Tag: Pie and Mash

Get the photos others can’t…

Michael Freeman, an old mate, a prodigious photographer and author – and an all-round very smart chap – has generously included me in a list of thirty photographers from across the world who are illustrative of various photographic practices that link to the title of this post.

I’m not sure whether I deserve to be in this list (along with the exceptional William Albert Allard) but Michael’s new book, Get the Photos Others Can’t illustrates, amongst many others, the notion of home territory – the idea that your knowledge of the everyday familiar will be invaluable in making images – with my work on London’s pie and mash shops. It’s ironic as Michael says that I’ve spent almost all of my career abroad, but it’s true that one never forgets where one comes from…

There’s an interview about how I approach and how I photograph people from a culture that I’m very familiar with as well as three illustrative images.

It’s a lovely book and, apart from my contribution, well worth a look.

Categories Blog, interview, photography, Tearsheet, Writing

Tearsheet – Mare Magazine

Photographers – well, certainly this one – are often disappointed when they give over their work to a magazine to publish.

The German Mare Magazine however, have done an absolutely wonderful job with my work on London’s iconic pie and mash shops in their latest issue. Essentially, a spread of my last book, The Englishman and the Eel (Dewi Lewis, 2017) it is beautifully and respectfully laid out over an enormous sixteen pages that give both my images and text space to breathe and shine.

It’s a long time since a magazine has given me so much space – especially a magazine that I’ve honestly wanted to work with for such a long time.

Wonderful.

 

 

 

Categories Blog, photography, Tearsheet, Writing

A new book – The Englishman and the Eel

 

 

I’m delighted to say that my new book, The Englishman and the Eel will be published by Dewi Lewis this  November.

A sort of companion to my last book (also with Dewi), The Palaces of Memory – Tales from the Indian Coffee House, it explores the eel, pie and mash shops of my childhood. In doing so it examines the rich, largely undocumented cultural heritage of generations of working-class Londoners in a city whose only constant is change. After spending the best part of twenty-five years working in Asia and Africa, this marks a departure and a conscious effort to return home and examine Britain at a crucial juncture.

You can order the book from Dewi’s site or directly from me.

Here’s one of my favourite, but less obvious images from the book…

 

Cindy and customers at T and J Kelly Pie and Mash shop, Loughton, Essex

 

Categories Blog, photography, Writing

The joy of the jellied eel?

 

According to a report in the Observer newspaper, Britain is again falling for the charms of the jellied eel. Apparently Tesco sales of the stuff have grown by “35% since the supermarket giant took a gamble and started selling them outside London”. The increase in consumption is being “attributed to a new, more austere environment”.

I’ve written and photographed jellied eels and the Pie and Mash shops of the East End a fair few times for different magazines over the last couple of years and I have to say reports that I have heard from there tell a completely different story. Very, very few people ask for eels in pie shops these days and those that do seem to fall into two categories. Firstly, older people that have always eaten them and remember their hayday pre-1950/60’s and secondly, young middle class emigres to the trendier spots of Hackney, that do so once for a bet.

What I suspect we might be seeing are the novelty buying habits of communities that still identify with the traditional accoutrement of a rosy, cosy fug of a dying white working class culture. These are to be found primarily in the post-war new towns of Hertfordshire and Essex. That would certainly explain the supermarket connection and why at least most pie and mash shops stopped killing and jellying their own eels years ago. Jellied eels are totemic of a simpler and now unrecognisable East End Victoriana but eels have long been a staple part of London food and were synonymous with the city and its people. In King Lear, Shakespeare’s Fool in his ramblings to the King, witters – “Cry to it, nuncle, as the Cockney did to the eels when she put ’em i’ the paste alive; she knapped ’em o’ the coxcombs with a stick, and cried ‘Down, wantons, down!’”

In a city dominated and bisected by the River Thames the eel’s popularity was that it was plentiful, cheap and when most meat or fish had to be preserved in salt, eel could be kept alive in puddles of water. The Victorian curate Reverend David Badham reports in his ‘Prose Halieutics; Or Ancient and modern fish tattle’ published in 1854 that –

“London steams and teems with eels alive and stewed. For one halfpenny a man of the million may fill his stomach with six or seven long pieces and wash them down with a sip of the glutinous liquid they are stewed in.”

Such was the demand that eels were brought over from The Netherlands in great quantities by Dutch eel schuyts and these were commended for helping feed London during the Great Fire in 1666. Although they were seen as inferior to domestic eels, the British government rewarded the Dutch for their charity by Act of Parliament in 1699 granting them exclusive rights to sell eels from their barges on the Thames. During the nineteenth century however, the Thames became increasingly polluted so that it could no longer sustain significant eel populations and the Dutch ships had to stop further upstream to prevent their cargo being spoiled.

The rise of the pie shops were a direct result of the adulteration of eels and pies sold on the streets. The shops were indicators of aspiration for sections of the urban working class and their physical rootedness. Their decoration and their hygiene were ways to ape ‘social betters’. The idea in the Observer article that jellied eels are traditionally austerity food is wrong. They were seen, certainly in the pie shops, as a treat. In wider society however, eating jellied eels and pies has a comedic value (but then the British always either laughed at or scorned its poor – except when it sent them off to die in the mud or Flanders or elsewhere) and a resonance with the ‘jolly’ Pearly Kings and Queens. Nowadays seen as quaint costumed charity workers, they were originally leading and respected costermongers that would settle often violent street disputes between gangs. A cartoon representation of poverty and tradition. The undoubted death of the pie mash and eel shops on the High Street is symptomatic of what the New Economics Foundation calls ‘clone town Britain’ where every High Street has the same shops. As Jane Jacobs argued in the Death and Life of Great American Cities (1960) communities are “created by myriad small daily encounters… the sum of such casual, public contact at local level is a feeling for the public identity… a web of public respect and trust”. It was that trust that made people flock to eel and pie shops in the late Nineteenth century because they knew that the food was ‘clean’ and somehow honest. It is what drives a more allegedly ‘sophisticated’ palate away today.

It’s what drives people to shop at Tesco. Even those whose families would describe themselves as ‘working-class East Enders’ whilst  living in more affluent suburbs.

When I interviewed Graham Poole, one of three brothers that run the authentic, remaining Manze pie and mash shops, he seemed to bear this out.

“We get emails at all times of night – after people have had a few drinks… old East Enders that have moved out, reminisce – they want their eels and pies”.

They want their memories.

Some memories are dangerous however. As much as I personally enjoy eating them, eels are endangered. In 2010 eel populations in the Thames had fallen by 98% in five years. Across the country there are similar issues. Nobody really understands why elvers aren’t spawning – but then nobody actually knows the precise mechanism for and the location of, the migration to the Sargasso Sea.

Catholic priest Father Oliver Kennedy, 80, has for forty years run one of the only remaining commercially viable wild eel fisheries in Europe (Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland). “Things are very bad (for the eel) in Germany, Holland and France… we on the other hand are relatively safe – we buy elvers out of the Severn (River in the UK) and they take between twelve and twenty years to mature so our crisis might be delayed”.

It is clear however that unless we find a way to farm eels like salmon or clear migratory paths, the European eel may not see the end of the century.

 

 

UK - London - A bowl of jellied eels in Cookes' Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Hoxton, London, UKEel, pie and mash shops are a traditional but dying business. Changing tastes and the scarcity of the eel has meant that the number of shops selling this traditional working class food has declined to just a handful mostly in east London. The shops were originally owned by one or two families with the earliest recorded, Manze's on Tower Bridge Road being the oldest surviving dating from 1908. Generally eels are sold cold and jellied and the meat pie and mash potato covered in a green sauce called liquor.
UK – London – A bowl of jellied eels in Cookes’ Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Hoxton. Pie and mash shops are a traditional but dying business. Changing tastes and the scarcity of the eel has meant that the number of shops selling this traditional working class food has declined to just a handful mostly in east London. The shops were originally owned by one or two families with the earliest recorded, Manze’s on Tower Bridge Road being the oldest surviving dating from 1908. Generally eels are sold cold and jellied and the meat pie and mash potato covered in a green sauce called liquor.

 

UK - London - Joe Cooke killing and gutting eels in the yard of Cookes' Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Hoxton
UK – London – Joe Cooke killing and gutting eels in the yard of Cookes’ Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Hoxton

 

UK - London - A bucket of eels ready to be killed and gutted at the rear of Cookes' Eel, Pie and mash shop in Hoxton
UK – London – A bucket of eels ready to be killed and gutted at the rear of Cookes’ Eel, Pie and mash shop in Hoxton

 

 

Categories Blog, photography, Writing

Manzes Pie and Mash shop now a listed building

 

I’m delighted that one of the traditional Pie and Mash shops that I was privileged to photograph a couple of years ago has been given Grade II Listed status.

According to the citation, “The building, which was first opened to the public in 1929, has been given the accolade for its ‘beautifully preserved interiors’, which have never been replaced or modernised”

I wrote and photographed at length about London’s dying Pie and Mash shops (and jellied eels) on this blog last year. See here.

Here’s a small selection of images from Manzes in Walthamstow Market.

 

UK - London - L Manze
UK – London – L Manze Eel, Pie and Mash Shop in Walthamstow East London. Although the shop still trades under the Manze name it is now independently owned and no longer part of the Manze family business.

 

UK - London - Manze's Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow, East London,
UK – London – Manze’s Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow, East London,

 

UK - London - The interior (including the painted tin tiles on the ceiling) of Manze's Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow,
UK – London – The interior (including the painted tin tiles on the ceiling) of Manze’s Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow

 

 

UK - London - Manze's Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow, East London, UK.Although the shop still trades under the original Manze name, it is now independently owned and no longer part of the Manze family. This resturant is a Grade-2 listed building with antique pressed-tin tiles on the ceiling
UK – London – Manze’s Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow, East London, UK. Although the shop still trades under the original Manze name, it is now independently owned and no longer part of the Manze family. This resturant is a Grade-2 listed building with antique pressed-tin tiles on the ceiling

 

UK - London - Period tiling at Manze's Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow, East London
UK – London – Period tiling at Manze’s Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow, East London

 

UK - London - Details of an antique cash register at Manze's Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow,
UK – London – Details of an antique cash register at Manze’s Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow,

 

 

 

Categories Blog, photography, Writing

Another Effilee Magazine spread

 

I’m delighted to see another of my pieces running in this month’s excellent Effilee Magazine. It’s a story I shot and wrote for them a couple of months ago called The Englishman and the Eel. It deals with the traditional London food (which is not fish and chips) of eels, pie and mash.

The piece attempts to look at (amongst other things) the significance and the decline of the eel and its fading from the changing London consciousness. For the story I photographed those palaces of Cockney culture, the Pie and Mash shops.

I will post the 5500 word piece on my website in the near future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Blog, photography

Yer actual Olympics. Innit?

I just picked up a story today from the Newham Recorder about how, and I quote,

“Pie and mash, jellied eels and a dose of Cockney charm will be used to sell a slice of the East End during the 2012 Olympics”.

Apparently the Mayor wants to showcase ‘local’ foods at the events but it seems that independent food producers will be excluded by the Olympic Committee in favour of exclusive deals with multi-national chains. Of course there’s nothing like watching supremely talented athletes in a competition sponsored by a burger company specialising in fatty, over salted, reconstituted animal ‘product’. The irony of the Olympics was never lost on Iain Sinclair however, and in this piece he articulates what a great number of Londoners feel – that the whole thing is a unsavoury liaison between developers and government. It will undoubtedly make both parties a great deal of money but like the enormous blue fence that surrounds the building work will effectively exclude the locals.

Interestingly, the traditional non-globalised foodstuffs of the London poor – eels, fish and chips and cheap cuts of meat, never caused an epidemic of obesity, developmental problems or litter. Still, best not to stand in the way of progress…

Here’s an image to warm the cockles on a cold November night – a shot of a pie and mash shop in Hoxton produced for an Annual Report a couple of years ago.

Bon appetit.

UK - London - a woman pours liquor into a carton in a Pie and Mash shop in Hoxton
UK - London - a woman pours liquor into a carton in a Pie and Mash shop in Hoxton

Categories Blog, photography

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