Alan Dein’s East End Shops
P.Lipman, Kosher Poultry Dealers, Hessel St
“In my twenties, I’d been doing a number of oral history recordings, working for the Museum of the Jewish East End which was very active recording stories of the life of Jewish people who had settled here.”explained Alan Dein, broadcaster and oral historian, outlining the background to his unique collection of more than a hundred photographs of East End shopfronts.
“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. They were like a mouthful of broken teeth, a boxer’s mouth that had been thumped, with holes where teeth once were.”
Feeding his twin passions for photography and collecting, Alan took these pictures in 1988 while walking around the streets of the East End at a time when dereliction prevailed. Although his family came from the Jewish East End and his Uncle Lou was a waiter at Blooms, Alan was born elsewhere and first came to study. “As a student at the City of London Polytechnic in Old Castle St, I spent a lot of time hanging out here – though the heart of the area for me at that time was the student common room and bar.” he told me.
“Afterwards, in 1988, I moved back to live in a co-operative housing scheme in Whitehorse Rd in Stepney and then I had more time to walk around in this landscape that evoked the fragmentary tales I knew of my grandparents’ lives in the East End. The story I heard from their generation of the ‘monkey parade’, when once people walked up and down the Mile End Road to admire the gleaming shopfronts and goods on display. My family thought I was mad to move back because when they left the East End they put it behind them, and it didn’t reflect their aspirations for me.
The eighties were a terrible time for removing everything, comparable to what the Victorians had done a century earlier. But I have always loved peeling paint, paint that has been weathered and worn seafront textures, and this was just at the last moment before these buildings were going to be redeveloped, so I photographed the shopfronts because this landscape was not going to last.”
In many of these pictures, there is an uneasy contradiction between the proud facades and the tale of disappointment which time and humanity has written upon them. This is the source of the emotionalism in these photographs, seeing faded optimism still manifest in the confident choice of colours and the sprightly signwriting, becoming a palimpsest overwritten by the elements, human neglect and graffiti. In spite of the flatness of these impermeable surfaces, in each case we know a story has been enclosed that is now shut off from us for ever. Beyond their obvious importance as an architectural and a social record, Alan’s library of shopfronts are also a map of his exploration of his own cultural history – their cumulative heartbreak exposing an unlocated grief that is easily overlooked in the wider social narrative of the movement of people from the East End to better housing in the suburbs.
Yet Alan sees hope in these tantalising pictures too, in particular the photo at the top, of Lipman’s Kosher Poultry Dealers, in which the unknown painter ran out of paint while erasing the name of the business, leaving the word “Lip” visible. “A little bit of lip!” as Alan Dein terms it brightly, emblematic of an undying resilience in the face of turbulent social change.
Goulston St
In Whitechapel
Commercial Rd
Redchurch St
Stepney Green
Cheshire St
Alie St
Hessel St
Hackney Rd
Quaker St
Mile End Rd
Toynbee St
Alie St
In E2
Brick Lane
Great Eastern St
Commercial St
Hessel St
Mile End Rd
Relocated to Edgeware
Bow Common Lane
Brick Lane
Ben Jonson Rd
Wilkes St
Bow Rd
Ridley Rd
New Goulston St.
Whitechapel High St
Alderney Rd, Stepney
Photographs copyright © Alan Dein
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That’s the curious part: the problematic situation of the shops with their decaying window fronts also reflects a special form of graphic aesthetics in the photo. It’s like a serious accident: you HAVE to look!
Love & Peace
ACHIM
The current inhabitants really have no idea.
So very sad, so much failed endeavour
Lovely pics of long gone Indy shops
A complete absence of luncheon voucher stickers tho’ but.
Cor ! These photos bring back memories.
Thank you.
I lived in Hoxton; went to school in Cowper Street snd worked in Goodmans Fields and Black Lion House Aldgate East.
Eddie
I remember shops like these in the 1970s when I still lived in London, some of them were still bustling with activity, steam and baking smells back then.
You never think in your youth how times will change and all will be swept away. Thank goodness for photographs like these.
I looked through this array once, twice, three times. On the first pass, I thought of the people
who inhabited the shops — their intentions, their toil, frustrations, joys, accomplishments, etc.
By the third time, I was noticing all the surfaces, textures, and colors. Only then, could these images become buoyant and quilt-like. I felt like I had a view finder that I could move all along the various photos, and recognize — (so much!) — scaling paint, rusted corrugated metal, brittle cardboard signboards in an inventive checkerboard, remnants of elegant lettering, the urgent scrawl of spray paint, stalwart cement blocks, crusty tiles, shards of plywood, rumpled grill work, tenacious handbills still clinging to walls, decrepit warped doors. Each “slice” of this city scape seemed to be saturated with melancholy and (for me) an undeniable strange beauty.
Remarkable, and harrowing. Thank you, GA and Mr. Dein.
Many fond memories of shops my parents frequented! Independent Shopkeepers we’re a special breed, working long hours in all weather to put bread on the table. They knew their customers and their customers supported them.
Surely ‘Steptowe & Son’ can’t be a real name?
I’m guessing a pun on the popular TV show?
I’m always saddened when I see pictures of old shops that have fallen into dereliction. The sign above the shoe shop that says “get Tuf here” made me smile though, Tuf shoes remind me of school in winter in the 60s, I think the boys ones used to have animal tracks on the soles.
Alfred Myers Great Eastern Street. Is the very place you bought mens wear , before you moved onto Cecil Gee W1. Smart shop that back in the 1960s, always bought Safari Suits there, only place that had them at the time. Another Smart shop for men in 1960s was Albert’s in Whitechapel High Street, next door to Blooms. Be Well GA.