I did the last of the events to promote my East London book in Pages of Hackney, a small, well stocked, neighbourhood bookshop established in 2008 on Lower Clapton Road, then known as Murder Mile.   Nearly in the front row was David Lowenthal, the great historian and geographer (The Past is a Foreign Country), father of the proprietor.   He turned out to have belonged to a movement of documentary photography in the 1950s, believing in photography as a medium of social and geographical record (in the early 1950s, Lowenthal was teaching in the Department of Geography in Vassar, before moving to the West Indies).   The group, which included John Brinkerhoff Jackson, took photographs of rural America, which have recently been rediscovered and exhibited in Montpellier under the title Notes on the asphalt:  A mobile and insecure America:-