Brick Lane in the 80s: before it became Banglatown
Raju Vaidyanathan’s photographs of east London’s famous street market area in the 80s capture how much it has changed.
Brick Lane in the 80s: crowds gather at the famous Sunday market, a man wanders past a video shop, a group of Bengali primary schoolchildren await the arrival of the Queen Mother outside Whitechapel Art Gallery with that uniquely youthful combination of boredom and anticipation. Raju Vaidyanathan’s fascinating monochrome photos tell the story of Brick Lane before it became the curry capital of Britain, the home of street art, the site of protests against a hipster cereal cafe, and a symbol of East End gentrification gone too far. This is when the street signs were still only in English. When Brick Lane was still becoming Banglatown.
Vaidyanathan’s photos of quotidian life on and around Brick Lane, where he grew up and still lives, capture an area associated with immigration for centuries. French Huguenots made Spitalfields famous for weaving and tailoring as far back as the 1600s, when Sir Christopher Wren reported that he had viewed Brick Lane on foot and found it “unpassable for Coach, adjoyning to Durty lands of meane habitations, & farr from any Church”. The Brick Lane market, which first ran in the 17th century at the Old Truman Brewery, was held on Sundays to respect religious observances by the Jewish community, until the second half of the 20th century when Bengali migrants arrived in great numbers.
Although I am Indian and a Londoner (born in 1979), I never went to Brick Lane in the 80s. This is partly because my family are south Indian, not Bengali, but more crucially because we are south Londoners. As my dad puts it when I ask him why they never took us to Brick Lane: “There was no need. We went to Hounslow or Southall.”
I probably first went to Brick Lane as a teenager in the mid-90s to rummage around in the market and buy Indian sweets. My dad first went in 1970 to stay with a friend for a few nights. “It was pretty rundown,” he tells me. “There were only one or two Bengali restaurants and hardly any Asian faces.” So where did we go for a curry in the 80s? “There was no eating-out culture then,” he says. “If we took you anywhere, it was probably to McDonald’s.” Though once, not long after it opened, we did go to Bombay Brasserie in Kensington. That was a good night.
But this is Vaidyanathan’s Brick Lane: a decade on from the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, when the local mosque had been open only a few years (housed in a building that was first a Huguenot chapel then a synagogue), and Tower Hamlets was still reeling from the racist murder of Altab Ali, a garment worker who, in 1978, was chased along Brick Lane on his way home from work and stabbed to death by three white teenagers. With a secondhand camera he bought in 1983, Vaidyanathan took thousands of photos then, unable to afford to print them, stored the negatives in boxes. Twenty-nine years later he opened them and realised that in the first two boxes alone he had 8,000 images. The photos – whether of washing hung behind flats on Myrdle Street or independent shopkeepers taking a break outside stores that have long since closed – tell the story of an area perpetually in flux that has always been the home of immigrants and outsiders. What’s so striking about these simple, natural images is how much Brick Lane has changed all over again.
Brick Lane Born, an exhibition of Raju Vaidyanathan’s photos, is touring Idea Stores – Tower Hamlets’ library and lifelong learning service – until 30 May.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.