The Wyvern Bindery Is Moving
The Wyvern Bindery has been a fond landmark on the Clerkenwell Rd for as long as I can remember, but now it is moving east on 13th March to 187 Hoxton St, N1 6RA
“We’re inspired by William Morris and by Eric Gill,” explained Mark Winstanley, self-styled “gentleman bookbinder” of the busy Wyvern Bindery in the Clerkenwell Rd – “Morris articulated the three crucial elements you need to run a successful bindery. You need a clientele with an appetite for hand made bindings. You need a skilled labour force to do the binding, And you need a nice rich city like London.”
Fortunately Mark has all three, and is ideally placed to bring the first two together in Clerkenwell, once the historic centre of London’s print trade and now the preserve of media and design companies. “Gill’s idea of a workshop was that everyone should own their personal set of tools,” he continued, recognising the need for individual autonomy within the workplace – a principle evidenced by the diverse group of young bookbinders working on different projects at the Wyvern Bindery, assisting each other and coming regularly to consult Mark whilst we were in conversation.
“There’s always been a bookbinding trade, but without Morris life for a bookbinder would be much more difficult today,” Mark conceded with an affectionate nod, “Hannah More, Rosie Gray and I started the Wyvern Bindery in 1990 in the Clerkenwell workshops. We got it going from nothing and we turned over thirty-five thousand pounds in the first year, with a little bit of luck and some hard work. And after five years, we took this shop at five thousand pounds a year.”
If you pause on the Clerkenwell Rd and look through the window of the Wyvern Bindery, you can witness the entire process of bookbinding enacted before your eyes. Among presses and plan chests, surrounded by racks of multi-coloured rolls of buckram and leather, and shelves of type and tools, the bookbinders work, absorbed at tables and benches, trimming pages and card for covers at guillotines, sewing and gluing and pressing and tooling, working with richly subtly hued canvas and leather, and finally embossing them with type for titles. In a restricted space, they pursue individual tasks while also engaging in an elaborate collective endeavour, sharing equipment and bench space as their projects require different areas of the shared workshop – all within a constant dynamic harmony.
“In the seventies when I started, the trade was opening up and it was easier to get into it without an apprenticeship.” recalled Mark, “I was one of the students on the very first full-time year’s course in craft book binding at the London College of Printing in 1976. My teacher was Art Johnson and he taught me to make books that lasted and were well made, with honesty.”A principle apparent today in the unpretentious work produced at the Wyvern Bindery, creating bindings that do not draw attention to themselves – avoiding ostentation in favour of work that is neat and well finished. “People ring up and say, ‘This is what we want it to look like. Can you work it out in twenty-four hours and we’ll fly off on Monday morning to do a pitch to Coca-Cola with it,’ -not a fancy leather binding that takes six weeks.” admitted Mark, revealing how his ancient trade thrives amongst the new media that surround him “We apply craft skills to a commercial proposition. It might not be art but it’s clean and neat and it’s done on time.” he said plainly.
If you think Mark’s pragmatism is not entirely convincing, your suspicion will be confirmed when he admits to the irresistibly seductive melancholy of damaged old books that demand restoration. A magnetism that led him to Ethiopia recently, where he was invited to restore a sixth century testament, the Abba Garima Gospels written around 560, the oldest illuminated church manuscript in Africa.“Written in one day – because God stopped the sun for three weeks – it is still a living document,” he assured me, his eyes sparkling with passion, “A seriously holy book that people pay to have read to them, believing that it can cure the sick, this is one of the greatest church documents in the world.”And then Mark showed me snaps of fragments of the beloved book, explaining how he painstakingly unpicked the stitches that were causing tears to the pages and reattached them all to the spine with Japanese tissue.
Bookbinding emphasises a sense of time and mortality for the binder, because alongside the bindings that Mark creates to preserve the content of new books, old damaged tomes are coming in for repair, illustrating the fate of his predecessors’ works, a fate that will also come to his own in turn. “When you see the work of the great book binders, like Riviere, Morrells and Bumpus – all dead and gone now – they jump at you, the quality of the leather and gold tooling, the attention to detail, the hand-sewn headbands and good quality card.” Mark declared to me, confiding his sense of personal connection. And I understood that the care he puts into these repairs honours those who came before him, expressing a latent hope that his work will be similarly respected by generations yet to come.
The first printing in London was done in Clerkenwell, while in the nineteenth century it became a place of booksellers and now Mark Winstanley has found an elegant way to make the artisan skills of the bookbinder serve the current inhabitants. The Wyvern Bindery with its hand tools and glue pots may appear the anachronism in Clerkenwell today, yet the truth is it carries the living spirit of the culture that has defined this corner of London for more than five hundred years.
Wyvern Bindery, 56/8 Clerkenwell Road.
Pages from the Abba Garima Gospels dating from before 560.
The Gospels restored with pages mounted on Japanese tissue by Mark Winstanley.
Mark Winstanley at the Clerkenwell Workshops in 1990
Photographs of the bindery copyright © Nicola Boccaccini
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Gram Hilleard’s Postcards From London
It is my delight to publish these postcards designed and conceived by comic genius Gram Hilleard
“The idea behind these postcard provocations is simple. London loves to sell the world its history while at the same time destroying it by selling out to asset-stripping developers and big business. If you visit a souvenir shop the nostalgic postcards you find there show London many years ago, whereas my postcards highlight the awful changes of contemporary London. Unfortunately my research brings up some ugly truths, especially when you join the dots to consider the bigger picture!” – Gram Hilleard
Postcards copyright Gram Hilleard
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Phyllis Archer, First Lady of Fournier St
It is my pleasure to publish these extracts from the memoir of Phyllis Grant Archer (1911-88), recounting the years she lived with her son Rodney in Fournier St.
Edited and annotated by her daughter Elayne Archer, Phyllis’ memoir CROSSING TROUBLED WATERS recounts her experiences as a war widow emigrating from London to Toronto with her two young children in 1944, before returning to spend her final years in Spitalfields thirty-six years later.
Phyllis Archer with Rodney & Elayne in Paris, 1962
In early 1980, my mother Phyllis and brother Rodney bought a very old house in the heart of the old immigrant East End. The area was then very rundown, only just beginning its resurgence to the fancy, trendy and historic neighbourhood of today. The house was 31 Fournier St, between Commercial St and Brick Lane. My mother loved all the history. She also loved the sound of the bells ringing from Christ Church and the Imam calling the faithful to prayer from the mosque.
Above all, my mother loved the house. It had four floors and a basement. It was built in 1726 and had been used for many years as a small clothing factory and then, for several years before she and my brother moved in, as the office of a minicab company. At first, my mother lived in the house alone for six months while my brother sold his house in North London. She lived without an indoor toilet or running water, not much in the way of electricity, beyond an occasional light bulb hanging from the ceiling. My mother described this time thus –
“I had many visitors. There were two social workers who lived in flats in the bowels of the church and people sent by Irving Tarn, the estate agent whose father had bought up half the houses in the area. He was very nice to me. he called me ‘the first lady of Fournier St’ because I was the first woman owner in the street.
Dennis Severs, a Californian who had a fantastic old house on Folgate St, came almost every day to get water in for me, using an old teakettle he’d bought in the market. It cost 25p and it leaked but Dennis had it soldered and it was ideal. For his kindness, Rodney gave him the picture of himself holding the sceptre and orb which is now a prized exhibit in Dennis’ Victorian parlour.”
At 31 Fournier St, my mother lived on the top two floors and my brother in the bottom three. She maintained that the exercise of the stairs was good for her. The attic had been the workplace of the Huguenot weavers and my mother imagined a canary’s cage hanging by the window to warn when the air was too thick with lint. The windows of her kitchen overlooking the walled garden were of eighteenth-century glass which distorted the view slightly. Of course, the house was a building site for the first two years but my mother loved it, except for the evenings when the rain poured in and she and my brother had to empty buckets of water into the kitchen sink until they could afford to repair the roof.
Every day my mother wandered the neighbourhood. She loved to browse the markets and usually returned with a plate, cup or bowl – often with cracks or chips – the older the better. Most of all, my mother loved to go to the Market Cafe at 5 Fournier St run by Clyde Armstrong and his sister Phyllis. There she would eat a hearty meal of meat, roast potatoes, yorkshire pudding, brussel sprouts and always a pudding – trifle, jam roly-poly or crumble with custard. She regaled the other customers – taxi drivers, market porters, old timers and new arrivals – with tales of London the thirties and her work at the Daily Mail. ‘Lord Rothermere made a pass at me in the lift!’ and ‘My boss, a lesbian, once did the same.’ In the afternoon, my mother often sat in the walled garden or in the front room on the second floor with one of my brother’s cats on her lap.
She entertained many friends visiting from Toronto, taking them to the Olde Cheshire Cheese where she ate hearty meals, regaling her friends with stories of the pub’s famous patrons as if they were personal friends. ‘Dr Johnson was a regular customer, he would take home oysters for his cat,’ my mother informed me as she gobbled her bread and butter pudding. She could sometimes be a little over the top.
‘Was I impossible, kids?’ she asked my brother and me once after such a performance. Rodney replied, ‘You were a little impossible, Mother, but you were also quite wonderful.’
During her years in Fournier St, my mother suffered a series of falls, resulting in broken hips, wrists and thighs. My mother’s eye sight was also an issue and she was always concerned about losing sight in her ‘good eye.’ Yet my mother remained upbeat and went out walking every day with a cane. My brother accompanied her to the doctor for her eyes, her liver and her broken bones, describing these visits thus –
“It was hard to see my mother as vulnerable because she had always seemed so strong to me throughout my life. Finally I saw Phyllis’ fear of mortality. I am sure many go through this reversal of the parent-child relationship. When I was teaching a class of students in their twenties and thirties, I found myself looking for a young woman with bright red hair, hazel eyes and a dazzling complexion – the woman my mother had been before motherhood, before war, before widowhood, before life treated her so horribly.
She was often stoic and brave but could be sad and complain, ‘O Rodney, you have no idea what I have been through. I wanted to be a writer too but I had to work so hard to bring you and your sister up, I never found time to develop my abilities.’
Other times, my mother would talk about how well things had worked out. How fortunate she was to have two loving if difficult – she thought – children, and then be spending her last years in a wonderful neighbourhood.”
I visited my mother in London for the last time in November 1988. I hardly recognised her when I walked into the ward and I think she understood this and waved at me. I asked ‘How are you doing, Mother?’ She replied, ‘Oh well, I suppose I could be worse.’
One day, when my brother accompanied me, she grabbed both our arms. ‘I’m going now, kids,’ she said. “Martin has my latest will. My memoir is under the bed and you know where my rings are.’ She looked at Rodney and said ‘We’ve been a good couple, haven’t we?’ And then to me she said, ‘You’ve been a wonderful daughter, Elayne.’
My mother’s ashes were scattered in the garden of 31 Fournier St, and my brother and I placed a plaque on the wall there in her memory.
The walled garden at 31 Fournier St
Phyllis with Elayne & Rodney as children
31 Fournier St
Phyllis in Toronto, 1947
31 Fournier St
Phyllis in Spitalfields, spring 1988
Elayne (photo by Nancy Siesel)
Rodney in Fournier St
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The Magnificent Old Ladies Of Whitechapel
Photographing daily on the streets of Spitalfields and Whitechapel for the last thirty years, Phil Maxwell has taken hundreds of pictures of old ladies – of which I publish a selection of favourites here today. Some of these photos of old ladies were taken over twenty-five years ago and a couple were taken quite recently, revealing both the continuity of their presence and the extraordinary tenacity for life demonstrated by these proud specimens of the female sex in the East End. Endlessly these old ladies trudge the streets with trolleys and bags, going about their business in all weathers, demonstrating an indomitable spirit as the world changes around them, and becoming beloved sentinels of the territory.
“As a street photographer, you cannot help but take photos of these ladies.” Phil admitted, speaking with heartfelt tenderness for his subjects, “In a strange kind of way, they embody the spirit of the street because they’ve been treading the same paths for decades and seen all the changes. They have an integrity that a youth or a skateboarder can’t have, which comes from their wealth of experience and, living longer than men, they become the guardians of the life of the street.”
“Some are so old that you have an immediate respect for them. These are women who have worked very hard all their lives and you can see it etched on their faces, but what some would dismiss as the marks of old age I would describe as the beauty of old age. The more lines they have, the more beautiful they are to me. You can just see that so many stories and secrets are contained by those well-worn features.”
“I remember my darkroom days with great affection, because there was nothing like the face of an old lady emerging from the negative in the darkroom developer – it was as if they were talking to me as their faces began to appear. There is a magnificence to them.”
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
See more of Phil Maxwell’s work here
Julie Begum, Someone Still Evolving
Portrait of Julie Begum by Sarah Ainslie
In the course of my work, I often discover that the people I meet are connected to others I have interviewed. This is especially true of Julie Begum, a woman of magnanimous spirit and moral courage who is widely respected for her involvement in many diverse threads of culture and community in the East End. When I asked Julie how I should describe her, she replied ‘As someone who is still evolving.’
Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I met Julie in the cafe on the top of the Idea Store in Whitechapel where a wall of glass affords magnificent views down onto the market and eastwards towards Spitalfields. Here at the heart of the East London, with all the different currents of life flowing around us, proved the ideal location for Julie to speak to us of her life and experiences in the surrounding streets.
“I was born in Mile End Hospital, Stepney, in 1968 and I grew up on the Digby Estate in Globe Town, but before that my parents lived in one room in a flat belonging to my uncle on the Chicksand Estate in Spitalfields. I have my mum and dad and two brothers, and Globe Town is my manor.
My dad came to London in 1962 as part of the voucher system to attract immigrants from Commonwealth countries. His father died when my dad was ten and he went to work in a rickshaw workshop in Sylhet. He was the second son of a large family and the eldest brother chose not to come, so the family funded my dad to go overseas to earn money and send it back. He did that for a long time and he paid for his siblings’ education. He worked as a machinist in the East End rag trade in Jewish and Turkish factories, whatever he could find. It was a dying trade then.
When immigration laws changed and it was more difficult to come and go, he decided that if he was going to stay here he would get married. So he went back to Sylhet and married my mum who was the eldest daughter in her family. She took care of her brothers and sisters at home, she did not go to school. She went once and saw a child getting beaten and decided she was not going to go back. She is a non-literate person and my dad did not even finish primary school. They were not the most educated people.
My mother was only a teenager when she arrived in London and then she had me and my two brothers. For both my parents, coming here was not something they had not anticipated in their lives but they did it because it was expected of them by their families. They made a home for themselves here but it was quite a hostile environment. There were other migrants – not just Bengalis, Irish, Caribbean and from other parts of the the world – and they clung to those relationships. They were all sorts and they were all in it together. I remember my mum used to leave me with her Irish neighbour when she needed to go off and do things. It was informal and friendly in the early days.
We lived on a mostly white council estate with a few black families and just a couple of other Bengalis. The atmosphere in Globe Town was quite nasty at the time. We were careful about not hanging about in public and going to school could be a challenge. If we were with adults, we would be safe. We had a neighbour, Pauline, who worked in the school and sometimes she took us and, if my mum could go, we would be fine.
If there was an incident, we would leg it. We had to go past this dry-cleaner’s shop that had an alsation and they would set dogs, on us on the way there and back, as a way of scaring us. That sort of thing happened on a daily basis, hostility in the street. There was quite a lot of paki-bashing going on, not just for children but for adults as well. People were being assaulted and they would go out in groups for security if they could. Sometimes you just had to get on with life and face it. We continued to play outside.
We had a very nasty family on the estate of known troublemakers who were always in trouble with the police and were known racists. I remember when my dad got arrested after Philip the son made me eat some dog shit because he thought that was what we ate. I went running home to my parents and my dad came out and challenged him. Then Philip’s dad came out and they got into an altercation. And the police arrested my dad for getting in a fight. I remember having to go to a phone box to get hold of someone to come and see my dad in the police cell in Bethnal Green. I was seven, eight or nine at the time. Things like that did not happen all the time but it created an atmosphere. You realised that the world was not a friendly place. Yet we also had neighbours who were very kind and supportive, and I was sad to leave the estate because it was where I grew up.
What I have drawn from those experiences is I want the world to be a better place and I am really pleased that those things don’t really happen any more in the same way. It has made me aware of social justice and the need for a fairer society, which is regardless of peoples’ backgrounds. My family were very keen to lead a certain kind of life, to be acknowledged and taken seriously, and not to be judged for what people think you might be.
My parents did not talk much about anything. As children, we did not know why they had come to this country or anything about what had happened to their families in Bangladesh. We did not know there had been a war there.
Globe School was really lovely. I loved it. It’s why I wanted to become a teacher. We had some really good teachers there, inspirational in lots of ways. Morpeth School, where I went next, was the opposite – it was more like being in a prison. There was lots of fighting in the corridors, a pupil took an overdose in the toilets and teachers were being assaulted by the kids. I became part of it, it was very nasty bullying environment. I adapted to being in a difficult place. I did not acknowledge my brothers in the playground because you did not want anyone to know who you were. We pretended we did not know each other. It was a horrible place.
That was the East End at that time. The boys came out of school and went to prison and the girls ended up having babies. There was no expectation of anybody, whether black, white or brown. School was merely a containment space for lots of young people.
Quite early on, I knew I did not want to get married or have children, so I realised I needed to earn a living. I thought, ‘What can I do that I can earn a living by? Maybe I can get a job doing something?’ I did not have a clue but I realised I needed to get some qualifications because I did not get any at Morpeth School, so I went to a sixth form centre to get some. After that, I did some A Levels and I decided it was time to think about getting a job. I was walking down the Holloway Rd with a friend and we saw an advert for a teaching training course in the window of the North London Polytechnic so I went in to have a look and ended up signing up for a B Ed and spent four years there.
I think my parents would been really happy if I had simply got married and had kids. They did not expect me to do very much. They did not understand my need to do something else, but my father would listen to a reasoned argument. We were brought up to reason. When the news was on we might not agree on the issues but we were encouraged to argue why. So I was able to persuade my father that getting an education would be something worthwhile and he agreed.
He had very particular ideas about life and what people should do. He said ‘If you live in my house, you live by my rules,’ and I accepted that until I realised, ‘I can’t live by your rules, so I am leaving’ and that was what I did. It wasn’t pleasant, it created quite a rift yet I respected his standards. I was eighteen.
I was lucky, I had good friends and I was introduced me to someone who lived in a shared women’s house that was short-life housing in Turner’s Rd, Bow. The place was falling apart but there was a spare room, so I moved in. There were women from different backgrounds, all sorts. It was eclectic. I ended up being the housing officer for that house because all my friends ended up living there too. If there was a spare room and a friend needed somewhere to live, and as long as they paid the rent, it was fine. We had a really nice time and it became quite normal for me as I had grown up in a family household. At home, we always had somebody staying over. In Bengali culture, people are not possessive about where they sleep, having your own bedroom or your own things.
During my last teaching practice, I was at a school where I saw a lot of racial discrimination and inequality. What disheartened me the most was it was coming from the head teacher who was African-Asian. The black and white staff were not working together and there was a bad attitude towards the kids. It made me think, ‘I don’t want to be a teacher if this is the case.’ So I nearly gave up, but my lecturer at North London Polytechnic, who was one of the few black women there, she gave me a good talking-to. She convinced me to finish the course. ‘Even if you don’t want to teach,’ she said, ‘you need to finish.’ That was good on her part and I did qualify but I didn’t end up teaching in a primary school as I had planned. I re-qualified to teach adults in further education. At least adults know their own minds and, teaching them, there is a sense of equality whereas I saw things were being done to children.
I taught in Tower Hamlets College and met some amazing people. I think it is really important to teach skills that people can use to improve their lives and have a good life. But after a few years, they were enforcing new terms and conditions, and I realised I did’t want to spend the rest of my life as a teacher. I was still in my twenties so I thought, ‘I’ll try to have an adventure.’ So I interviewed for Voluntary Service Overseas and I was posted to the Orange Free State in South Africa but it wasn’t possible under segregation because I was Asian. Then I was offered Pakistan, also not ideal for a person of Bengali heritage considering our recent history.
Instead they sent me to Nepal in the foothills of the Himalayas, as remote as you can be from East London. My job was to train teachers in the villages to interact with their pupils not just teach by rote. It made me very aware that I did not know very much about these people and I wanted to learn about them for a year first. I was completely clueless and I needed to learn what it was like to be hungry, be cold and without family or friends – to test myself. It taught me to take life more seriously and appreciate it better.
I hated it when I came back. I walked into a supermarket and walked out again because I couldn’t bear it. It was so stark, coming from a place where there was only six items in a shop. We have so much stuff that we do not need. I do not enjoy being a consumer of material culture.
After that I worked with Praxis Community Projects, for refugees and asylum seekers in Bethnal Green as a basic skills co-ordinator, teaching English and IT, whatever they needed to survive here. It was tough work because of the hostility those people face and I had to leave when the funding ran out. So eventually I joined the Museum of Childhood and then the Geffrye Museum, collecting oral histories of the experience of growing up in the East End. It is quite a rarified world, museums and galleries.
In 2000, I started Swadhinata Trust with Ansar Ahmed Ullah, and a few other like-minded people, to provide answers for young Bengali people who were wondering about their identities and history. When I was growing up there was nowhere to find out about why my parents came here.
My mother has been diagnosed with dementia and now I am preparing myself and my family for old age and what that it is going to mean for us. I volunteer for the Youth Offending Team working with young people and supporting families dealing with the situation where a member of their family has committed a crime, after they have gone to court, pleaded guilty, shown remorse and want to make good. They need to show they are going to learn from the experience, by making better choices and making amends.
I think I was lucky when I was a child that, even though things were being done to me that weren’t very pleasant, I had positive people around me, parents and teachers, who made me realise that there are other ways of living.”
Julie cooking at home (Photo by Sarah Ainslie)
Julie in Brick Lane at the time of the anti-fascist marches (Photo by Phil Maxwell)
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The Marquis Of Lansdowne Restored
The restoration of the Marquis of Lansdowne nears completion
The Marquis of Lansdowne in the thirties
Five years ago, the readers of Spitalfields Life led a successful campaign to save the Marquis of Lansdowne, dating from 1838 in Geffrye St, from demolition.
Over the past year, it has been handsomely restored by the Geffrye Museum – now renamed the Museum of the Home – as the museum prepares to reopen this summer, after extensive renovation by architects Wright & Wright which enlarges the exhibition space by opening up formerly unused attics and basements.
It is my hope that five years from now I shall be able to publish a similar report about the Whitechapel Bell Foundry when it is restored to a fully working foundry again.
The Geffrye Museum was created a century ago as a museum of furniture, reflecting the furniture trade that once flourished in Haggerston. With this in mind, I interviewed George Barker who was born in the Marquis of Lansdowne in 1931 and whose family ran the pub for three generations, from before 1915 until after World War II, serving the joiners, wood turners, cabinet makers and french polishers.
George Barker in the yard at The Marquis of Lansdowne aged six in 1937
For George Barker, born in the upper room of the pub in 1931, it was his family home, spanning three generations of Barkers – his grandfather William who came from a village in East Anglia at the end of the nineteenth century, his mother Lilian who ran the pub alone through the war and opened up every day during the Blitz, and lastly himself, the one who got a grammar school education and a Masters degree in Maths and has lived for the last fifty years in a beautiful house in Chorleywood.
The Marquis of Lansdowne is the only old building left on Cremer St, and the story of the pub is that of the working people who lived in the surrounding streets, for whom it was the centre of their community and meeting place for their extended families. It was a quintessential East End pub and the history of this place cannot be told without reference to these people.
Haggerston has changed almost beyond recognition in recent decades and, all this time, the Marquis of Lansdowne has remained as the lone sentinel of a lost world. Yet when I met George Barker and he told me the story of his family and the life they led there, he brought that world alive.
“My earliest memory is of being a kid playing on the street, everybody played on the street in those days. A couple of times, I went into the Geffrye Museum and we collected caterpillars in the gardens. They used to have a playground with swings and a place to play football at the back of the museum.
I was born at The Marquis of Lansdowne in February 1931, but my family’s involvement with the pub goes back to the beginning of the century. My grandfather William George Barker told me that the Barker family came from a group of villages near Ipswich, moving to Hoxton at the end of the nineteenth century. He came to London in 1899 and worked as a barman for year in the East End before becoming a policeman for twenty years.
Frederick Daniel Barker, my grandfather’s brother, was licensee of The Marquis of Lansdowne until he died of TB in 1919, when my grandfather took it over from Frederick’s wife Mary Ann. Then, when my grandfather died in the thirties, my father George Stanley Barker took it over until he died in 1937 when my mother Lily ran it. She remarried in 1939 and, as Lilian Edith Trendall, she held the license until 1954 when her husband Frederick Trendall took over after her death. I think they all made a living but it wasn’t a terribly easy life.
We had a side bar and then another one on the corner we called the darts bar, as well as the front bar and the saloon bar. Even then, there were redundant doors which meant that at one time the pub was divided up into more bars. The saloon bar had upholstered bench seats and bar stools, but the other bars just had wooden benches with Victorian marble-topped tables. The curved bar itself was in the centre, spanning all the divisions with a tall central construction for display of spirits and optics, and the beer pumps were in the front bar. I remember, as you came in the side door from Geffrye St, the wall had a large decorative painted panel advertising Charrington’s Beer and there were mirrors at the rear. The pub windows were of etched and cut glass, and above the main door was an illuminated panel with the words ‘Toby Beer.’ It was a Charrington pub and a wagon came with dray horses to deliver once a week from the brewery in Mile End. Further down Cremer St was the Flying Scud, a Truman’s pub, and the Star & Pack, a Whitbread pub.
On the Geffrye St side of the building was a kitchen which was – in effect – where we all lived, and an office. Above the kitchen was my bedroom, with a window looking onto Geffrye St and the railway arches. On the first floor at the corner was the front room where we didn’t go very often, and the main bedroom – where I was born – was on Cremer St, divided from the front room by a construction of wooden panels, as if it once had been one big room. All the arches were coal depots in those days. It was brought by railway every morning at six thirty and all the coal men would be filling sacks, and bringing their horses and wagons to carry it away. But it never woke me up though, because I got used to it.
In those days, on one side of the pub was a terrace of houses and on the other there were three shops. I remember Mrs Lane who ran the sweet shop next door and Mrs Stanley who had a cats’ meat shop where they sold horsemeat. In the thirties, there was a couple of fellows making springs for prams in the building across the road which became a garage in the nineteen forties. I recall there was a baker’s on the other side of the street too and H.Lee, a big furniture manufacturer, on the corner of the Kingsland Rd.
My mother, Lily, ran The Marquis of Lansdowne singled-handed through World War II. It was heavily bombed in the surrounding streets and, when there were raids, she took shelter in the spirit cellar which had been reinforced with stanchions. She had grown up in the area, and most people knew her and she knew them, and they had been to school together. She was quite an outgoing woman who enjoyed a bit of banter and a lot of chat with the customers. She was the daughter of James Wilson who ran the scrap iron yard opposite across Cremer St under a couple of arches. He started the business there and he had a place in Tottenham, so he left his three sons to run it.
There was a friendly community on our doorstep, she ran the pub and her three brothers ran the scrap iron business across the road, and there was another uncle called Harmsworth who had another two arches where he ran a furniture business – one of my aunts married him. All my uncles and aunts lived within about one hundred yards of each other. They were the Barkers, the Wilsons and the Cheeks. A Barker married a Wilson and then a Wilson married a Cheek and then a Cheek married a Barker. My mother had another three children with my stepfather in the forties, and we all lived together in the Marquis of Lansdowne. There was me and my sister Eileen, plus the twins Maureen and Christine, and their younger brother Freddie.
At the age of eight, I was evacuated during the Blitz, but when I came back it was still quite dangerous so I went to stay with an aunt in Kensal Green. I never lost contact because I cycled over at weekends and moved back at the end of the war when I was thirteen.
In the fifties, the business started to drift away. People didn’t have much money and television came along, so it could be quiet on week nights but it was always busy at weekends, and for celebrations like VE Day and the Coronation we got a special licence and opened from midday until midnight. Even if people had moved away, they came back for Saturday evenings to meet with their relatives and friends. I would be serving behind the bar – probably a little younger than I should have been – and by the age of eighteen I was regularly working there. I always looked after the place when they went in holiday.
My mother died in 1954 and my stepfather took over the pub. I studied for a Masters Degree in Maths at Woolwich Polytechnic and I was away from 1954-56 doing National Service. In 1957, I left The Marquis of Lansdowne forever – I was working for Hawker Aircraft in Langley by then. I only went back occasionally after that, not too often. As people moved out, it started dwindling away and I think my stepfather sold it to a family called Freeland who had been coalmen under the arches and then he moved away too.
If it had been up to me, I probably would have become a publican but I wasn’t going to wait for everyone else to die off first and, because of the war, I went to grammar school and then to university. I haven’t been back to Haggerston since the nineteen sixties.”
George Barker
At The Marquis of Lansdowne, 1957. George Barker on right, aged twenty-five, with sister Eileen, centre back. The other three are his half-brothers and sisters from his mother Lilians second marriage to Frederick Trendall. The twin girls are Maureen on the left and Christine on right, with their brother Freddie between them.
George Stanley Barker & Lilian Edith Wilson, married at St Leonards, Shoreditch on 7th September 1929. Lilian ran the pub after the death of her husband in 1937 until she died in 1954.
Ex-policeman William George Barker who ran The Marquis of Lansdowne from 1919 – photographed in 191o, with his wife Annie Susannah Oakenfold and son George Stanley Barker, who took over from his father and ran the pub until 1937.
20th December 1911, William George Barker is reprimanded for bring caught in pubs in Shoreditch and Spitalfields while on duty as a policeman – eight years later he became landlord of The Marquis of Lansdowne and spent the rest of his life in a pub. – “Inattention to duty and wasting his time by being off his Division and being in the White Hart Public House, High St, Shoreditch, out of the City from 3:30 to 4:50pm (1 hour & 2o minutes) while on duty on 13th instant. Also, being in the King’s Stores Public House, Widegate St, from 5:05 to 5:40pm (35 minutes) while on duty, same date.”
February 22nd 1919, William George Barker applies to leave the police to take over the running of The Marquis of Lansdowne from his sister-in-law after the death of his brother Frederick Daniel Barker. “I respectfully beg to apply to the Commissioner for permission to resign my appointment as Constable in the City of London Police Force, one month from the above date. My reason for doing so is that my sister-in-law Mrs Mary Ann Barker Licensee of The Marquis of Lansdowne Public House, No 32 Cremer St, Kingsland Rd, is unable to carry on the business in consequence of a nervous breakdown and she wishes me to hold the license and conduct the business on my own responsibility.”
May 9th 1919, Charrington’s, Anchor Brewery, Mile End, seeks a reference for William George Barker from the Commissioner of Police at Snow Hill. Presumably, the incidents of Christmas 1911 were discreetly forgotten.
The concrete box was Sir David Chipperfield’s proposed replacement for The Marquis of Lansdowne
Our visualisation of the Marquis of Lansdowne as it might look restored
Tim Whittaker of Spitalfields Trust standing outside the Marquis of Lansdowne as it was in 2015
I am giving a lecture for the Friends of the Geffrye Museum about THE BETHNAL GREEN MULBERRY on 15th February. Click here for tickets
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The Guardians Of London’s Lost Rivers
London is situated upon a river basin and owes its origin to the Thames. Yet once upon a time many other rivers flowed through the city which have been ‘lost,’ mostly absorbed into the modern drainage network or occasionally diverted into decorative water features such as the Serpentine in Hyde Park.
Adam Dant’s latest map celebrates the sources of the lost watercourses of the capital, delighting in the profanity of their transformation from wild streamlets to stinky sewers, through waters swollen by the effluent produced by mythic figures of London lore.
Some discreet digital smudging has been applied to avoid compromising those who read Spitalfields Life in the workplace, office or schoolroom. Unexpurgated limited edition prints are available by mail order for connoisseurs.
Click to enlarge
‘If London’s lost rivers ever had anything by way of protective gods, like the Old Father Thames and his wife Isis, then as river guardians they have performed a very poor job indeed it seems – or maybe not.
London’s lost rivers continue to flow, they still have identifiable sources and across this map of what is perhaps – as the torrent of guide books, novels, exhibitions, walking tours, and maps suggests – the city’s worst kept secret, they maintain a vigorous current.
By manifesting the histories of their meanderings as personifications of their sources, each gets an identity that needs no higher power than that which keeps the springs gurgling. Even without such phenomena, Londoners provide an ample stream of liquid too.
By the Middle Ages, some – most famously the Fleet and the Walbrook – had already become open channels of waste and were culverted over. Yet it was the Victorians who built a system that, by so efficiently hiding the passage of effluvia through the Thames’ tributaries, led to the complete disappearance of these former rivers.
Joseph Bazalgette’s network of vaulted sewers redirected the Tyburn and the Westbourne to good purpose, carrying off those things on which we do not wish to dwell. Would not a guardian of such a lost river be a bit ‘pissed’? I have conjured a cast of perpetually micturating masters and mistresses, depicted according to the particular histories of each river.
Thus, the River Tyburn flows from the ‘pissen-breeches’ of the hanged man at Tyburn’s ‘triple tree gallows,’ while a gang of sailors provide the source of the Neckinger, close to the docks, and the angel which appeared in the branches of a tree in William Blake’s garden is the fountain head of South London’s lost river Peck.’ – Adam Dant
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 GUARDIANS OF LONDON’S LOST RIVERS are available to purchase through TAG Fine Arts
