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The death of Sir David Lean in April 1991 afforded East Enders a brief glimpse into the fabulous home he had built for himself in Limehouse’s Narrow Street, when the luxurious home went, briefly, onto the market.

For one of the giants of British cinema, a move to an area of the East End forgotten by all but the residents seemed curious. By the 1980s, large parts of Limehouse were desolate, local people living in the shadow of the thousands of square feet of deserted warehouses and wharves, left behind by the departure of the docks trade. Lean bought four warehouses on Narrow Street’s Sun Wharf and knocked them together. A no-expense-spared modernisation converted the space into a massive luxury home, close to the City and right on the river.

With the current celebrations of Lean’s centenary, he is today regarded as a great film director. But by the time he moved to Limehouse in 1987, Sir David’s halcyon days in pictures were behind him, and critical opinion was divided.

Born in Croydon on 25 March 1908, he started in movies at the bottom, as a clapperboard boy in the 1920s. He worked a solid apprenticeship during the 1930s, editing newsreels for Gaumont and Movietone. It would give him a feel for structure and the technicalities of making a movie, and for the look of a film. He moved on to edit features, including Pygmalion in 1938 and Major Barbara in 1941. He worked with the British industry’s biggest names: Powell & Pressburger on Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941) and One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), and directing with Noel Coward on In Which We Serve (1942).

He went on to adapt a number of Coward’s plays as films, with This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945). There were hugely successful adaptations of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). And he made The Passionate Friends, from HG Wells’s novel, and the 1950 melodrama Madeline, before working with Terence Rattigan on 1952’s The Sound Barrier. This ‘greatest adventure story of our time’ went some way to establishing Lean’s reputation for stunning visual work - with the unbeatable accompaniment of music by Malcom Arnold. ‘I think people remember pictures not dialogue. That’s why I like pictures,’ Lean once mused. It was to be his trademark, but also a source for criticism later on.

Then followed Hobson’s Choice in 1954 and Summertime the year after, before the run of sumptuous, and very long, epics for which Lean became famous. In the austerity years of the fifties, British cinema was already nostalgically harking back to the victories of World War II, but in The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lean did far more than deliver a patriotic potboiler. The director, almost unknown outside Britain, was a risk for producer Sam Spiegel, who had already considered John Ford, William Wyler, Howard Hawks, Fred Zinnemann, and Orson Welles. Spiegel half joked that the Brit was chosen “in the absence of anyone else”. Malcom Arnold scored the movie once more, memorable for his arrangement of ‘The Colonel Bogey March’. In a black-and-white movie world of goodies and baddies, Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson’s maniacal pride -leading to his helping the Japanese to build their bridge - was unusually ambivalent. The film further cemented Lean’s reputation for spectacle - he used a full-size train and bridge for the final spectacular explosion.

The director was now playing on the biggest stage. In 1962, Spiegel employed him to make Lawrence of Arabia. The director’s cut would run to 227 minutes, while the budget would run to €15m. It would make a star of Peter O’Toole and influence a new generation of film makers, including Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. He followed with Doctor Zhivago in 1965, another huge popular success, but not so with the critics. This love story set around the Russian revolution sprawled over 26 years of plot time, cost €11m and ran to 197 minutes. ‘Too long’ they complained, and a hurt Lean said he would never make another film. He returned though, with Ryan’s Daughter in 1970, another monster, at €15m and 195 minutes. The critics roasted the movie, saying the story was dwarfed by Lean’s epic visuals. A rural Irish take on Madame Bovary, it failed to repeat the box office success of Lean’s two movies (which would have been some feat), and it would be another decade before he returned … for his last film.

A Passage to India, in 1984, introduced Lean to a new generation of filmgoers, and re-established the director’s reputation. Lean was back in fashion, and the movie won two Oscars, with a further nine nominations. The same year, he received a knighthood. Lean wasn’t a prolific director - just 16 films in 43 years, and it got harder and harder to get his epic films made. At the time of his death he was planning a production of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. Lean married six times, and was survived by his last wife, Sandra Cooke.

Is truth stranger than fiction? The tale of ‘The King of Lampedusa’ would suggest so. The play, the story of East End orphan Sydney Cohen and his capture of the tiny Italian island, started a record breaking run for a Yiddish play when it opened at the Grand Palais Yiddish Theatre in Commercial Road in the 1940s. It was a true story, but no Hollywood scriptwriter would have dared to make it up.

20-year-old Syd was working as a tailor’s cutter when he was called up to the RAF in 1941. He began his flying career at North Weald in Essex, before moving on to Malta. And it was from there that he was sent to search for survivors from a German plane that had, reportedly, crashed into the Mediterranean.

Cohen’s compass started playing up and, unwittingly, he struck a course directly away from Malta. Fuel began to run low. ‘We had to make for the nearest land,’ he remembered later. It turned out to be Lampedusa, a tiny speck of an island covering just 25 square kilometres of the Mediterranean. Belonging to Italy it’s far closer to Africa in fact, lying 205km south of Sicily and 113km east of Tunisia. In 1941 it was the base for a dispirited battalion of Italian soldiers.

‘As we came down on a ropey landing ground we saw a burnt hangar and burnt aircraft around us,’ Syd recalled. ‘A crowd of Italians came out to meet us and we put our hands up to surrender but then we saw they were all waving white sheets shouting, “No, no - We surrender.” The whole island was surrendering to us!’

An unnerved Syd put on a brave face and asked to see the commander. As he entered the commandant’s villa an air raid began. ‘Everybody suddenly dashed from the room. I concluded that the nerves of my hosts were a bit jagged! They asked me to return to Malta and inform the authorities of their offer to surrender. They gave me a scrap of paper with a signature on it.’

Sgt Cohen took on fuel, fixed his compass and the crew set off home to Malta, where he delivered the surrender document, confirming the capitulation of the 4300 Italian troops.

The story quickly spread - it was great morale boosting stuff back home in the East End. ‘London Tailor’s Cutter is now King of Lampedusa’, trumpeted the headline in the News Chronicle, while the Sunday Pictorial gave Syd a front page headline on 13 June, proclaiming ‘Lampedusa Gives In to Sgt. Cohen’. Young Syd his lightweight Swordfish biplane and a small crew had instigated the first step in the collapse of one of the major Axis powers. But the story was to get stranger yet.

SJ Charendorf was a Czechoslovak-American journalist and London correspondent for the ‘Jewish Morning Journal of New York’. He picked up on the popular tale doing the rounds in London and was off to wire his story back to base when he realised that Syd’s adventure would make a terrific play. Rather than continuing to the telegraph office at the Ministry of Information he headed back to his flat, whipped out a pen, and began to write ‘The King of Lampedusa’.

Syd Cohen became Sam Kagan in the play, and the orphan acquired parents and a fiancee. Otherwise the story was straight from life. In November 1943, Meir Tzelniker, the actor, producer, director and force behind the Grand Palais Yiddish theatre in Commercial Road, commissioned some music, wrote the lyrics himself and put on the play. He and daughter Anna had the lead roles and the musical had its premiere on New Year’s Eve.

The musical wasn’t a hit at first, but Charendorf was an ace at drumming up press support, and the play went on a record run. BBC Radio picked it up and broadcast (this time in English) with Sydney Tafler as Syd/Sam. Even Nazi propagandist William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) mentioned it in his nightly rants from Berlin, saying: ‘The Yids at the Grand Palais should not be laughing for much longer at the ridiculous play The King of Lampedusa because they are earmarked for a visit from the Luftwaffe.’

Syd finally saw his story in a Hebrew production at the Hamatae Theatre in Haifa at the end of 1944 when he was on leave from Malta. Life cannot imitate art with its happy endings though. Syd was flying home to a life on Civvy Street on 26 August 1946 when his plane was lost in the Straits of Dover. The King of Lampedusa was never found.

In 1936 a battle took place on the streets of the East End that was to focus the eyes of Britain on the growing threat of fascism in its midst.

A plaque on a wall in Dock Street tells the story. ‘The Battle of Cable Street: The people of East London rallied to Cable Street on 4 Ocotber 1936 and forced back the march of the fascist Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts through the streets of the East End … They shall not pass.’

And this Sunday, 8 October, there is a programme of events* to celebrate the 70th anniversary of that remarkable day. A procession, street theatre, exhibition, films, music, history and stalls (not to mention the Cable Street mural) combine to remind East Enders of why their stand mattered then … and matters just as much now.

Oswald Mosley had served in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, being invalided out of the forces following a plane crash in 1916. In 1918, at just 21, he became an MP, the youngest in the House of Commons, representing the Conservatives in Harrow. But Mosley was in a hurry, and with a disdain for what he saw as tired parties staffed with mediocre men. In 1926 he crossed the floor of the House, and was elected Labour MP for Smethwick. Appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the second Labour administration of 1929 he swiftly resigned again - furious that his plan for dealing with mass unemployment were ignored by the party leadership.

The impatient Mosley now formed and headed his own party, the New Party. They were unsuccessful in the elections of 1931, and once again he moved on. In 1932, fired by visits to Europe and the examples of Hitler and Mussolini, he formed the British Union of Fascists (BUF). The platform was anti-corporatist (especially anti the banks), protectionist and anti-Communist. But Mosley was taking on much more than that from the continental fascists.

An increasingly anti-semitic tone coloured his speeches - Jews were cast as the villains of international big business and banking. And his speeches were protected by the ‘Blackshirts’ who would brutally break up any disturbance. Mosley’s links to the Nazis in Germany were close - he married Diana Mitford in Goebbels’ home in Germany in 1936, with Hitler a guest. The newly-weds were also negotiating with Hitler to broadcast radio transmissions from Germany to Britain.

Mosley’s public marches were becoming increasingly provocative too, and a planned parade through the Jewish heartland of the East End was to prove the final straw. Remarkably, the march was legal - Government had been strongly petitioned by local people and politicians to ban the parade through Cable Street but had refused. A mixture of locals, Communist, Socialist and Jewish groups (many from out of the area and to a total of an estimated 250,000) erected roadblocks to stop the BUF passing.

So began ‘The Battle of Cable Street’, with running battles between the anti-fascists and police, who were trying to force a path for the BUF. With the Blackshirts largely shielded behind police lines, relatively little fighting was to take place between the BUF and the protestors. Fenner Brockway, Secretary of the Independent Labour Party, was injured by a police horse and, realising the carnage that would ensue if the fascists were helped by the police into the heart of the area, telephoned the Home Office. Mosley was ordered to cancel his march and the BUF were rerouted towards Hyde Park.

It wasn’t the end of the fascists in the East End. The following week, the windows of every Jewish-owned shop in the Mile End Road were smashed. And in the March 1937 local elections the BUF polled 23 per cent of the vote in Bethnal Green; l0.3 per cent in Limehouse and 14.8 per cent in Shoreditch. “The size of their vote was a surprise even to those in touch with the East End,” reported The Observer on 7 March that year. Mosley was to continue to address rallies around London over the following years.

But with the 1936 Public Order Act had come the banning of civilians parading in military uniform. That had removed the Blackshirts focus … and perhaps their appeal. Oswald Mosley would be interned in 1940, and the BUF itself later banned. By now war had started and the East End was involved in the bigger fight against fascism.

* The event runs from noon to 4pm in and around Cable Street, Sunday 8 October. Nearest station is Shadwell Tube and DLR; buses 15, 115 (Commercial Road), and D3 (Cable Street).

St George in the East is one of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s six London churches, three of them in Tower Hamlets. And its design is as idiosyncratic as followers of the brilliant and eccentric architect might expect - no Hawksmoor church is like the next.

Hawksmoor was a builder who people tended to love or hate (though his churches are much more appreciated than they once were). Architecture critic Mervyn Blatch got it about right back in the 1970s when he said ‘we can again stare in wonder or dismay at this strange building’. ‘Again’ because St George’s was very nearly lost to Luftwaffe firebombs. What Blatch was viewing was the fairly recently spruced up church, which had been saved by an imaginative plan from architect Arthur Bailey in 1960. Bailey proposed repairing the walls and tower, building a smaller, modern place of worship in the eastern part of the old nave. He would then transofrm the space between the west end of the new church and the old into an open courtyard. The space formerly occupied by the galleries would now become flats. Below, the old vaults would be cleared and a new parish hall put in their place.

The work was carried out between 1960 and 1964, and the church reconsecrated on 26 April that year. Two and a half centuries after its inception, St-George-in-the-East had been redesigned for the changing needs ot the 20th century. Back in 1711, the church had been commissioned for a swiftly changing Stepney, the huge parish being broken up into smaller units as the river traffic and population grew. This area of Upper Wapping qualified for a church of its own, on a site ‘in pleasantly wooded fields’. This new parish was one of people who built, owned and worked on sailing ships, but they would have to wait a long time for their new church. The Parliamentary Act of 1711 had provided tax money for 50 new churches for the capital, but only a dozen were ever built as the money ran out. Hawksmoor faced a constant struggle for funds for St George’s. Work took from 1714 to 1726. Even then, it took another three years for funds to be produced to pay for a priest and the consecration.

By the 1850s, the area had changed beyond any recognition. The Ratcliffe Highway (now The Highway) had become notorious for vice, drunkeness and crime. St George’s, meanwhile, became an epicentre of the battle between High and Low Church, which was splitting the Church of England and tapped into deep-seated fears of the power of the Roman Church. St George’s saw ’some of the most disgraceful scenes of modern times to take place in a Christian church’ when the Revd Bryan King and curate CF Lowder, High Churchmen both, adopted a very moderate form of ritual, donning surplices instead of the usual black gown.

The pair had been encouraged by the example of their bishop, another High Churchman. But when he was succeeded by a new bishop, born a Presbyterian and determined to stamp out High Church ritual there was trouble. The new bishop nominated a militant Low Churchmean, Hugh Allen, the vicar of a nieghbouring parish, to give afternoon lectures at St George’s. Soon there was organised disruption whenever King or Lowder tried to hold a service: pelting the altar with rubbish, catcalls and jeers, men still wearing thier hats and smoking their pipes, trombones being blown and, on one occasion, dogs drugged to make them howl were brought into the church. Press reports encouraged hooligans to come from all over London to join the fun, while local magistrates - egged on by Low Church members of the Vestry - turned a blind eye. Eventually the rector’s health gave way and a locum took over.

The once respectable area had now become a slum, with narrow dirty streets, brothels, rough taverns and much crime. In the late 1700s, church had gained new east windows, designed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the Victorians decorated the apse with Venetian glass mosaics in 1880, but much was swept away by incendiary bombs in May 1941. The exterior of the church gives away little of the changes wrought within during the 1960s repair. A bright, white exterior of Portland stone supports a massive, 160ft tower, with tall rectangular openings and deeply recessed windows at the west end. The crown is an open octagonal lanatern with eight rectangular buttresses topped with Roman altars. Buttressed turrets, topped by copper-roofed cupolas, resemble a cluster of pepper pots, and once contained stairways to the galleries. Projections at the west and east ends mark where the transepts once were, forming a double Greek cross. At the east end, an apse projects from the middle of a flat wall with a large pediment.

St George’s has had a mixed history. Built by an architect some writers have argued was a Satanist*, disrupted by the mob, fallen on hard times in a sinking area, and bombed out by the Luftwaffe … but this unique building lives on, still serving its community.

*see Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd and Lud Heat by Iain Sinclair.

It’s quite a journey from Cornish Methodism to Anglo-Catholicism (a ‘higher’ church tradition within the Church of England, bringing in much of the ritual of the Roman Catholic church). Father Gresham Kirkby (who died earlier this month) achieved it, along with a synthesis of his anarchist and pacifist beliefs. He also became one of the East End’s longest serving priests, one of the best known, and was the driving force behind the building of one of the borough’s most-recognisable church buildings.

You’ll recognise St Paul’s, Bow Common as you drive west along St Paul’s Way, crossing Burdett Road. There on your right is a petrol station, on your left a shimmering ‘mural’ of metal discs decking the church’s west wall. ‘Angel’ with its ‘O’, colon, dash and a bracket is, in fact, a smiley face (on its side) with a halo. It’s maybe not what you’d expect on the side of a church - but St Paul’s is no ordinary church.

When Gresham Kirkby became vicar of St Paul’s in 1951, he had very little church to be vicar of. Like so much of the surrounding area it had been largely destroyed by German bombing in World War II. His first job was to rebuild it. He chose the architects (Keith Murray and Robert Maguire) and the trio looked resolutely forward not back in their planning.

Murray and Maguire had already worked on the new chapel for the Royal Foundation of St Katherine in Stepney, alongside letter carver Ralph Beyer. St Paul’s was their first church, and it turned conventional design on its head. Asking ‘What will Christian worship be like in the year 2000, and how do we build a church to reflect this,’ they put the altar in the centre of the church, rather than facing a long aisle flanked by pews. They used new, industrial materials (as much from necessity, as these were years of austerity), making a font of concrete, inlaid with copper. A central glass roof flooded the building with light. The partnership of Murray and Maguire would go on to design many more churches (and schools) but Bow was the testing bed for their new ideas. In the late fifties they would return to build the church school at Bow Common. On that occasion, a tight budget would see them using portal frames (adapted from barns) to give space and light.

The new church at Bow Common was consecrated in 1960, Architectural Review dubbing it ‘the important church built in the 20th century’ - largely because it pointed the way forward. Maguire and Murray were only too aware of that. They viewed another project of the time, the new Coventry Cathedral by Basil Spence, (another building necessitated by enemy bombing), and which employed a more conventional church design, as essentially a ‘medieval building’.

And so Father Gresham Kirkby took charge of his new church, and was to stay there until 1994. Kirkby had been born in Cornwall, the son of a Methodist mother, though he moved swiftly to the Anglican church, and to the Catholic tradition within it. Leaving Leeds University in the early 1940s, he went on to study with the Community of the Resurrection in Yorkshire, an Anglican religious group which to this day aims to foster individual’s talents within a communal life, while propounding chasity, poverty and obedience. The Community gained a reputation for encouraging strong personalities. A contemporary and friend of the young Kirkby was Trevor (later Archbishop) Huddleston, who was to play such a key role in the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

Kirkby had strong views too. Moving through a succession of curacies in the North of England, he described himself as an ‘anarchist communist’. He joined the (anti-nuclear weapons) marches to the Aldermaston air base, and was imprisoned for his pains, in 1961. Throughout his career, Kirkby maintained his concern with the world, and how the Church and politics was serving it and its people - he was a confirmed ’socialist anarchist’ on his death bed. But he combined this world view with the hard work of a parish priest. He died a day before his ninetieth birthday, on 10 August. St Paul’s, of course, lives on.

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Isambard Kingdom Brunel this week (9 April)* marks one of the real pioneers of British industrial design. A multi-skilled engineer who built tunnels, bridges, steamships, railway trains and railway stations.

As well as a prodigious appetite for work, Brunel was a man who took risks, and alongside his spectacular successes were dramatic failures … sometimes with tragic consequences. The anniversary has particular significance for the East End of London. Brunel had worked on the Thames Tunnel, and during the 1850s he would launch the Great Eastern, the biggest ship ever, from the Isle of Dogs.

Brunel was born in Portsmouth the son of Sophia and Sir Marc Brunel, who had emigrated from France. The young Brunel was sent back to his father’s country to study, and at just 20 was made chief assistant engineer on his father’s Thames Tunnel project. The tunnelling shield, the first of its kind, supported the bore of the tunnel and allowed men to work inside. The technology forms the basis of tunnelling to this day.

It was unpleasant and dangerous work. The diggers were waist deep in foul water, there were two major floods, and several men were killed. On one occasion Isambard himself was almost drowned, and was never to fully recover. The tunnel took years to build, was a financial failure as a foot tunnel, and was then converted for use for the East London Line (Wapping-Rotherhithe).

Brunel had gained an extraordinary amount of engineering knowhow by his late twenties and began a prodigious career - one littered with ‘firsts’. In 1830, aged 24, he won the competition to design the Clifton Suspension Bridge at Bristol - it had the longest span of any bridge in the world. Brunel became a bridge specialist: the new railways and roads meant bigger and better bridges were being built. The Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar followed, as did the Maidenheead Railway Bridge. It was another first - the widest and flattest brick arch bridge in the world. Brunel seemed able to work in any material, and on any project.

Aged 27, Brunel was chief engineer of the Great Western Railway. Again he went out on a limb, deciding the lines from Paddington should be broad gauge, which he argued offered greater comfort than the standard gauge - Brunel brushed aside the fact that every other railway was using the standard gauge pioneered by George Stephenson. His railway became an engineering monument that defied nature - with dramtic viaducts and tunnels making light work of any obstacle (Box Tunnel was the longest tunnel in the world). After Brunel’s death, though, the Great Western adopted standard gauge.

Some inventions never got off the ground, including the Atmospheric Railway, which was to use vacuum power to move trains through Devon. But Brunel looked ever forward, and even while he was wrestling with the demands of the railways, he was looking at transatlantic passenger travel. New ways of making steel and the advances in steam power meant this was now a reality, and the bold Brunel convinced his bosses at the GWR to build the Great Western, simultaneously. advertising the railway. Typically it was to be no normal ship.

At 72 metres in length, she was the biggest steamship ever. The Great Western eventually made 74 crossings to New York, cutting the journey time in half. He went on to build bigger and better ships, including the Great Britain and the Great Eastern. Launched in 1858, this vessel dwarfed the Great Western, being 700ft long and carrying 4000 passengers.

Thousands flocked to the Isle of Dogs to see the work in 1858. She was the pride of Britain but, just before completion things began to go wrong. Several men died during the final stages of her construction: it was rumoured that a riveter and his mate were entombed between her twin hulls. From then on, hollow knocking sounds were heard below decks at night, horrifying the supersititious workers.

The launch was a disaster. Chains took the strain of moving the 19,000-ton vessel but snapped, hurling workmen into the air. Brunel called a halt with a man was dead and four others badly hurt. It took four months to drag the Great Eastern inch by inch to the water. As the ship steamed into the Channel, the skipper allowed steam to build up and there was an explosion. Scalded seamen struggled to the deck. One flung himself overboard in agony only to be mangled in the ship’s huge wheel. Three more died before the day was out. Visitors to Millwall today can, at low tide, still see the launching ways and piles built for the Great Eastern.

The strain told, and Brunel died of a stroke in 1859, just days before the maiden voyage to New York. He was just 53. Yet in the BBC poll of ‘Great Britons’ in 2002, Brunel came second only to Winston Churchill. The reason is probably that in his risk taking he came up with so many firsts.The Great Eastern would never make money, yet it had an importance that Brunel could never have anticipated. It was the ship used to lay the transatlantic telegraph cable … putting Europe and America in telecommunications contact for the first time.

*Events take place all year. A complete programme of the events during the Brunel 200 celebration can be found online at www.brunel200.com.

Comparisons between the Lea Valley and Venice may seem somewhat fanciful. Venice is, after all, one of the world’s major tourist destinations, arguably the world’s most romantic city, and is resplendent with treasures such as the Basilica di San Marco, the Rialto Bridge and the Doge’s Palace. The waterways of the Lea Valley, meanwhile, are flanked by wasteland and disused factories. The canals of the Serene Republic echo to the songs of gondoliers, while on the Lea you’re more likely to hear gaggles of anglers discussing the weather and West Ham’s prospects for next season.But these waterways were once the lifeblood of the East End, the trade routes of their day, before more than a century of neglect set in. That could be set to change, with the Water City Initiative aiming to bring the neglected docks, rivers and canals of east London back to life. With the River Lea and the Regent’s Canal at the heart of 250 hectares of new and improved public open spaces, linking the Lea Valley to the Thames, Stratford to Canary Wharf. Up to 40,000 new homes are planned to be built and 50,000 new jobs created, most in a huge new shopping and office complex, dubbed Stratford City.

It’s an enticing idea. The miles of waterways are largely unseen by most of us, hidden behind walls and factories, perhaps glimpsed from a train window or as we pass over a bridge. The plan is to turn our focus back toward the canals. London Development Agency chair Mary Reilly said Water City could help turn waterways which “currently divide the area, into a major asset”. And if that sounds fanciful, well it’s not so long since Docklands was rotting and forgotten and many Londoners never set foot on a Thames towpath.

Centuries back the Lea or Lee (or historically the Ley) was the home of Bronze and Iron Age settlements, while the Romans built Ermine Street parallel to the watercourse. The river rises around Luton in Bedfordshire before flowing down to the Thames. By the sixth century AD it was the boundary of the Saxon kingdoms of Essex to the east and Middlesex to the west. Always strategically important, by the ninth century the Lee was the last bastion between Alfred the Great’s Saxon England to the west and the Vikings (who had worked their way towards London via the east coast and through East Anglia) to the east. One story has Alfred marooning the Vikings by building a weir and thus draining the waters - certainly remains of Viking ships have been found further up river in Hertfordshire.

By the Middle Ages, the invaders were Englishmen and women themselves, England was at peace, and Middlesex and Essex were counties instead of kingdoms. Now began the all-important industrialisation of the Lee. What had been a strategic barrier now became an essential way of getting goods in and out of the capital, while the water from the river itself became crucial in manufacturing. The ’stink industries’ were to grow up along the banks, including tanning, tallow making and slaughterhouses, and this was the site of Britain’s first paper mill.

As early as 1424, government was recognising the importance of the route, instructing an act of parliament to improve navigation on the river. Deepening of the watercourse and canalisation of the banks meant flour, coal, malt, gunpowder and other vital supplies could now be moved quickly and in quantity into London. By the 18th century, engineering had developed apace, and new canalisation techniques saw locks being built and new cuts carved out, so larger barges could take goods right from the Thames Basin to Hertfordshire. From here they would join the wider canal network or be taken by road to the North and the Midlands.

And industry grew up along the banks - obvious as this was where the raw materials from around the world were landed. Bow China, the most famous maker of which was Thomas Frye, was manufactured here. In 1744, one Edward Heylen bought a property on the London side of the Lea, at Bow Bridge, and the Bow Porcelain Manufactory of New Canton went into business, becoming a huge success. But even as the Lea grew and developed, there was a new enemy on the horizon - the railways.

The history of the Victorian East End is more susceptible to myth-making and exaggeration than most. The horror of contemporaneous politicians, do-gooders and the popular press made it hard for the Victorian Middle Classes to establish facts about ‘the Great Wen’, ‘the Abyss’, ‘the City of Dreadful Night’. If life there were other than an endless round of gin-fuelled prostitution, crime, miserable labour and early death, then the respectable Victorian was hardly going to visit to find out. And for the modern reader, fuelled on endless speculation about the identity of Jack the Ripper and blood-curdling images of sweatshops and brutality towards women and children, a real picture of East End lives can be similarly hard to establish.

William Fishman went a long way to putting this right with his 1988 book* looking at the East End of exactly a century before. 1888 was a significant year. Income from the docks was collapsing (the lifeblood of many East End families), while the previous decade had seen an influx of people from Essex and East Anglia, driven by the agricultural depression of the 1870s. Workers’ and radical movements were sweeping Europe, and the tumult the authorities feared had erupted in the Bloody Sunday demonstration in Trafalgar Square the year before. The protest against the abolition of trial by jury in Ireland had struck a chord with many east London workers, one of whom had been killed by police in the demo. A parade of 120,000 people was to follow the funeral cortege from the West End to Bow Cemetery in December of 1887, hearing William Morris deliver the eulogy to martyr Alfred Linell.

Significantly too, the very term ‘East End’ had recently been coined ‘about 1880 … [and] was rapidly taken up the new halfpenny press … a shabby man from Paddington, St Marylebone or Battersea might pass muster as one of the respectable poor … the same man coming from Bethnal Green, Shadwell or Wapping was an “East Ender”. The box of Keating’s bug powder must be reached for and the spoons locket up’. The East Enders, then, were a race apart.

East End 1888 tried ‘to present an overall picture of life among the labouring poor of East London in Victorian times. To achieve focus, I concentrate on a single year, 1888, and a single borough, Tower Hamlets.’ The picture Bill Fishman paints in an elegant, scholarly, but above all compellingly readable book is no less horrible than the ’shock, horror’ stories of the yellow press of the day. The Reverend Samuel Barnett, who was to be instrumental in so many improvements in the East End, including the founding of Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel Library and Art Gallery, feared for the moral well being of children daily exposed to the public slaughter and ill-treatment of animals in Spitalfields. Fishman writes that ‘Aldgate, city entrance into Whitechapel, is plagued by open slaughterhouses in the main and side streets … with blood and animal innards spattered on the sidewalks.’

Of course the horrors were real, not simply aesthetic, and many East Enders were treated little better than animals themselves. Slums like the Jago and Old Nichol saw families crowded into filthy, pestilent and often subterranean rooms, with no light and often only body heat. Carving through this netherworld, the vast new arches of the railways coming in to Liverpool Street and Broad Street - themselves bringing in new East Enders from East Anglia - dwarfed the dwellings (while the developments made many more homeless, people who then had to squeeze into ever-more crowded accommodation). Attempts to improve things with the ‘new improved dwellings’, and clean, modern tenements often involved the clearing of more slums - whose occupants could not afford the rents in the new flats - and so the process continued.

‘East End 1888 was not the sort of place where one might live long … many lives would be very brief and death could be quite public,’ and the dehumanisation didn’t stop there. The London Hospital (itself as feared as the workhouse, as once in you were unlikely to return) had no mortuary. Bodies, including those of children, were housed in a shed. The disposal of ‘excess’ cockneys was equally brutal. We have children of nine ‘consenting to emigrate to Canada’ - the process was called ‘disposal’. Some found it difficult to discern humanity here at all. Professor Julian Huxley opined ‘I have seen the Polynesian savaging and in his primitive condition, before the missionary … got at him … He was not half so savage, so unclean, so irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an East London slum.’ Beatrice Webb initially found many East Enders ‘low looking, bestial, content with their own condition’. Yet there were many more who sought not to blame, but to change the environment that led to such social evils. Fishman focuses on Samuel Barnett, the Reverend Osborne Jay and unfashionable heroes such as Dr Barnardo, Frederick Charrington and General Booth - people who tried to change things for the better.

As Bill Fishman observes in his landmark work ‘East End 1888′, the area may only recently have got its name (’coined about 1880′) but the mythologised horror of the area had swiftly taken root. This vision of an abyss, a netherworld ‘was rapidly taken up the new halfpenny press … a shabby man from Paddington, St Marylebone or Battersea might pass muster as one of the respectable poor … the same man coming from Bethnal Green, Shadwell or Wapping was an “East Ender”. Dirty, feckless, amoral and above all criminal, the East Enders were different.

Fishman carefully and methodically strips away the hype by focusing on life as it was actually lived by our forebears. Significantly, once we’ve dealt with ‘The Image and Reality’, the first chapter proper is ‘Housing, Health and Sanitation’. If people weren’t sleeping rough, and most East Enders at least had a roof over their heads, then the reality was that accommodation was getting worse in the 1880s. Millions of people poured into London in search of work but there was no concerted programme of housebuilding to match, so subletting was the answer: families crammed into single rooms, with a subsequent increase in squalor and disease. Sharp investors cashed in with the lodging houses. Middle class investors employed wardens to police these houses, and the wardens themselves were often abusive of their power. The investors themselves were often blissfully unaware (or chose to be). They might only be a mile or two away in the West End, but they were unlikely ever to set foot east … and returns were good. For the poorest there wasn’t even that option - there wasn’t enough return in letting to those at the very bottom.

The Oxford English Dictionary first listed the word ‘unemployed’ in 1882, ‘unemployment’ entered its pages in our year of 1888. It’s a fair bet the words had been in currency in the East End for a while before that. ‘The Unemployed and the Sweated’ captures the desparate condition of East End labour. The docks, the garment factories, breweries and bakeries to feed all the new bodies … all had grown from nowhere to employing many thousands of East Enders (and all putting pressure on existing building stock of course). But there was no employment legislation. Casual labour meant a worker didn’t know, on finishing work on Monday night, whether there would be another payday on Tuesday. This fear lead to ’sweating’: a workshop with poor, unhealthy and unsafe conditions, rates of pay being ever driven down, as hours got longer and longer. Argue and you’d be out of a job.

Meanwhile politicians and priests were lecturing the East Enders on their lack of providence, of failing to save, of failing to build a decent future for their children. The East London Observer reacted with fury to the dismissive attitude of Lord ShaftsburyMargaret Harkness (a sympathetic observer) wrote: ‘First they grow reckless, then become hopeless, finally they take to drinking … to let thousands of men and women in enforced idleness is dangerous’. Here lay the great fear, that revolution was brewing. As the East London Advertiser wrote: ‘If our governors do not settle the question soon, the governed will adopt measures of their own to solve it.’

Meanwhile people fell - into the workhouses or ‘Bastilles of the poor’, or onto the street. In our year, East London ‘proper (Tower Hamlets, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney) had 17,000 in the workhouse. Harkness describes Jo in Out of Work. Arriving at the workhouse he is stripped naked, washed in a common bath, and led to a cell measuring 8ft by 4ft. There, written on the walls, is scrawled ‘I’ve served my Queen and country for 15 years, and this is what I’ve come to.’

Of course there is ‘Leisure’ too. ‘To portray the East End as one sombre mass of unmitigated woe would be a travesty,’ admits Fishman. Even the much-maligned pubs sold wholesome food, and would hire out backrooms for piano concerts and dances. The new mutual and friendly societies would meet in these de facto village halls - while MPs might lecture and hector, many East Enders were already embracing ’self help’. The political parties would hold their meetings in the pubs and clubs; there were even Bible classes. And though there is a particularly gruesome description of a bunch of lovable urchins beating a cat to death with sticks, there were healthy outdoor pursuits too. The new ‘lads clubs’ were organising trips out to take the greenery of Epping Forest and the healthy salt air at Southend, and ‘muscular Christians’ in the Oxbridge settlements were teaching young East Enders to box and play football. Fishman fully recognises the contribution of these often-mocked do-gooders.
East End 1888 by William J Fishman, Five Leaves, £14.99, ISBN 0907123856

Many actors have a crucial moment when the magic of the stage and screen captures them. For a four-year-old Terence Stamp, sitting in an East End cinema during World War II with mum Ethel, it was watching Gary Cooper in Beau Geste. For the next decade and a half, Stamp wanted to be Cooper.

But if the desert seemed impossibly exotic, stardom and Hollywood might as well have been on another planet. The young Terence was the oldest of five, born in Bow (and later living in Stepney and Plaistow). Dad Tom was away in the merchant navy for months at a time, and the close family unit saw the kids looked after not just by mum Ethel, but by his grandmother and a coterie of aunts.

Gary Cooper may have been an inspiration, but it was a huge handicap too, as Stamp later recalled, saying he was ‘poisoned’ by the unattainable fantasy of being a glamorous leading man, such as Cooper or Cary Grant - how on earth could he leap from his East End existence to that? The truth was, he didn’t really know what to do. ‘My mother was an unusually strong woman. I remember her once telling me I should be a journalist … that was toaly out of the question because I was so bad at school!’

So, shelving his ambitions, he found work on leaving school as a runner for an advertising agency in the West End. It took the emergence of a new generation of screen idols to free Terence’s ambitions again. In a West End cinema one cold New Year’s Eve in the mid-fifties, Stamp saw James Dean in East of Eden. ‘I was 17 and overwhelmed by him,’ remembered Stamp. ‘He was doing it … I was just dreaming about it … he was the first guy I ever saw that was not so removed. I thought “I’m like that.”‘

Fate intervened in the shape of Stamp’s feet - an earlier operation was enough to persuade the Army he was not fit for National Service. He had just been handed back two years of his life and realised that if he tried drama school and failed, he would be no further behind than his mates coming back into Civvy Street. He enrolled at the Trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, alongside fellow East End hopeful Stephen Berkoff.

The turn of the sixties saw Stamp honing his craft on the stage, where he assumed he would stay. Notable roles included that of Private Whittaker in Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall, during which he became friends with the young Michael Caine. ‘To be a young man, in London, in this career, at the turn of sixties … it couldn’t be any better, it was heaven,’ he laughed. But things were about to get better. In 1962, Stamp landed the role of Billy Budd in Peter Ustinov’s movie and became an overnight sensation. Working class actors were the darlings of the press in the newly egalitarian sixties. ‘The star from Stepney’ and ‘Tugman’s son: the boy with the Stamp of a star’ shouted the headlines in the Evening News and Evening Standard.

Stamp and Caine were now sharing a flat. The roles (and the women) came thick and fast. Stamp played Alfie on Broadway, but turned down the film role, which went to Caine. Iconic movies followd such as William Wyler’s The Collector and Far From the Madding Crowd. His girlfriends included Julie Christie (they were immortalised as ‘Terry and Julie’ in the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset) and Jean Shrimpton. Meanwhile, younger brother Chris Stamp, an East End mod, was making his fortune as co-manager of The Who.

But as the sixties drew to a close the golden touch failed him. Antonioni replaced Stamp at the last minute with David Hemmings as the lead in Blow Up and Shrimpton left him for another man. A devastated Stamp took off for an ashram in India. His search for answers would take him away for nearly a decade, including a spell working on an organic farm in Ibiza.

When he rejoined the circus in the late seventies, it couldn’t have been in more dramatic fashion. Stamp was recruited as evil General Zod for the Superman movies. The eighties saw one terrific role. In The Hit, Stamp plays a sixties cockney who emerges from years of hiding, much the wiser in spiritual matters.

Stamp had, as he readily admits, made his share of duds. But the nineties saw a couple of classics. The former sixties poster boy shone as a transsexual in The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Then, in The Limey, he brought superb menace to the role of Wilson, an ageing Cockney villain in Los Angeles. The tireless Stamp was also launching his own range of gluten-free foods, The Stamp Collection, and penning a cookbook of the same name.

The new century saw Stamp ‘homeless’ after leaving his long-time base in Piccadilly’s Albany apartments for a life in hotels, going where the work took him. On New Year’s Eve 2002, Stamp finally married, to 29-year-old Elizabeth. The boy from Bow had come a long way but had no wish to stop. ‘It’s still the most fun thing I can think of in which to make a living. I’ve never wanted to become a politician, I’ve never wanted to become an interior decorator, I’ve never wanted to speculate and make a load of money. I just wanted this. It’s fun!’

Charles Booth famously expended a dozen years of his life, between 1891 and 1903 compiling his mammoth Life and Labour of the People of London - 17 volumes exhaustively documenting the jobs, habits, lives and deaths of the cockney working classes. But if it hadn’t have been for Henry Mayhew, a half century before, the epic work may never have been started.

For before Mayhew turned his pen to them, nobody had paid too much attention to the poor of London’s East End. And yet the man was no philanthropist, politician or philosopher, rather a popular journalist picking up on the spirit of the times. This was the 1840s, and Friedrich Engels was writing about the appalling conditions of the working classes in Manchester, that ‘the working class and the bourgeoisie are like two radically dissimilar nations’. Benjamin Disraeli had just published his novel ‘Sybil, or The Two Nations’, laying bare the shameful state in which working people lived.

London had mushroomed in size from under a million souls in 1801 to being the world’s most populous city, with 1.6m people in 1831. By 1851, it would number more than 2.4m as trade and industry pumped ever more money and manpower into the capital - with the East End and docks growing most of all. And yet most of it was uncharted territory, unplanned housing, the people with no fixed jobs and often no fixed abode. The vast mass of the workers were effectively invisible to those in Westminster. Mayhew sensed that there were stories to be told about the millions who made up the other of the ‘two nations’

Mayhew may have been an unlikely social chronicler: he was joint founder of the satirical magazine Punch in 1841 with Mark Lemon and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Educated at Westminster School, he had worked as a lawyer in his father’s practice for three years, a stormy relationship that say Mayhew abandon the law for journalism in 1831. As well as writing he had an entrepreneurial streak, but he was a better wordsmith than businessman: Punch struggled to sell 6000 copies a week while 10,000 were needed to break even, and the title was sold in 1842. Severing his connections with ‘The London Charivari’ in 1845, Mayhew attempted to hop aboard the craze for railways with the launch of ‘Iron Times’. It lost so much cash that in 1846 he ended up in the Court of Bankruptcy.

His life took an unexpected turn in 1849, when an outbreak of cholera, a continual problem in Victorian London, killed a probable 13,000: the exact number was, of course, never known. Mayhew was still writing as a freelance for the Morning Chronicle (along with contemporaries Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill) and he wrote a piece on the outbreak. Mayhew saw the disease as one of poverty, centred as it was on the poorest and most crowded parts of the capital; it would be another five years before Dr John Snow would observe the common water pump in Soho’s Broad Street and make a further connection, that the disease was borne by dirty water.

Mayhew suggested to his editor, John Douglas Cook, that the paper should carry out an investigation into the state of the working classes in England. It would turn into a long-running and exhaustively researched project, fully feeding the Victorian reader’s obsession with detail, statistics and empirical ‘proof’. Cook assigned three reporters to help Mayhew: Angus Reach was sent off to the industrial towns of the north (he would die exhausted from overwork before he made 30), with Charles Mackay and Shirley Brooks.

Mayhew headed into the East End, where he interviewed milliners and millers, prostitutes and publicans, sawyers and smiths, tinkers and tailors … every conceivable profession in fact. The team produced an article every day for the rest of 1849 and most of 1850. It was a remarkable quantity of words, and the detail bordered on the obsessive. The minutiae on people’s religious and domestic practices, habits and working hours seems extraordinary to modern readers, with our myriad distractions and, perhaps, shorter attention spans, but it was meat and drink to the earnest and worthy Victorian readers, who loved facts and figures. And the Victorians, with long nights at home under the gaslight like to read. With no other media to distract them, these were Londoners who found light relief in the wordy tomes of Dickens and Walter Scott.

So we find out what the mudlarks who scoured the Thames foreshore were dredging up in the 1840s. Mayhew watches in horror as people draw drinking water from an open sewer ‘more like watery mud than muddy water; and yet we were assured this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink’. He painstakingly asks interviewees their wages and their detailed outgoings (and logs the shortfall). He cross references censuses, police reports and his own researches, to work out how many street traders are operating per square mile. He works out the margins tea traders are making on their cheaply hawked goods … the detail is remarkable.

The unexpected bonus for modern historians, of course, is that Mayhew and his team piled up a huge amount of original source material, telling us exactly how East Enders lived a century and a half ago. Next week we’ll see what they discovered about our forebears.

Last week we saw how Henry Mayhew and his team of reporters set out to chart the lives of the labouring classes of England and Wales - but what exactly did the inexhaustible founder of Punch discover when he ventured east of Aldgate?

An example of Mayhew’s staggering attention to detail, almost comical to modern eyes, is his attempt to quantify the excessive drinking habits of the various East End trades. In ‘The curiosities of drunkenness’ (one of the dozens of pieces that would appear during 1849 and 1850), Mayhew interviewed the coal whippers and coal backers employed in the Pool of London - the men who did the backbreaking job of hauling the coal out of the holds of ships. One of the men tells Mayhew that it ‘was an absolute necessity that the men … though earning only a pound a week, spend at least 12 shillings (60p) on beer and spirits to stimulate them in their work’.

In classic style, Mayhew sets out to test this thesis, interviewing men who drink, men who had signed the pledge ‘and kept it without any serious injury to their constitutions’ and those who had signed the pledge ‘but had been induced to violate their vow in consequence of injury to their health’. To the modern reader it may seem obvious that large quantities of water might be a better option than booze, but at least alcohol didn’t give you cholera and to Victorian East Enders beer was about as safe as liquid got. Mayhew prevents us with a magnificent table of those professions that are above the average for drunkenness (button makers top this, for some reason, with one in every 7.2 of them being a drunk). Toolmakers, surveyors, paper makers and brass founders come in close behind. Among the most sober professions are clergymen, grocers, book-binders and artificial flower makers.

Thomas Heath, a weaver of 8 Pedley Street, Spitalfields, gives Mayhew a detailed account of his earnings. ‘The sum of the gross earnings for 430 weeks is £322 3s. 4d., being about 15s. a week. He estimates his weaving expenses at 4s., 11s. net wages. He states his wife’s earnings at about 3s. a week. He gives the following remarkable evidence:

“Have you any children?” [asks Mayhew].

“No. I had two, but they are both dead, thanks to be God … I am relieved from the burden of maintaining them, and they, poor dear creatures, are relieved from the troubles of the mortal life.”‘

A woman is forced into prostitution to make ends meet. ‘I used to work at the shirt work - the fine full-fronted white shirts; I got 2d. each for them. There were six button-holes, four rows of stitching in the front, and the collars and wristbands stitched as well. By working from five o’clock in the morning till midnight each night I might be able to do seven in the week. Out of this the cotton must be taken and that came to 2d. every week. I had a child, and it used to cry for food.

‘So, as I could not get a living for him myself by the needle, I went into the streets and made out a living that way. I pledge my word, solemnly and sacredly, that it was the low price paid for my labour that drove me to prostitution.’

As Mayhew says in a speech to a meeting of London tailors in October 1850: ‘Morality on £5,000 a year in Belgrave Square is a very different thing to morality on slop-wages in Bethnal Green.’

Those who weren’t forced to sell themselves scraped what they could where they could. Tea traders adulterate their product with used leaves, grass and dirt; ‘pure finders’ gather dog faeces to sell to tanners; and of course the mudlarks and toshers dredge anything of value from the riverbanks and sewers.

The journalism of Mayhew and his team became hugely influential, gathered together in book form as London Labour and the London Poor, in three volumes in 1851, then a fourth ten years later. Christian Socialists such as Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, and FD Maurice seized on the work, as did Radicals and Republicans (a growing worry for the Government of Victorian Britain). And that other great chronicler of the East End, Charles Dickens, drew on his colleague’s work for inspiration. Henry Mayhew died in 1887.

London Labour and the London Poor: Selection
by Henry Mayhew, published by Penguin, £12.99, ISBN 0140432418