Baked apples
At this time of year my thoughts turn to baked apples. In Devon, I used to have my own Bramley Apple tree so I enjoyed a profusion of cooking apples that lasted until spring each year. Here in London, I walk down to the Borough Market to buy a crate of them for around twenty pounds. Then I stumble back to Spitalfields through the City with it on my shoulders, to arrive home with sore arms. On Saturday afternoon, I made the mistake of putting the large white box down to rest for a moment on the low stone wall outside the Gherkin. Immediately, three security guards clutching radiophones and fearful of terrorist bombers, ran towards me from inside the building. So I picked up my precious box of apples and moved on swiftly.
Overnight, a crate of apples will fill the house with an evocative fragrance that distinguishes this exact moment in the year for me. Baked apples are delicious served up with honey and cream or yoghurt. Eaten by the fireside on a frosty winter’s night (accompanied maybe with a nip of Macallan or Laphroaig), they are the perfect restorative for any soul challenged with dread at the expanse of cold nights ahead before spring.
I keep an apple corer stowed in the back of a drawer and once the cores are out, I stuff the apples with raisins, add a few cloves and put them in the oven on a baking tray. Cook them at a low heat for about forty minutes, but do not be tempted to think you can get your baked apples quicker by putting them in at a higher heat, otherwise they will explode – just as those security guards at the Gherkin feared.
Brian Butler’s Furniture
After photographing Roy Kinnear’s railway arch, I dropped by 157 Martha St (just a couple of arches west) where the magnanimous Brian Butler has his business. I was curious to learn about Brian’s extraordinary collection of sculptures and signs, but instead he wanted to talk about the farm he used to have in the next arch.
Once upon a time, someone rang to say there were some stray hens on wasteground in Backchurch Lane, so Brian brought them back in his truck. Soon they were roosting under his arch and once the word got round, Brian was asked to shelter some stray goats from Old Ford Lock too. Then a pal took Brian over to Southall Market where he was smitten by an old horse that he bought on impulse at a bargain price. He walked it all the way back from Southall himself, an epic journey of over six hours and a measure of Brian’s devotion to animals.
Quickly acquiring more livestock and a reputation somewhere between Noah and Old MacDonald, the presence of Brian’s farm under the railway arch became controversial in this densely populated corner of Shadwell. With some reluctance, Brian handed his creatures over to an animal sanctuary in Surrey – apart from Charlie the goat. Such was the sentimental attachment of man and beast that Charlie lived out his days here with Brian, roaming freely around Shadwell and regularly dropping into the chip shop for a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.
Over the thirty years Brian has been running his business under his arch, he has taken the opportunity to indulge himself in collecting bizarre stuff and making artfully hand lettered signs advertising his own idiosyncratic philosophy and humour. The result is a striking installation worthy of any of our more fashionable galleries. He claims no-one has ever asked to buy one of his signs but I think it might only be a matter of time. Brian told me that the monster burger in the picture above came from a French fast food chain and used to have lettuce in it until some kids stole it. I was about the learn the origin of the bull too, when a woman tried to negotiate the price of a table that was good value at the asking price. But Brian doesn’t negotiate, so she paid his price and took the table, and I never learnt where the bull came from.
Next, Brian told me of his Spitalfields upbringing. Until the age of six, he lived in Hobson’s Cottages in Deal St. Later, the family moved to Toynbee St and then Cable St – five minutes from his railway arch. So for Brian it has been a lifetime within a square mile and it is apparent that he is profoundly at home here. Up on the wall inside the shop hangs a tin plate with a text painted by Brian in bold capitals “MY HEART LIES HERE”. “It’s true!” he says, with an open-hearted grin illuminating his generously rounded moon face.
Gathering winter fuel in Spitalfields
In common with everyone else these days, I am feeling the pinch, so last winter when my boiler broke, I gave up on it and relied upon fires instead. There is plenty of scrap timber lying around the streets of Spitalfields in the form of abandoned broken pallets from deliveries to the stores here. Also, the constant renovations provide an endless supply of firewood that just needs to be salvaged from curbside skips.
Now it is time to start lighting fires and gathering winter fuel again. If you see someone struggling with a pallet on their shoulder around Brick Lane over the coming months, do not just stand and watch, please give a hand – because that person is me! Last winter, friends would keep a look out on my behalf and sometimes in the morning I found pallets kindly placed outside my house in the night.
My neighbour lends me his powersaw and I lay the pallets down on the pavement and cut them up. After months of practice, I have learnt to do this expertly with the minimum number of saw cuts. Like a master butcher slicing through the ribs of a prize bull, I make four cuts with my saw the whole length of the pallet, traversing the slats, and then flip it over to cut through the base supports. I make short work of these pallets and in no time at all, I am sweeping up the sawdust from the pavement and stacking up a satisfyingly neat woodpile. A couple of pallets only provide a few evenings’ worth of heat, so this is a constant task for me during the winter months.
To keep warm in the depths of last winter, I lay in front of the fire on my couch under a large sheepskin blanket, with a hot water bottle cradled underneath and Mr Pussy on top of me, too. It was cosy lying there watching films by firelight and I feel quite sentimental about it now. The first thing I did last Christmas Day was to go out into the frost and cut up pallets.
The truth is I grew up in a house with no heating, my family regularly wore overcoats indoors and I remember visiting my grandmother in Chard one Christmas to discover her in her fur coat and hat, mixing ingredients in a bowl on the kitchen table. My other grandmother was confined to a Tuberculosis clinic in Bovey Tracey during the nineteen twenties where they believed that fresh air was curative, to the extreme that she once wrote in a letter of waking in her bed to find a blanket of snow upon the covers. The snow had blown in during the night from Dartmoor through the open door and windows. It is no wonder she died a year later, aged twenty three.
My own discomfort rates as nothing beside this, but I did find it hard to wake to see my own breath in the bedroom and then heat water in pans before going into the cold bathroom for a wash, as I did all last winter. Now my boiler is repaired but I will still be collecting firewood because, in spite of the work and dirt entailed, I love fires – and I should rather gather wood in the streets than pay any more than I can avoid to the power companies, currently profiteering off our human need to be warm.
When I came to live in an old house in Spitalfields, I certainly did not anticipate it could mean living in historic conditions too!
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.
