David Dimitriou, actor/dog-walker
It is my pleasure to publish this guest interview by my friend Clive Murphy, novelist, poet, oral historian and long-time resident of Spitalfields. “The twenty-seven year old David Dimitriou of Leyden St, E1, spoke to me in my Brick Lane flat on the evening of Friday August 6th. I had thought he was dog-walker. Sometimes when ‘resting,’ he is a dog-walker, but he is principally a character actor of many voices.” Clive Murphy
“Actually, I am in a play tomorrow! ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – Lysander. I’m a little worried about the approach the director’s taking. He’s asking for Lysander to be wide boy, a South East Londoner. “Yeah, yer go,” I talk like that. I’ve managed to keep the chav accent centralised, and the movement and costume should do much of the talking. I’ve to wear a long white tracksuit and a sleeveless t-shirt. If you’re given an interpretation you run with it. I don’t mind upsetting a few purists. We’ve all, not only the Mechanicals, got a comic element. For example, Oberon’s a Deep South American army man.
We’re performing at the Bromley Park Amphitheatre. It’s my first open-air show. What happens if it rains? I haven’t a clue. It starts at six and lasts two hours so we should be OK for light. There’s no electrics, no “Am I in the spot?” As long as I am heard I’ll be happy. I’ve to be up at eight o’clock and take the train to Bromley for the ‘tech.’ Then it’s on stage at six, finish at eight and back for a matinee only, at two on Sunday.
I think of myself as a character actor. I’ve even been a rock drummer, a conceited comic arsehole, in a spoof documentary that won second place at the South Carolina Film Festival. My agent put me up to ITV recently for what I thought was the part of a Middle Eastern owner of a laundromat. I spent an entire three days preparing a Middle Eastern Accent, based on my own Greek Cypriot background, and, when I got to the audition, the director told me the character was brought up in England! Once you’ve prepared your lines with a special accent, it’s pretty hard to change the inflections at a moment’s notice, so I failed. I was so self-conscious I don’t think I did any acting at all!
No, I don’t take Unemployment Benefit when ‘resting’. I did to begin with, but they’re far too negative at the Job Centre, always trying to catch you out. Every time I wrote something slightly wrong on the form, they stopped my £70 a week. My rent is £1,500 a month which my girlfriend, Naomi, and I split between us. I can only manage with the help of non-acting jobs. For instance, I sometimes work for a company called Look Media. They give me a scooter on the back of which is a trailer with some, say, anti-foxhunting slogan attached. You drive around anywhere they send you for £15 an hour. I’ve been an usher at Wyndham’s and I’ve helped in Customer Care for Eurostar. Moneywise it’s tight but I’m a good saver. Luckily I’ve met a businesswoman in the foyer of the block where I live. She was with a gorgeous little puppy, a Bichon Frise called Frankie. I said, “If you’d like me to walk him for you every now and then, let me know.” She rang suggesting three times a day. It’s £15 according to the internet, so I charged her £10 as she lives upstairs. She later cut me down to three walks for the price of two. I get told off almost every day for allowing Frankie amongst the greenery of Spital Square. I used to take him to the gardens beside Christ Church but he kept finding chicken bones.
Don’t forget I’ve only been acting professionally since 2007 when I was twenty-four. I was born in Birmingham but was taken almost immediately with my only sibling, my older sister who’s now a diving instructor, to Nicosia where my father was in the family business, Alexander Dimitriou – founded by my great-grandfather, which imports Massey Ferguson tractors and Honda cars. My mother had been an actress. She’d toured St Joan around America. In Nicosia there was only Greek theatre so she founded an amateur company there called The Anglo-Cypriot Theatre. I appeared in her pantomimes from the age of seven as a dormouse in ‘Cinderella,’ one of the townsfolk in ‘Mother Goose.’ I played Lomax in ‘Major Barbara’ at the age of fourteen. I’d no idea what I was doing, but I enjoyed myself so much I guess it was then I decided to go on the stage. I remember that, around that time, Simon Gilligan impressed me as a terrific Falstaff. Eventually I came back to England permanently not just for holidays. I did my A levels at a sixth form college, Cambridge Arts & Sciences CATS. I adored the place. We could smoke. We could wear tattoos. We didn’t even have to be back with our Houseparents until eleven o’ clock at night.
After the time of my A levels, RADA came along to CATS and set up a Foundation Course for those who wanted to go into acting, and I was asked to be part of the pilot scheme as I’d appeared with some success in several college shows. Helen Strange was the main voice coach. And Ellis Jones, head of RADA at the time, so inspired me that I started auditioning for Drama Schools. Failing to get into one at one, I thought, “Sod it! I’ll go to Uni!” and over three years at Exeter, I did a BA in Drama after which I was accepted by Mountview Theatre School, Wood Green, for a post-graduate year. I was auditioned by Andrew Jarvis. Andrew had such an amazing way of engaging your attention that I developed a sort of man crush on him. He once said something to me that’s always stuck in my head: “I’m not questioning how hard you’re trying. Don’t try harder, try differently!” When he left to take the part of Lord Elron in “The Lord of the Rings” at Drury Lane, I was devastated, I was in tears, I was almost ready to quit.
Fortunately, Sheila Allen – yes, the Sheila Allen – came to Mountview to teach a Shakespeare Module and she decided to take me under her wing. She said, “Stop trying to find idols to teach you to act! Just do it!” And she gave me the role of Iachimo in ‘Cymbeline’ to build me up, help me to believe in myself. We became friends and remain friends. Whenever I need advice, she gives it to me over the phone or at her home in Hampstead. In return, I give her computer lessons. Sheila is a no-nonsense teacher. No ‘method.’ No morphing. No St Joan having to spend days locked up in a room like a real prisoner.
Sheila is very much about the line endings in Shakespeare. Many think that if there’s no punctuation at the end of the line you just run it on. Not Sheila. She, like John Barton, believes Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameters for a reason and that the line before frames the line after. “If it were done when ’tis done., then ’twere well/It were done quickly…” A slight pause after the tenth syllable gives more emphasis to the next line and achieves a more profound feeling. I phoned her about my performance tomorrow. She said, “Get your Complete Works and read it to me!” I did, and she noticed I wasn’t doing my line endings properly.
I’m sorry, Clive. It’s now 9:40. I’ve got to leave you. I must have a good night’s rest before tomorrow’s show. All right. One or two questions. Superstitions, apart from not naming ‘the Scottish play’? Well, before every performance I must wear odd socks and I must not walk over three drain grids in a row or under any pavement road signs. Also, I’ve a lucky mascot that goes on my make-up table if there is one, otherwise it stays in my backpack. It’s a Swedish house gnome my sister gave me, and it looks like Santa Claus crossed with an elf.
No, there won’t be a prompter tomorrow and no, I won’t forget my lines. That’s how you’ve got to think. I’m looking forward to playing Lysander very, very much. In fact, what I most want to do with my life is appear in plays which I consider great, and with actors – Dare I say? Like me! – who are without pretensions, just interpreting the roles given them as honestly as they can.”
You may like to read about The Shakespearian Actors in Shoreditch
Lysander & Helena as envisaged by John Simmons (1823-76)
David Dimitriou’s head shot. Hair: black, eyes: hazel, equity status: full, skills include stage combat with rapier and cloak, accents: Greek, London, Estuary (native), Middle Eastern, RP, Russian and Italian.
Clive Murphy’s books of oral history are now available from Labour & Wait
Derek Prentice, Master Brewer
This is Derek Prentice, master brewer, on a return visit to the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane where he first started out, aged seventeen, in 1968. On the right you can see the dark brick of the old brewery (the colour of the porter that was famously brewed here), and on the left you can see the yellow brick of the new buildings (the colour of the lager that brought the brewery’s demise). In this picture, Derek stands poised between the two walls – in a position that is emblematic of his ambivalence about the changes he has seen in the industry during his long career that began here in Spitalfields. “I helped build the new brewery and I helped close it too,” he confessed to me with a wry smile, “Yet Truman’s gave me a taste for the romance of brewing. What gave me most pleasure was being here at the age of twenty working in the old brewhouse.”
Now that Truman’s Beer is being brewed again, some of those involved in the former Brick Lane brewery have come forward to contribute their experience to the new venture, giving me the opportunity to speak to them about the company, and it was my pleasure to meet Derek as the first in this series of interviews.
We met over a glass of beer in the courtyard outside the Vibe Bar, an eighteenth century building that was once the Brewers’ House, where Derek used to sleep in a bedroom on the top floor when he worked late and early shifts. Rising before dawn to commence the brewing, Derek would return to the Brewers’ House in the early morning where the housekeeper would draw a bath and cook him breakfast before he returned to work again. A pattern of life that feels remote, walking through the fashionable bars, shops and new digital industries that fill these buildings today. Yet for Derek the memory remains vivid, as I quickly realised when he gave me a guided tour which stretched over several hours, talking excitedly almost in a whisper, delighting in the minutiae of brewing, mashing, sparging and pitching – running through the precise activities that took place in each space, while we wove our way through the elaborate palimpsest of old and new buildings that once housed the entire process on this site.
In spite of Derek’s passion for brewing, he came to it almost by chance.“I finished my A levels and was planning to go to university but I didn’t get the grades. So as I was interested in science and I loved beer, I wrote to Watney’s and Truman’s. Then, after two or three weeks here as a lab tech, I decided on a career change because I rather liked it. Brewing involves bringing together a number of disciplines I was interested in.” he explained thoughtfully, before changing tone to add, “And I got to go to Margate twice on a beano from Liverpool St Station with entry to Dreamland and tents serving free beer!”
As a newcomer, Derek was in awe of joining of the vast brewery, housed in the ancient labyrinthine complex, that was a closed society with its own codes and hierarchies.“After a couple of years, I was asked to join the brewing team led by George Brown, a forceful Scotsman who had run a brewery on a ship in World War II. And each year, you were summoned to meet the members of the Buxton family up in the board room, when you got a pay rise. We called it ‘carpet day.’ They’d say, ‘Thankyou very much for your efforts this year and we give you another two and sixpence a week.'” revealed Derek fondly as we walked through the corridors of the Directors House – chased by an over-zealous security guard – where today the paintings (including Gainsborough’s portrait of Ben Truman) are gone from the walls, the busts are absent from the niches and each room houses a different media company.
Leaving the old buildings on Brick Lane behind, Derek led me through a passage to where towering yellow brick manufacturing blocks stretch across Wilkes St and up to Quaker St. This was the expansion that happened in the seventies and eighties as Ben Truman’s seventeenth century house and the nineteenth century brewery gave way to modern industrial production. Truman’s became streamlined to “Truman” and the “s” was painted out on the chimney. In this era, Derek was appointed packaging manager and became in part responsible for the new development, but I could sense an uneasy emotion in him as we explored these spaces. He surveyed the buildings and shook his fist at them, “This yellow brick shit built factory!” he declared. Because, ultimately, it was industrialisation that closed the place down, the culture of economy and efficiency at the Truman Brewery led to its expansion and then to its own extinction too.
“I left in 1989 because I could see how it was going. I like brewing in traditional breweries rather than beer factories, and as early as the seventies the Truman Brewery had become a production facility. It had lost the heart and the family element. What made the brewery special was the people and the characters. There were fantastic people, you had a lot who had done over fifty years and families that had worked here for generations.” said Derek. He became animated with delight at this thought and then stopping in the midst of the crowds of young people who have now adopted these buildings as their social space to confide to me quietly, “I have been searching for it ever since.”
The Truman Brewery in Brick Lane was where Derek Prentice learnt to be a brewer and in his first years there, he had a glimpse of brewing as it had been for centuries in Spitalfields. But subsequently, he saw it corrupted until it became a factory making three different colours of beer and blending them to create each of the brands that the corporate owners required.These conflicting experiences informed Derek’s life, leading him to work next for Young’s for seventeen years and now at Fuller’s in Chiswick – he has spent the rest of his career working for small breweries.
The Truman Brewery as Derek first saw it before the “s” was painted out on the chimney.
The extent of the brewery before the expansion that happened in Derek’s time.
Looking back down Brick Lane.
The Directors’ House
A corridor in the Directors’ House
The Directors’ Dining Room where Derek came to collect his pay rise on “carpet day.”
The Brewers’ House where Derek used to stay in the top floor rooms when was working late shifts.
Derek sitting in the courtyard of the Truman Brewery today.
Portraits copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Archive pictures copyright © Truman’s Beer
Spitalfields Antiques Market 21
This is Emma, who usually shares a stall, pictured here on her first day of going it alone. “I’m coming back after having my baby, Albert, a year and a half ago on Christmas Day,” she confided to me gingerly, pushing her long hair behind her ears as she summoned the confidence to reassert herself in the world. Emma’s collection of pressed flowers, papercuts, old stationery and life drawings make an intriguing display with a poetry all of its own. “They fit together to make a story, a little bit like a fairytale, but I don’t know what the story is yet…” she added with a cautious smile of anticipation.
This is Scott & Alan, two lads from Brentwood in Essex, discreetly shielding their stock of prehistoric antiquities from view. “After eighteen years of metal detecting and collecting, we started buying and selling,” explained Scott, eagerly holding up a coin minted by the Iceni tribe two thousand years ago, “I’ve been doing it since I was eleven and developed a passion for it.” Surveying their trove of coins dating from the Iron Age to the sixteenth century, beside Anglo-Saxon bridle mounts and strappings of bronze overlaid with gold, who could resist the mystery and allure of these precious trophies?
This is happy-go-lucky Natalie from Dalston cradling Brian, her favourite bear. “He looks like a Brian,” she informed me with inexplicable authority, “Not a martian or a dodo, as some have suggested, but a nineteen fifties homemade attempt at a bear.” Do not always expect to see Natalie here in the market, because, as she declared candidly, “It’s too much like hard work to do it every week.” Yet Natalie is no slacker.“The truth is I am more of a buyer than a seller,” she confessed later, “I get sentimentally attached to everything and I don’t want to sell any of it.”
This is Marcus Rixon, a supply teacher from Portsmouth whose life changed six weeks ago. “Someone gave me a cabinet, and I thought ‘I want to do it up,'” said Marcus, open-heartedly revealing the origin of his modest business enterprise, reclaiming old furniture that has been beaten up and knocked about, repairing and recycling it. “It’s just me, a garage and the Volvo at the moment!” he added with a carefree shrug, relishing this newly discovered freedom from the classroom and excited by the possibilities of his first day stalling out in Spitalfields Market.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
At the Boys' Club 86th Anniversary Dinner
Last night, I had the delight of attending the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club eighty-sixth anniversary dinner at the invitation of my new friend, club member Ron Goldstein. Entering the bar, I was immediately in the thick of a loud exuberant party of a hundred old boys in dark suits and club ties – the majority were octogenarians – all laughing and greeting each other flamboyantly in unselfconscious joy.
The rare spectacle of so many happy people together in one room stopped me in my tracks, it was sight to lift the heaviest heart. These were boys of modest origins who grew up on the Boundary Estate and in the surrounding streets of Bethnal Green and for whom the boys’ club (founded in 1924) offered a place of refuge where they could participate in cultural, educational and physical activities that served to raise their expectations of life. And many of the bonds of friendship formed there a lifetime ago exist to this day, as these lively reunions testify.
Aubrey Silkoff, the boy who wrote his name on the wall in Navarre St, Arnold Circus on the 19th April 1950, came to greet me. Like me, he was a newcomer attending his first reunion but already he was swept along by the emotion of the occasion. “I’ve just met people I haven’t seen for fifty years!” he declared with breathless excitement, introducing three childhood friends Alan Kane, David Goldsmith and Melvyn Burton who also wrote their names on the wall in 1950 when they used to play together. “We were happy in those days,” announced Alan, turning sentimental and speaking on behalf of his pals. “Do you know why? Because we hadn’t got a pot to piss in!” he continued, answering his own question, guffawing and breaking into the broadest smile, while the others exchanged fond satirical glances. Reunited, the excited dynamic of their childhood friendship took over and, as I cast my eyes around the room, I realised that while all these men lived as husbands, fathers and grandfathers in daily life, tonight they were free to be boys.
Once everyone was gathered, Maxie Lea MBE, the diminutive and playful club secretary, invited us to walk through into the dining room, where Ron and I took our seats at large round tables. Then Monty Meth MBE, the bright-eyed club chairman welcomed everyone, reading out apologies for absentees, saluting an old boy who had flown in from Dallas for the night and remembering those who had died since last year. Each name was received with cheers, applause and cheerful hammering on the tables, with the greatest affectionate response reserved for those who were here last year and all previous years, but who would never be seen again.
After a chicken dinner followed by chocolate gateau, Tony and Irving Hiller stood up to sing, providing the opportunity for everyone to express the sentiment that had been building up all evening. The gentleman next to me confided he had been friends with Tony – a talented songwriter who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1976 – since they both met in kindergarten at the age of four, eighty years ago. All shyness and unfamiliarity were overcome now, bonds of friendship had been reaffirmed and it was time to play. Beginning with the club song (with new words to the tune of “Anchors Away”), providing the catalyst to release any lingering inhibitions, “So, as members of the best club of all/We’re shouting Cambridge/With a C-A-M-B-R-I-D-G-E/ Whizz bang, Whizz bang, Whizz bang rah/Who in the hell do you think we are?/C-A-M-B-R-I-D-G-E !” It was the cue for everyone to wave their hands, link arms, or stand and gyrate, re-enacting teenage idiosyncrasies and celebrating them in others, as distant memories of years ago came back to life. Although very little alcohol was drunk that night, everyone was high on emotion. A sense of mortality intensified the delight for some, and in the midst of the skylarking and high jinks a few tears of happiness were discreetly wiped away.
Few of these men live in the East End anymore, although many grew up here before the blitz – in a world we perceive today through black and white photographs of terraces with children playing in the street. Quite literally, some of these men were those children in the photos. Yet in their hearts they all still live in the East End, as incarnated by the spirit of emotional generosity, decency and respect that was encouraged by the boys’ club and which forms the basis of their common understanding. It is not the same East End you and I know today, but it is an East End that has a vibrant existence between members of this generation whenever they come together. My experience of the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club reunion dinner was a living vision of the very best of this lost world.
Through my many conversations, I learnt that while they have achieved professional careers and some have been honoured for distinguished service in the forces, none was ashamed of their origin. All were eager to come and show their gratitude to the boys’ club that provided such a life-changing experience – because, as the years go by, they recognise the familiar sense of belonging together more than they can belong to the increasingly unfamiliar geographical space of the East End.
I shook hands with Aubrey Silkoff at the end of our first reunion dinner, and we both turned to the spectacle of multiple farewells that filled the room. “Everyone turned out well, didn’t they?” he said, nodding his head in approval as the quiet realisation came to him. I think he will be back next year.
Pictured in the top photograph, boyhood chums Des Gammon and Sidney Berns.
Joe and Simon Brandez, father and son, both old boys.
Ron Goldstein with boyhood pal Ben Lampert.
Alan Kane
Len Sanders with his grandson Scott, both old boys.
Michael Denton, the oldest boy of all at ninety seven years of age.
At Canvey Island
Each Summer, as a respite from Spitalfields, I take a day trip to the sea. Last year, I enjoyed a visit to Broadstairs, but this year, inspired by a brochure given to me by Gary Arber, I decided to be more adventurous and go to Canvey Island. Printed by W.F.Arber & Co Ltd in the nineteen twenties – when Gary’s grandfather Walter ran the shop, his father (also Walter) was the compositor and uncles Len and Albert ran the presses – this brochure seduced me with its lyrical prose.
“Canvey Island, owing to its unique position at the meeting place of fresh and salt waters, which continually wash its shores, enjoys a nascent air which is extraordinarily health-giving and invigorating, and is, indeed in this respect, possibly above all other places in the kingdom. Prominent physicians in our leading hospitals pay tribute to the properties of the air, by sending patients to the Island in preference to any other locality.”
Yet in spite of this irresistible account of the Island’s charms, when I told people in Spitalfields I was going to Canvey, they pulled long faces and declared, “You’re joking?” Undeterred by prejudice, I packed ham sandwiches in my satchel and set out from Fenchurch St Station with an open mind to discover Canvey Island for myself. Alighting at Benfleet, I crossed the River Ray to the Island arriving at the famous wall that reclaimed the land from the sea – constructed in the seventeenth century by three hundred dutch dyke diggers under the supervision of Cornelius Vermuyden.
“One of the first places the visitor will make for is the sea-wall, which he has undoubtedly heard a good deal about before coming to Canvey, and with which he will be anxious to make a closer acquaintance. The wall completely encircles the Island, and, following all its windings in and out, covers a distance of about eighteen miles.”
Since I had no map and had not been to Canvey before, Gary Arber’s brochure was my only guide. And so I set out along the wall where stonecrop and asters grew wild, buffered and blown by salt winds from the estuary. With a golf course to the landward side and salt marshes to the seaward side, that widened out into a vast open expanse stretching away towards Southend Pier on the horizon, it was an exhilarating prospect and I enjoyed the opportunity to fill my lungs with fresh sea air.
“The grand secret of the wonderful health-giving properties of the air is the evaporation from the “saltings,” during the time when the tides are out, which charges the air with ozone, which is thus constantly renewed and refreshed, making it extremely healthy, clean and bracing.”
Reaching Canvey Heights and looking back, the contrast between the hinterland crowded with bungalows and whimsical cottages, and the bare salt flats beyond the wall became vividly apparent. Many thousands before me, coming to escape from East London, had also been captivated by the Island romance that Canvey weaves – and I could understand their affection for this charmed Isle that proposes such a persuasive pastoral idyll, when resplendent beneath a sky of luminous blue.
“There is a charming freedom about life on Canvey which will appeal to most people whose work-a-day life has to be spent in towns or their suburbs. The change of scene is complete in every respect; streets, bricks and mortar, are replaced by bungalows of very varied designs and appearances”
Surrounding Canvey Heights, I found a neglected orchard of different varieties of plum trees all heavy with fruit, and filled my satchel with a selection of red, yellow and purple plums, before making my way to Rapkins Wharf with its magnificent old hulks nestled together in a forgotten creek. The Island breezes played upon the rigging like a wind harp, filling the boat yard with other-worldly music, where old sea salts sheltering amongst the array of rotting vessels. Next, turning the corner of the Island, I reached the shore facing the estuary and walking along the esplanade soon came to Concord Beach Paddling Pool where I joined the happy throng at the tea stall, spying the big ships that pass close by.
“All the vessels, bound to and from the large ports on the Thames, must pass Canvey, and thus a constant procession of all sizes can be watched with interest and pleasure, ploughing their lonely furrows through the waters. Monster ocean-going liners bound for the other side of the world, sailing vessels with their full rig of canvas spread, and, as the sun catches the sails, delighting the eye with one of the most haunting sights to be imagined – the estuary teems with interest at all times. Here one can realise that, despite the progress of motor and steam in water travel, there still remain a few ocean-going vessels under sail only.”
At the next table, a group of residents were debating the relative merits of Benidorm and Costa del Sol as holiday destinations, only to arrive at the startling yet prudent consensus that staying here in Canvey Island was best. Eavesdropping on their conversation, and observing the idiosyncratic villas adorned with pigeon lofts and flags, I recognised that an atmosphere of gleeful Island anarchy reigns in Canvey, situated at one remove from mainland Britain.
“The strict conventions of dress and deportment so tiresomely observed in towns can be ignored here in Canvey, and the visitor casts off all artificial restraints, simply observing the ordinary rules of decency and respect towards others which his own courtesy will dictate.”
Crossing through the streets, marvelling at the varieties of bungalows, I came to the Canvey Island Rugby Club playing field at Tewkes Creek, where I sat upon a bench to rest and admire the egrets feeding in the creek, while men walked their bull terriers on the green. Tracing my path back along the wall towards Benfleet station, I discovered circles of field mushrooms and picked myself a bunch of the wild fennel that grows in abundance, imparting its fragrance to the breeze. Then I returned home on the train to Fenchurch St at six, pleasantly weary, sunburnt and windswept, with my mushrooms, plums and fennel in hand as trophies, enraptured by all the delights of Canvey.
“For the family there is no better spot than Canvey for holidays – the glorious, exhilarating air sends them home again pictures of health and happiness.”
I never saw Canvey Island’s petrochemical refineries, or what happens at night. I am prepared to countenance that Canvey has its dark side, but I was innocent of it. I am an unashamed day-tripper.
This boat is for sale, contact the owner at Rapkins Wharf, Canvey Island.
Mushrooms picked at Canvey.
Plums and fennel from Canvey
The wall around Canvey Island.
At the New Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market
Last week, twenty years after he photographed the final months of the old fruit & vegetable market, Mark Jackson returned to Spitalfields for the first time. Shortly after completing his year’s photographic project in collaboration with Huw Davies in 1991, Mark took a job in Scotland where he has spent the intervening decades, but at the invitation of Janet Hutchinson of the New Spitalfields Market Tenants’ Association, he was persuaded to return for one night to photograph the fruit & vegetable market as it is now.
Mark came down from Aberdeen on the train and we met for a late drink at The Golden Heart in Commercial St, before taking a night bus to Hackney Wick and walking East until we came to the New Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market, blazing with light through the darkness and rain. Although the market has been operating in Leyton successfully for nearly twenty years now, it still describes itself as “new.” And for Mark, it was a paradoxical experience, simultaneously familiar and unknown.
“The first aspect to strike me was the size of the new market, even the car park is vast – a stark contrast to the old lorry park at the top of Brushfield Street in E1 – it resembles a giant rave for white vans! Another difference is that the market is closed to the public now, late night revellers used to pour through the old market on their way home in 1990. Today there is a sense of being removed from the centre of London geographically, although not in spirit because the new market retains the same hum of business, the same frantic pace of sell, load and banter.
Over the years my memory has become monochrome. Huw and I worked in black and white and began to think in terms of contrast, shadows and grain, whereas the modern market is dominated by colour. Piles of fruit create an entire spectrum now the market is lighter, powerfully illuminated, and the produce is stacked much higher. Remarkably, some of the wooden carts I photographed still survive, but they are scattered thinly, replaced by a superhighway of forklifts swinging past like muscular daleks with tight turning circles.
The new building reflects the structure of the original with wide avenues and a roof constructed of girders, and a long thin line of overhead lamps. Yet in spite of the modern environment, some of the traders still have the same old desks and the clock on the main avenue was familiar, but I noted that very few of the salesmen wore the long overall that was almost a trademark uniform years ago. Although the languages and accents are more varied today, I recognised quite a few faces from before the move and a couple even remembered me too. Some I recalled working with their fathers when I was last here.
Twenty years ago, I returned frequently to photograph and absorb the spirit of Spitalfields – I revelled in it. By comparison, this was a flying visit and it was harder to soak up the essence in a much shorter time, so I’d welcome the chance to return and take more pictures. But it was very exciting to be ‘back’ and the reception was a really positive.”
When we met at The Golden Heart, Mark had already travelled overnight by train from Scotland and then completed a day of meetings in London, so I wondered how he would find the energy for a night awake at the market. Yet I need not have feared, because once we arrived he set to work tenaciously, excited by the environment, talking with one after another of the many hundreds who work there. If any were too busy, Mark arranged to return later in the night, revealing an enviable ability to strike up a conversation with anyone and everyone, speaking always as equals.
As we walked together, dodging the myriad forklifts flying past at death-defying speeds, I became aware of emotive conversations breaking out between the traders and customers, often in languages I did not understand. Many customers are wholesalers who need to pay the lowest price or risk making no profit at all, while equally the traders also have to make a profit selling the stock they have bought from producers, without losing customers to competition from other traders. This constantly volatile negotiation between the trader and the wholesaler is the point of maximum tension in the supply chain. It can be the cause for jubilation or disappointment, and Mark’s acute pictures of the traders totalling up their figures capture the exact moment of discovering which it will be.
I left Mark to pursue his personal exploration alone and wandered off along the long cathedral-like aisles lined with stacks of brightly coloured fruit under the halogen lights, gawping at the produce and savouring the fragrances of garlic, coriander and all the diverse varieties fresh greens gleaming with raindrops. Cobnuts and chanterelles were reminders of the season on this chilly night at the tail end of Summer. At the end of each aisle, I emerged through the hangar doors into the chaotic dark car parks where boxes were loaded all through the night in the incessant rain.
When dawn broke, we enjoyed a cooked breakfast with Jan Hutchinson at Dino’s Cafe to warm us after our night awake. Just six months into her job as Chief Executive, Jan is a passionate advocate for the market and, appreciative of the vibrant history and culture she inherits, she was eager to welcome the return of Mark Jackson. After so many hours awake, Mark could barely believe that the pictures he took half a lifetime ago had led him there. With the original portfolio of pictures by Mark Jackson & Huw Davies now acquired by the Bishopsgate Institute, I am delighted that their photographic endeavour of twenty years ago to record the life of the market is finally winning the recognition it deserves.
At Spitalfields Market 2010
At Spitalfields Market 1990
Photographs copyright © Mark Jackson
You may like the read my portrait of Jim Heppel, New Spitalfields Market
At the Old Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market
In the last eighteen months of the Fruit & Vegetable Market in Spitalfields, young photographers Mark Jackson & Huw Davies set out to record the life of the market that operated on this site for over three centuries, before it closed forever in 1991. As recent graduates, Mark was working in a restaurant at the time and Huw was a bicycle courier. Without any financial support for their ambitious undertaking, they saved up all their money to buy cameras and rolls of film, converting a corner of their tiny flat into a darkroom.
“It was quite a struggle,” Mark Jackson confided to me, “because we weren’t earning a lot of money. But Spitalfields fired our imaginations. We caught the last tube to Liverpool St and spent the night there taking photographs, before heading into work next morning.”
The result of their passionate labours is a portfolio of more than four thousand images that has recently been acquired by the Bishopsgate Institute, due to be shown there in a major exhibition next year. It is my privilege to be able to show you a small selection of these phenomenal pictures that have never been seen before, as the first glimpse of an undiscovered photographic treasure trove.
I have the greatest respect for anyone who sets out to pursue idealistic projects such as this at great cost to themselves of money, time and labour. In this case, I am equally impressed by the quality of Mark & Huw’s photographs as distinguished social documentary, unsentimental yet infused with affectionate poetry too. Today, we are the fortunate beneficiaries of their selfless enthusiasm over all those months when they stayed up each night to take pictures and worked each day to buy film. It sounds like a beautiful story in retrospect but I have no doubt it took plenty of determination to carry the project through in isolation. I know that the market traders warmed to the young photographers and I think, in part, this accounts for relaxed intimate nature of some of these images, because the traders respected the commitment that Mark & Huw demonstrated, turning up night after night.
This particular set of images take us on a cinematic journey from the busy nocturnal world, when the market was active, through dawn into the early morning when the drama subsided. Mark & Huw photographed a dignified gallery of both the market traders and the homeless people, who were drawn by the fire that always burned to alleviate their discomfort ever since the market was granted its charter. We no longer see any of these characters in Spitalfields. These men would look displaced here in the renovated market today, they are soulful faces from a universe that is gone. When I walk through the Spitalfields Market at night now, it feels like an empty theatre, lacking the performance of the nightly drama that ran from 1638 when Charles I signed the licence to commence trading.
Even though Mark & Huw took their pictures only twenty years ago, they describe a society that feels closer to the world Dickens knew than our own present tense, ten years into the twenty-first century. Inspired by Tom Hopkinson and Bert Hardy’s work at Picture Post, these photographs were to become the first of a series documenting all the markets of London, that might have been a lifetime’s vocation for Mark & Huw. It was not to be. Life intervened and without any support the projected sequence was abandoned. Mark became a writer and Huw is now a teacher – they each have lives beyond their nascent photographic enterprises – but they deserve to be proud of these vital pictures because they are an honourable contribution to the worthy canon of British documentary photography.
Photographs copyright © Mark Jackson & Huw Davies
