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.
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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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