The Return of Mick Taylor
It was at the end of 2009 that I first interviewed Mick Taylor, the Sartorialist of Brick Lane, who was then regularly to be seen standing outside the Beigel Bakery, and gained popular renown for his stylish personal dress sense. When we spoke, Mick confided that he had been unwell and so, although I was disappointed, I was not surprised that I did not see him in Brick Lane at all throughout the long harsh Winter that ensued.
But he did not return the next year, and as the months passed I no longer expected to see him any more, although there were reports that he had been spotted around Whitechapel where he lives, so I carried hope that he might return to Brick Lane one day. And then this Spring, out of the blue, I encountered Mick sitting on a stoop near the Beigel Bakery, looking debonair in his big sheepskin hat and flashing a smile, just as he always used to and I was overjoyed to greet him and know that he has returned to the location that is his spiritual home.
On Easter Sunday we sat and drank tea together on Brick Lane, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon and watching the passing show, while Mick spoke about his life’s journey that brought him there.
“If you come down here to Brick Lane somebody always helps you out with a sandwich or something. Sometimes I come here without a penny in my pocket but I get a cup of tea. All it takes is to ask nicely and people will help you out. People want to sell things and I tell them where they can sell it. Knowing how to make a shilling, that’s what it’s all about and I’ve sold anything you care to mention over the years here.
I was a war child, I had no father but I had a mother. On 9th November 1945, I was born in my grandmother’s bed in Maclaren St, Hackney. My mother couldn’t afford to keep me so my grandmother and grandfather, Florence and George Taylor brought me up. I never had anything new, only secondhand things, but they brought me up well. My grandfather was a lovely man, he never hit me. He only had one eye, he was blinded in World War I, and he worked on the barges on the River Lee. My grandmother used to pawn his suit every Monday, buy veg on Tuesday, and get it back again on Thursday when he got paid, so he could wear it at the weekend. She taught me how to cook, and I still cook dinner every Sunday.
One day, when I worked for Truman’s, I got up at seven thirty in the morning and my grandmother had a heart attack and died in front of me. I went to work but I couldn’t work because my mind was falling to bits. So I told the foreman, and then I went wandering all over the place for four days until the police picked me up and took me to Hackney Hospital and, while I was under observation, I cut my wrists. I wanted to die because my grandmother was dead.
The woman in the next bed there was Frances Shea, Reggie Kray’s wife, she had mental problems. It sent her a little crazy being married to one of the Krays, but she was a lovely girl. I dressed up smart for her. Sixteen weeks we were together, she needed a bit of company and I took care of her. Then, when they sent her home, she died at once of an overdose but I don’t believe it. I loved her, and she cured me of the loss of my grandmother.
After that, I worked for the council and I did various jobs, I started my life all over again. I’ve been married a couple of times. I’ve lived my life, I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve had some good times. I’ve two sons but I don’t know where they are. Me and their mother divorced and I’ve never seen them again.
I never had much money but I’ve always made myself smart with a few quid and a suit and shirt – buying the right clothes, the right colour, the right cut. I used to go to Albert’s in Whitechapel and pay seventy five pounds for a pair of shoes, a suit, and a shirt. For my birthday, when I was seven years old, I came down with my grandmother to buy Italian shoes in Cheshire St for two pounds, two shillings and sixpence – pointed black shoes with Cuban heels. I already knew what I wanted at seven years old – you’re born with it, your style.”
Sporting his cap at a calculated angle, dressed in his petrol blue slacks, with a singlet, silk scarf and chain, Mick was in his element that day, and even as we spoke, passersby interrupted to request photographs with him. Like so many others, Mick has found a sympathetic community on Brick Lane, where he can present himself as he pleases and be celebrated for who he is too. Neither cynical nor sentimental about his past, Mick is able to inhabit the present with equanimity. Once we had finished our cups of tea, the shadows were lengthening, the stalls were packing up and the market crowds were thinning out, so I asked Mick what his plans were for the rest of Easter Sunday, and he rubbed his hands in hungry anticipation with a gleam of joy in his intense blue eyes.
“I’m going to buy a bit of lamb at the corner shop and boil it up with some potatoes and carrots and a few seasonal things. That’s Cockney food – a bit of boiled veg and a bit of a joint and if you’ve got money left, something sweet like a Spotted Dick. I learnt to make it when I worked in a pie shop when I was a child. Whatever pies was left, I always took them home with me.“Give it to the family,” they used to say. That’s the Cockney way of life.”
A Night at the Café de Paris
The unexpected concurrence of the prolonged spell of fine weather with a string of celebrations and festivals has gripped London with such a pervasive atmosphere of high day and holiday, that Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Sarah Ainslie and I decided it was time for one of our rare trips up West – to see if we could experience for ourselves some of the glamor and tinsel of the sophisticated metropolitan nightlife that is on offer.
Our destination was the legendary Café de Paris, built as an exact replica of the ballroom on the Titanic and opened by impresario Harry Foster in 1924. This was the glittering nightspot where Louise Brooks introduced the Charleston to London, where Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich partied, where Orson Welles waltzed with Vivien Leigh, and where Cole Porter played many of his songs for the first time. Generations of Londoners celebrated here, the top place to see and be seen in the capital, and it stayed open throughout World War II until a pair of fifty pound bombs fell through the roof and exploded on the dance floor.
Yet in spite of everything, the Café de Paris is still here and it is just what a night club should be – with a pair of sweeping staircases leading down to an oval floor, surrounded by old gilt plasterwork and pillars with acanthus capitals supporting twirly gilded iron balconies, furnished with pink plush-velvet sofas, adorned with fringed rosy lanterns upon sconces, and topped off by a scarlet ruched-satin ceiling with a glistening crystal chandelier at the centre.
Promoter Tom Gravett has dedicated himself to rekindling the glory days of the Café de Paris as a cabaret venue with La Rêve each Friday night, and he certainly knows how to wear a double breasted suit to advantage too. Sporting a Clarke Gable moustache and floppy hair parted in the style of Errol Flynn, and flaunting an orchid in his buttonhole, he whirled us upon a breathless tour of the club and through into the dressing rooms upholstered in louche red velvet, where his performers – blithely unaware of our presence – were practising, preening and primping upon day beds in various stages of undress.
It was time to make our way to the centre of the floor where, beneath a haze of gold, pink and blue lights, candles glowed upon our table. Once we had taken our seats, Dusty Limits, a skinny birdlike young man with spidery limbs, fluent repartee and calculated insouciance, took the stage as master of ceremonies to promise us “an extraordinary cavalcade of cabaret genius.” Meanwhile, Tom retreated discreetly halfway up one of the sweeping stairs, a key position to scrutinise the progress of the evening. And all those in the balcony craned forward in excitement, their faces bathed in the reflected glow from the stage.
Opening act in the cabaret burlesque were the Bees Knees, an upbeat Charleston duo who did a bizarre quick change from Matelots to Russian peasants in folk costume while dancing all the time, followed by Miss Trinity Vogue in a red fedora who performed “Let’s have another drink!” accompanying herself on the ukulele, then the curvaceous blond Cherry Shakewell who lived up to her name with a neat trick spinning gold tassels from her appendages. Yet the undoubted early highlight of the show was Pippa the Ripper, rotating multiple hula hoops in opposite directions simultaneously from her gyrating legs, arms and torso. An act of excruciating complexity performed with a carefree expression of uninhibited delight, as if merely to say, “Look at me!” – when we were already slack-jawed in amazement at such an elegant spectacle.
East End favourite, Fancy Chance, winner of London’s Next Top Tranny Contest at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Social Club last year, burst into the club in a wedding dress – with the irresistible wayward intensity that is her forte – tearing off her bridal gown to reveal a sassy feathery number and then discarding this too, she let her waist-length hair flow free and cavorted like a siren in her fringed scanties, chuckling with elation at her teasing charade.
All these acts shared a wit and ingenuity that included the audience in the joke, and the charismatic intimacy of this soulful old nightclub encouraged a natural sense of complicity. There was a pleasing spontaneity about the show yet the individual turns were slick, and seeing such diverse talents live at close quarters imparted a frisson of excitement you might not experience elsewhere – especially true of the final act of the evening, Brett Vista, an aerialist who performed in a hoop suspended over our heads.
As if unaware of anyone watching, this lithe young man drew himself up into the roof and hung suspended there, twisting and stretching his body into extraordinary contortions with grace and ease, constantly moving and turning in slow rhythm like one lost in a dream. The mesmeric quality of his movement held us all spellbound. He incarnated the magic of the place like a spirit conjured out of air, and, as he revolved in a shimmering aura of light above the audience at the Café de Paris, silent in wonder, the vibrant poetry of this extraordinary venue was alive for me.
The Janus Sisters.
Tom Gravett, promoter of La Rêve.
Tricity Vogue, with Michael Roulston at the piano.
Louise London, prestidigitation at your table.
Dusty Limits, master of ceremonies.
Pippa the Ripper, hula hoop artist.
The Bees Knees, Charleston duo.
Cherry Shakewell, blonde burlesque bombshell.
Cigarette break on the fire escape.
Fancy Chance.
Brett Vista, aerialist.
“an extraordinary cavalcade of cabaret genius.”
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
The Spitalfields Nobody Knows
On Easter Monday, it is my pleasure to commence a new series in collaboration with Joanna Moore – conceived in homage to Geoffrey Fletcher and “The London Nobody Knows,” we shall be introducing you to lesser-known corners of Spitalfields and telling you their stories, each one illustrated with drawings by Joanna. (You can click on these pictures to enlarge them if you wish.)
The Old St Patrick’s School in Buxton St, dating from the eighteen sixties, stands upon the grass of Allen Gardens beside the Georgian vicarage of the former All Saints church – the last survivors of the nineteenth century streets that once stood here, long before the park was laid out. Enfolded by its lofty garden wall, containing huge exotic shrubs and dripping with climbing plants, this finely proportioned cluster of buildings rises with tall attenuated chimneys, like some mysterious castle of romance. St Patrick’s School is a tantalising enigma to those who walk through here regularly and have heard tales of the secret tropical garden which is rumoured to exist behind these implacable walls.
The Watchhouse on the corner of St Matthew’s Churchyard in Wood St was built in 1754 and, with the growing trade in human corpses for dissection, in 1792 it was necessary to appoint a watchman who was paid ten shillings and sixpence a week to be on permanent guard against resurrectionists. A reward of two guineas was granted for the apprehension of any body-snatchers and the watchman was provided with a blunderbuss and permission to fire from an upper window, once a rattle had been sounded three times. The churchwarden who lives there today told me that, according to the terms of his lease, he still holds this right – and the blunderbuss and rattle are stored in the house to this day. The small structure at the rear originally housed the parish fire engine, in the days when it was just a narrow cart. In 1965, the Watchhouse gained notoriety of another kind when fascist leader Oswald Mosley stood upon the step to give his last open air public speech.
Gibraltar Walk off the Bethnal Green Rd is a handsome terrace of red brick nineteenth century artisans’ workshops that once served the furniture trade when it was the primary industry in this area. Of modest construction, yet designed with careful proportions, the terrace curls subtly along Gibraltar Walk, turning a corner and extending the length of Padbury Court, to create one long “L” shaped structure. These appealing back streets still retain their cobbles and there are even a couple of signs left from the days of furniture factories, but, most encouragingly, the majority of these premises are still in use today as workshops for small industries, keeping the place alive.
In Emanuel Litvinoff’s memoir, “Journey Through a Small Planet” describing his childhood in Cheshire St in the nineteen twenties, he recalls the feared Pedley St Arches where, “Couples grappled against the dripping walls and tramps lay around parcelled in old newspaper. The evil of the place was in its gloom, its putrid stench, in the industrial grime of half a century with which it was impregnated.” And today, with a gut-wrenching reek of urine, graced by a profusion of graffiti and scattered with piles of burnt rubbish, the place retains its authentic insalubrious atmosphere – a rare quality now, that is in demand by the numerous street fashion photo shoots, crime dramas and pop videos which regularly use this location. There is a scheme to turn the Great Eastern Railway Viaduct into a raised park – like the High Line in New York – but in the meantime wildlife flourishes peaceably upon these graceful decaying structures dating from the earliest days of the railway, constructed between 1836 and 1840 to bring the Eastern Counties Line from Romford to the terminus at Shoreditch High St.
Drawings copyright © Joanna Moore
More of “The Spitalfields Nobody Knows” next week, but in the meantime you may like to read further about Joanna Moore
In the Roof of St Paul’s Cathedral
On the right of this photograph, taken in the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral, is the concave wall of the outer dome and curving away to the left is the convex wall of the painted inner dome that sits inside it, just like an enormous boiled egg beneath a cosy. It is a strange configuration which means the lower dome does not have the bear the weight of the dome roof, and which creates extraordinary incidental spaces that never cease to fascinate me whenever I return to scale this majestic cathedral.
Once I am through the main door, passing all the visitors standing and gazing at the vaulted cathedral ceiling far overhead, I go straight to the entrance to the roof. This was where I came the very first time I was ever permitted to visit London on my own as a child, and I have returned consistently through all the intervening years without disappointment.
Leaving the nave and ascending the stairs, you enter a different St Paul’s – no longer the monumental space dedicated to public worship but a warren of staircases and narrow passages that enable people to run like rats within the walls and emerge again to peer down at their world askance. If you are lucky, your initial burst of enthusiasm will carry you clattering up the wide spiral stairs to the height of the nave roof. At the head of these, formal elegance ceases as you turn left into a crooked passage and right, up a steep, tapering staircase which is only as wide as your shoulders, and where you must lean forward when the ceiling lowers to child height, before – without warning and quite unexpectedly – you step out into the cavernous void of the Whispering Gallery.
This was where I was transfixed by vertigo on my first visit. Sitting perched upon the tenuous balcony that circumscribes the dome with my back to the wall, the emptiness was overwhelming and the expectation of imminent collapse tangible. To this day it remains the most intense spatial experience that I know. I see the space contained by the great dome overhead and the aisles stretching below in four directions and it sets my head reeling, and I cannot avoid envisaging the dome spinning out of kilter and collapsing in an apocalypse. I can feel the magnetism to leap into the nothingness as if it were a great pool. Even the paintings upon the dome fill me with dread that the figures will fall from their precarious height. And each time I come there I must sit, while whispers fly around me, and make peace with these feelings before I can leave.
Sobered by the initial climb and awed by the Whispering Gallery, visitors usually take a moment to relax and scrutinise the views from the Stone Gallery that runs around the base of the exterior dome. Here I sat with my father while he recovered himself, when he came to visit me once when I first moved to London. As we discussed the idle spectacle of the view, I became aware for the first time that he was failing and growing old, and was quietly ashamed of my thoughtlessness in bringing him, when I knew it would be a point of honour for him not to admit to any struggle.
From here you climb into the interior of the domed roof – laced with iron staircases, spiralling and twisting around the central brick cone, like a giant pie funnel, that supports the lantern at the very top. Every wall tilts or curves or arches in a different direction and there is no longer any sense of height, you could equally be underground. Let me confide, on this recent visit, to my surprise and for the first time, this was where I experienced disorientation. I found myself in a space without a horizontal floor and barely any vertical services, hundreds of feet in the air, sandwiched between the roof dome with the sky above and the interior dome beneath – promoting morbid thoughts of smashing through this inner dome to fall like one of the figures from the paintings on the other side of the wall.
Yet as before, none of these grim fantasies were realised and I came safely to the Golden Gallery at the very top of the cathedral, two hundred and eighty feet above the ground. There is a spyhole in the floor there – God’s eye view – that allowed me to look right down through both domes to the floor below where the crowds crept like ants. And then, with the great dome beneath me, I could gaze out upon the city from a point of security, and free of vertigo.
When I climbed back down to ground level, I looked up to the dome from underneath and saw the speck of light from the spyhole and knew that to whoever was gazing at that moment I was now one of the ants. In medieval cathedrals, the focus of the architecture was upon the altar but at St Paul’s it is directly under the dome, where anyone can stand and be at the centre of things. The scale and ingenuity of St Paul’s are both an awe-inducing human achievement and one that makes people feel small too – a suitable irony in a great cathedral designed by a man named after the smallest bird, Wren.
I shall continue to return and climb up to the dome as long as I am able, because my trips to the roof at St Paul’s offer contradictory experiences that unlock me from the day to day. It is a reliable adventure which always delights, surpassing my recollections and revealing new wonders, because the vast scale and intricate configuration of this astounding edifice defy the capacity of the human mind to hold it in memory.
At the foot of the stair.
Graffiti at the entrance to the Stone Gallery.
On the Stone Gallery, at the base of the dome.
Iron staircases spiral in the hidden space between the inner and the outer domes of the cathedral.
Looking through from the top of the lantern down to the floor two hundred and seventy feet below.
Looking West from the Golden Gallery, down the Strand.
Looking East, Christ Church, Spitalfields can be seen top centre.
Looking from the floor to the dome and the lantern above.
The Widow’s Buns at Bow
Baked by Mr Bunn’s Bakery in Chadwell Heath
On Good Friday, what could be more appropriate to the equivocal nature of the day than an event which involves both celebration of Hot Cross Buns and the remembrance of the departed in a single custom – such is the ceremony of the Widow’s Buns at Bow.
A net of Hot Cross Buns hangs above the bar at The Widow’s Son in Bromley by Bow, and each year a sailor comes to add another bun to the collection. And this year I was there to witness it for myself, though – before you make any assumption based on your knowledge of my passion for buns – I must clarify that no Hot Cross Buns are eaten in the ceremony, they are purely for symbolic purposes. Left to dry out and gather dust and hang in the net for eternity, London’s oldest buns exist as metaphors to represent the passing years and talismans to bring good luck but, more than this, they tell a story.
The Widow’s Son was built in 1848 upon the former site of an old widow’s cottage, so the tale goes. When her only son left to be a sailor, she promised to bake him a Hot Cross Bun and keep it for his return. But although he drowned at sea, the widow refused to give up hope, preserving the bun upon his return and making a fresh one each year to add to the collection. This annual tradition has been continued in the pub as a remembrance of the widow and her son, and of the bond between all those on land and sea, with sailors of the Royal Navy coming to place the bun in the net every year.
Behind this custom lies the belief that Hot Cross Buns baked on Good Friday will never decay, reflected in the tradition of nailing a Hot Cross Bun to the wall so that the cross may bring good luck to the household – though what appeals to me about the story of the widow is the notion of baking as an act of faith, incarnating a mother’s hope that her son lives. I interpret the widow’s persistence in making the bun each year as a beautiful gesture, not of self-deception but of longing for wish-fulfilment, manifesting her love for her son. So I especially like the clever image upon the inn sign outside the Widow’s Son, illustrating an apocryphal scene in the story when the son returns from the sea many years later to discover a huge net of buns hanging behind the door, demonstrating that his mother always expected him back.
When I arrived at the Widow’s Son, I had the good fortune to meet Frederick Beckett who first came here for the ceremony in 1958 when his brother Alan placed the Hot Cross Bun in the net, and he had the treasured photo in his hand to show me. Frederick moved out from Bow to Dagenham fifteen years ago, but he still comes back each year to visit the Widow’s Son, one of many in this community and further afield who delight to converge here on Good Friday for old times’ sake. Already, there was a tangible sense of anticipation, with spirits uplifted by the sunshine and the flags hung outside, ready to celebrate St George next day.
The landlady proudly showed me the handsome fresh 2011 Hot Cross Bun, baked by Mr Bunn of Mr Bunn’s Bakery in Chadwell Heath who always makes the special bun each year -” fabulous buns!” declared Kathy, almost succumbing to a swoon, as he she held up her newest sweetest darling that would shortly join its fellows in the net over the bar. There were many more ancient buns, she explained, until a fire destroyed most of them fifteen years ago, and those burnt ones in the net today are merely those few which were salvaged by the firemen from the wreckage of the pub. Remarkably, having opened their hearts to the emotional poetry of Hot Cross Buns, at the Widow’s Son they even cherish those cinders which the rest of the world would consign to a bin.
The effect of the beer and the unseasonal warm temperatures upon a pub full of sailors and thirsty locals rapidly induced a pervasive atmosphere of collective euphoria, heightened by a soundtrack of pounding rock, and, in the thick of it, I was delighted to meet my old pal Lenny Hamilton, the jewel thief. “I’m not here for the buns, I’m here for the bums!” he confided to me with a sip of his Corvoisier and lemonade, making a lewd gesture and breaking in to a wide grin of salacious enjoyment as various Bow belles, in off-the-shoulder dresses, with flowing locks and wearing festive corsages, came over enthusiastically to shower this legendary rascal with kisses.
I stood beside Lenny as three o’ clock approached, enjoying the high-spirited gathering as the sailors came together in front of the bar. The landlord handed over the Hot Cross Bun to widespread applause and the sailors lifted up their smallest recruit. Then, with a mighty cheer from the crowd and multiple camera flashes, the recruit placed the bun in the net. Once this heroic task was accomplished, and the landlady had removed the tinfoil covers from the dishes of food laid out upon the billiard table, all the elements were in place for a knees-up to last the rest of the day. As they like to say in Bromley by Bow, it was “Another year, another Good Friday, another bun.”
Peter Gracey, Nick Edelshain and Roddy Urquhart raise a pint to the Widow’s Buns.
Tony Scott and Debbie Willis of HMS President with Frederick Beckett holding the photograph of his brother placing the bun in the net in 1958.
Alan Beckett places the bun on Good Friday, 4th April 1958.
3 pm, Good Friday, 22nd April 2011.
The Widow’s Son is the local for my pal Lenny Hamilton, the jewel thief.
A Widow’s Son of Bromley by Bow
by Harold Adshead
A widow had an only son, The sea was his concern, His parting wish an Easter Bun Be kept for his return. But when it came to Eastertide No sailor came her way To claim the bun she set aside Against the happy day. They say the ship was lost at sea, The son came home no more But still with humble piety The widow kept her store. So year by year a humble bun Was charm against despair, A loving task that once began Became her livelong care. The Widow’s Son is now an inn That stands upon the site And signifies its origin Each year by Easter rite The buns hang up for all to see, A blackened mass above, A truly strange epitome Of patient mother love.
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The Curious Cabinets of EC1 & SE1
Rumours reached me of the curious cabinets that have appeared in the streets, so I set out to search one sunny afternoon to see how many I could find. Even before my investigation, I was aware of the painted cabinets in the fringes of my vision and, as more impinged upon my consciousness, I realised that something was going on – in fact, the telephone company has granted artists a certain period of creative licence to decorate exchange junction boxes, before grey uniformity is restored later. These colourful designs are insects of a single season, bringing some agreeable surprises to familiar streets and so I was eager to celebrate the transient urban poetry of these curious cabinets while it lasts.
Whitecross St is the focus for a set of cabinets in EC1, with many in the streets leading off from the market, that catch your eye as you weave your way through the stalls. You will find images of the children in the school, and in the playground, and of a market stall, and of the YMCA, and of the weathervane upon St Luke’s Church and of the bicycles that stream endlessly down Old St. Recreating these local sights with such care and affection draws together the disparate elements that collectively define the character of this appealing locality bounded by the Barbican to the South and Old St to the North. All of these paintings are at a child’s eye level and as brightly coloured as toys, and I suspect they have become landmarks for school children, humanising the busy streets through the introduction of a playful imaginative element.
Street Art takes flight when it plays upon the drama of its location, enlivening the environment by its presence, and there is an innate surrealism to these cabinets that appear to have been removed from a house and dumped outside – defining the term “street furniture.” Yet many of the artists have chosen to look at them as architecture in miniature – a quality emphasised by their shallow pitched roofs – painting them as dolls’ house versions of buildings in the vicinity. And there is a desperate comedy in the tiny YMCA, painted upon two cabinets, that I found in a dull little street just round the corner from the real thing, while the blue house with the grotesque face on Whitecross St itself proposes a dreamlike fairytale fantasy. But it is the spirited painting of a terrace of derelict shops in the market, painted onto a cabinet at the South end of the street that spoke to me most eloquently, emphasising the isolation of these old buildings, built to a human scale, that were once the standard in the neighbourhood, now overshadowed by the Barbican towers looming overhead.
Down in the Borough High St, Southwark, I found a different school of cabinet painting at work, producing more highly wrought creations than North of the river, in which the drama of the location has been exploited to powerful effect. The vista of Little Dorrit park painted onto a cabinet beneath the real thing pulls off a neat trick out of Magritte’s repertoire, but the masterpiece is the one with the paintings of St George the Martyr Church located outside the church. There is a painting of the church, by day and by night, on either side of this cabinet across the road from its subject, and looking from one to the other is a strange experience – you compare your vision of the real thing and the squint perspective of the painted representation, while switching your perception in scale between the church towering over you and the painting you look down upon. And you walk away with an image of the church in your mind that is multi-dimensional.
Pradoxically, these cabinets draw attention to themselves in order to reflect attention onto the surrounding cityscape, functioning as catalysts which inspire us to look afresh at what we already know. Wittily contrived and lovingly painted by many different artists, this is the magic of the curious cabinets of EC1 & SE1.
In the Cellar of the Bishopsgate Institute
This is Stefan Dickers, the inspirational archivist at the Bishopsgate Institute who possesses such a charismatic sense of levity that he could join the “Carry On” team in any of their capers and be entirely at home. Although he is an authoritative scholar, Stefan recognises that to be serious, you do not have to be grave, and through his indefatigable nature belies the myth that librarians do not possess a sense of humour. Naturally magnanimous, he actively encourages people to come and consult the rich collection that he tends at the Bishopsgate, and it is always an adventure whenever I pay him a call – because I never know what new treasure he will produce for me to publish for your delight, here in the pages of Spitalfields Life.
So what is Stefan doing sitting in the cellar of the Bishopsgate Institute? Is this where the staff go for a quiet smoke? Or a peaceful nap in the afternoon? Or is he, in the manner of that other famous librarian, Jorge Luis Borges, pondering thoughts of transient mortality engendered by his life among the dusty tomes?
In fact, Stefan comes here to contemplate the ancient floor which once belonged to the stable that stood upon this ground long before the Bishopsgate was built in 1895. “Now I have thirty oyster shells on my desk and I live in constant fear of horse urine!” he admitted with self-satirising irony, referring to the outcome of the recent renovations that have revealed the bizarre legacy of the oyster shop and livery stables which previously occupied this site. “I say ‘shop,'” he told me, “because you can only have that many oyster shells in a shop.” rolling his eyes in illustration of the endless quantities of shells brought upstairs by the builders who discovered them down below. A common find in London, where oysters were once plentiful and the cheapest of foods.
But more pertinent to Stefan is the question of the horse urine because, as he explained to me in disappointment, “If a horse urinates onto the floor you will have to take all the soil out because otherwise you will never get rid of the damp.” This room with the stable floor was to have been the strongroom for his prized treasures, but since the porous surface renders this usage impossible and the historic floor cannot be removed, the floor itself must be the sole the treasure in the cellar – a modest relic of Bishopsgate’s past identity, as the point of departure and arrival for Ermine St, the main road North out of London, lined with coaching inns and stables, until Liverpool St Station was built and the railway took over.
The Bishopsgate Institute was created in 1891 through the enlightened foresight of Reverend William Rogers, a priest with secular tendencies, who diverted the vast funds piled up by St Botolphe’s church over centuries to pay for new schools for the poor, public toilets, baths, wash houses, drinking fountains, soup kitchens and even a hospital. From the start, access for all was the founding principle for the cultural institute, with a free lending and reference library, and a large hall where concerts and lectures on subjects of popular appeal were given. And thanks to the prudent radicalism of Rogers, the Bishopsgate remains autonomous today, independent of government or local authority funding, and free to pursue the same agenda of noble egalitarianism.
With a characteristic lightness of touch and the generosity of a favourite uncle, Stefan gave me a few pictures to show you that illustrate the nature of these early lectures at the Bishopsgate Institute. I like to think that if Stefan Dickers, the archivist with a sense of humour, were to meet the ghost of Rev William Rogers, the priest with secular tendencies, standing upon the old cellar floor, he might discover they had a lot in common.
The site of the Bishopsgate Institute in 1838 from Tallis’ London Street View – the nineteenth century forerunner of Google Street View. The entrance to the stable is central, with the oyster shop to the left.
The Bishopsgate Institute in 1895, the year it opened. Note James Ince & Sons, umbrella makers next door – operating today from Vyner St.
The Bishopsgate Institute today.
Rear view of the former oyster bar and livery stables that previously occupied the site. In the photo at the top of the story, Stefan Dickers is sitting upon the brick floor of one of these stables, in the cellar of the Bishopsgate Institute.
Fred Enock, expert in insect intelligence.
Cillford Collinson in the South Seas.
Escott North in the Golden West.
Photographs © copyright Bishopsgate Institute
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