The Return Of The Goodsyard Monster
The monster proposal for the BIshopsgate Goodsyard which first reared its ugly head in 2015 has returned. The Goodsyard is public land yet this greedy commercial development offers less than a hundred genuinely affordable housing units when the site has the potential to deliver thousands of public homes for Londoners. This beast will blight Spitalfields and Shoreditch for generations to come unless it can be stopped. Details of how to object are below.
The view from Shoreditch High St
The view from Norton Folgate
The view from Great Eastern St
The view from Quaker St
The view from Commercial St
The view from Bethnal Green Rd
The view from Shoreditch High St
The view from Bishopsgate
The view from Commercial St
The view from Elder St
Click on this image to enlarge
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Edith Tudor-Hart In London
Mark Richards explores the controversial work of photographer Edith Tudor-Hart and her secret life as a Soviet agent in London during the Cold War.
Edith’s photographs are featured alongside the work of Dorothy Bohm, Elisabeth Chat, Gerti Deutsch, Laelia Goehr, Elsbeth Juda and Erika Kochin a new exhibition ANOTHER EYE: WOMEN REFUGEE PHOTOGRAPHERS IN LONDON AFTER 1933 at Four Corners in Bethnal Green from 27th February until 2nd May.
Child staring into a bakery window, Whitechapel, 1935 (Courtesy of National Gallery of Scotland)
On a wall in a flat in Maida Vale hangs this small photograph. It is a window into a world of social unrest, poverty, espionage and insurrection. The photograph and the story behind it add weight to the view that there is often little truth in photography. What we see is what the photographer wants us to see.
I saw the photograph when I visited the late photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky for an interview and portrait session in 2016. It was not taken by him, but by his sister Edith Tudor-Hart (1908–1973). The picture had pride of place on a wall of well-known photographs just inside the entrance. Edith Tudor-Hart was one of the most talented documentary photographers of her time, but has now faded into obscurity after being being blacklisted for her Communist activity.
For me, it is one of the strongest photographs of its era. One of those pictures that all photographers hope to be able to capture one day. Its ability to tug the heartstrings and generate strong emotion remains even eighty years after it was taken. On face value, it is a photograph of a poor child staring into a bakery window in Whitechapel in 1935. The disparity between the hungry child and the plentiful display has an enduring poignancy, inspiring a futile desire to intervene.
This photograph was first published next to another of a baby chimp in a zoo, which was much better fed than this girl. The message was clear, as was Edith’s ability to use her camera as a weapon for social justice. The picture was subsequently reproduced widely in Communist leaflets, representing a call to action. Yet to grasp the nature of this phenomenon and understand the other photographs that Edith took of the East End, we need to appreciate both the social context and her personal motives. None of the photographs that she took at that time can be taken at face value.
There is no doubt that this photograph was staged – the bundle clutched tightly in the girl’s left hand is evidence of that. We shall never know who the girl was or how she became to the subject. Edith destroyed her photographic records in 1951 for fear of prosecution, so the background to most of her work is now lost. She used photography to highlight social inequality and deprivation, realising early on – while studying at the Bauhaus – that photographs have the power to alter people’s beliefs and change the world. In her time, photography had become a medium for social change, ideal for the promotion of political views to a large audience, affecting them through the impact of the visual image more powerfully than by the written word.
Edith was acutely aware of the potential to use photography to break down social barriers and influence an audience like never before. For her, photography represented a move of the locus of control into the hands of the people, offering the possibility of self-representation for everyone. She understood that those who press the camera shutter can control the story that a picture tells.
As well as being an accomplished photographer, Edith was also a committed Communist and a Soviet agent who used her power to further her hidden agenda. Born in Vienna in 1908, she had grown up during a period of unprecedented political and social upheaval which shaped her beliefs. Her radical views are probably best summed up in Das Eland Wiens by the Marxist writer Bruno Frei, which attacks the inequality of capitalism and demands a commitment to revolutionary activism and change. Unusually, the book contained photographs and this was probably a decisive influence in Edith’s choice to become a photographer.
Edith’s father ran a Socialist bookshop which stocked Bruno Frei’s work and she mixed in radical Jewish circles in Vienna. In 1927, she trained as a Montessori teacher in England until she was deported to Austria in 1931 after being photographed at a Communist rally. Once in Austria again, she worked as a photojournalist for the Soviet news agency TASS, but in 1933 she was arrested there, again for being a Communist activist. At this point, Edith fled from Austria with her husband and was exiled in England.
Back in England, she continued her affiliation with the Communist party, both as an activist and a Soviet agent. It is likely that she had been recruited by the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) as early as 1927. Edith is often portrayed as a low-level agent yet she spotted and recruited Kim Philby. He was one of the Cambridge spy ring with Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who caused damage to British interests and threatened its intelligence relationship with America during the Cold War. Edith knew Kim Philby’s wife Litzi Friedmann and was the one who introduced Philby to Arnold Deutsch, the Soviet Agent who managed the Cambridge spy ring. Her recruitment of Kim Philby was a seminal moment in her espionage activities.
In 1964, Anthony Blunt described Edith in his confession as being ‘the grandmother of us all.’ Yet, although she continued to be monitored by the security services until her death in 1973, she was never prosecuted for spying due to lack of evidence.
She had planned to produce a book of her photographs called Rich Man, Poor Man, after the nursery rhyme:
Daisy, daisy, who shall it be?
Who shall it be who will marry me?
Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,
Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…
The ambition of the book was to highlight the contrast between rich and poor in British society and it would have featured her photographs of the East End, together with a series she took of mining communities in Wales. The shocking juxtaposition of her ‘Poodle Parlour’ photograph with the picture of the Clerkenwell slums at Gee Street in Lilliput in 1939 demonstrated he power of her approach. However, the book was never published. Eventually, the difficulty of being a woman photographer as well as being blacklisted for her Soviet connections led Edith to abandon photography altogether at the end of the fifties.
Some of the images that were intended for this book are incredibly powerful and reveal the nature of her talent as a photographer. Her method included talking to her subjects instead of photographing them from a distance and she showed a real ability for putting people at their ease.
Bakery Window was to have been the cover photograph of Rich Man, Poor Man and what a book it might have been. Today it lies unconstructed among the negatives of her photographic archives held by the National Gallery of Scotland which were given to them by her brother Wolfgang in 2004.
Slums at Gee St, Clerkenwell 1936
Poodle Parlour, West End, 1935
Family Group, Stepney, 1932
No Home, No Dole, London 1931
Communist Party demonstration, Hyde Park, c.1934
In Total Darkness, London 1935
Caledonian Market, 1931
Self portrait with unknown man, Caledonian Market c.1935
Edith Tudor-Hart, self portrait 1936
Photographs courtesy National Gallery of Scotland
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The Silent Traveller
When I encountered the work of Chiang Yee (1903-77) writing as ‘The Silent Traveller’ I knew I had discovered a kindred spirit in self-effacement. These fine illustrations are from his book ‘The Silent Traveller in London’ published in 1938 and I am fascinated by his distinctive vision which renders familiar subjects anew.
‘This book is to be a sort of record of all the things I have talked over to myself during these five years in London, where I have been so silent,’ he wrote, ‘I am bound to look at things from a different angle, but I have never agreed with people who hold that the various nationalities differ greatly from each other. They may be different superficially, but they eat, drink, sleep, dress, and shelter themselves from the wind and rain in the same way.’
Summer afternoon in Kew Gardens
Morning mist in St James’s Park
Snow on Hampstead Heath
Early Autumn in Kenwood
Fog in Trafalgar Sq
Coalman in the rain
Umbrellas Under Big Ben
Deer in Richmond Park
Seagulls in Regent’s Park
At the Whitechapel Gallery
London faces in a public bar
London faces in winter
Coronation night in the Underground
Jubilee night in Trafalgar Sq
London faces at a Punch & Judy show
Images copyright © Estate of Chiang Yee
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The Division Bells Of Westminster
There were once as many as four hundred Division Bells in the pubs and restaurants of Westminster, summoning MPs back to parliament to vote, but when Contributing Cartographer Adam Dant & I set out to see how many we could find last week we could barely discover a dozen.
Apparently BT charged £3000 a year to provide the service which has now been discontinued and replaced by an app. In one bar, the manager used a piece of sellotape to reattach the disused bell and, in a restaurant, the maitre d’ opened a cupboard under the counter to reveal the dead plastic box that once relayed the Division Bell.
Regretfully, we realised that these are the last days of the Division Bells of Westminster but, as a consolation, our walk provided ample opportunities for refreshment.
Click on the map to enlarge
DIVISION – A MAP OF WESTMINSTER’S DIVISION BELLS
“When I was nine, I wrote a letter to my MP asking if he would grant me and my classmates a tour of Parliament. Very soon we were stuffed into the St Lawrence’s Catholic Primary’s rusty school bus and driven to the seat of power in Westminster.
What I remember from our tour of the chambers and the corridors lined with scary dark Victorian book cases is our MP’s description of his home in the capital. Did he come here from his constituency every day, I asked. When he told us that he also had a home in London ‘within the division bell’ I imagined that he actually had his living quarters inside a bell.
Once I had drawn this map, I realised that in effect MP’s do all live within a big bell. As well as the bells within the Parliamentary estate to summon MPs to the chamber to vote, there is also a network of extra-mural bells scattered across Westminster to remind MPs to return within eight minutes or miss a vote.
This custom originated when the Houses of Parliament were rebuilt after the fire of 1834 and the lack of food provision required MPs to visit local pubs and restaurants for sustenance. It is even claimed that last words of Pitt the Younger were not ‘Oh my country, my country‘ but ‘I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies.’” – Adam Dant
The Parliamentary Division Bell at St Stephen’s Tavern in Bridge St nestles discreetly in the left hand corner of the bar beneath the old radio
At the Marquis of Granby in Romney St
Anna Boot is guardian of the Division Bell at the Marriott Hotel in the former City Hall
Division Bell at the Blue Boar in Tothill St
Handsome bar at the Westminster Arms in Storey’s Gate
Division Bell at the Westminster Arms
Division Bell in the basement canteen of the Institute of Civil Engineers in Great George St
Division Bell behind the bar at the Red Lion in Whitehall
Stelios Michaelides is guardian of the Division Bell at St Ermin’s Hotel in Caxton St
Adam Dant’s Map of Westminster’s Division Bells was originally commissioned by The Critic
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 MAP OF WESTMINSTER’S DIVISION BELLS are available to purchase through TAG Fine Arts
Eleanor Crow At Leila’s Shop
Illustrator Eleanor Crow is giving a lecture at Leila’s Cafe, showing her watercolours and telling the stories of the shopkeepers from her book SHOPFRONTS OF LONDON, IN PRAISE OF SMALL NEIGHBOURHOOD SHOPS at 7:30pm on Tuesday 25th February.
Click here to order a copy for £14.99
At a time of momentous change in the high street, Eleanor’s witty and fascinating personal survey champions the enduring culture of Britain’s small neighbourhood shops.
As our high streets decline into generic monotony, we cherish the independent shops and family businesses that enrich our city with their characterful frontages and distinctive typography.
Eleanor’s collection includes more than hundred of her watercolours of the capital’s bakers, cafés, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, chemists, launderettes, hardware stores, eel & pie shops, bookshops and stationers. Her pictures are accompanied by the stories of the shops, their history and their shopkeepers – stretching from Chelsea in the west to Bethnal Green and Walthamstow in the east.
Love Tokens From The Thames
These love tokens are from the collection gathered by my Thames mudlark friend Steve Brooker, widely known as Mud God.
The magical potential of throwing a coin into the water has been recognised by different cultures in different times with all kinds of meanings. Yet since we can never ask those who threw these tokens why they did it, we can only surmise that engraving your beloved’s name upon a coin and throwing it into the water was a gesture to attract good fortune. It was a wish.
With a great river like the Thames racing down towards the ocean, there is a sense of a connection to the infinite. And there is a sweet romance to the notion of a lover secretly throwing a token into the water, feeling that the strength of their emotions connects them to a force larger than themselves.
Naturally, it was not part of the conceit that someone might ever find these coins, centuries later – which gives them a mysterious poetry now, because each one represents a love story we shall never learn. Those who threw them have gone from the earth long ago, and all we can envisage are the coins tossed by unseen hands, flying from the river bank or a from the parapet of a bridge or from a boat, turning over in the air, plip-plopping into the water and spiralling down to lie for centuries in the mud, until Steve Brooker came along to gather them up. Much as we may yearn, we can never trace them back to ask “What happened?”
In the reign of William III, it was the fashion for a young man to give a crooked coin to the object of his affections. The coin was bent both to become an amulet and to prevent it being reused. If the token was kept, it indicated that the affection was reciprocated, but if the coin was discarded then it was a rejection – which casts a different light upon these coins in the river. Are they, each one, evidence of unrequited affections?
From the end of the eighteenth century and until the early twentieth century, smoothed coins were used as love tokens, with the initials of the sender engraved or embossed upon the surface. Sometimes these were pierced, which gave recipient the option to wear it around the neck. In Steve’s collection, the tokens range from heavy silver coins with initials professionally engraved to pennies worn smooth through hours of labour and engraved in stilted painstaking letters. In many examples shown here, the amount of effort expended in working these coins, smoothing, engraving or cutting them is truly extraordinary, which speaks of the longing of the makers.
Steve has found many thousands of coins in the bed of the Thames over the years but it is these worked examples that mean most to him because he recognises the dignity of the human emotion that each one manifests. Those who threw them into the river did not know that Steve was going to be there one day to catch them yet, whatever the outcome of these romances, he ensures that the tokens are kept safe.
Benjamin Claridge.
The reverse of the Benjamin Claridge coin, from the eighteenth century or earlier.
The intials M and W intertwined upon a Georgian silver coin.
The intial W upon the smoothed face of Georgian silver coin, bent into an S shape.
Crooked Georgian silver coin, as the token of a vow or promise.
The initials AMD upon a smoothed coins that has been pierced to wear around the neck.
A copper penny with the letter D.
C.M. Marsh impressed into a penny.
The letter R punched into a penny within a lucky horseshoe.
Pierced coin set with semi-precious stones.
Who was Snod? Is this a lover’s token or a dog tag?
This pierced silver threepence commemorates the date January 11th 1921.
On the reverse of the silver threepence are the initials, L T. Are these the initials of the giver, or does it signify “Love Token”?
A smoothed penny with the name Voilet upon it. A phonetic spelling of the name “Violet”as the beloved spoke it?
Cut coins from the early twentieth century.
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So Long, ‘Smilin’ Sammy McCarthy
With sadness, I report the death on Monday of ‘Smilin’ Sammy McCarthy aged eighty-eight
Let me tell you the story of “Smilin'” Sammy McCarthy, one of legends of East End Boxing. Voted “Best British Boxer of 1951” by Boxing Times, Sammy was a golden boy who won eighty-three out of his ninety amateur contests and represented England four times in the nineteen fifties, before becoming British Featherweight Champion twice and then Lightweight Champion after that.
Yet Sammy was resolute in his refusal to be called a hero. With his impeccable manners and old-fashioned proper way of talking, he was the paragon of self-effacement – an enigma who modestly ascribed his spectacular boxing career to no more than a fear of disappointing others. His contemporaries informed me that only once I knew about his background, could I fully appreciate the true impulse behind Smilin’ Sammy’s suave temperament, but what I discovered was something far more surprising than I ever expected.
Born in 1931 as one of ten children, Sammy grew up in a terrace off Commercial Rd next to Watney Market as the son of costermonger. “My father used to go round the streets selling fruit and veg and we all helped him, and I helped him more than anyone but I always hated it,” Sammy revealed to me, explaining how he visited Spitalfields Market each day with his father in the early morning and stood outside the church while his father bought the produce. Then Sammy had to wheel the loaded barrow back to Stepney but, although it gave him the physical strength which made him a boxer, it was also was a source of humiliation when Sammy’s schoolmates jeered. “Subconsciously, I suppose I was a bit of snob – I wanted to be posh even though I didn’t know the meaning of the word.” he confided with a blush, expressing emotions that remained current for him even after all the years.
Sammy’s elder brother Freddie was a boxer before him and Sammy had a vivid memory of hiding under the table as a child, while his father and brother listened to the celebrated Tommy Farr and Joe Louis fight on the radio. “All the talk was of boxing and I so much wanted to participate but I was naturally timid,” he admitted to me shyly, “I was frightened of being frightened, I suppose – but after my fights I was always so elated, it became like a drug.”
Sammy joined the St George’s Gym in Stepney where his brother trained. “I absolutely loved it but each time I went, I was extremely nervous.” he continued, breaking into his famous radiant smile, “At fifteen I had my first fight and lost on points, so I didn’t tell my father but he found out and cuffed me for not telling him, because he didn’t mind.”
“I had a great following thanks to my two uncles who sold tickets and everybody in the markets bought them because my brother was already well-known. So there used to be coach loads coming to watch me box and I was always top of the bill, not because I was good but because I always sold plenty of tickets.” It was a characteristic piece of self-deprecation from a champion unrivalled in his era.
At nineteen, Sammy turned professional under the stewardship of renowned managers Jarvis Astaire and Ben Schmidt. “Every time I go to West End, I still go to Windmill St and stand outside where the training gym used to be. All the big film stars, like Jean Simmons and John Mills, they used to go there to the weigh-in before a big fight.” he told me proudly.
In spite of his meteoric rise, Sammy was insistent to emphasise his vulnerability. “Everyone’s nervous, but I was petrified, not of fighting but of letting the side down,” he assured me. “I’d rather fight a boxer who thought he could fight but actually couldn’t,” Sammy announced, turning aphoristic and waving a finger,“than a boxer who thought he couldn’t fight but really could.” And I understood that Sammy was speaking of himself in the latter category. “It makes you sharp,” he explained, “your reflexes are very fast.”
‘”I retired at twenty-six, but I didn’t know I was going to retire,” admitted Sammy with a weary smile,“I had to meet these people who were putting a book together about me and it turned out to be the ‘This Is Your Life’ TV programme. It was 1957 and they expected me to announce I was going to retire. I must have been a little disappointed but maybe I hadn’t seen I was slowing down a little.”
Married with two children and amply rewarded by the success of his boxing career, Sammy bought a pub, The Prince of Wales, known as “Kate Odders” in Duckett St, Stepney. You might think that Sammy had achieved fulfilment at last, but it was not so. “I hated every moment because I like home life and as a publican you are always being called upon.” he confessed, “I had a little money and I spent it all unfortunately.”
“My boxing career, it gave me confidence in myself. Boxing made me happy.” Sammy concluded as our conversation reached its natural resolution,” I didn’t enjoy the fights, but I love the social life. You meet the old guys and you realise it’s not about winning, it’s about giving of your best.” Living alone, Sammy led a modest bachelor existence in a neatly kept one bedroom flat in Wanstead but he met regularly with other ex-boxers, among whom he was popular character, a luminary.
And that is where this story would have ended – and it would have been quite a different kind of story – if Sammy had not confronted me with an unexpected admission. “I want you to know why I am divorced from my wife and separated from my children,” he announced, colouring with a rush of emotion and looking me in the eye, “I’m telling you, not because I’m boasting about it but because I don’t want you to make me out to be a hero.”
There was a silence as Sammy summoned courage to speak more and I sat transfixed with expectation. “I robbed banks and I stole a lot of money, and I was caught and I was put in prison for years.” he said.
“I think I was too frightened not to do it,” he speculated, qualifying this by saying,“I’m not making excuses.”
“I’m reformed now.” he stated, just to be clear.
“I was alright in prison because I’m comfortable with my own company and I read books to pass the time,” he added, to reassure me.
“But why did you do it?” I asked.
“Because we never had anything,” he replied, almost automatically and with an abject sadness. His lips quivered and he spread his hands helplessly. He had been referring back – I realised – to his childhood in the family of ten. A phrase he said earlier came back into my mind,“I can’t say that I experienced hardship,” he told me,“not by comparison with what my parents went through.”
Subsequently, a little research revealed that Sammy had been convicted three times for armed robbery and served sentences of three, six and fourteen years. When I think of Smilin’ Sammy now, I think of his sweet smile that matched the Mona Lisa in its equivocation. It was a smile that contains a whole life of fear and pain. It was a smile that knew joy yet concealed secrets. It was a smile that manifested the uneasy reconciliation which Sammy made with the world in the course of his existence.
Smilin’ Sammy McCarthy
Sammy McCarthy, the Stepney Feather, has Peter Morrison against the ropes under a fierce attack at the Mile End Arena.
Sammy McCarthy makes Denny Dawson cover up under a straight left attack.
Jan Maas goes headlong to the canvas after taking a Sammy McCarthy “special” to the chin.
Still smiling! Not even a knockdown can remove the famous smile from Sammy McCarthy, as he goes down for a count of “eight” in the fifth round.
Smilin’ Sammy McCarthy
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