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Perhaps Henry Raine wasn’t sure whether he had been a force for good or bad in the East End. He had certainly made a good living from brewing beer, and he had employed a lot of East Enders, but as a devout Christian, he must have worried about the effects his ales had on his customers. So he took the route of many a successful London businessman of his day, giving the proceeds of his work to charity.

Raine lived from 1679 to 1738, but he founded his school in Wapping’s Fawdon Fields in 1719. There were two academies, one taking 50 boys, the other 50 girls. A master was employed at £40 a year to teach the boys reading, writing, and arithmetic. A mistress earned £20 for teaching the girls reading, knitting and sewing. School was tough in those days. Long days of study also incorporated real work to augment the finances of the school, with the boys making nets, while the girls had to knit and sew. Holidays were restricted to four days a year - Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and Bartholomewtide. And any girl seen speaking to a friend on the way to or from church would lose her next day off (with expulsion for repeated offences).

By the mid-1800s, the construction of the London docks had seen the Wapping school cut off from its catchment area, and Raine’s moved to Cannon Street Road. The school would move again, to Arbour Square in 1913. The clamour for a good education in the 19th century (and in the decades preceding World War II) had seen Raine’s and the other East End grammars thrive. But the years after 1945 were tough on local schools. The East End population dropped year on year. Many people had been bombed out of their homes of course. The razing of many of the remaining houses, the building of the new towns, and a general movement of East Enders out to the home counties only accelerated the drop in numbers. East End schools, even the good ones, found it hard to maintain their rolls.

In 1963, the Minister of Education ordered Raine’s to drop its long-cherished practice of two single-sex schools and it became fully co-ed. In 1977, Raine’s merged with St Jude’s, and became a comprehensive. And in 1985, irony of ironies, it moved into a new home - the old Parmiter’s school building in Approach Road. Parmiter’s had left the East End to escape the problems beseting Raine’s, setting up a new home in the country - and with plenty of prospective pupils.

The Coopers’ Company and Coborn School has an even more venerable heritage than Raine’s. Its roots lie in the Nicholas Gibson Free School, founded in 1536 at Ratcliff, by a wealthy City of London grocer: stewardship passed to the City of London Coopers’ Company in 1552. Meanwhile, in 1701, Prisca Coborn, the widow of a brewer, set up a co-educational school in Bow, first near Bow Church then moving to Fairfield Road in 1814, and to Tredegar Square in 1870. The two schools became one in 1891 and remained in Bow until 1971. But a declining East End population, and the allure of a new and spacious site among the green fields of Essex (or Upminster at least) persuaded the governors to shift the school 15 miles east. The East End’s hold on its grammar schools was weakening.

Ralph Davenant hadn’t done anything so morally questionable as brewing beer - he had dedicated his life to doing the lord’s work, but his chief concern was what would happen after he was gone. The clergyman, a favourite of King Charles II and rector of St Mary’s Whitechapel, was a wealthy man. But perhaps looking for greater riches in heaven, he instructed his wife that, after their deaths, their goods should be sold to build a school. The reverend died in 1680, with a bequest of £100 funding an institution for ‘the poor boys of Whitechapel’. With his wife’s demise, and a grand sale of silver and gold plate, the pot grew. A number of houses were given to the foundation, yielding healthy rents to keep the school funded.

A building was raised on the Whitechapel Road (and is there to this day). It was a huge school, with a roll of more than 1200 in 1818. But as for many other schools, World War II was a turning point. The school was evacuated, and returned after the war to decaying buildings and with fewer pupils. As peace dawned, the Davenant Foundation Grammar School for Boys had just 200 pupils. And so, in 1966, Davenant followed the well-trodden route out to Essex - a county now filling up with former East Enders. The Davenant link isn’t dead though. The legacy for the East End is the Davenant Centre, now a ‘centre of excellence’ for youth services. The buildings themselves are a terrific blend of the Renaissance style building older pupils will remember and some dramatic modern spaces. The Revd Ralph wouldn’t recognise it … but his educational work goes on.

It was a tricky conundrum for wealthy East Enders of bygone centuries. How to store up extraordinary wealth in this life, while assuring themselves of a smooth passage to the next.

The likes of Ralph Davenant, Thomas Parmiter, Henry Raine, George Green, Nicholas Gibson and Prisca Coborn would have been believers all … or at the very least would have wanted to hedge their bets with God by doing good works. Davenant, after all, not only had a bit of cash but was also a clergyman.

They also knew that, satisfying though building wealth was, you couldn’t take it with you. So, rather than copying the pharaohs, and after taking care of the family, they built for future generations. Schools would be the way that the children of the poor would raise and improve themselves. It was a subject dear to the heart of Gibson, Parmiter, Raine and the rest - for many of them had come from humble beginnings themselves.

And there began a curious evolution. While many of the public schools began in just the same way, as endowments for small numbers of the poor to educate their children, they soon became appropriated by the rich, who knew a good deal when they saw it. Hence the paradox of a ‘public’ school that most of the public can’t get into - unless they are very rich. In the East End, the foundation schools took a different twist, becoming the grammar schools that everyone wanted to send their children too. But where are they now? In large part, the answer is ‘the home counties’, though there is a lot more to the story than the schools simply following East Enders as they decamped to Essex and Hertfordshire. A couple remain. But who were these wealthy benefactors, and how have the centuries changed their schools?

Parmiter’s School is now at Garston, near Watford in Hertfordshire, but it started life in St John Street, Bethnal Green. The school was founded by a bequest from wealthy East End silk merchant Thomas Parmiter. When Parmiter died in 1681 he left two farms in Suffolk - between them they would supply a fund providing £30 a year for six almshouses and £100 a year for ‘one free schoolhouse or room for ten poor children’ in Bethnal Green. Elizabeth Carter gave a plot of land at the top of what is now Brick Lane, as well as a further £10 a year. And William Lee gave a further tenner a year plus £100 for the raising of school buildings.

The school opened in 1722 and by 1730 had 30 boys, by 1809 there were 50. In 1839 the school had to move when the Eastern Counties Railway bought the original plot (the Liverpool Street Line runs beneath the original site and out to Bethnal Green overground station). The new site was in Gloucester Street (now Parmiter Street). The school moved again, to Approach Road in 1887. Parmiter’s was gradually moving further out of London, and steadily growing in size.  In 1977 the first pupils had entered the new Parmiter’s school in Hertfordshire. The Queen officially opened the new school in 1981, the 300th anniversary of Thomas’s bequest. The grammar school in Bethnal Green closed the same year.

George Green School is still in the East End, on Manchester Road on the Isle of Dogs, not so far from the home of its founder. George Green was from humble beginnings, starting as an apprentice shipbuilder at the Blackwall Yard in 1782. In 1796 he married the boss’s daughter and was made a partner. It was a boom time for shipping and Green became rich but devoted equal industry to giving his cash away - to almshouses, sailors’ homes, a chapel and, in particular, schools.

In 1828 the first George Green’s School was built on the corner of Chrisp Street and the East India Dock Road. A larger building was raised on the corner of Kirby Street and East India Dock Road in 1884, before the most recent move, in 1976. George Green School now sits on the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, and looking across at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. The shipyards and shipbuilders may have gone, but at least Green’s foundation still has the Thames as a neighbour.

Next week: Davenant, Raines and Coopers’ Coborn Schools … and why so many had to leave the East End.

Standing 70ft high and 44ft deep, supported by columns 8ft6in in diameter and carved from granite-hard Yorkshire stone, the Euston Arch should have been hard to misplace. But a deadly mix of corporate philistinism and official indifference saw one of the great monuments of London’s early railways disappear seemingly without trace - only to turn up lining the bed of an East End river.

The mystery was only solved thanks to assiduous detective work by architectural historian Dan Cruickshank - himself a long-time resident of Spitalfields. Cruickshank is a journalist, academic and broadcaster by profession, but a campaigner by instinct. Having moved into Spitalfields in the 1970s, a time when the 17th and 18th century Huguenot weavers’ houses were considered ripe for demolition and redevelopment, he immediately set about saving the buildings. As well as becoming a director of the Spitalfields Trust in 1977, he was a founder trustee in 1975 of Save Britain’s Heritage, and a committee member of the Georgian Group. The title of Cruickshank’s 1975 book, ‘The Rape of Britain’ refers to the casual vandalism visited on much of the country’s architectural heritage down the decades. And in 1993, Cruickshank took up an architectural cause that had, seemingly been lost forever more than 30 years before.

The modern Euston Station is a nondescript building, though lovers of bleakly functional 1960s architecture might leap to its defence. But the terminus is significant, being the first inter-city railway station to be built in London when it opened in 1837. The London terminus of the London and Birmingham Railway was built by the great civil engineer Robert Stephenson. These first railway termini were conceived as huge monuments to the birth of the age of steam - and of the might and prestige of the operating companies. The L&BR conceived of a fittingly grand entrance to their station. Designed by architect Philip Hardwick, the mighty Euston Arch mirrored that of Curzon Street Station, Birmingham, at the other end of the company’s mainline.

The L&BR directors described their ‘architectural embellishment’ as ‘grand but simple … well adapted to the national character of the undertaking’. Not everyone agreed: a London guide published for the Great Exhibition of 1851 described the arch as ‘gigantic and very absurd’. Undeterred, the railway company (by then the London and North Western) embellished the arch further in 1870, having ‘EUSTON’ carved onto the architrave in massive letters of gold.

By 1938, the station was in under the control of the London Midland and Scottish Railway. The LMS was not just the biggest of the British railway companies, it was the world’s largest transport group, and Britain’s biggest private company - only the Post Office employed more people. Perhaps the LMS was looking for its own monument, for the company proposed the rebuilding of Euston, and the destruction of the Euston Arch. Certainly the original Euston station was proving too cramped, and the LMS proposed an American-inspired Classical structure. The sparkling white monolith was shelved though, with war breaking out the following year.

But after the austere years of the fifties, a new spirit of modernism, and of sweeping away the old, gripped Britain. In 1960, the British Transport Commission announced its plan to demolish Euston - a new building would arise to coincide with the electrification of the West Coast mainline (which wouldn’t be completed until 1974). The station was too small and badly sited, on that everyone agreed. But did the arch have to go too? Many thought not. The London County Council advised the arch be ‘re-erected on another site in an appropriate dignified and open setting’. MP Woodrow Wyatt demanded in the Commons that the arch be saved. The Royal Fine Art Commission asked that it be consulted before demolition was ordered. Yet in an astonishing round of buck-passing, indifference and official deafness, deadlines passed as the LCC refused to act, the Minister of Transport refused to act, and eventually even Prime Minister Harold Macmillan refused to act.

Soon the arch was no more, and behind where it had stood arose the new Euston, variously described as ‘a dingy, grey, horizontal nothingness’, ‘an ugly desecration of a formerly impressive building, ‘the worst of the Central London terminuses, both ugly and unfriendly to use’ and, most succinctly ‘hideous’. Well, some people just don’t like Sixties buildings.

But there was a strange coda to the story in 1994. Dan Cruickshank used his strand of the ‘One Foot in the Past’ TV show to go hunting the lost arch. And his digging led him to Bob Cotton, a British Waterways engineer. He remembered that the stones which Frank Valori had offered to carefully store had been bought by the organisation back in 1962, and used to plug a hole in the bed of the River Lea. The cameras watched as pieces of the arch, some with the gold lettering of ‘Euston’ clearly visible, were winched from the East End river. Other pieces were then recovered from the gardens of those who had worked on the demolition.

And there the story might end, were it not for the campaigning zeal of Cruickshank, and a plan for Euston Mark 3. The historian launched the Euston Arch Trust in 1996: it has been gaining members ever since and is now headed by Michael Palin. And following the redevelopment of St Pancras, there are plans to demolish the ‘hideous’ Euston of the 1960s and build a new station, starting this year. What better to crown the new terminus than a reassembled Euston Arch? Cruickshank reckons that as much as 60 per cent of the original arch may still lie at the bottom of the River Lea. As for the rest, the Yorkshire quarry from which the original stone came is still in operation. With the developers reportedly looking for a signature structure to cap the whole development, the Euston Arch could soon be back in its rightful place.

* Read more about the campaign to rebuild the arch at http://eustonarch.org. You can also sign up to support the campaign. Those of an obsessive nature can order their own model kit of the Euston Arch (costing £5) at http://home.clara.net/rogerpattenden/eustonarch.html.

Last week we heard how Dick and Rozelle Raynes fell in love with, and settled in Limehouse. Their friends were horrified: Rozelle recalls cocktail parties in west London where people talked of the area as if it hadn’t changed since the days of Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu. ‘However did you come to live in a ghastly place like Limehouse,’ asks one. ‘It’s full of opium dens and drunken seamen isn’t it. Surely nobody actually lives there?’

But its otherness and its grittiness was what the pair loved, as Rozelle writes: ‘There are no soft undulations or vague contours in the Limehouse silhouette. It is a region of bold strong outlines, tall cranes, mighty chimneys, dark warehouses and immense blocks of council flats standing out in stark relief against the evening sky.’

In Rozelle’s fascinating memoir of 40 years of Limehouse Life*, she spends a lot of time looking up - at the ever-changing skies above Number 88 Narrow Street, at the wheeling seagulls and the walkways that used to run above the street, linking warehouse to warehouse. She look up at the chimneys of No88, which she baptises Lucy, George, Doris and Albert. But most of all she gazes up at ‘Limehouse Lil’ the enormous chimney towering overhead and belching smoke into the Limehouse air.

Dick and Rozelle caught their first glimpse of ‘the most beautiful house in London’ in the late sixties. The vendor had saved the entire terrace from numbers 78 to 88 a few years before, leading a battle against the GLC and Tower Hamlets Council, who had wanted to redevelop the lot. The eccentric owner plies them with sherry, before making them promise to give him first refusal should they ever want to sell the house again. And so began the pair’s life in Limehouse, and a string of new friends, including the redoubtable Dorothea Woodward Fisher, OBE, terrifying matriarch of the neighbouring barge yard. There are friends from Brightlingsea Buildings opposite, bonfires on the wasteground, trips out with the kids from Cyril Jackson School, and the initially suspicious (though eventually very welcoming) fellow members of the Greenwich Yacht Club.

Alongside anecdotes of their lives in Limehouse, Rozelle sprinkles plenty of historical colour: previous visitors included Charles Dickens, while Walter Raleigh and Humphrey Gilbert both lived in Narrow Street. Down the centuries (and Number 88 and its neighbours date back to the reign of Elizabeth I) Limehouse has been a rough, ready and hard working corner of London.

And that was just the way Dick and Rozelle loved it: the wharfs and the houses on one side, the river on the other. But inevitably Limehouse began to change. If Limehouse Lil had dominated the skyline for countless years, a new tower was rising to the east. And that, for good or bad, was the future of Docklands.

First One Canada Square grew and grew, and then Canary Wharf mushroomed around it. Slowly and not very successfully at first, but then the new ‘yuppified’ Docklands began to take over, and Limehouse changed forever. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, the Rayneses and neighbours such as Lord Owen, Ian McKellen, Janet Street Porter, Daniel Farson and Francis Bacon had been a rather exotic breed, considered eccentrics for settling in remote Limehouse. By the late Eighties, many of the surviving warehouses had been transformed into luxury homes, and developers were building new properties apeing the warehouse style. The ‘bold strong outlines’ of Limehouse had been watered down and sold to a new generation of settlers.

For many of the new breed, the old Limehouse was a little too rough hewn. Rozelle recalls the day she was stopped by one of her new neighbours, who gushed ‘Have you heard about the new marina they’re building to replace that monstrosity’. The monstrosity was Limehouse Lil, and Rozelle watched in tears as the chimney was swiftly felled. Their old friends in Brightlingsea Buildings were moved on as the council block was razed to make way for a much more profitable, if rather ugly, terrace of town houses. In true London style, the pub at the end of the terrace was spared - and the Black Horse could go on serving at least. Mrs Woodward Fisher’s barge yard was sold by her son to a property developer. Three luxury flats, at a half million each replaced the old yard, but the reassuring clank of the barges at their moorings was gone forever.

* Limehouse Lil: And That Small Corner of London’s Docklands Where She Ruled Supreme…Until Canary Wharf Arose (Paperback) by Rozelle Raynes, Catweasel Publishing, ISBN 0954746716, £7.50

Wander east along Narrow Street, past the Limehouse Basin to your left and the Thames to your right, over the swing bridge and the vista suddenly changes. Narrow Street defies its name to become broad, and the jumble of faux warehouse homes give way to a slice of the real Limehouse.

Numbers 78 to 88 Narrow Street form an imposing terrace backing onto the river. They are older than the ‘Docklands’ developments of course, but also much older than the real warehouses of this old sefaring quarter. To the ill-educated eye (mine) they might appear Georgian but in fact date back to the reign of Elizabeth I. They are also some of the last remaining houses on this north bank of the Thames. But having survived from the 16th to the 20th century, they very nearly fell foul of the developers in the 1960s.

The story of Number 88, and the other houses in the terrace form the core of an extraordinary memoir of Limehouse by Rozelle Raynes. ‘Limehouse Lil’ covers 60 years - from when Rozelle first visited the East End at the close of the Second World War. She had just been demobbed, as a 20-year-old Wren, from a naval base in the Portsmouth Command. The East End of the time was beyond the pale for a young woman from an upper class family, but there was a magic and romance about it that drew her in. As Rozelle admits, there was no mystery about when the seed had been sown.

“The whole adventure had been inspired by a book which my mother gave me when I was lying in bed with measles at the age of 12. ‘The Romance of London’s River’ was beautifully illustrated by Frank Mason (RI) and from it I learned there were warehouses full of elephant’s tusks in Wapping, gigantic Russian timber ships in Lavender Pond and oriental cafes filled with almond-eyed Chinamen in Pennyfields.” And the romance was only heightened by the names of the thoroughfares in the book. Were there really places called Shoulder of Mutton Alley, Picked Herring Street and Wapping Old Stairs?

Indeed there were, and Rozelle and fellow Wren Sue found them all. A lifelong love of the sea had been engendered by their tough jobs as Wren Stokers and Limehouse and Wapping, with their centuries of seafaring tradition (by that time sadly coming to an end) only fired their imaginations. The river at Limehouse and Wapping was still busy then, and the pair would sit for hours in Shadwell Park “entranced by the everlasting pageant of shipping”. There were tugs attached to long strings of barges, fish carriers hurrying upriver to Billingsgate, long ugly flat irons taking coal to Fulham gas works, a rusty Spanish freighter with a crago of oranges from Bilbao. “But the finest sight of all was a Thames sailing barge with its giagantic tanned mainsail, tacking up to Tower Bridge against the last of the ebb.”

The pair fell in love with the place, and while their posh friends were sipping cocktails up west, they could often be found drinking beer in the Prospect of Whitby. And there one of the other great things about the East End became apparent to Rozelle. Although undoubtedly outsiders, she and Sue were soon accepted as friends by a colourful crew that centred around Lucy Durrell, a Wapping matriarch then in her sixties. Lucy had survived a tough childhood to become the hub of an ever growing family (by the time Rozelle and husband Dick attended Lucy’s 80th birthday party in 1965, she had 28 great grandchildren). She was a link back to the myth and mist shrouded Wapping of the 1890s, with its dozens of pubs and brothels, its opium dens and poverty, and she had the stories to back it up.

As well as sinking pints and singing songs in the Prospect of Whitby, Rozelle would join the Durrell clan on their annual trip down to pick the hops in Kent. It was a friendship that endured. Even after Rozelle and Dick married and settled in an old farmhouse at Pluckley (Dick working as a GP in nearby Ashford), the pair kept in touch with the Wapping contingent. And it was at that 80th birthday party for Lucy, that the seeds were sown for the couple’s move to Limehouse. Dick mentioned to the guests that the pair would love to move to the East End if they should ever leave the country. It was a passing comment but a persistent dream. Then two years later the phone rang. There were some old houses being converted into flats in Wapping … would Dick and Rozelle like to take a look?

Clive Wright is an East End lad who left Bow a full 80 years ago … yet returned every Sunday with his family to worship at Liberty Hall in Lincoln Street, Mile End. Liberty Hall is no more (though the building still stands), and Lincoln Street has now been renamed Brokesley Street. Yet for Clive, many of the memories are as fresh as in those pre-War days - and he is on a quest for information. It all turns on Clive’s uncle, Wallace Hancock, and his journey from the trenches of World War I to becoming a conscientious objector in World War II. Clive takes up the story.

“My parents were born in the late 1890s and grew up in Bow. My mother’s family lived in Merchant Street; my father at Bow Common Lane then Lichfield Road. As a child my mother, Rose Plantin, attended Sunday School at Bow Wesleyan Church next door to the house in which she lived. My father, Tom Wright, was a choirboy at Holy Trinity Church, Mile End, which was the church where they were married in 1923.

“I am not sure when or how my parents became members of the Liberty Hall Mission. They were certainly involved when my father returned from four years in the trenches of the Western Front. His active service came to an end after he was blinded for weeks by gas in August 1918. My mother’s sister, Lily Plantin, and her future husband, Wallace Hancock – another survivor of four years in the trenches – were also members of Liberty Hall.”

Wallace joked about his time in the trenches, writing home that the rock buns the folk at Liberty Hall had sent him could have been used as shells with which to bombard the Germans. But the horror of war seems to have had a profound effect. In modern parlance, Hancock was ‘politicised’ by his experiences of the First World War and after. During the 1920s, Wallace worked for the Poplar Board of Guardians during the Poplar Rates Rebellion, led by George Lansbury in 1921. And, at the outbreak of World War II, pacifist Wallace became a conscientious objector.

As the 1920s drew on, Liberty Hall was very much the focus of the family’s social life. Clive’s father, Tom, was a keen member of the church’s football team, alongside Mission founder, Albert Green. The Greens’ home, at 54 Antill Road in Bow, became a home from home to church members. “I remember the interior as crowded in the Victorian fashion, heavy dark furnishings, chairs stuffed with horsehair which pricked the bare legs of little boys like myself,” recalls Clive. “I am pretty certain that on the wall was a framed list of friends killed in the Great War. The First World War, and the terrible grief that was its legacy to the 1920s and the 1930s was a calamity from which my parents’ generation and the founder members of Liberty Hall were never quite to recover.”

But if there was sorrow, there was a lot of joy too. “Mr Green and his wife Win were very hospitable and lunches at their home were a meeting occasion for friends. Mrs Green, a florid-faced woman, was the epitome of the hard working housewife and she devoted herself to providing food to huge numbers of people, either in her home or at parties in Liberty Hall. She seemed always to be toiling at domestic tasks.” To the Wright family, making their long Sunday pilgrimage from South Harrow to Mile End, 54 Antill Road was a welcome place to rest.

At the heart of it all was the energetic, slightly terrifying figure of Albert Green. Universally referred to as ‘Boss’, he was “a vigorous and forceful man, with a large hooked nose, a loud voice and a dominating personality”. This lively speaker vigorously asserted the importance of Liberty Hall remaining non-denominational and nonconformist, and was scathing about the Church of England’s status as the established church. At Liberty Hall, religion inevitably had a political dimension. Speakers were invited from local surrounding churches, invariably nonconformist organisations. One was Rev Ted Sorensen, a Unitarian minister who was later an MP and became Lord Sorensen of Leyton. The mission had the energy so typical of nonconformist churches of the day. Each week was a blizzard of activity - three services on Sundays, Scouts, Girl Guides, the Junior Christian Endeavour group, concerts and more.

Like so much in the East End though, the initial grouping dissolved in a gradual diaspora of members - in this case hastened by bombing and evacuation. Just as the Wrights had moved out, so their friends followed, and by the end of World War II Liberty Hall was no more. The community spirit persisted though, as Clive recalls. “The post-war reunions were very jolly events with huge quantities of food (provided presumably by the indefatigable Win Green) and with members supplying entertainment by songs, recitations and monologues or by playing musical instruments. One of the stars of these entertainments was the daughter of one of the Liberty Hall stalwarts, Gladys Cronmire, who had a fine and strong voice. My own sister played the piano on one occasion. My father did recitations and played the one-stringed fiddle. My mother helped in the kitchen. These hearty get-togethers were the final flowering of Liberty Hall and took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s.”

Today of course, most of the congregation are long gone. Among them were Ashley and Emily Cronmire and daughter Gladys. “Ashley worked on the railways and had a dreadful impression on his forehead in which the corner of a crate or box that must have fallen on him could be clearly seen.” There was fireman Tom Sweeney and wife Elsie; the prolix speaker Harry Pike; Frank Willson, an LCC employee and Secretary of the Hall, and who moved his family out to Kent after World War II; schooteacher Bill Berger and wife Lil and son Martin. As Clive describes them: ‘modest and typical East Enders’. Now Clive is digging back into that history while there are still (we hope) some people around who remember it. If you have any recollections of his uncle Wallace, please contact us at East End Life.

It seems remarkable that an East End cafe serving largely traditional fare should consistently feature in lists of Britain’s best places to eat, let alone attract visitors as diverse as the Krays and the Gallagher brothers. London has plenty of greasy spoons run by immigrant families, blending the traditional with stuff from the old country. So what is the special ingredient at Pellici’s on the Bethnal Green Road.

Well a large part of the appeal was maestro of the cafe Nevio Pellici himself, who died at the beginning of December, aged 83. He had been a constant fixture behind the counter since the early 1940s. And though as Italian as they come in appearance and loyalties Nevio was an East Ender born and bred. He was born in the the rooms above the cafe and never strayed too far away. Apart from the customers, home was important to Nevio, and so was family. “There were about seven of us back then, brothers and sisters, and we all lived here very happily in just the two little rooms. Me and my brothers had a few cafes around the area and we all worked in them. I finished up with this little one.”

Of course home and family wasn’t just about Bethnal Green. Nevio’s father (also Nevio) left his village near Lucca in Tuscany back in 1900 to seek a better life in London. He set up Pellici’s, in those days an ice cream parlour, that same year. The links with Italy and London’s Italian community would persist. In 1946, the wife of the original Nevio had the bright idea of commissioning the best of the many Italian carpenters working in the East End at the time to rework the interior of the cafe. Elide Pellici had Achille Capocci create a masterpiece of art deco marquetry that dazzles to this day. Back in the 1960s, the Italian lineage was revived when the younger Nevio married Maria - who had been sent over from the family’s home village in Tuscany to help out in the East End cafe. And to this day, the family close the cafe and decamp back to the ancestral home near Lucca in Tuscany for a month every summer.

Pay a visit to Pellici’s and you quickly understand why people go on about the place so much, why it regularly tops lists of places to eat in ‘Time Out’ as well as the national papers. There is the remarkable interior. There is the excellent food, with huge portions of bubble and squeak, spaghetti bolognese, steak pie, fry ups, steamed puddings and fresh coffee. But the added ingredient is the family behind the counter - 108 years of continuous ownership adds something a little bit special.

And having Nevio behind the counter was a direct link with the cafe and the East End of the 1940s. There have been too many customers down the years to remember all the names, though there are a host of regulars, with plenty of banter between customers and staff. Things have changed, with ‘fewer market traders’ and a few more celebs popping in (Steven Berkoff, Robbie Williams and Patsy Palmer among them). But Nevio did remember the Krays, who used to live nearby, as ‘…Gentlemen. They were children when I started serving them. They were very respectful, charming. If my mother was behind the counter and someone swore, they would ask them to show some respect.’

Even with the sad passing of Nevio Sr, fans of Pellici’s needn’t worry too much about change. Elide Pellici’s desire to vibe up her forties cafe gifted an unexpected benefit to her son and his heirs - and to the cafe lovers of London. In February 2005, the cafe was Grade II listed by English Heritage, one of only two 20th century cafes to earn the plaudit. It’s not just recognition, it means it would be much harder for any owner to wreck it. Not that that’s likely. Pellici’s is a family affair, with the children of Nevio and Maria now firmly established behind the counter. With Nevio and Anna front of house (and mum Maria still doing the cooking) the Pellici dynasty is well set for another century or so.

The funeral of Nevio Pellici took place on 12 December at St Peter’s Italian Church in Clerkenwell.

* Another sad passing with an East End connection is that of Oliver Postgate, creator of Noggin the Nog, the Clangers, Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, Pogles’ Wood and others. Postgate was the grandson of East End politician and Labour Party leader George Lansbury, and the cousin of actress Angela Lansbury. The animator, puppeteer and writer died on 8 December.

The kitchen sink drama is a staple of late 1950s and early 1960s cinema, with gritty northern dramas such as ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. A new social realism was joiining the escapist, glossy movies of the mainstream, as pictures explored the realities and the hardships of working class life in Britain.

The East End was to chip in with ‘Sparrers Can’t Sing’ in 1962, which took the drama out of the claustrophobic confines of the kitchen, living room or bedroom onto the streets and into the pubs of the East End. The Theatre Workshop production was improbably penned by Stephen Lewis (Blakey from ‘On the Buses’), though heavily improvised like all the group’s pieces. And it used lots of location filiming, offering modern viewers a fascinating glimpse of Limehouse, Stepney and Stratford in the early sixties, as well as cameo appearances by Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

But the whole movement was anticipated a decade earlier by ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’. The film, set on one Bethnal Green sunday in 1947 was an exercise in tedium, frustration and anger at the poverty of life in post-War Britain (and not just in the financial sense). Yet it still manages to grip the viewer. Rarely has boredom been so interesting.

The story has former barmaid Rose Sandigate trapped in a joyless marriage with an older man. Life in bombed out Bethnal Green is hard, with rationing still in place, little money and less to do. Into this dull, reliable existence bursts her former lover, who has broken out of prison and begs Rose to hide him. The tough housewife softens and hides him in the air raid shelter. The strain is intolerable, with family life intruding and the police net swiftly closing. Eventually he flees, to be hunted down in railway sidings by police sergeant Fothergill.

And if it’s sometimes melodramatic (and a touch unlikely) it does evoke the East End of the later forties, not least because real East Enders are in it. Not Rose - she is played by the impeccably posh Googie Withers. Nor escaped convict Tommy Swann (played by Googie’s Australian husband John McCallum). But Jewish East Ender Sydney Tafler, who was a stalwart of British cinema in the fifties and sixties, often playing spivs and crooks, appears as Morrie Hyams. John Slater, who built much of his career on playing cheery cockneys, was another East Ender playing largely to type, as Lou Hyams. Sgt Fothergill is played by Bow’s Jack Warner (Dixon of Dock Green of course). And the character of Dicey is played by Alfie Bass, born Abraham Basalinksy in Bethnal Green.

Of course a decent actor should be able to play the part wherever he or she comes from. But the authenticity of much of the cast may well have pleased the writer. The film came from a novel written by Arthur Bern, who also wrote ‘Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square’, later adapted for the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock as the movie ‘Frenzy’. La Bern called himself ‘a gallic cockney’ having been born in the East End of French parents. He was a prolific writer, combining a career as a journalist on the Evening Standard, the Evening News (a former competitor to the Standard), the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, with a steady stream of novels. His East End roots and his job as a Fleet Street crime reporter provided plenty of material. Arthur’s books may have been page turners and were regularly adapted for the big screen (other movies included ‘Good Time Girl’, ‘Freedom To Die’ and ‘Dead Man’s Evidence’) but they ranged from gruesome to downright miserable.

‘Nightmare’ follows Roland John Raine QC, whose wife has run off with a gangster, while his daughter ministers to dossers in the East End. The barrister attempts suicide with a bottle of pills and a jug of whisky, but wakes up in a mental ward. The trouble is just beginning though, as Mrs Raine’s gang boss lover is found murdered. The prolific La Bern had a profitable sideline writing biographies of famous murderers, such as Brides in the Bath killer George Joseph Smith and Acid Bath murderer John George Haigh, so he had plenty of material to draw on.

And take ‘Frenzy’, which tracks a serial killer as he rapes and strangles his way around London. Though to be fair to La Bern he hated Hitchcock’s movie so much that he felt compelled to write a letter of protest to The Times, bemoaning not just the ‘distasteful’ content but the hatchet job Hitchcock and his writer Anthony Shaffer had done on ‘the authentic London characters I created’. He described the dialogue as ‘a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce [and] Dixon of Dock Green’. For La Bern, if you were going to do the East End you had to do it right.

From the year 450,000 BC and the earliest human remains in the Thames valley, to the 2012 Olympics, taking in invasions, revolts and epidemics along the way - an entire history of London in words and pictures may seem a rather ambitious undertaking.

But ‘London: the Illustrated history’ does all that and more in 350 pages that whisk us in 15 chapters from prehistory to near future, each chapter broken down into themed sections that explore the lives of ordinary Londoners, from priests to prostitutes, bakers to burglars, cavemen to international financiers in the Square Mile.

A chapter on prehistory shows how the East End was once the stamping ground of mammoths and rhinos, reindeer and bison, with human species as far back as 400,000 BC. Around 10,000 years ago, the hunters became farmsteaders, and there have been hoards of metalwork unearthed in the East End - evidence of those early moves to permanent settlement.

Of course the first emergence of London as a town comes with the Romans. Londinium was founded soon after the invasion in 43 AD, though was razed by Boudicca 17 years later. We see the decline of London as the civilisation of the Roman era falls into the Dark Ages. The Roman army withdrew in 410 as Rome itself came under threat, and London was abandoned within a generation.

It was to another unwelcome invasion that London owes its recovery. After a gap of 200 years, during which the city was largely deserted, the Saxons arrived. Roman London lay between the modern Tower Hill in the east and Cannon Street to the west. The Anglo-Saxon invasions saw the establishment of a new London (discovered only within the last 20 years and dubbed ‘Lundenwic’ by archaeologists) around what is now the Strand, Aldwych and Covent Garden. In the ninth century the Vikings arrived, trashed Lundenwic and established their own London within the Roman city walls.

Of course all of this, though fascinating enough, might pall a little without pictures, and this is where the book really scores. Beautifully produced and reproduced on glossy paper, the tome is a succession of detailed maps; photographs of Saxon coins and swords; paintings of Londoners famous and ordinary. One of the most impressive features are the cutaway illustrations such as that of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, showing the elaborate work of architect Henry Holland. The authors have performed the same trick with the Barbican - follwing the detailed plan may be the first time many of us have managed to find our way around the centre. Or see the graphic reconstruction of the Crystal Palace, showing clearly the breathtaking size of this grandiloquent Victorian creation.

The scope of the book is, of course vast. As you turn the pages you move from the Gordon Riots to the first Underground trains; from early church bells to the Gherkin soaring above the City; from the medieval Jewish community to Brick Lane in the 1930s. Some of the modern photography is stunning, and there are new London landmarks aplenty, with the Tate Modern, the ever-growing cluster of towers on Canary Wharf and the London Eye. But artists have been depicting London for centuries, and it is some of these older works that really bring the town to life. George Hicks’s ‘The General Post Office, One Minute to Six’ shows the frantic dash of Londoners to catch the last post in 1860.

Some of the most fascinating images are from the Victorian painters who tried to capture a city that was growing by the day. London 1m people in 1801 and 6.5m a hundred years later. Artists depict the stewing mass of traffic, people, smoke, confusion and new buildings that were London. ‘From Pentonville Road looking west: evening’ painted in 1884 by John O’Connor, shows London in an atmospheric light. The Midland Railway Hotel at St Pancras (then recently opened, and currently being restored) emerges like a medieval cathedral from the smoky haze of a London evening, as horse-drawn omnibuses cram the streets.

For those already fascinated by London, this slab of a coffee table book would make a fantastic Christmas present. And for those who live here but know nothing of the history, this would make a superb primer. This is an irresistible page turner, as you flick from ‘The Growth of Victorian Suburbia’ to ‘Gangland and Crime’; from ‘Regency Shopping’ to ‘Beatnik London’. And we don’t stop with the present, looking at London moving east, and where the city is going in the 21st century. And the little chapter on Spitalfields is a gem - the illustrated and annotated spread showing how Georgian Spitalfields, Trendy Spitalfields and the glass cube business blocks of the New Spitalfields rub up against each other, and get along pretty much. And that pretty much is the story of London itself.

London - The Illustrated History by Cathy Ross and John Clark; published by Allen Lane, £30 hardback, ISBN 9871846141256

11am on 11 November, 1918, ‘the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ and the First World War finally came to an end. The ‘war to end all wars’ had seen the mobilisation of 60m European soldiers, 40m casualties, and some 20m military and civilian deaths.

It was a war that most Londoners struggled even to understand. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 would lead to a chain reaction of declarations of war across Europe. Yet few East Enders had even heard of the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina where the archduke was shot, and would struggle to understand why it should immerse them in a World War.

But life was to swiftly change for East Enders. Although Britain had a large standing army, a rush to enlist deprived London of workers. With conscription coming in 1916, things got tighter still, yet it opened up many jobs to women for the first time. And previously unemployable men, the old, the ill, prisoners, vagrants, even children were pressed into jobs. The irony was that with everyone working, the standard of living actually rose for working class Londoners. On the home front there were changes and losses of liberties. Opening hours for pubs were cut and British Summer Time introduced (all in the cause of productivity). Curfews and censorship were imposed, as were restrictions on movement.

Paranoia and fear of spies sometimes hardened into violence. In the East End the shops of Germans were attacked, never mind that some had been here for decades. For good measure, some attacked the shops of Russians, Poles, Lithuanians - the East End was full of exiles from Eastern Europe in those early years of the 20th century. Some would write explanations to put the mob right, with shops displaying signs such as ‘We are Russians’. Some simply followed the lead of the Royal Family and changed their surnames. As Saxe-Coburg and Gotha became Windsor, so Greenbergs became Greens, Schmidts Smiths.

Though we tend to associate air raids with the Second World War, East End suffered bombing during World War I too. The first daylight bombs fell on 13 June, 1917 (dropped from Zeppelins rather than airplanes). But though the raids were shortlived, with airships proving easy targets, the damage was bad enough, with 104 people killed in the East End, 154 seriously injured and 269 slightly injured. Among the casualties were 120 children killed and injured, 18 killed in Upper North Street School, Poplar. Across London, 600 people died in total.

After four long years, war was over, but some things would never return to normal. Society and a rigid class system had been rocked by the conflict, and the thousands of domestic servants who left service in 1914 would never return in any number. Women had discovered new freedoms, some of which were rudely snatched away with the peace, but many were inspired to fight for jobs and votes. More people had moved around Britain on active service or to new jobs in the cities, than ever before and some would never return home.

Of course many would never return at all. 750,000 British servicemen died, and 1.7m were wounded. 160,000 women lost a husband and 300,000 children lost fathers. One million London men enlisted, with 131,000 of them dying on active service. Go to almost any town or village across Britain and you will see the war memorials, the lists of names.

Each was a life cruelly cut short, denied possibilities. A glimpse at just three of the names whose lives ended during the Great War offers a glimpse of what might have been - lives of talent and promise prematurely ended.

Isaac Rosenberg lived from 1890 to 1918. Uniquely talented as both a gifted painter and poet. Rosenberg was opposed to World War I but signed up, not through patriotism, but to ‘find a job’ and financially support his mother. Brushing aside the claims of better-known war poets such as Sassoon and Owen, critic Paul Fussell claims Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ as “the greatest poem of the war”. Rosenberg was killed, possibly by a sniper, at dawn on 1 April 1918 on the Somme, having just finished night patrol.

Bethnal Green orphanage boy, Walter Tull, was the first black outfield professional footballer in Britain. In action from day one during the first battle of the Somme, he was also the first British-born black officer in the Army. During the second battle of the Somme, on 25 March 1918, he was cut down by machine gun fire. His body was never found, and his story was lost for decades.

And at sea there was the extraordinary heroism of young Jack Cornwell - just 16 years old as he found himself on the deck of HMS Chester, under the command of Captain Robert Lawson, joining the battle fleet at Scapa Flow. As the Chester sustained terrible losses, with three of its ten guns knocked out within minutes, and men dead or dying on the deck, the East End lad found himself the last member of his gun crew left standing. Boy (1st Class) John Travers Cornwell stood his post despite being mortally wounded. He died in Grimsby Hospital days later, and was mentioned in dispatches by Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty. The East End funeral, on a scorching summer’s day in July 1916, became an event to rival any state ceremony.

Each year since the end of hostilities, the sacrifice of millions has been marked - first on Armistice Day itself, and since 1939 on Remembrance Sunday (the Sunday closest to 11 November). The national ceremony is at the Cenotaph in Whitehall of course, though for many years there were ceremonies around Britain on the day too. Inevitably, with time and the natural passing of veterans and their families, the ceremonies have diminished somewhat, as has the wearing of poppies. Many people argue that interest has noticeably increased again in recent years (and especially on the 90th anniversary this year). Certainly, the sacrifice of these millions of men, women and children should never be forgotten.

By Remembrance Sunday 2008, only four British First World War veterans remained. Remarkably three of them - Henry Allingham (112), Harry Patch (110) and Bill Stone (108) were at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday to lead the two minutes’ silence. It’s 90 years since the guns fell silent - though around the world wars have never ceased.