The Tailors of Spitalfields
In 1956, when tailor Alan Shaw was twenty-one, as a young man starting out in the world, he opened up his own workshop in Whitechapel across the road from the Royal London Hospital. There were so many tailors workshops in the East End then that he had to search to find his own space, because everywhere he looked there were other tailors at work.
It is a very different picture today, and, when I set out to search for tailors in Spitalfields, I could only find a handful in the directory. Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Sarah Ainslie and I set to visit them in person to make a survey and see what we might find.
In a humid windowless room in Artillery Passage, we had the privilege to shake hands with Alan who now works for Norton & Townsend, doing their alterations at a bench in a narrow corner of a first floor storeroom. With a deferential nod to the sharp City types lingering outside, we made our way inside from Artillery Passage to stand upon the deep carpet of the showroom. We were told that all the tailoring is done off site, and these premises are simply where customers come to make orders and have their fittings. But brand manager Graham Hall intuited immediately who we would most like to meet, and we were grateful to be ushered up a back staircase and into Alan’s workroom. The circumstances could not be more modest in contrast to the affluence of the customers. Yet, although Alan no longer does tailoring any longer, he is every inch a tailor and, as the most senior practitioner in Spitalfields, we were eager to pay due reverence to this distinguished yet unassuming gentleman.
“It’s a good trade,” said Alan, speaking softly with an easy smile and quite surprised at our interest, “You can get a lot of satisfaction from putting a suit on someone and knowing it looks good. The whole business is in satisfying the customer. They bring back their friends and that’s how you built up contacts. I started at fifteen and my whole family were in the trade, my brother Norman had a big factory in Princelet St. When I was young I had loads of jobs but unfortunately all the little tailors have dropped away and there’s no workshops left in the East End any more. I’m seventy-five now and I only do a few days a week – but I continue because it’s part of my life.”
Alan would have been surprised to meet young Sharjahan, barely into his twenties, and working enthusiastically with colleagues Guffar and Lillur in the cramped backroom at Hussain Tailoring in Hanbury St – for a business that primarily serves the Bengali residents of Spitalfields, making suits, copies of customers’ clothes, and doing repairs and alterations too. With bolts of suiting arrayed on either side of the old wooden counter, wide enough to lay out a garment where Guffar was cutting a ladies’ tunic from richly woven green silk, this lively establishment is exactly how I imagine a tailor’s shop to be.
We were honoured by an invitation to visit the sweltering low-ceilinged workroom, where Sharjahan proudly showed us four sewing machine benches and three hemming machines around the walls, and the pressing bench in the middle of the workspace – another sewing machine and buttonholer were outside in the shop. As we spoke, he set about pressing a pair of worn stonewashed jeans, swiftly marking off the legs with chalk to tailor them for the owner. Meanwhile, two eminent white-haired gentlemen had arrived for a conversation in the front of the shop, revealing the premises as a social hub where local people constantly come and go, passing the time of day and making and collecting orders.
It could not have been in greater contrast to the cool of the cavernous office of Neil O’Brien tailors on the first floor of the former Fruit & Vegetable Exchange Building in Brushfield St. Agent Richard Elliott sat alone at his desk, in between visiting the offices of law firms, investment banks and private equity companies, where customers can order their suits without ever visiting his premises. A former sales manager for read-to-wear tailor Chester Barrie, Richard has worked for the last six years as an agent, visiting customers in offices, taking measurements and fitting suits. Welcoming us genially, in spite of our arrival unannounced and out of the blue, he snatched a fine linen jacket from a rail – hand-stitched in a unique style by a traditional family business in Puglia – as an example of the finesse of their Italian tailoring.
Our final stop was Max Hence, the tailor in Folgate St, now incorporated into Eveleigh & Read where executive Paul Read – natty in a glossy two piece with just one button at the front – was eager to show off his two hundred year old shears as an illustration of the traditional core values of the business that he started four years ago. Although all their garments are individually bespoke, Paul was keen to emphasise that they endeavour to suit every pocket, or – in other words – you can cut your coat to your cloth here. The biggest surprise here was to discover that, although some tailoring is done in Italy, Eveleigh & Read have a tailors’ workshop in Shoreditch. Excited, I thought we had found the object of our quest, if not in Spitalfields then nearby in Shoreditch, but Paul remained inscrutable, insisting that we could not visit it. Like the last rare specimen of an endangered species, the location of the tailoring workshop must remain a jealously protected trade secret.
In a single morning, we walked through the history of tailoring in Spitalfields, from the friendly neighbourhood tailor to the corporate agents speaking the paradoxical rhetoric of family businesses and British craftmanship. And memorably we encountered the king of Spitalfields tailors, Alan Shaw, a heroically soulful figure who carries the story of when the East End was full of tailors, just half a century ago.
Let me confess, I was more interested in the workrooms than the showrooms, which were calculated to flatter the customers’ tastes. However the economics of tailoring reconfigures the labour market, in the end it is about the rare human skill of working with cloth, creating outfits of subtle psychology that engineer modest transformations to show the wearer at their best, and this is what touches me.
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Columbia Road Market 43
There was a party in my garden last night but, rather than face the debris, I got out of bed at dawn, headed out the door and walked up the road to the market instead, passing St Anne’s the Brazilian church where I could hear the young Brazilians, who had been up all night partying, still singing for joy.
For a mere £3.50 I bought a tray of sixteen assorted Cornflowers, sufficient to fill two pots to stand on an exposed sunny wall and give me a display of flowers in soft blues and delicious strawberry pinks for the rest of Summer. Almost nothing speaks of high Summer in England as vividly as the Cornflower that I think of scattered among wild Poppies in meadows of golden corn. I remember them from the “Cottage Garden Mixtures” of seeds that I used to buy for my childhood garden. This domesticated variety comes under the charming name of Batchelor’s Button and I love the subtle complexity of the snowflake patterns adopted by the flowers, each one presenting a different intricate delight, perfectly counterpointed by the grey-green foliage.
At Shakespeare’s first theatre
Over in Shoreditch, just a few minutes walk from where I sit writing in Spitalfields, is the site of a seventeenth century playhouse called “The Theatre” built by James Burbage in 1576, where William Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist began. In this, the first custom-built public theatre, Shakespeare played as an actor and his first plays were performed, notably Romeo & Juliet and an early version of Hamlet.
Stepping through a blank door in the wooden hoarding in New Inn Yard, I walked along a raised pathway to look down upon the archaeological dig and see where the earth has been painstakingly scraped back to reveal the foundations of the ancient playhouse. Senior archaeologist Heather Knight of the Museum of London indicated the section of curved stonework which comprised part of the inner wall of the theatre and next to it a section of the paving of the passage where, more than four hundred years ago, the audience walked through into the body of the theatre, once they had paid their penny admission. Beyond this paving, a beaten earth floor has been uncovered, sloping gently down in the direction of the stage. This is where the audience stood to watch Shakespeare’s early plays for the first time.
For any writer, Shakespeare is a name that has a resonance above all others, and once Heather Knight explained what I was seeing, it took a while for the true meaning to sink in. My head was full with the cacophony of the dusty sunlit street and the discordance of heavy traffic and, superficially, the site itself was like any other archaeological dig I have visited. There was no poetry in it. But then the words of Hamlet came to me, “To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause…” And my stomach began to churn because I knew I was standing on the other side of Shakespeare’s unfathomable dream. It was as if I could feel the tremor of the London earthquake of 1580 coursing through my body. The monstrous city grew diaphanous and the street sounds faded away.
We know no more of what happens in the sleep of death than Shakespeare did. Yet we can say we do know the literal substance of the dreams evoked by these lines from Hamlet – the things that were to come in the space where Hamlet’s words were spoken by James Burbage’s son Richard, who was the first to play the role. We know things unknown to the writer or the actor or the audience in that moment, and, in this sense it may be said that we ourselves (even the archaeologists) are all part of Shakespeare’s boundless dream within the sleep of his own death.
We know that after a disagreement in 1598 The Theatre was covertly demolished by the theatre company while the freeholder Giles Allen was away for Christmas and the materials used to construct The Globe in Southwark the following Spring. We know that a factory was built on the site in the seventeenth century, then a house in the eighteenth century, and a warehouse in the nineteenth century until it became a lumber yard in the twentieth century, before archaeologists came along with sonar devices in the twenty-first century to ascertain the position of the theatre – although the workers in the lumber yard and all the local people always knew the yard was on top of “Shakespeare’s Theatre”.
But it was never Shakespeare’s theatre in any real sense, it is unlikely the audience here were aware of any particular significance in the event, when they heard his words, because he was an unknown quantity then. Plays were performed just once from cue scripts without any rehearsal or expectation of posterity. Each actor had a roll of paper with their character’s lines, plus their cue lines – so they knew when to speak. The implications of this were twofold. Firstly, the actors had to listen attentively to each other so they did not miss their cues. Secondly, beyond a broad knowledge of the story the actors might not know exactly what was going to happen in a scene. It placed the actor in the present tense of the dramatic moment, discovering it for the first time and knowing no more than their character did. The actor playing Romeo might take the poison without knowing that Juliet was going to wake up.
Shakespeare’s plays were conceived to play upon the spontaneous poetry of the elusive instant that, for both actors and audience, occurred uniquely. This embrace of the ephemeral moment is both innate to the form of Shakespeare’s plays and it is their subject too – the fleeting brilliance of life. These works were delights that, as transient as butterflies on Summer days, existed without expectation of longevity. The beautiful paradox is that, in recognition of their superlative quality, Shakespeare’s colleagues collated and printed them, so that his words could travel onwards through time and space to become the phenomenon we know today. And this modest piece of earth in Shoreditch is where it all began.
Releasing me from my idle speculation upon the dust, Heather Knight held up a concrete discovery in triumph. It was an earthenware ale beaker that she found recently, with a lustrous green glaze, which fitted the hand perfectly – a drinking vessel that Shakespeare would recognise, of the style that would be used in the tavern scenes at The Boars’s Head in Henry IV Part One, first performed at The Theatre. Heather has never found a complete beaker before and because it was discovered at The Theatre and is contemporary with Shakespeare, it is a magic artifact. It is something from Shakespeare’s world that he could have seen or touched. Although we can never know, we are permitted to dream.
This tiny plate marks the site of The Curtain Theatre that superceded The Theatre, just fifty yards down the road in Hewett St.
You may like to read these:
The door to Shakespeare’s London
Shakespearian actors in Shoreditch
Shakespeare’s younger brother, Edmond
You can learn more about the plans by the Tower Theatre to build a new theatre on the site of The Theatre at www.thetheatre.org.uk and discover more about the archaeology at www.museumoflondonarchaeology.org.uk
At Sandys Row Synagogue
Here is Mr Sender Chaim, always the last to leave after the lunchtime service at Sandys Row. On his way out he touches the box on the door frame which contains the Mezuzah, a scroll with two chapters of the Torah written in Hebrew to be recited daily.
This is one of thousands of intimate photographs taken by Jeremy Freedman over the last five years, documenting his growing involvement with Sandys Row, the oldest surviving Ashkenazi community in London and the only remaining synagogue in Spitalfields. Jeremy’s great-great-great-great-grandfather was one of the founders of the synagogue in 1854, but it was the death of his grandfather Alfred Freedman, the last president of the synagogue, which brought Jeremy back here in July 2005 – where five generations of his family have been before him.
A week after the funeral, Jeremy’s father Henry Freedman called an Extraordinary General Meeting to discuss the future of the shul which had dwindling attendances and a decaying building, and it was at this sombre gathering that Jeremy took his very first photograph in the synagogue, which you can see below. Henry Freedman is at the centre of the photo, and to the left in the dark cap is Jimmy Wilder who had been treasurer of the synagogue for seventeen years. “It was a catharsis,” admitted Jeremy, “As I took pictures, I realised that the majority of the board members were over sixty, many much older, and that nothing could happen unless a new generation got involved.”
Seeking to explore his own family’s past, Jeremy went down into the cellar, his feet sinking into the dust gathered like sand on the beach, making the first footprints in a generation. There he discovered a forgotten vault for the burial of religious documents containing Torah scrolls from the beginning of the community and, under debris, Jeremy found a relic that halted his photography. It was a forgotten vellum commemorating those who paid for the refurbishment of the synagogue a century earlier, in the promise that the acknowledgement of their work would always hang in the vestry.
Six months later, a broken water tank in the caretaker’s flat caused a flood that almost brought down the vestry ceiling. An accident which hastened the imperative for renewal, yet also revealed more of the history of the shul, as Jeremy explained,“We had to empty out the vestry before it was refitted. It took several weekends to clear the contents accumulated over a hundred years, books, letters, ledgers – some written in Dutch, indicative of the origins of past members of the shul. We even found a prayerbook dated 1680, produced by appointment to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor.”
Now the vestry has been refurbished and the vellum’s place is secured, indicative that the reins have been passed to a new generation – as the synagogue looks to the future, celebrating weddings and barmitzvahs with increasing attendances, and anticipating the renovation of the roof funded by English Heritage in time for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the building’s construction. With a quiet emotionalism, Jeremy’s subtle photographs record this transition through the eyes of a participant, while also honouring those senior members, many of whom have passed away in these five years, yet remembered today for keeping the Sandys Row synagogue open when all the others in Spitalfields closed.
The crisis meeting at the synagogue in July 2005.
Barry Pash is the fourth generation of his family to worship at Sandys Row. A gentle man, once a photographer for a London newspaper, Jeremy took this picture of Barry in the flat where he lives alone in Petticoat Tower, Petticoat Lane.
Michael Davidson, a scholar from an orthodox background, sifts through a century of accumulated books and documents in the vestry after the flood of 2006.
Stella Wilder (widow of Jimmy Wilder, the treasurer, whose picture is to be seen on the right) was the secretary of the Sandys Row synagogue for seventeen years until 2005. Born in Old St, she once worked for British Overseas Airways Corporation at their office there and, in spite of her fading sight, still takes huge pleasure today in watching the planes cross the sky, seen from the window of her flat nearby in the Golden Lanes Estate.
For the first time, Misha is summoned to carry the Torah that he will read at his Barmitzvah, as part of the ritual of becoming a man enacted by his forefathers.
Joe Listner, who used to run the shul, examining the vellum of 1905 discovered in the basement.
Many years ago, Milton who has resided and worked in the locality his whole life, celebrated his marriage here at Sandys Row.
For fifteen years there were no marriages at Sandys Row, then there were three in a year, and now young families are joining the synagogue, as Jewish people move back into the neighbourhood for the first time in a generation.
You can read further about Sandys Row Synagogue and see more of Jeremy Freedman’s portraits of the senior members of the shul here: Jeremy Freedman, photographer
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Spitalfields Antique Market 14
This is Justin Melican, an agreeable young actor of antipodean origin who enjoys selling kitschy collectables when he is not working. “I’m just back from Cambodia, shooting an episode of an American TV docudrama, playing a drug trafficker,” he let slip with deeply impressive indifference – as if this was something everyone did – before explaining that he has just completed the first year of a three-year interior design course as well. “I’m juggling everything at the moment!” he declared, brimming with the bright energy, bold schemes and winning charisma of one eager to discover his destined place in the world.
This is the gracious Sonoe Sugawara, seen here proudly holding an exquisite nineteenth century girl’s silk undergarment. Sonoe originally sold vintage English clothes from a stall in a Tokyo department store and now has a clever business going whereby she sells kimonos in London too, moving back and forth two or three times a year with a full suitcase in both directions. “My boyfriend’s great-grandparents were dealers before the war, collecting nineteenth and early twentieth century kimonos,” revealed Sonoe with a signficant nod, accounting for the origins of her ravishingly beautiful stock of fine antique kimonos.
This is Matthew Mcfarlane, a free-thinking one man band who enjoys the community here as much as the selling. “I can leave my stall unattended and no one will touch it,” he vouched confidently. Matthew modestly contends his stall offers him a day off from his work as a set builder and designer of shop windows, but I could see he possesses a good eye – and the rescued chairs he has reinvented (to be seen on his blog Sew Watless) testify to a cunning ingenious sensibility. “There is something hauntingly beautiful about dishevelled furniture, left to waste, yet with so much more to give.” he added, revealing his true soulful self.
This is Jennie Sedwell, Heather Sedwell and Lesley Willis – not sisters as you might assume, but in fact three generations who work happily together selling a breathtaking range of vintage textiles, clothing and haberdashery. Lesley has done it as a hobby for twenty-five years, while her mother Jennie joined ten years ago and daughter Heather completed the trio on leaving school. “It was ridiculous!” exclaimed Lesley, “We used to have twelve stalls – as much stock as a big shop – and a van with a mirror for a changing room. We didn’t even have time to sit down, whereas now unfortunately…”, protesting in appealingly overemphatic self-deprecation, whilst still presiding over one of the busiest stalls in the market.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Return to W. F. Arber & Co, Printing Works
There have been changes at W.F.Arber & Co Ltd (the printing works opened by Gary Arber’s grandfather in 1897 in the Roman Rd) since I was last here in February. At that time, Gary was repairing the sash windows on the upper floors, replacing rotten timber and reassembling the frames with superlative skill. This Spring, Gary was the recipient of a small grant from the Olympic fund for the refurbishment of his shop front, which had not seen a lick of new paint since Gary last painted it in 1965.
The contractors were responsible for the fresh coat of green but Gary climbed up a ladder and repainted the elegant lettering himself with a fine brush, delicately tracing the outline of the letters from the originals, just visible through the new paint. This was exactly what he did once before, in 1965, tracing the lettering from its first incarnation in 1947, when the frontage was spruced up to repair damage sustained during the war.
No doubt the Olympic committee can sleep peacefully in their beds now, confident that the reputation of our nation will not be brought down by shabby paintwork on the front of W.F.Arber’s Printing Shop, glimpsed by international athletes making their way along the Roman Rd to compete in the Olympics at Stratford in 2012. Equally, Gary is happy with his nifty new paint job and so all parties are pleased with this textbook example of the fulfilment of the ambitious rhetoric of regeneration in East London which the Olympics promises.
If you look closely, you will see that the glass bricks in the pavement have been concreted over. When Gary found they were cracking and there was a risk of some passerby falling eight feet down into the subterranean printing works, he obtained quotes from builders to repair them. Unwilling to pay the price of over five thousand pounds suggested – with astounding initiative, Gary did the work himself. He set up a concrete mixer in the basement printing shop, filled the void beneath the glass bricks with rubble, constructed a new wall between the building and the street, and carried all the materials down the narrow wooden cellar stairs in a bucket, alone. Gary’s accomplishments fill me with awe, for his enterprising nature, undaunted resilience and repertoire of skills.
“I shouldn’t be alive,” said Gary with a wry melancholic smile, referring not to his advanced years but to a close encounter with a doodle bug, while walking on his way down the road to school during the war, “The engine cut, which means it was about to explode and I could see it was coming straight for me, but then the wind caught it and blew it to one side. We lost all the glass in the explosion! Another day, my friend David Strudwick and I were eyeballed by the pilots of two Fokker Wolf 190s. We saw them looking down at us but they didn’t fire. – David joined the airforce at the same time I did, he flew Nimrods and died many years later, while making a home run during a cricket match in Devon.”
These thoughts of mortality were a sombre counterpoint to the benign season of the year. Leading Gary to recall the happy day his father and grandfather walked out of the printing works at dawn one Summer’s morning and, in their enthusiasm for walking, did not stop until they got to Brighton where they caught the train home, having walked sixty miles in approximately twelve hours.
In those days, Gary’s uncles Len and Albert, worked alongside Gary’s father and grandfather here in the print shop, when it was a going concern with six printing presses operating at once. Albert was an auxiliary reserve fireman who was killed in the London blitz and never lived to see his baby daughter born. Gary told me how Albert worked as a printer by day and as a fireman every night, until he was buried hastily in the City of London in an eight person grave. “I don’t know when he slept!” added Gary contemplatively. There was no trace of the grave when Gary went back to look for it, but now Albert is commemorated by a plaque at the corner of Althelstan Grove and St Stephen’s Rd.
Whenever I have the privilege of speaking with Gary, his conversation always spirals off in fascinating tangents that colour my experience of contemporary life, proposing a broad new perspective upon the petty obsessions of the day. My sense of proportion is restored. This is why I find it such a consolation to come here, and leads me to understand why Gary never wants to retire. Each of Gary’s resonant tales serve to explain why this printing shop is special, as the location of so much family and professional life, connected intimately to the great events of history, all of which remains present for Gary in this charmed location.
Now that Gary is a sole operator, with only one press functional, he is scaling back the printing operations. And I joined him as he was taking down the printing samples from the wall where they have been for over half a century, since somebody pasted them onto some cheap paper as a temporary measure. It was the scrutiny of these printing specimens that occasioned the reminiscences outlined above. Although these few samples comprise the only archive of Arber’s printing works, yet even these modest scraps of paper have stories to tell, of businesses long gone, because Gary remembers many of the proprietors vividly as his erstwhile customers.
I was fascinated by the letters ADV, indicating the Bethnal Green exchange, which prefix the telephone numbers on many of these papers. Gary explained this was created when smart people who lived in the big houses in Bow Rd objected to having BET for Bethnal Green, which they thought was rather lower class, on their notepaper. There were letters to the Times and a standoff with the Post Office, until the local schoolmaster worked out that dialling BET was the same as dialling ADV – which might be taken to stand for ‘advance’ indicating a widely-held optimistic belief in progress, which everyone could embrace. So just like Gary’s Olympic paint job, all parties were satisfied and looked to the future with hope.
“Bill Newman of Advance Insulation used to be covered in white asbestos powder. The whole place was like a flour mill! He smoked a fat cigar which we thought was the cause of the cancer that killed him, but later we learnt the truth. The Victoria Box Company closed in the nineteen sixties after a woman had her fingers cut off by a tin pressing machine and the compensation claim shut the company down. Mr Courcha was around in the nineteen fifties, he had a huge lump on his bald head like something out of a comic. We had three generations of Meggs chimney sweeps until the introduction of the smokeless zone finished them off.”
“Sollash made boxes, the factory took up four or five shops in the Hackney Rd but they packed up when Mr Sollash got old. You see that bull on the Bull Hotel notepaper, that was the bull we used on butcher’s bills! ‘Dr.’ means ‘debtor’, it was standard on invoices then.”
“This is a World War II ration card from Osborne the Butcher. Harry Osborne was a German who changed his name during World War I, his son Len ran the business until he retired in the nineteen seventies.”
You may like to read about my previous visits to Gary Arber’s printing works:
Jo & Sheba Eferoghene, Novo Fashions
Many times I have dawdled in Wentworth St to marvel at the wonderful range of dazzling African fabrics on sale in the specialist shops that line this street, drawing me with their powerful allure, every one presided over by charismatic sassy ladies who are both the proprietors and style exemplars in this glamorous world of “wax” and “lace.”
Since 1608, this neighbourhood has been known as “Petticoat Lane” on account of the textile and clothing markets here and, even though the name was changed in 1830, this is still how it is referred to. Where once Huguenot weavers wove cloth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in a location that was heart of the Jewish clothing industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, today it is Nigerian and Ghanaian women that uphold the traditional identity of these streets as a centre for textiles. They have made it the pre-eminent destination in London for the variety and quality of African fabric on sale here.
So it was a rare pleasure for me when Trevor of Liverpool St Chicken (that I wrote about in February) introduced me to Jo & Sheba Eferoghene, two vivacious sisters who run Novo Fashions at the corner of Wentworth and Leyden St, a tiny treasure trove of a narrow shop stacked to the roof with every kind of colourful attractive fabric in pattern and lace. “My mother was a dealer in Nigeria, so we learnt it from her and it is something we both love to do,” confessed Sheba, her bright eyes – enhanced by eyeshadow in peacock shades – glittering in delight. She welcomed me graciously, gesturing freely to the dazzling kaleidoscopic displays lining every wall. “The African fabric, this is what we wear – and the demand is so great that there never can be too much!”, she declared in dignified celebration.
Next, Jo, the other half of this impressive duo, came to greet me from the rear of the shop – alive with charm, and emerging suddenly from the melee of vivid competing patterns resplendent in a poker dot dress. She explained that although as sisters they work together, Sheba takes more responsibility for the shop, while she, the senior, travels around the globe to buy the fabric. With the keen sensibility and shrewd authority of a born businesswoman, Jo sets out three times a year to visit the distant warehouses of the cloth salesmen who turn up in Wentworth St leaving their cards, because she wants to be certain of the quality of the fabric she is buying for her customers.
The biggest selling textile in Wentworth St is “wax” – meaning batik fabric, created using the technique whereby patterns are printed onto cloth in wax which resists dye. Elaborate designs are built up through successive layers of dying, forming bold geometric patterns in strong colours. It is indicative of our modern world that very little of this “African” fabric is from Africa, in fact the best “wax” originates from Holland. Sheba apprised me of this with professional expertise, laying out a length of lustrous mustard coloured cloth as an example of “Holland wax” manufactured by Vlisco in Helmond for the African market. China and Thailand also produce wax, and Sheba hauled specimens from the shelves creating an extravagant collage of coloured cloth for me to appreciate, before she revealed there is also an “English Wax,” though ironically this recently moved manufacture from Manchester to Ghana.
Cloth is sold in pre-cut lengths of six yards, sufficient to make an outfit. For a woman, six yards gives you two sarongs, a top and a scarf, or a boubou (long kaftan) plus a headscarf – whereas for a man, six yards is enough to make a buba (short kaftan) plus sokoto (trousers). Although the wax fabric is for everyday wear, Jo & Sheba also sell elaborate “lace” manufactured in Switzerland and Austria, expensive perforated cloth, sometimes richly embroidered and sequined, that is reserved for special occasions, weddings, birthdays and other celebrations.
Once you bear in mind that lace can be combined with wax in a single outfit, topped off with a contrasting cloth (a gele) tied around the head and also accessorized with costume jewellery, then you begin to realise the dizzying number of permutations that are presented by the fabrics in this tiny shop. This is where Jo & Sheba offer professional advice as stylists, because commonly people come to get fabric for an entire wedding party to dress everyone in toning outfits, yet with the most expensive cloth for the bride and groom. With so many different outfits for a single event, I can see that it takes a miracle of diplomacy to steer people away from potentially disastrous colour combinations towards a sympathetic scheme. Yet equally, the creative possibilities for mixing these patterns and vibrant tones are limitless.
Jo & Sheba Eferoghene have been trading in Wentworth St for eight years – dealing to neighbours and friends from their home before that – and through working together and demonstrating strength of character they have won loyal customers and built a reputation for discernment, crucial when the entire street is full of shops in direct competition. In the serious business of wax and lace, these two proud sisters know what they are talking about, and the photographs below of them modelling their own glorious fabric are absolute confirmation that they really know how to wear it too.
Sheba Eferoghene
Novo Fashions at the corner of Wentworth St and Leyden St.
The Eferoghene sisters, Jo, Helen & Sheba, celebrating Helen’s sixtieth birthday in their own fabrics.
Rose, Sheba & Jo at a wedding celebration for which Novo Fashions supplied the fabric.
Jo, Morayo, Rose & Sheba at a child’s tenth birthday party dressed in Novo Fashions’ fabrics.
New photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
