The front garden at number 7 Fournier St
Here at number 7 is the only front garden you will find in Fournier St. Planted in two old rough-hewn granite troughs on the pavement, this is one of my favourite London gardens. Close by Commercial St and on the north side of Christ Church, Spitalfields, it is a tiny patch of plant life in an unlikely location. Forgoing the brightly coloured flowers, replaced seasonally and favoured by many urban gardeners, this is an austere but realistic choice of plants for such an exposed site. The Stonecrop, Ling and Rosemary growing here are hardy species, native to dry rocky uplands, that can thrive in an urban environment such as this, unaffected by the dirt and dust. Every time I walk past, my eye is always drawn to this unique and lyrical piece of cultivation. However preoccupied I may be, I am momentarily released in my imagination to the mountains and moors far beyond the powerfully immersive experience of living here in this great city.
When Roy Kinnear got his ladder stuck in Shadwell
This is what happens when you try to carry a ladder the wrong way down a narrow alley, as Roy Kinnear is discovering here. In this still from Joan Littlewood’s film Sparrows Can’t Sing, you can see through the arch to Cowley Gardens in Stepney as it was in 1962. This is where Fred (Roy Kinnear’s character) lives with his mother in the film and here his brother Charlie (James Booth) turns up after two years at sea to ask the whereabouts of his wife Maggie (Barbara Windsor), now that the old terrace in which he lived with Maggie has been demolished in his absence.
The drama revolves around Charlie’s discovery that Maggie has moved into a new tower block with a new man, and his attempts to woo her back. It may be clunky, with too many improvised scenes, yet in spite of this the film has a rare quality – you feel all the characters have lives beyond the confines of the drama. So, although some characterisations are broad, there is such spirit and genuine humour to all the performances that it successfully represents the emotional vitality of the society it portrays with great persuasion. In supporting roles, there is Harry H. Corbett, Yootha Joyce, Brian Murphy and several other superb working class actors who came to dominate television comedy for the next twenty years. Filmed on locations around Stepney and the East End, many locals take turns as extras, including the Kray twins (Barbara was dating Reggie at the time) who can clearly be seen standing among the customers in the final bar room scenes.
My favourite moment in the film is when Charlie searches for Maggie in an old house at the bottom of Cannon St Rd. On the ground floor in an empty room sits an Indian at prayer with his little son, on the first floor some Afro-Caribbeans welcome Charlie into their party and on the top floor Italians are celebrating too. These characters have their own space in the film and appear on the screen with a poetry that is all their own.
I once met Joan Littlewood at an authors’ party hosted by a publisher. She was a frail old lady then but I recognised her immediately by her rakish cap. She was sitting alone in a corner and I pointed her out discreetly to a couple of fellow writers. Too awestruck by her reputation, they would not dare approach but I loved her for her work and could not see her neglected, so I walked right over and asked if I could kiss her. She consented graciously, and once I had explained why I wanted to kiss her, I waved my pals over. We enjoyed a lively conversation but all I remember is that as we said our goodbyes, she took my hand in hers and said “I knew you’d be here”. Although she did not know me or my writing, I understood what she meant and I shall always remember the night I kissed Joan Littlewood.
Watching “Sparrows Can’t Sing” again recently (now reissued on DVD), I decided to go in search of Cowley Gardens only to discover that it is gone. The street plan has been altered so that where it stood there is not even a road anymore. Just as James Booth’s character returned from sea to find his nineteenth century street gone, the twentieth century tower where Barbara Windsor’s character shacked up with the taxi driver has itself also gone, demolished in 1999. Thus, the whole cycle of social and architectural change recorded in this film has been entirely erased.
I hope you can understand why I personally identify with Roy Kinnear and his ladder problem, it is because I too want to go through this same arch and I am also frustrated in my desire – because nowadays (as you can see below) there is a solid wall filling the void and preventing me from ever passing through. You can find the arch yourself beneath the Docklands Light Railway, between Sutton St and Lukin St. Behind this brick wall, which has been constructed between the past and the present, Barbara Windsor and all the residents of Cowley Gardens are waiting. Now only the magic of cinema can take me there.
The Bookshop On The Corner In Hoxton
I was in the bookshop on the corner of Charles Sq and Pitfield St when an author came in, all of a fluster, pink with embarrassment and breathless from running. She had just discovered that there were two lines missing from her book and she needed the copies back to correct them, she said. When Tanya Peixoto, the manager (pictured above), sensitively broke the news that some copies had been sold, the distressed author turned white with alarm, before asking if it might be possible to write to the customers who had bought them, apologise and request they return their copies.
This is a scene that is not credible in Waterstones or WHSmith, and this is one of the reasons that the wonderful Book Art Bookshop is unique. It is the only bookshop devoted entirely to books made by artists and small press publications. Tanya, the glamorous founder of the shop was just showing me an extraordinary book which only existed in a single copy (created by a local resident it had been gifted by the writer and sits on a shelf awaiting discovery) when another eager author came into the shop. From a satchel, he produced the handful of small handprinted books that he had made, succinctly titled “Country Cinema Pub”. He held them up full of pride. As he waited anxiously, Tanya quickly cast her critical gaze upon them, experienced yet benign, and when she agreed to take them at once, his face lit up in triumph.
All this drama in ten minutes on a regular afternoon at the book art bookshop. You really need to go there, because this is a haven for anyone with a passion for culture that has not been mediated by the restrictive gatekeepers of corporate literary and artistic taste. Bookshelves crammed with a vast variety of unlikely books reach to the ceiling and in every corner you can discover some unexpected publication. Enthusiasts of the work of Alfred Jarry, Pataphysician, inventor of the Absurd and creator of Ubu Roi, may like to know that this bookshop is also the headquarters of the London Institute of Pataphysics. There is an irresistible magnetism that leads people here to this beautiful oasis in South Hoxton, which welcomes all readers and writers who enjoy the arcane and esoteric.
After editing the “Artists’ Book Yearbook” for several years, Tanya attended a forum at the Artists’ Bookfair at the Barbican in 2000 to propose that there should be a bookshop devoted to artists’ and small press publications – when to her surprise, Alastair Brotchie (proprietor of the Atlas Press) offered her the opportunity to create such a bookshop and made the current shop available to her. It was an offer she could not refuse.
Observing Tanya sitting in the corner of the bookshop with Peggy her collie at her feet, an old carpet on the floor and an antique folding oak table piled with new arrivals, I cast my eyes around at the organised chaos of her stock and realised that this is what all local bookshops used to be like in the days before the chains arrived. Then, Tanya asked a startled passing customer to mind the shop while she vanished down to the cellar to find a stray title and I thought, if William Blake was alive printing copies of his “Songs of Innocence & Experience” nowadays, this is where you would find them.
Columbia Road Market 10
It was a gloomy, damp but mild morning as I set out for market, negotiating the puddles and swirling leaves. All last night’s spooks and bogles had vanished into thin air and the only evidence to be seen this morning was an old wig abandoned on the pavement.
Recently, I have been getting messages from friends who read this weekly feature asking me to pick up “two of those Chinese Lantern plants” or “that white flower you wrote about”. So after I had fulfilled this week’s orders I took a look around. For myself, I bought all these Blue Hyancinths for a fiver and then made it home before the heavy rain started.
The first time I ever saw Hyacinths was in this old Spode bowl belonging to my grandmother. Every year she planted them in this and thereby introduced me to the exquisite combination of blue and white china and Blue Hyacinths. Now this bowl is mine and I plant it every year with Hyacinths too. Buying them already sprouted means they will be in flower quickly, and in a few weeks I will show you the display.
The Crossrail drillers
Over the last week, there have been scenes worthy of nineteenth century California enacted in the car park of Sainsburys, Whitechapel. Deeper than Neville’s Turkish Baths, far deeper than the Charnel House in Bishops Sq, deeper even than the Central Line, something is stirring. Preparations are underway for the largest engineering project in Europe, building a monster tunnel from here to the future. Crossrail will extend right across London, from Shenfield in the east to Maidenhead in the west with a central underground railway tunnel over thirteen miles long, due for completion in 2017. So many skilled tunnellers are required that a Tunnelling Academy is being created in Newnham.
As you may now have surmised, the men with the derrick in Sainsburys’ car park are not prospecting for oil (although their primitive drilling rig would be recognised by the prospectors of a century ago), they are extracting samples to discover what is beneath, so that the challenge of digging the tunnel may be quantified. I took the liberty of asking some questions and the guys explained that they were drilling thirty five metres down. The first few metres are the hardest because the car park is on the site of the former Albion Brewery and when the entire structure was flattened, it filled the cellars with a dense layer of rubble. Beneath this is a deeper layer of Thames valley sediment and then sand until you reach the bedrock.
In the midst of our conversation, as we discussed the vast ambition of the project, I could not resist a sense of awe at this extraordinary undertaking. First there is the notion of digging so deep beyond the layers of recorded history into geological time, then there is immensity of the construction project and the logistics of organising it, and finally speculation at the transformation it will bring upon our neighbourhood – this place will change for ever as Crossrail pulls us closer to the centre of London and to Heathrow airport too.
I was becoming overawed, when I saw that – although these men were simply doing a routine job of work, drilling holes in Sainsburys’ car park – they were themselves excited and proud to be the harbingers of such a monumental and wondrous enterprise. It makes me think of the building of the Hoover Dam in America during the Great Depression and I recognise that in these times we need great projects of this nature both to generate employment and give us hope too. I realised I had witnessed a moment of history today.
Ben Eine, Shoreditch types
Anyone who has been walking round the neighbourhood will recognise the work of street artist Ben Eine who has been painting his distinctive alphabet on shutters for years and created handsome murals of words like EXCITING! and SCARY. His alphabet paintings have now become integral to my perception of this place, so that their presence has almost come to define the territory to me and I miss it if one disappears. In fact, there is a Google map that shows you where they all are and people take walking tours to visit every one. No longer confined to London, you can also now see Eine’s alphabet pictures in Paris, Copenhagen, Hastings and Newcastle too.
Many are the initial letters of the particular shops, but not all. After the first six, Eine approached the proprietors to ask permission and most were more than willing to have their initials on the shutters. However, Eine wanted to create a complete alphabet and there were certain letters missing, so then he asked owners if he could put letters on their shutters and simply painted the remaining letters that he needed to make up the set. They had to like it or lump it!
I think these alphabet paintings – which are derived from English and French woodblock display fonts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – suit the neighbourhood and its architecture perfectly, being sympathetic hybrids of the old and the brand new. I am pleased to report that in 2007, when Tower Hamlets council surveyed residents to ask their opinions about graffiti in general and Eine’s work in particular, the greater majority wanted his work to remain and even be preserved.
Out of all Eine’s works, I particulary like the locations where the letters form short words, as I have illustrated here. It must take a phenomenal amount of organisation to create (and regularly repaint) all these pieces with such efficiency and dexterity. Our neighbourhood is visually richer because of them. And I can only admire Eine’s heroic tenacity in the pursuit of pseudo-random poetry, he must be doing it for love.
Shakespeare in Spitalfields
This nineteenth century Staffordshire figure of Shakespeare stands on my chimney piece in Spitalfields to remind me of the writer I love best. (On the right is Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth and on the left is her brother John Phillip Kemble as Hamlet.)
Coming across William Shakespeare’s younger brother Edmond‘s tombstone in Southwark recently and learning that some of William’s plays were first performed in our neighbourhood has set me wondering about whether he was actually here in Spitalfields.
According to a memo by fellow actor Ned Alleyn, in 1596 Shakespeare lived “near the Bear Garden in Southwark.” London Bridge was the only bridge across the Thames in those days, so Shakespeare must have walked up and down Bishopsgate (he knew it as Bishoppes gate streete) whenever he made his way between Southwark and Shoreditch, while his plays were being performed at the Theatre and the Curtain Theatre here on Curtain Rd .
Maybe he got sick of trudging to and fro, commuting across the City? – because in 1598 there is a William Shakespeare listed by the tax collectors as resident in the parish of St Anne’s, Bishopsgate, though we cannot be certain if this was our man. We know he was lodging on Silver St (at the south of the Barbican) in 1604, based on the words of a maid “one Mr Shakespeare laye in the house” and a court deposition signed by Shakespeare himself when his landlord was challenged with not paying his daughter’s dowry
For five years I lived in the Highlands of Scotland and I remember the Gaelic weavers’ working songs, so it touched a chord with me when in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays I came across Falstaff’s line from “Henry IV Part One” in a scene at the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap in the City of London, “I would I were a weaver. I could sing all manner of songs.” Wool was the primary industry in Shakespeare’s day and in Spitalfields we have Tenterground, where once pieces of newly woven woollen cloth were staked out to dry. Surely the weavers sang at their work here just as the those in the Hebrides still do today? Shakespeare could have heard them singing when he walked through Spitalfields.
I was further intrigued to discover that in the earlier Quarto edition of 1598 the line reads “I could sing psalms or anything”. Many of the wool weavers in Shakespeare’s time were Calvinist exiles from Flanders who fled the Duke of Alva and were known for their love of psalmody. Scholars believe the line was altered in the First Folio to prevent any politically incorrect anti-Protestant reading.
I rest my case with a line from Shakespeare’s fellow playwright and drinking pal Ben Jonson, whose character Cutbeard in “The Silent Woman” has the line, “He got his cold with sitting up late and singing catches with clothworkers”.
So there you have it, Shakespeare knew Spitalfields and it is no stretch of the imagination to envisage him and Jonson enjoying late night singing sessions with the weavers here, just like the guys who come on all-night benders to the clubs in Brick Lane nowadays. And of course, Shakespeare portrayed a weaver in the character of Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – is it possible he met the prototype in Spitalfields?
