Firefighter Artists Of The Blitz
The crowdfund for our Hackney Mosaic Project book closes on May 17th
Dinah Winch uncovers the ‘Firemen Artists’ of the Second World War
Resting at a Fire by Reginald Mills
London Fire Brigade has a collection of paintings by the ‘Firemen Artists’ – including some women – who witnessed the terror and turmoil of the Blitz, and documented it in an extraordinary body of work..
In March 1941 the Firemen Artists Organising Committee held the first of six exhibitions in London of over 100 paintings. More than 30,000 people visited in three weeks. Further exhibitions were held at the Royal Academy and other London galleries, then in 1941 paintings were sent on a touring exhibition of the United States as part of the government’s efforts to encourage the Americans to join the war.
Yet this is a story which has been largely forgotten, despite examples of paintings by firefighter artists in the collections of the Imperial War Museum and several local museums, as well as London Fire Brigade.
While the LFB Museum is closed for redevelopment and the collections are in storage, the Museum has taken the opportunity to contribute to this year’s commemoration of the anniversary of the death of Sir Christopher Wren by exhibiting from our collection in a number of Wren churches. We are showing paintings and drawings by firefighter artists alongside photographs from London Fire Brigade’s archive, many of which are probably more familiar to the wider public than the paintings.
As the political climate intensified in Europe in the late thirties, plans were drawn up to form an Auxiliary Fire Service drawn from volunteers. Over 28,000 were recruited to supplement London Fire Brigade’s 2500 officers and firefighters, including many men who were too young or too old to join the armed services. It was the first time that women joined the London Fire Brigade and among the new recruits to the AFS were a number of artists. Some already had established careers as painters, graphic artists and illustrators, while others were amateurs.
The Blitz started on 7th September 1940, and this first night of bombing was the first experience of firefighting for many of the AFS volunteers.
Portrait of an AFS Messenger, by Bernard Hailstone. Messengers could be as young as sixteen
Artist Reginald Mills, who painted Blitz Scene, East End, 7th September 1940 recorded this incident in The Fireman describing the white heat of the huge fire in the distance ‘where the glare in the sky brought back daylight’. However, you can also see a smaller fire to the left of the painting; ‘people in the crowds were calling us to stop and tackle fires nearby, [which] made such a deep impression on my mind that I decided then and there to record it in paint.’
Blitz Scene, East End, 7th September 1940
‘I was riding on a heavy pump at the time, just at the back of the scene I have painted, and next day I made some sketches which I kept by me. The first chance I had of working on the painting was this year during the lull but even though it happened years ago, I can remember the sight that night as if it were but yesterday.’
The docks were a target and the large numbers of warehouses were a particular concern. The anonymous author of The Bells Go Down: The Diary of a London A.F.S. Man recorded his first visit in September 1939. ‘This morning I took a trailer pump all round the East End and the Docks. If this place catches fire all the LFB and the AFS won’t be able to put it out’.
Reginald Mills specialised in painting firefighters in action but there are notable examples of other artists capturing the experience of being at the scene from a different perspective.
Driving by Moonlight by Mary Pitcairn
Mary Pitcairn’s romantically title Driving by Moonlight depicts the extraordinary bravery of AFS Firewoman Gillian ‘Bobbie’ Tanner driving a truck from Dockhead in Bermondsey to deliver supplies of petrol to her AFS colleagues fighting Blitz fires with trailer pumps. Her courage earned her a George Medal and the citation stated, ‘Auxiliary G.K.Tanner volunteered to drive a 30 cwt lorry loaded with 150 gallons of petrol. Six serious fires were in progress and for three hours Miss Tanner drove through intense bombing to the points at which the petrol was needed, showing coolness and courage throughout’. Pitcairn was also instrumental to the success and impact of the firefighter artists as exhibition organiser for the committee.
Bells Down by Julia Lowenthal
Women joined the fire service for the first time through the AFS and, though they were not trained as frontline firefighters, they worked in a variety of roles from control operators to motorbike despatch riders, as well as more conventional female roles in the canteens that provided relief to exhausted firefighters on the incident ground.
While many firefighter artists’ paintings have the intensity of being at the scene even though they were painted later, some give an insight behind the scenes. Julia Lowenthal was based at Kilburn Fire Station and drew her fellow firefighters, at rest or on their way into action.
Cannon Street by Paul Dessau
In the background of Paul Dessau’s Cannon Street is St Paul’s Cathedral, symbol of resilience to Londoners and the Nation, and in the foreground, a trailer pump, providing the water for the firefighters. Trailer pumps were easier to move in bomb-damaged areas that were inaccessible to fire engines, and were a critical piece of equipment featuring in many paintings including Mills’ Resting at a Fire.
Red Sunday, 29th December 1940 by W S Haines
W S Haines’ dramatic Red Sunday shows the skyline of the city with St Pauls and several church spires through the distinctive silhouette of Tower Bridge. Haines had an unusual perspective amongst the artists as a firefighter with the London River Service, which gave him a wider view of the City. The night of 29th December 1940 was one of the worst nights of the Blitz and sometimes known as the Second Fire of London.
Nearly all of Wren’s great churches in the City, built after the first conflagration of 1666, suffered damage in the Blitz and many were completely destroyed. The direct hit from an incendiary bomb which destroyed the church of St Clement Danes was captured by Reginald Mills in his painting Fire on the Strand.
Fire on the Strand by Reginald Mills
Other paintings are considerably more than documentary, exploring the psychological terror of the experience. Paul Dessau’s quartet of paintings Menace were conceived as the movements of a symphony, charting the terrible escalation of the demon fire and its eventual defeat.
Menace No.4, Diminuendo, by Paul Dessau
Self Portrait, 1941, by Paul Dessau
When AFS firefighters first joined the service they experienced resistance and disdain with regular firefighters and civilians alike thinking they were ‘army dodgers’. Their bravery and dogged hard work in the Blitz led Churchill to hail them as ‘heroes with grimy faces’. The artists amongst them contributed to this change in fortunes through their paintings which created a shared visual culture of the London Blitz.
A Shaggy Dog Tale
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On the day after the 80th anniversary of VE Day, it is my pleasure to introduce this piece of short fiction set in the Blitz specially written for Spitalfields Life by Kate Griffin author of Kitty Peck & the Music Hall Murders
First things first: my grandfather Michael Kelly was always known as Timo. His six children and all of his eighteen grandchildren called him that too. I have a vague recollection of sitting on his knee once while he slurped tea from a saucer (he liked to do that as it made it cool down more quickly) and him asking me why I didn’t call him grandpa. Quite reasonably I replied that grandpa clearly wasn’t his name, so why should I call him anything different.
The matter ended there.
As a very small child I spent a lot of time with Timo. I was ‘quite a handful’ according to my mum and I think it was something of a relief for her to drop me off at her parents’ house in deepest Islington while she took the occasional break.
Fortunately, I could do no wrong as far as Timo was concerned. As the first child of his beloved first daughter (my mum arrived after four sons), I was always assured of a special place in the family tree and my appearance occurred at around the same time Timo officially retired so he had plenty of time on his hands to keep me entertained.
On good days we went out and about, sometimes riding London buses for miles just for the thrill of sitting in the front seat on the top deck. On grey days we sat in the basement kitchen together in front of an old-fashioned range. On these occasions, Timo would roll his own cigarettes (allowing me to pretend smoke my own curl of Rizla paper), sip tea from a saucer and tell me a story.
He had a vast repository of tales – some from his childhood in the East End, some from his days as a soldier in the Great War, some from the docks where he worked and some about the characters he met ‘up west’ when he was doing one of his other mysterious jobs. The concept of portfolio working is nothing new. For all the time I knew him – and I wish there had been more – Timo was always nipping off ‘to see a man about a dog’.
And that brings me to this story – a shaggy-dog tale for Christmas and my favourite of all the yarns that Timo used to spin.
“Do you want to hear the story about a ghost and the bravest girl in London?” he’d say.
And, of course, I did – because that girl was my mum.
* * * *
Saturday, May 10th 1941, was famously the worst night of the London Blitz. Less famously it was also my mum’s sixth birthday. It came at the end of a week of ferocious raids, according to Timo, and although they’d tried to make the day a special occasion, they all wondered what the night would bring.
By 10pm that evening all the younger Kellys and my Nan were bedded down together in the Anderson shelter dug out behind the chicken coop at the end of the garden. Timo went back into the house to ‘check on’ with a few last things. (That actually meant a final smoke and a furtive pint of Guinness, his favourite tipple.)
My grandparents’ house was in a street off New North Road and down towards the City. Including the attic rooms and the basement, it was a five-storey Georgian affair with a delicate fanlight over the front door, a gracious hallway and tall elegant windows. These days it would probably be worth a small fortune, admired for its ‘wonderful’ original features and ‘patina’ of age. But back in 1941 thousands of Londoners lived in gloomy brown houses packed with gloomy brown furniture that were just like it. For them, what we might regard as period charm was actually the inconvenience of impecunity.
No one spoke about the ghost at number 72, although everyone knew the house seemed to have an extra occupant. Things would go missing and appear days later in the most unlikely places. Sometimes mysterious sounds would be heard from a room overhead when everyone knew that there was no one up there. However, the Kellys were a live-and-let-live (or perhaps that should be a live-and-let-die?) sort of family and if there was a ghost they certainly weren’t going to start poking into its business.
So, when Timo stood in the little-used ‘best’ room on the first floor that ominous May evening and stared out at the deserted street before pulling down the black-out blinds, he wasn’t surprised to hear a noise behind him.
He didn’t even turn round. Instead he rolled himself another cigarette, lit it and had a quiet smoke. As he stood there ‘contemplating’ he felt something brush against his leg. He looked down, expecting to see Trouncer the family boxer dog (named after the warship on which the eldest of the Kelly boys was currently serving), but there was nothing there.
Odd, he thought, returning to his roll-up. Then the feeling came again – something was tugging at his trouser turn-ups, just above the ankle. In fact, it pulled so hard that he almost lost his footing. He turned around now and saw that the door to the hall was wide open. He was sure he’d shut it behind him. My Nan didn’t know precisely where he kept his Guinness and he liked to keep it that way.
Timo stubbed out his roll-up. It was time to go back to the shelter. Somehow the thought of being tucked up with the rest of the family, four foot down in that damp fox hole behind the chicken coop didn’t seem quite so bad now.
He stepped out of the ‘best’ room and took the first set of stairs down to the hallway at street level. There was a door in the back sitting room on this floor leading to steps to the garden. Timo headed down the passage towards the back room, but was stopped in his tracks by something that brushed against his leg. Then the tugging came again, this time it was insistent.
It was dark now and he was definitely rattled. Every step he took towards the back room made the peculiar sensation stronger. He told me it felt as if something didn’t want him to go there.
“Right!” he thought. “If you won’t let me out this way, I’ll use the other door.”
Down in the basement there was a second way out to the garden. Just before the kitchen there was a steep flight of stone steps that led to a little-used door leading out to a small yard behind the outside privy.
He turned and went down the hall pausing at the top of the winding set of stairs to the basement.
Nothing happened. Whatever it was, it didn’t mind him being here. He took the first flight and stopped again. Now there was something – a gentle nudging at his calves. It wanted him to go down, he was certain of it. Was that a good thing?
He didn’t have time to consider the question. The sudden wail of the air-raid sirens prompted him to cross the little landing and turn right to the stone steps leading out to the yard, and to the rest of the family in the garden shelter.
Something white moved down there, a little body was huddled against the door.
Timo flew down those ten stone steps and gathered my mum into his arms. A gash ran from her split top lip and up across her left cheek. She was bleeding profusely over her nightgown.
“Sorry, Timo,” she whispered, rubbing blood and tears from her face. “It was the game. I was practising while everyone was asleep, but I fell.”
He knew immediately what ‘game’ she meant.
Despite being warned not to, the younger Kelly boys (my uncles) insisted on challenging each other to take part in a potentially lethal jumping contest on the stone steps leading to the yard door. The winner was the person who dared to jump from the highest stair.
My tom-boy mum desperately wanted to beat her older brothers. Seizing the opportunity, she had sneaked out of the Anderson shelter and into the house to perfect her jumping skills while they were all asleep. But in the dark she had misjudged the leap and crashed against the door, ripping her face on the hooked metal latch.
The tear across her face was raw and deep. There was blood everywhere.
They went up to the kitchen and Timo tried to stop the flow with rags, but it kept coming. My mum obviously needed stitches and he was worried about concussion too. As he stood there beside the sink dabbing uselessly at her face the drone of the first bomber planes thrummed overhead.
It was at this point that my Nan appeared. She’d woken in the shelter and, finding both Timo and my mum missing, had gone in search of them. She burst into tears when she saw the state of my mum’s face, but that was nothing compared to the howling that came next when Timo bundled his daughter into her school coat and said the only thing to do was to get her to a hospital.
* * * *
And so it was that on the worst night of the London Blitz, Timo and my mum walked together through the bombarded streets to The Royal Northern Hospital at Holloway. Fires burned in the east and all around them they could hear the steady crumping thud of the bombs that changed the face of the capital for ever.
Timo had to carry my mum part of the way. “But she never cried and she never once said she was frightened. She was the bravest little girl in London,” he told me. (I always loved that part of the story).
He, on the other hand, was terrified. And so was the doctor at the hospital – a young, softly spoken Polish refugee. He agreed immediately that Timo had done the right thing, but as he carefully staunched the blood and repaired my mum’s torn face the sound of constant bombing rocked the hospital walls and made the implements on his metal tray clatter about. In fact, the doctor’s hands shook so much as he sewed twenty-five stitches into my mum’s lip and cheek that he kept apologising for his ‘poor workmanship’.
As he finished the task, the first of the real casualties of that night began to arrive. Timo and my mum were taken to a nearby shelter and they spent the rest of a sleepless night there while the streets of London – the East End in particular – became an inferno.
When they finally walked home the next morning through eerily deserted and sometimes devastated streets, Timo was silent, desperately willing the rest of his family to be safe and alive. My mum was quiet too, until they turned the corner into their gloriously untouched road.
Then she squeezed his hand and spoke in a muffled voice because of the stitches in her lip. “I hope the dog is safe too?”
“What dog?” he asked, confused.
“The little one that came with us from home last night. He followed us all the way. Didn’t you see him, Timo?”
Dog Portrait courtesy of Libby Hall Collection at the Bishopsgate Institute
VE Day, Patched Narratives
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Rag Rug by Jill Denton
Today is the eightieth anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, May 8th 1945, ending the Second World War.
A new exhibition on this subject, PATCHED NARRATIVES by Sarah Gray, Laura Roberts Bevan, Sarah Newson, Marcia Lois Riddington, Linda Bassett and Jill Denton, opens today at Townhouse Spitalfields and runs until 23rd May.
The textile artists embroidered their family histories onto jackets rescued from landfill, often sewing as a group and chatting as they worked. Their conversations became part of their stitched narratives, woven into the fabric of these textiles which include jackets, a work coat, a rag rug, a quilt and a tablecloth.
Magdalena by Sarah Gray
‘Magdalena was my great grandmother, a mother to four. Tom, the youngest was a talented and bright pilot in the RAF of twenty-four years old. There are five poppies embroidered on her jacket for each of the five years that passed without news of him, missing in France since 1941. Finally he was confirmed dead, identified by the inscription on his watch found next to his burnt-out plane.’
Back of Magdalena by Sarah Gray
Linda by Linda Bassett
‘This tells the story of how my mum and dad met in 1944. My dad had been wounded on a three man gun, the other two died. Dad was recuperating in Devon where his sister was in the Land Army. He took her to a dance where he met her friend Joan, my mum. After the war, they got married and found lodgings in Bovey Tracey, my home town from where I write this eighty years later.’
Linda by Linda Bassett
Marcia by Marcia Riddington
‘I wanted to demonstrate that with a little imagination and a few basic sewing skills an unloved garment could be given a new life. All of the haberdashery and fabrics were thrifted over the years so nothing new was used.’
Back of Marcia by Marcia Riddington
Starlings Family by Sarah Newson
‘My jacket is about the impact of war on people that I knew, their hopes for peace and their sorrow, trauma and loss. I have a quote in the sleeve, Every war is a war against children. My mother’s brother died aged twenty-three as a commando in Italy in April 1945. He was an art student at the Slade, a while life unlived. My mother and her brother were teenagers at the time and experienced things which have haunted them for their whole lives – their photograph is on the back of the jacket. ‘
Back of Starlings Family by Sarah Newson
Margaret by Sarah Gray
‘When VE Day was announced Margaret was a teacher and working mother of two sons, one of whom was my father. Her husband, my grandfather was a pharmacist and in the Home Guard. They navigated the Blitz in London and kept chickens.’
Back of Margaret by Sarah Gray
Ernest by Laura Roberts Bevan
‘My grandfather Ernest Read lost his life in 1942 while serving in the Royal Navy. He left behind a devoted wife and four young daughters. Probably not much celebrating was had on May 8th 1945. I did ask my grandmother about this once but she couldn’t talk about it, it just brought tears to her eyes. Across the jacket is an appliqued quote, In war there are no winners.’
Back of Ernest by Laura Roberts Bevan
Tray cloth by by Laura Roberts Bevan
‘8th May 1945, Peace in Europe, Got the flags out and fairylights. Had bonfire. Auntie and Uncle came also Auntie Connie and Uncle Frank. Stayed up til 3 o’clock in the morning. Had good party. Went to Mr Headlands this morning with Dad. Gave me 10/-. Went through London. Flags everywhere. Crowds everywhere.’ Les Roberts
Les Roberts’ Victory in Europe Day Diary, 1945
Alfred Daniels, Artist
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The Gramophone Man, Wentworth St
“I’m not really an East Ender, I’m more of a Bow boy,” asserted Alfred Daniels with characteristic precision of thought, when I enquired of his origin. “My parents left the East End, because they were scared of the doodlebugs and bought this house in 1945,” he explained, as he welcomed me to his generous suburban residence in Chiswick. Greeting me while dressed in pyjamas and dressing gown in the afternoon, no-one could have been more at home than Alfred in his studio occupying the former living room of his parents’ house. I found him snug in the central heating and just putting the finishing touches to a commission that his dealer was coming to collect at six.
I met Alfred at the point in life where copyright payments on the resale of works from his sixty-year painting career meant he no longer had to struggle. “I’ve done hundreds of things to make a living,” he confessed, rolling his eyes in amusement, “Although my father was a brilliant tailor, he was a dreadful business man so we were on the breadline for most of the nineteen thirties – which was a good thing because we never got fat …”
Smiling at his own bravado, Alfred continued painting as he spoke, adding depth to the shadows with a fine brush. “This is the way to make a living,” he declared with a flourish as he placed the brush back in the pot with finality, completing the day’s work and placing the painting to one side, ready to go. “The past is history, the future is a mystery but the present is a gift,” he informed me, as we climbed the stairs to the upstairs kitchen over-looking the garden, to seek a cup of tea.
Alfred had spent the morning making copious notes on his personal history, just it to get it straight for me. “This has been fun,” he admitted, rustling through the handwritten pages.
“My grandfather came from Russia in the 1880s, he was called Donyon, and they said, ‘Sounds like Daniels.’ My grandfather on the other side came from Plotska in Poland in the 1880s, he didn’t have a surname so they said ‘Sounds like a good man’ and they called him Goodman. My parents, Sam and Rose, were both born in the 1890s and my mother lived to be ninety-two. I was born in Trellis St in Bow in 1924 and in the early thirties we moved to 145 Bow Rd, next to the railway station. I can still remember the sound of the goods wagons going by at night.
One good thing is, I gave up the Jewish religion and thank goodness for that. It was only when I was twelve and I read about the Hitler problem that I realised I was Jewish. Fortunately, we weren’t religious in my family and we didn’t go to the synagogue. But I went to prepare for my Bar Mitzvah and they tried to harm me with Hebrew. We were taught by these Russians and if you didn’t learn it they bashed you. That put me off religion there and then. Yet when we got outside the Black Shirts were waiting for us in the street, calling ‘Here look, it’s the Jew boys!’ and they wanted to bash me too. Fortunately, I could run fast in those days.
My mother used to do all the shopping in the Roman Rd market. She hated shopping, so she sent me to do it for her in Brick Lane. It was a penny on the tram, there and back. But they all spoke Yiddish and I couldn’t communicate, so I thought, ‘I’d better listen to my grandmother who spoke Yiddish.’ I learnt it from her and it is one of the funniest languages you can imagine.
Although my parents were poor, my Uncle Charlie was rich. He was a commercial artist and my father said to him, ‘The boy wants to learn a craft.’ So Charlie got me a place at Woolwich Polytechnic to learn signwriting but I spent all day trying to sharpen my pencil. Then he took me out of the school and got me a job as a lettering artist at the Lawrence Danes Studio in Chancery Lane. It was wonderful to come up to the city to work, and his nephew befriended me and we went to art shops together to look at art books. We drew out letters and filled them in with Indian Ink, mostly Gill Sans. Typesetters usually got the spacing wrong but if you did it by hand you could get it right. It was all squares, circles and triangles.
When Uncle Charlie started his own studio in Fetter Lane above the Vogue photo studio, he offered me a job at £1 a week. Nobody showed me how to do anything, I worked it out for myself. He got me to do illustrations and comic drawings and retouching of photographs. At night, we went down in the tube stations entertaining people sheltering from the blitz. I played my violin like Django Reinhardt and he played like Stefan Grappelli, and one day we were recorded and ended up on Workers’ Playtime.
I had been doing some still lifes but I wanted to paint the beautiful old shops in Campbell Rd, Bow, so I went to make some sketches and a policeman came up and asked to see my identity card. ‘You can’t do this because we’ve had complaints you’re a spy,’ he said. It was illegal to take photographs during the war, so I sat and absorbed into memory what I saw. And the result came out like a naive or primitive painting. When Herbert Buckley my tutor at Woolwich saw it, he said, ‘Would you like to be a painter? I’ll put you in for the Royal College of Art. To be honest, I should rather have done illustration or lettering. At the Royal College of Art, my tutors included Carel Weight – he said, ‘I’m not interested in art only in pictures.’ – Ruskin Spear – ‘always drunk because of the pain of polio’ – and John Minton – ‘ a lovely man, if only he hadn’t been so mixed up.'”
Alfred was keen to enlist, “I wanted to stop Hitler coming over and stringing me up !” – though he never saw active service, but the discovery of painting and of his signature style as the British Douanier Rousseau stayed with him for the rest of his life. After Alfred left the East End in 1945, he kept coming back to make sketchbooks and do paintings, often of the same subjects – as you see below, with two images of the Gramophone man in Wentworth St painted fifty years apart.
With natural generosity of spirit, Alfred Daniels told me, “Making a painting is like baking a cake, one slice is for you but the rest is for everyone else.”
The Gramophone Man in Wentworth St, 1950
Sketchbook pages – Cable St, April 1964
Sketchbook pages – Old Montague St, March 1964
Sketchbook pages – Hessel St, April 1964
Sketchbook pages – Old Montague St & Davenant St, March 1964
Sketchbook pages – Fruit Seller in Hessel St, March 1964
Leadenhall Market, drawing, 2008
Billingsgate Market
Tower Bridge, 2008
The Royal Exchange, 2008
Crossing London Bridge, 2008
In Alfred’s studio
Alfred Daniels, Artist (1924-2015)
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John Thomas Smith’s Antiquities Of Old London
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For good reason John Thomas Smith acquired the nickname ‘Antiquity Smith’ – while working as Keeper of Drawings at the British Museum, between 1790 & 1800, he produced a large series of etchings recording all the antiquities of London, from which I publish this selection of favourites today
Old houses in the Butcher Row near Clement’s Inn, taken down 30th March 1798 – the right hand corner house is suggested to have been the one in which the Gunpowder Plot was determined and sworn
A Curious Pump – in the yard of the Leathersellers’ Hall, Bishopsgate
Sir Paul Pindar’s Lodge, Half Moon Alley, Bishopsgate
A Curious Gate in Stepney – traditionally called King John’s Gate, it is the oldest house in Stepney
London Stone – supposed to be the Millinarium of the Romans from which they measured distances
The Queen’s Nursery, Golden Lane, Barbican
Pye Corner, Smithfield – this memorialises the Great Fire of 1666 which ended at Pye Corner
Old house in King St, Westminster – traditionally believed to have been a residence of Oliver Cromwell
Lollards’ Prison – a stone staircase leads to a room at the very top of a tower on the north side of Lambeth Palace, known as Lollard’s Tower
Old house on Little Tower Hill
Principal gate of the Priory of St Bartholomew, Smithfield
Savoy Prison – occupied by the army for their deserters and transports
Mr Salmon’s, Fleet St
Gate of St Saviour’s Abbey, Bermondsey
Rectorial House, Newington Butts
Bloody Tower – the bones of the two murdered princes were found within the right hand window
Traitors’ Gate
The Old Fountain in the Minories – taken down 1793
The White Hart, Bishopsgate
The Conduit, Bayswater
Staple’s Inn, Holborn
The Old Manor House, Hackney
Dissenting Meeting House at the entrance to Little St Helen’s, taken down 1799
Remains of Winchester House, Southwark
London Wall in the churchyard of St Giles Cripplegate
London Wall in the churchyard of St Giles’ Cripplegate
Figures of King Lud and his two sons, taken down from Ludgate and now deposited at St Dunstan’s, Fleet St, in the Bone House
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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John Thomas Smith’s Ancient Topography
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana
A Letter From The Gentle Author
Dear Readers
May I express my gratitude to 193 of you who have generously contributed towards publishing Tessa Hunkin’s Hackney Mosaic Project book so far.
Over the past three weeks, thanks to your generosity we have raised £15,230, which is well over half of what it will cost to publish the book.
We still have quite a way to go to raise the rest of the budget. So I have extended the deadline by one week, to Saturday 17th May at midnight, to give us more time to reach the target.
It means these next two weeks will be crucial. But I am hoping that – with your help – we will meet our target and the book can go to the printers in mid-May for publication this October. If we do not reach the target in time then we will have to delay publication until next year to permit further time to raise the necessary funds.
Our target represents the total cost of printing, design, photography and digital post-production. The book will include high quality photographs of all the major mosaics, an interview with Tessa Hunkin outlining the nature of the project, commentary on the background to each mosaic by Wendy Forrest, illustrations of the working process by which the mosaics are created, a map showing the locations of the mosaics, and the names of everyone involved.
Hackney Mosaic Project are leading the revival of the art of mosaic in this country with their superlative work and it is an inspiring collective endeavour, bringing together a community of local people in the shared purpose of beautifying the streets of East London.
I want to publish this book because these beautiful mosaics are of the highest quality and I believe they need be recognised and celebrated by the widest possible audience, and for the makers to get the recognition they so well deserve for their phenomenal achievement.
If everyone who has donated were able to persuade one other person to contribute we could reach our target at once.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE & CONTRIBUTE
With every good wish,
I am your loyal servant
The Gentle Author
(You may like to take a look at some work-in-progress pages from the book below)
A Walk With Shloimy Alman
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Let us join photographer Shloimy Alman as he wanders the streets of the East End in the seventies accompanied by the Yiddish poet Avram Stencl.
Photographs copyright © Shloimy Alman
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