Books For Christmas

If you are seeking Christmas presents for family and friends, you need look no further because Spitalfields Life books make ideal gifts which you can have personally inscribed…

CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S LONDON ALBUM

Between the covers of this magnificent red Album with a gilded cover you will discover more than 600 of the Gentle Author’s favourite pictures of London in print for the first time, setting the wonders of our modern metropolis against the pictorial delights of the ancient city, and celebrating the infinite variety of life in the capital.

Take a walk through time with the Gentle Author as your guide – be equally amazed at what has been lost of old London and charmed by the unfamiliar marvels of London today.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S CRIES OF LONDON

The Gentle Author assembles a choice selection of CRIES OF LONDON, telling the stories of the artists and celebrated traders, and revealing the unexpected social realities contained within these cheap colourful prints produced for the mass market.

For centuries, these lively images of familiar hawkers and pedlars have been treasured by Londoners. In the capital, those who had no other means of income could always sell wares in the street and, by turning their presence into performance through song, they won the hearts of generations and came to embody the spirit of London itself.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM

The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.

As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY

“This small, beautiful book is an elegy to companionship. Encompassing both the everyday and the profound, it should be judged no less valid for the fact that the friend in question is a cat.” Times Literary Supplement

Anyone that has a cat will recognise the truth of this tender account by The Gentle Author. Filled with sentiment yet never sentimental, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY is a literary hymn to the intimate relationship between humans and animals.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER TRAVELLERS CHILDREN IN LONDON FIELDS

A handsome photography book collecting together Colin O’Brien’s portraits of the Travellers’ Children in London Fields.

These pictures record an extraordinary meeting between a photographer and a group of Irish Travellers’ children in London Fields in 1987, yet the subject of Colin O’Brien’s tender and clear-eyed photographs is no less than the elusive drama of childhood itself.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A MODEST LIVING, MEMOIRS OF A COCKNEY SIKH

“a timely reminder of all that modern Britishness encompasses” The Observer

In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh Singh tells the candid and sometimes surprising story of his father Joginder Singh who came to Spitalfields in 1949.

Joginder sacrificed a life in the Punjab to work in Britain and send money home, yet he found himself in his element living among the mishmash of people who inhabited the streets around Brick Lane.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER EAST END VERNACULAR

The Gentle Author presents a magnificent selection of pictures – many never published before – revealing the evolution of painting in the East End and tracing the changing character of the streets through the twentieth century.

“A fragment of the riches flowing from a continued fascination with London’s topography” – Evening Standard

“Harvested from the thirties to the present day, Spitalfields Life’s gorgeous collection of East End paintings is more knees-up than misery-fest” – Hackney Citizen

CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE MAP OF THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR

Follow in the footsteps of all those who came before, with a keen eye and an open heart, to discover the manifold wonders of Spitalfields.

Adam Dant has populated The Gentle Author’s Tour with portraits of more than fifty people – both the living and the dead – who have lived and worked in Spitalfields over the past two millennia.

Ramble through two thousand years of culture in the heart of London and discover some of the people and places that make this historic neighbourhood distinctive.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A HOXTON CHILDHOOD

AS Jasper’s tender memoir of growing up in the East End of London at the beginning of the twentieth century was immediately acclaimed as a classic when it was described by the Observer as ‘Zola without the trimmings.’

In this definitive new edition, A Hoxton Childhood is accompanied by the first publication of the sequel detailing the author’s struggles and eventual triumph in the cabinet-making trade,The Years After.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER ON CHRISTMAS DAY

The Gentle Author picks up the threads of Christmas fiction from Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas and George Mackay Brown to weave a compelling tale of family conflicts ignited and resolved in the festive season.