Spitalfields Life: the everyday East End

With the Olympics soon upon us, End London has been the subject of an intense flurry of celebrations, lamentations, eulogies and general chatter. Spitalfields Life is the latest of a series of creative efforts to capture the ‘old’ East End before it disappears.

The area just east of the City is perhaps the corner of London that has witnessed the greatest amount of change in recent years, with the re-vamp of the old Spitalfields Market, the attendant inward creep of high-street chains, and the relentless sprouting of modern blocks.

At the same time, much of the area’s past is still left in the crevices between gleaming glass and refurbed exteriors.

Homing in on the quirky idiosyncrasies of East End denizens who have eluded the homogenising forces of modern life, this volume consists of a series of sketches of local places and characters.

The book is somewhat unusual in having been born as a blog. As explained in the preface, the collection is culled from the eponymous website (spitalfieldslife.com), which started in 2009 as a series of pen-portraits begun soon after their creator – ‘The Gentle Author’ – moved to the area.

The overall project is intended to span 10,000 blog posts; the present volume represents a selection of approximately 150 of the sketches produced during the first eighteen months.

The book’s title is somewhat deceptive, as the ‘Spitalfields’ it covers extends as far as Dalston and London Fields, taking in much of the southern part of Hackney. We are acquainted, for example, with Robert Cooke of F. Cooke pie and mash shop on Broadway market and the annual Grimaldi Clown Service at the Holy trinity Church in Dalston.

If East End local colour is your thing, then this is the book for you. Curious in subject-matter and also in its tone, these somewhat oddly-drawn fragments are a far cry from the conventional account of an outside observer commenting in finely-crafted acerbic prose on the oddities of a place.

Reading these reports, one feels as if one is seeing the East End from the inside out; the writing style has a slightly antiquated, home-made feel consistent with the institutions described.

Quite a number of the entries slip into unabashed romanticisation, yet there are also some true gems, including ‘Gary Arber, Printer’, ‘At God’s Convenience’ and ‘The Alteration Tailors of the East End’.

Illustrations by Mark Hearld and Lucinda Rogers doorstop the nicely-produced volume, whilst Bob Ryan supplies witty woodcut-style images of bells inscribed with sayings beginning ‘this bell will ring when…’.

The book is also illustrated with numerous photographs old and new, some of which have printed considerably better than others, but which together represent a valuable documentary compendium of a world that is fast disappearing.

Spitalfields Life by the Gentle Author is published by Hodder and Stoughton, 2012.
ISBN: 978 1 444 70395 5.
RRP: £20.