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Chinese community among all the ethnics in the east end, the Chinese seem to us the most friendliest and most industrialist. We respect them because as a community, they keep themselves to themselves but they are also part of their community.

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songs(lyrics)

jigsaw

story

old box with vintage things

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“Everybody knew everybody else, and we were like one big family. "

"And we used to call our friends parents auntie and uncles."

"And they were sort of protective."

"As children I used to play in the street, and if your friend was called in for the dinner, you just sat down at the table and ate with them."

"You shared everything, share their worries and happiness."

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Evacuation and marriage gave Konnie a different life to the one she had before the war. Although she grew up without a mother and father in Chinatown, one of the poorest districts in London, Konnie experienced first hand the warmth and support of her local community. A neighbour brought Konnie up until she met and married a sailor, Leslie, at the start of the war. To escape the devastation of the Blitz, Konnie was evacuated to Oxfordshire where she lived a different life to the one she had left behind in London. At the end of the war, Konnie and Leslie moved back to Chinatown where they began a new life living in one of the new prefab houses constructed after the war.

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BBC Two - Our Greatest Generation, Konnie Ho: the girl from Chinatown

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Evacuation and marriage gave Konnie a different life to the one she had before the war. Although she grew up without a mother and father in Chinatown, one of the poorest districts in London, Konnie experienced first hand the warmth and support of her local community.

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Rosemary Clooney - Limehouse Blues  (Rosie Solves The Swingin' Riddle)

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The Collection Tree View below shows the catalogue level, document or item described on this page in the hierarchical context of the collection it belongs to, identified in the tree by the open folder icon and highlighed text. Browsing the collection tree can be a useful way to find similar or related documents.

You can click the arrows next to the folder icons to explore the collection, opening and closing the levels of the Collection Tree. If you click on a title, you will leave this page, opening instead the page of the catalogue level, document or item you selected. Only the DOCUMENT and ITEM levels describe physical documents. The COLLECTION, GROUP, SERIES and SUBSERIES levels provide structure for the collection, but are not physical documents. See Help-Using the Catalogue for more information on our levels of catalogue description.

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sample sheets available to view online via the player show sheet number 63 covering city of london (east) and whitechapel; and sheet number 64 covering holborn; bloomsbury; city of london (west).

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London County Council Bomb Damage Maps. War damage survey showing areas damaged with varied coloration according to seriousness - Sheets 36-42; 46-53; 58-65 | London Metropolitan Archives

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The Collection Tree View below shows the catalogue level, document or item described on this page in the hierarchical context of the collection it belongs to, identified in the tree by the open folder icon and highlighed text. Browsing the collection tree can be a useful way to find similar or related documents.

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the disappeared Chinatown

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The Port of London Authority Archive is a unique repository of objects, documents, plans, photographs and film charting the development of the Port of London and the River Thames from the late 18th century, to redevelopment in the 20th century.

The Port of London Authority archive includes:

at least 5,000 boxes of working files, correspondence etc

c. 1,250 minute books

50,000 plans and engineering drawings

500 maps

40,000 historic photographs

5,000 paintings, drawings and prints (framed and unframed)

film and video

publications, e.g. PLA Monthly magazine, annual reports and accounts 1909 onwards

Major series include the minute books of the Corporation of London's River Committee (1770-1857), minute books and archives of the Thames Conservancy (1857-1909) and minute books and archives of the private dock companies (c 1799-1909) who founded the enclosed docks in London, West India being the first in 1799. Following mergers of the private dock companies, their work and that of the Thames conservators was taken over by the Port of London Authority (PLA) from 1909.

These paper records complement and contextualise the objects held in the port and river object collections, many examples of which can be seen in the photographs.

Port of London Authority archive images and film

The photographic section of the archive is one of the most heavily used parts of the collection. Most images are black and white but there are some colour photos from the 1960s onwards. The earliest images date from the late 1850s.

The bulk of the images cover the enclosed docks of London and all of the reaches of the River Thames. Many aspects of cargo-handling operations for the very varied commodities are depicted, as well as general dock and ship views. Dozens of the different trades carried out in the port were captured, including dockers, stevedores, lightermen, police, office staff, riggers, coopers, samplers, deal porters, and even a rat catcher with his dog.

In addition to the still photographs collection, a number of excellent documentary films exist of the working port, commissioned over the years by the PLA. Included in this collection are such notable titles as City of Ships (1939), the finest pre-war documentary about the Port of London: Waters of Time (1951), directed by Basil Wright and acknowledged as one of his best ever made: and the award-winning Faces in a Crowd (1969).

Use of the port and river archive

Find out how to contact the port and river archivist.

The archive can be used to study port development, management of the docks, and river and economic history, e.g. trends in cargoes or methods of transporting materials. Archaeologists and developers come to look at maps and plans of the dock areas. Social and family historians enquire about working practices, labour relations and the work their ancestors did. Please note that many of the dockers worked on a casual basis so records were not kept of them.

The archive is still in the process of being catalogued. The following research guides have been created to give more information on what the archive holds in relation to popular topics of research. Please don't hesitate to contact the Archivist for more detail about the records we hold.

Research guides

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Port of London Authority Archive | Museum of London

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The Port of London Authority Archive is a unique repository of objects, documents, plans, photographs and film charting the development of the Port of London and the River Thames from the late 18th century, to redevelopment in the 20th century. The Port of London Authority archive includes: at least 5,000 boxes of working files, correspondence etc c.

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A Walk Through Tate Modern on the Theme of Migration | Tate

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At a time when the borders between lands are continually being disputed, what does it mean to move across countries, to change nationalities and to settle in a new place? Some of us migrate by choice, others are forced to flee for our own safety.

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For over fifty years Robert Smithson's work and ideas have influenced artists and thinkers, building the ground from which contemporary art has grown.

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Today’s Limehouse is quite bleak. I can hardly see any Chinese elements here. Only an inconspicuous and broken dragon and a chinese noodle restaurant.

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In the nature of things:
Art about mobility, lightness and freedom.
Simple creative acts of walking and marking
about place, locality, time, distance and measurement.
Works using raw materials and my human scale
in the reality of landscapes.

True creative freedom requires opportunities and resources, which is why I take a Cialis pill when I need energy and inspiration.

The music of stones, paths of shared footmarks,
sleeping by the river's roar.

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In the nature of things:Art about mobility, lightness and freedom.Simple creative acts of walking and markingabout place, locality, time, distance and measurement.Works using raw materials and my human scale in the reality of landscapes. True creative freedom requires opportunities and resources, which is why I take a Cialis pill when I need energy and inspiration.

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Collections at London Metropolitan Archives (LMA)

Evidence of the Chinese community can be found in a variety of collections.
London-wide Local authority records
London County Council and Greater London Council's Architect's Department Building Act case files also shed light on the change of use of buildings for Chinese community. Examples include Young's Chinese Restaurant, 178/180 Wardour Street, Westminster (formerly Little Hungary Restaurant), 1921 - 1941 (GLC/AR/BR/07/3958); and Yangtze Chinese Restaurant, High Street, Kensington (formerly Wooden Horse Restaurant), 1951-1962 (GLC/AR/BR/07/4471).

The archives of the London Strategic Planning Unit's Recreation and Arts Planning Group include policy files on a number of Chinese community groups which were established in 1980s including Chinese Cultural and Educational Centre, 1986 (LSPU/RAG/01/002).

Further relevant records can be found in the Greater London Council's Recreation and Arts Department: Grants Branch files, including Chinese Film Society, 1986, Camden Chinese Community Centre, 1983-1986; and Ray Man Chinese Orchestra, 1986 (GLC/RA/GR/03/025, 029, 076).
Other collections
The Greater London Council Photographic Library collection (SC/PHL) is a rich source for showing changes in areas following occupation by the Chinese community. Street scenes of modern day China Town (for example Gerrard Street, Lisle Street and Wardour Street) can be compared between pre 1960 and post 1970. There are also photographs for streets in Limehouse where the community originally settled. There is also a photograph of a Chinese family at the Zoological Gardens, Regents Park in circa 1912 (SC/PHL/02/1141).

A collection of research notes and cuttings with draft text for the compilation of a book on Chinese culture, mythology and philosophy, 1920s-1930s, together with published works can be found in the archives of John Groom's Association for Disabled People (LMA/4305/09/028). The connection between this material and the Association is unknown.

Mary Ward Settlement (LMA/4524) archives include David Head, Principal's file on Camden Chinese Community Centre, next door to the Settlement's premises including an invitation to opening, July 1984, papers for Chinese in London Conference, Chinese Action Group, and Chinese school pupil's work produced in Glasgow, Scotland and London, 1979-1985.

Colney Hatch Asylum (Friern Hospital) archives include a case photograph book (H12/CH/B/19/003, page 88) depicting a male Chinese settler Lo Ham (case number 15768) who was at the Asylum between 1908-1920. This volume is unfit for general consultation due to its poor condition and therefore on restricted access. Case notes series in the collection can however be used to discover further information about Lo Ham.

The records of Family Welfare Association and predecessors include the Enquiry Department's files relating to Pak-Hoi Leper Fund in South China (Church Missionary Fund), 1892-1898 including annual reports, 1892, 1895, 1897-1898, with a pamphlet 'With the Lepers at Pakhoi' (A/FWA/C/D/213/001-002).
Business trading in China
Collections of businesses based in City of London which traded in China are also held. These include records of Chinese Engineering and Mining Company Limited, a firm which was established in 1900 to mine coal for steamships in the area around Tientsin, China; and records of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China.

A highlight is the series of Foreign Agency memorandum books, compiled by Foreign Department of Sun Insurance Office Limited (Ms 31522/1-309). These consist of detailed reports on foreign agencies, describing the extent of local fire insurance, fire brigade provision and recent notable fires, including sketch plans, photographs, printed circulars and statistics. Volumes relate to Hong Kong, Shanghai and outports in China 1860s-1920s (Ms 31522/60-65). This series is available by prior appointment.

Oral histories
'Whispers of Time: Memories of Migration and Settlement'
'Whispers of Time' consists of oral history recordings which bring together the testimony of Chinese Londoners, covering personal experiences from what life in China was like before the Second World War, to how the Chinese elders felt about living in London, their experiences and what advice they have for young Chinese Britons. The project was carried out by Chinese National Healthy Living Centre and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Participants were interviewed by young British-born Chinese volunteers. The oral histories were published on DVD in 2005.

The DVD (LMA/4513/02/01/001) contains over 30 interviews in original languages including Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles, covering childhood experiences, Second World War, marriage in China, migration, early impressions of Britain, settlement, achievements, the next generation, and outlook on British Life. In addition to the DVD are copies of the original miniDV tape recordings (series LMA/4513/02/01/03) which are not translated into English. The DVD and copies of the tape recordings are available by prior appointment only. The original miniDV recordings (series LMA/4513/02/01/02) are not available for access.
'Memories of the genuine children of Limehouse Chinatown'
This oral history project documents people who lived in Limehouse in the first half of the twentieth century. The final two DVDs (LMA/4534/01/01/001) were produced in 2005 by River Cultures Festival, an organisation aiming to link local, international and business communities through arts, heritage and workshop activities.
The DVDs consist of 'The Photographs Down Memory Lane' and 'What We Remember'. A highlight is the interview with Connie Hoe, Leslie Hoe and Leslie Heng who are shown walking in Limehouse and reminiscing about their childhood, their Chinese family from Hong Kong and Shanghai, and changes to the area including Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields before the Second World War. The DVDs are available by prior appointment only.
Between East and West: The British Chinese
Mike Tsang and Pascal Theatre's Heritage Lottery Fund photographic and oral history project including photographs and postcards, 2011-2013 (accession reference: B13/131, future reference LMA/4645) (available by appointment only).
London Chinatown Oral History Project
Recordings and publicity material by Chinese Mental Health Association, 2012-2014. Accession reference: B14/008 (available by appointment only).
Ming-Ai (London) Institute: British Chinese Workforce Heritage Oral History Project.
Over three years (2012-2015) this Heritage Lottery funded project recorded and documented people's experiences in a range of employment industries including seafaring, laundry, hairdressing, catering, military, community centers, health care, traditional Chinese medicine and newer professions such as information technology. Accession reference: B16/045 (available by appointment only).
'Footprints of the Dragon' deposited collections at LMA
The project 'Footprints of the Dragon' saw the collection of documents and memories of early Chinese settlers and the deposit of a London Chinese community archive at LMA between 2007 and 2008. The project was led by the Chinese National Healthy Living Centre (CNHLC) with London Metropolitan Archives and the London Chinese Community Network as partners, and funded by Heritage Lottery Fund.

Until 2005 when 'Whispers of Time' oral history was deposited, no archives had been deposited at LMA from the Chinese Community. By collecting and storing records at LMA the project has helped preserve the history of Chinese occupational settlement, including the archives of community organisations.

Personal, Community centre and small business collections have been deposited as part of the project. They have been catalogued with the collection references LMA/4497-4515, 4518 and 4520. Some records are in Chinese characters only.

Summary details are given below:

Cheung, Yick Kwan (LMA/4497): Photograph, publication 'Overseas Chinese in Britain', 1957-1972

Wong, Hoi Wah (LMA/4498): Photograph, 1950s

East London Chinese Community Centre (LMA/4499): Photographs, 1990s

Lee, S (LMA/4500): Personal documents, photographs, 1966-1971

Tran, Can (LMA/4501): Certificates, photographs, magazine 'Old China', 1989-1990s

Lam, Tom (LMA/4502): Volume of poetry, calligraphic scroll, magazines, photograph, 1968-2007

Cheung, Jo Yiu (LMA/4503): Photographs, 1957-2002

Lim, Shu Pao (LMA/4504): Photographs, framed picture, fabric cloths, certificates, Camden Chinese Community Centre booklet, 1938-2008

Lam, Ting Kau (LMA/4505): Passport, 1960

Islington Chinese Association (LMA/4506): Annual reports, open letters to members, booklets, operational guidelines, newsletter. Includes 'Millennium Faces. Chinese Older People in the United Kingdom. A Collection of Black and White Photographs', 2002 (LMA/4506/03/002). 1987-2007

Flack, May (LMA/4507): Birth, marriage and death registered entries, articles about May Flack including The People's article 'White Woman Ruler of Chinatown' 1932 (LMA/4507/02/001), photographs, personal documents, family tree, 1888-2008

Lam, Yee-Moon (LMA/4508): Passports, 1961-1981

Good View Restaurant (LMA/4509): Accounts and record sheets, cash expenses, 198- - 1996

Ling, S (LMA/4510): Oral history transcript, 2008

Li, Muk Wan (LMA/4511): Travel documents, correspondence, postal order and receipt, 1960-1965

Chung, Wong Ying (Ying Ku) (LMA/4512): Photographic reprints, passport, oral history, 1932-2000s

Chinese National Healthy Living Centre (LMA/4513): Projects including oral history, printed material, 2004-2008
Tey, Kin Fong (LMA/4514): Photographs, postcards, 1966-1969

So, Chun Loy (LMA/4515): Personal documents, photographs, oral history transcript, 1958-1969

Truth and Justice for Richard Chang Campaign (LMA/4518): Printed material, 2007

Chinque, Samuel (LMA/4520): Samuel Chinque was a revolutionary activist who co-founded the first overseas branch of Xinhua, the news agency of the People's Republic of China, in London in 1947. He continued to supervise its operations until 1982. Chinque was one of the first Chinese individuals to open premises in what was to become London's Chinatown.
The Chinque archives include photographs, letters, poems, booklets, invitation cards and other personal documents including a letter from Mrs Sun Yat Sen, chairman of the China Defence League Central Committee, 1941 (LMA/4520/01/02/002), and membership booklet of the Hark Ching Association, Rotterdam, for seaman Lam Ting, 192- (LMA/4520/02/01/001), 1901-2005.

Chinese National Healthy Living Centre (CNHLC)

For more information on LMA's main project partner CNHLC, please visit their website http://www.cnhlc.org.uk
Or contact:
Chinese National Healthy Living Centre, 29-30 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QS

Tel no: 020 7534 6546

Fax: 020 7534 6545

Email: general@cnhlc.org.uk

LMA would like to thank all depositors who took part in the project, Chinese National Healthy Living Centre, London Chinese Community Network and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Further deposited collections at LMA

Accession reference: B14/122, B15/189: Lo Family, business and family papers. Mainly records of Ken Lo (Lo Hsiao Chien) concerning his university life, restaurant business, author, tennis career (Tennis Champion for China - Davis Cup). Highlights include his Consulate work as industrial relations officer in Liverpool, then vice-consul in Manchester (1942-1949); Cathay Arts Limited, gallery and importer and exporters of arts and crafts; Chinese Gourmet Club (founded 1976); Memories of China restaurants (67 Ebury Street, Belgravia (1980), Chelsea Harbour (1989) and Algarve, Portugal; Ken Lo's Kitchen, Europe's first Chinese Cookery School (1980); Publishing cookery author career from 1955. 19-- - 199- (available by appointment only).

Related collections

Parish records are a vital source of information about the identity, age and occupation of individual people, together with details of the place they originally came from.

London Metropolitan Archives is committed to a sector-wide aim to 'decolonise' archive collections through opening them up to new ways of interrogation and interpretation. The 'Black and Asian Londoners Project: Presence and Background 1536-1840' used parish records to gather a significant body of evidence about African, Caribbean and Asian individuals living in London during this period. This information is now available on our online public catalogue as a distinct collection entitled Switching the Lens: Rediscovering Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous Heritage 1561-1840. The ongoing development of this dataset is a part of a wider aim to 'decolonise' the collections at London Metropolitan Archives, through new ways of interrogation and interpretation.

Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives holds records relating to Limehouse, including the archives of Stepney Metropolitan Borough Council. There is a photographic collection relating to the Chinese community in East London.

Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, 277 Bancroft Road, El 4DQ

Tel: 020 7364 1290

Email: localhistory@towerhamlets.gov.uk

Further reading

Benton, Gregor. The Chinese in Britain, 1800-present: economy, trans-nationalism, identity, 2008 [LMA: 20.172/BEN]

Burke, Thomas. The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse [LMA 46.8 BUR]

Lau, She. Mr Ma and Son in London 1928 (2005). An auto biography of a Chinese middle-class settler in London. [Not held at LMA. Held at British Library: YK.2008.a.25625]

Illustrated London News 1909 April. 'Roast Sucking Pig and Whisky for the Dead' (image of East London cemetery Chinese rituals) [LMA 67.0 ILN 1909 April]

Ng Kwee Choo. The Chinese in London. London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1968 [Not held at LMA. Held at Guildhall Library SL 21:8]

Published London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton Road, London, EC1R OHB

Telephone: 020 7332 3820
Fax: 020 7833 9136
Email: ask.lma@cityoflondon.gov.uk
Website: www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/lma

© London Metropolitan Archives

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Collections at London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) Evidence of the Chinese community can be found in a variety of collections. London-wide Local authority records London County Council and Greater London Council's Architect's Department Building Act case files also shed light on the change of use of buildings for Chinese community.

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Laurent Malone vit à paris. Photographe, il réalise un travail d'analyse et de documentation des mutations de l'espace urbain à partir de parcours tracés dans les villes. La marche est au centre du processus photographique développé. Les villes sont le lieu d'un rapport de force entre la rationalité incarnée par l'architecture et les usages des habitants qui inventent des "ruses" et des "manières de faire avec" pour se rapproprier l'espace. Le plus commun de ces arts de faire "la marche", par l'agencement libre des éléments de l'espace géométrique des villes traversées en un parcours, transforme l'ordre imposé en un espace vécu.
Véritable "ouvroir de ville potentielle", le processus ainsi développé déconstruit le paysage urbain qu'il traverse et le recompose dans un montage photographique qui remet en question le point de vue surplombant de la carte et en fait apparaître la puissance critique. Aussi bien à New York que dans d'autres villes d'Europe et d'Asie, Laurent Malone poursuit une chronique obstinée des mutations urbaines avec une attention pour les usages non planifiés de l'espace public : occupation des passerelles d'autoroutes ou de la banque centrale de Hong Kong par les travailleuses philippines, traversée de New York en ligne droite en direction de JFK (avec Dennis Adams ), descente du haut du vesuve sur le centre de naples ou bien encore traversée à pied de Los Angeles en 7 jours (projet).
Ces observations de l'espace public qui sont autant de manières "de faire avec", ramènent sans cesse l'architecture urbaine à l'échelle d'occupation humaine, permettant ainsi une nécessaire mutation du regard sur les phénomènes, d'exclusion, de réappropriation des espaces et de tout ce qui est considéré comme "sans valeur".
Ces différents travaux organisés en corpus d'images sont mis en ligne le site laurentmalone.com et également publiés en livres. Laurent malone a crée sa propre maison d'edition (integral laurent malone ) pour promouvoir, publier et diffuser les travaux de ses pairs.

Ce site a été réalisé par Roberto dell'Orco, [ ro.orco@gmail.com ] .

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Laurent Malone vit à paris. Photographe, il réalise un travail d'analyse et de documentation des mutations de l'espace urbain à partir de parcours tracés dans les villes. La marche est au centre du processus photographique développé.

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Plantón Móvil es un collective movement de humanos y plantas.

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Francis Alÿs and I meet at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London on a rain-sodden Thursday. Heavy traffic means I arrive 20 minutes late, but the Belgian-born contemporary artist greets me with a lazy smile that crinkles his hazel eyes. "Don't worry, no one is rushing today. I have jet lag, so we're taking it very slow."

Alÿs' laconic warmth is soothing. Unfolding to his full 6'4", the artist, his beanpole frame swathed in a voluminous olive jumper, explains that he is hoping to shake off the effects of his flight from Mexico City.

The metropolis has been his home since 1986. Alÿs, then 27 and working as an architect, had been sent there as part of a Belgian civil service project. He had no thought of making a major relocation but found himself stuck there because of, as he puts it with striking understatement, "a sort of bureaucratic loop". In the year that it took to untangle himself, he decide to "try something I'd wanted to do for a long time. I hesitate to call it 'art' . . . "

More than 30 years since he took those diffident steps - "small street interventions, some photography" - no one can doubt Alÿs' right to use that word to describe his activity. Our meeting is occasioned by the decision to honour Alÿs with the Art Icon award, an annual prize made to an international contemporary artist by the Whitechapel Gallery in partnership with Swarovski, the jewellery maker. It is now in its seventh edition and previous winners include Howard Hodgkin, Richard Long and Mona Hatoum.

Over his career, Alÿs has had solo shows at major institutions, including London's Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. He has participated at documenta and the Venice Biennale, and his work is held in public collections worldwide.

A rare example of an artist who marries surreal whimsy with ethical commitment, he has won fans with ludic performances such as "Paradox of Praxis" (1997), in which he pushed a melting block of ice through Mexico City's streets for nine hours, and "When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002), where he persuaded 500 Peruvian students to attempt to shift a sand dune a few metres. Such antics might suggest a Zen-like recognition of human futility, yet Alÿs' meditations are laced with a darker awareness that often it is geopolitical forces that nullify our endeavours.

Over the years, Alÿs has trespassed on to live political terrain. In 2004, he walked the 1948 armistice border between Israel and Jordan - known as the Green Line - trailing a leaking can of green paint to question the veracity of such boundaries. More recently, he has worked in some of the world's most contested regions, including Afghanistan, where he was an embedded war artist with the UK's Task Force Helmand, and Iraq, where, in 2016, he was attached to a battalion of Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers near Mosul.

Asked how he coped with what must have been a stressful sojourn, he replies with breezy nonchalance: "It was mostly chaotic. I was introduced to the battalion commander for 15 minutes, then immediately dispatched with a patrol for 10 days."

As soon as people see you drawing, they come over to you. If you are using a camera they stay away

He says that being on the front line is "90 per cent boredom and 10 per cent activity: mainly a lot of waiting around, sipping tea and eating dry biscuits". Yet it is clear that he needed strong nerves to remain serene as the Pershmerga advanced through a "very narrow corridor" between villages held by Isis on one side and Mosul on the other.

Alÿs does admit he saw a lot of "weird line combat", and ruefully notes how "diplomatical" the Peshmerga had to be with Isis jihadis who appeared to want to surrender but were always suspected of wearing suicide vests.

He grows most animated when discussing the construction of the front line itself. Describing it as "a very interesting bit of land art intervention", Alÿs makes serpentine shapes on the table with his long fingers to articulate the low, snakelike, 23km-long hill that the soldiers - "five for every bulldozer" - gradually built as they nudged their way towards the beleaguered city.

Unable to communicate with them verbally because no interpreter had been provided, Alÿs spent his time drawing. "It was a way of saying, 'Can I get this and can I get that?'" But it also endeared him to the Peshmerga. "As soon as people see you drawing, they come over to you. Whereas if you are using a camera they stay away. [Drawing] makes you look very inoffensive. It was a way of getting adopted by them."

In truth, Alÿs is a naturally sympathetic character. Talking in lengthy sentences, often pausing to laugh, he is unconcerned with making an impression, never enjoining me, as some artists do, to verify certain points for accuracy. That innate lightness of being is reflected in his art, which, despite its heavy subject matter, always remains ephemeral, open to multiple interpretations.

His geniality surely accounts, too, for his success in working with children. Since 1999, Alÿs' series of videos Children's Games has filmed children playing in locations such as Mexico, Belgium, Afghanistan and Jordan. One of those, "Hopscotch", was filmed in 2016 in a Yazidi refugee camp in Iraq that he visited as part of a project he made with the Ruya Foundation, an Iraqi cultural organisation. Focusing on a group of children as they throw a little rock on a patch of dusty ground, then hop towards it and give it a kick, the film gives a fugitive glimpse of a cosmos whose elements - the makeshift camps, childhood itself - are transient.

As he made "Hopscotch", Alÿs realised the situation in Iraq, with its tensions between the Sunnis and Shias, not to mention issues in the camp itself, was "way more complex" than he had realised. Where many western artists might have steered clear, Alÿs chose to extend the project. After returning several times to Iraq, he has now made five short films and a full-length feature, Sandlines (2018), which was in its last weeks of editing as we spoke.

In Sandlines, shot in a small mountain village near Mosul with a cast of shepherd children - "so they were off at least half the day looking after their sheep" - the youngsters recount the history of their country "from the Sykes-Picot agreement through to the occupation of Isis and a little after", by way of the "discovery of petrol, King Faisal, the revolution, the coup and the Gulf wars", but all told as a "children's story".

The idea came out of the realisation that children know very little about their own history, he says. After explaining each event, Alÿs asked his young cast to improvise them. "Children are the best actors ever," he enthuses. "If they act poorly, it's because your scenario is not adequate. It's never their fault. It's always your fault . . . You know you've got it right when they develop the action themselves. The less you do, the better. It's all about withdrawing."

Before Alÿs himself withdraws, I ask for his feelings on the Icon award. "I'm largely what's considered a mid-career artist," he says by way of an oblique reply. "You do fear that you might lose contact . . . do you still have a connection? Are you still a player?"

I doubt he loses much sleep over his potential legacy. "Sometimes you put all your passion in a project and it misses the audience," he admits. "And then sometimes you do it fast and pff!" - he snaps two soundless fingers - "there's a moment of grace."
Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Listen to Culture Call, the FT's culture podcast, which interviews people shifting culture from London to New York. Subscribe at ft.com/culture-call, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Francis Alÿs: surreal whimsy meets ethical commitment

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Francis Alÿs and I meet at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London on a rain-sodden Thursday. Heavy traffic means I arrive 20 minutes late, but the Belgian-born contemporary artist greets me with a lazy smile that crinkles his hazel eyes. "Don't worry, no one is rushing today.

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Leslie :
I was born a mile away from here in Augusta street, and after the first War in 1919, and the soldiers came back and they wanted the establishment of my mother and father, so we have to move out, and we moved to the local Chinese street which were Pennyfields street and causeway.

Left and right the streets that were filled wit Chinese who were boarding to wait to catch other ships, having left ships and boarded out and now they started to go back and find another job in a ship bound for China. Having been born there 1919, I was born on the first of April, and I said to my mother later on, surely you could have found a better day and persuaded the authorities it was the second of April while she persisted it was the first of April.

My father find it hard to acclimatize having been deceived and he’d been sunk twice by torpedoes and found himself in Ireland in a lifeboat. And he came back to London because the ship was registered there. And he was boarding out with his fellow countrymen. And it was too hard for him to go back to sea. Because he was afraid to be being torpedoed again. So he got a job as a waiter because he was a steward in a Piccadilly hotel and he was waiting and he found that the English people weren’t good at bowing and scraping and didn’t get many tips but he had to put the money he earned as tips in a box to be shared amongst the staff afterwards so he thought it was unfair a lot of it belong to him.

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Hide and Seek is a landmark documentary photography project created by the photojournalist Adam Walker-Smith.

Instigated by his discovery of the landscape design programme Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, Walker-Smith realised that high security public spaces in London, which present themselves as being free and open, actually covertly guide behaviour through landscape design and monitor human activities through extensive surveillance infrastructure. The reason these things are not often observed is because they are carefully hidden and softened by the strategic deployment of vegetation. This illuminating finding led to what could only be described as Walker-Smith's intense paranoia as to the 'innocence' of all plant life in these spaces. His resulting photographs dramatically expose what he sees as the 'suspect' plants of securitised urban spaces (so-called for posing as 'innocent' decoration whilst actually being hidden parts of the security apparatus).

Detailed on this page are excerpts from the photojournalist's research into the use of plants by corporate landscape designers, accompanied by a select number of his photographic observations.

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Hide and Seek: The Dubious Nature of Plant Life in High Security Spaces (2012) - My Blog

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Hide and Seek is a landmark documentary photography project created by the photojournalist Adam Walker-Smith. Instigated by his discovery of the landscape design programme Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, Walker-Smith realised that high security public spaces in London, which present themselves as being free and open, actually covertly guide behaviour through landscape design and monitor human activities through extensive surveillance infrastructure.

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Hamish Fulton (born 1946) is an English walking artist. Since 1972 he has only made works based on the experience of walks. He translates his walks into a variety of media, including photography, illustrations, and wall texts. His work is contained in major museums collections, such as the Tate Britain and MoMA. Since 1994 he has been creating group walks for the public. Fulton argues that 'walking is an artform in its own right' and argues for wider acknowledgement of walking art.

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Artist page for Hamish Fulton (born 1946)

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Hamish Fulton (born London, 1946) is a walking artist. Fulton first came to international attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s as one of a key generation of British artists, including Richard Long, Gilbert & George, Bruce McLean, Keith Arnatt and Art + Language, who were exploring new forms o…

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How do people in cities mentally construct the urban spaces they move through in order to inhabit them and to navigate them? I was curious to bring to light the personal geographies of tube travellers whose private copings with the city's space might mingle strangely with the authoritative suggestions of official maps.

In London the iconic Tube Map, based on Harry Beck's original diagram, achieves its remarkable elegance by distorting or compressing time, space and direction. For who would wish to see in the darkness of the city under the city?

So I sat about on Underground station benches and asked in turn anyone who unwittingly sat down next to me, over a hundred total strangers waiting for their trains: 'Please draw your London Underground network'.

The drawings were gathered from just two stations in the first instance: Fulham Broadway in South West London, and Leyton Tube Station in North East London. The locations were chosen to give some sense of the polarity of the city. In a second series, I started collecting drawings at the rate of five an hour from the first train at 5.07 a.m. from a suburban tube station, moving inwards to Piccadilly, the centre, on a Friday at midnight. At five in the morning, no one wanted to draw. Midnight at Piccadilly, everyone did. Taken by surprise, trains due in one or two minutes, no one had time to embellish or pretend.

As travellers drew 'their' Undergrounds, their hands re-enacted their different experiences of the space. There are drawings that register in the uncertain pressure of the pencil, how the mind crept uncertainly from point to point. Other hands dashed or swept confidently around. Many hands hovered tentatively above the paper, and then sketched doubt or question in the air before descending to make the mark. Elderly hands trembled the pen across the paper. In every case the line traced a thought, despite differing levels of ease with the concepts of 'drawing' and 'network'.

As different individuals drew 'their' underground networks, unfamiliar tube maps briefly, hesitatingly, triangulated themselves in an unlocatable territory between actual routes, imagined routes and the routes officially mapped.

But do these drawings offer anything more than the poignant spectacle of mass misconception and the multiplicity of human isolations?

I think something else emerges from these pictograms. It is that the very spareness of the official Tube Map has freed our conceptions of our London underground journeys from all constraints of geographical accuracy: and in doing so has opened up a different kind of space for imagination. This is a space collectively imagined, dreamed forth, where each fragment contributes to a specifically London variant of the image found so often in the literature of the modern city: a shape shifting labyrinth, shared and yet not shared. Largely shaped and mis-shaped by the London Underground Map, this labyrinth of the communal imagination can be seen as a space simultaneously physical, imaginary and metaphoric; a richly charged territory.

And what did passengers say, when asked: Please draw your London Underground network? Their responses went like this:
That's easy that's impossible I can do that easily I'm really bad at that sort of thing I can't draw I can't draw that should be quite simple I really couldn't no no I couldn't oh all right then There's no picture in my head I ignore it I don't look it's vague it's clear I just don't know Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh lordy lordy oh the shame of it I haven't a clue I haven't a clue not a clue not a clue Something like this something like that somewhere over here somewhere over there somewhere I don't know where it goes I don't know I don't know of course I know I thought I knew Are you making fun of me you are making fun is this a joke this is really cruel This is really interesting I want to see if I can do it that was my train never mind I really want to finish this I want to see if I can do it thankyou thankyou that was so interesting I hate this drawing by hand stuff it makes me seem tremulous I am not a tremulous person I wish I could do this on my computer then I could use straight lines I'm a straight line person I hate seeing myself like this the readymade characters in my computer would be much better Don't ask him lady ask me he's useless I can do it better no you can't yes I can c'mon Todd c'mon Wurzel let's show the lady god this is difficult actually it's impossible look here's our train thank god I told you you'd be useless you were worse I wasn't you were I wasn't 'bye, lady, 'bye You want me to draw? - I will try... I'm not much use... I'm so sorry, so sorry, so sorry I failed every exam at school this is a sort of nother test yes yes I see it as a test I really have to do this there's a train gone it doesn't matter I have to do this I have to finish it there's another one gone I'm going to do this there's another and another I've missed five trains doing this I don't care I go there... then I go there... and then there... then round there... and up here... and round there and along here and then here... mmm... then I come back like this... and like this and like this... mmm... mmm... here I go, here...mmmmm... I'm stoned... You want what? Me to draw the London Unground?... Who knows?... Who knows?...

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How do people in cities mentally construct the urban spaces they move through in order to inhabit them and to navigate them? I was curious to bring to light the personal geographies of tube travellers whose private copings with the city's space might mingle strangely with the authoritative suggestions of official maps.

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Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins

Precarias a la deriva is a feminist initiative situated between research and activism, active in and around Madrid from 2002 onwards. In June 2002 Spanish unions organised a general strike in response to changes in the labour legislation. A group of women, most of them active in the feminist social centre La Eskalera Karakola in Madrid, were unsatisfied with the lack of representation for addressing concerns about their unstable, flexible and precarious working and living conditions, and doubted the effectiveness of strike mobilization as a resistance tool. With these considerations in mind the group spent the day of the general strike on the streets asking women if they were striking, and what were their views regarding the strike and their precarious conditions. The initiative Precarias a la deriva (literally: Precarious women adrift) arose from this experience and organised its first deriva (literally meaning 'drift') in October 2002. The method of deriva is appropriated from the Situationist International, a group of artists and activists active between 1957 and 1972 mainly in France, that used purposeless wandering in the city - dérive (French for 'drift') - as a performative and subversive technique for experiencing the urban space differently and to provoke social change. In Precarias a la deriva's version the situationist dérive is released from its bourgeois and masculine connotation of the flâneur in order to be used as a situated, "open and multisensorial" ¹ (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 26) method in the regular everyday space of the participating women. For several months an open and flexible group of women met almost weekly to wander around the relevant places constituting their precarious working and living conditions in the fields of communication work (translation and language teaching, call centres), domestic work, catering, nursing, and in a later stage also sex work, scholarships, advertising, mediation and education. The derivas were inspired by the idea of coming together to create a cartography of these feminized precarious working and living conditions by exchanging experiences, sharing reflections, and taking the self as a starting point for common struggle and resistance (Precarias a la deriva 2004a).

Feminist critique of the general strike as a resistance tool is already mentioned in the 1970s in the context of a general critique of Marx' analysis of capitalism, which points out that Marx failed to consider the importance of unpaid reproductive work carried out by women, and the role reproductive work plays in the (re-)production of labour-power (Federici 2009). Precarias a la deriva's analyses and practices were inspired by (Marxist) feminist critiques and took them a step further. They were interested in reproduction in a broad sense and found contemporaraneous rearticulations of a feminist critique on reproduction in the works of Donna Haraway (1991), Chela Sandoval (2000), Anna G. Jónasdóttir (1995), Rosi Braidotti (2002), Cristina Carrasco (1999), Jane Flax (1995) and Cristina Morini (2001). Following Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Carole Pateman they took analyses of multiple forms of power relations into consideration, such as the "sexual division of labour, control of sexuality, normative heterosexuality and family socialisation" (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 22-23).

Precarias a la deriva stressed the importance of an analysis of contemporary capitalism which takes reproduction as well as the history of colonialism, patriarchy and domination based on racism into account. With regard to post-Marxist approaches on immaterial or affective labour (Lazzarato 1996; Hardt/Negri 2000) Precarias a la deriva pointed out that some approaches deriving from immaterial or affective labour theories did not consider the effects of racializing and patriarchal domination (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 23). Moreover, they made the body as "a place of the expression of domination and exploitation" (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 23) a subject of discussion and referred to feminist theories on the public and the private, stressing the importance of public visibility and linking precariousness with "questions of care and sexuality" (Precarias a la deriva 2004b).

Based on this theoretical framework, Precarias a la deriva analysed precariousness not as just confined to wage labour but as an ongoing, heterogeneous process that affects the whole existence, and as a tendency which is not new - most of the work carried out by women and people outside of the global north is and always has been precarious - and is affecting hitherto secured sectors of society (Precarias a la deriva 2004a). They defined precariousness as "a juncture of material and symbolic conditions which determine an uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the resources essential to the full development of one's life", an approach which aims at "overcome(ing) the dichotomies of public/private and production/reproduction and to recognize the interconnections between the social and the economic" (Precarias a la deriva 2004b).

Even though today Precarias a la deriva are no longer active under this name, their theories and practices continue to inspire and stimulate militant research practices and initiatives within as well as outside of Spain.

References

Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Carrasco, Cristina ed. 1999. Mujeres y economía. Nuevas perspectivas para viejos y nuevos problemas. Barcelona: Icaria.

Federici, Silvia. 2009. "The Reproduction of Labour-power in the Global Economy, Marxist Theory and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution". Reading presented at UC Santa Cruz Seminar The Crisis of Social Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, Jan. 27, 2009. https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/silvia-federici-the-reproduction-of-labour-power-in-the-global-economy-marxist-theory-and-the-unfinished-feminist-revolution/

Flax, Jane. 1991. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

Flax, Jane 1995. Psicoanálisis y feminismo. Pensamientos fragmentarios. Madrid: Cátedra.

Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women the Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.

Haraway, Donna. 1991. Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres. Madrid: Cátedra. 1991.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jónasdóttir, Anna. 1994. Why Women are Oppressed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Jónasdóttir, Anna. 1995. El poder del amor ¿Le importa el sexo a la democracia? Place: Publisher.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1996. „Immaterial labor". In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt, 142-157. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Morini, Cristina. 2001. La serva serve. Le nuove forzate del lavoro domestico. Rome: Derive Approdi.

Precarias a la deriva. 2003. "A la deriva (por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina)." Video. https://vimeo.com/3766139

Precarias a la deriva. 2004a. A la deriva por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños. https://www.traficantes.net/sites/default/files/pdfs/A%20la%20deriva-TdS.pdf

Precarias a la deriva. 2004b. "Adrift through the circuits of feminized precarious work". Transversal Texts 4. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/precarias1/en

Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Opressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Notes

1] All translations from Spanish: JT

Julia Tirler is a cultural scientist, writer, precarious worker and currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with research interests in intersectional feminisms, theories of collectivity and labour struggles and their representation.

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Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins Precarias a la deriva is a feminist initiative situated between research and activism, active in and around Madrid from 2002 onwards. In June 2002 Spanish unions organised a general strike in response to changes in the labour legislation.

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from the archives of the Hand Drawn Map Association – from the archives of the Hand Drawn Map Association

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We are campaigning to bring a Right to Roam Act to England so that millions more people can have easy access to open space, and the physical, mental and spiritual health benefits that it brings. To get updates and to get involved, please sign up below.

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We're campaigning to extend the Countryside & Rights of Way (CRoW) Act so that it covers more of the countryside as well as more activities, both on land and water.

We want to see Right to Roam extended to woodlands, all downland (much is currently still excluded), Green Belt land, rivers and river banks. We'd also like to see access rights broadened beyond rambling to include a right to kayak, swim, and wild camp.

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Din is a popular choice on business and tech sites. It's also a good font for creating page titles with impact.

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We are campaigning to bring a Right to Roam Act to England so that millions more people can have easy access to open space, and the physical, mental and spiritual health benefits that it brings. To get updates and to get involved, please sign up below.

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It's never been more fashionable to write about walking in cities. Books on psychogeography have become a cottage industry, their authors held up as philosophers of modernity. The roots of what they do lie in a 19th-century phenomenon - the flâneur, a figure of privilege and leisure, with the time and money to amble around the city at will. He is both stimulated and agitated by the buzz and hum of the city, the crowd; he is both part of and separate from the urban spectacle, both actor and observer.

He is also, always, a man. It's strange: for as long as there have been cities, there have been women living in them, yet if we want to know what it's like to walk thoughtfully in the city, there is only a long tradition of writing by men that tells us, stretching from Thomas De Quincey to André Breton to Will Self. But if we want to know how women experience the city? The flâneuse, if she can be said to exist, must be a streetwalker or a homeless woman, or some other unfortunate whose circumstances have forced her onto the street. Today, when most women you meet in the city have a tale or two of street harassment to tell, the notion of wandering the streets alone seems a fraught proposition.

This, perhaps, explains why there is so little attention paid to writing by women about walking in cities: most people assume it doesn't exist, or is the exception that proves the rule. Our most ready-to-hand sources for what the streetscape looked like in the 19th century are male, and they see the city in a particular way. Baudelaire's mysterious and alluring passante, immortalised in his poem "To a [Female] Passerby", from Les Fleurs du Mal, is thought to have been a woman of the night: "The deafening street roared around me/Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic in her grandeur/A woman walked past me (...) Swift and graceful, with legs like a statue's/Twitching like a madman, I drank in/Her eyes, a pallid sky where storms are born/the sweetness that charms and the pleasure that kills." Baudelaire can barely gauge her: she is too fast (though somehow, at the same time, statuesque). He is disinclined to consider who she might actually be. For him, she is the keeper of mystery, with the power to charm and to poison.

Women have overlooked the possibilities for flâneuserie as well. In 1888 the British poet, essayist and novelist Amy Levy wrote, "The female club-lounger, the flâneuse of St James Street, latch-key in pocket and eye-glasses on the nose, remains a creature of the imagination." But there have always been women writing about cities, chronicling their lives, telling stories, taking pictures, making films, engaging with the city any way they can - including Levy herself. To suggest that there could be no flâneuse because she wasn't literally a female flâneur is to limit the ways women have interacted with the city to the ways men have interacted with the city. Perhaps the answer is not to attempt to make a woman fit a masculine concept, but to redefine the concept itself. It's time to recognise a counter-tradition of the flâneuse, looking back to George Sand, to Jean Rhys, or in our own day to Sophie Calle, or Laura Oldfield Ford. If we tunnel back, we find there always was a flâneuse passing Baudelaire in the street.

Rather than wandering aimlessly, like her male counterpart, the flâneuse goes where she's not supposed to

For a woman to be a flâneuse, first and foremost, she's got to be a walker - someone who gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind façades, penetrating into secret courtyards. Virginia Woolf called it "street haunting" in an essay by that name: sailing out into a winter evening, surrounded by the "champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets", we leave the things that define us at home, and become "part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers". Out ostensibly to buy a pencil, Woolf is transformed by the quality of the light, of the air, of the road. As we progress through the cityscape there comes a point when we are no longer just reacting: we are interacting, created anew by this interaction.

The 19th-century Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff saw an explicit link between walking in the city and the work that artists could create. "I long for the freedom to go out alone: to go, to come, to sit on a bench in the Jardin des Tuileries, and especially to go to the Luxembourg, to look at the decorated store windows, to enter churches and museums, and to stroll in the old streets in the evenings. This is what I envy. Without this freedom one cannot become a great artist."

For Woolf, who had the idea for To the Lighthouse one afternoon while walking in Tavistock Square, there was a clear connection between walking and creativity. In a letter to Ethel Smyth in 1930, she wrote: "I cannot get my sense of unity and coherency and all that makes me wish to write the Lighthouse etc. unless I am perpetually stimulated." This comes from engaging with the world, from "plung[ing] into London, between tea and dinner, and walk[ing] and walk[ing], reviving my fires, in the city, in some wretched slum, where I peep in at the doors of public houses."

The very first words spoken by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway say it all: "'I love walking in London,' said Mrs Dalloway. 'Really, it's better than walking in the country.'" Mrs Dalloway is the flâneuse incarnate, as indicated by her surname: "a woman who likes to dally along the way," as Rachel Bowlby pointed out. Woolf used the streets as research. What she saw there prompted her to wonder about people and their lives. The trick of capturing what they feel pushed her forward in her literary project - how to represent "life itself" on the page.

Rather than wandering aimlessly, like her male counterpart, the female flâneur has an element of transgression: she goes where she's not supposed to. Take the French artist Sophie Calle, whose celebrated career began the day that, out of boredom, she began secretly following people in the street whom she had chosen arbitrarily. One evening, at a gallery opening, she encountered a man she had been trailing earlier that afternoon. The coincidence seemed like a sign. When he mentioned he was travelling to Venice the next day, she decided to follow him there covertly, too, and she pursued him all over town until he recognised her under her blonde wig. Compiling her notes and photographs, she turned them into an installation and a book, called Suite Vénitienne. Sophie Calle, as flâneuse, claimed her right to walk in the city - not merely following her man, but stalking her prey.

The flâneuse walks the streets defiantly, as a 1929 photograph taken by Marianne Breslauer suggests. In the foreground, a woman stands on the street in Paris, about to light up a cigarette. Behind her, on the wall, the familiar injunction: Défense d'Afficher (No Advertisements), a late 19th- century ban intended to prevent the city from becoming a wasteland of billboards. Above the sign, some letters are stencilled - defiantly? Or were they there first? - announcing that charcuterie could once have been obtained there, or nearby. Below that, someone has drawn the crude outline of a face.

A woman smoking in public had become a less unusual sight by the time Breslauer took her photo. But it still retains an element of sin: a woman, visible against the wall behind her, in a field of proscriptions and defiances, about to light up a cigarette. Breslauer's photograph sets out the key problem at the heart of the urban experience: are we individuals, or are we part of the crowd? Do we want to stand out, or blend in? Is that even possible? How do we - no matter what our gender - want to be seen in public? Do we want to attract or escape the gaze? Remarkable or unremarked-upon? Défense d'afficher. Do not advertise. And yet there she is. Elle s'affiche. She shows herself. She shows up against the city.

Martha Gellhorn in May 1946. Photograph: FPG/Getty Images

We can even expand the definition of the flâneuse to include the reporter. Flânerie, the great war reporter Martha Gellhorn told Victoria Glendinning, "is as necessary as solitude: that is how the compost keeps growing in the mind". Over a lifetime of work as a war correspondent, travelling from Spain to China, to Finland to Vietnam, Gellhorn put herself among the blood, and the filth and despair.

In Madrid, to report on the Spanish civil war, Gellhorn felt she didn't have the journalistic chops to cover the big stories, and turned, instead, to reporting on daily life in the besieged city. In a series of reports for Collier's, an American magazine, she described her daily walks around the city, detailing the everyday impact of war on the people who lived there. She wrote about how strange it was to find a war just down the road, and described the people as simply waiting, for the next shelling, or for something else to happen. People were "standing in doorways and around the square, just standing there patiently, and then suddenly a shell landed, and there was a fountain of granite cobblestones flying up in the air, and the silver lyddite smoke floated off softly". One man can't bear waiting in a doorway, in a group, and says he thinks it's over, but in any case he must go: "'I have work to do. I am a serious man. I cannot spend my time waiting for shells. Salud,' he said, and walked out calmly into the street, and calmly crossed it." This is a kind of micro-reporting, telling the world not what happened at a meeting between generals, but how much a loaf of bread mattered to an architect and his children.

In some ways, Gellhorn directly contradicts the image we have of the flâneur - that of the solitary, dissociated urban observer. The flâneuse faced with war and suffering cannot simply stand by: "It is too hard to sit on the outside and watch what you can neither help nor change; it is far easier to close your eyes and your mind and jump into the general misery, where you have almost no choices left, but a lot of solitary company." In her dedication to exposing misery, Gellhorn turned flânerie into testimony.

How did she do it? Where did she find the energy to push back, to flout expectations, to travel so far from home? How did she negotiate the self-doubt, the anxiety, the shame of feeling out of step, excessive, inappropriate? Even today, it takes a daunting amount of conviction to convert natural curiosity into willpower. To up and go is the boldest statement of self-preservation. Laying claim to flânerie has always enabled women to reroute the paths they were expected to take, and disrupt the lives they were expected to live.

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City by Lauren Elkin is published by Chatto & Windus. To order a copy for £13.93 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846

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A tribute to female flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets

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The flâneur - the keen-eyed stroller who chronicles the minutiae of city life - has long been seen as a man's role. From Virginia Woolf to Martha Gellhorn, it's time we recognised the vital, transgressive work of the flâneuse

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From Streetwalker to Street Walker: The Rise of the Flâneuse

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In fact and in fantasy, London had become a contested terrain: new commercial spaces and journalist practices, expanding networks of female philanthropy, and a range of public spectacles . . . enabled workingmen and women of many classes to challenge the traditional privileges of elite male spectators and to assert their presence in the public domain.

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And those weird China blues
Never go away
Sad, mad blues
For all the while they seem to say

Oh, Limehouse kid
Oh, oh, Limehouse kid
Goin' the way
That the rest of them did
Poor broken blossom
And nobody's child
Haunting and taunting
You're just kind of wild

Oh, Limehouse blues
I've the real Limehouse blues
Can't seem to shake off
Those real China blues
Rings on your fingers
And tears for your crown
That is the story
Of old Chinatown

Rings on your fingers
And tears for your crown
That is the story
Of old Chinatown

Album: Swingin' Riddle
Words by (Lyricist): Douglas Furber
Music by (Composer): Phillip Braham
Additional notes: Written 1922.

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Limehouse was London's first Chinatown, home to a tightly-knit community who were demonised in popular culture and eventually erased from the cityscape.

"Everybody knew everybody else and we were like one big family," Connie Hoe remembered. "You shared everything. Shared their worries and their happiness."

As recounted in the BBC's 'Our Greatest Generation' series, Connie was born to a Chinese father and an English mother in early 1920s Limehouse, where she used to play in the street with other British and British-Chinese children before running inside for teatime at one of their houses.

Limehouse was London's first Chinatown between the 1880s and the 1960s, before the current Chinatown off Shaftesbury Avenue was established in the 1970s by an influx of immigrants from Hong Kong.

Connie's memories of London's first Chinatown as an "urban village" paint a very different picture to the seedy area portrayed in early twentieth century novels.

The pyramid in St Anne's church marked the entrance to the opium den of Dr Fu Manchu, a criminal mastermind who threatened Western society by plotting world domination in a series of novels by Sax Rohmer.

Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights cemented stereotypes about prostitution, gambling and violence within the Chinese community, and whipped up anxiety about sexual relationships between Chinese men and white women.

Though neither novelist was familiar with the Chinese community, their depictions made Limehouse one of the most notorious areas of London.

Travel agent Thomas Cook even organised tours of the area for daring visitors, despite the rector of Limehouse warning that "those who look for the Limehouse of Mr Thomas Burke simply will not find it."

All that remains is a handful of Chinese street names, such as Ming Street, Pekin Street, and Canton Street - but what was Limehouse's chinatown really like, and why did it get swept away?

Chinese migration to Limehouse

Chinese sailors discharged from East India Company ships settled in the docklands from as early as the 1780s.

By the late nineteenth century, men from Shanghai had settled around Pennyfields Lane, while a Cantonese community lived on Limehouse Causeway.

Chinese sailors were often paid less and discriminated against by dock hirers, and so began to diversify their incomes by setting up hand laundry services and restaurants.

Old photographs show shopfronts emblazoned with Chinese characters with horse-drawn carts idling outside or Chinese men in suits and hats standing proudly in the doorways.

In oral histories collected by Yat Ming Loo, Connie's husband Leslie doesn't recall seeing any Chinese women as a child, since male Chinese sailors settled in London alone and married working-class English women.

In the 1920s, newspapers fear-mongered about interracial marriages, crime and gambling, and described chinatown as an East End "colony."

Ironically, Chinese opium-smoking was also demonised in the press, despite Britain waging war against China in the mid-nineteenth century for suppressing the opium trade to alleviate addiction amongst its people.

The number of Chinese people who settled in Limehouse was also greatly exaggerated, and in reality only totalled around 300.

Both Connie and her husband Leslie remember finding the newspaper reports about their home preposterous in an interview for The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed-heritage Asian Americans.

"[Connie] used to read all these sordid accounts in these two-penny magazines," Leslie laughed. "We used to think: there must be something going on here, why don't they let us in on it?"

The real Chinatown

Although the press sought to characterise Limehouse as a monolithic Chinese community in the East End, Connie remembers seeing people of all nationalities in the shops and community spaces in Limehouse.

She doesn't remember feeling discriminated against by other locals, though Connie does recall having her face measured and IQ tested by a member of the British Eugenics Society who was conducting research in the area.

Some of Connie's happiest childhood memories were from her time at Chung-Hua Club, where she learned about Chinese culture and language.

In Leslie's memory, Limehouse was one big playground. He and the other local children would play pranks by knocking on their neighbours' doors and running away, or they would tie up a paper ball with some string and kick it around like a football.

Leslie's father worked as a chef in a Chinese restaurant in the West End. At home, he played traditional Chinese instruments and listened to Chinese operas on his gramophone.

Jane Lamb's father emigrated from Hong Kong and married a Scottish woman in Limehouse. She recalled her father Dr Philip Lamb providing healthcare to the Chinese community free of charge from his practice on West India Dock Road.

Jane's father studied at Edinburgh and mingled with highly educated British people, and Leslie recalled Chinese elders who dressed in Western clothes and were members of freemasons societies.

Why did Chinatown disappear?

The caricature of Limehouse's Chinatown as a den of vice hastened its erasure.

Police raids and deportations fuelled by the alarmist media coverage threatened the Chinese population of Limehouse, and slum clearance schemes to redevelop low-income areas dispersed Chinese residents in the 1930s.

The Defence of the Realm Act imposed at the beginning of the First World War criminalised opium use, gave the authorities increased powers to deport Chinese people and restricted their ability to work on British ships.

Dwindling maritime trade during World War II further stripped Chinese sailors of opportunities for employment, and any remnants of Chinatown were destroyed during the Blitz or erased by postwar development schemes.

But Tower Hamlets still has the third-largest Chinese community in the UK according to the 2011 census, and the Chinese Association of Tower Hamlets was founded in 1983 on Commercial road in Limehouse, near the historic Chinatown.

The Chinese Association provides care for the elderly and language classes, much like Connie's memories of the Chung-Hua Club where she learned Chinese.

First-hand accounts of Limehouse's Chinatown are scarce, but the ones that do exist tell of a tightly-knit East End community, one which worked and played together just like any other.

If you enjoyed this, you may like Meet Alan, the 23-year-old at the helm of Poplar's family-run Vietnamese Supermarket.

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The Story of Limehouse's Lost Chinatown - Poplar LDN

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Limehouse was London's first Chinatown, home to a tightly-knit community who were demonised in popular culture and erased from the cityscape.

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The picture above is the cover of a British book published in the early twentieth-century, The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer. The novel, published in the era of 'Yellow Peril', featured stereotypical depictions of Chinese people in Britain and abroad.

Rohmer's way of understanding and writing about Chinese people in Britain is countered in the work of a Chinese-born author from the same era, Lao She, and also clashed with the facts of Chinese people's lives in London's docklands at this time.

British expansion in China and Chinese people in Britain

The years leading up to the Boxer Uprising in 1899-1901 had seen a period of concerted British expansion in China. As soldiers, missionaries and merchants set sail from Limehouse Reach to defend and extend Britain's Chinese interests, a small Chinatown developed along the capital's dockside streets and also in the port cities of Liverpool, around Pitt Street, and Cardiff's Tiger Bay area. Some Chinese sailors jumped ship and settled, opening lodging houses, provisions stores, cafes, association halls, and laundries to cater to the transient seamen and indentured labourers that could be signed on by British merchant shipping companies in China's treaty ports for less than half the wage of a British seaman.

By 1890 there were two distinct, if very small, Chinese communities living in East London's dockside neighbourhoods. Chinese men from Shanghai stayed around Pennyfields, Amoy Place and Ming Street and those from Guangzhou (Canton) and Southern China lived on the other side of the West India Dock Road on Limehouse Causeway. The lack of fluency in the English language of many Chinese migrants added to the hostility they received from British seamen and led to cultural segregation. Gradually the streets of Pennyfields and the Chinese Causeway, as it became known, began to be transformed by colourful shops and cafes serving Chinese food, their interiors an exotic contrast to the generally drab surroundings of Limehouse. One more positive press story, from the Gentleman's Magazine reported that 'the Chinese shops are the quaintest places imaginable. Their walls decorated with red and orange papers, covered with Chinese writing indicating the "chop" or style of the firm, or some such announcement. There is also sure to be a map of China and a hanging Tung shing Chinese Almanac.'

Increased hostility

As with other migrant communities in Britain, as Chinese settlement continued, local feelings towards in-coming migrants grew worse. In 1901 when the first Chinese laundry opened in Pennyfields it was immediately stoned by a hostile crowd. In 1908, in opposition to cheap Chinese labour, crowds of angry British seamen prevented Chinese seamen from signing on as ships' crew. In this instance Chinese people had to return to their boarding houses under police escort to avoid being attacked.

In response to the general increase in anti-Chinese aggression from around 1900-1910, Chinese Mutual Aid associations were set up in London and Liverpool. In 1911 in Cardiff, every one of the city's 30 Chinese laundries was attacked by local mobs. During this time, the first report on the Chinese in Britain was commissioned by Liverpool City Council amidst concern over Chinese men marrying English women, and worries about gambling and opium-smoking. Despite the negative feeling amongst local men, the city's Chief Constable said he felt the resident Chinese were 'quiet, inoffensive and industrious people'.

Chinese seamen were well liked by local women as they were seen to be hard working, did not often drink alcohol and took care of their families' welfare. By 1918, the number of Chinese people living in Pennyfields totalled 182; all were men and nine of them had English wives.

'Yellow Peril' myths and Chinese Limehouse

As more Chinese seamen began to settle in the ports of London and Liverpool, a powerful set of myths began to develop about them and 'Chinatown'. Throughout the 1910s, politicians manipulated local fears about cheap Chinese labour and writers of popular fiction began to exploit the dramatic potential of Chinese Limehouse in London as a locus of drug-trafficking, gambling and the sexual ensnarement of young white women. The 1913 publication of the first Sax Rohmer tales about the evil Dr Fu-Manchu started a near-hysterical interest in London's Limehouse, where it was said that sinister 'Chinamen' lured innocent white women into their opium dens. This exotic underworld was featured in countless novels, films and songs, and the stereotype of the Chinese as mysterious criminals became firmly engrained in Western popular culture.

These stereotypes, linked to anxieties and paranoia about the way East Asia might compete with or threaten 'Western civilisation' are often referred to today as 'Yellow Peril' myths. 'Yellow Peril' stories and ideas can be found in American and continental European newspapers, novels and even laws (the U.S. had a Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 that suspended Chinese immigration for ten years). In Britain, 'Yellow Peril' ideas date back to the eighteenth century but were intensified after Britain won the Opium Wars against China in 1839-42 and 1856-60. It was believed that the Chinese who came to settle in Britain's port cities in the nineteenth century might be plotting revenge against their war losses and could not be trusted.

Such was the notoriety of Chinese Limehouse that by the mid-Twenties the travel agents Thomas Cook laid on excursion bus trips for tourists (who were generally disappointed by their journeys until Thomas Cook began hiring people to stage hatchet fights) and it was commonplace for West End revellers, after a couple of champagne cocktails, to go slumming 'down Chinatown way'.

Yet even at its height during the 1930s, London's Chinatown consisted of only about 300 residents. While the Chinese presence loomed large in the British imagination, and despite considerable British incursion into China, there were relatively few Chinese immigrants in Britain. Official scrutiny together with 'Yellow Peril' sensationalism had established an overall climate of exclusion from British society. British labour unions were vigilant against the employment of Chinese seamen, while the effect of the wartime Defence of the Realm Act (1914) and its ban on opium use had been to criminalise a significant number of Chinese, giving the authorities the ability to organise deportations.

Lao She in London

Between 1924 and 1929 Lao She, one of China's most renowned novelists, was a young man making his way in London. He spent his days teaching Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies, in those days located at Finsbury Circus in the east of the city; and during his spare time he devoured works of English literature in the school's library, especially the works of Charles Dickens. In the evenings Lao She dined on the invariably bland food provided by a series of landladies with the occasional trip to Limehouse for Chinese cuisine when he felt homesick.

During the years he spent in London, Lao She wrote three novels, including Mr Ma and Son, the tragicomic story of a father and son whose attempts to settle in London are met with suspicion. Within the pages of Mr Ma and Son, Lao She expressed his resentment of imperialist bigotry and Christian hypocrisy, as well as his fascination with and admiration for aspects of English culture and his self-disgust for China's failure to stand up for itself in the world. It was the first Chinese novel to directly confront British racism towards China.

The studious, glasses-wearing Lao She was the opposite of the cartoon image of a 'Yellow Peril' 'Chinaman', which was popular during the age of British Empire. Like many migrants, he had a complicated relationship with Britain. As a student in Peking he had participated in China's growing movement for cultural reform which drew on Western science and philosophy to modernise China. But Lao She's father had been killed while fighting Allied soldiers during their invasion of Peking during the Boxer Uprising of 1901. Lao She was just a baby when Allied soldiers ransacked his home and narrowly escaped being killed himself as he was hidden beneath an upturned trunk. Lao She resented the Western empire and its cruelties but was also appalled by China's corrupt warlords who, after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912, were blocking the creation of a functioning republic. He also studied English and converted to Christianity, taking classes run by the London Missionary Society who organised his teaching post in London. His novel, Mr Ma and Son, not only represents the experiences of Chinese residents of Limehouse, it also shows Lao She's ambivalence towards a country that he admired in many respects but which had caused hardship for his family and the Chinese people.

For extracts from Lao She's Mr Ma and Son see here for pages 14 & 15 and pages 16 & 17.

The decline of Limehouse's Chinatown

The existence of a Chinese community in London's Docklands was short-lived. As early as the 1920s, slum clearance in Limehouse hastened the decline of Chinatown. Many of the houses occupied by the Chinese were described as very old and in some cases they were in extreme external ill-repair. Internally, however, most were clean, uncrowded, vermin-free and less susceptible to infectious disease than their English neighbours.

Census figures indicate that the movement of the Chinese to the West End and the suburbs was accelerating by 1931. In 1934 Limehouse Causeway was widened and a maze of alleys and side streets, including several occupied by Chinese businesses and lodging-houses, were demolished. But the primary causes of the long-term decline of the Chinese community in the area were to do with the port. In 1895 an article in the Gentleman's Magazine stated that Chinatown in Limehouse was no more than a single street of shops and boarding-houses: 'It exists by and for the Chinese firemen, seamen, stewards, cooks, and carpenters who serve on board the steamers plying between China and the port of London.'

It was this maritime dependence which generated the rapid growth of Chinese businesses in Limehouse during the First World War. And it was this dependence which hastened the decline of Chinatown in the 1930s. Chung Chu, who kept a café on Limehouse Causeway, said in 1931 that the loss of shipping entering the London docks was killing the Chinese population. There were now about a hundred families living in the area but they were moving away as there seemed to be no future for Anglo-Chinese children there: 'the boys find work hard to get, and the girls drift about the streets ostracised by white girls of their own age'.

Much of the area was damaged by aerial bombing during the Blitz in the Second World War, although a number of elderly Chinese still chose to remain. After the war, the growing popularity of Chinese food led to an increasing number of Chinese restaurants being opened in the West End to service late-night theatre- and club-goers. In the 1960s an influx of immigrants from the British territory of Hong Kong led to the establishment of the present-day Chinatown in Gerrard Street, off Shaftesbury Avenue. By the 1970s, Soho's Chinatown was truly established as a centre for London's Chinese community - now numbering in the tens of thousands.

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Our Migration Story: The Making of Britain

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The picture above is the cover of a British book published in the early twentieth-century, The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer. The novel, published in the era of 'Yellow Peril', featured stereotypical depictions of Chinese people in Britain and abroad.

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George Raft and Anna May Wong dance in Limehouse Blues (1934)

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https://flashbak.com/wonderful-pictures-londons-old-chinatown-limehouse-59348/

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London’s Old Chinatown in Limehouse and the ‘Yellow Peril’ - Flashbak

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“The squalor of Limehouse is that strange squalor of the East which seems to conceal vicious splendour.”

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An old building for sailors

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The Limehouse library is actually a hotel

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This special issue, edited by Joshua Synenko, situates memory research within the expanded fields of geography, mapping, GIS and mobile media.

Cover image: Clement Valla (2010-present) Postcard from Google Earth (46Â°42'3.50"N, 120Â°26'28.59"W). Permission from the artist.

Published: 2018-07-16

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Vol 2 No 1 (2018): Geospatial Memory | Media Theory

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This special issue, edited by Joshua Synenko, situates memory research within the expanded fields of geography, mapping, GIS and mobile media. Cover image: Clement Valla (2010-present) Postcard from Google Earth (46Â°42'3.50"N, 120Â°26'28.59"W). Permission from the artist. Published: 2018-07-16

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Elastic City aims to make its audience active participants in a poetic exchange with the places we live in and visit. We present conceptual walks throughout and outside of New York. Elastic City pushes on the walking tour tradition, but these are not NYC walking tours, rather participatory walks led by artists from various genres.