A Cat In The Dog Days
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While Londoners luxuriate in the warmth of high summer, I miss my old cat Mr Pussy who endured the hindrance of a fur coat, spending his languorous days stretched out upon the floor in a heat-induced stupor.
As the sun reached its zenith, his activity declined and he sought the deep shadow, the cooling breeze and the bare wooden floor to stretch out and fall into a deep trance that could transport him far away to the loss of his physical being. Mr Pussy’s refined nature was such that even these testing conditions provided an opportunity for him to show grace, transcending dreamy resignation to explore an area of meditation of which he was the supreme proponent.
In the early morning and late afternoon, you would see him on the first floor window sill here in Spitalfields, taking advantage of the draught of air through the house. With his aristocratic attitude, Mr Pussy took amusement in watching the passersby from his high vantage point on the street frontage and enjoyed lapping water from his dish on the kitchen window sill at the back of the house, where in the evenings he also liked to look down upon the foxes gambolling in the yard.
Whereas in winter it was Mr Pussy’s custom to curl up in a ball to exclude drafts, in these balmy days he preferred to stretch out to maximize the air flow around his body. There was a familiar sequence to his actions, as particular as stages in yoga. Finding a sympathetic location with the advantage of cross currents and shade from direct light, at first Mr Pussy sat to consider the suitability of the circumstance before rolling onto his side and releasing the muscles in his limbs, revealing that he was irrevocably set upon the path of total relaxation.
Delighting in the sensuous moment, Mr Pussy stretched out to his maximum length of over three feet long, curling his spine and splaying his legs at angles, creating an impression of the frozen moment of a leap, just like those wooden horses on fairground rides. Extending every muscle and toe, his glinting claws unsheathed and his eyes widened gleaming gold, until the stretch reached it full extent and subsided in the manner of a wave upon the ocean, as Mr Pussy slackened his limbs to lie peacefully with heavy lids descending.
In this position that resembled a carcass on the floor, Mr Pussy could undertake his journey into dreams, apparent by his twitching eyelids and limbs as he ran through the dark forest of his feline unconscious where prey were to be found in abundance. Vulnerable as an infant, sometimes Mr Pussy cried to himself in his dream, an internal murmur of indeterminate emotion, evoking a mysterious fantasy that I could never be party to. It was somewhere beyond thought or language. I could only wonder if his arcadia was like that in Paolo Uccello’s “Hunt in the Forest” or whether Mr Pussy’s dreamscape resembled the watermeadows of the River Exe, the location of his youthful safaris.
There was another stage, beyond dreams, signalled when Mr Pussy rolled onto his back with his front paws distended like a child in the womb, almost in prayer. His back legs splayed to either side, his head tilted back, his jaw loosened and his mouth opened a little, just sufficient to release his shallow breath – and Mr Pussy was gone. Silent and inanimate, he looked like a baby and yet very old at the same time. The heat relaxed Mr Pussy’s connection to the world and he fell, he let himself go far away on a spiritual odyssey. It was somewhere deep and somewhere cool, he was out of his body, released from the fur coat at last.
Startled upon awakening from his trance, like a deep-sea diver ascending too quickly, Mr Pussy squinted at me as he recovered recognition, giving his brains a good shake, once the heat of the day had subsided. Lolloping down the stairs, still loose-limbed, he strolled out of the house into the garden and took a dust bath under a tree, spending the next hour washing it out and thereby cleansing the sticky perspiration from his fur.
Regrettably the climatic conditions that subdued Mr Pussy by day, also enlivened him by night. At first light, when the dawn chorus commenced, he stood on the floor at my bedside, scratched a little and called to me. I woke to discover two golden eyes filling my field of vision. I rolled over at my peril, because this provoked Mr Pussy to walk to the end of the bed and scratch my toes sticking out under the sheet, causing me to wake again with a cry of pain. I miss having no choice but to rise, accepting his forceful invitation to appreciate the manifold joys of early morning in summer in Spitalfields, because it was not an entirely unwelcome obligation.
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John Claridge’s Other World
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INTO THE NIGHT, E3 1987
“Sometimes, I speak with my mates and they say, ‘We’ve come from another world,'” John Claridge admitted to me in astonishment, recalling his origins in the post-war East End and introducing this set of pictures. To create the series, John has been revisiting his old negatives, printing photographs that he took decades ago and surprising himself by the renewed acquaintance with lost visions of that other world, unseen since the moment the shutter fell. Yet even in his youth, John was drawn to the otherness that existed in his familiar landscape, transformed through his lens into a strange environment of dark brooding beauty – inflected by his passion for surrealism, the writing of Franz Kafka and film noir.
“It’s difficult for me to explain why I am attracted to things.” John confessed, “I was off doing other work, producing commercial photography and making films, but I never stopped taking pictures of the East End. Some of these images have never been printed before, and it’s strange when I see the prints now because I have a good memory of taking them, even though I had forgotten how much I had done.”
Always alert to the dramatic potential of the cityscape, John recognised that the magnificence of a gasometer could be best appreciated when photographed by moonlight – in John’s mind’s eye, every location proposed a scenario of imaginative possibility. The images you see here are those that burned themselves onto his consciousness, stills from his photographic dreaming, and when we look at them we can share his reverie and construct our own fictions. His titles read like the titles of grand narratives, firing the poetic imagination to enter another, dystopian, world where industrial buildings become prisons and monumental landscapes are ravaged by unexplained dereliction.
John knew the East End when it was still scarred from the bombing of World War II and then he witnessed the slum clearances, the closure of the docks, the end of manufacturing and the tide of redevelopment that overtook it all. His soulful urban landscapes record decisive moments within decades of epic transformation that altered the appearance of the territory forever. “Some things needed changing, though not all the demolition that happened was necessary,” John informed me. Then, regretful of the loss of that other world yet mindful of the resilience of the psyche, he continued his thought, adding – “but people have a spirit and you can’t break that.”
IT TOLLS FOR THEE, Whitechapel Bell Foundry 1982.
SILVER TOWERS, E16 1982.
DE CHIRICO ARCHES, E16 1982.
IN THE SHADOW, E3 1961.
GRAVEYARD, E16 1975.
WATCHTOWER, Spitalfields 1982. “If you look at from where I was standing, you might expect to see someone trying to escape and a guard firing a machine gun from the watchtower.”
THE HOOK, Whitechapel Bell Foundry 1982.
UNLOADED, E16 1962.
DETOUR, E16 1964.
LABYRINTH, E16 1982.
NO ENTRANCE, E13 1962.
BEYOND THE BRIDGE, E16 1978.
THE WINDOW, E16 1982.
DARK CORNER, E16 1987.
BLIND SPOT, E16 1987.
CAPTIVE CITY, E3 1959.
PIER D, E16 1982.
THE CASTLE, E16 1987 – “It has a mocking face!”
THE LONG WALK, E16 1982.
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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At Chatham
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Cliff, HMS Gannett
Behold the ancient mariner I met at Chatham Dockyard. After a long career navigating the seven seas, he now guides visitors around HMS Gannett permanently berthed in a dry dock on the Medway.
Over three hundred years, more than four hundred warships were constructed here and, during the eighteenth century, Chatham became one of this country’s largest industrial sites. Even today – thirty years after it ceased to be a working dockyard – the legacy of this endeavour over such a long period and on such a scale is awe-inspiring.
The vast wooden vault of the covered slipway, dating from 1834, is something akin to a cathedral or an aircraft hangar, and climbing up into the roof is a spatial experience of vertiginous amazement. At the other end of the dockyard, a ropewalk contains a room that is a quarter of a mile long for spinning yarn into cables. Midway between these two, I discovered the Commissioner’s Garden, offering a horticultural oasis in the midst of all this industry with a seventeenth century Mulberry at its heart.
Yet as my feet grew weary, my sense of wonder grew troubled by more complicated thoughts and emotions. The countless thousands that laboured long and hard in this dockyard through the centuries produced the maritime might which permitted Britain to wrestle control of the Atlantic from the French and the Spanish, and build its global empire, delivering incalculable wealth at the expense of the people in its colonial territories.
For better or worse, to see the machinery of this history made manifest at Chatham is an experience of wonder tinged with horror which cannot be easily reconciled, yet it is an inescapable part of this country’s identity that compels our attention if we are to understand our own past.
Horatio Nelson
HMS Gannet (1878)
The covered slipway (1838)
The covered slip was designed by Sir Robert Sebbings, Surveyor to the Navy Board & former Shipwright
HMS Ocelot (1962)
HMS Cavalier (1944)
Threads of yarn are twisted to make twine
Rope continues to be manufactured today in the ropewalk
Machinery from 1811 is still in use
The rope walk dates from 1729
Women were employed from 1864 when mechanisation was introduced
Officers’ houses (1722-33)
The Cashier’s Office where Charles Dickens’ father John Dickens worked as a clerk, 1817-22
Figures and coat of arms from HMS Chatham (1911) on the Admiral’s Offices
Sail & Colour Loft (1734) where the sails for HMS Victory were made
Admiral’s Offices (1808) with George III’s coat of arms
Entrance to the Commissioner’s Garden
Seventeenth century Mulberry tree in the Commissioner’s Garden
Richard Wellesley, brother of the Duke of Wellington, and Royal Dockyard Church (1755)
Main Gate (1720) with arms of George I
Visit CHATHAM HISTORIC DOCKYARD, open every day from February until November
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Dr Syntax In London
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Dr Syntax & his Spouse plan their trip to London
Written anonymously and published in 1820, The Tour of Dr Syntax Through the Pleasures & Miseries of London was one of a popular series of comedies featuring the idiosyncratic Dr Syntax, a character originated by William Coombe and drawn by Thomas Rowlandson. These plates are believed to be the work of Robert Cruikshank, father of George Cruikshank.
Setting out for London
Arriving in London
Robbed in St Giles High St
A Promenade in Hyde Park
A Flutter at a Gaming House
At an Exhibition at the Royal Academy
At a Masquerade
In St Paul’s Churchyard on a Wet & Windy Day
Inspecting the Bank of England
Presented to the King at Court
A Night at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens
A Visit to the House of Commons
A Trip behind the Scenes at the Opera
A Lecture at the London Institution
Going to Richmond on a Steam Boat
Reading his Play in the Green Room
Overshoots London Bridge & pops overboard into the Thames
Images courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
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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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