Tales of the City: Spitalfields under threat

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Eric Garcia

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I discovered Spitalfields Market by accident earlier this year. On the way to interview Gilbert & George at their Fournier Street address, I spotted a cool-looking bar called the Spitz and resolved to check it out. Next Friday evening, over music and pints of Guinness, I discovered that its ground-floor restaurant opened onto the back of London's old fruit and veg market (closed and bare at that time of night) and resolved to try its wares at the weekend.

Two days later, I stood in a throng of milling visitors, browsing at a couple of hundred stalls, astonished by the high quality, the variety and profusion and (especially) the one-off nature of the stuff on display: electric flowers to festoon on your lady-friend's ballgown; lacquered boxes plastered with Varga pin-up girls; fancy waistcoats; home-made chilli jam. The next week, I brought the children. The smallest one marvelled at the ceiling-dangled fairyland of a shop called Queens, run by two camp Australians in skin-tight vests; the eldest one craved the £400 electric-neon Budweiser signs on sale nearby. We all decided: this is where we'd come to do all our Christmas shopping.

And whenever I walk down Commercial Street to the market, the sight of Fashion Street (an address to die for), the Hawksmoor church on the edge of Fournier Street, the whiff from a hundred curry houses in Brick Lane, the rhubarbing of lunchtime drinkers at the Spitz, and the prospect of spending an hour in the best market in London always lifts my heart.

I wouldn't bang on about such a favourite spot (I'd rather keep it a secret) except that the market is in imminent danger. Actually, it's been under threat since 1987, fighting off plans by the expansionist Corporation of London to use the two-acre site for more serious commercial purposes (it's worth a billion quid in potential development). But now it's serious. Local residents and traders – and glamorous well-wishers such as Terence Conran, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Julie Christie and John Humphrys – have been fighting off a proposed 750,000 sq ft office building, designed by Norman Foster, whose construction would mean the demolition of the western half of the market. Apart from the dubious delight of having a steel monstrosity, home to 4,000 lawyers, looming over this magical district, it would mean an end to the partly subsidised market stalls, the probable erection of a Milton Keynes-style shopping mall, and a wholesale dereliction of Spitalfields' unique, rackety community atmosphere.

Norman Foster isn't the villain of this dismaying scheme, merely the executioner. The Corporation of London is keen to maximise its profit centres, having enviously watched the Docklands Corporation make a fortune out of developing Canary Wharf for the past 10 years. The real villain of the piece is probably Ken Livingstone, whose recent Greater London Authority report came out in favour of the Foster monster. The London Mayor admits, in the report, that "the majority of jobs in the new development will not be accessible to residents of this deprived locality", and he concedes that the social fabric of Spitalfields will be ripped asunder. But he goes along with it anyway, in the teeth of residents' disapproval and a petition with 38,000 signatures put together by the Spitalfields Market Under Threat group (or Smut). This seems a far cry from the democratic swagger of Young Ken at the Greater London Council – but then the Corporation of London's chief executive, Judith Mayhew, is Mr Livingstone's business advisor, so you can see how his ideals might have been compromised.

The dispute comes to a head at 7pm this evening, when the Tower Hamlets planning committee votes for or against the development. If they nod it through, Mr Livingstone has a fortnight to signal upwards or downwards with his imperial thumb.

There is a curious sense of déjà vu about all of this. Since it developed from fields into roads and house in the 1660s, Spitalfields has had a very volatile history. In the late 17th century, it led the country in silk-weaving, with some 15,000 looms spinning away around Spital Square, but it was always threatened by the switchback of fashion. Yet, in the end, it was free trade that killed off the industry in the mid-19th century. Tens of thousands of weavers were left unemployed and Charles Greville MP wrote, sadly, in 1832: "The parish [of Spitalfields] is in debt; every day adds to the number of paupers and diminishes that of ratepayers. These are principally small shopkeepers, who are beggared by the rates..."

As will the stallholders be, in this classic stand-off between commerce and community. I hope the Tower Hamlets planning committee won't let it happen to this jewel in the East End's scruffy crown.

Milestone for Miles

Chaps and ladies who are pushing 50 and can remember what happened in the Albert Hall in 1966 will have a fantastic time in the pages of In the Sixties, the long-awaited autobiography by Barry Miles. The biographer of William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Paul McCartney, Mr Miles (invariably known to all as "Miles") was right in the groovy swim from the start. He was Mr Alternative before the Beatles or the Rolling Stones got going. He was a garret-bound bohemian, aged 16, in 1959. Like Brian Jones of the Stones, he came from Cheltenham, and like almost every Sixties musician, he attended art school. At Oxford he linked up with Michael Horovitz of New Departures magazine, which published the Beat poets, and conceived a lifelong fascination for, and friendship with, many of them.

His chronicle of life in the eye of the psychedelic counterculture is utterly absorbing. For Miles wasn't a rock star, nor a songwriter, nor a Sixties personality – he was a bookseller, and his total-recall memoirs are charmingly full of bookshop lore, in Charing Cross Road and the Apple shop in Carnaby Street. Miles always came across as the subversive geek – a willowy Ganymede in black-framed specs, a pin-striped jacket and a cigarette held camply aloft. Whatever is he doing in one of the photographs in the book, standing like a schoolboy, laughing but evidently mortified, as a hairy, simian Ginsberg cavorts, naked, beside him on his 39th birthday? But Miles was the one they all liked, confided in and trusted with their lives (at least, their published ones).

Those were the days

Miles's launch party was full of old Sixties faces, like the abrasive Jenny Fabian of Groupie fame, and Jonathon Green, the exuberant lexicographer and author of All Dressed Up, the standard history of the times. Long grey hair, ageing red faces, and fading polychromatic hats wafted by. Then I spotted a freakishly tall, stooping beanpole in a three-piece carrot suit and professorial specs. I knew this guy. I'd seen him at Chelsea's Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1974. In fact, I'd been on stage with him. No, it's true. My tutor at Oxford, David Jarrett, was a friend of Heathcote Williams, the actor-poet-magus, whose wife had been attacked by police at a festival earlier that year. Williams was suing the police for assault, and holding a benefit night to raise funds. He'd asked David to supply a student actor, and that's how I found myself at the legendary theatre in a pig mask impersonating a corrupt policeman. There, I'd watched the lanky geezer do a turn.

I went over to him: "Excuse me," I said, "were you on stage at the Royal Court in 1974, singing a version of 'Old Man River' that went, 'Old Dope Peddler/ Dat Old Dope Peddler.../ He just keeps rollin'/ He keeps on rollin'/ A long one'?" He nodded. He was Steve Abrams from Beverly Hills, founder of Soma, the drugs research association. He seemed pleased to be remembered for having been there on that wild night. So was I. I'd completely forgotten that, for exactly two hours, I'd been bang at the heart of the counter-culture. A little late for the Sixties, perhaps – but hell, better late than never.