eastlondonhistory.com

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.

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

When the docks left the East End they took with them a way of life and an economic base that had underpinned Wapping, Shadwell and the rest of the Tower Hamlets for 150 years and more. But along with them they took a whole language that had sprung up around ships, cargoes and the dirty, dangerous and uncertain work that serviced them.

The East and West India Docks, the Millwall and St Katharines, Blackwall, the Royals, and the Surrey Docks on the Rotherhithe bank are all history now – with large parts of the land and buildings taken over by premium-priced housing. But much of the arcane and colourful language that sprang up around the quaysides in the 19th and 20th century is with us still.

Tom Ash* started work in the Surrey Docks in 1960, and soon found it was a hard way to earn a living. ‘Bomping on money’ was just 13/- a day (65p). Bomping money was paid to dockers if they hadn’t got a job for the day – nobody was guaranteed a day’s work of course. If there was no work he’d have to go to the ‘Pool’ and get his work book stamped (or bomped). Better than the old days of waiting behind ‘the chain’ to be called forward to work or sent home with nothing, but an uncertain wage nonetheless.

The days of the chain had in turn been replaced by those of the ‘brass tally men’. Before the Dock Labour Scheme was created in 1946, bringing with it at least some guarantee of pay, the dockers were each given a brass tally, oval in shape. They would hand this in when given a job for the day, and collect it again when given their pay. If they didn’t get a day’s work they would have to sign on at the local Labour Exchange, bearing their brass tally as proof.

Even with those days gone, the dockers would still refer to a day’s work as ‘tallying’. And they would still gather each morning at the dock gates, ‘shaping up’ for work. And if you were the only person ‘on a call’ who hadn’t been taken on for work, you would be ‘left roasting’ at the gates.

For the rest, the day’s started. Each hold would have a ‘top man’ controlling the direction of the crane for the cranedriver. Right palm downward with an up-and-down movement would signify lower; touching the top of his head would have the jib raised; a clenched fist would stop the crane. The top man would shout ‘muggo’ when it was time for a tea break.

There would be extra money for different types of work. ‘Dirty money’ was the extra dockers would be paid for unloading particularly filthy cargoes, and ‘snow banging’ carried a premium too. When working in the cold storage depots or ‘cold pots’, men would be employed to bang the ice from the refrigeration pipes. Think about that next time you moan about defrosting the fridge.

For as long as there had been docks, there had been pilfering, and security was taken care of the dock policemen or ‘beadles’, which conjures up images of Dickensian London.

And there would be strikes of course. Any union member could call for a ‘show of cards’, and a manual count would be taken of the union cards held in the air. ‘White ticket’ holders, (members of the TGWU) would take precedence over those with ‘Blue tickets’ (the Stevedores Union). All this was to end with the abolition of the Dock Labour Scheme in 1989. Within a year the number of dockers fell from 9,221 to fewer than 4,000. A way of life – and a language – that had long been dying was finished off.
Childhood Days – the docks and dock slang, written and published by Thomas William Ash, ISBN 0952318407
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Some more dock slang
Beach comber
Day worker employed to keep the quays clear of broken pallets and other debris
Ceiling of a ship
Actually the floor of the vessel. When the dockers were unloading they would cry “I can see the ceiling” meaning the floor was in sight and the job was nearly done
The drink
Not refreshments, but the Thames itself. As in “he’s fallen in the drink”, very dangerous with the undercurrents swirling around the massive hulls of docked vessels
The Queen’s holiday
Dockers always got a day off work in honour of the Queen’s birthday
Ice cream man
The rat catcher, so called because he wore a white coat
Mud pilots
Tugs that brought ships in
Toke
Food
Dolly bags
Silk stocking carried by men in the tea warehouses for secreting tea inside their trousers
Light horsemen
Those who stole from barges or ships
Huffling
Steering a barge with an oar

It was an unnerving stay in hospital that got Ken Kimberley thinking again about his childhood days in the East End. Suddenly, as mortality became more real, he had a new sense of urgency about writing them down before they were lost to him.

So was born the idea for one of the most personal and ‘real’ memoirs of East End life in the 1920s, 30s and 40s – the curiously titled Oi Jimmy Knacker. As Ken admits, there is nothing unusual about his story, “there must be thousands like me with similar thoughts of yesteryear … whether you lived in London, Liverpool or Leeds.” But it is exactly the fact that this was a life everyone lived– and which no-one lives anymore, that makes it such an irresistible read. To anyone under 30 it seems like another world.

About that title first of all. Legions of readers will remember Oi Jimmy Knacker as a kids’ street game where one team of energetic cockney kids would form a human horse while the other team would leap upon their backs – trying to stay feet off the ground while simultaneously making the opposition collapse. It’s just one of the games Ken details, Knock Down Ginger being another favourite guaranteed to infuriate the neighbours.

Games are only part of this journal of East End street life for the kids of seventy years ago. There is Delamura’s horse-drawn ice cream cart; the spectacular and lavish East End funerals – also horse-drawn of course; and street parties for the Silver Jubilee of George V and Queen Mary in 1935.
And there is a taste of things to come for Ken and his young pals when a grumpy neighbour parks that rarity, a car, in their street. “You can’t park there, that’s our football pitch,” cry the outraged kids. Little do they realise that a couple of generations on and it will be a space between the cars that is a rarity.

And even when the kids aren’t in the street playing conkers, or cricket, or snowballs, or Christmas carol singing, or watching the council workmen “relaying our cricket pitch” as tyre-friendly tarmac smoothes over the old-fashioned cobblestones, they are out and about. The truth is, with no television, videos, computer games and precious little space, the children have to look far and wide for their fun.

Trips down to the Thames are a favourite pastime. The Woolwich Ferry makes an excellent free trip across the Thames, though as Ken’s Grandad warns, “across the water” is like being in a foreign land, “cos they don’t even speak the King’s English over there”. Off the ferry, the kids race down and through the tunnel to beat the boat back to the northern shore. The swing bridge at Custom House is another favoured destination. Watching the Star of India cruise past, its hull as long as a street, Ken remarks in wonder at the crewmen waving down at him “Look Grandad, they’ve all got black faces.”

And there are much-awaited trips out of the East End. Forget school skiing trips and excursions to France – Ken and his classmates travel to the wilds of North Ockendon, just outside Upminster. Trips out of town mean Essex of course, and the excursion to Southend on Sea is eagerly awaited, as much for the trip on the LMS steam train through the countryside as for the day at the beach itself.

Come World War II and the streets become places of fear, with the Luftwaffe and V2s bringing destruction, and unexploded bombs making whole roads impassable.

But mostly it is happy memories and of streets crowded with people, not cars. Salvation army bands play; huge gangs of kids assemble for the regular Sunday bike ride, children collect for Bonfire Night and chat to the night watchmen guarding the docks and building sites.

Whether you were born in the East End or just moved here, the stories strike a chord. Oi Jimmy Knacker was a game known all over – in other parts of London as Hi Jimmy Knacker, in Croydon ‘Bury the Barrel’, ‘Mountikitty’ in Newcastle and Pomperino in Cornwall to name just a few. But is it still played in East End streets? Probably not.

Oi Jimmy Knacker, written and illustrated by Ken Kimberley, is a Silver Link Book, ISBN 1857941209, price £15.99.