Paul Gardner, Paper Bag Seller
Recently, I have taken to dropping in to the premises of my new friend Paul Gardner, the paper bag seller at 149 Commercial St, to observe the constant parade of long-standing customers that pass through, creating the life of this distinctive business. One morning, I called round at six thirty, opening time, to enjoy a quiet chat before the rush and Paul explained that his great-grandfather James Gardner began trading here in this same building as a Scalemaker when it was built in 1870 – which means Paul is a fourth generation Market Sundriesman and makes Gardners the longest established family business in Spitalfields.
Paul still has his great-grandfather’s accounts from the end of the nineteenth century, when as Scalemakers they serviced the scales for all the traders in the fruit and vegetable market on a regular basis. Turning the pages and scanning the lines of James’ fine copperplate handwriting your eye alights upon the names, Isaac, Isaiah and Ezekiel, indicative of the Jewish population that once defined the identity of Spitalfields. There is an ancient block of wood with two scoops carved out that are smoothed with wear, it has been in use since the days of Paul’s great-grandfather. Then his son Bertie (Paul’s grandfather) used it, then Bertie’s son Roy (Paul’s father) used it and Paul still keeps his cash in it today. As the twentieth century wore on, each of the successive Mr Gardners found that customers began to expect to buy their produce in a paper bag (a trend which is now reversed) and so the trade of dealing in bags supplanted the supply of scales entirely over four generations.
Turn your back on the traffic rattling down Commercial St and stand for a moment to contemplate the dignified Brunswick green frontage of GARDNERS Market Sundriesman. An old glass signs reads “PAPER & POLYTHENE BAG MERCHANT” and, sure enough, a variety of different coloured bags are festooned on strings like bunting, below them are some scales hinting at the origins of the business and then your attention is distracted by a mysterious wooden sieve, a momento of Paul’s grandfather. Enter the shop to be confronted by piles of bags of every variety in packets stacked up on either side and leaving barely any room to stand. Only two routes are possible, straight ahead leading into the dark recesses where the stacks grow taller and closer together in the gloom or turn right to the makeshift counter, improvised from an old counter-top supported upon yet more packets of bags. Beneath the fluorescent glow, the dust of ages is settling upon everything. You think you have entered a storeroom, but you are wrong because you neglected to notice Paul sitting at the counter in a cosy corner, partly concealed by a stack of bags. You turn to greet him and a vista appears with a colourful display of bags and tags and tapes and those old green-grocers’ signs that say “Today’s price 2/8” and “Morning Gathered” – which creates a pleasant backdrop to the figure of Paul Gardner as he stands to greet you with a genial “Hello!”
With his wavy grey locks, gentle face, sociable manner and innate decency, Paul could have stepped from another age and it is a joy to meet someone who has successfully resisted the relentless imperative to haste and efficiency at any cost, that tyrannises our age and threatens to enslave us all. When you enter the shop, you enter Paul’s world and you discover it is a better place than the one outside.
Paul was thirteen when his father Roy died unexpectedly in 1968, creating a brief inter-regnum when his mother took over for four years until he came of age. “I came here the first day after I left school at seventeen”, says Paul, “It was what I wanted to do. After the first year, my mother stopped coming, though my nan used to live above the shop then. I haven’t had a day off since 1972. I don’t make much money, I will never become a millionaire. To be honest, I try to sell things as cheap as I can while others try to sell them as expensive as they can. I do it because I have done it all my life. I do it because it is like a family heirloom.”
Paul Gardner’s customers are the stallholders and small businessmen and women of East London, many of whom have been coming for more than twenty years, especially loyal are the Ghanaian and Nigerian people who prefer to trade with a family business. Paul will sell small numbers of bags while others only deal in bulk and he offers the same price per bag for ten as for a hundred. Even then, most of his customers expect to negotiate the price down, unable to resist their innate natures as traders. Paul explained to me that some have such small turnovers they can only afford to buy ten carrier bags at a time.
In his endeavours, Paul supports and nurtures an enormous network of tiny businesses that are a key part of the economy of our city. Many have grown and come back with bigger and bigger orders, selling their products to supermarkets, while others simply sustain themselves, like the Nigerian woman who has a stall in Brixton market and has been coming regularly on the bus for twenty-three years to buy her paper bags here. “I try to do favours for people”, says Paul and, in spontaneous confirmation of this, a customer rings with the joyous news that they have finally scraped enough money together to pay their account for the last seven years. Sharing in the moment of triumph, Paul laughs down the phone, “What happened, did you win the lottery or something?”
Paul has the greatest respect for his customers and they hold him in affection too. In fact, I think Paul’s approach could serve as a model if we wish to move forward from the ugliness of the current business ethos. Paul only wants to make enough to live and builds mutually supportive relationships with his customers over the longterm based upon trust. His is a more equitable version of capitalism tempered by mutual respect, anchored in a belief in the essential goodness rather than the essential greediness of people. As a fourth generation trader, Paul has no business plan, he is guided by his beliefs about people and how he wants to live in the world. His integrity and self respect are his most precious possessions. “I have never advertised,” says Paul, “All my customers come because they have been recommended by friends who are already my customers.”
However, after Gardners survived two World Wars and the closure of the market, there is now a new threat as the landlord seeks to increase the annual rent from £15,000 to £25,000 in a single step this June. “I earn two hundred and fifty pounds a week,” reveals Paul with frank humility, “If I earned five hundred pounds a week, I could give an extra two hundred and fifty towards the rent but at two hundred and fifty pounds a week, the cupboard is bare.”
Ruminating upon the problem,“They’ve dollied-up the place round here!” says Paul quietly, in an eloquently caustic verdict upon this current situation in which his venerable family business finds itself now, after a hundred and forty years, in a fashionable shopping district with a landlord seeking to maximize profits. Paul needs to renegotiate his rent increase and we must support Paul by sending more business his way (at the very least, everyone go round and buy your bin bags from him), because Paul is a Spitalfields legend we cannot lose. But more important than the history itself, is the political philosophy that has evolved over four generations of experience. It is the sum of what has been learnt. In all his many transactions, Paul unselfconsciously espouses a practical step-by-step approach towards a more sustainable mode of society. Who would have expected that the oldest traders in Spitalfields might also turn out to be the model of an ethical business pointing the way to the future?
Below you can see Paul’s grandfather Bertie Gardner, standing with Paul’s father Roy Gardner as child outside the shop around 1930. In the next picture you see Roy, now a grown man, standing outside the shop after World War II, around 1947. The third picture is Paul Gardner outside his shop today.
The strippers of Shoreditch
Last night, I met a nice girl called Lara for drink in The Pride of Spitalfields with her good friend Sarah, a photographer. Superficially, if you were introduced to the fresh-faced Lara Clifton and she flashed her dark eyes and her lovely gap-toothed smile that gives her an appealing aura of gaucheness, you might assume she was once a member of the Brownies or the Pony Club. You would certainly recognise her as a well-brought-up girl. You would never in a million years guess that she enjoyed a successful career as a stripper. You would not believe that it is her in the picture above. But Lara has far more sophistication, intelligence and moral courage than meets the eye upon first introduction.
“My flatmate started doing it,” says Lara, explaining how she began, “And I was shocked until I realised that it was less exploitative and better paid than the office temping I was doing. It was a more honest form of commerce and a lot of the girls enjoyed doing it. It was not sleazy or seedy.” I was very startled to hear this because I perceived stripping as a degrading activity that humiliates women, but this is not Lara’s view. Commenting on the notion of the dominant male gaze, Lara proposes a different perspective, “The punters are like little boys in a sweet shop, it’s a gentle gaze, it’s passive, very respectful. Everyone knows what’s going on. Nothing is hidden.” And Lara speaks warmly of the relationships between the girls too, “There is this genuine camaraderie. You quickly get to know people if you are naked together.” In Lara’s description, it sounds like they enjoyed a high old time, “The girls used to jump from table to table, it was like a crazy circus. They were the best group of people ever.”
Lara is quick to qualify her comments, emphasising that she can only speak for her own experience. And I must applaud her audacity in making such a brave career move because, even if Lara took to stripping like the proverbial duck to water, I have no doubt it took strong nerves to step out naked in public and laudable self-confidence to be open about what she did when there are plenty who would not hesitate to censure. Lara explained the routine to me whereby three women would perform in sequence during an evening, giving three shows each over three hours and passing the jug around before every strip. In Lara’s eyes, entirely preferable to the many more hours temping in an office to earn a comparable sum. I was intrigued by Lara’s interpretation of the power relationship between stripper and punter and it was my understanding that a strip ended at the moment of full nudity, but I learnt this not the case in Lara’s world. She ran around the pub naked, performing not on a stage but commanding the whole space, though, significantly, Lara always kept her high heels on, as the symbol of her dominant status within the performance arena over which she held control.
One day, Lara put a note on the changing room wall requesting written contributions from her fellow strippers and quickly found she had enough material for a book. Before long, Lara met photographers Sarah Ainslie and Julie Cook, who visited the pubs and the dressing rooms recording every aspect of the culture in hundreds of arrestingly candid and delicate pictures. “It was a gift,” admitted Sarah,“I drifted in and out for months, so I built a relationship with the girls.” “We forgot she was there,” says Lara, which is quite remarkable considering that in most pubs a single toilet served as makeshift changing room for all the dancers.
Three years in the making, the result is “Baby Oil & Ice – Striptease in East London”, a large format full-colour hardback limited edition book of nearly two hundred pages edited by Lara, that blends writing and photographic imagery together to create a broad and authoritative picture of the particular hidden world of East End striptease. “I wanted to capture something that was dying,” says Lara fondly, but she has achieved far more. Her remarkable book is an exuberant celebration, created by women, of the life, poetry and contradictions of this entirely absurd practice of a woman cavorting naked in clunky high heels for the pleasure of a mesmerised (and paradoxically emasculated) bunch of fully-dressed men. Previous books about stripping were written by journalists and academics with their own moral agendas, but Lara’s book is important because it is the first written by performers -allowing the voices of real live strippers, who are usually silent, to speak in their own unedited words.
Until very recently, there were several pubs in Shoreditch that hosted stripping and formed a circuit for the performers, Ye Olde Axe, The Royal Oak, The Spreadeagle, Browns, The Crown & Shuttle and The Norfolk Village. Now this has ceased and some are closed entirely, although Lara says The White Horse still has strippers. Lara gave up when table dancing came in, because it took away the quality of performance from girls who could no long do their acts with their own music, and “I was rubbish at getting money out of people,” admits Lara wryly and somewhat unconvincingly.
Although Lara no longer strips, she feels connected to that world today through all the friendships formed in her days as a stripper and she offered to take me along one night and introduce me to her pals who are still performing. So, on behalf of my curious readers, I think I will take her up on her offer because this is a subject that merits further investigation.
You can buy a copy of “Baby Oil & Ice” direct from Lara Clifton for £25 and she will sign it for you personally. Definitely a collectors’ item. Simply email lclifton76@gmail.com
The three pictures of strippers are by Sarah Ainslie and the shot of the interior of Ye Olde Axe is by Julie Cook.
Dickens in Spitalfields
It is my great pleasure to welcome Charles Dickens as a guest writer for Spitalfields Life. On 5th April 1851, Dickens published a feature entitled “Spitalfields” in Household Words, his weekly journal. Here, to whet your appetite, is the opening of the piece written by Dickens in collaboration with his sub-editor W.H.Wills. The article will be serialised here over the coming weeks.
When Dickens came to Spitalfields, the weaving industry was in decline, unable to compete with cheaper imports and the mechanised mills of the North. Liverpool St Station had not yet been built, instead there was an Eastern Counties Rail terminus at the junction of Shoreditch High St and Commercial St, fragments of which still survive. Fascinated by the precarious ramshackle wooden constructions upon the tops of houses, used for breeding pigeons and as weavers’ workshops, Dickens and his colleague Wills entered Spitalfields from Bishopsgate, walking into Spital Sq, site of the former Priory of St Mary Spital.
Have you any distinct idea of Spitalfields, dear reader?
A general one, no doubt you have – an impression that there are certain squalid streets, lying like narrow black trenches, far below the steeples, somewhere about London – towards the East perhaps – where sallow, unshorn weavers, who have nothing to do, prowl languidly about, or lean against posts, or sit brooding on doorsteps, and occasionally assemble together in a crowd to petition Parliament or the Queen; after which there is a Drawing Room or a Court Ball, where all the great ladies wear dresses of Spitalfields manufacture; and then the weavers dine for day or two, and so relapse into prowling about the streets, leaning against the posts, and brooding on doorsteps.
If your occupation in town or country ever oblige you to travel by Eastern Counties Railway ( you would never do so, of course, unless you were obliged) you may connect with this impression, a general idea that many pigeons are kept in Spitalfields, and you may remember to have thought, as you rattled along the dirty streets, observing the pigeon-hutches and pigeon-traps on the tops of the poor dwellings, that it was a natural aspiration in the inhabitants to connect themselves with any living creatures that could get out of that and fly into the air. The smoky little bowers that you may have sometimes seen on the house-tops, among the pigeons, may have suggested to your fancy – I pay you the poor compliment of supposing it to be a vagrant fancy, like my own – abortions of the bean-stalk that led Jack to fortune: by the slender twigs of which, the Jacks of Spitalfields will never, never, climb to where the giant keeps his money.
Will you come to Spitalfields?
Turning eastward out of the most bustling part of Bishopsgate, we suddenly lose the noise that has been resounding in our ears, and fade into the great churchyard of the Priory of St Mary, Spital, otherwise “Domus Dei et Beate Mariæ, extra Bishopsgate, in the parish of St Botolph.” Its modern name is Spital Square. Cells and cloisters were, at an early date, replaced by substantial burgher houses, which, since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, have been the chief depositories of silk manufacture introduced into London, by the French Huguenots, who flew from the perfidy of Louis the Fourteenth. But much of the old quiet cloistered air still lingers in the place.
The house to which we are bound, stands at an angle with the spot where the Pulpit-cross was anciently planted; where on every Easter Monday and Tuesday, the Spital sermons were preached, in the presence of the Lord Mayor and Corporation, and children of Christ’s Hospital. We cross the many cornered “square” and enter a sort of gateway.
Along a narrow passage, up a dark stair, through a crazy door, into a room not very light, not in the least splendid; with queer corners, and quaint carvings, and massive chimney-pieces; with desks behind thin rails, with aisles between thick towers of papered-up packages, out of whose ends flash all the colours of the rainbow – where all is as quiet as a playhouse at dawn, or a church at midnight – where, in truth, there is nobody to make a noise, except one well-dressed man, one attendant porter (neither of whom seem to be doing anything particular), and one remarkably fine male cat, admiring before the fire, the ends of his silky paws – where the door, as we enter, shuts with a deep, dull, muffled sound, that is more startling than a noise – where there is less bustle than at a Quakers’ meeting, and less business going on than in a Government office – the well-dressed man threads the mazes of the piles, and desks, and cupboards, and counters, with a slow step, to greet us, and to assure us, in reply to our apology, that we have not made any mistake whatever, and that we are in the silk warehouse which we seek: a warehouse in which, we have previously been informed, by one whose word we never before doubted, that there is “turned over” an annual average of one hundred thousand pounds, of good and lawful money of Great Britain.
We may tell our informant, frankly, that, looking round upon the evidences of stagnation which present themselves, we utterly disbelieve this statement…
In the next installment, we shall meet Mr Broadelle, the proprietor of the silk warehouse and encounter the silk-buyer of Messrs Treacy & McIntyre and discover the circumstances of their business. In further installments, we shall accompany Dickens and Wills on their tour of Spitalfields to a ragged school, a weaver’s loft and a young artist’s studio.
Spital Sq (with the Spitalfields Market beyond in Lamb St) seen from the Bishopsgate end where Dickens entered Spitalfields. Although this picture was taken by C.A.Mathew in 1912, the square had altered little from when Dickens paid his visit in 1851, it is today as you see below.
Nathaniel Lee-Jones, antiques dealer
Although Nathaniel is only thirty three, he has the style of wit, gravitas and experience of a gentleman twice his age, and speaks with all the beguiling rhetoric and arcane poetry of an old-school London antiques dealer. My belief is that Nathaniel was born advanced for his years. When he told me he was the son of an antiques dealer and started out dealing from a stall in the Portobello Rd, I wondered how he would react if I suggested we have marmalade sandwiches and mugs of cocoa, in the manner of Mr Gruber and Paddington bear. But as you can see from the picture above, Nathaniel’s concerns are far more adult.
This painting is the only nude from the collection of the late Benny Hill, sold at Christies in 1991 when the contents of the comedian’s Kensington flat went until the hammer. Its provenance renders this bizarre painting on velvet, of a Mediterranean woman taking off her skirt with a provocative smirk, as a uniquely significant historical artifact. Brazenly, she invites your gaze, tantalising the viewer by playing the moment before she reveals her glory. There are many photos of the reception rooms in Benny’s flat but none show this painting, suggesting he kept her in a private place for his sole pleasure. At present, she is in pride of place at M.Goldstein, the candy coloured shop at 67 Hackney Rd that Nathaniel runs with his girlfriend Pippa Brooks – selling art, antiques and attire – and you are welcome to go round their to feast your eyes upon Benny’s Latin lady’s gorgeous endowments.
My father switched the television off whenever scenes of copulation appeared on wildlife programmes, but he always tuned in to Benny Hill’s raucous comedy shows and choked with laughter at the knobs and knockers jokes, much to my prurient adolescent embarrassment. Then, I disapproved of the shabby humour of sexual euphemism but now I have learnt to laugh at the absurdity induced by the culture of sexual repression that Benny Hill celebrates. These days, Benny Hill is dead, is rehabilitated and is big in the USA, as Nathaniel discovered last time he took a taxi from Manhattan to JFK airport and the Indian cab driver enthused “You’re English! – You like Benny Hill?” In fact, I hope Nathaniel will forgive me if I say that when he is telling an amusing story (as he always seems to be), his eyes roll, his eyebrows rise and his ironically insinuating smile lifts his rounded cheeks to reveal more than a casual resemblance to the great comedian.
Once upon a time, Nathaniel was a teenage street urchin who lived as a caretaker in his father’s business premises, Elms Leicester Painting Rooms (theatrical scene painting workshops), up an alley in Denmark St off Charing Cross Rd, next to St Giles’ church. These were the days when the strip clubs and sex cinemas were closing and young Nathaniel roamed the streets of Soho in the early morning scavenging the discarded neons and signs from sleazy clubs like Charlie Chester’s Casino and Raymond’s Revuebar, saying STRIPTEASE, FULL NUDITY and PEEPSHOW. “I supported myself for two or three years on erotic signage,” he reveals proudly, confirming his acute eye for spotting the precious things that others discard as worthless. Nathaniel cultivates an appealing levity that makes him great company and he obviously relishes the opportunities his profession offers to search through the detritus of the world. “I go to places, auctions, flea markets and car boot sales, and people are throwing out stuff – they don’t realise the charm and importance of old things that are worth more than money, small things, personal bits and pieces, and photo albums, as well as furniture, neon lights, paintings and clothes.” A sentiment you will find expressed repeatedly in different forms throughout the pages of Spitalfields Life.
Today, Nathaniel lives in a tiny flat in Waterloo with Pippa and their two sons Joe and Duke, travelling back and forth to the shop and to the Spitalfields Market, where you can find Nathaniel and his stall every Thursday. Customarily behatted, he cuts a rakish bohemian figure dressed from head to toe in carefully chosen examples of fine vintage clothing and is currently wrapped up in a long sheepskin coat. “I quickly realised that Spitalfields rather than Portobello was the place to trade and be seen,” he says with the dignified authority of a seasoned professional, explaining that there is a wider mix of customers, including City gents, here in the East End. Characteristically, Nathaniel kept the beautiful original sign “M.Goldstein” (that he uncovered on the front of the shop), as the name for his business and I never miss the opportunity to call in here to enjoy the loving displays of Nathaniel’s recent offbeat discoveries and revel in the endless repertoire of intriguing stories that comprise the colourful life of Nathaniel Lee-Jones.
Columbia Road Market 20
The market was full of life this morning on account of the milder temperatures and wider range of plants and flowers that are now available, including colourful displays of Mimosa and Lilac already in flower in pots, and bunches of Cherry blossom to celebrate the Chinese New Year. I opted for some Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) at four pots for a fiver and planted them in this old clay pot of indeterminate age that I dug out of the Thames mud at Strand on the Green, where I had the good fortune to rent a room in an eighteenth century house when I first came London as a young writer. The Snowdrops in my garden that I planted in-the-green last year are just beginning to show, so these will see me through until those outside come into flower.
With my humble Snowdrops in hand, I had the pleasure of bumping into Cynthia Grandfield, the Queen of Ryantown, deliberating over which richly coloured flowers would best complement Lulu Guinness’ Columbia Rd Bag (featuring all the Columbia Rd shops along the side) which will go on display in the shop window today. I think I shall have to go back and take a look.
All Change at 27 Fournier St
This is the actress Tamzin Griffin communing with Pius the house cat in her bathroom at 27 Fournier St. With only the old cat to keep her company now, Tamzin is the last remaining tenant of all the young actors, artists, writers, photographers, playwrights and theatrical producers who have rented rooms in this historic house over the last quarter of a century. Last year, the owner Henry Barlow put the house, which was built by Peter Bourdon in 1725, up for sale at £3.75 million pounds and it was bought for a cool £4 million this year.
It was as if I had walked into the last act of “The Cherry Orchard” when I went round to pay a call on Tamzin in the empty house this week. As the last to leave, I think she was glad of an excuse to take a break from her lonely packing chores and sit in the bath for a daft photo, while I was grateful for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of a tour of this majestic house, awaiting the imminent arrival of its new owner. “There is a peace here that people remark upon,” commented Tamzin as we stood at the foot of the eccentrically angled staircase and I inhaled the pervasive scent of beeswax that drifts through the entire house.
When the Spitalfields Trust rescued 27 Fournier St in its damaged state in 1981, it had been divided up for use as textile sweatshops. With a mixture of scholarship and clever detective work, they reinstated the original layout of the rooms, restoring the house to its full glory. Henry Barlow bought it from the trust under covenant and for the past twenty-five years has altruistically let it to a loosely collegiate group of creative individuals whom he knew would appreciate the place – at rents they could afford, well below the market value.
“He had a huge amount of trust and generosity of spirit,” said Tamzin in tribute to Henry. The outcome out of his extraordinarily Utopian gesture was an exceptional community of lucky young people who loved and cared for the house, filling every corner with energy and life. Each had their own living space and bathroom, and they shared the communal space on the ground floor and the cosy flag-stoned kitchen in the basement, with its long table that was the social focus for lively conversation over innumerable happy shared meals.
Tamzin lived here for twelve formative years, in which she worked with Theatre de Complicite and co-devised the long-running “Shockheaded Peter”, and though Tamzin has yet to discover a perspective on this time, it is apparent that living here in this inspirational old house has been an experience she will carry away with her. “It has been like twelve years living in as dream,” she said as we walked through the echoey panelled rooms glowing in the morning sunlight, “Now the house is spitting me out, but although I do not know where I am going next, I am not worried,” surprising herself with her own words, I think. For a moment the bravado of the strolling players came up her. In fact, Tamzin has been offered accommodation locally, but none at a price she can pay. Revealing the disappointing truth that living in Spitalfields is no longer within the budget of actors or artists, as it once was (unless they are already rich and famous), a sober fact which speaks of the changing nature of our neighbourhood and serves to emphasise the special quality of the era that Henry Barlow fostered at 27 Fournier St.
In Tamzin’s presence I felt I was exploring an empty theatre that had seen plenty of dramas and awaited new characters to walk onto the scene. What is most remarkable as you walk through this fine house is the sense of space and proportion. The lack of furniture makes the architecture speak. Nothing is regularly shaped but everything is beautifully yet modestly proportioned, and the subdivision of the space creates domestic spaces that are immediately pleasant and comfortable to inhabit.
All the rooms lead off the tall staircase, winding upwards to the weavers’ loft and down to the kitchen, and each room also has a door leading to the next which creates a sense of fluid movement throughout the living space. You are aware of light coming through windows at the front and back. On one side, the windows frame portions of the fine elevations of the eighteenth century houses opposite, while those on the other side provide views into the quiet hidden world contained between Fournier St and Princelet St, a place of gardens, yards and secret buildings that is alive with plants and birds. This other world has an atmosphere all its own, secluded and almost rural, here birdsong fills the air.
The moment I shall never forget is when Tamzin opened the door to the cellars and we peered into the infinite shimmering darkness holding a single candle. As my eyes accustomed, I could appreciate a vaulted brick ceiling and a brick floor, but beyond that I could not tell how far it extended. The hair on my neck stood up and a shiver went down my spine. This was the entrance to the past, it was cold, it was damp and it smelled of mould, and I should not be surprised if someone told me there was a tunnel from here to the Tower of London. I did not desire to explore further into the void because I wanted to go away allowing my imagination free to elaborate.
Shortly, Tamzin will carry out her last box (holding her hopes for the future and our wishes for her success), then she will turn out the light and close the door – and the most recent phase of the long history of 27 Fournier St will end. But let us know that the new owner has expressed honourable intentions to care for the illustrious house as it deserves, and that Pius the cat is returning to his suburban roots, retiring to live out his years with his mother in the Elephant & Castle where he was born.
The Return of Joan Rose
This gracious lady with the keen grey eyes is Joan Rose, standing in the door way of Leila’s Shop in Calvert Avenue on the spot where her father was photographed in 1902, aged six, more than a century ago. I restaged the photo from 1902 with the assistance of the children from Virginia Rd School last year, so I was eager to meet Joan in person and learn something of her experience as a child growing up in Arnold Circus early in the last century. Joan’s grandfather Albert Raymond opened the greengrocer’s shop in 1900, running it with assistance of her father Alfred Raymond, who continued the business until it closed when he died in 1966. Much to Joan’s delight, in recent years Leila McAlister has picked up where Alfred Raymond left off and the place is once again filled with a quality selection of fresh fruit and vegetables for sale.
Joan is a remarkably spirited person with an exceptional recall for names and places throughout her long life. An educated woman and former teacher, she can place anyone within London by their accent. Although unsentimental about the past, she talks affectionately about her happy childhood here in Arnold Circus. In 1951 she left to get married and live in Beacontree, but the emotional memory of her time in Shoreditch remains vivid to her. “I am here” she said to me when I met her for tea at Leila’s Cafe and I understood what she meant, even if today she lives on the other side of London.
When she was growing up in the nineteen thirties, Joan told me, she helped her grandfather in the shop and he called her “tangerine” because she always stole tangerines, even though she could have as many as she wanted. “I used to sit on his lap in the corner of the shop and he told me all these stories about the neighbourhood and I thought they were all nonsense – but later I found they were all true. He had a set of Shakespeare in the flat up above the shop and he said, “There’s a plaque to Shakespeare in St Leonard’s Shoreditch.” After he died, I found the plaque and I cried because I had never believed him.”
Joan was very close to her grandfather Albert who taught her the exact science of stacking fruit and vegetables in tall pyramids (stalks up for apples, pears, plums and tomatoes, eyes up for oranges) and when he went to Spitalfields Market in the dawn to buy new stock, he took her with him and they had breakfast together at one of the pubs that opened in the early morning. He kept a pony and trap in the yard at the back of the shop and took Joan for rides around Arnold Circus, that was when she learnt that eight times round the bandstand was a mile.
Born in 1926 as the youngest of four daughters, Lily, Vera and Doris being the names of her sisters, Joan’s family lived in a series of different flats in the Boundary Estate as she was growing up, moving at one point from 20 Shiplake Buildings (eighteen shillings and sixpence a week) to 10 Laleham Buildings (twelve shillings and sixpence a week) to save money.
“Although we had a shop here, my mother went out working as a furrier’s machinist. We never realised that things were hard for our parents. My mother made our clothes and Mr Feldman made our winter coats. It was a system of favours, you deal off me, I’ll deal off you. People were poor but proud, they ate the cheapest food, monkfish or a pig’s head as a Sunday roast. My father hated Christmas because he saw people buy the best of everything and toys for their children, when they could barely afford a loaf of bread, and he knew they would end up in debt, running round to the pawnbrokers in Boundary Passage.”
Joan never felt that she was disadvantaged by her origins until she and her sisters went up to the West End to dances and met boys who asked where they came from. “If you said you were from Shoreditch, that was the last you saw of them,” Joan admitted to me, “We used to say we were from Arnold Circus because they didn’t know where it was.” Occasionally, charabancs of out-of-towners would slow down outside Raymond’s grocers’ shop and the driver would announce to the passengers “And these are the slums,” much to her grandfather’s ire.
Joan’s father was disappointed that he never had a son to carry on the business in his family name but he changed his opinion when World War II came along, declaring he was grateful to have four daughters and not to have a son to send to war. There was a hidden irony to this statement, because he had an illegitimate son, Terry Coughlan, who turned up in the shop once to buy an apple when Joan was serving and her father was out. In a youthful impulse and, to Joan’s eternal regret, she said to her father when he returned, “Your son was here!” Alfred went into the back of the shop, talked with her mother, then came out and said “I spoke to the boy.” That was the last that was ever said of it and Joan never met her younger brother again. Now Joan would like to find him, he will be seventy years old if he lives.
Joan describes the burning of London in 1940, when the warden knocked on all the doors in the Boundary Estate, telling the residents to take refuge in the crypt of St Leonard’s Shoreditch. She was not scared at all until she got down into the crypt and saw the priest in his black robes walking among the hundreds of silent people sitting in the gloom, it was this eerie image that filled her with fear. Joan remembers the wartime shortage of onions and the queue that formed outside the shop stretching all the way round Arnold Circus to Virginia Rd when they came into stock.
Although her grandfather refused to leave during the London Blitz, Joan’s father took the family to Euston and made the spontaneous choice to buy tickets to Blackpool where he quickly found an empty shop to open up as a greengrocer, and they lived there until the war ended. As they left Euston, the sisters sat crying on the train and the other passengers thought a member of their family had been killed in the bombing, when in fact the four girls were weeping for their wire-haired terrier, Ruff, that had to be put down on the morning they left London.
We leave Joan in that railway carriage travelling North, knowing that she will come back to London, get married, have children, become a teacher, have grandchildren, have great-grandchildren and live into the new millenium to return to Arnold Circus and discover that the greengrocers opened by her grandfather in 1900 has reopened again and life goes on and on.
When she speaks, telling her stories, Joan fingers the broad gold ring made from her grandmother Phoebe and mother Lily’s wedding rings. Once, it had the initials JR, standing for Joan’s maiden name Joan Raymond, and it was on her husband’s finger but now that he has gone and the initials have been worn away, Joan wears it as a simple gold band to contain all the memories that she carries of her family and of this place. To many of us born later, even familiar history can appear as unlikely fiction, but meeting someone with Joan’s generosity of spirit, eloquence and grace brings the big events of the last century vividly alive as reality. Joan does not bear grievances or carry complaints, she has not been worn down or become in the least cynical by her life, she is an inspiration to us all.
