Night at the Brick Lane Beigel Bakery
New Year’s Eve is always the busiest night of the year at the Brick Lane Beigel Bakery, so yesterday I chose to spend a night accompanying Sammy Minzly, the celebrated manager of this peerless East End institution, to observe the activity through the early hours as the staff braced themselves for tonight’s rush. Yet even though it was a quiet night – relatively speaking – there was already helter-skelter in the kitchen when I arrived mid-evening to discover five bakers working at furious pace amongst clouds of steam to produce three thousand beigels, as they do every day of the year between six at night and one in the morning.
At the centre of this tiny bakery which occupies a lean-to at the rear of the shop, beigels boiled in a vat of hot water. From here, the glistening babies were scooped up in a mesh basket, doused mercilessly with cold water, then arranged neatly onto narrow wet planks named ‘shebas,’ and inserted into the ovens by Stephen the skinny garrulous baker who has spent his entire life on Brick Lane, working here in the kitchen since the age of fifteen. Between the ovens sat an ogre of a huge dough-making machine, mixing all the ingredients for the beigels, bread and cakes that are sold here. It was a cold night in Spitalfields, but it was sweltering here in the steamy atmosphere of the kitchen where the speedy bakers exerted themselves to the limit, as they hauled great armfuls of dough out of the big metal basin in a hurry, plonking it down, kneading it vigorously, then chopping it up quickly, and using scales to divide it into lumps sufficient to make twenty beigels – before another machine separated them into beigel-sized spongey balls of dough, ripe for transformation.
In the thick of this frenzied whirl of sweaty masculine endeavour – accompanied by the blare of the football on the radio, and raucous horseplay in different languages – stood Mr Sammy, a white-haired gentleman of diminutive stature, quietly taking the balls of dough and feeding them into the machine which delivers recognisable beigels on a conveyor belt at the other end, ready for immersion in hot water. In spite of the steamy hullabaloo in the kitchen, Mr Sammy carries an aura of calm, working at his own pace and, even at seventy-five years old, still pursues his ceaseless labours all through the night, long after the bakers have departed to their beds. Originally a baker, he has been working here since the beigel bakery opened at these premises in 1976, although he told me proudly that the Brick Lane Beigel Bakery superceded that of Lieberman’s fifty -five years ago. Today it is celebrated as the most visible legacy of the Jewish culture that once defined Spitalfields.
Hovering at the entrance to the kitchen, I had only to turn my head to witness the counterpoint drama of the beigel shop where hordes of hungry East Londoners line up all night, craving spiritual consolation in the form of beigels and hot salt beef. They come in sporadic waves, clubbers and party animals, insomniacs and sleep walkers, hipsters and losers, street people and homeless, cab drivers and firemen, police and dodgy dealers, working girls and binmen. Some can barely stand because they are so drunk, others can barely keep their eyes open because they are so tired, some can barely control their joy and others can barely conceal their misery. At times, it was like the madhouse and other times it was like the morgue. Irrespective, everyone at the beigel bakery keeps working, keeping the beigels coming, slicing them, filling them, counting them and sorting them. And the presiding spirit is Mr Sammy. Standing behind the counter, he checks every beigel personally to maintain quality control and tosses aside any that are too small or too toasted, in unhesitating disdain.
As manager, Mr Sammy is the only one whose work crosses both territories, moving back and forth all night between the kitchen and the shop, where he enjoys affectionate widespread regard from his customers. Every other person calls out “Sammy!” or “Mr Sammy” as they come through the door, if he is in the shop – asking “Where’s Sammy?” if he is not, and wanting their beigels reheated in the oven as a premise to step into the kitchen and enjoy a quiet word with him there. Only once did I find Mr Sammy resting, sitting peacefully on the salt bin in the empty kitchen in the middle of the night, long after all the bakers had left and the shop had emptied out. “I’m getting lazy! I’m not doing nothing.” he exclaimed in alarmed self-recognition, “I’d better do something, I’d better count some beigels.”
Later he boiled one hundred and fifty eggs and peeled them, as he explained me to about Achmed, the cleaner, known as ‘donkey’ – “because he can sleep anywhere” – whose arrival was imminent. “He sleeps upstairs,” revealed Mr Sammy pointing at the ceiling. “He lives upstairs?” I enquired, looking up. “No, he only sleeps there, but he doesn’t like to pay rent, so he works as a cleaner.” explained Mr Sammy with an indulgent grin. Shortly, when a doddery fellow arrived with frowsy eyes and sat eating a hot slice of cake from the oven, I surmised this was the gentlemen in question. “I peeled the eggs for you,” Mr Sammy informed him encouragingly, a gesture that was reciprocated by ‘donkey’ with the merest nod. “He’s seventy-two,” Mr Sammy informed me later in a sympathetic whisper.
Witnessing the homeless man who came to collect a pound coin from Mr Sammy nightly and another of limited faculties who merely sought the reassurance of a regular handshake, I understood that because it is always open, the Beigel Bakery exists as a touchstone for many people who have little else in life, and who come to acknowledge Mr Sammy as the one constant presence. With gentle charisma and understated gesture, Mr Sammy fulfils the role of spiritual leader and keeps the bakery running smoothly too. After a busy Christmas week, he was getting low on bags for beigels and was concerned he had missed his weekly deliver from Paul Gardner because of the holiday. The morning was drawing near and I knew that Paul was opening that day for the first time after the break, so I elected to walk round to Gardners Market Sundriesmen in Commercial St and, sure enough, on the dot of six-thirty Paul arrived full of good humour to discover me and other customers waiting. Once he had dispatched the customers, Paul locked the shop again and we drove round to deliver the twenty-five to thirty thousand brown paper bags that comprise the beigel shop’s weekly order.
Mr Sammy’s eyes lit up to see Paul Gardner carrying the packets of bags through the door in preparation for New Year’s Eve and then, in celebration of the festive season, before I made my farewells and retired to my bed, I took advantage of the opportunity to photograph these two friends and long-term associates together – both representatives of traditional businesses that between them carry significant aspects of the history and identity of Spitalfields.
Old friends, Paul Gardner, Market Sundriesman, and Sammy Minzly, Manager of the Beigel Bakery.
In Search of Relics of Old London
Staple Inn, High Holborn, 1878 & today
Those who have read my stories of A Room to Let in Old Aldgate and The Ghosts of Old London will know that I have become fascinated with the atmospheric detailed pictures taken by the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London over twelve years from 1875, preserved in the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute. The original intent of these photographs was to record ancient buildings at risk of demolition, in the hope that their quality might be recognised and they could be saved. Most of the edifices portrayed in these melancholic twilight images were destroyed in the nineteenth century but, becoming familiar with these pictures, I recognised a handful that still stand today. So I decided to set out on a quest to find them and discover some Relics of Old London for myself.
It was a suitably foggy morning when I set out across the city with my camera in hand, in the footsteps of Henry Dixon, William Strudrick and A. & J. Bool, the photographers employed by the Society. My intention was not to rival their exemplary works but merely to take look at these places today. Starting at Queen Anne’s Gate, the most Westerly destination, I walked from one location of their pictures to another, making my way Eastwards back to Spitalfields, and passed a pleasant day in the process.
In Whitehall, Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House is surrounded today by buildings in a similar style, which makes me wonder if any passersby realise that it predates everything else in this street, as the lone fragment of the ancient Palace of Whitehall. I recognised a similar phenomenon in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Inigo Jones’ Lindsey House is so spruce and clean it is almost indistinguishable from the copy next door, while Newcastle House, also dating from the seventeenth century but reworked by Sir Edwin Lutyens in the nineteen thirties, now looks like a modern pastiche.
In fact, the whole of Central London has been mightily scrubbed up and little of the grime of ages deposited by smoke from coal fires remains now, and the airborne filth which supplied such dramatic patination to nineteenth century photographers has gone. Yet I have clear memories of how black all these buildings were until quite recently, and I recall Trafalgar Sq feeling like centre of a diabolic city when I first visited London and discovered the buildings entirely coated with soot. The outcome of this great clean up is that today the city no longer looks old as it does in old photographs, it has been polished up like new.
I had absurd experiences wandering around Fleet St, Clothfair and Bermondsey St looking for buildings I saw in the photographs which I believed still existed, only to discover they did not. Searching for the reality of pictures that had merged with my own memories, I was confounded. But there were other sites, notably Queen Anne’s Gate, Gray’s Inn and Charterhouse, where little had changed and I was rewarded by the delight of recognition from the photographs.
It was a sentimental journey I made. I knew that the man in the stove pipe hat at the entrance to Charterhouse was not going to be there to grant me a conversation, much as should wish for it, but I still wanted to go and look anyway.
At Queen Anne’s Gate.
The Banqueting Hall, built by James I to a design by Inigo Jones and completed in 1622, is today all that remains of the Palace of Whitehall. Charles I stepped from a first floor window onto a wooden scaffold where he got his head chopped off on 30th January 1649.
This water gate stood at the river’s edge, fifty yards from Samuel Pepys’ house. Built in 1626, as the triumphal entry for the Duke of Buckingham to York House, since the Victoria Embankment was completed in 1870 it has been marooned a hundred yards from the Thames.
Lindsey House, built in 1640 and attributed to Inigo Jones, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – it looked older in the nineteenth century than it does now.
Newcastle House at the corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields was built in the sixteen eighties and remodelled by Sir Edwin Lutyens in the nineteen thirties.
In Gray’s Inn, the Plane trees have grown taller.
St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell. Built in 1504 by Thomas Docwra and restored heavily in the late nineteenth century.
At the entrance to Charterhouse in Smithfield.
Temple Bar, designed by Christopher Wren in 1672, once stood in the Strand as one of the gates to the City of London, but it was removed in 1877 and languished in Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire until it was brought back and installed at the entrance to Paternoster Square next to St Paul’s Cathedral in 2004.
The George is the last of London’s venerable coaching inns – preserved today by the National Trust. Two of the bar staff obliged me by standing in the doorway in place of the couple in the earlier picture.
Archive images copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
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With the Spitalfields Milkman at Christmas
Yesterday was the first delivery after Christmas for Kevin Read, the heroic milkman who delivers the milk to Spitalfields and a whole expanse of the East End stretching from the Olympic Park in the East to Hoxton Square in the West. After a heavy downpour, on such a damp occluded morning, while the rest of the world were still dozing in their warm beds, it was my pleasure to join Kevin on his round to offer some companionship in his lonely vigil.
The temperatures have risen since last week’s freeze that sent Kevin tumbling off an icy step with an armful of milk bottles in Mile End. “The worst thing about this job is when people don’t clear the snow off the steps. You hold onto the rail and hope you don’t fall.” he declared with admirable restraint. No milk was spilt, but Kevin has a sore back now and – although he insists he takes it in his stride – even after three days off, there is a stiffness to his gait as he hurries from door to door with bottles in hand.
“I worked Christmas Days in this job back in the nineteen eighties,” Kevin recalled without sentiment, cheerful that those times are behind him as we sped along in the heated cabin of his diesel-powered float.“When I had the electric float with the open cabin, I used to be white down one side of my body by the time I arrived at my first call on snowy mornings,” he added with a shudder.
As we drove up through Hackney from Spitalfields in the darkness of the early morning, I spotted a few souls shivering at bus stops, cleaners and service workers reluctantly off to work, and we passed several beaten-up vans of totters cruising the streets to salvage abandoned washing machines and other scrap metal discarded over Christmas. The road sweepers were out too, muffled up in hooded windcheaters like fluorescent Eskimos, dutifully cleaning up the gutters in the night.
“With so many people away, it’s difficult to keep track,” said Kevin, rolling his eyes crazily as he scrabbled through his round book, “I should save time, but I have to keeping checking the books – so I don’t, I just lose money.” With an income consisting entirely of commission on sales, Kevin is used to seeing his earnings plummet at this time of year when offices are shut and customers go away, reducing his weekly delivery from eight thousand to two thousand pints.“After buying diesel for the van, I’ll be lucky if I see twenty pounds for today’s work.” he admitted to me with a shrug, squinting through the windscreen into the murky depths beyond. Yet in recognition of his popularity in the East End, Kevin takes consolation that his Christmas tips were up this year. “People are getting to know me, I’m becoming part of the family!” he reassured me with a cocky smirk, before he ran off into the dark with a wind-up torch and a handful of milk bottles.
“How are you supposed to read a damp note in the dark?” he asked, as he returned from the rain, playfully waving a soggy piece of paper between two fingers, “It’s like being down a coal mine with your eyes shut out there.” The note read “No Milk till Tuesday,” but today was Tuesday. Kevin and I looked at each other. Did the note mean this Tuesday or next Tuesday ? “You need to be mind reader in this job!” observed Kevin, with a wry grimace – though, ever conscientious, he elected to leave milk and make a detour to discover the outcome next day.
For four hours we drove around that cold morning, as the sky lightened and the streetlights flickered out, to deliver two hundred pints of milk, twisting and turning through the streets and housing estates, in what appeared to be an unpopulated city. And Kevin seemed to loosen up, overcoming his stiffness, and constantly checking the pen which was the marker in his round book, dividing the calls done from those still to do, as he made sharp work of his scattered deliveries. In some streets, Kevin makes one call and in others a cluster. It is both inexplicable and a matter of passionate fascination to Kevin – trying to discover the pattern in this chaos. Because if he can unlock the mystery, perhaps he might restore the lost milk rounds of the East End and go from one door to the next delivering milk again, as he did when he began over thirty years ago.
At the end of his short Christmas round, Kevin could go home and have a nap, but he seemed dis-satisfied. “I sometimes think I’d like just this round, without the extra pressure of the office deliveries.” he brooded, envisaging this hypothetical future before dismissing it, smiling in recognition of his own nature, “I’d work three until seven, be done and dusted, and home by eight in the morning – but I’d be so bored.”
The truth is that Kevin provides a public service as much as he is in business, and while it may not make him rich, he shows true nobility of spirit in his endeavour. Renowned for his humour and resilience, it is a matter of honour for Kevin to go out and deliver the milk, working alone unseen in the night for all these years to uphold his promise to his customers, whatever the weather. He takes the rigours of the situation as a test, moulding his character, and this is how he has emerged as an heroic milkman, with stamina and dreams.
There is a myth that it is cheaper to buy milk in a supermarket or shop than have it delivered, but this is false. So why not consider having Kevin deliver to you in the New Year ? – because it is a beautiful thing to discover milk in glass bottles on your doorstep in the morning.
If you want Kevin Read to deliver milk or yoghurt or eggs or fresh bread or even dogfood to you, contact him directly by calling 07940095775 or email kevinthemilkman@yahoo.co.uk. Kevin says, “You don’t have to have a delivery every day,” and “No order is too small.”
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Some Christmas Baubles
Is this a lemon? Is this a pine cone? Or is it a sculpture by Tony Cragg? The truth is I do not even know when my grandmother bought this glass decoration and I cannot ask her because she died twenty years ago. All I can do is hang it on my tree and admire it gleaming amongst the deep green boughs, along with all the others that were once hers, or were bought by my parents, or that I have acquired myself, which together form the collection I bring out each year – accepting that not knowing or not remembering their origins is part of their arcane charm.
Although I have many that are more elaborate, I especially admire this golden one for its elegant simplicity of form and I like to think its chic ridged profile derives from the nineteen thirties when my mother was a child, because my grandmother took the art of Christmas decoration very seriously. She would be standing beech leaves in water laced with gelatine in October, pressing them under the carpet in November and then in December arranging the preserved leaves in copper jugs with teazles sprayed gold and branches of larch, as just one example of her fancy contrivances that she pursued each year to celebrate the season in fastidious style.
Given the fragility of these glass ornaments, it is extraordinary that this particular decoration has survived, since every year there are a few casualties resulting in silvery shards among the needles under the tree. Recognising that a Christmas tree is a tremendous source of amusement for a cat – making great sport out of knocking the baubles to the ground and kicking them around like footballs – I hang the most cherished decorations upon the higher branches. Yet since it is in the natural course of things that some get broken every year, and as I should not wish to inhibit the curiosity of children wishing to handle them, I always buy a couple more each Christmas to preserve the equilibrium of my collection.
Of course, I am aware that everlasting baubles are available – they do not smash, they bounce – but this shatterproof technological advance entirely lacks the ephemeral poetry of these fragile beauties that can survive for generations as vessels of emotional memory and then be lost in a moment. Much as we might wish it, life is not shatterproof, and in widespread recognition of this essential frailty of existence, there has been a welcome revival of glass ornaments in recent years.
They owe their origins to the glassblowers of the Thuringian Forest on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic where, in Lauscha, glass beads, drinking glasses, flasks, bowls and even glass eyes were manufactured since the twelfth century. The town is favoured to lie in a wooded river valley, providing both the sand and timber required for making glass and in 1847 Hans Greiner – a descendant of his namesake Hans Greiner who set up the glassworks in 1597 with Christoph Muller – began producing ornaments by blowing glass into wooden moulds. The inside of these ornaments was at first coloured to appear silvery with mercury or lead and then later by using a compound of silver nitrate and sugar water. In 1863, when a gas supply became available to the town, glass could be blown thinner without bursting and by the eighteen seventies the factory at Lauscha was exporting tree ornaments throughout Europe and America, signing a deal with F.W.Woolworth in the eighteen eighties, after he discovered them on a trip to Germany.
Bauble is a byword for the inconsequential, so I do not quite know why these small glass decorations inspire so much passion in my heart, keeping their romance even as other illusions have dissolved. Maybe it is because I collect images that resonate with me? As well as Father Christmas and Snowmen, I have the Sun, Moon and Stars, Clocks and even a Demon to create a shining poem about Time, Mortality and Joy upon my Christmas tree. Let me admit, I cannot resist the allure of these exquisite glass sculptures in old-fashioned designs glinting at dusk amongst the dark needles of fir, because they still retain the power to evoke the rich unassailable magic of Christmas for me.
This pierrot dates from the nineteen eighties.
Three of my grandmother’s decorations. The basket on the left has a piece of florists’ wire that she placed there in the nineteen fifties.
This snowman is one of the oldest of my grandmother’s collection.
Bought in the nineteen eighties, but possibly from a much older mould.
Baubles can be further enhanced with painted stripes and glitter.
The moon, sun and stars were acquired from a shop in Greenwich Avenue on my first visit to New York in 1990, amazingly they survived the journey home intact.
These two from my grandmother’s collection make a fine contrast of colour.
Even Christmas has its dark side, this demon usually hangs at the back of the tree.
It is always going to be nine o’clock on Christmas Eve.
Three new decorations purchased at Columbia Rd last year.
A stash of glittering beauties, stored like rare eggs in cardboard trays.
My first bicycle, that I found under the tree one Christmas and kept ever since.
Mama Irene, Chef
By the time you read this, Irene Sagar – proprietor of Lennies Snack Bar in Calvert Avenue in Shoreditch – will be in Thailand, gone to visit her family for Christmas. But each year, on the night before her departure, she closes early and cooks an elaborate feast for her friends. If you passed by that evening you would have seen a long table in the window with happy diners in party hats enjoying Mama’s Irene’s spicy cuisine, and it was my delight to be there amongst them to savour this special meal and record the preparations.
Lennies Snack Bar presents a modest face to the street, yet the view from inside across to George Dance’s magnificent church of St Leonards opposite, framed in Spring by the almond trees in blossom, creates a breathtaking prospect. But as the dusk fell on this particular afternoon in late December, the church receded into the gloom and the lights were out in the front of the cafe while Mama Irene worked peacefully in the kitchen at the back, where I kept her company and she told me her story.
“I only cook what I love, and I believe you can only do what you love. That’s why it’s not a job, it’s a passion.” she announced, stating her personal creed, as she placed a side of pork in the oven with a pat of affection and set about filleting six seabream conscientiously. “I will never get tired of cooking,” she continued brightly, raising her head momentarily to share a grin with me.
Although you might assume that Mama Irene grew up cooking the Thai and Malaysian food for which she is famous, she only came to it later in life. Born in Malacca to a Malaysian father and a Thai mother she came to Yorkshire in 1958 as the wife of an airforce officer. “It was bloody cold,” she recalled. This was where Mama Irene attempted the Cornish pasty that became her notorious culinary debut, a gesture of reconciliation for her long-suffering husband after she was arrested several times for protesting against nuclear missiles. “I told him, ‘I believe in protest,'” she confided,“‘I married you, not the airforce,’ – but he was worried that they would take away his stripe.” Mama Irene delivered the pasty to her husband at work, with such overzealous contrition that she dropped it on the floor. And, partly as a consequence of this incident, today she is divorced with a fifty-year-old daughter and no hard feelings.
“I used to be an antique dealer specialising in nineteen twenties and Art Deco,” explained Irene, stirring her stockpot and introducing the next chapter in her life with cheerful alacrity “But I was so obsessed with that period that I wouldn’t sell any of it and I nearly lost my house. So I had to quit trading and I registered with a catering agency instead, as a general kitchen assistant. Working in different places, I saw what a chef can do and it made me want to be a chef. I worked during the day and went to school at night to get my qualifications. Then I became a commis chef and in the end I opened my own sandwich bar, Lennies Snack Bar in Old St.”
Mama Irene is justly proud of this period in her life, when things started to go right for her. Such was her success that she needed extra premises to prepare all the sandwiches and that was when she came to Calvert Avenue. “It was twenty years ago.” she realised, peeling garlic and filling with sentiment, “I saw this cafe, a typical greasy spoon, and I fell in love with it. So I asked the owner if she would sell it and I christened it Lennies after my place in Old St. But I thought it could become a Thai restaurant, and I opened up during the day selling homemade food.”
Halting from chopping celery and peering out towards the street to contemplate the changing neighbourhood, “I don’t know if it has changed for the better or the worse,” she said. “When I came here there was a strong community atmosphere, everyone looked out for each other. There was this button and buckle factory that stood empty for years, inhabited by Italian squatters, they had no money and no place to stay, and I used to go to wild parties there. They came to London to study circus and on Summer evenings there used to be juggling, fire-eating and rollerskating in the middle of Calvert Avenue. But also in those days, it was risky to walk down this road alone, quite often people would be attacked for their mobile phones, and they always came in here as a safe house where they could call and wait for the police to come.
This was the only cafe here, and I stayed open late so students studying art and photography at Hackney College could come and eat. They used to say, ‘Let’s go to Mama Irene’s and get a bowl of soup’ and they all gave me a couple of pounds each and I made them a bowl of soup, that’s how opening in the evenings first came about.” Since then, Mama Irene has been running her cafe by day and opening as a Thai restaurant at night, building up a loyal following and acquiring a lot of friends. There is nothing swanky about Lennies Snack Bar, simply a plain cafe with an open kitchen serving honest food and that is just how I like it.
“I love England so much,” she revealed, turning unexpectedly emotional as she added the spices and seasonings to her Thai Curry, “I am quite patriotic, I would rather live here in spite of the snow and the recession. It’s still a very fair place to live. You can make yourself heard here, but in Thailand or Malaysia you can’t even voice your opinion. I worked all my life here and I pay my dues, and I get upset when people run it to the ground.”
It was all coming together nicely. Once Mama Irene had her seabream marinating and her chicken, duck and pork cooking, and the curry was simmering, it was time to make her famous spicy sauce. “Cooking is an art, both in how you cook it and how you present it.” she informed me with authority, flourishing a ladle and arching her brows for emphasis.“First of all you eat it with your eyes. When it’s inviting and colourful, you want to eat it. My cooking is very spicy, I like strong flavours. I always do wholesome cooking, I don’t do artificial ingredients. In the Summer, I grow my own vegetables and bring them here from my allotment in Twickenham. I pick them in the early morning – you must pick them before midday because they taste so different, especially root vegetables. I grow my own herbs, beans, courgettes, tomatoes, lettuces and onions.”
By now, guests had begun to arrive, taking refuge from the cold night and sitting around in hungry anticipation, watching appreciatively as Mama Irene had three woks on the flame simultaneously, cooking the tofu, greens, and asparagus. With a placid nature and concentrated application, she had prepared an entire menu of dishes as we talked, and now they were all ready to be served at the same joyous moment. We had come to pay tribute to Mama Irene, and as we took our seats around the table, we were her children and we were blessed with her beneficence.
Lennies Snack Bar, 4 Calvert Avenue, is closed until Tuesday 4th January while Irene is in Thailand.
You may be interested in my other stories about Calvert Avenue:
How Raymond’s Shop became Leila’s Shop
Syd’s Coffee Stall, Shoreditch High St
The Ghosts of Old London
Click to enlarge this photograph
To dispel my disappointment that I cannot rent that Room to Let in Old Aldgate, I find myself returning to scrutinize the collection of pictures taken by the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London held in the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute. It gives me great pleasure to look closely and see the loaves of bread in the window and read the playbills on the wall in this photograph of a shop in Macclesfield St in 1883. The slow exposures of these photographs included fine detail of inanimate objects, just as they also tended to exclude people who were at work and on the move but, in spite of this, the more I examine these pictures the more inhabited they become.
On the right of this photograph, you see a woman and a boy standing on the step. She has adopted a sprightly pose of self-presentation with a jaunty hand upon the hip, while he looks hunched and ill at ease. But look again, another woman is partially visible, standing in the shop doorway. She has chosen not to be portrayed in the photograph, yet she is also present. Look a third time – click on the photograph above to enlarge it – and you will see a man’s face in the window. He has chosen not to be portrayed in the photograph either, instead he is looking out at the photograph being taken. He is looking at the photographer. He is looking at us, returning our gaze. Like the face at the window pane in “The Turn of the Screw,” he challenges us with his visage. Unlike the boy and the woman on the right, he has not presented himself to the photographer’s lense, he has retained his presence and his power. Although I shall never know who he is, or his relationship to the woman in the doorway, or the nature of their presumed conversation, yet I cannot look at this picture now without seeing him as the central focus of the photograph. He haunts me. He is one of the ghosts of old London.
It is the time of year when I think of ghosts, when shadows linger in old houses and a silent enchantment reigns over the empty streets. Let me be clear, I am not speaking of supernatural agency, I am speaking of the presence of those who are gone. At Christmas, I always remember those who are absent this year, and I put up all the cards previously sent by my mother and father, and other loved ones, in fond remembrance. Similarly, in the world around me, I recall the indicators of those who were here before me, the worn step at the entrance to the former night shelter in Crispin St and the eighteenth century graffiti at the entrance to St Pauls Cathedral, to give but two examples. And these photographs also provide endless plangent details for contemplation, such as the broken windows and the shabby clothing strung up to dry at the Oxford Arms, both significant indicators of a certain way of life.
To me, these fascinating photographs are doubly haunted. The spaces are haunted by the people who created these environments in the course of their lives, culminating in buildings in which the very fabric evokes the presence of their inhabitants, because many are structures worn out with usage. And equally, the photographs are haunted by the anonymous Londoners who are visible in them, even if their images were incidental to the purpose of these photographs as an architectural record.
The pictures that capture people absorbed in the moment touch me most – like the porter resting his basket at the corner of Friday St – because there is a compelling poetry to these inconsequential glimpses of another age, preserved here for eternity, especially when the buildings themselves have been demolished over a century ago. These fleeting figures, many barely in focus, are the true ghosts of old London and if we can listen, and study the details of their world, they bear authentic witness to our past.
Two girls lurk in the yard behind this old house in the Palace Yard, Lambeth.
A woman turns the corner into Wych St.
A girl watches from a balcony at the Oxford Arms while boys stand in the shadow below.
At the Oxford Arms, 1875.
At the entrance to the Oxford Arms – the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London was set up to save the Oxford Arms, yet it failed in the endeavour, preserving only this photographic record.
A relaxed gathering in Drury Lane.
A man turns to look back in Drury Lane, 1876.
At the back of St Bartholomew’s, Smithfield, 1877.
In Gray’s Inn Lane.
A man peers from the window of a chemists’ at the corner of Lower James St and Brewer St.
A lone policeman on duty in High Holborn, 1878.
A gentleman in Barnard’s Inn.
At White Hart Inn yard.
At Queen’s Inn yard.
A woman lingers in front of the butcher in Borough High St, Southwark.
In Aldgate.
A porter puts down his basket in the street at the corner of Cheapside and Friday St.
In Fleet St.
The Old Bell, Holborn
At the corner of Fore St and Milton St.
Doorways on Lawrence Pountney Hill.
A conversation at the entrance to Inner Temple, Fleet St.
Images copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
You can see more pictures from the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London here In Search of Relics of Old London
On Christmas Night in the City
Fortified by a late supper of lamb cutlets, I set out after eleven through the streets of Spitalfields just as some of the residents were making their way to Christ Church for the midnight service, but I did not join them, instead I walked out into the City on Christmas Eve. As I passed through Brick Lane, the ever-optimistic curry touts were touting to an empty street and in Commercial St a few stragglers who had been out for the night loitered, but I left them all behind as I entered the streets of the City of London where there was no-one. Passing through the deserted Leadenhall Market, illuminated like a fairground, I slipped into the web of narrow alleys to emerge at the Bank of England. Here where the Bank, the Mansion House and the Royal Exchange face each other at this famous crossroads, the place was empty save a lonely policeman patrolling outside the Bank of England.
I headed down to the river and as I crossed the footbridge above the dark water with powerful currents churning in the depths below, I could enjoy the panorama of the vast city of empty rooms around me. Tonight, I was the sole rambler through its passages and byways, an explorer in the unknown territory of the familiar city, transformed by the complete absence of inhabitants. The sound of the gulls’ cry registered as it had not before and birdsong followed me throughout my journey into the dark streets, in which for the first time ever I heard the echo of my own footsteps in the centre of London.
Yet just as I had befriended the emptiness, I came round a corner in Southwark to see the cathedral glowing with light and the tune of a carol blowing on the breeze. I stepped down to the cathedral door and discovered a candlelit service in progress. An usher saw me through the glass door, and although I kept a respectful distance – imbued with the generosity of the season, he could not resist coming outside to lead me in. Before I knew it, I was in the midst of the service and it was overwhelming in contrast to the cold dark streets to which I had acclimatised. But once the bishop had led the choir in a procession through a haze of incense as the congregation sang “O Come all Ye Faithful,” the service was over. So as quickly as I arrived, I was able to return to my wandering.
Hastening Eastward along the Thames, I came to Tower Bridge where I crossed and skirted around the Tower of London. In the absence of floodlighting, its grim austerity came to the fore, yet even though all the gates were shut for the night I could see a few of the residents’ individual lights still burning within. From here I set out Westward, along Cheapside and Cannon St, where I came upon the fabled London Stone, built into an illuminated box in the wall, as I was passing on my way to St Pauls. Here also, the floodlighting was off, allowing Wren’s great cathedral to loom magnificently among the trees like some natural excrescence, a towering cliff of rock, eroded into pinnacles.
Winding my way onwards along the Strand through the courtyards and alleys, I found myself in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and I had it to myself. And in homage to the writer most famous for his walks by night through London, I visited the Old Curiosity Shop. Already, the night was drawing on and I discovered a sense of urgency, walking on purposefully even though I did not where I was going. At the Savoy, I turned down Carting Lane where I came upon one of just three people that I saw suffering the misfortune of sleeping out last night, though equally I was also aware of many bundled up in dark clothing with backpacks walking slowly and keeping to the shadows. I could only presume these people were walking all night in preference to sleeping in the frost.
I followed the Embankment along to Parliament Sq where there was no-one, apart from the antiwar protesters sleeping peacefully in their tents and statues of dead men standing around on plinths. Big Ben struck three in the morning and, without any traffic, I could sense the sound travelling around me, bouncing and reverberating off the stone buildings as I made my way up Whitehall. Coming to the end of Downing St, two policemen with machine guns on duty behind the fortifications spotted me, the lone figure in the street, and I realised they were focusing on me. Then, to my surprise, one waved, and so I returned the wave automatically and the atmosphere of unease was broken.
There were plenty of taxis for hire circling Trafalgar Square – they were the only traffic on the road by this time – but absurdly there were no customers to rent them. Looking through Admiralty Arch, I espied Buckingham Palace tempting me, and I wanted to go walking around St James’ Palace too, but weariness was also coming upon me. It was time to return home. I walked doggedly across Covent Garden, along Holborn and over Smithfield, then through the Barbican and so I found myself in Spitalfields again.
The city was as still as the grave and there was a keen edge to the wind, yet I had kept warm by walking continuously. It was as though I had travelled through a dream – a dream of an empty city. Although I delighted in the privilege of having London to myself, it is an alien place with nobody in it, so I was eager to renounce my monopoly and give the city back to everyone else again, because I longed for the reassurance of my warm bed. Already children were waking to unwrap parcels that appeared mysteriously in the night, although I must confess I saw no evidence of nocturnal deliveries upon my walk. It was now 4:30am on Christmas Morning and as I approached my front door, even before I took out the key to place it in the lock, a cry of a certain cat was heard from just inside, where he had been waiting upon my return for all this time.
You may expect two more reports of nocturnal escapades from the gentle author this week.
Leadenhall Market at 11:50pm on Christmas Eve.
At the Bank at Midnight.
In Southwark Cathedral, 1:00am Christmas Morning.
Leaving Southwark Cathedral.
The London Stone in Cannon St.
At St Pauls, 2:00am Christmas Morning.
The Old Curiosity Shop, 2:30am.
At the Savoy, 2:45am.
In Carting Lane, next to the Savoy.
A lonely photographer at the London Eye, 2:55am
The Nativity scene in Trafalgar Square, 3:15am.
In Covent Garden, 3:30am.
At High Holborn, 3:45am.
At the Barbican, 4:00am on Christmas Morning.
