In his last interview, Dennis Potter famously eulogised the glory of cherry blossom as an incarnation of the overwhelming vividness of human experience. “The nowness of everything is absolutely ...

Hosted by The Gentle Author, this is a walking tour of storytelling and sightseeing, complemented with archive photography, paintings and music. Tours commence at 2pm, meeting outside Aldgate Station ...

Auriculas were first recorded in England in the Elizabethan period as a passtime of the elite but it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that they became a widespread passion amongst ...

There are more than 5,000 stories by The Gentle Author with 44,000 pictures to be found in the categories and archives on this site ...

Roger Preece, Master of the Royal Foundation of St Katharine invited me to Limehouse recently to explore the archives, where I found this wonderful album of photographs documenting the activities of ...

Brick Lane takes its name from the brick works that once filled Spitalfields and I always wondered how it was in those former times. So you can imagine my delight to visit Bulmer Brick & Tile Company ...

After finding a two volume set of Thomas Bewick’s British Birds, I also discovered a copy of his General History of Quadrupeds from 1824 in the Spitalfields Market and I turned first to his entry upon ...