Graham Marshall, Spitalfields Crypt Trust
Graham Marshall
The name ‘Spitalfields’ refers to the Priory of St Mary Spital, situated on Bishopsgate where Spital Sq is today, that offered shelter to the dispossessed and homeless from 1197 until it was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. Yet the identity of Spitalfields as a place of refuge had been established and, to this day, this vital work goes on at the Spitalfields Crypt Trust. Originating as a shelter under the church, opened by Rector Dennis Downham in 1965, the endeavour acquired its own dedicated building in the corner of Shoreditch churchyard when Spitalfields was being renovated in the nineties .
The common thread through recent decades has been the benign presence of Graham Marshall, a modest man who began as a volunteer in the seventies and discovered his life’s work in the crypt, serving those who walked through the door. The policy was never just to offer shelter but to assist in finding the path to recovery. When Graham started, half of the residents were Scottish and half Irish, and the prevailing affliction was alcohol dependency, whereas these days the racial mix is more diverse and drug use is the major problem.
“It’s handholding all the way, because if you let go people will get lost,” Graham admitted to me, speaking from thirty years of experience, “It’s about getting them on to the next stage and sticking with them.”After thirty-seven years, Graham is now Director of the Trust, overseeing the running of the organisation yet still directly involved with everyone that comes through the door and aware of each individual’s needs and challenges.
The Trust runs four open sessions each week, either at St Leonard’s Church or the Tabernacle Centre, at which anyone in need can come for food and tea. Acorn House, at the corner of Calvert Avenue and Shoreditch High St replaces the crypt, provides accommodation for sixteen residents for up to a year, while the New Hanbury Project on the ground floor of this building offers educational activities, from literacy courses to basic IT skills and woodwork. “It’s about ‘What am I going to with myself?’,” Graham said simply, ‘It’s a place where people can start to make progress.” Beyond this, there are three long-term hostels where people can stay for three to four years, as they learn to live independently, and the Trust runs Paper & Cup Coffee Shop in Calvert Avenue and another in Bow, where residents can learn the skills of working with people and gain experience that will give them a chance of finding a job.
An individual of self-effacing temperament and single-minded determination, Graham has kept the Spitalfields Crypt Trust small with minimal bureaucracy, so that it can remain a flexible organisation focussed on its purpose, and financially independent, so that it can work in its own way without being subject to the whims of local authority funding. Above all, he has personally kept the project alive so that the quietly dignified work can continue, enabling hundreds of people to find a new existence away from the streets and free from the dependencies that blighted their lives.
“I volunteered for a year at the Spitalfields crypt in 1977 and stayed ever since. My first job was working at the front desk, giving people their sandwiches and clothing. They came down into a place in the crypt where they could take a shower and we would change their clothes.
I come from Folkestone. Like many young people, I experimented with drugs and got into trouble, and spent a few nights on the streets of London as a seventeen year old, but fortunately had a home to go back to. A couple of years later, I met a girl who was a Christian and I became a Christian, and then I went into rehab in Greenwich for a year. I did a lot of voluntary youth work and tried to get into YMCA college but failed, so then I went back to work in Spitalfields again as a volunteer.
From the start, I worked on the front desk and I loved it. After a year, they asked if I could stay on permanently, but I said, ‘I need to find a way to make some money.’ They said, ‘We are going to advertise for someone to do your job.’ So I thought, ‘Oh wow, I’d love to do that!’ and I got the job and the rest is history.
I love my work. I love every day, I don’t ever have a bad one. I see positive change. Some people think it’s depressing and it’s about failure and degradation, but it’s not – it’s about people coming off dependency and recovering their sobriety, and learning to love themselves.”
At the entrance to the crypt at Christ Church in the seventies
Domitory in the crypt
Dining room in the crypt
Recreation in the crypt
New Hanbury Project in Calvert Avenue
The yard between New Hanbury Project and St Leonard’s Churchyard
Portrait of Graham Marshall copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may also like to read about
Irene Stride Remembers Spitalfields
Wapping Tavern Tokens
I would dearly loved to have accompanied you on a pub crawl along the river and through the alehouses and stews of seventeenth century Wapping, but instead we must content ourselves with these few humble tavern tokens as the imaginative means to evoke an entire long-lost world.
King’s Head Taverne
… At The Hermitage
The Ship Taverne
… Wapping Wall, 1650, John Saunders
Bunch of Grapes, John Goddin, King’s …
… Streete At Wapping
Queen’s Head, New Crane Wharf ….
Coffee, chocolat, tea, sherbet .… Can anyone decipher the rest?
At The White Bear
… At Wapping Wall
Edward Fish At …
… The Sunn In Wapin…
Roger Price At The…
… Black Boy In Wapin
At The Man In The …
.. Moun In Waping, 1652
The Cock In Wapping ..
.. Andrew Coleman At, His Halfpenny
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to take a look at
The Gentle Author’s Wapping Pub Crawl
and these other tokens
At The Boar’s Head Parade
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I were greeted by Neil Hunt, Beadle of The Worshipful Company of Butchers, when we arrived at their Hall in St Bartholomew’s Close, Smithfield, yesterday to join a small crowd eagerly awaiting the annual appearance of the celebrated Boar’s Head in the first week of Advent, marking the beginning on the Christmas season in London.
This year sees the sixtieth anniversary of the revival of this arcane tradition which has its origin in 1343 when the Lord Mayor, John Hamond, granted the Butchers of the City of London use of a piece of land by the Fleet River, where they could slaughter and clean their beasts, for the token yearly payment of a Boar’s Head at Christmas.
To pass the time in the drizzle, the Beadle showed us his magnificent staff of office dating from 1716, upon which may be discerned a Boar’s Head. “Years ago, they had a robbery and this was the only thing that wasn’t stolen,” he confided to me helpfully, ” – it had a cover and the thieves mistook it for a mop.”
Before another word was spoken, a posse of members of the Butcher’s Company emerged triumphant from the Hall in blue robes and velvet hats, with a livid red Boar’s Head carried aloft at shoulder height, to the delighted applause of those waiting in the street. Behind us, drummers of the Royal Logistics Corps in red uniforms gathered and City of London Police motorcyclists in fluorescent garb lined up to receive instructions from Ian Kelly, the Master of the Company.
Everyone assembled to pose for official photographs with the perky red ears of the Boar sticking up above the crowd, providing the opportunity for a closer examination of this gloss-painted paper mache creation, sitting upon a base of Covent Garden grass and surrounded by plastic fruit. As recently as 1968, a real Boar’s Head was paraded but these days Health & Safety concerns about hygiene require the use of this colourful replica for ceremonial purposes.
The drummers set a brisk pace and before we knew it, the parade was off down Little Britain, preceded by the police motorcyclists halting the traffic. For a couple of minutes, the City stopped – astonished passengers leaned out of buses and taxis, and office workers reached for their phones to capture the moment. It made a fine spectacle advancing down Cheapside, past St Mary Le Bow, with the sound of drums echoing and reverberating off the tall buildings.
The rhythmic clamour accompanying the procession of men in their dark robes, with the Boar’s Head bobbing above, evoked the ancient drama of the City of London and, as they paraded through the gathering dusk towards the Mansion House looming in the east on that occluded December afternoon, I could not resist the feeling that they were marching through time as well as space.
Neil Hunt, Beadle of The Worshipful Company of Butchers
The Beadle’s staff dates from 1716
Leaving St Bartholomew’s Close
Advancing through Little Britain
Entering Cheapside
Passing St Mary Le Bow
In Cheapside
Approaching the Mansion House
The Boar’s Head arrives at the Mansion House
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
You may also like to read about
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries Of London
Today it is my pleasure to publish Marcellus Laroon’s vibrant series of engravings of the Cries of London reproduced from an original edition of 1687 in the collection at the Bishopsgate Institute
The death of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of Charles II made the thoroughfares of London festive places once again, renewing the street life of the metropolis – and when the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the shops and wiped out most of the markets, an unprecedented horde of hawkers flocked to the City from across the country to supply the needs of Londoners .
Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe both owned copies of Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London. Among the very first Cries to be credited to an individual artist, Laroon’s “Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life” were on a larger scale than had been attempted before, which allowed for more sophisticated use of composition and greater detail in costume. For the first time, hawkers were portrayed as individuals not merely representative stereotypes, each with a distinctive personality revealed through their movement, their attitudes, their postures, their gestures, their clothing and the special things they sold. Marcellus Laroon’s Cries possessed more life than any that had gone before, reflecting the dynamic renaissance of the City at the end of the seventeenth century.
Previous Cries had been published with figures arranged in a grid upon a single page, but Laroon gave each subject their own page, thereby elevating the status of the prints as worthy of seperate frames. And such was their success among the bibliophiles of London, that Laroon’s original set of forty designs – reproduced here – commissioned by the entrepreneurial bookseller Pierce Tempest in 1687 was quickly expanded to seventy-four and continued to be reprinted from the same plates until 1821. Living in Covent Garden from 1675, Laroon sketched his likenesses from life, drawing those he had come to know through his twelve years of residence there, and Pepys annotated eighteen of his copies of the prints with the names of those personalities of seventeenth century London street life that he recognised.
Laroon was a Dutchman employed as a costume painter in the London portrait studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller – “an exact Drafts-man, but he was chiefly famous for Drapery, wherein he exceeded most of his contemporaries,” according to Bainbrigge Buckeridge, England’s first art historian. Yet Laroon’s Cries of London, demonstrate a lively variety of pose and vigorous spontaneity of composition that is in sharp contrast to the highly formalised portraits upon which he was employed.
There is an appealing egalitarianism to Laroon’s work in which each individual is permitted their own space and dignity. With an unsentimental balance of stylisation and realism, all the figures are presented with grace and poise, even if they are wretched. Laroon’s designs were ink drawings produced under commission to the bookseller and consequently he achieved little personal reward or success from the exploitation of his creations, earning his living by painting the drapery for those more famous than he and then dying of consumption in Richmond at the age of forty-nine. But through widening the range of subjects of the Cries to include all social classes and well as preachers, beggars and performers, Marcellus Laroon left us us an exuberant and sympathetic vision of the range and multiplicity of human life that comprised the populace of London in his day.
Images photographed by Alex Pink & reproduced courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Peruse these other sets of the Cries of London I have collected
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
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
Nick Garrett At The George
Nick Garrett signwriting upon The George
Behold the mighty George Tavern standing majestic in Stepney, as it has for centuries, presiding regally over the traffic along the main road to and from the City of London. From the medieval era, this ancient watering hole was known as the Halfway House and stood upon White Horse Lane that once ran along the back of the property but since 1802-6, when Commercial Rd was cut through on the other side of the building by the East India Company, it acquired the stucco frontage you see today and was renamed The George after George III, the monarch of the time.
For the past eleven years, the building has been undergoing renovation under the fond stewardship of Pauline Forster who has devoted herself to the care of this beloved East End landmark and, on Sunday, I went down to witness signwriter Nick Garrett apply the gold leaf upon the fascia as one of the finishing touches, completing the refurbishment of the exterior. The winter sunlight bathed The George in a warm glow as if to celebrate the restoration, illuminating the words ‘George Tavern’ in newly-applied gold leaf for the benefit of anyone travelling eastward down the Commercial Rd who might need a gentle reminder of this ideal spot for refreshment en route.
Yet when I arrived around three o’clock, the sunlight was already glimmering and the dark clouds gathering and Nick Garret had his work cut out to finish the job before daylight faded. “Every second counts in this job,” he reminded me, peering over his shoulder anxiously towards the setting sun, as I climbed upon the scaffolding to join him. With the confidence of a master, Nick was painting ‘Cask Ales’ freehand in size prior to applying the gold leaf and, in his absorption, he confided to me that it was a job which inevitably brought to mind his signwriting predecessor whose work he was replacing.
“For ten years, when I started as a signwriter, all I did was gilding pubs for Watneys and Taylor Walker. I remember the guy who did this lettering, the last time it was painted, about 1978. His lettering was eccentric, he was from the old school. We were being expected to paint commercial fonts then but he struggled with it, because his hands wanted to go another way, yet his lettering was really nice and his ‘S’s were distinctive – that’s what I recognise here.
My grandfather was my mentor, Francis Baker born in 1901. He was a lettercutter, the fourth generation of Francis Bakers of Fulham. They worked for Thorneycrofts, who made most of the statuary in central London, and they cut the lettering on the plinth of Boudicea on Westminster Bridge. He was a very old man when he used to come to my studio and he’d say, ‘Nick, that’s marvellous!’
I was so lucky with the Taylor Walker brewery because I just made a phone call one day and the chief surveyor answered. He said, ‘Come over and show me what you can do.’ So I went over there in my little minivan and came out with about ten years worth of work. In the eighties, we got hit by the wave of vinyl signs and I lost half my business, so I went into wood-graining and french-polishing just to make a living. But now designers are demanding signwriting and there’s a huge resurgence in the trade.
I live in Italy and come over for a couple of weeks at a time to get all the jobs done, and I teach youngsters who come to me to learn signwriting at workshops in Sydenham. It’s an interesting time now because there’s so many people wanting to learn the skills. There’s so much work – any job I can’t do, I pass to my students.”
By this point, Nick was pressing the squares of Italian gold leaf onto the newly-painted size that had just reached the necessary degree of tackiness, and the sun was setting in the sky and his freshly-gilded lettering was catching the first gleam of the street lights as they flickered on in Commercial St.
The stucco detail of ropework, egg and dart, and floral border has been recast from fragments
Nick Garrett paints freehand in size upon the fascia prior to application of the gold leaf
The George Tavern upon Commercial Rd in the early nineteenth century
You may like to read more about the history
Winter Light In Spitalfields
We are back in December again and the inexorable descent into the winter darkness has begun, even if just three weeks from now we shall reach the equinox and days will start to lengthen. At this season, I am more aware of light than at any other – especially when the city languishes under an unremitting blanket of low cloud, filtering the daylight into a grey haze that casts no shadow.
Yet on recent mornings I have woken to sunlight and it lifts my spirits to walk out through the streets under a clear sky. On such days, the low-angled sunshine and its attendant deep shadow conjures an exhilarating drama.
In these particular conditions of light, walking from Brick Lane down Fournier St is like advancing through a cave towards the light, refracting around the vast sombre block of Christ Church that guards the entrance. The street runs from east to west and, as the sun declines, its rays enter through the churchyard gates next to Rectory illuminating the houses opposite and simultaneously passing between the pillars at the front of the church to deliver light at the western end where it meets Commercial St.
For a spell, the shadows of the stone balls upon the pillars at the churchyard gate fall upon the houses on the other side of the street and then the rectangle of light, admitted between the church and the Rectory, narrows from the width of a house to single line before it fades out. At the junction with Commercial St, the low-angled sun directed through the pillars in the portico of Christ Church casts tall parallel bars of light and shade that travel down Fournier St from the Ten Bells as far as number seven, reflecting off the window panes to to create a fleeting pattern like stars within the gloom of the old church wall.
As you can see from these photographs, I captured these transient effects of light with my camera to share with you as a keepsake of winter sunshine, for consolation when those clouds descend again.
The last ray
The shadow of the cornice of Christ Church upon the Rectory
The shadow of the pillars of Christ Church upon Fournier St
Windows in Fournier St reflecting upon the church wall
In Princelet St
You may also like to read about
Towers Over The Goodsyard
Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney presents his completed film
[youtube wBbckajC91Q nolink]
Click here to read the East End Preservation Society’s guide to how to object effectively
You may also like to read about
