The Dalston Mulberry
Here we go round the Mulberry bushes! After I featured the Bethnal Green Mulberry last week which – at four hundred years old – lays claim to be the oldest tree in the East End, I was contacted by a reader who introduced me to the ancient Haggerston Mulberry and then, over the weekend, I was invited up to Hackney to meet the Dalston Mulberry.
Secluded in gardens behind a nineteenth century terrace near London Fields, the Dalston Mulberry grows upon the boundary of two properties and consequently has two custodians, neighbours Molly and Megan. When the fence was replaced in recent years, it was painstakingly constructed around the cherished Mulberry so that residents upon either side might enjoy its fruit and benign influence equally. In the same street, there are several early-eighteenth century cottages and it seems likely that Dalston Mulberry is their contemporary, planted three centuries ago.
For years, I wondered what happened to all the Mulberry trees. Since the East End was home to a thriving silk industry for generations, they must have been ubiquitous once and I could not believe they had all gone. In each case, the Mulberries I have met predate everything that surrounds them and it fills me with humility to encounter these gracious specimens, which have mastered the art of longevity – by producing a generous crop of fruit each year, they ensure their survival and earn their right to exist in spite of all the changes.
Now the venerable Mulberries of the East End are emerging from the shady groves where they have been sequestered for centuries and declaring themselves, who knows what horticultural discoveries may lie ahead?
The other side of the fence
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The Oldest Tree in the East End
Drivers In The Eighties
Today it is my pleasure to publish this selection of favourite photographs from Chris Dorley-Brown’s DRIVERS IN THE EIGHTIES, newly published by Hoxton Minipress this month
Honda Moped, Mare St
Ford Sierra, Bishopsgate
Vauxhall Astra, Piccadilly
Vehicle unknown, Bishopsgate
Ford Transit, London Bridge
Routemaster Bus, Bank
Telecom Van, City of London
Ford Escort, Gracechurch St
Peugeot 604, Mare St
Vauxhall Astramax, Moorgate
Leyland Sherpa, Mare St
Peugeot 305, Old St
Ford Escort Van, London Wall
Ford Tipper, Mare St
Black Cab, Bank
Toyota Corolla, London Bridge
Vehicle unknown, Bishopsgate
Austin Maestro Van, London Bridge
Black Cab, Mare St
Bedford Plaxton Coach, London Bridge
“I grew up around cars. Dad was a car man – he bought them, sold them, mended and polished them and sold the petrol to make them run. When I was eight years old, he arrived home one day in the most glamorous Ford I had ever seen – convertible Cortina Mk2, off- white with a black canvas roof. We piled in and went for a spin on country roads and at one point stopped to admire the view. I picked up mum’s camera and for the first time in my life I took a photograph. It was of the old man, still in his work clothes, dark suit and tie, looking out of the car window.
These images are from the first five rolls of colour film I ever shot. Simple portraits, faces and torsos reframed by the windscreens and doors of the vehicles, they hold a stillness in a world of movement and unpredictability. I never bought another roll of black and white film again, the journey had started.
My destination was to record the sell-off of Rolls Royce in May 1987 – one in a series of unedifying gold-rush stampedes – and as I left the studio on foot and headed towards Bank Station, the traffic on Mare St and Hackney Rd were gridlocked by people trying either to get to the sell-off, or mainly, trying to avoid it. It was the first warm day of the year and the drivers and passengers were trapped – impatient, sweaty, wanting to be outside in the sunshine. As far as I and the Rolleiflex were concerned, they were asking for it. I could get close, very close. They were sitting ducks.
I followed the traffic and walked south onto Shoreditch High St, then all the way down to the river by London Bridge. Tourists were stuck on open top Routemaster buses, motorcycle couriers were lighting fags, engines idled, the lights would only let a few through on green before the waiting continued. The sell-off was causing chaos, drivers looked deflated, maps were consulted for escape routes, midday editions of the Evening Standard given the once-over, frustrated children plonked on drivers laps. The traffic islands, surrounded by those now long-gone steel barriers, provided a refuge from which to take photos, and I was more or less invisible, able to fully concentrate on these prisoners of glass, metal and capitalist reverie.”
– Chris Dorley-Brown
Peter Dorley-Brown in his Ford Cortina, 1967
Photographs copyright © Chris Dorley-Brown
The Haggerston Mulberry
After I published my portrait of the four hundred year old Bethnal Green Mulberry yesterday, a reader invited me over to photograph the Haggerston Mulberry which has its own claim to longevity.
I hopped on a bus up the Kingsland Rd as soon as I got the message and I was filled with wonder to be led into a hidden garden where this magnificent ancient specimen flourishes in a sheltered corner surrounded by protective walls.
Its deeply-textured, gnarly bark was riven with the scars of innumerable branches gone long ago yet the old Mulberry had a healthy showing of new growth, heavy with buds unfolding into the fresh green leaves of spring. Like its relative in Bethnal Green, this tree produces a heavy crop of fruit each year.
Liz, the fond custodian of the Haggerston Mulberry told me that within living memory there were once two other Mulberries close by but people took them down “because the birds dropped red berries and juice over your washing.” Older than all the buildings around, local lore has it that these trees were planted at the time of the arrival of the Huguenots.
If readers know of any more ancient Mulberries in the East End please get in touch and I will come and photograph them.
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The Oldest Tree in the East End
The Oldest Tree In The East End
Thanks to an invitation from one of the readers, I had the opportunity of making the acquaintance of the oldest tree in the East End yesterday, a dignified tottering specimen known as the Bethnal Green Mulberry. It is more than four hundred years old and its leaves were intended to feed silkworms cultivated by local weavers.
The Black Mulberry originally grew within the grounds of Bishop Bonner’s Palace that stood on this site and an inkwell in the museum of the Royal London Hospital, made in 1915 from a bough, has a brass plate engraved with the sardonic yarn that the Bishop sat beneath it to enjoy shelter in the cool of the evening while deciding which heretics to execute.
Yesterday’s visit was a poignant occasion since the Mulberry stands today in the grounds of the London Chest Hospital which opened in 1855 and closed forever last week prior to being handed over by the National Health Service today, in advance of redevelopment. My only previous visit to the Hospital was as a patient struggling with pneumonia, when I was grateful to come here for treatment and feel reassured by its gracious architecture surrounded by trees. Of palatial design, the London Chest Hospital is a magnificent Victorian philanthropic institution where the successful campaign to rid the East End of tuberculosis in the last century was masterminded.
It was a sombre spectacle to see workmen carrying out desks and stripping the Hospital of its furniture, and when a security guard informed me that building had been sold for twenty-five million and would be demolished since “it’s not listed,” I was shocked at the potential loss of this beloved structure and the threat to the historic tree too. Yet as far as I am aware, no formal decision has been made about the future of the Hospital’s fabric and, thankfully, the Mulberry is subject to a Tree Preservation Order.
Gainly supported by struts that have become absorbed into the fibre of the tree over the years, it was heartening to see this ancient organism coming into leaf once more and renewing itself again after four centuries. The Bethnal Green Mulberry has seen palaces and hospitals come and go, but it continues to bear fruit every summer regardless.
The Mulberry narrowly escaped destruction in World War II and charring from a bomb is still visible
The London Chest Hospital opened in 1855 and closed forever last week
Ancient Mulberry in Victoria Park which may be a contemporary of the Bethnal Green Mulberry
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Return Of The Monoliths
This week, I learnt of a thirty-three storey tower proposed in Whitechapel on top of Sainsburys’ supermarket and last week, I was told of a twenty-five storey tower proposed for the Holland Estate beside Petticoat Lane. Meanwhile, campaigns to prevent blocks of more than forty storeys at the Bishopsgate Goodsyard and thirteen storeys in the Conservation Area in Norton Folgate have been running for months.
All of which makes John Claridge‘s photographs of the construction of monoliths in the East End in the last century especially pertinent. Many of these structures were subsequently regarded as mistaken in conception and have long been demolished. Yet as we embark upon a new wave of taller, meaner monoliths, it seems that no lessons have been learned.
In the Beginning
“The rich got richer and the poor got bathrooms” – this is photographer John Claridge’s caustic verdict upon the invasion of the monolithic tower blocks in the East End of his youth, as recorded in this set of pictures taken between 1962 and 1982.
“In the terraces of two-up two-downs, people could talk over the garden fence but in the towers they became strangers to each other. The culture of how they lived was taken away from them, and I knew a lot of people that got fucked up by it.” John told me, still angry about the wilful destruction of communities enacted in the name of social progress. “It was a cheap shot. People were making a fortune out of putting up crap.” he revealed in contempt, “I don’t think anyone has the right to destroy other people’s lives in that way and tie it up with a silk ribbon.”
While in London’s richer neighbourhoods old terraces were more likely to be renovated and preserved, in the East End and other poorer districts pressure was exerted through slum clearance programmes to force people from their homes, demolishing swathes of nineteenth century housing in preference to simply installing modern amenities. In retrospect, many of these schemes appear to have been driven by little more than class prejudice and created more social problems than they solved, dislocating communities and systematically erasing centuries of settled working class culture.
John’s photographs record how the monoliths first asserted their forbidding presence upon the landscape of the East End, arriving like the Martian fighting machines in the War of the Worlds. “You made fun of it and got on with your life,” he admitted to me and, with sardonic humour – adopting titles from cinema and jazz – he confronts us in these pictures with a series of mordant graphic images that imprint themselves upon the consciousness.
As new, even larger, tower blocks rise over the East End today, John Claridge’s vivid photographs of the monoliths remain as resonant as ever.
On Dangerous Ground – “They didn’t half put them up quick, I’m telling you.”
Gloomy Sunday
Room With a View – “Which is the view, from this window or from the block?”
The Dark Corner
The Four Horsemen
Foggy Day
Three Steps to Heaven
Caged – “An old lady who lived in a block in which the lift broke told me she felt like a caged animal.”
Freedom is Just Another Word – “Prefabs offered one kind of freedom and tower blocks offered another – but then the word didn’t mean anything anymore.”
Stranger on the Third Floor – “Once the small businesses go, people became estranged from their local environment.”
Odds Against Tomorrow – “There were still a few people left in this derelict terrace because they didn’t want to move out, but the odds were against them.”
House of Cards – “When a gas stove blew up and part of Ronan Point collapsed, my father, who was a qualified engineer, went to check it out – there were bolts missing and it had been constructed on the cheap.”
Dark Water -“These reminded me of apartment buildings in the Eastern Bloc.”
House of Strangers
Undercurrent
Out of Nowhere
High Wall
Dark Passage
Lift to the Scaffold
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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Signs, Posters, Typography & Graphics
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In Search Of William Shakespeare’s London
On the eve of William Shakespeare’s birthday, I present this account of my quest to find his London
Sir William Pickering, St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, 1574.
Ever since I visited the newly-discovered site of William Shakespeare’s first theatre in Shoreditch, I found myself thinking about where else in London I could locate Shakespeare. The city has changed so much that very little remains from his time and even though I might discover his whereabouts – such as his lodging in Silver St in 1612 – usually the terrain is unrecognisable. Silver St is lost beneath the Barbican now.
Yet, in spite of everything, there are buildings in London that Shakespeare would have known, and, in each case, there are greater or lesser reasons to believe he was there. As the mental list of places where I could enter the same air space as Shakespeare grew, so did my desire to visit them all and discover what remains to meet my eyes that he would also have seen.
Thus it was that I set out under a moody sky in search of Shakespeare’s London – walking first over to St Helen’s Bishopsgate where Shakespeare was a parishioner, according to the parish tax inspector who recorded his failure to pay tax on 15th November 1597. This ancient church is a miraculous survivor of the Fire of London, the Blitz and the terrorist bombings of the nineteen nineties, and contains spectacular monuments that Shakespeare could have seen if he came here, including the eerie somnolent figure of Sir William Pickering of 1574 illustrated above. There is great charm in the diverse collection of melancholic Elizabethan statuary residing here in this quaint medieval church with two naves, now surrounded by modernist towers upon all sides, and there is a colourful Shakespeare window of 1884, the first of several images of him that I encountered upon my walk.
From here, I followed the route that Shakespeare would have known, walking directly South over London Bridge to Southwark Cathedral, where he buried his younger brother Edmund, an actor aged just twenty-seven in 1607, at the cost of twenty shillings “with a forenoone knell of the great bell.” Again there is a Shakespeare window, with scenes from the plays, put up in 1964, and a memorial with an alabaster figure from 1912, yet neither is as touching as the simple stone to poor Edmund in the floor of the choir. I was fascinated by the medieval roof bosses, preserved at the rear of the nave since the Victorians replaced the wooden roof with stone. If Shakespeare had raised his bald pate during a service here, his eye might have caught sight of the appealingly grotesque imagery of these spirited medieval carvings. Most striking is Judas being devoured by Satan, with only a pair of legs protruding from the Devil’s hungry mouth, though I also like the sad face of the old king with icicles for a beard.
Crossing the river again, I looked out for the Cormorants that I delight to see as one of the living remnants of Shakespeare’s London, which he saw when he walked out from the theatre onto the river bank, and wrote of so often, employing these agile creatures that can swallow fish whole as as eloquent metaphors of all-consuming Time. My destination was St Giles Cripplegate, where Edmund’s sons who did not live beyond infancy were baptised and William Shakespeare was the witness. Marooned at the centre of the Barbican today like a galleon shipwrecked upon a beach, I did not linger long here because most of the cargo of history this church carried was swept overboard in a fire storm in nineteen forty, when it was bombed and then later rebuilt from a shell. Just as in that searching game where someone advises you if you are getting warmer, I began to feel my trail had started warm but was turning cold.
Yet, resolutely, I walked on through St John’s Gate in Clerkenwell where Shakespeare once brought the manuscripts of his plays for the approval by the Lord Chamberlain before they could be performed. And, from there, I directed my feet along the Strand to the Middle Temple, where, in one of my favourite corners of the city, there is a sense – as you step through the gates – of entering an earlier London, comprised of small squares and alleys arched over by old buildings. Here in Fountain Court, where venerable Mulberry trees supported by iron props surround the pool, stands the magnificent Middle Temple Hall where the first performance of “Twelfth Night” took place in 1602, with Shakespeare playing in the acting company. At last, I had a building where I could be certain that Shakespeare had been present – but it was closed.
I sat in the shade by the fountain and took stock, and questioned my own sentiment now my feet were weary. Yet I could not leave, my curiosity would not let me. Summoning my courage, I walked past all the signs, until I came to the porter’s lodge and asked the gentleman politely if I might see the hall. He stood up, introducing himself as John and assented with a smile, graciously leading me from the sunlight into the cavernous hundred-foot-long hall, with its great black double hammer-beam roof, like the hand of God with its fingers outstretched or the darkest stormcloud lowering overhead. It was overwhelming.
“You see this table,” said John, pointing to an old dining table at the centre of the hall, “We call this the ‘cup board’ and the top of it is made of the hatch from Sir Francis Drake’s ship ‘The Golden Hind’ that circumnavigated the globe” And then, before I could venture a comment, he continued, “You see that long table at the end – the one that’s the width of the room, twenty-nine feet long – that’s made from a single oak tree which was a gift from Elizabeth I, it was cut at Windsor Great Park, floated down the Thames and constructed in this hall while it was being built. It has never left this room.”
And then John left me alone in the finest Elizabethan hall in Britain. Looking back at the great carved screen, I realised this had served as the backdrop to the performance of ‘”Twelfth Night” and the gallery above was where the musicians played at the opening when Orsino says, “If music be the food of love, play on.” The hall was charged and resonant. Occasioned by the clouds outside, sunlight moved in dappled patterns across the floor from the tall windows above.
I walked back behind the screen where the actors, including Shakespeare, waited, and I walked again into the hall, absorbing the wonder of the scene, emphasised by the extraordinary intricate roof that appeared to defy gravity. It was a place for public display and the show of power, but its elegant proportion and fine detail also permitted it to be a place for quiet focus and poetry. I sat on my own at the head of the twenty-nine foot long table in the only surviving building where one of William Shakespeare’s plays was done in his lifetime, and it was a marvel. I could imagine him there.
Judas swallowed by Satan
An old king at Southwark
St Giles Cripplegate where Edmund’s sons were baptised and William Shakespeare was the witness.
St John’s Gate where William Shakespeare brought the manuscripts of his plays to the Lord Chamberlain’s office to seek approval.
The Middle Temple Hall where “Twelfth Night” was first performed in 1602.
The twenty-nine foot long table made from a single oak from Windsor Great Park.
The wooden screen that served as the backdrop to the first production of” Twelfth Night.”
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Sir George’s Residence for Respectable Girls
All the years I have been walking through Gunthorpe St, taking a shortcut through the back streets to Spitalfields, I have never had any reason to notice the tall unassuming brick building set back from the street with the date 1886 set in a stucco panel on the top, until current resident Daron Pike wrote to share the intriguing history he has discovered – for this was once ‘Sir George’s Residence for Respectable Girls.’
‘Respectable’ tells it all, distinguishing the residents from those ‘unrespectable’ girls whose presence made Whitechapel a notorious destination for predatory males in the final decades of the nineteenth century. When the Residence was built, Gunthorpe St was known as George Yard, described by the East London Advertiser in 1888 as “one of the most dangerous streets in the locality – a narrow turning out of the High St leads into a number of courts and alleys in which some of the poorest of the poor, together with thieves and roughs and prostitutes, find protection and shelter in the miserable hovels bearing the name of houses.”
Provision merchant turned evangelist, George Holland, founded the George Yard Mission and Ragged School in the eighteen-fifties, winning recognition for his philanthropic work which permitted him to raise the finance for the Residence. “When Mr Holland began his work, George Yard was inhabited by such a desperate class that he often had to be accompanied by two policemen, bricks, flower pots and other missiles being, even then, flung at his head,” wrote the ‘Record of Christian Work’ in October 1885, thirty-five years after George Holland established his Mission, “Now, however anyone may walk through that locality with impunity … the success of this work has mainly been owing to Mr Holland’s untiring soul, three days being the longest holiday he has allowed himself since he first put his hand to the work.”
Yet it was the knife attack upon Emma Smith in George Yard in April 1888 followed by the murder of Martha Tabram close by in August of that year, initiating a spree of violence against women known retrospectively as ‘the Whitechapel Murders,’ which shone a light upon the work of George Holland in the national press. In November 1886, The Times reported on a conference of the Ragged School Union at which “Mr Holland next gave a graphic description of his work in the eastern part of London, remarking that in times past some 50,000 children had passed through his hands and that he now had under his care some 3,000 men, women and children.”
The violent murders of 1888 inspired terror among those at the ‘Residence for Respectable Girls’, while also throwing into relief the necessity of the Mission and the Residence, as the Daily News reported in November that year – “Mr. George Holland, whose remarkable work has been going on for so very many years in premises occupying an obscure position in George Yard, Whitechapel – where it will be remembered one of these unfortunate women was found with thirty or forty stabs – says that the sensation has affected his institution very greatly. He has some hundreds of young women connected with his place, and many of them have been afraid to stir out after dark. He is under some anxiety, too, lest ladies who have been wont to come down there on winter evenings to teach and entertain his young people, should be deterred by this latest addition to the evil reputation of Whitechapel.”
George Holland died in 1900 and, by the First World War, the building had ceased to be a home for girls and was in general residential use by a predominantly Jewish population, until the sixties when it was emptied of inhabitants at the time of the slum clearances in the East End. Today it is well kept and back in use as flats. The Mission itself and the Ragged School are long gone, and just the implacable ‘Sir George’s Residence for Respectable Girls’ remains in Gunthorpe St to remind us of his compassionate purpose.
Sir George’s Residence for Respectable Girls
Gunthorpe St
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