Garden Extracts
In celebration of the East End’s horticultural history and heritage, Townhouse Spitalfields, is staging ‘Garden Extracts,’ a series of events between May 21st & June 5th as part of the Chelsea Flower Show Fringe, including an exhibition of botanical prints from ‘The British Herbal’ published in parts by John Hill 1756 – 1757 and a series of talks and workshops.
POTTING SHED: FLIFF CARR & MATILDA MORETON are running workshops this Saturday 21st & Sunday 22nd May, giving you the opportunity to impress flowers into clay and make your own ceramics Click here to book
STEPHEN NELSON: PLANTSMAN & PERFUMER will be giving three talks on the history of scent on 31st May, 1st June & 2nd June at 2:30pm
TWENTIETH CENTURY PERFUME: LIZZIE OSTROM AKA ODETTE TOILETTE will be giving a talk on contemporary perfume Sunday June 5th
Stephen Nelson, Plantsman & Perfumer recreates perfumes from history
Learn more about Stephen Nelson’s work at www.darasina.co.uk
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Nicholas Culpeper in Spitalfields
The Return Of Pat Nightingale
Contributing Writer Sarah Winman, author of When God Was a Rabbit & A Year of Marvellous Ways, interviewed Pat Nightgale last week on an especially showery day
“A little girl with long plaits on weekdays, ringlets on Sundays and baggy knickers most of the time. A shilling pocket money: sixpence to be saved, a penny for the Sunday school box, and five pennies for sweets.”
For many people, the memories laid down in childhood are vivid, often golden. They offer an unshifting narrative in an ever-changing world, a refuge to return to, a place that is simpler, kinder, and most of all, magical. And sitting with Pat Nightingale, overlooking Brushfield St, as heavy rain kept the promise of spring at bay, I had never felt this so keenly.
“Mum was in and out of hospital after my birth in 1946, so I ended up living with my grandparents in Harman St, Hoxton, for the first twelve years of my life. My grandfather was called Alfred Thomas Jenkins, but I called him Pop. Others called him ‘Oppy’ on account of his bad leg. My Nan was Susan Rose. She was lovely. She did everything for Pop. He wanted a cup of tea – she’d make him a cup of tea. He wanted the television channel changed – she’d change it. Rent needed paying at 9am every Monday – she’d do it. He was a bit of a bastard, really, a Victorian through and through, but a great storyteller.
They were market traders in Hoxton St where they had a vegetable stall. Nan’s parents were traders too, and my Great Grandmother, who was always known as Polly, was the Ladies Barrow Race Champion. The Barrow Race was held annually from 1918 to 1929, and the route was between Borough and Spitalfields, and any market trader could take part. And when Polly died, there were one hundred and forty wreaths at her funeral, all from the traders she raced against. She was a kind and charitable woman and if anyone came to her stall hungry, she’d send them back over to her house where Nan would be cooking dinner. Sometimes Nan had to cook for an extra twelve or fourteen people.
We had a whole townhouse to ourselves. Me, my grandparents and two aunts. An eight room house with an outside toilet. You’d go up the first flight of stairs to a half-landing where there was a small sink, then up another to the cooker. And looming over the whole of Hoxton was the workhouse, built on the Land of Promise. I never remember going without anything, but I had friends who did. Friends who had to sleep in the same bed with all their siblings. One wet the bed, they all smelt. And there was shame around poverty, real shame. I never liked walking past the workhouse, and I still don’t. People used to say it costs nothing to be clean but Nan would’ve said, ‘Then you’ve never had to choose between a bar of soap and a loaf of bread.’
End of day, the market traders dumped their rubbish in the gutter and me and my friends used to play there, searching for pennies and food. If my Nan had ever known, she would’ve murdered me. It just wasn’t done, see? Coal that had fallen on the streets, firewood, food, you left it for people who needed it. And if you could afford it, then you never needed it.
I remember oranges used to come in wooden crates that were nearly white and my friends used them for their furniture. And I wanted to too, instead of the mahogany stuff we had at home. Eventually, I got one to keep my books in and my Aunt Vera made a curtain to put around it.
On Mondays, I occasionally went to school but, when there was racing on, me, Nan and Pop went racing instead. We’d get the bus up to Stamford Hill and then get the coach. If the racing was at Brighton, we’d end up at the beach.
Every winter, I had a new coat, and a new coat meant Christmas was coming. We got it at Evada’s in Whitechapel. And there were all sorts of smells on the streets in winter, roasted chestnuts and baked potatoes and pigs’ trotters, and because Nan’s stall was on the corner of the street, we could smell the bread from Anderson’s too and the Pie and Mash at Fortunes, and it’s always the smells that take me back to that time.
But my favourite thing, though – and it only happened during school holidays – was to go to Spitalfields with Pop. I’d go to bed early and I could never sleep because I was so excited. I’d pile on the clothes, and we’d set out into the dark frosty winter morning, and you know, it was so lovely, so magical. And I can see my Nan watching me go, wondering if it was all right.
The stables were at the back of our street and that’s where we kept our pony called Mary, and the cart. I’d sit up front with Pop, and I’d look up at the sky, and there were dark blue skies then, with millions of stars that danced as we jolted across the streets and sparks shot out from the cobblestones as they clashed with the metal rim of the cart wheels. And, if we were early, we’d stop at the horse trough on the corner of Camwood St so Mary could drink.
Spitalfields was huge with baskets piled high and Pop knew exactly what he wanted at the right price, so we had to walk round and round. And he tipped the porters well because they let him know whose produce was good. And there were things there that we never had at home, like Sparrows Grass (asparagus) that people said made your wee green. I remember, when it was pea season, that’s all Pop bought for his stall. People talk about the smell of money, well, the money from Spitalfields had a greasy vegetable smell.
And it was on these trips that Pop liked to tell me his stories. He told me how he’d swum the English Channel. How he’d put grease all over himself to keep out the cold and a boat had followed him. He told me how he’d been a cowboy in America fighting the Indians, but he didn’t stay long because he didn’t like the food. And when Edmund Hillary climbed Everest, Pop said that he’d already done that but he didn’t like to brag.
And then he told me about the Rainbow Fairies. How when it rains and rainbows appear in greasy puddles, he said that it was really a sign that fairies were about, because when fairies’ wings get wet and heavy, they come down and land in puddles.
Pop was a clever man with little education, a man who told me I had to know my place in the world without telling me what my place was.
Later, in 1956 maybe, I asked what happened to Mary, and my Nan said, ‘She ran off to be a race horse.’ Pop said, ‘Don’t tell stories, she went off to the circus.’ To this day I never knew what happened.
It was a different time. All I know is that rain smelt different, street lights were fewer, and skies had more stars. I can never remember not feeling safe. I was a much-loved child, and I had the best of everything available. It was almost like magic. And I still look out for puddles, but I don’t tell everyone because everyone will come and look for them, and Pop said fairies are very private people.”
Pat’s grandparents, Susan Rose & Alfred Thomas Jenkins at their stall in Hoxton St
Pat Nightingale seeks rainbow fairies in Brushfield St
Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Vanishing London
Four Swans, Bishopsgate, photographed by William Strudwick & demolished 1873
In 1906, F G Hilton Price, Vice President of the London Topographical Society opened his speech to the members at the annual meeting with these words – ‘We are all familiar with the hackneyed expression ‘Vanishing London’ but it is nevertheless an appropriate one for – as a matter of fact – there is very little remaining in the City which might be called old London … During the last sixty years or more there have been enormous changes, the topography has been altered to a considerable extent, and London has been practically rebuilt.’
These photographs are selected from volumes of the Society’s ‘London Topographic Record,’ published between 1900 and 1939, which adopted the melancholy duty of recording notable old buildings as they were demolished in the capital. Yet even this lamentable catalogue of loss exists in blithe innocence of the London Blitz that was to come.
Bell Yard, Fleet St, photographed by William Strudwick
Pope’s House, Plough Court, Lombard St, photographed by William Strudwick
Lambeth High St photographed by William Strudwick
Peter’s Lane, Smithfield, photographed by William Strudwick
Millbank Suspension Bridge & Wharves, August 1906, photographed by Walter L Spiers
54 & 55 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the archway leading into Sardinia St, demolished 1912, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Sardinian Chapel, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, August 1906, demolished 1908, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Archway leading into Great Scotland Yard and 1 Whitehall, September 1903, photographed by Walter L Spiers
New Inn, Strand, June 1889, photographed by Ernest G Spiers
Nevill’s Court’s, Fetter Lane, March 1910, demolished 1911, photographed by Walter L Spiers
14 & 15 Nevill’s Court, Fetter Lane, demolished 1911
The Old Dick Whittington, Cloth Fair, April 1898, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Bartholomew Close, August 1904, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Williamson’s Hotel, New Court, City of London
Raquet Court, Fleet St
Collingwood St, Blackfriars Rd
Old Houses, North side of the Strand
Courtyard of 32 Botolph Lane, April 1905, demolished 1906, photographed by Walter L Spiers
32 Botolph Lane, April 1905, demolished 1906, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Bird in Hand, Long Acre
Houses in Millbank St, September 1903, photographed by Walter L Spiers
Door to Cardinal Wolsey’s Wine Cellar, Board of Trade Offices, 7 Whitehall Gardens
Old Smithy, Bell St, Edgware Rd, demolished by Baker St & Edgware Railway
Architectural Museum, Cannon Row, Westminster
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Insitute
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Happy Days At The Queen’s Head
As regular readers will know, there is a campaign underway to Save The Queen’s Head in Limehouse, which was declared as an Asset of Community Value this spring. Supporters have until the end of August to buy the pub from its current owners and prevent it falling into the hands of developers. Pledges can be made here. Today, I publish an interview by ‘The Returning Native’ with Tony Minehane, whose family kept the pub open through two world wars.
John Driscoll at The Queen’s Head, 1926
To the locals downing their pints at The Queen’s Head today, Tony Minehane is an unfamiliar face – but this grand old East End boozer on Limehouse’s verdant York Sq was once home for Tony, whose family ran the pub from 1926 until 1961.
“My father found this tucked away under the counter the day he left The Queens Head in 1961,” he said, placing an unopened bottle of Young’s Coronation Ale in my hand. “This may well be the only one in existence.”
As a schoolboy, Tony earned pocket money delivering bottles of gin and advocaat to a house of upmarket prostitutes on Cable St. “These girls used to drink in the saloon bar here and they’d take drink back with them,” he recalled.“But once a month, usually about midnight, they’d phone up and say, if Tony’s available, could he drop something down to us? So I’d jump on my bike and take it there.”
Tony’s grandfather, John Driscoll, was the first in the family to take charge behind the bar, securing the tenancy in 1926 after a career as a sailor in the merchant navy.
“At that time this place had more mice than it had customers,” Tony claimed, rifling through his folder stuffed with sepia photographs of the pub and documents he has gathered from his family’s history.
“Fortunately it had the beer, which was good. My grandparents came in for a drink and the landlord said he was getting out. So my granddad thought, ‘Well, I’ll get in touch with the brewery.’”
In the early part of the twentieth century, it was not uncommon for former seaman to retire to run East End pubs, not least because there were so many of both dotted around London’s docks at the time. But Tony’s grandfather went to the front of the queue when he discovered an unlikely connection with the executive at Young’s brewery who was picking between the candidates.
“They were shown into this guy’s office, and my grandfather thought he recognised him, but didn’t say any more because he wasn’t sure. They talked about his career in the Merchant Navy and my grandfather mentioned that he worked on a ship called the ‘Omrah’, going backwards and forwards to Australia.
The guy said, ‘Do you remember anything a bit strange in such-and-such a year?’ My grandfather thought about it and said, ‘Oh, yes, we had a fire in the bunker that took two days to put it out and we had a stowaway that we dumped off in Sydney.’ The guy then said, ‘Well, I was the stowaway.’”
The pub was extended around the time that Tony’s father, James Minehane, agreed to take over as manager from his parents in 1938.
“At the time, this place was packed, but there was this great big yard out there at the back,” Tony explains. “My dad had this thing about going to Australia, and he said to the brewery, ‘Either you’ve got to make the pub bigger or I’m going to emigrate.’ So the brewery said, ‘Right, we’ll extend’. The new bar opened about twelve weeks before the Second World War started.”
Although the smart frontage of The Queen’s Head is much as Tony remembers it from his childhood, some things have disappeared, like the pewter counter top that once ran the length of the bar. Tony’s father also used to keep a revolver under the bar, taking it with him for protection when he and a couple of other local landlords together the takings to the local Midland Bank each Friday morning by hand, carrying the silver and copper coins in large sacks with ‘money’ written on them.
“They used to go into the bank, dump it all on the counter, which at that time was just a four-foot-wide oak table. They would put the paying-in book in the sacks for the cashier to sort out, while they went off to a cafe and had breakfast.”
Tony has a detailed knowledge of the firearm since cleaning it was one of his weekly chores as a child, something – he admits – might lead to a call from Social Services today.
As the evening progressed we attract a large crowd of regulars to our table, eager to hear more about the pub’s colourful past. The carpets at The Queen’s Head might be a little more faded and the bar top a little less grand than in Tony’s youth, but the place still offers a warm welcome to both old and new East Enders and has a loyal cohort of local customers.
Their hope is that the story of The Queen’s Head will continue, but this is currently in doubt. In 2013, under former mayor Lutfur Rahman, Tower Hamlets council sold the pub’s 125-year lease to a charity called Unity Welfare Foundation. This organisation decided to sell off the venue after a group of locals this year successfully applied for the Queen’s Head to gain protections from redevelopment as an Asset of Community Value.
The challenge supporters now face is trying to raise more than £500,000, which will be needed to meet the asking price. Let us hope that this latest chapter in The Queen’s Head’s long history has a happy ending.
The Queen’s Head, 1926
Pub dogs in the yard, 1928
New Saloon Bar, 1939
Public Bar, 1939
James Minehane, landlord 1939-1961
The Queen’s Head Beano in the late forties with James Minehane second from left in front row
High jinks in the Saloon Bar in the fifties
Christmas party, c.1954
Customers in the Public Bar in the fifties
Darts in the Saloon Bar in the fifties
The Queen’s Head Beano in the fifties
James Minehane’s retirement in 1961
The Queen’s Head – photography by Sarah Ainslie
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Malcolm Tremain’s East End In Colour
Complementing Malcolm Tremain’s colour photographs of Spitalfields in the early eighties, here are those taken around the East End and the City in the same era published for the very first time – as always, identifications of precise locations from readers are welcomed.
‘Games & Viewing Lounge Upstairs’
Wapping
The Turk’s Head, Wapping
Wapping
Wapping
Wapping
Wapping
Wapping
Wapping
Brewhouse Lane, Wapping
King Henry’s Wharf, Wapping
Wapping
Smithfield General Market
London Wall
Entrance to Museum of London at London Wall
London Wall
Spitalfields Market
Admissions line at Crispin St Night Shelter
Dusk in Allen Gardens
Photographs copyright © Malcolm Tremain
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Norton Folgate, The Fight Is On Again!
Hundreds joined hands to encircle Norton Folgate last summer
At a meeting on Tuesday night, the Spitalfields Trust decided to go to the Court of Appeal to challenge the verdict delivered by Justice Gilbart on Monday in favour of the Mayor of London and against the Trust in their campaign to prevent British Land destroying Norton Folgate.
There is a consensus that the Judge’s confirmation of the mishandling of the Mayor’s call-in of the Norton Folgate planning application cannot be squared with his conclusion that the Mayor’s decision to approve the development is legitimate. What kind of justice is it to confirm that powerful people can break the rules and get away with it? You have to ask yourself at which point such mishandling becomes abuse of power.
In their official statement (issued yesterday and published below) the Spitalfields Trust chose to widen their challenge by questioning the partial nature of the Mayor’s call-in whereby the GLA planning officers wrote their recommendations to suit the predetermined decision, emphasising the supposed benefits of the development and neglecting other factors. This is termed the ‘poisoning of the well’ issue and it brings the entire process into disrepute.
The notion that a Mayor of London who calls himself the ‘friend of developers’ should have the power to overrule planning decisions made democratically by local authorities is questionable. When this same Mayor stages a hearing and planning officers write reports to confirm his predetermined outcome this is highly questionable. When Justice Gilbart chose the opportunity of delivering his verdict to declare that it ‘warmed the cockles of his heart’ to read Boris Johnson’s words in the transcript of the hearing, this suggests a cosy level of flippant complacency which is also questionable.
The fight is on!
STATEMENT BY THE SPITALFIELDS TRUST, 12th May 2016
The Spitalfields Trust is naturally disappointed at the outcome of the Judicial Review. However there is more to this than the simple ruling: there is the full text of Mr Justice Gilbart’s judgment to consider.
This reveals that, in significant respects, the position taken by the Trust has been advanced. It is now definitively established that errors were made by the GLA on all four of the the Trust’s grounds – on the impact of Crossrail, on the cross-boundary effects of Crossrail, on the failure to take account of the Trust’s representations on the statutory criteria for Mayoral intervention, on the premature sending of an email confirming the planning officer’s recommendation.
The judgment establishes that a series of errors were made, with wider implications for the Mayor of London’s handling of planning applications. There is the matter of the weight that should be given to these mistakes – and the judge considered that each of these errors would not have made a difference to the take-over decision.
The Trust disagrees. It contends that the errors need to be considered in their totality, and their significance tested by the Court of Appeal.
The Court of Appeal may consider that the errors go further…
- That the misunderstanding of the criteria which has been identified in respect of Crossrail point to mistakes in identifying economic impacts and effects.
- That significant impacts needed to be addressed across the London Plan as a whole and that the Mayor failed to do so.
- That, having told the developer what the recommendation would be before reading statutorily relevant material, officers then wrote a report which was relentlessly supportive of the recommendation, omitting any arguments that the first two statutory criteria were not met.
- That officers who proceed on the basis of ‘recommendation first, evidence second’ and who privately tell the developer what they will – not might – say cannot be relied upon when they misreport the contrary view and make substantive errors. The judge did not grapple with this ‘poisoning of the well’ issue.
PLEASE CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO THE SPITALFIELDS TRUST’S
SAVE NORTON FOLGATE FIGHTING FUND
Photograph of Joining Hands To Save Norton Folgate by Morley Von Sternberg
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
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Malcolm Tremain’s Spitalfields In Colour
A few weeks ago, I published Malcolm Tremain’s evocative black and white photographs of Spitalfields in the early eighties and today it is my pleasure to complement these with a selection of his colour pictures, seen here for the first time
In Liverpool St Station
Goulston St
Brushfield St
Brushfield St
Crispin St
Railing of the night shelter in Crispin St
Brune St
Holland Estate
Artillery Lane
Looking towards the city from the Spitalfields Market car park
Looking south towards Brushfield St
Looking north towards Spital Sq
Goulston St
Goulston St
Middlesex St
Middlesex St
Alley at Liverpool St Station
Sun Passage
Tunnel at Liverpool St Station
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station under demoliton
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station
Old Broad St Station
Abandoned cafeteria at Old Broad St Station
Pedley St Bridge looking towards Cheshire St
Pedley St Bridge
Pedley St
Pedley St
Photographs copyright © Malcolm Tremain
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