Group posing in front of a 38 bus, Clapton, Hackney, October 2005

This was taken on the last day of the Routemaster buses on this route.

Mytilla’s tomb, St Lawrence Parish Church, Oxhill, Warwickshire, 2010

This image is the gravestone of an enslaved girl called Myrtilla who had lived in the parish during the early eighteenth century. The inscription reads:

‘Here lyeth the body of Myrtilla, negro slave to Mr Thos Beauchamp of Nevis. Bapt Oct ye 20th. Buried Jan ye 6th 1705.’

She represents one of the thousands of Africans who came to Britain during the period of the transatlantic slave trade. Some, like Myrtilla were enslaved, whilst many others were free men and women. Their stories represent a myriad of experiences and demonstrate the long history of an African presence in Britain dating back to the Roman occupation of the islands.

Worshipper

My grandfather and my great-grandfather

Alexander (Alick) Golding, and Simon Golding. Alick was born around 1866 in Russia, and his son Simon, I believe, in 1885, according to a later naturalisation certificate in Grodno, now Belarus. The family came to London, according to our family history, in 1887 to
escape the anti-Jewish pogroms, and settled in the East End of London. I would guess that my grandfather is about four or five years old in the photograph, which suggests that it was taken in 1889 or 1890.

My great-grandfather was a master tailor, and his son, my grandfather, became a successful tailor too. In the photograph, he is wearing a little velvet suit that his father had made for him. The family can only have been in Britain for two or three years. But one senses the speed and confidence with which they had begun to acclimatise and be assimilated into late-Victorian commercial society.