Javed Iqbal, TV Repair Man
If you are looking for TV repair in the East End, I recommend you visit Master Tech in Heneage St off Brick Lane – where, not only will the job be done expertly and at a fair price, but most importantly you will have the opportunity to meet Javed Iqbal, one of Spitalfields’ most engaging raconteurs.
Although I do not even possess a TV, I was happy to spend my Saturday morning in Javed’s shop beside his workbench and surrounded by TV spare parts, as he topped up my tea cup from his thermos flask, while I perched listening to his extraordinary monologues, covering so many areas of existence with appealing levity. There is an indomitable good humour that underscores Javed’s conversation. A buoyancy which I found especially heroic when he revealed the years of overt antipathy and threats of physical violence he has withstood – just to create a modest life for himself.
One huge window gives onto Heneage St, and Javed sits upon a tall stool, level with his work bench at the centre of his shop, while the wall behind him is lined with shelves stacked with televisions waiting his attention. Upon the bench sits a large flat screen monitor with the back removed and – while exploring this labyrinth of wires and components – Javed is in his element, talking as he works.
“I came to Brick Lane from Pakistan with my father in 1960, and I went to Christ Church School across the road. On the first day, I went into the playground and I had my arm broken. I was the first Asian boy at the school.
I was seven. I came with my five year old brother Tasleem. We came in February and it was very cold indeed. It was strange, because I had never seen snow before and there was deep snow. We travelled BOAC. It was a beautiful experience. Forget the wonder of an aeroplane, I had never been in a car.
My father came in 1958. First he went to Liverpool and then came here and ran the Star Cafe on the corner, 66 Brick Lane. Once he was established, he came to fetch us. My father was very rich man thanks to the restaurant business, but he gambled it all away playing poker with Gregory Peck. He had the talent as a gambler and in those days there were few Asians, so it was a novelty for them to have one at the table.
The first house I lived in was 22 Princelet St where my father had a basement. Jews were the only people that would rents rooms to us. In those days, Irish, Jews, Blacks and Asians were known as “dogs.” When I was a little boy, the Seven Stars across the road was dominated by the Kray Brothers. Every Friday night, somebody would go out from there round all the businesses in Brick Lane and whatever you did, you had to pay.
I was allowed to watch television from four until five thirty and then my step-mother would down sticks, she had the temper of a gorilla. After school, I went to help in my father’s cafe. The Pakistanis were all coming here to Brick Lane. It was a mixed area then, the gateway for everybody basically.
When I started at the Robert Montefiore Secondary School in Deal St, it was a different headache. The pupils were divided between Christians and Jews, with two lunch sittings, kosher and non-kosher. One week the Jews ate first and the next week the Christians ate first. There was no halal in this country then, but Muslims can eat kosher so I ate with the Jews. I had one friend, Janel Singh, we were the only two Asians in the school, a Pakistani and an Indian. People looked at us in a different way.
On the first day, we were told to take our clothes off and they thought we must have TB because we were both so skinny. When we went to school, the white people used to hit us. The Turkish people were scared as well, so we got together. When we went to school, we had to go four or five of us together to be safe. The headmaster was Rhodes Boyson who became education minister for Margaret Thatcher, and he said, “What happens outside the school is not my responsibility.”
When I left school, I worked as a porter at the Royal London Hospital and I was learning TV repair after hours with a man from Mauritius who had a shop in the Roman Rd. One night, I was beaten up there by skinheads – it was sixteen to one. They beat me unconscious and, after I came round and stopped a taxi to take me to the hospital, the driver refused when he saw all the blood. He said he didn’t want to get blood on the inside of his taxi. I had a broken jaw. Later, I joined an anti-racist march here in Brick Lane after the death of Blair Peach and I was beaten up again. This time, by the police with truncheons.
Thanks to a Jewish doctor, Dr Wootliff, a good friend of my father’s, I got the biggest break of my life. He wrote me a reference and I got a job at Alba TV manufacturers in Tabernacle St. I was fitting radiograms together and I got a penny, ha’penny for each one. I thought, “Bloody Hell! This is a production line.” Most of my friends were white and they had already broken into skilled trades. I really wanted to be a TV repair man.
I went to an interview in Dagenham. They said, “Forget about the job, this area is not good for black people. Just leave now before somebody puts a knife in you.” I got a job in Canning Town for Multibroadcast where I found it bloody hard. There were many customers when they answered the door and saw you, they wouldn’t let you in the house. It was the worst place I could imagine working. The people were all dockers and they didn’t like my face. I’d park my car and when I’d return there’d be shit on it. After six months, I quit.
In the late seventies, I was working for a TV repair company called Derwent in Streatham. There was this great guy called George, an English guy. If you brought in a broken TV and put it on the bench, he’d say, “Put the kettle on!” and light a fag. Before the kettle boiled and he’d smoked the fag, the TV would be repaired. He inspired me. TV repairs were in big demand. One day I went to repair a TV and the customer’s brother was there who was also TV repairman, he worked for Visionhire. He asked me how much I earned a week, and when I told him £16, he offered me £50 a week to join his company.
I opened up my own shop here in Heneage St, Spitalfields in 1976. It used to be a sweets and paraffin shop belonging to a Mr Lewis, and I came here as a child with my father to buy sweets. It took me a year to clear out the rubbish and fix it up. I am the only Pakistani here surrounded by Bengalis. I said to them, “Fair enough, the country is divided but it’s nothing to do with me!” If God don’t give me, then the Devil will give me, and I will serve the mixed community. I started with ten shillings and I have worked here for thirty-eight years. And I am grateful to the Bengalis because I am still working and it is all through word of mouth.
I believe no country gives you anything, it’s what you can give and make that counts. I bought a house out of working in this shop. If you look back at the past, all the immigrants that made money started their own businesses. Even Marks & Spencer started here in Spitalfields in Old Montague St.
I have struggled quite a bit but with Allah’s help I have got through. I am not an Asian anymore, I am more British than the bloody British.”
“People looked at us in a different way.”
“In those days, Irish, Jews, Blacks and Asians were known as ‘dogs.'”
“If God don’t give me, then the Devil will give me …”
“With Allah’s help, I have got through …”
Master Tech, 1 Heneage St, Spitalfields, E1 5LJ 0207 247 7703 07956549599
Gina’s Restaurant Portraits
Gina has been cooking meals in Spitalfields for fifty years
Last Sunday, Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien commenced a new project – making portraits of the customers at the celebrated Gina’s Restaurant in the Bethnal Green Rd. Here you see the first results of this novel endeavour and there will be more to come over successive Sundays.
Gina Christou and her husband Philip first opened up for business in Brick Lane in 1961 and, although the location has shifted a couple of times, many of the customers have been coming to their restaurant ever since. Today, after more than fifty years serving meals to the people of Spitalfields, Gina and her husband Philip are in semi-retirement. Yet since they live above the restaurant, they continue to open just on Sunday for lunch, out of loyalty to their long-term customers, very many of whom are old friends now. And it is a devotion that is gratefully reciprocated by those for whom weekends in the East End would be unimaginable without Sunday roast at Gina’s.
In Spitalfields, no-one else can match Gina & Philip’s half century of service, and so these pictures are both a tribute to their perseverance and also a celebration of the lively social scene that has grown up around this beloved restaurant which becomes the centre of the world every Sunday.
Brian Welch – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s for thirty years.”
Julia Sparks – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s for thirty years.”
Don Aylan – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s for eighteen years.”
Caroline Duffy – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s about twenty years.”
Chen – “I’ve ben coming to Gina’s five years.”
John Plummer – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s for seven years.”
Tudor Davies – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s for twenty years.”
Tony Briggs – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s for thirty years.”
Sandra Benson – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s for ages … years and years.”
Ernie Taylor – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s about forty years.”
Maurice – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s for thirty weeks.”
Jake Hamilton – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s since I was ten, one year.”
Stephen Coughlan – “I’ve been coming to Gina’s for fifteen years.”
Del Martin – “I was born in Fuller St, Brick Lane. I’ve been coming to Gina’s for forty years.”
Karim Ali, waiter – “Today is my first day at Gina’s.”
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
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Jimmy Pollock, Fruit & Vegetable Wholesaler
In the garden shed of his peaceful house beside Epping Forest, Jimmy Pollock keeps just wooden one box as a souvenir of his thirty-seven years in the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market. A native of Hemming St in Bethnal Green, Jimmy is a rare example of a porter who rose to become a trader and then a guvnor, owning his business. But ever-conscious of the formal hierarchy of the market, Jimmy has always retained an emotional loyalty with the porters rather than the traders, a lifelong allegiance confirmed now in his retirement by the presence at our interview of his friend and contemporary in the market, the porter Jimmy Huddart.
Jimmy Pollock is a man of stature – a former athlete – who demands respect on the basis of his physical presence alone, yet assumes a sweetness of manner when talks of the Spitalfields Market, recalling an array of savoury characters and incidents as if he were describing a former life upon a pirate ship. His emotional honesty and generosity of spirit are qualities that won him popularity and respect in the market where the long-term reputation of any individual is the most valuable commodity.
“I left school at fifteen and wanted to be an electrical engineer, but I while I was waiting to start my training there was a vacancy for an empty boy at Pash, Cornish & Smart at the Spitalfields Market in an old synagogue made into a warehouse. I remember as clear as anything the first day I started, the smell of the produce was just unbelievable – I thought it was going to be like that everyday, but I got used to it. I started at two pounds ten shillings a week. Outside the warehouse was where the greengrocers delivered their produce, and the cart marker who stood there, Mick Cotton, he told me which porters needed empties collecting. As an empty boy you were only allowed to touch empty boxes. I liked market life, I was sixteen. I was just starting getting interested in women and there were always office girls from the City strolling by. You worked by night but your days were your own, and there was football and cricket of a good standard. We competed against all the teams from the other markets.
At twenty-one, the union informed me that I could become an employee at the market and gave me a licence. Your badge had be on show at all times or you got pulled up by a superintendent. I started work at Lechsteins on the corner of Lamb St and Commercial St. I collected my barrow from Bobby Hatt in one of the arches Wheler St, he had the monopoly. It cost me five shillings a week in maintenance and hire, but every Monday, I had to take the wheels off and grease the axles myself. When I started I couldn’t take too heavy loads at first. You weren’t really a porter until you had shot your first load. You hit a bump and over you went. The plus was that everyone would stop and come help you pick it all up. Once you had got the cart running you just kept going. You pulled it behind you and it was all a question of balance. There were more than twenty cart stands around the market perimeter supervised by cart markers and I delivered the greengrocers’ orders to these locations where they collected them. Each one had a name, such as Top o’ the court (by Puma Court) or Crutchey Day (named after a famous one-legged porter) or The Dormitory (after the Sisters of Mercy Night Shelter) – and when they moved the market to the new building some of these cart stand names travelled too.
I remember, one year after Boxing Day, two homeless guys got killed in front of the car park gates. They had made a camp under cardboard boxes to keep warm. On the first morning back a forty ton trucks pulled out from the gates, they just thought it was a pile of waste boxes and crushed them. After eighteen months at Lechsteins I was made unemployed and I had to stand under the clock in the centre of the market to get seasonal work. There might be twenty-five of us standing there. Next, I worked for Vellacot for three years. I was approached by Dick Barrett an elderly porter who had become a trader – it was something everybody wanted to do – he told me it was now too much for him and would I be interested in working with him part-time at E.Dennis owned by Bob Reynolds. So I spoke with my boss at Vellacots and he had no problem with it.
Then Dick Barrett said he’d had enough and asked if I could become full-time. Bob Reynolds, the guvnor was from North Stifford in Essex where he had farms and he used to come in to Spitalfields four days a week. I took the job and worked there for ten years selling produce for him. Familiarity taught me the trade, I already knew all the greengrocers. One day, Dick Barrett told me had cancer and he had another five years and his family were secure, and would I be interested in taking over the business. It was opposite The Gun on Brushfield St. He said he’d been offered ten thousand pounds for the business but as I’d served him well he would give it to me for three thousand. It was a good deal and we made a verbal agreement. He was dead within nine weeks and then I had to wait a year for probate before I could trade. I had seventeen years trading as E.Dennis, from 1976 until 1992. My first five years were unbelievable, from the first day it kicked off. I only stayed two years after they shifted to the new market, I took my old signboard with me and I was told I could not put it up for health and safety reasons. I sold the business to John Thomerson of JT Produce Ltd in 1994.
There was quite a few porters that became traders but few that became a guvnor. You live your life and no regrets.”
Jimmy Pollock at the Spitalfields Market, with the returned crates he once collected as empty boy.
Jimmy with Lennie Jones -” He was more than a father to me, and recognised as one of the best judges of quality and pricing of produce to walk the market.”
Old friends from the Spitalfields Market – Jimmy Huddart, Porter, and Jimmy Pollock, Porter turned Trader.
Pictures 2, 4 & 6 copyright © Mark Jackson & Huw Davies
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Jimmy Huddart, Spitalfields Market Porter
David Kira Ltd, Banana Merchants
Peter Thomas, Fruit & Vegetable Supplier
Ivor Robins, Fruit & Vegetable Purveyor
John Olney, Donovan Brothers Ltd
Jim Heppel, New Spitalfields Market
At Batty Fashions
This is Devinder Singh Battu, seen in the basement of 127 Bethnal Green Rd where he works with his brother Gurmeet creating the leatherwear sold under their own label Batty Fashions. The two brothers have always worked together, Gurmeet as pattern cutter and Devinder as machinist putting the garments together, and now Batty Fashions is the longest established leather business in Brick Lane still making clothes, when the others have switched to wholesaling imported leatherwear.
The musky tang of leather exudes from the walls here, walls lined floor to ceiling with rails hung six deep with leather jackets in muted tones of black and brown. There is a gleaming magnificence to it all, and it extends further than the eye can see – as I discovered when Gurmeet led me into the next shop, equally filled with leatherwear, and the basement workshop also hung with rails of leather jackets and a vast stash of leather in a multiplicity of colours and finishes. And as Gurmeet led me on the tour, ever garrulous and brimming with good humour, he told me the story of Batty Fashions, and the rewards that he and his brother have reaped from their labour.
“We came from Kenya in 1971. My father was a tailor and he worked in a leather shop here. My brother had rag trade connections in Whitechapel at that time and – looking at their business – we thought we can do our own. We started out as partners in this business in 1978 and we had some help from our father. We were on the second floor in the Whitechapel Rd and we were making for other people but we made some for ourselves too. It was jackets and we did some marketing and slowly we built it up. We moved here to the Bethnal Green Rd in 1986 opening up The Leather Ware House and we had up to eight people working here in this building. This used to be the centre of the leather market, before 1990 London was supplying the whole world but then the whole world started making and the quality has gone down. Now we can’t find people who want to work making leatherwear for the wages we can offer.
We’re taking it easy now because we’re secure. We worked hard for years, seven days every week we were working and late nights too. Our business is wholesale, we’re supplying a lot of leather shops around the country. We’re trying a bit of retail ourselves because so many of our wholesale customers – the High St stores – are closing down, so now we try to do everything, we even do repairs. And we enjoy our work.
On Sundays, my wife Kuldip comes here, she is a partner. Our four children are grown up, all educated. My first daughter, she is a pharmacist married to a senior maths teacher. My second daughter is a teacher married to a businessman. My third daughter is a dietitian married to a doctor and my son has just qualified as a dentist. And my brother Devinder, he has three children. His first son is an optician with three shops in Essex, his second son is a dentist, and his daughter is a student. We’ve got three sisters and four brothers – a large family – the sisters are married and everybody is here, living their lives.
We are having a good life, we live in big houses in Essex. Our grandchildren can play football in our back gardens. We made the money and we spent it. We saved the money first and then we spent it. I attribute our success to hardworking and being a close family, we help each other a lot. My father Bachan Singh Battu, he is ninety in March – he’s active and he enjoys his life. My mother Bhagwanti is blind and every day, before work and after work, we go to visit. If we wanted to, we could sell out and pack up at any time but we want to work as long as we can, to stay fit.”
By now, we were standing in the basement workroom, where Devinder was placidly at work at his ancient sewing machine. More reserved than Gurmeet, he extended a warm hand to greet me and Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie, before dampening his appealingly wispy beard under the tap and scooping it up under his chin to look more kempt for the camera. Meanwhile Gurmeet was taking hold of irons and patterns demonstratively, offering any number of staged poses to Sarah’s lens. It was obvious that the two brothers delight in each others’ company and, “We have our ups and downs,” was the only admission I could evince of the nature of their relationship, though I did discover they live close to each other in Essex and drive up together each day in the same car.
Yet while Gurmeet & Devinder’s designs are modest and conservative, those the brothers create for Boudica (the trendsetter of Brick Lane formerly known as Mark Petty) are extravagant in style and in colour, bringing glamour and flamboyance into the workshop. “Mark is a nice person,” Gurmeet assured me while Devinder grinned in agreement, rolling his eyes in excited confirmation,“He comes here and we sit down with him. What we do for Mark is fun!” In fact, a pale pink fur-trimmed cape hung awaiting collection by Boudica, the single coloured item, frivolous and fluffy among a sea of dark jackets. And, after Gurmeet pointed out the cape to me proudly, I noticed the two brothers exchanged a private glance of wonder at this ostentatious confection.
Gurmeet Singh Battu
Gurmeet & Devinder
Kuldip & Gurmeet Battu with their most celebrated customer Boudica (formerly known as Mark Petty), the trendsetter of Brick Lane, in a Batty Fashions creation.
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie, except Mark Petty photograph copyright © Colin O’Brien
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So Long, Mother Levy’s Nursing Home
Last week, Peabody demolished the historic Mother Levy’s Nursing Home in Spitalfields – in arrogant disregard of the widespread public demand for it to be preserved. Today, I am republishing my profile of Tom Ridge as a salute to the valour he showed in leading such a magnificent campaign which culminated in a unanimous vote by Tower Hamlets Council to save this beautiful old building. Yet even this was not enough to succeed, and my feature is accompanied by Tom’s recent statement which is touching in its dignity and restraint at such an emotional time.
Tom Ridge
For over twenty years, historian Tom Ridge has been fighting selflessly to save significant buildings that tell the story of the East End. A noble warrior who has single-handedly pursued a relentless campaign, writing letter after letter – waging what he terms “an endless battle” – Tom’s latest combat has been to prevent the demolition of the former Jewish Maternity Hospital in Underwood Rd in Spitalfields.
Beyond its obvious significance as part of the history of the Jewish East End, the edifice was also important as the last example of its kind in the country. Operating from 1911 until 1940, this pioneering institution was the personal mission of Alice Model who started and ran the hospital to help the sick among the poor and women at home with babies. Popularly known as Mother Levy’s Nursing Home, it was the first organisation in this country to provide home helps and maternity nurses, and among the many generations of East Enders who came into the world within the walls of this dignified Arts & Crafts building were Alma Cogan, Arnold Wesker and Lionel Bart.
The possibility of converting the elegant structure – which resembles a painting by Vermeer upon its street frontage – was never entertained, instead it was destroyed in a development by Peabody that was hastened through, in which a token consultation of the immediate residents was invited and then their wishes were ignored. Meanwhile, Angela Brady of Brady Mallalieu – the architectural practise designing the new building – who is the current RIBA president, said in The Guardian on 5th October 2011, “Let’s ask what people want,” emphasising that she is, “enthralled by the ‘rich mix’ of the capital’s culture.”
In harsh contrast to these sentiments, the developers sent a Prior Notification of Demolition to Tower Hamlets Council Planning Department that same month. Obtaining this approval in advance of any public consultation meant that Peabody could demolish the buildings irrespective of what the people of the East End had to say, and without any assessment of the historical importance of the existing structure or the environmental impact of a new block upon this quiet corner of Spitalfields.
Regrettably, this alarming set of circumstances is a familiar story for Tom Ridge, just the latest episode in a conflict in which for too long he has been a lone warrior, chasing bureaucrats around and becoming expert at deciphering their game of weasel words, as large organisations pursue their own interests at the expense of the culture of the East End. Occasionally, Tom will confess the weight of emotional responsibility he carries for his “failures” – those instances where he has lost the battle against developers and part of our history has gone forever – but it almost impossible to get him to disclose his successes.
Yet we all owe Tom Ridge a debt of gratitude for those important facets of the East End that have survived thanks to his heroic campaigning. It was he who discovered that an old building by the canal had been used by Dr Barnardo and was responsible for saving it, and creating the Ragged School Museum there – “because there should be a museum of the East End in the East End.” It was he who led the successful campaign to save the Bancroft Rd Local History Library when the Council would have preferred to close it down and sell off the collection. It was he who prevented buildings being constructed upon the small public park at the heart of Bethnal Green, by ensuring it was listed as of historic importance.
When Tom arrived in the East End from Liverpool in 1965, at the age of twenty-three, and asked the way to St Saviour’s School where he had been employed to teach geography, he was told to go over Stinkhouse Bridge and the walk down to cross Gunmakers’ Arms Bridge. Entranced by the poetry of these names – dating from 1818 – Tom did not at first realise their significance as part of a six mile ring of waterways, originating from the time when, “London was the greatest industrial city in the world with the greatest port in the world.” Years later, Tom set up the East End Waterways group to preserve the canals and their attendant structures – “because the Waterways are the last places of peace and tranquillity in the East End.”
“I fell in love with the East End and its people – maybe it’s because I come from Liverpool which is also a port city.” Tom confided to me, tracing the origins of his passion, “I was born on a council estate in Everton, and my greatest excitement was travelling on the overhead railway along seven miles of dockland and looking into each of the docks, and seeing all the things there.”
Working in a post-war bomb-damaged East End as a young teacher, he witnessed the social effects of the closure of the London docks and the rebuilding of the territory. “I shall never forget the old cleaning ladies at the school saying to me, ‘Mr Ridge, we do miss our cottages. They took our cottages away.’”Tom recalled in sombre reminiscence, speaking of his days at St Saviour’s in Bow, –“what they were talking about were their terraced houses, that were almost entirely swept away.”
The Jewish Maternity Hospital in Underwood Rd. An elegant crow-stepped gabled building reminiscent of a streetscape by Vermeer. Although it had lost its diamond-paned leaded windows, it retained its original doors and ironwork.
The Arts & Crafts style cottage was designed by John Myers in 1911.
No amount of commemoration by Peabody will compensate for this shocking and needless destruction of a little building which meant so much to so many people. And as an affordable family home, it would have been a living memorial to a unique maternity hospital.
There are now only two historic Jewish welfare buildings which stand testament to that extraordinary outburst of vitality and creativity known as the Jewish East End. But the old people’s home in Mile End Road and the soup kitchen for the Jewish Poor in Spitalfields are relatively unknown and unloved buildings, compared to the pride of place which was embodied in the name “Mother Levy’s.”
This name and the remarkable history of the unique hospital run by women for women will live on in the history books about the East End, but as built evidence and a living memorial for future generations to understand and appreciate the Jewish East End, and the East End as an historic point of arrival for migrants from Europe and indeed the whole world, Mother Levy’s is dead.
All the buildings at the former hospital are being demolished by Peabody, aided and abetted by officers in Tower Hamlets Council but against the unanimous wishes of its elected Councillors.All four hospital buildings on Underwood Road could and should have been adapted for residential use (with the utilitarian buildings at the back replaced by new homes). We began the campaign with this proposal but discovered that Peabody’s architects had already drawn up their plans for new buildings on the site of the former Jewish Maternity Hospital, which Peabody had purchased from Tower Hamlets Council in March 2011. It was at this point that Dr Sharman Kaddish, as director of Jewish Heritage UK, made her compromise proposal for the retention of the two cottages and their conversion to family homes.
Our petition to Peabody was based on this proposal and signed by about 760 people, including Arnold Wesker and former MP Mildred Gordon and councillors from all four political groups on Tower Hamlets Council. Dozens of letters were written to Peabody’s Chief Executive, Stephen Howlett. They included letters from the chairs of the Jewish East End Celebration Society and the East London History Society, Cllr Rabina Khan, and Cllr Bill Turner, the secretary of SAVE Britain’s Heritage and Lord Janner of Braunstone QC.
At the full council meeting on 29 November 2011, Cllr Judith Gardiner proposed the Labour group’s motion calling on the Mayor to negotiate with Peabody, and Peabody to spare the cottages. The motion noted that Peabody has a duty to optimise the amount of housing it provides but also to protect the borough’s heritage. Cllr Peter Golds, Leader of the Conservative group, spoke in support. Additionally, John Penrose MP, Minister for Tourism and Heritage recommended engagement between the Campaign, Council and Peabody for an amicable settlement to keep the two cottages. But Peabody was unmoved and, in demolishing the oldest and most attractive part of the former hospital, Peabody has committed the gross act of cultural vandalism which we all tried to prevent.
Tower Hamlets Council has the highest housing target in London and unless it formally identifies all its unlisted buildings which are heritage assets, and insists on their retention and adaptation by developers and housing associations, the borough will go on losing historical buildings capable of re-use. It is said that the Council has a list of 600 planned building sites for new housing. Most of the 600 sites will have existing buildings and doubtless many of them are unlisted buildings of some architectural and/or historic interest. Although none of them are likely to have been loved as much as Mother Levy’s, her tragic death must signal a new start for Tower Hamlets.
Had the 2008 Planning Statement for the redevelopment of the former hospital been made available for public comment, an altogether more transparent process may well have resulted in the retention and adaptation of the two cottages. Several years ago, Planning Statements for three redundant Tower Hamlets Council buildings were made available for public comment. As a matter of extreme urgency, all present and future council disposals must be subject to the same good practice. And as an integral part of this process, the Council must draw up a list of all unlisted heritage assets for retention and adaptation.
Tom Ridge
This is what became of the former Mother Levy’s Nursing Home where Alma Cogan, Lionel Bart, Arnold Wesker and many thousands of Jewish East Enders were born.
Portrait of Tom Ridge copyright © Lucinda Douglas Menzies
You may like to leave your own salute to Tom Ridge on the Save Mother Levy’s Campaign Facebook page
Peter Stanton, Empress Coaches
One of the corners of the East End that intrigues me most is at the boundary of Bethnal Green and Hackney, where a narrow path bordered by crumbling old brick walls leads up from the Hackney Rd to the junction of Mare St and the Regent’s canal. Cutting through at an angle to the grid of streets, it has the air of a field track that was there before the roads and the railway. Looming overhead against the skyline is a tall ruinous structure with the square proportions of a medieval castle, London’s last unreconstructed bomb site, left to decay since an incendiary hit in World War II. Beyond this, you pass under the glistening railway arches to arrive at the canal where, to your left, a vista opens up with majestic gasometers reaching up the sky and a quaint old building with bay-fronted windows entirely overgrown with ivy, cowering beneath. This is the headquarters of Empress Coaches.
Yesterday there was ice on the canal, which made me all the more grateful for the generous welcome extended by Peter Stanton, third generation of the Stanton family at the coach yard and still operating from the extravagantly derelict premises purchased by his grandfather.
Edward Thomas Stanton was an enterprising bus driver who bought his bus in 1923 and created a fleet operating from a yard in Shrubland Rd, London Fields, whence he initiated several familiar bus routes – including the No 8 pictured above on the office wall – journeys that became part of the perception of the city for generations of Londoners. In 1927, he bought the property here in Corbridge Crescent but when the buses were nationalised in 1933, he made £35,000 from the sale of the fleet, permitting him to retire and hand over to his son Edward George Stanton, changing the business from buses to coaches at the same time. “It was a bloody fortune then!” declared Peter, his grandson still presiding with jocularity over the vestiges of this empire today. Outside the fleet of coaches in their immaculate cream paintwork, adorned with understated traditional signwriting sat dignified and perfect as swans amidst the oily filth of the garage, ready to glide out over the cobbles and onto the East End streets.“A coach yard within two miles of the City of London, it will never happen again,” declared Peter in wonder at the arcane beauty of his inheritance.
“My father came here at sixteen with his sister Ivy who did all the accounts,” he explained, sitting proudly among framed black and white photographs that trace the evolving design of coaches through the last century. At first, the bodies of the vehicles were removed in the Winter to convert to flat trucks out of season and these early examples resemble extended horsedrawn coaches but, as the century wore on, heroically streamlined vehicles took over. And the story of Empress Coaches itself became interwoven with the history of the twentieth century when they were requisitioned during World War II to drive personnel around airfields in Norfolk, while the staff that remained in London took refuge in the repair pit in the coach yard as a bomb shelter during the blitz.
“My father didn’t encourage me to come into the business,” admitted Peter, who joined in 1960, “But after being brought up around coaches and coming up here every Saturday morning with your dad, it gets into your blood and I could think of nothing else but going into it. I started off at the bottom, I was crawling under the coaches greasing them up. I was a mechanic for twenty-two years but then me and my brother Trevor bought out the company from the rest of the family, and the two of us took it over.”
“In those days, people didn’t go on holidays, they had a day out to the sea on a coach. And they had what they called “beanos,” pub and work excursions going to Margate or Southend and stopping at a pub on the way back and arriving back around midnight. Those pubs used to lose their local trade because people didn’t want to go into a bar filled with a lot of drunken East Enders. They were very rowdy and the girls were as bad as the boys.” revealed Peter, able to take amusement now at this safe distance and pulling a face to indicate that there is little he has not seen on the buses. “Put it like this, I used to say that when you took a coachload of girls out on a beano and their boyfriends and husbands came to pick them up at one o’clock – if they knew what I knew these girls had been up to they wouldn’t be so welcoming. In other words, they were not so innocent in those days as people thought they were. But the police were the worst, they went bloody barmy and they did things they would nick anybody else for doing!”
“When I first started there were six beanos every Saturday in the Summer but in the whole of the last year we only did two.” he admitted with a private twinge of disappointment. As the beanos decreased in the sixties, Empress Coaches were called upon by the military for troop movements. “We used to do the Trooping of the Colour, we drove the troops from Caterham Barracks with a police escort. It was the time of the IRA and they had to check all the bins along the way and have a guy with a jammer sitting in the front of the bus, so if there was a remote-controlled bomb it wouldn’t go off. They told us, ‘Whatever you do, drive on. Even if you hit someone.’ There’d be twenty of our coaches full of soldiers plus an escort.”
These are now the twilight years at Empress Coaches, after the family sold the business and are simply employed to keep it ticking over, which explains why little maintenance is undertaken. Yet the textures of more than eighty years of use recall the presence of all those who passed through and imbue the place with a rare charmed atmosphere. I was not the first to recognise the appeal of its patina, as I discovered when Peter reeled off the list of film crews that had been there, most notably “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” who wallpapered his office with the gold wallpaper you see in the top picture. “We’ve had Michael Caine here,” he boasted, “Gary Oldman, Ray Winstone and Dennis Waterman too.”
“After I spent fifty-two years of my life here, I’ve got be here.” Peter assured to me, biting into a sandwich and chewing thoughfully,“It’s more than likely this place will be redeveloped before too long and that will be the end of it, but in the meantime – I’m just trying to keep this show on the road!”
Edward Thomas Stanton, the enterprising bus driver who invented the number eight bus route.
Edward George Stanton in his leather bus driver’s coat.
Brothers Peter and Trevor Stanton.
Mark Stanton, Trevor’s son.
Jason Stanton, Peter’s son.
Between the coaches.
A forgotten corner of the yard.
Empress Coaches, the office entrance.
Corbridge Crescent, with the canal to the right.
A narrow path leading from the Hackney Rd to the junction of Mare St and the Regent’s canal.
London’s last unreconstructed bomb site.
You may also like to read about two nearby industries
Spitalfields Market Nocturne
Nowadays the Spitalfields Market shuts at night, but for centuries this was when it opened, as a vast nocturnal wholesale market for fruit and vegetables. Initiated by charter signed by Charles I in 1638, it existed in Spitalfields until 1991 when it moved to a custom-built market hall in Leytonstone.
I have already published a few pictures of the market by Mark Jackson & Huw Davies – two poets with cameras who came nightly during the last year and took thousands of photographs – but, returning to their vast canon of work to choose which to include in the Spitalfields Life book, I came across so many more wonderful images which have not been seen before that I could not resist publishing another selection for you today.
At the new market hall in Leytonstone forklift trucks were introduced, but in Spitalfields human labour dominated when it came to moving produce around whether by barrow, trolley or up on the shoulder. Such an occupation required brawn and physical fitness, attracting many ex-boxers, and the rigours of market life encouraged idiosyncrasy, as everyone fell into their larger-than-life roles over decades. Mark & Huw’s photographs delight in the dramatic chiaroscuro of bonfires, flaring lamps, glistening wet streets, velvet darkness and the coming dawn which impart these photographs an undeniable romance as a unique record of the last days of ancient market.
It is my privilege to be able to publish some of these photographs in print for the very first time in the book of Spitalfields Life, and the Bishopsgate Institute, which has digitized the entire collection, will be exhibiting a selection to coincide with publication.
Photographs copyright © Mark Jackson & Huw Davies
You can see the original selection of
Mark Jackson & Huw Davies’ Photographs of the Spitalfields Market
and read about
Spitalfields Market Portraits, 1991
