eastlondonhistory.com

Depending on your point of view, the gentrification of the Isle of Dogs is a vital shot in the arm for a decaying chunk of post-industrial Docklands, or an insensitive example of the way money comes first in the 21st
century – riding roughshod over a solid and established working class community.
But the yuppie homes of the 1980s weren’t the first attempt to entice the middle classes onto the Island. One hundred and fifty years ago, an ambitious builder and entrepreneur was trying to transform the Isle of Dogs into the Belgravia of east London.
Transforming London
William Cubitt was born in Dilham, Norfolk in 1785, with brother Thomas following three years later. They weren’t a pair born to greatness – their father was a poor miller, and William did well, in 1800, to secure an apprenticeship to a cabinet maker and joiner. Thomas had an equally mundane, if secure, trade mapped out, as a ship’s carpenter.
Yet the two of them were to play a huge role in transforming London from the still small city of Stuart England into the vast metropolis it is today.
Although Thomas was the younger, he had the more dramatic career. He had moved from carpentry to engineering and then started building in around 1815.
The 1820s were very productive for Thomas. Working with the Marquis of Westminster, who owned vast tracts of useless bogland to the south-west of the City of Westminster, he began designing, laying out and building streets, squares and whole districts.
His genius lay in forming the first true building firm, employing a wide range of
specialised craftsmen and architects (including another brother, Lewis) on his staff in order to enable the company to provide a one-stop shop.
His extraordinary energy produced the new suburbs of Belgravia, Pimlico, Barnsbury and much of Bloomsbury. Elsewhere, he built Brighton’s huge Kemp Town development, and worked with Prince Albert on Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
Waste not want not
Belgrave Square was Thomas’ piece de resistance. Ironic, then, that this ‘future residence of the highest class of the fashionable world’ was built on waste from the East End! The energetic Thomas was building St Katharine Dock at the same time, and used the spoil carved out of the river bed to make the posh square’s foundations.
William was equally innovative. In 1807 he had, in a nod to his roots, patented what became the standard design for windmill sails. Then, in 1812, he turned his hand to engineering, specialising particularly in waterways and canals. He built railways and, like his brother, he was to work with the Prince Consort – in his case as consultant engineer on the Crystal Palace. And with a keen utilitarian sense that prisoners should be productive too, he invented that brutal mainstay of the Victorian penal system, the prison treadmill.

But if he had emulated
his brother’s inventiveness, William hadn’t accumulated the same wealth. William decided he too would capitalise on the middle class demand for villa
homes by developing an unexploited patch of the capital.
Back in the 17th century, Christopher Wren had admired the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, though more for its views than its hinterland. He declared it the best spot from which to view the spectacular Greenwich Hospital.
Thomas decided the river views would make it the ideal focus of a villa community. There was only one problem – the resolutely plebeian community. And, ironically, they were outsiders too.
Social reformer Beatrice Webb wrote about the locals at the time. “They are for the most part countrymen imported some years back to break a combination of corn porters” [shipped in to break a strike, in other words].
Stubborn
Even then, she wrote that the Islanders were individuals, different: “Cut off by their
residence from the social
influences of the East End, they have retained many traits of provincial life.”
Most important, they were stubborn. They were not to be moved. The middle classes, meanwhile, sniffed the prevailing winds and proved resis-
tant to Thomas’ marketing attempts. The pragmatic entrepreneur instituted Plan B and built timber wharves, sawmills, cement factories, brickfields, roads and a church… and
terraces of artisans cottages.
Thomas died in 1861 as
Lord Mayor of London, but his work was completed in the 1880s. Sadly, most was swept away by World War II.
But just 40 years later, the architects would move in again, and Cubitt Town would attempt to go upwardly mobile once more.

St Katharine Dock is probably the best known of all the
old London docklands to outsiders .
While the huge docks of the Isle of Dogs and beyond were hidden to anyone but East Enders themselves, tourists and Londoners alike only have to wander a few yards east of Tower Bridge to be in the heart of one of the relics of the Pool of London.
It was also one of the first of the moribund docks to be brought back to life: long before Canary Wharf and Yuppie housing were a twinkle in the planners’ eyes, St Katharine’s Dock had become a berth for luxury watercraft and a popular watering hole, thanks to the Dickens Inn and the Tower Hotel.
Royal connections
The Dock was a hugely ambitious but, in reality, never particularly successful venture. It was carved out of the banks of the Thames in 1827, marking a triumph of commerce over religion and bringing to an end the area’s centuries of history as a sacred site.
When St Katharine’s Hospital was pulled down in 1827 it brought to an end an association dating back to 1148, when Matilda of Boulogne, the wife of the usurping king of England, Stephen, established a hospital for the repose of her two deceased children.
It was also the start of a
long association with queens
of England. In 1273, Queen Eleanor, the widow of Henry III, kicked out the Prior
and brothers who had
been purloining funds, and re-established St Katharine’s with a new master.
Philippa of Hainault, the queen of Edward III, was
next to grant funds and found
a charity to benefit St Katharine’s, and the two Henrys V and VI later became benefactors.
The hospital benefited
further when its master, Thomas de Bekington, later the Bishop of Bath and Wells, obtained a Royal charter of privileges in 1445.

21-day feast
Thomas had cut a marvellous deal. The precincts of the hospital were declared free from all jurisdiction, be it civil or ecclesiastical, other than that of the Lord Chancellor. And to bolster funds, an ann-ual fair was to be held on Tower Hill, starting on the Feast of St James and lasting a full 21 days.
Short of being declared an independent state with its
own tax-raising powers, St Katharine’s couldn’t have had it better.
And St Katharine’s even escaped the grasp of that great dissolver of holy establishments, Henry VIII. In 1526, the king confirmed its rights, supposedly as a favour to his new queen, Anne Boleyn.
But the hospital was too rich a plum to remain unplucked forever. And in Edward VI’s reign, its lands were seized by the Crown. Then Dr Wylson, the secretary to Elizabeth I, tore up Henry VI’s charter and swiftly drew up a new one, conveniently leaving out any mention of Tower Hill Fair. He sold rights to the fair to the Corporation of London for the sum of £466, 13s and 4d.
The beleaguered hospital was ravaged by fire in 1672, when 100 houses were destroyed, and a storm in 1734 razed 30 more. Then, during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, a Protestant mob tried to destroy the church – its sin being that it was built in ‘Popish times’.
In the end it was not the greed of kings, the vagaries of nature, nor the bigotry of rioters that ended St Katharine’s. Big business saw it off in 1825, when the church was demolished to make way for the new docks.
The Gothic building, with stalls dating back to 1340, was unceremoniously razed and the hospital was no more.

These days, most East End children will study at school or college until the age of 18, and more than ever before are going on to university or some other form of higher education.
Extraordinary to think then that, little more than a century ago, most cockney kids wouldn’t have been going to school at all – their only option was to go out to work as soon as they were able.
Until 1870, there were a handful of private and church schools in the East End but most parents couldn’t afford the school fees – especially when the alternative was putting the children to work to augment the meagre family income.
All that changed with the 1870 Education Act, which created the School Boards. Among their powers was the option of making education compulsory in their area – an option the London School Board took up.
The Isle of Dogs was one of the poorest areas for children’s education. The Board set to putting this right by building three new schools. Arthur Joseph Hubbard, born in 1869, was one of the first pupils at Glengall Road School.
“There were vacant fields on the Island, one in Glengall Road… on which I have seen a flock of sheep brought there for pasture. This became the Board School,” he recalled.
The three-storey building – infants on the ground floor, girls on the first, and boys on the second – was a revelation to the poor kids of the Island. Everything was brand new – slates, books, pencils and coat pegs, even the asphalted and shell-coated playground.
3 Rs and the Drill
The new students learned the 3 Rs of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic among other subjects – including the rather military sounding Drill.

The Island’s other Board schools were in British Street (later Harbinger Road) and Wharf Road (later Saunders Ness Road), and these were joined in the 1870s by three new church schools.
Frederick Pearson, born in 1899, went to St John’s Church of England School.
“St John’s School was a happy one,” he remembered.
“My first memory was threading long strips of coloured paper into a kind of small mat.
There were slates, too, with scratchy slate pencils. There was a lot of spitting,
with a rag to clean the slates. Hardly hygienic, but then it was the 1890s!”
“The school was gas-lit, in those days, by a naked flame. Three pineapple-shaped gas-holders hung from the rafters, nine jets to each pineapple.
“In the winter at lighting-up time, I sat fascinated when the school caretaker came in with his long pole on which was a lighted taper. For me it was all very wonderful.”
In 1902, local education authorities were set up to take learning a stage further. All primary education was now free and the LEAS set up secondary and technical schools, evening institutes and adult education.
A different world
Lily, born in Janet Street in 1897, remembers her daily trek to grammar school in Hackney as entering a different world.
“I wore a straw boater with elastic under the chin, which was very uncomfortable,” she said.
“Immediately I arrived home I changed into my usual clothes, as the other children would only play with me when I was dressed in ordinary clothes.”
Lily travelled to and from school by tram, but for most kids it was a long, and in winter very cold, walk.
Dick Waterhouse was born on the Isle of Dogs in 1911, and in his early walks to Cubitt Town School had to contend with Zeppelin raids and foul weather.
And there were no expensive Nike or Adidas trainers to pose around the playground in back in the early 1900s.
“A sound pair of boots was a must,” he recalled.
“In my last new pair, I had walked about a hundred yards in some snow and, by the time I got back indoors, the soles had fallen off!”

To read more about the early years of East End schooling see ‘Memories of Childhood on the Isle of Dogs 1870-1970’, edited by Eve Hostettler, published by the Island History Trust, 1993.

The East End has been home to many nationalities and ex-pat communities over the centuries. Much has been written about the Huguenots, who fled religious persecution in the Low Countries to settle to their silk-weaving business in Spitalfields. Until the 1920s, there was a Chinatown in Limehouse to rival that north of Leicester Square today. And, of course, Brick Lane is today renowned as Banglatown.
But one of those communities, today almost forgotten, probably dwarfed the rest in size. Its final death knell was only sounded with the closure of Alie Street’s St George’s Church in 1997. But who today remembers London’s 16,000-strong German community?
Luckily, though the church itself held its final service on November 24, 1996, a mere handful of worshippers attending, its legacy is a rich library compiled by the church’s pastors over its 250-year history. The books were acquired by the British Library and were the subject of an exhibition earlier this year. They tell a fascinating story of two-and-a-half centuries of Anglo-German life in east London.
The Lutheran Church opened its doors to the parishioners of Goodman’s Fields in 1762, the fifth in the capital to cater to a large
and growing German-speaking congregation.
The man behind the new place of worship was Dietrich Beckmann, the rich owner of an East End sugar bakery. Whitechapel had many of these refineries at the time – the smell and the smoke were said to be overpowering – and they were almost exclusively staffed by immigrant German labour.
Beckmann recruited his cousin Gustav Anton Wachsel as pastor, from the city of Halberstadt, and Wachsel quickly acted to set up an English-German school to satisfy parents who were worried their children were already losing touch with their heritage and language. And it was Wachsel’s own private library that formed the core of the
collection the British Library would acquire more than two centuries later.
Over the years, books from the school were added, along with those which had belonged to the children and other parishioners.
Germans, like other immigrants, had to contend with
discrimination and prejudice, much of it sanctioned by law. But in 1769, William III,
himself from Orange in the Low Countries, passed the Toleration Act. As a result, St George’s could set up its own parish legislation.

The document the church elders drew up is still in the collection. But the library was much more than a dry reference source. The church encouraged its use as a lending library, and the children and their parents were enthusiastic borrowers of German folk and fairy tales. Some books were repeatedly borrowed over decades, and then centuries.
Travel literature, guide books, colourful engravings and street plans were also hugely popular as the parishioners soaked up knowledge of a land they had, increasingly as the years drew on, never seen.
The second half of the 19th century saw major expansion, with infants and secondary schools being added.
The church had a new
influx of parishioners in the 1930s, as refugees fled Hitler’s Germany. For a few months, the congregation was led
by the legendary Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer was a theology professor from Berlin. While many of the church tolerated and even lauded the Fuhrer, Bonhoeffer travelled at home and abroad decrying Hitler’s evil record. The safest place for Bonhoeffer was probably in Whitechapel, but he insisted on returning to preach his
message in Germany.
In 1943 he was imprisoned by the SS, and on April 9, 1945, the beleaguered Hitler had
him hanged.
After the war, German wives of British soldiers entered the congregation, and numbers boomed again. But, at the close of 1996, following the dispersal of the core community, St George’s was placed in the care of the Historic Chapel Association.
A Whitechapel church might have seemed an unlikely home for such an outstandingly important collection. And, indeed, the church elders thought better of using a small room above the vestry to house 750 volumes when burglars broke in in 1995.
Now, though, the tomes are safe forever in the British Library. And a viewing (by appointment only) secures a fascinating glimpse into a little piece of Germany in the heart of the East End.

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 East End suffered badly from bombs in the Second World War, Stepney worse than most. And what the Luft-waffe’s bombs didn’t flatten was to meet its fate at the hands of developers’ wrecking balls in the 1960s.
But take a walk down past Stepney Green, pass by Ben Jonson Road, and cut down the tiny stretch of Stepney High Street and you come to St Dunstan’s Church.
Suddenly you get a sensation of how the old village of Stebenhethe must have looked in the hundreds of years before it was swallowed in the eastward sprawl of the City.
The medieval church stands on a winding stretch of road, quaint and countrylike amidst the regimented grid of modern roads. Look at the pictorial map of Stepney, drawn in 1681, and compare it with the modern A-Z layout, and the reason becomes clear.
Amid massive redevelopment, the church – the heart of the ancient village – survives untouched, as it was hundreds of years ago.
It’s all the more remarkable as St Dunstan’s is by the far the oldest church in the borough. It dates from not long after Stibba, the Saxon warrior who gave Stepney its name, first landed.
Three millennia
Before Stibba’s Hythe, meaning landing place, became Stybbanhythe, then Stibenhede, and afterwards Stebenee, there was a church there. In this fast-changing world, it’s amazing to reflect that in January next year, Stepney will have been in existence through three millennia.
And for hundreds of years after its foundation, St Dunstan’s remained the sole church standing to the east of the City gates.
In fact, Stepney can lay claim to being the first of the Tower Hamlets. Shoreditch and Aldgate were hard by the walls of the City itself – suburbs in modern parlance – but Bow didn’t get its own church till 1311, and the famous White Chapel had only been built a hundred years before that.

With its enviable position as an established village amidst the Essex countryside, Stepney became popular and fashionable. It was thriving and prosperous, with a rich mix of farmers, millers, silk weavers, coopers, brewers and throwsters – the men and women who made the silk thread into yarn.
And in 1299, the good burghers of Stepney included the Lord Mayor of London, Henry le Waleys, emphasising the hamlet’s status as a rural retreat for the wealthy Londoner.
In the Middle Ages, parliament would tour, sitting in different halls in London. And so it was in 1299 that Stepney became, briefly, the home of the mother of parliaments.
And it could offer stiff competition to modern-day Mayfair for its sprinkling of nobs and aristos.
By the early 1500s, Stepney was still a fashionable spot and, in 1503, the wife of Henry VII made a note in her account book, detailing her payments to the Duchess of Suffolk, for a stay in her house in ‘Stebenhath’.
And just to the east of St Dunstan’s stood the mansion of the Marquis of Worcester. Visit the adventure playground today and you’ll be standing on the same spot.
Excellent hunting
What made Stepney so popular with kings of the time was its access to the excellent hunting in the old forest which covered the land, and all within an easy hour’s ride of London.
There’s little of the rural idyll left today of course. Snatches were saved in the establishing of Victoria Park, and the open green space of Stepney Green itself.
But walk by St Dunstan’s on a warm summer’s evening. Let your eye travel along the curve of the road and settle on the medieval, tree-flanked church – and you can picture the village that was.

The City of London wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for the River Thames. And the reason that the East End is more than just a collection of country hamlets is because of its history as a river gateway to the City, as people and produce poured into London from around the world over the last two millennia.

But the Thames isn’t the only river in the history of Tower Hamlets. Once there were other watercourses, now buried beneath the industrial and residential development of the East End, but all of which played their part in its past.
Until the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII in the 16th century, the Abbey of St Mary Graces stood at Tower Hill, not far from the subsequent site of the Royal Mint.

Old maps of the abbey show a river running down each side of what was then
called Nightingall Lane – now renamed Thomas More Street. Some sources suggest that the river rose at what is now Royal Mint Street. But Kenneth Reid, writing in the archives of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society back in 1954, makes a more realistic claim that it followed a course from Wellclose Square, which fits in better with the contours of the land.

Wapping’s Crashe Mill

It was possibly on this river that Wapping’s Crashe Mills stood. This watermill is
recorded in 1233 as belonging to the Priory of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, and was a tidemill, most likely providing power for the milling of grain.

The unromantically named Black Ditch appears on Horwood’s map of the parish boundaries of London, which appeared in 1799. The river apparently rose at Rhodeswell Road in Stepney, and headed east as far as Bromley-by-Bow before looping back in an arc across what is now the start of the East India Dock Road. It then fed into the Thames at the easternmost end of Narrow Street.

Veitch’s plan for the Sewerage of the Metropolis, which appeared in 1851, shows the Black Ditch as now being an underground watercourse, little more than a sewer. And Joseph Bazalgette’s massive programme of underground waterworks for the City in the mid- and late-1800s enclosed many ancient streams and rivers in pipes, and transformed them into waste and outflow sewers.

The lost River Walbrook

Strange to think that, hundreds of years ago, there were major rivers feeding into the Thames from the banks of the City. The Walbrook – which gives its name to the existing City ward – was fed by one tributary which rose just to the east of Aldgate and another which appeared by the side of Shoreditch High Street.

The Walbrook gave into the Thames between Southwark and London Bridges, but began to be choked with rubbish during Roman times. It was excavated, canalised and used for traffic up to medieval times. It was finally covered over in 1440 at the instigation of Robert Large, Lord Mayor of London.

The untamed River Lea

Before its canalisation, the River Lea was a far more sprawling waterway, and one of its major tributaries was Hackney Brook. Now completely lost, Hackney Brook rose at two points near the Holloway Road, crossed Mare Street – known as Merestret back in 1443 – and flowed down to Hackney Wick before meeting the Lea a little way to the south. The Hackney Brook was no minor stream. The Report on the Public Bridges of Middlesex, published in 1825, described the brook flooding to 100ft in width at Hackney Wick Bridge.

All these rivers are now hidden, but they still flow along their ancient courses. Nowadays, they are only seen when torrential rain causes flooding, but they are there just the same, forming a large part of the Victorian sewer system that still serves London.

THE death of reclusive film-maker Stanley Kubrick earlier this month resurrected one of the unlikeliest stories, even in a business where nothing is quite what it seems.
For the last years of his
life, the Hollywood director refused to set foot out of England – so it was that the apocalyptic battle scenes in Full Metal Jacket were shot on the blasted no-man’s land of the Royal Docks at Beckton.
But it was only one of the most recent appearances of East London in the movies. Since the cameras started rolling 100 years ago, the East End has been the set, star and subject matter of countless films – both fiction and documentary, comedy and drama.
Tower Hamlets first starred in the newsreels – the documentaries that used to accompany feature films at the cinema. One of its earliest appearances was in The Great East End Anarchists Battle, a dimly-lit newsreel of the 1911 Sidney Street Siege. Run in the movie theatres of the time, it propagated the myth that the East End was wild and dangerous, peopled by foreigners and revolutionaries.
In fact, Tower Hamlets was always fertile ground for documentary makers. The Peaceful Years (1948) was a broad-
ranging look at London in the 30 years between the wars, featuring footage of a smiling Oswald Mosley as he prepared to address thousands of his Blackshirts at a Whitechapel meeting in 1935.
Much of the early footage was naïve by today’s standards. Often, the cameraman would simply point his machine and log what he saw – giving us films like Hoxton… Saturday July 3rd (1920). Not much explanation needed there, but it gives a modern viewer a
fascinating slice of street life of the time.
Of course, that life – and the streets – were soon to change. A series of Government documentaries chart the problems and redevelopment of the slum-blighted East End. Housing Problems (1935) and London Can Take It (1940) chart an East End in decay and being rebuilt after the destruction of the Blitz. And Homes For All (1947) provides a nostalgic view of the prefabs that once peppered the bombed-out Tower Hamlets.
It wasn’t till the socially realistic films of the 1950s and 1960s that the East End made a real entrance in feature films. Carry On star Barbara Windsor starred as a dissatisfied Bethnal Green housewife in the 1962 movie Sparrows Can’t Sing. The film was shot around Cambridge Heath Road, and in a strange twist of fact and fiction, Ronnie and Reggie Kray were hired to provide security on the film set. A quarter of a century later, the Krays’ own East End story would be immortalised in The Krays, starring Gary and Martin Kemp of pop group Spandau Ballet. Martin can now be
seen in EastEnders with one Barbara Windsor.
With its moody and dramatic wharfs, warehouses and waterways, Docklands always made a great set for gangster movies, even if some of the older features, like Pool of London (1950) were corny takes on a Hollywood theme. One of the delights of that movie, though, were the interior shots of the Queen’s Theatre in Poplar, and the chase scenes in a starkly-lit Wapping.
The decline and rebirth of Docklands was charted in
1979 gangster movie The Long Good Friday, starring Bob Hoskins as a psychopathic gang boss whose dream was the rebirth of the redundant docks as a bustling new city. Twenty years on, and fact
at last seems to be copying
film fiction.

London owes its existence to its strategic position as a crossing over the River Thames, and since Roman times the city has grown and flourished as a ford as well as a port.
But not all roads to London led from the Channel or the North. One of the most ancient gateways to the capital is from Essex and the current Bow Flyover is just the latest in a long line of crossings over the River Lea, dating back to the times of Julius Caesar.
The original Roman road from London to Essex crossed the Lea at Old Ford - the only remnant now is Old Ford Road at the north end of Bow.
Farmers and their wagons would struggle through the tidal river across the flooded marshes of Leyton and Strat-ford, and on to the haymarkets that ran along what is now the Bow and Mile End Road.
But so treacherous was the crossing that Maud, the Queen of England, almost lost her life in the attempt, in 1118.
It was another 58 years before the bridge was started, but that still came 60 years before the first bridge was built over the Thames. And Bow Bridge had another claim to fame: it was the first in Britain with a stone arch. Unlike earlier wooden constructions, this was built to last.
And last it did, through long arguments about who was responsible for its upkeep and its repairs.
In the 16th century it lay within the jurisdiction of the old Langthorne Abbey at Stratford, remembered now in the Abbey Mills area to the east of the Lea.
When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1535, he may have swelled the royal coffers, but he left Bow Bridge parentless.
The row rumbled on, astonishingly, for 300 years. In 1834, the Abbey landowners finally agreed to share the cost with the Middlesex and Essex Turnpike Trust. Stratford lay in Essex and Bow in Middlesex and the trust’s engineer, James Walker, proposed a new stone bridge of one arch, its span of 70 feet and width of 41 feet more worthy of forming the principal connection between the counties of Middlesex and Essex .
In Walker’s words lay the real problem of the Bow Bridge: as the principal connection between the city and the farms that supplied it, it became a notorious traffic blackspot, with horses and carts taking hours to cross the Lea. The biggest corn merchant, Goulds, actually had its premises at Bow Bridge wharf.

So, in 1898, the London County Council proposed another new bridge, less than 70 years after the previous replacement had been built.
The new bridge was a plainer, metal affair and the cost was split between the LCC, West Ham Council and the River Lea Conservancy Board.
The result, Thomas D’Akers Bridge, stands to this day, although hidden under the roundabout beneath the flyover. It replaced the old Bow Bridge and a couple more to the north, the St Michael’s and Peg’s Hole Bridges, whose foundations were dug up and incorporated in the fabric of the new crossing.
But by the 1960s the crossing faced a new kind of congestion – cars. More than 1,000 an hour crawled over the bridge during the rush hour, and plans were laid for a flyover. In 1963 work started, at a cost of £1,784,500.
Today the bridge carries commuters out to Essex and East Anglia; hundreds of years ago it was used by arable farmers, but Bow’s proud history remains – as the first river bridge into London.

Most of us think of history as something we dig out of books and located firmly in the past. But the streets of the East End are steeped in their own history. Take a closer look at your own road, for example – you might be surprised at what you see.

Take Fairfield Road in Bow. Today it’s the home of the Bow Quarter flats, and the final destination for the Number 8 bus. But a century ago Bow Quarter was Fairfield Works, the largest factory in Europe, and the home of Bryant and May matches.

Bryant and May factory

Bryant and May had bought the patent rights of the process for making safety matches from a Quaker, the Swedish inventor Johan Lundstrom, in 1852 and the Fairfield Works were built in 1861 on the model of Lundstrom’s Jon-koping works.
From 1868, chairman Wilberforce Bryant pushed the works towards ever-greater mechanisation, meaning the factory was not just the biggest in Europe but one of the most modern.

Take a closer look at Bow Bus Garage and you will see two arches, one for the buses to enter and one for them to exit. But look a little closer and the lighter-coloured brick in between shows the outline of a third arch, now bricked in.
Until their demise in the 1950s, that was where the trams rolled in and out of the garage on their way up to the West End. Work on Fairfield Road a couple of years ago took the top layer of tarmac from the street and exposed the metal rails, still in place just a few inches below the new road surface, as they sweep out of the garage up towards Bow Road.

Whitechapel Murders

Opposite the Bow Quarter today stand modern factories, such as that of French Connection and Nicole Farhi. But a century ago, the grim buildings of the Bow Infirmary Asylum, a home for the dangerously mentally ill, stood there.
And the asylum played a key role in one of the strangest stories of the unsolved Whitechapel Murders.

A police report of 1888 tells the tale of a man named Iscenscmid, detained in Holloway as a lunatic because of his strange behaviour. The eastern European immigrant had made a living in London as a butcher, but his business had failed. Iscenscmid became depressed, and took to wandering the streets, eventually being confined in an asylum.

The Christmas before the onset of the murders, Iscenscmid was released, apparently cured. But he disappeared from home once more, taking with him two large butcher’s knives – he wasn’t to be seen again for six weeks.

His reappearance came with press reports on the murder of Annie Chapman.
At 7am on the morning of Chapman’s murder, a man entered the Prince Albert public house in Brushfield Street – just 400 yards from the scene of the killing – acting strangely and covered with blood.

Staff at the asylum read the press report and realised it fitted their patient. The police were eager to question the man, but the Bow authorities argued that, with public feelings running high, they could be risking a riot. Eventually the police managed to covertly question Iscenscmid, but to no effect – he couldn’t account for any of his actions, nothing was ever proved and the butcher never regained his mind.

Bow Fair banned for rowdiness

Take a walk to the south end of the road and you visit the scene of more recent history. Today the East End is administered by Tower Hamlets Council but, until 1965, there were a handful of local authorities and the grand building that curves into Bow Road was the offices of Poplar Council. But long before that it was an open field, in the old, rural Tower Hamlets, which gave Fairfield its name.
For hundreds of years, people would gather there for the annual Bow Fair, until its eventual banning in the 18th Century, for rowdiness, drunkenness and vice.
So don’t just assume your road is as it has always been. Take a deeper look – there may be dark secrets lurking there.