'My East End's gone, it doesn't exist any more. And these are pictures I could never do again, I don't have that naivety and innocence': photographer and Londoner John Claridge

 
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9 September 2013

At the age of eight, the story goes, John Claridge saw a plastic camera at an East End fun fair and knew he had to have it. A few years later, with money saved up from his paper round in the London docks, he bought a proper camera and set about recording the world in which he was growing up. At 15 he started work in the photographic department of McCann Erickson, thereby setting off on the road of a long and distinguished career as a photographer. Here are some of the pictures he took of the London he once knew.

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