(The Pantry Underwear team. Elly Rusted: centre) It’s amazing how weather dependent the underwear business is! “When the sun’s out and shoppers haven’t the hassle of peeling off layers to try stuff on – and when people start to think about wearing revealing things, that’s when we’re at our busiest!”, said Elly Rusted who owns The Pantry Underwear on Camden Passage. The 30-year-old set up The Pantry Underwear almost three years ago and knows more than most the impact weather can have. Within two weeks of opening, a Thames Water pipe burst, flooding numerous businesses and forcing some to close for up to a year. She recalled: “We were lucky we didn’t flood but there was a lot of damp and, with

(Maryna Fontenoy, Beaucatcher) From the outside Beaucatcher might look like an ordinary hair salon, but step inside and you’re in for a treat. The walls of this Stoke Newington salon have been providing pop-up gallery space for talented local artists for 15 years. Each exhibition lasts for around three months and all the artwork is available to buy. Maryna Fontenoy founded Beaucatcher from her flat above the greengrocers on Church Street when her daughter was a baby. When the lease became available for the shop opposite, she snapped it up and right from the start she offered the walls free of charge to artists. She said: “For the artists it’s an opportunity to show their work locally withou

(The team at Hackney Foodbank) Residents with severe mental health problems are being thrown on the scrapheap and left to a downward spiral of poverty under the new Universal Credit system. That’s the verdict of the team at Hackney Foodbank who say poverty is the worst they’ve ever known it – they say most of the people going hungry and struggling to pay rent are those with conditions like depression, anxiety, agoraphobia and post-traumatic stress disorder. As the charity gears up for a busy summer holidays, they’re already reeling from a 44% increase in referrals. At the end of every week the shelves are almost empty and they’re spending around £1,000 per week on food shops. Hackney Foodban

There’s beauty in the fact that London’s Magnificent Seven Cemeteries are teeming with life… Not the rising from the dead, ghost and vampire kind of life (though there have been stories!) – but rare birds, bees, bats and butterflies, foxes, badgers and insects. Far from being simply places of mourning, the best of the city’s cemeteries are now sites of natural importance, green lungs in the busy metropolis for people seeking tranquillity. They’re home to occasional markets, music and performances. How many of us wander through oblivious to the history, the art and architecture and the extraordinary stories of some of the cemeteries’ permanent residents? The Magnificent Seven cemeteries were