Joan Dannatt with her self-portrait at her solo exhibition of prints and paintings in Canonbury

MUCH ink has been spilled on the secret to a long life well lived, but for 100-year-old artist Joan Dannatt it’s as simple as “use it or lose it”.

Joan’s 100th birthday last weekend coincided with the opening of her second solo exhibition of prints and paintings, hosted at The Place, a cafe in Canonbury at the end of the road she has lived in since 1955.

“I had to bully you into it again, didn’t I, Joan?” joked her son, Adrian Dannatt, who encouraged his mother to hold her first ever solo show on her 90th birthday, 10 years ago to the day.

Despite making prints since the age of seven, Joan had never had an exhibition of her own work before that.

“Thanks to Adrian and his bullying I think it was a way to celebrate,” Ms Dannatt said, adding: “At 100, one has very few friends left, so it is very important to also have younger friends. I think stimulation is just vital.”

As well as surrounding herself with interesting people, Ms Dannatt puts her longevity down to staying active in body and mind – all the more important after an accident in her mid-90s put a stop to gallery visits and print etchings.

“You get up and you have got to create a day for yourself,” she said.

She memorises a poem every week before doing her daily exercises and heading out for a “little relay” around the neigh­bourhood, and receives monthly stacks of fiction, art books and biographies from Islington’s mobile library service, which visits people who are home-bound in the borough.

Ms Dannatt with son Adrian

“I find starting the day with a poem is very enriching. It gives a sort of purpose. I find poetry terribly satisfying in that you can reduce a whole experience to one very telling line.”

At 100, Ms Dannatt is practical about the prospect of her own death. She had her own coffin made several years ago and has hand-painted it with watercolour flowers and etched her name and birth date into a panel on the lid.

“It was a fascinating exercise. Trying to get a coffin is really impossible – the undertakers have all got together so it’s a closed shop.

“And everything has to be flammable. You have to have screws that are flammable. I wanted wooden handles, but I had to get very garish gold plastic handles. Again, flammable.”

Most of Ms Dannatt’s working life was spent as an art advisor at J. Walter Thompson, then the biggest advertising agency in the world, but she always kept an eye on Islington issues too.

She started up a play group at Union Chapel and set up the North London branch of NAWCH, the National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital, forcing the removal of set visiting times for children in hospital.

Ms Dannatt’s memories of Canonbury in the early years – when it was filled with architects and writers, before the bankers moved in – seem distant from the upmarket area it is today.

She recalled a dangerous neighbourhood where police would patrol the street in pairs after dark, the air would be clouded by thick smog from coal fires and her well-heeled friends were suspicious about coming to visit.

In the freezing cold winter of 1963, Ms Dannatt ordered a weekly Selfridge’s delivery of baby vests and garden spades to clear the snow.

“I suppose we really were in the first wave of what they now call gentrification. Canonbury seemed a very long way indeed from Selfridge’s, an entirely different world,” she said.

But through all the many changes of the past 70 years, it still feels like home.

“I enjoy the fact that we’ve had a life in this house for so long. It has transformed from a very war-torn area, into a very pleasant…” “Leafy enclave,” Adrian supplied.

“Yes,” his mother agreed.

• The exhibition continues at The Place, 11 Canonbury Place, until March 14. Prints and paintings are available to buy from £200-£4,000.