Christmas At The Salvation Army
Photographer David Hoffman took these pictures at the Salvation Army Christmas Day lunch in Globe Rd in 1975
“On Christmas Day 1975, I was squatting in Fieldgate Mansions in Whitechapel and it was a bit boring because all my friends were away for the holiday. The shops were shut and I was looking for something interesting to do with the day. I had seen that the Salvation Army were holding an open Christmas lunch at Sigsworth Hall in Globe Rd so I rocked up there with my camera and, without any formality, I just started to take photographs.
It was terribly dark. I had no flash and I had to work hard in the darkroom to coax these images from the horribly under-exposed and heavily over-developed film. The prints I made at the time were flat and grey but, now that I have been able to convert them to digital files, they do look a bit better and remind me of a very different era, now lost without trace.” – David Hoffman
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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David Hoffman at Fieldgate Mansions
Christmas With Dennis Severs
I often wonder if those who visit the Christmas installation at Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St in spellbound silence today have any idea of what it was like when the creator was alive.
The late Rodney Archer was a close friend of Dennis and, in this extract from Volume One of his Diary This Strange Re-collection of People (1980-88), Rodney spills the beans. Illustrated with archive photographs.
Christmas was for me the best time of the year to visit Dennis Severs in his house, which he shared with Mr & Mrs Jervis and their children in the Liberty of Norton Folgate. The hall was festooned with garlands of holly and ivy and mistletoe. No tinsel marred the scene! The smell of Christmas spices assaulted your nostrils as you entered the front door. Oranges stuck with cloves abounded and the warm hospitality of the Jervises’ was almost palpable.
Young boys in velvet waistcoats and knee britches and enchanting young girls in Kate Greenaway muslin dresses would greet you as you entered, offering rum punch circa 1730. Steven, who was eventually to run a restaurant from the ground floor of his house in Church St, had found the recipe in an old eighteenth century cookbook and Dennis was delighted. These children bearing punch were the sons and daughters of neighbours, friends and guests. If you were among the favoured, invited to one of Dennis’ private parties, you had to be prepared to join in and not rock the boat. Everything and everyone was highly organised.
As midnight struck, we were all hurried out of the drawing room and upstairs in the dark to the attic. This was the room in which the sitting tenant, who died within minutes of Dennis signing the contract to secure the house, lived and so promptly perished. It was also the room in which Dorian, the most beautiful of Dennis’ footmen, had his lodging. Towards the end of his brief life, when he was dying of AIDS, Dorian was forced to step into the cupboard when the tours came round to see the room inhabited – in the fiction of it – by Tiny Tim and his father, Bob Cratchet. I am not sure how the Jervises were connected to the Cratchets but what with the arrival of the Spinning Jenny in the early nineteenth century, hard times overtook the silk weavers of Spitalfields and perhaps Mrs Jervis had to take in a lodger? Eventually, Dorian was to move to Church St, two doors away from where I lived with my mother.
“Shhh, don’t talk any of you, shhh… Steven, Arlecchino, Quiet!” Dennis ordered like the matron in charge of a hospital ward. Think Hattie Jacques in ‘Carry on Nurse.’ “Where are Beyond & Ken? Not behind again?!” he asked, wondering if the two performance artists who attended the Hornsey School of Art had lost their way.
Beyond & Ken had lingered too long in the front room on the first floor, called somewhat grandly the ‘piano nobile.’ They were duly fetched and fixed in Dennis’ disapproving eye. All ready and inspected, we followed faithfully and quietly behind as he pushed open the door to his bedroom where we saw the four poster bed covered in red velvet. The bed and canopy had been made from pallets and refuse rescued from the nearby fruit and vegetable market – Dennis was an early recycler.
“Nothing here is real,” he cautioned as Judy (Edgar-in-Elder-St’s first wife) dared to touch a papier mache wig stand. In real life, the bed was Dennis’ own but for the purpose of the pantomime had become… “The bed of Ebenezeer Scrooge, just imagine it,” he said in an almost conspiratorial whisper. Dennis took himself very seriously in these moments and woe betide anyone who did not share his enthusiasm. I wondered why I often felt the need to come out of the illusion he had spent so long in creating. Perhaps, even though I was not a ‘Guardian’ reader, there was something in me that felt too manipulated in these moments? A kind of scepticism mixed with jealousy perhaps? After these many years, now Dennis has departed to join the great Ebenezeer in the sky, I ask his pardon if I did not always share his vision. It was complete but unrelenting and did not allow for one’s own response.
“Imagine,” he continued, “the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future flying overhead.”
Being dyslexic, Dennis had probably never read ‘A Christmas Carol,’ although he would have seen and loved that most famous version with the peerless Alistair Sim as the old miser and, of course, he would have remembered his mother, in the years before she fell ill, reading it to him in the far-removed and warm and sunny clime of California, in the town of Escondido where he had been born.
“You must imagine the snow falling on the rooftops and the frost on the windowpanes of Scrooge’s London house,” she might embroider, delighting her enchanted son, who would one day bring back to the land of its origin the very tale that had been exported so far across the world.
The tape of ‘A Christmas Carol’ would be playing in the background as we all stood, unable to hear it clearly, while Dennis in headmistress mode kept us quiet and I suspect, if we were honest, slightly resentful. Or did the others just feel, “Dear Dennis, he’s so eccentric, how wonderful!” ?
Finally, we were ushered into the drawing room on the ‘piano nobile’ floor where wine glasses and Christmas punch awaited. Dennis proposed a toast to Christmas,
“To Christmas, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Queen and Spitalfields,”
to which we all added,
“And Dennis,”
“And Dennis,”
“And Dennis.”
Lionheart marred the occasion to my mind – I may have stood outside of it a bit but I never deliberately sabotaged the tale – Lionheart laughed and stabbed out with, “The Queen!” stressing Her Majesty in such a way that it was quite clear what queen he had in mind. There was little love lost between Lionheart and Dennis. There always existed between them that false bonhomie that just manages to control the very real dislike underneath.
Later on, I made moves to go. Phyllis, my mother, had already said goodnight amongst much gooing and gahing, cooing and cahing and was waiting for me downstairs. She was always a bit ambivalent about Dennis and the house he shared with the Jervis family. But she responded to his flattering ways and purred appropriately when stroked. Outside, on the way, home her tarter, or perhaps even her Tartar side, would emerge.
“Well, I’m glad that’s over for another year. I can’t bear those garlands made out of nuts. And, as for the Queen,” she added tetchily.
The garlands in question were draped across the panels in Mrs Jervis’ drawing-room and, from a distance, looked remarkably like the Grinling Gibbons’ carvings found in many a stately mansion and English country house. Up close, however, the illusion vanished and you saw that they were an ingenious hodgepodge of walnuts, almonds and brazil nuts sewn together of an evening by Dennis and his friends. Dennis would often have his most trusted fans around for a night in the smoking room. There, clad cap-a-pie in leather, they would celebrate the joys of friendship in a modern version of the eighteenth century Hellfire Club, sharing a pipe of marijuana and a working class lad or two.
“All is illusion and magic, that is the whole point,” he warned, his voice veering into a higher key as his eagle eyebeam struck the further side of the room, where Ian Gladly had been sighted examining a painting of Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy’ too closely. It looked real but how could it be?! Had Dennis raided the Tate Gallery? He was known for his daring.
“Do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold philosophy?” – our host amazed nearly everyone by quoting John Keats. I was not amazed, though I was amused, because I had given Dennis the Keats quotation only a week before when he was complaining about the people who had not “got it” because their reading of ‘The Guardian’ and their critical eye got in the way. Duly chastised, Ian scurried away to refill his empty glass with the Christmas punch circa 1730.
“Dennis, I must go now too. Thank you for a wonderful evening,” I ventured, not realising that I was skating on very thin ice. Dennis replied with suave charm,“Thank you, Rodney, thank you for sticking it out for so long.”
For a moment, I did not feel the pain. I genuinely thought he was thanking me and then I realised that his was as much an attack as Lionheart’s had been. Maybe I had sounded rather grand, rather condescending? – I have that effect occasionally but, on this occasion, I chose my words carefully and was genuinely grateful. Perhaps, and this is more likely, he had picked up on my attitude at a much deeper level? Dennis was not an intellectual in any way. He was very much a creature of instinct, emotion and intuition. And he would sniff out any insincerity on your part and snuff you out immediately like a candle in an eighteenth century wall sconce. When riled he was a veritable tiger. He himself was, however, notoriously insincere. He liked to think of himself as very American and straightforward, but he could smile and be a villain with the best of us. In short, he was a ‘character.’
A group of us had gathered in the hall on the ground floor, fumbling for our coats in the Victorian room which opened off the room in which the Christmas goose sat proudly on its big eighteenth century platter, awaiting consumption.
“The wonderful thing about Denny,” Edgar-in-Elder-St drawled, “is he is a confidence man, a trickster. He sold to the English what was already theirs. It’s better than bottled water – and what a swizz that is – And we fell for it completely. We bought it!”
“Very American, that,” Lionheart added, as he struggled to find Arlecchino’s opera cape which had somehow gone missing.
“Lionheart, where ees my cape, I can’t pass thee market porters dressed as a ‘macaroni’, a kind of Yankee Doodle Dandy! I will be a laughing stocking.”
At this point Arlecchino’s eyes met those of Whitechapel, Dennis’ black and white cat, sitting at the bottom of the stairs and enjoying the festivities. Finally, we found the cape and Arlecchino’s costume was hidden from the amused and even scornful eyes of the market porters, through whom he imagined himself moving so perplexingly.
I had confided to Lionheart earlier that I found the house too much of a museum and a bit too Hollywood for my taste. I can say this without doing Dennis any harm at all because, in all these years, I have only met two other people who felt the same as I did. Dennis prided himself on being the real thing. The ‘real thing’ in terms of taste and decoration was distinguished by him as the ‘Joan Collins School of Decoration’ versus the ‘Queen Mother’s School of Decoration.’ There was even a television programme on the area in which Dennis and William Candy, the architectural-historian-who-wore-a-kilt-and-sported-a-pigtail, were seen wandering around Spitalfields and Brick Lane, past the Jewish Soup Kitchen for the Poor, along the Moorish Arcade in Fashion St, examining different facades and door fronts, lintels and fanlights, approving or disapproving as the Queen Mother dictated.
Our door front had been a thing of beauty and a joy forever, until we had to have it taken away and repaired and, in that process, hundreds of years of paint stripped off – O, God, forgive me – to reveal the original contours sleeping unsuspected beneath and then the door became a bad thing. In vain did I argue that mother and I had very little choice in the matter – the architect insisted – but Dennis would have none of it, and so Phyllis and I had the indignity of hearing Dennis and William Candy, the architectural-historian-who-wore-a-kilt-and-sported-a-pigtail, stop in front of our door and exclaim to the nation in a televised documentary, “This is very much an example of the Joan Collins School of Decoration! We prefer the Queen Mother’s School.” They both shook hands on it and that was that. Our fate was sealed.
My mother and I had been consigned to that uncomfortable circle of Dante’s Inferno shared by homosexuals and failed house restorers. Though he would have been mortally offended to hear it, Dennis’ house had a bit too much of the ‘Metro Goldwyn Mayer School of Decoration’ itself but God protect you if you ever hinted so much. He was not only very sensitive in these matters but also – and the two go together like a horse and eighteenth century carriage – deeply insecure.
I had previously joked with Lionheart about Dennis’ ordering us all about as if we were servants, “Now those of you who are sitting in them, bring the eighteenth century chairs up to the drawing room.”
“Dennis, which ones are they?” I asked.
“O, Rodney, really! The eighteenth century chairs have no arms, thereby enabling Mrs Jervis and her daughter, Sophia, to sit with their farthingales and hoopskirts unimpeded,” he emphasised, somewhat pedantically in his short quick trans-Atlantic accent.
Well, lah-di-bloody-dah, my dears, and God bless you all – Dennis, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Queen and Spitalfields!
Text copyright © Estate of Rodney Archer
Photographs copyright © Dennis Severs House
Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, Norton Folgate, E1 6BX
Rodney Archer’s diary is preserved in the archive at Bishopsgate Institute
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Fritz Wegner’s Christmas Plates
A few years ago, I came across this set of small souvenir Christmas plates Fritz Wegner designed for Fleetwood of Wyoming between 1980 and 1983 in limited editions, which I acquired for almost nothing. They are crudely produced, not unlike those ceramics sold in copy shops with photographic transfers, yet this cheap mass-produced quality endears them to me and I set them out on the dresser every Christmas with fondness.
I discovered my delight in the work of illustrator Fritz Wegner (1924-2015) in primary school through his drawings for Fattypuffs & Thinifers by Andrew Maurois. Throughout my childhood, I cherished his book illustrations whenever I came across them and the love of his charismatically idiosyncratic sketchy line has stayed with me ever since.
Only recently have I learnt that Fritz Wegner was born into a Jewish family in Vienna and severely beaten by a Nazi-supporting teacher for a caricature he drew of Adolf Hitler at the age of thirteen. To escape, his family sent him alone to London in August 1938 where he was offered a scholarship at St Martin’s School of Art at fourteen years old, even though he could barely speak English.
Journey to Bethlehem, 1983
The Shepherds, 1982
The Holy Child, 1981
The Magi, 1980
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Courage, Crime & Charity In The City Of London
Author of the SYMBOLS & SECRETS blog, and alumnus of my writing course, John Gillman introduces his personal pocket-sized City of London guidebook Courage, Crime & Charity in the City of London.
My little book is a guide for curious visitors and Londoners alike who want to explore the City off the beaten track.
Most of the memorials it will lead them to are no more than a ten-minute walk apart, but the people and stories it will introduce them to cover hundreds of years of a diverse and rich history.
My book reveals the stories and tales that lie behind these memorials – of gruesome murders and executions, of great bravery and terrible tragedies, of boundless generosity and intriguing curiosities.
It was in the City of London that I started my first job many years ago. As time went on I got to know the place well and I realised that much of the past had not disappeared at all in this part of London and that it spoke to me in numerous ways. For example, before it became a rank unpleasant sewer that was eventually covered up, the Fleet River was an important thoroughfare delivering coal from the North East to the centre of the City.
I smiled at the evidence of this when I came across a lane which, once upon a time, if you mistakenly followed it, you found it led to the Fleet and you could go no further. Hence its name – Turnagain Lane.
Nearby Seacoal Lane referenced the cargoes that were formerly unloaded there. Once, you could buy milk in Milk Street, corn in Cornhill and, of course, honey in Honey Lane. But it is easy to be mistaken.
Cannons were not manufactured in Cannon Street, it is an abbreviation of Candlewick. And you would not go to Cloak Lane for your new cloak – it derives from the Latin word cloaca and was an open sewer. I will let you use your imagination when it comes to what was on sale in Love Lane.
Until the seventies you could smell the past too, if you headed south from Fenchurch St via St Katherine’s Row. Embedded in the walls of the adjacent warehouses were the odours of spices – cardamom, nutmeg, cloves and others, the trade which helped make London the wealthiest city in the world.
And then there were the memorials – some modest, some spectacular, they all acknowledged people who had long vanished from this earth along with the friends, relatives and compatriots who strove to maintain their memory. Some spoke of bravery and self-sacrifice, some merely reported an unfortunate event, others were evidence of generosity, philanthropy and care for fellow human beings.
I marvelled at John Donne’s memorial in St Paul’s Cathedral modelled by him personally, it bizarrely shows him embraced by his death shroud. But what was particularly interesting to me was that you could still see the scorch marks on it from the Great Fire of 1666. His was the only memorial that survived that conflagration – a spooky acknowledgment of his time as one of the Cathedral’s most famous Deans.
My curiosity was initially prompted when I came across an inscription on a mysterious gravestone. It spoke of the murder of a young man and the death of his poor father who died of a broken heart. I had to find out more and bring the young man and his dad back to life. Their story recalls a time when London almost descended into civil war. You can read the results of my research in the first story in this book. And the tombstone is still there for you to visit, in the churchyard of St Botolph without Aldgate.
The more I walked around, the more I noticed and learned – about people I would never have heard of otherwise, but who seemed to demand my attention.
In Postman’s Park near St Paul’s Cathedral, you can read about young Alice Ayres, who gave no thought to her own safety when she rescued three young children from a burning building, sacrificing her own life in the process.
And what about brave Dr Hodges, who stayed in the City to administer to his patients throughout the terrible plague of 1665 only to eventually die in poverty and debt? You will find a fitting memorial to him in St Stephen Walbrook, one of the many beautiful churches in the City of London.
My list of memorials is by no means complete, there are literally hundreds of them all over the City and I selected only the ones that I found particularly interesting, moving or thought-provoking. I hope the stories they tell will lead you to make your own discoveries along the way.
Click here to buy a copy of ‘Courage, Crime & Charity in the City of London’ from Daunt Books
Effigy of John Donne, Poet & Dean of St Paul’s (1572-1631), monument by Nicholas Stone
The gravestone of Thomas Ebrall at St Botolph Without Aldgate, recording the murder of a young man and the death of his poor father who died of a broken heart.
Thomas Ebrall was killed in the riots following the arrest of Francis Burdett in 1810 known for his demands for electoral reform.
The memorial to Alice Ayres at Postman’s Park
The fire in which Alice Ayres sacrificed her own life to saved the lives of three children
Memorial to the plague doctor Dr Nathanael Hodges in St Stephen’s Walbrook
Title page of Loimologica by Dr Nathanael Hodges, 1727
John Gillman at the Barbican
The Battle For Liverpool St Station
Griff Rhys Jones, President of the Victorian Society, has written this update on the revised yet equally misguided proposals for Liverpool St Station
Visualisation courtesy of ACME
After a positive roar of protest, with over two thousand unsolicited objections to the last scheme, Herzog & de Meuron and the original get-rich-quick developers, Sellar, and their wrap-around scheme, appear to have taken a train out. But Network Rail have come back furiously, deceptively and determinedly. They have appointed new architects, ACME. They are back with new proposals, as unrepentant as ever.
Look at these very carefully. The exact plans have not yet been revealed but these visualisations are hugely misleading. The angle of vision is of a three-foot tall squirrel wearing wide-angle glasses. It would seem that the former Great Eastern Hotel will dwarf the proposed office block. Not so, these newly planned structures would tower ninety metres over the Conservation Area. You will not get this from the architect’s pictures because they are apparently going to be constructed of gossamer. So light and virtually invisible that you will have to squint at these ‘imagineerings’ to even see them against the sky.
Yet this is pulled wool for disbelieving eyes.
The proposed new towers above the station, even swathed in a boa of fashionable greensward, are still there.
LISSCA (the campaign to Save Liverpool St Station) has taken time to unravel exactly what is proposed. It appears the developers are still building directly on top of the listed station concourse and now demolishing and expanding much of the area below too, adding shops to the engine sheds. They are still radically altering the majority of protected views in the Conservation Area. The money to be made from offices and retail is – most emphatically – still the driving force behind this development.
I fear the developers’ ‘improvements to the concourse’ PR spin is a deliberate blind. It is a snow job. It is a distraction. It ignores the White Elephant in the room.
Recently Network Rail staged a hurried ‘consultation’ to outline what they offer the man on the Ilford five-thirty.
If you were asked this sort of question…
‘Do you think disabled access should be improved at this station?’
or…
‘Do you want step-free access?’
or…
‘Would you like more room on the concourse?’
or…
‘Would you like to ascend to heaven in a phaeton accompanied by angels tootling trumpets?’
You would probably answer ‘yes’.
Network Rail claim 250,000 people ‘interacted’ with their consultation but they can only muster 1,800 actual people who approve. In other words, the vast majority saw this for what it was – a one way ticket to the moon.
Many of those consulted have complained that their own negative comments and criticisms have been ignored, not accepted or presented. There was a question – for example – that asked ‘Wouldn’t you like a greater selection of cafes and shopping experiences?’ – to which the answer was a generally straightforward ‘No’. But Network Rail did not include that in their gushing self-congratulation. They are eager to push on and seem to be in a terrible hurry. To wrong-foot any further protest one must suppose.
In truth, more retail space is towards the real centre of their proposal while the unnecessary office space is at the very heart.
How can I say it is unnecessary? Surely, I must be aware that the City needs to grow because the Corporation says so. In fact, the Corporation has already given its blessing to fourteen new office skyscrapers, even though only eleven have proved possible. Developers balked at the commercial viability of the others. The Corporation has produced a fanciful projection of millions of square feet of new demand. They foresee a decade of more massive City of London growth. Really?
Here at Liverpool St we see the end result. The assertion that London needs to sacrifice its precious heritage by building on top of it – in order to achieve this specious intent – is wholly preposterous, yet this what is being proposed.
Walk around the existing concourse. Please. It is easy to do. It is very rarely crammed, malfunctioning and unfit for purpose – even in the rush hour. (As the PR people repeatedly claim.)
Many of the required ‘improvements’ are undoubtedly possible without any significant alterations. There is – for example – already a disabled lift but the constant complaint recorded on TripAdvisor is that that it is never working. It does not require a couple of billion quid to ensure proper maintenance.
There should also – surely – be step-free access from the new building in Broadgate? That should have been part of any deal for the overbearing re-development to the west. Why has it not been achieved?
Take a look at the elaborate and rather lovely bargeboards at the back of the train shed. Get some paint out Network Rail. They are rotting away.
Network Rail have a statutory duty to make the station work and address these failures. They do not have a statutory duty to trash heritage. They do not have a statutory duty to be avaricious property developers and build office blocks on top of stations. Yet they have already done so at London Bridge with the Shard and now they think they can do the same at Liverpool St. Horrifically, they have announced plans and greedy ambitions to do the same at Victoria and Waterloo.
I use Liverpool St Station regularly. It is my station. I do not recognise the claims that it is – as ‘the busiest station’ in London – in urgent need of radical reformation. I do not find it at all crowded and impractical, and I often use it at rush hour. I simply do not recognise Network Rail’s claims of inherent pandemonium.
The proposed massive office development at Liverpool St is not at all necessary to the community, to heritage, to the railway system or to London. We must assemble the troops and continue stating our case. This is not about the past this is about the future. Our great-grandchildren will not applaud us for permitting a totally out-of-character cankerous growth to sprout on top of a noble Victorian station.
St Pancras and Kings Cross stations demonstrate how wonderful and historically important it is to strip away later ‘improvements’ to reveal the splendours of the railway age. This is good practice. The Liverpool St proposal is bad practice, obviously.
Take a really good look at this proposal. We need to register our discontent even more forcefully. We have not had a proper response to the legitimate objections already aired. Our case still stands.
Visualisation courtesy of ACME
ACME’s proposal for the entrance from Bishopsgate with a tower block on top
Visualisation courtesy of ACME
The foot of the tower block viewed looking east along Liverpool St
Visualisation courtesy of ACME
The foot of the tower block looking west along Liverpool St
If you have not done so already, please sign the Save Liverpool St Station petition, and share it with your friends, family, colleagues and networks.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION
Support our crowdfund, so we can take the legal fight all the way to the Secretary of State and halt these destructive plans.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO THE CROWDFUND
When the new planning application is submitted – probably in January 2025 – please be ready to write a letter of objection. We will alert everyone who signs the petition when the application is live.
Festive Tours & Gift Vouchers
Boy brings home a Christmas tree at Spitalfields Market in 1946 by Monte Fresco, East End Photographer (1936-2013)
Blow away the cobwebs with a walk around Spitalfields on New Year’s Day. Tickets are available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields on January 1st 2025 at 2pm.
CLICK HERE TO BOOK FOR NEW YEAR’S DAY
Bookings are open now for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields and also The Gentle Author’s Tour of The City of London until September 2025.
Gift Vouchers for The Gentle Author’s tours make ideal gifts for family and friends. Supply the name and postal address of the recipient of the gift voucher when you make your order and The Gentle Author will mail them a hand written Christmas card with a code that can be redeemed for tickets to the value of the voucher.
Spitalfields Life Books For Christmas
If you are seeking Christmas presents for family and friends, you need look no further because Spitalfields Life books make ideal gifts which you can have personally inscribed…
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Between the covers of this magnificent red Album with a gilded cover you will discover more than 600 of the Gentle Author’s favourite pictures of London in print for the first time, setting the wonders of our modern metropolis against the pictorial delights of the ancient city, and celebrating the infinite variety of life in the capital.
Take a walk through time with the Gentle Author as your guide – be equally amazed at what has been lost of old London and charmed by the unfamiliar marvels of London today.
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The Gentle Author assembles a choice selection of CRIES OF LONDON, telling the stories of the artists and celebrated traders, and revealing the unexpected social realities contained within these cheap colourful prints produced for the mass market.
For centuries, these lively images of familiar hawkers and pedlars have been treasured by Londoners. In the capital, those who had no other means of income could always sell wares in the street and, by turning their presence into performance through song, they won the hearts of generations and came to embody the spirit of London itself.
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The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.
As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.
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SIGNED COPIES
David Hoffman’s bold, humane photography records a lost era, speaking vividly to our own times.
When David Hoffman was a young photographer, he came to live in a squat in Fieldgate Mansions in Whitechapel and it changed his life.
Over the following years, he documented homelessness, racism and the rise of protest in startlingly intimate and compassionate pictures to compose a vital photographic testimony of resilience.
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“This small, beautiful book is an elegy to companionship. Encompassing both the everyday and the profound, it should be judged no less valid for the fact that the friend in question is a cat.” Times Literary Supplement
Anyone that has a cat will recognise the truth of this tender account by The Gentle Author. Filled with sentiment yet never sentimental, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY is a literary hymn to the intimate relationship between humans and animals.
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“a timely reminder of all that modern Britishness encompasses” The Observer
In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh Singh tells the candid and sometimes surprising story of his father Joginder Singh who came to Spitalfields in 1949.
Joginder sacrificed a life in the Punjab to work in Britain and send money home, yet he found himself in his element living among the mishmash of people who inhabited the streets around Brick Lane.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER EAST END VERNACULAR
The Gentle Author presents a magnificent selection of pictures – many never published before – revealing the evolution of painting in the East End and tracing the changing character of the streets through the twentieth century.
“A fragment of the riches flowing from a continued fascination with London’s topography” – Evening Standard
“Harvested from the thirties to the present day, Spitalfields Life’s gorgeous collection of East End paintings is more knees-up than misery-fest” – Hackney Citizen
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE MAP OF THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR
Follow in the footsteps of all those who came before, with a keen eye and an open heart, to discover the manifold wonders of Spitalfields.
Adam Dant has populated The Gentle Author’s Tour with portraits of more than fifty people – both the living and the dead – who have lived and worked in Spitalfields over the past two millennia.
Ramble through two thousand years of culture in the heart of London and discover some of the people and places that make this historic neighbourhood distinctive.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A HOXTON CHILDHOOD
AS Jasper’s tender memoir of growing up in the East End of London at the beginning of the twentieth century was immediately acclaimed as a classic when it was described by the Observer as ‘Zola without the trimmings.’
In this definitive new edition, A Hoxton Childhood is accompanied by the first publication of the sequel detailing the author’s struggles and eventual triumph in the cabinet-making trade,The Years After.
