Gayle Chong Kwan, Alma Mater, Alma Enterprises, London, 2006
On a softer note, Gayle Chong Kwan’s installation produces a profound and insightful experience that also touches on the canal alongside the gallery. A tiny dinner table set with small samples of food can be enjoyed whilst blindfolded, accompanied by a headphone soundtrack. Meanwhile, menus on the table recount the experiences of local shop owners being displaced by the drive to regenerate the neighbourhood around the gallery.
Anthony Alexander, a-n reviews, a-n magazine, April 2006
Alma Mater is Latin for ‘nourishing mother, taken from the motto ‘Alma Mater Studiorum’ of the oldest European University, the Universitry of Bologne, AD 1088. Reflecting the way in which the area around Alma Enterprises is being consumed and changed through the influx of art galleries and studios as well as other developments, Alma Mater sets up a conversation between people who live and work in the area surrounding the gallery, with visitors to the exhibition.
A small half circle table, covered in a white tablecloth, displays various sensory objects and food, suggested by businesses, communities and individuals that are local to Alma Enterprises. Participants include: Marie, who lives in sheltered accommodation nearby; Cyprus Taxis, which re-condition and re-sprays black Hackney cabs; Lewis Milk Supplies, whose family business started over a hundred years ago when the Welsh came to the East End and ran the milk trade; Lazy Days furniture removals and sales, where Terry, who has lived in Bethnal Green all his life, works; and Regent’s Canal, which snakes alongside Alma Enterprises.
Visitors were invited to take a seat on the accompanying chair and to put on a blindfold and headphones if they wish. A menu for each participant recounts the story of my initial conversations and relationship with each participant, a dish containing their suggested food or object, a small booklet for each participant, and a pencil. When reading Marie’s story visitors are offered a slice of French Sandwich cake she first shared with me. When reading about Cyprus Taxis, visitors are not given a food or object but are asked to feel their bare skin for a graze, scar or nick and to recount a story from that, reflecting the way in which Cyprus Taxis use their senses, their hands rather than eyes, to feel along each taxi for where it needs to be sanded down, smoothed and re-sprayed. In these booklets visitors are able to write their own responses and memories aroused by each sensory element. These entries accumulated as the exhibition progresses and were given to each participant at the end of the exhibition (the entries for Regent’s Canal will be posted up there).
Text from exhibition
Instructions | Marie’s Story | Irfen’s Story | Terry’s Story | Canal Story | John’s Story
Marie’s Story | back to top
I first met Marie (the emphasis is on the Ma not the rie in the way you pronounce her name) on Cambridge Heath Road. I was going to the shops to buy some coffee. Marie was trying to cross the road by the Museum of Childhood, her face was covered in blue bruises and cuts, like she had been beaten up. I thought that she could not see where she was going and I was right, she said she had broken her glasses when she had tripped on the pavement a few days before when she had also got the bruises. I am really shortsighhted and sometimes try to see if it is possible for me to walk without glasses or contact lenses to my local shop, I find it terrifying and feel like I am somehow underwater and may drown from myopia during the short walk there and back to my house. She said that she had grown up in the East End and Bethnal Green all her life and had thought that, even without her glasses, she would be able to make her way around.
I asked if she was okay and offered to accompany her and gave her my arm to lean on. She was on her way to her first day in sheltered accommodation for elderly people, just near my house and kept saying that she was so grateful I was helping her and that she did not want to be a bother. I got her to the home and said I would like to visit her sometimes if that was okay with her as I just lived next door.
A few weeks later I popped round with vanilla Viennese whirl biscuits. She had bought a French Sandwich cake for my visit and we shared a slice each over a cup of tea. I told her how my Grandmother lived in Scotland and that I missed being able to just pop round to see her like I used to. Marie told me her children, who were stepchildren through her marriage, all lived in Australia. When they had asked her if she would be okay if they left she said of course they had to go, how could she stop them doing what they wanted for her.
Marie showed me around the sheltered accommodation, just so that I knew what it was like for when I was older.
She also gave me her email address and demonstrated the internet system she had in her flat. She goes to weekly classes to learn how to use it properly and makes notes and underlines all the important information from the course. She asked me to let any other people over 65 in the area that they can get a grant to help them install the system and invited me to share another kind of cake with her the following week.
Irfen’s Story | back to top
I had walked past Cyprus Taxis, which is opposite to Alma Enterprises, and always thought that there was a sensory aspect to their work. Carcasses or taxis lie around outside, and are transformed with an alchemical process inside into gleaming, smooth and sprayed black taxi cabs. I had thought that the men that worked there had an ‘appreciation’ of the body, whether female or in the form of a vehicle, in the same way that men who work with meat in butchers seem to. All the men that worked there were born in Cyprus or had Cypriot parents.
I spoke to Irfen, who is in charge of bodywork, at Cyprus Taxis. He explained that he did not visually check out the body work for any nicks or gazes or rust, but that he ran his hands across the entire surface of the taxi body to feel for what needed to be repaired.
Terry’s Story | back to top
I had bought a 1950s side table for £30 from Lazy Days on Cambrdige Heath Road, and when it was delivered I got chatting to Terry, who worked there. We reflected on the changes in the area, especially now that Bestways Cash and Carry had knocked down the original Victorian building and is in the process of constructing a huge modern stripy building in its place. Terry remembers the old building, the horses and carriages entering the yard when he was a young boy.
Broadway Market used to be the best market in the East End. Terry and his brothers had two fruit and veg stalls there, they used to push the barrows from Hoxton Market to Broadway Market, over the bridge that was then called Mutton Bridge, but that was in the days when Terry says he had muscles and looked like a bodybuilder.
Along Vyner Street was Lime Wharf, where Terry remembers them unloading the barges of tea and tobacco. Liptons, which was based just down the road, used to employ over five thousand people, and there was also the Brook Bond based in the East End. Terry recalls the scents and smells of the tea and the tobacco in the East End when he was young.
Terry says there used to be a Mulberry Tree opposite York Hall, as the Huguenot silk weavers who moved into the area used to feed the silk worms on Mulberry leaves.
I went back to Lazy Days to ask Terry more about this tree and he drew me a plan of the Huguenot houses, with the weaving in the attic, accessible through a small door. He recalls visiting one as a child, he thought their layout very economical.
Terry says a Danish woman spoke to him about the Mulberry Tree and that she is planning a campaign to reinstate the tree in its original position.
Terry remembers as a child that the garden area, alongside where the tree once stood, used to be known as Barmy Park, as there was a Mental Hospital just the other side of the park. Officially named the Bethnal House Lunatic Asylum there was also a British Penitent Female Refuge on Old Bethnal Green Road or Hackney Road.
Terry says he was good at art when he was young and that he once won a drawing competition in the Daily Mail. He says that he and his brother, Henry, designed the Bethnal Green crest. His son has the original. Another version, but not his, he says, stands carved on the Old Bethnal Green Town Hall, which now stands empty.
Terry showed me how where Lazy Days now stands used to be a dairy. He says the sloping floor and sliding doors stand testament to its former use.
Canal Story | back to top
East London’s canal network snakes past Alma Enterprises, stretching along East to Limehouse Basin and north along to Islington. The canal’s fishermen catch mainly carp. The cold weather meant there were few fishermen out, let alone any who had caught anything, but in warmer months if you manage to buy one from them, or even fish yourself, Mrs Beeton provides a recipe you may find useful
Stewed Carp
1 carp
salt
stock
2 onions
6 cloves
12 peppercorns
1 blade mace
1/4 pint of port wine
the juice of 1/2 lemon
cayenne and salt to taste
a faggot of savoury herbs
Scale the fish, clean it nicely, and, if very large, divide it; lay it in the stewpan, after having rubbed a little salt on it, and put in sufficient stock to cover it; add the herbs, onions, and spices, and stew gently for 1 hour, or rather more should it be very large. Dish up the fish with great care, strain the liquir, and add to it the port wine, lemon-juice, and cayenne; give one boil, pout it over the fish, and serve.This fish can be boiled plain, and served with parsley and butter. Chub and Char may be cooked in the same manner as the above, as also Dace and Roach.
Walking the stretch of the Canal trying to find fresh caught carp did bring another kind of sensory encounter, in the form of fresh eggs, thrown at myself and other ‘canal walkers’ by three young boys from the street above.
Regent’s Canal offers you this simple soup, which I have made fresh from nettles I found growing along the side of the canal.
Wild Irish Nettle Soup
12oz / 350g nettle leaves and young tender stems
3-4oz / 75-110g butter
A mixture of leek, onion and celery, roughly chopped (about 6oz / 175g total weight)
2.5 pints / 1.5 litres chicken stock
1.5 lb / 675g potatoes, sliced
0.75 pint / 425ml single cream
salt and freshly group black pepper
Wash the nettles. Melt 3oz/75g of the butter in a heavy based pan and sweat the leek, onion, celery and the nettles for 5 to 6 minutes without browning. Add the chicken stock and bring to the boil, then add the potatoes. Cook over a low heat for about 40 to 50 minutes. Liquidize the soup to a fine puree, then return it to the pan, and add the cream. Salt and pepper to taste, reheat gently and check the consistency. Some extra butter may be whisked for a richer, smoother finish. Garnish each serving with a blanched nettle leaf.
I recommend this as an ideal accompaniment to Stewed Carp.
John’s Story | back to top
Terry at Lazy Days had thought that Lewis’s Supplies might have been the dairy that had started out at their site. I wanted to ask the women who worked in the Lewis shop on Hackney Road about this possible connection, but when I arrived I found it closed in the middle of the day.
A few doors down the road, was Lewis Dairies headquarters, where I went to inquire as to why the shop was shut. The man who greeted me at the door introduced himself as John Lewis, and explained that he was the grandson of Lewis Lewis, who had set up Lewis’s Milk Supplies. It turned out that John’s father, Glyn, whom I remember working in the Lewis shop, had died two weeks ago. On his death the family had decided, partly through economic considerations and partly on the wishes of his mother, that they would have to close and sell the shop. It had been running continuously for nearly seventy-five years to the day. John said that he had been surprised at how many people in the area had come in asking about the shop, and that it was only now that it was gone that he thought people had really become aware of it. He thought it was the same with his father. Glyn had started work every day so early that by the time John came home from he was already asleep, leaving little time for them to share their days with each other.
My grandfather, Douglas, had just died a few days before and we talked about our losses. John said he had been so busy organising things for the business that he thought his father’s death had not really sunk in. His father had never been ill and had worked continuously with daybreak starts throughout his life. It was his heart that got him in the end, just really old age. My grandfather had died from angina, but it was old age too, 86 years, that got him in the end.
John recounted his father as a man of few but well chosen words, he had charisma and people listened to him, he had definitely been the head of the family. Glyn had been the one responsible for the ‘look’ of the Lewis shop. He had stacked the shelves every day of his life. He would have kept more goods, stacked to the roof, as it used to be done, but Environmental Health said that anything on display in a shop legally must be for sale, and that meant that he was not allowed to keep out of date goods on the shelves, and so would have had to rearrange the them every few days, which would have been too much work. Environmental Health had also wanted Glyn to move the bread serving area from being near the window, where incoming sunshine could ‘spoil’ the bread, to the back of the shop. Glyn had thought this a regulation too far and said that as soon as the Council removed all the market stalls from Bethnal Green Road, he would move his bread. He never heard from them again.
John said his father would have enjoyed speaking to me about the changes he had witnessed in his lifetime. He used to love telling stories about the milk business, particularly how he used to graze the cows in Victoria Park and how his father, Lewis Lewis, used to meet the train at Paddington to receive the milk coming from Wales. The Lewis family are from Kilkenin, mid Wales, where they still have a family house.
The Welsh connection with the London dairy trade started with the cattle drovers who brought cattle from Wales to Smithfield meat market. These drovers often acted as ‘agents’ for women from impoverished areas in Wales by finding them seasonal work. Many of these women stayed on and found regular work in the dairy trade, and as the agricultural depression in Wales worsened they were joined by their brothers. By 1881 the Welsh ran a quarter of London’s dairies. The milksellers had ‘milk walks’, regular rounds of streets where they walked, which could be sold off to other milksellers. In the days before refrigeration rounds were often served four times a day.
John had seen the milk distribution in the UK centralise. All their milk now came from Dairycrest, but there was also Express, which served the home counties and more rural areas, and Wiseman’s, which operates north of the border. Lewis is a commercial rather than a domestic supplier, and John say it is mainly semi-skimmed rather than full fat, which was all that was known when he was a boy, that is ordered from them. In 1977 Glyn decided to bring all the different parts of the business into one area, containing the current office, giant milk fridges, delivery vans and a depot. They had previously operated from various points all around the area. John has only one child, a daughter, who at seventeen years old, he says she, understandably, is not particularly interested in the milk business. He doubts she will want to take over the running of Lewis’s Supplies from him, as he has done from his father, and his father did from his father before.
