Amy Cooper's handiwork
One afternoon at the end of last week, I walked down the Mile End Rd to the Bancroft Library, where the Local History collection is housed, to see a newly donated collection of Spitalfields silk and lace. The archivist produced a small cardboard chocolate box from the nineteen sixties with a Raeburn portrait of a child on the top. He kindly placed a table beside the window in the dying light and covered it with a piece of grey paper. The he opened the box and unwrapped the precious packages inside wrapped in white tissue paper, arranging them on the table, so that in the last light of day I could photograph them for you.
The first item to catch my eye was this little silk purse with the phrase SPITALFIELDS SCHOOL OF DESIGN 1848 elegantly picked out in gold thread. Not only is the stitching neat and regular, the balance and spacing of the typography is perfect – James Brown and Richard Ardagh would be impressed. This curious item has no wear, it cannot have had any function beyond displaying the accomplishment of its own creation. It fits neatly into the palm of the hand and is exquisite in every detail, the string of golden glass beads looped around the edges, the delicate string handle, the jet button and the oyster blue silk lining.
Next I examined the needlebook below, with embroidery of flowers on both covers, and taking the utmost care I unfastened the ribbons that held it closed. Opening it up, I found a scrap of paper folded in between the pages of needles which tells us the maker. This needlebook was made by Miss Amy Cooper: she was born in 1794 & died in 1891. The script itself had a delicacy and restraint, similar to the handwriting of “No more twist!” pinned on the Lord Mayor’s unfinished waistcoat in The Tailor of Gloucester.
I love the aesthetic, using pale silk and embroidering subtly coloured flowers in natural colours, as fresh as the day they were stitched. The use of different toned threads in the recognisable heather and rose flowers suggests she worked from nature. Every individual stitch is a decision made with the same care you might bring to the selection of vocabulary and arrangement of words in a poem. Fine details, like the sky blue lining, the grey glass beads sewn at intervals around the edge of covers and the use of bordered ribbon upon the spine, draw the eye in to observe the nuances of this lovely artefact. When someone invests as much time and consideration as Amy did here, it deserves our closest examination and rewards us in turn by delighting the eye.
Amy Cooper lived to be ninety-seven, born five years after the French Revolution, she died in the year that automobiles began manufacture. The three sisters who donated the collection, which belonged to their mother Mrs Ann Maitland MacEwen, know nothing of its origins – so we cannot say if Amy made them all or establish what is the connection to the Spitalfields School of Design, which was an early government project to promote design in industry, founded at 37 Crispin St in 1842. Amy would have been fifty-four in 1848, when the purse was made, and I would like to think she made it as an example to show her pupils at the school.
The other two items that complete this modest collection are two girls’ lace caps. The workmanship of these pieces is inconceivably intricate and bears testimony to long hours of patient labour and awe-inspiring skill. I am a keen stitcher myself, I have sewn shirts by hand, I mend my own clothes and you have seen the quilt I made, but I could never begin to approach this level of expertise. I particularly like the smaller one with its beautifully regular ruching, gathered at the crown and the drawstrings at front and back.
Now I have seen my first examples of Spitalfields lace and silk, it has made me curious to find more. This place is famous for the silk thread, cloth and clothing that was made here, and much of the story of Spitalfields can be told through the textile industry. Somewhere in archives there must be wonderful examples, and I have decided that I am going to seek some more of our predecessors’ work to show to you.
So long, Piers Wardle
This drawing by Piers Wardle has been on the wall of my office for more than ten years now. I love the irrepressibly joyful smile of this happy dumpster and it serves as a healthy reminder to me never to take myself too seriously. Significantly, the drawing is made upon a rare piece of lumpy handmade paper made of sheep shit in North Devon. This accounts for the pleasant beige tone of the paper which even has a watermark of a sheep running through it. It is highly characteristic of this clever artist that the dopey cartoon drawing is entirely in contrast with the hidden poetry of this charismatic work.
Piers Wardle, who died unexpectedly over Christmas, was a popular figure in Spitalfields – a participant in the art scene here for the past twenty years, at first as part of Joshua Compston’s Factual Nonsense in Charlotte Rd, including the “Fete Worse Than Death” in Hoxton Sq, and more recently as part of Decima Gallery. Tall and naturally authoritative, with old-fashioned deferential good manners and a disarmingly unsentimental sense of humour, yet equally blessed with a generous kindly spirit, Piers Wardle was an intriguing and attractive man. He cultivated an attitude of amused bewilderment at the absurdity of life and I think of him always primed with some droll unique observation to lighten any moment.
It was in early December, on the day I interviewed John Constable at the Crossbones Cemetery in the Borough, that I last saw him. After the interview, I walked down to visit Piers in his flat in Southwark to borrow a tripod to take the photo of the children outside Leila’s Shop before Christmas. Typically of Piers, he insisted on giving me the tripod as a gift, and instead of just dropping by, I found myself going off to have lunch with him at the local Spanish restaurant. Once we realised we had no money to buy lunch, this became an excuse for a tour around the architectural wonders of the neighbourhood as we searched for a cash machine.
That day he showed me his last artwork. A transparent plastic pin wheel that sat upon the screen of an overhead projector and turned in the heat rising from the light, projecting a revolving image of a star upon the wall. It was elegant in its simplicity, funny and magical too. Although he did not know it, it was a beautiful image to conclude his work as an artist and I am grateful to have last seen Piers then, on an inconsequentially happy day.
We had a nice lunch and, as it was getting dark, we said our goodbyes and I walked back towards Spitalfields, only to discover part of the tripod was missing. It was cold and miserable but in spite of my urge to go straight home, I called Piers and retraced my steps. He buzzed me into the building, I walked up the stairs, he passed me the missing piece of the tripod and with a brief amicable greeting we parted. We were sublimely unaware that after all the years we knew each other, this was the moment when we would never see each other again in this life. In retrospect, the moment is startling for its insignificance and I am glad of it. There is no good way to say goodbye to a friend forever, but there are plenty worse than my farewell to Piers.
Aged 49, Piers died unexpectedly of a brain haemorrhage on 22rd December at his mother’s home at Clyst Hydon in Devon. He will be greatly missed by everyone who knew him, including me.
I took this picture of Piers on my phone in the private bar at The Golden Heart, one summer’s evening in 2008 after a Decima Gallery cowboy event.
Columbia Road Market 18
Last Sunday, I woke early and walked up the road from Spitalfields through the frost to arrive at the market at the usual time, but there was hardly anyone there. Wisely, most of the stallholders had stayed at home and the hardy souls who had arrived were still unpacking. It was cold and it was grim, so I simply returned home and went back to bed. This week, I returned an hour later and the picture was much the same but I resisted walking away because I felt a hunger for some new plant life. So I began searching through the trolleys of plants, stacked up in trays and when I tore away the plastic wrap, I found a tray of these Snake’s Head Lilies or Fritillaria meleagris at the bottom of a trolley. They were four pots for a fiver, so I handed over my cash and bagged the lilies.
I have always been fascinated by these wonderfully strange plants with their spindly stems and exotic chequer board flowers in purple or white. They seem too exotic for England and yet there are places where they grow wild. I was once in Magdalen Meadow for a picnic, the island between tributaries of the river in Oxford that belongs to Magdalen College, and the entire meadow was full of Snake’s Head Lilies in flower. Having struggled to grow them in the past from bulbs, I was relieved to read Christopher Lloyd writing about the difficulties of cultivating them in “A Year at Great Dixter”. However, buying them in pots and then transplanting them is an effective subterfuge, and that is what I shall do with these – once I have enjoyed them indoors in this Honiton Pottery bowl of my grandmother’s and when the thaw has come.
On the way home, I passed Gilbert & George in the Bethnal Green Rd, on their way to E.Pellicci for breakfast. They were all wrapped up against the cold in magnificently tailored full-length tweed coats and mufflers. George wore a flat cap and Gilbert had a pair of ear muffs. With my first discovery at Columbia Rd and my first sighting of G&G, I feel that the New Year has now begun in Spitalfields.
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.
