Spitalfields Life

Celebrating our tenth anniversary with  favourite stories from the first decade

I set out early from Spitalfields, crossing the freshly fallen snow in Weavers’ Fields and walking due East until I came to the premises of Arber & Co Ltd at 459 Roman Rd. Once I rang the bell, Gary Arber appeared from the warren of boxes inside, explaining that he did not have much time because he had to do his accounts. So, without delay, I took the photo above and Gary told to me that his grandfather Walter Francis Arber first opened the shop in 1897, as a printer and stationer that also sold toys. The business was continued by Gary’s father who was also called Walter Francis Arber and it is this name that remains on the stationery today.

“I’m here under duress because I’m an airman,” said Gary, explaining that he took over the business, sacrificing his career as a pilot flying Lincoln Bombers when his father died, because his mother relied upon the income of the printing works. “I left the beautiful Air Force forever in 1954,” he revealed wistfully. It is not hard to envisage Gary as a handsome flying ace, he has that charismatically nonchalant professionalism. Gary retains the Air Force moustache over half a century later, so you only have to imagine a flight suit in place of the overall to complete the picture. There is no doubt Gary saw life before he swapped the flight suit for an overall and vanished into the print shop. He was there at Christmas Island in 1946 to witness one of the first nuclear tests, though thankfully Gary was not one of those pilots who flew through the dust cloud to collect samples. “We were guests of the day, watching from a boat, we had bits of dark glass and they told us to shut our eyes when the countdown reached two and open our eyes to look through the glass when it reached minus five – but you saw it through your eyelids. Then you felt the shock, the turbulence and the heat. It was great fun.” Mercifully, Gary appeared to have suffered no ill-effects, still driving daily from his home in Romford.

In those days, Gary’s shop became something of a magnet for artists who loved his old-school letterpress printing but, as a sole operator, Gary only undertook these jobs “under pressure.” “The quality is rubbish,” he said, grabbing a pad of taxi receipts and turning one over to reveal the impress of the type, embossed into the paper – the only way he could get a clear print from the worn type then. “It should be smooth, like a baby’s bottom,” he sighed, running a single finger across the reverse of the page before tossing it back onto the pile. I was concerned upon Gary’s behalf until he disarmed me, “I don’t make any money, I’m just pottering about and enjoying myself!” he confided gleefully. Owning his premises, Gary enjoyed complete security and the freedom to carry on in his own sweet way.

I heard a rumour that the Suffragettes’ handbills were printed there and Gary confirmed this. “My grandmother, Emily Arber, was a friend of Mrs Pankhurst and she wouldn’t let my grandfather charge for the printing. A ferocious woman, she ruled everyone – the women, my grandmother and aunt, ran the toys’ side of the business.” And although the toys side was wrapped up long ago when Gary’s aunt (also called Emily) died, the signs remained everywhere. Lifting your eyes above the suspended fluorescents, you discovered beautifully coloured posters produced by toy manufacturers pasted to the ceiling. “If I removed those the roof would probably collapse!” quipped Gary with a grin. Then, indicating the glass-fronted cases that were used to display dolls, “All the shopfittings are a hundred years old, nothing’s been touched.” he said proudly, and pointed to an enigmatic line with scruffy ends of string hanging down, each carrying more dust than you would have thought possible, “Those bits of string had board games hanging from them once.”

Moving a stack of boxes to one side, Gary uncovered some printing samples for customers to select their preferred options. What a selection!  There was a ration card from a butcher round the corner, a dance ticket for December 30th 1939 at Wilmot St School, Bethnal Green, and one for an ATS Social with the helpful text “You will be informed in the event of an air raid,” just in case you got seduced by Glenn Miller and do not hear the siren. There was a crazy humour about these things being there. I turned to confront an advert for a Chopper bicycle portraying a winsome lady with big hair, exhorting me to “Be a trendy shopper.” I turned back to Gary, “This is a shop not a museum,” he said sternly. You could have fooled me.

Aware that I was keeping Gary from his chores, I was on the brink of taking my leave, when Gary confessed that he was no longer in the mood for doing accounts. Instead he took me down to the cellar where six printers worked once. “This is where it used to happen,” he announced with bathos, as we descended the wooden staircase into a subterranean space where six oily black beasts of printing presses crouched, artfully camouflaged beneath a morass of waste paper, old boxes and packets with the occasional antique tin toy, left over from stock, to complete the mix. Here was a printing shop from a century ago, an untidy time capsule – where the twentieth century passed through like a furious whirlwind, demanding printing for the Suffragettes and printing for the Government through two World Wars, and whisking Gary away to Christmas Island to witness a nuclear explosion. And this what was what was left. I was completely overawed at the spectacle, as Gary began removing boxes to reveal more of the machines, enthusiastically explaining their different qualities, capabilities and operating systems. He pointed out the two that were used for the Suffragettes’ handbills and I stood in a moment of silent reverence to register the historical significance of these old hulks, a Wharfdale and a Golding Jobber.

Gary made a beeline for the Heidelberg, the only one that still worked, and began tinkering with the type that he used to print the taxi receipt I saw earlier. This was the heart of it all. I joined him and, standing together in the quiet, we both became absorbed by the magic of the press. Gary was explaining the technical names for the parts of the printer’s pie, when an unexpected wave of emotion overcame me there in this gloomy cellar, on that cold morning in February, up to my ankles in rubbish surrounded by historic printing presses.

I doubt very much that Gary did his accounts that day, but Gary is a sociable man with a generous spirit – even if he strikes an unconvincingly gruff posture occasionally – and if you chose to pay a visit yourself, then it is highly possible that you will have learnt – as I did – about the Roman sarcophagus that was discovered in the Roman Rd, or the woman who was the inspiration for the character of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, or Gary’s adventures on steam trains in India, or when Gary was invited to the National Physics Laboratory in the fifties see an early computer, as big as four houses, that could play chess.

One word of caution, “Printers are either highly religious or wicked,” declared Gary, adding “- and I don’t go to church!” with melodramatic irony. So if you decided to go round, you had to be sure to pay Gary due respect by buying something, even if it was only a modest thing. You needed to bear in mind, as you purchased your box of paperclips, that Gary was there under duress – he would rather be flying Lincoln Bombers – and then, once this subterfuge was achieved, it was appropriate to widen the nature of discourse.

This picture shows the garden at the rear of Arber’s printing works in the Roman Rd photographed in 1930. I was going to photograph the same view today but, once I saw it for myself, I decided that you would rather not know.

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Gary Arber at Home

Celebrating our tenth anniversary with a week of favourite posts from the first decade

The charismatic Abdul Mukthadir – widely known as Muktha – was a born storyteller, blessed with a natural eloquence. As I quickly discovered when I sat down with him in the brief stillness of the afternoon, while the last diners emptied out of Herb & Spice Indian Restaurant in Whites Row. The businessmen were still finishing off their curry in the other half of the restaurant whilst in a quiet corner Muktha produced a handful of old photographs and discreetly spread them out on the table to begin. Our only interruption was a request for the bill and – once it had been settled – in the silence of the empty restaurant, Muktha’s story took flight.

“I came to Spitalfields in 1975 when I was ten years old. My father got married one day when he went back home to Bangladesh, it was an arranged marriage. At the time I was born, he was working in this country. He didn’t see me until two years later when he came back again and stayed for three months. I have another two sisters, and a brother born here.

My father missed his family, so once he got his British citizenship and he had the right to stay in this country, he made a declaration to bring us over and my mother had a big interview at the British consul in Dhaka. When we came we had nowhere to stay, my father shared a room with three others in Wentworth St. The other gentlemen moved into the sitting room and gave one room for us all to live there. After three weeks my father went to the GLC office in Whitechapel (where we used to go to pay the rent). They gave us a one bedroom flat in the same street without a bathroom and a loo in the passageway shared by two households, for £1.50 a week. My father earned £55 as a presser in the tailoring industry and supporting a family on it was really difficult. On Saturday, he gave us each 10p and we used to go to the Goulston St Public Baths. They gave you a towel, a bar of soap and a bottle of moisturiser and you could change the bath water was often as you liked. Six hundred people used to line up. It was very embarrassing for the Asian ladies, so one day my mother called all the ladies in the building into our flat. She said, “We can buy a tin tub so we can bath ourselves at home.” Everyone contributed, and they bought a long tin bath and took it in turns. But there was no hot water, so they worked out a rota, eight ladies put their kettles on at the same time. They put the bath up on the flat roof, and sent the smallest boys round to collect all the kettles and  fill the bath. Only the women could do this.

We were not allowed to play outside alone, because of the racist movement. The skinheads used to prowl around  the area. We could not go out to play football in the Goulston St playground until after the English boys had gone home, but even then we had to watch out for their return – because anyone might come and snatch our ball or beat us up.

One day, my mum came out swearing at them in Bengali, “Leave my boy alone! Let them play!” We had that sort of problem every week, and for us that was the only playground we had. Although we were not allowed out after dark, we used to go to Evening Classes in Bengali on Saturday and Arabic on Sunday. At that time, there was a man who went round with a sack and if he found anyone, he would capture them and ask for a ransom. There were one or two incidents. One day he pounced upon our neighbour’s daughter as she was coming from Arabic. He caught her and tried to put her in the sack and carry her away. She was screaming and we were all at home, everyone came outside and I saw. We saw this three or four times. Between the English kids and the man following us to rape or take us, fourteen was very tough. My people were scared in those days. At that time you couldn’t even go out, it wasn’t safe.

We had to move because they were expanding the Petticoat Lane Market, it was really famous then. So the GLC offered my dad a flat in Limehouse but my father thought it wasn’t safe because there were no other Bangladeshis. Then he refused Mile End, even worse for a Bangladeshi family. Finally, he was offered a flat in Christian St off Commercial Rd. It had four bedrooms and a bathroom, and he fell in love with it. This was in 1979, after the six of us had lived in a one bedroom flat for four years. He was over the moon. I can remember the day we moved. He moved all the furniture in an estate car in five or six trips.

That was how we lived in England in those days. It was tough but it was fun and everyone was more sincere, people spoke to each other. No-one worked on Saturday and everyone used to invite each other round, saying “Come to my home next Saturday, my wife will cook!”

I have hundreds of stories because this is my playground. I belong here, I have so many memories, where I played and where I practised football. If I see a mess in this street, I clear it up because it matters to me. I am a poor man, if I was a millionaire I would do something here  – but I am just a waiter, working to pay my mortgage.”

The first of Muktha’s family came to Britain in the nineteen forties to work in the Yorkshire cotton mills and he married an English woman, a sailor lured by tales of Tower Bridge, the miraculous bridge that rose up to let the ships pass through. And when he returned to East Pakistan, crowds followed him shouting, “He comes from England. Wow!” They nicknamed him “Ekush Pound” because he earned £21 a week as a foreman at a cotton mill in Keighley, and at the request of the mill owner he sponsored eight men to return with him. Thus Muktha’s father and uncle came to Britain, setting in train the sequence of events that led to Muktha working in Herb & Spice restaurant in Spitalfields, serving curry to businessmen.

A waiter since the age of fifteen, Muktha was distinguished by a brightness of spirit that made him a popular figure among regular customers, who all hoped that he might join their table at the end of service and regale them with his open-hearted stories. He became enraptured to speak of Spitalfields, because the emotional intensity of his childhood experiences here bound him to this place forever, it was his spiritual home.

Abdul Mukthadir died in 2013 and Herb & Spice is now the Gunpowder restaurant.

Muktha with his beloved teacher Miss Dixon, “She was like a mother to me.”

Muktha (centre) with his class at the Canon Barnett School in Commercial Road, 1976

Muktha at the Goulston St playground, with his friend Sukure who became a pop singer and one of the judges of the Bangladeshi X Factor

Muktha recalls that the winter of 1979 brought thirteen weeks of snow. (He stands to the left of the tree)

Three friends sitting in the rose garden in Christian St – from left Akthar, Hussein and Mukthar

On a day trip to France from the Montifiore School, Vallance Rd in 1980. (Mukthar is in the pale jacket)

Abdul Mukhtadir in Wentworth St – the window of the top flat on the corner was where Muktha first looked out and saw white people when he arrived as a ten year old in 1975

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A Walk With Abdul Mukhthadir

Celebrating our tenth anniversary with  favourite posts from the first decade

This gracious lady with the keen grey eyes is Joan Rose, standing in the door way of Leila’s Shop, 15 Calvert Avenue, on the spot where her father was photographed in 1902, aged six.

The photograph below was believed to have been taken one Sunday around the time Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra came to open the Boundary Estate. After restaging the photograph in December 2010 with the assistance of a class from Virginia Rd School, I was eager to meet Joan and learn something of her experience as a child growing up in Arnold Circus early in the last century.

Joan (unmarried name Raymond) told me that her father Alfred was born in 1896 and is approximately six years old in the picture. The woman beside him in the doorway is Phoebe Raymond his mother, Joan’s grandmother, and the man on the left is his father, Joan’s grandfather Albert Alfred Raymond (known as Alf), the first proprietor of the newly built shop. They all lived in the flat up above and you can see their songbird in the cage, a cock linnet. Phoebe has her smart apron with frills and everyone is wearing their Sunday best – remarkably for the time, everyone has good quality boots.

Joan believes her family are of French Huguenot origin and the original surname was Raymond de Foir, which means the people you see in the old photograph are probably descended from the Huguenot immigrants that came here in the eighteenth century.

What touched me most was to learn from Joan that Alfred her father – pictured eternally six years old in his Sunday best on the threshold of his father’s shop – went off to fight in the First World War and, aged twenty-two, was there at the battle of the Somme where so many died, but returned to run the shop in Calvert Avenue carrying on his father’s business in the same premises until his death in 1966.

Joan is a remarkably spirited person with an exceptional recall for names and places throughout her long life. An educated woman and former teacher, she can place anyone within London by their accent. Although unsentimental about the past, she talks affectionately about her happy childhood here in Arnold Circus. In 1951 she left to get married and live in Beacontree, but the emotional memory of her time in Shoreditch remains vivid to her. “I am here” she said to me when I met her for tea at Leila’s Cafe and I understood what she meant, even if today she lives on the other side of London.

When she was growing up in the nineteen thirties, Joan told me, she helped her grandfather in the shop and he called her “tangerine” because she always stole tangerines, even though she could have as many as she wanted. “I used to sit on his lap in the corner of the shop and he told me all these stories about the neighbourhood and I thought they were all nonsense – but later I found they were all true. He had a set of Shakespeare in the flat up above the shop and he said, “There’s a plaque to Shakespeare in St Leonard’s Shoreditch.” After he died, I found the plaque and I cried because I had never believed him.”

Joan was very close to her grandfather Albert who taught her the exact science of stacking fruit and vegetables in tall pyramids (stalks up for apples, pears, plums and tomatoes, eyes up for oranges) and when he went to Spitalfields Market in the dawn to buy new stock, he took her with him and they had breakfast together at one of the pubs that opened in the early morning. He kept a pony and trap in the yard at the back of the shop and took Joan for rides around Arnold Circus, that was when she learnt that eight times round the bandstand was a mile.

Born in 1926 as the youngest of four daughters, Lily, Vera and Doris being the names of her sisters, Joan’s family lived in a series of different flats in the Boundary Estate as she was growing up, moving at one point from 20 Shiplake Buildings (eighteen shillings and sixpence a week) to 10 Laleham Buildings (twelve shillings and sixpence a week) to save money.

“Although we had a shop here, my mother went out working as a furrier’s machinist. We never realised that things were hard for our parents. My mother made our clothes and Mr Feldman made our winter coats. It was a system of favours, you deal off me, I’ll deal off you. People were poor but proud, they ate the cheapest food, monkfish or a pig’s head as a Sunday roast. My father hated Christmas because he saw people buy the best of everything and toys for their children, when they could barely afford a loaf of bread, and he knew they would end up in debt, running round to the pawnbrokers in Boundary Passage.”

Joan never felt that she was disadvantaged by her origins until she and her sisters went up to the West End to dances and met boys who asked where they came from. “If you said you were from Shoreditch, that was the last you saw of them,” Joan admitted to me, “We used to say we were from Arnold Circus because they didn’t know where it was.” Occasionally, charabancs of out-of-towners would slow down outside Raymond’s grocers’ shop and the driver would announce to the passengers “And these are the slums,” much to her grandfather’s ire.

Joan’s father was disappointed that he never had a son to carry on the business in his family name but he changed his opinion when World War II came along, declaring he was grateful to have four daughters and not to have a son to send to war. There was a hidden irony to this statement, because he had an illegitimate son, Terry Coughlan, who turned up in the shop once to buy an apple when Joan was serving and her father was out. In a youthful impulse and, to Joan’s eternal regret, she said to her father when he returned, “Your son was here!” Alfred went into the back of the shop, talked with her mother, then came out and said “I spoke to the boy.” That was the last that was ever said of it and Joan never met her younger brother again. Now Joan would like to find him, he will be seventy years old if he lives.

Joan describes the burning of London in 1940, when the warden knocked on all the doors in the Boundary Estate, telling the residents to take refuge in the crypt of St Leonard’s Shoreditch. She was not scared at all until she got down into the crypt and saw the priest in his black robes walking among the hundreds of silent people sitting in the gloom, it was this eerie image that filled her with fear. Joan remembers the wartime shortage of onions and the queue that formed outside the shop stretching all the way round Arnold Circus to Virginia Rd when they came into stock.

Although her grandfather refused to leave during the London Blitz, Joan’s father took the family to Euston and made the spontaneous choice to buy tickets to Blackpool where he quickly found an empty shop to open up as a greengrocer, and they lived there until the war ended. As they left Euston, the sisters sat crying on the train and the other passengers thought a member of their family had been killed in the bombing, when in fact the four girls were weeping for their wire-haired terrier, Ruff, that had to be put down on the morning they left London.

We leave Joan in that railway carriage travelling North, knowing that she will come back to London, get married, have children, become a teacher, have grandchildren, have great-grandchildren and live into the new millenium to return to Arnold Circus and discover that the greengrocers opened by her grandfather in 1900 has reopened again and life goes on and on.

When she speaks, telling her stories, Joan fingers the broad gold ring made from her grandmother Phoebe and mother Lily’s wedding rings. Once, it had the initials JR, standing for Joan’s maiden name Joan Raymond, and it was on her husband’s finger but now that he has gone and the initials have been worn away, Joan wears it as a simple gold band to contain all the memories that she carries of her family and of this place. To many of us born later, even familiar history can appear as unlikely fiction, but meeting someone with Joan’s generosity of spirit, eloquence and grace brings the big events of the last century vividly alive as reality. Joan does not bear grievances or carry complaints, she has not been worn down or become in the least cynical by her life, she is an inspiration to us all.

15 Calvert Avenue, 1902

15 Calvert Avenue, 2010

Alfred was born in 1896 and is approximately six years old in the picture, beside him in the doorway is Phoebe Raymond, his mother

Joan Rose 2010

Alf & Phoebe Raymond, Joan’s grandparents outside their shop in 1900

Joan Rose presided over the cutting of  the cake at the centenary of the Arnold Circus bandstand

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Joan Rose at Gardners Market Sundriesmen

LAST CHANCE! IN CELEBRATION OF TEN YEARS OF SPITALFIELDS LIFE, WE ARE OFFERING READERS 50% DISCOUNT ON ALL TITLES IN OUR ONLINE BOOKSHOP UNTIL MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. SIMPLY ENTER DISCOUNT CODE ‘SPITALFIELDS’ AT CHECKOUT.

Celebrating our tenth anniversary with  favourite stories from the first decade

Paul Gardner, The Paper Bag Baron of Spitalfields

I always delight to drop into the premises of my friend Paul Gardner – the paper bag seller of Gardners Market Sundriesman, 149 Commercial St – to observe the constant parade of long-standing customers who pass through, creating the life of this distinctive business. It was early one morning, when I called round at six-thirty – opening time – to enjoy a quiet chat before the rush, that Paul explained to me his great-grandfather James Gardner began trading here in this building as a Scalemaker when it was built in 1870 – which means Paul is a fourth generation Market Sundriesman and makes Gardners the longest established family business in Spitalfields.

Paul still has his great-grandfather’s accounts from the end of the nineteenth century, when as Scalemakers they serviced the scales for all the traders in the fruit and vegetable market on a regular basis. Turning the pages and scanning the lines of James’ fine copperplate handwriting your eye alights upon the names, Isaac, Isaiah and Ezekiel, indicative of the Jewish population that once defined the identity of Spitalfields. There is an ancient block of wood with three scoops carved out that are smoothed with wear, it has been in use since the days of Paul’s great-grandfather. Then his son Bertie (Paul’s grandfather) used it, then Bertie’s son Roy (Paul’s father) used it and Paul still keeps his cash in it today. As the twentieth century wore on, each of the successive Mr Gardners found that customers began to expect to buy their produce in a paper bag (a trend which is now reversed) and so the trade of dealing in bags supplanted the supply of scales entirely over four generations.

Turn your back on the traffic rattling down Commercial St and stand for a moment to contemplate the dignified Brunswick green frontage of Gardners Market Sundriesman. An old glass signs reads “Paper & Polythene Bag Merchant” and, sure enough, a variety of different coloured bags are festooned on strings like bunting, below them are some scales hinting at the origins of the business and then your attention is distracted by a mysterious wooden sieve, a memento of Paul’s grandfather. Enter the shop to be confronted by piles of bags of every variety in packets stacked up on either side and leaving barely any room to stand. Only two routes are possible, straight ahead leading into the dark recesses where the stacks grow taller and closer together in the gloom or turn right to the makeshift counter, improvised from an old counter-top supported upon yet more packets of bags. Beneath the fluorescent glow, the dust of ages is settling upon everything. You think you have entered a storeroom, but you are wrong because you neglected to notice Paul sitting at the counter in a cosy corner, partly concealed by a stack of bags. You turn to greet him and a vista appears with a colourful display of bags and tags and tapes and those old green-grocers’ signs that say “Today’s price 2/8” and “Morning Gathered” – which creates a pleasant backdrop to the figure of Paul Gardner as he stands to greet you with a genial “Hello!”

With his wavy grey locks, gentle face, sociable manner and innate decency,  Paul could have stepped from another age and it is a joy to meet someone who has successfully resisted the relentless imperative to haste and efficiency at any cost, that tyrannises our age and threatens to enslave us all. When you enter the shop, you enter Paul’s world and you discover it is a better place than the one outside.

Paul was thirteen when his father Roy died unexpectedly in 1968, creating a brief inter-regnum when his mother took over for four years until he came of age. “I came here the first day after I left school at seventeen,” said Paul, “It was what I wanted to do. After the first year, my mother stopped coming, though my nan used to live above the shop then. I haven’t had a day off since 1972. I don’t make much money, I will never become a millionaire. To be honest, I try to sell things as cheap as I can while others try to sell them as expensive as they can. I do it because I have done it all my life. I do it because it is like a family heirloom.”

Paul Gardner’s customers are the stallholders and small businessmen and women of East London, many of whom have been coming for more than twenty years, especially loyal are the Ghanaian and Nigerian people who prefer to trade with a family business. Paul will sell small numbers of bags while other suppliers only deal in bulk, and he offers the same price per bag for ten as for a hundred. Even then, most of his customers expect to negotiate the price down, unable to resist their innate natures as traders. Paul explained to me that some have such small turnovers they can only afford to buy ten carrier bags at a time.

In his endeavours, Paul supports and nurtures an enormous network of tiny businesses that are a key part of the economy of our city. Many have grown and come back with bigger and bigger orders, selling their products to supermarkets, while others simply sustain themselves, like the Nigerian woman who has a stall in Brixton market and has been coming regularly on the bus for twenty-three years to buy her paper bags here. “I try to do favours for people,” says Paul and, in spontaneous confirmation of this, a customer rings with the joyous news that they have finally scraped enough money together to pay their account for the last seven years. Sharing in the moment of triumph, Paul laughs down the phone, “What happened, did you win the lottery or something?”

Paul has the greatest respect for his customers and they hold him in affection too. In fact, Paul’s approach could serve as a model if we wish to move forward from the ugliness of the current business ethos. Paul only wants to make enough to live and builds mutually supportive relationships with his customers over the longterm based upon trust. His is a more equitable version of capitalism tempered by mutual respect, anchored in a belief in the essential goodness rather than the essential greediness of people. As a fourth generation trader, Paul has no business plan, he is guided by his beliefs about people and how he wants to live in the world. His integrity and self-respect are his most precious possessions. “I have never advertised,” says Paul, “All my customers come because they have been recommended by friends who are already my customers.”

However, after Gardners survived two World Wars and the closure of the market, there is now a new threat in the form of rent increases demanded by greedy agents on commission, who can easily exploit the situation when chain stores can pay high rents which they do not need to match with turnover. “I earn two hundred and fifty pounds a week,” reveals Paul with frank humility, “If I earned five hundred pounds a week, I could give an extra two hundred and fifty towards the rent but at two hundred and fifty pounds a week, the cupboard is bare.”

Ruminating upon the problem, “They’ve dollied-up the place round here!” says Paul quietly, in an eloquently caustic verdict upon this current situation in which his venerable family business finds itself now, after a hundred and forty years, in a fashionable shopping district with a landlord seeking to maximize profits.

Gardners Market Sundriesmen embodies the spirit of Spitalfields and no-one can truly say they have been here unless they have shaken the hand of Paul Gardner. Yet more important than the history of his business, is the political philosophy that has evolved over four generations of experience. It is the sum of what has been learnt. In all his many transactions, Paul unselfconsciously espouses a practical step-by-step approach towards a more sustainable mode of society. Who would have expected that the oldest traders in Spitalfields might also turn out to be the model of an ethical business pointing the way to the future?

Paul’s grandfather Bertie Gardner, standing with Paul’s father Roy Gardner as child outside the shop around 1930

Roy Gardner, now a grown man, standing outside the shop after World War II, around 1947

Gardners Market Sundriesmen, 149, Commercial St, Spitalfields, E1

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At Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen

Paul Gardner, Paper Bag Baron

Roy Gardner’s Sales Tickets

Paul Gardner’s Collection

Joan Rose at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen

James Brown at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen

Vigil at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen

Christmas at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen

IN CELEBRATION OF TEN YEARS OF SPITALFIELDS LIFE, WE ARE OFFERING READERS 50% DISCOUNT ON ALL TITLES IN OUR ONLINE BOOKSHOP UNTIL MIDNIGHT ON MONDAY. SIMPLY ENTER DISCOUNT CODE ‘SPITALFIELDS’ AT CHECKOUT.