eastlondonhistory.com

I love your column - it is always fascinating and I can’t believe
your apparently never-ending supply of stories to write about. Long
may it continue! Someone recently told me that some time in the
1880s, the Wallace Collection had to be moved out of Hertford House
for a year, for refurbishment or something and, after long debate, it
was agreed to move it to Bethnal Green. There was much mockery in
the press and art world about the inability of east enders to
appreciate the fine art of the Wallace Collection but it turned out
to a smash hit and several million people (so I was told) visited
during the year that it was at Bethnal Green. I was thinking of
contacting Ros Saville, the excellent director of the Wallace
Collection, to find out if that is all true - but thought you might
be interested in following it up and seeing if it has the makings of
one week’s column.
With best wishes,
John Newbigin

Today it is just another East End street, and passers-by doubtless sometimes wonder at the roots of its curious foreign name. But Swedenborg Gardens marks the home of one of the most extraordinary men of the 18th century – a brilliant scientist whose visions were to change the way many saw God and religion. It was here he lived in the heart of the East End’s Swedish community, and here he had his conversations with his maker.

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm on 29 January 1688. The son of a clergyman, he grew up in a home filled with intellectual, philosophical, political and moral debate. He was certainly an intense child, writing later: “From my fourth to my tenth year, I was constantly engaged in thought upon God, salvation, and the spiritual sufferings of men, and several times I revealed that at which my father and mother wondered … from my sixth to my twelfth year my delight was to discourse with clergymen concerning Faith.”

Leaving Uppsala University at 22, he decided to travel Europe and immersed himself in an astonishing variety of disciplines. To the specialists of today, his work in physics, astronomy, metallurgy, mineralogy, geology, chemistry, watchmaking, bookbinding and lens grinding is staggering. And the tireless Swedenborg was a creator too. He designed a submarine, an aeroplane, a steam engine, an air gun and a slow combustion stove.

Most of his designs were never built, but undaunted he wrote numerous books, as well as taking a seat in the Swedish equivalent of our House of Lords. He also took up a post as the King of Sweden’s Assessor of Mines.

From the 1720s, Swedenborg was dividing his time between Sweden and London. The English capital attracted him, because its free press allowed him to publish his often controversial works without hindrance or censorship. Arriving in Wapping, Swedenborg first made his home in Wellclose Square, near the Highway.

Wellclose and Prince’s Squares were lined with grand townhouses, built by the wealthy Swedish merchants who had settled in the area. These timber traders had their wharves at Wapping, and soon the local Swedish community grew, with shopkeepers, craftsmen and itinerant sailors. In 1728, the community raised money for their own place of worship – and London’s first Swedish church was built in Prince’s Square.

Swedenborg became a regular worshipper at the new church. He was still commuting between his native and adopted countries - returning to the Swedish parliament to deliver a paper on the future of the national currency, coming back to London to publish his groundbreaking works on the brain and cerebral cortex – but soon his life was to take an extraordinary turn.

In 1744 Swedenborg began to have vivid, disturbing and exhilarating dreams and visions. He told no-one, merely logging his experiences in his diaries. But trying to make sense of it all, he began a meticulous study of the Bible. Then, in April 1745, came the experience that changed his life forever. God appeared to him, telling him that he would reveal truths to humanity through Swedenborg.

For the next 25 years, Swedenborg became ever more prolific, publishing 18 theological works at his own expense. Resigning his job as Mines Assessor, he wrote ceaselessly, expounding on the hidden, inner meanings to the stories of the Bible; the fundamental nature of God, Humanity and Creation; the truth about the afterlife; the key to personal spiritual growth and the secrets to a happy marriage, to name but a few.

Swedenborg kept as low a profile as such a productive writer was able. He published his work anonymously in London (his followers in Sweden began to be persecuted by the authorities), and he made no attempts to set up a church to disseminate his ideas.

But the secret escaped one night back in Gothenburg. Dining with friends, he suddenly became pale. Asked what was wrong, he said he had just ‘heard’ that a fire had broken out near his home in Stockholm, 300 miles away. A little later he became relieved, explaining that the fire had been put out safely. Days later, a messenger arrived from Stockholm, with exactly the same story. His vision became the talk of the town, and people realised that Swedenborg was the author of the extraordinary tracts that had been appearing.

On 29 March 1772, Swedenborg died at his Wapping home, and was buried in the little Swedish church in Prince’s Square. Not much remains to be seen now. The Swedish community has long since dispersed, and the visionary’s remains were removed to Uppsala Cathedral in 1908. The church closed in 1910 and, despite a fierce campaign, it was demolished in 1921.

In 1938, Prince’s Square was renamed Swedenborg Square. But though the fine old houses of Swedenborg and Wellclose Squares escaped the Blitz, they couldn’t dodge the planners. In the 1960s both were demolished as slums by the GLC.

Today Vidal Sassoon lives a life of luxury and glamour. Elegantly dressed, with a permanent Californian tan and transatlantic accent he seems a million miles from the Whitechapel of the 1930s.

Yet that was where he began. And a childhood of poverty, and of witnessing anti-semitism at first hand, moulded a far more complex and colourful figure than the glossy pictures would suggest.

Sassoon was born into a struggling East End family in 1928. Poor to start with, things were to get much worse for the Sassoons when his father abandoned them, leaving the five-year-old Vidal in a Jewish orphanage for the next six years.

His mother remarried when he was 11 and reclaimed her son, but the experience of poverty had left deep scars. Sassoon enjoyed school but the family couldn’t afford to keep him there earning no money. His mother was determined he should learn a trade and – after a dream that he should become a hairdresser – marched him off to a barber’s shop round the corner from the family home in Whitechapel and had him put to work.

The 14-year-old Vidal was mortified. “I wanted to be a footballer!” he remembered over half a century later. Instead, he reluctantly set out on the career that was to support his family and then make him a household name.

He worked hard at the basics of his trade, but could already see that he was going to have to leave the East End to get on. But applying for jobs in the late forties, he found that the doors of the plush West End salons were closed to him. It was his cockney accent that was the problem.

“In those days you couldn’t get hired in the more fashionable West End with an Artful Dodger accent like mine,” he laughed. And just as he had worked tirelessly on his cutting technique, Vidal set to training his voice. He would sit for hours in West End theatres, listening and swallowing the plummy vowels of actors such as Edith Evans, Trevor Howard and Cecil Parker.

But if he was burying his East End accent he wasn’t ignoring his past. His Whitechapel childhood may have been scarred by poverty and desertion but there was an even greater threat. Sassoon and his friends had watched as the Blackshirts marched down Brick Lane in the 1930s, but he did far more than just observe.

“My mother was very active in political, anti-Fascist movements,” he remembered. “So I met some extraordinary people.” Citing the “passion I felt about these issues” and inspired by his Zionist mother, Sassoon put his burgeoning career on one side in 1948 to go and fight in Israel’s War of Independence, following the partitioning of Palestine.

It was an extraordinary contrast. From fighting for his life and for that of the new country, Sassoon was back in the West End in the early fifties, and his career went into overdrive.

He teamed up with Mary Quant in 1957, the beginning of his association with the most glamorous designers, models and actresses of the day. Famously, with Quant’s bobbed hair, he turned the fashion designer herself into a fashion item. Soon even aristocracy were queuing to have their hair done by the cockney crimper. “When we opened the big salon in Bond Street, people came from all walks of life,” he recalled. “I remember the Duchess of Bedford and her secretary sitting on the stairs because there wasn’t any room!”

Certain people and places define the Swinging London of the 1960s – the Beatles, Twiggy, David Bailey … and Vidal Sassoon. Now into his 30s, Sassoon found himself cutting Catherine Deneuve’s hair while Roman Polanski shot a movie upstairs on the salon’s balcony. Polanski was to call on Sassoon again, to create the elfin look for Mia Farrow in horror flick Rosemary’s Baby. Such was his fame by now and such the notoriety of the production, that Vidal found himself creating the hairstyle in front of a hundred press photographers.

By the 1980s Sassoon’s interests had turned full circle. Putting down his scissors he set up the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), which publishes books and funds research into the phenomenon. The Californian millionaire had moved a long way from those East End roots, but not forgotten them.

Panoramas of the River Thames have a long and fascinating history, stretching back to the 16th century. Visiting Dutch and Flemish artists would create oil paintings, pencil drawings, etchings or engravings, capturing in minute detail the buildings and ships of the waterfront.

Into the 20th century, and many Londoners lost touch with their river, as water traffic dropped and they would only see the Thames as they crossed its bridges.

Fortunately, before the old world of the docks, wharves and river trade disappeared forever, a definitive record of the riverfront was produced. The Port of London Authority commissioned a series of photographs in 1937. Stitched together, they comprised a complete panorama of the river’s banks, both north and south.

A couple of years ago, a group of photographers decided that the job needed to be done once more. Charting every inch of the river’s north bank from London Bridge to North Greenwich, and back again on the south side from Greenwich to London Bridge, they offer a fascinating picture of how the East End’s riverfront has changed over the last 60 years.

Brought together in London’s Riverscape Lost and Found the two panoramas provide a startling contrast. The 1937 pictures show a busy waterfront, when the East End was the world’s greatest port and home to a huge number of manufacturing and processing works. By 1997 most of the vistas had moved from industry, through dereliction, and on to residential use.

One of the most dramatic changes is at St Katharine Wharf, right next to Tower Bridge. In 1937 the Steam Packet Wharf still dominated the skyline, but by 1997 the monolithic Tower Thistle Hotel has taken its place.

Much of the docklands was destroyed by German bombing in World War II. In the 1937 pictures, the Union Stairs, with the Turks Head pub, is almost unchanged from Whistler’s 1859-61 Thames Set of etchings. But this ramshackle riverfront, made up of small wharfside buildings of differing heights, was erased by enemy bombs.

Of course, much that wasn’t destroyed has since become a lot more desirable and valuable. The Wapping Pierhead Houses, fine Georgian homes overlooking the river and just yards from the City, are much sought after today. Right next door, Oliver’s Wharf was to undergone a transformation considered revolutionary in 1972. Built in 1870 in a stunning Tudor gothic style, it was still handling cargoes in 1937. Redundant in the early seventies, it was one of the first warehouses to be converted into luxury apartments.

The next building along, Orient Wharf, was not to survive. At first glimpse, though, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Toynbee Housing Association homes that replaced it were part of the original riverfront. Built in 1988, they adopted the mock-warehouse look that has become the style for much new building in Docklands.

In fact moving along the Wapping riverfront, it is often difficult to tell new from old. The derelict Middleton’s and St Bride’s Wharves were demolished, and now the massive Towerside development sits tidily next to the refurbished (but original) New Crane Wharf. The irony – comparing the 1937 vista of a working port to that of the industry-free 1997 – is that the 90s’ waterfront has more wharf and warehouse buildings.

But there’s no risk of confusing the 1980s’ development of Ratcliff’s Free Trade Wharf with the original working model, which shut up shop in 1971. Looking rather like a jumbled heap of cardboard boxes you could never imagine this was part of the old riverscape.

The site of the West India Docks, at the neck of the Isle of Dogs, provides the most dramatic contrast in the two sets of pictures. It’s now the site of Canary Wharf, and the eighties development leaves no trace of the original riverfront.

Further down the Island it’s little different. Unlike Wapping, where preserved facades concealed gutted and gentrified interiors, most of the riverfront developments are new. In the 1937 pictures, Morton’s Sufferance Wharf (the works employees’ football team was later to become Millwall FC) can still be seen with a steam tug moored out front. By 1987 it had been replaced by the dramatic Cascades apartment block, much hated and criticised by Prince Charles.

But some Island wharves were already going in the thirties. In the 1937 pictures, the Workmen’s Dwellings were just being completed on the site of the old Phoenix Wharf, where Duckham’s Paints used to do business. And not all eighties developments were for moneyed newcomers. Maconochie’s Wharf was demolished to be replaced by a scheme known as the Great Eastern Self-Build Association. By 1990, 89 houses had been built by and for local people.

It’s almost a relief to get to the end of the northern stretch and find one site that’s recognisably the same. Island Gardens, with its trees and the dome of the Greenwich foot tunnel is unmistakable. The most dramatic difference is the looming tower of 1 Canada Square, which dominates almost every one of the 1997 pictures.

London’s Riverscape Lost and Found, Chris Ellmers and Alex Werner, ISBN 1-874044-30-9, www.londons-found-riverscape.co.uk

It occupies the north-east corner of Tower Hamlets, a Victorian development of grand scale and imposing construction. Extraordinary then that the Boundary Estate was the realisation of the dream of one man - a tireless local vicar, determined to rid London of its most squalid and infamous slum.

Like so many East End slums this area hard by the walls of the City had seen much better days, before unplanned and uncontrolled building turned the rural hamlet around St Leonard’s Church into a byword for crime and disease. It was originally part of the garden of the nunnery of St John the Baptist, Holywell. But in the 18th century the rapidly growing East End population was exerting pressure on space, and the land was turned over to housing. You can still see the origins of this new building at 74 Swanfield Street, the last remaining weaver’s house in the area.

But even as Swanfield Street was laid out, the East End’s great days as a weaving centre was behind it, with cheaper fabrics being produced on the Continent. And soon the new houses were subdivided, with each room home to small workshops and ‘manufactories’, where East Enders scraped a living making matches, matchboxes, clothes pegs, shoes and cheap clothes.

By the mid-1800s the area, bounded by Virginia Road to the north, Mount Street on the east, Boundary Street to the west, and Old Nichol Street to the south, was famous as the worst slum in London. Friars Mount, as it was more poetically known, was now infamous as ‘the Old Nichol’.

The inhabitants were the poorest of the East End’s homeworkers, and their miserable plight was graphically described in the Illustrated London News of 24 October 1863. “The limits of a single article would be insufficient to give any detailed description of even a day’s visit. There is nothing picturesque in such misery. It is but one painful and monotonous round of vice, filth and poverty, huddled in dark cellars, ruined garrets, bare and blackened rooms, reeking with disease and death, and without the means, even if there were the inclination, for the most ordinary observations of decency and cleanliness.’

So notorious had the Old Nichol become that it grasped the attention of two influential outsiders. The first was the Revd Osborne Jay, who accepted the living of the parish in December 1886. It was to be a cheerless Christmas in the area Charles Booth named the most poverty-stricken in London. 5,700 souls were crammed into the tiny area. Crime was rife; street fights between the rival gangs were a regular event; the death rate was 40 per 1,000, twice as high as the rest of Bethnal Green and four times that of London as a whole; and one child in four died before his or her first birthday.

The Revd Jay realised that simply preaching from his pulpit wouldn’t change things– most of his lost souls never strayed through the doors of his church. Instead he began to work on the streets, a cheerful and charismatic presence. Within ten years he had raised £25,000 to build a new church, social club, gym and lodging house in Old Nichol Street. But he wasn’t content in ministering to his parishioners’ social, physical and spiritual needs; he realised that nothing would really change until the Nichol was reduced to rubble and built anew. And in 1890, he persuaded the newly formed London County Council (LCC) to clear the slum and build new flats.

The second influential outsider was Arthur Morrison. Jay persuaded the writer to visit the area. The shocked writer poured his observations into the seminal A Child of the Jago. Victorians were horrified by the barely fictionalised account of a child’s struggle against poverty. So deep did it cut that when the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) opened the rebuilt estate in 1900, he mentioned Morrison’s book, saying: “Few indeed will forget this site who had read Mr Morrison’s A Child of the Jago.”

The irony was that by the time Morrison wrote his account, the Nichol was already half-demolished. But a more bitter twist lay ahead for the inhabitants of this real-life ‘Jago’. The new flats comfortably housed 6,000 souls, and statistics from the LCC had recorded 5,666 previously squeezed into the rat’s nest of streets and alleys. Before, the widest road was only 28ft across; some of the ground floors of houses were below street level; many of the houses were built back-to-back; and the average room was home to 2.25 people (with 107 rooms housing five or more). Now there rose huge blocks of flats, sited round the circular park of Arnold Circus, with a bandstand provided for the residents and the blocks named after Thames beauty spots.

But they weren’t the same 6,000 people as before. It was the ‘industrious poor’ who were rewarded with the new flats. Meanwhile, the residents of the Nichol were swept further into Dalston or Bethnal Green … creating more overcrowding and new slums.
With thanks to Walks Through History – Exploring the East End by Rosemary Taylor.

Too many of us spend our time shut away from the history of the East End: stuck inside our houses or offices, in cars, buses or underground. But getting out and walking around our streets is better than a trip to any museum. And there are so many famous places and events peppered around Tower Hamlets that a quick circuit around any part of the borough unearths a host of treasures.

Rosemary Taylor has been telling the history of the East End for years, in numerous books, articles, lectures and newsletters. Now, her new title, Walks through history: Exploring the East End* puts the onus on us to go out and explore for ourselves.

The 12 walks here will not only give you hours of healthy (and entirely free) entertainment – once you’ve completed them you’ll have a much clearer grasp of how the history of the East End meshes with the geography of the place.

Walk 1, like most of the perambulations here, begins and ends at a tube station. From Shadwell Underground (or DLR) you will reach Wapping tube. Within yards you will pass the St George’s Town Hall mural depicting the Battle of Cable Street, when local people routed the Blackshirts; then the former home of Dr Hannah Billig, the ‘Angel of Cable Street’. At the junction with Cannon Street Road you will pass the grisly spot where John Williams once lay buried. Accused of the 1811 Ratcliffe Murders, Williams was found dead in his prison cell and his body was paraded around Wapping. The vengeful mob seized it, drove a stake through his heart and, symbolically buried the corpse at the crossroads. In all, 25 historical hotspots lie along the way, taking in the ancient, medieval and maritime history of this crowded quarter.

Walk 2 puts flesh on the bones of that vanished curiosity, Chinese Limehouse. Fictionalised into infamy by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Sax Rohmer and even George Raft, you can view the real sites – those that haven’t been improved by the bulldozers and wrecking ball.

A walk round Poplar and the East India Dock Road charts the development of an area created by the new London docks. The East India Dock Road itself was built in 1805 (on land bought for £900) to link the new Blackwall dock to the Commercial Road. Next go to All Saints’ Church, the hub of the new parish created to serve the burgeoning numbers of dockworkers in 1823. Then you come to Poplar Baths, built originally in 1856 for workers who had no running water at home. A library, council offices, Coroner’s Court and mortuary were all to follow, along with a multitude of further churches, shops, theatres and pubs, all with stories attached.

Walk 4 takes you further into the old East India and Blackwall Docks themselves. There’s no maritime trade left now of course, but there’s plenty still to see. The waterways are still there of course; and though most of the warehouses have been demolished, the bridges, gates, pubs and many of the fine houses of the 19th century survive. No 1 Coldharbour was built in 1825 as a home for the dockmaster, by that great architect of the docks, Sir John Rennie. And No 3 Coldharbour is reputed to have been where Nelson stayed when he visited Blackwall.

Bromley St Leonard is one of the less-sung corners of the East End, but it has its history. Three Mills is home to the last surviving tide mills in London, while Kingsley Hall in Powis Road was home to Gandhi when he lived in London.

On to Bow, and you can visit the sites where the Pankhursts et al gave birth to the Suffragette movement, while a trip to the easternmost end of Bow Road reveals the hidden curiosity of a surviving 17th century corn chandler’s shop.

For retail early-1900s style, travel down to Whitechapel and you can see the curiosity of Wickham’s department store. It was the grandest store in the East End until it closed in 1969. But look again and you see Wickham’s was built in two halves, with a small shop in the middle. The little shop had been on the site since Mr Spiegelhalter had travelled from Germany in 1820 to set up his watchmaker business in Whitechapel. In 1927, the increasingly successful Wickhams wanted to expand, but the Spiegelhalter family stubbornly refused to sell out. The solution? Wickham’s had to build their new monolith in two parts – with the jewellers in the middle.

These are just a few of the hundreds of familiar and surprising sites to see on a dozen walks. So get a pair of stout shoes, set a few Sundays aside, and do your history.

Walks through history: Exploring the East End by Rosemary Taylor, published by Breedon Books, ISBN 1 85983 270 9, paperback, £9.99.

Every so often in history a technological hotspot emerges – helping to drive industry and technology onward and upward. In the mid-1700s that clutch of enterprising Lancastrians John Kay, James Hargreaves and Samuel Compton were revolutionising weaving with the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny and the mule. In the 1970s it was the turn of the geeks of the US West Coast, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak et al – as they invented personal computing and kick-started the information age.

But who would have thought that the Lea Valley, running down Tower Hamlets’ eastern boundary, was the birthplace of Britain’s own post-industrial revolution? As the title of Dr Jim Lewis’s first book suggested, it was ‘Britain’s best kept secret’. Now, in a fascinating sequel*, Dr Lewis reveals more of the developments that turned the Lea into the UK’s technological crucible.

In fact, Lewis argues, the likes of Gates wouldn’t ever have been able to make their billions from the PC were it not for a much earlier invention in the Lea Valley. In 1904 Professor Ambrose Fleming developed the diode valve. The invention not only paved the way for today’s multimedia electronics industry – it also created the platform for space travel, computers, email and the internet.

Firstly though, the diode valve gave birth to the modern wireless. So radio has its roots in the Lea Valley, and Britain’s first radio valve factory was established there in 1916, with the first television tube factory following in 1936.

But the technological developments in the Lea Valley were as diverse as they were numerous. The monorail may still seem a futuristic mode of transport, but it was developed here by Henry Robinson Palmer as long ago as 1821. This ingenious method of hanging heavy goods from the sides of a rail carriage to lower the centre of gravity meant that great weights could be smoothly shifted. The invention went into use at the Royal Victualling Yard at Deptford in 1824, with the frictionless action meaning four men could easily shift 5cwt loads of provisions from warehouse to ship.

And another welcome innovation on board ship was that of IPA (India Pale Ale). Dreamed up by George Hodgson at his Bow Brewery, it was the first beer that could be transported to the hot climes of the Empire without tainting – giving East End sailors some relief and British soldiers a welcome taste of home.

The geography of the Lea Valley reads like a Who’s Who of British industry in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Johnson Matthey, Hawker Siddeley, Reuters, Lotus Engineering, Tesco, Keith Blackman, BOC and Matchbox Cars were just a few of the innovators who built their businesses here. Petrol was not only manufactured, it also received its name here, and the British Army’s rifle of choice was, for decades, the Lee Enfield. That reliable weapon was of course manufactured in the Lea Valley.

It’s just a handful of East End streets. Two centuries ago it didn’t exist at all – and if it weren’t for an army of determined residents fighting urban ‘improvement’ it might not exist today. Mile End Old Town has seen the end of East End agriculture; industrial development and decline; and economic boom, bust and recovery. It’s a story traced in a new book – much of it in first-person accounts by long-time residents.*

To find the area in question take a map and draw a line around Mile End Road to the south, the Liverpool Street rail line to the north, Coborn Street to the west and the Regent’s Canal to the east. The original Mile End Old Town had been sited to the north and south of Mile End Road, to the east of the London Hospital. It had been settled from the late 17th century, as City residents fled the plague, and merchants and sea captains of the East India Company sought country dwellings near to the docks. But our small square of land was fields and market gardens in the early 19th century – over the next few decades all that was to dramatically change.

The first factor was an incredible population explosion. During the first half of the 19th century, the population of England and Wales more than doubled, from under 9m in 1801 to 18m by 1851. In the latter half of the century the increase was to be even more dramatic, rising to 40m. Next, industrial development in the cities put huge pressure on existing housing. In addition, following the economic disaster of the Napoleonic Wars, money and men were freed up again in the 1820s and were poured into raising homes for the new industrial working class (and their bosses).

The new terraces on the Mile End and Bow Roads were swiftly raised in the early 1820s, and were quickly followed by the side roads of Frederick Place (Aberavon Road), Cottage Grove (now Rhondda), Coborn Street, Coborn Road and Morgan Street. The south and west of Tredegar Square followed in the 1830s, and the square was complete by 1847. By 1862, 40 years after the first farmland was turned over to the builders, the area was more or less complete – though a comparison with a map of the day will show how many of the street names have changed.

Nearly all the houses in the area were built on ground belonging to two estates – Coborn and Morgan. Prisca Coborn, the wife of a wealthy brewer, had died childless in 1701. She left her fortune to found a school to teach 50 poor children to read and write, and to help poor families in other ways. One sure way to keep the money flowing in to the foundation was to lease land, and the trustees exploited the new demand for real estate. In the 1820s, the fields the Coborns had left began to be peppered with new housing developments. The Morgan Estate owned the lands nearer to Bow, and from 1823 these too began to disappear under new estates.

But the new prosperity brought its own pressures on space, and by the end of the century, craftwork and light industrial work was increasingly being carried out in the ordinary houses of Mile End Old Town.

The economic boom of the mid-1800s was followed by bust. As the new century approached so did recession, and the 1891 census gives a clear snapshot of the declining fortunes of the Old Town. There were now more lodgers and boarders, even in the grand houses of Tredegar Square, whose owners were now struggling to pay the bills. There were fewer families with private means. Earnings came from the crafts rather than the professions and there were fewer live-in servants.

Decades of slow decline followed – and the Blitz turned a shabby area into a crumbling one. The first flying bomb hit Grove Road on 13 June 1944, with six people killed, 30 injured and 200 made homeless. 20 years later not much repair work had been done, and Mile End Old Town still had gap sites, prefab homes, bombed-out shells of buildings and a pervading atmosphere of decline.

To the modernist planners of the 1960s the answer was obvious – demolish the whole area and start again. But in the 1970s the Mile End Old Town Residents’ Association (MEOTRA) was formed to fight the multitude of redevelopment plans threatening the area. Gradually the conservation movement gathered momentum, with the Tredegar Square conservation area being established in 1971 and extended in stages over the next years.

Next, right-to-buy legislation transferred ownership (and power) from big landlords to individual owners. And by the early 1990s a shabby and rundown area was spared from the wreckers ball - and thriving once again.

*Changing Places: a short history of the MEOTRA area, by Nigel Glendinning, Joan Griffiths, Jim Hardiman, Christopher Lloyd and Victoria Poland, is published by the Mile End Old Town Residents’ Association, 2001. Price £4.50

London, with its two millennia of history, shows only its most recent past on the surface. Dig down a few feet and layer upon layer of buildings are uncovered. It’s an excavation job that the Museum of London and its predecessors have been doing for years – unearthing around 1,000 sites in Greater London. And Tower Hamlets, with its centuries of development as a port and borough hard by the old City walls, has more to reveal than most.

More than 70 historical digs pepper the borough. Most of them are clustered around Aldgate to the west – that’s unsurprising, because for the greater part of our history, Bow, Bromley, Stepney and Mile End were wild countryside. But they lie as far east along the river as the Limehouse Link’s meeting with The Highway – where a 1989 dig recovered many prehistoric ‘worked’ flints and located the remains of a c.18th century factory that produced Limehouse porcelain. This dig revealed the successive layers of industry too, also uncovering older brick buildings engaged in pickling and lime burning.

Roman quarry in Armagh Road

And in the north of the borough, a cluster of digs around Bow reveal treasures from the Roman occupation and later. A 1990 dig in Armagh Road not only uncovered a Roman quarry, supplying the rock for the invaders’ excellent roads, but evidence of ploughsoil – so farming was going on as well.

Many of the digs around the City walls reveal the grim legacy of the waves of plague that hit London from the Middle Ages onward. Digs in Artillery Lane revealed medieval plague pits, though interestingly there were also signs of Roman burials – so the same graveyards had been in use for many centuries.

Indeed, the piling on of layers of use and development can make the archaeologist’s job a brain-bending puzzle. A dig in Back Church Lane, E1, in 1988 revealed traces of Roman features, but the Roman strata had been much damaged by a post-medieval cemetery and more modern buildings. Adding to the confusion, the line of a Roman road cuts across the modern street plan.

Tudor garden in Stepney

Of course the plague and pestilence of medieval Aldgate began to drive people out to the countryside of Stepney and beyond. For those who could afford it, the answer was to build a manor house in what was then the Essex countryside. A dig in Butcher Row, E14, in 1975, revealed not just an ancient chalk-and-flint boundary wall, but three later buildings on top of it. These c17th century buildings were revealed by the remnants of their gravel yards. In another part of the site the archaeologists had to be even more clever – traces of Tudor garden soil betrayed the fact that homes had stood beneath the 18th and 19th century warehouses.

Peeling back the layers on the Butcher Row site reveals a microcosm of how Tower Hamlets has changed – agriculture, supplanted by grand homes, replaced in turn by industry. Perhaps in 500 years, archaeologists will be digging beneath the foundations of Wapping’s luxury flats and finding that wharves and warehouses once stood here.

Some of those Tower Hamlets digs

72a Armagh Rd, E3: 1990 excavation revealing early Roman gravelling, probably for construction of London to Colchester road.
37-39 Artillery Lane, E1: 1976 dig revealed remains of a plague pit.
East Tenter St, Scarborough St, E1: 1988 dig revealed shallow Roman deposits, eight burials (three in chalk) and fragments of a mortared flint structure which may have been part of a mausoleum.
36-44 Gower’s Walk, E1: 1989 dig revealed sandy layer beneath garden soil, dated to 16th century. Structures included a basement, well and cesspit. Also a small part of Dissenters’ burial ground.
Hooper St, E1: 1988 dig revealed extensive Roman cemetery lying alongside a road or track. Numerous burials of adults and children. Goods found included hobnail shoes, shale bracelets, glass beads and a possible jewelled casket. Also half of an inscribed gravestone.
Morville St, E3: Excavation in 1972-73 unearthed a ditch, burial pit and shallow gullies contain Roman pottery of the 1st or 2nd centuries.
Priscilla Rd, E3: 1977 observations recorded a flat-bottomed pit cut into gravel. Above was a layer of ploughsoil.
For more information read ‘Archaeology in Greater London 1965-90: a guide to records of excavation by the Museum of London, edited by Thompson, Westman and Dyson, ISBN 0-904818-80-2

Farce, chaos or shambles. Writer Wes Whitehouse* offers a choice of words to describe the mess Labour and the Tories got themselves into when choosing their candidates for Mayor of London. 18 months before campaigning officially began, Labour found themselves saddled with a candidate they didn’t want, and the Conservatives with one who would end up in jail.

At the end of the campaign Ken Livingstone was Mayor, but had been expelled from the Labour Party. Jeffrey Archer meanwhile had been hurriedly dumped by the Tories. But if the Greater London Authority (GLA) campaign had set candidate against party, it was nothing compared to the politics of confrontation that had marked that earlier London authority, the Greater London Council (GLC).

The most famous battle took place in the 1980s of course. No sooner had Ken Livingstone become leader of London’s strategic authority in 1981 than he set the GLC on a collision course with Government. He announced his intention of using the council’s County Hall headquarters as a campaigning base to attack the Thatcher government. His activities included hanging anti-government banners on County Hall’s riverfront, in bold view of the Houses of Parliament on the other bank of the Thames. So infuriated was Thatcher at being confronted by this as she took her tea on the Commons’ terrace that she was to abolish the GLC altogether – on April Fools Day 1986.

It was the last act in a long and mixed history. Remarkably, London had no comprehensive local government until the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855. Before that, the capital had been inadequately served by a hotch-potch of parish vestries, boards, commissions and justices of the peace.

But in 1855 the constant threat of cholera and the ‘Big Stink’ of a sewage-choked Thames (so bad that Parliament had to be suspended) forced action. The Board’s prime task was to provide clean water and commission a mains drainage system. Soon other duties were added: street improvements; Thames crossings; parks and fire fighting; the abolition of tolls; all came under the umbrella of the board.

In 1888 the Board was tidied up into a new London County Council (LCC). In the early years it was dominated by the Municipal Reformers (Tories), who ruled from 1907 until 1934. That was the year Labour got in, under the dynamic leadership of Herbert Morrison. Under Morrison the LCC produced its famed three-year plans for health, education, town planning, parks and housing. They were as successful as they were ambitious – building nearly 100,000 new homes by 1939, and making London a model for the world with its excellent hospitals, ambulance service, child care, clean water and 6000 acres of open space.

Reorganisation came again in the sixties. London had changed, depopulating as many moved into the suburbs and the home counties – many families had been bombed out never to return. The 1960 Royal Commission proposed an extension of London’s boundaries to cover 616 square miles (previously it had been 117), doubling the electorate to 5.5m. Middlesex was to be swallowed and with it large chunks of Essex, Kent, Surrey and Hertfordshire. The hospitals went to the young NHS and schools went to a new Inner London Education Authority (ILEA).

The new body, born on 1 April 1964 irritated some Londoners with its lumbering and expensive procedures. The new members (never councillors) had their own entrance, terrace, a grand dining room and bar. To many they seemed to be aping the MPs across Westminster Bridge.

Formality and grandeur faded a little with the election of ‘Red Ken’ in 1981. Formal dress codes were consigned to history. The new leader was universally addressed, even by junior staff, as ‘Ken’. Some old hands found it a culture shock. Whitehouse asked one lady press officer, who had served numerous previous administrations, what she made of the new bunch. ‘Well love,’ she opined. ‘Let’s face it. Bunch of w*****s aren’t they?’

Margaret Thatcher obviously agreed, and gleefully pulled the plugs on the GLC, 35 years to the day from its inauguration. London was now without a strategic voice for the first time in a century.

The Conservatives delighted in rubbishing its achievements, but supporters will point to a raft of innovations, some since discarded but some ahead of their time; some loved, some hated. The Council brought in free travel for the over-60s; it pioneered the use of wheel clamps; it was responsible for the New Towns; it rehoused needy Londoners in flats and bungalows everywhere from the Wash to Weston-Super-Mare; it turned Covent Garden from a central London wasteland to a major shopping and tourism centre; it pioneered the recycling of household rubbish; and it revitalised the Tube; it brought arts to the people; and it built the Thames Barrier.

Now there’s a new London council, and again it’s headed by a Ken Livingstone at odds with the Prime Minister. But with our ageing infrastructure creaking at the seams, will the GLA get the money and powers to rebuild London?

GLC – the inside story by Wes Whitehouse, published by James Lester Publishers, ISBN 095381713X, £14.99 hardback