London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  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 Spitalfields, 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.”

  Yet in another sense the halls represented the extension and intensification of East End life in the nineteenth century. Many emerged and prospered in the 1850s-the Eagle Tea Gardens, the Effingham and Wilton’s are of that period-by including burletta performances as well as variety acts and orchestral music. Among those who played here were the “lions comiques,” Alfred Vance and George Leybourne, who sang such Cockney songs as “Slap Bang, Here We Are Again” and “Champagne Charlie.” Vance in particular was known for his “coster” songs written in a “flash” or Cockney dialect, among them “Costermonger Joe” and “The Chickaleary Cove” where humour and bravado are easily mingled. Such songs as these became the folk songs of the East End, animated by all the pathos and diversity of each neighbourhood, charged with the circumstances and realities of the entire area. They remain powerful because they are filled with a real s
ense of place, as tangible as Artillery Lane or Rotherhithe Tunnel. When Charles Coborn sang “Two Lovely Black Eyes” at the Paragon in Mile End, he recalled “parties of girls and lads of the coster fraternity, all of a row, arm in arm, shouting out my chorus at the top of their voices.” The identification of performer and audience was paramount, so that when Lively Lily Burnand sang about the housekeeping of the poor at the Queen’s in Poplar she was touching upon a familiar subject:

  Don’t forget the ha’penny on the jam jar …

  The landlord’s comin’ in the mornin’

  An he’s so par-ti-cu-lar …

  In this instance, it was the importance of earning the halfpenny on the return of the jam jar to the shop. The common elements of privation, and poverty, were lifted into another sphere where they became touched by universal comedy and pity; thus, for a moment at least, was misery transcended. It would not be too much to claim, in fact, that the halls provided a boisterous and necessary secular form of the Mass in which the audience were themselves identified and uplifted as members of a general community.

  In early twentieth-century memoirs of the East End that life is recorded with what, in retrospect, looks like the precision of all lost things. Along Poplar High Street there were, Horace Thorogood wrote in East of Aldgate, once “little shops of various shapes and heights and sizes” interspersed with small houses “with polished brass numbers on the doors.” Here might be found “a parrot-cage shop, a musical instrument shop,” and, characteristically, “rows of little one-storeyed houses standing a few feet back from the pavement behind iron railings.” In Shadwell the children went barefoot and wore rags but “that was just Irish slovenliness, they never wanted for food.” In the East End, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the public houses “were open from early morning till half-past midnight” with gin at fourpence halfpenny a quartern and “beer a penny for a half-pint. Women would come in at seven in the morning and stay till three in the afternoon.” The East End was also famous for its markets-Rosemary Lane, Spitalfields, Chrisp Street, Watney Street-when the thoroughfares “swarmed with people, and at night flared with naphtha light … you could have walked on the people’s heads all the way from Commercial Road to Cable Street.”

  A fierce and protective sense of identity marked out the East End in these decades. The inhabitants of Limehouse called the people to the west those “above the bridges,” and there was a great deal of “inbreeding” which sprang from territorial loyalties. One isolated corner of Poplar, beside the Leamouth Road, in the 1920s had a population “numbering about 200 men, women and children,” according to The East End Then and Now, who were “members of no more than six families, among whom the Lammings, the Scanlans and the Jeffries were the most numerous. These families tended to marry within their own circle … the community had its own school, two pubs and a small general store.” It was noticed, too, that the Chinese residents of Pennyfields married girls from Hoxton rather than those from Poplar. “Poplarites were against mixed marriages,” according to one observer in the 1930s. It might be surmised that since Hoxton is closer to the City, and to the rest of London, it has avoided that peculiar sense of territoriality or insularity.

  When East Enders became more affluent, they moved out. The clerks of the nineteenth century, for example, took advantage of the burgeoning transport system to migrate into the more salubrious areas of Chingford or Forest Gate. The population of Middlesex grew 30.8 per cent in ten years; Wembley grew by 552 per cent and Harrow by 275 per cent. Only the poor remained in the old centres of the East End, their numbers increasing as their fate grew more desperate. This in turn established precisely the sense of separation and grievance which has not yet been dissipated.

  The cost of labour, in human terms, was very high. The East End tended to wake up earlier than the rest of the city, and at dawn the area became a great plain of smoking chimneys. The factories kept on coming, in search of cheap labour, and by 1951 it contained almost 10 per cent of the city’s working population. In the early years of the twentieth century, Horace Thorogood came upon one East End “cottage” under a railway where he “found a family of six living in one upper room, the window of which had to be kept closed, otherwise sparks from the trains flew in and set light to the bedclothes.”

  The effect of the Second World War surpassed those few disagreeable sparks, and great swathes of the East End were destroyed; approximately 19 per cent of the built areas of Stepney, Poplar and Bethnal Green were razed. Once more the East End was adversely affected by its industrial history; the German bombers sought out the ports, and the factory areas close to the Lea Valley, as well as using the inhabitants of the East End as an “example.” It suggests the importance of the East, in the whole process of the war, that the king and queen visited Poplar and Stepney immediately after the celebrations of VE Day in May 1945. It was, perhaps, one method of controlling or ascertaining the mood of a populace which since the nineteenth century had been considered mysterious.

  Even as late as 1950 whole areas were still characterised only as “bomb-sites” where strange weeds grew and where children played. A temporary housing programme authorised the construction of Nissen huts and prefabricated single-storey dwellings, but many of these prefabs were still in use more than twenty years later. There were other schemes to house the residents of the East End, not least the “Greater London Plan” of Professor Abercrombie who wished to relocate many city dwellers in satellite towns beyond the newly established Green Belt. The proposal was to disperse a large number of residents from Hackney and Stepney and Bethnal Green, yet the whole history of London suggests that such exercises in civic engineering are only partially successful. An equivalent emphasis was placed on the rebuilding and replanning of the devastated East, as if its character might be thoroughly changed. But it is impossible to destroy three hundred years of human settlement.

  For all the redevelopments of the East End in the 1950s and 1960s, you had only to turn a corner to encounter a row of terraced housing erected in the 1880s or the 1890s; there were still Georgian houses, as well as laid-out “estates” from the 1920s and the 1930s. The postwar East End was a palimpsest of its past. For those who cared to look for such things, there were the dark canals and the gasworks, old pathways and rusting bridges, all with the exhalation of forgetfulness and decay; there were patches of waste ground covered with weeds and litter, as well as deserted factories and steps seeming to lead nowhere. The old streets of tiny yellow-brick houses were still to be found, with their characteristic pattern of a small front parlour and a passage leading past it from the street door straight into the kitchen, which looked out upon a small yard; two small bedrooms above, and a cellar beneath. Along the Barking Road were scores of side-streets-Ladysmith Avenue, Kimberley Avenue, Mafeking Avenue, Macaulay Road, Thackeray Road and Dickens Road form one sequence-in which row upon row of suburban villas, albeit one grade higher than the terraces of Bethnal Green or Whitechapel, effortlessly retained into the 1960s the atmosphere of the late nineteenth century.

  The borough of Hackney epitomises sprawl and heterogeneity. One account, evocatively titled A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London, published in 1991, took Dalston Lane as its centre of enquiry; here the author, Patrick Wright, discovered “a street corner of forgotten municipal services” as a token of civic neglect. Yet its old energies remain, and “Dalston Lane is a jumble of residential, commercial and industrial activities” with factories, clothiers, shops and small businesses.

  One of the most surprising aspects of the contemporary East End is the extent to which it has maintained its economic life in the equivalent of the nineteenth-century small workshop; a number of the main thoroughfares, from the Hackney Road to the Roman Road and Hoxton Street, are populated by store-front businesses ranging from television repairers to newsagents, upholsterers to fruiterers, cabinet-makers to money-exchangers. In the East, where historically land and property have been less valuable than in the West
, the relics of lost decades linger and are commonly allowed to decay.

  There are curious regions of the East End where other continuities may be glimpsed. In Walthamstow, just beyond the High Street to the east, some spectral image or atmosphere of the countryside suddenly pervades Church Hill; this is indeed a peculiar sensation since all the streets close to it, including the High Street, Markhouse Road and Coppermill Road, embody the characteristic patterns of the East End suburbs. Nevertheless the old presence of a once rural neighbourhood seems to issue from the territory itself. Many areas in that sense preserve their identity. There is a harshness about Barking, for example, which makes it dissimilar from Walthamstow; here a native population seems to have maintained its presence, with a kind of bleakness or hardness of attitude. The survival of part of the ancient abbey in no way diminishes that atmosphere, which is powerfully sustained by the presence of the old creek from which the majority of the population once earned their living. It remains a strangely isolated or self-communing neighbourhood, where the London accent seems peculiarly thick. In Pennyfields, where the Malays and Chinese dwelled more than a century before, there is now a large population of Vietnamese. Second-hand pornography is sold in Sclater Street, Shoreditch, in what has always been a red-light district. The market of Green Street, in East Ham, recalls the energy and spirit of medieval London itself. In fact the ancient mercantile life of the city has been reawakened (if indeed it ever really slept) in areas as diverse as West Ham and Stoke Newington, Spitalfields and Leytonstone.