London
The story of Balwinder Singh Rana, an Indian activist who has been fighting racism and structural attempts at division in Britain for decades. Read my article for the Byline Times here. And for more on the ‘Brick Lane Project’, here’s an article about Barbara Beese and the Mangrove Nine https://bylinetimes.com/2020/09/29/the-woman-with-the-afro-the-story-of-barbara-beese/
I’ve been a yoga devotee for many years, and reviewed Yoganesh (Old Ford Road, Bethnal Green) for the Yogi London website. Today it goes under the name of the Yoganest. Next stop, Goa… I’m available to write reviews for individual yoga practitioners, as well as yoga workshops, yoga weekends and retreats.…
October 2015 Winning ‘Best Honey in London’ has made me very proud. Not that it’s been especially easy to get to this point. After doing my training with Capital Bee towards the end of 2011, I finally got my hive and bees in May 2012. The hive is in Cordwainers Garden, the community garden that…
March 2015 From time to time, the charitable foundation, the Bulldog Trust, opens the charming Two Temple Place for excellent exhibitions. This one is no exception. ‘Cotton to Gold’ brings together some of the extraordinary collections of wealthy philanthropists who made their fortunes in the Industrial North West. The collections were generously loaned by the…
A neo-classical architect married an heiress, bought a house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then another, and another. He knocked them all through and filled every inch of space with his extensive collection of architectural fragments, sculptures and paintings. He lost three of his sons, fell out with the last one, and left the lot to…
East London Federation of Suffragettes Didn’t know that it’s 100 years since the start of the First World War? Unlikely. You can’t move for TV and radio programmes dedicated to it, local talks, ceremonies, commemorations, exhibitions… No, this centenary is something that we are all very much aware of. But what of the anti-war movement?…
18 July 2013 As I walked up the road to Leila’s Café in Shoreditch – a familiar place where I’ve had many a delicious breakfast, almost sharing a table with Keira Knightley once, but I digress – I mused on the fact that very soon I was going to have dinner with a bunch of…
Passersby might be intrigued by the gilded weather vane of Columbus’s caravel, the Santa Maria, that sits atop this beautiful building – I was one of them – but opportunities to discover more about it are limited as, for most of the year, Two Temple Place is closed to the public. So it’s worth keeping…
24 January 2013 The craft of etching ‘What you can do with a line…’ I overheard one visitor comment to her friend. That’s quite an understatement. Morandi’s s exquisite attention to detail gives ordinary subjects a visual importance and value. Simple household items – bottles, jars and vases – seem to reverberate with life, even…
UPDATE: UNPACKAGED CLOSED ITS HACKNEY BRANCH IN 2013, BUT OTHER PREMISES CAN BE FOUND IS ISLINGON AND MUSWELL HILL. FIND OUT MORE HERE Saturday, December 15, 2012 It was a shame that Unpackaged had to leave its little premises in the Old Dairy in Islington, but here in Hackney, we’re delighted – on so many…