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Rachel Lichtenstein’s books, along with her multimedia art, represent her explorations of her British Jewish identity and her place in British Jewish culture as an imaginative odyssey. Her work represents research, stories, and traces from London’s Jewish past and multicultural present as well as from Poland and Israel, her family’s accounts, and the testimony of recent immigrants and long-time residents. Lichtenstein is a place writer whose artistic projects subject her relationship to the Jewish past and East End to critical interrogation through a metaphorical method composed of fragments that represent varied segments of Jewish history and memory as well as wandering as a narrative of personal exploration.

  At one point in Estuary , a book the author describes as \"a collective memory map\" of the Thames Estuary, she encounters an intense man who calls himself River Jim. He is a licensed \"mudlarker\", with permission from the Port of London Authority to dig for objects washed up on the river's silty foreshore. \"There's an older landscape underlying the present one,\" he tells her. \"The Estuary is not a permanent thing. It's moving, it's changing, it's eroding.\" Establishing trust The author came to prominence writing about London's East End in Rodinsky's Room (1999), cowritten with Iain Sinclair, and, later, On Brick Lane (2007), combining an archivist's attention to detail with a psychogeographer's visionary fervour. [Rachel Lichtenstein] also possesses the oral historian's knack for establishing trust so that people speak freely about themselves and their work. She also meets an artist who spent 240 nights living on a sea fort and confides that he became \"the spirit of the fort somehow\". She gives a dazed description of a boat crash she experienced, and a stomach-turning account of the violent movements of a cockle fishing boat she spends a night on: \"Flicking bits of seaweed and broken cockleshell out of my hair, I thought for a moment that I would quite like to go home.\"

On the face of it, there is nothing very eerie about Southend Pier. Opened in 1830 and restored many times since, it's meant to be a place of fun, as cheap and cheerful as the town itself (\"Southend is the Pier, the Pier is Southend,\" John Betjeman said). Certainly Rachel Lichtenstein, who grew up nearby and whose memories of the area are \"filled with colour, noise and laughter\", was unprepared for the night she spent five years ago moored beside the pier's lower deck in a Dutch barge called (correct spelling and no irony) Ideaal: She talks to tugmen, dock workers, ornithologists and mudlarkers; takes part in a Thames barge race; walks the Broomway on Foulness, \"Britain's most dangerous path\"; gets tossed around in a cockleboat (\"it was like being inside a tumble dryer\"); and samples mud cola, a drink made from Estuary slime. She is a generous listener -- a diligent reader, too, paying homage to those who have trodden similar paths before her, including Robert MacFarlane, Ken Worpole, Iain Sinclair and WG Sebald. Rather than impose herself on the landscape, she lets it seep into her psyche. Unsurprisingly, after that night on the Ideeal, what often comes through is fear. Among the more obvious dangers is the SS Montgomery, which ran aground near Sheerness in 1944 with 1,400 tonnes of bombs on board. The wreck is still visible and carefully patrolled. The lone canoeist who once perched on top of it while eating a cheese sandwich can count himself lucky: according to one expert a detonation of the unexploded bombs onboard would be enough to create a tidal wave engulfing the Isle of Sheppey. There are many other wrecks in the Estuary, more per square foot, we're told, than anywhere along the UK coastline, the most famous of them HMS London, which went down in 1665 with the loss of 300 lives (Pepys records the sinking in his diary). Divers continue to explore the wreck, at their peril: \"If you came up on the surface when a container ship passes,\" one of them tells Lichtenstein, \"you'd be dead.\"

\"It amazes me the place doesn't cave in,\" said Mitzy, a former ring-maker from Hatton Garden. \"With the weight of gold and heavy metal above and all those ancient, watery passageways honeycombing the ground underneath.\" One of the elderly dealers I spoke to, who did not want to be named, told me: \"Things have changed so much already and now security will become much tighter again.\" He remembered a different time, before the war, when diamond deals would be conducted openly on street corners or across tables in the many little kosher cafs that once existed in the area. \"That would never happen now.\" Solo traders like Mitzy, developed their skills over decades, starting as 14-year-old apprentices sweeping up the shavings of gold left on the floor at night, before moving on to work at the benches, eventually becoming master craftsmen. Most of those who remain cannot afford to have a safe on their premises. Many of them would have kept their valuables in the safe deposit boxes. \"The footballers and wealthy jewellers who had their goods insured will be OK,\" said the dealer, \"but these other characters will be the real ones to lose out. Their businesses will never recover.\"

Put prosaically, Hatton Garden is a street in central London. For more than a century it's been known as the centre of the British diamond trade. A magnet for Jews escaping pogroms across Europe and poverty in the capital's East End, remembered by old-timers as a tightly knit place where Yiddish was widely spoken.

The interviews with retired diamond traders and goldsmiths provide a generous heartbeat to the book, as do the testimonies from former inhabitants of Little Italy. Economic theory has reclaimed \"clusters\" as the key to success in post-industrial cities. Today's \"silicon roundabout\" at Old Street in Shoreditch is in many respects a contemporary version of Hatton Garden, though unlikely to prove as durable. Such economic affinities add cultural distinctiveness to a neighbourhood, and Diamond Street is a lively and rewarding addition to the capital's rich history.

Put prosaically, Hatton Garden is a street in central London. For more than a century though it's been known, at home and abroad, for its jewellery dealers and for being the centre of the British diamond trade. A magnet for Jews escaping pogroms across Europe and poverty in the capital's East End, remembered by old-timers as a tightly knit place where Yiddish was widely spoken, it was once likened by a journalist to \"Little Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land\". [Rachel Lichtenstein]'s previous book, On Brick Lane (2007), was a contribution to the popular field of disappearing London studies. It evoked lives and communities rendered fragile by real-estate developers, City encroachment, and the neighbourhood's discovery by \"creatives\". Shadows fall over Diamond Street too: the apprenticeship system that guaranteed high standards is on the wane, little polishing and manufacturing is carried out any longer in London, competition from companies in Singapore and Taiwan is rising. This goldsmith and his colleagues were responsible for Siren, Marc Quinn's life-sized 2008 sculpture of Kate Moss, thought to be the largest man-made gold statue since Egyptian times. But his expertise and his pride in his work aren't unusual; many of Lichtenstein's interviewees, though earning meagre salaries, carried on well after their retirement ages. Their collective eloquence about their graft and guile makes Diamond Street a timely companion volume to Richard Sennett's The Craftsman (2008) and Matthew Crawford's Shop Class As Soulcraft (2009).

When [Rachel Lichtenstein] encountered jeweller Isadore Mitziman in Brick Lane (the subject of her previous book) in 2004, he inspired the journey that became Diamond Street. \"It amazes me the whole place [Hatton Garden] doesn't cave in,\" he told her, \"with the weight of gold and heavy metal above and all those ancient, watery passageways honeycombing the ground underneath.\" Pursuing her quest for the essence of the place, Lichtenstein consulted a whole gang of glorious characters, collecting tales, history and lore on her way. And she explored the secret spaces in backstreets and basements where the past appears to linger, and the spirits of Shakespeare, Hogarth, Dick Turpin and Dickens may still be found. Her relationship to \"Diamond Street\" is also personal, through a family jewellery business in which she was employed and which her husband manages today.

Rachel Lichtenstein admits that Brick Lane was \"a mythical landscape\" for her as a child. She grew up in Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex - or Whitechapel-on-Sea, as many of her family's East End friends called it. Her grandparents were Polish-Jewish refugees who opened a jewellers shop at 67 Brick Lane in the 1930s.

The decline and renewal of east London have been recorded by many admirers. [Rachel Lichtenstein]'s history of Brick Lane draws on their memories as well as their words.