East End Review

Category: HISTORY

  • Bells still tolling at Whitechapel foundry

    Whitechapel Bell Foundry
    Alive and bell: inside the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Photograph: Richard Simpson

    The Whitechapel Road originated as a Roman highway – a direct route from the City of London to Colchester. As centuries have come and gone the road has now completely changed, but for more than 400 years now there has been one constant: the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.

    Established in 1570 during the reign of Elizabeth I, the elegant wooden Georgian facade of the grade II listed Whitechapel Bell Foundry still graces the busy thoroughfare. Most importantly, the facade in question belongs to the UK’s oldest manufacturing company. To this day bells tolling across the world are being cast in Whitechapel.

    The entrance brings you into a heavily decorated reception room full of old photographs and memorabilia – some highlighting royal visits, others commemorating specific anniversaries. The unbroken line of master bell founders stretching back to 1420 is also proudly exhibited, as is the wooden template used when manufacturing Big Ben.

    There is no doubt the factory’s main claim to fame is the production of the almighty 13.5 ton Big Ben in 1858 (Big Ben is, of course, the name of the bell – not the tower). But the roll-call extends much further than that.

    The Liberty Bell (symbol of American freedom), the Bells of St Clement Danes (of ‘Oranges & Lemons’ nursery rhyme fame), Bow Bells (which chime from the belfry of Saint Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside in the City rather than from Bow Church, as is commonly assumed) were all cast there as well. As were the clock bell at St Paul’s Cathedral, the octave at Winchester Cathedral, the hour bell at Canterbury Cathedral, the Great Bell of Montreal, the Bicentennial Bell…

    Moving on into the back room a short video can be watched explaining the manufacturing of a bell from beginning to end. The process is complex, but it interesting to note that despite technological progress, the fundamentals of bell founding remain the same as they were in medieval times: molten metal is poured in to a bell-shaped mould, which is then opened once the metal has cooled. The fine-tuning which follows has evolved, but the basics remain unchanged.

    Adjacent to this room is an outdoor courtyard with bells scattered across it. At the far end the lead water tank dating back to the building’s days as the Artichoke Inn still stands. I am informed that some of the bells out there are destined for Brazilian and American shores.

    On a hot summer day the shutter doors on Plumbers Row are sometimes opened and offer a glimpse into a world which is very different to what many of us have grown accustomed to. Here you might find master founders Alan and Kathryn Hughes (whose family have been founding bells in East London since 1884) and members of their team hard at work casting glistening bells in what is otherwise a dreary workshop. Rows of variously-sized bells line the floor – church bells, hand bells, ship bells, level crossing warning bells – and are surrounded by all the machines required for tuning, moulding, drilling, skirting, testing, fitting and fashioning. It’s quite a site.

    Meanwhile, just down the street in the City of London, thousands are crunching numbers, analyzing spreadsheets, and typing away on their computers. The contrast between the rustic workshop and the shiny glass towers could hardly be more pronounced.

    It is remarkable to think that across the street from HSBC bank, a few doors down from the Rhythm Factory music venue and the Tesco supermarket, there remains a factory of such historical significance that has been specialising in such a unique craft for over four centuries.

    “Our business runs counter to the national economy” Alan Hughes explained to the Gentle Author blog. The reason for this, he says, is that “bell projects take a long time, so churches commit to new bells when the economy is strong and then there is no turning back.”

    Apparently it takes at least 10 years between order and delivery. This has consequently enabled the foundry to have a continuous work flow throughout the good times and the bad.

    Whitechapel Road has changed time and again, and the upcoming opening of the new Crossrail station is likely to ensure that another wave of change sweeps through the area. It’s safe to say, however, that the Whitechapel Bell Foundry can probably handle whatever comes its way, just as its bells have done year after year.

    www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk

  • Fetishising East London’s past

    Arber and Co 620

    Before moving to London, I watched David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and recognised his flickering Whitechapel freak-show dream-reel as something called the old East End. I didn’t spot it by extant landmarks. Instead, the old East End seemed to emerge from a well-worn confection of signifiers: smog, crowding, cobblestones, Cockney chatter, grinning bawds and ill-shod, street-smart beggar kids.

    Lynch was tapping into an accumulated reservoir of fetishistic representations of the East End’s grit and squalor. There are countless variations on the theme, enough to comfortably accommodate both Jack the Ripper and Call the Midwife.

    There is, it seems, an enduring hunger for an imagined old East End. In the context of modern British ‘keep calm’ retromania – the glinting flotsam of the jubilee flotilla – this doesn’t seem out of place. But the lure of East London’s memories seems very particular, and more powerfully mythic than the wistful patriotism of bunting-and-cake nostalgia.

    I wondered whether the fervour for remembering was a sympathetic response to East London’s history of trauma, which is deep and perhaps unechoed in the rest of the city.

    In a Poplar pie and mash shop with tiled walls and framed pictures of pre-war East India Dock Road I meet Ian Porter, a London tour guide and historical novelist. East End poverty, degradation and destruction might be the stuff of popular fascination, he tells me, but they don’t completely explain it. After all, Southeast London’s history was similarly traumatic. Bermondsey was a slum-scape and dumping ground for the city’s unsavoury industries – tanneries, slaughterhouses, soap works, breweries – and took an almost equally heavy beating in the World Wars. “But go into any library,” Porter says, “and there will be twenty books about the old East End. There won’t be any on Bermondsey.”

    The crucial divergence is, according to Porter, that Victorian Whitechapel, not Bermondsey, formed the backdrop for the murders, which drew the gaze of the British literary and political classes towards urban poverty. “Nowadays you have all these tacky tours,” says Porter, “Actually, Jack the Ripper had a huge effect. Until 1888 no politicians would come down here. But now, the papers weren’t just covering the murders, they were covering the squalor, the poverty, the prostitution too. The East End becomes the template, if you like.”

    Sensational newsprint quickly gave way to fiction as conduit for the consumption of the East End’s savagery. Arthur Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago, which narrated the moral descent of a Shoreditch slum boy towards violent death at 17, was a bestseller in 1896. The East End was being reconstructed in the reading public’s imagination as an urban wasteland of moral rot, an ‘other’ repository for their social anxieties.

    The Victorians’ macabre preoccupations have wound their way into the bank of stereotype, which lend Lynch’s oblique visuals that unexpected connotative eloquence. The distancing effect of passing time has polished the horror into the sort of shadowy glamour commodified by the Ten Bells in Shoreditch, a pub famous for hosting the Ripper’s victims. Porter thinks the East End’s grisly historic reputation – from Ripper to Kray twins – underpins East London’s trendiness. “It’s that edgy charm,” he explains.

    Edgy charm aside, memory is an identity-building project and not a static commodity. In today’s East End, this process is not only socially significant, but necessarily fractured, devolved and continuous. Established cultural signifiers can be endowed with new meaning. So the old East End – still cobbled, still gas-lit – can be code for hard working people, community and resilience in the face of bombardment, at the same time as it is the memory of urban degradation and corruptive poverty.

    Rupture and change make us want to tell stories afresh. Every new building between old ones is a manifestation of absence, a gap in the architectural record, which demands explanation. A gap in a different record inspired Tabitha Stapely, leader of a resident’s association concerned with the regeneration of Roman Road.

    Finding meagre archival data for Bow, she started to dig for stories that would frame the locality’s historic character. “Bow is about pioneers and radicalism, rule-breakers,” Stapely says. “Poverty attracts the social changers.” Stapely drafted the programme of July’s inaugural Roman Road festival to reflect the historic identity she sees there. Walks trailed Sylvia Pankhurst’s suffragette legacy through familiar streets, talks explored the Matchstick Rebellion and the Cable Street anti-fascists, and, in a local cafe, Bow’s elderly denizens shared their direct experience of a fading East End.

    We have less and less access to direct experience of the wartime East End, says Stapely. The festival took place the same week that Gary Arber, of W.F. Arber & Co printing works on Roman Road vacated the premises. I met Arber, the octogenarian grandson of the company’s founder, and final custodian of the shop’s 117-year legacy, about a year ago.

    He was in blue coveralls, and the shop was a relic in disarray – paper stacked ceiling high, walls chequered with wooden pigeonholes, the counter studded with the tacks and staples of ages. I told him I felt like I had stepped back in time. He told me he liked to time travel, too: with cotton stuffing his ears against the sound of motors, a hurricane lamp for light and a book of collected Victorian news bulletins open across his knees.

    The encounter had a melancholy feeling. Perhaps it was because I thought he was seeking refuge in a time of beginnings, before the printing works was living history. Perhaps I was just dizzied by the looping circularity of the memory game. Indeed, as Arber and his printing press left the Roman Road, I found that in my own imagined picture-book of the old East End, with dockers and pie shops, pearly kings and kids playing in the bombed-out rubble, the shops all look a little more like his.

  • The Morning Star: black, white and red all over

    Editor of the Morning Star Richard Bagely
    Editor of the Morning Star Richard Bagely

    The image of the British Left suffered an unfortunate blow in 2008 when the Google Streetview camera van drove past the offices of The Morning Star – the world’s only English-language socialist daily newspaper – the day after they had been gutted by a catastrophic fire.

    “I think it’s been updated now,” says Morning Star editor Richard Bagley. “But for a while if you went to the address on Streetview you had the door hanging off, loads of smoke damage, the windows smashed and the company secretary with his head in his hands on the curb!”

    The offices are in better shape today. Down the road from the Stour Space gallery in Hackney Wick, two smart red five-pointed stars sit above the door of a squat brick building, bookending the legend: William Rust House. Inside is a life-size brass relief of the eponymous one-time editor, done in jagged Vorticist style.

    The newsroom holds a dozen state-of-the-art iMacs, a Palestinian flag and a pinup front-page from the paper commemorating the late trade union leader Bob Crow: “LOVED by the workers, FEARED by the bosses”. According to a whiteboard, James is ‘Worker of the Week’. Journalists drift in as the morning proceeds, a little sun-damaged from spending the previous day covering a march through central London by the People’s Assembly, an umbrella group for left-wing activists sponsored by the union Unite.

    The paper has survived worse than fire in its time. When the USSR collapsed in the early nineties, it nearly took the Morning Star with it: since 1974 the Soviets had been funding the paper through buying thousands of copies a week and shipping them to Moscow.

    The cash dried up not long after the Wall came down, causing a financial coronary at the Morning Star. Their building on Farringdon Road had to be sold and staff went unpaid. Bagley’s father, who started at the paper in the days when it was called the Daily Worker, left at this time because he needed to support his family. “Personally for him it was a very difficult time as well, seeing it all be torn apart,” recalls Bagley. “There was a lot of division, in-fighting, factional splits and acrimony. It was a very difficult period”.

    Strikes by journalists in 1998 and 2009 again brought the Morning Star to the brink of closure. Pay was notoriously bad, the then-editor John Haylett writing in 2009 that “Every Morning Star staff member is told bluntly at interview: ‘The wages are crap. We work at the paper because we are politically committed to its aims’.”
    Things have changed since then. Starting salaries are just over £20,000, with plans to increase in coming years. The staff wouldn’t give much away about their levels of political commitment, joking when asked that “some of us are more socialist than others”.

    Funding comes from selling papers (cover price £1, circulation 15-20,000) and from fundraising from supporters. This includes jumble sales and second-hand book auctions, and, in September, a group of readers from Merseyside doing a sponsored cycle-ride from London to Paris. The paper is owned by the People’s Press Society, a cooperative with shares owned by readers.

    Bagley points out that this is one reason why the Star’s editorial policy is different to other national dailies. The People’s Assembly march is a case in point. Unite paid for a free giveaway of the Morning Star at the demonstration, for whom it was front-page news. According to the organisers, 50,000 people marched through London on 21 June, though it was barely covered elsewhere in the press. Why?

    “I think it possibly reflects the make-up of people in the media and what their outlook is personally,” is Bagley’s answer. “It’s also kind of like: ‘We don’t want there to be an alternative projected; that’s last century, left and right don’t exist.’ There’s a buy-in to this idea that this is it now; we’ve got this model, this is it, and nothing else is valid.”

    For the same reason, Labour politicians who advocate nationalisation will be “gone for” by the newspapers. Says Bagley: “I mean the press is owned by oligarchs and pornographers. And the ‘hooray for the Blackshirts’ peeps at the Daily Mail”.

    Since Bagley’s brought up the Mail’s Blackshirts connection, it seems fair to ask him about the support the Morning Star gave to Soviet repression in the twentieth century. The Morning Star backed the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, which saw tanks on the streets of Budapest and thousands killed.

    The Morning Star masthead, with its red star insignia, would be illegal across much of eastern Europe (Estonia, say), much as Swastikas are forbidden in Germany. But this doesn’t much bother Bagley, who believes in the power of branding: “It’s just our logo. It’s not a Soviet star. And we’re not in Estonia anyway. I mean we’ve had that logo since 1966 – it’s our logo.”

    A related legacy is a certain trigger-happiness with the word “fascist”. Bagley makes out the 2010 Conservative election campaign was “fascistic” for including “big slogans”.

    With such loaded terms in play, politics can become a moral activity, rather than an intellectual one. Editorially, this moral preoccupation comes out in a tendency to commentate-as-you-report, with phrases such as “disgusting work capability assessment privateer Atos” used unflinchingly in the main news section. Bagley contends that this is simply doing more overtly and honestly what other papers do covertly. “We’re not ashamed to show who we are,” he says; which is why the front cover bears an explicit statement of the paper’s aims: “for peace and socialism”.

    The paper’s stance follows the policy document of the Communist Party of Britain, Britain’s Road to Socialism, and the decision to do so is endorsed every year by shareholders in the People’s Press Society. Is this preferable to having to answer to the Barclay brothers or Rupert Murdoch? “I don’t get a phone call saying ‘this is your command today’,” Bagley clarifies.

    “The broad thrust is that there needs to be an anti-monopoly alliance involving small shopkeepers, labour communities and trades unions, encountering the weight of the corporations and global pressures. That’s a comfortable place to be for a newspaper.”

    What is striking is that, despite everything, it’s possible to feel extremely comfortable reading The Morning Star. Bagley’s view that we have a political monoculture is a valid one, and it’s worth giving serious time to his proposition that “under the guise of austerity, a lot of the advances made in the last hundred years are just being rolled back, because they’re not seen as required”. The typos and flagrant bias make you less angry than the stories it is actually reporting on do.

  • Inside Wilton’s Music Hall

    The Mahogany Bar, Wilton's Music Hall. Photograph: James Perry
    The Mahogany Bar, Wilton’s Music Hall. Photograph: James Perry

    To visit Wilton’s Music Hall for the first time is to discover something new about London. 

    Hidden down an alley way in the heart of London’s East End, Wilton’s at first glance is just a wooden doorway surrounded by a facade of peeled paint and worn stone. 

    But inside lies a gymnasium-sized mid-nineteenth century auditorium, once a rowdy hub of Victorian popular entertainment, where sailors and their sweethearts would carouse to the leading Music Hall acts of the day. During the 1860s and 1870s, the theatre saw tightrope walkers, the first British can-can show, and performances by artistes such as Champagne Charlie, one of the first music hall acts to play to royalty, now a resident of Abney Park cemetery.  

    In the main hall the sense of past is palpable. You can imagine dock workers standing by the cast iron barley-twist columns, or canoodling up in the gallery. The original stage is vertigo-inducing, made to accommodate an audience of top hat wearers, and on the ceiling you can see where a crystal chandelier with 300 gas jets once hung, ventilating the hall from the rising plumes of tobacco smoke. 

    The hall has recently undergone substantial repair work, though you wouldn’t realise it by the bare brick walls and furnishings. “The hall is finished and is exactly how we want it to be,”  Wilton’s Oona Patterson insists. “We may still have holes in the roof but whereas they once were real they are now preserved. It’s typical East London shabbiness – but I’d like to think we were there first.” 

    Although a significant period, the 30 years Wilton’s spent as a music hall was relatively short. In 1888 the building was bought by the East London Methodist Mission, and became a focus for efforts to alleviate extreme poverty and improve living conditions. During the Great Dock Strike of 1889, a soup kitchen was set up that provided a thousand meals a day to the starving families of dockers.

    The Methodist Mission stayed open for nearly 70 years, surviving the Blitz and witnessing the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. But after the Second World War the building fell derelict and was scheduled for demolition before a campaign supported Sir John Betjeman, Peter Sellars and Spike Milligan managed to save it from the wrecking ball.  

    The next turning point in fortune came in 1997 when a newly reopened Wilton’s staged a one-woman performance by Fiona Shaw of T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland. The faded grandeur of Wilton’s provided a perfect setting for the poem and put the venue on people’s radar once more.  

    The threats of closure and demolition now in the past, Wilton’s is in the midst of addressing the long term structural problems with the building. Back in 1850, founder John Wilton had a vision for a ‘Magnificent Music Hall’ which consisted of buying five terraced properties, knocking them through, and building a music hall in what was essentially their back gardens. 

    The result was a unique structure – few theatres have the main entrance to the auditorium behind a staircase. But it also created some unique structural problems: namely, the auditorium and the houses it backs onto are not a perfect fit. From one of the office rooms you can see clear space between the back wall of the houses and the hall. 

    “It looks pretty cool, the way the light comes through, but in the long term it’s not ideal – there are a lot of leaks. What we’ve previously been able to do is to make it as strong as we’ve needed to continue using it, but it was never going to be sustainable,” says Patterson. 

    From this summer until autumn next year Wilton’s, while remaining open with a full programme of events, will be undergoing repairs to fix the structural irregularities once and for all. “We just want to stop the clock so that it’s safe and it’s structurally secure,” says Patterson. 

    But when the curtain rises on the new and improved Wilton’s Music Hall in 2015, don’t expect it to look much different from how it is now. “We’re not going to replaster everywhere and we’re not going to put in shiny floors,” Patterson adds.  

    “But we are going to make it safe and we’re going to get things like some proper electricity and maybe even some plumbing!” 

    Wilton’s Music Hall, 1 Graces Alley, E1 8JB.

  • The history of Club Row live animal market

    Puppies for sale at Dog Market, Club Row
    Puppies for sale at Dog Market, Club Row

    Choosing a dog is no easy task. The cuteness of a terrier, or the leanness of a whippet? The stature of a labrador or the Englishness of a bulldog?  

    In most cases the pet shop owner will run you through the pros and cons, the pedigree and the breed. But at the Club Row Animal Market – just north of Bethnal Green Road – you would have simply been fed what you wanted to hear.

    Kaye Webb provides a vivid account of the trading techniques in her 1953 book Looking at London and People Worth Meeting.  

    “ ‘Hi, mate, buy a dog to keep you warm!’ said the man with the Chows to a pair of shivering Lascar seamen. ‘E’s worth double, lady, but I want ‘im to ‘ave a good ‘ome’ or ‘Here’s a good dog, born between the sheets, got his pedigree in my pocket!’ ‘Who’d care for a German sausage? – stretch him to make up the rations,’ the salesman with the dachshund said.”

    Club Row Market was London’s one and only live animal market. Dogs, cats, birds, chickens, snakes, gerbils, guinea pigs – even monkeys and lion cubs could be found there.  Imagine that – lion cubs for sale on the streets of Shoreditch.

    From its humble beginnings as a place where farmers could trade outside the city walls, Club Row market spread down Sclater Street and initially developed into a bird market.  This was a legacy of the French Huguenots who immigrated to the area after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and had the custom of keeping canaries and various singing birds.   

    Writing in the early 20th Century, George R. Sims described the market as follows: “On Sunday nothing but bird-cages are to be seen from roofs to pavement in almost every house. At first you see nothing but the avenue of bird-cages. The crowd in the narrow street is so dense that you can gather no idea of what is in the shop-windows or what the mob of men crowding together in black patches of humanity are dealing in.”

    And the market wasn’t restricted to the street either. “It was an extraordinary sight, this marvellous old pub full of stacked up cages of exotic screeching birds” comments Derek Brown on the Spitalfields Life blog. The pub in question was the Knave of Clubs – now an upmarket restaurant called Les Trois Garçons where the “wildlife is taxidermy”. 

    As time progressed dogs and other animals were eventually sold alongside the caged birds. By the 1960s “a cacophony of whimpers, yaps, yelps, and just plain barking guides you to the spot where Bethnal Green Road branches off to Sclater Street,” Webb writes.

    The RSPCA and other animal rights groups eventually succeeded in shutting the market down, and judging by most accounts this was fully justified.  There is no shortage of stories about boot polish being used to mask sores and entire litters of puppies sold for medical research.  

    Far from defending the traders or seeking to rationalise animal cruelty, there is – however –  no denying that the market must have been quite a sight: a street theatre for East End traders which knew no limits.

    Street trading is still alive and well in the streets of Spitalfields with Club Row’s animals making way for Brick Lane’s antiques and toiletries, bikes and records. Virtually everything imaginable is on offer now – except animals that is. 

    When the government introduced a law in 1983 outlawing the street sale of live animals, centuries of East End tradition were brought to a close. London lost its only live animal market, and is unlikely to ever see another one. 

    A stroll down Club Row and Sclater Street today is a very different experience to what it was just twenty years ago. Former bomb sites where the market used to spread have now been developed and Shoreditch’s first skyscraper now reigns supreme. As for dogs – well, why keep a dog in Shoreditch anyway?

    @raisimpson

  • George Orwell’s East London footsteps

    George Orwell credit public domain 310
    George Orwell. Credit: public domain

    In the not so distant past, London’s East End was a place to be forgotten, an area readily associated with disease, overcrowding, alcoholism and crime. Either you had the misfortune of living in one of the area’s slums, or you simply stayed clear. 

    Or, if you’re George Orwell, you quit your steady well-paid job and hit the streets.

    In 1927, after five years serving the British Empire as a police officer in colonial Burma, Orwell traded his uniform for rags and spent a few months living a life of abject poverty in two of Europe’s grandest capital cities. He recounts his experience in Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933.

    In many ways, this experience defined Orwell’s writing career. The poverty he witnessed in London’s own backyard came as an eye opener after years of service in the Imperial Indian Police. Here was Great Britain preaching enlightenment to all corners of the globe, yet in Spitalfields and Whitechapel the living conditions were as bad as in the slums of Calcutta.

    The seeds had been sown. Over the following two decades Orwell would use his words to fight social injustice and imperialist and authoritarian rule. His righteous causes would be developed novel after novel, and ultimately culminated in the publication – sixty five years ago next month – of 1984.

    So what has changed since the time of Orwell’s writing? What has become of the East End lodging-houses that played such an instrumental role in his writing career?

    The simple truth is that most of the squalor he experienced no longer exists here. Many of the buildings, however, do still stand – though under a very different guise.

    The Providence Row Night Refuge “for deserving Men, Women, and Children” on modern day Crispin Street used to provide accommodation for more than 400 destitute people, and did so from 1860 until as recently as 1999. Inmates would get a bed for the night, as well as a ration of cocoa and bread. Nowadays it’s a student residence for the London School of Economics.  Students may not have much money but it’s fair to say these are two very different levels of poverty.

    Then: Providence Row night shelter in 1902. Credit: Bishopsgate Institue archives
    Then: Providence Row Night Refuge in 1902. Credit: Bishopsgate Institute archives

    The Brune Street Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor opened in 1902 and as it its name suggests used to provide nourishment for the Jewish community of Spitalfields. In the 1960s it was still regularly feeding 1,500 clients. The establishment has now been divided into expensive flats.

    Fieldgate Street’s Rowton House, also erected in 1902, offered 816 beds. It is known for a fact that George Orwell stayed there, as did Soviet revolutionaries Maxim Litvinov and Joseph Stalin when they attended the London conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1907. American author Jack London called it the “Monster Doss House” packed with “life that is degrading and unwholesome”.  Today it is known as Tower House and offers a vast array of luxury apartments, some worth more than £1 million – a far cry from the shilling Orwell had to pay for a night’s rest.

    These are but three examples of the many East End establishments that have gone from rags to riches in less than a hundred years. Back in Orwell’s day these institutions existed to assist the poor, now the buildings they were housed in serve a wealthier class of person.

    But times have changed and so has the area. Would Orwell roll over in his grave at the thought? Perhaps not. In many ways we have people like George Orwell to thank for this progress.

    Jack the Ripper’s infamous murders in 1888 made international news and the area saw unprecedented regeneration thereafter. Orwell’s work brought East End misery back to the forefront of social agendas and ensured the regeneration triggered by the Ripper years didn’t stop there.

    Whereas people used to avoid the area and even fear it, nowadays people of all walks of life flock to the area to tour the sites – a celebration of immigration, poverty and murder if you will. Thanks for your help George.

    @raisimpson

  • Last chance to catch Speakers’ Corner project at Bishopsgate Institute

    Doris the heckler at Speakers' Corner 1968. Photograph: Chris Kennett
    Doris the heckler at Speakers’ Corner 1968. Photograph: Chris Kennett

    Do you believe in the freedom to speak your mind in front of other people? Sounds From The Park (SFTP), currently at the Bishopsgate Institute, focuses on one small part of London where the principle of freedom of speech is held as sacrosanct: Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, a haven for left-wingers, right-wingers, Communists, weirdos, eccentrics, trade unionists, radical thinkers, religious fundamentalists, and all manner of in-between.

    More than just an exhibition, SFTP mixes photos and field recordings together to weave a beguiling and inspiring feel capturing those gathered at the podium. A number of black-and-white photos show a range of characters heckling the gathered crowds, from the 1970s right up to the present; one shows an intense debate between a Palestinian and a Jewish man. Meanwhile, an accompanying audio guide contains twenty-nine interviews with speakers, who recount their interest in taking the podiums, along with actual samples of the speakers in action.

    SFTP is culmination of a 14-month project commissioned by On The Record, a not-for-profit co-operative devoted to audio and historical samples of London life. Initiated by two oral historians, Rosa Vilbr and Laura Mitchinson, On The Record have uncovered a mountain of audio gems which paint a picture of London’s vibrant history just as compelling as photography and film on their own can do. Working with skilled volunteers, they have trained members of the public in oral history and techniques such as digital storytelling.

    “We aim to create participatory projects that involve more people in uncovering previously overlooked aspects of heritage”, Vilbr says. “SFTP was our first major project and has been our greatest achievement – recording and sharing an important part of London’s social history and exploring a fascinating site of political, religious and eccentric discussion and performance. Because we are an oral history organisation, we were fascinated by collecting oral histories of what is essentially a diminished tradition – outdoor public oratory and debate”.

    The choice of Bishopsgate Institute as the venue to house SFTP was no accident: “We worked with Bishopsgate because it is dedicated to the history of free speech, labour movements, and progressive movement”, proclaims Vilbr. “The idea was to show the many meanings Speaker’s Corner has held for many diverse people over time. Another key theme is the dialogue and interaction that has historically taken place there – it’s not all about speakers shouting at people. Hecklers answer back, disrupt and question”.

    Meanwhile, Vilbr has been involved with projects in Hackney as part of a background in community development: she was involved with a project called the Hackney Housing History Project, which explored oral histories of the borough.

    “One of our directors lives in Hackney and we work here whenever we can”, she enthuses. Recalling last year, she remembers: “We ran digital storytelling workshops in May 2013 for adult learners from Hackney that were very popular”.

    In addition, they are currently developing a project later this year researching the history of Centerprise, once one of Hackney’s principal community centres. They are also working with Campaign Against Arms Trade on a separate project called Selling to Both Sides, in which the arms trade during the First World War will be documented, along with the accompanying resistance to it. Both should be essential viewing – and listening too.

    Sounds from the Park is at the Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, EC2M 4QH until 30 April.

  • Macs from way back – East London’s museum of all things Apple

    The 'Mac-smith': Paul Marc Davis. Photograph Eleonore de Bonneval
    The ‘Mac-smith’: Paul Marc Davis. Photograph Eleonore de Bonneval

    If your Macbook Pro has ever made contact with a mug of milky coffee you may think there’s only one outcome, but try telling that to ‘Mac-smith’ Paul Marc Davis.

    Davis has been restoring Macs since 2008, starting out in his home before last September setting up shop on Hackney Road.

    This is no ordinary computer repair shop, however. Ghosts of computers past confront those entering the premises. In contrast to Apple’s futuristic sheen, Davis has filled half of his shop floor with relics from Apple’s 30 year history.

    He explains his thinking behind the Mac museum, saying: “I left out a few old machines one day and when my customers came in they went crazy for them. It made me realise that people were as excited about them as I was, so I built a place for them and started filling in the gaps in my collection.”

    Among the museum pieces is an innocuous-looking circuit board from Apple’s first personal computer. “Believe it not but the first Apple computer you had to make yourself,” he says. “You bought the board, then a keyboard and screen to plug into it. This one is missing quite a lot of components, but the last complete one sold for half a million.”

    Other curiosities include the rare Apple Lisa from 1983, so called after Steve Jobs’s daughter, and the Graphics Tablet from 1979, which allowed users to create images by hand with a pen. Drawing a circle or a square were about the extent of its capabilities, but it was still advanced for its time.

    But being advanced has not always worked to Apple’s advantage commercially. Davis shows me a Twentieth Anniversary Mackintosh (TAM) from 1997, a desktop computer with built-in LCD and Bose speakers. “No one really understood this idea of a computer being a media centre,” says Davis. “They started off selling them for $7,500 dollars but within a year they were trying to flog them for about $2,000.”

    The Mac-smith holds no truck with the “white purity of the Mac store”, instead decking the shop out with Victoriana fittings. “What we’re trying to do here is an antithesis,” he says. “We’re moving towards something with a little bit more warmth and a lot more heart.”

    To that end, Davis plans to open a cocktail bar and even a school giving Mac-based tuition in the basement. “It’ll be an interesting cocktail bar with a rough and ready Victorian feel to it. In line with the rest of the place here,” he says. “Let’s see if we can keep the students away from the booze.”

    Davis’s unusual career trajectory saw him practise as a sculptor for 12 years. He has also found success as an actor, with parts in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Dr Who. For now, though, nothing is going to eclipse the Mac restoration game.

    “I’ll fix anything – cars, motorbikes … I understand things for some reason,” he says with a shrug.

    “And I know what Apple teach their employees. As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing you couldn’t pick up in an afternoon. We go a hell of a lot deeper.”

    489 Hackney Road E2 9ED, 07907 508678, www.macsmith.co

  • Hoxton Hall celebrates 150 years

    Burlesque: performer Immodesty Blaize
    Burlesque: performer Immodesty Blaize

    Hoxton Hall, one of the last surviving music halls in East London, is this month celebrating its 150th birthday with a series of fundraising events.

    Having provided entertainment and support to the local community since the days of Queen Victoria, the hall is now in need of critical repairs and is looking to raise £30,000.

    Headlining the celebrations will be international burlesque star Immodesty Blaize, whose first solo performance in London was held on stage at Hoxton Hall back in 2004.
    
    The anniversary festivities also include a vintage variety day which incorporates live music, a ballroom tea dance and a market at which treasures unearthed from the hall’s wardrobe department will be sold.

    Hayley White, Group Director of Hoxton Hall, says: “Over our history we have presented an array of talent, often those starting out.
    “It is a delight to celebrate the history of the building with a diverse and stunning showcase of events presenting our past alongside our future ambitions for the space.”

    In Victorian London, often dubbed ‘the music hall era’, Shoreditch boasted more than ten music halls. But over the years these numbers dwindled and now there are just two remaining in East London.

    Hoxton Hall first opened its doors to the public in 1863, hosting its first entertainment evening in the November of that year.
    The year 1878 saw the site offer an entirely different service, when Quaker W. I. Palmer bought the hall and used the space to house and clothe local women and children, as well as to provide the period’s equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

    The hall was then used as an air raid shelter during the Second World War, once more highlighting the crucial role it has played in the community over the years.

    Hoxton Hall, 130 Hoxton St, N1 6SH

  • Homing is where the heart is

    Pigeon maestro Albert Stratton
    Pigeon maestro Albert Stratton. Photograph: Rachael Getzels


    Albert Stratton has 80 pigeons, 56 medals, and two bird sheds. His garden isn’t much bigger than a bus shelter but over the years he’s bred more than 200 of London’s favourite pests.

    Once neighbours complained and environmental health was called round – they photographed every inch of his roof and concluded that there weren’t an unsafe number of droppings. “No more than you’d expect for underneath the railway arches anyway,” chips in his wife.

    Albert, who is now 84, was once an avid pigeon racer known in clubs up and down London for his sharp eye for a good bird. He lives in the same small, dark-brick house in a cul-de-sac behind the Bethnal Green train lines where he resided during his glory days of playing the sport. “Back then I was a force to be reckoned with!” he exclaims. “All them plaques up there – we boshed them! Cups and everything! We really gave them a run for their money.”

    He waves towards his windowsill which is crammed with shiny dove effigies and bird busts. Instead of family photos there’s a keepsake box with the homing pigeons’ ankle rings. When I ask about his children, Albert pauses for a second. “Kids? Oh yeah. I’ve got one pest at university.” The humour passes him right by.

    But it’s not that funny anymore. Pigeon racing is a dying sport, and with it, go his friends. “When I started in 1983, there were over 20 of us at the club house. Now there’re only three.” He breathes deeply into the muggy air, made thicker still by the lingering whiff of bird feed and sawdust and lets out a sigh. “It’s just Ixy, Smivvy and me… We just had one die. That’s the trouble.”

    During the 1800s, pigeon racing was a flourishing sport. Albert reckons the club-house near Spitalfields Market that Charles Dickens wrote about is the same one he was a member of. “It used to be huge,” he explains. “The Queen is the patron. Her grandfather had lofts out in Sandringham. Mike Tyson does it too you know.” Indeed, the testosterone laced, rough-talking boxer who once bit the ear off an opponent is a devoted ‘pigeon fancier’ – and he’s a hero among racers.

    Albert Stratton is a self-made champion. He’s won scores of titles, but he didn’t learn it from a trainer or his family. “As a kid I found a pigeon that got lost in the flats where we lived. No meat on him at all, he’d flown himself out. My dad ain’t a big one for animals but he’d do nothing to hurt ‘em. Built a little box for him, fed it up, got it right again. But he said it belonged to someone else so we let it go but it never went. It stayed. Just kept coming back, right through my bedroom window, for about two years. That’s what intrigued me.”

    Two years ago Albert had a stroke. He’s lost the use of one leg and gets around with a walking stick. He has one placed below the stairs and one at the back door next to the lofts. “I spend more time with the pigeons now. It gives me something to do.” As he struggles to step down from the loft step, he lets out a frustrated sigh. Under his breath he mutters, “I tell you, what you don’t want is a stroke. It’s completely debilitating.”

    But the pride he takes in his birds hasn’t waned with his strength. “They’re the cleanest animals on the planet!” he proclaims. Ken Livingstone called them ‘flying rats’ and feral birds are well-known carriers of disease. But not kept pigeons. Albert bathes them every other day in a small plastic tray with bath salts – and they love it. The best racing birds fetch thousands. He once paid £500 for a star breed, but he can’t tell his wife.

    Homing pigeons can fly 50mph, and the longest races are 600 miles – up to the tip of Scotland. You do lose birds now and then; hawks are ravaging the skies. Let free by ‘do-gooders’ tuts Albert. Safe in their coops, his well-kept prize pets babble away.

    Albert once lost a five-time winner – he says it was heartbreaking. “But when you’re standing in your garden and a pigeon you expected at half past arrives on the hour, it really makes your heart pound. You think to yourself, woweee, I’ve really got a good one here.” He whistles the ‘woweee’ and you can feel his pride. Albert is an old man now, but he physically straightens up, puffs up his chest and coos with glee. His pigeons do the same.