If Brexit is the result of a backward-looking nostalgia, the Swinging London of the Chelsea Set was the opposite: it marked a determination to move on from the devastation and austerity left by World War II.
In 1962 The Westinghouse Corporation made a documentary film exploring the state of the nation as Britain continued to register the aftershocks of war, adjusted to the loss of empire and witnessed the erosion of its status as a world-class industrial nation.
As a half French, half American individual, I give in to a pastime common to double nationals, which consists of regularly comparing both countries of origin.
If you can get along to Bethnal Green in the next three weeks, I highly recommend a visit to this exhibition of photographs. They document a dramatic period in the history of the East London.
The Russian architect Berthold Lubetkin once declared “Nothing is too Good for Ordinary People”* and as a founder of the radical Tecton group he designed municipal housing which combined the creation of healthy spaces, where people could live healthy lives, with the expression of his modernist aesthetic.
A new municipal HQ for the Borough of Tower Hamlets is being built on the site of the old Royal London Hospital, and it’s due to open in 2022.
What do you do when life gives you lemons? Make lemonade is the wrong answer, says Elf Lyons, who is the product – and that’s not too economic a term – of father Gerard Lyons, former economic advisor to Boris Johnson, artist mother Annette Lyons and the Philippe Gaulier clown school on the outskirts of Paris.
Nick Cooke considers Ruth O’Callaghan’s ambitious poetic meditation on London’s immigrants
There’s no other way to say it – we were in a different world – one with a clock tower and two oast houses, paved with cobble stones.
The East End of London was a crucible for radical ideas and activism, including the women’s suffrage movement, fired in part by the deprivation and inequality experienced by so many of its inhabitants.
Rip Bulkeley describes the planning and production of a forthcoming anthology of poems responding to the fire in Grenfell Tower .
“Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham”, by Jon Bloomfield. Review by Jane McChrystal.
Although Jon Bloomfield intended “Our City” for a general audience, I think some of our elected representatives could learn a lot from it.