London’s East End in the 1970s underwent incredible change in a short period, and a photography exhibition looks back at that lost world.
It was both an area of considerable old poverty and post-WWII dereliction, but also the place where many people moved to when migrating to the UK. As such, it’s a world where new migrants mix with old migrants, in houses that were either destined for demolition or lingered around long enough to be transformed by the docklands redevelopment of the 1980s.
At the same time, young photographers saw an opportunity to document ordinary people’s lives and give visibility to working-class experiences.
And it’s their photos that are on display in Bethnal Green at the moment.
A photo of a packed corner shop caught my attention for the sign in the background, announcing that the shop was shut on Saturdays but open on Sundays until 2pm. A relic from the weirdness of allowing newsagents to open on Sundays but hardly anyone else.
Although I think that store was pushing the definition of a newsagent to its limit.
A lot of the photos are of this lost world of retailing, and mostly food, when people started to see long-standing Jewish stores being replaced by Halal stores as populations, always in flux, changed yet again.
I loved the very “Bend It Like Beckham” moment of Asian schoolgirls playing football in the East End streets. And of course, lots of photos of Last of the Summer Wine-style housewives in their floral print dresses worn out by a lifetime of domestic labour.
It’s not voyeuristic though, as the photographers engaged closely with their subjects, being invited into their homes, and unusually for the time, offering copies of their portraits to the people to keep. That gives glimpses into domestic lives, and one photo jumped at me for something on the wall – the telephone. In a sparsely furnished room, they had a phone, but you had to stand to use it as it was mounted high up on the wall, out of reach of the children.
There’s probably an entire social history to be written in how the telephone was located in people’s homes.
In 1973, the photographers put on what is said to have been the world’s first outdoor photography exhibition, taking their works out of the fussy galleries into the places where the East Enders hung out. That was also part of the E1 Festival, which ran for many years in a plot of empty land in Stepney.
The era drew to a close amid the demolition of derelict houses to be replaced by modern tower blocks, and in the process accidentally depriving the residents of the riches that were to come later from being able to sell their Victorian homes to the 1980s Yuppies.
It is a fascinating exhibition offering a glimpse into the last vestiges of the sort of poverty and urban landscape that most people assumed had been swept away, but clung on in the East End.
The exhibition, A WORLD APART: Photographing Change in London’s East End, 1970-76 is at Four Corners until 6th December 2025.
Entry is free and the gallery, on Roman Road, is open Wednesday to Saturday from 11am to 6pm.
