More Of Fran May’s Brick Lane Photos
Shall we take another walk around Brick Lane with Fran May on a damp wintry Sunday in 1976? Responding to popular demand, here are more of Fran’s splendid photographs of Spitalfields which have recently been published in two books.
BRICK LANE by Fran May, published by Cafe Royal Books
FRAN MAY, PHOTOGRAPHY 1974-78 published by Storm Books
Photographs copyright © Fran May
You may also like to take a look at the earlier selection
Cruikshank’s London Almanac, 1835
In 1835, George Cruikshank drew these illustrations of the notable seasons and festivals of the year in London for The Comic Almanack published by Charles Tilt of Fleet St. Produced from 1835 – 53, distinguished literary contributors included William Makepeace Thackeray and Henry Mayhew, but I especially enjoy George Cruikshank’s drawings for their detailed observation of the teeming street life of the capital. (Click on any of these images to enlarge)
JANUARY – Everybody freezes
FEBRUARY – Valentine’s Day
MARCH – March winds
APRIL – April showers
MAY – Sweeps on May Day
JUNE – At the Royal Academy
JULY – At Vauxhall Gardens
AUGUST – Oyster day
SEPTEMBER – Bartholomew Fair
OCTOBER – Return to Town
NOVEMBER – Penny for the Guy
DECEMBER – Christmas
You may also enjoy
George Cruikshank’s Comic Alphabet
Matchbox Models By Lesney & Company
It is my pleasure to publish the Matchbox 1966 Collector’s Guide & International Catalogue by Lesney Products & Co Ltd of Hackney Wick (courtesy of Libby Hall). The company was founded by Leslie & Rodney Smith in 1947 , closed in 1982 and the Lesney factory was demolished in 2010.
It all began in 1953, with a miniature diecast model of the Coronation Coach with its team of eight horses. In Coronation year, over a million were sold and this tremendous success was followed by the introduction of the first miniature vehicle models packed in matchboxes. And so the famous Matchbox Series was born.
More than five hundred million Matchbox models have been made since the series was first introduced during 1953, and today over two million Matchbox models are made every week. The life of a new model begins at a design meeting attended by Lesney senior executives. The suitability of a particular vehicle as a Matchbox model is discussed and the manufacturer of the full-sized car is approached for photographs, drawings and other information. Enthusiastic support is received from manufacturers throughout the world and many top secret, exciting new cars are on the Matchbox drawings boards long before they are launched to the world markets.
1. Once the details of the full-size vehicle have been obtained, many hours of careful work are required in the main drawing office in Hackney.
2. In the pattern shop, highly specialised craftsmen carve large wooden models which form the basic shape from which the miniature will eventually be diecast in millions.
3. Over a hundred skilled toolmakers are employed making the moulds for Matchbox models from the finest grade of chrome-vinadium steel.
4. There are more than one hundred and fifty automatic diecasting machines at Hackney and all have been designed, built and installed by Lesney engineers.
5. The spray shop uses nearly two thousand gallons of lead-free paint every week, and over two and a half million parts can be stove-enamelled every day.
6. Final assembly takes place over twenty lines, and sometimes several different models and their components come down each line at the same time.
7. Ingenious packing machines pick up the flat boxes, shape them and seal the model at the rate of more than one hundred and twenty items per minute.
8. Ultra-modern, automatic handling and automatic conveyor systems speed the finished models to the transit stores where electronic selection equipment routes each package.
From the highly individual, skilled worker or the enthusiast who produces hand-made samples of new ideas, to the multi-million mass assembly of the finished models by hundreds of workers, this is the remarkable story of Matchbox models. Over three thousand six hundred people play their part in a great team with the highest score in the world – over a hundred million models made and sold per year. Enthusiasts of all ages throughout the world collect and enjoy Matchbox models today and it is a true but amazing fact that if all the models from a year’s work in the Lesney factories were placed nose to tail they would stretch from London to Mexico City – a distance of over six thousand miles!
You may also like to take a look at these other magnificent catalogues
Voices From Brick Lane’s Jewish Past
I am delighted to announce more in the ongoing series of free webinars presented by the Spitalfields Trust as part of the Save Brick Lane campaign
The meeting at which Tower Hamlets Council decides upon the Truman Brewery’s application to build an ugly shopping mall with four floors of corporate offices on top is likely to be on 27th April.
If you have not lodged a formal objection, there is still time.
Learn how at www.battleforbricklane.com
VOICES FROM BRICK LANE’S JEWISH PAST
7:30pm Tuesday 20th April
NADIA VALMAN and RACHEL LICHTENSTEIN investigate the Jewish history of Brick Lane.
From the late nineteenth century until the Second World War, Brick Lane and the surrounding streets were home to Britain’s largest Jewish population. Originating from towns and villages in Russian and Eastern Europe, Jews came to London in search of freedom and a better life. Crowded into dilapidated eighteenth-century houses, they built a rich and complex subculture over generations.
Professor Nadia Valmam explores the locations around Brick Lane that once housed centres of Jewish social and religious life – where Jews prayed, shopped, debated, worked, learned and played – through the words of journalists, writers and residents.
Rachel Lichtenstein shares voices from the archive of recordings she has gathered over the past thirty years researching the Jewish East End. Some of these appear in her book On Brick Lane and, more recently, the digital project Memory Map of the Jewish East End. You will hear recordings of some who are no longer with us, such as Professor Bill Fishman, the historian who put the story of the Jewish East End on the map and the Polish tailor Majer Bogdanski, who made Brick Lane his home.
Rachel Lichtenstein is an artist, writer and curator who is internationally known for her books, multi-media projects and artworks examining place, memory and Jewish identity. Her publications include Estuary (Penguin, 2016), Diamond Street: The Hidden World of Hatton Garden, (Penguin, 2012), On Brick Lane (Penguin, 2007), and Rodinsky’s Room co-written with Iain Sinclair (Granta, 1999).
Nadia Valman is Professor of Urban Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She is a cultural historian of the East End and author/editor of eight books. She has written about several East End authors including Alexander Baron, Margaret Harkness and Israel Zangwill, and is the creator of Zangwill’s Spitalfields, a multimedia tour of nineteenth century Spitalfields through the eyes of Jewish immigrants.
Click here to register for free for VOICES FROM BRICK LANE’S JEWISH PAST
HOUSE OF ANNETTA, SITE OF RESISTANCE
7pm Tuesday 13th April
LOUIS SCHULZ of Turner Prize winning architects ASSEMBLE introduces ANNETTA’S HOUSE, a new centre for campaigning and resistance against exploitative development.
25 Princelet St in Spitalfields was the home of the architect, cybernetician, conservationist, builder, beekeeper, and campaigner ANNETTA PEDRETTI until her death in 2018. An obsessive polymath, her work has been all but forgotten.
Her large home has been given to charity and is now to be used as a social centre for all, and a base for mounting a resistance against proprietarian society, and campaigning for land reform and housing justice for all.
In this talk Louis Shulz, from the Turner Prize winning architecture collective ASSEMBLE, who are leading the project, will discuss what we know of Annetta’s life and work, as well as plans to harness the site – forever removed from the flow of land speculation and inheritance – as a place that can catalyse a resistance against the relentless top-down redevelopment of the city.
Click here to register for free for HOUSE OF ANNETTA, A SITE OF RESISTANCE
Annetta’s House, 25 Princelet St
The ugly big block proposed for the corner of Brick Lane & Woodseer St
HELP US SAVE BRICK LANE
* This development will undermine the authentic cultural quality of Brick Lane.
* The generic architecture is too tall and too bulky, ruining the Brick Lane & Fournier St Conservation Area.
* It offers nothing to local residents whose needs are for genuinely affordable homes and workspaces.
* It is an approach that is irrelevant to a post-Covid world, with more people working from home and shopping locally or online.
* Where it meets the terraces of nineteenth century housing, the development is out of scale and causes up to 60% loss of light.
* Instead of this arbitrary scheme, we need a plan for the entire brewery site that reflects the needs and wishes of residents.
HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY
You can help us stop this bad proposal by writing a letter of objection to the council as soon as possible.
Please write in your own words and head it OBJECTION.
Quote Planning Application PA/20/00415/A1
Anyone can object wherever they live.
Members of one household can each write separately.
You must include your postal address.
Send your objection by email to Patrick.Harmsworth@towerhamlets.gov.uk
Or by post to Planning Department, Town Hall, Mulberry Place, 5 Clove Crescent, London, E14 2BG
Ernest George’s Old London Etchings
Aldgate
Stefan Dickers, Archivist at Bishopsgate Institute, introduced me to these fine copper plate etchings by Ernest George (1839-1922). In the eighteen-eighties, George set out to immortalise those fragments of London which spoke of times gone by and Londoners long dead, recording buildings and views which have for the most part now disappeared.
I realise that my affection for these images sets me in line with the generations of chroniclers who have made it their business to document the transience of the city, starting with John Stow who wrote the very first Survey of London between 1560 and 1598 to describe the streets of his childhood that were vanishing before his eyes.
Ernest George’s etchings were published by the Fine Art Society in New Bond St in 1884, a magnificent temple of culture designed by Edward William Godwin which survived through the twentieth century only to close in August 2018.
Bishopsgate
Wych St, Strand
Fouberts Place, Soho
Crown Court, Pall Mall
St Bartholomew, Smithfield
Warwick Lane, City
Tower of London
London Bridge
Staple Inn, Holborn
Drury Lane
St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell
Limehouse
Shadwell
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to look at
Upon The Origins Of Bow Church
Bow Church is one of my favourite places in the East End, so it was an honour to be asked to write the history of this ancient place for their new website. Below you can read the first page and the rest is available at www.bow.church
The ancient Church of St Mary Stratford Atte Bow stands in the middle of the road at the entrance to the East End, where the lofty old tower welcomes travellers from Essex and bids farewell to those leaving London.
Our story begins with a miracle, when the waters of the River Lea parted in the manner of the Red Sea, allowing the wondrous passage of the body of St Erkenwald, carried across the dry riverbed on his journey from Barking Abbey to his final resting place in St Paul’s Cathedral in 693. Legend has it that when the saint’s body was laid down in Bow upon what became the site of the church, flowers blossomed where the bier sat upon the ground.
Our history continues with an accident, when Queen Matilda fell into the River Lea on her way to Barking in 1110 and became ‘well wetted with water,’ according to medieval historian John Leland. In the absence of miracles and to avoid future muddy mishaps, Matilda ordered the building of a bridge at this spot. Leland tells us it was ‘arched like unto a bowe,’ which gave the name to the village that grew up beside the crossing where a community of bridge keepers, boatmen, millers, fishermen, farmers, bakers, butchers, fullers, saddlers, dyers and cap makers flourished.
Each winter the inhabitants of Bow grew sick of trudging through the muddy paths to the parish church of St Dunstan’s in Stepney and launched a petition, believing that they were worthy of having their own place of worship, inspired perhaps by the building of the White Chapel in Aldgate. On 7th November 1311 Bishop Baldock of London complied, licensing the construction of a ‘chapel of ease’ at Bow and in 1327 King Edward III granted a piece of land ‘in the middle of the King’s Highway,’ where the chapel was founded as daughter church to St Dunstan’s.
A few years later in 1348 the Black Death pandemic arrived, blighting the land and killing as many as half the population which led to a labour shortage and the expectation of higher incomes. But the Statue of Labour of 1351 capped wages, escalating grievances and social unrest that contributed to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in which over 1,500 people died.
Demanding an end to serfdom, protestors led by Wat Tyler marched from Essex through Bow in May to confront the fourteen year old King Richard II on Stepney Green. Although he acceded to their wishes, they entered London in June, sacking the Savoy Palace and occupying the Tower of London. Richard met with the rebels again in Smithfield where violence broke out and Wat Tyler was stabbed by William Walworth, Mayor of London, crushing the revolt.
The growth of the community at Bow over the next century was such that the chapel of ease acquired its first priest in 1456, recorded simply as ‘John.’ Significant legacies from local tradesmen permitted the improvement of the building, known as ‘The Great Work,’ enlarging it to the size it is today by 1490. John of York, a baker, left £13 4d to pay for candles and £3 towards the building of a steeple. John Laylond, a carpenter, bequeathed his stock of timber for ‘making doorways and floors of the new belfry.’ Richard Robyn, chapel warden, left forty shillings for the steeple and John Bruggis left £3 for glazing the west window.
At this time, a vaulted crypt of sixty feet long was constructed beneath the nave to store the bodies of parishioners until Judgement Day, which was sealed by government health order in 1891. The lower part of the tower of Kentish ragstone dates from this era, as does the battered octagonal font that was discarded in 1624 in favour of a more modern design. After three hundred years as a garden ornament, it was rescued and continues in use for baptisms.
As more houses, shops and taverns were built surrounding the churchyard, it created a public space for gatherings and markets, especially at public holidays and seasonal festivals. Thus arose the celebrated Bow Fair, recalled today in the street name of Fairfield Road. The market had its origins as a Green Goose Fair held at Whitsuntide for the sale of young geese from the surrounding countryside.
Every Whit Wednesday, the congregation of Bow visited their mother church of St Dunstan’s, walking in procession through the fields to pay their dues of twenty-four shillings, declaring their membership of Stepney parish and participating in a service of worship. Bow Fair culminated an annual week of festivity in summer. Over proceeding centuries, the fair attracted large crowds of visitors from London and Essex, acquiring a reputation for debauchery and drunkenness, as Shakespeare’s contemporary Gervase Markham wrote in 1600.
‘To Stratford Bow unto the Greengoose Fair
A world of people one day did repair
Both poor and rich, men likewise old and young.
Mixt with the males, the females came along.
The season of the year as usually was parching hot,
The weather scorching dry.
Hay makers, mowers, thither did repair.
Compelled by the sultry-hot-fire breathing air
The extreme heat did cause a thirst
So they drank until they almost burst.’
Shrine of St Erkenwald in Old St Paul’s by Wenceslas Hollar
Queen Matilda fell into the River Lea in 1110
King Edward III granted a piece of land ‘in the middle of the King’s Highway’ in 1327
Richard II meeting the Peasant’s Revolt in Stepney in 1381 by Jean Froissart
Octagonal font of 1410 at Bow Church
A village fair by Gillis Mostaert, 1590
You may also like to read about
Fran May’s Brick Lane
Our spring sale ends at midnight. Enter ‘SPRING’ at checkout to claim 50% discount.
Click here to visit the Spitalfields Life online bookshop
In 1976, Fran May arrived in London at the age of twenty-one to study photography at the Royal College of Art and some of the first pictures she took were of Brick Lane.
“At first, exploring London was daunting, too big and exhausting. Someone suggested I visited Brick Lane, but I would have to get there at dawn for the best of it. An early bird by nature, this was not too difficult. And what a reward. I wore my hair long and had a duffle coat—the perfect disguise. My dominant eye is my left eye, so the camera is always in front of my face. It is like the child of two who covers their eyes and thinks you cannot see them. I had become invisible too. I went time and time again. It was like stepping into a different world, a different universe, a film set. Characters, faces, businesses, from another time, caught in a time warp.
Head of Photography, John Hedgecoe, came to me one day and said I had been selected to be taught by Bill Brandt. The first time I went to his house near Kensington Church St, I took my landscape photographs. I confess I did not know all of Bill Brandt’s work, but I knew of the nudes on the beach. I rang his bell, acknowledged by a woman’s voice, the door clicked open. Once through the open front door, a voice called from beyond. “Come in. Come in.”
Bill sat before a fire in the grate, the light from the flames flickering on his face. “What have you brought me?” he asked in his gentle voice. I placed my portfolio on the floor and lifted the pictures to him one by one. He was silent until he looked at me and said, “I don’t think I can teach you anything, do you?” I did not know how to take this. I packed everything away, thanked him and left.
A couple of days later, I bumped into John Hedgecoe again in the corridor. “How did you get on with Bill Brandt?” he asked. I told him I didn’t think I should go again because Bill had said he couldn’t teach me anything. “No, you must go see him again. You must make the most of your opportunities”. So off I went, this time taking some of the images I had taken while at Sheffield and the more recent ones shot in Brick Lane.
This was a different experience. Bill studied each one for a long time. Seated on the footstool at his feet, Bill moved his reading light nearer and re-settled himself in his chair. I studied the firelight flickering on his face. Then he put the pile of photographs flat on his lap, breaking the silence and said, “Ah, Fran. Let me tell you something. Never loose these images, don’t think of them just as student work, for they will have social significance one day”. His eyes twinkled as he smiled at me.
I returned one more time to visit Bill Brandt. He told me he had not really known what he had achieved until later. The photographs he had taken were commissioned jobs. When they were put together in a particular order, they meant something new and that the passage of time mattered. Well, I did keep these images.”
Fran May’s Brick Lane photographs have recently been published in two books
BRICK LANE by Fran May, published by Cafe Royal Books
FRAN MAY, PHOTOGRAPHY 1974-78 published by Storm Books
Photographs © Fran May
You may also like to take a look at
Raju Vaidyanathan’s Brick Lane
