Anyone working near French Market in Chicago is spoiled for choice when it comes to sizing up lunch options. The 30 or so food stalls under one roof serve up everything from Vietnamese noodle soup to Italian smoked-meat sandwiches. It’s a gastronomical dream. Established in 2009 next to […]
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. […]
‘Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas’. The Canvey Island amusement arcade may have borrowed its name from the popular Nevada gambling resort, but there didn’t seem to be many parallels between the two. In the United States people come in their droves to watch lavish live shows, but at […]
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 […]
