Ron McCormick has written about his personal “migration” to East London, “…arriving in 1968 from Liverpool at the age of twenty-one as a postgraduate student to study painting at the Royal Academy of Art. Being working class and having little money, I was drawn to Whitechapel in London’s East End. It was cosmopolitan, run-down and gritty but the streets were imbued with a vibrant energy and importantly, accommodation was cheap. Spitalfields, one of the poorest of London neighbourhoods, sits adjacent to the wealthy City of London institutions, only a few hundred yards from Liverpool Street and less than a mile from the Bank of England. This was the context when, in 1970 he began to make his first photographs, knowing little about the practice of documentary photographer, nor the skills required to construct a photo-essay. Entirely self-taught with no formal photographic training, he was soon seduced by the expressive power of the photographic image as he began to record the micro-dramas unfolding on the streets and the people that lived and worked there.