Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I made the trip over to Leytonstone to pay homage to Cordelia – known as ‘Dee’ – Tocqueville, the undisputed queen of East End Lollipop Ladies, who has been ...

At this moment of the year, when the temperature drops and the dusk closes in, I get a longing to go walking through Walter Thornbury’s London ...

Here are the East Enders of the nineteen seventies as pictured by photographer Tony Bock in the days when he worked for the East London Advertiser – the poncey dignitaries, the comb-over tories, the ...

Visiting in 1966, with the squares on their last legs, the historian and journalist Ian Nairn, who wrote so perceptively about the “soft-spoken this-is-good-for-you castration of the East End,” summed ...

Although he illustrated life in the West End and as well as in the East End, it is Doré’s images of the East End that have always drawn the most attention with their overwhelming sense of diabolic ...

This is the eulogy for writer and historian Gillian Tindall by travel writer Colin Thubron which he read at her memorial gathering held at Cecil Sharp House in Regent’s Park on Friday last. Gillian ...

As the temperatures plunge this week, there will be no denying that winter has its grip upon London – which offers the ideal premise to look back at winters long ago in the capital, as witnessed by ...

As you can see, my collection has grown as I have discovered that coin collectors are eager to dispose of pierced coins at low prices and I have taken on the responsibility of wearing them on behalf ...

Celebrating the publication of Journal of a Man Unknown, I am publishing a series of pieces by Gillian Tindall. Today you can read about her quest for Flower & Dean St where the protagonist of her ...

There are more than 5,000 stories by The Gentle Author with 44,000 pictures to be found in the categories and archives on this site ...

Years ago, I wrote this appreciation of Dorothy Annan’s ceramic murals adorning Fleet House in Farringdon St which was due for demolition, but I am happy to report that – as a consequence – these ...

A hidden enclave cloistered from the hubbub of the modern City, where illustrious portraits of former gentlemen publishers – including Samuel Richardson – peer down silently at you from the walls, ...