineering and then I went back home. At that time, the British ruled the country and I became a Surveyor of Works. I did not return to Britain until 15th June 1990, fleeing the Civil War, and then I brought my wife and family with me. We became British Citizens and now I come regularly to Mayfield House Day Centre to meet other Somalis who were seamen, and there are lots of them. I find it calm and cool, no problems here.”
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Simon Pettet At Dennis Severs’ House
Dennis Severs with Simon Pettet (standing)
Have you ever wondered about the lives of the people who lived at 18 Folgate St in the nineteen eighties – Dennis Severs and his circle – those who worked together, creating what is now known as Dennis Severs’ House? To me, their stories have always been a subject of at least as great interest as the tale of the fictional Huguenot family that Dennis Severs invented.
Two years ago, it was my great delight when the Spitalfields Trust invited me to reinvent Dennis Severs’ tours as part of renewal of the house after the pandemic. Now I am thrilled that they have invited me back to script and direct an entirely new tour, exploring the real lives of the residents of 18 Folgate St in the rooms where they lived and worked.
My new tour is SIMON’S STORY, focussing on Simon Pettet, a young and gifted ceramicist who met Dennis outside Heaven, the nightclub beneath Charing Cross Station, as an eighteen-year-old art student in 1983 and moved in with him shortly after.
Personally and creatively, Dennis and Spitalfields opened a whole new world of possibilities that allowed Simon’s work to develop in a unique way. He reimagined traditional blue-and-white pottery, employing vernacular techniques and historical references to create the pieces of delftware which enliven 18 Folgate St today.
Yet in 1984, at nineteen years old, Simon Pettet was diagnosed HIV+ as one of the earliest cases in this country and he died at the age of just twenty-eight in 1993, leaving ten years of work including tiles, profile pots, a barber’s bowl, a money box, a marriage plate, obelisks and mugs.
SIMON’S STORY is devised from interviews I undertook with Patrick Handscombe who lived at 18 Folgate St at that time and is performed by actor Joel Saxon who plays the role of ‘Paddy’, narrating the intimate tale of Simon and his relationship with Dennis Severs.
The new tour is launched to complement the exhibition MAKING HISTORY: THE CERAMIC WORK OF SIMON PETTET, opening on 4th May and running until 4th June, curated by Rupert Thomas, formerly editor of The World of Interiors.
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Simon Pettet’s self portrait tile at Dennis Severs’ House
Simon Pettet (1965-1993)
The Old City Of London
The City of London has long been a subject of fascination for me and these powerfully atmospheric glass slides of over a century ago from the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society Collection at the Bishopsgate Institute evoke the drama and mystery of this ancient citadel magnificently.
Starting on Sunday 4th June, join me on the first Sunday of each month through the summer at 2pm on a storytelling ramble across the Square Mile, from the steps of St Paul’s through the narrow alleys and lanes to the foot of old London Bridge, in search of the wonders and the wickedness of the City of London.
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Ludgate Hill
George & Vulture
Throgmorton St
Apothecaries Hall
Goldsmiths Hall
Tower Bridge
Mansion House
London Bridge
Earl of Warwick
The Old Dick Whittington, Clothfair
Billingsgate Market
The Little Midshipman, Leadenhall St
Leadenhall Market
St Mary Woolnoth
Doors in Laurence Pountney Lane
St Michael’s Cornhill
St Mary Le Bow
Watchhouse Smithfield
London Bridge
St Margaret Pattens
The Pannyer Boy
St Paul’s Cathedral
St Helen’s Bishopsgate
Fishmongers Hall
Leadenhall Market
Mark Lane
All Hallows London Wall
Royal Exchange
St Paul’s Cathedral
London & Middlesex Archaeological Society Collection photos courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
In Search Of Joseph Merceron
Biographer Julian Woodford, author of The Boss of Bethnal Green, will be telling the breathtakingly appalling story of Joseph Merceron on Tuesday 2nd May 6pm at the Hanbury Hall in Hanbury St where Merceron was baptised in 1764.
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Joseph Merceron was the East End’s first corrupt politician and also the East End’s first gangster, ruling Spitalfields and Bethnal Green for fifty years through the end of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. Yet he was also an exploitative developer who built swathes of substandard housing, which ultimately led to cholera outbreaks and contributed to the human catastrophe of poverty and overcrowding in the nineteenth century East End.
Birthplace of Joseph Merceron “On Sunday 29th January 1764, Joseph Merceron was born on Brick Lane, which formed the boundary between the parishes of Spitalfields and its eastward neighbour Bethnal Green. His parents were James Merceron, a Huguenot pawnbroker and former silk weaver, and his second wife Ann. The Mercerons had three other children: Annie, Joseph’s two-year-old sister, John, almost thirteen, and Catherine, eight, the latter two being the surviving offspring from James’s first marriage.”
“Joseph was christened at the local Huguenot church known as La Patente, in Brown’s Lane (the building and lane are now known as Hanbury Hall and Hanbury Street) just a short walk from his parents’ house. The Mercerons, like other Huguenot families in the area, clung tightly to their nationality. Joseph’s details in the register of baptisms – the first recorded at La Patente for 1764 – were entered in French, which many families still insisted on speaking out of respect for their ancestors.”
“On the corner of Fournier Street stands the Jamme Masjid, since 1976 one of London’s largest mosques. For much of the twentieth century it was a synagogue, and before that it spent a decade as a Methodist chapel. Originally, before a brief occupation by the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, it was a Huguenot church. High on a wall is the date of its completion, 1743, and a sundial with its motto: Umbra Sumus (‘we are shadows’).”
“The Merceron pawnshop at 77 Brick Lane was at the epicentre of this district, among a row of ramshackle buildings directly opposite Sir Benjamin Truman’s imposing and famous Black Eagle brewery. The Black Eagle was one of the largest breweries in the world. To those living opposite, the mingled odours of yeast, malt and spilt beer – not to mention the steaming output of the many dray horses – must have been overpowering, even by the pungent standards of the times. The noise, too, was tremendous, as the shouts of draymen punctuated the rumble of horse-drawn carriages and carts up and down the lane.”
“The judge had ordered the execution to take place several miles away at Tyburn, the usual site of such events in London, but the master weavers – keen to dispose of Valline and Doyle in front of their own community to discourage further loom cutting – lobbied successfully to change the location to ‘the most convenient place near Bethnal Green church’. Several thousand people assembled outside The Salmon & Ball to see Valline and Doyle hang. Bricks and stones were thrown during the assembly of the gallows. They protested their innocence to the end, but to no effect. Doyle’s last words were enough to ignite an already explosive situation. As soon as the hanging was over, the crowd tore down the gallows and surged back to Spitalfields…”
“On 26th October 1795, Joseph Merceron donned his magistrate’s wig and robes and climbed the steps of the imposing Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green for his first Middlesex Sessions meeting. This was a world away from Brick Lane. The Sessions House, built in the aftermath of the Gordon Riots, was awe-inspiring and was said to rival any courthouse in England.”
“St John on Bethnal Green was built by the eminent architect Sir John Soane but budgetary constraints led to his grand design for a steeple being aborted, replaced with a stunted tower of particularly phallic design that rapidly became a source of bawdy amusement throughout the neighbourhood. Merceron was outraged. Announcing that the design had ‘mortified and disappointed the expectations of almost every individual’, he ordered Brutton to write to complain. The task put Brutton in an acutely awkward position: how to explain the exact nature of the problem? The vestry clerk’s literary skills were tested to the limit as he described the tower’s ‘abrupt termination in point of altitude’ that made it ‘an object of low wit and vulgar abuse’.”
“All the great and good of London’s East End were there. Twenty thousand people, packed six deep in places along the Bethnal Green Road, had turned out to see the cortège on its way to St Matthew’s church. Just before one o’clock the procession arrived, at a sedate walking pace. The jet-black horses, with their sable plumes, were blinkered to prevent anything from distracting the stately progress of the hearse. Merceron was the original ‘Boss’ of Bethnal Green, the Godfather of Regency London, controlling its East End underworld long before celebrity mobsters such as the infamous Kray twins made it their territory. His funeral at the church of St Matthew, Bethnal Green – the very same church where the Krays’ funerals would be held more than 150 years later – reflected his importance: it was by far the biggest event to take place at the church since it was established in the 1740s.”
Tomb of Peter Renvoize “His closest ally and childhood friend, Peter Renvoize, was repeatedly elected as churchwarden for much of this period, from which position he helped Merceron pull off his most audacious financial coup yet. Bethnal Green’s share of the government relief grant was £12,200, equivalent to almost three times the annual poor’s rates raised by the parish. Having obtained the money, Merceron appointed himself chairman of a committee, with four of his closest associates, including Renvoize, to manage its distribution. What happened next is difficult to determine. But it is clear that, five months after the government had advanced the funds, there were several thousand pounds sitting in Merceron’s own account.”
“As for Joseph Merceron, lying buried in the shadow of the vestry room he dominated for half a century, there is one last strange episode to recount. In the afternoon sunshine of Saturday 7th September, 1940, as millions of Londoners sat down to their tea, the ‘Blitz’ began. Bethnal Green suffered terribly, and in the carnage St Matthew’s church took a direct hit from an incendiary bomb. Next morning it was a roofless, burnt out shell, but two gravestones survived the bombing intact. The first, outside the main entrance to the church, is that of Merceron’s old friend Peter Renvoize. About twenty paces away, a large pink granite slab, surrounded by a low iron rail in the shelter of the south wall of the church, is the grave of Joseph Merceron and his family. He spent a lifetime cheating the law, somehow it is fitting that he should have cheated the Luftwaffe too.”
“Merceron Houses, erected in 1901 by the East End Dwellings Company on land formerly part of Joseph Merceron’s garden in Bethnal Green.”
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The Spitalfields Bowl
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One of these streets’ most-esteemed long-term residents summoned me to view an artefact that few have seen, the fabled Spitalfields Bowl. Engraved by Nicholas Anderson, a pupil of Laurence Whistler, it incarnates a certain moment of transition in the volatile history of this place.
I arrived at the old house and was escorted by the owner to an upper floor, and through several doors, to arrive in the room where the precious bowl is kept upon its own circular table that revolves with a smooth mechanism, thus avoiding any necessity to touch the glass. Of substantial design, it is a wide vessel upon a pedestal engraved with scenes that merge and combine in curious ways. You have the option of looking down upon the painstakingly-etched vignettes and keeping them separate them in your vision, or you can peer through, seeing one design behind the other, morphing and mutating in ambiguous space as the bowl rotates – like overlaid impressions of memory or the fleeting images of a dream.
Ever conscientious, the owner brought out the correspondence that lay behind the commission and execution of the design from Nicholas Anderson in 1988. Consolidating a day in which the glass engraver had been given a tour of Spitalfields, one letter lists images that might be included – “1. The church and steeple of Christ Church, Spitalfields, and its domination of the surrounding areas. 2. The stacks, chimneys and weaving lofts. 3. The narrowness of the streets and the list and lean of the buildings with their different doorways and casement windows.”
There is a mesmerising quality to Nicholas Anderson’s intricate design that plays upon your perception, offering insubstantial apparitions glimpsed in moonlight, simultaneously ephemeral and eternal, haunting the mind. You realise an object as perilously fragile as an engraved glass bowl makes an ideal device to commemorate a transitory moment.
“It took him months and months,” admitted the proud owner,“and it represents the moment everything changed in Spitalfields, in which the first skyscraper had gone up and there were cranes as evidence of others to come. The Jewish people have left and the Asians are arriving, while at the same time, you see the last of the three-hundred-year-old flower, fruit and vegetable market with its history and characters, surrounded by the derelict houses and filthy streets.”
Sequestered in a locked room, away from the human eye, the Spitalfields Bowl is a spell-binding receptacle of time and memory.
The Jewish soup kitchen
To the left is the Worrall House, situated in a hidden courtyard between Princelet St & Fournier St
A moonlit view of Christ Church over the rooftops of Fournier St
The bird cage with the canary from Dennis Severs House
“He was a tinker who overwintered in Allen Gardens and used to glean every morning in the market…”
To the left is Elder St and the plaque commemorating the birth of John Wesley’s mother is in Spital Sq.
An Asian couple walk up Brushfield St, with the market the left and the Fruit & Wool Exchange and Verdes to the right
Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
The Broderers Of St Paul’s
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Anita Ferrero
Like princesses from a fairy tale, the Broderers of St Paul’s sit high up in a tower at the great cathedral stitching magnificent creations in their secret garret. Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I climbed up one hundred and forty-one steps to pay a visit upon these nimble-fingered needleworkers.
‘There are fourteen of us, we chat, we tell stories and we eat chocolate,’ explained Anita Ferrero by way of modest introduction, as I stood dazzled by the glittering robes and fine embroidery. ‘It’s very intense work because the threads are very bright,’ she added tentatively, lest I should think the chocolate comment revealed undue levity.
I was simply astonished by the windowless chamber filled with gleaming things. ‘There are thirteen tons of bells suspended above us,’ Anita continued with a smile, causing me to cast my eyes to the ceiling in wonder, ‘but it’s a lovely sound that doesn’t trouble us at all.’
Observing my gaze upon the magnificent textiles, Anita drew out a richly-embellished cope from Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. ‘This is cloth of gold’ she indicated, changing her voice to whisper, ‘it ceased production years ago.’
‘There are still wonderful haberdashers in Kuala Lumpur and Aleppo,’ she informed me as if it were a closely-guarded secret, ‘I found this place there that still sold gold thread. If someone’s going to Marrakesh, we give them a shopping list in case they stumble upon a traditional haberdashery.’ Next, Anita produced a sombre cope from Winston Churchill’s funeral, fashioned from an inky black brocade embroidered with silver trim, permitting my eye to accommodate to the subtler tones that can be outshone by tinsel.
In this lofty chamber high above the chaos of the city, an atmosphere of repose prevails in which these needlewomen pursue their exemplary work in a manner unchanged over millennia. I was in awe at their skill and their devotion to their art but Anita said, ‘As embroiderers, we are thankful to have a purpose for our embroidery because there’s only so many cushions you can do.’
I walked over to a quiet corner where Rachel Rice was stitching an intricate border in gold thread. ‘I learnt my skills from my mother and grandmother, and I always enjoyed sewing and dressmaking but that’s not fine embroidery like this,’ she admitted, revealing the satisfaction of one who has spent a life devoted to needlework. Yet she qualified her pride in her craft by admitting her humanity with a weary shrug, ‘Some of the work is extremely tedious and it’s never seen.’
‘We are all very expert but our eyesight is fading and a few of us are quite elderly,’ confided Anita, thinking out loud for the two of them as she picked up the story and exchanged a philosophical grin with Rachel. Nowhere in London have I visited a sanctum quite like the Broderers chamber or encountered such self-effacing creative talents.
‘We not so isolated up here,’ emphasised Anita, lifting the mood with renewed enthusiasm, ‘Most people who work in the Cathedral know we’re here. We often do favours for members of staff, taking up trouser hems etc – consequently, if we have a problem, we can call maintenance and don’t have to wait long.’
I was curious to learn of the Broderers’ current project, the restoration of a banner of St Barnabas. ‘He’s the one saint I’d like to meet because he’s called ‘The Son of Encouragement’ – he looks like a nice guy,’ confessed Anita fondly, laying an affectionate hand upon the satin, ‘We’re restoring the beard of St Barnabas at present and we’re getting Simon the good-looking Verger up here to photograph his beard.’
Rachel Rice – ‘I learnt my skills from my mother and grandmother’
Sophia Sladden
Margaret Gibberd
‘As embroiderers, we are thankful to have a purpose for our embroidery because there’s only so many cushions you can do.’
Judy Hardy
‘We chat, we tell stories and we eat chocolate..’
Virger Simon Brears is the model for the beard of St Barnabas
View from the Triforium
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Ernest George’s London Etchings
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Aldgate
Stefan Dickers, Archivist at Bishopsgate Institute, introduced me to these fine copper plate etchings by Ernest George (1839-1922). In the eighteen-eighties, George set out to immortalise those fragments of London which spoke of times gone by and Londoners long dead, recording buildings and views which have for the most part now disappeared.
I realise that my affection for these images sets me in line with the generations of chroniclers who have made it their business to document the transience of the city, starting with John Stow who wrote the very first Survey of London between 1560 and 1598 to describe the streets of his childhood that were vanishing before his eyes.
Ernest George’s etchings were published by the Fine Art Society in New Bond St in 1884, a magnificent temple of culture designed by Edward William Godwin which survived through the twentieth century only to close in August 2018.
Bishopsgate
Wych St, Strand
Fouberts Place, Soho
Crown Court, Pall Mall
St Bartholomew, Smithfield
Warwick Lane, City
Tower of London
London Bridge
Staple Inn, Holborn
Drury Lane
St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell
Limehouse
Shadwell
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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