Andrew Coram’s Toby Jugs
Look at the old men, sitting lined up with their flasks of ale to watch the rain falling. They are late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Toby jugs and this is Andrew Coram’s antique shop, Beedell Coram at 86 Commercial St, which has London’s most consistently-fascinating window displays.
These curious characters only appeared at the beginning of this week and, in spite of one-hundred-mile-an-hour gusts, I halted in my path to peer from beneath my umbrella through the window and admire their ugly mugs, returning my glance with glazed expressions. Toby jugs have fallen from popularity in recent generations thanks to the proliferation of homogenised versions in the last century – but those in Andrew’s collection all date from before 1820 and, in their vividly-caricatured features and fine details, they have the authentic grotesque vigour of folk art which sets them apart from the banality of their mass-produced descendants.
“Toby Fillpot was a notorious Yorkshire drunkard whose real name was Harry Elwes,” Andrew informed me authoritatively, positing his theory of the origin of these charismatic designs when we convened in his shop yesterday, sheltering from a particularly virulent downpour. “It should be a full length figure sitting with a flask and a pipe, and wearing an eighteenth century frock coat and a tricorn hat,” he continued, admiring his treasured specimens that he acquired from a collector in Wales.
“I like the anthropomorphic quality,” Andrew admitted to me with relish, “the uglier the better.”
Look at the old men, sitting lined up with their flasks of ale to watch the rain falling
Pearlware Toby jug with stopper, early nineteenth century
London Salt Glaze, late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century Toby jug
Ralph Wood type Toby Jug with pipe, c. 1790
Sponge ware Toby jug, c. 1790
Hearty Goodfellow, early nineteenth century Staffordshire figure
“With my pipe in one hand & jug in the other
I drink to my Neighbour & Friend
My cares in a whiff of tobacco I’ll smother
For Life you know shortly must end”
Small Toby jug, c. 1800
Toby Fillpot, etching by Robert Dighton 1786
From his shop window, antiques dealer Andrew Coram watches the rain falling upon Spitalfields
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Emily Webber’s East End Shop Fronts
Hanbury St, E1
Ten years ago, Emily Webber began photographing London Shop Fronts and now she has collected more than fifteen hundred fine examples across the capital, from which these East End favourites are selected. “I was initially fascinated with the fonts, but after a step back I started to look at the whole picture,” Emily explained to me, “I choose shops that look like they have a story to tell. I look for clues — worn signage or a sign that is half written-over, a tile design, any mark of individuality. These premises are the overlooked backdrop to our city and already a fair few have gone or changed their appearance.”
Copper Mill Lane, E17
Kenworthy Rd, E5
High Rd, Leyton, E10
Sandringham RD, E8
Casenove Rd, N16
Mile End Rd, E3
High Rd, Leyton, E10
Lower Clapton Rd, E5
Kingsland Rd, N16
Mile End Rd, E1
Whitechapel High St, E1
Wentworth St, E1
Bethnal Green Rd, E2
Grove Rd, E2
East India Dock Rd, E14
Bethnal Green Rd, E2
Chatsworth Rd, E5
Clarence Rd, E5
Roman Rd, E2
Graham Rd, E8
Bethnal Green Rd, E8
Lea Bridge Rd, E10
Well St, E9
Church St, N16
Lower Clapton Rd, E8
Roman Rd, E2
Whitechapel Rd, E1
Chatsworth Rd, E5
Rectory Rd, N16
Photographs copyright © Emily Webber
Emily is planning a book of her shop frontsand you can subscribe to updates here
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Alan Dein’s East End Shop Fronts, 1988
More of Alan Dein’s East End Shop Fronts
Eleanor Crow’s East End Fish Shops
Izis Bidermanas’ London
Lithuanian-born Israel Bidermanas (1911-1980) first achieved recognition under the identity of Izis for his portraits of members of the French resistance that he took while in hiding near Limoges at the time of the German invasion. Encouraged by Brassai, he pursued a career as a professional photographer in peacetime, fulfilling commissions for Paris Match and befriending Jacques Prévert and Marc Chagall. He and Prévert were inveterate urban wanderers and in 1952 they published ‘Charmes de Londres,’ delivering this vivid and poetic vision of the shabby old capital in the threadbare post-war years.
In the cemetery of St John, Wapping
Milk cart in Gordon Sq, Bloomsbury
At Club Row animal market, Spitalfields
The Nag’s Head, Kinnerton St, W1
In Pennyfields, Limehouse
Palace St, Westminster
Ties on sale in Ming St, Limehouse
Greengrocer, Kings Rd, Chelsea
Diver in the London Docks
Organ Grinder, Shaftesbury Ave, Piccadilly
Sphinx, Chiswick Park
Hampden Crescent, W2
Underhill Passage, Camden Town
Braithwaite Arches, Wheler St, Spitalfields
East India Dock Rd, Limehouse
Musical instrument seller, Petticoat Lane
Grosvenor Crescent Mews, Hyde Park Corner
Unloading in the London Docks
London Electricity Board Apprentices
On the waterfront at Greenwich
Tower Bridge
Photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Melvyn Reeves, Retired Civil Servant
Here is Melvyn at the Jane St Coronation Party in Stepney in June 1953. He is the one with the curls at the centre on the right, and to left you can see the legendary flyweight champion Smilin’ Sammy McCarthy bringing a touch of his celebrity glamour to the occasion. No wonder Melvyn was astonished at the drama and excitement of his childhood world in Jane St, and chose never to leave this favoured corner of the East End.
“When people call me a stick-in-the-mud, I say, ‘Yes!'” Melvyn admitted to me with a triumphant smile, “When they ask me, ‘Why did live you with your family, why didn’t you move away?’ I always say, ‘Why?'” When I went to my college interview, they said ‘Have you listed your university preferences in order of their distance from your home?’ and I said, ‘Yes, that’s right!” And I went to Queen Mary University in Mile End and got a first class degree in Maths.”
In 1961 Melvyn’s family moved from Jane St, when it was demolished, into a newly-built council flat just a few streets away. Fifty-three years later, Melvyn lives there alone – now that his parents have died and his sister has moved away. “I used to be fat but after I lost my mum it fell away and I went from eleven and a half stone to eight and a half stone,” he revealed. Yet Melvyn is happy to be at the centre of his own personal universe and, after a decade of being the sole occupant, he is contemplating the bold step of having the place redecorated this spring and replacing the chintz curtains and floral carpet with decor that suits his personal taste.
“I do miss having someone to argue with and someone to tell me what to do,” he confessed to me when I visited him there one rainy afternoon last week.
“I was born at the Maternity Hospital in Commercial Rd on 8th December 1949, I grew up in Jane St and I moved here with my mum, dad and sister when I was eleven. My mum was very upset when Jane St was demolished as a Slum Clearance because it wasn’t a slum! They used to have a contest to see who had the cleanest front step in the street.
We were the last family left in the street to go and it got very eerie. She had offers to move out to lots of places beyond the East End but she turned them all down and the lady from the council said, ‘If you keep turning them down, you’ll have nowhere.’ Then they suggested the Mountmorres Estate and we didn’t know where it was, but as soon as she realised it was nearby she was quite happy. She had been born just two streets away in Fenton St and she was reluctant to leave Jane St, but she was pleased when we got here because before we had no bathroom and only an outside toilet.
We weren’t poor, we were just the same as everybody else in the street. Those houses would be worth one and a half million each if we had them now. The first immigrants in Jane St were a Cypriot family at the top of the street and we children were too scared to go near them. There was a guy called ‘Dirty Dick’ who had a cockerel than ran out into the street, we never went near his house either. If we played football at the far end of Jane St, the mothers would come out of the houses and say, ‘You don’t live at this end of street, go back to your own end and play football.’ So I guess we were quite parochial in our way.”
Once he graduated from Queen Mary University, Melvyn returned to the Central Foundation Boys School in Old St where had been a pupil to work as a teacher. “I was only there for four years, but people locally still know me as Mr Reeves the Maths Teacher,” he told me, amused at the persistence of this former identity nearly forty years later. “I have never worked more than five miles from Stepney,” he continued, revelling at his personal success in securing an entire career of employment close to home, working as an Inspector for the Inland Revenue and then in IT at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs before retiring ten years ago.
Recently, Melvyn visited Mulberry School, built upon the site of his former home in Jane St, and showed the pupils his Coronation Party photograph as evidence of the wonders that once were there – and in the hope that they may have the good sense to follow his own example and enjoy the benefits of staying put.
“My Russian grandfather, Hyem Ryefsky, was born in Novgorod in 1878 and died in Stepney in 1953”
“My Polish grandfather Henry Laibglit was born in Warsaw in 1880 and died in Stepney in 1967. He fought at Ypres during the First World War. He came to this country around 1900 and was a Market Trader in Petticoat Lane until the late fifties, selling all types of luggage and suitcases.”
“My mum – Leah Esther (nee Laibglit), known as “Lily”, born on 28 April 1915 and died in May 2003.”
Lily’s Freedom Pass
Melvyn as a baby in Jane St with his dad and cousin Arnold “My Dad – Abraham, commonly known as “Alf”, was born on 20th June 1914 and died in June 1998. He was a cabinet maker before the war, a skilled riveter during the War and worked afterwards for the Post Office, sorting letters at the Eastern District Office in Whitechapel”
Melyvn as a toddler
Melvyn’s first car
Melvyn and his sister Sheree
Melvyn on holiday at the seaside with his Aunt Polly
Melvyn with his parents Lily & Alf and his sister Sheree
Melvyn as a schoolboy
Melyvn and his dad have a bit of fun
Melvyn at his Bar Mitzvah
The receipt for Melvyn’s Bar Mitzvah party in Whitechapel, 1962
Melvyn as a young man
Melvyn at the recent wedding of his neighbour Nurul Islam
Melvyn Reeves
Images courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
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At The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Water Gate at Greenwich
When Queen Mary commissioned Christopher Wren in 1694 to build the Royal Hospital for Seamen, offering sheltered housing to sailors who were invalid or retired, she instructed him to “build the Fabrick with Great Magnificence and Order” and there is no question his buildings at Greenwich fulfil this brief superlatively. On a bright February morning, you may discover yourself the only visitor – as I did last week – and stroll among these august structures as if they existed solely for your pleasure in savouring their ingenious geometry and dramatic spatial effects.
Since the fifteenth century, the Palace of Pleasaunce commanded the bend in the river here, where Henry VIII was born in 1491 and Elizabeth I in 1533. Yet Inigo Jones’ Queen’s House built for Anne of Denmark and the words ‘Carolus Rex’ upon the eastern extremity of the Admiral’s House, originally begun in 1660 as a palace for Charles I, are the only visible evidence today of this former royal residence abandoned at the time of the English Civil War.
It was Wren’s ingenuity to work with the existing buildings, sublimating them within the seamless unity of his own grandiose design by replicating the unfinished fragment of Charles’ palace to deliver magnificent symmetry, and enfolding Inigo Jones’ house within extended colonnades. The observant eye may also discern a dramatic overstatement of scale in architectural details that is characteristic of Nicholas Hawskmoor who was employed here as Wren’s Clerk of Works.
From 1705, the hospital for seamen provided modest, wood-lined cabins as a home-from-home for those who had spent their working lives at sea, reaching as many as two-thousand-seven-hundred residents at its peak in 1814, until superceded in 1869 by the Royal Naval College that left in 1995. Today the University of Greenwich and Trinity School of Music occupy these lofty halls but, in spite of its overly-demonstrative architecture, this has always been a working place inhabited by large numbers of people and the buildings suit their current purpose sympathetically .
The Painted Hall is the tour-de-force of this complex, guaranteed to deliver a euphoric experience even to the idle visitor. Here the Greenwich Pensioners in their blue uniforms ate their dinners until James Thornhill spent eighteen years painting the walls and ceiling with epic scenes in the classical style celebrating British sea power and it was deemed too grand for anything but special occasions. Yet down below, the home-made skittles alley brings you closer to the domestic lives of the former residents – who once enjoyed fierce after-dinner contests here using practice cannon balls as bowling balls.
Exterior of the Painted Hall
The Chapel
King William Court
King William Court
The Admiral’s House was originally built as a residence for Charles I. Abandoned in the Civil War, Queen Anne commissioned Wren to rehabilitate the unfinished palace as part of his design for the Royal Hospital for Seaman which opened in 1705
Inspired by the Elgin marbles, the elaborate pediment in Coade stone is a tribute to Lord Nelson
Exterior of the Painted Hall
Pump and mounting block in Queen Anne Court
The chapel was completed to Wren’s design in 1751 and redesigned by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart in 1781
Plasterwork by John Papworth
Queen Anne Court
In the Painted Hall
Begun in 1708, Sir James Thornhill’s murals in the Painted Hall took nineteen years to complete
Man with a flagon of beer from Henry VIII’s Greenwich Palace
Man with a flask of gin from Henry VIII’s Greenwich Palace
The Skittles Alley of the eighteen-sixties, where practice cannon balls serve as bowling balls
Entrance to the Old Royal Naval College
The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, is open daily 11:00 – 5:00 Admission Free
Geoff Perrior, Photographer
Geoff Perrior
This small cache of Geoff Perrior’s photographs of Spitalfields taken in the nineteen-seventies was deposited recently at the Bishopsgate Institute Library by his widow Betty Perrior. Fascinated to learn more of the man behind these pictures, I spoke with Betty yesterday in Brentwood where she and Geoff lived happily for the last forty-two years.
“He was a character,” she recalled fondly, “he belonged to eight different societies and he was a member of the Brentwood Photography Club for fifty-three years, becoming Secretary and then President.”
“He started off with a little Voightlander camera when he was a youngster, but he graduated to a Canon and eventually a Nikon. He said to me, ‘I can afford the body of the Canon and I’ll buy a lens and pay for it over a year.’ Then he sold it and bought a Nikon. He only switched to digital reluctantly because he thought it was rubbish, yet he came round to it in the end. For twenty years, we did all our own developing in black and white.
Geoff & I met at WH Smith. I had worked at WH Smith in Salisbury for twelve years before I went on a staff training course at Hambleden House in Kensington and Geoff was there. We just clicked. That was in July, we were engaged in October and married a year later. I was forty-four and we were both devoted, my only regret is that we had just forty-two years together.
Geoff worked for WH Smith for thirty-seven years and for thirty years he was Newspaper Manager at Liverpool St Station, but he never took photographs in the station because it was private property. He used to do the photography after he had done the early shift. He got up at three-thirty in the morning to go to work and he finished at midday. Then he went down to Spitalfields. One of the chaps by the bonfire called out to him, ‘I love this life!’ and, one day, Geoffrey was about to take out ten pounds from his wallet and give it to one of them, when the vicar came by and said, ‘Don’t do that, they’ll only spend it on meths – buy him a dozen buns instead.’
Geoff had a rapport with anybody and everybody, and more than two hundred people turned up to his funeral. I have given most of Geoff’s pictures away to charity shops and they always sell really quickly, I have just kept a selection of favourites for myself – to remind me of him.”
Geoff Perrior
Sitting by the bonfire in Brushfield St
“Got a light, Tosh?”
In Brushfield St
In Toynbee St
Spitalfields Market porter
In Brushfield St
In Petticoat Lane
In Brushfield St
In Toynbee St
In Brushfield St
In Brushfield St
Spitalfields market porter in Crispin St
In Brune St
In Brushfield St
In Brushfield St
Images courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
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Dennis Anthony’s Petticoat Lane
Adam Dant’s Map Of Budge Row
Click on the map to enlarge and learn about Budge Row
It seems almost unimaginable now to envisage the City of London when it was densely populated and packed with thriving small trades, before the residents departed and the financial industry took over to deliver the Square Mile as we know it today. Yet London’s most creative cartographer, Adam Dant’s, new map of Budge Row is a just such an endeavour – by conjuring the multifarious life of one street in the City which no longer exists.
“I chose Budge Row as, like Bucklersbury and Walbrook, it has its roots in the birth of mercantile London, plus it was the site of the worship place of retired Roman soldiers known as the Mithraeum,” Adam admitted to me, “but if you visit it at this moment there is just a huge hole in ground – though I understand the new development plans to reinstate the street diagonally through the building as an indoor shopping causeway.”
Yesterday, Adam & I climbed up onto the roof of Number One Poultry to look down upon the site of the former Budge Row, now engulfed by the City’s largest building site, and wondered at the lost industry and culture of two thousand years in a single thoroughfare. “I think there’s a moment of recognition for Londoners, when they pass by and look into these huge excavations, of their part in a general urban continuum,” said Adam, thinking out loud, as we both peered down into the construction site.
Adam Dant in the City of London with the site of former Budge Row in the background
Budge Row is to be seen in the bottom left corner of this 1720 map of the City
Map copyright © Adam Dant
Bowing to popular demand, Adam Dant has agreed to produce a limited edition of his MAP OF THE COFFEE HOUSES. If you are interested to acquire a copy, email adamdant@googlemail.com
