Last of the swagmen

I have hitherto resisted my wife’s frequent recommendations that I should read a daily blog about the life of the denizens of Spitalfields, but, now that they have been published in book form, I can see why she is such an enthusiast.

The Gentle Author is deliberately anonymous and bases his style on a combination of John Gay and Henry Mayhew, a pseudo-18th-century faux naïf, who wanders round his local neighbourhood collecting the tales of ordinary folk, including the last of the so-called swagmen who has a market stall in Spitalfields, the waiter in an Indian restaurant just off Brick Lane, Fred, who sells chestnuts at the corner of Bell Lane and Wentworth Street, and Paul Gardner, the fourth generation in his family to sell paper bags.

Most popular

Jawad Iqbal

Blue Origin’s all-female space flight was a step backwards for feminism

It is astonishing how many small traders survive through several generations and what stories they have to tell, like Maria Pellicci who works a 13-hour shift running her family’s café in the Roman Road, having left Tuscany in 1961. Many of them are immigrants, but they have been sucked into the life of the neighbourhood, sometimes over several generations, and are admirably unembittered about the racial prejudice they met in the 1950s.

There are some people who I would have liked to be included. I’m sorry, for example, that the Gentle Author never managed to interview David London, who ran an old East End tailors in the Bethnal Green Road, supplying suits to Gilbert and George before departing to Spain. And he ought to have caught Richard Naylor, an ex-architect, who established Jones the Dairy as a reincarnation of an old East End food shop in the late 1970s just off Columbia Road.   

Some of the stories are incredibly moving, like the account of Joan Rose, who was brought up living poor in the Boundary Estate, where her father ran a greengrocers in Calvert Avenue, before moving to Blackpool in the war and became a teacher in Becontree.