Lucinda Douglas-Menzies, Spitalfields Portraits
I have always admired the portraits of local personalities upon the walls of The Golden Heart in Commercial St but I never knew who took these elegant pictures, so I was delighted when Ricardo Cinalli introduced me to the photographer Lucinda Douglas-Menzies in his studio in Puma Court this week.
Lucinda first came to live in Spitalfields in the late nineteen eighties when she met her future husband Anthony de Jasay. They brought up their two children here in his old house in Elder St and now live in a flat above the Spitalfields Market. She has enjoyed a distinguished photographic career with more than seventy works in the National Portrait Gallery collection and recently completed a series of thirty-eight portraits of eminent astronomers which were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery and around the country in 2009.
Next day, Lucinda kindly invited me round to her modest studio on the first floor of the Heba building in Brick Lane, where she explained that it was Sandra Esqulant who first offered her an exhibition at The Golden Heart. Having accepted Sandra’s offer, once Lucinda considered the scale of the rooms and the social nature of the space, it became apparent that a collection of portraits would be ideal. So, with Sandra’s advice, Lucinda began approaching local people, some were her neighbours and friends, others were patrons of The Golden Heart that Sandra knew – and quickly the project acquired a life of its own. Taking these lively portraits and displaying them in this celebrated meeting place proved such a popular success in 2002 that another exhibition followed in 2004, and the pictures of Sandra’s closest friends still hang in pride of place upon the bar wall today.
It is my pleasure to publish these lucid images from Lucinda Douglas-Menzies’ Spitalfields Portraits. Although you may recognise some of Lucinda’s subjects, in compiling this new selection, we have deliberately picked others that we wish to introduce to you.
At the top is Eric Reynolds, founding director of Urban Space Management who is fondly remembered – amongst his other regeneration schemes – for his revitalisation of the Spitalfields Market in the early nineties. When he showed Lucinda around the Bishopsgate Goods Yard, he hoped he might be able to bring life back to the vast abandoned brick arches there, but he went on to develop a centre for arts and creative activity at Trinity Buoy Wharf instead. Lucinda remembers Eric arrived for the session on his motorbike, wearing the full-length raincoat you see in the picture, and she photographed him in 2004 standing on the former railway bridge over Brick Lane.
“I got to know Gary Wilson from buying fruit at his stall outside Whitechapel Station,” explained Lucinda, remembering this vibrant personality who suffered a heart attack and died while still young, photographed here in the midst of life, standing at the rear of his van. “He was really nice guy who worked on equal terms alongside the Bengali traders – he cut through all the barriers.” recalled Lucinda affectionately, “Many of my subjects came to the East End but he was born and bred here – as local as anyone could be.” His unexpected death endows this portrait of 2004 with a haunting poignancy today.
Michelle Norgan pictured in 2002 astride Chester her Cob, outside the Spitalfields City Farm that she helped run for many years. The perfection of this bucolic image with its immaculately groomed horse and correctly turned out rider, standing under the may trees in blossom, exists in strange contrast to the urban images that define this collection of pictures, yet the farm is an integral part of the identity of Spitalfields. Michelle gamely dressed up for this picture in a formal outfit, entirely unlike her usual work clothes, to create this exuberantly absurd tableau.
Raphael Samuel was Lucinda’s neighbour and became a friend, a circumstance which afforded the opportunity for this luminous intimate portrait taken three years before his death in 1996. Pre-eminent historian of the East End and author of “Theatres of Memory”, Raphael Samuel, with his wife Alison Light, was one of the very first to move to Elder St in appreciation of the architecture in the days when the street was derelict. The East London History Centre at the Bishopsgate Institute where his papers are preserved is today named the Raphael Samuel Centre in his memory.
This portrait of artist and Spitalfields resident Gillian Wearing was taken at a sitting with her partner Michael Landy. The portrait of Landy is in the National Portrait Gallery and their joint portrait can be seen at The Golden Heart, yet this picture has not been published before. I wanted to include it here because it is one of my favourite of Lucinda Douglas-Menzies’ photographs, a quiet masterpiece of classical portraiture in which the simplicity of composition and poise of the sitter serve both to disarm and captivate the viewer.
Critic Edward Greenfield, pictured here in in 2004 in the living room of his house in Folgate St, looks very fine in his beautifully polished riding boots, surrounded by the tottering piles of CDs that have overtaken his dwelling, and which, in their overwhelming profusion, manifest the concrete evidence of his encyclopaedic knowledge of music. On the staff of the Guardian for over forty years, among his many accomplishments, Edward Greenfield is a popular broadcaster, a regular contributor to Gramophone magazine since 1960 and co-author of the Penguin Guide to CDs.
Johnny Vercoutre, Tilly Vercoutre, Suzette Field and Glory photographed in 2004 at their home in Shoreditch High St, furnished throughout in a rigorously authentic early twentieth century style, and including a private cinema. On the ground floor, Johnny runs “Time for Tea”, and in the surrounding streets you will commonly see examples of his collection of vintage trucks and vans that he hires out for films. In 2009, Suzette Field opened the singular “Shop of Horrors” with Viktor Wynd on Mare St.
As everyone who lives in Spitalfields knows, Gilbert & George walk everywhere, and Lucinda wanted to capture this perambulatory quality in her portrait, so she asked them to walk down Fournier St and freeze in the moment of walking. It was an inspired gesture on her part which imbues the illustrious duo with the surreal quality of mechanical figures, permitting them scope to perform upon the stage of the urban theatre that is their imaginative universe.
Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Mr Pussy in Summer
Those of you that are luxuriating in the warmth of Summer, spare a thought for Mr Pussy who has a fur coat surgically attached and spends his languorous days stretched out upon the floor in a heat-induced stupor. As the sun reaches its zenith, his activity declines and he seeks the deep shadow, the cooling breeze and the bare wooden floor to stretch out and fall into a deep trance that can transport him far away to the loss of his physical being. Mr Pussy’s refined nature is such that even these testing conditions provide an opportunity for him to show grace, transcending dreamy resignation to explore an area of meditation of which he is the supreme proponent.
In the early morning and late afternoon, you will see him on the first floor window sill here in Spitalfields, taking advantage of the draught of air through the house. With his aristocratic attitude, Mr Pussy seeks amusement in watching the passersby from his high vantage point on the street frontage and enjoys lapping water from his dish on the kitchen window sill at the back of the house, where in the evenings he also likes to look down upon the foxes gambolling in the yard.
Whereas in Winter it is Mr Pussy’s custom to curl up in a ball to exclude drafts, in these balmy days he prefers to stretch out to maximize the air flow around his body. There is familiar sequence to his actions, as particular as stages in yoga. Finding a sympathetic location with the advantage of cross currents and shade from direct light, at first Mr Pussy will sit to consider the suitability of the circumstance before rolling onto his side and releasing the muscles in his limbs, revealing that he is irrevocably set upon the path of total relaxation.
Delighting in the sensuous moment, Mr Pussy stretches out to his maximum length of over three feet long, curling his spine and splaying his legs at angles, creating an impression of the frozen moment of a leap, just like those wooden horses on fairground rides. Extending every muscle and toe, his glinting claws unsheath and his eyes widen gleaming gold, until the stretch reaches it full extent and subsides in the manner of a wave upon the ocean, as Mr Pussy slackens his limbs to lie peacefully with heavy lids descending.
In this position that resembles a carcass on the floor, Mr Pussy can undertake his journey into dreams, apparent by his twitching eyelids and limbs as he runs through the dark forest of his feline unconscious where prey are to be found in abundance. Vulnerable as an infant, sometimes Mr Pussy cries to himself in his dream, an internal murmur of indeterminate emotion, evoking a mysterious fantasy that I can never be party to. It is somewhere beyond thought or language. I can only wonder if his arcadia is like that in Paolo Uccello’s “Hunt in the Forest” or whether Mr Pussy’s dreamscape resembles the watermeadows of the River Exe, the location of his youthful safaris.
There is another stage, beyond dreams, signalled when Mr Pussy rolls onto his back with his front paws distended like a child in the womb, almost in prayer. His back legs splayed to either side, his head tilts back, his jaw loosens and his mouth opens a little, just sufficient to release his shallow breath – and Mr Pussy is gone. Silent and inanimate, he looks like a baby and yet very old at the same time. The heat relaxes Mr Pussy’s connection to the world and he falls, he lets himself go far away on a spiritual odyssey. It is somewhere deep and somewhere cool, he is out of his body, released from the fur coat at last.
Startled upon awakening from his trance, like a deep-sea diver ascending too quickly, Mr Pussy squints at me as he recovers recognition, giving his brains a good shake, now the heat of the day has subsided. Lolloping down the stairs, still loose-limbed, he strolls out of the house into the garden and takes a dust bath under a tree, spending the next hour washing it out and thereby cleansing the sticky perspiration from his fur.
Regrettably the climatic conditions that subdue Mr Pussy by day, also enliven him by night. At first light, when the dawn chorus commences, he stands on the floor at my bedside, scratches a little and calls to me. I waken to discover two golden eyes filling my field of vision. I roll over at my peril, because this will provoke Mr Pussy to walk to the end of the bed and scratch my toes sticking out under the sheet, causing me to wake again with a cry of pain. Having no choice but to rise, accepting his forceful invitation to appreciate the manifold joys of early morning in Summer in Spitalfields, it is not an entirely unwelcome obligation.
You can read more about Mr Pussy here:
Helen Galland, Spitalfields City Farm
Even though the temperatures of high Summer are here, the effects of last Winter are still with us, as I discovered when I arrived at the Spitalfields City Farm to meet Helen Galland who has been farmyard manager here for the last seven years. Helen was busy mixing up powdered ewe’s milk and decanting it into bottles with teats for the orphaned lambs – who were fully aware it was feeding time and making loud hungry baaing sounds on the other side of the farmyard. The poor quality grazing occasioned by the severity of last Winter left many ewes unable to feed all their young, hence the number of “orphaned” lambs this year.
As we climbed into the sheep pen with bottles in hand, where the noisy young diners were waiting, children in the adjoining playground ran to the fence and asked excitedly if they could feed the lambs. When Helen consented, they sprinted around the block in anticipation to arrive at the pen where Helen handed them the bottles, and much hilarity, delight and mobile phone footage ensued as the thirsty lambs quickly sucked the bottles dry.
“Many children grow up in tower blocks and estates where they cannot even have pets,” explained Helen to me later, “so they have no direct contact with animals, which they need to do if they are to learn respect for life and understand that animals have needs.” It was both an eloquent summation of the role of the city farm itself and a heartfelt declaration of a personal creed for Helen, a trained zoologist who works sixty hours each week here with the animals.
We retreated from the midday sun into the cool of the animal sheds where Helen is rearing chicks to replace two Bantam Blue Orpingtons that died recently. “I wanted to breed them here but I never managed to get a clutch of their eggs so I had to buy some Buff Orpington eggs off the internet.” she explained as she lifted the lid of the cage where she was nurturing the tiny little fluffy birds, stumbling around with stumpy wings like clockwork toys and falling suddenly asleep, even in the feed bowl, as if they needed winding up again.
Only one of the six eggs that came through the mail hatched and this single survivor has tested Helen’s ingenuity to rear it successfully, becoming an intense focus for her energies in the process. Deploying cunning old tricks, she placed the head of a mop in the cage where the chick could seek maternal consolation and a mirror so that, like the caged songbird, the chick had a companion to speak with, until two others she loaned from another farm arrived to teach the necessary social skills for a hen. By tapping her finger in the grain and the water, while making the noises of a mother hen, Helen herself taught the Orpington chick to feed. Now at a week old, it runs to her hand and responds to her touch. We were both mesmerised by this helpless creature, quick with life, that had just shed the nib from its beak which enabled it to peck its way out of the egg and into existence. “They get uglier from now on!” quipped Helen, spellbound by her charge.
Helen arrives at a quarter to eight every morning and leaves at a quarter to eight in the evening five days a week, all year round, in a job that entails a great detail of manual labour yet which she embraces with an infectious joy. Her tattoos, pink hair and combat pants impart a punky street credibility (closer to Tank Girl than the shepherdesses of yore), that enables her to be an energetic advocate to all the school children that come daily to encounter the different animals, gain respect for their fellow creatures and understand the origins of their food. Like the others who run the farm, Helen is a knowledgeable professional who works hard to tend the livestock, as well as communicating her knowledge and passion for the animals, not forgetting office work and the constant necessity to chase funding to keep the whole enterprise afloat.
I remember when I first visited the Spitalfields City Farm, walking across a muddy urban wasteland to visit the animals in pens, looking quite forlorn in a former railway siding. Much less verdant than today, it was a curiosity that existed in defiance of its environment, yet remarkably it is still here thanks to the staying power of a few industrious individuals like Helen. I have always loved it for leavening the neighbour with its anachronistic poetry – delivering farmyard sounds, of cockerels crowing and sheep bleating, upon the wind. They bring us down to earth with their age-old cries, because the truth is that the anachronism is not the farm, it the city that surrounds it. And for the benefit of our collective sanity we all need to be reminded of this daily, an essential duty that falls to the modest hens and sheep – this the story of how Helen Galland takes care of the animals and the animals take care of us in return.
If you are interested in volunteering to work at the farm or sponsoring an animal click here.
On the roof with Roy Emmins
On a humid midsummer’s day in Whitechapel, the ideal place to be is up on the roof with Roy Emmins, in his wonderful sculpture garden at the back of the Royal London Hospital. Peering down upon everyone else, looking like ants going about their business with entirely mysterious imperatives, it is a refreshingly liberating experience, and if there is any breeze to be had, you feel its cooling influence up here, wafting the scents of Roy’s flowers over the rooftops. From this lofty roost, Roy can look back fondly to the hospital where for thirty-two years he worked as porter, surrounded today by the some of the sculptures that have occupied him full-time since he took early retirement from the hospital fifteen years ago.
For the last thirty years, Roy has inhabited this tiny caretaker’s flat, added as an afterthought upon the roof of a streamlined art deco block in Turner St, and it was my pleasure to pay him a visit there. Roy took me up in the lift to the top floor, opened his blue front door and genially ushered me inside. To my delight, I found four small rooms organised meticulously, like cabins on a boat, with all kinds of shelves and cabinets where everything had its place, and every space was embellished with the great variety of Roy’s extraordinary sculptures and paintings, bestowing a magical presence of their own – from tiny birds shaped out of tinfoil to graceful human figures hewn from alabaster.
Each narrow room has windows on either side, with views across the roofs and far over the city on both sides. On the South side is a bare roof covered in pigeons who conveniently leave fertilizer that Roy gratefully collects for his flourishing garden on the North side. Stocked from Columbia Road and Watney Markets, Roy’s roof garden possesses an intriguing selection of plants. Hardy varieties that withstand wind and thrive in dry conditions suit this location best, and I admired Roy’s inspired combinations of succulents, miniature trees and colourful border planting, like heucheras, artemisias, gazzanias, ox-eye daisies and mallow, mixed in with potatoes and three kinds of tomato plants.
Yet it is the sculpture that make Roy’s garden pure poetry, his charismatic stone and concrete figures encrusted with lichen and bronze figures patinated green by the elements. At first, you do not spot all of them lurking among the plants, driftwood, shells and pots, but, as they catch your eye, you see the individual sculptures against the backdrop of the distant cityscape, proposing extraordinary contrasts of scale that fire the imagination.
Roy’s earthly paradise is occasionally shattered when helicopters fly low overhead to land at the nearby helipad on the roof of the hospital. It gave our conversation some pauses for consideration, as we sipped our tea, waiting for the din of the whirring steel monster to pass over. However, the authorities at the hospital are conveniently moving the helipad shortly, away from Roy’s flat, up onto the top of the gleaming blue towers. The startling modernity of this new development exists in bizarre contrast to Roy’s first experience when he began working at the hospital in 1964 as a catering porter, and he remembers delivering milk to the matron’s flat in the eighteenth century West wing, with an old parlour retaining all of its nineteenth century furnishings including an aspidistra on a stand.
To the East, directly across Turner St, is the deconsecrated church of St Augustine with St Philip, now used as the hospital library and archive, where the Elephant Man’s hat is kept, and Roy pointed out the bronze bell at our eye level, still hanging high upon the rooftop, where once he saw a kestrel perch to pull the feathers off a small bird and devour it for its dinner. To the West, gesturing in the opposite direction, Roy pointed out the former hostel in Fieldgate St that once counted Lenin and Orwell amongst its transient occupants. In this location, rich in every kind of cultural and historical resonance, Roy is alive to all the stories, which serve as a colourful background to the quiet home where he spends most of his time in his roof garden at this time of year.
Two weeks ago, Roy acquired a new companion, Max, a short-haired black tomcat with a sturdy muscular body and a forthright personality. Previously living the life of a homeless alley cat, with battle scars and mange to prove it, under Roy’s benign influence Max already looks healthier. He has quickly made himself sublimely at home on Roy’s rooftop, even jumping with reckless innocence across the chasm onto the chimney stack of The Good Samaritan pub next door and sunning himself among the chimney pots. As Roy and I enjoyed our tea and idle conversation upon the roof top beneath the sunshine and slow-moving clouds, with astute opportunism Max took advantage of the companionable shade we created, stretching out beneath our seats.
Moving between his rooftop flat and the studio down in Cable St, where he makes his sculptures, it is a modest yet enviable existence Roy has carved out for himself. As I said “Goodbye”, he handed me a bag with the noble paper mache lion that I bought from him, which now sits upon my desk as a constant reminder of Roy’s vision. I do not know if Roy Emmins’s placid spirit is the result of the life he has created for himself or whether his personality led him to seek out these calm spaces conducive to his sympathetic nature, so instead I must credit it all to the unique quality of his inventive imagination, creating such a prodigious range of work with constantly renewing delight.
You can read about my visit to Roy’s studio by clicking here and you can see more of his work at www.emminsart.org
Max contemplates a death-defying leap onto the chimney stack of The Good Samaritan pub next door.
Roy Emmin’s paper mache lion.
Colin Taylor, the secret language of Tic-Tac
As soon as Rob Ryan alerted me to the remarkable work of Colin Taylor, a young graphic designer who has been on placement at his studio, I went over immediately to meet Colin at the Central St Martins degree show, held in the atmospheric spaces of the former Nicholls & Clarke building on Shoreditch High St.
Colin, who originates from Dagenham and possesses a keen eye and a generous smile, used to be taken along to the dog races at Walthamstow, Romford and Brighton by his dad, uncle and grandad. “Once,” Colin confided to me, with a broad grin of amazement, “I was sitting next to a tic-tac and I wondered what the hell he was at.” Years later, Colin has returned to the racetracks to investigate the secret world of the tic-tacs and create a unique graphic record of their vanishing language of gestures.
A tic-tac – in case you wondered – is someone who works for a bookmaker at a race track, keeping him apprised of the bets being laid elsewhere and the odds being offered by the other bookies. While this is essential knowledge for any bookie if he is to maintain a competitive edge, it is also information that needs to be communicated discreetly in a form that is not obvious to other parties. Out of this situation arose an ingenious terminology and language of signs which, like its proponent, takes the name “tic-tac.” With tremendous speed and facility, tic-tacs are able to keep the bookie informed, through visual signals, of everything they need to know. The bookies could receive information from as many as four tic-tacs working for them simultaneously, whilst also taking bets from punters. “At the heart of the language was the need for quickness of communication,” explained Colin. In the minutes between each race, the tic-tacs would be continuously signaling everything they saw in front of them.
Inspired by campaigns to record lost languages in remote corners of the globe, Colin headed down to the racetracks to record the fading language and culture of tic-tac, which declined with the rise of the mobile phone and has not been practised for the last ten years. Little has ever been written of the language and lore of tic-tac, so Colin set out to record the entire vocabulary while it was still possible, not just the terminology but the hand gestures as well.
It took Colin three months of visiting racetracks, getting to know those there that were once tic-tacs but now work as bookies. At first he encountered resistance, but through perseverance he made friends with a tic-tac called Michael. Once he made this connection, Colin returned each night for the next week to speak more with Michael, and gradually other tic-tacs joined the conversation too. “I think Michael was quite pleased that someone showed serious interest. When I learned that Michael’s father had also been a tic-tac and realised that all the guys still knew the language, it was such a rush of excitement,” admitted Colin, “I wanted them to unload all they knew about the language onto me.” Outlining his approach, Colin said, “Each night I had a plan of specific questions to ask, because I respected the fact that they were trying to work while talking to me.” Eventually Colin persuading the tic-tacs to let him photograph them between races, and his tenacity was rewarded by the tic-tacs running through their entire lexicon of gestures to be recorded by his camera.
Colin’s discoveries reveal something of the intriguing history and origins of the language, which he has arranged in three categories, “Cash Amounts,” reporting the size of bets being laid, “Odd Gestures,” conveying the odds being offered by other bookmakers, and “Trap Numbers,” noting the gates assigned to each dog. All this has been organised by Colin into three elegant books, in which he has honed the text and arranged the type with exemplary typographic judgement, complementing his linocuts that illustrate the gestures with appealing directness and wit. These modest cuts, no more than three inches square, reveal a bold graphic sensibility that references the Beggarstaff Brothers in its confident use of large areas of rich black, combined with an unusual, almost photographic use of light and shade.
Unsurprisingly, Colin himself has now developed a facility for tic-tac, running through any sequence of gestures with practiced ease and able to illustrate more sophisticated techniques whereby the language is communicated by barely perceptible twitches, sufficient for a recipient who already knows the signs. Through his persistence and creativity, Colin has uncovered a neglected area of discourse that has its own culture and history, but he becomes most animated when speaking of the friends that he made at the racetrack – in particular, Michael, whose father was also a tic-tac, and Skinny, a tic-tac in his late seventies with a career of over forty years who still returns to the race track each night, even though he can no longer work. In the end Colin’s project is no mere cultural curiousity, nor is it an antholopological exercise, it a serious record celebrating a phenomenon that exists as a fine illustration of the endless witty ingenuity of working people.
Bottle refers to odds of two to one. This originates from the early nineteenth century when spruce was used in the production of beer, referred to as a “bottle of spruce” which cost a deuce, leading to the use of “bottle” to convey the value of two. Score originates from the practice of counting sheep in twenties, carving a notch or a score on a stick to keep a tally, hence tap chest with hand. Pony for £25, derives from the pony illustrated on the twenty five rupee note when British soldiers were serving in India, while Monkey for £500 derives from the monkey on the five hundred ruppee note. Grand meaning £1000, is conveyed by the gesture of playing a grand piano.
Skinny
Columbia Road Market 40
In the unseasonable shivering temperature of the market early this morning, I realised that now is the time for Bellflowers. From tall Canterbury Bells to low ground cover varieties, there are so many options with these (mostly blue) Campanulas, that I did not know which to choose. After careful consideration of proportion and colour, I bought this Campanula pulla for £1.50, an alpine variety no more than three inches high. As regular readers will know, my garden is so tiny that I am always searching for plants to bring detail, and this plant rewards close examination handsomely. I love the deep (almost Bluebell) tone, the elongated flowers and glossy texture which make the flowers a close match for those glass lampshades of a century ago. The trend is to breed larger plants but I prefer these tiny varieties, with finer proportions and details that are even more beautiful seen in miniature.
From my bathroom, I heard my neighbour shriek in his garden, and leaned out of the window to discover the joyous news that his white Passionflower, which he planted two years ago, has flowered at last. Let me admit, I was fearful that this plant, more exotic and fleshy than the more commonplace variety I have, would survive last Winter. But it did and now it is flowering. I ran round with my camera to photograph the first cool white (almost pale green) flower for you, so you can admire this otherworldly bloom that glows in the sunlight and turns flourescent in the dusk, before closing up each night.
A Spitalfields weaver’s stool
I found this in Brick Lane yesterday, disregarded on the pavement outside a leather shop that was being refitted. I walked past and stopped in my path and turned back, I could not believe my eyes. I knew what it was but I never expected to see it there. Nearby stood a couple of workmen who were stripping out the shop and I asked the men if they had cleared out the stool and if I could buy it. Withholding my excitement, I offered five pounds and after a little negotiation my cash was accepted. Maybe they put the stool on the pavement hoping someone would simply take it away and I was a fool to pay – but this question was of no consequence to me because I had found a Spitalfields weaver’s stool. In spite of its bare utilitarian construction, knowing the meaning of this object, which exists as an illustration of the history of this place, makes it an object of fascination to me.
I knew it was a weavers’ stool because Danny Tabi, the last furrier in Spitalfields has one that he found in the Gale Furs factory in Fournier St when he began working there in the nineteen sixties. He remembered the day of the shooting of The London Nobody Knows in 1967, regretting that he never left his work to be filmed in the travelling shot along Fournier St, in which today he can identify all the faces. When I visited him early one morning last Winter, he proudly pulled the weavers’ stool out from under his sewing machine bench and placed it on his worktable, explaining what it was and pointing out the standardised aspects of the design.
These stools date from an era when it was cheaper to knock together something by hand than get it mass-produced. Essentially constructed from three pieces of one plank, with a couple of cross pieces, and sides to the seat added, this was something a carpenter could make in ten minutes. The “V” cut into each of the side supports created an approximation to four legs, making it stable upon irregular floors, as there are to be found in the old houses that were appropriated as factories here.
Originally used by weavers at looms, Danny explained that these stools became the standard for machinists in the clothing industry in Spitalfields. The close similarities between the stool I found and Danny’s suggest that the design was honed over time to arrive at a standard stool. The splayed angle of the legs and depth of the “V” is consistent, and the sides of the seat have their ends cut away on both stools. A little higher than a chair, it is tall enough for my thighs to be parallel with the ground when I sit upon it.
Although, in most illustrations I have found, the weaver stands or sits upon a cross piece attached to the loom, I am aware that there were different looms for different purposes. Maybe when Danny described this as a weaver’s stool, he referred to it as a common design used in the weaving industry? I cannot know the story of this stool, it can only exist as a general reminder of those who worked with their hands here for centuries in the textile industry. For an object of such cheap manufacture it has fulfilled its purpose well, outliving those who made it to become a relic of an industry that has all but vanished from these streets.
My stool declares its recent history through the printed plastic tape with the words “Future Designs” taped along the wooden edges of the seat. A name that possesses aspirations in absurd contradiction to the mundane wooden stool it graces. Should I remove this tape? Pasted upon the seat itself are closely lettered documents containing the date 1956 as part of the Conditions of Carriage by Road Act. Should I remove these? The stool has been mended with an extra cross piece added to stabilise it, more crudely done than the originals, and it has wood blocks glued underneath the seat to keep the structure rigid. Just the wear of hands upon the sides has worn the ridges in the woodgrain into relief.
I like this sad old stool for its functional austerity and evidence of wear. I shall not alter it. Commonplace objects that are used by many people in the course of daily life always speak to me more than rare precious artefacts. I cannot tell if this stool is fifty or one hundred years old, but I do know it has seen a lot of use and thereby carries the story of countless thousands of hours expended upon the weaving and sewing of cloth here – where I shall keep it – in Spitalfields.
You might like to read Charles Dickens’ account of visiting a weaver’s loft in Spitalfields in 1851 that I published in the Spring.
