At Stephen Walters & Sons, Silkweavers
The Huguenots of Spitalfields have organised a visit to Stephen Walters & Sons, Silkweavers, in Sudbury on 18th July. For details email bookings@huguenotsofspitalfields.org
Joseph Walters of Spitalfields by Thomas Gainsborough
When Julius Walters of Stephen Walters & Sons says, “I am just a weaver,” it is a masterpiece of understatement, because he is a ninth generation weaver and the custodian of the venerable family business founded by his ancestor Joseph Walters in Spitalfields in 1720, which was moved to Suffolk by his great-great-great-great-grandfather Stephen Walters in the nineteenth century – where today they continue to weave exemplary silk for the most discerning clients internationally, building upon the expertise and knowledge that has been accumulated over all this time. This is the company that wove the silk for the Queen’s coronation robes and for Princess Diana’s wedding dress.
Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Joseph Walters was there to greet us when I arrived at the long finely-proportioned brick silk mill overlooking the green water meadows at the edge of Sudbury, where his ninth generation descendant Julius came down the stairs to shake my hand. Blushing to deny any awareness of the family resemblance, that his proud secretary was at pains to emphasise, he chose instead to point out to me the willows nearby that had been felled recently – as a couple are each year – for the manufacture of cricket bats.
We convened around a long wooden counter in a first floor room where the luxuriously coloured strike offs – as the samples are called – were laid out, glowing in the soft East Anglian light. There is such exquisite intricacy in these cloths that have tiny delicate patterns woven into their very construction, drawing the daylight and delighting the eye with their sensuous tones. Yet lifting my gaze, I could not resist my attention straying to the pigeon holes that lined the room, each one stacked with patterned silks of every hue and design. A curious silence resided here, yet somewhere close by there was a centre of loud industry.
“Everything we do comes from somewhere…” interposed Julius Walters enigmatically, as he swung open a door and that unmistakeably-appealing smell of old leather bindings met my nostrils. There were hundreds of volumes of silk samples from the last two centuries stacked up in there, comprising thousands upon thousands of unique jewel-like swatches still fresh and bright as the day they were made. Some of these books, often painstakingly annotated with technical details in italic script, comprised the life’s work of a weaver and all now bear panoramic witness to the true colours of our predecessors’ clothing. A vast memory bank woven in cloth, all available to be reworked for the present day and brought back to new life.
Spellbound by this perspective in time, I awoke to the clamour of the mill as we descended a staircase, passing through two glass doors and collecting ear plugs, before entering the huge workshop filled with looms clattering where new silk cloths were flying into existence. Here I stood watching the lush flourishes of acanthus brocades and tiny complex patterns for ties appear in magical perfection as if they had always existed, yet created by the simple principle of selecting how the weft crosses each thread of the warp, whether above or below. Although looms are mechanised now, each still retains its Jacquard above, the card that designates the path of every thread – named after Joseph Marie Jacquard who invented this device in 1804, which became so ubiquitous that his name has now also become both the term for the loom and for any silk cloth that has a pattern integrated into the weave.
With the bravura of a showman and the relish of an enthusiast, Julius led us on through more and more chambers and passages, into a silk store with countless coloured spools immaculately sorted and named – crocus and rose and mud. Then into a vaporous dye plant where bobbins of white thread came out strawberry after immersion in bubbling vats of colour. Then into a steaming plant where rollers soften the cloth to any consistency. Then into the checking office where every inch is checked by eye, and finally into the despatch office where the precious silken goods are wrapped in brown paper and weighed upon a fine red scales.
There are so many variables in silk weaving, so many different skills and so much that could go wrong, yet all have become managed into a harmonious process by Stephen Walters & Sons over nine generations. In his time, Julius has introduced computers to track every specification of ten of thousands of orders a year – one every five minutes – created by so may short runs. New technology has provided a purifier which uses diamonds to cleanse dye from the water that eventually returns to the water meadows, renewing the water course that brought his ancestors from Spitalfields to Suffolk one hundred and fifty years ago.
“All my school holidays and spare time were spent at the mill – but then I went away, and came back again.” confided Julius quietly as we made our farewells, “With eight generations behind you, it changes the way you approach your life. It’s not about this year, it’s about managing the company from one generation to the next, so you deal with your employees and your customers differently.”
Now you know what it means when Julius Walters says, “I am just a weaver.”
Dobby Weaving, 1900.
Aaron Offord, Machine Operator
Warping in the early twentieth century
Vikki Meuser, Warping in the early twenty-first century
Employees in 1966
Weaving umbrella silk in the nineteen fifties
Preparing skeins of silk for weaving the coronation robes, 1952
Weaving the silk for the coronation robes, 1952
Staff photograph 1949, Bernard Walters (grandfather of Julius Walters) sits second from right in front row, with his sister Winnie on his left and Mill Manager, Bill Parsons on his right
You may also enjoy these other stories of silk
At Anna Maria Garthwaite’s House
Anna Maria Garthwaite, Silk Designer
Charles Dickens in Spitalfields
Charles Dickens’ visit to a silk warehouse
Phil Maxwell At Watney Market
The markets of the East End tend to divide between those for recreational shopping at weekends and those which are weekday and utilitarian, where people seek the essentials of life at the keenest prices. Both are interesting in different ways, yet the recreational markets tend to get photographed much more than the utilitarian ones, which makes Contributing Photographer Phil Maxwell‘s pictures of Watney Market over the last thirty years especially fascinating.
Once one of the East End’s largest, Watney Market boasted an early branch of Sainsburys in 1881 – selling cheese and salt bacon to dockers – and by 1900 it was claimed there were a hundred stalls and a hundred shops. By 1928, the number of businesses had more than doubled, drawing protests from nearby churches for trading on Sundays. Yet by the sixties it was in decline and Tony Bock photographed the last days of the old market before it was redeveloped into its current form in the eighties.
Watney Market is a pedestrianised precinct now, creating an uninterrupted theatre of human life with a lively immersive atmosphere where locals feel free to linger, enjoying the socialising and banter for which East End markets are justly famous.
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
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Phil Maxwell in Bethnal Green Rd
The Artists Of Headway East
Operating for the last ten years under the auspices of Headway East, SUBMIT TO LOVE STUDIOS is a collective of self-taught artists who have all survived brain injuries. This week they are opening a shop at 93 Kingsland Rd, E2 8AG, for five days from Monday until Friday with an exhibition of works for sale and a range of activities daily.
Errol Drysdale – ‘In my mind, Art is a Godsend. It’s a peaceful thing to do.’
Jon Barry
Sandra St Hilaire – ‘I enjoy creating my Art work as I didn’t know I could draw before.’
Sam Jevon – ‘I only discovered Art after my accident, I find I have a lot of concentration and patience.’
Sean – ‘I just enjoy doing it, I’d never done it before. I don’t think about it too much. For some reason I enjoy doing oil pastels’
Brian Searle – ‘Art is about learning through opportunities when accidents come along – learning how to take that opportunity and make Art out of it. In my artist’s statement, I call it a ‘happy-accident style.’ That’s when the best Art comes along – through happy accidents.’
Nicholas Mayers – ‘Art work is a funny thing. However, you make it up as you go along.’
Cecil Waldron
Naila Ai
Chris Miller
Freddie Irshad – ‘Each short or long project I do gives me ideas for my next project and helps me explore the hidden talent within myself. Art is something I used to run away from, but thanks to a friend I was brought back into the Art room’
Chippy Aiton
Shinobu Soya – ‘I come in here, I don’t think about anything I just do it.’
Sandra Lott – ‘At 57 age I finally had to sketch and succeed at last – Garden Landscaping, Tree Native Plants, Florals, Herbs.’
Tirzah Mileham – ‘I love Art. It helps me do things of how I’m feeling, and drawing or making things I like, and also for my family.’
Peter Lawrence
Tony Allen – ‘I do love Art, you can do absolutely anything you want as long as you don’t go overboard. You get a chance to put down things you think of and share it with everyone.’
Stephen Staunton
Mark Taylor – ‘I lose myself in painting, it makes me more relaxed, it makes me concentrate. The confidence it gives me when I see the end product is unbelievable.’
Joseph Hector
Richard Symes – ‘It’s a great place to come to, in my case it really tests my concentration, it’s a place where I can practise getting things done.’
Mark Bishop
Theresa Malcolm – ‘Even though I find it frustrating sometimes, I really enjoy seeing the finished piece.’
Richard Moss
SUBMIT TO LOVE STUDIOS at 92 Kingsland Rd, E2 8AG – 8th-15th May, 11am – 7pm
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Miriam Lantsbury, Headway East
In the Kitchen At Headway East
Chris Miles’ East End
Chris Miles contacted me from Vancouver Island, where he describes himself as a Londoner in exile. ‘In the early seventies, I lived as a recently-graduated student in the East End, firstly on Grove Rd and then on Lauriston Rd above a supermarket,’ he explained and sent me his splendid photographs. Published for the first time today, mostly were taken around Bethnal Green, Roman Rd and Mile End, and Chris & I welcome identification of precise locations from eagle-eyed readers.
George Davis is Innocent, Mile End Rd
Linda ‘n Laura
Getting a loaf, Stepney Green
S Kornbloom, Newsagent & Confectioner, Jubilee St
Corner Shop Groceries & Provisions, Stepney Way
Ronchetti’s Cafe, Piano’s & Kitchen Chairs Wanted
Snacks & Grills
The Bell Dining Rooms, Lot 63 Buildings at back
Leslies Restaurant, Fresh Up with your Meal
Harry’s Cafe, Teas & Snacks, Breakfasts & Dinners
Valente’s Cafe, Hackney Rd
Cafe Restaurant
Dinkie
Station Cafe
Fish Bar
J Kelly, No Prams or Trollie’s, Please
G Kelly
Charlie & Mick’s Cafe
Menu at Charlie & Mick’s Cafe
John Pelican
Joe’s Saloon – ‘We cater for long and short hair styles’
M Evans & Sons, Garn Dairy
Marion’s, Blouses, Trouser Suits, Smock Dresses, Ect.
Sunset Stores
N Berg, Watch & Clock Repairs
S Grant, High Class Tailor, Seamens Outfitter
Littlewood Brothers Ltd, Domestic Stores, Grocery & Hardware
J Galley & Sons, Established 1901
Henry Freund & Son, Established 1837
Rito for Better Roof Repairs
Common Market NO
Alan Enterprises Ltd, L & R Ostroff Ltd, Brick Lane
Photographs copyright © Chris Miles
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A Walk In Long Forgotten London
If you got lost in the six volumes of Walter Thornbury’s London Old & New you might never find your way out again. Published in the eighteen-seventies, they recall a London which had already vanished, in atmospheric engravings enticing the viewer to visit the dirty, shabby, narrow labyrinthine streets leading to Thieving Lane, by way of Butcher’s Row and Bleeding Heart Yard.
Butcher’s Row, Fleet St, 1800
The Old Fish Shop by Temple Bar, 1846
Exeter Change Menagerie in the Strand, 1826
Hungerford Bridge with Hungerford Market, 1850
At the Panopticon in Leicester Sq, 1854
Holbein Gateway in Whitehall, 1739
Thieving Lane in Westminster, 1808
Old London Bridge, 1796
Black Bull Inn, Gray’s Inn Lane
Cold Harbour, Upper Thames St, City of London
Billingsgate, 1820
Bedford Head Tavern, Covent Garden
Coal Exchange, City of London, 1876
The Cock & Magpie, Drury Lane
Roman remains discovered at Bilingsgate
Hick’s Hall in Clerkenwell, 1730
Former church of St James Clerkenwell
Door of Newgate Prison
Fleet Market
Bleeding Heart Yard in Hatton Garden
Prince Henry’s House in the Barbican
Fortune Theatre, Whitecross St, 1811
Coldbath House in Clerkenwell, 1811
Milford Lane, off the Strand, 1820
St Martin’s-Le-Grand, 1760
Old Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam), Moorfields, in 1750
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Gentle Author In Covent Garden
On Friday 19th May, I will be talking about the history of street trading in Covent Garden and showing old pictures of the CRIES OF LONDON at the London Transport Museum in the Piazza, as part of the launch evening for their SOUNDS OF THE CITY exhibition. Tickets available here
Today it is my pleasure to publish Marcellus Laroon’s vibrant engravings of the Cries of London that he drew while living in Covent Garden, reproduced here from an original edition of 1687 in the collection at the Bishopsgate Institute
The death of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of Charles II made the thoroughfares of London festive places once again, renewing the street life of the metropolis – and when the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the shops and wiped out most of the markets, an unprecedented horde of hawkers flocked to the City from across the country to supply the needs of Londoners .
Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe both owned copies of Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London. Among the very first Cries to be credited to an individual artist, Laroon’s “Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life” were on a larger scale than had been attempted before, which allowed for more sophisticated use of composition and greater detail in costume. For the first time, hawkers were portrayed as individuals not merely representative stereotypes, each with a distinctive personality revealed through their movement, their attitudes, their postures, their gestures, their clothing and the special things they sold. Marcellus Laroon’s Cries possessed more life than any that had gone before, reflecting the dynamic renaissance of the City at the end of the seventeenth century.
Previous Cries had been published with figures arranged in a grid upon a single page, but Laroon gave each subject their own page, thereby elevating the status of the prints as worthy of seperate frames. And such was their success among the bibliophiles of London, that Laroon’s original set of forty designs – reproduced here – commissioned by the entrepreneurial bookseller Pierce Tempest in 1687 was quickly expanded to seventy-four and continued to be reprinted from the same plates until 1821. Living in Covent Garden from 1675, Laroon sketched his likenesses from life, drawing those he had come to know through his twelve years of residence there, and Pepys annotated eighteen of his copies of the prints with the names of those personalities of seventeenth century London street life that he recognised.
Laroon was a Dutchman employed as a costume painter in the London portrait studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller – “an exact Drafts-man, but he was chiefly famous for Drapery, wherein he exceeded most of his contemporaries,” according to Bainbrigge Buckeridge, England’s first art historian. Yet Laroon’s Cries of London, demonstrate a lively variety of pose and vigorous spontaneity of composition that is in sharp contrast to the highly formalised portraits upon which he was employed.
There is an appealing egalitarianism to Laroon’s work in which each individual is permitted their own space and dignity. With an unsentimental balance of stylisation and realism, all the figures are presented with grace and poise, even if they are wretched. Laroon’s designs were ink drawings produced under commission to the bookseller and consequently he achieved little personal reward or success from the exploitation of his creations, earning his living by painting the drapery for those more famous than he and then dying of consumption in Richmond at the age of forty-nine. But through widening the range of subjects of the Cries to include all social classes and well as preachers, beggars and performers, Marcellus Laroon left us us an exuberant and sympathetic vision of the range and multiplicity of human life that comprised the populace of London in his day.
Images photographed by Alex Pink & reproduced courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Peruse these other sets of the Cries of London I have collected
More John Player’s Cries of London
More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
Homer Sykes’ Spitalfields
At the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in Brick Lane
From the moment he first came to London as a student until the present day, Homer Sykes has been coming regularly to Spitalfields and taking photographs. “It was very different from suburban West London where I lived, in just a few tube stops the contrast was extraordinary,” he recalled, contemplating the dislocated world of slum clearance and racial conflict he encountered in the East End during the nineteen seventies when these eloquent pictures were taken.
Yet, within this fractured social landscape, Homer made a heartening discovery that resulted in one of the photographs below. “The National Front were demonstrating as usual on a Sunday at the top of Brick Lane.” he told me, “I was wandering around and I crossed the Bethnal Green Rd, and I looked into this minicab office where I saw this Asian boy and this Caucasian girl sitting happily together, just fifty yards from the demonstration. And I thought, ‘That’s the way it should be.'”
“I walked in like I was waiting for a taxi and made myself inconspicuous in order to take the photograph. It seemed to sum up what should be happening – they were in love, and in a taxi office.”
In Princelet St
In Durward St
Great Eastern Buildings
In a minicab office, Bethnal Green Rd
Selling the National Front News on the corner of Bacon St
Photographs copyright © Homer Sykes
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Homer Sykes, Photographer
