All Change At Barney’s Eels
Photographer Stuart Freedman was down in Chambers St next to the Tower of London before dawn last week to record the last ever boiling of eels at Barney’s Seafood. In common with many East End businesses operating under railway arches, Barney’s were confronted with an exorbitant rent increase of 400% by Network Rail. Then, once the arches were sold, they were given notice to quit by the end of the month so a neighbouring hotel can expand onto their site.
Fortunately, proprietor Mark Button has taken this as an opportunity to enlarge his business and move to Billingsgate Market on the Isle of Dogs where his regular customers will still be able to pick up their supplies of freshly-boiled eels, thereby guaranteeing the continuing supply of this most traditional of East End delicacies.
I was lucky enough to sit in the office and enjoy a chat over a quiet cup of tea with Mark’s son Harry Button while the phone rang off the hook with eager customers wanting their eels. Mark is the third generation in the family business and passionate to carry it forward into the future.
“I started here three years ago. My dad and uncle work here, and it was my grandad’s before them. There were two brothers Tubby and Barney Solomon, one had Tubby Isaac’s Jellied Eels stall and the other had Barney’s Jellied Eels stall on opposite sides of the road in Goulston St. People swore blind that one stall was better than the other but Barney’s supplied them both. All their eels came from here, Chambers St. This was originally a lock-up for the two stalls but when my grandad Eddy Button bought the business in the sixties he turned it into a factory and a shop.
I’ve been down here since I was knee-high, there’s pictures of me holding crabs as a baby. I spent my summers here. Working with your family isn’t the easiest of things. We have our arguments but we get over it in ten minutes. Today was our last boiling of eels here. It’s a sad day because we have been here so long. Eels have been boiled here in since the nineteen-thirties. We are moving to Billingsgate Market, where we are going to have a shop and we’d love to see our customers there.”
Once we had finished our tea, Ernie Peachum known as ‘Ginger,’ emerged from the kitchen where he had been chopping and boiling eels since five that morning and told me his story.
“I have been here thirteen years. I worked for Mick’s Eels for eight years and then I came here, so over twenty years boiling eels. It’s quite enjoyable. When I left school, my sister was going out with a guy called Dennis who worked for Mick’s Eels. I had a choice to be an electrician or a plumber or go in the eel game – and the eel game has given me three times the amount of money.
The skill lies in not cutting your fingers off. I don’t wear a metal glove because I don’t need to. I use a big knife and I have never seriously cut myself but my stepson who works here nearly took a finger off. Luckily he had not been here that long and did not know how to sharpen the knife, so it stopped when it hit the bone. He was out for a little bit and now he wears a metal glove. You learn to respect the knife but it hurts if you cut yourself.
When I first started, I was scared of an eel but I got over it with experience. I like working on my own, only talking when I have to. It gives me time to think. I start at five in the morning and finish at half one. It’s sad in a way that we are moving but in my eyes things happen for a reason. We are moving to nicer premises and we are expanding.”
Simon Brennan and Ernest ‘Ginger’ Peachum gutting and chopping eels
Harry Button seeks Simon’s lighter
Ernest and Simon
Simon Brennan
Simon boiling eels
Mark & Harry Button of Barneys Seafood
Photographs copyright © Stuart Freedman
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The Pearly Kings & Queens’ Harvest Festival
Tomorrow is the annual Pearly Kings & Queens’ Harvest Festival, gathering in Guildhall Yard at 12:30pm followed by a service at St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside
On the last Sunday afternoon in September, the Pearly Kings & Queens come together from every borough of London and gather in the square outside the Guildhall in the City of London for a lively celebration to mark the changing of the seasons.
On my visit, there was Maypole dancing and Morris Dancing, there was a pipe band and a marching band, there were mayors and dignitaries in red robes and gold chains, there were people from Rochester in Dickensian costume, there were donkeys with carts and veteran cars, and there was even an old hobby horse leaping around – yet all these idiosyncratic elements successfully blended to create an event with its own strange poetry. In fact, the participants outnumbered the audience and a curiously small town atmosphere prevailed, allowing the proud Pearlies to mingle with their fans, and enjoy an afternoon of high-spirited chit-chat and getting their pictures snapped.
I delighted in the multiplicity of designs that the Pearlies had contrived for their outfits, each creating their own identity expressed through ingenious patterns of pearl buttons, and on this bright afternoon of early autumn they made a fine spectacle, sparkling in the last rays of September sunshine. My host was the admirable Doreen Golding, Pearly Queen of the Old Kent Rd & Bow Bells, who spent the whole year organising the event. And I was especially impressed with her persuasive abilities in cajoled all the mayors into a spot of maypole dancing, because it was a heartening sight to see a team of these dignified senior gentlemen in their regalia prancing around like eleven year olds and enjoying it quite unselfconsciously too.
In the melee, I had the pleasure to grapple with George Major, the Pearly King of Peckham (crowned in 1958), and his grandson Daniel, the Pearly Prince, sporting an exceptionally pearly hat that is a century old. George is an irrepressibly flamboyant character who taught me the Cockney salute, and then took the opportunity of his celebrity to steal cheeky kisses from ladies in the crowd, causing more than a few shrieks and blushes. As the oldest surviving member of one of the only three surviving original pearly families, he enjoys the swaggering distinction of being the senior Pearly in London, taking it as licence to behave like a mischievous schoolboy. Nearby I met Matthew (Daniels’s father) – a Pearly by marriage not birth, he revealed apologetically – who confessed he sewed the six thousand buttons on George’s jacket while watching Match of the Day.
Fortunately, the Lambeth Walk had been enacted all round the Guildhall Yard and all the photo opportunities were exhausted before the gentle rain set in. And by then it was time to form a parade to process down the road to St Mary-le-Bow for the annual Harvest Festival. A distinguished man in a red tail coat with an umbrella led the procession through the drizzle, followed by a pipe band setting an auspicious tone for the impressive spectacle of the Pearlies en masse, some in veteran cars and others leading donkeys pulling carts with their offerings for the Harvest Festival. St Mary-le-Bow is a church of special significance for Pearlies because it is the home of the famous Bow Bells that called Dick Whittington back to London from Highgate Hill, and you need to be born within earshot of these to call yourself a true Cockney.
The black and white chequerboard marble floor of the church was the perfect complement to the pearly suits, now that they were massed together in delirious effect. Everyone was happy to huddle in the warmth and dry out, and there were so many people crammed together in the church in such an array of colourful and bizarre costumes of diverse styles, that as one of the few people not in some form of fancy dress, I felt I was the odd one out. But we were as one, singing “All Things Bring and Beautiful” together. Prayers were said, speeches were given and the priest reminded us of the Pearlies’ origins among the costermongers in the poverty of nineteenth century London. We stood in reverent silence for the sake of history and then a Pearly cap was passed around in aid of the Whitechapel Mission.
Coming out of the church, there was a chill in the air. The day that began with Summery sunshine was closing with Autumnal rain. Pearlies scattered down Cheapside and through the empty City streets for another year, back to their respective corners of London. Satisfied that they had celebrated summer’s harvest, the Pearlies were going home to light fires, cook hot dinners and turn their minds towards the wintry delights of the coming season, including sewing yet more pearl buttons on their suits during Match of the Day.
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Origins Of Facadism
In today’s extract from my forthcoming book THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM I explore the origins of facadism, the bizarre architectural fad that is currently blighting the capital.
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You can also support publication by ordering a copy in advance for £15. Click here to preorder
I was always familiar with suburban houses adding porticos to enhance their status, cathedrals adorned by elaborate gothic west fronts and country houses evolving with the fortunes of successive generations through the addition of larger and grander classical façades. Some of the greatest of our cathedrals and country houses are the outcome of this approach to architecture, palimpsests in which the building’s evolution can be read by the perceptive viewer. In the past, new frontages were added to old buildings to modernise them or increase their importance. Yet in my time I have witnessed the in- verse – the removal of the former building and the retention of the façade.
The origin of façadism lies in the myth of the Potemkin Villages along the banks of the Dnieper River, built to impress Empress Catherine the Great on her visit to the Crimea in 1787 by her former lover Field Marshal Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin. Allegedly, painted façades with fires glowing behind were constructed by Potemkin when he was Governor of the region to give the Empress, sitting in her barge, the impression of Russian settlement in contested territory only recently annexed from the Ottoman Empire.
How appropriate that this story is without any convincing provenance and may contain no more reality that the façades it describes. Although this tale was likely invented by Potemkin’s political rivals, the legend of the Potemkin Villages has passed into common lore as a means to discuss notions of falsehood, whether architectural or ideological. Yet in the twentieth century, this fiction became a reality as successive authoritarian powers constructed façades to serve their nefarious purposes.
The Theresienstadt concentration camp was used by the Nazis from 1941 as a way-station to the Auschwitz death camp. When the Danish Red Cross insisted on an inspection in 1944, façades of shops, a cafe and a school were constructed as part of a beautification programme which succeeded in convincing the inspectors that nothing was amiss.
During the fifties, North Korea built Kijongdong as a model village designed to be seen from across the border in South Korea. The propaganda message was that this was an affluent settlement with a collective farm, good quality housing, schools and a hospital, but the reality was that these buildings were empty concrete shells in which automated lights went on and off.
In a strange enactment of the Potemkin Villages, when Vladimir Putin visited Suzdal in 2013, derelict buildings were covered with digitally-printed hoardings showing newly-built offices of glass and steel. Similar printed hoardings are often to be seen in London with images of the buildings behind, sheltering them from public view while the practice of façadism is underway.
You might conclude that these grim authoritarian precedents would discredit façadism as an acceptable practice entirely, yet it was legitimised by postmodernism at the end of last century. Irony and discontinuity were defining qualities of postmodern architecture, permitting architects to play games with façades and fragments of façades without any imperative to deliver an architectural unity. The ubiquitous façadism of today is the direct legacy of this movement, except now it is enacted without inverted commas and licensed as orthodox in the vocabulary of contemporary architecture.
Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin (1739-91), after Johann Baptist von Lampi the Elder
Drawing by Bedřich Fritta, a prisoner at Terezín, depicting the ‘beautification’ of the ghetto-camp undertaken by the SS before the Red Cross visit in 1944
Kijongdong, a Potemkin village built in North Korea as a model settlement designed to be seen from across the border in South Korea
Digitally-printed facade fitted to hide dereliction for Vladimir Putin’s visit to Suzdal, Russia, in 2013
An example of postmodern facadism
Imminent facadism at the former Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel
Imminent facadism in Norton Folgate where British Land are retaining only the front piers of the Victorian warehouses
Facadism proposed by Sir Norman Foster for the corner of Commercial St
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“As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture which threatens to turn the city into the backlot of an abandoned movie studio.”
The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.
As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.
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Autumn In Spitalfields
The rain is falling on Spitalfields, upon the church and the market, and on the streets, yards and gardens. Dripping off the roofs and splashing onto the pavements, filling the gutters and coursing down the pipes, it overflows the culverts and drains to restore the flow of the Black Ditch, the notorious lost river of Spitalfields that once flowed from here to Limehouse Dock. This was the watercourse that transmitted the cholera in 1832. An open sewer piped off in the nineteenth century, the Black Ditch has been co-opted into the drainage system today, but it is still running unknown beneath our feet in Spitalfields – the underground river with the bad reputation.
The shades of autumn encourage such dark thoughts, especially when the clouds hang over the City and the Indian Summer has unravelled to leave us with incessant rain bringing the first leaves down. In Spitalfields, curry touts shiver in the chill and office smokers gather in doorways, peering at the downpour. The balance of the season has shifted and sunny days have become exceptions, to be appreciated as the last vestiges of the long summer.
On such a day recently, I could not resist collecting these conkers that were lying neglected on the grass in the sunshine. And when I got home I photographed them in that same autumn sunlight to capture their perfect lustre for you. Let me confess, ever since I came to live in the city, it has always amazed me to see conkers scattered and ignored. I cannot understand why city children do not pick them up, when even as an adult I cannot resist the temptation to fill a bag. In Devon, we raced from the school gates and down the lane to be the first to collect the fresh specimens. Their glistening beauty declared their value even if, like gold, their use was limited. I did not bore holes in them with a meat skewer and string them, to fight with them as others do, because it meant spoiling their glossy perfection. Instead I filled a leather suitcase under my bed with conkers and felt secure in my wealth, until one day I opened the case to discover they had all dried out, shrivelled up and gone mouldy.
Let me admit, I feel the sense of darkness accumulating now and regret the tender loss of summer, just as I revel in the fruit of the season and the excuse to retreat to bed with a hot water bottle that autumn provides. I lie under the quilt I sewed and I feel protected like a child, though I know I am not a child. I cannot resist dark thoughts, I have a sense of dread at the winter to come and the nights closing in. Yet in the city, there is the drama of the new season escalating towards Christmas and coloured lights gleaming in wet streets. As the nights draw in, people put on the light earlier at home, creating my favourite spectacle of city life, that of the lit room viewed from the street. Every chamber becomes a lantern or a theatre to the lonely stranger on the gloomy street, glimpsing the commonplace ritual of domestic life. Even a mundane scene touches my heart when I hesitate to gaze upon it in passing, like an anonymous ghost in the shadow.
Here in Spitalfields, I have no opportunity to walk through beech woods to admire the copper leaves, instead I must do it in memory. I shall not search birch woods for chanterelles this year either, but I will seek them out to admire in the market, even if I do not buy any. Instead I shall get a box of cooking apples and look forward to eating baked apples by the fire. I am looking forward to lighting the fire. I am looking forward to Halloween. I am looking forward to Bonfire Night. I am looking forward to Christmas. And I always look forward to writing to you every day. The summer is over but there is so much to look forward to.
Artists Of East End Vernacular
Since the publication of my survey of EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists Who Painted London’s East End Streets in the 20th Century, photographer Stuart Freedman has been making portraits of those contemporary artists who – in various ways – continue this living tradition of East London topographic art.
We are proud to publish this gallery of Stuart’s pictures for the very first time today. Click on the name of each artist to see their work.
Eleanor Crow, Walthamstow
James Mackinnon, Hastings
Doreen Fletcher, Forest Gate
Jock McFadyen, London Fields
Lucinda Rogers, Bethnal Green
Dan Jones, Cable St
Nicholas Borden, Hackney
Anthony Eyton, Brixton
Marc Gooderham, Spitalfields
Ronald Morgan, Mile End
Adam Dant, Spitalfields
Peta Bridle, Spitalfields
Portraits copyright © Stuart Freedman
Click here to order a copy of EAST END END VERNACULAR for £25
Peter Sargent, Bethnal Green Butcher
Celebrating our tenth anniversary with favourite stories from the first decade
Peter Sargent
In 1983, when Peter Sargent took on his shop, there were seven other butchers in Bethnal Green but now his is the only one left. A few years ago, it looked like Peter’s might go the way of the rest, until he took the initiative of placing a discreet sign on the opposite side of the zebra crossing outside his shop. Directed at those on their way to the supermarket, it said, “Have a look in butcher’s opposite before you go in Tesco.”
This cheeky intervention raised the ire of the supermarket chain, won Peter a feature in the local paper and drew everyone’s attention to the plain truth that you get better quality meat at a better price at an independent butcher than at a supermarket.“Tesco threatened legal action,” admitted Peter, his eyes gleaming in defiance, “They came over while I was unloading my van to tell me they were serious, but I told them where to go.” Shortly afterwards, it was revealed that Tesco had been selling horsemeat and Peter left a bale of hay outside his shop. “I invited customers to drop it off if they were going across the road,” he revealed to me with a grin of triumph.
This unlikely incident proved to be a turning point for Peter’s business which has been in the ascendancy ever since. “There’s not many of my old East End customers left anymore and I was close to calling it a day,” he confided to me, “but I’ve found that the young people who are moving in, they want to buy their meat from a proper butcher’s shop.”
In celebration of this change of fortune in the local butchery trade, Photographer Colin O’Brien & I paid a visit behind the counter to bring you this report, and we each came away with sawdust on our boots and the gift of a packet of the freshly-made sausages for which Peter’s shop is renowned.
“I started as a Saturday boy in Walthamstow, when I was sixteen, in 1970,” Peter told me, “and then it became a full-time job when I left school at eighteen.” Over the next ten years, Peter worked in each of half a dozen shops belonging to the same owner, including the one in Bethnal Green, until they all shut and he lost his job. Speaking with the bank that his ex-employer was in debt to, Peter agreed to take on the shop and, when they asked if he had a down payment, Peter’s wife Jackie produced ten pounds from her handbag.
Since then, Peter has been working twelve hours a day, six days a week, at his shop in Bethnal Green – arriving around eight each morning after a daily visit to Smithfield to collect supplies. “I love it and I hate it, I can’t leave it alone,” he confessed to me, placing a hand on his chest to indicate the depth of emotion, “it’s very exciting in a Saturday when all the customers arrive, but it can be depressing when nobody comes.”
Peter is supported by fellow butcher Vic Evenett and the pair make an amiable double-act behind the counter, ensuring that an atmosphere of good-humoured anarchy prevails. “I started as a ‘humper’ at Smithfield in 1964 for six years, then I had my own shop in Bow for twenty-three years, then one in Walthamstow Market, Caledonian Rd and Roman Rd, but none of them did very very well because I had to pay too much rent,” Vic informed me, “I came here twenty years ago to help Peter out for a few days and I stayed on.”
In a recent refit, an old advert was discovered pasted onto the wall and Peter had the new tiles placed around it so that customers may see the illustration of his shop when it was a tripe dresser in 1920. Yet Peter will tell you proudly that his shop actually dates from 1860 and he became visibly excited when I began talking about the centuries-old tradition of butchery in Whitechapel. And then he and Vic began exchanging significant glances as I explained how Dick Turpin is sometimes said to have been an apprentice butcher locally.
Thankfully, East Enders old and new took notice of Peter’s sign, “Have a look in butcher’s opposite before you go in Tesco,” and he and Vic – the last butchers in Bethnal Green – will be able to continue to make an honest living without the necessity of turning highwaymen.
Peter’s sign outside Tesco
Excited customers on Saturday morning
Vic Evenett & Peter Sargent
Peter & Vic sold more than five hundred game birds last Christmas
The Butcher’s Shop, 374 Bethnal Green Rd, E2
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
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Eleanor Crow’s Fish Shops
An exhibition of Eleanor Crow’s watercolours of classic London shopfronts featuring many paintings from her book SHOPFRONTS OF LONDON, In Praise Of Small Neighbourhood Shops is at Townhouse in Fournier St from Friday 4th October. You are all invited to the opening and book launch on Thursday 3rd October from 6:00pm.
Eleanor will giving an illustrated lecture at Wanstead Tap on Wednesday 9th October, showing her pictures and telling the stories of the shops. Click here for tickets
Click here to order a signed copy of Eleanor’s book for £14.99
Victoria Fish Bar, Roman Rd
I try to eat fresh fish at least once a week and so, as I travel around the East End, I tend to navigate in relation to the fish shops. Eleanor Crow shares a similar passion, witnessed by these loving portraits of top destinations for fish, whether jellied eels, fish & chips or fresh on the slab. “These places are a reminder of our river-dependent history,” Eleanor informed me, “I love the look of London’s famous eel shops with their ornate lettering and wooden partitions. Nothing beats having a proper fishmongers’ shop or market stall in the neighbourhood – not only do the shops look good, but these guys really know about fish.”
F.Cooke, Broadway Market
The Fishery, Stoke Newington High St
George’s Place, Roman Rd
G. Kelly, Bethnal Green Rd
Mike’s Quality Fish Bar, Essex Rd
Davies & Sons, Hoe St
The Fish Plaice, Cambridge Heath Rd
Mersin Fish, Morning Lane
Dennis Chippy, Lea Bridge Rd
Kingfisher, Homerton High St
Mersin 2, Lower Clapton Rd
Golden Fish Bar, Farringdon Rd
Tubby Isaacs, formerly in Aldgate
L. Manze, Walthamstow High St
Sea Food & Fresh Fish, Chatsworth Rd
G. Kelly, Roman Rd
Steve Hatt, Essex Rd
Jonathan Norris, Victoria Park Rd
Downey Brothers, Globe Town Market Sq
Barneys Seafood, Chambers St
Billingsgate Market
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At a time of momentous change in the high street, Eleanor’s witty and fascinating personal survey champions the enduring culture of Britain’s small neighbourhood shops.
As our high streets decline into generic monotony, we cherish the independent shops and family businesses that enrich our city with their characterful frontages and distinctive typography.
Eleanor’s collection includes more than hundred of her watercolours of the capital’s bakers, cafés, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, chemists, launderettes, hardware stores, eel & pie shops, bookshops and stationers. Her pictures are accompanied by the stories of the shops, their history and their shopkeepers – stretching from Chelsea in the west to Bethnal Green and Walthamstow in the east.
