secrets of east end - the widegate street bakers

Whilst all the Instagrammers and Snapchatters are gramming and snapping their way up and down Brick Lane, capturing a whole host of vibrant street art created in the last few years, they are all missing a rather older piece of street art just around the corner. Just by Spitalfields market, above Honest Burger on Widegate Street, sits a piece of art with an interesting historical story – four sculptures of some busy East End bakers.
 
The streets around this area, like Artillery Passage and Widegate Street, are often packed full of night time revellers and daytime Jack The Ripper tourists, but if you stop and look up, you realise you are walking through a truly beautiful time capsule. Long before Honest Burger and Simmons Cocktail Bar were here, these nooks and crannies were host to many a business with many a story. The four ceramic reliefs of bakers tell just one of them.
 
At the turn of the 20thcentury, this area was largely Jewish and was home to several Jewish bakeries. The four bakers, which adorn Honest Burger today, mark the location of one of the most famous, the Nordheim Model Bakery, which rustled up beigels and other Jewish delights for those who lived in the surrounding alleyways and beyond. These glazed ceramic reliefs were installed in 1926 and were made by Poole Pottery. They were designed by an artist named Philip Lindsey Clark and they demonstrate the four stages of the bread-making process. 
 
These fascinating sculptures, however, also came with their fair share of controversy. Many felt that they did not simply depict bakers innocently going about their daily baking, but were rather subtly hinting at religious persuasions – and not Jewish ones. Clark, who later became a Carmelite monk, often referenced religious iconography in his work and many thought that these pieces were no different. Many noted that the baker carrying bags of flour is in a pose similar to that of Jesus carrying the cross. Indeed, the bread itself was also criticised as looking far less Jewish and Eastern European, but rather more English. These bakers seem to be preparing soft, bouncy cottage loaves, not traditional Jewish unleven bread, as the Nordheim would have done. In a period where there was enormous tensions between different populations in the East End, this piece of art was actually covered up and hidden, due to the controversy it caused. 
 
Take a moment to stop on Widegate Street and look up at the bakers busily working away. This piece of art serves as a reminder of the Jewish populations that have made this area their home at different points in history. Many Portuguese Sephardic Jews settled here in the 17thcentury and, more recently, in the late 19thand early 20thcentury, many Polish and Russian Jews lived here. Their legacy can be felt all around, in bakeries, such as Beigel Bake and Rinkoff’s, the fascinating Secret Synagogue and also from the fact that Petticoat Lane is a Sunday market, rather Saturday one – the Jews working here couldn’t work or shop on Saturdays. The wonderful piece of historical street art depicting the Nordheim Model Bakers is another, slightly more secret, reminder of the Jewish history here – even if these bakers aren’t particularly Jewish at all.