Dan Cruickshank, Photographer
Dan Cruickshank took these photographs between 1969 when he first came to Spitalfields and 1977 when he led the first campaign to stop British Land destroying Elder St. “I did it to document the buildings that were here then,” he explained to me in regret, “but sometimes you’d go back the next Saturday and there’d be virtually nothing left.”
Barrowmakers in Wheler St
Baker in Quaker St
Quaker St and Railway Dwellings
Junction of Bethnal Green Rd & Redchurch St
Weaver’s House at the corner of Bacon St & Brick Lane
Weavers’ houses in Sclater St, now demolished
Weavers’ houses in Sclater St, only those in foreground remain
Weavers’ houses in Sclater St, now demolished
Corner of Sclater St & Brick Lane
Houses in Hanbury St, now demolished
Houses in Hanbury St, now demolished
Old House in Calvin St, now demolished
Elaborate doorcase in Wilkes St, now gone
Brushfield St
Brushfield St, buildings on the right now demolished
Brushfield St, buildings on the right now demolished
Buildings in Brushfield St, now demolished
Brushfield St, buildings on the left now demolished
Looking from Brushfield St towards Norton Folgate
Selling Christmas trees in Spital Sq
Spital Sq with St Botolph’s Hall
Folgate St with Dennis Severs’ House in the foreground, houses in the background now demolished
House in Folgate St, now demolished
5 & 7 Elder St during squat to prevent complete demolition by British Land
Partial demolition of 5 & 7 Elder St
Rear of 5 & 7 Elder St during partial demolition
Inside 7 Elder St
Douglas Blain of Spitalfields Trust reads a paper in the loft of 7 Elder St after the roof was removed
Alleyway off Folgate St
Photographs copyright © Dan Cruickshank
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Adam Dant’s New Cries Of Spittelfields
(click on this image to enlarge)
Contributing Artist Adam Dant sent me his latest print, a limited edition hand-tinted woodcut of the NEW CRIES OF SPITTELFIELDS that he finished just last week, showing many of the familiar street characters of our beloved East End neighbourhood. If you would like to buy a copy, drop the artist a line: Adamdant@adamdant.com
Meanwhile, you can attend my illustrated lecture at the Society of Genealogists in Clerkenwell this Thursday 15th March at 2pm, showing images of itinerant traders over the last four hundred years. Click here for tickets
Cries of London 1600, reproduced from Samuel Pepys’ Album © Magdalene College, Cambridge (Click this image to enlarge)
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H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
CLICK TO BUY A COPY OF THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S CRIES OF LONDON FOR £20
At Wood St Stables
Just occasionally, I hear distant horses’ hooves in the street outside when I am sitting writing at my desk in Spitalfields. It always causes me to stop and consider this evocative, once familiar sound, that echoes down through the centuries. When horses were the primary mode of transport, there would have been hundreds of stables in the City, but today there is only one. So I decided to follow the sound of the hooves back to their source in Wood St and pay a visit to the last stable, the home of the City of London Mounted Police – and Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Patricia Niven came along with me.
Passing among the shining glass towers of the City and then entering Wood St Police Station, we were ushered behind the desk, past a sign that said “Level of threat: normal,” down a passageway, through a courtyard and into the stables where the magnificent beasts are kept. Leather harnesses hung from the walls, straw was scattered upon the floor and the acrid smell of the farmyard prevailed here in this quiet enclave, a world apart from the corporate financial culture that surrounds it.
These are the last working horses in the City, out on the street in pairs for four hours at a stretch as they undertake patrols three times a day. Exchanged fortnightly, the troupe of ten is divided equally between here and Bushey Park where they get to run free and where training takes place. Mounted police officers double up as stable hands, cleaning kit and mucking out, grooming and feeding their charges. And, consequently, the stable is a scene of constant activity from seven each morning, when they arrive to wake the horses before setting out on the first patrol at eight thirty.
“I never envisaged, when I joined the police, I’d end up riding a horse,” admitted Sergeant Nick Bailey, greeting us eagerly, “I joined the police to ride motorbikes, but I suppose you could say I found a different horsepower.” Yet, in spite of his alacrity, Sergeant Bailey is a passionate horseman who grew up riding and competed in equestrian events before the demands of police work caused him to choose between his career and sporting endeavours. Now with thirty years service behind him, he came to the City of London to take charge of the mounted police just twelve months ago from Bridgend in Wales, where he set up the equestrian department. “My wife and family are still in Wales, I go back every third week” he confessed with a shrug, yet he was keen to outline his busy year that began with the Lord Mayor’s Show and included student protests, an English Defence League demo, football matches at Watford and Arsenal, and a Heavy Metal festival.
Before the mounted police were created in 1946, horses were drafted in from the cavalry and recently the stable had a visit from blind ninety-seven-year-old who had lead the last cavalry charge in battle – an event which filled Sergeant Bailey with awe. “I can’t imagine what that was like,” he confided, as a vision of a distant harsher world, even if he admitted that “if a bomb went off, we would have horses out on the streets for seven hours at a stretch.”
Sergeant Bailey introduced his four horses in the stalls that morning. Trader, a powerful white stallion quivering with life, reached over to scrutinise us while Little Dave, a smaller dark horse, eyed us from a distance – weary from the traffic patrol that morning. Opposite, Finn, the oldest horse, with ten years service, stood composed and dignified and then Roxie, the only mare, pushed her glossy striped head over the gate to greet us enthusiastically.
There are one hundred and twenty five horses in the Metropolitan Police today where twenty years ago there were over two hundred and fifty. A fact which makes Sergeant Bailey evangelical on behalf of his charges, advocating the horses’ credentials as cheaper and greener than motorcars. “In the Summer, cafe owners bring out a bucket of water for them,” he told me, “People feel safer when they see horses on the street.”
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
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At A & E Batchelor Ltd, Saddlers
Harry Permutt, Master Goldsmith
Harry Permutt, Master Goldsmith
At eighty-two years old, Harry Permutt believes he is the oldest working goldsmith in Hatton Garden. As the grandson of immigrants who made their lives in Petticoat Lane at the beginning of the last century and as one who has learnt his skills over more than sixty years in the Clerkenwell jewellery trade – working his way up to become a master goldsmith – Harry carries an astonishing collection of stories and a rare depth of historical perspective.
Yet Harry’s vision is tinged with melancholy these days, as I discovered when I visited him at his beautiful old workshop in Panther House, Mount Pleasant from which he is being evicted at the end of this month prior to redevelopment for luxury flats. Hidden in a back street at the junction of Grays Inn Rd and Clerkenwell Rd, the attractive towering castle-like structure of Panther House was built by lithographers Malby & Sons in 1905. Harry told me it was built on the site of the madhouse attached to the old Fleet Prison and as long as he can remember – which is around eighty years – it has been used for workshops for small tradesmen and craftworkers. Supplying essential skills to the lucrative jewellery business in Hatton Garden, their activities have defined the identity of this corner of London for centuries but now they are struggling to find space to work.
In spite of the poignant circumstances of my visit to see his atmospheric workshop before he loses it, Harry was able to rise to the occasion magnificently, regaling me with lyrical tales of old Clerkwenwell.
“In Clerkenwell, from Goswell Rd up until Mount Pleasant, I know everything about. Please God! For guys like me, Clerkenwell is known as the ‘Well.’ From the top of St John St to the Angel, go around in a half circle and you’ve got the back way where all the engravers were, you’ve got the silversmiths, the trophy makers, the masonic jewellers and the polishing workshops. All dingy, dirty basements. We have lived in basements like nobody would ever believe. We had fire gilding and mercury gilding in the Goswell Rd on the site where the University of London is now. In Britton St, where all the condemned houses were, Old Joe, one of the polishers I worked with down in Benjamin Hill, he had been born down there. The one room flat that they rented was surrounded with prostitution. It was so colourful, we knew everybody down there by name. This was where the burglars brought their stuff, it goes back to the Dickensian days when you could do anything and get away with anything. It spread out from the City into the Well and we got mixed up with the Sicilians on the one side and the Italians on the other, of which the twain never met. They were rogues, especially just after the War. They brought back a lot of stuff that was illegal and you did whatever work came to hand. You’d never let a job go and you charged accordingly. One of the oldest Italian families, I still work for them. The grandmother she still lives here and her husband was one of the big villains down here in the old days.
My grandparents came into Middlesex St as immigrants from Russia and Poland in 1917. They had four sons who were educated at the Jewish Free School in Strype St, Spitalfields and they all became cabinet makers, including my father, before they went off and did other things. They were such good cabinet makers, they were commissioned to do all the veneers in the lounge saloons on the Queen Mary. One of my uncles was picked for the England Cricket team but he died of tuberculosis.
My grandmother ran a fruit and veg business in Petticoat Lane, she got all the stallholders together and they started to trade into the Spitalfields Market. It was a poor family but my grandparents did very well for themselves,
I failed my eleven-plus and I told my parents I wanted to go to art school. At Central School of Arts, I studied jewellery – mounting, setting and enamelling. Then, because I had family in the business from Russia dealing in diamonds and so forth, my father was coming down here to Clerkenwell and he knew some of the Italian families, so I got introduced down here and I got an apprenticeship.
I started at 144 St John St, facing us used to be the the old LCC block of flats where all the prostitutes used to hang out. After I graduated from Central, the governor said to me, ‘Harry, throw everything out the window and start again from the beginning.’ So I swept floors for a year and made the tea until I graduated up. But I had to break my apprenticeship to do National Service and I got sent to Korea. In 1956, I came back and finished and started to work on my own, running here, there and everywhere. Technically, I was a ‘runner.’ A runner is a ‘jewellery runner,’ you learn how to pick up the nice pieces of jewellery. You ply your trade that way. You go round markets and you go ‘on the knocker,’ house to house. Four o’clock in the morning I used to go to Bermondsey and Camden Passage. You could get the finest pieces of jewellery out of Bermondsey in those days. I used to sell them to the antiques dealer from Macy’s New York.
A ‘runner’ is considered equally knowledgeable to a ‘mounter’ in the jewellery business. You get taught and you pick up how all this works. It’s a shake of hand, that’s how we still do business together among those that know. In doing that, you get a reputation and – thank goodness – I have still got mine, because that’s how I get work.
From 1957, work was so prolific in the jewellery trade I used to share workshops and I got offers to go around the world buying for other people. I never been employed by anybody since my apprenticeship days. I used to do their work first in the back of the workshop in the Clerkenwell Rd and then I would bring my own work in. The old boss there who knew my father, said, ‘Come and work for me!’ but I said to my dad, ‘I’m not going to work for him, he’s untrustworthy,’ which he was. They were a load of crooks. I used to deal in the ‘Garden,’ but I never did much because I don’t like the ‘Garden.’
I am a bench guy and nothing more. I didn’t actually get taught, I taught myself from the stuff I was handling in the old days. I didn’t learn from books, I learnt from hands. There are only about three of us left that can do what I do, I can restore gold and silver, I can do everything but then I don’t do anything modern. I can handle it but I don’t like it, I have my own views.
I will die doing my work at my bench. I love fine art and it is the fascination of what I do that keeps me going, I go into raptures over it. It’s not the value for me, it’s the fascination. When you restore antique jewellery, you’ve got to copy it so that it is exact. I had a friend who was a great artist who taught me me how to copy properly, that was Tom Keating. He took me under his wing. He used to say to me, ‘Harry, if you are going to copy something, be exact and you can’t go wrong.’
I’m working and working and I’m coming up to eighty-two and I’m staying healthy. My family have always been associated with this side of London, they call it the ‘East End.’ Let it be the ‘East End’ but it’s bloody marvellous. We all grew up here, we are all ‘toe-rags’ for want of a better word.”
Harry works on a pair of earrings with his French pipe
Kevin Cordery, Polisher & Plater shares the workshop with Harry
Panther House was built in 1905
Panther House in Mount Pleasant is to be redeveloped for luxury flats
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The Doors Of Old London
The door to Parliament
Look at all the doors where the dead people walked in and out. These are the doors of old London. Some are inviting you in and some are shutting you out. Doors that lead to power and doors that lead to prison. Doors that lead to the parlour, doors that lead to the palace, and doors that lead to prayer. These are the doors that I found among hundreds of glass slides once used for magic lantern shows by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, many more than a century old, and housed today at the Bishopsgate Institute.
Looking at life through a doorway, we are all either on the way in or on the way out. Like the door to your childhood home that got sold long ago, each one pictured here is evidence of the transient nature of existence, reminding you that you cannot go back through the portal of time.
Yet there is a powerful enigma conjured by these murky pictures of old doors, most of which will never open again. Like the pauper or the lost soul condemned to wander the streets, we cannot enter to learn what lies behind these doors of old London. But a closed door is an invitation to the imagination and we can wonder and dream, entering those hidden spaces in our fancy.
London has always been a city of doors, inviting both the curiosity and the suspicion of the passerby. In each street, there is a constant anticipation of people popping out, regurgitated onto the street by the building, and the glimpse to be snatched of the interior before the door closes again.
I cannot resist the notion that every door contains a mystery and all I need is a skeleton key. Then we can set out to explore as we please, going in one door and out another, until we have passed through all the doors of old London.
The entrance to the Carpenters’ Hall
The doors of Lambeth Palace
Door in the cloisters in Westminster Abbey
The door to the chamber of Little Ease at the Tower of London.
In St Benet’s Church, Paul’s Wharf.
Back door of 33 Mark Lane
Back door to Lancaster House.
In Crutched Friars.
14 Cavendish Sq.
The door to 10 Downing St
39a Devonshire St.
The door to the House of Lords
Wren doorway, Kensington Palace.
The door to Westminster Abbey
St Dunstan’s in the West
The entrance to Christ Church, Greyfriars.
The door to St Bartholomew’s, Smithfield
Temple Church
The Watchhouse, St Sepulcre’s, Smithfield.
Door by Inigo Jones at St Helen’s Bishopsgate.
Prior Bolton’s Door at St Bartholomew the Great.
At the Tower of London
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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East End Women In Colour
These portraits were all taken by Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie for Spitalfields Life over the past eight years. You can see them in Sarah’s exhibition WOMEN OF THE EAST END AT WORK which runs at the Brady Centre in Hanbury St until 30th March as part of Women’s History Month.
Sue Venning, Proprietor, G Kelly Pie & Mash, Roman Rd
Elfet, Garage Mechanic, Three Colts Lane
Anjum Ishtaq, Heba Women’s Project, Brick Lane
Mrs Mustapha, Nazal Dry Cleaners, Hackney Rd
Sandra Esqulant, Publican at The Golden Heart, Spitalfields, and Molly
Shakala, Customer Assistant at Favorite Fried Chicken
Fatima Chowdury, Jumara Noor Eli and Sumsun Nahar Shirna at Mahir Sarees in Bethnal Green
Arful Nessa, Home Machinist, Spitalfields
Laura Porter, Powerlifter, Bethnal Green
Carol Burns, Manager, C.E. Burns Waste Paper Merchants, Spitalfields
Chloe Robertson, Electroplater at Margolis Silver, London Fields
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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The Principal Operations Of Weaving
These copperplate engravings illustrate The Principal Operations of Weaving reproduced from a book of 1748 in the collection at Dennis Severs House. Many of these activities would have been a familiar sight in Spitalfields three centuries ago.
Ribbon Weaving
Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate House, Spitalfields, E1
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