Once on the road it picked up pace, free-wheeled,
then moved up through the gears, and wouldn’t give
Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets, E2
to shoulder-charges, kicks; resisted force
until to tangle with it would have been
Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets, E2
to test bone against engine or machine,
to be dragged in, broken, thrown out again
minus a limb.
Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets, E2
From Simon Armitage’s The Tyre (1997)
Filed under Photographs
And some are pretty enough,
And some are poor indeed;
Helena Roden's Flowers, Lefevre Park, Bow, Tower Hamlets, E3
And now again the people
Call it but a weed.
From Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Flower (1864)
Filed under Photographs
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)
Filed under Books
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