eastlondonhistory.com

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.

The East End of London certainly consumes its fair share of beer – though the days when there was a pub on every street corner have gone forever.
But though you’ll find plenty of ale brewed in Burton, Germany or Holland, you’d be hard pressed to order a pint produced in Tower Hamlets itself.
It’s all a far cry from the days when the East End had a powerful reputation for making some of the best beer in the country, and was home to three big breweries turning the stuff out.
London’s name for fine ales goes back centuries, with references cropping up in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
One of the oldest East End breweries was the Black Eagle, at 91 Brick Lane.
Builder John Stott had acquired the land for development in 1660. He set to laying out the gridwork of streets which still forms Spitalfields today.
Joseph Truman sublet the land and started his brewing business, handing over to his sons, Joseph and Benjamin.
When Joseph Jr retired in 1730, the business fell to Benjamin, who made Truman the success it continued to be until the latter part of the 20th century.
The Black Eagle works became renowned for its porter, a drink not unlike modern stout.
Sampson Hanbury took over on Ben’s death in 1780, and by the time of his death in 1835, the Black Lion was producing an awesome 200,000 barrels of porter a year.
Thomas Buxton had joined the firm in 1808 and, having converted the works to steam power, took over the reins after Hanbury’s death.
The company went from strength to strength and, by 1873, Truman Hanbury and Buxton was the biggest brewer in the world.
In 1989, though, brewing ended at Brick Lane.
Less than a mile away, at 333 Whitechapel Road, stood the Albion Brewery. The first brewer, in 1808, was one John Hoffman, but things really began when Philip Blake and James Mann took over in 1819.
Robert Crossman and Thomas Paulin joined the firm in 1846, and in 1899 Mann, Crossman and Paulin introduced the first bottled brown ale in England.

The firm was folded into Watney, Combe Reid in 1959 and ceased brewing at the Albion site in 1959.
The last of the three great East End brewers did their work at the Anchor Brewery in the Mile End Road.
In 1757, Westfield and Moss shifted their brewery from Bethnal Green. The new site was much more handy for the farm carts bringing in barley and hops from Essex and Kent.
Nine years later, John Charrington bought a third of the company, taking over completely in 1783.
Charrington was an all-powerful figure in London brewing at this time, being Master of the Brewers’ Company in 1785.
The firm stayed in the family, passing down through his son Nicholas, then grandsons Charles and Frederick.
The Charringtons were nothing if not traditionalists. Though they installed a revolutionary new steam engine in 1828, they didn’t use electricity until 1927.
And until 1946, the old dray horses could still be seen hauling wagons, laden with kegs, to pubs around the East End.
In 1967, Charrington amalgamated to become Bass Charrington, and the brewery shut for business in 1975.
Now East End drinkers quaff fizzy lagers, with foreign names, made on licence in the Midlands. The traditional porters and brown ales are a thing of the past, as is the label “Brewed in Tower Hamlets”.

Eating out in the East End these days is likely to mean pizza, a kebab, a Chinese or – most likely of all – a curry.
It’s long been a fact of London cuisine that the more far-flung its origins, the more likely we are to swallow it. But a few hundred years ago, cockneys were more likely to be eating stewed pears, curds and whey, and even swans or turtles.
A fascinating exhibition at the Museum of London, called London Eats Out, focuses on 500 years of eating out in the capital. And the East End – the gateway through which the new foods first hit the country – plays a major role.
Back in 1544, sugar was still a novel and prized deli-cacy. It was imported from Morocco but, largely, prepared in the sugar refineries just to the east of the City in Spitalfields. Banqueting tables would be decorated with sugar sculptures.
Troops of turkeys
The 1600s saw the rise in popularity of that Christmas staple, the turkey. They were walked in their thousands
from Norfolk to the East End, where they were slaughtered.
Forward to the 1680s, and Spitalfields began to be
populated by the Huguenots, bringing French cuisine and Dutch biscuits among other delicacies.
A stranger import was turtle. East End taverns would keep them alive in tanks in the
cellar, before the unfortunate creatures became that great delicacy – turtle soup. And, on ‘Fish Days’ in the 16th century, East Enders would feast on porpoise, dolphin and seal.
In 1815, the first restaurant guide to London appeared, with 464 entries. Interestingly, although Southwark had as long a history as a City overspill as the East End, there was barely a south London entry
in Epicure’s Almanac. The East End, though, boasted dozens, sprinkled along the Thames from Wapping, through Limehouse and all the way to Blackwall.
And if you thought the Indian restaurant only made an appearance in the 1960s, think again. The first Indian-run eating place in London opened in 1809, at 34 George Street. The Hindostanee Coffee-House was set up by ex-Indian Army man, Dean Mahomet. Today, there are more than 600 Indian restaurants in the capital.
Convenience food made a surprisingly early debut. The first mechanical vending machine, ‘the curious mathematical fountain’, was set up in the Black Horse Tavern, Smithfield at the end of the 17th century. It dispensed tea, coffee, whisky, raspberry and cherry brandy, and punch.
Another lunchtime snack, the sandwich, was just as popular in the 1800s as it is today. Back then, though, rather than a Tupperware box, workers would pick up their sarnie wrapped in a cabbage leaf to keep it fresh.

And it was in 1842 that
East Enders got their first
taste of a new delicacy,
pineapple, sold in slices on the streets of Spitalfields for a penny a time.
Poor man’s oyster
For hundreds of years, East Enders would buy much of their food on the streets, not being able to afford a stove of their own. Hot puddings and pies were popular in the 1700s, and jellied eels, raw and boiled oysters began to make an appearance – oysters then being poor man’s food. By the 20th century, eels had moved indoors, and by World War II there were 100 eel-and-pie shops in London.
Fish and chip shops have been around for hundreds of years, but reached their peak in the early 19th century, and in 1840 Bishopsgate had more than any other area of London.
Food mixed with politics
in the early 1900s, with the East London Federation of Suffragettes’ Cost Price Restaurant at 440 Old Ford Road, allowing poor mothers with young children a cooked meal at lunchtime and hot soup in the evening. And in 1917, Lady Rhondda opened the first Communal Kitchen in Poplar, serving 600 diners a day.
The early 1900s were, of course, the heyday of the Jewish East End. As well as Blooms, there was the prestigious Stern’s Hotel in Aldgate, run by the famed Sam Stern. A menu from the 1940s makes fascinating reading, with pickled herring for 6d (2.5p), beer for the same and a mixed grill for 2/3 (13p).
And the exhibition features a poignant image of a lost aspect of Limehouse – the old Chinatown swept away in the 1920s amid hysteria about the ‘Yellow Peril’. Waiters stand, in a fading photograph, at the door of Old Friends Rest-aurant, in the aptly named Mandarin Street, E14. The Chinese restaurants did a roaring trade to the sailors coming off Limehouse ships, the locals were enticed in with the promise of ‘knives and forks instead of chopsticks’.
London Eats Out is at the Museum of London, London Wall, EC2, until 27 February.

These days, keeping your fruit, veg and meat fresh is easy – you just pop it in the fridge or freezer.
As a result, the time-honoured culinary arts of bottling, curing, pickling and salting are performed mainly as a treat for the tastebuds, rather than from hygienic – or economic – necessity.
Go back 400 years though, and things were very different. Keeping the abundant spring and autumn harvests fresh to see people through the long, cold months of winter was a matter of life and death, and throwing food away was a costly luxury.
It was to these problems that wealthy Bethnal Green landowner Sir Hugh Platt turned his considerable intellect in the late 1500s.
The son of a successful Hertfordshire brewer, Hugh was also a bright lad, and studied at Cambridge University before coming down to London to study law at Lincoln’s Inn.
Blessed with an inventive and eccentric streak, Hugh never came to the bar. Instead, he bought a fine country house, Bishops Hall in Bethnal Green, and set about his studies of the cultivation of new and unusual plant varieties.
It was the time of Elizabeth I and England’s emergence as a naval and imperial power. Adventurers such as Sir Francis Drake were coming back from the new colonies with exotic crops such as tobacco and potatoes and Sir Hugh eagerly set about raising these from his East End soil. He also made wine grown from his own vineyards.
But if the new foods the Navy was bringing back were a source of excitement to Sir Hugh, the problem of keeping that same Navy fed sparked his scientific imagination to life.
The problem was that ships had never before sailed so far from land, fresh food and clean water. Scurvy and rotten grub were an intractable problem.
In the course of his experiments, Hugh discovered that keeping freshly picked fruit in a vacuum would prolong its life – and so was born the bottling of fruit. He also found that boiling beef in brine would stop the process of decay.

One of his recipes read as follows: “To preserve cowcumbers all the yeere: Take a gallon of faire water and a bottle of verjuice, and a pint of bay salt, and a handful of greene fennel or Dill; boile it a little, and when it is cold put it into a barrel, and then put your cowcumbers into that pickle, and you shall keep all the yeere.”
Drake’s saviour
Sir Francis Drake, busy with the fitting out of his ship, the Defiance, broke off from his work at Wapping to see Sir Hugh’s work at Bethnal Green.
The adventurer was so impressed that he took quantities of Platt’s salted meats and bottled fruits on his voyage. He also took Sir Hugh’s advice on keeping water fresh – though the addition of powdered brimstone, or sulphur – might not be swallowed quite so easily by today’s sailors.
Platt also addressed the health problems that the new foodstuffs were causing. Rich Londoners of the late 1500s were already developing smoker’s coughs and rotten teeth from eating too much sugar – Queen Elizabeth’s teeth were black from advanced decay according to contemporary reports.
Common remedies included rubbing ashes of rosemary or powdered alabaster over the teeth. More drastically, a barber would scrape the teeth, then apply aqua fortis (nitric acid) to bleach them white.
Sir Hugh, who had now also produced his beauty book, Delights for Ladies (1602), warned that after a few of these treatments “a lady may be forced to borrow a ranke of teeth to eate her dinner, unless her gums do help her the better”. The book became a 17th century best-seller.
He was also ahead of his time in developing an early turkish bath. In his “delicate stove to sweat in”, a gentlewoman could “sit or stand in the steam for two hours or more, her head helde above the tubbe”.
Sir Hugh’s authority and knowledge was growing. He drew up plans for English agriculture, advocating crop rotation and the use of artificial fertilisers.
For his pains, he was knighted in 1605, by James I, for his services as an inventor.