Heirs of the East London Group

Taking a step back from his work that so often takes him overseas, Stuart Freedman finds himself pursuing a project closer to home.

- Stuart Freedman

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 years I have, however, been drawn back to my roots, attempting to come to terms with my own identity through the changed landscape of my past. My last book, The Englishman and the Eel (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.

The same year my book was published I found myself reading the daily and extraordinarily encyclopedic Spitalfields Life blog. I found an article, East End Vernacular, about a historical group of painters (and their heirs) that had attempted to document the same streets and spaces that I was now meditating on.