Enjoy 400 years of Christmas in Hackney

A hint of holly, 16th century style

The advent of Advent means that it’s just about decent to mention a certain winter festival – which also means that it’s the perfect time to recommend a visit to the Geffrye Museum to check out Christmas Past: 400 years of seasonal traditions in English homes.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the Geffrye is a museum of the English domestic interior in Hackney.

First opened in 1914 and extended in 1998, the main body of the museum sits in the Grade 1-listed almshouses of the Ironmongers’ Company, which were built in 1714 thanks to a bequest from the eponymous Sir Robert Geffrye.

In these are recreations of rooms through the centuries – rooms of the urban ‘middling sort’, as an introduction explains.

It’s a fascinating museum at any time, but each year at this point in the year, the rooms are decked out in appropriate Christmas garb, providing a further educational aspect to a visit.

It’s intriguing to see how – in middle-class homes at least – Christmas faded rather over the centuries, with many old, pagan-based traditions dying out.

A recognisable Victorian Christmas

The early rooms, starting with the 17th century, see little in the way of decoration – a small sprig of holly here or there leaves you hunting to spot indications of the season.

What we recognise as Christmas only began in the 19th century, in the Victorian era, when the relevant room is decked out in a way that is instantly recognisable.

The notes point out that, although Prince Albert is often credited with introducing Christmas trees to Britain from Germany, this overstates the situation.

But his enthusiasm for the Tannenbaum was crucial in its developing popularity – not least give the swathes of the public who were caught up in the cult of the young royal family.

Unlike the festive tree, the Christmas card was an English invention – from Sir Henry Cole in 1843, although it was a couple of decades before it really took off, with the Post Office having to ask people to ‘post early’ by 1880 – although that only meant post by Christmas Eve!

Christmas in hip Shoreditch

Interestingly, the 19th century was also when there was a revival in some of the old traditions that had faded over the centuries: for instance, an old Twelfth Night game reappeared, but as something closer to charades.

There are a number of rooms covering the 20th century – there were many changes in design over that period – and all these reflect a world that we are more personally familiar with.

The exhibition takes us to ‘the present’, ending in a “converted industrial building or warehouse in the newly-fashionable area around Shoreditch”.

This year’s look at Christmas past is on at the Geffrye until 3 January. There are plenty of activities and events organised over that period too.

And a fine café and shopped absolutely packed with Christmas baubles and games gives visitors more to do.

If you can’t make it in the coming weeks, the Geffrye is a gem at any time of the year – and with the Hoxton overground station right behind it now, it’s even easier than before to reach.

Find out more at http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk.

Marketing at its brightest: the towering twaddle edition

What could be loosely termed as ‘my’ day-to-day patch in London is largely defined by the bus journey that takes me between Hackney and the area around Euston and King’s Cross.

The latter has been a hive of building activity for some years now, but Haggerston is rivaling it these days, with almost frenetic redevelopment on Whiston Road, after the Kingsland Estate was finally torn down.

There is already ‘Silk House’ and ‘Velvet House’, next to another smaller block that has been thrown up on the site of just one more of the pubs that have been lost to flats in the last decade and a half.

And on the other side of the road there is going be far more of this vast development, which all goes under the banner of ‘City Mills’.

Passing, you notice site hoardings that declare, among the pictures of bright young things looking happily domestic: “Made for living”. Well, what a jolly good thing that will be, since they’re building flats for people to, err, live in.

It’s a fine example of marketing twaddle – but pales into insignificance beside what’s happening on City Road.

First, let’s start with the Canaletto London.

Yes. That’s right: the Canaletto, as in the 17th century painter of Venice.

You can call it 'Canaletto London' all you like ...

Most certainly an interesting-looking piece of architecture – and given that it appears to be taking rather longer to build than some other nearby blocks, the finished building might actually be of a high standard.

But really, just because it’s next to City Road Basin, which butts into the Regent’s Canal, doesn’t justify the suggestion of the Grand Canal.

“Extraordinary waterside apartments overlooking the City of London,” proclaims the website for this 31-story tower. Well, if you’re on one of the higher floors, obviously.

And it’s near “Tech City” too, apparently. Which is news to me.

I thought it was near Old Street roundabout.

It’s been with some relief that I have discovered that I’m not the only one who didn’t know there was anywhere in London called “Tech City”. But we’ll come back to that.

Just a few metres away, the Lexicon London is taking shape in an upwardly fashion. It’s going to have 36 floors, making it the tallest building in Islington – at least until the planned 39-storey one goes up a five-minute walk further down the road.

“It’s the place from which to write your own life story,” wibbles the website.

“The one, two and three bedroom apartments take their inspiration from the culture and landscape of Lexicon’s location.”

I’m not sure that scruffy and run-down interiors are going to sell very well. Will rooms come complete with the smell of traffic fumes too?

The Eagle – also on City Road – is going to be “Art Deco inspired” and, like the Canaletto, will include a residents’ private cinema, a pool and god alone knows what else.

The Caneletto will have a restaurant too, so you won’t even need to cook in what will be, judging by the architects’ computer-generated images, your rather bijou kitchenette.

... but being next to this ...

We may not have gated communities yet, but you won’t need that with such developments.

Not far down the road, the Link is already complete – and is really rather disappointing, given that it was apparently “designed for stylish living”. Surprisingly, it never mentioned the stunning views over the next-door carpark, which is on the site of an old workhouse.

Another block nearer Old Street roundabout that’s well on the way has diamond-shaped windows set in steel cladding – which would probably do your head in on the morning after the night before.

The gobbledegook isn’t limited to developers, though.

According to the London Evening Standard: “The eastern side of the canal basin falls into Hackney borough and has a grittier feel. This is where Jamie Oliver opened his Fifteen restaurant, giving apprenticeships to out-of-work youngsters. Shepherdess Walk is one of the best addresses, with authentic lofts available at The Factory, a decade-old development by Manhattan Loft Corporation. Urban Spaces is selling a 1,481sq ft loft for £945,000.”

Haggerston is so cheap by comparison! But Shepherdess Walk – “one of the best addresses”? Is that complete with the bits of workhouse wall still visible around the carpark? Or is it because of the cop shop?

Seriously, though – how the hell do you get a sensible mortgage for nearly a million quid?

... does not have anything to do with this ...

The old rule of thumb used to be that you didn’t go above three times your annual household income. 

So whoever buys a loft apartment like that should – to be sensible – need to be earning £315,000 a year.

And don’t forget that the average UK wage is around £26,500, according to the Office of National Statistics, while employment agency Reed suggests that the average salary of someone in “strategy and consultancy” is £56K.

In the “media, digital and creative” industries, Reed lists the average annual income as £34,553. A software developer is listed as having an average salary of £44,050.

“Tech City” is nearby, remember.

Who is buying – and going to buy – these properties at such prices and how?

Shepherdess Walk – one of "the best addresses"

Either there’s been a substantial rise in the number of people earning vast salaries or financial institutions are playing the very same games that helped to cause the financial crisis in 2008.

And it is not the former.

London is already crowded, and even the Financial Times has recently carried a piece expressing fears for the future of our green spaces amidthis development madness.

The extra infrastructure is not there – and Crossrail and yet more bleeding supermarkets do not count.

Indeed, local infrastructure is going as the developers move in. As just one small illustration, on Kingsland Road, just around the corner from the nonsense that is ‘City Mills’, a dentist’s surgery and the pub next door have both been demolished to make way for more blocks of flats.

Next to Euston, the community around Drummond Street is threatened by the high-speed rail link to Birmingham (which scheme has both pros and cons about it).

The Link: "stylish living". No. Really.

Camden Lock, with all it’s small, independent businesses, was under threat from that too, but the plans are shifting.

While further afield from ‘my’ patch, Soho is undergoing massive change as the developers waltz in and completely change it’s character with, apparently, the acquiescence of council and police, as Rupert Everett suggests in a remarkable article.

According to Everett, plans are afoot to build huge towers topped by helipads on Walkers Court – after knocking down the houses, of course. The London Evening Standard and assorted architects are merrily trilling about cleaning up one of London’s last “seedy areas”.

Oh yes, the whole city is being sanitised in a puritan’s wet dream.

One visualisation of what might happen to Walker's Court

Denmark Street – Britain’sTin Pan Alley – is also under threat.

Consolidated Developments claims that it “will bring the site next to the new Crossrail station back into use with new shops, a hotel and the regeneration of Soho’s Denmark Street.”

They seem to have conveniently forgotten that it is not currently out of use. And you can bet your bottom dollar that most of the new retail outlets will be too expensive for most small, independent businesses.

The company also says that “a new urban gallery space will celebrate these [musical] links” and “recreate a music quarter for London”.

More verbal diarrhea, intended to calm criticisms of this gutting of the area.

Over at Broadwick Street, Cowling & Wilcox, theart shop that has traded there since 1961, ceased doing soearlier this year, having been priced out by landlord Great Portland Estates, which wants to demolish existing buildings and ‘redevelop’ them.

The planned 'redevelopment' of Denmark Street

It happened in the City at Leadenhall Market – oh, they kept the market structure itself, but rising rents forced the last, real market shops out years ago.

Now, it’s yet another cathedral to the homogenised blandness of corporate franchising.

On Euston Road, right opposite the British Library, there used to be a marvelous bookshop, Unsworths, full of second-hand, remaindered and antiquarian books.

It was driven out by a similar policy of hiking rents. As was a tiny – and very convenient in that area – convenience store a few doors down in the same Clifton House office block.

It took several years after those businesses were forced out to see what we were going to get – I suspect that that means that planning permission was rejected initially by Camden Council before being overturned by Eric Pickles, secretary of state for the biscuit barrel.

Computer visualisation of Clifton House, with hotel

Now, there is a new three-storey glass box on top of an initial six-storey building – which has become a new Premier Inn, and which is near enough to the next Premier Inn on the street for Usain Bolt to make it between the two in little more than 10 seconds.

Meanwhile, back in Haggerston, the word on Broadway Market is that our own dastardly local developer, the dreaded Roger Wratten By Name and Rat by Nature, has got his wayand will be demolishing the old Market Garden pub and replacing it – and the remains of Tony Platia’s old café next door (from which he was thrown outyears ago in highly dubious circumstances) – with a new building.

His initial attempt to get planning permission for a seven-storey block on the site, with restaurant at the bottom, was rejected by the council, so it remains to be seen whether he offered Eric a custard cream and that’s what’s going ahead, or whether there have been modifications to the plans, such as it not having so many more floors than any other building on the street or whether, as plenty of local people mutter, the council is just bent.

Around the corner, theplanned block of flats that was slated to go up, with office space below – inan area where there’s already plenty of empty office space, which then getsturned into another sodding supermarket, with the change in use requiring no furtherplanning consultation – is now being built.

I remain curious as to how that happened, since the council told me that the entire process had been abandoned after extensive local objections from residents and small businesses alike.

Under-construction and planned towers on City Road

Those businesses included some that have subsequently been thrown out of their premises by this development.

Since I had written to the council on that issue at the time and asked to be informed of any council meeting where it was raised, it is interesting to note that I have never received anything about the subject.

So much for local democracy in Hackney, it seems.

I am not against development and redevelopment per se, but it must have human beings at its core – and building vastly overpriced “multi-storey rabbit hutches” as Lucian would have described them in The Liver Birds, is not the answer to our housing problems.

However, I am against simply ripping the heart out of places – not just because of the arrogant disposal of history or even the dreadful, soulless homogenising that follows, but also because of the impact on small, independent businesses and local people who cannot afford the increasingly ludicrous prices for rent or mortgages.

Boris Johnson might have pretended to combust at the mere suggestion that government changes to housing benefit would ‘cleanse’ London of its more lowly citizens, creating Paris-style Banlieue outside the city proper, but all development, the trendification and the gentrification is helping to shove up rents and mortgages, and it will have the same effect.

How will the cleaner who wipes away the wine glass marks from the tables in the Canaletto’s private cinema be able to afford to live anywhere near their place of work?

Denmark Street – still in use

The whole thing is unsustainable insanity that has nothing whatsoever to do with the majority of the city’s people.

Somebody, somewhere needs to seriously start asking why a constantly growing London population – both residential and working – goes generally unchallenged as being positive or inevitable.

Why can not more businesses, in these times of digital communications, locate outside London?

Does “Tech City” really have to be lots of companies all physically based around Old Street?

Locating elsewhere would even provide boosts to local economies outside the capital.

How many more people do we need in a city that already struggles to cope – not least in terms of transport? What will be the tipping point?

In the meantime, while the developers hold sway, it’s small comfort to highlight the towering twaddle that they spout as they try to persuade people to line their pockets.

PS: I have not edited these bits of marketing nonsense: they seem, however, to share a common link of not understanding how to use a hyphen for a compound adjective. Just as the ‘City Mills’ people don’t understand what an apostrophe is.

Paris to Bow: an encounter with the East London Group

Bow Bridge, Walter Steggles

Paris might now be consigned to the past, but the return to England’s own bustling metropolis didn’t mean an end to viewing art.

With only a few days left before it closed, I finally made it down to the East End for an exhibition of work by the East London Group.

The Nunnery is so much in the East End that, never mind being within the sound of Bow bells, it’s almost directly opposite Bow Church itself.

This is, indeed, the very heart of Cockneydom.

Bryant & Mays, Oscroft

It’s odd how different it feels to Hackney – given that it’s not really very far away, but the same is true of many parts of London: it’s far from being a single, homogenised entity.

The Nunnery Gallery itself is situation in a former Carmelite nunnery that dates from 1850 and is now part of the Bow Arts Trust.

There’s an element of stepping back in time about the area – and this was an exhibition that emphasised that.

The East London Group was the brainchild of Yorkshire artist John Cooper, who taught at the Bow and Bromley Evening Institute from the mid-1920s.

Hackney Empire, Turpin

It was made up of two core groups – aspiring East Enders, plus some who, like Cooper himself, had trained at the Slade.

According to art historian David Buckman, Albert Turpin, for instance, was a “professional window cleaner, Anti-Fascist protestor and Labour mayor of Bethnal Green”.

Walter Sickert was involved, addressing classes and even showing with the group for a while.

There was a great deal of acclaim for the artists at the time, with a final group exhibition taking place in West End gallery the Lefevre in 1936, although works were also displayed collectively and individually elsewhere, including at the National Gallery and at Tate Britain.

Old Ford Road, Harold Steggles

But all this has been forgotten in the decades since WWII, although the work of dedicated people, including family members and Buckman, has been starting to turn that around.

One of the particular pleasures to be gained from exploring the work of the East London Group is the chance to look back in time to a very different London – although, as touched on above, they painted pictures of buildings and places that are still recognisable today.

The exhibits included a work by Harold Steggles, for instance, showing Grove Hall Park, which is still there – right behind the Nunnery.

Farringdon Road, Osbourne

There’s the instantly-recognisable Hackney Empire by Turpin, and his Salmon and Ball, which is an equally-recognisable corner of Bethnal Green.

Indeed, these two stood out in the exhibition as being rare examples of heavily-peopled works.

In most other cases, the streets are devoid of either traffic or people, which lends a haunting quality to the paintings.

The Arches, Mare Street, Turpin

There are occasional figures – walking away from the artist, with their back to us, or simply too distant to tell us anything.

But that only seems to add to the feeling, whether intended at the time or not, of the isolating nature of the city.

Grace Oscroft’s Bryant & Mays is a case in point: the bright palette used – seen among many of the artists – seems only to emphasise the lack of people and suggest a philosophically mixed view of the world they lived in: on the one hand, with industry offering a bright future, but on the other, it replacing humanity.

It’s inevitable that seeing many of these works, set as they are in working-class areas, one is reminded of Lowry, but that absence of people and that brightness of colour are two of the most obvious differences.

The Great Ventriloquist, Cooper

Sickert in particular urged the group to realism, but Walter Steggles’s Bow Bridge uses blues that almost take it into the realms of Impressionism.

A note helpfully points out that this is where the Bow flyover now starts. Imagining Bow Road with no traffic today is not easy.

This shouldn’t be read as suggesting a uniformity of approach, though.

Cecil Osbourne’s Farringdon Road (1929) – or the rooftops above it – goes down a very different route, with muted, dark tones that give it a very broody atmosphere.

But Harold Steggles’s Old Ford Road (c1932) is another bright but almost deserted world.

Perhaps surprise at this is because we mentally tend to view their world as a smog-filled monochrome. ‘But’, they seem to be saying to us, ‘there was plenty of colour. It wasn’t just unrelentingly grim’.

Kitchen Bedroom, Turpin

Cooper’s own The Great Ventriloquist – like many of the works, undated, but we known it was shown at the Lefevre in 1930 – shows clearly enough that the group were neither averse to painting people nor incapable of it, with Turpin’s Kitchen Bedroom (c1930) is another example of this.

Indeed, it’s possible to see in these two a passing of the baton: the realism of Cooper’s painting is tempered by a certain sentimentality in the image.

With Turpin’s domestic, working-class interior, there is none.

Harry Tate: The Freeman of Bethnal Green, Turpin

The teacher was being surpassed.

But it’s those deserted yet colourful scenes, such as Water Steggles’s tiny – just 15x20cm – Canvey Island (c1933), that stick in the mind.

And The Arches, Mare Street is another Turpin piece that, while colourful, has a deserted, mysterious air.

More than one of the artists were commissioned to provide artwork for the sort of travel posters that are now iconic, and the presence of two of these in the adjoining café was a reminder of how that lack of people was not limited to the group’s activity: you recognise it in those suggestions for motoring out to see some old church.

No people: just the bricks and mortar. 

Canvey Island, Walter Steggles

The group painted parts of London other than the East End, and they painted parts of England other than London and parts of the world other than England.

They didn’t limit themselves to the urban, while there are still lives, interiors and portraits too – Turpin’s Harry Tate: The Freeman of Bethnal Green is a fascinating example – but it’s those deserted landscapes that stay with you.

It was a case of better late than never getting to this exhibition, but it was not something that was held in isolation, but as part of an ongoing campaign to revive knowledge of an interest in these artists. 

Travel poster, Walter Steggles

In that, it has already had success, with good crowds and a decent level of media coverage.

And if you want to know more, search out Buckman’s excellent 2012 book, From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group.

Online, there’s much more about Walter Steggles at www.wjsteggles.com, and about the group as a whole at www.eastlondongroup.com, while you can keep tabs with what’s going on – and see plenty of pictures – on Twitter @EastLondonGroup.