Along The Thames With John Claridge

Click here to book Remembering John Claridge who died on Sunday aged eighty-two. In Silvertown, 1964 These atmospheric photographs of the Thames by John Claridge offer a poignant vision of the working river that was once a defining element of the East End. Within living memory, the busiest port in the world was here yet today barely a trace of it remains. And John’s pictures, mostly taken when he was a mere kid photographer, capture the last glimmers of the living docks. “My dad’s friends were saying that the docks were going down, so I was aware of that and I just wanted to grab hold of it,” John told me. “As a child, from my bedroom in Plaistow, I could see the lights of the docks at night and I used to go to sleep listening to the sound of the horns on the Thames whenever there was fog, which was quite often. You could smell the river if the wind was blowing in the right direction. A lot of the men in my family worked down the docks. My father took me down to the dock gate when he…