East End statues
THE West End of London is famous for its grand bronzes and statues.
Walk down the Mall or Horse Guards Parade, and you will be bombarded with figures from Britain’s imperial and artistic past. They range from the celebrated figures – such as Churchill, Disraeli and Edith Cavell, to the largely forgotten George Nathaniel Curzon and Sir Alexander Dixon.
But take a walk around Tower Hamlets, and you see that it too has its famed men and women immortalised in bronze and stone. And the choice of figures says a lot about the kind of people who were important to the East End and the work that was done here.
That bastion of Victorian Liberalism WE Gladstone (1808-1898) has a statue in bronze in Bow Churchyard. It was sculpted by Albert Bruce-Joy, and erected in 1882 when Gladstone was at the peak of his powers.
Walk down Roman Road and you will come across, in succession, William… Ewart… and Gladstone Streets.
The grand old man is certainly well-remembered though sceptics might ask, with his concentration on the Irish Question and foreign affairs generally, how much he did to tackle the problems of the Victorian East End, its poverty and appalling work practices.
Limehouse MP
A generation on, Clement Attlee (1883-1967), the First Earl of Attlee (or simply Clem to his followers), was Stepney’s first Labour mayor and became MP for Limehouse in 1922.
As a member of the Fabian Society, Clem was in at the start of the labour movement that meant the first political involvement, and opportunity for change, for East Enders.
His spell as mayor coincided with his vigorous support for the women’s suffrage movement, centred in the East End. Attlee is remembered in Frank Forster’s bronze (1988) outside Limehouse Library.
While many East Enders were passionate socialists, some were confirmed monarchists. Opposite the London Hospital in Mile End Road, stands a column bearing a winged angel and displaying a bronze medallion of King Edward VII (1841-1910).
The column is flanked by fountains and sculptures of Justice and Liberty. The whole work, a gift from the Jewish people of east London, was completed by WS Frith in 1911.
And Edward’s long-suffering wife, Queen Alexandra, is remembered at the London, too. She was hugely popular in the East End and a bronze by George Wade (1908), showing her in coronation robes and bearing crown and sceptre, marks her contribution to medicine. According to the inscription, she “introduced to England the Finsen Light cure for lupus and presented the first lamp to this hospital”.
If politics and the crown were important elements of East End Life, so too was religion, and in particular the missionary movements of Victor-ian times.
General William Booth (1829-1912), the founder of the Salvation Army, was one of the first to reveal the horrors of poverty in the East End, with his 1880 book In Darkest England.
Booth is marked by a bronze bust in Mile End Road. Cast by GE Wade in 1927, the statue is on the spot where Booth held his first open-air services.
Alms to the poor
Of course, work for the poor had been going on a long time before the Sally Army. But in the time of Sir Robert Geffrye (1613-1704), it consisted of the rich giving alms to the poor.
Geffrye founded his almshouses in Kingsland Road – now the Geffrye Museum – and the man is marked there by a 6ft lead sculpture. The statue of the once Lord Mayor of London was cast by James Mande and Co in 1913.
Some of the names are less renowned these days. But of course what wealth and work did come into the East End came through the docks.
Stop outside the old public baths in East India Dock Road in Poplar and you will see the bronze of Richard Green, head of a shipping family who operated out of Blackwall Yard.
And Viscount Milner (1854-1925) may be a less-celebrated statesman than Gladstone or Attlee, but in his day he was renowned too.
He is marked by a bronze medallion at Toynbee Hall, a copy of Gilbert Ledward’s 1930 original in Westminster Abbey.
These are just a sample of the names remembered in statues and street names in the East End.
Tell us about your favourite memorials, or perhaps there is someone you think should be marked – but isn’t.