These gorgeous Kodachrome photographs taken by David Granick between the late 1950s and 1980s might be the best images of London’s East End we’ve seen. Found by photographer Chris Dorley-Brown at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives, David Granick’s images take us back to the streets of Aldgate, MileEnd, Stepney, Whitechapel and Spitalfields. “The collection has about 3,000 slides going back to the fifties,” says Dorley-Brown, “but they have been well preserved. Many had been unseen for fifty years or more.”
The New Globe, Mile End Road, 1977
“The East End is well documented photographically, [but] nearly always in monochrome. Those images have defined our perspective of the period: stark, foggy and loaded with political agitation and unrest.
“Granick takes a step back. Shooting in colour, we are presented with a very different matrix of information. Colour does that, it’s a different language. It’s really astonishing how few colour images survive from that era. They have a modern sensibility to them – they are minimal, topographic.”
The George Tavern, Commercial Road, 1969, London
Whitechapel Road, 1965
Gardiners, London, circa 1977
Brushfield Street, 1970, London
Alie Street, London, 1963
Commercial Road, 1974
Spitalfields Market, 1973
Belhaven Street, 1977
Watney Market, 1974
Stifford Estate, Stepney Green, 1961
West India Dock, 1971
The East End in Colour 1960-1980 by David Granick is published by Hoxton Mini Press. An exhibition is at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives until 3 May 2018.
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