Evening At Brick Lane Mosque
Today, as part of the Immigrants of Spitalfields Festival, we publish the second of the pair of stories by Contributing Photographer Bob Mazzer & Contributing Writer Delwar Hussain recording twenty-four hours at Brick Lane Mosque
Imam Yasin is the newest imam at the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid. He is just twenty-six years old and has a contagious laugh that is free and easy. I ask him how he ended up becoming an imam. He laughs and says he does not know the answer. He grew up in Poplar and attended school in Bethnal Green. He tells me he always wanted to be a teacher and worked in a primary school before being asked to join the mosque, where he was already involved in teaching children the Quran.
We are on the top floor outside the teachers’ staff room. The streets are getting dark and soon it will be time to break the fast. I asked Imam Yasin to take my collaborator Photographer Bob Mazzer & me to his favourite part of the building and this is where he brought us. In the early hours of the morning when the pair of us ventured up here previously, it was dark and very quiet. I spooked myself then by thinking about djinns but now, with Imam Yasin and his smile by our side, it could not feel more different.
“This entire building has such a wonderful history,” he tells us. “It is the only place outside of Jerusalem that has hosted the three Abrahamic faiths. That really is something. But up here, this floor is my favourite bit of it all, it means so much to me, it is where it all began when I was eighteen and started teaching.”
Imam Yasin explains that, alongside learning the classical Arabic script in which the Quran is written, children who come here are taught about Islamic identity, dress code and food. “But, by that age,” Bob enquires, “don’t children already know these things?” Imam Yasin laughs again.
“You would be surprised how many of them are confused when they arrive. Some of the children think Christmas and, in particular Jesus, is bad or against Islamic beliefs. In fact, we teach them that Jesus is one of the most beloved of Allah’s prophets, mentioned more times in the Quran than Mohammed himself.”
We are standing below the plaque dedicated to the memory of Deborah Kay, written in English and Hebrew. I had been told that the Hebrew is a direct translation of the English but Imam Yasin disagrees. Hebrew speakers who came to the building as part of a Jewish tour of the East End had translated it for him. According to them, he says, part of it is also a prayer. Unfortunately, Bob cannot break our deadlock, having forgotten the Hebrew he learnt as a boy. “If it looks like an ‘L’ than it is an ‘L’,” he says unhelpfully, peering at the writing though his glasses.
Then, as we are standing in this building on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier St – a mosque which was once a synagogue which was once a church – the sediment of history momentarily settles. Bob recalls that when he attended ‘chaider’ (pronounced khaider) at the Bernard Baron Settlement on Henriques St as a boy, he was taught Hebrew and history – essentially Jewish identity. A realisation dawned for me. Before learning the Quran, I was taught the ‘Qai’dah’ (pronounced khaider) which lays out the alphabet and rules of pronunciation. Do ‘Chaider’ and ‘Qai’dah’ share the same linguistic root – I wonder – reminding ourselves of our shared humanity?
At 9:23pm the sun sets and it is time to break fast. We have been at the mosque for nearly nineteen hours. Ravenous men with little energy and, by now, even less humour go down into the cellar. It looks as if it may have once been a bomb shelter, painted with white, lime and red stripes throughout. Lit by harsh fluorescent lighting, lines of blue plastic tarpaulin and white paper run the length of the floor, laden with white plates of kichuri (rice and dhal), chickpeas, sweets, dates and pineapple. Some of this is donated by local restaurants but, during Ramadan, families in the neighbourhood – my mother included – also send food every day.
A few of these hungry men have ‘Deliveroo’ marked on their t-shirts, others work as cabbies, some are widowers or foreign students. Once the azaan is called, everyone takes a swig of water – their very first since sunrise. The man in a plaid shirt sitting in front of me holds a pile of medication. He takes little white and pink pills methodically before biting his dates and tucking into the rest of the meal. The men eat quickly, in silence and without fuss.
My mother refuses to accept that, when the caretakers receive the Tupperware boxes she prepares lovingly, they simply put the food into one big communal pile. She thinks hers are eaten separately – maybe – by the head imam himself.
In this place, time does not operate as it does on the outside. This is a space that forces you to sit still, reflect and be at rest. Yet, paradoxically, the opposite is also true. Nothing stands motionless here for long either, there is constant activity and movement. After we eat, there is little chance to digest because we go back upstairs for Terrabi. It is the main Ramadan prayer, when the entire Quran is recited by heart over the course of a month. This is an endurance test and can be gruelling, because of the amount of time you must be prostrate or kneel while each prayer is completed. Even the plushness of the carpet does not help much at this point yet, like many religious experiences, this prayer series is designed to encourage meditation and can propel you into a higher state of being.
I sit on the mezzanine floor hoping to see friends I had gone to school with. As a teenager, I spent long, memorable evenings with them here. But I am disappointed, I do not see any of them. I look around and only see a guy who was at school with me in the year above. He looks much older from how I remember him, and he has a pony tail and a little rice belly. Other younger people, groups of teenage friends are creating new memories in this building, but what has happened to those I used to come here with? Why are none of them here?
This is when it all comes full circle – the denouement, the reveal. It is not difficult to guess and if you have not worked it out, then you have not been following the clues. Most of my friends and their families from school, including many neighbours, have followed the routes our Huguenot and Jewish forebears have already taken – further east into the suburbs. Seven Kings, Ilford, Chelmsford, Barking, Dagenham – names that I did not ever hear mentioned as a child are now in common parlance. The residents of these places have their own mosques and – needless to say – have little reason to come back to Brick Lane. My sister and her family moved to Essex last year. Long lines on the human map of Spitalfields, extending from this building on the corner, now include those spaces too, becoming ever more densely woven.
Young people are enticed by mosques that have better resources paid for through international funding and not merely supported by local donations. Mosques that are not characterised by the use of the Sylheti language or that practice a localised sufi Islam, where they have air conditioning, up-to-date facilities for women, and the roofs and windows do not leak. I notice a window on the mezzanine has been barred up since strong winds in April knocked out its fragile glass. Other windows facing Fournier St are filled with cardboard cut from boxes. I wonder whether Imam Nazrul Islam’s plea to the congregation earlier, at Jummah, will deliver the desired outcome.
Terrabi finishes just shy of 1:00am. In an hour or so, the day will start and, with it, the cycle of prayer and fasting. I look for Bob but cannot find him and I assume he has gone home. By now, we had been at the mosque for nearly twenty-four hours. We had seen so many faces, heard so many voices and been told so many memories by the people who love this building and have an intimate attachment to it. Except, the following morning, I discovered that Bob had stayed at the mosque after I left, lying on the carpet and talking with someone about the first man on the moon.
I follow a line of old men out. They put one foot in front of the other, walking in a line, leg, stick, pause, leg, stick. It has rained and the air is cool and crisp. I pass a group of Scandinavians with luggage trolleys who have just arrived at Liverpool St Station from a RyanAir flight and are looking for an address on google maps. The grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of those first Sylheti seamen who had settled in Spitalfields and who, forty years ago this year, established the mosque, were too on the move. At that moment, the motto Umbra Sumus (We are shadows), the Latin inscription on the sundial upon the building on the corner, could not have been more fitting.
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Photographs copyright © Bob Mazzer
You may like to take a look at the first part of this story
Morning At Brick Lane Mosque
On the opening day of the Immigrants of Spitalfields Festival we publish the first of a pair of stories by Contributing Photographer Bob Mazzer & Contributing Writer Delwar Hussain recording twenty-four hours at Brick Lane Mosque
2:14am Friday 17th June
At 2:45 am, the muezzin walks up to the front of the prayer hall, places his hands besides his ears and makes the call to prayer, heralding the beginning of the new day.
“Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar,” he calls in classical Arabic. “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar.”
A dozen or so people sit on the floor. A dim light from a brass chandelier illuminates some but most are bathed in the darkness of night. Their silhouettes brush against one of the large pillars, besides an ornately panelled door, legs crossed in quiet thought and contemplation. Some have their heads down, others finger prayer beads or leaf through ancient pages of a Quran.
“As-salatu Khayrun Minan-nawm. Allāhu akbar. La ilaha illa-Allah.”
The muezzin’s voice is so clear it cuts through the shadows and rouses the assembled. Most look like they may be over the age of sixty, with long wispy tendrils of white beards, and shawls over suit jackets over jumpers and long worn hats. They hobble on walking sticks – some have two – slowly and methodically to the front, where they line up. A few, even less mobile, sit on metal fold-out chairs from which they will perform their prayer.
At 3:00am, the numbers increase with younger men in attendance. All follow the imam in kneeling, prostrating and standing. This is the first of the five obligatory prayers which punctuate the day. They are set pieces, each with their own routines and recitations, taught in childhood and practiced and performed over a lifetime.
Finally, the imam faces the congregation, brings his open hand to his chest and asks Allah for forgiveness of sins, to be spared from ill-health, and peace. The Fojor prayer draws to an end and the men leave the mosque, walking back out onto Brick Lane, drenched in amber streetlight and with a stray night clubber ambling back home. I ask my collaborator, photographer Bob Mazzer, how he finds his first experience of the place. Bob wears an embroidered hat, one that looks like he had bought it on a trip to India, and his camera dangles low from his neck.
“It was incredibly moving,” he whisperes.
It has been a long time since I have been inside of the mosque and I surprise myself that I feel the same as Bob. I am reminded what an important role the mosque has played in the life of my family. It is considered an honour if an imam from the mosque attends your house for an event, whether social or spiritual. My siblings had Quran classes on the top floor of this building. When my brother had a traffic accident and ended up in a coma, prayers were said for him there. The very first time I saw my father cry was at the mosque. Much later, a funeral service was held there for him attended by many who had known him in the sixties, when he worked a machinist in a leather jacket factory opposite the beigel shop on Brick Lane itself.
There is nothing that quite symbolises the unique quality of Spitalfields and the communities that have forged a home here as much as this building which looms soberly and sombrely on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier St. It has been and continues to be a place of sanctuary but – more than that – it is both a witness and an agent in connecting and linking the roots and routes which span time, transition and imagination.
It was constructed as a church in 1743 by Huguenot refugees who fled to the East End of London escaping persecution in France. Naming it the Neuve Eglise (New Church), they worshipped here until the late nineteenth century when they prospered, assimilating into wider British society and moving out to the suburbs. With a dwindled population, the building changed too – from hosting Wesleyan Methodists to becoming headquarters of the Society for Propagating Christianity among the Jews. By then, Yiddish, Russian, Polish and Lithuanian were the dominant languages spoken on the streets, as Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe escaping pogroms settled and made home in the gaps and spaces left by the Huguenots.
In 1891, the building changed hands again and the Machzike Hadath (Great Synagogue) opened which served the population for over seventy years. It survived the First World War intact, but a bomb destroyed the roof and it was gutted by fire in the Second World War. Although it was repaired and reconsecrated in 1951, by then the Jews of the East End were already following the trend and moving to the suburbs.
This was the time when Sylheti seamen from East Bengal, working on British merchant navy ships, arrived at the docks in Poplar. By the mid-twentieth century – following the turbulent break-up of the Indian sub-continent and later the creation of Bangladesh – their families and descendants, people such as my own family, came to live and work in the surrounding streets. In 1976, the building was bought by donations from the Sylheti community and the London Jamme Masjid (Great Mosque) was established (later renamed Brick Lane Jamme Masjid).
Bob & I walk up the wide rickety staircase that runs through the belly of the building to the mezzanine level above the main prayer hall. We stand in the pitch black unable to see anything. In the days it was a synagogue, this would have been the women’s gallery, where women and children sat and looked over the heads of men below. As a youngster, I came to the mosque with my father and brothers, and teenage boys and young men sat upstairs, with the older men downstairs. There is space for women in the mosque today, yet my mother has never set foot inside despite her intimate connection with the building. She is of the generation who could not attend, and carries on performing her religious duties and obligations at home.
The two of us continue our journey to the top floor. Tapping the wood panelling, Bob says it reminds him of the synagogue in the Bernard Baron Settlement down the road from the mosque which he attended as a boy and where he had his bar mitzvah.
“Where did you grow up?” I ask him.
“Henriques St,” he replies. “Do you know it?”
Earlier, I overheard Bob talking to one of the older parishioners downstairs who asked where he was born. It is always odd what strangers want to know about you so early in the morning when the light is still opaque. “At the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel,” Bob replied and the man walked off looking satisfied with what he was told. I too was born in the same hospital.
“Of course, I know Henriques St. I went to Harry Gosling School which is still on that street.”
We both start laughing, knowing what was to come, because Bob had gone to the same school as a child in the fifties. It was primarily a Jewish school then, in a poor Jewish neighbourhood. I went there in the eighties. By then, and like the mosque itself, it was transformed into a primarily Sylheti school, within a poor Sylheti neighbourhood.
Suddenly it no longer felt as if the story Bob & I had gone to tell about this building was just about bricks and mortar, or something located in the past, something distant and opaque. The things we were discovering were pieces, or fragments, of a living continuum that connected us.
On the top floor, under the criss-crossing beams of the roof, two large, round windows flank both ends of the building. One looks out onto Brick Lane and the East, and the other onto the City and the West – the iconic mapping of Spitalfields. Up here, Quranic classes are held each day. It is where Torah (and I would like to think Bible) classes were also taught. The space is painted in primary school colours with drawings and stories of the life and times of the Prophet Mohammed written by children hanging on the walls. Bob photographs a pair of sandals abandoned in the corridor (making us speculate how the owner managed to get home). I wander around the deserted classrooms. Outside one of them is a plaque that is dedicated to the memory of Deborah Kay who died on 17 Tamuz 5683, or the 1st of July 1923, with Hebrew writing above the English text.
Just then a booming, rumbling noise echoes around and through the walls like the sound of a hungry mechanical stomach. Something that my mother once said comes back to me and I feel a cold shudder through me. Apparently, my youngest brother who attended classes here told her that there were djinns living up here. In Islam, djinns are spirits created by Allah to live on earth and, like humans, can be good or bad. If they are in the mosque, then they must be friendly ones – I console myself – but I cannot get the thought out of my head. Eventually Bob finishes photographing the sandals.
“What a creepy noise the old plumbing is making,” he says. “Let’s get back down.”
At midday, the prayer hall is flooded with light. Jummah is the most important congregational prayer of the week and it is also Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims from sunrise to sunset. Consequently, the mosque is busier than usual. There are piles of Qurans placed neatly on most available flat spaces, bottles of rose water and perfumed oils, wooden rawals (mini-lecterns where the Quran is placed) and hats. A notice tells people not to dry their wet socks on the radiators. Beautiful brass chandeliers, similar to the ones over the road at 19 Princelet St and the Bevis Marks Synagogue dangle from the ceiling. When I was younger, I was fascinated by these wondering what it would be like to swing from one to another, Tarzan-style.
Men in sharp, expensive suits and briefcases, who work in the city, enter and are joined by men in distinctly North African hats and long jelabas that skim the floor. Men from Afghanistan and Pakistan wear their ruby-jewelled hats and shirt-dresses, central Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Somalians, Nigerians, Malaysians – restaurant waiters, shopkeepers, accountants, doctors, physicists, cabbies, accountants. Ties, turbans and t-shirts. There are men with blond hair, black hair, brown, blue and ginger hair, grey and white hair. Men with hoodies and hats, shawls and handkerchiefs. One has a cap with SWAG written in gold lettering. Some come into the hall dripping in water having performed ablution, the ritual wash in the courtyard besides the hall. A blind man walks in touching the walls with one hand and holding a stick with the other. He stops exactly where he wanted to, hangs his coat on a hook and folds his stick, putting it under a bookshelf. He feels the ground with his feet and joins everyone else on the thick, peacock turquoise carpet.
Resplendent in a long black robe, the head Imam of the mosque, Nazrul Islam, delivers the Friday sermon in Sylheti, part-singing and part-talking. The subjects range from the importance of fasting during Ramadan, to forgiveness, the beauty and wonders of Paradise – and also the windows of the Grade II listed building. It turns out that they need replacing and it will cost thousands of pounds, which he hopes parishioners will generously donate.
In the afternoon, a man with an electric blue jumper brings out a bucket and mop to swab the staircase, he cleans the wood panelling and wipes away dust that has no chance of settling. In the evening, there is a football match on the television, and shouts and yells of revellers outside intermingle with the snores from tired parishioners and the sounds of people reading the Quran – all now waiting until sunset when they can break their fast.
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Photographs copyright © Bob Mazzer
You may like to take a look at these profiles of Bob Mazzer & Delwar Hussain
East End Independents’ Day
Click on Martin Usborne’s photograph to enlarge
I am delighted to announce that my friends at the East End Trades Guild are going forward with their campaign of advocacy for the small shops and independent business which define the personality of the East End – by launching their latest scheme, East End Independents’ Day …
[youtube ZUBqd16zsrA nolink]
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The Rise Of The East End Trades Guild
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Phil Maxwell’s Kids On The Street
Dr Daniel DeHanas, Author of London Youth, Religion & Politics: Engagement & Activism from Brixton to Brick Lane, will be giving a lecture as part of the Immigrants of Spitalfields Festival on the subject of The Children of Immigrants: The Religious & Cultural Lives of Young East End Bengalis this Sunday 19th June at 1pm at Hanbury Hall, E1 6QR. Click here for tickets
Phil Maxwell’s BRICK LANE photo exhibition runs at The Archers, 42 Osborne St, E1 6TD from 26th June until July 10th. You are all invited to the opening on Sunday 26th from 1pm onwards. Please RSVP clara@theculpeper.com to attend.
East End Film Festival is hosting a screening of Phil Maxwell’s films on Sunday 26th June at 4pm at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green Rd, E1 6LA. Click here for tickets
In Spelman St
Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Phil Maxwell – who has taken more pictures on Brick Lane than anyone else over the past thirty years – selected these vibrant images of children running free upon the streets of Spitalfields from his vast personal archive. “Most of these pictures are twenty to thirty years old.” he admitted to me, “There aren’t any contemporary photographs because I don’t take pictures of kids these days, not least because there aren’t so many on the street anymore – they are all at home playing on their computers.”
Phil’s lively photographs are evidence that – not so long ago – the streets of Spitalfields belonged to children, offering them an extended playground, including the market, waste land and derelict houses, where they roamed without adult supervision.
“When I first started taking photographs in Liverpool, the children in the street would demand that I take their photographs but that wouldn’t happen today.” Phil recalled, “In those days, children were a constant presence upon the streets in every city, playing their games and enjoying themselves. In the East End in particular, a lot of children played on the street because they lived in restricted conditions – so the street was the space where they were free to run around and discover things.”
In Swanfield St
On Brick Lane
On Brick Lane
In Commercial St
On Brick Lane
In Hanbury St
On Brick Lane
In Cheshire St
In Bethnal Green Rd
On Brick Lane
On Whitechapel Rd
On Brick Lane
In Buxton St
In Arnold Circus
In Cheshire St
On Brick Lane
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
Follow Phil Maxwell’s blog Playground of an East End Photographer
See more of Phil Maxwell’s work here
Phil Maxwell & Sandra Esqulant, Photographer & Muse
More of Phil Maxwell’s Old Ladies
At St George’s Lutheran Church
The Altar and Pulpit at St George’s German Lutheran Church, Alie St
In Aldgate, caught between the thunder of the traffic down Leman St and the roar of the construction on Goodman’s Fields sits a modest church with an unremarkable exterior. Yet this quiet building contains an important story, the forgotten history of the German people in the East End.
Dating from 1762, St George’s German Lutheran Church is Britain’s oldest surviving German church and once you step through the door, you find yourself in a peaceful space with a distinctive aesthetic and character that is unlike any other in London.
The austere lines of the interior emphasise the elegant, rather squat proportion of the architecture and the strong geometry of the box pews and galleries is ameliorated by unexpected curves and fine details. In fact, architect Joel Johnson was a carpenter by trade which may account for the domestic scale and the visual dominance of the intricately conceived internal wooden structure. Later iron windows of 1812, with their original glass in primary tones of red and blue, bring a surprising sense of modernity to the church and, even on a December afternoon, succeed in dispelling the gathering gloom.
This was once the heart of London’s sugar-baking industry and, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, Germans brought their particular expertise to this volatile and dangerous trade, which required heating vast pans of sugar with an alarming tendency to combust or even explode. Such was the heat and sticky atmosphere that sugar-bakers worked naked, thus avoiding getting their clothes stuck to their bodies and, no doubt, experiencing the epilatory qualities of sugar.
Reflecting tensions in common with other immigrant communities through the centuries, there was discord over the issue of whether English or the language of the homeland should be spoken in church and, by implication, whether integration or separatism was preferable – this controversy led to a riot in the church on December 3rd 1767.
As the German community grew, the church became full to overcrowding – with the congregation swollen by six hundred German emigrants abandoned on their way to South Carolina in 1764. Many parishioners were forced to stand at the back and thieves capitalised upon the chaotic conditions in which, in 1789, the audience was described in the church records as eating “apples, oranges and nuts as in a theatre,” while the building itself became, “a place of Assignation for Persons of all descriptions, a receptacle for Pickpockets, and obtained the name St George’s Playhouse.”
Today the church feels like an empty theatre, maintained in good order as if the audience had just left. Even as late as 1855, the Vestry record reported that “the Elders and Wardens of the Church consist almost exclusively of the Boilers, Engineers and superior workers in the Sugar Refineries,” yet by the eighteen-eighties the number of refineries in the vicinity had dwindled from thirty to three and the surrounding streets had descended into poverty. Even up to 1914, at one hundred and thirty souls, St Georges had the largest German congregation in Britain. But the outbreak of the First World War led to the internment of the male parishioners and the expulsion of the females – many of whom spoke only English and thought of themselves as British.
In the thirties, the bell tower was demolished upon the instructions of the District Surveyor, thus robbing the facade of its most distinctive feature. Pastor Julius Reiger, an associate of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leading opponent of the Nazis, turned the church into a relief centre offering shelter for German and Jewish refugees during World War II, and the congregation continued until 1996 when there only twenty left.
St George’s is now under the care of the Historic Chapels Trust, standing in perpetuity as a remembrance of more than two centuries of the East End’s lost German community.
The classically-patterned linoleum is a rare survival from 1855
The arms of George III, King of England & Elector of Hanover
The principal founder of the church Diederick Beckman was a wealthy sugar refiner.
The Infant School was built in 1859 as gift from the son of Goethe’s publisher, W. H. Göschen
Names of benefactors carved into bricks above the vestry entrance.
St Georges German Lutheran Church, c. 192o
The bell turret with weathervane before demolition in 1934
The original eighteenth century weathervane of St George & the Dragon that was retrieved from Ebay
St George’s German Lutheran Church, 55 Alie Street, E1 8EB, can be visited as part of the Immigrants of Spitalfields Festival on Sunday 19th, Monday 20th & Tuesday 21st June between 2pm and 4pm
At Bevis Marks Synagogue
Built in 1701, Bevis Marks Synagogue is the oldest synagogue in this country and it has been continuously in use for over three hundred years, making it – according to Rabbi Shalom Morris – the oldest working synagogue in the world.
Its origin lies with Spanish and Portuguese Jews who came to London in the seventeenth century, escaping persecution of the Catholic Church and taking advantage of a greater religious tolerance in this country under Oliver Cromwell’s rule. When war broke out between England and Spain in 1654, Antonio Robles, a wealthy merchant, went to court to prove that he was Jewish rather than Spanish – establishing a legal precedent which permitted Jewish people to live freely in this country for the first time since their expulsion by Edward I in 1290.
By 1657, a house in Creechurch Lane in the City of London had been converted into a synagogue and the site of Bevis Marks was acquired in 1699. Constructed by Joseph Avis, a Quaker builder who is said to have refused any profit from the work, and with an oak beam presented by Queen Anne, the synagogue was completed in 1701.
Remarkably, the synagogue has seen almost no significant alteration in the last three centuries and there are members of the current congregation who can trace their ancestors back to those who worshipped here when it first opened – even to the degree of knowing where their forebears sat.
On the sunlit morning I visited, my prevailing impression was of the dramatic contrast between the darkness of the ancient oak panelling and the pale white-washed walls illuminated by the tall clear-glass windows, framing a space hung with enormous brass chandeliers comprising a gleaming forest of baubles suspended low over the congregation. You sense that you follow in the footsteps of innumerable Londoners who came there before you and it makes your heart leap.
The lowest bench for the smallest children at the end of the orphans’ pew
Rabbi Shalom Morris turns the huge key in the original lock at Bevis Marks
Bevis Marks Synagogue has open days as part of the Immigrants of Spitalfields Festival on Sunday 19th June 10:30am – 12:30pm, Monday 20th June 10:30am – 2:00pm & Tuesday 21st June 10:30am- 1:00pm
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At The Curtain Theatre
Archaeologists excavating The Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch
When the Chorus addresses the audience from the stage at the opening of Shakespeare’s Henry V, he refers to ‘this wooden O’ – a phrase that is commonly understood as an image of an Elizabethan theatre such as The Globe, which was octahedral. Imagine the surprise of the archaeologists currently excavating the foundations of The Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch, where Henry V is believed to have been first performed, who have discovered that it was rectangular.
Yet an ‘O’ is usually rectangular. Whether drawn with a pen or as a typeform, it has two longer sides connected by two shorter sides, just as The Curtain Theatre did – arranged with a stage at one end and galleries on three sides, after the model of inn-yards which served as the first theatres.
Heather Knight, Museum of London Archaeology site director at the excavations in Curtain Rd was filled with excitement when I met her last week. On the basis of her discovery, she had come to a wider realisation about the theatres of Tudor London. While those on the South Bank, such as The Globe and The Rose, which also served for bear-baiting, appear to have all been round in form, The Curtain Theatre seems to follow the trend for theatres north of the Thames, such as The Fortune and The Boar’s Head which were also used for fencing displays, to be rectangular. A similar distinction may be appreciated today at the National Theatre in the difference between The Olivier and Lyttleton Theatres.
In fact Henry V and Romeo & Juliet, which both first saw the light of day at The Curtain, contain significant amounts of swordplay. An element that reflected the audience’s expectations in a venue with a wide stage that was also used for fencing displays and where dramatic scenes were sometimes interposed into such displays to create context for the sword-fighting episodes.
The earliest evidence for the existence of The Curtain Theatre – named after the curtain wall of the Holywell Priory that once stood here – is in a sermon condemning it in 1577 yet by 1578, L.Grenade writes in his Singularities of London –
‘As one leaves the city through the gate of Moorgate, one comes into a fine and pleasant meadow … At one end of this meadow are two very fine theatres, one of which is magnificent in comparison with the other and has an imposing appearance on the outside. This theatre can hold from 4,000 to 5,000 people and it is said that a great Lord had it erected. Now, both of these were erected and dedicated for the performance of some plays and other spectacles, containing actions created to give pleasure rather than the ones which have actually taken place.’
Grenade’s account testifies to both The Theatre and The Curtain as being ‘very fine theatres’ while celebrating the larger Theatre over The Curtain, and confirming the use of these buildings for the performance of entertaining fictional dramas.
These tangible discoveries are remarkable, yet the most powerful import of this excavation is the experience of visiting the site and recognising that you are there in the place where it all actually happened. Incontrovertibly – you realise – William Shakespeare was once here. You walk through the commercial hoarding in Curtain Rd to find yourself on a raised walkway suspended over the ground level of the dig, several metres below, where archaeologists in hard hats scrape at the soil. Once you realise that the location of this entrance approximates to the entrance to The Curtain Theatre itself, you cannot ignore a heart-stopping sense of time travel – of being suspended over the Tudor audience, like a spirit on a wire as a one of the gods appearing at an opportune moment in the drama.
The walkway delivers you to a point above the stage and a glance to either side gives you the locations of the galleries which define the width of the performing area. In front of you is the back wall of the stage – a former garden wall, co-opted into the theatre building and pierced to create dramatic entrances. You turn around and you can see the depth of the audience and imagine the gaze of the actor across the sea of expectant faces. This is where Shakespeare saw Henry V and Romeo & Juliet performed, and the discovery by the archaeologists of a fragment of a ceramic bird whistle at the rear of the stage has acquired a unique poignancy in this location.
JULIET
ROMEO
For a few weeks, you can visit the site where the actors heard that birdcall more than four hundred years ago when these words were first spoken. You can see the foundations laid out upon the ground with walls extending in all directions, granting an extraordinary vision of a Shakespearian theatre in ‘a fine and pleasant meadow.’ By 1625, The Curtain had been redeveloped into tenements and a brick hearth of this era, still blackened by fire, recalls the domestic life that superseded it.
Next month, the archaeologists will be called upon to designate the boundaries of this Ancient Monument, defining what will be preserved and what will be destroyed. Within a few years, you will be able to visit the monument enshrined beneath a shopping mall at the foot of tower of luxury flats, but – before that future arrives – I urge you to see it as they have found it.
Excavating the stage at The Curtain Theatre
The yard of The Curtain Theatre
A seventeenth century brick hearth from the tenements that superseded The Curtain Theatre
Spraying water onto the foundations of the entrance to The Curtain Theatre
It is still possible to visit the site of The Curtain Theatre before excavations are completed in a few weeks time. Details can be found at Museum of London Archaeology.
You may also like to read about
At Shakespeare’s First Theatre
In Search Of Shakespeare’s London
The Door to Shakespeare’s London
