Spitalfields Life

http://www.66000milesperhour.com/2012/02/the-gentle-author-of-spitalfields-life/
Paul Gardner, the Market Sundriesman, incarnates the essence of Spitalfields. Unless you have gone and shaken hands with Paul Gardner you can’t really say you have been to Spitalfields. 

It has been speculated by some historians that Christ Church Spitalfields, erected between 1714 and 1729, was placed here as a symbol of oppression; a powerful emblem of the Anglican Church to remind these Protestant refugees where they were.

The effect was undeniably potent. Against the chaos of traffic, the crowds and advertisements, the noises and smells of the modern-day East End, this church appeared like a timeless glyph, its powerful shapes standing clear and distinct and overwhelmingly anachronistic; it looked more drawn than built.

Hawksmoor built his Spitalfields Christ Church above a plague pit, a mass burial site; not that there was any shortage of those in London, by the end of the bubonic plague epidemic. For sustenance, the roots of Christ Church dug deep into the mass graves of London’s damned.