Norman Phelps, Model Boat Club President
This is Norman Phelps, President of the Victoria Steam Boat Club, proudly displaying his ratchet lubricator that he made recently – just the latest example of an enthusiasm that began in 1935 when, at the age of five years, he fell into the boating lake in Victoria Park. It might have been a tragedy but instead it was the beginning of a lifetime’s involvement with model boats, and seventy-five years later, you can still find him at the lakeside on Sundays, giving the benefit of his experience to the junior members of the club.
Norman was understandably wary of speaking to me because the last time he gave an interview in 1951, he got taken for a ride by the News Chronicle. Although Norman spoke at length about the venerable club, all that got published was a souped-up account of how he courted his wife at the lake over the model boats. Seizing the opportunity to set the record straight, Norman generously sat down with me next to the boating lake last Sunday and spoke with lyrical ease.
“I was always known, not by my father’s name of Phelps, but as Watson – because my mother was famous as “Dolly Watson” on account of running the sweetshop in Rockmead Rd, where I grew up. I stayed in London all through the blitz and I saw the city burning and I saw this park blown apart, and our house was destroyed by a rocket in early 1945. Because of the bombing everyone knew everyone else. I saw neighbours dead on the pavement and I heard people crying out from beneath the wreckage of buildings where we could never dig them out. I saw the Home Guard practising with wooden rifles because we didn’t have real ones. It was crazy!
Funnily enough, I married a girl from Seweston Rd, on the other side of the park. I met her dancing at the Hackney Town Hall and because we were keen dancers and won prizes, we decided we would race model boats and see if we could win. We joined separately, but we did our courting through the club, and she won a lot of prizes and ruffled a few feathers. She’s been running boats her whole life and she still is at seventy-eight.
We got married in 1956, had our reception in the clubhouse and I was made secretary of the club at the same time. They gave us a presentation box of cutlery as a wedding present that we have today. In the early days, I supported my wife because she had such an enormous predilection to compete. She’s won so many prizes, we’ve got boxes full. If we turned up to compete, other people would say, ‘Let’s give up now!’ It was the art of straight-running. I did the designing, and she did the maintenance and cleaning. My wife was the talent, and I tended to stay in the background and be the club secretary and that was enough.
To be a great straight-runner you have to know a lot about the water and the wind, and the boat itself has to be considered too. The greatest talents in the world have competed here. So many people have gone now but I saw all the greatest exponents, like Stan Pillinger of Southampton, John Benson of Blackheath, Peter Lambert of St Albans, Jim King of Welwyn and Edgar Westbury, editor of Model Engineer. In this club we were lucky, we had pawnbrokers, jewellers, butchers, several tug skippers from the Thames – many of our members were skilled people. They didn’t have any money, so they built boats out of cocoa tins and orange boxes, producing some of the finest straight-running hulls in the club.”
Norman recognises that the flourishing of the boat club was in direct correlation with the heyday of skilled trades. He speaks passionately of the deference that existed between the members who all brought their different areas of experience and abilities to the boat club, and the culture of mutual respect that went with it, based never upon economic status but always upon skill. Tanned and lined from endless Summers on the lake, still with thick white hair and a scrawny energetic physique, he looks like a character drawn by Mervyn Peake. Possessing an eloquent tongue and a raucous laugh, Norman is engaging company too, with tender stories to tell of former members, especially his friend Bill, “even though he was a South London boy, we managed to see eye to eye.”
“So many have pegged out. I can’t get my head round it. I suppose I’m next for the chop.” he continued with a droll grimace, crossing his arms protectively. Yet Norman remains fiercely proud of the culture of the boat club and their marvellous vessels, honed to perfection over so many years. “This is still the home of straight-racing, we have the greatest talents here.” he said, indicating a pale young man in waders enjoying a quiet sandwich, who blushed readily as I was authoritatively informed he was the grandson of “a great talent”.”These skills are rare now. I spoke to the editor of Model World recently and he told me they have people ringing up because they can’t even put kits together today,” Norman declared in breathless amazement, before lowering his voice further and raising his brows to confide, “None of our members can give out their home addresses, because the boats have become too valuable and they don’t want to get turned over.”
“Who needs a computer?” asked Norman in derision, “I have a problem with the lubrication of my boat engine to solve.” But in spite of his disaffection, the contemporary world is affecting the boat club in ways that are not entirely disadvantageous, and even skills nurtured through computer games have their place here. “We have lowered the age limit for membership from twelve to ten, because nowadays ten-year olds are better with the radio controls than we are.” declared Norman proudly.
I can understand Norman’s ambivalence when he has lived through such big times, during which the Victoria Model Steamboat Club sailed on as a beacon of civility across troubled water. Its survival today as one of only two in existence (along with Blackheath), makes it all the more important as a reminder of the best of that other world, before the computer, when just a few people sat behind desks and most possessed a skilled trade that enabled them to earn their living and achieve self-respect too.
You also like to take a look at these other stories about the Victoria Model Steam Boat Club
Columbia Road Market 45
It was refreshing to walk through the early morning streets of Spitalfields in the gentle rain, which cleaned the air and the pavements, and brought out all the fragrances of the plants. I was the only customer at the market first thing and it was my privilege to have it to myself, with such breathtaking displays of colourful flowers solely for my pleasure at that time. There was a relaxed atmosphere, induced by the balmy temperatures and the arrival of the holiday season, which meant a few spaces in the market where traders had gone away, and also several sons and daughters helping out their parents on their stalls, getting inducted into the trade.
In spite of all the flowers, it was the fragrance of Sylvia’s herb stall at the corner of Ezra St that caught my attention with its delicate herbal scents released by the moisture. And upon a whim I bought these two purple herbs for just £3 the pair, a Purple Basil (Ocimum basilicum purpurascens) and a Purple Sage (Salvia officinalis purpurascens). Just brushing my finger over the leaves, sprinkled with soft rain, was sufficient to release their irresistible scents. The aesthetic of these purple herbs is exquisite, enough to convince me that they taste even more vivid than their green counterparts.
The Purple Basil will make a tasty and colourful addition to the green salads that are my staple diet at this season of the year, while I shall plant the Sage in a dry border next to a Heuchera and a Geranium with purple leaves, to add to a subtly contrasted purple patch that I am developing in a corner of my garden.
David Milne, Dennis Severs’ House
Once upon a time, David Milne used to arrange all the old things from his parents’ house in the attic of their home to create his own world of play. David is pictured here in the attic of Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St where today, as curator of the house, it is his job to arrange things – both in the general sense of maintaining every aspect of the property and also in the specific sense of arranging all the myriad objects that fill these crowded rooms.
Yet the success of David’s arrangements renders his labour invisible, since when you come upon the artifacts occupying these rooms, everything appears to have occurred naturally in the course of the daily life of the fictional inhabitants. But very little is accidental in this house of mysteries, because everything has been arranged to tell a story, and making those arrangements is David’s tour de force and his life’s passion too.
“I think I have a good understanding of what the life of a servant must have been like, except I am the servant to an imaginary family,” David confided to me after years of cleaning and polishing. Widening his eyes significantly as he revealed his qualification, “though I am a very taxing master – because everything has to be right.” and underlining the statement with such a stern glance that I almost felt pity for him, suffering such an exacting scrupulous employer.
I recognised the glance from when David instructed me to hold silence upon my arrival at the house, when I came to visit during a public opening. It was a look of such gravity that it ensured silence reigned throughout the property, no-one dared utter a word in the face of such an authoritative visage. Yet this hauteur only serves to emphasise the unexpected radiance of his smile when you greet him off duty, because the evocation of fantasy at 18 Folgate St is a serious business and David understands his dignified responsibility to set a certain tone whilst at work. It is an onerous duty that magistrates, members of the clergy, footmen and the guards at Buckingham Palace will recognise, and one which David has perfected to an art.
David discovered 18 Folgate St in his early twenties when was exploring London by following the medieval street plan and he came upon Norton Folgate while walking up through Shoreditch. He peered through the lattice-work of the dining window and spied the baroque interior. “Spitalfields at that time was dark and faded, as if the eighteenth century inhabitants had simply locked their doors and gone, and because I had seen into one of the houses, my imagination created the stories in all the others.” he told me, recalling the moment with delight.
With characteristic rigor, David decided that he would never pay to visit the house, because he knew at once that his involvement had to be more than a tour. Fortuitously, years later, he was invited to a party in the East End and found himself back outside 18 Folgate St. As he explained to me, “I came into this house, walked up to the first floor where Dennis Severs was sitting in the Smoking Room holding court with his circle of friends, and I asked him, ‘Whose house is it?’ and he said, ‘It’s mine!’ And from that moment we were friends, speaking on the telephone every day until two weeks before his death. I never came to this house to strip it down, I never asked questions, I never asked ‘Why?’ I just accepted it as his beautiful creation.”
David lives in a tiny modern flat built upon the roof of a Victorian stucco mansion block in Earls Court, that he has furnished with seventeenth century furniture and lit entirely by candlelight – like a cabinet of curiosities – existing in a manner that is completely in tune with the ambience of Folgate St. “When you live with candlelight, you learn how to use it.” David told me, “You don’t arrange your candles evenly in the room and all at the same height, as people commonly do. You place them strategically. For example, in the kitchen here, there is a low candle on the table where the cook was studying a recipe book. I like to place things together in the manner of ‘still life’ and I love the light of seventeenth century paintings, you see it everywhere in this house.”
I realised how unusual it was for David to sit and talk, because his job consists primarily of housework, revealed by the long apron that is his professional uniform. All four storeys, staircases and rooms, are cleaned twice a week, the silver, brass and copper are polished every fortnight, floors and furniture are waxed annually, bed and table linen are laundered and starched regularly, and dusting is a continuous activity. Additionally, the food is prepared daily, with the master’s breakfast cooked every morning, and tea and coffee freshly brewed. It takes all day, while the house is closed, to prepare it to open for visitors, because even maintaining imaginary inhabitants in the patina to which they have become accustomed takes a lot of work.
As with Mick Pedroli, house manager, David Milne’s involvement in the house is personal, rooted in his friendship with Dennis Severs, which ultimately led to his lifelong commitment to the vision which the house manifests. “I used to come and stay regularly, and Dennis and I used to play together, cooking meals and taking photographs. I spent twelve Christmases in this house. When Dennis died, I decided to step up and take on the house because it needed people who understand it. Now I am waiting for the right person to walk through the door, one day, who can do my job.” said David, getting lost in thought, gazing fondly around the artfully dilapidated Dickensian attic where he stayed when he first came to visit for weekends at Dennis Severs’ extraordinary house so many years ago, “It’s a story that’s never-ending.”
You may like to read my other stories about Dennis Severs’ house
Niki Cleovoulou, dress designer
Niki has always been a perfectionist, since she first learnt sewing and pattern cutting in Cyprus before coming to London at the age of thirteen in 1959. “I could never pass any faults. I don’t care about the money, I don’t care about the time, I don’t care about the trouble, so long as I can do something good for the customer, then I can be happy.” she declared with a grin of satisfaction, speaking of her work today as a designer and maker of haute couture gowns for special occasions – in plain words, a traditional dressmaker.
“I couldn’t go to school because of the war in Famagousta,” revealed Niki regretfully, giving the reason for her journey across Europe in her early teens, leaving the village of Styllous to live with her brothers in Neasden, who were students at that time.“Within three days they took me to the factory in the West End where my older sisters worked. I was a machinist, making skirts for ladies’ suits.” she told me. And so Nikki’s working life in London commenced, and the photograph above serves to illustrate this time eloquently, revealing Niki as a poised young woman of modest temperament, full of life and anticipation at the possibilities of existence.
In those days, Niki’s godfather Sophocles came regularly to the Spitalfields Market to buy fruit and vegetables, and he always got his hair cut by a young bachelor Kyriacos Cleovoulou at the salon in Puma Court. It was a chance meeting that was to decide the course of Niki’s life, because their respective families decided to put Niki and Kyriacos together. “They came over to see my family in Neasden. It was very difficult for us to go outside or even be alone,” admitted Niki, rolling her eyes with a blush and a shrug, “It was arranged, we got engaged within two or three weeks and married three months later.”
“We came to live here in Spitalfields in 1970, but the building had to be fixed up because it was in a poor state and we did the salon first. I remember the men with barrows of fruit and vegetables running around shouting at four in the morning, and people going to cafes for breakfast early. You could do your shopping at dawn. It was very friendly, like a family. My husband used to go and buy boxes of fruit, he knew everyone and they knew him because they all came here for haircuts! He used to open very early in those days.
A year after we were married, we went to Cyprus together for two months and when we came back he stopped cutting hair and worked with me in the factory, where I taught him how to sew trousers. But then the factory burned down, so my husband went back to hairdressing, ‘Hairdressers always have money in their pocket.’ he used to say, because he never had to wait until pay-day as other professions did. He set up a sink and all he needed was a comb and scissors to earn money.”
Although Niki held great affection for the sociable life and community that she encountered living in proximity to the market, she was less enthusiastic about the living conditions in the tiny rooms above the salon in Puma Court where she brought up her two young sons George and Panayiotis, while still doing sewing from home. “It was very difficult, there was no bathroom – so my husband fixed one up in the hallway and we had a kitchen at the back.” she confided, thankful that within five years they were able to buy a house in Palmer’s Green and Kyriacos could commute on the train to Liverpool St each day.
Throughout all these years, Niki earned money through her sewing and yet, as she confessed to me, she was secretly frustrated because she never got to design dresses as she had always wished, “I was doing my dress designs but only for the people that knew me. I thought, ‘If only, if only everyone knew what I could do, I could make a dress for the Queen’ – I had so much confidence in myself and my gift.” Niki never gave up her ambition and, even though she was qualified in pattern cutting in Cyprus, she achieved a City & Guilds’ Diploma that qualified her in this country too. Then, just ten years ago, working in partnership with her daughter Stavroulla (widely known as Renee) she created Nicolerenee, making bespoke wedding dresses and gowns for special occasions, working from the old family premises in Puma Court.
My conversation with Niki took place over a cup of tea in a quiet corner of Cleo’s Barber Shop, the salon where her husband Kyriacos began cutting hair in 1962 – where her godfather Sophocles came for a haircut in 1969 and discovered that Kyriacos the barber was an eligible bachelor. It is a location charged with powerfully emotional resonance for Niki and now, five years after Kyriacos’ death, their three children, Panayiotis, George and Stavroulla have reopened the barber shop, continuing the tradition for a second generation. When the time came for Niki’s portrait, we walked through to the premises next door, once derelict, now a showroom full of elegant silken gowns arrayed upon rails, all examples of Niki’s talent and expertise. Here Niki took out a favourite pink dress, full of proud memories, that she made for herself and wore frequently in the nineteen sixties, still in immaculate condition today.
This is a story that shows how external events can affect a life, sending Niki from Cyprus to London and from Neasden to Spitalfields, while equally illustrating the power of resolute self-belief to overcome obstacles. As Niki confirmed when she held up the dress in triumph, cast her eyes around the rails of dresses filling the tiny shop and said with a gleeful smile, “In the end all my wishes have come true, because I have the shop here today with my daughter, and I am a very happy person, especially when I can talk about my work!”
Niki on a visit to her childhood home in Styllous, Famagousta, Cyprus in 1966
Niki’s father George, 1966.
Kyriacos at the Acropolis, early sixties.
Niki and Kyriacos outside St Andrew’s Church, Kentish Town on their wedding day, 1969.
Kyriacos and Niki
Cleo’s Barber Shop in Puma Court, Spitalfields, nineteen eighties.
Kyriacos stringing beans in the yard at the back of the salon between haircuts, ten years ago.
Niki Kleovoulou today.
Photograph copyright © Jeremy Freedman
You may like to read my earlier story about Cleo’s Barber Shop
Spitalfields Antiques Market 16
This is Hollie Reedy, a sassy young New Zealander who possesses an arresting knack with eyeliner and always dresses in black. “I have lots more stuff at home, but what you see is what I can carry in two black bags on the bus from the Kingsland Rd.” she enthused, while adopting a series of fashion plate postures with an endearing lack of self-consciousness. A restless nomadic spirit, Hollie confessed with an eager smile, “I used to have a shop in New Zealand, but I shut it to come here and brought the stock with me, and now I am ready to go back and start again in Auckland.” Catch this exotic migratory bird with the raven plumage before she flies off to another hemisphere.
This is my pal Bill, a dignified market stalwart who deals in coins, antique whistles, gramophone needle boxes, souvenir thimbles, magic lantern slides, trading tokens, small classical antiquities and prehistoric artifacts. “I sell quite a few things, but on a low margin because it’s more interesting to have a quick turnover.” he admitted to me, speaking frankly, “I’m here more for enjoyment really – quite a few friends I’ve made over the years. I was a shy person before, but it’s made me confident having a stall. I’ve become an optimistic person.” Bill travels from Walthamstow to Spitalfields each week with all his stock in a backpack and large suitcase – practical, economic and an incentive to sell as much as possible.
This is Barrie Reeve, a bold adventurer who scours Belgium and Holland, exploring the stranger margins of the trade – with eclectic finds such as the medical specimens and charts, chemistry jars, maps and artificial limbs you can see in the picture, which delight the bohemian tastes of his specialist customers here in Spitalfields. I especially liked the orrery on the top right with all the planets made of little wooden balls on wires turning round a tin disc, a primitive model of the grandest scheme of all. Surrounded by his marvellous discoveries, Barrie exudes a proprietory largesse, proud to share his appreciation with aficionados of the offbeat.
This is Richard Rags and his appealingly voluble son Cosmo Wise, both dressed head to toe in the clothing from the nineteen forties and earlier that is their shared passion. They cherish the extravagantly worn-out old togs your grandparents discarded, full of vibrant character and handmade details no modern garment can ever match. Cosmo really knows how to wear it and, with admirable enterprise, is now copying his most treasured finds in old fabric, to create exclusive pieces sold under his own label “De Rien.” “We are drowning in clothes, clothes dripping from the ceiling, even beds made of clothes.” he revealed with barely concealed delight, divulging the singular living conditions at their clothing warehouse in Hackney Wick.
photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
More East End Shopfronts of 1988
There is an astonishing contradiction in this photograph – taken by broadcaster Alan Dein on Alderney Rd, Stepney in 1988 – between the elegantly written surname upon an eau-de-nil ground, full of majestic promise, and the overstated brutality of the breeze blocks filling the shopfront, intended to shut it down and shut us out, irreversibly and forever. Yet in spite of the pathos of the image, Alan admitted it was “a kind of bliss for someone like myself who was documenting the ramshackle and the uncelebrated.”
This picture is another of the compelling photographs in the remarkable unseen collection of more than one hundred East End Shopfronts by Alan Dein, from which I am pleased to publish a second selection for you today. Alan was twenty-seven years old when he embarked upon the project, inspired by the work of Eugene Atget, Walker Evans and Bill Brandt, whose work he encountered through well-thumbed copies of monographs of their beautiful photographs in the Art & Music department on the top floor of the former Whitechapel Library.
“From my room in White Horse Road, Stepney I could find so many places close-by that fascinated me at that time. My favourites were shop fronts – particularly the ones with Jewish names, though once I’d run out of those (their era had already passed by), I’d be on the look-out for anything that was pleasing to my eye. Looking back, my motivation was to capture their last moments on earth. I was and I still am, a devotee of ’junk’, and at that time the battered and the worn-out were almost anonymous in a landscape that still resembled a scarred battleground of the WWII Home Front.
The surviving shops didn’t have long to live. These are the last breaths of these little places, before succumbing to the pincer-like squeeze of the Docklands Development Corporation on one side, and the encroaching eastward sprawl of the hungry City upon the other. But the end for many of them had come earlier, as the proprietors retired, moved away or died, and significantly their children wished for another way of life beyond the four walls of the parents’ shop.”
Each of these shops had their heyday and those images would tell a very different story, of the world inhabited by Alan’s grandparents before the Jewish people left the East End, turning their backs on the history of poverty as they moved to newly built suburbs. This earlier world was accessible to Alan only through reluctant family reminiscence. But when he came to walk around the streets of East London, seeking for himself the remnants of the Jewish East End culture in which his family had its origins, he found closed-up shops that acquired a strange beauty for him.
There is an elegiac poetry in every one of these shopfront images, unsentimental in their formal compositions and inscrutable facades – boarded up to exclude squatters or thieves. They show the texture and patina evidencing the activity of those who have gone, and the confident colours and outdated signwriting dramatizing pitifully redundant aspirations to seek “exclusive tailors” or to “get tuf here”.
The shutter in Alan Dein’s camera became the final curtain that fell upon an unknown drama, framed by the proscenium of each shop window. The actors had gone, the stage was bare, they were theatres only of memory and no more performances would be played, yet Alan’s achievement was to record the human presence that remained.
“Posner’s in Commercial Rd was just round the corner from where I lived – once the site was gutted, an estate agent moved in, selling and renting properties in the Docklands.”
Stepney Green. “Only recently closed – you can see a hand-written flyer for the Half Moon Theatre in the window.”
Alie St
Hackney Rd
Mile End Rd
Alie St
Brick Lane (see Suskin’s Wilkes St premises in the previous set of pictures)
Commercial St
“I used to buy my shoes at Schwartz’s, trading on the Mile End Road, just by the old Half Moon Theatre. It was lovely to think that these places which resembled those old Ladybird book-style shops of the fifties and sixties were hanging on into the eighties.”
Bow Common Lane
Ben Jonson Rd. “A twilight zone where the shops built underneath the post-war housing blocks were still selling goods from a past age.”
Bow Rd
Here are just two of the many Levy’s that once existed on the streets of East London, above in Ridley Rd and below in Goulston St.
photographs copyright © Alan Dein
Take a look at more of Alan’s pictures here Alan Dein, East End Shopfronts 1988
Up the tower with Rev Turp
Who would have dreamed there was as much as two hundred and fifty tons of ironwork inside the tower of George Dance’s St Leonard’s Shoreditch? This edifice, completed in 1740, does not impose itself monumentally upon the High Street, and yet, comprising seventeen hundred tons of masonry, with walls eleven feet thick, it is as awe-inspiringly vast a structure as any parish church tower could be – as I discovered for myself, when I had the privilege of a guided tour by Reverend Paul Turp that led me up and up and up.
Following in the Rev Turp’s footsteps – picking up where we left off at the end of my subterranean adventure at St Leonard’s – I walked into the entrance of the church and slipped through the narrow door to the tower, next to the seventeenth century stocks and whipping post. Ascending the cramped stone staircase in the thickness of the wall, spiralling upwards towards the ringers’ chamber, I could not resist poking my head round the door of the dark and dusty room behind the clockface. As with the space beyond the cinema screen, there is an intriguing enigma about the hidden world behind the clock, like standing inside an eye, with external vision obscured by the single image upon the lense.
While Rev Turp expounded enthusiastically about his magnificent thirteen bells, named after the twelve apostles plus Andrew and rung more than any other church bells in the South East of England thanks to a set of shutters that spare the neighbours from the clamor, my eyes wandered to explore the eighteenth and nineteenth century graffiti upon the panelling. Men’s names and initials were incised in confident block or italic letters. There is nothing furtive about these carvings, suggesting those responsible were bellringers or other church officials, confident of their right to be here and leave modest inscriptions for perpetuity.
Ascending further up the spiral staircase, we came to the place where the stone steps ended at the foot of a metal ladder leading into the steel bell frame itself. Here we stood upon a grid of hefty iron girders from which the bells hang, each mounted upon a massive wheel, turned by ropes pulled in the chamber below. Now, it was as if we were interlopers within the workings of a giant clock, dwarfed by ranks of wheels and gleaming bells on either side. This is where Rev Turp lowered his voice to issue a warning – explaining that there was no obligation to go any further – and when I saw the narrow old wooden ladder roped in place, ascending diagonally across the space, it did cause me to think twice. “I don’t want you falling and damaging my bells,” declared the Rev, wagging his finger with droll humour, before setting a bold example by clambering swiftly up the precarious ladder with the unique confidence of one who has a special relationship with the almighty.
Inspired by the Rev’s example, I set out confidently upon the ladder too, only to find myself unexpectedly in a vast dark chimney, standing upon a few planks creating a makeshift platform within the bare internal shaft of the tower. Here I made the mistake of looking down through the floor to the bell frame far below. I did not want to fall and damage the Rev Turp’s bells. Recovering myself, I discovered another ladder in the gloom leading upwards to a square of daylight where the Rev Turp stood, like St Peter, waiting to greet me with a welcoming hand, once I had transcended the final level. Concentrating on holding the rungs firmly, as the Rev taught me, so that if one should break I could hold my own weight and my hands would not slide down the slides, I climbed safely to the top of the ladder.
Just as in those fairground rides which induce an accumulation of tension only to deliver a powerful rush once the pinnacle is reached, I was exhilarated to arrive at the top of the tower and look out across the expansive roofscape of Shoreditch, with Spitalfields and the City of London beyond. Where a moment before, I was gripped with a sense of my own vulnerability, now I could survey my fellow humans as if they were ants beneath my feet. The new overland rail line, so many years in construction, was a mere toy for our amusement from up here. “Look there goes a train!” pointed out the Rev in childlike delight.
Yet the humbling evidence of greater forces was here in the lumps of grey shrapnel, some as large as potatoes, buried in the stonework at the very top of the tower. The blast of World War II bombs was sufficient to propel debris to this height and embed them in stone. Changing tone, the Rev described how during the burning of London, the heat was so great that people took refuge in the crypt to escape the flames of Shoreditch High St. When he was a young priest, Reverend Paul Turp spent many hours up here in this eyrie (explaining his nimble confidence within the tower today), from whence he surveyed his whole parish, learning more about his community from this vantage point, because the physical composition and social contrasts of the neighbourhood are more apparent from above than at street level.
Returning to earth again, my legs turned to jelly, briefly unaccustomed to merely walking upon the pavement. In spite of the insights Rev Turp had granted me, I was relieved to be back, because I am not a burrowing creature that feels comfortable under the ground, nor am I a fowl that can soar effortlessly up into the sky, but one that delights to walk with my own two feet upon the plain surface of the earth.
World War II shrapnel embedded in the stone at the top of the tower.
Shoreditch High St from above, looking towards the Barbican.
Graffiti in the bell ringers’ chamber.
