Wealth of experience

In 1902 Jack London determined to travel to East London. He relates in People of the Abyss how he approached Thomas Cook & Son, but was disappointed to find that though a travel agent

unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Tibet, but to the East of London, barely a stone’s distant from Ludgate Circus, [they] know not the way.

For many of the late Victorian middle class the East End was as mysteriously exotic a place as the furthest reaches of the Empire.

In contrast to any bemused Thomas Cook operator, John Marriott’s new history of the East End, Beyond the Tower, is an expert guide to the area. The author gives an authoritative overview of East London’s history that is scholarly and lucid, handling complex economic and demographic issues with impressive clarity. It underplays the narrative drama of famous events, such as the strike of match girls at the Bryant and May factory or the Cable Street riots, but  is not overly dry; the narrative is enriched by descriptions of the vivid personalities and vital culture of East Enders. The book should join Patrick Wright’s A Journey Through Ruins and the Young Foundation’s The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict as required reading for those wishing to understand the area.

The story starts in the 17th century with what can readily be recognised as the ribbon development of spec-developers along arterial roads. The hostility towards this proto-sprawl was expressed in terms remarkably redolent of contemporary debate, as the countryside became ‘incroched vpon by building of filthy Cottages…’

In the 18th century prosperous and gentrified inhabitants became refugees from the effects of growing industrialisation. Docks and sweatshops dominated 19th century East London, as it was blighted by cholera epidemics and overcrowding.

The 20th century saw the terminal decline of the area’s industries, political extremism (about 80 per cent of Mosley’s BUF were recruited from the East End), the Blitz, mass emigration to Essex suburbia and mass immigration from the commonwealth. The next few decades will see changes, wrought by the Olympic site and the Thames Gateway redevelopment, which will be no less radical than those experienced in the past. Marriott is gloomy about the prospects.

Despite these immense changes, what is most striking about the narrative of East End history are the recurring themes that echo through the centuries, and indeed resonate today. One notes that harsh economic downturns and the eruption of rioting have been persistent features of East End history. Immigration is another recurring issue: the centuries having seen the successive settlement of Huguenot, Irish, Jewish and Bangladeshi peoples in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. The starkly conspicuous inequality of the Victorian docks, where all the riches of Empire were unloaded by a wretched community of casual labourers, is inevitably recalled today in the juxtaposition of a Dockland landscape of glass and steel towers looming above the estates of Poplar.

In the aftermath of this summer’s rioting, and the subsequent resurgence of ‘two nation’ concerns about the cultural divide between Britain’s rich and poor, perhaps the most germane section of this book concerns how outsiders viewed the population of the East End in the 19th century. It is striking how evocative the now prevalent characterisations of a ‘feral criminal underclass’ are to a Victorian lexicon. Marriott makes it clear that in the 19th century such pejorative and dehumanising stereotypes, applicable at most to a small minority, ended up tarring entire communities, despite the fact that those stereotyped often displayed an admirable culture of respectability, self-improvement and mutual support.

In the book Jack London published on returning from his East End explorations, he characterised the area’s inhabitants as

the people of the abyss… the stones the builder rejected. There is no place for them in the social fabric… The work of the world goes on above them, and they do not care to take part in it, nor are they able.

 Marriott’s book gives us a fuller portrait of the communities of East London than those afforded by such protest literature. His book certainly documents numerous cases of crushing poverty and deprivation, but it also depicts many of the remarkable individuals that have contributed to East End life and culture over the centuries: a panoply of Huguenot scientists, Jewish anarchist intellectuals, music-hall entertainers and zealous reformers.
 
The East End is still very poor; in a 2007 survey of the most deprived areas in the country, Hackney came second, Tower Hamlets third and Newham sixth. Nevertheless, because of the peculiarities of its past it continues to be an extraordinary and vibrant place, appearing today, as it often has done, at the forefront of British history.