Same Streets, Different Lives – stories of Whitechapel and Shadwell
‘History told by the people who make it’: The Hackney and Newham History Social Club
Fans of the Hackney and Newham History Social Club podcast will be delighted to hear that a clutch of new episodes has been released.
Series 3 ventures out into Whitechapel and Shadwell to trace the exuberant life of ‘uncle Tex’ (Bandele Ajetunmobi), a Nigerian-born amateur photographer who took to shooting the world around him from the 1940s to the 1980s.
His images, which are now hanging in galleries from Autograph in Shoreditch to the Tate Britain, document East London in riotous flux.
We follow niece Victoria Loughran as she helps the podcast team to track down the various locations where Tex took his photos of glamorous and not-so-glamorous locals.
In the process we meet Raju, who tells us about ebullient 1970s Petticoat Lane, and Ali, who recounts the lively ethnic drinking clubs of Shadwell in the 1950s.
The trek takes also to meet Second World War veteran Gilbert, who settled in Harold Wood with his family after the war and later became a musician.
A subtext of the series is couples with different ethnic origins who feature strongly in both Tex’s photos and in the cast of characters we encounter along the way.
This is a sign of the times in these parts, as the 2021 census showed, and it makes for a fascinating insight into the history of ethnic integration in years gone by.
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The Hackney and Newham History Social Club is an award-winning project narrated by Sue Elliott-Nicholls and produced by Immediate Theatre in partnership with Hackney and Newham Archives.
Read more about it here.