I spent part of the morning poring over, and admiring, the documentary photographs taken by a relatively unknown photographer, David Granick, of the East End in the 1960s and 1970s. He apparently took them as illustrations for talks he gave for the monthly meetings of the East London History Society, but it is impossible to tell from the photographs what the talks might have been, as the photographs are neither particularly sociological (there are not many people in them) nor especially architectural, although they record the character of the streetscape. What is amazing is how decayed the area still was in the 1970s, still with very obvious signs of bomb damage. The docks were still working. That is by far the biggest change. Spitalfields, the subject of many of the photographs, including Fournier Street and Elder Street, has changed amazingly. But the photographs are not at all nostalgic, just straightforward, beautifully composed images, which are powerful precisely because they are not nostalgic.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
The decay and lack of re-building is one of the striking aspects of his photographs. The East End just looks very empty. Did you get to the ‘David Granick: The East End In Colour 1960-1980’ exhibition at the Local History Library? I liked the way the photographs were printed on over-sized paper and pinned up such that people were encouraged to record their own memories and notes around them, which made the prints a historical asset too.
No, I now really regret not seeing it. Charles
I’ve yet to get to The Women’s Hall: East End suffragettes exhibition at the Local History Library (https://eastendwomensmuseum.org/the-womens-hall) but it’s on till 20 October. There was a show at Gallery 46 in the vein of Granick – A Sort of Home: 1970s Whitechapel – exhibiting photographs by David Hoffman (http://gallery46.co.uk/exhibitions/18-july-15-august-2018-a-sort-of-home-1970s-whitechapel-david-hoffman/) which I enjoyed a lot. More focused on internal spaces and people than Granick, and all black-and-white.
It was Granick’s use of Kodachrome 64 colour slide film which gives his pictures some of their unusually cool intensity. Charles