Tony Hall’s East End In The Afternoon
Tickets available this Saturday 21st June
There is little traffic on the road, children are at play, housewives linger in doorways, old men doze outside the library and, in the distance, a rag and bone man’s cart clatters down the street. This is the East End in the afternoon, as photographed by newspaper artist Tony Hall in the nineteen sixties while wandering with his camera in the quiet hours between shifts on The Evening News in Fleet St.
“Tony cared very much about the sense of community here.” Libby Hall, Tony’s wife, recalled, “He loved the warmth of the East End. And when he photographed buildings it was always for the human element, not just the aesthetic.”
Contemplating Tony’s clear-eyed photos – more than half a century after they were taken – raises questions about the changes enacted upon the East End in the intervening years. Most obviously, the loss of the pubs and corner shops which Tony portrayed with such affection in pictures that remind us of the importance of these meeting places, drawing people into a close relationship with their immediate environment.
“He photographed the pubs and little shops that he knew were on the edge of disappearing,” Libby Hall confirmed for me, ‘He loved the history of the East End, the Victorian overlap, and the sense that it was the last of Dickens’ London.”
In 1972, Tony Hall left The Evening News and with his new job came a new shift pattern which did not grant him afternoons off – thus drawing his East End photographic odyssey to a close. Yet for one who did not consider himself a photographer, Tony Hall’s opus comprises a tender vision of breathtaking clarity, constructed with purpose and insight as a social record. Speaking of her late husband, Libby Hall emphasised the prescience that lay behind Tony’s wanderings with his camera in the afternoon. “He knew what he was photographing and he recognised the significance of it,” she admitted.
Three Colts Lane
Gunthorpe St
Ridley Rd Market
Stepney Green
Photographs copyright © Estate of Libby Hall
Images Courtesy of the Tony Hall Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute
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Tony Hall’s East End Panoramas
Makes me feel good looking at these photos .
Betwixt shadows of Dickensian London & the new dawn of sixties vibrancy, working class East enders didn’t know they were poor…
You get a sense of community looking at these pictures and it’s sad so many nice old properties have been demolished over the years to make way for the modern, are the terraced houses in the first image still there?
The photo of 3 children standing together, the boy on the left has one roller skate on – I wonder what happened to the other one?
A great series of photos. Despite the visible poverty and slow decay, the people simply lived! Their children, in particular, made the best of their circumstances: a car wreck is the most beautiful playground!
Love & Peace
ACHIM
So evocative of my years of growing up in London. We actually lived in Chelsea, but not the Chelsea people see today. Our playgrounds back then in the early 50s were bomb sites, and trying to climb down into cellars open to the elements. Certainly the rag and bone man came round our estate (land of which was donated by the Cadogan estate to house all those who’d been in war requisition houses), and if you had anything to donate, got a balloon in return. We walked miles back then, and during school holiday, visited the Museums at South Kensington on wet days, and Battersea Park on fine days. I also remember a man sat on the kerb re-weaving a chair seat as I walked to school, and another who have a knife-sharpening machine which was always a bit scary to watch.