The Gentle Author’s Spitalfields Pub Crawl
In Spitalfields, I can undertake a pub crawl whenever I please without even leaving the parish.
The Golden Heart, Commercial St
The Pride of Spitalfields, Heneage St
Ten Bells, Commercial St
Commercial Tavern, Commercial St
Woodin’s Shades, Bishopsgate
Dirty Dick’s, Bishopsgate
Water Poet, Folgate St
The Magpie, New St
The Bell, Middlesex St
Duke of Wellington, Toynbee St
King’s Stores, Widegate St
The Gun, Brushfield St
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The Gentle Author’s Lantern Shows
The publication of my Album gives me a wonderful excuse to stage live presentations of some of the photos of London I love the most and, announcing the first shows today, gives me the opportunity to publish more unseen glass slides from the hundred year-old collection of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute – like this enigmatic picture of an unidentified street plastered with bills.
MY MAGIC LANTERN SHOW
Monday 28th October 7pm at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green Rd, E1
I will be showing and talking about my favourite pictures of London, both past & present.
Free admission but tickets must be reserved by emailing info@bricklanebookshop.co.uk
A NIGHT IN OLD LONDON
Thursday 31st October 6:30pm at Westminster Arts Library, Leicester Sq, WC2
I will be showing the lantern slides of London 100 years ago from the collection of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society with live piano accompaniment by David Power, the eighty-six-year-old Showman, and Henrietta Keeper, thirty-year-veteran of Tate & Lyle Concert Parties, will be singing the songs of old London.
Presented by Salon for the City and sponsored by Hendricks Gin
Tickets £7 & £4 available from We Go Tickets
If you are a bookseller in London and you would like me to come and do a magic lantern show in your shop before Christmas please email me spitalfieldslife@gmail.com. If you are a retailer and you would like to sell copies of The Gentle Author’s London Album please email bridgetlj@faber.co.uk who deals with trade orders.
Holborn Bars
Women shelling peas at Covent Garden Market
Graffitied doorway at Westminster School
The Monument
Leicester Sq
The throne of England, Westminster Abbey
In Fleet St
St George St, Hanover Sq
In Pump Court, Middle Temple
Chopping block & executioner’s mask at the Tower of London
Raven at the Tower of London
Rays of sunlight in St Bartholomew-the-Great
Unknown street with billboards
At the back of St Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield
Delivering newsprint to the News of the World and Boys Own Paper off Fleet St
Watch House at Newgate
Farringdon Rd
Funeral effigy of Nelson in Westminster Abbey
In Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Westminster Abbey
Paddington Station
St Ethelburga’s, Bishopsgate
St Lukes, Old St, on a foggy day
Lantern slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ
This course will examine the essential questions which must be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.
A few places are still available on my two-day course this weekend at The Guardian, 90 York Way, N1
Saturday 26th & Sunday 27th October, 10am – 5pm
Book your place online at Event Brite
At the Mannequin Factory
In the Museum Department
You are never alone at the mannequin factory. Wherever you turn at Proportion>London’s manufacturing operation in Walthamstow, there is always someone else in the room with you – and, even if these naked figures are inanimate, you cannot ignore their presence.
Eighty people work in the factory yet they are outnumbered by mannequins and, when Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I walked into the building, the first thing we saw were hordes of them lined up as far as the eye could see.
It might easily turn ugly if the mannequins decided to rebel but – fortunately – they are placid, waiting patiently for their time to go out into the world. Perhaps their good nature is explained by the love and care lavished upon them by their creators, producing well-balanced shop dummies with perfect bodies. Those created in this particular Eden are shameless in their nudity, even if their destiny lies in clothing. These are pedigree mannequins manufactured by Britain’s leading supplier for many of the most famous High St brands and fashion houses. More than eighty per cent migrate, constituting a global retail display diaspora originating from Walthamstow.
Built in 1911 for manufacturing buses to transport recruits to the First World War, the handsome factory in Blackhorse Lane has seen many incarnations – used for manufacturing chocolates and then footwear before it became the birthplace for a new race of mannequins in 2000. “Thirteen years ago, I was in shoe manufacturing,” explained Peter Ferstendik, the owner, “but the industry was destroyed by the Far East and we had no option but to cease production, so then I decided to buy this company and improve it.”
Seigel & Stockman was founded in Paris in 1867 and began trading in London in the nineteen-twenties, manufacturing paper maché dummies for couture houses and dressmakers’ showrooms, and benefitting from the rise of department stores. When Peter acquired the company, it was independent of the parent and operating with fifteen employees from a factory Old St, still making mannequins in the traditional manner as it had done for one hundred and thirty years.
Today, with five times the staff, Proportion>London produces fibreglass models alongside the original paper maché and has diversified into a wide range of display mannequins for retail and museum use that are continually redesigned and updated. “Our competitors copy our mannequins,” admitted Peter, with more than a hint of swagger,“but we are always a year ahead. The only time we should worry is if they stop copying us!”
Peter Ferstendik, Chairman of the company – “We live and breathe retail display”
Leon Silva, Supervisor for Paper Maché – “I am the only original employee from Old St – when I started here in 1993, we just had paper maché but now fibreglass is the thing.”
Mayur Bhadalia, Mould Maker – “Since 1987, I worked in this factory as a shoemaker, but in 2000 I became a mould maker.”
Mark Deans, Mould Maker – “I’ve always made models, since I was a boy”
Arjan Shbani & Basil Simoni, Laminators
Des Riviere & Dilhan Mustafa, wood finishers. Des – “When I started I did whole figures but now I just do arms.”
Ghazala Asghar, Anna Ostrowko & Amina Burosee
Andrew Thomas, Cleaner & Odd Jobs Man – “I used to pack chocolates here twenty years ago.”
Old museum dummies
George Bush & The Queen
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
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Remembering The Queen Elizabeth Hospital For Children
Playing at Doctor – A Scene in the Hospital for Children, Hackney Rd, Bethnal Green
The former Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in the Hackney Rd is a landmark of deep significance for generations of East Enders, yet a decision to flatten it and replace it with densely-built generic ‘new slums’ type flats has been made by Tower Hamlets Council, without any public consultation, dismissing the option of integrating the old building into the housing scheme. As the decision goes to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, on Wednesday this week there is one last chance to save it. So today, I sketch a brief history of the tradition of care that had its home there for over one hundred and twenty years in the hope that this will not be erased.
In 1867 – Quaker sisters, Ellen & Mary Elizabeth Phillips, established a Dispensary for Women & Children in two rented rooms in Virginia Rd, Shoreditch. The previous year, at the time of the cholera epidemic in the East End, Ellen had worked in the cholera wards at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel through a connection to Elizabeth Garret, Britain’s first woman doctor. By 1871, the sisters had the lease at 327 Hackney Rd, on the site that would one day become their custom-built hospital to minister exclusively to the needs of sick children.
Just three years later, they laid the foundation stone for the building in adjoining Goldsmith’s Row, attracting Royal patronage and the support of Oscar Wilde who wrote a poem for their fund-raising publication. The attractive terracotta sunflower freizes upon William Beck’s building reflect the Arts & Crafts style of this era and, throughout the interior, details of iron work and ceramic tiled floors continue this decorative theme. In 1904, the building on Hackney Rd was added, defining the triangular shape of the complex which continued to expand, acquiring additional buildings to fulfil the needs of the hospital throughout the twentieth century.
Amalgamation with the Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital in Shadwell in 1942 delivered the name by which it was most commonly known. Charles Dickens was patron of this hospital, that he found operating in a sail loft in 1869 and for which he raised money to build a dedicated hospital building.
Thus, two nineteenth century philanthropic ventures combined to create an institution that was absorbed into the National Health Service and closed at the end of the twentieth century when the services it offered were fulfilled elsewhere, rendering it defunct. Yet in 1974, it was the largest children’s teaching hospital in Britain with three hundred students every year and Victoria Holt, General Practitioner, remembers her time there fondly – as the most inspirational part of her training.
“I worked there in 1988 when I was training to be a GP in Hackney. The Hospital served the East End but it was also used by Great Ormond St as the place where their nurses were trained – they had to spend some time ‘roughing it’ in the East End. What was so special about the Queen Elizabeth was that it was the opposite of Great Ormond St, it didn’t have a rarified atmosphere. You could literally walk in the door and be seen in the Accident & Emergency Department. It was a genuinely open door policy, whoever you were and wherever you came from – people who had grown up in the East End would bring their children there from Essex because it felt like home to them.
The complete range of all children’s illnesses came through the door and I learnt to distinguish between a not-very-ill and a very-ill child really quickly. I learnt so much there, it meant that even though I was incredibly young, I had this depth of experience in paediactrics. It was about an ethos – there was a collective wisdom in the community – people understood that you took your sick children there, because that hospital had looked after their families for generations.”
Sign the petition to save the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Building here
The Queen Elizabeth Hospital closed in 1996
The Queen Elizabeth Hospital opened on this site in 1872
“Each nurse shall attend to the children with care and kindness, and use every endeavour to make them happy.” – from the Hospital Constitution of 1874
The Hackney Rd building opened in 1904
The Goldsmiths Row Building with its attractive sunflower freizes was opened in 1880
Victoria Holt is a GP who did part of her training at Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in 1988 – “The complete range of all children’s illnesses came through the door and I learnt to distinguish between a not-very-ill and a very-ill child really quickly. I learnt so much there…”
Portrait of Victoria Holt © Colin O’Brien
Archive images courtesy Prof Rob Higgins
At The Launch Of My Album
The crowds pour into Christ Church
In Spitalfields, the October dusk was gathering as the bells rang out through the narrow streets to summon the crowds and, when the great wooden doors swung open, the excited throng poured in to fill the magnificent baroque church.
But Crudgie, London’s most famous motorbicycle courier, celebrated for his great height and astonishing facial hair, was already inside. Ever ingenious at finding ways in, “Don’t people realise there is a side door? “ he queried with more than a hint of swagger. I showed him his portrait in my Album. “Oh! Couldn’t you have airbrushed my nose?” he gasped, exclaiming in surprise at seeing himself. “It’s a very fine nose, Crudgie,” I reassured him, as he took consolation in a glass of Truman’s beer.
Just that morning, I had collected the huge screen sewn together by the tailor in Hanbury St from fabric supplied by Crescent Trading in Quaker St, and now favourite images from the Album appeared shining like apparitions in the gloom of the old church. After all the months that designer David Pearson and I worked through the night to make the most beautiful Album that we could for you, it was a joy to see people taking up the treasured copies and leafing through them with eager curiosity now.
With newly-purchased copies under their arm, guests were enjoying Justin Gellatly’s spicy buns and slices of his enormous ‘Cathedral Loaf ‘served by the team from Leila’s Shop. One by one, people from the Album appeared as if they had stepped from its pages to join the party.
There were Punch & Judy Professors meeting Wax Ladies from Wentworth St meeting Boxers photographed by John Claridge. There was Gary Arber the printer, Henrietta Keeper the ballad singer, Sandra Esqulant the Queen of Spitalfields, Clive Murphy the Oral Historian, Viscountess Boudica the Trendsetter from Bethnal Green, Mister Mondo representing the Pellicci regulars, among many others – and Aaron Biber, London’s Oldest Barber at ninety-one years old, was guest of honour. Meanwhile in a corner, Barn the Spoon produced an unfeasibly large pile of wood chips as he took the opportunity to show off his bravura spoon-making abilities by knocking up a few examples for guests.
Then it was time to sit at a table and inscribe copies of my Album and enjoy the rare opportunity of this special occasion to meet you, the readers. It was an extraordinary moment, as I sat signing books – after writing more than fifteen hundred stories over the last four years and two months – to realise how far we have come together. And it fills me with excited anticipation to continue in my chosen path through the years that lie ahead and discover where it will all lead…
Event photographs by Simon Mooney & paparazzi shots by Jeremy Freedman
On bookshop duty, Charlie De Wet and friend enjoy a bracing drink before the doors open
Leila McAlister serves Justin Gellatly’s spicy buns with slices of caerphilly to Punch & Judy Professors
Glasses of Truman’s Swift & Swallow to quench our literary thirst
Stefan Dickers, Archivist at the Bishopsgate Institute, makes the speech of welcome
Admiring Adam Dant’s ‘The Map of Spitalfields Life’
Actor Harry Landis settles down to look at the Album
Paul Gardner regales Ros Niblett and Jo Waterhouse
Tate & Lyle Concert Party Veteran, Henrietta Keeper, sings
Roger Mills and Mavis Bullwinkle spotted in the crowd
Carrom Paul was teaching the rudiments of Carrom
At 91 years old, Aaron Biber London’s Oldest Barber, was guest of honour
Pearly Queens enjoy a chinwag
London’s most famous motorcycle courier, Crudgie, flirts with Joan Rose
Barn the Spoon quickly produced a pile of wood chips
King Sour performed his poems
Henrietta Keeper signed autographs for fans
Staff of Bishopsgate Institute performed as ‘The Costermongers’
Remembering Philip Christou of Gina’s Restaurant
Photographer, Jeremy Freedman, got out his ring flash and turned paparazzi, as you see below
Pictures above copyright © Simon Mooney
Pearly King grapples with Tayo & Abby Abimbola
Delwar Hussain and Julie Begum
Landlady of The Golden Heart & Queen of Spitalfields, Sandra Esqulant, & Rodney Archer, Aesthete
Photographers Bob Mazzer & Patricia Niven with Paul Bommer, Artist.
The glamorous Abimbola sisters of Franceskka Fabrics in Wentworth St
Henry Freedman with Philip Pittack of Crescent Trading
Angling Writer, John Andrews, & the Duchess
Cheers to the Spitalfields bell ringers!
The Truman’s van arrives at Christ Church
Paparazzi shots copyright © Jeremy Freedman
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Mr Pussy Gives His First Interview
Recently, Mr Pussy was featured by Tom Cox as ‘Literary Cat of the Week’ in Under the Paw.
Name?
Mr Pussy
Nicknames?
They call me ‘Rosemary’ as a tease sometimes – it is the name my first owner gave me as a kitten when she thought I was a girl. Hence the gender confusion.
Theme Tune?
Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner…
Age?
Twelve
Owners?
My first owner was a kind old lady called Valerie who loved gardening and taught me to love plants, but since her demise I live with the next generation.
Brief biography?
Born on the street in Mile End, then a wild five years in Devon catching rabbits and moorhens, but now back in the East End for good.
Catchphrase?
In the midst of life I woke to find myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London.
Favourite Habits?
Perching on a window sill and looking down imperiously. Licking up fresh running water in the sink. Sitting in patches of sunlight and on paper bags.
What constitutes a perfect evening for you?
Stretched out before the iron stove in an insensible stupor of warmth.
Favourite food?
I am partial to licking chicken liver pate off a finger.
Defining moment of your life?
The death of my mistress Valerie seven years ago. I search for her every day and still live by the routine that I established with her. I have not given up hope she might come back if I wait long enough. Like Hamlet, I wear my black coat in eternal mourning.
If you could do one thing to make the world a better place for felines what would it be?
Tell everyone to sit still.
If you could meet a celebrity who would it be and why?
William Shakespeare, because we share an instinctive appreciation of the lonely poetry of the night.
Here follows a selection of Mr Pussy’s photography
Interesting street art on Brick Lane
Masterpiece by Banksy
The cat that wrote the dictionary
Attractive public sculpture in Bloomsbury
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and take a look at
The Cats of Spitalfields (Part One)
The Return of Justin Piers Gellatly
I visited Justin at his new bakery where he is making us 500 spicy buns for the launch party tonight.
Justin & Louise Gellatly
I rose at four in the morning, walked down through the lonely City streets and crossed empty London Bridge to arrive at Borough Market where, in the shadow of Southwark Cathedral, Justin Piers Gellatly opened his new bakery recently. The reason I got up so early and why Justin’s progress is of such interest to me is that, for the last five years, I have been in thrall to his baking. Quite simply, Justin makes the best bread I ever tasted in my life. Some might describe him as a prince among bakers but I would call him the king.
This spring, after thirteen years, Justin left St John where he had been head baker, to take care of his sister who was unwell, but now he is back with a bakery of his own and he has brought his wife, Louise, along too. “I had planned to do something of my own eventually,” Justin admitted, “but Matt Jones of Bread Ahead offered me a partnership in the business, so I have complete control and I can do my own thing.”
It all started at a special service in Southwark Cathedral in September. “I made the sour dough starter in the Cathedral and the priest blessed it and I carried it back to the bakery and it’s gone like a rocket!” Justin confided to me, widening his eyes in wonder.
“We start at three or four in the morning and finish around twelve,” he continued wistfully, “we’re trying to avoid the nocturnal and see more daylight.” Across the other side of the bakery, Louise was man-handling heavy sacks. Previously a chef and now just a few weeks into her apprenticeship to her husband as a baker, she was making dough. “It’s the most important job,” Justin assured me while Louise wrestled with bags of flour,“but it’s also the least glamorous side of baking because it’s handling lots of heavy stuff.” Wiping perspiration from her brow and persevering with the task in hand, Louise did not disagree. “Louise is the focaccia queen,” he added in a respectful whisper, “she’s nailed it.”
With Justin wearing his square hat and Louise in her headscarf, and both swathed in their aprons, the pair look for all the world like medieval images of Mr & Mrs Noah from Noah’s Ark – and it was obvious they make an effective double act in the bakery too. “We have been together twenty-four years – since we were sixteen,” Justin revealed, “We ran off to Las Vegas and got married a few years back.”
The modestly sized new bakery supplies restaurants nearby and they sell their bread from a stall in the market six days a week – but soon they plan to open a baking school and teach others how to bake. “It will be a good thing,” Justin declared to me, turning evangelical, “because there’s not enough good bakers around.”
All this time, as we spoke, he had been working – taking the sour dough and white crusty loaves from their shaping baskets, tipping them onto the wooden peal (which he uses to put them in the oven), scoring them with a razor blade and baking them. Within fifty minutes, Justin was taking out his beautiful loaves, golden and brown, and they commenced their strange crackling sound as they cooled – which Justin calls ‘the loaves singing.’
Then it was on to making raisin bread and spelt bread and rye bread and ginger loaf and bread pudding and cheese & olive sticks – and thus the night wore away and the pile of Justin’s baking grew and grew, like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold. Blue dawn rose over London Bridge Station and the Shard became visible, as much of it that was not concealed by cloud. The first trains of commuters were rumbling overhead while, from Justin’s warm humid world below, the hot fresh bread was being carried away to local restaurants and cafes for breakfast service. Justin’s night of work had produced seven hundred beautiful loaves, every one checked by him to ensure it met his personal standard.
With enviable stamina, Justin & Louise carried on working furiously but weariness overcame me and so, laden with gifts from the bakery, I stumbled home through the City where the pavements were now filled with grey-faced office workers filing to their desks. It was not yet daylight when I fell into my bed in Spitalfields and dreamed of the seven kilo ‘Cathedral Loaf’ that Justin promised to bake for the launch of my Album tonight.
Bread Ahead, Bakery & Baking School, Cathedral St – Borough Market Stall, Mon – Sat
Read my other stories about Justin Piers Gellatly
Night in the Bakery at St John
