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On 2 September 1666, London ignited. Over the next few days gales blew without interruption. The resulting firestorm took 100 hours to destroy virtually every trace of a medieval city that had been 600 years in the making. Now, 335 years later, a new book presents the astonishing true story of one of the most famous, yet little understood events in history.

The Dreadful Judgement* is an historical detective story, combing through the ashes, combining modern knowledge of the physics of fire, forensics and arson investigation, with the moving accounts of East Enders and City dwellers who lived through the Great Fire – and many who did not.

The book casts fresh light on the shadowy background to the Fire, which came as London was in the horrific grip of the bubonic plague, and it advances a startling new theory about the origin of the conflagration. It also attacks the previously accepted idea that only a handful of lives were lost in the blaze. with the mass graves of

The first Bill of Mortality (the weekly record published by the City authorities

The great diarist Samuel Pepys was up at four in the morning, loading ‘all my money and plate and best things’, into a cart sent by him by his friend Lady Batten. He then put a fire-break of countryside safely between him and his destination – Sir William Rider’s house in Bethnal Green. He wasn’t alone, observing ‘Lord to see how the streets and the highways are crowded with people running and riding and getting of carts to fetch away things.

* The Dreadful Judgement: the true story of the Great Fire of London, by Neil Hanson. Published by Doubleday, £16.99, ISBN 0385601344.

Somebody has kindly pointed out that the link to 100 Faces of the East End by John Rennie has died along with the old website. You can buy copies of the book by following that link. The book is a collection of 100 or so pieces from the older editions of East End Life, tidied up, reedited and then hurriedly slapped into book format. The catchline is ‘the thieves, charlatans, seers, architects, revolutionaries, soldiers, sailores, killers, businessmen, musicians and artists who built the East End of London, and that just about says it and, we hope sells it.

Pieces within cover Ronnie Scott, Matthew Arnold, Holman Hunt, Thomas Frye, Lew Grade and a host more. Why should I buy stuff you’ve already put on your website for free, I hear you cry. Because you can’t curl up in bed with a cup of cocoa and a website, I reply. You also can’t give a website as a birthday or Christmas present.

Jane Cox will be familiar to many readers of East End History. The author of London’s East End: Life and Traditions and a number of genealogical works has devoted 25 years to researching and archiving Tower Hamlets.
Now she has turned her attention to “The mother church of the East End”, the venerable St Dunstan’s – once as important to the religious fabric of London as St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey is today.
And the results of her research – soon to form the basis of a new book – are the subject of this month’s talk at the Ragged School Museum.
The church’s very antiquity makes compiling a history difficult. We know that it was rebuilt in the 10th century by St Dunstan – then Bishop of London – so it is even older than that. Until the 13th century it was the only church for the whole of Stepney; then the whitewashed chapel of Whitechapel was built.
Jane’s research into the history of the church seek to separate fact from legend by going back, where possible, to the original sources.
Her book will trace the history of the church and its village from earliest times, bringing alive the cast of royal servants and fishermen from the Marsh (now the Isle of Dogs), the turbulent hot-gospellers, officious vestrymen, sailors and tailors, ‘top-booted’ gentlemen parsons, parish clerks on the fiddle and sextons on the make.
Stepney church was once the church for the whole of what is now the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and part of Hackney. The enormous far-flung parish was said to be the “most ample in Europe”, covering, at its greatest, seven square miles.
Village church
In the early middle ages people from all the villages and hamlets east of the Tower of London – Bow, Whitechapel, Poplar, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Mile End, Shadwell, Limehouse, Wapping and Ratcliffe – came trudging along the lanes to worship and seal their rites of passage at Stepney church.
In the 13th century only the farmers and fishermen of the Marsh had their own chapel-of-ease elsewhere.
The Mother church stood for many hundreds of years among walled orchards and waving corn, flanked by fine houses.

In the 16th century the riverside hamlets became ‘sailortown’, crowded with ships’ workshops and lodging houses for the navy. And the sea captains and merchants of the East India Company were the congregation and financial backbone of the church for two hundred years or more.
As the population of its great neighbour, London, swelled and spilled out into the East End, row upon row of houses marched relentlessly over the fields of Stepney.
The sky was dark with the masts of ships on the river and the air hung black with soot and grime; dockers and factory workers took their place in the pews instead of gentlemen, sailors and market gardeners.
And the Church had to grow with its new congregation. Between the 14th and the 19th centuries the old parish church spawned no less than 67 daughter parishes as the rural retreat sank beneath the weight of humanity into a seething slum.
Stepney was like a vast transit camp, taking in Dick Whittingtons who flocked towards London in search of work, and many thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers from abroad.
Anchors in Stepney
As the newcomers arrived, so others left, many seeking a new life across the Atlantic.
Driven to crime because of their poverty, East Enders were deported to Botany Bay in great numbers. For thousands of American and Australian families, Stepney Church is their home anchor; the place where their ancestors were baptised, married and buried.
Now, the only remnant of the medieval East End, it stands in its leafy churchyard, as if on a village green, miraculously saved from the Blitz.
It is one of the liveliest and best loved churches in London and, for the genealogical fraternity at least, the best known of all English churches.

Talk about air raids on the East End, and
we immediately think about flying bombs and the Luftwaffe. So great was the devastation wrought during World War II that most people forget there had been victims 25 years before.
The recently published The East End at War puts the record straight, and next week co-author Rosemary Taylor will be giving a talk at the Ragged School Museum, recognising the victims of two world wars.
The book, which draws heavily on photos from the Tower Hamlets Local History library and archives, goes back as early as the 18th century.
WWI Zeppelin
The first bombings of the East End itself occurred during the First World War, with the first daylight aerial bombing occurring on June 13, 1917. Then, of course, it was ponderous Zeppelins rather than fast fighter planes attacking, but the damage was still terrible.
In the East End, 104 were killed, 154 seriously injured and 269 slightly injured. Among the casualties were 120 children killed and injured, 18 killed in Upper North Street School, Poplar.
But it was during the Second World War that the East End was worst hit. The book came out last year to mark the 60th anniversary of the Blitz – a reign of terror which began in earnest on September 7, 1940.

By that time, German radio propagandist William Joyce – ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ – had warned that “the Luftwaffe will smash Stepney”. It was a prediction that came horribly true.
The strategic importance of the East End docks made the area a natural target, and during the Blitz thousands of homes, factories, shops and businesses were destroyed. The figures are mind-boggling today: 2,221 civilians were killed and 7,472 injured in Tower Hamlets; 46,482 houses were destroyed and 47,574 damaged.
The Blitz was no surprise, of course. The build-up to that bombing campaign saw major preparations: trench-digging in the parks; sandbagging of strategic buildings such as town halls; the introduction of blackouts and air-raid precautions (ARP); and the evacuation of thousands of women and children.
Many harrowing photos from that time bear witness to the devastation of the Blitz in the East End, and to tragedies like the Bethnal Green Tube disaster of 1943 and the terrible damage caused by the first V1 flying bomb, which killed six people in Grove Road in 1944.
But they also tell another story – of resilience in the face of terrible hardship, of heroism and, when it was all over, of joyful celebration and the gradual rebuilding of lives, homes and communities.
Many heroic acts were performed by Eastenders – and some of these by unusual heroes. Rip, a dog found by Warden E King of Poplar, helped in the search for people buried under debris. He proved an invaluable asset and was awarded the Dickin Medal – the animals’ VC – “for locating many air-raid victims buried by rubble during the Blitz of 1940”. In the wartime East End, even the mutts were heroes!
The East End at War by Rosemary Taylor and Christopher Lloyd is available only at WH Smith, price £14.99.

There can’t be many dates more embedded in the consciousness of the English people than the last year the English mainland was invaded, and the final year of the Great War.
The Isle of Dogs – 1066 to 1918 is subtitled a brief history, though it deals with nearly a millennium of our history.
A fascinating volume, it traces the history of this out-of-the-way, marshy peninsula, from its rural past (most of its history) and through the relatively brief period of its industrial might.
In fact shipbuilding and the docks, the businesses for which we know the island, and whose passing is much mourned today, only arrived around 1800 – so what was going on for the first 734 years?
The first surprising fact we learn is that our Isle of Dogs isn’t the original island at all. The present Island was known as Stepney Marsh, Poplar Marsh or Wet Marsh, and off its south-west bank lay a small islet, marked on Tudor maps as the “Ile of Dogges”.
Why? Nobody knows, but the isle was gradually eroded by the river, and the colourful name became attached to the marsh itself.
The Normans are the first recorded settlers. William of Pontefract had an 80-acre estate on the Island in the late 12th century, his lands boasting a chapel and a manor house.
And by the mid 14th century the manor and its farms were still intact, with quotes of labourers reaping the corn that grew there.
In the 15th century, when Poplar, Limehouse and Blackwall were beginning to industrialise, the Island stayed remote, maintaining its agricultural nature.
Fishing was important too, and the Marsh began to evolve as a quite different place from the rest of Stepney, with local people proudly referring to themselves as ‘of the marsh’.
But farming on Stebunheath (Stepney) Marsh suffered a setback in 1449. The old embankment wall had been neglected and the Thames broke through. The hamlet of Pontefract Manor fell into decline, and there is no evidence of corn growing after this point.
The farmland was pressed into new use, with the marshy pastures being used to hold and fatten cattle brought to London for slaughter. The laws of the time meant that slaughter was only allowed in two London locations – Stepney and Knightsbridge – at the east and west of London respectively, so the island became lucrative ground.
The island was now making connections south of the river. In the mid-1400s, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, created the park and mansion that became the foundation for Greenwich.
By the 1500s, there was a ferry running from the island to Greenwich and another to Deptford – setting off from what is now Deptford Ferry Road. In 1665, Samuel Pepys was catching the Deptford Ferry when he had the misfortune to be stranded because of a low tide.
He wrote: “We were fain to stay there, in the unlucky Isle of Doggs, in a chill place.”
The first rumblings of industrialisation came with the building of flour mills – a dozen were built on the western embankment of Stepney Marsh between 1679 and 1740, and the name Mill Wall was born.
By the end of the 18th century, some of the mills had converted to crushing oil seed, and the barges unloading the raw grain saw the start of the island’s history as a dock.
Winding Thames

It was the rapid growth of London as a trading centre, together with the difficulty of getting ships in and out of the crowded and winding Thames, was to change the nature of the island forever.
Confronted by the risk of losing valuable business to Liverpool, the Corporation of London approved the building of London’s first wet docks for the loading, unloading and storage of cargoes.
The 1799 Act of Parliament allowed for the construction of the London Docks, at Wapping and the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs.
The millers, cowherders and other rural folk who had largely escaped the bustle of London saw the new docks carve across their banks, ditches, meadows and lanes, cutting right across the neck of the old marsh and turning it into an island for real.
Find out more about the development of the docks in next week’s East End Life.
In 1800 the population of the island numbered 200, but by 1830 it had risen to 1,400.
Streets, an idea unknown on the island before, were quickly built in Millwall and Cubitt Town. Shops and pubs appeared.
Finally, with the building of Millwall Docks in the 1860s, all but a few scraps of isolated open land disappeared – the transformation from rural settlement to metropolitan London was complete.
Of course this meant a new population had to be drafted in, to work in the docks and shipyards. Migrants poured in from all over Britain and Ireland.
The island was a good place to be at the time, with the shipwrights enjoying a high status and good wages.
That abruptly changed in 1866, when a financial crisis hit the shipyards, closing many and throwing thousands out of work.
There is much documentation of the industry and firms which effected this transformation of the Isle of Dogs.
In 1811 it was reported that “some very extensive iron works have been lately established at Millwall, near the Canal and West India Docks, by Jukes, Coulson and Co [making] sheet and rod iron, for home consumption and exportation… anchors and mooring chains”.
Nearby, Sir Charles Price and Co had a mill for crushing rapeseed and linseed, a turpentine distillery and a manufactury of rosin.
Rope & cable makers
In 1817, Johnstone’s London Commercial Guide and Street Directory listed 32 businesses in Millwall. They included Samuel Brown, the chain cable maker; Ferguson and Todd, mastmakers; James Grellier, stone lime works; Joad and Curling, rope makers; and Greve, Grellier and Co, Roman cement makers.
The nautical links were obvious, with four mast makers, eight ship and barge builders, three ships chandlers, three timber merchants, an iron founder and a chart seller. Most were small businesses, all have now, of course, disappeared.
One of the bigger concerns was John Scott Russell’s engineering works. Latterly it took over the firms of those two great Scots engineers David Napier and William Fairbairn. Napier had pioneered steam-powered iron vessels from his Millwall yard; Fairbairn perfected tubular iron bridges.
The giant yard that Russell developed would be chiefly remembered for producing Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s giant vessel The Great Eastern in 1858. This white elephant of a vessel proved too costly and cumbersome for transatlantic travel, and ended its days as a travelling exhibition and fun fair.
The collapse of shipbuilding saw the island’s second industrial revolution follow hard on the first.
From the 1860s on, and for the next hundred years, it would be docking that was the island’s business, with Millwall Docks opening in 1868.
New firms sprung up. Brown Lenox and Company, chain cable makers; Joseph Wetwoods, electrical and mechanical engineers; Locke Lancaster and Co, lead processors; and Duckhams Oil were just a few.
The 20th century saw a long and slow decline, of course. There were false dawns, but now the business of unloading ships is conducted down river, at Tilbury docks.
The industrial future of the island, meanwhile, seems to lie more in newsprint and money trading conducted in steel and glass towers – a long way from the river that first gave the Isle of Dogs its business and its jobs.

l The Isle of Dogs – 1066 to 1918, A Brief History Vol 1, by Eve Hostettler, an Island History Trust Publication; 120 pages paperback, £12.99.
Buy your copy from the trust or Asda on the Isle of Dogs for a special price of £10. To place your order call the Island History Trust on 7987 6041, call into its office at the Dockland’s Settlement, 197 East Ferry Road, E14, or go along to the Asda superstore in East Ferry Road, E14

For as long as authors have been writing, they have written about the East End… though not always in flattering tones.
For writers as diverse as PG Wodehouse and William Morris, the East End was a byword for poverty, danger and horror.
Morris, in fact, wished the area out of existence.
In his socialist utopia, News from Nowhere, published in 1890, the narrator awakes in the year 2003. He is told by his guide: “Once a year, on May Day, we hold a solemn feat in those easterly communes of London to commemorate the Clearing of Misery, as it is called. On that day we have music and dancing, and merry games and happy feating on the site of some of the worst of the old slums.”
A year earlier, George Gissing betrayed a similar horror of the East End in his novel The Nether World. The narrator is leaving Liverpool Street station for a holiday in Chelmsford: “Over the pest-stricken regions of east London, sweltering in sunshine which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of the damned… above streets swarming with a nameless populace… stopping at stations which it crushes the heart to think should be the destination of any mortal, the train made its way at length beyond the outmost limits of dread.”
Of course, many of these dramatic accounts were based on only fleeting knowledge of the regions east of the City.
In 1916, Thomas Burke wrote a lurid series of stories called Limehouse Nights, peopled with opium-crazed Orientals menacing innocent white girls.
Later though, Burke cheerully admitted: “At the time of writing those stories I had only once spoken to a Chinese for two minutes when I was six years old!”
And Sax Rohmer’s notorious Fu Manchu novels placed Limehouse at the centre of the Yellow Peril, the greatest danger facing the White Man.
The ‘peril’ amounted to a mere 300 peaceable Limehouse residents. Tragically though, this hysteria was largely res-ponsible for the clearing of the East End’s Chinatown in the early part of the last century.

Even PG Wodehouse’s amiable twit Bertie Wooster pontificated about East End opium dens. In Much Obliged, Jeeves, Bertie refers to one of those “sinister underground dens lit by stumps of candles stuck in the mouths of empty beer bottles such as abound, I believe, in places like Whitechapel and Limehouse”.
But of course Tower Hamlets literary history goes back far further to that of Aldgate resident Geoffrey Chaucer, who peopled his Canterbury Tales with colourful East End characters. His prioress, Madam Eglantine, had learned her French with a cockney accent: “And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, after the scole of Stratford atte Bowe.”
While Chaucer was penning his fictionalised accounts of Londoners’ pilgrimages, Wat Tyler and his peasants would have passed by Aldgate, in 1381. A century and a half later, that great London historian John Stow wrote an account of the Revolt in his Chronicles.
Samuel Pepys went on to document the East End in the 1660s, writing of the area as a haven from the Plague and then an escape from the Great Fire that followed.
Daniel Defoe wrote his A Journal of the Plague Year much later, noting in wonder that Whitechapel High Street became covered with grass due to the lack of traffic using the road.
By the 1800s, of course, Dickens was peppering his novels with East End references, with Dombey and Sons’ Captain Cuttle very punctual in his attendance at St Anne’s, Limehouse, and David Copper- field leaving his coach at the Blue Boar Inn, Whitechapel, on his way to school.
It seems hardly a novel of the time was written without a reference to Tower Hamlets. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aunt Agatha pays visits to play piano duets. “They are so unhappy in Whitechapel. And Gray dissipates himself in the low dens of Shadwell”.
In fact, it was left to a real outsider, California’s Jack London to feel pity rather than horror or prurient fascination. He took up residence in Flower and Dean Street in 1902, while he wrote The People of the Abyss. He called the East End a “human hellhole”, but paints the East Enders as the victims.
It was a literary torch that was to be picked up by George Orwell 30 years later.

Literary London by Andrew Davies, published by Macmillan, ISBN 0333457080.

The East End may not be the prettiest or the grandest corner of the capital, but it has more than its fair share of fascinating buildings.
As characters in London’s history, many of them are just as important as the great men and women who built our city – and they are still around to tell their tale.
Just after the Second World War, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the eminent German émigré and art historian, set himself the mammoth task of compiling the Buildings of England series – his aim being to provide an up-to-date and portable guide to the nation’s architecture.
In the second of his two books on London, Pevsner examined the buildings of the then East End boroughs: Bethnal Green, Poplar and Stepney.
Published in 1952, it provides a unique glimpse of the area that was to become Tower Hamlets, before major reconstruction compounded the devastation wrought by the Luftwaffe.
Much has changed in the last 50 years, and now work is underway on a revised volume. The new book will be dedicated to all the east London boroughs and will now incorporate Docklands.
The authors of the new volume are Bridget Cherry and Charles O’Brien and this Wednesday*, as one of a continuing series of talks at Mile End’s Ragged School Museum, O’Brien will be talking about the rich architectural heritage of Tower Hamlets.
Many of the buildings will be familiar, some have been covered in these pages.
Places of worship play a predictably large role. There is the parish church of St Dunstan’s, which for hundreds of years was the only church outside the City boundaries, and the parish church to the whole of Middlesex.
The fine 17th and 18th century houses, large and small, of Spitalfields, Mile End and Stepney are given particular attention. And the book also looks at our commercial and industrial past, from the warehouses of the Co-operative Wholesale Society to the Bryant & May match factory – now the luxurious Bow Quarter in Fairfield Road.

O’Brien also looks at the unique survivors of bombing and redevelopment – those 19th century civic buildings, schools, clubs, hostels and shelters which provided a social support system for generations of East Enders.
We know the Bethnal Green Museum as a fascinating historical repository of toys, but it is also one of the single most important surviving iron structures in London.
And he also looks at the Trinity Almshouses, whose threatened destruction spawned the first calls for the preservation of East End buildings.
Their survival was also testament to skilled restoration by the London County Council, (the GLC’s predecessor) after the destruction of World War II.
Philanthropic buildings and the architecture of social reform have left a lasting legacy to the East End. Toynbee Hall, Oxford House, the People’s Palace, the Whitechapel Art Gallery – these buildings played a crucial role in the cultural and educational lives of the East Enders of the late 1800s and after.
Not all of the charitable projects were such a success.
Columbia Market was paid for by Angela Burdett-Coutts (at a cost of £20,000) and opened in 1869.
The market was intended as a project “to supply the poor with wholesome food at a fair rate” by breaking the monopoly and toll system that operated in other London markets and supplying east London with cheap food.
The ambitious project had room for 400 stalls, but was a failure. Despite attempts to turn it into a fish market to rival Billingsgate (which ironically ended up in the borough anyway), it never caught on, and closed in 1886.
It still had its uses: the cellars were used as air-raid shelters during World War Two, but the building was finally demolished in 1960.
The new volume doesn’t simply celebrate the old, though. Since the war there have been pioneering housing schemes and massive reconstruction.
And O’Brien’s lecture will focus on the changes experienced in the borough since 1952 – as well as the expansion of understanding and appreciation of the area’s distinctive architectural heritage.

Charles O’Brien will be giving the talk ‘Revising Pevsner: A new look at East London’ at the Ragged School Museum, 46-50 Copperfield Road, (Tel. 020 8980 6405) at 7pm on Wednesday, January 17. Cost £1 (50p unwaged); free to members of the Ragged School Museum Trust. The museum café will be open from 6.30pm.

A century ago the streets of the East End were very different to today, with a vibrant community of street traders, beggars and confidence tricksters employing any and every manner of business to drag them out of poverty. It’s a colourful world that would be lost to us were it not for an astonishing and immense photographic archive, compiled over three decades by one of the great pioneers of the camera.

Of course Francis Frith didn’t only snap the East End. Amazingly, this devout Quaker, former grocer and ace businessman set himself the project of photographing every city, town and village in Britain, as well as undertaking exotic and perilous photo-expeditions to Africa. But it is his pictures of the bootblacks, knife sharpeners, organ grinders and cake sellers of Whitechapel that provide a vivid history lesson in the nature of Victorian poverty.

Frith had established a thriving grocery business in Liverpool by 1855, but had always yearned to travel. He sold up for the enormous sum of £200,000 – around £15m at present values. A man of leisure, and captivated by the new science of photography, he set out to see the world.

He spent the next four years travelling to Africa, using a specially designed wicker carriage that doubled as sleeping quarters and dark room. He laboured for hours in his sweltering dark room, but the results were spectacular. Back in London, he exhibited to the Royal Society and was rapturously cheered.

Frith may have been an artist, but he was ever the businessman, and he spotted an opportunity in the increased leisure time of the Victorians. Bank holidays and half-day Saturdays had been made law by an Act of Parliament, and Frith reckoned that the new tourists would want souvenirs to commemorate their days out. The idea of the picture postcard was born, and Frith set out on his epic journey round Britain. It was to take the remaining 30 years of his life.

His pictures of the East End weren’t pretty mementoes of course. But deliberately or not, the sheer number of shots Frith took leaves us with an amazing photo-documentary of life on east London’s streets in the last years of the 19th century. The street traders were often grindingly poor. Selling a few lucifer matches was often a pretext for begging. Bryant and May of Bow employed 700 girls to sell their matches on London’s streets, and Frith’s picture of a shoeless and emaciated Bryant and May vendor paints a thousand words.

His pictures say a lot about the poverty of that age and the wastefulness of ours. Nowadays, we wouldn’t employ knife sharpeners, chair menders and street cobblers – we would simply throw away and buy new. And the growth of casual wear means there would be no employment today for the hundreds of shoeblacks who plied their trade in Tower Hamlets.

East Enders had a bewildering number of morning and evening London papers to choose from – and there were paper sellers on every corner.

Between the 1870s and late 90s, Frith wandered the East End streets with his camera, capturing the baked potato sellers, muffin and gingerbread men, strawberry vendors and the rest who have long disappeared. He also amassed an archive of shots of the bustling Thames, with steamers and good ships putting in and out of the Port of London.

Frith died in 1898 at his villa in Cannes, his mammoth project still growing. The Frith Archive continued to grow for another 70 years, in fact, by 1970 containing more than a third of a million pictures.

You can see more pictures of the East End at the Frith archive on the web, at www.frithbook.co.uk, or contact The Francis Frith Collection, Frith’s Barn, Teffont, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP3 5QP for details of books and prints. Tel: 01722 716376. Email: uksales@francisfrith.com.

London writer Peter Ackroyd has long had an interest in East End characters and locations – his novels Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and Hawksmoor each use fascinating, factionalised accounts of real events in East End history. And his string of biographies include those of famed Londoners Charles Dickens and William Blake.

But Ackroyd’s new work is possibly his most ambitious yet – a biography of the town of London itself. This vast, sprawling work, running to 800 pages, treats the metropolis as an organic, growing thing, and for fans of East End history there are tales to keep you coming back over and over again.

Tower Hamlets and stink industries

Particular chapters will fascinate Tower Hamlets readers. The section on the history of the East End is entitled The Stinking Pile and charts the historical poor-relation status of the regions east of the River Walbrook.

The area was poor in terms of its people anyway, if not in its industries. The factories that generated wealth for London at the same time as they despoiled its eastern reaches were appearing surprisingly early. A Lea Mills court in 1614 recorded the appearance of “Launcelot Gamblyn, lately of Stratford Langthorne, starchmaker, because of unlawful making of starch such a stink and ill favour continue and daily arise”.

We see the gradual overfilling of Tower Hamlets until, in the 1880s, the East End implodes. From being merely dirty, noisy and overcrowded, it becomes the abyss, a nether world. The west had long been talking about the East End with horror, as a foreign country. In 1812, we see Thomas De Quincy talking of Limehouse as a strange and frightening world, as he writes about the Ratcliffe Highway Murders.

Jack London in London

And yet, by the early twentieth century, it was still a mystery to most outsiders. When Call of the Wild author Jack London visited London in 1902, and wanted to pay a visit to Tower Hamlets, he went into Thomas Cook in Cheapside.

The startled office manager informed London: “We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place.”

London might have found the Klondike more accessible. Still he found his way there, and went on to describe East Enders as The People of the Abyss.
As Ackroyd observes: “The West End has the money, and the East End has the dirt; there is leisure to the West and labour to the East.”

Cockney slang from Middle Ages

We see a split between the speech of the West and the East as early as the Middle Ages. East Enders shared their East Saxon-derived dialect with the people of Essex and would ‘walk down the strate’, while westerners spoke the West Saxon dialect of the Court and would use the ‘strete’.

Ackroyd unearths a mine of colourful cockney witticisms and put-downs, though some would now sound more at home in the Fast Show’s music hall skits than on any East End street. Have a banana, what a shocking bad hat, has your mother sold her mangle?, and who put a turd in the boy’s mouth – a conversation stopper from the fifteenth century. Ackroyd sees much of the cockney character defined in its speech. The great essayist, William Hazlitt, had a rather jaundiced view of East Enders’ manner of talking.

Cockneys, booze, suicide & prostitution

“Your true cockney is your only true leveller,” he wrote in 1826. “Everything is vulgarised in his mind. Nothing dwells long enough on it to produce an interest … He has no respect for himself and still less (if possible) for you. He cares little about his own advantage, if he can only make a jest out of yours. Every feeling comes to him through a medium of levity and impertinence.”

There are fascinating chapters on a host of London’s character traits – on the history of drink, the history of suicide, the history of silence and the history of light, as the town ages from the time of the Druids to the dawn of the twenty-first century.

We read of East Enders as traders, gamblers, merchants, soldiers, prostitutes, politicians and nobles. It all builds into an enthralling biography of a complex and often-contradictory character… London.

London The Biography by Peter Ackroyd; published by Chatto and Windus; ISBN 1-856-19716-6; £25.

As the fashionable riverside restaurants multiply, the prosperous young move into Wapping and Spitalfields and the shining office blocks of the new Dock-lands spread over the Isle of Dogs, the very words East End begin to have a different ring.
For centuries, East End was synonymous with sweated labour, poverty, Cockney solidarity and popular protest, such as the dock and Bryant & May strikes, and the Poplar rent protests.
Now, an East End battered by the collapse of traditional industries, by wartime bombing and equally brutal redevelopment is beginning to redefine itself.
A fascinating book, in paperback for the first time, looks at the defining threads that have run through the last 400 years of East End life – what has changed, and what remains the same.
The East End – Four Centuries of London Life is a remarkable work. Alan Palmer writes of a quarter of London perennially poor, yet rich for the historian and casual reader alike.
And he does so in a way that is never a dry discourse of the historical facts but rich in colour and poetry – this is an elegant, detailed, lively and sometimes hilarious trawl through the characters and events that produced the rich stew of Tower Hamlets.
We learn how the East End was first marked out by its geographical otherness.
It lies on a raised strip of gravel separate from the other hills emerging from the flood plain of the London Basin. As early as the fifth century, this marked a division, with the conquering Saxons settling to the west of the River Walbrook, while the defeated Romano-Britons retreated to the east.
The role of the Church in limiting and defining the nascent East End is tackled in fascinating detail.
The Church dominated the manors of Stepney and Hackney – St Dunstan’s was the earliest Christian settlement east of London and for centuries was the diocesan centre for the whole of Middlesex and prevented the suburbs spreading to the east of the City.

This in turn led to the short-term speculation in land that blighted Tower Hamlets development. Land was only available on 31-year leases, and so investors were never lured to develop the grand squares and avenues that characterised the western sprawl of population into the likes of Kensington and Mayfair.
The East End, in consequence, took on a piecemeal appearance – no Regent Streets or Piccadillys in Stepney or Wapping. Ironically, the first wave of planning unity was only to break in response to the Blitz and the subsequent redevelopment of the 1960s and 70s.
But amid the poverty, planning blight and constant rebuilding, Alan Palmer suggests that the East End remains a microcosm of London’s past. Though time and Tower Hamlets have moved on, what happened in London happened first here.
The marvellous invention of the London Theatre took place in Shoreditch with The Theatre and The Curtain, and Music Hall took its bow in the houses of Hoxton and Wellclose Square.
Radical and religious reinvention had their London births here with the various millenarians and levellers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Ana-baptists, Fifth Monarchy Men and Quakers.
Municipal Socialism, one of the defining notes of late 19th and early 20th century politics (and without which we would have had no Labour governments), found its voice in George Lansbury, alongside the early feminism of Sylvia Pankhurst and the Bow match girls.
Above all, Palmer’s aim is to sketch in the details of this colourful past, while relating what was happening in the East End to the rise and fall of London as an imperial city.
This isn’t local history, he is saying – the whole area between the City and metropolitan Essex is rich in a history which is of national significance rather than merely of local curiosity.
The East End – Four Centuries of London Life by Alan Palmer. Published by John Murray Publishers. ISBN 0-7195-5666-X. £10.99 paperback.