As far as London guide books go, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies has to be one of the more usual. While most focus on popular tourist attractions such as St Paul’s Cathedral, London Zoo and the Science Museum, this one takes a different subject altogether. It was […]
London is a photogenic city to capture given iconic buildings like the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London. I am by no means a professional photographer, but when it’s sunny I enjoy heading down to the Thames to take snaps of structures – […]
Looking down a nondescript alley off Rye Lane it’s hard to believe this is the proposed start of “a new linear park” which will “reconnect Peckham’s neighbourhoods”. It’s here, behind Ali’s fruit and vegetable stall, that stairs and a ramp will lead to the Peckham Coal Line – […]
One year on from the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the 24-storey North Kensington block of flats – now covered in protective plastic inscribed with the words ‘Forever In Our Hearts’ – and other public buildings were illuminated in green. It was just one of many ways that people all […]
When the Travel Bookshop opened its doors in Blenheim Crescent in 1981, Notting Hill was on the cusp of change. For much of the 20th century this West London neighbourhood was the place many people lived if all other accommodation options had failed. But now bedsits were being […]
People have long come to London to enjoy its many attractions, but for some in the 1920s and 30s it wasn’t tourism that brought them here. Visitors travelled from across Europe and America to see Bermondsey Council’s pioneering work in providing residents with decent homes in pleasant surroundings. […]
Gentrification has for several decades followed a familiar pattern. It starts when “artists move into an area with cheap housing and studio space, then developers follow – and longstanding communities are forced out,” the Guardian reported. “Little thought is given to the people who have lived there for […]
For the Daily Mail in 1901 Dorset Street was “the Worst Street” in London.” The notorious stretch in Spitalfields was somewhere that “boasts a murder on average once a month, of a murder in every house, and one house at least, a murder in every room,” it wrote. […]
When the social researcher Henry Mayhew reported on Spitalfields in 1849, the living conditions that he discovered in some people’s homes was shocking. In one weavers’ house in the East London neighbourhood he found “spread a bed, on which lay four…. boys, two with their heads in one […]
Where does the City of London end and the rest of the capital begin? The quick answer can of course be determined by tracing the boundary on maps – or in certain places painted bollards. But for Londoners and visitors alike these official demarcations are meaningless for most […]
Past In The Present 