Local Heroes

If you’re stuck for a photo project idea look no further than your own neighbourhood. Here three photographers show us what’s on their doorstep.

Pie and mash

The Englishman and the Eel is a journey into the culture of that most London of institutions, the eel, pie and mash shop. In a sense it follows on from my last book, The Palaces of Memory, which was about the forgotten spaces of the Indian coffee houses – my shelter during 20 years of working and sometimes living in India. The palaces reminded me of my own past growing up in Hackney in the 1970s and, after spending much of my working life in the developing world, I wanted to re-explore this.

Eel, pie and mash shops, along with rough pubs and greasy spoon cafes, were the landmarks of my upbringing and I felt it would be interesting to document a culture I grew up in but travelled away from. I’ve photographed and written about 30 of these shops in and around London. They hold the memories of a largely undocumented working-class culture. In decline, they are however still recognisable – serving warm comfort food. Steam. Tea. Laughter. In Essex, the East End’s new spiritual home, they are undergoing something of a renaissance – identifying as they do with a reimagined and distilled working-class culture that’s geographically separate from its traditional roots.

Talk, listen and wait

The execution of the project was relatively straightforward. The resulting book is not encyclopaedic, rather I wanted to record the most interesting culture of the places. I extended the work outwards, shooting eel fishing in Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland as well as two of the remaining eel processors in London. I also wanted to explain the changed landscape by including East Enders too frail and elderly to get to the shops. I photographed them at home, with the food brought to them.