Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Few places in London have engendered so many myths as the
East End
, a catch-all title
that covers just about everywhere east of the City, but has its historic heart closest to
the latter. Its name is synonymous with slums, sweatshops and crime, epitomized by
antiheroes such as Jack the Ripper and the Kray twins, and with rags-to-riches success
stories of a whole generation of Jews who were born in these cholera-ridden quarters
and then moved to wealthier pastures. Old East Enders will tell you that the area's not
what it was - and it's true, as it always has been. The East End is constantly changing,
as newly arrived
immigrants
assimilate and move out.
The first immigrants were
Huguenots
, French Protestants fleeing from religious
persecution in the 1680s, who bequeathed the word “refugee” (from the French,
réfugié
). They were welcomed by all except the apprentice weavers whose work they
undercut. Some settled in Soho, but the majority settled in Spitalfields, where they
were operating thousands of silk looms by the late eighteenth century. Within three
generations the Huguenots were almost entirely assimilated, and the
Irish
became the
new immigrant population. Irish labourers, ironically enough, played a major role in
building the area's Protestant churches, and were crucial to the development of the
canals and docks. The threat of cheap Irish labour provoked riots in 1736 and 1769,
and their Catholicism made them easy targets during the 1780 Gordon Riots.
It was the influx of
Jews
escaping pogroms in eastern Europe and Russia that defined
the character of the East End in the late nineteenth century. The Bishop of Stepney
complained in 1901 that his churches were “left like islands in the midst of an alien
sea”. The same year, the MP for Stepney helped found the East End's first organized
racist movement, the British Brothers League, whose ideology foreshadowed the British
Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley and famously defeated at the
Battle of Cable
Street
(see p.194). The area's Jewish population has now dispersed throughout London,
and gentrification has made serious inroads over the last decade or so, though the East
End - and the borough of Tower Hamlets in which it resides - remains a deeply
deprived area. Despite the millions that have been poured into the nearby Docklands
development, and the proximity of the wealth of the City, unemployment, racial
tensions and housing problems persist.
Spitalfields
W
visitspitalfields.com
On the eastern edge of the City,
Spitalfields
started life as a cemetery, situated just
outside the Roman walls. Its name derives from the medieval priory and hospital
(hence “spital”) of St Mary which stood here until the Dissolution - the old priory
mortuary chapel has been preserved, in an underground vault, to the west of the
old market. Nowadays, Spitalfields is continuing to undergo a slow but steady
gentrification. The whole area is at its busiest and buzziest on Sundays, when there
are no fewer than five
markets
all within a stone's throw of one another.
Spitalfields Market
Thurs & Fri 10am-4pm, Sun 9am-5pm •
W
oldspitalfieldsmarket.com •
!
Liverpool Street
Originally established back in the seventeenth century in open countryside east of
the City,
Spitalfields Market
was once the capital's premier fruit and vegetable market.
Since the wholesale market moved out to Stratford in 1991, Spitalfields has become
something of a hybrid. In the rather lugubrious Victorian red-brick and green-gabled
The East End of London is the hell of poverty. Like an enormous, black, motionless, giant kracken, the poverty
of London lies there in lurking silence and encircles with its mighty tentacles the life and wealth of the City
and of the West End…
J.H. Mackay,
The Anarchists
(1891)
