East End of London

• 1. Introduction

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  The East End of London has never had agreed borders. It has no single founder, no clear start date, and no official definition. What it has is a quality that almost everyone who has lived there, written about it, or fled from it seems to agree upon: the East End is unlike any other part of the capital. Aldgate Pump, a water pump on the edge of the medieval City, is regarded as the symbolic entrance to the area. Everything east of that point, north of the Thames and beyond the old Roman walls, is where this story begins. The Prussian writer Archenholz captured the contrast in 1797, writing of the east that its streets were "narrow, dark, and ill paved; inhabited by sailors and other workmen" and that "the contrast between this and the west is astonishing". The questions that contrast raises are the ones this documentary will answer. How did geography and prevailing winds shape a district? What forces turned a scatter of medieval hamlets into one of the most densely populated places on earth? And what happens to a place defined by poverty and migration when the money finally arrives?

• 2. Shaped by Wind and Water

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  London's prevailing winds blow from the west-south-west for three quarters of the year, and that meteorological fact did more to shape the East End than any deliberate act of planning. The winds carried smells and smoke eastward, away from the palaces and markets of Westminster and toward the marshes beyond Aldgate. Industries that were too noisome or too dangerous for the walled City followed the wind outward. Metalworking is recorded between Aldgate and Bishopsgate as early as the 1300s. Shipbuilding for the navy appears at Ratcliff in 1354. Shipfitting and repair was established at Blackwall by 1485. The processing of urine for the tanning industry, the manufacture of gunpowder, and the proving of guns all settled beyond the walls for the same reason: the City could regulate what was inside it, but not what lay beyond. The River Thames reinforced this industrial geography by making the east the natural home of maritime trades. Eastcheap, the smaller of the two main City markets, sat near the river precisely to handle seaborne goods. Rope making grew so extensive that its legacy is still visible in the long, straight, narrow streets of the area; Ropery Street near Mile End follows the footprint of a former ropery. On the 31st of January 1858, the largest ship then in existence, the SS Great Eastern designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was launched sideways from the Millwall yard of Messrs Scott Russell and Co. The ship measured 692 feet. It was too long to fit across the river. The technical difficulties of that launch sent Thames shipbuilding into a long decline, and the last major yard at Blackwall and Canning Town, run by the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company, closed in 1913 shortly after the launch of the Dreadnought Battleship HMS Thunderer.

• 3. The Docks and Their Dominion

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  Six and a half miles of former docklands stretch east from the Tower of London, a chain of enclosed basins that for over a century formed the commercial engine of an empire. St Katharine Docks, the most central, was built in 1828 to handle luxury goods; it was raised on the cleared site of the ancient Hospital of St Katharine. It proved unable to accommodate the largest ships and its management was merged with the London Docks by 1864. The London Docks themselves dated from 1805 and could berth more than 300 sailing vessels simultaneously, receiving tobacco, wine, and wool into guarded warehouses behind high walls. The West India Docks opened in 1803, offering berths for larger ships and a model for the dock building that followed. Ships were limited to 6,000 tons. The Millwall Docks arrived in 1868, built primarily for grain and timber, and housed what was described as the first purpose-built granary for the Baltic grain market. The Royal Docks extended the system further east onto the estuary marshes: the Royal Victoria Dock in 1855 could take vessels up to 8,000 tons; the Royal Albert Dock in 1880 handled ships up to 12,000 tons; and the King George V Dock of 1921 accommodated vessels up to 30,000 tons. That expansion drew 30,000 houses into West Ham between 1871 and 1901. When containerisation made these enclosed docks obsolete, the closures came quickly. The last, the Royal Docks, shut in 1980. The loss was not only commercial. The docks had employed tens of thousands of people on terms that were brutal but reliable enough to sustain whole communities. Colonel G. R. Birt, general manager at Millwall Docks, described dock workers to a parliamentary committee as "miserably clad, scarcely with a boot on their foot" and men who came to work "without having a bit of food in their stomachs, perhaps since the previous day". The London Dock Strike of 1889, which demanded sixpence per hour and an end to casual labour, was settled only after the mediation of Cardinal Manning and financial support from dockworkers in Australian port cities.

• 4. Waves of Migration

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  As early as 1483, the Portsoken ward recorded more aliens in its population than any ward in the City of London. That pattern never reversed. Huguenot Protestant refugees, many of them weavers fleeing persecution in France, arrived in the 17th century and settled in Spitalfields and western Bethnal Green. They brought with them a tradition of reading clubs that met in public houses, and those clubs, viewed with suspicion by the authorities, grew into workers' associations. The silk industry they established expanded rapidly. Bethnal Green's population trebled between 1801 and 1831, with 20,000 looms operating inside people's own homes. When restrictions on importing French silks were relaxed in 1824, up to half those looms fell idle. In 1655, Cromwell permitted the resettlement of Jews in England, reversing an expulsion ordered by Edward I in the 13th century. The East End became the major centre of Jewish life in England. In the 1870s and 1880s the arrival of Ashkenazi émigrés fleeing pogroms prompted the construction of more than 150 synagogues. Jewish immigration peaked in the 1890s and the resulting political agitation led to the Aliens Act 1905, which slowed the flow. Three active synagogues remain in Tower Hamlets today: Sandys Row Synagogue, founded in 1766; the Congregation of Jacob Synagogue, established in 1903; and the East London Central Synagogue, opened in 1922. From the late 1950s, immigration from Sylhet in East Pakistan, which became part of Bangladesh in 1971, began to reshape the area again. Bangladeshis now form the largest minority population in Tower Hamlets, constituting 32 per cent of the borough at the 2011 census, the largest such community in Britain. The contribution of this community to public life was marked in 1998 when Pola Uddin, Baroness Uddin of Bethnal Green, became the first Bangladeshi-born Briton to enter the House of Lords. The Brick Lane Mosque stands as a single physical record of this sequence. Built first as a church by Huguenot refugees, it became a Methodist chapel, then a synagogue used by Jews escaping persecution in the Russian Empire, and finally, in 1976, it was acquired by the Bengali community and converted to a mosque.

• 5. Poverty, Reform, and Rebellion

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  Henry Mayhew visited Bethnal Green in 1850 and wrote for the Morning Chronicle that the roads were "unmade, often mere alleys, houses small and without foundations, subdivided and often around unpaved courts". He described "pigs and cows in back yards, noxious trades like boiling tripe, melting tallow, or preparing cat's meat" and pools of what he called "putrefying night soil". The conditions he found were not a historical accident but the product of structural choices: the medieval copyhold system discouraged investment in short-lease land; noxious industries operated outside City regulations; dock labour was paid by the piece, by the day, or by the casual hour. The response to these conditions was an extraordinary concentration of reform. Thomas John Barnardo arrived from Dublin at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in 1866, shortly before a cholera epidemic killed 3,000 people in the East End. Seeing children sleeping rough, he opened his first home for boys at 18 Stepney Causeway in 1870. When a boy died after being turned away because the home was full, the policy became "No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission". William Booth began preaching in a tent at the Friends Burial Ground on Thomas Street, Whitechapel in 1865. On the 7th of August 1878, the Salvation Army was formally constituted at a meeting held at 272 Whitechapel Road. In 1884 the Settlement movement brought university students to live in the slums at places such as Toynbee Hall, whose notable residents included Clement Attlee, R. H. Tawney, Guglielmo Marconi, and William Beveridge. The Workers Educational Association, the Citizens Advice Bureau, and the Child Poverty Action Group were all either founded or directly shaped by Toynbee Hall. In 1888, the matchgirls of Bryant and May in Bow struck for better working conditions. In 1968, female workers at the Ford plant in Dagenham took industrial action to demand equal pay with male colleagues. That dispute directly prompted the Equal Pay Act 1970. The Communist Manifesto had first been published, in German, in 1848 at a printer's on 146 Liverpool Street in Bishopsgate Without. In 1907, Lenin and Stalin attended the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party at the Brotherhood Church in De Beauvoir Town; Trotsky noted in his memoirs meeting Maxim Gorky and Rosa Luxemburg at the same conference. Sylvia Pankhurst spent twelve years in Bow fighting for women's suffrage, establishing a nursery, clinic, and cost-price canteen at a bakery on Bow Road, enduring multiple imprisonments in Holloway Prison, many on hunger strike. The full adult female suffrage she sought was achieved when the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 passed.

• 6. Identity and Resistance

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  On the 4th of October 1936, between 3,000 and 5,000 uniformed members of the British Union of Fascists assembled to march through the East End. Led by Oswald Mosley, the march was intended as an anti-semitic display inspired by German and Italian fascism. Up to 100,000 East Londoners turned out to oppose them. Clashes broke out at Tower Hill, the Minories, Gardiners Corner at the junction of Whitechapel High Street and Commercial Street, and most famously in Cable Street. The combined engagements, known as the Battle of Cable Street, forced the fascists to abandon the march entirely and redirect to the West End. Racially motivated hostility was not new. In 1517, the Evil May Day riots resulted in the deaths of 135 Flemings in Stepney. In the mid-1970s, Altab Ali, a 25-year-old clothing worker, was murdered by three white teenagers in a racially motivated attack. Seven thousand people marched to Hyde Park in protest. In 1998, the former churchyard of St Mary's Whitechapel, near where Ali was killed, was renamed Altab Ali Park. The Cockney identity that grew through this history carries its own complexity. A traditional definition held that a Cockney had to be born within the sound of Bow Bells on Cheapside. The East End's low topography and the prevailing westerly wind carried those bells as far as Stamford Hill, Leyton, and Stratford in the 19th century; modern noise pollution has reduced that range to Shoreditch. The dialect itself absorbed Yiddish, Romani, and costermonger slang, while developing T-glottalization and rhyming slang. It has since spread beyond London as Estuary English and is being partly displaced within the capital by Multicultural London English. In 1938, West Ham's inside-left Len Goulden, born in Hackney and raised in Plaistow, scored England's winning goal against Germany in Berlin in front of 110,000 people, including Hermann Goering and Josef Goebbels. Stanley Matthews described it as "the greatest goal I ever saw". Goulden celebrated with a shout of "Let 'em salute that". In 1966, Bobby Moore from Barking, Martin Peters from Plaistow, and Geoff Hurst from Chelmsford were among the principal contributors as England won the World Cup at Wembley, managed by Alf Ramsey from Dagenham.

• 7. Regeneration and Its Limits

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  The London Docklands Development Corporation operated from 1981 to 1998, charged with using deregulation to stimulate economic renewal in the land left empty by the dock closures. The most visible result was Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs, a commercial and residential development on a scale that reshaped London's skyline. London City Airport was built in 1986 in the former King George V Dock. The Docklands Light Railway opened in 1987, the Jubilee line extension arrived in 1999, and the East London Line was extended in 2010. The 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics were held in an Olympic Park created on former industrial land around the River Lea at Stratford. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which opened in 1570 and had cast Big Ben, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, and Bow Bells, closed in 2016 after nearly five centuries as what had been described as the oldest manufacturing company in the UK. The Olympic Bell at the London Stadium, the largest harmonically tuned bell in the world and used in the opening ceremony of the 2012 games, was jointly developed by Whitechapel in partnership with a Dutch foundry. Canary Wharf brought service industry employment, but that work did not closely match the skills of dockland communities. Some parts of the East End now record among the highest mean salaries in the United Kingdom, while others remain among the worst areas of poverty in Great Britain. The East London Tech City cluster around Shoreditch, the art galleries that grew around Hoxton Square and the expanded Whitechapel Gallery, and the fashion for Brick Lane have pushed property prices to levels that have driven out many of the residents who made the area attractive in the first place. The Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets, now the largest in Britain, is beginning to follow the pattern established by generations before them, migrating to eastern suburbs as economic circumstances improve. The pattern of arriving poor, surviving, building community, and moving on when prosperity allows has repeated across more than three centuries of East End history.