I have not paid Council Tax now for the past 8 years citing English Constitutional Law which we were never taught at school when it should be imbibed with our school milk as the reason to not pay it.

I often wonder what my old school teachers would say if they could see me do that.Īt close to 60 I am doing a Law degree with the OU as I am still irascible and iconoclastic when it comes to authority. The first was in pro football as a sports psychologist then I became a peripatetic chess coach which lasted for 19 years as I taught in both State and Private schools which were a real eye-opening experience. I was dragged up in Broadway house and went to school at Seabright in the 60’s the headteachers being Ms Soames and Mr Eveans in those days we were feral, I ended up in the army, boxed in the pros and then worked as a Clinical Hypnotherapist for several years and I discovered how we create our experiences which led me into two of my dream jobs. Every summer and as often as I could, I would buy a pound of cherries from the coster-manger who had a stall just on the corner near ‘The Dove’ pub and eat the lot, mentally chanting ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor….’ as I ate my way through my lunch. Nothing like the pallid, dusty white things ‘pitta bread’ sold in Sainsbury’s. I was intrigued by the flat-breads that they sold, golden as harvest and huge. Nearly 4 very happy years spent there, I used the Post Office opposite, Percy Ingle’s bakery (Belgian buns and coffee meringues), the sandwich shop and the print shop and the supermarket which opened up next door and was run by an enterprising Turkish family.

I believe the previous practice had been above the chemist’s shop at number 3 and was run by Dr. The street seemed to be at something of a nadir, very quiet, mostly shabby and generally forgotten. Oh my! I worked in Broadway Market between 19, in the new general practice: The London Fields Medical Centre. In those days, there was not a gastro pub in sight and no-one had ever heard of a buffalo burger. I miss the place, not the squalor, the outside loo, the cold – but the people, the community and, somehow, the optimism. Now I live in Norwich but I still have connections with the place, my sister-in-law was the ladybird book lady, running a stall opposite where I once lived, and my brother sells vinyl in the upmarket bit up the road. I met both my wives there too, though – thankfully – not at the same time.Īlthough I lived in Broadway Market for a few years, I only photographed it once, wandering around for a couple of hours. By 1977, I was a partner in Hot Shots, a short-lived screen printing extravaganza, and I lived in an exceptionally squalid flat above and below the shop at number 52. “I first found Broadway Market by mistake in 1976 and fell in love with the place, the cobbles, the people and the Cat & Mutton pub. “They were first shown in 1983 at an exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall, organised by the Greater London Council,” he explained, “which was ironic really because the GLC had a massive 1000-property compulsory purchase scheme to construct a nightmare version of the Westway through East London, that included the market.” Take a walk through Broadway Market in March 1982 with Photographer Stuart Goodman, when it was quite a different place to the fashionable destination of today.Ī former Fleet St Photographer & Picture Editor, Stuart sent me these pictures last week.

Hot shots coffee bar