"The East End that I found when I arrived in 1970 was a different world to today's bustling, regulated prosperity. Bombsites and tumbledown, near-derelict housing were the unremarkable norm. Walking home from my truck-driving job to my rented slum room in Chicksand Street I would step carefully over gutters running with blood from the kosher chicken slaughterhouse. Residents' main source of income had evaporated as the docks and their supporting trades closed. Empty shells of buildings sheltered the most desperate homeless. Tumbledown, leaky old houses made for easy squats or cheap rents and began to attract impoverished students, artists, political activists and young Bangladeshi men working in the rag trade. These books document aspects of that metamorphosis."