I’ve noticed that they’ve let the shops in the Commercial Road run down. It used to be where the local gun shop was, and Callegari’s Restaurant, once a roadside café is now derelict. One could buy fish from a fishmongers which was open to all the exhaust fumes of the main road, and bread round the corner at Walls. But now the whole block is vacant, awaiting redevelopment. This was Callegari’s:
I always liked the lettering on The Emporium:
Round the corner, you could buy fruit and veg:
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
We used to get all our bread from Walls when I was growing up on the thirteenth floor of Latham House (a tower block looking onto St Dunstans) in the 60s and 70s. Those were heady days in that locality what with squatters and anti-Jubilee demonstrations. One local resident was Dom Mintoff’s daughter who famously threw horse manure in the House of Commons. Incidentally I always think of your house as being close to the ‘Moony Sipal’ which is what we knew the Municipal Baths on the Mile End Road as when I was growing up. Just as I didn’t realise I had been climbing over a Henry Moore on the Stifford Estate throughout my childhood until I was an adult, neither did I know the word ‘municipal’!
By the way Radical Geometry was one of the best exhibitions my family and I (including our teens) saw this year. A real revelation.
So glad you liked Radical Geometry and agree that it was a really beautiful exhibition. Must do a post on the Municipal Baths ! Charles