Stepneys slum-dwellers address the camera directly in 1935 in the ground-breaking documentary Housing Problems. John Grierson, legendary documentary maker, convinced the Gas Board to fund this film he later called the beginning of cinema verite. His younger sister, Ruby, who worked on the film was determined that the working-class contributors, many of them women, would command attention. She told them: The camera is yours. The microphone is yours. Now tell the bastards exactly what it is like to live in the slums. The film was shown to them at Stepney Town Hall. Director Edgar Anstey recalled: Nobody had been able to bring these poor suffering characters to an audience before.. Just three years later, the basement of the London Fruit Exchange, Spitalfields Market, was placed on Stepney Borough Councils official list of public air-raid shelters. Although some slums had been cleared and new housing schemes erected (the film goes to Ring House in Shadwell), Stepney was soon heavily bombed in the war. So much for the Shelter in Stepneys LFWE being comparable to the one under the Tate Gallery and the Dickins & Jones Department Store - as the DCMS Listing Review Designation officer said in his refusal to List the LFWE. This is what Stepney was like, before the bombs started to drop...
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 12:09:39 +0000
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