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.
Edward Bawden on Liverpool St Station
Edward Bawden made this huge linocut of a smoke-blackened Liverpool St in 1960. It extends to almost five feet in length, so long that to allow you to see the details of this epic work I must show it here in two panels.
When I first visited the station it was just like this and I remember it as a diabolic dark cathedral. As a student new to London, I arrived back from Cromer one Sunday on a late train after the tubes had closed and spent a terrifying night here, shivering on a bench. Sitting awake, I watched all through the small hours as the trucks rattled in and out of the station, racing down the slope onto the platforms, delivering newspapers and mail sacks to the waiting trains.
But as this print reveals, Edward Bawden had a keen eye for elegant nineteenth century ironwork and, even before it was cleaned up, he was alive to beauty of the station. Contemplating Liverpool St on the BBC television programme Monitor in 1963, he said “I think the ceiling is absolutely magnificent, it is one of the wonders of London.” And he knew it well, because for nearly sixty years – between 1930 and 1989 – he travelled regularly through the station, whenever he took the train back and forth between London and Braintree station, just one mile from his home at Brick House in Great Bardfield, Essex.
He is one of my favourite twentieth century British artists and the span of Edward Bawden’s career is almost as wide as the Liverpool St arches. After leaving the Royal College of Art, he began designing posters for London Transport in the nineteen twenties, then became a war artist in World War II and was busy creating prints and paintings, alongside murals, wallpapers, commercial illustration and design, right up until the late eighties. I particularly admire his unique bold sense of line that gave an unmistakeably appealing graphic quality to everything he touched.
Appropriately enough, this Winter you can take the train from Liverpool Street up to Bedford to visit the Edward Bawden retrospective at the Bedford Gallery (from the archive of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery) that runs until 31st January.
Sunday board games in Brick Lane
I photographed these two men playing Carrom at the top of Brick Lane on Sunday. This curious game was new to me and I can only describe it as a hybrid of drafts and billiards, in which the objective is to push your opponent’s counters into the corner pockets. Not only is it absorbing for players, as my picture illustrates, but it is also a stirring spectator sport, demonstrated by the excited crowds that quickly gather to watch in Brick Lane. Rob, the gregarious proprietor of the Carrom Cafe which provides the boards free to market visitors every Sunday, explained to me that it is an ancient game which exists all across Asia and was brought here from India, but of which the origins are lost in time.
Then I walked on down the Lane and, at the Hanbury Street entrance to the Truman Brewery, I met Luca and Sam happily playing chess on a home made board, with paperclips in two contrasted colours bent into different shapes for each of the different chess pieces. Luca and Sam were amusing themselves whilst having a slow day at their stall selling t-shirts which they design under their own label smudge the bear but, judging from the witty ingenuity of their chess set, I predict big success for these two engaging young men.
Mr Pussy Takes A Nap
The time has come to put the quilt on the bed until Spring. I made this quilt from thirty tapestries that I bought secondhand and sewed together. So much work goes into stitching tapestries, but then no-one knows what to do with the completed ones and they end up in car boot sales, markets and charity shops. My plan was to make a quilt of unloved tapestries.
At first, I collected all I could find and I liked the idea of sewing together these tapestries that were often ugly and creating something beautiful from them. But then I found some special ones that were far from ugly and decided only to use the nicest. At this point, I discovered there were hundreds listed on ebay and soon I had tapestries turning up in the mail from all over the globe.
There is another side to this too, because I chose to make the quilt in memory of my mother. A warm and colourful quilt that would stay with me always and evoke memories of her tucking me up in bed when I was a child, this was very attractive to me. Now I wanted to collect the images that she loved, birds, boats, flowers, paintings and landscapes.
Eventually, my house was piled with tapestries, far more than necessary for the quilt and I spent months shuffling them around on the floor to create the ideal arrangement before I sewed them together. Then I attached a lining of the softest lemon yellow velvet and the quilt was complete a year after my mother died. Now, every Autumn, I bring it out at this time and I love the feeling of lying beneath it and surveying its rich colours, both as I lay my head down each night and every morning when I wake too.
Franze & Evans, the divine Teresa
This is the divine Teresa Lococo who makes heavenly hummus. Before I discovered Teresa, I searched all over London in supermarkets and delis, even the Borough Market, but too much of the hummus that is on sale resembles stale mayonnaise, homogenous and tasteless – disappointment in a plastic pot.
Just as I was almost at the point of giving up on my search for decent hummus, just as I was beginning to think maybe I was too damned fussy, just as I was beginning to wonder if I had simply imagined that hummus could be better – the Franze & Evans delicatessen opened on Redchurch Street and I discovered Teresa’s heavenly hummus. Believe me, you have never tasted hummus as good as this. Possessing a good texture, a delicate fragrance, and a taste balancing a whole combination of subtle flavours, this hummus with a slice of St John bread represents the ideal marriage.
However, Teresa does not make hummus every day and a fresh batch (£2.50 a pot) can sell out to the cognoscenti within hours. So I advise you to call (02070331910), as I do, to check they have some in stock before you set out on a pilgrimage up Brick Lane to the shrine in Redchurch Street, because you would not want to get there and have your hopes of Teresa’s heavenly hummus disappointed, would you?
Columbia Road Market 7
It was just spitting with rain as I set out for the market under a gloomy occluded sky this morning, and it lifted my spirits to hear the cockerell crow at the Spitalfields City Farm as I passed. My first task on arrival in Columbia Road was to buy some Polyanthus (six for a fiver) because I know my neighbour likes them and I am going to replant the box under his kitchen window before his return from hospital. You have to be careful with polyanthus and look out for the richer, more natural colours because there are some varieties in harsh unnatural shades – the blue hybrids are especially vile I think.
Once I had bought the polyanthus, I cast my eye around for something else and was delighted to discover a variety of Japanese Anemone that I haven’t seen before, Whirlwind. It has a pleasant double flower with white petals in a subtle spiral as if they had been blown. This is an ideal shade plant for my garden and I snapped it up for a mere £3. Then I ran home again in the rain to rescue my dry washing from the line before it was too late.
