At Lady Sandra Bates’ Birthday Bash
There are some people you meet to whom you cannot say “No,” because it would simply be an affront to their overwhelming generosity of spirit, and the redoubtable Lady Sandra Bates (Bunny Sandie of 1966) who I met at the Bunny Girls’ Reunion at the Grapes in Limehouse is one such person.
So when Lady Sandra invited me and Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Sarah Ainslie to her sixty-fifth birthday bash in Mayfair, it would have been disingenuous not to accept. The truth is that we leapt at the invitation because, now that the season for celebration is upon us, we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to make a rare foray up to the West End and become society reporters for a night, to permit our readers in the East End a glimpse of how the other half lives.
We were walking down Dover St through the driving snow in search of the party venue, and feeling far from our familiar East End streets, when three young ladies imbued with festive spirit rolled out of a taxi, so we thought it pertinent to ask them if they knew where Lady Sandra Bates’ birthday party was taking place. At the very mention of the magic name, all three lit up with delight and anticipation, and the tallest cried out “Batesy, you old bitch, where are you?” to the street, in a reckless shriek of bravado, which was a cause of great relief to us because we knew we had come to the right place.
Before we knew it we were ushered into a high class cellar, where the elite were gathering, drawn together by their shared affection for Lady Sandra Bates who held the focus of attention effortlessly, glittering magnificently in a gold-sequined top, which exemplified her larger than life disposition and sparkling personality. I quickly discovered that almost no-one knew anyone else, and everyone had a different story to tell about how they met Lady Sandra – in a nightclub toilet, or an art gallery in Kensington or at one of Jason’s famous networking parties, these were explanations that cropped up several times. Yet in spite of their diversity of background, everyone was excited to be here “in society,” unified by their passion for Lady Sandra who makes it her business to be the life and soul of any party. Undertaking an impromptu survey, I asked people what they admired most about Lady Sandra and the answered ranged from, “Her hair, eyelashes and nails” – “Her balls” – “Her smile” – “Her tenacity and determination”- “Her ability to bring people together,” to “Her propensity to go in the lift in her pyjamas.”
Lady Sandra’s daughter Charlotte confessed to me how much she admired her mother’s strength of character for taking advantage of the opportunities available to her as a Playboy Bunny in sixties’ London. “She bought her first house with the diamonds Sir Charles Clore gave her, you know?” she told me, flashing her eyes in wonder. Charlotte regaled me with happy childhood tales of learning to ride her bike in Grosvenor Square, and when her mother came to the school fete in a long black wig and ankle-length fur coat, and got drunk with the headmaster. I also had the pleasure of an introduction to mild-mannered East Ender, Frank Gregory, Lady Sandra’s Bates’ gentleman, owner of a Lancia dealership and a block of flats in Whitechapel, or as she put it succinctly, “the one who buys my diamonds and furs, darling.”
The surprise of the evening was an encounter with the amiable Sean McGuigan, full of swagger and charm, flashing a rakish gold tooth, and showing off the flask of vodka that he had concealed “down me nuts.” He was delirious with glee to brag of his recent release from prison following a conviction for blackmailing the Royal family – the first attempt in over a century. The next guest to swerve into my field of vision was a fresh faced thirty-eight year old, Crystyl, from California who explained that she was delighted to be here in London because everyone at parties in Los Angeles looked young. And then she proceeded to share her discovery that Vaseline applied to the lower eyelids takes eight years off your age, as well as being cheaper and less invasive than Botox.
At last, in the midst of the lively throng vying for her attention, hungry myself to gather further morsels of information about Lady Sandra’s charmed life, I managed to snatch the privilege of a few intimate moments with the birthday girl herself. Batting her eyelashes seductively and displaying a blissful smile, she told me she woke to glass of champagne that morning, then it was off to Princess Margaret’s hairdresser to get spruced up, followed by tea at the Ritz with her two daughters. Getting a little dreamy when she admitted that she took a sentimental moment to think of George Best, with whom she once opened a club, Blondes in Dover St, and gazing up into my eyes, for a moment, in her reverie she had the look of a lost child. “That’s all I know, darling, is Dover St.” she declared – as if it were a summation of her existence – flicking her wrist in a gesture of louche resignation and assuming a tone of dreamy innocence. Then she confided she had received a diamond ring worth a quarter of a million and a Gucci handbag that cost nine hundred and fifty pounds.
When I asked about her future plans, entering her sixty-fifth year, Lady Sandra told me that she has bought “a little place in Covent Garden with a turret,” where she plans to set up a salon with all her young artists that she patronises around her. The model is Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, she explained. Apparently “Hef” has a turret where he surrounds himself with young ladies and now Lady Sandra, with characteristic flamboyance, plans to surround herself with talent in the same way. And if that is how Lady Sandra chooses to grow old gracefully, who are we to deny her such extravagant dreams?
Reluctantly, Sarah and I had to slip away from the party before midnight to catch the bus home, our heads spinning with the night’s adventures, yet although I was delighted to have glimpsed another world – almost like a painting by William Hogarth come to life – I must confess I was not unhappy to return to my modest existence in the East End.
Watch a short film of Lady Sandra Bates introducing herself by clicking here.
Three belles from Berkhamsted, Carole, Jane and Carolynne.
Fay met Lady Sandra in a nightclub toilet and Elaine met Lady Sandra at an art gallery.
Ed with new friends Wendy and Yang.
Lady Sandra and her daughter Charlotte, with legendary DJ Fitz Brown from Tramps – back in the glory days when Catherine Zeta-Jones and Mick Hucknall were dating.
Actress Maggie Steed raises a birthday toast to Lady Sandra Bates.
Maggie Steed with Mr & Mrs Collins, a happily divorced couple.
Elizabeth & Crystyl from Los Angeles by way of South Woodford.
Theodora, Davina and Lady Sandra Bates’ gentleman Frank Gregory.
Sean McGuigan and Genevieve, celebrating six months since Sean’s release from prison.
The ever-radiant Lady Sandra Bates with her proud daughters, Camilla and Charlotte.
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Columbia Road Market 62
There was an even greater than usual bustle of activity at Columbia Rd early this morning, with big trucks backing up in the darkness, and traders running to and fro, to unload hundreds of Christmas trees that have arrived from Scandanavia to grace the parlours of the East End. It was an extraordinary spectacle to come round the corner and discover the street transformed into a pine forest, with so many trees lined up in such depth to create a magical landscape, as if – like Narnia – you could walk into a thicket and come out in another world.
At the Western end of Columbia Rd, I came across the tree-sellers A.E.Harnett & Sons of Stock in Ingatestone, Essex, who have imported an entire forest of lustrous sweet smelling pines of all sizes. Shane Harnett, a fourth generation nurseryman told me his family have been selling trees here on this spot in Columbia Rd for over a century each Christmas. While Shane and his colleagues busied themselves martialling their stock in preparation for a furious day’s trading, his wife Yvonne graciously spared me a few moments for a chat, clutching a cup of hot soup and a sandwich, as we stood together, surrounded by trees in a temporary forest grove.
Throughout the year, Harnett’s nursery maintain a double pitch and a casual pitch on Columbia Rd selling plants of all kinds, but for four weeks in December the entire family turns out to lend a hand with the mighty endeavour of the Christmas trees. “Shane and the family run the nursery and I stay at home,” confided Yvonne with a good-humoured smirk from beneath her fur-lined hat, but that did not stop her from getting up at twenty past two this morning to be here lending her husband a helping hand, as she has done each Christmas for the past seven years. A woman of spirit, she appeared quite unconcerned by the sub-zero temperatures. “It’s alright,” she reassured me, “We do it every year, we know what it’s going to be like.”
Photograph copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Terry O’ Leary, Joker
“For two years, I cared for my brother – who was diagnosed with HIV in 1987 – in his council flat, but after he died I couldn’t stay there because my relationship with him as his sister wasn’t recognised by the council, and that’s how I became homeless,” said Terry speaking plainly, yet without self-pity, as we sat on either side of a table in Dino’s Cafe, Spitalfields. And there, in a single sentence you have the explanation of how one woman, in spite of her intelligence and skill, fell through the surface of the world and found herself living in a hostel with one hundred and twenty-eight other homeless people.
Terry is a shrewd woman with an innate dignity, and a lightness of manner too. She manages to be both vividly present in the moment and also detached – considering and assessing – though quick to smile at the ironies of life. She wears utilitarian clothing which reveals little of the wearer and sometimes she presents an apparently tentative presence, but when you meet her sympathetic dark eyes, she reveals her strength and her capacity for joy.
No one could deny it was an act of moral courage, when Terry gave up her career as a chef to care for her brother at a time when little support or medication was available to those with AIDS, moving in with him and devoting herself fully to his care. Yet in spite of the cruel outcome of her sacrifice, Terry discovered the resourcefulness to create another existence, which today allows her to draw upon these experiences in a creative way, through her work as performer and teacher with Cardboard Citizens, the homeless people’s theatre company based in Spitalfields.
“I took what I could with me, the rest I left behind. I took photographs and personal things. You fill your car with your TV, records, books and all the rest of it – but then you find it can be quite liberating because you realise all that stuff is not important.” admitted Terry with a wry smile, recounting a lesson born out of necessity. In the Mare St hostel in Hackney, Terry stayed in her tiny room to avoid the culture of alcohol and drug-taking that prevailed, but instead she found herself at the mercy of the absurdly doctrinaire bureaucracy, “I remember the staff coming round and saying, ‘You have to remove one of the two chairs in your room because you’re only allowed to have one.'” Terry recalled.“You find you’re living in a universe where you can get evicted for having two chairs in your room.” she added with a tragic smirk.
A few months after she came to the hostel, Cardboard Citizens visited to perform and stage workshops, permitting Terry to participate and make some friends – but most importantly granting her a new role in life. “I was hooked,” confided Terry, “What I liked about it was the opportunity to talk about our own experiences and how we can make a change. And the best part of it was when the audience became involved and got on stage.” Now that she works for them, Terry describes the aim of the company as being to “give voice to the homeless oppressed and show the situations homeless people face.” Inspired by the principles of theatrical visionary Augusto Boal, the company perform in homeless shelters and hostels, creating vital performances that invite audiences of the homeless to participate, addressing in drama the pertinent questions and challenges they face in life – all in pursuit of the possibility of change.
Terry’s role is central to the company, as mediator, bringing the audience to the play, and raising questions that articulate the discussion manifest in the drama. She carries it off with grace, becoming the moral centre of the performance. And it is a natural role for Terry, one she refers to as “Joker” – somebody who will always challenge – anchoring the evening with her sense of levity and quick intelligence, without ever admitting that she understands more than her audience. Though, knowing Terry’s story, I found it especially poignant to observe Terry’s measured equanimity, even when the drama dealt with issues of grief and dislocation that are familiar territory for her personally.
“You don’t have to accept things as they are. You can fight back.” declared Terry, her dark eyes glinting as she spoke from first hand experience, when I asked how her understanding of life had been altered by becoming homeless. “Why is it that the economic underclass are being hammered for the mess that we’re in?” she asked in furious indignation, “I think what’s opened my eyes is that there’s so much kindness and support coming from people who have got very little. I can’t deal with the big picture, I tend to narrow it down to the people in the room and just keep chipping away at small changes. And I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.” There is an unsentimental fire in Terry’s rhetoric, denoting someone who has been granted a hard won clarity of vision, and at the Code St hostel where I saw the performance I was touched to see her exchanging greetings with long-term homeless people she has known over the eight years she has worked with Cardboard Citizens.
As we left Dino’s Cafe and walked up the steps of Christ Church, Spitalfields, to take Terry’s portrait in the Winter sunlight, she cast her eyes around in wonder at the everyday spectacle of people walking to and fro, and confessed to me, “I teach up at Central School of Speech & Drama now and it’s quite amazing to think ten years ago I was sitting in a hostel, wondering what’s going to happen next and what’s my future going to be? Am I going to be like that woman down the hall, drunk off her head, or on crack?” Then she it shrugged off as she turned to the camera.
Terry still thinks about her brother. “His eyesight started to go and he set fire to the bed,” she told me, explaining why it became imperative to move in with him,“He was a stubborn guy but he had to concede that he needed help. He was developing dementia and his eyesight was fading.” It was his unexpected illness and death that triggered the big changes in her existence, but today Terry O’Leary lives in a flat of her own again and finds herself at the centre of a whole new life.
Terry when she started with Cardboard Citizens in 2002.
The Curry Chefs of Brick Lane
With the blizzard whirling down Brick Lane this week, it was the ideal moment for a hot curry to warm the spirits, and so – dodging the mischievous curry touts’ snowball bouts between rival restaurants – I set out in the company of Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Jeremy Freedman, to make the acquaintance of some of Brick Lane’s most celebrated Curry Chefs. We were privileged to be granted admission to the modest kitchens tucked away at the back or in the basement of the curry houses, where Head Chefs martial whole teams of underchefs in a highly formalised hierarchy of responsibility.
It was a relief to step from the cold street into the heat of the kitchens, where we discovered our excited subjects glistening with perspiration, all engaged in the midst of the collective drama that results in curry. We found that these were men who – for the most part – had worked their way up over many years from humble kitchen porters to enjoy their heroic leading roles, granting them the right to a degree of swagger in front of the lense.
We encountered the charismatic Zulen Ahmed (pictured above) standing over his clay-lined tandoori oven beneath the Saffron restaurant where he has been Head Chef for ten years now. Trained by the renowned Curry Chef, Ashik Miah, Zulen served eight years as a porter before ascending to run his own kitchen, now supervising a team consisting of two chefs who do the spicing and make the sauces, a tandoori chef, two cooks who cook rice and poppadums, a second chef who prepares side dishes and a porter who does the washing up. “The Head Chef listens to everybody,” he explained deferentially, with his staff standing around within earshot, and thereby revealing himself to be a natural leader.
Across the road at Masala, we met Head Chef, Shaiz Uddin, whose mother is a chef in Bangladesh. She taught him to cook when he was ten years old. Shaiz told me he worked in her kitchen as Curry Chef for seven years, before he came to London ten years ago to bring the authentic style to Brick Lane, where today he is known for his constant invention in contriving new dishes for his eager customers.
It was quickly apparent that there is a daily routine common to all the curry kitchens of Brick Lane. At eleven each morning, the chefs come in and work until three to prepare the sauces and half cook the meat for the evening. At three they take a break until six, while the underchefs, who arrive at three, prepare the vegetables and salad. Then at six, when the chefs return, the rice is cooked and – now the kitchen is full – everyone works as a team until midnight, when it is time to throw out the leftovers and make the orders for the next day. This is the pattern that rules the lives of all involved. “I like to be busy,” Nurul Alam, Head Chef at Preem & Prithi, informed me blithely – he regularly cooks three hundred curries a night.
Over at the Shampan, Monzur Hussain, emerged from the kitchen with his brow covered in perspiration to brag about his meteoric rise, commencing as a kitchen porter in 1997, becoming a chef in 2000 and winning Best Chef in the Brick Lane Curry Festival in 2005. Monzur sets an example that is an inspiration to Dayem Ahmed, a porter who has been there just six months, already daydreaming of achieving Best Curry Chef in 2018.
Finally, at the Aladin we met Brick Lane’s most senior Curry Chef, the distinguished Rana Miah who started work in 1980 as a kitchen porter when he arrived from Bangladesh, graduating to chef in 1988. “At that time we served only Bengalis, but by 1995 the customers were all Europeans,” he recalled, describing his tenure as chef at one of Brick Lane’s oldest curry houses, which opened in 1985 and is second only to the Clifton in age. Rana explained that he runs his kitchen upon the system of “Handy Cooking,” based around the use of large stock pots to cook the food. “That’s the way it’s done in Bangladesh,” he confirmed, “This is a traditional restaurant.” As the longest serving Curry Chef, Rana gets frequent consultations from the other chefs on Brick Lane and, remains passionate about his vocation, arriving before everyone each day and leaving after everyone else too.
We never asked the Curry Chefs to cross their arms, but they all assumed this stance, independently and without prompting – even Dayem, the kitchen porter, yet to commence his training as a chef, knew what to do. It is a posture that proposes professionalism, dignity and self-respect, yet it also indicates a certain shared reticence, a reserved nature that prefers to let the culinary creations speak for themselves. So I ask you to spare a thought for these proud Curry Chefs, working away like those engineers slaving below deck on the great steam ships of old, they are the unseen and unsung heroes of Brick Lane’s Curry Mile.
Abdul Ahad Forhad, Curry Chef at Monsoon, 78 Brick Lane – “I’m the master of curry!”
Head Chef Shaiz Uddin with his colleague Monul Uddin, Tandoori Chef at Masala, 88 Brick Lane.
Nurul Alam, Head Chef at Preem & Prithi, 124/6 Brick Lane, cooks three hundred curries a night.
Rana Miah, Brick Lane’s longest serving Curry Chef stands centre, flanked by Kholilur Rahman and Mizanur Khan in the kitchen of the Aladin, 132 Brick Lane.
Monzur Hussain, Head Chef at Shampan, 78 Brick Lane.
Dayem Ahmed, kitchen porter of six months standing and aspiring chef, at Shampan.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
A Farewell to Spitalfields
In 1988, the Bishopsgate Institute staged an exhibition entitled “A Farewell to Spitalfields” curated by John Shaw and Raphael Samuel, the distinguished historian of the East End. The purpose was to assess the history of Spitalfields in the light of the changes that were forthcoming, as a result of the closure of the Truman Brewery and the Fruit & Vegetable Market – and it is my pleasure to publish these excerpts from Raphael Samuel’s introductory essay accompanied by David Bateman’s photographs of the Spitalfields Market, commissioned as part of this exhibition.
Twenty years later, it is sobering to recognise the prescience of Raphael Samuel’s words. He was a historian with strong opinions who, on the basis of this article alone, demonstrated an ability to write about the future as clearly as he wrote the past. The Spitalfields portrayed in these pictures has gone and now – for better or worse – we live in the Spitalfields that Raphael Samuel, who died in 1996, wrote of yet did not live to see.
Spitalfields is the oldest industrial suburb in London. It was already densely peopled and “almost entirely built over,” in 1701 when Lambeth was still a marsh, Fulham a market garden and Tottenham Court Rd a green. It owes its origins to those refugee traditions which, in defiance of the Elizabethan building regulations, and to escape the restrictions of the City Guilds, settled in Bishopsgate Without and the Liberty of Norton Folgate.
Spitalfields is a junction between, on the one hand, a settled, indigenous population, and on the other, wave upon wave of newcomer. Even when it was known as “The Weavers’ Parish,” it was still hospitable to many others – poor artisans, street sellers, labourers among them. In the late nineteenth century Spitalfields was one of the great receiving points for Jewish immigration and the northern end of the parish provided a smilar point of entry for country labourers. There was a whole colony of them at Great Eastern Buildings in the eighteen eighties, working as draymen at the brewery, and another at the Bishopsgate Goods Station. This “mixed” character of the neighbourhood is very much in evidence today.
Spitalfields Market – threatened with imminent destruction by a coalition of property developers, City Fathers, and conservationists – is almost as old as Spitalfields. It was already in existence when the area was still an artillery range. In John Stow’s “Survey of London” (1601) it appears a trading point “for fruit, fowl and root.” A market sign was incorporated in the coat of arms for the Liberty of Norton Folgate in Restoration times, and the market’s Royal Charter dates from 1682. The market, in short, preceded the arrival of the Hugeunots and has some claim to being Spitalfields’ original core. The market continued as a collection of ramshackle sheds and stalls until it was transformed, in the 1870s, by Robert Horner, who bought the lease of the land from the Goldsmid family in 1875. Horner was a crow scarer from Essex who, according to market myth, walked to London, became a porter in the market and eventually got a share in a firm. Ambitiously, he set about both securing monopoly rights for the existing traders, and replacing the impromptu buildings with a purpose built market hall – the “Horner” buildings which today is the oldest part of the market complex.
The older, eastern portion of the market is the direct product of Robert Horner’s vision of his own situation. It is built in the manner of the English Arts and Crafts movement. On its own terms, the old market is a pleasing piece and a worthy addition to the diversity of Spitalfields. Its rusticated archways on the Commercial Street facade and the repeated peaks of the roof with their smallish sash windows lend a clearly Victorian flavour to Commercial Street, which was largely a Victorian venture anyway. Inside the market it is a vintagely Victorian hall of glass and iron of unassuming beauty, even more so when at work, then its true worth as a genuinely functioning piece of Victorian space is revealed. Like St. Pancras in a different way, it has an element of the museum and an aesthetic that overlays the original construction upon utilitarian principles. Most of all the old market appears as a peculiarly English space. An effect that is heightened by the lavish use of ‘Wimbledon’ green. It is that deep traditional green that characterises English municipal space and that, in this case helps to marry the market to the discordant additions of the late 1920’s and to give distinction to the territorial boundaries of the market that have been historically more fluid.
The old market is a celebration of trade, a great piece of Victorian working space, not only of great historical value itself, but contributing to the visual manifestation of the historical development of the whole of Spitalfields. It is a worthy layer in an area that grew by a sort of architectural sedimentation. Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, the Huguenot fronts of Artillery Passage, the Georgian elegance of Elder Street and the smaller houses of Wilkes Street and Princelet Street, the mid-Victorian utility of the Peabody Buildings, the rustic character of the old market, the twentieth century neo-classicism of the Fruit Exchange and several examples of a more unspeakable modernity are some among many accretions which contribute to make Spitalfields what it is. The most perfect example of a palimpsest in which diversity rather than Georgiana or Victoriana represent the true nature of the area.
The character of a district is determined not by its buildings, but by the ensemble of different uses to which they are put, and, above all, by the character of the users. It should be obvious to all but the self-deceived, that to stick an international banking centre in the heart of an old artisan and market quarter, a huge complex with some six thousand executives and subalterns, is, to put it gently, a rupture from tradition. The whole industrial economy of Spitalfields rests on cheap work rooms: rentals in the new office complex are some eight times greater than they are in the purlieus of Brick Lane, and with the dizzy rise in property values which will follow the new development, accommodation of all kinds, whether for working space or home, will be beyond local people. The market scheme will mean a social revolution, the inversion of what Spitalfields has stood for during four centuries of metropolitan development.
The fate of Spitalfields market illustrates in stark form some of the paradoxes of contemporary metropolitan development: on the one hand, the preservation of “historic” houses; on the other, the wholesale destruction of London’s hereditary occupations and trades and the dispersal of its settled communities. The viewer is thus confronted with two versions of “enterprise” culture: the one that of family business and small scale firms, the other that of international high finance with computer screens linking the City of London to the money markets of the world.
This set of photographs by David Bateman show something of the activity of the market today in what – if the Second Reading of the Market Bill continues its progress through Parliament – are likely to be its closing months.
Raphael Samuel 22nd July 1988
I was fascinated to read these words, because in my own work I have become vividly aware of the rich culture of artisans and small tradesmen – which I have undertaken to record – that still persists in Spitalfields, against all the odds. This year we have seen Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen and Crescent Trading, the last traditional cloth warehouse, challenged respectively with rent increases and the necessity to move to smaller premises. Yet as we approach the end of the year, it is something to be able to report that they are both still here and doing brisk business, thanks to the support of customers who delight in these small businesses that carry the history of the neighbourhood just as much those historic houses which Raphael Samuel refers to.
Photographs copyright © David Bateman
Take a look at Mark Jackson & Huw Davies’ photographs of the Old Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market.
The Cat Lady of Spitalfields
When I wrote the story of Blackie, the last Spitalfields Market cat, my friend Phil Maxwell sent me his photographs, taken twenty years ago, of the cat lady of Spitalfields who used to feed all the neighbourhood felines daily. It is my great pleasure to publish these pictures today with Phil’s accompanying text as a means to introduce you to his blog – Playground of an East End Photographer – that he started just last week to publish the entire canon of his life’s work online, at the rate of a few photographs every day. For over thirty years, Phil has been recording the people and the changing life on the streets in Spitalfields, and so for anyone interested in the East End www.philmaxwell.org is an essential daily port of call. Phil & I are eager to learn more of the mysterious cat lady who disappeared twenty years ago, so please get in touch if you know her name or can supply us with further information.
The cat lady on Brick Lane in the late nineteen eighties.
The woman in this photograph was always dressed in a head scarf and large coat. Usually she would pull a shopping bag on wheels behind her. She was the cat lady of Spitalfields. She knew where every cat and kitten lived in the wild and made it her task to feed them every day. Her bag was full of cat food which she would serve on newspaper at designated spots around Spitalfields.
The cat lady pauses for a second beside the Seven Stars pub on Brick Lane. She has just left some food in the ‘private road’ for some cats.
The cat lady floats past Christchurch School on Brick Lane. With her eyes closed she contemplates the next cat awaiting a delivery.
The cat lady waits outside her favourite cafe in Cheshire Street. Now a trendy boutique, in the nineteen eighties you could buy a cup of tea and a sandwich for less than a pound at this establishment.
The cat lady ‘kept herself to herself’ and avoided the company of others.
It must be about twenty years since I last saw the cat lady of Spitalfields. She devoted her life to feeding the stray cats of the area. I have no idea where she lived and I never saw her talking to another person. She seemed to live in her own separate cat world. Even though I was sitting opposite her when I took this photograph, I felt that she had created a barrier and would be reluctant to engage in conversation. It was impossible to make eye contact. I’m pleased I photographed her on the streets and in her Cheshire Street cafe. She would not recognise Cheshire Street and Brick Lane today.
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
Stephen Watts, Poet
“I remember coming out of the tube in Whitechapel in 1974 and being overwhelmed,” recalled Stephen Watts affectionately, his deep brown eyes glowing with inner fire to describe the spiritual epiphany of his arrival in the East End, when coming to London after three years on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides. Today Stephen lives in Shadwell and has a tiny writing office in the Toynbee Hall in Commercial St where I paid him a call upon him recently.
“Migration is in my awareness and in my blood,” he admitted, referring to his family who were mountain people dwelling in the Swiss Alps on the Italian border – living twelve hundred feet above sea level – and his grandfather who came to London before the First World War, worked in a cafe in Soho and then bought his own cafe. “I realised this was an area of migration since the seventeenth century when the farm workers of Cambridgeshire, Kent and Suffolk began to arrive here, and I immediately felt an affinity for the place,” Stephen continued, casting his thoughts back far beyond his own arrival in Whitechapel, yet wary to qualify the vision too, lest I should think it self-dramatising.
“It is very easy to be romantic about it, but I think migration has been the objective reality for many people in the twentieth and twenty-first century. So it seemed to be something very natural, when I came to live in Whitechapel.” he revealed with an amiable smile. Yet although he allowed himself a moment to savour this thought, Stephen possesses a restless energy and a mind in constant motion, suggesting that he might be gone at any moment, and entirely precluding any sense of being at home and here to stay. Even if he has lived in his council house in Shadwell for thirty years, I would not be surprised if the wind blew Stephen away.
A tall skinny man with his loose clothes hanging off him and his long white locks drifting around, Stephen does present a superficial air of insubstantiality, even other-wordliness. Yet when you are in conversation with Stephen you quickly encounter the substance of his quicksilver mind, moving swiftly and using words with delicate precision, making unexpected connections. “In the Outer Hebrides the unemployment rate was twenty-five per cent and it was the same in Tower Hamlets when I arrived,” he said, informing me of the parallels with precise logic, “also Tower Hamlets had large areas of empty water then, just like the North Uist.” drawing comparison between the abandoned dockland and the Hebridean sea lochs, in regions of Britain that could not be more different in ever other respect.
We took the advantage of the frosty sunlight to make a half hour’s circuit of the streets attending Brick Lane and these familiar paths took on another quality in Stephen’s company, because while I tend to be always going somewhere, Stephen has the sense to halt and look around – indicative of certain open-ness of temperament that has led him befriend all kinds of people in pubs and on the street in Whitechapel over the years. I took this moment to ask Stephen if he chose to be a poet. “I made a choice when I quit university after a year and went to live in North Uist,” he said as we resumed our pace, “and then I made a choice to be a poet. But as a choice it was unavoidable, because I realised that it was so much part of me that not to have done it would be a denial of my humanity.”
Returning to the Toynbee Hall, Stephen allowed me the privilege of a peek into his tiny room on an upper floor, not much larger than a broom cupboard. The walls were lined with thin poetry books in magnificent order, arrayed in wine boxes stacked floor to ceiling and standing proud of the walls to create bays, leaving space only for one as slim as Stephen to squeeze through. It was a sacred space, the lair of the mountain man or a hermit’s retreat. It felt organic, like a cave, or maybe – it occurred to me – a shepherd’s hut carved out of the rock. And there, up above Stephen’s head was an old black and white photo of shepherds on a mountain road, taken in the Swiss Alps whence Stephen’s family originate and where even now he still returns to visit his relatives.
Stephen’s room is a haven of peace in the midst of Whitechapel, yet he delights to complement his life in here by working alongside Bengali and Somali poets in all kinds of projects in schools around Tower Hamlets, and pursues translation alongside his own poetry too, as means to “invite difference” into his work. Possessing a natural warmth of personality and brightness of temperament which make you want to listen and hang off his words, Stephen has a genuine self-effacing charm.“I don’t believe in being a professional poet in the sense of promoting myself, being a poet is about becoming embedded in humanity.” he proposed modestly, presuming to speak for no-one than himself, “And that’s why I lived in the East End and that’s why I still find it inspiring – because of the tremendous range of human presence in Whitechapel.”
BRICK LANE
(after the death of Altab Ali, and for Bill Fishman)
Whoever has walked slowly down Brick Lane in the darkening air and a stiff little rain,
past the curry house with lascivious frescoes,
past the casual Sylheti sweet-shops and cafés
and the Huguenot silk attics of Fournier Street,
and the mosque that before was a synagogue and before that a chapel,
whoever has walked down that darkening tunnel of rich history
from Bethnal Green to Osborne Street at Aldgate,
past the sweat-shops at night and imams with hennaed hair,
and recalls the beigel-sellers on the pavements, windows candled to Friday night,
would know this street is a seamless cloth, this city, these people,
and would not suffocate ever from formlessness or abrupted memory,
would know rich history is the present before us,
laid out like a cloth – a cloth for the wearing – with bits of mirror and coloured stuff,
and can walk slowly down Brick Lane from end to seamless end,
looped in the air and the light of it, in the human lattice of it,
the blood and exhausted flesh of it, and the words grown bright with the body’s belief,
and life to be fought for and never to be taken away.
Song for Mickie the Brickie
Mickie I met down Watney Street and he whistled me across.
“How are you” he said
—and of course really meant “have you a little to spare for some drink”—
but could not bear to ask.
We walked through the decayed market,
a yellow-black sun gazed down over Sainsbury’s as I went to look for change.
Ten pound was hardly enough to get him through the dregs of that bitter day.
We stood on the corner where for centuries people have stood.
Many worlds passed us by.
When he had been in hospital he’d taken his pills and been looked after and had not got worse.
Now he’s barely getting by.
He walks out of the rooming house in Bethnal Green when it gets too loud inside.
His scalp’s flaking and he needs a reliable level and a small brickie’s trowel.
That woman’s son’s inside for good.
That one’s man is a chronic alcoholic.
This one’s on her own and better for it.
But how can you know anyone’s story when every day you walk by without stopping.
Charlie Malone was a good friend. So was John Long.
Now they’re resting in Tadman’s Parlour
—and first thing in the morning Mickie’ll go and say to them words that cannot be answered.
Those are the best words, but they’re hardest to bear.
To me he says : “Always—always—stop me—always—come across.”
And what is the point of centuries of conversation if no-one’s ever there to hear.
FRAGMENT
… And so I long for snow to
sweep across the low heights of London
from the lonely railyards and trackhuts
– London a lichen mapped on mild clays
and its rough circle without purpose –
because I remember the gap for clarity
that comes before snow in the north and
I remember the lucid air’s changing sky
and I remember the grey-black wall with
every colour imminent in a coming white
the moon rising only to be displaced and
the measured volatile calmness of after
and I remember the blue snow hummocks
the mountains of miles off in snow-light
frozen lakes – a frozen moss to stand on
where once a swarmed drifting stopped.
And I think – we need such a change,
my city and I, that may be conjured in
us that dream birth of compassion with
reason & energy merged in slow dance.
Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
