How Old Is The Bethnal Green Mulberry?
Graphic by Paul Bommer
In the week Tower Hamlets Strategic Development Committee meet to decide whether or not to grant developer Crest Nicholson’s request to dig up the historic Bethnal Green Mulberry for a block of luxury flats, I publish this edited transcript of the Bethnal Green Mulberry Lecture originally delivered by Julian Forbes Laird at the Garden Museum in Lambeth in the spring.
Julian Forbes Laird of Forbes Laird Arborcultural Consultancy is an expert witness in matters arborcultural and editor of the British Standard in tree conservation. He gave evidence in the High Court last year when the original permission to dig up the Bethnal Green Mulberry, granted by former Tower Hamlets tree officer Edward Buckton, was quashed.
Since this lecture was delivered in March, the Bethnal Green Mulberry was recategorised as a ‘Veteran Tree’ which gives it extra protection in planning law on top of the original Tree Protection Order. Additionally, National Planning Policy Framework was changed in July to give more protection to Ancient & Veteran Trees.
Previously, Ancient & Veteran Trees could be sacrificed if the ‘benefits of the development in that location clearly outweigh the loss’ but these criteria are no longer relevant. Under the new guidelines, Ancient & Veteran Trees can only be removed for ‘exceptional reasons.’
Does Crest Nicholson’s bog-standard block of luxury flats constitute ‘exceptional reasons’ ? I think not.
On Friday, I will publish the outcome of the council meeting and the fate of the Bethnal Green Mulberry. In the meantime, the petition to SAVE THE BETHNAL GREEN MULBERRY has passed 10,000 signatures.
Click here to sign the petition if you have not yet done so.
Nurses dance round the ancient Bethnal Green Mulberry in the grounds of the London Chest Hospital, 1944 (Courtesy of the Royal London Hospital Archives)
THE BETHNAL GREEN MULBERRY LECTURE
Delivered by Julian Forbes Laird
This lecture is in four parts. I am going to begin by looking briefly at the planning context. Then I will consider how old people think the Bethnal Green Mulberry is, before presenting the available evidence for dating it and offering a little bit of ancient history at the end.
1. THE PLANNING CONTEXT
Is it a Veteran Tree? And there are two definitions that might concern us. The most important is that from the National Planning Policy Framework. It references “trees which have great age, size or condition and potentially exceptional value for wildlife in the landscape or culturally.” The British Standard for trees in relation to design, demolition and construction – for which I was a technical editor – has another definition,“trees that by a recognised criteria show features of biological, cultural or aesthetic value.”
The bible on this subject is by Dr Helen Read. She is the Ecologist for the Corporation of London and looks after number of very old collections of trees and individual trees as part of her work. Natural England published her book ‘Veteran Trees: A Guide to Good Management,’ in which she includes, ‘How to spot your Veteran Tree.’ The features she identifies are loose bark, dead wood, holes in branches and holes for wildlife. She also draws attention to trees which are large for their species, trees which have an old look, a pollard form which indicates historic management, and have known cultural or historic value. That the concept of a Veteran Tree promoted by Natural England.
So I understand that Crest Nicholson’s tree advisor does not believe that the Bethnal Green Mulberry is a Veteran Tree, and it is a fair enough to ask whether this person is right. But I think that would be no. Self-evidently, the Bethnal Green Mulberry ticks so many of the boxes that define a Veteran Tree that I think it is outside the range of professional opinion to say otherwise.
This has implications for the planning application. The Bethnal Green Mulberry is a Veteran and the proposal to relocate it is unlikely to succeed. The tree will either fall apart or die, or possibly both.
The proposals for development will be assessed under paragraph 118.5 of the National Planning Policy Framework which says: “planning permission should be refused for development resulting in the loss of Veteran Trees unless the need for and benefits of the development in that location clearly outweigh the loss.”
2. HOW OLD IS THE BETHNAL GREEN MULBERRY?
Probably not as old as Stonehenge. Roman? No. Vikings? No. Tudor? It has been suggested that it is a Tudor tree. Bishop Bonner was a Tudor bishop of London, and the question is, “Is it his tree?” Certainly, many people believe it to be so. Conversely, is it a tree of about one hundred and fifty years old contemporary with the building of the London Chest Hospital? The latter two are the most likely suggestions.
In Crest Nicholson’s case, in the first planning application they provided a site investigation report. This identified the soil type to be plastic clay. Plastic clay is a type of soil. Unfortunately, it was read slightly differently by the archaeologists. Instead of reading plastic clay with glass and concrete inclusions it was clay with plastic, glass and concrete inclusions. The archaeologists decided this meant the soil was modern and therefore the tree sitting in the soil had to be modern as well. Which is credible if it had said plastic inclusions but it did not. It said plastic clay.
So the soil has fragments of glass and concrete and does that mean it is modern?Consider the Pantheon in Rome, it was built in AD125 and is still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. The Romans knew how to make concrete. So glass and concrete in soil do not date that soil.
3. THE EVIDENCE FOR DATING THE BETHNAL GREEN MULBERRY
We are going to look now at the available evidence for dating the Bethnal Green Mulberry.
We are going to start by comparing the morphology of the Bethnal Green Mulberry in two photographs published below, one from the nineteen-thirties and the other from three years ago. In the photo from the thirties hospital fundraising pamphlet, you can see the stem of the tree goes off at an angle. Very clearly, there should have been another bit and that has gone.
If you look at the photo of the tree as it stands today, you will see precisely the same angle change. The missing branch was gone by 1930. This has a number of important implications. Firstly, the Bethnal Green Mulberry is patently much older than seventy-five years. Secondly, the failure of the crown only happens in mulberry trees after they are about one-hundred-and-twenty-years old. I have never seen a younger mulberry collapse. So when the Bethnal Green Mulberry suffered a crown failure prior to 1930, at the time of its failure it would be at least one hundred and twenty years years old.
Here we come to the famous inkwell preserved in the archive at the Royal London Hospital. A brass plaque notes that the inkwell’s base was cut in 1911 out of a broken bough from what was reputed to be Bonner’s Mulberry. If we take 1911 as the date when the bough fell off – although it could be before that – and you wind back one-hundred-and-twenty years, you get to around 1800. This is fifty years before the London Chest Hospital was built. In order to arrive at a planning-relevant judgement for the age of the Bethnal Green Mulberry, we need to understand how old it probably is. The youngest probable age of the Bethnal Green Mulberry is around 1800.
The other point to consider is that a tree planted as a sapling in the eighteen-fifties when the hospital was built was very unlikely to have sufficient stature to have had the legend of Bonner’s Mulberry attached to it. That legend would only be attached to the Bethnal Green Mulberry because it predated the hospital. So we have got the tree predating the Chest Hospital. When the hospital was built, the legend was already in place.
The Forestry Commission dating method produced by the Forestry Commission’s Research Dendrologist is a complicated series of calculations. Applying this method to the tree is fraught with difficulty because at the moment the tree only has about 680mm stem diameter. In the photographs, you can see there is quite a lot of the stem missing. So any measurement you make of the stem today is going to be a false record as to the maximum girth and therefore the likely age of the tree. At its peak, I estimate that the tree would probably have been about 800mm at its peak.
The Forestry Commission dating method also requires allowance be made for senescence. As trees age or suffer structural failures, they grow much more slowly. The minimum possible rate of growth of a tree is 0.5mm a year in its stem. A tree can only put on a fraction of growth over ten years and barely change its stem measurement.
If you start from what I believe to be a correct ballpark of 800mm stem diameter and you then allow that the Bethnal Green Mulberry has lost between fifty to one hundred years’ growth, this gives an estimate of three-hundred-and-fifty to four hundred years old for its age. This raises an interesting question – If it is too old to be planted by Bishop Bonner, where did the Bethnal Green Mulberry come from?
The Mulberry not a native British species and to propagate Mulberries in this country requires cuttings. You cannot grow them from seed. What this means is that the Mulberry which stands before us today could be a cutting of Bonner’s tree, preserving a cultural link.
There are three principal eras of introduction for Mulberries into this country. First, the Romans, secondly during Tudor times and thirdly King James’ introductions in the seventeenth century. If our tree is Bonner’s Mulberry, dating from the sixteenth century, it necessarily predates the King James’ introductions, so we can cross out number three. Therefore the chances are that it was a Tudor introduction, that is the most likely conclusion.
Yet there is another possibility which is a lot more fun, so now we are now going to delve into ancient history.
4. A HISTORY LESSON
Even before the Romans arrived, there were well established trade links between London and Colchester. The major obstacle to the movement of goods and services at the London end was the River Lea. In winter, the road heading out of London towards Colchester was often barred by the spreading Lea and the marshes of Hackney and Bow. The road immediately south of the former London Chest Hospital site is Old Ford Road which is the route to the old ford over the River Lea. In pre-Roman Britain, this would have been a necessary and important river crossing between the two trading centres.
When the Romans invaded Britain in AD43, they had to deal with the increasingly belligerent Catuvellauni who they had their tribal base in Colchester. The route of the invading army which came up from Kent into London would have taken them over the old fords of the Lea on their way to lay siege to Colchester. That was the only road. Later the Romans made a new road, still called Roman Road today, possibly because the old road was prone to flooding.
The Romans believed that Mulberries had beneficial effects on the gastro-intestinal system and a fair amount of of their writing about medical plant use has survived, recording this benefit. Mulberries were imported not simply because they thought they were pretty, they liked the shade or they liked the taste, but because they believed it was actually good for their troops to have it. They planted Mulberries at their military bases.
Let us consider the site of the former London Chest Hospital in Roman times.
It occupies relatively high ground compared to the marshes to the east, so it is a site which remained dry all year round. I would suggest that this was why it was subsequently occupied by the Bishop of London’s palaces. Higher ground permits a better view, high enough to get a good view of Old Ford Road around a hundred metres away. So you have a dry site with a good view of traffic on the road which makes it an obvious location for a Roman garrison outpost. The Illustrated London News recorded Roman tiles and bricks being discovered during the demolition of the Bishop’s Palace and the construction of the London Chest Hospital
Early in the fourth century, under Constantine the Great, the Roman Empire converted to Christianity which reached our shores around the same time. The Romans left Britain in 410AD but remains of their culture survived at least years after that. By the sixth century, the site of the former London Chest Hospital was owned by the early church. The name of ‘Bishopsgate’ in the London Wall reveals this as the portal by which the early bishops of London travelled to and from their seat at Bishop’s Hall.
The occupants inherited whatever the Romans left behind and the monks who attended the bishops were well known as herbalists. They read Latin texts about the medicinal uses of plants. This is why Mulberries are found in the physic gardens of monasteries and abbeys, because of their medicinal use. So if the Romans had planted Mulberries at the former London Chest Hospital site, they could have survived – their longevity is such – to span the gap between when the Romans left and the occupancy by the monks of the early church.
If you study the engraving of Bonner scourging a heretic from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, there is a tree in the background, the Bethnal Green Mulberry of legend perhaps. This engraving was made in 1563, contemporaneous with the events it records. So there is no reason to doubt that Bishop Bonner had a Mulberry in his garden at the former London Chest Hospital site. The engraving shows a tree that could easily be a Mulberry. It could be something else but what reason is there to doubt it? If someone were to make up that detail, it could be an oak tree or a lime tree.
So where did Bonner’s Mulberry come from? Was it a Tudor import or was it propagated from the scion of Roman stock, discovered in a weeded-over orchard by the first monks who inherited the site from the Romans? If the latter is the case, the Bethnal Green Mulberry could be a direct lineal descendant of a tree from the time of Constantine – a tree that preserves in its DNA the original import, a tree that bore ancestral fruit which fed the legions of Roman that watched over ancient London.
Transcript by Rachel Blaylock
The Bethnal Green Mulberry, 1930 (Courtesy of the Royal London Hospital Archives)
The Bethnal Green Mulberry, spring 2015
Inkwell made in 1911 from a branch of the Bethnal Green Mulberry (Courtesy of the Royal London Hospital Archives)
This engraving of the completed London Chest Hospital published by the Illustrated London News on June 28th 1851 shows the fully-grown Mulberry tree to the left of the main building (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Illustration of Bishop Bonner scourging a heretic from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 1563
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
Here We Go Round The Bethnal Green Mulberry
A Plea For The Bethnal Green Mulberry
The Reckoning With Crest Nicholson
At 38 Princelet St
Spitalfields Life Books will be publishing A MODEST LIVING, Memoirs of Cockney Sikh by Suresh Singh in October. The book was inspired by the account of Suresh’s father Joginder Singh, which was first published in these pages in 2013. Here is a second instalment and further excerpts will follow over coming weeks.
In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh tells the story of his family who have lived in their house in Princelet St for nearly seventy years, longer I believe than any other family in Spitalfields. In the book, chapters of biography are alternated with a series of Sikh recipes by Jagir Kaur, Suresh’s wife.
You can support publication by pre-ordering a copy now, which will be signed by Suresh Singh and sent to you on publication.
Click here to order a signed copy of A MODEST LIVING for £20
Suresh Singh and his wife Jagir in Princelet St this summer (Photograph by Patricia Niven)
Joginder Singh at 38 Princelet St
Dad came with very little. In 1949, he left his village in the north of India, carrying a small satchel with a tin of shoe polish and not much else. Because he was from the shoemaking caste he thought he could shine peoples’ shoes in London and that was what he did at first.
Somebody told Dad that you could sleep in doorways in Spitalfields and quickly find work there. The porters piled up their barrows and it fell on the floor in abundance, so you could easily collect enough fruit and vegetables for a week. He knew people would leave you alone and you could get by. I think something drew him to Spitalfields.
A man called Mama Nanak came to London before my father. He was a friend of the family and a wheeler-dealer, a dodgy guy. No-one ever said much about him but there is a photograph of him in his suit with a big moustache. He was an enterprising, entrepreneurial man. Eventually, he went to work at Heathrow Airport cleaning toilets and moved to Southall. He brought Sikhs over and said to them, ‘You can stay here.’ He was someone who worked his way around things. He and Dad got hold of a house from a Jewish furrier. In those days, you could just buy the keys.
Our house, it was a slum then. Official records state it was vacant at the time. Dad wanted a big house so that he could welcome his mates and soon there were as many as fifty people living in it. You ask any Punjabi from here to Glasgow who arrived in Spitalfields in the fifties and they will tell you they lived at 38 Princelet Street, even if it was for one night. Some people even walked from Heathrow Airport. They were hot-bedding, with one person getting up to go to work and another climbing into the same bed. It was pretty rough but it was a place where people got on. You could mingle in Spitalfields if you had a big overcoat and a hat, tucking yourself into the area with its smell of bonfires, the brewery, and the fruit and vegetable market.
It was a dark place at night but Dad had a sense of direction even though he could not read or write. He found his way by landmarks. Hawksmoor’s tall spire of Christ Church, with its illuminated clock, dominated the neighbourhood. Even when it was dirty, Christ Church was pretty swag, and Dad liked it. Although there were tramps outside and the bustling Spitaltfields market was across the road, he believed you could elevate yourself out of it.
Our house was in the next street and Liverpool Street station was beyond. On Sundays you could pick up stuff for nothing in the flea markets and Dad got most of our furniture there. In the surrounding streets were Maltese families, Irish families, Hassidic and other Jewish families. It was a mishmash of people and Dad was in his element. Spitalfields pulled him in. The Punjab and the East End of London were two different worlds. I think the docks and the river led him to this place, where you could get by even if you had very little.
Dad found it very difficult to get work because he had a beard and long hair wrapped up in a turban. Some Sikhs shaved their heads. He was told there was a guy in Glasgow who would do it with an accompanying ritual. Dad took the coach to Glasgow to the rough part of the tenement blocks. The guy said to my Dad, ‘This is how you get a job in England.’ He took Dad into the yard and removed his turban and shaved his hair and his beard off. They said that day, ‘Joginder Singh wailed at the top of his voice.’ Dad said, ‘Now my Sikhism is from within.’ He realised that he was in a foreign land but he could keep his faith inside. He made that sacrifice to get a job.
Dad worked in Liverpool Street station and Old Broad Street shining shoes on and off for fifteen years. He did not mind it, although others in the house often asked, ‘Why do you want to do that? You’ve come to England, why do you want to get down on your knees and shine shoes?’ Dad answered, ‘That is a lovely thing to do.’
When he came back from Glasgow, he got a job at once on a building site. People in the house thought, ‘Oh well he shaves, he gets a Wilkinson blade from the market and he keeps himself clean-cut.’ Yet Dad always wore the clothes of a Punjabi Sikh in the house, even if outside he wore proper tailored suits with a nice cut from a good Jewish tailor. These were bought down Brick Lane or in Cheshire Street and probably came off a stiff but they were bespoke. His friends always used to laugh, ‘Joginder Singh, the suits are very beautiful – don’t know how you got them?’ He always kept his shoes polished too, that was very important to him. Even today, I always keep my shoes polished.
I think it is funny but also sad that Dad would do that. Why did he put his pyjamas on and become like a proper Punjabi in the house, but dress in a suit before he went out? I think if he had put a coat over his pyjamas to go out he probably would have got away with it, but he never did. He always valued being in Britain and he worked really hard. I think Spitalfields welcomed him for that.
Dad was always bringing home down-and-outs he met in the street. Often, Dad would invite his vagabond friend Karama but Mum would say, ‘Keep him downstairs,’ because he was infested. So Dad sat him in the yard, shaved his hair off and set it alight, and as they burnt, the fleas would pop like sparklers. I remember Mum being at the end of her tether sometimes because Dad fed these down-and-outs. We still eat the same diet today and, if anybody comes, they eat what we eat. We do not say, ‘We’ve got friends coming, we’ve got to get special food.’ It is what it is, that was how it was and how it is today. It was the same when Mum was here and she passed it on to Jagir, my wife.
Dad became the owner of 38 Princelet Street in 1951, about two years after he arrived in London. I remember the house being full of people, with three gas meters and cookers upstairs and downstairs. My view was of kneecaps and shoes. Mr Ford, the environmental health officer was knocking on the door all the time saying, ‘We’re going to close you down.’ When I was a child we lived on the top floor, which was just an open space with the walls knocked through and the rafters uncovered with two skylights.
Our house was quite broken down and we did not have hot water or central heating. We used to bathe outside in the yard. I remember putting pans on the gas, heating up water. Once it boiled, we tipped it into a bucket and carried it down into the yard then topped it up with cold water. Dad washed in cold water and when he threw it on him, he yelled ‘Wah Hey Guru!’ The joke in the community was that Joginder Singh was a holy man because he kept shouting ‘Wah Hey Guru!’ but really it was the shock of cold water.
Some Sikhs did not want to stay with us, saying, ‘How can you live among Muslims and Jews?’ and he replied, ‘At least they don’t gossip, so you go and I’ll stay here.’ Our house was an open house and for many people it was a safe house – especially when Dad was there.
Joginder Singh in the kitchen at 38 Princelet St – “I think it is funny but also sad that Dad would do that. Why did he put his pyjamas on and become like a proper Punjabi in the house, but dress in a suit before he went out?”
Mama Nanak – “He was an enterprising, entrepreneurial man. Eventually, he went to work at Heathrow Airport cleaning toilets and moved to Southall.”
Joginder Singh
Click here to order a signed copy of A MODEST LIVING for £20
A Strange Storm In Shoreditch
As well as collecting his experiences of life in his diaries, Samuel Pepys collected many other things, including prints of the Cries of London, cheese wrappers and Broadsheet Ballads. Thanks to his foresight, these are all preserved in the Pepys Library at his former college, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
This broadsheet from his collection records something strange and wondrous that happened in Shoreditch on 18th May 1630, when hailstones eight inches in circumference fell from the sky resulting in the near-fatality of a hemp dresser. Connoisseurs of doggerel can enjoy the full story below.
Learn more about the history of this ancient parish at an exhibition of artefacts recently excavated by Museum of London Archaeology, open now at St Leonard’s Church from Tuesday to Sunday each week until 14th October.
Click on this image to enlarge
Image reproduced courtesy Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge
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Peter Turner, Silversmith
I am delighted to publish this post by Julie Price who was a graduate of my blog writing course this spring. Julie’s family were originally from the East End and consequently the capital has always held a fascination for her. Follow Julie’s Price’s View Of London.
We are now taking bookings for this autumn’s course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on November 10th & 11th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches from Leila’s Cafe, eat cakes baked to historic recipes by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details
If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.
Peter Turner
One of my relatives, Peter Turner, is a retired silversmith who lives in the village of Great Abington with his wife Ann. It is inspiring for me to have another creative person in the family, so I was keen to find out more about his work.
While visiting, I was amused to hear villagers refer to him as ‘Hatton Garden Pete.’ When I asked to see his workshop, he caught my eye with a cheeky glint as he declared, “I work in a studio darling, I’m ‘Fine Art’!”.
Peter said he had always been interested in artistic subjects at school but there was no career guidance available and boys were simply told to take a form to the Labour Exchange. He said, “I always knew I wanted to do something with my hands and the Labour Exchange gave me a form for an apprentice engraver. The apprenticeship was for four years, which was lucky because it could have been up to seven years.”
Peter was offered the apprenticeship and started work at fifteen years old at H J Greenwood & Son, a father-and-son firm in Stratford High St. Mr Greenwood, was a silversmith who was known to be one of the best at lettering. Peter remembers his strict Victorian attitude but feels lucky that he was taught by such a talented man.
Peter reminisced about Stratford sixty years ago, “I remember there being a leather shop downstairs, Woolworths was opposite and it was close to Yardleys in the Mile End Rd, with beautiful tiles depicting a lavender seller. Next to Yardleys was a knacker’s yard where they boiled bones for glue and – when they opened the vats – it stank. I used to put a hanky over my mouth!”.
“I worked on simple things there, initials on signet rings, cufflinks and bracelets,” Peter recalled. After his apprenticeship, he left to work for Gill & Stevenson in Hatton Garden. The interview was at 8:00am on a Saturday morning and he was told to bring his own tools. “The guv’nor, Ernie Stevenson was the only person there so I laid my tools out on the work bench,” Peter explained. Ernie left him some work and said, “Do what you think you can do and I will be back.” Peter did all of it with an hour and a half to spare, so he did some other things that he noticed on the shelf. When the ‘guv’nor’ came back, he asked Peter, “When can you start?!”. He was chuffed because he was given £36 for the work although his weekly wage was only £11. He was only nineteen years old at the time but proudly remembers Ernie telling the other employees “This is Peter and he set his tools up himself!”.
Peter worked at Gill & Stevenson for twelve years, commuting from the village of Over in North Cambridge. He remembers, “I worked next to an old boy called Harold Fuller who was the tops in heraldry” and added, “I’ve been lucky to have had two excellent masters.”
In Hatton Garden, Peter met a gentleman who had lots of connections with major silver and antique dealers in London. This connection led to enough extra work that he could become self-employed.
While he was self-employed Peter worked for many clients in Bond St, Hatton Garden and the silver vaults in Chancery Lane. He also did work for the royal family. “Prince Charles brought his Mum a silver thimble and asked me to engrave it with ER II,” he recalls, “I think it was her Christmas or birthday present.” He engraved for the Queen too. “While she was at Sandringham,’ he explained, “she brought me a sheep’s dog whistle and I engraved it with ER II.” At this time, Joe Bugner won the European & Commonwealth Boxing Championship and Peter was asked to engrave his name onto the championship belt. Peter laughed as he confesses, “My two sons were running around the house wearing Joe Bugner’s belt on their shoulders and blowing the Queen’s sheep dog whistle at the same time!”.
I asked Peter what he was most proud of and he told me how a Jewish New York dealer had asked him to re-engrave two Paul Storr sauceboats. When I asked who Paul Storr was, he revealed, “He used to be a silversmith – one at the top of his game. A Huguenot who came over from France or Holland with a lot of silk weavers and set up shop in East London, he is rated to be the top English silversmith ever.”
Once Peter was asked by a dealer to erase a crest and coronet from a pair of Paul Storr silver sauceboats, but the engraving was so beautiful he took a print before removing it. This was silver that Lord Lucan had sold to pay off gambling debts. Later, the Lucan family asked Peter to erase the new engraving and replace it with the original crest. Fortunately, having taken a print of the Lucan crest, he was able to do it quickly. Peter admitted to me, “The family said it was so beautiful, they could not tell the difference from the original.”
I wanted to learn the basic principles of engraving and asked Peter to give me a lesson. This is what he said, “Wipe your fingers on your forehead or chin, to get a grease deposit, then rub it onto the silver. Then take a tin of powdered chalk and rub some onto the metal with cotton wool. Mark guide lines in the chalk with something that doesn’t scratch but just leaves a mark on the chalk – I used old knitting needles. Then you look at it, ask yourself, ‘Is that right?’ When you are happy, use rules and a pair of compasses to mark the size of the lettering. Scratch through the chalk with a sharp point so marks of the letters are left, then wipe off the chalk and start, using a small chisel.”
Since retiring, Peter has now taken up wood carving and wants to make handles for gentleman’s canes. He is currently working on his first, which will be in the shape of an elephant’s head. He wants to carve another in the shape of “an heraldic dolphin, the type you would see wrapped around embankment lampposts.” I cannot wait to visit Hatton Garden Pete and his wife again to see how the cane handles are progressing.
Peter’s design for a Dutch marriage box
Peter’s design for a crest
Examples of fonts engraved by Peter
Examples of romantic keepsakes that Peter makes for his wife each Valentine’s Day
Photographs copyright © Julie Price
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On Top Of Britannic House With Lew Tassell
Detective Constable Tassell of the City of London Police Serious Fraud Squad magically escorts us thirty-five years back in time and onto the roof of Britannic House in Ropemaker St to enjoy the view
“In the summer of 1983, I was part of the City of London Serious Fraud Squad, operating from Wood St Police Station. A friend and ex-colleague of mine became head of security at British Petroleum in Britannic House, Ropemaker St and he invited me to photograph the views of London from the rooftop, so I took the opportunity. I went along one June morning and took my pictures.
Britannic House was the first building in the City of London to be taller than St Paul’s Cathedral and remained the tallest until the NatWest Tower was built in 1976. It is now known as City Point – since BP moved out some years ago – and has been refurbished with extra storeys, so it is even taller.” – Lew Tassell
Looking towards Christ Church, Spitalfields
Looking northeast towards the Bishopsgate Goodsyard with Bethnal Green beyond
Looking east to Old Broad St and Liverpool St Station with Spitalfields beyond.
Car park at Old Broad St Station where the Broadgate Estate is today
Looking east along Liverpool St towards Bishopgate and Dewhurst’s Butchers
Looking southeast to Finsbury Circus and the City of London
Looking southeast across the City of London towards Tower Bridge
Looking southwest along London Wall with St Paul’s Cathedral
The dome of St Paul’s with Westminster and Big Ben
Looking west towards Old Bailey and Trafalgar Sq
Looking northwest towards the Post Office Tower with the Barbican to the right
Looking northwest across Clerkenwell with St Pancras Station in the distance
Looking north to Whitecross St Market
Looking down onto the Barbican
St Giles Cripplegate
Looking down from the top of Britannic House
Looking down on Silk St
City of London mounted police in Fore St
Photographs copyright © Lew Tassell
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Angie Lewin & Emily Sutton’s Nature Table
At the end of this glorious long summer, as we reach the season of flower shows and harvest festivals, St Jude’s returns to Townhouse in Fournier St to present NATURE TABLE, an exhibition of lyrical works on rural themes by two favourite artists, Angie Lewin & Emily Sutton. Open daily from Wednesday 19th until Sunday 30th September.
Gardener’s Arms, linocut by Angie Lewin
Preparation for Gardener’s Arms
Portrait of Angie Lewin by Allun Callender
Cottage Garden, watercolour by Emily Sutton
Sea Holly, Walberswick
Dunwich Beach
Summer Sweet Peas
Portrait of Emily Sutton by Allun Callender
Linocut copyright © Angie Lewin
Watercolours copyright © Emily Sutton
Kyriacos Hadjikyriacou, Pleater
Kyri demonstrates a pattern for a circular pleat
In a remote corner of Tottenham, in the midst of an industrial estate, sandwiched between a kosher butcher and a panel beater, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I found Rosamanda Pleaters. We dipped our heads and stepped through a low door to enter a crowded factory. As our eyes accustomed to the gloom, we peered into the depths where lines of machines filled the space, appearing to recede into the infinite distance. We expected a horde of ghostly workers shrouded in cobwebs, but on closer examination the machines were all idle.
Yet, in a pool of bright light, one man worked alone, wrestling cloth, cardboard, sticks and string, subjecting them to his will with expert control. This was the legendary pleater Kyriacos Hadjikyriacou, universally known as Kyri. He removed a piece of silk from between a pair of cardboard patterns that were folded into an intricate design which they imparted to the cloth, as delicate as a butterfly wing and as richly coloured as the plumage of an exotic bird. We were entranced.
The magic of pleating is to take diaphanous fabric and give it volume and structure through a geometric series of creases. These pleats move, amplifying the gesture and motion of the wearer in unexpected and sensuous ways. This is the spell that pleating can impart to clothes. Kyri is the grand master of it.
He has contrived hundreds of unique designs for pleats, spending months conjuring his intricate notions. Pleating is his imaginative world. ‘This one is stars on one side and squares on the other,’ he explained unrolling an elaborately folded piece of cardboard that quivered as if it had a life of its own. ‘I call it ‘Crown Pleat,” he confided to me in a proud conspiratorial whisper. ‘I have never used it yet.’ Kyri finds inspiration for new designs in pantiles, scallop shells and hieroglyphics.
All day the phone rings and breathless fashion assistants arrive from London’s top designers – Christopher Kane, Alexander McQueen, Jasper Conran, among others so fancy we are not permitted to mention – bringing lengths of cloth for Kyri to work his transformative wizardry upon.
A tall slim man with pale grey hair and straggling white moustache set off by his mediterranean colouring, Kyri cuts a handsome figure. Of philosophical nature, he is untroubled by the endless to and fro, delighting in the attention and maintaining a confident equanimity throughout. He may serve the capricious world of fashion, but his is the realm of geometry and chemistry. Cardboard, sticks and string are his tools, and steam is the alchemical essence that enables him to work his sorcery upon the cloth, subjecting it to his desire.
“As a pleater, you are always learning. Even after forty-three years of pleating, I am learning. It is not just a question of mastering three or five styles, you have to use your imagination. You have know engineering and about how machines work, you have to know geometry to understand how the patterns function, you have to know chemistry to predict how the material will react.
There’s a lot of things you have to know to be a pleater. It’s a talent. I create new things everyday. I design my own patterns. If I see something I like, I work how it is done and I design my own version. At the beginning, I used to come in every Saturday just to experiment with styles. I tried different ways to use the machines to find new styles. I have two hundred different designs of my own.
Hand pleating is done by placing the cloth between two paper patterns, known as ‘pleating crafts.’ They are made of a special paper that is water resistant and does not get wet. You open the craft, stretch the two papers and lay down the material, sandwiched between the two papers. Then you tie them tight and put them in the steam.
The easiest fabric for pleating is polyester. It holds the pleats well, you can even put it in a washing machine. In hand-pleating, you use only steam but in machine-pleating you use the heat of the machine and steam too, so it is more powerful and will resist washing. I have all these machines. One can do fifteen hundred different styles, another is a fancy one that do a couple of thousand different styles.
I don’t need to advertise, people come and find me, and they keep coming back. I tell them,’If you need me, you find me!’ If I make something, it has to be of the standard that I would like to buy – which means it is good to give to a customer.
My work is perfect pleating. It is rare. There are some patterns, I am the only person in England who can do them. Other pleaters do standard pleats and they think that’s everything but it is not. It can take six months to design a pattern. I might start work on it at Christmas and finish in June. I did not know how to do it, but slowly I work it out. I enjoy pleating because I am always creating things. When I started, I didn’t know anything about this.
I have an Msc in Agriculture. I finished my studies in Athens in 1975 and, because of the war in which Turkey invaded Cyprus, I came to England as a refugee. I married my wife Eleni and in the beginning I worked in a knitting factory, Sharon Fabrics in Holloway. After they closed down, I worked at a water plant, analysing water in Crews Hill in Enfield for bacteria. But somebody told me to push a wheelbarrow and I didn’t like it so I left.
After that, I was asked to work for a pleater in Hackney and that was how I started. In 1980, me and two other people, we opened a knitting factory in Clerkenwell near Smithfield Market. My wife worked in Holborn as a bookkeeper then. She asked me, ‘How much does it cost to set up a pleating factory? I told her, ‘Maybe two or three thousand pounds.’ So that’s what we did, we started in business together and we employed two boys. Eighteen months later, we had a fire and all the others left but I carried on.
I have been here in this workshop in Tottenham for twenty-six years. I had a pleater who passed away before my wife eighteen months ago, so I am on my own. There’s just me now but in the past I used to have seven pleaters working for me. All these machines I have are from factories that closed and nobody else wants them There is no business any more for volume. All the High St shops manufacture in the Far East, my business is just with designers now.
I used to work on Sundays, I arrived at eight o’clock every morning and worked until seven. Now I arrive at nine o’clock and work until five, just weekdays. I will carry on as long as I can. I said to my children, ‘I am not going to retire because – for me – if somebody retires they are waiting for death.’ It’s true! If you put your car outside for six months and don’t use it, the tyres and battery go flat. The human being is like that I think.”
Kyri lays a pattern on the table
Kyri has over two hundred patterns for pleating that he has designed
Kyri shows off a favourite pleating pattern
‘I call this ‘Crown Pleat”
‘Craft pleats’ ready for use
Kyri places weights upon the patterns to make sure the fabric is tightly sandwiched
Kyri removes the weights once the pattern is compressed
Kyri rolls the patterns to squeeze the fabric into the form of the patterns
Kyri places the patterns between two splints
Kyri ties the splints together
Kyri concertinas the patterns as tight as possible between the splints
The completed ‘pleating craft’ is ready for the steam oven
Kyri’s steam ovens where the pleats are baked
Kyri shows off his pleating machine
Last minute maintenance to the steamer
A pleated silk shirt ready to be steamed flat
Kyri the pleater
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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