Sunday board games in Brick Lane
I photographed these two men playing Carrom at the top of Brick Lane on Sunday. This curious game was new to me and I can only describe it as a hybrid of drafts and billiards, in which the objective is to push your opponent’s counters into the corner pockets. Not only is it absorbing for players, as my picture illustrates, but it is also a stirring spectator sport, demonstrated by the excited crowds that quickly gather to watch in Brick Lane. Rob, the gregarious proprietor of the Carrom Cafe which provides the boards free to market visitors every Sunday, explained to me that it is an ancient game which exists all across Asia and was brought here from India, but of which the origins are lost in time.
Then I walked on down the Lane and, at the Hanbury Street entrance to the Truman Brewery, I met Luca and Sam happily playing chess on a home made board, with paperclips in two contrasted colours bent into different shapes for each of the different chess pieces. Luca and Sam were amusing themselves whilst having a slow day at their stall selling t-shirts which they design under their own label smudge the bear but, judging from the witty ingenuity of their chess set, I predict big success for these two engaging young men.
Mr Pussy Takes A Nap
The time has come to put the quilt on the bed until Spring. I made this quilt from thirty tapestries that I bought secondhand and sewed together. So much work goes into stitching tapestries, but then no-one knows what to do with the completed ones and they end up in car boot sales, markets and charity shops. My plan was to make a quilt of unloved tapestries.
At first, I collected all I could find and I liked the idea of sewing together these tapestries that were often ugly and creating something beautiful from them. But then I found some special ones that were far from ugly and decided only to use the nicest. At this point, I discovered there were hundreds listed on ebay and soon I had tapestries turning up in the mail from all over the globe.
There is another side to this too, because I chose to make the quilt in memory of my mother. A warm and colourful quilt that would stay with me always and evoke memories of her tucking me up in bed when I was a child, this was very attractive to me. Now I wanted to collect the images that she loved, birds, boats, flowers, paintings and landscapes.
Eventually, my house was piled with tapestries, far more than necessary for the quilt and I spent months shuffling them around on the floor to create the ideal arrangement before I sewed them together. Then I attached a lining of the softest lemon yellow velvet and the quilt was complete a year after my mother died. Now, every Autumn, I bring it out at this time and I love the feeling of lying beneath it and surveying its rich colours, both as I lay my head down each night and every morning when I wake too.
Franze & Evans, the divine Teresa
This is the divine Teresa Lococo who makes heavenly hummus. Before I discovered Teresa, I searched all over London in supermarkets and delis, even the Borough Market, but too much of the hummus that is on sale resembles stale mayonnaise, homogenous and tasteless – disappointment in a plastic pot.
Just as I was almost at the point of giving up on my search for decent hummus, just as I was beginning to think maybe I was too damned fussy, just as I was beginning to wonder if I had simply imagined that hummus could be better – the Franze & Evans delicatessen opened on Redchurch Street and I discovered Teresa’s heavenly hummus. Believe me, you have never tasted hummus as good as this. Possessing a good texture, a delicate fragrance, and a taste balancing a whole combination of subtle flavours, this hummus with a slice of St John bread represents the ideal marriage.
However, Teresa does not make hummus every day and a fresh batch (£2.50 a pot) can sell out to the cognoscenti within hours. So I advise you to call (02070331910), as I do, to check they have some in stock before you set out on a pilgrimage up Brick Lane to the shrine in Redchurch Street, because you would not want to get there and have your hopes of Teresa’s heavenly hummus disappointed, would you?
Columbia Road Market 7
It was just spitting with rain as I set out for the market under a gloomy occluded sky this morning, and it lifted my spirits to hear the cockerell crow at the Spitalfields City Farm as I passed. My first task on arrival in Columbia Road was to buy some Polyanthus (six for a fiver) because I know my neighbour likes them and I am going to replant the box under his kitchen window before his return from hospital. You have to be careful with polyanthus and look out for the richer, more natural colours because there are some varieties in harsh unnatural shades – the blue hybrids are especially vile I think.
Once I had bought the polyanthus, I cast my eye around for something else and was delighted to discover a variety of Japanese Anemone that I haven’t seen before, Whirlwind. It has a pleasant double flower with white petals in a subtle spiral as if they had been blown. This is an ideal shade plant for my garden and I snapped it up for a mere £3. Then I ran home again in the rain to rescue my dry washing from the line before it was too late.
Hospital visiting in Whitechapel
My neighbour is in the Royal London Hospital having gallstones removed, so I have been running back and forth to Whitechapel visiting him this week, delivering magazines and charging his mobile phone. One day I had to wait half an hour to see him, so I decided to explore the hospital museum.
To my alarm, the first thing I saw was a collection of conker-sized lumpy gallstones that had been removed from patients and arranged like rare birds’ eggs in a wooden case. Immediately, I began to wonder if my visit to the museum was perhaps a trifle ill-advised in the circumstances. Once I had been told that the skeleton of Joseph Merrick (known popularly as The Elephant Man) is preserved here, but I was relieved to discover that it was not on display.
In fact, the museum is not at all the ghoulish collection I had feared, although the story it witnesses of sickness as a result of poverty and deprivation is enough to dispel any romantic notion of “colourful” East End history that anyone might ever be ill-informed enough to harbour.
Conversely, there is the inspiring story of the hospital itself which, since its foundation as The London Infirmary in 1757 on the present site, is one of real progress in overcoming suffering and disease through the application of medical science. This is where Joseph Merrick found sanctuary in 1886 from those who saw him merely as a freak. Thanks to the humane foresight of the surgeon Frederick Treves, he was able to live out his days here with dignity. I was intrigued to see the hat and hood (pictured above) that is reputed to have been worn by him.
Also, I was touched by the pathos of this painting by Sir John Lavery of the first injured soldier of World War One to be treated at the Royal London Hospital in 1914. I could not help noticing how, in spite of some updating, the ward I where was visiting my neighbour was similar to the one pictured.
After my visit to the museum, I delivered the magazine and the charged mobile to my neighbour, but I never told him about the gallstones.
Labour & Wait, connoisseurs of hardware
It all began with this brush. When Rachel Wythe-Moran and Simon Watkins opened Labour & Wait in 2001, this was the first item that arrived in stock – and you can still buy it there. With natural bristle and a dip-painted wooden handle that fits naturally into the hand, it is the ideal brush for its purpose.
From their shop in Cheshire Street, Rachel and Simon pursue their quest to find the very best of traditional hardware and sell the things you can’t get anywhere else. These brushes which have been steady sellers over the years, were made by a company in Edinburgh that only this year has ended production. L&W bought out the stock and then there will be no more.
And so it is a constant juggling process of finding new suppliers, just as existing manufacturers close down. Recent discoveries have been spotted handkerchiefs in a range of jaunty colours, Brown Betty teapots, Winchcombe bowls and leather school satchels. I had exactly this satchel (below) when I was sent off to prep school one September, and although they ceased manufacture years ago, the original makers have now started producing them all over again for L&W.
Taking its name from the original motto of the Co-operative movement, Labour & Wait has become a phenomenon, with another shop inside Dover Street Market and franchises in Japan. I love the romance of their flawless displays of aesthetic functional artifacts that would not look out of place in a Joseph Beuys vitrine. Always, in this arcane cabinet of delights, I discover either a new curiosity to relish or something familiar I haven’t seen for years.
What a seductive feeling it was to inhale the long-forgotten smell of the new leather of that satchel – I almost expected to open it and discover inside my new pencil case and tin of crayons sandwiched between coloured exercise books and my own homework notebook for the Autumn term.
Youthquake in Spitalfields
There has always been a significant transient population in Spitalfields and it is the presence of these people, in part, that has created the complex history of our neighbourhood as a shifting ground, an intermediary space at the City boundary.
First there were the sick and needy who inhabited the Hospital of St Mary (St Mary Spital), founded in 1197 next to the Roman road out of the City. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were the itinerant workers who found employment as weavers and in the market, while dossing in the seedy lodging houses that surrounded the market. In the last century, I think of the dispossessed who took refuge in the Sisters of Mercy Hostel in Artillery Lane.
In our own century, something new and on an entirely different scale is about to arrive within close vicinity of these locations. This picture shows the thirty five storey Nido building currently under construction in Middlesex Street. From winter 2010, this will provide accommodation to 12o4 students with rents starting at £720 a month for a single bedroom studio. The complex will have its own cinema and shops in a cashless environment where residents use their Nido card to pay. Students who are anxious at being away from home for the first time will be consoled by technology that promises an SMS to tell them when their laundry is done.
Maybe we shall find ourselves living in the student quarter next, when Spitalfields becomes London’s Rive Gauche?
