Moving around

(Bethnal Green, 22 Jan - 9 Abr).

«When, five years ago, I told a friend that I was moving from Blackheath in south London to Bethnal Green in the east, an area I had always loved, he was genuinely speechless. The appeal of the East End - and to those of us who love it, it is truly magnetic - is utterly lost on some people. Jack the Ripper, Dickens and the Krays have a lot to answer for: they have sealed the image of the East End as a place notable only for criminality, squalor and degradation. My friend's silence eloquently expressed a fearful perception one can trace back many centuries, even millennia. Roman burials excavated in east London have revealed that the dead were laid out with their heads facing to the west, as if peace and harmony lay in that direction. Peter Ackroyd, the laureate of London life, has observed of this ancestral taboo that, to outsiders, the East End has always been the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery. It represented the heart of darkness.» (aqui.)