The love affair of the English and the eel
- Text by Michael Fordham
- Photography by Stuart Freedman
Photographer and writer Stuart Freedman has spent half a lifetime documenting the classic subjects of photo-reportage. Famine, conflict and subcultures have all been evoked through Stuart’s incisive lens, his work ranging from Sub Saharan Africa to the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent to the Balkans and beyond.
Recently he unveiled a new body of work on a subject close to home for the born and bred East Londoner: the Englishman and the eel. The book, available for preorder now, is a beautiful and timely take on a disappearing aspect of English identity.
“I grew up in East London in the 1970s, which was then a byword for poverty and now a metaphor for gentrification,” he explains. “The streets then were navigated by pubs, cheap cafes and eel pie and mash shops. Often they were elaborately decorated with ornate Victorian tiling and many sold live eels in metal trays that faced the street to the fascination, and sometimes horror, of passersby.”
The definition of a hard-nosed photojournalist, Stuart is no sentimentalist. The book evokes nevertheless an image of an East London that few first time visitors would recognise today. ”Inside there was warm comfort food. Steam. Tea. Laughter. Families. Already in decline by the mid-century, the shops were still dominated by a handful of families and passed down through generations,” he says.
The few remaining eel shops deep in the heart of the London’s East end are havens for what the East End once was, repositories of memory for people like Stuart, who grew up with a raft of certainties and aesthetics that have all but vanished in this part of the world.
“These places are a portal back to my own past and a way of examining the change that has taken place to the culture that I left,” he says.
But the work reaches far beyond any kind of cockney caricature and any latent sense of nationalist anachronism. It transcends the English capital’s Eastern environs to look at the relationship of the eel itself to generations of the working classes.
“In the course of making the work I’ve travelled to Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland to photograph eel fishing. I’ve made work at both Barney’s and Mick’s Eels, the two companies left that process the fish. I’ve photographed and written about Millwall fans (who chant about the the eel on the terraces) and recorded those that now eat their pies and eels at home, too elderly and frail to journey to the shops.”
Embedded deep at the heart of the work is an incisive take on the ever-shifting sands of culture – and a comment on how constancy and evolution are involved in a dynamic – the surface appearances of which can fascinate and surprise. “Now, the spiritual home of the eel, pie and mash shop is out in Essex, he says. “People who have made Essex their home often identify re-imagined and distilled working-class culture that is geographically separate from their traditional roots.”
Donate to Stuart’s kickstarter here.
Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Latest on Huck
In Photos: A decade growing up in pre-gentrification Lower East Side
A new photobook provides an up-close-and-personal look at the life of a Puerto Rican family, documenting them growing up as the world changed around them.
Written by: Isaac Muk
This summer taught us everything is... marketing
Months of historic political violence, memes, auras, and, of course, ‘brat’ has newsletter columnist Emma Garland asking if anything is real anymore?
Written by: Emma Garland
Rick Castro’s intimate portraits of love and remembrance
Columbarium Continuum is an ongoing exhibition of photographs displayed inside the two-story art nouveau columbarium of the iconic Hollywood Forever cemetery.
Written by: Miss Rosen
The disabled Flâneur forcing us to rethink our cities
This perspective-shifting short film follows Phil Waterworth, the wheelchair-bound urban explorer confronting a lack of accessibility in cities like Sheffield.
Written by: Alex King
Chronicling conflict and survival in the Democratic Republic of Congo
A new photo exhibition documents how a brutal conflict on the eastern edge of the country continues to devastate the lives of civilians.
Written by: Miss Rosen
A playful look at Gen X teens coming of age in 1980s America
After fleeing Pinochet, Sergio Purtell created a photographic love letter to the people of his adopted home with the knowing eye of one who has seen their homeland fall to fascism.
Written by: Miss Rosen