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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.

From the year 450,000 BC and the earliest human remains in the Thames valley, to the 2012 Olympics, taking in invasions, revolts and epidemics along the way - an entire history of London in words and pictures may seem a rather ambitious undertaking.

But ‘London: the Illustrated history’ does all that and more in 350 pages that whisk us in 15 chapters from prehistory to near future, each chapter broken down into themed sections that explore the lives of ordinary Londoners, from priests to prostitutes, bakers to burglars, cavemen to international financiers in the Square Mile.

A chapter on prehistory shows how the East End was once the stamping ground of mammoths and rhinos, reindeer and bison, with human species as far back as 400,000 BC. Around 10,000 years ago, the hunters became farmsteaders, and there have been hoards of metalwork unearthed in the East End - evidence of those early moves to permanent settlement.

Of course the first emergence of London as a town comes with the Romans. Londinium was founded soon after the invasion in 43 AD, though was razed by Boudicca 17 years later. We see the decline of London as the civilisation of the Roman era falls into the Dark Ages. The Roman army withdrew in 410 as Rome itself came under threat, and London was abandoned within a generation.

It was to another unwelcome invasion that London owes its recovery. After a gap of 200 years, during which the city was largely deserted, the Saxons arrived. Roman London lay between the modern Tower Hill in the east and Cannon Street to the west. The Anglo-Saxon invasions saw the establishment of a new London (discovered only within the last 20 years and dubbed ‘Lundenwic’ by archaeologists) around what is now the Strand, Aldwych and Covent Garden. In the ninth century the Vikings arrived, trashed Lundenwic and established their own London within the Roman city walls.

Of course all of this, though fascinating enough, might pall a little without pictures, and this is where the book really scores. Beautifully produced and reproduced on glossy paper, the tome is a succession of detailed maps; photographs of Saxon coins and swords; paintings of Londoners famous and ordinary. One of the most impressive features are the cutaway illustrations such as that of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, showing the elaborate work of architect Henry Holland. The authors have performed the same trick with the Barbican - follwing the detailed plan may be the first time many of us have managed to find our way around the centre. Or see the graphic reconstruction of the Crystal Palace, showing clearly the breathtaking size of this grandiloquent Victorian creation.

The scope of the book is, of course vast. As you turn the pages you move from the Gordon Riots to the first Underground trains; from early church bells to the Gherkin soaring above the City; from the medieval Jewish community to Brick Lane in the 1930s. Some of the modern photography is stunning, and there are new London landmarks aplenty, with the Tate Modern, the ever-growing cluster of towers on Canary Wharf and the London Eye. But artists have been depicting London for centuries, and it is some of these older works that really bring the town to life. George Hicks’s ‘The General Post Office, One Minute to Six’ shows the frantic dash of Londoners to catch the last post in 1860.

Some of the most fascinating images are from the Victorian painters who tried to capture a city that was growing by the day. London 1m people in 1801 and 6.5m a hundred years later. Artists depict the stewing mass of traffic, people, smoke, confusion and new buildings that were London. ‘From Pentonville Road looking west: evening’ painted in 1884 by John O’Connor, shows London in an atmospheric light. The Midland Railway Hotel at St Pancras (then recently opened, and currently being restored) emerges like a medieval cathedral from the smoky haze of a London evening, as horse-drawn omnibuses cram the streets.

For those already fascinated by London, this slab of a coffee table book would make a fantastic Christmas present. And for those who live here but know nothing of the history, this would make a superb primer. This is an irresistible page turner, as you flick from ‘The Growth of Victorian Suburbia’ to ‘Gangland and Crime’; from ‘Regency Shopping’ to ‘Beatnik London’. And we don’t stop with the present, looking at London moving east, and where the city is going in the 21st century. And the little chapter on Spitalfields is a gem - the illustrated and annotated spread showing how Georgian Spitalfields, Trendy Spitalfields and the glass cube business blocks of the New Spitalfields rub up against each other, and get along pretty much. And that pretty much is the story of London itself.

London - The Illustrated History by Cathy Ross and John Clark; published by Allen Lane, £30 hardback, ISBN 9871846141256

Wander east along Narrow Street, past the Limehouse Basin to your left and the Thames to your right, over the swing bridge and the vista suddenly changes. Narrow Street defies its name to become broad, and the jumble of faux warehouse homes give way to a slice of the real Limehouse.

Numbers 78 to 88 Narrow Street form an imposing terrace backing onto the river. They are older than the  ‘Docklands’ developments of course, but also much older than the real warehouses of this old sefaring quarter. To the ill-educated eye (mine) they might appear Georgian but in fact date back to the reign of Elizabeth I. They are also some of the last remaining houses on this north bank of the Thames. But having survived from the 16th to the 20th century, they very nearly fell foul of the developers in the 1960s.

The story of Number 88, and the other houses in the terrace form the core of an extraordinary memoir of Limehouse by Rozelle Raynes. ‘Limehouse Lil’ covers 60 years - from when Rozelle first visited the East End at the close of the Second World War. She had just been demobbed, as a 20-year-old Wren, from a naval base in the Portsmouth Command. The East End of the time was beyond the pale for a young woman from an upper class family, but there was a magic and romance about it that drew her in. As Rozelle admits, there was no mystery about when the seed had been sown.

“The whole adventure had been inspired by a book which my mother gave me when I was lying in bed with measles at the age of 12. ‘The Romance of London’s River’ was beautifully illustrated by Frank Mason (RI) and from it I learned there were warehouses full of elephant’s tusks in Wapping, gigantic Russian timber ships in Lavender Pond and oriental cafes filled with almond-eyed Chinamen in Pennyfields.” And the romance was only heightened by the names of the thoroughfares in the book. Were there really places called Shoulder of Mutton Alley, Picked Herring Street and Wapping Old Stairs?

Indeed there were, and Rozelle and fellow Wren Sue found them all. A lifelong love of the sea had been engendered by their tough jobs as Wren Stokers and Limehouse and Wapping, with their centuries of seafaring tradition (by that time sadly coming to an end) only fired their imaginations. The river at Limehouse and Wapping was still busy then, and the pair would sit for hours in Shadwell Park “entranced by the everlasting pageant of shipping”. There were tugs attached to long strings of barges, fish carriers hurrying upriver to Billingsgate, long ugly flat irons taking coal to Fulham gas works, a rusty Spanish freighter with a crago of oranges from Bilbao. “But the finest sight of all was a Thames sailing barge with its giagantic tanned mainsail, tacking up to Tower Bridge against the last of the ebb.”

The pair fell in love with the place, and while their posh friends were sipping cocktails up west, they could often be found drinking beer in the Prospect of Whitby. And there one of the other great things about the East End became apparent to Rozelle. Although undoubtedly outsiders, she and Sue were soon accepted as friends by a colourful crew that centred around Lucy Durrell, a Wapping matriarch then in her sixties. Lucy had survived a tough childhood to become the hub of an ever growing family (by the time Rozelle and husband Dick attended Lucy’s 80th birthday party in 1965, she had 28 great grandchildren). She was a link back to the myth and mist shrouded Wapping of the 1890s, with its dozens of pubs and brothels, its opium dens and poverty, and she had the stories to back it up.

As well as sinking pints and singing songs in the Prospect of Whitby, Rozelle would join the Durrell clan on their annual trip down to pick the hops in Kent. It was a friendship that endured. Even after Rozelle and Dick married and settled in an old farmhouse at Pluckley (Dick working as a GP in nearby Ashford), the pair kept in touch with the Wapping contingent. And it was at that 80th birthday party for Lucy, that the seeds were sown for the couple’s move to Limehouse. Dick mentioned to the guests that the pair would love to move to the East End if they should ever leave the country. It was a passing comment but a persistent dream. Then two years later the phone rang. There were some old houses being converted into flats in Wapping … would Dick and Rozelle like to take a look?

Next week … Changing Limehouse, from the 1960s to the present day.

Limehouse Lil: And That Small Corner of London’s Docklands Where She Ruled Supreme…Until Canary Wharf Arose (Paperback) by Rozelle Raynes, Catweasel Publishing, ISBN 0954746716, £7.50

Last week we heard how Dick and Rozelle Raynes fell in love with, and settled in Limehouse. Their friends were horrified: Rozelle recalls cocktail parties in west London where people talked of the area as if it hadn’t changed since the days of Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu. ‘However did you come to live in a ghastly place like Limehouse,’ asks one. ‘It’s full of opium dens and drunken seamen isn’t it. Surely nobody actually lives there?’

But its otherness and its grittiness was what the pair loved, as Rozelle writes: ‘There are no soft undulations or vague contours in the Limehouse silhouette. It is a region of bold strong outlines, tall cranes, mighty chimneys, dark warehouses and immense blocks of council flats standing out in stark relief against the evening sky.’

In Rozelle’s fascinating memoir of 40 years of Limehouse Life*, she spends a lot of time looking up - at the ever-changing skies above Number 88 Narrow Street, at the wheeling seagulls and the walkways that used to run above the street, linking warehouse to warehouse. She look up at the chimneys of No88, which she baptises Lucy, George, Doris and Albert. But most of all she gazes up at ‘Limehouse Lil’ the enormous chimney towering overhead and belching smoke into the Limehouse air.

Dick and Rozelle caught their first glimpse of ‘the most beautiful house in London’ in the late sixties. The vendor had saved the entire terrace from numbers 78 to 88 a few years before, leading a battle against the GLC and Tower Hamlets Council, who had wanted to redevelop the lot. The eccentric owner plies them with sherry, before making them promise to give him first refusal should they ever want to sell the house again. And so began the pair’s life in Limehouse, and a string of new friends, including the redoubtable Dorothea Woodward Fisher, OBE, terrifying matriarch of the neighbouring barge yard. There are friends from Brightlingsea Buildings opposite, bonfires on the wasteground, trips out with the kids from Cyril Jackson School, and the initially suspicious (though eventually very welcoming) fellow members of the Greenwich Yacht Club.

Alongside anecdotes of their lives in Limehouse, Rozelle sprinkles plenty of historical colour: previous visitors included Charles Dickens, while Walter Raleigh and Humphrey Gilbert both lived in Narrow Street. Down the centuries (and Number 88 and its neighbours date back to the reign of Elizabeth I) Limehouse has been a rough, ready and hard working corner of London.

And that was just the way Dick and Rozelle loved it: the wharfs and the houses on one side, the river on the other. But inevitably Limehouse began to change. If Limehouse Lil had dominated the skyline for countless years, a new tower was rising to the east. And that, for good or bad, was the future of Docklands.

First One Canada Square grew and grew, and then Canary Wharf mushroomed around it. Slowly and not very successfully at first, but then the new ‘yuppified’ Docklands began to take over, and Limehouse changed forever. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, the Rayneses and neighbours such as Lord Owen, Ian McKellen, Janet Street Porter, Daniel Farson and Francis Bacon had been a rather exotic breed, considered eccentrics for settling in remote Limehouse. By the late Eighties, many of the surviving warehouses had been transformed into luxury homes, and developers were building new properties apeing the warehouse style. The ‘bold strong outlines’ of Limehouse had been watered down and sold to a new generation of settlers.

For many of the new breed, the old Limehouse was a little too rough hewn. Rozelle recalls the day she was stopped by one of her new neighbours, who gushed ‘Have you heard about the new marina they’re building to replace that monstrosity’. The monstrosity was Limehouse Lil, and Rozelle watched in tears as the chimney was swiftly felled. Their old friends in Brightlingsea Buildings were moved on as the council block was razed to make way for a much more profitable, if rather ugly, terrace of town houses. In true London style, the pub at the end of the terrace was spared - and the Black Horse could go on serving at least. Mrs Woodward Fisher’s barge yard was sold by her son to a property developer. Three luxury flats, at a half million each replaced the old yard, but the reassuring clank of the barges at their moorings was gone forever.

* Limehouse Lil: And That Small Corner of London’s Docklands Where She Ruled Supreme…Until Canary Wharf Arose (Paperback) by Rozelle Raynes, Catweasel Publishing, ISBN 0954746716, £7.50

Modern-day policing owes as much to the forensics lab as good, old fashioned sleuthing. Many a murderer is captured by a DNA match, rather than Holmes-style deduction. But the case of Frances Coles and Tom Sadler, at the close of the 19th century, makes you wonder how traditional policing ever nailed anyone.

Sadler was a violent drunk, and Frances his occasional mistress. She was found brutally murdered and he turned himself in at Leman Street police station bruised and covered with blood. The police were sure they had their man - they just couldn’t prove it.

Friday the 13th of February, 1891 proved an unlucky night for young PC Ernest Thompson, as he patrolled the area around Leman Street, Mansell Street and Royal Mint Street. The Whitechapel beat was quiet around 2am, so the copper, who had only been on the force for two months, was a little surprised to hear a man’s footsteps retreating from the railway arches on Swallow Street, opposite Chamber Street. It was just unusual enough for PC Chambers to take a look at the clock on the Co-operative store in Leman Street - it read 2.15. But it wasn’t remarkable enough for the PC to pursue the man. How he later wished he had.

Entering the alley, Thompson saw a grisly sight. A young woman lay, barely breathing, her throat slit across. A sergeant was summoned and then the doctor, George Bagster Philips, who pronounced Frances Coles dead. Police Inspector Donald Swanson, ordered that a sample of the blood be kept for analysis and the rest washed away. It was the same hastiness to clean up a crime scene that had been seen in some of the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders; though detective work and analysis was at such a crude level in the 1890s that it’s arguable that preserving the scene wouldn’t have made much difference. Analysis of blood was very basic, with scientists just about being able to tell the difference between animal and human gore.

And despite the police’s conviction that they had another Ripper murder on their hands, their attempts to track down the most likely accomplice were pretty feeble. They knew that Frances had last been seen with Tom Sadler, a fireman on the SS Fez, and that the two had been seen drunkenly stumbling from pub to pub in the day or two before the murder. They quickly discovered that Sadler took up with 26-year-old Frances, a working prostitute, when he was ashore. They just couldn’t track him down. When Sadler was eventually run to ground the next day at the Phoenix pub, in Upper East Smithfield, he was pretty scathing about the detective work of London’s finest. ‘I have not disguised myself in any way,’ Sadler said. ‘If you couldn’t find me the detectives in London are no damned good.’

Sadler told a desperate story of a couple of days descending ever deeper into drunkenness, with a couple of nasty beatings sustained along the way. No he didn’t kill Frances, he said, though he was infuriatingly vague about his movements, and how and where he had parted from Frances (another drunken row). The coroner identified three cuts across the throat, left to right,  back again, then back once more. Sadler’s sailor’s cap was drenched in what was probably human blood. The story changed from day to day, and the arresting officers were not only confident they had got their man, but that they would get a conviction.

But before any trial there had to be an inquest, and that was called before the East London coroner at the Working Lads’ Institute in Whitechapel. Mr Wynne E Baxter heard the evidence of Bagster Phillips who opined that Sadler’s bruised and bloody appearance was at least consistent with having murdered Frances Coles. The press had a field day, deciding that they had at last run Jack the Ripper to ground. It was just three years since the Whitechapel murders had shocked London, and there was enough in common with the murder of Frances for editors to decide this was the latest in that violent series. But when the jury returned on Friday 27 February 1891, they had not found enough to decide on anybody’s guilt. The foreman declared ‘We find that the deceased was wilfully murdered by some person or persons unknown, and we wish to say that we think the police did their duty in detaining Sadler’.

It was a frustrating verdict rather reminiscent of the ‘not proven’ of Scottish courtrooms. The finger had been firmly pointed at Sadler, but no more. The suspect went free, but the story doesn’t end there. Two years later the police logged reports of Salder having threatened to murder his wife Sarah. Neighbours described him as ‘violent and treacherous’. The murder of Frances Coles stayed as an open case meanwhile. The way it was treated speaks volumes at what the police really thought: it was filed as the last entry in the Home Office and police files on the Whitechapel Murders.

With thanks to East End Murders from Jack the Ripper to Ronnie Kray by Neil R Storey, published by The History Press, ISBN 9780750950695, £12.99.

It’s the sort of mad scheme that only an enthusiastic amateur historian would come up with … and for which researchers ever after would be eternally grateful. For when Mrs Basil Holmes set out to write a book detailing every London cemetery of every and all denomination and creed, there was no financial incentive in the job. The market for the book, would be small, but Isabella Holmes (to give her back her Christian name) was tireless, sometimes fanatical in tracking down her sites – often risking suspicion and physical danger in the process. But writing as she did at the close of the 19^th century, she caught some of the burial grounds just in time. If it hadn’t have been for her seminal work, many sites of special historic interest in the East End would have been lost to posterity.

The London Burial Grounds website* takes the work of Mrs Holmes as its starting point. The book is a ‘useful and surprisingly lively account’ of Isabella’s adventures around the East End and beyond ‘encountering mystified workmen, suspicious householders and savage guard dogs on the way’. Her aim was to preserve as many of the burial grounds as possible as open spaces - the demands on land in a London with an ever growing population were huge.

Many of the spaces we still have. There is St Anne’s Limehouse, one of Hawksmoor’s triumphs, with its mysterious pyramid, ‘beloved of occultists and psychogeographers’. And there is St Paul’s Shadwell, consecrated in 1671 and a plague pit for Stepney Parish originally. There is another old plague pit opposite St John’s Church in Wapping. And there are churchyards that have been pressed into new uses: St James’s Church in Ratcliff was destroyed in 1940 and the churchyard was cleared in 2002, to create ‘a bleak, joyless park overlooking the approach to the Rotherhithe Tunnel’. But there are still fragments of gravestones left at the park’s edges. The Brunswick Wesleyan Chapel Ground in Three Colts Lane, meanwhile, which reportedly contains some thousand bodies, is now the playground of the Cyril Jackson primary school. And some are lost forever, such as the Roman Cemetery which stood on Sun Tavern Fields as was, between the Highway and Cable Street today. Lost too is the Friends Burial Ground in Wapping, first used in 1700, but now buried beneath later redevelopments.

Some sites have a mixed history. The Roman Catholic Burial Ground in Bethnal Green was in use in the early 19^th century, but was possibly on the site of an earlier plague pit. Certainly, by the 1900s, some of the cemeteries were becoming full up (leading to the creation of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ – giant new cemeteries, including Tower Hamlets Cemetery (now the Cemetery Park) in the 1830s and 1840s. The rather ominously titled ‘Gatherings from Graveyards’ was written by London surgeon GA Walker in 1839, just as the problem of overcrowding was at its worst. Walker writes in sometimes gruesome detail of the worst of the burial grounds. The doctor was a subscriber to the ‘miasmic’ theory of contagion - the same thinking that attributed cholera and malaria to ‘bad air’ rather than, respectively, dirty water and mosquitoes. He thus had a particular interest in the health problems that could result from overcrowded local churchyards (which certainly were a health hazard, though for different reasons). He writes of the ground having to be ‘dug with care’ to avoid disturbing newly interred corpses.

Death was not always bad news for all concerned of course. For some it was good business. In 1736 it was discovered that the grave digger at St Dunstan’s in Stepney, one Thomas Jenkins, was selling bodies to Cesar Hawkins, a surgeon at Pall Mall. Mr Hawkins seems to have got away with what was effectively receiving stolen goods. Jenkins was less lucky, being sentenced to a public whipping. In ‘Albion’s Fatal Tree’, author Douglas Hay writes that ‘a mob of sailors and chimney sweeps met in Stepney Churchyard and he was tied to a cart. The cart horses were walked slowly so that he received many hundreds of lashes from the hangman, John Hooper, encouraged by the mob who shouted that he was not to spare him’.

The sites are peppered around the borough, from Bow in the east to Aldgate in the west, north from Bethnal Green to south on the Isle of Dogs. Many of us walk past the evidence every day without realising – a few headstones laid up against the wall of a park here, some fragments almost buried in tarmac there. The sites (and you can find dozens more at London Burial Grounds) could form the basis of a fascinating history tour around the East End … and the history that lies hidden beneath our feet and in unexpected corners.

* http://www.doubleo.fsnet.co.uk/bgpage1.htm

An interesting little book wings its way to us for review this week, in Paul Talling’s ‘Derelict London’. We become used to new towers of glass and steel soaring above the East End, while scarcely a day seems to go by without earth being broken on a new development of luxury flats. But what about the bits in between, the buildings that get forgotten.

For years now, Paul Talling has been photographing ‘Derelict London’ on his website of the same name. What he finds isn’t the picturesque London of the guidebooks - though the buildings are often very beautiful if sadly decayed. Now Derelict London has gone into print and, sadly perhaps, the East End has more than its share of entries.

There are houses, flats, docks, factories and shops. Pubs and cafes rub shoulders with public baths and cinemas, schools, hospitals and the odd fire station. There are boats and trains and the grand Victorian cemeteries of London.

Some of the structures are hidden and easy to miss though. A pillbox in Bow, next to the River Lea, is one memento of World War II. The Lea itself is, of course, as a mystery to many East Enders - just part of the labyrinth of waterways that snakes around the eastern edge of the borough. Bow Creek too is a mess of derelict factories. The Pura vegetable oil works is captured in the book, but is now gone. Sitting on the fringes of the Olympic site, the area is to go under concrete with the building of 2500 new homes. And Pudding Mill River, one of the Bow Backs, is a sad sight, chockful of old car tyres. It is though a habitat for swans, pike, eel and the black redstart, one of Britain’s rarest birds.

Other buildings have gone through changes before eventually becoming redundant. The VIP Garage in Limehouse was originally built in 1869 as a sailmaker and ship chandler’s warehouse. From 1889 it was the home to Caird & Rayner, who built boilers for Royal Navy ships, before ending its days as a garage. An attractive building, with cast iron window frames and double loading doors, it will nonetheless be demolished to make way for flats.

And some buildings are failed ventures in the last great wave of East End regeneration. Tobacco Dock is a beautiful brick building with fine ironwork, built in 1812 to store tobacco coming off the ships in Wapping. The moribund building was converted into a shopping centre but never took off and today stands eerily empty. Outside, meanwhile, are two defunct red telephone boxes. Removed by BT, then brought out of mothballs, and finally killed off by the ubiquitous mobile phone. A public toilet in Poplar is another reminder of a utility that once seemed to be everywhere … but now is very hard to find!

The docks, canals and rivers of the East End, which played such a vital role in trade and manufacturing, appear over and over again. There is the Chisenhale Works in Bow, built by Morris Cohen in 1943 to produce parts for Spitfire and Mosquito aircraft. There is the Tate Institute in Silvertown, founded by Sir Henry Tate to allow the workers in his sugar factory to enjoy some leisure and self improvement time.

Pubs are closing all over the country of course, but there’s still something plaintive about a blacked-out London boozer, especially when it’s a building as fine as The Crown and Shuttle in Shoreditch. Brick Lane’s last pub, the Seven Stars, is now boarded up too, perhaps a casualty of the changing population of the area. And the marvellously named Flying Scud now stands empty, the ubiquitous flyposters papering every available surface.

You can’t help but mourn the passing of certain buildings. Couldn’t Poplar well do with a public baths … Poplar Baths has stood empty for 23 years now.

Sometimes the buildings are saved, though often only a facade remains. The result can be seamless though occasionally it can be bizarre, as in the Providence Row Refuge and Convent in Spitalfields. A swift double take of the Victorian facade reveals new, yellow brick offices lurking behind the empty window frames. And the irony of the regeneration of Tower House, one of the original Rowton House hostels built to provide decent accommodation for working men, is striking. The derelict building is accommodation for London workers again, though this time luxury flats at hundreds of pounds a week.

Just a taster. Paul Talling has hundreds more on his website, and from the rest of London too, with new photos being added all the time. Check it out at www.derelictlondon.com.

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.