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)

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.