Paul Gardner, paper bag seller
Recently, I have taken to dropping in to the premises of my new friend Paul Gardner, the paper bag seller at 149 Commercial St, to observe the constant parade of long-standing customers that pass through, creating the life of this distinctive business. One morning, I called round at six thirty, opening time, to enjoy a quiet chat before the rush and Paul explained that his great-grandfather James Gardner began trading here in this same building as a Scalemaker when it was built in 1870 – which means Paul is a fourth generation Market Sundriesman and makes Gardners the longest established family business in Spitalfields.
Paul still has his great-grandfather’s accounts from the end of the nineteenth century, when as Scalemakers they serviced the scales for all the traders in the fruit and vegetable market on a regular basis. Turning the pages and scanning the lines of James’ fine copperplate handwriting your eye alights upon the names, Isaac, Isaiah and Ezekiel, indicative of the Jewish population that once defined the identity of Spitalfields. There is an ancient block of wood with three scoops carved out that are smoothed with wear, it has been in use since the days of Paul’s great-grandfather. Then his son Bertie (Paul’s grandfather) used it, then Bertie’s son Roy (Paul’s father) used it and Paul still keeps his cash in it today. As the twentieth century wore on, each of the successive Mr Gardners found that customers began to expect to buy their produce in a paper bag (a trend which is now reversed) and so the trade of dealing in bags supplanted the supply of scales entirely over four generations.
Turn your back on the traffic rattling down Commercial St and stand for a moment to contemplate the dignified Brunswick green frontage of Gardners Market Sundriesman. An old glass signs reads “Paper & Polythene Bag Merchant” and, sure enough, a variety of different coloured bags are festooned on strings like bunting, below them are some scales hinting at the origins of the business and then your attention is distracted by a mysterious wooden sieve, a memento of Paul’s grandfather. Enter the shop to be confronted by piles of bags of every variety in packets stacked up on either side and leaving barely any room to stand. Only two routes are possible, straight ahead leading into the dark recesses where the stacks grow taller and closer together in the gloom or turn right to the makeshift counter, improvised from an old counter-top supported upon yet more packets of bags. Beneath the fluorescent glow, the dust of ages is settling upon everything. You think you have entered a storeroom, but you are wrong because you neglected to notice Paul sitting at the counter in a cosy corner, partly concealed by a stack of bags. You turn to greet him and a vista appears with a colourful display of bags and tags and tapes and those old green-grocers’ signs that say “Today’s price 2/8” and “Morning Gathered” – which creates a pleasant backdrop to the figure of Paul Gardner as he stands to greet you with a genial “Hello!”
With his wavy grey locks, gentle face, sociable manner and innate decency, Paul could have stepped from another age and it is a joy to meet someone who has successfully resisted the relentless imperative to haste and efficiency at any cost, that tyrannises our age and threatens to enslave us all. When you enter the shop, you enter Paul’s world and you discover it is a better place than the one outside.
Paul was thirteen when his father Roy died unexpectedly in 1968, creating a brief inter-regnum when his mother took over for four years until he came of age. “I came here the first day after I left school at seventeen,” said Paul, “It was what I wanted to do. After the first year, my mother stopped coming, though my nan used to live above the shop then. I haven’t had a day off since 1972. I don’t make much money, I will never become a millionaire. To be honest, I try to sell things as cheap as I can while others try to sell them as expensive as they can. I do it because I have done it all my life. I do it because it is like a family heirloom.”
Paul Gardner’s customers are the stallholders and small businessmen and women of East London, many of whom have been coming for more than twenty years, especially loyal are the Ghanaian and Nigerian people who prefer to trade with a family business. Paul will sell small numbers of bags while other suppliers only deal in bulk, and he offers the same price per bag for ten as for a hundred. Even then, most of his customers expect to negotiate the price down, unable to resist their innate natures as traders. Paul explained to me that some have such small turnovers they can only afford to buy ten carrier bags at a time.
In his endeavours, Paul supports and nurtures an enormous network of tiny businesses that are a key part of the economy of our city. Many have grown and come back with bigger and bigger orders, selling their products to supermarkets, while others simply sustain themselves, like the Nigerian woman who has a stall in Brixton market and has been coming regularly on the bus for twenty-three years to buy her paper bags here. “I try to do favours for people,” says Paul and, in spontaneous confirmation of this, a customer rings with the joyous news that they have finally scraped enough money together to pay their account for the last seven years. Sharing in the moment of triumph, Paul laughs down the phone, “What happened, did you win the lottery or something?”
Paul has the greatest respect for his customers and they hold him in affection too. In fact, Paul’s approach could serve as a model if we wish to move forward from the ugliness of the current business ethos. Paul only wants to make enough to live and builds mutually supportive relationships with his customers over the longterm based upon trust. His is a more equitable version of capitalism tempered by mutual respect, anchored in a belief in the essential goodness rather than the essential greediness of people. As a fourth generation trader, Paul has no business plan, he is guided by his beliefs about people and how he wants to live in the world. His integrity and self-respect are his most precious possessions.“I have never advertised,” says Paul, “All my customers come because they have been recommended by friends who are already my customers.”
However, after Gardners survived two World Wars and the closure of the market, there is now a new threat as the landlord’s agents’ Tarn & Tarn seek to increase the annual rent from £15,000 to £25,000. “I earn two hundred and fifty pounds a week,” reveals Paul with frank humility, “If I earned five hundred pounds a week, I could give an extra two hundred and fifty towards the rent but at two hundred and fifty pounds a week, the cupboard is bare.”
Ruminating upon the problem,“They’ve dollied-up the place round here!” says Paul quietly, in an eloquently caustic verdict upon this current situation in which his venerable family business finds itself now, after a hundred and forty years, in a fashionable shopping district with a landlord seeking to maximize profits. Paul needs to renegotiate his rent increase and we must support Paul by sending more business his way (at the very least, everyone go round and buy your bin bags from him), because Paul is a Spitalfields legend we cannot lose. But more important than the history itself, is the political philosophy that has evolved over four generations of experience. It is the sum of what has been learnt. In all his many transactions, Paul unselfconsciously espouses a practical step-by-step approach towards a more sustainable mode of society. Who would have expected that the oldest traders in Spitalfields might also turn out to be the model of an ethical business pointing the way to the future?
You may also like to read about Paul Gardner’s Collection and When Paul Gardner met Joan Rose
Paul’s grandfather Bertie Gardner, standing with Paul’s father Roy Gardner as child outside the shop around 1930.
Roy Gardner, now a grown man, standing outside the shop after World War II, around 1947.
First Annual Report
One year has passed since I wrote the first post here at Spitalfields Life and now, reaching three hundred and sixty-five, I hope you will permit me a moment of reflection. Let me confess to you that writing Spitalfields Life daily has become a compulsion, an ecstatic project driven by the desire to communicate my sense of wonder at the people I meet in the East End.
How quickly this first year has gone! Yet I feel I have hardly begun, because three hundred and sixty-five stories merely scratches the surface of the subject. And I fear I shall barely have time to blink before I will be writing the twenty-seventh annual report, with less than four months left to run before the ten thousandth post that is my ultimate target.
People ask me all the time,“What are you going to do when you run out?” but it is evident to me at the end of this first year that there will be no problem in finding enough subjects for the pen portraits which are the core of Spitalfields Life. My frequent experience is that each interviewee tells me of others I should write about. Readers write in with suggestions too, and the endlessly expanding possibilities give me a sense of vertigo sometimes.
Yet, extrapolating twenty-six times from what I have already written, I already recognise that space is going to be limited. Looking back over the Bakers, Nuns, Poulterers, Paper Bag Sellers, Bell Founders, Jewel Thieves, Artists, Publicans, Novelists, Gangsters, Paper Cutters, Songwriters, Aesthetes, Cloth Merchants, Machinists, Bellringers, Steeplekeepers, Designers, Furriers, Dairymen, Nursery Rhyme Collectors, Antique Dealers, Chefs, Strippers, Sheep-shearers, Farmers, Weavers, Photographers, Shoe-shiners, Barbers, Ostrich Feather Sellers, Grocers, Playwrights, Letterpress Printers, Street Dancers, Architects, Pearlies, Steeplejacks, Rag Dealers, Trendsetters, Model Boat Enthusiasts, Priests, Sculptors, Head-dress Makers, Beekeepers, Milkmen, Ostlers, Swagmen, Mudlarks, Tailors, Laundrette Attendants, Mechanics, Beigel Sellers, Bunny Girls, Pigeon Fliers, Bankers, Dockers, Junk Dealers, Gardeners, Restauranteurs, Ceramicists and Mapmakers, I can imagine how Noah must have felt, thinking, ”How am I going to fit everyone in?” But, also like Noah, I am equally eager not to miss anyone out that should be included and so I rely upon you, my gentle readers, to direct my footsteps by informing me of other individuals that I must write about.
Walking through Spitalfields, in streets and lanes that were once familiar to William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, and more recently to Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Beatrix Potter and J.K.Rowling – among other literary luminaries – I am constantly reminded of my predecessors. As a writer of modest ambition, I am commonly filled with awe at the nature of what I have taken on, but the truth is that it comes down to writing one story each day. This is how I keep a sense of proportion, by concentrating on the task in front of me.
I often worry about what would happen if I became sick, yet the for the first time in my life I have lived through a whole year without being ill at all. This has been the year of writing constantly – an unforgettable year, unforgettable not simply because of everything that has happened and all the people I have met, but unforgettable because – writing every single day – all the posts now exist as a reminder of what I did. They are the substance of my activity over this past twelve months.
Once I was concerned that writing was an overly solitary activity to pursue as a lifetime’s occupation, yet this year writing has led me out into the world and drawn me closer to life. I have never met more people than I have recently. When I get home from an interview and open my notebook to look at my notes, I always think “How can I do justice to this person?” Without all these generous individuals who have opened their hearts to me, these stories could not exist and the success of Spitalfields Life must be attributed to their qualities alone.
Some kind of miracle has happened. The internet gave the means of printing and distribution for free, enabling me to begin. Then, out of nowhere, from London and across the globe, more and more readers appeared to read Spitalfields Life each day, giving me the confidence to continue and encouraging me to write better stories to delight and intrigue. “You are obviously a big-hearted woman.” one esteemed reader commented, which is perhaps the best compliment anyone every paid my writing.
So many have joined along the way, that I am taking this opportunity of the first anniversary to look back over some of the prime posts which you may not have seen. During the next week, I shall be publishing a selection of my favourites from the first three hundred and sixty-five, while I take this brief opportunity to enjoy a few drinks with Sandra Esqulant at The Golden Heart, tidy my desk and make preparations for next year.
One day, I shall throw a big party for all the subjects of my pen portraits in one of Spitalfields’ finest old houses and invite you, my readers, to come and meet them. But in the meantime, as I gather my thoughts, steel myself and sharpen my pencil to commence the second year, I hope, through the practice of my work to become better at this endeavour, in order to be more worthy of my subjects – since there are so many marvellous things I must show you and more people I want to introduce.
And now I must run, because I am off to spend all night at the New Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market in Stratford and in one week’s time you will discover why…
Thus, with all these thoughts in mind, I come to the end of this first year of Spitalfields Life.
I am your loyal servant
The Gentle Author
Take a close look at this character because you are going to see a lot more of him. In a previous life in Devon, he used to catch rabbits and even moorhens but now he is learning the ways of the alley in Spitalfields. A small creature with a large personality. (It started with a black cat named Mr Pussy – the first post, 26th August 20o9)
Spitalfields Antiques Market 20
This is Debbie Price with her two fine daughters Tilly & Scarlett. “They don’t get pocket money, they have to sell things to earn their own money,” explained Debbie – a seasoned trader who began going to jumble sales at the age of ten and reselling her finds, just as she is now teaching her daughters to do. It means that while Tilly is awaiting her exam results this week, her ever-loving mother can be reassured that even if she does not get the grades, her daughter has something to fall back on. Like mother, like daughters.
This is Susan Hustwayte holding a Truman’s ashtray, a trophy of the brewery where she once worked as secretary to Mr Perkins, earning a wage of seven pounds and sixpence that she spent on fashions in Petticoat Lane each week. Susan comes from a venerable family whose ancestors include Henry VIII’s gardener and inherits her addiction to markets and collectibles from her father. “He was a demolition contractor who took me scavenging on sites when I was five years old,” she recalled with a smirk, “You should have seen his bedroom – it looked like Steptoe’s backyard!” Like father, like daughter.
This is Catherine with her daughter Sarah, and noble boyfriend Gary who carries the boxes. “All my family are in markets, one way or another,” declared Catherine plainly, a veteran of fifteen years of car boot sales,“My parents started off with a stall and I worked for them as a little girl.” Now Sarah has started trading too, showing her mother some moral support, “I’ve been helping my mum for years and I decided to give up my office job and go independent selling clothes,” she admitted shyly. Like mother and boyfriend, like daughter.
This is glass dealer Sarah Ovans‘ son John Ovans, who with knitwear designer Morgan Allen-Oliver also deals in glass. “Sarah’s house is like a showroom with all this glass everywhere, priced for sale,” revealed Morgan with a coy grin. “Her taste is sophisticated and grown up, whereas our stall is like a sweetshop!” he added, exchanging a knowing smile with John as they happily gestured in unison at their multi-coloured glittering display. Like mother, like son and boyfriend.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Blackberry season in the East End
It is blackberry season. In Spitalfields, I always feel a pang to be reminded of the seasonal delights that I am missing here in the midst of the city. When I was a child, I thought the chief virtue of growing up was the opportunity to reach blackberries that grew higher in the hedgerow. I spent so many seasons trailing behind my parents on blackberry picking expeditions down deep lanes and along the banks of the river Exe, carrying baskets and plastic bags – and armed with umbrellas or walking sticks to pull down elusive branches from above. It was an exciting yet risky endeavour, if you were to avoid getting scratched by thorns or stung by nettles, but we were prepared to endure these petty hazards for the sake of blackberry jam to enjoy in the Winter months ahead.
As a consequence, even today I feel that a Summer without picking blackberries is incomplete and so, in order to exercise my ability to reach those higher branches, I set out to find some blackberries in the East End. I took a bus to Bow and got off at the church, walking through the streets until I came to Three Mills Island. Just fifty yards along the towpath of the river Lee, I found blackberries growing in profusion, cascading from the old walls of abandoned factories and set to work picking them, pulling down those top branches that are especially heavy with fruit. Within minutes, a mother and her two children who had been similarly occupied came past clutching their bags of blackberries and, without a second thought, we exchanged greetings. It was the natural camaraderie of purple-fingered blackberry pickers.
At the end of August, the variety of Autumn berries was already diverse, scarlet rosehips, shiny black elderberries, delicately segmented pink spindleberries, red hawthorn berries, purple sloes and even golden greengages. I lost sense of time absorbed in picking blackberries, making my slow deliberate progress along the hedge. The quiet river was covered in green pondweed where moorhens made aimless trails, and I stood to watch the lonely heron in contemplation, until it gave flight when a District Line train rattled over the bridge towards central London. I followed the towpath North, aware that I was walking a narrow passage of green between the new housing developments of Hackney Wick on one bank of the river and the Olympic site on the other. High winds sent clouds racing across the sky and the sunshine I had been granted for my blackberrying expedition was shortlived, turning to rain before I reached Bethnal Green.
In Spitalfields, I tipped my modest haul of blackberries into an old bowl. Gleaming berries that come for free and incarnate all the poetry of late Summer in England. I was satisfied that the annual ritual had been observed. It was the joyful culmination of Summer. My passion for blackberry picking is sated for another year and there will be blackberry crumble tonight. Within weeks, the flies will get to the bushes and blackberries can no longer be picked. Each year presents this momentary opportunity, once they become ripe and before they are ruined – weather permitting. You are given one chance to pick blackberries before Summer is over. It is a chance which, for someone like myself, ever eager to seize the ephemeral pleasures of existence, cannot be missed.
The House Mill at Three Mills Island, a tidal mill built on the River Lee in 1776.
At Malplaquet House
Walking East from Spitalfields down the Mile End Rd, I arrived at the gateway surmounted by two stone eagles, and reached through the iron gate to pull on a tenuous bell cord, before casting my eyes up at Malplaquet House. Hovering nervously on the dusty pavement with the traffic roaring around my ears, I looked through the railings into the overgrown garden and beyond to the dark windows enclosing the secrets of this majestic four storey mansion (completed in 1742 by Thomas Andrews). Here I recognised a moment of anticipation comparable to that experienced by Pip, standing at the gate of Satis House before being admitted to meet Miss Havisham. Let me admit, for years I have paused to peek through the railings, but I never had the courage to ring the bell at Malplaquet House before.
Ushered through the gate, up the garden path and through the door, I was not disappointed to enter the hallway that I had dreamed of, discovering it thickly lined with stags’ heads, reliefs, and antiquarian fragments, including a cast of the hieroglyphic inscription from between the front paws of the sphinx. Here my bright-eyed host, Tim Knox, director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, introduced me to landscape gardener Todd Longstaffe-Gowan with whom he restored the house. In 1998, when they bought Malplaquet House from the Spitalfields Trust, the edifice had not been inhabited in over a century, and there were two shops,“F.W. Woodruff & Co Ltd, Printers Engineers” and “Instant Typewriter Repairs,” extending through the current front garden to the street.
Yet this pair of single-minded fellows recklessly embraced the opportunity of living in a building site for the next five years, repairing the ancient fabric, removing modern accretions and tactfully reinstating missing elements – all for the sake of bringing one of London’s long forgotten mansions back. Today their interventions are barely apparent, and when Tim led me into his Regency dining room, as created in the seventeen nineties by the brewer Henry Charrington and painted an appetising arsenic green, I found it difficult to believe this had once been a typewriter repair shop. Everywhere, original paintwork and worn surfaces have been preserved, idiosyncratic details and textures which record the passage of people through the house and ensure the soul of the place lingers on. The sum total of the restoration is that every space feels natural, as you walk from one room to another, each has its own identity and proportion, as if it always was like this.
By December 1999, the shops had been almost entirely removed leaving just the facades standing on the street, concealing the garden which had already been planted and the front wall of the house which was repaired, with windows and front door in place. Then, on Christmas Eve an exceptionally powerful wind blew down the Mile End Rd, and Tim woke in the night to an almighty “bang”, only to discover that in a transformation worthy of pantomime, some passing yuletide spirit had thrown the shopfronts down into the street to reveal Malplaquet House restored. It was a suitably dramatic coup, because today the house more than lives up to its spectacular debut – it is some kind of masterpiece.
I hope Tim will forgive me if I confess that while he outlined the engaging history of the house with professional eloquence – as we sipped tea in the first floor drawing-room – my eyes wandered to the mountain goat under the table eyeing me suspiciously. Similarly, in the drawing-room, my attention strayed from the finer points of the architectural detail towards the ostrich skeleton in the corner.
As even a cursory glance at the photos will reveal, Tim & Todd are ferocious collectors, a compulsion that can be traced back to childhoods spent in Fiji and the West Indies. They have delighted in the opportunities Malplaquet House provides to display and expand their vast collection of ethnographic, historical, architectural and religious artefacts, natural history specimens and old master paintings. Consequently, as Tim kindly led me from one room to another, up and down stairs, through closets, opening cupboards in passing, directing my gaze this way and that, while continuously explaining the renovation, pointing out the features and giving historical context, I could do little but nod and exclaim in superlatives that grew increasingly feeble in the face of the overwhelming phantasmagoric detail of the collection.
In fact, the collection has outgrown the house and the startling news I have to impart is that after twelve years, the owners now seek a larger home for their acquisitions, out of London. Gazing from an upper window and turning his back on the collection, Tim explained how fascinated he is by the everyday life of the Mile End Rd and the taxi office across the road that has remained open night and day since he first came to live here. Next, we walked into the walled yard at the rear, canopied by three-hundred-year-old tree ferns, and wondered at the echoing sound of a large community of sparrows that have made their home in this green oasis. It is a curious paradox of submitting to the spell of this remarkable house that the ordinary world becomes exotic by comparison.
I have been in older houses and grander houses, but Malplaquet House has something beyond history and style, it has pervasive atmosphere. It has mystery. It has romance. You could get lost in there. When I came to leave, I shook hands with Tim and lingered, reluctant to move, because Malplaquet House held me spellbound. After my hour’s visit, I did not want to leave, so Tim walked with me through the garden into the street to say farewell, in a private rehearsal for his own departure from Malplaquet House one day.
The basement kitchen (photo by Klaus Wehner)
(photo by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan)
The North-west bedroom (photo by Klaus Wehner)
The South-east bedroom (photo by Derek Henderson)
(photo by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan)
(photo by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan)
(photo by Derek Henderson)
Looking out from the first floor window to the Mile End Rd. (photo by Andrew Lawson)
Malplaquet House, May 2010 (photo by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan)
Malplaquet House, May 1998 (photo by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan)
The photo of the ostrich in the dining room is by Derek Henderson
The rise of Ben Eine, street artist
“It’s been mad!” announced Ben Eine, with a jubilant cock-eyed grin, when I walked over to visit him at work on a new painting in Middlesex St recently. Since I was there in June to record the origin of his project – masterminded by Jessica Tibbles of the Electric Blue Gallery – to paint the complete alphabet on the shutters of the shops, there have been significant developments. Not only did Ben complete the alphabet and the glorious “Happy” painting above, but he also achieved overnight international fame when David Cameron gave his painting “Twenty-first Century City” to Barack Obama as a gift. Now that he is the only British painter to have a picture hanging in the White House, the shopkeepers of Middlesex St are feeling justifiably proud of their foresight in permitting Ben to paint their shutters this Summer.
“For the first time in my life, I am making my living as an artist,” admitted Ben, his eyes gleaming in triumph, revealing the primary outcome of this absurd event which has transformed his reputation from that of a highly respected figure (within the confines of street art) into a household name. In the past, he worked making screenprints for others and it is even rumoured that he was the one employed to do the paintings for Banksy – but now Ben Eine is a star in his own right. And, when I arrived to shake his hand last week, there were three eager photographers and a cameraman following Ben’s every move as he undertook an ambitious mural over successive Saturdays on a wall at the Liverpool St end of Middlesex St.
Once upon a time, Ben used to get arrested regularly and only began painting the letters of the alphabet on shutters, for which he always asks permission, when a judge warned him that another conviction for criminal damage would mean a prison sentence. Happily those days are behind him now, because as a family man of forty years old with three children, this is no longer a risk he can take. He told me, with incredulous delight, that a police car pulled up recently and the officers got out to ask for his autograph for their children.
Pulling a grimace of crazed disbelief, Ben admitted he has shaken hands with the Prime Minister, “I went to visit David Cameron. I rang the doorbell at number ten and they let me in ! I had to sit and wait while he spoke to Mervyn King and then we had a chat, before he went off to have dinner with Berlusconi.” Adding breezily, “He seemed a nice man,” with a non-committal grin, revealing he has never voted in his life. In the Hackney Rd, Ben has painted his vivid personal response to these events in six-foot high letters composed of smiley faces, spelling out “The Strangest Week.” – a work which, with supreme irony, Hackney Council are threatening to paint over imminently.
Down in Middlesex St, all the media attention received by Ben’s alphabet has empowered curator Jessica Tibbles to enlist other artists to paint shutters as the project spills into the adjoining streets. At this moment, Goulston St is currently acquiring a series of monochromatic images of the beasts that once roamed here when London was a prehistoric swamp. Meanwhile Jessica’s sights are set upon Wentworth St, aiming for a total of more than three hundred painted shutters, transforming this neglected neighbourhood into an after hours gallery of street art with Ben Eine’s alphabet as the centrepiece.
Ben’s current work-in-progess uses his trademark shadowed letters to spell phrases that will only be revealed in their legible entirety when the work is completed next Saturday. I watched for several hours as, working with two assistants, Ben painted a series of red squares upon a yellow ground, in an apparently haphazard fashion, moving back and forth across the surface with a spray can in one hand and cigarette in the other, hunching his shoulders a little and cocking his head as transfers his gaze between the detail he is working on and the larger scheme of things. “I haven’t got clue what I am doing,” he declared to me with the spontaneous swagger of an experienced showman, whilst pouring himself a Jack Daniels and coke in a plastic cup, against the chill of the damp afternoon.
The very nature of this work, in which each red square corresponds to a letter spelling out the undisclosed text reveals a grand design that Ben is fully aware of. He cultivates an appealingly ego-free happy-go-lucky manner that denies his own sophistication. Yet after he went off for a break and the rain set in, there was a brightly coloured backpack left on the pavement and I realised it was Ben’s. He left it in assumption of an unspoken trust that we would take care of it for him. There is a certain touching vulnerability about this man who gleefully leaps up unstable ladders in the rain, leaning too far out with his spray can while puffing on a cigarette.
While the conception of Ben’s work is always sharp, there is an innate roughness to his work on the street, always designed to be seen from a distance and while the spectator is in motion. I noticed that some of the letters of the alphabet in Middlesex St were already peeling and usage will damage them further. Part of the mutable world of the street, Ben has accepted the ephemeral nature of his work long ago, fleeting like memories. If you go along to Middlesex St next Saturday you can experience the moment when the latest bright new work is revealed. Take the time to look for yourself, because none of these paintings will be here forever, they are the product of a moment, but – as a result of recent events – this moment belongs to Ben Eine.
You can read my earlier story The return of Ben Eine, street artist
At the North corner of the junction of Wentworth St and Middlesex St.
Looking down Middlesex St.
At the South corner of the junction of Wentworth St and Middlesex St.
Looking up Middlesex St.
Ben Eine’s “The strangest week” in the Hackney Rd.
Off the Hackney Rd.
Ben at work with an assistant in Middlesex St on Saturday August 14th.
Ben choosing the stencils for the individual letters.
Work-in-progress, pictured a week later.
The completed painting.
Columbia Road Market 49
This surreal conical-shaped flower emerging into the sunlight from the deep shadow of a late Summer’s afternoon is Hydrangea, Peniculata Limelight that I bought at Columbia Rd for just four pounds. My garden is too tiny for most hydrangeas but this small variety suits it well, and is especially welcome at this season when the yard is bereft of other flowers. The saving grace has been this rambling rose, Aimée Vibert, a pale noisette cultivated in 1828, that I planted two years ago and which, although it has already climbed to the window of my first floor drawing-room, has only just flowered for the very first time this week – offering just three sprays of fragrant double blooms up to the glass as if seeking approval. I love the form of these sprays, giving forth a cascade of roses all at once and I am especially delighted that it should come into bloom now at the end of August when most other roses are over. Henceforward I shall be able to anticipate the flowering of Aimée Vibert each year, as the last rose of Summer in Spitalfields.
