Knick knacks and assorted objects lined the streets of Whitechapel’s bustling markets as documentary photographer David Hoffman walked along them capturing the hubbub of city life in 70s London. Squatting in the East End for around 15 years he managed to record intimate moments of the inhabitant’s lives.
Shouts of ‘seen on Police Five’ would be heard, as that television program was a popular one and might persuade a passer-by to spend 50p on a broken piece of pottery in the hope it would be part of an unsolved heist.
His images communicated tableaux’s of the innermost workings of people’s homes and at a time when racism was high against the mainly Bengali and Jewish communities in Whitechapel. The sense of community which he captures cements a history of people’s lives that may dissolve and fade from current discourse on this city’s past and current gentrification.
He talks of the area back then as full of “empty sites. It had been pretty worthless, nobody wanted to live around here, there was no trade around here, no income, it was pretty much a wasteland. It was fairly busy but very, very derelict, very impoverished."
Gentrification brings conflict between long-time residents of old neighbourhoods and new arrivals and is especially linked to disrupting and erasing cultural heritages of working-class families in communities of colour. Whitechapel itself has undergone this process with buzzwords of revitalisation and urban renewal being thrown around developments in ‘trendier’ locations, yet the underlying focus is the accumulation of wealth through ‘dispossessing the poor from their housing and community’.
Hoffman’s work confirms the beauty and unity of the lives of the people living there first. Fieldgate Mansions being an assemblage of second hand furniture and the belongings of squatters, was full of energy, of strength to withstand adversity and its jumble of inhabitants being artwork in their very existence.
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