Ninth Annual Report
In late August, upon the anniversary of starting to write Spitalfields Life, it is my custom to make a summary of the year’s activities, prior to taking a short break and recommencing in September.
When I began nine years ago, my ambition was to write celebrating the people of the East End. More than three thousand stories later, this undertaking has proven an education. In learning of the extraordinary resilience of East Enders, equally I have become aware of their struggles.
In 2012, I was involved in the founding of the East End Trades Guild because I believe that independent shops and small businesses here need to collaborate to fight for their survival. The excessive increases in business rates and rents are destroying these small endeavours that have characterised the East End for centuries. You will have read in these pages of the plight of traders operating under railway arches as Network Rail hikes the rents to unrealistic levels prior to selling them off. Thousands of people in London and across the country will lose their livelihoods. Similarly, the redevelopment of workshops is destroying affordable workspaces for small trades. The human cost of this became starkly apparent with the suicide of Kevin Cordery, Clerkenwell jewellery worker, following his eviction from his workshop by a developer this spring.
In Spitalfields, the redevelopment of the London Fruit & Wool Exchange, retaining just the facade of the original building, nears completion. It will be occupied by a single international legal corporation replacing hundreds of small businesses that formerly occupied this publicly-owned building. On a more positive note, the architect for the monstrous development on the Bishopsgate Goodsyard has been fired, and the proposal for monolithic towers of luxury flats aimed at the international market and overshadowing the Boundary Estate abandoned. Meanwhile, British Land’s plans for the demolition of most of Norton Folgate remain in abeyance as the market for offices for financial industries declines in the City of London.
Gratifyingly, at the Geffrye Museum, the restoration is underway of the 1838 Marquis of Lansdowne that we fought to save. In the City of London, the corporation rejected the developer’s appeal to revoke the Asset of Community Value status for the historic Still & Star in Aldgate which we campaigned for.
No decision has yet been made about the future of the historic Bethnal Green Mulberry in the grounds of the former London Chest Hospital next to Victoria Park and I am hopeful it will be saved.
As you know, I support a scheme to save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry proposed by the UK Historic Buildings Preservation Trust and Arte Factum, reopening it as a working foundry marrying old and new technology, and offering apprenticeships and training to local people. Unfortunately the developer who has acquired the foundry wants to redevelop it as a boutique hotel like Shoreditch House. In order to proceed, they need to apply to the council for permission for a change of use from foundry to hotel. When this happens, I hope you will join me in challenging this application which would destroy the possibility of any future for the Whitechapel Bell Foundry forever.
Last autumn, I was proud to publish East End Vernacular, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century, reclaiming the work of forgotten artists whose works form a continuum stretching back to the nineteenth century. This summer, I collaborated with Batsford Books to publish Adam Dant’s Maps of London & Beyond, collecting Adam’s celebrated cartography which has graced these pages in recent years.
Already a year has passed since the death of my beloved old cat Mr Pussy and now that Schrodinger, his successor, is established in his new home, I feel the time is right to bring out The Life & Times Of Mr Pussy, A Memoir of a Favourite Cat in September.
Over the next week, I will be publishing favourite posts from the past year until I resume with new stories on Monday 3rd September.
Thus another year passes in the pages of Spitalfields Life.
Click here to pre-order a copy of THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY
Click here to order a signed copy of EAST END VERNACULAR
Click here to order a signed copy of MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND
Schrodinger, formerly Shoreditch church cat, came to live with The Gentle Author this year
You may like to read my earlier Annual Reports
A Walk Around The Docks With Lew Tassell
Constable Tassell of the City of London Police is going to escort us around the London Docks today
Police Constable Tassell, 1971
“During the summer of 1971, I was on duty one Sunday on Tower Bridge, walking up and down and spending a bit of time in the control box. On my way back to Bishopsgate where I was stationed, I bumped into a couple of London Port Authority Police who were opening up St Katharine Dock to have a look inside. I said, ‘I’d love to have a look in there myself.’ and they replied, ‘When you finish work, come round to our office in Thomas More St – we’ll give you the keys and you can spend the afternoon in Western Dock and Eastern Dock up to Shadwell Basin.’ So I said, ‘That’s wonderful, thankyou very much!’
I dashed back to Bishopsgate Police Station where I was living at the time, changed and got my camera, picked up the keys and made my way to the Western Dock just east of St Katharine Dock. Today this area is a housing estate and a supermarket, and virtually all the water has gone. So I spent the afternoon going round the derelict docks taking pictures. It was quite unsafe as you can see from some of the photographs. There are only eighteen pictures because I used the other eighteen frames on the film to take pictures of my girlfriend at the time, whom I married the next year and is my wife today.’
Western Dock parallel with Pennington St looking east
Looking towards Wapping Pierhead
Looking west across Western Dock
Bridge between Western Dock to the left and Tobacco Dock on the right
Interior in Western Dock
Interior in Western Dock
Western Dock looking towards Tower Bridge
Western Dock looking towards Wellclose Sq
Western Dock looking towards St George-in-the-East
Western Dock looking east
Southern part of Western Dock, partly demolished
At Crescent Warehouse
Interior of Crescent Warehouse
Interior of Crescent Warehouse
Interior of Crescent Warehouse
Buildings east of St Katharine Dock
Semi-demolished buildings east of St Katharine Dock
Photographs copyright © Lew Tassell
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Barbara Jezewska, Teacher
Barbara as a pupil of the Central Foundation Grammar School for Girls, Spitalfields
Barbara Jezewska was not born in the East End nor was she of East End parentage, yet she lived her formative years here and it left an indelible impression upon her.“I love the people, the places and the experiences that I have known, and look for every opportunity to go back and visit,” she confessed to me, “I consider myself so rich for having grown up in a time and a place that was quite extraordinary.”
Barbara grew up in Casson St, a modest back street connecting Old Montague St and Chicksand St in Spitalfields. Opposite was Black Lion Yard, known then as the Hatton Garden of the East End because it contained eighteen jewellery shops. Old Montague St had a sleazy reputation in those days – it was a busy thoroughfare crowded with diverse life, filled with slum dwelllings, punctuated by a bomb site and a sugar factory, and lined with small shops and cafes. There, long-established Jewish traders sat alongside coffees bars in which Maltese, Somalis, Caribbeans and others congregated.
While others might consider themselves disadvantaged to grow up in such an environment, Barbara’s experience was quite the opposite and she recognised a keen sense of loss from the moment her family were rehoused in 1965 as part of the slum clearance programme. Very little of Casson St survives today and the spot where Barbara’s house stood is now a park, yet it is a location that still carries immense significance for her.
“We moved to 1 Casson St in 1957 when I was three years old. We came to London from Paxton, Berwickshire on the border with Scotland where my mother, Elizabeth Carr, had been born. My father was Polish, born in Lublin, and when he was fifteen, he ran away from home and ended up fighting in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. He never talked about it but he had a graze on his arm that he said was from a bullet wound. I believe he met my mother while he was washing dishes at a West End hotel where she also worked. When I was eighteen he left and married again, and I only saw him a few times before he died. We became estranged and, in 1994, we got a phone call to say he had died in Poland.
My father couldn’t speak English when he arrived in this country, but he was very talented in music and he paid for guitar lessons out of his earnings. As a child, I remember him practising and practising and I didn’t appreciate what was going on, yet eventually he ended up teaching at Trinity College, Cambridge.
We shared the house in Casson St with a Greek family, the Hambis. It wasn’t partitioned, they had some rooms and we had the others. There was no bathroom, no heating and no hot running water. We did have an inside toilet but the Hambis had one in the back yard. They had five children and there were the three of us, so there was always somebody to play with and always something going on.
Across the street from us was the Beehive Nougat Factory (‘nugget’ as we used to say it). We rang the bell and asked for an old man we called ‘Uncle Alf’ who worked there, and he gave us sweets, handfuls of broken chocolates and nougat. We used to raid the bins of the textile factories and get cardboard tubes, then we’d stage incredible battles, lining up on either side of the street and hitting each other with the tubes until they broke. There was Mrs Miller who sold toys on Petticoat Lane, when she and my mother met they would talk for hours. One day, a dandelion seed – which we called fairies – floated by and went into Mrs Miller’s mouth while they were talking. She swallowed it and never noticed, so we always remembered ‘the day Mrs Miller swallowed a fairy!’ There was Mrs Isaacs, a widow who lived next door who spent all her time at the upstairs window, watching. If you did anything she didn’t approve of, she’d shout at you. One day, I was going to chalk on the wall and she shouted out, ‘Don’t you make a mess!’ I stuck my tongue out at Mrs Isaacs and she disappeared from the window, so I ran back inside and said to my mother, ‘Mrs Isaacs is coming,’ and she came round and said, ‘Your daughter stuck her tongue out at me!’
We used to play on the bomb sites and I climbed into a basement of a bombed-out house in Old Montague St. I was scared because there was a lot of rubble on top but I found some silver threepenny bits in a bag. We took them to the sweet shop and passed them off as sixpences. I think the shopkeeper realised they were silver and was happy to accept them for sweets. Round the corner in Hopetown St, lived Alfie and his parents who were the first get a television. So, at 4pm, we’d all queue up outside Alfie’s house – half a dozen of us – and ask to watch the Children’s Hour, and we’d sit on the kitchen floor to watch. The only time we went to the seaside was on a Sunday school trip, and they gave us Christmas parties at which we’d all get a present of a second-hand toy.
There were several tramps that I remember. Coco worked for the stallholders and slept in an empty building on the corner of Black Lion Yard, every morning he came out with his bucket of slops and threw it over onto the bomb site. Ivan used to wander up and down Old Montague St, and I think I saw two men trying to kill him once, dropping bricks from the roof as he walked past. Stinky Sheridan had one leg and used to sell matches in Whitechapel Rd. Whenever we saw the tramps, my mother who was a very kind person, taught me to respect them, she’d say, ‘Remember, that’s somebody’s son.’
In 1965, we were moved out as part of slum clearance to Brownlow Rd, off Queensbridge Rd in Haggerston. At the time, I was eleven and we thought it was very exciting. It was a maisonette with a bathroom, so we thought it was wonderful, but my experience when we moved was I felt lonely and missed the other children in our extended family. It felt strange. But being realistic, it would have been pretty awful staying in Casson St without any privacy or a bathroom.
I went to Robert Montefiore Primary School in Hanbury St and, when I left, I remember saying to my mother, tell the headmaster I want to go to the Central Foundation Grammar School in Spital Sq. I’d heard it was the good place to go. We were allowed out to wander around the Spitalfields Market at lunchtime. Every month the girls used to support a different charity there. We’d go down to the market and beg boxes of fruit and sell it at breaktimes and the money would go to charity. The art room overlooked the market and I did a painting of it that won a prize. I joined the choir so I could sing at St Botolph’s in Bishopsgate and get invited back for sandwiches and ice cream by the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers. I thought I was very clever because I went to a Grammar School.
My first job was at Fox’s the Chemist in Broadway Market, from four until six every day after school and all day Saturday for £2.50. At eighteen, I left school and worked for two years in the City at the National Westminster Bank in Threadneedle St. It was easy to get work, you could go to an agency and get a job, and if you didn’t like it you could go back in the afternoon and get a different one.
Then I did teacher training in Tooting. I couldn’t do it at eighteen because my father wouldn’t sign the grant form as he was about to remarry and didn’t want to commit himself, but when the divorce came through my mother signed. I asked to do my teaching practise in the East End and I was placed at Virginia Rd Primary School. I qualified as teacher in 1978, and I worked at Randal Cremer school in Hackney, I was part-time at Redlands School off Sidney St and deputy head at St Luke’s in Old St. I had wanted to be a teacher since the age of five, I think I just wanted a register and a red pen.
At forty-five, I had a son and we moved to Walthamstow and then to Hertfordshire, but I want to be back here – and one day I’ll be back. You can’t explain it to some people, because so many worked so hard to get out. I bring my son Adam to see the street art. I think he’s interested in the East End.”
Barbara keeps the button box from her childhood in Casson St. On the table are swatches from her mother’s dresses bought in Petticoat Lane and a necklace she made out of melon pips at age nine in 1963.
Barbara’s school report from the Central Foundation Grammar School in Spital Sq, July 1968.
Barbara, aged three.
The ‘goal’ where Barbara and her friends played football, photographed in the eighties.
Barbara, aged five.
The furniture factory opposite Barbara’s home in Casson St, photographed in the eighties.
Barbara (second from the left) in the Central Foundation School production of The Mikado.
Casson St under demolition.
Jerzy Jezewska, Barbara’s father was a celebrated guitarist who taught at Cambridge.
Barbara visits Columbia Rd in the eighties.
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The Hounds Of Hackney Downs
I was among the first to admire the latest masterpiece created by Hackney Mosaic Project under the presiding genius of Tessa Hunkin, completed on Hackney Downs yesterday. Tessa’s design takes its inspiration from the canine users of the park and proud owners were lining up at once to identify their pets immortalised upon the wall. The mosaic can be visited any day in the park and look out for a celebration in September when all the dogs portrayed will gather for an official unveiling ceremony.
THE HACKNEY MOSAIC PROJECT is seeking commissions, so if you would like a mosaic please get in touch hackneymosaic@gmail.com
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The Mosaic Makers of Hackney Downs
The Award-Winning Mosaic Makers of Hackney
Henry Croft, Road Sweeper
Henry Croft
Trafalgar Sq is famous for the man perched high above it on the column, but I recently discovered another man hidden underneath the square who hardly anybody knows about and he is just as interesting to me. I have no doubt that if you were to climb up Nelson’s Column, the great Naval Commander standing on the top would have impressive stories to tell of Great Sea Battles and how he conquered the French, though – equally – if you descend into the crypt of St Martin in the Fields, the celebrated Road Sweeper who resides down there has his stories too.
Yet as one who was born in a workhouse and died in a workhouse, Henry Croft’s tales would be of another timbre to those of Horatio Nelson and some might say that the altitude history has placed between the man on the pedestal and the man in the cellar reflects this difference. Unfortunately, it is not possible to climb up Nelson’s Column to explore his side of this notion but it is a simple matter for anyone to step down into the crypt and visit Henry, so I hope you will take the opportunity when you next pass through Trafalgar Sq.
Henry Croft stands in the furthest, most obscure, corner far away from the busy cafeteria, the giftshop, the bookshop, the brass rubbing centre and the art gallery, and I expect he is grateful for the peace and quiet. Of diminutive stature at just five feet, he stands patiently with an implacable expression waiting for eternity, the way that you or I might wait for a bus. Yet in the grand scheme of things, he has not been waiting here long. Only since since 2002, when his life-size marble statue was removed to St Martin in the Fields from St Pancras Cemetery after being vandalised several times and whitewashed to conceal the damage.
Born in Somers Town Workhouse in 1861 and raised there after the death of his father who was a musician, it seems Henry inherited his parent’s showmanship, decorating his suit with pearl buttons while working as a Road Sweeper from the age of fifteen. Father of twelve children and painfully aware of the insecurities of life, Henry launched his own personal system of social welfare by drawing attention with his ostentatious outfit and collecting money for charities including Public Hospitals and Temperance Societies.
As self-appointed ‘Pearlie King of Somers Town,’ Henry sewed seven different pearly outfits for himself and many suits for others too, so that by 1911 there were twenty-eight Pearly King & Queens spread across all the Metropolitan Boroughs of London. It is claimed Henry was awarded in excess of two thousand medals for his charitable work and his funeral cortege in 1930 was over half a mile long with more than four hundred pearlies in attendance.
Henry Croft has passed into myth now, residing at the very heart of London in Trafalgar Sq beneath the streets that he once swept, all toshed up in his pearly best and awaiting your visit.
Henry Croft, celebrated Road Sweeper
At Henry Croft’s funeral in St Pancras Cemetery in 1930
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In Search Of Val Perrin’s Brick Lane
In recent days, the weather in London has been bright so I waited for a suitably occluded sky to set out with my camera in search of Val Perrin’s Brick Lane and below you can see my photographs beneath Val’s shots from 1972, revealing more than forty years of change in Spitalfields
Brick Lane 1972
Brick Lane
Cheshire St 1972
Cheshire St
Cheshire St 1972
Cheshire St
Brick Lane 1972
Brick Lane
Cheshire St 1972
Cheshire St
Brick Lane 1972
Brick Lane
St Matthew’s Row & The Carpenters’ Arms 1972
St Matthew’s Row & The Carpenters’ Arms
St Matthew’s Row 1972
St Matthew’s Row
Sclater St 1972
Sclater St
Corbett Place from Hanbury St 1972
Corbett Place from Hanbury St
Bacon St 1972
Bacon St
Code St & Shoreditch Station 1972
Code St & Shoreditch Station
Pedley St Bridge 1972
Pedley St Bridge
1972 Photographs copyright © Val Perrin
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In Mr Pussy’s Chair
With your help, I am producing a handsome collection of stories of my old cat, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY, A Memoir Of A Favourite Cat to be published by Spitalfields Life Books on 20th September. Below you can read an excerpt.
Support publication by preordering THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY and you will receive a signed copy when the book is published.
Click here to preorder your copy
Mid-afternoon in Spitalfields, Mr Pussy snoozes
Is that an old fur hat on that chair in the corner? You would be forgiven for making such a simple mistake, but in fact it is my old cat, Mr Pussy, slumbering the hours away in the armchair that is his ultimate home, the place where I first laid him down as a tiny kitten and the place where he has spent more hours of his life than anywhere else – even if it has now moved over two hundred miles from one end of the country to the other. It is Mr Pussy’s chair.
My mother bought this chair in 1963. She had been married five years and had a three year old child, and she was still struggling to furnish our house. She was patient, doing without and waiting until the opportunity arose to acquire suitable things. She had very little money to spend but she wanted furniture that would last, and the passage of time has proved she chose wisely. I think she bought this chair in a sale and, although I do not know if it can truly be memory on my part, I see her searching among the cut-price furniture in the shop and filling with delight to discover this handsome Queen Anne style wingchair that was within her budget.
It was a deep green velvet then and one of my earliest memories is of standing upon the seat, safe between the wings of the chair, and reaching up vainly attempting to grasp the top. I yearned for the day when I would be tall enough to reach it, for then I should grown up beyond my feeble toddler years. The chair seemed huge to me and I could climb beneath it comfortably, much to my father’s frustration when he was sitting in it on Saturday afternoons and attempting to take note of the football results from the television, in order to complete his pools form and discover if he had become wealthy.
He never became wealthy yet he never gave up hope of winning either, sitting in this chair and filling in the football scores every Saturday, for year after year, until he died. Just a few weeks after his funeral, I bought a small black kitten for my mother as a means to ameliorate her grief and the tiny creature slept curled up in the corner of the armchair, seeking security in its wide embrace. It was his earliest nest. By now the green velvet had faded to a golden brown and the cushion has disintegrated, so that if a stranger were to visit and sit down quickly upon it they would fall right through the seat. Yet this did not matter too much to us, because we kept the chair exclusively for the use of the cat who did not weigh very much.
Eventually, to rejuvenate the chair, we had a new seat cushion made and a loose fabric cover of William Morris’ Willow Leaves pattern, which is still serviceable more than ten years later. Once my mother began to lose her faculties in her final years, I often sat her in it that she might benefit from its protection, when her balance failed her, and not fall off onto the floor as she did from chairs without wings. After she died, it became the cat’s sole preserve and it still delights me to see him there in the chair, evoking earlier days. It is almost the last piece of furniture I have from my childhood home and, although I do not choose to sit in it much myself, I keep it because I can still see my father sitting there doing his football pools or my mother perched to read the Sunday supplement.
One day, I mean to have the armchair reupholstered in its original deep green velvet but until then, by his presence, Mr Pussy keeps the chair and the memories that it carries alive. I realise that Mr Pussy is keeping the chair warm for me and I am grateful to him for this service that he offers so readily.
With your help, I am producing a handsome collection of stories of my old cat, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY, A Memoir Of A Favourite Cat to be published by Spitalfields Life Books on 20th September.
Support publication by preordering THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY and you will receive a signed and inscribed copy when the book is published.
