Lindsey Garratt, Chairman Of New Era Estate Tenants Association
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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Sam Middleton & Jasmine Stone, Campaigning Stratford Mothers
At The Model Engineering Exhibition
Over the weekend, I braved the frozen wastes of North London to visit Alexandra Palace for the London Model Engineering Exhibition at which myriad wonders of handmade technology were to be admired. It was a heartwarming experience to view the thousands of little trains, planes, boats and cars of expert manufacture, painstakingly crafted in loving detail, and all working – powered by steam, motor, electricity, clockwork or candle power.
The model engineers watched over their cherished creations with a mixture of pride and protectiveness, enjoying the adulation of casual enthusiasts, while taking the opportunity to exchange specialist banter among their peers and cast a critical eye over the competition too. It was the culmination of countless hours in sheds and attics, when the pale-faced creators emerged blinking from the gloom of their self-imposed captivity into the glare of the limelight to accept applause for their tiny miracles.
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George Cruikshank’s Sunday In London
George Cruikshank published these engravings in 1833 as a protest against a Sabbatarian bill “in order to promote the better observance of the Lord’s day” which called for restrictions upon secular public activity. Yet the persistence of bars, clubs and markets opening on Sunday bears witness to the enduring and unassailable commitment of Londoners to make the most of their precious weekends.
“Miserable Sinners!”
Marching to Divine Service
Cordial Workings of the Spirit
The Sunday Market
“Thou Shalt Do No Manner of Work – Thou, nor Thy Cattle”
“People of Condition” on a Sunday
“The Servants Within Our Gates”
Gin-Temple Turn-Out At Church Time
Sunday Ruralizing
The Pay-Table
Sunday “Soiree Musicale”
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Nicholas Borden’s New Paintings
Petticoat Lane
Nicholas Borden is the hardiest artist I know. When I met him in January two years ago, he was standing at a easel on Valance Rd in a blizzard. One afternoon last December, I came upon him painting on Shaftesbury Av just as the dusk was falling and everyone else was hurrying for the tube. Then yesterday I went round to Nicholas’ ice cold flat, where it is necessary to wear your coat indoors, and he showed me the pictures he has been working on while the rest of us were huddled in the chimney corner.
Spitalfields seen from Petticoat Lane
Brushfield St
Charing Cross Rd
Shaftesbury Avenue
Charing Cross
Regent’s Canal at Broadway Market
Wilton Way, Hackney
Queen Victoria St
Outside Liverpool St Station
Nicholas Borden wisely keeps his coat on at home during cold weather
Paintings copyright © Nicholas Borden
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Nicholas Borden’s East End View
Paul Sandby’s Cries Of London, 1760
Frontispiece to Paul Sandby’s ‘Cries Of London Done From The Life’
Observe this young woman displaying her raree box containing the views of Paul Sandby’s ‘Cries of London Done From Life’ while, in the background, the artist is seen carrying packets of his prints back to his house in Carnaby Market, Soho, where he sold them directly to customers from the door – becoming a hawker in his own right.
Celebrated with his brother Thomas as a landscape watercolourist, Paul’s hundred or so sketches of London street traders – of which just twelve were issued as engravings, reproduced here from the set in the Museum of London – proved to be a misdirection in his career, yet they are distinguished by a greater social reality than any artist had brought to prints of the Cries of London before.
Both Paul and Thomas trained in military drawing at the Tower of London. Then Paul assisted in the surveying of the Highlands of Scotland after the defeat of the Jacobite Rebellion and began to paint landscapes in his spare time, before moving to live with Thomas in Windsor Great Park where his brother had been appointed Deputy Ranger. Over a decade there, Paul established himself as a consummate landscape painter with his views of Windsor, winning the admiration of Thomas Gainsborough for his accomplished work.
In 1760, Paul moved to London and set up house in Soho upon his marriage, and his set of Cries may be understood as his response to the city after years in Windsor. He saw with the eyes of an outsider to London and, perhaps, his military training encouraged a certain objectivity and lack of sentiment regarding hawkers. In Scotland, he mapped the land as part of the subjugation of the rebels and, now in London, he mapped the underclass of street traders with new realism.
These are the first set of the Cries in which the traders as portrayed as filthy and there is no doubt that the mackerel seller would have smelled foul too. Each of these sellers is a portrait of an individual, not just a social type as was the case in earlier series but, more than this, we have characters placed in a dramatic relationship to the world and, in many cases, stories that tell us of their circumstance.
Far from merely picturesque, these hawkers confront us in ways that we might choose to avoid. The ballad seller proffering two parts of ‘Kitty Fisher’ was known to work with a pickpocket, while the seller of switches for the distribution of domestic punishment raises his arm as if he is about to lash out at us. The provocation offered by the low-bodiced woman offering nosegays and notebooks is overtly sexual, and her expectant posture turns the use of ‘Your honour’ into a challenge.
Yet the lack of sentiment does not ever reduce Paul’s subjects but, rather, grants them power and independent existence beyond his portrayal. No longer rendered as the amusing curiosities of earlier Cries, these hawkers are the first to demand our respect. While, in life, we might take detours or do almost anything to avoid them, these prints offer a more complex and troubling political relationship between sellers and buyers than had been described before.
Unsurprisingly, Paul found that the public did not warm to his realistic portrayal of this urban social landscape with the same enthusiasm which they responded to his naturalistic rural landscapes. Beyond the set of twelve engravings, none other of the hundred sketches were ever turned into prints.
In 1760, Paul displayed his rural landscapes as part of the Society of Artists which became the Royal Academy when it was incorporated by George III in 1765, with Paul chosen to be one of the twenty-eight founder members in 1768. For the rest of his career, Paul sublimated his figures to landscapes, existing as polite adornments to add scale to the majesty of scenes which established his reputation as the father of English Landscape Painting – but he never did better figure drawings than in his characterful and raggedy Cries of London.
“My pretty little Gimy Tarters for a ha’penny a stick”
“Any tripe or neats’ feet or calves’ feet”
“Will your honour buy a sweet nosegay or a memorandum book?”
“All sorts of earthenware”
The Walking Stationer
“A hot pudding, a hot pudding, a hot pudding”
“Rare mackerel, three a groat or four for sixpence”
All fire and no smoke.
“Rare Meltin Oysters”
“Do you want any spoons, any hard-mettle spoons”
“Fun upon fun, or the first & second part of Mrs Kitty Fisher”
Paul Sandby (1731 – 1809) by Francis Coates
Paul Sandby’s design for his trade card
Prints copyright © Museum of London
Peruse these other sets of the Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
Charles Booth in Spitalfields
Studying Charles Booth’s notebooks from his research for the Survey into Life & Labour of the People of London (1886-1903), I came upon the volume for Spitalfields from Spring 1898 when he walked through many of the streets and locations of the Spitalfields Nippers around the same time Horace Warner took his photographs. So I thought I would select descriptions from Booth’s notebooks and place Warner’s pictures alongside, comparing their views of the same subject.
March 18th Friday 1898 – Walk with Sergeant French
Walked round a district bounded to the North by Quaker St, on the East by Brick Lane and on the West by Commercial St, being part of the parish of Christ Church, Spitalfields.
Back of big house, Quaker St
Starting at the Police Station in Commercial St, East past St Stephen’s Church into Quaker St. Rough, Irish.Brothels on the south side of the street past the Court called New Square. Also a Salvation Army ‘Lighthouse’ which encourages the disreputable to come this way. The railway has now absorbed all the houses on the North side as far as opposite Pool Square. Wheler St also Rough Irish, does not look bad, shops underneath.
Courts South of Quaker St – Pope’s Head Court, lately done up and repaired, and a new class in them since the repairs, poor not rough. One or two old houses remaining with long weavers’ windows in the higher storeys.
New Square, Rough, one one storey house, dogs chained in back garden…
Pool Sq
Pool Square, three storeyed houses, rough women about, Irish. One house with a wooden top storey, windows broken. This is the last of an Irish colony, the Jews begin to predominate when Grey Eagle St is reached. These courts belong to small owners who generally themselves occupy one of the houses in the courts themselves.
Isaac Levy
Grey Eagle St Jews on East side, poor. Gentiles, rough on West side, mixture of criminal men in street. Looks very poor, even the Jewish side but children booted, fairly clean, well clothed and well fed. Truman’s Brewery to the East side. To Corbet’s Court, storeyed rough Irish, brothels on either side of North end.
Washing Day
Children booted but with some very bad boots, by no means respectable….
Pearl St
Great Pearl St Common lodging houses with double beds – thieves and prostitutes.
South into Little Pearl St and Vine Court, old houses with long small-paned weavers windows to top storeys, some boarded up in the middle. On the West side, lives T Grainger ‘Barrows to Let’
Parsley Season in Crown Court
Crown Court, two strong men packing up sacks of parsley…
Carriage Folk of Crown Court – Tommy Nail & Willie Dellow
The Great Pearl St District remains as black as it was ten years ago, common lodging houses for men, women and doubles which are little better than brothels. Thieves, bullies and prostitutes are their inhabitants. A thoroughly vicious quarter – the presence of the Cambridge Music Hall in Commercial St makes it a focussing point for prostitutes
Detail of Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889
I shall be showing Horace Warner’s SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS and telling the story behind the photographs at WILTON’S MUSIC HALL next week on Wednesday 21st January 7:30pm, as part of 5 x 15 STORIES – five speakers, fifteen minutes each – alongside Franny Armstrong, Lisa Hannigan, Mike Figgis & Viktor Wynd.
At Rinkoff’s Bakery
Ray Rinkoff braids his Challah
“Hold on a few minutes, I’ve got something in the oven!”” exclaimed Ray Rinkoff, when Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I arrived at his family-run bakery in Jubilee St, Whitechapel, founded by Hyman Rinkoff in 1911. “I always wanted to be a Baker,” Ray continued, a moment later. “My grandfather was a Master Baker who came over from the Ukraine and opened up in Old Montague St, but – although my father couldn’t boil an egg – the talent was passed on to me.”
In this corner of London, Rinkoff’s Bakery is a major cultural landmark yet they wear their legendary status lightly. In 1906, Master Baker Hyman arrived fleeing the pogroms in Kiev and opened his shop five years later in Spitalfields opposite Black Lion Yard, lined with jewellers and known then as the Hatton Garden of the East End. All the family, uncles, cousins and aunts lived up above the bakery and worked in the business which flourished there until 1971 – when a compulsory purchase order presaged the demolition of the building, along with the rest of Old Montague St.
Since he was ten years old, Ray came in to work in the bakery during his school holidays and discovered a natural affinity with baking. “By the time I was twelve, my grandparents would pick me up in their car and bring me in and I got paid £2 a day,” Ray recalled fondly, “I used to help my grandfather Hyman with the baking, serve in the shop and make dough.” At fifteen years old in 1968, Ray wanted to go to Switzerland to train as a patissier but he settled for working at the Floris Bakery in Soho. “But then my dad said, ‘We’ve got problems at the bakery,’ so I came in to the family business and stayed,” Ray admitted to me, “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
“I used to get up at two in the morning and be at work by three, to light the old ovens and warm them for two hours before we could start baking,” he confessed with a shrug, “and then I’d get home at nine at night, for ten years, seven days a week.” These days Ray takes it easy on himself by working a mere twelve hour day, five days a week.
In recent decades Rinkoff’s has operated from Jubilee St with a small shop and a large busy bakery behind, where the next generation have joined the family business. In 1982, Lloyd Rinkoff was only thirteen when his father told him he could either take Hebrew Classes or work at the bakery on Sundays, so he chose the latter and stayed. More recently, in 2007, Jennifer Rinkoff joined and has expanded the bakery range to include Linzer biscuits and muffins.
“When you’ve worked hard all your life, you’re very proud of what you’ve got,” Ray assured me in haste, and then he had to run again because he had something in the oven.
Hyman Rinkoff, the founder
Max Rinkoff
The former shop in Jubilee St
The original shop in Old Montague St
Max in Old Montague St
Sylvie & Max Rinkoff
Max at the new bakery in Jubilee St
Rinkoff family group in Jubilee St with Ray (far right)
Lloyd, Jennifer & Ray Rinkoff
Aziz
Timothy, Head Pastry Chef – “I’ve been here thirty years”
Jamal
Sajez
Richard
Jennifer & Ray Rinkoff
New photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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