Adam Dant’s London Rebus
Click on the rebus to enlarge
Contributing Artist ADAM DANT created this ingenious puzzle to amuse you while staying at home this weekend. Here are the answers:
Marylebone, Harley Street, Telecom Tower, UCL, Oxford Street, Broadcasting House, Bloomsbury, Hyde Park Serpentine, Marble Arch, Mayfair, Fortnum & Mason, Soho, Ritz, Claridges, Belgravia, Victoria, Buckingham Palace, Lambeth Palace, The Mall, Jermyn Street, Houses of Parliament, Covent Garden, St Giles, Waterloo, The Cut, Somerset House, Holborn, Aldwych, Fleet Street, Blackfriars, Tate Modern, Borough, Cannon Street, St Paul’s, Tower Hill, London Assembly, Bermondsey, Royal Mint, Fenchurch Street, Aldgate, Bank of England, Guildhall, St Bart’s, Barbican, Bunhill, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Hackney, Moorfields, Finsbury, Hatton Garden, St Pancras, British Museum, Clerkenwell.
We received more than thirty correct entries. The twenty readers below were the first to submit their answers and Maps of Spitalfields Life are in the mail to them.
Ele Aaser
Lucinda Acland
Ayla Bedric
Rebekah Bristow
Clare Britton
Andrew Collingridge
Sue Davis
Sarah Dawson
Lucy Fawcett
Richard Fearn
Anne Flavell
Sean Galvin
Peter Halston
Julia Harrison
David Hunter
Martin Peterson
David Rees
Lynn Roffee
Kerry Sewell
John White
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CLICK TO ORDER A COPY OF MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND BY ADAM DANT
Adam Dant’s MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND is a mighty monograph collecting together all your favourite works by Spitalfields Life‘s Contributing Cartographer in a beautiful big hardback book.
Including a map of London riots, the locations of early coffee houses and a colourful depiction of slang through the centuries, Adam Dant’s vision of city life and our prevailing obsessions with money, power and the pursuit of pleasure may genuinely be described as ‘Hogarthian.’
Unparalleled in his draughtsmanship and inventiveness, Adam Dant explores the byways of London’s cultural history in his ingenious drawings, annotated with erudite commentary and offering hours of fascination for the curious.
The book includes an extensive interview with Adam Dant by The Gentle Author.
Adam Dant’s limited edition prints including THE LONDON REBUS are available to purchase through TAG Fine Arts
Paul Trevor In Brick Lane, 1978
Photographer Paul Trevor captured the drama of Brick Lane during the summer of 1978 when protests erupted after the racist murder of Altab Ali, a twenty-five-year-old leather garment worker, on May 4th.
Now a project is underway to trace the people in these photographs and record personal accounts of this transformative moment in racial politics in the East End when people organised to fight back against racism. The aim is to gather an archive of oral histories leading to an exhibition at Four Corners Gallery in Bethnal Green next year.
If you are in these photographs or you can identify anyone, or you would like to contribute your personal experiences of these events, please email bricklane1978@gmail.com
Marching down Brick Lane
This woman carries a Campaign Against Racism & Fascism paper with the story of Altab Ali’s murder
Community Gathering
Writers’ Group
Members of the Bangladesh Youth Front
Anti-racist protest in Bethnal Green
Photographs copyright © Paul Trevor
At The Truman Brewery, 1931
Tomorrow is the formal closing date for submitting your comments on the Truman Brewery redevelopment plans for a shopping mall and corporate offices. Click here for more information
There is a curious drama in the presence of the two brewers in overalls in this picture of the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, looking like ants by comparison with the tall coppers towering above, each with the capacity for boiling four hundred barrels of liquid. Can you even find the second brewer, high on a gantry up above his colleague busy stirring with a long pole?
This is an illustration of the crucial stage in the brewing process when the hops are added to the boiling “wort,” as the malt infused liquor is called before it becomes beer. Yet in spite of the awe-inspiring modernity of this vision, you can still see the smallest of the coppers in the top left corner within the shell of the seventeenth century brewhouse, itself enclosed by the vast brewery that grew up around it.
The contrast between the heroic scale of the brewing operation and the figures of cloth-capped workmen looks absurd today. The industrialisation of the process which this sequence of pictures celebrate is unremarkable to us, it is the presence of the wooden barrels and use of horsepower that we find exotic. This is a quaint English modernity which has more in common with W. Heath Robinson than Fritz Lang. The agricultural illustrations of the cultivation of barley show a haywain reminiscent of John Constable’s work and stooks of corn upon the hillside as you would see in a landscape by Samuel Palmer.
These intriguing pictures were created as a supplement to The Black Eagle Magazine, published by Truman Hanbury & Buxton in 1931, and grant a rare glimpse into the working life of the brewery that flourished here for over three hundred years.
Yet, although these pictures were designed to elucidate the brewing process, in fact they merely serve to romance the alchemical mystery even further. The text of the accompanying brochure contains some elegant obfuscation too.
“Living things have ever an individuality of their own which defies mere rule of thumb government. Brewing is not merely an elaborate process of manufacture, but it includes in it the application of man’s brain power as scientist and technician, to guide the processes of nature, and to help understand something of life’s basic but baffling problems: food, health and clean surroundings.”
These artists’ impressions seem to imply that the brewery contained another reality, stranger the outer world and containing magical possibilities. A notion enforced by references to the use of a Jacob’s Ladder, Archimidean Screw and Dust Destroying Plant, while the language of “sparging” the “wort” evokes a universe as bizarre as anything Tolkien imagined.
Yet it was all real, a discrete society with its own arcane language and culture that evolved during three centuries in Brick Lane until it modernised itself out of existence. What touches me in these curious pictures are the small human figures – often hidden or partially concealed in the background – and the few artefacts on their scale, the sinks, buckets, barrels and jugs, which appear miniature beside the industrial scale brewing equipment.
A mixture of machinery and horsepower was used in the production of barley in 1931
East Enders travelled down to Kent each year to work as hop pickers
Barley arrived at the maltings, where it was hauled up to the top storey, spread out onto the floor and covered with water, turned daily for ten to twelve days, and thinned out when it began to germinate. Then the barley was transferred to the malt kiln and heated until it reached two hundred degrees farenheit. The malt, as it now was, came from the kiln and was cooled before being stored.
On the right you can see the malt is being delivered at the brewery in Brick Lane, then elevated to the Malt Loft by means of a Jacob’s Ladder, which you can see top left, and distributed by means of a screw to malt bins with a capacity of 12,000 quarters. At the bottom, you can see the malt being transferred from the bins for the day’s brewing by means of an Archimedean Screw. The movement of the malt caused dust to rise and thus a connection with a large dust destroying plant was required.
The malt was received from the malt bins in the malt tower and weighing room at the top of this picture, before being passed through the malt screens on the floor below to remove any foreign matter. Then the malt was weighed again before going into the hoppers beneath, from whence it was again lifted by suction to the tower in the new brewery.
This is the malt tower, from where the malt was distributed down through various blending hoppers and then ground in the malt mills below.
In the top picture, the malt passes to the grist cases ready for the mash tun. In the next picture you see the mash tun stage. On entering the mash tun, the malt was mixed with liquor, allowed to stand and then “sparged” at a rate of one hundred and twenty barrels per hour to create a substance resembling porridge. The resulting liquid, referred to as “wort” was run off into the receivers you can see bottom left, labelled ale and stout, while on the right you can see the used malt being removed by farmers. The wort was then boiled in the coppers, that you see in the picture at the very top, where the hops was added.
In these pictures you see how the wort was pumped from the coppers through the refrigerator room at the top and then into the fermenting squares on the floors below where the yeast was added and fermentation took place. Finally, the yeast was collected in the vessel in the top right and the beer was run to the racking square and put into casks.
Above, in descending order, you see the bottle washing floor, the bottle filling floor, the loading-out stage and then the barrels in the cellars ready for loading.
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The Mysterious Tree Huts Of Epping Forest
Who can resist the lure of the forest at Midsummer? Since Epping Forest is a mere cycle ride from Spitalfields, I paid a visit this week to seek refuge among the leafy shades. In the depths of the forest, I came upon these makeshift tree huts which fascinated me with the variety and ingenuity of their design.
Who can be responsible? Is it children making dens or land artists exploring sculptural notions? Clearly never weatherproof, they are not human habitations. I wondered if the sprites and hobgoblins had been at work constructing arbors for the spirits of the forest. But then I remembered I had seen something similar once before, Eeyore’s hut at the edge of the Hundred Acre Wood.
Some are elaborate constructions that are worthy of architecture and others merely collections of twigs which tease the eye, questioning whether they are random or deliberate. They conjure an air of ritualistic mystery and, the more I encountered, the more intrigued I became. So much effort and skill expended suggest deliberate purpose or intent, yet they remain an enigma.
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Portraits Of Working Lads Of Whitechapel
These portraits were taken around 1900 at the Working Lads Institute, known today as the Whitechapel Mission. Founded in 1876, the Institute offered a home to young men who had been involved in petty criminal activity, rehabilitating them through working at the Mission which tended to the poor and needy in Whitechapel. Once a lad had proved himself, he was able to seek independent employment with the support and recommendation of the Institute.
The Working Lads Institute was the first of its kind in London to admit black people and Rev Thomas Jackson, the founder, is pictured here with five soldiers at the time of World War I
Stained glass window with a figure embodying ‘Industry’ as an inspiration to the lads
In the dormitory
Rev Thomas Jackson & the lads collect for the Red Cross outside the Mission
Click here to learn more about The Whitechapel Mission
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At St Mary’s Secret Garden
The garden is currently open for plant sales on Tuesday and Friday from 10am until 1pm
St Mary’s Secret Garden is situated in a quiet back street in Shoreditch and it comes as a welcome surprise to discover this verdant enclave amongst the dense maze of streets and housing that surround it. Yet two hundred years ago, this area North of Old St was the preserve of market gardens and nurseries, before the expansion of the city rendered what was once commonplace as the exception.
In 1986, some volunteers cultivated plants upon a piece of wasteground and, more than a quarter century later, there are well-established trees and a density of luxuriant growth that propose a convincingly leafy grove worthy of being described as a secret garden. You walk through the gate and you leave the realm of concrete and enter the realm of plants. Here nature is not something to be eradicated but is encouraged, where the enclosing trees induce a state of calm and urban anxieties retreat.
One overcast morning, with fine rain blowing in the wind, I cycled over to explore this Shoreditch Eden. I followed a path through an overarching stand of hazels with beehives in a line, leading round to the greenhouse and an old market barrow used to display plants for sale, while beyond this lay a vegetable garden organised in raised beds and a peaceful herb garden with a huge bay tree at the centre, with plants selected for their scent and texture.
Once you have made this journey you are at the centre of St Mary’s Secret Garden, and when I sat here alone to contemplate the peace, an hour passed before I realised it. Clearly it is not just me that finds gardens therapeutic because, as well being open to the public, St Mary’s runs gardening sessions for people with disabilities of all kinds.
Anyone can come to St Mary’s Secret Garden to seek solace. You can volunteer, take gardening courses, rent space to grow vegetables, and buy plants and seeds cheaply. Or you can simply escape the city streets to sit and dream surrounded by the green leaves – as I did – enjoying horticultural therapy.
Victoria Fellows and Israel Forrest planting Scabious
The garden where I lost an hour.
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Heather Stevens, Head Gardener at the Geffrye Museum
The Gentle Author’s Coronavirus Diary
Oxford St in March
Early in the lockdown I pulled the volume of Samuel Pepys’ diary for 1665 from the shelf and, as my daily exercise, wandered over to St Olave’s in Seething Lane to walk in his footsteps through the vacant city.
At first, his diary consoled me like a dark mirror, describing a tragedy so much grimmer and more extreme than in our own times. It was at the end of April that he noted ‘Great fears of the Sickenesse here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up.’ Yet with every day that passed as the numbers of deaths increased, the difference in our circumstances lessened and his words acquired greater immediacy for me.
I took off my watch and let time go adrift since there were no longer any appointments or meetings. From that moment I forgot which day of the week it was, and the rituals of a daily walk and cooking dinner prevailed as the measure of time.
Searching for objective news, I deliberated each evening over the ascendant curve of the mortality rate, willing it to level off and decline until my anxious curiosity was rewarded by the realisation that these figures were unreliable and the true numbers were much higher.
I struggled to write of my experience because I was thinking of those who were suffering while I had the good fortune to remain healthy. As long as I was able to sit safely at home, this crisis was happening to others elsewhere but, without fail, every day on my walk I encountered an ambulance in the street as a constant reminder that it was all around me.
I began sleeping later, discovering that it was the traffic noise which previously woke me early each morning. I slept again as I did when a child, falling off the edge of consciousness into a soft dark oblivion and awakening to birdsong to find the world unfamiliar, as if – every morning – I were a traveller returning from a long journey to wonder at the changes.
Like Pepys, I was grateful that I had written my will and my affairs were in order. I am older than Pepys who was thirty-six years in 1665 and I feel I have already lived many lifetimes, even if I am not ready to leave this one. For the first time I found I was grateful that my parents are dead, since they have been spared these times. I realised was mentally preparing myself for whatever might come.
Each Friday, I cycled to deliver essential supplies to a couple of older friends in West London who live alone and of whom one was shielded. I shall never forget the solitariness of my first trip as the only cyclist in Oxford St on a cold afternoon in spring, traversing the lonely city as if I were the last human alive. Each week, more boards appeared upon the closed-up shops, seemingly in anticipation of the gathering apocalypse. I changed my route, cycling through the back streets of Bloomsbury and Marylebone in a vain hope of avoiding exposure.
I did the most conscientious spring clean of my house I have ever done and sewed all the missing buttons back on my clothes. I did it all slowly. I darned my quilt and I lay on the floor for two days, sewing patches on the sofa where the cat had torn it apart. Each day, I watered the garden and delighted in the plants flourishing as they gained inches in height from one day to the next in the exceptionally warm spring.
Other writers have written of their relative ease in adapting to the lockdown, since our work is solitary by nature and, over years, we learn to be comfortable with our own company. Thus it was with me too, until I fell into a hole when the coronavirus struck.
The virus – and my dawning recognition of the scale of the calamity – have left me with a mental paralysis. I had always been able to force myself to write, resisting tiredness, laziness or indolence. It is different now. I cannot force myself any more, I have to wait until the impulse arises. This is a significant departure for one with such a puritanical work ethic, yet for the first time in years the dark rings have gone from under my eyes. Now I can sit with the cat on my lap in the sunlight and spend the afternoon looking out at the garden, letting my thoughts drift into daydreams just I did in childhood.
When I picked up Pepys’ diary again, I discovered I had fallen out of sympathy with him. At the time of writing this, the cumulative death toll in London has passed ten thousand, as many people have died as perished in a single week in 1665 in a much smaller city. I realised that the quality of Pepys’ diary lies in its emotional authenticity, including some callous observations which make uncomfortable reading. At the height of the plague, he was filled with delight and self-satisfaction that his career was in its ascendancy and his bank account was growing. He was shocked when his coachman was struck down with the plague mid-journey in Holborn and horrified when confronted at night by a corpse on a stretcher on the watermen’s stairs, yet he lived in a bubble of privilege that permitted him to compartmentalise with astonishing disregard.
Once I recovered sufficiently to resume my weekly deliveries by bicycle, I found the city had changed with more people on the streets, dispelling the ghost town atmosphere that had pervaded. I want London to renew itself now, but I do not want it to return to how it was before. I have grown accustomed to the peace. My watch sits on my desk – still ticking – keeping the time of that earlier world before all this happened. I wonder when I shall put it on again.
Trafalgar Sq in March
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