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 ...

I was born in Balmoral Castle and I grew up in Windsor Castle …” Tony Jack told me proudly without bragging, “… they were both pubs in Canning Town.” It was a suitably auspicious beginning for an East ...

The reputation of the Truman’s bottling girls has passed into legend in Spitalfields. In the course of my interviews, so many people have regaled me with tales of this heroic tribe of independent ...

Click here to book for tomorrow’s TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS JULY 1838 – Flying Showers in Battersea Fields Should you ever require it, here is evidence of the constant volatility of English summer weather, ...

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 ...

As part of London Festival of Architecture, I am participating in an event hosted by SAVE Britain’s Heritage on Wednesday 11th June at 6pm at 77 Cowcross St, EC1M 6EJ, entitled Beyond Carbon: How ...

Today I publish these excerpts from Margaret Willes‘ book The Domestic Herbal, Plants for the Home in the Seventeenth Century published by the Bodleian Library London grew rapidly from the late ...

Hardly anyone notices this venerable pump of 1832 in Shoreditch churchyard, yet this disregarded artifact may conceal the reason why everything that surrounds it is there. Reverend Turp of St ...