Taking a Walk
Led through the streets of east London… patrick barkham
GARY WING
I’ve always resisted guided walks, because they’re what tourists do. Especially in Spitalfields, just east of the City of London, where I lived 20 years ago. Then, as now, most guided walks consisted of gaggles of holidaymakers goggling at Jack the Ripper fables. This, though, was a guided East End ramble with a difference. Within seconds of meeting our guide, the enigmatic blogger known only as the Gentle Author (TGA), I felt my prejudices blow away like litter on the pavement. ‘We’re going time travelling and this is how we’re going to do it,’ said TGA, standing outside Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields. He removed a talisman from around his neck to reveal his mother’s wedding ring, his grandmother’s wedding ring, half-acrown from Elizabeth I and a Roman coin he bought from a grave-robber, worn for good luck two millennia ago. ‘Before Spitalfields was anything, it was a cemetery,’ TGA explained, and we were off. Our guide walked briskly ahead, after filling our heads with pictures of this busy inner-city neighbourhood in the 12th century,
when it was marshland beyond the City walls. Rough sleepers were shunted to the homeless shelter of Spital. TGA, a local resident since 1981, began telling the stories of neighbours past and present on his blog more than a decade ago. His guided walks are new. In the flesh, TGA is an even better storyteller, a magician of social history, who not only brings the past alive but reanimates the present. We see how today’s travails would be grimly – or amusingly – familiar to our ancestors. Our first stop is outside a building with ‘Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor 1902’ engraved above its doors. This area, then known as Little Jerusalem, was filled with exiles fleeing Russian violence in what is now Ukraine. Fishing the first of many laminated photos from a leather satchel, TGA told of four-year-old Harry from Ukraine, whose mother lied to the authorities about having a second child to obtain extra food tokens. Smelling a rat, the official asked Harry what his little sister was called. ‘Rosie,’ he deftly replied. From that moment, Harry Landis became an actor, growing up to take the
lead role in The Kitchen (1957) by Arnold Wesker, another citizen of Spitalfields. We twist through tiny streets, toxicscented wheelie bins enlivening stories of poverty, ancient and modern. We learn the origin of ‘tenterhooks’ and ‘refugee’, brought by the Huguenots, the Protestant silk weavers who fled persecution in 17thcentury France. We also discover recently minted words such as ‘façadism’. TGA illustrates this by showing us a decorative brick frontage – all that remains of a 19th-century pub, behind which there are shoddy, ugly 21st-century student flats. A theme emerged, pertinent to all London. Because new-builds are VAT-free but the tax is levied on refurbs, ‘There’s a financial imperative to destroy old buildings,’ explained TGA. At first, TGA was avowedly apolitical, but he’s been sucked into campaigns to save what is still a resolutely mixed neighbourhood of homes and small businesses from being swallowed by the City’s concrete-and-glass conquest. ‘Every old building in Spitalfields is left only because there was a fight over it that was won,’ said TGA as we marvelled at what remained of Elder Street, possibly the prettiest Georgian street in London. Behind it, 86 per cent of the fabric of a ‘conservation area’ is being destroyed by new development. This is not just an architectural tour but a walk where people are constantly present. Photographs whipped out of TGA’s satchel include everyone from Indian freedom fighter and assassin Udham Singh to artist Tracey Emin. We end, without a single mention of the Ripper, at TGA’s home, for tea and cake, baked to a 1720 recipe. As I wander away, I feel humbled by how ignorant I was as a resident of Spitalfields. How enlightened I have become as a tourist, realising that every street in every city holds a marvellous fund of stories, if only we stop, sniff and listen. Spitalfields tour (two hours) www.thegentleauthorstours.com The Oldie August 2022 87
