Further Along The Regent’s Canal
The towpath fiddler in Camden
Taking advantage of the crystalline February sunlight on Thursday, I continued my ramble along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal which is two hundred years old this year. I walked as far as Paddington Basin in the frost, picking up my journey where I cast off in Shoreditch. Swathed in multiple layers of clothing against the cold, I was alarmed to encounter rough sleepers under bridges when I set out but, as the temperature rose, I was astonished to discover a zealous sunbather in Camden. My most inspiring meeting of the day was with fiddler Lee Westbrook who, like me, had also been encouraged to venture out by the sunlight. His music echoed hauntingly under the multiple bridges at Gloucester Ave. And by the time I reached Paddington, it was warm enough to unbutton my coat before taking the Metropolitan Line back again to Liverpool St.
Approaching Bridport Place Bridge
De Beauvoir Rd Bridge
Approaching City Rd Lock
Lock keeper’s cottage at City Rd Lock
At City Rd Lock
Danbury St Bridge
Approaching the Islington Tunnel
Entrance to the Islington Tunnel
Lock Keeper’s Cottage at St Pancras Lock
Bridge at Royal College St
Canalside Terrace in Camden
At Camden Lock
At Camden Lock
Lee Westbrook
Mansions by Regent’s Park
Bridge into Regent’s Park
Mansion in Regent’s Park
Onwards towards Paddington
In Lisson Grove
In Maida Vale
Little Venice
Paddington Basin
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The Bethnal Green Mulberry Saga
Readers may wonder what has become of the Bethnal Green Mulberry and what the future holds for the oldest tree in the East End.
When I was first taken to see the Bethnal Green Mulberry five years ago, I had no idea what part it would play in my life or the long fight that would ensure to prevent it being dug up. I had no idea that it would lead to me becoming a ‘Mulberry Martyr’ when I fell out of an ancient Mulberry and broke my wrist last summer while picking Mulberries for the campaign.
Next Saturday afternoon, 15th February at 2:30pm, I shall be giving a lecture on the subject of the Bethnal Green Mulberry, recounting the history of Mulberries in London, the tale of the most venerable East End specimen, the story of the fight to save it, and the next steps to ensure its survival.
The lecture is organised by the Friends of the Geffrye Museum at St Peter de Beauvoir Church, Northchurch Terrace, N1 4DA.
Tea and scones will be served.
The Bethnal Green Mulberry (Photograph by Bob Philpots)
The Haggerston Mulberry
The Dalston Mulberry
The Whitechapel Mulberry
The Mile End Mulberry
The Stoke Newington Mulberry
The Spitalfields Mulberry
The Tower of London Mulberry
Click here to read my feature in The Daily Telegraph about the scandal of the Bethnal Green Mulberry
Read more here about the Bethnal Green Mulberry
The Fate of the Bethnal Green Mulberry
How Old is the Bethnal Green Mulberry?
Here We Go Round The Bethnal Green Mulberry
A Plea For The Bethnal Green Mulberry
The Reckoning With Crest Nicholson
So Long, Henrietta Keeper
With sadness, I report the death yesterday of my friend Henrietta Keeper, the irrepressible ballad singer, at the fine age of ninety-three
Friday was always an especially good day to have lunch at E. Pellicci in the Bethnal Green Rd, because not only was Maria Pellicci’s delicious fried cod & chips with mushy peas likely to be on the menu, but also – if you were favoured – you might also get to hear Henrietta Keeper sing one of her soulful ballads. Celebrated for her extraordinary vitality, the venerable Henrietta (known widely as “Joan”) was naturally reticent about her age, a discretion which you will appreciate when I reveal that she was able to pass as one thirty years her junior.
Henrietta tucked into her customary fried egg & chips as the essential warm-up to her weekly performance while I sat across the table from her enjoying the cod & chips with mushy peas, and helping her out with her chips. “My husband died fourteen years ago, of emphysema from smoking and he ate a lot of hydrolized fat.” she admitted to me, her dark eyes shining with emotion,“When he died, I threw away the biscuits and I bought a book on nutrition and studied it, and now I’ve got strong. I only eat wholemeal bread, white bread’s a killer. I am keeping well, to stay alive for the sake of my children because I love them. I don’t want to go the same way my husband did.”
“Anna Pellicci makes me laugh, ‘She says, ‘Are you still here?”” continued Henrietta, with affectionate irony, leaning closer and casting her eyes around the magnificent panelled cafe that was her second home,“I first came to Pelliccis in 1947 when I got married. No-one had washing machines then, so I used to take my washing to the laundrette and come here with my three babies, Lesley hanging onto the pram, Linda sitting on the front and Lorraine the baby inside.” Yet in spite of being around longer than anyone else, Henrietta possessed a youthful, almost childlike, energy and wore a jaunty bow in her hair. “I’m so tiny,” she declared to me batting her eyelids flirtatiously, “I’m just a little girl.”
As a prelude to the afternoon’s performance, I asked Henrietta the origin of her singing and she grew playful, speaking with evident delight and invoking emotions from long ago. “It all started with my dad when I was a little girl, he had a beautiful voice.” she recalled fondly, “He was a road sweeper, but years ago there wasn’t much work – so, when he couldn’t get a job, he used to stand outside the pub singing. And people put money in his hat, and he took it home and gave to my mum. That was the only entertainment we had in those days. Everybody was poor, so the best thing was to go to the pub and make your own music. When I was sixteen years old, I used to sing duets with my dad in pubs. The first song I sang was “Sweet Sixteen – When I first saw the love light in your eyes, when you were sweet sixteen…”
Henrietta got lost in the sentiment, singing the opening line of Sweet Sixteen across the table in a whisper, before the choosing the moment to assure me,“I’m a ballad singer, I don’t like to sing ‘Hey, Big Spender!’ even though I think Shirley Basset’s marvellous – that suits her voice, not mine.” I nodded sagely in acknowledgement of the distinction, before she continued with a fresh thought, “But I like Country & Western. Have you heard of Patsy Cline and Lena Martell? I like that one, ‘I go to pieces each time I see you again…'”
Born in the old Bethnal Green Hospital in the Cambridge Heath Rd, Henrietta and all her family – even her great-grandparents – lived in Shetland St opposite. Evacuated at the age of ten to Little Saxham, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, Henrietta found herself with a devout Welsh family who worked on the land and went to church on Sundays. Here Henrietta excelled in the choir and “that’s how I learnt singing. I got to sing, ‘My Lord is Sweet,’ on my own and I loved it.” she confided to me with a tender smile.
Returning to the East End at the time of the doodlebugs, Henrietta was out playing with her friend Doris when they heard the sound of the Luftwaffe overhead followed by explosions. In the horror of the moment, Doris suggested they take refuge in Bethnal Green Tube Station, but Henrietta had the presence of mind to refuse and went instead to join her family sleeping under the railway arches. That night, one hundred and seventy three people were killed on the staircase as they crowded into the entrance of the tube, including Henrietta’s friend Doris. “It’s not for your eyes,” Henrietta’s father told her when they laid out the bodies on stretchers upon the pavements in lines, but she recalled it in vivid detail all her days.
We ate in silence for a while before Henrietta resumed her story.“When my children started school, I joined the Diamond “T” Concert Party,” she told me,”I had a friend who worked at Tate & Lyle in Silvertown and one of the things they did for the community was organise entertainments. We used to go to old people’s homes, churches and hospitals, and I became one of their singers for thirty years. We had quite a laugh. The only reason I left was that everyone else died.”
I understood something of Henrietta’s circumstance, her story, the origin of her singing and how she made use of her talent over all these years. I realised it was imperative that Henrietta continued singing, that was how she won the longevity she desired, and for one born and bred in Bethnal Green, Pelliccis was the natural venue. Yet there was one mystery left – why did everyone know Henrietta as ‘Joan’ ?
“My mum was called Henrietta, and because I was the eldest I was called Henrietta, but I hated it so I when I went for my first job interview, as a machinist in Mare St making army denims, I told them I was called, “Joan.” she confessed, “They was more cockney there than I am, they said, ‘What’s your name, love?’ and I didn’t like calling out ‘Henrietta’ because it sounded so posh, I just said the first name that came into my head – ‘Joan.’ All my neighbours and my mother-in-law know me as Joan, but my family know me as Henrietta. And that’s how I told a little white lie, in case you might be wondering.”
As our conversation passed, we had completed our meals. Joan ordered a piece of bread pudding to take home for later and I polished off a syrup pudding with custard. And then, the moment arrived – Henrietta took her microphone from her bag and composed herself to summon the spirit of the place, a hush fell upon the cafe and she sang…
“I’m a ballad singer, I don’t like to sing ‘Hey, Big Spender!”
Henrietta Keeper – “I’m so tiny, I’m just a little girl.”
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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
