The Consolation of Schrodinger
While the Gentle Author takes a holiday, we are celebrating the joys of the season with a HARVEST SALE, selling all our books at half price so you can treat yourself and your friends and family. Simply add code ‘HARVEST’ at checkout to claim your discount.
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I believe most will agree that life is far from easy and that dark moments are an inescapable part of human existence. When I feel sad, when I feel confused, when I feel conflicted, when it all gets too much and my head is crowded with thoughts yet I do not even know what to do next, I lie down on my bed to calm myself.
On such an occasion recently, I was lying in a reverie and my consciousness was merging with the patterns of the changing light on the ceiling, when I heard small footsteps enter the room followed by a soft clump as Schrodinger landed upon the coverlet in a leap.
I lifted my head for a moment and cast my eyes towards him and he looked at me askance, our eyes meeting briefly in the half-light of the shaded room before I lay my head back and he settled himself down at a distance to rest.
I resumed my contemplation, trying to navigate the shifting currents of troubling thoughts as they coursed through my head but drifting inescapably into emotional confusion. Suddenly my mind was stilled and halted by the interruption of the smallest sensation, as insignificant yet as arresting as a single star in a night sky.
Turning my head towards Schrodinger, I saw that he had stretched out a front leg to its greatest extent and the very tip of his white paw was touching my calf, just enough to register. Our eyes met in a moment of mutual recognition that granted me the consolation I had been seeking. I was amazed. It truly was as if he knew, yet I cannot unravel precisely what he knew. I only know that I was released from the troubles and sorrow that were oppressing me.
When he was the church cat, Schrodinger lived a public life and developed a robust personality that enabled him to survive and flourish in his role as mascot in Shoreditch. After two years living a private domestic life in Spitalfields, he has adapted to a quieter more intimate sequestered existence, becoming more playful and openly affectionate.
At bedtime now, he leaps onto the coverlet, rolling around like a kitten before retreating – once he has wished me goodnight in his own way – to the sofa outside the bedroom door where he spends the night. Thus each day with Schrodinger ends in an expression of mutual delight.
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Schrodinger’s First Year in Spitalfields
Twelfth Annual Report
We are celebrating the joys of the season with a HARVEST SALE, selling all our books at half price so you can treat yourself and your friends and family. Simply add code ‘HARVEST’ at checkout to claim your discount.
CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE SPITALFIELDS LIFE BOOKSHOP
We live in such curious and volatile times that – as I reach the end of my twelfth year of writing The Gentle Author – I have become inordinately grateful for my self-appointed task of publishing a story in these pages every day, as a constant in my life and a consolation against disruption.
In the midst of the pandemic, this has been a year of ceaseless fighting to Save The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, Save The Bethnal Green Mulberry and Save Brick Lane.
After five years of campaigning to Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry it was a profound disappointment when the Secretary of State endorsed Tower Hamlets Council’s decision for it to be converted into a boutique hotel with just a toy foundry in the lobby, making souvenir hand bells. It came as no surprise when I heard an unconfirmed leak that a major private members’ club had granted a lifetime’s membership to a supporter in Whitehall as a gesture of thanks for expediting this. Thus ends more than five hundred years of bell-making tradition in Whitechapel.
After such a catastrophe, it was an enormous relief when we won our Judicial Review at the High Court to Save the Bethnal Green Mulberry. Yet, although we understand Crest Nicholson have applied for an appeal, we do not expect it to be granted. I will keep you informed of the outcome of this.
I am delighted to report that our cuttings of Shakespeare’s Mulberry Tree have taken, thanks to the capable hands of Nurseryman Lyndon Osborne. We will be distributing these to the donors of our legal fund in the autumn when it is best for planting trees. We had originally intended to do this in the summer, but we decided to wait for more root growth, giving these saplings a better chance of survival. We thank our donors for their patience.
As I write to you, the outcome of the Battle for Brick Lane is undecided, despite an unprecedented level of protest and objection. We were pleased when Mayor John Biggs declared his willingness to entertain a community-led master plan for the entire Truman Brewery site which reflects the needs of local people. And it was gratifying when Rushanara Ali, MP for Bethnal Green & Bow, endorsed this approach.
But this notion now seems to have been dismissed as the council again appears to be seeking to approve the Truman Brewery’s planning application for a shopping mall with four floors of corporate offices on top. A council officer is claiming they have no choice but to approve the scheme since the developer would likely win on appeal, even though there are solid legitimate reasons for rejection in planning law. Such a defeatist attitude is a betrayal of the more than 7000 people who wrote letters of objection and most crucially of the Bangladeshi community who will suffer most from this development.
I would dearly like to return to publishing books and we have been working with David Hoffman on a collection of his superlative photography entitled A PLACE TO LIVE, Endurance & Joy in the East End, 1971 – 1987. David came to live in Whitechapel in 1971 and photographed homelessness, racism, the incursion of developers and the rise of protest. In the process, he discovered his vocation as a photographer and his bold, humane pictures record a lost decade, speaking vividly to our own times.
One of the joys of the past year was a commission from the Spitalfields Trust to reinvent the tours that Dennis Severs gave when he first opened his eighteenth century house to visitors. The discovery of fragmentary recordings and unpublished writings gave a flavour of what they were like, yet also granted me licence to rewrite and reimagine the tours for a new audience. Working with a talented actor, Joel Saxon, brought another level of creativity. Joel seized the opportunity to show off his theatre skills in playing the roles of multiple different residents through time and delivers a bravura performance.
I have been delighted and surprised to receive the greatest demand yet for my writing courses and I look forward to spending autumn weekends meeting many of my readers and hearing your stories.
The lockdowns restricted my ability to undertake interviews and write individual profiles which have always been the heart of my work, but I hope to make up for lost time with a lot more in the next year.
Thus, with these thoughts in mind, ends the twelfth year in the pages of Spitalfields Life.
I am your loyal servant
The Gentle Author
Spitalfields, 27th August 2021
A handful of places are available on my course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on the weekend of 30th & 31st October. Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book.
Cover design by Friederike Huber for our first new book, post-pandemic
You may like to read my earlier Annual Reports
I am taking my annual holiday now and will resume with new stories on September 13th
At The House Mill
The House Mill of 1776 at Bromley by Bow is the largest tidal mill in the world and the only remaining mill at Three Mill Island on the River Lea, an artificial island created in ancient times – like Venice – by driving thousands of wooden stakes into the mud, for the purpose of harnessing the powerful tidal surge of the Thames. Daniel Bisson, a Huguenot, built the House Mill for grinding grain to bake bread and the manufacture of gin to supply London, and it functioned here until the end of World War II, before falling into disrepair.
Thirty years ago, William Hill saw the derelict mill from the train and came to explore. He became one of a group of committed volunteers who have been responsible for overseeing the magnificent restoration programme of recent years, and it was he who showed me round. We spent a couple of hours, climbing up and down ladders, and exploring every corner of the huge old mill, including those parts not open to visitors – enabling me to create this photographic record.
Initials of Daniel Bisson, builder of the mill, and his wife Sarah
View down the River Lea
Some of the beams at House Mill are one hundred foot long and may be recycled ships’ timbers
Nineteenth century wooden patterns for casting the machinery of the mill
Stretcher frames from World War I
Hopper where the grain was channelled down to the mill stones
The oasthouses and the clock mill
The Miller’s staircase
Millstones
Pegs where the millers hung their coats
Mill worker in the nineteen thirties
The same spot today
Iron frames for the nineteenth century mill wheels
The Clockmill
Visit The House Mill, Three Mill Lane, Bromley by Bow, London E3 3DU
Volunteers are always required to act as stewards, guides and to run the cafe at the House Mill. If you would like to help, please contact info@housemill.org.uk
Stan Jones Of Mile End
Stan Jones
Such has been the movement of people and the destruction and reconstruction of neighbourhoods in the last century that I often wonder if anyone at all is left here from the old East End. So you can imagine my delight when I met Stan Jones of Mile End who has lived in his house for more than eighty years, moving there at the age of ten from a nearby street.
Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I were enchanted to be welcomed by Stan to his extraordinary home where nothing has ever been thrown away. Every inch of the house and garden has found its ideal use in the last eight decades and Stan is a happy man living in his beloved home that is also the repository of his family history.
Fortunately for us Stan has been taking photographs all this time, starting out in the days of glass plate negatives, and below you can see a few examples of his handiwork. Famously, Stan photographed the exterior of his house from the Coronation in 1953 and his picture was published in The Times, which has led to return visits by the daily newspapers on subsequent occasions of national celebration to record Stan’s unchanging decorations on the front of his unaltered house.
Most inspiring to me was Stan’s sense of modest satisfaction with his existence in his small house backing onto the railway line. Mercifully untroubled by personal ambition, Stan has immersed himself in domesticity and creative pastimes, and enjoyed fulfilment at the centre of his intimate community over all this time. Such is his contentment that not even a World War with bombs dropping from the sky could drive Stan out of his home. Stan never had any desire to go anywhere else because he found that all which life has to offer may be discovered in a back street in Mile End.
“I was born nearby in Coutts Rd in 1929 and I came here with my mother and father in March 1939, so I have lived in this house for eighty years. I have no brothers or sisters and I never married. I did have one cousin until last December, but he has gone now and my closest relative is his daughter who lives in Hornchurch.
My mother was Ethel and father was Arthur, they were both from Stepney. My grandparents all lived in Stepney, just across the other side of Mile End Road. My mother was one week older than my father but they both passed away within nine weeks of each other in 1978, when they were seventy-five.
My father was an engineer, repairing steam lorries, until he got a job with the council as mace bearer to the Mayor. Also he was personal messenger to the Town Clerk of Stepney, all through the war he carried messages around on a bike.
My mother was a machinist until the day she got married, then she never went out to work any more. Before fridges and freezers, women had to go out shopping every day to buy food and look after the children. He had to work to feed her, keep her in clothes and pay the rent, which was about a pound a week. That was their life.
I had a happy childhood but it was very lonely, I never had friends, I always had hobbies indoors. I hardly got any education. I only went to Malmesbury Rd School for a few months before the war started and the schools shut down. Most children were evacuated but I never went away, I did not want to. I was here right through the war. I went back to school for about six months after the war and that was my education because you left school at fourteen in those days. I must have educated myself because I did not have much schooling.
On the first night of the air raids, a row of houses down this road got a direct hit. Most nights, I was in the Anderson shelter with my mother. We were down there when the bomb fell just along the road and when a flying bomb hit the railway bridge and ripped it in half and the two halves were lying in the road. I must have been frightened but I cannot remember.
My father did not go into the army because the Town Clerk was a barrister and made him exempt. Instead, he was in the Home Guard out on duty at the Blackwall Tunnel or wherever.
My mother was not well after the war and she was not keen to push me in to work, so I was about fifteen before I started work at a shopfitters in Commercial St. I was with them for forty-eight years, that was my working life. I started in packing, then became a despatch manager and finally warehouse manager, keeping check of stock.
I had a Brownie box camera, and I took pictures if we went out for a day at the seaside and at local celebrations. My photograph of this house decorated for the Coronation in 1953 was published in The Times. But I did not go out a lot as I say, because a lot of my photography was not actually taking pictures. I did a lot of black and white processing for other people. I had a dark room upstairs and, in summer, when people were taking photos I was the one upstairs developing their films. This was all for neighbours, people at work, you know. If they took them to the chemist, they would have to wait a week to get them back, but they got them back next morning from me!
Never being married, I was not pushed into a better paid job. In 1946 my first week’s wages were £2.50 and a rise was twelve and a half pence. It improved as the years went on, although not top wages. I never had a pension scheme but, for my loyalty, they gave me a monthly allowance.
I am very happy here in this house. Most of the others have been extended, but this one is as it was built.”
Stan at home
Arthur & Ethel Jones at their wedding on Christmas Day in 1928
Ethel at Brighton in the thirties
Arthur with Stan at Brighton in the thirties
Stan in his pedal car in the thirties
Stan’s photograph of his childhood dog
Stan’s photograph of a train at the end of his garden – ‘Sometimes our cats strayed onto the railway tracks and never came back, one returned without a tail!’
Arthur Jones stands at the centre of this group of steam lorry drivers in the thirties
Arthur Jones escorts the Mayor of Stepney and King George the Sixth with the Queen Mother to visit the bombing of Hughes Mansions in Vallance Rd
The Mayor’s chauffeur comes to pick up Arthur for his mace-bearing duties
Arthur stand on the left as Clement Attlee speaks
Arthur Jones leads the procession through Stepney to St Mary & St Michaels Church
Ethel & Arthur Jones in the back garden
Stan shows the glass plate of his famous photograph
Stan’s photograph of his parents in 1953 that was published in The Times
Stan’s recent decorations for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee
Stan Jones outside his house today
Stan’s photograph of entertainment for the Coronation Party in Mile End, 1953
Stan’s photograph of the conga at the Coronation Party in Mile End, 1953
Stan’s photograph of a display at the shopfitters where he worked
Stan’s photograph of mannequins
Stan as a youth
Ethel & Arthur Jones in later years
Stan Jones in his garden today
Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Liam O’Farrell’s Markets
As you can see, Artist Liam O’Farrell loves markets of all kinds – old and new, large and small – so it is my pleasure to publish this gallery of his watercolour paintings celebrating this essential element of the identity of London
Broadway Market
Columbia Rd Market
Brick Lane Market
Bacon St Market
Sclater St Market
Whitechapel Market
Spitalfields Market
Borough Market
Covent Garden Market
Camden Market
Portobello Rd Market
South Bank Market
Liam O’Farrell pictured in Fournier St
Images copyright © Liam O’Farrell
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At Westminster Abbey
The past is a cluttered and shadowy place, filled with wonders we do not know and things that we choose to forget. These were my thoughts on visiting Westminster Abbey for the first time in many years, taking the unique opportunity of the absence of tourists to explore an old haunt that is otherwise inaccessible without crowds.
Certainly on the day of my arrival, the living were outnumbered by the 3300 dead yet, more than this, the over 300 statuary easily outnumbered the animated souls in the Abbey too. It is hard not to get overwhelmed by the weight of history in a place of such dense and heavy significance as this. Greater than the sense of a vast contained space is the feeling of how narrow and gloomy it is, and how crowded with tombs and memorials, like a great skull crowded with too many memories and not all of them good ones.
It is the nature of the place and of our history that this is literally a shrine to imperialism. Confronted with bombastic statues of those who subjugated the world, it was my great relief to discover Thomas Fowell Buxton, brewer and abolitionist, sitting quietly on a chair for eternity as if he were waiting to greet me. And just a few feet away sat William Wilberforce, also approachable in an armchair, by contrast with those colonial ‘heroes’ asserting their bellicose virility upright on plinths.
The myth of the abbey’s origin is that fisherman had a vision of St Peter while fishing near Thorn Island on the Thames in the seventh century and founded a church on the site. But the recorded origins of the abbey lie with our own St Dunstan of Stepney who installed a community of Benedictine monks here around 970.
Of particular fascination for me is the Cosmati Pavement laid down by Islamic craftsmen in 1268 for Henry III at the centre of the abbey. This intricate mystical design of interwoven circles composed of coloured mineral stones is believed to be a symbolic map of the cosmos – the primum mobile – and it is at the centre of this pavement that every monarch has been crowned since 1066.
Perhaps the most magical part of the abbey are the ancient battered tombs of the early English kings, such as Henry V and Richard II, personalities whom we feel we know thanks to William Shakespeare. Once you reach the east end of the old abbey, steps ascend to Henry VII’s Lady Chapel. You enter the light of a renaissance chapel from the gloom of the medieval abbey and the astonishing geometric detail of the fan vaulting high overhead takes your breath away.
Even as they were rivals in life, it is surprising to discover that Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots are both memorialised here in shrines of apparent equal status, each in a separate side chapel set apart diplomatically at distance on either side of the main space.
It is impossible not to be moved by the worn stones under your feet, smoothed by the tread of our innumerable forebears through centuries and the poignant multiplicity of tombs and effigies, striving so hard to win eternal remembrance for those who are now entirely forgotten.
I must confess to unease about the selection of writers honoured in Poets’ Corner which to my eyes appears as remarkable for the omissions as much as for those who are included. I have not been here since I attended the inauguration of a plaque for John Clare in 1993. On this recent visit, it delighted me more to visit the tomb of a favourite writer, Aphra Behn, the first woman to earn her living by the pen, in the cloister. Even if the inscription ‘Here lies a proof that wit can never be / proof enough against immortality’ is less than generous and, thankfully, now proved incorrect.
William Wilberforce
Cosmological Pavement
The Coronation Chair
Tomb of Henry V
Henry VII’s Lady Chapel
Poets’ Corner
Tomb of Aphra Behn in the cloister
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Along Old St
Old St
In my mind, Old St is interminably long – a thoroughfare that requires me to put my head down and walk doggedly until I reach the other end. Sometimes the thought of walking the whole length of Old St can motivate me to take the bus and, at other times, I have been inspired to pursue routes through the side streets which run parallel, in order to avoid walking along Old St.
Yet I realised recently that Old St is short. It only extends from Goswell Rd, on the boundary of Clerkenwell, to the foot of the Kingsland Rd in Shoreditch – just a hop, skip and a jump – which leaves me wondering why it seems such a challenge when I set out to walk along it. Let me confess, I have no love for Old St – that is why I seek alternative routes, because even the thought of walking along Old St wears me down.
So I decided to take a new look at Old St, in the hope that I might overcome my aversion. Over the last week, I have walked up and down Old St half a dozen times and, to my surprise, it only takes ten minutes to get from Goswell Rd to Shoreditch Church.
Old St was first recorded as Ealdestrate around 1200 and as Le Oldestrete in 1373, confirming it as an ancient thoroughfare that is as old as history. It was a primeval cattle track, first laid it out as a road by the Romans for whom it became a major route extending to Bath in the west and Colchester in the east. No wonder Old St feels long, it is a fragment of a road that bisects the country.
Setting out from Goswell Rd along Old St on foot, you realise that the east-west orientation places the southerly side of the street in permanent shadow, only illuminated by narrow shafts of sunlight extending across the road from side-streets on the southern side. In winter, this combination of deep shadow and the ferocious east wind, channelled by the remains of the eighteenth and nineteenth century terraces that once lined Old St which are mostly displaced now by taller developments, can be discouraging.
Of course, you can take a detour along Baltic St, but before you know it you are at St Luke’s where William Caslon, who set up the first British Type Foundry here in Helmet Row, is buried. Nicholas Hawksmoor’s obelisk on the top of St Luke’s glows in the morning sunlight shining up Whitecross St Market, which has enjoyed a revival in recent years as a lunchtime destination, offering a wide variety of food to City workers.
Between here and the Old St roundabout, now the focus of new industries and dwarfed by monster towers rising to the north up City Rd, you can pay your respects to my favourite seventeenth century mystic poet Christopher Smart who was committed in his madness to St Luke’s Asylum and wrote his greatest poetry where Argos stands today. Alternatively, you can stroll through Bunhill Fields, the non-conformist cemetery, where Blake, Bunyan and Defoe are buried. Seeing the figure of John Bunyan’s Christian, the Pilgrim of Pilgrim’s Progress, upon the side of his tomb always reminds me of the figure of Bunyan at Holborn, and I imagine that he walked here from there and Old St was that narrow straight path which Christian was so passionate to follow.
Crossing the so-called Silicon Roundabout, I am always amused by the incongruity of the Bezier Building that for all its sophisticated computer-generated geometry resembles nothing else than a pair of buttocks. Taking a path north of Old St, takes you through Charles Sq with its rare eighteenth century survival, returning you to the narrowest part of our chosen thoroughfare between Pitfield St and Curtain Rd, giving an indication of the width of the whole street before it was widened to the west of here in the nineteenth century.
The figure on the top of Shoreditch Town Hall labelled ‘Progress’ makes a highly satisfactory conclusion to our journey, simultaneously embodying the contemporary notion of technological progress and the ancient concept of a spiritual progress – both of which you may encounter upon Old St.
Hat & Feathers, Goswell Rd
Central Cafe
Helmet Row, where William Caslon established his first type foundry
St Lukes Churchyard
St Luke by Nicholas Hawksmoor
The White Lion, Central St
At Whitecross St
In Whitecross Market
In Bunhill Cemetery
John Bunyan’s tomb in Bunhill Fields with the figure of the pilgrim
John Wesley’s House in City Rd
Old St Gothic on the former St Luke Parochial School
The Bezier Building has a curious resemblance to a pair of buttocks
Eighteenth century house in Charles Sq
Prince Arthur in Brunswick Lane
Old House in Charles St
Figure of Progress on Shoreditch Town Hall
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