Regular Londonist readers might recognise the name Paul Trevor.
For decades, he has been capturing the rough and tumble of London's east end — markets where TV sets are wheeled about in old prams; young Bangladeshi men in flares spread across car bonnets — juxtaposed with the cut and thrust of the Thatcherite City of London (think bowtied yuppies swigging from bottles of Becks). He is one of the great visual documenters of the area.
So it's fitting that six of Trevor's close-up portraits of anonymous East Enders have now been transferred to the brick niches of the &Soul building on Cheshire Street, by street artist Abraham O. The faces are taken from Trevor's 2020 book In Your Face, a collection of candid photos of east Londoners, taken between 1977 and 1992.
A seventh face that appears in the polyptych is recognisable — it's that of Emanuel Litvinoff, the late Jewish novelist and poet, who grew up in the area and is pictured on Cheshire Street itself, on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of his novel Journey Through a Small Planet.
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