The Gentle Author’s Piccadilly Pub Crawl
I set out to explore the pubs of Piccadilly in search of some Dutch courage for my MAGIC LANTERN SHOW at Waterstones Piccadilly next Wednesday 5th February at 7pm, when I will be showing around a hundred favourite pictures from these pages and telling the stories of the people and the places. Tickets are free but should be booked by emailing events.piccadilly@waterstones.com Who will join me for a celebratory drink at The Red Lion in Crown Passage afterwards?
The Blue Posts in Rupert St, since 1842
The Chequers in Duke St, since 1839
The Queens Head in Denman Street, a free house since 1736
The Red Lion in Duke of York St ,since 1788
At The Queen’s Head
At The Coach & Horses in Greek St, since 1724
At The Blue Posts, Rupert St
At The Red Lion, Duke of York St
De Hems in Macclesfield St since 1900, formerly The Macclesfield since 1890 and The Horse & Dolphin since 1685
At The Red Lion, Duke of York St
Kings Arms in Shepherd Market since 1660, known as The Jolly Butcher during the Common Wealth
At the Red Lion, Duke of York St
The Golden Lion in King St since 1721. Originally, the pub for St James Theatre next door from 1835, demolished 1957.
The Criterion opened in 1873, this was where Sherlock Holmes first met Dr Watson
St James Tavern, Windmill St
Nineteenth century mirrors of The Red Lion
Hand & Racquet in Orange St since 1865, “A Little Pub with a Big Welcome”
The Red Lion in Crown Passage
Regulars at The Red Lion in Crown Passaage
The Red Lion in Crown Passage is reputed to be London’s second-oldest licensed pub
You may like to read about my previous pub crawls
The Gentle Author’s Next Pub Crawl
The Gentle Author’s Spitalfields Pub Crawl
The Gentle Author’s Dead Pubs Crawl
In The World Of Phlegm
Here is Phlegm working through the small hours of the damp, dark January night to complete his installation entitled The Bestiary, which opens today at the Howard Griffin Gallery, 189 Shoreditch High St. Last week, Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney & I braved the downpour to go along and offer our encouragement.
A street artist who became known for huge murals painted inside derelict factories in Salford and Rotherham, Phlegm has transformed the gallery beyond all recognition for his debut show. Since the middle of December, he has been at work lining the walls with an assortment of scrap timber, creating an irregular interior space that resembles a cave or the nest of some mythic creature. This is the lair of Phlegm.
At first you enter a maze of partitions, painted with specimen jars containing animals, as if you were approaching the private museum of some obsessive collector, greedily snaffling up every species in the natural world. Beyond, you find yourself in a large chamber with a sequence of large monochrome compositions painted in plaster relief upon the walls. You think of the prehistoric artists who painted the caves of Lascaux and you think of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and you think of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are – and Phlegm’s work is a little of all these things, and something more.
In Phlegm’s imaginative world, nature is an ambivalent force, brutal and violent, and burgeoning with sinister hybrids and aliens. To your right, an epic chase of animals hunting is scattered across the first wall, followed by a scene of the collection of eggs by semi-human creatures with stick-like limbs dressed in primitive Fair Isle shifts. At the rear, another creature crouches warily, carrying its young upon its back, while on the right a vessel is being loaded with specimens, just as we saw upon the shelves where we came in.
There is an exciting tension between the rough timber cladding, coated with plaster relief, and the finely hatched lines applied with an aerosol by Phlegm upon the surface, that pull the entire vision into focus, as if the whole thing were a mirage or nightmare hallucination conjured out of scrap. Yet Phlegm also exhibits a playful sensibility that underscores the comic book violence with a poignant levity, and the vitality of his work is irresistible.
A softly-spoken Northerner, with dark eyes, pale skin and locks down to his waist, Phlegm began as an illustrator – drawing elaborately detailed ink illustrations of his own private mythology and publishing them in zines, before transferring them onto walls at a vast scale. Like Roa, he has now become part of a global circuit of street artists, executing commissions in Canada, Norway, Sri Lanka, USA and elsewhere. This is Phlegm’s first gallery show and his first sculpture, and it is a breathtaking, wondrous thing to divert you in this grim season of the year.
Photographs (except first picture) copyright © Simon Mooney
You might also like to read about
Mannie Blankett, Hairdresser/Furrier/Lifeguard
Mannie Blankett
“You can call me ‘Jack Of All Trades’ if you want,” suggested Mannie with a characteristic grin of self-effacement, when I asked his profession, as if he were more concerned to make things easier for me than to assert his accomplishments. Such is the philosophical detachment of one born in 1917, who saw the passage of the twentieth century, who is the last of a family of six children, and is a man at peace with himself.
While the January afternoon light faded outside, I was privileged to spend a few hours with Mannie in the peace of his modern flat looking down upon the Petticoat Lane Market.
“As a youngster, I remember going to the Pavilion Theatre in the Whitechapel Rd and seeing the boxing and wrestling. It was full of people and very popular. That was a long time ago, the end of the thirties, so you can imagine how old I am. The boxing ring was in the middle of the theatre with seats all round and upon the stage. It can’t have been expensive because I didn’t have anything. It must have been pennies. I remember an American boxer came over called ‘Punchy’ Paul Shaffer who knocked out all his opponents in the first round and there was Max Krauser the wrestler, a heavyweight who won all his fights.
I was born in Jamaica St and I left the East End at twenty years old, when the family moved to Stamford Hill in 1937. Jamaica St had all these bug-ridden houses then. We used to call them ‘red bugs,’ and they came out in the summer. Six of us shared a three bedroom house and we had no back garden or bathroom, and we had an outside toilet. Opposite, there was company that did deliveries by horse and cart, collecting and transporting goods. There were few cars around then, very few people had them, just the milkman, the baker and the coalman. I wish I could remember more about the old days. As a kid, my mother used to take me up to Brick Lane to buy clothes and I remember the market in Whitechapel all along Mile End Waste
My parents came from Poland. My father Harry was a furrier who had his own business in the West End and my mother Sarah had six children to bring up. Blankett & Sons had workshops around Oxford St and Soho, and I had a brother who worked there with my father. I went to South St School, then I won a scholarship to Mile End School in Myrdle St and I was supposed to stay until sixteen, but my mother took me out at fourteen. I didn’t want to work as a furrier, instead I worked as a hairdresser all over the East End, before my mother sent me to a hairdressing school to learn my trade for three years but I wasn’t keen on that – the hours were very long, eight in the morning until eight at night – so I went into the family business after all.
I worked there for a couple of years and I learnt all the parts of the trade, making patterns, cutting and nailing. At lunchtimes, I used to go swimming and sunbathing at the Serpentine Lido and I got chatting with the attendant and he said there was a job going as a lifeguard and suggested I apply. I worked at the Lido for five years, it was a seasonal job from Easter until September. At school, I had learnt to swim and won a bronze medal for lifesaving. I was in my late teens and I loved that job. In our English summers, you get weeks of rain and we used to sit and play chess all day.
I always wanted to travel and, one day, I saw an advert in the London Times offering return tickets to India for seventy-five pounds. So I got a ticket and it was to travel overland, so it took a month just to get there! I met this young lady, Pat Evans, and we used to write to each other. When I went to India, I gave up my flat in Blandford St, so she said, ‘When you come back you can stay at my place in Croydon for a night, if you need somewhere.’ I stayed ten years until she died. She used to do a bit of writing, she wrote stories and poems for magazines and had quite a few published. In Croydon, I got a job at the swimming pool in Purley Way, opposite where the old airport and I was there for five years.
I got called up in 1943 for three years and, when I came out, I did a bit of hairdressing and part-time work in the family business to get by. In the sixties, I worked in Housman’s Radical Bookshop in the Caledonian Rd and I was in the Peace Movement. I joined Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and became one of the Committee of One Hundred, including Bertrand Russell, Arnold Wesker, Christopher Logue and Vanessa Redgrave. We had demonstrations and, when they were arrested, we would step in to fill their places – I was arrested a number of times too.
When I was in Croydon, I got friendly with a guy who liked to dress up in uniform and do historical re-enactments, and he told me there was a VE Day Celebration coming up in the East End and they had two big bands playing including one led by Glenn Miller’s brother. So we went along and I met this woman who lived in Petticoat Sq. She was called Rene Rabin and that was twenty-five years ago. That was how I came back to the East End, to live in Middlesex St. Now I’ve lived in Petticoat Lane for twenty years and I like it round here. I have travelled a full circle in my life. “
Mannie with his sister Anne and their parents Sarah and Harry Blankett in the thirties
The Pavilion Theatre as Mannie knew it in the thirties
In his flat in Petticoat Sq, Mannie Blankett looks down upon the Petticoat Lane Market
You may also like to read these other Petticoat Lane Stories
Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane
Billy & Charley’s Reliquaries
Courtesy of Philip Mernick, here are more of the wonderful zany works of Billy & Charley, the celebrated East End mudlarks-turned-forgers who created thousands of fake antiquities known as ‘Shadwell Shams,’ that successfully fooled the archaeological establishment in the nineteenth century.
There is a extra level of irony to these reliquaries, once produced to contain sacred relics, such as pieces of the’ true cross’ or body parts of saints which were believed to convey special powers to the owner, since they were always fakes produced to exploit the credulous and thus Billy & Charley were manufacturing fakes of fakes.
This is a fake Billy & Charley medallion given away with a women’s magazine in the nineteen-fifties – can anyone tell us which magazine?
These are plates of medieval pilgrim badges from Charles Roach Smith’s Collectanea Antiqua, Volume II, 1848, that Billy & Charley may have used as the basis for their own designs
Plate from The Antiquaries Journal 1846
One of Billy & Charley’s ‘Shadwell Shams’ perhaps inspired by the historical engraving above
You may also like to take a look at
From My Scrap Collection
For some time, I have been collecting Victorian scraps of tradesmen and street characters, and putting them in a drawer. So these damp days at the end of January gave me the ideal opportunity to search through the contents and study my collection in detail. I am especially fascinated by the mixture of whimsical fantasy and social observation in these colourful miniatures, in which even the comic grotesques are derived from the daily reality of the collectors who once cherished these images.
Street Photographer
Exotic Birds
Sweets & Dainties
Acrobat & Performing Dog
Performing Dogs
The Muffin Man
Street Musician
Street Musician
Baker
Smoker
Butcher
Waiter
Itinerant
Sweep
Naturalist
Lounge Lizard
Dustman
Costermonger
Spraying the roads
Milkman
Knife Grinder
Scottish Herring Girls followed the shoals around the East Coast, gutting and packing the herring.
Herring Girl
You may like to see these other scraps from my collection
The Gentle Author in Piccadilly
Next week, I shall be climbing aboard a number twenty-three bus at Liverpool St Station and going up west to alight in Piccadilly Circus, then walking down Piccadilly to just where this photograph was taken and entering Joseph Edgerton’s modernist shop front of 1935 that you can see on the right.
Originally opened as Simpsons of Piccadilly, today it is Britain’s largest Waterstones bookshop where I shall be giving a MAGIC LANTERN SHOW at 7pm next Wednesday 5th February showing one hundred of my favourite photographs of London old and new, selected from more than sixteen thousand pictures I have published on these pages, and telling the stories of the people and the places. It is my honour to present this as the inaugural event in The London Salon and tickets are free but should be reserved by emailing events.piccadilly@waterstones.com
Contemplating my trip to the West End inspired me to take a look through the collection of thousands of glass slides, once used for education lectures by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society around a century ago at the Bishopsgate Institute, and show you these old photographs of Piccadilly.
Piccadilly Circus was my first view of London as I ascended the steep staircase from the underground on the western side and later, when I came to reside here, I felt that unless I went through Piccadilly at least weekly I was not really living in London. Stephen Spender once told me that he also enjoyed passing through Piccadilly and the thrill of feeling that he was at the centre of the world and – although I hardly ever seem to go there these days – whenever I see the cylindrical structure at the core of Piccadilly Circus, I still cannot resist the notion that it is the hub around which the earth revolves.
Rush hour in Piccadilly c.1900
Piccadilly Circus, c.1900
Piccadilly Circus in the fog, c1910
Piccadilly Circus, c.1880
Piccadilly Circus, c.1930
In Piccadilly Circus, c. 1910
In Piccadilly, c.1920
In Regent St, c.1900
Outside the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, c.1930
Old shop in Haymarket, c. 1900
The Haymarket Theatre, c.1900
The Ritz Hotel, c. 1900
Commissionaire, c. 1930
Piccadilly and Green Park, c.1890
Walking down Piccadilly beside Green Park at the time of Victoria’s Jubilee, 1897
Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner, c.1910
Strolling at Hyde Park Corner, c.1920
St James Palace, c. 1900
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S MAGIC LANTERN SHOW, Waterstones Bookshop in Piccadilly, 7pm Wednesday 5th February
You may also like to take a look at
The Lantern Slides of Old London
The High Days & Holidays of Old London
The Fogs & Smogs of Old London
The Forgotten Corners of Old London
The Statues & Effigies of Old London
The City Churches of Old London
Giorgione In Clapton
You enter a disused tramshed in Clapton, climb a ramshackle staircase and discover yourself in the studio of Giorgione, one of the greatest Venetian artists of the High Renaissance, who died in 1510. How can this be? Here in a room of comparable size to one of the smaller chambers at the National Gallery you are confronted with an array of masterpieces – familiar works, like Giorgione’s most famous painting The Tempest, surrounded by others that were thought to be lost, known only by engravings. Potentially the lair of an art thief or a master forger, it is some kind of miracle you have stumbled upon.
Neither thief nor forger, the magus responsible for working this magic is Danny Easterbrook who has devoted the last sixteen years to repainting the canon of works of Giorgione at the rate of three a year, using all the correct pigments and practices of Giorgione’s time. It is an extraordinary project rendered all the more astonishing by its location in this deserted tramshed and thus it is no surprise to discover that Danny is almost as passionate about the building as he is about Giorgione.
“The Tudor palace of Brooke House, dating from 1470, stood across the road from here until it was demolished in 1955,” Danny explained, widening his eyes in wonder, “The stables and coach yard for Brooke House were on this side of the road, becoming the Clapton Coachworks and, in 1873, The Lea Bridge Tramway Depot.”
The tramshed was shut more than a century ago, when the system switched from horsepower to electricity in 1907, and since then the buildings have served as a warehouse for Jack Cohen, the founder of Tesco, and as the home to the Odessa recording studios, employed by Iron Maiden, Dire Straits, The Police and Pete Doherty among others. Until recently, the entire complex was in use as artists’ studios and crafts workshops, but they have all gone now, except Danny and a small company selling foam rubber.
The imminent demolition of the building underscores the melancholy of Giorgione’s dreamlike paintings, that emphasise the transient, ephemeral nature of the world, and colours Danny’s quest to recover something lost centuries ago. Vasari believed Giorgione to be the peer of Leonardo and Michelangelo, yet today only a handful of paintings are ascribed to him and his reputation has faded to an enigma that matches the mysterious nature of his subjects. “We don’t know much about Giorgione, he died young and he’s been obscured by Titian, who was his pupil,” admitted Danny with a frown, “Many of his paintings have been taken away from him and given to Titian.”
“When I came to London from New Zealand in the seventies, I was a bass player,” Danny revealed, speaking of his own past,“but a painter lived across the road and it sparked my interest. Since the late eighties, I’ve been painting and making lutes.” Then he took one from a whole line of different lutes he had made, hanging upon the wall, and began to improvise upon it with the ease of a virtuoso, and I realised I was in the company of a genuine Renaissance man.
A talented individual with a fierce scholarly intelligence, Danny has immersed himself in Venetian culture of Giorgione’s time, exploring the provenance of disputed works, and – in his versions – removing overpainting and images that have been added, in order to get closer to Giorgione. Through his intimate understanding of Giorgione, Danny seeks to restore the reputation of his beloved master by demonstrating the true range of his achievements in painting.
It is an endeavour that sits somewhere in between art history and conceptual art, and Danny’s accomplishment is breathtaking – even manufacturing elaborate gilt frames for each of the paintings in the authentic method. You look around the room and you realise you are seeing something impossible, something even Giorgione never saw – all his works in one room. Through comparison, Danny is beginning to construct a tentative sequence of Giorgione’s paintings and also, through comparison, to establish that paintings misattributed to others are in fact the work of Giorgione.
Ten years ago, Danny spent a year putting a new roof on his studio which is also his home, high up in the former stables of the former tramshed. He has been a good custodian of a dignified old building but now he is forced to leave, he can find nowhere else in Hackney to continue his project and is looking at moving to Wales or the West Country. “When I came here it was cheap and you didn’t have to work a sixty hour week just to pay the rent, it was a perfect space for what I wanted,” he confessed to me regretfully.
Yet it is apparent that Danny’s visionary project will carry him forward wherever he goes. “I believe Giorgione painted sixty or so paintings,” he admitted to me, “and if I live long enough I’ll run out of paintings to paint.”
Danny Easterbrook
Danny Easterbrook’s studio
A corner of the studio
The old stableyard
A blacksmith operated from here until recently
A ring to tether a horse
This foam rubber company is the last business still operating in the tramshed
A hidden passage at the tramshed
A secret yard at the tramshed
The North Metropolitan Tramways Company Depot was opened in 1873
Rails where the trams once ran
Brooke House in the twenties
Brooke House in the eighteen-eighties, drawn in the style of Wenceslas Hollar
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
