Rodinsky’s Room

This was an unrequired story. My feeling now is that the routines I listened to were the ones I solicited.

19 Princelet Street, Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets, E1

I was looking for confirmations and extensions of what I already knew.

Brick Lane, Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets, E1

Rodinsky was an empty space, a lacuna; that which was not to be uncovered something sealed and forgotten.

19 Princelet Street, Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets, E1

This was the period, the seventies between his disappearance and the breaking open the attic room. He wasn’t visible or invisible. He had neither presence nor absence.

Brick Lane, Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets, E1

His story hadn’t been formulated.

Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair's Rodinsky's Room (1999)

From Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair’s Rodinsky’s Room (1999)

On Brick Lane

I returned to the streets my grandparents had willingly left to find the last of the elderly Jewish East Enders and to hear their stories. I spent my days talking with people in shops and old people’s homes and walking the streets where my grandparnts had walked.

Rachel Lichtenstein's On Brick Lane, Brick Lane, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, E1

Over time, I began to pick up traces left by other groups of people who had lived in the area. I learned that the Latin inscription ‘Umbra Sumus’ above the great mosque, which was once a synagogue and before that a church, translates as ‘We are Shadows’.

From Rachel Lichtenstein’s On Brick Lane (2007)

Old Truman Brewery

Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth…

Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets, E1

…a pint of plain is your only man.

From Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939)