East End Beer Bottle Labels
Paul Shearsmith kindly sent me these splendid mid-twentieth century labels from Charrington’s at the Anchor Brewery in Mile End and Mann Crossman & Paulin at the Albion Brewery in Whitechapel. It makes me thirsty just contemplating their bold designs, strong typefaces and vibrant warm colours. Anyone fancy joining me for a pint of Toby Brown Ale or a glass of Mann’s Barley Wine? Cheers!
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So Long, Myra Love
Myra Love, Maori princess, jazz singer & long-term Bethnal Green resident, died last Wednesday aged eighty-three after complications following heart surgery. Today I publish my profile of Myra as a tribute to one of the most spirited women I ever met.
“We are a warlike people!”
“My mother was the Queen of Rarataonga, so I am a princess,” revealed Myra Love, with a gentle ambivalent grin, when I pressed her to admit her royal lineage. Her ancestry on her father’s side was equally impressive, she was a Maori of the Te Ati Awa tribe of Petone, and her ancestors included two eighteenth century Scotsmen from Selkirk – an explorer and an whaler – who married Maori princesses, Robert Park (brother of Mungo Park) and John Agar Love. “I always say my legs are Scottish,” Myra added with a smile, claiming the European part of her family with pride.
Although Myra’s residence was a one bedroom flat in Bethnal Green – as far away as it is possible to be from her ancestral land – she carried the weight of responsibility to her people, revealing a passionate sense of duty when she spoke of the politics of land. “I never learnt Maori because my grandmother said ‘English is the language of power, and you have to be fluent in English and get the land back’ – and we have. We formed corporations and we’re able to reclaim it today because the leases are coming up after a hundred years. There’s loads of land that we gave away for beads and blankets, and we’re getting it back.” Myra told me, swelling with magnificence and widening her eyes in skittish delight, adding, “Most of Wellington belongs to us now, and we got the railway station back last month.”
In that moment, I was afforded a glimpse of the woman who was born to be Queen of Rarataonga, because even though she did not choose to enact her public role, Myra’s abiding concern was the stewardship of the land on behalf of her people and her driving force was her desire to leave it in a better state. In another age, Myra might have led her tribe in battle, but in her time she fought at the High Court instead. “We are a warlike people!” Myra informed me proudly, accompanying the declaration with a winning smile. She knew that the success of her endeavour would define her legacy when she was long-gone, and in this sense, her concerns were parallel to medieval English royalty, seeking to unify the realm for generations to come.
“When I was a child, there was a feeling that we were second-class citizens.” continued Myra with a shrug, “If I was put down for being a Maori, my grandmother would say ‘Remember they’re walking on our land,’ and she owned quite a lot of land. My father was going to change how land was owned in our part of the country but he went to war and got killed instead. He was a leader of men. I was only five when he left. He went to Sandhurst and was the first Maori to command a battalion in World War II, but Maori leaders always fight alongside their men, and he was shot.
I was the youngest of three siblings so I didn’t count for very much until they died, and then I became very important because now I own a lot of land. I’m getting some of the land in New Zealand and some of the land in Rarataonga. And their siblings are fighting me for it and I am defending it in the High Court. I’m partitioning it out because I don’t want it for myself and I don’t want them to sell it, and I intend to stay as healthy as possible because they all want me to die.”
Stepping into Myra’s warm flat, painted in primary colours and crowded with paintings, plants, photographs, legal books, jewellery and musical equipment, Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I entered the court of a woman of culture. Not in the least high-faluting, she balanced her serious intent with an attractive emotional generosity, which made it an honour to sit beside her as she opened her photo album. Myra confessed that she became the author of her own destiny, when she made the break at twenty-one and ran away – like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday – to find a new life in the wider world.
“Once my grandmother died, the family disintegrated and I was moved out of the family house, so I decided to leave. Every Christmas we met together, but when she was gone there was a fight for the land, so because my family were all angry, I chose to go to America and become a jazz singer.
I sold a piece of my land to my uncle for £300 and bought a P&O ticket to San Francisco. You think everywhere’s going to be like New Zealand, so it was a bit of a shock when I got off the boat, because I was bit of a hokey girl. But it was exciting and, going through the Golden Gate Bridge, I thought, ‘My dreams are coming true.’ And some girls on the boat told me they knew Oscar Peterson, and they took me to the Black Hawk Club and there was Oscar Peterson. But I thought, ‘I’m going to New York,’ so I got on a train. It was 1958 and I had £100 left. I was an innocent abroad. In New York, I stayed on Bleecker St, just around the corner from Marlon Brando.
It was such a joy to visit places you’d only read about in books. At school I learnt Wordsworth’s Composed Upon Westminster Bridge and when I came to London I had to go there at dawn. By then, I had only about £25 left, but money went a long way in those days.”
Myra told me it takes thirty years to learn to be a jazz singer, but she also filled those thirty years with getting married, having three children and getting an Open University degree. “I got divorced because he wouldn’t let me go on singing,” she confided, spreading her hands philosophically, “When we broke up, I did a teacher training course and my first job was in the East End. I’ve always worked in underprivileged areas, and I’ve sent more kids to university than I’ve had hot dinners. These kids they know a little about a lot, and they’ve got the ability to latch onto something. They’re more than people who don’t live in the area know, because their struggle has been long. I’ve always believed that knowledge is power and that’s what I’ve tried to teach these kids.”
Discovering a recognition that the situation of the people of the East End equated with the circumstance of her own race, Myra discovered a sense of camaraderie here which drew her to adopt Bethnal Green as her home from home. So it was that, Myra Love, the heroic Maori princess – devoted to fighting for the rights of her tribe – became a popular figure in the East End, renowned for singing jazz at the Palm Tree. “I get my kicks from meetings with old East Enders,” she confessed enthusiastically, “They’re a tough breed. These people are just like me – they’re Maoris!”
This painting of 1858 by William Beetham shows the Maori Chiefs of Wellington with Dr Featherstone at the time of treaty of Waitanga which established peaceful colonial government in Aotearoa. On the left is Hon Tako Ngatata MLC and in the centre Honiana Te Puni Kokopu, from whom Myra was descended
Taumata, Koro Koro Rd, Petone – “My grandmother had this house built in 1898, she picked this hill so she could see where she was born and where she would be buried. And I was born there November 8th, 1934, and I will be buried there too.”
Myra’s grandmother, Ripeka Love
Myra’s mother, Takau Upoko-o-nga Tinirau Makea Nui Ariki Love, Queen of Rarataonga
Rangitira women of the Te Ati Awa tribe. At the centre is Lady Pomore, standing to her right Romahora, then Grandaunty Mata with Grandma Ripeka Love at the end of the row.
Myra Love in her debutante’s dress – “We are really very posh in the Maori way of thinking!”
Myra Love (1934-2017)
Portraits copyright © Patricia Niven
A Brief History Of Crypts
Malcolm Johnson, author of Crypts of London, offers this brief history of crypts. Malcolm was formerly Rector of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, where he ran a homeless shelter in the crypt.
At St Clement, King Sq
After the Great Fire of 1666, it was decided not to replace thirty-two out of those churches destroyed in the Square Mile. Yet St Paul’s Cathedral and fifty-one churches were rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and others, and almost all of these new buildings were given a crypt of the same extent as the ground floor. This was also true for churches in Westminster and those on the edges of the City such as in Spitalfields, Shoreditch and St Clement, King’s Sq.
What were these spaces intended for? Charity schools? Storage? Meeting rooms? There was no chance of any of these, because the clergy and their vestries soon realised that good money was to be made by charging wealthy parishioners to stack coffins containing their dead family members under the church.
In doing so, they went against the advice and opinions of both architects and others, who doubted the wisdom of burying the dead among the living. In 1552, Bishop Hugh Latimer thought it “an unwholesome thing to bury within the city,” considering that “it is the occasion of great sickness and disease.” Mainly for architectural reasons, Wren and Vanbrugh were also opposed to burial in or close to a church, although when Wren was interred beneath St Paul’s when he died.
In my research, I found that in the eighteenth century most parishes received around seven per cent of their income from interments, although at St James Garlickhythe the average was nearly twenty-seven per cent. All five Westminster parishes had a high burial income by the end of the eighteenth century – around thirty-five per cent of the wardens’ income at St Martin-in-the-Fields and twenty-five per cent at St James Piccadilly.
After the Reformation, burial within a church was seen as a mark of social distinction – the nobility regarding it as their right – but by the mid-seventeenth century the professional classes were also seeing it as a sign of a successful career. Over the next century, doctors, solicitors, high-ranking soldiers and ‘gentlefolk’ frequently left instructions in their wills for intra-mural burial, although some cautioned prudence and economy in arranging it, because fees could be high. Coffins of the clergy were placed in the vault below the altar and the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields allowed Nell Gwyn to be interred in his space there.
Why were families willing to pay large sums for a crypt burial when churchyard fees were much cheaper? Some hoped for an ‘eternal bedchamber’ because they knew that bodies in the churchyard would be dug up after thirty or so years and the bones placed in a charnel house when the space was needed for new burials. Others hoped the congregation worshipping above the crypt would continue to pray for them and many more were apprehensive that body-snatchers might plunder the churchyard. Yet, in crypts, bodies were sometimes tipped out of their coffins so that the lead could be sold together with the metal handles.
Rarely do published histories of our churches mention these undercrofts. Obviously it is possible to visit those churches that have survived and establish precise details of their crypts – where it is not possible to enter, burial registers can give details of size and layout. For the churches that have not survived, the best descriptions of their crypts are often found in the faculties which authorised their destruction, and in the Vestry minutes recording the process of emptying the remains and transferring them to a cemetery. Written accounts are rare, because few people visited these dark, dismal places apart from the sexton.
The lucrative burial income ended abruptly in 1852 when sanitation legislation forbade further interments in crypts and churchyards. Joint-stock cemeteries such as Kensal Green were opened to receive London’s dead and the clergy lost the links with parishioners although they were still financially recompensed, even if the vestries and sextons lost their burial dues. The removal of human remains from crypts began for a variety of reasons – such as demolition of the building, its sale to raise funds or road widening. If the building remained and a new use for the crypt was found, then an appeal for funds was made, such as at St Bride Fleet St in the nineteen-fifties when its museum was equipped from gifts of nearby publishing firms. Other churches have attracted grants from the Lottery fund, statutory bodies, charitable foundations, businesses and individual donors.
The first crypt to be cleared of human remains for use other than storage was in 1915 when the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Dick Sheppard, set up a canteen to welcome men returning from the Front. Two learned reports of the Council for British Archaeology describe the clearance of coffins and remains from the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields in 1984/5. Nearly one thousand bodies were carefully examined and researched. Interment in a crypt obviously preserves a corpse and coffin longer than if it was buried in a churchyard but the state of preservation of those in coffins in Spitalfields’crypt varied from virtually complete, including skin, hair and internal organs to a just sediment of crystal debris being all that remained of the bones. When lead was used, as it was in this crypt after 1813, this preserved the cadaver longer, but if air or water was allowed to penetrate then decomposition was much quicker.
Where were coffins and remains from crypts taken? A minority went to the East London Cemetery, Plaistow, or to the Great Northern London (now New Southgate) Cemetery. Some relatives were allowed to transfer the coffin of a family member to a burial ground of their choice, but most went to Brookwood or the City of London Cemetery, Ilford.
Some two thousand two hundred acres of land owned by Lord Onslow on Woking Common at Brookwood were purchased by the newly-formed London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company. Despite opposition, Royal Assent was given to the London Necropolis Bill on 30th June 1852, but the first funeral was not held until 13th November 1854. Soon afterwards, several Westminster parishes, including St Anne Soho, St Giles-in-the-Fields and St Margaret Westminster, reserved plots there. Coffins and mourners were transported by special trains from a private terminus near Waterloo to the cemetery’s two stations, one for Anglicans and one for others. The Bishop of London was apprehensive that the coffin of ‘some profligate spendthrift’ might be in the same compartment as a respectable member of the Church. A notice in the station refreshment room at Brookwood reads ‘Spirits served here.’
The City of London Cemetery, used by nearly all the City parishes, opened in 1856 and is approximately eight miles north-east of the City. Since then, over forty City parishes have removed their crypt remains to Ilford, which is today one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the country.
Today, around half of London’s crypts have been emptied. Some, such as that of St Martin-in-the-Fields house a restaurant, bookshop and meeting rooms which contribute a very large sum to the Parish Church Council. Others are chapels and columbaria, yet others are museums while – sadly – two which were once homeless centres are now empty. Those with coffins still in place await a use – as at St Clement, King Sq, where David Hoffman took the photographs which accompany this article.
Coffin plates from Holy Trinity, Minories – now demolished
At St Clement, King Sq
The entrance to the family vault of Mr Thomas Gall of King Sq
Crypts of London by Malcolm Johnson is published by the History Press
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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Upon The Fear Of Reptilian Creatures
I believe I was born with a medieval imagination. It is the only way I can explain the explicit gothic terrors of my childhood. Even lying in my cradle, I recall observing the monstrous face that emerged from the ceiling lampshade once the light was turned out. This all-seeing creature, peering at me from above, grew more pervasive as years passed, occupying the shadows at the edges of my vision and assuming more concrete manifestations. An unexpected sound in my dark room revealed its presence, causing me to lie still and hold my breath, as if through my petrified silence I could avert the attention of the devil leaning over my bedside.
When I first became aware of gargoyles carved upon churches and illustrated in manuscripts, I recognised these creatures from my own imagination and I made my own paintings of these scaled, clawed, horned, winged beasts, which were as familiar as animals in the natural world. I interpreted any indeterminate sound or movement from the dark as indicating their physical presence in my temporal existence. Consequently, darkness, shadow and gloom were an inescapable source of fear to me on account of the nameless threat they harboured, always lurking there just waiting to pounce. At this time of year, when the dusk glimmers earlier in the day, their power grew as if these creatures of the shades might overrun the earth.
Nothing could have persuaded me to walk into a dark house alone. One teenage summer, I looked after an old cottage while the residents were on their holiday and, returning after work at night, I had to walk a long road that led through a deep wood without street lighting. As I wheeled my bicycle up the steep hill among the trees in dread, it seemed to me they were alive with monsters and any movement of the branches confirmed their teeming presence.
Yet I discovered a love of ghost stories and collected anthologies of tales of the supernatural, which I accepted as real because they extended and explained the uncanny notions of my own imagination. In an attempt to normalise my fears, I made a study of mythical beasts and learnt to distinguish between a griffin and a wyvern. When I discovered the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Breughel, I grew fascinated and strangely reassured that they had seen the apocalyptic visions which haunted the recesses of my own mind.
I made the mistake of going to see Ridley Scott’s The Alien alone and experienced ninety minutes transfixed with terror, unable to move, because – unlike the characters in the drama – I was already familiar with this beast who had been pursuing me my whole life. In retrospect, I recognise the equivocal nature of this experience, because I also sought a screening of The Exorcist with similar results. Perhaps I sought consolation in having my worst fears realised, even if I regretted it too?
Once, walking through a side street at night, I peered into the window of an empty printshop and leapt six feet back when a dark figure rose up from among the machines to confront my face in the glass. My companions found this reaction to my own shadow highly amusing and it was a troubling reminder of the degree to which I was at the mercy of these irrational fears even as an adult.
I woke in the night sometimes, shaking with fear and convinced there were venomous snakes in the foot of my bed. The only solution was to unmake the bed and remake it again before I could climb back in. Imagine my surprise when I visited the aquarium in Berlin and decided to explore the upper floor where I was confronted with glass cases of live tropical snakes. Even as I sprinted away down the street, I felt the need to keep a distance from cars in case a serpent might be lurking underneath. This particular terror reached its nadir when I was walking in the Pyrenees, and stood to bathe beneath a waterfall and cool myself on a hot day. A green snake of several feet in length fell wriggling from above, hit me, bounced off into the pool and swam away, leaving me frozen in shock.
Somewhere all these fears dissolved. I do not know where or when exactly. I no longer read ghost stories or watch horror films and equally I do not seek out dark places or reptile houses. None of these things have purchase upon my psyche or even hold any interest anymore. Those scaly beasts have retreated from the world. For me, the shadows are not inhabited by the spectral and the unfathomable darkness is empty.
Bereavement entered my life and it dispelled these fears which haunted me for so long. My mother and father who used to turn out the light and leave me to sleep in my childhood room at the mercy of medieval phantasms are gone, and I have to live in the knowledge that they can no longer protect me. Once I witnessed the moment of death with my own eyes, it held no mystery for me. The demons became redundant and fled. Now they have lost their power over me, I miss them – or rather, perhaps, I miss the person I used to be – yet I am happy to live a life without supernatural agency.
Fourteenth century carvings from St Katherine’s Chapel, Limehouse
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Sophie Spielman, Shorthand Typist
Portrait of Sophie Spielman by Sarah Ainslie
Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting ninety-three-year-old Sophie Spielman at her immaculate flat in Treves House, an elegant modernist block at the Whitechapel end of Vallance Rd, designed by Ralph Smorczewski and built by Stillman & Eastwick Field in 1956.
As the most senior resident in the building, where she has lived longer than anyone else, and at such a venerable age, you might expect Sophie to be taking it easy. Yet she has reluctantly found herself the focus of recent national media attention as the spokeswoman and figurehead for the residents of Treves House and the neighbouring Lister House, who are confronted with the prospect of losing their homes as part of Tower Hamlets Council’s plans to demolish and redevelop the properties.
Blessed with natural dignity and possessing a innate sense of decorum, Sophie is an heroic figure who is able to face these current troubles with fortitude, viewing her situation from the perspective of one who has lived a full life and experienced a great deal. In particular, I was fascinated by the pleasing irony that Sophie who was born into an Iranian Jewish family, resident in India, should find herself at home in Whitechapel for the last half century, living among Jewish and Asian neighbours.
Sophie clasped her hands and gave me a world-weary smile, casting her mind back over the long journey which led her to the domestic happiness she found in Whitechapel, before confessing her disappointment that anyone could be so petty as to challenge her right to live out her days in her home of fifty-five years.
“I was born in Bombay but my parents were Iranians. My grandmother was called Rachel and my mother was Leah, they were born in Iran. When my grandfather died, my mother was still very small and so my grandmother brought her to Bombay. Those children that were married stayed in Iran but those that were young came with her to Bombay, where there was a Jewish community known as the Sassoons who were from Iraq. They came to Bombay and they were like the Rothschilds of the East, so there was help there. We stayed there and I went to a Jewish school that was founded by the Sassoons.
When I was older, I worked in the Bombay Telephone Company for about twelve years. I joined as a shorthand typist, but I preferred to work with my hands because that is what I like to do. So I went into the Inspection Department checking all the different parts that go into a telephone.
At that time, India was under British rule and I had very good English. Although I had an English and a Jewish education, I felt closest to the English. My brother went to Canada for a while. When he came back, he said, ‘I’m going to England, do you want to come?’ So I said, ‘Oh I’d love to!’ That was my dream to come to England.
When I came here in 1957, I was first in Stamford Hill but, when I met my husband Nathan Spielman and got married, he already had this flat in Whitechapel. He was moved here in 1959 from Anthony St which was demolished and the residents were all given new flats. He worked in the railways, as a ticket collector at Liverpool St Station. He told me had been involved in the anti-fascist movement and was at the Battle of Cable St in 1936. He passed away in 1982 when my daughter Gloria was nineteen. I only had one child, my one and only – but she has five children!
I worked in Nortons, the suitcase factory, as a secretary in the office. I worked there until I got married and Gloria was born. At first, I took her to nursery and, when she was bit older and went to school, I worked part-time in Hatton Garden, in an office where they received and sold jewellery.
When I first moved into Treves House in 1962, it was all new and modern and I thought it was very nice. Now it is different, the council has neglected it for years, but I do not want to move from here. We had very good neighbours. Most of the original residents have died or moved away, apart from me. There is one tenant still living in the flat that was his grandparents, who were the very first to move in. I have Nora, an Irishwoman next door who is a very good neighbour. She always comes and visits me and asks, ‘Are you alright?’ I still walk down to Whitechapel every day, I have done it since I moved in. It is the only place I know now.
According to what I understand, the council want to pull down all these houses to build new flats, but I am a leaseholder and it has a great many years to go still. So I am fighting, I am trying to find out what is going to happen. I would like them to improve these flats by taking care of the building. They promised to replace the windows and I went to three or four meetings. What happened to that money? I went to the meeting with the Mayor of Tower Hamlets, it was the same thing. They say, ‘Yes, yes,’ but we do not know what is going on behind our backs. I wish they would tell us exactly what they want to do. They do not discuss it with us.”
Sophie in Bombay in 1950
Sophie as a young woman
Nathan & Sophie Spielman
Sophie with her daughter Gloria
Treves House, designed by Ralph Smorkczewski and built by Stillman & Eastwick Field in 1956
Treves House seen from the garden
The Working Artist: The East London Group
Michael Rosen & Emma-Louise Williams write about THE WORKING ARTIST, the exhibition of East London Group paintings they have curated which runs at The Nunnery Gallery in Bow until 17th December. There will be a panel discussion discussing The East London Group, Then & Now featuring Michael Rosen & David Buckman on 15th November.
Rebuilding Bethnal Green, The Victoria by Albert Turpin
There is an interesting contradiction between painting and the city, none so apparent as when anyone attempts to seize scenes, moments or people in the East End. After all, this has been a place of change and movement for hundreds of years and yet a painting is still: a fact accentuated by the way in which we frame it and hang it on the wall.
Any painter wanting to imply stability, certainty or continuity might well have felt at almost any time over the last few centuries that the likes of Whitechapel, Stepney, Bishopsgate or Spitalfields were not ideal subjects. What is more, the constant lure of the rural, the pastoral and the maritime will not be be satisfied by East End streets. Though the Thames could always be relied on for its width, grandeur of a classical nature, it had to be found at Greenwich and Westminster – as Canaletto shows us.
All the more surprising then, that a group of painters established themselves in the late twenties and thirties as being predominantly interested in grabbing this environment. My mother and father, both born in 1919, though great lovers of London, are testament to the idea that if a person wants to feel uplifted or liberated, the places to go were ‘in the country’. The organisers of the Jewish Boys’ Clubs of their time saw it as their duty to get the boys out of the slums and tenements and into tents in Epping Forest or even further afield. This reminds us that the few square miles of dense habitation, industry and trade are not easily typified as the hopeless ‘Babylon’ of nineteenth century journalism. In spite of the poverty, filth and overcrowding, there was aspiration and because of the degradation there was do-goodery. Both forces offered improvement which might express itself in religion, education, sports, the arts or political activity. Some of the buildings that housed my parents’ aspirations still stand: Myrdle St and Globe Rd Primary schools; Central Foundation School and Davenant Foundation; the ‘Brady St’ Boys’ club in Hanbury St (!) and the Bethnal Green Museum.
It would be wrong to characterise John Cooper’s evening classes for painters as some kind of lone fountain irrigating a desert. Thousands of people were flocking to the Yiddish Theatre, attended classes in Toynbee Hall, filled the Whitechapel Library and Gallery. The streets themselves were full of outdoor meetings and rallies calling people to struggle against unemployment, rogue landlords or Fascist aggression.
In the group, one painter in particular was engaged in the locality in another way: politics. Albert Turpin, who would eventually become Mayor of Bethnal Green, was an active member of the Labour Party and in the upheavals of the thirties had taken a public stand against an organisation which sought to divide the East End: the British Union of Fascists. Quite explicitly, the Fascists led by Oswald Mosley tried to harass, threaten and organise against Jews, the most populous and most recent immigrants living in the East End’s Victorian streets and tenements. Because Turpin could see the threat this posed to everyone’s life – not only the lives of Jews – he took an active part in the fight against the Fascists, earning their contempt and hate in the process – a side of Turpin we are able to represent in the exhibition, thanks to Turpin’s family. Visitors can see newspaper cuttings and a poster where these upheavals are played out.
The East London Group is a pre-war phenomenon, but Turpin had much more painting and drawing to do. As a consequence, he saw change, some of it imposed by the effects of the bombing and some by what the planners had in mind. He sketched and painted prefabs, that most temporary and yet unexpectedly persistent of housing. His eye fell on scaffolding and the first high rise blocks. He remembered the entrance to Bethnal Green Station where tragically so many people died in a wartime stampede. – Michael Rosen
Entrance to Bethnal Green tube by Albert Turpin
Old Ford Rd by Harold Steggles
Grove Rd, Bow by Harold Steggles
The East London Group captured the urban landscape in eerily still, detailed paintings. Their works are a meditation on place and the narrative of the rise and fall of the group is a way to grasp the changing face of a city.
Between 2009 and 2011, there was a period of about eighteen months when I was roaming the streets of East London doing some intense looking: housing, old factory buildings, car workshops, disused pubs, an empty hospital, markets, parks, void ground – urban, social places and spaces. Layers of life.
I was making a filmpoem, Under the Cranes (2011), adapted from a play for voices by Michael Rosen. It was about migration to Hackney over several hundred years but also an intervention in the discourse around regeneration, so-called: the kind of regeneration I could see going on everyday in Dalston where we lived: the kind of regeneration which is top-down, in the moment, and certainly not about creating the kind of housing which gives people duration through their lives.
In the film, I was able to show paintings by Leon Kossoff, Jock McFadyen and James Mackinnon, artists who, for me, seemed to find a clear-eyed beauty in the urban landscape. Their gaze inspired me to attempt the same with the camera.
Later, when I first came across paintings of the East London Group at the Townhouse gallery in Spitalfields and in the 2014 Exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow, I made the connection with Kossoff, McFadyen, Mackinnon and the like – these were artists who went out and painted what they saw in the places where they lived and worked in twentieth century London.
In The Working Artist: The East London Group, the new exhibition at The Nunnery which Michael and I have co-curated, we show works by William Coldstream, Elwin Hawthorne, Brynhild Parker, Harold Steggles, Walter Steggles with a special focus on Albert Turpin, the socialist window-cleaner, Cable St activist, fireman and Mayor of Bethnal Green.
Turpin’s stated intention in 1949 was “to show others the beauty in the East End and to record the old streets before they go.” It would be very easy to attribute this statement to clichéd sentiment, yet there is nothing nostalgic in paintings which show us the scrappy backs of things, dilapidation, side-alleys, back-yards, glimpses through bridges, steps winding down to a canal towpath, buildings coming down after the Second World War, pre-fabs and new tower blocks going up.
Turpin’s sketchbooks, on show for the first time, thanks to his daughter, Joan, capture buildings but also people: a man in a cap reading – a fireman; a piano-player at Butlins – “Mum, asleep” and Joan as a child. These are intimate and affecting portraits in which emotion and attitude are caught in the confident line of his drawing.
My own response to the work on show has been to create a soundscape for the exhibition “Excuse me, are you looking for ghosts?” collaged from present day Strassenrausch or street clamour with its mix of diverse communities and living styles, news-reel archive and music. The flow of the city, rising and falling in contrast with the stillness in the paintings.
Albert Turpin’s insistence in his art on the streets and architecture where people live, work and get by, reads to me like an expression of camaraderie for a community which went through privations and upheaval, and deserved something better. Everything has changed. Nothing has changed. – Emma-Louise Williams
At Rest by Albert Turpin. The subject is Jack Simmons (1907-1991) who served in the London Fire Service for the duration of the Second World War
THE WORKING ARTIST, paintings by the East London Group curated by Michael Rosen & Emma-Louise Williams runs at The Nunnery Gallery in Bow until 17th December. Admission Free.
A Plea For The Bethnal Green Mulberry
Next week, Circle Housing & Crest Nicholson who are redeveloping the site of the former London Chest Hospital next to Victoria Park, present a public exhibition of their revised scheme. In spite of a petition launched by the East End Preservation Society and signed by over three thousand people, they are still intent on digging up the ancient Bethnal Green Mulberry, even though there is plenty of room on site for them to move their proposed building by ten metres to spare the venerable tree.
Readers are encouraged to attend the developers’ presentation at Bethnal Green Methodist Church, Approach Rd, E2 9JP on Wednesday 1st November between 2-8pm and put their request in writing that the Mulberry not be dug up. This is very important since any comments recorded must be submitted to the council with the application in November.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION IF YOU HAVE NOT YET DONE SO
Even with revisions, this is a vast overblown development with a very disappointing low level of ‘affordable’ housing, which includes hideous ‘heritage style’ alterations to the listed Chest Hospital building. I call upon Circle Housing & Crest Nicholson to show some respect to the wishes of local people by saving the Mulberry tree and reconsidering their whole development.
Design by Paul Bommer
Growing in the grounds of the former London Chest Hospital next to Victoria Park, the Bethnal Green Mulberry stands today in the middle of a development site for luxury flats. It is a gnarly old specimen which in local lore is understood to be more than four hundred years old and is believed to be the oldest tree in the East End. Centuries ago, these were the gardens of Bishop Bonner’s Palace and it is he who is credited with planting the Mulberry tree.
I find it a poignant spectacle to view this venerable Black Mulberry. Damaged by a bomb in the Second World War, it has charring still visible upon its trunk which has split to resemble a Barbara Hepworth sculpture. Yet, in spite of its scars and the props that are required to support its tottering structure, the elderly tree produces a luxuriant covering of green leaves each spring and bears a reliably generous crop of succulent fruit every summer.
Astonishingly, it seemed that all this history and a Tree Protection Order are insufficient to protect the venerable Mulberry. This spring, developer Crest Nicholson obtained a waiver from Tower Hamlets Senior Arboricultural Officer, Edward Buckton, permitting them to prune it, dig it up and move it to clear the way for their proposed development, even though this has not yet been approved by the council (headquarters at the appropriately named Mulberry Place).
The decision was made under delegated powers by Buckton on the basis of a report commissioned by the developer from planning consultants ‘Tree: Fabrik’ who conveniently dismissed any notion that this Mulberry is a veteran specimen, suggesting instead that it is a more recent planting which might easily survive having its roots and branches pruned, and being moved out of the way this spring. The first that was known of the decision by members of the public and local councillors was when an announcement was posted on a lamppost in Bethnal Green, precluding the possibility of any consultation.
Enter the heroic White Knight of East End conservation Tom Ridge, a former geography teacher and veteran local heritage campaigner, who issued Judicial Review proceedings at his own expense, claiming that the council had acted unlawfully in granting permission to dig up the tree and thus obtaining a stay of execution for the ancient Mulberry. As expert witness, Ridge employed Chartered Arboriculturist Julian Forbes-Laird who was the technical editor of the British Standard for tree protection.
Forbes-Laird’s report as submitted to the High Court makes compelling reading. “I identify the Mulberry as a veteran tree,” he wrote, “I cannot understand how any reasonable arboriculturist could conclude otherwise.” He quotes Gascoigne’s map of 1703 confirming the location of the Bishop’s Hall and even refers to a woodcut in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs published in 1563 that illustrates the Bishop flogging a martyr in his garden beneath the branches of a young tree which he suggests is the Mulberry in question. He describes the commemorative inkwell kept at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, dating from 1915, with a brass plate explaining it was made from a branch of the Mulberry beneath which Bishop Bonner sat while deciding which heretics to execute.
These scraps of evidence confirm a long-standing cultural history attached to the Bethnal Green Mulberry, which was already considered to be ancient over than a century ago. A feeble claim by the developer that concrete found among the roots confirms the recent origin of the tree receives short shrift from Forbes-Laird, who points out that the Romans used concrete to build the Pantheon. He confirms, “there is no evidence that the Mulberry stands upon modern made ground, meaning that it could, indeed, be as old as is believed.”
Most sobering is Forbes-Laird’s conclusion, “Overall, I consider that the intended tree works offer very little chance of the tree’s survival.” Thankfully, Tom Ridge won the Judicial Review and, in a Consent Order sealed by the High Court in July, the council’s decision was quashed. The Council were also ordered to pay Tom Ridge’s costs, although they are refusing to comply with this part of the judgement.
Even now the Bethnal Green Mulberry is not saved.
In their current proposals, Crest Nicholson have plonked a block of luxury flats exactly where the Mulberry grows, which means that Tower Hamlets planning committee may be confronted with a choice between the tree or the building when the application is considered later this year. Yet it would be a simple matter to move the proposed building within the ample grounds of the former London Chest Hospital to allow the Mulberry sufficient space to flourish. With a little imagination, the flats could even be named Mulberry Court.
Tom Ridge, White Knight of East End Heritage Campaigners (Portrait by Lucinda Douglas Menzies)
Illustration of Bishop Bonner scourging a heretic from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 1563
You may like to read my other stories about Mulberries
