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The new Mediatheque at the BFI Southbank (formerly the National Film Theatre) is bringing hundreds of long-forgotten movies and documentaries to visitors, in easy-to-access digital format. Liberated from their dusty vaults, there are real gems here for lovers of London: one of three strands in the first release, of 300 hours of film, is ‘London Calling’.

One absolute gem comes from Lindsay Anderson. He became a maker of feature films during the sixties and seventies, with ‘This Sporting Life’, ‘If’ and the dystopian ‘Britannia Hospital’, but he was a documentary maker first. In the fifties he was producing the kind of short movies you just don’t see anymore. No talking heads, precious little talking in fact - the camera was simply allowed to observe Britain. As part of the ‘Look at Britain’ series, Anderston shot the 40-minute ‘Every Day Except Christmas’ over four weeks in 1956, a beautifully paced black-and-white movie depicting 12 hours in the life of the stallholders and customers of Covent Garden Market. While Covent Garden is now a place of coffee shops, clothes stores and street entertainers, you don’t have to be very old to remember it as a working flower market. It still comes as a shock though to see a lady flower vendor pushing her barrow (real shades of Eliza Doolittle) in the film. A highlight of the Free Cinema movement of the time, it has a soundtrack that is a clever montage of voices, natural sounds and added music. The film hardly needs a narration, though Anderson added one as a concession to the series’ sponsor, Ford Motors.

Another extraordinary example of the Free Film movement was Lorenza Mazzetti’s 52-minute ‘Together’. Set in an East End of bombsites, narrow streets, riversides, warehouses, markets and pubs. It follows two deaf-mute dockers who are completely cut-off from the outside world and are constantly pursued by groups of jeering children. Mazzetti had been a student at the Slade and she used two friends - sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi and painter Michael Andrews - as the two main characters. Lindsay Anderson enters the picture again, helping Mazzetti with the editing and adding a soundtrack. The movie was a phenomenal success, being selected as one of two British shorts for the Cannes Film Festival of 1956.

There are the feature films too, including ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’. First performed at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal in Stratford and written by workshop member Stephen Lewis (who went on to greater fame as Blakey in ‘On the Buses’ and now Smiler in ‘Last of the Summer Wine’). Littlewood used her famed improvisational techniques on the transfer to the big screen. Made on location in Stepney the film thus acquired an amazing realism. This is a true East End of pub goers, spivs, shopkeepers and street people, quite unlike the ‘cockernee’ characters usually grafted onto a feature film. Actors James Booth, Barbara Windsor, Roy Kinnear, Brian Murphy and George Sewell fit right in - Windsor winning the 1963 Best Actress Bafta for her performance. A bemused New York Times reviewer said “This isn’t a picture for anyone with a logical mind or an ear for language. The gabble of cockney spoken here is as incomprehensible as the reasoning of those who speak it.”

‘A Kid For Two Farthings’ meanwhile, penned by Bethnal Green writer Wolf Mankewitz stars East Enders David Kossoff and Alfie Bass in a magical fable of a young boy’s dreams and hopes amidst the harsh realities of life in Spitalfields. Diana Dors, Sid James, Irene Handl and Sydney Tafler are among the other stalwarts of British film on show.

It isn’t just London film makers making use of the city. A couple of weeks back we recounted the story of May Flack in the Chinatown of Limehouse in the 1920s. Hollywood director DW Griffith recreated that Limehouse in his ‘Broken Blossoms’ of 1919. A masterpiece of melodrama, which some critics claim invented the whole ‘film noir’ genre, and which inspired the young Federico Fellini, it was based on Thomas Burke’s collection of short stories ‘Limehouse Nights’. America was indulging in the same terror of Chinese immigration (the ‘yellow peril’) that was infecting the English popular press, and Griffith altered Burke’s story to emphasise a message of racial tolerance.

Just a few hours of the 300 on offer, and with lots more to come - you could spend months in the BFI Mediatheque and not exhaust the catalogue. And it’s all free!

For programme listings visit www.bfi.org.uk/mediatheque. The Mediatheque will be open Tuesday – Sunday from 11am – 9pm and Bank Holiday Mondays throughout the year. Every month new specially selected programmes will be added to the collections. Coming soon for May 2007 is ‘Play for Today’: a complete retrospective (300 titles) of the groundbreaking BBC drama strand including ‘Blue Remembered Hills’, ‘Nuts in May’ and ‘Abigail’s Party’. 30 titles will be launched in May followed by new additions every month. Other programme highlights for later in 2007 include: ‘The Way We Ate’ – A social history of food, eating and feasting in Britain – from rationing to Fanny Cradock to the rise and rise of the chicken tikka masala; 100 titles which reveal the hidden history of Black Britons; 100 titles reflecting lesbian and gay experience in British film and television.
The year is 1961, the scene Hessel Street in London’s East End, moments before bulldozers started pulling down the old shops and houses. A shopkeeper stands at the door of his store, knowing that in the space of a few minutes his business, his job and the certainties of his life in London will be torn away. ‘The Vanishing Street’ documents, in 20 minutes, the life of a typical Jewish community in 1960s Britain, showing us its street market, kosher food shops, newspaper and synagogue.

It’s an astonishingly vibrant and moving piece of work, one of the highlights of the Free Cinema documentary film movement, which emerged in Britain in the 1950s. Leading lights included Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti - the movement really beginning with a programme of their short films at the National Film Theatre in London in February 1956.

For decades these, and countless other depictions of London life past, have been out of the reach of most of us. They form part of the enormous archive of the British Film Institute (BFI), which comprises more than a quarter of a million international films and half a million TV programmes. This “filmic equivalent of the collections of the British Museum, containing more material than the Library of Congress”, as it is described by BFI director Amanda Neville, occupies 37 acres on two sites outside London. Previously, you could only view the films at special screenings or by request.

For the last year or two, BFI technicians have been undertaking the marathon task not just of restoring and preserving the movies, but also digitising them. Loaded onto hard disk, a fraction of the film stock is now available for instant access at the Mediatheque, which occupies old Museum of the Moving Image beneath Waterloo Bridge. So far there are just 300 hours of footage, with the same again due by the end of the year. Now visitors to the Mediatheque can slide in front of a plasma TV screen at the sparkling new BFI Southbank complex and, with a mouse click, enjoy the film of their choice.

The initial offerings are under three headings. ‘Exodus’ is a collection of 25 or so documentaries and TV dramas that tell the story of Britain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade - 2007 marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. ‘Essentially British’ is a collection that explores Britain and British identities with 100 titles dating back as far as 1900. Visitors to the Mediatheque can call up images of Victorian tourists at Stonehenge, see life in Britain during the war as depicted to audiences in the US or take a sweep through the history and traditions of cricket. They will be able to see scenes of communities in the 1950s linked by their connection to the coal mining industry, and a film that follows the fortunes of young punk rockers in Northern Ireland.

Most fascinating for East Enders is ‘London Calling’, more than a century of London through the lens. Here you’ll see some of the very earliest film in the Archive, including ‘Blackfriars Bridge’, a 25-second film from 1896. In a film from 1903 we are taken on a journey round central London taking in familiar sights and some that have long since disappeared. Half a century later, the innocently titled ‘Nice Time’, by Goretta and Tanner, pulls together the disparate sounds and images of a Saturday night out as the crowds gather around Eros. And you’ll see some of the most recent, with Peter Ackroyd’s ‘London’ and Saul Dibb’s ‘Bullet Boy’ from 2004.

The documentaries are perhaps the most enticing place to start. ‘The Elephant Will Never Forget’ is a record of the last week of London’s trams in July 1952. The film is largely shot from the tram driver’s position, giving you the rather strange sensation of actually driving the vehicle. Half a century on, of course, our trams are on the way back. By 2013 they’ll be rattling over Waterloo Bridge, right above the NFT’s current home. Ironically, that will force the BFI Southbank to find a new home. In the meantime though, there are delights from London past to enjoy - Carnaby Street swinging in the sixties, lunch at the top of the Post Office Tower, and a host of documentaries and feature films filmed in and about the East End, from ‘Broken Blossoms’ to ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’. Next week we look at a sample of what’s in store.

BFI Southbank is on the southern end of Waterloo Bridge (nearest tube Waterlool). For programme listings visit www.bfi.org.uk/mediatheque. The Mediatheque will be open Tuesday – Sunday from 11am – 9pm and Bank Holiday Mondays throughout the year; www.bfi.org.uk.

The May Day holiday means different things to different people. Rather stripped in Britain of its associations as an international day of Labour, it has sometimes been the focus in recent years for anti-capitalist protests in London. In China and Russia over the 20th century, its labour associations were twisted until the May Day parades became a vehicle for lavish public displays of military hardware. In the US meanwhile, two periods of hysteria in the 1920s and 1950s (the ‘Red Scares’) saw May Day unceremoniously uprooted and dumped into September as ‘Labor Day’ - any connection with Communist celebrations thus severed. Part of the problem for Britons is that this is a relatively young Bank Holiday (it only entered the official English holiday calendar in the seventies, along with the non-entities of ‘Spring Bank Holiday’ and ‘August Bank Holiday’ and the brutal culling of the traditional Whitsun) The result is that many people are unsure of what May Day is for.

And yet, like many of our holidays and celebrations, this one has ancient roots, and a natural place in the calendar. So Christmas marks the winter solstice and Easter the spring solstice, while the autumn equinox is marked by harvest festivals. May Day, similarly pre-dates the arrival of Christianity in this country, and heralded the start of summer in pagan England. It might seem a bit early to be celebrating summer to many of us, but take the summer solstice (midsummer) as 21 June and work back six weeks (or half a season) and you arrive at early May. This ‘cross quarter’ day equates to the Celtic feast of Beltane. For a population deprived of fresh food during the long winter, the fact that spring crops were finally appearing was a significant one, and the celebrations reflected this. Traditional rites included the crowning of the May Queen, the celebration of the Green Man, and dancing around the Maypole, all connected in their differing ways with fertility and fecundity.

And May Day has a long association with civic unrest, protest and riot. Evil (or Ill) May Day exploded onto the streets of London in 1517, as a mob of ‘apprentices, clerics and ruffians’ voice violent protest against the increasing numbers of foreign merchants and craftsmen from France, Flanders, Italy and the Baltic who were settling in London. The story wasn’t new and it has been repeated many times since by vocal and charismatic leaders seeking to stir up action against immigrants. There was a shortage of skilled tradesmen in London, and the Government of the day encouraged silversmiths, jewellers, silkmakers, traders, bankers and many others to come and fill the gap. The control of the City of London by the livery companies meant that immigrants had to settle and practise their trades just outside the City walls … in the East End that meant homes and workshops in Spitalfields. The obvious problem was that the existing tradesmen found their inferior skills were no longer in demand, in an already depressed London economy.

Into this tinderbox, preacher Dr Beal, who would speak publicly at St Paul’s Cross each Sunday, threw his spark. Over Easter, he demanded that ‘Englishmen rise up and defend themselves’. Rumours grew that May Day would see the tinderbox ignite. On 1 May, a thousand-strong gang of apprentices gathered in Cheapside. Led by an embittered broker, John Lincoln, they first moved north to St Martin Le Grand, home to many immigrants. Despite the pacifying efforts of under-sheriff Thomas More, fighting broke out as the mob looted houses. They headed for the East End, by way of the Tower of London.

As they reached Tower Hill, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Richard Cholmley, had his men open fire; the Earls of Surrey and Suffolk rode in with their troops, seizing 400 prisoners. Justice was immediate. Lincoln and his fellow leaders were hung, drawn and quartered, their remains gibbeted as a reminder to others. The surviving prisoners were charged with the ‘breaking the peace of Christendom, another capital crime. Pardoned by Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, the prisoners ‘took the halters from their necks and danced and sang’.

Within a generation or so, the newcomers would be part of the seamless fabric of the East End of course - Anglicised French and Dutch names being the only reminder that their families had once been anything other than Londoners. But down the centuries the pattern of rabble-rousers leading the common people against ‘economic migrants’ would persist, through the Gordon Riots, the Blackshirts marches and beyond.

Donald Crisp was ‘a player’ in Hollywood long a lifetime before the movie of the same name. Director, producer, actor and behind-the-scenes powerbroker - it’s certain that the movie industry would have looked very different without his input. But his extraordinary life in front of and behind the camera tell only half the story - it was a remarkable enough tale, though augmented by a few creative movie business twists.

George William Crisp was born in Bow on 27 July, 1882. A humble enough beginning, he was one of four boys and four girls born to James and Elizabeth. His later Hollywood biogs claimed that he had attended both Eton College and the University of Oxford. The latter is unlikely, the former pure fiction, though it would have added an faux-authentic Englishness; by the time Crisp became an established actor he had acquired cultured upper-crust tones, though would slip as easily into a Welsh or Scottish accent. For the record, the official Eton archivist denies Crisp was ever at the school, observing that a career at England’s premier public school ’seemed to go down quite well in early Hollywood!’

Certainly George did serve in the Second Boer War, around 1900, enlisting as a trooper in the 10th Hussars. It was in South Africa that he encountered a young Winston Churchill. George returned to London, but like so many decided that his fortune lay abroad. Borrowing the fare from his brother-in-law James Needham, he headed for the USA in 1906. On the boat to America, Crisp’s singing voice caught the ear of opera impresario John C Fisher, who signed him up to his company. Tours of the United States and Cuba followed, and this taste of the bright lights decided him to try his luck in the theatre.

He worked first as a stage manager for George M Cohan. Playwright, composer, singer, dancer, director and producer, the multi-talented Irishman was known as ‘the man who owned Broadway’ in the years before World War I. It was on Broadway in 1910 that Crisp met DW Griffith. Griffith would become a legendary director in early Hollywood - at that time he was just an actor looking to break into the new medium of motion pictures. Griffith told Crisp that he was heading to Hollywood to get involved, and his new friend elected to go along.

Crisp found himself in the right place at the right time. Hollywood was a production line, churning out quick, cheap features, and with a desperate need for manpower. Over the next 20 years George (the soon to be Donald) would direct dozens of movies and appear in around 100 more. Most were bit parts, but Crisp would play Ulysses S Grant in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. And in Broken Blossoms, he returned (at least within the movie) to the East End. In the Limehouse melodrama he played Battling Burrows, the brutal father of Lillian Gish’s character.

Remarkably, Crisp returned to London to sign up again during the First World War, working in army intelligence. He would also enlist during World War II, at the age of 60, rising to the rank of Colonel in the US Army Reserve.

While the talkies finished the careers of many from the silent days of Hollywood, for Crisp it meant a renaissance. Wearied by directing hundreds of features he switched exclusively to acting in the thirties. An imposingly handsome man in late middle age, with cultured English tones, he became a popular character player, sometimes the villain, sometimes the good guy, but invariably in supporting roles. You’ll see Crisp alongside Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights and Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty. Perhaps his best role, and one for which he won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, was How Green Was My Valley, in 1941.

Crisp’s remarkably diverse career put him in a unique position in the Hollywood of the forties and after. He had been in since the beginning, before the major studios existed, and had a network of contacts from his work on the business and production side, as well as from his days in the military. He became an advisor to the Bank of America, which was to finance many of the movies of this era, giving the nod to projects. A major player, he now grew rich and invested heavily in property. But he never stopped acting, working into his eighties. His first screen role was in The French Maid, in 1908; his last would be in the 1963 movie Spencer’s Mountain, with Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara (on which TV’s The Walton’s would later be based). he died in Hollywood in 1974, aged 91, and is buried in the final resting place of so many Hollywood stars, the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, California.

A curious ceremony marked the end of major building works at Bow Church last Sunday - when the Rector re-interred human remains from the churchyard, disturbed during the relaying of the drains.

At 11.30am last Sunday, 6 May, after the normal Communion Service, the Reverend Michael Peet conducted a short burial service to lay to rest once again the mortal remains of several local people who were originally buried here about 1800, when Bow was still a village in the Middlesex countryside east of London. In the spirit of the early 19th century, the Revd Peet used a Common Prayer Book that once belonged to the splendidly named Hamlet Harrison (Rector of St Mary’s in 1809). He also donned robes appropriate for that period.

The recent work on the roof, gutters and drains of the church, which has been supported by grants from English Heritage and the Historic Churches Preservation Trust, is the first step in a programme of restoration and refurbishment of the building in preparation for the 700th anniversary of the foundation of Bow Church in 2011 and for the Olympic Games the following year. When the games commence, St Mary’s will be a major sight on the ‘Olympic Boulevard’, which will run from the City to the Olympic site at Stratford.

Not everything turned up in the excavations was quite so venerable of course. The builders unearthed a small metal shield which first thoughts had down as a 17th century coffin plate. Scraping away the earth, they the inscription: ‘The public are requested to place waste paper and orange peel in this basket’. A rather charming relic of Victorian times (and manners), buried when the church tower was bombed in 1941.

Further reading:
* The Olympic Boulevard: www.towerhamlets.gov.uk
* The church’s history: www.stmarylebow.co.uk/?History.

It may be produced in Wapping, but it’s hard to imagine any other connection between the Sun and legendary East End politician George Lansbury. Britain’s best-selling paper may have backed Tony Blair in recent years, but that hardly represents a commitment to the left.

Strange to think that The Sun started life as a ‘labour movement daily’, brainchild of Lansbury and Bethnal Green union man Ben Tillett. More ironic still (given the later war at Wapping between Murdoch and the print unions), this new paper sprung from a daily strike bulletin printed by the London Society of Compositors (LSC) - the printers trade union engaged in a bitter struggle to win a 48-hour working week.

Tillett was a leading figure in the London Dock Strike of 1889 and by the 1890s was one of the leaders of the Labour movement, pivotal in the founding of the Labour Party and president of the General Labourer’s Union.

In December 1910, London printers were locked out by the newspaper publishers for demanding a 48-hour week. The owners were hardly going to put the printers’ case on their pages, so Tillett, Lansbury and other Labour leaders produced a strike sheet, The World. An important recruit was Australian Will Dyson, arguably the best and most popular political cartoonist of the day. Dyson’s biting satire gave the new paper a unique flavour. The next month, the tyro publishers retitled their paper the Daily Herald. The first issue of 13,000 copies sold out straight away, and sales grew over the following weeks.

By April 1911, the strike was over, but Lansbury and Tillett were encouraged enough to believe there was a permanent market for a Labour paper. Funds were raised, and the Herald was relaunched on 15 April 1912. The shortlived launch editor was William H Seed and Dyson was given a full page to fill (occasionally even the front page). Eminent contributors included GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, causes supported by the paper include women’s suffrage, British rule in Ireland, and workers’ struggles everywhere. Sales nudged up to 230,000 a day.

The paper was democratic, with readers forming local branches of the ‘Daily Herald League’, with a say in the running of the paper, but all was not well between the Herald and its fathers. Dyson was attacking the Labour Party for being too conservative, and he mercilessly lampooned Ramsay McDonald in his cartoons. The Christian Lansbury was disturbed by Dyson’s representation of capitalists as ‘devils’, while the board felt the paper’s attacks on individuals (rather than systems and conditions) were far too personal. By late 1913, when Charles Lapworth was asked to resign, the paper had lost four editors.

By 1914, Lansbury was in control, but the First World War, which split the left, hurt the Daily Herald badly. The paper opposed Britain fighting, and sales (already between 50,000 and 150,000 a day) slumped further. It’s a hard job being an anti-war paper when many readers have elected to support the troops ‘right or wrong’. Will Dyson, meanwhile, had decided to do his bit, and had joined the Australian Army. The paper went weekly before returning to a daily sale in 1919. In 1922 the TUC took over publication, appointing Henry Hamilton Fyfe (a respected Fleet Street man) as editor. Fyfe recruited well, but never felt free of interference from his masters, opining that ‘the Herald never escaped entirely its first days as a strike sheet’ He resigned in 1926.

With new editor Frederic Salusbury in charge, the Herald was about to change yet again. In 1930, the TUC sold a 51 per cent share to the Odhams Press, publisher of The [Sunday] People. The synergy was obvious: the TUC needed a professional publisher to push their ailing paper, while the Sunday paper publisher was looking to employ its presses seven days a week. Odhams launched a huge promotional campaign and by 1933 the Herald was the world’s largest-selling daily paper, hitting 2m a day. That signalled war to the conservative opposition such as the Daily Express. Competition grew fierce and it was the Herald that suffered, limping through the forties and fifties losing money.

In 1961, Mirror Group bought Odhams, and found itself with an oddity - owning 51 per cent of a paper, the other ‘half’ of which was owned by the TUC. Until very recently the paper had been tied to supporting Labour Party policy … right or wrong. The paper did still sell 1.4m copies a day, but it didn’t make a profit, and the ageing, working class readership didn’t help the paper sell its ads. In 1964 the publishers went for broke, reformatting and relaunching the old Labour paper as The Sun, a mid-market, left-leaning daily. The obvious problem was that it was head to head with the Daily Mirror, and in 1969 the publishers (now reinvented as IPC) sold the title to Rupert Murdoch.

Resized as a tabloid, taken downmarket and with the addition of Page 3, any vestigial links to its inky Labour past were finally broken. And, irony of ironies, the print unions, which had created the paper 60 years before, were largely supportive … the incoming owner had promised them their jobs were secure. The Wapping dispute was still 17 years away.

The opening of Spa London at Bethnal Green’s York Hall is another welcome stage in the saving of this East End landmark. York Hall has meant different to the generation of East Enders who have used it. For many it’s the spiritual home to London boxing. For others it meant the luxury of a Turkish bath … or simply the luxury of a bath in other than a tin tub in front of the front-room fire!

But for years, the grand old building was in terrible decline. Terminal decline it sometimes seemed, and there were dark rumours about plans to tear it down and redevelop the site. Happily, that’s not come to pass, and a three-year programme of modernisation is now coming to an end.

Public baths and washhouses are pretty much a thing of the past these days - understandable when every house has its own bathroom. But when York Hall was opened in 1929, by the then Duke and Duchess of York (later to become King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and she, later still, to become the Queen Mother), a bath in the house was an undreamed-of rarity in most East End domiciles. And that meant a weekly trip to the public baths at York Hall.

York Hall, an imposing edifice with its long red-brick frontage, with plinths and cornices of Portland stone, was a late arrival on the London bathhouse scene, though there was a huge revival in interest in the health benefits of public bathing in the 1930s (that was when many of London’s lidos were laid out; most of those too have now been closed, with others in sorry states of repair).

The real heyday had been in Victorian times, the Public Baths and Wash Houses Act of 1846 allowing local parishes to provide public baths and laundries. The importance of hygiene (cholera was, of course, an ever-present threat in Victorian London) was being recognised, and this was the only way working Londoners could get a regular wash.

But the East End beat the 1846 Act to it. Robert Cotton, Governor of the Bank of England, had founded the Committee for Promoting the Establishment of Baths and Wash-Houses for the Labouring Classes in 1844. It built its first washhouse in Whitechapel that year. They soon set to planning a second, the Goulston Square Washhouse, part of which survives as the Women’s Library in Old Castle Street. A second Public Baths Act was passed in 1897, and now Bethnal Green got its own washhouse, built between 1898 and 1900 in Cheshire Street. A redbrick building clad in Portland stone, it somewhat anticipated the later York Hall in its style.

York Hall was an impressive arrival on the scene in 1929. The main hall was a boxing venue of course, and is to this day. The home of countless ABA championships, as well as televised professional bouts, it was a proving ground for the likes of Charlie Magri and Terry Marsh, Nigel Benn and Rod Douglas, John H Sracey and Terry Spinks - many fighters graduating from local boys boxing clubs such as Repton. There were the Turkish Baths and slipper baths, a brace of swimming pools and (each set in its own cubicle) huge baths where (for a shilling or so) East Enders could soak away a week’s grime. They would enjoy a huge tub in its own private cubicle - the attendant rushing up and down outside, using a special key to top up the hot and cold on demand. If you get a chance to see the film ‘Quadrophenia’ you’ll see that Londoners were still scrubbing up in the public bathhouses till well into the 1960s, but indoor bathrooms put an end to all that.

The demise of public bathing was only one of the problems that beset York Hall. Amid fears that the building might be closed, Tower Hamlets Council pointed out that the boxing bouts and bathers went nowhere near to covering the £600,000 a year running costs of the huge old building. Ray Gerlach, the Council’s director of environment and culture, described the saving of York Hall as “the most complex issue I have tackled in 25 years: an out of date building, a borough that needs a sporting venue and we have to recognise the unique national significance of York Hall. But what is not acceptable is for Tower Hamlets residents to subside people who travel in from the leafy shires to watch a boxing match and then go away again.”

But now, the three-year, £4.5m improvement of York Hall is almost complete, with a new gym and reception area, and a 33-metre swimming pool joining Spa London. The bathers of the 1930s may not have recognised some of the modern treatments (saunas and Turkish baths are joined by an Ice Fountain, Kneipp Hose and Monsoon Showers) but they would be pleased to see that Bethnal Green still has its own, communal bathhouse.

When the air raid sirens sounded on the evening of Saturday 9 September, 1940, East Enders were still getting used to enemy action. Though World War II was a year old, and around 800,000 children had been evacuated from Britain’s cities and ports, the bombs hadn’t fallen. That had all changed on the afternoon of 7 September, when 300 bombers bombarded the Port of London … the Blitz had begun in earnest.

Those around Columbia Road in Bethnal Green who didn’t have their own Anderson Shelter in the back garden had a readymade sanctuary in the basement of the moribund Columbia Road Market. The enormous Gothic building had been raised in 1869 by Angela Burdett-Coutts to supply affordable food to impoverished East Enders, but it never thrived. By World War II it had been closed for more than half a century, the market moving to the streets on and around Columbia Road.

The cellars formed one of the makeshift mass shelters, similar to the Tube platforms at Bethnal Green. And it should have been safe enough, but for a tragic fluke. A 50kg bomb jettisoned by a German plane dropped straight down an air shaft and into the shelter below. Columbia Road certainly wasn’t a target, but German planes would typically loop north-west from the docks, over Victoria Park and then Bethnal Green before heading home. As they did so, they would discharge any unused bombs.

58 people were lost, among them the four siblings of Ellen Ackred (nee Neport). Rene (15), Joyce (13), Samuel (5) and Derek (3), were killed outright. Ellen, who was 17, was at the cinema, and brother James also escaped the disaster.

The bitter irony was, of course, that had the children stayed at home in Baroness Road, they would have been fine. Ellen takes up the story. ‘My mother never recovered. We found her one day in the street - we always tried to keep an eye on her after that - and asked her where she was going.’ Searching her handbag, the family found a carving knife. The distraught Mrs Neport told them she was heading for Victoria Park, which as well as being the main anti-aircraft gun (Ack-Ack) emplacement had been converted into a POW camp for Italian and German captives. ‘They took my children, I’m going to take some of them,’ she said. The family quietly led her home.

It was just the start of the Blitz, which would hit London every night bar one until mid-November 1941. After that intensive bombardment, the second phase started, with heavy bombing through to February 1941. Now the Luftwaffe began to target other industrial centres, cities and ports. Prime targets were Liverpool, Birmingham, Plymouth, Bristol, Glasgow, Southampton, Coventry, Hull, Portsmouth, Manchester, Belfast, Sheffield, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff. And still London was hit - one of the worst days was 29 December 1940, the so-called Second Great Fire of London, when St Paul’s survived, miraculously, amidst the devastatation. Phase 3 ran from February to May 1941, with civilians now firmly in the Luftwaffe’s sights. The last big attack on the capital, 10 May 1941, was also the worst, with 1436 killed and 1800 seriously injured. Buildings including the Houses of Parliament, St James’s Palace (though not Goering’s prize target of Buckingham Palace) and the British Museum were also hit.

On 7 September 430 had died with many more injured. The following day 412 died. By the end of the Blitz some two million houses (60 per cent of them in London) had been destroyed, 60,000 civilians killed and another 87,000 seriously injured. Most of them were in London, and a large proportion of those in the East End. Until midway through World War II, more women and children in Britain had been killed than British soldiers.

As the war went on, there were sporadic further attacks, including the Baedker Blitz of 1942 (which targeted historic cities including Bath, Canterbury in York in a morale-shredding exercise) and the Baby Blitz of 1944, which again targeted London (though with scant accuracy of success). The next airborne horror to be visited on the East End was that of the flying bomb, the V1 and V2 rockets first hitting London in 1944.

Many people then and since have wondered why Londoners were left so exposed. An Anderson Shelter was fine for resisting flying rubble, but corrugated steel was little protection against anything heavier. Morrison Shelters, designed for use indoors, were arguably a little better. The Catalan engineer, Ramon Perera had built hundreds of public shelters in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Despite heavy bombing by Franco’s planes, casualties were minimal. Perera escaped to London just before World War II and offered his expertise to the British Government. The authorities demurred, opting for the Anderson Shelter and makeshift mass shelters instead. How many lives would have been saved had they taken Perera seriously? We’ll never know.

Columbia Market was finally demolished in 1958, and Ellen Ackred only returned to the site in the last few years, though she had never moved far away. ‘It still affected me … I couldn’t bear it,’ she admits. But of one thing she is sure: those 58 lives cruelly snatched in the early days of the Blitz should never be forgotten.

The discovery of a World War II bomb in Bethnal Green last week brought just a small taste of the chaos that descended on the East End during the dark days of the Blitz. Builders were working near Suttons Wharf, on the canal at the southern tip of Victoria Park last Monday (16 May) when they got a nasty shock. Their mechanical digger uncovered a 500lb unexploded bomb. Police threw a 200-yard exclusion zone round the bomb as the bomb disposal experts moved in.

It seems remarkable that such a monster could have fallen and remained unnoticed in such a populated spot. But when you look back at the chaos that engulfed the East End during 1940 and 1941 it is less of a surprise. For while 21st century East Enders may have had to endure evacauation, discomfort and traffic chaos, as the police threw a 200-yard exclusion zone round the bomb, it was nothing compared to the misery that tore whole families apart back in the early 1940s.

One such was Ellen Ackred, now 84 and living in Patriot Square, who lost four siblings to German bombing. On 7 September 1940 she was the 17-year-old Ellen Neport, living in Baroness Road, just off Columbia Road. Britain was a year into World War II but to date hadn’t suffered the devastating bombardment gloomily predicted by the Ministry of Health. In spring 1939, that department had prepared for war by calculating 600,000 dead and twice that number injured during the first six months of war. It didn’t happen, but in anticipation around 650,000 children had been evacuated from city to countryside.

That first year was the so-called
‘phoney war’ in Europe. The Great Powers were in conflict but there had been limited fighting or bombardment. From July 1940, the Luftwaffe had been carrying out daylight air raids on Britain. Germany’s plan was that having won this ‘Battle of Britain’, they would then invade. The galliant efforts of ‘The Few’ halted that plan. (The RAF crews gained that tag from Winston Churchill’s quote that “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”) And while the Hurricanes and Spitfires of Fighter Command were fighting a desperate battle in the skies over southern England, Bomber Command was hitting the towns and industrial base of Germany’s Ruhr. These were frightening days for the Allies. The Luftwaffe were numerically superior and were scoring major successes on British airfields; some estimate that had Germany persisted for another couple of weeks then Britain would have been defeated. But a bloodied Luftwaffe drew back, and the Germans launched Plan B.

To now, attacks on civilian targets had been limited, though the Luftwaffe had hit industrial targets in Birmingham and Liverpool. On 24 August 1940, after a raid on Thames Haven, the Germans had dropped bombs on Bethnal Green, Islington, Hackney, Finchley and Tottenham, though that was accident rather than design. The British retaliated by bombing Berln and, in a strategy of tit-for-tat, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to target British civilians - hoping to flatten morale at home while most of the male population was away fighting. The Fuehrer demanded ‘disruptive attacks on the population and air defences of major British cities, including London, by day and night’. Air Reichsmarschall Goering decided to switch to night flights, as German bombers had suffered heavily during daylight raids.

The Blitz began on 7 September, with planes hitting the Port of London. 300 bombers protected by 600 fighters dropped tons of high explosive on the docks and, of course, on the homes around. Some 436 people were killed in that first bombing with 1600 injured. It was the start of a bombardment that would continue every night (bar one) for two months.

London, meanwhile, was woefully unprepared. The RAF was stretched almost to breaking (and the nippy Spitfires and Hurricanes were ineffective at night). The anti-aircraft guns were limited in number and were a terribly inexact weapon against German bombers flying thousands of feet above London. The ground-based searchlights didn’t penetrate high enough into the sky to pick out the bandits. And when bombs reached the ground the fire crews were stretched beyond coping as the streets and buildings blazed.

On the evening of 9 September, the Neport family were prepared for the bombs, and the children were hurried off to the air raid shelter. Many families in Baroness Road had long gardens with Anderson Shelters, but not the Neports - their backyard was eaten into by neighbouring industrial units, so the only option was the communal shelters - but the night was to end in tragedy.

In autumn 1937, committed socialist Sol Frankel decided he would sign up with the International Brigades and go and fight against the fascist Franco in Spain, although his family were bitterly opposed. ‘Being Jewish in the East End they were dead against politics - they thought it best to keep to themselves.’

But Sol felt impelled to fight. ‘Socialism is my religion’ he would tell family and friends. Having seen the rising threat of fascism in London during the early 1930s, he wanted to join the significant number of London Jews who were taking the fight against the far right to Europe (by some estimates around 20 per cent of the International Brigades). The rest of the Continent had already seen the Luftwaffe razing the Spanish Basque city of Guernica, with the aid of Mussolini’s Italian troops, and in support of Spanish fascist leader Franco. If the left were not united, they reasoned, who would be next.

Solomon Frankel was born on 31 March 1914, one of nine children to Polish-Jewish parents in Whitechapel. He left school at 14, working as a tailor in the local sweatshops. By his early twenties he was a committed socialist. In 1936 two events tipped the balance into activism. The first was the Battle of Cable Street, where he had crowbarred up paving stones to make barricades and block the advance of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. The cry of the Spanish Communists, ‘No pasaran’ (they shall not pass) had been taken up by the defenders of Cable Street.

A second was his work at a refugee camp outside Southampton in 1937, where he erected tents and dug latrines for some 4000 Basque children who had been evacuated following the blitzing of Guernica. One day, the news came that Bilbao had fallen to Franco’s Nationalist forces. The children rioted and broke camp, desparate to return to Spain and fight for the Republic. The helpers were up all night, rounding up the youngsters, who called Frankel and his fellows ‘fascistas’. It was a clear message to Sol that he was either with the Republicans or against them. He decided to head off to Spain and play a role in the international fight against fascism.

But there was a good chance he would never get to Spain. ‘They were stopping everyone at Dover, trying to stop anyone who looked likely to be heading for Spain,’ he remembered. Sol told the police he was off to visit an uncle in Paris. ‘Lucky they didn’t search me … I had a Spanish dictionary tucked in my pocket!’

Sol reached Paris, sending his worried parents a postcard befor heading south for the Pyrenees and the Spanish border. The crossing was made by night, on foot, the volunteers wearing plimsolls, which afforded a good grip and were silent on the rocks. In the early hours he was gazing down upon the Mediterranean from atop the mountains. ‘A beautiful blue sea … I was excited that night, not scared at all.’

As the soldiers marched through Spain they would meet Spanish peasants, who fired the foreigners up, greeting them with the clenched fist salute, but shortly after leaving their training camp in Albacete, it all became frighteningly real. “We were marching along when the order was given to dig in on the side of the road. Suddenly the order was countermanded. We ran into an ambush of fascist tanks. Blinking tank was so bloody near me, he couldn’t bring his machine guns down to bear on me. He fired right over my head into the side of the mountain. It was my 24th birthday.” A few months later, Sol took a bullet in his right arm at the Battle of the Ebro, the last major Republican offensive in the war, which raged from July to November 1938.

It was the end for Sol. Though he hoped to be back fighting ‘in a couple of weeks’ his right hand was permanently disabled and he had to return home. The defeat at Ebro shattered the Republican Army as a fighting force too. From here it would be a steady process of withdrawal until 1 April 1939, when Franco would declare the war won. The fascist general would rule Spain as dictator until 1975.

Sol returned to London where he took up his old job as a tailor, switching to his left hand and learning to grip the cloth with his disabled right. His injury would rule him out of fighting in World War II, and he worked as a volunteer air-raid patrol warden - vital work in the Blitz of London. He was now a member of the Communist Party, having left Labour in disgust at their lack of active opposition to first Mosley and then to the rise fascism in Europe. During the War he again came up against the Labour leadership. Home secretary Herbert Morrison had banned the Communist Party’s Daily Worker paper for criticising Britain’s war aims.

A new title, the Stepney Worker, took up the fight, and Sol contributed cartoons, penned with his left hand, for the paper. He married editor Peral Simonson in 1943. He remained a Party activist during the fifties and sixties, fighting for nuclear disarmament and against apartheid, but the pair eventually quit the Communists in 1968, protesting against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia. He rejoined Labour.

Sol didn’t return to Spain until the death of Franco in 1975, returning once more in 2003 for the 65th anniversary commemorations for the Battle of the Ebro, when large numbers of International Brigades fighters were reunited. Solomon Frankel died on 18 May, aged 93.

Since the publication of Peter Ashley’s book ‘London Peculiars’ in 2004, much has changed in London. The Routemaster buses have left service, Wembley Stadium has been finished and, thanks to the Olympics, people outside the East End know where Stratford is. But a thousand tiny details remain, the ‘peculiars’ that make London unique.

Ashley and his camera go looking for the little oddities, not necessarily grand builldings (though there are several of those too in his new collection, ‘More London Peculiars’. For if London is rarely a spectacular or stunning city in the way of Manhattan, Florence or Paris, it has many centuries of idiosyncratic detail that make it far more interesting. Ashley focuses his lens on the council-flat railings made from World War II ARP stretchers, the tombstone of the pet Alsation of the last Weimar Republic ambassador to London, and the tobacco Indians of St James’s Street.

The East End, of course, features strongly. The east London churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor are discussed in some detail. Ashley quotes writer Ian Nairn who puts his finger on the strangeness yet cohesion of the great architect’s work: ‘in the maddest of Hawksmoor’s designs there is always architectural and religious logic’ There are so many extraordinary details: the pepper pot turrets of St-George-in-the-East; the massive tower of St Anne’s Limehouse, which gathers together bell openings, pilasters, columns and obelisks; the visual trick of Christ Church Spitalfields, where it appears the tower is balanced on stilts of stone. Such unusual churches are they that many have spectaculated and fantasised (not least Peter Ackroyd in his marvellous novel ‘Hawksmoor’) that the churches are giant masonic shrines, four pieces in a demonic puzzle. The author describes them as ‘white Portland stone codes still waiting to be deciphered’.

Hawksmoor was, of course, an East End boy during the Great Plague of 1665. That morbid time is echoed in another East End church, St Olave’s. In ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’, Charles Dickens enthuses about the little church between Hart Street and Seeting Lane, with its trio of skulls in the curved pediment of the entrance. ‘Such strange churchyards hide in the City of London’. St Olave’s was Dickens’s favourite ‘one of my best beloved, which I call the churchyard of Ghastly Grim’, with its ferocious iron gate spiked like a jail, the gate surmounted with a larger than life skull and crossbones, wrought in stone and then thrust through with iron spears. A no-nonsense sight for mourners going to visit their departed friends. This church survived the Great Fire of 1666, was blitzed in World War II but survives largely unscathed. Samuel Pepys and wife Elizabeth are buried there.

In Donovan Bros of Spitalfields, ‘the noted house for paper bags’, Ashley is delighted to find an antique Spitalfields shop front still more or less intact, having first snapped it in the late 1980s. Spitalfields, with the ever-encroaching City, has changed a lot in the intervening two decades, but Donovan Bros (which now does business in Essex) belongs to another world, when Spitalfields was a working fruit and veg market and little businesses thrived in its shadow. Strange to think now that there were once little cigarette and cigar ‘manufactories’ dotted all around the capital. Godfrey Phillips started trading as a cigar merchant in 1865 at the meeting of Commercial Street and Jerome Street, and 50 years later the company built a slimline Art Deco factory here, producing Ariston Plain and The Greys brands of cigarettes. Today, a gilded wall sign is all that remains.

In Bow, of course, they made the matches that lit the fags. Bryant and May stopped making their safety matches in Fairfield Road in 1979, now the Bow Quarter offers what the developers called ‘Manhattan-style loft living’ (though without the cockroaches obviously). Actually, Manhattan is quite wrong. Gaze at the Italianate water tower of the main building, built in red industrial brick to last centuries, and you could be gazing at a campanile in Florence or Siena. Size isn’t everything of course. Equally delightful is the little cast-iron chimney on Tower Bridge. Ornately disguised to blend in with the lamp standards on the bridge walkway, it in fact served the fireplace in the guardroom below the bridge. The ironfounder’s name and address is still clearly visible on the flue: Durham Brothers, 205 Bow Road, E.

Spitalfields features again with some lovely pictures of the old silk weavers houses of Fournier Street, Wilkes Street and Princelet Street. These were very nearly demolished a few decades back, and as recently as the 1980s ‘you could look through letterboxes at big empty and dusty hallways … staircases ascending into the gloom of upper floors’. Photos of the restored houses today show just how much has been saved, though the days of people picking up a distressed weavers’ house for a song have long gone - architectural salvage has now matured into unaffordable real estate.

The East End has some love-em-or-hate-em modern curiosities too. Fatboy’s Diner on Trinity Buoy Wharf, perhaps picked up from the American Midwest by a Kansas whirlwind and dropped in east London, is wonderfully incongruous, The same site sees the brightly coloured Container City, a giant child’s playset of a building. And then of course there are all the peculiars outside the East End … you’ll just have to read the book.

More London Peculiars by Peter Ashley, ISBN 9781850749998, £15.99