eastlondonhistory.com

It seems like the streets of the East End get busier every day, as cars, buses, lorries and pedestrians rush frantically about their daily business.
But if London seems busy on the surface, there is another world, a subterranean world we only see glimpses of. As much is going on beneath the streets of the city – and a new edition of a fascinating book scratches away at the London clay to uncover the complex world that lies beneath our feet.
Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman’s London Under London leaves no stone unturned, as the pair look at East Enders being driven underground by the Blitz, the lost and buried rivers of London, the intricate network of water, hydraulic power and gas pipes that feed our city, tunnels under the Thames, underground railways, civil defence… and ‘oddities’.
Many of these oddities are underground systems that have been made redundant by progress and the passage of time – the subterranean tram system proposed by a Royal Commission in the early 1900s but never adopted; the ghost Underground stations, such as St Mary’s Whitechapel, which were left behind by population shifts, ruthless competition, or just rank bad planning; and the disastrous attempts to join east and south London by tunnels under the Thames.
We see the often shambolic progress of Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel – 18 years and several bankruptcies in the construction, it claimed the lives of several workmen and, ultimately, that of the broken Brunel himself.
The tunnel, like many under-London schemes, adapted to the times, becoming first a footway, then the route of the London to Brighton railway, before finally settling into its role as the conduit of the East London Line between Wapping and Rotherhithe.
Of course, much of the tunnelling was essential to protect the life of London as a city. The East End was sinking under a tide of filth and sewage before Joseph Bazalgette built his new sewage system in the 1800s, and we follow the progress of London’s fresh drinking water eastward – in fact only the pipes that run from the River Lea’s reservoirs go against this flow, pumping water westward and back into the East End.

And if you think London is overcrowded today, take a look at Victorian street scenes – if possible, the traffic moves even more slowly. It was in response to this Dickensian gridlock that underground railways were first proposed – boring through the East End soil in the case of the Central Line, but causing much more chaos in the construction with the cut-and-cover District Line and wholesale destruction of streets and houses.
Some tunnelling is more secret than others of course. The book charts the building and appropriation by tunnels of generations of governments, ministries and essential utilities, as they built bolt holes against terrorism, insurrection and nuclear war
And we see how the undermining of London continues into our new century, as ever more traffic competes for a finite amount of space – the Isle of Dogs, already carved to pieces a century or so ago to accommodate the ocean-going goods ships, is now holed beneath the surface too, as the Jubilee Line extension snakes under the borough.

London Under London: a subterranean guide by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman; published by John Murray ISBN 0719552885; £15.99.

It’s an irony of royal life that though our kings and queens may have been born in Westminster, Scotland, Germany, France or elsewhere, a good number of them ended their days right here – in Tower Hamlets.
With a room at the Tower, a number of them ended their days a little sooner than they would have planned.
Now a new book digs into the medical history of our monarchs. The Death of Kings takes a detailed, grisly, but fascinating look at the causes, that saw off some of our rulers.
Since William I built the Tower of London, it had become the most select jail in the land, housing not only enemies of the ruler but rulers who had fallen from power themselves.
Queen to be, Elizabeth I was famously incarcerated in the Tower by her sister, Queen Mary. In the 1550s, England was in the midst of a religious schism, as Mary tried to re-institute Catholicism as the established faith of the land.
Wyatt Rebellion
Elizabeth, meanwhile, faithfully followed her father Henry VIII’s lead, as founder of the Church of England. She became closely identified with plots such as the Wyatt Rebellion, which aimed to overthrow Mary and continue with England’s Protestant Reformation.
Mary had Elizabeth locked in the Tower for two months until she relented and put her under house arrest in Woodstock, Oxfordshire.
Another of Mary’s possible rivals was less fortunate. Her cousin, Lady Jane Grey was seen as a possible rallying figure for angry Protestants. Following the Wyatt Rebellion, many courtiers called for her death – Mary reluctantly agreed.
First though she tried to save Jane’s soul by begging her to convert to Catholicism. Jane, in her comfortable Tower apartments, reportedly enjoyed theological debates with Dr Feckenham, the Abbot of Westminster, but refused the offer. She was executed on Tower Green on February 12, 1554.
Eighty years before, one of Elizabeth’s predecessors as monarch had not managed to escape the Tower alive.

Melancholy
Henry VI had always had problems as King. He inherited a degree of mental instability from his mother, Catherine de Valois. He had attacks of melancholy and depression that lasted months, in one case from August 10, 1453 to Christmas the following year.
The apathetic king showed no reaction upon the birth of his son and had mixed fortunes in his battles with the House of York, at one stage being captured by the enemy. His powerful wife Queen Margaret, leading the royal army, managed to free her hapless husband with a victory at the Battle of St Albans.
But his freedom was short lived. Edward of York advanced on London and was proclaimed Edward IV - Henry was sent to the Tower in 1461. Edward soon fell out with his lieutenant, Warwick, and fled to Calais. Henry was free, and King, once more.
Edward returned to England in 1471 and, at the battle of Tewkesbury, the redoubtable Margaret was finally defeated. Edward VI returned to the Tower for good.
Stabbed
It is most likely that Henry was stabbed to death by his guards, on Edward’s orders. His body was disinterred in 1910, and medical experts took a new look at his case.
The book holds a grisly fascination – William II dying in battle, Henry V of cancer of the rectum, Henry III of a stroke, and Mary II of smallpox. Our rulers, though grand in life, in death are as human and vulnerable as the rest of us.

The Death of Kings:
a medical history of the Kings and Queens of England
by Clifford Brewer; published Abson Books £7.95.

Visiting tourists looking for the East End’s most famous market could be forgiven for being confused.
In fact, you will sometimes see them outside Aldgate East station, or at the foot of Middlesex Street, scratching their heads as they pore over their A to Zs.
Because, of course, there is no such street as Petticoat Lane – and nor has their been for around 170 years.
Hog’s Lane
Back in medieval times, Middlesex Street, the hub of the modern-day Lane, was a pleasant, tree-lined country road called Hog’s Lane – probably because it was used as a path to drive pigs from the nearby fields to market.
As early as 1590, its rural nature was changing, and Hog’s Lane meandered through a residential suburb of tidy country cottages, nestling outside the City walls.
And only a few years later, in 1608, it had changed again, to a commercial district. A map of the time shows the Lane
was now being referred to as ‘Peticote Lane’, named after the used garment vendors who plied their trade there.
It was still considered a fashionable address in the country, and during the reign of James I, the Spaniards who came to the English court settled here.
But like so much of London, Petticoat Lane was altered forever by the Great Plague of 1665. The rich fled the dangers of London, and property prices plummeted. As so often in Spitalfields, a new wave of immigrants replaced the old. This time it was Huguenot and Jewish weavers, carrying on the tradition of garment workers in the area.
It’s astonishing to think that this thread of tradition is unbroken – though the faces, clothes, names and nationalities of immigrants have changed – more than 300 years later.

By the 1750s, Petticoat Lane was not only a centre of manufacturing clothes, it had become a garment market, too. The well-to-do would trip out of the City on a Sunday to purchase the wares at the Lane.
It was 1830 when Petticoat Lane was dignified with the new name of Middlesex Street. Amazing, too, that though the name was taken off official maps so long ago, it is still how everyone knows the market.
By now, the Lane was not only the place to buy new and second-hand clothes, it was a centre for all kinds of secondhand goods, and the nearby markets of Brick Lane and Club Row made Spitalfields the marketplace of all London.
Sunday sins
Middlesex Street was widened following demolitions in 1900, giving the traders even more room to set up their stalls. But the moralities of the time frowned on Sunday trading, and there were numerous attempts to halt the famous Petticoat Lane Sunday market.
Some of these were none too subtle – with buses and fire engines being driven through the crowds in an attempt to break things up.
In 1936, the authorities bowed to the inevitable, and the Lane became protected by an Act of Parliament.
Brick Lane may have become increasingly gentrified these days, and Club Row can no longer sell the caged birds that made it famous from the Huguenot times right through to the 1980s. But Petticoat Lane remains essentially unchanged, with an exuberance and life that comes from several hundred years of the rag trade plying its business on East End streets. To tourists it may turn out to be ‘Middlesex Street’, but to East Enders it will always just be The Lane.

As our Olympians prepare for another assault on the medals, the thoughts of one East End hero will be racing back 44 years to another Australian Olym-piad, and the winning of a precious gold medal.
Terry Spinks was the babyfaced boxing hero of the 1956 Games in Melbourne. Just 18-years-old when he boarded the plane for the Olympics he looked ten years younger, but the unrumpled boyish features belied the courage and skill of a lion.
Gold medals are always hard to come by, but in ‘56, the British fight game was on a starvation diet. Thirty-two long years had passed since a UK fighter had come out on top in an Olympiad, and Terry nearly didn’t make the cut.
It was a late call-up to the team – just days before, Terry had been emptying bins in Albert Docks. But he’d kept himself fit and ready, and he got the call he’d been praying for while he was training in his West Ham gym.
The flyweight had to win four fights before he made the final, against the Romanian champ Mircea Dobrescu. A mix of speed, skill and all the power his eight-stone frame could summon up saw Terry lift the gold, as fellow Olympic champions Gillian Sheen, Judy Grinham and Chris Brasher looked on.
Back home, Canning Town was awash in Union Jacks, and the Spinks family were the surprised and delighted recipients of a case of Champagne, sent by Prince Philip. The rarity of the moment made it all the more precious.
Terry was joined by Dick McTaggart, as Olympic lightweight champion, but it was another 12 years before Britain tasted victory again, when Chris Finnegan lifted Gold at the 1968 Games in Mexico. Mixed fortunes followed for Terry. He was the toast of the East End and was photographed with the Kray Twins – ex-boxers themselves and huge fans of the fight game. Spinks played down the gangland association. “I was popular, they were popular and they wanted to be seen with me, there was nothing more than that to it,” he said.

But though Terry’s link with crime amounted to no more than a handshake and a photo, many feel that the publicity did him no favours. His cousin Rosemary has been running a campaign to win an MBE for the ex-boxer - but while Finnegan and McTaggart were honoured, Terry was left aside.
“Family and friends have racked their brains trying to come up with an explanation,” says Rosemary. “I once thought the fact Terry had been photographed with the Kray twins may have gone against him.
“Terry has never been in trouble in his life and I think it is disgraceful how he’s been treated.”
Fellow hero Finnegan has added his weight to the campaign, saying: “I was awarded the MBE only a few months after I’d won my gold – and the day I went to the Palace to collect it is one of the highlights of my life.
“It is diabolical that Terry has been left out and I would do anything to help right this wrong. I can’t understand why the authorities have insulted a great champion like this.
“After 44 years it is about time this matter was sorted out and Terry gets what he deserves.”
Terry never became bitter, though he took some hard punches. Two marriages collapsed as the boxer turned publican developed drink problems, and in 1994 he was taken to hospital. Alcohol was killing him, and cousin Rosemary decided to take care of him.
Terry still has his medal, but is still waiting for that call from the Palace. So as you enjoy the action from Sydney, think about a great East End Olympian who hasn’t received his due. And if you want to do something about it, write a letter to your MP, or Sports Minister Kate Hoey.

Nothing in Granville Sharp’s background would have suggested that he was to become one of England’s most celebrated campaigners for the abolition of slavery.
Yet a chance encounter in Wapping turned the course of his life forever, and hastened the demise of that evil trade.
Sharp was born in Durham on November 10, 1735. One of eight children, he was also the youngest son, and missed out on the formal education his older brothers enjoyed.
Instead he was sent to London, to work in the Spitalfields’ linen trade. But though he didn’t get the schooling of his professional brothers, he was learning in other ways. He moved from employer to employer, picking up wisdom from each.
“This extraordinary experience has taught me to make a proper distinction between the opinions of men and their persons,” he would write later.
Sharp was lodging with his brother, a surgeon in Wapping. One day a black slave, Jonathan Strong, staggered into the house. He had been so badly pistol whipped by his master that he was at the point of death.
An appalled Sharp took Strong to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where he lay a full four months recovering from his terrible injuries.
Beaten and abused
Strong related his story – how his owner, David Lisle, had brought him from Barbados, but become unhappy with his work, beaten him and hurled him onto the street.
Strong recovered, and the unrepentant Lisle hired two thugs to recapture him. A furious Sharp decided to take up Strong’s case, and adopted the role of barrister, arguing in court that as Jonathan was living in England he was no longer legally a slave.
Many of the judiciary in England were already growing uncomfortable with the evils of the slave trade, but it took three years before English law took its labyrinthine course – Strong was freed in 1768.
The case became a national cause celebre. Sharp used the publicity to step up the fight to free not just victims of violence, but all slaves.

His argument was that a slave treading on English soil was subject to English law. English law precluded slavery, so “as soon as any slave sets foot on English territory, he becomes free”.
His most famous case came when he represented James Somerset. In what was to become known as the “Somerset ruling” Sharp fought and won a battle which allowed Somerset to stay in England.
Somerset’s master, a Virginia planter, wanted to take him back to the plantations in the West Indies. Sharp argued that everyone coming into this country was subject to its laws and protection, and that Somerset had every right to abscond because he was only property in the West Indies not here in England.
After much deliberation, Lord Mansfield found in favour of Somerset and Sharp won the case.
However, many people misunderstood the ruling believing that it meant that all the slaves in Britain were automatically free. The irony was that Sharp had had to accept the legal existence of slavery in other countries, using it as a tactic to fight slavery in England. The biggest fight was still to come.
In 1787, Sharp and his friend Thomas Clarkson formed the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, along with influential Quakers such as John Wesley and Josiah Wedgwood. Their breakthrough came when they persuaded William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull, to be their spokesman in the House of Commons.
Thumb screws
Thomas Clarkson was busily amassing information to support their case. He interviewed 20,000 sailors and collected equipment used on the slave-ships such as iron handcuffs, leg-shackles, thumb screws, instruments for forcing open slave’s jaws and branding irons.
Sharp, meanwhile, was becoming a thorn in the side of Government in other ways.
He argued in favour of parliamentary reform and an increase in the low wages paid to farm labourers. Now a prominent civil servant as well as a lawyer, Sharp also supported the American colonists against the British government and had to resign from the civil service in 1776.
Things were changing slowly but surely. After the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 Sharp joined Thomas Clarkson and Thomas Fowell Buxton to form the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery.
Sadly he would never see abolition come to pass.
The great campaigner died on July 6, 1813.

There are many extraordinary figures and high achievers in the history of the East End, but few are more remarkable than the woman who
broke down two of the
barriers to her sex – becoming England’s first doctor and the country’s first
elected mayor.
Elizabeth Garrett was born in Whitechapel in 1836, one of 12 children of Newson and Louise Dunnell. Newson was a very able businessman, and supported his sizeable family by running a thriving pawn-broker’s shop – always much
in demand in poverty-stricken Whitechapel.
In 1841, Newson made another shrewd business move, buying a corn and coal warehouse in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. The business was a roaring success and the Garretts could afford to send all 12 offspring to boarding schools.
More to life…
Young Elizabeth’s life was mapped out. After finishing school, she would stay idle in the family home until a suitable husband appeared. But she had other ideas. In 1854 she met Emily Davies, a fierce proponent of women’s rights. Emily introduced Elizabeth to other feminists, and in 1859 she met Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first woman doctor.
She decided to pursue a medical career herself but first had to win over her father. He was appalled by the idea. Elizabeth wrote later: “I asked [my father] what there was to make doctoring more disgusting than nursing, which women were always doing, and which ladies had done publicly in the Crimea. He could not tell me.
“He said the whole idea was so disgusting that he could not entertain it for a moment. I felt rather overcome with my father’s opposition, but said as firmly as I could that I must have this or something else, that I could not live without some real work.”
Newson came round in
the end, though Elizabeth’s mother never did.
“My mother speaks of my step being a source of lifelong pain to her, that it is a living death,” Elizabeth recalled.
Sneaked into lectures

Next she had to take on the medical authorities. All the medical schools rejected her, so Elizabeth became a nurse at Middlesex Hospital, sneaking into lectures for the male
doctors. After students complained, she was banned from the lecture rooms.
The persistent Garrett then discovered that the Society of Apothecaries didn’t debar women from their exams. She took her exams, passed and was made a doctor, and the Society immediately changed its rules so that no other women could follow her.
But Elizabeth was qualified and, with her father’s support, set up a medical practice in London.
In 1866, Elizabeth set up a dispensary for women, later to become the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital. In 1870 she scored another first by being appointed as a visiting physician to the East London Hospital.
Still she was determined to earn her medical degree, and sat and passed her exams at the University of Paris. The British Medical Register, though, blankly refused to recognise her degree.
Marital laws
There were more battles
to come. Although her new
husband, James Anderson, supported her career, they fell out when he tried to insist he take control of her earnings – under the law of the time, a wife and all she had were the legal property of her spouse.
In 1872 she opened the
New Hospital for Women, a London infirmary entirely staffed by females, for females.
In 1902, Elizabeth retired to Aldeburgh. Her interest in the politics of change was still strong and, in 1908, she stood for mayor of the town. She was elected, the first woman mayor ever in England.
Even in her 70s, Elizabeth became active in the suffragette movement that had
its roots in the East End, and her daughter Louisa was jailed in 1912 for her militant
suffragette activities.
Elizabeth died in 1917 in Suffolk.

There can’t be many more fervent hotbeds of football than the East End, and Tower Hamlets has certainly produced more than its fair share of soccer talent.
Yet it’s an irony that though the borough gave birth to two of the oldest and established football league teams, nowadays both play outside the area.
West Ham United have been gone for the best part of a century. Millwall, meanwhile, were still local lads until 1910, when they left the Isle of Dogs for a new home south of the river.
But while they may have a reputation for hard-battling football on the pitch, it goes hand-in-hand with an unfortunate reputation for crowd trouble off it – and it’s a reputation that has existed for almost as long as the club itself.
Like many of the early league teams, Millwall started off as a works side, giving the employees of JT Morton’s jam and marmalade works a welcome dose of exercise.
When the club was formed in 1885 the company’s works, in West Ferry Road, on the Isle of Dogs, was still a new operation.
Millwall Dock, at the southern end of the island, had only opened in 1864 – before that Millwall was a remote and unpopulated part of London.
But very soon the area was firmly industrial and populated with immigrant labour.
Nearly all of the workers at Morton’s were Scottish immigrants. In honour of their homeland they adopted the blue and white of the Scots flag as their team colours, and took the lion rampant of their country’s flag as their symbol. The football club they set up was called Millwall Rovers.
And the team had a ready-made fan base, in the thousands of men and boys who poured onto the island to work in the new docks. The uncompromising play of the Scots and the no-nonsense demands of the fans made Millwall a fearsome place to visit.
Things started badly though. The first ever fixture, on October 3, 1885, was against Fillebrook, from Leyton. Millwall lost 5-0.

The side gradually improved joining the old Southern League, and reaching the semi-finals of the FA Cup in 1903, losing 3-0 to Derby County in front of 45,000 fans at Villa Park.
Having gone through a name change to Millwall Athletic, they now became plain Millwall FC and played on a number of sites on the Isle of Dogs before moving to The Den at New Cross in 1910.
The 1930s and 40s saw huge gates of 40,000 plus, and the noise of the crowd saw The Den became one of the most feared grounds in the country. Cold Blow Lane was closed on a number of occasions as violence spilled on to the pitch and the streets around.
The decades since have seen the Lions yo-yoing up and down through the divisions, at one point becoming founder members of the old Fourth (now Third Division) by virtue of a relegation!
Current Spurs boss George Graham took over in 1982, and handed a debut to the young Teddy Sheringham. Graham guided the club back up to the Second Division, before leaving for Arsenal.
New boss John Docherty led Millwall to the Second Division championship in 1988 and First Division football for the first time in the club’s history.
Sheringham and Tony Cascarino scored the goals that put Millwall on top of the league, hitting the heights with a 3-2 win over QPR at The Den on October 1, 1988.
For the fans it seemed too good to be true. Sadly it was. Millwall finished tenth that season and, the following year, the rot set in. After briefly topping the table again, the Lions failed to win any of their last 20 games, and were relegated.
The subsequent years have been traumatic for Millwall – moving grounds, seeing a bewildering succession of bosses and currently sitting in Division Two.
But as a new season gets under way, the fans can dream about 40,000 crowds and topping the table.

When the battered body of Leon Beron was discovered on Clapham Common on New Year’s Day 1911, it was to set in motion the most notorious murder trial of the day.
And it was to provide a day in court for some of the
East End’s most colourful characters… and least reliable witnesses.
The case also dragged in the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, allegations of spying and sinister implications with the recent Sidney Street siege and the Houndsditch Murders.
Slum landlord
Beron wasn’t universally loved – as a slum landlord he was unlikely to be. He owned nine decaying houses in Russell Court, Stepney, which provided him with 10 shillings (50p) a week, enough to pay his own two shillings rent on 133 Jubilee Street, Stepney, and provide the one and sixpence a day for his meals
at the Warsaw Kosher Restaurant at 32 Osborn Street, Whitechapel.
It was at the Warsaw that Beron began to be seen in the company of Steinie Morrison, in December 1910. Morrison was another Russian Jew, who had arrived in England in 1898. Where he arrived from wasn’t certain – he claimed to be Australian and also used the pseudonyms Alexander Petro-pavloff, Morris Stein and Moses Tagger. What was certain was that he was a professional thief, who had already served five sentences for burglary.
Prompt arrest
Beron was found in gorse bushes on the Common, his head staved in by a blunt instrument, his legs neatly crossed, his wallet emptied, and a curious ‘S’ mark carved into each cheek. They were, observed the police surgeon, “like the f holes on a violin”.
It took the police just seven days to pick up Morrison, arresting him as he tucked into his breakfast at Cohen’s Restaurant, in Fieldgate Street.
They had quickly discovered that he had been working at Lavender Hill, so might know the Common well. They also discovered that on the morning of New Year’s Day, Morrison, using yet another pseudonym of Banman, had lodged a revolver and 45 bullets at the left luggage office of St Mary’s Railway Station, in Whitechapel.
They also discovered that he had moved in with a Lambeth prostitute, Florrie Dellow,
on January 1 – after telling his Newark Street landlady that he was off to Paris.
All very suspicious, but also all circumstantial evidence.

The defence and prosecution witnesses were as unreliable as each other. Beron’s brother Solomon attempted to physically attack defence counsel Edward Abinger when he implied he might have had something to do with Leon’s death.
Unreliable evidence
Meanwhile, 16-year-old Janie Brodski backed Morrison’s alibi – that he had spent the night at the Shoreditch Empire watching Harry Champion and Harry Lauder. She claimed that she and her sister had paid on the door for seats in the stalls at a shilling each.
Unfortunately, the theatre manager confirmed that the seat prices had been raised to 1s 6d (71/2p) for the night, and had all been sold out days in advance.
Add in the unreliable and conflicting evidence of a number of cab drivers placing Morrison at the murder scene (by now his photo and offers of a reward had appeared in the newspapers) and it is difficult to see how any court could reasonably convict him.
Abinger attempted to cloud the waters further. He implied that Beron was a police informant who had been assassinated for grassing on the anarchists responsible for the Houndsditch Murders and the Sidney Street siege. The ‘S’ marks stood for the Polish word ‘spiccan’ or spy, he suggested.
The policeman in charge, DI Wensley, scoffed at the theory, and the jury took 35 minutes to find Morrison guilty of murder. The judge had no option but to pass the death sentence, saying: “May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
“I decline such mercy!” shouted Morrison. “I do not believe there is a God.”
The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction but the Home Secretary was not so sure. Churchill commuted Morrison’s sentence to life.
Ironically, it was a decision the prisoner himself would not accept. He repeatedly appealed to be put to death and, on January 24, 1921, weakened by a series of hunger strikes, he died in Parkhurst Prison.

ONE thing we all take for granted today is clean, fresh water and – barring the next Thames Water hosepipe ban – plenty of it.
But until just a century ago, East Enders were more likely to be killed by their water than revived by it.
In the 1800s, as Tower Hamlets multiplied in size with the influx of immigrants from the countryside and abroad, cholera became a chronic threat to human health.
Look left out of the train window as you travel from Bromley-by-Bow to West Ham and you will see the distinctive rococco form of Abbey Mills pumping station.
It may look like something from a horror film but, in its day, it made the East End a safe place to live and work, as it carried sewage out to the Thames.
London had a problem getting rid of its rubbish for centuries, and for a long time the East End benefited. There was no mains drainage in the middle ages – instead excrement would be stored in cesspits under the houses.
This ‘nightsoil’ would then be carted away to ‘laystalls’, and then from there to the new market gardens around the Essex villages of Stepney, Bethnal Green and Bow.
If that sounds unsanitary, it was an improvement on the earlier system in the City, where a gulley down the middle of the street would be awash with rubbish and human excrement.
The lack of concern of Londoners was shown by Samuel Pepys observation in his famous Diary, recording how his wife “stooped down in the street to do her business”.
The Tower Hamlets market gardens may have flourished, but by the mid-1800s they had been buried under bricks and mortar, and cholera epidemics were sweeping the borough.
In desperation, the newly- formed Metropolitan Commis-sion of Sewers decreed in 1847 that cesspits were now banned.

The move was a disaster, as the main sewers and underground streams now discharged their filth straight into the Thames. A decade before, salmon had still been seen jumping in the river at Wapping. By the 1850s nothing could live in what had become a huge, stinking open sewer.
The matter came to a head in the long, hot summer of 1858. Wapping windows had to be draped with lime chloride soaked curtains, and tons of chalk and carbolic acid were tipped into the Thames.
But nothing could mask ‘The Great Stink’ as it became known. Prime minister Benjamin Disraeli himself described the river as “a Stygian Pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror”.
It was the last straw, and in that year a Bill for the purification of the Thames was passed – but the first step was to find an answer to the removal of the human waste of three million Londoners.
One plan was proposed by the painter John ‘Mad’ Martin. Rather unfairly named, his plan was to pipe the filth out to Essex to propagate land – pretty much what the East Enders had previously done for their farmland.
But the task eventually fell to the great engineer Joseph Bazalgette. He constructed a huge system of sewers running east from London Bridge for a distance of eleven miles, assisted by pumping stations such as Abbey Mills.
When Bazalgette was finished, London boasted 1,300 miles of sewers, along with the London Underground, one of the great engineering marvels of his age.
And as with the Under-ground, many of the same tunnels are still serving East Enders today. Others, like that beneath Stratford’s Greenway, have now gone out of service.
But all were part of the hidden network that saved the East End from the cholera-ridden hell it was a century ago.

SUGAR production has a long tradition in east London. Today, Tate & Lyle, with its Silvertown works, is the only cane sugar refiner in the UK.
But a century ago things were very different. In 1864 there were 74 refineries in the country, and the home of sugar refining was in the heart of the East End.
Paid in beer!
But it was a far cry from the hygienic, state-of-the-art factories of today. In 1876, James Greenwood was researching his book, The Wilds of London. His descriptions of the sugar bakers of Spitalfields describe a scene reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno.
The sugar firms employed several thousand men, and were so desperate for labour that they would offer unlimited beer as a bribe. Irish immigrants, the mainstay of much labouring work at the time, weren’t interested in such unpleasant work, and the firms ended up having to import labour from Germany.
To Greenwood, the East End was like a foreign country, the business a mystery to him, and it seems appropriate that his guide was a German missionary. Greenwood was revolted by what he saw… and smelled.
“Soon as I put my head in at the door of the bakery, the nature of the manufacture in progress was at once made apparent to my senses.
“Just as unmeasured indulgence in sugar is nauseating to the palate, so was the reek of it palling to one’s sense of smell. You could taste its clammy sweetness on the lips just as the salt of the sea may be so discovered while the ocean is yet a mile away,” he wrote.
Whitechapel provided sugar to the whole country. The raw cane would come in to the West India Docks, and countless backstreet sweatshops would set about the business of transforming the dark, rough raw material into a gleaming white confection.
Greenwood wrote: “In Backchurch Lane, in White-chapel, there are dozens of these baking, or, as they would more properly be called, boiling-houses.
“They are buildings enormous in size, usually occupying the whole of a street side, and so high that the massy ‘mats’
of sugar craned up to the topmost storey.”

Grim conditions
The conditions were as grim as you might have expected of a Victorian factory.
“Low-roofed, dismal place with grated windows, and here and there a foggy little gas-jet burning blear-eyed against the wall.
“The walls were black – not painted black. As far as one might judge they were bare brick, but basted unceasingly by the luscious steam that enveloped the place, they had become coated with a thick preserve of sugar and grime.”
And it quickly became apparent to Greenwood why the Irish wisely turned down work in the sugar bakers.
“The close, reeking, stifling place, the disgusting atmosphere, the incessant toil and the disgusting conditions of it… better a hod of bricks with a 60-round ladder to mount out in the open air than such mean, enervating drudgery as this.”
Greenwood’s guide remar-ked that without the generous helpings of beer, the labourers would be dead within weeks. It was common practice at the time for men in such dehyd-rating trades to continually refuel with ale, a diet that would have been slowly killing them anyway.
It is unlikely that the Whitechapel bakers would have passed any modern food standards tests, either. Spotting what appeared to be large heaps of mud, Greenwood was told that these were the scrapings from beams and the shovellings from the floors, gangways and workshops – once the stuff had been filtered through charcoal, it would be deemed fit to be sold to the public, as pure white sugar.
But even as Greenwood wrote, the East End trade was declining. In his book East and West London, the Reverend Harry Jones wrote: “In 1864 there were 23 producers of loaf sugar in London. Since then their trade has shrunk very seriously. A short time ago I believe only three survived, and the chief of them, in St George’s in the east, has ceased operations in the course of this year.”
And very soon the trade would move down river to Silvertown, where the two great rivals, Messrs Tate and Lyle, would vie for business.
The Wilds of London, by James Greenwood. Published in 1876 by Chatto & Windus.
East and West London, by Rev Harry Jones. Published by Smith, Elder & Co in 1875.