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.
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At Shakespeare’s First Theatre
In Search Of Shakespeare’s London
The Door to Shakespeare’s London
At The House Of Dreams
A number forty bus took me from Aldgate to the House of Dreams and it only took half an hour to arrive at the front door. Once across the threshold, an alternative cosmos of colour and eye-popping surreal fantasy awaits, transporting you far from the London rain.
Perhaps one of the happiest people I have met, Stephen Wright delights to share the strange but joyous world of his personal subconscious, peopled with a universe of outlandish celestial beings – all made tangible within the interior of a modest Victorian terrace.
For this ever-growing endeavour is no random installation, but an endearingly intimate diary of Stephen’s emotional and spiritual life in sculptural form – as he was eager to explain when I dropped by last week.
“There is no plan – it’s just evolving, like life itself! My house is like a baby that needs constant feeding. It says, ‘Mama, I need more food!’ and I say, ‘Oh, give me a break.’
It began as a response to a series of programmes by Jarvis Cocker about ‘Outsider Art.’ When I saw those, I thought, ‘I’ve found my family, I’ve found where I fit in.’ So I visited a lot of Outsider Artists in France, they were mostly elderly, and then I began work on my House of Dreams in 1999/2000.
At first it was purely decorative, but then it became a response to the death of my partner Donald, and when – two years into it – both my parents died, I found that difficult to deal with. So my work changed and it became a way of grieving and dealing with loss – because I didn’t have a family this became my way of life. I want to leave something behind. Since then I met Michael, ten years ago, and he’s been very supportive. It’s important to have someone on your side.
I’m from the North and I found it difficult to put down roots in London, so I live in this safe house behind a high wall with a gate where I feel free to be me. All the objects in my house carry a meaning or memory for me and many are from places I consider sacred, like Cornwall, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid & Amsterdam.
The design has a South American style because I’m in touch with spirits from a former life when I was a grave digger in Oaxaca. I’ve been to Mexico to visit the place where I was born.
I’m always amazed that anybody wants to come to my House of Dreams but I love it. People come round all the time to visit and I’ve made a living out of being me. I get up and I’m me. I’m me everyday!”
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Cries Of London At The NPG
If any of my readers should crave some distraction from the forthcoming Referendum on Europe, I shall be giving a lecture about the history of the CRIES OF LONDON at the National Portrait Gallery at 7pm on Thursday 23rd June. Click here for tickets
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For those who were unable to visit the exhibition last year, here are panels comprising a selection from my personal collection of CRIES OF LONDON memorabilia.
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Introducing The Cries of London
The Curious Legacy of Francis Wheatley
A Nation Of Tea-Drinkers
Markman Ellis introduces his talk for the Immigrants of Spitalfields Festival – ‘A Tea-Drinking Nation: How Britain Came to Identify with a Migrant Alien in the Early Eighteenth Century’ on Monday 20th June 3pm, Hanbury Hall, Hanbury St, E1 6QR. (Click here for tickets)
Richard Collins’ ‘The Tea Party’ (c.1727), Courtesy of Goldsmiths’ Hall
Britain has been celebrated as ‘a tea-drinking nation’ since at least the late eighteenth century and a nice cup of tea remains one of life’s most comforting rituals. Tea-drinking has associations with hearth and home, and is emblematic of wider British ideas of both polite society and humble domesticity. How did this little leaf, a migrant from half-way round the world, come to such prominence in Britain?
Although tea-drinking has been almost ubiquitous in Britain for over two hundred years, tea itself is both a migrant and a relative newcomer. Tea first arrived in London in the mid-seventeenth century – too late for Shakespeare ever to have had a cuppa, for example. All tea in the eighteenth century was grown and manufactured in China and Japan. In the nineteenth century, tea growing extended to India and Sri Lanka, and later to Africa. Commercial tea plantations even exist in Britain today, but tea was at first an exotic rarity. Imported by merchants and adventurers, tea was a strange hot drink made from a pale grey-green leaf, producing a subtly-flavoured brightly verdant liquor – aromatic with grassy vegetable aromas – with the ability to aid wakefulness.
Tea-drinking was transformed in the course of the eighteenth century. At the beginning, the migrant leaf was scarce, luxurious and ruinously expensive. At up to ten pounds a pound, it was the equivalent today of about ten thousand pounds a pound. But by the seventeen-eighties – only a century later – tea was ubiquitous in Britain, retailed in every town and city with the cheapest varieties selling for a shilling a pound – still a substantial amount – but within reach of all but the poorest. Tea had become essential to the British way of life.
The East India Company was central to this transformation, just as tea was central to the East India Company. The company had begun as a corporation specializing in the importation of silk and spices from India. The trade in tea began with small and irregular parcels, sent almost as an afterthought, in the seventeenth century. But in the eighteenth century, the East India Company began to find a ready market for tea. Establishing a trading factory in Canton (now Guangzhou) in the early eighteenth century gave the Company access to a steady supply of tea and imports increased exponentially through the rest of the century.
In London, the tea was offloaded from the Company ships and stored in a series of vast warehouses near their headquarters in Leadenhall St, both those in New Street off Bishopsgate St, and those running down towards the Thames, in Crutched Friars and Mincing Lane. Some of these warehouses can still be seen in Devonshire Sq, just south of Spitalfields, though these huge buildings are Victorian replacements. The tea was sold in the vast Sales Room at East India House for distribution though the networks of tea-merchants and grocers. Moving all this tea around employed thousands of men as porters and warehouse men – tea was big business in Shoreditch.
Eighteenth-century tea was different to the beverage normally consumed in Britain today. We are now used a dark and tannic brew, which stains the water quickly, usually made from a teabag, and is consumed with milk. Early eighteenth-century tea was almost always one of various forms of green tea (with names like ‘bing,’ ‘hyson,’ and ‘imperial’). But there was also ‘bohea,’ a form of red or brown tea now identified as a Chinese Oolong tea. All tea is made from the same plant, Camellia sinensis, and the difference between kinds of tea reflects growing conditions and manufacturing process. For darker teas, the leaves are allowed to oxidize before being cured or roasted.
Being green or at most the delicate reddy-brown of an Oolong, eighteenth-century tea was usually consumed without milk. Sugar, when available, was preferred. Richard Collins’ conversation painting ‘The Tea Party’ of 1727 shows an English family taking tea at home, displaying their cultured prosperity through their elaborate display of tea-things. On their lacquered tea-tray is an English silver tea-set, comprising a teapot on a stand, a water jug, a tea canister, a sugar bowl, a pair of sugar tongs, a spoon boat with three tea spoons, and a slops or waste bowl. The mother is dressed in a lustrous black silk gown with a gold apron, with delicate lace cuffs, handkerchief and cap. Her husband relaxes in an unbuttoned shirt and a soft turban-like cap known as a ‘banyan,’ proclaiming his status as a gentleman at leisure. Sheltering under an arm of each parent is a child, with loose hair and dressed in plain clothes. The tea is consumed in fine blue and white china cups and saucers. As was conventional in this period, the teacups are without handles. The family displays the various polite ways to hold a cup of scalding hot tea. The painting depicts three Chinese commodities central to the East India Company -silk, porcelain, and tea. Even in a simple quotidian activity like taking tea, eighteenth-century Londoners participated in the globalized economy.
Collins’ painting of this unnamed English family is a kind of showing off, advertising their success as a prosperous family in the middle stations of life. Tea was the perfect emblem of their success, a status symbol at the center of a complex social ritual. When tea became British, it was associated with both luxury and good health – although it was of course a highly habit forming drug, it did not inebriate. Tea-drinking was further associated with the polite forms of sociability practiced by high-status women, especially the queen and her maids of honour.
Even when tea became ubiquitous in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, it retained this association with more refined forms of human interaction – with conversation, with family and with good manners. Tea-drinking seemed to express most clearly a preference for enlightened forms of social behavior, for civic values, for domestic virtue, for tolerance and kindness. Tea, even though it was an alien and exotic commodity, came to express those qualities that British people most admired about themselves.
Morning by Philippe Mercier, 1758 (Courtesy of Yale Centre for British Art)
Camellia Sinensis, engraving by J Miller, 1771 (Courtesy of Wellcome Library)
A tea plantation in China with workers packing the tea into boxes (Courtesy of Wellcome Library)
East India Company warehouses in New St, Spitalfields
Sale Room of East India House by Augustus Charles Pugin & Thomas Rowlandson from the Microcosm of London, 1809 (courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
Trade card of Robert Fogg (courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
Trade card of Raitt’s Tea Warehouses (courtesy of Lewis Walpole Library, Yale)
The Tea Phrensy by M Smith, 1785 (Click this image to enlarge)
Markman Ellis is co-author (with Richard Coulton & Matthew Mauger) of Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World. They teach eighteenth-century studies at Queen Mary University where they blog at Tea in Eighteenth-Century Britain.
East End Film Show
(Due to extraordinary demand this event is SOLD OUT but we will repeat it on Tuesday 21st June at 7pm. Please drop an email to info@vout-o-reenees.co.uk to let us know you are coming.)
In celebration of the John Claridge’s EAST END photography exhibition, you are all invited to a free film show at 7pm next Tuesday 14th June at Vout-O-Reenees in Aldgate with a screening of THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS and a programme of EAST END short films introduced by DAVID COLLARD, who was responsible for the recent successful campaign to Save Spiegelhalters.
James Mason in Hanbury St
If you wonder what it was like here fifty years ago and would like to be personally escorted around Spitalfields in the spring of 1967 by James Mason, it can be arranged next week. Make your way to Vout-O-Reenees at 30 Prescott St, E1 8BB on Tuesday night.
One day when the first leaves were showing but snow was still piled up in yards, James Mason came knocking on the door of 29 Hanbury St (where the Truman Brewery Upmarket building now stands) and in this picture you see him asking the householder if he can look in her back yard, which was the site of the second Ripper murder. I think she makes a fair show of being surprised at his request, when he can hardly have been the first Ripper tourist to knock on her door. It was all part of the filming of The London Nobody Knows based upon Geoffrey Fletcher’s book of the same title.
In a series of books and a regular column in the Telegraph that added up to a life’s work, Geoffrey Fletcher set out to make an affectionate record of all the corners of old London that were being neglected and devalued while the cultural focus was upon modernity at any cost. He wanted to record these precious fragments of the past before the wrecking ball destroyed them forever. Illustrated with his own delicate line drawings, copies of Geoffrey Fletcher’s books can still be found in public libraries and make fascinating guides today because – in spite of everything – most of the London nobody knows is still there.
He doubted very much that the house I live in today in Spitalfields would survive more than a few years – this was at least thirty years ago. Geoffrey Fletcher was an unashamed sentimentalist and I love him for seeking out the poetry in ordinary common things. In fact, reading his books was one of my inspirations to begin writing these posts to you every day.
Brandished an umbrella, with well-polished handmade brown shoes and a cloth cap to signify class solidarity, James Mason makes an amiable guide to Geoffrey Fletcher’s sixties London. He takes us from an old railway goods yard and a tragically abandoned music hall in Camden Town to the perky Kings Rd fashion parade, by way of a Salvation Army hostel and Kensal Green Cemetery, before ending up in Spitalfields. Here they filmed meths drinkers fighting on the steps of the synagogue in Brick Lane, old men collecting discarded cabbages at the Market, garment workers outside their workplaces in Fournier St, and tenement children playing raucous singing games and scrapping on the pavement.
Director Norman Cohen’s film is an unlikely charismatic amalgam of sixties whimsy and realist documentary footage of markets, street performers, hostel dwellers and drunks. These last two subjects are the most memorable, as candid yet humane testimonies of the hopeless and the dispossessed. It is in this rare footage that the film achieves its lasting value, tenderly witnessing the existence of these seemingly-innocent refugees from an earlier world who became casualties in the post-war years.
DAVID COLLARD WRITES:
Look up The London Nobody Knows on the International Movie Database and in the section devoted to ‘plot keywords’ you’ll find the following: River Thames, chains, whip, pub, dancing, lavatory, haggling, catacombs and (somewhat more respectably) ‘reference to Christopher Wren’. That last reference is – we shall discover at the screening on 14th June – wrong in every detail. But the other words give an idea of what a very very strange documentary this is.
I know of nothing remotely like it – imagine Ian Nairn’s topographical excursions directed by Ken Loach. Presented by the Huddersfield-born Hollywood leading man James Mason, this 1969 was briefly circulated as a support feature to the big screen version of the BBC television comedy Till Death Us Do Part. What audiences keen to hear Alf Garnett’s bilious rants made of it at the time is hard to imagine – apart from a couple of heavy-handed slapstick sequences staged for the camera what we get, for much of the time, is harrowing reportage: we encounter the buskers and dossers and meths drinkers of Spitalfields, we enter the squalid slums around Fournier St and meet the inmates of the Salvation Army hostel.
The spectacle of Mason strolling through street markets as heads turn, or loitering in a dank urinal, or uttering a fastidious ‘yick’ at some modern blot on the skyline is one that will stay with you. He is brilliantly empathetic sharing a mug of tea with hostel inmates, wonderfully sad in the wreck of an abandoned music hall. How he came to be involved in the project – well, you’ll find out at the screening. That the film today is something of a cult is hardly surprising – it ticks all the boxes and creates some new ones to tick.
Other plot keywords for The London Nobody Knows are ‘decay’ and ‘Camden Town’ – if Withnail and I had been shot as a documentary it might have looked something like this.
John Claridge’s EAST END exhibition runs at Vout-O-Reenees until 21st July
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Doreen Fletcher, Landscape Painter
On the eve of Doreen Fletcher’s exhibition LOST TIME which opens this Friday 10th June at Townhouse, Spitalfields, I visited Doreen in her studio to learn the story behind her remarkable series of urban landscape paintings of the East End, created over twenty years between 1983 and 2003
Turner’s Rd, 1998
Doreen Fletcher – Looking back, I suppose I was very spoiled. From a young age I liked painting and my dad used to take me to the toy shop and we had to buy the best, most expensive paints. I was an only child, born into a working class family, and my parents, Colin & Alice, were semi-literate, I guess you would say.
I was a bit of a loner, I liked going for long walks. I passed the eleven-plus but I had a very difficult time at Grammar School because, although I was clever, I came from the wrong side of the tracks. I used to have to wear this hat and every morning, as I was walking to school, the Secondary Modern kids would come and knock it off my head. When I got to school, I had to pretend I was from somewhere else, because all the other kids they came from families who were doctors, solicitors, and so I felt, you know… odd.
The Gentle Author – What was the first landscape that you knew?
Doreen Fletcher – It was grey. Grey, brown streets with sparrows, lots of sparrows and pigeons. I used to long for colour. I grew up in a two-up, two-down terrace in Stoke-on-Trent, but every Sunday my parents used to take me on a bus into the country and I just loved colour.
I remember, when I was five, I was bought a set of encyclopaedias from the guy who came round knocking on street doors and it had colour pictures in it – paintings – and I thought they were wonderful. And I suppose that was when I started to be interested in visual things – plus at Grammar School, when we were doing Art, I did not have to talk and my accent in those days was quite broad. All the other girls spoke with posh accents, so I would paint in silence and it was something I was good at, so I got praise for that.
The Gentle Author – What work did your parents do?
Doreen Fletcher – Oh Alice, my mother, she was a servant. She worked in a munitions factory during the war and then she became a servant afterwards. It gave her ideas about not having the newspaper on the table and no tomato ketchup, and healthy eating. So in her case, there was a slight social mobility. She was very very fussy about the front step being clean. Colin, my dad, started off as a farm worker, he had wanted to be a vet but the fact that he did not like school – could hardly read or write – stood in the way.
After I was born, they moved to the town because he could earn more money and, in the late fifties, when they started putting up pylons he worked on that, and then later he worked putting in pipes for North Sea Gas too. When he was fifty-seven, he had a brain haemorrhage when he was working, probably because of the pneumatic drills, and he did not work again after that.
The Gentle Author – So what took you away from the Potteries?
Doreen Fletcher – I did not like living in a small town. I hated the constrictions and the pettiness. I wanted to go to Art School in London, and I met a boy who got a place in one and I moved with him to London.
The Gentle Author– But did you apply to Art School yourself?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes, I did a Foundation Course in Newcastle but after that I became a model. I did that for a long time.
The Gentle Author – Where did you live when you came to London?
Doreen Fletcher – I moved to Colliers Wood in South West London and I got a job at an Art School as a model. Gradually, I started taking photographs and doing drawings but – at that point – I did not really know what I wanted to paint, except that it was almost a compulsive activity.
I did quite a lot of self portraits and still lives. It was only when I moved to Bayswater in 1976 that I developed a strong interest in urban landscape. For me, it was a very exciting place to be – having come from this small town – and it was close to the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, Notting Hill Gate and Portobello Rd. I started painting the local streets – the Electric Cinema, the Serpentine Boathouse – and then I became interested in Underground stations at night – Bayswater, Paddington – and this continued when I moved to the East End.
The Gentle Author – What brought you to the East End?
Doreen Fletcher – Simply that the relationship I was in broke up and I met someone new and the housing was cheap in the East End. It was relatively cheap to rent at that time because lots of people were moving away, so artists were still moving in to places like Bow and Mile End.
The Gentle Author – How do you remember the East End as it was then?
Doreen Fletcher – There was corrugated iron everywhere! I loved it here because I had had enough of the sophistication of the West End. It seemed to me like coming back home here – lots of corner shops and tiny pubs. There was a community but, after a couple of years, I realised that they were not staying, and the corner shops and pubs were closing.
Bus Stop, Mile End, 1983
The Gentle Author – Why did you start painting the East End?
Doreen Fletcher – I was visually excited by being somewhere new. The first painting I did in the East End was the bus stop in Mile End in 1983, and then I think I did Renee’s Café next. Once I realised they were going, it triggered this idea of painting the pubs and the shops.
The Gentle Author – Was this your full time occupation?
Doreen Fletcher – No, I was working as a model. It was the most boring job you could imagine but I just stuck at it during term time, so I would have periods of full-time painting and I could keep myself by working three days a week as model.
The Gentle Author – How central to your life were your paintings at that time?
Doreen Fletcher – Very. That was my focal point. My studio was a small room at the top of a run-down three-storey house in Clements St. It faced north so the lighting was good in the day time.
I spent a lot of time just walking around at all times of day and in different weather conditions. Eventually a specific scene imprinted itself on my mind which I felt could have potential as a painting. I would make thumbnail sketches sketches on the spot and take a picture with my camera.
Once I had gathered as much information as I could, I would make a highly detailed drawing which acted as a basis for the painting. This might evolve gradually over a period of months or even years, as a tension built up between my need to represent reality and the demands made by the painting itself. I always struggled to resolve it in an abstract and objective way as well as recording a recognisable subject.
I used to try and work twenty-eight hours a week, I never wanted to become a Sunday painter.
The Gentle Author – Did you have ambition for this work?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes and I did have some limited success in the eighties. I had a show at Spitalfields Health Centre on Brick Lane and then at Tower Hamlets Library in Bancroft Rd. Local people loved my paintings but there was limited interest from any critics.
The Gentle Author – Did you pursue other avenues to get recognition for your work?
Doreen Fletcher – Once a month, I used to send off for lots of slides in response to competitions and requests for submissions in Artists’ Newsletter but it never seemed to go anywhere.
The Gentle Author – How did you maintain morale through that twenty year period?
Doreen Fletcher – I have an optimistic nature and I remained optimistic up until the late nineties when my interest in the genre waned and I think it affected the quality of what I was doing. I realised I was coming to the end of the series I was doing of the East End.
The Gentle Author – What told you that you were coming to the end?
Doreen Fletcher – The East End was changing and I was not really interested any more. The new build made it very dense, taking away the individuality and the sense of community. At first, I was interested while it was being built – on the Isle of Dogs, for instance – but once it became functional there were just too many people.
The Gentle Author – At the time you concluded the series, were there changes in your life?
Doreen Fletcher – I became more involved in teaching Art to kids with special needs. I grew more interested too, because I appeared to be good at it and my work was successful. Gradually, I became involved in the tutorial side of it as well and supporting other lecturers.
The Gentle Author – Did you find that rewarding?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes, I was earning money from it and it was rewarding working with other people, so I became more and more involved in that.
The Gentle Author – Once you had completed nearly twenty years of painting the East End, what were your feelings about that series of work?
Doreen Fletcher – I felt that I had tried very hard to be successful, to get my work out there and get it seen. I had hoped for some kind of recognition. I was never ambitious in terms of international recognition or anything like that, but I did feel that the work was good enough to be recognised more than it was
The Gentle Author – Were you disappointed?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes. I remember the day I made a conscious decision to pack away my paints. It was November 16th 2004. I said, ‘That’s it!’ I am not going to paint again.
The Gentle Author – Do you think your project reached its culmination?
Doreen Fletcher – At the time I thought not, but looking at the work again, I am very very glad I did it now – what I think was important was that I recorded something which has gone.
The Gentle Author – Do you think that you evolved as a painter by doing this work?
Doreen Fletcher – I think, if I had I been taken on by a gallery, I would have developed more as a painter. Instead, I think I found a method of working that suited what I was doing and I stayed with it. Maybe with a bit more encouragement I would have done what I am doing now – since I have come back to painting – which is pushing the boundaries?
The Gentle Author – Do you have a criterion for judging if one of your paintings is successful?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes, a painting is successful for me when I believe I have captured a moment.
Transcript by Louisa Carpenter
Portrait of Doreen Fletcher by Lucinda Douglas Menzies
Doreen Fletcher’s exhibition LOST TIME opens on Friday 10th June at Townhouse, 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields and runs daily until 26th June. Catalogues are available for £5.
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