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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Scotland met Poplar: Two hundred years ago, the area east of the City was still farmland and market gardens, with villages such as Bow and Bethnal Green, Stepney and Limehouse among the fields. Ribbon developments were snaking out along the main highways, such as the Whitechapel and East India Dock Roads, and soon the green would be engulfed by a tide of concrete, mortar and brick.

To the people living there in rural Middlesex, soon to become ‘East Enders’ it must have seemed like a new street was thrown up every week. Perhaps it was a little quicker than that - in 1801 there were 900,000 Londoners, by 1901 more than six million. There was just one problem for the builders racing to erect terraces to house the new workers - finding unused names for all their new streets. Sometimes it was children’s names, famous poets, sometimes places from far flung corners of the Empire, and sometimes towns from across the British Isles. Dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases were plucked from the shelf and pored over in a desperate search for new names. Take a trip out along the Romford Road to Ilford and you see one estate where the builders appear to have given up in despair. You drive past 1st Avenue, 2nd Avenue and all the way through to 8th … hardly names to stir the imagination.

When Scotland met Poplar: And one little part of Poplar, delimited by the Docklands Light Railway to the west, the Limehouse Cut to the north, the River Lea to the east and the East India Dock Road to the south, became forever Caledonia. For the many Scots who headed south to work in the docks, it must have been strange to see names of rural Scottish villages, rivers and valleys cut and pasted onto the templated rows of east London streets. This area had been the Bromley Marsh, but with the development of the riverside, and particular the construction of the East India Docks at Blackwall in 1802, the scrubby land suddenly had potential … though it was a long time before it was realised.

In 1813, the whole area was bought by ‘contractor and excavator’ Hugh McIntosh from the East India Company, his main employer. It was still rural for a long while, with maps of the time showing ‘McIntosh’s Farm’ at the northern end of McIntosh’s Lane. By 1849, his son David seemed to have had an eye on the future sprawl of London east towards and then beyond the River Lea, having a clause on road widening inserted in the Commercial Roads Continuation Act, which was working its way through Parliament.

But it was only with Hugh McIntosh’s grandson, another David, that the streets started going up. By now, the docks and factories of Canning Town were creating a demand for workers’ housing, and Bromley Marsh was an island of green amid the new building. Perhaps the McIntosh’s took their Scottish antecedents as inspiration for the naming, though the estate proved too big for one firm. In 1873, McIntosh sold the land east of 375 East India Dock Road to a manufacturing chemist called John Abbott, of Forbes & Abbott. That firm had its base at the Iceland Wharf Works in Old Ford Road.

Abbott continued the naming convention begun by McIntosh, with a web of streets bearing Scottish place names from A to Z. It wasn’t quite as neat as that - there weren’t 26 streets, and the letter ‘Z’ proved a problem, as detailed below. But within a few years the streets were up, and the two developers were happily sold out and collecting ground rent. Mr Abbott, in an expression of ego, had named the longest road in the development after himself. The area was radically changed in the 1890s with the construction of the Blackwall Tunnel, and the Approach Road would later slice right through this little Caledonia. And to latterday residents of the Aberfeldy Estate, the green fields of Perthshire must have
seemed very far away.

When Scotland met Poplar: those street names … and where they come from

Aberfeldy
Lying on the River Tay in Perthshire, the town features in Robert Burns’s poem ‘The Birks of Aberfeldy’. With a population of less than 2000 people, it has an 18-hole golf course and the Black Watch Memorial.

Ailsa
From Ailsa Craig, an island formed by the plug of an extinct volcano, lying 10 miles west of Girvan in the River Clyde. Ailsa is uninhabited though it has a lighthouse.

Blair
From Blair Atholl, a little town in Perthshire, a rare flat area in the midst of the Grampian Mountains, and recently incorporated into the Cairngorms National Park. The town’s most famous feature is Blair Castle.

Culloden
A village three miles east of Inverness and site of the Battle of Culloden in 1746 - the final meeting of the French-backed Jacobites and the Hanoverian British Government during the Jacobite Rising. Protected by the National Trust for Scotland.

Dee
The River Dee rises in the Cairngorms and flows to the North Sea at Aberdeen, via Braemar, Ballater, Aboyne and Banchory. A stunningly beautiful area of the Highlands.

Ettrick
In the county of Selkirk, in the Scottish borders. Once covered by the Royal Ettrick Forest, now farming country.

Findhorn
A village in Morayshire and on the southern side of the Moray Firth. Traditionally a fishing village, it’s now arguably most famous to outsiders for the Findhorn Foundation spiritual community.

Leven
A seaside town in Fife, which has suffered badly from the closure first of the coal mines then the docks. Has two golf courses.

Lochnagar
A mountain in the Grampians range, Beinn Chiochan in Gaelic. Setting for the story ‘The Old Man of Lochnagar’ written by Prince Charles for his little brothers Andrew and Edward. The area produces Lochnagar malt whisky.

Oban
Seaside resort on the Firth of Lorn, on Scotland’s west coast. Flanked by the mountains of Morvern and Ardgour. Attractions include the Cathedral of St Columba, a brace of castles and the Oban Distillery.

Spey
The fastest flowing river in Scotland, and the second longest. Famed for salmon fishing and the number of whisky distilleries along its banks.

Teviot
A river in the Scottish Borders, flanking Dumfries and Galloway and then flowing north past Hawick and Roxburth to Join the River Tweed near Kelso.

Zetland
Arguably, our builder cheated a little here. After all, you try to find a place in Scotland beginning with the letter ‘Z’. ‘Zetland’ is the archaic spelling of ‘Shetland’, the far flung archipelago way off the north east coast of Britain.

Tags: East End of London

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.

Every so often in history a technological hotspot emerges – helping to drive industry and technology onward and upward. In the mid-1700s that clutch of enterprising Lancastrians John Kay, James Hargreaves and Samuel Compton were revolutionising weaving with the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny and the mule. In the 1970s it was the turn of the geeks of the US West Coast, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak et al – as they invented personal computing and kick-started the information age.

But who would have thought that the Lea Valley, running down Tower Hamlets’ eastern boundary, was the birthplace of Britain’s own post-industrial revolution? As the title of Dr Jim Lewis’s first book suggested, it was ‘Britain’s best kept secret’. Now, in a fascinating sequel*, Dr Lewis reveals more of the developments that turned the Lea into the UK’s technological crucible.

In fact, Lewis argues, the likes of Gates wouldn’t ever have been able to make their billions from the PC were it not for a much earlier invention in the Lea Valley. In 1904 Professor Ambrose Fleming developed the diode valve. The invention not only paved the way for today’s multimedia electronics industry – it also created the platform for space travel, computers, email and the internet.

Firstly though, the diode valve gave birth to the modern wireless. So radio has its roots in the Lea Valley, and Britain’s first radio valve factory was established there in 1916, with the first television tube factory following in 1936.

But the technological developments in the Lea Valley were as diverse as they were numerous. The monorail may still seem a futuristic mode of transport, but it was developed here by Henry Robinson Palmer as long ago as 1821. This ingenious method of hanging heavy goods from the sides of a rail carriage to lower the centre of gravity meant that great weights could be smoothly shifted. The invention went into use at the Royal Victualling Yard at Deptford in 1824, with the frictionless action meaning four men could easily shift 5cwt loads of provisions from warehouse to ship.

And another welcome innovation on board ship was that of IPA (India Pale Ale). Dreamed up by George Hodgson at his Bow Brewery, it was the first beer that could be transported to the hot climes of the Empire without tainting – giving East End sailors some relief and British soldiers a welcome taste of home.

The geography of the Lea Valley reads like a Who’s Who of British industry in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Johnson Matthey, Hawker Siddeley, Reuters, Lotus Engineering, Tesco, Keith Blackman, BOC and Matchbox Cars were just a few of the innovators who built their businesses here. Petrol was not only manufactured, it also received its name here, and the British Army’s rifle of choice was, for decades, the Lee Enfield. That reliable weapon was of course manufactured in the Lea Valley.

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

We all know Whitechapel, home of the Blind Beggar, the London Hospital, and entrance to the East End as you emerge eastward from the City. But what was the ‘White Chapel’ and what became of it?
The present Whitechapel/Mile End/Bow Road has for centuries been the main highway out of London into Essex. About a mile beyond Aldgate, 13th century travellers out of the City would have come across the alba capella or White Chapel, standing just to the south of the main road.
Another name for the distinctively whitewashed church was the chapel of the Blessed Mary of Matfelon. There are a number of myths about the naming of the chapel – one that it refers to a ‘felon’, a sailor hanged for robbing a local widow. Another is that it refers to the knapweed (otherwise known as matfelon) that grew in the locale. Most likely is that the Matfelons, a local family, had a hand in the funding of the church.
By the middle of the 14th century, the area that had begun as an overspill from London was becoming a sizable community in its own right, and St Mary Matfelon was established as the parish church. The parish, meanwhile, had become known as Whitechapel – the glistening white of the building’s stone had made it a well-known landmark on the London-Essex road, and the name had stuck.
Sometime in the late 1300s the white chapel was replaced by a new church, 100ft long and 60ft wide, and as the parish grew in population, legacies from parishioners made it richer. In 1410, the rector, Roger Haldanby left £2 for the belfry. John Sonder left £4 8/- 6d in 1428, and Robert Mason left 3/- 4d (about 17 pence in today’s money) in 1437.

This new parish of Whitechapel was effectively a suburb of the City, an extension of the ward of Portsoken. But even if it was increasingly affluent, it was a higgledy-piggledy and unhygienic offshoot. The historian John Stow wrote in the late 1500s about what had become a filthy shanty town. The field by Whitechapel church, “being sometime the beauty of the city on that part, is so encroached upon by building of filthy cottages, and with other purpressors, inclosures and laystalls (notwithstanding all proclamations and Acts of Parliament made to the contrary) that in some places it scarce remaineth a sufficient highway”. So chaotic had the unregulated development of Whitechapel become, that people were building shops and homes that actually blocked the route out to Essex.
It’s probably inaccurate to describe Whitechapel at the time as London overspill. What was happening was that the increased size and affluence of the City was starting to draw immigrants like a magnet from Essex, Suffolk and beyond. People travelled to the capital in search of work and riches, and fetched up camping outside the City gates, where lodgings were cheap – if not pleasant. Stow had, in fact, recorded the first emergence of the East End slums, with subdivided properties and an endless inpouring of new souls to fill them. The pleasant Essex countryside “without” the City wall had gone forever.
But though the new population may have been poor and transient, they were devout. Parishioners left money for lights to be burned before the statues in the church. Individual fraternities, or associations of worshippers, also endowed tapers to be burned in the church – Blessed Trinity, St Luke, the guild of Corpus Christi and Our Lady, the guild of St Katharine and St Margaret were just some of the associations remembered in the church.
The church was rebuilt again in 1669, and again after excavations in 1874. But the church was destroyed for the last time by enemy bombs in the Second World War, and was never rebuilt. Now, all that remains of the white chapel is a name.

Big Ben celebrated its 150th anniversary last week, its distinctive cracked tone ringing out on April the tenth, and giving the world’s most famous bell a character that some more perfect instruments lack. Big Ben and Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell are only the best known products of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, Britain’s oldest manufacturing company and in continuous business since 1570, with the roots of the company going back to 1420.

But Big Ben might not have that slightly off-key sound had it not been for the persistent meddling of the man put in charge of the project. Edmund Beckett Denison QC was a man who didn’t like to admit he was wrong - although in his opinion the occasion didn’t arise. It was an arrogance that would see him the lawyer end up in court himself, sued twice for libel by the Whitechapel firm.

Big Ben was the job nobody wanted. The old Palace of Westminster, which had stood for hundreds of years and survived plotting by Guy Fawkes and his pals, was razed by fire on 16 October 1834. A new Houses of Parliament was needed, and the members decided a new clock tower, with mighty bell, should cap the project. Charles Barry, the architect building the new Parliament, in 1844 invited a single clockmaker to submit a proposal for the tower clock but there were howls of protest from rival clockmakers and the job went out to tender. Astronomer Royal, George Airey drew up a specification that was fiendishly exacting. Among his demands that ‘ the first stroke of the hour bell should register the time, correct to within one second per day, and furthermore that it should telegraph its performance twice a day to Greenwich Observatory, where a record would be kept.’

The clockmakers suddenly fell silent. The spec Airey had given was impossible in the eyes of the experts, but the Astronomer Royal wouldn’t back down. Parliament broke the deadlock by appointing Sir Edmund. The first Baron Grimthorpe was “zealous but unpopular, self-accredited expert on clocks, locks, bells, buildings, as well as many branches of law, Denison was one of those people who are almost impossible as colleagues, being perfectly convinced that they know more than anybody about everything - as unhappily they often do.”.

And he did in this case, though progress was slow. In 1851 he came up with a design of his own. The timepiece, meeting Airey’s strict demands was built by Messrs EJ Dent & Co. These master clockmakers are still in business incidentally, producing the station platform clock for the revitalised St Pancras Station. Dents finished the clock in 1854 and it was held at their works for the next five years … the tower wouldn’t be ready until 1859.

Now Beckett, newly made Sir Edmund, moved to the bells. The brilliant Barry had been ambitious but vague in his demands. A 14-ton bell was specified with four smaller quarter chime bells, but that was as far as he went. Sir Edmund’s clock researches had brought him into contact with bells too, and he was confident he could design the things. The problem was, the biggest bell ever cast in Britain had been less than 11 tons, Great Peter at York Minster. This time it was the bell founders of Britain who fell silent. Adding to their concern, Sir Edmund had designed the bell, giving it an unconventional shape and a new recipe for the bell metal. John Warner & Sons at Stockton-on-Tees came up with a 16-ton answer on 6 August 1856, but it cracked beyond repair while being tested at Palace Yard in Westminster.

Denison sacked Warners and gave the broken bell to George Mears, master founder and owner of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Mears quoted £2401, but knocked off £1829 as he was able to melt down the broken bell - a job that took a week and three furnaces. The finished bell, which took 20 days to cool, was then ceremonially carried on a trolley from Whitechapel to Westminster. 16 beribboned horses processed over London Bridge, through Borough and back over Westminster Bridge, cheered all the way by crowds.

And two months after it had been hauled into place, Big Ben cracked again. Denison had demanded an over-heavy hammer. The bell went out of action for three years and was eventually spun a quarter turn and a lighter hammer fitted. The crack remained, giving Big Ben the slightly off tone for which it is famous.

But Sir Edmund wasn’t done. In an extraordinary twist he befriended one of the Whitechapel moulders, got him drunk and had him swear that the Whitechapel Foundry had cast the bell badly and bodged it with filler. The Foundry sued and Denison lost. Still he wouldn’t let it go. Twenty years later he repeated the libel in print. Whitechapel, now under a new founder, Robert Stainbank sued again. Again they won. But were they right? Experts examined Big Ben in 2002 to see if there had been a cover up. Not a trace of filler was found. Whitechapel Foundry had produced the best bell they could to Sir Edmund’s recipe, and 150 years later it’s still ringing out … if a little off key.

With many thanks to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which is at 32/34 Whitchapel Road, London E1 !DY, UK. www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk. You can visit the museum and shop, though note that you can’t actually watch the bells being cast … much too dangerous!