There are around 3,500 train drivers working on the Tube, and an estimated 20,000 people working for London Underground as a whole. Who are these mysterious, uniformed people? And what do they do when they’re not under the ground?
This month an exhibition called Out of Uniform showcases art made by London Underground employees.
Held at Fill the Gap gallery in Leytonstone, the exhibition is named after an art collective founded by David Nevin, a station supervisor and artist, who back in 2010 realised that more and more of his colleagues were artists on the side.
“I have worked side-by-side magicians, musicians and PhD environmentalists not to mention a clairvoyant,” says Nevin.
“But the most common previous life that caught my ear, eye and heart were the artists. They have a common story of people needing to make a living to support a family and their creative passion.”
The exhibition contains a wide variety of art, from glorious landscape photography to paintings inspired by dreams. The first Out of Uniform exhibition in 2010 was a roaring success, with the response overwhelmingly positive, and Nevin is hoping for a repeat performance.
Fill the Gap gallery is a converted office space just outside Leytonstone station, and is run on a voluntary basis by a trio of tube staff who are also members of Out of Uniform.
Out of Uniform: Artists Working for London Underground is on until 5 December.
Fill the Gap, Church Lane, E11 1HE (next door to La Parisien café, Leytonstone station)
Hitchcock mosaic from Rebecca at Leytonstone tube. Photograph: Russell Parton
Momentum is gathering for a museum in Leytonstone dedicated to the life and work of one of its most famous sons, the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock.
Ros Kane, a charity founder who has lived in Leytonstone since 1974, is looking to create a steering group to secure a site for the museum, claiming the “time has come” for the filmmaker to be properly commemorated.
Hitchcock, known as the ‘master of suspense’ for the directorial techniques he pioneered in films such as Birds and Vertigo, was born in Leytonstone in 1899, where a blue plaque marking his place of birth can be found at a petrol station on Leytonstone High Road.
“Waltham Forrest has got William Morris and Hitchcock, these two famous people. We managed to save the William Morris gallery and this is the second thing we need to do,” said Kane.
“There are murals underground, but this is a poor area – or has been – and could do with a bit of building up.”
Kane has already identified a potential site, a large office with a basement close to Hitchcock’s place of birth, and is looking for support from residents to get the campaign going.
“I met a woman who moved to south Leytonstone because of Hitchcock and was then appalled to find that there was no museum,” Kane said.
“It would put Leytonstone on the map and considering Hitchcock is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time it’s just so obvious that it needs to be done.”
If you would like to be part of the steering group for a Hitchcock museum in Leytonstone (wherever you live), email roskane@btinternet.com
Son of a grocer: Mosaic showing Alfred Hitchcock’s father’s shop. Photograph: Russell Parton
Rolling with the times: Russell Frost gets ready to make a print. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Slowly but surely, technology is becoming effortless. A toddler can use a computer these days, and as a species we’re used to all manner of machines which would have baffled our forbears.
But for Russell Frost learning about technology works both ways. His hobby, which has evolved into a passion, is letterpress printing, which from its invention by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s until the mid-twentieth century, was the primary method used for all things printed, including the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
Frost is part of a letterpress revival, a craftsman who sees value in this old technology and who wants to exploit its artistic potential. His workshop in Leytonstone contains several well-travelled presses, each with their own individual mechanisms.
“I don’t live in the past,” he assures, “but I love aspects of the handmade and the way they did things.”
Frost grew up in a remote, mountainous part of New Zealand and trained as a landscape architect before becoming a “professional fly fishing guy” for six years. Now 40, he lives in Leytonstone with his wife and daughter and is trying to make a go of it selling his prints.
“Someone gave me a business card that had been letterpress printed which sort of got me thinking,” he says, explaining how he started out. “As a fly fishing guy I had my own little company and wanted to print my own vouchers so I made my own block, carving it gung ho with a dentist’s drill.”
Frost shows me a Vandercook proofing press, the gold-standard for artisan letterpress work. The ‘form’, blocks of type locked together into what you want to print, goes on the bed of the press. Then you apply ink using a roller before passing paper over it on a rotating cylinder. My effort smudges, but the visual definition and crispness is far superior to what I get from my Laser Jet at home.
Frost’s prints lend themselves to word play and visual gags. One of his latest editions shows a leaping salmon with the text: “Smoking cures.” The pun is a satirical nod to vintage advertisements and true in a culinary sense. Another print bears the slogan “Give me hops” in a homage to craft brewing. There’s often some historical association, or reason for using a particular font: when we first met, at an exhibition next to Leytonstone station organised by Transport for London, he was allowing members of the public to make a print using the original London Underground font.
It’s surprising how readily printers abandoned the letterpress, which had served us well for so long, once offset and digital printing came along in the twentieth century. Old presses were dumped in woods, sold for scrap metal or burnt on bonfires outside print works. Beautiful sets of type in Frost’s collection are badly charred, and one press he bought in Wellington he discovered had been used for toasting marshmallows at Christmas.
But letterpress printing lives on, not only through people like Frost, but in the very words we speak. A ‘chase’ is a steel frame that the type goes inside before being printed. From it is derived the expression ‘cut to the chase’. A piece of type is called a ‘sort’, from which we get the term ‘out of sorts’. It makes you wonder how many technological expressions we use today will be in circulation long after that technology has moved on.
Russell Frost is resident artist this month at The Hawkhurst Vault 240 Brick Lane, E2 7EB.
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.
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.
