Jude Rosen’s Poems Of Place
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It is my delight to publish these five poems from Jude Rosen’s new collection Reclamations from London’s Edgelands published next Monday 9th September at a joint launch event with Derrick Porter’s The Art of Timing at the Rose & Crown, 53 Hoe St, Walthamstow, E17 4SA . There will be readings and you are all invited to attend.
Sculpture of porters in London Fields
Black Path
A rumour of a parting in the green sea –
Black Path, the ancient dirt track cut diagonally
from London to Walsingham or Waltham Abbey
known as the Templars’ Path or Porters’ Way
when hauliers drove reluctant cattle and sheep
to Smithfields market, and dragged hand-carts
filled with eggs and fruit and wilting cabbage
to Spitalfields. Black Path may have been named
after the plague or the trail across Black Breeches
or the bridge over Blackmarsh or ‘Blackbridge’
as Shortlands Sewer was known, or the clinker and ash
surface to the route laid down in the 18th century.
Dave’s mum recalled, when she was a girl around
1910, they still drove sheep to market
through Porters’ Field and when they built the prefabs
after the war, they left a diagonal gap
through the estate, in memory of the drove,
even though the practice had died out long ago.
The Tower
Flickering in the background on tv screens,
the Orbit’s red mesh whirls in a drunken coil,
its helter-skelter body torn and bashed,
a stripped tin can no one shows affection for
by hanging a football shirt around it
or leaving a pint of milk by a door.
The Orbit’s origins are concealed
in the iron ore from the Omarska mines,
scene of massacre in the Bosnian War.
The survivors who are denied a memorial
claim the Orbit – Arcelor-Mittal Tower –
as their own twisted monument in exile
standing on excavated ground that now
has been covered over with fresh soil.
Which Wick?
Wandering on Wyke Rd, you knew you were
in old country, a Latin vicus – settlement –
or a Viking vik – inlet or creek – the weak point
to invade, then a trading post. In Middle English
it became –wich in salt brine wells and spas:
Droitwich or Nantwich, or a –wich which was
a landing place for goods special to that place
like wool-wich –Woolwich – or a trait of the place
such as green-wich – Greenwich – or a -wick where
the village grew up around dairy farms like
Hackney Wick – the 13th Century ferm of Wyk –
or around dairy produce, cheese wick – Chiswick –
and goat wick – Gatwick. Just as a candle
dies down leaving only the trace of a wick,
when the land disappears, so too does the language.
Merisc
We slid off our cycles as we encountered
the slick mud on the path at the opening
to the water flats of the Lea Valley reserve,
the filtered silt preserving the life of birds.
An Asian man stopped me to ask the way
to Kingfisher Woods. The marsh, that in full
spring flush boasts a hundred football matches
in a day, this day was almost deserted.
The ground sprung up as we trudged, lifting us back
to the surface of the grass. It’s green, it’s so green,
Lucia gasped. Yes, these were fields of emeralds!
She strode across the territory, chanting
Marciare per non marcire – ‘March rather than rot!’
while the merisc stretched out, sublimely indifferent.
Incantation to the Marsh
Mossy carpet, grassy knolls, leaf-lined holm,
marshlands, harsh lands, green fable!
When I fall in a myoclonic jerk in dreams,
you’re there to catch me so I don’t fall through
the floodplains into a burial pit but
recover, without need of an archeologist.
Poems copyright © Jude Rosen
Reclamations from London’s Edgelands is available from Paekakariki Press
Nicholas Borden’s Stoke Newington Paintings
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Stoke Newington Old Church
I am delighted to announce a new exhibition by favourite painter Nicholas Borden and you are all invited to the opening at Everyday Sunshine Gallery, 49 Barbauld Rd, Stoke Newington, N16 0RT next Thursday 12th September from 6:30pm.
Through the past year, painter Nicholas set up his easel on the streets of Stoke Newington to produce a series of vibrant urban landscapes, transforming familiar scenes with his bold palette and dynamic compositions.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, for the past decade Nicholas has been painting outdoors in the East End, manifesting the spontaneous life of the streets with consummate painterly ease, delighting in the quirky geometry and the curious divergent perspectives of the urban grain.
The spontaneous quality of Nicholas’ elegant pictures belies their sophisticated technique yet – more significantly – they display a joy in the medium which grants them a visceral, irresistibly sensuous appeal as paintings.
Clissold House
‘People outside and walking in the winter light’
Clissold Skate Park
Rose & Crown
Mind Charity Shop, Church St
‘The beautiful deep ultramarine blue used on the front contrasts with the warm orange and cadmium yellow of the interior’
The Auld Shillelagh
Church St Corner
Coffee House
‘This looks hip and clean from the outside. I hope I actually get to visit when there is a spare moment’
The Spence
Olive House, Church St
‘the overgrown hydrangeas are wonderful’
Cobbled Yard
Sutton House
Kynaston Allotment
‘Modestly and almost secretly positioned off the High St, these beautifully maintained little vegetable patches are looked after all hours of the day’
Brett Close
Fishmonger
Football Training in Victoria Park
‘Sunday league football is highly competitive’
Healthy Produce at the Farmers’ Market
‘Arrived here on a suggestion and was pleasantly surprised at the wealth of choice in healthy food’
Park With Swings
‘The almost flatness of the shapes and composition were my key fascination while working on this painting’
Yellow House, Neville Rd
‘The yellow frontage with the steps in the sunlight, painted one quiet morning when no-one was around’
Yorkshire Grove
‘A bit of colour in a challenging world. I came across this housing block whilst first visiting the area and the red frontage immediately grabbed my attention’
Red House
Farmer’s Market Stall
‘This painting was done in the colder winter months’
Canal Bridge
‘Painted in the last few winter months’
Blue Barge
Park Tavern
‘This fine pub in Victoria Park through trees in bright winter sunshine’
London Fields
‘This a place I have known for a large part of my life. A friend who lives nearby who told me that people stay all night there in the summer because no one locks it up after dark’
Victoria Park
Snowy Scene on the Roman Rd
Snowy Garden
Paintings copyright © Nicholas Borden
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Nicholas Borden’s Spring Paintings
The Roundels Of Spitalfields
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Around the streets of Spitalfields there are circular metal plates set into the pavement. Many people are puzzled by them. Are they decorative coal hole covers as you find in other parts of London? Or is there a mysterious significance to them?
Sculptor Keith Bowler was walking down Brick Lane one day when he heard a tour guide explaining to a group of tourists that these plaques or roundels – to give them their correct name – were placed there in the nineteenth century for the benefit of people who could not read. Keith stuck his neck out and told the guide this was nonsense, that he made them on his kitchen table a few years ago. And although the tour guide gave Keith a strange look and was a little dubious of his claim, this is the truth of the matter.
“I was approached by Bethnal Green City Challenge in 1995, and I was asked to research, design and fabricate twenty five roundels. I was given a list of sites and I spent a few months doing it,” explained Keith summarily as we sat at the table where he cast the moulds for the roundels in the basement kitchen of his house in Wilkes St. Keith cut the round patterns out of board and then set real objects in place on them, such as the scissors you see above. From these patterns he made moulds that were sent over to Hoyle & Sons, the traditional family-run foundry by the canal in the Cambridge Heath Rd, where they were cast in iron before being installed by council workers.
The notion was that the pavements were already set with pieces of ironwork, made it a natural idea to introduce pieces of sculpture, and the emblems and locations were chosen to reflect the culture and history of Spitalfields. Sometimes there was a literal story illustrated by the presence of the roundel, like the match girls from the Bryant & May factory who met in the Hanbury Hall to create the first trade union. Elsewhere, like the scissors and buttons above in Brick Lane, the roundel simply records the clothing industry that once existed there. Once there were interpretative leaflets produced by the council which directed people on a trail around the neighbourhood, but these disappeared in a few months leaving passersby to create their own interpretations.
The roundels have acquired a history of their own. For example, the weaver’s shuttle and reels of thread marking the silk weavers in Folgate St were cast from a shuttle and reels that Dennis Severs found in his house and lent to Keith. And there was controversy from the start about the roundels, when two were mistakenly installed on the City of London side of the street in Petticoat Lane and at at the end of Artillery Passage in City territory, leading to angry phone calls from the Corporation demanding they be moved. Six are missing entirely now, stolen by thieves or covered by workmen, though occasionally roundels turn up and wind their way back to Keith. He has a line of errant roundels in his hallway, ready to be reinstalled and, as he keeps the moulds, plans are afoot to complete the set again.
Keith told me he liked the name “roundels” because it was once used to refer to the symbols on the wings of Spitfires, and is also a term in heraldry. There is a simplicity to these attractive designs that I walk past every day and which have seeped into my subconscious, witnessing the presence of what has gone. I photographed half a dozen of my favourites to show you, but there are at least eight more roundels to be found on the streets of Spitalfields.
On Brick Lane, among the Bengali shops, a henna stenciled hand
Commemorating the Bryant & May match girls, outside the Hanbury Hall on Hanbury St
In Folgate St, cast from a shuttle and reels from Dennis Severs’ House
In Brick Lane, outside the railings of Grey Eagle Brewery
In Princelet St, commemorating the first Jewish Theatre, where Jacob Adler once played
In Petticoat Lane, on the site of the ancient market
In Wentworth St, an over-vigilant council worker filled in this roundel as a potential trip hazard
You may also like the read about
In The Orchards Of Kent
St Botolph’s Crypt wet shelter 1976
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When I first visited the National Collection of Fruit Trees at Brogdale outside Faversham in Kent to enjoy the spring blossom, I vowed to go back to admire the crop. This year, I fulfilled my ambition in the company of Contributing Photographer Rachel Ferriman and we were blessed with a golden afternoon in the North Kent Fruit Belt.
Nothing prepared me for the seemingly infinite variety of fruit that exists in nature. Walking into an orchard of two-thousand-two-hundred varieties of apple, all in fruit, is a vertiginous prospect that is only compounded by your guide who informs you this is merely a fraction of the over ten thousand varieties in existence.
What can you do? Your heart leaps and your mind boggles at the different colours and sizes of fruit. You recognise russets, laxtons and allingtons. Even if you had all day, you could not taste them all. Despite the cold spring, it has been a good year for apples. You stand wonderstruck at the bounty and resilience of nature. Then you start to get huffy at the pitiful few varieties of mostly-bitter green apples available to buy in shops, always sold unripe for longer shelf life. How is this progress?
Yet this thought evaporates as you are led through a windbreak into another orchard where five hundred varieties of pear are in fruit. By now your vocabulary of superlatives has failed you and you can only wander wide-eyed through this latter day Eden.
That afternoon there was no-one there but me, Rachel and the guide. We were delighted to have the orchards to ourselves. But this is when you realise the world has gone mad if no-one else is interested to witness this annual spectacle that verges on the miraculous. Walking on, as if in a medieval dream poem, you discover an orchard of medlars and another of quinces.
By now, your feet are barely touching the ground and you hatch a plan – as you munch an apple – to return at this same time of year, decide upon your favourite varieties and then plant your own orchard of soft fruit. When you stumble upon such an ambition, you realise that life is short yet we are all still permitted to dream.
Medlars
Quince
Plum
Mike Austen, our guide
Photographs copyright © Rachel Ferriman
The National Collection of Fruit Trees at Brogdale
You may like to read about my first visit
Arful Nessa’s Sewing Machine
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Contributing Writer Delwar Hussain tells the story of his mother’s sewing machine
Arful Nessa with her sewing machine table
Rather than the sound of Bow bells, I was born to the whirring of sewing machines in my ear. Throughout most of my childhood, my mother did piecework while my father worked in a sweatshop opposite the beigel shop on Brick Lane, stitching together leather jackets for Mark & Spencer. The factory closed down long ago.
Initially my mother’s industrial-grade Brother sewing machine was in the kitchen, in between the sink and the pine wood table. But it took up too much space there and was also considered dangerous, once ambulatory children started populating the house. It was decided that it would be moved to one of the attic rooms on the top floor of our home, following the custom of the Huguenot silk weavers of the past. There the machine lived and there my mother would be found hunched over it, during all hours of the day and often late into the night. She says it was most hard on her back and shoulders, which would ache from the work.
“The men used to work in the factories. I preferred to do it at home because it was less work compared to what they did. They had to work harder,” she explains, “I began before the children were born. I wasn’t doing much at home, so I thought I should try it and earn a little money. Other women were working as machinists then and an old neighbour who had lived on Parfett St taught me how to operate the machine. I couldn’t do pockets, but I did pleats, belts and hems on skirts for women who worked in offices. I took in work for a factory on Cannon St Rd that made suits and another on New Rd that made blouses.”
For a while my mother sewed the lining into jackets and winter coats, working for a short Sikh man who had a clothes shop on Fournier St. He had quick steps and a bunch of heavy keys dangling from the belt on his trousers. The man still owes her money, she recalls. He would give her wages in arrears, promising to pay, but it never materialised. Following him, she worked for another man, who also did not pay. “Where would you go looking for them today?” my mother asks, “Everyone we used to know around here has left. So much has changed.”
I remember the almost-sweet smell of the machine oil, the thick needles, bundles of colourful nylon yarn, piles and piles of skirts in all shades and sizes, the metal bobbin cases and the sound of the sewing machine. When the foot peddle was down, the vibration could be felt throughout the house. Strangely, this provided a sense of comfort – the knowledge that my mother was upstairs and everything in the world was as it should be.
When I was around twenty, my brothers and sisters and I colluded with each other to get rid of the sewing machine. It had lain dormant in the attic room ever since my mother gave up taking in piecework some years previously. The work had slowly become more irregular and less financially rewarding. “When I first started, I was able to earn around seventy-five pence per skirt, then towards the end, when there were many more women working, it dropped to around ten pence per coat.” These were also the days when much of the manufacturing in East London was being shipped out to parts of the world where there was cheaper labour, including Bangladesh and Turkey.
With my mother’s working paraphernalia left as it was, the space resembled Rodinsky’s room – he was the mythical recluse who once lived a few doors down from us in the attic of 19 Princelet St and who had disappeared one day, leaving everything intact. I had an idea to turn our attic into a study, installing my PC which my mother had bought for me from the money she had saved from sewing. With a separate monitor, keyboard and large hard drive, it was almost as big as her Brother sewing machine.
She had always been a hoarder, so we knew that getting rid of it was going to be a delicate and difficult matter. We had given her prior warnings, but these had fallen on deaf ears. Then one night, when she had gone to bed, my siblings and I crept upstairs and, with a lot of effort, detached the head of the sewing machine from the table. Huffing and puffing, we carried it down three flights of stairs and delicately dumped it at the end of our street. We did the same with the table base.
Of course, she discovered the machine was missing the next day and was incredibly upset. She had “spent one hundred and forty pounds on it,” she said. “It still worked,” she said, “why had we not told her, she could have given it to someone at least, instead of it being thrown away” and “what had she done to deserve children who were so wasteful.” After that, I forgot all about the Brother sewing machine that once lived in our attic.
Once when I returned from a trip to Dhaka, researching a book about the people of that city and interviewing garment workers about their lives and fears, I was speaking with my mother when the subject of her earlier life as a machinist came up. And then she announced her revelation.
My mother and our Somali neighbour had managed to rescue the sewing machine from where my brothers, sisters and I had thought we had discarded the thing. The two women had somehow managed to shuffle the table base along, scraping hard along the pavement. But instead of bringing it back to the house, they took it to the neighbour’s, where it was to stay in the garden until they decided what to do with it. The machine head on the other hand was far too heavy for them to carry and they abandoned it.
This disclosure had to be investigated. My mother and I immediately knocked on our neighbour’s door, and asked if it was still there. The neighbour led us to the garden where, hidden behind wooden boarding and tendrils of ivy, we found the sewing machine my mother had spent so many years working on.
Considering it had endured years outdoors, it looked like it was still in relatively good health. Bits of it, such as the bobbin winder and the spool base were slightly rusty, but the address of the showroom on Cambridge Heath Rd where my mother bought it was clearly labelled and the motor looked in working condition.
She is still upset with my brothers and sisters and me for throwing it away. This confused me. “Why would you want to hold onto something that is a source of oppression?” I asked, high-mindedly. “The machine helped to feed and educate my family,” she answered quietly.
My mother then reminded me that my aunt, her sister, also had a Brother sewing machine and made skirts for many years from her kitchen in Bethnal Green. We went to speak to her. She no longer works as a seamstress and has resorted to keeping her dismembered machine on the veranda of her ground floor flat. The table now stores pots and pans, baskets containing seeds and drying leaves. The head was in the bottom drawer of a metal cabinet next to it, wrapped up in a Sainsbury’s shopping bag. My aunt still has some of the cloth which she would make into skirts and she showed me the pleats on a piece of salmon-coloured material.
“Most of the women in this block worked for different factories and one of them taught me how to do it. I worked for a Turkish man on Mare St for around seven years. I would get started around 7am after the morning prayer at 6am. I can’t remember where the skirts were being sold, but they were for well known shops in the West End. In one day, I could work on fifty or sixty pieces. Some days I made around a hundred. I received around forty or fifty pence per piece and could earn around three hundred pounds per week. But it was all irregular, nothing was fixed. My children would help by cutting the loops off when they got home after school. There is no work anymore, but I kept the machine in case I needed to fix things. It still works.”
While I took notes, sitting on the chair she would sit on whilst working, I could hear dregs of conversation between the two sisters, comparing the quality of oranges in Bethnal Green market to Asda and Iceland, as well as recalling what happened to other women whom they both knew that had worked as seamstresses. This industry, now gone, is a piece of the thread that joins the past with the present in the East End and, in turn, unites the people who have come to make this part of London their home.
My aunt with her sewing machine in Bethnal Green
Arful Nessa
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may like to read Delwar Hussain’s other story about his mother
The Pleasures & Miseries Of London
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Written anonymously and published in 1820, The Tour of Dr Syntax Through the Pleasures & Miseries of London was one of a popular series of comedies featuring the idiosyncratic Dr Syntax, a character originated by William Coombe and drawn by Thomas Rowlandson. These plates are believed to be the work of Robert Cruikshank, father of George Cruikshank.
Dr Syntax & his Spouse plan their trip to London
Setting out for London
Arriving in London
Robbed in St Giles High St
A Promenade in Hyde Park
A Flutter at a Gaming House
At an Exhibition at the Royal Academy
At a Masquerade
In St Paul’s Churchyard on a Wet & Windy Day
Inspecting the Bank of England
Presented to the King at Court
A Night at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens
A Visit to the House of Commons
A Trip behind the Scenes at the Opera
A Lecture at the London Institution
Going to Richmond on a Steam Boat
Reading his Play in the Green Room
Overshoots London Bridge & pops overboard into the Thames
Images courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
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At Aldgate Pump
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See these people come and go at the junction of Fenchurch St and Leadenhall St in the City of London in 1927. Observe the boy idling in the flat cap. They all seem unaware they are in the presence of the notorious “Pump of Death” – that switched to mains supply fifty years earlier in 1876, when the water began to taste strange and was found to contain liquid human remains which had seeped into the underground stream from cemeteries.
Several hundred people died in the resultant Aldgate Pump Epidemic as a result of drinking polluted water – though this was obviously a distant memory by the nineteen twenties when Whittard’s tea merchants used to “always get the kettles filled at the Aldgate Pump so that only the purest water was used for tea tasting.”
Yet before it transferred to a supply from the New River Company of Islington, the spring water of the Aldgate Pump was appreciated by many for its abundant health-giving mineral salts, until – in an unexpectedly horrific development – it was discovered that the calcium in the water had leached from human bones.
This bizarre phenomenon quickly entered popular lore, so that a bouncing cheque was referred to as “a draught upon Aldgate Pump,” and in rhyming slang “Aldgate Pump” meant to be annoyed – “to get the hump.” The terrible revelation confirmed widespread morbid prejudice about the East End, of which Aldgate Pump was a landmark defining the beginning of the territory. The “Pump of Death” became emblematic of the perceived degradation of life in East London and it was once declared with superlative partiality that “East of Aldgate Pump, people cared for nothing but drink, vice and crime.”
Today this sturdy late-eighteenth century stone pump stands sentinel as the battered reminder of a former world, no longer functional, and lost amongst the traffic and recent developments of the modern City. No-one notices it anymore and its fearsome history is almost forgotten, despite the impressive provenance of this dignified ancient landmark, where all mileages East of London are calculated. Even in the old photographs you can trace how the venerable pump became marginalised, cut down and ultimately ignored.
Aldgate Well was first mentioned in the thirteenth century – in the reign of King John – and referred to by sixteenth century historian, John Stowe, who described the execution of the Bailiff of Romford on the gibbet “near the well within Aldgate.” In “The Uncommercial Traveller,” Charles Dickens wrote, “My day’s business beckoned me to the East End of London, I had turned my face to that part of the compass… and had got past Aldgate Pump.” And before the “Pump of Death” incident, Music Hall composer Edgar Bateman nicknamed “The Shakespeare of Aldgate Pump,” wrote a comic song in celebration of Aldgate Pump – including the lyric line “I never shall forget the gal I met near Aldgate Pump…”
The pump was first installed upon the well head in the sixteenth century, and subsequently replaced in the eighteenth century by the gracefully tapered and rusticated Portland stone obelisk that stands today with a nineteenth century gabled capping. The most remarkable detail to survive to our day is the elegant brass spout in the form of a wolf’s head – still snarling ferociously in a vain attempt to maintain its “Pump of Death” reputation – put there to signify the last of these creatures to be shot outside the City of London.
In the photo from 1927, you can see two metal drinking cups that have gone now, leaving just the stubs where the chains attaching them were fixed. Tantalisingly, the brass button that controls the water outlet is still there, yet, although it is irresistible to press it, the water ceased flowing in the last century. A drain remains beneath the spout where the stone is weathered from the action of water over centuries and there is an elegant wrought iron pump handle – enough details to convince me that the water might return one day.
Looking towards Aldgate.
The water head, reputed to be an image of the last wolf shot in London.
The pump was closed in 1876 and the outlet switched to mains water supply.
Archive photographs copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
