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John Allin, Painter
Gun St, Spitalfields John Allin (1934-1991) began painting while serving a six month prison sentence for minor theft, and achieved considerable success in the sixties and seventies with his vivid...
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Viscountess Boudica’s Drawings
Viscountess Boudica is the most creative person I know. Her phenomenal artwork never ceases to astonish me with its endless invention and today it is my please to publish this small selection from...
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Morley Von Sternberg At 19 Princelet St
The old synagogue in Princelet St is one of Spitalfields’ most atmospheric and mysterious spaces, so I was thrilled when Architectural Photographer Morley Von Sternberg agreed to take these pictures...
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Doreen Fletcher’s Exhibition
Just over six months ago, I introduced you to Doreen Fletcher’s paintings in these pages and I am thrilled to announce that – thanks to the extraordinary positive response by you, the readers of...
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Doreen Fletcher’s East End, Then & Now
Recently, Contributing Photographer Alex Pink accompanied Doreen Fletcher on a pilgrimage to visit the locations of many of her paintings and Alex photographed what they discovered … Benji’s Mile End,...
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A Walk With Rachel Lichtenstein
Join Rachel Lichtenstein on Sunday June 19th for a walk around the Jewish East End as part of the Immigrants of Spitalfields Festival. Rachel is a writer and artist whose books include ‘Rodinsky’s...
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Doreen Fletcher, Landscape Painter
On the eve of Doreen Fletcher’s exhibition LOST TIME which opens this Friday 10th June at Townhouse, Spitalfields, I visited Doreen in her studio to learn the story behind her remarkable series of...
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East End Film Show
In celebration of the John Claridge’s EAST END photography exhibition, you are all invited to a free film show at 7pm next Tuesday 14th June at Vout-O-Reenees in Aldgate with a screening of THE LONDON...
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A Nation Of Tea-Drinkers
Markman Ellis introduces his talk for the Immigrants of Spitalfields Festival – ‘A Tea-Drinking Nation: How Britain Came to Identify with a Migrant Alien in the Early Eighteenth Century’ on Monday 20th...
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At The House Of Dreams
A number forty bus took me from Aldgate to the House of Dreams and it only took half an hour to arrive at the front door. Once across the threshold, an alternative cosmos of colour and eye-popping...
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At The Curtain Theatre
Archaeologists excavating The Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch When the Chorus addresses the audience from the stage at the opening of Shakespeare’s Henry V, he refers to ‘this wooden O’ – a phrase that...
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Viscountess Boudica’s Open House
Rally round our beloved Viscountess in her hour of need! This coming weekend, Saturday 25th & Sunday 26th June, Viscountess Boudica is opening her home to the public from 1-5pm daily for an...
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East End Pubs, Then & Now
It is my pleasure to publish this collaboration with Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archive in which Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Alex Pink selected photographs of pubs from...
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Cockney Beano Time
A beano from Stepney in the twenties (courtesy Irene Sheath) It is Midsummer, and we have reached that time of year when a certain clamminess prevails in the city and East Enders turn restless,...
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Israel Zangwill’s Spitalfields
Literary historian Nadia Valman introduces the work of nineteenth century novelist Israel Zangwill, author of Children of the Ghetto and subject of a newly-launched app Zangwill’s Spitalfields, which...
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A Brief History Of London’s Mulberries
Several readers who visited the exhibition of proposals for the site of the former London Chest Hospital by Crest Nicholson & Circle Homes contacted me in alarm when they discovered the developer...
View ArticleThe London Nobody Knows Now
Today I present THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS NOW, a short film by Douglas Anderson, revisiting the locations of THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS, Norman Cohen’s film of 1969 based upon Geoffrey Fletcher’s book of...
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Jeffrey Johnson’s Favourite Signs
Mysterious Photographer Jeffrey Johnson deposited a stack of his pictures from the seventies and eighties with Archivist Stefan Dickers at the Bishopsgate Institute recently, including these photos of...
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Stoke Newington’s Ghost Signs
This is the epicentre of ghost sign activity in Stoke Newington Church St. On the left is a triple-layer painted wall of the Westminster Gazette, Criterion Matches and Gillette Razors – all merged...
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On A Thames Sailing Barge
David Pollock, skipper of S B Repertor “It’s all my wife’s fault,” admitted David Pollock of the Thames Sailing Barge Repertor with a grin of pure delight, when I asked how he came to be the owner of...
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