The Gentle Author

For more than seven years, and without missing a single day, the Gentle Author – for that is the name he prefers – has written a daily story on his blog Spitalfields Life about the people and culture of the East End. There, he describes his "hare- brained" promise to write 10,000 stories about Spitalfields, which has grown to cover a much wider area of the East End. He affectionately depicts local people and places, and by doing so has become a celebrated diarist and cultural historian of our time.

The project has a deeply personal motivation. After his father died, the Gentle Author moved back to his childhood home in Devon to look after his mother who suffered from dementia. During the six years he lived with her until her death he was rarely able to leave the house. He couldn’t have done this, he says, without the help of some amazing people.

It was something that altered his view of life and made him realise just how extraordinary it is to be in the world. He had had a successful career as a writer, but from that point on he wanted to write in a different way. For one thing, he wished to express himself in an unmediated way, with no gatekeeper between him and the reader. He also wanted to write stories that nobody else was writing – about the ordinary and, to other eyes, invisible people that surrounded him.

He moved back to Spitalfields in 2009 (his first job was there in 1981) and began writing his now famous Spitalfelds Life. He started without much purpose beyond trying to take the idea of a blog as a literary form quite seriously. Very quickly he noticed that the more ambitious the stories, the quicker the readership grew. Besides writing his daily stories, he publishes books, teaches courses, leads political campaigns and writes articles for magazines and newspapers.

By way of writing Spitafields Life, the Gentle Author found out that his family actually came from the East End. When he published some letters his grandmother had written to his father (she was an unmarried mother who had to give him away as a child), two genealogists who read his blog got in touch with him. Together they were able to uncover his own ancestry. It turned out that his great-grandmother grew up just 50 yards from where he lives now near Brick Lane. To know that he is connected to the place through his ancestors makes him feel more comfortable writing about it.

The Gentle Author's pledge to write his daily stories means he will be writing for many years to come, but seven years into the project he is still enthusiastic. "The fact that I’ve written the life stories of about 1,500 people – that’s a real personal passion.” It's very distressing to the Gentle Author to know that when people die, sometimes their life stories, along with their work, are lost for ever. This is part of the reason he writes Spitafield Life and the stories he reveals help to immortalise the fascinating people of the East End. Last autumn, for example, he published a selection of remarkable paintings created by artist Doreen Fletcher. She had given up her art years ago because of the lack of interest in her work. When he published her paintings of the East End in Spitalfields Life it was a sensation. Several galleries became interested and a solo show is now planned.

It's wonderful to hear stories like this and it shows just how influential Spitalfields Life has become and how many possibilities it has created. In all the years the Gentle Author has been writing, and to his own surprise, he has been able to keep his identity secret. Writing anonymously is not a publicity stunt but a device deliberately chosen to put the people and the culture centre stage. “I decided to step back and all I want to reveal is that my intention in doing this is benign.”

We are lucky to have had the chance to meet the Gentle Author and, by way of Spitalfields Life, will continue to accompany him on his wanderings for many years to come.

What makes you most proud? I suppose you could say that I’m proud that the 1838 Marquis of Lansdowne Pub is still there in Cremer Street, Hoxton. We saved that pub when the Geffrye Museum wanted to use Heritage Lottery funding to demolish it. I thought it was disgraceful, because they call themselves a "museum of the home" and in the East End the pub is an extension of the domestic space. When the director of the museum justified this by saying that the museum was "not interested in the culture of the labouring classes" it was very disappointing. But at that point I realised that we had a huge readership who could write letters of objection. It was class war. And the Hackney Planning Committee refused permission for demolition. That’s a victory you could say I'm proud of.

What are you working on? Photographer John Claridge took more photographs in the East End in the fifties and sixties than anyone else. Because he was just a kid with a camera everyone was very open to him and he took many beautiful photographs, which we are now putting together into the definitive book of his work to be published this summer.

Best coffee in these parts? I don’t drink coffee but my favourite places for a cup of tea are Pellicci’s in Bethnal Green, Leila’s Café in Shoreditch and the Town House in Spitalfields. Those are the places I like to go.

Where do you eat out? I like St. John Bread & Wine in Spitalfields – it’s my regular and it never disappoints.

What do you do at weekends? I don’t really have weekends, but I do love to go to the market. Occasionally, it’s been possible to have guest writers take over sometimes, but the irony is that when I do get a few days off it is to finish a book or to tidy the house.

Anything you would change? In Spitalfields, there’s now a vacant lot where they demolished the London Fruit & Wool Exchange. There were more than a 100 small businesses in there and Tower Hamlets Council voted unanimously to save the building but Boris Johnson overruled them in favour of the developers. It’s going to become chain stores and headquarters for an international law firm. Boris wants to do the same thing in Norton Folgate. Tower Hamlets refused the developers but he is going to overturn that. And then there is the Bishopsgate Goods Yard... With over 40,000 on the housing list, Hackney and Tower Hamlets object to a luxury development of tower blocks of flats that will put the Boundary Estate into permanent shadow. There will be no benefit for local people and it will blight the East End for generations to come. Boris Johnson is able to overrule local democracy and do all this. If I could change one thing it would be to take that power away from him.

The area’s best-kept secret? Well, I’d say it is Paul Gardner’s paper bag shop (see picture below). I’ve written about it a lot. It’s just up the road at 149 Commercial Street. It was opened by James Gardner in 1870 and then his son Bertie took over, and then his son Ray took over and now Paul Gardner is there. It is the oldest-established business here and it’s the cheapest paper bag shop in London. It also sells balls of strings and tags... anything you could need to do with market trading. And it’s a wonderful place because Paul is a very charismatic man and all the customers love him. His shop is like a pub where people stand around and tell stories, an incredible institution and the hub of Spitalfields. The whole meaning of Spitalfields is bound up with that place.

If the East End were human? It would be Nicholas Culpeper, a physician in the 17th century. He believed it was wrong that the Royal College of Physicians could set the price of what it cost to see a doctor because it meant that most people could never see one. He worked and lived in Spitalfields and was the first to put forward the idea that healthcare ought be free as a human right. He treated 40 people a day for free and translated medical books from Latin into English so that anyone could read them. His generous and radical spirit embodies the best of the East End.

East End in a word? Resourcefulness.

www.spitalfieldslife.com

This article was co-written with Julie Daniels and appeared in the January 2016 issue of LoveEast Magazine

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