On Brick Lane
(Hamish Hamilton, 2007)
On Brick Lane, the first in the London street series was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. This unique book takes readers on an unforgettable journey through the vanished past, the disappearing present and the emerging future of one of Britain’s most mythologized and misunderstood streets. Home to successive waves of immigrants, from eighteenth century Huguenot weavers to the Jewish refugees of the 1880s to the late twentieth-century Bangladeshi community, Brick Lane is now one of the most fashionable areas. The street is a place of extremes that is constantly reinventing itself – at once a multicultural melting pot and sacred site, bounded by Hawksmoor churches, abandoned synagogues and newly developed mosques, with the Old Truman Brewery at its heart.
Interspersed within this text are a collection of archival and contemporary photographs, along with quotes from literature and poetry. Together they combine to create an endlessly intriguing portrait of Brick Lane, which is as alive and fascinating as the neighbourhood it so movingly celebrates. This beautiful book is a work of retrieval, an archaeology of memory, that provides testament to a disappearing world. Tales of market traders, anarchist priests, Jewish tailors, Bengali teenagers, gangsters, brewery workers and celebrities interweave with Lichtenstein’s own account of over a decade of living and working in the area as an artist, archivist and writer.
