Geoff Perrior’s Spitalfields
Geoff Perrior
This small cache of Geoff Perrior’s photographs of Spitalfields taken in the nineteen-seventies was deposited at the Bishopsgate Institute Library by his widow Betty Perrior. Fascinated to learn more of the man behind these pictures, I spoke with Betty in Brentwood where she and Geoff lived happily for forty-two years.
“He was a character,” she recalled fondly, “he belonged to eight different societies and he was a member of the Brentwood Photography Club for fifty-three years, becoming Secretary and then President.”
“He started off with a little Voightlander camera when he was a youngster, but he graduated to a Canon and eventually a Nikon. He said to me, ‘I can afford the body of the Canon and I’ll buy a lens and pay for it over a year.’ Then he sold it and bought a Nikon. He only switched to digital reluctantly because he thought it was rubbish, yet he came round to it in the end. For twenty years, we did all our own developing in black and white.
Geoff & I met at WH Smith. I had worked at WH Smith in Salisbury for twelve years before I went on a staff training course at Hambleden House in Kensington and Geoff was there. We just clicked. That was in July, we were engaged in October and married a year later. I was forty-four and we were both devoted, my only regret is that we had just forty-two years together.
Geoff worked for WH Smith for thirty-seven years and for thirty years he was Newspaper Manager at Liverpool St Station, but he never took photographs in the station because it was private property. He used to do the photography after he had done the early shift. He got up at three-thirty in the morning to go to work and he finished at midday. Then he went down to Spitalfields. One of the chaps by the bonfire called out to him, ‘I love this life!’ and, one day, Geoffrey was about to take out ten pounds from his wallet and give it to one of them, when the vicar came by and said, ‘Don’t do that, they’ll only spend it on meths – buy him a dozen buns instead.’
Geoff had a rapport with anybody and everybody, and more than two hundred people turned up to his funeral. I have given most of Geoff’s pictures away to charity shops and they always sell really quickly, I have just kept a selection of favourites for myself – to remind me of him.”
Geoff Perrior
Sitting by the bonfire in Brushfield St
“Got a light, Tosh?”
In Brushfield St
In Toynbee St
Spitalfields Market porter
In Brushfield St
In Petticoat Lane
In Brushfield St
In Toynbee St
In Brushfield St
In Brushfield St
Spitalfields market porter in Crispin St
In Brune St
In Brushfield St
In Brushfield St
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Dennis Anthony’s Petticoat Lane
At Paul Gardner’s Party
Gardners Market Sundriesmen is moving to 78 Ruckholt Rd, Leyton, E10 5NP. Phone 0208 558 1289
“I am sure everyone here tonight will remember this little shop for years to come”
Twelfth Night is a traditional occasion for a party and in Spitalfields we celebrated it at Gardners Market Sundriesmen which moved to Leyton this week after one hundred and fifty years in Commercial St. It is not uncommon for parties to be held when shops open but few shopkeepers enjoy such a party when their shop closes. The volunteers who helped Paul Gardner pack up his shop on Friday returned on Monday night to join with his many friends and loyal customers in showing their appreciation.
Paul climbed onto a wooden crate, proudly wearing his paper hat and Metallica jacket, to make a speech to the assembled throng of well-wishers and old friends who crammed the shop that night.
“When I first came here in 1973, I wore a suit for two days and then I thought to myself ‘I don’t really like this very much,’ but it’s always been so interesting and brilliant being here because I get such a wide range of people in. Half the time, I don’t know if I am Basil Fawlty or Manuel…
It’s so inspiring to be here because I meet so many nice people. You get the odd one, but 99% of the people who come in to my shop are pleasant. They have all been enthusiastic, wanting me to carry on and I hope I have given them some inspiration too. If you have your own small business, it is very hard to survive.
I am a simpleton really yet I have managed to survive through hard work, so far. I am sure everyone here tonight will remember this little shop for years to come and hopefully I will see you all in the future. It’s absolutely great all of you coming here to see me off, but you ain’t seen the end of me yet. I’m not on the highway to hell!
I’d like to thank all the people who have helped me over the years, especially Krissie, Leila … the East End Trades Guild has been an inspiration to me and its getting bigger and stronger all the time … the Gentle Author has done some mind-blowing stories about my shop … and to Jane, my lovely wife, who has stuck by me through thick and thin, working seven days a week clearing everything out.
Cheers then, thanks very much and goodbye!”
At the conclusion of Paul’s speech the crowd sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,’ and so say all of us.
Jane Gardner welcomes guests to the party
Paul embraces his fans
Lucinda Douglas Menzies arrives in a magnificent hat
Paul with his son Robert
Paul and the curator of the Operating Theatre Museum
Fiona, the Spitalfields dog walker, and friend
Jane Gardner with Stanley Rondeau, the Huguenot
Paul Gardner with ‘Pickles’ a market stalwart
Paul and Samson Soboye
Paul’s breaks into an improvised song with harmonica accompaniment
‘I am a simpleton really yet I have managed to survive through hard work, so far’
Paul holds up his card made by Jill Wilson incorporating Eleanor Crow’s painting
Jane and Paul Gardner
The Paul Gardner doll in the pocket of Paul’s overcoat
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may like to read my other stories about Gardners Market Sundriesmen
At Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
Packing Up Gardners Market Sundriesmen
Paul Gardner Goes To Downing St
Paul Gardner Returns to Downing St
Joan Rose at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
James Brown at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
The Dioramas Of Petticoat Lane
As soon as the landlord of The Bell in Petticoat Lane wrote to say he had discovered some neglected old models of Spitalfields in the cellar, I hurried over to take a look. Once upon a time, these beautiful dioramas enjoyed pride of place in the barroom but by then they had been consigned to oblivion.
Although hefty and dusty and in need of a little repair, nevertheless they were skilfully made and full of intriguing detail, and deserved to be seen. Thanks to the enlightened curatorial policy of Archivist Stefan Dickers, today they enjoy a permanent home in the reading room at the Bishopsgate Institute where they can visited during opening hours.
I am always curious to learn more of this southerly corner of Spitalfields closest to the City that gives up its history less readily than some other parts, but where the market dates from the twelfth century – much older than that on the northern side of the parish which was not granted its charter until the seventeenth century. The Bell, topped off by a grotesque brick relief of a bell with a human face and adorned with panels of six thousand bottle tops by Robson Cezar, King of the Bottletops, has always fascinated me. Once the only pub in Petticoat Lane, it can be dated back to 1842 and may be much earlier since a Black Bell Alley stood upon this site in the eighteenth century.
I first saw the dioramas in the cellar of The Bell, when the landlord dragged them out for me to examine, one by one, starting with the largest. There are four – three square boxes and one long box, depicting Petticoat Lane Market and The Bell around a hundred years ago. In the market diorama, stalls line up along Middlesex St selling books and rolls of cloth and provisions, while a priest and a policemen lecture a group of children outside the pub. In total, more than thirty individually modelled and painted clay figures are strategically arranged to convey the human drama of the market. By contrast, the square boxes are less panoramic in ambition, one portrays the barroom of The Bell, one the cellar of The Bell and another shows a drayman with his wagon outside the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, with a steam train crossing the railway bridge in the background.
A discreet plate on each diorama reveals the maker as Howard Kerslake’s model studio of Southend, a professional model maker’s pedigree that explains the sophisticated false perspectives and clever details such as the elaborate lamp outside The Bell – and the stuffed fish, the jar of pickled onions and the lettered mirror in the barroom – and the easy accomplishment of ambitious subjects such as the drayman’s cart with two horses in Brick Lane.
Nowadays, the dioramas have been dusted down and cleaned up and I recommend a visit to examine them for yourself.
Click on this picture to enlarge the diorama of Petticoat Lane
At the Truman Brewery Brick Lane, looking north
The barroom of The Bell
The cellar of The Bell
The Bell in the 1930s
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Dennis Anthony’s Photographs of Petticoat Lane
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The CR Ashbee Lecture 2020
For the East End Preservation Society’s CR Ashbee Lecture 2020, Oliver Wainwright, Architecture Critic of The Guardian, introduces Architect Peter Barber. The lecture is at 7pm on Thursday 23rd January at The Wash Houses, The Cass, London Metropolitan University, 25 Old Castle St, E1 7NT.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT IS FULLY BOOKED
Perhaps the most burning question in the capital now is how to provide enough good quality genuinely affordable housing? Peter Barber is an architect who is celebrated for designing humane high density council housing.
“One of the most original architects working today. Over the past decade he has built a reputation for his ingenious reinventions of traditional house types and his ability to craft characterful chunks of city out of unpromising sites.” – Oliver Wainwright
Peter Barber has entitled his lecture HUNDRED MILE CITY & OTHER STORIES. He will be discussing the ideas which underpin his work and showing images of built and theoretical projects for Donnybrook Quarter and Hundred Mile City. Peter is responsible for some of the best new social housing in Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets.
Each year, the East End Preservation Society presents the CR Ashbee Memorial Lecture. The inaugural lecture was delivered by Oliver Wainwright on the Seven Dark Arts of Developers, the second lecture was given by Rowan Moore on The Future of London, in the third lecture, Maria Brenton, Rachel Bagenal and Kareem Dayes spoke about Hope in the Housing Crisis, and in the fourth lecture The Gentle Author explored the activities of CR Ashbee in the East End.
This event is presented with the gracious support of The Cass, London Metropolitan University.
CLICK HERE TO RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKETS
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Packing Up Gardners Market Sundriesmen
All are welcome at a party to celebrate Paul Gardner and one hundred and fifty years of Gardners Market Sundriesmen – his family business through four generations – at his old shop at 149 Commercial St this Monday 6th January from 6:00pm – 9:00pm.
Gardners Market Sundriesmen is moving to 78 Ruckholt Rd, Leyton, E10 5NP. Phone 0208 558 1289
After 150 years, Paul closes up in Spitalfields for the last time
Each day since Christmas, Paul Gardner, his wife Jane, and their sons have been clearing up the shop opened by Paul’s great-grandfather James in 1870 as the first tenant of the newly-constructed Peabody Building in Commercial St. By seven o’ clock on Friday night, three van loads of paper bags had already gone to the new shop in Leyton, and the family were exhausted, when the gang of volunteers arrived to assist with packing up.
Although depleted of stock, the shop looked pretty much as it had always done, yet an hour later it was almost empty. Without waiting for instructions, the well-wishers set to work stowing all the contents into boxes and stacking everything outside on the pavement before forming a human chain and passing the boxes into the van. Paul and his wife Jane stood in weary amazement at the centre of the whirlwind as the counter was disassembled and the cellar was emptied.
In between carrying boxes, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie managed to take enough photos to record the historic event. No-one complained about the dust of ages that was stirred up, coating Paul Gardner with a cobwebby layer which gave him the appearance of the old retainer who had been there for one hundred and fifty years, and rendering his face as grimy as a chimney sweep.
Once the van was full, Jane set off with the driver to supervise the unloading at the new shop in Leyton. In the meantime, we set to work on the final clear out. All kinds of old signs and mementos of past times were discovered, including Paul’s father’s receipt books dated up until the month in 1968 when he died. As the team of volunteers lifted the shop counter out onto the pavement, bank notes fluttered down Commercial St to the delight of passersby.
By then, the shop looked like an empty theatre after the scenery had been removed. Paul lay down on the floor to make one last phone call to his wife on the spot where he had stood behind the counter for the past forty-seven years. Before long, the van returned and we loaded the counter and the remaining scales, trolleys and other paraphernalia.
By now, Paul was so tired he could hardly stand up but he sent me down the road to the off licence for some beers and we drank a toast together. Then he locked up his shop for the last time and this was how one hundred and fifty years ended in Spitalfields.
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may like to read my other stories about Gardners Market Sundriesmen
At Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
Paul Gardner Goes To Downing St
Paul Gardner Returns to Downing St
Joan Rose at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
James Brown at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
Toy Theatres In Old St
William Webb, 49 Old St, 1857
These days, Old St is renowned for its digital industries but – for over a hundred years – this area was celebrated as the centre of toy theatre manufacture in London. Formerly, these narrow streets within walking distance of the City of London were home to highly skilled artisans who could turn their talents to the engraving, printing, jewellery, clock, gun and instrument-making trades which operated here – and it was in this environment that the culture of toy theatres flourished.
Between 1830 and 1945, at a handful of addresses within a half mile of the junction of Old St and City Rd, the modest art of publishing engraved plates of characters and scenery for Juvenile Dramas enjoyed its heyday. The names of the protagonists were William Webb and Benjamin Pollock. The overture was the opening of Archibald Park’s shop at 6 Old St Rd in 1830, and the drama was brought to the public eye by Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured in 1884, before meeting an ignominious end with the bombing of Benjamin Pollock’s shop in Hoxton St in 1945.
Responsibility for the origin of this vein of publishing belongs both to John Kilby Green of Lambeth and William West of Wych St in the Strand, with the earliest surviving sheets dated at 1811. Green was just an apprentice when he had the notion to produce sheets of theatrical characters but it was West who took the idea further, publishing plates of popular contemporary dramas. From the beginning, the engraved plates became currency in their own right and many of Green’s vast output were later acquired by Redington of Hoxton and eventually published there as Pollock’s. West is chiefly remembered for commissioning artists of acknowledged eminence to design plates, including the Cruickshank brothers, Henry Flaxman, Robert Dighton and – most notably – William Blake.
Green had briefly collaborated to open Green & Slee’s Theatrical Print Warehouse at 5 Artillery Lane, Spitalfields, in 1805 to produce ‘The Tiger’s Horde’ but the first major publishers of toy theatres in the East End were Archibald Park and his family, rising to prosperity with premises in Old St and then 47 Leonard St between 1830 until 1870.
Park’s apprentice from 1835-42, William Webb, set up on his own with shops in Cloth Fair and Bermondsey before eventually opening a quarter a mile from his master at 49 (renumbered as 146) Old St in 1857. Webb traded here until his death in 1898 when his son moved to 124 Old St where he was in business until 1931. Contrary to popular belief, it was William Webb who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous essay upon the subject of toy theatres. Yet a disagreement between the two men led to Stevenson approaching Webb’s rival Benjamin Pollock in Hoxton St, who became the subject of the story instead and whose name became the byword for toy theatres.
In 1876, at twenty-one years old, Benjamin Pollock had the good fortune to acquire by marriage the shop opened by his late father-in-law, John Redington in Hoxton in 1851. Redington had all the theatrical plates engraved JK Green and, in time, Benjamin Pollock altered these plates, erasing the name of ‘Redington’ and replacing it with his own just as Redington had once erased the name ‘Green’ before him. Although it was an unpromising business at the end of the nineteenth century, Pollock harnessed himself to the work, demonstrating flair and aptitude by producing high quality reproductions from the old plates, removing ‘modern’ lettering applied by Redington and commissioning new designs from the naive artist James Tofts.
In 1931, the writer AE Wilson had the forethought to visit Webb’s shop in Old St and Pollock’s in Hoxton St, talking to William Webb’s son Harry and to Benjamin Pollock, the last representatives of the two surviving dynasties in the arcane world of Juvenile Dramas. “In his heyday, his business was very flourishing,” admitted Harry Webb speaking of his father,” Why, I remember we employed four families to do the colouring. There must have been at least fifteen people engaged in the work. I could tell their work apart, no two of them coloured alike. Some of the work was beautifully done.”
Harry recalled visits by Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens to his father’s premises. “Up to the time of the quarrel, Stevenson was a frequent visitor to the shop, he was very fond of my father’s plays. Indeed it was my father who supplied the shop in Edinburgh from which he bought his prints as a boy,” he told Wilson.
Benjamin Pollock was seventy-five years old when Wilson met him and ‘spoke in strains not unmingled with melancholy.’ “Toy theatres are too slow for the modern boy and girl,” he confessed to Wilson, “even my own grandchildren aren’t interested. One Christmas, I didn’t sell a single stage.” Yet Pollock spoke passionately recalling visits by Ellen Terry and Charlie Chaplin to purchase theatres. “I still get a few elderly customers,” Pollock revealed, “Only the other day, a City gentleman drove up here in a car and bought a selection of plays. He said he had collected them as a boy. Practically all the stock has been here fifty years or so. There’s enough to last out my time, I reckon.”
Shortly after AE Wilson’s visit to Old St & Hoxton, Webb’s shop was demolished while Benjamin Pollock struggled to earn even the rent for his tiny premises until his death in 1937. Harry Webb lived on in Caslon St – named after the famous letter founder who set up there two centuries earlier – opposite the site of his father’s Old St shop until his death in 1962.
Robert Louis Stevenson visited 73 Hoxton St in 1884. “If you love art, folly or the bright eyes of children speed to Pollock’s” he wrote fondly afterwards. Stevenson was an only child who played with toy theatres to amuse himself in the frequent absences from school due to sickness when he was growing up in Edinburgh. I too was an only child enchanted by the magic of toy theatres, especially at Christmas, but I cannot quite put my finger on what still draws me to the romance of them.
Even Stevenson admitted “The purchase and the first half hour at home, that was the summit.” As a child, I think the making of them was the greater part of the pleasure, cutting out the figures and glueing it all together. “I cannot deny the joy that attended the illumination, nor can I quite forget that child, who forgoing pleasure, stoops to tuppence coloured,” Stevenson concluded wryly. I cannot imagine what he would have made of Old St’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ today.
Drawings for toy theatre characters by William Blake for William West
The sheet as published by William West, November 4th 1816 – note Blake’s initials, bottom right
Another sheet engraved after drawings by William Blake, 1814
124 Old St, 1931
73 Hoxton St (formerly 208 Hoxton Old Town) 1931
Benjamin Pollock at his shop on Hoxton St in 1931
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Roy Gardner’s Sales Tickets
Gardners Market Sundriesmen is moving to 78 Ruckholt Rd, Leyton, E10 5NP. Please help Paul Gardner with his move by coming along to the old shop at 149 Commercial St at 7pm today, Friday 3rd January to help load paper bags into vans. If you have a van and are willing to assist with transport, please call Paul direct on 020 7247 5119.
All are welcome at a party to celebrate Paul and one hundred and fifty years of Gardners Market Sundriesmen in Spitalfields at his shop this Monday 6th January from 6:00pm – 9:00pm.
One shilling by Roy Gardner
Paul Gardner, the fourth generation in Spitalfields oldest family business, Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen in Commercial St, was just thirteen when his father Roy died in 1968. So Paul’s mother ran the shop for four years until 1972 when Paul left school and he took over next day – running the business until now without a day off.
In the shop, Paul found these intricate designs of numbers and lettering that his father made for sales tickets and grocers’ signs which, in their accomplishment, express something of his father’s well-balanced and painstaking nature.
At one time, Roy bought small blackboard signs, that were used by greengrocers to price their stock in chalk, from Mr Patson in Artillery Lane. Mr Patson sliced the tickets out of hardboard, cut up motorcycle spokes to make the pins and then riveted the pins to the boards before painting them with blackboard paint.
In the same practical spirit of do-it-yourself, Roy bought a machine for silk-screen printing his own sales tickets from designs that he worked up in the shop in his spare time, while waiting for customers. Numbers were drawn freehand onto pencil grids and words were carefully stencilled onto card. From these original designs, Roy made screens and printed onto blank “Ivorine” plastic tickets from Norman Pendred Ltd who also supplied more elaborate styles of sales tickets if customers required.
Blessed with a strong sense of design, Roy was self-critical – cutting the over-statement of his one shilling and its flourish down to size to create the perfectly balanced numeral. The exuberant curves of his five and nine are particular favourites of mine. Elsewhere, Roy was inspired to more ambitious effects, such as the curved text for “Golden Glory Toffee Apples,” and to humour, savouring the innuendo of “Don’t squeeze me until I’m yours.” Today, Paul keeps these designs along with the incomplete invoice book for 1968 which is dated to when Roy died.
No doubt knocking up these sales tickets was all in day’s work to Roy Gardner – just one of the myriad skills required by a Market Sundriesman – yet a close examination of his elegant graphic designs reveals he was also a discriminating and creative typographer.
Designs for silk-screen by Roy Gardner
The finished silk-screened signs by Roy Gardner
Pages from the Ivorine products catalogue who could supply Roy’s customers with more complex designs of sales tickets than he was able to produce.
Roy Gardner stands outside Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen in the nineteen forties – note the sales tickets on display inside the shop.
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