"I've never met an ordinary person": An Interview with The Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life
When E. M. Forster wrote “Only connect” as the epigraph to Howard's End, he was not anticipating the worldwide impact of the local history and culture daily blog Spitalfields Life written by the elusive Gentle Author, but it is hard to think of a better example of the rewards that can come from a life spent following that maxim.
The blog’s success may be due in part to the size of the Cockney diaspora, many of whom did not leave by choice. My grandparents (from families of master upholsterers and furniture makers on my grandmother’s side, policemen and railwaymen on my grandfather’s) were forced out of the area by the German bombing campaign during the Second World War, and it’s fair to say that they subconsciously missed the warmth of that community ever after. At the time it was a predominantly Jewish place, full of charitable organisations, social clubs, and good works that enabled its embattled population to survive, and all the inhabitants became acculturated to this way of living with others and the daily round of interactions with shopkeepers. (As the elderly spindle turner Maurice Franklin reminisced in one of Spitalfields Life’s most popular entries, before the War Shoreditch was "90% Jewish and those who weren’t were Jewish in their own way," which explains my Methodist grandfather's Yiddish-influenced linguistic quirks). The blog radiates a profound sense of respect for the individuality and dignity of its subjects, with moments of playfulness, and shows how this small geographic area has been impacted by world history throughout the centuries, from the Huguenot persecution in France through the World Wars to decolonisation.
The beginnings of the blog are fascinating. The Gentle Author, referred to as TGA for short, had already lived in London for twenty years and worked at the Bishopsgate Institute in 1981. They had loved Spitalfields in the eighties because of its unique sociability and community spirit, and following the death of their father and five years spent caring for their mother before she died, they decided to move to Spitalfields fifteen years ago. It was only after this that they discovered that their family had migrated from the area to Devon a hundred years previously, so that while exploring the new neighbourhood they had also unintentionally been discovering their own roots.
The move was made in some trepidation that the spirit of Spitalfields might have been compromised by all the recent redevelopments and population movements out of the area, but they soon discovered that in spite of everything, “this is still a place of tremendous life and soul,” and decided to capture this extraordinary scene in an online journal. TGA denies that they have revived the sociability of the East End; it was always there, waiting to be noticed. When asked pessimistically whether there is any of the old East End left, they always send the enquirer to the over one-hundred-year-old restaurant E. Pellici in Bethnal Green. A visit there is like entering the Pellici family's “front room,” where all the customers are seated together, so that all different kinds of people become “guests of the family.” This creates an atmosphere that expects social interaction, so that the guests are drawn naturally into conversation with each other. TGA describes this as “an astonishing experience” which captures the traditional East End “better than anything else I can think of.”
In person the Gentle Author is serious, kindly, and considered in everything they say, with sudden accesses of humour, much like their blog. They are very secretive about the writing that they did under their birth name and refuse to be drawn much on their previous life –not even, sadly, the time spent on an uninhabited island in the Outer Hebrides. The aim of the blog was to foreground their subjects and retreat into the background, to keep out their own identity, gender, and ego. ('The Gentle Author' has ultimately become a much more comfortable identity than their own birth name, which, it was discovered on the death of their father, was only the latter's adoptive surname.) This self-effacement has not been completely successful, since the blog has sparked considerable curiosity and interest about the author amongst its readers, and given TGA status as a well-known local figure.
Spitalfields Life seems in many ways to be a throwback, applying an approach to the modern world that cannot be found elsewhere, probably another reason for its rapturous reception. It revives a benign literary style last truly widespread in the thirties. The anachronism is (at least) threefold: firstly the courtesy and care with which all the interview subjects are treated, in contrast to the ethics of much modern print journalism; secondly the neo-Dickensian conscious and unabashed deployment of sentiment as a vehicle for conveying meaning (a hallmark of the traditional East End mindset complementary to the proverbial toughness), particularly when capturing community interactions; and thirdly a frequent lyrical innocence which may derive from TGA’s rural upbringing with a mother who always encouraged them "to remember the best of people," beautifully evoked in the profoundly moving essay "A Spring Shirt from Liberty of London." This undiminished capacity for wonder is a rare gift, enabling TGA to fully see and appreciate the extraordinary people, places, arts and crafts that they encounter.
I ask TGA about the thinking behind the blog's poetic language, and they explain that they deliberately chose a very descriptive prose style to show that "writing on the Internet need not necessarily be casual." They also made a conscious decision to evoke individuals in a novelistic rather than a journalistic way. When asked about literary influences, after some reflection they name Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul as a major impact on their thought and style, praising the remarkable way that Pamuk found to evoke a city, its people and spirit. TGA also acknowledges the obvious influences of Dickens and Henry Mayhew, who wrote about the East End world in the nineteenth century. (Psychogeography, by contrast, has not been an influence at all, due to what TGA sees as its over-imaginative subjectivity; instead TGA tries to vanish from the scene in favour of highlighting "the truth.") In other interviews TGA has mentioned the Welsh New Left author Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society as a major influence on them during their student days, so I ask what they now think, based on the experience of writing Spitalfields Life, of the famous dictum that "culture is ordinary." At the time of starting the blog they were "very aware of this very oppressive culture of celebrity" and in a sense the blog has been "anti-celebrity" in that it never features anybody famous, but over time they have come to understand that absolutely nobody is ordinary, that "everybody carries a story." The falseness of the myth that people are all the same and the reality that everyone is different have come to preoccupy them more and more over the course of the interviewing. I ask if they think that there is something about the East End that brings out the type of extraordinary individuality that they routinely encounter (such as in the meeting with a man who carves spoons all day but finds that the perfect spoon is a rarity). TGA believes that what is special about the East End is that people have had to "invent their own lives" instead of climbing a career ladder, which has fostered the cultural richness of the area; indeed, they have come to the conclusion that ultimately all of London’s culture has come from the East End, belying the outsider view that the area has no culture.
It’s not only humans to whom this ancient corner of London appears to give licence to be completely themselves, but also cats. (TGA’s own cats have made frequent appearances on the blog, and they are a great help in the creative process because they love "people who sit still"; having a cat asleep on your lap creates "an atmosphere of calm and concentration" highly conducive to writing, and TGA finds the moment when the cat nods off particularly magical. Having a cat is also an aid to keeping warm in an ancient and rather chilly house.) A superb montage from 1953 of historical photographs by Felix Fonteyn of "Cockney Cats" has proven an especially popular blog entry. Here, an assortment of mainly working felines are captured basking in the warm regard of their human colleagues: Tibs the Great at the Post Office, Tiger of The Times with his trophy for "Best Office Cat in Fleet Street," Min at the Port of London authority who "has many friends among the dockers and very good ratting at night," the furry guard of the Queen’s Warehouse at Customs and Excise who receives sixpence a day from the Treasury, Cecil at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and Minnie of the Stock Exchange.
The individuality of these cats is remarkable; the goodwill that surrounds them in their neighbourhoods has clearly allowed them to self-actualise to their fullest catpacity (sorry). In the case of 'Old Bill the railway cat' who guards Blackfriars Station, the results are borderline intimidating. One set of pictures is particularly amusing, capturing the moment when one Tower of London cat suddenly appears to glower like a tiny green-eyed monster at the sight of the other Tower cat, Pickles, being photographed.
TGA’s ability to talk to absolutely anybody (in the past month a gathering of Punch and Judy professors, and in a recent entry entitled “Among The Pagans at Beltane” the “druid of Wormwood Scrubs”) may be a famously London talent, but in their case it seems to have had its genesis in a sociable childhood in Devon, visiting elderly neighbours to hear their life stories. Their interviewing practice has been a way of making lasting contact with a very large group of local people —"I’ve always worked on the principle of no boundaries, that I’m not like a journalist who arrives and does the story and disappears" —with the awareness that receiving the gift of other people’s stories creates a bond of intimacy, so that now when they walk around the East End they are constantly greeted by people they know. As a result they have the same sort of friendly everyday life that they grew up with in the West Country and are "part of a real community."
All these unusual traits have allowed TGA to build up an extraordinary level of trust on the part of the local community that has ensured a steady flow of material. When I ask about the logistics of getting stories they admit that at the beginning it was difficult and a lot of people said no when asked for interviews, but that the way in turned out to be profiling small businesspeople, for whom interviews provided free publicity. That was how they "got into writing about the culture of shops and shopkeepers and traders." Once their profile was established it was easier to get stories, and now people send them messages such as "my great-grandfather is 103 years old and he was a fireman in the London Blitz, would you like to come and interview him?" TGA experiences these kinds of approaches as a "gift." At the beginning they were constantly concerned as to what the next day's story would be about, but now the inexhaustible abundance of material makes running the blog more like being the editor of "a newspaper or magazine."
At the start TGA was unaware that they were doing oral history, but this became apparent over time. While the subjects do dictate their responses to TGA, the final version is edited for the blog, partly because the way that people convey meaning when they speak often comes across differently in written form, and the responsibility to the subject entails an obligation to present their stories faithfully to their intended meaning. It never occurred to TGA fifteen years ago when they began the blog that as many of the interviewees were quite old they would inevitably pass on, and often the Spitalfields Life pieces were the only records of their biographies. As a result the blog entries often ended up "being read out at memorial services," which TGA describes as a very humbling experience. When older people pass away the stories they carry go with them, and it has sunk in for TGA that in some respects they have been "recording a world that is fading out" in front of them.
It didn’t take long for the blog’s historical importance to be recognised, and it is now archived by the British Library and the Bishopsgate Institute. The latter has worked closely with TGA, in the form of its "inspirational and iconoclastic archivist" Stefan Dickers, who believes in maintaining an 'open' archive and making his collections extremely public and accessible. He approached TGA and asked to archive the blog in exchange for TGA being allowed to publish anything from the archive —and, prompted by the Spitalfields Life pieces on contemporary street traders, asked them if they knew about the Institute’s collection of historical street trader photographs and the four-hundred-year-old history of London street trader portraiture. This opportunity allowed TGA to feature historical and contemporary pictures alongside each other. As TGA publishes pictures at 600 pixels wide, which cannot be copied and reused for commercial purposes, their featuring of these photographs drove up the requests for commercial reproductions tenfold as well as doubled visitor numbers at the Bishopsgate Institute, which TGA sees as a great example of how an archive can vastly expand its user base.
Indeed, the blog has brought TGA many surprises, such as a role in this year’s Spitalfields Music Festival presenting an illustrated lecture on the lives of street criers to accompany a musical arrangement of the Cries of London. Their totally unexpected local political engagement also developed out of the blog, from the contact with the third-generation sundriesman (supplier of paper bags and other small business necessities) Paul Gardner. (The blog entries on TGA's visits to this shop contain extraordinarily rich socioeconomic observation; nowhere else would you read, for example, that Ghanaian and Nigerian traders are particularly loyal to Gardner’s shop due to a cultural preference for dealing with family-run businesses.) This friendship led to TGA’s formation of a shopkeepers' union, the East End Trades Guild, to represent the interests of the small traders whose businesses give the area its distinctive identity. Now the Guild is investigating the possibility of developing community land trusts to allow small businesses to survive in the face of soaring commercial rents.
TGA has been involved in a string of campaigns to prevent inappropriate developments, such as, most famously, to save a five-hundred-year-old mulberry tree with a preservation order on it, which was to have been sacrificed for an overly dense housing development with "a very low proportion of affordable housing" that would even have had a separate poor entrance. The High Court judicial review battle over that resulted in the rescue of the tree and the developer selling the site to a housing association, which will build an integrated housing project with a much higher proportion of affordable housing. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry battle resulted in an obligation on any new owners to continue casting bells, preventing it from being turned into a boutique hotel. The massive fight over the plans to redevelop the Truman Brewery site into a shopping mall, which would have raised the land values, driven up the rents in Brick Lane and forced out its famous ecosystem of curry houses and other independent businesses, will be going to the Supreme Court in August, and a renewed struggle is looming over a new proposal to "build financial towers across the entire site." One of TGA’s earliest successes came in 2012, when they were instrumental in forcing Hackney’s Geffrye Museum --originally opened as a museum to the furniture trade but then, if my memory serves, mostly dedicated to middle class interiors-- to restore rather than demolish a handsome old pub called the Marquis of Lansdowne that had been the centre of the furniture-making community prior to Hackney’s gentrification. (This autumn TGA is curating a photography exhibition at the museum, which is now called the Museum of the Home.) Over the past decade, the string of successes that TGA has achieved with the East End Preservation Society, despite the apparent David and Goliath odds, is truly striking.
TGA muses on the strange trajectory from doing oral history to political battling, but despite the work and sacrifice involved in this engagement, they feel very privileged to have this opportunity. It requires constant vigilance, since redevelopment is an area in which history threatens to repeat itself with a return of the massive population displacements that accompanied the 'slum clearances' following the War. Although some people moved out voluntarily postwar for a better standard of living in North London, Ilford, and Hornchurch, many were moved into tower blocks "against their will" and lied to about the quality of their condemned terraced housing. The Spitalfields Trust has since discovered, by working with old Whitechapel terraces, that it is perfectly possible to salvage these houses by adding a mansard, basement, and a staircase with bathrooms at the back. The houses could have been easily rehabilitated: all that was needed was bathrooms, and repair of the bomb damage.
The Spitalfields Life tours of the area, now one of TGA’s major endeavours, are another form of activism, aimed at providing a redress for the epidemic of ghoulish, misogynist Jack the Ripper tours in the neighbourhood, which feature explicit autopsy photographs of the murdered women and feed a prurient interest in the suffering of Victorian society's most vulnerable members. The proliferation of Ripper tours over the last few years means that locals who live in the area constantly encounter this horror, in tandem with the tourists who find pleasure and humour in it. "These sensation narratives have been promoted here to the extent that they overwhelm all the other narratives of the place, and in a sense the identity of it has been hijacked and it’s been monetised…when you’re living here it’s relentlessly shocking to be confronted with this stuff the whole time," and it particularly distresses TGA to hear people laughing. Some of the Ripper tours have up to a hundred visitors, requiring the use of megaphones, and there can be four or five tours going on at the same time. The blaring narratives of violence have begun to drive families with small children out of the neighbourhood.
It has long been deeply offensive to people from the area that the Ripper's sickening crimes have been allowed to overshadow all its other stories, and instead the Gentle Author's tour, which took about five years of planning and work to develop, integrates the stories of the people who feature on the blog, places, music, photographs, and artefacts and ends with a shared sit-down in a three-hundred-year-old house and cake made to an equally old recipe. It aims to beat the Ripper tours by being more entertaining, imaginative, and enjoyable; "most fundamentally, [it] doesn't include femicide." The tours, which run for two hours every Saturday, are always full and attract a lot of tourists from the USA, Canada, and Australia who often turn out to be East End descendants, so that TGA has the honour of putting them in touch with the world of their ancestors. Many of these visitors come with photographs and family stories to tell TGA about, narratives which have become "a constant thread" in the blog. TGA’s favourite part of the tour is the time spent together afterwards in which these family histories are shared and connections are made, between people who would otherwise only be offered the completely negative and dark view of the Ripper tours.
Ripperology is perhaps the most startling example of the wholly negative outsider view of the East End, an attitude shared even by respectable historians who disseminate a picture dominated by poverty and violence. The insider perspective which TGA propagates is focussed instead on the "culture of resourcefulness and resilience" that the necessity to build one’s own life has created in the community. When I comment on the gulf between the two images, that you would think that people were talking about completely different planets, TGA comments that they "came across this very starkly when I edited and wrote the book East End Vernacular." Although there are so many cultural institutions in the East End, this was the first art history of the area, and TGA finds it shocking that nobody had thought of producing such a book before. The project was inspired by the widespread delight caused by the rediscovery of the East London Group, but TGA's research uncovered a much longer period, taking in the interwar Group to cover an extraordinarily creative 150 years in which East End artists celebrated their environment and the beauty that they found in that distinctive combination of "domestic buildings, utilitarian factories and railways" that has so often "been denigrated." To give just one example, TGA tells me that when Dickens first arrived in 1851 he interviewed a young local artist who worked as a weaver but had also just had a picture exhibited at the Royal Academy. Once the book was out, TGA realised that it would not be possible to do a book called West End or South London Vernacular because there simply aren't the artists (although they concede that it might be possible to write a book called North London Vernacular). Most of the painters featured in the book "never became famous or made a living from their art," and this may be due to the general overlooking of culture produced by the East End.
I point out that similar questions can be asked concerning the extraordinary collections that TGA routinely discovers by photographers whose great talent they have been able to publicise for the first time via the blog, leading to crowdfunded publications. These books, for TGA, are a matter of pride. "There’s a politics to it," they comment, community publications having previously been somewhat "apologetic," which is why Spitalfields Life Books have production values to compete with the likes of Phaidon or Thames & Hudson, in order to give their subjects the prestige that they deserve. The most spectacular success of the twenty-odd books that TGA has published over the last six years has been the discovery of the formidably talented contemporary artist Doreen Fletcher, whose eerie paintings of East End buildings call up a sense of the ineffable. (Paul Flux reviewed TGA'S book and interviewed Fletcher herself in Albion in 2019.) The whole experience has shown TGA that the internet can be used in a democratising way, to make artists who would otherwise be ignored by the Establishment accessible to a huge audience, generating public interest which can then lead mainstream galleries and publishers to focus on them. The books also profile slice-of-life histories, such as Suresh Singh’s stories of his father Joginder in the book A Modest Living: Memoirs of a Cockney Sikh. In 1949 Joginder "sacrificed a life in the Punjab to work in Britain and send money home, yet… found himself in his element living among the mishmash of people who inhabited the streets around Brick Lane." (He was later confronted with the somewhat unexpected development of his son becoming the country’s first Punjabi punk and going on tour with Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees.)
When I put to TGA that the blog often conveys an unusual sort of multicultural nostalgia, in that it cherishes the legacies of groups of people who have either already left the area or whose position has been made precarious by commercial forces —challenging the widespread assumption that nostalgia is necessarily a reactionary and exclusionary phenomenon— they receive the remark happily and muse upon it. They see the condemnation of nostalgia as "connected to the idea that sentiment is a bad thing, but that’s not really what I feel." Throughout life "I’ve always been incredibly aware of a sense of loss," which was part of the motivation for the blog. They identify strongly with Kierkegaard’s comment "that being a writer is like running through a burning house" and salvaging whatever you can "although you never get out on the other side of the house" --you are constantly running and salvaging. After a moment of deep cogitation they continue,
"I also have an opinion about history, which is that I don’t see history as being something in the past. I see that history also includes the present day, and I see it all as a continuum, so I think that we need to own our history and know our history in order to understand where we are and what rights we have, and why things are as they are and whether things have always been like this, or was it different in the past? I think that all these things are necessary for people to have self-realisation and to have a sense of power. But it’s also about affection. I only write about the things I love --I won’t write about anything that I don’t love, you know?-- and I think that there’s a great merit in being able to put into words what you love and to discover that other people love the same thing, and so it does come to a sense of communality and shared beliefs."
They conclude that nostalgia may not be "an expansive enough term to cover all of these aspects," but they can certainly understand why the blog can be seen as nostalgic, and point out that it also embraces the historically very powerful East End Radical tradition. (At the time of writing-up, TGA has been on a pilgrimage to contemplate various local sites associated with William Morris, taking an old wooden orange crate from Spitalfields Market to sit on.) This rumination about the significance of history develops into a conversation about TGA’s involvement with Dennis Severs’ house, in which the American presented his own invented story of a Huguenot weaver family over three generations (my unforgettable visit there at Christmas 2016 was described here). Before Severs' death in 1999 he used to explain the various mises en scene in the different rooms to visitors in a tour that lasted for three and a half hours, but after his death visitors were allowed to explore them in silence. TGA has been commissioned to work with actors and develop a new version of the tour true to Severs' spirit, based on his book and some recently rediscovered fragmentary recordings of some of the rooms.
However, in the process it has become apparent to TGA that Severs' world view was totally different to their own and that today’s attitude to history diverges from Severs' interpretation in the eighties: "we live in a time when notions of history are really in a crisis and are being challenged, and there’s a whole revolution going on about what we think history is. I felt that if we were going to do these tours today it couldn’t be a recreation of what Dennis was doing in 1985, it had to be about how this house can speak to 2024." So TGA kept the basic structure of the rooms and the three-generation Huguenot weaver family, but related their story more to the other waves of immigration and integration that have defined the area. When I probe about the other ways in which TGA's approach differs from Severs,’ they note that female characters were mostly sidelined in his tour, whereas now TGA feels that the past "lives of women are as relevant as those of men." As they had to reduce the material to ninety minutes, these considerations became criteria for what to preserve and what to cut.
Another issue with Severs' original tour was that "Dennis, for better or worse, was celebratory about the culture of stockbroking and the British Empire; there’s a scene in the smoking room all about how stockbroking was invented," which, as TGA points out, was "as a way for people of modest means to invest in the slave trade —the stockbroker was the man who put together all the people so they had enough money to hire a ship and come back, and the invention of insurance went along with that" to assuage investors' fears of what would happen to their profit if the 'cargo' were lost. Severs' uncritical approach was consistent with the eighties ethos ("Dennis was in a world of Wall Street and the Big Bang in the City" and was keen to celebrate it all), but today we are "in a very different space, a very different relationship to all that, and it would be a lie and a betrayal of our audience if we didn’t actually address those contradictions and make them visible." While Spitalfields weavers did very well through the silk trade, "they made a lot more money by going up to the City and investing in the coffee houses." It is important to TGA "to accept and recognise" the fact that "colonialism is a massive element of the wealth that built all this stuff here in the East End," so that once you have that knowledge "you come to Dennis Severs’ house in a different way."
This leads me to ask about the City and the love-hate relationship between it and the East End throughout history, reflected in TGA’s new tour which highlights, in their words, "the wonders and the wickedness" of the Square Mile. TGA was commissioned by the Barbican Arts Centre to develop this tour of the City, a place about which they have always felt, personally, deeply ambivalent: "the history is fascinating, but you can’t deny the wickedness of that place —it’s unfathomable, the wickedness of it. So whereas if you do a tour of Spitalfields, ultimately you’re going to talk about community and resilience, and it’s celebratory, if you do a tour of the City of London it’s something else. So I’ve created a tour which is a way of making visible the drama of the history," while also acknowledging its darkness. Although such themes are beginning to come to the surface, there is a lack of scholarship on this area which adds to the difficulty of talking about this history, and TGA thinks that it will "be the job of the next generation of historians to uncover all these stories and make it tangible."
In a monologue outside the Bank of England as part of the tour they discuss its most important governor in the eighteenth century, Sir Humphrey Morice, who "was personally responsible for more than 20,000 people being trafficked into slavery across the Atlantic, a thousand of whom did not survive the journey." Another stop is at the Royal Exchange, the pediment of which is inscribed with the text 'The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,' with sculptures representing "all the commodities that God has given us" with, right in the centre, a relief of "an enslaved African man kneeling in supplication. It's there in plain sight!" they exclaim in horror. TGA finds it a very different and overwhelming experience to do the City tours, although it is important to offer them, since the listeners are always astonished by the history.
To provide an example of how the histories of the two neighbourhoods have intersected, they mention the Lloyds building in Leadenhall Street, which was the headquarters of the East India Company. The Company bulldozed Commercial Street right through Spitalfields in order to transport "loot from the East India Docks," since they didn’t want the traffic coming through the City (though they were happy to collect the duty at the customs houses), and in the process they displaced hundreds of East Enders from their homes. Moving on to the large present-day Bangladeshi community in Spitalfields, TGA points out that Bangladesh is the current name for what used to be called East India. "They're here because the East India Company was there, and now we have a fight over Brick Lane and the Truman Brewery" and the aforementioned plan to redevelop the site which would "drive out the small businesses of the Bangladeshi community, it will wipe out that community ... there's a sort of sense of the past within the present all the time here, in the relationship of the City and Tower Hamlets." I ask why they think that there has been so little critical reckoning with the past, a reckoning which might create an inhibition about echoing it in the present, and they suggest that Britain’s heroism in the battle against fascism in the Second World War has tended to occlude its far more equivocal history before the twentieth century.
When I comment on the oddity of a traditionally welcoming Cockney community sitting cheek by jowl with a financial district that has this sort of history, TGA concurs that "it’s like the meeting of tectonic plates, really, where Tower Hamlets meets the City of London." The oddity increases when you consider that the East End only exists because of the City, since it was "a place where people could arrive, live cheaply, sell things to the rich people and thrive," partly because in the East End "there was more freedom and less restriction," conditions which attracted Shakespeare and the theatres to this part of London. On the other hand, they point out, there has always been an awareness in the East End that the City is so much more powerful, a sense that is now even more immediate with its recent attempts to expand beyond the boundary in order to build more corporate towers.
I ask about TGA’s personal highlights from the experience of doing the blog, and after some consideration they single out the friendship with Paul Gardner, who "embodies all the best of the East End" and has put them "in touch with so many people." The connection led to Gardner becoming the chair of the East End Trades Guild and the involvement of Gardner’s sons with his sundries business. There have been many other incredible moments, such as when TGA received Bob Mazzer’s collection of Tube photography for the book that would ultimately become Underground, or the "mind-boggling" appearance of the Spitalfields Nippers pictures by Horace Warner. TGA was particularly awed by their meetings with the Dutch Second World War heroine Alie Touw, with whom they have done three interviews for the blog. Alie is now 104 years old ("her father was born in 1847," TGA notes in amazement), and she lived in Arnheim during the German occupation, which she survived with her two children while hiding German Jewish child refugees en route to safety in England in her terraced house under the noses of her collaborationist neighbours. Now she lives in a tower block above Petticoat Lane, where, as the blog puts it, she observes "the City to the west and Spitalfields to the east," bakes cakes, and knits socks (a skill that she learnt in the orphanage in which her overwhelmed father had placed her following the death of her mother) for the children of her Eastern European carers, practical expressions of empathy with these women’s struggles in England. Alie, TGA concludes, "is an inspiration to us all," having "lived through some of the darkest things that anyone could imagine and shown great courage," and retaining, at 104, "a great sense of levity and magnanimity."
I had always been curious about the beautiful Staffordshire dogs that feature on the cover of the Spitalfields Life book. TGA explains that they were instantly drawn to the wistful, romantic paper cut art of Rob Ryan, who designed the dogs, and that as Ryan was already considerably famous they thought that Hachette would probably agree to integrating his work into the jacket art. But there was also a deeply personal component to the idea, which was that during TGA’s childhood a couple of Staffordshire dogs which had belonged to their grandparents, who had died before their birth, stood on a window ledge in the staircase, "and I always thought somehow that they were my grandparents, that they contained the spirits of my grandparents —they were like the Lares and Penates of the house." Together with the local fondness for Staffordshire dogs on Brick Lane, this was the motivation for the decision, and the symbol of TGA’s publishing company is now a Staffordshire dog in outline.
When asked about the practicalities of life TGA admits that there is really "no such thing as a normal day," apart from the constant necessity of writing a blog post. Book projects, such as a new volume by David Hoffman about the postwar migration of the Jewish community to North London, keep them very busy, and there are currently three books in the pipeline. Editing takes up quite a lot of time that might otherwise be spent writing, although "the whole thing has a momentum that carries you along —you have to accept that you’re never going to finish the to-do list." The first five years were a time of self-impoverishment during which TGA survived on a weekly chicken and veg box donation from the local community, and was also hospitalised twice with exhaustion due to overwork on the blog, but now the various ventures —tours, blogging workshops, and publishing— that have come out of the blog’s success allow them to "just about make a living."
In the process TGA has also acquired new skills, developing an interest and competence in photography through collaborations with professional photographers, even though they had never taken a picture until the age of fifty and initially despaired at their own lack of ability. (Nowadays regular readers of the blog can admire their stunning photographs of bouquets bought at the Columbia Road Flower Market.) Although TGA had always felt like quite a timid person, working with these pros showed them how to infiltrate groups of unknown people for interviews; they reminisce in particular about a visit to a mannequin factory during which the photographer’s ability to open up the crowd was "really helpful." Finally, the requirement to do tours and lectures forced TGA to build a proficiency in public speaking, which, though it is still exhausting, is no longer their "worst nightmare."
This determination has paid great dividends at the personal and local levels and beyond. With their tireless chronicling of their environment, TGA catches at fleeting life and holds it fast. In these fractious and pessimistic times, their regular evocations of a close-knit community in which the world is at home are balm to the soul. By noticing and committing to writing the loving-kindness that flourishes in a too-often overlooked part of the capital, they multiply it for a global audience. The blog performs a valuable public service not only for present-day Cockneys, but also for the large diaspora of those who —had history taken a different turn— might also have been born within the sound of Bow Bells.--Isabel Taylor