No jokes in this post: VOTE KEN!

Leytonstone Lady

Following a brief reconnaissance mission at the weekend, I will shortly be shifting Sajarina HQ a few miles further East to Leytonstone. Admittedly, I did visit on an almost criminally nice day, and spent a while enjoying the sunshine among the graves and bluebells (frigging bluebells!) in the churchyard of St John the Baptist, which [...]

“That gorgeous playing-place erected in the fields”

As a big Shakespeare fangirl (the last scene of The Winter’s Tale makes me cry every damn time I read it, which was fairly inconvenient while I was writing my dissertation) I was pleased to read a bit in Saturday’s Grauniad about his links with Shoreditch, which in fact has a pretty solid [...]

** Piglet Alert **

Here’s a scampery lot, courtesy of Newham City Farm.
posted with vodpod

See how I resist making a Duran Duran reference?

Iron-willed, that’s me. Because last weekend I paid a visit to the rather gorgeous Dalston Rio Cinema, to watch It Always Rains On Sunday, which was showing as part of the East End Film Festival. It was one of their ‘Silver Screen’ matinees, which are free for the over 60s and include tea and cake [...]

The ‘Olympic gold rush’

“Urgent action must be taken to prevent the communities of east London being trampled in the Olympic gold rush,” according to Josh Ryan-Collins, co-author of a new report, as quoted in The Guardian (isn’t it a surprise  that I’m a Guardian reader! who’da thunk it? ;))
The report, Fools Gold, was published today by the New [...]

Botolph-without-Bishopsgate

While I was pootling around Bishopsgate the other day (in fact I was attending a breakfast seminar about online fundraising, but that’s another fascinating story… I stepped inside the very lovely and highly incongruous St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate church.
The thing that drew me in there most of all was the windows, made of that beautiful old swishy [...]

Anarchy in Victoria Park

Victoria Park cropped up briefly a few posts ago, as the site of plentiful suffragette protests and the violent police smackdowns that inevitably accompanied them.
The green “lung” of North East London, Victoria Park was opened in the 1840s amid rising concern about the health of the East End working class, with the aim of providing [...]

The Bop is back!

Two words: Unskinny. Bop.

I thought it was high time for a post that showed I do occasionally go out with my friends rather than just wander around on my own all day taking pictures of pigeons. And when I go out, I like to go to the Unskinny Bop at the newly refurbished Star of [...]

Pigeon detectives…

A team of pigeons hard at work despite the inhospitable weather. They will not rest until they’ve checked every inch of this concrete for the missing steam engine…