The Dinners of Old London
Dinner at the Mercers’ Hall, c.1910
Is that your stomach rumbling or is it the sound of distant thunder I hear? To take your mind off hunger, let us pass the time until we eat by studying these old glass slides once used for magic lantern shows by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Insititute. Observe the architecture of gastronomy as expressed in the number and variety of ancient halls – the dining halls, the banquet halls and the luncheon rooms – where grand people once met for lengthy meals. Let us consider the dinners of old London.
The choicest meat from Smithfield, the finest fish from Billingsgate, and the freshest vegetables from Covent Garden and Spitalfields, they all found their way onto these long tables – such as the one in Middle Temple Hall which is twenty-seven feet long and made of single oak tree donated by Elizabeth I. The trunk was floated down the river from Windsor Great Park and the table was constructed in the hall almost half millennium ago. It has never been moved and through all the intervening centuries – through the Plague and the Fire and the Blitz – it has groaned beneath the weight of the dinners of old London.
Dinners and politics have always been inextricable in London – as in many other capitals – but, whether these meals were a premise to do business, make connections and forge allegiances, or whether these frequent civic gatherings were, in fact, merely the excuse for an endless catalogue of slap-up feasts and beanos, remains open to question. John Keohane, former Chief Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London told me that his troupe acquired their colloquial name of “beefeaters” because – as royal bodyguards – Henry VII granted them the privilege of dining at his table and eating the red meat which was denied to the commonfolk. In the medieval world, your place at dinner corresponded literally to your place in society, whether at top table or among the lower orders.
Contemplating all these empty halls where the table has not been laid yet and where rays of sunlight illuminate the particles of dust floating in the silence, I think we may have to wait a while before dinner is served in old London.
Christ’s Hospital Hall, c.1910
Buckingham Palace, State Dining Room, c.1910
Grocers’ Hall, c.1910
Ironmongers’ Hall, Court Luncheon Room, c.1910
Mercers’ Livery Hall, 1932
Merchant Taylors’ Hall, c.1910
Painters’ Hall, c.1910
Salters’ Livery Hall, c.1910
Skinners’ Hall, c.1910
Skinners’ Hall, c.1910
Stationers’ Hall, Stock Room, c.1910
Drapers’ Hall, c.1920
The Admiralty Board Room, c.1910
King’s Robing Room, Palace of Westminster, c.1910
Buckingham Palace, Throne Room, c.1910
Houses of Parliament, Robing Room, c.1910
Lincoln’s Inn, Great Hall, c.1910
Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall, c.1928
Drapers’ Hall, c.1920
Middle Temple Hall, c.1910
Mansion House Dining Room, c.1910
Ironmongers’ Hall, Banqueting Room, c.1910
Apothecaries’ Hall, Banquet in the Great Hall, c.1920
Boys preparing to cook, c.1910
Boar’s Head Dinner at Cutler’s Hall, c.1910
Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall, 1933
Baddeley Cake & Wine, Drury Lane, c.1930
Opening of The Artists of Spitalfields Life
If you ventured out last Wednesday evening, through the narrow streets and dark old squares east of the British Museum, you might have caught a whiff of roast chestnuts in the frosty air and turned a corner to discover an excited crowd, clamouring at the entrance to a tiny shop with Ben Pentreath painted over the fascia. This was the opening night of The Artists of Spitalfields Life.
Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney, resplendent in a double-breasted pin-striped suit, produced a camera from on old leather case and slipped among the throng, discreetly recording the event in this atmospheric set of pictures – to give a flavour of proceedings for all those readers who were unable to make it over to Bloomsbury that evening.
Adam Dant’s Map of Spitalfields Life adorned the chimney breast.
Rob Ryan’s Staffordshire dogs graced the mantlepiece.
Roy Emmins points out his jungle sculpture.
Drawings of Brick Lane traders by Lucinda Rogers and a bottletop picture by Robson Cezar
Sebastian Harding signs one of his Smithfield books on a table laden with Paul Bommer’s tiles.
Rooftops of Spitalfields by Lucinda Rogers.
Painting of Fournier St by Marc Gooderham and Wheildon Tortoise by Laura Knight.
Robson Cezar, King of the Bottletops, sported a top hat.
Paul Bommer greets admirers.
Ben Pentreath takes a snap.
Bloomsbury resident, Jimmy Cuba, a legend in the London markets.
Photographs copyright © Simon Mooney
Click to enlarge this poster designed by Alice Pattullo
Sebastian Harding’s Latest Creations
Earlier this year, Sebastian Harding made models of the lost buildings of Smithfield that had important tales to tell, but now he has cast his sights further afield with these new creations that can be seen in The Artists of Spitalfields Life exhibition until 24th November.
The Saracen’s Head, 4-7 Aldgate High St.
The Saracen’s Head by Henry Dixon for the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London.
Rear of the Saracen’s Head.
The yard of the Saracen’s Head from the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society glass slides.
The Saracen’s Head public house was demolished in 1913. Even in the late nineteenth century, Aldgate survived as a slice of sixteenth and seventeenth century London until the developers moved in from the eighteen eighties to modernize these streets. It was one of the few places to avoid the Great Fire of 1666, where the locals gathered to watch the conflagration. This makes the Saracen’s Head all the more important to the area’s history.
The area of Aldgate, first documented as Ealse Gate, centred around what is now Aldgate High St – still a vital artery into the city. This road predates the Normans and the gate itself which gives Aldgate its name was originally built by the Romans. It was subsequently rebuilt in the twelfth century, the thirteenth, and finally in the early seventeenth century. Though long gone, there is a plaque at No. 88 Aldgate High St commemorating its existence.
When poring through old photographs of Aldgate, I was struck by the architectural merits of the Saracen’s Head in particular. Founded in 1681, it operated as a coaching inn with a service that departed from the yard at the back, transporting Londoners to East Anglia – hence the building’s location on the main road eastward out of the city.
It was documented in the nineteenth century by Henry Dixon for Society for the Photographing the Relics of Old London. These records have allowed me to recreate the exteriors viewable from the street and yard. The frontage holds wonderful early examples of Baroque decoration and the ornate moulding echoes the decoration seen on the Baroque post-Fire churches – including St Paul’s – that emerged throughout London at the time. When the building was demolished, it was functioning as the Metropole Restaurant with the Ladies Select Dining Room housed on the first floor. After its destruction, the Guildhall Museum bought the intricate wooden pilaster capitals for their collection, confirming its aesthetic importance.
The Victorian buildings which replaced the Saracen’s Head and its neighbours were in turn bulldozed in the nineteen eighties to make way for the anonymous offices that dominate this once remarkable area today.
by Sebastian Harding
Nicholas Culpeper’s House, Red Lion Field, Spitalfields.
On John Horwood’s map (1794-99) Nicholas Culpeper’s house is clearly shown, sticking out on the corner of Red Lion St and Red Lion Ct.
In 1640, when Nicholas Culpeper, the herbalist, married Alice Field, aged fifteen, he was able to build a substantial wooden house in Red Lion Field, Spitalfields, with her dowry. Here, he conducted his practice, treating as many as forty citizens in a morning, and in the land attached he cultivated herbs – collecting those growing wild in the fields beyond. Since Culpeper never finished his apprenticeship, he could not practise in the City of London but chose instead to offer free healthcare to the citizens of Spitalfields, much to the ire of the Royal College of Physicians. In this house, Nicholas Culpeper wrote his masterwork known as Culpeper’s Herbal which is still in print today.
After Culpeper’s death, the building became the Red Lion public house, surviving into the nineteenth century when it was demolished, as part of the road widening for the creation of Commercial St to carry traffic from the London Docks. Although the site of Culpeper’s house is now in the middle of Commercial St, the replacement building which served as the Red Lion until 1917 is in use today – appropriately enough -as Spitalfields Organics, selling wholefoods and herbal products. Andy Rider, Rector of Spitalfields, keeps an old print of Culpeper’s House in the Rectory in Fournier St and we are grateful to him for allowing Sebastian Harding access to this image which served as the visual reference for this model.
Read the full story of Nicholas Culpeper in Spitalfields
186 & 184 Fleet St.
186 & 184 Fleet St photographed by Henry Dixon for the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London.
If you were to take a stroll down Fleet St today, you might like to take a closer look at the buildings that stand at 186 & 184. They perch immediately to the right of St-Dunstan-in-the-West on the north side of the Street in a row of inconspicuous turn-of-the-century buildings. On closer inspection each appears distinct, but all three are somewhat tall and somewhat narrow. Their cramped proportions are explained by the fact they were built, like much of London, on the site of two ancient pre-fire buildings.
The history of the nineteenth century buildings that occupy the site today relates directly to the rise of the newspaper trade that proliferated in the area. Indeed, Fleet St is still synonymous with British journalism despite all major publications now being headquartered elsewhere.
Today the site of 184 & 186 is home to the Scottish firm D.C. Thomson & Co., who claim to be the last newspaper group to retain a base on Fleet St, and the titles of their publications, The Sunday Post and The Dundee Courier, are still proclaimed in mosaic on the façade of their neighbour at 188.
We know how the buildings that preceded them looked thanks to a photograph taken by Henry Dixon in the eighteen eighties for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London. Remarkably ,the buildings date from before the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Thanks to the efforts of the Dean of Westminster and forty scholars roused from Westminster School in the middle of the night, the fire stopped at Fetter Lane, just short of St-Dunstan-in-the-West and these intervening houses. John Aubrey, who lived through the Fire, recorded in his Brief Lives that Michael Drayton, the great topographical poet and a contemporary of Shakespeare, once resided in the house in the middle of our group of three, ‘the bay-window house, next to the East end of St. Dunstan’s Ch. in Fleet-Street.’ Drayton is one of many significant writers who have gravitated towards the area since William Caxton’s assistant, Wynandus de Worden, set up shop nearby in 1500, thus beginning Fleet St’s enduring association with the printed word. In keeping with the tradition, Drayton’s house at 185 was, at the time of Dixon’s photograph, a bookseller and publisher.
The immediate area was also the setting for the story “The String of Pearls” which gave rise to the urban legend of Sweeeney Todd and his accomplice Mrs Lovett . The murderous barber in the story lived above his premises at No. 186. In the tale, he is said to have slit the throats of over one hundred and fifty customers. That a significant portion of them would have been lawyers based in the local area woud have delighted the original readership, as it still does today.
by Simon Wright
Part of the Rothschild Buildings, 1888
Coming across Thrawl St on a sunny summer day in 2012, the atmosphere is calm and quiet. Now home to a community centre, nature reserve and basketball court, it appears to the casual pedestrian as an oasis of green and open space in a dense urban neighbourhood. This could not be more different to how it was described a mere forty years ago. Before their demolition in the seventies, the Rothschild Dwellings were visited by historian Jerry White whose first impression of the buildings was that he had “never seen tenements, so starkly repulsive” and “so much without one redeeming feature” in his whole life.
The Rothschild Buildings were unveiled on the second of April 1887, less than a year before the onset of the Whitechapel murders, perpetrated in the area surrounding the Rothschild Dwellings, and illustrating very publicly the need for social improvement in this ramshackle district. Many believe the murders were a catalyst to change, but the Rothschild Buildings prove that even before that there were philanthropists and businessmen keen to support the area.
The policy of cleaning up the East End had been underway in the streets around Spitalfields since the eighteen sixties. The Rothschild Dwellings were erected by the ‘Four percent Industrial Dwellings Company’ and stood on the sight of what had once been respectable middle class residences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had degenerated into lodging houses and slums. In the mid-nineteenth century, the old filthy streets with their myriad alleyways and courts were swept away. In their place, came the wide thoroughfare of Commercial St and large housing blocks such as the Nathaniel Dwellings (1892), the Lolesworth Buildings (1885) and, of course, the Charlotte De Rothschild Dwellings (1887). The tenants of these buildings were respectable working class tradesmen and craft workers able to pay the slightly higher rent. The area was heavily populated by Jewish immigrants who played a large part in instilling a sense of a prosperous community into what had been a lawless dangerous neighbourhood.
There is no need to glamorize the Rothschild Dwellings for we know that they were built on basic architectural principles and given absolutely no aesthetic embellishment. These buildings were designed less as homes and more as a way to contain the working classes. Built from yellow London brick with red lintels adorning the windows, this splash of colour provided the only visual break from the mass of sulphur-toned exteriors. In terms of layout there were three wings to the building, all arranged around a large courtyard which, in the few photographs available, appear ill-lit and oppressive.
But before we surmise that they were poor places to live for their inhabitants, I’d like to quote the late great Kenneth Williams when visiting the nineteenth century London council estate he grew up in – “I’m not trying to romanticize these living conditions and, of course, the rooms were cramped, but they were not jerry built and they’ve stood the test of time marvellously. On these balconies, there was a good deal of friendliness and probably a good deal more neighbourliness than you’d find on any high rise block” – Kenneth Williams, 1975.
By Sebastian Harding
Images copyright © Sebastian Harding
Archive images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Follow Sebastian Harding’s blog The Past in Paper, publishing his models as he makes them .
You may also like to take a look at Sebastian Harding’s Lost Buildings of Smithfield
You can see more pictures from the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London in A Room to Let in Old Aldgate and The Ghosts of Old London.
David Power, Showman
David Power lives in a comfortable Peabody flat round the back of the London Coliseum and, with his raffish charm, flowing snowy locks and stylish lambswool sweater, he is completely at home among the performers of theatre land. Yet, although David may have travelled only a short distance to the West End from his upbringing in the East End, it has been an eventful and circuitous journey to reach this point of arrival.
Blessed with a superlative talent, both as a pianist and as a composer, David interrupted our conversation with swathes of melody at the keyboard – original compositions of assurance and complexity – and these musical interludes offered a sublime counterpoint to the sardonic catalogue of his life’s vicissitudes. Settled happily now with his third wife, David organises charity concerts which permit him to exercise his musical skills and offer a lively social life too. At last, winning the appreciation he always sought, David has discovered the fulfilment of his talent.
“I’ve done a lot of things in my time. All my family were boxers. In those days you had thirty or forty fights a week before you could make a living. It was a different world. Them days we had some good fights but they were hungry then. They punched the fuck out of each other but they were all friends too.
Me, I love boxing but I was a prodigy at the piano at the age of five. My mother, Lily Power, she couldn’t afford no piano lessons for me because we were poor. People have no idea how hard it was in the thirties and forties. I was born in Hounslow and my mother moved us back to Spitalfields where she was from.
My mum paid five shillings a week rent at 98 Commercial St but she wouldn’t let me answer the door when the rent collector came round. Today you couldn’t buy it for two million. Wilkes St was called the knocking shop because the brass went round there for the top class girls. They said, “Can we help you out, any way you like?” Itchy Park, next to the church, we called that Fuck Park – you could get it in there for sixpence. It was a wonderful, wonderful world.
Then I was evacuated to Worcester but I ran away about nine times. Each time, the police picked me up when I got to Paddington Station and put me on the train back again, I was nine years old. It was very funny.
They gave my mother an old pub in Worcester and she took in twenty armaments workers. There was no water, it was outside in the scullery. She charged one pound fifty a week for bed and breakfast and I used to get up at five-thirty to do the fires each morning in 1940. The most wonderful thing was when they brought gas into the house and we had a gas stove, and I didn’t have to worry about making up the fire each morning and heating the water for everyone for bath night on Friday. I got in a lot of trouble at school because I was Jewish and they used to say, “Show us your horns!” and that’s how I got into fighting.
I started work in Spitalfields Market when I was fourteen, I worked with a Mr Berenski selling nuts – peanuts and walnuts. The place was piled high with nuts! I had to stack them up with a ladder. I remember once the sack split and the nuts went everywhere and he chased me around the market. But Harry Pace, my cousin, he was a middleweight, he protected me.
I got a job in The Golden Heart playing the piano at weekends, earning one pound for two sessions. An old guy asked me to play, “When I leave the world behind,” and I thought, “He ain’t got long to go.” I earned three pounds, seventeen shillings and tuppence but, when my father discovered, he hit me round the ear and said, “You’ve been thieving!” Then my mother explained what I had been doing, and he took the money and gave me two bob.
After the war, my mother moved to Westcliff on Sea and that’s when she could afford two and sixpence for piano lessons for me, but by then I was much more interested in sport. As a child, I could play any music that I heard on the radio but, when I had my first lesson at ten years old, I thought crochets and quavers were sweets. There was a big Jewish community in Westcliff and I went to Southend Youth Club and started boxing there until I was called up for the army. I played football for Southend, we won the cup and I scored two goals. In the army, I sent my mum one pound a week home, but I was supposed to have been a concert pianist at eighteen. Fortunately, my Colonel liked music and I was in the NAAFI playing the piano and he asked me to play for the officers. They shipped me out to Hong Kong and Singapore and I played twice a month in the Raffles Hotel on Sundays and for the Prime Minister of Hong Kong.
When I came out the army, I was supported by Harriet Cohen, a concert pianist. I told her I was a ragged man but she wrote to the principal of the Guildhall School of Music. The professor told me to play flat, so I lay on the floor. I said, “You asked me to play flat, you fucking nitwit.” Then I went for an audition at the Windmill Theatre but they only offered me eight pounds a week for playing fourteen shows, so I jacked it in and did the Knowledge and became a cab driver, and got married in 1960. Then I decided to go into the markets and I worked in Covent Garden for twelve months as a porter, until my wife’s dad and I went into hotels – The Balmoral in Torquay and Hotel 21 in Brighton, but in the recession of the nineties I went bankrupt. We couldn’t compete with the deals offered by the big chains where businessmen used to bring their dolly birds at weekends.
Then I went on the road selling and I was earning three or four hundred pounds a week, especially in Wales. They didn’t know what a carpet was there. I once bought ten thousand dog basket covers for five pounds and sold them all at four for a pound as cushion covers in Pitsea Market. And that’s when I went into Crimplene, and then china, and then ties. Those were great days. Eventually, I went back in the taxi, worked like a slave, had a heart attack and died. Half of my heart is dead. I’ve been in and out of hospital with the old ticker ever since, so I decided to give something back by holding concerts for University College London Hospital. I do it all. I know talent when I see it and we have shows every month.
I never played the piano for twenty years, until ten years ago I went back to it – I wrote a piece of music when my wife died. I always wanted to be a pianist because music is something I get wrapped up in. A lot of people never believed I played the piano because I was so ragged, I had a ragged upbringing. If you come from the background that I came from, you’ve got keep putting money on the table. To be dedicated to music, you to have to be rich or a fool. I’m a born showman, that’s what they tell me, “David, you’re a showman.””
David (on the left) enjoys a picnic with his mother Lily and brothers and sisters in Itchy Park, Spitalfields in the nineteen thirties.
David as a young boxer in the nineteen fifties.
Concert Pianist Harriet Cohen encouraged David to become a professional pianist.
David Power, Showman
Roll Up For Hot Chestnuts!
Tonight, you will discover my pal Amos, the roasted chestnut seller, outside Ben Pentreath Ltd in Rugby St where he will be handing out hot chestnuts to all and sundry from sixty thirty onwards to celebrate the opening of THE ARTISTS OF SPITALFIELDS LIFE curated by yours truly.
All the artists will be there in person to welcome you and we look forward to the pleasure of your company.
Click to enlarge this poster designed by Alice Pattullo
Whitechapel sculptor, Roy Emmins, arrives at the gallery with one of his sculptures.
Pair of Staffordshire dogs by Rob Ryan.
Model of Nicholas Culpeper’s house in Spitalfields made by Sebastian Harding
My pockets were going in holes until Jill Green made me this suede coin purse emblazoned with foxes, and I have persuaded her to make limited supply to sell at the exhibition. Below you can see a few of my discoveries from the Spitalfields Antiques Market.
Doulton Lambeth saltglaze harvest jug
Nineteenth century Staffordshire figure
Child’s mug.
Staffordshire figure of Lurcher.
Cries of London jam pot by Holkham Pottery.
Satlglaze Loving cup.
Sunderland lustre jug.
Large saltglaze flagon.
Staffordshire money box.
Roy Emmins sculptures installed in the window at Ben Pentreath Ltd
This is Max, the shop dog.
Lillie O’Brien & The London Borough of Jam
The loganberry jam that Lillie O’Brien and I made will be available exclusively at The Artists of Spitalfields Life opening at Ben Pentreath Ltd tonight.
Lillie O’Brien among the loganberries
As you can see, Lillie O’Brien sole trader of the London Borough of Jam has a passion for loganberries, that curious nineteenth century hybrid of the raspberry and the blackberry which possesses its own piquant flavour quite distinct from its cultivars – tart and pungent and tangy. Lillie has devoted herself to earning a living by making jam in small batches from fresh fruit as it comes into season and last summer she became captivated by the irresistible notion of loganberry jam.
The loganberries season only lasts two weeks and, when Lillie contacted Covent Garden Market, she discovered that none were to be found. There is no demand for loganberries, she was told. Yet the scarcity only sharpened Lillie’s resolve, recognising that if she found some, she could corner the market in loganberry jam for the whole of London. Many phone calls later, Lillie spoke with a fruit farmer in Kent who had just one line of loganberry plants, ready to pick. Having located the elusive berries, Lillie just needed some assistance with the picking, which was how I became her accomplice in the quest for this rare fruit.
After a week of floods, we expected the weather to be against us but yesterday morning dawned dry and sunny after the night of heavy rain, filling us with hope as we set out from East London towards Kent with buckets and pots in hand. Trudging through fields of strawberries, passing raspberries and blackberries, we came to the loganberries trained upon wires – since, in its trailing form, the plant bears a closer resemblance to the blackberry, even if the individual fruits look like extended raspberries. Once we arrived, Lillie clasped her hands and gasped in delight to set her eyes upon the object of her quest. We were not disappointed.
In fact, we found ourselves doubly the beneficiaries of this respite in the weather, because no-one else had been there to pick for several days and the plants were heavy with fruit, many turning the deep pink with a tinge of blue that is the sign of the ripe loganberry. Working on either side of the line, Lillie and I picked our way along systematically, working without a break and gathering over twenty kilos in just a few hours, stripping the plants of ripe fruit. The berries were sweet and aromatic, and soon our fingers were stained purple. For a couple of hours, we had the privilege to enjoy a blue sky and racing clouds for our loganberry picking, which could not have happened if the fruit were wet.
Yet by the time we reached London in the early afternoon, the clouds had already covered the sky again and the first raindrops were falling, which served to emphasise how lucky we were to have gathered our precious haul. As soon as we had carried the fruit into Lillie’s kitchen in Hackney, she filled her copper jam pan with two kilogrammes of loganberries and set straight to work, making jam to capture the flavour of the fruit within hours of picking it in the field. Once the berries in the pan upon the stove had broken down, Lillie added the sugar and tested the syrupy mixture constantly with her wooden spoon, to ensure that the consistency of the jam was satisfactory and avoid any overcooking of the fruit which would impair the flavour.
Within an hour, we had eight jars of loganberry jam, glowing a rich pink upon the table. It marked the proud achievement of our quest. Afterwards, I walked back through the driving rain in the premature dusk to Spitalfields and, once I arrived home, I took a spoon and sat alone in my living room with my jar of jam. Already it had set to a gelatinous consistency, and I ate a spoonful direct from the pot. At once, I was transported back to my few hours in the sun picking berries. There was a delicate natural sweetness to this jam that was not at all sugary, an intense fruit flavour with a flowery perfume and a delicious tang of citrus. Let me confess, I ate another spoonful of jam, and then, in the half light, I sat and contemplated the aftertaste of loganberries.
I had left Lillie completely absorbed in her task of making jam from all the loganberries we had picked. It may take her all day on Friday to complete the estimated batch of eighty jars of jam that our crop of berries should produce. You can buy your own pot of this rare preserve to enjoy for yourself, exclusively from The Artists of Spitalfields Life at Ben PentreathLtd.
Lillie O’Brien sells her jam at Chatsworth Rd Market. London Borough of Jam preserves are also available from A. Gold in Spitalfields, Leila’s Shop in Shoreditch and the E15 Bakery in London Fields.
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Justin Knopp, Typoretum
Come and see Justin Knopp’s woodblock Spitalfields Life print at The Artists of Spitalfields Life opening at Ben Pentreath Ltd on Wednesday 7th November.
Justin Knopp
I had not met Justin Knopp of Typoretum before he designed the print you see him holding in this photograph – I had not even spoken with him – yet when a copy arrived out of the blue, I was so impressed that I got on the train up to Coggeshall at once, eager to go and find the man behind this clever piece of typography.
Situated where the suburbs of Essex have unravelled into green fields and villages with old flint churches, Coggeshall is an ancient market town lined with medieval houses upon Stane St, the Roman road which is the continuation of Old St. Outlying the village, behind a modest nineteenth century terrace, you will find a long weatherboarded shed with a plume of blue smoke drifting through the orchard from the chimney of the wood-burning stove within. Here, in a single long room lined with trays of magnificent wooden type and filled with gleaming iron printing presses crouching like tamed mythical beasts, Justin Knopp – printer, typographer and retained fireman – works his subtle magic.
Justin was born in Coggeshall though he studied in London at St Martin’s College of Art in Covent Garden before returning after graduation in 1994. “My family are all from London for generations,” he told me as he started blending ink with a palette knife upon a glass plate, “before that they were from round here, Maldon. They were bootmakers.” And then he went silent, assuming the grimace of concentration upon the task in hand.
Meanwhile, the printer’s pie sat upon the Albion Press of 1851 awaiting the ink and I could not fail to be impressed that although Justin had used a different typeface for each line, all the lines were of equal length. “I like the challenge of fitting the type into the block,” he explained, observing my interest, “It certainly makes life difficult, but it’s a bit of a house style of mine!” After years of commuting and working as a graphic designer in London while pursuing letterpress as a hobbyist, Justin took the brave step of starting out on his own in 2009. He built the shed, installed the presses and never looked back.
“I started doing this because I loved it and I knew lots of the old boys that were doing it” he confided to me as he began to roll the ink onto the type, “and I thought, ‘It’s dying out and that’s a terrible shame,’ so it became my ambition to carry it on.” In fact, Justin’s school playground sat beside The Anchor Press, one of the largest printing factories in the country at the time and although it is long gone, Justin befriended many of the veterans of the printworks, recording the oral history and archiving the photographic record. The outcome of this passion was that Justin was gifted collections of type and presses that he has supplemented with his own acquisitions.
Bringing a contemporary sensibility to the use of these classic typefaces, Justin finds himself in demand, not just for business cards and wedding invitations, but providing fine letterpress printing for all kinds of projects such as the recent limited edition of Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84.” “Lots of weird and wonderful things we get involved with,” admitted Justin with a delighted smile, as he laid the paper down delicately upon the type, placing the packing on top and rolling the whole contraption forward beneath the press before pulling upon the lever and leaning back with his whole weight.
“I like a degree of imperfection,” he confessed, scrutinising the resulting print with a frown, “but any more than that and it looks badly printed.” Justin is scrupulous to achieve what he terms, the “kiss” impression that sits upon the surface of the paper, not the indented imprint that is commonly associated with letterpress yet merely an indicator of poor quality printing. The truth is that the print looked mighty fine to me, an enormous thrill to see my words emblazoned in such style.
By now, Justin’s wife Cecilia arrived with his two excited daughters from school to interrupt the calm of the print shop. “Which of you is going to be a printer?” he teased, as each gave him the kiss impression upon the cheek, and I could not but envy these children growing up with a printing press at home. Then, while the family went for tea, Justin carried on, re-inking the block and studying each impression as it came off the press. “Printing in this way, there’s a lot more variation,” he said, permitting himself grudging satisfaction as he hung the prints on the drying rack suspended from the ceiling, “each one can be unique, which is nice.”
Working assiduously in his Guernsey sweater and canvas apron, surrounded by nineteenth century presses and bringing new life to old techniques, Justin is a happy man. He is at home here, with a busy family life and an active involvement in village life that includes firefighting duties too. “I’ve gone from doing it purely for the love of it to making a living out of it, and we’re still alive!” he declared to me, casting his eyes around his beautiful print workshop in triumph.
Copies of Justin Knopp’s print are available from the Spitalfields Life online shop
