Until Further Notice: Lily Waite captures her favourite East London pubs under lockdown in her new zine

Lily Waite is a Hackney-based brewer, artist, beer writer and photographer and well known in the UK’s tight craft beer community. To show the impact the Covid-19 crisis is leaving on hospitality, she captured some of East London’s favourite pubs in her new zine Until Further Notice.

“I’ve been thinking about producing zines for some time, and have plans to self-publish collections of work made in response to pubs—site specific writing, photography, and drawings. My aim with these is to really try to capture a sense of the pub in question, given that each individual pub has its own energy, feel, and, at the risk of sounding absurd, life-force.”

“Unfortunately, this project has now been put on hold for obvious reasons, so I started thinking about other ways to document pubs, especially in the circumstances we’ve recently found ourselves. Never before have so many pubs been shuttered simultaneously, and I wanted to capture that in a way that would last, so a zine made more sense than simply posting the photographs on Instagram: the physicality of the zine will serve in years to come as an artefact, as ephemera.”

“In terms of how I’m creating during lockdown, I’ve had my ups and downs. I’ve just come out of a two week period in which I struggled to write a single word I didn’t loathe, but at the same time I did my first painting in years. I’m unable to make any ceramic work (which is breaking my heart!) but I also produced this zine! I’ve been baking bread, making jam, and fermenting kombucha, and though my creativity comes and goes, taking my mind off artistic output with cooking, or the like, is always my fallback.”

The Pembury Tavern in Hackney is a thirty minute walk from my house, and some of my favourite memories have been made there. It’s a wonderful space, with fantastic beer, lovely people, and the pizza is to die for! It’s the first place I’ll be heading once pubs reopen, in whatever format they may do.

Lily graduated from Camberwell College of Arts in 2018 with a BA in Fine Art Painting, but quickly branched out to a great number of creative disciplines, with the connection people have with food and drink as a recurring theme.

“I’m a maker. I trained as a fine artist, with interests in painting and conceptual installation, but now my predominant occupation is as a beer writer and photographer. I also run The Queer Brewing Project, a non-profit LGBTQ-focused brewing initiative in which I work with breweries across the world to raise money for LGBTQ charities and provide visible representation of queer and trans people in the beer world, through brewing. I’m also a (part-time) ceramicist, focusing on functional tableware for modern food and drink. In short, I make things.”

Until Further Notice

The zine features a collection of 37 images of East London pubs that had to close their doors because of the lockdown.

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