Poetic Summer Party 2019
In July 2019, we gathered at Linden House on the Thames in Hammersmith for an early Poetic Endings summer party: food, flowers, friends, collaborators and a very full riverside house.
In the summer of 2019, Poetic Endings was still very young. We gathered at Linden House, beside the Thames in Hammersmith, with some of the people who were already becoming part of its world.
Looking back at Shaun Foulds' photographs now, years later, they feel like a time capsule: a full house, food and flowers, conversations happening everywhere and the energy of something that was still taking shape.
Linden House was a beautiful place to hold it, tucked beside the river and away from the usual surroundings of funeral work.
It is also somewhere funeral ceremonies can take place. For people looking beyond a crematorium or church, Linden House offers a distinctive riverside setting for a funeral.
An evening at Linden House
Funeral work rarely gives you much reason to throw a party. That was part of the pleasure of it.
Linden House gave us somewhere generous and relaxed to gather, eat, drink and talk, with the Thames just outside.
Shaun's photographs move between the wider room and the small details: people arriving, glasses being poured, flowers and food on the tables, conversations beginning and the house gradually filling up.
These photographs are less a record of a formal event than of the people around Poetic Endings at that particular moment.
Arrivals, details and the first conversations
The early frames from Linden House: the room taking shape, people arriving and the evening beginning to gather momentum.
Linden House became wonderfully full
There are photographs of conversations in every corner, people meeting for the first time, people who already knew each other, and groups changing shape as the evening went on.
It is easy to forget how much of a small independent business is made through relationships. These pictures make that visible.
People, conversations and everything happening in between
A photographic sweep through the middle of the evening, kept at a scale where the pictures can actually be seen.
Food, flowers, glasses, tables and all the things around the people
Parties are remembered through people, but also through the small things: what was on the table, what someone was holding, what was happening just outside the centre of the frame.
The photographs hold all of that too.
A party in full swing
More of the people, tables and conversations that made up the evening.
An early chapter of Poetic Endings
Looking at Shaun's pictures now is strange in the nicest possible way.
So much has changed since 2019, but the things that mattered then still look familiar: people, conversation, creativity, food, flowers and a willingness to do funeral work a little differently.
The photographs are part of the history of Poetic Endings now.
That feels like a good enough reason to keep all of them.
The photographs we didn't want to lose
The quieter frames, the candid moments and the photographs that don't need a separate explanation to earn their place here.
The end of the roll
The final photographs from the Summer Party archive.