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?
Jill’s handiwork
My pockets were wearing out with all the coins, until I bought this purse with foxes on it from Jill Green in the Sunday Upmarket a year ago. Now I collect my loose change in here and empty it into the self-checkout at Sainsburys, Whitechapel whenever I go there to buy cans of rice pudding and cheap toilet paper. This modest little purse has served me well, it is a perfect piece of design and a year’s use has only improved its beauty.
All credit goes to Jill, who designs and manufactures them along with other screenprinted artifacts in an attic workshop high above the Brick Lane bookshop. Originally from Leeds, she studied graphics at Glasgow School of Art and expected no more than to end up working in Tesco, but spent a couple of years in various design jobs before starting out on her own seven years ago.
Jill has a technique of printing on leather whereby the soft suede pile is only exposed within the images – this is what gives the foxes on my purse such a convincingly rich colour and texture. Using this specialist technique, she makes an attractive range of small leather goods. Each piece is designed, printed and sewn together by Jill herself using leather from local suppliers. She loves making things and, as my purse illustrates, these are not mere novelty items, they are robust and functional too – desirable to own and a pleasure to use.
I want to celebrate Jill because she manifests an essence of what makes this place interesting to me. Running her own business, she is a designer of real talent, who is also highly skilled and experienced in printing and sewing too. It is no small achievement that she makes a living doing this because she is a perfectionist and puts a lot of time into finishing every single piece to a high standard, which means the profit margin is low. But, justifiably, she has great pride in what she does and I think her work deserves wider recognition, so I was pleased to learn Jill has recently been approached by Liberty. In fact, I know of people who buy her beautifully hand-screenprinted cards for a few pounds and then frame them.
When I visited her workshop, Jill was hard at work, busy and excited, making things to sell for Christmas. I love these leather pencil cases with black cats on them that she has underway this week. Reflecting her own Northern character, there is a very personal droll humour to all Jill’s work that I find immensely appealing.
Be sure to look out for her in the Upmarket on Sundays and go say hello, or visit Shopjill.com.
For all your feathery requirements
There was a saucy burlesque dancer by the name of Suki Sumatra doing a dance with Ostrich feathers at the Boom Boom Club at the Bathhouse last week and it reminded me of this photograph I took earlier in the Summer up in Hoxton. Here at the wonderfully named Plumage House in Shepherdess Walk was once the headquarters of H. Bestimt & Co Ltd feather merchants, that disappointingly closed down in 1994. Tantalisingly, we shall never know what we missed.
Where else to go now for feathers, but to the ubiquitous Mr Ali who I photographed last Sunday in Columbia Rd? He has regularly been selling Peacock feathers that he imports from Bangladesh for years, here, on Brick Lane and sometimes outside the Spitalfields Market too. At just £2 for five, £5 for fifteen or £10 for thirty, it makes economic sense to buy in bulk from Mr Ali. Cutting a venerable figure with dispassionate poise, dapper dress sense, a stylish white beard and always proudly displaying an armful of dazzling Peacock feathers, Mr Ali is one of my favourite neighbourhood personalities. Entirely unwittingly, he has become a familiar icon of Spitalfields and I am always delighted to see him here on the street, resolute in a niche market that is all his own .
Dan Cruickshank’s sex book
There are few in Spitalfields that I hold in such high esteem as Dan Cruickshank, so it was an honour to be invited over to meet him in his beautiful eighteenth century house in Elder St last week. The remaining old houses in Spitalfields are just a tiny fragment of what stood here half a century ago, and if it were not for the visionary pioneering campaigns of Dan and his friends in the late seventies there might be none left today. They squatted empty houses to prevent them being bulldozed and once famously locked themselves inside the Board School in Spital Sq to stop its demolition. Dan has spent his life engaged with the history of Spitalfields and in doing so he has now become part of that history himself.
Meeting Dan for the first time is quite an overwhelming experience, because you immediately realise that this is a man with a vast number of stories to tell. Yet he wears his scholarship lightly and it is tempered by an appealing levity and self-deprecation, so I was mesmerised to listen as he spoke – quickly and almost in a breathless whisper – recounting stories of the history of the neighbourhood, one after another.
My visit was to learn about his new book, The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin shaped the Capital. It was a passion for the architecture that first led Dan to the Georgians, but this in turn led to a curiosity to know the lives of the people and their society of which these buildings are enigmatic remnants. While the architecture may be celebrated, Dan recognises it was not created out of aesthetic endeavour but as a money-making operation. Most of the houses around Spitalfields, including his own, were thrown up by developers – built quickly and cheaply without any intention that they might last beyond their original sixty year leases.
Dan’s first query was where was this money coming from and who was spending it? Following the money, he considered some of the great industries of London at this time, silk (in this neighbourhood), brewing, the ports and printing – before turning his mind to the service industries, and in particular the sex trade. For the past ten years, through comparing fiction and studying documentary evidence, he has sought the reality of the eighteenth century sex industry and low life.
Staggeringly, there were as many as fifty two thousand women working as prostitutes in London by the end of the eighteenth century, which is one in five women – creating an estimated turnover of twenty million pounds a year when the country’s entire annual tax revenue was only six million.
Dan’s research has uncovered many individual fascinating stories of these women. At a time when there were few opportunities for females of intelligence and spirit, without inherited wealth, the primary options to make money were being a servant or a washerwoman. Some passed through the sex industry to achieve independence as actresses, while others even lived and dressed as men. Yet in spite of the tens of thousands who fell victim to abuse and disease, they are also a few stories of women who succeeded, escaping to riches and fame – inspiring personalities like the Duchess of Bolton (the original Polly Peachum in The Beggars’ Opera), Mrs Addington (great friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds) and the beloved Emma Hamilton.
You can learn more when Dan speaks at the Bishopsgate Institute this Thursday 29th October at 7:30pm.
I am hoping that my meeting with Dan Cruickshank was the beginning of a conversation that will enable me to recount to you many of his stories of the history of Spitalfields over the coming years.
Columbia Road Market 9
Just as I was about to take a properly composed photograph of these sweet scented Paperwhites that I bought this morning in the market for £5 the lot, Mr Pussy walked into the frame and highjacked the picture.
It certainly was busy at the market earlier, and I think many residents of the neighbourhood took advantage of the extra hour combined with the opportunity of a clear Autumn morning to head down to Columbia Rd, which put all the stallholders into a good humour too. As well as the Paperwhites, I bought a tray of my favourite white Cyclamen for £6 to replant the box on my bedroom window sill to enliven my view each morning.
