Ed Gray’s Streetlife Serenade
Ed Gray introduces his new exhibition, Streetlife Serenade: 30 Years of Painting City Life, which opens tomorrow at House of Annetta, 25 Princelet St, E1 6QH and runs until 20th July. Open Mondays & Tuesdays 11am-5pm, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays 11am-8pm.
Lucky Tiger, Whitechapel Market 2008
‘This exhibition Streetlife Serenade features my paintings of London life loaned from collectors from my thirty-year career as an artist, with street drawings and some prints of highlights from along the way. In addition, there are two large new paintings of London exhibited for the first time Remembrance, West Lane War Memorial Rotherhithe exploring the motionless silence of loss, tribalism, sacrifice, conflict and ritual and Triumph of Shoreditch, Shoreditch High St Station dramatising the vital call of the roaring city and the unrehearsed choreography of the street – the eternal dance of life that leads us onwards.
In 1995, I left art college in Cardiff to return to my home city of London. I knew I wanted to paint people, that was what I had always done. One day my dad showed me a book of William Hogarth’s work. I did not understand the narratives in Hogarth’s scenes back then but I recognised the Londoners romping, raving and roving through his clustered scenes. In Cardiff, I had begun to paint fish markets and caffs, learning to befriend and persuade fishmongers and caff owners that I would be no bother and keep out of their way as I drew.
In 1996, I left my studio in a squat on the Old Kent Rd, pacing self-consciously up and down the ancient highway, trying to find a way to draw what I thought I was seeing. It was another five years before I felt able to venture into the city with my sketchbook and pencils and really begin to sketch life of the city. I cast my net in different city streams and brought my haul back to a bedroom in Brixton, filleting my drawings to piece together moment, memory, echoes and rework all these elements into a canvas.
I tried to learn to be bold enough to stand in the street and draw faces, finding ways to record flitting and fleeting urbanites, to capture character in a few strokes with only a few seconds’ observation. I was learning to hold a stare, to avoid confrontation, to blend and be a part of the street, to be visibly invisible, but most of all I was learning to be present enough to really look.’
– Ed Gray, Rotherhithe 2025
Triumph Of Shoreditch, Shoreditch High St Station 2025
Adoration in the Lions Den, Milwall 2014
Blackfriars Skittles, 2008
Brockwell Kiss, Brockwell Lido 2005
Full English, Rock Steady Eddies, Camberwell 2005
Golden Day, Bar Italia, Soho 2010
I am Bacchanale, Notting Hill Carnival 2010
Let Me Eat My Wings On Camberwell Green, 2010
Night Bus, Old Kent Rd 2004
Nighthawks, Whitehall 2000
Nothing To See Here, 2007
Remembrance, West Lane, Rotherhithe 2024
Sledgers, Primrose Hill 2008
Tooting Lido, 2004
Xmas With The Camden Cat, Camden Town Station 2008
Ed Gray in his studio
Paintings copyright © Ed Gray
My Night On Liverpool St Station
If you have not yet objected to the monstrous block they want to plonk on top of Liverpool St St Station, the deadline is this Friday 4th July.
When I wrote ten days ago there were only 180 objections versus 613 comments in favour but – thanks to you the readers of Spitalfields Life – there are now 836 objections versus 680 comments in favour. This is astonishing progress.
Yet if we are to stop this appalling development, we have to far surpass those comments in favour and we have until the end of Friday to do this. Please encourage your friends, family, neighbours and colleagues to object.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY
Many of the comments in favour are in response to adverts placed by the developers on social media asking people to support more toilets and better handicapped access at the station – with barely any mention of the monster tower block. I would question whether these commentators were fully aware of the nature of the development that they were supporting. Consequently, it is arguable whether these single line comments are legally compliant and some readers have already chosen to refer the developers’ adverts to www.asa.org.uk as misleading.
When I was callow and new to London, I once arrived back on a train into Liverpool St Station after the last tube had gone and spent the night there waiting for the first tube next morning. With little money and unaware of the existence of night buses, I passed the long hours possessed by alternating fears of being abducted by a stranger or being arrested by the police for loitering. Liverpool St was quite a different place then, dark and sooty and diabolical – before it was rebuilt in 1990 to become the expansive glasshouse that we all know today – and I had such an intensely terrifying and exciting night then that I can remember it fondly now.
Old Liverpool St Station was both a labyrinth and the beast in the labyrinth too. There were so many tunnels twisting and turning that you felt you were entering the entrails of a monster and when you emerged onto the concourse it was as if you had arrived, like Jonah or Pinocchio, at the enormous ribbed belly.
I was travelling back from spending Saturday night in Cromer and stopped off at Norwich to explore, visiting the castle and studying its collection of watercolours by John Sell Cotman. It was only on the slow stopping-train between Norwich and London on Sunday evening that I realised my mistake and sat anxiously checking my wristwatch at each station, hoping that I would make it back in time. When the train pulled in to Liverpool St, I ran down the platform to the tube entrance only to discover the gates shut, closed early on Sunday night.
I was dressed for summer, and although it had been warm that day, the night was cold and I was ill-equipped for it. If there was a waiting room, in my shameful fear I was too intimidated to enter. Instead, I sat shivering on a bench in my thin white clothes clutching my bag, wide-eyed and timid as a mouse – alone in the centre of the empty dark station and with a wide berth of vacant space around me, so that I could, at least, see any potential threat approaching.
Dividing the station in two were huge ramps where postal lorries rattled up and down all night at great speed, driving right onto the platforms to deliver sacks of mail to the awaiting trains. In spite of the overarching vaulted roof, there was no sense of a single space as there is today, but rather a chaotic railway station criss-crossed by footbridges, extending beyond the corner of visibility with black arches receding indefinitely in the manner of Piranesi.
The night passed without any threat, although when the dawn came I felt as relieved as if I had experienced a spiritual ordeal, comparable to a night in a haunted house in the scary films that I loved so much at that time. It was my own vulnerability as an out-of-towner versus the terror of the unknowable Babylonian city, yet – if I had known then what I knew now – I could simply have walked down to the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market and passed the night in one of the cafes there, safe in the nocturnal cocoon of market life.
Guilty, and eager to preserve the secret of my foolish vigil, I took the first tube to the office in West London where I worked then and changed my clothes in a toilet cubicle, arriving at my desk hours before anyone else.
Only the vaulted roof and the Great Eastern Hotel were kept in the dramatic transformation that created the modern station and the dark cathedral where I spent the night is gone. Yet a magnetism constantly draws me back to Liverpool St, not simply to walk through, but to spend time wondering at the epic drama of life in this vast terminus where a flooding current of humanity courses through twice a day – one of the great spectacles of our extraordinary metropolis.
Shortly after my night on the station experience, I got a job at the Bishopsgate Institute – and Liverpool St and Spitalfields became familiar, accessed through the tunnels that extended beyond the station under the road, delivering me directly to my workplace. I noticed the other day that the entrance to the tunnel remains on the Spitalfields side of Bishopsgate, though bricked up now. And I wondered sentimentally, almost longingly, if I could get into it, could I emerge into the old Liverpool St Station, and visit the haunted memory of my own past?
A brick relief of a steam train upon the rear of the Great Eastern Hotel.
Liverpool St Station is built on the site of the Bethlehem Hospital, commonly known as “Bedlam.”
Archive images copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
Happy 100th Birthday, Peggy Metaxas!
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Join me in sending birthday greetings to this proud centenarian today
Portrait by Sarah Ainslie
There is a quiet cul-de-sac to the east of Vallance Rd, positioned half way between Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, where all the East End’s stray cats – and sometimes stray humans – end up. But, fortunately for them, Peggy Metaxas, is waiting to offer a plate of food or a cup of tea before putting them on the right path again. Peggy has been presiding here as long as anyone can remember, so I went along recently to enjoy a cuppa and slice of Victoria sponge and learn the extraordinary story of how she arrived in this benign spot.
‘I was born here in the East End in 1925. My parents already had one girl, my sister Gwendoline, who was three when I was born. My father Edward John Axton worked in the docks, he was from a bright family – a teacher, a swimming instructor, a shopkeeper, a dragoon and a musician – but he was the one who held family together. Being the eldest, he worked to get them all into education.
In 1922, when my sister was born, things were pretty bad because of the Depression and so my dad followed in his father’s footsteps to get a job in the docks. He was only twenty. Things got so bad financially he used to go round the streets to find wood and make dolls’ furniture, little prams and cots and blackboards. I remember him saying to me, ‘I learnt how to put the blacking on the board so it never came off when the children cleaned the board.’ He would go down Brick Lane and sell them. I was very proud of my dad.
He married my mum, Maud Agnes Elizabeth Hendall, in 1921. She was a very good cook and a very careful, correct person. I think she was born too late, she should have lived in the Victorian times because she did not fit in. The people in that area of Bow where we lived were working class but not low working class. Next door to us in Belhaven St was a man who was a sailor and, when he came home on leave, I went next door and sat on his knee while he told me stories of where he had been. It was the first time in my life I had seen tattoos and that fascinated me.
My father did not earn much money but they had enough for the rent – six shillings and eight pence a week – and the insurance – two shillings a month – which was so important, and coal money, you had to have that. A little pile of coins would go up on the mantelpiece and that you never touched. They insured us children, that was what people did, they insured their babies. I remember standing at the door when the insurance man came for his money and my mum gave him half a crown. And he put it between his teeth and bit it and broke it and said ‘I’m sorry ma’am.’ I have since thought that he did a switch and my mum knew. I remember it so well because to me it was a tragedy. It was a couple of weeks savings from my dad’s pay and without it we would be out on the street. My mother was crying, she went to see the neighbour who said, ‘Don’t worry Maud, it will sort itself out.’
My father did not have much overtime but, when he did, he put money by and once a year we went to Southend or Margate. This was before he became a ‘ganger’ which gave him regular employment. He had to go to the docks at five in the morning and wait to be called. He walked or jumped on a tram.
It was an enjoyable few years, which is amazing to me that I can recall because I was only two or three. We left when I was five because the owners of the houses where we were living wanted to sell them. It was only a small terraced house with two bedrooms for three of us and my mum and dad, so my parents jumped at the offer of a council house in Dagenham. It was still only two bedrooms but it was new and we had a bathroom.
I grew up there until 1939 when I was evacuated because Dagenham was one of the first places to be bombed. They were getting all the kids together to send them west of London and I went with my brother, who was three years younger than me, to Cirencester in Gloucestershire. There was no war yet but the the government was thinking to get the children out. Me and my brother were separated and placed with different families. I was about fourteen. It was not ideal, so my father came one day just before Christmas with a green leather overcoat and he said, ‘That’s for you.’ Then he said, ‘Let’s get your brother, we’re going home.’ My sister who was three years older than me was working by then, she had a job in a photographer’s studio in Fenchurch St.
At Dagenham, I sat for the scholarship exam and I won a scholarship to Brentwood. I stayed at home and my mum had another child. When the bombing started my father prepared, as most men did, by building an air shelter in the garden. He brought home some car seats from Brick Lane and made it really nice. He also joined the Home Guard, putting out incendiary bombs, and he got quite ill because he was working in the day and doing this at night. It was a really busy time.
One day when the bombings were really heavy, I was in the shelter with my dad. He said ‘This is ours’ and it was indeed. The bomb dropped in the garden next to ours, everything blew with the force and the windows were blown out. We had two chickens, Mary and Phoebe, they were blown sky high.
My dad said, ‘This is no good. Leave it to me.’ He did not now London at all, he only knew the East End. He got a train to Baker St and another to Uxbridge. He got off at Eastcote, he had no idea where he was. He turned left and he saw all these new house being built there. He saw a watchman sitting at a brazier and asked him, ‘Is there any chance…?’ ‘They are going to rent them out’ said the watchman. So my dad gave him ten bob and got a key. ‘I’m don’t know if I’m allowed to do this,’ said the watchman and probably he was not. My father went back and said to my mum, ‘We’re moving.’ He got a lorry for our things – the piano had to go – and my mum and I went in the lorry and my sister and my brother sat in the front with my dad. That’s how we moved to Middlesex and I left the East End, until I came back in the nineteen-nineties.
In 1957, I got married and emigrated to Canada. My sister and my brother had already gone to Toronto. They encouraged me and my husband George who was in the diplomatic service at the Greek embassy. We met when we worked in the same office at the embassy, I was a receptionist and dogsbody. George was at university in Athens, then he had to do his military service but his aunt who knew the naval attache arranged for him to come to London instead, decoding for the Admiralty. He learnt English and typed in English and Greek and he was a dear. We got to know the diplomats and the ship owners, and they got us a passage to Canada. We stayed thirty years and had a family there.
I do not know why I came back really. It was a long way from England and a long way from Greece. In Canada we moved so many times because George could not get a job. He did not have a profession because he had only worked in shipping for the Admiralty. Eventually he got several good jobs, working for Olivetti and Air Canada. He was a good man and he tried hard but I always wanted to settle down and have a dog. It took us ten years, until 1967, to get a house of our own and by then our kids were teenagers. We had three mortgages and we did not spend a penny, not even a newspaper, until we paid off all the mortgages. We made it. Then one day George said, ‘Let’s go back to England, where we are near Canada and Greece.’ He wanted to come back more than me. I was not unhappy but I wanted more. Yet my mother had died and my father remarried, so there was no house or mum and dad, it was starting all over again.
I stayed with my aunt in Bethnal Green, and put my name down for a council house and came and went to Toronto and Greece. In 1999, George died in Canada and then I came back for good because by that time I had been offered a council flat. It took me time but I love it here. I have family friends from years ago and here I am now. I feel attached to the East End, it is like family. I like it here. I think I will stay here now.
I have learnt during all these years that have got to love people. There is always another side to everything even when people say something bad, which they do, because that person is not like them. I am grown up now and I have learnt you cannot judge people. I found someone sleeping next to my bin, I did not call the police, I gave her a chair and a cup of tea. This poor old woman, she was somebody. I have thought of her since, ‘What happened to her?’ You can only do what you can do. I do not smoke but I used to keep a packet of cigarettes because passersby used to see me brushing the path and ask me for one. I would say, ‘Would you like to sit down for a cup of tea and I will find you one?’ I would never say, ‘No.’ The road ends here and sometimes people wander down this street and do not know where to go.’
Belhaven St, Bow, where Peggy was born (photograph by Tony Bock)
Peggy in 1925
Peggy as bridesmaid at her aunt’s wedding, 1928
Peggy with Aunt Beatrice, 1929
Peggy on the ferry, 1930
Peggy (centre) with her family at the seaside, 1939
Peggy, 1944
Peggy & George at the beach, 1948
Peggy & George’s wedding, 1949
Peggy with her children Peter & Kate, 1956
Peggy & George, 1996
Peggy and her daughter Kate, 2025
New portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Mr Pussy In Summer
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In these dreamy days of high summer, I often think of my old cat Mr Pussy
While Londoners luxuriate in the warmth of summer, I miss Mr Pussy who endured the hindrance of a fur coat, spending his languorous days stretched out upon the floor in a heat-induced stupor. As the sun reached its zenith, his activity declined and he sought the deep shadow, the cooling breeze and the bare wooden floor to stretch out and fall into a deep trance that could transport him far away to the loss of his physical being. Mr Pussy’s refined nature was such that even these testing conditions provided an opportunity for him to show grace, transcending dreamy resignation to explore an area of meditation of which he was the supreme proponent.
In the early morning and late afternoon, you would see him on the first floor window sill here in Spitalfields, taking advantage of the draught of air through the house. With his aristocratic attitude, Mr Pussy took amusement in watching the passersby from his high vantage point on the street frontage and enjoyed lapping water from his dish on the kitchen window sill at the back of the house, where in the evenings he also liked to look down upon the foxes gambolling in the yard.
Whereas in winter it was Mr Pussy’s custom to curl up in a ball to exclude drafts, in these balmy days he preferred to stretch out to maximize the air flow around his body. There was a familiar sequence to his actions, as particular as stages in yoga. Finding a sympathetic location with the advantage of cross currents and shade from direct light, at first Mr Pussy sat to consider the suitability of the circumstance before rolling onto his side and releasing the muscles in his limbs, revealing that he was irrevocably set upon the path of total relaxation.
Delighting in the sensuous moment, Mr Pussy stretched out to his maximum length of over three feet long, curling his spine and splaying his legs at angles, creating an impression of the frozen moment of a leap, just like those wooden horses on fairground rides. Extending every muscle and toe, his glinting claws unsheathed and his eyes widened gleaming gold, until the stretch reached it full extent and subsided in the manner of a wave upon the ocean, as Mr Pussy slackened his limbs to lie peacefully with heavy lids descending.
In this position that resembled a carcass on the floor, Mr Pussy could undertake his journey into dreams, apparent by his twitching eyelids and limbs as he ran through the dark forest of his feline unconscious where prey were to be found in abundance. Vulnerable as an infant, sometimes Mr Pussy cried to himself in his dream, an internal murmur of indeterminate emotion, evoking a mysterious fantasy that I could never be party to. It was somewhere beyond thought or language. I could only wonder if his arcadia was like that in Paolo Uccello’s “Hunt in the Forest” or whether Mr Pussy’s dreamscape resembled the watermeadows of the River Exe, the location of his youthful safaris.
There was another stage, beyond dreams, signalled when Mr Pussy rolled onto his back with his front paws distended like a child in the womb, almost in prayer. His back legs splayed to either side, his head tilted back, his jaw loosened and his mouth opened a little, just sufficient to release his shallow breath – and Mr Pussy was gone. Silent and inanimate, he looked like a baby and yet very old at the same time. The heat relaxed Mr Pussy’s connection to the world and he fell, he let himself go far away on a spiritual odyssey. It was somewhere deep and somewhere cool, he was out of his body, released from the fur coat at last.
Startled upon awakening from his trance, like a deep-sea diver ascending too quickly, Mr Pussy squinted at me as he recovered recognition, giving his brains a good shake, once the heat of the day had subsided. Lolloping down the stairs, still loose-limbed, he strolled out of the house into the garden and took a dust bath under a tree, spending the next hour washing it out and thereby cleansing the sticky perspiration from his fur.
Regrettably the climatic conditions that subdued Mr Pussy by day, also enlivened him by night. At first light, when the dawn chorus commenced, he stood on the floor at my bedside, scratched a little and called to me. I woke to discover two golden eyes filling my field of vision. I rolled over at my peril, because this provoked Mr Pussy to walk to the end of the bed and scratch my toes sticking out under the sheet, causing me to wake again with a cry of pain. I miss having no choice but to rise, accepting his forceful invitation to appreciate the manifold joys of early morning in summer in Spitalfields, because it was not an entirely unwelcome obligation.
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Mr Pussy Gives his First Interview
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Wonderful London’s East End
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It is my pleasure to publish these evocative pictures of the East End (with some occasionally facetious original captions) selected from the popular magazine Wonderful London edited by St John Adcock and produced by The Fleetway House in the nineteen-twenties. Most photographers were not credited – though many were distinguished talents of the day, including East End photographer William Whiffin (1879-1957).
Boys are often seen without boots or stockings, and football barefoot under such conditions has grave risks from glass or old tin cans, but there are many urchins who would rather run about barefoot.
When this narrow little dwelling in St John’s Hill, Shadwell, was first built in 1753, its inhabitants could walk in a few minutes to the meadows round Stepney or, venture further afield, to hear the cuckoo in the orchards of Poplar.
Middlesex St is still known by its old name of Petticoat Lane. Some of the goods on offer at amazingly low prices on a Sunday morning are not above suspicion of being stolen, and you may buy a watch at one end of the street and see it for sale again by the time you reach reach the other.
A vanished theatre on the borders of Hoxton, just before demolition, photographed by William Whiffin. In 1838, a tea garden by the name of ‘the Eagle Tavern’ was put up in Shepherdess Walk in the City Rd near the ‘Shepherd & Shepherdess,’ a similar establishment founded at the beginning of the same century. Melodramas such as ‘The Lights ‘O London’ and entertainments like ‘The Secrets of the Harem,’ were also given. In 1882, General Booth turned the place into a Meeting Hall for his Salvation Army. There is little suggestion of the pastoral about Shepherdess Walk now.
In the East End and all over the poorer parts of London, a strange kind of establishment, half booth, half shop, is common and particularly popular with greengrocers. Old packing cases are the foundation of a slope of fruit which begins unpleasantly near the level of the pavement and ends in the recess behind the dingy awning. At night, the buttresses of vegetables are withdrawn into shelter.
Old shop front in Bow photographed by William Whiffin. Pawnbroking, once as decorous as banking, has fallen from the high estate in the vicinity of Lombard St. Now, combined instead with the sale of secondhand jewellery, furniture and hundred other commodities, it is apt to seek the corners of the meaner streets.
A water tank covered by a plank in a backyard among the slums is an unlikely place for a stage, but an undaunted admirer of that great Cockney humorist, Charlie Chaplin, is holding his audience with an imitation of the well-known gestures with which the famous comic actor indicates the care-free-though-down-and-out view of life which he has immortalised.
Old shop front in Poplar photographed by William Whiffin
An old charity school for girl and boy down at Wapping founded in 1704. The present building dates from 1760 and the school is supported by voluntary subscriptions. The school provided for the ‘putting out of apprentices’ and for clothing the pupils.
The hunt for bargains in Shoreditch. A glamour surrounds the rickety coster’s barrow which supports a few dozens of books. But, to tell the truth, the organisation of the big shops is now so efficient that the chances of finding anything good at these open air book markets may have long odds laid against it.
The landsman’s conception of a sailing vessel, with all its complex of standing and running rigging that serves mast and sail with ordered efficiency, is apt for a shock when he sees a Thames barge by a dockside. The endless coils and loops of rope of different thickness, the length of chain and the litter of brooms, buckets, fenders and pieces of canvas, seem to be in the most insuperable confusion.
Gloom and grime in Chinatown. Pennyfields runs from West India Dock Rd to Poplar High St. A Chinese restaurant on the corner and a few Chinese and European clothes are all that is to be seen in the daytime.
The gem of Cornhill, Birches, where it stood for two hundred years. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the brothers Adam erected its beautiful shop front. Within were old bills of fare printed on satin, a silver tureen fashioned to the likeness of a turtle and many other curious odd-flavoured things. Birches have catered for the inspired feasting of the City Companies and Guilds for two centuries but now this shop has moved to Old Broad St and, instead of Adam, we are to have Art Nouveau ferro-concrete.
It is doubtful if the Borough Council of Poplar had any notion, when they supplied the district with water carts, that the supplementary use pictured in this photograph by William Whiffin would be made of them. Given a complacent driver, there is no reason why these children should not go on for miles.
Grime and gloom in St George’s St photographed by William Whiffin. St George’s St used to be the famous Ratcliff Highway and runs from East Smithfield to Shadwell High St. It is a maritime street and contains various establishments, religious and otherwise, which cater for the sailor.
River Lea at Bow Bridge photographed by William Whiffin. On the right are Bow flour mills, while to the left, beyond the bridge, a large brewery is seen.
A view of Curtain Rd photographed by William Whiffin, famed for its cabinet makers. It runs from Worship St – a turning to the left when walking along Norton Folgate towards Shoreditch High St – to Old St. Curtain Rd got its name from a curtain wall, once part of the outworks of the city’s fortifications.
Fish porters of Billingsgate gathered around consignments lately arrived from the coast. At one time, smacks brought all the fish sold in the market and were unloaded at Billingsgate Wharf, said to be the oldest in London.
Crosby Hall as it stood in Bishopsgate. Alderman Sir John Crosby, a wealthy grocer, got the lease of some ground off Bishopsgate in 1466 from Alice Ashfield, Prioress of St Helen’s, at a rent of eleven pounds, six shillings and eightpence per annum, and built Crosby Hall there. It came into the possession of Sir Thomas More around 1518 and by 1638 it was in the hands of the East India Company, but in 1910 it was taken down and re-erected in Cheyne Walk.
Whatever their relations with the Constable may come to be in later life, the children of the East End, in their early days, are quite willing to use his protection at wide street crossings.
There is no more important work in the great cities than the amelioration of the slum child’s lot. Many East End children have never been beyond their own disease-ridden courts and dingy streets that form their playground.
Photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Liverpool St Station In The 20th Century & Beyond
John Betjeman on Liverpool St Station c1961, photograph by David Sim
If you have not yet objected to the monstrous block they want to plonk on top of Liverpool St St Station, the deadline is 4th July.
When I wrote a week ago there were only 180 objections versus 613 comments in favour but – thanks to you the readers of Spitalfields Life – there are now 623 objections versus 659 comments in favour. This is astonishing progress.
Yet if we are to stop this appalling development, we have to far surpass those comments in favour and we have until next Friday to do this. Please encourage your friends, family, neighbours and colleagues to object.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY
This is the Liverpool St Station of living memory – the station as I first knew it – recorded in these splendid photographs from the collection of the Bishopsgate Institute.
A vital transport hub through two world wars and, most significantly, the point of arrival for the Kindertransport, children fleeing nazi Germany, this is the station that John Betjeman fought to save, winning a landmark conservation battle which gave us the sensitively restored station of recent years.
At the end of this post, I append my photographs of the beautiful station as we know it today with its luminous marble floor refracting the morning light from the lancet windows high above.
Glass was removed from the roof in World War II
Photograph by Malcolm Tremain
Photograph by David Johnston
Photograph by David Johnston
Photograph by David Johnston
Photograph by David Johnston
Photograph by The Gentle Author
Photograph by The Gentle Author
Photograph by The Gentle Author
Photograph by The Gentle Author
Photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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George Fuest, Baker
I am delighted to announce that Spitalfields baker, George Fuest of POPULATIONS BAKERY has opened his first bakery shop this week, where you can buy his creations over the counter, as part of CORNER SHOP at 7 Arundel St, WC2R 3DA.
George Fuest by Patricia Niven
A while ago, I was intrigued to hear of a baker running a solo bakery from a shed in the backyard of a house in Fournier St by the name of Populations Bakery. Orders could only placed online, I learnt, and collected from the front door direct from the baker George Fuest on Friday. So in January I ordered Galettes des Rois, without any expectation but as a treat to lift my spirits in the first weeks of New Year, only to be astonished by the sophistication and accomplishment of these sweet treats.
Over the year, a stream of delights followed including a magnificent Simnel cake at Easter and an unforgettable birthday cake – all evidence of a truly outstanding talent in baking. In December, I happened to meet George one cold morning in the cycle lane in Westminster just below Big Ben as it struck nine. He was on his way to make deliveries but he stopped his bike and handed me a mince pie. It was my first Christmas moment and was spoiled because I could imagine any other being as good as George’s.
Contributing photographer Patricia Niven & I joined George for a session in his bakery to see for ourselves what goes on. George baked loaves of bread, croissants, danish pastries and pains au chocolate with an ease which belied his precision and expert judgement, while he explained to us how and why he conjured his bakery into being in the house where he grew up.
“Even before Lockdown I used to make a lot of bread and pastries. When I left university, I was trying to start a website and to finance that I worked as bike courier for Little Bread Pedlar delivering pastries to coffee shops. That was when I realised I just really enjoyed eating pastries and it inspired me to start baking.
I started working at a coffee shop as a barista because I wanted to get into the coffee industry. But then, when Lockdown happened, I started baking a lot more regularly and delivering to friends and family, mostly as a way to have something to do, to get out on my bike and go and see people, delivering supplies. Then I did some charity fundraisers because people wanted to pay for my pastries but I did not think they were good enough, so I asked people to make donations to charity rather than take money from them. And it grew from there.
I was attracted to the mission of a bakery employing heritage grains, supporting farmers that are focussing on regenerative agricultural practices. I realised I really wanted to be a baker. I am interested in being the middle person between the farmer and the customer, and promoting this approach to baking.
During Lockdown I could get on my bike and deliver direct. I used to bake though the early hours of the morning and then be cycling around London for six or seven hours a day. Now people come and collect, and I have some drop-off points around London.
I am self taught though a lot of trial and error, and a lot of reading recipes. And I did work experience at Flore Bakery in Bermondsey and at Landrace Bakery in Bath and I did holiday cover at Toad Bakery in Camberwell. I learnt a lot that way.
When you work with specialty grain, there is a lot of trial and error anyway because you can only learn how to interpret the flour by working with it. With modern cereals, you get this complete consistency that industrial processes require – they want the baking to be the same every time.
That is not the case with heritage grain where you can get different characteristics from field to field, so every sack of flour can be quite different which means you are always learning – as a baker – the properties of the grain and what you can do with it. The baking tastes better. In commercial production, there is no requirement for flavour. Modern wheat is roller milled which strips off a lot of elements of the grain but, with stoneground, the entire grain is ground.
I call my bakery Populations because it focusses on genetically diverse wheat. With modern wheat you get a monoculture where every plant is genetically identical which makes them vulnerable to infections and pests, so they require a lot of pesticides and herbicides which are oil-based chemicals. With populations-diverse wheat, you have a blend of many different wheats which are grown in the same field and the seeds saved, and the process is repeated again and again. This creates a complete genetic diversity in the crop and it will be different in every part of the country because it will adapt to wherever it is grown.
This may sound like the past, employing traditional methods and not using modern fertilisers, but it is also the future because it is the way crops need to be grown to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and start regenerating the land.
When I am baking, it is a lot of hours work. When I started out, I did not have many customers so I would be cycling seventy kilometres a day to deliver bread and pastries, after five or six hours of baking beforehand. It kept me fit but it was not really sustainable.
I would love to open a community-based coffee shop and bakery, and I am also enjoying small scale wholesale. This Christmas I am making mince pies for ten select coffee shops in London and it is lovely to get the feedback.
There are so many things I enjoy about this work. I love the challenge of woking with different grains and learning new methods. I still enjoy eating the pastries and my bread too!.”
Sough dough loaves
Croissants
Pains au chocolate
George Fuest
Photographs © Patricia Niven
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