Twenty New Paintings By Nicholas Borden
Some tickets are available for my tour of Spitalfields next Thursday 30th June
I have been regularly publishing the work of painter Nicholas Borden since we first met, when he was painting on the street in Bethnal Green in 2013, and these twenty painting comprise his work of the past year.
Kelly’s Pie & Mash, Roman Rd
On a 254 bus
Ten Bells
Kenton Rd, Hackney
Monger’s Almshouses, Meynell Crescent
St Paul’s Cathedral
In Whitehall
St Martin’s Lane
Camden Lock
Marquess Tavern
Piccadilly Circus
St Mary’s, Islington
Council Housing Block, Hackney
Sutton Place
Blocks with winter trees
St John of Jerusalem, Hackney
Natural History Museum Ice Rinks
Covent Garden
Greenhouse Effect
Brighton Pier
Paintings copyright © Nicholas Borden
Email nicholasborden100@yahoo.co.uk to enquire about any of these paintings
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Nicholas Borden’s Lockdown Paintings
Nicholas Borden’s Latest Paintings
Catching Up With Nicholas Borden
Nicholas Borden’s East End View
Nicholas Borden’s Winter Paintings
Nicholas Borden’s Spring Paintings
Six Days Left To Save Brick Lane!
Tonight is the benefit concert at Rich Mix to raise money for next week’s Judicial Review at the High Court
CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS FOR TONIGHT
The Judicial Review of Tower Hamlets Council’s undemocratic approval of the destructive Truman Brewery scheme for an ugly shopping mall and corporate offices is due to take place at the High Court next week on Wednesday June 29th. (We will publish a link for readers to watch)
The Save Brick Lane coalition brought the action against the Council after two members out of a Planning Committee of only three voting members chose to ignore the wishes of 7476 objectors – more than 1300 of whom were local residents – in order to push through the disastrous planning application.
Unfortunately, once planning consent has been granted it cannot be revoked. So the only recourse now open to the people who objected is to seek a legal investigation into the irregular processes by which the permission was granted. If it can be proven at the Judicial Review that the Planning Committee was deliberately misled and restructured to deny some Committee members the votes they were entitled to – and which their electorate deserved – the consent will automatically be quashed.
One encouraging development has been the election of a new Mayor of Tower Hamlets who is vociferously and eloquently opposed to the Truman Brewery scheme. Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s list of immediate priorities includes working on a community-focussed alternative to the current plan – and in a vigorous article for Jacobin magazine he committed to ending “the slow destruction of our local heritage, most grimly represented by the Truman Brewery on world-famous Brick Lane being handed over to luxury developers.”
The controversial scheme develops the south-eastern corner of the historic Truman Brewery site at the junction of Brick Lane and Woodseer St, by inserting a huge block, comprising a steel and glass shopping mall with corporate offices looming high overhead. The new buildings will be out of proportion to the historic terraces, at rents few local people can afford, and draining business away from the small-scale local shops and restaurants in the surrounding streets, which form the character and economic backbone of Brick Lane.
7476 people objected while only 82 supported the scheme. The plans were put forward to Tower Hamlets’ Planning Committee in April 2021, but the applicant was asked to make amendments and the decision was deferred. Shortly afterwards, the Planning Committee was restructured and, when the Committee met again in September 2021, they were told that only those members who had been there in April could vote on the revised scheme. We believe this is incorrect and all of the Committee members could have voted. Only four people on the new Committee had been there in April, but one of them was told she could not vote because she was dialling into the meeting due to Covid. Again, we believe this is incorrect.
By misleading the Committee, the approval of the scheme was secured by a vote of two against one and the wishes of the people were overridden. Ultimately, this is not just about bad design, protecting our vibrant communities and historic built environment, it is about democracy.
We urgently need your support to stop this scheme, halt the corporate shopping mall and Save Brick Lane. A clock is ticking and we only have until 29th June to reach our target – six days!
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR FIGHTING FUND FOR THE JUDICIAL REVIEW
Photograph copyright © David Hoffman
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Grayson Perry’s End Of Covid Bell
Book now for THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS
Installation at the Royal Academy
The Royal Academy Summer Show opens today which features the public debut of Grayson Perry’s ‘End of Covid Bell’ that he made in support of our ongoing campaign to Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
This is the first of an ambitious series of projects devised to establish the centrality of bells within our culture, recognising their long history in marking time, mourning death and celebrating life. Grayson’s bell was cast under the auspices of ‘The London Bell Foundry,’ the company established to take over the former Whitechapel Bell Foundry and re-open it as a working foundry.
“I’ve always wanted to make a bell,” admitted Grayson, “it is one of the categories of objects that are traditional and potent. This bell I conceived as a memorial to the dead of the pandemic, it is covered in what looks like an aerial view of a multicultural cemetery. It also features a doctor and a patient. It could also be rung as a celebration that we have survived.”
Nigel Taylor – who was foreman at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry for forty years – worked closely with Grayson, tuning the bell to ensure that it delivers a suitably resonant chime. Without access to the foundry in Whitechapel, the bell was fabricated by Factum Arte in Spain, cast by Pangolin Foundry, Gloucestershire and tuned at Nicholson Engineering in Dorset.
After the Royal Academy, we hope to transfer the bell to the Royal London Hospital, where those who experienced bereavement due to Covid can come to toll it in commemoration of their loss. We would like the bell to undertake a tour of major hospitals throughout the country next year.
Meanwhile down in Whitechapel, the historic foundry buildings sit forlorn, unaltered and occupied by property guardians indefinitely. Post-Covid, it is evident that the boutique hotel proposal is no longer viable. The developer’s commitment to employing the old foundry buildings as workshops for local people – which we believe they entered into to make the planning application acceptable – renders the notion of an upscale hotel at the rear problematic at best.
Grayson Perry’s maquette for his ‘End of Covid Bell’
Rob Ryan’s logo for The London Bell Foundry
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The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
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The Secretary of State steps in
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14 Whitechapel Bell Foundry Poems
Rory Stewart Supports Our Campaign
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Adam Dant’s Bells of Whitechapel
Dorothy Rendell at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
People On The Street & A Cat
Some tickets are available for my tour of Spitalfields next Saturday 25th June
Brick Lane 1966
“Sometimes there is no reason, but you have to do it and that’s what makes magical things happen.” photographer John Claridge said, introducing this set of pictures,“There is no why or wherefore of doing it, because it’s not from the head – it’s from the heart.”
I took John’s declaration as a description of his state of rapture as he wandered the pavements of the East End to take these photographs of people on the street, going about their daily lives.“I used to get up early and walk around,” he confided to me and I understood the sense of loneliness that haunts these evocative pictures, in which the subjects appear distant like spectres, self-absorbed and lost in thought.
“The important word is ‘request'” said John, speaking of the photo of the man at the request bus stop, “He’s in some kind of world that we are not party to.” In John’s youthful vision – enthralled by the writing of Franz Kafka – the East End street became an epic stage where an existential drama was enacted, peopled by characters journeying through a strange landscape of forbidding beauty.
John knew he was photographing a poor society within a poverty stricken environment, but he was a part of it and held great affection for it. “Just another day of people walking around,” he concluded to me with uneasy levity – emphasising that while these images are emblematic of a world which time may have rendered exotic, it is also world that was once commonplace to him.
Whitechapel, 1960
Whitechapel, 1981.
E13, 1962 -“This was taken from my window at home.”
Spitalfields, 1962 – “They look like they are up to no good.”
Whitechapel, 1968 -“Where did the boy get that peaked cap?”
Spitalfields, 1961. -“An old man stops to light up.”
Spitalfields, 1961 – “A moment, a story in itself.”
Whitechapel, 1982
Spitalfields, 1982 – “I walked past her and just grabbed the picture as I went by.”
Spitalfields, 1962
Spitalfields, 1968 – “The dog is looking at the rubbish in exactly the same way as the man is looking at the rubbish.”
At the ’59 Club, 1973
Weavers’ Fields, 1959 An old lady walks across a bombsite in Bethnal Green.
Whitechapel, 1964
E16, 1964 –“The important word is ‘request.’ He’s in some kind of world that we are not party to.”
Whitechapel, 1982
E16, 1982 -“He’s going home to his dinner.”
Princelet St, 1962 – “Just a man and a pigeon.”
Spitalfields, 1968 -“I like the shadows, where they’re falling.”
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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Visit Culpeper’s Spitalfields
Click here to book for my tour and visit Culpeper’s Spitalfields with me!
Ragwort in Hanbury St
(The concoction of the herb is good to wash the mouth, and also against the quinsy and the king’s evil)
Taking the opportunity to view the plaque upon the hairdresser at the corner of Puma Court and Commercial St, commemorating where Nicholas Culpeper lived and wrote The English Herbal, the celebrated seventeenth century Herbalist returned to his old neighbourhood for a visit and I was designated to be his guide.
Naturally, he was a little disoriented by the changes that time has wrought to Red Lion Fields where he once cultivated herbs and gathered wild plants for his remedies. Disinterested in new developments, instead he implored me to show him what wild plants were left and thus we set out together upon a strange quest, seeking weeds that have survived the urbanisation. You might say we were searching for the fields in Spitalfields since these were plants that were here before everything else.
Let me admit, I did feel a responsibility not to disappoint the old man, as we searched the barren streets around his former garden. But I discovered he was more astonished that anything at all had survived and thus I photographed the hardy specimens we found as a record, published below with Culpeper’s own annotations.
Honeysuckle in Buxton St (I know of no better cure for asthma than this, besides it takes away the evil of the spleen, provokes urine, procures speedy delivery of women in travail, helps cramps, convulsions and palsies and whatsoever griefs come of cold or stopping.)
Dandelion in Fournier St (Vulgarly called Piss-a-beds, very effective for obstructions of the liver, gall and spleen, powerful cleans imposthumes. Effectual to drink in pestilential fevers and to wash the sores. The juice is good to be applied to freckles, pimples and spots.)
Campion in Bishop’s Sq (Purges the body of choleric humours and helps those that are stung by Scorpions and other venomous beasts and may be as effectual for the plague.)
Pellitory of the Wall in Hanbury St (For an old or dry cough, the shortness of breath, and wheezing in the throat. Wonderfully helps stoppings of the urine.)
Herb Robert in Folgate St (Commended not only against the stone, but to stay blood, where or howsoever flowing, and it speedily heals all green wounds and is effectual in old ulcers in the privy parts.)
Sow Thistle in Princelet St (Stops fluxes, bleeding, takes away cold swellings and eases the pains of the teeth)
Groundsel off Brick Lane (Represses the heat caused by motions of the internal parts in purges and vomits, expels gravel in the veins or kidneys, helps also against the sciatica, griping of the belly, the colic, defects of the liver and provokes women’s courses.)
Ferns and Campanula and in Elder St (Ferns eaten purge the body of choleric and waterish humours that trouble the stomach. The smoke thereof drives away serpents, gnats and other noisome creatures which in fenny countries do trouble and molest people lying their beds.)
Sow Thistle and Herb Robert in Elder St
Yellow Wood Sorrel and Sow Thistle in Puma Court (The roots of Sorrel are held to be profitable against the jaundice.)
Comfrey in Code St (Helps those that spit blood or make a bloody urine, being outwardly applied is specially good for ruptures and broken bones, and to be applied to women’s breasts that grow sore by the abundance of milk coming into them.)
Sow Thistle in Fournier St
Field Poppy in Allen Gardens (A syrup is given with very good effect to those that have the pleurisy and is effectual in hot agues, frenzies and other inflammations either inward or outward.)
Fleabane at Victoria Cottages (Very good to heal the nipples and sore breasts of women.)
Sage and Wild Strawberries in Commercial St (The juice of Sage drank hath been of good use at time of plagues and it is commended against the stitch and pains coming of wind. Strawberries are excellent to cool the liver, the blood and the spleen, or an hot choleric stomach, to refresh and comfort the fainting spirits and quench thirst.)
Hairy Bittercress in Fournier St (Powerful against the scurvy and to cleanse the blood and humours, very good for those that are dull or drowsy.)
Oxe Eye Daisies in Allen Gardens (The leaves bruised and applied reduce swellings, and a decoction thereof, with wall-wort and agrimony, and places fomented or bathed therewith warm, giveth great ease in palsy, sciatica or gout. An ointment made thereof heals all wounds that have inflammation about them.)
Herb Robert in Fournier St
Camomile in Commercial St (Profitable for all sorts of agues, melancholy and inflammation of the bowels, takes away weariness, eases pains, comforts the sinews, and mollifies all swellings.)
Unidentified herb in Commercial St
Buddleia in Toynbee St (Aids in the treatment of gonorrhea, hepatitis and hernia by reducing the fragility of skin and small intestine’s blood vessel.)
Hedge Mustard in Fleur de Lys St (Good for all diseases of the chest and lungs, hoarseness of voice, and for all other coughs, wheezing and shortness of breath.)
Buttercup at Spitalfields City Farm (A tincture with spirit of wine will cure shingles very expeditiously, both the outbreak of small watery pimples clustered together at the side, and the accompanying sharp pains between the ribs. Also this tincture will promptly relieve neuralgic side ache, and pleurisy which is of a passive sort.)
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Rob Ryan, Papercut Artist & Designer
Book now for THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS
A few tickets remain for Rob Ryan at the Bloomsbury Jamboree next Sunday 26th June 3:45pm at the Art Workers’ Guild
Click here to book for Rob Ryan’s talk, ‘You Can Still Do A Lot With A Small Brain’
In a quiet street off the Old Bethnal Green Rd, there is a large wooden door. If you go through a smaller door within this large one, you enter a passage, under an arch, that leads to a courtyard where there is another door. Go through this door, climb up a staircase and you will find the secret den of Rob Ryan, the papercut artist. With his luxuriant curls and thick beard, working here in this old loft, intent upon his creations, Rob Ryan might appear as a Romantic nineteenth century figure – like “The Tailor of Gloucester” – if it were not for the hoodie and Raybans that bring him bang up to date.
“I am not a connoisseur of papercutting” Rob declares in self-deprecating style, when I ask him about the origins of his work, as we cosy up on a couch upholstered in denim jeans. Years ago, before the seismic shift in cultural hierarchies that happened at the end of the last century, Rob was a painter who included words in his paintings and got a lot of flak for it. “Cheating” was the particular crime levelled at him at the Royal College of Art, where Rob was studying printmaking.
Rob produces a scruffy old Thames & Hudson paperback of Tyrolean papercuts – if there was a eureka moment, it was the discovery of this book. Making papercuts, he explains, was a natural extension of the screenprint stencils that he was already cutting and the symmetrical nature of these papercuts did not allow for the inclusion of words. So papercutting was the “cure” for the “malaise” of sticking words in his pictures.
Rob’s story is a startling reminder of how the hegemony of the art world has changed now, but it does not begin to account for the extraordinary flair that he brings to everything he touches. This is work of immense appeal that celebrates life and the complex emotions that colour our daily experience.
Obviously, the “cure” was completely ineffectual because his work is full of words that provide an important dynamic to the images. “I like the work of William Blake, and those English twentieth century artists like Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Eric Fraser,” Rob explains, and his work is an honourable inheritor of this lively tradition.
There is an emotional fullness and attractive energy to all of Rob’s work that speaks of an artist who has found his perfect medium. Quickly, he saw the limitations of entirely symmetrical papercuts and that is when the words came back in again. Getting passionate, he gestures rhetorically and, in delight, declares of papercutting “There is no cheating! There is no right! There is no wrong!”
Things start to get exciting now, as he offers me an apple, and moves over to his work table to commence a papercut. His energy changes and a serene Rob Ryan emerges as he opens a notebook and begins purposefully to copy a sketch in pencil onto a sheet of paper on a light box. Then he transfers the paper to a green cutting board and begins to cut it out with a scalpel in swift confident strokes. There is a different, more intense, atmosphere in the room now, everything focussed to the quick movement of the blade between Rob’s nimble fingers, and I reach over to capture the moment with my camera. Then it has passed, Rob inscribes the papercut and kindly presents it to me with as a souvenir.
It is an image of a mother and child playing together. As I examine the treasured scrap, when I get back to my desk, I am conscious of the sinuous subtle lines of this delicate cut that give these figures life and movement, and capture an ephemeral moment of intimate affection between parent and child.
In a papercut, all the elements have to be connected – human figures have to hold hands or touch – and as result of this technical requirement, this sense of connection has become a defining element in Rob Ryan’s work, as both technique and as subject matter. The breathtaking skill on display brings an audience to these works, but it is the language that gives depth in the exposure of ambivalent or raw emotion, and this emotionalism, whether light or dark, creates an exciting counterpoint to the control required to make them.
Years ago, Rob had a studio at the Bishopsgate end of the Spitalfields Market before it was demolished. He regularly used to eat a huge roast lunch at the Market Cafe in Fournier St before it shut at eleven in the morning, to set him up for a day’s work. He has now become one of the most popular artists, in our neighbourhood and far beyond, and I like to think that in his use of familiar domestic images, he captures something of the essence of the life of this place as it is lived now.
The Staffordshire dogs Rob Ryan made for Spitalfields Life
Images copyright © Rob Ryan
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A Walk With Philip Cunningham
Some tickets are available for The Gentle Author’s Tour this weekend, 18th & 19th June
While living in his grandfather’s house in Mile End Place during the seventies and eighties, Philip Cunningham used to explore the streets of the East End taking photographs.
“What the Germans had not bombed in the war, the GLC and the council were trying to pull down. There were ruins everywhere and it gave the borough a strange character,” recalled Philip, “There were asbestos prefabs all over the place but they slowly disappeared – the last two I remember were in Globe Rd.”
At Brady St Dwellings
Brady St Dwellings
At Brady St Dwellings
Brady St Dwellings
Brady St
Durward St, Whitechapel
Mural of Canon Barnett at Whitechapel Art Gallery
Brick Lane
Fournier St
Brick Lane
Folgate St
Grimsby St
Cheshire St
Spitalfields Coal Depot
Bethnal Green
Artillery Passage
Middlesex St
Old Castle St
Leadenhall Market
Alie St
At St George in the East
White Horse Lane
Mile End Rd
Mile End Rd
Mile End Rd
Mile End Rd
Alderney Rd
Limehouse
Photographs copyright © Philip Cunningham
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More of Philip Cunningham’s Portraits
