Rising East Online

How sustainable is the East End?

Alan White

In this brief essay I want to address one aspect of the question ‘How sustainable is the East End’? I do not mean the bricks and mortar, although that will of course crumble one day. What I am talking about is the concept or the imaginary of the East End of London.

During the industrial revolution the eastern end of cities often came to be where the poor and the workers lived, because the dominant winds in Britain blow west to east. All the stink and pollution of industry is blown away from the rest of the city, and ends up on the east side. However not all cities have an ‘ East End’, if by that we mean a space that is culturally and historically defined as a carrier of meaning(s).

I was brought up in Leytonstone, and took my first degree at the University of East London; but as a post-graduate in Leeds I swapped the east end of one city for another. In the early 1980s, Harehills, east Leeds, and Leytonstone, east London, had a lot in common. However, in many ways they were different. A different accent, of course, but even in the 1980s Harehills had a large Muslim population located just a bit further down the hill from where I lived, closer to the city centre.

Perhaps the key way in which east Leeds and east London are different is in their imaginary or symbolic power. Enter ‘east end London’ into Google and you get just under 2 million hits. Do the same for ‘east end Leeds’ and the figure is just under 177,000; ‘east end Sheffield’ 162,000; ‘east end Glasgow’ 413,000 and ‘east end Dublin’ 220,000. These cities of the industrial revolution are linked in that their respective east ends went from industrial powerhouse to sites of urban deprivation in just over 100 years.

But the east end of London, as evidenced by the crude, zeitgeist-marker of web pages, excites more attention. And in this case the large number of matches does, I think, signify something more than a simple marker of it being the imperial capital. The East End of London, and its inhabitants, occupy a place in the imaginary life of the country that is unique, and sometimes approaches the mystical. One has to struggle to find a comparison on the national stage. Glasgow, in its ‘Red Clyde’ moment of the late 1910s and early 1920s, is one contender.

This is not to say that the East End of London is always and everywhere constructed as a site of revolution and resistance (although that is one of the ways it is constructed). But it is often constructed as a site of something unique and this uniqueness is sometimes a presence and sometimes an absence. The East End can be represented as a place of great heroism or of great danger. Equally it can be a place of stoicism and resolve or of social breakdown and incipient decline. The thing that links these, and other, narrations of what the East End can be, is that in all of them it is a crucible for the future.

For Marx in the period 1866-7, the East End of London, and especially those areas inhabited by the labour aristocracy working in its shipyards, was a site of great destitution and distress brought on by one of the periodic cycles of capitalist slump. In Volume One of Capital, he quotes from a Tory newspaper called the Standard that thousands from the east end are now ‘breaking in upon the other quarters; always half-starving, they cry their misery in our ears’.

In a similar fashion, but from a very different perspective, in 1893 Andrew Mearns had this to say about his investigations into Ratcliff and Shadwell:

We have opened but a little way the door that leads into this plague-house of sin and misery and corruption, where men and women and little children starve and suffer and perish, body and soul. But even the glance we have got is a sight to make one weep.

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The Bitter Cry of Outcast London

Charles Dickens, in one of his sketches from Household Words, recounts a supposed encounter he had one night in Whitechapel in the 1850s:

Crouched against the wall of the Workhouse, in the dark street, on the muddy pavement-stones, with the rain raining upon them, were five bundles of rages. They were motionless, and had no resemblance to the human form. Five great beehives, covered with rags – five dead bodies taken out of the grave, tied neck and heels, and covered with rags…

I will not dwell any further on these nineteenth century examples of how the East End and its inhabitants have been constructed. My reason for bringing them into this piece is not to show that the nineteenth century East End was a place of poverty and misery. This is too well known to need establishing. I want to show that the East End of London has historically been constructed as a place of more-or-less homogeneous experience and, therefore, more-or-less homogeneous identity. It is a space and place where uniformity of life experience could be captured through the use of terms such as ‘class’ or ‘order’. Moreover, it is a space and a place with a community and a sense of shared and common understandings born of a common life and existence. What is community if it is not the thing that emerges out of, and shapes our engagement with, our lived experience?

This ‘community’ is what Michael Young and Peter Willmott talk about in their 1950s study of Family and Kinship in East London. What Young and Willmott found in Bethnal Green was a dense and all-embracing tangle of kin and friendship ties that wove the community together, and stitched members of the community into each others’ lives:

Fifty-three per cent of the people in the general sample were born in Bethnal Green, and over half those not born locally had lived in the borough for more than fifteen years. Most people have therefore had time to get to know plenty of other local inhabitants. They share the same background. The people they see when they go out for a walk are people they played with as children.

This is the world I remember from my own childhood in Leytonstone, East London. My mother was one of 15 children and up to the late 1960s the households of my aunts and uncles were all within 20 minutes’ walking distance. Two of my cousins went to the same secondary school as me. In the post-war block of council maisonettes where we lived, every house had at least two children and age cohorts played together. Many of our fathers drank in the same pub, played in the same darts team and competed in the same autumn flower and produce competition. A family outing to Southend required the hire of a coach, and family parties filled the hired room above a pub or overflowed into the garden if held in a house.

This is the world we have lost, and it is one of the dominant images of how the East End was. But what if this was the exception rather than the rule? What if the multi-cultural East End of 2005 is just a return, in a different surface form, to its past?

In 1901 the street in East Ham where I currently live had yet to be built, but a street 90 seconds away, Central Park Road, had been completed. The enumerator’s returns show that of the 97 individuals living in Central Park Road recorded as ‘Head’ or ‘Wife’, 44 were born outside of London. Some were born in the hinterland of London, in counties such as Norfolk, Hertfordshire or Kent, while others came from Devon, Yorkshire, or Cumberland. Still others were born outside of England altogether: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, America and India are all given as places of birth.

The disparate nature of the community in this one road is thrown into even sharper focus if you use the same measure as Young and Willmott above. That is, how many people living in Central Park Road in 1901 were born in East Ham which was then its Civil Parish? The enumerator’s returns show that 243 individuals slept in a property on Central Park Road on census night 1901. Some of these people were in transit, but not many. Of the 243 recorded on census night 1901 only 29 were actually born in East Ham. This is about 12%. A number of the rest had been born in other areas of London but most had not.

This was then a new and diasporic community in an area of London that was just being developed, and yet is part of the East End. It was also a young community. It was young in the sense of being new but also young in the literal sense. The average age of those described in the enumerator’s returns as ‘Head’ or ‘Wife’ was 36 and of those described as ‘Son’ or ‘Daughter’ only 10. If interviewed in 1911 or 1921 these ‘Sons’ and ‘Daughters’ would probably have reported the same shared upbringing and life experiences as Young and Willmott’s sample in the 1950s. Indeed, these 1901 ‘Sons’ and ‘Daughters’ were the parents and grand-parents of the 1950s sample.

But for the parents of the 1901 ‘Sons’ and ‘Daughters’, things were different. Many of them were first generation Londoners and most of them were new to the area. Some were very far indeed from their place of birth. In some ways then, what was going on in areas of East Ham in 1901, and one assumes other parts of the East End, were not too different from what is going on in these same areas in 2005. There had been a rapid influx of newcomers which helped produce a young population who had little shared history and culture. Of course history does not repeat itself (except as farce), so there are crucial differences as well; but my point here is that the image of the East End of London as a place of continuity and homogeneity may be at best partial and at worst a projection of a particular moment in its history onto a complex process of influx and disruption. The East End as a place of continuity which has only recently been lost, is not supported by these records. As a space of repeatedly new beginnings, alongside ongoing tradition, it is much more sustainable.

Dr Alan White is principal lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, UEL.

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