An email via Flickr:

Hi

I work at Hackney Museum. We’re working on an exhibition about independant shops in the borough and hope to include a projected slide show of pictures of shops that have caught people’s eye. Could we include this one please?

Definitely. And this one too.

The exhibition will be at Hackney Museum from 20th March to 7th June 2008.

One man’s collection of 3,500+ photographs taken in the highways and byways of London, including my area and beyond. A wonderful find, and recommended viewing for anyone who lives in or loves our capital city.

Apologies if you got a load of my Flickr photos in your RSS feed reader. I was playing with the settings over at feedburner.com. Anyway, my curiosity is now sated and the nuisance has stopped.

If, for some reason, you actually do want to look at my photos, then this is where you can find them. And if you haven’t yet subscribed to this site’s RSS feed, making sure you need never miss an update again (there’s peace of mind for you, eh?), then click here.

Oh, and that’s a heron I saw on the River Lea in Haringey, early yesterday afternoon.

Riffle through the flea markets, attics, basements and junk heaps of Prague, Zagreb, Travnik and Subotica; latch on to any old family photos you find; and then publish them online.

You should end up with a site like this one, crammed full of snapshots that are in turns touching, banal, crumpled, cheesy, formal, unposed - but all fascinating.

Soldiers, officials, mothers, children, families, lovers. They’re all there. And, because they’re all anonymous and unknown, you have to make up your own story for each photograph. That’s the site’s charm, which a properly-documented catalogue (useful as it is) lacks.

Have a look. And then go and visit August - something tells me this is rather up her alley.

The clothes and the uniforms may belong to 1977, and there may be three officers instead of today’s normal roster of two; but many Londoners still see the scene above acted out dozens of times over the course of a year.

There’s a lot more they’ll recognise in Paul Trevor’s archive of photographs, now available online at the Visual Arts Data Service, which he took in Spitalfields and the surrounding areas (including Hackney) between the 1970s and 1990s: shops, launderettes, mosques, graffiti, markets, families. There’s also a lot that we should be glad to have seen the back of: particularly the then frequent National Front and White Pride marches.

So go take a look. What stands out for me, though, is not how much more tolerant East London life has become when compared to 30 years ago, but how fragile those changes for the better actually are.

Sunday. Douglas Road South, next to the New River Walk, Islington. Amazing how at first glance a torched scooter can look like gnarled wood, totally in keeping with its surroundings.