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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?

Next week … Changing Limehouse, from the 1960s to the present day.

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

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