Harry Levenson, Bookmaker
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These are just some of the bouncing cheques presented by inveterate gambler Sidney Breton to Spitalfields’ first Bookmaker Harry Levenson and preserved today by his son David Levenson as momentos, eternally uncashed. Indicative of the scale of the compulsion, David has over a thousand pounds worth of these cheques dating from an era when the average salary was just £4 a week.
Before 1961, it was illegal to accept bets off the racecourse and there were no Betting Shops, only Commission Agents who – in theory – passed the bets onto the Bookmakers at the courses. Yet the Bookie’s Agents often took bets themselves, resulting in a lucrative business that existed in the shadows, and consequently – David Levenson revealed to me – the police took regular backhanders off his dad, until the change in the law. After that, Harry was able to obtain a permit and operate legally from his premises on the first floor at 13 Whites Row, conveniently placed for all the bettors who worked in the Spitalfields Market and Truman’s Brewery, as well as the passing trade down Commercial St.
David came to Spitalfields and we made a pilgrimage together to Whites Row to find the site of his late father’s betting shop, and I learnt that Harry’s career as a Bookmaker was just one in a series of interventions of chance that had informed the family history.
“My father was born in 1919 and grew up in Regal Place off Old Montague St. His father Hyman, a tailor, came from Latvia and his mother Sarah came from Lithuania or Belarus, and they met in London. I once asked my father why his parents came here but he said they never wanted to talk about it, and I knew about the pogroms against the Jews, so I imagine there were pretty bad things.
I think it was a tough childhood, but when my father spoke of it, it was with fondness. After school – he told me – he used to walk to his grandparents’ house and sit on the step and wait for his grandfather to come home from work, and his grandfather used to take him to buy sweets.
My dad told me he was there, standing with the other Jewish boys, when Mosley tried to march through Whitechapel in 1936 and he said all they had was rolled up copies of the News of the World to defend themselves.
His elder brother, Sam, had a barber’s shop and after he left school in the late thirties my dad went to work with him until war broke out, when my dad was twenty. He was the most peaceable man you could meet, but when he joined the army he said, “I want to fight at once, I don’t want to march about.” So they recruited him into the Isle of Man Regiment and he served as a gunner on a Bofors Gun. He became one of only forty soldiers from his Battery to escape alive from the battleground of Crete – none of the Jews that were captured ever returned. In January 1943, he suffered serious shrapnel wounds when several of his fellow gunners were killed by a direct aircraft attack near Tripoli. Then his father, Hyman, died while Harry was recuperating but he did not find out until months later when his brother Sam broke the news in a letter in July.
When my father came back on leave, he found just a bombsite where Regal Place had been and all the flats were destroyed. But he discovered the family had gone to Nathaniel Buildings in Flower & Dean St and everybody was safe. Incredibly, the bomb had fallen on the only night his father had ever gone to the shelter. They were calling out in the street for, “Any off-duty soldiers?” and my father spent his entire leave searching for bodies in bombed-out buildings.
I could see no relationship in my father’s life to what he had been through in the war – I think he wanted to start again. Afterwards, he simply went back to work in his brother’s barber shop. He learnt to cut hair and became a barber. He started getting tips for horses, so he phoned up his other brother who worked in a betting office and placed bets. There were no betting shops at the time – it was illegal – but people asked my father, “Why don’t you take bets yourself?” And as more as more people came to place bets than to have their hair cut, he was making more money from being a bookmaker than a barber. Because it wasn’t legal, he wasn’t paying tax, and he was walking around with thousands of pounds in his pocket. But you could never call our family wealthy, we were just middle class. So it is a mystery to me where the money went.
When my mother, Ivy, met him he was flush with cash and he used to drive a Jowett Javelin. She thought he was a millionaire. Although he was brought up Jewish, she was Church of England, so I am not Jewish and he never made any attempt to bring me up in the faith.
In 1961, the law changed and my dad obtained the first Bookmaker’s permit in Spitalfields. He moved the business out to Gospel Oak when I was about two, but he used to bring me back with him whenever he came visit his friend Dave Katz who had a factory making trousers off Commercial St. I remember walking around the streets when I was four or five years old, Spitalfields was frightening to a boy from the suburbs. It was a strange place.
My dad never gambled because he saw people lose all their money, and I’ve only ever had a little flutter myself – but my mother is ninety-three and she says it’s what keeps her going.”
Harry Levenson obtained the first bookmaker’s permit in Spitalfields in 1961.
Harry’s grandparents, Morris & Sarah Moliz.
Harry’s parents, Hyman & Sarah Levenson of Regal Place, Spitalfields,
Harry holds the card in his class photo at Robert Montefiore School, Deal St. c. 1925.
Harry at his Bar Mitzvah, Great Garden St Synagogue, Spitalfields, 1932.
Harry (left) with an army pal in Cairo, September 1941. On the reverse he wrote, “I wish this had been taken outside Vallance Rd Park instead.”
Harry & Ivy Levenson at their marriage in 1957.
Harry takes Ivy for a spin in his Jowett Javelin.
Harry’s synagogue card, which lapsed in 1957 at the time of his marriage.
Harry returns to Old Montague St in 1980.
Harry revisits the site of Regal Place, off Old Montague St, where he was born in 1919.
Harry at Vallance Rd Park.
Harry reunited with an army comrade on the Isle of Man in 1989.
Harry with his granddaughter Katy in 2005.
David Levenson revisits 13 Whites Row where his father ran the first betting shop in Spitalfields.
East End Desire Paths
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In Weavers’ Fields
Who can resist the appeal of the path worn solely by footsteps? I was never convinced by John Bunyan’s pilgrim who believed salvation lay in sticking exclusively to the straight path – detours and byways always held greater attraction for me. My experience of life has been that there is more to be discovered by stepping from the tarmac and meandering off down the dusty track, and so I delight in the possibility of liberation offered by these paths which appear year after year, in complete disregard to those official routes laid out by the parks department.
It is commonly believed that the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard invented the notion of “desire paths” (lignes de désir) to describe these pathways eroded by footfall in his book “The Poetics of Space,” in 1958, although, just like the mysterious provenance of these paths themselves, this origin is questioned by others. What is certain is that the green spaces of the East End are scored with them at this time of year. Sometimes, it is because people would rather cut a corner than walk around a right angle, at other times it is because walkers lack patience with elegantly contrived curved paths when they would prefer to walk in a straight line and occasionally it is because there is simply no other path leading where they want to go.
Resisting any suggestion that these paths are by their nature subversive to authority or indicative of moral decline, I prefer to appreciate them as evidence of human accommodation, coming into existence where the given paths fail and the multitude of walkers reveal the footpath which best takes them where they need to go. Yet landscape architects and the parks department refuse to be cowed by the collective authority of those who vote with their feet and, from time to time, little fences appear in a vain attempt to redirect pedestrians back on the straight and narrow.
I find a beauty in these desire paths which are expressions of collective will and serve as indicators of the memory of repeated human actions inscribed upon the landscape. They recur like an annual ritual, reiterated over and over like a popular rhyme, and asserting ownership of the space by those who walk across it every day. It would be an indication of the loss of independent thought if desire paths were no longer created and everyone chose to conform to the allotted pathways instead.
You only have to look at a map of the East End to see that former desire paths have been incorporated into the modern road network. The curved line of Broadway Market joins up with Columbia Rd cutting a swathe through the grid of streets, along an ancient drover’s track herding the cattle from London Fields down towards Smithfield Market, and the aptly named Fieldgate St indicates the beginning of what was once a footpath over the fields down to St Dunstan’s when it was the parish church for the whole of Tower Hamlets.
Each desire path tells a story, whether of those who cut a corner hurrying for the tube through Museum Gardens or of joggers who run alongside the tarmac path in London Fields or of the strange compromise enacted in Whitechapel Waste where an attempt has been made to incorporate desire paths into the landscape design. I am told that in Denmark landscape architects and planners go out after newly-fallen snow to trace the routes of pedestrians as an indicator of where the paths should be. Yet I do not believe that desire paths are a problem which can be solved because desire paths are not a problem, they are a heartening reminder of the irreducible nature of the human spirit that can never be contained and will always be wandering.
The parting of the ways in Museum Gardens.
The allure of the path through the trees.
In Bethnal Green, hungry for literature, residents cut across the rose bed to get to the library.
A cheeky little short cut.
An inviting avenue of plane trees in Weavers’ Fields.
A detour in Florida St.
A byway in Bethnal Green.
Legitimised by mowing in Allen Gardens, Spitalfields.
A pointless intervention in Shadwell.
Which path would you choose?
Over the hills and faraway in Stepney.
The triumph of common sense in Stepney Green.
Half-hearted appropriation by landscape architects on Whitechapel Waste.
A mystery in London Fields.
A dog-eared corner in Stepney.
The beginning of something in Bethnal Green.
East End Shopfronts
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S.Jones, Dairy, 187 Bethnal Green Rd
These splendid shopfronts from the beginning of the last century are published courtesy of Philip Mernick who has been collecting postcards of the East End for more than thirty years. In spite of their age, the photographs are of such high quality that they capture every detail and I could not resist enlarging parts of them so you can peer closer at the displays.
J.F. List, Baker, 418 Bethnal Green Rd
A.L.Barry, Chandlers & Seed Merchants, 246 Roman Rd
Direct Supply Stores Ltd, Butcher, Seven Sisters Rd
Vanhear’s Coffee Rooms, 564 Commercial Rd
Williams Bros, Ironmonger, 418 Caledonian Rd
Francis J. Walters, Undertakers, 811 Commercial Rd
Pearks Stores, Grocer, High St, East Ham
A. Rickards, Umbrella Manufacturer, 30 Barking Rd, East Ham
Huxtables Stores, Ironmonger, Broadway, Plaistow
E.J Palfreyman, Printer, Bookbinder & Stationer, High Rd, Leytonstone
J.Garwood, Greengrocer, Bow Rd
“The banana is the safest and most wholesome fruit there is”
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Alan Dein’s East End Shopfronts
Emily Webber’s East End Shopfronts
At John Keats’ House
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“Much more comfortable than a dull room upstairs, where one gets tired of the pattern of the bed curtains” – Keats was moved to this room on 8th February 1820 at the onset of tuberculosis
I set out with the intention to photograph the morning sunshine in John Keats’ study at his house in Hampstead. Upon my arrival, the sky turned occluded yet I realised this overcast day was perhaps better suited to the literary history that passed between these walls two centuries ago. The property was never Keats’ House in any real sense but, rather, where he had a couple of rooms for eighteen months as a sub-let in a shared dwelling.
Born in a tavern in Moorgate in 1795, where the Globe stands today, and baptised at St Botolph’s Bishopsgate, John Keats was ridiculed by John Gibson Lockhart in Blackwood’s magazine in 1817 for being of the ‘Cockney School,’ implying his rhymes suggested working class speech. Qualifying at first as an Apothecary and then studying to be a Surgeon, in 1816 John Keats sacrificed both these professions in favour of poetry. “It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved Apothecary than a starved Poet, so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,” wrote Lockhart condescendingly, but Keats was not dissuaded from his chosen path.
Early on the morning of 1st December 1818, after passing the night nursing his brother Tom through the terminal stage of tuberculosis at 1 Well Walk, Hampstead, John Keats walked down the hill to the semi-detached villas known as Wentworth Place to visit his friend Charles Armitage Brown. He invited Keats to move in with him, sharing his half of the house and contributing to the household expenses.
John Keats’ arrival at Wentworth Place was also the entry to a time when he found love with Fanny Brawne, who moved in with her mother to the other half of the villa, as well as his arrival at the period of his greatest creativity as a poet. It was a brief interlude that was brought to an end in early 1820 when Keats discovered he had tuberculosis like his brother, from whom he had almost certainly contracted the infection.
Within three weeks of moving in, Keats suffered from a severe sore throat and worried for his own health as he struggled to complete his epic ‘Hyperion,’ yet his spirits were raised by an invitation for Christmas from Mrs Brawne at Elm Cottage and the growing attachment to her daughter Fanny, whom he had previously described as “animated, lively and even witty.”
In April, the tenants vacated the other part of Wentworth Place and Mrs Brawne moved in with her daughters, which meant that John Keats met the eighteen-year-old Fanny Brawne continuously in the gardens that surround the house. At any moment, he might glance her from the window and thus their affection grew, leading to the understanding of an engagement for marriage between them. This romance coincided with a flowering of creativity on Keats’ part, including the composition of of his celebrated ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ inspired by hearing the nightingale sing while on a walk across Hampstead Heath
Yet Keats spent the summer away from Hampstead, visiting the Isle of Wight, Winchester and Bath, while engaging in an emotionally-conflicted correspondence with Fanny and pursuing the flow of poetic composition that had begun in the spring. Although Keats wrote to Brown of his attraction to return to Fanny, admitting “I like and cannot help it,” perversely he took rooms in Great College St rather than moving back to Wentworth Place. But on Keats’ return to Hampstead to collect his possessions on 10th October, Fanny Brawne opened the door to him and he was smitten by her generosity and confidence, and his hesitation dissolved. He moved back to Wentworth Place almost at once and presented Fanny with a garnet ring, even though he could not afford to marry.
Living in such close proximity to the object of his affection led Keats to adopt a vegetarian diet in the hope of lessening his physical desire. During the long harsh winter that followed, Keats was often isolated at Wentworth Place by heavy snow and freezing fog, making only occasional trips down to London to visit literary friends. Catching a late coach back to Hampstead, Keats had left his new warm coat behind at Wentworth Place and sat on the top of the coach to save money. Descending in Pond St, Keats felt feverish but, by the time he reached Wentworth Place, he was coughing blood and realised he had suffered a lung haermorrhage. Yet he wrote that all he could think of was, “the love that has been my pleasure and torment.” He was twenty-four years old.
At first Mrs Brawne tried to keep Fanny and John Keats apart in the tiny house and he wrote her twenty-two letters in six weeks, but it proved impossible to sustain the separation and she permitted her daughter to visit him every day while he was recuperating. Keats could not see her without recognising that death would separate them and he wrote a poem entitled ‘To Fanny’ in recrimination against himself.
The tragedy of the situation was compounded when Brown, Keats’ landlord, decided to lease his part of Wentworth Place, forcing Keats to leave in the spring. At the beginning of May, he moved to cheaper lodgings in Kentish Town, still within a mile of Fanny Brawne. In July, ‘Hyperion’ was published but by then he realised was living in the shadow of death and told a friend he was suffering from a broken heart.
In August, Keats went to Wentworth Place in distress and laid himself upon the mercy of Mrs Brawne, who took him in and permitted him to live under the same roof as her daughter for a few weeks before he travelled to Italy for his health. On Wednesday 13th September 1820, John Keats walked with Fanny Brawne from Wentworth Place to the coach stop in Pond Place and they said their last farewells. Fanny went home and wrote “Mr Keats left Hampstead” in her copy of the Literary Pocket Book that he gave her for Christmas 1818. They did not meet again and Keats never returned to Wentworth Place, dying in Rome on 23rd February 1821.
Within decades, the railway came to Hampstead and then the tube train, and the village became a suburb. An actress bought Wentworth Place, redeveloping it by combining the two houses into one and adding a large dining room on the side. In 1920, the house was threatened with demolition to make way for a block of flats. However, funds were raised to restore the house as a memorial to Keats. Thus you may visit it today and enter the place John Keats and Fanny Brawne fell in love, and where he wrote some of the greatest poems in our language.
John Keats in 1819 when he lived at Wentworth Place
Wentworth Place, completed 1816 as one of the first houses to be built in Lower Hampstead Heath
John Keats lived here
In John Keats’ study
The right hand room on the ground floor was John Keats’ study and the room above was his bedroom
Keats’ room where he learnt he had tuberculosis which had killed his brother Tom a year earlier
“Dearest Fanny … They say I must remain confined to this room for some time. The consciousness that you love me will make a pleasant prison of the house next to yours.” 4th February, 1820
In Fanny Brawne’s room
The boiler for hot water. The house had no running water which had to be brought from the pump.
The Mulberry tree is believed to have been planted in the seventeenth century and predates the house.
The death mask in John Keats’ bedroom at Wentworth Place
The font at St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, where John Keats was baptised in 1795
Visit Keats House, Keats Grove, Hampstead, NW3 2RR
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The Alleys Of Old London
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I set out in the footsteps of Alan Stapleton seeking London’s Alleys, Byways & Courts that he drew and published in a book in 1923, which I first encountered in the archive at Bishopsgate Institute.
It is a title that is an invitation to one as susceptible as myself to meander through the capital’s forgotten thoroughfares and my surprising discovery was how many of these have survived in recognisable form today.
Clearly a kindred spirit, Stapleton prefaces his work with the following quote from Dr Johnson (who lived in a square at the end of an alley) – ‘If you wish to have a notion of the magnitude of this great city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but survey its innumerable little lanes and courts.’
Jerusalem Passage, Clerkenwell
Jerusalem Passage, Clerkenwell
St John’s Passage, Clerkenwell
St John’s Passage, Clerkenwell
Passing Alley, Clerkenwell
Passing Alley, Clerkenwell
In Pear Tree Court, Clerkenwell
In Pear Tree Court, Clerkenwell
Faulkner’s Alley, Clerkenwell
Faulkner’s Alley, Clerkenwell
Red Lion Passage, Holborn
Red Lion Passage is now Lamb’s Conduit Passage, Holborn
Devereux Court, Strand
Devereux Court, Strand
Corner of Kingly St & Foubert’s Place, Soho
Corner of Kingly St & Foubert’s Place, Soho
Market St, Mayfair
Market St is now Shepherd Market, Mayfair
Crown Court, St James
Crown Court is now Crown Place, St James
Rupert Court, Soho
Rupert Court, Soho
Meard St, Soho
Meard St, Soho
Alan Stapleton’s images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Townhouse Open Exhibition 2022
Tickets are available for my walking tour this weekend and throughout July.
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The George Tavern, Commercial Rd, by Jonathan Madden
Here are a few favourites from this year’s Townhouse Open Exhibition which opens on Wednesday 13th July. Meanwhile, you only have today to catch Doreen Fletcher’s show which closes this afternoon at 5pm.
In The City It’s Hard To Be Alone by Steve Wilde
Interior In Morning Light, Breakfast, by Eleanor Crow
Street Painting by Dave Edmond
Summer by Janet Keith
Last Orders by Michelle Heron
Candy by Emma Davis
On The 254 Bus by Nicholas Borden
Home Inside by Cinzia Castellano
Time For Tea by Lara Voce
London Fields by Marie Lenclos
New Cross Barbers by Paul Flanders
Remembering Dennis Severs
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Reflections at Dennis Severs’ House
Over recent months, Contributing Photographer Lucinda Douglas Menzies has begun a series of portraits of those who knew and remember Dennis Severs (1948-99), while I have undertaken the accompanying interviews which reveal different aspects of his multi-facetted personality.
Martin Lane
‘I was his good friend and neighbour. Dennis often came round for coffee or I would come here and sit in the kitchen. Mostly this was in the morning, seldom in the evening. Though, if I was giving a dinner party, I would invite Dennis to make up numbers.
I recall he told stories of his youth in America, coming over to London and meeting people who were interested in old houses and restoration. But details of our frivolous conversation at these drink-fuelled parties are now beyond me to remember.
One was very excited that Dennis had taken a wreck and was recreating it. He was operating on a shoestring and he needed to earn the money to keep it going and he ploughed it back in. It was an endless string of botched rescue jobs with minimal money.
As a member of the public, one was mesmerised by Dennis’ tours. You left the parlour with a tear in your eye at the death of Queen Victoria. Eventually he achieved such a high profile that if anyone interrupted and he did not like them, he simply threw them out of the house.
Dennis slotted in anywhere and could mix with anyone from a dustman to a duke. I liked his style and imagination. I think it took an American to appreciate our local history.
When he first arrived, he was going through his English stage, clean shaven with flowing hair, in a Harris tweed sports jacket. Then there came a time when he grew sufficiently relaxed with his sexuality and became himself, with t-shirt and jeans – the butch look.
Why, once he got the credit for being an American who rescued a bit of British history, should he act any other than as an American? Until the day he died, his bomber jacket hung in Mrs Jervis’ bedroom where he slept with his typewriter.’
Anna Skrine, former secretary of Spitalfields Trust
‘My sister Fiona & I moved into a derelict Georgian house in Wilkes St in the seventies when the houses had been uninhabited for a long time. Bengali people saw us and asked, ‘What are you doing? You’re mad!’
Of course, we met Dennis very quickly. At that time, he was slowly doing up his house and collecting pallets from the old fruit and vegetable market – it was in full swing then – and making panelling out of them. We often saw each other at the Brick Lane junk market too.
We became good mates. Dennis was the most vital person you could meet – effusive, full-on, generous and kind – and with such an interesting take on life, history and imagination. It was incredible what he did, collecting all these chipped bits and pieces, he knew exactly what he needed and would take them back to his house and slot them in.
Of course, his tours were just amazing – magical from the moment you walked in the door. I loved the stories he told about the house. But it was not just the stories, he explained how particular words came into the language too.
There was a side of him that was very intolerant of anyone that did not ‘get’ what he was on about, so occasionally he would tell someone, ‘Off you go, out the door!’ I came on quite a few tours and brought quite a few people because I did love them.
My most special memories are of his Christmas parties. The beauty of the Drawing Room hung with red apples and, on the landing outside, a beautiful piece of china full of the most elegant looking sweets and candied fruits.
Occasionally, we would all dress up in eighteenth century things we found in flea markets and have a get-together here. Once I said something that would have been quite of place in the eighteenth century and Dennis told me later, ‘That was the end of it when you said that!!’
We were great friends for quite a number of years. I was studying nutrition because I wanted to sing and, when he became ill, I used to bring him over healthy salads.’
Stephen Furniss, Antiques Dealer
‘I worked at Bonhams and Dennis turned up one day in 1973 to work as a porter and we became good chums. We were porters together in the picture department.
I understood that his grandfather had built a petrol station in Pasadena and the city grew up around it so they made a large amount of money as the only petrol station.
Most Saturdays, he and I would go to Portobello together. We started off at the Westway and walked the entire length of the market. He would buy damaged items because they were fine for display and I would buy perfect things to sell. He was particularly fond of an English porcelain called ‘Amherst Japan,’ and you have it all downstairs in the kitchen today.
Then he started up his carriage tours and I remember seeing him doing the tours around South Kensington. He was friendly with a lady called Jane Seabrook who ran a florists and one day she looked out of her shop and there was Dennis with the coach going by. She thought he was so marvellous that they became good friends. I remember the three of us went fly-pitching in Brick Lane Market. She was selling flowerpots while Dennis was buying more than he was selling.
One day, Dennis came into Bonhams and said, ‘I’ve just bought this house in Spitalfields.’ I said, ‘Where on earth is that?’ and he explained ‘It’s right out in the East End of London, I’d like you to come and see it.’ So one lunch break, a number of us from Bonhams trooped over here and we had never seen anything like it, it was unbelievable. Firstly, the whole experience of the East End was very Dickensian. Dennis had bought the house with a sitting tenant, an elderly Jewish gentleman, and on the day Dennis signed the lease, the tenant died so he got freehold possession.
Dennis worked on the house room by room and we would come back to see how he was getting on. He invited us for meals, consisting of vegetables that he had picked out of the gutter in the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market. All the walnuts for the Grinling Gibbons style swags came out of the gutter too!’
Ricardo Cinalli, Artist
‘Dennis & I met in Gloucester Rd once, accidentally. I saw this man with a coach and horses, and a grand hat, formally dressed. I said to myself, ‘This is fantastic, this is London – what a crazy, eccentric person!’
A couple of years later, when I was restoring the door case on Eric Elstob’s house, 14 Fournier St, I saw Dennis standing on the other side of the road. I asked myself, ‘What is he doing in Spitalfields?’ because in the late seventies very few people walked around here. Then I went to the Market Cafe and there he was. And we ate roast beef together and got on like wildfire. We became very close because we were both in the same boat.
I followed his project from the very beginning. The house Eric & I lived in was much grander and Dennis’ house more compact, but it had this atmosphere.
I visited his house for parties – a million parties – they were amazing because you were transported to another time and another life, especially in the Smoking Room where Dennis prepared his delicious punch. They were parties for ‘gentlemen’ in the Smoking Room.
Dennis had a lavish life, a day life and a night life. I always asked ‘Dennis, please take me out at night,’ but he told me ‘You are too soft…’ Except one day, he said, ‘Let’s go to a party’ and we went just around the corner from here. I could not believe it because the place was completely ‘Sodom & Gomorrah,’ full of people and machines. It was a sex dungeon. I was not uncomfortable, but at some point I left.
Dennis was one of the most peculiar characters I ever encountered. He had the most extraordinary life and he was a celebrity too because everybody knew about his house.
He was one of the first men I knew to get HIV and then life was different once he knew he was ill. It was very sad. What happened to Simon Pettet was a tragedy because he was adored by everybody and so talented. The house was a great inspiration to Simon and he made the wonderful fireplace of Delft tiles with all the portraits. Simon was very much loved by Dennis and it was a big blow to him when Simon died.’
Fiona Skrine
‘You could never take California out of Dennis. He was passionate, enthusiastic and very opinionated. It was refreshing. He was a Californian in his use of language, his cutting through stuffiness or fustiness, his enthusiasm – being round the markets collecting all the bits and pieces – and his appreciation of this country. Growing up in California there were not the historic houses that we have, so he just loved it here.
I met Dennis when my sister Anna and I restored an eighteenth century house in Wilkes St. She was the secretary of the Spitalfields Trust, so we knew everybody. The Market Cafe in Fournier St was key for us because we had no windows and barely any floors – a decent lunch was vital – and Dennis would there at the cafe. There would be bickering and gossiping, ‘Have you seen the colour that so-and-so has painted their walls, isn’t it awful?!’ We all fed off each other’s enthusiasm and it was great fun.
I loved his Christmas parties, everyone who had an old house locally was invited. It was great fun, the darkness and the gossip – it was a great opportunity to get into a huddle with somebody and have a really good conversation.
I was a mother with three small children at the time but I used to pop round. I remember he had a couple of assistants who helped him with tours, scurrying around organising sound effects and making sure the smells were just right. I used to hear a lot from other people about doing the tours and who had been thrown for being a Guardian reader or sniggering or not taking Dennis seriously enough. He was pretty brutal in this respect.
I met someone in Ireland the other day who said, ‘I went on one of those tours and I was derogatory because I like things to be authentic and it was not, so we got thrown out.’ ‘They just didn’t get it!’ was what Dennis would say.’
Simon de Courcy-Wheeler, Photographer
‘Dennis was an absolute true eccentric. I did not see a great deal of him but, whenever I did, I thoroughly enjoyed him.
He was a sort of genius and he was in the middle of creating this house. He did most of it through Brick Lane which was full of junk markets them. So he was a real inspiration and the centre of the Spitalfields movement for everybody.
I am a photographer and I was looking for free accommodation because I had very little money. My uncle said, ‘I can help you, you can look after 17 Princelet St.’ And lived there for a couple of years.
At that time, Fiona Skrine (my future wife) lived nearby in Wilkes with her sister Anna who was secretary of the Spitalfields Trust. In those days, everyone knew everyone else – friends one day then falling out the next day and friends again the next!
Dennis, in particular, had a very fiery relationship with all sorts of people, but then he always seemed to make it up again.
Of course, the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market was still here. There were working girls on the street, and tramps sitting around the bonfire and peeing into your basement. We knew them all by name. It was dirty and there were rats on the street, but everybody was passionate about saving these old houses.
Fiona and her sister fell in love with the idea of doing up a Georgian house – I think they paid fourteen thousand for 14 Wilkes St. It did not have windows or a great many original features but it had enough to be seductive.
Dennis was always organising parties and they were a good craic. There was a lot of drinking and hilarity. It is a sort of environment you do not find anymore. Old Dublin where I come from was like that – a very informal way of entertaining. You just turned up and Dennis’ parties were heaving.
He was a real mover and shaker, and it was tragedy that he and his boyfriend, Simon, both died. Looking back on it now, it was such a loss.’
Grant Burnside
‘I met Dennis in a leather bar, The Coleherne in Earls Court, when I was twenty-two. I was a pretty boy and he liked me because I was cute and had an East London accent. He thought I was rough trade, I was the East End ginger boy and he liked that.
We had a kiss and I found him very attractive. He was a handsome man with a close-shaved beard – a good-looking fella and different to all the other guys. They were dressed in an eighties clone style with vests, leather jackets, moustaches and caps, it was all very Tom of Finland.
Dennis stood out because he was wearing a coloured baseball jacket and cap, and he was American and I had just come back from a trip to New York. I was an Essex boy living with my parents, but itching to discover and explore life.
Then I bumped into him one day in Bishopsgate. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked me and I explained, ‘I work up the road.’ I was working in a bank in Basinghall St as a messenger boy. We often went for a cup of tea in the City Corner Cafe in Middlesex St during my lunch hour.
I didn’t see Dennis again for ten years but then I met him again at the Copacabana in Earls Court Rd which was one of the first bear bars in London. By then I had a boyfriend and there is a photograph of us chatting with Dennis which was published in the ‘Out on the Scene’ section of ‘Boyz’ magazine. He was trying to get us both to come back with him but we were not into that kind of thing.
He was interesting and sexy, and every time we met we had a nice little snog. When he first invited me back to his house, I said, ‘I can’t go back to a house that doesn’t have any lights or hot water! I have to get up in the morning and wash and go to work in a suit.’ I was not so daring in those days but, had I come back here, it might have spoiled a nice connection that we had.
I first visited his house not long after he died and it filled my senses, I thought ‘I can do this,’ and I renovated a grade II listed Georgian cottage in Walmer outside Deal.
I was really sad when I found out he had died.’
Patrick Handscombe, Friend of Simon Pettet & Dennis Severs
“I met Dennis first in the seventies when he was tousle-haired Californian surfing boy.
In 1989 at The Market Tavern, a gay pub at Nine Elms, I met Simon Pettet who came to stand beside me, eating cheese and onion crisps. ‘They smell dreadful,’ I said and he replied, ‘I’m only eating them to stand next to you. Do you want to come back to my place in Spitalfields?’ So we go out to my Rolls Royce and he said, ‘Is this your car?’ and I said, ‘It’s not the most usual car!’ and he said, ‘I live in a very unusual house.’ I replied, ‘I guess you live in Dennis Severs’ House?’
We spent a night of passion, it was wonderful. Dennis was in America but when he returned Simon rang and asked me to dinner. Dennis was delighted Simon had found someone he already knew and Simon was pleased that Dennis approved. I spent a lot of nights here and then I lived here for about nine months, until Simon switched me off. I was floored.
Dennis put me onto Rodney Archer so I lived at 31 Fournier St for four years. Then one morning the phone rang and it was Simon. He said, ‘Don’t panic, I’m in hospital.’ He had pneumonia and the question was where would he live. He knew already that he had HIV but now he had AIDS.
Dennis said Simon could not live in his house any more. He had HIV himself. Deep down, I think he was frightened. Dennis was the love of Simon’s life but, in the end, Dennis was a loner and one of the most promiscuous men in London.
Marianna Kennedy arranged for Simon to live at 27 Fournier St and he lasted a couple of years there until he died at twenty-eight years old. He opened up to me again and I looked after him. There was no treatment then and Simon got ill with different things, but he was terrifically brave.
Late one night, I lost my leg driving Simon’s motorbike – I left it in Lewisham High St. I swerved and caught my leg on an unlit skip, and it ripped my leg off. The bike was undamaged but I lay with my leg hanging off.
I got out of hospital and went back to Simon. The doctor said, ‘If you had not had Simon to look after, you would have wallowed.’’
Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Tickets are available for Dennis Severs’ Tour at Dennis Severs’ House
