Spitalfields Life

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I returned to the New Era Estate in Hoxton to meet Tony Garrett who lives there with his daughter Lindsey Garrett, Chairman of the Tenants Association and leader of the successful fight to save the Estate from corporate property developers.

A thoughtful man of quiet dignity, I was fascinated to hear Tony speak of his family history which reflects the dramatic changes in Hoxton over the last century. Today, several members of the extended Garrett family live in the New Era Estate as part of the long-established and closely-woven community that proved to be so resilient in the face of last year’s threat.

Tony is a proud father and fierce supporter of Lindsey and her achievements. His account reveals the origin of her political beliefs and sets the recent conflict into a wider perspective of social history – explaining why Estates like New Era came into being in the first place.

“Here at the New Era Estate, most people have lived in Hoxton all their lives and their families have always lived in Hoxton. I was born in Hoxton in 1949. At that time, it was one of the poorest areas in London and we lived in Essex St which was one of the worst streets in Hoxton. There were four families in each house – one in the basement, the ground floor, the first floor and the attic, where we lived in two rooms. There was our front room which was furnished with just a table and three chairs, and a back room with two double beds. My mum and dad slept in one and we three kids slept in the other. There was a toilet in the yard shared by all four families, and we had a gas ring on the landing and a cupboard which we called a larder, no refrigerator.

At ten years old, it was my job to take my brother and sister to the Public Baths in Haggerston each week. It was called a slipper bath. I got in first, then my brother and sister. It was just rows of baths with curtains round them and everybody used to go there. We had a tin bath but it wasn’t really practical, heating the water and carrying it upstairs. There was sixty houses in Essex St and everyone was poor, they kept their door keys on a string so you could reach through the letterbox to get it and open the door. Because nobody had anything, there was no jealousy.

My dad wasn’t there. He was a crook and he was in prison, but I didn’t realise that at the time. It was only later we found out we were poor. There was no social security or benefits then, and I wish I’d asked my mum how she survived, because she always got money to feed us – though we never had enough to eat and we were hungry all the time. Everyone was the same. My mum was always ill, she had pleurisy that became pneumonia which was quite a serious thing then. She was in hospital and they sent her away to a convalescent home out of London, so we couldn’t see her. We had to go into foster care – our grandparents couldn’t take care of us, there were already six of them living in their home in Falkirk St – they had eleven children.

When I was eleven, Essex St was demolished as part of ‘Slum Clearance’ and my father was released from prison. I remember coming home from my first day of secondary school and my mum said, ‘We’re moving.’ We moved into a newly-built three bedroom flat and it felt like Buckingham Palace to us. That was 1960 and I can still remember walking through the door. We had no furniture but people lent us bits and pieces. We had no blankets, in the old place we slept under coats on the bed in winter. It was full of bugs and fleas. Once a month, we went to this place where you took all your clothes off and they painted you with blue unction. You were blue for days, it was under your nails and in your hair.

The new flat was in a building called Touchard House and things seemed better for us there. We had a bit more comfort and a bit more food, until my dad went into prison again for another two years. My mum got ill again too, so the three of us went to my gran and we lost the flat, but later the council rehoused us in Queenhythe House.

When I was fourteen, I left school and got a job. I got in trouble with the police, just petty offences but after four or five times I was committed to borstal at seventeen years old. All my friends’ dads were either in prison or had been in prison, there was no-one I knew that didn’t have that. The justice system was different then, more severe and disciplinarian. After three offences, you were automatically sent to borstal – the minimum period was nine months and the maximum three years. It was like a boot camp and you had to work your way out. When you arrived you wore a red tie for three months, but then you could earn a blue tie and finally a green tie which meant you were due for release. You were assessed every month, and I was labelled anti-establishment and anti-authority. I did two and a half years, so it proves I could have been more sensitive. We had to get up at five and march in all weathers before making your bed pack. Your boots had to be shiny. It was like the army and all the officers were ex-military. It certainly worked for me though, because I was never in trouble again.

I was sent to a place called Moreton Hall in Lincolnshire. I was one of only two from London there – me and Johnny Hughes – and because we were this pair of Cockneys among all these Northerners, we got it harder than the rest. Every day was a battle. There was a lot of violence and if you were soft your life was hell. A lot of people used to abscond because of bullying.

I came out at nineteen and got a job as a porter down at Smithfield Market. Then I met my wife Christine and got married when I was twenty, and at twenty-one I had my first son, Nicholas. We had a flat about above a chemist in Blackstock Rd, Highbury, but it was terrible cold place with mice and we was rehoused in Sutton Dwellings, Old St. Times got better for us with Christine working and I got a job at the Post Office. I worked long hours, and we built up a bit of money and got a three bedroom council house in Broadway Market which we managed to buy under the right-to-buy, and we lived there for a few years. We had two sons Nicholas and Simon, and then twin daughters, Anne and Lindsey.

We sold that house and used the money to pay the fees for Lindsey to go to university. It funded four years at university. That’s when we moved back here to the New Era Estate in Hoxton. You had to be recommended but I had an aunt who had lived here her whole life, so she spoke to the caretaker. It was means tested and we had to fill in a form. We met the criteria and we moved in, and we’ve been here twenty-six years.

Over the years, I worked as a porter at Smithfield, Billingsgate and Spitalfields, then a postman and finally as a chauffeur for Islington Council. I liked that job but I got knocked over by a car and was ill for years, and was given a pension and a lump sum. So I left at fifty-five and haven’t been able to work since.

I’ve always been interested in politics and I’ve always been in the union and been shop steward. I’ve always been to the Left of everything. At the Post Office, I was asked if I’d ever been a member of the Communist Party and I used to be – because I believe in equality for all – so I said, ‘Yes,’ and they sacked me for that.

Lindsey is a fighter. I think she gets it from me. In her public speaking, some of the things she says, I can hear myself. She belonged to the debating society at the University of Northumbria. She just gets up and it comes to her. She was brilliant on the steps of Number 10. It’s confidence.”

Tony aged five standing in Hoxton Market with his father John Garrett and pals in 1953

Tony Garrett

Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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Lindsey Garrett, Chairman of New Era Estate Tenants Association

Kitty Jennings, Dressmaker

Contributing Artist Adam Dant has installed a life-size replica of a cabbies’ shelter as the centrepiece of his new exhibition at the Bloomberg Space in Finsbury Sq. Adam’s proposition is that these cherished landmarks are reliquaries which contain the collective unconscious of the city, where only those initiates possessing ‘the Knowledge’ may enter. Yet at the gallery all are invited to step inside the shelter to hear a litany of archaeologists’ dreams recorded by Adam as manifestations of the urban imagination at work.

Complementing the cabbies’ shelter, the walls are hung with a series of the vast intricate drawings for which Adam is celebrated, rivalling Piranesi and Hogarth in their audacious scale and overwhelming detail. The largest of these is entitled ‘The Budge Row Bibliotheque’ which envisions the hole that comprises the largest building site in the City of London at present, filled with a surreal sequence of simultaneous events selected from the last two thousand years of history and lore.

Adam Dant at the Cabbies’ Shelter in Warwick Avenue

The Budge Row Biblotheque (Click image to enlarge)

Post debt crisis restructuring: Fleet Place (Click image to enlarge)

The Abandoned City: Guildhall (Click image to enlarge)

Dismantling the printing presses at Paternoster Square (Click image to enlarge)

An Anecdotal View of Walbrook (Click image to enlarge)

Drawings photographed by Dave Morgan

You can visit the cabbies’ shelter and view The Budge Row Bibliotheque at Bloomberg Space, 50 Finsbury Sq, EC2A 1HD – Monday-Saturday 11-6pm until 15th March 2015

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John Hall

Contributing Artist Lucinda Rogers took me to visit her friend John Hall, the Piano Accordionist, in Haggerston and she drew this portrait while John and I enjoyed a chat. We sat in John’s new flat, replacing his former home in Samuel House that was demolished last year when the Estate was cleared, to be replaced by a much larger development including a significant number of private flats.

From John’s flat in the completed building, housing the former tenants of Samuel House, we looked across to the construction site where another building will rise, eating up almost all the green space of the old Haggerston Estate and we wondered what the future will bring. All around, John was surrounded by musical paraphernalia attesting to his remarkable talent that has brought him new friends and enlivened his social life over the last forty years.

“I was born in a prefab in the Old Ford Rd in 1947. They were built as temporary accommodation after the bomb damage in the war, and they had everything you needed – even gardens. My dad was given one when he came out of the Navy, though I don’t remember it too well because we moved when I was small to Reginald Rd E7. Originally he had been a furniture van driver but he took over a little corner shop. A lot of people had the idea that we had it easy  because my dad ran the shop, but it was hard work, we always came home from school and had to work behind the counter. The shop was open from seven until nine every day. I was the third of four children – Lesley the oldest, Linda my elder sister, then me and Peter, my little brother.

When I was at school, I was good at metalwork and I had no trouble getting a job because in those days you had all this manufacturing in the East End. For a spell, I was in the services and I went to Berlin but they found I had bronchitis and I got discharged in 1968.

My grandmother was a classical pianist but I didn’t discover music until my teens when I saw Allodi’s Accordions in Finsbury Park. I just remember looking in the shop window and seeing these piano accordions and deciding I wanted to learn to play one. I went to have lessons above the shop given by Mr Allodi’s son, and I took to it naturally. This was in 1971 when I was working as an ambulance man, after joining the service in 1968. I played the accordion at The Talbot in Englefield Rd and I used to play at the Ambulance Service Social Club in Highams Park in variety shows. In the early seventies, I had a significant social life. I wanted to try busking, so I went down to Ezra St next to Columbia Rd and I was there for ten years. That’s where I met David Bailey. He told me to look in the lens and he snapped me. Then he came back the next week with an autographed print. I like his pictures because they are very clear.

After eleven years in the ambulance service, I went into anaesthetics and I worked at the East London Chest Hospital, it was a very homely place in those days. In 1980, I moved into Samuel House in Haggerston. They had some flats that were described as ‘hard to let’ and it was quite run down in those days with lots of broken windows, although it wasn’t too bad. Four flights of stairs is no problem when you are thirty but I couldn’t make it now. I was having trouble getting up there.

These days, I am in a wheelchair and I live in a flat on the ground floor of the new building. The old flats were very draughty and the double glazing here helps enormously. But it’s sad in a way, I miss some of those people, those that died. They went through a lot but they never got a new flat.

I still play the accordion occasionally.”

Customers at John’s family corner shop in Reginald Rd

John and his younger brother Peter

John in a sharp suit in the sixties

John experimented with sideburns in the seventies

An early photo of John with his piano accordion

John as an ambulance man with John Rose (standing) and David Komble (right)

John plays piano accordion at Pellicci’s in Bethnal Green

John in the Samuel House days

John shows David Bailey’s photograph of him playing the accordion in Ezra St

Drawing copyright © Lucinda Rogers

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So Long Samuel House

Lindsey and her daughter Dolly

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I went up to Hoxton to visit Lindsey Garratt who is still reeling from her revelatory triumph before Christmas when she and the other tenants, with moral support from Russell Brand, forced Westbrook Partners to relinquish control of the New Era Estate where ninety-two families were under threat of eviction. This success has been a transformative experience for Lindsey, awakening her to a recognition of the wider crisis beyond the immediate problem she and her neighbours confronted. Theirs is an inspirational example that reaffirms the power of collective action in the struggle for justice against the malign forces of corporate property development.

“I’m a Healthcare Co-ordinator and I love it, but I also like campaigning now too. I’d never done anything like that before. I was never interested in Politics, it didn’t affect me before because I’ve always lived in my working class bubble here in Hoxton. I lived on the New Era Estate since I was fifteen. This is my home. My great nan lived in Hoxton and my grandfather, and all my dad’s family have been here for ever. I would never want to live anywhere else. My parents live opposite, my sister and aunty live on the Estate. I know everyone here. It wasn’t just about our homes, it was about what we have here, our community. I’ve got such lovely memories of my time on the Estate, I couldn’t bear to leave.

In July 2012, we were told the flats had gone up for sale and I arranged a meeting to set up a Tenants Association, although we were told that there was nothing to worry about. Then in July 2014, we were told the Estate was sold and our rents would go up. I just felt compelled to do something, so I called up the Daily Mail and they put the story on the front page because the owner, Richard Benyon, was one of the Tory elite. We held regular meetings to keep people informed and hold everyone together, but we didn’t think we had much chance. We set up a pitch in Hoxton Market and it all died down, until one day Russell Brand walked past and asked us what was going on.

Three hundred of us dressed up in a Dickens theme and we marched to Benyon’s office to serve an eviction notice upon them – that was my idea. It worked, because they pulled out and sold their stake in the Estate. After that we had Westbrook Partners to contend with. So we marched with six to eight hundred people from their offices in Berkeley Sq to Downing St to deliver our petition of nearly three hundred thousand signatures. We weren’t going to give up but they did. We were surprised. We thought, ‘Bloody Hell, that was easy! What next?’

It’s changed me personally, it’s opened up my eyes to how politics works and how difficult it is for the working class – how much pressure is put on you. I was ‘restructured’ at work and I lost three hundred pounds a month and my rent went up two hundred pounds a month, and I was being told, ‘You just can’t live in London anymore.‘ I felt I was being forced into poverty, but I’m a single parent and I’ve never claimed benefits. I’ve got work and I’m just asking to pay an affordable rent.

All around us is going, for us to remain when all around us is going is scary. It’s easy for landlords to divide and rule when it’s a more diverse community, but because the families in the New Era Estate have been here together since the nineteen-thirties it’s harder to get rid of us. We said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We proved people can make a difference because it happened here. At Christmas, we all celebrated and cried a lot. It was a real success story, everyone got to stay and all the shops too.

There are other communities that are being cast aside. I feel passionate about it and I will continue to campaign for it.”

Portrait copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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