Robert Leeming

The silvery spires of Canary Wharf, the spotless thoroughfares and perfectly kept squares, sit upon the buried foundations of the West India Import Dock. From its early days when the Isle of Dogs (as it is also, poetically, known) was the beating heart of an expanding trading empire, to the Night of Fire when the German Luftwaffe turned the dock and great swathes of Wapping into a fiery furnace, this area of London has never […]

1 The balloon was nothing more than an experiment to me. A ribald joke on the inhabitants of a town I never liked, nor trusted, nor felt a part of. I suppose that is what it was. It was a metaphysical something, a clichéd statement born out of amphetamine and tepid water. It was an empty folly and a hopeless gesture, loved in quarters and hated in others, held up for ridicule in Sussex and […]