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For a while in the Sixties, it was like the entire action drama output of British TV was coming out of Whitechapel. Lew Grade was heading up ITC - the programme-making side of ITV franchisee ATV, with a string of hits including The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Saint, Danger Man, The Baron, The Champions, The Prisoner, The Persuaders, Department S and many more.

Meanwhile, the tireless team of Robert Baker and Monty Berman, both Whitechapel boys themselves, were writing, directing and producing a string of hits, including The Saint, The Baron and Gideon’s Way. Alongside, the pair managed to churn out dozens of films, with thrillers and chillers a speciality. At one point, they were rivalling Hammer as the kings of British cinema horror.

Sidney Baker was born on 27 October 1916 in Whitechapel. His dad pushed him to join the family furrier business but an unwilling Sid decided to go travelling in Europe with pals instead. Back in Britain in 1937 he won a photography competition and landed a job as an assistant director at a London film studio. Joining the Royal Artillery in 1939 he found himself billeted with five other blokes - four of them called Sidney! Each adopted a nom de guerre, with our man becoming ‘Robert’. The name would stick for life.

Baker saw active service at El Alamein, but his greatest experience came with his transfer to the Army Film and Photographic Unit, filming in Italy and Germany, and riding into Berlin on a motorbike and being photographed amid the ruins of Hitler’s Chancellery. It was in the unit that ‘Bob’ met Monty Berman. Nestor Montague Berman was four years older but had shared a similar career trajectory to his new pal. He had worked at Twickenham studios before the war, working his way up to cameraman and getiing a credit on Michael Powell’s semi-documentary The Edge of the World (1937).

The pair emerged into Civvy Street with hundreds of wartime hours of filming behind them - a superb grounding and one that gave them the confidence to make their own movies. Their partnership, Tempean Films, was superbly disciplined, bringing in movies on time and to budget - crucial as they had borrowed the money to set up. It was a lean operation too, with Berman generally working the camera and Baker directing, and the two collaborating on the scripts.

They co-produced two budget vehicles for budding comedy star Terry-Thomas, with A Date With a Dream in 1948 and Melody Club in 1949. The experienced pair were also picking up freelance work, with Berman working with the second unit on Carol Reed’s The Third Man in 1949. The two switched seamlessly between writing, producing and directing.

The pace was relentless, with Baker and Berman reliable producers of the ‘B’ movies that supported the main feature. There were thrillers such as Three Steps to the Gallows, a series of movies in Ireland for Emmett Dalton, some light comedy and, from the late Fifties, schlock-horror to rival Hammer. Consciously or otherwise, the pair paid a number of visits to their native East End, though the historical accuracy of Jack the Ripper (1958) and The Siege of Sidney Street (1960, and actually shot in Dublin on the basis that the Irish capital looked more like the East End than the real East End) is open to question.

As cinema faded and TV came to the fore in the Sixties, the pair were perfectly placed. Baker went to Associated Rediffusion with his treatment for a new series based on the classic Saint crime novels, having persuaded author Leslie Charteris to grant the pair TV rights. Rediffusion were appalled by Baker’s budget of £16,000 an episode - a huge sum for the day - so Baker approached the more farsighted Lew Grade at ATV. Grade saw the potential for selling the high-quality shows, shot on film unusually, to the US. And he had charismatic TV star Patrick McGoohan, already a hit in ATV’s Danger Man, in mind for the lead role.

McGoohan turned it down (too much sex), matinee star Roger Moore stepped in and a hit was born, as well as a lifelong friendship. When Baker died in September this year, Moore described him as one of the kindest men he had ever worked with - praise indeed in the tough world of TV. The ‘overpriced’ ‘The Saint’ went on to gross more than £350m worldwide. Grade commissioned the pair to produce Gideon’s Way, all shot on location around London. Starring John Gregson it was another hit, and The Baron completed the set.

Baker and Berman parted company in the late Sixties, though remained friends. Bob Baker went into partnership with Roger Moore, producing hour-long episodes of The Saint through to 1969, lavishly funded by US TV. The pair hit paydirt again with The Persuaders, teaming Moore with Tony Curtis. Baker came back with Return of the Saint in the late Seventies and squeezed the last drops from the franchise with the Val Kilmer Saint movie in 1997.

Monty hooked up with Dennis Spooner, a native of Tottenham and former Leyton Orient pro, and the new pairing dominated ITV schedules in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The Champions (1968), Randall and Hopkirk (1969), Department S (1969 and starring Peter Wyngarde from the Siege of Sidney Street), and Jason King (1971) rattled off the production line. Berman made his exit with The Adventurer in 1972. Starring that American stalwart of Sixties British telly Gene Barry, it was an unexpected flop. Monty took the hint and withdrew to 30 something years of well-funded retirement. He died on 20 June 2006.file:///Network/Servers/ExpressServer02.express.news/Homes/SilvermanL/Desktop/untitled%20folder/saint%20annual.jpg

The reopening of the Whitechapel Gallery earlier this month, impressively expanded into the space vacated by the Whitechapel Library, is a bold leap into the future for a gallery that has always been proud of its ‘firsts’ and always punched above its weight.

There was much controversy about the library collection’s move out into the new Idea Store, but few would argue about the way the liberated space has been used.The former library is now given over to reading rooms, studios and more gallery space. How appropriate then that one of the opening shows for the reopening should be ‘The Whitechapel Boys’.

Why? Because for that extraordinary group of working class, East End and mostly Jewish artists, the library was both evening school and study, an escape from the cramped Whitechapel houses and tenements in which most lived. ‘The Whitechapel Boys’, which runs until 20 September at the gallery, looks at the origins of a group of radical thinkers who, improbably, escaped the poverty of the East End to form a powerful avant garde in the years around the First World War.

It did no harm at all that gallery and library were next door neighbours. This was a Whitechapel of sweatshops and vermin-plagued tenements and could have been a million miles from the salons and galleries of the West End. To the aspiring young artists the two institutions must have seemed a haven.

The library was endowed by one of the most productive philanthropists of the Victorian age. John Passmore Edwards was the son of a Cornish carpenter, and became first a journalist, then a wealthy newspaper proprietor. Fiercely independent, he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament, twice refused a knighthood and spoke out against the Boer War. You don’t have to walk far in London to stumble across a Passmore Edwards library (there were 24 of them, three in the East End alone) and he also endowed drinking fountains, hospitals, galleries and nursing homes. Edwards was a generous giver to the Workers’ Educational Association and he must have been delighted at the success of his Whitechapel Library, which opened in 1891 - it proved immediately popular.

The gallery meanwhile, was the work of the inexhaustible husband-and-wife team of Samuel and Henrietta Barnett. Canon Barnett had taken the Whitechapel parish of St Jude’s in 1873, and from the start the pair saw their work as a mission. Barnett was instrumental in founding the University Settlements Association, and he would become the first warden of Toynbee Hall (which became the template for others in Britain and the United States). Canon Barnett was another fierce believer in culture and education as a stepladder out of the slums. He held free art exhibitions in St Jude’s schoolroom every Easter but it wasn’t enough. He wanted a dedicated gallery space, where the working men and women of Whitechapel could walk in off the street and see “the finest art of the world”.

Enter Passmore Edwards and his chequebook once more. There was a vacant plot next to the library, and Barnett tapped the philanthropist for £6000 - enough to buy the land and get the building started. It was a masterpiece of the Art Nouveau style. Barnett wanted a statement, but he was canny too. The building was eyecatching, and you walked straight in from the street (no steps) which he and architect Charles Harrison Townsend reasoned would be less intimidating for new visitors. And while the collections drew people in, it didn’t hurt that the gallery had electric light which meant you could stay till 10pm. Most West End galleries closed at dusk.

Over its 108 years the gallery has had ups and downs, but it started on an incredible high, with 206,000 coming to the opening show (including Constable, Rubens and Hogarth) in spring 1901. The first director, Charles Aitken, soon steered the shows away from such traditional fare by showing more challenging modern work by the Fauves, Cubists and Vorticists. A minnow compared to the huge West End galleries, Whitechapel would find its niche as a showplace for new and avant garde work. Meanwhile, the young Whitechapel artists and writers found shelter and inspiration there. And down the years, under the various guises of the East End Academy, the East London Open and the Whitechapel Open, local people were able to display their own work - an East End version of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.

The gallery has really become famous for its ‘firsts’ though. In 1939, the Whitchapel hung ‘Guernica’, Picasso’s depiction of the horrors of the Spanish civil war is displayed at the Whitechapel on its first and so far only visit to Britain. 1956 saw the groundbreaking ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition, while 1958 saw the first major show in Britain of American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. In 1961 came the British premiere of Mark Rothko. 1970 and 1971 saw the first shows of David Hockney, Gilbert & George and Richard Long. And in 1982
the gallery introduced Frida Kahlo to London audiences.

But with the reopening of the expanded Whitechapel it’s appropriate to go back to those early days, when the gallery and the library worked together to produce an extraordinary flowering of East End talent. ‘The Whitechapel Boys’ is an umissable opportunity to see what it was all about.
Artworks on show include ‘Racehorses’ by David Bomberg, ‘Study for Rock Drill’ by Jacob Epstein, ‘Rabbi & Rabbintzin’ by Mark Gertler. Writings include a first edition of Stephen Winsten’s ‘Chains’ and John Rodker’s ‘Collected Poems’ from 1921-25. Context is provided by catalogues, correspondence and press cuttings, building a picture of the world in which they worked.

Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX | T +44 (0)20 7522 7888. For a full list of current exhibitions at the gallery, go to www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions

On 20 May 1900, William Sutton died, leaving a generous bequest to the poor of London. A huge sum, the equivalent of £80m today would found the Sutton Model Dwellings Trust and build a string of estates for the poor, beginning in Bethnal Green, then Chelsea, Islington, Rotherhithe, Plymouth and Birmingham.

If generous, the bequest wasn’t unusual. The Victorian philanthropist-businessman, building a fortune through hard work only to disburse it to those less fortunate, able or motivated, became an archetype. There was landed aristo Lord Rowton, with this Rowton Houses, later patronised by George Orwell. American financier George Peabody was sufficiently appalled by housing in the East End after settling in London in 1837 that he endowed the Peabody Trust. In other parts of Britain, businessmen were building whole towns of model dwellings for their workers, places like New Lanark, Saltaire, Bournville and Port Sunlight.

The bequest did come as a nasty shock to his family though. For unlike those fellow worthies, Sutton had shown no taste for philanthropy during his life. While the Victorian businessman added to the wealth of the country, he also degraded it. The poor were pressed into poorly paid, dirty and often dangerous work, children too. They increasingly squeezed into ever-more crowded London slums. And alcohol (Sutton made a fortune from brewing and distilling) was both a curse and a necessity with no drinkable water in the towns. But during his lifetime Sutton showed no interest in social or sanitary problems. He held no public office and did no charity work. In these dark days before a welfare state, survival depended on the beneficence of rich men and women putting something back. Sutton, it seems, stubbornly kept it all to himself.

William Richard Sutton wasn’t quite a self-made man - his family had enough money from trade to give him a start - but he did show extraordinary industry and foresight. He was born in 1836 at his father’s inn, The Fountain, which stood at 5 Foster Lane, just off Cheapside in the City. His father died when William was just 16 or so, and the family decamped to his mother’s childhood home of Merton in Surrey. His education, at the City of London School, had already ended: William had to get out and earn some money.

Sutton founded Sutton and Co Carriers while he was still in his teens and he showed a sharp eye for business. He turned his eye to the booming businesses of the Victorian era - the new ‘manufactories’, the postal service and the railways - and cleverly put it all together. He had observed that the Post Office, though splendid for letters, didn’t carry parcels. Not that there wasn’t a demand: individuals and small businesses had to trail off to their local railway station and organise carriage, and then inform the recipient, who would travel to their local station to take collection.

Madness thought Sutton. Pubs such as the Fountain had existed as coaching inns for centuries, and the coaches had always transported goods as well as people. The young entrepreneur’s plan was to get country traders to order a delivery from Sutton. He would then bulk everything for a town together into large packages and put it on a train. When they arrived in London, Manchester, Birmingham or wherever, his agents would split the bundles and distribute them. The basement of The Fountain, appropriately enough, served as his centre of operations.

He had founded the firm in the late ‘fifties. By the mid-1860s, he had smart new premises at 35 Aldersgate Street, a business partner in Thomas Watson, and a reputation as ‘carriers to the principal towns in the UK, colonial and foreign parts’. By 1899, the company had a Royal Appointment. The firm was now resplendent in purpose built offices in Golden Lane (close to the modern Barbican). An appalling slum had been cleared to make way - indeed a plague pit needed to be covered with 10ft of concrete before the £33,000 building could be raised.

The scale of Sutton’s business was breathtaking. The freight business alone was so large that the Great Western Railway tried to limit its activities, charging Sutton more than his competitors. The indefatigable Sutton took to the road, employing new-fangled motor lorries, as well as the reliable horse and cart. And he rode out the railways’ resistance, with the business eventually being absorbed into the nationalised freight industry in the 1950s.

Sutton also bought into 11 brewing, bottling and distilling firms. With water unfit to drink, booze was considered essential to keep working people willing and able to work (as well as helping them to forget the horror of their lives). Sutton then diversified into wines, cordials, mineral waters, tea, coffee and tobacco, and then into inns and hotels. And Sutton had money in railway and mining companies throughout the Empire - as these fledgling businesses grew, Sutton’s wealth grew with them. Back in London he invested in the building of warehouses and factories.

A Victorian model then. He gained a reputation for hard work, diligence, energy, foresight … and for having on discernible sense of humour. The only thing missing was the philanthropy. Sutton had been writing and rewriting his will during the 1890s. Part of the problem lay in his complicated family life. He was twice married and apparently had no children, though the 1881 census has him as the father of his wife’s adopted daughter Kate. Wife Eleanor died in 1892, and Sutton married again in 1895, having remade his will. He had removed various of his brother and business partner Charles’s children from the will (Charles married four times and had ten children). He also struck ‘daughter’ Kate from the will and added his new wife. But the majority of the money would go to establish the ‘Sutton Model Dwellings’.

Sutton died in 1900 and his massive inheritance languished in Chancery while the arguments raged. It wasn’t just disgruntled and disinherited family members. Existing landlords, among them the London County Council were worried that these cheap and desirable dwellings would lower competing rents (and thus also cut the income from rates). Sutton’s generous bequest wasn’t going to enrich everyone. But within just a few years, most of the objections had been settled, and the Trust was busily building new homes. The first to rise was the Bethnal Green Estate, completed on 9 May 1909. Designed by architect ECP Monson, the flats had rooms 10 per cent bigger than the average tenement of the day, and most had baths. A century later all do of course … and the estate is still providing affordable homes for East Enders.

It wasn’t the ideal time to be moving into a new flat with your first child, but when is? Bombs were falling on Bethnal Green as a young Julia Richards and husband David moved into their new home on the William Sutton Estate on Roman Road. The new flat wasn’t a palace but it was a lot better than they had been used to. The estate had been completed in May 1909 and celebrates its centenary this year.

The couple had been squeezed into a tiny flat in Temple Dwellings on the Old Bethnal Green Road. There were no bathrooms there of course. Bathtime meant heading out into the concrete yard and fetching the tin tub down from the line. In winter that was pretty miserable. Summer, if anything was worse. ‘The smell from the rubbish was terrible; we had to keep all the windows shut,’ remembers Julia (known universally as ‘Ann’). ‘The Sutton flats weren’t all that good either - but they were cheap, and you had a bath inside. There was a long queue to get them.’

The facilities might seem eccentric by modern standards: the ‘bathroom’ comprised a tub shoehorned into the kitchen, and the living room fire served also to heat the oven. But the family were struggling to live on the couple of quid a week pulled in by David’s job driving a horse and cart. The rents on the Sutton Estate (11 shillings for a two-bedder, 7s and 6d for a one-bed and 5s for a bedsit) helped a lot. But if the flats were nothing special, the entry requirements were brutally strict.

‘You had to have children to get a flat here. I was expecting my first child in 1937 and we were on the list, but I lost it and so we were turned down,’ remembers Ann. The couple finally added to their family in 1941 with Patricia, and Eileen came along two years later. As was the custom with expectant mothers, Ann was evacuated to Northampton until the baby was born, and then, bizarrely, brought back to live in Bethnal Green, with bombs falling around her. The estate was never hit, though the enemy was never far away. Too close for some of the dads on the estate in fact. “On the other side of Roman Road there was an Italian prisoner of war camp. The men used to go off every day for demolition work, but when they were back in the camp you used to hear them singing - beautiful songs, lovely voices. They were good looking men too, and the dads from the estate used to patrol around to stop their daughters going over there!’

Ann has lived in Bethnal Green her whole life. Born in Commercial Road in 1913, she lost her father in the First World War and her mother in the 1920s. After being billeted with a succession of aunts during her teenage years, she married David at 21, ‘the best decision I ever made,’ she laughs.

Michael Jones, originally from Oldham and still with a broad Lancashire accent, is a relative newcomer, only moving to the estate in 1992. An artist, he was drawn by the artistic community that started to grow around Bethnal Green in the eighties and nineties. And moving from Chelsea, he found the Sutton Estate a much more affordable place to live. From his attic flat he has views west to the City and east to the new City at Canary Wharf, and he likes it so much he has no plans to move away.

Michael pulls out an impressive leather-bound rent book and ledger from 1950. The names each have a neat tick against them to say ‘rent paid’. Edwards, Rayment, Peake, Vallance, White, Smith - the surnames are a solid mix of Anglo-Saxon, Irish and Jewish. They don’t use the ledger now of course, but those names would today be mixed with names from the Indian sub-continent, from Africa, and from all over the world. “The estate has changed a lot, and it’s now a really good mix of indigenous East Enders and Bengalis … the new East Enders really. And it’s always been like that in the East End hasn’t it - Huguenots, Jews, Irish, we all become East Enders eventually!” The great thing for Michael is the way the community here is working together, with a sewing group in the estate’s Old Workshop just one of the ways people are meeting and sharing time, skills and memories.

Shahida Khanom’s family moved to the estate from Birmingham when she was just three years old. A quarter of a century on, she wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. ‘There’s a lovely community spirit here - I just feel very safe. We go out to the countryside sometimes and I hate it … it’s too quiet,’ she laughs. ‘I love the activity and the noise round here. And my two sons go to school at Globe, just across the road.’ The same school that Ann Richards’s daughters, Eileen and Patricia, trotted across the road to 60 years ago. The names and faces may change, but some things on the estate stay constant.

[boxout]
100 years of the William Sutton Estate.
Our pictures come from the Fun Day on 7 April, which involved old and young, an art competition, old pictures, a timeline and an Easter Egg hunt. But this is just the start of the celebrations of 100 years of the estate. The managers and residents are keen to collect the memories and memorabilia of people who live or lived on the estate … no matter where you are. Did you grow up on the William Sutton Estate in Bethnal Green? The estate managers have set up an email address, at bethnalgreenreunited@williamsutton.org.uk for residents and people in the local community (or those who’ve moved away) to contact if they have any interesting photos or memories that they’d like to share. And residents on the estate have uploaded a blog in celebration of reaching their century. Take a look at http://ifwallscouldtalk100years.wordpress.com.

Benjamin Baruch Ambrose entered the world on 15 September 1896, the son of an East End Jewish wool merchant. His parents, like many thousands of Jews before them, had fled to London from the persecution and pogroms of Eastern Europe. And like many thousands of others, they believed in the twin pillars of hard work and family.

The young Benjamin, with his at least slightly Anglicised name, was luckier than many. As a merchant, his middle class father was better placed than the multitude of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who daily fought for a living in the sweatshops of Whitechapel. Benjamin, or Bert, as he was now calling himself, had no intention of going into the family firm though. Music was everywhere in the East End Jewish community of the early 20th century - in the home, on the street in the theatres and music halls - and the young Bert showed an early flair for the violin.

But playing the violin on street corners and in East End music halls wouldn’t be enough for the ambitious young Ambrose. America was where the glamour and the money was. New York in the days before World War I was a far more bustling and vibrant place than London, as immigrants poured in from all over the globe. The restaurants and supper clubs of the city were paying good money and musicians arrived from all over Europe, melding their traditional folk strains with music from the classics and the music hall, and the Blues music which Black musicians were bringing from the south. From this rich mix would emerge Jazz, while the new supper bands would serve up ‘whiter’ versions to enterain the diners and quaffers of cocktails.

At 15, Ambrose (the Bert was soon discarded) left for New York with his aunt, and soon landed his first professional job on violin, playing for Emil Coleman at Reisenweber’s restaurant. He was able, ambitious and worked hard and soon moved to the big band at the Palais Royal, backing the floor show. But Bert wasn’t to stay in the background long. When the bandleader was taken ill, the teenager stepped into the breach and made the job his own. Realising there was more money in running the show, he put together a 15-piece band at $50 a week. A row with the owner of the Palais Royal saw Ambrose moving his whole outfit to the Club de Vingt, where his popularity and wages only increased.

But brilliant careers depend as much on chance as design. Ambrose was back in London in 1922 to visit his sick mother in Whitechapel when he was approached by the owner of the West End’s Embassy Club. Albert de Corville was trying to build a nightspot to rival the glamour of New York and offered Ambrose the unheard-of sum of £360 a week to lead a seven-piece band at the club. Almost immediately de Corville fell into money troubles and was bought out by restauranteur Luigi, who offered Ambrose a share of the business.

It seems extraordinary now that a star of Ambrose’s magnitude could get to his late twenties without ever hanging made a recording. But the 1920s is when records really kicked off. Not many people could hear the famous bands live, but they could buy their discs and listen to them on the wireless. In April 1923, Ambrose entered the studio to cut 12 sides for Columbia. He must have had a canny eye on the States, where live broadcasts from the restaurants and clubs, and from theatres such as the Savoy Ballroom and the Apollo, were making stars of the musicians and boosting demand for their recordings.

Back in London though, Ambrose’s records weren’t selling, hindered by Luigi’s staunch insistence that there would be no broadcasting from the Embassy. Columbia, denied the publicity of radio, didn’t ask Ambrose and his boys to cut any more discs. The following year, Ambrose walked out, onto the boat, and took up a residency at New York’s Clover Gardens for $200 a night. For a year, the bandleader ignored the increasingly frantic pleas from Luigi to return home, only capitulating when he got a cable from the Prince of Wales, an Embassy regular. “The Embassy needs you. Come back - Edward,” read the message. Ambrose heeded the royal command and returned, for a couple of years at least.

But in 1927 he was enticed away for good, by a contract at the newly opened May Fair Hotel. The money wasn’t so great, around £500 a week, but crucially broadcasting was included, and Ambrose became a huge star with his Anglo-American combo. If Ambrose had a sharp eye for the deal, he also had a terrible way with money and a habit of falling out with his business partners. During the twenties and thirties he moved back and forth between The May Fair and the Embassy, to the Cafe de Paris, to Ciro’s Club (and an abortive business venture with American bandleader Jack Harris), and made his real money with countless recordings for Decca, HMV and Brunswick.

By 1940, Ambrose was exhausted and fed up with a West End beset by German air raids. He decamped to his farm in Hertfordshire, only emerging to cut more discs with his all-star band. He discovered his taste for live music in the fifties, but also found that the world had moved on. He played with ever-smaller bands in the hope that rock and roll would be a passing fad. By the late fifties, the money had gone. A compulsive gambler, Ambrose once boasted he had ’spent a million pounds at the tables’. In the late forties he had been hauled into court on currency charges. But now he struck lucky, discovering the 16-year-old Kathy Kirby singing at the Ilford Palais. Ambrose pushed here and her song ‘Secret Love’. Kirby became a star, and Ambrose was flush once more. His remaining years were spent as Kirby’s manager.

Ambrose collapsed on Saturday, 11 June, 1971 at the Yorkshire TV studios, where Kirby was recording a show. He died later that night. Kirby was shattered by the death of her mentor and her career never recovered.

There’s nothing new about panoramas of the River Thames. In pen and pencil, oil, etching and engraving and latterly on film (and its digital successor), men and women have been picturing the continuous development of London’s riverscape.

To a list including James McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet, JMW Turner and Canaletto, add the names of Mike Seaborne, Graham Diprose and Charles Craig. Last year, these three London photographers set themselves the task of making a complete panorama of the north and south banks of the Thames from London Bridge: downriver to Greenwich on the southern bank and the Isle of Dogs on the north. One of the most fascinating results was the change that time had wrought … because of course the trio have been here before.

The story of the panorama really starts in 1937, when the Port of London Authority (PLA) commissioned Avery Illustrations to produce a complete set of overlapping photos, downriver from London Bridge to Greenwich and the Island. Why they did so was a mystery. The PLA was a mighty organisation, then-governor of the largest port of the world (London is still Britain’s second biggest), and very media-savvy, yet the photos appeared in none of its own publications nor in the press. The mammoth job of shooting 4.8 miles on either bank was completed - and then disappeared into the PLA library and archive, only to emerge 50 years later.

Chris Ellmers and Alex Werner immediately saw the potential of the find when they published ‘London’s Lost Riverscape’ in 1988. It was 20 years after the final mass closure of the docks (the London Docks in Wapping were closed in 1969). ‘Docklands’ was emerging as a commercial venture from the wreckage of 200 years of commercial, maritime and architectural activity. And Londoners, many of whom had forgotten the fact that theirs was a seafaring and trading town, were getting nostalgic. Werner and Ellmers’ book was a huge seller, and it fired the curiosity of Seaborne, Diprose and Craig. In 1997 the trio thought ‘why not do it again … but this time in colour?’.

They found an extraordinary world, where sweeping away two centuries of history and contamination. wasn’t so easy as the developers might have hoped. Trudging across the site of the yet-to-be-built Millennium Dome, in full protective gear, the snappers were warned ‘don’t tread on the green crystals, they’re cyanide’. They watched in amazement as a JCB digger gracefully sank into an unmarked coal-tar pit.

Their work was published in 2000 as ‘London’s Riverscape Lost & Found’, and provided a remarkable side-by-side comparison of what had been swept away by Luftwaffe bombs and redevelopment - and what had remained. Wapping’s Gun Wharves was still there, converted into luxury flats, as were New Crane Wharves and large chunks of the Limehouse waterfront;Crown Mill, Roneo, Eagle and a dozen other Limehouse wharves are now luxury apartment blocks, with cleaned-up brickwork and suspiciously modern windows giving the redevelopment game away. Alongside though, are acres of ‘faux Docklands’; eighties blocks pretending to be old warehouses, and ranging from the fairly convincing to the hideously garish - this was the 1980s after all.

So how much has changed in 2009? Many of the remaining post-industrial gaps have been plugged, and the Greenwich peninsula is no longer a polluted wasteland. After the false start of the Millennium Dome, the O2 has now brought that corner back to life. And interestingly, at a time when many are bemoaning the lack of access to the river, with private apartment blocks providing an impenetrable barrier, the trio found Londoners were using their river far more than a decade before. The development of the Thames Pathway, new gardens and public spaces, riverside pubs and restaurants, and new piers for the riverboats, are all pulling us back to the river … and reminding us of why London was here in the first place. And alongside the panorama pieces, the authors have selected candid shots from the early years of the 20th centuries - reminding us of when all this was docks, not just Docklands.

London being London, the process of change never stops of course. Mike Seaborne is also Senior Curator of Photography at the Museum of London, and has spent much time recently photographing the Lower Lea Valley - which is fast becoming the 2012 Olympic site. London writer Iain Sinclair isn’t alone in mourning the improvement of another slice of east London’s post-industrial present into a tidily packaged future. In ten years time we may be looking back at Seaborne’s Lea Valley photos and thinking - alongside what we’ve gained - of how much we’ve lost.

London’s Changing Riverscape, Panoramas from London Bridge to Greenwich by by Graham Diprose, Charles Graig, Mike Seaborne with Chris Ellmers and Alex Werner, published by Frances Lincoln, ISBN-10: 0711229414, hardcover, £30

Timeline:
43AD: Romans establish London as a fort and trading base.
1550s on: Dutch and Flemish painters come to London and depict Thames. Among them are Leonard Knyff Jan Siberechts and Johannes Kip
1740s: Canaletto’s paintings include one of the first Westminster Bridge.
1840s: First photographs of London and the Thames
1860s: Whistler produces numerous etchings, prints and oil paintings including ‘The Thames in Ice’
Early 1900s: Claude Monet’s London paintings including ‘London, the Parliament, Effects of Sun in the Fog’ (1904). Exactly a century later this painting sold for $20.1m
1920s on: Stanley Spencer produces paintings of the upper reaches of the Thames
1937: PLA commissions Avery Illustrations to produce a black-and-white photographic panorama of the Thames
1939: Second World War sees extensive damage to docks accelerating decline
1969: London Docks close and are taken over by Tower Hamlets. Remnants today include Tobacco Dock and the Shadwell Basin
1988: Alex Werner and Chris Ellmers produce the book ‘London’s Lost Riverscape’ based around the 1937 photos
1997: Craig, Diprose and Seaborne begin a colour panorama, extending the reach downriver to the Millennium Dome site on the south bank and Bow Creek on the north. Published in 2000 as ‘London’s Riverscape Lost & Found’

We seem to be awash in anniversaries at the moment. But Charles Darwin and Robbie Burns can step aside for a true hero of the East End this month. George Lansbury was born on 21 February 1859. He lived to see World War II, having fought alongside striking dockers, founded a national newspaper, gone to prison for his beliefs, and led the Labour Party.

A programme of events at Bow and Westminster will mark a century and a half since the birth of the man AJP Taylor called ‘the most lovable figure in modern politics’. Local happenings include a memorial service at St Mary’s Bow, where Lansbury worshipped for 40 years. There will be a meeting at Bromley Public Hall, addressed by Tony Benn. The connections both with family and East End politics go back a long way - Benn’s grandfather John was an LCC councillor and active in the 1889 London Docks Strike alongside Lansbury. Other speakers include Shirley Williams and Roy Hattersley - it’s obvious that Lansbury means a lot to the Labour movement to this day. But the tenor of the celebrations marks a change of emphasis, putting Lansbury’s remarkable political contribution firmly in the context of his Christian faith.

The enduring affection for Lansbury largely comes from his stubborn determination to stand up for what he thought was right: he was a constant thorn in the side of party colleagues and opponents alike. In 1886 Lansbury, at that time a Liberal, was General Secretary of the Bow & Bromley Liberal Association, but would resign over the leadership’s refusal to support legislation for a shorter working week. In 1892 Lansbury was elected to the Board of Guardians that ran Poplar Workhouse. Bucking the principle that the workhouse should be made miserable, so miserable that people would avoid it at all costs (and so save the borough money), Lansbury and his colleagues made the workhouse a useful experience. They sent unemployed men out to the Laindon Farm Colony, near Basildon, taught them the basics of market gardening and got many back to work.

It took Lansbury three goes to win a Parliamentary seat, but having landed Bow & Bromley for Labour in 1910, he resigned his seat two years later, fighting the resulting by-election on a platform of votes for women. It was a ploy to draw attention to the plight of Suffragette prisoners, but was never likely to find sufficient popular support (women not having the vote of course). The Daily Herald he helped found in 1911 opposed Britain entering the First World War: they weren’t unique in this, but it was a boldly contrary move as the country was being whipped into a jingoistic fervour.

And in 1921 came the campaign which would define Lansbury in the eyes of many East Enders - and which would create that reputation as ‘the most lovable figure in modern politics’. As Mayor of Poplar he defied government to raise the rate - again, it was to boost poor relief. Lansbury and his councillors refused to back down, going to prison for four months for their principles and inventing the word ‘Poplarism’ in the process. He would resign from Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government in 1931 (and go on to lead the Labour Party himself), and bitterly opposed Britain’s entry into World War II.

Lansbury’s politics were grounded in principle and in his Christian faith. Some would argue that such a principled refusal to compromise is the opposite of politics. But another East Ender, who succeeded him as Labour leader, neatly argued that Lansbury was not only a good man, but an effective operator. Clement Attlee called him ‘an evangelist rather than a Parliamentary tactician. Yet during those years in which he led the small Party in the House he showed great skill and powers of everyday leadership’.

The Revd Michael Peet, Rector of Bow church is leading the events that celebrate Lansbury’s life over the weekend of 21/22 February and argues “George Lansbury’s achievements in local and national politics are enormously impressive, but even more so is the sheer goodness of the man. After his death a local man said that, ‘One just could not help loving George Lansbury because there was nothing but love in his heart.’” While maintaining his political career and running the Daily Herald, Lansbury was a tireless figure in his local church, serving on its councils, running men’s and youth groups, Bible classes, the Temperance Society, supporting the church football team.

Events include a history walk along Bow Road on Saturday 21 February at 2pm, starting at Bow tube station. The memorial service is at St Mary’s Bow Church on Bow Road, Sunday 22 February at 4pm. For further information contact Nigel Whiskin on 01793 747362, 07775 630153 or whiskino6@btinternet.com.

The themes, language and characters of ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’ were a disturbing blast of the new for London’s theatreland when the play moved up west from Stratford. So it comes as a shock to realise that the irreverent musical is 50 years old this month.

So much about the play was novel. This exuberant and sentimental piece by Lionel Bart and Frank Norman may not seem to share much with the ‘kitchen sink dramas’, and the ‘angry’ writers such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker. But it too played its part in sweeping away the dead wood from the West End. The Shaftsbury Avenue of the 1950s seemed filled with plays that reflected polite Edwardian London rather than a city where Teddy Boys were slashing cinema seats. In the work of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, the working classes were represented by minor comedy characters - in Bart and Norman’s play, the working classes (teds and all) took centre stage.

With the background of the two, how could it be any different. The play had been written by Norman, who had followed a troubled road to the East End. He had been abandoned by his mum and dad as a boy, turned out by his adoptive parents, and shunted around a succession of children’s homes before drifting into crime and a three-year prison sentence in his early twenties. Released from jail in 1957 he began writing. First his prison memoir, ‘Bang to Rights’ was a surprise hit. Soon afterwards, Joan Littlewood, who was reinventing theatre out at Stratford East, picked up the draft of ‘Fings’. She handed it to collaborator Lionel Bart and the experimental theatre company had a hit on its hands.

Bart meanwhile was East End to the core. Lionel Begleiter had been born in Stepney, the son of a Jewish tailor. He was a talented painter and a natural musician but seemd to lack the discipline to stick at anything. In the late forties he was expelled from St Martin’s School of Art for ‘mischievousness’. That mischief found an outlet a few years later, first in a string of hits for Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Anthony Newley, then in a run of musicals that drew heavily on his cockney roots.

Bart took the language of the East End and cranked it to within an inch of parody. And in ‘Fings’ he had great material to start with. Jeffrey Bernard, no mean hand with a comic phrase himself, wrote that Norman was “a ‘natural’ writer of considerable wit, powers of sardonic observation and with a razor sharp ear for dialogue particularly as spoken in the underworld”. As any writer knows, there is a wealth of craft and a deal of sweat in appearing ‘natural’. Frank’s renditions of cockney speak is real like the New York slang of Damon Runyon’s New Yorkers is real - colourful, exaggerated and humourous, catching the spirit of the language better than any dry transcription could.

And when Bart got hold of Norman’s play ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be’ (it was always dubbed ‘a play with music’ rather than a musical) the great Brooklyn writer might have recognised many of the character types - if he could have understood the words that is. Bart, released from the restrictions of turning out two and a half minute pop songs for Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Anthony Newley, went totally to town. He knew he was good. For years he had been writing songs for amateur revues at the left-wing Unity Theatre (a theatre club that had grown from the Workers’ Theatre Movement, itself born in the politics of the 1930s’ East End). But he had also won three Ivor Novello awards for his pop numbers in 1957, another four in ‘58 and two in 1960. By the time he got to work on ‘Fings’ Bart was at the top of his game and oozing confidence.

So Lionel took Norman’s motley crew of spivs, hookers, gamblers, teds and bent coppers and matched his cracking tunes to lyrics that had some among the West End audiences laughing … but others scratching their heads. The references to ‘our local Palais’, trips to Southend and ‘Teds in drainpipe trousers’ were one thing. But the use of rhyming slang and thieves cant (similar to gay ‘polari’, this back slang was only intelligible to those in the know) mystified many in the stalls. The producers thoughtfully produced translations of many of the words in the programme. A few years later, another product of Stratford East, ‘Sparrers Can’t Sing’ would also baffle non-cockneys.

Give it a few years and everybody would expect regional accents and slang in their films, plays, musicals and pop songs. Bart, who probably thought he was, at 29, at the start of a brilliant career, was sadly closer to its end. ‘Oliver!’ followed just a year after ‘Fings’ but the sixties saw a a couple of hits followed by some expensive flops. Norman wrote more autobiography, a string of moderately successful novels, before enjoying an Indian Summer with his three late ‘Soho caper’ novels, featuring Soho private eye Ed Nelson.

* Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be debuted at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in February 1959.
* Frank Norman died in December 1980 of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
* Lionel Bart died in 1999 of cancer.

So what do ‘canaries’ and ‘herons’ have to do with the docks? What exactly was the ‘poplar’ or the ‘mudchute’. The London Underground and DLR have some pretty curious station names, and in the East End we have some of the more bizarre.

Aldgate Station was opened on 18 November 1876, and is named after one of the four original gates in the wall of the City, built by the Saxons, rebuilt in 1609 but finally taken down in 1761. The gate which once spanned the road between Dukes Place and Jewry Street, was once thought to derive its name from ‘old gate’, though the Saxon root is ‘Aelgate’, meaning ‘open to all gate’ or free in other words). The derivation of Aldgate East station is fairly obvious, though the halt, opened on 6 October 1884, was originally to be called Commercial Road. The station was moved a short way east in 1938.

There are some arguments about the derivation of the name Bethnal Green. The green is obvious enough (though there is little of that left) and the area was known as Blithehale during the 13th century. There was a family named Blida here during the early middle ages and the Bythe stream once flowed through the area. Before the station was opened as part of the Central Line extension on 4 December 1946 there was some debate as to whether it should be called simply ‘Bethnal’ to distinguish it from the LNER station a few minutes away.

On the same day, the new Mile End station opened with Central Line trains; the station had first opened in June 1902 as part of the Whitchapel and Bow Railway (W&BR), one of the many midget operations that abounded in London at the time. Mile End is so called because of its position on the main London-Colchester road (the main thoroughfare from Roman times). ‘La Mile ende’, as it was recorded in 1288, was a hamlet a mile east of Aldgate.

The only other stops on the W&BR were Whitchapel, Stepney Green, Bow Road and Bromley. Stepney is recorded as Stibenhede in the Domesday Book, coming from Stebbing (a family name) and hithe (meaning ‘landing place’, think Rotherhithe). Stepney remains though the green is much reduced. Whitechapel owes its name to the white stone chapel of St Mary Matfelon, which dated from 1329. After several rebuildings and World War 2 bomb damage, it was eventually demolished in 1952. This station predates the W&BR, opening in 1876 with the extension of the East London Railway north from Wapping to Liverpool Street.

The W&BR eventually joined up with the District Railway and ran into Tower Hill station (which of course gets its name from the rise next to the Tower of London). To inject a dash of the confusion so beloved of London Underground, the station has been renamed (originally Seething Lane was an option before it was opened as Mark Lane in 1884). It got the name Tower Hill in 1946, and was then moved in 1967 to the site of the old Tower of London station (open for just two years in the 1880s). Clear enough? Good.

The district of Bow, of course, owes its name to the arched or bowed bridge built over the River Lea in the 12th century. The main road east out of the City thus became the Bow Road. The current Bow Road tube station opened in 1902 but was one of only three stations within a few yards of each other. There was also a Bow Road station on the Great Eastern Line (the old station building is between the Ferrodo rail bridge and the Little Driver pub), and Bow station on the North London Railway (now the site of Bow Church DLR station).

Just down the line from Bow, Bromley station was opened on the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway (the modern Fenchurch Street Line) in 1858. It was taken over by the London Underground in 1902 and renamed Bromley-by-Bow in 1968. Records from the year 1000 have Bromley as Braembelege, from the Old English broom (tree) and leah (forest).

The new Docklands tube and DLR stations tend to hark back to the days when these were docks proper. Canary Wharf station dates from 1987, but the original Canary Wharf was built in 1936, a nod to the Canary Island imports which were a mainstay of the area’s trade. West India Quay was once the West India Dock. This seems to follow a post-industrial naming tradition in London - just as Surrey Docks became Surrey Quays, so the southern part of the West India Dock became South Quay, and a nesting place for Herons became Heron Quays. A neat theory that breaks down once we get to the old East India Docks: the station is plain East India.

The medieval ‘Bleak wall’ was a shipyard from the 16th century, and became the entrance to the West India Docks in the 1800s. Today the ships are gone and we have Blackwall station. Crossharbour, meanwhile, was the functional name invented for the new development at the centre of the Isle of Dogs, the station losing its ‘London Arena’ appendage in 2007 after the arena was demolished. The name Mudchute is similarly prosaic - lying next to an artificial hill created by the dredging of mud from the Millwall dock down the years. Island Gardens, meanwhile, lies next to the formal gardens laid out on former wasteland at the tip of the Isle of Dogs in 1895 by the London County Council.

And Poplar? Well, in the absence of documentary proof, historians have to fall back on that reliable mainstay … guesswork and a bit of cheating. Many sources have it as ‘probably’ a poplar tree that served as a meeting place for local folk.

For more (loads more) see ‘What’s in a name’ by Cyril M Harris, which documents the origins of the names of all current stations on the Tube and DLR. A London Transport Museum publication, ISBN 9781854142412, £4.95.

Many cities are defined by their soaring towers - Manhattan, Shanghai, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur and the rest compete to outdo the next town with the latest shimmering shard of glass and steel. London’s different - our Gherkins and Canary Wharfs barely scratch the ankles of the world’s tallest buildings. Maybe that’s because a 2000-year-old city feels less need to show off. But also, with generation upon generation, layer upon layer of building, much of our most interesting stuff is in the little curiosities, in buildings that are hidden, or even underground.

David Long’s ‘Tunnels, Towers & Temples - London’s Strangest Places’, is a mini coffee table slab with some worthy mentions of East End and City places. This sideways look at London’s ‘built environment’ is a great way in to London and the East End. The best way to get to know a city is to get off the well-beaten tourist routes and into the grubby corners, and Long’s book has plenty of those. At the corner of Chance Street and Whitby Street, at the City end of Bethnal Green Road, you happen upon the ‘massive corner slab’ of the ‘Dirty House’. Architect David Adjaye’s remodelling of a Victorian brick terrace, as a live-work space for artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster is at the heart of Shoreditch’s reinvention as London’s artists’ quarter: neighbours include Antony Gormley, Michael Craig Martin and Rachel Whiteread (in that East End staple, the converted synagogue).

A little way south in Spitalfields lie the ‘elegant sweatshops’ of Wilkes Street in Spitalfields, the old weavers’ houses built for Huguenots who fled here following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Clustered around Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, the terraces were long in the shadow of demolition before being saved by campaigners (both private owners and the Spitalfields Housing Trust) from the 1980s onward. These are houses of such simple beauty that it is extraordinary to think they were ever threatened with redevelopment.

Head down to the river at Wapping Wall and you’ll find the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. Nowadays it’s the Wapping Project, a posh restaurant serving ’substantial modern Mediterranean food and an all Australian wine list’ but for more than a century it was home to the London Hydraulic Power Company. From the little brick building, a network of nearly 200 miles of tunnels radiated from Limehouse in the east to Earls Court Exhibition Centre in the west; from Pentonville Road in the north and south under the river to Southwark and Rotherhithe. The conduits carried water pressurised to 600lb per square inch, the power to drive hotel lifts, theatre curtains, dockyard cranes and presses for forging, flanging and hat-blocking around the capital. Heath Robinson it may sound, but such was the Victorian genius for invention before electricity came along to solve the problem. The station opened in 1890 and only closed in 1977, with its tunnels (one big enough to drive a car through) now used to carry fibre optic cables.

There’s another example of a new use for old tunnelling right next door - albeit on a much grander scale. Wapping Underground Station, currently closed during the extension of the East London Line, isn’t much to look at - the interesting stuff lies beneath. The Thames Foot Tunnel was constructed over 18 years by the Brunels, at heavy cost in both money and human life. An engineering miracle, it was also a white elephant, until taken over by the new East London Railway in 1865. At least it found a new use. Columbia Market was a laudable attempt by philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts to give East Enders a decent place to both shop and run market stalls, a full 400 of them. Opened in 1869, it struggled unsuccessfully along until 1886, and was finally demolished in 1958, despite protests from many including architecture historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner.

Older by far is the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which was a century and a half in business before it moved into its ‘new’ premises on Whitechapel Road in 1583. Shortly afterwards the foundry was casting the bells for Westminster Abbey. The business moved to its current home in 1670, and here they made the bells for Russia’s new capital of St Petersburg in 1747 and for Christ Church in Philadelphia in 1784. Most famously, the largest bell ever made in London was cast here. Big Ben first rang out in July 1859.

It’s well worth heading out from the East End, to oddities such as the ancient place of sanctuary in Ely Place in the City (technically part of Cambridgeshire); to London’s own aqueduct, which runs through Myddleton Square, EC1; the sewer-powered gas lamp in Carting Lane, WC2; and Coram’s Fields, where adults are only allowed in if accompanied by a child.

‘Tunnels, Towers & Temples - London’s Strangest Places’ by David Long, published by the History Press, £19.99 hardback, ISBN 9780750945097.