The Ravenous Appetite Of Mr Pussy
I have rarely had an uninterrupted night’s sleep recently. Although characteristically a mild and sedentary personality by day, my old cat – Mr Pussy – transforms at night into an insistent creature of voracious appetite, waking me from my slumber to demand I feed him with a nocturnal snack. I tried shutting the bedroom door but he screamed so long and so loud, he woke up the neighbours. I have no choice but to take the path of least resistance and fill up his dish, if I am to have any sleep at all.
Mr Pussy is fourteen years old and I did fear that there could be some sinister emerging affliction which might provoke this rapacious conduct. Old cats can be susceptible to thyroid problems, I read, and the symptoms including ravenous hunger and volatile behaviour. So – reluctantly – I took him to the veterinary surgeon last week for expensive blood tests which might discover any underlying problems, and came back with a test tube to collect a urine sample.
Just six months ago, Mr Pussy had serious dental work to remove several rotten teeth which led him to forsake the biscuits that, like an eighteenth century mariner, have been his staple diet until this year. Consequently, he has discovered a whole new appetite and has no scruple about asserting his right as a member of the household to participate in every meal, preferring human food to anything produced for cats. No longer able to hunt for prey, nowadays he eats kitchen scraps supplemented with raw meat and sardines.
When I returned home from the vet and released Mr Pussy from his basket, the challenge of obtaining a feline urine sample dawned. Dutifully I tipped the non-absorbent granules I had been supplied into a litter tray and locked the cat flap, on the principle that once Mr Pussy did his business, I could syringe it up into the test tube. Yet this was not be, instead he paced around with increasing anxiety, taking no interest in the litter tray and seeking a likely location as a last resort for when the pressure grew too much.
Tactfully, Mr Pussy chose the corner of the bedroom where the shoes are lined up as the smelliest spot in the house where his misdemeanour might be least noticed and, after enduring his vocal frustration for several hours, I was delighted when he squatted down beside my boots to relieve himself on the floor. “That’s very professional,” gasped the receptionist at the veterinary surgery when I delivered the test tube promptly, suggesting that I was perhaps not alone in my struggle with this particular task.
Once I had accommodated to the painful realisation that Mr Pussy’s recent nocturnal behaviour might signal the commencement of his terminal decline, I received the call from the vet to inform me that all the tests revealed he was in exceptionally good health for a cat of his age. He was a little underweight, I was told. The dry biscuits he had forsaken were high protein and Mr Pussy is a large cat, so he needs to eat a significantly higher volume of other food to compensate.
The explanation was unavoidably simple. Mr Pussy woke me in the night because he had a ravenous appetite and I fed him too little. Now I leave him a generous late supper before I take to my bed and, thankfully, nocturnal dramas have relented. We can all sleep peacefully in this corner of Spitalfields again.
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Nicholas Borden’s Solo Show
Nicholas’ first major solo show is at Millinery Works in Islington from today until November 15th
Princelet St
Ever since I came upon Nicholas Borden working at his easel in the snow on Vallance Rd in Bethnal Green a few years ago, I have been captivated by his painting. In a quietly subversive way, Nicholas has created his own distinctive way of viewing the city that entirely re-invents urban landscape painting. Sensitive to the spirit of place yet equally alive to the abstract and colourist potential of his subjects, his pictures possess a freshness of vision that is as unique as it is unexpected. Hardened by his years as a freshwater fisherman, he is curiously impervious to the English weather and you know that – like Joseph Mallord Turner or John Constable before him – each of these paintings is the outcome of a battle with the elements that Nicholas Borden won.
Fleur de Lys St
Middlesex St
Spitalfields from Petticoat Lane
Shoreditch High St
Durant St, Bethnal Green
Regents Canal
Wilton Way, Hackney
At the Royal Exchange
Queen Victoria St
Charing Cross Station
Charing Cross Rd
Shaftesbury Ave
In Cambridge Circus
Paintings copyright © Nicholas Borden
You may like to take a look at more of Nicholas Borden’s work
Nicholas Borden’s East End View
Nicholas Borden’s Winter Paintings
London Market Chit-Chats
As part of the CRIES OF LONDON season I have devised for Bishopsgate Institute, we are staging three CHIT-CHATS in November with traders from Billingsgate, Smithfield & New Spitalfields sharing stories of market life. Click here to sign up – tickets are free but numbers are limited.
Clare Market c.1900
I never knew there was a picture of the legendary and long-vanished Clare Market – where Joseph Grimaldi was born – until I came upon this old glass slide among many thousands in the collection of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, housed at the Bishopsgate Institute. Scrutinising this picture, the market does not feel remote at all, as if I could take a stroll over there to Holborn in person as easily as I can browse the details of the photograph. Yet the Clare Market slum, as it became known, was swept away in 1905 to create the grand civic gestures of Kingsway and Aldwych.
Searching through this curious collection of glass slides, left-overs from the days of educational magic lantern shows – comprising many multiple shots of famous landmarks and grim old church interiors – I was able to piece together this set of evocative photographs portraying the markets of old London. Of those included here only Smithfield, London’s oldest wholesale market, continues trading from the same building, though Leather Lane, Hoxton Market and East St Market still operate as street markets, but Clare Market, Whitechapel Hay Market and the Caledonian Rd Market have gone forever. Meanwhile, Billingsgate, Covent Garden and Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market have moved to new premises, and Leadenhall retains just one butcher selling fowl, once the stock-in-trade of all the shops in this former cathedral of poultry.
Markets fascinate me as theatres of commercial and cultural endeavour in which a myriad strands of human activity meet. If you are seeking life, there is no better place to look than in a market. Wherever I travelled, I always visited the markets, the black-markets of Moscow in 1991, the junk markets of Beijing in 1999, the Chelsea Market in Manhattan, the central market in Havana, the street markets of Rio, the farmers’ markets of Transylvania and the flea market in Tblisi – where, memorably, I bought a sixteenth century silver Dutch sixpence and then absent-mindedly gave it away to a beggar by mistake ten minutes later. I often wonder if he cast the rare coin away in disgust or not.
Similarly in London, I cannot resist markets as places where society becomes public performance, each one with its own social code, language, and collective personality – depending upon the nature of the merchandise, the location, the time of day and the amount of money changing hands. Living in Spitalfields, the presence of the markets defines the quickening atmosphere through the week, from the Thursday antiques market to the Brick Lane traders, fly-pitchers and flower market in Bethnal Green every Sunday. I am always seduced by the sense of infinite possibility when I enter a market, which makes it a great delight to live surrounded by markets.
These old glass slides, many of a hundred years ago, capture the mass spectacle of purposeful activity that markets offer and the sense of self-respect of those – especially porters – for whom the market was their life, winning status within an elaborate hierarchy that had evolved over centuries. Nowadays, the term “marketplace” is sometimes reduced to mean mere economic transaction, but these photographs reveal that in London it has always meant so much more.
Billingsgate Market, c.1910
Billingsgate Market, c.1910
Whitechapel Hay Market c.1920 (looking towards Aldgate)
Whitechapel Hay Market, c.1920 (looking east towards Whitechapel)
Porters at Smithfield Market, c.1910
Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Book sale at Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Covent Garden Market, c.1920
Covent Garden Market, c.1910
Covent Garden, c.1910
Covent Garden Market, 1925
Covent Garden Market, Floral Hall, c.1910
Leadenhall Market, Christmas 1935
Leadenhall Market, c.1910
East St Market, c.1910
Leather Lane Market, 1936
Hoxton Market, Shoreditch, 1910
Spitalfields Market, c.1930
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to look at these old photographs of the Spitalfields Market by Mark Jackson & Huw Davies
Night at the Spitalfields Market
Other stories of Old London
Out Partying With The Bunny Girls Again
Several years ago, I attended a Bunny Girls Reunion at The Grapes in Limehouse hosted by ex-Bunny Barbara Haigh and to my amazement I was invited back this year as a guest of honour …
Old friends, Bunny Cherry & Bunny Odette
On Sunday afternoon, while the rest of London was tidying up leaves in the garden, taking tea, visiting the markets or enjoying a bracing autumn walk, I was at the Hippodrome Casino in Leicester Sq with Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven attending the Bunny Girls & Playboy Models Reunion.
The doorman gives you a deferential nod when you step from the milling tourist crowd over the threshold of the casino and the coat check woman bids you “Good afternoon!” as you pass through the passageway that leads into the vast gaming room. The proscenium and the elaborate plasterwork from the Edwardian theatre loom overhead, framing the auditorium that once hosted the “Talk of the Town,” where today excited gamblers throng around the roulette wheel and the baize tables where blackjack, craps and baccarat are played.
You ascend a winding staircase and acquire a glass of champagne, and you find yourself on another level and in another world. It is a poignant universe of nostalgia and recollection, where those who once based their public identities upon their youthful beauty gather to revisit and assess that experience, and rekindle the friendships and camaraderie forged a lifetime ago in the unlikely environment of the Playboy Club.
Presiding over the gathering of these evanescent spirits were the Oberon & Titania of this shadowy realm – Victor Lownes, the mythic lothario who opened the Playboy Club in Park Lane in 1966, now frail in his mid-eighties yet twinkling with genial humour, and his paramour, Marilyn Cole, the first full frontal Playboy centrefold, still sassy and commanding in physical presence.
In these more puritanical times, former Bunnies are aware of those who might judge them harshly yet they are unanimously unapologetic about their choice to become part of Playboy and their right to that choice. No-one voiced any regrets except one woman who confessed to me wistfully, “I wish I could go back and do it all over again.”
“Emmeline Pankhurst would have been proud of us!” asserted Marilyn with proud audacity, disarming me with her cultural reference while drawing raucous cheers from the crowd, “We were pioneers for equality – at the Playboy Club, the women all earned more than the men.”
A certain autumnal melancholy coloured the proceedings that afternoon, arising perhaps from a collective realisation of the transience of youth and physical beauty as commodified by Playboy. With unnecessary modesty, one woman confided to me that she was touched that anyone would be interested to take her portrait today and, as with other reunions, there were those who were absent never to return and quietly mourned by their fellows.
My enduring impression will be of astonishment at the vitality of these women. In spite of the changes that time has wrought and which are common to all humanity, they still have an abundance of spirit and charisma. Exhausted after a couple of hours chatting, I sat quietly in the corner to wonder at their stamina. Whatever life has dealt them, these women have not lost their star quality.
Regrettably, I do not think I could ever be a Bunny Girl because, alongside other obvious insufficiencies, I do not have the effervescence. When I confessed this weary realisation to Marilyn Cole at the end of Sunday’s long afternoon of mingling, she looked me in the eye and gave a surprising response. “That’s because you actually listen to what people say,” she informed me with a forgiving smile.
Marilyn Cole – “We were pioneers of equality!”
Bunny Marlon AKA Patricia Robson – “I was a cockney from Stepney and I went from there to the Bahamas!”
Bunny Monique AKA Mary Phillips –‘”I started as a Bunny at seventeen and was a croupier at eighteen. All the famous people were there and as a Bunny Girl you were a celebrity in your own right”
Bunny Kim AKA Therese Hyland – “I came from a boring office job and it opened my eyes”
Bunny Modesty AKA Bee Cassen – “I learnt Black Jack & was dealing roulette in the Officers’ Mess”
Bunny Sheen AKA Sheen Doran – “Forty years later, I still have so many friends from Playboy”
Danny Conti, Doorman – “I worked in the Car Park on Park Lane and they came over and asked me if I’d like to be doorman at the Playboy Club”
Bunnie Bobbie AKA Eileen Wilson
Bunny Zoe AKA Mary Sharina -“I’m a librarian now and no-one’s interested but if I tell them I was a Bunny, they say ‘Really?'”
Chris Shuter, Craps Dealer – “I used to have a big house with a swimming pool and all the girls came over”
Bunny Ruth AKA Elaine Murray
Bunny Elayne AKA Elaine Kingston – “I was the only Bunny DJ”
Kenny Houng, PR man – “I brought in all the big players from the Far East who would lose two or three million a night.”
Bunny Joni AKA Ann Oliver – “As a nice girl, I had a bit of trouble with my parents but they came in for dinner and thoroughly approved”
Bunny Joan AKA Joan Lawrence – “I was the first woman to manage a casino in Britain”
Bunny Cherry AKA Yvonne Johnson
Bunny Odette AKA Lorraine Palmer
Marilyn Cole & Victor Lownes
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
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Publication Day For Baddeley Brothers
Please join me tonight at 7pm at St Bride Institute in the shadow of St Bride’s Church, Fleet St, for the launch of my new book Baddeley Brothers with typographic designs by David Pearson, drawings by Lucinda Rogers and a fold-out map by Adam Dant. There will be opportunities to try an embossing press and imbibe beer, courtesy of London Fields Brewery. Click here to sign up
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CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR COPY OF BADDELEY BROTHERS
The Caslon Letter Foundry
On the eve of publication of my account of Baddeley Brothers, (specialist printers in Moor Lane from 1885 until 1940) I present these photographs of their neighbours, the Caslon Letter Foundry, from St Bride Printing Library off Fleet St where the book launch is taking place tomorrow night. Click here to sign up for the party
22/23 Chiswell St with Caslon’s delivery van outside the foundry
William Caslon set up his type foundry in Chiswell St in 1737, where it operated without any significant change in the methods of production until 1937. These historic photographs taken in 1902, upon the occasion of the opening of the new Caslon factory in Hackney Wick, record both the final decades of the unchanged work of traditional type-founding, as well as the mechanisation of the process that would eventually lead to the industry being swept away by the end of the century.
The Directors’ Room with portraits of William Caslon and Elizabeth Caslon.
Sydney Caslon Smith in his office
Clerks’ office, 15th November 1902. A woman sits at her typewriter in the centre of the office.
Type store with fonts being made up in packets by women and boys working by candlelight.
Another view of the type store with women making up packets of fonts.
Another view of the type store.
Another part of the type store.
In the type store.
A boy makes up a packet of fonts in the type store.
Room of printers’ supplies including type cases, forme trolleys and electro cabinets.
Another view of the printers’ supplies store.
Printing office on an upper floor with pages of type specimens being set and printed on Albion and Imperial handpresses.
Packing department with crates labelled GER, GWR, LNWR, CALCUTTA, BOMBAY, and SYDNEY.
New Caslon Letter Foundry at Rothbury Rd, Hackney Wick, 1902.
Harold Arthur Caslon Smith at his rolltop desk in Hackney Wick with type specimens from 1780 on the wall, Friday 7th November, 1902.
Machine shop with plane, lathes and overhead belting.
Gas engines and man with oil can.
Lathes in the Machine Shop.
Hand forging in the Machine Shop.
Another view of lathes in the Machine Shop.
Type store with fonts being made up into packets.
Type matrix and mould store.
Metal store with boy hauling pigs upon a trolley.
Casting Shop, with women breaking off excess metal and rubbing the type at the window.
Another view of the Casting Shop.
Another view of the Casting Shop.
Founting Shop, with women breaking up the type and a man dressing the type.
Casting metal furniture.
Boys at work in the Brass Rule Shop.
Boys making packets of fonts in the Despatch Shop, with delivery van waiting outside the door.
Machine shop on the top floor with a fly-press in the bottom left.
Woodwork Shop.
Brass Rule Shop, hand-planing the rules.
Caretaker’s cottage with caretaker’s wife and the factory cat.
Photographs courtesy St Bride Printing Library
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William Caslon, Letter Founder
Return To Trinity Green
A few years have passed since I first walked through the gate off Mile End Rd into the quiet enclave of London’s oldest almshouses at Trinity Green where cats preside over a green lawn shaded by gnarly trees and enfolded by two lines of seventeenth-century brick cottages that glow in the October sunlight.
This extraordinary survival of Sir William Ogbourne’s seafarers’ almshouses from 1695 is almost solely due to the efforts of CR Ashbee, pioneer of the Conservation movement in this country and founder of the Guild of Handicrafts in Bow, who rescued them from demolition in 1895. It was the first historic building in the East End to be saved and exists today as an early example of the benign provision of social dwellings.
Regrettably, my return was at the invitation of the residents who wish to draw attention to the spiral of neglect by the council and to the imminent threat of a tower of luxury flats overshadowing Trinity Green, about which they have received no consultation. Built on top of Sainsburys in Whitechapel, they told me this proposed block will be as tall as Centrepoint.
After post-war restoration, the almshouses were handed over to the council, pursuing an enlightened policy of reusing these historic buildings for social housing, and celebrated by a visit of the Queen in 1963. More recently, many of the flats have been sold to private owners although the council still owns many of the dwellings and the chapel, and is responsible for the green which is a public park.
The residents wanted to show me how the council is failing in its duty of care to this grade I listed property. Cast your eyes along the front wall and you notice that four stone ball finials have gone missing. Step inside the gate and a vacant council-owned dwelling has water damage where a cistern was allowed to overflow for months. Next door, at another of the council-owned cottages, a ball has been removed from the pediment years ago and not replaced, while the pediment itself has been needlessly pierced by a flue outlet which could have been sited at the rear of the building.
I visited the chapel for the first time and discovered one of the East End’s finest architectural spaces. Within living memory, this chapel used as a satellite for St Anne’s, Underwood Rd. Today, although it retains its magnificent original features – its panelling, cornice and octagonal vestibule – it is a municipal meeting room marred by stacks of ugly furniture, corporate carpet and strip lighting. Most-disappointingly, the pair of seventeenth century brass chandeliers have gone in recent years leaving just the chains on which they once hung. Outside upon the stone steps, crude repairs in concrete will exacerbate problems with the ageing stonework over time.
With poignant symbolism, the hands have been removed from the clock face on the top of the chapel. If you step in through the main gates from Mile End Rd and cast your eyes upwards, this clock appears to meet your gaze as the central focus of Sir William Ogbourne’s entire architectural conception.
After it was saved by CR Ashbee at the end of the nineteenth century and restored for social housing in the twentieth century, I hope we shall not be the generation that presides over the decay of Trinity Green, leaving it to languish for future generations in the shadow of a monstrous tower.
A pair of quaint narrow terraces face each other across a green off the Mile End Rd in Whitechapel. Although they are lined up neatly like ships’ cabins, only the model boats upon the street frontage remain as evidence that these were built for as almshouses for mariners. But, if you step closer and crane your neck, a stone plaque high on the wall proclaims their noble origin thus, “THIS ALMES HOUSE wherein twenty-eight decay’d Masters & Commanders of Ships, or ye Widows of such are maintain’d, was built by ye CORP. of TRINITY HOUSE, ano 1695. The Ground was given by Capt. HENY MUDD of Rattcliff an Elder Brother, whose Widow did alfo Contribute.”
Even today, a certain atmosphere of repose hangs upon this small enclave, protected from the pandemonium of East London traffic by trees and delicate emerald green railings – now a preserve of cats and flowerpots and twisted old trees and lawns strewn with dandelions and daisies – where it is easy to imagine those “twenty-eight decay’d Masters & Commanders” who once sat around here competing to outdo each other with oft-repeated tales of high adventures upon the seven seas.
The architect was Sir William Ogbourne, and his design was ship-shape in its elegant organisation, fourteen dwellings on either side, each one with three rooms stacked up on top of the other, all arranged around a chapel at the centre to provide spiritual navigation. It was a rigorous structure enlivened by lyrical flourishes, elaborately carved corbels above each door, model boats and stone balls topping off the edifice, and luxuriant stone crests adorning the brick work.
In the nineteenth century, a tall mast stood at the centre of the green to complete the whole endeavour as an approximation of a ship upon dry land – complementing the concave walls at the front in place of a hull and the raised chapel in the aft where the poop deck would be. Just a mile from the docks, it was the perfect spot for Masters & Commanders to enjoy their decay, and it might have sailed on majestically, if it had not been sunk by the bombing in 1943, that destroyed part of the chapel and the rear eight cottages. Taken over by the LCC, Trinity Green is now a mixture of private and public dwellings where everyone gets along peaceably, unified in their appreciation of this favoured spot.
One of the guardians of Trinity Green
This stone ball was removed from the roof of a council owned cottage and never replaced, meanwhile a vent punctures the cornice of this grade 1 listed building
While this council owned cottage sits empty, the water tank has leaked for months damaging brick work
Council owned property to the left and privately owned property to the right reveal comparative levels of maintenance
Unappreciated interior of the chapel, where seventeenth century chandeliers have recently been removed leaving just the chains
Finely carved wooden cornice in the chapel
After three hundred years, the hands have recently been removed from the clock face
When I visited in 2011, the hands were still on the clock at Trinity Green
The proposed tower of luxury flats as tall as Centrepoint that threatens Whitechapel & Trinity Green
Letter by Charles Robert Ashbee, designer & founder of the School of Handicraft in Bow, to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings about the Trinity Almshouses.
Trinity Almshouses, Mile End Rd, 1695
CR Ashbee letter published courtesy of Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings
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