Brick Lane and Tubby Isaacs is the third and final part of my walk which began with A Walk In the City – March 1989. The previous post was Shops, Soup Kitchen, Spitalfields 1989.
Hanging on the wall outside the Mosque on Brick Lane were a number of posters for sale showing various aspects of the Muslim World.
As is widely known, the mosque – which I’ve photographed on various occasions so didn’t bother on this walk – has a long a varied history since it was built in 1743 as La Neuve Eglise for the Huguenots who had come to the area as refugees from persecution by Catholics in France.
In 1809 is became a Methodist chapel for the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, changing ten years later to a more mainstream Methodist chapel.
In 1898 it became the Spitalfields Great Synagogue for the Machzike Hadath communty of Lithuanian heritage, one of several large synagogues in the area. Not far away in Aldgate was the Great Synagogue of London (destroyed in wartime bombing) as well as the Sandys Row Synagogue and there were others in the area. After over 70 years the Machzike Hadath moved in 1970 to Golders Green where most of the community now lived.
The building was bought and refurbished by Bangladishis, by then the main community in the area, and opened as a mosque for in 1976 as the London Jamme Masjid. Friday sermons are in Bengali, English and Arabic and the Grade II listed building can accomodate over 3,000 worshippers.
I continued north up Brick Lane and was surprised to see this workmanlike horse-drawn cart crossing the street and going up Bacon Street, pulled by a rather resigned-looking small working horse.
I hadn’t seen something like this since I was in short trousers back in the early 1950s. There were still some breweries using horse-drawn drays, mainly for publicity but those were much grander affairs with huge Shire horses. This was a rather smaller and more crude heavy-duty construction, almost home-made compared to the highly finished examples my father worked on in his father’s workshop as a young man.
Probably you are more likely to see horse-drawn vehicles in London now than back in the 1980s, but these are either the grand carriages such as those used on occasions such as the Lord Mayor’s show or light traps in which a few mainly travellers occasionally come in from the countryside for a sporting Sunday ride around the capital.
The buildings on the corner of Brick Lane and Bethnal Green Road still look much the same, at least above the ground floor, where the shops are now rather less interesing than the Surplus Centre, dealing as it states in ‘Government Surplus Clothing & Camping Equipment, JEANS, Trousers, Combat & Donkey Jackets, Leather & Fur Lined Jackets, Motor Cycle Clothing, Anoraks, Shirts, Gloves, Tents & Everything For Camping’
Although the small print helpfully informs me “126 Brick Lane & 45-B Hanbury St Prop Contessa-Restaurants Ltd‘ and gives telephone numbers its difficult to recognise this location now, though I think the two doorways are still present if no longer in use on a graffitt-covered brick wall which has lost its upper storey, just a few yards east of Brick Lane on Hanbury St.
The first Indian Restaurant in Brick Lane was The Clifton, a cafe which opened in 1959 by Musa Patel, a Pakistani migrant to the UK in 1957, named after the wealthy seaside suburb of Karachi where he had been born in 1936.
In 1974 he made it into Brick Lane’s first licensed restuarant, later renamed The Famous Clifton. It was the first restaurant on the street to use a tandoori oven, and the first to attract customers other than the local Bangladeshi clientele and thus begin the transformation of Brick Lane. It closed soon after Musa Patel’s death in 1996.
H Suskin Textiles Ltd had a workshop in Wilkes St and are said to have had a shop at 45 Wilkes St, since demolished. This is very clearly at Number 45 so I think this is probably it. They also had a shop at 79 Brick Lane.
At the top of the flyposted window shutters are political posters in Bengali and English asking for votes for Mohammad Huque and Syed Islam in the local elections. Below that are three adverts for Gurdas Maan Nite, an Indian musical event starring the famous Indian Punjabi singer, songwriter & actor, probably on film.
At bottom right are adverts for an expensive Dinner and Dance in August 1988 at the London Hilton, but the largest space is taken by posters ‘Hands Off Afghanistan‘ advertising New Worker public meetings in Manchester, London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Sheffield calling for support for the People’s Government left in charge when the Russians withdrew and for an end to UK support by MI6 and the SAS of the Mujahideen. The New Worker is the weekly newspaper of a 1977 splinter group, the New Communist Party of Britain, from the Communist Party of Great Britain which among other differences had been opposed to the 1966 renaming of the Daily Worker as the Morning Star.
I walked on down Brick Lane and Osborne Street to Whitechapel High Street and then back towards the City. On my way I passed the corner with Goulston Street where until 2013 you could still see the world famous Tubby Isaacs sea food stall.
Isaacs was founded by Isaac Brenner in 1919, and when he emigrated to the USA in 1939 to avoid conscription it was taken over by Solomon Gritzman. He had a brother Barney who set up another stall opposite and the two were bitter rivals for many years – I think the ‘We Lead – Others Follow‘ was a reference to his brother. When Solly died in 1975 the business passed to his nephew Ted Simpson who had worked with him.
My picture shows his son Paul who had just taken over, having worked with his father since he was 14. In 2013 he decided it was time to close the stall as most of its customers had died. I don’t know where this gang of children came from but I don’t think they were about to buy anything back in 1989.
I made my way back to Bank for the train home, pausing only briefly for yet another picture of the recent Lloyd’s building, not digitised.
