Jar of Teeth Hardback Book
Information
120 pages
Hardback bound
Debossed cover title
Lithographically printed
Black and white images throughout
170gsm matte paper
8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm)
About the Book:
The city once listened as one, but the reach of the bells has
diminished in more recent times, as taller buildings have curtailed
the distance their sound can travel. Accents migrate with people.
East London’s accent itself has been reshaped in inner London through
shifts in the populations of historically working-class districts,
and through the influence of newer voices, vocabularies, and speech
patterns that have taken root with confidence, carrying the strength
of their mother cultures into the fabric of England. Some contend that
the older London accent is now more likely to be heard beyond the
capital, as earlier generations relocated to newly built towns further
east—often following post-war housing clearance, but more recently
alongside the arrival of new communities—and carried their accents
with them, passing them down to their children. Language, as a record
of labour and community, reminds us that the Cockney accent stands as
proof that London was once heard by the people who built it, just as
today’s evolving speech reflects those who continue to build, trade,
cook, pray, and raise families here, folding their inheritance into
the wider mother culture of England while reshaping it in return.
Accents change over time, but the views from certain communities in
the East remain the same: looking outward toward higher ground and
brighter towers, toward landscapes that still signal distance in
wealth and power, even as the streets below remain places of arrival,
resilience, and renewal. The relationship between the City of London
and the districts that now form the London Borough of Tower Hamlets
has long been marked by uneven power and proximity without equality—
shaped over centuries by contested jurisdictional boundaries, competing
commercial interests, and stark disparities in wealth and governance.
Since the nineteenth century, the East End has supplied labour in many
forms—once sending dockworkers, sailors, and soldiers into the service
of empire, and today sustaining the engines of the modern city, as
working-class families continue to keep the City of London and Canary
Wharf supplied with workers while rarely sharing in the privileges of
the Square Mile. Beyond the boroughs, meanwhile, Britain finds itself in
a season of reckoning over the meaning of nationhood, as a new tide of
policies seeks both to tighten the gates of immigration and to preserve
what many regard as the enduring contours of British cultural identity.
Published in a limited edition of 250 signed and numbered copies, Jar of Teeth is both a personal reflection and an ongoing record of a place. It invites viewers to spend time with Tower Hamlets as it reveals itself: complex, layered and continually shaped by the people who call it home.
