John Claridge’s Nation Of Shopkeepers

Click here to book Remembering John Claridge who died on Sunday aged eighty-two Ross Bakeries, Quaker St, 1966 I am grateful to John Claridge for his prescience in taking these photographs because if I could travel back to the East End of sixty years ago this is exactly what I should like to see – the local shops and the faces of the shopkeepers. “I used to go to the shops with my mum every Saturday morning, and she’d meet people she knew and they’d be chatting for maybe an hour, so I’d go off and meet other kids and we’d be playing on a bombsite – it was a strange education!” John told me, neatly illustrating how these small shops were integral to the fabric of society in his childhood.”People had a pride in what they were selling or what they were doing” he recalled,”You’d go into these places and they’d all smell different. They all had their distinct character, it was wonderful.” Although generations of the family were dockers, John’s father warned him that the London Docks were…