15 Black and White Photographs Capture the Gritty Reality of Life in East London During the Swinging Sixties

From between 1963 and 1969, Steve Lewis, a former photographer for The Sun and the Newham Recorder, captured the East End in all its dilapidated glory. He tilted his lens towards everything from the era's bomb-site reconstruction to its political graffiti daubed across walls east of the City and north of the Thames, the area traditionally considered to be the East End. Here are some of his photographs...

Leslie Lucking combined the roles of Lollipop lady and mother to her daughter Tracey.

In a halfway home in Newham.

Alfred Davies had been delivering milk from this handcart to homes in Forest Gate for over thirty years.

Sisters Rose Walsham & Susan Lawrence, lifelong customers at the Duke of Fife.

Street trader selling vegetables in Barking.

In Whitechapel, a group of National Front supporters came by night to nail their message of racial hatred to the door and fire bomb this family.

This urban beachcomber was a familiar sight upon the streets of Whitechapel and Stepney.

John Loftus of the Manby Arms in Stratford adopted “Bass” a retired donkey.

David Bailey and his American girlfriend Penelope Tree visit his mother in East Ham.

Mrs Mary Riley, caravan dweller, peeling potatoes in Barking.

A Gipsy family on Beckton Marshes.

A street trader from the 1960s who – from his appearance – could equally belong to the 1860s.

In the “Swinging Sixties.”

Homeless children in a halfway home.

An ambitious rag and bone man advertises “COMPLETE Homes Purchased.”

(Photographs © Steve Lewis)