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Adam Dant’s Map Of Walbrook
Click on Adam Dant’s map to enlarge it and study the detail Inspired by a visit to see the recent discoveries that Museum of London Archaeology Service excavated from the City of London’s largest...
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Giorgione In Clapton
You enter a disused tramshed in Clapton, climb a ramshackle staircase and discover yourself in the studio of Giorgione, one of the greatest Venetian artists of the High Renaissance, who died in 1510....
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The Gentle Author in Piccadilly
Next week, I shall be climbing aboard a number twenty-three bus at Liverpool St Station and going up west to alight in Piccadilly Circus, then walking down Piccadilly to just where this photograph was...
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From My Scrap Collection
For some time, I have been collecting Victorian scraps of tradesmen and street characters, and putting them in a drawer. So these damp days at the end of January gave me the ideal opportunity to search...
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Billy & Charley’s Reliquaries
Courtesy of Philip Mernick, here are more of the wonderful zany works of Billy & Charley, the celebrated East End mudlarks-turned-forgers who created thousands of fake antiquities known as...
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In The World Of Phlegm
Here is Phlegm working through the small hours of the damp, dark January night to complete his installation entitled The Bestiary, which opens today at the Howard Griffin Gallery, 189 Shoreditch High...
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The Gentle Author’s Piccadilly Pub Crawl
I set out to explore the pubs of Piccadilly in search of some Dutch courage for my MAGIC LANTERN SHOW at Waterstones Piccadilly next Wednesday 5th February at 7pm, when I will be showing around a...
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Dan Jones’ Paintings
Celebrating Dan Jones’ new exhibition The Singing Playground which opens tonight at Rich Mix in the Bethnal Green Rd, here is a gallery of his work spanning the last forty years. Click to enlarge Dan...
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At The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Water Gate at Greenwich When Queen Mary commissioned Christopher Wren in 1694 to build the Royal Hospital for Seamen, offering sheltered housing to sailors who were invalid or retired, she instructed...
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Andrew Coram’s Toby Jugs
. Look at the old men, sitting lined up with their flasks of ale to watch the rain falling. They are late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Toby jugs and this is Andrew Coram’s antique shop,...
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Last Days At WF Arber & Co Ltd
Gary Arber Four years have passed since I first walked eastward through the freshly fallen snow across Weavers’ Fields on my way to visit Gary Arber, third generation incumbent of W.F. Arber & Co...
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Imaginary Libraries In The City Of London
The ever-ingenious Adam Dant has devised these illustrations selected from his new book BIBLIOPOLIS, Imaginary Libraries in the City of London, proposing an alternative history for the Square Mile...
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Mortlake Jugs
Once, every household in London possessed an ale jug, in the days before it was safe to drink water or tea became widely affordable. These cheaply-produced salt-glazed stoneware items, that could be...
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At The Smithfield Market Public Enquiry
Behold the winged lion on the Holborn Viaduct looking down protectively upon the Smithfield General Market, as – over at the Guildhall – the Public Enquiry that will decide the fate of this...
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At Dalston Lane
Can you believe that this partly-demolished late Georgian terrace is the outcome of a “conservation-led’ scheme? So it is in Hackney, where the bulldozers moved in last month only to be hastily...
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Sarah Ainslie At Smithfield Market
For six months during the winter and into the spring of 1994, Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie visited Smithfield Market one night each week from two or three until six or...
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C A Mathew At Brightlingsea
In September 2010, I wrote speculatively about the obscure photographer C A Mathew who took an extraordinary set of pictures in Spitalfields in April 1912 – now preserved at the Bishopsgate Institute –...
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Bob Rogers At Speakers’ Corner
“I’m old enough to know better and young enough not to care” Despite the timbre of the message he has been wearing around his neck each Sunday at Speakers’ Corner for decades, Bob Rogers is not the...
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Melvyn Reeves At The Troxy
It is a source of great joy to Melvyn Reeves that he has always lived within a few streets of where he was born in Stepney and that, at the centre of his personal universe in the East End, stands a...
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An Afternoon In Old Marylebone
With the recent change in the weather, I thought I could risk a trip beyond Spitalfields and so I took the Metropolitan Line from Liverpool St Station over to Baker St and spent a pleasant afternoon...
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