London as you've never seen it — and as you'll never see it again

The East End of London has changed rapidly in recent years, but photographer Paul Trevor chronicled it from the 1970s to the 1990s. His images have been collected in a new book, Market Day.

Cheshire Street, London E1, in 1976. From Market Day by Paul Trevor, published by Hoxton Mini Press.
Cheshire Street, London E1, in 1976. From Market Day by Paul Trevor, published by Hoxton Mini Press.
(Image credit: Paul Trevor)
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Gritty, clamorous, proper old London is celebrated in a new book of photographs by Paul Trevor, who helped set up the Half Moon Photography Workshop in 1975, a collective that saw photography as a tool for social change, at about the same time he edited the magazine Camerawork.

His work is in the V&A Museum, among other public and private collections. Between 1974 and 1992, he captured the markets of his local Brick Lane and Petticoat Lane before rapid gentrification changed the character of the East End.

Granby Street, London E2, 1975. Picture from Market Day by Paul Trevor, published by Hoxton Mini Press. ©Paul Trevor.

‘I was drawn to the Sunday market by the people, by the contrast between the energy they created and the run-down state of the place, and by the spontaneous and highly visual “street theatre” on display,’ Mr Trevor explains.

Familiar faces on Middlesex Street, London E1, 1986. Picture from Market Day by Paul Trevor, published by Hoxton Mini Press. ©Paul Trevor.

‘Like theatre, the show was repeated every week, but the performance was never the same.

Picture from Market Day by Paul Trevor, published by Hoxton Mini Press. ©Paul Trevor.

'You never knew what to expect, which is probably why I persisted with it for so long.’

Market Day is published by Hoxton Mini Press — you can order a copy here.

Picture from Market Day by Paul Trevor, published by Hoxton Mini Press. ©Paul Trevor.

Credit: Alamy

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Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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