The Finnegans Wake reading group for 2026 on Reddit has begun. It's handy for people who have never tried a reading group and don't have one physically nearby. I am trying to get caught up, and as the organizers point out, it's not too late to join and get up to speed. (This is one of the two reading groups announced as part of Bobby Campbell's Maybe Night). 

Here is the information and schedule for the readalong. You can also access the schedule directly.  The actual reading group posts are at Finnegans Wake on Reddit. 

Michael Johnson has a major new essay up, "Robert Anton Wilson on Plant Intelligence, (Part One?" which I recommend to everyone who reads this blog. Here is the opening bit:

A poor kid born three years into the Great Depression, near Brooklyn, who contracted polio as a child and was enamored of Weird Tales and mathematics and poetry, you might think Wilson would not be a good candidate to develop a pantheist, vitalist, panpsychist point of view. He was not a hiker (the polio), but in the 1970s in Northern California he and his wife Arlen were very much involved with modern paganism and definitely did magickal rituals in Berkeley and met other pagan artists and intellectuals in the redwoods in Northern California. What was the trajectory? How did he develop this mystical outlook?

Allen Ginsberg in 1979 (Creative Commons photo, more information). 

Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926, so as Eric Wagner remarked on Facebook, June is the Ginsberg centennial. 

The Wikipedia bio will fill you in on the writer RAW called "our major living American poet," in Coincidance.  

Each year, a new batch of books (and other creative works) enter the public domain. This year works published in 1930 enter the public domain. 

This year, the books that go into the public domain include As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (RAW was a Faulkner fan) and Standard Ebooks already has an edition out.  Here are 20 new books offered by Standard Ebooks, including The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, The Castle by Franz Kafka and mysteries by Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. 

———— This is part 2 of a long blog post. The first part is called "Wandering" and this part is "Wondering." No real reason for those names, just playing with words. But mostly these posts are about images. Kawaii. Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″. December, 2025 At one point, I had a nice square […]

The post Wondering first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

I've been hanging around with Barb Ash a lot. I published Sqinks. I painted quite a bit. I'll break my doings into two posts: "Wandering" and "Wondering." Barb is a photographer, as am I, and we enjoy working on pictures together, each using their own camera, but helping each other see. Barb is better at […]

The post Wandering first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

My new novel, and a journal about writing it. Published via my very own indie press,  which is Transreal Books. I raised funds for it on a Kickstarter page…and I have a Sqinks book page.. Towards the end of Novembler, I'll be publishing Sqinks and Sqinks Journal in hardback, paperback, and ebook on all the usual […]

The post Sqinks Novel & Sqinks Journal first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

I am giving an illustrated lecture about Colin O'Brien, the Clerkenwell Photographer, on Tuesday 10th February at 6:30pm at Islington Museum, 245 St John St, EC1V 4NB. Entry is free and no booking is required, just come along.

Observe this tender photograph of Raymond Scallionne and Razi Tuffano in Hatton Garden in 1948, one of the first pictures taken by Colin O'Brien - snapped when he was eight years old, the same age as his subjects. Colin forgot this photograph for over half a century until he discovered the negative recently and made a print, yet when he saw the image again he immediately remembered the boys' names and recalled arranging them in front of the car to construct the most pleasing composition for the lens of his box brownie.

Colin grew up fifty yards from Hatton Garden in Victoria Dwellings, a tenement at the junction of Faringdon Rd and Clerkenwell Rd - the centre of his childhood universe in Clerkenwell, that Colin portrayed in spellbinding photographs which evoke the poetry and pathos of those forgotten threadbare years in the aftermath of World War II. "We had little money or food, and shoes were a luxury. I remember being given my first banana and being told not to eat it in the street where someone might take it," he told me, incredulous at the reality of his own past,"Victoria Dwellings were very run down and I remember in later years thinking, 'How did people live in them?'"

Blessed with a vibrant talent for photography, Colin created images of his world with an assurance and flair that is astounding in one so young. And now these pictures exist as a compassionate testimony to a vanished way of life, created by a photographer with a personal relationship to all his subjects. "I just wanted to record the passage of time," Colin told me with modest understatement, "There were no photographers in the family, but my Uncle Will interested me in photography. He was the black sheep, with a wife and children in Somerset and girlfriends in London, and he used to come for Sunday lunch in Victoria Dwellings sometimes. One day he brought me a contact printing set and he printed up some of my negatives, and even now I can remember the excitement of seeing my photographs appear on the paper."

Colin O'Brien's clear-eyed Clerkenwell pictures illustrate a world that was once familiar and has now receded far away, yet the emotionalism of these photographs speaks across time because the human detail is touching. Here is Colin's mother spooning tea from the caddy into the teapot in the scullery and his father at breakfast in the living room before walking up the road to the Mount Pleasant Sorting Office, as he did every day of his working life. Here is Mrs Leinweber in the flat below, trying to eke out the Shepherd's Pie for her large family coming round for dinner. Here is the Rio Cinema where Colin used to go to watch the continuous programme, taking sandwiches and a bottle of Tizer, and forced to consort with one of the dubious men in dirty raincoats in order to acquire the adult escort necessary to get into the cinema. Here is one of the innumerable car crashes at the junction of Clerkwenwell Rd and Faringdon Rd that punctuated life at Victoria Dwellings - caused by lights that were out of sync, instructing traffic to drive in both directions simultaneously - a cue for Colin to reach out the window of their top floor flat to capture the accident with his box brownie and for his mother to scream, "Colin, don't lean out too far!"

At fifteen years old, Colin's parents bought him Leica camera. "They couldn't afford it and maybe it came off the back of a lorry, but it was a brilliant present - they realised this was what I wanted to do," he admitted to me with an emotional smile. "My first job was at Fox Photo in the Faringdon Rd. I worked in the library, but I spent all my time hanging around in the dark room because that was where all the photographers were and I loved the smell of fixer and developer." he recalled, "And if I stayed there I would have become a press photographer." But instead Colin went to work in the office of a company of stockbrokers in Cornhill in the City and then for General Electric in Holborn - "I hated offices but I aways got jobs in them" - before becoming a photographic lab technician at St Martins School of Art and finally working for the Inner London Education authority in Media Resources, a role that enabled him to pursue his photography as he pleased throughout his career.

Over all this time, Colin O'Brien has pursued his talent and created a monumental body of photography that amounts to over half a million negatives, although his work is barely known because he never worked for publication or even for money, devoting himself single-mindedly to taking pictures for their own sake. Yet over the passage of time, as a consequence of the purism of his approach, the authority of Colin O'Brien's superlative photography - distinguished by its human sympathy and aesthetic flair - stands comparison with any of the masters of twentieth century British photography.

Members of the Leinweber family playing darts at the Metropolitan Tavern, Clerkenwell Rd, 1954.

Girl in a party dress in the Clerkwenwell Rd, nineteen fifties.

Solmans Secondhand Shop, Skinner St, Clerkwenwell, 1963.

Colin's mother puts tea in the teapot, in the scullery at Victoria Dwellings, nineteen fifties.

Linda Leinweber takes a nap, 117 Victoria Dwellings, nineteen fifties.

Colin's father eats breakfast before a day's work at the Mount Pleasant Sorting Office.

Jimmy Wragg and Bernard Roth jumping on a bomb site in Clerkenwell, late fifties.

Accident at the junction of Clerkwell Rd and Faringdon Rd, 1957.

Mrs Leinweber ekes out the the Shepherd's Pie among her family, Victoria Dwellings, 1959.

Rio Cinema, Skinner St, Clerkenwell, 1954.

Hazel Leinweber, Victoria Dwellings, nineteen fifties.

Fire at Victoria Dwellings, mid-fifties.

Colin's mother outside her door, 99 Victoria Dwellings, nineteen fifties.

Boy at Woolworths, Exmouth Market, 1954.

Two women with a baby in Woolworths, Exmouth Market, 1954.

Cleaning the windows in the snow, Clerkenwell Rd, 1957.

Cowboy and girlfriend, 1960.

Nun sweeping in the Clerkenwell Rd, nineteen sixties.

Colin's window at Victoria Dwellings was on the far right on the top floor.

An old lady listens, awaiting meals on wheels in Northcliffe House, Clerkenwell, late seventies.

The demolition of Victoria Dwellings in the nineteen seventies.

Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O'Brien

Alan Dein remembers Barry Rogg and his celebrated Whitechapel delicatessen

Barry Rogg by Shloimy Alman, 1977

As the years tick by and the places and the people I have loved pass on, I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on a remarkable character whose shop was an East End institution for over fifty years.

Just south of Commercial Rd, Rogg's delicatessen stood at the junction of Cannon Street Rd and Burslem St with its white-tiled doorway directly on the corner. One step transported you into a world of 'heimishe' or homely Jewish food that still had one foot in the past, a land of old-time street market sellers and their Eastern European roots.

Rogg's was crammed from floor to ceiling with barrels, tins and containers of what Barry Rogg always called "the good stuff". He was the proud proprietor who held court from behind the counter, surrounded on all sides by his handpicked and homemade wares. The shelves behind him were lined with pickles and a variety of cylindrical chub-packed kosher sausages dangled overhead.

Barry's appearance was timeless, a chunky build with a round face that sometimes made him look younger or older than he was. He would tell you the story of Rogg's if you wanted to know, but he was neither sentimental about the heyday of the 'Jewish East End' nor did he run a nostalgia-driven emporium. Rogg's customers were varied and changed with the times. There was always the Jewish trade but, up to their closure, Rogg's was also a popular a haunt for dockers who would traipse up from the nearby Thames yards. After that his customers were made up from the local Asian community, until there came another wave when he was being discovered by the national press increasingly focusing eastwards.

Barry's grandfather started in the business at another shop on the same street in 1911. By 1944, when Barry was fourteen and still at school, he had already begun to help the family out at their new corner shop at 137 Cannon Street Rd. In 1946 he moved in for good, though he had only anticipated it would be a two-year stint as the building was earmarked for compulsory purchase for a road widening scheme that fortunately never happened.

I got to know Barry Rogg in 1987 when I joined a team of part-time workers at the Museum of the Jewish East End - now the Jewish Museum - who were collecting reminiscences and artefacts relating to East End social history. Then Rogg's was one of the very last of its kind in East London. By the nineties it was Barry alone who was flying the flag for the Yiddisher corner deli scene that had proliferated in Whitechapel from the late nineteenth century. Thankfully, due to his popularity and the uniqueness in the last decade of the twentieth century, we have some wonderful photographs and articles to remember Barry by.

There are tantalising images of the food but we no can longer taste it. An array of industrial-sized plastic buckets filled with new green cucumbers, chillies, bay leaves and garlic at various stages of pickling, the spread of homemade schmaltz herrings, fried fish, gefilte fish, salt beef, chopped liver, the cheesecake. I am sure everyone reading this who visited Rogg's will remember how their senses went into overdrive. The smells of the pickles, the herrings, the fruit and the smoked salmon, the visual bombardment of all the packaging and the handwritten labels. "Keep looking" was a favourite Barry catchphrase and how could you possibly not?

Of course, you could spend all day listening to the banter with his customers. I also fondly recall conversations with his partner Angela, who helped out but generally kept a low profile in the back of the shop. Rogg's was Barry's stage. He had a deep love for the theatre and for art, and one wonders what else he might have done if - like so many of his generation - he had not ended up in the family business as a fifteen-year-old out of school.

Barry died in 2006 at the age of seventy-six. Years ago, I co-compiled an album for JWM Recordings, Music is the Most Beautiful Language in the World: Yiddisher Jazz in London's East End from the twenties to the fifties. As a follow-up, my co-compiler and regular companion on trips to Rogg's, Howard Williams suggested releasing another disc, this time with a food theme and dedicated to Barry Rogg.

This disc dishes up two sides recorded in New York in the late thirties and forties. Slim Gaillard - whose hip scatological word play would be celebrated in On the Road - performs a paean to the humble yet filling Matzoh Balls, dumplings made of eggs and matzoh meal. Yiddish singer Mildred Rosner serves Gefilte Fish a galloping love affair with this slightly sweet but savoury ancient recipe which consists of patties made of a poached mixture of ground deboned white fish, boiled or fried. These two classic dishes have graced the Jewish luncheon or dinner table for generations and the recipes are included.

On the label is Irv Kline's portrait of Barry from 1983. Irv was an American who had retired to live in London. Barry's photograph formed part of Irv's study of surviving Jewish businesses in the East End, a travelling exhibition which I helped to hang during the eighties. I recall Irv being a real jazz buff so I hope that he too would appreciate the music accompanying his portrait of Barry Rogg.

Click here for information about the 'Gefilte Fish/Matzoh Balls' recording

Irv Kline's portrait of Barry Rogg, 1983

Alan Dein's photograph of Rogg's with one of Barry's regular customers framed in the doorway, 1988

Shloimy Alman's photograph of Rogg's interior, 1977

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A few years ago, I visited a leafy North London suburb to meet Ruth Boswell - an elegant woman with an appealing sense of levity - and we sat in her beautiful garden surrounded by raspberries and lilies, while she told me about her visits to the East End with her late husband James Boswell who died in 1971. She pulled pictures off the wall and books off the shelf to show me his drawings, and then we went round to visit his daughter Sal who lives in the next street and she pulled more works out of her wardrobe for me to see. And when I left with two books of drawings by James Boswell under my arm as a gift, I realised it had been an unforgettable introduction to an artist who deserves to be better remembered.

From the vast range of work that James Boswell undertook, I have selected these lively drawings of the East End done over a thirty year period between the nineteen thirties and the fifties.There is a relaxed intimate quality to these - delighting in the human detail - which invites your empathy with the inhabitants of the street, who seem so completely at home it is as if the people and cityscape are merged into one. Yet, "He didn't draw them on the spot," Ruth revealed as I pored over the line drawings trying to identify the locations, "he worked on them when he got back to his studio. He had a photographic memory, although he always carried a little black notebook and he'd just make few scribbles in there for reference."

"He was in the Communist Party, that's what took him to the East End originally," she continued, "And he liked the liveliness, the life and the look of the streets, and and it inspired him." In fact, James Boswell joined the Communist Party in 1932 after graduating from the Royal College of Art and his lifelong involvement with socialism informed his art, from drawing anti-German cartoons in style of George Grosz during the nineteen thirties to designing the posters for the successful Labour Party campaign of 1964.

During World War II, James Boswell served as a radiographer yet he continued to make innumerable humane and compassionate drawings throughout postings to Scotland and Iraq - and his work was acquired by the War Artists' Committee even though his Communism prevented him from becoming an official war artist. After the war, as an ex-Communist, Boswell became art editor of Lilliput influencing younger artists such as Ronald Searle and Paul Hogarth - and he was described by critic William Feaver in 1978 as "one of the finest English graphic artists of this century."

Ruth met James in the nineteen-sixties and he introduced her to the East End. "We spent quite a bit of time going to Blooms in Whitechapel in the sixties. We went regularly to visit the Whitechapel when Robert Rauschenberg and the new Americans were being shown, and then we went for a walk afterwards," she recalled fondly, "James had been going for years, and I was trying to make my way as a journalist and was looking at the housing, so we just wandered around together. It was a treat to go the East End for a day."

Rowton House

Old Montague St, Whitechapel

Gravel Lane, Wapping

Brushfield St, Spitalfields

Wentworth St, Spitalfields

Brick Lane

Fashion St, illustration by James Boswell from "A Kid for Two Farthings" by Wolf Mankowitz, 1953.

Russian Vapour Baths in Brick Lane from "A Kid for Two Farthings."

James Boswell (1905-1971)

Leather Lane Market, 1937

Images copyright © Estate of James Boswell

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The Spitalfields Nobody Knows (Part One)

The Spitalfields Nobody Knows (Part Two)

Tony Bock took these pictures of Watney Market while working as a photographer on the East London Advertiser between 1973 and 1978. Within living memory, there had been a thriving street market in Watney St, yet by the late seventies it was blighted by redevelopment and Tony recorded the last stalwarts trading amidst the ruins.

In the nineteenth century, Watney Market had been one of London's largest markets, rivalling Petticoat Lane. By the turn of the century, there were two hundred stalls and one hundred shops, including an early branch of J.Sainsbury. Tony's poignant photographs offer a timely reminder of the life of the market that existed before the concrete precinct of today.

Born in Paddington yet brought up in Canada, Tony Bock came back to London after being thrown out of photography school and lived in the East End where his mother's family originated, before returning to embark on a thirty-year career as a photojournalist at The Toronto Star. Recalling his sojourn in the East End and contemplating his candid portraits of the traders, Tony described the Watney Market he knew.

"I photographed the shopkeepers and market traders in Watney St in the final year, before the last of it was torn down. Joe the Grocer is shown sitting in his shop, which can be seen in a later photograph, being demolished.

In the late seventies, when Lyn - my wife to be - and I, were living in Wapping, Watney Market was our closest street market, just one stop away on the old East London Line. It was already clear that 'the end was nigh,' but there were still some stallholders hanging on. My memory is that there were maybe dozen old-timers, but I don't think I ever counted.

The north end of Watney St had been demolished in the late sixties when a large redevelopment was promised. Yet, not only did it take longer to build than the Olympic Park in Stratford, but a massive tin fence had been erected around the site which cut off access to Commercial Rd. So foot and road traffic was down, as only those living nearby came to the market any more. The neighbourhood had always been closely tied to the river until 1969 when the shutting of the London Docks signalled the change that was coming.

The remaining buildings in Watney St were badly neglected and it was clear they had no future. Most of the flats above the shops were abandoned and there were derelict lots in the terrace which had been there since the blitz. The market stalls were mostly on the north side of what was then a half-abandoned railway viaduct. This was the old London & Blackwall Railway that would be reborn ten years later as the Docklands Light Railway and prompt the redevelopment we see today.

So the traders were trapped. The new shopping precinct had been under construction for years. But where could they go in the meantime? The new precinct would take several more years before it was ready and business on what was left of the street was fading.

Walking through Watney St last year, apart from a few stalls in the precinct, I could see little evidence there was once a great market there. In the seventies, there were a couple of pubs, The Old House At Home and The Lord Nelson, in the midst of the market. Today there are still a few old shops left on the Cable St end of Watney St, but the only remnant I could spot of the market I knew was the sign from The Old House At Home rendered onto the wall of an Asian grocer.

I remember one day Lyn came home, upset about a cat living on the market that had its whiskers cut off. I went straight back to Watney St and found the beautiful tortoiseshell cat hiding under a parked car. When I called her, she came to me without any hesitation and made herself right at home in our flat. Of course, she was pregnant, giving us five lovely kittens and we kept one of them, taking him to Toronto with us."

Eileen Armstrong, trader in fruit and vegetables

Joe the Grocer

Gladys McGee, poet and member of the Basement Writers' group, who wrote eloquently of her life in Wapping and Shadwell. Gladys was living around the corner from the market in Cable St at this time.

Joe the Grocer under demolition.

Frames from a contact sheet showing the new shopping precinct.

Photographs copyright © Tony Bock

You may like to see these other photographs by Tony Bock

Tony Bock, Photographer

I am publishing my account of a visit to the Annual Grimaldi Service as a reminder to any readers who might choose to join this year's service which takes place next Sunday 1st February at 3pm at All Saints Church, Livermore Rd, Dalston.

The first Sunday in February is when all the clowns arrive in East London for the annual service to honour Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837), the greatest British clown - held since 1946 at this time of year, when the clowns traditionally gathered in the capital prior to the start of the Circus touring season. Originally celebrated at St James' Pentonville Rd, where Grimaldi is buried, the service transferred to Holy Trinity, Dalston in 1959 where the event has grown and grown, and where there is now a shrine to Grimaldi graced with a commemorative stained glass window.

By mistake, I walked into the church hall which served as the changing room to discover myself surrounded by painted faces and multi-coloured suits. Seeing my disorientation, Mr Woo (in a red wig and clutching a balloon dog) kindly stepped over to greet me, explaining that he was veteran of forty years clowning including a stint at Bertram Mills Circus with the legendary Coco the clown - before revealing it was cut short when he fell over and fractured his leg, illustrating the anecdote by lifting his trouser to reveal a savagely-scarred shin bone. "He's never going to win a knobbly knees contest now!" declared Uncle Colin with alarming levity, Mr Woo's performing partner in the double act known as The Custard Clowns. "But what did you do?" I enquired in concern, still alarmed by Mr Woo's injury. "I got a comedy car!" was Mr Woo's shrill response, accompanied by an unnerving chuckle.

Reeling from the tragic ambiguity of this conversation, I walked around to the church where fans were gathering for the service and there, in the quiet corner church dedicated to Joseph Grimaldi, I had the good fortune to shake hands with Streaky the clown, a skinny veteran of sixty-three years clowning. There is a poignancy  to old clowns such as Streaky with face paint applied to wrinkled skin - a quality only emphasised by the disparity between the harsh make-up and the infinite nuance of the lined features beneath.

At first, the presence of the clowns doing their sideshows to warm up the congregation changed the meaning of the sacred space, as if the vaulted arches became tent poles and we had come to a show rather than a church service - although both were strangely reconciled in the atmosphere of celebration that prevailed. Yet although the children delighted in the comedy and the audience laughed at the gags, I must admit that - as I always have - I found the clowns more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha.

But it is precisely this contradiction which draws me to them, because I believe that, through embracing grotesque self-humilation, they expose an essential quality of humanity - that of our innate foolishness, underscored by our tendency to take ourselves too seriously. We need to be startled or even alarmed by their extreme appearance, their gurning and their dopey japes, in order to recognise our true selves. This is the corrective that clowns deliver with a cheesey grin, confronting us with a necessary sense of the ridiculous in life.

"This is the best job I ever had - to make people smile and get them to laugh," declared Conk the Clown, once he had demonstrated blowing bubbles from his saxophone. "How did you start?" I enquired. "I got divorced," he replied - and everyone within earshot laughed, except me. "I had depression," Conk continued with a helpless smirk, "so I joined the amateur dramatics, but I was no good at it, so I thought, 'I'll be a clown!'" Twelve years later, Conk has no apparent cause to regret his decision, as his mirthful demeanour confirmed. "It's something inside, a feeling you know - everyone's got laughter inside them," he informed me with a wink, before disappearing up the aisle in a cloud of bubbles pursued by laughing children.

Turning around, I found myself greeted by Glory B, an elegant lady dressed in subtle tones of turquoise and blue, and sporting a huge butterfly upon her hat. Significantly, her face was not painted and she described herself as a 'Children's Entertainer' rather than a 'Clown.' "Sometimes children are scared of clowns, " she admitted, articulating my own thoughts with a smile, "so I work with Mr Woo as a go-between, to comfort them if they are distressed."

Once the clown organist began to play, everyone took their seats and the parade of clowns commenced - old troupers and young goons, buffoons and funsters, jokers and jesters - enough to delight the most weary eyes and lift the spirits of the most down-hearted February day. An army of clowns filled the church with their pranking and japes, and their high wattage personalities. The intensity of an army of clowns is a presence that defies description, because even at rest there is such bristling potential for misrule.

In their primary-coloured parodic suits, I could recognise the styles of many periods, from both the twentieth and the nineteenth centuries, and when a clown stood up to carry the wreath to lay in honour of 'Joey Grimaldi,' I saw he was wearing an eighteenth century clown suit. At the climax of the service, the names of those clowns who had died in the year were read out and, for each one, a child carried a candle down the nave. After the announcements of 'Sir Norman Wisdom,' 'Buddi,' 'Bilbo' and 'Frosty,' I saw a feint light travel through the crowd to be lost at the rear of the church and it made tangible the brave purpose of clowning - that of laughing in the face of the darkness which surrounds us.

Mr Woo worked with Coco the clown at Bertram Mills Circus until he fractured his leg

Conk the clown once suffered from depression

Arriving at Holy Trinity, Dalston

Streaky at Grimaldi's shrine with the case of eggs recording the distinctive make-up of famous clowns

Streaky the clown, a veteran of sixty-three years clowning

Glory B, Children's Entertainer

The commemorative window for Joseph Grimaldi

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John Claridge's Clowns (Act One)

John Claridge's Clowns (Act Two)

John Claridge's Clowns (The Final Act)

These copperplate engravings illustrate The Principal Operations of Weaving reproduced from a book of 1748 in the collection at Dennis Severs House. Many of these activities would have been a familiar sight in Spitalfields three centuries ago.

Ribbon Weaving

Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate House, Spitalfields, E1

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There is an unmistakeable melancholic beauty which characterises Eva Frankfurther's East End drawings made during her brief working career in the nineteen-fifties. Born into a cultured Jewish family in Berlin in 1930, she escaped to London with her parents in 1939 and studied at St Martin's School of Art between 1946 and 1952, where she was a contemporary of Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach.

Yet Eva turned her back on the art school scene and moved to Whitechapel, taking menial jobs at Lyons Corner House and then at a sugar refinery, immersing herself in the community she found there. Taking inspiration from Rembrandt, Käthe Kollwitz and Picasso, Eva set out to portray the lives of working people with compassion and dignity.

In 1959, afflicted with depression, Eva took her own life aged just twenty-eight, but despite the brevity of her career she revealed a significant talent and a perceptive eye for the soulful quality of her fellow East Enders.

"West Indian, Irish, Cypriot and Pakistani immigrants, English whom the Welfare State had passed by, these were the people amongst whom I lived and made some of my best friends. My colleagues and teachers were painters concerned with form and colour, while to me these were only means to an end, the understanding of and commenting on people." - Eva Frankfurther

Images copyrigh t© Estate of Eva Frankfurter

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Remembering writer and historian Gillian Tindall who died in October, I am publishing her meditation upon the paradox of photography - that brings us closer to history yet also separates us from the past.

Boulevard du Temple, Paris, by Louis Daguerre, 1838

It is over a hundred and fifty years years since photographic portraits ceased to be an exotic rarity and began to make their way into the homes of those with a little money to spare. And it is over a hundred years since the first cinemas opened to show flickering silent movies.

For all the centuries before, nearly all people and places that had gone were lost forever, surviving only in the memories of those who would themselves disappear in turn. As each generation died, another tranche of the past slipped quietly into the vast pool of the irretrievable. The faces of kings and a few others rich or famous enough to be painted from life were preserved. But the vast majority of men and women, however prosperous, however active and handsome, however busy their lives, simply became - as the Bible quietly warns - 'as if they had never been born'.

The tiny minority whose names survived because their stories were told and re-told were typically portrayed in clothes and circumstances that belonged to the time of telling rather than those of their own date. We are used to seeing Mary the Virgin in medieval dress and Christ garbed something like a travelling friar of the same era. It does not bother us that the Palestinian garments of two thousand years ago may have been rather different.

Similarly, our Elizabethan ancestors, looking back into history, were quite at ease imagining that people had always lived and thought more or less as they did. Actors wore the contemporary clothes of their own time rather than 'period costume.' The battle scenes in Macbeth bear more relation to the Wars of the Roses  - which in Shakespeare's childhood would still have been remembered by the old - than they do to the battles of the Scottish usurper of five hundred years earlier. And the famous dinner, at which Macbeth is alarmed by Banquo's ghost, resembles an Elizabethan social gathering rather than anything credible in a remote Scottish glen in the Dark Ages.

Today, if we have any acquaintance with history, we understand the past - I will not say 'better' but 'differently.' We know that our ancestors, though 'just like us' in some ways, did not speak or even think like us. They feared things we do not fear and were robust-minded in ways that shock us. We know they had different assumptions from us, different moral imperatives and different expectations. They are Philip Larkin's 'endless altered people', forever walking down the church aisle in the same way - yet not quite the same.

Anyone who has seen They Shall Not Grow Old, the World War One documentary - with clips of the era adjusted to modern film-speed, coloured and with a sound-track added - will know what I mean. In one way, these young men brought back to life again, so many of whom did not survive till 1918, are painfully like our own husbands, brothers, sons. Only, they are not. They are preserved in an eternal moment that brings them close just as it keeps us apart from them. So much about them - their clothes, their weapons, their slang, their bad teeth, their boots, their mannerisms - indicate that it is the irretrievable past we are viewing.

Another remastered film came my way recently, of a journey along the Regent's Canal in its working heyday, interspersed with fleeting views of  surrounding streets. No Camden Lock market then, instead barges loaded with timber and hard-core, slowly pacing horses and men shifting crates. But no thumps and bangs, no clopping of hooves or crash of water into locks, for films were silent then. Instead, elegiac music has been added, even over the glimpses of streets full of trams and open-topped buses. Nothing could emphasise more the fact that, since the film was shot in 1924, all the busy people in hats and long coats, glancing curiously at the camera as they hurry pass, must now be dead.

The same is true of many other street photographs that now fascinate us with their juxtaposition of the familiar and the strange. Yet often they do not quite carry the same emotional charge as random shots. Many twentieth century photographers, in this and other countries, have done what sketchers and engravers of street-scenes did before them: they have picked out distinctive street-people - traders, beggars, down-and-outs, well-known local characters - as representative figures. Yet the very fact of being singled out makes these people subtly special.

It is the completely incidental figure, often apparently unaware of the camera, in a picture otherwise taken as a streetscape, that stirs in me the feeling that I really am being offered a brief entry into the past. The blessed Colin O'Brien's views of Clerkenwell and Hackney in the later decades of the twentieth century are occasionally of this kind. So too are some of the East End scenes of John Claridge, though much of the dereliction he recorded is essentially unpeopled. In just a few shots - a lone man in a mackintosh riding a bicycle though a waste-land, a gaunt-faced workman in a suit looking round warily from his work in a yard - I get the eerie sense of being close to a vanished individual's reality.

And this is true of the celebrated earliest street photo of all, which was taken by Louis Daguerre from a high window of a Paris boulevard in 1838. The camera's shutter had to open for a long exposure which renders passing carriages and pedestrians as only faint blurs. Yet clearly visible is one man, because he was standing still to have his boots cleaned. He was the first person ever to be photographed. He did not know it. And we have no idea who he was.

Accident at the junction of Clerkenwell Rd and Farringdon Rd, 1957. Photo by Colin O'Brien

E16, 1982. "He's going home to his dinner." Photo by John Claridge

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The Ghosts of Old London

Colin O'Brien, Photographer

John Claridge, Photographer

In recent years, I have eschewed public transport and become a committed cyclist, so I was delighted to discover this 1896 catalogue for The Metropolitan Machinists' Co, yet another of the lost trades of Bishopsgate, reproduced courtesy of the Bishopsgate Institute

Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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First Snowdrops in Wapping

Even now, in the depths of Winter, there is plant life stirring. As I travelled around the East End over the past week in the wet and cold, I kept my eyes open for new life and was rewarded for my quest by the precious discoveries that you see here. Fulfilling my need for assurance that we are advancing in our passage through the year, each plant offers undeniable evidence that, although there may be months of winter yet to come, I can look forward to the spring that will arrive before too long.

Hellebores in Shoreditch

Catkins in Bethnal Green

Catkins in Weavers' Fields

Quince flowers in Spitalfields

Cherry blossom in Museum Gardens

Netteswell House is the oldest dwelling in Bethnal Green

Aconites in King Edward VII Memorial Park in Limehouse

Cherry Blossom near Columbia Rd

Hellebores in Spitalfields

Spring greens at Spitalfields City Farm

The gherkin and the artichoke

Cherry blossom in Itchy Park

Soft fruit cuttings at Spitalfields City Farm

Seedlings at Spitalfields City Farm

Cherry blossom at Christ Church

Russian Troops Strap Starlink Terminals to Horses as Russian Cavalry Makes 'Historic' Return - Kyiv Post

A WWII propaganda film narrated as an "auto"-biography