Heirs of the East London Group
The past is apparently a foreign country. This has been almost entirely true in my case: born and brought up in the East End of London before it was embarrassingly fashionable, I've spent almost my entire career working in the developing world. It was a conscious decision to tell the stories that I felt important and a way to escape the cold, grey streets of my youth.
Over the past few(Dewi Lewis, 2017) was an attempt to connect with those repositories of London working-class culture and memory, the humble (and fast-disappearing) pie and mash shops of my youth. I spent three years building on an initial essay I made for a German magazine, eventually documenting 30 shops, owners and customers to show a seldom-seen side of London.
