Chris Dorley Brown began photographing London’s East End in the mid-1980s and has kept at it since. A History of the East End, published by Nouveau Palais in 2024, gathers more than a hundred of those pictures, made between 1984 and 2023, into a single 152-page sequence. It records four decades of urban change, but the change is not arranged as a story with a lesson at the end.

Dorley Brown is a self-taught documentary photographer who lives and works in Stratford. His education in the area’s culture took shape in the late 1970s, against a backdrop of sharply polarised political conflict, and the book keeps something of that vantage: a resident’s attention rather than a visitor’s.

The book is built as a walk. It opens on the banks of the Thames and moves through the vernacular architecture of the 1980s, its demolition a few years later, and the buildings that followed; past construction for the Olympic Games, through the emptied streets of lockdown, and out to the river again near its mouth. Single pictures, one-offs, interrupt the run. Alongside the photographs, texts and leaflets are reproduced, and Dorley Brown writes about his own career, the accounts concrete and anecdotes set beside his reflections.

What holds the sequence together is an argument about development. The East End is not treated as a place that lost its character but as ground on which capitalism repeatedly took new forms, and the book’s horizontal pages — 18.4 by 29.5 centimetres — give the street views and the cleared sites room to state their case.

For a collector, the interest lies in the span and in the editing: forty years of negatives resolved into a sequence that moves as the district moved, with printed matter admitted to the record rather than kept outside it.