Blackwall
To a New World
THE RIVER WALL along the eastern side of the Isle of Dogs was once painted black, hence the name Blackwall. The BLACKWALL TUNNEL, built by Sir Alexander Binnie, was THE LONGEST UNDERWATER TUNNEL IN THE WORLD when it opened in 1897. A second bore was opened in 1967.
Standing on the waterfront above the tunnel, in front of a new apartment complex called Virginia Quay, is the FIRST SETTLERS’ MONUMENT, commemorating the cold December day in 1606 when three ships sponsored by the Virginia Company, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery, slipped away from Blackwall Stairs, taking 105 adventurers to start a new life and found a new world. They landed on Cape Henry, at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, on 26 April 1607, and sailed on up the wide James River until, on 13 May 1607, they settled on a protected site at a bend in the river which they named JAMESTOWN after their King, James I of England. Here, under the strong leadership of CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH, they founded THE FIRST PERMANENT ENGLISH COLONY IN AMERICA. They were the forebears of the Founding Fathers of America, and it is largely thanks to them that English became the first language of America.
John Smith was captured by a tribe of local Indians after a skirmish, but wrote that his life was saved by the intervention of the Indian chief’s daughter, Pocohontas who, in 1614 married the man who had created Virginia’s first tobacco plantation, CAPTAIN JOHN ROLFE. They returned to England with their son and settled in Blackwall where Pocohontas unexpectedly bumped into John Smith, whom she had thought dead. Pocohontas herself died of an illness on a trip down the Thames and is buried in Gravesend.
On 30 July 1619, just 12 years after they had left England, some of the original settlers, led by EDWARD MARIA WINGFIELD, President of the Council, and the REVD ROBERT HUNT, convened THE FIRST REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLY IN AMERICA at Jamestown, Virginia.
Moored outside the museum at West India Dock is a full-scale replica of the tiny 20-ton Discovery, which carried 22 men on the stormy, five-month voyage across the Atlantic to Virginia. It poignantly illustrates just how small and flimsy the boats were that carried the genesis of the New World.
Trinity Buoy Wharf
London’s Only Lighthouse
FURTHEST EAST IN Tower Hamlets, tucked away down a dusty, potholed side road, beyond a nature reserve and a line of derelict factory buildings, is TRINITY BUOY WHARF, the home of LONDON’S ONLY LIGHTHOUSE. This is a wonderful, windswept, free-spirited place, where the meandering waters of Bow Creek gurgle brown and busy as they mingle with the sea breezy white-caps on the Thames. There were once two lighthouses here, the first built in 1854 and demolished in 1928. The physicist MICHAEL FARADAY (1791–1867), who discovered electromagnetic induction and gave us words such as ‘cathode’, ‘electrode’ and ‘ion’, was scientific adviser to Trinity House and did experimental work here on his first electrically powered light, which was installed in the South Foreland lighthouse on the cliffs above Dover. His life and work can be explored through a display housed in a docker’s hut by the entrance to the wharf. The surviving lighthouse, built in 1864, was used for testing maritime lighting equipment and for training lighthouse keepers.
The lighthouse and the other buildings at Trinity Buoy Wharf now house a variety of arts and creative industries and even an authentic American diner, the Fat Boy Diner.
Well, I never knew this
ABOUT
POPLAR & THE ISLE OF DOGS
The HENRY ADDINGTON pub in Canary Wharf is named after BRITAIN’S FIRST MIDDLE-CLASS PRIME MINISTER and the man who opened the docks in 1802. It also claims to have BRITAIN’S LONGEST PUB BAR. Covering 13 acres (5.2 ha) of the North West Quay is BILLINGSGATE FISH MARKET, which moved here from the City in 1982. It is THE LARGEST INLAND FISH MARKET IN BRITAIN.
The famous picture of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in a tall hat, standing in front of some great iron chain links and smoking a cigar, was taken at JOHN SCOTT RUSSELL’S YARD, in Millwall during construction of the Great Eastern.
On the river at Blackwall, a sinister-looking black glass cube is the new headquarters of REUTERS, THE WORLD’S LARGEST INTERNATIONAL NEWS AGENCY, which moved here from Fleet Street in 2005. The building was designed by Sir Richard Rogers and opened by the Queen. Reuters was founded in 1851 by a German immigrant, PAUL JULIUS REUTER, who started in the business using pigeons to deliver financial news from the Brussels Bourse to Aachen. Among those who have learned their trade working for Reuters are the thriller writers Ian Fleming and Frederick Forsyth.
THE EAST END
WHITECHAPEL – SPITALFIELDS – MILE END – STEPNEY
Christ Church, Spitalfields – home of London’s only surviving large Georgian organ
Whitechapel Bell Foundry
For Whom the Bells Toll
SITUATED AT THE corner of Whitechapel Road and Plumbers Row, WHITECHAPEL BELL FOUNDRY was established in 1570 and is THE OLDEST MANUFACTURING COMPANY IN BRITAIN. The company moved to its present premises, which date from 1670 and originally housed a coaching inn called The Artichoke, in 1738.
In 1752 the foundry cast the original LIBERTY BELL, bearing the inscription ‘PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF’ LEV XXV X. This was commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges, Pennsylvania’s original constitution. The Liberty Bell was hung in the Philadelphia State House steeple but, for some reason, cracked on the first ring and had to be twice recast. Tradition tells us that in 1776 the Liberty Bell rang out from the steeple of the Philadelphia State House in celebration of the first public reading of the American Declaration of Independence there. In 1846 the jagged crack that finally muted the Liberty Bell occurred while the bell was being rung to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. Since 2003 it has been housed in the Liberty Bell Centre near the Philadelphia State House, now called Independence Hall.
The largest bell ever cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is the most famous bell in the world, the hour bell for the Great Clock of Westminster, ‘BIG BEN’, which was cast in 1858 and rang out for the first time on 31 May 1859.
Other bells cast at the Foundry include ‘Great Tom’ at Lincoln Cathedral, which can be heard from 13 miles (21 km) away, the ‘Clock Bells’ at St Paul’s Cathedral, the bells of Westminster Abbey and the 13 bells of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral which make up THE WORLD’S HEAVIEST CHANGE-RINGING PEAL OF BELLS.
Tower House
Soviet Cradle
TUCKED AWAY IN Fieldgate Street, behind the huge new East London Mosque, is TOWER HOUSE, formerly Rowton House, a lodgings place built by Disraeli’s private secretary Lord Rowton, to provide cheap and safe accommodation for young men arriving in London. It was immortalised by Jack London in The People of the Abyss (1902) and by George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). In 1907 Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugas-hvili, otherwise known as STALIN, the ‘Steel One’, stayed here as a penniless 28-year-old student, while attending the 5th Russian Social Democratic Labour Party Congress, held at a venue in Fulbourne Street, opposite the Royal London Hospital. In the next-door cubicle was Maxim Litvinov, who was to become Stalin’s Foreign Affairs Commissar. Others who attended the Congress were Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Maxim Gorky. Tower House has recently been converted into luxury apartments for capitalist City whiz-kids.
Royal London Hospital
Elephants and Orphans
A PROMINENT LANDMARK on Whitechapel Road is the ROYAL LONDON HOSPITAL, founded in 1740 and opened on this spot in 1757. In Victorian times it became THE BIGGEST HOSPITAL IN BRITAIN.
THOMAS BARNARDO came to study at the medical school in 1866 and, horrified by the plight of the East End street children, the following year set up a ‘ragged school’ in Hope Place, Stepney. He opened THE FIRST DR BARNARDO’S HOME FOR ORPHANS at No. 18 Stepney Causeway in 1870. His motto, ‘No destitute child ever refused admission’, came about as a result of the death of a boy nicknamed ‘Carrots’, who was turned away from the Hope Place
Ragged School when there was no room, and was later found dead from exposure and malnutrition.
Some years later DR FREDERICK TREVES, a physician at the Royal London Hospital, rescued JOSEPH MERRICK, the ‘Elephant Man’, from a shop window at NO. 259 WHITECHAPEL ROAD, opposite the hospital. Merrick was being displayed in a cage like a circus freak. He was suffering from a medical condition that caused his bones to grow unevenly and his deformed head was twice the normal size. Although the condition was untreatable, Dr Treves arranged for Merrick to have a private room in the hospital, where he could live out his life away from public ridicule. Merrick died in 1890 at the age of 27. In 1980 a moving film of his life was made starring Anthony Hopkins as Dr Treves and John Hurt as Joseph Merrick.
Spitalfields
Cosmopolitan
SPITALFIELDS, OR HOSPITALFIELDS, grew up around the priory and hospital of St Mary’s Spital, founded in 1197, on the site of a Roman cemetery. Part of a 14th-century charnel house, where the bones of the dead were stored, can be seen beneath the pavement at Bishop’s Square, off Bishopsgate. The area, one of the oldest suburbs of the City, is also the most densely populated area of London.
In 1666 many homeless Londoners camped out here after the Great Fire. Later that century, an influx of Huguenots (French Protestants), fleeing religious persecution in their home country, settled in the area, mainly as silk weavers. ‘Spitalfields silk’ became famous and was exported all over the world. The Huguenots at first were so poor that they could only afford the food that the market traders threw away, such as the tails of cows and oxen, which they boiled up to create THE FIRST OXTAIL SOUP.
The next wave of immigrants were Jews escaping the pogroms of eastern Europe in the 19th century, who crammed into the lodging houses and tenements and took up the local rag trade. After the Second World War the Jews, having worked hard and made their fortunes, moved to the healthier climes of north and west London, and their place was taken by Bengalis and Bangladeshis, the area becoming known as Banglatown.
Much improved and rejuvenated in the last 25 years, Spitalfields is renowned for its street markets, its cosmopolitan atmosphere, and pockets of unspoiled Georgian architecture.
Toynbee Hall
Good Works
TOYNBEE HALL, IN Commercial Street opposite Spitalfields Market, was founded in 1884 by Canon Samuel Barnett of St Jude’s and named in honour of Arnold Toynbee, an Oxford economist and reformer who had pioneered social work in Whitechapel, before he died at the age of 30. It was BRITAIN’S FIRST UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT and was intended as a place where students from Oxford and Cambridge could work among those less fortunate.
The YOUTH HOSTEL ASSOCIATION (YHA) was established here in 1931, and among the staff at various times were the two main architects of the Welfare State, WILLIAM BEVERIDGE (1879–1963), author of the Beveridge Report, and CLEMENT ATTLEE (1883–1967), MP for Limehouse and Labour Prime Minister. JOHN PROFUMO (1915–2006), former Conservative Secretary of State for War, who resigned over his affair with call-girl Christine Keeler in 1963, redeemed himself by becoming involved with charity work at Toynbee Hall.
Christ Church
Towering Faith
DOMINATING THE WHOLE area, and best appreciated from the end of Brushfield Street to the west, is the triumphant 225 ft (69 m) high tower of CHRIST CHURCH, the most spectacular of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s three baroque East End churches, consecrated in 1729. When, in 1711, the government allocated money to build 50 new churches in London, only 12 were ever built – Christ Church being one of them. Inside there is a magnificent organ by Handel’s favoured organ-builder Richard Bridge, which was installed in 1735, and is THE ONLY LARGE ORGAN FROM GEORGIAN TIMES TO SURVIVE. The church was closed for 50 years but reopened in 2004 and has been quite superbly restored – the result is breathtaking. Christ Church was designed as a striking statement by the Anglican Church in an area noted for its nonconformity.
Georgian Streets
The Spoils of Silk
FOURNIER STREET, WHICH runs between Christ Church and the mosque, is lined with fine early Georgian houses built by the Huguenot silk weavers. Queen Victoria’s Coronation gown was woven at No. 14, and the artists Gilbert and George have their studio at No. 12. Wilkes Street, running north off Fournier Street, is perhaps the most gloriously Dickensian street in London, dark, narrow and full of grimy but gorgeously unaltered early Georgian houses. On the corner of Wilkes and Princelet Streets is a large house that was once the home of ANNA MARIA GARTH-WAITE (1690–1763), the daughter of a Lincolnshire clergyman, who was the finest designer in silks of her day.
Other good Georgian streets in Spitalfields are ELDER STREET, home of tragic anti-war artist MARK GERTLER who lived at No. 32, and next-door FOLGATE STREET. Here, at No. 18, Californian artist DENNIS SEVERS restored a Huguenot silk weaver’s house, filling it with period furniture and fittings, as well as authentic sounds and smells, to create a unique early 18th-century atmosphere. Although Severs died in 1999, the house has been preserved and is open on some Sundays, or on Monday evenings for candle-light tours. A unique and imaginative experience.
Winding eastwards from Bishopsgate is ARTILLERY LANE, where Henry VIII’s Royal Artillery Company, founded in 1537, used to exercise. Nos. 56 and 58 boast THE FINEST GEORGIAN SHOP-FRONTS IN LONDON.
BORN IN SPITALFIELDS
SUSANNA WESLEY (1669–1742) was born at No. 71 Spital Yard, off Spital Square, the 25th child of Dr Annesley. A plaque marks the site. She gave birth to 19 children, two of whom, John and Charles, grew up to be the founders of Methodism.
BUD FLANAGAN (1896–1968), comedian and member of the Crazy Gang along with Chesney Allen, was born Reuben Weintrop at No. 12 Hanbury Street.
ABE SAPERSTEIN, founder of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, was born in Flower and Dean Street (now Lolesworth Close) in 1900.
JOHN DOLLAND (1706–61) was born into a Huguenot weaving family and set up an optical workshop in Vine Street, Spitalfields, in the 1740s. This shop was the first of a chain that grew into THE BIGGEST OPTICIANS IN EUROPE, DOLLAND AND AITCHISON.
Mile End
Heading East
MILE END TAKES its name from the first milestone outside London’s Aldgate, which was positioned close to where Mile End Road meets Stepney Green.
On the north side of Mile End Road are some of the most handsome buildings in the East End, the TRINITY ALMSHOUSES. They were built in 1697 to house ‘28 decayed masters and commanders of ships or widows of such’ and were possibly designed by Sir Christopher Wren and John Evelyn.
The explorer CAPTAIN JAMES COOK (1728–79) and his family lived at No. 88 Mile End Road, almost opposite. Some of his children were born here, and it was from this house that he set off on his last journey. He was killed by natives in Hawaii, a fate of which his wife remained ignorant for nearly two years. For some reason the house was demolished and the site is now marked by a blue plaque.
Nearby, in a pleasant strip of garden once known as Mile End Waste, there are two statues of WILLIAM BOOTH, the founder of the SALVATION ARMY. He PREACHED HIS FIRST SERMON HERE in 1865, outside the Vine Tavern, long since vanished.
A little further on, the Tower Hamlets Mission stands on the site of the GREAT ASSEMBLY HALL. The Mission was opened in 1886 as a meeting-place and religious centre, dedicated to the eradication of drunkenness from the streets of the East End. It was founded by FREDERICK CHARRINGTON, the heir to the nearby Charrington’s Anchor Brewery. Charrington turned his back on his inheritance after witnessing a drunken man knock down his pleading wife and child as he staggered into a pub with the name Charrington’s over the door. Some of the brewery buildings still survive, but the site is now occupied by a small retail park.
The huge stone façade of WICKHAMS department store, built in 1927 and known as ‘the Harrods of the East’, still looms over the north side of the Mile End Road. The company bought up and demolished a whole row of small shops except for the premises of a jeweller called Speigelhalter, who r
efused to sell his property. Consequently there is a strange gap, like a missing tooth, in the grand frontage and the tower is slightly off centre.
At No. 253 is the ALBERT STERN HOUSE, built as a home for Sephardi Jews from Spain and Portugal, and now used as accommodation for St Mary’s College. Behind the house is THE OLDEST JEWISH CEMETERY IN BRITAIN, bought in 1657 when Oliver Cromwell invited Jews back into Britain after their expulsion by Edward I over 350 years before. BENJAMIN DISRAELI, grandfather of the Prime Minister of that name, is buried here.
Nearby, MILE END PLACE is a brief and unexpected taste of the countryside, a short street of idyllic little cottages one step removed from the noise and grime of the main road.
A little further east, on the front wall of the Queen’s Building, part of Queen Mary College, are sculptures by Eric Gill, showing Drama, Music, Fellowship, Dance, Sport and Recreation. Opened in 1937, as THE FIRST ENGAGEMENT OF THE NEWLY CROWNED KING GEORGE VI, this building replaced an educational and entertainment centre for East Enders which burned down. It was known, in an early example of tabloid phraseology perhaps, as the PEOPLE’S PALACE.
Stepney
Green and Lovely
SOUTH OF MILE End Road, STEPNEY GREEN is where Wat Tyler and the men of Essex met with Richard II, during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. No. 29 used to be ROLAND HOUSE, a centre for Boy Scouts founded by Roland Phillips, who died at the Battle of the Somme and was awarded the VC. No. 37 Stepney Green is one of London’s finest Queen Anne houses, built in 1692, when Stepney was a pleasant country village.
I Never Knew That About London Page 18