Spitalfields Life

Today – after more than two thousand posts published in these pages – we come to the end of the sixth year of Spitalfields Life. Perhaps the most unexpected moment of the last twelve months came one Sunday when I discovered myself sprinting down Folgate St exhorting people to spread out and hold hands. It was not random evangelism, but my hare-brained plan to invite people to join hands around Norton Folgate as a symbol of the widely-held desire to see the old buildings reused rather than demolished.

Two days later, Tower Hamlets Council rejected the application for redevelopment and now the Spitalfields Trust is devising an alternative scheme for Norton Folgate in collaboration with local businesses which, by seeking the minimum architectural intervention, can match the viability of the expensive and destructive British Land proposal.

The past year has also seen the publication of Spitalfields Nippers by Horace Warner and London Life by Colin O’Brien. Each of these books is a remarkable testimony of the culture of London by a distinguished photographer. Both have been critically acclaimed and proved to be very popular with the widest audience – yet neither of these would have seen the light of day, if not for the generous support of you – the readers of Spitalfields Life – who funded their publication.

It never ceases to astonish me to recognise what has come from the simple act of publishing a story every day. Six years ago, I never expected to produce books or get involved in campaigns to save old buildings in the East End, but I am hugely proud of our endeavours in both departments.

In spite of all this excitement, my essential task of undertaking interviews and writing stories remains at the core of my work. I love going out with the Contributing Photographers on assignments and we are never disappointed by the everyday wonders we encounter here in the East End.

Above all, I value the experience of meeting the people whose lives I have recorded in these pages. Listening to their stories is an ongoing education for me, offering inspiration and restoring a sense of proportion too.

On contemplation, I wonder if perhaps the act of retelling these stories for a wider audience is akin to running down the street and asking strangers to join hands? I consider myself privileged to do what I do because undertaking these interviews is such a source of joy to me – and it is this constantly-renewing sense of delight which keeps me going.

And thus, with all these thoughts in mind, I come to the end of this sixth year of Spitalfields Life.

I am your loyal servant

The Gentle Author

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For the next week, while I am completing my book about THE CRIES OF LONDON, I shall be publishing favourite posts from the past year and then resuming with new stories on Monday 31st August

You may like to read my earlier Annual Reports

First Annual Report 2010

Second Annual Report 2011

Third Annual Report 2012

Fourth Annual Report 2013

Fifth Annual Report 2014

After I featured Mia Sabel the Saddler in Walthamstow last spring, Anthony Batchelor got in touch and invited me to visit his family business of A E Batchelor Ltd, Saddlers, established in Epping in 1919

Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I took the train down to Epping to meet Anthony Batchelor and his dad John who work together as the third and fourth generation in their family saddlery business. Anthony picked us up from the station and drove us through the town, past the former shoe shop and saddlery established by his great-grandfather in an old weatherboarded house in 1919.

Since 2005, high street premises have no been longer required by A E Batchelor Ltd. Anthony drove us through the winding lanes until we turned into the yard behind an imposing Georgian farmhouse, where he and his father operate today from a comfortable and quiet workshop in a converted barn. Such is their reputation that, even without a website, Anthony and his father find they have as much work as they can handle simply by word of mouth.

While John stays in the workshop at his bench, Anthony sets out on the road driving seven hundred miles a day to visit customers across East Anglia, from the daughters of wealthy businessmen in Southend up to old hunting families in Norfolk. I was assured that, given their different preferences in music and choice of radio channels, such a division of responsibility suits father and son very well.

“In 1919, my great-grandfather Alfred Edward Batchelor returned from the West Indies where he had a sugar plantation,” Anthony explained to me,”he worked for Freeman Hardy Willis in Croydon and then he bought a shoe shop in Epping.” In the thirties, the family purchased the saddlery next door and ran both shops until 2005.“He always called himself the reluctant saddler,” admitted Anthony, referring to his grandfather Alfred Robert,“so he went and worked at Blisses.”

Bliss & Co of Sun St, behind Liverpool St Station, were the last of the many saddlers that once existed in the vicinity of Bishopsgate, originally serving the needs of travellers in the days before the coming of the railway. Thus Alfred Robert and then his son Alfred John both trained at Blisses, which – astonishingly – only closed in the eighties and today its handsome red brick building, custom-built as a saddlers, still stands in Sun St unfortunately awaiting imminent demolition.

“We still use my grandfather’s tools,” Anthony revealed, lifting and brandishing up a half-moon shaped knife which his father had just employed,“he ‘liberated’ this knife from an abandoned saddlery when he went into occupied France at the end of World War II.”

Neither father nor son have any regrets about abandoning the retail side of the business in Epping.“When we had the shop we were there all hours, it was a hard life,” confided John,“now I can take a day off whenever I please.” I watched John as he stitched a simple dog lead with painstaking care. “The work we do is rustic in style,” he informed me modestly, almost apologetically, confessing that his primary concern was to create items which serve their purpose at a reasonable price. Yet, to my eyes, John’s expert stitching and years of experience conspired to produce a distinctive object of subtle beauty in which the form fitted the function perfectly.

The shoe shop in Epping High St opened by Alfred Edward Bachelor in 1919 with the saddlers next door

Alfred John Batchelor

In the saddlery in Epping in the sixties

Alfred John Batchelor with his father Alfred Robert

John at his work bench

Sewing a dog lead with the traditional saddlers’ double stitch

Bob Cuthbert repairing harnesses at A E Batchelor in the sixties

The knife ‘liberated’ by Alfred Robert Batchelor in World War II and still in use

Anthony shows the card templates used to ensure saddles fit the horse’s back

A Sciver – a machine for splitting leather straps

Catalogue for Bliss of Sun St, beside Liverpool St Station

Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven

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Mia Sabel, Saddler

Tom Burch, Farrier

At Wood St Stables

At least once each Summer, I direct my steps eastwards from Spitalfields along the Mile End Rd towards Bow Cemetery, one of the “Magnificent Seven” created by act of Parliament in 1832 as the growing population of London overcrowded the small parish churchyards. Extending to twenty-seven acres and planned on an industrial scale, “The City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery” as it was formally called, opened in 1841 and within the first half century alone around a quarter of a million were buried here.

Although it is the tombstones and monuments that present a striking display today, most of the occupants of this cemetery were residents of the East End whose families could not afford a funeral or a plot. They were buried in mass public graves containing as many as forty bodies of random souls interred together for eternity. By the end of the nineteenth century the site was already overgrown, though burials continued until it was closed in 1966.

Where death once held dominion, nature has reclaimed the territory and a magnificent broadleaf forest has grown, bringing luxuriant growth that is alive with wildlife. Now the tombstones and monuments stand among leaf mould in deep woods, garlanded with ivy and surrounded by wildflowers. Tombstones and undergrowth make one of the most lyrical contrasts I can think of – there is a beautiful aesthetic manifest in the grim austerity of the stones ameliorated by vigorous plant life. But more than this, to see the symbols of death physically overwhelmed by extravagant new growth touches the human spirit. It is both humbling and uplifting at the same time. It is the triumph of life. Nature has returned and brought more than sixteen species of butterflies with her.

This is the emotive spectacle that leads me here, turning right at Mile End tube station and hurrying down Southern Grove, increasing my pace with rising expectation, until I walk through the cemetery gates and I am transported into the green world that awaits. At once, I turn right into Sanctuary Wood, stepping off the track to walk into a tall stand of ivy-clad sycamores, upon a carpet of leaves that is shaded by the forest canopy more than twenty metres overhead and illuminated by narrow shafts of sunlight descending. It is sublime. Come here to see the bluebells in Spring or the foxgloves in Summer. Come at any time of the year to find yourself in another landscape. Just like the forest in Richard Jefferies’ novel “After London,” the trees have regrown to remind us what this land was once like, long ago before our predecessors ever came here.

Over time, the tombstones have weathered and worn, and some have turned green, entirely harmonious with their overgrown environment, as if they sprouted and grew like toadstools. The natural stillness of the forest possesses greater resonance between cemetery walls and the deep green shadows of the woodland seem deeper too. There was almost no-one alive to be seen on the morning of my visit, apart from two police officers on horseback passing through, keeping the peace that is as deep as the grave.

Just as time mediates grief and grants us perspective, nature also encompasses the dead, enfolding them all, as it has done here in a green forest. These are the people who made East London, who laid the roads, built the houses and created the foundations of the city we inhabit. The countless thousands who were here before us, walking the streets we know, attending the same schools, even living in some of the same houses we live in today. The majority of those people are here now in Bow Cemetery. As you walk around, names catch your eye, Cornelius aged just two years, or Eliza or Louise or Emma, or Caleb who enjoyed a happy life, all over a hundred years ago. None ever dreamed a forest would grow over their head, where people would come to walk one day to discover their stones in a woodland glade. It is a vision of paradise above, fulfilled within the confines of the cemetery itself.

As I made my progress through the forest of tombstones, I heard a mysterious noise, a click-clack echoing through the trees. Then I came upon a clearing at the very heart of the cemetery and discovered the origin of the sound. It was a solitary juggler practicing his art among the graves, in a patch of sunlight. There is no purpose to juggling than that of delight, the attunement of human reflexes to create a joyful effect. It was a startling image to discover, and seeing it here in the deep woods – where so many fellow Londoners are buried – made my heart leap. Outside on the streets, a million people were going about their business while in the vast wooded cemetery there was just me, the numberless dead and the juggler.

Find out more at Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park

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At St Pancras Old Churchyard

David standing outside 103 Commercial St in the mid-sixties

David Prescott was not at all surprised to see the empty space behind the Fruit & Wool Exchange when he returned to Spitalfields last week, because he used to play football in the empty parking lot there in the sixties before the construction of the multi-story car park which has just been demolished. Growing up in the large flat above the market at 103 Commercial St, with school and the family business nearby, David had run of the neighbourhood and he found it offered an ideal playground.

One day in the sixties, David leaned out of the window and made his mark by spraying painting onto a flower in the terracotta frieze upon the front of the nineteenth century market building. Astonishingly, the white-painted flower is still clearly discernible in Commercial St half a century later, indicating the centre of David’s childhood world.

No wonder then that David chose to keep returning to his home territory, working in the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market until it closed in 1991. These days, he is amazed at the changes since he lived and worked here but – as long as the white-painted flower remains on Commercial St – for David, Spitalfields remains the location of his personal childhood landscape.

“Albert, my grandfather, ran fruit & vegetable shops down in Belvedere, and he used to come up to Spitalfields Market with his horse and cart to buy produce. So my father ‘Bert and his brother Reg decided to start a business in a little warehouse in Tenterground. Upstairs, there were prostitutes and men in bowler hats would come over from the City and look around, circumspect, before going upstairs.

They traded as R A Prescott, which was the initials of the two brothers, Reginald & Albert, but also my grandfather’s initials – which meant they could say they had been going over a hundred years already. They started in Spitalfields in 1952 but, when I was born in 1954, my father took the flat over the market at 103 Commercial St opposite the Ten Bells. Mickey Davis, who ran the shelter at the Fruit & Wool Exchange during the war lived in the flat below, but he had died in 1953 so we just knew his wife and two daughters.

I went to St Joseph’s School in Gun St and I loved it because all my friends lived nearby, in Gun St and Flower & Dean St, and I went to the youth club at Toynbee Hall. I used to walk through the market and everyone knew me – and since my sister, Sylvia, was six years older, they always teased – asking, ‘Where’s your sister?’

We never locked the doors except when we went to bed at night. One day, we came home and found a woman asleep in the living room and my dad sent her on her way. I used to climb up out from our flat and take my dog for a walk across the roof of the market, until the market police shouted at me and put up barbed wire to stop me doing it. Our mums and dads didn’t know what we were up to half the time. We made castles inside the stacks of empty wooden boxes that had been returned to the market.

I remember there was was a guy with a large bump on his head who used to shout and chase us. It would start on Brick Lane and end up in Whitechapel. There was another guy with a tap on his head and one who was shell-shocked. These poor guys, it was only later we realised that they had mental problems.We threw tomatoes, and we put potatoes on wires and spun them fast to let them fly.

In 1966, me and my pal Alan Crockett were  in ‘The London Nobody Knows.’ They said, ‘Do you want to be in a film? We want you to run down the street and pile into a fight.’

My dad died of lung cancer when I was fifteen in 1969, but my mum was able to stay on in the flat. He got ill in April and died in August in St Joseph’s Hospice in Mare St. I left school and went to work with my uncle. By then, Prescotts had moved over to 38 Spital Sq. They weren’t part of the market, they supplied catering companies with peeled potatoes and they bought a machine to shell peas and were the first to offer them already podded. I worked with my elder brother Michael too, he set up on his own at 57 Brushfield St, but then he moved to Barnhurst in Kent and bought a three bedroom house. I became a van boy at Telfers, I used to leave home at half past two in the morning to get to Greenwich where they had a yard, by three to start work.

In 1972, we left the flat in Spitalfields and moved to a house in Kingston, and I worked for Hawker Siddley – they trained me as an engineer. But I missed the market so much, I had to come back. I got a job with Chiswick Fruits in the Fruit & Wool Exchange and then I went back to Prescotts. I was working at the Spitalfields Market in 1991 when they moved out to Leyton, but it was’t the same there and, by 2000, I’d had enough of the market. In those days, you could walk out of one job and straight into another. I must have had thirty to forty jobs.“

R A Prescott of 38 Spital Sq

David as a baby at 103 Commercial St in 1955

David at five years old at his brother Michael’s wedding in Poplar in 1959

David with his mum, Kathleen, playing with the dog in the yard at the back of the market flat

David’s sister Sylvia, who went to St Victoire’s Grammar School in Victoria Park

David is centre right in the front row at St Joseph’s School, Gun St

In 1966, David and his pal Alan Crockett were in ‘The London Nobody Knows.’ This shot shows Alan (leading) and David (behind) running down Lolesworth St.

Christmas at 103 Commercial St in 1967

David’s mother Kathleen and his father ‘Bert on holiday in 1968

David stands on the far right at his sister Sylvia’s wedding at St Anne’s, Underwood Rd, in 1964

David leaned out of his window and sprayed paint onto this flower in 1964

Looking south across the Spitalfields Market

Spitalfields Market empty at the weekend

Spital Sq after the demolition of Central Foundation School

The Flower Market at Spitalfields Market

From the roof of Spitlafields Flower Market looking towards Folgate St

Clearing out on the last day of the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market in 1991

David stands in the Spitalfields Market today beneath the window that was once his childhood bedroom

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