FESTIVAL - a Picture Story of the E1 Community Festival in the 1970s


From a garden fete in the heart of Stepney to five day festival attracting 25,000. How’s that for growth in five years?  Organised by the managers and supporters of the E1 Junior Football League and their friends and relatives, the E1 Festival proper began as a modest one-day affair in 1970; now it is recognised as the ‘big daddy’ of London’s many community festivals, supported by the whole network of neighbourhoods which make up the E1 district. It takes 6 months to prepare, the organisers foot-slog around the area in search of funds, meeting regularly in pubs and clubs to think up the widest range of free entertainment the East End has ever seen.

Things are changing in London's East End; the old streets of Stepney have been up-ended, and there are no street parties in a skyscraper. The Festival aimed to release people from their tower prisons, and it has succeeded. Once again the community gets together on Bigland grass and entertains itself. But it is not a sentimental reunion. New traditions are born amidst the wealth of home-grown talents for which the Festival is the perfect showcase. The ‘round-the-pubs race’, the ‘Dockland road race’, exhibition soccer and the street processions are an invitation for everyone to join in. So too are the stages, stalls, and side-shows, which provide a variety of events and a chance for people to look again at who they are and what is happening to them.

More play space for kids, Dockland for the people, Wilton’s Music Hall for the East End - are just a few of the themes that the Festival has taken up, so there is more to it than the ever-open bar, the music, and the fairground. It is the community making itself heard from the toddlers to the pensioners. When that happens, everyone listens. And, when the Festival is over, the soccer season starts again. Any surplus cash from the Festival is ploughed back into the E1 League, community projects, and local charities, and, of course, the next bigger, better E1 Festival.



This edition is published in association with the Four Corners Gallery exhibition 'A WORLD APART' and showcases the 1974 exhibition through facsimile reproduction of the original panels, shown at several unusual venues across Stepney, from a swimming pool to a laundrette and an open-air display at the festival site, and concluded with a show at The Half Moon Photography Gallery in Alie Street, Whitechapel.
See: https://www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/whats-on/a-world-apart-photographing-change-in-londons-east-end-1970-76



Published by Communimedia, Newport, South Wales

Size A4, 297×210 cm

36 Pages with 19 illustrations

Staple-bound, Velvet-laminated covers

Published in October 2025

Language: English

RRP  £10.00 Plus P&P