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One cold day many years ago, photographer Colin O’Brien & I were greeted by the Beadle of The Worshipful Company of Butchers, when we arrived at their Hall in St Bartholomew’s Close, Smithfield, to join a small crowd eagerly awaiting the annual appearance of the celebrated Boar’s Head in the first week of Advent, marking the beginning on the Christmas season in London.

This arcane tradition which has its origin in 1343 when the Lord Mayor, John Hamond, granted the Butchers of the City of London use of a piece of land by the Fleet River, where they could slaughter and clean their beasts, for the token yearly payment of a Boar’s Head at Christmas.

To pass the time in the drizzle, the Beadle showed us his magnificent staff of office dating from 1716, upon which may be discerned a Boar’s Head. “Years ago, they had a robbery and this was the only thing that wasn’t stolen,” he confided to me helpfully, ” – it had a cover and the thieves mistook it for a mop.”

Before another word was spoken, a posse of members of the Butcher’s Company emerged triumphant from the Hall in blue robes and velvet hats, with a livid red Boar’s Head carried aloft at shoulder height, to the delighted applause of those waiting in the street. Behind us, drummers of the Royal Logistics Corps in red uniforms gathered and  City of London Police motorcyclists in fluorescent garb lined up to receive instructions from the Master of the Company.

Everyone assembled to pose for official photographs with the perky red ears of the Boar sticking up above the crowd, providing the opportunity for a closer examination of this gloss-painted paper mache creation, sitting upon a base of Covent Garden grass and surrounded by plastic fruit. As recently as 1968, a real Boar’s Head was paraded but these days Health & Safety concerns about hygiene require the use of this colourful replica for ceremonial purposes.

The drummers set a brisk pace and before we knew it, the parade was off down Little Britain, preceded by the police motorcyclists halting the traffic. For a couple of minutes, the City stopped – astonished passengers leaned out of buses and taxis, and office workers reached for their phones to capture the moment. It made a fine spectacle advancing down Cheapside, past St Mary Le Bow, with the sound of drums echoing and reverberating off the tall buildings.

The rhythmic clamour accompanying the procession of men in their dark robes, with the Boar’s Head bobbing above, evoked the ancient drama of the City of London and, as they paraded through the gathering dusk towards the Mansion House looming in the east on that occluded December afternoon, I could not resist the feeling that they were marching through time as well as space.

Neil Hunt, Beadle of The Worshipful Company of Butchers

The Beadle’s staff dates from 1716

Leaving St Bartholomew’s Close

Advancing through Little Britain

Entering Cheapside

Passing St Mary Le Bow

In Cheapside

Approaching the Mansion House

The Boar’s Head arrives at the Mansion House

Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien

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George Fuest by Patricia Niven

Last January, I was intrigued to hear of a baker running a solo bakery from a shed in the backyard of a house in Fournier St, by the name of Populations Bakery. Orders could placed online, I learnt, and collected from the front door direct from the baker George Fuest on Friday. So I ordered Galettes des Rois, without any expectation but as a treat to lift my spirits in the first weeks of New Year, only to be astonished by the sophistication and accomplishment of these sweet treats.

Over the past year, a stream of delights followed including a magnificent Simnel cake at Easter and an unforgettable birthday cake in the autumn – all evidence of a truly outstanding talent in baking. Then last week I happened to meet George one cold morning in the cycle lane in Westminster just below Big Ben as it struck nine. He was on his way to make deliveries but he stopped his bike and handed me a mince pie. It was my first Christmas moment and now I am spoiled because I cannot imagine any other being as good as George’s.

Contributing photographer Patricia Niven & I joined George for a session in the bakery recently – before the Christmas rush began – to see for ourselves what goes on. George baked loaves of bread, croissants, danish pastries and pains au chocolate with an ease which belied his precision and expert judgement, while he explained to us how and why he conjured his bakery into being in the house where he grew up.

“Even before Lockdown I used to make a lot of bread and pastries. When I left university, I was trying to start a website and to finance that I worked as bike courier for Little Bread Pedlar delivering pastries to coffee shops. That was when I realised I just really enjoyed eating pastries and it inspired me to start baking.

I started working at a coffee shop as a barista because I wanted to get into the coffee industry. But then, when Lockdown happened, I started baking a lot more regularly and delivering to friends and family, mostly as a way to have something to do, to get out on my bike and go and see people, delivering supplies. Then I did some charity fundraisers because people wanted to pay for my pastries but I did not think they were good enough, so I asked people to make donations to charity rather than take money from them. And it grew from there.

I was attracted to the mission of a bakery employing heritage grains, supporting farmers that are focussing on regenerative agricultural practices. I realised I really wanted to be a baker. I am interested in being the middle person between the farmer and the customer, and promoting this approach to baking.

During Lockdown I could get on my bike and deliver direct. I used to bake though the early hours of the morning and then be cycling around London for six or seven hours a day. Now people come and collect, and I have some drop-off points around London.

I am self taught though a lot of trial and error, and a lot of reading recipes. And I did work experience at Flore Bakery in Bermondsey and at Landrace Bakery in Bath and I did holiday cover at Toad Bakery in Camberwell. I learnt a lot that way.

When you work with specialty grain, there is a lot of trial and error anyway because you can only learn how to interpret the flour by working with it. With modern cereals, you get this complete consistency that industrial processes require – they want the baking to be the same every time.

That is not the case with heritage grain where you can get different characteristics from field to field, so every sack of flour can be quite different which means you are always learning – as a baker – the properties of the grain and what you can do with it. The baking tastes better. In commercial production, there is no requirement for flavour. Modern wheat is roller milled which strips off a lot of elements of the grain but, with stoneground, the entire grain is ground.

I call my bakery Populations because it focusses on genetically diverse wheat. With modern wheat you get a monoculture where every plant is genetically identical which makes them vulnerable to infections and pests, so they require a lot of pesticides and herbicides which are oil-based chemicals. With populations-diverse wheat, you have a blend of many different wheats which are grown in the same field and the seeds saved, and the process is repeated again and again. This creates a complete genetic diversity in the crop and it will be different in every part of the country because it will adapt to wherever it is grown.

This may sound like the past, employing traditional methods and not using modern fertilisers, but it is also the future because it is the way crops need to be grown to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and start regenerating the land.

When I am baking, it is a lot of hours work. When I started out, I did not have many customers so I would be cycling seventy kilometres a day to deliver bread and pastries, after five or six hours of baking beforehand. It kept me fit but it was not really sustainable.

I would love to open a community-based coffee shop and bakery, and I am also enjoying small scale wholesale. This Christmas I am making mince pies for ten select coffee shops in London and it is lovely to get the feedback.

There are so many things I enjoy about this work. I love the challenge of woking with different grains and learning new methods. I still enjoy eating the pastries and my bread too!.”

Click here to order from Populations Bakery and collect from Fournier St

Sough dough loaves

Croissants

Pains au chocolate

George Fuest

Photographs © Patricia Niven

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Poet, compositor and publisher, Catnach moved to London from Newcastle in 1812 and set up Seven Dials Press in Monmouth Court, producing more than four thousand chapbooks and broadsides in the next quarter century. Anointed as the high priest of street literature and eager to feed a seemingly-endless appetite for cheap printed novelties in the capital, Catnach put forth a multifarious list of titles, from lurid crime and political satire to juvenile rhymes and comic ballads, priced famously at a ‘farden.’

A An Apple Pie

B Bit it

C Cut it

D Dealt it

E Did eat it

F Fought for it

G Got it

H Had it

J Join’d for it

K Kept it

L Long’d for it

M Mourned for it

N Nodded at it

O Open’d it

P Peeped into it

Q Quartered it

R Ran for it

S Stole it

T Took it

V View’d it

W Wanted it

XYZ and & all wished for a piece in hand

Dame Dumpling who made the Apple Pie

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This biscuit was sent home in the mail during World War I

As regular readers will already know, I have a passion for all the good things that come from the bakery. So I decided to take advantage of the fine afternoon yesterday to take a walk through the City of London in search of some historic bakery products to feed my obsession, and thereby extend my appreciation of the poetry and significance of this sometimes undervalued area of human endeavour.

Leaving Spitalfields, I turned left and walked straight down Bishopsgate to the river, passing Pudding Lane where the Fire of London started at the King’s Bakery, reminding me that a bakery was instrumental in the very creation of the City we know today.

My destination was the noble church of St Magnus the Martyr, which boasts London’s stalest loaves of bread. Stored upon high shelves beyond the reach of vermin, beside the West door, these loaves were once placed here each Saturday for the sustenance of the poor and distributed after the service on Sunday morning. Although in the forgiving gloom of the porch it is not immediately apparent, these particular specimens have been there so many years they are now mere emblems of this bygone charitable endeavour. Surpassing any conceivable shelf life, these crusty bloomers are consumed by mould and covered with a thick layer of dust – indigestible in reality, they are metaphors of God’s bounty that would cause any shortsighted, light-fingered passing hobo to gag.

Close by in this appealingly shadowy incense-filled Wren church which was once upon the approach to London Bridge, are the tall black boards tabulating the donors who gave their legacies for bread throughout the centuries, commencing in 1674 with Owen Waller. If you are a connoisseur of the melancholy and the forgotten, this a good place to come on a mid-week afternoon to linger and admire the shrine of St Magnus with his fearsome horned helmet and fully rigged model sailing ship – once you have inspected the bread, of course.

I walked West along the river until I came to St Bride’s Church off Fleet St, as the next destination on my bakery products tour. Another Wren church, this possesses a tiered spire that became the inspiration for the universally familiar wedding cake design in the eighteenth century, after Fleet St baker William Rich created a three-tiered cake based upon the great architect’s design, for his daughter’s marriage. Dedicated today to printers and those who work in the former print trades, this is a church of manifold wonders including the pavement of Roman London in the crypt, an iron anti-resurrectionist coffin of 1820 – and most touching of all, an altar dedicated to journalists killed recently whilst pursuing their work in dangerous places around the globe.

From here, I walked up to St John’s Gate where a biscuit is preserved that was sent home from the trenches in World War I by Henry Charles Barefield. Surrounded by the priceless treasures of the Knights of St John magnificently displayed in the new museum, this old dry biscuit  has become an object of universal fascination both for its longevity and its ability to survive the rigours of the mail. Even the Queen wanted to know why the owner had sent his biscuit home in the post, when she came to open the museum. But no-one knows for sure, and this enigma is the source of the power of this surreal biscuit.

Pamela Willis, curator of the collection, speculates it was a comment on the quality of the rations – “Our biscuits are so hard we can send them home in the mail!” Yet while I credit Pamela’s notion, I find the biscuit both humorous and defiant, and I have my own theory of a different nuance. In the midst of the carnage of the Somme, Henry Barefield was lost for words – so he sent a biscuit home in the mail to prove he was still alive and had not lost his sense of humour either.

We do not know if he sent it to his mother or his wife, but I think we can be assured that it was an emotional moment for Mrs Barefield when the biscuit came through her letterbox – to my mind, this an heroic biscuit, a triumphant symbol of the human spirit, that manifests the comfort of modest necessity in the face of the horror of war.

I had a memorable afternoon filled with thoughts of bread, cake and biscuits, and their potential meanings and histories which span all areas of human experience. And unsurprisingly, as I came back through Spitalfields, I found that my walk had left me more than a little hungry. After several hours contemplating baked goods, it was only natural that I should seek out a cake for my tea, and in St John Bread & Wine, to my delight, there was one fresh Eccles Cake left on the plate waiting for me to carry it away.

Loaves of bread at St Magnus the Martyr

Is this London’s stalest loaf?

The spire of Wren’s church of St Bride’s which was the inspiration for the tiered design of the wedding cake first baked by Fleet St baker William Rich in the eighteenth century

The biscuit in the museum in Clerkenwell

The inscrutable Henry Charles Barefield of Tunbridge Wells who sent his biscuit home in the mail during World War I

The freshly baked Eccles Cake that I ate for my tea

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Consider supporting us as a Patron and receive a signed fine art print by Doreen Fletcher, signed photographic prints by David Hoffman and Sarah Ainslie, plus an inscribed copy of my forthcoming book.

I believe in the primacy of books because – even if the web gets wiped out tomorrow – they will endure. Publishing is not an easy task, yet I am passionate to do it when I find stories that I want to cherish, that I know people will love, and that deserve to be dignified in our time and for posterity.

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Favourite illustrator Marion Elliot is launching her first tea towel designs at her pop-up shop at 17 Rugby St, WC1N 3QT, (beside Pentreath & Hall) next Tuesday 10th to Saturday 14th October with a late night opening and drinks until 7.30pm on Thursday 12th. Marian’s designs are so bright and cheerful, they could equally be hung on the kitchen wall as prints.

“As an entrée into the world of printed textiles I thought I would begin by designing tea towels and see how I got on, but I am very keen to move on to silk scarves eventually!

Tea towels are a brilliant vehicle for printed designs, and I am especially inspired by the work of the American textile designer Tammis Keefe who produced a vast collection of witty and playful handkerchief and tea towel designs.

I have always loved artist-designed textiles. I am a great fan of Ascher scarves that feature images by Picasso, Matisse, Feliks Topolski and Henry Moore. I also love highly-illustrated commemorative head scarves”

Marion Elliot

Designs copyright © Marion Elliot

Yesterday, we passed the midway point of our month’s crowdfund campaign and I am grateful to the 99 people who have contributed £10,755, and touched by your messages of encouragement. I am hoping that we can reach the target in the next 2 weeks.

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A Corner of the Kitchen at Dennis Severs’ House

I am delighted to publish this gallery of favourites from Contributing Artist Eleanor Crow‘s forthcoming exhibition of paintings entitled EVERYDAY at Townhouse Spitalfields, opening next Saturday 7th and running until 22nd October.

The Kitchen of Jagir Kaur and Suresh Singh

A Plate of Greengages

A North London Kitchen, Summer Light

A Dorset Kitchen in Summer

A Plate with Fruit

At The Quality Chop House

The Kitchen at Leila’s Cafe

Bread on a Delft Plate

A Corner of a Stockwell Kitchen

Bird How Still Life

Tomatoes and Garlic

Still Life in Dinah’s Kitchen

The Little Dutch Kitchen

St. John Bread & Wine, Morning Light

Paintings copyright © Eleanor Crow

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William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker of Bermondsey

Everyone knows Cheddar, Stilton, Wensleydale and Caerphilly, but there is an unexpected new location on the cheese map of Great Britain. It is Bermondsey and the man responsible is William Oglethorpe – seen here bearing his curd cutter as a proud symbol of his domain, like a medieval king wielding a mace of divine authority.

When photographer Tom Bunning & I went along to Kappacasein Dairy under the railway arches beneath the main line out of London Bridge in the early morning to investigate this astonishing phenomenon, we entered the humid warmth of the dairy in eager anticipation and encountered an expectant line of empty milk churns.

Already Bill had been awake since quarter to four. He had woken in Streatham then driven to Chiddingstone in Kent and collected six hundred litres of milk. Beyond us, in a separate room with a red floor and a large glass window sat a hundred-year-old copper vat containing that morning’s delivery of milk, which was still warm. Bill with his fellow cheesemakers Jem and Agustin, dressed all in white, worked purposefully in this chamber, officiating like priests over the holy process of conjuring cheese into existence. I stood mesmerised by the sight of the pale buttery liquid swirling against the gleaming copper as Bill employed his curd cutter, manoeuvring it through the milk as you might turn an oar in a river.

Taking a narrow flexible strip of metal, he wrapped a cloth around it so that the rest extended behind like a flag. Holding each end of the strip and grasping the corners of the cloth, Bill leaned over the vat plunging his arms deep down into the whey. When he lifted the cloth again, Agustin reached over with practised ease to take two corners of the cloth as Bill removed the sliver of metal and – hey presto! – they were holding a bundle of cheese, dredged from the mysterious depth of the vat. It was as spellbinding as any piece of magic I have ever seen.

“Cheesemaking is easy, it’s life that is hard,” Bill admitted to me with a disarming grin, when I joined the cheesemakers for their breakfast at a long table and he revealed the long journey he had travelled to arrive in Bermondsey. “I grew up in Zambia,” he explained, “And one day a Swiss missionary came to see my father and asked if I’d like to go to agricultural school in Switzerland.”

“I earned a certificate of competence,” he added proudly, assuring me with a wink, “I’m a qualified peasant.” Bill learnt to make cheese while working on a farm in Provence with a friend from agricultural college. “It was simply a way to sell all the milk from the goats, we made a cheese the same way the other farmers did,” he informed me, “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

Bill took me through to the next railway arch where his cheeses are stored while they mature for up to a year. He cast his eyes lovingly over the neat flat cylinders each impressed with word ‘Bermondsey’ on the side. Every Wednesday, the cheeses are attended to. According to their type, they are either washed or stroked, to spread the mould evenly, and they are all turned before being left to slumber in the chilly darkness for another week.

It was while working for Neals Yard Dairy that Bill decided to set up on his own as cheese maker. Today, Kappacasein is one of handful of newly-established dairies in London producing distinctive cheeses and bypassing the chain of mass production and supermarkets to distribute on their own terms and sell direct to customers. Yet Bill chooses to be self-deprecating in his explanation of why he is making cheese in London. “It’s just because I can’t buy a farm,” he claims, shrugging in enactment of his role of the peasant in exile, cast out from the rural into the urban environment.

“I’m interested in transformation,” Bill confided to me, turning serious as he reached his hand gently down into the vat and lifted up a handful of curds, squeezing out the whey. These would form the second cheese to come from the vat that morning, a ricotta. All across the surface, nodules of cheese were forming, coming into existence as if from primordial matter. “I don’t want to interfere,” Bill continued, thinking out loud and growing philosophical as he became absorbed in observing the cheese form, “Nature’s that much more complicated – if you let it do its own thing that’s much interesting to me than trying to impose anything. It’s about finding an equilibrium with Nature.”

Let me confess I had an ulterior motive for being there. One day, I ate a slice of Bill’s Bermondsey cheese and became hooked. It was a flavour that was tangy and complex. One piece was not enough for me. Two pieces were not enough for me. Eventually, I had to seek the source of this wonder and there it was in front of me at last – the Holy Grail of London cheese in Bermondsey.

Cutting the curd

The curds

Squeezing the curds

Scooping out the cheese

The second batch of cheese from the whey is ricotta

Jem Kast, Cheese Maker

Ana Rojas, Yoghurt Maker

Agustin Cobo, Cheese Maker

The story of cheese

William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker of Bermondsey

Photographs copyright © Tom Bunning

Visit KAPPACASEIN DAIRY, 1 Voyager Industrial Estate, Bermondsey, SE16 4RP

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Tomorrow at 11:30am sees the Ceremony of the Widow’s Sixpence in Smithfield

Distribution of buns to widows in the churchyard of St Bartholomew the Great

St Bartholomew the Great is one of my favourite churches in the City, a rare survivor of the Great Fire, it boasts the best Norman interior in London. Composed of ancient rough-hewn stonework, riven with deep shadow where feint daylight barely illuminates the accumulated dust of ages, this is one of those rare atmospheric places where you can still get a sense of the medieval world glimmering. Founded by Rahere in 1123, the current structure is the last vestige of an Augustinian Priory upon the edge of Smithfield, where once  martyrs were burnt at the stake as public entertainment and the notorious St Bartholomew Fair was celebrated each summer from 1133 until 1855.

In such a location, the Good Friday tradition of the distribution of charity in the churchyard to poor widows of the parish sits naturally. Once known as the ‘Widow’s Sixpence,’ this custom was institutionalised by Joshua Butterworth in 1887, who created a trust in his name with an investment of twenty-one pounds and ten shillings. The declaration of the trust states its purpose thus – “On Good Friday in each year to distribute in the churchyard of St. Bartholomew the Great the sum of 6d. to twenty-one poor widows, and to expend the remainder of such dividends in buns to be given to children attending such distribution, and he desired that the Charity intended to be thereby created should be called ‘the Butterworth Charity.'”

Those of us who gathered in the churchyard at St Bartholomew the Great on Good Friday were blessed with sunlight. Yet we could not resist a twinge of envy for the clerics in their heavy cassocks and warm velvet capes as they processed from the church in a formal column, with priests at the head attended by vergers bearing wicker baskets of freshly buttered Hot Cross Buns, and a full choir bringing up the rear.

In the nineteen twenties, the sum distributed to each recipient was increased to two shillings and sixpence, and later to four shillings. Resplendent in his scarlet robes, Rev Martin Dudley, Rector of St Bartholomew the Great climbed upon the table tomb at the centre of the churchyard traditionally used for that purpose and enacted the motions of this arcane ceremony – enquiring of the assembly if there were a poor widow of the parish in need of twenty shillings. To his surprise, a senior female raised her hand. “That’s never happened before!” he declared to the easy amusement of the crowd.

I detected a certain haste to get to the heart of the proceedings – the distribution of the Hot Cross Buns. Rev Dudley directed the vergers to start with choir who exercised admirable self-control in only taking one each. Then, as soon as the choir had been fed, the vergers set out around the boundaries of the yard where senior females with healthy appetites reached forward eagerly to take their allotted Hot Cross Buns in hand. The tense anticipation gave way to good humour as everyone delighted in the strangeness of the ritual which rendered ordinary buns exotic. Reaching the end of the line at the furthest extent of the churchyard, the priests wasted no time in satisfying their own appetites and, for a few minutes, silence prevailed as the entire assembly munched their buns.

Then Rev Martin returned to his central position upon the table tomb. “And now, because there is no such thing as free buns,” he announced, “we’re going to sing a hymn.” Yet we were more than happy to oblige, standing replete with buns on Good Friday and enjoying the April sunlight.

The Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great, a century ago.

John Betjeman once lived in this house overlooking the churchyard.

The ceremony of the Widow’s Sixpence in the nineteen twenties.

“God’s blessing upon the frosts and cold!”

A crowd gathers for the ceremony a hundred years ago.

Hungry widows line up for buns.

The churchyard in the nineteenth century.

Rev Martin Dudley BD MSc MTh PhD FSA FRHistS AKC is the 25th Rector since the Reformation.

Testing the buns.

The clerics ensure no buns go to waste.

Hymns in the cold – “There is a green hill far away without a city wall…”

The Norman interior of St Bartholomew the Great at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Gatehouse prior to bombing in World War I and reconstruction.

Archive images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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Victoria Fish Bar, Roman Rd (Gone but not forgotten)

I try to eat fresh fish at least once a week and so, as I travel around the East End, I tend to navigate in relation to the fish shops. Illustrator Eleanor Crow shares a similar passion, witnessed by these loving portraits of top destinations for fish, whether jellied eels, fish & chips or fresh on the slab. “These places are a reminder of our river-dependent history,” Eleanor informed me, “I love the look of London’s famous eel shops with their ornate lettering and wooden partitions. Nothing beats having a proper fishmongers’ shop or market stall in the neighbourhood – not only do the shops look good, but these guys really know about fish.”

F.Cooke, Broadway Market (Gone but not forgotten)

The Fishery, Stoke Newington High St

George’s Place, Roman Rd (Gone but not forgotten)

G. Kelly, Bethnal Green Rd (Gone but not forgotten)

Mike’s Quality Fish Bar, Essex Rd

Davies & Sons, Hoe St (Gone but not forgotten)

The Fish Plaice, Cambridge Heath Rd (Gone but not forgotten)

Mersin Fish, Morning Lane

Dennis Chippy, Lea Bridge Rd

Kingfisher, Homerton High St

Mersin 2, Lower Clapton Rd

Golden Fish Bar, Farringdon Rd (Gone but not forgotten)

Tubby Isaacs (Gone but not forgotten)

L. Manze, Walthamstow High St (Gone but not forgotten)

Sea Food & Fresh Fish, Chatsworth Rd

G. Kelly, Roman Rd

Steve Hatt, Essex Rd

Jonathan Norris, Victoria Park Rd

Downey Brothers, Globe Town Market Sq (Gone but not forgotten)

Barneys Seafood, Chambers St (Gone but not forgotten)

Billingsgate Market

Illustrations copyright © Eleanor Crow

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At the Fish Harvest Festival

At the Fish Plaice

Boiling the Eels at Barney’s Seafood

At Tubby Isaac’s

Tom Disson, Fishmonger

Charlie Casey, Fishmonger

Albert Hafize, Fish Dealer

The Last Porters of Billingsgate Market

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Syd’s Coffee Stall, Shoreditch High St

(Gone but not forgotten)

Illustrator Eleanor Crow made this set of watercolour portraits of cafes as a tribute to those cherished institutions which incarnate the essence of civility in the East End. “It’s because they’re individual concerns, often owned by families across generations who get to know all their customers,” admitted Eleanor, revealing the source of her devotion to cafe culture ,“I like the frontages because each is designed uniquely for that café with wonderful sign-writing or lettering and eye-catching colours. Some of these cafés have been here for a very long time and everyone in the area is familiar with them, and is very fond of them. They make the streets into a better place and are landmarks upon the landscape of the East End.”

E. Pellicci, Bethnal Green Rd

Savoy, Norton Folgate (Gone but not forgotten)

Time for Tea, Shoreditch High St (Gone but not forgotten)

Dalston Lane Cafe

Paga Cafe, Lea Bridge Rd

Lennies Snack Bar, Calvert Avenue (Gone but not forgotten)

Marina Cafe, Mare St

Kingsland Cafe, Kingsland Rd

Grab & Go, Blackhorse Lane

Gina’s Restaurant, Bethnal Green Rd (Gone but not forgotten)

Copper Grill, Eldon St

Billy Bunter’s Snack Bar, Mile End Rd (Gone but not forgotten)

Beppe’s Cafe, West Smithfield

B.B. Cafe, Lea Bridge Rd

Savoy Cafe, Graham Rd

A.Gold, Brushfield St (Gone but not forgotten)

Arthur’s Cafe, Kingsland Rd (Gone but not forgotten)

Cafe Bliss, Dalston Lane

Cafe Rodi, Blackhorse Lane

Rossi Restaurant, Hanbury St  (Gone but not forgotten)

Eleanor Crow at E.Pellicci

Drawings copyright © Eleanor Crow

Portrait copyright © Colin O’Brien

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At Gina’s Restaurant

At Mister City Sandwich Bar

At Arthur’s Cafe

At City Corner Cafe

At E.Pellicci

At Regis Cafe, Leadenhall Market

At Dino’s Grill & Restuarant

At Syd’s Coffee Stall, Shoreditch High St