Fabulous Old Photos From London’s East End

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Via The Online Photographer:

The gentle author of a small blog called Spitalfields Life has been mining the early work of a photographer named John Claridge, who came up from the East End to become successful in advertising. His pictures of the East End were taken between 1959 and 1982, many of them when he was no more than a boy.

Here’s a sample:

A Nation of Shopkeepers
Working People & a Dog

There’s a long list of additional links to Claridge’s photos at The Online Photographer (scroll down to the bottom of the post).

7 thoughts on “Fabulous Old Photos From London’s East End”

  1. Amazing! As one who is married to a true Londoner – “born within the sound of Bow bells” – Thank you for posting these wonderful pictures!
    Best regards
    JDinOslo

  2. They’re even more fantastic than what is at Shorpy. One of my grans and both my granddads were English and English-Irish. They all emigrated between 1910-1925, and even giving the gap of twenty years or so, this is what they would have known.
    That and John Goodall…
    http://www.amazon.com/Edwardian-Summer-John-S-Goodall/dp/B002BC0HMG/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345251615&sr=1-17&keywords=john+goodall
    I bought that book for my daughter, for a Christmas present, and my grandmother and great-aunt went over it, with happy cries of recognition.

  4. Great photos. I was in the East End in 1981 when so much had been demolished. We went to the Prospect of Whitby, a famous pub, then started to walk back looking for a cab. There was none to be had and we finally found another pub where we could call one. It looked like London in 1945. Just desolate.

    Around that time Canary Wharf was built. We were there in 1977 when the Queen’s jubilee was celebrated by a yacht race from the Thames estuary to London Bridge. The yachts came up with the tide and it was really dramatic. The river was dry, then an hour later, it was ten feet deep. The onrushing ride looked like Mont San MIchel. The harbor at Canary Wharf has lock gates which are dry at low tide. You can only go in or out at high tide.

  7. The surfaces appear primitive,or perhaps plain is the better word. Now,things are more sophisticated,but the people themselves have been coarsened. Not an improvement for Britain.

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