A Public Inquiry For The Bell Foundry
I am overjoyed to publish the news that – further to the Holding Order that he issued in December – yesterday Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities & Local Government announced there will be a Public Inquiry into the future of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
After three years of campaigning and all the letters that you the readers of Spitalfields Life have written, this is a highly gratifying result.
The UK Historic Building Preservation have been invited to present their proposal for the future of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a proper working foundry at the Public Inquiry. This will redress the glaring omission at Tower Hamlets Planning Committee Meeting when this scheme was passed over without due attention in favour of the bell-themed boutique hotel. The hotel developers and their planning consultants may have been able to walk all over the council, but they will not be able to do the same at a Public Inquiry
When announcing the call-in yesterday, Robert Jenrick wrote, ‘In general, planning applications are only called-in if planning issues of more than local importance are involved.’ This comment reveals the Secretary of State’s recognition of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry’s national and international significance.
We will keep you informed once the date for the Public Inquiry is set and report upon it as it progresses. At this moment, let us celebrate that we now have real hope of saving the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to cast bells here in the East End for future generations to ring across the world.
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The Secretary of State steps in
A Letter to the Secretary of State
Rory Stewart Supports Our Campaign
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager
Four Hundred Years at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Pearl Binder at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Dorothy Rendell at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
At Barts’ Great Hall
Yesterday’s clear January sunshine offered the ideal light for a visit to the Great Hall at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield. This North Wing was the first part rebuilt by James Gibbs in his modernisation of the medieval hospital between 1738 and 1769 which delivered the elegantly-proportioned quadrangle at the heart of the complex. Here in the Great Hall three thousand names are recorded of the benefactors who made this possible.
Now an independent charity, Barts Heritage, has been formed to care for the Great Hall and the Hogarth Staircase, and renovate them in time for the nine hundredth anniversary of the hospital in 2023. I was privileged to have these magnificent airy chambers to myself yesterday and record the charismatic patina in advance of their forthcoming restoration.
The staircase painted with murals by William Hogarth
John Soane is recorded among the three thousand names of benefactors
Portrait of St Bartholomew over the fireplace
Looking out onto James Gibbs’ courtyard
Napkins and tablecloths for fancy dinners
The North Wing at St Bartholomew’s Hospital
Remember the Poor’s Box
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Spitalfields Market In The Eighties
Nearly thirty years have passed since the Fruit & Vegetable Market which had operated since 1638 left Spitalfields and now it has passed into legend. Yet I am frequently regaled with tales of the characters who inhabited this colourful lost world that has receded in time as the old market and its attendant buildings have been altered and rebuilt.
So you can imagine my delight when Stefan Dickers, Archivist at Bishopsgate Institute, showed me this photo album of portraits of market traders from the eighties, crammed with such vivid personalities it resembles a series of stills from a lost BBC comedy series of the era.
The fat album with gilt edges comes with its own box and a lock and key. Inside, a letter of dedication explains that it was presented by the Spitalfields Market Tenants Association to Charles Lodemore in 1987 upon the occasion of his retirement after thirty years as Clerk & Superintendent to the market. The photograph above shows the view across the Market from his office.
It was Marion Bullock, Charles Lodemore’s daughter, who presented the album to the Bishopsgate Institute. We do not know who took these characterful pictures and very few of the subjects are named, so I call upon my readers in the London fruit and vegetable business to come forward and help us identify these portraits.
Photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Sclater St Weavers Houses
Weavers houses at 70-74 Sclater St built 1718-20
The terraces of lavish silk merchants’ mansions in the streets by Christ Church in Spitalfields are celebrated eighteenth century survivals, but the modest dwellings of the weavers who actually wove the silk are less visible and less appreciated, though no less significant in telling the history of this place.
Last year we were delighted when Historic England listed a pair of 1760s weavers’ houses at 3-5 Club Row in response to a campaign of letters by readers of Spitalfields Life, at the time the buildings were threatened with demolition.
Now the spotlight has fallen upon 70-74 Sclater St. These three brick-built weavers’ tenement houses were constructed 1718-20 and form the last remnant of a terrace. They are of three storeys and a cellar, with staircases to the front. Each floor comprises one room which served as both a working and living space. Number 70 was refronted in 1777 and is subtly different from its neighbours.
Anyone that knows Sclater St market will recognise these houses, shored up with girders and smothered in graffiti. Neglected and forlorn, these three hundred year old houses have been permitted to fall into spectacular disrepair yet they a crucial part of the history of Spitalfields. Possibly constructed when Sclater St was laid out in the eighteenth century, they have been there longer than anything else and sit today within the Brick Lane Conservation Area.
The terrace is part of the contested Bishopsgate Goodsyard site and, if the current proposal goes ahead, it will be swallowed by an office development. This entails repairing the front walls of the houses but destroying the rear wings, yards and outhouses, which are rare survivals and form an integral part of these buildings.
In an attempt to prevent this destruction, the Spitalfields Trust has submitted an application for listing to Historic England, offering the Trust’s expertise to assist in repairing the houses in their entirety. As with the Club Row houses, it will be invaluable if readers can write letters of support for listing to Historic England.
Please email ApplicationsSouth@HistoricEngland.org.uk
‘shored up with girders and smothered in graffiti, they have been permitted to fall into spectacular disrepair’
Yard with original outhouses and pantiled roofs at the rear of 70 Sclater St
In the seventies, a lot more of the terrace was standing – 70-74 Sclater St are the last houses with pitched roofs to the right (photo by Dan Cruickshank)
70-84 Sclater St, showing more of the terrace intact (photo by Dan Cruickshank)
Looking west down Sclater St, 70-74 can be seen towards the end of the terrace on the left (photo by Dan Cruickshank)
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Piotr Frac’s New Window
Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie went along to St John of Jerusalem in Hackney to record stained glass artist Piotr Frac installing his new window in commemoration of parishioner June Pipe who worked for Penguin Books all her life.
Last summer we visited Piotr in his workshop and we are thrilled to see his talent gaining well-deserved recognition through this latest commission that he won as a result of a competition. I took the opportunity to pop over to join Piotr in the crypt of St John on Bethnal Green for a cup of tea early one morning before he started work for the day and hear all about it.
“St John of Jerusalem is a beautiful church near Victoria Park and they contacted me to take part in a competition for designing and making a window. Of course I agreed and luckily I won the competition!
I did not know June but I was given plenty of information about her life, her work and her interests, as well as her involvement with the church. On the basis of this, I created a design. She had a large collection of Penguin Books and she was passionate about fonts and calligraphy, so I tried to capture a sense of this in my window. But I realised that you cannot show all aspects of person’e life in a window, you have to find a way to extract an essence of who they were.
My first sketch was entirely illustrative of June Pipe’s life and the committee at the church really liked it, but I realised that it was too literal and so my design became more abstract. Creating this window was quite a long journey but I am happy with the finished result. The competition took place in 2017 and then my design had to pass several committees. It was complicated because there is not one person who makes the decision and this is compounded by the fact you working in an historic building. There are already three memorial windows in the church so my window had to sit alongside them and suit the life of the church too.
Then I had to collect the right glass. This was quite challenging because I used antique glass that is unique and I sourced it from France, Germany, England and Poland. I wanted to use materials from all over Europe to create this window, so it brings the countries together in harmony.
I do not have huge windows here in my workshop, so I can never predict how the light will work with the glass when a new window is installed. Even when a stained glass window is installed, the light will change all the time during the day. So there is always an element of surprise. Each time when I come back at a different time of the year or a different time of day, the window will look different.
When I installed my window in St John of Jerusalem, the sunlight was shining right through it and it made the colours appear very delicate but, when I returned on a duller day, the window surprised me by how intense the colour was. I know these things but, every time I look, it is almost like the first time again.”
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Contact Piotr Frac direct to commission your own stained glass window
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Jack Sheppard, Highwayman
On the morning of 4th September 1724, an inconsequential thief named Jack Sheppard was to be hung at Tyburn for stealing three rolls of cloth, two silver spoons and a silk handkerchief. But instead of the routine execution of another worthless felon, London awoke to the astonishing news that he had escaped from the death cell at Newgate.
With the revelation that this was the third prison break in months by the handsome boyish twenty-two year old Jack Sheppard, he flamed like a comet into the stratosphere of criminality – embodying the role of the charismatic desperado to such superlative effect that his colourful reputation for youthful defiance gleams in the popular imagination two centuries later.
In the Spring, he broke out through the roof of St Giles Roundhouse, tossing tiles at his guards. In the Summer, with his attractive companion Elizabeth Lyon, he climbed through a barred window twenty-five feet above the ground to escape from New Bridewell Prison, Clerkenwell. And now he had absconded from Newgate too, using a metal file smuggled in by Elizabeth and fleeing in one of her dresses as disguise. Sheppard was a popular sensation, and everyone was fascinated by the inexplicable mystery of his unique talent for escapology.
Spitalfields’ most notorious son, Jack Sheppard, was born in Whites Row on 4th March 1702 and christened the very next day at St Dunstan’s in Stepney, just in case his infant soul fled this earth as quickly as it arrived. Unexceptionally for his circumstances and his time, death surrounded him – named for an elder brother that died before his birth, he lost his father and his sister in infancy. When his mother could not feed him, she gave him to the workhouse in Bishopsgate at the age of six, from where he was indentured to a cane chair maker, until he died too. Eventually at fifteen years old, he was apprenticed to a carpenter in Covent Garden, following his father’s trade, but at age twenty he met Elizabeth Lyon, his partner in crime, at the Black Lion in Drury Lane, a public house frequented by criminals and the infamous Jonathan Wild, known as the “Thief-taker General.”
On 10th September 1724, Sheppard was rearrested after his break-out from Newgate and returned there to a high security cell in the Stone Castle, where he was handcuffed and fettered, then padlocked in shackles and chained down in a chamber that was barred and locked. Yet with apparent superhuman ability – inspiring the notion that the devil himself came to Sheppard’s assistance – he escaped again a month later and enjoyed a very public fortnight of liberty In London, eluding the authorities in disguise as a dandy and carousing flamboyantly with Elizabeth Lyon, until arrested by Jonathan Wild, buying everyone drinks at midnight at a tavern in Clare Market, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Back in Newgate – now the most celebrated criminal in history – hundreds daily paid four shillings to visit Sheppard in his cell, where he enjoyed a drinking match with Figg the prizefighter and Sir Henry Thornhill painted his execution portrait.
Two hundred thousand people turned out for Jack Sheppard’s hanging on 16th November, just two months since he came to prominence, and copies of his autobiography ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe were sold. Four years later, John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” with the character of Macheath modelled upon Sheppard and Peachum based upon his nemesis Jonathan Wild, premiered with spectacular success. Biographical pamphlets and dramas proliferated, with Henry Ainsworth’s bestseller of 1839 “Jack Sheppard” – for which George Cruikshank drew these pictures – outselling “Oliver Twist.” Taking my cue from William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote that, “George Cruikshank really created the tale and Mr Ainsworth, as it were, merely put words to it,” I have published these masterly illustrations here as the quintessential visual account of the life of Spitalfields’ greatest rogue.
And what was the secret of his multiple prison breaks?
There was no supernatural intervention. Sheppard had outstanding talent as a carpenter and builder, inherited from his father and grandfather who were both carpenters before him and developed during the six years of his apprenticeship. With great physical strength and a natural mastery of building materials, he possessed an intimate understanding of the means of construction of every type of lock, bar, window, floor, ceiling and wall – and, in addition to this, twenty-two year old Jack Sheppard had a burning appetite to wrestle whatever joy he could from his time of splendour in the Summer of 1724.
Mrs Sheppard refuses the adoption of her little son Jack
Jack Sheppard exhibits a vindinctive character.
Jack Sheppard committing the robbery in Willesden church.
Jack Sheppard gets drunk and orders his mother off.
Jack Sheppard’s escape from the cage at Willesden.
Mrs Sheppard expostulates with her son.
Jack Sheppard and Blueskin in Mr Wood’s bedroom.
Jack Sheppard in company with Elizabeth Lyon escapes from Clerkenwell Prison.
The audacity of Jack Sheppard.
Jack Sheppard visits his mother in Bedlam.
Jack Sheppard escaping from the condemned cell in Newgate.
The first escape.
Jack Sheppard tricking Shortbolt, the gaoler.
The second escape.
Jonathan Wild seizing Jack Sheppard at his mother’s grave in Willesden.
Jack Sheppard sits for his execution portrait in oils by Sir James Thornhill – accompanied by Figg the prizefighter (to Jack’s right), John Gay, the playwright (to Jacks’s left), while William Hogarth sketches him on the right.
Jack Sheppard’s irons knocked off in the stone hall in Newgate.
Jack Sheppard of Spitalfields (Mezzotint after the Newgate portrait by Sir James Thornhill, 1724) – “Yes sir, I am The Sheppard, and all the gaolers in the town are my flocks, and I cannot stir into the country but they are at my heels baaing after me…”
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Joy Harris, Dressmaker
Joy with her engagement ring, at seventeen.
Almost sixty years after she was apprenticed as a dressmaker in Spitalfields, Joy Harris returned to visit the streets where she began her career and found them much changed. The sweatshops and factories have new uses today and the textile industry itself has gone but, as we walked around in search of her long-lost haunts, Joy told me her story – and it all came back to life.
“Dressmaking was all I was interested in, and I wanted to be a court dressmaker. My mother made her own clothes and she made mine too. She was from Stepney and she had done an apprenticeship as a dressmaker in the East End. I think I was born with it and I can’t ever remember not being able to sew, even at twelve or thirteen I made clothes for other people.
In 1961, at fifteen years old, I was offered an apprenticeship at Christian Dior in Paris but my mum and dad couldn’t afford to send me there. So Eastex in Brick Lane was the next best option – very disappointing that was! I left school in July and went straight to Eastex where I earned a pittance, it only covered my fare. Eastex were a middle range clothing company and I worked on the third floor at the corner of Brick Lane and Wentworth St. I started off making shoulder pads by the hundred and then you did darts and gradually we were taught to make a whole garment. Zips were measured and everything had to be in the right place. We used to sing, “Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer do!” all day at work. It was boring. We spent all day making darts and then we’d take it up to show what we’d done, and we’d be sent back to do it all over again.
My friend Sandra already worked in Fashion St and we travelled up together to Aldgate East on the train from Barking each day. In Wentworth St, there was an underground butcher where there’d always be these men up against the grilles whistling at us, in our miniskirts at fifteen. They’d get locked up now. My mother let me keep my money for the first three weeks, and the first week I bought her a watch and, on the second week, I bought these black patent leather Italian slingbacks in Commercial St. I love shoes and I can remember everybody looking at my slingbacks. Of a Friday, we’d go down Petticoat Lane where there was a table that sold forty-fives and I bought my first Beatles record there and everybody asked me, “Who’s the Beatles?” I was a teenager and everybody I knew bought records, I had loads because they were really cheap.
I’ve known Larry since I was fourteen. We met at the youth club where I was friends with this guy called John. I’d seen Larry and I thought he looked nice and he had a scooter. John and Larry went on an Outward Bound trip for a month, and I was quite taken aback when John turned up with Larry. We got engaged after I finished my apprenticeship at seventeen, and John became the best man at our wedding.
And then I went to work in Fashion St which was a very stupid thing to do. But it was where my friend Sandra worked and they were paid three times as much at Lestelle Modes as I got at Eastex. It was a sweatshop they used to make very cheap clothes for C&A and market stalls. It ended my ambition to become a court dressmaker but all I wanted to do was get married and have children. Yet I didn’t make any money at first because I’d been trained to make clothes properly whilst at this place they were running them up quickly. The other girls made fifty dresses a day yet I only made ten because I was trying to make them as I was taught at Eastex. It took me ages to get the hang of throwing them together! It was a big problem and I used to go home crying with frustration, because I’d given up my apprenticeship to do this and I thought I’d be making more. But after a few weeks, I managed to do it.
It was a horrible place, a filthy dirty shed in a back yard with eight or ten machinists, and a tea table at the end of the line. The whole workshop was thick with fluff and people used to smoke there. We didn’t have overalls we just wore our old clothes. Yet it was a fun time in my life. They were wonderful people that owned it, Les and his sister Estelle – and Estelle and her husband Jack managed it. It was a relaxed place. We had a record player and took in our own records and played them while we worked. We played “Hit the Road Jack!” on Fridays when Jack left early and ran out the door afterwards, once he’d gone. We curled our hair with cotton reels, permed it in our lunch break and washed it out in the afternoon tea break, ready for the evening. We spent most of our money down the Lane. The motto there was, “If it don’t fit, cut it off!” – if you had spare fabric left over anywhere on the dress.
I stayed there two years, and then me and my friend left and went to a place in Chadwell Heath, until I had my first baby at twenty-one. Then I machined at home for a company from Hackney. It was bloody hard work, but he was a very good baby. Returning to work, I went to a really posh place and my dressmaking training was essential there. It was evening wear and it was all beaded, made of satin and chiffon, and my skills came back because it all had to be done properly.”
In spite of her sojourn in a sweatshop in Fashion St, Joy discovered the fulfilment of her talent as a dressmaker. “I’ve done it all my life!” she informed me proudly, “I made four thousand costumes for a dance contest once, and me and my friend we work self-employed making bridal gowns and bridesmaid’s dresses. Last year, I made twelve Disney costumes for my daughter’s twenty-first birthday party and it took me six months.”
Walking up Fashion St together past the newly renovated Eastern Bazaar that Joy remembers as crowded sweatshops and scruffy fabric warehouses, we met young women outside a fashion school. Joy’s contemporary counterparts, they explained they were at training to be stylists and while Joy was delighted to see that life goes on here, they were even more excited to meet Joy and learn of the clothing manufacturing that was once in Fashion St more than half a century ago, before they born.
Joy aged four in a dress made by her mother, taken in Dagenham where Joy was born – “My parents moved from Stepney in 1939, both were from the East End.”
Joy (right) and her best friend Sandra (left), 1961. – “We were always together. We used to see each other every Wednesday night, even after we were married.”
Joy and Larry up a mountain near Gelligaer, Glamorganshire, in 1963, when Joy was seventeen.
Joy and her husband Larry re-enact the phone call made from this box outside Christ Church Spitalfields in 1963 when Joy rang her sister to learn of the birth of her nephew.
Joy meets Carina Arab, Gulia Felicani and Julie Adler, students at fashion school in Fashion St, on her first return visit since she worked there in a sweatshop in 1963.
Joy at the corner of Brick Lane and Wentworth St where she did her apprenticeship as a dressmaker in 1961, working for Eastex on the third floor. The building is now offices of the Sky network.
Joy Harris, Dressmaker
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