In Anticipation Of The Festive Season
A swallow at Christmas
George Cruikshank‘s illustrations of yuletide in London 1838-53 from his Comic Almanack remind us how much has changed and also how little has changed. (You can click on any of these images to enlarge)
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve
Christmas dining
Christmas bustle
Boxing day
Hard frost
A picture in the gallery
Theatrical dinner
The Parlour & the Cellar
New Year’s Eve
New Year’s birth
Twelfth Night – Drawing characters
January – Last year’s bills
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George Cruikshank’s Comic Alphabet
Piotr Frac, Stained Glass Artist
Last chance to book for my one-day-only EAST END TRADES GUILD TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS this Saturday 3rd December at noon, telling the stories of the different local shops and their origins in this traditional heartland for small traders.
An EETG cloth bag, a copy of Rob Ryan’s map, and small gifts from guild members are included in the ticket, along with refreshments served by a member of the guild at the end of the tour.
CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR TICKET
Happy in the crypt beneath John Soane’s St John on Bethnal Green of 1828, Piotr Frac works peacefully making beautiful stained glass while the world passes by at this busiest of East End crossroads. Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I visited Piotr in his subterranean workshop and were delighted to observe his dexterity in action and admire some of his recent creations.
Piotr’s appealingly modest demeanour and soft spoken manner belie the moral courage and determination it has cost him to succeed in this rare occupation. This is to say nothing of his extraordinary skill in the cutting of glass and the melding of lead to fashion such accomplished work, or his creative talent in contriving designs that draw upon the age-old traditions of stained glass but are unmistakably of our own time.
Gripped by a passion for the magic of stained glass at an early age, Piotr always knew this what what he had to do. Yet even to begin to make his way in his chosen profession, Piotr had to leave his home country and find a whole new life, speaking another language in another country.
It is our gain that Piotr brought his talent and capacity for work to London. That he found his spiritual home in the East End is no accident, since he follows in the footsteps of centuries of skilled migrants, starting with the Huguenots in the sixteenth century, who have immeasurably enriched our culture with their creative energies.
“I am from a working class family in Byton, Silesia, in the south of Poland. My interest in stained glass began when I was ten or eleven years old and I went with my school to see Krakow Cathedral. The stained glass was something beautiful and that was the first time in my life I saw it. I was inspired by the colours and the light, it still excites me.
I always had an interest in drawing and painting – so, after high school, I went to a school of sculpture where they taught stained glass restoration. This was more than twenty years ago, but it was the start of my journey with stained glass. After I got my diploma in the restoration of stained glass, I worked on a project at a church for a few weeks before university. I studied art education in Silesia and I learnt painting, sculpture and calligraphy. I believe every artist needs a background in drawing and painting.
My ambition was to do stained glass, but there were hardly any jobs of any kind – I sold fish in the market in winter and I worked in a hospital, I took whatever I could get. Around 2005, I decided to leave the country. I had some Polish friends who had come to London and they helped me find a place to stay in Brixton. In the beginning, it was very difficult for me because of the language barrier. Without English, it was hard for me to communicate and find a job here. I worked on building sites. Every morning I got up at five and I walked around with this piece of paper which told me how to ask for a job. Someone wrote down a phonetic version of the words for me and I asked at building sites. After two weeks, I got a labouring job.
I lived in many places south of the river but seven years ago I moved to East London and I have stayed here ever since. At first I lived in the Hackney Rd near Victoria Park and I am still in that area, close the Roman Rd. I visited stained glass workshops but I could not get a job because I could not communicate. I did not want to work as a labourer forever so I decided to go to language school to learn English and this helped me a lot. At the English school here in the crypt of St John’s Bethnal Green, my teacher asked us to prepare a talk about myself and my interests. So I talked about my profession as a stained glass artist and my teacher introduced me to a stone carver in the crypt workshop. He told me, ‘If you are willing to teach stained glass classes, you are welcome to use the workshop.’ I started eight years ago with one student.
My first commission was to repair a Victorian glass door. Most of my work has been Victorian and Edwardian windows and doors, which has allowed me to survive because there are plenty that need repair or replacement. There are not a lot of creative commissions on offer but sometimes people want something different.
Two years ago, I won a competition to design a window for St John’s Hackney. It took a year for them to approve the design and I am in the middle of working on it now. I need to finish and install it. Also the Museum of London bought a piece of mine. It is gorilla from a triptych of gorillas and it will be displayed there next year.
Once I moved to East London, I felt I belonged to here – not only because I started my workshop but because I met my wife, Akiko, here. In 2016, I become a British citizen so now I am a permanent member of the community.
Stained glass is a wonderful medium to work with and always looks fantastic because it changes all the time with the light, in different times of the day and seasons of the year. I believe there is a great potential for stained glass in modern architecture.
These days I am able to make a living and I would like to become more recognised as a stained glass artist. I am seeking more ambitious commissions.”
Constructing a nineteenth century door panel
A panel from Piotr’s triptych of gorillas
Piotr’s first panel designed and made in London
Piotr with one of his stained glass classes in the crypt of St John’s Bethnal Green
Repairing a Victorian glass door
Restoring nineteenth century church glass
Before repair
After repair
Piotr Frac, Stained Glass Artist
Studio portraits © Sarah Ainslie
Contact Piotr Frac direct to commission stained glass
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The Curry Chefs Of Brick Lane
In celebration of Small Business Saturday, I am hosting the one-day-only EAST END TRADES GUILD TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS this Saturday 3rd December at noon, telling the stories of the different local shops and their origins in this traditional heartland for small traders.
An EETG cloth bag, a copy of Rob Ryan’s map, and small gifts from guild members are included in the ticket, along with refreshments served by a member of the guild at the end of the tour.
CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR TICKET
This is the ideal moment for a hot curry to warm the spirits, so I set out with photographer Jeremy Freedman to make the acquaintance of some of Brick Lane’s most celebrated Curry Chefs. We were privileged to be granted admission to the modest kitchens tucked away at the back or in the basement of the curry houses, where Head Chefs marshal whole teams of underchefs in a highly formalised hierarchy of responsibility.
It was a relief to step from the cold street into the heat of the kitchens, where we discovered our excited subjects glistening with perspiration, all engaged in the midst of the collective drama that results in curry. We found that these were men who – for the most part – had worked their way up over many years from humble kitchen porters to enjoy their heroic leading roles, granting them the right to a degree of swagger in front of the lense.
We encountered the charismatic Zulen Ahmed, pictured above, standing over his clay-lined tandoori oven beneath the Saffron restaurant where he has been Head Chef for ten years now. Trained by the renowned Curry Chef, Ashik Miah, Zulen served eight years as a porter before ascending to run his own kitchen, now supervising a team consisting of two chefs who do the spicing and make the sauces, a tandoori chef, two cooks who cook rice and poppadums, a second chef who prepares side dishes and a porter who does the washing up. “The Head Chef listens to everybody,” he explained deferentially, with his staff standing around within earshot, and thereby revealing himself to be a natural leader.
Across the road at Masala, we met Head Chef, Shaiz Uddin, whose mother is a chef in Bangladesh. She taught him to cook when he was ten years old. Shaiz told me he worked in her kitchen as Curry Chef for seven years, before he came to London ten years ago to bring the authentic style to Brick Lane, where today he is known for his constant invention in contriving new dishes for his eager customers.
It was quickly apparent that there is a daily routine common to all the curry kitchens of Brick Lane. At eleven each morning, the chefs come in and work until three to prepare the sauces and half cook the meat for the evening. At three they take a break until six, while the underchefs, who arrive at three, prepare the vegetables and salad. Then at six, when the chefs return, the rice is cooked and – now the kitchen is full – everyone works as a team until midnight, when it is time to throw out the leftovers and make the orders for the next day. This is the pattern that rules the lives of all involved. “I like to be busy,” Nurul Alam, Head Chef at Preem & Prithi, informed me blithely – he regularly cooks three hundred curries a night.
“When I started, I dreamed of being a chef,” confessed Jamal Uddin, Head Chef at Bengal Cuisine, referring to his ambition when he came here to Brick Lane from Bangladesh aged nineteen. For the last fourteen years, Jamal has reigned supreme in his kitchen with a Tandoori Chef, a Cook and a Porter working under his supervision as he prepares as many as two hundred curries every day. “I love cooking,” he admitted to me as his gleaming face broke into a smile, though whether it was the intensity of his emotion or the humidity in the kitchen that was the cause of his glowing complexion, I never ascertained.
Syed Jahan Mir, Head Chef at Chillies Restaurant, told me he came to this country at the age of eighteen with his mother and father. Syed was able to learn from his father who was also a chef and they started out together at first, working side by side in the same restaurant. “He’s better than me, but now he is retired to Sunderland I am the best!” Syed asserted, placing a hand on his chest protectively. “Of course I like it,” he confirmed for me with fierce pride, “Twenty-four years, I’ve been doing this, just making curry – it’s my profession.” A poet with spices, Syed creates his own personal mixture for curry. “It’s all the blending,” he emphasised, running his fingers through the golden powder in a steel dish to demonstrate its special properties.
Mohammed Salik still remembers arriving in Britain at the age of seven. “It was quaint and nice here and the people so good, not overcrowded and dirty like my country,” he recalled with a sublime smile of reminiscence, “My dad used to work at the Savoy, but I wanted to be part of the community here in Brick Lane.” Starting as kitchen porter, Mohammed spent the first five years watching and learning and is now Head Chef at Eastern Eye Restaurant. Our brief conversation in the kitchen was eclipsed by the arrival of a bucket on a piece of string from the restaurant above and inside was a yellow slip of paper, occasioning a polite, apologetic glance from Syed as he turned away to study the handwriting and order his team to work, making up the order.
At Cinnamon, Head Chef and veteran of twenty-five years in the business, Daras Miya was keen to introduce me to the two smiley, hardworking young Kitchen Porters under his care, skinny twenty-four year old Belal Ahmed who has been there three months and also works as a waiter, and nineteen year old Mizanor Rahman who started a week ago. Newly married and with little English, wide-eyed Mizanor was experiencing his first winter in London, after marrying his wife who came from Britain to Bangladesh find a husband.
Finally, at the Aladin we met Brick Lane’s most senior Curry Chef, the distinguished Rana Miah who started work in 1980 as a kitchen porter when he arrived from Bangladesh, graduating to chef in 1988. “At that time we served only Bengalis, but by 1995 the customers were all Europeans,” he recalled, describing his tenure as chef at one of Brick Lane’s oldest curry houses, which opened in 1985 and is second only to the Clifton in age. Rana explained that he runs his kitchen upon the system of “Handy Cooking,” based around the use of large stock pots to cook the food. “That’s the way it’s done in Bangladesh,” he confirmed, “This is a traditional restaurant.” As the longest serving Curry Chef, Rana gets frequent consultations from the other chefs on Brick Lane and, remains passionate about his vocation, arriving before everyone each day and leaving after everyone else too.
We never asked the Curry Chefs to cross their arms, but they all assumed this stance, independently and without prompting. It is a posture that proposes professionalism, dignity and self-respect, yet it also indicates a certain reticence, a reserved nature that prefers to let the culinary creations speak for themselves. So I ask you to spare a thought for these proud Curry Chefs, working away like those engineers slaving below deck on the great steam ships of old, they are the unseen and unsung heroes of Brick Lane’s Curry Mile.
Abdul Ahad Forhad, Curry Chef at Monsoon, 78 Brick Lane – “I’m the master of curry!”
Head Chef Shaiz Uddin with his colleague Monul Uddin, Tandoori Chef at Masala, 88 Brick Lane
Nurul Alam, Head Chef at Preem & Prithi, 124/6 Brick Lane, cooks three hundred curries a night
Abdul Tahid, Head Chef at Papadoms, 94 Brick Lane
Jamal Uddin, Head Chef at Bengal Cuisine, 12 Brick Lane
Syed Jahan Mir, Head Chef at Chillies Restaurant, 76 Brick Lane
Mohammed Salik, Head Chef at Eastern Eye Balti House, 63a Brick Lane
Daras Miya, Head Chef at Cinnamon, 134 Brick Lane
Belal Ahmed & Mizanur Rahman, porters at Cinnamon 134, Brick Lane
Rana Miah, Brick Lane’s longest serving Curry Chef stands centre, flanked by Kholilur Rahman and Mizanur Khan in the kitchen of the Aladin, 132 Brick Lane
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
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The Drawing Rooms Of Old London
In celebration of Small Business Saturday, I am hosting the new EAST END TRADES GUILD TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS this Saturday 3rd December at noon, telling the stories of the different local shops and their origins in this traditional heartland for small traders. An EETG cloth bag, a copy of Rob Ryan’s map, and small gifts from guild members are included in the ticket, along with refreshments served by a member of the guild at the end of the tour.
CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR TICKET
Impending gloom at the Mansion House, c. 1910
Given the increasing volatility of meteorological conditions as we head into another long winter in the northern hemisphere, I think the only prudent course of action is to withdraw into one of the drawing rooms of old London. Once the last meagre ray of November sunlight has filtered through the lace curtains, highlighting the dust upon the armoire, pull the brocade drapes close and bank up the fire with sea-coal. Stretch out upon the chaise langue, I shall take the sofa and my cat will settle in the fauteuil.
These glass slides once used for magic lantern shows by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute reveal glimpses into the lavish drawing rooms occupied by those at the pinnacle of power in old London, and I can only wonder what the East Enders of a century ago thought when exposed to these strange visions of another world.
State Room Chelsea Royal Hospital, c. 1920
Drawing Room at Lindsay House, Chelsea, former home of the Moravians, 1912
Hall at Fulham Palace, c. 1920
White Drawing Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Dining Room at Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Christians’ Sitting Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Prince Consort’s Writing Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Throne Room at St James’ Palace, c.1910
Prince Consort’s Music Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Prince Consort’s Tapestry Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Empress Eugiene’s Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Bow Saloon, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Prince Consort’s Writing Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Prince Consort’s Music Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Queen Victoria’s Dolls’ House, Kensington Palace, c. 1910
Holland House, c. 1910
Lord Mayor’s Room, Mansion House, c.1910
Drawing Room, Goldsmiths Hall, c. 1920
Drawing Room, Armourers’ Hall, c. 1920
Small Hall at Cordwainers’ Hall, 1920
Drawing Room, Goldsmiths’ Hall, 1920
Drawing Room, Salters’ Hall, c. 1910
Drawing Room, Mercers’ Hall, 1920
Drawing Room, Devonshire House, c. 1910
Ballroom at Devonshire House, c. 1910
Drawing Room, Whitehall Gardens, 1913
Prince Consort’s Dressing Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Belgian Suite Bedroom, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Prince Consort’s Study, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Bow Saloon, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Throne Room, Buckingham Palace, c. 1910
Vestry of St Lawrence Jewry, c. 1920
Glass slides copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
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David Pearson’s Lecture
As part of this year’s Bloomsbury Jamboree at the Art Workers’ Guild on Sunday 11th December, David Pearson will be giving an illustrated talk about his exemplary book designs, entitled MONEY FOR OLD ROPE
“I’ll do this to the day I die if I’m allowed to!”
This man is so busy that the only way he can keep still is to sit on his hands. He is David Pearson, a designer who has been responsible for some of the most distinctive books produced in recent years, and it was my good fortune that he chose to apply his talents to designing my first book Spitalfields Life and many of the others I have published since. I needed someone who could find a way to let my stories be at home upon the printed page and David rose to the challenge superlatively.
There were innumerable trips over to his long narrow studio in Back Hill, Clerkenwell – the traditional home of printing in London – as David’s ideas evolved until we arrived at the complete volume in which one hundred and fifty stories, three hundred pictures and innumerable illustrations all fitted together to become one four hundred and fifty page book with its own unity of purpose. Once that the mighty task was done and we could draw breath, I took the opportunity to enquire more of David’s rare clarity of vision.
Starting as a junior text designer at Penguin as recently as 2002, David was given the job of selecting the titles for a history of the company’s cover designs. In two weeks, he went through the entire sixty year archive, taking each one off the shelf for two seconds and replacing it again. Not only did “Penguin By Design,” the book David compiled and designed, achieve unexpected popular success, reaching a readership far beyond aficionados of publishing history, but the research that he undertook granted him a unique and inspiring insight into the evolution of book design in this country.
“Everything I have done since has been based upon an application of that to my own work,” he admitted to me with blatant modesty and an easy relaxed smile, “Good design is about refinement and details – I’ve learnt it’s ok not to reinvent the wheel.”
On the basis of “Penguin By Design,” David was given the job to design the covers for Penguin Great Ideas, an experimental series of low-budget books with two-colour covers. “I’m not an illustrator and I can’t take photographs, so I decided to do all the covers with type,” explained David, almost apologetically. Yet David’s famous landmark designs for these books, derived from his knowledge of the history of Penguin covers, were a model of elegant simplicity that stood out in bookshops and sold over three million copies. “I saw people picking them up and they didn’t want to put them down!” he confided to me, rolling his eyes in delight, “They were a phenomenon.” Then he placed a hand affectionately upon a stack of copies of this series for which he has now designed one hundred covers.
“I was only ever good at one thing, I used to finish off other people’s drawings for them at school,” he revealed to me suddenly, looking up as he retreated from his previous thought, taking me back to the beginning by recalling his childhood in Cleethorpes and adding, “I decided not to be an artist because I always need a brief or I flounder, so instead I trained to be a designer.” David’s disarming self-effacement is entirely in contrast to what I had expected, knowing him only through his bold designs.
It was on the basis of David’s brilliant typographic covers for the Great Ideas series, that I leaped at the chance of having him take on Spitalfields Life – because I wanted a designer who could work with classic type in a modern way and create something with an attractive utilitarian quality, reflecting the contents and subject of the book. Before I met him, I braced myself to encounter a fierce typographer with an authoritarian manner but – to my surprise – there was David, chuckling like a schoolboy, and with his corkscrew curls and plain features resembling a saint that just stepped off the front of a Romanesque cathedral, and lounging comfortably with his lanky limbs outstretched.
For interest’s sake I sent David a copy of a page of Dickens “Household Words” from 1851, as the closest precedent I knew for a collection of short literary pieces. Dickens published these weekly and for tuppence his forty thousand readers in London received a pamphlet of half a dozen stories every Saturday morning – a publication that today would almost certainly be a blog. When David saw this, he decided to adopt the same two column structure for Spitalfields Life, recognising that this format brought a pace and a dynamism to the flow of the type, and the font he chose was Miller by Matthew Carter, a redesign of a Scotch Roman face of a century ago which possesses subtle details, and that he characterised as “resolute.” What most appeals to me about David’s designs is that they do not look “designed,” they look as if they arrived how they are naturally and the success of his work on Spitalfields Life means that I could not now imagine the book any other way.
Like me, David likes to work late into the night when the phone stops ringing and the emails cease. “It’s a way to be able to pay attention to everything to the Nth degree,” he confided to me, “I can’t work quickly.” In spite of his success, David works long hours and weekends. “I’ll do this to the day I die if I’m allowed to!” he declared to me candidly, almost in a whisper.
David Pearson’s beautifully proportioned title page for Spitalfields Life.
Charles Dickens’ Household Words provided the inspiration for David Pearson’s page design.
David Pearson’s page design for Spitalfields Life.
David designed this book and compiled the covers.
David’s redesign of the penguin for Penguin Books.
Illustration by Joe McLaren
Artwork by Phil Baines
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The Cries Of London Lecture
As part of this year’s Bloomsbury Jamboree at the Art Workers’ Guild on Sunday 11th December, I shall be giving a illustrated lecture about my love for the CRIES OF LONDON, showing images of four hundred years of street life in the capital.
Cries of London 1600, reproduced from Samuel Pepys’ Album © Magdalene College, Cambridge
The dispossessed and those with no other income were always able to cry their wares for sale in London. By turning their presence into performance with their Cries, they claimed the streets as their theatre – winning the lasting affections of generations of Londoners and embodying the soul of the city in the popular imagination. Thus, through time, the culture of the capital’s street Cries became integral to the distinctive identity of London.
Undertaking interviews with stallholders in Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Columbia Road and other East End markets in recent years led me to consider the cultural legacy of urban street trading. While this phenomenon might appear transitory and fleeting, I discovered a venerable tradition in the Cries of London. Yet even this genre of popular illustrated prints, which began in the seventeenth century, was itself preceded by verse such as London Lackpenny attributed to the fifteenth century poet John Lydgate that drew upon an earlier oral culture of hawkers’ Cries. From medieval times, the great number of Cries in London became recognised by travellers throughout Europe as indicative of the infinite variety of life in the British capital.
Given the former ubiquity of the Cries of London, the sophistication of many of the images, their significance as social history, and their existence as almost the only portraits of working people in London through four centuries, it astonishes me that there has been little attention paid to this subject and so I have set out to reclaim this devalued cultural tradition.
I take my cue from Samuel Pepys who pasted three sets of Cries into his albums of London & Westminster in a chronological sequence spanning a century, thereby permitting an assessment of the evolution of the style of the prints as well as social change in the capital in his era. In my book, I have supplemented these with another dozen series published over the following centuries which trace the development of the Cries right into our own time. My policy has been to collate a personal selection of those that delight me, those that speak most eloquently of the life of the street and those created by artists who demonstrated an affinity with the Criers.
Through the narrow urban thoroughfares and byways, hawkers announced their wares by calling out a repeated phrase that grew familiar to their customers, who learned to recognise the Cries of those from whom they bought regularly. By nature of repetition, these Cries acquired a musical quality as hawkers improvised upon the sounds of the words, evolving phrases into songs. Commonly, Cries also became unintelligible to those who did not already know what was being sold. Sometimes the outcome was melodic and lyrical, drawing the appreciation of bystanders, and at other times discordant and raucous as hawkers strained their voices to be heard across the longest distance.
Over time, certain Cries became widely adopted, and it is in written accounts and songbooks that we find the earliest records. Print collections of pictures of Criers also became known as ‘Cries’ and although the oldest set in London dates from around 1600, there are those from Paris which predate these by a century. Characteristically, the Cries represented peripatetic street traders or pedlars, yet other street characters were also included from the start. At first, the Cries were supplemented by the bellman and the town crier, but then preachers, beggars, musicians, performers were added as the notion of the Cries of London became expanded by artists and print sellers seeking greater novelty through elaborating upon the original premise.
Before the age of traffic, the streets of London offered a common public space for all manner of activity, trading, commerce, sport, entertainment and political rallies. Yet this arena of possibility, which is the primary source of the capital’s cultural vitality has also invited the consistent attention of those who seek policing and social control upon the premise of protecting citizens from each other, guarding against crime and preventing civil unrest. It suits the interest of those who would rule the city that, in London, street traders have always been perceived as equivocal characters with an identity barely distinguished from vagrants. Thus the suspicion that their itinerant nature facilitated thieving and illicit dealing, or that women might be selling their bodies as as well as their legitimate wares has never been dispelled.
Like the internet, the notion of the street as a space where people may communicate and do business freely can be profoundly threatening to some. It is a tension institutionalised in this country through the issuing of licences to traders, criminalising those denied such official endorsement, while on the continent of Europe the right to sell in the street is automatically granted to every citizen. Depending upon your point of view, the itinerants are those who bring life to the city through their occupation of its streets or they are outcasts who have no place in a developed modern urban environment.
When I interviewed Tony Purser on his last afternoon after fifty-two years selling flowers outside Fenchurch Street Station in the City of London, he admitted to me that as a boy he assisted his father Alfie, and, before licences were granted in 1962, they were both regularly arrested. Their stock was confiscated, they were charged three shillings and spent the night in the cells at Bishopsgate Police Station, before going back to trade again next day.
Street trading proposes an interpretation of the ancient myth of London as a city paved with gold that is not without truth. Many large British corporate retailers including Tesco, started by Jack Cohen in 1919, Marks & Spencer, started by Michael Marks in 1884, owe their origin to single stalls in markets – emphasising the value of street trading to wider economic development.
In the twentieth century, the Cries of London found their way onto cigarette cards, chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, tea towels, silk scarves, dinner services and, famously, tins of Yardley talcum powder from 1912 onwards, becoming divorced from the reality they once represented as time went by, copied and recopied by different artists.
Yet the sentimentally cheerful tones applied by hand to prints that were contrived to appeal to the casual purchaser, chime with the resilience required by traders selling in the street. And it is our respect for their spirit and resourcefulness which may account for the long lasting popularity of these poignant images of the self-respecting poor who turned their trades into performances. Even now, it is impossible to hear the cries of market traders and newspaper sellers without succumbing to their spell, as the last reverberations of a great cacophonous symphony echoing across time and through the streets of London.
Surely none can resist the romance of the Cries of London and the raffish appeal of the liberty of vagabondage, of those who had no indenture or task master, and who travelled wide throughout the city, witnessing the spectacle of its streets, speaking with a wide variety of customers, and seeing life. In the densely-populated neighbourhoods, it was the itinerants’ cries that marked the times of day and announced the changing seasons of the year. Before the motorcar, their calls were a constant of street life in London. Before advertising, their songs were the jingles that announced of the latest, freshest produce or appealing gimcrack. Before radio, television and internet, they were the harbingers of news, and gossip, and novelty ballads. These itinerants had nothing but they had possession of the city.
The Cries of London have taught me the essential truth of London street traders down through the centuries, and it is one that still holds today – they do not need your sympathy, they only want your respect, and your money.
Costermonger by Marcellus Laroon, 1687 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
Pedlar by Marcellus Laroon, 1687 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
‘Two Bunches a Penny, Primroses, Two Bunches a Penny!’ The Primrose Seller by Francis Wheatley, 1793 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
‘Strawberries, Scarlet Strawberries’ by Francis Wheatley, 1793 (image courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
Hair Brooms outside Shoreditch Church by William Marshall Craig, 1804 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
Showman with a raree show at Hyde Park Corner by William Marshall Craig, 1804 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
‘Rabbit, Rabbit – Nice fat Rabbit!’ by Luke Clennell 1812 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
‘Lilies of the Valley, Sweet Lilies of the Valley’ by Luke Clennell 1812 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
Pickled Cucumbers by John Thomas Smith, 1816 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
The Flying Pie Man by John Thomas Smith, 1816 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
London boardmen & women by George Scharf 1825-33 © British Museum
Long Song Seller, engraved from a photograph by Richard Beard, 1851 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
Click here to buy a copy of my book of CRIES OF LONDON for £20
The Map Of East End Independents
Next Saturday is Small Business Saturday and East End Trades Guild are launching their beautiful new limited edition map of East End Independents design by Rob Ryan. You can study the preview below but large format printed copies will be available next Saturday exclusively from the shops on the map or by joining my tour.
I am hosting the new EAST END TRADES GUILD TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS on Saturday 3rd December at noon, telling the stories of the different local shops and their origins in this traditional heartland for small traders. An EETG cloth bag, a copy of Rob Ryan’s map, and small gifts from guild members are included in the ticket, along with refreshments served by a member of the guild at the end of the tour.
CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR TICKET
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