The Leather Shops of Brick Lane
Everything at Oceanic Leather is made in Brick Lane
Not so long ago, almost all the shops north of the railway bridge in Brick Lane sold leather jackets and bags manufactured locally, but now there are only a handful of these businesses left. So Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I went along to find out what is going on in the world of East End leather, and we encountered an entire spectrum of human emotion.
The manufacture of leather garments is an age-old industry on this side of London, existing as part of the clothing and textile trade that was a major source of employment here for centuries. A hundred years ago, the industry was predominantly Jewish but when Asian people arrived in significant numbers in the last century they worked as machinists in a trade that they eventually took over and now, a generation later, they find themselves presiding over its slow demise.
At Truth Trading, 151 Brick Lane, I encountered the father and son in a family business that began in 1978, sitting facing each other across a desk in an empty shop. “It’s dead! I make but I can’t sell,” declared Abdul Bari, leaping up almost apoplectic with frustration at the seventeen pounds they had taken that day, while his son sat watching with visible concern for his father’s distress. A skilled man who trained as a cutter and knew everything there is to know about the making of leather garments, Abdul Bari worked in the trade locally since 1968. Then he started making clothes at home before opening a shop in Commercial St, graduating through premises in Wentworth St and Bell Lane, then purchasing the Brick Lane premises in 1986. “We have a factory in Pakistan with one hundred sewing machines but it is closed down because there are no orders,” he lamented, leaving me searching for words that might console him.
Across the road in the compact corner shop packed with glistening leather, Open Space, 200 Brick Lane, Mohammed Kamran was resolutely cheerful, explaining that his uncle Mohammed Yusuf Nagory started the business, making leather jeans and selling them at Kensington Market in the seventies. Moving to Brick Lane in the eighties, he started a factory with twenty-five people in Cheshire St which his nephew joined at fifteen years old. Today, as a smaller business they are sustained by loyal customers and have recently made costumes for Harry Potter and the West End theatre. Astonishingly, you can buy a handmade leather jacket there for as little as thirty-five pounds.
Mr Mahmood at the Brick Lane Boutique, 137 Brick Lane, who began working as a machinist twenty-six years ago and started his own business twenty years ago, explained the root of the problem to me. “When I started here, I used to sell everything I made, but now the Chinese use artificial leather and in the chain stores people can buy one of these jackets for £15. So why are they going to come here and spend £100 for real leather?” he asked, his eyes glistening with emotion as he gestured around his shop which was more-than-half given over to t-shirts, with leather jackets consigned to a corner. Fortunately our conversation was interrupted by a customer who did want to spend £100 for a real leather jacket and so I left Mr Mahmood to it, thankful that his salesmanship had been given an opportunity to shine.
Bashir & Sons (London) Ltd at Bashir House is a towering landmark at 180 Brick Lane, where you can walk in to admire a vast stock of leather jackets in every permutation of design upon rails in a labyrinthine ground floor showroom. I was welcomed by the ebullient Mr Ahmed, one of the brothers in this family business which started forty-six years ago in Commercial St and moved to the current premises thirty-five years ago. “I started when I was sixteen,” he admitted to me in a nostalgic tone, “In those days, the customers just came and bought the stuff but now we have to sell it.” With outlets in Birmingham and elsewhere, this is an elaborate operation, manufacturing in Asia and distributing throughout Europe. “We’re not the biggest but the best,” Mr Ahmed assured me, demonstrating professional charm while boasting Dustin Hoffman and Lennox Lewis among his customers, “And we sell the largest selection of fancy sun glasses in London.”
Further down, at 168 Brick Lane, another Ahmed, proprietor of Oceanic Leather was the most frank of the leather sellers, in spite of his self-effacing demeanour. “A lot of people left or went bankrupt. We had a regular business and then one day it dried up.” he revealed with a melancholy frown, “I’ve suffered pain, but I rode out the worst part of it.” In his store, everything has been made in the workshop above, though there is nothing to indicate this to customers, just piles of pieces of high quality leather stacked up in the crowded space attesting to the distinction of the garments on display.
My final call was Rana Leather, 160 Brick Lane, where I discovered the proprietor Mr Rana and his beefy assistant trying to squash an impossibly large number of leather jackets into a tiny cardboard box. The beefy assistant held the box shut while Mr Rana wrapped it in tape and they succeeded in packing a curious irregularly-shaped parcel. Afterwards, Mr Rana wiped perspiration from his brow while explaining that he was one of three brothers who ran the business which started on Fashion St in 1975. This busy shop was filled with boxes of clothes in transit, as much a warehouse for the wholesale trade as a retail outlet, and it indicated that a certain volume of business was being done on the premises.
All but one of the leather shops I visited owned their buildings, which proved to be the key factor in their survival when others that paid the escalating rents had gone. I was fascinated to find that most were run by skilled men, experienced leatherworkers who offer the facility to have clothes and bags made to order. It was even more remarkable to learn that for a modest price you can buy a good quality jacket which has been made by hand in a workshop on Brick Lane. There may be only a few left, but my discovery was that these leather shops still have plenty going for them – if people only knew.
Abdul Bari, Truth Trading, founded his business by making clothes at home in 1978.
The grandchildren of M.Schulman, the kosher poulterer, gave this photo to Truth Trading, now operating from the same premises.
Mohammed Kamran’s uncle founded the business, Open Space, by selling leather jeans in Kensington Market in the seventies.
Mr Mahmood, Brick Lane Boutique, started as a machinist twenty-six years ago.
Mr Ahmed at Bashir Leather – “We are not the biggest but the best”
Ahmed, proprietor of Oceanic Leather.
Mr Rana of Rana Leather
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Recent Paintings by Marc Gooderham
Lost Control Again (Hanbury St)
A year has passed since I came across the work of painter Marc Gooderham and here you see a selection of the new pictures he has created since then – of scenes that will be familiar to many readers. “My first year was just about getting going,” he admitted to me, “but now I’m in the flow of it and I’m in control of it. As time has gone by, I’ve thought more about composition and colour.”
“There’s so much more colour in my pictures because of the street artists, some of those works are so well painted, yet they’re giving it away – it keeps the streets really vibrant.” said Marc, modestly acknowledging the symbiotic relationship his paintings on canvas have with this most democratic of art forms.
Yet, speaking of his picture of Hanbury St, he says, “I saw that grey and the explosion of colour beside it, and I realised the grey had as much power as the colour.” Although they may appear superficially photorealistic, Marc subtly manipulates the elements he discovers to construct an intense personal vision which has a dreamlike quality. In each of his paintings, there is a dynamic contrast between the detailed rendering of architecture and the images applied by street artists, often amplified by an ethereal blue sky overhead.
It takes around a month for Marc to create a painting, building it up from architectural sketches and balancing the components. During the last year, as his paintings have got larger and his palette bolder, he has acquired a passionate following which means that once the pictures are the complete, the gallery takes them out of his hands. “It helps to have that routine of working on something and getting it finished within the month,” Marc confirmed, enjoying the momentum, “I like to paint them and there are people now that appreciate what I do, so that’s a good common ground.”
“Each of these paintings is about a discovery,” he confided to me, “I stumble upon them – I go out to explore the area and even though I am walking down familiar streets, I always find a new scene. There’s a lot to paint because the East End changes so quickly and my mission is to hunt out potential paintings, discovering more buildings that deserve to be painted.”
Marc Gooderham in Hanbury St yesterday.
The Split (Holywell Lane Car Park)
Wild and Free (Dalston Lane) – “I crept behind a car park, crawled through a fence and stumbled upon this, a large old house surrounded by scarecrows. It looked like a fantasy, a haunted house where the scarecrows were guarding the place.”
Blue Above the Wires (Mare St)
Smoke Stacks (Dalston Lane)
Nightfall on Whitepost Lane (Hackney Wick) – “I realised it looked as if it was glowing and so I went back during the day to find the right time when it looked like it was still alive, even though it was derelict.”
Fashion Street
Marc Gooderham in Toynbee St.
Marc Gooderham’s work is represented by Artisan Galleries
You may also like to read my original profile
So Long, Spitalfields Fruit & Wool Exchange
After the proposal to demolish and redevelop the historic Spitalfields Fruit & Wool Exchange was rejected unanimously twice by the members of Tower Hamlets Council, last night the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, overruled them and gave the plan his blessing. Now, the sixty small businesses based there have to move out by the end of November to make way for the corporate office block that will take the place of the current building. Today I am republishing this account of my visit to the Exchange earlier this year.
Opening in 1929, when the volume of imported produce coming through the docks more than doubled in the ten years after the First World War, the mighty Fruit & Wool Exchange in Spitalfields was created to maintain London’s pre-eminence as a global distribution centre. The classical stone facade, closely resembling the design of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church nearby, established it as a temple dedicated to fresh produce as fruits that were once unfamiliar, and fruits that were out of season, became available for the first time to the British people.
After sixty years as a teeming warren of brokers and distributors, the building languished when the Fruit & Vegetable Market moved out from Spitalfields in 1991 and there were no wholesalers left to cross Brushfield St and supplement their supplies of British produce from the auctions at the Exchange. Since then, around sixty small businesses operated peaceably from the building which through its shabby grandeur reminded every visitor that it had once seen better days.
Yet it was only a matter of time before the notion of redevelopment arose, and when ambitious plans were revealed over a year ago for a huge new building to replace both the Exchange and the multi-storey car park behind it – filling two entire blocks – a sense of disquiet was generated in Spitalfields, especially among those who remembered the uneasy compromises entailed in the rebuilding of the Market.
Few have been convinced by the homogeneous box that was proposed to stand in place of the Exchange and many were disappointed when the creators of such mediocrity dismissed the current structure as of negligible architectural worth. In fact, the Commercial St end of the Exchange building closely matched the window structure and red brick of the eighteenth century houses in Fournier St, while the facade mirrored Christ Church itself. Since then, a revised proposal has been forthcoming which retains the Brushfield St frontage facing the Spitalfields Market but is far from being a design worthy to face Nicholas Hawksmoor’s masterpiece of English Baroque upon the opposite side of Commercial St.
And so, before it vanishes forever, I went over to take a look around and savour the past glories of the City of London Fruit & Wool Exchange for the last time.
Ascending from the grand entrance, a double staircase worthy of a ballroom in a liner or fancy hotel leads you up to the auction rooms. Built as the largest in the country, seating nearly nine hundred people, these magnificent panelled chambers were each the height of two storeys within the building. Fitted with microphones, which were an extraordinary innovation in 1929, possessing elaborate glass roofs that promised to simulate daylight – even on dark and foggy days – to best illuminate the fruit, they were served by high-speed hydraulic lifts to whisk samples of each consignment from the basement in the blink of an eye. Too bad that a recent fire, occurring since the redevelopment was announced, meant they could never be visited again. Now the entrances to the most significant spaces which define this edifice are sealed with tape and off-limits for ever, while charred parquet flooring evidences the flames that crept out under the door.
Instead, I had to satisfy myself with a stroll around the empty top floor through centrally-heated corridors maintained at a comfortable temperature ever since the offices were all vacated two years ago. Everywhere I could see evidence of the quality of this building, from the parquet floors which extend through each storey, to the well-detailed brass fixtures and high-quality Crittall window frames that were still in good order. Within the building, hidden light-wells permit glass-ceilings to be illuminated by daylight upon each storey. Peering into these spaces reveals the paradoxical nature of this edifice which presents ne0-classicism to the street but adopts a vigorous industrial-modernism within, employing vast geometric shaped concrete girders to support the roof spans of the auction rooms below and arranging rows of narrow metal windows in close grids that evoke Bauhaus design.
From the top, I descended through floors of long windowless corridors lined with doors, where an institutional atmosphere prevailed, hushing the speech of those stepping outside their offices as they enter these strange intermediary spaces that belong to no-one any more. My special curiosity was to explore the basement which served as a refuge for the residents of Spitalfields during the Blitz. It was here that Mickey Davies, an East End optician known as “Mickey the Midget,” became a popular hero through his work in improving the quality of this shelter. It had gained the reputation as the worst in London, but later acquired the name “Mickey’s Shelter” in acknowledgment of his good work. As a shelter marshall, Mickey witnessed the overcrowding and insalubrious conditions when ten thousand people turned up at this basement which had a maximum capacity of five thousand. He organised medical care and recruited volunteers to undertake cleaning rotas. And, thanks to his initiative, beds and toilets were installed, and even musical entertainment arranged.
The vast subterranean network of chambers has been empty for twenty years now – gloomy, neglected and scattered with piles of broken furniture. Although partitions have been fitted to create storage rooms – where, mysteriously, Rupert Murdoch recently installed his archive – the Commercial St end of the building remains open and forlorn, with concrete pillars adorned by graffiti. Fruit packers marked off batches of produce in pencil on the wall here, and amused themselves by writing their names and making clumsy doodles. In this lost basement, it is still possible to imagine the world of Mickey Davies, where thousands once slept upon the floor while the city burned outside.
From Brushfields St, the City of London Fruit & Wool Exchange appears implacable – yet I discovered it contains a significant part of the hidden history of Spitalfields that will shortly be erased, to leave just an empty facade.
The central staircase, worthy of a ballroom in a liner or grand hotel.
One of several light wells, lined with Crittall windows and permitting daylight to reach lower storeys.
Looking out towards Crispin St from the rear of The Gun.
Washing room in the basement.
As many as ten thousand people slept here every night while taking shelter from the London Blitz.
Nineteen forties graffiti portrait from the basement.
The telephone exchange.
State of art auction room in 1929, lit by a glass ceiling offering “artificial daylight” on foggy days.
Fruit & vegetable auction
An entrance to the Auction Hall, now sealed permanently after a recent fire.
The broken pediment at the top of this frontage mirrors Nicholas Hawksmoor’s design of Christ Church.
The Exchange in 1929. It is proposed that only this frontage be retained in the redevelopment.
View of Christ Church from the top floor.
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At the Fruit & Wool Exchange, 1937
Mickey Davis at the Fruit & Wool Exchange
Fruit & Vegetable auction photograph courtesy of Stuart Kira
Other archive images courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
George Cruikshank’s Comic Alphabet
You might like to see other work by George Cruikshank
Jack Sheppard, Thief, Highwayman & Escapologist
The Bloody Romance of the Tower
Henry Mayhew’s Punch & Judy Man
and these other alphabets
Vivian Betts of Bishopsgate
Vivian & Toto outside The Primrose
You will not meet many who can boast the distinction of being brought up on the teeming thoroughfare of Bishopsgate but Vivian Betts is one who enjoyed that rare privilege, growing up above The Primrose on the corner of Primrose St where her parents were publicans from 1955 until 1974. Yet it was a different Bishopsgate from that of the present day with its soaring glass towers housing financial industries. In her childhood, Vivian knew a street lined with pubs and individual shops where the lamplighter came each night to light the gas lamps.
Living in a pub on the boundary of the City of London, Vivian discovered herself at a hub of human of activity. “I had the best of both worlds,” Vivian confessed to me, when she came up to Spitalfields on a rare visit yesterday, “I had the choice of City life or East End life, I could go either way. I had complete freedom and I was never in any danger. My father said to me if I ever had any trouble to go to a policeman. But all my friends wanted to come over to my place, because I lived in a pub!”
Vivian knew Bishopsgate before the Broadgate development swallowed up the entire block between Liverpool St and Primrose St. And as we walked together past the uniform architecture, she affectionately ticked off the order of the pubs that once stood there – The Kings Arms, The Raven and then The Primrose – with all the different premises in between. When we reached the windswept corner of Primrose St beneath the vast Broadgate Tower, Vivian gestured to the empty space where The Primrose once stood, now swallowed by road widening, and told me that she remembered the dray horses delivering the beer in barrels on carts from the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane.
In this landscape of concrete, glass and steel, configured as the environment of aggressive corporate endeavour, it was surreal yet heartening to hear Vivian speak and be reminded that human life once existed there on a modest domestic scale. Demolished finally in 1987, The Primrose had existed in Bishopsgate at least since 1839.
“My brother Michael was born in 1942, while Bill my father was away in the war, and Violet my mother got a job as a barmaid, and when he came back she said, ‘This is how I want to spend my life.’ Their first pub was The Alfred’s Head in Gold St, Stepney, in about 1946, and she told me she was washing the floor there in the morning and I was born in the afternoon. We left when I was three and all I remember of Stepney was walking over a bomb site to look at all the caterpillars.
In 1955, we moved into The Primrose at 229 Bishopsgate, directly opposite the Spitalfields market – you could look out of the window on the first floor and see the market. My first memory of Bishopsgate was lying in bed and listening to the piano player in the pub below. We had three pianos, one in the public bar, one in the first floor function room and one in our front room. On Sunday lunchtimes at The Primrose, it was so busy you could hardly see through the barroom for all the hats and smoke.
I used to go to Canon Barnet School in Commercial St and, from the age of seven, my dad would see me across Bishopsgate and I’d walk through the Spitalfields Market on my way to school where the traders would give me an apple and a banana – they all knew me because they used to come drinking in the pub. It was a completely Jewish school and, because no-one else lived in Bishopsgate, all my friends were over in Spitalfields, mostly in the Flower & Dean Buildings, so I spent a lot of time over there. And I used to come to Brick Lane to go the matinees at the cinema every Saturday. Itchy Park was our playground – in those days, the church was shut but we used to peek through the window and see hundreds of pigeons inside.
My dad opened one of the first carveries in a pub, where you could get fresh ham or turkey cut and made up into sandwiches and, in the upstairs room, my mum did sit-down lunches for three shillings – it was like school dinners, steak & kidney pudding and sausage & mash. She walked every day with her trolley to Dewhurst’s the butchers opposite Liverpool St, she got all her fruit and vegetables fresh from the Spitalfields Market, and she used to go to Petticoat Lane each week to buy fresh fish.
Every evening at 5pm, we had all the banks come in to play darts. On Mondays, it was the ladies of The Primrose darts team and on Wednesdays it was the men’s darts league. And, once each year, we organised the Presentation Dance at the York Hall. Every evening in the upstairs function room, we had the different Freemason’s lodges. Whenever I came out of my living room, I could always see them but I had to look away because it was part of my life that I wasn’t supposed to see. After I left school, I went to work for the Royal London Mutual Insurance Co. in Finsbury Sq – five minutes walk away – as a punchcard operator and, whenever it was anyone’s birthday, I’d say ‘Come on back to my mum’s pub and she’ll make us all sandwiches.’
Then in 1973, Truman’s wrote to my dad and gave him a year’s notice, they were turning the pub over to managers in April 1974, so we had to leave. But I had already booked my wedding for July at St Botolph’s in Bishopsgate, and I came back for that. Eighteen months later, in 1976, my mum and dad asked me and my husband to go into running a pub with them. It was The Alexandra Hotel in Southend, known as the “Top Alex” because there were two and ours was at the top of the hill.
Three months after we moved in, my dad died of cancer – so they gave it to my mum on a year’s widow’s lease but they said that if me and my husband proved we could run it, we could keep it. And we stayed until 1985. Then we had a murder and an attempted murder in which a man got stabbed, and my husband said, ‘It’s about time we moved.’ And that’s when we moved to our current pub, The Windmill at Hoo, near Rochester, twenty-eight years ago. We had a brass bell hanging behind the counter at The Primrose that came off a train in Liverpool St Station which we used to call time and we’ve taken it with us – all these years – but though we don’t call time any more, we still use it to ring in the New Year.
I’ve only ever had two Christmases not in a pub in my life, when you’re born to it you don’t know anything else.”
Vivian told me that she often gets customers from the East End in The Windmill and they always recognise her by her voice. “They say, ‘We know where you come from!'” she confided to me proudly.
The Primrose, 229 Bishopsgate, as Vivian knew it.
Toto sits on the heater in the panelled barroom at The Primrose.
Vivian at Canon Barnet School in Commercial St.
Bill and Vi Betts
“My first Freemason’s Lodge night when I was twelve or thirteen in 1965. My brother Michael with his wife Valerie on the right.”
Vivian stands outside The Primrose in this picture, looking east across Bishopsgate towards Spital Sq with Spitalfields market in the distance.
Vivian was awarded this certificate while a student at Sir John Cass School, Houndsditch.
Vivian on the railway bridge, looking west towards Finsbury Sq.
Vivian outside the door which served as the door to the pub and her own front door.
Vivian’s friends skylarking in Bishopsgate – “They always wanted to come over to my place because I lived above a pub!”
“When I was eight, we went abroad on holiday for the first time to Italy, we bought the tickets at the travel agents across the road and, after that, twelve or fourteen couples would come with us – my parents’ friends – and I was always the youngest there.”
Vivian prints out a policy at the Royal London Mutual Insurance Co. in Finsbury Sq.
“And what do you do?” – Vivian meets Prince Charles on a visit to Lloyd Register of Shipping in Fenchurch St.
“Harry the greengrocer and Tom the horse, they used to get their fruit & vegetables in the Spitalfields Market. My husband Dennis worked for this man when he was about twelve years of age, driving around the Isle of Dogs. He loved horses, and we’ve got a piece of land with our pub now and we’ve kept horses since 1980.”
Bill & Vi Betts in later years.
Vivian Betts at St Botolph’s Bishopsgate where she married her husband Dennis Campbell in 1974.
The Primrose in a former incarnation, photographed in 1912.
Bishopsgate with The Primrose halfway down on the right, photographed in 1912 by Charles Goss.
Bishopsgate today.
Archive photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You might also like to take a look at these other Bishopsgate Stories
The Romance of Old Bishopsgate
The Nights Of Old London
The nights are drawing in and I can feel the velvet darkness falling upon London. As dusk gathers in the ancient churches and the dusty old museums in the late afternoon, the distinction between past and present becomes almost permeable at this time of year. Then, once the daylight fades and the streetlights flicker into life, I feel the desire to go walking out into the dark in search of the nights of old London.
Examining hundreds of glass plates – many more than a century old – once used by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute, I am in thrall to these images of night long ago in London. They set my imagination racing with nocturnal visions of the gloom and the glamour of our city in darkness, where mist hangs in the air eternally, casting an aura round each lamp, where the full moon is always breaking through the clouds and where the recent downpour glistens upon every pavement – where old London has become an apparition that coalesced out of the fog.
Somewhere out there, they are loading the mail onto trains, and the presses are rolling in Fleet St, and the lorries are setting out with the early editions, and the barrows are rolling into Spitalfields and Covent Garden, and the Billingsgate porters are running helter-skelter down St Mary at Hill with crates of fish on their heads, and the horns are blaring along the river as Tower Bridge opens in the moonlight to admit another cargo vessel into the crowded pool of London. Meanwhile, across the empty city, Londoners slumber and dream while footsteps of lonely policemen on the beat echo in the dark deserted streets.
Glass slides copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
Read my other nocturnal stories
On Christmas Night in the City
On the Rounds With the Spitalfields Milkman
Other stories of Old London
Roy Emmins’ Sculptures
Click to enlarge this poster designed by Alice Pattullo
It is my delight to announce THE ARTISTS OF SPITALFIELDS LIFE, an exhibition curated by yours truly, opening at BEN PENTREATH in Bloomsbury one month today.
Please join me for the private view on the evening of WEDNESDAY 7th NOVEMBER to celebrate the work of artists who will be familiar from these pages – Paul Bommer, James Brown, Robson Cezar, Alfred Daniels, Adam Dant, Anthony Eyton, Marc Gooderham, Sebastian Harding, Marianna Kennedy, Laura Knight, Justin Knopp working as Typoretum, Joanna Moore, Alice Pattullo, Lucinda Rogers & Rob Ryan.
The centrepiece of the show will be a display of the work of Roy Emmins the Whitechapel sculptor, whose work has rarely been seen. And today I am publishing this preview of Roy’s magical menagerie alongside the pen portrait I wrote when I first met him two years ago.
Sea birds – painted wood and milliput
Rain Forest – painted wood enhanced with milliput
Coral Reef – paper maché and milliput
I spy breakfast – painted wood
Arable Life – Cedar wood
Bush Life – painted wood and milliput
Coral Reef – ashwood
Wood Mouse & Butterfly – painted wood with milliput
Owl – branch and painted milliput
Galapagos – limewood
Hare – painted milliput
Jungle – painted Zeldovia wood
White Horse – paper maché
African Mountain – painted wood and milliput
Stag – paper maché
At the furthest end of Cable St are the Cable St Studios where Roy Emmins has cloistered himself for more than ten years, working six days every week, alone in a tiny workshop. A former porter at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, after more than thirty years service Roy took early retirement to devote himself to sculpture, and today his studio is crammed to the roof with innumerable creations that bear testimony to his prodigious talent and potent imagination.
When Roy opened the door to me, I could not believe my eyes. There were so many sculptures, it took my breath away. With more artifacts than a Pharoah’s tomb, I did not know where to look first. Roy stood and smiled indulgently at my reaction. Not many people make it here to the inner sanctum of Roy Emmin’s imagination. He is not a demonstrative man, and he has no big explanation – not expecting praise or inviting criticism either. In fact, he has no art world rhetoric at all, just a room packed with breathtaking sculptures.
First to catch my attention were large carvings hewn from tree trunks, some in bare wood, others painted in gaudy colours like sculptures in medieval cathedrals and sharing the same vigorous poetry, full of energetic life and acute observation of the natural world. Next, I saw elaborate painted constructions in papier-mache, scenes from the natural world, gulls on cliffs, fish in the ocean, monkeys in the jungle and more – all meticulously imagined, and in an aesthetic reminiscent of the dioramas of the Natural History Museum but with more soul. I stood with my eyes roving, absorbing the immense detail and noticing smaller individual sculptures in ceramic, bronze, and plaster, on shelves and in cubbyholes. Turning one hundred and eighty degrees, I faced a wall hung with table tops, each incised with relief sculptures. I sat on a chair to collect my thoughts and cast my eyes to the window sill where sat a menagerie of creatures, all contrived with exquisite modesty and consummate skill from tinfoil and chocolate wrappers.
The abiding impression was of teeming life – every figure quick with it, as if they might all spring into animation at any moment, transforming the studio into an overcrowded Noah’s Ark, with Roy as an entirely convincing Mr Noah. Yet, in his work, Roy emulates the supreme creator, reconstructed Eden – fashioning all the beloved animals, imbuing them with life and movement, and creating jungles and forests and oceans – imparting a magical intensity to everything he touches. There is a sublime quality to Roy Emmin’s vision. Roy’s sculptures are totems, and his carved tree trunks resemble totem poles, with images that evoke the spirits of the natural world. Even Roy’s tinfoil stags possess an emotionalism – born of a tension between the heroic dignity of the creature he sculpts so eloquently and the humble material from which each figure is fashioned.
It is a paradox that Roy, an English visionary, exemplifies in his own personality, which is so appealingly lacking in ego yet tenacious of ambition in sculpture. Originally apprenticed as a graphic artist, he developed Wilson’s disease, which caused him to shake, yet spared him military service. After years attending the Royal London Hospital, a drug was founded to treat his affliction but by then, Roy admitted, he preferred the atmosphere of the hospital to the design studio because it was an environment where he always was meeting new people. Taking a job as a porter, Roy also attended evening classes at Sir John Cass School of Art in Whitechapel, pursuing painting, ceramics, life modelling, and wood-carving. Once these closed down in 1984, Roy joined a group of wood-carvers who met at the weekends in the garden studio of their ex-tutor, Michael Leman, in Greenford. When the hurricane came in 1987, they hired a crane to collect fallen trees – and one of these became Roy’s first tree trunk carving.
When he took retirement in 1995, Roy was permitted to retain his caretaker’s flat in Turner St at the rear of the hospital. After a stint at the Battlebridge Centre in King’s Cross, where he had A free studio in return for one day a week building flats for homeless people, Roy came to the Cable St Studios and has been here ever since. Always working on several sculptures at once, Roy often returns to pieces, reworking them and adding ideas, which may go some way to explain the intensity of detail and richness of ideas apparent in all his sculpture.
Looking at Roy’s work, I wondered what influence it had on his psyche, wheeling patients around for thirty years at the hospital. The sense of wonder at the natural world is exuberantly apparent, but this is not the work of an innocent either. In a major sculpture that sits outside his door entitled “The Shadow of Man,” Roy dramatises the destructive instinct of mankind, yet it is not a simple didactic work because the agents of destruction are portrayed with humanity. Again, it brought me back to medieval carving which commonly subverts its own allegory, picturing villains with charisma, and there was a strange pathos when Roy placed his hand affectionately upon the head of a figure wielding a chainsaw, a contradictory force embodying both destruction and creation.
Roy inherited his love of people from a father who worked his whole life on the railway and ended up manager of the bar on Liverpool St Station, while Roy’s mother was skilled at assembling electrical parts, which she did at home, imparting an ability in intricate work to her son. Each of Roy’s three uncles, a master carpenter, plumber and builder were model makers and Roy’s brother makes models too, though, in contrast to Roy, he makes ships and cars, mechanical things.
I am fascinated by the creative skills of working men expressed in areas of endeavour parallel to their working lives. Roy’s work exists in the tradition of the detailed handicrafts undertaken by sailors and prisoners, and the model railways of yesteryear, yet in its accomplishment and as a complete vision of the world, it transcends these precedents. Roy is a unique talent and a true sculptor who grasps of the essence of his medium.
Showing me a wire and plasticine dancer, with a skirt made from the paper cases manufactured for buns, Roy explained that a figure must have three points of contact with the ground to stand upright. In this instance, the ballerina had one foot pointing forward and a back foot that met the ground at toe and heel. Roy placed the precarious figure on a surface and, just like his spindly tinfoil creatures, it stood with perfect balance.
Roy Emmins with his sculpture ‘The Shadow of Man.’
Roy’s paper maché lion sits upon my desk in Spitalfields.
