Words by Roger Mills.

When I told people I was writing a book about Cable Street, many assumed it would all be about the Battle of 1936 when the locals halted the march by Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts. Yet that only makes up part of my book Everything Happens in Cable St. It is an oral history, featuring interviews with some of the Battle veterans – but it is also about the creative and cultural life of the area, things that have taken place in the more recent past.

These wonderful portraits here by photographer Jeremy Freedman taken on Cable St, feature some of those I spoke to – all from different walks of life and each one with a unique story to tell. I have lived along Cable Street for decades and, over the years, made contact with hundreds of people. I wanted to record their stories and their lives before they faded from memory.

Kim McGee was one  of the Basement Writers who gathered in the vault-like rooms beneath the old St. George’s Town Hall in Cable St to share their poetry. Writers brought together by teacher Chris Searle in the nineteen seventies, after he was sacked for publishing his pupils’ poetry against the wishes of the governors and all the schoolchildren came out on strike in support.

“I was one of Chris Searle’s pupils. He inspired me. We would have lessons where he moved all the tables and chairs out of the way, and we’d sit scattered around the room. He would say, “Just call me Chris.” And we’d say, “Is that allowed?” I was one of the school strikers and I went on the march to Trafalgar Square. I only went so far because I was a bit nervous. I’m still in touch with Chris Searle, which is pretty good going after all those years. I do storytelling for children now, I read  folk tales and rearrange them a bit and make puppets of the characters. For a basically shy person, you wouldn’t think I’d be up there doing it. It’s funny when you look back and think, “This is where I am and that’s where I was then.” I think that it’s due to having people who believed in you when you were a kid, giving you a respect you never imagined having.’

Ray Newton is secretary of the History of Wapping Trust, which over the years has produced a stream of local books and postcards. Ray was born in the part of Cable Street known as Shadwell.

“You knew everybody and most people worked locally. My dad was a docker and his father was a docker, and my mum’s family were lightermen, so I was brought up with the river. In this little area, you either worked in the docks or you were a carman, or you worked in a factory or something. I didn’t go to work the docks. In the nineteen fifties my dad bought a pub in the Highway. Most of the dockers and lightermen who used it had been in the First World War. They were very interesting people. That’s where I learnt all my local history. When my dad died, I became a publican at twenty-three years old. I did that for over eight years. The pub was demolished and my brother who had a betting shop asked me to be a manager. I did that, but I thought, “Well, I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life.” So I went to university and got a degree. I was about thirty-six, I suppose. I did teacher training and went to West Ham College to teach sixteen to nineteen-year-olds.”

Denise Jones married in her last year as a student at Brighton Art College, and she and husband Dan moved to London in 1967. ‘When we approached a local estate agent he was shocked, saying, “You don’t want to live there! Cable Street is a horrible place!”” she recalled.

Denise told me about the origin of Stepney Books in 1973, beginning as a Saturday stall in Whitechapel Market. Denise’s friend Celia Stubbs was amongst the volunteer staff and, while wandering along the row of stalls, she discovered one selling second-hand books and comics. Celia became entranced by stallholder Jim Wolveridge’s recollections of his East End upbringing and realised that there was a book there. Stepney Books became a small publisher and Jim’s book “Ain’t It Grand,” was released in 1976.

Early publications included “Victoria Park” by Charles Poulson, a history of the famous “lung for East London,” while “Under Oars” by Thames lighterman, Harry Harris, arrived via the author’s son as a copper-plate handwritten manuscript, written forty years earlier. It would probably have remained a family heirloom if not for Stepney Books. Others followed – “Children of the Green” by Doris M. Bailey, an autobiographical portrait of a Bethnal Green family between the wars – “Tough Annie,” which chronicled the life of Annie Barnes, a suffragette friend of Sylvia Pankhurst – and two autobiographies,  ”Looking Back – A Docker’s Life “by Joe Bloomberg and “Memories of Old Poplar” by John Blake.

Denise is a local councillor and a past leader of Tower Hamlets Council.

Most people do not realise that the story of “To Sir, With Love” is set in Cable Street, based upon the true story of E. R. Braithwaite, who came from Guyana to teach in East London. Alf Gardner was one of the real-life pupils at the school where Braithwaite taught. Alf doesn’t think much of the book – or the film they made from it in the mid-sixties, starring Sidney Poitier and Lulu. He feels that neither the book or the film represent the school as it really was.

Alf remembers Cable Street’s “red-light” years in the nineteen fifties. Personally, I have always found it hard to equate the softly-spoken and slightly formal pensioner with the eighteen-year old thrill-seeker that he once was. Alf and his drinking pal, Dave visited such places as the scarily named “Black Door,” a wretched basement bar off Leman Street, with a clientele of razor-slashed members of the underworld – where, on one of their visits, a man at the bar produced a pistol, waving it around at the other customers.

In his self-published book “An East End Story,” Alf recalls his friend Dave’s attempts to impress a lady friend with tales of life on the wild side. When she asks Alf if it was as notorious as the scandal sheets made out, he replied, “Much worse”.

Alf wrote, “I explained that the area, like Soho, was a red-light district respectable women avoided day or night. Far from deterring Eileen, my deliberate discouraging description of Cable St seemed to arouse her interest more, giving me the impression that she was keen to visit some of the bars at the earliest opportunity.”

I talked to Director Frances Mayhew amongst the magnificent decrepitude of  Wilton’s Music Hall. She stumbled across the building in 1997, while working as an intern for Broomhill Opera.

“It was completely boarded-up. We came in through the window and had a look around. Everyone fell in love with it. It was derelict, most of the original features had been ripped out and looted generations ago. I came back about six years later under the new Wilton’s Music Hall Trust, I saw the new electrics being put in and it got its first proper license since about 1880. The original pub was called the “Prince of Denmark” but it became known as the “Mahogany Bar” because of the wood in it. When John Wilton came here in the eighteen fifties, he bought up the four adjoining terraced houses with a vision to build a hall in the back yards. He knocked through the houses sideways, leftways, upways, downways – until it became this beautiful honeycombed building. You can get quite lost in it.”

“The bar is open, but because the building is so fragile I don’t think we could handle being super-popular at the moment. There’s something nice about this area in that you can find little hidden gems – you stumble across a bit of history that you wouldn’t see elsewhere. When people do come here they have quite a personal reaction. They get a feeling, or an atmosphere, or a vibe. We’d hate them not to feel that. They feel they’ve made a bit of a discovery and walked into a time warp.”

Alan Gilbey was one of Chris Searle’s school strikers and a Basement Writer. When I first met him there he did not speak much but would spend group meetings scratching brilliant cartoons onto a pad at a furious rate.

He later formed a theatre group “Controlled Attack” and also worked as a community drama worker on the Isle of Dogs. During this period, he took on the Battle of Cable Street, when “Shattersongs,” was performed by WOOF! Theatre Company at the Half Moon Theatre in Mile End in the late nineteen eighties. It used cabaret-style songs, comedy and semi-surreal imagery to represent not just the Battle but contemporary anti-fascist activity. Alan was particularly pleased that they managed to acquire a real lorry to represent the one turned over for use as a barricade in 1936.

Alan is now a screenwriter and script consultant, working in the world of animation, utilising his lifelong love of cartoons.

Dan Jones lives in Cable Street with his wife Denise. He was instrumental in setting up the Basement Youth Project in the late nineteen sixties and has fronted any number of community groups and campaigns.

Dan is also an artist. An entire wall in his house is taken up with one of his murals, painted on heavy wooden panels and bolted into the brickwork, depicting children in the playground of nearby St. Paul’s School. The rhymes they are chanting float in the air around them. Dan’s fascination with different cultures is reflected in his paintings, a trip to West Africa as a teenager is recalled in the colourful cloths and head-ties of women on market day, and vivid sketches of village life chart his trips to Bangladesh.

An equal amount of the pictures represent Dan’s lifelong association with the labour movement. He told me, “A lot of my larger work is screwed onto the wall in various trade union places. I made a large one for the National Union of Seamen depicting the 1966 seaman’s strike. Although I had imagined the faces of the seamen I’d painted on to it, when we took it out on a march people kept coming up claiming they’d worked with the crew members on it. Invented people became real in their minds!”

Maggie Pinhorn told me, “I grew up in the countryside but I always wanted to come to London. As soon as I could I left home and came to art school here at Central Saint Martin’s. From then on this was the place I wanted to be. I loved it.” Maggie studied theatre design but her real interest was in film. She worked on James Bond’s Japanese adventure, “You Only Live Twice,” the four-wheeled children’s fantasy “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” and – with perhaps fate playing a hand in directing Maggie eastwards – the big screen incarnation of telly comedy “Till Death Us Do Part,” the story of Wapping racist bigot, Alf Garnett.

But Maggie felt constrained in the art department, eager to create her own work and was happier collapsing onto mattresses in subterranean cinemas to watch experimental European films flickering through a haze of cigarette smoke. “I started Alternative Arts and produced a film in the early 1970s called “Dynamo,” made in basement strip clubs in Soho,” she told me – but she soon found herself working in a different sort of Basement.

“Dan Jones at the Basement Youth Project had got this idea about how these kids he was working with could make a film but he didn’t know how to go about it. I went and talked to him. I said, “Yeah, I’d be interested in doing that.”Firstly, I had to be checked out by the Inner London Education Authority to see that I was a suitable person.” she remembered, “That became increasingly useful later on – when I had to go down to Leman St Police station to bail out members of the cast, I could show I didn’t have a police record.” The subsequent forty-minute production “Tunde’s Film,”was co-directed by Maggie and local youth Tunde Ikoli.

These days, Alternative Arts is involved in a wide range of community activities.

In the late seventies Paul Butler’s interest in murals led him to contact Dave Binnington after reading an article about his work. “Then, one day,” Paul told me, “Dave called out of the blue, asking if I would be interested in a new project in Cable St.”

The Cable St Mural was an ambitious project, a huge depiction of the 1936 Battle of Cable St on the wall of St. George’s Town Hall. About the time that Paul arrived, much of Binnington’s original work was destroyed by right-wing vandals and he left the project. “I was left holding the proverbial baby.” said Paul.

He got in touch with two other artists, Ray Walker and Desmond Rochfort and, working as a team, they renovated what they could but largely redesigned the whole thing.“In some ways I relished it. It was a great opportunity. I was pretty inexperienced and I was probably biting off far more than I could chew. But in the end, I think I managed to chew it.” he said. Paul found the process stimulating if sometimes slightly unnerving, certainly in regards to the physical working conditions, “The scaffolding was very high. It didn’t half keep you fit, battling the wind, your paint flying off, splattering all over. We never used ladders, we used to go straight up the outside, grabbing hold of the scaffolding poles like a monkey. We all made a huge contribution towards the mural but none of us claimed ownership of it. We were extremely proud and extremely pleased with it. It was a fantastic time – a great moment in our lives.”

Roger Mills, writer, long-term Cable St resident, and author of Everything Happens in Cable St published by Five Leaves Publications.

These are selection of commercial, editorial and private portraits I made in 2012.

Enjoy!

Aurélie L’hote and Nadia Brahim at CHEZ ELLES Bistroquet, Published on Spitalfields Life.

Boyd Bowman of Alexander Boyd, Published in the Guardian.

 Panayiotis Charalambous of D G Autos , Published on Spitalfields Life.

Tina Ratzer is a prolific textile designer, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. In September 2012 I was comisioned by Tina to produce a series of photographs of her new collection as part of London Design Festival . Tina works with natural materials like merano wool and clay to produce a beatuful array of functional and beautiful pieces.

I enjoyed making these pictues at the Town House – the shop was the perfect location for her work. I look forward to working with RATZER again – I just need to remember to buy one of her quilts next time, they all sold out befoe I got a chance…

Over the past three years I have been photographing the interiors of Spitalfields – through personel facination and comercial commisions I have built up quite a collections of pictures. I will be adding to this page regularly –  as much of my work is shot on film and the images are in the process of being scanned.

If you live in Spitalfields and would like your home of office interior photographed please to get in touch… 

I love making pictures at events and have been doing it for years – I know my clients value my creative approach and often wacky use of lighting. Wether the function be private of corporate, a wedding, birthday of an impromptu street party – it’s important the images capture the event and feelings of the guests perfectly.

If you would like me to capture an event you’re organsing, don’ be shy just get in touch.

It was my delight to be commissioned by the renowned ballerina Gillian Winn of the West Hampstead School of Dance, to make photographs for their recent performace of Sleeping Beauty at the Arts Depot in London.

I was exceptionally impressed with the students  professionalism and dedication. This was a last minute job – not something I usually take on – and I didn’t quite know what I had signed up to – However it turned out to be a incredible experience. I had the pleasure of shooting two full dress rehearsals and “these students are going places“.

I really enjoyed shooting on the stage – the lights, the attitude, the pressure – and it is something I intend to do a lot more of.

With the blizzard whirling down Brick Lane this week, it was the ideal moment for a hot curry to warm the spirits, and so – dodging the mischievous curry touts’ snowball bouts between rival restaurants – I set out in the company of the Gentle Author, to make the acquaintance of some of Brick Lane’s most celebrated Curry Chefs.The Curry Chefs of Brick Lane. We were privileged to be granted admission to the modest kitchens tucked away at the back or in the basement of the curry houses, where Head Chefs martial whole teams of underchefs in a highly formalised hierarchy of responsibility.

“working away like those engineers below deck on the great steam ships of old, they are the unseen and unsung heroes of Brick Lane’s Curry Mile.”

The Gentle Author wrote two wonderful story to accompany these portraits and you can find them here and here.

Mr Zulen Achmed

Nurul Alam, Head Chef at Preem & Prithi, 124/6 Brick Lane, cooks three hundred curries a night.

Abdul Ahad Forhad, Curry Chef at Monsoon, 78 Brick Lane – “I’m the master of curry!”

Head Chef Shaiz Uddin with his colleague Monul Uddi

Monzur Hussain, Head Chef at Shampan, 78 Brick Lane.

Dayem Ahmed, kitchen porter of six months standing and aspiring chef, at Shampan.

Abdul Tahid, Head Chef at Papadoms, 94 Brick Lane

Jamal Uddin, Head Chef for fourteen years at Bengal Cuisine, 12 Brick Lane.

Syed Jahan Mir, Head Chef at Chillies Restaurant, 76 Brick Lane.

These are selection of commercial, editorial and private portraits I made in 2011.

Enjoy!

These are the venerable antiques traders of Spitalfields – my friends and collegues – in the finest market I have ever had the pleasure to trade in. There is something about Spitalfields market that warms the soul and it took many months to realise what is was. It’s the traders – with their endless amour of good banter and east end charm.

In April 2011, with the help of the gentle author and Nido – I put on an exhibition of fifty of these photographs showcasing the traders and their importance in one of London’s oldest markets. It was great success and an excuse for me to throw a little party for the traders and their families.

This is still an ongoing series – keep a look for updates here and on Spitalfields Life. The wonderful stories that accompanies each photograph has been graciously provided by the gentlest of authors.

Sonoe Sugawara

Paul the Urban Shepherd

This is Paul the Urban Shepherd. “I work with serious clothing but make it fun. My stock is countrywear, not made in the city but worn in the city,” said Paul, introducing the trend for men’s clothing from the provinces, appropriated by fashionable gallants here in London and worn with an urban attitude. Fondly drawing my attention to the quality on display, “It’s very well made – designed to last a lifetime – and, if it doesn’t fit exactly, it can easily be tailored to the new owner.” he explained. A style ambassador, Paul intuitively understands the necessary balance of levity and sobriety in menswear.

Jennie Sedwell, Heather Sedwell and Lesley Willis

This is Jennie Sedwell, Heather Sedwell and Lesley Willis – not all sisters as you might assume, but in fact two generations who work happily together selling vintage textiles, clothing and haberdashery. Lesley has done it as a hobby for twenty-five years, while her daughter Jennie joined ten years ago and then Heather completed the trio on leaving school. “It was ridiculous!” exclaimed Lesley, “We used to have twelve stalls and a van with a mirror for a changing room. We didn’t even have time to sit down, whereas now unfortunately…”, in appealingly overemphatic protest, whilst presiding over one of the busiest stalls in the market.

Sarah Ovans

This is the stylish Sarah Ovans – just arrived from West London – an exteacher now turned dealer in antique glass. “I am trying it out to see what happens” she declared recklessly, twirling her twisted glass walking stick, liberated from the schoolroom by this new adventure that began with a stall at a charity fair in Kensington. Dressed for the part in an alice band and floral gown adorned with blue cabbage roses, “It’s a tonic meeting all these different people!” she admitted to me in a hushed whisper of excitement, as her eyes roved around the bohemian East End crowd in Spitalfields.

Mr Singh

This is the distinguished Mr Singh, expertly modelling a dress sword which belonged to the Lieutenant General to the Tower of London between 1880-90, a very fine example, that was once presented to Lord Chelmsford. “I must differentiate myself from the general public and I do it by an emphasis on quality,” explained Mr Singh modestly and, casting my eyes upon his impressive selection of antique silver cutlery, I found no reason to disagree. If you see Mr Singh, impeccably dressed English gentleman, and dealer in militaria and classy bric-a-brac, either here in Spitalfields or at St James, Piccadilly, be sure to pay your respects and wish him “Good day.”

John Ovans and Morgan Allen-Oliver

This Sarah Ovans’ son John Ovans, who with knitwear designer Morgan Allen-Oliver also deals in glass. “Sarah’s house is like a showroom with all this glass everywhere, priced for sale,” revealed Morgan with a coy grin. “Her taste is sophisticated and grown up, whereas our stall is like a sweetshop!” he added, exchanging a knowing smile with John as they happily gestured in unison at their multi-coloured glittering display. Like mother, like son and boyfriend.

Matthew Mcfarlane

This is Matthew Mcfarlane, a free-thinking one man band who enjoys the community here as much as the selling. “I can leave my stall unattended and no one will touch it,” he vouched confidently. Matthew modestly contends his stall offers him a day off from his work as a set builder and designer of shop windows, but I could see he possesses a good eye – and the rescued chairs he has reinvented testify to a cunning ingenious sensibility. “There is something hauntingly beautiful about dishevelled furniture, left to waste, yet with so much more to give.” he added, revealing his true soulful self.

Jessica Hazel and Markus Maverick

This is Jessica Hazel & Markus Maverick, who have been dealing in vintage clothes for over a year but have chosen to branch out into antiques now. “I’m not interested in modern things,” announced Jessica, who developed her passion for dressing up in old clothes as a child in her grandmother’s attic. With their playful outfits, Jessica & Markus are superlative ambassadors for their business – and Markus, famous for rocking his swanky Victorian dandy look, admitted that he recently got talent-spotted in Brick Lane to play Jack the Ripper on the History Channel.

Ian Jeffries and Wayne Shires

This is Ian Jeffries and Wayne Shires, who describe themselves as a couple of Spitalfields virgins, enjoying their first day on the market. Two old friends, both shopaholics, now downsizing and decluttering, Ian & Wayne were positively bristling with excitement. “We’re just here to see what the ride is like today,” quipped Ian, an interior designer with a saucy grin and suave attitude. Already they had sold a lot to the other dealers, “I think they smelled fresh meat!” declared Wayne, a former club promoter and DJ, rubbing his hands in gleeful anticipation.

Lily Beth Wood

This is Lily Beth Wood, daughter of Stuart, which makes her a third generation market trader at least. Lily was enjoying helping out her dad on his stall, while on half term holiday from St Peter’s School, down in Wapping where she lives. “I collect small things when the tide goes out,” said Lily, proudly outlining her mudlarking activities on the banks of the Thames, and revealing an inherited curiosity about things from the past. “Sometimes I find old ship’s nails, bones, oyster shells, bullets, book hinges and once I found a clay pipe in three pieces.” she told me.

Richard Rags and Cosmo Wise

This is Richard Rags and his appealingly voluble son Cosmo Wise, both dressed head to toe in the clothing that is their passion. They cherish the extravagantly worn-out old togs your grandparents discarded, full of vibrant character and handmade details no modern garment can ever match. Cosmo really knows how to wear it and is now copying his most treasured finds in old fabric, sold under his own label “De Rien.” “We are drowning in clothes, clothes dripping from the ceiling, even beds made of clothes.” he revealed with barely concealed delight, divulging the singular living conditions at their clothing warehouse in Hackney Wick.

Rishi Shah and Thomas La Roche

This is Rishi Shah from Bethnal Green & Thomas LaRoche from Paris, two pale young gentlemen pedalling charnel house chic. “We came together because we both collect taxidermy and we realised there is a shortage.” explained Thomas, casting an affectionate eye over his depleted collection of animal parts, bones and religious artefacts.“We sell jars with foetal pigs, chicken embryos, octopus and rats in formaldehyde, all of which have died of natural causes,” revealed Rishi, tenderly displaying a sinister white rodent in a bottle for me to admire.

Sue Stokes and Leo Kurunis

This happy couple comprises Sue Stokes & Leo Kurunis, loving mother and son. Sue lives in Bath and is an antique dealer while Leo lives in Hackney and is in a band. “Leo doesn’t come home very often,” confided Sue, who got up at three thirty in the morning to drive down to London with her stock of French antiques. It was Sue’s first week in Spitalfields, but she planned to be there every Thursday in future, taking the opportunity to stay over at Leo’s place in Hackney each week and see more of her son – that is, if he is not out gigging with Lord Auch.

Jimmie Fish

This is Jimmie Fish of Fish Island Antiques in Hackney. An ex-cocktail waiter on cruise ships who once served Rod Stewart, in an impressive reinvention, Jimmie now deals in industrial and workshop items, like desks, lockers, lamps and trunks. A proud Cumbrian from Carlisle with dark ginger hair and keen grey eyes, full of humour and bristling with positive energy – thriving in his new profession – Jimmie declared, “You get on better, if you’ve got a bit of character and personality about you. It’s good fun, every day’s different and you are your own boss!” Plain words that, in Jimmy’s mouth, became a declaration of independence.

With so many unemployed actors already on its books, you would imagine that London dreads seeing a new batch of drama school graduates each July. Fortunately 2011’s input is sweetened by the presence of Isabelle Rose.

North London born and bred but with a helping of Lebanese genetics to keep her different, Isabelle trained at Mountview before studying French and Film Studies at UCL. While a love of languages kept her going, it was obvious that she would always long to build a career on the stage and was delighted to be offered a place at Drama Studio in 2010.

After a year of corsets, movement classes and line-learning Isabelle’s prospects are looking better than ever and she has even recently turned down her first role in a questionable film. Come July she will be living the dream as an unemployed actor, although no doubt very briefly, glass of red wine in hand.

Isabelle Rose

Some time ago I was asked by Mathieu Jourdain de Muizon and the fine art students of Byam Shaw to produce a series of portraits of the ‘lads’ to include in a fundraising calendar. They needed to raise money for their end of year exhibition and the calendar was a guaranteed money spinner for them.

Out of 12 males studying in the year i managed to photograph nine. Artists being artist, 2 of them decided to do there own thing – and one of them sent a pair of pants to represent his presence. all these gentlemen have now graduated and are productive member of the art world.

Here’s to you chaps!

These are just a few of the portraits I have made of the members of Sandys Row Synagogue, of which I am one myself. These individuals are the last remnants of a once thriving place where people regularly queued outside in the street to get chance to pray.

Sandys Row Synagogue is the oldest ashkenazi synagogue in London and very last fully functioning jewish place of worship in Spitalfields. It is imperative that it survives. I am the decedent of one the founding members and although I am not a fully practising orthodox Jew, I feel it is my duty to uphold and honour the traditions of my forefathers and honour the sacrifices they made to this communities continuation.

It hard to describe in words; but when you can sit in the same seat as your great great great great grandfather (a tobacco trader from Amsterdam) and read from the same book, and sing the same prayers with the same tune – it’s very emotional. I condisored myself a bit of a wondering Jew, that was until I came back to this place.

Today, I am unqiue position to help manage this communities future and to document the membership as it declines. I have been commissioned to document the life of this place and I intend to until the end mine. I have high hopes for the place that is my spiritual home.

You can read more about my relationship to Sandys Row Synagogue here and here…

Reverend Malcolm Gingold

Julie Smith and Pauline Rifkind

Harry Gilbert

Llly and Ray Messophia

Morris and Maurine Delew

Rose Edmunds

Henry Glass

Henry Freedman 2011

These are the charming botanical traders of Columbia Road Flower Market. A fine group of people who meet every Sunday of the year to sell plants and flowers to the masses.

Over a four month period I set out before dawn every Sunday morning to meet and photograph these traders, closely followed by the gentle author. The wonderful stories that accompanies each photograph has been graciously provided by the gentle author of Spitalfields Life.

No matter how early I get to the market – whatever the season or the weather – herbsellers Mick & Sylvia Grover are always already set up, possessing resilient smiles and ready for business at the corner of Ezra St and Columbia Rd, where they sell the enormous variety of sweet-smelling and useful plants which they grow themselves in Hainault. Married forty-nine years ago, they spend all week together tending to the hundred and fifty different herbs they cultivate at their nursery, and every Sunday running the stall.“My family have always been in the flower business, but over the years we’ve specialised in herbs,”explained Mick who began at eight years old, selling flowers in Romford Market with his mother and father. He fills with affection to recall his grandfather, a flowerseller with a horse and cart, who sold ice cream in the Summer months, calling out “Oki poki, a penny  a lump, eat it quick or it makes you jump!” Mick & Sylvia set out on their own in the Caledonian Rd Market forty years ago selling flowers and plants. “Although we always had a nursery, we only started this ten years ago,” he revealed, with understated pride for his beloved herb stall that has become an East End landmark as well as the lynchpin of the flower market.

This cheerful fellow is Carl Grover, flowerseller – son of herbsellers Mick & Sylvia Grover whom I featured last week as the first in my series introducing you to all the street traders of  Columbia Road Market. Occupying the pitch next to his parents, Carl started over thirty years ago in the market, working with his uncle Bob, his dad and his uncle Lee. “I used to go to the old Covent Garden Market with my father to buy flowers, and I can still smell the scent of freesias upon the cobbles today,” he recalled fondly.

“East London markets have always been such vibrant places, and Columbia Road Market at full pitch is one of the most vibrant places in London.” said Carl, turning evangelical in his declaration of affection for this beloved Sunday institution.”My customers are from all over London, from all backgrounds and walks of life. We may be English and not speak in the railway carriage, but in markets people engage with one another. Markets are proof that we’ve still got the art of conversation. We’ve still got the banter!”

Carl gets up at one in the morning each Sunday to make an early start setting up his stall, ready for the first customers arriving from seven o’clock onwards. Few realise that he also works from early Saturday, preparing the flowers ready to load up his van last thing on Saturday night before he goes to bed. Yet in spite of the early starts and relentless pace, working in all winds and weathers at unsocial hours, Carl delights in his chosen trade.“What a wonderful thing it is, to grow your own plants and flowers and bring them up to sell. We are the original farmer’s market.”, he said, reminding me that these stalls in the market each Sunday are the outcome of a whole world of horticultural endeavour which goes on every day through all seasons of the year.

Having seen the demise of Covent Garden market, Carl is understandably protective of Columbia Rd and the culture that attends it, built up over generations.“We’ve seen other places with great atmosphere lost,” he confided ominously, admitting a heartfelt concern for the future of the market.“We have no need of think tanks and consultants brought in by the Council, we just need places for the traders to leave their vans and for customers to be able to park without fear of fines. The Local Authority have a duty to provide for the needs of the traders.” This is Carl’s modest request, for this celebrated market drawing thousands of people from all over London each week, simply to be able to continue without interference.

As a fourth generation flowerseller, Carl Grover incarnates his role wholeheartedly, full of exuberant energy and easy charm which transforms his business into charismatic street theatre. Carl is proud to be part of the venerable tradition of London flowersellers, as he explained to me, “Over the years since I began in the market, I have been very fortunate to work with some great characters, some no longer with us unfortunately, and what I learnt from those people has enriched my life.”

Dawn had not yet broken at six this morning when I rose in the dark to walk up the road to have a chat with Denis Madden, one of the most spirited traders in the Columbia Road Market. When I arrived at six thirty, he was already set up and bright with anticipation for the day’s trading.

“I’ve been here forty years, since I was seventeen,” he revealed to me with a droll grimace, rubbing his hand together in sentimental contemplation,”I met this girl, she was third generation, her family had been trading here since the nineteen thirties, they used to come down from Hoxton on a horse and cart. I was playing football on a semi-professional basis at the time, but her father (he became my father-in-law) put me on the stall and I was a natural.  Previous to that, I was somebody who couldn’t take to anything, I’d had at least fifteen jobs – disaffected you might say. But it’s very easy for me to stand behind a stall and shout, and meet people. I just took took to it.”

Denis had been up since three-thirty this morning, driving from Hertfordshire. “I shall be tired come four thirty this afternoon,” he admitted with a shrug,” You’ll see it in my eyes.” And he gestured to his eyes enacted a cartoon version of sleepiness. I admire his stamina, because this pitch in Columbia Rd is just a third of his business. Yesterday, Denis was trading, as he does every Saturday, in Saffron Walden, and on Friday in Uppingham in Rutland – and he spends two days each week prepping back in Hertfordshire. Yet Denis is full of magnanimous humour and energy, steeling himself for another winter on Columbia Rd. “You learn to tolerate the cold, you accept the bad weather in Winter just as you accept the good weather in Summer. The only real problem comes with the flowers when the water freezes, some don’t like getting frozen and defrosted again.” he explained in characteristically practical terms. After forty years trading here, Denis takes all it in his stride now.

“I’ve already retired once, packed it up and moved to France but I found I kept coming back to sort things out…” Denis confessed to me, rolling his eyes with an absurd grin of self-parody and spreading his hands as if to say, “What can I do?” The market is his life and he is not going to give it up any day soon.

This is Neil Swailes who specialises in house plants, surrounded by some prime specimens of the tropical orchids upon which he bases his reputation. “Go and look at the web and you’ll be back to buy the best!”is one of Neil’s cries.“We pride ourselves on selling top quality stuff,” he assured me, proudly holding up an exotic bloom with a confident grin.

A relative newcomer in this long established market,“I’ve been here for just eight years,” he declared modestly, “although my family’s been here for twenty.” Neil married into the trade, his wife’s family own the business -“I married their daughter and then started working on the stall,” explained Neil with the open-hearted alacrity of one who takes life as it comes. Based in Theydon Bois, Essex, Neil’s business consists in the import and selling of indoor plants, and he works as a gardener for the rest of the week.

Each Sunday, Neil gets up at 1:30 in the morning to drive up to Columbia Rd and work a sixteen hour day. In common with many of his fellow traders he is devoted to this weekly ritual. “It’s a good business and nice people. I don’t know what I’d do without it now, I’d be lost,” he confided to me, even tolerating the mysterious meteorological phenomenon whereby, “It always usually rains on Sundays.” Just like the sale of garden plants, the trade in indoor plants also seasonal, “In the Summer it trails off but it picks up in the Winter, and Christmas is a good time.” said Neil with a grin of anticipation, as the season shifts in his favour.

There is a certain resilience of spirit and brightness of manner that is required in the market and for Neil these are innate. Though when I asked if he would like his children to come into the business, he dismissed the idea at once. “I hope not, it’s a hard old grind!” he exclaimed. Yet in this walk of life, major recognition can come in unexpected ways.“David Bailey took my photograph,” admitted Neil proudly,“He brought me a framed print and I’m going to be in his new book.”

This is Finty Chester who, at the tender age of seventeen years old, has the distinction of being the youngest trader in Columbia Road Market. Jeremy took a photograph of Finty a few weeks ago, but we decided to reshoot the portrait when we examined it and realised she had a black eye. With cheerful alacrity, Finty explained that she acquired the injury while defending herself against a gang of thieves who stole her mobile phone. I winced to hear this story but, with admirable strength of character, Finty had already put the experience behind her.

Such is her self-assurance that I had assumed Finty was in her mid twenties – since with her bright energy, charisma and great taste in flowers, she has already established herself as one of the most popular traders in Columbia Rd. No blushing violet, Finty has shown she has the personality to hold her own amongst the loud cries and banter of the more experienced stallholders that surround her, all of whom have become endeared by her spirited approach. The senior flowersellers have taken Finty to heart because she reminds them of their early days.

It is apparent that Finty is a young woman of independent nature, living on her own since the age of fifteen and trading here for over a year now with the support of her father. “I spend Saturday getting ready, and I set up the stall and run it on Sunday, while he prepares all the flowers and gets the van ready for me,” she explained enthusiastically, delighting in the whole process. While Finty studies at college in the week, her father goes to the wholesale market to get the stock, although she decides what he should buy. It means that by selling flowers at the weekend Finty can support herself through college. “I’ve always known Columbia Rd,” said Finty with open-hearted affection for the life of the market, “It’s great company, I have regular customers and it’s something I want to do always.”

Yet Finty cherishes other ambitions too, she is pursuing media studies with the intention to become a journalist and combine this career with selling flowers in Columbia Road. Finty has the qualities to stay the course, and match Tony Purser’s career and be there selling flowers over fifty years from now if she chooses. But Finty brings a new perspective, shrewdly recognising that a parallel career in media will enrich her life and give her financial security. Finty Chester is the model of a twenty-first century flower girl.

There was just me and the lonely fox on the streets of Spitalfields before seven this morning as I made my way up to Columbia Rd to have a chat with Anthony James Burridge. He is the first member of this celebrated family I have spoken with, but in coming weeks I hope to introduce you to them all, because their story is interwoven with that of the flower market here over several generations – the Columbia Rd aristocracy. “They might not all be called Burridge but there’s quite a lot of us working here, brothers, cousins, sisters and uncles,” explained Anthony with a cheery grin that belied the chilly morning, while at the next stall, his son (also Anthony James), who started three weeks ago selling winter bulbs, shivered in the cold.

Anthony started trading in Columbia Rd twenty-eight years ago at the age of twenty-two. “When I left school I was a marble fitter but then I joined the family business,” he explained, “My dad had a stall at the end and this pitch became available. My dad and all his brothers were in the business. It goes back to my nan who died fifteen years ago, she was here up to sixty years ago.” Anthony first came to Columbia Rd when he was five. “My dad would get me up and bring me down here in the Summer.” he told me, casting his eyes up and down the road affectionately,“In the sixties and seventies, this market used to be seasonal and we only traded twenty-five to thirty weeks of the year. Then it was only English produce but the variety of plants has been extended by bringing them from overseas.” Adding with a shrug of droll bemusement, “People no longer know the seasons for plants anymore, now that everything’s available all the time.”

Shrubs and small trees are Anthony’s speciality, including evergreen shrubs, conifers, Camelias, topiary, and Winter Chrysanthemums, though I spotted some interesting bedding plants including a special favourite of mine, Gentians. Over the years, he has learn what plants work best in the small gardens of the East End. When I asked Anthony how he dealt with the cold, he told me that he keeps the house plants in the van until it is time to sell them so they do not get spoilt by the frost, without realising that I was enquiring about his own welfare. “You get used to it. You put on an extra coat and an extra couple of jumpers. You pull your hat down over your ears and get on with it!” he declared with sparkling eyes of anticipation, looking up to the beautiful clear sky of dawn breaking over us and in hope of a sunny Autumn day that will bring plenty of eager customers to the flower market.

The full moon was still reflecting in the puddles from last night’s downpour as I walked up to Columbia Rd before dawn to speak with young Albert Dean, at his double pitch selling cut flowers at the Western end of the market. With his knitted hat pulled down over his ears, hopping from foot to foot and rubbing his hands together enthusiastically in the cold, this wiry young man with sharp eyes informed me proudly that, although he has only been working there full time for about five years, the stall has been in his family for four generations.

Albert Dean is the fourth Albert Dean since his great-grandfather to run the pitch on this site – as long as the market has been here – which means that at any time during the last century you could have come and bought flowers from an Albert Dean at this street corner. The current Albert Dean has been working on the stall regularly since he was seven and now that his father is in semi-retirement, his energy motors the business into the future. “I don’t see why not, I’d like to think so!” he declared with an eager grin, when I asked if  he expects to be here his whole life. “It’s in the blood, I don’t know anything different,”he announced with a hint of absurdity at his rare horticultural pedigree.

Rising at three in the morning, Albert drives down to Columbia Rd with a lorry full of flowers each Sunday, setting up at five-thirty and returning home again with an empty lorry. Taking Monday off, Albert works for the wholesale side of the business based at Golfside in Cheshunt the rest of the week. Flower orders are sent off on Tuesday, for the coming weekend at Columbia Rd and all the wholesale customers, while Wednesday is Albert’s second day off in his curiously syncopated routine. Then on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Albert is sending out deliveries to restaurants, corporate clients and freelance florists, as well as preparing for Sunday too, including supplying other stalls in Columbia Rd.“We’re about as cheap as you can get,” he assured me with a toothy grin.

And thus the business has rolled on through four generations. Albert already has a daughter of sixteen months, Taylor May, but if a boy comes along there will be no question but that he will become Albert Deane V. Albert is qualified in his hopes that his children can continue the business, “I’d like to think so, though it’s getting a lot harder with the supermarkets getting better at selling flowers.” he confided cautiously. Yet Albert has the necessary optimistic temperament, acquired over these generations, that requires a energetic focus upon the business in hand, telling me that he actually prefers the cold to the heat. “It’s an incentive to keep moving!” he declared brightly, fidgeting in anticipation of all the day’s activities to come, “And it’s harder to keep the flowers looking good in the heat.”

With Halloween approaching, Albert has Chinese Lanterns (Physalis) on sale alongside a fine variety of decorative foliage. “That’s what all the restaurants are ordering this week!” he confirmed with all the inborn swagger and breezy confidence befitting the fourth generation Albert Dean, standing on the street corner that is his birthright.

There was a misty haze over the City and the distant sound of gulls as I left home this morning early to speak with the redoubtable Josephine Ferguson who celebrates half a century of trading at Columbia Rd this year. When I arrived she was nursing an injured foot that had been run over by a trolley, but as soon I introduced myself, she rose to the occasion, dismissing it as nothing, her glittering grey eyes lifting to meet mine. “I’ve been here since I was twenty-two and now I ‘m seventy-two,” she declared with a gracious smile, framed by her long straight red hair emerging from a knitted cloche hat.

Josephine’s first husband was Herbert Burridge, one of the proud family that above all others has defined the nature of this market for generations. And although he is no longer alive, Josephine is supported today on her stall by her two energetic daughters Denise and Daphne who hovered protectively as we spoke, and by her son Stephen Burridge who has a stall at the other end of the market. Additionally, Josephine’s grandson, who is in floristry, supplies the handsome gourds you can see in the picture, which are in season now.

Personally, Josephine specialises in cacti and succulents, as well as a range of ferns, bulbs, and cyclamen. “Mostly it’s a thing that men don’t sell, because you need to lay out a lot of money for a small profit. You’ve got a lot of your money tied up in them and if it’s severely cold you could lose them.” she explained cautiously, casting a maternal glance of affection over all her bizarrely shaped, spiky yet tender, cacti nestling in their trays.

Although in retirement, Josephine still gets up at five to come here from Enfield every Sunday, and in the week she helps out her son with his business.“It doesn’t seemed to have changed much,” she said, glancing around and reflecting on her fifty years trading in Columbia Rd, “My husband used to say that years ago they had to run with baskets on their heads to get a pitch. Somebody blew a whistle and they ran. Lady Burdett-Coutts set it up and she tried to get a railway here to help the traders. Now it can get a little petty, the market inspectors come along and say, ‘Move this, move that.’”

“I like it, we all like it.” admitted Josephine, confirming her statement with a smile, and contemplating the chaotic scene that surrounded her with sublime equanimity, “It gets you out and it’s an adrenalin rush. Even if you don’t make a lot you’ve achieved something and it gets you by for another week. The only thing I don’t like is the rain.” And then, as if Josephine had tempted the gods, with a wry grin Denise reached out her hand to the gentle raindrops that had begun to fall from the low cloud which hung over the East End this morning. Mother and daughter exchanged a momentary affectionate glance of recognition, before setting to work eagerly, preparing the stall for yet another Sunday’s trading, confident in their shared belief that the rain would pass presently.

It was the first cold morning of the season, and Kenny Cramer was in hasty conversation with some of his fellow stallholders when I arrived at the market. Once they had concluded their chat, I took the opportunity to speak with Kenny and in the course of my interview discovered that the chilly atmosphere in the market today was for reasons other than meteorological. But first Kenny outlined his family’s involvement in the market over the the last three generations.

“This business is family run, my grandad Bill before me and my dad Ron and then onto myself today. We’ve been here since the market began, over sixty years. I first came when I was six, it wasn’t what it is now, there were only about twelve stalls then. After finishing school at seventeen, I came down here to work with my dad. We run a flower shop during the week in Lodge Avenue, Dagenham and the only day I get off is Tuesday, depending on how busy we are with weddings and funerals.”

Usually stallholders speak with pride when they describe how their family history is interwoven with that of the market, yet I discovered a reticence with Kenny which I had not encountered before, so I asked about the next generation. “I’ve got one boy, he’s at college studying IT and computers,” Kenny explained,“But I wouldn’t want him to go into the market. Things are not going to last here.” And he revealed that all the traders had been to a meeting with the council on Tuesday where they were told that within weeks big changes are coming to Columbia Rd Market over which they have no control.

“Nobody’s happy. Nobody wants it. None of us has got no say. All of us went to the meeting, but everything has already been decided. It will be the end of the flower market,” he confided to me, his eyes blazing with withheld emotion. We stood for a moment without speaking in the midst of the market and then I walked round to the front of the stall to talk with Kenny’s father Ron to learn his opinion on this unexpected development. I found the senior Mr Cramer hard at work organising the flowers before the customers arrived, yet although he turned away from his task to greet me when I approached, I discovered the emotion of the situation was such that he could find no words to express his feelings adequately. He stood in dignified silence and looked me in the eye with regret, before returning to the consolation of his work.

Alarmed at what I had discovered and realising why the traders were in conference when I arrived, I crossed the road to speak with Carl Grover who was busy wrapping up bunches of Amaryllis for sale later in the morning. He confirmed what I had been told, adding that the market is going to be extended to each end of the street, trolleys will no longer be permitted on the pavements and there is the possibility of other traders being introduced selling different commodities. Most frustratingly, the flowersellers are not being informed yet of the specific nature of the changes thus preventing their objection. “There’s a question mark hanging over the future of the market.” Carl announced with a weary grimace, and a glance over my shoulder to check that his parents Mick & Sylvia Grover the herbsellers were not within earshot. “Show me a long-established market like this where they have made changes for the better. The age of traditional markets is coming to an end.” he added with a shrug.

It was apparent from everyone I spoke to this morning that this week’s “consultation” meeting had been used to announce changes which are being decided without the participation of the traders. Over recent weeks, I have been learning of the beauty of the human culture manifest in Columbia Rd  Market and the families who have built it up over generations of hard work, turning up in all seasons to provide flowers to the people of the East End, and making a modest living but never a fortune. Unquestionably, these people have earned the moral right to decide the destiny of their flower market and the fate of their respective pitches that sometimes, like Albert Dean, have been in their families for as many as four generations. “Hopefully they will listen to us,” said Carl Grover with a bright grin of fragile optimism.

It was damp and misty and mild when I left Spitalfields early this morning to pay a call upon Stuart Crump, his daughter Alice, and Curly who works with them on their stall. A man of substance yet a relative newcomer to the market, Stuart has been in Columbia Rd for ten years and worked this pitch for the past two or three years. “My mum was a lecturer in floristry at the college in Southwark,” he explained proudly, “so when I left school in 1994, I opened a flower shop in Tottenham and then I had a place in the Edgware Rd, before I came here.” Stuart flies to Holland every Tuesday where he spends two days of each week buying plants for the coming Sunday at the huge auctions in the West Land. This week, Stuart has a fine selection of Orchids at competitive prices, and Chilli plants and Cyclamen are popular too.

At this point, Stuart’s enthusiastic daughter Alice bounced into the conversation to explain that she takes responsibility for rousing her father from his bed each Sunday at three-thirty in the morning, which caused Stuart to place his arm round her protectively as he rolled his eyes at the very thought of these reluctant awakenings. Alice takes great delight in the market, working here alongside her brother Charlie most weeks, and she is eager to follow her father into the family business, even though Stuart is dubious of the imminent changes coming to Columbia Rd. Stuart told me the stalls will be widened to twice the breadth and separated. “It won’t be good for the market, people like the hustle and bustle, and we haven’t got the stock to fill the width.” he confided with a shrug.

At the other end of the stall I had a chat with Curly. A celebrated character in the market, he has been employed on this pitch for the past twenty-five years – working for the previous owner Colin Roberts for twenty-three years. From Mondays to Fridays, Curly has a job at a tyre and bodyshop in Tottenham but, after a quarter of a century, his regular Sunday foray into market life has become the highlight of his week. “It’s something different, very sociable, you meet great characters and the stallholders are quite friendly,” he said, taking a bite from a hasty beigel, “It’s been like this as long as I’ve known it.”

This is Rosario Rospo, universally known as Ross, who told me he has been trading here for fifteen years, but then we did the sums and he realised it was more like twenty five – that is how time passes when you are busy selling flowers every week in Columbia Rd. At the age of nineteen, Ross began working with his uncle Dennis selling cut flowers at the other of the market while worked his way up the waiting list to get a pitch of his own, where he presides today with a irresistible smile. Many of the traders I speak with each week in the grey dawn possess the pallid faces of those who rose too early, but Ross has a ruddy complexion and healthy tan complemented by intense blue eyes. The picture of vigorous health and with the physical presence of an athlete, bouncing around on the balls of his feet and limbering up for day’s trading, Ross bragged he has just lost twenty pounds through the boxercise and karate that he practises with his eleven year old son.

Ross has cut flower stalls at Bishop’s Stortford Market on Thursday and Saturday, and Hertford on Saturday, as well as his regular pitch here in Columbia Rd, which has the reputation as the best-organised flower stall in the market. In fact, it was only on my second attempt that I managed to snatch a conversation with Ross, because each time I asked he was pre-occupied in the all-consuming creative task of arranging his beloved roses, tulips and freesias in perfect ranks to create a masterly floral panorama worthy of an artist. This week Ross recommends buying Amaryllis which will last until Christmas. When I asked what keeps him coming back, “I know nothing else,” Ross answered plainly over his shoulder, his eyes already straying back to the fulsome perfection of his stall awaiting the imminent despoilation of this morning’s customers.

This is Lyndon Osborn, a noble plantsman from New Zealand, who has been trading here for nine years – although he spent the first seven years nearby in Ezra St, while he worked his way up the waiting list for a pitch on Columbia Rd. “It’s only my third year in the firing line,” he declared with characteristic Antipodean bonhomie, “but I built up quite a big customer base round the corner – and now I’ve discovered many others who only walk along Columbia Rd.”

Nine years ago, I bought one of the tree ferns from Lyndon that he imports from New Zealand and which remain his speciality to this day. These extraordinary plants lie dormant, permitting the trunk alone to be transported, apparently a dried-out husk – until you add water and it regenerates, sprouting tendrils from the top and resuming vigorous life in a new continent. Over this time – just like his tree ferns – Lyndon himself has put down roots and shown dramatic growth too, establishing a nursery in High Barnet. And I have found that because Lyndon rears his seedlings in London, they are acclimatised to the conditions which improves their chances of thriving in my garden.

In particular, Lyndon has become famous for his spectacular pelargoniums, especially the deep crimson “Lord Bute,” which I have spied in many of the discerning gardens of the East End over recent Summers. The copyright that exists on more recent strains sent Lyndon back to propagate nineteenth century cultivars, also more hardy and pest resistant that their modern counterparts.

Starting from one trolley in Ezra St Market, Lyndon has now ascended to the lofty heights of plantsman appointed to Dunhill in Mayfair and Selfridges’ Shoe Shop. “Just as the nineteenth century aristocracy gave their gardeners free rein, these clients let me do what I want, and they love the idea of it being a small nursery, supplying plants grown up the road. I plant them up four times a year, and last time I was planting the Dunhill Shop, someone from Claridges came to speak to me…” confided Lyndon proudly, his green eyes shining in eager anticipation of what might follow. I thought of Lyndon when I visited the magnificent fern garden at Malplaquet House, so it was no surprise to discover that he supplied the ferns and is the principal plant supplier to Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, the landscape designer who lives there – collaborating on many of his projects including a forthcoming garden of tree ferns for the central atrium at the Royal College of Art.

Lyndon is a popular character in the market, renowned for his relaxed, droll humour and fascinating mixture of plants, always quick with a cheery greeting and eager to strike up a conversations with customers who share his horticultural enthusiasms. “It has re-ignited my interest in London. I don’t come here to make money, it’s a social event. I’ve gone from meeting people as customers, who have become acquaintances and then friends,” admitted Lyndon with a sentimental smile, expressing his affection for Columbia Rd, “From here, everything has snowballed and that’s why I have such high regard for the market.”

There was an even greater than usual bustle of activity at Columbia Rd early this morning, with big trucks backing up in the darkness, and traders running to and fro, to unload hundreds of Christmas trees that have arrived from Scandanavia to grace the parlours of the East End. It was an extraordinary spectacle to come round the corner and discover the street transformed into a pine forest, with so many trees lined up in such depth to create a magical landscape, as if – like Narnia – you could walk into a thicket and come out in another world.

At the Western end of Columbia Rd, I came across the tree-sellers A.E.Harnett & Sons of Stock in Ingatestone, Essex, who have imported an entire forest of lustrous sweet smelling pines of all sizes. Shane Harnett, a fourth generation nurseryman told me his family have been selling trees here on this spot in Columbia Rd for over a century each Christmas. While Shane and his colleagues busied themselves martialling their stock in preparation for a furious day’s trading, his wife Yvonne graciously spared me a few moments for a chat, clutching a cup of hot soup and a sandwich, as we stood together, surrounded by trees in a temporary forest grove.

Throughout the year, Harnett’s nursery maintain a double pitch and a casual pitch on Columbia Rd selling plants of all kinds, but for four weeks in December the entire family turns out to lend a hand with the mighty endeavour of the Christmas trees. “Shane and the family run the nursery and I stay at home,”confided Yvonne with a good-humoured smirk from beneath her fur-lined hat, but that did not stop her from getting up at twenty past two this morning to be here lending her husband a helping hand, as she has done each Christmas for the past seven years. A woman of spirit, she appeared quite unconcerned by the sub-zero temperatures. “It’s alright,” she reassured me, “We do it every year, we know what it’s going to be like.”

“We help out Carl and Mick – who I call dad – on a Sunday, selling the flowers, and we just love it. They’re my adopted family now.” explained Keith Manning proudly, speaking for himself and his brother Donald, when I managed to snatch a brief conversation with Keith round the back of Carl Grover’s stall. Keith, who magnanimously describes his baby brother Donald as “the good-looking one,”is renowned for his primary coloured outfits, always topped off by one of his collection of more than twenty hats. “I love bright colours and I find the customers like it too, ” he informed me enthusiastically.

For more than ten years, Keith and Donald have been coming to Columbia Rd to assist Mick and Sylvia Grover, the herbsellers, and their son Carl Grover, the flowerseller, at their adjoining stalls. “We get together at social occasions too, it’s a family thing. Since my dad’s passed away, Mick’s become like a father to me, and Carl’s got to share his dad with me now.” confessed Keith with a toothy grin, before revealing that this remarkable friendship between the Grovers and the Manning brothers came about quite fortuitously. “One day I was driving my black cab past Mick’s flowershop in South Kensington, when he gave me a bird of paradise flower and I put it in the front of the cab.” recalled Keith fondly. He is a colourful bird of paradise himself, and I realised it was this parallel that inspired Mick’s spontaneous gesture, which became the catalyst for their friendship.

“Then, coincidentally, we met again when we recognised each other at Columbia Rd,” continued Keith, “and me and my brother started doing flower deliveries for him on special occasions like Valentine’s Day. Then I began coming here every week to help, I started with flowers because my mother loves flowers and I help Mick pack up too.” As well as being cab drivers for thirty years and supporting the Grovers, Keith and his brother make regular trips to Gambia on a personal mission. “We collect clothes and other things, and we go out to the villages there and distribute them.” admitted Keith, who had just returned from Africa that week. On a cold morning, I was cheered by my chat with Keith Manning, illustrating the beauty of the random connections that can happen in the big city and the unexpected bonds of friendship which may result.

Alongside George Gladwell, the other trader who has been in Columbia Rd the longest is Louis Burridge – widely known as Lou – pictured here with his son William – widely known as Billy. He is celebrated as the preeminent supplier of climbers and creepers, clematis, honeysuckle, passionflowers and vines, that adorn the gardens of the East End. Yet, although Lou started trading in the late forties, I discovered that the story of the Burridges, the family who are regarded as Columbia Rd nobility, begins even further back in the last century.

“My father was here in 1922, he was plantseller with a horse and cart,” explained Lou, glancing over to the site where his father’s pitch was, when I drew him away from the market for a chat on the wall beside Ravencroft Park. “He had a lot of land at Cuckoo Lane, Edmonton. Before that, the family had fish shops in Portsmouth and in the Hackney Rd – a big family of fish dealers. My father was pretty well educated in botany, because my grandfather paid for him to learn, and quite a lot of his family moved into the plant business, but they’re nearly all dead now except me.”

Still limber and lean – clad in ski clothing as protection against the cold on a January morning – Lou is enthusiastic to talk of the market which has been his lifelong delight, as well as the source of livelihood for his family over four generations. “I’m retired really but I come down here every Sunday to see my boys, Billy who’s taken over my stall and Louis who sells cut flowers.” he revealed with quiet satisfaction, “I am one of the oldest now and it makes a day out for me. There’s very few of the originals left who were down here after the war. Just me, George, the Harnetts and Albert Dean on the corner (they were all Alberts, it was his grandfather who was here when I first arrived). I was the only one who sold plants, shrubs and that during the fifties and sixties, but in the eighties I specialised in climbers because you can’t do everything. It’s not an easy business to make a living at, the prices haven’t gone up in years.”

Today, Lou is the head of the extended Burridge clan, whose members you find trading along the length of Columbia Rd.“My five brothers gradually got into it and they all had stalls, and then you’ve got their sons, and their sons – so you’ve got all the family.” he declared in joyful tones, “We all get together for birthdays and that. I’m seventy, and I suppose there must have been a hundred people at my birthday party. We all get on pretty well. Some live in Hertfordshire, some in live in Rayleigh, some live in Southend.

We all come from Edmonton originally. There were eight of us children,  five boys and three girls. There was not a lot of money, because my father lost it when he sold all his land before the war and then he became sick. He had bad arthritis, he was born in 1895 and only traded till 1955, but my mother worked here till she was eighty-nine. For years we had it hard but we were very close, and trade picked up in the nineteen sixties. To a certain extent, we have built up this market, the Burridges, the Harnetts and the Deans.”

“I’ve always loved market work. It’s a funny thing growing plants and selling them, because you get very interested in them, people who sell wholesale plants in supermarkets have no idea.  - This is life.”he said, with a sprightly smile of pride, before springing up from the wall, eager to return to his pitch, because he could no longer resist the magnetism drawing him back to the site where his father started in 1922.

Approaching Columbia Rd from the West today, or at any time in the last sixty years, you would see the Harnett’s plant stall to your left and Albert Dean’s flower stall on your right, and then Lou Burridge’s stall, another pitch down from the Harnetts, also on the left. There you find Lou – slight of stature yet bright of spirit – presiding every week among a forest of cherished specimens of climbers that are as tall as he is, with the rare experience of a plantsman born and bred.

Waking early to sunlight, I am tempted to lie in bed watching the nesting birds coming and going from the bird house outside my bedroom window all morning, but it is a pleasure to rise when the sun offers such promise, and take a stroll up to Columbia Rd to visit Lisa Burridge at her stall and return with an armful of Spring flowers for the exchange of a few pounds. With her brightness of manner and sassy hoop earrings Lisa brings a touch of feminine glamour to the market, and it is always a pleasant diversion to stop by for a chat interspersed between the eager customers arriving to carry off flowers in delight. Lisa married into the Burridges –  the family that over more than three generations have become such an integral part of the history of this market that they are considered the royalty of Columbia Rd.

“I started working here for my father-in-law Herbie Burridge when I was eighteen, twenty-four years ago,” Lisa confided to me proudly. “And my kids usually help out, only one’s got a driving lesson and the other has a throat infection,” she added with a philosophical smirk, explaining, “I take care of my family all week and work here on Sunday, and sometimes in the market at Waltham Abbey on Saturday.”

Lisa runs the cut flower stall on the one of the long-established Burridge family pitches for her husband Pete, while he manages the nursery in Hoddeston with his brother dealing in plants that are sold on another pitch. “It used to be forty stalls out of fifty-two here were Burridges once upon a time, Herbie told me,” commented Lisa in wonder. “More like twenty-one out of fifty-two,” qualified Pete with a good natured shrug, making a more conservative estimate as he arrived to join the conversation – though still quite an extraordinary proportion for one family in a market. “The old man liked to tell a tale,” admitted Lisa to me, flashing an indulgent smile, before she turned back to serve the next customer, reaching for yet another handful of the scented Spring flowers that surrounded her in a bower of pale yellow.

These are  just some of the magnificent Wax of Sellers of Wentworth Street, from a series I made whilst on assigment for Spitalfields Life.

Wentworth Street has been the centre of the cloth trade in London of over a half a millennia and it is where my family lived when they came to the UK many generations ago. Over the centuries the Irish, French and Jewish communities have all set up shop here and have thrived. Now the west african community has settled here, many of them coming from Nigeria. These ladies are now flying the flag for London’s fabric trade, and it feels me with such joy.

When you walk in these shops you are hit by an overwhelming wall of colour. Make no mistake, nothing can prepare you for the visual delight.

Read the full story by the Gentle Author here.

Franceskka Abimbola, Franceskka Fabrics

Sheba Eferoghene, Novo Fashions

Fola Mustapha, Fola Textile

Tayo Oladele, Tayo Fashions & Textiles

Banke Adetoro, Royal Fashions

Onome Efebeh-Atano, Beauty Stones

With grateful thanks to Sheba Eferoghene for making the introductions and Andrew for making my life a little easier…

After collaborating with the gentle author to interview and photograph every trader at Spitalfields Antiques Market for Spitalfields Life. The gentle author and I are now embarking on our next market project. Over the coming months and years I will be photographing every single trader on Brick Lane  (Including Scatler street, Bacon Street and Cheshire Street). This assignment is turning into a mammoth project and one I am enjoying greatly. Every Sunday you will find me – camera in hand – on Brick Lane, capturing traders with their stalls.  If you see me, come and say hello!

These are Traders of London’s most diverse market. The wonderful stories that accompanies each photograph has been graciously provided by the gentle author and in the case of Pickles - Sarah Winman.

As the first of these Brick Lane posts, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Dennis and Arthur, two stalwarts who incarnate the spirit of the market. You will find them occupying Hare Marsh each Sunday – the cul-de-sac down towards the railway line at the end of Cheshire St, formerly Hare St.

Wiry and agile and full of vitality, Dennis Major has been dealing in toiletries, cut-price chocolate and general hardware in the market for more than thirty-five years. “When I first started, I was down the other end of Cheshire St.” he explained to me casting his beady eyes around at the fabled market that once was here,“They used to sell dogs and cats then, and sometimes I took sickly kittens home that were abandoned in the gutter but they always died. There was a stall that who sold chickens, they would wring their necks and pluck them for you before your eyes. We were next to the bird man, he would go crazy because everybody would be all over the bird cages, and the birds would make such a racket. We did have some laughs.”

For many years Dennis ran a hardware shop in Norbury but, even retired now, he cannot break the habit of  Sunday in Brick Lane because the same customers keep coming back to greet him after all these years. While we were talking, Arthur Whitmore, a senior market gardener from Cambridgeshire with hardy features and straggly white hair, who has been travelling down on the bus each Sunday for more than fifteen years in search of “something fresh to see,” popped by to have his weekly chat with Dennis.“There’s no end of villages where I come from,” he informed me, hinting at the workaday nature of his rural life.

When Arthur departed, in a brief lull, Dennis pointed across Cheshire St and confided to me quietly ,“One Sunday, I came down when Ginger Marks was killed outside the Carpenter’s Arms. The was a bullet hole in the wall and they’d roped it off where he’d been shot but they never found the body. If you lost a bike in South London you could always find it here next Sunday. This was a good market. People off the boats in the docks would come here and you could sell them all sorts of things. There was a fellow who sold train sets. Most of them have died, there’s not so many like me down here any more.”

“I’ve been coming here since I first visited with my father to buy canaries for our shop in Woking, that was sixty-two years ago,” revealed Arthur with the relaxed genial air of one entirely at home in the market, for whom doing deals and taking money off a string of customers is second nature. “I’ve always been at this end of the street, since I started as a very young lad fly-pitching with a pram full of bits and pieces.” he recalled enthusiastically, “And I have been on this spot as a licenced trader for at least twenty-five years. I took over from Frank Fisher who’d been here many moons before me, he was a Smithfield meat porter. This little area was packed then, it was a job to get a pitch – they used to fight over them. Ever since I could drive, it’s been a weekly ritual coming into London on Sunday.”

Such is Arthur’s trustworthy reputation that local people will confidently buy used electrical gadgets from him, “I always offer a refund on anything electrical,” he assured me as an African lady delightedly carried off a food processor in her bag for twenty pounds, “I remember what I buy and sell and I know the price of everything. Sometimes I keep things in the interests of future prosperity, and I’ve got a nice rug as a future heirloom. Once I bought a lion with with its foot on the globe for fourteen shillings, then sold it for fifty shillings to a lady named Sylvia. It turned out to be early eighteenth century Capo de Monte and went for £2000 at auction – but when she died ten years ago, she left me £1000 in her will.”

Arthur buys at house clearances and jumble sales, hoping to clear a quarter of the stock that he keeps in his van and top it up again each week. “My father bred canaries and showed them at Crystal Palace. He used to buy the birds up here in the market because he had the experience to know what he was buying. I remember the first thing I ever sold, a BSA bantam motorcycle in Club Row when I was seventeen, and I still can’t keep away from it today.” Arthur confessed to me with an amiable modest grin, hooked by the endless cycle of market life – appreciating it as a place of commerce, and equally as an important location of social life and collective memory.

Had I walked this street on a Sunday in 1911, I would have had florins or farthings or halfpennies in my pocket, and I would have been in search of a linnet or a parrot or maybe a Japanese Nightingale to share my home. And this narrow road would have been packed with all variations of humanity, a dark heaving mass ebbing and flowing, searching high amongst the piles of cages for a feathered companion to add song to their days. And, according to George Sims in his book “Off the Track in London,” when you buy a canary off a road hawker “he puts it in a little paper bag for you, and you carry it away as if it were a penny bun.”

But it is not 1911, it is now, and I am in search of a woman called “Pickles” who has traded at the market on and off for the last thirty years.

Ahead of me, I see a petite woman, pretty, with a red flower in her hair. The colour cuts through the grey light like a burst of joy. She stands in front of her Aladdin’s cave, part-tucked into a wall next to an old railway chapel. It is filled with the clothes and trinkets of past lives; rows of beads and racks of shoes, of hats – once someone’s favourite skirt, favourite jumper – ready to live again on swaying bodies. A treasured hoard of glass and crockery, of books and purses, and a mother’s hand-made dolls, and all – all – so cared for by Pickles, and displayed as she once would have done in her shop, the one with the old-fashioned bell above the door.

“Every class of man and woman came to that old bird market,” says Pickles, “and the same today. Markets – they’ve always been a great leveller,” and she hands me a welcomed cup of tea.

“I was hit hard by the development of Spitalfields. I always thought that this was a place that if you fell upon hard luck, hard times, you could start again. But it’s been difficult. When the old bridge was taken down, I lost everything – home and livelihood. Change bulldozes everything. I wrote to Prince Charles, and even Prince Charles tried to save the bridge. Development has no place for the everyman history,” she adds, her green eyes flashing. And I feel the injustice, a force potent and understandable. A sense of wrongness, an awakening to a  world that is suddenly awry and unrecognizable.

“Even for kids, there are no discoveries to make anymore, nowhere to play,” Pickles adds. “Imagination is squashed – such a lack of creativity. I played on bomb sites when I was a child, and in the sink mud of the Thames,” she laughs. “I had a lot of freedom. Well it was after the war, and I suppose my mum had got quite desensitized, because of all the things she’d seen. She wasn’t overly protective. When I was nine, I got run over on the Wandsworth Bridge Road. When the policeman came to tell my mum, she said, ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I suppose people were used to expecting the worst. When she came to see me in the hospital, I made out I was worse than I was and groaned and pretended to pass out. I had to stay like that till she’d gone – serves me right!” she laughs.

“Later I went with my mum and lived in a gypsy caravan. That’s where I learnt how to recycle things – make use of everything. Mum used to cut the zips and buttons off clothes and I‘d take them to the rag man and collect money. I’ve worked since I was fourteen. Played truant and worked as a waitress, a shop assistant in Woolworths, worked in a hat factory, started as a packer and ended up being able to make a block and hats. I’ve always done something, kept going. Always been a bit of an outsider too – I’ve lived up North, lived down here, lived wherever I could make a home.”

“Maybe it’s the gypsy caravan in your blood,” I venture.

“Maybe. But even my Nan moved a lot during the war. I think she was trying to outrun Hitler!”

“So what did you do after the development? After you were moved on?” I ask, and she points to the yellow van with the image of Mickey Mouse and “Pickles Parties” painted along the side. “I couldn’t do markets for a bit. A lot of stuff was ruined or in storage, and it hurt too much. So I did that. I made lucky dips and did face painting.”

And I marvel at Pickles’ spirit, at her passion and articulacy. Her tenacity and style is infectious. And as a sudden chill whips along the street, I’m about to cap my pen, when I stop.

“I have to ask you, you know,” I say.

“Oh Blimey, not my age!”

“No. Why are you called Pickles?”

“Ah,” she laughs, “that’s another story…”

This is John and his father Alf in the charismatic old shed they have just opened up beside the railway bridge in Brick Lane. Two stalwarts who have spent their working lives buying and selling all manner of commodities in the East End – Alf entered local lore when he bought a lion cub off a ship in the docks forty years ago and sold it at Club Row animal market, while his son John has always traded around Brick Lane.

“I used to to have the biggest railway arch here, then I was in Cheshire St and once I had the biggest yard in Bacon St.” he boasted, explaining that for the past six years he has lived in the tiny caravan nestled snugly at the rear of his shed. When you enter the tall red wooden doors leading off Brick Lane into the huge shack with a multiplicity of stalls and a tea stand, you enter John’s world where he sells “all and everything, from a-z.”

“Is this bric-a-brac or junk?” I ventured, casting my eyes around the ramshackle mixture filling the cavernous space, where Tom the weather-beatened and tanned sailor lurked in the shadows at the rear with his big black dog. Raising his brows at the impudence of my question, “It’s shabby chic!” John declared, twisting his stubbly features into the leery smirk of a showman – “’Shabby chic’ was invented in Brick Lane.”

“I used to come up here with my dad and it was like a day out. If you wanted something you could get it for pennies. This place is what Brick Lane was like twenty years ago,” he continued, introducing his personal view of the changing currents of the market. “Saturday is better for us than Sunday now,” he said,“People come to all the vintage clothes shops but I don’t know how they make any money. I reckon that’s why they call them ‘pop-up shops’ because they pop up and then pop off.”

Over a cuppa from the tea stall, I settled down to enjoy Alf’s lyrical stories of the old East End, of Spratt’s dog food, Twining’s Tea, Percy Dalton’s peanuts, and of the former magnificence of Wellclose Square and when Wilton’s Music Hall was a rag store, and of his poor old pet fox, and Quackers, his pet duck, that followed him around the streets. “I think it’s a more violent world now,” he confided in a whisper,“beyond Vallance Rd is a dangerous place with gangs and drug wars. I won’t go there.”

When John’s two sons arrived from school in their smart green uniforms, I asked them if they planned to continue trading here on Brick Lane but they both shook their heads in unison. “I want them to be traders in the stockmarket,” said John, accompanied by nods of enthusiasm from his boys, “I take them for walks around the Docklands and tell them which companies to work for.”

“You want them to be bankers?” I queried. “I want them to make money,” he confirmed, “A lot of successful people have come out of Brick Lane, Alan Sugar started round the corner and the old man used to sell records to Richard Branson.” And then, turning to his father, their eyes met in a moment of shared realisation. “Where did we go wrong?” he asked, raising his hands with a grimace of bewilderment.

When I  was asked by the gentle author to photograph Keith in Sclater St, I came back with a picture of someone the gentle author did not recognise as Keith. “This is Keith,” I said. And when I returned next Sunday to seek the particular Keith I  had supposed to to photograph, I came back again from Sclater St with a picture of another man called Keith that the gentle author did not recognise. Happily, on the third week, I found the Keith I was seeking and, as a consequence, it is now my great pleasure to introduce you to each of the three Keiths of Sclater St Market.

“This is the best site,” said Keith proudly, speaking of the corner of the yard in Sclater St where he has been trading for twelve years, “but this land was sold years ago and they’ve got planning permission for shops and flats. Soon, Brick Lane will have no space for people like me, we’re going to become dinosaurs. The City is moving right in and the gap between here and there is quite short. It’s squeezing out all the local people and their families who have made a living here.”

Even as we spoke, a tall white block of flats was being constructed across the road, while lively business went on as usual below among the stalls upon the two remaining pieces of undeveloped land, and Keith winced to peer up into the sunlight at this visible symbol of  the changes that threaten his beloved market.

“My dad brought me here when I was three or four years old. It used to be a lovely atmosphere,” he mused, contemplating the half-dozen trestle tables that comprise his pitch in this corner of the yard, piled with books, records, clothes, china ornaments and attended by a eclectic display of pictures hung upon the brick wall.

In the Winter months, Keith sometimes has a fire in a brazier in his corner and I always come over to examine his ever-changing stock as I work my way through this market each week. Blessed with a placid nature, Keith maintains a dignified presence in his black peaked cap, and his corner is a recognised meeting place where other traders and friends gather in conversation. As long as the recession continues, and the development of Sclater St Market remains suspended, you will find Keith presiding here, with the generous civility and modest charisma of one who has emotional if not legal ownership of his territory.

Keith has been here at the Western end of Sclater St for just six weeks and is doing a roaring trade in old clothes, shoes, used computer parts and other junk. In spite of the empty street in this photograph, he could barely stand still for the constant assault of eager customers, swarming all over his gear and making demands from all directions, as we attempted a conversation.

“They think you get it for free,” he exclaimed, rolling his eyes in humorous exasperation as an over-zealous bargain hunter attempted to press a pound coin into his hand as payment for an item priced at five pounds. “Do I look like I need a pound?” declared Keith in self-parodic affront, placing his hands up in surrender, while shaking his head in disbelief and breaking into a smile at the audacity of it.

“I used to do Western Rd, and I was in Brick Lane a long time ago.” continued Keith, a man in his element, “I also had a shop but it closed down. Years ago, this was my way of life, yet although I have got a lot of stuff to sell, it’s not worth it full time. Now I refurbish homes and doing this on Sunday suits my job.”

With his lively animated nature and ease of banter, Keith delights in his weekly stalling out in Sclater St – as he confirmed for me, “I enjoy coming. I look forward to it because you meet all these different people. I’m just down here for the stories, they tell you more stories than you have ever heard.”

Keith told me he has been selling bicycles in this corner of the Sclater St yard “forever,” which means every Sunday for the last thirty years.

Each week, he fills his van with as many bicycles as he can, around forty – specialising in good quality used and single speed bikes – and such is his widespread reputation and keen pricing that mostly he returns again to Essex at the end of the day with an empty hold. “I don’t mind it here,” he admitted,with understated affection for this familiar piece of empty land, casting his eyes thoughtfully around the territory, “It’s become a second home, I’ve been here that long.”

“I used to have a couple of shops in Essex, but now I trade at Portobello on Saturdays and here on Sunday instead – you just pay the rent for your stall and walk away.” Keith revealed with a smile, spreading his arms in a spontaneous gesture that simultaneously indicated liberation from responsibility, as well suggesting a philosophical acceptance of circumstances beyond his control, “In Essex, bikes are seasonal, they’ll only buy from you in the Summer and at Christmas – whereas here you can sell them all year round.”

This is Paul Macatoni, the sack seller, with his fine display of printed hessian coffee bags from Africa, Asia and South America, that he has been selling on Sclater St for the past six months. “They’re popular, I’m in a niche market,” he admitted with glee, “People use them as decoration, storage, or to re-upholster furniture, to make cushions, beanbags and one lady even made a handbag out of one.” The amassing of so many sacks draws attention to their aesthetic qualities, attracting curious crowds to admire their typographic decoration and exotic trade marks, ensuring a brisk trade for Paul. The rest of the week he runs a call centre in Chigwell, but on Sundays Paul is big in sacks

This is John Calcutt who has been trading on Brick Lane each Sunday since 1974. “I’m from Hoxton and I used to come down here when I was a little boy, and the stall next to me sold performing fleas.” he recalled affectionately, casting his eyes up and down the market, “It was absolutely packed by eight in the morning, they used to ring a bell at one o’clock then and you had to stop.” Now semi-retired, yet still energetic and limber, John comes from Dagenham to sell rugs here and in Deptford, three days a week.“I don’t like getting up early in the morning but I still come because I’ve got a mortgage to pay,” he confided as he began to fold up his wares, turning morose in his weariness. “I’m just hanging on,” he confessed to me in a whisper, “I don’t even break even but I don’t mind coming, as long as I don’t lose too much money.” It was an admission that revealed John’s depth of sentiment for Brick Lane. But then John remembered that he is close to paying off his mortgage, the result of thirty-seven years hard work here in the market, and brightened visibly, “Another three months, and  I’ll be free in July!” he declared, triumphant.

This is Laura & Milly, two skinny art students from London Metropolitan University who have been trading here on Brick Lane for seven weeks, selling books and bric-a-brac from a folding table.“It’s been tough, we’re not going to lie - but today’s been really good,” revealed Milly, sharing an emotional grin of achievement with Laura.“This is our food money for the week, we’ll go food shopping tonight before we get the bus back to Stratford.” she added in excited anticipation of a feast, revealing how essential the stall is to their survival during their studies. The pair fell into market life almost by accident. “We got pissed one night and thought, ‘We’ll give it a go!’” confessed Laura with a blush, making light of the origin of this brave endeavour that has made such a difference to their quality of life -“and now we’re both addicted, because it’s too much fun.”

This is the amiable Frank Ganeda – dealer in minerals – who was born in Eastern Europe, raised in Canada, and after ten years here now admits, “It’s hard to remember the original reasons why I came.”Fascinated by the legends and the touch of all his multi-coloured rocks and crystals that glint and gleam in the sunlight, Frank has found his ideal occupation in life – permitting him to go travelling to warm places each Winter and buy stones, which he can then sell in London each Summer, the high season for sales of minerals. “One of the fascinating parts of this job is picking what to bring to Brick Lane, I can spend hours deciding,” he disclosed, his pupils sparkling with the intensity of his polished stones. And whichever you pick, Frank will regale you with his eloquent patter, outlining their propitious influences, and sometimes rattling them together in his cupped hands and holding them up to your ear, saying, “Let me show you how they sing together.”

Henry William Lee began selling bicycles from a stall in Sclater St each Sunday in the eighteen eighties, a trade carried on by his son Henry George Lee and – a hundred and thirty years later – his grandson Richard Lee still continues to do good business there today. A remarkable feat in the apparently transient world of the street market, making Richard the stallholder with the longest continuous business in Brick Lane, by far.

“My dad was born into it in 1913, died at eighty-six, and he was here ’til the end,” recalls Richard, “I first came down here when I was five, and I was thirteen when I started working on the stall.” With a vital spirit, thick ginger hair and a constant expression of eagerness, Richard is commonly to be seen in front of his stall in Sclater St with his oily hands wrapped around his body and tucked into his armpits, rocking back and forth on the balls of feet, in readiness for the next customer.

“People know me,” he declares, “I was selling to them when they were kids and now I’m selling to their kids. I don’t tuck anybody up, I sell quality stuff and I sell it cheap.” Even as he spoke, cyclists of all ages were arriving – children included – pulling up and balancing on their bikes to ask, “How much for coloured tyres?” – “Any back wheels?” – and “How much are your D -locks?” And Richard has an answer for everyone off the top of his head, reaching back into the organised chaos of his stall, where everything is miraculously no further than arm’s length, to produce straight handlebars or brake calipers or anything else that might be required, cyclewise.

It was no surprise to learn that his son Ray is a magician because there is an aura of the conjurer about Richard ‘s performance – producing the unexpected with an ease that denies his expertise. “I’m due to retire but I can’t afford to retire,” he pleads with a smirk, “I do a sixteen hour day. It’s not easy getting up at four and then when you go home, there’s all the bookwork.” Yet I was unconvinced by Richard’s entreaty, because it gives him such visible pleasure to be in the spot where his father and grandfather were before him – even in a street that has changed beyond all recognition – and I hope we shall see him there for many years to come, because this is the longest running show on Brick Lane.

This is cheery Maurice, known as “Mo” who works the rest of the week as a paediatric nurse at Outpatients in the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital and treats Sunday trading on Brick Lane as “a bit of a day out.” Most weeks you will find him with his folding table selling colourful trinkets at the entrance to Bacon St, set back from the main drag – “It’s a choice location,” he reveals, “People spend more time.”

Lean and nimble, and blessed with restless energy, Mo would rather be in Brick Lane than at home with his feet up on Sunday -“I’m quite active, I cycle to the hospital and I’m used to being on my feet all day,”he admits. Originally from Hackney, Mo used to trade here years ago but then he worked overseas for eight years for the Romanian Relief Fund and in Australia. Upon his return, he found himself living in West London, so going East every Sunday is way for Mo to return to home territory. “Very enjoyable and profitable too!” he declares, “It’s just like the hospital outpatients, you meet everybody.”

This is Jeremiah, an artist, and her friend Alan, a psychologist, who sell art and antiques, trading as Crazy Horse Collectibles. “It’s my business but Alan helps me out,” explained Jeremiah, flashing her dark eyes and tossing her red curls proudly, “We’ve been at it for a year and a half, and since we came here it really took off.” Jeremiah was speaking from behind a line of tables stacked with all kinds of weird and wonderful paintings and kitschy figures that were attracting a fascinated crowd.

“I had to get out of dire financial difficulties and Alan reached the point where he couldn’t get into his flat because of the collectibles,” she confessed in whisper, “so we both needed to offload stuff in Brick Lane, and it’s all come about in a spontaneous hippy way.” Then, not to be outdone, Alan removed his horse’s head and gave his estimation of their endeavour, “Jeremiah ‘s stuff is ‘fine art and collectibles’ while I call mine,”obscenities and corruptibles.’” he announced with a broad smile, rolling his eyes provocatively. “In other words antiques over here and junk over there!” Jeremiah retorted, pointing in Alan’s direction.

This is Andrew who, with his partner Maria, has been running this stall at the Shoreditch end of Sclater St selling cut price DVDs and training shoes for twenty -three years, and making a quiet living out of it.“Twenty-five years ago, we came to look around and decided to set up a stall,” he told me, exaggerating his consonants to be heard over the blaring music that advertises the existence of his pitch.

A modest figure, standing to the rear in dark clothes against a black wall, Andrew is almost invisible behind the barrage of sound and the noisy customers riffling through his DVDs, yet he has an ideal vantage point upon the market. “It’s got more yuppified,” he admitted, observing the change in the neighbourhood, “But it helps us – especially the younger ones with money to spend.” A noble example of the resilience of the street traders, Andrew is phlegmatic in the face of  the big buildings springing up around him to overshadow the market.

“I came here when I was a little girl and I remember when they sold pets – there was a man on the corner with a pair of owls on his shoulders.” recalled Emily, whose parents run “This Shop Rocks” opposite her stall on Brick Lane, “When I was nine, I bought a terrier who we called J.Burstein & Son after the shop where we bought him. It was a big adventure coming here in those days and I never imagined then I’d be trading in the market one day.”

Emily has a keen sense of the drama of Brick Lane, both its joy and turbulence. “I love all this,” she confessed open-heartedly, gesturing around to her stock, “I only buy things I love, so I like it when people appreciate something and I know it’s going to a good home.” Emily spends all week collecting the small pieces of furniture, luggage, crockery, mirrors and  household things that she brings here each Sunday but, in such busy location, she can hardly keep an eye on everything -“Mike comes to help me and make sure I don’t get robbed.” she admitted candidly.“We get up at six thirty and we come, rain or shine. In the Winter, we were scraping the snow off the pitch before we set up.” Emily continued with a equivocal smile, revealing the tenacity and strength of character it takes to be a trader on Brick Lane.

“I am from a land where everyone’s very relaxed,” declared Albert enigmatically from beneath his green felt hat, when I went along to have chat at seven o’clock, after all the other traders had gone and his stall remained alone upon the empty yard, while Ernest Ranglin’s mellow jazz drifted off down Sclater St. Albert was speaking of his distant homeland of Vojvodina, but nowadays he drives to Spitalfields every week from Sheffield in his van full of curiosities. “There is a guy who comes each week to chat, he says, ‘I can’t afford to buy anything but I like your music’” Albert revealed to me, cherishing the delicate compliment.

“I used to do lots of things, I’m a furniture maker and I used to be teacher of geography – I like challenges,” he confided with gentle melancholic irony, whilst presiding upon the square of tables that defines his personal oasis of thoughtfulness. Albert is the philosopher of Sclater St market, who can always be relied upon to turn up intriguing finds, whether old cameras, photographs, tools, records, musical instruments, carpets, hats – or almost anything else you care to imagine – and accompanies them with superlative absurdist patter.

Patricia Green told me her  father Ronald began selling menswear from this pitch when he obtained a licence in 1956 – although the family were in Sclater St long before that, when it was an animal market.

“Originally his father used to be down here selling birds,” explained Patricia, “and my father used to sell birdseed as a boy. He stayed until he was seventy-six, and was down here until a few weeks before he died.” Leaving school at fourteen, Ronald worked in a pawnbrokers and then a department store, before opening his own shop, selling menswear in Upton Park and on Sclater St each Sunday. “I started coming down here to the market with him when I was five years old,” admitted Patricia fondly, casting her eyes along the street to see the invisible crowds of long ago,“there were so many people you couldn’t walk through it, you just got carried along with the crowd. You never used to see any women, it was a men’s market – maybe one in fifty was a woman.”

“I don’t go to bed on Saturday night,” she explained with a grin of extraordinary vitality,“I just sit on the bed and maybe have forty winks, before I get up at ten past one to make the sandwiches and flask of tea. I get here around three o’clock and by the time I have set up and unloaded all the stuff it’s quarter to five, then at six o’clock I go and have a little chat with my friends.” It is a routine that few would choose, yet even though she is retired Patricia is keen to come every week. “I have regular customers and I know a lot of people who’ve been here for years – but every now and again someone disappears.” she confessed in a diplomatic whisper.

At the next stall is Patricia’s brother Robert Green, who helps out his friend Simon Lynch selling household goods. “I’ve been here since 1977, when I left school and started working alongside my father, “ he declared in triumph, “In forty years, I have only missed five Sundays – that was when I broke my leg and had to take five weeks off.”

When Robert reached fifty, he and his sister sold their father’s shop.“We used to work seven days,” he said, “Since I left school, my entire life had been the business and I wanted to have more time, but to tell you the truth I don’t have any more time than I had before.”  - shaking his head in good-humoured perplexity. “After all these years, I still try to serve someone enthusiastically,” he informed me, raising a hand as a point of honour, “even if they are only buying a bottle of washing up liquid and, even though I don’t need the money, I  treat them with as much respect as if they were buying a hundred pounds worth of stock years ago.”

With the ease of one who is at home in the world, Robert has an innate sense of decency and delight in what he does. “I hope to make money – but it doesn’t really matter, because I’ve always done it so I’d feel out of place if I didn’t do it. I am used to being down here at three in the morning in the freezing cold every week” he said, declaring both his own nature and affection for the market.“It’s a combination of things, tradition, culture and a lot of history – this is a very old market here.”

I stood at Robert’s side as eager customers paid for their purchases and he continued talking over his shoulder animatedly.“It’s traditio, because because years ago everything else used to shut and this was the only place open on a Sunday.” he told me, “It’s culture because there’s a lot of people on the other pitches who, even if we are not exactly friends, they always come and tell me what they are doing. And it’s history because some of the customers, I remember when they were young and now they are in their seventies and eighties. We’ve all grown old together. There’s a lot more to it than just coming down here to sell a few things.”

Victor Otigbah runs a bicycle repair workshop, doing on-the-spot repairs with his pal Rob, each Sunday morning under the railway bridge, where he also sells old bikes they have fixed up. You can buy some of the cheapest bicycles in London here. “A friend of mine gave me a bike when I first moved to Brick Lane in 2005 and I sold it for forty-five pounds.” explained Victor, as we stood among the sea of bicycles for sale, “With that money, I bought three more bikes, and fixed them up and sold them too. Then the council got hold of me and said it was illegal to sell on the street, so I got a licence and I’ve been here ever since.” A Glaswegian by origin, “I used to cycle up around Loch Lomond, when I was young and cycling was my life,” Victor admitted to me,“But I didn’t know anything about bikes until I did a course in cycle maintenance, and that’s when it all took off.”

Kal Newby & Bettina Gallizzi, on the Sclater St yard, were trading together for the first time. In fact, Kal confided to me it was her first day in the market, as she handed over an old but still serviceable Venetian blind to a customer for three pounds. “Betty’s been up here before, and she gave me a call asking if I fancied coming and joining her, so I took it as an opportunity to clear out my parents’ garage.” she said, “It’s been up and down today, but we’ve sold a lot.” Kal is a sign language interpreter by profession, while her friend Bettina is a sports instructor who teaches cycling – and she reminded me that each London borough offers four hours of free cycling tuition to every resident. Bettina also runs www.velo-re.com where she sells belts and wallets she makes out of old bicycle tyres and inner tubes.

Sneizana & Justin both came from Lithuania to Brick Lane. Sneizana has worked as a trader her whole life, but when the markets began to die in her country, she realised she could do better in London and took the brave decision to move here. “This is my holiday!” Sneizana declared to me with a weary smile, since she works the other six days of the week as a cleaner. And “This is my day off,” Justin announced too – not to be outdone – because he works all week on a building site. Yet in spite of this relentless routine of work, both were keen to emphasise how much they enjoy selling old clothes in the market. “It’s relaxing. People like us, and we’ve made lots of friends,” Justin informed me enthusiastically,“There are Italians, French, Portuguese, Polish, Serbians and Croatians – every country is here and this is good!”

This is the genial Bob Barrance who has been selling cut-price prepacked food from the same spot in Bacon St for over forty years. Suiting its name, this street was formerly reserved exclusively for food stalls and – pointing out the empty pitches of his long-gone neighbours – Bob recalled the stall that sold hot pineapple fritters, another which dealt in every kind of pickled onion and Tubby Isaacs Jellied Eels, all once keeping him company in the place where today he is the lone trader.

This is Sean who sells vacuum cleaners and spare parts on Sclater St Market. “I’ve been involved in markets since I was twelve and then, in my mid-twenties, I decided to do it full time – and twenty-five years later I am still here,” he informed me with a bemused grin. Sean bought the business from the man he worked for who had been here since the early sixties, which makes half a century of trading in vacuum cleaners every Sunday on the same spot.

“I enjoy the lifestyle because I’ve done it all my life,” he declared – a man of extraordinary resilience, as swarthy as a seaman after working six days a week in markets over all these years. “I’ve been selling people vacuum cleaner bags so long, I’ve now got the children of my original customers coming back and reminding me of when they came here with their mum and dad,” he admitted shyly, “It’s a community, completely different from the High St. If people don’t have enough money, I say, ‘Pay me next week.’”

Like many of the stallholders, Sean is ambivalent about the tall buildings under construction that will soon tower over the market. “I think the new flats will regenerate the area, “ he said optimistically, gazing up to the sky, “unless they decide they don’t want the market anymore because it lowers the tone…”

Once a year I escape with friends to Ullswater, Cumbria. One of the most beautiful and scenic places on earth. The air is so crisp and the landscapes and views are unsurpassable. I spend my time walking, eating good food meeting welcoming people from all walks of life.

This year I took my Hassablad and few rolls of transparency film to try capture the serene beauty that draws me back to the area every year – and below are the results.

Kirkdale Pass

Mother and Calf

Aire Force

It is my great pleasure to publish this selection of Photographs from some of the many thousands I have made over the past 6 years of the life of Sandys Row Synagogue. The oldest Ashkenazi Synagogue in London and the very last in Spitalfields.

These images I dedicate to my Grandfather and other past members for their struggle and sacrifice to keep Sandys Row synagogue open when all the others in Spitalfields closed.

Here is Mr Sender Chaim, always the last to leave after the lunchtime service at Sandys Row. On his way out he touches the Mezuzah on the door frame - he has done this every weekday for nearly 30 years.

This is Henry Freedman - discussing the future of the synagogue to board of management in 2005.

Barry Pash is the fourth generation of his family to worship at Sandys Row. A gentle man, once a photographer for a London newspaper, I made this image of Barry in the flat where he lives alone in Petticoat Tower, Petticoat Lane.

Michael Davidson, a scholar from an orthodox background, sifts through a century of accumulated books and documents in the vestry after the flood of 2006.

Julie Smith - Dancing with friends and familly at a Purim party in 2007. She is one of oldest members however is dancing less these days.

Many years ago, Milton who has resided and worked in the locality his whole life, celebrated his marriage here at Sandys Row. He still attends regularly.

Joe Listner, who used to run the shul, examining the vellum of 1905 discovered in the basement.

Hetty sits alone in the Synagogue - "it hasn't always been like this"

Stella Wilder loving wife of Jimmy Wilder, (the ex-treasurer, whose picture is to be seen on the right) was the secretary of the Sandys Row synagogue for seventeen years until 2005. Both are no longer with us.

From time to time Police officers pay as visit - they are always very friendly and enjoy the kosher biscuits.

For fifteen years there were no marriages at Sandys Row, then there were three in a year, and now young families are joining the synagogue, as Jewish people move back into the neighbourhood for the first time in a generation.

A staid old lady gets new life, thanks to Loving-Kindness and Friendship.

Last week, I was on assigment with gentle author and  took a ringside seat beneath the vast barrelled roof at the York Hall in Bethnal Green to experience a night of White Collar Boxing – the sport which gives City workers with no pugilistic experience the chance to slug it out in the ring and channel their excess pugnacity into three short volatile rounds, cheered on by an audience of their contemporaries.

This is high theatre, enacted beneath a golden glow of light within the cathedral gloom of the great hall, marshaled by a compere in a dinner jacket, and with busty wenches, in high heels and hot pants, parading the ring carrying placards between rounds – as if to offer an equal counterpoint to the extreme notion of masculinity as pure violence enacted there.

See the full story and the all the full photo essay here.

“As dawn broke this morning, I found myself coffee less and in need of nicotine, so I followed my nose. In a lovely yard off Ezra St is quite possibly the friendliest market I ever ventured into. I couldn’t help myself. I was flashed up and at war with the rising sun – notice the crisp Autumn sky!”

The wonderful stories that accompanies each photograph has been graciously provided by the gentle author.

Renee Duffy

This the alluring Renee Duffy, a Hoxton native who brings a certain delicate movie star glamor to the market, which occupies a modest yard hidden behind a battered corrugated iron fence, nestling beneath old workshops and warehouses. As I took her thin cold hand in mine to warm it, she batted her eyelashes delightedly and welcomed me to her cherished market which she shares with just a handful of other select traders. “Late in life I decided to do it,” she admitted flirtatiously, while gesturing to her stock of fine galvanised steel watering cans and planters, before confiding to me in a whisper,“Hoards of people want to have stalls in here, there’s over a hundred on the waiting list!”

Shaun Barnett

This is Shaun Barnett, who has been here the longest, trading for the last fifteen years of the market’s thirty year history and presiding over it today with Falsftaffian largesse. “We all come here every Sunday as regular as clockwork and we all get on, that’s why everyone likes it.”, he explained from behind his stall piled with an eccentric mix of stock, including some rather underpriced early pearl ware and old ladderback chairs. “I’m looking for madness!” Shaun declared recklessly with a smirk, “I buy whatever I like and if it doesn’t sell, I have to live with it.”

Suze Hails

This is Suze Hails who deals in antique textiles and linen. “I am a grandmother and a mother and a carer for my husband, so this is a fun day out for me coming here,” she revealed excitedly, “I came from Kenya originally to study Fine Art & Etching at the Central School of Art, but then before I got going I found myself bringing up three children.” A natural enthusiast, Suze brings her artist’s eye to the selection of vintage fabrics and knows how to wear a duffle coat better than anyone I know.

Caroline Foley

This is distinguished gardening writer Caroline Foley in her Sunday guise as a trader in old china, baskets and gardening equipment. “This is a sideline,” she told me, “since I spend so much time on my own writing, it is lovely to get out in the world meeting people.” Caroline has published nine books in the past ten years, and her latest, The Allotment Source Book is published today. She also edits “On Topiary” magazine for the European Box Hedge & Topiary Society.  Yet I found Caroline most passionate about Ezra St Market, “In this bit, there’s great camaraderie. We all stick together through the good times and the bad.” she said. You can read Caroline’s monthly allotment column for the Observer by clicking here.

Jo Watts & Mytle Watts

This is Jo Watts & her daughter Mytle who deal in kitchenalia, comprising the old china, kitchenware and enamelled pots that fill both their stalls and their home in South Woodford. Be advised, Jo has the best selection of enamel teapots in the East End.“I love market life, I wouldn’t want a shop – except maybe when it’s raining,” confessed Jo with a good natured shrug, looking up through her plastic canopy. “I’m training to my daughter up and I let her have a little stall,” she continued, delighting in her chosen routine,“All week I go sourcing, in between going to the gym and being a mother and a wife. This started as a business but now it feels like a hobby rather a job.”

Ezra Quinne

This is Ezra himself. Ezra of Ezra St Market, Ezra Quinn. Even from his demeanour, I surmise he is a gentleman of singular personality, quite possibly a raconteur. From his trousers, I also presume he is either a cyclist or a style eccentric, if not both. The fancy silk scarf and wonderfully weathered fishing jacket are characteristic of the swanky hauteur with which he wields his cigarette. A dealer in Peruvian knitwear and metal curios, carriage lamps, scales and cameras, Mr Quinn remains an enigma to me – because I never met him. He was not there when I visited Ezra St Market.

In a charismatic shabby yard in a hidden corner of Ezra St, a group of unlikely characters have created their own lively community that exists for just one day every week. Let me admit, I was innocent of the intrigues and gossip, but now I have introduced the appealing personalities of the leading characters in the weekly drama that is Ezra St Market, be sure to pay them a call next Sunday and introduce yourself.

I feel very privileged when I make a headshot, when someone asks you make an image that will define them and play a key part in furthering their career, I feel honoured.

An actors headshot is one of the most important tools in the process of landing a casting, getting agent representation and being considered a professional artist.

No casting director, producer or director ever hired an actor who didn’t take themselves and their career seriously to much of a degree and until you are well known, nothing says more about how serious an actor you are than your choice of headshot. It must project a serious attitude and a professional look / determination – and therefore a headshot must be the absolute best that you can afford.

Impact is paramount and I tend use natural light and tailor my composition for each client – to get the very best out of them.

Anthony Hurst

Elizabeth Robert

Vaughn Stein

Rebecca Tortora

Wayne Morgan-Williams

I made these photographs when i was asked to capture Lily Bull’s Christening day. She’s a very lucky lady to born into such a loving – wonderful family. It started off as cloudy day but the sun soon broke through – Thank you Sunshine!