|
I came across a fantastic collection of photos on Flickr from 1978/79 taken around Stoke Newington Common by Alan
Denney.
I met up with him to discuss the collection and find out more about the background to the pictures. Born in Medway, Kent, in 1952, Alan moved to Hackney in 1974. He lived at 20 Stoke Newington Common, paying his rent from a job that paid £3 per week. One of the photographs features a shot from his bedroom across the road to where Londis supermarket is now. He still lives in Stoke Newington. Why go anywhere else? :-)
Alan is a talented amateur photographer who has never shown this work before. Therefore we are excited that Alan has agreed to mount an exhibition of his photographs at the 2009 Stoke Newington Common Annual Picnic in September 2009. He has also been invited to exhibit 50 photographs at Chat's Palace as part PhotoMonth - a photographic festival across East London during October and November 2009.
You can view his entire collection of Hackney (214 photographs) on
Flickr,
but I've copied some of the most relevant here with his permission. It would be
a fantastic project to try to reproduce some of these shots and match them side
by side. If anybody would like to publish modern reproductions of these pictures please get in contact. We would also like to identify anybody in these shots, so please get in touch if you recognise anybody.
[John Campbell, June 2009]
 Notice the Anti-Nazi League / Rock Against Racism stall - and the dart board with Hitler's face on. You win a prize if you get the dart in his mouth.
 
The stall on the right was selling toilet rolls and at this one you could buy
DelCrest extra large tights.
The view from 20 Stoke Newington Common
When people queued outside phoneboxes
Winter of Discontent- huge piles of uncollected rubbish -this one caught fire.
Stoke Newington Common- home to the young Marc Bolan and, in the Nineteenth
Century, Freddy Demuth (Karl Marx's unacknowledged/illegitimate son) who lived
at number 13.
| 
