The documentary photographer David Hoffman took this picture of the market in Sclater Street near Whitechapel in east London in 1977. He had been living in the area since the start of that decade having moved down from York. To begin with, he worked as a truck driver to pay the rent, but, wanting to take pictures full time, he then lived in squats just off Whitechapel Road. The plan, he recalls, “was just to photograph stuff that I thought was interesting or would be important to record. And then I’d wait for people to find me and hopefully pay me money for the pictures.”
There were a number of street markets in close proximity in those years, one in Brick Lane, another in Cheshire Street, the main Whitechapel Market, each characterised, Hoffman recalls, by differing levels of desperation. “You would have some people trying to sell a single shoe or a broken pair of glasses,” he says.
