Time To Write Your Novel?
The Bronte sisters arrive in Cornhill to meet their publisher Thackeray, 1848
In response to popular demand, we are running our HOW TO WRITE YOUR FIRST NOVEL course again in Spitalfields on the weekend of Saturday 22nd & Sunday 23rd March. The course is hosted by two writers who achieved notable success with their first novels – Rosie Dastgir author of A Small Fortune published by Quercus & Kate Griffin author of Kitty Peck and The Music Hall Murders published by Faber.
As guests, Walter Donohue, Senior Editor at Faber, will be talking about what he looks for in a first novel and Spitalfields resident Clive Murphy will be amusing us with his experiences as a novelist in London in the seventies.
The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, an eighteenth century weavers’ house, on Saturday and Sunday from 10am – 5pm. Lunch catered by Leila’s Cafe and tea, coffee and cakes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £250.
There are just fourteen places available, email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book your place on the course. Accommodation at 5 Fournier St can be provided upon enquiry.
Walter Donohue, Senior Editor at Faber
“I am looking for a distinctive narrative voice and an arresting first line, one that makes the reader ask, ‘What happens next?’ Of course, any novel must have structure – a beginning, middle and an end, though each part doesn’t have to be of equal length. I hope for characters that are grounded and authentic, with whom the reader can empathise, and prose that flows across the page, drawing the reader into a believable world. Originality and imagination are essential, expressed in a strong story. But above all, I look for a certain confidence that derives from a writer responding to what their instinct tells them to write about.”
Rosie Dastgir
“I never made a conscious decision to be a writer. Writing was always something I did from a very early age. But I did make a conscious decision to write a novel when I moved to New York in 2005, it was the moment to try something new. I’d been writing screenplays and had worked in documentaries at the BBC for many years. One day, a project that I’d worked on for a while stalled and I was so demoralized that I decided I’d write something that didn’t require a committee of approval. So I wrote a short story, inspired by a trip I’d made to Pakistan when I was a teenager, and that became the seed of this novel. It evolved over several years and went through many iterations, as I rewrote it. I finished it in New York where it was published in 2012.”
Kate Griffin
“Writing is an oddly lonely thing to do. It’s just you, staring at a notebook or a laptop, perhaps the sound of a clock ticking somewhere in the background, the occasional gurgle of central heating pipes, maybe a radio playing softly in an another room, a child laughing in the street?
That’s my experience anyway. I’m sure every writer will tell you something different. We all work in different ways. Despite the impression I might have given above of an isolated hermit-like existence, the main reason I write is that I love being surrounded by people. More specifically, I love it when my own sense of self is crowded out by the characters in my head clamouring to have their say. On a good day, they tell their own story – I don’t even have to do the work! On a bad day, I give up and attempt to find inspiration in the fridge. (It’s never there.)
Writing appeals to the thwarted theatrical in me. Not only do I get to set the scene, build and decorate the sets and write the script, I get to play all the parts too. Sometimes I run characters’ lines through my head as I type (I’m a lap top writer, not a long-hander) and at other times I read them aloud in suitable voices to make sure they sound right. There’s a chasm of difference between words on a screen and words spoken aloud. Often the only way to bridge that gap – and find out if they fly – is to try them out.
Having the opportunity to become a new person and explore an alien world through their eyes is something that motivates me to write. It’s like setting off on an adventure – even if you think you’ve got a map and a plan you’ll often surprise yourself. That’s part of the fun and part of the challenge.
My first novels ‘Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders’ and ‘The Jade Boy,’ for children, were published in the summer of 2013. I think it’s no coincidence that on Midsummer’s Day last year I also turned fifty. It was a watershed moment.
I’ve always written, in some way, for a living. I started out as a journalist on a local newspaper and then I hopped over the fence to work as a press officer. I love playing with words, but increasingly I found myself frustrated that I was telling other people’s stories not my own. I don’t think I ever admitted this, even to myself, but at some level, a small but horribly insistent voice kept insinuating itself into my mind, whispering that there was something else, something more creative and personal, that I could be doing with my ‘skills’.
Eventually I listened. Outside of work, I started writing about things that interested and entertained me. I was quite surprised at some of the macabre, strange, fanciful, gothic and, frankly, camp scenes that leapt from my head to the page. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I was like Cecil B. DeMille directing a private and slightly mad epic. I’ve realised I don’t really do ‘small’. I’d love to pretend that I write with the precision and miraculous delicacy of Jane Austen, but, in truth, my characters and stories have a larger than life quality that owes a great deal to fairy tale, pantomime and the stage – the great obsessions of my childhood.
Actually, those passions have never gone away. They’ve clearly been marinating on a low flame for nearly half a century, but now they’re ready to serve and I’m grateful that despite the terrible things I put them through, my characters – the repertory company that lives in my head – still want to talk to me and tell me what happens next.
When they don’t, I’ll start to worry. ”
Clive Murphy, Poet, Oral Historian & Author of three novels – Summer Overtures, Freedom For Mr Mildew & Nigel Someone. Brigid Brophy wrote of Summer Overtures, “It makes angelic use of words (and sentences and paragraphs). It is lucid, cool, sly and inventive … may well be required reading, having become a classic.”
HOW TO WRITE YOUR FIRST NOVEL, 22nd & 23rd March, 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields
You may also like to read about
At The Smithfield Market Public Enquiry
Behold the winged lion on the Holborn Viaduct looking down protectively upon the Smithfield General Market, as – over at the Guildhall – the Public Enquiry that will decide the fate of this magnificent building designed by Horace Jones, the architect of Tower Bridge, reaches the end of its second week.
I went over yesterday as SAVE Britain’s Heritage began to outline their proposal which seeks the renovation of the building and its reopening as a retail market, in opposition to the plan by Henderson Global Investments which entails demolishing the structure and retaining only the facade as an apologia for three disproportionately-large office blocks that would sit behind it.
When I arrived, Chris Costelloe the Director of the Victorian Society, was championing the significance of the General Market as an integral part of the grandest procession of market buildings in Europe and its use as a market hall as intrinsic to the distinctive character of Smithfield, an area of cultural significance both within London and nationally. He gave no quarter to the developers’ advocates who maintained that retention of the old facades upon their new blocks was itself a form of conservation and were eager to refute the suggestion that the neglect of the building in recent years was in any sense deliberate upon their part.
“The public hasn’t been given enough information to envisage the potential of the market,” Clementine Cecil, the Director of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, explained to me afterwards, “It’s a classic situation – a building is boarded up and thus its architectural and historical significance is concealed.”
Yet Clementine was able to supply me with the photographs below that reveal the beautiful forgotten interior of the last market structure designed by Horace Jones after he had designed Central Smithfield, Leadenhall and Billingsgate. He rose to the engineering challenges posed by this problematic site, suspended over a railway line and upon a slope, with ingenuity and flair, devising hollow “Phoenix columns” that were strong enough to support the vast open roof while minimising the weight of the edifice.
If you care about the future of Smithfield, I urge you to join the audience at the Enquiry and demonstrate by your presence the importance of preserving London’s oldest market. The Smithfield Market Public Enquiry is open to the public at the Basinghall Suite, accessed via the Art Gallery, at the Guildhall in the City of London from 10am daily. There are four days remaining for the enquiry, today Friday 21st February and next week, Tuesday 25th, Wednesday 26th and Friday 28th February – the latter being the culmination of the enquiry with final submissions.
The vast dome at the heart of the Smithfield General Market
The magnificent roof span of an avenue in Horace Jones’ General Market
Horace Jones’ ingenious lightweight hollow “Phoenix columns” that support the roof span
A trading avenue within the General Market
About 40% of the Fish Market will be demolished as part of Henderson Global Investment’s plan
This part of the Fish Market could get demolished and reconstructed with an office block on top
You may also like to read about
Joan Brown, Secretary at Smithfield Market
Mortlake Jugs
Once, every household in London possessed an ale jug, in the days before it was safe to drink water or tea became widely affordable. These cheaply-produced salt-glazed stoneware items, that could be bought for a shilling or less, were prized for their sprigged decoration and often painstakingly repaired to extend their lives, and even prized for their visual appeal when broken and no longer of use.
All these jugs from the collection of Philip Mernick were produced in Mortlake, when potteries were being set up around London to supply the growing market for these household wares throughout the eighteenth century. The first of the Mortlake potteries was begun by John Sanders and taken over by his son William Sanders in 1745, while the second was opened by Benjamin Kishere who had worked for Sanders, and this was taken over by his son William Kishere in 1834.
These jugs appeal to me with their rich brown colouration that evokes the tones of crusty bread and their lively intricate decoration, mixing images of English country life with Classical motifs reminiscent of Wedgwood. Eighteenth-century Mortlake jugs are distinguished by the attenuated baluster shape that follows the form of ceramics in the medieval world yet is replaced in the early-nineteenth century by the more bulbous form of a jug which is still common today.
There is an attractive organic quality to these highly-wrought yet utilitarian artefacts, encrusted with decorative sprigs like barnacles upon a ship’s hull. They were once universally-familiar objects in homes and ale houses, and in daily use by Londoners of all classes.
1790s ale jug repaired with brass handle and engraved steel rim
A panel of “The Midnight Conversation” after a print by Hogarth
Classical motifs mixed with rural images
A panel of “Cupid’s Procession”
A woman on horseback portrayed on this jug
Agricultural implements and women riders
Toby Fillpot
Panel of Racehorses
Cupid’s procession with George III & Queen Charlotte and Prince of Wales & Caroline of Brunswick
Panel of “Cockerell on the Dungheap”
Panel of “The Two Boors”
Square- based jug of 1800/1810
Toby Fillpot
William Kishere, Pottery Mortlake, Surrey
You may also like to look at
Imaginary Libraries In The City Of London
The ever-ingenious Adam Dant has devised these illustrations, selected from his new book BIBLIOPOLIS, Imaginary Libraries in the City of London, proposing an alternative history for the Square Mile based upon Culture rather than Commerce. With each example, Adam has helpfully given us a photograph of the location today so that we may observe the remaining ‘evidence’ and share his vision of this strangely credible yet entirely fictitious version of the past.
The Subterranean Bovine Archive
The Bathhouse Library
The Walbrook Fluvial Shelves
The Guildhall Peripatecknicon Library
The Gresham Secretary
The Walbrook Stepped Library
The Candlewyke Lineamental Census
Gallic Oculus & Vitiarama
Stowe’s Raised Survey Diorama
Cheape Moralitorium
The Wall Reading Rooms
The Library By The Tree
The Debtors’ Library
The Library Of Compleat Replenishment
Jamaica Topoteque
Library On A Pole
Bibliothecque Incinis
An ape studies Adam Dant’s handsome new book
Copyright © Adam Dant
Signed copies from the hardback limited edition of three hundred copies of BIBLIOPOLIS, IMAGINARY LIBRARIES IN THE CITY OF LONDON are available direct from Adam Dant at £45 + £5 (postage & packing) adamdant@gmail.com
You may also like to take a look at
Last Days At WF Arber & Co Ltd
Gary Arber
Four years have passed since I first walked eastward through the freshly fallen snow across Weavers’ Fields on my way to visit Gary Arber, third generation incumbent of W.F. Arber & Co Ltd, the printing works in the Roman Rd opened by Gary’s grandfather Walter Francis Arber in 1897. Captivated by this apparent time capsule of a shop where little had changed in over a century, I was tempted to believe that it would always be there, yet I also knew it could not continue for ever.
“In October, I couldn’t find enough money from my takings to pay my business rates,” Gary admitted to me yesterday, “and that’s when I decided it was time to call it a day.” As the last in the family business, in recent years Gary had been pleasing himself. After three generations, the metal type is all worn out and so Gary let the machines run down, taking on less and less printing. Now he has put the building up for sale with Oliver Franklin and set May 28th, when his insurance runs out, as his date to vacate the premises.
Bearing the responsibility of custodian of the contents, a major question for Gary has been where to find a home for his collection of six printing presses which are of historic significance. I am pleased to report that he has given them to the Cat’s Eye Press in Happisburgh, Norfolk, who have agreed to restore them all to working order and put them to use again. Since he made his decision in October, Gary has been at work clearing up the sea of boxes and detritus that had accumulated to conceal the machines and yesterday I took advantage of this brief moment to see the presses in their glory before the process of taking them apart and transferring them to Norfolk commences later this week.
“It’s good to see them again after thirty years,” declared Gary, as he led me down the narrow staircase to the small basement print workshop where the six gleaming beasts are newly revealed from beneath the litter. In the far corner is the Wharfdale of 1900 that has not moved since it was installed brand new and, at the foot of the stairs, sits the Golding, also installed in 1900. The Wharfdale is a heavy rectangular machine that famously was used to print the Suffragettes’ posters while the more nimble Golding was employed to print their handbills. At WF Arber & Co Ltd it has not been forgotten that Gary’s grandmother Emily would not permit his grandfather to charge Mrs Pankhurst for this work.
The Heidelberg of 1939 is the last press still in full working order and Gary informed me that since World War II broke out after it was delivered, his father (also Walter Francis) had to pay the British Government for the cost of it, although he never discovered if the money was passed on to the Germans afterwards. Next to it, stands the eccentrically-shaped Lagonda of 1946 which we are informed by its future owner is believed to be the last working example in existence.
In between these two pairs, sit the big boys – two large post-war presses, a Mercedes Glockner of 1952 and Supermatic of 1950. Gazing around at these monstrous machines, sprouting pipes and spindles and knobs, Gary can recall them all working. In his mind, he can hear the fierce din and see those long-gone printers – Fred Carter, Alfie Watts, Stan Barton & Harry Harris among others – who worked here and wrote their names in pencil underneath the staircase. Sometime in the mid-fifties, alongside their names and dates, Gary wrote his name too, but instead of the date he wrote “all the time” – a statement amply confirmed by his continuing presence more than half a century later.
Yet Gary never set out to be a printer. He set out to fly Lincoln Bombers, only sacrificing his life as a pilot after his father’s premature death, in order to take over the family print works. “I bought myself out in 1954, but I would be dead by now if I had stayed on, retired and grown fat like all the rest,” he confided to me, rationalising his loss,“I’m the only one surviving of my crew and I can still lift a hundredweight.”
“I remember when I first came here to visit the toy shop upstairs as a child but I didn’t get a toy except for my birthday and at Christmas,” Gary informed me, “My grandfather always had his bowler hat on. He had two, his work bowler and his best bowler. He was a very strict and moral man, he raised money for hospitals and he was a governor of hospitals.”
We shall all miss WF Arber & Co Ltd, but it is far better that Gary chose to dispose of the business as it suits him, and wraps it up to his satisfaction, than be forced into it by external circumstances. After all these years, Gary Arber can rest in the knowledge that he has fulfilled his obligation in a way that pays due respect to both the Walter Francis Arbers that precede him.
The Wharfdale & The Glockner
The 1900 Golding that printed the Suffragettes’ handbills
The 1900 Wharfdale that printed the Suffragettes’ posters
The 1952 Mercedes Glockner
Gary was printing with this 1939 Heidelberg last week
The last known working Lagonda in the world, 1946
The 1950 Supermatic
Gary found his Uncle Albert’s helmet under one of the machines while clearing up. Albert was killed while in the fire service during World War II.
The printers wrote their names and dates in the fifties but Gary wrote “[here] all the time”
Read my other stories about Gary Arber
Peter Sargent, Butcher
Peter Sargent
In 1983, when Peter Sargent took on his shop, there were seven other butchers in Bethnal Green but now his is the only one left. Two years ago it looked like Peter’s might go the way of the rest, until he took the initiative of placing a discreet sign on the opposite side of the zebra crossing outside his shop. Directed at those on their way to the supermarket, it said, “Have a look in butcher’s opposite before you go in Tesco.”
This cheeky intervention raised the ire of the supermarket chain, won Peter a feature in the local paper and drew everyone’s attention to the plain truth that you get better quality meat at a better price at an independent butcher than at a supermarket.“Tesco threatened legal action,” admitted Peter, his eyes gleaming in defiance, “They came over while I was unloading my van to tell me they were serious, but I told them where to go.” Shortly afterwards, it was revealed that Tesco had been selling horsemeat and Peter left a bale of hay outside his shop. “I invited customers to drop it off if they were going across the road,” he revealed to me with a grin of triumph.
This unlikely incident proved to be a turning point for Peter’s business which has been in the ascendancy ever since. “There’s not many of my old East End customers left anymore and I was close to calling it a day,” he confided to me, “but I’ve found that the young people who are moving in, they want to buy their meat from a proper butcher’s shop.”
In celebration of this change of fortune in the local butchery trade, Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I paid a visit behind the counter recently to bring you this report, and we each came away with sawdust on our boots and the gift of a packet of the freshly-made sausages for which Peter’s shop is renowned.
“I started as a Saturday boy in Walthamstow, when I was sixteen, in 1970,” Peter told me, “and then it became a full-time job when I left school at eighteen.” Over the next ten years, Peter worked in each of half a dozen shops belonging to the same owner, including the one in Bethnal Green, until they all shut and he lost his job. Speaking with the bank that his ex-employer was in debt to, Peter agreed to take on the shop and, when they asked if he had a down payment, Peter’s wife Jackie produced ten pounds from her handbag.
Since then, Peter has been working twelve hours a day, six days a week, at his shop in Bethnal Green – arriving around eight each morning after a daily visit to Smithfield to collect supplies. “I love it and I hate it, I can’t leave it alone,” he confessed to me, placing a hand on his chest to indicate the depth of emotion, “it’s very exciting in a Saturday when all the customers arrive, but it can be depressing when nobody comes.”
Peter is supported by fellow butcher Vic Evenett and the pair make an amiable double-act behind the counter, ensuring that an atmosphere of good-humoured anarchy prevails. “I started as a ‘humper’ at Smithfield in 1964 for six years, then I had my own shop in Bow for twenty-three years, then one in Walthamstow Market, Caledonian Rd and Roman Rd, but none of them did very very well because I had to pay too much rent,” Vic informed me, “I came here twenty years ago to help Peter out for a few days and I stayed on.”
In a recent refit, an old advert was discovered pasted onto the wall and Peter had the new tiles placed around it so that customers may see the illustration of his shop when it was a tripe dresser in 1920. Yet Peter will tell you proudly that his shop actually dates from 1860 and he became visibly excited when I began talking about the centuries-old tradition of butchery in Whitechapel. And then he and Vic began exchanging significant glances as I explained how Dick Turpin is sometimes said to have been an apprentice butcher locally.
Thankfully, East Enders old and new took notice of Peter’s sign, “Have a look in butcher’s opposite before you go in Tesco,” and he and Vic – the last butchers in Bethnal Green – will be able to continue to make an honest living without the necessity of turning highwaymen.
Peter’s sign outside Tesco, July 2012
Excited customers on Saturday morning
Vic Evenett & Peter Sargent
Peter & Vic sold more than five hundred game birds last Christmas
The Butcher’s Shop, 374 Bethnal Green Rd, E2
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
You may also like to read about
At The Jewish Soup Kitchen
Originally established in 1854 in Leman St, the Jewish Soup Kitchen opened in Brune St in 1902 and, even though it closed in 1992, the building in Spitalfields still proclaims its purpose to the world in bold ceramic lettering across the fascia. These days few remember when it was supplying groceries to fifteen hundred people weekly, which makes Photographer Stuart Freedman’s pictures especially interesting as a glimpse of one of the last vestiges of the Jewish East End.
“After I finished studying Politics at university, I decided I wanted to be a photographer but I didn’t know how to do it,” Stuart recalled, contemplating these pictures taken in 1990 at the very beginning of his career. “Although I was brought up in Dalston, my father had grown up in Stepney in the thirties and, invariably, when we used to go walking together we always ended up in Petticoat Lane, which seemed to have a talismanic quality for him. So I think I was following in his footsteps.”
“I used to wander with my camera and, one day, I was just walking around taking pictures, when I moseyed in to the Soup Kitchen and said ‘Can I take photographs?’ and they said, ‘Yes.’ “I didn’t realise what I was doing because now they seem to be the only pictures of this place in existence. You could smell that area then – the smell of damp in old men’s coats and the poverty.”
For the past twenty years Stuart Freedman has worked internationally as a photojournalist, yet he was surprised to come upon new soup kitchens recently while on assignment in the north of England. “The poverty is back,” he revealed to me in regret,“which makes these pictures relevant all over again.”
Groceries awaiting collection
A volunteer offers a second hand coat to an old lady
An old woman collects her grocery allowance
A volunteer distributes donated groceries
View from behind the hatch
A couple await their food parcel
An ex-boxer arrives to collect his weekly rations
An old boxer’s portrait, taken while waiting to collect his groceries
An elderly man leaves the soup kitchen with his supplies
Photographs copyright © Stuart Freedman
Follow Stuart Freedman’s blog Umbra Sumus
You can read more about the Soup Kitchen here
You may also like to take a look at
