These gorgeous Kodachrome photographs taken by David Granick between the late 1950s and 1980s might be the best images of London’s East End we’ve seen. Found by photographer Chris Dorley-Brown at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives, David Granick’s images take us back to the streets of Aldgate, MileEnd, Stepney, Whitechapel and Spitalfields. “The collection has about 3,000 slides going back to the fifties,” says Dorley-Brown, “but they have been well preserved. Many had been unseen for fifty years or more.”

The New Globe, Mile End Road, 1977

“The East End is well documented photographically, [but] nearly always in monochrome. Those images have defined our perspective of the period: stark, foggy and loaded with political agitation and unrest. “Granick takes a step back. Shooting in colour, we are presented with a very different matrix of information. Colour does that, it’s a different language. It’s really astonishing how few colour images survive from that era. They have a modern sensibility to them – they are minimal, topographic.”

The East End in Colour 1960-1980 by David Granick is published by Hoxton Mini Press. An exhibition is at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives until 3 May 2018.