The vermin of Spitalfields
If you remember the squirrel and the rat that I wrote about last year, you will recognise the style of these paintings by the Belgian street artist Roa that I came across last weekend. With the building of the East London Line, Pedley St has become a forgotten cul-de-sac and I realised it was months since I had climbed over the iron footbridge from Cheshire St, walked under the smelly railway arch to turn left and make my way along the fragmented cobbled street – where on Sunday I was surprised by these enormous birds, startling in their scale and vitality. If you know where to look, you can even see them from Buxton St, a quarter of a mile away across the railway line on the other side of Allen Gardens.
At first, I thought they might be emus but, on closer examination, the body shape is like a goose or a diving bird. My opinion, bearing in mind their scrawny necks and febrile scavenging nature, is that that they are cormorants. Whatever birds Roa thinks they are, they seem particularly at home in this neglected area of Spitalfields, where nature has taken over and where the neighbourhood foxes have their lair. So I recommend you take a stroll along there yourself, because this is a work that deserves to be visited in its chosen location and seen with your own eyes.
In my enthusiastic haste to write to you about the squirrel and the rat last year, I quickly realised that I had neglected to notice several other paintings that Roa did at the same time. I am making up for it now by showing you this fierce bird in Spital St at the back of the Truman Brewery, this miserable lazy pig dozing on the pavement outside a tattoo parlour quietly ignored by a preoccupied smoker in Bacon St, this fine crow on a pair of doors also in Bacon St and this other little crow, round the corner on the shutter of the Brick Lane Boutique.
Roa is unique among street artists for his unsentimental images of animals that, in spite of their exaggerated features, reveal an understanding of the anatomy, movement and personality of the species in question. He has a real feeling for the living world, his creatures are always quick with life and I consider him to be an unlikely wildlife artist. In each example, the presence of Roa’s charismatic vermin in this extreme urban environment raises a question about our relationship with nature, that can tenaciously adapt, survive and thrive – supporting a variety of animal life here even in such apparently unsympathetic circumstances. There is an unease about their presence, a tension that provokes us to see the reality of the cityscape we have created. His creatures may be at odds with the city but they are not defeated by it, they are clinging onto life, tooth and claw. They demand our respect.
You can watch a timelapse film of Roa at work by night in Chance St on a painting of two pigs sleeping here. The short film successfully captures Roa’s natural draftsmanship in action and the immediacy of his spontaneous way of working through building up the image with feathery strokes, resulting in such lively paintings placed strategically in unloved corners of our neighbourhood.
For those completists among you, there is a Flickr site here with all of Roa’s works, including a rabbit in Curtain Rd that I missed. These are the vermin I like.
Shakespearian actors in Shoreditch
Nowadays, the neighbourhood is full of actors like moths batting around a flame. Some live here, others drop by. I only have to walk out of my front door and I am tripping over Toby Stephens in Hanbury St, Damian Lewis in Redchurch St, Reese Witherspoon shopping in the Spitalfields Market, Gael Garcia Bernal and Eva Green lunching at St John Bread & Wine, Sienna Miller wolfing curry in Brick Lane, Ralph Fiennes reading Dostoevsky in Leila’s Cafe, Julie Christie in Bethnal Green Tesco, Maggie Gyllenhaal in Ryantown, Gywneth Paltrow dining at Les Trois Garcons or Jennifer Aniston stepping into Shoreditch House. The list is endless.
In this respect, not much has changed since the sixteenth century when, before the West End and before the South Bank, this was London’s theatre district and most of the actors were residents. The very first playhouse, “The Theatre” opened in New Inn Broadway in 1576 and then “The Curtain” nearby in Curtain Rd in 1577. I have no doubt there were plenty who felt the neighbourhood was going downhill when these new entertainment venues opened up within a year of each other.
If you read my post about Shakespeare in Spitalfields you will know that many of his plays were first performed here at the Curtain Theatre and you may recall that I came upon the tombstone of Shakespeare’s younger brother Edmond in Southwark Cathedral last year – he was an actor at the Curtain and his young son was buried in the churchyard of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch.
It surprised me, after all these years, to come upon the collecting box (that you can see above) with the phrase “The Actors’ Church” when I visited the atmospheric unrenovated St Leonard’s Church recently. In the sixteenth century, it was simply the parish church for local actors but it has been entirely rebuilt since then and nowadays St Paul’s, Covent Garden is known as “The Actors’ Church” – I have attended it when friends of mine in the theatre have had ceremonies there. However, since I discovered who exactly is buried at St Leonard’s, I understand why they might wish to brag about it.
If you enter the main door of St Leonard’s (built by George Dance the elder in 1740) and turn right inside the body of the church, you can go through a pair of double doors to ascend a wide staircase which leads to a space at the top of the stairwell where you will find the monument to all the Shakespearian actors who were once residents of our neighbourhood and are interred here. It is an impressive roll call, taller than a man and graven in marble by the Shakespeare League in 1913, who I suspect were also responsible for the phrase on the collecting box.
Top of the list is James Burbage, who trained as joiner then became an impresario, building “The Theatre”, believed to be the first purpose-built playhouse, and whose sons became distinguished actors. I like to imagine James Burbage was like Tyrone Walker-Hebborn who runs the Genesis Cinema in Whitechapel today. Tyrone was a roofer who took on the cinema because he fancied running one, was not challenged by the holes in the roof and has now become a film producer. Similarly, James was not troubled with explaining the requirements of a theatre to a carpenter because that was his own trade, also he had an instinct for show business and became a theatrical producer in his own building. In the future, we will need to keep an eye on Tyrone’s children – if he has any – because the most exciting name on the list of Shakespearean actors is James’ son Richard Burbage who was the first to play Hamlet.
When I met Ben Whishaw – the most exciting Hamlet of our own generation – buying his Christmas tree at the Columbia Rd Market recently, I wish I had suggested he walk over to the churchyard of St Leonard’s, and maybe take a holly wreath, to admire the wintry flowers growing there nourished by the remains of our very first Hamlet, Richard Burbage, who was buried there in 1619. Certainly, I shall never be able to walk down Shoreditch High St and take the shortcut through the churchyard again without thinking that this is where Hamlet lies.
If, like “Orlando”, I could have lived through all these centuries, I might have written four hundred years ago that the neighbourhood was full of theatrical types, like moths batting around a flame – I could not walk out of my front door without tripping over William Shakespeare stepping out of the ale house with Ben Jonson, Edmond Shakespeare mourning his son at St Leonard’s church, Richard Burbage supping with his father James and brother Cuthbert at The Boars Head, Richard Tarlton shopping at the market, Gabriel Spencer in Bishoppes gate St, William Somers in the Spittal Fields, William Sly at the bawdy house and Christopher Marlowe getting arrested in Norton Folgate. The list is endless.
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I did not know it”. With this opening sentence begins Orhan Pamuk’s new novel that is published today. It is a book that has sustained me over the last few wintry months here in Spitalfields, as I have rationed myself through its five hundred and thirty-one pages. Rarely in my life have I ever read something new and known for sure that it is of such quality that it will still be read and celebrated a hundred years from now. The Museum of Innocence is such a book.
Sometimes I feel I have read too much and it has made me overly-critical of new books that come my way. I do wish I could enjoy more, but often I am simply embarrassed by literary fiction, embarrassed in sympathy for the authors, straining awkwardly for self-consciously literary effect (you are at liberty to include me in this category). So please forgive me if I confess that, as I write in these posts only about what I like personally, I have had little cause to write to you about recent fiction, until now.
Let me admit though, even before I read his new novel, Orhan Pamuk was one of my favourite living writers. It was his emotional autobiography of Istanbul that became one of my inspirations to begin writing Spitalfields Life, and I love his earlier novel “My Name is Red”, a lyrical murder mystery set amongst the miniature painters at the court of the Topkapi Palace in the sixteenth century. Consequently, it was with immense expectation that I came to this new book after waiting several years since his last novel “Snow”.
From the opening sentence of “The Museum of Innocence” you are swept up into a compelling drama, and before you know it you have discovered a whole new world and a complete society of characters – this is the upper middle class milieu of Istanbul in the nineteen sixties and it is the tale of a secret love, in which the protagonist is Kemal, indolent son of a wealthy family of industrialists. He is engaged to the docile Sibel from an equally well-off family but the woman he truly loves is Fusun, a distant cousin from an impoverished branch of his own family. Fusun is poetry incarnate, with grace and mystery and an irresistible natural beauty, so the two embark upon a raging affair.
How lively and idiosyncratic these people are, how vivid is their world and how appalling are their actions. You are hungry to know where it is going and you know it is going to go wrong. Then you take a breath, and realise that in the midst of all this ugly social manipulativeness, these characters are blind to the implications and outcomes of their actions – they are each innocent in differing degrees. You love them, and you want to shake them too, and you have to keep reading to discover just how much of a mess is going to result.
At first, I had the feeling I was reading a Muriel Spark novel with its delicate irony and acute observation of middle class foibles, then as the sensuousness of the illicit affair came to dominate I had the thought it could be a John Updike novel. Such is the elegant fluid quality of Pamuk’s writing that it transcends these comparisons, even if Vladimir Nabokov came to mind as the narrator tells of his obsessive love in appropriately obsessive interior monologues. Ultimately, “The Museum of Innocence” speaks of the specific truth of human experience in a style and form that is both the inevitable outcome of the story and entirely its own.
With this book, it is not simply a case of an inspired piece of writing by a novelist at the height of his powers, the book carries such reality that I felt afterwards as if I had lived through these events myself, and I shall never forget it. Orhan Pamuk’s achievement is to create an effective reconciliation of a contemplative literary voice with an exciting story that can never be second guessed. “Let everyone know, I’ve lived a very happy life,” these words of Kemal are the final sentence of Orhan Pamuk’s best book to date.
Photograph of Orhan Pamuk by Jerry Bauer
Twelfth Night in Spitalfields
Today is the day for clearing out all the Christmas clutter, sweeping up the pine needles, and tossing the dried up holly and mistletoe onto the fire and watching it crackle. Once upon a time, I used to throw all my cards in the bin, but somewhere over the years I had a change of heart on Twelfth Night and now I keep the ones I love best and put them up again next Christmas. Thus began a process that has continued ever since and my affection for some of these special cards that get put up on the chimneypiece year after year has grown and grown.
People do not send cards as much as they used to, in fact my best festive missive this year was a beautiful animated email from Rob Ryan of moving papercuts, which you can see here. Oftentimes, friends apologise to me for not having “got round to sending cards this year”, and I can cheerfully say “That’s fine! I have a half-dozen of yours that I put up every year.” For some friends, I have a complete archive of their cards going back years and years. Above you can see a small selection of my favourites. On the right is a card of Peter Blake’s Toy Shop Window in the Tate Gallery which he sent me himself in 1990. On the left is a handmade card from Lindsay Porteous, the Scottish Jaws Harp Champion. In the centre is a more recent hand painted portrait of Mr Pussy. I will not burden you with the sentimental story of every card.
Visitors sometimes gasp at the impressive array of my cards. “Goodness you are popular!” they exclaim and I have to disenchant them by explaining that most are old ones. I like it when friends recognise cards they had forgotten sending me, years ago. Inevitably, as time goes by, some of the cards in my collection are now from people who have died and I place these prominently as poignant reminders of those who have been important to me in my life – to be fondly remembered at Christmas.
Once I left home to go to college, my parents began sending me cards that would arrive the week before I returned for Christmas. As the years went by, their choices of card became more banal and routine as they picked up whatever was to hand at the Post Office near to the house in Devon where I grew up. Eventually, they stopped sending them at all, instead they would hastily scribble them out on Christmas Day and hand them to me with an apologetic smile. It gave me a sinking feeling. I put them all in a drawer, and I have around a dozen of these, that you can see below, some still with their envelopes. A couple are duplicates, where they bought boxes of cards and made them last several years, presumably unaware that they were giving me the same card every Christmas. At the time, these duplicates filled me with disappointment but now there is something especially touching about them, manifestations of their unchanging love for me.
Spanning the years between me leaving home and when my parents died, they reveal the passage of time in their declining handwriting – these cards are now the most treasured. All have almost the same message “Love Mummy and Daddy x”, though later as I grew into adulthood and my parents felt the imperative to modernity, the text was streamlined to “Love Mum and Dad x”. Significantly, they are almost always in my mother’s handwriting. Any form of writing was a chore to my father and I can hear him now, sighing and saying “Oh no, you do it!” to my mother. There are also a couple of revealing individual ones from each of them. I have a lonely girl selling mistletoe from a sentimental nineteenth century painting with “Love from Mummy x” inside the card and a painting of pheasants in bold masculine colours with the elliptical “From Dad” inside. I am grateful now for this rare example of his vigorous old school handwriting.
As my collection of cards has grown, it has become necessary on Twelfth Night to decide which to keep for next year. That is what I am doing today.
Marianna Kennedy, Designer
Behind this enigmatic facade – lettered W&A Jones – at 3 Fournier St, directly across from Christ Church Spitalfields is the showroom, workshop and home of designer Marianna Kennedy. You can even see Nicholas Hawksmoor’s spire reflected in the crown glass panes of her shopfront.
For years, I have walked past this place and wondered what goes on here, so I was very excited to go inside and meet Marianna in person. Entering through the door on the right, I found myself in a bare eighteenth century hallway, the austerity punctuated by a single bunch of mistletoe hung above the foot of the old stairwell, where I was greeted by a woman dressed in elegant charcoal tones who spoke with a soft Canadian accent. Marianna invited me upstairs and I followed in her footsteps until we arrived in her beautifully proportioned panelled living room. As I craned in wonder at the window, looking down onto Fournier St and raising my eyes to the steeple towering overhead, Marianna busied herself screwing up newspaper with professional aplomb. She was lighting a fire in my honour, so we could enjoy a fireside chat.
Observing my curiosity, Marianna offered me a tour of the house and then, with a playful levity, she was off again, vanishing from the room like the White Rabbit. I followed her up more stairs, round and round, with each storey offering a new perspective backwards into all the secret gardens and yards that comprise the spaces between these ancient houses in the shadow of the church. There are so many of these wonderfully irregular old staircases in Spitalfields, each with their own creaking language and each leading to surprises. I hope to explore them all, in time. At the top of this one, we turned sharply and ascended a final narrow flight, barely two feet wide, to pass through a door and arrive on the roof where, hidden behind the parapet, Marianna has created an astounding secret garden with a wildflower meadow. The rooftop is on a level with the bell tower of the steeple across the road, and Marianna stood patiently in the frosty meadow with all the mysterious poise of a heroine in a Wilkie Collins novel – while I gazed across the rooftops of Spitalfields, admiring the ramshackle irregularity of the old tiled roofs and chimney pots.
Once we were back by the fireside, Marianna settled into a wing chair illuminated by the morning sunshine and became eloquent in her affection for Spitalfields and the architecture of the old houses here. She explained that she first came to stay in Fournier St twenty five years ago while a student at the Slade. Marianna and her husband renovated 42 Brushfield St (the house with the sign “A. Gold, French Milliners”) before taking on the current property in a derelict state, prior to their repairs, ten years ago. Working with the Spitalfields Trust over all this time, Marianna has developed a sympathetic instinct for the enhancement of these wonderful spaces through the subtle use of traditional paint colours and careful choices of finish for panelling and old floors. “It is all about lack of ego, restraint and humanity,” she admitted to me. “You can make something look so natural, like it has always been there,” she explained, before adding significantly “- that is a very hard thing to do.” Certainly, Marianna’s home confirms this aesthetic, a working house with elegant functional spaces which serves as the ideal showplace for her snazzy furniture designs, that she delighted to show me (and which you can see on her website by clicking on her name at the top of this feature).
Above the fireplace in her living room is a huge bronze foliate mirror with tinted mercury glass to Marianna’s design, here in a corner is a chic little lacquerwork table with cast bronze legs, hanging against the stairwell window is a dazzling collection of colourful transparent resin casts of old plasterwork details and in each room there are the lamps of traditional design, also cast in brightly coloured resin – these lamps are her signature pieces. All these designs are unmistakeably contemporary and yet, because they are skillfully made by craftsmen using techniques that have been around for centuries, they compliment the interior of the old house perfectly.
As we made our way down to the shop to say goodbye, Marianna showed me her two prized chairs that she rescued from The Market Cafe when it closed and then, as we parted, I congratulated her on her achievement in recreating such a beautiful house. “It still has its magic,” she said with understatement, and, after my unforgettable experience that day, I can happily confirm her assertion.
Marianna Kennedy
Portrait copyright © Lucinda Douglas Menzies
Taj Stores, then & now
The gentleman on the right is Abdul Khalique, standing with his shop assistant, in the early nineteen fifties outside the very first Taj Stores in Hunton St (now Buxton St, where Allen Gardens is today). Abdul Khalique’s brother Abdul Jabbar, the founder of the grocery store, commonly known then as “Jabber’s Shop”, was a seaman who came here from Bengal (as it was called at that time) to Spitalfields in 1934 after leaving the navy. He worked in textile sweatshops for two years before opening his store, which he ran with his Irish wife Cathleen.
These sparse facts, which I learnt from Abdul Jabbar’s nephew Jamal (who never met his uncle), are all that is known of this brave man (pictured below) who travelled across the world and undertook the risky venture of starting a business in another continent, working so hard to build it up until his death in 1969. I think he would be quite amazed to visit the Taj Stores today in Brick Lane and see how his modest enterprise has blossomed.
I enjoyed the privilege of a tour of the aisles recently in the company of Jamal (Abdul Quayum), who has been involved in the family business since he was 17 years old, and now runs the store jointly with his elder brother Junel (Abdul Hai) and younger brother Joynal (Abdul Muhith). It is a wonderful experience simply to explore here and savour the rich selection of produce on offer from all over the world in the Taj Stores. I love to study the beautifully organised displays of exotic fruit and vegetables, printed sacks of rice, tall stacks of brightly coloured cardboard packages, cans, bottles and jars – each with their distinctive fragrances. Then there is the cooking equipment, towers of plastic jugs and bowls, steel pots and pans, and scourers. There is a compelling poetry to the vast intricate diversity of all the attractive things collected here and it is a phenomenal feat of organisation that the brothers have pulled off, bringing this huge range of supplies together from the different corners of the globe.
Jamal explained to me how the business is run nowadays between the three brothers. Jamal does the hiring and the paperwork, while Joynal takes care of the day-to-day buying and selling, and Junel runs the catering supply and wholesale side of the business. “The beauty of it is, we have different responsibilities. We are a modern muslim family and we treat each other like friends.” says Jamal proudly.
Their father Alhaj Abdul Khalique first came to the United Kingdom in 1952 as a student, before becoming involved in running the business with his brother. In 1956 the grocery shop moved to larger premises at 109 Brick Lane (opposite where Eastside Books is now), and then when Abdul Jabbar died in 1969, Abdul Khalique ran it with his brother Abdul Rahman. The pair are seen here looking every bit the sharp business men they were, in this handsome studio portrait taken at that time.
As the Taj Stores prospered, they moved again in 1979 to the current site at 112 Brick Lane and an era ended in 1994 when Abdul Khalique died – then the family business passed from the brothers who had emigrated to this country, into the stewardship of the current generation who were born here.
In recent years the stores have continued to expand with the purchase of the premises next door and this year sees the launch of the online business. When I took my portrait of Joynal, Junel and Jamal recently (reproduced below), the brothers explained to me that they now look back to their roots and, in the tradition of nineteenth century businessmen turned benefactors, they are funding a school and a mosque, building social housing, investing in irrigation and two cancer clinics back in Moulvibazar, Sylhet, Bangladesh – the home town where Abdul Jabbar set out from all those years ago when this story began.
Doulton Lambeth ware
More than twenty years ago, I bought a teapot almost identical to this one for £18 in a junk shop next to the Naval Academy in Greenwich. It caught my eye because it was in the same style as a jug in my grandmother’s house in Chard. This was how my collection of Doulton Lambeth salt glaze pottery began, and now I have innumerable jugs, mugs, teapots, pots and bowls, cluttering up my house in Spitalfields.
I like the modesty of these vernacular designs and, as they are completely out of fashion, I have acquired them cheaply over the years in markets, fetes, charity shops and ebay – where nobody bothers to bid for them. The large blue jug below went for just £5, and I bought the small two-handled bowl in Coppermill Market, Cheshire St for £8 last summer. Even the teapot above, which is in perfect condition with the original price still written in pencil inside the lid was just £22 on ebay, only £4 more than the one from Greenwich, with barely any appreciation in value in the intervening years.
I am fascinated by the small relief images which are made in moulds and applied to the form before firing. There is always a windmill and always a tree, and vignettes of life worthy of Thomas Bewick. The huntsman with a bugle chasing a stag around the bowl is perhaps the reason why no-one likes this stuff now, but I am not offended by this motif of past rural life, whenever it catches my eye I always think the stag is at the moment of escape. Most interesting to me are the recurring domestic scenes with an implied narrative or allegory. In one, a young man is pouring beer down his throat while a woman feeds her baby with a spoon and the other children gather round. Meanwhile, behind his father’s back, a boy prises open a barrel for himself and in the background a pig sleeps, underscoring this picture of the dangers of intemperance (or simply of the chaos of a young family), pertinently placed upon an ale jug. Equally, there are also images of an older fellow in a tricorn hat, sitting alone with a pipe and pint of ale, with a cat at his feet or a wise owl in a little bush, by contrast these figures speak of the contentment ( or loneliness) of age.
Beginning as Jones, Watts & Doulton in 1815, the company of potters founded by John Doulton and taken over by his son Henry, evolved to become Doulton & Co, Lambeth in 1827 when they acquired a property in Lambeth High St, where they continued to manufacture salt glaze ware until 1956. The sprigged jugs that I have collected are sometimes credited to Joseph Mott, Doulton’s art director from 1897, he had his own collection of old London ale jugs and based his designs upon these. However, there are similar jugs made earlier by Doulton from the 1830s onwards and many other London potteries including Deptford, Mortlake, Vauxhall, Fulham, T.Smith and Stiff, produced jugs in this style too.
So there you have my collection of Doulton Lambeth ware. I am aware that these jugs are a bizarre hybrid, essentially a form of seventeenth century retro created in the nineteenth century. But in their limited variety of colour and form, these austere pieces are also the culmination of a long tradition of salt glazed ware that has its origins in the domestic earthenware pottery that was once the standard for daily use by all Londoners. And I enjoy using them every day, though I am not expecting the Doulton Lambeth salt glaze ware revival will start any time soon.
