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Rachel Lichtenstein is an artist, archivist and writer. She is the author of Rodinsky’s Whitechapel and co-author, with Iain Sinclair, of Rodinsky’s Room.

Diamond Street is the second in a trilogy of books by Rachel on London streets. On Brick Lane was the first and both will be followed by a volume on Portobello Road, also to be published by Hamish Hamilton. Find out more about Rachel by visiting her site.

After receiving the fantastic news in 2012 that my application to the Arts Council to produce a digital app to coincide with the paperback edition of my latest book Diamond Street: the hidden world of Hatton Garden had been successful, I have spent the best part of a year working in collaboration with an amazing team of experts in the digital media, film, design, literary and historical fields to produce this new media project. 

The development of a digital app may at first seem like an odd choice for a non fiction writer with absolutely no experience of or skills in this type of medium but from the first time I heard about GPS technology being used in locative apps, I immediately recognised what a great tool this could be for me. I have always worked in a very multi-disciplinary way, having trained as a sculptor before becoming a writer. My creative practise currently involves writing of course, alongside walking, intensive archival research, photography, audio recording, painting, site-specific art installationsand making short films. The multi-media capabilities of a digital app seemed to offer a good way for my readers to experience my work not just as a printed text but also through digital space, new media and in real time.

Before starting this project I spent a long time imagining what a digital app could offer that a printed book could not and how new technologies could be used not to replace but to enhance and support a book.

I wanted the app to offer new insights for my readers into both the stories in the book and the places and people I have written about. I’m really pleased to say that after a lot of hard work I really do believe this has been achieved. Mainly due to the exceptional team I have been collaborating with who have made this magic happen.

Work on the app began with paper plans, budget discussions and meetings with Simon Poulter, Metal Culture’s digital arts officer who was co-producer of the project. We brainstormed on my original idea: ‘to pick up on traces of the history of the place as you wandered around, with images, audio and text being activated by geo-technology.’ We literally ripped the printed book apart and imagined these pages being scattered around the Hatton Garden area, transformed into different digital media, which would then beactivated as users passed by specific locations. The idea was to develop an experimental drift through an area, rather than a guided, chronological linear walk. 

From paper designs formulated during this process we developed the rough outline for a design for both the virtual (armchair version) and the GPS on location versions of the app.

The next stage of the development involved intensive meetings with Phantom Production who produced and mixed the extraordinary sound files for the app. Phantom consist of an amazing team of audio producers headed by the multiple-award winning sound artist Francesca Panetta, who runs the Guardian’s audio team. Francesca was one of the first to work on this type of GPS activated app (Soho Stories App). Her knowledge and expertise has greatly enhanced the project and through Francesca I was introduced to Calvium, app developers based in Bristol, worldwide leaders in the field of GPS activated apps.

Before working on the back end of development I spent a considerable amount of time storyboarding the app. I found this a painful process, after five years of researching the area and its history and a book’s worth of material gathered and more, it was hard for me to cut this down. I eventually decided on 12 different story zones, which take you through the story of the historic quarter of Hatton Garden, from its time as a medieval rural monastic landscape in the Fleet Valley, to its transformation in the nineteenth century into a jewellery quarter and the contemporary story of the place today. 

Even though I had already conducted hundreds of hours worth of audio recordings of people who work in the Hatton Garden jewellery trade, it was decided these needed to be re-recorded. The quality of my recordings was just not high enough for the project. So I contacted a number of people who had been involved in the book, from Iain Sinclair, to geologist Diana Clements, to orthodox diamond dealers and sewer flushers and then BBC broadcaster India Rakusen re-recorded my interviewees. These recordings were then mixed with bespoke soundscapes and music to create 12 beautifully produced and extremely high quality sound files, which really form the core of the GPS experience. As you walk around with your smartphone in your pocket and your headphones in your ears the secrets of the streets around you are revealed. Have a listen to some of the sound files we used on the Diamond Street App here. 

After spending a lot of time in different archives, deciding on which images to use in the app and editing down some of the text from the book, we had all the content ready to go. The next stage got a lot more techy! In November 2012 Simon Poulter and I attended an intensive training day with app developers Calvium learning how to use Calvium’s specially developed platform for GPS located apps.

In collaboration with Phantom Production and Calvium we decided on location zones and then placed the sound files and images within these zones. A period of intensive testing ensued, with extensive notes on any issues on site (such as leakage of sound files from one zone to another, or places where sound files overlapped) being taken and then reported back to Calvium who made continual adjustments to the back end of the app. There were many small problems to iron out and a lot of testing was needed before the app was working well. Most of the testing took place throughout the coldest winter on record and I can’t say it was all an enjoyable experience, but hearing those stories come to life in place as I wandered around was undeniably really exciting, a very contemporary way of conducting pyschogeography in place.

I really did jump into the deep end with this project. I had to learn a whole new language fast, as developers and digital artists asked me questions about ‘front ends’ and ‘back ends’, ‘story zones’ and ‘location zones’. To try and explain what I mean, below is a screen shot of the ‘back end’ of the app in development.

Alongside intensive testing on location we began to develop the designs for the armchair version of the app, which eventually became a swiping timeline through the stories in the book, with embedded text, images, films and sound.

I’m delighted to say the Diamond Street App has now been published and is available as a free download both in the iTunes store and for the Android market. I’m really excited about the project, which I hope has achieved its aim of giving readers a much deeper, interactive, dynamic and live experience of the locations, people and stories described within my printed text.

For me, working for the first time with these new mediums has completely altered my outlook on digital publishing and the potential of using new media to connect with new readers and audiences. I’ve found the collaborative multi-media way of working both really exciting and really challenging and whilst I’m looking forward to some quality time alone with my computer, cracking on with my next book, I can certainly imagine working on more digital app projects in the future.

www.diamondstreetapp.com

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Found another doodle from an evening at WOMAD. I think they are howling along to something or other.

I'm working on my novel, fixing up bad sentences, knitting some bits of psychology into early scenes that should help with later ones. Clearing up character motivations, checking reasons and reactions, tidying up weird metaphors. It's slow but satisfying work.

We went to ALDI today, a small island of familiarity on this side of the world, and bought things to cook. It's expensive to eat out here, but I am really enjoying our evening outings after the sun has gone down. There is live music and loads of great places to sit and eat and drink and plan and talk.

I keep thinking of things I want to do when I get back to London - sit in the British Library and write, buy some treats from Borough Market, make a big salad in my own kitchen. Then again I feel like I don't want to go back, but move somewhere more pleasant. Somewhere the houses aren't surprised when it gets cold every winter. Somewhere with more space to go around... pretty much every time I travel to a different city the higher ceilings give me slight vertigo, and I start to calculate how many bedsits each house could be broken up into, and who could afford to live there.

But London is where I live. I'll travel back to London in a few days, and see my friends, make some books, eat some salad, complain about the rent and the weather and public transport, and it will be good to be home.

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A new one here. When I started this it was going to be one of my trademark pen drawings. Just a bunch of pens on a page. I don't know at what point it became London Bridge. That's even if it is London bridge and not, in fact, Tower Bridge.

Can you read the text on this one? Cos, I seriously have NO idea what I'm doing when it comes to resizing these days. It's pot luck.

Anyway, this one drawing is not just new to my blog, but it's new to my shop too. I've put a few originals up for sale over the last few days. Have a gander HERE.

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Recent sketching in various cafes.
Paper 53 on iPad. Click to enlarge.

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I read Pam Decides, the sequel to Pam, on Sunday. A note at the beginning suggests that Pam was never intended to have a sequel, but I occasionally felt, as I read Pam Decides, that Pam existed for no other reason than to provide an excuse for one. Which isn’t true, but tells you a little bit about how I feel about both. I still like Pam, a lot, which is to say that I still find it frustrating and delightful and moving and difficult to describe. But my thoughts and feelings about Pam Decides are a little different.

When we last saw Pamela Yeoland, she had just been left penniless, homeless and friendless by the death of her grandfather. Her loving but neglectful parents were abroad somewhere. James Peele had proposed that Pam become his mistress after he married her cousin Henrietta, causing her to lose all respect for him. Eight years later, Pam’s 27th birthday finds her living in a boarding house in London with Jane Pilgrim, her old nurse, and making a scant living by writing romance novels.

Pam reconnects with Henrietta’s  mother, the Duchess, after receiving a letter from her, and the Duchess sort of comes to take the place of Lord Yeoland as a friend to Pam. There’s little overarching structure to the plot; von Hutten has a way of throwing stuff at Pam that’s all the more realistic for its lack of obvious purpose. So here’s some stuff that happens: Pam’s cousin De Rattrec “Ratty” Maxse chases her across London in a sequence that’s almost slapstick, her (other) former suitor Charnley Burke dies and leaves her an incredibly delightful house, she meets and forms a close friendship with a Polish diplomat named Jean de Lensky, she adopts a baby, and, inevitably, James Peele reappears in Pam’s life. Well, no wonder. He’s one of her best friends’ son-in-law.

So. Things I loved about this book:

Pam. She’s such a credible character, and such a credible adult.There are ways in which she’s incredibly strong and empowered and good a setting boundaries, and there are way in which she isn’t and doesn’t know what do do about things, and asks for help when she shouldn’t and doesn’t ask for help when she should.

The way characters drift in and out. The people who are important during one section of the two years the book covers aren’t necessarily the people who are important during other sections. Lensky is around for quite a while before he even speaks to Pam. The Penge family, some of Pam’s closest friends at the end of the book, don’t even appear until maybe three quarters of the way in.

Jack Lensky. I just. I can’t even.

The Duchess being all supportive and caring and saying the right things at the right times.

The Duchess’ grandson.

The house. It is the best house. It has three front door and rolls of valuable lace stuffed into vases and stuff. I want the house.

Things I didn’t love:

I don’t really see the point of the baby.

Cyril Wantage, who breaks into Pam’s house (formerly his house) to steal some of his stuff back. Pam ends up becoming responsible for him and his wife, and while I sort of like what they — and Pam’s actions regarding them — bring to the story, Cyril is just so useless and I find him pretty irritating.

Things that just are:

Everything connected to James Peele. There’s no way of explaining this without giving away what happens, but it was all so interesting — seeing how he’s changed over the course of eight years, and knowing that he’s unworthy, and fearing that Pam will fall into his arms anyway. And she does, and it’s super uncomfortable. And then…what happens is simultaneously expected and a shock.

I don’t know how well this book would have worked for me if I hadn’t read Pam first. There’s a summary of Pam in the front of the book, but it doesn’t tell you much you couldn’t figure out from the text, and there’s so much in Pam that can’t be fully explained by passing references. But this is one of the stronger sequels I’ve read exactly because it moves on from the book that precedes it. By the time you get to Pam Decides, you’ve already been through Pam. You’ve gained a very clear understanding of what her childhood was like, and you’ve mentally calculated the ratio of happy marriages to unhappy ones and you’ve gotten your hopes of for James Peele and been disappointed by him right along with Pam. And now that’s all over, and Bettina von Hutten doesn’t feel the need to keep rehashing the same issues.

Pam is an interesting and frequently enjoyable novel in it’s own right, but in relation to its sequel, it’s like a prerequisite course in college: having been through it, you get to jump straight into the good stuff with the next thing. And it might just be because Pam Decides feels at times as if it was written specifically for me, but I really do think it’s the good stuff. I kind of want to sit right back down and read it again.

Tagged: 1900s, bettinavonhutten, london

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Right. This is what you will do on the weekend from the 14th this month:
Come to South Bank and play games. Hide and Seek, the famed and excellent makers of  social games and playful experiences, are running one of their best-of events on Southbank, London.
There will be games for every taste, stategic and silly, with varying degrees of running around, creativity and all other good things to do with play. Children and adults welcome.

And there will be my game: 150m of cardboard turned into a corrugated labyrinth. ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY. That's a lot of cardboard.

Hide and Seek's Holly wrote about it:

Treasure Maze is a massive winding installation and a game all in one. The game itself is simple – collect treasure in the maze while avoiding the roaming shark. There are safe places in the maze where you can shelter, and of course you can always leave the maze, if you can find the way – but if the shark gets you before you make it out, then all the treasure you’ve collected is lost. So when you play there’s a classic balancing act between sticking around and collecting more treasure, or getting out while it’s safe instead of risking everything you’ve accomplished so far.
It’s a game that children and adults can play together on a pretty even basis, which is rare – adults might be better on average at plotting and doubling back, but kids can get into the safe spaces much more easily.
What really makes the game special, though, is the physicality of it – squeezing through corridors, crawling into safe caves, feeling the burr of movement as other players move past on the other side of a corrugated cardboard wall (or is it the shark?).

We ran it before at the National Maritime Museum where it really took off--- literally, I sometimes had to herd it back into place because it was physically running away, full of people excitedly hunting treasure and each other.
This time it will be sat in the Clore Ball Room, which in itself is amazing.
Also, I will take a whole day to paint the thing as well, and we will have to cut it up on the last evening - you can reserve your favourite parts during the weekend, and take them away Sunday night.

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This evening of "politics, poetry & the fictions of modern love... with Danny Hayward, Jennifer Cooke, Reina van der Wiel and Felicity Allen" looks interesting (more at parasol-unit.org), particular the talk by Danny Hayward (How to be Dominated, or, Night Thoughts on Poetry and World History):

The talk will attempt to specify a category of writing that wishes not only to contest the ownership of the category of the popular, but which wants actively to ownthat category. In its first parts it will offer a polemical history of its central category for the previous two centuries of capitalist development, from Schiller via Wordsworth to Brecht, before proceeding to a more speculative discussion of contemporary writing that wishes to seize (and not merely to gain) popularity from the interests for whom popularity is a synonym of turnover. Setting itself in equal opposition to Adorno's view of "high" and "low" culture as two torn halves that will not be added together, and the profitable therapeutics of anything goes, the talk will argue that a contemporary communist popular culture can only function as a comedy of domination instated at the level of syntax, prosody, and narrative. Broadly speaking, the talk will claim that the poetic writing, if it wishes to maintain some relation to historical development, must learn how to work with its own domination.

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5 Stars Scrooge: A Christmas Carol & A Remembrance of Mugby Charles Dickens Papercutz 96 Pages   Ages: 8 and up   Scrooge is actually two books in one. In addition to the traditional Dickens classic  A Christmas Carol there is also another Charles Dickens classic, A Remembrance of Mugby. Chances are good you have not [...]

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NW: A Novel Zadie Smith

I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time writing this review. It’s taking me longer to write about than to read, and it took FOREVER to read this book.

We start with Leah, who falls for a scam, who doesn’t want the kids her husband is desperate for, who thinks that if she still acts like she’s 18 (because she still feels like she’s 18) then she won’t have to grow up. Leah’s section of the book is choppy, much like Leah’s mind. Part is in poetry.

Felix’s section is next, told in more traditional narrative style, covering a day in his life as he visits his dad, buys a car, and attempts to finally end things with an old girlfriend (because things have gotten that serious with his current girlfriend.) And then it goes horribly wrong.

The final section is Natalie’s, Leah’s best friend from childhood. Natalie is the most successful, having left behind the council estate and gone to college and law school and now leads an upper middle class life. But she leads her life the way she thinks she’s supposed to, and can’t find herself in there anymore, and starts looking for ways to feel something. Natalie’s section is mostly told in very brief vignettes, covering most of her life until the present.

All three stories overlap, timeline-wise. There isn’t much of a plot, it’s more like three character sketches, where most things are shown, rather than told.

I say this book took me forever to read, and it did. Part of that had to do with my discovery of a certain game called Tower Madness. Part of it had to do with the fact it wasn’t a rush-through-breathlessly-to-see-what-happens next type book. I did, however, like it. I liked it a lot. I enjoyed the shifting narrative styles. As they changed with character, it didn’t seem too much like “uh-oh, your craft is showing!” It’s also a refreshing challenge to read something where so much is left unexplained, left for the reader to figure out by reading closely. As someone who reads a lot of fiction, where this isn’t done as much, it took a while for me to get used to that. It was a difficult book for me, and I enjoy a challenge. Most of the stuff I read tends to make sure you know what's going on. Sometimes a little too much. I read a lot of plot-heavy books (and nonfiction, where everything should be spelled out.) I'm hoping with my Outstanding Books for the College Bound, I'm going to step out of what I normally read. This book reminded me that I like being challenged in my reading by craft/form. (I don't enjoy as much when I'm challenged by content.)

Book Provided by... my local library

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By Gordon R. Thompson

The Beatles were unlikely successes on London’s record charts in December 1962. Northerners with schoolboy haircuts who wrote and performed their own songs, their first record “Love Me Do” had risen slowly up British charts, despite lack of significant promotion by their publisher and record company, and without an appearance on national television. Moreover, while they should have been touring Britain to promote the disc, they instead played a pre-booked residence at the Star Club in Hamburg. The disc should have flopped.

Some have speculated that the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein arranged for the family business, North End Music Stores to purchase enough copies of the record to move it in the charts. “Fiddling” with the charts was hardly unknown both in Britain and in the US. The notorious British manager Don Arden (Sharon Osborne’s father) later bragged that he could move the rank of a disc with a discrete monetary investments.

The most widely read music papers of the day — the weeklies The New Musical Express and Melody Maker — contained interviews with artists, managers, producers, and songwriters, listed tour dates and contract changes, featured recently released discs in reviews, and ranked the week’s top recordings. By today’s standards, their methods were primitive, blending a few calls to big merchants with personal intuition. An informed manager or producer could move a release in the charts simply by purchasing the right number of discs in the right shops or by persuading the right people that particular artists were the next big thing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The curious chart history of “Love Me Do” sees the song appear first on Record Retailer’s charts shortly after its release and then two weeks later on Melody Maker’s charts. In Record Retailer, the disk would reach #17 in the 27 December 1962 issue, while in Melody Maker, it reached #21 the first week of January. The recording entered the charts of Disc weeks after the other papers and climbed no higher than #24 in December.

If these charts represent record sales, one wonders why they should differ. Record Retailer prided itself on having its finger on the pulse of record merchandising by polling its readership: Britain’s retail disc merchants. Earlier in 1962, when a flu swept through Decca’s manufacturing plant disrupting their ability to press records, both Melody Maker and the Daily Mail published charts showing Elvis Presley’s newest recording (“Rock-a-Hula Baby”) suddenly holding the #20 position, despite the absence of disks to sell. Melody Maker insisted that it had placed the disk in the charts because of comments from retailers combined with a previous announcement of its release. Melody Maker’s stated sources — and their data on record sales — suggest that the venerable music paper relied on selected stores and intuition. Another variable in these numbers recognizes that some figures may reflect the number of discs purchased by shop owners as distinct from the number of disks purchased by customers.

Two weeks after “Love Me Do” entered Record Retailer’s charts, NME apparently gave the recording a quick guess placement, before dispatching it to presumed history. An October 26 article by one of NME’s writers, Alan Smith, extols the group and the budding talent of its songwriters. “Newcomers to the Charts: Liverpool’s Beatles Wrote Their Own Hit” makes the connection between the Beatles and Billy Fury and promoted the potential of the recording. The NME’s editors apparently seized upon the convergence of sales reports in other papers and the press releases to write something they thought would sell a few papers.

Over at Record Retailer, however, the disk climbed slowly with little apparent promotion, peaking at the end of the year, setting the stage for the release of their second single, “Please Please Me,” which the Beatles had already recorded in November. Breaking into the charts represented a remarkable feat for a new group, let alone one from the provincial and industrial north. Perhaps Liverpudlian Billy Fury had paved the way for them with three significant hits in 1962: “Letter Full of Tears” (charts 15 March, UK #32), “Last Night Was Made for Love” (charts 3 May; UK #4), and “Once upon a Dream” (charts 19 July, UK #7).

Click here to view the embedded video.

That cold and dark December would see Ray Davies meet British bluesman Alexis Korner and work his way into Dave Hunt’s Rhythm and Blues Band and play at the Piccadilly Jazz Club. There, another new group, the Rolling Stones (who had just landed a bass player in the form of Bill Wyman) would impress him. Something musical was beginning to happen in London. Something raw and exciting.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Gordon Thompson’s posts on The Beatles and other music here.

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By Bryan Fanning and Denis Dillon

The Tottenham riots in the London Borough of Haringey took place in August 2011. We examined three responses to them: reports by North London Citizens, an alliance of 40 mostly faith community institutions including schools, the Tottenham Community Panel established by Haringey Council, and the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel established by Parliament.

The riots coincided with the end of an era of British urban policy when various community-centred regeneration programmes introduced by the previous New Labour Government, were being wound down. One of its flagship initiatives was the New Deal for Communities (NDC), a ten year programme which invested £50 million in each of thirty deprived areas including Tottenham.  More recently, David Cameron has promoted the idea of the Big Society with an accompanying rhetoric that blames big government for enfeebling the civic sphere.

Two of the three analyses of the Tottenham riots that we examined shared this perspective. North London Citizens emphasised the need to create new community leaders; the Riots Communities and Victims Panel emphasised an on-going failure of services to engage with communities and vaguely endorses an agenda of neighbourhood-level community empowerment. Cameron’s Big Society agenda envisioned communities and neighbourhoods becoming empowered to take local decisions and solve local problems taking over the running of services and facilities where appropriate. None of the three reports make such recommendations for Tottenham. Rather, they restate in minor key the need for greater responsiveness to communities with no clear ideas about how this might be achieved.

All three reports emphasised a deficit in community cohesion. All three identified inadequate engagement by local service providers with residents as part of the problem. But Tottenham has been here before. The aftermath of the 1985 riot saw considerable effort to improve, foster and build community cohesion in Tottenham. Many of the buildings that were looted and burned in 2011 had been the focus of regeneration efforts.

We had just completed research on the efficacy of such policies when the riots occurred. Our 2011 book Lessons for the Big Society: planning, regeneration and the politics of community participation (Ashgate, 2011) examined a long history of failed efforts by the local authority to secure such participation. There were many reasons for this. Labour held a political monopoly in Tottenham. Community activism not sponsored by the party was often ignored. The institutional culture of the local authority councillors and officials was often hostile to community participation in decision-making even if official rhetoric claimed otherwise. Well-to-do parts of the borough had articulate well-organised groups capable of putting pressure on officials and councillors. Community groups in Tottenham lacked the skills and cultural capital that worked to win responsiveness from institutional actors.

The kind of community capacity that regeneration programmes in Tottenham sought to introduce appeared feeble compared to the on-going capacity for unsolicited activism found in well-to-do areas – expressed through single issue campaigns, the establishment of long-standing amenity groups and well-organised networks able to compel responsiveness from Council officials and councillors. The New Labour diagnosis was that areas like Tottenham lacked the necessary social capital. But the regeneration programmes it put in place engendered only a limited form of community capacity, and this depended on the life-support of funding that has since ended.

What then for Cameron’s Big Society? Even after decades of community-focused urban renewal in Tottenham, both community-institutional relationships and community cohesion remain weak. However, this does not justify the withdrawal of state support or bucolic expectations that civil society can fill the resulting void with minimal support. The very localities that need community empowerment also need state support the most.

We argue that what might work for Tottenham is an approach that seriously interrogates why past regeneration efforts were unable to empower local communities but at the same time accepts that such empowerment cannot be realised without significant state funding. It would take seriously the scepticism-bordering-on-hostility of the Big Society to local authority officialdom. But what Tottenham needs for the foreseeable future is big government willing to learn from past mistakes.

Professor Bryan Fanning is the Head of the School of Applied Social Science at University College Dublin. Dr Denis Dillon is employed by Community Services Volunteers (CSV) in North London. They are the co-authors of Lessons for the Big Society: planning, regeneration and the politics of community participation (Ashgate, 2011). Their article, The Tottenham riots: the Big Society and the recurring neglect of community participation, appears in Community Development Journal.

Since 1966 the leading international journal in its field, Community Development Journal covers a wide range of topics, reviewing significant developments and providing a forum for cutting-edge debates about theory and practice. It adopts a broad definition of community development to include policy, planning and action as they impact on the life of communities. It publishes critically focused articles which challenge received wisdom, report and discuss innovative practices, and relate issues of community development to questions of social justice, diversity and environmental sustainability.

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Image credit: After the Riot – View from near Scotland Green. Photo by Alan Stanton, 2011.  Creative Commons Licence. (via Wikimedia Commons)

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The video of my Cards of U'ut has been launched. Many thanks to all concerned, especially the director Azi Khatiri for making it possible.

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The Frog at Sharon's Cafe.
Watercolour 28cm x 38cm. Click to enlarge.

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I'm sooo tired today after a whirlwind of a week - my sister & family have been stayng with us for the Easter hols. They live in rural Scotland so were keen to get out and about and see the sights. Here are the selected  'L is for London' highlights...

B is for boats - the Cutty Sark, the Thames Clipper...

C is for cousins...
E is for Easter eggs on the South Bank...


 and H is for hunting Easter eggs in the garden...


M is for museums...Maritime, Science & the V&A...

 P is for picnics...
...and pirates...

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