Meet the Curry Chefs of Brick Lane
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Originally published by Spitalfields Life, Jeremy Freedman’s portraits of The Curry Chefs of Brick Lane are to be shown at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green Rd, from 23rd February until 31st March. Learn more about events accompanying the exhibition including a competition and curry cook-off here
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William Marshall Craig’s Itinerant Traders
The latest wonder in my ongoing exploration into the innumerable prints of the “Cries of London” published over the centuries is William Marshall Craig’s Itinerant Traders of London in their Ordinary Costume with Notices of Remarkable Places given in the Background from 1804. A portrait artist who exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1788 and 1827, Craig was appointed painter in watercolours to the queen. This set of prints was discovered yesterday at the Bishopsgate Institute, bound into the back of a larger volume of “Modern London” published in 1805, and the vibrancy of their pristine colours suggests they have never been exposed to daylight in two centuries.
Hair brooms, hearth brooms, brushes, sieves, bowls, clothes horses and lines and and almost every article of turnery, are cried in the streets. Some of these walking turners travel with a cart, by which they can extend their trade and their profit, but the greater number carry the shop on their shoulders, and find customers sufficient to afford them a decent subsistence, the profit on turnery being considerable and the consumption certain. (Shoreditch Church, standing at the northern extremity of Holywell St, commonly called Shoreditch, is a church of peculiar beauty. It has a portico in front, elevated upon a flight of steps and enclosed with an iron railing, which is disgraced by a plantation of poplar trees.)
Baking & boiling apples are cried in the streets of the metropolis from their earliest appearance in sumer throughout the whole winter. Prodigious quantities of apples are brought to the London markets, where they are sold by the hundred to the criers, who retail them about the streets in pennyworths, or at so much per dozen according to their quality. In winter, the barrow woman usually stations herself at the corner of a street, and is supplied with a pan of lighted charcoal, over which, on a plate of tin, she roasts a part of her stock, and disposes of her hot apples to the labouring men and shivering boys who pass her barrow. (At Stratford Place, on the north side of Oxford St.)
Band boxes. Generally made of pasteboard, and neatly covered with coloured papers, are of all sizes, and sold at every intermediate price between sixpence and three shillings. Some made of slight deal, covered like the others, but in addition to their greater strength having a lock and key, sell according to their size, from three shillings and sixpence to six shillings each. The crier of band boxes or his family manufacture them, and these cheap articles of convenience are only to be bought of the persons who cry them through the streets. (Bibliotheque d’Education or Tabart’s Juvenile Library is in New Bond St.)
Baskets. Market, fruit, bread, bird, work and many other kinds of baskets, the inferior rush, the better sort of osier, and some of them neatly coloured and adorned, are to be bought cheaply of the criers of baskets. (Whitfield’s Tabernacle, north of Finsbury Sq, is a large octagon building, the place of worship belonging to the Calvinistic methodists.)
Bellows to mend. The bellows mender carries his tools and apparatus buckled in a leather bag to his back, and, like the chair mender, exercises his occupation in any convenient corner of the street. The bellows mender sometimes professes the trade of the tinker. (Smithfield where the great cattle market of London is held, on which days it is disagreeable, if not dangerous to pass in the early part of the day on account of the oxen passing from the market, on whom the drovers sometimes exercise great cruelty.)
Brick Dust is carried about the metropolis in small sacks on the backs of asses, and is sold at one penny a quart. As brick dust is scarcely used in London for any other purpose than that of knife cleaning, the criers are not numerous, but they are remarkable for their fondness and their training of bull dogs. This prediliction they have in common with the lamp lighters of the metropolis. (Portman Sq stands in Marylebone. In the middle is an oval enclosure which is ornamented with clumps of trees, flowering shrubs and evergreens.)
Buy a bill of the play. The doors of the London theatres are surrounded each night, as soon as they open, with the criers of playbills. These are mostly women, who also carry baskets of fruit. The titles of the play and entertainment, and the name and character of every performer for the night, are found in the bills, which are printed at the expense of the theatre, and are sold by the hundred to the criers, who retail them at one penny a bill, unless fruit is bought, when with the sale of half a dozen oranges, they will present their customer a bill of the play gratis. (Drury Lane Theatre, part of the colonnade fronting to Russell St, Covent Garden.)
Cats’ & dogs’ meat, consisting of horse flesh, bullocks’ livers and tripe cuttings is carried to every part of the town. The two former are sold by weight at twopence per pound and the latter tied up in bunches of one penny each. Although this is the most disagreeable and offensive commodity cried for sale in London, the occupation seems to be engrossed by women. It frequently happens in the streets frequented by carriages that, as soon as one of these purveyors for cats and dogs arrives, she is surrounded by a crowd of animals, and were she not as severe as vigilant, could scarcely avoid the depredations of her hungry followers. (Bethlem Hospital stands on the south side of Moorfields. On each side of the iron gate is a figure, one of melancholy and the other of raging madness.)
Chairs to mend. The business of mending chairs is generally conducted by a family or a partnership. One carries the bundle of rush and collects old chairs, while the workman seating himself in some convenient corner on the pavement, exercises his trade. For small repairs they charge from fourpence to one shilling, and for newly covering a chair from eighteen pence to half a crown, according to the fineness of the rush required and the neatness of the workmanship. It is necessary to bargain for price prior to the delivery of the chairs, or the chair mender will not fail to demand an exorbitant compensation for his time and labour. (Soho Sq, a square enclosure with shrubbery at the centre, begun in the time of Charles II.)
Cherries appear in London markets early in June, and shortly afterwards become sufficiently abundant to be cried by the barrow women in the streets at sixpence, fourpence, and sometimes as low as threepence per pound. The May Duke and the White and Black Heart are succeeded by the Kentish Cherry which is more plentiful and cheaper than the former kinds and consequently most offered in the streets. Next follows the small black cherry called the Blackaroon, which is also a profitable commodity for the barrows. The barrow women undersell the shops by twopence or threepence per pound but their weights are generally to be questioned, and this is so notorious an objection that they universally add “full weight” to the cry of “cherries!” (Entrance to St James’ Palace, its external appearance does not convey any idea of its magnificence.)
Doormats, of all kinds, rush and rope, from sixpence to four shillings each, with table mats of various sorts are daily cried through the streets of London. (The equestrian statue in brass of Charles II in Whitehall, cast in 1635 by Grinling Gibbons, was erected upon its present pedestal in 1678)
Dust O! One of the most useful, among the numberless regulations that promote the cleanliness and comfort of the inhabitants of London, is that which relieves them from the encumbrance of their dust and ashes. Dust carts ply the streets through the morning in every part of the metropolis. Two men go with each cart, ringing a large bell and calling “Dust O!” Daily, they empty the dust bins of all the refuse that is thrown into them. The ashes are sold for manure, the cinders for fuel and the bones to the burning houses. (New Church in the Strand, contiguous to Somerset House and dividing the very street in two.)
Green Hastens! The earliest pea brought to the London market is distinguished by the name of “Hastens,” it belongs to the dwarf genus and is succeeded by the Hotspur. This early pea, the real Hastens, is raised in hotbeds and sold in the markets at the high price of a guinea per quart. The name of Hastens is however indiscriminately used by all the vendors to all the peas, and the cry of “Green Hastens!” resounds through every street and alley of London to the very latest crop of the season. Peas become plentiful and cheap in June, and are retailed from carts in the streets at tenpence, eightpence, and sixpence per peck. (Newgate, on the north side of Ludgate Hill is built entirely of stone.)
Hot loaves, for the breakfast and tea table, are cried at the hours of eight and nine in the morning, and from four to six in the afternoon, during the summer months. These loaves are made of the whitest flour and sold at one and two a penny. In winter, the crier of hot loaves substitutes muffins and crumpets, carrying them in the same manner, and in both instances carrying a little bell as he passes through the streets. (St Martin in the Fields, the design of this portico was taken from an ancient temple at Nismes in France and is particularly grand and beautiful.)
Hot Spiced Gingerbread, sold in oblong flat cakes of one halfpenny each, very well made, well baked and kept extremely hot is a very pleasing regale to the pedestrians of London in cold and gloomy evenings. This cheap luxury is only to be obtained in winter, and when that dreary season is supplanted by the long light days of summer, the well-known retailer of Hot Spiced Gingerbread, portrayed in the plate, takes his stand near the portico of the Pantheon, with a basket of Banbury and other cakes. (The Pantheon stands on Oxford St, originally designed for concerts, it is only used for masquerades in the winter season.)
Images courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
At the Fruit & Wool Exchange
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-story 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 were 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 matches the window structure and red brick of the eighteenth century houses in Fournier St, while the facade mirrors 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.
Before the decision on the redevelopment is made by Tower Hamlets Council on March 6th and the resident businesses find they may have as little as six months to move, I went over for a look to savour the past glories of the City of London Fruit & Wool Exchange for myself.
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, means they can 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.
Learn more about the proposals for the City of London Fruit & Wool Exchange site here
Take a look at Mark Jackson & Huw Davies’ photography of the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market
Spitalfields Market Portraits, 1991
Night at the Spitalfields Market, 1991
Fruit & Vegetable auction photograph courtesy of Stuart Kira
Other archive images courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
On the Kingsland Rd
Brothers on the Kingsland Rd
In 2006, photographer James Pearson-Howes could not afford the rent in Shoreditch and so he moved to the Kingsland Rd, living in a tiny flat on the corner opposite where the new Haggerston Station is now. “Once I discovered the place and the people, I grew to love that road,” he admitted, “I can’t think of anywhere like it. There were Turks, Africans, White, Jewish – it was a hub of creativity and everybody got on.”
James discovered he had arrived at a time of change as major building work for the new East London Line commenced, promising a metamorphosis of this ancient thoroughfare following the line of Ermine St, the Roman road north from London through Spitalfields and across hunting grounds that were once the property of Henry VIII – the king referred to in the name Kingsland Rd.
“There was all this building work going on, so it was an instinctive response for me to record the transformation,” James recalled. “At that time, I made friends with Roy and we both shared a love of the road, so we met three times a week and walked up and down the road together. He told me the stories and I took the photographs.”
Ease and intimacy characterise these fluent images, taken by a photographer who has embedded themselves within the community they portray. And today, some of what is pictured has already gone – Lady Glitter and Pier One are no more – as Dalston changes from a scruffy neighbourhood where everyone can feel at home to live and let live, already becoming another fashionable destination where the rents go up and up and up.
“These were all shot on film. I always take my personal work using film, to trust what I’ve got.” James explained, revealing his preference for the discipline of analogue photography, “You shoot – then you wait and get your your photos back a few days later.” Yet there is a relaxed spontaneous quality shared by all James’ Kingsland Rd pictures, both reflecting his delight in the endeavour and speaking eloquently of the distinctive nature of the place portrayed. “I love street photography and I just wanted to get my teeth into it,” he confessed to me.
“This is my favourite image. A fashion shoot in Ridley Rd Market in front of a man selling fish.”
Ridley Rd Market, late afternoon.
“This gold shop in Dalston is still there.”
“These old boys always sit in the window of this cafe at Dalston Junction.”
Window shopping in Dalston.
Dog leaning out of a truck.
“This is String, a friend of Roy’s and the proprietor of Lady Glitter, a barber’s salon.”
At Lady Glitter.
String observes work on the new railway line and housing complex at the rear of Lady Glitter
The development nears completion.
Guitar girl.
Guitar boy.
“This lady always sat here.”
At “Manhattan” in Dalston, specialising in suits for African weddings.
At “Da Endz,” specialising in New Era hats.
“This girl wanted to show off her watch.”
“Gilbert & George eat dinner at Mangal in the Kingsland Rd every night. Gilbert takes a bus and George walks.”
“I liked this lady’s look with her earrings.”
Paloma Faith, rising pop star.
Jamie from the Klaxons at the laundrette.
Turkish bakers make yufka at Somine Restaurant.
“Sharma, a stylist, who has now opened her own nail bar – Wah Nails.”
“At Pier One, the club was painted all black with neons and day-glo, and they played predominantly Hip Hop and R’n’B.”
At Pier One.
A restaurant at the rear of a car wash.
“Halal grocery store by night, photographed from a passing bus.”
Sleeping by the Regent’s Canal.
Photographs copyright © James Pearson-Howes
You may also like to read these other Kingsland Rd stories
Joanne Ross, Florist
This is Joanne Ross – fearless florist of the Roman Rd – her grey eyes sparkling as she summons her courage and steels herself to face the annual onslaught of Valentine’s Day tomorrow. “We’re talking about men, here,” she whispered to me, raising her eyebrows significantly, “We’re talking random, last minute…” Yet Joanne was not commenting upon the vagaries of the masculine sex when it comes to romance, but about the practicalities of supplying bouquets to the Romeos of the Roman Rd.
On Valentine’s Day, many contemplate their chances of getting flowers, assessing the likelihood in terms of the state of their relationship or – fatally – even as a barometer of their personal attractiveness, but Joanne knows better. “I’ve got to lay out a lot of money and it’s a big gamble.” she explained plainly, “But you don’t know if it’s going to go or not. Weather plays a big part, windy or sunny makes a difference. And what day of the week it falls isimportant, a weekday is always better.”
If all the factors are in place, Joanne will expect have a queue of up to twenty outside her shop in Globe Town Market Sq on Valentine’s Day, and you can assured she will be working assiduously at her bench to send the gallants away with ravishing examples of her famous hand-tied bouquets to impress their beaus.
As you will have gathered – in spite of superficial appearances – the work of a florist is far from romantic. In Joanne’s tiny shop, she maintains both a wide stock of cut flowers and an equally impressive display of plants in pots outside on the pavement, and for her business to succeed she needs to ensure a quick turnover. Consequently, it is work that requires a keen knowledge of the market and phenomenal organisation to avoid wastage, but after nearly thirty years in business, Joanne has demonstrated staying power.
“I’ve worked in Globe Town Market Sq since I was thirteen. At first, I was my step-grandad’s Saturday girl on the fruit & vegetable stall outside. By the time I was fifteen, my dad had taken over the stall and he set me up with a little flower stall next to his. He made me do it, but it was pitiful – it was pathetic. I used to have an Oxo tin and sometimes I only turned over ten pounds. Then this shop became empty and I borrowed five hundred pounds off the bank when I was eighteen to set up here. It was a lot of money then, when I was only getting fifteen pounds a week. My dad got me started, he saw the potential and he worked quite hard to push me do it, and he was right.
When I first started here, I used to work eight until two and then go to Upton Park to our family florist, Maggie Lenny, and she taught me floristry. She was big lady and she used to butter the bread on the bench right where the moss was! She set me on the right track. And when I got my shop, I bought her an apple blossom tree and she planted it right opposite her shop where she could see it. And it’s still there, although she has gone now. She was very bad with diabetes, so I had to clean the shop and change the water in the vases, and she’d tell me what to do. She inspired me. She showed me how to wire a flower and how to moss a wreath. Years ago, we used to moss everything. She showed me the traditional way and I’ve always stuck with what she taught me. The first funeral order I had, I wasn’t confident but she made me prepare the wreathes and moss them up, and dad took them all over to her. I had greened the wreathes back to front, but she helped me unpick them and put it right.
Even as a kid, I used to love floristry. I saved up all my money to get my mother’s day flowers. Our family got all our wedding and funeral flowers from Mrs Lenny, she was a wonderful woman and a very wealthy one too, but I don’t think you can get rich from floristry any more. It’s a hard life, the hours are long and you work in the cold. Everything has to be maintained and kept fresh. I go the market daily, my day starts at half past four and some days if we’re busy I don’t get home ’til eight or nine. You forget about your life, I’ve given up everything to make this successful – happily, because it has worked. Eighty per cent of the people that come in here, I know them by their first name. There’s a lot of families, I’ve done all their weddings and funerals. You’ve got to do it with kindness and respect, and do it properly – it’s got to be done right.”
Joanne’s father, Colin Ross, rose to prominence as a union leader fighting for the rights of his fellow dockworkers prior to the closure of the London Docks. In 1980, he came with his wife Patricia to Globe Town. They took over a fruit & vegetable stall from Robert Wheeler who had in turn inherited it from his parents who traded here prior to World War II when this was known as Green St, before the Market Sq was built. Colin sold vegetables, Patricia sold fruit and Joanne sold flowers. After his experience of the labour market, Colin wanted his daughter to have self-reliant employment and today, seven years after Colin & Patricia gave up their stall, Joanne continues in her flower shop.
So Joanne is braced, ready to supply the flowers for her thirtieth Valentine’s Day in Globe Town Market Sq tomorrow, delighting to play her part because she already knows that some of these customers will return to order wedding flowers, as the sequence of life rolls resolutely onward in the Roman Rd.
Joanne’s mother Patricia Ross at her fruit stall in Globe Town Market in 1980.
Joanne’s dad Colin Ross, a former hero of the London Docks, at his vegetable stall.
Joanne give her mother a peck on the cheek.
Joanne Ross
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Joanne’s Florist, 122 Roman Rd, London, E2 0RN 020 8981 8420
Tif Hunter’s Maltby St Portraits
Justin – Head Baker at St John
This is Justin Piers Gellatly, emerging from the depths of the railway arch in Maltby St, Bermondsey, where he does the baking for which St John has become deservedly renowned. His weary raffish expression is familiar to me, simultaneously frazzled by working long hours, yet equally buoyed with pride to send his masterly creations off into the world.
Every one of these charismatic portraits of working people by Tif Hunter evokes a different dramatic circumstance and – even when we are not party to the stories – there is a vivid sense that each subject exists in a moment stolen from the round of productive labour which characterises Maltby St – a phenomenon in recent years, where some of the best produce and provisions in London are to be discovered. As a consequence, it has become a regular excursion for me on a Saturday morning to walk down from Spitalfields across Tower Bridge, and it delights me to be able to go from arch to arch buying beer from the brewer, coffee from the roaster, meat from the farmer and – of course – doughnuts from the baker. Over this time, a few places have opened where you can eat lunch yet Maltby St has never become too busy, by operating only upon Saturday mornings it has kept its local identity.
A community has grown in Maltby St, occasioned by the common enthusiasm amongst those who work here and all the regular customers who turn up weekly to the same suppliers. As one who lives nearby and has been a visitor here since its inception, Tif Hunter created this series of dignified portraits to record the band of independent self-respecting folk who choose to work here in complicity, pursuing their own way of doing things.
Tif Hunter explained to me that he took these photographs with a 5×4 camera, which – to you and me – is one of those cumbersome nineteenth-century-style gadgets upon three legs with black bellows separating a lens and a plate. Tif invited his subjects to step out momentarily from their work into the street, then he disappeared under a black cloth and after an exposure of one second, each of these portraits was photographed in a single take. “They were all lit by God,” he told me in a sudden flight of lyricism. Yet the process is not as arcane as it sounds, because Tif uses Polaroid. This film produces both a positive image and negative, and it is this negative from which Tif to makes his print. “The quality of focus is unsurpassed,” he revealed with a smile of visible pleasure.
“I wanted to photograph through the seasons,” Tif explained to me, “to get people in t-shirts and in woolly hats, and everything in between.” There is an intensity to each of these portraits which compels the attention – borne of a coalescence of these spirited individuals and an imaginative embrace of the medium by the photographer. Starting in the spring of 2011, the series – which currently stands at fifty-five – remains a work in progress. “It is the beautiful accident, that’s what I am drawn to,” Tif confessed to me as we examined the effect of the random elements produced by the process which frame each image, generating a fascinating dynamic with the finesse of his portraits, “It’s the magic which brought me into photography in the first place.”
Katie – St John Bakery
Katherine – Fern Verrow
Elliott – The Ham & Cheese Company
Stasia – Topolski
Dominic – Borough Cheese Company
Jane – Fern Verrow
David – 40 Maltby St
Anita – Monmouth Coffee Company
Evin – Kernel Brewery
Lillian – Neal’s Yard Dairy
Guillaume – Aubert & Mascoli
John – Tayshaw Ltd
John – Mons Fromager
Jack – Coleman Coffee Roasters
Tony – Tayshaw Ltd
Joseph – The Ham & Cheese Company
JK – Monmouth Coffee Company
Anna – Monmouth Coffee Company
Raef – 40 Maltby St
The Microcosm of London II
Vauxhall Gardens
(click on this plate or any of the others below to enlarge to full size and examine the details)
How very pleasant to be a tourist in the metropolis of 1809, thanks to the magnificent plates of “The Microcosm of London,” contained in three large red volumes at the Bishopsgate Institute. Here are the wonders of the capital, so appealingly coloured and so satisfyingly organised within the elegant classical architecture that frames most social activity – while also conveniently ignoring the domestic reality of the greater majority of the populace.
In fact, these images might be as vacuous as picture postcards, if it were not for the contribution of cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson who drew the human figures onto the architectural plates draughted by Augustus Charles Pugin, father of Augustus Welby Pugin who designed the Houses of Parliament.
While the first impression is of harmony and everyone in their place – whether it be church, masquerade, asylum, theatre, prison or lecture hall – examining these pictures close-up reveals the genius of Thomas Rowlandson who cannot either prevent himself introducing grotesque human drama or adding comic specimens of humanity into these idealised urban visions. Just like an early nineteenth century version of “Where’s Wally?”, Rowlandson implicitly invites us to seek the buffoons. Even if in some plates, such as the Drawing Room in St James, he appears to acquiesce to a notion of mannequin-like debutantes, Rowlandson more than makes up for it at the Bank of England where – surprise, surprise – the buffoons take centre stage. Spot the clown in a stripy waistcoat with a girl on each arm in Vauxhall Gardens, or the dolts all robed up in coats of arms at Herald’s College, or the Masquerade where as characters from Commedia dell’Arte the funsters seem most in their element.
Meanwhile at the Post Office, in cubicles not so different from those in call centres of our own day, clerks are at work in identical red uniforms which deny them both the idiosyncrasy and demonstrative individuality that is the vain prerogative of the rich in this vision of London. Equally, at the asylum nobody gets to assert themselves, while in the prisons people are diminished both in size and in colour by their environment. In “The Microcosm of London,” Augustus Pugin portrayed an architect’s fantasy vision of a city of business, of politics, of religion, of education, of entertainment, of punishment and reward, but Thomas Rowlandson populated it with life.
The Post Office
The Royal Circus
The Great Hall, Bank of England
Dining Room, Asylum
Royal Geographic Society
Drawing Room, St James
St Martin in the Fields
Pantheon Masquerade
King’s Bench Prison
Sadler’s Wells Theatre
Coal Exchange
Herald’s College
Surrey Institution
Fleet Prison
Watercolour Exhibition, Old Bond St
Drury Lane Theatre
Coldbath Prison
Hall and Staircase, British Museum
Common Council Chamber, Guildhall
Images courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to take a look at the rest of the plates in The Microcosm of London
