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.
Bishopsgate bathhouse frolics
This extravagant domed orientalist edifice topped by the crescent moon is what you see above ground in the churchyard of St Botolph’s Bishopsgate, but it is the mere portal to a secret subterranean world beneath your feet. These Turkish baths were built in 1895 by Henry and James Forde Neville, and clad with dazzling ceramic tiles worthy of the Alhambra – manufactured in Egypt in the Turkish style and shipped over. As you descend the spiral staircase inside, note the ceramic motif of the hand of Fatima raised in blessing.
In 1963 when Geoffrey Fletcher author of “The London Nobody Knows” passed by, the brass plate with the words NEVILLE’S TURKISH BATHS was still here, but by then it was only in use as a storage space. “Still eloquent of the vanished days when a corpulent company director would while a way an afternoon and a little avoirdupois in these exotic surroundings before taking himself to his green and pleasant villa in Denmark Hill”, he wrote.
Bathhouses have always been locations for illicit sensuous encounters and I was tempted to speculate upon the erotic history of Neville’s Turkish Baths which now, like steam itself, has utterly evaporated. In fact, I had just realised that I needed to get out more, when I received an invitation to the Boom Boom Club held every Thursday night at the Bathhouse – which is now open for coffee by day and as a bar at night.
I am very grateful to my hosts for this opportunity to see the wonderfully atmospheric bathhouse interior full of life, and though the club was a little more KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE than MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS, there was an undeniable to poetry to the authentically crummy comedians, still carrying the torch for Archie Rice. The club promises a gin-soaked evening and I’ve no doubt that getting tanked is the best way to enter into the spirit of things. So that next day you wake, as I did this morning, with just a partial memory of the night before – recalling only images of glittery burlesque showgirls worthy of Walter Sickert.
Albam, a bold enterprise
The man with the broom is James Shaw, who two years ago founded the clothing company Albam in partnership with Alastair Rae. By chance, I walked into their shop in Beak St, Soho on the very first week they opened in October 2007 and met James and Alastair, tentative yet enthusiastic about their new venture. I loved the pared-down modern design of their clothes, elegantly simple, sensibly priced and made to last. And mostly manufactured here in Britain by long-established companies with a craft tradition. In short, Albam is one of only a few companies where a man could happily dress himself entirely from their shop and always look great. I remember going away and telling my friends about this wonderful shop but secretly thinking they were too good to last. It was the worst possible moment to start something, I thought, and a cynical voice was telling me that flashier, cheaper clothes usually sell better.
Sometimes it is good to be proved wrong. It was a real delight to meet James two years later, super-positive and flushed with success, as Albam open their second store, here in the Old Spitalfields Market – conveniently placed just across the road from St John Bread & Wine and the Golden Heart.
What I have realised is that Albam’s lean aesthetic suits the mood of our times perfectly. Over these two years, their clothes have subtly evolved as the designs get refined each time a batch comes from the factory. However, although these clothes are flattering and they really fit, it is not just about looking fashionable this season, it is about looking good in clothes you can wear until they fall apart.
I particulary liked the way James and Alastair were always there in the tiny Beak St shop, running up and down stairs getting different sizes for customers from the store in the cellar. It is a lovely thing to be able to buy clothes from the person who designed them and have a conversation about what you are buying. James spends two days a week at the factories in Nottingham and the challenge, he says, is to keep the whole operation tight – so that he can listen to customers in the shop and then talk to the people who make the clothes too, thereby ensuring that Albam is creating the clothes people really want to wear. The basement of the Spitalfields shop is now their design studio and office, so I look forward to seeing them here in the shop and around the neighbourhood too. Fancy a pint at the Golden Heart, lads?
Albam’s style inspirations are Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. James’ blue eyes glittered with emotion as he produced a book from beneath the counter of William Claxton’s photographs of Steve McQueen, to show me the picture below taken in 1964. Somehow they discovered that the beautiful shawl neck cardigan Steve wears in this photograph was made by a British company. Now in an astonishing coup, they have persuaded this company to make a limited number of these exact same blue cardigans which you can buy in their shop from early November for £155 each. Courtesy of Albam, this is your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to release your inner Steve McQueen.
