Nik Strangelove’s Brick Lane
Nik Strangelove‘s father’s family originated from Bow but Nik first came to Brick Lane to take photographs in 1993, when he was studying photography, as picture editor of The London Student. In 1997, Nik returned under commission to photograph Brick Lane for the Express on Sunday but these pictures were never published and are revealed for the first time here today.
Photographs copyright © Nik Strangelove
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Human Remains At Christ Church
Dr Margaret Clegg Keeper of Human Remains at the Natural History Museum will be giving a lecture at Christ Church Spitalfields on Thursday July 2nd at 7pm, talking about exhumations from the crypt thirty years go and subsequent research upon these bones
“They were once living, breathing people – they are you.”
In Spitalfields, people often talk of the human remains that were removed from the crypt – nearly a thousand bodies that were once packed in tight during the eighteenth century, safe from resurrectionists and on their way to eternal bliss.
During the nineteen eighties, they were exhumed and transferred to the Natural History Museum where they rest today under the supervision of Dr Margaret Clegg, Head of the Human Remains Unit, who guards them both with loving attention and scholarly rigour, unravelling the stories that these long-ago residents of Spitalfields have to tell us about the quality of their lives and the nature of the human species.
“From the very first lecture I attended on the subject as an undergraduate, I became fascinated by what human remains can tell us about ourselves,” Dr Clegg admitted to me enthusiastically, “You can’t help but feel some kind of relationship when you are working with them. They were once living, breathing people – they are you.”
Dr Clegg led me through the vast cathedral-like museum and we negotiated the swarming mass of humanity that crowded the galleries on that frosty morning, until we entered a private door into the dusty netherworld where the lights were dimmer and the atmosphere was calm. Next week, Dr Clegg is making the trip to Spitalfields to deliver a report on the human remains – a venerable message home from these ex-residents in the form of a lecture at Christ Church – and thus our brief conversation served as a modest preamble to set the scene for this hotly-anticipated event.
“Dr Theya Mollison did the original excavation of the remains in the nineteen-eighties. There were more than nine hundred and for about half we know their age, sex, and when they were born and when they died, from the coffin plates. After they were removed, the remains were brought here to the Natural History Museum for longer-term analysis and study of the effects of occupation and the types of diseases they suffered. We had a large amount of information and could tell who was related to who. We could also tell who died in childbirth, and we have juveniles so we got information on childhood mortality and the funerary practices for children and babies, for example.
We have a special store for human remains at the museum, where each individual is stored in a separate box – it’s primarily bones but some have fingernails and hair. Any bodies that had been preserved were cremated when they were exhumed. The museum applied for a faculty from the Diocese of London to store the bones, the remains are not part of our permanent collection. The first faculty was for ten years and over time a second and third faculty were granted, but this will be the final one during which a decision will be made about the final disposition of the bones. During these years, the bones have been studied intensively. They are quite rare, there are very few such collections in which we know the age and sex of so many. They are probably our most visited and most researched collection. We have our own internal research and visiting researchers come from all over the world – for a wide variety of research purposes, including important work in forensics and evolutionary studies.
I am by training a biological anthropologist, and I am interested in the study of human archaeological remains from the perspective of how they grew and developed and what that can tell us about them.
In Spitalfields, you can compare families of the same age – one that ages quickly and one that ages slowly, which tells us something about the variables when we try to calibrate the date of remains at other sites. You can’t always tell what they did but you can tell, for example, that they used their upper body or that they developed muscles in their arms or legs as a direct result of their occupation. My dad was a printer and when he started out he used a hand press and developed a muscle in his arm as a consequence of using it. He’s seventy-nine and it’s still there. In those days, people started work at twelve or thirteen while the muscles were still developing and these traits quickly became established based upon their occupation. They were the ordinary working people of eighteenth century Spitalfields.
We get half a dozen emails a year from families who want to know if their ancestor who was buried in Christ Church is in the collection, but often I can’t help because they were buried in the churchyard or another part of the church. Occasionally, relatives ask if they can come and see them.”
Bonnet collected during excavations at Christ Church.
Shroud collected during excavations at Christ Church.
Cotton winding sheet collected during excavations at Christ Church.
Gold lower denture formed from a sheet of gold which was cut and folded around the lower molars.
Medicine bottle found in a child’s coffin during excavations at Christ Church.
Archaeological excavations in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields, London, 1984-1986.
Excavation images © Natural History Museum
Portrait of Dr Clegg © Sarah Ainslie
Click here to book tickets for Dr Margaret Clegg’s lecture at Christ Church on 2nd July
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The Huguenot Map Of Spitalfields Unveiled
Last week, the Huguenots came from far and wide to converge at Townhouse, 5 Fournier St, to see the completed Huguenot Map of Spitalfields drawn by Adam Dant.
Brainchild of Fiona Atkins, proprietor of Townhouse, the project has seen more than three hundred and fifty descendants of Huguenots in Spitalfields submit the addresses of their refugee ancestors to compose a street map with all the names in place. The unveiling was undertaken by Clifford Atkins & Stanley Rondeau whose Huguenot forebears lived in Spitalfields and likely knew each other three hundred years ago.
Click on the map to enlarge
Gathering of just a few of the current descendants of the Huguenots of Spitalfields featured on the map
Stanley Rondeau points out his ancestor Jean Rondeau, who came to Spitalfields in 1685, to Adam Dant
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Copies of the limited edition of The Huguenot Map are available from Townhouse
Click for details of the HUGUENOT SUMMER festival which continues until September
You can view The Huguenot Map at Townhouse for the next few weeks
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Contributing Writer Rosie Dastgir meets Aminul Hoque as he returns to the familiar streets where he grew up, and reflects upon childhood memories of racism and football in Spitalfields in the eighties
Portrait of Aminul Hoque in Spitalfields by Sarah Ainslie
One bright morning in Whitechapel, I am sitting in the Brady Centre with Aminul Hoque, a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, when he asks a deceptively simple question – “Who are you? If you aren’t Bangladeshi and you’re not really British, tell me who you are.”
The question of non-belonging is at the core of his new book, British Islamic Identity – Third Generation Bangladeshis from East London, an exploration of the lives of young Bangladeshis and the new British Islamic identity they have constructed for themselves. The book draws on hundreds of conversations that he conducted over a five year period with a group of young people, their friends and families, colleagues, boyfriends, girlfriends, social workers and teachers.
We meet in a place that is close to Aminul’s heart, near where he used to play football and where he grew up in a council flat with his family, after moving here, aged two, from Bangladesh. The trees are in blossom along a street now studded with new coffee joints and a starburst of silver street art glints against a grey brick wall, its reflection captured in a huge black puddle. The rough aesthetic of the area is almost unrecognizable from the place where Aminul grew up and where he spent years working with local young people.
“The conundrum is ‘not belonging’ because you are reminded you aren’t British,” Aminul explains, “Many young people express their sense that you need to be white to be British, so they say to me, ‘But I was born here, so what am I then? They keep telling me to go back where I come from. Go back where? You tell me.’” But there is no going back – so where, then, do you go?
The image of the Bangladeshi community has changed from being quiet, hard-working and law-abiding to one that poses a national threat. Aminul suggests to me there has been a shift from old style racism to the politics of otherness, of difference. “You are different, because you wear a hijab, you have a beard, you believe in the Ummah, you pray to a different god, you’re attracted to extremism,” he declares, quoting the commonplace mis-assumptions.
Outsiders point fingers at the community for its refusal to be like others. Yet is it a refusal or, rather, is it the impossibility of that expectation? Expectation is a river that runs deep beneath the bedrock of the Bangladeshi community and the question is – do you cleave towards or against it? Aminul seems to have done both, confounding some expectations and embracing others.
“I was football hungry growing up,” he says, as we take a stroll around Whitechapel towards a grassy football pitch that did not exist when he was a child. “It was a survival thing, growing up in Bethnal Green in the eighties and nineties.”
It was a time of poverty and of racism so commonplace that it was considered just a normal part of existence. ‘Paki-bashing’ was a feature of daily life and football was the antidote. Most families Aminul knew, including his own, were too poor to have a television back then, so they all watched football matches crammed into the front room of someone’s flat where they were lucky enough to have a telly. On the estate where he grew up, he and his friends played football on a concrete pitch.
“It was like a prison,” he recalls, “with a barbed wire fence. The neighbouring block was for the white boys and girls and we wouldn’t go into their area for fear of being attacked, but they’d always come into ours. And they’d do it routinely, just for fun. Paki-bashing.” A popular pastime in those days was for white kids to come and let loose their pit bulls when the Bangladeshi boys were playing football, trapping them in the pitch so they would have to climb the fence to escape the vicious dogs. Even going to school involved running a gauntlet through the neighbouring estate of predominantly white residents. “We were just really scared,” Aminul admits, “So we used to go in numbers. It was like a game of cat and mouse.”
Football was Aminul’s passion and he dreamed of making it as a professional. Bangladeshis have never really made it in the sport, yet he was determined to until his dream was shattered in 2002 when he fractured his leg during a game. Marooned in his bedroom, his leg in plaster, Aminul hit a low point. At his bedside sat a complete stranger. The stranger was his father, somebody he loved, yet barely knew. Everything was about to change.
“I’d never really had a proper relationship with my father emotionally – he was a disciplinarian, really, a fantastic person, always present, but he never spoke very much to me.”
The fracture forced the two men to start talking to each other. At first, it was simply the son asking the father to fetch the TV remote or a glass of water, but later it evolved into longer, deeper conversations. Out came the family photographs and the story of his father’s own migration to this country from Bangladesh – his hopes and dreams of return gradually unfurled. His father had eventually settled permanently in the East End of London after a period in the north of England, like many fellow Sylheti fellow migrants. That was 1963.
Talking to his father, Aminul discovered how tightly his own identity was bound up with his notion of home. Home was Bangladesh. Home was the river he jumped into, the mangos he pinched from the neighbours’ tree. Home was the country where Aminul had been born and yet it was unchartered territory.
Aminul shows me a black and white portrait of his grandfather, which features his mother as a young bride, left behind in Bangladesh while Aminul’s father struggled to become established in England. Behind the formal image lies a poignant story.
“My grandfather was very strict, old-fashioned, a conservative, traditional man, who gave my mum a hard time. She was expected to do chores, keep the house clean, but to her that was normal.” It was in the years just before the 1971 War of Independence with Pakistan and there were many women who had to live through the war while their husbands were away working in the UK. Snippets of his father’s oral history inspired a need to know more about his own identity and origins.
Once his broken leg had healed, Aminul took a journey home to his village in Bangladesh and, to his surprise, even though he had left when he was a baby, he experienced a magnetism drawing him to his birthplace that he could not fully explain. Is the place you are born so tied up with your sense of identity, he wonders?
He is a father of three daughters now, all born here. Aminul and his wife, a teacher in the East End of London, used to visit Bangladesh regularly with their children but, these days, the trips are less frequent. His daughters’ connection to Bangladesh is minimal, acquired primarily via the medium of cable TV, yet they are reminded constantly, he says, that they are not actually British – and that herein lies the tragedy for this third generation of Bangladeshi young people.
In 1995, Aminul Hoque ventured south of London to study at Sussex University, confounding the usual expectations to stay close to home, as many Bangladeshis still do when choosing higher education. Encouraged by the example of his older brothers, it was an iteration of his own migration, away from the urban landscape of the East End to the undulating chalk hills of the Sussex Downs. It was a world that was new and adventurous, very liberal, very welcoming, and white.
At Sussex, he studied Politics and History, with American Studies, and his fascination with the United States grew. Once more, he bucked expectations of what young Bangla boys from the East End do, by hopping across the Atlantic to study in the sleepy seaside suburban town of Santa Cruz in California. He was frequently taken for Latino, something that did not faze him, but rather added to his youthful sense that identity is complex, fluid, and more than skin-deep. What did he do there, so far from home? “I settled in,” he says, “It was amazing.”
These days, home is in Walthamstow, where he lives with his wife and three daughters. There is an expectation for the extended family to live in close proximity, sharing accommodation, mingling generations, yet Aminul chose to leave the East End for the suburbs. In Walthamstow, the attractions are manifold – the leafy appeal of Epping Forest, more living space, a garden, good schools nearby.
How does he find suburban life, I wonder, after the tight-knit world of the East End? Aminul is enthusiastic about it and the family have settled down – yet he mentions that, when they first arrived in the area, there was some resistance from the neighbours in the form of an objection to the building of a loft extension, which he had to overcome. One neighbour said, “This place is changing,” an indirect comment on the influx of people like Aminul, now that the suburbs no longer contain or express what they used to.
Yet Aminul seems adept at straddling traditional and progressive values in his work and life, in particular in his thoughts on Islam and feminism. He points out that there is now a burgeoning resistance from young women to be easily defined by old stereotypes. “Younger girls are part of a rising, educated generation – a numerate, literate generation, who are globally aware, and whose interpretation of culture and religion is not oral, handed down from their elders. It’s something they’ve read about for themselves. Girls are becoming financially independent, they’re going to university, they are challenging their fathers, their uncles, brothers, husbands.”
Expectations about who these young Muslim girls are and what they should do with their lives are being confounded, he says. Education has been a significant driver and the parents of third generation Bangladeshis are literate, engaged and critical. Unlike their parents, the first generation, they are more deeply engaged in their children’s education, in helping with homework, and pushing for participation in sport and after school activity. Consequently, the old image of underachievement is swiftly vanishing.
Does he challenge certain patriarchal attitudes to women and girls in the community? “I do challenge patriarchal conventions,” he admits with a smile, “and I get in trouble.” The elders sometimes disapprove of his ideas. “Women should get to know their partners before marriage,” is one example he cites which causes plenty of friction and he admits to getting ticked off for being too westernized at times – “For insisting that women shouldn’t wait to eat after their men, but should that they should all sit down together.”
Sitting down together is an eloquent image of kinship and equality between the sexes and across generations. It carries the emblematic force of inevitability. Yet the journey to this point has been anguished, long and hard fought, even violent at times. When Aminul was around eight, he remembers one hot day when a group of white kids invaded the football pitch where he was playing with his friends, brothers and cousins. Name calling and teasing escalated into a brawl with his older brother being attacked and Aminul ran home to fetch help from his mother. She had once been set upon herself by a mob of men and women from a neighbouring estate yet, sensing her son was in danger, she was fearless. She abandoned her work at the sewing machine stitching garments and ran to her son’s rescue.
“I remember going back home with them,” Aminul says, eyes shining, “and I vividly remember the sound of the sewing machine, which was still running.“
In Hanbury St
Aminul’s grandfather and mother, holding Aminul as a baby, taken in Bangladesh
In Heneage St
Aminul’s family in the eighties
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
British Islamic Identity – Third Generation Bangladeshis from East London is published by Trentham Books
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At Midsummer On Primrose Hill
On Tuesday 23rd June at 7pm, Colin O’Brien will giving an illustrated lecture at Waterstones Piccadilly, showing his photographs and telling more stories of LONDON LIFE. Please mail piccadilly@waterstones.com to book your free ticket. Meanwhile, Colin’s exhibition at The Society Club in Soho runs until 1st August.
In the grove of sacred hawthorn
At Midsummer, Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I joined the celebrants of the Loose Association of Druids on Primrose Hill for the solstice festival hosted by Jay the Tailor, Druid of Wormwood Scrubs. As the most prominent geological feature in the Lower Thames Valley, it seems likely that this elevated site has been a location for rituals since before history began.
Yet this particular event owes its origin to Edward Williams, a monumental mason and poet better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg, who founded the Gorsedd community of Welsh bards here on Primrose Hill in June 1792. He claimed he was reviving an ancient rite, citing John Tollund who in 1716 summoned the surviving druids by trumpet to come together and form a Universal Bond.
Consequently, the Druids begin their observance by gathering to honour their predecessor at Morganwg’s memorial plaque on the viewing platform at the top of the hill, where they corral bewildered tourists and passing dog walkers into a circle to recite his Gorsedd prayer in an English translation. From here, Colin & I joined the Druids as they processed to the deep shade of the nearby sacred grove of hawthorn where biscuits and soft drinks were laid upon a tablecloth with a bunch of wild flowers and some curious wooden utensils.
Following at Jay the Tailor’s shoulder as we strode across the long grass, I could not resist asking about the origin of his staff of hawthorn intertwined with ivy. “It was before I became a Druid, when I was losing my Christian faith,” he confessed to me, “I was attending a County Fair and a stick maker who had Second Sight offered to make it for me for fifteen pounds.” Before I could ask more, we arrived in the grove and it was time to get the ritual organised. Everyone was as polite and good humoured as at a Sunday school picnic.
A photocopied order of service was distributed, we formed a circle, and it was necessary to select a Modron to stand in the west, a Mabon to stand in the north, a Thurifer to stand in the east and a Celebrant to stand in the South. Once we all had practised chanting our Greek vowels while processing clockwise, Jay the Tailor rapped his staff firmly on the ground and we were off. A narrow wooden branch – known as the knife that cannot cut – was passed around and we each introduced ourselves.
In spite of the apparent exoticism of the event and the groups of passersby stopping in their tracks to gaze in disbelief, there was a certain innocent familiarity about the proceedings – which celebrated nature, the changing season and the spirit of the place. In the era of the French and the American Revolutions, Iolo Morganwr declared Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association. Notions that retain strong resonance to this day.
Once the ritual wound up, we had exchanged kisses of peace Druid-style and everyone ate a biscuit with a gulp of apple juice, I was able to ask Jay the Tailor more questions.“I lost my Christian faith because I studied Theology and I found it difficult to believe Jesus was anything other than a human being, even though I do feel he was a very important guide and I had a personal experience of Jesus when I met Him on the steps of Oxford Town Hall,” he admitted, leaving me searching for a response.
“When I was fourteen, I went up Cader Idris at Midsummer and spent all night and the next day there, and the next night I had a vision of Our Lady of Mists & Sheep,” he continued helpfully,“but that just added to my confusion.” I nodded sagely in response.“I came to Druids through geometry, through studying the heavens and recognising there is an order of things,” he explained to me, “mainly because I am a tailor and a pattern cutter, so I understand sacred geometry.” By now, the other Druids were packing up, disposing of the litter from the picnic in the park bins and heading eagerly towards the pub. It had been a intriguing day upon Primrose Hill.
“Do not tell the priest of our plight for he would call it a sin, but we have been out in the woods all night, a-conjuring the Summer in!” – Rudyard Kipling
Sun worshippers on Primrose Hill
Memorial to Iolo Morganwg who initiated the ritual on Primrose Hill in 1792
Peter Barker, Thurifer – “I felt I was a pagan for many years. I always liked gods and goddesses, and the annual festivals are part of my life and you meet a lot of good people.”
Maureen – “I’m a Druid, a member of O.B.O.D. (the Order of Bards, Ovates & Druids), and I’ve done all three grades”
Sarah Louise Smith – “I’m training to be a druid with O.B.O.D. at present”
Simeon Posner, Astrologer – “It helps my soul to mature, seeing the life cycle and participating in it”
John Leopold – “I have pagan inclinations”
Jay the Tailor, Druid of Wormwood Scrubs
Iolo Morgamwg (Edward Williams) Poet & Monumental Mason, 1747-1826
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
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At The Launch Of London Life
Thankyou to everyone who came along to celebrate the launch of Colin O’Brien’s London Life, also to Truman’s Beer for providing us with unlimited refreshment and especially to The Society Club for hosting the event so magnificently. Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney slipped among the crowds to capture all the drama of a euphoric night in Soho.
Colin O’Brien photographed by Bob Mazzer, photographer of Underground, at the launch of London Life
Colin signed books for three hours non-stop
Crowds converged at The Society Club on Thursday night
Henrietta Keeper from Bethnal Green sang for the assembled throng
Patricia Niven greets Frederike Huber
Colin O’Brien congratulates book designer Friederike Huber
Robson Cezar, King of the Bottletops handed out posters to all
Babette Kulik of The Society Club meets Bob Mazzer
Photographer Patricia Niven takes a quiet peek at Colin’s book
Photographs copyright © Simon Mooney
On Tuesday 23rd June at 7pm, Colin O’Brien will giving an illustrated lecture at Waterstones Piccadilly, showing his photographs and telling stories of LONDON LIFE. Please mail piccadilly@waterstones.com to book your free ticket.
Meanwhile, Colin’s photography exhibition at The Society Club, Ingestre Place, Soho, W1, runs until 1st August.
Alice Pattullo’s Alphabet
For the past year and a half, illustrator Alice Pattullo has been working at her studio in London Fields to create this splendid portfolio of screen prints of animals for each letter of the alphabet and it is my pleasure to publish the entire set of twenty-six for the first time today
A is for Armadillo who is short stout and round
B is for Beetle who stays close to the ground
C is for Crab who crawls on the sea bed
D is for Dove who likes to fly overhead
E is for Elephant who is anything but light
F is for fox who roams the city streets at night
G is for grizzly bear, a fierce looking fellow
H is for Hippo who is altogether more mellow
I is for Iguana a large scaly reptile
J is for jack rabbit who jumps mile after mile
K is for Kangaroo who takes hop, skip and bound
L is for leopard who moves fast across the ground
M is for Moth, a winged friend of the butterfly
N is for Nautilus who in his shell is quite shy
O is for okapi, our strange stripy friend
P is for polar bear who lives at world’s end
Q is for quail whose bright head feathers are fun
R is for Rhino who weights almost a tonne
S is for sloth who hangs and sleeps in a tree
T is for turtle who swims through the sea
U is for uakari whose face is small, wrinkly and red
V is for viper whose bite might leave you dead
W is for Whale, the biggest animal of them all
X is for Xantus who is remarkably small
Y is for Yak, like a cow with long hair
Z is for Zebra, so stripy you might stare
Copyright ©Alice Pattullo
Alice has produced an edition of thirty screen prints of each letter, sized at 60 x 60 cm, and priced at £100 each. If you would like buy prints email alice@alicepattullo.com
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