My East End by Gilda O’Neill
What does the East End mean to you? Is it communal bath houses and stewed eel sellers proffering their wares on street corners? Doing a moonlight flit to avoid the rent-collecting landlord, or bread and jam for tea?
Or is it the steel and glass towers of Canary Wharf and a Docklands of upmarket houses rather than docks? Or a profusion of curry houses, tower blocks and council estates?
And where does your East End finish? Is it the Tower Hamlets area covered by East End Life or do you include Hackney and Stratford in your map?
Gilda O’Neill’s new book, My East End: A History of Cockney London, asks as many questions as it poses answers.
Not merely a sentimental skip through the Cockney cliches, it questions how much of the East End has
disappeared with the dispersal of its people to Canada, New Zealand… and Essex, and how much those people still carry the East End within them.
Gilda O’Neill is a successful novelist, with seven titles in print, but she is as well known as a historian – born and bred in Bethnal Green and the East End is her
subject.
The strength of her previous two works of non-fiction: Pull No More Bines: An Oral History of Women Hop Pickers and A Night Out with the Girls: Women Having Fun, lay in the eloquent
first-person testimonies O’Neill faithfully collected and transcribed.
My East End is O’Neill’s most ambitious history yet. She traces the history of the area from its earliest times - “liquid history, as it begins with the River Thames”, through its growth as the world’s biggest port in the chapter “Feeding the Imperial Powerhouse”, and the collapse of Tower Hamlets into the hellish Victorian slums detailed by William Booth’s In Darkest England.
There is plenty of colour too, though often of a grim and morbid hue. The East End boasted the first person to be murdered on a British train. Thomas Briggs, taking a trip on the new Fenchurch Street line on July 6, 1864, had the misfortune to encounter his nemesis, Franz Muller, between Bow and Hackney Wick.
It’s all fascinating stuff, irresistibly written and painstakingly researched - the bibliography alone stretches to three pages, enough to keep East End history fans in reading for the rest of their days. But where My East End really kicks in is with the first-person testimonies, largely limited, naturally enough, to the 20th century.
There are tales of the pleasures and pains of knowing your neighbours and living in each others pockets. “People didn’t shut their front doors because it was usually shared accommodation, so you had to leave it open. But the front door was also left open because your neighbour would say, ‘I’ll come round and have a cup of tea with you at four o’ clock.’ I think if you didn’t ask your neighbours for help, they used to think you were being standoffish.”
Living so close-knit could cause problems. “Some people, to save the expense of the sweep, would set fire to the chimney, a dangerous thing to do, and the whole street would be covered in soot and the washing ruined.” Feuds were always going off as “each street had its noisy family, its dirty one”.
That was The Golden Age, as the chapter title would have it. O’Neill finishes with a look at the Post War, Post Imperial, Post-industrial, Postmodern periods which were worrying times for east London. Two years after the government was trumpeting the new Docklands as “the greatest opportunity for the reconstruction of London since the Great Fire of 1666”, the Financial Times of 31 July 1978 was charting the area’s collapse into dereliction.
But what comes across in O’Neill’s vox pops of ordinary people is hope, pride, humour and a relish in the diversity of the East End.
And while that still burns,
so does hope in the East End’s future.
My East End: A History of Cockney London, Gilda O’Neill, Viking Penguin, £16.99.