At Stephen Walters & Sons, Silk Weavers
Joseph Walters of Spitalfields by Thomas Gainsborough
When Julius Walters of Stephen Walters & Sons says, “I am just a weaver,” it is a masterpiece of understatement, because he is a ninth generation weaver and the custodian of the venerable family business founded by his ancestor Joseph Walters in Spitalfields in 1720, which was moved to Suffolk by his great-great-great-great-grandfather Stephen Walters in the nineteenth century – where today they continue to weave exemplary silk for the most discerning clients internationally, building upon the expertise and knowledge that has been accumulated over all this time. This is the company that wove the silk for the Queen’s coronation robes and for Princess Diana’s wedding dress.
Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Joseph Walters was there to greet us when I arrived at the long finely-proportioned brick silk mill overlooking the green water meadows at the edge of Sudbury, where his ninth generation descendant Julius came down the stairs to shake my hand. Blushing to deny any awareness of the family resemblance, that his proud secretary was at pains to emphasise, he chose instead to point out to me the willows nearby that had been felled recently – as a couple are each year – for the manufacture of cricket bats.
We convened around a long wooden counter in a first floor room where the luxuriously coloured strike offs – as the samples are called – were laid out, glowing in the soft East Anglian light. There is such exquisite intricacy in these cloths that have tiny delicate patterns woven into their very construction, drawing the daylight and delighting the eye with their sensuous tones. Yet lifting my gaze, I could not resist my attention straying to the pigeon holes that lined the room, each one stacked with patterned silks of every hue and design. A curious silence resided here, yet somewhere close by there was a centre of loud industry.
“Everything we do comes from somewhere…” interposed Julius Walters enigmatically, as he swung open a door and that unmistakeably appealing smell of old leather bindings met my nostrils. There were hundreds of volumes of silk samples from the last two centuries stacked up in there, comprising thousands upon thousands of unique jewel-like swatches still fresh and bright as the day they were made. Some of these books, often painstakingly annotated with technical details in italic script, comprised the life’s work of a weaver and all now bear panoramic witness to the true colours of our predecessors’ clothing. A vast memory bank woven in cloth, all available to be reworked for the present day and brought back to new life.
Spellbound by this perspective in time, I awoke to the clamour of the mill as we descended a staircase, passing through two glass doors and collecting ear plugs, before entering the huge workshop filled with looms clattering where new silk cloths were flying into existence. Here I stood watching the lush flourishes of acanthus brocades and tiny complex patterns for ties appear in magical perfection as if they had always existed, yet created by the simple principle of selecting how the weft crosses each thread of the warp, whether above or below. Although looms are mechanised now, each still retains its Jacquard above, the card that designates the path of every thread – named after Joseph Marie Jacquard who invented this device in 1804, which became so ubiquitous that his name has now also become both the term for the loom and for any silk cloth that has a pattern integrated into the weave.
With the bravura of a showman and the relish of an enthusiast, Julius led us on through more and more chambers and passages, into a silk store with countless coloured spools immaculately sorted and named – crocus and rose and mud. Then into a vaporous dye plant where bobbins of white thread came out strawberry after immersion in bubbling vats of colour. Then into a steaming plant where rollers soften the cloth to any consistency. Then into the checking office where every inch is checked by eye, and finally into the despatch office where the precious silken goods are wrapped in brown paper and weighed upon a fine red scales.
There are so many variables in silk weaving, so many different skills and so much that could go wrong, yet all have become managed into a harmonious process by Stephen Walters & Sons over nine generations. In his time, Julius has introduced computers to track every specification of ten of thousands of orders a year – one every five minutes – created by so may short runs. New technology has provided a purifier which uses diamonds to cleanse dye from the water that eventually returns to the water meadows, renewing the water course that brought his ancestors from Spitalfields to Suffolk one hundred and fifty years ago.
“All my school holidays and spare time were spent at the mill – but then I went away, and came back again.” confided Julius quietly as we made our farewells, “With eight generations behind you, it changes the way you approach your life. It’s not about this year, it’s about managing the company from one generation to the next, so you deal with your employees and your customers differently.”
Now you know what it means when Julius Walters says, “I am just a weaver.”
Dobby Weaving, 1900.
Aaron Offord, Machine Operator
Warping in the early twentieth century
Vikki Meuser, Warping in the early twenty-first century
Employees in 1966
Weaving umbrella silk in the nineteen fifties
Preparing skeins of silk for weaving the coronation robes, 1952
Weaving the silk for the coronation robes, 1952
Staff photograph 1949, Bernard Walters (grandfather of Julius Walters) sits second from right in front row, with his sister Winnie on his left and Mill Manager, Bill Parsons on his right
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At Anna Maria Garthwaite’s House
Anna Maria Garthwaite, Silk Designer
Charles Dickens in Spitalfields
Charles Dickens’ visit to a silk warehouse
Three Antiques Market Treasures
Over all the years I have frequented the Spitalfields Antiques Market every Thursday, I have succeeded in buying almost nothing, tempering my acquisitive tendencies by writing the stories of more than two hundred stallholders instead.
Yet last week, I found this eighteenth century Sun Fire Insurance plaque and could not resist buying it. When I was a child, my mother used to point these out to me on old houses and all this time I have been searching for one of my own. Apparently, the insurance company adopted this symbol which had always been used traditionally on buildings to avert the evil eye. One day, I will nail it up high on the front of my house.
During the lockdown, St John Bread & Wine made wonderful pies every Friday which you could walk over to collect and take home to bake in your own oven. These weekly pies became emotional landmarks that sustained me through those trying times and I missed them so much when lockdown ended that I was converted into a piemaker.
Now I bake a pie every Wednesday as a mid-week landmark to counterpoint Sunday dinner each weekend. Of course, I needed a pie funnel and I was overjoyed to find this fine thirties’ specimen, designed by Clarice Cliff I am assured, for ten pounds in the Spitalfields Market.
Ten years ago, I walked through the market in the late afternoon of the last trading day before Christmas, calling in to exchange greetings with some of the traders. While passing the time in idle chatter, I picked a up a smooth prehistoric stone axe head, cradling it in my palm absent-mindedly. How well it sat there in my hand.
The axe head was of British origin and approximately five thousand years old, I was informed. It certainly was a handsome piece of granite that I held, deep slate-blue, finely worked and veined with subtle lines. Immediately, by running your finger along the sharp edge and by clutching the smooth curves, you were in contact with all those numberless others who held it and appreciated it, going right back to the one who made it. This was not an axe designed for use but to demonstrate the painstaking skill of the maker, and of value as a gift or token of high status. This axe had always been prized and I could not resist prizing it myself, as I found my fingers closed naturally over it.
There is a paradoxical intimacy that I feel with whoever made my axe, since I can share their delight in pure sculptural form without ever knowing anything else. Whoever made this axe is lost in the all-enveloping darkness of history, but I shall keep it safe for them in my desk drawer for my remaining years
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Spitalfields Antiques Market 1
People From Spitalfields’ History
Here are some people from Spitalfields’ history who you may meet upon my tour, as illustrated by Adam Dant upon the border of the map of The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields
Click here to book tickets for the tour at Easter and through May
Click here to buy a pocket-sized fold-out copy of the map for £5
Adam Dant’s fine art prints are available from TAG
At Billingsgate Roman Bathhouse
Tepidarium at Billingsgate Roman bathhouse
In Lower Thames St, where the traffic roars past old Billingsgate Market and around the Tower of London, there is an anonymous door that leads to the past. It is a piece of spine-tingling magic. You walk through a modern door into an unremarkable corporate building and descend a staircase to discover the best preserved piece of Roman archaeology in London.
Here is a second century riverside villa with an bathhouse of cruciform shape complete with an elaborate underfloor heating system. You can see the square frigidarium with its tessellated floor and then the smaller rooms with curved walls, the tepidarium and the caldarium, with tiled floors supported upon pilae permitting the hot air to travel underneath. In these rooms, water could be thrown upon the heated floor to create clouds of steam. For those who originated in warmer climes, the bathhouse provided a welcome antidote to the misery of cold winters in London.
The Billingsgate Roman Bathhouse was first uncovered in 1848 during the construction of the London Coal Exchange and drew a response of such wonder that – unlike many other ancient remains discovered in the City in that era – it was preserved. When the Coal Exchange was demolished in the last century for the widening of Lower Thames St, more of the Roman ruins were uncovered before being concealed in the basement of the block where they are housed today.
A century after the bathhouse was constructed, a six metre defensive wall was built along the water front, concealing the river view and blocking out the light. It was then that the bathhouse was expanded within the garden of the villa and perhaps the dwelling changed from a desirable private house to some form of temporary lodging, with the added attraction of a steam bath.
In use until the Romans departed London in the fifth century, the bathhouse then fell into disrepair and collapsed before being covered with a layer of silt, preserving the remains and preventing anyone carrying off the building materials for reuse. Tantalisingly, a Saxon brooch was found on top of the pile of collapsed roof tiles dating from a time when this part of the City of London was uninhabited. Did someone from the nearby Saxon settlements come to explore the Roman ruins one day and slip upon the rubble, dropping a brooch?
When you walk upon the metal gantries over the Roman walls, you feel you are a ghost from the future eavesdropping on another time. The scale of the rooms is apparent, the stone bench in the steam room is discernible and you can see the fragments of worn floor, smoothed with centuries of use by the long-dead. Square pipes, tiles and other details of the construction reveal the work of skilled craftsmen in ceramic and brick, and a single tile bears the imprint of a dog’s paw that wandered through the brick maker’s yard in London seventeen hundred years ago.
The hot air from the furnace entered the building and circulated under the floor
The curved walls of the caldarium
Tiles supported on pilae as part of the underfloor heating system in the tepidarium
Tessellated floor in the frigidarium
Fragment of tessellated floor
The stone bench in the tepidarium
The paw print of a dog in London seventeen hundred years ago
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Spitalfields Market by John Allin, 1973
I am delighted to announce that thanks to the magnificent generosity of over 400 people who supported our crowdfund, The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields will launch at Easter and run throughout the summer.
Our website is now live for bookings until the end of May.
BOOK YOUR TOUR AT WWW.THEGENTLEAUTHORSTOURS.COM
A fold-out pocket-sized map of the tour, illustrated by Adam Dant, with text by The Gentle Author is available for £5.
The Gentle Author’s Tour map contains portraits of more than fifty people – both the living and the dead – who have lived and worked in Spitalfields over the past two millennia.
Follow in the footsteps of all those who came before, with a keen eye and an open heart, to discover the manifold wonders of Spitalfields.
Printed in London on recycled paper by Aldgate Press
Click here to buy a copy of The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields Map
I hope my readers will not consider it immodest if I republish this letter which appeared in The Guardian last Saturday
The Gentle Author’s Wapping Pub Crawl
Four-hundred-year-old stone floor at The Prospect of Whitby
Tempted by the irresistible promise of spring sunlight, I set out for Wapping to visit those pubs which remain in these formerly notorious riverside streets once riddled with ale houses. Yet although there are pitifully few left these days, I discovered each one has a different and intriguing story to tell.
Town of Ramsgate, 288 Wapping High St. The first alehouse was built on this site in 1460, known as The Hostel and then as The Red Cow from 1533. The pub changed its name again, to the Town of Ramsgate, in 1766 to attract trade from Kentish fishermen who unloaded their catch at Wapping Old Stairs adjoining. Judge Jeffreys was arrested here in disguise, attempting to follow the flight of James II abroad in 1688, as William III’s troops approached London.
The Turk’s Head, 1 Green Bank. Originally in Wapping High St from 1839, rebuilt on this site in 1927 and closed in the seventies, it is now a community cafe.
Captain Kidd, 108 Wapping High St. Established in 1991 in a former warehouse and named after legendary pirate, Wiiliam Kidd, hanged nearby at Execution Dock Stairs in 1701.
Turner’s Old Star, 14 Watts St. In the eighteen-thirties, Joseph Mallord William Turner set up his mistress Sophia Booth in two cottages on this site, one of which she ran as an alehouse named The Old Star. In 1987, the current establishment was renamed Turner’s Old Star in honour of the connection with the great painter. Notoriously secretive about his lovelife, Turner adopted Sophia’s surname to conceal their life together here, acquiring the nickname ‘Puggy Booth’ on account of his portly physique and height of just five feet.
The Old Rose, 128 The Highway. 1839-2007
The last pub standing on the Ratcliffe Highway
The Three Suns, 61 Garnet St. 1851 – 1986
The Prospect of Whitby, 56 Wapping Wall. Founded 1520, and formerly known as The Pelican and The Devil’s Tavern.
What does a cat have to do to get a drink around here?
Sir Hugh Willoughby sailed from The Prospect of Whitby in 1533 upon his ill-fated attempt to discover the North-East Passage to China.
The Grapes, 76 Narrow St. Founded in 1583, the current building was constructed in 1720 – it is claimed Charles Dickens danced upon the counter here as a child.
Anthony Gormley’s sculpture visible from the balcony of The Grapes
You may like to read about my previous pub crawls
The Gentle Author’s Next Pub Crawl
The Gentle Author’s Spitalfields Pub Crawl
At Speakers’ Corner
“I’m old enough to know better and young enough not to care”
Despite the timbre of the message he has been wearing around his neck each Sunday at Speakers’ Corner for decades, Bob Rogers is not the lugubrious fellow you might imagine. Contrary to expectation, he wears it to cheer people up – as he explained to me when I joined him in the park one Sunday.
“It was the winter when British Rail reported ‘The Wrong Kind of Snow’ on the line and that became an Evening Standard headline. The next day, I saw ‘It’s Going to Get Worse,’ on the newsstand as I went through Piccadilly on a bus. So I jumped off and took it from the hoarding and put in my bag because I like the prose style of newspaper headlines,” he explained. “Then I came here on a Sunday in February and everyone looked so miserable that I took it out of my bag and held it up, and it made them all smile. It caught on to such an extent that I am pictured wearing it in guidebooks to London.”
A stalwart of more than half a century at Speakers’ Corner, always in his faded brown corduroy suit with a beret in winter or a bucket hat in summer, and the celebrated notice round his neck, Bob Rogers is an erudite historian and a self-appointed custodian of this celebrated British institution.“Unless I am very unwell, I always come here because it retains its function as a meeting place and you encounter people from all around the world,” he revealed to me, “I keep coming back because I know people here and they know me, so it has a social content as well as a social purpose.”
As if to illustrate this, one of Bob’s pals joined us and, realising I was doing an interview, he took the opportunity to make some points.”These days people are frightened of saying the wrong thing,” he assured me, rolling his eyes contemptuously, “It’s no longer about politics, it’s just a circus of religion – fifty seven varieties of Christianity and fifty-seven varieties of Islam and they all disagree with each other.”
The 1873 reform of the Parks Regulation Act of 1872 conferred legitimacy upon Speakers’ Corner, enshrining the right to give an address though not – as some assume – the right to free speech since speakers are still subject to the law.“I enjoy the weekly privilege of visiting the only place where people can gather without police permission,” Bob confided to me, lowering his voice and casting his gaze around,“When people ask me how many police undercover agents are in the park, I say, ‘Every third man.'”
“Over fifty years ago, I missed a connection on my bus and I looked over the railings and I saw all these people and what got me was the babble of their voices,” he continued, as we stood against the railings watching the excited crowds gathered around the speakers and the hecklers adding drama with their interruptions.“The Catholic Evidence Guild were here one hundred years ago and are here this week and that’s because this is the site of of Tyburn, the place of public executions,” Bob added, gazing through the perspective of time,“Even as we speak they are praying for the Catholic Martyrs.”
Then, swinging his arms wildly and intoning like a priest, Bob enacted the bizarre yet compelling performance style of Nutty Norman, the ‘arms-up’ man, one of the past legends of Speakers’ Corner. “You’d never know he was homeless, he carried all his possessions in a shoulder bag,” Bob revealed, protective of his mentor, “He inducted me to the night buses and sometimes he passed the night at Heathrow.” Gesturing to a charismatic speaker surrounded by an attentive gathering, Bob pointed out Heiko Khoo, a part-German-part-Icelandic ex-bus conductor who famously threw Sir Michael Joseph off his bus, declaring, “I’m not having any Tories on my bus!”
Even as Bob and I chatted, bystanders came over and formed an audience around us, in expectation of a colourful debate and making tangible the rare quality of this special place where we are free to speak with each other as humans, without the need to be introduced.
“Religious people talk about the power of God, I talk about Horse power!”
Omid Mankoo – “People’s lives are really fixated on the sex stuff and they’re neglecting everything else. I’ve written this book and I want to share my secrets.”
Matthew from St Albans – “Jesus told me to come here because the years of his blessing our nation are at an end.”
Christians praying
Christians spreading the Word
Thai people protesting against their corrupt government
Celebrating the Thai Royal Family
Proclaiming the Nigerian Messiah
“If that frightens you, give Jesus a call”
“Don’t be late like the foolish virgins”
Bob re-enacts the gestures of Nutty Norman the ‘arms-up’ man
Heiko Khoo – “I’m not having any Tories on my bus!”
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
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