At St Pancras Old Churchyard
The Hardy Tree
As I arrived at Old St Pancras Churchyard yesterday, the Verger was sweeping leaves from the steps and she informed me there was a wedding taking place inside the church. Yet I was more than happy to explore this most ancient of central London churchyards for an hour while the nuptials were in progress.
The churchyard itself is upon a raised mound that is the result of all the hundreds of thousands of burials upon this ground which is claimed to be one of the earliest sites of Christian worship in London, recorded by the Maximilian Mission as already established by the year 324. Such is the proximity of St Pancras Station, you can hear the announcements from the platforms even as you wander among the tombs, yet an age-old atmosphere of tranquillity prevails here that cannot be dispelled by the chaos and cacophony of contemporary King’s Cross and St Pancras.
However, the railway has encroached upon the churchyard increasingly over the years and, in the eighteen-sixties, architect Arthur Blomfield, employed Thomas Hardy as his deputy, responsible for exhumations of the dead. Tombstones were arranged around an ash tree which has absorbed some of them into its trunk over time and acquired the name ‘The Hardy Tree,’ commemorating this unlikely employment for the young novelist whose subsequent literary works express such an inescapable morbidity.
Once the bride and groom emerged from the church door, the Verger ushered me in through the back and I was delighted by the intimate quality of the church interior, studded with some impressive old monuments. The Verger relished telling the tale of St Pancras, beheaded by the Emperor Diocletian in Rome in 304 at the age of fourteen for refusing to renounce his faith.
When the cloth had been removed from the altar after the ceremony, I was able to view the small sixth century altar stone, marked with five crosses of curious design, of which the only other examples are upon the tomb of Eithne, mother of St Columba, on the Hebridean island of Luing, dated to 567. A modest piece of Kentish rag stone, there is a legend this once served as an altar for St Augustine.
“We try to fall down every two hundred years,” explained the Verger breezily, drawing my attention to the alarming cracks in the wall and outlining the elaborate history of collapse and rebuilding that has produced the appealing architectural palimpsest you discover today.
Outside in the June sunshine, the newly-married couple were getting their wedding photographs taken, while rough sleepers slumbered among the graves just as the long-gone rested beneath the grass. A text carved nearby the entrance of the church reads “And I am here in a place beyond desire and fear,” expressing the quality of this mysterious enclave in the heart of London perfectly.
The Vestry
St Pancras Coroners
Sir John Soane’s tomb of 1837 inspired Giles Gilbert Scott’s design for the telephone box
Baroness Burdett Coutts was responsible for the vast gothic memorial sundial
Mary Wollstonecraft, born in Spitalfields and buried in Bournemouth, but commemorated here with her husband William Godwin
The grave of Charles Dickens’ school teacher, William Jones, believed to be the inspiration for the ferocious Mr Creakle in David Copperfield. “By far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know … one of the worst tempered men perhaps that ever lived.”
Norman stonework uncovered in the renovation of 1848
The seventh century altar stone is incised with crosses of Celtic design
“O passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!”
“We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
‘I know not which I am!’”
Thomas Hardy, The Levelled Churchyard (1882)
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Visit Norton Folgate’s Victorian Warehouses
This weekend, Norton Folgate hosts Best of Britannia, a pop-up department store showcasing the best of British manufacturing and permitting the opportunity to visit the wonderful nineteenth century warehouse interiors that British Land want to destroy.
This event illustrates the flexibility of the existing spaces and proposes one possible use for the buildings if they can escape demolition. Tower Hamlets Planning Committee vote on British Land’s proposal to obliterate Norton Folgate under a hideous corporate plaza on July 21st, so there is still time to object – and you have until 8pm today and 6pm this Sunday to take a look for yourself at what could be lost.
In 2010, Photographer Rachael Marshall took these atmospheric pictures of the buildings which were the headquarters of Nicholls & Clarke from 1875 until quite recently, supplying hardware and ironmongery of all kinds.
Photographs copyright © Rachael Marshall.
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
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Dan Cruikshank in Norton Folgate
Restoration At Wilton’s Music Hall
Yesterday, I spent the morning exploring Wilton’s Music Hall and visiting all the secret corners to record the progress of the major restoration project which aims to preserve as much of the original fabric and patina as possible, whilst also securing the building and delivering the requirements of a working theatre to ensure the long-term future of this magnificently atmospheric survival.
Where Champagne Charlie once played
Marc Almond lingers in the foyer
In a secret workshop in the basement
The space between the former terrace of houses and the music hall that was built behind them
Old lamp stored in the cellar
Nineteenth century boiler beneath the auditorium
In the Mahogany Bar
Visit Wilton’s Music Hall, Grace’s Alley, E1 8JB
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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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