Alan Dein’s photographs of East End shopfronts were taken in 1988 when many Tower Hamlets streets were about to collapse. Alan, a broadcaster and oral historian, lived in Stepney at the time. Photographing the decaying local shops in the area, many of which were relics of the Jewish community, he decided to document the diminishing, decaying shops on film.
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 hanging on; some premises had been emptying 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.
