A Pilgrimage to Old Town
If you remember your Chaucer, you will know that April is the time to go on pilgrimages. As I have not been outside London since I went to Broadstairs for the day in August, I decided to seize the opportunity of the Spring weather to make a pilgrimage to Old Town to collect my trousers that I ordered last month. Taking the train from Liverpool St up to Sheringham, I walked five miles over the hills to Holt, a small town that exemplifies the term quaint. Here in Bull St, next to the fishmonger and the butcher was my destination.
On this dreamy afternoon, there were bluebells in the woods and rabbits in the hedges as I walked along lanes through attractive villages with fine churches built of flint, to arrive in Holt where second-hand bookshops and antique shops filled with Staffordshire figures beckoned. But my thought was only of trousers, and this kept my wayward footsteps directed upon the straight path that led directly to Bull St.
I rang the bell and Miss Willey descended the narrow staircase to welcome me into the shop. Once I saw all the clothes, I wanted to try on everything at once, but first Marie ushered me upstairs to have cup of tea and say “Hello” to Will Brown, who was working in the room above, cutting cloth. He was preparing all the pieces that make up each garment, ready for collection by the half-dozen machinists who sew the clothes together at home and deliver them back for Will to add the finishing touches later in the week.
For more than ten years, with remarkable strength of mind, Marie & Will have been working here in two small rooms above their shop in this remote corner of Norfolk making their heart-warming clothes, and, as a result, today this cottage industry is working at peak capacity, selling as much as they can produce. Their unlikely success is a testament to their hard work and perseverance over all this time, pursuing the distinctive vein of workwear that is their forte and which has established them as pre-eminent in the field. Designers from Levis and Burberry sneak up to Norfolk to get a feeling for what is going on and attempt to incorporate it, but while trends ebb and flow, clothes from Old Town are classics that never go out of fashion.
Informed by his knowledge of workclothes over the last century, Will Brown’s designs are not reproductions of vintage or in the style of any single period, they are a synthesis. Using mostly British fabrics, every single garment is made to order with rigorous quality control – because Marie & Will personally ensure that everything is done beautifully. Their clothes are functional without being mundane, elegant without being demonstrative, and lacking in unnecessary details while at the same time possessing good details. You can wear them everyday. Neither posh, nor bohemian, nor nerdy, they exude a levity that defies categorisation. This is the genius of Old Town.
As I sipped my tea, Marie & Will chatted as they worked, without ceasing from the job in hand, inhabiting a moment of constant amused animation, moving from one task the next and doing each thing properly. Marie was answering the phone, wrapping up parcels perfectly in brown paper and pressing clothes with a steam iron – all in a room barely six-foot square – and running downstairs to customers in the shop. As a couple, Marie & Will complement each other naturally. While Marie is flitting up and downstairs, holding it all together with indefatigable buoyancy, Will quietly works at the cutting table with efficient calm and gravity. You could say it is all a kind of performance, but you could equally say it is a lot of hard work too. The singular life they have created for themselves and the clothes they make are inseparable, and to their many appreciative customers, Marie & Will are the quiet heroes of drill and twill.
Once I had finished my cup of tea, Marie placed my newly made pair of brown tweed trousers upon the cutting table with discreet pride and I carried them downstairs to the empty shop where, all alone in a back room, I tried them on. The tweed was soft and light, with a pale brown cotton lining, bone buttons and the most beautifully embroidered button holes I ever saw. Pulling them on, my legs seemed to grow longer and as I pulled them up around my waist, I lifted my head to stand up straighter. Once they were buttoned, I pushed my hands into the pockets for the first time and raised my eyes to the mirror to admire the effect. Although these were my first pair of Old Town trousers, the effect was curiously familiar. They fitted perfectly and the design was such a masterpiece of understatement that I was at home in them at once.
Before I set out for the bus stop, Marie packed my trousers into a flat cardboard box that, if it were under a Christmas tree, would create the expectation of a doll’s tea set or a model railway inside. Striding across the town square with the magic box under my arm, I was grateful to Marie & Will, not only for my wonderful tweed trousers, but also because thanks to Old Town – although it is only Spring – I already have a reason to look forward to next Winter.
Spitalfields Antiques Market 6
This elegant woman surrounded by a kaleidoscope of vivid florals is Lucy Welsh from North London. “I was working in a cafe but I gave it up because I thought I could make a living by buying and selling,” said Lucy brightly, revealing a brave spirit of enterprise. “I sell the kind of thing that I would buy for myself,” she explained, making graceful gestures with her delicate fingers to indicate the subtle blue shades of her Poole Pottery coffee set for just £25 and the pair of Sanderson chintz curtains in near mint condition for a mere £30. Keen prices at this stall from a lady of taste and discernment.
This is Sue & Roy Watts, popular stalwarts in the market, who have been been getting up at three in the morning and coming every week to Spitalfields from Norwich for seven years. Sue deals in jewellery and Roy sells furniture. “We’ve been through the good, the bad and the ugly,” confirmed Roy with a caustic grin, because, once, he and Sue endured a hurricane whilst trading outside the market during the renovations. Adding, “I used to think I was selling antiques, but now I realise I am a Dickey Dealer!” with the philosophical smile of one who has survived tempests to arrive happily in the calmer waters of this present day.
This is Molly & Ellen, who can be seen working together in the market every Monday, Thursday and Friday. Molly’s family have been swagmen in the East End for generations and Ellen played here in the fruit & vegetable market when she was child. “I was born in Whitechapel and this used to be our playground – only the porters could control us because they were the only ones we would listen to.” confided Ellen with a proud smirk. Witnessing the fluctuations of the neighbourhood, Molly & Ellen are two women of great spirit who speak for a resilient local community that has lived through all the changes, and I hope to talk further with them both in coming weeks.
This intriguing individual with the thoughtful gaze is Ali Winstanley from Stoke Newington whose father and sister are both antique dealers, which means that, even though she only been trading for six months, she has an educated eye. I particulared admired the millefiori brooches that she has and you must look out for Ali’s collections of vintage purses, silver lockets and decorated toffee tins too. “I have a passion for all things curious and kitsch!” declared Ali enigmatically, offering a tantalising invitation to view the contents of her newly-minted blog that explores her enthusiasms. www.kuriosas.blogspot.com
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
The return of Roa, street artist
It was last Autumn that Roa’s squirrel and rat first caught my eye, and then earlier this year I discovered a whole host of vermin that the prolific Belgian street artist had painted in Spitalfields. Now, as you can see from this tall bird that appeared at the junction of Hanbury St and Brick lane last week, Roa is back again, and he has taken the opportunity to further populate our neighbourhood with his distinctive, finely drawn creatures.
I was walking down Hanbury St when I looked up, unexpectedly, to see Roa hard at work painting on the top of a motorised cherry picker, high above my head. He was adding the black hatching onto the white base coat and I craned my neck, watching as he used strokes of the spray can to make each of the individual marks that characterise his highly recognisable style. From the cradle of the cherry picker, at arm’s reach from the wall, Roa could only see directly in front of him, so in his left hand he clutched a sketch that allowed him to see the entire figure, while he wielded the spray can in his right.
Charlie Uzzell Edwards, curator of the Pure Evil Gallery, said that Roa’s intention had been to paint a heron but, after being asked if it was a crane by Bengali people – for whom the crane is a sacred bird – Roa morphed his bird into a crane to best complement its location on the wall of an Indian restaurant. Charlie also told me that Roa always asks before painting his creatures onto walls and has discovered that many owners are receptive to having large paintings enhancing their buildings, which can become landmarks as a result. The truth is that since these paintings take four to eight hours to complete, it is not an option to create them as a hit and run operation, especially if you want them to last.
Roa’s fine draftsmanship sets him above other street artists and I particularly admire the vivid sense of life that he imparts to his creatures, which transfix you with their wide eyes. The anatomical detail of these animals is lovingly achieved, yet they are unsentimental portraits of feral beasts that demand respect, resisting our simple affection. Their looming scale and piercing gaze can be challenging – charged with tension, their eyes always follow you. Similarly, any human figure you see in the vicinity of these paintings unavoidably exists in relation to them, a measure of their fierce intensity.
For the most part, Roa places his animals in unloved, unrecognised corners of the cityscape that are the natural home for scavengers and vermin. But once these spaces are inhabited, the creatures become the familiar spirits of their locations, living embodiments of these places, and our relationship with them parallels our feelings about the streetscape itself. Their powerful presence no longer permits us to remain indifferent.
Since Roa was last here, he had a sellout show in Paris and then returned to stay with Charlie for three weeks this Spring. Spending a week installing his show in the gallery, he did some huge paintings directly onto the walls, before setting out to find spaces and create new works around the streets of East London for two weeks. A pair of distinctive new creations that are definitely worth the visit are to be found in the Hackney Rd – the beaver and the rabbit are both poised in a quivering moment of life, ready to bound away. Placed on the sides of old buildings and peering out into the street, they enliven this stretch of the road for drivers and pedestrians alike.
Charlie explained that Roa is off to New York for his first show in America, at the Factory Fresh Gallery in Brooklyn. Taking no works with him, except a set of images, he will undertake a series of paintings there in the gallery and on the street. Once that is complete, he is going next to Mongolia to paint horses on buildings. Then in July we shall see him back in Spitalfields, when you can expect to see the next brood of creatures proliferating on the street, and I hope to accompany Roa and write an account of the painter at work, because I am curious to know if the mind of the artist is as febrile as his creations.
In the meantime, you can find a map below of all Roa’s street work in the neighbourhood, as the basis for a walk to take a closer look at these fascinating paintings for yourself.
A beaver in the Hackney Rd
A rabbit in the Hackney Rd
A fox at the Pure Evil gallery
A map of Roa’s paintings
Dog days at Club Row Market
“… furry faces peering incongruously from the jackets of hawkers.”
Early in 1953, Kaye Webb and her husband Ronald Searle came to the East End one Sunday to write this account of Club Row Market for their book, “Looking at London and People Worth Meeting” published by the News Chronicle. A R. J. Cruickshank wrote in the introduction, ” This book rediscovers for us some of the odd places and odd faces of London that most of us have forgotten, if we ever knew them. The warm-hearted humanity of Kaye Webb’s writing and the tender sympathy of Searle’s drawings are beautifully matched.” I am delighted to republish this excerpt from their work for you.
Curious, considering our national reputation, that of all the street markets in London only one should sell dogs. This can be found any Sunday morning by taking a bus to Shoreditch High St and following your ears. a cacophony of whimpers, yaps, yelps and just plain barking will guide you to the spot where Bethnal Green Rd branches off to Sclater St.
There you may find them – the unclaimed pets of a hundred homes : new-born litters of puppies tumbling over each other in children’s cots ( the most popular form of window display) : “mixed bags” of less lively youngsters huddling docilely together in laundry baskets; lively-looking sheepdogs, greyhounds and bulldogs straining at the ends of leashes and furry little faces peering incongruously from the jackets of hawkers, who often look as if they’d be happier in the boxing ring.
The sales technique of their owners is almost as varied as the ware and almost always accompanied by much affectionate handling of the dogs. “It’s good for business and sometimes they mean it,” we were told by an impartial vendor of bird-seed who has been on the same pitch for twenty years. “Hi, mate, buy a dog to keep you warm!” said the man with the Chows to a pair of shivering Lascar seamen. “E’s worth double, lady, but I want ‘im to ‘ave a good ‘ome” or “Here’s a good dog, born between the sheets, got his pedigree in my pocket!” “Who’d care for a German sausage? – stretch him to make up the rations”, the salesman with the dachshund said, demonstrating too painfully for amusement.
R.S.P.C.A. interference is needed less often now. The days are gone when sores were covered with boot polish; when doubtful dogs were dyed with permanganate of potash; when, as tradition has it, you could enter the market at one end leading a dog, lose it half way, and buy it back at the other end. In fact the regular dog hawkers were never the ones to deal in stolen pets. “Stands to reason, this is the first place they’d come, and besides, look at the number of coppers there are about anyway.” But it is still possible to buy pedigree forms “at a shop down the road”, “just a matter of thinking up some good names and being able to write”.
The regular merchants, whose most frequent customers are the pet shops, are mostly old-timers ( some who have been coming for forty years and from as far away as Southend) and since a new law was passed insisting that all animal sellers should have licences, the ‘casuals’ are forbidden. But on the occasion of our visit the law had not yet been made and we passed quite a number of them. Most attractive was a red-cheeked lad with a spaniel puppy – “I call him Gyp; we’ve got his mother, but there’s no room for another, so my uncle said to come here.” Every time he was asked: “How much do you want, son?” he stumbled over his answer and hugged the dog closer. And when the would-be buyer moved on, his eyes sparkled with relief.
That day the dog section of Club Row was not very busy; it was too cold. But the rest of the market waxed as usual. Unlike its near neighbour, Petticoat Lane, Club Row Market has a strong local flavour. The outsiders who make the long journey to its “specialised streets” are mostly purposeful men looking for that mysterious commodity known as Spare Parts.
In Club Row itself are to be found bicycles, tyres, an occasional motor bike or a superannuated taxi. The police are frequently seen about here looking for “unofficial goods”. Chance St sells furniture and “junk”, Sclater St is a nest of singing birds, rabbits, white mice, guinea pigs and their proper nourishment. In the Street of Wirelesses the air is heavy with crooning, and Cheshire St is clamorous with “Dutch auctions”, or demonstrating remarkable inventions like the World’s Smallest Darning Loom (“Stop your missus hating you … now you can say ‘you might darn this potato, dear, while I have shave’ … and she’ll do it before you’ve wiped the soap off!”).
We found one street devoted to firearms, chiefly historic, and another where secretive, urgent men offered us “a good watch or knife”, implying that it was “hot” and therefore going cheap. But we had learned that this was “duffing” and the watch was most probably exactly the same as those sold on the licenced stalls just up the street.
At ten to one the market reaches a crescendo. One o’clock is closing time and many of the stallholders won’t be back until next Sunday. This is the time when the regulars know where to find bargains, but it needs strong elbows. Our way out, along Wheler St, under the railway bridge and past the faded notice which says ‘Behold the Lamb of God Cometh”, brought us back to the dog market. It was surprisingly quiet. On the other side of the road we spotted a small figure hurrying off with the spaniel puppy. It looked as if Gyp was safe for another week anyway.
Over the weekend, I found my copy of “Looking at London and People Worth Meeting,” when I opened one of my many sealed boxes of books that have sat in the attic since I moved in. It was my great good fortune that, Kaye Webb, the legendary editor of Picture Post, Lilliput and Puffin Books, was the first person to recognise my work and encourage me in my writing. When I used to visit her in her flat overlooking the canal in Little Venice, I remember she had Ronald Searle’s drawings of the bargees from this book, framed on her wall and I often stood to admire them.
I hope you will not consider it vain if I reveal that Kaye gave me this book and inscribed it under the title with my name and the text ” – also a person worth meeting!” Although Kaye died in 1995 and I have not opened the book for years, I am delighted to rediscover it now because it has been in my mind as an inspiration while I have been writing pen portraits myself. I was touched to think of Kaye here in these streets over half a century ago, and imagine Ronald Searle bringing out his sketchbook in Sclater St where I buy my fruit and vegetables every Sunday.
“…the rest of the market waxed as usual” ; a bookseller in action.
A Night in the Bakery at St John
At midnight, once the last diners have departed from St John Bread & Wine, the head baker & pastry chef, Justin Piers Gellatly, wheels his gleaming black motorcycle in from Commercial St and parks it in the middle of the floor. The restaurant that feels so large when it is full of customers seems to diminish once it is empty and all the chairs are stacked up. Now the chefs are gone from the kitchen, and until the clock on Christ Church, Spitalfields reaches eight o’clock in the morning, the place is the sole preserve of the bakers.
Justin greeted me with a cheery “Good Morning!” when I arrived shortly after twelve to join the team, as he and Luka Mokliak both set to work to make four hundred loaves and have them ready before the chefs reappeared in eight hours. At once, the huge porridge-grey lumps of gelatinous wet shining dough were hauled from the proving cupboard – where they had been sitting since they were made yesterday – and, using scales to ensure a consistency of size, Justin and Luka wasted no time in cutting up the living dough into pieces and shaping them into loaves.
First in the sequence of different loaves comes the sourdough, that takes longest to prove because it is a natural yeast. Once it is shaped, each piece of sourdough is placed into a proving basket made of a single spiral of bamboo that imparts the characteristic design of concentric circles on the dough. It is a furious business to prepare one hundred and sixty of these, but Justin and Luka make short work of flouring the baskets, shaping and working the dough with swift efficiency, folding it always inwards like the corners of an envelope.
As they filled the baskets, they arranged them on trays and stowed them under the table in racks, then, once the racks were full, the loaves were stacked on counters and spilled out onto the restaurant tables, to allow the yeast do its work for a few more hours before they go into the oven. After the sourdough, Justin and Luka set to work on the white, the rye and the raisin breads, which have live yeast added to the dough and prove more quickly. Sandwich loaves and baguettes are arranged on linens to prove, with the cloth folded in pleats to prevent the loaves sticking to each other.
By two-thirty all the loaves were shaped, and the warm air was thick with a delicious hazy aroma of dough, and by three o’clock the first white loaves were in the oven. The rhythm of the night changed as the first flurry of activity was complete and Justin shifted his attention to baking, while on the other side of the room Luka made dough ready for tomorrow night.
Using a peel (a long wooden paddle), Justin loaded the loaves into the four shelves of the deck oven. Each of the doughs are ready to go into the oven at different times, and their readiness can vary according to all kinds of factors, so Justin was constantly pulling, patting and sniffing his loaves to assess the progress of the proving process. Equally, each of the doughs need different baking times and conditions, which requires judgement too. Justin hovered for hours, sweating and pre-occupied, alternately checking the loaves in the oven and the dough in the racks – all in order to bring out one rack of loaves when they are baked, at the same time another batch reach the moment they are ready to go in. It is a challenging game of weighing all the variables and every night it is different. On this night, the white dough was a little dry, which required slower cooking and gave Justin concern for his loaves waiting to go into the oven.
As he tipped each loaf from the linen onto the peel, Justin shaped it up again gently, then scored the surface with a razor, which allows the crust to open up in the oven and permits the loaf to bloom. Justin used an old fashioned double-edged razor to do this because he has not found a knife sharp enough to match the resistance of the dough, which is sufficient to blunt two razors each night. “If you lose one of these everything stops!” he declared, holding up the razor with an absurd grimace. Once the loaves were in the oven, Justin flipped them onto the baking surface with practiced ease and, when the shelf was full, he sprayed steam from a diffuser into the oven to create the thicker, more leathery than crisp, crust that is characteristic of his bread.
At five, the butcher arrived with his delivery for the restaurant, placing it in the food store housed in the former secure vault of the building, that was once a bank. During the earlier part of the night the tempo of conversation had been brisk as Justin maintained a vigorous buoyant energy, but now in the earlier hours the pace was quieter. Justin was computing all the baking in his mind, while Luka was quietly measuring out flour and salt and water, and conscientiously stowing tomorrow’s dough in the prover. Last to go into the oven were the sourdough loaves as dawn came over Commercial St and, at five thirty, Justin opened the double doors of the restaurant, admitting the cool fresh air to ameliorate the steamy atmosphere of the baking. By the time the milkman arrived with his delivery, the first loaves were ready and Justin was relieved that the white loaves had turned out magnificently. Spontaneously, he held up a family loaf in triumph and I recorded the glorious moment with my camera.
Making up the bread orders in trays among the restaurant tables, Justin ended the night by taking the finished loaves from the oven as they were ready and stacked them up to create a satisfying display, still radiating heat and all discreetly crackling to themselves as they coolled down – an extraordinary sound I had never heard before. “That’s what first drew me to baking!” revealed Justin with a proud grin.
Accepting his gift of a loaf, I carried my beautiful sourdough home with me as the sun rose, grateful to have enjoyed the company of two fine bakers and witnessed a commonplace yet magical routine that has been taking place in these streets each night as long as people have been living in Spitalfields.
Columbia Road Market 32
Sitting in Philippa Stockley‘s garden in Whitechapel last week reminded me of Clematis Montana that grows so readily in East London. In recent years, I have seen them all over the neighbourhood spreading rampant on fences and even up onto telegraph poles. I photographed the fine specimen above growing in Woodseer St at the junction with Spital St, where I have admired it over successive summers as it has crept further and further along the fence. A remarkably hardy species, it is undiminished by the rigors of last winter. Rejected by some gardeners for its ubiquity and ridiculous profusion of flowers, I embrace Clematis Montana for its vigorous life. In my garden, there is an old Laurel that has grown to become a tree and this morning I bought myself a white Clematis Montana at Columbia Rd for £6 to climb up and smother it with flowers. Then for £5 I bought two Thyme plants, a Variegated and a Golden Thyme to plant together in a pot on my kitchen window sill. It was a moist occluded morning and by the time I arrived home, it was raining for the first time in weeks, which seemed slightly exotic, whilst being just what my garden needs now.
Rob Ryan at Somerset House
Last year, I visited Rob Ryan, the papercutting supremo at his studio in Bethnal Green, so when I heard he was transporting his entire workshop over to Somerset House for the duration of the Pick Me Up Contemporary Graphic Art Fair, this seemed the ideal premise to wander down the Strand and pay him a visit. It was a sunlit day that rendered everything in sharp focus, as if the city was setting out to resemble papercuts in celebration of this inspirational artist, for whom, undoubtably, a certain moment has arrived.
Leaving the sunlight, I entered the gallery where Rob will be working in his temporary studio for the next ten days like a monkey at the zoo. It is going to busy. Rob is going to get mobbed. It is going to be like feeding time at the penguin house. Visitors can see everything, peek over Rob’s shoulder as he sketches, then poke their noses in further to get an eyeful of all the cutting, printing, and other fiddly and fussy, fancy footwork that is involved in making his ingenious works. The dark subterranean space of the gallery had all the charisma of an old prison or an underground car park, but once I saw Rob’s cosy denim couch, his cutting table, his billboards, lamps and all the personal paraphernalia that is essential to his creative process, I was relieved to enter a familiar more sympathetic zone that goes by the name of Ryantown.
Even as I sat at Rob’s elbow while he drew branches on a tree in pencil, he had one eye on the photographers and cameramen prowling around, walking in slow motion. The dark space and powerful lighting made us feel as if we were enacting something, as if we were on stage or Rob Ryan was starring in the movie of his own existence. When asked to pose for the cameras, I thought Rob rose to the occasion with a bravura performance, as you can see above, assuming a bold, heroically comic stance that is worthy of Buster Keaton. Rob has no fear of clowning in the face of a media circus.
More than anything, Rob’s studio reminded me of the workroom in Bertolt Brecht’s house in East Berlin, where, on a series of different tables, the writer applied himself to a set of tasks simultaneously, plays, poems and letters. And so it is with Rob Ryan, only he has more projects underway than the British government. While Rob was drawing those branches on a tree on one side of the table, across from him a badge maker was furiously at work on the opposite side of the same table and half a dozen others of Rob’s loyal team were occupied in other tasks at different tables. On the next table, Rob showed me a larger paper cut in progress and, at another table, yet a larger one of a tree blowing in the wind. Then, he waved a fax of the template for “The Stylist” magazine for which he doing a cover, while explaining about the record label he is starting (Reacharound Records), his forthcoming tapestry designs and the plan to make his own customised Staffordshire figures.
I can barely keep up with all the work that Rob Ryan creates, his paper cuts, his prints, his ceramics and all the exquisite bits and pieces of graphic design for magazines and book jackets that keep cropping up everywhere. Yet most of all, I appreciate the silence and sense of calm that exists in Rob’s work. The intricacy is appealing, like lace or tapestry it delights the eye, and there is a childlike playfulness, almost an innocence to many of Rob’s pieces. They can be as delicate as cobwebs, and it is precisely this ephemeral quality which means they can also be read as memento mori. Every one a drama in microcosm, the emotional ambivalence of these evocations of the fleeting moment is what gives them such powerful resonance for me, melancholic and joyful at the same time. Rob has a benign eye and even the smallest works function as keepsakes to communicate his affectionate celebration of the transience and fragility of the human experience.
I could not reconcile the organised chaos of the studio and Rob’s attractive robust public persona with the intimacy of the work, until Rob explained that while he brings his ideas to the studio and works them out there, the source of his inspiration is elsewhere. His life in the world is his inspiration, not his life in the studio. Then Rob lifted up one of his beloved Staffordshire dogs, describing how he painted glasses onto it as a prototype for his customised Staffordshire figures. In doing so, he discovered that the ceramic spaniel had floppy ears corresponding to his own errant locks and that he had unwittingly created a self-portrait as a Staffordshire dog, and he roared with laughter at this daft notion.
Let me admit I am a fan. I love the wit of Rob Ryan’s vision of the world, picking up loose ends of pop and popular culture, from samplers and Staffordshire figures to pin badges and record sleeves, and weaving them all together like an extraordinarily clever bird to make a uniquely colourful nest that is unmistakably his own.
These tiles are available from Ryantown in Columbia Rd and www.misterrob.co.uk
