White Collar Boxing at the York Hall
Last week, I took a ringside seat beneath the vast barrelled roof at the York Hall in Bethnal Green to attend a night of White Collar Boxing – the sport which gives City workers with no pugilistic experience the chance to slug it out in the ring and channel their excess pugnacity into three short volatile rounds, cheered on by an audience of their contemporaries. And Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Jeremy Freedman was there to capture the event, as this latest phenomenon took over the spiritual home of British boxing for a night.
My heart leapt at the first round as the two opponents set upon each other in their curious Mickey Mouse primary-coloured outfits of big gloves and baggy shorts, imparting a bizarre histrionic cartoon quality to the violence. It was apparent at once that this event which is in theory about power is actually about vulnerability. Without experience – or the peak of fitness, or practised technique – what is revealed is raw will and human spirit. And over a thousand passionate boxing fans, including a high contingent from the City, were there to savour the visceral appeal of this emotive contest.
Each boxer emerged from the dressing room to parade in ostentatious confidence through the crowd to a booming soundtrack that promised glory, cheered on by their co-workers and loved ones – having their laces checked, being fed liquid from a bottle, and cossetted like babies, with pats and strokes and cuddles of encouragement – as they approached the moment of exposure.
When the rounds are only two minutes there is little room for mistakes, yet mistakes abound, and in each case I found that what I – and the crowd – were searching for was the signal expression of dominant willpower which would decide the bout. Though even as winners became apparent, it was often those who held up in defeat that won the emotional victory, for the sake of their courage in exposing personal vulnerability. And many opponents embraced passionately at the end, drawn together by the strength of emotion they had shared, dripping with perspiration and drained of energy, yet exhilarated to have tasted an overpowering experience that they could not get at the office.
This is high theatre, enacted beneath a golden glow of light within the cathedral gloom of the great hall, marshaled by a compere in a dinner jacket, and with busty wenches, in high heels and hot pants, parading the ring carrying placards between rounds – as if to offer an equal counterpoint to the extreme notion of masculinity as pure violence enacted there.
These contenders are brokers and bankers, businessmen and women, who have a fighter inside and they want to let it out loose in the pursuit of primal gratification – you might say that White Collar Boxing is the overflowing of the fierce aggressive emotional life of the City made manifest in physical terms.
Broad St Boxing Club, where they train in their lunch breaks, is an old-school East End boxing club run by Johnny Gleed who has been coaching boys there for forty-three years since he gave up his own distinguished career that once saw him boxing here at the York Hall and at the Albert Hall. Johnny was enraptured to be back at the York Hall and enjoying the infectious enthusiasm of the night. “We run the gym to keep the kids off the streets,” he told me, “but an event like is a tremendous injection of energy for us.”
“I was a boxer who retired,” he explained, “and I went along to a show to help put the gloves on the boys and one asked if I could train him. Then you get into the habit and you don’t want to let the boys down. Everyone that helps out at the gym is an ex-boxer. We’ve won everything going.”
As the evening passed, the bouts intensified in pitch, the crowd had more beers, and a roar grew. A succession of young striplings and old bruisers took the ring, taunting, grappling and pummelling relentlessly, retreating to their corners to be re-hydrated and have their bloody noses wiped before seeking more pain. This was York Hall, the centre of the boxing world and the place was alive with collective hysteria.
Johnny Gleed, ex-boxer, and trainer at Broad St Boxing Club for forty-three years.
Chrissy Morton of Bad Boy Promotions, who staged the event to support Broad St Boxing Club.
Aaron O’Neill after his first fight, a draw. Aaron had just been training since a couple of months before Christmas. “I’m going to win aren’t I?” he told me earlier, “I’m doing it to get a buzz.”
Monica Harris, Keeley Lane and Kirsty Jones.
Louise Berridge & Annika Sintim, the only women contenders, before their first fight….
…and after, Louise won – yet still friends.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Brick Lane Market 5
On any Sunday, at the heart of Brick Lane, where all the food stalls cluster upon the railway bridge, you will find eager gamers around Carrom boards, absorbed in their games, and you can guarantee there will be a crowd of spectators too, mesmerised by this fascinating sport from India that is a curious blend of Billiards and Drafts. Played with discs upon square wooden boards coated in french chalk, the objective is to knock you opponents counters into the pockets at each corner.
If you look closely among the throng you will spot the cunning genius responsible for this spontaneous flowering of a vibrant game culture that has complete strangers of diverse backgrounds playing together across the table every week. Slight of build, with spidery limbs and lanky hair – a man who greets everyone as a friend – this understated presence is Carrom Paul, President of the Carrom Association of the United Kingdom.
“One day fifteen years ago, I went to Ealing and I saw these game boards that I’d seen in India, so I bought four and brought them back to the Spitalfields Market and set them up for people to play, but it got so big I had hassle from the other stallholders. I was selling religious artifacts then, and once I sold the Carrom boards, I thought I wouldn’t get any more. But this old Indian man came along and explained that the pockets at each corner are the four great religions of the world, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism, and when all the religions meet in the centre there will be peace and the moon will turn red, represented by the red counter at the centre.
So then I decided to buy lots! I moved to the Upmarket and they gave me the dead stall out the back where no-one goes, but I opened the fire exit and played my music and everyone came in from Brick Lane and the place was full of people playing Carrom. Eventually they put my rent up from thirty to one hundred and ninety pounds a week, and squeezed me out of there in 2009. Then the food stalls on Brick Lane invited me to join them and set up my Carrom boards and play my music, and I’ve been here ever since. And now, this is my life! It’s become my life because I love the game so much. The beauty of it is there is no luck, no chance, only tactics and play. You get lovely people come to play, no blaggards, drunks or druggies – they can’t be bothered. It’s a magnet. It’s chilled out and it’s relaxed.”
Gentle Paul comes up to Brick Lane from Tunbridge Wells every weekend. He takes the day off on Monday, does his website orders for Carrom boards on Tuesday, delivers them on Wednesday, and spends Friday and Saturday preparing for Sunday. Now he has a mission to get Carrom declared an Olympic sport, and since Billiards, which is a derivative of Carrom, has already been listed, he has high hopes of success.
It certainly is a beautiful spectacle Carrom Paul has conjured on Brick Lane, an unlikely haven where anyone can sit down and play for free. He paired me with Robbie, a passing white-haired gentleman to try a friendly game, just to learn the ropes and develop our technique for flicking the counters, and by the end of the game – which I found unexpectedly relaxing – we had become friends. It is a perfect Sunday pass time, civilised and egalitarian, with subtle religious overtones.
You can visit Paul’s shop www.carromshop.co.uk
Carrom Raj, the Carrom Master in Brick Lane– “to my mind, he is the best Carrom player in the UK.”
Spitalfields Nippers
Let me introduce you to the Spitalfields Nippers of 1912 as photographed by Horace Warner. Although the origin of these pictures is an enigma, these frisky nippers of a century ago require no introduction or explanation, because they assert themselves as the mettlesome inhabitants of their territory.
Geographically, they are creatures of the secret byways, alleys and yards that lace the neighbourhood. Imaginatively, theirs is a discrete society independent of adults, in which they are resourceful and sufficient, doing their own washing, chopping wood, nursing babies and even making money by cleaning windows and running errands.
A few nippers may be swaggering for the camera, but most are preoccupied with their own all-consuming world, and look askance at us without assuming the playful, clownish faces that adults expect today. These nippers have not been trained to fawn by innumerable snaps as contemporary children are, and consequently they have a presence and authority beyond our expectation of their years.
Little is known of Horace Warner and nothing is known of his relationship to the nippers. Only thirty of these pictures survive, out of two hundred and forty that he took, tantalising the viewer today as rare visions of the lost tribe of Spitalfields Nippers. They may look like paupers, and the original usage of them to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitalfields, may have been as illustrations of poverty – but that is not the sum total of these beguiling photographs, because they exist as spirited images of something much more subtle and compelling, the elusive drama of childhood itself.
Click here to order a copy of SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS by Horace Warner
Tom’s Van
Tom took me to see his van yesterday. “It’s packed up,” he explained. Adding with philosophical levity, “Nothing lasts forever,” as he led me through the busy streets with his dog Matty tugging eagerly at the leash all the way – and stopping occasionally to check bins for interesting stuff – until we arrived back in the safety of the tiny yard behind black corrugated iron gates, where he parks his van and sleeps in the shack at the rear. “He’s at home,” Tom declared, as he released Matty from his lead, once we were standing together in the quiet to survey the van overflowing with all the gear that Tom sells on Brick Lane each day.
“I got this van for next to nothing, three hundred quid – it’s worth four hundred quid for scrap – and it’s been a hell of a good van,” admitted Tom, praising the old blue van covered with slogans that is a familiar sight in Spitalfields – as if it were a thoroughbred he was reluctantly putting out to grass.“I’m clearing it out now.” he confided, raising a smile of anticipation, “It’s full of what I’ve picked up, stuff that’s been thrown away – it’s all worth money, especially if you’re a vendor. I’m finding things I didn’t know I had, old mobile phones in their boxes complete with their chargers – big ugly old ones.”
This is how Tom has created a sufficient life for himself and Matty, rescuing what others discard and selling it on Brick Lane to keep himself, and sleeping on an old couch in a windowless shed. While Matty climbed into the cabin of the van and curled up where he delights to snooze, Tom swung back a door to show me his own dwelling by the glimmering light of a bicycle lamp. A cell less that ten feet square of bare brick and concrete, piled with books and blackened pans, and with an old sofa partly concealed in an alcove. “How can you live like this?” I asked at once, unable to believe how anyone could exist in such frugal conditions through this last harsh Winter,”What about the cold?”
“It’s what I am used to.” announced Tom defiantly, eager to dispel my concern, “I enjoy the way I am, I don’t want to live like other people – it’s called survival. I got gas for cooking in bottles. I could have water and electricity, but I don’t need it.” Seeing that I was not convinced, Tom expanded his explanation to emphasise that this was his choice, “I’ve got my light, it only costs me batteries and I can bring in water. If you’ve got water, you’ve got rates. If you’ve got electricity you’ve got bills. But if you’ve got a torch, you buy batteries and if you run out of them, then you go without…” Seeing I was at a loss for words, Tom assumed a friendly smile and asserted his personal notion of liberty. “People get thrown out of their homes, and they’re making it so hard you haven’t got a chance – so the best chance you can have is to have nothing.” he said. When I thought of the anxious stream of brown envelopes that come through my letterbox, I could not deny that Tom had a point, but equally I do not know if I have the courage to cut loose as he has done.
So, amazed by Tom’s stamina and resilience, both physically and emotionally, I turned our conversation back to his van and the question of how he could replace it. “I’ve got cash.” he said, “It’s a recession – so they say – there should be lots of vans going cheap because of the parking fines. A friend of mine has a Jaguar and he parked it in a loading bay and they want to charge him thousands in fines or take it from him. There’s something wrong when you can take a man’s Jaguar from him.” And he shook his head in bemused disappointment.
Then, as he padlocked the yard to leave, unable to resist the magnetic pull drawing him back to Brick Lane where he spends all his waking hours, Tom added, “The owner was here, he said, ‘You’re alright, mate. Keep an eye on the place for me.'” With subtle grace, Tom had absolved me of any responsibility for him, but more than this I was impressed by the strength of his character and the austerity of his vision of life, which has come to define the nature of his existence, granting him the particular freedom that suits his temperament.
“Be lucky, adieu!” he wished me, as we shook hands outside the beigel shop, arriving back in Brick Lane at the centre of the world.
“The best chance you can have is to have nothing.”
Read my first interview with Tom
Favourite Pie & Mash Shops (Part One)
I have grown so skinny these past months at the end of Winter – chasing stories around Spitalfields – that I decided to undertake a tour of my favourite Pie & Mash Shops in the company of Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Sarah Ainslie, in order to explore all the delights on offer and put some meat on my bones into the bargain.
Pie & Mash Shops have a special place in my affections because they are unique to East London and inextricably bound up with the cultural and historical identity of this place – becoming destinations where people enjoy pilgrimages to seek sustenance for body and soul, by paying homage to the spirit of the old East End incarnated in these tiled, steamy temples dedicated to the worship of hot pies. Let me admit, it is a creed I can subscribe to wholeheartedly.
Taking our cue from that golden orb in the sky, Sarah & I decided to commence in the East and work our way West across the territory, beginning with G. Kelly, established since 1937 at 526 Roman Rd. Here we had the privilege to be welcomed by the lovely Sue Venning – resplendent in her white uniform – the proprietor who greets everyone universally with a brisk yet cheery “Yes, Love?” – commonly reciprocated by “Hello, Gorgeous.” It was a delight to walk into this sympathetic, clean and bright interior, adorned with daffodils and lined with marble and tiles, gleaming under the globe lamps.
“My Aunt Theresa on my father’s side married George Kelly who opened this in 1937,” explained Sue, introducing the intricate web of relations that connect this establishment to the two other Pie & Mash Shops by the name of Kelly, all independently run today by increasingly distant relatives as the generations pass by. “Samuel Robert Kelly opened up originally in Bethnal Green in 1915 – he had three sons, Samuel who took over in Bethnal Green, Joe who opened in Bonner St and George who came here to the Roman Rd. My father Bill (George Kelly’s brother-in-law) ran this with my mother Bea, until he died in 1969, and then I took over from her in 1990.” she outlined with a relaxed smile and a practised efficiency that left me reeling.
Arriving with the first customers of the day, I was fascinated to discover that my fellow diners were from Suffolk and Kent, and had gone out of their way to be there. In particular, the couple from East Anglia were up to visit their nan who lived nearby, and Sue confirmed that many of her customers were those who had once moved out of the East End, for whom a return visit to her Pie & Mash Shop was an opportunity to revisit a taste of home. Yet Sue retains a solid constituency in the Roman Rd. “People know each other here,” she confirmed fondly, “You know their orders when they come in, they don’t need to ask.”
We hit the rush at G. Kelly, 414 Bethnal Green Rd, (connected only genealogically to G. Kelly, Roman Rd) where Matt Kelly, proprietor for the last fifteen years, baker and third generation pie man, had his work cut out in the kitchen to meet the lunchtime demand for pie and mash and liquor at £2.65. Diners here eat off elegant cast iron tables beneath framed portraits of local boxing heroes of yesteryear and everyone is at home in one of this neighbourhood’s cosiest destinations.
At the head of the lunch queue was Mrs Julia Richards. “I’m going to be ninety-eight,” she bragged with a winsome grin, the picture of exuberance and vitality as she carried off her plate of pie and mash hungrily to her favourite corner table, pursued by her sprightly seventy-year-old daughter Patricia – both superlative living exemplars for the sustaining qualities of traditional East End meat pies. “I’ve been coming here over fifty years,” revealed Patricia proudly. “I’ve been coming here since before it opened!” teased Julia, her eyes shining with excitement as she cut into her steaming meat pie.“They used to have live eels outside in a bucket,” she continued, enraptured by memory, “And you could pick which one you wanted to eat.” We left them absorbed in their pies, the very epitome of human contentment, beneath a hand-lettered advertising placard, proclaiming “Kelly for Jelly.”
Up at F.Cooke in Broadway Market, once we had emptied our plates of some outstandingly delicious pies, Sarah & I enjoyed a quiet after-lunch cup of tea with the genial Robert Cooke – “Cooke by name cook by nature” – whose great-grandfather Robert Cooke opened a Pie & Mash Shop at the corner of Brick Lane and Sclater St in 1862. “My father taught me how to make pies and his father taught him. We haven’t changed the ingredients and they are made fresh every day,” explained Robert plainly, a fourth generation born-piemaker sitting proudly in his immaculately preserved cafe, that offers the rare chance to savour the food of more than century ago.
“My grandfather Robert opened this shop in 1900, then he left to open another in the Kingsland Rd, Dalston in 1910 and Aunty May ran this one until 1940, when they shut it after a doodlebug hit the canal bridge.” he recounted. “My mother Mary came over from Ireland in 1934 and worked with my grandfather in Dalston, alongside my father Robert and Uncle Fred. And after they got married in 1947, my grandfather said to my parents, ‘Here’s the keys, open it up,’ and they returned here to Broadway Market, where I was born in 1948.”
It was a tale as satisfying in its completeness as eating a pie, emphasising how this particular cuisine and these glorious shops are interwoven with the family histories of those who have run them and eaten at them for generations. Yet beyond the rich poetry of its cultural origin, this is good-value wholesome food for everyone, freshly cooked without additives, and meat pies, vegetable pies, fruit pies and jellied eels comprise a menu to suit all tastes. Reluctantly, after three Pie & Mash Shops in one day, Sarah & I were finished – but even as we succumbed to the somnolence induced by our intake of pies, we took consolation in dreamy thoughts of all those pleasures that await us in the other Pie & Mash Shops of the East End, yet to come.
This is Dean Cecil who bakes the pies at G.Kelly in the Roman Rd.
Sue Venning at G.Kelly, Roman Rd – her Aunt Theresa, who married George Kelly, is the woman in the dark coat, pictured in the black and white photo, standing outside the shop in 1937.
Liquor (Parsley sauce) and mash at G.Kelly
G.Kelly, 526 Roman Rd.
At G.Kelly, Bethnal Green
The prizefighters of yesteryear fondly remembered in the Pie & Mash Shop in Bethnal Green.
Julia Richards, nearly ninety-eight – “They used to have live eels outside and you could pick your own.”
Regulars, Julia Richards and her sprightly daughter Patricia Wootton aged seventy, at the favoured corner table at G.Kelly, Bethnal Green.
G.Kelly, 414 Bethnal Green Rd
Jellied Eels at F.Cooke
Robert Cooke under the clock commissioned by his grandfather Robert Cooke from a clockmaker in Hackney in 1911.
Robert Cooke, fourth generation pie-maker -“Cooke by name, cook by nature.”
Pat with a tray of pies at Broadway Market
F.Cooke, 9 Broadway Market, since 1900.
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
The Bread, Cake & Biscuit Walk
This biscuit was sent home in the mail during World War I
As you will know from my many stories about doughnuts, custard tarts, hot cross buns, mince pies, beigels and loaves of bread, I have a passion for all the good things that come from the bakery. So I decided to take advantage of the fine afternoon yesterday to take a walk through the City of London in search of some historic bakery products to feed my obsession, and thereby extend my appreciation of the poetry and significance of this sometimes undervalued area of human endeavour.
Leaving Spitalfields, I turned left and walked straight down Bishopsgate to the river, passing Pudding Lane where the Fire of London started at the King’s Bakery, reminding me that a bakery was instrumental in the very creation of the City we know today.
My destination was the noble church of St Magnus the Martyr, which boasts London’s stalest loaves of bread. Stored upon high shelves beyond the reach of vermin, beside the West door, these loaves were once placed here each Saturday for the sustenance of the poor and distributed after the service on Sunday morning. Although in the forgiving gloom of the porch it is not immediately apparent, these particular specimens have been there so many years they are now mere emblems of this bygone charitable endeavour. Surpassing any conceivable shelf life, these crusty bloomers are consumed by mould and covered with a thick layer of dust – indigestible in reality, they are metaphors of God’s bounty that would cause any shortsighted, light-fingered passing hobo to gag.
Close by in this appealingly shadowy incense-filled Wren church which was once upon the approach to London Bridge, are the tall black boards tabulating the donors who gave their legacies for bread throughout the centuries, commencing in 1674 with Owen Waller. If you are a connoisseur of the melancholy and the forgotten, this a good place to come on a mid-week afternoon to linger and admire the shrine of St Magnus with his fearsome horned helmet and fully rigged model sailing ship – once you have inspected the bread, of course.
I walked West along the river until I came to St Bride’s Church off Fleet St, as the next destination on my bakery products tour. Another Wren church, this possesses a tiered spire that became the inspiration for the universally familiar wedding cake design in the eighteenth century, after Fleet St baker William Rich created a three-tiered cake based upon the great architect’s design, for his daughter’s marriage. Dedicated today to printers and those who work in the former print trades, this is a church of manifold wonders including the pavement of Roman London in the crypt, an iron anti-resurrectionist coffin of 1820 – and most touching of all, an altar dedicated to journalists killed recently whilst pursuing their work in dangerous places around the globe.
From here, I walked up to St John’s Gate where a biscuit is preserved that was sent home from the trenches in World War I by Henry Charles Barefield. Surrounded by the priceless treasures of the Knights of St John magnificently displayed in the new museum, this old dry biscuit has become an object of universal fascination both for its longevity and its ability to survive the rigours of the mail. Even the Queen wanted to know why the owner had sent his biscuit home in the post, when she came to open the museum. But no-one knows for sure, and this enigma is the source of the power of this surreal biscuit.
Pamela Willis, curator of the collection, speculates it was a comment on the quality of the rations – “Our biscuits are so hard we can send them home in the mail!” Yet while I credit Pamela’s notion, I find the biscuit both humorous and defiant, and I have my own theory of a different nuance. In the midst of the carnage of the Somme, Henry Barefield was lost for words – so he sent a biscuit home in the mail to prove he was still alive and had not lost his sense of humour either.
We do not know if he sent it to his mother or his wife, but I think we can be assured that it was an emotional moment for Mrs Barefield when the biscuit came through her letterbox – to my mind, this an heroic biscuit, a triumphant symbol of the human spirit, that manifests the comfort of modest necessity in the face of the horror of war.
I had a memorable afternoon filled with thoughts of bread, cake and biscuits, and their potential meanings and histories which span all areas of human experience. And unsurprisingly, as I came back through Spitalfields, I found that my walk had left me more than a little hungry. After several hours contemplating baked goods, it was only natural that I should seek out a cake for my tea, and in St John Bread & Wine, to my delight, there was one fresh Eccles Cake left on the plate waiting for me to carry it away.
You can watch a film about a cake made to replicate the spire of St Bride’s Church by clicking here.
Loaves of bread at St Magnus the Martyr.
Is this London’s stalest loaf?
The spire of Wren’s church of St Bride’s which was the inspiration for the tiered design of the wedding cake first baked by Fleet St baker William Rich in the eighteenth century.
The biscuit in the museum in Clerkenwell.
The inscrutable Henry Charles Barefield of Tunbridge Wells who sent his biscuit home in the mail during World War I.
The freshly baked Eccles Cake that I ate for my tea.
You may like to read these other bakery related stories
The Tart with the Heart of Custard
The First Mince Pies of the Season
Justin Piers Gallatly, Baker & Pastry Chef
Night in the Bakery at St John
Night in the Brick Lane Beigel Bakery
All Change at 15 & 17 Fournier St
Over the last year, I have enjoyed dropping in regularly to fifteen and seventeen Fournier St to visit Jim Howett and observe the progress of the mighty works that have been undertaken there by the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust to reinstate these two gracious houses built by joiner William Taylor in 1726 – which were carved up to become a Mission House for the conversion of Jews to Christianity in 1878.
Jim and I always end up chatting in the attic room of number fifteen, lined with leaded casements, offering mind-boggling views to Nicholas Hawskmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields opposite, and where, over our heads, old notches in the beams reveal where the looms for silk weaving were once attached. Since the endeavour reaches completion this week, as foreman and architect, Jim was able to savour the moment up there in his light-filled eyrie above the rooftops, and look back upon a remarkable job achieved in partnership with Tim Whittaker, Director of the Spitalfields Trust.
“This is the last structural Georgian reconstruction that is going to happen in Spitalfields,” admitted Jim, with a tinge of disappointment in his softly spoken voice, because although these houses have posed an extraordinary exercise in deduction, it has been one that he has relished. With evangelic fervour, Christ’s Mission to the Jews tore the staircase out of the corner house, took out the walls on the ground floor to create a gospel hall and punched doorways between the two buildings to make them one – while subsequent factory usage and then a carve-up into flats in the nineteen eighties ravaged the buildings still further. “This reconstruction sets it back with a footprint as it was intended,” explained Jim, casting his eyes around the empty rooms in pleasure at the freshly sanded floors, new panelling, windows, shutters and doors made by joiner Aaron McGill. all connected by the tour-de-force of this entire project – the new staircase winding up through four storeys fitted by carpenter Pauol Cierny, constructed in the eighteenth century method, and to the design of William Taylor.
Entering the house this week was a rare engagement with time travel, to visit a newly constructed eighteenth century interior where the sawdust was still fresh and history waiting to happen. But when I first came here last Spring, Jim took me down into the cellar where excavations revealed remains of the dwelling that previously existed upon this site. Beneath the cellar floor was the ground level of a seventeenth century courtyard with a stone culvert that discharged water towards Lolesworth Field, gone centuries ago. Among the debris beneath the floor, Jim found quantities of charcoal confirming his belief that the land from here to Bethnal Green was back-filled with rubble from the Fire of London, raising the ground level by as much as two metres and burying a seventeenth century path below the cellar floor of an eighteenth century house. Ascending from the gaping muddy chasm of the cellar, the house was in disorder, doorways were being bricked up and holes cut in the floor. It was a composite of discordant spaces connected by eccentric arrangements that required you to walk into number seventeen to reach the top floors of number fifteen and go downstairs in number fifteen to reach the cellar of number seventeen – where the long-suffering residents endured living beneath a daily-accumulating layer of builder’s dust.
Yet I discovered a exhilarating transformation when I came back months later as the staircase was being fitted in number fifteen, spiralling up through the centre of the structure and restoring its spine. Unlike modern stairs in which the treads are supported on either side, the staircases of the eighteenth century were built one step on top of the next, supported by a central ascending beam – much more sturdy, as well as accommodating to the irregularities of an old building. When Jim first showed me his cherished staircase, it was not all there – you walked up and up, and then it ran out … But when I next returned, I was greeted with the triumphant news that the stairs had reached the roof and miraculously met the marks in the joists on the top floor where the original staircase had sat.
The sculptural quality of this fine staircase, adorned with spindles turned by Aaron McGill and barley sugar twists courtesy of Nichols Brother (established over a hundred years in the Hackney Rd), brings the building alive with dynamic energy. It takes you on a journey through differently proportioned spaces, all neatly panelled and flooded with light, to arrive at the lantern at the top. The layout of the rooms has been recreated and while there is a scrupulous attention to detail in all the work, idiosyncrasy is restrained – throwing emphasis upon the graceful flow of architectural space. Most importantly, the institutionalisation and its subsequent chaos is gone, humanity has been restored in the recovery of the sympathetic yet relatively modest domestic spaces which comprise this unusual corner house.
“I think we got the best out of all these people – there’s never been an argument, because everyone’s worked to their strengths” confided Jim quietly, almost speaking to himself in admitting his responsibility to his team. And realising that his own time to inhabit these houses, which have been his consuming passion since October 2009, is now at end, he added, “I’ll miss it.” Jim and I left the weavers’ attic glowing with sunlight and walked down through the empty panelled rooms, where the finishing touches were being made before everyone left.
Now the residents of number seventeen can finally hoover up the dust and the household spirits of number fifteen can experience a moment of peace, renewed and waiting, until the next wave of inhabitants arrive and time can begin all over again.
15 & 17 Fournier St restored.
As the Mission of Christianity to the Jews until 1947.
W.P. The Donor – he paid for the purchase of fifteen and seventeen to become a mission house in 1878.
The interior of the mission hall occupying the ground floor of number fifteen.
The new staircase at number fifteen constructed according to the method and design of William Taylor, the joiner who built these houses in 1726.
Detail of the spindles.
Pauol Cierny, from Slovakia, the Head Carpenter who built the staircase.
Surviving spindles from adjoining houses by William Taylor, used as patterns for creating new.
Aaron McGill, the Head Joiner, in his workshop where he made the windows, shutters and doors.
The Weavers’ loft overlooking Christ Church, Spitalfields. Notches in the beams indicate where looms were attached.
Petro Leanca, Carpenter from Moldova, who has worked on the house for the past six months, doing floorboards, doors and wall carpentry.
The previous property on the site is marked upon the Gascoigne map of Spitalfields from 1700 – above the “L” of hamlet.
In the cellar of number fifteen, two metres below current ground level, the sixteenth century culvert in the yard of an earlier building.
Rob Stroud in the finished basement where he and Hamish Lancaster spent most of the last year digging out the floor by several feet – “We’re well proud of this now.”
This is the light well in the picture up above – that Jim Howett discovered blocked with debris when he excavated to create a light well where one was necessary.
Looking up to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s spire, looming overhead.
Painter, Daniel Costea, arrived from Timisoara, Romania three weeks ago.
A fanlight discarded from another house in Fournier St.
The fanlight installed.
You may also like to read about
