East End Review

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  • Brick Lane is remembered in photographs

    Doing the laundry: photograph of Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell
    Doing the laundry: photograph of Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell

    Since moving to London in 1981, Phil Maxwell has always lived just off Brick Lane in an 11-storey tower block. It is the perfect location for somebody who is known as the photographer of Brick Lane and its surrounding areas. “I’ve noticed how the London skyline changes over the years,” Maxwell says.

    These changes are documented in Maxwell’s new book Brick Lane by Spitalfields Life Books, an intimate collection of photographs dating back to 1982. The book dispenses with words to let the photographs speak for themselves.

    His passion for documenting the inner city began in Toxteth, Liverpool, a place that, Maxwell says, “wasn’t too dissimilar to Brick Lane”. Maxwell admits he is particularly fond of his photographs from the 1980s because the “environment was so disconnected”. Maxwell adds: “The area had lots of corrugated iron, dilapidated buildings and that somehow enabled me to focus on the people better.”

    Maxwell’s photography captures moments of humanity that are apparent in all three decades. “There’s a similarity in the faces and a common humanity which I’m interested in capturing in my work,” says Maxwell.

    However, Maxwell has been witness to a lot of change in the area since 1981. Maxwell says: “When I moved here, it was quite run down but now it is a playground for people who can frequent the bars. A lot of people have been driven out of the area. I preferred it before it became commercialised like it is now.”

    This change has not dampened Maxwell’s enthusiasm for the area. The older photographs are special, Maxwell insists, because it shows how Brick Lane used to be a meeting place for Bangladeshi families. “The houses were quite overcrowded, so people treated the street as an extension of their home. It’s like a theatre where all human life is there.”

    Asked if the area bored him, Maxwell says: “I never get bored of the area. If I walked out and took a photograph now, there’d be something new for me. It constantly surprises me.” Against a backdrop of change, Maxwell finds interest in the faces of Brick Lane and its surrounding areas.

    “It’s interesting to see the different characteristics and personalities on Brick Lane or in Whitechapel and Stepney,” Maxwell tells me. Brick Lane is a crossroads between the city and the “real east end” with people on lower incomes. His photography thrives on the hustle and bustle of the marketplaces, the interaction between people from different cultures and the faces of the people.

    When asked if his work was political, Maxwell replies: “It is insomuch that it values the lives and the tribulations of ordinary people. They came together to demonstrate against the war and the BNP and National Front in the 80s and 90s. I celebrate the people and their lives, and the difficulties they have in trying to survive.”

    Maxwell’s book is a heartfelt look at a city and, most importantly, its people. “A lot of our culture celebrates celebrity. I think it’s important to show the other side. I am full of admiration for ordinary people and I want to celebrate them in my work.”

    Maxwell’s work shows the change in our city, but also celebrates the undimmed enthusiasm of ordinary people trying to survive in London.

    Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell on at the Mezzanine gallery, Rich Mix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, E1 6LA until 26 April.

     

     

     

     

  • Play tackles subject of ‘paupers’ funerals’

    Dying light: rehearsals for The Nine O'Clock Slot. Photograph: Phoebe Cooke
    Dying light: rehearsals for The Nine O’Clock Slot. Photograph: Phoebe Cooke

    A new play exploring the rise of modern-day ‘paupers’ funerals’ is to explore the taboo subject of death using poetry, humour as well as audiovisual and physical comedy.

    The Nine O’Clock Slot, by East End-based theatre company ice&fire and directed by Lisa Spirling, retraces the lives of four individuals buried in communal graves and will be the first play staged in Shoreditch’s Red Gallery.

    Annecy Lax, who co-wrote the play with Hannah Davies, says they were started writing it after developing a fascination with the death industry and the Dickensian concept of ‘paupers’ funerals’.

    “We became really interested that in a city where there is so much and so many people, that people can die alone with absolutely nothing, so that the state has to take care and look after their arrangements,” she says.

    Lax and Davies interviewed local hospital chaplains, mortuary assistants, soup kitchen helpers and hospice carers for the play.

    They also spoke to women in their 70s, 80s and 90s at a community centre in Tower Hamlets who spoke with humour and levity about dying and inspired the play’s title.

    “The 9 o’clock slot is the one nobody wants. It’s a real mark of shame if you have to have an early morning funeral,” Lax explains.

    The Nine O’Clock Slot is at Red Gallery, 1-3 Rivington Street EC2A 3DT from 26 March until 19 April. For tickets see www.iceandfire.co.uk.

  • BB&C at the Vortex Jazz Bar – review

    Jazz trio BB&C. Photograph: Peter Gannushkin
    Jazz trio BB&C. Photograph: Peter Gannushkin

    Laboured synaesthesic analogy: if main stream Sanborn-esque smooth horn is saccharin or aspartame, then Tim Berne’s sax is something far less instantly accessible and cloying. You know when you eat really strong cheddar and the salt and calcium crystals make your gums itch? That’s what Tim Berne is approaching. I like strong mature cheddar. I think I like Tim Berne- the think outlining the limits of the analogy as much as reluctance to wholeheartedly condone him.

    If you listen to Jazz on 3 now and again or check out the jazz press, you will often hear Berne referred to in exalted tones. He is an American saxophonist who made a few records for Columbia (corporate) and since has done his own thing with whoever he pleases. Last month he was in London for the Vortex gig with a trio comprising Jim Black on drums and Nels Cline on guitar.

    He started proceedings with a deadpan jibe at the establishment, joking he had two tickets to see Prince at Ronnie Scott’s that he was happy to give away to whoever was interested. There was then a brief entrée with some high register squawking to scare off TAFKAP’s symbol, before things really got down to business, Berne leading the charge with a plastic water bottle rammed in his sax’s bell.

    What followed was around 75 minutes of constant noise; a few identifiably separate contrasting motifs but mainly an attention-maintaining cycle of loud/soft/loud/soft.

    During the deluge drummer Jim Black played with very open arms, taking the focus away from any immediately bass/snare/hi-hat groove and towards the rhythmically free; Nels Cline shouted into his guitar’s pickup through a strange red tub (conceptually free); Berne put various things in his bell and blew it hard (texturally free). The loud/soft cycle provided an inevitable tension and release. Given the level of abstraction being meted out however, it was sometimes hard to discern this release on all levels (rhythmic/textural/conceptual). Getting all these components in close apposition may be nigh on impossible with such free music, but on the few occasions when it did happen it was sensational.

    Back to that analogy: saccharin is synthetic, salt and calcium crystals are natural. 95 per cent of pop music is synthetic; the emotions engendered by Tim Berne are natural. He’s not bullshitting. Too much saccharin has a bitter aftertaste, but too much salt will kill you. Few people know the former; everyone knows the latter. And likewise Tim Berne isn’t as famous as Prince.

    The only reservation I have in not wholeheartedly recommending this thing is that when music is too abstruse, it is sometimes hard to get a full handle on it. It also polarises opinion. Most people hate it; a small minority profess to love it, but in doing so perhaps have the same level of understanding as a latter day pogonophile has of Victorian times. I’d say it opens a door it’s worth looking into – I just haven’t gone inside yet.

  • Roy Williams to make return to East London with new play Kingston 14

    Playwright Roy Williams
    Playwright Roy Williams

    When Roy Williams’ debut play was shown at Stratford East 18 years ago the odds were stacked against him, not least because few black playwrights at the time were enjoying mainstream success.

    But ever since childhood, growing up in Notting Hill on a diet of seventies TV drama, Williams believed he had something to say, and his career to date has justified that conviction, with a string of celebrated plays about black British life, as well as an OBE, to his credit.

    This month Williams returns to Stratford East for the first time, with Kingston 14, a play that looks beyond Williams’ usual compass of black Britain to Jamaica, the ‘sunshine isle’ from where both his parents emigrated.

    “It’s a drama that deals with levels of police corruption in the Jamaican police force but it’s also really about people living in Jamaica doing what they do to get by,” says Williams.

    Kingston 14 is the postcode of an area of Kingston called Denham, with the play the story of a British police officer who is sent there to investigate the murder of a British tourist. The investigation runs into difficulties when a gang leader, played by musician turned actor Goldie, is brought into custody.

    “The play lifts the lid on an aspect of Jamaica I would say not many people have seen,” says Williams.

    “If you put aside all the sun, the sea and all the stereotypes it’s quite a poor island actually and poverty breeds criminality and corruption so that’s what I’m pinpointing in the play.”

    A lot of Williams’ plays are explicitly about race: from the racial tensions and football yobbery of Sing Yer Hearts Out For the Lads to the award-winning Sucker Punch and most recently his play Advice For the Young at Heart which looked into the 1958 Notting Hill race riots.

    Kingston 14, however, is not overtly about race, and while featuring an all-black cast, Williams is ambivalent about the label ‘black theatre’.

    “Naturally because I’m black that’s going to be my point of reference. But my plays are for everybody. I don’t just write for black audiences, I write for all audiences that are interested in theatre,” he says.

    Williams’ recent plays have been staged at the Royal Court and National Theatre, but the playwright is quick to recognise his debt to Stratford East, who took a risk on him all those years back.

    “They say it’s a people theatre and it really does live up to that. Audiences that see a play at Stratford East are very involved and supportive, and unlike any other.”

    Williams, now 45, remains prolific – with a new play emerging nearly every year. He insists though that writing plays never gets easier.

    “Once you’ve finished one play you go back to the beginning and stare at that computer screen and try and work out what’s the next thing that’s going to come flowing out of my brain,” he reveals.

    “No it never gets easier and it shouldn’t – it’s flipping hard writing a play. But if I didn’t like it I would have stopped doing it long ago.”

    Kingston 14 is at Stratford East, Gerry Raffles Square, Greater Theatre Square, E15 1BN from 28 March – 28 April

     

  • Hitchcock’s East End

    A mosaic in Leytonstone underground station featuring a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's film Rebecca
    A mosaic at Leytonstone underground station of a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca

    Waltham Forest has spawned many famous sons – William Morris, Brian Harvey and, yes, Alfred Hitchcock.

    The master of suspense was born in Leytonstone and was the son of an East End greengrocer.

    It is thought he got his first taste of the magic of the silver screen at the now derelict EMD Cinema in Walthamstow’s Hoe Street.

    There is a plaque commemorating Hitchcock’s birthplace (now a petrol station) on Leytonstone High Road, and there’s a hotel near Epping Forest that is named after the great man.

    It is also true that several glorious mosaics depicting scenes from Hitchcock’s most famous films adorn the inside of Leytonstone Tube Station.

    But apart from these somewhat modest focal points, reminders of the director’s links with the East End are strangely absent. Until now.

    Early this month the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow Village played host to two screenings of one of Hitchcock’s most famous films, The Birds, starring Tippi Hedren, as part of The Barbican’s ‘Hitchcock’s East End’ season.

    This atmospheric small museum was decorated with origami birds, and ornithological tea towels featuring ‘the birds of Waltham Forest’ (kingfishers, kestrels, coots, etc) were among the themed objects available to buy. To judge from the demand there is no shortage of interest in Hitchcock’s local connections, and the ‘rediscovery’ of this Hollywood legend’s Waltham Forest origins has conveniently coincided with the growing cultural renaissance in this area, whose residents exult in its newfound reputation as ‘Awesomestow’.

    The Barbican has produced mini walking guides which can be downloaded from its website and which let locals lead themselves on a tour of the streets the young Hitchcock would have walked down to see if they can spot features that might have influenced his films.

    A big outdoor screening is, it is rumoured, being planned for this summer as the finale to this series of events. For the latest information on this keep checking The Barbican’s website.

    Create London, an arts organisation that is also working on the project, says on its website that the Hitchcock programme leads towards “the opening of the new Empire Cinema in late 2014…which will form part of a major regeneration project, The Scene at Cleveland Place, a new leisure destination for Waltham Forest.”

    As one of the artform’s most influential figures, Hitchcock would surely have approved of a new picture palace opening on his boyhood turf.

    What a shame, however, that the Hoe Street picturehouse – a beautiful venue whose future has been the subject of a long and continuing saga – still languishes amid the ranks of London’s boarded-up ghost cinema.

    The Barbican

  • Stephen Willats – conceptual art that is socially and politically relevant

    Display Boards from the Stephen Willats' project work, Inside An Ocean, that took place on the Ocean Estate during the exhibition, Concerning Our Present Way of Living, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1979. Photograph courtesy of Stephen Willats The archive of the artist
    Display Boards from Stephen Willats’ project work Inside An Ocean during the 1979 exhibition Concerning Our Present Way of Living. Photograph courtesy of Stephen Willats 

    Since the French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’ to describe an artistic practice centred on human interaction and experience in the late 1990s, a great deal of traction has been given to the idea of artworks as models for living and action.

    In many ways London-born conceptual artist Stephen Willats was way ahead of the game. He studied at the Ealing School of Art in the early 1960s and, influenced by cybernetics and the science of communication, became a pioneer of collaborative, socially-engaged art created in site-specific contexts.

    Commissioned to produce a solo show for the Whitechapel Gallery in 1979, Willats involved people from the local area, initiating projects with leather and textile workers from in and around Brick Lane, labourers at the West India Dock and residents from the Ocean housing estate in Tower Hamlets.

    Twenty-five years on, Willats’ exhibition is being revisited in a new archive display at the Whitechapel featuring works on loan from the Tate, the Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art and the Museum of London alongside documentary material from the artist’s personal archive.

    “Willats always imagined the artist’s role as a social and political one and the archive display is a chance to reflect on an early example of an artist engaging with the local community,” says exhibition curator Nayia Yiakoumaki.

    Part of the new archive display is dedicated to Willats’ work with residents on the Ocean housing estate, including a series of tape recordings and diagrams produced by Willats reflecting how people felt about their living conditions, from damp-ridden walls to the lack of facilities for children.

    Now the subject of a £200m programme of regeneration works carried out by the East Thames Consortium, the archive display at the Whitechapel Gallery opens a window on the history of the community on the Ocean Estate, one of the oldest, largest and most impoverished in the country.

    “In one sense there’s the art historical element to the archive exhibition, the chance reexamining of an early example of community engaged artistic practice pioneered by Willats in the more recent context of relational aesthetics,” Yiakoumaki says.

    “On the other hand it presents a slice of history contrasting the very different reality of the East End amid financial crisis in the seventies with the here and now, something which I think newer residents to the area forget.”

    Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living is at Whitechapel Gallery until 14 September. 77-82 Whitechapel High St, E1 7QX

     

  • Rare photographs show East End life 100 years ago

    Detail of a photograph by C.A. Mathews of Crispin Street looking towards Spitalfields Market and Dorset Street.
    Detail of a photograph by C.A. Mathews of Crispin Street looking towards Spitalfields Market and Dorset Street

    Jeremy Freedman – contemporary photographer, 10th generation Spitalfields resident and founder of the Huguenots of Spitalfields charity – uncovered a mystery at the Bishopsgate Institute.

    It was a box containing 21 photographs – badly damaged – revealing Spitalfields life a century ago. The photographs were taken by C.A. Mathew, who, Freedman says, “we know little about”. Freedman has spent the last few years restoring the photographs.

    They will be available for the public to see at Eleven Spitalfields Gallery from 7 March for the first time in over 100 years.

    These photographs are the last surviving legacy of the enigmatic Mathew. Freedman and I followed the footsteps of Mathew from Liverpool Street, down Bishopsgate and explored the streets branching off it. It is fascinating to compare the photographs to Spitalfields today.

    The details reveal a world that was alive with movement, life, death and tragedy. A photograph of Artillery Lane reveals that the Titanic had sunk four days prior; on Crispin Street are a multitude of children, faces uncertain, natural. Another photograph reveals an electric bakery and a shoeshine at work. These photographs are, as the Gentle Author writes, the “most vivid evocation we have of Spitalfields at this time”. They show an ever-changing city in movement.

    “Spitalfields has always been an area of change,” says Freedman, and “a hub of immigration”. Some photographs show areas that have been completely destroyed, paving way for the Spitalfields we know today. Frying Pan Alley, once populated with children and homes, is now Nido Spitalfields, expensive accommodation for students. Others remain almost identical, such as Middlesex Street, the buildings still intact.

    However, it is important not to politicise these photographs. “The photographs are a wonderful celebration of life,” says Freeman. “This area has always been unique because it’s about people who live here – families – most of them multigenerational. People know each other here. It’s always felt like home.’

    As we turned down Commercial Street, we passed Gardner’s, the oldest traditional family business in the area. On the front door of the shop, an East End Trades Guild sticker says ‘Together we are Stronger’. The sense of community witnessed in Mathew’s photography, then, is still alive in the streets today.

    Mathew’s photographs engage with the modern audience because we see a mirror to our own time. These photographs are a vital reminder of the everyday and a celebration of life in the city of London.

    C.A. Mathew: Photographs of Spitalfields a Century Ago is at Eleven Spitalfields Gallery, 11 Princelet Street, E1 6QH from 7 March – 25 April.

  • Painting the past in Another Country exhibition

    Skeleton by Matthew Krishanu
    Skeleton by Matthew Krishanu

    Another Country is the first exhibition to be held at The Nunnery, a new contemporary gallery located a stone’s throw from the Olympic Park. Since opening its doors in January, The Nunnery has showcased the work of two highly acclaimed, award-winning artists Cara Nahaul and Matthew Krishanu.

    These artists have come together to explore the themes of travel, dislocation and memory. They both use photographs from their childhood as starting points for their artwork. While Krishanu uses photos from his own childhood in India as inspiration, Nahaul uses photographs of her grandparents in Malaysia.

    The deft strokes, bold shapes and fresh colours of both artists leave the viewer wanting to know more about the distant lands they depict. But not only are these vibrant compositions easy on the eye, they also explore the artists’ deeply personal relationships to their past.

    Krishanu explain: “The paintings are about stepping into ‘another country’ – one created from a combination of old photographs, memory and imagination.

    “The show was initially inspired by the LP Hartley line ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. I like the idea of being able to enter the past through a painting, as if it still exists. For me memory is about restructuring and re-imagining the past. Essentially, it is an opportunity for me to tell stories in paint.”

    While Khrishanu’s paintings depict his experience of growing up in India and embarking on childhood adventures and games with his brother, Nahaul’s paintings explore the far-off lands of her grandparents which she felt quite distant from.

    Nahaul says: “I was struck by this idea of looking at my own past as something foreign – a physical space unknown and elsewhere. I embrace this dislocation and I try to reflect that in the paintings.”

    In using paint as a way to access the past, both artists explore the complex relationship between the past and memory. Furthermore, by using art to re-imagine the past and transform old memories, the exhibition unearths the ever-shifting, circuitous nature of memory.

    Both artists have been keen to maintain the community spirit of Bow Arts – the educational arts charity which runs The Nunnery. Since the exhibition opened, Krishanu and Nahaul have worked with several local schools, organised talks and are planning an exhibition tour on Thursday 6 March.

    Another Country is at The Nunnery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ until 6 April

  • Krista Papista – the sound of ‘sordid pop’

    Krista Papista
    Krista Papista

    Krista Papista, 24, is unlike other musicians. Since the age of 14 she has written, mixed and recorded music and done so entirely on her own. Today, operating from out of a small bedroom studio in Dalston, she remains unsung and unsigned, though with the determination and potential to go far.

    But that is not all. Papista’s songs are open to interpretation – something she unquestionably advocates.

    “My sound unravels elements of Riot Grrl chicness, requiem ballads and film noir trumpets with rabbit hole transitions … my mind is naturally preoccupied by melancholic thoughts and mood swings that manifest in my music,” she says.

    The self-coined ‘sordid pop’ musician makes her eclectic tastes and strong sense of self more apparent by using dark, emotive lyrics and deep electronic beats. Her brawny voice echoes the androgynous and otherworldly tones of Karin Dreijer of Swedish experimental duo, The Knife. It is safe to say she is no wilting wallflower.

    Papista’s roots are in Cyprus and Australia, and her early experiences growing up in Cyprus led her to discover artists who were non-commercial and far from the mainstream. “I wasn’t particularly interested in anything that was accessible to me,” she says. “I liked punk rock, electronic and pop music, and was never able to see my favourite artists live or even hear the music I liked anywhere. But there are many Cypriot/Greek artists I adore: Soteria Belou, Arleta, Manos Hatzidakis and many more.”

    After moving to East London six years ago, Krista is enjoying feeling more settled. “I feel comfortable here. I like the restaurants, I like the gayness, I like the bars, I like the Mediterranean supermarkets and I like the dodgy-ness,” she specifies.

    This spring Krista is planning to release her first album (all on her own, naturally) and from there see where ambition takes her. But first comes her morning cup of coffee. “My typical day usually consists of jogging first thing, after that I drink coffee and I either work on my music, read, day dream or get paranoid about everything,” she says.

    www.kristapapista.com

  • Pie-oneers of fast food

    Traditional fare: an East End pie and mash shop
    Traditional fare: an East End pie and mash shop

    As a kid in the 90s, whenever we visited my Granddad at the family home in Leyton, it became a habit to stop off en route at a pie mash shop. We’d drive via the North Circular from suburban trappings where the precursors to today’s identikit high streets – Burger King, Our Price, Dixons and Woolworths – had taken root. From a menu solely comprised of ratios of beef mince pie to mash, the only necessary choice is whether to go for the single ‘one and one’ or plump for a double. Sitting on immovable chairs we’d top vast bowls of luminous green parsley liquor with chilli vinegar from the pierced lids of vodka bottles, occasionally daring to try the traditional trimming of jellied eels.

    For a six-year-old it was a peculiar experience. If the past is a foreign country then pie mash shops with their ornately-tiled walls with photos of Pearly kings and queens and great tanks of writhing eels spoke of especially exotic climes of London’s history. European Eels begin their life as larvae in the depths of the Sargasso Sea, undergoing various stages of metamorphosis during a three-year passage along the Gulf Stream to the freshwater rivers of Europe. Able to survive in almost any water and resilient to the industrial filth of the mid-eighteenth century Thames, the jellied variety of the cheap and plentiful serpentine fish became a Cockney staple. During the Victorian era, they would be plucked from estuarine mud flats and shipped live to eel pie purveyors, landing finally on the working class dinner plates of some of London’s oldest fast food outlets.

    M. Manze’s pie mash shop in Walthamstow, which opened in 1929, was awarded Grade II listed status in October last year, and whilst many of the buildings themselves are remarkable, the people that populate them – the staff, the owners and the customers – are what keeps these pockets of history breathing. Before cameraman Chris Brunner and I set out to document them through a series of interviews we were weary of a predictable narrative bemoaning the loss of a bygone era. Instead we found an industry on the wane perhaps but by no means in decline.

    A century since the pie mash hey day, owners three or four generations deep into the business, who share their name with their shops, have willing inheritors of the family recipes. Far from an obscure tourist curiosity, patrons enjoying a ritual family expedition or lining the stomach before a day at the Millwall pack the places on Saturdays. Though we didn’t get to meet him, apparently Leytonstone lad David Beckham still pops into his favourite shop in Waltham Abbey for a two and two. The European Eel is classified as critically endangered, but recent signs suggest the decline has halted or even reversed. Like their wares, the institution that is pie mash continues to endure, nourishing London’s Cockney soul. Make mine a double.

    www.georgesteptoe.co.uk