The Leopard is the symbol of the Goldsmiths’ Company. Whenever I walk through the City to St Paul’s, I always marvel at the great blocks of Hay Tor granite which form the plin ...

Henrietta Keeper (widely known as “Joan”), the vivacious octogenarian ballad singer who used to perform at E.Pellicci in the Bethnal Green Rd on Fridays, once invited me to round to her tiny flat to ...

My father was born in 1914 in Fort Street, which ran across that site and was demolished to make way for the “new” Spitalfields market. It is strange that the Roman remains we ...

Andy Strowman, poet of Stepney, sent me these photos and the stories which accompany them. Uncle Dave came to visit us from time to time. Maybe my mum knew in advance, it was like having royalty come ...

George Dodd came to Spitalfields to write this account for Charles Knight’s LONDON published in 1842. Dodds recalls the rural East End that still lingered in the collective memory and described the ...

Consequently, I was more than happy to make a trip to Rainham to pay a call upon Pamela Cilia, who proved to be a fine specimen of a bottling girl, full of vitality, sharp intelligence and strong ...

Today, the sad old pump in Shoreditch has lost its handle, had its nozzle broken and even its basin is filled with concrete, yet a lone primrose flowers – emblematic of the mystic quality that some ...

Chris plants crops in rotation to renew the soil. ‘Potatoes take quite a lot of nutrients out of the earth which is why we will follow them the next year with chard, which is not a very heavy feeder, ...

Over the years, many thousands of images have been taken of Columbia Rd Flower Market, but George Gladwell’s relaxed photographs are special because they capture the drama of the market seen through ...

By a fluke of history, the business that trades here now has retained the interior with minimum intervention, which meant that when David’s son Stuart Kira returned for the first time since he left in ...

My experience of life has been that there is more to be discovered by stepping from the tarmac and meandering off down the dusty track, and so I delight in the possibility of liberation offered by ...

Photographer Patricia Niven and Novelist Sarah Winman visited the Freed of London factory in Well St to create these portraits of the Pointe Shoe Makers, an elite band of highly-skilled craftsmen who ...