Roy Reed At Billingsgate Market
Roy Reed took these pictures of Billingsgate Market when he was a twenty-three-year-old documentary photography student at the London College of Printing in 1975 and they are seeing the light of day for the first time now.
Roy’s enthusiasm for the subject was greater than the interest of the student-journalist who asked him to take the pictures for a project on London’s dying markets. “When I suggested we get there early, she said, ‘See you there at eight,'” Roy recalled, rolling his eyes significantly. In the event, Roy got there at seven-thirty on a February morning and took his pictures just here as business was winding up at the nocturnal market. Forty years later, any disappointment Roy might harbour that the project was never written up and published is outweighed by his satisfaction in having taken these rare photographs of a lost world.
“It was nice chatting with the porters,” Roy remembered fondly, “No-one seemed to mind having their photograph taken – except maybe the guy in the tweed hat, you can see him looking at me suspiciously in the picture.” Taken at the time the market was already due to leave its ancient location next to London Bridge, Roy’s lively photographs comprise a fascinating record of a seemingly recent era in market life that grows increasingly remote.
Photographs copyright © Roy Reed
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Charles Ginner In Bethnal Green
In today’s extract from my forthcoming book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century I need your help to identify the exact location of this painting in Bethnal Green. Click here to preorder a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR
Bethnal Green Allotment (Courtesy of Manchester City Art Gallery)
How neatly aligned are the leeks in this allotment painted by Charles Ginner in 1943. They are almost as tidily organised as the council flats, assembled in towering brick mansions and each dwelling connected to its neighbour by a balcony, thus granting tenants the opportunity of both privacy and community as they feel disposed. And how convenient for the residents to have an allotment on the doorstep, encouraging them to spend their leisure time in the fresh air as well as ensuring a regular supply of fresh vegetables and soft fruit in season. A prominently placed Union Jack flutters over the allotment for all to see, serving to rouse the patriotic spirit of the gardeners and encourage them to contribute to the war effort through their horticultural labours. Observe the nettles on the right, opposing the well-ordered vegetables on the left. We know which is going to prevail.
When this picture was commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, Charles was in his mid-sixties and a veteran Official War Artist of two world wars. Born in Cannes to British parents, he made London his home from 1910. Starting out as a young painter in France, his inspirations were Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne, but in London he joined the Camden Town Group. He shared their concern with representing everyday life and adopted their New Realism for which he wrote the manifesto, yet he brought his own post-Impressionist sensibility to it, as evidenced by his use of thick paint and bright colours.
Fellow artist Marjorie Lilly observed Charles at work at this time, noting his painstaking method, by which he “drew in his picture, faintly but carefully, then applied a thin colour wash of approximately the right colours, using turpentine so that it dried quickly. Then he started his real painting with a quantity of rather small, flat brushes and in his methodical way working from left to right across the canvas, finishing the picture in one very thick coat of paint. His aim was to complete this second coat without any corrections.”
Celebrated for his street scenes in the West End of London, Charles also painted street markets and circuses, before travelling north to portray industrial scenes, factory interiors and hospital wards. “Each age has its landscape, its atmosphere, its cities, its people. Realism, loving Life, loving its Age, interprets its Epoch by extracting from it the very essence of all it contains of great or of weak, of beautiful or of sordid, according to the individual temperament,” he wrote in 1919, “Realism is thus not only a present intimate revelation of its own time, but becomes a document for future ages. It attaches itself to history.”
Bethnal Green Allotment is a fine example of his meticulous technique and composition, dignifying the commonplace through authoritative and sympathetic representation, and delighting in a harmonious image of social order. A nineteenth century street can be seen in the background but Charles chose to view the East End as a location of recent social improvement, looking from the foreground of a communal garden.
Self portrait by Charles Ginner (1878–1952) Courtesy of Tate Gallery
Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular
John Thomas Smith’s Antient Topography
Bethelem Hospital with London Wall in Foreground – Drawn June 1812
Two centuries ago, John Thomas Smith set out to record the last vestiges of ancient London that survived from before the Great Fire of 1666 but which were vanishing in his lifetime. You can click on any of these images to enlarge them and study the tender human detail that Smith recorded in these splendid etchings he made from his own drawings. My passion for John Thomas Smith’s work was first ignited by his portraits of raffish street sellers published as Vagabondiana and I was delighted to spot several of those familiar characters included here in these vivid streets scenes of London long ago.
Bethel Hospital seen from London Wall – Drawn August 1844
Old House in Sweedon’s Passage, Grub St – Drawn July 1791, Taken Down March 1805
Old House in Sweedon’s Passage, Grub St – Drawn July 1791, Taken Down March 1805
London Wall in Churchyard of St Giles’ Cripplegate – Drawn 1793, Taken Down 1803
Houses on the Corner of Chancery Lane & Fleet St – Drawn August 1789, Taken Down May 1799
Houses in Leadenhall St – Drawn July 1796
Duke St, West Smithfield – Drawn July 1807, Taken Down October 1809
Corner of Hosier Lane, West Smithfield – Drawn April 1795
Houses on the South Side of London Wall – Drawn March 1808
Houses on West Side of Little Moorfields – Drawn May 1810
Magnificent Mansion in Hart St, Crutched Friars – Drawn May 1792, Taken Down 1801
Walls of the Convent of St Clare, Minories – Drawn April 1797
Watch Tower Discovered Near Ludgate Hill – Drawn June 1792
An Arch of London Bridge in the Great Frost – Drawn February 5th 1814
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana
Dorothy Bishop in Bethnal Green
Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. Click here to preorder your copy
Looking towards the City of London from Morpeth School, 1961
This painting shows the view from the Art room at the top of the school in Bethnal Green where Dorothy Bishop taught for twenty years. It was a formative experience that Dorothy treasured and this painting – which her friend Ruth Richardson kindly brought to my attention – is one of only a few pictures of hers that are known to exist. Although she painted throughout her life, she did not consider herself a professional artist.
Born in Brockley, Dorothy lived with her parents, her elder sister and younger brother for most of her life. After training as an Art teacher, she taught at a school in the north west of England for the duration of the war, returning south to live in Harefield, Uxbridge with her parents afterwards. In 1947, Dorothy took a job teaching evening classes Stewart Headlam Recreational Evening Institute in Morpeth Street, an employment which was to occupy her until 1968. Recording her memory of these years, Dorothy wrote a diary of her impressions of the people and the place from which we include these excerpts.
“I was there for twenty-one years and it was one of the best things in my life. Now I am old and I must lead a quiet life, I would give much to be back at Stewart Headlam School. I really loved the cockney boys and girls, especially the wit and vitality of the boys. The whole atmosphere was full of life and rough kindness. I loved the wildness of the boys, once it had snowed and they made for me with snowballs and I saw their dark eyes dancing with joy, shining in the lamplight. They did enjoy things. The layabout boys tended to come to Art as in football training you had to do something, whereas in Art you could just sit and exercise your wit on the teacher and thus show off to your friends. The girls then were almost a different tribe and provided me often with members of the class who would work and were also friendly. They always supported me in any trouble with the boys and, on the whole, sex solidarity was more powerful than class solidarity.”
“The class was from 7:30pm to 9:30pm with a quarter of an hour’s break to go to the canteen for a cup of tea. The second half of the class was the most difficult as the boys would become restless, even to throw pencils. Sometimes I was utterly exhausted at the end and thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’ but then I thought, ‘Why should they drive me out?’ also I really loved them and there were some gentle quiet boys and girls who would talk to me. The next week they would be quite different and ask, ‘Did we upset you, Miss? We was only having a bit of a giggle.’”
“I was not approved of by the L.C.C. inspectors. Once they found my class copying Mickey Mouse and painting him in bright colours. I told them I could not change the taste of Bethnal Green for such things, but did not add – as I thought – that it would be impertinent to try to do so. In their report they said I was ‘defeatist’. I got a letter which said, ‘While your qualifications remain at their present level you are not suitable for employment by the L.C.C.” I was devastated. I was not terrific but I had had a full art training. As to drawing Mickey Mouse, the Pop Artists were doing this a few years later.”
Dorothy Bishop (1913-2005)
Painting copyright © Estate of Dorothy Bishop
(With thanks to Esther North, Dorothy’s niece)
Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular
Lost Spitalfields
Looking towards Spitalfields from Aldgate East
London can be a grief-inducing city. Everyone loves the London they first knew, whether as the place they grew up or the city they arrived in, and everyone loses it. As the years pass, the city bound with your formative experience changes, bearing less and less resemblance to the place you discovered. Your London is taken from you. Your sense of loss grows until eventually your memory of the London you remember becomes more vivid than the London you see before you and you become a stranger in the place that you know best. This is what London can do to you.
In Spitalfields, the experience has been especially poignant in recent years with the redevelopment of the Market and the demolition of the Fruit & Wool Exchange. Yet these photographs reveal another Spitalfields that only a few people remember, this is lost Spitalfields.
Spital Sq was an eighteenth century square linking Bishopsgate with the Market that was destroyed within living memory, existing now only as a phantom presence in these murky old photographs and in the fond remembrance of senior East Enders. On the eastern side of Spitalfields, the nineteenth century terraces of Mile End New Town were erased in ‘slum clearances’ and replaced with blocks of social housing while, to the north, the vast Bishopsgate Goodsyard was burned to the ground in a fire that lasted for days in 1964.
Yet contemplating the history of loss in Spitalfields sets even these events within a sobering perspective. Only a feint pencil sketch of the tower records the Priory of St Mary which stood upon the site of Spital Sq until Henry VIII ‘dissolved’ it and turned the land into his artillery ground. Constructing the Eastern Counties Railway in the eighteen-thirties destroyed hundreds of homes and those residents who were displaced moved into Shoreditch, creating the overcrowded neighbourhood which became known as the Old Nichol. And it was a process that was repeated when the line was extended down to Liverpool St. Meanwhile, Commercial St was cut through Spitalfields from Aldgate to Shoreditch to transport traffic more swiftly from the docks, wreaking destruction through densely inhabited streets in the mid-nineteenth century.
Look back at these elegiac photos of what was lost in Spitalfields before your time, reconcile yourself to the loss of the past and then brace yourself for the future that is arriving.
Spital Sq, only St Botolph’s Hall and number 37 survive today
Spital Sq photographed in 1909
Church Passage, Spital Sq, 1733, photographed in 1909 – only the market buildings survive.
17 Spital Sq, 1725
25 Spital Sq, 1733
23 Spital Sq, 1733
20 Spital Sq, 1723
20 Spital Sq, 1723
20 Spital Sq, 1732
32 Spital Sq, 1739
32 Spital Sq, 1739
5 Whites Row, 1714
6/7 Spring Walk, 1819
Buxton St, 1850
Buxton St, 1850
Former King Edward Institution, 1864, Deal St
36 Crispin St, 1713
7 Wilkes St, 1722
10 & 11 Norton Folgate, 1810 – photographed in 1909
Norton Folgate Court House, Folgate St, photographed in 1909
52 & 9a Artillery Passage, 1680s
Bishopsgate Goods Station, 1881
Shepherd’s Place arch, 1820, leading to Tenter St – photographed 1909
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Lawrence Gowing In Mare St
Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. Click here to preorder your copy
Mare St, 1937
“I set to work at once on the flat roof of a furniture shop facing the corner of Dalston Lane (to the right of the picture) where my father and his father before him had his drapery business, until it failed shortly before in competition with the multiple draper down the road,” wrote Lawrence Gowing (1918-91), “I had lately helped behind the cash desk, not all dependably, at the closing-down sale… The next tenants who had failed in their turn, covered the fascia, which was inscribed in gold on brown glass, R.H. Gowing & Son, The Busy Corner.”
Painted when Lawrence was just nineteen years old, this painting embodies the moment when his artistic career took off and carried him away from the East End forever. His grandfather Robert Henry Gowing had opened the drapers’ shop at 419 Mare Street (on the far right of the painting) in the nineteenth century and lived above the business, but Lawrence’s father, Horace Gowing bought a house in Stamford Hill where he brought up his family. Lawrence was sent away to a Quaker boarding school at Colwall in Herefordshire where art teacher Maurice Feild recognised his ability and encouraged the young artist to paint landscapes in the open air.
When Lawrence returned to London after failing his school certificates, his father arranged for him to become an insurance clerk but, through an introduction by Maurice Feild to William Coldstream, Kenneth Clarke, Director of the National Gallery bought one of Lawrence’s paintings and, fortunately, this was sufficient for Lawrence’s father to permit his son to pursue a career as a painter. A photograph of the time shows him as pale faced young man in a felt hat, nicely dressed in a well cut tweed jacket and trousers, wielding a paintbrush and poised behind an easel in the open air.
William Coldstream persuaded Lawrence that, “as the existence of painting depended on people wishing for it… it should represent subjects of interest to them,” and the result was this picture of Mare Street undertaken for an exhibition of views of London at the Storran Gallery in Albany Courtyard, Piccadilly in 1938. Lawrence adopted the broad perspective to which he had become accustomed in painting rural landscapes and employed the technique that Maurice Feild taught him, of cutting a rectangular frame from a cigarette packet and looking through it to establish a composition. Subsequently, when the work was shown three years later at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford as part of an exhibition of paintings by the Euston Road Group, the critic Clive Bell acclaimed it as “the surprise of a surprising exhibition.”
In later years, Lawrence revealed an ambivalence about the picture. “My own purpose was not elegant,” he wrote, ”I privately thought of the subdued but respectful manner in which I painted as in some way identifying with people deprived of the fruits of their labour, among whom I should have counted the entire population of Hackney. I think a debonair, failed draper-master was regarded as more laudable than a successful one, but I took my father no more seriously, alas, than most sons.”
Irrespective of Lawrence’s questioning of his own artistic motives in retrospect, his choice of subject matter, painting a location that was familiar to him in childhood and of major significance for his father and grandfather, memorialised his own family history. The picture counterbalances a sense of departure with a private elegy for the lives of previous generations. Yet the irony is that it was the closure of the Gowing family drapery business which granted Lawrence the opportunity to leave and seek an artistic career instead.
Mare St today
419 Mare St, formerly R.H. Gowing & Son, The Busy Corner
Lawrence Gowing’s painting reproduced courtesy of Jonathan Clarke Fine Art
Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular
Old Signs Of Spitalfields
Commit no Nuisance
I am the keeper of the old signs in Spitalfields. I have embraced it as my self-appointed duty, because although many are “dead” and others have become “ghosts,” disappearing into ether, they are all of interest to me. By “dead” signs, I mean those that no longer have a function, where their useful life is over, and by “ghost” signs, I refer to the next stage in the afterlife of signage where the text fades into illegibility until eventually no trace remains.
Some old signs are prominently placed and some are hidden in obscure corners but, irrespective of their locations, their irrelevance has rendered them invisible – yet I welcome them all into my collection. The more shabby and disregarded, the more I like them, because, as the passing years have taken away their original purpose, these signs have become transformed into poetry. In many cases, the people whom these notices address are long gone, so unless I am there to pay attention to these redundant placards and grant them dignity, they can only talk to themselves like crazy old folk rambling in the dark.
Given that the street name was altered generations ago, who now requires a sign (such as you will find at the junction with St Matthew’s Row) to remind them that Cheshire St was formerly Hare St, just in case of any confusion? I doubt if anyone can remember when it was Hare St. And yet I cannot deny the romance of knowing this older name, recalling the former hare marsh at the end of the street.
Ever since someone pointed out to me that “Refuse to be put in this basket” could be interpreted as an instruction to reject being placed in the basket yourself, the literal netherworld implied by signs has captivated me. Now when I see the sign outside the travel agent in Brick Lane with the image of Concorde, I yearn to go in and ask to buy a ticket for Concorde as if – through some warp in reality – the sign was a portal inviting me to a different world where Concorde is still flying and this office in Spitalfields is the exclusive agent. I am fascinated by the human instinct to put up signs, craving permanent declarations and desiring to accrete more and more of them, whilst equally I recognise it is in the survival instinct of city dwellers that we learn to exclude all the signs from our consciousness, if we are to preserve our sanity.
To my mind, there is an appealing raffish humour which these old signs acquire through longevity, when they cock a snook at us with messages which the passage of time has rendered absurd. “Commit no Nuisance” painted discreetly in Fournier St on the side of Christ Church, Spitalfields, has long been a cherished favourite of mine. I wonder what genius came up with this notion, which if it were effective would surely be emblazoned on every street in the world. It could solve many of the problems of humanity at a stroke. Although, unfortunately, it does rely upon a certain obedient compliance from those most likely to offend, who are also those most unlikely to pay attention. In fact, I am reliably informed that this sign is actually employing the language of euphemism to instruct customers of the Ten Bells not urinate against the church wall. Almost faded into illegibility today, with pitiful nobility, “Commit no Nuisance,” speaks in a polite trembling whisper that is universally ignored by those passing in Commercial St.
Even in the face of evidence to the contrary, signs can still propose a convincing reality, which is why it is so perplexing to see those for businesses that no longer exist. They direct me to showrooms, registered offices and departments which have gone, but as long as the signs remain, my imagination conjures the expectation of their continued existence. These old signs speak of the sweatshops and factories that defined the East End until recently, and they talk to me in the voices of past inhabitants, even over the hubbub of the modern city. Such is the modest reward to be drawn from my honorary role as the keep of old signs in Spitalfields.
Generations have passed since Cheshire St was known as Hare St.
This sign at the entrance to Dray Walk in the Truman Brewery, closed twenty years ago, was once altered from “Truman’s” to “Truman Ltd” when the company was sold, and, with due respect, the name of successive company secretaries was updated in stencilled lettering. These considerations are mere vanities now upon a dead sign surrounded by ads for the shops and bars that occupy Dray Walk today.
Travel agent on Brick Lane offering flights on Concorde.
Steam department works office in Fashion St.
Today’s top prices at the former scrap metal dealer in Vallance Rd.
Incised on the side of Christ Church Spitalfields: In case of fire apply for the men of the engine house and ladders at the Station House, No 1 Church Passage, Spital Square. 1843. A precaution adopted after the great fire of 1836.
No more enamelling on Brick Lane.
No more veneers on Great Eastern St.
Car Park on Petticoat Lane.
Registered Office in Commercial St.
Charlie’s Motors once offered services from £30 in Brady St.
On Christ Church, Spitafields: All applications about Marriages, Burials & c. at this church must be made to Mr Root. Note the reference to Church St – renamed Fournier St in the nineteenth century.
Car Spares on Three Colts Lane.
On Commercial St, “Woollen” overpainted onto “Glass Globes”
In Aldgate, Ben Eine adorns Stick ‘Em Up! sandwich bar.
Off Charlotte Rd, a courteous hand directs you to non-existent showrooms.
Diaphanous oblivion on Commercial St.
