eastlondonhistory.com

London is nearly 2,000 years old, growing from a Roman walled settlement to the one of the world’s greatest cities. And not a year has passed in those two millennia without the emergence of epoch-making characters and events.

History books normally concentrate on those great men and women, and those turbulent events. But an astonishingly ambitious volume puts London right at the heart of the story, charting events year by year over the past 1,000 of those years – and the East End has a starring role.

The story of the modern London really begins in Tower Hamlets, with William I fortifying the Tower of London in 1067 and then building the stone structure in 1078.
On to 1101 and we see how traffic was already starting to come in to the City – the evidence being the building of Bow Bridge across the River Lea, by Queen Matilda.
In that year too, the Tower held its first prisoner, the Bishop of Durham, who also became the first man to escape from the Tower of London.

Bedlam and Liverpool Street Station

The East End’s long association with holy orders is first noted in 1108, when the Augustinians founded Holy Trinity Priory near Aldgate. The buildings were to burn down in 1133. 1235 sees the establishment of the first London zoo, with leopards and polar bears housed at the Tower of London. And in 1247, the notorious lunatic asylum of St Mary Bethlehem, or Bedlam, was instituted on the later site of Liverpool Street station.

In 1374, Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the greatest writers in the English language, set up home above the Aldgate, and in 1380 we read the first recorded settlements on the Isle of Dogs, with the establishment of a chapel on the old ‘Stepney Marsh’. In 1448 we see an early danger of living on the Island, the whole area being submerged when the embankment was breached.

The theatre at Shoreditch

1576 sees the opening of the first London playhouse, the Theatre at Shoreditch. And in 1614 we see the East India Company – which shaped the fortunes of the East End as much as any – taking over a new ten-acre site at Blackwall. So began the modern London docks.
In 1684, Spitalfields Market opened for business.

Then, in 1711, the East End received a rash of new churches in response to a Government Act addressing the lack of places of worship in the east. Christ Church Spitalfields, St Anne’s Limehouse and St George in the East all date from this time.

In 1780, religious intolerance reared its head in the East End, with the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots. On a happier note, in the same year William Addis set himself up as a ‘stationer and rag merchant’ at 64 Whitechapel High Street. Addis was to invent the first toothbrush, made of bone and horsehair, giving East Enders relief from the scourge of tooth decay resulting from their consumption of the new delicacy – sugar. The company still bears Addis’s name.

East End brothels and alehouses

And interspersing all these seminal events we read of more mundane matters. The constant attempts of the authorities to contain the nuisance and noise of the East End brothels and alehouses, via a series of laws over the centuries – none of which worked. The continual attempts to curtail the anti-social behaviour of the tanners, weavers, spurriers and other guild workers as they go about their trade with scant concern for the comfort, safety or well-being of their neighbours.

And we read of the strange freaks of nature – the first sighting of Halley’s Comet in 1446 which “served only to confirm a general air of unease and foreboding”, the once a century freezing over of the Thames, and the blazing summers bringing plague and pestilence. And, least expected of all, the East End being hit by a hurricane in 1703.

The Annals of London by John Richardson; published by Cassell and Co; price £30.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does the East End mean to you? Is it communal bath houses and stewed eel sellers proffering their wares on street corners? Doing a moonlight flit to avoid the rent-collecting landlord, or bread and jam for tea?
Or is it the steel and glass towers of Canary Wharf and a Docklands of upmarket houses rather than docks? Or a profusion of curry houses, tower blocks and council estates?
And where does your East End finish? Is it the Tower Hamlets area covered by East End Life or do you include Hackney and Stratford in your map?
Gilda O’Neill’s new book, My East End: A History of Cockney London, asks as many questions as it poses answers.
Not merely a sentimental skip through the Cockney cliches, it questions how much of the East End has
disappeared with the dispersal of its people to Canada, New Zealand… and Essex, and how much those people still carry the East End within them.
Gilda O’Neill is a successful novelist, with seven titles in print, but she is as well known as a historian – born and bred in Bethnal Green and the East End is her
subject.
The strength of her previous two works of non-fiction: Pull No More Bines: An Oral History of Women Hop Pickers and A Night Out with the Girls: Women Having Fun, lay in the eloquent
first-person testimonies O’Neill faithfully collected and transcribed.
My East End is O’Neill’s most ambitious history yet. She traces the history of the area from its earliest times - “liquid history, as it begins with the River Thames”, through its growth as the world’s biggest port in the chapter “Feeding the Imperial Powerhouse”, and the collapse of Tower Hamlets into the hellish Victorian slums detailed by William Booth’s In Darkest England.
There is plenty of colour too, though often of a grim and morbid hue. The East End boasted the first person to be murdered on a British train. Thomas Briggs, taking a trip on the new Fenchurch Street line on July 6, 1864, had the misfortune to encounter his nemesis, Franz Muller, between Bow and Hackney Wick.

It’s all fascinating stuff, irresistibly written and painstakingly researched - the bibliography alone stretches to three pages, enough to keep East End history fans in reading for the rest of their days. But where My East End really kicks in is with the first-person testimonies, largely limited, naturally enough, to the 20th century.
There are tales of the pleasures and pains of knowing your neighbours and living in each others pockets. “People didn’t shut their front doors because it was usually shared accommodation, so you had to leave it open. But the front door was also left open because your neighbour would say, ‘I’ll come round and have a cup of tea with you at four o’ clock.’ I think if you didn’t ask your neighbours for help, they used to think you were being standoffish.”
Living so close-knit could cause problems. “Some people, to save the expense of the sweep, would set fire to the chimney, a dangerous thing to do, and the whole street would be covered in soot and the washing ruined.” Feuds were always going off as “each street had its noisy family, its dirty one”.
That was The Golden Age, as the chapter title would have it. O’Neill finishes with a look at the Post War, Post Imperial, Post-industrial, Postmodern periods which were worrying times for east London. Two years after the government was trumpeting the new Docklands as “the greatest opportunity for the reconstruction of London since the Great Fire of 1666”, the Financial Times of 31 July 1978 was charting the area’s collapse into dereliction.
But what comes across in O’Neill’s vox pops of ordinary people is hope, pride, humour and a relish in the diversity of the East End.
And while that still burns,
so does hope in the East End’s future.

My East End: A History of Cockney London, Gilda O’Neill, Viking Penguin, £16.99.

Today, everybody knows where the Isle of Dogs is. The presence of the tallest building in Britain, most of the ex-Fleet Street papers and some of the priciest new housing in the country has seen to that.
The thing is, whether they come from Inverness or Islington, they’ll probably call it Docklands.
“Even now, try and say to someone you live on the Isle of Dogs, and they go ‘Where’s that?’” laments Christine, an Island dweller.
People have always known that the Island was a bit different, remote even from the rest of the East End.
Now, a new book, Docklands – Cultures in Conflict, Worlds in Collision*, looks at the history of this idiosyncratic chunk of Tower Hamlets, what makes it unique, and how a self-contained, isolated area dealt with the upheaval of the biggest urban regeneration project in British history.
Author Janet Foster starts with the background history of the Island and how despite its hundreds of years of habitation, most particularly the boom years between 1800 and the start of this century, many Londoners passed by, with no idea of the Island’s existence.
Local disenchantment
All that was to change in 1981 with the foundation of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC). Something needed to be done to rejuvenate 5,100 moribund acres in the heart of London, that was for sure. Whether it was done right depends on your point of view.
As the Canary Wharf development gathered pace, local disenchantment set in.
“The people on the Isle of Dogs started to realise this glossy utopia was not for them,” comments one local woman.
One protest march showed the depth of feeling. In May 1986, hundreds dressed in black and carried a coffin down the streets, mourning the death of their community. Their destination was Canary Wharf where a symbolic burial took place.
An incoming businesswoman could see the problem. “This is the first time since the dock wall went up in 1800 that the area has been open to the public,” she commented.
And it wasn’t just the Islanders who felt railroaded by the furious and sometimes insensitive development. Rich-ard Rogers, himself a modernist and architect of the Lloyds Building, Stansted Air-port and the Pompidou Centre in Paris described the development as “a hymn to greed”.
“The tragedy is immense,” wrote D Widgery in 1991, in Some Lives, A GP’s East End.
“Docklands was the world’s choicest building site… an area larger than the city of Venice. It didn’t need to become a jumble lot of giant offices at the whim of land prices driven dizzy by speculation and recession.”

Even the former chairman of the LDDC, Sir Christopher Benson, admits the new authority made big mistakes with a population which had recently had the trauma of having its core industry, dockwork, entirely swept away.
Demoralised people
“There’s no shortage of hard-working people in Docklands, but they’d been utterly demoralised,” he said.
“We failed to discover how deep was that desolation. We just regarded them as people who didn’t understand what we were about. Perhaps we should have started with community feeling on the board.”
The contrasts were the hardest thing for many Islanders to take. As redundant land was sold off as prime development real estate, and the Govern-ment poured in millions of pounds in grants, many campaigned in vain for cash to be spent on their decaying council properties.
Foster spent most of the Nineties collecting the material for her book.
In the meantime much more has been swept away and big business seems to dominate the Island more and more. The LDDC has gone but there’s probably another seven years of development to come.
But the overwhelming feeling from reading this book is one of sadness. Not just from what has gone – the Island had to change and be rebuilt – but at what could have been.

Docklands – Cultures in Conflict, Worlds in Collision
by Janet Foster.
Published by UCL Press, ISBN 1-85728-274-4, price £14.99.

THE date was Wednes-day, July 7, 1948. Lon-don was in the midst of rebuilding itself after six long, hard years of war.
The East End of London had more rebuilding to do than most – much of it was bombsites or building sites, as reconstruction went on to repair the damage wrought by the Blitz.
Meanwhile, up West, the life of one of the key figures in the East End’s rebuttal of the Luftwaffe was brought to an untimely close.
When Councillor Frank Robert Lewey collapsed and died crossing Westminster Bridge that summer morning, he was just 55 – but he already had a lifetime of dogged service to the East End behind him.
Frank Lewey was a Stepney councillor for all but three years between 1928 and his death. He was election agent for Labour leader Clement Attlee in the great, post-War shock General Election victory of 1948 and he was Mayor of Stepney during the dark years of the Blitz.
But he might have been forgotten except for his remarkable, and exhaustive, book logging the experiences, horrors and privations of the East End during those times.
The reissue of Cockney Campaign over 50 years after his death is a fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary Londoners during the Blitz.
Part diary, part reportage, much of it told in the directly quoted words of East Enders in the thick of it, it has a power and immediacy most historians could only dream of capturing.
Frank Lewey was born in Mile End and spent a bleak childhood, much of it in the Stifford Homes. After his apprenticeship as a gardener, he fought for his country in the Great War. Coming back to Civvy Street, he faced what so many other veterans had to contend with – unemployment and constant lay-offs.
For Lewey, the answer lay in politics. He joined Limehouse Labour Party, determined to help build the promised – but illusory – land fit for heroes to live in.

It was the beginning of a solid commitment to the people of the East End that would win him friends on all sides – after his death there were tributes from Conservative and Communist councillors, as well as his own group.
In Cockney Campaign, Lewey paints an extraordinary picture of an East End only too aware – and wary – of fascism, from its repelling of Mosely and his Blackshirts in the late 1930s.
And it’s as an insider’s view that the book draws its strength. He talks of East Enders erecting barricades in the Stepney streets in the weeks before war broke out (a story suppressed by Fleet Street at the time for fear of stimulating national panic).
Spies at large
He writes of the German fascist spies who were seen at large in Tower Hamlets at the same time.
The sub-headings of the chapters tell their own story. ‘Fifty per cent of houses
gone’, ‘Their spirit cannot be broken’, ‘Mass murder raids begin.’ And intriguingly ‘Digging out 120 sheep’!
In fact, the whole story of horror is peppered with humour and hope.
And it doesn’t stop with the end of hostilities. Lewey casts a critical eye at the slums left in the wake of the bombing, the tardiness at rebuilding for the people of the East End, how despite all the efforts for a fairer society, the wealth of the country remained in the hands of just 30,000 men.
Through it all shines Lewey’s admiration for the resilience of the East Enders. It may be a tragedy that he didn’t live to see the rebuilding continue, but his lasting legacy is Cockney Campaign, as vivid a picture of life in Blitzed Britain as you will ever read.

l Cockney Campaign by Frank R Lewey. Originally published by Stanley Paul and Co, 1948. Reissued by Tower Hamlets Local History Library, 1999. Hardback, £14.99.
Available from Bancroft Library, 277 Bancroft Road, London E1. Tel: 0181-980 4366.

The thought of corpses being dug up from a cemetery in the middle of the night makes the blood run cold. But it often happened in the Victorian East End.
In ill-lit streets around burial grounds at Whitechapel, Mile End and Bethnal Green, chilling tales were told of men carrying slumped shapes to a waiting horse and cart.
Hospitals were helped by an old law which allowed murderers’ bodies to be cut up for research by the Surgeons Company. After all, it was argued, the killers had it coming.
But London was at the heart of international medical research and would-be surgeons required at least a dozen bodies to complete their studies.
They had no other reliable source than shadowy figures, known as Resurrection Men, who roamed the graveyards at night with their shovels and were prepared to provide a freshly-buried corpse at the back door for £4.
Not the least of the attractions were teeth which could be made into dentures. A resurrectionist named Murphy is said to have earned £60 in one burial vault simply by going around, yanking out teeth.
The infamous Ben Crouch Gang used to pay bent grave-diggers in London to slip a fresh body from its coffin soon after mourners left the open graveside. The hole would be filled in with the corpse on top, under a thin layer of earth, to await “collection after dark.”

Grave robbers William Burke and Bill Hare also made a lucrative living selling corpses but went over the top by murdering at least 15 people to step up their supply.
They started their gruesome trade in Edinburgh, then moved to London in the 1820s where there was more demand. Burke was eventually hanged, largely on the evidence of his dim companion who survived to beg on East End streets for many years.
Burke confessed to the world at large after his conviction but was outraged by what he thought was a real wrong-doing. He claimed he had not been paid in full for one of his last bodies and wanted the balance to buy a decent coat for his execution.
Some undertakers took special precautions to thwart grave robbers. An example is recorded of 73-year-old Mary Mason, buried at Christ Church, Spitalfields, who had three iron bands fastened around her coffin. Another was chained to the wall.
Undertaker William Horne was so concerned about his own resting place, at Spital-fields in 1826, that he had three coffins, one inside the other. One was lead, another iron and the last one wood.
Death was almost as important as life to Victorians, and it was many years before fears of bodysnatching finally receded and relatives of the deceased slept soundly in their beds.
For further reading: Bodysnatchers by Martin Fido; and Life and Death in Spitalfields 1700-1850 by Margaret Cox.

James Page-Roberts has made something of a cottage industry from books about the Docklands he lived and worked in during the years after the war.
And with his latest work ‘Docklands Buildings Old and New’, which he flags up as ‘a personal, anecdotal and historical guide’ the author doesn’t disappoint.
Roberts takes the reader on a guided tour through the streets and passages of the East End, pointing out sites as he goes. Noticing the tiny details of a building here or an old wall or lamppost there, he reveals its hidden history.
The author claims that “to love buildings is to love history and to love life. Whether travelling a few paces or around the world, not a second will be boring and not a moment wasted”.
And Roberts certainly squeezes the most from his Docklands walks, training the reader’s eye as he goes. As has often been written, the history of Docklands is the history of London, for it was here where the waves of immigrants over the centuries set their first foot on English soil, and where, for two millennia, the traded goods that made London rich arrived and left the country.
The history of the docks is, of course, inextricably linked with the historical riches of the City of London – where trade in the goods that landed in the East End was conducted.
Logically enough then, we start with a walk from the Old Billingsgate Fish Market in Lower Thames Street to Shadwell, via the Monument, the Tower and St Katharine’s Dock and into the East End.
The author pauses to point out the ornate decoration on the fine houses of Wapping Pierhead – the decorative drainpipes and bootscrapers.
Up Brewhouse Lane to Tower Buildings is a fine example of the workingmen’s dwellings which sprung up all over the capital in the middle of the last century.

But Roberts isn’t just concerned with the old. His next route takes us from Shadwell via St George in the East, past Francis & C Walters funeral parlour in Commercial Road, and then onto the ultra-modern Canary Wharf development.
Ancient and modern, all are examined in the same intricate detail. The excellent photographs will keep you on the right track as well as helping you get the most from your walk. This is a book you will use time and time again.
There is a series of eight walks, including the Tidal Mills at Bow, two trips round the Isle of Dogs and a hop across the river to Rotherhithe and Greenwich – two areas which share in the rich history of London’s docks. Along with all the walks there are tips on buses, tubes and DLR stations to help you return from B to A.
And as all this walking is likely to be thirsty work, readers may be grateful to know that some of the East End’s best and most historically intriguing pubs are included.
An extensive bibliography and index helps you glean the most from the book, whether your passion is West India Quay, James Whistler or whitebait!
For those of us who want to learn more about the history and buildings of the most varied and history-packed corner of Britain, this book will be a valuable guide.
But a warning, once you start looking a little more closely, you may get a shock when you realise just how much you’ve been missing!

Docklands Buildings Old and New is available from Mudlark Press (ISBN 0953051722) priced £5.95.

Back in January, East End Life looked at the extraordinary life of Rudolf Rocker, the German anarchist who settled in Stepney Green.
He dedicated himself to the organisation of Jewish immigrant workers – his leadership of the 1912 garment workers strike swept away much of the Victorian culture of poor sweated labour.
Now a new translation by his surviving son, Fermin, tells a story every bit as remarkable.
It charts how the young Fermin grew up as the cockney son of East End immigrants, moved to New York with his parents as a boy and finally, as an elderly man, came back to settle in London in 1972.
The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood first appeared in German translation a few years ago.
It is a fascinating memoir for the thousands of Eastern European and German Jews whose families made the exodus to England to escape the pogrums and Nazi persecution.
Now, appearing for the first time in English to coincide with Fermin’s 90th birthday exhibition of paintings, the book is fascinating both for the descendants of those early refugees and anyone intrigued by the way Jewish immigrants shaped the rich culture of the East End.
And The East End Years doesn’t offer a dusty and impersonal image of Rudolf Rocker, the political activist, academic and hero. We see a German immigrant family at home, with all the fun, parties, arguments and racial frictions that were part of normal life.
The Rockers, though Christians themselves, were immersed in the Jewish community, and this gave the young Fermin a unique insight into the tensions between the two communities.
“The Cockneys of the district had little love for their Jewish neighbours, who in addition to being Jews, had the misfortune to be foreigners as well,” he wrote.

But the tradition of rubbing along with different incoming cultures was already established. “Open clashes between the adult communities must have been rare, for I never heard of any,” Fermin observed.
There were scraps between gangs of youths though.
“The Jewish youngsters of Whitechapel and Stepney were a rather rough and scrappy breed who gave as good as they got in those skirmishes,” he said.
The Rocker home in Dunstan House, Stepney Green, was a constant stopping-off point for visitors from mainland Europe – friends of Rudolf driven to England by religious or political persecution abroad.
Squalor and misery
For them, the East End was a culture shock. “Nothing they had seen in other capitals equalled the squalor and misery that confronted them here,” wrote Fermin.
“Nor can I recall ever seeing such numbers of beggars, drunks and derelicts as roamed the streets in those days. The sight of the poor sot lying sprawled in the gutter, drunk to the point of insensibility, was so common as to elicit hardly more than a shrug.”
Yet the main tone of the book is how much the young Rocker soon finds he has in common with his new compatriots, their humour and their strength during the Zeppelin raids of the First World War – a time of particular pain for Fermin, as it leads to his father’s internment and eventual expulsion from Britain.
When Fermin returned to London in the early 1970s, he saw how many of the buildings he remembered were still standing, though the worst of the squalor was thankfully gone.
And, most fascinating of all, Fermin’s writings bring history to life.
As one review had it: “This little book will come as a relief to all those who have had enough of the dryness and soullessness of much professional history.
“It is full of life and atmosphere. Not simply history to be digested, it brings to life a political movement in its day-to-day activities.”

The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood, Fermin Rocker, Freedom Press, ISBN 0 900384 92 1, Price £7.95.