With so many pubs closed, it remains vital to recognise the community-minded pastoral work publicans have done for decades. Whether offering a kind ear in troubled times or organising a whip-round for someone in need, the role of an East End victualler is far more than just pulling pints.

Alistair Von Lion

AKA 'The London Pub Explorer'

Tracing shadows

Tom Bolton’s brilliant book Vanished City focuses on how London is in a constant state of transformation. "Layers of lost London lies right under our noses, in places we think we know and places we never thought to visit".

Each chapter uncovers an area that has virtually disappeared but over many centuries would have been familiar to every Londoner, including districts like Limehouse, Wellclose, Ratcliff and Horsleydown, these were the areas where my antecedents lived and worked.

The minutiae and ephemera of everyday life are the true archives of the city. They remake the urban landscape everyday. They sculpt a thousand pasts that are perhaps no longer nameable. These scattered fragments are witness to a history that, unlike that of museums or books, no longer has a language.

Michel De Certeau
‘Ghosts in the city’

The residue from millions of Londoners is ever present in these forgotten places, their structure and the geography in which they stood would have been recognised by my ancestors.

Their surfaces are scarred with the marks, traces and shadows of those who lived and walked before, I feel a deep connection to them.

...if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of vision. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.

W.G. Sebald. Austerlitz

The Royal Mint

Oil on panel  225x205mm £850