The Carpenters Arms, Gangster Pub
When this photo was taken, The Carpenters’ Arms in Cheshire St was the most notorious pub in London – owned by the gangster twins, Reggie and Ronnie Kray who bought it in 1967 for their mother Violet. They grew up in house just a hundred yard away at 178 Vallance Road, went to Wood Close School in Brick Lane and as youngsters frequented the Repton Boys’ Boxing Club (London’s oldest boxing gym, established in 1884 and still in existence) midway between the pub and their home. This was their manor, they hung their boxing gloves over the Carpenters’ crest behind the bar and such was their gallows humour that (so the story goes) they had the counter made up from coffin lids.
The Krays were pair of cruel psychopaths who became the most infamous of East End gangsters and bizarrely sought out the society of celebrities in the vain hope of drawing attention from their litany of crimes. It is strange to me that Barbara Windsor (someone for whom I have great respect) can claim to have known nothing of the brothers’ criminal activities while she was dating Reggie. Eventually, both twins ended up convicted with life sentences for murder and the whole story came to its grim conclusion when Reggie Kray’s funeral cortege passed by the Carpenters’ on its way down Cheshire St on 11th October 2000.
Nowadays, the Carpenters’ is a welcoming place with a fashionable clientele and an impressive range of over fifty different ales from all over the world, landlords Eric and Nigel keep it as fresh as a pin and there is always a large display of fresh flowers on the bar.
Before they took over, Eric and Nigel were regular customers here and when the previous management went bankrupt early in this decade, they struggled for years to obtain the lease, fighting off property developers who wanted to turn it into flats. When they moved in, it had been shut for four years and the place was stripped out, only the bar counter remained. Constructed of panels of glossy heavy timber – this could be the Krays’ coffin-lid counter. Nigel told me the Krays decorated the place in a faux Regency style with striped wallpaper to match their West End nightclub, and he pointed to a chip in the paint on one of the cast iron roof pillars revealing the burgundy colour scheme of that period.
Nationwide, thirty six pubs are closing every week and in this climate a pub has to be special to survive. But I have every confidence that, in this current celebrated incarnation under Eric and Nigel’s joint landlordship, the Carpenters will be here for us for a long time. I like to pop in regulary for a drink early in the week on a quiet night and now, apart from a discreetly placed print of the long-departed evil twins, you would never guess at its sinister past.
Steve Benbow, homes wanted for bees
This is Steve Benbow, the urban beekeeper and he needs homes for his bees. No doubt you’ve heard of the drastic decline in the bee population and I am sure you are also aware that our very existence depends on bees to pollinate the plants that grow our food. Steve explained to me that GM crops and pesticide spraying are making life difficult for bees in our countryside, so he is trying to find locations for one hundred beehives in London by next Summer. The city is the future for bees, he says.
If you have a garden, or a yard, or a rooftop, or any secure exterior space measuring five square metres that could offer a home to five hives, Steve wants to hear from you. He would require access once a week during the Summer to tend the hives and pay rent to you in jars of delicious honey. Be assured, his bees are carniolans – a gentle species that will not cause a hazard.
I invited Steve over to Spitalfields last Sunday to take a look at my garden in the hope it might be suitable for beehives, but unfortunately he says there is not enough sunlight. So I am hoping that there are some other people in the neighbourhood that can help out instead.
Steve has been producing London honey for years and he says the vegetation and green spaces here make it ideal for bees. Some readers may remember him selling his honey in the Spitalfields Market in the past. Steve runs the London Honey Company and currently has hives placed on the roof of Fortnum & Mason (to whom he is the official beekeeper), at the Barnes Wetland Centre, on a roof in Tooley St and on barges by Tower Bridge. London honey is prized for its complexity of taste and honey from each borough is inflected with different qualities, Piccadilly honey has a hint of lime while Tower Bridge honey has a whiff of toffee. I want Steve to place hives here in the neighbourhood so I can discover the unique flavour of Spitalfields honey.
If you can help by providing a home for Steve’s bees please email steve.benbow@btinternet.com
St John, Go Nuts for Doughnuts!
In the past, I was never that crazy about doughnuts and though I can appreciate the pop sensibility of Dunkin Donuts and Krispy Kremes that I encountered in America with their infinite permutations of sprinkles and coloured icings, I never wanted to eat them.
Disenchantment set in at an early age. From the works of Richmal Crompton and other favourite childrens’ authors, I learnt that doughnuts were something completely delicious that all children loved to eat, but then my expectations were crushed once I actually tasted one. It was horrible, a greasy sticky lump of sponge filled with synthetic cream and a squirt of sickly red syrup at its heart. Like Proust with his madeleine, I can remember it now, only I should rather forget.
But then last week as I was buying my daily loaf at St John Bread & Wine in Commercial St, one of the waiters dropped a hint that Mr Gellatly was baking doughnuts at the weekend and my curiosity was piqued. I decided – in the interests of keeping an open mind – to give doughnuts a second shot. On Sunday on the dot of ten, opening time, I was there at St John to inspect the doughnuts, a pile of freshly baked custard-filled ones nestling together like eggs in a basket. Even as I paid for mine (£2 each), another customer arrived and went straight for the doughnuts, so I knew something was up.
Once I got home, it all went into slow motion. The world dissolved as I bit into my doughnut and the intensity of the moment of consummation exploded to fill my consciousness entirely. In that first bite, there was the delicate nutty flavour of the outside mingling with the feathery sponge of the inside and then both of these mixed with the rush of delicious custard. It wasn’t too sweet, and the texture of the sponge was ideally contrasted with both the sugary exterior and the creamy custard interior.
Then I woke, as if from a dream, the world came back to me and I realised my face and hands were covered in sugar. Now I understand what all the fuss was about. Now I know, this is what doughnuts should be like!
Be warned though, Mr Gellatly has a strict baking regimen, he only bakes doughnuts on Sundays and from the beginning of December, these will be replaced by mince pies – which means you have just six opportunities left this year to get your hands on a St John doughnut.
Roa, the squirrel and the rat
I saw this handsome squirrel as I was walking down Redchurch St on my way to pick up some hummus from Teresa last week. It is ideally placed beside the old tree and I like the skillful way the aerosol has been used to create the effect of an ink drawing – it makes a perfectly seasonal image with the Autumn leaves beneath. As I continued on my way home down Brick Lane, I noticed a hungry rat (see below) drawn by the same hand, placed beneath the sign for Bacon St, his eyes gleaming in excitement as if he has caught a whiff of bacon.
Then, passing the Brick Lane Gallery, I saw a whole pile of rats painted on the gallery wall and in the basement I discovered a smaller version of the squirrel from Redchurch St. I learnt that these lively drawings of vermin were by the prolific Belgian street artist Roa who has painted menageries on derelict buildings in Brussels and Ghent, all inflected with an attractive dead-beat humour. In common with the drawings here, they are ambivalent creatures, charismatic yet sinister too and full of life.
I cannot conceal my personal admiration for these two particular vermin for their wily intelligence and tenacious hold on life. It was very perceptive of Roa to paint them as his response to the neighbourhood because we have them both in abundance here.
By the time you read this, the exhibition will be gone, but I hope Roa’s squirrel and the rat will stay with us for a long time to come. They look at home in the street, their natural element, rather than on a clean white gallery wall.
Columbia Road Market 8
There was a nip in the air this morning and, as I walked out under a clear Autumn sky, I could see my own breath. At the market, two of the stallholders were dressed as witches, which reminded me that it is nearly Halloween and inspired me to buy a bunch of Chinese Lanterns (Physalis) to dry. Then I found the plants were on sale and remembered that my grandmother grew them in her garden in Chard. She used to dry them every year and I was captivated by the exoticism of the lanterns displayed in an old copper jug in her hallway.
Apparently Physalis likes sun or partial shade, so I decided to have a go at growing them myself for next year and I bought a plant for £4.
Paul Trevor, photographer
Paul Trevor photographed these children playing in Fournier Street one afternoon in 1974. “Much of it was derelict. It felt abandoned,” he says, describing the neighbourhood at the time, “yet from this unlikely location I was gifted a vivid story of a community surviving considerable hardship with resilience, humour and hope – none more so than the kids.”
Since the nineteen seventies, Paul Trevor has been taking pictures here whilst going about his day-to-day business. The result is an important body of work by a photographer of stature that now exists as a record of the social change that has come upon this place, and five hundred of Paul Trevor’s photographs of Spitalfields are collected in the London Metropolitan University East End Archive. Currently, there is also a well chosen exhibition of his photographs of children, at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green until 29th November.
Paul Trevor’s beautiful and empathetic pictures record the daily lives of people here with an acute eye, while also recording the vast physical changes and witnessing the social tensions too – manifested particularly in the demonstrations by the Anti Nazi League against the National Front. It was at one of these in 1978, that he photographed this audacious brat gleefully waving his toy gun behind a policeman’s back at the corner of Brick Lane and Quaker Street.
Kevin Read, The Spitalfields Milkman
This is Kevin Read the milkman who has been delivering three pints of semi-skimmed organic milk to my doorstep every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for ages and never missed a delivery, not even during the heavy snowfall last winter. Until today I had never seen him, the only evidence of his existence was the deliveries themselves and his footprints in the snow.
I think he looks pretty good for a guy who gets up at 1:00am every day to deliver milk to three hundred customers in Spitalfields and surrounding neighbourhoods. From his powerful windswept features, it is apparent that Kevin is a seasoned professional, delivering milk over thirty years – since he was thirteen years old. He began doing a round in Spitalfields in the mid-eighties and the changes in the neighbourhood are reflected in his orders, nowadays there are less large Bengali families needing daily deliveries for their children, he says.
Another change is that milkmen are self employed now and their income depends on the number of customers. While Kevin has three hundred customers, he really needs three hundred and fifty. So I am asking you to consider having a delivery. Kevin says no order is too small, you do not have to have a pint every day, and he can deliver between 6-6:30am 0r 8-8:30am depending on your preference.
We have all got to pull together for Kevin and spread the word to send some more business his way. It is a beautiful thing to have milk delivered to your doorstep in the morning and milk tastes better from proper glass bottles with tinfoil tops, I think. Also, re-using glass bottles is environmentally sound – just think of the hundreds of cartons you would waste in a year otherwise.
Call Kevin 07940095775 or email kevinthemilkman@yahoo.co.uk to book your deliveries.
