London

by Peter Ackroyd

  There is one interesting and significant feature of the eastern area which suggests a living tradition stretching back beyond the time of the Romans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was found evidence of a great “wall” running along the eastern portion of the Thames, down the river bank and along the Essex shores, to protect the land from the depredations of the tidal river; it was constituted of timber banks and earthworks. At the end of the wall in Essex, close to the area now known as Bradwell Waterside—which may plausibly be translated, even after two thousand years of transition, as Broad Wall—were discovered the earthworks of a Roman fortress as well as the ruins of a later chapel, St. Peter-on-the-Wall, which had become a barn. Other local antiquarians have also found small churches or chapels placed beside what might be called this great eastern wall. It is quite forgotten, save by a few local historians, but by keeping at bay the water, and by helping to drain the marshland of the eastern areas, it created the East End or London’s dark side. Every city must have one.

  And where does the “East” begin? According to certain urban authorities the point of transition was marked by the Aldgate Pump, a stone fountain constructed beside the well at the confluence of Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street; the existing pump lies a few yards to the west of the original. Other antiquaries have argued that the real East End begins at the point where Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road meet. The taint of poverty, already apparent in the late medieval period, was in any case gradually extended. Stow observed that between 1550 and 1590 there was “a continual street or filthy strait passage with alleys of small tenements or cottages built … almost to Ratcliffe.” The road from the pump of Aldgate to the church at Whitechapel was by this date also lined with shops and tenements, while the adjoining field to the north was “pestered with cottages and alleys.” In similar manner there was “a continuous building of small and base tenements for the most part lately erected” from Bishopsgate to Shoreditch, and even beyond that there were mean buildings “a good flight shot” as far out as Kingsland and Tottenham. By the end of the sixteenth century the eastern portions of the city were being defined as “base” and “filthy,” their squalor and stench emerging despite proclamations and parliamentary Acts. The area of Spitalfields, laid out along more regular lines between 1660 and 1680, also soon acquired a reputation for poverty and overcrowding. The houses were small and narrow, while the streets themselves were often only fifteen feet wide. That sense of diminution, or of constriction, exists still. As the houses, so their inhabitants. A report of 1665 described the overcrowding created by “poor indigent and idle and loose persons.” So the “filthy cottages” of Stow’s report were being filled with “filthy” persons. It is the story of London.

  The industries of the eastern neighbourhood gradually became filthy, too. Much of its trade and commerce came from the river, but in the course of the seventeenth century the region became steadily industrialised. In the vicinity of the Lea mills, malodorous manufactories were introduced. In 1614 a local court records that “The jury present Lancelot Gamblyn, lately of Stratford Langthorne, starchmaker, because by unlawful making of starch such a stink and ill favour continue and daily arise.” Less than fifty years later Sir William Petty was lamenting “the fumes, steams, and stinks of the whole Easterly Pyle,” and indeed for hundreds of years after that the “Easterly Pyle” became the home of what were known as “the stink industries”; all forms of corruption and noisomeness were fashioned there. It represented the focus for London’s fear of corruption and disease. Nor were these fears entirely ill-founded, either; demographic surveys revealed a remarkably high incidence of consumption and “fever” in the eastern reaches of London.

  So the flight westward continued. From the seventeenth century onward the laying out of streets and squares moved inexorably in that direction; the wealthy and the well-born and the fashionable insisted upon dwelling in what Nash called “the respectable streets at the West end of the town.” The topographical divide, or rather the obsession with the West over the East, could be seen in minute particulars. When Jermyn Street was completed in the 1680s, the London Encyclopaedia observes that “the west end of the street was more fashionable than the east.” Another line of demarcation ran through Soho Square, where “every minute longitude east is equal to as many degrees of gentility minus,” as an American visitor put it, “or towards west, plus.” Of the newly fashioned Regent Street it was noted that “there are many squares on the eastern side of this thoroughfare, and some good streets, but rank and fashion appear to avoid them.”

  It has been observed that the West End has the money, and the East End has the dirt; there is leisure to the West, and labour to the East. Yet in the early decades of the nineteenth century it was not singled out as being the most desperate source of poverty and violence. It was known principally as the centre of shipping, and of industry, and thus the home of the working poor. In fact the industry and the poverty steadily intensified; dye works and chemical works, manure factories and lamp-black factories, manufacturers of glue and of paraffin, producers of paint and bonemeal, all clustered in Bow and Old Ford and Stratford. The River Lea for centuries had been the site of industry, and of transport, but throughout the nineteenth century it was further exploited and degraded. A match factory on its banks lent the water a urinous taste and appearance, while the smell of the whole area became offensive. In all this, of course, we see the condition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries being expanded and intensified; it is as if the process continued with a momentum of its own. The industrial districts of Canning Town, Silvertown and Beckton were created between the Lea and Barking Creek, Beckton becoming particularly well known for its sewage dispersal system. All the filth of London crept eastwards.

  But then, at some point in the 1880s, it reached what might be called critical mass. It imploded. The East End became “the abyss” or “the nether world” of strange secrets and desires. It was the area of London into which more poor people were crammed than any other, and out of that congregation of poverty sprang reports of evil and immorality, of savagery and unnamed vice. In his essay “On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas De Quincey apostrophised the area of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1812 as one of the “most chaotic” and “a most dangerous quarter,” a “perilous region” replete with “manifold ruffianism.” It is perhaps important that a writer should inscribe the East End in this manner, since its subsequent and lurid reputation was to a large extent established upon the work of journalists and novelists who felt almost obliged to conjure up visions of darkness and horror as a way of describing the shadow which London itself cast. And of course the defining sensation which for ever marked the “East End,” and created its public identity, was the series of murders ascribed to Jack the Ripper between the late summer and early autumn of 1888. The scale of the sudden and brutal killings effectively marked out the area as one of incomparable violence and depravity, but it was equally significant that the crimes should have been committed in the darkness of malodorous alleys. The fact that the killer was never captured seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves; that the East End was the true Ripper.

  All the anxieties about the city in general then became attached to the East End in particular, as if in some peculiar sense it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life. There were books written, the titles of which represented their themes—The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, The People of the Abyss, Ragged London, In Darkest London, The Nether World. In that last novel George Gissing provides a description of “the pest-stricken regions of East London, sweltering in sunshine which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of the damned, such as thought never conceived before this age of ours; above streets, swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwonted light of heaven.” This is a vision of the East End as the Inferno, the city as hell, and it is
not one confined to the novelist. The autobiographical narrative of “John Martin, School Master and Poet” was partly set in the purlieus of nineteenth-century Limehouse. “A mind is needed—black, misanthropic in its view of things, used to fearful visions of the night, to look with comprehensive and unflinching eye upon these scenes of sickly horror and despair.”

  When Jack London first wished to visit the East End in 1902 he had been told by the manager of Thomas Cook’s Cheapside branch that “We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place at all.” They knew nothing about it, perhaps, and yet everyone knew of it. In Tales of Mean Streets (1894) Arthur Morrison declared that “There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand of man has made. But who knows the East End?”

  The presence of 100,000 Jewish immigrants, in Whitechapel and in Spi-talfields, only served to emphasise the apparently “alien” quality of the neighbourhood. They served also to reinforce that other territorial myth which clung to the East End. Because it did indeed lie towards the east, it became associated with that larger “east” which lay beyond Christendom and which threatened the borders of Europe. The name given to the dispossessed children of the streets, “street-Arabs,” offers some confirmation of this diagnosis. The East End was in that sense the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery. It represented the heart of darkness.

  Yet there were some who came as missionaries into that darkness. As early as the 1860s men and women, impelled by religious or philanthropic motives, set up halls and chapels in the East End. The vicar of St. Jude’s in Whitechapel, Samuel Barnett, was instrumental in what was called “settlement work” where generally idealistic young men and women tried materially to assist the straitened or precarious lives of the East Enders. Arnold Toynbee declared in one of his lectures to the inhabitants of Bethnal Green: “You have to forgive us, for we have wronged you; we have sinned against you grievously … we will serve you, we will devote our lives to your service, and we cannot do more.” Partly as a result of his example, and his eloquence, various “missions” were established, among them Oxford House in Bethnal Green and St. Mildred’s House upon the Isle of Dogs. The tone of supplication in Toynbee’s remarks might also be construed as one of anxiety that those, who had been so grievously treated, might react against the “sinners” who betrayed them.

  There was indeed much radical activity in the East End, with the members of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s and the Chartists in the 1830s meeting in the mug houses and public houses of Whitechapel and elsewhere, in order to promote their revolutionary causes. A radically egalitarian and anti-authoritarian spirit has always been rising from the area, in terms of religious as well as political dissent (if in fact the two can be distinguished). In the eighteenth century the Ancient Deists of Hoxton espoused millennarian and generally levelling principles, and there is evidence of Ranters and Muggletonians, Quakers and Fifth Monarchy men, contributing to the general atmosphere of dissent. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the political ethic of the East End was dominated by “municipal socialism.” George Lansbury in particular became associated with the movement known as “Poplarism,” a variant of populism whereby in 1919 the local Labour Party in control of the borough set unemployment relief at a level higher than the central government permitted. There was a confrontation, and the councillors of Poplar were briefly imprisoned, but the central demands of Lansbury were eventually met.

  It was a characteristic episode, in the sense that the East End never “rose up,” as the civic authorities feared. It was always considered a potent ground for insurrection, as Oswald Mosley and his followers demonstrated in the 1930s, but like the rest of London it was too large and too dispersed to create any kind of galvanic shock. A more important revolutionary influence came, in fact, from the immigrant population. The communist and anarchist movements among the German and Russian populations have borne significant witness to the effect of the East End upon human consciousness. There was the celebrated Anarchists Club in Jubilee Street, among whose members were Kropotkin and Malatesta; opposite the London Hospital along Whitechapel High Street, a hall accommodated the fifth congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which ensured the preeminence of the Bolshevik Party. In a hostel in Fieldgate Street, Joseph Stalin was a welcome guest. Lenin visited Whitechapel on numerous occasions, and attended the Anarchists Club, while Trotsky and Litvinov were also frequent visitors to the area. The East End can in that sense be considered one of the primary sites of world communism.

  No doubt the presence of political exiles from Europe is largely responsible for that eminence, but the prevailing atmosphere of the place may also have been suggestive. Blanchard Jerrold, in the 1870s, had remarked upon the fact that “the quaint, dirty, poverty-laden, stall-lined streets are here and there relieved by marts and warehouses and emporiums, in which rich men who employ the poorest labour, are found.” Already the startling contrast between the “rich” and the “poorest,” standing upon the same ground, is being revealed. The East End was also the image of the whole world, with “the German, the Jew, the Frenchman, the Lascar, the swarthy native of Spital-fields, the leering thin-handed thief … with endless swarms of ragged children.” International communism sprang from an international context.

  But other visitors saw other realities. The Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek, observing the East End at first hand in the early twentieth century, suggested that in “this overwhelming quantity it no longer looks like an excess of human beings, but like a geological formation … it was piled up from soot and dust.” It is an impersonal force of dullness, the total aggregate of labour and suffering among the soot of ships and factories. It is a “geological formation,” perhaps, to the extent that the area itself seems to emanate waves of frustration and enervation. At the turn of the nineteenth century Mrs. Humphry Ward noticed the monotony of the East End in terms of “long lines of low houses—two storeys always, or two storeys and a basement—of the same yellowish brick, all begrimed by the same smoke, every doorknocker of the same pattern, every window-blind hung in the same way, and the same corner ‘public’ on either side, flaming in the hazy distance.” George Orwell noticed it, too, in 1933 when he complained that the territory between Whitechapel and Wapping was “quieter and drearier” than the equivalent poor areas of Paris.

  This is a familiar refrain, but it tends to come from those upon the outside. The autobiographical reminiscences of East Enders themselves do not dwell upon monotony or hardship, but upon the sports and clubs and markets, the local shops and local “characters,” which comprised each neighbourhood. As one old resident of Poplar put it in a recent history of the area, The East End Then and Now, edited by W.G. Ramsey, “It never occurred to me that my brothers and sisters and I were underprivileged, for what you never have you never miss.” This is the experience of the East End, and of all other impoverished parts of London, for those who live in them; the apparent deprivation and monotony are never realised, because they do not touch the inner experience of those who are meant to be affected by them. Any emphasis upon the uniformity or tedium of the East End has in any case to be seriously modified by the constantly remarked “merriment” or “cheerfulness” of its inhabitants. There was “a valiant cheeriness full of strength,” Blanchard Jerrold remarked after reciting a litany of sorrowful mysteries to be found upon the eastern streets, “everywhere a readiness to laugh.” He also observed that “The man who has a ready wit will employ his basket, while the dull vendor remains with his arms crossed.”

  Thus emerged the figure of the Cockney, once the native of all London but in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries identified more and more closely with the East End. This was the character heard by V.S. Pritchett with “whining vowels and ruined consonants” and “the hard-chinned look of indomitable character.” The creation
of that chirpy and resourceful stereotype can in some measure be ascribed to another contrast with East End monotony, the music hall. The conditions of life in Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and elsewhere may have predisposed their inhabitants to violent delights; the penny gaffs and the brightly illuminated public houses are testimony to that, as well as the roughness and coarseness which were intimately associated with them. But it is also significant that the East End harboured more music halls than any other part of London—Gilbert’s in Whitechapel, the Eastern and the Apollo in Bethnal Green, the Cambridge in Shoreditch, Wilton’s in Wellclose Square, the Queen’s in Poplar, the Eagle in the Mile End Road, and of course the Empire in Hackney, are just the most prominent among a large number which became as characteristic of the East End as the sweatshops or the church missions. By the mid-nineteenth century, the area roughly inclusive of the present borough of Tower Hamlets harboured some 150 music halls. It is perhaps appropriate that Charles Morton, universally if inaccurately known as “Father of the Halls” because of his establishment of the Canterbury in 1851, was born in Bethnal Green. In one sense the eastern region of the city was simply reaffirming its ancient identity. It has been mentioned before that two of the earliest London theatres, the Theatre and the Curtain, had been erected in the sixteenth century upon the open ground of Shoreditch; the whole region outside the walls became a haven for popular entertainment of every kind, from tea-gardens to wrestling matches and bear-baiting. So the music halls of the East End represent another continuity within the area, equivalent to its poor housing and to its “stink industries.”