The ‘Drawing London’ Group in Spitalfields
One afternoon last Winter, as I was walking through the lobby of the Barbican library to return my books, a beautiful drawing caught my eye among the works exhibited there. It was a fine architectural drawing, with precise spidery lines and subtle watercolour tints, by the wonderfully named Shelby Dawbarn and the exhibition was organised by the ‘Drawing London’ Group.
I wrote a compliment in their comments book and, to my surprise, within days I received an invitation to the opening party where I had the honour of meeting the talented Shelby Dawbarn. She explained that, although she had once studied architecture and attended Liverpool College of Art, her talent in drawing had only come to fruition recently, after a long gap in which she had a family and a career. It was inspiring to meet someone who had recently achieved the fulfilment of a gift that had lain dormant for years – discovering so much pleasure in drawing today.
Each month, the ‘Drawing London’ Group, which has around fifteen members, meets in a different part of the city and spends a day drawing on the streets. Once I was introduced to Bill Aldridge and Marion Wilcocks who (with Shelby) founded the group spontaneously in 2003 when they met on a course at the Prince’s Drawing School, I took the opportunity to invite them over to Spitalfields and last week it was my pleasure to welcome them to the neighbourhood.
When I arrived in the morning to greet them at St John, Nicky Sherrott was already hungrily tucking in to a bacon sandwich as sustenance for a serious day’s drawing and I was captivated at once by the group’s collective anticipation at the potential which lay ahead. Even though these were Londoners and it was merely one day’s drawing, there was the feeling of an expedition. On these occasions, the members of this gentle and freewheeling drawing group leave their usual lives at home and set out, enjoying the camaraderie of the freshly sharpened pencil, to look at life afresh. It is a small adventure and an intensely civilised one. Last Friday, clutching their fishing stools and drawing boards, they spread out around the Spitalfields Market and the surrounding streets, and set to work.
When I returned later, the members were all shyly clutching their artworks, but I managed to persuade them to step out from the lunch queue and onto the steps of Christ Church, where Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Jeremy Freedman took their portraits with their drawings, which you can see below.
Holding up her sketchbook in the wind with her curls blowing everywhere, the charming Wendy Winfield was especially pleased to be back in Spitalfields, and fascinated by all the changes, because she first came here while she was at art school in London between 1947-53, when this was the Jewish neighbourhood. “In those days, you left home to go to art school at sixteen,” she confided, “it was very exciting!” Such was her passionate curiousity that Jeremy offered to take Wendy inside the Sandys Row Synagogue, one of the last fragments of Jewish Spitalfields.
“I love London, my mother was a Londoner. She thought London was the only place in the world and she instilled it in me. So I am grateful for the chance to travel round London and see the parts other people don’t know,” explained Marilyn Southey modestly, a woman of natural elegance who had passed her morning drawing in the market, discovering a consensus from the other members that the elaborate cast iron roof makes it a challenging subject. Meanwhile, Nicky Sherrott, the keen-eyed retired lawyer who enjoys bacon sandwiches, confessed to me that after twenty years working in the city, she appreciated the opportunity drawing gave simply to look at things closely. For her, the finished artwork was secondary to the privilege of concentrated looking.
After lunch, I accompanied the group on the private tour of the Sandys Row Synagogue hosted by Jeremy, and it was refreshing to find myself amongst people for whom, although they had all lived plenty of life, the common factor was that they retained their sense of wonder. I could have spent the whole afternoon talking with these folk, but before long it was time for them to return to their drawings and make the most of the rest of their day in Spitalfields.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Joan Naylor of Bellevue Place
This is Joan Naylor, photographed last year in the garden of her house in Bellevue Place, the hidden terrace of nineteenth century cottages in Stepney featured in “The London Nobody Knows,” that I visited recently in the footsteps of Geoffrey Fletcher.
Joan moved into Bellevue Place with her husband Bill in 1956 when they were first married, and they brought up their family there. “When we first moved in it was known as ‘Bunghole Alley’ and no-one wanted to live there,” she recalled with a shrug. Originally built as a crescent of cottages around a green which served in the Victorian period as tea gardens, Charringtons built a brewery on the site, lopping the terrace in half, constructing a wall round it and using the cottages for their key workers. Enclosed on all sides, there is a door in one wall that led directly into the brewery, which remains locked today, now the brewery is gone.
Joan’s husband, Bill, was a load clerk whose job it was to devise the most efficient delivery routes and loads for the draymen on the rounds of all the Charringtons pubs in the East End. When Joan arrived, the brewery workers started early, commencing each day with a few pints in the tap-room before beginning work, and Bill was able to pop home through the door in the wall at nine o’clock to enjoy breakfast with Joan.
“If you looked out of the bedroom window, you could see a pile of wooden barrels a hundred foot high, and the smell of stale beer permeated the air.” said Joan, recalling her first impressions.“Nothing had been changed in the house. The brewery brought in the decorators but we still had a tiny bathroom off the kitchen and an outside loo. It didn’t bother me. When you think we brought up six of us in that house – I remember the ice on the inside of the window! We used to cut up old barrels to light the fire and they’d burn really well because they had pitch in them.”
It is with pure joy that Joan remembers the days when there were around a dozen children, including her own, living in Bellevue Place. They all played together, chasing up and down the gardens, an ideal environment for games of hide and seek, and there were frequent parties when everyone celebrated together on birthdays, Christmas and bonfire night. “There was always a party coming up, always something to look forward to,” explained Joan, because it was not only the children who enjoyed a high old time in the secret enclave of Bellevue Place.
Although unassuming by nature, Joan became enraptured with delight as she explained that, since everyone knew each other on account of working together at the brewery, there was a constant round of parties for adults too. It was the arrival of Stan, the refrigeration engineer and famous practical joker, to live in the end cottage, that Joan ascribes as the catalyst for the Golden Age of parties in Bellevue Place. You can see Stan in the pith helmet in the photo below. When all the children were safely tucked up asleep (“We had children, we couldn’t go out“), the residents of Bellevue Place enjoyed lively fancy dress parties, in and out of the gardens, and each other’s houses too. “The word would go around from Stan and we would go round the charity shops to see what we could find, but no-one would tell anyone what their outfit was going to be. It was lovely. Everybody had fun and nobody carried on with each other’s wives.” Joan told me.
Let us not discount the proximity of the brewery in our estimation of the party years at Bellevue Place because I have no doubt there was never any shortage of drinks. Also, number one Bellevue Place, the large house at the beginning of the terrace, was empty and disused for many years, and the brewery even gave the residents a key, so it could become the social venue and youth club for the terrace, with a snooker table, and a roof top that was ideal for firework parties. With all these elements at their disposal, the enterprising party animals of Bellevue Place became expert at making their own entertainments.
There is a bizarre twist to Joan’s account of the legendary parties at Bellevue Place, because she was born on the twenty-ninth of February, which means she only had a birthday every leap year. So, when she did have a birthday, Joan’s neighbours organised parties appropriate to the birthday in question. In the photo below you can see her reading a Yogi Bear annual as a present for her seventh birthday, when she was twenty-eight years old. I hope Joan will not consider it indiscreet if I reveal to you that she has now at last reached her twenty-first birthday.
It is apparent that the mutual support Joan enjoyed amongst the women in her terrace, who became her close friends, and the camaraderie shared by the men, who worked together in the brewery – all surrounded by the host of children that played together – created an exceptionally warm and close-knit community in Bellevue Place, that became in effect an extended family. Even though they did not have much money and lived together in a house that many would consider small for six, Joan’s memories of her own family life are framed by this rare experience of the place and its people in this particular circumstance, and it is an experience that many would envy.
Last winter, Joan moved out of Bellevue Place for good, but she had become the resident who had lived there the longest and remains the living repository of its history. Last week, I visited her in sheltered housing in Bethnal Green where she told me her beautiful stories of the vibrant social life of this modest brewery terrace, while her son John, who is a regular visitor, worked on his handheld computer in the corner of the room.
“We were very lucky to have lived down there to bring up the family,” said Joan, her eyes glistening with happiness, as she spread out her collection of affectionate and playful photographs, cherishing the events which incarnate the highlights of her existence in Bellevue Place. She may have first known it as “Bunghole Alley,” but for Joan Naylor “Bellevue Place” lived up to the promise of its name.
Joan, as flapper, with her neighbour Harry.
Joan (holding the glass) and her neighbours as hippies.
Lil, Teddy and Tilly, Joan’s neighbours in Bellevue Place.
Joan with her husband Bill, and Mrs Boxall who had lived the longest in Bellevue Place at that time.
One of Joan’s birthday parties, with presents appropriate to her seventh birthday.
Joan Naylor
Columbia Road Market 33
The first weekend in May traditionally produces the most profitable Sunday’s trading in the entire year for the plant sellers of Columbia Rd. In spite of this morning’s cheery shouts – from the trader wishfully singing,“Rain before seven, dry before eleven,” – it was obvious they were all dismayed by the downpour that drove their customers away. I was there early among the hardy souls that could not keep away and our fortitude was rewarded by the astounding display of plants just waiting to be carried off the to fill the gardens of East London.
Incongruously, I was searching for some flowers to enhance a dry border against a sunny wall in my garden and I found these three plants which complement each other beautifully. The white flower is a hardy alpine variety of Phlox that grows low to ground and cost me £4. It has the softest grey-green leaves and the sharp white flowers have tiny purple rosettes at the heart. The blue flower is Lithodora, another hardy alpine variety with gentian-like flowers in finely differentiated tones of blue, for £5. These are both contrasted nicely with this tricolore Sage for £3, one of my favourite herbs, to be savoured for its subtly variegated red, green and white leaves as well as its culinary potential.
Pearl Binder, artist & writer
“City and East End meet here, and between five and six o’clock it is a tempest of people.”
This is Aldgate, pictured in a lithograph of 1932 by Pearl Binder, as one of a series that she drew to illustrate “The Real East End” by Thomas Burke, a popular writer who ran a pub in Poplar at the time. Among the many details of this rainy East End night that she evokes so atmospherically with such economy of means, I could not help noticing the number fifteen bus which still runs through Aldgate today. In her lithographs, Pearl Binder found her ideal medium to portray London in the days when it was a grimy city, permanently overcast with smoke and smog, and her eloquent visual observations were based upon first hand experience.
This book was brought to my attention by Pearl Binder’s son Dan Jones, the rhyme collector, who explained that his mother came from Salford to study at the Central School of Art and lived in Spread Eagle Yard, Whitechapel in the nineteen twenties and thirties. It was an especially creative period in her life and an exciting time to be in London, when one of as the first generation after the First World War, she took the opportunity of the new freedoms that were available to her sex.
In Thomas Burke’s description, Pearl Binder’s corner of Whitechapel sounds unrecognisably exotic today, “It is in one of the old Yards that Pearl Binder has made her home, and she has chosen well. She enjoys a rural atmosphere in the centre of the town. Her cottage windows face directly onto a barn filled with hay-wains and fragrant with hay, and a stable, complete with clock and weather-vane; and they give a view of metropolitan Whitechapel. One realises here how small London is, how close it still is to the fields and farms of Essex and Cambridgeshire.” From Spread Eagle Yard, Pearl Binder set out to explore the East End, and these modest black and white images illustrate the life of its people as she found it.
Her best friend was Aniuta Barr (known to Dan as Aunt Nuta), a Russian interpreter, who remembered Lenin, Kalinin and Trotsky coming to tea at their family home in Aldgate when she was a child. Dan described Aunt Nuta announcing proudly, “Treat this bottom with respect, this has sat upon the knee of father Lenin!” He called her his fairy godmother, because she did not believe in god and at his christening when the priest said, “In the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost…”, she added, “…and Lenin”.
Pearl Binder’s origins were on the border of Russia and the Ukraine in the town of Swonim, which her father Jacob Binderevski, who kept Eider ducks there, left to come to Britain in 1890 with a sack of feathers over his shoulder. After fighting bravely in the Boer War, he received a letter of congratulation from Churchill inviting him to become English. Pearl lived until 1990 and Nuta until 2003, both travelling to Russia and participating in cultural exchange between the two countries through all the ups and downs, living long enough to see the Soviet Union from beginning to end in their lifetimes.
Pearl left the East End when she married Dan’s father Elwyn Jones, a young lawyer (later Lord Elwyn Jones and member of parliament for Poplar), and when they were first wed they lived at 1 Pump Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, yet she always maintained her connections with this part of London. “Mum was trying to fry an egg and dad came to rescue her,” was how Dan fondly described his parents’ meeting, adding,“I think the egg left the pan in the process,” and revealing that his mother never learnt to cook. Instead he has memories of her writing and painting, while surrounded by her young children Dan, Josephine and Lou. “She was amazingly energetic,” recalled Dan,“Writing articles for Lilliput about the difficulties of writing while we were crawling all over the place.”
Pearl Binder’s achievements were manifold. In the pursuit of her enormous range of interests, her output as a writer and illustrator was phenomenal – fiction as well as journalism – including a remarkable book of pen portraits “Odd Jobs” (that included a West End prostitute and an East End ostler), and picture books with Alan Lomax and A.L.Lloyd, the folk song collectors. In 1937, she was involved in children’s programmes in the very earliest days of television broadcasting. She was fascinated by Pocahontas, designing a musical on the subject for Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. She was an adventurous traveller, travelling and writing about China in particular. She was an advocate of the pearly kings & queens, designing a pearly mug for Wedgwood, and an accomplished sculptor and stained glass artist, who created a series of windows for the House of Lords. The explosion of creative energy that characterised London in the nineteen twenties carried Pearl Binder through her whole life.
“She was always very busy with all her projects, some of which came about and some of which didn’t.” said Dan quietly, as we leafed through a portfolio, admiring paintings and drawings from his mother’s long career. Then as he closed the portfolio and stacked up all her books and pictures that he had brought out to show me – just a fraction of all of those his mother created – I opened the copy of “The Real East End” to look at the pictures you can see below and Dan summed it up for me. “I think it was a very important part of her life, her time in the East End. She was really looking at things and using her own eyes and getting a feel of the place and the people – and I think the best work of her life was done during those years.”
A Jewish restaurant in Brick Lane.
A beigel seller in Whitechapel High St.
A Jewish bookshop in Wentworth St.
A slop shop in the East India Dock Rd.
Pearl Binder’s self-portrait
Pearl Binder ( 1904-1990)
A Pilgrimage to Old Town
If you remember your Chaucer, you will know that April is the time to go on pilgrimages. As I have not been outside London since I went to Broadstairs for the day in August, I decided to seize the opportunity of the Spring weather to make a pilgrimage to Old Town to collect my trousers that I ordered last month. Taking the train from Liverpool St up to Sheringham, I walked five miles over the hills to Holt, a small town that exemplifies the term quaint. Here in Bull St, next to the fishmonger and the butcher was my destination.
On this dreamy afternoon, there were bluebells in the woods and rabbits in the hedges as I walked along lanes through attractive villages with fine churches built of flint, to arrive in Holt where second-hand bookshops and antique shops filled with Staffordshire figures beckoned. But my thought was only of trousers, and this kept my wayward footsteps directed upon the straight path that led directly to Bull St.
I rang the bell and Miss Willey descended the narrow staircase to welcome me into the shop. Once I saw all the clothes, I wanted to try on everything at once, but first Marie ushered me upstairs to have cup of tea and say “Hello” to Will Brown, who was working in the room above, cutting cloth. He was preparing all the pieces that make up each garment, ready for collection by the half-dozen machinists who sew the clothes together at home and deliver them back for Will to add the finishing touches later in the week.
For more than ten years, with remarkable strength of mind, Marie & Will have been working here in two small rooms above their shop in this remote corner of Norfolk making their heart-warming clothes, and, as a result, today this cottage industry is working at peak capacity, selling as much as they can produce. Their unlikely success is a testament to their hard work and perseverance over all this time, pursuing the distinctive vein of workwear that is their forte and which has established them as pre-eminent in the field. Designers from Levis and Burberry sneak up to Norfolk to get a feeling for what is going on and attempt to incorporate it, but while trends ebb and flow, clothes from Old Town are classics that never go out of fashion.
Informed by his knowledge of workclothes over the last century, Will Brown’s designs are not reproductions of vintage or in the style of any single period, they are a synthesis. Using mostly British fabrics, every single garment is made to order with rigorous quality control – because Marie & Will personally ensure that everything is done beautifully. Their clothes are functional without being mundane, elegant without being demonstrative, and lacking in unnecessary details while at the same time possessing good details. You can wear them everyday. Neither posh, nor bohemian, nor nerdy, they exude a levity that defies categorisation. This is the genius of Old Town.
As I sipped my tea, Marie & Will chatted as they worked, without ceasing from the job in hand, inhabiting a moment of constant amused animation, moving from one task the next and doing each thing properly. Marie was answering the phone, wrapping up parcels perfectly in brown paper and pressing clothes with a steam iron – all in a room barely six-foot square – and running downstairs to customers in the shop. As a couple, Marie & Will complement each other naturally. While Marie is flitting up and downstairs, holding it all together with indefatigable buoyancy, Will quietly works at the cutting table with efficient calm and gravity. You could say it is all a kind of performance, but you could equally say it is a lot of hard work too. The singular life they have created for themselves and the clothes they make are inseparable, and to their many appreciative customers, Marie & Will are the quiet heroes of drill and twill.
Once I had finished my cup of tea, Marie placed my newly made pair of brown tweed trousers upon the cutting table with discreet pride and I carried them downstairs to the empty shop where, all alone in a back room, I tried them on. The tweed was soft and light, with a pale brown cotton lining, bone buttons and the most beautifully embroidered button holes I ever saw. Pulling them on, my legs seemed to grow longer and as I pulled them up around my waist, I lifted my head to stand up straighter. Once they were buttoned, I pushed my hands into the pockets for the first time and raised my eyes to the mirror to admire the effect. Although these were my first pair of Old Town trousers, the effect was curiously familiar. They fitted perfectly and the design was such a masterpiece of understatement that I was at home in them at once.
Before I set out for the bus stop, Marie packed my trousers into a flat cardboard box that, if it were under a Christmas tree, would create the expectation of a doll’s tea set or a model railway inside. Striding across the town square with the magic box under my arm, I was grateful to Marie & Will, not only for my wonderful tweed trousers, but also because thanks to Old Town – although it is only Spring – I already have a reason to look forward to next Winter.
Spitalfields Antiques Market 6
This elegant woman surrounded by a kaleidoscope of vivid florals is Lucy Welsh from North London. “I was working in a cafe but I gave it up because I thought I could make a living by buying and selling,” said Lucy brightly, revealing a brave spirit of enterprise. “I sell the kind of thing that I would buy for myself,” she explained, making graceful gestures with her delicate fingers to indicate the subtle blue shades of her Poole Pottery coffee set for just £25 and the pair of Sanderson chintz curtains in near mint condition for a mere £30. Keen prices at this stall from a lady of taste and discernment.
This is Sue & Roy Watts, popular stalwarts in the market, who have been been getting up at three in the morning and coming every week to Spitalfields from Norwich for seven years. Sue deals in jewellery and Roy sells furniture. “We’ve been through the good, the bad and the ugly,” confirmed Roy with a caustic grin, because, once, he and Sue endured a hurricane whilst trading outside the market during the renovations. Adding, “I used to think I was selling antiques, but now I realise I am a Dickey Dealer!” with the philosophical smile of one who has survived tempests to arrive happily in the calmer waters of this present day.
This is Molly & Ellen, who can be seen working together in the market every Monday, Thursday and Friday. Molly’s family have been swagmen in the East End for generations and Ellen played here in the fruit & vegetable market when she was child. “I was born in Whitechapel and this used to be our playground – only the porters could control us because they were the only ones we would listen to.” confided Ellen with a proud smirk. Witnessing the fluctuations of the neighbourhood, Molly & Ellen are two women of great spirit who speak for a resilient local community that has lived through all the changes, and I hope to talk further with them both in coming weeks.
This intriguing individual with the thoughtful gaze is Ali Winstanley from Stoke Newington whose father and sister are both antique dealers, which means that, even though she only been trading for six months, she has an educated eye. I particulared admired the millefiori brooches that she has and you must look out for Ali’s collections of vintage purses, silver lockets and decorated toffee tins too. “I have a passion for all things curious and kitsch!” declared Ali enigmatically, offering a tantalising invitation to view the contents of her newly-minted blog that explores her enthusiasms. www.kuriosas.blogspot.com
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
The return of Roa, street artist
It was last Autumn that Roa’s squirrel and rat first caught my eye, and then earlier this year I discovered a whole host of vermin that the prolific Belgian street artist had painted in Spitalfields. Now, as you can see from this tall bird that appeared at the junction of Hanbury St and Brick lane last week, Roa is back again, and he has taken the opportunity to further populate our neighbourhood with his distinctive, finely drawn creatures.
I was walking down Hanbury St when I looked up, unexpectedly, to see Roa hard at work painting on the top of a motorised cherry picker, high above my head. He was adding the black hatching onto the white base coat and I craned my neck, watching as he used strokes of the spray can to make each of the individual marks that characterise his highly recognisable style. From the cradle of the cherry picker, at arm’s reach from the wall, Roa could only see directly in front of him, so in his left hand he clutched a sketch that allowed him to see the entire figure, while he wielded the spray can in his right.
Charlie Uzzell Edwards, curator of the Pure Evil Gallery, said that Roa’s intention had been to paint a heron but, after being asked if it was a crane by Bengali people – for whom the crane is a sacred bird – Roa morphed his bird into a crane to best complement its location on the wall of an Indian restaurant. Charlie also told me that Roa always asks before painting his creatures onto walls and has discovered that many owners are receptive to having large paintings enhancing their buildings, which can become landmarks as a result. The truth is that since these paintings take four to eight hours to complete, it is not an option to create them as a hit and run operation, especially if you want them to last.
Roa’s fine draftsmanship sets him above other street artists and I particularly admire the vivid sense of life that he imparts to his creatures, which transfix you with their wide eyes. The anatomical detail of these animals is lovingly achieved, yet they are unsentimental portraits of feral beasts that demand respect, resisting our simple affection. Their looming scale and piercing gaze can be challenging – charged with tension, their eyes always follow you. Similarly, any human figure you see in the vicinity of these paintings unavoidably exists in relation to them, a measure of their fierce intensity.
For the most part, Roa places his animals in unloved, unrecognised corners of the cityscape that are the natural home for scavengers and vermin. But once these spaces are inhabited, the creatures become the familiar spirits of their locations, living embodiments of these places, and our relationship with them parallels our feelings about the streetscape itself. Their powerful presence no longer permits us to remain indifferent.
Since Roa was last here, he had a sellout show in Paris and then returned to stay with Charlie for three weeks this Spring. Spending a week installing his show in the gallery, he did some huge paintings directly onto the walls, before setting out to find spaces and create new works around the streets of East London for two weeks. A pair of distinctive new creations that are definitely worth the visit are to be found in the Hackney Rd – the beaver and the rabbit are both poised in a quivering moment of life, ready to bound away. Placed on the sides of old buildings and peering out into the street, they enliven this stretch of the road for drivers and pedestrians alike.
Charlie explained that Roa is off to New York for his first show in America, at the Factory Fresh Gallery in Brooklyn. Taking no works with him, except a set of images, he will undertake a series of paintings there in the gallery and on the street. Once that is complete, he is going next to Mongolia to paint horses on buildings. Then in July we shall see him back in Spitalfields, when you can expect to see the next brood of creatures proliferating on the street, and I hope to accompany Roa and write an account of the painter at work, because I am curious to know if the mind of the artist is as febrile as his creations.
In the meantime, you can find a map below of all Roa’s street work in the neighbourhood, as the basis for a walk to take a closer look at these fascinating paintings for yourself.
A beaver in the Hackney Rd
A rabbit in the Hackney Rd
A fox at the Pure Evil gallery
A map of Roa’s paintings
