In The World Of Phlegm
Here is Phlegm working through the small hours of the damp, dark January night to complete his installation entitled The Bestiary, which opens today at the Howard Griffin Gallery, 189 Shoreditch High St. Last week, Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney & I braved the downpour to go along and offer our encouragement.
A street artist who became known for huge murals painted inside derelict factories in Salford and Rotherham, Phlegm has transformed the gallery beyond all recognition for his debut show. Since the middle of December, he has been at work lining the walls with an assortment of scrap timber, creating an irregular interior space that resembles a cave or the nest of some mythic creature. This is the lair of Phlegm.
At first you enter a maze of partitions, painted with specimen jars containing animals, as if you were approaching the private museum of some obsessive collector, greedily snaffling up every species in the natural world. Beyond, you find yourself in a large chamber with a sequence of large monochrome compositions painted in plaster relief upon the walls. You think of the prehistoric artists who painted the caves of Lascaux and you think of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and you think of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are – and Phlegm’s work is a little of all these things, and something more.
In Phlegm’s imaginative world, nature is an ambivalent force, brutal and violent, and burgeoning with sinister hybrids and aliens. To your right, an epic chase of animals hunting is scattered across the first wall, followed by a scene of the collection of eggs by semi-human creatures with stick-like limbs dressed in primitive Fair Isle shifts. At the rear, another creature crouches warily, carrying its young upon its back, while on the right a vessel is being loaded with specimens, just as we saw upon the shelves where we came in.
There is an exciting tension between the rough timber cladding, coated with plaster relief, and the finely hatched lines applied with an aerosol by Phlegm upon the surface, that pull the entire vision into focus, as if the whole thing were a mirage or nightmare hallucination conjured out of scrap. Yet Phlegm also exhibits a playful sensibility that underscores the comic book violence with a poignant levity, and the vitality of his work is irresistible.
A softly-spoken Northerner, with dark eyes, pale skin and locks down to his waist, Phlegm began as an illustrator – drawing elaborately detailed ink illustrations of his own private mythology and publishing them in zines, before transferring them onto walls at a vast scale. Like Roa, he has now become part of a global circuit of street artists, executing commissions in Canada, Norway, Sri Lanka, USA and elsewhere. This is Phlegm’s first gallery show and his first sculpture, and it is a breathtaking, wondrous thing to divert you in this grim season of the year.
Photographs (except first picture) copyright © Simon Mooney
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Mannie Blankett, Hairdresser/Furrier/Lifeguard
Mannie Blankett
“You can call me ‘Jack Of All Trades’ if you want,” suggested Mannie with a characteristic grin of self-effacement, when I asked his profession, as if he were more concerned to make things easier for me than to assert his accomplishments. Such is the philosophical detachment of one born in 1917, who saw the passage of the twentieth century, who is the last of a family of six children, and is a man at peace with himself.
While the January afternoon light faded outside, I was privileged to spend a few hours with Mannie in the peace of his modern flat looking down upon the Petticoat Lane Market.
“As a youngster, I remember going to the Pavilion Theatre in the Whitechapel Rd and seeing the boxing and wrestling. It was full of people and very popular. That was a long time ago, the end of the thirties, so you can imagine how old I am. The boxing ring was in the middle of the theatre with seats all round and upon the stage. It can’t have been expensive because I didn’t have anything. It must have been pennies. I remember an American boxer came over called ‘Punchy’ Paul Shaffer who knocked out all his opponents in the first round and there was Max Krauser the wrestler, a heavyweight who won all his fights.
I was born in Jamaica St and I left the East End at twenty years old, when the family moved to Stamford Hill in 1937. Jamaica St had all these bug-ridden houses then. We used to call them ‘red bugs,’ and they came out in the summer. Six of us shared a three bedroom house and we had no back garden or bathroom, and we had an outside toilet. Opposite, there was company that did deliveries by horse and cart, collecting and transporting goods. There were few cars around then, very few people had them, just the milkman, the baker and the coalman. I wish I could remember more about the old days. As a kid, my mother used to take me up to Brick Lane to buy clothes and I remember the market in Whitechapel all along Mile End Waste
My parents came from Poland. My father Harry was a furrier who had his own business in the West End and my mother Sarah had six children to bring up. Blankett & Sons had workshops around Oxford St and Soho, and I had a brother who worked there with my father. I went to South St School, then I won a scholarship to Mile End School in Myrdle St and I was supposed to stay until sixteen, but my mother took me out at fourteen. I didn’t want to work as a furrier, instead I worked as a hairdresser all over the East End, before my mother sent me to a hairdressing school to learn my trade for three years but I wasn’t keen on that – the hours were very long, eight in the morning until eight at night – so I went into the family business after all.
I worked there for a couple of years and I learnt all the parts of the trade, making patterns, cutting and nailing. At lunchtimes, I used to go swimming and sunbathing at the Serpentine Lido and I got chatting with the attendant and he said there was a job going as a lifeguard and suggested I apply. I worked at the Lido for five years, it was a seasonal job from Easter until September. At school, I had learnt to swim and won a bronze medal for lifesaving. I was in my late teens and I loved that job. In our English summers, you get weeks of rain and we used to sit and play chess all day.
I always wanted to travel and, one day, I saw an advert in the London Times offering return tickets to India for seventy-five pounds. So I got a ticket and it was to travel overland, so it took a month just to get there! I met this young lady, Pat Evans, and we used to write to each other. When I went to India, I gave up my flat in Blandford St, so she said, ‘When you come back you can stay at my place in Croydon for a night, if you need somewhere.’ I stayed ten years until she died. She used to do a bit of writing, she wrote stories and poems for magazines and had quite a few published. In Croydon, I got a job at the swimming pool in Purley Way, opposite where the old airport and I was there for five years.
I got called up in 1943 for three years and, when I came out, I did a bit of hairdressing and part-time work in the family business to get by. In the sixties, I worked in Housman’s Radical Bookshop in the Caledonian Rd and I was in the Peace Movement. I joined Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and became one of the Committee of One Hundred, including Bertrand Russell, Arnold Wesker, Christopher Logue and Vanessa Redgrave. We had demonstrations and, when they were arrested, we would step in to fill their places – I was arrested a number of times too.
When I was in Croydon, I got friendly with a guy who liked to dress up in uniform and do historical re-enactments, and he told me there was a VE Day Celebration coming up in the East End and they had two big bands playing including one led by Glenn Miller’s brother. So we went along and I met this woman who lived in Petticoat Sq. She was called Rene Rabin and that was twenty-five years ago. That was how I came back to the East End, to live in Middlesex St. Now I’ve lived in Petticoat Lane for twenty years and I like it round here. I have travelled a full circle in my life. “
Mannie with his sister Anne and their parents Sarah and Harry Blankett in the thirties
The Pavilion Theatre as Mannie knew it in the thirties
In his flat in Petticoat Sq, Mannie Blankett looks down upon the Petticoat Lane Market
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Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane
Billy & Charley’s Reliquaries
Courtesy of Philip Mernick, here are more of the wonderful zany works of Billy & Charley, the celebrated East End mudlarks-turned-forgers who created thousands of fake antiquities known as ‘Shadwell Shams,’ that successfully fooled the archaeological establishment in the nineteenth century.
There is a extra level of irony to these reliquaries, once produced to contain sacred relics, such as pieces of the’ true cross’ or body parts of saints which were believed to convey special powers to the owner, since they were always fakes produced to exploit the credulous and thus Billy & Charley were manufacturing fakes of fakes.
This is a fake Billy & Charley medallion given away with a women’s magazine in the nineteen-fifties – can anyone tell us which magazine?
These are plates of medieval pilgrim badges from Charles Roach Smith’s Collectanea Antiqua, Volume II, 1848, that Billy & Charley may have used as the basis for their own designs
Plate from The Antiquaries Journal 1846
One of Billy & Charley’s ‘Shadwell Shams’ perhaps inspired by the historical engraving above
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From My Scrap Collection
For some time, I have been collecting Victorian scraps of tradesmen and street characters, and putting them in a drawer. So these damp days at the end of January gave me the ideal opportunity to search through the contents and study my collection in detail. I am especially fascinated by the mixture of whimsical fantasy and social observation in these colourful miniatures, in which even the comic grotesques are derived from the daily reality of the collectors who once cherished these images.
Street Photographer
Exotic Birds
Sweets & Dainties
Acrobat & Performing Dog
Performing Dogs
The Muffin Man
Street Musician
Street Musician
Baker
Smoker
Butcher
Waiter
Itinerant
Sweep
Naturalist
Lounge Lizard
Dustman
Costermonger
Spraying the roads
Milkman
Knife Grinder
Scottish Herring Girls followed the shoals around the East Coast, gutting and packing the herring.
Herring Girl
You may like to see these other scraps from my collection
The Gentle Author in Piccadilly
Next week, I shall be climbing aboard a number twenty-three bus at Liverpool St Station and going up west to alight in Piccadilly Circus, then walking down Piccadilly to just where this photograph was taken and entering Joseph Edgerton’s modernist shop front of 1935 that you can see on the right.
Originally opened as Simpsons of Piccadilly, today it is Britain’s largest Waterstones bookshop where I shall be giving a MAGIC LANTERN SHOW at 7pm next Wednesday 5th February showing one hundred of my favourite photographs of London old and new, selected from more than sixteen thousand pictures I have published on these pages, and telling the stories of the people and the places. It is my honour to present this as the inaugural event in The London Salon and tickets are free but should be reserved by emailing events.piccadilly@waterstones.com
Contemplating my trip to the West End inspired me to take a look through the collection of thousands of glass slides, once used for education lectures by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society around a century ago at the Bishopsgate Institute, and show you these old photographs of Piccadilly.
Piccadilly Circus was my first view of London as I ascended the steep staircase from the underground on the western side and later, when I came to reside here, I felt that unless I went through Piccadilly at least weekly I was not really living in London. Stephen Spender once told me that he also enjoyed passing through Piccadilly and the thrill of feeling that he was at the centre of the world and – although I hardly ever seem to go there these days – whenever I see the cylindrical structure at the core of Piccadilly Circus, I still cannot resist the notion that it is the hub around which the earth revolves.
Rush hour in Piccadilly c.1900
Piccadilly Circus, c.1900
Piccadilly Circus in the fog, c1910
Piccadilly Circus, c.1880
Piccadilly Circus, c.1930
In Piccadilly Circus, c. 1910
In Piccadilly, c.1920
In Regent St, c.1900
Outside the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, c.1930
Old shop in Haymarket, c. 1900
The Haymarket Theatre, c.1900
The Ritz Hotel, c. 1900
Commissionaire, c. 1930
Piccadilly and Green Park, c.1890
Walking down Piccadilly beside Green Park at the time of Victoria’s Jubilee, 1897
Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner, c.1910
Strolling at Hyde Park Corner, c.1920
St James Palace, c. 1900
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S MAGIC LANTERN SHOW, Waterstones Bookshop in Piccadilly, 7pm Wednesday 5th February
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The Lantern Slides of Old London
The High Days & Holidays of Old London
The Fogs & Smogs of Old London
The Forgotten Corners of Old London
The Statues & Effigies of Old London
The City Churches of Old London
Giorgione In Clapton
You enter a disused tramshed in Clapton, climb a ramshackle staircase and discover yourself in the studio of Giorgione, one of the greatest Venetian artists of the High Renaissance, who died in 1510. How can this be? Here in a room of comparable size to one of the smaller chambers at the National Gallery you are confronted with an array of masterpieces – familiar works, like Giorgione’s most famous painting The Tempest, surrounded by others that were thought to be lost, known only by engravings. Potentially the lair of an art thief or a master forger, it is some kind of miracle you have stumbled upon.
Neither thief nor forger, the magus responsible for working this magic is Danny Easterbrook who has devoted the last sixteen years to repainting the canon of works of Giorgione at the rate of three a year, using all the correct pigments and practices of Giorgione’s time. It is an extraordinary project rendered all the more astonishing by its location in this deserted tramshed and thus it is no surprise to discover that Danny is almost as passionate about the building as he is about Giorgione.
“The Tudor palace of Brooke House, dating from 1470, stood across the road from here until it was demolished in 1955,” Danny explained, widening his eyes in wonder, “The stables and coach yard for Brooke House were on this side of the road, becoming the Clapton Coachworks and, in 1873, The Lea Bridge Tramway Depot.”
The tramshed was shut more than a century ago, when the system switched from horsepower to electricity in 1907, and since then the buildings have served as a warehouse for Jack Cohen, the founder of Tesco, and as the home to the Odessa recording studios, employed by Iron Maiden, Dire Straits, The Police and Pete Doherty among others. Until recently, the entire complex was in use as artists’ studios and crafts workshops, but they have all gone now, except Danny and a small company selling foam rubber.
The imminent demolition of the building underscores the melancholy of Giorgione’s dreamlike paintings, that emphasise the transient, ephemeral nature of the world, and colours Danny’s quest to recover something lost centuries ago. Vasari believed Giorgione to be the peer of Leonardo and Michelangelo, yet today only a handful of paintings are ascribed to him and his reputation has faded to an enigma that matches the mysterious nature of his subjects. “We don’t know much about Giorgione, he died young and he’s been obscured by Titian, who was his pupil,” admitted Danny with a frown, “Many of his paintings have been taken away from him and given to Titian.”
“When I came to London from New Zealand in the seventies, I was a bass player,” Danny revealed, speaking of his own past,“but a painter lived across the road and it sparked my interest. Since the late eighties, I’ve been painting and making lutes.” Then he took one from a whole line of different lutes he had made, hanging upon the wall, and began to improvise upon it with the ease of a virtuoso, and I realised I was in the company of a genuine Renaissance man.
A talented individual with a fierce scholarly intelligence, Danny has immersed himself in Venetian culture of Giorgione’s time, exploring the provenance of disputed works, and – in his versions – removing overpainting and images that have been added, in order to get closer to Giorgione. Through his intimate understanding of Giorgione, Danny seeks to restore the reputation of his beloved master by demonstrating the true range of his achievements in painting.
It is an endeavour that sits somewhere in between art history and conceptual art, and Danny’s accomplishment is breathtaking – even manufacturing elaborate gilt frames for each of the paintings in the authentic method. You look around the room and you realise you are seeing something impossible, something even Giorgione never saw – all his works in one room. Through comparison, Danny is beginning to construct a tentative sequence of Giorgione’s paintings and also, through comparison, to establish that paintings misattributed to others are in fact the work of Giorgione.
Ten years ago, Danny spent a year putting a new roof on his studio which is also his home, high up in the former stables of the former tramshed. He has been a good custodian of a dignified old building but now he is forced to leave, he can find nowhere else in Hackney to continue his project and is looking at moving to Wales or the West Country. “When I came here it was cheap and you didn’t have to work a sixty hour week just to pay the rent, it was a perfect space for what I wanted,” he confessed to me regretfully.
Yet it is apparent that Danny’s visionary project will carry him forward wherever he goes. “I believe Giorgione painted sixty or so paintings,” he admitted to me, “and if I live long enough I’ll run out of paintings to paint.”
Danny Easterbrook
Danny Easterbrook’s studio
A corner of the studio
The old stableyard
A blacksmith operated from here until recently
A ring to tether a horse
This foam rubber company is the last business still operating in the tramshed
A hidden passage at the tramshed
A secret yard at the tramshed
The North Metropolitan Tramways Company Depot was opened in 1873
Rails where the trams once ran
Brooke House in the twenties
Brooke House in the eighteen-eighties, drawn in the style of Wenceslas Hollar
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Adam Dant’s Map Of Walbrook
Click on Adam Dant’s map to enlarge it and study the detail
Inspired by a visit to see the recent discoveries that Museum of London Archaeology Service excavated from the City of London’s largest building site at the location of the Roman port, cartographer extraordinaire Adam Dant has drawn this map of Walbrook illustrating people and events from two thousand years of history in this ancient corner of the capital. And, as a bonus, I have appended my account of a journey in search of the river Walbrook.
Adam Dant stands at the pump in Shoreditch Churchyard which marks the source of the Walbrook, before setting out with his map of the Roman City of Londonium to trace the route of the lost river
Beneath the Bank of England
Ever since the Rev Turp pointed out to me the spot outside Shoreditch Church where the river Walbrook had its wellspring, I have been curious to discover what happened to this lost river which once flowed from here through the City to the Thames. This photograph of the Walbrook, which was taken by Steve Duncan, the urban explorer, deep beneath the Bank of England in 2007, gives the answer. The river has been endlessly covered over and piped off, until today it is entirely co-opted into the system of sewers and drains.
Yet in spite of this, the water keeps flowing. Irrespective of our best efforts to contain and redirect water courses, the movement of water underground always eludes control. A fascinating detail of this photo, which shows the sewer deep below the City, built in the eighteen forties, is that today the water table in the City has risen to the level where water is actually pouring from the surrounding earth into the tunnel between the bricks.With astonishing courage, Steve Duncan enters these secret tunnels through manhole covers and undertakes covert explorations, bringing back photos of the unseen world that he finds down there, as trophies. I was captivated by this nightmarish subterranean image, which reminded me that the primordial force of nature that this river manifests still demands respect.
Lacking Steve’s daredevil nature and experience in potholing, I decided to keep my exploration above ground, following the path of the river and seeing what sights there are to be discovered upon the former banks of this erstwhile tributary of the Thames. The Walbrook has attracted its share of followers over the years, from anti-capitalist protestors who attempted to liberate the river by opening hydrants along its route, to milder gestures adopted by conceptual artists, sacrificing coins to the river through storm drains and releasing fleets of paper boats into the sewers.
The historian John Stow is the primary source of information about the Walbrook, writing in his “Survey of London” in 1598 – though even in his time it was already a lost river, “The running water so called by William Conquerour in his saide Charter, which entereth the citie,&c. (before there was any ditch) betweene Bishopsgate and the late made Posterne called Mooregate, entred the wall, and was truely of the wall called Walbrooke… it ranne through the citie with divers windings from the North towards the South into the river of Thames… This water course having diverse Bridges, was afterwards vaulted over with bricke, and paved levell with the Streetes and Lanes where through it passed, and since that also houses have beene builded thereon, so that the course of Walbroke is now hidden under ground, and therby hardly knowne.”
Arriving at St Leonard’s Shoreditch, as the first drops of water from the ominous lowering clouds overhead began to fall, the Rev Turp’s description of the poisoning of the Walbrook (when seepage from the seventy-six thousand human remains in the churchyard found its way into the watercourse) came to mind. The Walbrook, which entered through the wall beside the church of All Hallows on the Wall, was the only watercourse to flow through the City and was both an important source of freshwater as well as a conduit to remove sewage, two entirely irreconcilable functions.
There is no evidence of the route of the brook outwith the wall and so I walked straight down Curtain Rd, entering the City at London Wall, with the church of All Hallows on the Wall to my left. I turned right on London Wall, where the brook was once channeled along the wall itself. At Copthall Avenue, I turned left where the watercourse flowed South down through Token House Yard, under St Margaret’s Church and the Bank of England. As I left Copthall Avenue to walk through the maze of narrow lanes, including Telegraph Alley and Whalebone Alley, the changing scale indicated I was entering the ancient city. Then I enjoyed a breathtaking moment as I passed through the dark low passage into Token House Yard, discovering a long tall street with cliffs of grey buildings on either side, that ended in the towering edifice of the Bank of England.
From here, I walked down Princes St to emerge at the front of the Bank facing the Mansion House, basking for a moment in the drama of this crossroads, before walking onwards down Poultry past Grocer’s Hall and then turning left to arrive at the Temple of Mithras. Just an outline in stone today, the former temple which was discovered in 1954 on the bank of the Walbrook, eighteen feet below modern ground level – a miraculous survival of two millennia, standing at the head of the navigable river where barges were berthed in Roman times .
At the time of these excavations, a square token of lead with the name Martia Martina carved backwards on it was found, once thrown into the Walbrook – in Celtic culture this was believed to bring bad luck to the subject. Also, in the eighteen sixties, Augustus Pitt Rivers uncovered a large number of human skulls in the river bed, which could be either those of a Roman legion who surrendered to the Britons or the remnants of Boudica’s rebellion. Both these finds may reflect a spiritual significance for the watercourse.
Next stop for me was Christopher Wren’s church of St Stephen Walbrook on the far bank of the Walbrook. My favourite of his City churches, this is always a place to savour a moment of contemplation, beneath the changing light of the dome that appears to float, high up above the roof. The name of this street, Walbrook, within the ward of Walbrook confirms beyond doubt that you are in the vicinity of the lost river, and from here it is a short walk down Cloak Lane by way of College Hill to Walbrook Wharf on the riverfront below Cannon St Station, where the Walbrook meets the river Thames. In the end, whatever route they came by, this is where the raindrops that fell outside Shoreditch Church arrived eventually.
I am entranced by the romance of the lost river Walbrook – even if it may have been a stinking culvert rather than the willow-lined brook of my imagination – because when you are surrounded by the flashy overbearing towers of the City, there remains a certain frail consolation in the knowledge that ancient rivers still flow underground beneath your feet.
Shoreditch Church once stood upon the bank of the Walbrook
All Hallows on the Wall where the Walbrook entered the City of London
The passage from Whalebone Alley to Token House Yard
Approaching the Bank of England
The Roman temple of Mithras upon on the bank of the Walbrook
St Stephen Walbrook
Christopher Wren’s church of St Stephen Walbrook with altar by Henry Moore
The dome of St Stephen Walbrook
The City of London’s largest building site upon the location of the Roman port
Walbrook Wharf where the Walbrook enters the Thames
