Published in issue 5 of Ton Magazine.
Jake Burt of Jake’s, 63 Vyner Street, E2 9DG.
AF: What have you been up to this morning?
JB: I got here at around half eight, but I end up not doing much in the mornings — it just makes me feel like if anything happens, I can deal with it… not that anything will. I also love walking here as everyone's setting up shop. Anyone who goes to the effort of renting a space, setting it up, and turning up knows it’s their way of expressing themselves — that there's something they’re trying to say which can only be said through having a shop that people can walk into.
AF: What are you trying to say?
JB: Most of the time, I spend months developing a collection for Stefan Cooke. I show it via a show or a lookbook, go to Paris to sell to wholesale clients, produce it, and help promote it. I can get lost in the abstraction of that process, and I love that too — there's something quite magical and intangible about it, which we do play into. But I'm a frenetic person who has to constantly be working, and the shop is an immediate way of reacting to what people like without the marketing fluff. The objective is simple, and it's just to sell clothes.
AF: People can feel that in the space when they come in — that you don't have this ulterior motive. It's just about interesting, well-crafted clothes, made for them every week.
JB: I like that people panic to get them, and I'm glad that I do this as well as Stefan Cooke. It’s not an antidote because Stefan isn’t poisonous, but once I started Jake’s, designing became so much clearer, because it wasn't my whole identity. I also grew up with shops — my parents were shopkeepers with various ventures, and I worked in everything from furniture sales to a bakery to opening a café as a teenager. It's always been there.
AF: Do you think having all those different stores has affected how you approach this one?
JB: Yeah, but in simple stuff, even merchandising. Having the shops before has meant I’ve become practical about decision-making, and I know what the barriers might be for customers and how to remove them. Like, Jake’s is behind a bell on a door, down a small street of a lot of other shops. It can be quite hard to find, which some people do on purpose thinking it would build more desire, but that stuff is incidental. I would love to end up with a shopfront.
Coco Bayley and Ben Wilcock of Lant Street Bar, 59 Lant Street, SE1 1QN.
AF: Do you see yourself as part of a new wave of approaching hospitality?
CB: I see it as quite old-fashioned and based around fortuitous moments or spaces, rather than a new wave of concept-driven hospitality. That word sounds so corporate and crap, but it's about facilitation — Ben and I making a drinks list which isn't freaking anyone out, just giving them good stuff over a candle. This building is a beautiful foundation. There are proper materials, there's wood, and there's nothing nicer than seeing the bricks of a wall through a poster. People sometimes come in here thinking that its bare-bones-ness is because we're unable to think of a more complicated wine list. It's just a result of being involved in a ton of restaurant openings.
BW: We just want people to feel comfortable in here. We’re not reinventing anything at the moment. I’m quite proud of our house red, white, and rosé — I don't think you’ll get a glass as good or as cheap in London.
CB: There’s no intention for this to be a perfect space. It's almost a defence mechanism, but it’s also nonsense — it's never going to happen. But that process, if you're mindful, is the beautiful thing. It's a constant evolution with the furniture, the drinks, Ben’s shop. I guess that has people feeling comfortable; there's no grand plan to it. We're putting in what we're hoping to get out in every respect, and we hope that's something emotionally and culturally fulfilling as well as viable.
BW: Lots of places around town have been sanitised and homogenised — they all look the same, even if the building’s old. This space is home-like because this is my home. I’ve been running around here for twenty-five years, and there’s been wine in the building since 1986. People feel that.
AF: When people open these concept spaces, they believe that if everyone’s the same, they'll have a connection, but people feel most comfortable when they realise that there is no set agenda to a place.
BW: Big time. People come in from over the river, working in the city, and we've got artists, wine merchants, fashion people, professors coming down from King’s. It's a nice, eclectic mix.
CB: That’s also rare for London. Most of the places I’ve worked for have honed their supposed audience, and there’s no dynamism. I don't want to be part of a “community” that’s just people like me.
AF: Have you got any plans for the future?
CB: We’ve got big plans to clear out part of the warehouse downstairs. It's beautiful, with the same high ceilings and a few arches. There's no reason why we shouldn't have a massive table down there with champagne and delicious food.
Mariam Bergloff of Raleigh Chapel, 138 Church Walk, N16 8QQ.
AF: Tell me about your plans for this space.
MB: It’s going to remain a church, but it’ll also be a community hall and an art space. There'll be an event area upstairs for live performance art, moving image screenings, talks, book launches, sample sales, flea markets, whatever people need in the daytime. Further along the line, we want to host artist residencies, but I don't want to jump the gun — I want to just open and go from there. What the space does in the long term is not for me to decide. We'd been looking for a year and a half for a space when we found this building, and we've been working on it since May, when we got the keys.
AF: That’s a perfect summer project. What do you mean when you say it's going to remain a church?
MB: We’re looking to host Sunday service and other things related to the heritage of the building, because it's quite unusual. The church was built in 1880, and then it was bombed in the war. It was rebuilt, then burnt, and then rebuilt again, but the upstairs hasn’t been used for some fifty years. I've been hearing some wives’ tales from the neighbours about the church — one woman told me that some of the floor was taken and put in St. Paul's Cathedral. There's also this dynamic, being in Stoke Newington, knowing our neighbours. I'm hoping that residents will be happy to have yoga sessions or a knitting club here.
The more you talk to people running things, we're always thinking about similar things — if you see, there's a lack somewhere, like, just neighbourhood spaces to read books that are also beautiful and well-resourced. I think having more control is also part of it — we’re all trying to find some anchor. These spaces are few and far between. It's also a love project for all my friends who are so skilled but don’t have space to work.
AF: Do you think your approach to your artistic practice will influence this space?
MB: I’m sure it will. With music, I’ve always relied on found footage, and sampling and stretching and playing with sound as if it were a sculptural material is so important to me. I almost entirely work with things that are already there. This project certainly is a collage, but it's a weird one, because I've never worked with such a tangible thing — sound is quite elusive. I’m excited to be physically transforming people.
AF: What are your plans for the interior?
MB: It’s not often that you find churches that don't look like a church — this already looks like a studio space. It's got all this steel, but with these medieval-looking windows and pews. Jermaine [Gallacher] is leaning into the gothic, folkloric thing, and referencing how the church has been using yakisugi, a traditional Japanese technique that chars the surface of the wood.
Charlotte Cullinan of 4COSE, 7 Vyner Street, E2 9DG.
AF: What’s happening?
CC: We've got trouble with our parmesan — they’ve confiscated it at the port, which is causing a bit of an international incident. It's a mature cheese, so it shouldn't be pulled over. It's hundreds of years old. There's only one small area in the whole world where you can make it. They’ve just decided we need an extra document to bring the cheese in, which has never happened before. The Italians are so upset, and I can hardly get them to calm down.
AF: That's so stressful.
CC: Very. You have to apply a logic you didn’t think you had, especially if you're trained as a creative. There's a lot of risk-taking involved with these shops, but these risks aren't presented to the types of people who do these things. It's sort of like making art. You're stumbling into something that you don't know much about, so it's about intuition and communication and the material connections. Food is a material, in a way, so where it's grown and how it's come into the world is quite a seductive thing for artists. But it’s fascinating how these problems lead you down these different paths of researching how things work in the world. You learn about the logistics of how things cross borders — I'm really interested in trade in the context of civilisation. People have been meeting in marketplaces, selling and bartering and talking there for thousands of years. That's how social networks happen.
AF: What’s the story behind the shop?
CC: It came from a connection with Rosanna Chiessi, who came from Reggio Emilia and worked with many of the Fluxus group in the sixties. Daniel Spoerri was part of that, and he ran two restaurants in the sixties — one in New York, and one in Paris — called Eat Art. It was about artists' recipes and food, and he would make table tops covered in plates after a dinner, and that would be the work. Food, art, and life are set on the same planet, especially in Italy. It's obvious.
Kelsey Dykes of Rambooks, 66 Holloway Road, N7 8JL.
AF: How did Rambooks come about?
KD: Michael Harris opened Rambooks in Moor Street in Soho in 1982. Dave, our current owner, got a summer job there, and when Michael died later that year, he was given the remaining stock, signs, logos, and rights to the films for an undisclosed favour. And the rest is history! Rambooks was reborn ten years ago on Holloway Road. As the last remaining vintage erotica shop, it preserves a sexual history that’s often forgotten in this beautiful, printed matter.
AF: Have your own interests influenced the direction of the shop?
KD: Well, while I was researching a personal project around AtomAge, I realised how much unseen material Rambooks has to offer. I called Dave for weeks, asking for work so that I could dive deeper into this lifelong obsession. I was inspired by the work of female artists, writers, sexologists, sex workers, pornographers, and dominatrices — Annie Sprinkle, Tuppy Owens, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Terence Sellers, Monika Treut, and Kathy Acker, to name a few. The excitement and intent behind their work opened up a different viewpoint on pornography that moved away from a straight, male-dominated space. These women were reclaiming their sexuality, shaping culture, and helping people through their work. That’s had a huge impact on me, and it’s led to a real change within the space. There’s such a broad mix of people interested now. The clientele has shifted to a wide spectrum that includes female and LGBTQIA+ communities. Photographers, designers, sex workers, and artists come in to use the material as references for their work, and we sometimes work with the artists we meet in the shop.
AF: And how do you approach preserving and sharing the collection?
KD: We create digital formats from the physical archives to widen access to unseen, obscene, and uncensored media. It is so important to us to preserve this history by archiving everything we know to be undocumented or rare, especially material unlikely to pass through the store again. We make affordable digital scans so that the information is accessible to a wider audience, and we’ve scanned more than three thousand magazines to date.