Dog days at Club Row Market
“… furry faces peering incongruously from the jackets of hawkers.”
Early in 1953, Kaye Webb and her husband Ronald Searle came to the East End one Sunday to write this account of Club Row Market for their book, “Looking at London and People Worth Meeting” published by the News Chronicle. A R. J. Cruickshank wrote in the introduction, ” This book rediscovers for us some of the odd places and odd faces of London that most of us have forgotten, if we ever knew them. The warm-hearted humanity of Kaye Webb’s writing and the tender sympathy of Searle’s drawings are beautifully matched.” I am delighted to republish this excerpt from their work for you.
Curious, considering our national reputation, that of all the street markets in London only one should sell dogs. This can be found any Sunday morning by taking a bus to Shoreditch High St and following your ears. a cacophony of whimpers, yaps, yelps and just plain barking will guide you to the spot where Bethnal Green Rd branches off to Sclater St.
There you may find them – the unclaimed pets of a hundred homes : new-born litters of puppies tumbling over each other in children’s cots ( the most popular form of window display) : “mixed bags” of less lively youngsters huddling docilely together in laundry baskets; lively-looking sheepdogs, greyhounds and bulldogs straining at the ends of leashes and furry little faces peering incongruously from the jackets of hawkers, who often look as if they’d be happier in the boxing ring.
The sales technique of their owners is almost as varied as the ware and almost always accompanied by much affectionate handling of the dogs. “It’s good for business and sometimes they mean it,” we were told by an impartial vendor of bird-seed who has been on the same pitch for twenty years. “Hi, mate, buy a dog to keep you warm!” said the man with the Chows to a pair of shivering Lascar seamen. “E’s worth double, lady, but I want ‘im to ‘ave a good ‘ome” or “Here’s a good dog, born between the sheets, got his pedigree in my pocket!” “Who’d care for a German sausage? – stretch him to make up the rations”, the salesman with the dachshund said, demonstrating too painfully for amusement.
R.S.P.C.A. interference is needed less often now. The days are gone when sores were covered with boot polish; when doubtful dogs were dyed with permanganate of potash; when, as tradition has it, you could enter the market at one end leading a dog, lose it half way, and buy it back at the other end. In fact the regular dog hawkers were never the ones to deal in stolen pets. “Stands to reason, this is the first place they’d come, and besides, look at the number of coppers there are about anyway.” But it is still possible to buy pedigree forms “at a shop down the road”, “just a matter of thinking up some good names and being able to write”.
The regular merchants, whose most frequent customers are the pet shops, are mostly old-timers ( some who have been coming for forty years and from as far away as Southend) and since a new law was passed insisting that all animal sellers should have licences, the ‘casuals’ are forbidden. But on the occasion of our visit the law had not yet been made and we passed quite a number of them. Most attractive was a red-cheeked lad with a spaniel puppy – “I call him Gyp; we’ve got his mother, but there’s no room for another, so my uncle said to come here.” Every time he was asked: “How much do you want, son?” he stumbled over his answer and hugged the dog closer. And when the would-be buyer moved on, his eyes sparkled with relief.
That day the dog section of Club Row was not very busy; it was too cold. But the rest of the market waxed as usual. Unlike its near neighbour, Petticoat Lane, Club Row Market has a strong local flavour. The outsiders who make the long journey to its “specialised streets” are mostly purposeful men looking for that mysterious commodity known as Spare Parts.
In Club Row itself are to be found bicycles, tyres, an occasional motor bike or a superannuated taxi. The police are frequently seen about here looking for “unofficial goods”. Chance St sells furniture and “junk”, Sclater St is a nest of singing birds, rabbits, white mice, guinea pigs and their proper nourishment. In the Street of Wirelesses the air is heavy with crooning, and Cheshire St is clamorous with “Dutch auctions”, or demonstrating remarkable inventions like the World’s Smallest Darning Loom (“Stop your missus hating you … now you can say ‘you might darn this potato, dear, while I have shave’ … and she’ll do it before you’ve wiped the soap off!”).
We found one street devoted to firearms, chiefly historic, and another where secretive, urgent men offered us “a good watch or knife”, implying that it was “hot” and therefore going cheap. But we had learned that this was “duffing” and the watch was most probably exactly the same as those sold on the licenced stalls just up the street.
At ten to one the market reaches a crescendo. One o’clock is closing time and many of the stallholders won’t be back until next Sunday. This is the time when the regulars know where to find bargains, but it needs strong elbows. Our way out, along Wheler St, under the railway bridge and past the faded notice which says ‘Behold the Lamb of God Cometh”, brought us back to the dog market. It was surprisingly quiet. On the other side of the road we spotted a small figure hurrying off with the spaniel puppy. It looked as if Gyp was safe for another week anyway.
Over the weekend, I found my copy of “Looking at London and People Worth Meeting,” when I opened one of my many sealed boxes of books that have sat in the attic since I moved in. It was my great good fortune that, Kaye Webb, the legendary editor of Picture Post, Lilliput and Puffin Books, was the first person to recognise my work and encourage me in my writing. When I used to visit her in her flat overlooking the canal in Little Venice, I remember she had Ronald Searle’s drawings of the bargees from this book, framed on her wall and I often stood to admire them.
I hope you will not consider it vain if I reveal that Kaye gave me this book and inscribed it under the title with my name and the text ” – also a person worth meeting!” Although Kaye died in 1995 and I have not opened the book for years, I am delighted to rediscover it now because it has been in my mind as an inspiration while I have been writing pen portraits myself. I was touched to think of Kaye here in these streets over half a century ago, and imagine Ronald Searle bringing out his sketchbook in Sclater St where I buy my fruit and vegetables every Sunday.
“…the rest of the market waxed as usual” ; a bookseller in action.
A Night in the Bakery at St John
At midnight, once the last diners have departed from St John Bread & Wine, the head baker & pastry chef, Justin Piers Gellatly, wheels his gleaming black motorcycle in from Commercial St and parks it in the middle of the floor. The restaurant that feels so large when it is full of customers seems to diminish once it is empty and all the chairs are stacked up. Now the chefs are gone from the kitchen, and until the clock on Christ Church, Spitalfields reaches eight o’clock in the morning, the place is the sole preserve of the bakers.
Justin greeted me with a cheery “Good Morning!” when I arrived shortly after twelve to join the team, as he and Luka Mokliak both set to work to make four hundred loaves and have them ready before the chefs reappeared in eight hours. At once, the huge porridge-grey lumps of gelatinous wet shining dough were hauled from the proving cupboard – where they had been sitting since they were made yesterday – and, using scales to ensure a consistency of size, Justin and Luka wasted no time in cutting up the living dough into pieces and shaping them into loaves.
First in the sequence of different loaves comes the sourdough, that takes longest to prove because it is a natural yeast. Once it is shaped, each piece of sourdough is placed into a proving basket made of a single spiral of bamboo that imparts the characteristic design of concentric circles on the dough. It is a furious business to prepare one hundred and sixty of these, but Justin and Luka make short work of flouring the baskets, shaping and working the dough with swift efficiency, folding it always inwards like the corners of an envelope.
As they filled the baskets, they arranged them on trays and stowed them under the table in racks, then, once the racks were full, the loaves were stacked on counters and spilled out onto the restaurant tables, to allow the yeast do its work for a few more hours before they go into the oven. After the sourdough, Justin and Luka set to work on the white, the rye and the raisin breads, which have live yeast added to the dough and prove more quickly. Sandwich loaves and baguettes are arranged on linens to prove, with the cloth folded in pleats to prevent the loaves sticking to each other.
By two-thirty all the loaves were shaped, and the warm air was thick with a delicious hazy aroma of dough, and by three o’clock the first white loaves were in the oven. The rhythm of the night changed as the first flurry of activity was complete and Justin shifted his attention to baking, while on the other side of the room Luka made dough ready for tomorrow night.
Using a peel (a long wooden paddle), Justin loaded the loaves into the four shelves of the deck oven. Each of the doughs are ready to go into the oven at different times, and their readiness can vary according to all kinds of factors, so Justin was constantly pulling, patting and sniffing his loaves to assess the progress of the proving process. Equally, each of the doughs need different baking times and conditions, which requires judgement too. Justin hovered for hours, sweating and pre-occupied, alternately checking the loaves in the oven and the dough in the racks – all in order to bring out one rack of loaves when they are baked, at the same time another batch reach the moment they are ready to go in. It is a challenging game of weighing all the variables and every night it is different. On this night, the white dough was a little dry, which required slower cooking and gave Justin concern for his loaves waiting to go into the oven.
As he tipped each loaf from the linen onto the peel, Justin shaped it up again gently, then scored the surface with a razor, which allows the crust to open up in the oven and permits the loaf to bloom. Justin used an old fashioned double-edged razor to do this because he has not found a knife sharp enough to match the resistance of the dough, which is sufficient to blunt two razors each night. “If you lose one of these everything stops!” he declared, holding up the razor with an absurd grimace. Once the loaves were in the oven, Justin flipped them onto the baking surface with practiced ease and, when the shelf was full, he sprayed steam from a diffuser into the oven to create the thicker, more leathery than crisp, crust that is characteristic of his bread.
At five, the butcher arrived with his delivery for the restaurant, placing it in the food store housed in the former secure vault of the building, that was once a bank. During the earlier part of the night the tempo of conversation had been brisk as Justin maintained a vigorous buoyant energy, but now in the earlier hours the pace was quieter. Justin was computing all the baking in his mind, while Luka was quietly measuring out flour and salt and water, and conscientiously stowing tomorrow’s dough in the prover. Last to go into the oven were the sourdough loaves as dawn came over Commercial St and, at five thirty, Justin opened the double doors of the restaurant, admitting the cool fresh air to ameliorate the steamy atmosphere of the baking. By the time the milkman arrived with his delivery, the first loaves were ready and Justin was relieved that the white loaves had turned out magnificently. Spontaneously, he held up a family loaf in triumph and I recorded the glorious moment with my camera.
Making up the bread orders in trays among the restaurant tables, Justin ended the night by taking the finished loaves from the oven as they were ready and stacked them up to create a satisfying display, still radiating heat and all discreetly crackling to themselves as they coolled down – an extraordinary sound I had never heard before. “That’s what first drew me to baking!” revealed Justin with a proud grin.
Accepting his gift of a loaf, I carried my beautiful sourdough home with me as the sun rose, grateful to have enjoyed the company of two fine bakers and witnessed a commonplace yet magical routine that has been taking place in these streets each night as long as people have been living in Spitalfields.
Columbia Road Market 32
Sitting in Philippa Stockley‘s garden in Whitechapel last week reminded me of Clematis Montana that grows so readily in East London. In recent years, I have seen them all over the neighbourhood spreading rampant on fences and even up onto telegraph poles. I photographed the fine specimen above growing in Woodseer St at the junction with Spital St, where I have admired it over successive summers as it has crept further and further along the fence. A remarkably hardy species, it is undiminished by the rigors of last winter. Rejected by some gardeners for its ubiquity and ridiculous profusion of flowers, I embrace Clematis Montana for its vigorous life. In my garden, there is an old Laurel that has grown to become a tree and this morning I bought myself a white Clematis Montana at Columbia Rd for £6 to climb up and smother it with flowers. Then for £5 I bought two Thyme plants, a Variegated and a Golden Thyme to plant together in a pot on my kitchen window sill. It was a moist occluded morning and by the time I arrived home, it was raining for the first time in weeks, which seemed slightly exotic, whilst being just what my garden needs now.
Rob Ryan at Somerset House
Last year, I visited Rob Ryan, the papercutting supremo at his studio in Bethnal Green, so when I heard he was transporting his entire workshop over to Somerset House for the duration of the Pick Me Up Contemporary Graphic Art Fair, this seemed the ideal premise to wander down the Strand and pay him a visit. It was a sunlit day that rendered everything in sharp focus, as if the city was setting out to resemble papercuts in celebration of this inspirational artist, for whom, undoubtably, a certain moment has arrived.
Leaving the sunlight, I entered the gallery where Rob will be working in his temporary studio for the next ten days like a monkey at the zoo. It is going to busy. Rob is going to get mobbed. It is going to be like feeding time at the penguin house. Visitors can see everything, peek over Rob’s shoulder as he sketches, then poke their noses in further to get an eyeful of all the cutting, printing, and other fiddly and fussy, fancy footwork that is involved in making his ingenious works. The dark subterranean space of the gallery had all the charisma of an old prison or an underground car park, but once I saw Rob’s cosy denim couch, his cutting table, his billboards, lamps and all the personal paraphernalia that is essential to his creative process, I was relieved to enter a familiar more sympathetic zone that goes by the name of Ryantown.
Even as I sat at Rob’s elbow while he drew branches on a tree in pencil, he had one eye on the photographers and cameramen prowling around, walking in slow motion. The dark space and powerful lighting made us feel as if we were enacting something, as if we were on stage or Rob Ryan was starring in the movie of his own existence. When asked to pose for the cameras, I thought Rob rose to the occasion with a bravura performance, as you can see above, assuming a bold, heroically comic stance that is worthy of Buster Keaton. Rob has no fear of clowning in the face of a media circus.
More than anything, Rob’s studio reminded me of the workroom in Bertolt Brecht’s house in East Berlin, where, on a series of different tables, the writer applied himself to a set of tasks simultaneously, plays, poems and letters. And so it is with Rob Ryan, only he has more projects underway than the British government. While Rob was drawing those branches on a tree on one side of the table, across from him a badge maker was furiously at work on the opposite side of the same table and half a dozen others of Rob’s loyal team were occupied in other tasks at different tables. On the next table, Rob showed me a larger paper cut in progress and, at another table, yet a larger one of a tree blowing in the wind. Then, he waved a fax of the template for “The Stylist” magazine for which he doing a cover, while explaining about the record label he is starting (Reacharound Records), his forthcoming tapestry designs and the plan to make his own customised Staffordshire figures.
I can barely keep up with all the work that Rob Ryan creates, his paper cuts, his prints, his ceramics and all the exquisite bits and pieces of graphic design for magazines and book jackets that keep cropping up everywhere. Yet most of all, I appreciate the silence and sense of calm that exists in Rob’s work. The intricacy is appealing, like lace or tapestry it delights the eye, and there is a childlike playfulness, almost an innocence to many of Rob’s pieces. They can be as delicate as cobwebs, and it is precisely this ephemeral quality which means they can also be read as memento mori. Every one a drama in microcosm, the emotional ambivalence of these evocations of the fleeting moment is what gives them such powerful resonance for me, melancholic and joyful at the same time. Rob has a benign eye and even the smallest works function as keepsakes to communicate his affectionate celebration of the transience and fragility of the human experience.
I could not reconcile the organised chaos of the studio and Rob’s attractive robust public persona with the intimacy of the work, until Rob explained that while he brings his ideas to the studio and works them out there, the source of his inspiration is elsewhere. His life in the world is his inspiration, not his life in the studio. Then Rob lifted up one of his beloved Staffordshire dogs, describing how he painted glasses onto it as a prototype for his customised Staffordshire figures. In doing so, he discovered that the ceramic spaniel had floppy ears corresponding to his own errant locks and that he had unwittingly created a self-portrait as a Staffordshire dog, and he roared with laughter at this daft notion.
Let me admit I am a fan. I love the wit of Rob Ryan’s vision of the world, picking up loose ends of pop and popular culture, from samplers and Staffordshire figures to pin badges and record sleeves, and weaving them all together like an extraordinarily clever bird to make a uniquely colourful nest that is unmistakably his own.
These tiles are available from Ryantown in Columbia Rd and www.misterrob.co.uk
Juke Box Jimmy, the Scots Cockney
Here is Jimmy in 1969 on his wedding day at St Dunstan’s, Stepney, aged twenty-three, full of life and surveying the world with a grin that indicates a man who knows his way around. Yet only ten years earlier, he came to London from Cowdenbeath where Jimmy’s father was a Scottish miner who wanted a better life for his three young sons. In their corner of Fife, the only sources of employment were the mines or the docks, both declining industries. With brave foresight, he quit his job and came alone to London to seek a new life for his family and once he had secured a job at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, they came to join him.
“I went to Daniel St School and when the teacher asked me to read a story from the book out loud, I said, ‘I’ll have to read it in Scots, Sir,’ and obviously all the kids laughed. I didn’t speak Cockney at that time.” admitted Jimmy, describing his first encounter with cultural displacement, adding that he picked up Cockney at once and never looked back since.
Jimmy has been a regular customer at E.Pellicci in the Bethnal Green Road since 1959 and once he had polished off his steamed pudding with custard, we walked briskly West together, weaving our way through the back streets over to 19 Old Nichol St.
In the nineteen sixties, Jimmy used to work up on the third floor as an optical technician, manufacturing spectacles at Prince’s Optical Company and enjoyed a high old time. “We did have some great laughs,” he confided with a twinkly smile.
In Jimmy’s animated company, the street transformed before my eyes as he pointed out the exact spot in Camlet St opposite, where the foreman became visible as he approached – explaining that someone always had to keep watch at the window, especially if all the staff of the spectacle factory were skylarking up on the roof making comedy home movies with a super eight camera, as they liked to do. Crossing to the corner of Camlet St, Jimmy placed his hand on a sill with a significant grin. Here lived the infamous Nell who threw a bucket of piss from this window onto any car that parked outside. Then, with a gesture in the direction of the site of a hut across the road where Marc Bolan played, Jimmy walked into Redchurch St, that was all cabinet makers in his personal landscape of memory, which, I began to realise, was more vivid to him than the mere shadow of our present day.
I ran at his heels scribbling in my notebook as we made our way East, Jimmy speaking to me as if to one blind, indicating landmarks that were visible only to him, referring to the names of pubs closed years ago and pointing out the bullet hole from the shooting of Ginger Marks in Cheshire St, in the wall that no longer stands. Passing the Cheshire St washhouse that is now flats, he said, “When we first came down from Scotland we used to come here for lovely baths.” Then he halted in his steps, pointed reverentially and announced, “This is where I spent my youth playing football on the grass.” Such was the limitation of my vision, all I could see was the bare concrete car park in front of us.
Next, we crossed Vallance Rd to arrive at the corner of Menotti St where Jimmy lived when he first arrived from Scotland. “There were five of us living in two rooms on the first floor, a front room and a bedroom. I slept with my dad on the lower bunk and my mum slept on the top bunk with my two brothers. The rent was too high and we had mice in there.” Jimmy recalled dispassionately, as he peered up expectantly to the blank first floor window of the newly built flats that occupy the site today.
Everything has changed on this side of the street, but a passing train drew Jimmy’s attention to the railway opposite. “It took a while to get used to that!” he said and looked over at the gloomy dripping arch that he was was too frightened to walk under alone as a child. He indicated the corner where his loyal friend Alan, who lived in Whitechapel, would wait until Jimmy was safely inside his front door before turning for home. Then we walked away into Weavers Fields in the afternoon sun.“This used to be all debris here – bombsites – we loved it,” declared Jimmy, gazing around at his former playground in delight.
“I feel most at home in Bethnal Green, my roots are here because this is where I was brought up. That’s why I come five days a week to Pelliccis, when you go in there you feel part of a family, and I love all the hospitality that goes with it. There’s two chaps I see on a Friday, they are my friends from seventeen years old. To me, it’s the best place I’ve found for food – when they close for a holiday, I’m lost, I don’t know where to go.”
Walking the streets with Jimmy, each place became familiar and domestic, and I envied his ability to strike up conversations with everyone who walked into his path. To Jimmy, the street is a social environment where he feels at home and can meet anyone as an equal. He expects to speak with everyone and his only disappointment is when he receives no response to his open-hearted entreaties.
Next day, I took the 309 bus from Bethnal Green to Poplar where Jimmy lives alone with his cat in a small flat, to see the juke box he is renowned for. The glistening handsome machine enjoys pride of place in the living room, lined with filing cabinets containing Jimmy’s vast and meticulously organised record collection. Unfairly dismissed from his job one day, Jimmy won justice in the form of a lump sum of compensation at a tribunal, allowing him the once-in-a-lifetime chance of an expensive purchase. So he bought the beautiful Seburg jukebox you see below, which he cherishes as a symbol of both his self-respecting independence and the love of music that fills his life today, even if he rarely plays the machine out of consideration for his neighbours.
“I’ve still got the Scottish tongue, though I don’t use it now,” said Jimmy, turning Scottish with complete playful authenticity to surprise me, as if he had switched records in his own internal jukebox.“Even when I go back to Scotland I find it too embarrassing to speak it in front of the Scots, but I always spoke Scots to my parents.” he explained. Then, changing tone and referring back to the moment when his father came South more than half a century ago, he added quietly, “I’ve got him to thank for everything in the first place.”
Spitalfields Antiques Market 5
This is Eric Holah who was a buyer before he was a seller. When he moved house, Spitalfields became the obvious place to sell off his clutter. “Council Estate Chic, that’s my look,” he explained mischievously, “I am obsessed with collecting, so this was my way to get rid of stuff.” Once he began selling, something unexpected happened, he became addicted to coming here, so now Eric buys to sell. “Last week, I had a week off and I couldn’t even walk through the market because I didn’t want to see who had my pitch – I knew if I saw it I would want to rearrange their stall,” revealed Eric, rolling his eyes in self-parody.
This is the radiant Caroline Dill who loves everything from the nineteen sixties, especially bold floral prints and vanity cases. Although it was her mum who grew up in the sixties and passed on the enthusiasm, with her long straight auburn hair and pale round face, Caroline Dill certainly has the look of that era. Among her selection of colourful vintage luggage, the original Pan-Am flight bag is especially covetable. “My flat used to be completely sixties, but by my partner’s not so keen on it, so now we meet somewhere in the middle.” she confided sagely, clutching her funky tangerine ice bucket protectively.
This is the gregarious and charismatic Griff, caught in a rare contemplative moment behind his stall. “I have been buying and selling since I was fourteen,” explained Griff, by way of introduction. As a sculptor, he started in the antique business by restoring broken stone sculptures and selling them, but has since diversified into wood, marble and granite sculpture too, as well as painting and ceramics. Griff has a keen eye and an amenable manner, and we enjoyed puzzled over the large earthenware pot you can see on the stall with two dragons incised in the glaze, which is his current object of fascination.
This genial gentleman is Davey, who came in September to give it a try and has been coming back ever since. “It was a new venture, I started selling off things I had collected over the years,” explained Davey, before he was interrupted by an enquiry about his Cheyne Patent Skirt Gauge. It was a costume expert who confirmed the gauge for sale on Davey’s stall dated from the flapper era, when hemlines went from the ankle to the knee in five years. “You can’t know everything about things from the past,” enthused Davey in delight, afterwards, “That’s why I came here, because there’s so much to discover.”
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
The Last Derelict House In Spitalfields
This is the view of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s spire upon Christ Church seen from the weaver’s loft at the top of 2 Wilkes St, the last derelict house in Spitalfields. Once upon a time people used to wander among the streets surrounding the shabby old church, savouring the romance of these ancient Huguenot houses that had seen better days and were then used as workplaces or left derelict. Those days are long gone, since Spitalfields got toshed up, the church was scrubbed behind the ears, the sweatshops moved out, skips appeared as renovations began and the value of these dwellings went through the roof.
Today, that process is almost complete, as I visited the last house in Spitalfields to be rescued from decay, where I met Peter Sinden who is overseeing the repairs on behalf of Anisur Rahman who bought the building in the nineteen seventies as a warehouse for his cash and carry business, Star Wholesale. When he bought it, the house had been a workplace for generations with boards nailed over panelling, false ceilings added and layers of flooring concealing the original floorboards. Behind all these accretions, the old structure remained intact and when the additions were removed, along with some of the fabric, in a former restoration attempt no-one bothered to dispose of any of the timber from the house. While elsewhere in Spitalfields, properties were being turned upside down, removing all evidence of the previous occupants, Mr Rahman did nothing and, as a consequence of his benign neglect, 2 Wilkes St exists today as an eighteenth century time capsule.
Stepping through the door, I was amazed by the multilayered textures that are the result of human activity throughout the long history of the building, especially the flaking paint that reveals every single coat taking you back three centuries. The house has a presence that halts you in your step. It grabs you and you lower your voice without knowing why. You stand and gaze. The reflected light from the street falls upon dusty old floorboards, visibly worn beside the windows where people have stood in the same spot to look down upon Wilkes St since the seventeen twenties – when the house was built by Henry Taylor who was responsible for the house next door and several others in the vicinity. Of all the old houses in Spitalfields I have been inside, this is the one that has best retained its atmosphere. All of its history remains present in the dense patina, that speaks of everyone who has passed through. The house retains its own silence and the din of the contemporary world is drowned out by it.
Peter Sinden is the proprietor of the Market Coffee House and has brought the expertise that he acquired in the work he did there. His first realisation in Wilkes St was that no timber should leave the house, because all the piles that lay around comprised the missing pieces of an enormous three dimensional jigsaw waiting to be put back together.
The central staircase of the house had collapsed but he rebuilt it with the original treads, on wooden bearers that support each step, in the traditional method, starting at the bottom and working his way up – just as a joiner would have done in the eighteenth century when all carpenters did their work on site. Today, a staircase would be manufactured offsite on “strings”(which are the side panels used to support the treads) and then reassembled in situ but, by reconstructing the staircase in the old manner, Peter was able to refit it in the way that was most complementary to both the irregularities of the building and the staircase. I was fascinated by the few surviving hand-turned stair rods, one sole example with a barley sugar twist for the first flight and others with a simpler profile for the upper flights. These will now be copied to complete the staircase.
I could see my own breath in the air as we descended into the dark musty cellar by torchlight, to enter a kitchen where the beam of light fell upon eighteenth century matchboarding and a flag floor, just as I have seen newly installed in other houses at great expense. The torchlight caught portions of an old dresser and a stone sink, beneath layers of dust, grit and filth – presumably abandoned in the nineteenth century – again similar to those I have seen in recreations of period kitchens. Any of Charles Dickens’ characters would recognise this space.
Peter explained that the floorboards above our heads had partly collapsed in the nineteenth century and been shored up, with another floor laid on top to level it up. Inserting new supports, he had lifted the ground floor eight to ten inches back to its original level. Elsewhere he has removed warped panelling and steamed it flat before replacing it. On the first floor, he took me into an intermediary space off the stairwell that linked to the rooms on either side, divided from them by partitions. This was a rare example of a powder room. Any of Henry Fielding’s characters would recognise this space.
You will never see a skip outside 2 Wilkes St because Peter’s approach is that of minimum intervention, he speaks of sympathetic repair rather than renovation. Always reusing the original timbers wherever possible, he is treating the project as you would the restoration a piece of fine old furniture. With an open-ended timescale and a sympathetic owner, work can progress slowly. “You take stock, be patient and you let the house speak for itself,” explained Peter, who is undertaking the painstaking work for Mr Rahman without remuneration. “He is a friend and I am trying to help him,” said Peter, talking plainly. Casting my eyes around the house, it was also easy to understand how this project could become compulsively engaging.
At the recent Annual General Meeting of the Spitalfields Trust, held in the building next door, Douglas Blain, chairman of the trust, spoke of the threat to these old houses in Spitalfields that he sees coming from new money today. Where once in Spitalfields a few enthusiasts renovated their houses, mostly doing the work themselves, now these buildings are a magnet for the super rich who may expect to strip out interiors according to their whims and, in doing so, bear no regard for the subtleties that make them special in the first place. In this context, 2 Wilkes St serves as a timely reminder of the authentic atmosphere of old London that Fielding and Dickens knew, which is incarnated here, witnessing the presence of all our forebears, and which can too easily be destroyed forever.
