A London Inheritance & The Bug Woman
It is my delight to publish excerpts from two favourite alumni of my HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ course.
There are a couple of places available on my next course on 20th & 21st November. You are invited to spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house, learn the secrets of Spitalfields Life, enjoy delicious lunches catered by Leila’s Cafe and cakes baked to historic recipes by the Townhouse, and learn how to write your own blog.
Click here for more details. Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book
A LONDON INHERITANCE, a private history of a public city
Walking Brunel’s Tunnel from Rotherhithe to Wapping
I have always been fascinated by what is beneath the surface of London and I can trace this interest back to the seventies when I read one of my father’s books Under London, A Chronicle Of London’s Underground Life-Lines & Relics by F.L. Stevens, published in 1939.
In this book were chapters on the Fleet Drain, Tube Tunnels, Roman London, Crypts and Vaults, Rivers, Wells and Water, and Tunnels under the Thames. There was also a final chapter titled [London Takes Cover’ which at only ten pages looked to be a last-minute addition and began “Queer things are happening under London to-day” before describing preparations being made for Londoners to seek shelter underground from terrors on top. I wonder if they could have imagined what would happen over the next few years and what those terrors would be?
The chapter on Thames Tunnels starts with Brunel’s tunnel connecting Wapping and Rotherhithe, not only the first tunnel driven under the Thames but also the first tunnel under any river.
I learnt of an opportunity to walk this tunnel during closure of the line for maintenance work and joined the queue at Rotherhithe station. Once inside, it was only a short flight of stairs and walk along the platform to reach the entrance to the tunnel.
The Rotherhithe-Wapping Thames Tunnel was not the first attempt at a tunnel under the Thames. In 1799, a tunnel between Gravesend and Tilbury was begun, given up as a bad job and then started again a couple of years later. A shaft was sunk and the tunnel reached within 150 feet of the other bank of the river before it was again abandoned.
A Thames Tunnel was badly needed. It is a four mile circuit between Rotherhithe and Wapping, via London Bridge, and ferries carried 4,000 people across the Thames every day at Rotherhithe. Marc Brunel was convinced that a tunnel could be built and originated the concept of a shield to protect the men digging at the face of the tunnelling work. At a meeting of investors on the 18th February 1824, Brunel was appointed as engineer.
The shaft was begun in March 1825 and all appeared to be going well until January 1826 when the river broke in. Yet work pressed ahead and, by the beginning of 1827, the tunnel had reached 300 feet. As work progressed, there were all manner of problems including strikes, mysterious diseases (the Thames was London’s sewer at this time), and explosions from ‘fire-damp.’ The river continued to break in. On Saturday 12th January 1828, six workman were trapped and drowned and, despite the hole being filled with 4,000 bags of clay, the project was abandoned due to lack of funds. The tunnel was bricked up. No further work happened until seven years later on 27th March 1835 and it carried on for a further eight years.
In March 1843, staircases were built around the shafts and Marc Brunel led a triumphant procession through the tunnel. Marc’s son Isambard worked with his father and was appointed chief engineer in 1827, however his work with the Great Western Railway took him away during the later years of construction. Marc Brunel worked on the tunnel from start to finish.
As one of the sights of London, the Thames Tunnel was a huge success. Within twenty-four hours of the tunnel’s opening, fifty thousand people had passed through and a total of one million visitd within the first fifteen weeks. The Thames Tunnel was purchased by the East London Railway in 1866 and, three years later, became part of the underground railway system.
At the Rotherhithe end of the tunnel, large pipes with the sound of running water descended below the level of the tunnel. According to our guide, if these pumps that drain the water failed then the tunnel would flood within a matter of hours.
THE BUG WOMAN, Adventures in London
Because a community is more than just people
Magpie Wars
Dear Readers, ever since I have been putting live mealworms in the garden I have been ‘adopted’ by a pair of magpies. Goodness, what pirates they are! They terrorise the collared doves by swooping into the tree in a menacing way though I have never seen them actually attack one. I do suspect that they sometimes take an unsuspecting tadpole but so far the starling fledglings have gone unmolested.
Then yesterday there was a ridiculous amount of noise coming from the front of the house, I walked out the front door and almost locking myself out. Two pairs of magpies were facing off on the roof opposite. I remembered that when magpies are in a tree, the most dominant – which often has the longest tail – sits at the top. So I wondered if this was the case here too, with one pair claiming the roof line.
As I watched I concluded that the roof line was maybe the boundary between their territories. My pair seemed much happier once the other pair had departed. After all the cackling and chuckling, there was a return to calm as they popped back to check out the mealworms again.
I have been reading about magpies’ territorial behaviour. A resident pair will be challenged by non-breeding males on a regular basis. Often, as soon as battle commences, a great flock of other magpies will turn up to watch the fun. Apparently, this gives them an opportunity to review the strength of the combatants without putting themselves at risk. If a male fancies his chances, he will be back later. This makes me wonder if what I was seeing was not a fight between two pairs, but between a pair and two males, one fighting and the other watching.
In towns, magpies’ territories tend to be smaller because there is more availability of food, especially for an omnivore who eats everything from tadpoles and mealworms to chips and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I suspect my garden has the advantage of availability of food but the disadvantage of cats and humans. Yet birds can inhabit territory for as long as eight to ten years, so it looks like the magpies and I have plenty of time to get to know one another.
HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 20th & 21st November 2021
This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.
“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author
COURSE STRUCTURE
1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.
SALIENT DETAILS
The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 20th-21st November, running from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.
Lunch will be catered by Leila’s Cafe of Arnold Circus and tea, coffee & cakes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £300.
Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.
Fifty Years Since The Stepney School Strike
Alan Dein recalls the Stepney School Strike of 1971, fifty years ago this week
When I found a copy of Stepney Words in a school jumble sale, I had no idea what a remarkable discovery I had made. I can still remember reading the poems while walking home through the very same East London streets depicted in many of the poems. With titles like ‘The Chance,’ ‘Death in a Churchyard,’ ‘The World is Dim and Dull,’ ‘Let it Flow Joe,’ and writing that was vivid and raw and utterly captivating, I had stumbled upon the inner thoughts and observations of young people aged eleven to fifteen years from another time.
The beautifully atmospheric cover photograph confirmed that their Stepney was a world when the dockyard cranes and heavy industry depicted in a brown haze were still a part of the working life of the River Thames. I knew I had found a precious document and I felt compelled to find out more. A visit to Tower Hamlets Local History Library helped me discover the remarkable story and I made a BBC Radio documentary in 1997 about the astonishing impact this thirty-two-page booklet had on so many people’s lives, and upon the meaning of classroom education .
In May 1971, Chris Searle, a young English teacher was sacked by the governors of Sir John Cass Foundation School in Stepney for publishing Stepney Words, a collection of his students’ poems. Searle had encouraged his pupils to write about their lives and their neighbourhood. These were same streets where his own literary hero, the great poet Isaac Rosenberg, had once lived.
In response to Searle’s dismissal, on the 27th May 1971, eight hundred pupils, including those from neighbouring schools, went on strike. With banners aloft and chanting ‘We Shall Overcome’ in the pouring rain, they refused to return to school until Chris Searle was reinstated.
Following a spate of industrial disputes that had seen dustcarts and the postal system out of action, many of the youngsters had seen their parents on picket lines, so they followed their pattern. Several strikers marched into the offices of the local paper, who then called the national papers. The children’s strike was front page news, and the next day the strikers took to the streets of London, marching from Stepney to Trafalgar Sq, making sure that their route took them right through Fleet St which generated even more coverage.
The publication of Stepney Words extended beyond the strike. There was a second volume later in the year, readings by the young writers at poetry festivals, and some of the Stepney poets set up a pioneering arts project in Cable St, the Basement Writers, a multi-disciplinary platform for working class writers and performers.
Behind the scenes, controversy raged surrounding of the reinstatement of Searle. In 1973, with support from the National Union of Teachers and the Inner London Education Authority, Chris Searle did get his job back. The student strikers were vindicated. But by then the older ones had already left school and, on his return, Searle was ostracised by other staff and denied a class of his own.
He moved to Langdon Park School in Poplar where he helped to publish The People Marching On, a ground-breaking anthology of key events in East End history written by the English students.
Stepney Words remained in print throughout the seventies and into the eighties, selling tens of thousands of copies.
In 1973 Hackney’s Centerprise compiled the two volumes of Stepney Words into a single edition and hailed “the great upsurge in community and working class publishing … where the movement to write and publish was taken up in a small area of East London, today it is being continued in many other towns and cities throughout the country.”
Over the years since my documentary, I have been invited to a number of reunions of the Stepney Poets and strikers, along with Chris Searle, who went on to head a secondary school in Sheffield after working in East Africa and the Caribbean. In the course of these gatherings, the events of 1971 have been described as extraordinary and life-changing by those who were there. They are all in agreement that it is their former English teacher whose creativity and vision was their inspiration. For Searle, it was the energy and actions of those young people who set the course of his life’s work in education.
Later this year, we are planning to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary with a symposium held at Queen Mary University in Mile End exploring the events of 1971 and their legacy, with teachers, students, young poets and community groups discussing both the immediate impact and the longer-term influence, encouraging new generations of young people to find their own voices.
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So Long, James McBarron
James Mc Barron died on Monday at the fine age of ninety-four, he was born in Hoxton on 21st September 1926
James McBarron
When I published Horace Warner’s photographs of Spitalfields Nippers from around 1900, I never expected to meet anyone who knew them. Yet Lynne Ellis wrote to say her father James McBarron recognised Celia Compton whom Horace Warner photographed at the age of fifteen in 1901. By the time James knew Celia, when he was a child in the thirties, she was Mrs Hayday and he encountered her as a money-lender when he was sent to make weekly repayments on his mother’s loans.
Intrigued by this unexpected connection to a photograph of more than a century ago, I took the train from Fenchurch St down to Stanford Le Hope to meet James McBarron and learn more of his story. This is what he told me.
“I am from Hoxton, Shoreditch, I was born in George Sq at the back of Hoxton Sq – it’s not there anymore. There were seven tenements and another building where Mrs Hayday lived, all around a yard with a lamppost in the middle. We attached a rope onto the lamppost and swung on it. We used to have a bonfire there in November and all the families came along. It was like a village and a lot of people were related, and everyone knew each other. We were clannish and there were quite a few families with members in different flats – my grandmother and grandfather lived there in one flat and I had two aunts in another.
Eighty years later I can still remember Mrs Hayday, even though I was only seven, eight or nine at the time. It was in 1936 or thereabouts. She was a money-lender and I was sent by my mother every Sunday to pay sixpence to her, but it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. To my eyes, as young boy, she was overwhelming. I was shown into the bedroom by her daughter and she was always lying there in bed. She took out a book from the bedside and made a note of the money. I recall an impression of crisp white sheets and she had dyed blonde hair. She was a buxom woman, a little blowsy. She smelled of scent – Phul Nana by Grossmith – the only scent I knew as a young boy, the factory was in Newgate St. I was awestruck because she was so unlike any of the other people I knew. There was a never a man there or a Mr Hayday. She was a very nice lady, she said, ‘Hello’ and ‘Say ‘Hello’ to your mum and dad,’And that was Mrs Hayday.’
My father, George, was a carpenter from Sunderland and he served in the Great War. My mother worked at Tom Smith’s Cracker Factory in Old St. My parents met in London and my mother’s family already lived in George Sq. My grandfather, he was an inventor and I admired him very much. He made a little working steam engine, and he tapped the gas main and had a tube with a little flame, so he could light his roll-ups. He played the violin and read music, and he never went to work. My gran used to go round to the pub for a jug of beer and they’d all go upstairs to my grandparents’ flat and play darts, and he’d play the violin.
We kids used to chop firewood to make money. The boys and girls used to go around collecting tea-chests and packing-boxes from the back of all the furniture factories, and say ‘Can we take it away, Mister?’ We chopped it up into sticks and made bundles, and we’d sell them for a penny or a ha-penny. We used to go to Spitalfields Market and ask for ‘Any spunks?’ or ‘Spunky oranges and apples?’ and they’d chuck the fruit that was going bad to us.
We didn’t think we were poor, except there was a family called Laban who were better off than us. He was a bookmaker and had touts. I remember their son had a jacket with pleats in the back and I wanted one like it, but when my mum eventually got me one it wasn’t so good. My father had a blue serge suit and it was pawned each Monday to pay the rent and bought back each Friday when he got paid. On Sundays, we went down to Stephenson’s Bakery in Curtain Rd to get a penny loaf.
When you came out of George Sq, there was a little alleyway leading through to Hoxton Market. There was Marcus the Newsagent, and next to it was Pollock’s and they had toy theatres in the window and these glass bottles with coloured liquid – it was a tiny shop. Next to that was Neville’s where my father bought our boots and shoes. I can remember every shop in the Market. Hoxton St was different then, bustling with stalls and there were barrows selling roasted chestnuts and boiled sheep’s heads.
William was the eldest child in our family, then I was born, then Peter, then Johnny and last of all Margaret. There was twenty-one years between us and she was born while I was away in the army, so she didn’t know me when I came back. I knocked them up at seven in the morning and called, ‘Here’s your boy, back again!’ We had three rooms – two bedrooms and a living room, and that’s why we had to move.
After the war, they moved us up to Haggerston to a new building in Stean St and George Sq was demolished because it was a slum. Everything broke up when people moved out. They took out all our furniture – including a table and chest of drawers my father made – and put it in a closed van and fumigated it because of the bugs. I’ve still got his tool box. It was a ragtag and bobtail existence, but I think we were a little better off than some. “
Celia Compton photographed at age fifteen by Horace Warner in 1901. Years later in 1936, a year after her husband died and when James McBarron was a child, she lived at 5e George Sq and he knew her by her married name of Celia Hayday.
James McBarron with his father’s carpentry box
Margaret & George McBarron in Haggerston
James and his brother Peter
As a boy, James visited Benjamin Pollock’s Toy Theatre shop at 208 Hoxton Old Town
James’ younger brother Johnny in the new flat when the family were rehoused in Stean St, Haggerston, in 1946
James’ elder brother William at the piano
James & June McBarron
James & June McBarron got married in St Leonard’s Shoreditch on 5th June 1954
James McBarron, 1965
James catches mackerel on holiday in Devon
James & June McBarron’s children, Lynne & Ian, in the sixties
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Joseph Markovitch, I’ve live in Hoxton for eight-six and a half years
The Battle For Brick Lane Exhibition
Dan Cruickshank shows his son the model of the Truman Brewery
The Battle For Brick Lane exhibition that I curated for the Spitalfields Trust – as part of their campaign to stop the proposed Truman Brewery shopping mall with corporate offices on top – reopens this Saturday and can be viewed for the next three weekends. If you have not seen Annetta Pedretti’s extraordinary house at 25 Princelet St this is also your opportunity to pay a visit.
Sebastian Harding’s model of the Truman Brewery forms the centrepiece of the exhibition, complemented with displays of documentary photography by Phil Maxwell and Saif Osmani, celebrating the culture of Brick Lane.
The Battle For Brick Lane exhibition is open at Annetta Pedretti’s House, 25 Princelet St, E1 6QH, from noon until 6pm every weekend
We need volunteer invigilators for the exhibition. If you can help please send an email to Heloise Palin at Spitalfields Trust heloise@spitalfieldstrust.com
VISIT WWW.BATTLEFORBRICKLANE.COM
Louis Shultz, Seyi Adelekun & Fran Edgerley of Assemble Studio who manage Annetta’s House
Dan Cruickshank cuts the ribbon held by Seyi Adelekun and Gillian Tindall, opening the exhibition
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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A Door In Cornhill
The Bronte sisters visit their publisher in Cornhill, 1848
An ancient thoroughfare with a mythic past, Cornhill takes its name from one of the three former hills of the City of London – an incline barely perceptible today after centuries of human activity upon this site, building and razing, rearranging the land. This is a place does not declare its multilayered history – even though the Roman forum was here and the earliest site of Christian worship in England was here too, dating from 179 AD, and also the first coffee house was opened here by Pasqua Rosee in 1652, the Turk who introduced coffee to London. Yet a pair of carved mahogany doors, designed by the sculptor Walter Gilbert in 1939 at 32 Cornhill – opposite the old pump – bring episodes from this rich past alive in eight graceful tableaux.
Walter Gilbert (1871-1946) was a designer and craftsman who developed his visual style in the Arts & Crafts movement at the end of the nineteenth century and then applied it to a wide range of architectural commissions in the twentieth century, including the gates of Buckingham Palace, sculpture for the facade of Selfridges and some distinctive war memorials. In this instance, he modelled the reliefs in clay which were then translated into wood carvings by B.P Arnold at H. H. Martyn & Co Ltd of Cheltenham.
Gilbert’s elegant reliefs appeal to me for the laconic humour that observes the cool autocracy of King Lucius and the sullen obedience of his architects, and for the sense of human detail that emphasises W. M. Thackeray’s curls at his collar in the meeting with Anne and Charlotte Bronte at the offices of their publisher Smith, Elder & Co. In each instance, history is given depth by an awareness of social politics and the selection of telling detail. These eight panels take us on a journey from the early medieval world of omnipotent monarchy and religious penance through the days of exploitative clergy exerting controls on the people, to the rise of the tradesman and merchants who created the City we know today.
“St Peter’s Cornhill founded by King Lucius 179 AD to be an Archbishop’s see and chief church of his kingdom and so it endured for the space of four hundred years until the coming of Augustine the monk of Canterbury.”
“Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, did penance walking barefoot to St Michael’s Church from Queen Hithe, 1441.”
“Cornhill was an ancient soke of the Bishop of London who had the Seigneurial oven in which all tenants were obliged to bake their bread and pay furnage or baking dues.”
“Cornhill is the only market allowed to be held afternoon in the fourteenth century.”
“Birchin Lane, Cornhill, place of considerable trade for men’s apparel, 1604.”
“Garraway’s Coffee House, a place of great commercial transaction and frequented by people of quality.”
“Pope’s Head Tavern in existence in 1750 belonging to Merchant Taylor’s Company, the Vinters were prominent in the life of Cornhill Ward.”
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Jim Howett, Designer
In my opinion, Jim Howett is the best dressed man in Spitalfields. Here he is with a characteristically shy smile, sitting on a seventeen-twenties staircase in a houses in Fournier St he was restoring for the Spitalfields Trust. Jim was entirely at home in this shabby yet elegantly proportioned old house, a specifically localised environment that over time has become his natural habitat and is now the place you are most likely to find him.
For years, I admired Jim’s artisan clothing whenever I caught glimpses of him, always crossing Commercial St and disappearing through the market or off down Folgate St preoccupied with some enigmatic intent. When we were introduced, I discovered that Jim sleeps each night in the attic at Dennis Severs’ House and crosses the market every day to work in Fournier St with Marianna Kennedy, designing the furniture and lamps that have become ubiquitous in the houses around Spitalfields. I also learnt Jim is responsible for a significant number of the most appealing shopfronts in the neighbourhood.
At first, I assumed Jim was Irish on account of his soft vowels and quietly spoken manner, almost whispering sometimes, even swallowing his words before he utters them, and thereby drawing your attention to listen, concentrating to gather both what is said and what is unspoken. Such is the nature of his mind that Jim will begin a sentence and then pursue a digression that leads to another and yet another – though such is the intelligence of the man, that when he leads you back to the resolution of the original thought, it acquires a more precise import on account of all the qualifications and counter arguments. Without a doubt, Jim is a consummate prose talker.
Jim’s origins lie in Ohio in the foothills of the Appalachians, where he grew up in Salem. But Jim’s father worked in international development and in the nineteen-sixties the family moved to the Congo and then his father was transferred Vietnam, with the family ending up in London in 1967. Jim studied at the Architectural Association under the tutelage of Dan Cruickshank, subsequently working for a few years in prehistoric archaeology, before deciding to study at the London College of Furniture which was then in Commercial Rd.
Renting a room on Brick Lane, Jim dropped a card to his former tutor who wrote back to say he had just bought a house in Elder St full of broken furniture, so Jim set up a workbench in Dan’s basement to undertake the repairs.
“Dennis Severs knocked upon the door one day, looking for Dan,” Jim told me. “He said he’d just bought a house round the corner and wanted to do tours, and we thought he was crazy but we helped him set it up. I made the shutters, the partition with the arch in the dining room and I copied the fireplace from one in Princelet St.” he added, revealing the origin of his own involvement with 18 Folgate St, where today he is the sole resident. Before long, Jim was sharing a workshop with Marianna Kennedy and ceramicist Simon Pettet in Gibraltar Walk, sharing aspirations to create new work inspired by historical models by applying traditional craft skills. They found themselves amidst a community centred around the restoration of the eighteenth century houses, dubbed ‘Neo-Georgians’ by the media – a moment recorded today in the collection of magazines and photo features, illustrating the renaissance of Spitalfields, that Jim keeps in a box in his workshop.
Jim taught himself furniture making by copying a Hepplewhite chair – constructing four versions until he could get the proportion right – before he discovered that there was no market for them because dealers considered them too dangerously close to the originals as to approach fakes. Yet this irony, which was to hamper Jim’s early career as a furniture maker, served as a lesson in the significance of proportion in engaging with historical designs.
When Jim won a commission to design an armoire for Julie Christie, he thought he had found the path to success. “She gave me tip of half the value of my commission fee and I thought ‘This is as good as it gets’, but she remains the best client I ever had.” admits Jim, wistfully recognising the severely limited market for custom-built new furniture in antique styles. “I used to make these pieces and have no money left over to buy coffee afterwards,” he declared with a shrug.
The renovation of Spitalfields gave Jim the opportunity to become one of those who has created the visual language of our streets, through his subtle approach to restoring the integrity of old shopfronts that have been damaged or altered. Perhaps the most famous are A.Gold and Verdes in Brushfields St, 1 & 3 Fournier St and 86 Commercial St. In these and numerous other examples, through conscientious research, Jim has been responsible for retaining the quality of vernacular detail and proportion that makes this Spitalfields, rather than any other place. The beauty of Jim’s work is that these buildings now look as if they had always been like they are today.
Yet Jim is quick to emphasise that he is not an architect, explaining that his work requires both more detailed knowledge of traditional building techniques and less ego, resisting the urge to add personal embellishments. “The difference between me and architects, working on historic buildings is that I restrict myself to organising the space. I believe if a building has survived for two hundred years, it has survived because it has certain qualities. The reason, I don’t put my finger in the pie is because I can express myself in other things.”
While Jim spoke, he produced file after file of photographs, plans and maps, spreading them out upon the table in his workshop to create a huge collage, whilst maintaining an extraordinary monologue of interwoven stories about the people, the place and the buildings. I was fascinated by Jim’s collection of maps, spanning the last five hundred years in Spitalfields and I realised that he carries in his mind a concrete picture of how the place has evolved. When I have seen him walking around, he is walking in awareness of all the incarnations of this small parish, the buildings that have come and gone through past centuries.
It fired my imagination when Jim took me into the cellar of 15 Fournier St and pointed out the path across the yard belonging to the sixteenth century building that stood there before the eighteenth century house was built, telling me about the pieces of charred wood they found, because this was where debris was dumped after the Fire of London in 1666.
Simon Pettet portrayed Jim on one of his tiles as a fly on the wall, reflecting Jim’s omnipresence in Spitalfields. “I think if my father had not taken us to the Congo, I should still be there in Salem, Ohio,” confessed Jim with a weary smile, “because at heart I am a localist.” Jim showed me the missing finger on his left hand, sliced off while cutting a mitre from left to right, a mark that today he regards as the proud badge of his carpenter’s trade. In his work and through his modest personal presence, Jim has become an inextricable part of the identity of Spitalfields – after more than forty years, I hope we may now describe him as a local.
Jim at Jocasta Innes’ house in Heneage St, 1990
Jim with Dennis Severs and Simon Pettet, pictured in a magazine feature of 1991
Jim modelling his calfskin apron, 1991
Jim pictured in the penurious weavers’ garret at Dennis Severs’ House that today is his bedroom
In the Victorian Parlour at Dennis Severs’ House
Hoisting up the new cornice in Commercial St
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Some Favourite London Mulberries
In celebration of the news that the Bethnal Green Mulberry is saved, here is a gallery of some of my favourite London Mulberries
At the Tower of London
At Charlton House
At Middle Temple
At KIng’s Bench Walk
In Haggerston
In Whitechapel
In Stoke Newington
At Charterhouse
In Victoria Park
In the Commissioner’s Garden at Chatham Royal Naval Dockyard
At Mile End Place
At Abbey Wood
At Syon
At Sayes Court, Deptford
In Bunhill Fields
In Dalston
At the London Chest Hospital
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