The Albert Square matriarch, Peggy Mitchell, once told her former husband’s brother (with whom she was romantically involved) “I’m old East End. Proper. You don’t mess with me”. Seemingly, what she meant by being “old East End” was that she was to be feared, rather than approached by in-laws for sexual encounters.
This toughness is typical of the East End, an area which has a history like maybe no other region in London. In this column I intend to look at the relationship between the East End of old and new, looking at the changes and the stalwarts in landscape, residents and culture, focussing on one street or district in each article.
Vol. 1: Brushfield Street – Christ Church and Consumption
Brushfield Street
Brushfield Street (formerly Paternoster Row) is the one little bit of serenity one can encounter between Bishopsgate and Brick Lane. An East End to City walk through, it has all of the dichotomous aspects one has come to expect from a modern street in the East End – elegant, iconic Hawksmoor-designed church at one end and busy, hellish approach to Liverpool St. station at the other. Stuck in the middle of the street, spilling out of the side like some kind of allegorical sandwich spread, are the New and Old (of course!) Spitalfields Markets.
On a summer’s day you can find all manner of hipsters and Essex girls sat on the lawn by the market, crammed between outdoor sports shops and Patisserie Valerie (engaged in an intriguing demonstration of diametric dialectics – smoking roll-ups and discussing Yo La Tengo/drinking lattes and discussing hair extensions). On winter nights one can take in all of the kept oldness of The Gun, a pub which is ostensibly proud not convert to any of this modern day poncery, instead electing to keep a bit of the spit and sawdust charm that would have been the gold standard of a proper East End boozer of the ‘60s, the East End of old.
Modern day Brushfield Street has an air of calm about it that none of its neighbouring carriageways or footways can claim to possess. Maybe it has something to do with Hawksmoor’s wonderful Christ Church, bearing down like a structural elegy, all Pagan and quiet, forcing the inhabitants of the street to go about their business in a slightly more reserved manner than those rats racing through the city (by Christopher Wren’s lavish St. Paul’s Cathedral) or those DJs thuggishly tearing through sets in Shoreditch. Or it could be to do with the comparative lack of motor cars slashing through the still with their intrusive black smoke and noisy engines. Maybe Brushfield Street is a touch calmer due to Spitalfieds Market taking all of the noisy tourists and nutjobs away from its pristine splendour. It’s hard to know quite why such a seraphic experience lies on the edge of Bishopsgate, but it’s undeniable that it does.
Christ Church
Forever immortalised in From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s masterwork of a graphic novel-cum-Jack the Ripper serialisation, Christ Church is the jewel in the Spialfields crown. Hanging over Brushfield Street like a flag on an embassy, the church has such a commanding presence on the street that it even overshadows the markets (be they the fashion or monetary kind nearby).
The great straight lines of the nave point in a parallel fashion, as if pre-empting those drainpipe jeans favoured by your average East End dweller these days. Indeed, as if knowing that the East End would one day be the place that the rest of the country looked to for aesthetic iconography, Christ Church was one of the first of a scheduled 50 churches to be built called the Commissioners’ Churches (the commissioners list including Wren and Thomas Archer), of which only 12 would be built (six would come from the legendary pencil of Hawksmoor – many of these were built in the East End).
Christ Church has all of the style and, now, comic book geek chic a modern day East End type may expect from anything in Spitalfields, and while it is not technically on Brushfield Street, it is most certainly best viewed from this fantastic little enclave of the East End. Without Christ Church watching over it in a placatory, soothing fashion, the street would not have the same allure that it rightfully holds. Not then, not now, not ever.
Consumption
Spitalfields Market is as good a representation of how the East End has, rather than completely rebuilt itself, but recontextualised itself as any. Originally a food market in the 1600s in what was then the outskirts of London, it was closed down and re-opened in that decade, but came to take shape properly as we know it in the 1880s. In 1926 an extension was built and, thus, we have Old and New Spitalfields Markets.
Having been a market designed for the trade of food in its older incarnation, the market has now taken on record stalls, vintage fashion stalls, jewellery stalls, book stalls, art stalls… stalls which are for the acquisition of anything one may associate with the modern East End basically. It now houses some fine street food vendors too, where one can take in many of the flavours of the world, in a manifestation of the old which could be described as a microcosm of the East End’s former dockyards.
Spitalfieds Market is the cultural hub squeezing itself out of the north of Brushfield Street where the main commodity is consumption itself, but in that most East End of ways, it’s not the kind of consumption so favoured by many in the West End – the buying of the new to be up to date – but, rather, the buying of the used, old or international to be truly in vogue. It acts as a fine representation of the zeitgeist in fashion in general over the last 10 to 15 years: it’s only new if it’s old.
Our Fathers Wouldn’t Recognise It
Cheap puns (such as the one above on Brushfield Street’s former name) aside, it is arguable that the fathers of many of this generation’s kids, who knew the street of old, maybe wouldn’t recognise it. Or, rather, in that way that one does when one reaches a certain age, they may profess not to, what with all of the modernising effects that have been placed on the old street.
Be it through modern chain eateries such as Eat and Patisserie Valerie or the marquee-like sitting area by the entrance to Spitalfields Market, Brushfield Street has been given a bit of a facelift. Equally though, its main features of Christ Church and consumption are still its most enduring ones. It draws many parallels with Argyll Street in the West End, which similarly sits between the manic main road (Oxford Street instead of Bishopsgate) and the fashionable, vintage-obsessed cool row (Carnaby Street instead of Brick Lane). Like a reaction to the London that surrounds it, Brushfield Street is the quieter, more stoic little brother of its surroundings.
