Join me for ramble through 2000 years of culture and history in SPITALFIELDS followed by tea and cakes freshly baked to recipe of 1720 served in a 300 year old house. This Saturday is sold out but tickets are available on Saturday 11th, Saturday 18th and Saturday 25th April, and through the spring.
Some tickets also available for my TOUR OF THE CITY OF LONDON on EASTER MONDAY.
Click here to book
In Bethnal Green
Let me admit, this is my favourite moment in the year – when the new leaves are opening fresh and green, and the streets are full of trees in flower. Several times, in recent days, I have been halted in my tracks by the shimmering intensity of the blossom. And so, each spring, I enact my own version of the eighth-century Japanese custom of hanami or flower viewing, setting out on a pilgrimage through the East End with my camera to record the wonders of this fleeting season that marks the end of winter incontrovertibly.
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 wondrous … The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.” he said and, standing in front of these trees, I succumbed to the same rapture at the excess of nature.
In the post-war period, cherry trees became a fashionable option for town planners and it seemed that the brightness of pink increased over the years as more colourful varieties were propagated. “Look at it, it’s so beautiful, just like at an advert,” I overheard someone say yesterday, in admiration of a tree in blossom, and I could not resist the thought that it would be an advertisement for sanitary products, since the colour of the tree in question was the exact familiar tone of pink toilet paper.
Yet I do not want my blossom muted, I want it bright and heavy and shining and full. I love to be awestruck by the incomprehensible detail of a million flower petals, each one a marvel of freshly-opened perfection and glowing in a technicolour hue.
In Whitechapel
In Spitalfields
In Weavers’ Fields
In Haggerston
In Weavers’ Fields
In Bethnal Green
In Pott St
Outside Bethnal Green Library
In Spitalfields
In Bethnal Green Gardens
In Museum Gardens
In Museum Gardens
In Paradise Gardens
In Old Bethnal Green Rd
In Pollard Row
In Nelson Gardens
In Canrobert St
In the Hackney Rd
In Haggerston Park
In Shipton St
In Bethnal Green Gardens
In Haggerston
At Spitalfields City Farm
In Columbia Rd
In London Fields
Once upon a time …. Syd’s Coffee Stall, Calvert Avenue
