Little Amal comes to Deptford

At least a couple of thousand people turned out last Friday (22/10/2021) to greet 'Little Amal' to Deptford: a 3.5 metre-tall puppet of a young refugee girl that has been travelling  8000 km across Europe from the Turkish-Syrian border. Created by the Handspring Puppet Company (famous for The War Horse among other projects), the puppet ...

Tupac SE8

Tupac Shakur, corner of Deptford High Street and Comet Street, SE8.Speedy Auto Service Ltd, Creek Road, SE8 - I like this, anyone know who these people are?

Celebrity street art in Deptford and Hackney

  Deptford High Street has some famous visitors' albeit only in 2D representations. Jim Hendrix (I think):  Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia meet John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Nothing quite as grand as the Frida Kahlo mural I saw last week by Hackney Wick station: 

Deptford and Lewisham on film, 1922

The BFI's new Britain on Film Archive, launched today, no doubt has many local treasures among its 25,000 films available to view online. My favourite so far is remarkable film tour of Lewisham in 1922, featuring lots of high street scenes, along with Deptford High Street, Ladywell park and other locations: 'This exquisitely detailed tour ...

New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival 2014

New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival 2014 kicked off last night with 'Bend it Like Beckham' at the Hill Station Cafe and Superman of Malegaon at the Big Red Pizzeria. Loads more free events at interesting venues over the next week - see full programme here.I will just mention a couple of events with ...

Chinese New Year in Deptford + Deptford High Street Song

 Chinese New Year was marked in Deptford in Saturday with a lion dance procession from the Deptford Lounge to the Albany, where the Yam, Yam! East and South East Asian Arts and Food Festival is now on until March 15th.There was a classic Deptford Market moment where the lion got in a face off with ...

Deptford High Street Art and Lai Loi

Well everyone knows there's lots of art in Deptford, and quite a bit of art that takes Deptford as its subject. Some of it's great, some of it feels a bit like artists scenting the territory or crudely plundering the area for raw cultural materials.For me the more interesting work that is about the area ...

Spooky Deptford in new Kate Mosse book

The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales is a new collection of short stories by Kate Mosse (no not her). One of the stories, The Princess Alice, is set in Deptford - the narrator lives in a flat in Glaisher Street and finds a diary after browsing for books among 'the second-hand sellers who set ...

Deptford Anchor Saga: the next chapter

For the last twenty years or so there has been an anchor at the Broadway end of Deptford High Street, a nod to the area's maritime past (although actually it came from Chatham dockyard rather than Deptford). Famously it became the place to hang out for the area's street drinkers - then in April it ...

Saving Our High Streets

The Economy Committee of the London Assembly today released a report that sets out a package of emergency and longer term measures to break the cycle on the high street that has led to an increase in empty shops across the capital. [...]