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Are You Being Served?
Until Nov 9
V&A Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Rd, London, E2 9PA
By Natasha Polyviou

Posted: Mon Jun 2
Triggered by a nineteenth-century model of a butcher’s shop in the Museum of Childhood, Tom Hunter’s new photographic portraits focus on shopkeepers and market traders from the main thoroughfare between Bethnal Green and central Hackney.

Hunter is best known for ‘Living in Hell and Other Stories’, the series that made him the first photographer to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery. For this show, the museum involved children from Marner, Redlands and John Scurr local primary schools and adults from Tower Hamlets College, who interviewed the shopkeepers and created an installation that is part of the exhibition. Hackney resident Hunter’s photographs capture the inimitable mix of ethnicities and independent shops they bring with them to create the uniquely textured canvas of the East End.

While it’s fun to pick out familiar detail in the heavily stacked counters of a grocer’s or newsagent’s, the aspects that most draw in the viewer are the people and the personal stories eked out by Hunter. Exhibition organiser Teresa Hare Duke has identified several family-run businesses in the area, such as Rinkoff’s Bakers and Sidhu fashions. Rinkoff’s, which has been feeding the locals with rolls and chola bread since 1911, represents the wider changes in our shopping habits in the last century: ‘The building of a large Sainsbury’s in Whitechapel about ten years ago has had an effect on trade. People do all their shopping in one place and tend not to go to individual shops.’

Having said that, the ceaseless flux of new traders replacing old, alongside perennial stalwarts who lend a reassuring familiarity to the area, mean the neighbourhood has largely resisted the pull of the homogenous high street (despite a recent smattering of Tesco’s blighting the homely landscape like multiplying spores).

The area’s individual character and vibe is largely due to the diversity of its residents. Gary Wilson, who has run a fruit stall at Whitechapel market for 43 years, ‘has adapted his trade to the shifts in the local population,’ explains Hare Duke. ‘Originally he sold just English vegetables, then a combination of English and West Indian and Bengali. He speaks bits of Indian, Bengali, Greek, Turkish, Romanian, Lithuanian and Russian, all picked up from his customers.’

A huge number of Londoners who are migrants from abroad or other parts of the UK, who had never tasted a fat and fragrant freshly baked bagel or sucked on a tough, juicy sugar cane when they arrived, now consider these new edibles part of their personal culinary cartography.

Hunter’s work elevates these everyday experiences and shines a photographer’s flash on their uplifting qualities: their ability to reinvigorate your love of London with little more than a friendly exchange or one memorable bite into an unfamiliar foodstuff.

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Details
V&A Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Rd, London, E2 9PA
, UK

Geo: 51.527660, -0.054812
020 8983 5200/020 8983 5235 (information line)
Category: Museums & Attractions
Times: Daily 10am-5.45pm
Tube: Bethnal Green