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.
Matthew Reynolds, the Duke of Uke
This charismatic fellow with the lively eyebrows is Matthew Reynolds, the self-styled Duke of Uke, proprietor of the ukelele and banjo emporium at 22 Hanbury St. “Every day we’re still here surprises me!” he said brightly, introducing the tale of how he started his singular business from nothing, before revealing,“It took a couple of years before I could get a night of sleep.” That was just four years ago now but, thanks his buoyant confidence and zeal, this shop with a rehearsal room and recording studio in the basement has acquired a big reputation as the destination of choice for everyone that loves these underdogs of the musical instrument family. It is a true community hub, full of musicians coming and going, creating music and giving lessons too – as well as a wonderful friendly place to drop in and admire the huge display of ukeleles in diverse sizes, shapes, colours and prices to suit every pocket. Some are so dinky, cute and garish they look more like toys than serious musical instruments. You can see one in the photograph made of a cigar box.
I always poke my head around the door whenever I am passing in the hope of catching a spontaneous concert, because if one person is playing a ukelele then you can bet someone else will snatch another instrument from the wall and join in. There are usually interesting people hanging around in here, they might not all appear remarkable at first glance, but once they take an instrument in hand a sublime transformation comes upon them. At any time of the day you are likely to stumble upon a happy musical party at the Duke of Uke. If I see an excited crowd on the pavement outside pressing their faces against the window, then I elbow my way to the centre of the throng, because it means someone famous is giving an impromptu ukelele solo inside. Sparing yourself the melee of the fans, you can click on the following names to see films of recent performances at the Duke of Uke by Pete Doherty, The Mystery Jets, Le Volume Corbe and Allo’ Darlin’.
Sure enough, when I arrived at the shop for my interview, customers Charlotte (a ukelele novice) and Christopher (a professional guitarist) who had just met, were jamming playfully together on their ukeleles. Charlotte who is evangelical in her advocacy, discovered the ukelele only recently when a friend bought one for her son, but she soon got one for herself and now has an amateur ukelele band composed of a half-dozen friends and relations who participated in the performance last year by the Ukelele Orchestra of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” at the Albert Hall. Immaculately dressed in tweeds, Matthew presides with a magnanimous grin from behind the counter in the manner of an old school publican, sympathetically allowing his customers make themselves at home and have a good time with the ukuleles. But only the tiniest cue is required to encourage Matthew himself to take his ukelele in hand and demonstrate the melodic flights that can be conjured by a master in a few adroit gestures.
With modest erudition, Matthew gave me whistle-stop tour of the history of the ukelele which originated when three Portuguese guitar makers emigrated to Hawaii, taking the machete or small guitar with them, there the royal family became besotted with these instruments, renamed as ukeleles. The 1916 Panama Exhibition in San Francisco introduced the craze to America and the fad lasted until the nineteen fifties when ukeleles were manufactured in a plethora of designs, and popular radio and television programmes broadcast lessons in how to play.
What is it that gets people about this little instrument that is so cheeky and cute, yet capable of poetry and pathos too? Being straightforward, Matthew tells he loves the ukelele because it is “a really simple instrument that has never reached its full potential,” continuing with a hint at the instrument’s unlikely sex appeal,“It is promiscuous, anyone can find a partner in a ukelele.” he says. There is something both comic and cheap about the ukelele, the perfect instrument for those early twentieth century sentimental songs. Yet, even though the honest ukelele has – just like those popular songs of yesteryear – acquired a greater emotional resonance over time, it never lost its sense of fun.
So Long, Rossi’s Cafe
After more than half a century of business, these are now the last days of Rossi’s Cafe in Hanbury St which closes forever on Friday. Opened by the Rossi family as an Italian cafe in the nineteen fifties and run by Johnny Rossi until his death nine years ago, this venerable Spitalfields institution has been upheld and thrived under the management of Harold and Jenny Londono from Colombia – who have become popular hosts in their own right, loyally serving the original clientele from the days of Mr Rossi. Opening six days a week at six in the morning, Rossi’s was a central meeting place in Spitalfields for more than a generation, held in affection by the stalwarts who came here for breakfast, lunch and a vivid social scene their whole lives.
Luzangy, Harold’s daughter, kindly served me a cup of tea in the beautiful fifties interior of the cafe, as I sat enjoying the vaporous warmth. Harold joined me, explaining that since the landlord refused to renew the lease for the cafe and, after a petition and a court appeal failed, they have no choice but to close. It is understood that the property can be more profitably let as office space, now that Spitalfields has gone up in the world, but no office, however sympathetic, can replace the rich social milieu that Rossi’s supports.
Then a friendly gentleman who has been coming through the door of Rossi’s Cafe for more than twenty years walked up to the table and into our conversation, desiring to make his voice heard. “Do you come here every day?” I ventured, “Unfortunately!” he replied with an ironic grimace. “And what do you have?” I enquired, “The full poison on a regular basis.” he reported gleefully, yet with a hint of elegy in his voice. “We know everyone, they’re lovely people, exceedingly friendly,” confided Harold to me later.
It is not so long ago that Rosa’s Cafe in Hanbury St, and The Market Cafe in Fournier St shut, places that once served the porters in the days of the fruit and vegetable market. When The Market Cafe closed, Gilbert & George started going to eat at Rossi’s twice every day, for breakfast at six thirty and lunch at eleven thirty. “If they are in town, they will be here,” confirmed Harold proudly. I raised my gaze to the familiar scene of diners hungrily tucking into cooked breakfasts before hurrying off to work, and old friends sipping tea and passing the time of day without any imperative of time. All embraced within the warmth of a traditional fifties cafe interior, lovingly kept and perfectly clean. Next week this scene will be gone and the daily performance will end. Where will Gilbert & George and all the other regulars go now? John and Jimmy (pictured below) have been coming here over forty years.
This is an emotional moment for the staff and customers of Rossi’s Cafe, and rightly so because they are drinking tea on the edge of a cliff that is about to collapse and there is nothing anyone can do about it. “We are going to miss our customers, we are going to miss the place. We tried very hard to stay,” admitted Harold in reluctant acceptance. He gets up at quarter to five in the morning, six days a week, to drive here from his home in Pimlico to Spitalfields and open the cafe. If he goes to Smithfield Market to buy sausages, bacon and ham then he rises even earlier. Harold was never going to get rich running Rossi’s Cafe but it gave him and his family a modest living, provided a egalitarian space where everyone could afford to eat. Many in Spitalfields will feel the lack of it once it has gone and the long-established social network that attends it is lost forever.
Pictured behind the counter today, here are all the staff of Rossi’s Cafe, Betty, Jenny, Harold, Fanny, Luzangy, Fabio and Jolio, putting a brave face on the situation as Jolio, the kitchen comedian, skylarks with a plate of cheese to lighten the moment. Harold and his wife Jenny occupy the centre of this photo, just as they have carried the family business, with the support of Harold’s sister Fanny (who stands in front him) and Harold and Jenny’s daughter Luzangy (standing next on the right), one of their two children who help out when not attending university. I was touched by Harold’s dignified self-effacing manner, now that the long fight to save the cafe is over. He and Jenny are already searching for new premises and I know they their customers will follow them if they can re-open elsewhere in the vicinity, so we must wish them well and hope to see them again soon. But in the meantime, we have two days to go round there and pack the place out, giving Harold and Jenny and their team a worthy send off in appreciation of the service they have given to Spitalfields.
Graham Bignell, New North Press
There is a certain magnetism about printshops that I cannot resist, so when I visited the New North Press for the first time at the end of last year to meet Richard Ardagh, I was eager to return and have a chat with Graham Bignell who founded the press in 1986 and has amassed a formidable collection of old wooden and metal fonts. “It was a long process,” he said, outlining how he began, “because you have to acquire type. I advertised in print magazines and I bought a whole print workshop from John Wellbourne in Southend – two Heidelberg presses and a fantastic collection of type. It is not easy dealing with old printers,” he explained diplomatically “because they don’t retire, they just carry on…”
Printers, I soon understood, are a breed apart. For Graham Bignell, printing was a passion that became a vocation that became his life. Clearly, the smell of printers’ ink can be as addictive to some as that of greasepaint is to actors. From the gleam in Graham’s eyes as he described the first acquisition of type, initiating a collection which has grown and grown over the past twenty years, I discerned a compulsive side to the pursuit of letterpress printing. “Five years ago, Ron Stamp of Cafe Press in Uxbridge rang me to say – I’ve got some stuff in sheds down the back…” continued Graham enigmatically, with a smile and a pause for dramatic effect, before announcing in triumph,“It was a goldmine of typographical material!”
I know I too am susceptible to this same urge because whenever I come across single blocks of wooden type for sale it irks me to see the letters split up and their function destroyed. I want to buy all the stray type and reconstruct the complete typefaces so they can have a new life. Consequently, it made feel good just to see all the neat trays of old type that Graham has rescued and put back to use, in this loving sanctuary for old and neglected fonts. More than this, I am delighted to report that letterpress printing is enjoying a resurgence and Graham opens his workshop up to students who find they return to their computers with a better understanding of typography once they have actually shuffled blocks of type around.
Graham’s occupation requires a rare combination of both the mental and the physical, the aesthetic and the practical manifested in a flexible mind and a steady hand. As well as being the one who chooses the typeface and decides upon the composition of type upon the page, the letterpress printer needs dexterity to work the printing press and set the type in the frame. It is all part of the same job. Typography for letterpress demands considerable powers of imagination to envisage the design of a page because the actual arrangement of words and white space is only revealed when it is printed on paper. It takes years of experience and a certain unquantifiable knack to master the idiosyncrasies of the press, and judge all the variables that must be controlled to arrive at a perfect print. This is the magic of printing.
While Graham spoke, I cast my eyes around the workshop – the walls decorated with old wood block posters in frames, the ceiling festooned with proofs of new prints drying in a rack, and the space divided by tall cabinets of drawers of type arranged around the fine nineteenth century iron presses that are the central focus of activity. Every spare surface was covered with intriguing paraphernalia, wedding invitations and correspondence cards, rolled posters and discarded pulls of type, wooden cases of intricately arranged tiny lead alloy type shining like fish scales, a recent copy of the British Medical Journal with Graham’s typographic cover design, some of Graham’s beautiful Christmas cards that he printed and never sent, and a stack of lively examples of the classy artists’ books that Graham produces to commission. It is the workplace of a happy man.
Dereliction of care
Not so long ago, almost all of Spitalfields was shabby or derelict but today there is very little that has not been cleaned up. Dereliction is now the exception where it was once the rule, and I have become a connoisseur of the tragic poetry incarnated in these rare anachronisms. Just like those ambivalent gypsy children who came to the aid of the upright protagonists in Enid Blyton novels, many buildings in Spitalfields have been grabbed by the collar and scrubbed within an inch of their lives to make them acceptable at the tea-table. It would be disingenuous not to embrace these edifices that have been rehabilitated, but sometimes the patina that records the history of human presence gets lost – which is why I am drawn to these pitiful ruins, because they still hold their mystery intact, even if the fabric is falling apart.
At 4 Princelet St the patina has been scrupulously maintained and the house regularly serves as a location for film and television dramas. This is where Sharon Stone tied Hugh Dancy naked to the bed in Basic Instinct 2, where Little Dorritt had coffee with Arthur Clennam and where Rupert Pendry Jones discovered one of the victims of the Ripper copy-cat in “Whitechapel” last year. It is a familiar sight to see actors in full nineteenth century costume, enjoying a cigarette or talking into a mobile, on the doorstep here between takes. Once, I overheard a couple of visitors on the pavement outside, innocent of the deliberate preservation of the house in this state, debating whether they could get it cheap, considering that it would need a lot spent on it but concluding it might be a good investment once it was cleaned up. That day is long past.
To many people, properties that have no human life are rendered invisible, blurry holes of emptiness in the neighbourhood. So, in a small selection that is entirely subjective and far from comprehensive, I decided to take a single walk, photographing for you some buildings that deserve better. Multiply these a hundred-fold and you would have the neighbourhood thirty years ago. I hope that illustrating the qualities of these stubbornly neglected edifices, restoring their visibility, might encourage someone to cherish them for their intrinsic worth. Although I am not claiming all of these buildings are of historical or architectural importance, each has a modest dignity which complements the place and it would enrich the city if they were sympathetically restored. Above all, I know these buildings will not remain in this state forever, so I consider it my duty to record these last shabby remnants as they are today.
The first stop on my walk was Toynbee St, just a hundred yards from Christ Church Spitalfields, where there is this early twentieth century two-storey building with the unusual proportion of a long barn or stable block, filling the eastern side of the street. The ground floor comprises a row of shops, mostly boarded up now, and on the first floor, workshops or living spaces with wide casement windows. This attractive property belongs to the council and sits decaying when it could be repaired and put back to use.
Next I walked over to Elder St, where at the junction with Commercial St is the gaping facade of a nineteenth century house with fragments of brickwork structure visible behind. Rebuilding this property would be most effective way close the gap in a run of nineteenth century buildings, thereby restoring the streetscape.
Continuing onwards up Great Eastern St, there are these two monumental nineteenth century warehouses, with an extension comprising workshops at the rear and bare remnants of the ground floor facade of a curved building at the street corner. It was here I took the photo at the top of the article, holding my camera through a gap in the hoarding. Both buildings have well-proportioned frontages with cornices and fine detailing but have rotted so long the floors have fallen in. The attendant at the car park behind told me the owner was under no pressure to do anything with them but sent surveyors to check the structure regularly. This seemed particularly absurd given the collapsed state of the floors but maybe he just wants to be sure he will not find himself liable for damage if the buildings collapse into the street?
This derelict terrace at the junction of Redchurch St and Bethnal Green Rd includes two eighteenth century weaver’s houses. Dan Cruickshank visited these the day before I interviewed him last year and enthused to me about the architectural detail that survives here.
I climbed up a step ladder in the car park to take this photo of the back yard of one of the terrace of three old house in Sclater St that are surrounded in scaffolding and have been boarded up as long as I can remember. It is amazing what you can discover if you look over a fence.
Finally, there is this railway building in Pedley St, just off Brick Lane, with its fine curved windows and door, that still has its decorative lamp fitting above it. This is a property that could be suitable for any manner of uses and bringing it back to life would lift up this sad alley, that primarily serves as a toilet at present.
Once I had taken these pictures, the light was fading, the rain was coming on and it was time to go home and end my short melancholic tour of dereliction. As I stood in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil for tea, I realised there were plenty I had missed and, spreading the radius further, there were more I would like to have photographed. Also, I did not include buildings in the Bishopsgate Goods Yard or the Truman Brewery because these sites raise many other questions. Those pictured are examples where the possibility for restoration is apparent, they are structures that could become serviceable again and are buildings worthy of keeping. I hope none are left to fall down or neglected until the case for their demolition becomes persuasive.
However, the neighbourhood is full of eagle eyes and, even as I took my pictures, others were doing the same. Photographing derelict buildings in Spitalfields has become a popular sport over these last thirty years, though, like some rare species, there are less and less to photograph as time passes, attracting proportionately more and more photographers. All these buildings pictured are spoken for and there are plans for some – in fact, I hope to report to you about one in particular shortly. We shall wait and watch for developments.
Columbia Road Market 19
A respite has come, after weeks in which the oppressive cold has filled me with the overwhelming urge to make a hot water bottle and take to my bed at three in the afternoon, I woke before dawn this morning, restless with thoughts and plans. Walking up the road to the market early, I discovered that now the snow is gone the puddle under the railway bridge is back, so I had to wait for a gap in the traffic and sprint under the bridge to avoid getting drenched by a wave of spray from a passing car. The first thing I saw at the market were Daffodils from Lincolnshire and from Cornwall, and although there were only a fraction of the stallholders and as yet no customers, there was a prevailing atmosphere of optimism. “It’s not raining and it’s not cold , no excuses this week!” I heard one stallholder declare in expectation of a healthy day’s trading.
To celebrate this change in the weather, I bought cut flowers, these Narcissi from Tremelethen Farm, St Mary’s in the Scilly Isles, three bunches for £2. Their heavenly scent will fill my small drawing room and remind me that there are warmer climes where Spring is happening already.
The Golden Heart, 1986
Here, as promised, is Mike Myers’ pub profile of The Golden Heart in Commercial St, opposite the market, from “Spitalfields News”as originally published in February 1986:
“Den and Sandra Esqulant have run The Golden Heart for seven years. During that time Spitalfields has changed quite a bit and the pub has altered accordingly. Out went the public bar with its pool table, dart board and large colour TV. In came the Spitals Wine Bar with waitress service, a “very high standard of food, good wine” (no bottles of Hirondelle suspended over fibre optics here), and a wicker fan from the Kings Rd. They were the first to open a wine bar in Spitalfields and the first to serve a Beaujolais Nouveau breakfast last November – an event covered by the local press.
The Golden Heart is a chameleon-like pub with its character changing with each session. It opens at six in the morning and is soon full of bustling market men and Spanish lorry drivers, who apparently prefer coffee to beer. A typical market pub in fact. Lunchtime sees the pub filling up with chartered accountants and in the evening the pub is used mainly by local residents. So it could be a metaphor for the whole of Spitalfields – that is if you’ve drunk enough Beaujolais Nouveau and are feeling suitably pretentious.
The saloon bar has black flocked wallpaper, table tops in metal, red carpets, gilt framed mirrors and a “real” gas fire. Like any other Trumanized pub in fact. The only exceptional thing about it are the signs above the toilets – “Dames” and “Hommes” they read, instead of Ladies and Gents. Was this a concession to the Common Market? I asked Sandra, who has dark hair and eyes, and bears a striking resemblance to the barmaid in Eastenders. “No,” she said, “We have an old French name, so I wanted to add a bit of France to the bar.”
Had she any plans for the future? “Yes, lots but I’m not going to tell you anything,” she replied brusquely, pouring another glass of wine as if to mollify her refusal to reveal anything further. “You should see it in a few months though,” she added. Do they get any prostitutes in the pub? “No, never, they are not allowed to come in. We’d rather have an empty pub. I like to keep a high standard. A pub should be an extension of your home.”
Both Den and Sandra are attached to Spitalfields. “We love the people, the market, the area, it has lots of character and everyone is very neighbourly.” Den and Sandra are a friendly couple and it is their presence that turns the pub from an ordinary Truman’s pub, wine bar notwithstanding, into a jolly sort of place to have a drink in…”
When I met Mike Myers, the Spitalfields crooner, who edited the “Spitalfields News” for two years in the eighties, we searched in vain through his personal archive to find this article. Mike thought he probably gave his only copy to Sandra in 1986, but thanks to the Local History Collection at the Bancroft Library you can read it today. Once I opened the copy of “Spitalfields News,” there was Sandra prominent on page three.
Although the picture is feint and grainy, there is no doubt Dennis and Sandra make a happy couple and I think Sandra looks pretty good, fashion-forward in an eighties mode with her Princess Diana style ruffle collar. Not yet the Queen of Spitalfields we know today, but already a princess in waiting. She seems to have shown Mike a little bit of attitude when he went to interview her early in 1986, but we all mellow with time, and neither she nor Mike knew that he would become a regular, still coming back for a pint a quarter of a century later.
Reading the feature now, I am struck by the novelty of European things. The United Kingdom joined the European Union in 1973 and wine bars were all the rage throughout the eighties as drinking wine became a more sophisticated alternative to an honest pint. No doubt Sandra is relieved not to open at six in the morning anymore, though she still retains an early licence. We shall not grieve for the flock wallpaper either. The French signs on the toilet doors remain, as does the “real” gas fire where Sandra’s dog Molly sleeps most nights, and The Golden Heart does feel like a private home. Back then, people were already talking about Spitalfields “changing quite a bit” just as they do today, though regrettable prostitution is still part of our neighbourhood.
Yesterday, I dropped into The Golden Heart around five o’ clock when Sandra was busy serving pints to the thirsty office workers. Once there was an opportunity, I handed her a photocopy of the story, unfolding it onto the counter and, amid the clamour of the Public Bar, she read it through to herself with her hand upon her cheek in quiet concentration. Sandra remembered the moment when the picture was taken and placed her fingers affectionately upon the image of Dennis,who died last year, “He never changed” she said, “I still have that sweater, I always bought him intarsia cashmere sweaters from Ballantynes.” I asked Sandra about her old French surname, mentioned in the article, and she confirmed that she understands Esquilant is of Huguenot origin.
I had not realised that The Golden Heart was the first pub in London to host a Beaujolais Nouveau breakfast, “We used to have two chefs and Edith Piaf blazing until five in the morning, and all the directors of Trumans got drunk and collapsed in the brewery,” she recalled with pride. Reconsidering her comment about the prostitutes, Sandra told me candidly, “We used to be friends and I protected them when they needed it.”
I think it was a cushy job Mike had going round writing pub profiles and now that most of the ones he wrote about have closed it has become an important social record. Maybe I can follow his example, writing pub profiles for “Spitalfields Life”? There are plenty of bars left in the neighbourhood for me to work my way around.
