Alongside John Claridge’s book of photographs of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, I have also acquired a copy of his book of photographs of the East End, published in 2016 by Spitalfields Life. They are amazingly atmospheric. He was brought up in Plaistow and acquired his first camera, an Ilford Sportsman, as a child. He got a job aged fifteen working in the photographic department of McCann Erickson, an advertising agency, and, aged seventeen, he took his photographs to show Bill Brandt. All through the 1960s, he documented the old East End in grainy, moody photographs of an area which was still war ravaged, poor, and still with a strong sense of working class community, which he depicts with affection.