Brick Lane Market 11
Patricia Green told me her father Ronald began selling menswear from this pitch when he obtained a licence in 1956 – although the family were in Sclater St long before that, when it was an animal market.
“Originally his father used to be down here selling birds,” explained Patricia, “and my father used to sell birdseed as a boy. He stayed until he was seventy-six, and was down here until a few weeks before he died.” Leaving school at fourteen, Ronald worked in a pawnbrokers and then a department store, before opening his own shop, selling menswear in Upton Park and on Sclater St each Sunday. “I started coming down here to the market with him when I was five years old,” admitted Patricia fondly, casting her eyes along the street to see the invisible crowds of long ago,“there were so many people you couldn’t walk through it, you just got carried along with the crowd. You never used to see any women, it was a men’s market – maybe one in fifty was a woman.”
“I don’t go to bed on Saturday night,” she explained with a grin of extraordinary vitality,“I just sit on the bed and maybe have forty winks, before I get up at ten past one to make the sandwiches and flask of tea. I get here around three o’clock and by the time I have set up and unloaded all the stuff it’s quarter to five, then at six o’clock I go and have a little chat with my friends.” It is a routine that few would choose, yet even though she is retired Patricia is keen to come every week. “I have regular customers and I know a lot of people who’ve been here for years – but every now and again someone disappears.” she confessed in a diplomatic whisper.
At the next stall is Patricia’s brother Robert Green, who helps out his friend Simon Lynch selling household goods. “I’ve been here since 1977, when I left school and started working alongside my father, “ he declared in triumph, “In forty years, I have only missed five Sundays – that was when I broke my leg and had to take five weeks off.”
When Robert reached fifty, he and his sister sold their father’s shop.“We used to work seven days,” he said, “Since I left school, my entire life had been the business and I wanted to have more time, but to tell you the truth I don’t have any more time than I had before.” – shaking his head in good-humoured perplexity. “After all these years, I still try to serve someone enthusiastically,” he informed me, raising a hand as a point of honour, “even if they are only buying a bottle of washing up liquid and, even though I don’t need the money, I treat them with as much respect as if they were buying a hundred pounds worth of stock years ago.”
With the ease of one who is at home in the world, Robert has an innate sense of decency and delight in what he does. “I hope to make money – but it doesn’t really matter, because I’ve always done it so I’d feel out of place if I didn’t do it. I am used to being down here at three in the morning in the freezing cold every week” he said, declaring both his own nature and affection for the market.“It’s a combination of things, tradition, culture and a lot of history – this is a very old market here.”
I stood at Robert’s side as eager customers paid for their purchases and he continued talking over his shoulder animatedly.“It’s tradition, because because years ago everything else used to shut and this was the only place open on a Sunday.” he told me, “It’s culture because there’s a lot of people on the other pitches who, even if we are not exactly friends, they always come and tell me what they are doing. And it’s history because some of the customers, I remember when they were young and now they are in their seventies and eighties. We’ve all grown old together. There’s a lot more to it than just coming down here to sell a few things.”
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Aubrey Goldsmith of Shoreditch
Aubrey Goldsmith sits poised in tremulous expectation at the bottom left of this Rochelle School photograph of 1934, ready to reach out and grasp his future – or, as he puts it quite simply, “I was desperate to get on.” Yet the personal trajectory of Aubrey’s life must be set against the extraordinary perspective of his family’s presence in the East End, because Aubrey’s ancestors first came here in the early seventeenth century from Portugual via Holland – and his own story exists as both coda and culmination of their history.
At Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London where records of marriages since the time Oliver Cromwell re-admitted the Jews to England in 1656 are preserved, Aubrey can trace fifteen generations of his family. “The Belinfantes, they were Bankers, Religious Ministers, Lawyers and Courtiers of the Dutch court – but we have gone down hill a little since then,” he admitted to me with a crooked smile. And, as evidence of the social decline of his aristocratic forebears, Aubrey cites his grandfather who grew up as one of eleven children in a couple of rooms in Tilly St off Whites Row, with one of the daughters recorded in the 1860 census as an umbrella maker by profession at eleven and a half years old.
Recent ancestors remain present for Aubrey and, even though they may have died years ago, these characters spring into life when he speaks of them. Aubrey will tell you about his grandmother Sarah Belinfante, a draper in Redchurch St who enjoyed a pint of Guinness and a cigar at McCanns with her sister Edith, much to the disapproval of more recent East European Jewish immigrants. Aubrey will also tell you how Sarah set up a tally business collecting money weekly from the girls in the cigarette factories, paying for towels and sheets from her drapers shop to make their trousseaux – an endeavour that preceded the modern credit industry. Aubrey will tell you about his grandfather Raphael Goldsmith, a modest clerk at the Stock Exchange who invested in rubber shares in 1900, became the proprietor of the London Rubber Company, built a factory on the North Circular and was responsible for bringing the first Indian workers to Southall. Aubrey will tell you about his uncle known as “Kid Millions,” reputed to be the highest-earning taxi driver of all time. Aubrey will tell you about his father’s cousins, a Portuguese family by the name of Elboz, who were once famed gangsters in Petticoat Lane, until their snooker hall was closed down by the police in the nineteen seventies.
Lowering his voice, Aubrey will then tell that you his father Samuel, one of the first pupils at Rochelle School in 1902, used to line up with the other neighbourhood boys to watch Prince Edward arrive at the Blue Anchor, a notorious boxing booth and brothel at the corner of Chance St – where the prince had a weekly appointment with a whore who gave him VD, that he passed on to Princess Alexandra. And nearby was the church in Old Nichol St – he will also tell you – with the famous priest, Father Jay who regularly used to lay his hand on Samuel’s head and curse him as a Jew.
Aubrey had plenty to live up to, but he proved himself worthy of his ancestors – achieving success that took him away from the East End, yet fulfilling the aspirations of his forebears magnificently.
“I was born in Shoreditch in 1928 and my father was the number one tic-tac in Britain, the only one that ever saw a hundred pounds a day in the nineteen twenties,” revealed Aubrey, introducing his story with pride, “But he had two children that died, my brother and sister that I never saw, and he swore that money was unlucky and he gave it up and became a taxi driver, and after that he only earned enough money for our food and clothes.
We lived on the Boundary Estate and I was a pupil at the Rochelle School and, in 1939, Peter Moore and myself took a scholarship exam for two places at the Coopers’ Company School, along with two hundred others, and we were both successful. But then the war began and I was evacuated to Helston and didn’t come back until 1942. I went to Coopers’ Company School in Tredegar Sq when I was fifteen but my education was destroyed. I wanted to be a doctor and you had to have Latin but the classics teacher had been called up.
So, at the end of 1943, unknown to my parents, I left school, I managed to get employment cards at Penton St Labour Office and took a job with a firm of chartered accountants. Even though I was only sixteen, I did tax computations and final accounts for some very important clients. My parents didn’t want me to leave school, but I had to tell them eventually and my father didn’t speak to me in quite a while. One of things I did in my job was to play snooker every Saturday morning with Tommy Trinder – “if it’s laughter you’re after, Trinder’s the name” – because I could play snooker and he liked snooker and he was a client of my boss. He invested all his money and owned half of Sydney.
I was playing soccer with some quite wealthy boys when I was picked for the English Jewish eleven to play in France in 1948, and one of them introduced me to people in my future trade which I knew nothing about then. I saw there was a lot of money in selling furniture on behalf of the manufacturing trade as an agent. After two years, I broke through and got an agency, and then for four or five years I was reputed to be the highest paid agent in the country. And I moved to Scotland where I enjoyed another very successful seven years as chairman of two public companies, and my accountancy skills proved to be a big help. Then I retired at fifty to travel with my late wife, we met some very important people both socially and in my work – we dined with Pierre Trudeau and Imelda Marcos.”
Aubrey Goldsmith left Shoreditch a long time ago, yet when when I asked him if he still has a relationship with the East End he looked at me in surprise, turning suddenly emotional and launching into this eulogy, full of tenderness, and searching for words to complete a story that eludes conclusion.
“I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in the East End. You mix with a lot and it teaches you humility. There’s many a friendship that has endured. It taught me that I could mix with anybody. I am a freeman of the City of London. I consider being a Londoner is quite something. My kids only knew affluence, they only knew two bathrooms, while I went to the public bathhouse when I was child. After school I worked every day, knocking up mirror frames to sell. My parents were never very wealthy or very educated but they were good parents, we were very lucky. I bought my father a house in Cockfosters but he would never move into it. I used to put him in my Rolls Royce and he was relieved to get back to the East End.”
Sarah and Ethel Belinfante, 1912
Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club Summer Camp 1943 – Aubrey stands in the centre
Samuel Goldsmith (1895 – 1981) The number one tic-tac in the nineteen twenties.
Aubrey’s Portuguese cousins, the Elboz family, were gangsters who ran a snooker hall until the police closed them down.
The corner of Chance St and Grimsby St where once stood the Blue Anchor – boxing booth and brothel. As a child, Aubrey’s father saw Prince Edward visit here for his weekly appointment. The new building on the site is aptly named “the dirty house.”
Aubrey Goldsmith
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A Fireplace in Fournier St
The scourging
There is a fine house in Fournier St with an old fireplace lined with manganese Delft tiles of an attractive mulberry hue illustrating lurid Biblical scenes. Installed when the house was built in the seventeen fifties by Peter Lekeux – a wealthy silk weaver who supervised two hundred and fifty looms and commissioned designs from Anna Maria Garthwaite – these lively tiles have survived through the centuries to educate, delight and inspire the residents of Spitalfields.
Tiles were prized for their value and their decorative qualities, and in this instance as devotional illustrations too. Yet although Peter Lekeux was a protestant of Huguenot descent, a certain emotionalism is present in these fascinating tiles, venturing into regions of surrealism in the violent imaginative excess of their pictorial imagery. The scourging of Jesus, Judith with the decapitated head of Holofernes, the Devil appearing with cloven feet and bovine features, and Jonah vomited forth by the whale are just four examples of the strangeness of the imaginative universe that is incarnated in this fireplace. Arranged in apparent random order, the tiles divide between scenes from the life of Jesus and Old Testament saints, many set in a recognisable Northern European landscape and commonly populated by people in contemporary dress.
It is possible that the tiles may date from the seventeenth century and originate from continental Europe. Their manufacture developed in Delft when, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Chinese ceramics were imported from Portuguese ships captured by the Dutch, and because these were in demand local potters tried to copy them, starting a new industry in its own right. The earthenware tiles were covered with a tin glaze to create a white ground upon which the design was pricked out from a stencil, and then the artist simply had to join up the dots, producing the images quickly and to a relatively standard design.
“I’m not sure what this is supposed to illustrate!” exclaimed Sister Elizabeth at St Saviour’s Priory, colouring slightly when I showed her the tile of the topless woman dragging a bemused man towards a bed, “Maybe the woman taken in adultery?” Yet she was able to identify all the other stories for me, graciously assenting to my request when I called round to the priory seeking interpretation of the scenes in my photographs – after I had spent a morning in Fournier St crouching in the soot with my camera.
Upon closer examination, several hands are at work in these tiles – with the artist who drew Jesus confronting the Devil in the wilderness and Jonah thrown up by the whale, setting the dominant tone. This individual’s work is distinguished by the particular rubbery lips and fat round noses that recall the features of the Simpsons drawn by Matt Groenig, while the half-human figures are reminiscent of Brueghel’s drawings illustrating the nightmare world of apocalypse. More economic of line is the artist who drew Jesus clearing out the temple and Pilate washing his hands – these drawings have a spontaneous cartoon-like energy, although unfortunately he manages to make Jesus resemble an old lady with her hair in a bun.
There is an ambivalence which makes these tiles compelling. You wonder if they served as devout remembrances of the suffering of biblical figures, or whether a voyeuristic entertainment and perverse pleasure was derived from such bizarre illustrations. Or whether perhaps there are ambiguous shades of feeling in the human psyche that combine elements of each? A certain crossover between physical pain and spiritual ecstasy is a commonplace of religious art. It depends how you like your religion, and in these tiles it is magical and grotesque – yet here and now.
My head spins, imagining the phantasmagoria engendered in viewers’ imaginations over the centuries, as their eyes fell upon these startling scenes in the glimmering half-light, before dozing off beside this fireplace in a weary intoxicated haze, in the quiet first floor room at the back of the old house in Fournier St.
In the wilderness, the Devil challenges Jesus to turn stones into bread.
Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.
St Jerome with the lion in the wilderness.
Jesus drives the traders from the temple.
Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well.
Sampson and Delilah, cutting Sampson’s hair
Noah’s flood.
The woman who touched Jesus’ robes secretly and was instantly cured of her haemorrhage.
Judith with the head of Holofernes
Pilate washes his hands after Jesus is bound and led away.
Jesus and the fishermen
Jonah sits under the broom tree outside Nineveh.
The soldiers bring purple robes to Jesus to rebuke him when he claims to be an emperor.
Jonah is cast up by the whale upon the shore of Nineveh.
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King of the Bottletops
Emboldened by the success of the Market Portraits exhibition in the Spring, it is now my great pleasure to invite you to the second exhibition from Spitalfields Life. Please come and celebrate the opening of the debut solo show by Robson Cezar, King of the Bottletops from 6pm next Thursday 2nd June.
The exhibition runs from 2nd – 3oth June at three venues in Spitalfields, agnes b. in the Spitalfields Market, The Golden Heart in Commercial St, and Rough Trade East in the Truman Brewery. Drinks will be served at agnes b, and in the Golden Heart, hosted by Sandra Esqulant.
Starting at the Golden Heart, Robson Cezar has been collecting bottletops from pubs in Spitalfields in recent years and making breathtakingly elaborate pictures of shimmering beauty. Combining the sensibility of a fine artist and the painstaking technique of a folk artist, this is an art which transforms these ill-considered objects into works of delicacy and finesse, contrived with sly humour, and playing upon their subtle abstract qualities of colour and contrast.
Robson Cezar came to Spitalfields in the footsteps of fellow Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, who staged an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967, introducing the new cultural movement of Tropicalia to Europe. And now Robson is creating his own Tropicalia here in the twenty-first century, reinventing this poverty aesthetic with a pop exuberance that reflects the cosmopolitanism of his own life experience – which began in a favela in Brazil and took him on a journey from South to North America and eventually to Europe, where he found his home in the East End of London.
Pictures copyright © Robson Cezar
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
The Return of Anthony Eyton
You may have noticed Anthony Eyton sitting in Wilkes St each day over the last few weeks. A discreet yet distinguished figure with his straggly white whiskers and extravagant flowing mane barely contained beneath a wide brimmed hat, perched upon his modest folding chair, holding his drawing board, and working intently at an intricate cityscape. He is pursuing a personal vision of these ancient narrow streets which is informed by his lifelong relationship with Spitalfields.
It was in 1948 that Anthony first walked up Brick Lane, after visiting the Mark Gertler retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery. The unique quality of the place held such enduring fascination to the young art student from Camberwell, new to London after finishing military service, that he kept a studio here for fourteen years from 1968 until 1982, and still returns with undiminished interest today, more than sixty years since he first visited.
“What struck me when I came out of the Whitechapel Gallery were the barrows, where everybody looked bigger and creamier. I walked along Brick Lane and saw all the sweatshops. It must have been a colourful time, it was decrepit but I thought it was alive. You certainly get attached to an area, you feel embraced by it, and I still get that feeling now.” Anthony told me as I sat upon the kerb beside him, peering down Wilkes St, while he focused his attention back and forth between the drawing and the street.
“At art school, we were taught drawing, but nothing about drawing outside,” he continued, gazing at people on mobile phones, standing like apparitions in the street, “though I’ve always drawn people in situations, and this was re-inforced when I went to Italy after art school and drew people in the streets there – it’s so much part of Renaissance painting, placing figures in spaces.”
Looking down Wilkes St, I had the feeling we were looking down a tunnel, a tunnel of light and a tunnel through time. Directly in front of us was the red brick house on the corner of Wilkes St and Princelet St with a blue plaque commemorating the eighteenth century silk designer, Anna Maria Garthwaite, who once lived there, and beyond that 2 Wilkes St, the house where Anthony rented his first studio in 1968, up on the top in the weavers’ loft. Filling the end of the street was the unremitting mass of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church with its line of circular windows along the side, like a vast ocean liner moored at a wharf. To the right was Puma Court, leading through to Commercial St which was the main source of the lunchtime passersby who were unaware of Anthony, even if they were central to the subject of his drawing.
“I wanted to do Wilkes St,” explained Anthony, “because the size of it is so perfect. A little wider than Princelet St, and Fournier St is so grand, but Wilkes St is the ideal scale for people. People look at home in this space, they go into a doorway and it has significance.” We sat in silence together and watched the people come and go, preoccupied with their mysterious intentions, and exchanged glances of amused fascination at this every day wonder, as if we were the sole audience to this spectacle of life and it was contrived for our diversion.
“My first impression, when I came back, was how drab it was,” admitted Anthony to me with a smirk, deliberating over his box of pastels, “In the old days it was all bright colours with so many factory signs, but now it is houses it’s all sombre colours. I remember blue front doors and the hum of machines.” And then he winced up at the sky in concern, hoping that the clouds would not break to let the sunshine through. “The sun gets in my eyes so much,” he confided, frowning, “the colours become blurred and misty. If it’s a dull light, the Dawlish cliffs (as he referred to house on the corner) become a wonderful rich ochre, there will be a yellow line round the windows and the bricks round the windows will be red, and all the colours will be much more intense. On a cloudy day, I can see colours in the shadows.”
I looked down Wilkes St again, and into the landscape of Anthony’s imagination, illuminated by more than sixty years of experience of this place, framed by the proportion of Renaissance painting, and enlivened by his love of the poetry of the fleeting life of the street.
“The friendly chap opposite, a Spanish architect called Hannibal, he kept on bringing me cups of tea and he even offered me a beer.” confessed Anthony, rolling his eyes in delight at the infinite adventure of being an artist working outdoors in the city, “And the lorry drivers, they glance down from their cabins and give me the thumbs up. “Alright uncle!” they say. And you feel you belong. A couple of times that happened, which is always nice. My theory is that everybody has a natural appreciation of art, so if a lorry driver likes it, that’s good enough for me.”
At the core of the ancient palace at the Tower of London is a fine octagonal room with a lofty vault of stone, the Presence Chamber where the medieval kings of England held court – with one entrance leading back into the Tower and the other out towards the City. The Plantagenet dynasty came to a violent end here in the Wakefield Tower when Henry VI was imprisoned and then murdered in 1471, allegedly whilst at prayer in the oratory on the night of 21st May, the Vigil of the Ascension.
In 1923, a marble tablet was laid in the oratory floor in memory of Henry and since then lilies have been placed there by students of Eton College upon the evening of each anniversary, commemorating Henry as their founder. And since 1947, the lilies have been supplemented by roses, a token of King’s College Cambridge, the other of the two royal colleges founded by Henry, as the enduring legacy of his ill-fated reign.
Held in private, by the fading rays of the evening sun, to the accompaniment of a small choir singing plainsong, this is a quiet ritual of remembrance, and I was granted the opportunity to attend this year as the guest of John Keohane, Chief Yeoman Warder in the company of Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Patricia Niven, who took these first pictures of the ceremony of the lilies and roses in decades.
Three weeks before Henry’s murder, his only son Edward was killed at the battle of Tewkesbury on May 4th where his wife, Margaret of Anjou, had been taken prisoner by the Yorkists – bringing the Wars of the Roses to an end. Seventeen years earlier, King Henry had suffered a breakdown and he declined into mental illness through the rest of his life, unleashing a power struggle within the kingdom that was only resolved by his death here upon the stone floor in this room in the Wakefield Tower.
Once the Tower of London had emptied out of visitors at the end of the day, a procession gathered outside the Queen’s House on Tower Green, led by the Yeoman Warders. John Keohane first marched in this procession in 1992 as assistant Sexton, then in 1995 he was promoted to the Clerk’s position, rising to the role of Gaoler in 2000 before being appointed to Chief Yeoman Warder in 2004. Each role has its staff of office and John has carried every one, culminating in the solid silver mace with a finial in the shape of the Tower that he wields today.
I accompanied the guests, winding up a narrow staircase of worn steps from Water Lane and crossing a stone bridge to enter the austere octagonal chamber where a single shaft of blazing sunlight traversed the space. From within the Tower, arriving through an ancient low doorway that required the crucifix to be lowered to enter, came the procession, warders with their maces, the chaplain and the governor of the Tower, the provosts of Eton and King’s Colleges in their dark gowns, the young scholars with their sheaves of lilies and roses, and the choir in their red vestments. Once this party took up their positions, facing the oratory and filling the chamber, the entire space took on its intended reality, as a place of ritual and the role play that accompanies the distinctions of hierarchy and responsibility.
Plainsong in the confines of a medieval chamber carries a resonance that is intense and immersive, as if the number of singers were multiplied – an effect that was vividly apparent when the priest led those gathered in prayer and the voices were augmented through echo, as if a host of unseen guests joined us in attendance for the ceremony. The solemn gathering at twilight and the prayers and the psalms, in this bare stone hall, created a circumstance in which the age of Henry VI no longer seemed beyond reach.
Outwith the quiet of the empty Tower of London at the end of the day, the City was busy, yet it dissolved into insubstantiality as we stood in silence together in the ancient Wakefield Tower – while the last shaft of sunlight travelled across the room and the young scholars laid their lilies and roses upon the site where the founder of their colleges was killed long ago, in another age.
Henry VI ( 1421 -1471)
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
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The Bloody Romance of the Tower
John Keohane, Chief Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London
Among the Breaking Boys
In the subterranean depths beneath Piccadilly Circus, something extraordinary is going on. My friend Prince of England, the Underground Dancer tipped me off about it, and so I took Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Patricia Niven along to see for myself what was happening down there in the tunnels under the Trocadero.
Above ground, tourists were gathering at Eros’ statue in the evening sunlight and sightseers were surging through Leicester Sq as the quickening of energy that accompanies Friday night filled the crowded streets with a crackling excitement. But stepping into the Trocadero, past the souvenir shops and fast food joints into the labyrinth of escalators and amusements arcades – apparently bound together only by eccentric towers of scaffolding and ceaseless jangling pop – and descending to the basement, you discover the secret heart of this place, the true source of heat and hullabaloo in Piccadilly.
For more than a year now the tunnels connecting the Trocadero and the tube station have been appropriated by the street dancers of London as a rehearsal, practice and jamming space where they can meet together and display their superlative artistry. Upstairs above ground, almost every form of entertainment or culture involves money, but below ground it is all about talent, and daring, and wit, and showmanship, and the love of dance. As you enter the tunnels, you are aware of leaving a commercial environment and entering a space that has been reclaimed by people as a meeting place of equals, because among dancers of divergent ability and accomplishment, everyone has come to celebrate a shared enthusiasm, and the sense of goodwill is immediately apparent.
Turn left at the foot of the moving staircase on any night of the week and you will see people standing on their heads and attempting to spin. These are the neophytes on the periphery, those – like you and me – who are drawn to dance but as yet have only the modicum of technique. They come to aspire, to learn the moves and to win respect among their peers. They look a little lonely and a little needy, standing on their heads and falling over and trying again. Show them a nod of deference but please do not linger to make them self-conscious.
Next, at the entrance to the tunnel you discover a round space, like tiny circus ring where a DJ and and an MC preside over a jamming session of dancers circling constantly, coaxing each other forward, popping, locking, krumping, waacking – showing off, playing games and enjoying high jinks for the delight of a small overexcited audience. Jump up and join the crowd, and now you are part of it.
Look beyond this and you see the breaking boys – the stars of the underground dance scene – who command a wide floor with a painted backdrop where they practice their blow-ups. This is the prime space that those you saw standing on their heads at the entrance to the tunnel aspire to, where a quieter, more concentrated atmosphere presides. The breaking boys sit in a line upon a low bench, dripping with perspiration, loose limbed and wild eyed, collecting their faculties before taking it in turn to step up and lay down their moves – commonly halting mid-move and collapsing onto the floor in frustration, yet always going back to venture again. And there is plenty of mutual encouragement here, because the breaking boys are not battling each other but the limits of their own abilities.
From the opening movement of the comedic running on the spot movement known as “top rocking,” it is a swift transition for the breaking boy into “blow ups,” the extended heroic sequence of spinning upside down that is the tour de force of break dancing. Placing weight upon a single hand, or an elbow, or on his head, the breaking boy defies gravity, propelling himself ever round with supreme dexterity, obeying multiple rhythms within the music, yet halting and reversing the spin at whim – in cartoon-like self parody – just to distract you from the heart-stopping accomplishment of his moves. It is a brilliant and sophisticated expression of the strange experience of being human, in which the psyche is in constant motion, juggling myriad thoughts and actions simultaneously with extraordinary ease.
Once these gloomy tunnels beneath the Trocadero were empty, just the rare lone commuter coming through occasionally, taking a short cut and hoping not to get mugged. But today the management have granted licence to the dancers to be here and now those same commuters halt in their tracks to stand in open-mouthed amazement at the exuberance of the show.
London is the centre of the world in street dance and at the very centre of London the dance goes on relentlessly. A community has come together spontaneously and the wonder of it is that, surrounded by lofty cultural institutions, corporate-owned entertainment complexes, and chains – in spite of all that – these dancers are here for the hell of it. This is the party where everyone is welcome, the best show in town where you do not need a ticket. The breaking boys are here to express the joy of being alive, and being full of beans and in your moment of glory. Of all forms of human expression, I find dance the most emotional, and the sight of people leaping for sheer pleasure is one that never fails to touch my heart. So, if you go up West, this is where you have to go – because here and now in London, this is where it is at. And this is what I call culture.
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
