The Return of Crescent Trading
The boys are back!
No doubt you remember my pals Philip Pittack & Martin White – the Mike & Bernie Winters of the textile business – famous for their ceaseless repartee and classy taste in fabrics? They run Crescent Trading, Spitalfields’ last cloth warehouse, and possess more than one hundred and twenty years of experience in the trade between them.
Last winter, they suffered a fire that nearly put them out of business but, displaying singular tenacity and strength of purpose, they are now open again with their premises restored and an entirely new stock of cloth.
During the interim, I visited regularly to offer moral support while they carried on trading with a hole in the roof, arriving to discover Martin lugubrious in Wellington boots as he spent four hours each day sweeping out rain water and Philip shedding sentimental tears over fire-damaged rolls of rare cashmere. Every single piece of fabric had to go, the roof had to be replaced, and the interior restored and repainted. Yet through all the grim winter months, Philip & Martin came into work each day, greeting customers brightly in spite of their pitiful circumstance.
“It cost us everything,” admitted Philip last week, sitting with Martin in their newly-painted office and looking out in wonder upon the shelves of brand new stock in the refurbished warehouse. It was a rare moment of contemplation, afforded now that they have reached the other side of their ordeal. Having witnessed the extended struggle, I enquired why they did not simply close the business and retire after the fire – a question that Martin seized upon with a passion. “This is our life and our livelihood,” he declared, his eyes shining and his voice raised, ” We love doing it and, as long as there’s breath in us, we will continue – we are not interested in retiring.”
“Jews don’t give up,” was Philip’s simple summation, crossing his arms demonstratively with a broad smile as, from the other side of the room, Martin nodded in agreement.
“It’s a way of life, and it’s been my way of life for sixty years,” Martin assured me, turning to catch Philip’s eye as he proceeded to speak for them both, “We’ve been wrapped up in fabrics all our lives. We love touching fabrics. In Yiddish, it’s called ‘tupping.’ To understand fabrics, you’ve got to touch them and know the feel in your hand.”
“We are passing on our knowledge about fabric to fashion students and young designers that even their teachers don’t know,” continued Philip, picking up Martin’s drift, “We like the youngsters coming in and having a laugh, it keeps us young.”
“I couldn’t afford to retire,” barked Martin in comic affront, as an afterthought, recalling my initial question.
“We’ve worked bloody hard,” declared Philip, folding his hands with incontrovertible authority and pride, and casting his eyes around the refurbished warehouse to meet Martin’s gaze in an exchange of unspoken understanding.
I was delighted by such a lively display of emotion which demonstrated that Philip & Martin are undaunted by the fire and undiminished in enthusiasm for business, even after all these years. Their warehouse in Quaker St is the last remnant of the textile trade that occupied Spitalfields for centuries, and Philip & Martin embody the culture with aplomb. At Crescent Trading, you will discover an infinite variety of ends of runs and surplus stock of high-end fabrics, mostly from British mills. The place is a magnet for students and fashion designers, and – once again- during business hours you may walk in and reliably encounter a lively social scene, centred around the selection and purchase of luxury textiles at bargain prices.
Martin organises his new stock in the refurbished warehouse.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Crescent Trading, Quaker Court/Pindoria Mews, Quaker St, E1 6SN. Open Sunday-Friday.
You may like to read my earlier stories about Crescent Trading.
Philip Pittack & Martin White, Cloth Merchants
All change at Crescent Trading
Julius Mendes Price’s London Types, 2
Here is the second set of London Types designed and written by celebrated war artist Julius Mendes Price and issued by Carreras with Black Cat Cigarettes in 1919. Although Price reveals a strange fascination with those involved in social control, he counters this with a generous appreciation of those employed in the most menial occupations. Given the pick of these jobs, I think I should choose to be the Keeper of the Ape House at the Zoo.
You may also like to take a look at these other cigarette card sets of the Cries of London
Julius Mendes Price’s London Types 1
William Caslon, Letter Founder
Learning of the work of William Caslon, whose Doric & Brunel typefaces, newly digitised by Paul Barnes, are being used by David Pearson in The Gentle Author’s London Album, I was inspired to write this brief account of the life of Britain’s most celebrated letter founder.
Portrait by Francis Kyte, 1740
Double-click to enlarge William Caslon’s Specimen of Typefaces from 1734
William Caslon was the first major letter founder in London and, nearly three centuries later, remains the pre-eminent letter founder this country has produced. Before Caslon, there was little letter founding in Britain and most type was imported – even Shakespeare’s First Folio was printed with French type. But Caslon’s achievement was to realise designs and produce type which have been widely used ever since. And it all happened here, around the eastern fringes of the City of London. The Caslon family tomb stands alone today in front of St Luke’s Old St, just yards from where William Caslon started his first letter foundry in Helmet Row in 1727 and, with pleasing consistency, it is lettered in Caslon type.
A native of Cradley in Worcestershire and the son of a shoemaker, Caslon was apprenticed as a Loriner (or metalworker) to Edward Cookes in the Minories in 1706. Here the young apprentice learnt the essentials of metal casting that were to prove so crucial to his career but, most significantly, he undertook the engraving of letters onto gun barrels. Equally, the company produced punches of letters for book-binding and there is a legend that Caslon’s talent for type design was first spotted by a printer, coming upon his lettering upon the spine of a book in a shop.
Marrying the sister of a fellow apprentice in 1719, Caslon set up his first type foundry in Helmet Row in 1727. This initiative was based upon the success of a commission for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge who required an Arabic typeface to be used in religious texts distributed among Christian communities in the Middle East. Yet it was in the creation of his distinctly English version of Roman letters and italics, derived from the Dutch typefaces that were most commonly used in London at that time, which was the decisive factor in the establishment of Caslon’s reputation.
Caslon’s first type Specimen of 1734 exemplifies a confidence and clarity of design which has become so familiar that it is difficult to appreciate in retrospect. The Specimen offered a range of styles and sizes of type with an unprecedented authority and a distinctive personality which is immediately recognisable. As a consequence of the legibility and grace of Caslon’s work, his became the default choice of typeface for books and all kinds of publications in the English-speaking world for the next two centuries.
Caslon’s own background in engraving and metalwork was the ideal preparation for the cutting of letter punches and, among the related trades of watch-making and instrument-making which thrived in the City of London, he was able to find others with the necessary skills. Each letter had to be cut by hand at first and some of these punches are preserved at St Bride Printing Library – breathtakingly intricate pieces of metalwork upon a microscopic scale. Once complete, these punches were impressed into copper to make moulds, known as matrices, that were used for the casting of type for printing.
Moving in 1727 to larger premises in Ironmongers’ Row, by 1730 Caslon had eclipsed his competitors, securing the exclusive contract to supply type to the King’s printers. Later, Benjamin Franklin was to choose Caslon’s type for printing both the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.
In 1734, Caslon established himself in his permanent premises in Chiswell St, where the letter foundry continued until 1936. At this address, he staged monthly concerts upon an organ fitted into his music room, serving beer that he brewed himself. Caslon had inaugurated a long-standing dynasty, naming his first son William and, by 1742, specimens designed by William Caslon junior were being produced. It was a pattern that, like the typefaces, was replicated until well into the twentieth century. Caslon retired in 1750 to a house in the Hackney Rd opposite the Nag’s Head (where Hackney City Farm is today), and soon after he moved into his country house in Bethnal Green, where he died in 1766.
Within a generation, Caslon’s first types acquired the moniker Caslon Old Face, referring to their antique credentials yet, with innumerable recuttings, these typefaces have persisted to the present day when other types that once superceded them have been long forgotten. Caslon’s letters are often characterised as distinctively British in their sensibility and there is a lack of uniformity among them which sets them apart from their European counterparts, yet the merit of Caslon’s letters is their ability to mingle harmoniously among their fellows and create a pleasing texture upon the page – balancing the requirements of order and variety to achieve a satisfying unity.
In Helmet Row, off Old St, where William Caslon established his first type foundry in 1727.
William Caslon’s letter foundry in 1750
The Caslon letter foundry in 1900 (Photograph from St Bride Printing Library)
Dedication page of William Caslon’s Specimen
The Caslon Letter Foundry in Chiswell St ran from 1734 until 1936.
Elisabeth Caslon (known as the Widow Caslon) who ran the foundry after her husband’s death
William Caslon II (born 1720, died 1778)
William Caslon III (born 1754, died 1833)
Henry William Caslon IV (born 1786, died 1850)
Henry William Caslon V (born 1814, died 1874)
Display faces became very popular in the nineteenth century.
Vignettes from a nineteenth century Caslon Specimen Book.
Steam trains from a Caslon Specimen Book.
The Caslon Family tomb at St Luke’s Old St.
Caslon letters on Caslon’s tomb.
Unless otherwise ascribed all archive images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Julius Mendes Price’s London Types
It is my greatest delight to show these examples of London Types, designed and written by the celebrated war artist Julius Mendes Price and issued with Carreras Black Cat Cigarettes in 1919. After months of searching, these are the latest acquisition in my ever-growing collection of London Street Cries down through the ages. Some of these images – such as the cats’ meat man – are barely changed from earlier centuries, yet others – such as the telephone girl – are undeniably part of the modern world.
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
At Barts Pathology Museum
You enter a door at the hospital and over it are the words, ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.’ Then the first thing you come upon as you climb the stairs is a vast stone sarcophagus, stored on the landing as if it were a spare piece of medical equipment. It is wedged half open as if the inhabitant had climbed out and could return at any moment, and a sign above it warns ‘Smoking Prohibited,’ just in case they considered lighting up.
By the time you reach the top of the winding staircase in this lonely corner of West Smithfield, you are emotionally prepared to enter Barts Pathology Museum – one of the saddest and strangest places I have ever been. Arranged in bottles and jars, preserved in fluids and organised upon shelves spanning three storeys, is a vast, encyclopaedic collection of human body parts acquired by the hospital over centuries, for the study of anatomy and ailments. There are more varieties of carcinomas and hernias, more malformations and deformations, more ways that the human body can be blighted and broken than in your worst nightmares.
Each one of the five thousand specimens represents a different example of human suffering, and you stand overawed to see pain quantified and categorised in this way. Gazing around from the centre of the room at the expansive galleries that run floor to ceiling, I became wary to approach the display in any direction out of reluctance at what I might discover.
In such a circumstance, Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I were grateful to be greeted by the pragmatic enthusiasm of Carla Valentine, Technical Assistant Curator. “I’m a mortician,” she admitted reassuringly, “for eight years, I worked in mortuaries doing autopsies, but this is what I always wanted to do. I wanted to do it since I was ten, I think some people are born to do this. I was always cutting up slugs and worms from the garden, and probably I was a weird child.”
Carla has been employed to work upon the conservation of the collection.“They’re all leaking over there,” she revealed, gesturing to a long gallery lined with organs in bottles that she has been transferring into safe containers. I learnt that in recent decades, the practice of preserving new specimens has ceased, except in rare cases. “The only people who are placed in here now are those who choose to be,” Carla explained helpfully, “if, for example, they have some unusual cancer that they want to have put on display.”
Eager to reward our interest, Carla drew our attention to the case of foreign objects extracted from the human body – the toothbrush removed from the oesophagus in 1944, the pencil case removed from the bladder in 1932, the needle removed from the heart in 1879, the torch removed from the rectum in 1933 and the metal dart removed from the brain at an unspecified date. It became apparent that each specimen had its own story, even if they were not always obvious.
“We have a lot of Victorian factory workers,” Carla informed me, moving on and indicating a case of semi-disintegrated jaw bones that were examples of ‘Phossy Jaw’ – the condition acquired by those who worked with phosphorus in the manufacture of matches. Beside them were specimens that illustrated ‘Chimney Sweeps’ Cancer’ – the testicular cancer that came about as a result of a life spent climbing up chimneys. And then there was the fractured mandible of the fourteen year old boy whose head was caught between the rollers of a rotary printing machine and died a week later. And I shall not easily forget the metal cap designed to hold together the broken pieces of the skull of a man run over by a carriage, that enabled him to live several years after.
Proudly, Carla showed us the inguinal hernia from around 1750 that is the earliest specimen in the collection, preserved by Percivall Potts – one of the museum’s most celebrated curators. “Unfortunately the perspex box was leaking, so I decided that – for the safety of the specimen and for aesthetic appeal – I would put the hernia into a glass pot with fresh fluid.” Carla confided to me cheerfully. You stand helpless in front of these examples and others, nodding politely at the explanations and feeling numb as you seek to discover a relationship with what you are seeing. The skull of John Bellingham who murdered the Prime Minister in 1812 and the skull of a Norman killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 leer back at you, and a vision of the largest centipede you ever saw in your life that, although safely preserved in a glass bottle, nevertheless wriggles deep into your consciousness.
There is certain grim grandeur to this museum designed by Edward l’Anson in 1878, where mustachioed busts of James Paget and John Hunter, two nineteenth curators, stare eternally upon their creations from either end of the gallery. Once you have confronted the detail for yourself, you cannot but admire the moral courage of those who were unflinching in their pursuit of medical science. As Carla Valentine concluded sagely, this is a museum of how we got to where we are today in medicine. Yet I could not resist a surge of personal grief when confronted with particular examples of afflictions suffered by those I have known closely and so, after everything I had seen, it made me grateful for my own good health.
In a lonely corner of the hospital.
“Whatsoever they hand findeth to do, do it with thy might”
The sarcophagus on the stair.
Specimens of ‘Chimney Sweeps’ Cancer’
Carla Valentine, Technical Assistant Curator & Mortician.
The oldest specimen is this inguinal hernia from around 1750, preserved by by Percivall Potts.
Specimens of ‘Phossy jaw’ – a decay of the jaw bone caused by exposure to phosphorus and suffered by workers in East End match factories in the nineteenth century.
Bladder stones
Skull of John Bellingham, the assassin who killed the Prime Minister, Spencer Percival, in 1812.
A rat that suffered from tuberculosis
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
Archive images courtesy of the Royal London Hospital Archives
Follow the Pathology Museum blog Potts’ Pots
Learn about forthcoming Autumn Seminars at the Pathology Museum.
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Cruikshank’s London Almanack, 1838
This set of engravings is the fourth in a series of calendars illustrating the seasons and festivals of the London year, drawn annually by George Cruikshank for The Comic Almanack published by Henry Tilt of Fleet St. 1838 was the year of Victoria’s coronation and I had no idea that frost fairs persisted until this era, equally the ‘Flying Showers’ of July provide evidence – should we ever need it – of the constant volatility of English summer weather. (Click on any of these images to enlarge)
JANUARY – New Year’s Eve, 1837 departs and 1838 arrives
FEBRUARY – Frost Fair on the Thames
MARCH – St Patrick’s Day at Seven Dials
APRIL – Street market on Low Sunday
MAY – Street plant sellers ‘All a growing!’
JUNE – The Coronation of Queen Victoria
JULY – Flying Showers in Battersea Fields
AUGUST – ‘Sic Omnes,’ on board the steamer from London Bridge to Boulogne
SEPTEMBER – The Michaelmas Gander, ‘De goostibus non est disputandum.’
OCTOBER – Battle of A-gin-court in Petty France
NOVEMBER – The Gunpowder Plot or Guys in Council
DECEMBER – Christmas Eve
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Cruikshank’s London Almanack, 1835
Cruikshank’s London Almanack, 1836
Cruikshank’s London Almanack, 1837
Save The Rochelle Infants’ School
Back in February, Tower Hamlets Council Planning Committee voted to refuse alterations to the Rochelle Infants’ School that would erase the social history of this important building at the core of Arnold Circus, Britain’s first Council Estate.
Yet this week, James Moores, the current owner, appeals to the Planning Inspectorate to overturn this decision and permit him to alter the structure so that he can turn the building over to commercial use as corporate offices, taking it away from use by the people of the Boundary Estate as a community resource forever.
It was thanks in no small measure to objections sent by readers of Spitalfields Life that the Council rejected the application to alter the school, and so today I publish a revised version of my original article, outlining the significance of the building and including new material uncovered about this historic structure.
This is Contributing Artist Lucinda Rogers‘ sketch of the facade of the former Nichol St Infants’ School that opened in 1879, known as Rochelle Infants’ School since 1900. Yet even those who are familiar with this corner of Shoreditch may not recognise it, because the Boundary Estate was constructed around the school as Britain’s first social housing in 1895.
Blending so harmoniously with the Estate buildings on either side, few realise that this school carries the history of those who once lived here in the notorious slum known as The Nichol, for whom it was built. Apart from the bandstand created from the pile of the rubble of their demolished homes, the school is now the only visible evidence of their existence. But, unlike the inscrutable mound, through the nature and detail of its design this fascinating building speaks eloquently of life in The Nichol.
Walk down Montclare St and enter the yard beside the old Wash House to see this view of the elegant facade, conceived upon an eighteenth century model with two symmetrical wings framing an imposing central entrance beneath a gable in the Queen Anne style, which today looks out upon an area divided by low walls into gardens and courtyards. The central tower contains two separate staircases – gently sloping for child safety – a shallower one for juniors and a steeper one for senior infants, leading to the covered playground on the roof. Walk around the block to Club Row and you will see the other elevation, with its row of eight neo-classical arched windows interspersed by brick pilasters, by which the building is most commonly recognised.
Nichol St Infants’ School was designed by the progressive school architect Edward Robert Robson, who had worked with George Gilbert Scott and knew Dante Gabriel Rossetti personally. In the East End, he was also responsible for the People’s Palace in Mile End and the Jews’ Free School in Spitalfields. Nichol St Infants’ School was constructed as a gesture of idealism to raise the aspirations of the residents of The Nichol. In his pioneering and definitive work of 1874, “School Architecture,” Robson wrote, “If popular education be worth its great price, its homes deserve something better than a passing thought. Schoolhouses are henceforth to take rank as public buildings, and should be planned and built in a manner befitting their new dignity.”
Accommodating over three hundred and sixty pupils within the restricted site of Nichol St Infants School required a playground upon the roof, which Robson designed with a metal cover taking into account that pupils might not possess adequate clothing for rain or poor weather. Recent research by engineering historian and industrial archaeologist, Malcolm Tucker, has confirmed that the metal roof of 1879 is a unique survivor, complete with its nineteenth century wrought iron structure and original iron trusses intact.
Robson’s arrangement of the classrooms exemplified his own ‘model plan’ that he devised as early as 1840. This consisted of one large schoolroom containing a ‘double classroom’ at each end with a partial wall down the middle separating two classes, permitting one senior teacher to supervise junior teachers and their classes. Schools could not afford to employ enough experienced teachers and Robson’s design provided an architectural solution to this deficiency by permitted teaching assistants to be overseen. The schoolroom at Rochelle is possibly the only example of this configuration still in existence.
The high ceilings and large windows were designed to admit plenty of light and air, offering sufficient ventilation to ameliorate the smell of a large number of unwashed infants packed closely together. The architect’s sensitivity to the children’s needs is evident in these considerations and many others, yet his concern extended beyond the material in this modest building, which possesses spare lyrical flourishes that transcend the utilitarian. A prime example is the unexpectedly intricate decorative wooden casing of the iron girders in the ceilings of the classrooms, as if to reward those who lifted their gaze upwards.
Today, the former Nichol St Infants School stands as the only unaltered example of Robson’s principles of school design and thus it is of unique importance, socially, historically and architecturally. In February, Tower Hamlets Council voted to reject the proposed series of alterations to the building enabling commercial office use which would change it irreversibly – partly demolishing Robson’s facade to create an extension, raising the roof level, thus destroying the covered playground with its original metal roof structure, and dividing up the double classrooms with their high ceilings by inserting mezzanine floors which will require removing the decorative casings of the beams in the process.
This week, James Moores, the owner, is appealing to the Planning Inspectorate to overturn that decision, thus permitting him to enact these changes and more which are proposed, that will eradicate much of the meaning of the building – both as a witness of the lives of the people of The Nichol, and as a pertinent reminder of an era when improving the lot of the poor, and allowing them human dignity, became a priority.
Just fifteen years after the school was completed, the Boundary Estate was constructed around it, with the position of the bandstand and the orientation of the seven roads radiating out from it defined by the location of Robson’s building. Thus his school became the keystone of Britain’s first social housing Estate – in its layout and in adopting Robson’s lyrical use of red brick detailing that referenced vernacular architecture of an earlier age but, most importantly, in the social values embodied. Remodelling Robson’s building to facilitate a permanent incursion of commercial offices that serve corporate business interests and preventing any future use by the people of the Boundary Estate would be a betrayal of the founding principles of this historic endeavour.
Lucinda Rogers’ sketch of the Club Row elevation of the former Nichol St School.
The stair tower leading to the covered playground was at the centre of the building, beneath these windows topped by E.R.Robson’s magnificenty flourished gable in the Queen Anne style.
In spite of an accretion of low walls, the facade of Nichol St Infants School is still intact.
The school seen from Club Row, formerly Nichols Row, showing the eight windows that give light to the schoolroom and the eight-barred openings that gave light and air to the covered playground.
Decorative roof beams in the schoolroom.
Double classrooms designed by Robson, as employed at Nichol St Infants’ School (From School Architecture 1874)
The site of Nichol St Infants School surrounded by the streets of The Nichol before they were replaced by the Boundary Estate. (Edina Historical Maps)
1895, the construction of the Boundary Esate around the Rochelle School and Nichol St School, seen at the centre of this photograph. The pile of rubble to the left became the bandstand at the centre of Arnold Circus. (City of London, London Metropolitan Archives)
This 1938 London County Council map shows the Boundary Estate as it remains today with the Rochelle Infants’ School Building half way up Club Row on the right.
Edward Robert Robson (1835-1917), Consulting Architect to Her Majesty’s Education Department.
Drawings copyright © Lucinda Rogers
You have until 5pm on Tuesday 13th August to write to the Planning Inspectorate, opposing the appeal and asking them to uphold Tower Hamlets Council’s decision to refuse the alterations to the Rochelle Infants’ School.
Send your email to Michael Joyce teamp16@pins.gsi.gov.uk quoting Appeal Case No. 2199055 Club Row Building and include your address.
If you would like to join THE FRIENDS OF ROCHELLE, a group dedicated to retaining the Rochelle School as a community asset for the people of the Boundary Estate please email thefriendsofrochelle@gmail.com
Click to sign the petition to protect the Rochelle Infants School Building
My grateful thanks to Tom Ridge who supplied his research as the basis of this feature.
You may like to read about some local people who were educated at Rochelle School
