The Return Of My Right Arm
Medical Update
They are cutting it off in a week – not my arm you understand but the plaster – and then I shall have my right arm returned to me after this unfortunate episode which began a month ago when I slipped and broke my wrist. I count myself lucky that it was a routine accident which will heal completely and thus is of no consequence in the wider scheme of things.
Already, I am typing these words to you with the fingers of my right hand and, in recent weeks, you may have spotted my photographs of Rodney Archer and of the trees in Brushfield St, which I managed to take by holding the camera in my left hand and pressing a single finger of my right hand against the shutter.
Let me admit, I cannot remember too much of these last weeks while my right arm has been out of service, although I shall never forget the moment when the doctor grabbed my broken limb by the hand and pulled as hard as he could to set it back into shape. Since the plaster was applied though, the arm became strange to me from the elbow downwards, secure in its case yet an unremitting source of discomfort too.
In response to this affliction, I have been sleeping away the hours. Each day, I have left the house to do my essential tasks before retreating again to my bedroom as soon as possible. My bed acquired a second counterpane of papers, where my cat nestled among the litter as I lay there putting my stories together.
Over the past weeks, I have learnt to do my buttons and light fires with my left hand, though cutting my nails and changing light bulbs still eludes me. Anyone who has received an envelope addressed by me will, perhaps, have thought twice about the deranged spidery left-handed handwriting.
I’d like to thank my loyal readers for their patience over the last month, while I have been unable to run around and undertake interviews and take photographs in my usual fashion. This situation will be remedied in coming weeks as use of my right arm returns to normal.
I am looking forward to the spring.
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Joe Lawrence, Traditional Butcher & Writer
Joe Lawrence
There is a legend that Dick Turpin started out as a Butcher’s apprentice in Whitechapel before graduating to the role of Highwayman. Yet only now that I have read Joe Lawrence’s fictionalised memoir The East End Butcher’s Boy can I fully appreciate how one activity could be the natural outcome of such an employment.
In 1972, at fourteen years old, Joe fell into a Saturday job at a Butcher’s shop in East Ham and found himself unwittingly swept up into a criminal underworld only to emerge on the other side at nineteen – fully qualified in butchery and a street-savvy survivor. Joe quickly became complicit as his boss used the premises for trading in all kinds of stolen goods with accumulating success and escalating risk.
Returning to these seminal experiences in the light of maturity, Joe has crafted a compelling account which reads like a thriller and allows us to identify with the innocence of the narrator while also fearing for the consequences as he gets in too deep. The work is an impressive debut, possessing an unmistakeable authenticity and, in its human sympathy and complex moral scheme, recalling the work of Bill Naughton, a favourite writer of mine.
Part of the fascination of the book is how Joe describes an entire illicit subculture with its elaborate codes and relative sense of justice yet, at the end, you realise it has been an unexpected love story – a rite of passage, delivering the protagonist into adulthood and a complex relationship with the society he inhabits.
Contributing Photographer Alex Pink accompanied Joe on his daily trip to Smithfield Market before dawn recently and, later in the morning, I met with them both at The George on the Isle of Dogs where we enjoyed pints and plates of delicious bangers and mash, supplied by Joe. “I’ve always loved getting up early,” he admitted to me fondly, “I’m up at three-thirty, out of the house by four and at Smithfield Market by four-thirty.”
After his volatile start in butchery, Joe forsook the beloved trade for twenty years, working for the Post Office and then running his own courier business from Bermondsey. “In 2010, I realised I’d had enough,” Joe confessed, “I thought, ‘What was it I enjoyed more than anything else in the world?'”
Joe also wrote ‘The East End Butcher’s Boy’ in six months in 2010 and, encouraged by a positive response from a literary agent, set out to get it published. “I have written another book and I am halfway through a third,” he revealed to me enthusiastically. Thus, Joe has reconciled himself to his past through writing and returned to what he always wanted to do.
“I know there is still a market for a traditional English butcher,” he informed me authoritatively, “so people send me their orders and I go down to Smithfield and get it for them, all packaged exactly as they want.” Now Joe is his own man, doing what he loves best, making his daily runs that end up at The George and working on his writing too.
Joe runs a meat raffle on the last Friday of every month at The George
Photographs copyright © Alex Pink
You can obtain a signed copy of THE EAST END BUTCHER BOY from Joe Lawrence for £5 by dropping him an email at eastendbutcher@gmail.com Joe is also happy to make personal deliveries of meat and poultry at keen prices to any readers in the East End direct from Smithfield Market.
You may like to read my other stories of butchery
Joan Brown, Secretary at Smithfield Market
David Hoffman At St Botolph’s In Colour
Contributing Photographer David Hoffman sent me this dramatic set of photographs that he took at the ‘wet shelter’ for homeless people – where alcohol and drugs were permitted – in the crypt of St Botolph’s Church, Aldgate, in the seventies. Readers may recall David’s series of black and white pictures of St Botolph’s shelter that I published over a year ago, recording Rev Malcolm Johnson’s compassionate initiative offering refuge to the dispossessed without distinction.
These colour photographs make a fascinating contrast to the monochrome realism of David’s earlier series, offering a distinctive vision of the same subject that is both more emotive and visceral, yet also more painterly and even lyrical.
“These were shots undertaken as tests as much as documenting the wet crypt. The light was a mix of coloured fluorescent tubes and tungsten bulbs, and the types of film available that were sensitive enough to use in this relatively-dark environment also varied a lot in their sensitivity to different-coloured lighting – all of which made for unpredictable results as I moved around, and the push-processing required gave a lot of grain which cut down the sharpness I could achieve.
In those days, I was keen to show off my technical skills and didn’t really like the effect – so I quickly gave up using colour and returned to black and white. But, looking back at these pictures now, I wonder what I was thinking. I find the colour shifts and graininess quite gorgeous and I regret not taking the idea further.”
– David Hoffman
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
You may like to take a look at these other stories about St Botolph’s
Rev Malcolm Johnson at St Botolph’s
and explore these other sets of pictures by David Hoffman
David Hoffman at Fieldgate Mansions
David Hoffman at Crisis At Christmas
Under St Leonard’s, Shoreditch
This is an account of my exploration of the crypt of St Leonard’s Shoreditch and you can visit yourself this Saturday at noon. Just email Robin Hatton-Gore to book your free ticket rt_hattongore@yahoo.co.uk
I have always wondered if there is anything left in the neighbourhood from Shakespeare’s time, when his plays were performed here at “The Theatre” and “The Curtain Theatre” in Curtain Rd. The Norman church of St Leonard’s Shoreditch that he knew was demolished in the early eighteenth century but I heard a story that a door from the church had been preserved, a door that Shakespeare could have walked through.
When I spoke to the Reverend Paul Turp, he confirmed that the new church had reused much of the material from the earlier building and that the paving of the portico included twelfth century stone. In fact, he believes the current building was constructed using the floor of the Norman church as its foundation, and the tombs of the Shakespearian actors are buried down below, just waiting to be rediscovered. My enquiry became the premise for an exploration, and when I met the beguiling Rev Turp on the steps of the church, he handed over a flashlight, a single gesture that filled me immense anticipation.
Standing there on the porch in the afternoon sunlight, the Rev Turp began by conjuring a picture of the moment the Roman army arrived on the other side of the road to secure a source of fresh water. This was the wellspring of the River Wallbrook at the junction of Shoreditch High St and Old St. From a camp here at the crossroads, the Roman army controlled England and Wales. The road West led to Bath, the road North led to York, the road East to Colchester and the road South to Chichester. When I heard this I realised that Old St truly is an old street.
The Anglo-Saxon word “suer,” meaning stream, gave the neighbourhood its name “Shoreditch,” and it was this stream that undermined the old church, leading to its demolition. Even after the building of George Dance the Elder’s church in 1740, there were problems with flooding and the ground level was built up to counter this. Only the top three steps out of the ten at the front of the church are visible now, the rest are underground. Similarly, the lower crypt was filled to stabilise the structure, which is very frustrating for the Rev Turp because he believes that the floor of the lower crypt is the floor of the Norman church, where the tombs of the Shakespearian actors are. This is the floor that William Shakespeare walked upon, whenever he came for services, weddings of his fellow actors, or when his brother Edmund‘s son was buried here in 1607.
As I stood in the depths of the crypt with the Rev Turp, beneath a dusty brick vault, peering down to the mysterious lower vault that has been filled in, the physical space came to manifest the distance between us and Shakespeare’s world. The Rev Turp wants to excavate through the layers of rubble and human remains to reach it. “If I can find a stone with the name Burbage on it then I shall be satisfied,” he confessed, referring to the joiner James Burbage who built the first theatre in Shoreditch and his son Richard who was the first actor to play Romeo, Hamlet and Richard III.
We were standing in the underworld of the imagination, it was packed with the dead, though just a fraction of the more than seventy-six thousand buried at this site. We peered deep into small family vaults on each side, where piles of coffins had collapsed upon each other, broken open over time, creating a mishmash of bones. Many coffins were discovered to have been filled with bricks, indicating the undertakers had sold off the bodies before burial – though fortunately the families of the dead were none the wiser. We gazed through a large central vault where, beneath a surface that resembled dunes, countless layers of coffins were stacked up yet broken in upon each other to create a morass of unknown depth. Under the porch, on a level with corners of lead coffins sticking out from the surface, we were literally walking upon the dead. The Rev Turp told me tests were done to check whether the remains of those that died of smallpox still presented any risk of infection today, and I was reassured to learn that although the virus was present, it was inert.
In the crypt, I was confronted with the great number of dead that exist between us and Shakespeare’s world, when I had just wanted to walk through a door and be there. So I asked the Rev Turp about the surviving door from the earlier church and, leading me back from the depths, he took me to the Clerk’s House facing Shoreditch High St, which has the door in question built into it. Maybe it was the experience of the crypt, but as I walked through the churchyard, wiping the sinister dust off my hands and relieved to be out in the air, I thought of lines from Romeo & Juliet (first performed at The Curtain Theatre). Mortally injured, Mercutio says of his wound, “tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.”
Once I saw the old door, I was disappointed at first, though I tried to hide it from the Rev Turp. The door was tall and narrow, with panels that appeared eighteenth or nineteenth century in style, not the wide medieval church door I had envisaged. The Rev Turp explained it was from a side entrance, but I began to wonder. Not only were there two layers of railings between me and the door – which was locked – but even if I was able to walk through it, could I accept that this door that was around in Shakespeare’s time? Then something unexpected happened, by chance the resident of the Clerk’s House arrived home at that moment and, without thinking twice, I leant through the railings to ask if I could see the reverse of the door. He said “Yes. Come in.” So, leaving the Rev Turp standing, I ran out of the churchyard gate and into the gate of the Clerk’s House – and through the door.
At once, I could see from the back of the door that it was ancient, with primitive iron hinges, and acceptably medieval in its robust contruction. Then my host showed me old panelling, also incorporated into the building, at the top of the stairs, of proportion and construction that was of the renaissance or earlier. Now I was persuaded of the history of the door and, as I stood to take my picture, looking out from behind the portal to Shakespeare’s London, a black cat ran down the stairs and out of the door, turning to look back at me, as if in confirmation of my good luck at this discovery.
The Clerk’s House
The enigmatic doorway
Beneath Shoreditch Church
Stacks of coffins collapsed upon each other and broken open
Tudor stocks and whipping post in the entrance to Shoreditch Church. “Every church should have one!”says the Rev Turp
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Up the Tower with Reverend Turp
Shakespearian Actors in Shoreditch
So Long, Blustons Of Kentish Town
This week, Michael Albert announced the imminent closure of Blustons – so I publish my story today as a tribute and to give my readers the opportunity to make one final visit to purchase a frock as a souvenir of this legend in ladieswear.
If you are considering a new gown for spring, then this might be your last chance to take a hop, skip and a jump over to Blustons in Kentish Town, and find Michael Albert waiting eagerly to welcome you to the family business founded by his grandparents Samuel & Jane Bluston. Pictured above in the changing room at the rear of his immaculately preserved eau-de-nil store – standing between portraits of the progenitors of this legend in ladies’ clothing – Michael was the proud custodian of the shrine to the Blustons, whose romance blossomed over sewing machines in an East End clothing factory a century ago.
Outside, upon the art deco facade, the heroic name of Blustons was proclaimed to the world in three-dimensional block capitals, flanked by the words “coats” and “gowns,” paying court like flunkeys. A marble checkboarded entrance led you between gleaming windows filled with a magnificent array of clothing, some on mannequins and some suspended upon lines as if floating like kites on the breeze. You seized the chrome handle and pulled, and you were transported into a Shangri-La of green paint and old lino, where the dress styles had remained eternally unchanged. In the fickle and capricious world of fashion, this was the strange magic of Blustons.
Michael Albert and his colleague Barbara Smith ran the shop with the effortless aplomb of a vaudeville conjurer and his assistant. You selected your desired gown, Barbara lifted it from the rails with a flourish, swept aside the curtain of the cubicle with practised ease, and invited you to step inside. Yet, even though I was a perverse customer who had come not to seek a gown but to discover the story of Blustons, Michael was gracious enough to indulge my fancy.
“My grandparents started the store in the nineteen twenties, they had four shops including one on Oxford St and they had four daughters – Minnie, Sophie, Anne and Esther – who were each given a shop to look after, but two weren’t interested, so my mother and her sister had to run them all.
My grandparents were originally sent here from Russia by their parents towards the end of the nineteenth century to get away from the White Russians – Jewish people were restricted in what they could do, banking and commerce were closed to them, so really the only trade open to them was tailoring or being seamstresses. They came to live with relatives in the East End and ended up working on sewing machines in the same workshop, one behind the other – that’s how they met – and they got talking. They discovered they shared an uncle, and because they were closely related, they had to get a special dispensation to get married.
My mother, Minnie, had this shop when she got married and my aunt Sophie ran the shop in Dalston, where they started. My grandfather had a workshop over the shop there and he specialised in tailoring suits for ladies. When I was sixteen, my father had a heart attack and I came here to help my mother while my father was in hospital. I never intended to go into the shop, yet when my father eventually came back, I stayed on and I have been here ever since. It gives me great satisfaction, going out buying goods, displaying them and selling them. I do the entire window display every season, perhaps four times a year. I don’t do it quite as often as I did, I’m getting lazy.
It hasn’t really changed the whole time I have been here. When I started, we sold a lot of bridal gowns and mourning wear. Nowadays we do a lot of separates, blouses and skirts, and twenty years ago we didn’t sell any trousers, whereas now we sell more trousers than skirts. Over time, the age group of our customers has gone up and up. On average, our customers are eighty to one hundred years old. We have people who buy clothes here for for their mothers who are 104 and 105, in two cases. A lot of our older customers moved out to live in new towns such as Basildon and Basingstoke, but they come in when they visit relatives nearby. One woman came from Australia to see us.
We are open five and a half days a week, we close on Thursday and I go down the East End in the afternoon to do a bit of buying. Most of our clothes are made there by suppliers we have always worked with, I try to buy British made where possible. We do get youngsters in for fifties and sixties styles now, they like our shirt-waisted dresses. We sell classic ladies wear.”
And then, to illustrate the cyclical nature of fashion, Michael produced the current edition of Vogue, leafing through with pride to reveal a photo of a model standing in the entrance of Blustons in a Dior suit, not so different from those on sale. Both he and Barbara exchanged knowing smiles, glowing with pleasure at such an authoritative confirmation of their shared belief that the clothing they sell transcended mere trend. And as I knew my story would not be complete without a word from Barbara, I took this opportunity to ask how she came to be there.
“First of all, I came as a cleaner for Albert’s mother, Minnie, when my youngest daughter was ten months old and, once she went to primary school, Minnie asked me to work in the shop – and that was forty-two years ago. She was a darling, a lovely lady. She made such a fuss of my little girl. I used to bring her in a carrying cot and Minnie would keep her quiet while I did the cleaning. It’s always been like a family here, a close-knit family business. At seventy-four, I should be retired but I don’t want to and so I am still here. My husband is retired and he does the house work.”
Something becomes classic when it cannot be improved upon and this was the nature of Blustons’ dress shop. Even though most of the customers were octogenarians and their seniors, the renewed appeal of this clothing for the younger generation brought a whole new clientele. So, as there was no reason to suppose that this cycle should not repeat in perpetuity, I hoped Blustons would go on forever.
Yet age creeps upon us all and the time has now come for Michael Albert to retire. A story that began over a century ago in the East End concludes here. I am sure we all wish Michael well in his retirement but, in my mind, I shall always think of his shop as the eternal Blustons of Kentish Town.
Barbara Smith & Michael Albert welcome you to Blustons.
Barbara Smith with one of Blustons’ classic dresses.
Michael Albert – “On average, our customers are eighty to one hundred years old.”
Blustons, 213 Kentish Town Road, London, NW5 2JU. 020 7485 3508
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Night On Brick Lane
Contributing Photographer Phil Maxwell sent these recent photographs of Brick Lane at night which inspired me to make a short nocturnal progress from Whitechapel High St to the Bethnal Green Rd by way of this most-celebrated East End thoroughfare and write you an account.
Even on Tuesday evening, I discovered a hubbub of activity down in Whitechapel High St when I reached the tail end of Brick Lane, more properly known as Osborn St at its southern extremity.
This was where I first arrived in 1976, coming round the corner from Aldgate East Station and walking up Brick Lane in search of the London I knew from Daniel Defoe’s ‘Journal of a Plague Year.’ It was Defoe who first recorded the paving-over of Brick Lane three centuries earlier but I do not recall what I expected to find that day. Once I reached the Truman Brewery, there were so many trucks loading and unloading in the street I felt as if I had entered the precincts of the brewery itself and overwhelmed by the intensity of activity in this unfamiliar zone, I ventured no further.
I cannot count the number of times I have walked up Brick Lane since then and now I can travel the journey in my mind almost as clearly as on foot. Yet it is a street that is constantly changing, even if daily familiarity can render these changes imperceptible.
I wonder if Brick Lane was originally the path to and from the White Chapel, which formerly stood where the park is now just across the road from the foot of Osborn St? There is curious line of canteen-like curry houses catering to the corporate City customers in Osborn St before you reach my favourite travel agent which still advertises tickets for Concord, facing the mysteriously-large electricity substation opposite. Until recently in Osborn St, there was also Elfe’s, the monumental masons, serving as a discreet memento mori to those enjoying their dinners on the other side of the road.
Brick Lane proper begins at the junction with Wentworth St where, across the crossroads, The Archers faces the Brooke Bond Tea factory at One Brick Lane which is now an unlabelled outpost of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. At this point, the mix is established of curry houses, money changers, grocers, gaudy sweet shops, interspersed with newly-arrived estate agents, all casting a multicoloured glow onto the pavement and turning the passers-by to silhouettes against their vivid illuminations.
Just before the junction with Fashion St, Leo Epstein presides over Epra Fabrics, the last Jewish business in this part of Brick Lane. Only he had gone home long ago when I passed last night, even if the lights were still burning within. Here you find a cluster of new arrivals from across the globe, a Japanese barber, an Argentinian grill and a French bistro to add to the cultural mix in the shadow of the minaret.
Walking on, I entered the busiest section of Brick Lane, where I was personally offered seven meals accompanied by free rounds of drinks before I reached the Truman Brewery. Yet if had acquiesced to all these deals, I never should have made it beyond Hanbury St.
The meeting of Hanbury St and Brick Lane is surely the epicentre of the world. In the neon glow, you encounter discount vintage hawkers and curry touts full-on, while becoming an unwitting participant in Street Art tours and occasionally stumbling over the street artists at work in the dark – all while doing your best to avoid the speedy drivers showing off and the cyclists weaving through the crowd.
After Woodseer St, the atmosphere changed. On a week night, the madding crowds packing in to Dray Walk were absent. There was no police van or portable pissoir. Instead, pedestrians walked quietly beneath the walls of the great brewery overhead, dark now the Vibe bar no longer overflowed the courtyard with inebriated revellers. Fifty yards up, the familiar sight of the writers group, meeting after-hours at the Brick Lane Bookshop, indicated a more sedate mid-week atmosphere.
Beyond here the buildings give way to the railway bridges above and below. At weekends, this becomes a seething torrent of humanity crowded between the food stalls but on a quiet Tuesday night, lonely walkers hurried through.
This last section of Brick Lane is devoted to leather, vintage clothing and coffee shops but, once these close for the day, the bars take over – picking up a lively passing trade. And the twenty-four hour Beigel Bakery is the final landmark, before you reach the end of the known world at the Bethnal Green Rd.
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
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Publication Day for Phil Maxwell’s ‘Brick Lane’
Robert Wells, The Boy on The Bicycle
Click here to buy a copy of Phil Maxwell’s Brick Lane for £10
Stories Of Norton Folgate, Old & New
For those readers who were unable to visit Dennis Severs House in Folgate St to view the exhibition I curated for the Spitalfields Trust, I am publishing these panels from the display with my text telling the stories of old Norton Folgate, outlining British Land’s development proposals and setting forward the Trust’s alternative vision for the future.
Click on each panel to enlarge
Click on each panel to enlarge
Click on each panel to enlarge
Click on each panel to enlarge
Click on each panel to enlarge
Click on each panel to enlarge
Click on each panel to enlarge
Click on each panel to enlarge
Click on each panel to enlarge
Click here for a simple guide to HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY prepared by The Spitalfields Trust
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
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Dan Cruickshank in Norton Folgate
Taking Liberties in Norton Folgate
