Clive Murphy, Oral Historian & Writer of Ribald Rhymes
Above a curry house in Brick Lane lives Clive Murphy, like a wise owl snug in the nest he has constructed of books and lined with pictures, photographs, postcards and cuttings, over the thirty six years that he has occupied his tiny flat. Originally from Dublin, Clive has not a shred of an Irish accent. Instead he revels in a well-educated vocabulary, a spectacular gift for rhetoric and a dry taste for savouring life’s ironies. He possesses a certain delicious arcane tone that you would recognise if you have heard his fellow-countryman Francis Bacon talking. In fact, Clive is a raconteur of the highest order and I was a willing audience, happy merely to sit at his feet and chuckle appreciatively at his colourful and sometimes raucous observations.
I was especially thrilled to meet Clive because he is a writer after my own heart who has made it his business to seek out people and record their stories. At first in Pimlico and then here in Spitalfields through the sixties and seventies, Clive worked as a “modern Mayhew, publishing the lives of ordinary people who had lived through the extraordinary upheavals and social changes of the first three-quarters of the century before they left the stage.” He led me to a bookshelf in his front room and showed me a line of nine books of oral history that he edited, entitled Ordinary Lives, as well as his three novels and six volumes of ribald verse, all of which are available through his own publishing company Brick Lane Books. I was astonished to be confronted with the achievements of this self-effacing man living here in two rooms in such beautiful extravagant chaos.
Naturally, I was immediately curious of Clive’s books of oral history. Each volume is an autobiography of one person recorded and edited by Clive, “ordinary” people whose lives were revealed in the telling to be compelling and extraordinary. They are A Funny Old Quist, memoirs of a gamekeeper, Oiky, memoirs of a pigman, The Good Deeds of a Good Woman, memoirs of an East End hostel dweller, A Stranger in Gloucester, memoirs of an Austrian refugee, Endsleigh, memoirs of a riverkeeper, At the Dog in Dulwich, memoirs of a struggling poet, Four Acres and a Donkey, memoirs of a lavatory attendant, Love, Dears! memoirs of a chorus girl and Born to Sing, memoirs of a Jewish East End mantle presser. The variety of subjects was intriguing and bizarre, and Clive explained his personal vision of creating a social panorama, “to begin with the humblest lavatory attendant and then work my way up in the world until I got to Princess Margaret.”
Much to Clive’s frustration, the project foundered when he got to the middle classes, and he coloured visibly as he explained, “I found the middle classes had an image of themselves they wanted to project and they asked to correct what they had said, afterwards, or they told downright lies, whereas the common people didn’t have an image of themselves and they had a natural gift of language.” I was curious to understand the origin of Clive’s curiousity, and learn how and why he came to edit all these books. And when he told me the story, I discovered the reasons were part of what brought Clive to England in the first place.
“I lived a sheltered life in Dublin in a suburb and qualified as a solicitor before I came to England in 1958. My mother wanted me to be solicitor to Trinity College where her father was Vice-Provost but I had been on two holidays to London and I’d fallen in love with the bright lights. I wanted to see a wider variety of people. So as soon as I qualified I left Dublin, where I had been offered a job as a solicitor at £4 and ten shillings a week, and came to London, where I got a job at once as a liftman at a Lyons Corner House for £8 a week and I have lived here ever since.
I was staying in Pimlico and there was a retired lavatory attendant and his wife who lived down below, and they invited me down for supper. He had such a natural gift for language and a quaint way of expressing himself, so I said ‘Let’s do a book!’ and that was ‘Four Acres and a Donkey’. Then I was living in another house and by complete chance there was another retired lavatory attendant, a woman who had once been a chorus girl, so I did another book with her, too, that was ‘Love Dears!’
At that time there was an organisation called Space which let out abandoned schools and warehouses to artists. In 1973 I answered their letter in The Times and they found me this empty building, it was the Old St Patrick’s School in Buxton St. I lived in the former headmaster’s study and that’s where I recorded my first East End book. I had nothing but a tea chest, a camp bed and a hurricane lamp. There was no electricity but there was running cold water. Meths drinkers used to sit on the doorstep night and day, and at night they would hammer on the door trying to get in. I was a bit frightened because I had never met meths drinkers before and I was all alone but gradually three artists came to live in the school with me.
Then I had to leave the school house because I was flooded out and, after a stint on Quaker St, I saw an ad in Harry’s Confectioners and moved here to Brick Lane in 1974. The building was owned by a Jewish lady who let the rooms to me and a professor from Rochester University who only came to use his place in vacations, so it was wonderfully quiet. There was a cloth warehouse on the ground floor then which is now the Aladin Restaurant. Every shopfront was a different trade, we had an ironmonger, an electrician and a wine merchant with a sign that said ‘purveyors to the diplomatic service.’ The wine merchant also had a concoction she sold exclusively to the meths drinkers but that wasn’t advertised.
I thought when I came here to Spitalfields I was going to be solely a writer, I had taught at a primary school in Islington but very soon I became a teacher of children with special needs here. Occasionally, I used to go in the middle of the night to buy food from a night stall outside Christ Church, Spitalfields called ‘The Silver Gloves.’ I had no money hardly and I used to live off the fruit and veg thrown out by the market onto Brushfield St. But I found it exciting to be here because I found lots of people to interview. I had already written two novels and I was busy recording Alexander Hartog and Beatrice Ali, and I was happy to be learning about them, because I did lead a very restrictive life before I came to England.”
It interested me that Clive now writes poetry because I think he is a poet at heart and there is an unsentimental appreciation of the poetry of the human condition that runs through all his work. He chose his subjects because he saw the poetry in them when no-one else did and the books, recording the unexpected eloquence of these “ordinary” people telling their stories, bear witness to his compassionate insight.
As a writer still in the early days of writing my pen portraits, I was curious to ask Clive what he had learnt from all his interviews with such a variety of people. “The gamekeeper said to me, ‘You mean you don’t know how to skin a mole?'” Clive recalled with relish, evoking the gamekeeper in question vividly, before returning to his own voice to explain himself, “I am amazed that we are all stuck in our little worlds – he really thought everyone would know that. It wasn’t just the knowledge that I learnt from people, it was their outlooks and personalities.”
Clive gave me copies of his two East End books and, as we sliced open a box I was delighted to discover “new” copies of books from 1975, beautifully printed in letterpress with fresh unfaded covers and some with a vinyl record inside to allow the reader to hear the voice of the protagonist. I could not wait to go home and read them, and listen. Now I will never be able to walk down Brick Lane again without thinking of Clive Murphy, living there above the Aladin Restaurant, as a beacon of inspiration to me while I am running around Spitalfields pursuing my interviews.
With Clive’s kind permission, I shall be publishing an extract from each of his two East End books, The Good Deeds of a Good Woman by Beatrice Ali (An account of a mixed-race marriage) and Born to Sing by Alexander Hartog (A picture of Jewish life by a failed tenor who believes in re-incarnation), over the next fortnight to give you a flavour of his remarkable work.
Clive Murphy’s oral histories are now available at Labour and Wait and his ribald rhymes can be purchased from Rough Trade East.
Danny Tabi, furrier
At six yesterday morning, Brick Lane was empty of people but Danny Tabi, the last furrier in Spitalfields was already at work when I arrived at Gale Furs. When Danny started in 1963, hundreds worked in the fur trade and the streets thronged with workers from all the different garment industries making their way to work at six, but now there is just Danny. Others who merely import furs call themselves furriers, but Danny is the only one still working here with a lifetime’s expertise, at an occupation that must surely rate as one of the oldest known to mankind. I sat alone with Danny in the empty workshop at Gale Furs as the sun rose over Whitechapel and he told me his story.
“I was walking down Fournier St looking for a job one day and above the Market Cafe was a furrier, he interviewed me and said could I start on Monday. So I got a job starting the next week. Then, as I came out of there and walked back towards Brick Lane along Fournier St, when I got to Gale furs at number 8, I asked if they had any vacancies. The proprietor, Solly Shamroth, said “yes” and I could start the following day. So I went there rather than the other place and this was how my association started with Gale Furs. If I had turned left rather than right that day in Fournier St, my life would have been different.
I started at the firm, working with a guy called Max Ross, as a nailer. That’s a person that used to shape the furs by stretching them when they were wet. I picked up the nails off the floor and dampened the skins for him, then I used to go downstairs and pick up the needles from between the cracks in the floorboards with a magnet – nothing was wasted. In those days when you started in a firm like that you did everything, swept floors, did errands and got the cheese rolls too. Also on Friday my job was to clean three cars!
I could tell you a million stories of the street and the customers, and all the characters. Everyone had their special way of doing things. Morrie Klass, who taught me how to cut, he turned up for work in detachable collars, immaculately turned out, dapper like a city gent. He read The Guardian and The Times and spoke perfect Queen’s English. Maxie Ross, the nailer, he was a chain smoker always with a cigarette or a cigar. He used to leave a pint of milk on the window sill until it had congealed for a week and drank it sour because he loved it that way. He picked up nails and pieces of string and made use of it. He couldn’t walk past something he could use. One time, he had to go to a funeral but he had no proper black tie, so he wore a bow tie! Maxie was champion ballroom dancer, and he and Morrie won competitions in the ballrooms. That’s where Maxie met his wife, and his son used to play drums for Joe Loss. That was how I got to go to West End clubs because he got complimentary tickets and passed them onto me as a young lad of sixteen and seventeen.
Along the way I learnt all my skills and, as the factory started dwindling in workers, I found myself taking the places of the people who had left. People just retired but no-one came in to the trade, instead they were encouraged to go into office work.When you couldn’t replace them, you had to do certain things yourself. I found myself doing more cutting, making and sewing too. I learnt my trade during the sixties and seventies, then I started using my skills in the late seventies and eighties. During the sixties when there were eighteen people working in the furriers – it was a beautiful thing – turning out coats, collars, cuffs, stoles and hats, you name it we made it. It wasn’t just the work, it was the atmosphere.
Every single time you make a garment, it’s different because fur is a living thing. You work from scratch, one skin at a time, every time – when you match up pieces, the fur has to be same length. It’s definitely an art, you can’t explain what you did from arriving in the morning to going home at night. I’ve enjoyed my work over the years. I made a white collar from fake fur for Princess Diana. I’ve worked for lords and ladies. Katy Price is wearing one of my coats at present, and Kate Moss and Jemima Khan both have pieces of my work. They go to the West End stores to buy stuff but we make them here.
I was born in 136 Brick Lane in the attic in a one room flat, my mother lived there with me and my brother Ray. We weren’t brought up in luxury. At one point we lived in a hostel in Cable St because housing wasn’t available to mixed race families. I’ve worked since I left school, I never claimed benefits and I can count on my two hands the days off. I must be one of the longest-serving people in Brick Lane, I’ve always worked here.
I love walking down Brick Lane at five thirty in the morning, I can hear echoes from the past of when I walked down there suited and booted. I get emotional. People have moved away but I have always been drawn to the area. This used to be the dregs here, but here’s nothing wrong with Brick Lane. I’m pleased to see lots of young people come now. I pop out to get something and there’s crowds of young people. It’s incredible.”
Danny worked for Gale Furs for thirty years before he took it over, and now he is the proprietor and sole employee. Leaving the factory premises at 8 Fournier St in 1994 (it has become a private house now), today Danny works from a small nondescript second floor space on Whitechapel High St. On one side are the rails of coats and other pieces that have come in for renovation and repair, with prime garments displayed upon stands as superlative examples of the furrier’s art, and on the opposite side is the work table, pierced with infinite lines of little holes created when Danny transfers the pattern to the skins. Everywhere, scraps of fur are piled and paper patterns hang in sheaves from the wall.
Danny is justifiably proud of his skill and accomplishments and retains an appealing enthusiasm, shrewd yet bright. I was fascinated to watch Danny work at his cutting table, displaying natural dexterity, confidence and love of what he does, using all the tools that have always been with the company, many of which are a hundred years old or more, but still serviceable and in fact perfectly suited to the job. I felt privileged to be there in this sanctum and to understand that Danny extended his trust and welcome to me.
“It’s going to die a death” he declared without any regret, explaining that the Chinese are now the whole world’s furriers, as he took me through all the various tools of his trade demonstrating the purpose and telling the story for each one. A new world opened to me as Danny outlined the enormous number of processes and techniques that meet in the creation of garments of fur. We kept eye contact, like teacher and pupil, as he took me through what it takes to make a fur coat that might require seven weeks work. Picking up the tools, he mimed how he used them, specifying each of the distinctive requirements of the job and sometimes losing words when there were none to describe the methods of how you work with fur, and I had simply to follow his expert demonstration.
Today, Danny does all the different jobs and possesses all the skills of the eighteen staff that once worked for Gale Furs. He is widely respected for his talent and forty-seven years of experience at the high-end of an exclusive luxury trade. No-one is learning from Danny and, irrespective of your feelings about the origin of fur, there is an undeniable poignancy about the culture of the furrier which is an intricate refined expression of a certain vein of human ingenuity, with its own language, history and tools, and of which Danny is now the last exponent in a place where once so many people pursued this ancient trade.
The tool at the top is for stretching skins. Danny has used these scissors his entire career, they have a perfect balance and silken movement, and are over a hundred years old.
These irons which Danny uses as weights are over a century old too.
Newly acquired rolls of the highest quality silk lining, dated last day of December 1948.
Danny uses this machine from the Fournier St factory, the cloth with pins on it has been there since before he started in the trade. Note the Bishopsgate phone number carved into the wooden base on the right.
The tool on the left is a homemade device for snapping a razor into two triangular blades, it works perfectly. The other two are stretching blocks for stretching skins into shape, the one in the centre is marked with its owner’s initials.
An old weaver’s stool of traditional design that Danny uses when he sits at his sewing machine.
The magnet Danny used to pick up pins from the floor when he started work at Gale Furs in Fournier St in 1963.
Spitalfields Antiques Market 2
Continuing this occasional series, I am delighted to introduce four more traders from the antiques market held each Thursday in Spitalfields. With all kinds of drapes and flags hung up, antique carpets spread out, rails filled with old clothes and lines of stalls piled with antiques, bric-a-brac and curios spreading onto the floor, it is a breathtaking spectacle. And, since most of the traders are also collectors and are naturally curious to see what everyone else has for sale, they all go prowling around and the whole event spontaneously ignites into a great big party.
This debonair gentlemen with the intrinsically cool attitude goes by the name of Tem. As a photographer and theatre designer, he comes upon all kinds of interesting props that he uses in his work and sells them afterwards on his stall. Specialising in nineteen thirties and forties items, Tem cherishes a vintage pair of sunglasses with mirror-reflective lenses and gold-plated frames in mint condition with their original case, a movie star accessory that can be yours for the right price.
This friendly bearded fellow in the Guernsey is Steve Sorrell who has been buying and selling furniture from his home in West Sussex for thirty years, originally dealing in Art Deco, now he sells anything quirky. Steve became passionate when I asked him about the market, clearly relishing the social event as the highlight of his week, he broke into a big smile, waving his arms and declared with magnanimous enthusiasm “It’s the best antique market in London, without a doubt. There’s a great buzz here and it just keeps getting better and better!”
This flirty lady modelling her pink silk bag is Annie Curtis Jones who has enjoyed a distinguished career as a costume designer for films for over thirty years. A popular and highly respected figure among the traders, Annie confided, “I love the market, I like to bring different stuff every week. I come here when I’m not working on a project and you meet all sorts of remarkable people.” Recently Annie has been making cushions and bags using her vast collection of antique silk scarves. Every one is unique and they are exclusive to Paul Smith and Liberty but you can buy them direct from Annie at her stall.
This guy showing off his spiffy jacket is Jeremy Freedman, photographer, market trader and all round charismatic entrepreneur. Jeremy trawled the charity shops of the Lake District while he was there on assignment last month to top up his stock of “tut and tat, schmutter and antiques.” I was more interested in an early edition of Babar than the vintage soda syphon, complete with a stack of refill canisters that Jeremy wanted to sell me, but when he described it as “a Summer of soda” it suddenly became an enticing proposition.
All photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Alex Preston, novelist & banker
Alex Preston is a natural writer who speaks in wonderful long sentences with all the profusion of his adverbs, adjectives and subclauses in their correct places, and as a result I found myself struggling to keep pace with his easy eloquence as I scribbled frantically in my scruffy little notebook during our conversation over coffee at St John. In his choice of dual professions, Alex presents something of Jekyll & Hyde identity because while our bankers are the pariahs of the age, our novelists have always been one of the glories of the nation. Consequently, I was thankful to be having a conversation with Alex Preston the novelist.
There are many noble precedents, including Kenneth Grahame author of “The Wind in the Willows” who was secretary to the Bank Of England and T.S.Eliot who worked for Lloyds Bank, while Alex also cites Wallace Stevens who was President of the Hertford Life Insurance Company and Franz Kafka who dealt in insurance too, though I am not sure that the life of Kafka, in spite of the brilliance of his vision, is one that many would choose to emulate.
Alex is enjoying a productive Spring with his first novel This Bleeding City published last month and his second baby born on the night of the publisher’s launch party. He looked sprightly in an extremely well-cut suit as he arrived at St John and I was flattered that someone might choose to take time out from the world of high finance to speak with me. Living in Spitalfields, the City of London is on my doorstep and yet the financial world remains a blank enigma that I witness whenever I walk over to the Borough Market and find myself wandering like a ghost among the men in suits hurrying with such inexplicable purpose between the glittering palaces.“The city is designed for the abstractions it pedals,” explained Alex, “When you walk out onto a trading floor, you are walking from the real world into an abstract world of numbers that is deliberately unknowable.”
I was not any wiser. So I asked Alex how, like Charlie the protagonist of his novel, he came to work in the City after studying English Literature at Oxford under the celebrated liberal critic and writer Tom Paulin. Ten years on, Alex can admit, “I had my head turned,” with the candid qualification,“It’s ridiculous to make these decisions at twenty.” Alex’s novel is a testament to the seductive power of the City, a tale of an intelligent young man from a middle class background encountering an elevated milieu at university and then following his peers into the ambivalent world of finance. Somehow I was expecting a glittering tale of ambition and greed like “American Psycho” or “Bright Lights, Big City,” but Charlie in “This Bleeding City” has more in common with Leonard Bast the young clerk in “Howards End,” with a fragile emotionalism that retains the reader’s sympathy even as you question the character’s choices.
For a few years, Alex lived in Wilkes St and worked for ABN Ambro in the glossy new building on the site of the old Spitalfields Market. Now that he lives in Kensal Green, he looks back to this time in Spitalfields when he and his housemates celebrated their birthdays in the private bar at The Golden Heart, “I loved living here so much, nowhere else in the city does the fun life come up against the work life so closely. From my office I could look down onto Spitalfields Market and see people coming out of The Golden Heart. It was galling to be here when the crash came.”
“Having things fall apart among people who were so overworked, and putting in such long hours yet who had so little vocation or feeling for their jobs, combined with the necessity to blank out all the finer things, no time for their friends or family, meant that the fragile self-fulfilling optimism which existed turned to panic and despair very quickly.” said Alex darkly, evoking the psychology of the crash that he witnessed at first hand, in one of his famously erudite sentences.
As we walked past the ABN Ambro building where Alex saw it happen, I reminded Alex that this is also where they filmed the car commercial in which a lost young man carries the contents of his desk out in a box that breaks scattering his possessions onto the pavement, prompting him to break into song affirming the power of positive thinking, before he gets into his shiny new car and drives off to the Highlands of Scotand. Whenever I see this commercial, I always wonder what he is going to do when he reaches the wilderness. In confirmation of this notion, Alex pointed out the two shops selling bicycles and camping gear that he always noticed, strategically positioned directly opposite the entrance of ABN Ambro in case any employees should require a quick escape.
Beneath the bright surface of Alex’s intellect I detect a quiet melancholy that feels a little strange to discern in someone who has achieved success early in life. I think Alex lived a lot between the ages of twenty and thirty, years coinciding with the disappointing first decade of this new century and colouring his vision with an elegiac tinge that belies his youthful nature. As we walked through the narrow streets from Spitalfields towards the Bank of England to take the photographs, Alex talked about Kenneth Grahame both as a very successful banker and equally as someone who needed to explore that other world of Ratty and the whimsical riverbank characters in Cookham, far from the city – contrasting Grahame’s career with Eliot as the poet forced to do something grubby. Hearing Alex’s internal debate dramatised in this way, I was compelled to ask the obvious question, “Are you a novelist or a banker?”
Graciously acceding to my impertinence with a shy grin, Alex replied, “At dinner parties I am a novelist rather than a banker.” In a city as expensive as London, it can be a struggle to make a living as a novelist unless you are bestselling author, especially when you have a wife, two babies and a family home in Kensal Green to support, but with “This Bleeding City” creeping up the WHSmith top ten in Liverpool St Station I hope it will not be too long before the Dr Jekyll can triumph over the Mr Hyde in Alex’s career, even if he spends the rest of his writing life exploring their struggle within his own psyche.
Jim Heppel, New Spitalfields Market
I left my home near the Old Spitalfields Market early and walked East for an hour through Bethnal Green and Hackney Wick, as the dawn came up and the empty streets filled with people, until I reached the New Spitalfields Market where I had the honour of a breakfast with Jim Heppel, the Chief Executive of the Market Tenants’ Association, at seven. Jim joined the Spitalfields Market on 11th February 1983 and retires this week after twenty-seven years service that included masterminding the move to this new site on Walthamstow Marshes in 1991.
In spite of the vast scale of the trading operation, as Jim stood grinning like a schoolboy to have his scarf tied round his neck by his secretary I realised the atmosphere in the Tenants’ Association office was closer to that of a small family business, with plenty of affectionately cherished quirks and idiosyncrasies displayed by the long time employees. Without a doubt, Jim is the least corporate executive I ever met.
As we set out across the car park from the office towards the market structure that loomed in front of us, filling the field of vision entirely, I could see the trading aisles crisscrossed by a hundred fast-moving forklift trucks, receding into the far distance beneath the yellow vaulted steel roof. At the entrance, I was dazzled by the spectacle of armies of traders dealing more fruit and vegetables that I could dream of. Then, once we entered the trading area, people ceased their labours which were all-engaging the second before and came over to shake Jim’s hand in recognition of the unique role he has played in the history of the market.
It was a touching sight to witness these men open up to Jim with exuberant smiles and to recognise that the market enjoys a vigorous life as a human community which is as vibrant as it ever was. But even more remarkable to me at first was the strange air of familiarity about the whole scene. The stacks of crates, the busy traders, the trashed boxes and spilled produce, even the scavengers scrabbling for stray tomatoes in the car park, I recognised all these from my memories of the old Spitalfields Market and Mark Jackson & Huw Davies’ photographs taken there in 1991.
As we walked through the market, I found myself looking over my shoulder at the forklift trucks careering like dodgems in every direction but Jim walked with relaxed assurance, owning the space as if he were a ring master at the centre of his own personal circus, entirely unafraid of collisions with acrobats or stray elephants. He wanted to be photographed beneath the clock that was all they brought from the old market yet, as I was introduced to men who were six generation fruit and vegetable sellers, I realised the market itself is an enduring social organism that has greater longevity than the buildings and their fixtures.
Back in Spitalfields, even nearly twenty years after the move, there remains a sense of absence that something which defined the place for centuries has gone. But the market has not disappeared, I am happy to report that like the island which sailed away it still exists and thrives. More than this, the island has grown to become a continent, because while the old market provided ten acres of trading there are now thirty-two acres, providing employment for fifteen hundred people. And, although in recent years supermarkets have taken 80% of the fruit and vegetable trade, New Spitalfields Market has been re-invigorated by new traders of diverse ethnicities who now make up 60% of the tenants.
In this microcosm of the world, fruit and vegetables from every corner of the globe are traded by European, Asian, Afro-Caribbean, Turkish, Chinese and Egyptian traders (among others), creating a marketplace of Babel. A dignified Hasidic Jewish gentleman passed me clutching a Horseradish root in one hand while his behatted colleague proudly carried a box of fine pink Pomegranates, in preparation for Passover, and reminding me how essential fruit and vegetables are to the cultural vocabulary of almost every people. It filled me with a vertiginous sense of wonder to be at this turning point of the world, where so much produce passes through, coming from farmers on its journey to the people who will eat it.
After breakfast in the Floral cafe, Jim and I retreated to the peace of his office which was empty of people by nine in the morning after the night’s work. He explained that Spitalfields Market was created by a royal charter in 1682 signed by Charles II, which meant that only Parliament could alter the charter when the move was proposed, and so Jim spent two and half years in Westminster seeking the approval of both the House of Commons and House of Lords on behalf of the traders.
Jim is a phlegmatic yet good-humoured man with whom it is very pleasant to spend time. He seemed remarkably placid for someone who has spent his life bringing conflicting parties to agreement and managing the move of the market that caused plenty of controversy in its time. In these last days now before his retirement, I was touched to sit alone with him as he explained modestly that it all happened because he failed his eye test for the Merchant Navy. Instead he found himself working as Secretary to the Traders’ Federation at the old Covent Garden Market and then in 1974, when that moved to Vauxhall, he had the opportunity to travel around Britain visiting all the regional markets. These visits and the sense of markets as communities of people that he experienced on these trips, touched Jim in some way, because at this point in his story he changed his tone and turned to me, realising what he really wanted to say.
“I fell in love with the industry and the trade. As you walk around the market, it’s like a small village where you know virtually everyone and everyone knows you. We’re off the road here in our own private world in the New Spitalfields Market. I think the traders can be a bit insular because it’s a very competitive business and since market prices can alter by the hour – every price is negotiated every time like the old stock exchange.” After this discreet summation, Jim considered, to add what he had learnt,“One of the most interesting things now is that it is such a mixture of people, Christians, Muslims, Hasidic Jews and other cultures too – yet if anyone spills a load, everyone comes to help. Outside there is religious conflict but here in the market everyone works together.”
Once upon a time the small streets of Spitalfields were crammed with articulated lorries every night and on the restricted site there, the market could never have held its own against the supermarkets. It was the move achieved under Jim’s brave stewardship which permitted expansion and ensured its survival.
We have learnt to despise the marketplace as an image of the world, but Jim changed my mind because in contrast to the corporate dominance of the supermarket, the New Spitalfields Market thrives as a collective enterprise of traders which exists supplying smaller independent businesses. Over coming weeks, I am planning some return visits to interview the proprietors of the oldest family businesses here and learn their stories, now I have found my way from Old Spitalfields to New Spitalfields.
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Hot Cross Buns from St John
For reasons that do not merit explanation, I cannot eat chocolate – which means that Easter celebrations revolve instead around baking, Simnel Cakes, Easter biscuits and especially Hot Cross Buns. This weekend, Justin Piers Gellatly at St John Bread & Wine in Commercial St baked the first Hot Cross Buns of the season, but I almost forgot on Saturday morning because I was too preoccupied sitting in bed watching the Blue Tits flying in and out of the birdbox outside my window. Then, in over-affectionate playfulness, Mr Pussy, who is moulting his Winter coat now and getting frisky, succeeded in drawing blood from my fingers with his sharp claws as I was pulling my socks on, before I ran over to St John to get my hands on a couple of the hotly anticipated buns.
The lovely pair of buns fitted snugly inside a small brown paper bag from St John, clenched in my sweaty fist as I made my way home to enjoy them with a cup of tea, before the rain clouds burst upon Spitalfields. I think there is an archetypal perfection to the archaic criss-cross design of Hot Cross Buns that is the bakery equivalent of those Elizabethan half-timbered buildings. Even as I unrolled my crumpled bag to admire them, an aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg greeted me, a scent that drifted through the house as I sliced up my precious buns and put them under the grill.
Purists might expect me to wait until Good Friday for Hot Cross Buns (first recorded under this name in 1733) as symbols of the Christ’s crucifixion, while Pagans enjoy them as mystic illustration of the four quarters of the moon, the symbol of the goddess Eostre. Whichever way you choose to look at it these buns are delicious toasted on one side with a little butter.
There is a chunkiness about these specimens from St John that is especially satisfactory, with the cross applied in sweet chewy dough speckled with nutmeg and the whole thing glazed nicely to catch the Spring sunshine. I have been disappointed sometimes with Hot Cross Buns that are too insubstantial, the ones you buy at the bakery in four or six and they get squashed flat if something gets put on top of them in the shopping basket, before dissolving like Spring clouds into cotton wool upon first bite.
On Saturday, there was no disappointment in the air as I bit into the buns that have real substance. The sweet fluffy texture of the spicy dough is enlivened with raisins and candied fruit, and contained by the thin glazed sugary crust that has just enough bite to be interesting without ever becoming challenging, while the whole thing is offset by delicious thick strips of chewy pastry that make the cross. Sweet but not too sweet, spicy but just spicy enough and substantial without becoming heavy – Justin Piers Gellatly has excelled himself again, demonstrating exemplary judgement in balancing all the qualities of the Alchemical mix that go to make the perfect Hot Cross Bun.
On Sunday afternoon, I returned to St John and left again with another small brown paper bag clenched in my fist containing two more Hot Cross Buns. This time I ate my buns untoasted and with a little Spring Rhubarb jam, providing a refreshing fruity contrast to the chewy dough, perfectly suiting the brief spell of sunshine that accompanied my Sunday tea. Now I have a week of potential ahead of me. A Hot Cross Bun with a slice of cheese is an old favourite and, moving beyond that, I can add Blackcurrant jam to the slice of mature Cheddar on my Hot Cross Bun. You can be reassured, I have accommodated to the lack of chocolate in my Easter celebration magnificently, without any significant gap in the densely woven tapestry of my personal existence in Spitalfields.
Columbia Road Market 28
Whenever there has been a day of sunshine, I have managed to snatch a few hours in my garden to undertake a little tidying up, reinstating the edge of beds where the rocks and scallop shells have sunk into the ground, and pulling out weeds before they get a chance to become established. My garden had been sad and neglected for months, but now it looks cared for again and is ready for the long anticipated rush of growth we shall see over the coming weeks. Already the pattern of sunshine and showers is upon us, and when I look down from the upper windows onto my garden there is an exciting contrast between the rich black earth and the green of new leaves that grow more vivid every day, almost glowing with fluorescence. I think it is all about green at this time of year and I know of no other place on earth that can match the variety of tones which create the symphony of green that is the English Spring.
Today I was at the market by eight and the possibilities now are quite overwhelming, so I found myself compiling a mental list of plants that I hope to add to my garden over coming months. This week I bought these sublimely scented Lily of the Valley (Convallaria Majalis), three pots for £5, with the ambition to create a drift of them in coming years under a Japanese Maple that my predecessor planted. I think the fragrance of Lily of the Valley is almost my favourite scent in the world, along with beeswax, sweet peas, lemon verbena, tea roses, frankincense, myrrh, and my cat’s ears.
