Over the years, loads of imimgrants came to East London, and set up in essential industries such as food logistics and distribution.
Produce was brought in at Tilbury Docks etc, warehoused and distributed from places like Leytonstone. After world War II, the automatic telephone and long distance dialling made it a lot easier for these businesses to take orders from a wider customer base as far as Essex and Suffolk…
Today whilst cycling to work I noticed a big van on Norwich Road, delivering “specialist East European Groceries” (actually I had to ride round it as it was half parked in the middle of the road)
their telephone number was something like
020 8539 0023 (actually the last four digits are made up
or 020 8 LEYtonstone 0023
I must have a look in that shop one day, they are good for cheap food and booze (if you don’t know what the foreign names are, just ask the people there or look them up on the internet :laugh_at:)
