Spitalfields Life

Franceskka Abimbola, Franceskka Fabrics

On a rainy Sunday in Spitalfields when everything is grey, I wend my way to Wentworth St to visit the African textile stores, that glow like multicoloured lanterns illuminated in the dusk – where a troupe of magnificent women preside, each one a shining goddess in her own universe. A radiance which Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Jeremy Freedman celebrates in his exuberant portraits published here.

Sunday is when it all happens in Wentworth St, when customers coming from as far as away as Aberdeen and the Netherlands converge to savour its wonders as the international destination for the best Holland Wax, French Lace, Swiss Voile and Headties to be found anywhere.

Weaving through the Petticoat Lane Market and pausing in the drizzle to gaze into the shop windows, you will spy the fine ladies of Wentworth St holding court in their shops to the assembled throng, simultaneously displaying the wit of matriarchs, the authority of monarchs and the glamour of movie-stars, and all dressed up to show off the potential of their textiles. Identified upon the fascias by their first names, as Franceskka Fabrics, Tayo Fashions & Textiles, and Fola Textile, many of these women put themselves forward personally as bold trendsetters, designing their own fabrics, defining the fashion and styling their customers too. In this, the oldest part of Spitalfields, the textile industry which has defined this neighbourhood for centuries is alive and thriving today thanks to the talents of these shrewd businesswomen of Wentworth St.

Franceskka Abimbola, whose business is the longest established here, welcomed me into her kaleidoscopic shop with mirrored ceiling and walls draped in lush fabrics, just as there was a brief lull in the mid-afternoon trade. “In the late eighties, I came here from Edinburgh to Petticoat Lane to buy this fabric and I found the dealers were all Jewish who didn’t wear it and didn’t understand it,” she explained with a humorous frown, “I spoke to Solomon at Renee’s who introduced me to his supplier. So then I wanted to be the first African woman to open a shop, and I used to buy it and sell it from the back of a car. But when I spoke to the supplier about opening my own place, he said, ‘You want to open a shop and start selling my fabrics? I’m going to break you into pieces!’”

Undeterred, Franceskka bravely opened her shop in the Kingsland Rd – at a respectable distance – and, fourteen years ago, she was one of the very first to open in Wentworth St, thus initiating this extraordinary phenomenon where now every other shop here sells Wax, all fiercely competing with their own styles and prices. Thankfully, Franceskka is still in one piece and, in reward for her courage, she is a big success.

“Lots of Nigerian women came at first to buy and ask advice,” she revealed delightedly, “but then women from Gambia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Ghana came too. Many didn’t know how to tie the headtie so I teach them how to do it.” With an unassuming relaxed presence, Franceskka, who has a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Studies, controls her international business empire from this tiny shop, extending to two more in Lagos and a third in Abuja. “I go to the fabric exhibitions in Paris and Spain to get inspiration, I design the fabrics myself and get them manufactured in Switzerland. The French Laces are in vogue at the moment and they are very expensive, but if it’s for a wedding people will go all out to look beautiful.” she said, with a delicate smile and lift of her brow, merely hinting at the razzle-dazzle on offer.

Banke Adetoro at Royal Fashions incarnates the notion of sassy with her extravagant eyelashes, constantly fluttering like butterflies. “There’s nothing you want that you can’t get here,” she informed me with an amused gesture of unqualified authority, when I dropped in, “I get all the latest stuff. I can do as many as twenty buying trips in a year. My shop is the biggest and the most beautiful!” You really need to visit this shop to experience the vast phantasmagoria of patterns on display.

By contrast, across the road at Tayo Fashions & Textiles, I met the alluring Tayo herself in her modestly-sized shop. “My mother used to do this back in Africa, and I picked it up,” she confided to me quietly, “I just started trading at home and through the church, and then I started in a small shop with a little help from the bank. Now I have a shop in Lagos too and I go three times a year.” Outlining the convenient balance between the trade in  both continents, “At Christmas it’s busy there when it’s quiet here, and it’s busy here in the Summer when it’s quiet there.” she said. Tayo’s two sons help her out in the shop and I was fascinated that in every single shop I visited these women had their children present. In fact, most had come into it through their families and some already had their children working with them, and I found it an interesting contrast to the perceived dilemma between children and career that many European women face.

Betwixt the fabulous fabric shops in Wentworth St are those selling the accessories to complete the outfit, the gleaming metallic pointy shoes and matching bags in multiple colourways and, of course, the jewellery. My favourite is Beauty Stones, lined entirely with coral necklaces that cascade like a waterfall down the walls to create an environment enraptured like a magic cave in a fairy tale. “In the beginning of African culture, anyone that wears it will be honoured,” declared Onome, the gentle custodian of the coral, “In Africa, we believe it is more precious than gold but, in this market, I have realised that lots of people are in love with it too.” Standing proud, Onome who is a celebrant in her own tribe, gestured to the coral that surrounded her, feeling its benign presence. “It’s my mother’s business,” she continued fondly,”but when she died ten years ago I couldn’t let the business die too.” And today the business is lively, since Onome’s nine children work in the shop (two were adopted after her sister’s death) and, as we spoke, happy little children ran around our legs playing with strings of corals beads they were threading. “It’s really is lovely to look at – sometimes when I put my hand on a bead, it tells me what to do, how to make the necklace,” Onome admitted, clasping a string of coral in her hand, “and the children are very good at the beads too, it’s in the family.”

Speaking with the Wax sellers of Wentworth St, who taught me the Yoruba concept of “Aso- Ebi” – using co-ordinated textiles at a social gathering to express the inter-relationships of all the people there – I realised that these modest shops contain an entire cultural universe with its own sophisticated language spoken in the vocabulary of textiles. Fashion exists here but, more than this, each decision taken, both in the choice and combination of fabrics makes a personal statement, which gives every single outfit a vibrant poetry all of its own.

Sheba Eferoghene, Novo Fashions

Tayo Oladele, Tayo Fashions & Textiles

Fola Mustapha, Fola Textile

Banke Adetoro, Royal Fashions

Onome Efebeh-Atano, Beauty Stones

Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman

With grateful thanks to Sheba Eferoghene for making the introductions.

You can read my original feature about Jo & Sheba Eferoghene, Novo Fashions

In London, the Thames has always been the natural receptacle for concealing and disposing things, creating a miry hoard of secrets, all just waiting for Steve Brooker, the mudlark, to come along and snaffle them up. Over the last seventeen years while he has been searching, the mud has been eroded by wash from the Thames Clippers, exposing an unprecedented level of finds that compel Steve to come mudlarking several times each week at low tide and be the first to see what has been newly revealed.

Steve is widely known as the Mud God – which seemed a little far fetched to me – until I saw him striding towards me eagerly in his chest-high bespattered waders, clutching his yellow plastic bucket and trowel. Over six feet tall with a grizzled beard and intense, glittering eyes, he was as excited to get down onto the beach as a child on the first day of the Summer holiday. Only someone with Steve’s natural authority can carry off such unmediated enthusiasm naturally. He is a man who is confident of his place in the world, and that place is the foreshore of the Thames.

We came down the slipway as the tide fell towards its lowest ebb. The day was mild yet occluded, and my heart lifted as I was released from city streets into a vast open space, the domain of water and sky. The territory of the Mud God. He understands the idiosyncrasies of the tide, and the nuances of the mud banks and the river bed. As well as coins and buttons, he finds Roman shoes, Medieval pins, eighteenth century witches’ bottles, nineteenth century lovers’ tokens, twentieth century voodoo dolls, live bombs and new guns – and sometimes he find human bodies too. He knows where to look and he does not need a metal detector because he has sharp eyes.

When Helen Mirren lost her ring throwing her grass clippings over the river wall from her Wapping garden, it was Steve who found it for her in the river. When villains throw handguns and sawn-off shot guns into the river at Woolwich to lose them forever, it is Steve who collects them and hands them to the police – he found fifteen recently.

Mudlarks tend to work in pairs for safety’s sake on this hazardous river and I had the privilege to be Steve’s partner in slime for a day. And I was happy to be in his company because Steve is a member of the Society of Thames Mudlarks, has a licence from the Port of London Authority and has the necessary experience to judge the treacherous movement of the tide against the access points to the shore.

On the beach, Steve used his trowel to indicate where the mud had been washed away revealing a fresh bed of stones beneath, suggesting the type of location worthy of searching. Scraping away the top layer, he scanned for objects and passed me a Medieval pin – a sign that other personal or domestic artifacts might be present. Thus the pattern was established of walking, scanning and pausing to scrape at promising sites. We continued until Silvertown where thousands of bullets mysteriously litter the foreshore, an unexplained military dump from World War II. All around the Isle of Dogs, we walked upon a shore littered with the metalwork of the ship building industry that was once here. Lying redundant, we saw eighteenth century iron splitters used for breaking up tree trunks into planks, to build ships sunk long ago.

At low tide, we reached Mast Point where Steve finds whole clay pipes. Pipes that once fell from a stevedore’s hand and sunk into the mud without breaking. Here I saw impacted layers of eighteenth and nineteenth century river bed, now exposed by erosion, with tantalising fragments of white pipe protruding. We squatted down to peer at the tiny bowl of a pipe, washed from the mud by the waves that very day and exposed from the mud for the first time. In the shape of a lady with a wide skirt that formed the bowl of the pipe, it was a tiny sculpture with a presence all its own, and we were the first to touch it since whoever dropped it two hundred years ago. Steve’s eyes popped because he never saw one like it before. Moments like this are what keep bringing Steve back, because he knows will always find something, yet he never knows what it will be.

We walked miles along the water’s edge in the centre of London and the only others we met were two friends of Steve’s, also searching the shore. I forgot entirely about the city on the river bank above us, because I was down in the river bed in the land of the mudlarks. All of the history of London was present with us, you just had to look, and it was a magical place to be.

Take a look at www.thamesandfield.com where you can see more than thirteen thousand pictures of Steve Brooker’s incredible finds that have earned him his reputation as the Mud God.

The detritus of the former shipyards lines the shore.

Thousands of bullets lie in the mud at Silvertown.

The lady as we found her face down in the Thames mud

The lady recovered after two hundred years.

Our haul, a tudor brick, decimal coins, bullets, marbles, a spur, an eighteenth century fork, a cabinet handle, clay pipes, a shell dated 1942, a fragment of a Bellemine jug, a broken seventeenth century buckle and a horse’s tooth.

Steve Brooker, the Mud God.

Mudlarking on the Thames, with remnant of a mesolithic forest in the foreground.

You may also like to read

Mud God’s Discoveries 1

Mud God’s Discoveries 2

Mud God’s Discoveries 3

Among the Mudlarks

The Mudlark of 1861

Norah Pam first came to Spitalfields in August 1931 and this week she made a return visit, just to see how things were ticking over in her old neighbourhood eighty years later. Here you can see her standing outside 11 Victoria Cottages, where her great-grandparents Lewis Carr, a silk dyer, and his wife Louisa came to live with their three children, shortly after the terrace was built in the 1860s. Norah was delighted to see that the gardens are well kept – just as she remembers them in her childhood in the 1930s.

By 1881, the family had moved to the flats at the rear of the cottages, known as Albert Family Dwellings and it was there that Norah grew up. She still has vivid memories of these formative years in Spitalfields, even though she only came to live in the Dwellings at the age of six and left in 1940 at the age of fifteen when the bombing of London made it too risky to stay.

It was my pleasure to introduce Norah to Spitalfields resident Mavis Bullwinkle who also grew up in Albert Family Dwellings in the 1930s, which was the cause of considerable mutual excitement since – although Mavis does not remember Norah – Norah, being seven years older, remembers seventy-nine year old Mavis being born. “You were such a little baby,” she recalled sweetly, causing Mavis to blush, “I remember when your sister was born, she had golden curls and blue eyes and everyone doted on her, and my mother said to me, ‘Pay some attention to the little girl standing at the side of the pram,’and that was you.”

This was a cause of great amusement to Mavis, who shrieked with girlish delight to confirm this unexpected recollection. “Yes, that’s right” she exclaimed in surprise, “My hair was was straight as die!” Yet all these years later, this conversation was evidence that Norah had taken notice of her mother’s instruction. “I can see you now coming down the stairs beside the pram,” she added, thinking back across time, on the occasion of meeting someone she had not seen in more than seventy years.

We all sat in a garden at Victoria Cottages and enjoyed a sunny morning chatting together, while Norah brought out her family photographs, which span dizzying amounts of time, and beguiled us with her account of her Spitalfields childhood.

We moved into a flat in Albert Family Dwellings to be close to my grandmother – the family had been in Spitalfields since the 1840s.

I went to All Saints School in Buxton St. Some of the children were quite poor. I had a friend whose father was a ganger – a roadworker – and if it rained he got no work and he had no money. Several children had parents who were builders, they couldn’t work in bad weather either. Some were railway people, and if they had big families they couldn’t manage. My friend’s family worked in the parcels office, they were comfortable, they even had a holiday because they got free travel. There was a lot of poverty because in 1931 all public service workers had a pound cut from their pay – a wage of three pounds and five shillings a week went down to two pounds and five shillings a week. It was a significant amount of money and people had to cut back.

I wasn’t allowed to play outside. I was an only child and very protected, but I caught Scarlet Fever. I was taken to Homerton in the fever ambulance which was grey. My parents weren’t allowed to visit. They would bring a parcel each week and stand outside. The flat was sealed and the bedding taken away for fumigation, and my father had to have three days off work because it was so contagious. Then after six weeks, they said I had Nasal Diptheria and I had to stay another six weeks, so it was very harrowing for all of us. My mother cried when people asked how I was.

When the war came, everyone was evacuated but, because I had been seriously ill, I pleaded with my parents to let me stay at home, and there was no school, so I had a heyday. I remember the bombing of the docks. On that day, I went on my own to Dalston on the bus to buy a skirt at Marks & Spencer. The air raid siren went at two o’clock and we were told to get off the bus and go to a shelter. Then, at four, I bought my skirt and walked back to Spitalfields.

I wanted a pair of silk stockings to go with my skirt and in Hanbury St there was a little shop that sold everything. The owner was Noah Cohen, so I went to his shop and there was this little old lady and her daughter who was in her thirties. Noah let them go into the back to change and he told me their story. The girl had been in the bath when the air raid siren went and her mother called her to go to the Anderson shelter. The house was in Jamaica St and it got a direct hit, but they were saved by the shelter and all she had left was the dress she put on when she got out of the bath. Her mother had come to buy her a set of underwear to go a night shelter in a school, and he let her change into her new clothes. I often wondered what happened to that woman because a lot of the schools were hit.

I went home and, by the time I got to the Cottages, I was running because I could smell the fires burning at the docks. And, as my mother opened the door, the people upstairs were coming down for safety. We sat in the doorway and my mother made tea while the bombs fell. The German planes made a particular noise. They got nearer and nearer and nearer, and you heard the bombs dropping, and you thought, “This is us,” and then they went over.

The people in the building across the road all left, and they set their cats and dogs loose. We found a dog in the street and my mother called it “Victory “because she said, “We’re going to have victory! They can continue bombing but we won’t give in. They can do what they like.” We kept him for seven years and he died on 31st May 1946, on my twenty-first birthday, in his sleep.

Then, in 1940, a landmine fell on the Crown & Leek in Deal St and they evacuated a mile around, and that’s when we all decided to leave. But even after we moved out, I was always coming back to see my friends. I missed by friends. And my father said, “But I thought you wanted a house with a garden?!”

Today, the Albert Family Dwellings have long gone, demolished in 1975. Mavis Bullwinkle who lived in the Dwellings until the end and now lives a quarter a mile away, told me she had not been over to this area of Spitalfields for thirty years, “Because I miss them so much.” The pair of terraces named Victoria and Albert Cottages, and St Anne’s Church, are all that remain now of the world that Norah and Mavis knew in their childhood. Yet for a couple of hours it came alive again, as they sat in the garden and shared recollections of the two old ladies who ran the sweetshop across the road – gone more than half a century ago – the mission hall that moved to Bethnal Green in 1935, and of the teachers at Sir John Cass School where they were both pupils before the war.

In contrast to the general assumption of poverty in the East End, Norah and Mavis’ history reveals a more complex social picture of people of different incomes living in close proximity. Norah and Mavis were also keen to emphasise the self-respecting ethic they grew up with.“They think we were all prostitutes and drunks, and we were dirty, but our working class morality was strong,” declared Mavis, turning passionate, “We didn’t think we were poor, we had enough to eat and we never wasted anything.” A statement which prompted the exchange of a glance of unity between the two women.

Then it was time to say goodbye – once Norah Pam and Mavis Bullwinkle had swapped numbers, because a new friendship had been kindled that morning. Norah took one last glance at the gardens of Victoria Cottages, where her great-grandparents lived one hundred and fifty years ago, and looked up to the space in the sky where Albert Family Dwellings once stood. “I had a happy childhood here,” she said.

Norah’s great grandparents, Lewis and Louisa Carr, and their children, Lewis, Louisa Ann and George – the residents of 11 Victoria Cottages, Spitalfields. On the reverse of this photograph Norah has written, “When my great-grandfather became a widower, he went to lunch each Sunday with my gran, always arriving wearing wearing a tall silk hat.”

Norah’s great uncle, Lewis Carr. He became a vaccination officer for Smallpox and lived on Cheshire St.

Norah’s grandmother, Louisa Ann Carr as a young woman. She worked at home sewing waistcoat buttons for Savile Row.

Norah’s grandmother, Louisa Ann, as an older woman at Albert Family Dwellings.

Norah’s parents’ on their wedding day.

Norah’s father Edward Samuel Simmonds in 1939.

Norah’s mother, Violet Louisa Simmonds, with their dog Victory.

Norah’s class at All Saints’ School, Buxton St in 1934.  Nine year old Norah is in the check dress with spectacles, third from the right in the first row seated on chairs. Norah’s glasses were from Mr Stutter, the optician in Bishopsgate.

Norah in 1940, aged fifteen.

Norah and Mavis both grew up in the Albert Family Dwellings in Deal St that were demolished in 1975.

The last May Queen at Sir John Cass School in 1939, Mavis is third from the right in the front row of girls standing.

Mavis’ Aunt Ada and her mother Gwen in Deal St outside the Albert Family Dwellings in the 1920s.

Norah Pam & Mavis Bullwinkle at Victoria Cottages.

You may like to read my profile of Mavis Bullwinkle, Secretary