Spitalfields then and now

Today I headed for my favourite London haunt, Spitalfields. This was the district east of the city wall where in mediaeval times the rich hunted and frolicked while the dispossessed attempted to benefit from proximity of wealth. Huguenot weavers driven out of Catholic France settled here in the 17th century, prospered and left their mark in the form of grand town houses; they were followed by waves of Russian Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms of the late 19th century: they made the area their own until, assimilated or dispersed,  their place was taken by another influx of migrants, this time from the east, mainlyBangladesh, in the mid-20th century. What developed was a palimpsest of lifestyles, languages, cultures and cuisines. The local church morphed into a synagogue and is now a mosque. The main drag, Brick Lane, is redolent today of spicy fumes from its many curry houses but you can still get salt beef beigels too. A few rag trade sweatshops still operate in the rambling buildings but nowadays the streets are full of artists and craftspeople, hipsters and gawpers, vintage clothes shops and tattoo parlours. There are witty graffiti and cool posters and shops belonging to Jeanette Winterson and Tracey Emin.  People say that Spitalfields not what it was - nor can it be, but I still find it addictive and, having steeped myself in the history, even the street names excite me: Fournier, Folgate, Fashion, Princelet, Hanbury, Bacon (this lasts makes me smile.)

I only discovered Spitalfields for myself about 10 years ago, when as a result of some family history research on my mother's Jewish forbears, I found that I could claim it as my own, in a manner of speaking. My mother's maternal roots were never mentioned when I was growing up, in contrast to my father's Russian ancestry. I can't blame her: she was born into a society where Jewish genes were a stigma and popular novelists such as Agatha Christie and John Buchan could write in anti-semitic stereotypes with casual impunity.

So: top centre in my collage is Number 14 Woodseer Street, which was named Pelham Street when my grandmother, Leah, was born there in 1871. Her parents, Solomon and Dinah, had arrived in the east end the previous year with their elder daughters: Rosa, Caroline and Elizabeth. Their son had been left behind in Vilna (Vilnius) and the third girl had been born en route, at their port of embarkation, Hamburg. Presumably this house was shared lodgings perhaps kept by a sympathetic compatriot. Next door was the home of one of Jack the Ripper's putative victims, a woman of the street who was murdered but not, it turned out, by him.

I don't know much about what happened to my grandmother's family subsequently. Solomon, her father, a successful furrier in Vilnius, found work in the rag trade (as  a cap maker), as did his daughters who all eventually escaped  to better localities and social positions via marriage: the eldest to a furrier cousin in New York, the next two to greengrocer brothers in Islington and my grandmother, to the best prize,  the son and heir of a newly middle-class  family of  a successful builder-turned-contractor in Hampstead. (The disastrous consequences of that union can be found in an earlier blip.)

Today Pelham/Woodseer Street, which runs east from Brick Lane besides the old Trumans Brewery, is not one of Spitalfield's most interesting so I have added some local colour in this collection of images I took today.  Top left is one of the few remnants of the Jewish presence in the area, a closed-up shop in Wilkin Street I think. Top right is Redchurch Street adorned with a huge image of a bird. A book I bought today tells me that this was intended by the Belgian street artist to be a heron but the local Bengali people prevailed upon him to turn it into a crane since that bird is sacred to them and as a crane it now complements its location on an Asian restaurant.

Bottom right is one of the cats to be found adorning Cheshire Street (geddit?); in the middle, also in Cheshire Street, is one of the many cheap/vintage fashion outlets, often just pop-up shops, this one selling budget shoes: I was attracted by the sign which states The Devil wears Prada but the People wear Plimsoles  £5. Finaly, bottom left, the face (left) painted on the wall in Bacon Street commemorates Charlie Burns, one of the area's oldest residents who died earlier this year at the age of 96. He first went to work, at the age of 6, in the family waste paper business, started by his own grandfather in 1864, and he turned it into a financial success. He remained in post for all his long life and
"By living so long, Charlie became the last representative of a distant world and through the depth of his perspective in time, recalling his parents and grandparents, he was our living link to the nineteenth century."
(From   Spitalfields Life by The Gentle Author, Saltyard Books, 2012.)
The face on the right I don't know but no doubt represents some other local character from another heritage, another tradition, from Spitalfields' mingled gene pool.