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When you live somewhere for a long time, change can occur without you realising. It creeps in gently: a new coffee shop there, a demolition here, a pub which closed for lockdown and never opened back up. One day you wake up and you’re living somewhere else entirely.
Chris Dorley Brown’s photographs catalogue the shifting urban landscape of London’s East End in a similar vein: quietly, slowly, an invisible force at work. Even his images of tower blocks being blown-up have a calmness to them. Documentary in nature, they capture moments in time which often go unnoticed: a construction worker holding a ‘stop’ sign beside a skeletal building being reduced to rubble, an upended car under a towering road bridge, stands of football fans transfixed as the ball is kicked towards the net, the same stands being gobbled and chewed and spat out by a digger only months later.
The East End of London has undergone a dramatic, rapid transformation in recent years. Parts have flourished while others have shrunk and faded. Empty or squatted warehouses have been torn down to make room for luxury flat developments; construction for the 2012 Olympic Games has opened up connections to the rest of the city; Hackney has turned from a relatively run-down part of London into a self-aware borough of creative directors and sourdough starters.
Having lived and worked in the East End for the best part of four decades, when photographer Chris Dorley Brown was approached to create a book documenting the history of the area, at first he wasn’t quite sure. ‘I didn’t really want to be nostalgic,’ he says. ‘But then I was looking at some of the older work I took – in hospitals, of the tower blocks of Hackney – and I realised that they went together very well.’
The result was a striking insight into his personal journey as a photographer and a collection of images charting how development has spread through a part of the city in particular flux. ‘My subject matter is very normal: hospitals, street corners, disused factories,’ Dorley Brown says. ‘I walk and cycle around, and when I recognise something that excites me, I take a picture in a very straightforward way.’
There’s a certain mood – a sense of stillness, detachment and quiet peculiarity – that permeates the photos. ‘There was a coherence to the atmosphere that I was trying to project: quiet and contemplative,’ he says, about curating the book.
‘Looking at it as a whole, after it’s printed, the overwhelming feeling I get is that there’s been a hell of a lot of changes in east London in the last few years, and in the last few decades. It’s a very politically charged environment. A lot of the things we took for granted in a civic sense – like football matches and factories and workplaces and places where we used to gather – have now either kind of completely disappeared or they’re being repurposed.’
Produced by French publisher Nouveau Palais and featuring images shot between 1987 and 2023, the book journeys through Upton Park, Stratford, Bow, Stepney, Walthamstow, and Hackney via the deserted streets of lockdown, hospitals, social housing, the Thames Estuary and the once-iconic ‘Shithouse to Penthouse’ graffiti on the side of the Lord Napier pub in Hackney Wick. ‘The environment that I grew up in – the post-war welfare state – has now been discarded in favour of something more capitalist,’ Dorley Brown says. ‘But I’m not looking for signifiers that make political statements or anything like that: I’m just responding to colour and form.’
Dorley Brown says he likes to imagine he’s making pictures for people who haven’t been born yet. And who knows what east London will look like in another 40 years time? ‘Photographs become more interesting the older they get,’ he says. ‘They’ll be put away in a safe somewhere, and maybe they will emerge in 100 years time and then people will know what London looked like.’
Chris Dorley Brown: A History of the East End is available at Burley Fisher Books, £5.
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