![]() The work Pettet created was in the grand if local tradition of English delftware. He soon moved in and started helping Severs create his living installation-painting clockfaces, plastering cherubs, fitting ceiling mouldings, and above all making an extraordinary series of ceramic items that were inserted in almost every room. Pettet met Severs at Heaven, the gay nightclub under the arches near Charing Cross, as he was beginning a ceramics degree at Camberwell School of Art & Design. And a central strand of this stagecraft was the ceramic work of one of Severs’ partners, Simon Pettet. Plastic fruit from a local supermarket was glued to the ceiling and painted over to look like ornate plasterwork. A four-poster bed was convincingly constructed out of pallets and toilet rolls soaked in glue. Severs performed at least three architectural gestures in the house: the elimination of later material the insertion of salvaged objects and, perhaps most importantly, the recreation of lost originals with makeshift materials. In 1977 the Spitalfields Trust began buying up these buildings as an act of resistance, in order to restore and preserve them. The local council was busy at commercial redevelopment-tearing down houses and stores or ripping out their delicate internal cornicing and fire surrounds. It was also in the 1970s that a new generation of exiles began to set up in Spitalfields: sometimes international, sometimes gay, sometimes both, they were people who found in this apparently liminal zone both a different way of living and a different approach to architecture. It was a strange hinterland adjacent to the city center both sociologically and architecturally, its most notable feature being the vast fruit and vegetable market that functioned as a barricade against the bourgeois professionals from the nearby financial district. The built fabric of this area was a mixture of postwar urban detritus and elegant eighteenth-century townhouses that were now rotten and unstable. By the 1970s it had acquired a new population of Bangladeshi immigrants working in the rag trade, in garment factories and warehouses. Once the habitat of Huguenot weavers fleeing the massacres in France, it later became a refuge for Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe and Russia. ![]() Just to the east of the City of London is the district called Spitalfields.
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