“In 1988 these ex-shops didn’t have long left. Long after the interiors had turned to dust, what you see are pretty much their last appearances on earth.”
Alan Dein’s photographs of East End shopfronts were taken in 1988 when many Tower Hamlets streets were on the verge of dereliction. Alan, an oral historian and broadcaster, lived in Stepney at the time. He decided to capture the diminishing, decaying local shops on film, many of them relics of the area’s Jewish community.
“My photographs of the derelict shopfronts record the last moments of the Jewish community in the area – the bustling world of the inter-war years had been moved into the suburbs, and the community that stayed behind was less identifiable. In the nineteen eighties they were just hanging on, some premises had been empty for more than five years. Like a mouthful of broken teeth, a boxer’s mouth that had been thumped, with holes where teeth once were.”
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| Hessel St |
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| In Whitechapel |
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| Redchurch St |
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| Cheshire St |
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| Hessel St |
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| Quaker St |
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| Toynbee St |
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| In E2 |
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| Great Eastern St |
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| Relocated to Edgware... |
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| Brick Lane |
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| Wilkes St |
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| Goulston St |
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| Hessel St |
(via Spitalfields Life)
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