Spitalfields Life

Each Saturday, we shall be featuring one of Adam Dant’s MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND from the forthcoming book of his extraordinary cartography to be published by Spitalfields Life Books & Batsford on June 7th.

Please support this ambitious venture by pre-ordering a copy, which will be signed by Adam Dant with an individual drawing on the flyleaf and sent to you on publication. CLICK TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND BY ADAM DANT

Click to enlarge and study the details of Industrious Shoreditch

A century before the New Industries that define Shoreditch today, there were once the Old Industries. Then, small manufacturers and their suppliers occupied every building, and the neighbourhood teemed with skilled workers and craftsmen who made things with their hands. Cartographer extraordinaire Adam Dant celebrates this culture with his Map of Industrious Shoreditch, 1912.

“I chose 1912 because it precedes the First World War, when everything changed. It encapsulates Industrious Shoreditch,” explained Adam, “I started off with the major landmarks serving the industries of the time. For the main thoroughfares, I listed the concentrations of manufacturers, using lists of companies from the Post Office Directories. These are complemented by vignettes of people making things, and I filled the border with machines used for wood and metalwork.”

After the First World War, many of the industries moved to larger factories outside London and the twentieth century saw the decline of manufacturing in Shoreditch, with the hardware shops and suppliers of raw materials being the last to go, holding on even into recent decades. Now that Shoreditch is booming again with new technology companies occupying many of the old buildings once used for manufacturing, Adam Dant’s map offers us a poignant opportunity to explore that lost world of industriousness.

You will discover mattress makers, french polishers, feather dyers, hatters, bootmakers, chandlers, over-mantle manufacturers, cabinet makers, coach builders, wood turners, corset makers, and more…

Adam Dant goes in search of Industrious Shoreditch

CLICK TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND BY ADAM DANT

Adam Dant’s MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND is a mighty monograph collecting together all your favourite works by Spitalfields Life‘s cartographer extraordinaire in a beautiful big hardback book.

Including a map of London riots, the locations of early coffee houses and a colourful depiction of slang through the centuries, Adam Dant’s vision of city life and our prevailing obsessions with money, power and the pursuit of pleasure may genuinely be described as ‘Hogarthian.’

Unparalleled in his draughtsmanship and inventiveness, Adam Dant explores the byways of English cultural history in his ingenious drawings, annotated with erudite commentary and offering hours of fascination for the curious.

The book includes an extensive interview with Adam Dant by The Gentle Author.

Adam Dant’s  limited edition prints are available to purchase through TAG Fine Arts

Readers are invited to visit the London Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy this weekend where some of Adam Dant’s prints are being displayed. Click here for two complimentary tickets.

John Lloyd, Watch Repairer

When you step into The Little Yellow Watch Shop in the Clerkenwell Rd, you discover yourself among an eager line of customers clutching their precious timepieces patiently and awaiting the moment they can hand them into the safe hands of John Lloyd, the watch repairer who has worked in Clerkenwell longer than any other. With his long snowy white locks, John looks like a magus, as if by merely peering down critically over his long nose at a broken watch and snapping his fingers, he could conjure it back into life.

While John works his charm, his wife Annie Lloyd fulfils the role of magician’s assistant with consummate grace, taking down all the necessary information from the owner  and keeping everything moving with superlative efficiency. Together they preside over a hundred watches a week arriving for repair, and thereby maintain the tradition of clock-making and repair that has occupied Clerkenwell for centuries.

John has worked in the Clerkenwell Rd since 1956 and remembers when every shop between St John St and Goswell Rd was a watch repair or watch materials supply shop. Today, although his business is now one of just a tiny handful remaining in Clerkenwell, it is apparent that there is a healthy demand for his services to sustain him for as long as he pleases.

“I’m from Shepherd’s Bush originally and my stepfather had a watch repair stall in Romford Market,” John admitted to me, “I was only eleven when I started to work with him, but I quickly took to it.”

“I first came to Clerkenwell in the nineteen-forties, when I did a three year course in Instrument Making at the Northampton Polytechnic, now known  as the City University. Then I joined A. Shoot & Sons in Whitechapel at seventeen years old, was conscripted for National Service at eighteen and returned to my job again in 1956. Shoot & Sons supplied watch materials from a tall thin building at 85 Whitechapel High St next to the Whitechapel Gallery, but in that year we moved to Whitworth Buildings in Clerkenwell and then to the corner of St John St & Clerkenwell Rd in 1959. At Shoot & Sons, I used to go to the manager Leslie Lawson at weekends and we stripped down antique watches together – not many people these days know the inside workings of a watch.”

In 1992, when Shoot & Sons Ltd closed after more than thirty years on the corner, John moved to the kiosk fifty yards away at 60 Clerkwenwell Rd which was even smaller than the current Little Watch Shop. He opened it in partnership with his colleague Barry Benjamin but, when Barry became ill after just three years, John continued the business alone until his wife Annie came in one day a week and then later joined him full time. What was once a miniscule kiosk has expanded into a tiny shop where John presides happily from behind the counter, surrounded by photos of old Clerkenwell and his step-father’s sign from Romford market where John started out in the nineteen-forties.

“People ask me when I ‘m going to retire,” John confided to me gleefully, “but I’m already past retirement age – I’m having too much fun here.”

John Lloyd – Clerkenwell’s longest-serving member of the watch business

John’s mother and stepfather in Brighton, 1954

At Shoot & Sons Ltd

Maurice Shoot, John’s boss from the early fifties until his retirement in 1989

Phil, John and Barry at Shoots

Shoot & Sons Ltd on the corner of St John St & Clerkenwell Rd in the eighties

The interior of the shop at Shoot & Sons Ltd

60 Clerkenwell Rd in 1900, note the watch and clock shops

Clerkenwell Rd in the sixties

Barry Benjamin outside the original Little Yellow Shop

Signs uncovered in the expansion of the Little Yellow Shop

John & Annie Lloyd

Portraits © Estate of Colin O’Brien

The Little Yellow Shop, watch service centre, 60 Clerkenwell Rd, EC1

You may like to read these other Clerkenwell stories

In Old Clerkenwell

At Wyvern Bindery

At Embassy Electrical Supplies

A Dead Man in Clerkenwell

Colin O’Brien’s Clerkenwell Car Crashes

At Clerkenwell Fire Station

Adam Dant’s Map of the History of Clerkenwell

At the southeast corner of Blackheath Park stands a red-brick nineteenth century gatehouse with a drive curving beyond and disappearing into the trees. You might wonder if this is the London retreat of a reclusive plutocrat, yet a sign announcing ‘Morden College’ disabuses you of this notion. So then you assume it must be an exclusive private school and you look for errant pupils in uniform, yet you are wrong again. Morden College is one of the capital’s best-kept secrets.

It was founded by Sir John Morden (1623-1708) in 1685 as a charitable home for ‘decayed merchants’ of the Levant Company and constructed in the style of Christopher Wren by Wren’s master-mason Edward Strong. Remarkably, it is still going strong and now offers good quality retirement accommodation to four hundred people, including a nursing home.

When I visited recently, I walked up the sweeping drive to pass through the main entrance beneath the statues of Sir John & Lady Susan Morden and arrive at the central quadrangle, which looks as fine today as it did three hundred years ago. It was my privilege to enjoy lunch in the dining hall, sitting beneath the portrait of Sir John, followed by a stroll around the well-kept gardens just as the wisteria was coming into flower.

Sir John Morden administered the college himself in his final years and it flourishes today as a inspirational and far-sighted example of philanthropy. Born into a modest family in the parish of St Bride’s, Fleet St, he rose by his own ability through an apprenticeship to a Committee Member of the East India Company. After a successful posting to Aleppo, he later became Deputy Governor of the Company and a Board Member of the Levant Company. Yet he also lived through the Plague and the Great Fire, causing him to move from the City to Greenwich where Charles II held court and many distinguished Londoners sought refuge at the time. As his friend Daniel Defoe noted, “The beauty of Greenwich is owing to the lustre of its inhabitants.”

Without children, Sir John had no heir for his fortune and decided to use his wealth to found a college for, “Poor Merchants and such as have lost their Estates by accidents, danger and Perills of the Seas or by any other way of means in their honest endeavours to get a living by means of Merchandizing.”

Defoe wrote describing the venture.

“I had it from his own mouth that he was to make apartments for forty decay’d merchants to whom he resolv’d to allow forty shillings per annum each, with coals, a gown (and servants to look after their apartments) and many other conveniences so as the make their lives as comfortable as possible.

Each apartments consists of a bedchamber and a study, or large closet for their retreat, and to divert themselves with books etc.

They have a public kitchen, a hall to dine in. There is also a very good apartment for the chaplain, whose salary is fifty shillings a year, there are also dwellings for the cooks, butlers, porter, the women, and other servants, and reasonable salaries allow’d them. Behind the chapel is a handsome burial ground wall’d in, there are also very good gardens. In a word, it is the noblest foundation and most considerable single piece of charity that has been erected in England since Sutton’s hospital in London.”

While enjoying the benefits of good fortune, John Morden recognised that it was equally possible to suffer ill-fortune and – with startling insight and generosity – left his inheritance to support to those who needed it, in perpetuity. When William Morris campaigned to save the Trinity Green Almhouses in Whitechapel in the eighteen-eighties, he argued that we need them as a reminder of the enduring spirit of fellowship. I came away from Morden College uplifted by the same thought, humbled and touched by John Morden’s open-handed appreciation of the needs of others, and with a renewed recognition of the responsibility we all have to support those who are vulnerable in our society.

Anagram & acrostic in memory of Sir John Morden over the entrance to the dining hall

At the southeast corner of Blackheath Park stands a red-brick nineteenth century gatehouse

Constructed in the style of Christopher Wren by Wren’s master mason Edward Strong

“His statue in stone set up by his lady and since her death her own is set up near by the trustees” – Daniel Defoe commented on the statues of Sir John & Lady Susan Morden when he visited in 1725

Entrance to the quadrangle

“And that there be a Sun Dyall set up for Keeping the Clock right w’ch often goes wrong.” The motto reads “Sic Umbra, sic vita,” comparing the transiency of life to a fleeting shadow.

“the chaplain, whose salary is fifty shillings a year”

“a handsome burial ground wall’d in”

The Edwardstone bell from the church where Lady Susan Morden worshipped as a child

Mulberry tree c.1700

“there are also very good gardens”

Purple sprouting and wisteria in the allotments

The college fire engine was presented by Richard Chiswell in 1751

Morden College, 1755

Sir John Morden (Courtesy of Wellcome Foundation)

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Only yesterday, I learnt of the retirement of Tom Disson of George’s Plaice in the Roman Rd, one of the East End’s longest-established and best loved fishmongers. I know you will want to join me in wishing Tom well for his retirement years.

Tom shows Jesus’ thumbprint on a Haddock

For the last thirty-five years Tom Disson has viewed the world through the narrow frame of the shopfront at George’s Plaice in the Roman Rd where he knows all his customers by name. When I joined him behind the fishermonger’s slab with its gleaming array of the harvest of the deep laid out before us, our conversation was regularly punctuated as Tom turned his head to utter a greeting to each person that appeared in the field of his peripheral vision, flitting past the shop window – “Hello Mary Love!”- “Hello Ted!” – “Hello Ginger!”

There has been a fishmonger on this site since 1898 and today George’s Plaice is the centre of the world in the Roman Rd, where customers come to introduce their daughters to cockles and to order jellied eels for family funerals, while Tom keeps everything buoyant with constant flow of banter, both lewd and lugubrious by turns. “Are you looking for service? I’m feeling chesty today,” proposed Tom with a provocative comedy smirk as his customers scrutinised the kippers, heroically suppressing the heavy cold that was getting him down.

“My dog had a wart on its ear and do you know what it cost me? – £387 to have it removed!” protested Tom, sharing his affront at the iniquity of our times with Rene, who matched it with an account of her greyhound’s leg that cost £475 to set. This statement was countered by Tom’s revelation that his dog required cream for its foot, to stop it scratching, that cost £85. A resultant empathetic silence of mutual outrage prevailed while Tom wrapped up Rene’s fish, before an exchange of genial smiles accompanied the close of the transaction.

“I was a banana salesman at Fyffes Bananas for fifteen years, until I met my lovely wife at an eel stall in Club Row and that’s how I came to be here,” Tom confided proudly, “She’s an East End girl, born in Poplar from a family of twelve. I’m from West London, but I never had cause to regret moving here because I’ve met some lovely, lovely people over the years. My brother-in-law George was a fishmonger, he used to go down to the country, buying crabs and whelks in Norfolk and Suffolk. He ran this shop for seven years before I took over from him in 1982, and the fellow before him, he was a porter from Billingsgate Fish Market.”

Tom has decorated his walls over the last thirty-five years with an appealing gallery of pictures, some of the old East End, others of himself in former days – with two stuffed oystercatchers in a glass box as the centrepiece of the shop. And the view from the pavement, looking across the expanse of coloured fish to where Tom stands in his white apron and flat cap with the backdrop of framed pictures, is a memorable spectacle.

Week in, week out,  through all weathers, Tom has been sitting keeping his fish company with his good pal Geoffrey (“East End born and bred”) a former publican. “There used to be thirty-two pubs between here and Shoreditch, but if there’s eight now it’s a lot,” posited Geoffrey regretfully to me in a quiet moment. “We’ve definitely seen the best days,” agreed Tom, nodding with a sardonic grimace, playing Vladimir to Geoffrey’s Estragon in this fish shop re-enactment of Waiting for Godot. “Years ago, you had so much banter with the people, we used to have queues both ways on a Saturday morning!” continued Tom, crossing his arms, gazing across the sea of gleaming fish for consolation and smiling fondly in a reverie of the glory days of fishmongery in the Roman Rd.

Yet the moment a customer appeared, Tom and Geoffrey both sprang into animated life, eager to please, because they appreciated the esteem with which the local people hold this shop – as an unchanging landmark and reminder of the time when people always greeted each other in this neighbourhood. For Tom Disson, it was no duty, it was his joy, because this was his community. His customers may be aging but the affection with which George’s Plaice is held by the populace of the Roman Rd ensures that this bravura performance is destined to be remembered for many years to come

Choosing the haddock

Choosing the cod roe

Tom waits while customers deliberate over the skate

A satisfied customer, delighted with her cod roe

Tom’s vigil at George’s Plaice

A thoughtful moment

1985

1985

Tom’s magnificent display of freshly boiled cod roe

Tom Disson, 1985

Tom Disson, thirty-five years behind the counter in the Roman Rd

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