Four Corners' autumn exhibition captures a unique moment of change in London’s East End.

Brought together for the first time, these rarely seen images document a now-disappeared world. Bengali migrants live side-by-side with elderly Jewish shopkeepers and artisans, dockers socialise in Wapping’s clubs and pubs, and neighbours and children celebrate at a raucous, multicultural Stepney festival.

But the photographs reveal streetscapes and communities on the verge of change. Desolation hangs over the soon-to-be demolished streets, the dock cranes stand lifeless over empty quays awaiting speculative ‘redevelopment’. Amid this apparent wasteland a new East End was coming into being. New migrant communities were creating a space for themselves as economic decline led to the displacement of earlier neighbourhoods.

Young photographers were drawn to document working-class people’s lives at this moment of upheaval, and to advocate for social change. They mounted ‘guerrilla’ exhibitions in launderettes, on estate walls, and even held a sandwich board show. At a time when photography was largely unrecognised by the elitist art world, they aimed to engage local people to view images of their own communities.

A World Apart features remarkable work by Ron McCormick and the Exit Photography group (Nicholas Battye, Diane Bush, Alex Slotzkin, and Paul Trevor), alongside images by Ian Berry, John Donat, Leonard Freed, David Hoffman, Jessie Ann Matthews, and Ray Rising.

Image credit: Child playing in a tenement block courtyard, Whitechapel or Wapping, around 1972. © David Hoffman