The people in the group, some being born here some having lived here for over a decade, some who have just arrived, we each have our own impression or anecdotes worth sharing with the rest of the group. We leave the Children’s Hospital on Hackney Road now being turned into luxury flats for the first halt of the journey.
Sebastiano takes us J. Hoyle & Son Foundry from where he hopes he could find some material to use as pigment for his paintings. Next, Jaime remembers walking on the tracks years ago and seeing this incredible noisy monster he identified as a railgrinder, not quite aware these existed. After that, it is time for Yasmine to share a special memory in Vyner street. She was fortunate enough to hold a solo exhibition only a month after moving to London. Which shows us how sometimes harsh London spoils us with good luck. At the corner of Cambridge Heath road and Hackney Road, Bill tells the strange energy this place seems to hold for him, like that time he and his housemate were moving houses and pushing a couch filled with boxes in the streets and the wheels of the couch broke down just here forcing them to carry it over a mile to his new house.
We are now looking at a wooden door. There is seemingly nothing special about it. We soon understand that Rupert’s intention in this random choice of location is about creating memory together as part of the process not only relating to the past but the present. This spot has now acquired meaning for all of us just by pointing at it.
We are now learning from Anna about the rather dark episode of this part of London’s history that is the hanging of two men in front of the Salmon and Ball Public House, in 1769 when these men were accused of cutting the silk on the looms during the Spitalfield riots. Today’s walk comes to a close on another tragic story that occurred two centuries later just across the road.
An incident kept silent for years and recently brought to light with the building of a new memorial by Bethnal Green tube station. Ines, who met a woman, a baby at the time and who miraculously survived, tells us about that terrible accident that killed 173 people in 1943 as people were rushing down the stairs to take shelter from an air-raid.We are perpetuating History by telling stories read or heard… So many layers of history can be seen in London’s landscape, decades after decades, centuries after centuries, we are with Mnemonic City modestly adding our own layer to the collective memory.
Mnemonic City 
