David Hoffman’s Endurance & Joy in the East End 1971–1987 book review

The first extensive photobook by legendary riot photographer David Hoffman shows the hard and soft sides of daily life in a squatted Whitechapel

Endurance & Joy in the East End 1971-1987 is the first attempt from fabled street photographer David Hoffman to synthesise his wide-ranging legacy. The photobook displays over a decade of Hoffman’s early work when he was living in and around the squats of the Fieldgate Mansions of Whitechapel. 

‘In ‘71 I wasn’t really a photographer, I was taking pictures,’ Hoffman said, ‘just photographing things that I thought were of interest.’ 

Having recently moved to London from the suburbs, Hoffman was taken by the brokenness of the neighbourhood in which he found himself living above a ramshackle jeweller’s shop in Black Lion Yard. 

With his pockets bulging with jewels, Hoffman’s landlord used to frog-march him as an escort to the tube, through the downtrodden and sketchy streets, to ensure he didn’t get robbed.   

The shining steel and glass of Whitechapel today has all but erased the outlines of Whitechapel as it was then. ‘It just shocked me really, I had never seen so much poverty,’ Hoffman said.

Among the unhealed bombsites and rubble of war, people lived in close quarters and terrible conditions. Rag traders, market sellers and crumbling supply stores made up the local economy. Corrupt and lacking cash, the local government was unsupportive. 

Along with the shop he lived above, Hoffman soon found his entire street, full of jewellers and once known as the ‘Hatton Garden of the East End,’ demolished by the council in 74 – a rare image of the boarded-up shopfronts awaiting demolition is featured in the book, eerie in how unfamiliar it feels to the modern day. 

‘I thought by taking pictures, people who didn’t know about this sort of thing, people like me who had come from the suburbs, might be inspired to think actually we should be doing better than this,’ Hoffman said. 

After losing his flat in Black Lion Yard, Hoffman was tipped off by friends from the London College of Furniture of a squat in Fieldgate Mansions. They were early 20th-century tenements, well-built in brick but scheduled for demolition by the council and empty as a result. He moved in in 1973.

Along with the London College of Furniture students, in its early days, the squat housed a wide range of people, including medical students, silversmiths, sex workers, artists and more. Although the flats lacked bathrooms or insulation, they were free, attracting people with unpredictable incomes wanting a shot at freedom from the everyday grind. 

Hoffman’s photos of the squat, taken with a Nikon on black and white film, are equal measures disturbing and nostalgically endearing. There are musicians crafting beautiful things, impromptu street parties, and happy children who have never seen an iPad. Alongside we see steaming mounds of rubbish, or people huffing glue. 

The photos taken of the squat were developed inside of it, in the frontroom-turned-darkroom of Hoffman’s squatted flat on the top floor. The roof was just slate,’ Hoffman said, ‘so in the summer, the sun hit the slates, heated them to red hot, and the flat was just boiling, it was horrible. I fixed a hosepipe to spray water on the roof to keep it a bit cooler. And in the winter, it froze.’

Despite the cons, not paying rent allowed Hoffman to escape the tiring cycle of getting and then quitting blue-collar jobs like truck driving when he ran out of money from photography. ‘Squatting made it possible for me just to concentrate on photography,’ Hoffman said, ‘and if I had no money, somebody else would feed me, if they had no money I’d feed them, it was just very communal like that.’

An abundance of unused buildings marked for demolition combined with a need for housing in London made squatting a common practice in the 70s. By the mid-70s some 20–30,000 people were squatting in London and were more than willing to put up a fight when local government and landowners attempted eviction. Squatting was outlawed in the UK in 2012 (although that doesn’t mean it’s out of practice today). 

Hoffman’s photos record some of the warfare between squatters and those who wanted them out, capturing protests, doors being boarded up, and windows being cheekily jumped into. The Fieldgate Mansions are, despite the Council’s efforts at the time, still standing today. 

Today, Hoffman is renowned for his street photography and is known particularly as one of the greats of protest and riot photography. Alongside intimate portraits of domestic life, we see Hoffman’s lens begin to take to the streets in earnest in Endurance & Joy, foreshadowing an interest that would carry him through his career. 

As a photographer, Hoffman’s eye is very particular, almost painterly and filled with texture. His photos are cleverly dynamic and often reveal more at second or third glance. 

Hoffman also has a form of face-blindness, meaning he rarely recognises people at a second glance. 

He recalled one incident during a shoot of Annie Lennox for the Free Tibet movement ‘I spent a quarter of an hour trying to shake this boring guy off who was talking to me about photography,’ he said, ‘he was on my shoulder talking about photography and asking what I’m doing and what camera are you using and going on.’ After shaking him off, Hoffman later realised it had been Paul McCartney. 

The faces in Endurance & Joy hold more than they appear to – a smile might be strained, or a frown secretly smug. Many of the characters feel archetypal. It’s possible the tendency only to recognise someone where they are, not where they’ve been, is a secret strength. 

From the growing demographic of Bengali families seeking stability in squats to chaotic characters in the crypt of St Botolph’s homeless shelter, Hoffman photographed his neighbours. 

He helped open up flats for new residents and brought the people he photographed copies of their likenesses. But despite a deep entanglement with his subjects, when photographing Hoffman did his best to become invisible. 

‘I think my photographs are the most powerful when I am the least observed, I have the least effect on what’s happening,’ he said, ‘where I am active is where I choose to be.’

When the owners of the Fieldgate Mansions managed to start charging the squatters rent of 50p a week, Hoffman decided he had had enough. In the Autumn of ‘84, he spent eight grand (all his money at the time) on a crumbling house in Bow, taking the next four years to fix it up. At age 78, he lives there still and is currently fighting cancer while sifting through the masses of photographs in his archives. 

Hoffman has always preferred to sell reproduction rights on his photography to mass media. ‘You get a picture in the Sun and 10 million people see it, you get a picture in a book, 600 or a thousand people might see it. It just seemed inefficient in terms of me communicating what I’m seeing to the world,’ he said. 

Yet with the demise of mass media and the negative, transient tendencies of social media, Hoffman shifted to publishing more intentionally. He collaborated on photo essays of his early work with The Gentle Author, a locally celebrated anonymous blogger who runs a small publishing press.

The idea came up to compile the work properly in a book. ‘It just seemed to me it was obvious that I could just stick them all together and do a piece that talked about that area, over that period,’ Hoffman said. ‘Also, as you get further from it, it gets more interesting.’ 

Endurance & Joy does the important job of recording a time that has faded quickly into the speedy churn of change in London. ‘It’s a look back into a world that not many of the people who read The Slice will have any experience of,’ Hoffman said.

With crowdfunding led by The Gentle Author, the book was published this year with a matching exhibition in Hoxton’s Museum of Home, which will run until March 2025. The final book is a handsome, brown fabric-bound hardcover with 240 pages of photography. It is published by The Gentle Author’s printing company, Spitalfields Life Books. 

Until recently, the working title for Endurance & Joy in the East End 1971–1987 was simply A Place to Live, Hoffman’s answer to why he’d squatted in Fieldgate Mansions to begin with. Putting the book together, the right name revealed itself – it was a bit more than that. 

Endurance & Joy in the East End 1971–1987 is available for purchase at spitalfieldslife.bigcartel.com as well as in local bookshops and on Amazon. 

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