I am attaching Gillian Tindall’s excellent article about Stepney as it was in 1963 because it gives such a powerful sense of what the area was like post-war and the impulse towards redevelopment, including the lack of political support for, and interest in, shopkeepers and small traders: such a contrast to both Paris and rural France where one sense that the tissue of society is maintained by its small shops, the butchers still working, and the bakers who I was told are state subsidised.

https://spitalfieldslife.com/2023/03/06/gillian-tindall-in-stepney-1963/?s=09