Stephanie Sian Smith, headdress maker
When I visited Stephanie Siân Smith at her workshop in the roof of an old warehouse in Bethnal Green, she was working flat-out through the weekend to make a collection of ten different headdresses for an order to be delivered this week. Everywhere I looked there were feathers of diverse kinds, embroidery, lace, cloth and all manner of paraphernalia which Stephanie uses to contrive her extravagant headdresses, that have made such a hit in the capricious world of fashion this year. Meanwhile, her ginger cat, Marmalade Donkey Ron Jeremy Clarkson (given a different name by everyone at the house in Gun St, Spitalfields where Stephanie lives), strolled around among the feathers and debris, intrigued by the spectacle.
Stephanie comes from the tiny village of Hanbury in Staffordshire where her grandmother taught her how to sew. “It’s a lot do with the fact that I grew up in the middle of nowhere,” she revealed, outlining a rural childhood where she devised her own entertainments, and explaining something of her playful creativity that bridges handicrafts and high fashion with such bravura and charm. When Stephanie talks about her family, her father who is a steel fabricator, or her aunt that took her skunking in Alberta, you get a strong sense of Northern personalities, people who know who they are. And Stephanie herself is no exception, because while she enjoys spontaneous delight in what she does, a quality that is communicated by the fanciful drama of the headdresses, she is also taken seriously by Mrs Jones, an acknowledged arbiter of taste, who styles Kylie Minogue and The Scissor Sisters.
There is a feeling of liberation when you don a headdress, a licence for flamboyant, cheeky or mischievous behaviour. Irrespective of your clothing, the headdress is sufficient to set you apart from the world as participant in a surreal drama – the child within the adult is released. “People like to wear them at festivals,” explained Stephanie, and I can imagine that possessing one could be an invaluable confidence booster at a parties, especially if you were feeling a little shy. With her doll-like features, huge blue eyes and unkempt blonde hair, Stephanie is the ideal model for her headdresses and, several times during our conversation, when she tried one on to the gauge the effect, batting her long eyelashes flirtatiously and asking “What do think?”, I was stuck for a response. She looked like someone had taken her photo and scribbled all over the top of it with coloured crayons.
“Would you like to see my pom-poms?” offered Stephanie – a twinkle in her eye – throwing open a suitcase with a theatrical flourish to reveal dozens of those multicoloured woollen pom-poms that every child makes by winding two rings of cardboard with whatever spare yarn is knocking around the house. Jeremy Freedman, Spitalfields Life contributing photographer, accompanied me on this interview and, when the case opened, neither of us could withhold our delight at these super pom-poms which Stephanie made in a whole variety of sizes and gauges of yarn.
It was time to take pictures and when Stephanie, who is herself an experienced photographer, suggested Jeremy photograph her pouring pom-poms from her teapot with a woolly cosy into a giant teacup, it would have been disingenuous not to acquiesce. Jeremy and Stephanie did a dance in the sunlight, photographer and model, prancing in tandem, as they moved around the studio together in a glamorous scene reminiscent of playful sixties movies. There was an intoxicating sense of infinite possibility in the fleeting moment, an effervescence generated by the exhilaration of youth, the seduction of romance and the escapism of fantasy.
Once the impromptu dance was over, the time arrived to leave Stephanie and Marmalade Donkey Ron Jeremy Clarkson to complete the other seven headdresses in time for the opening of Mrs Jones’ shop. You have to admire Stephanie’s wit and confidence, “I am just doing it for myself, I like working with feathers,” she says plainly, before listing the gamekeepers of Suffolk, Staffordshire and even Balmoral, that she has befriended to keep her supplied with the materials of her trade, which are a byproduct of the making of game pies. Engaging with the emotional vocabulary of childhood dressing up games, Stephanie has refashioned these images, introducing rare humour into high fashion and having a lot of fun too.
As we shut the door on this colourful and bizarre world, I wondered if this could be the start of major trend for the cognoscenti to sport headdresses in daily life. Walking along Bethnal Green Rd in the noise and dust, I wondered if I should ask Stephanie to make me one to give me confidence when I visit the supermarket in Whitechapel. Hats off to the ingenious Miss Smith, making whimsical headdresses for Mrs Jones!
If you want to get one before everyone else does, you can visit Mrs Jones, and see more headdresses by looking at Stephanie Siân Smith’s blog feathersmith.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
In The Debtors’ Prison
Walking into a cell from an eighteenth century prison in Wellclose Square was an especially vivid experience for me because, if I had lived then, I and almost everyone I know would have invariably ended up in here at some point. Although almost nothing is known of the occupants of this cell, they created their own remembrance through the graffiti they left upon the walls during the few years it was in use, between 1740-1760, and these humble inscriptions still recall their human presence after all this time.
No one could fail to be touched by the emotional storm of marks across the walls. There are explicit names and dates carved with dignity and proportion, and there are dozens of crude yet affectionate images, presumably carved by those who could not write. There are also a few texts, which are heartbreaking in their bare language and plain sentiment, such as “Pray Remember the Poor Deptors.” The spelling of “deptors” after the model of “Deptford” is a particularly plangent detail.
About six feet wide and ten feet long, with a narrow door in one corner, and lined with vertical oak planks, this is one of several cells that once existed beneath the Neptune public house. There is a small window with wide bars, high upon the end wall, corresponding with street level – not enough to offer a view, but just sufficient to indicate if it was daylight. There would have been straw on the floor and some rough furniture, maybe a table and chairs, where the inmates might eat whatever food they could afford to buy from the publican, because this was a privately managed prison run for profit.
Wellclose Square was once a fine square between Cable St and the Highway, which barely exists any more. St Peter’s School, with its gleaming golden ship as a weathervane, is the only building of note today, though early photographs reveal that many distinguished buildings once lined Wellclose Square, including the Danish Embassy, conveniently situated for the docks. When the Neptune was demolished in 1912, two of the cells were acquired by the Museum of London, where I was able to walk into one this week to meet Alex Werner the curator responsible for putting it on display. “We’re never going to know who they are!” he said with a cool grin, extending his arms to indicate all the names and pictures that people once carved with so much expense of effort, under such grim conditions, to console themselves by making their mark.
It is a room full of sadness, and even as I was taking my photographs, visitors to the museum came and went but did not linger. In spite of their exclamations of wonder at the general effect of all the graffiti, people did not wish to examine the details too closely. The lighting in the museum approximates to candlelight, highlighted some areas and leaving others in gloom, so I took along a flashlight to examine every detail and pay due reverence to the souls who whiled away long nights and days upon these inscriptions.
In a dark corner near the floor, I found this, painstaking lettered in well-formed capitals, which I wrote on the back of an envelope, “All You That on This Cast an Eye, Behold in Prison Here Lie, Bestow You in Charety.” The final phrase struck a chord with me, because I think he refers to moral charity or compassion. Even today, we equate debt with profligacy and fecklessness, yet my experience is that people commonly borrow money to make up the shortfall for necessary expenses, when there is no alternative. I was brought up to avoid debt, but I had no choice when I was nursing my mother through her terminal illness at home. I borrowed because I could not earn money to cover household expenses when she lived a year longer than the doctors predicted, and then I borrowed more when I could not make the repayments. It was a hollow lonely feeling to fill in the lies upon the second online loan application, just to ensure enough money to last out until she died, when I was able to sell our house and pay it off.
So you will understand why I feel personal sympathy with the debtors who inhabited this cell. Every one will have had a reason and story. I wish I could speak with Edward Burk, Iohn Knolle, William Thomas, Edward Murphy, Thomas Lynch, Richard Phelps, James Parkinson, Edward Stockley and the unnamed others to discover how they got here. In spite of the melancholy atmosphere, it gave me great pleasure to examine their drawings incised upon the walls. Here in this dark smelly cell, the prisoners created totems, both to represent their own identities and to recall the commonplace sights of the exterior world. There are tall ships with all the rigging accurately observed, doves, trees, a Scots thistle, a gun, anchors and all manner of brick buildings. I could distinguish a church with a steeple, several taverns with suspended signs, and terraces stretching along the whole wall, not unlike the old houses in Spitalfields.
I shall carry in my mind these modest images upon the walls of the cell from Wellclose Square for a long time, created by those denied the familiar wonders that fill our days. Shut away from life in an underground cell, they carved these intense bare images to evoke the whole world. Now they have gone, and everyone they loved has gone, and their entire world has gone generations ago, and we shall never know who they were, yet because of their graffiti we know that they were human and they lived.
The return of Ben Eine, street artist
Ben Eine, the street artist famous for painting letters of the alphabet on shops in Shoreditch, told me that he had never been able to persuade more than three shopkeepers in a row to let him do his paintings on their shutters – but now, Jessica Tibbles, the enterprising curator of the Electric Blue Gallery in Middlesex St, in a act of heroic bravado, has persuaded twenty six to grant permission for Ben to paint a whole alphabet.
This grand endeavour, painting “a” to “z” sequentially on shutters along the entire length of the street, is a community initiative in which the traders of Petticoat Lane have come together to welcome an artist, bringing vibrant colour to these grey streets at the border of the City. On one side of Middlesex St are the dilapidated nineteenth century shops of Tower Hamlets, which exist in sharp contrast to the modernist block belonging to the City of London on the other side. Yet Ben Eine’s alphabet, which now adorns both sides of Middlesex St proposes a sympathetic conversation. His letters, deriving from nineteenth century woodblock display types, draw the eye to appreciate the details and proportion of the brick terraces, while the bright colour palette that he employs enlivens the geometric concrete edifice opposite. Even though the architectural language may in discord, Ben’s happy paintings humanise the environment, utilising a vocabulary that everyone can relate to, thereby unifying the streetscape.
Anyone that has walked through Petticoat Lane over recent Saturdays will have witnessed Ben at work on this magnum opus, and I enjoyed the privilege of his company last weekend as he worked his way from “n” to “r”. His Shoreditch alphabet has become inextricable from the identity of its location, and the popularity of these works have led Ben to paint them in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Osaka, Tokyo and Budapest. Ben admitted to me that he has now painted more than two hundred letters of the alphabet on shutters, and waved his dirty finger in the air playfully, proudly displaying the thickened skin upon the tip of his forefinger, where he presses the nozzle on the can, formed as his hand accustomed to spray painting over the years.
Ben grew up in South London, but he has affectionate memories of when his mother brought him to Petticoat Lane to buy him his first grown up leather jacket at eleven years old. Today he is excited to be back and bringing his witty enigmatic vision to play upon this famous street. It is the very first time Ben has painted lower case letters, a new departure that reflects the significance of this commission, and he showed me an outline of the complete alphabet he drew, that he carries in his bag for reference, though I never saw him look at it.
Each time he sets out, Ben puts enough spray paint for three letters in his bag, but does not decide in advance upon the colour combinations, both to avoid repeating preferred schemes and to invite a wild element into the composition. Ben works fast, each letter takes less than an hour, commencing by sketching the body of the letter, establishing the horizontal and vertical lines, then adding the background but leaving space for the outline of the letter. Although in the first instance Ben has only bought spray cans in colours he likes, he says the first two colours for each letter can almost be chosen at random. The most important decisions are the colour for the surround and the colour of the horizontal stripes within the body of the letter, the latter being the crucial element to the success of each painting as a composition.
I was wary of talking to Ben and interrupting his furious pace, but he read my thoughts, turning from the shutter with his can in hand and declaring generously with a cock-eyed grin, “You can ask me questions while I work. I can paint and talk at the same time.” Although he is a married man with three children, Ben retains the charisma of an artful street urchin, with his pants falling down, his glasses that are always squint and his habit of rocking on the balls of his feet, as if he might run off any time. There is a magic moment when he takes a can and gives it a shake while standing in front of a new shutter, taking in the potential with a single gaze. The intense shaking of the can manifests the accumulating thoughts in Ben’s mind. It is a rush of mental energy that culminates in the first lines he paints, defining the entire image, and drawn with such confidence, as if he were tracing an invisible image that was already there – which it is, in his mind’s eye.
“I hate doing ‘o’s!” admitted Ben, rolling his eyes with good natured irony, as he traced out a huge full moon in pale blue,“You spend all your time painting circles.” The blue barely registered on the steel shutter, but when Ben added the violet background, it jumped into relief. The colours spoke to each other. Then the drama ramped up a level, as he approached the shutter with a new can to commence the outline. In an instant, the pale blue popped when he added the red, causing the whole painting to sing. Finally, he added yellow horizontal stripes and the whole composition unified in a moment of exhilaration for Ben. He had reconciled all the elements into a harmonious whole, and raised a paint-stained hand in triumph.
All of Ben’s painting is a performance, and on Saturday afternoon there was a constant crowd of passers-by, shopkeepers, residents, and a few stray tourists, all rapt by the spontaneous drama of Ben at work. An elegant Nigerian lady came out of her shop, selling African batik fabrics, to admire Ben’s “q” which matched the tones of her colourful outfit. “Nice one!”, she cried in delight. Then a senior gentleman, walking slowly with a zimmer frame emerged from Petticoat Square and halted to gather his strength and take in Ben’s dazzling “o.” “It’s looking good!” he exclaimed, filled with sudden animation as he cast his eyes up and down the street in pleasure to see the whole alphabet.
Although there is an immense cultural history in Petticoat Lane, ever since the Jewish people left half a century ago there has also been a sense of absence in these streets. The residents and traders there have shown a sense of vision and community in supporting Ben Eine to create this glorious gallery of joyful, quirky paintings celebrating life and the city. I hope this unlikely alphabet will bring more people to appreciate this neglected corner of East London. Go and take a look for yourself.
Columbia Road Market 38
I woke in the night to the sound of the downpour, yet when I rose at six the rain had ceased and the air was cool and fresh, with the call of the wood-pigeon echoing in the still of the morning. By the time I reached the market at seven, there was already a brisk trade and the traders were cheerful at the opportune timing of the rain, good for gardeners and good for the market too. The damp air brought out all the fragrances of the flowers and, as one trader wheeled a barrow of bunches of sweet peas past me this morning, the scent was intense.
I was in no mood for any arduous gardening today, in this humid weather, so I simply bought myself two pots of these delicious Pinks, the attractively named Whatfield Ruby for £3 each – the colour of strawberry blamanche – to stand in pots on a wall. Each summer, I collect more Pinks. The single less-cultivated varieties are my preference in pale or deep pink, as these are. It is the subtle details that speak to me, the deep red pattern of veins and the lovely denticulated ends of the petals.
I leaned perilously far out of the window to photograph this Passion Flower (Passiflora Cerulaea) for you, that has just reached the first floor and came into flower this week. It cost me just £6 for a tiny plant at Columbia Rd last year and now it covers a vast wall. As I contemplated the consequence of falling – while eyeballing this gloriously strange bloom – the gruesome religious iconography of the flower came to mind.
Apparently, the three stamens represent the nails of the crucifixion, the lower five stand for the five wounds, while the attractive blue rosette of filaments recalls the crown of thorns and the ten petals remind us of the ten true apostles. It was a suitably sober lesson for a Sunday, but my affection for the Passion Flower is purely aesthetic. Like so many brooches adorning the wall, the decorative extravagance of these prolific flowers is an irresistible delight to me.
Joan Rose at Gardners Market Sundriesmen
Between the ages of twelve and fourteen years old, Joan Rose regularly visited Gardner’s Market Sundriesmen (established 1870) in Commercial St to collect orders of paper bags from Bertie Gardner for her grandfather Alfred Raymond, proprietor of Raymond’s greengrocers (founded 1900) in Calvert Avenue next to Arnold Circus, where Leila’s Shop is today. Joan, now eighty four, has not been back to Gardners since she was evacuated from London at fourteen years old, so yesterday I took her along to meet Bertie’s grandson, Paul Gardner, who runs the shop today – a fourth generation paper bag seller and the owner of Spitalfields’ oldest family business.
Paul never met his grandfather Bertie, but Joan remembers him clearly, always wearing his brown dustcoat. “He didn’t talk down to you. Even though I was twelve years old, he’d say ‘Can I help you?’” recalled Joan, appreciative of the respect that Bertie, whom she knew as Mr Gardner, paid to her as a young woman over seventy years ago. Once I made the introductions, Joan and Paul began their conversation by discussing bags. “Would you mind going over to Gardners, we’re short of 2lb bags?” Joan announced gleefully, quoting a commonplace line of her grandfather’s, to outline the premise of her visits to Commercial St, so long ago. “I think we had bags printed here?” queried Joan, as Paul indicated a dusty old brown paper carrier with images of fruit printed upon it, as a example, while he and Joan exchanged a nod of joyful recognition. “They were much wider in those days, weren’t they?” she commented to Paul, who directed her to the contemporary equivalent hanging on the opposite wall that is taller – with a grin, revealing that a certain professional rapport had been cemented between them.
Surrounded on all sides by packets of paper bags, Joan sat herself down upon a stack, gazing around her with a child’s delight at this spectacle from her youth, as Paul served a stream of customers coming in for bags. Joan was fascinated by the familiar brass scales with a large scoop that stands on Paul’s counter, and the old weights with iron loop handles that sit upon shelves behind the counter. “When a bomb landed on Calvert Avenue, a fourteen pound weight like that blew off the shelf and hit my grandfather in the head and nearly killed him,” she informed me, widening her eyes in amazement at the wonder of his survival.
Once the flurry of customers had departed, Paul produced two of his ancient account books with entries for “Raymond” to show Joan. One was in the eighteen nineties, when Paul’s great-grandfather, James, serviced the scales for a Mr Raymond in Quaker St. “One of my grandfather’s brothers I think,” explained Joan, “they were all costermongers.” The other entry was for a Mr Raymond in Dalston Lane in 1920, who was slow to clear his account. The page was annotated with the phrases,“Reminder sent” then “Stiff letter,” before payment was eventually received by cheque in 1923. Joan was dubious about this entry, because her grandfather never wrote cheques, he always gave her an envelope of cash to pay for the bags, which may account for the lack of surviving paperwork. With regret, she dismissed this unreliable character from Dalston Lane as another of her grandfather’s brothers.
Joan recounted to Paul how Bertie Gardner occasionally walked into her grandfather’s shop to make deliveries in person, with the cursory, “Alf, here’s your bags!” – a cue for Alfred to search through the wooden block of wood with scoops in it where he kept his change. Hearing this story was the cue for Paul, the grandson, to bring out the block of wood with scoops out of it that has served four generations of his family to store coins. The merest sight of it was a delight for Joan. “But he never kept notes in it!” she retorted, wagging her finger in amused qualification, a comment that was itself another cue for Paul. This time, with a mischievous smile, he brought out an old Oxo tin and then a Fuller’s Cake tin, that he uses to keep his bank notes in today, causing Joan to clasp her hands in rapture.
Then, with a natural sense of theatre, Joan opened her handbag and produced a photograph of Raymond’s greengrocers taken in the nineteen thirties and, sure enough, there were the bunches of brown paper bags that came from Gardners. As more customers arrived in Paul’s shop, they also became party to this impromptu display, sharing expressions of wonder at these images, and amazed to meet a returned customer in the shop from more than seventy years ago. For a moment the haste of the day was stilled.
It was a timely reminder of the unique quality of Gardner’s, a remarkable and much loved establishment, where the smallest traders of East London go to buy their bags today, as they have done for over a century. Even though he has a vast number of loyal customers who rely upon him, Paul Gardner only earns £250 a week, yet his landlord’s agents Tarn & Tarn are seeking to raise Paul’s rent from £15,000 in a single step to £25,000 per annum, next month – a single act that could drive Gardners out of business, destroying an invaluable East End family institution. Joan was outraged to hear this news, “We’ll have to start a petition!” she declared, animated with righteous anger.
Once we had taken pictures to record the auspicious occasion of the visit, it was time to make our reluctant departure and retrace Joan’s former path back to the location of her grandfather’s shop in Calvert Avenue, where we sought a cup of tea at Leila’s Cafe. Joan and Paul parted with a kiss, intimate acquaintances now through an unlikely bond and, as we walked up Commercial St together, Joan confided to me with a smile, “His grandfather had a longer face, but he does look just like him.”
Paul’s grandfather Bertie and father Roy outside the shop in Commercial St around 1930.
Joan’s grandfather Alfred Raymond outside the shop in Calvert Avenue around 1930.
Joan sitting in Arnold Circus in 1940.
The Dog Roses of Spitalfields
Dog roses have always had a special place in my affections, recalling high Summer, deep lanes, tall hedges and the lush meadows of the English countryside. Even people who dismiss wild flowers as weeds recognise the beauty of the wild rose tumbling from the green depths of the hedgerow. There is a wanton extravagance to the wild rose that can produce a profusion of delicate flowers of the softest hue, glowing in the sunlight against the deep shade, even in the most inopportune conditions. I have seen them on quarries, cliffs, railway sidings and even growing out of the shingle at the beach.
As I cast my mind back upon other Summers, dog roses appear in all corners of my recollections. I have a treasured copy of W. Keble Martin’s “Concise British Flora,” with his botanical plate of the wild rose upon the jacket, undoubtably the most appreciated page of the book. At primary school we sang Cicely Mary Barker’s “Songs of the Flower Fairies”. My special favourite was the dog rose, “I am the flower that everybody knows, I am the English rose.” Even without pulling my mother’s copy of this book from the shelf, inscribed to her in 1936, “To Valerie, the little girl who loved all the flowers,” I can see the familiar spirit in question. A woman with fine cheek bones and a jaunty regal attitude in a silk dress of rose tint, wearing a garland upon her head fashioned from the golden stamens of a rose, reaching up to caress a cherished bloom. I never questioned how she was able to sit, so confident yet precarious, upon the stem of a briar surrounded by her beloved flowers, because that was the magic of the flower fairies. All these images, memories and emotions come to the forefront of my mind each year when I see the first dog roses of Summer. I stand and take them in for a moment, refreshing the picture in my mind for another year.
The commonplace sights of the rural world take on a powerful exoticism in the city and the humble dog roses of Spitalfields are rare phenomena to city dwellers, evoking the entire expanse of countryside that we forget, yet we know exists somewhere far beyond our London streets. There is another dimension to the presence of wild flowers here too, because these flowers remind us of those fields that once were here long ago, where residents of the City of London came to take rural walks and build country mansions, as both Elizabeth and Essex did in Petticoat Lane, and Oliver Cromwell did over in Clerkenwell. The colourful resurgence of the wild flowers speaks of all the long lost fields that gave Spitalfields its name. To see these few flowers here is a tantalising illustration of the richness of the meadows before the streets were laid.
I photographed my dog roses in Allen Gardens, between Brick Lane and the Spitalfields City Farm. This expanse of green now comprises the only field to speak of in Spitalfields, and as I set out on my botany field trip, it was full of sunworshippers, dog walkers, homeless people and alcoholics, all gambolling and disporting themselves upon the lawn in the manner of those shepherds and shepherdesses in the pastoral idylls.
Fifty years ago, the site of Allen Gardens was mostly streets and houses, though I believe there was a paddock for the dray horses from the brewery on this site. Today we are all thankful for this small patch of green that has been restored to us, though I wonder if perhaps the reason the wild flowers grow here is because some guerilla gardeners scattered seeds.
It feels shameful now to admit that my mother used to take me for walks through the fields in Devon to pick wild flowers when I was a child, though particular bunches remain vivid to me, and I shall carry them always in my mind’s eye, even years after the posies themselves have wilted away to nothing. I think of those bunches of celandines I picked on the banks of the River Exe, the primroses and violets at Chard, and harebells at Corfe Castle, especially. Although picking wild flowers might be seen as ecological vandalism today, it did ensure I learnt all the names, and somewhere I have an album of pressed specimens all carefully labelled with their species.
So, as I walked around Allen Gardens, I was proud to recognise buttercups, cornflowers, field poppies, ox-eye daisies, camomile, vetch, clover, white and pink campions, scabious, yarrow and herb robert, among many others that are extraordinary for a city park. I did not pick them, I photographed them for you instead. When I walked with my mother along the cliff path outside Weymouth, learning the names of the flowers, I never expected I should use the knowledge in London, but I am especially grateful to know their names now, because recognising the different species of plants keeps me in touch with the greater landscape beyond our urban enclave.
Andrew Coram, Antique Dealer
For several years now, the most interesting shop window in Spitalfields has been that of Bedell Coram, Andrew Coram’s antique shop at 86a Commercial St. Every single day, I walk past and always direct my gaze to discover what is new. I am rarely disappointed with lack of novelty, and sometimes I am astounded by Andrew’s latest finds and ingeniously surreal displays that are worthy of Peter Blake or Marcel Duchamp.
Over a year ago, I admired three yellowed newspaper hoardings in his window, Evening Standard: THE PRINCE: TOUCHING SCENE, Evening News Late Extra: MAN-HUNT IN LEICESTER SQUARE and Evening News 6:30: LONDON HIGHWAYMEN ON WHEELS. They were gone as quickly as they appeared. “Gilbert & George bought them,” Andrew told me discreetly, “They rang to say they saw them in the window and came round next morning to buy them. They don’t usually collect old ones, they just go to the newsagent across the road each day to get them new.” Clearly, Andrew has a well-deserved following, and as I have gone about my interviews, when occasionally I have admired a delft bowl or a corner cupboard in an old house, invariably the proud owner will say, “I got it from Andrew.”
Andrew is the youngest of eight children of an antique dealer from Plymouth who was born in 1900 and died in 1980, when Andrew was still a child. His father began in domestic service and started in the antique business after World War II when the country houses of Devon were being knocked down, creating a vibrant trade in china, furniture and paintings. “He knew how to speak to those people,” explained Andrew, vividly aware of the negotiation skills that are key to his profession. When Andrew was growing up, his father was trading from Carhampton, near Minehead in Somerset, and he remembers long Summer holidays hanging around the shop. “I think my poor brother spent all his time polishing my finger marks off the mahogany furniture,” he recalled fondly.
Today, Andrew Coram is a popular figure in Spitalfields, with trenchant humour, and a fluent lyricism that he indulges when speaking of his treasured discoveries. He is a poet among antique dealers, with a melancholy streak that he resists, yet exposes when he speaks of his motives. Sitting in a chair wedged between boxes of stock, casting his eyes around at all the beautiful things that he has surrounded himself with in his shop, Andrew revealed almost apologetically, “It’s not about the money, it’s about the way that some antiques speak to you. There’s a sense of loss every time you sell something you like, which I didn’t have when I started. I think I may have lost focus. My father never lost focus because he had to support six people. It’s easy to let the things take over. You hope to do something that continually generates itself, and inspires you, so that, as you are discovering new things, you are learning more and you accumulate knowledge.”
Who cannot sympathise with this conflict? It is the quintessential dilemma that cuts to the heart of the passionate antique dealer. The modest trader spends his time searching, using his ingenuity to find wonderful things, and learns to appreciate and understand their histories, as Andrew has done. Then he collects his treasures together, and all for the purpose of disposing of them to others.
Even though his father was an antique dealer and Andrew incarnates his occupation so magnificently that I cannot think of him any other way, he did not set out to follow in his father’s footsteps. Impatient of waiting for a lucky break as an artist, Andrew started trading his personal collection in the Spitalfields Market years ago, in the days when it was free to have a stall, and he made £75 on the first day. “When you start out trading, you feel you have achieved something the first time you buy a Georgian chest of drawers or a long case clock on a hunch and it proves to be right.”, said Andrew, relating a milestone on the career path. He claims he learnt everything as he went along, that he has no conscious memories of the trade from his childhood, but I think Andrew’s upbringing accounts for the special quality of his personal sensibility that he brings to everything he does. Andrew’s unique sense of tone, his distinctive style of dress that is of no determinate period, his instinct for seeking out such charismatic artefacts and the artful displays he creates, all these attest to his special quality as an antique dealer, born and bred.
Still ambivalent about how much he chooses to keep, Andrew admitted recklessly, “There’s a part of me that would like to have nothing!” So I asked him what drew him to things that he liked and he thought for a moment, assuming his grimace of rumination. “Things that have rarity value – that you might not see again. As I said, things that speak to you. Things of which there’s a sort of … clarity about what they are … a quietness about them, even a stillness.” he replied, searching for words beyond grasp.
Then his eyes lit up, as he thought of an example to illustrate his point, and held it up, in mime,“I found this tooth, a boar’s tooth, mounted in silver with the inscription upon the base ‘Roasted upon ye Thames Jan 15th 1715/6’ – I’m not selling it!” Once we had considered this treasured momento from a frost fair together, in another mime for my delight, Andrew produced a copper pie dish with words “Lincoln’s Inn 1779” upon it, folding his fingers as if to grip the sides of the invisible dish. Then, returning to the material world, Andrew passed me a tiny delft tea bowl in pale porcelain with Chinese figures on the outside and the softest blackbird egg blue interior. It was a mid-eighteenth century English tea bowl and as I cradled it in my palm where it sat so comfortably, he told me in triumph it was worth a thousand pounds. “Holding a delicate thing like that in your hand puts you in touch the past. – it’s the story that connects us.” he said, intoxicated by the magic of the bowl, and breaking into a broad grin.
I spent much of my childhood being taken around the country antique shops of Devon and Somerset by my mother and father, and the romance of these places and my parents’ delight at their finds remain vividly with me today. I do not know if Andrew’s path and mine crossed back then, but I do know that Andrew Coram has soul and his antique shop is a proper one, of the old school, where authentic treasures are still to be found.
You might like to watch Andrew’s film “Edge o’ Beyond” shot on Dunster Beach by clicking here.
