Raju Vaidyanathan has lived in Brick Lane in London’s Tower Hamlets all his life. In 1983, he acquired an old second-hand camera and started taking photos, but without enough money to print them he left the negatives stored in boxes. He began developing them 18 months ago. ‘I thought there might be a couple of thousand, but never realised that there would be about 8,000 in the first two boxes alone,’ he said

• His exhibition Brick Lane Born will be touring Idea Stores in Tower Hamlets until May
  
• Chitra Ramaswamy – Brick Lane in the 80s: before it became Banglatown