Christmas Stories
Illustration by Mark Hearld
Bell by Rob Ryan
The Fogs & Smogs of Old London
St. Martin, Ludgate with St. Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1900
At this time of year, when dusk gathers in the mid-afternoon, a certain fog drifts into my brain and the city itself grows mutable as the looming buildings outside my window merge into a dark labyrinth of shadows beyond. Yet this is as nothing compared with the smog of old London, when a million coal fires polluted the atmosphere with clouds of filthy black smoke carrying noxious fumes, infections and lung diseases. In old London, the city resounded with a symphony of fog horns on the river and thousands of people coughing in the street.
Looking at these glass slides of a century ago, once used for magic lantern shows by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute, the fogs and smogs of old London take on quite another meaning. They manifest the proverbial mythic “mists of time,” the miasma wherein is lost all of human history, save the sketchy outline that some idle writer or other jotted down. Just as gauzes at the pantomime conjure the romance of fairyland, the hazes in these pictures filter and soften the images as if they were faded memories, receding into the past.
The closer I examine these views, the more I wonder whether the fog is, in some cases, an apparition called forth by the photographic process itself – the result of a smeary lens or grime on the glass plate, or simply an accident of exposure. Even so, this photographic fogging is no less evocative of old London than the actual meteorological phenomenon. As long as there is atmosphere, the pictures are irresistibly atmospheric. And old London is a city eternally swathed in mist.
St Paul’s Cathedral from the north-west, c. 1920
Pump at Bedford Row, 1911
Cenotaph, 1919
Upper Thames view, c. 1920
Greenwich Hospital from the Park, c. 1920
City roadworks, 1910
Looking north across the City of London, c. 1920
Old General Post Office, c. 1910
View eastwards from St Paul’s, c. 1910
Hertford House, c. 1910
New River Head, c. 1910
The Running Footman public house, c. 1900
Unidentified building, c 1910
Church Row, Hampstead, c. 1910
Danish Ambassador’s residence, Wellclose Square, Wapping c. 1910
Church of All Hallows, London Wall, c. 1890
Drapers’ Almshouses, Bromley Street, c. 1910
Battersea Bridge, c. 1910
32 Smith Grove, Highgate, in the snow, 1906
Unknown public building, c. 1910
Training ship at Greenwich, c. 1910
Flooded moat at the Tower of London, c. 1910
The Woodman, 1900
Bangor St, North Kensington, c. 1910
Terrace of the Houses of Parliament, c.1910
Statue of Boudicca on Westminster Bridge, c. 1910
Glass slides copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
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Colin O’Brien’s Pellicci Portraits
Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien begins a new series today, taking portraits of the esteemed diners at London’s most celebrated family-run cafe – E.Pellicci at 332 Bethnal Green Rd, in business since 1900. Many customers have been coming their whole lives to this tiny marquetry-lined restaurant where everyone sits cheek-by-jowl, engaging their neighbours in lively conversation while enjoying freshly cooked honest food at keen prices, and demonstrating that in the East End community spirit is alive and flourishing.
Juke Box Jimmy, the Scots Cockney – “I’ve been coming to Pelliccis since I first arrived from Scotland in 1960 and I eat here five days a week.”
Julie Rassatt – I’ve been coming here since about five years ago, I live across the street.”
Del – “My aunt Theresa first brought me here when I was twelve, and I’ve been coming in my own since I was about sixteen and I am thirty-two now.”
June Mumford – “I’ve been coming here since I was eight or nine.”
Dave Cowland, Cab Driver & Boxing Trainer – “I’m a newcomer, I only started coming here a couple of years ago.”
Maureen Thaxter – “I’ve been coming here regularly, on and off, since my daughter was small and she’s forty-seven now.”
Tyrone Walker Hebborn, Cinema Owner & Ex-Roofer – “I first came to Pelliccis in the late eighties, when I was working with my dad doing roofs in Bethnal Green.”
Samantha Clarke – “I used to come here with my dad when I was little and I’m twenty now.”
John Atherton – “I live in West London but I always visit Pelliccis whenever I am in the neighbourhood. I found out about it from book of Classic Cafes five years ago and I’ve been coming regularly ever since.”
Lauren Bonner – “This is my first visit to Pelliccis!”
Melvin Pamplin, Can Driver & Ex-Roofer – “I’ve been coming here most days for about thirty years.”
Elizabeth James – “I’ve been coming here for twenty-five years, ever since my son Michael first brought me here.”
Michael James – “I was born in Stepney and I’ve been coming here thirty years. I think I first came with the Art Critic Andrew Lambirth.”
Claire Marden, Hampshire Lass – “I’m from the Isle of Wight, I’ve only been coming here for a year.”
Stan Dowsett – ‘I can’t remember how long I’ve been coming here, I’ve been fairly regular for many years and my office is just down the road. On Sunday, I was elected Toastmaster President to the Toastmasters’ Guild.”
Anna Pellicci – proud third generation in the family business.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
You may like to read these other Pellicci stories
Maria Pellicci, The Meatball Queen of Bethnal Green
And these other Colin O’Brien stories
Colin O’Brien’s Clerkenwell Car Crashes
Colin O’Brien’s Kids on the Street
Travellers’ Children in London Fields
Colin O’Brien’s Brick Lane Market
William Blake’s Songs of Experience
In celebration of William Blake’s birthday today, it is my pleasure to publish his Songs of Experience from 1794, complementing his Songs of Innocence in “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.”
The only prize I ever won was a copy of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence & Experience” awarded to me for English composition at the age of seventeen, yet it was one of the greatest gifts I ever received and I have carried this treasured book with me through life as an enduring source of inspiration. Years ago, when I found myself living in a council flat in Bunhill Row next to the City of London, I was heartened on waking each morning to see the memorial to Blake in Bunhill Fields, the Dissenters’ graveyard, from my window.
Blake came there in the summer of 1784 when his father was buried in a mass grave and again in 1792 for the interment of his mother. Wishing to be close to them, he was buried there in the summer of 1827, nine feet under, in an elm coffin with three other bodies beneath him and another four above.
Today, whenever I walk from Spitalfields to Covent Garden, I always make the detour through Bunhill Fields to pay my respects to William Blake and his literary neighbours in eternity, Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan. Passing along the narrow path between the crowded graves – paved with large tombstone slabs from which the lettering has worn away, overhung by tall trees and girded by green railings – it never fails to dispel my trivial concerns and replace them with metaphysical reflection.
In Blake’s time, it was possible to walk from the London out into the fields and, although his life was mostly occupied within the maze of narrow streets between Holborn, the Strand and Oxford St, we know that he regularly wandered far into the countryside and so it is not hard to imagine him, as a young man enraptured by visions, strolling through Spitalfields.
Memorials to Daniel Defoe and William Blake in Bunhill Fields, the Dissenters’ graveyard outside the wall of the City of London. Blake’s mortal remains lie nearby in an unmarked mass grave for paupers.
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William Blake’s Songs of Innocence
In anticipation of the birthday tomorrow of the beloved William Blake – the greatest poet of London – it is my delight to publish his Songs of Innocence of 1789 today. When Blake was developing his copper plate printing technique that would enable him to become his own publisher and be free of the restrictions of others, he wrote, “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s.” So I think we may assume that if Blake were writing now he would embrace the opportunity of publishing his work freely upon the internet.
You may also like to read about
Jock McFadyen, Landscape Painter
Aldgate East by Jock McFadyen
Hidden behind an old terrace facing London Fields is a back street with a scrapyard and a car repair garage, and a row of anonymous industrial units where painter Jock McFadyen has his studio. You enter through a narrow alley round the back to discover Jock in his lair, a scrawny Scotsman with freckles, tufts of ginger hair, and beady eyes that look right through you. Yet such is the modesty of his demeanour, he acted more like the caretaker than the owner – concentrating on the coffee and biscuits, and leaving me to gasp at his vast canvasses of landscapes on a scale uncommon in our age.
With plain titles such as “Dagenham,” “Looking West,” “Pink Flats,” and “Popular Enclosure,” Jock McFadyen evokes the terrain where East London unravels into Essex beneath apocalyptic northern skies, encompassed by an horizon that extends beyond your field of vision when you stand in front of these pictures. The works of man appear insubstantial, either dwarfed by the scale of the landscape or partly obscured by meteorological effects.
Originating from Paisley, Jock has lived and worked in the East End since 1978, with studios in Butler’s Wharf, Bow and the Truman Brewery before arriving in London Fields fifteen years ago. Although he has painted a whole series of epic landscapes of the East End, Jock remains ambivalent about its impact upon his work. “It’s difficult to say how much a place affects you because my real influences are other painters like Lowry and Sickert,” he admitted to me with a shrug, “You’re never just painting what’s in front of your nose, you’re aware of the history of painting.”
“When I was a student at Chelsea in the seventies, the previous generation were the pop artists and my work was quite stark and self-referential.” he confessed with a chuckle, breaking into a shy grin, “But when I became Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in 1981, I realised I couldn’t spend my life just making art about art, so I started painting what I saw in the street – What could be less fashionable?”
“Then in 1991, I got commissioned to design a set for the Royal Ballet. They thought, ‘It’s urban despair, let’s get Jock McFadyen!'” he continued, sipping his coffee with relish, “There were no figures in my design, because the dancers were the figures. And that’s when I realised I had been a landscape painter all along – I’d been painting people in places.”
Once we had reached this point and he had told the story of his self-liberation as an artist, Jock leaned back on his couch and cast his eyes in pleasurable appreciation up to a rusty bicycle frame hanging from the roof. He wanted to talk about his love for Lowry and Sickert. “Lowry was the most committed painter because he had nothing else in his life. I think he spent every day outdoors in his raincoat, knocking out paintings. You believe him, it’s authentic.” Jock assured me fondly. Yet it was Sickert who has provided the inspiration for the current exhibition entitled “After Walter” at Eleven Spitalfields in which, after two decades of landscapes, Jock returns to painting figures. “They’re the first full-blown figures I’ve done,” he declared with a significant nod, “They’re not actual people though, they’re dirty old man fantasies.”
So there we left our conversation, as I set off to the gallery in Princelet St to discover the substance of Jock’s libidinous imagination. But before I departed his studio, I paused to admire a huge canvas of magnificent old rotting warehouses on the River Lea. It occurred to me that Jock came from Glasgow – a decayed port city with a vibrant working class culture – and felt at home in the East End, a location with a similar identity. I saw Jock looking at me and I realised he knew what I was thinking. “If you are a landscape painter you can only paint one place at a time,” he said, anticipating my words “So the question is ‘Are you an East End painter or are you just a landscape painter that happens to live here?'”
Jock McFadyen in London Fields
Looking West
Bud
From Beckton Alp
Goodfellas
Showcase Cinemas
Tate Moss
Pink Flats
Jock & Horseshoe Jake in front of Popular Enclosure
Dagenham
Roman Rd
Jock McFadyen
Black & white portraits copyright © Lucinda Douglas Menzies
Jock McFadyen’s exhibition AFTER WALTER runs at Eleven Spitalfields in Princelet St until 23rd December.
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Six)
Photographer and Ex-Boxer John Claridge has been making regular trips to the East End to take on members of London Ex-Boxers Association. John distinguished himself with some fine shots in Round One, proved a class act with a bravura display of his singular talent in Round Two, commanded the ring in Round Three, showed himself as a potential champion in Round Four, continued his astonishing performance in Round Five and now excels himself in Round Six.
Eddie Lazar (Boxed in the fifties, his name was shortened from Lazarus because at his first fight there was not enough space on the poster.)
John Powell (First fight 1964 – First fight 1969)
Colin Lake (First fight 1961 – Last fight 1970)
Mick Pye (First fight 1956 – Last fight 1966)
Vic Moore (First fight 1965 – Last fight 1969)
Ted Cheeseman (First fight 2007 and still boxing)
Mark Lazarus (Brother of Eddie Lazar, Amateur Boxer & Professional Footballer who scored final goal in 1967 Cup Final))
Johnny Shannon (First fight 1946 – Last fight 1955)
Chas Taylor, LEBA Welfare Officer (First fight 1956 – Last fight 1958)
Dennis Hinson (First fight 1948 – Last fight 1960)
John Docker (First fight 1946 – Last fight 1962)
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
Take a look at
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round One)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Two)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Three)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Four)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Five)
and these other pictures by John Claridge
Along the Thames with John Claridge
At the Salvation Army with John Claridge
A Few Diversions by John Claridge
Signs, Posters, Typography & Graphics
Views from a Dinghy by John Claridge
In Another World with John Claridge
A Few Pints with John Claridge
Some East End Portraits by John Claridge
Sunday Morning Stroll with John Claridge
