Pictures ofBermondsey & Rotherhithe

I'm a retired art teacher having last taught 19 years at St. Michael's RC School, Bermondsey. I still work part-time in a Catholic secondary school in North London mainly assisting GCSE students to consolidate their exam port folios in Art & Design.

Amateur though I may be I consider myself a local archivist. I have digitally photographed over many years the fauna and flora of varied green areas concentrating on Southwark parks; but; predominantly certain Southwark and Lewisham cemeteries which, if helped with municipal sensitivity in not going for destructive blanket gardening allows for surprising insects, birdlife and wild plants to thrive. I've amassed a sizable CD record which I thought lost of stored data seeing as a re-reading of my RW-CD library saw whole batches going back to 2003 appearing wiped. After initial panic and then persistence I found a Mac computer at my school was able to read what my home Microsoft PC couldn't. I have newly copied onto DVDs with the amazement that considerably fewer discs were needed for the same voluminous copied to CD-RW data. I've further backed-up on an external HD. Even so; I have been unable to retrieve lumps of my archive. I bore readers with this anorak info as there are important lessons to be learned in not trusting even the most up-to-date technology.

I have loads of school pics from my teaching at St. Michael's taken before recent data protection had complicated the taking of photos in public issue. I don't know where this fits in where this site is concerned re photos of past events, etc. and of individuals whose permission may need to be obtained. Present data protection has undoubtedly stultified the art of recording and archiving and has complicated the pastimes of innocent hobby snappers. Even so; This Bermondsey archive site is invaluable in helping Bermondsey people and the wider community to share memories and history.

Throughout childhood I was in local authority care with my twin sister. The ID image is from a drawing of me in adolescence by a foster mother who was the WW2 Official War Artist Evelyn Dunbar.