Unseen 1970s photographs of East London squatters discovered after photographer's death at 99

When filmmaker Derek Smith began sorting through the belongings of his friend Joyce Edwards after she died in 2023, he didn't expect to uncover more than 100 rolls of unseen film.

Edwards, who died just months before her 100th birthday, had quietly spent the 1970s photographing a squatting community in East London.

Her intimate portraits reveal a group of musicians, artists and radicals who reclaimed abandoned houses and, against the odds, built a housing co-operative that still exists today.

Remarkably, Edwards was not a professional photographer.