Maria Pellicci, the Meatball Queen of Bethnal Green
With the arrival of the first chills of Autumn in Spitalfields, my mind turns to thoughts of steaming meatballs. So I hot-footed it up the road to Bethnal Green and the kitchen of Maria Pellicci, cook and beloved matriarch at E. Pellicci, the legendary cafe that has been run by her family since 1900. Although I find it hard to believe, Maria told me that meatballs are not always on the menu here because people do not ask for them. Yet she graciously assented to my request, and even granted me the honour of permitting my presence in her kitchen to witness the sacred ritual of the making of the first meatballs of the season.
For many years, meatballs and spaghetti comprised reliable sustenance that could deliver consolation on the grimmest Winter day. If I found myself in a cafe and meatballs were on the menu, I had no reason to think further because I knew what I was having for lunch. But then a fear came upon me that drove away my delight in meatballs, I began to doubt what I was eating and grew suspicious of the origins of the ingredients. It was the loss of an innocent pleasure. Thus began the meatball famine which lasted ten years, that ended this week when Maria Pellicci made meatballs specially for me with fresh meat she bought from the butcher in the Roman Rd. Maria has worked daily in her kitchen in Bethnal Green from six until six since 1961, preparing all the dishes on the menu at E.Pellicci freshly as a matter of principle. More than this, reflecting Maria’s proud Italian ancestry, I can confirm that for Maria Pellicci the quality of her food is unquestionably a matter of honour.
Maria mixed beef and pork together with eggs, parsley, onion and other herbs, seasoned it with salt and pepper, letting it marinate from morning until afternoon. Then, as we chatted, her hazel eyes sparkling with pleasure, she deployed a relaxed skill borne of half a century’s experience, taking bite-sized pieces from the mixture and rolling them into perfectly formed ruby red balls, before tossing them playfully onto a steel baking tray. I watched as Maria’s graceful hands took on independent life, swiftly rolling the meatballs between her flattened palms and demonstrating a superlative dexterity that would make her the virtuoso at any card table. In no time at all, she conjured one hundred and fifty evenly-sized meatballs that would satisfy thirty lucky diners the following morning.
I was at the snug corner table beside the serving hatch in Pellicci’s immaculately cosy cafe next day at the stroke of twelve. After ten years of waiting, the moment was at hand, as Anna Pellicci, Maria’s daughter proudly delivered the steaming dish, while Salvatore, Maria’s nephew, brought the Parmesan and freshly ground pepper. The wilderness years were at an end, because I had spaghetti and meatballs in front of me, the dish of the season. Maria made the tomato sauce that morning with garlic, parsley and basil, and it was pleasantly tangy and light without being at all glutinous. As a consequence, the sauce did not overwhelm the subtle herb-inflected flavour of the meatballs that crumbled and then melted in my mouth, the perfect complement to the deliciously gelatinous spaghetti. Sinking my teeth into the first meatballs of the twenty-first century, I could only wonder how I lived through the last decade without them.
Outside a cold wind was blowing, so I took courage from ingesting a syrup pudding with custard, just to finish off the spaghetti and meatballs nicely, and restore substance to my attenuated soul. The special quality of E. Pellicci is that it is a family restaurant, and that is the atmosphere that presides. When I confided to Anna that my last living relative had died, she told me at once that I was part of their family now. Everyone is welcomed on first name terms at Pellicci’s in an environment of emotional generosity and mutual respect, a rare haven where you can enjoy honest cooking at prices everyone afford.
I call upon my readers to help me keep meatballs on the menu at E. Pellicci now, because we need them to help us get through the Winter, the government cuts, the Olympic games, and the entire twenty-first century that is to come. Let us send a collective message to the Pelliccis, that we love their meatballs with spaghetti, because when we have a cook like Maria Pellicci, the meatball queen of Bethnal Green, we cannot forgo the privilege of her genius.
Maria Pellicci has been making meatballs in Bethnal Green for half a century.
Anna Pellicci with the first meatballs of the season in Bethnal Green.
The coveted corner table, next to the serving hatch at E. Pellicci.
Hogarth at St Bartholomew’s Hospital
In 1733, when William Hogarth heard that the governors of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield were considering commissioning the Venetian artist, Jocopo Amigoni, to paint a mural in the newly constructed North Wing of the hospital, he offered his own services free. Always insecure about his social status, it was a gesture of largesse that made him look good and provided the opportunity for Hogarth to prove that an English artist could excel in the grand historical style. Yet such was the mistaken nature of Hogarth’s ambition that his “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” is a curious hybrid at best. Illustrating Christ healing the sick, each of the figures in the painting illustrate different ailments, a bizarre notion that undermines Hogarth’s aspiration to the sublime classical style and results in a surreal vision of a dystopian arcadia instead. In plain words, it is a mighty piece of kitsch.
Let me take you through this gallery of maladies. Be warned, it is not a pretty picture, definitely not something you would choose to look at if you were unwell. In the detail below, on the extreme left we begin with two poor women. Some art historians believe the first represents Cretinism, or Down’s Syndrome to use the contemporary description. Another opinion suggests that the forearms of the two women, side by side, one fat and one thin, illustrate two forms of Consumption or Tuberculosis – whereby the thin woman has Phthisis which causes the body to waste, while the fat woman has the Scrofulous form that causes weight gain. The man with the stick is undeniably Blind. The fourth figure, with the anxious yellowish face may have Jaundice, or alternatively this could represent Melancholia, or Depression as we would call it. The bearded man with the red complexion has Gout, while the sling may be on account of a Sceptic Elbow Joint. The distressed woman beside him has an injured breast which may be Mastitis or an Abscess. Meanwhile, the child on the ground below this group has a curved spine and holds a crutch to indicate Rickets.
At the centre of the composition is Christ reaching out to the crippled man at the Pool of Bethesda, as described in the Gospel of St John. The bible tells us this man had been incapacitated by the pool for thirty-eight years, which makes the muscular physique that Hogarth gave him a little far fetched. It owes more to the requirements of the classical style than to veracity, although Hogarth did choose to portray him with a Chronic Leg Ulcer to introduce an element of authenticity to the figure.
In the background, a man is accepting a bribe from the servant of the naked woman with the wanton attitude on the right of the composition, this is to push the mother with the sick baby out of the way so that his mistress can get to the healing water of the pool first. The reason for her unscrupulous haste is that she has a Sexually Transmitted Disease, most likely Gonorrhea, indicated by the rashes upon her knees and elbows. Finally, we complete the sorry catalogue with the pitiful man with the swollen abdomen on the extreme right of the canvas, he has Liver Cancer.
Hogarth painted “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” in his studio in St Martin’s Lane in early 1737 and it was put in place at Bart’s in April. Although it is a huge painting, approximately thirty feet across, its position on the stairwell means that you see just a portion of the picture from the foot of the stairs, then you pass close by it as you ascend the staircase and only achieve a vision of the entire work from the head of the stairs. Let me say that this arrangement does the painting no service. When you see it close up, the broad theatrical brushstrokes of the framing scrolls and of the background, which were painted by George Lambert, scenery painter at Covent Garden, become crudely apparent.
Perhaps these ungainly miscalculations in “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” were what led Hogarth to paint the companion piece “The Good Samaritan” in situ, from a scaffolding frame. Did he get seduced by the desire for monumentalism while painting the “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” in his studio and forget that it would be seen close to, as well as from a distance? Time has done the picture no favours either. With innumerable cleanings and restorations, the canvas has buckled and now daylight prevents you from seeing the painting without reflections, blanking out whole areas of the image. Maybe this was the reason for Hogarth’s instruction that the picture should never be varnished? It was ignored.
I cannot avoid the conclusion that “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” was a misdirection for Hogarth. It has more bathos than pathos. He aspired to be an artist in the high classical style, yet we love Hogarth for his satires and his portraits. We love his humanity, recording the teeming society that flourished in the filth of eighteenth century London. These pictures speak more of life than any idealised visions of nymphs and swains frolicking in a bucolic paradise. And, even in this, his attempt at a classical composition, Hogarth’s natural sympathy is with the figures at the margins. Far from proving that an English artist could excel at the grand historical style,”Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda” illustrates why this mode never suited the native temperament. All the qualities that make this painting interesting, the human drama and pitiful ironies, are out of place in the idealised landscape that suited the tastes of our continental cousins.
Hogarth was born in Bartholomew Close and baptised around the corner from the hospital at St Bartholomew’s Church. At the time of “Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda,” Hogarth’s mother still lived nearby and she must have been proud to see her son’s painting installed in the fine new hospital buildings. It was symbol of how far he had come. Yet, for obvious reasons, the painting is mostly ignored in books of Hogarth’s work today, so the next time you are in Smithfield, go in and take a look, and savour its bizarre pleasures for yourself.
This woman has a sexually transmitted disease.
This man has cancer of the liver.
The poor box at the entrance to the North wing.
The new entrance to St Bartholomew’s Hospital built in 1702, with the North wing containing Hogarth’s mural just visible through the gate
St Batholomew’s Church in Smithfield where William Hogarth was baptised.
Photographs of the mural © Patricia Niven
Larry Goldstein, Toyseller & Taxi Driver
Larry Goldstein, who sells toys in Petticoat Lane each Sunday, showed me this photograph of his grandfather Joseph Goldstein, born in 1896 in the village of Inyema in Poland. Joseph had two elder brothers and, although there are no photographs of them, they are the true heroes of this story – because at the the time of the pogroms against the Jews, these two brothers realised they had enough money for one brother to escape, so they gave it to Joseph.
In 1915, at the age of nineteen, Joseph travelled to Brick Lane via Hamburg to join an uncle who had a business selling lemonade. Yet when he arrived by boat in the Port of London, Joseph was told he must either enlist or return to Poland. Joseph enlisted, occasioning the photograph you see above, and was sent off to fight in the First World War. He never learnt what became of his brothers and today the village of Inyema does not even exist.
Although these events happened nearly a century ago, they remain vividly in mind for Larry, Joseph’s grandson. “It is amazing that his brothers put him first, so that he could get out of the country and carry on the name Goldstein, when they were murdered or tortured by the Russians. It’s touching when you come to think about it,” Larry confided to me with quiet humility, during his hour’s lunch break from driving his taxi. These events have cast a certain tender emotionalism upon subsequent family history, because all are aware they are the descendants of the brother that survived to begin a new life in Spitalfields.
Having escaped Poland, Joseph was lucky enough to survive the First World War too. No wonder he got married in April 1918, as soon as the war was coming to its end, to Amelia (known as Milly). Milly Viskin was born in Pedley St, Spitalfields, in 1894 and her father was a cabinet maker. At first, they lived with her parents in Hare St (now known as Cheshire St) and he was able to get a job as a presser in Flower & Dean St, off Brick Lane.
Joseph & Milly had five children, Sid, Jack, Cecilia, Janet and Dave. And today it is impossible to look at the wedding day photograph of Joseph with his son Jack, taken in 1955, and not appreciate Joseph’s intense expression of pride upon this special day in the light of his personal history. To my eyes, the picture of Larry with his grandparents Joseph & Milly taken at his Bar Mitzvah in 1970, has a similar quality – it is the visual link between Larry in the present day and the world that Joseph knew in Poland, over a century ago. Larry fondly recalls visiting Joseph & Milly when he was child, “They always made you welcome and they were always there when you needed them, even though they had no money. They died very close to each other, within a year because they were so attached.”
Larry told me his father Jack and uncle Sid ran a stall with Joseph on Saturdays in Kingsland Waste selling photographic equipment. It was a precedent that Larry adopted once he got married, “My wife’s dad had a double-pitch in Church St, off the Edgware Rd, so he said we could have one, selling wooden boxes and china figurines. Then in 1972, we had some friends in Petticoat Lane who said we could sublet a pitch, and we changed our commodity over to Teddy Bears because the stall was licenced for toys. I had a friend who imported Teddy Bears and he said ‘I’ll give you a couple to try out’ and it took off from there.”
Nearly forty years later, Larry is still selling Teddy Bears on Petticoat Lane. His joyous display of brightly-coloured children’s toys is a landmark, and he is one of the very last Jewish traders today in what was once a Jewish neighbourhood.“Coach parties used to be dropped off at the Aldgate end of Petticoat Lane and Christmas clubs came to spend all their money,” he told me, describing the hey day of the market, “You had to get an affadavit from the Rabbi to trade in those days. Before the repeal of the Sunday trading laws, Petticoat Lane and Wembley were the only licenced Sunday markets, but now it’s only just worth my while.”
Larry is a hard-working, self-respecting individual, driving the taxi to make ends meet, as well as trading in the market. Once he had found a parking place in Spitalfields, Larry had less than an hour to tell me his story and drink a cup of tea before had to get back on the road. Yet in spite of whatever challenges he faces today, Joseph’s story sets everything in perspective for Larry Goldstein, who cherishes his childhood memory of his grandfather, “He was a very kind-hearted man. Although he spoke very little English, he always liked to bet on the favourites at the dogs, so my dad used to place the bets for him at the betting shop. His children and his grandchildren were his life. He was so grateful to be alive after what he had been through.”
Joseph at the wedding of his son Jack in 1955.
Larry’s parents, Jack & Phyllis Goldstein on their wedding day, 7th August 1955.
Joseph & Sid selling photographic equipment on the Kingsland Waste in the nineteen seventies.
Larry with his grandparents Milly & Joseph at his Bar Mitzvah in 1970.
Milly & Joseph at the beach
Milly Goldstein in her seventies
Larry Goldstein, one of the last Jewish stallholders on Petticoat Lane today.
Portrait copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Among the Mudlarks
This is mudlark Rae, proudly displaying the gold ring from 1668 that she found in the Thames at Southwark. “It was a total piece of luck,” she admitted modestly, “the first ring I ever found. I had a little gander and there it was sitting on top of the mud.” The pleasingly irregular ring is delicately engraved with the name “Alex Cheenke” and the date “15th February 1668” on the inside, and has a curious design of a skull on the outside, extended like the skull in Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” in the National Gallery.
Rae explained it is an obituary ring – there was a custom for people to leave money to pay for others to wear rings in remembrance of them. The ring has special significance for Rae, because it is dated the day after Valentine’s Day and her daughter’s fiance, also named Alex, died on the day before Valentine Day, 13th February. And thus it was that a ring lost over three centuries ago in the Thames acquired a vivid new emotional meaning in the present day, connecting directly to its original purpose as a token of remembrance and bringing Rae into a personal relationship with the long distant Alex Cheenke.
Rae brought the ring along to the monthly gathering of the members of Thames & Field, the community of mudlarks presided over by Steve Brooker, where she was handing it to Kate Sumnal, the Finds Liaison Officer from the Museum of London, so that it could be studied and the location of its discovery plotted, adding to the greater picture of Thames archaeology. When I arrived at the meeting after walking through the dark suburbs of Bexleyheath, I felt I had arrived at the court of the Mud God, because as I came in from the rainy street into the harsh lights, I encountered Steve regaling an circle of attentive neophyte mudlarks with eloquent and impassioned tales of his spectacular finds in the Thames. It was an uninspiring lounge with an institutional atmosphere attached to the public library, but that was irrelevant to the mudlarks because they had all brought inspiration with them in tupperware boxes and plastic bags, containing recent discoveries to show. They were a diverse crowd of different ages and social backgrounds, of which the only common factors were that none of them was afraid of getting their hands dirty and they all shared a fascination with liquid history.
“I used to have a life,” confessed mudlark Euan with a wry smile, “I used to go jogging, but now I just jog to get to the river!” He got hooked when he found a female jaw bone on the beach in Chelsea outside the headquarters of MI5 and feared the worst, until the bone was identified as from the Bronze Age, approximately three thousand years old. Euan had a handful of nineteenth century coins to show me, “These were in the river six hours ago,” he admitted with glee, “What’s remarkable is how the Thames sorted them for me, all the pennies, ha’pennies and silver coins were collected together in separate locations within the same area.”
Mudlark Terry, a housepainter also had his eye on the river at Chelsea. “I was driving over the bridge on the way to work and, when I saw it was low tide, I really wanted to be down there on the beach searching.” he admitted shyly, just eight months into his new existence as a mudlark, “I love it, I really do because you never know what you are going to find down there. I went back in my lunch break and got my brand new white painter’s overalls covered with mud.” Terry had a little white pot to show me that once contained Holloways’s Embrocation for the Cure of Gout & Rheumatism, but it was a mere fraction of his haul from Wandsworth. “I found a bucket of whole bottles and I had to leave about fifty behind.” he informed me in delight tinged with disappointment. “It all started when I bought my boy a metal detector and I had a go with it,” explained Terry candidly, “He’s only seven, so he was bit young for it.”
The enigma of the evening was Woolwich John, a white-haired softly-spoken Irishman who drew a crowd of envious admirers for the Tudor dagger handle he had to show. “What some of these people have in a year, he can find in a week,” Steve Brooker whispered in my ear, out of reverence for John, the old fox standing nearby who has searched the beach at Woolwich every day for the last twenty-six years. “Just fit for lady,” announced John, a legend amongst mudlarks, as he passed me his elegant black dagger handle with ruffled head finial, raising his sprightly white eyebrows and peering at me in quiet satisfaction. “It’s artifacts, it’s history,” he said, to articulate my thoughts, as I turned the piece over in silent wonder.
While I could not resist the infectious delight the mudlarks took in their finds, equally I shall never forget mudlark Mike’s description of the “splatted musket ball with a human tooth stuck in it” that he found in the river at Greenwich. Lined up at a bus stop, you would never guess they were all kindred spirits, mudlarks unable to resist the call of the Thames offering up its secrets at low tide. Yet they share a mutual respect that cuts across everything else. And in each case, the connections they have discovered with other worlds and other times – all within London – serve to liberate them from the present moment and grant a fresh vision of the infinite possibility of life.
Mudlark Euan with the fossilised tree bark he found in the river in Southwark.
Mudlark Peter with a fragment of a Bellemine jug from a Tudor dump in Greenwich.
The handle of a Tudor dagger found by Woolwich John at Rotherhithe.
Columbia Road Market 55
There was just me and the lonely fox on the streets of Spitalfields before seven this morning as I made my way up to Columbia Rd to have a chat with Anthony James Burridge. He is the first member of this celebrated family I have spoken with, but in coming weeks I hope to introduce you to them all, because their story is interwoven with that of the flower market here over several generations – the Columbia Rd aristocracy. “They might not all be called Burridge but there’s quite a lot of us working here, brothers, cousins, sisters and uncles,” explained Anthony with a cheery grin that belied the chilly morning, while at the next stall, his son (also Anthony James), who started three weeks ago selling winter bulbs, shivered in the cold.
Anthony started trading in Columbia Rd twenty-eight years ago at the age of twenty-two. “When I left school I was a marble fitter but then I joined the family business,” he explained, “My dad had a stall at the end and this pitch became available. My dad and all his brothers were in the business. It goes back to my nan who died fifteen years ago, she was here up to sixty years ago.” Anthony first came to Columbia Rd when he was five. “My dad would get me up and bring me down here in the Summer.” he told me, casting his eyes up and down the road affectionately,“In the sixties and seventies, this market used to be seasonal and we only traded twenty-five to thirty weeks of the year. Then it was only English produce but the variety of plants has been extended by bringing them from overseas.” Adding with a shrug of droll bemusement, “People no longer know the seasons for plants anymore, now that everything’s available all the time.”
Shrubs and small trees are Anthony’s speciality, including evergreen shrubs, conifers, Camelias, topiary, and Winter Chrysanthemums, though I spotted some interesting bedding plants including a special favourite of mine, Gentians. Over the years, he has learn what plants work best in the small gardens of the East End. When I asked Anthony how he dealt with the cold, he told me that he keeps the house plants in the van until it is time to sell them so they do not get spoilt by the frost, without realising that I was enquiring about his own welfare. “You get used to it. You put on an extra coat and an extra couple of jumpers. You pull your hat down over your ears and get on with it!” he declared with sparkling eyes of anticipation, looking up to the beautiful clear sky of dawn breaking over us and in hope of a sunny Autumn day that will bring plenty of eager customers to the flower market.
Photograph copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Joseph Markovitch of Hoxton
It was this hauntingly brilliant photograph – the reflection of a girl looking at Hoxton resident Joseph Markovitch drinking a cup of tea – that first drew my attention the work of photographer Martin Usborne. Within this single compelling picture, with its two figures that can barely be reconciled, is manifest the elusive relationship between those who have lived their whole lives in the East End and the young people who are drawn here through instinctive curiosity. Yet this fascinating photograph is itself the result of just such a relationship, Martin saw Joseph walking through Hoxton Sq one Summer’s day in 2007 and the two struck up an unlikely friendship. And in the following months, Joseph who has lived his whole life in Hoxton became a muse to Martin, the young working photographer with a studio in Hoxton Sq. The two remain friends today, and it is my pleasure to publish some of the tender portraits that have resulted from this remarkable collaboration, interspersed with Joseph’s own words.
“This is where I was born, right by Old St roundabout on January 1st, 1927. In those days it wasn’t called a hospital, it was just called a door number, number four or maybe number three. The place where I was born, it was a charity you see. Things were a bit different back then.”
“When I get trouble with my chest I have to stand still. Last Saturday, a woman come up to me and said “Are you OK?” and I said, “Why?” She said, “Because you are standing still.” I said, “Oh.” She said she comes from Italy and she is Scots-Canadian, and do you know what? She wanted to help me. Then I dropped a twenty pound note on the bus. A foreign man – I think he was Dutch or French – said, “Mate, you’ve dropped a twenty pound note.” English people don’t do that because they have got betting habits. They take your twenty pounds and go and put it on the horses. It’s good to have all sorts of foreigners here.”
“I worked two years as a cabinet maker in Hemsworth St, just off Hoxton Market. But when my sinuses got bad I went to Hackney Rd, putting rivets on luggage cases. For about twenty years I did that job. My foreman was a bastard. I got paid a pittance. He tried to sack me but his father said, “You can’t throw Joe out of the firm, he is too good.” I used to shout at the foreman. The job was alright apart from that. If I was clever, very clever, I mean very very clever, then I would like to have been an accountant. It’s a very good job. If I was less heavy, you know what I’d like to be? My dream job, I’d like to be a ballet dancer. Or maybe a clown. But I know what I definitely do not want to be is a funeral director. What a terrible job! Or what about those people that study the stars? That’s a very good job. I’m interested in the universe. In how things began and what’s out there on other planets and lumps of energy that are millions of miles away. It’s more interesting than rivets. Hey, if a meteor landed in Hoxton Square, you think anyone could survive?”
“If I try to imagine the future. It’s like watching a film. Pavements will move, nurses will be robots and cars will grow wings…
…you’ve just got to wait. There won’t be any cinemas, just computers in people’s homes. They will make photographs that talk. You will look at a picture of me and you will hear, “Hello, I’m Joseph Markovitch.” and then it will be me telling you about things. Imagine that!”
“My mother was a good cook. She made bread pudding. It was the best bread pudding you could have. She was called Janie and I lived with her until she died. I wasn’t going to let her into a home. Your mother is your best friend, you see. If she went to the butcher, even if she went early on a Friday, I left work early so I could go with her to the butcher. Your mother should be your best friend.”
“I like to go to the library on Monday, Tuesday and … Well, I can’t always promise what days I go. I like to read about all the places in the world. I also go to the section on the cinema and I read a book called “The life of the stars.” But I only spend thirty per cent of my time reading. The rest of the time, I like to sit on the sofa and sit quite a long way back so I am almost flat. Did you know that Paul Newman’s father was German-Jewish and that his mother was Hungarian-Catholic? You know Nicholas Cage? He is half-German and half-Italian. What about Joe Pesce? Where are his parents from? I should look it up.”
“A lot of young kids do graffiti around Hoxton. It’s nice. It adds a bit of colour, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never had a girlfriend. I think it’s better that way. I have always had very bad catarrh, so it wasn’t possible. That’s the thing, my health. And I had to look after my mother all my life. Anyway, if I was married, I might be dead by now. I probably would be, if you think about it. I would have been domineered all my life by a girl and that ain’t good for nobody’s health. I’m too old for that now. I would like to have had a girlfriend but it’s OK. You know what? I’ve had a happy life, I never starved. That’s the main thing, it’s been a good life.”
“Some things make me laugh. To see a dog talking makes me laugh. I like to see monkeys throwing coconuts on men’s heads, that’s funny. When you see a man going on a desert island, and he is stranded, the monkeys are always friendly. You think the monkeys are throwing things at your head but really he is throwing the coconuts for you to eat.”
Photographs copyright © Martin Usborne
Pete Donne, Rough Trade
Every weekend, a wave of young people surges through Spitalfields and down Brick Lane, bringing riotous new life to these old streets. Some come to show off their outfits, some come to sell off their stuff, all come to participate in the crowded drama of the markets, shops, bars, clubs and galleries in which all kinds of cultural interchange and discovery are possible. At the hub of this whirling hurricane of excited humanity is Rough Trade East in the Truman Brewery, a cavernous independent record shop that opened up audaciously a few years ago with triumphantly perverse logic just at the time all the music chain stores in London were shutting. There are no fancy shop fittings in this whitewashed warehouse space but there are bicycle racks and there is a coffee shop. Crucially, the vinyl is at the front of the store and you can spend all day in here listening if you please.
Pete Donne has worked for Rough Trade since 1979 and was one of those responsible for this brilliant stroke of counter-intuitive thinking. Because if – like Pete – you have spent your working life in a record shop and delight in all the music culture that attends it, and that is your world, then you cannot simply give it up. You have no choice but to be resourceful and stage a transformation. “It got to the whites of the eyes time,” admitted Pete, “Survival required a bold step, something at odds with perceived wisdom. So we decided to open a shop that would be unlike any record shop that came before, and Spitalfields was where we chose to do it.”
When he dropped out of the London School of Economics at the age of nineteen to work in the local record shop in Aylesbury instead, Pete had no idea where it would lead. As he confided to me, “It was no more than a booth really, like a kiosk at a railway station. Two racks of records, an alleyway, two windows and an L-shaped bit where the live records were stored. A one man operation. No loo. You locked up for five minutes if you got caught short.” Earth Records was a sideline for the owner Dave Stopps who needed a ticket outlet for the ambitious concerts he was presenting at Aylesbury Friars, bringing in Sham 69, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Lou Reed, and not unsurprisingly, Pete got a taste for the excitement of it all. “Rough Trade used to send the records down to us every Friday night. It was such a thrill going down to the station and waiting for the box and immediately opening it up and going through the records. They were invariably brilliant. Then the next day a little coterie of in-the-know-punks would come in and buy them up.” he recalled.
Pete was offered a job by Rough Trade driving their Reggae van around London selling pre-release LPs, but at nineteen years old he found it too challenging. Then, in May of 1979, they invited him to work in their shop in Portobello, famous as a meeting place for musicians, journalists and everyone involved in the music industry, where he was to spend the next twenty years, “It became a nightmare on Saturdays, full of glue-sniffers and punks, happily that side doesn’t exist any more.” recalled Pete affectionately.
Set up originally as a hippy-influenced workers’ collective, Rough Trade became identified with the punk explosion. By the nineteen eighties, that had passed and the company hit problems, laying people off. Then one day in 1982 – “the year of the great change,” Pete calls it – he came to work as usual only to learn that the shop was going to shut. Pete talked with the others who worked in the shop, and a new phase began.“We decided to ask to take the shop over, and it was agreed in minutes” said Pete, uncertain to this day if it was a set-up and this was his expected response, “With a shake of a hand the record company and the shop parted company. There has been no contract to this day.” confirmed Pete. “We ploughed the indie furrow until 2006,” he continued, “until it became difficult to sustain an existence because the model was no longer functional. It’s a tough business and we were on the wrong side of the Mr Micawber equation.” The shop in Covent Garden was shut and Slam City Skates, a subsidiary, was sold.
This was the moment when Pete remembered Earth Records and that little coterie of in-the-know-punks in Aylesbury. And Rough Trade East was launched in Spitalfields, in the faith that there are people who love music and there has to be more to it than chart hits in the supermarket.“We brokered deals to get things for favours,” confided Pete, recognising it was make or break for the company,“and we managed to get it open in three months, at a fraction of the budget anyone envisaged possible. Now it has taken on its own life, a focal point for visceral and edgy creativity, not prescriptive or pompous.” And, unwittingly, Rough Trade has become the most recent inheritor of the long tradition of those that have come to Spitalfields to reinvent themselves.
In an era of dumbing-down there is something heartening in the rare and paradoxical success of a music store that has unapologetically brained-up. Speaking with Pete, I learnt that the egalitarian quality I like so much in Rough Trade, creating a cultural space where everyone meets as equals, has its roots in the inspiration that fired him thirty years ago, encountering the world of hippies and punks. This is a space of possibility where anything can happen. You might even stumble upon an unexpected Radiohead concert here. No wonder it is a place of pilgrimage.
Pete is no longer the nineteen-year-old gangly kid he was when he started out working in Earth Records in Aylesbury, although he still lives in Aylesbury and now commutes to Spitalfields every day. Once he turned down the job to drive the Reggae van, yet today he drives back and forth between Rough Trade East and the shop in Portobello, making deliveries. “My involvement in this turned what was a fleeting interest into a lifelong obsession,” he declared to me in wonderment, yet without regret.
New portraits of Pete Donne © Jeremy Freedman
Pete Donne (standing third from left) at Earth Records, Aylesbury 1979.
Pete in the eighties.
Pete in the nineties at Rough Trade, Portobello.
I am delighted to be joining forces with Rough Trade to present a series of Chit-Chats in which characters from the pages of Spitalfields Life interview each other live in front of an audience – after hours in the record shop in Dray Walk, Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane. This occasional series commences next Thursday 21st October at 7pm with CHIT-CHAT #1 The Stripper & The Oral Historian, featuring my esteemed friends Lara Clifton, the celebrated stripper of Shoreditch, in conversation with Clive Murphy, the oral historian of Spitalfields and writer of ribald rhymes.
Admission is free and no booking is required. Do please come along to help me launch this auspicious new venture, I hope it will be amusing and informative, and we can all go along to the Golden Heart for a couple of drinks with Sandra afterwards.
