At The Shops With Tony Hall

Tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields this Saturday 12th September. Click here to book In the sixties and seventies when these pictures were taken, every street corner in the East End that was not occupied by a pub was home to a shop offering groceries and general supplies to the residents of the immediate vicinity. The owners of these small shops took on mythic status as all-seeing custodians of local information, offering a counterpoint to the pub as a community meeting place for the exchange of everybody’s business. Shopkeepers were party to the smallest vacillations in the domestic economy of their customers and it was essential for children to curry their good favour if the regular chore of going to fetch a packet of butter or a tin of custard, or any other domestic essential, might be ameliorated by the possibility of reward in the form of sweets, whether there was any change left over or not. Yet, even in the time these photographs were taken, the small…