For a long time, the poorest residents of London lived in the East End. A similar situation arose back in the 16th century, when blacksmiths and other workers involved in the production of metal products were ordered to move here. Cheap housing was the natural reason for the flow of immigrants pouring here, starting from the 17th century, when they were Huguenots, and ending with the 60-70s of the last century, when the Bengalis settled here. The East End has long been known as a troubled area with a high crime rate. During the time of Queen Victoria, it was the population of this area that was terrorized by Jack the Ripper. But today a lot has changed here. The London Docklands area has become a place to live.
House-Museum of Denis Severs" House. H2)
This house, built in the Georgian style, seems to forever freeze the time when a family of poor Huguenot weavers lived in it. Here you get the feeling that you are in the 18th century, and the inhabitants of the house are still somewhere nearby. The rooms smell of dinner dishes, the steps creak, the clock ticks, and the clatter of horse hooves can be heard on the pavement. Until his death in 1999, American actor Dennis Severs lived in this house. As a matter of principle, he did not install any heating, electricity, or plumbing in the house, and after his death he bequeathed it to the Spitafield Association of Historic Buildings. Opening hours: 1st and 3rd Sunday of every month from 14.00 to 17.00; Monday after the 1st, 3rd Sunday - from 12.00 to 14.00; “quiet evening” by candlelight - every Monday (except officially established non-working days), the time depends on the beginning of twilight. Order tickets by phone: 020 7247 4013 (from 9.30 to 15.00): fax: 020 7377 5548. 18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields (18 Foigate St, Spitalfields E1); Art. Liverpool St metro station.
Geffrye Museum (H1)
Housed in former ironmonger's almshouses dating from 1715 onwards, this museum is one of London's little-known gems. It was turned into the Museum of Furniture and Costume at the beginning of the 20th century, and now we have an excellent opportunity to take a fascinating journey into history, looking at the home furnishings of old drawing rooms. Starting with the Elizabethan era, you are transported to the Georgian era, then the reign of Queen Victoria and... Finally, you arrive in modernity with its high-tech interiors. housed in the new bright extensions of the museum. Opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday from 10.00 to 17.00, Sunday and holidays from 12.00 to 17.00. the restaurant is open until 16.45. From April to October, you can visit the medicinal plant garden during museum opening hours. Tel: 7739 9893. 136 Kingsland Road (E2); Art. Liverpool St tube, then bus number 242 or number 149 from Bishopsgate or Old Street (exit 2), then bus number 243 or approximately 15 minutes on foot.
Petticoat Lane, NZ
This street is famous for its Sunday morning markets, where they sell mainly clothes. The tradition of Sunday markets appeared after Huguenots and Jews settled in the area, among whom there were many tailors and weavers. Now you can buy almost everything here. and the Sunday markets are proud of their traders, perhaps the most colorful and persistent in all of London. The local trade can rightfully be considered; a magnificent spectacle, but when going here, be prepared! to bargain. Middlesex Street (E1); Art. meters "Liverpool Street" "Aldgate" "Aldgate East" (Liverpool Street Aldgate Aldgate East).
Whitechapel Art Gallery, NZ
At the end of Middlesex Street, cross Whitechapel High Street and follow it to the beautiful museum building, built in 1899. The gallery houses one of the most delightful exhibitions of contemporary British and international artists. . Opening hours: Tuesday - Sunday from 11.00 to 18.00; Thursday - until 21.00, tel.: 7522 7888.. 80-82 Whitechapel High Street (E1); Art. Aldgate East metro station.
Christ Church Spitalfields, NZ
Head straight north on Commercial Street and you'll soon come to this remarkable church, built in 1714 by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor with funds from Huguenot immigrants. Its massive portico is decorated with four Tuscan columns, and its unusual English Baroque tower is topped by a 69-metre (226 ft) spire. Next to the church is the building of the Spittlefields wholesale market for vegetables, fruit and flowers, which is undoubtedly worth a look, especially since they also sell clothes, works of art and handicrafts on Commercial Street (E1); Art. Aldgate East Liverpool Street metro station.
Brick Lane Market, H2
If you walk north from Christ Church along Fournier Street, you'll find a variety of shops selling spices, groceries and clothing. On Sundays, the market on this street becomes a bastion of South Asian culture in the heart of London's East End. The stalls here are filled with spices, oriental carpets, mats and various fabrics. Opening hours: Sunday from 5.00 to 14.00. Brick Lane (E1); Art. Aldgate East Shoreditch metro station.
Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood
The National Museum of Childhood delights both children and their parents. There is an amazing collection of toys, children's costumes, exhibits from ancient children's institutions, and another 50 delightful doll houses. Opening hours: Monday - Sunday from 10.00 to 17.50. Cambridge Heath Road (E2); Art. Bethnal Green metro station.
Docklands area of London. (Docklands)
The vast territory of London's docks reached its scale during the heyday of the British Empire in the 19th century, but then, after the turnover of container shipping by sea sharply decreased in the 60s, a crisis sharply set in. In the 80s The government decided to transform the London Docklands into a model urban development area. Its centerpiece was the stunning steel structure by architect Cesar Pelli - the One Canada Square Building - the tallest in the UK (246 m). A ride on the DLR to Island Gardens gives you a stunning view of another of Christopher Wren's creations, the Royal Hospital, which sits across the river in Greenwich. You can get there by walking along the pedestrian Greenwich Foot Tunnel, built in 1902. Travel by metro or Dockland Railway to the station. Canary Wharf: eastern part of Island Gardens.
Historic Maritime Greenwich
This complex of historic buildings is filled with light and space, there are parks, museums, and markets on weekends. We recommend starting your acquaintance with a tour of the stunningly beautiful building of the Royal Hospital, built by Christopher Wren. It was opened by the decision of King William and his wife Queen Mary for retired sailors, and in 1873 it was transformed into the Royal Naval College. Tourists should visit the “Painted Hall” - a former refectory, as well as a chapel. The National Museum of the Navy occupies several buildings. the central part of which is the carefully restored Queen's House - Queen's House. It was built in the 17th century according to the design of the architect Inigo Jones for the wife of King James I, Queen Mary Henrietta. We recommend visiting the Tulip Staircase ) and the painted ceilings of the royal bedchamber. In the side wings of the building there is a rich collection of ship models, paintings by marine painters, maritime symbols and navigational instruments.
Built by Christopher Wren, the old Royal Observatory building has undergone a major renovation and now houses a sound show in the Telescope Dome, as well as a presentation of the Greenwich Prime Meridian. If you are here exactly at 13.00, you can see how a red signal ball falls on the turret of the Flamsteed House building specifically so that ships passing by can check their chronometers. Nearby, the famous tea clipper Cutty Sark (since 1869) and the yacht Gipsy Mot IV, on which in 1966-1967, were installed for eternal mooring on the Thames. the famous English traveler F. Chisester traveled around the world alone. Opening hours: the museum is open daily from 10.00 to 17.00: tel.: 8858 4422 Greenwich (Greenwich, SE10): travel by Dockland Railway to station. Cutty Sark (DLR: Cutty Sark)
Dam across the Thames (Thames Barrier, MZ)
About a couple of miles down the Thames you can see the huge, gleaming steel gates of the world's largest sliding river dam. In former times, the river level could rise by almost seven meters (24 feet), but now its flow is under constant control. The visitor center provides detailed information on how the dam was built, how it works, with videos shown, a working model of the dam, and an amazing audio-visual show. Opening hours of the tourist center: April - September, Mondays - Sundays from 10.30 to 16.30. the rest of the year - from 11.00 to 15.30: the last demonstration takes place one hour before closing. Tel: 8305 4188. Unity Way, Woolwich (Unity Way, Woolwich. SE18): travel by train from the station. Charing Cross to Art. Charlton Station, also by bus or approx. 20 minutes. on foot or by metro to the station. North Greenwich.
It has often been argued that the East End is the product of XIX century; undoubtedly, the name itself only arose in the 1880s. In fact, however, east London has always existed as a demarcated, recognizable urban unit.<…>
At one time it was said that the West End gets the money and the East End gets the dirt, that the West can idle while the East has to work. However, in the first decades XIX century, the East End was not singled out as the center of the most desperate poverty and crime. Above all, it was considered a shipping center and an industrial zone - and therefore the home of the working poor. In fact, the intensity of industrial production and the level of poverty increased steadily; Dye factories, chemical factories, fertilizer factories, lamp black processing plants, glue and paraffin production, paint and bone meal were concentrated in Bow, Old Ford and Stratford. The River Li has been an industrial and active river for centuries, but in XIX century, it was greatly degraded, subjected to merciless exploitation. A match factory built on its shore made the water look and taste like urine, and a disgusting smell reigned throughout the area. In all this, of course, one can see the expansion and strengthening of trends already operating in XVI And XVII centuries; the process seemed to draw accelerating energy from itself. Between the Rivers Lea and Barking Creek the industrial districts of Canning Town, Silvertown and Beckton arose; Becton was best known for its wastewater treatment system. In short, all the dirt in London was creeping east.
And at some point in the 1880s it reached critical mass. There was an internal explosion. The East End became an "abyss" or "underworld", full of terrifying secrets and dark aspirations. More poor people crowded into this part of London than anywhere else, and their great concentration began to give rise to rumors of corruption and immorality, of savagery and unnameable vices. In his essay “A View of Murder as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas De Quincey called the area around Ratcliffe Highway, where the notorious murder of an entire family took place in 1812, “one of the most chaotic” places in the city, a “very dangerous” area where “ various crimes." That such a characterization of the East End was given by a writer seems significant: the dark fame that the area subsequently acquired was largely based on the works of journalists and novelists who felt almost obliged to use images of horror and darkness in depicting the shadow cast by London. And, of course, the main sensation that forever defined and colored the East End, creating its “face” in the eyes of the public, was a series of murders in the late summer and early autumn of 1888, attributed to Jack the Ripper. The scale of these sudden, brutal murders sharply marked the East End as a region of unparalleled brutality and ferocious debauchery, but no less significant was the fact that the crimes were committed in the darkness of fetid alleys. The fact that the killer was never caught only intensified the impression of bloodshed perpetrated by these vile streets themselves; the real Ripper seemed to be the East End itself.
All the anxieties about the city as a whole were then concentrated on one part of it, as if in some strange sense the East End had become a microcosm of the whole darkness of London. Books were written whose titles speak for themselves: “The Bitter Cry of the Dispossessed of London”, “People of the Abyss”, “London in Rags”, “In Pitch London”, “The Underworld”. George Gissing's novel, the last on this list, describes “the plague-ridden districts of east London, sweltering under a sun that only reveals the ins and outs of their vile decline; which illuminates the miles-long city of the damned, unimaginable in eras before ours; which hangs over the street swarm of nameless people, cruelly exposed by these unusually shining skies.” This is a view of the East End as hell, a view of the city as hell, and Gissing is not alone in this. The action of an autobiographical narrative XIX century, by "John Martyn, schoolmaster and poet", partly takes place in the slums of Limehouse. “Gloomy, misanthropic in its view of things, it takes a soul accustomed to the terrible visions of the night to look at these scenes of painful horror and despair with a firm and integral gaze.”<…>
Czech playwright Karel Capek, having seen the East End firsthand XX century, wrote that “this inconceivable accumulation no longer seems to be a human mass, but a geological formation... layers of soot and dust.” Faceless, dull power, a petrified mixture of labor, suffering and soot from steamship and factory smoke. The whole thing may have become a "geological formation" to such an extent that the area itself seemed to radiate waves of stupor and depression. At the end XIX century Mrs. Humphrey Ward [Mrs. Humphrey Ward (real name Mary Augusta Arnold, 1851-1920) - English writer.] wrote about the monotony of the East End: “Long rows of squat houses - invariably two-story, sometimes with a semi-basement - of the same yellowish brick smoky with the same smoke, and all the door knockers are the same shape, and all the curtains hang in the same way, and on all corners the same pubs shine from afar through the hazy air.” George Orwell had similar impressions: in 1933 he complained that the area between Whitechapel and Wapping was “quieter and duller” than the equivalent poor areas of Paris.
It's a familiar refrain, but it usually comes from outside observers who don't live here. In the autobiographical memories of the Eastenders themselves, the main place is not monotony or hardship, but entertainment, clubs, markets, local shops and local characters. The life of the neighborhood was made up of all this. In the words of one old Poplar resident, quoted in the recent history edited by W. J. Ramsay, The East End Then and Now, “It never occurred to me that my brothers and sisters and I were destitute people; If you try, you won’t regret it.” This is how not only the East End, but also all other poor areas of London are perceived by their inhabitants; obvious deprivations and monotony of life are not realized, since they do not affect the inner being of those on whom they, it would seem, should influence. In any case, when speaking about the uniformity or boredom of the East End, we must always make a significant allowance for the often noted “gaiety” and “affability” of its inhabitants. After listing the sad mysteries that can be encountered on the eastern streets, Blanchard Jerrold speaks of a “brave, strong good nature”, of a “universal readiness to laugh.” He also noted that “whoever has a joke at the ready, his basket quickly empties, and a boring merchant stands with his arms crossed and waits.”
This is how the Cockney figure arose. Originally a native of London in general, he then became, at the end XIX and the beginning XX century, more and more associated with the East End. The speech of this character is full, in the words of V. S. Pritchett, of “plaintively whining vowels and crushed consonants,” and his appearance is conspicuous by his “hard, indomitable chin.” The music halls, which were another contrast to the monotony of the East End, were to some extent involved in creating the image of this resourceful, resilient fellow. The conditions of life in Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and other similar areas disposed their inhabitants to seek opportunities for riotous fun, and evidence of this is the cheap booths and brightly lit pubs with their inseparable rudeness and frivolity. It is also significant, however, that there were more music halls in the East End than in any other part of London. Gilberts in Whitechapel, Eastern and Apollo in Bethnal Green, Cambridge in Shoreditch, Wiltons in Wellclose Square, Queens in Poplar, Eagle in Mile End Road and of course The Empire in Hackney are just the most famous of a huge number of music halls that have become as much a feature of the East End as sweatshops and church charity missions. Towards the middle XIX century, there were about one hundred and fifty music halls in an area roughly corresponding to the current administrative borough of Tower Hamlets. It couldn't be more fitting that Charles Morton, who opened the Canterbury in 1851 and is therefore nicknamed, somewhat unfairly, the "father of music halls", was born in Bethnal Green. In a sense, the eastern part of the city has simply returned to its former character. Two of London's oldest theatres, the Playhouse and the Curtain, were built in XVI century on undeveloped land in Shoreditch; the entire space outside the city walls became a place for a variety of folk entertainment, from open-air tea houses to wrestling matches and bear baiting. The music halls of the East End are thus another manifestation, along with the poor quality of housing and "smelly industries", of local continuity.
On the other hand, music halls expressed the expansion and intensification of East End life in XIX century. Many of them originated and became famous in the 1850s, including Eagle T Gardens, Effingham and Wiltons. The evening programs included small comic operas and variety shows accompanied by orchestral music. Among the speakers were the so-called lions comics- comedians who portrayed “secular lions.” Alfred Vance and George Leyburn sang songs in Cockney dialect such as "Bang Bang - Here We Come Again" and "Charlie Champagne." Vance was especially famous for his "costermonger" [ Costermonger(English) - a street seller of fruit, vegetables, fish and other things.] Cockney songs - for example, "Costermonger Joe" and "The Boy's No Miss" - where humor was easily combined with bravado. Such songs, enlivened by all the pathos and originality of a particular area, saturated with the circumstances and realities of the area as a whole, became truly folk songs of the East End. They remain powerful to this day because they have so much of a real, concrete sense of place - say, when talking about Artillery Lane or the Rosehithe Tunnel. Charles Cowborne recalled that when he performed “Two Little Black Eyes” at the Paragon Music Hall in Mile End, “the boys and girls of the Costermonger fraternity, sitting in groups side by side, arm in arm, a sip chanted the chorus with me.” The feeling of kinship between performer and audience was extremely strong. When "Lily the Fidget" Bernand sang a song about housekeeping in a poor family at the Queens Music Hall in Poplar, she touched on a familiar theme:
Yes, take halfpenny for the jar, don’t forget...
Tomorrow morning the householder will show up,
Corrosive - wow!
It was about the importance of earning a halfpenny by returning an empty jam jar to the shopkeeper. The signs of need, common to all, rose to the height where they were transformed by the universal comic-compassionate principle; It was, albeit temporary, but a victory over deprivation. One does not have to be particularly bold to say that the music halls, in a noisy and completely unecclesiastical manner, satisfied the people's need for some kind of mass with its uplifting sense of conciliarity.
In the memoirs of the beginning XX century, East End life is captured with that meticulous attention to detail that, in hindsight, suggests thrift for the unthrifted. As Horace Thorogood writes in East of Aldgate, Poplar High Street was once home to “shops of varied shape, height and size,” interspersed with houses with “polished brass numbers on their doors.” Here one could see “a parrot cage shop, a musical instrument store,” and, characteristically, “rows of small one-story houses set back several feet from the sidewalk and separated from it by iron fences.” At Shadwell the children walked barefoot and wore ragged clothes, but “it was just Irish sloppiness, they didn’t go hungry.” In the first decades XX century, East End pubs "were open from early morning until half past twelve at night." Gin cost four and a half pence for a quarter pint, “beer a penny for a half pint. Women often came at seven in the morning and stayed until three in the afternoon.” The East End was also famous for its markets - in Rosemary Lane, Spitalfields, Crisp Street, Watney Street; on the streets, “the crowded crowds of people were illuminated in the evenings by oil lamps... the whole path from Commercial Road to Cable Street could have been hit over their heads.”
During these decades, Eastenders had a fiercely defensive sense of their own specialness. The people of Limehouse called those to the west "the bridge crowd", and loyalty to their territories was the cause of quite a lot of "inbreeding". According to the book East End Then and Now, in the 1920s, in one isolated corner of Poplar off Limouth Road, “there lived about two hundred men, women and children” who were members of “at most six families; the most numerous were the Lammings, the Scanlans and the Geoffreys. Marriages, as a rule, took place within this circle... This community had its own school, two pubs and a small store where they sold everything.” It was also noted that the Chinese who lived in Pennyfields were more likely to marry girls from Hoxton than natives of Poplar. “The Poplars were against intermarriage,” wrote one observer in the 1930s. It can be assumed that, being closer to the City and the rest of London, Hoxton was not affected by this special sense of its territorial identity.
Those Eastenders who became more prosperous moved away. In particular, in XIX century, when new means of communication appeared that made it possible to travel to work from the suburbs in the City, clerks began to move to healthier places - to Chingford, to Forestgate. In ten years, Middlesex's population grew by 30.8%; in Wembley the number of residents increased by 552%, in Harrow by 275%. In the ancient centers of the East End, only the poor remained, whose numbers grew and their situation worsened. This is where the bitter resentment and feeling of the ghetto stemmed, and they have not disappeared to this day.
In human terms, the cost of goods produced here was very high. The East End woke up earlier than the rest of the city, and at dawn turned into a vast plain of smoking chimneys. More and more factories opened, using cheap labor, and in 1951 almost 10% of the city’s working population lived here. At first XX century Horace Thorogood noticed an East End "cottage" under a railway arch, where "in one upper room lived a family of six, who had to keep the window closed at all times, otherwise sparks from the trains would fly into the room and could set fire to the bedding."
Sparks sparked, and the Second World War ignited truly devastating fires here, and large areas of the East End were swept away by bombing. In Stepney, Poplar and Bethnal Green, approximately 19% of buildings have disappeared. Once again the East End had been brutalized by its industrial history, with German bombers targeting the ports, the factory areas near Lee Valley and the East End population itself as a “case in point”. The importance of East London throughout the war is illustrated by the fact that immediately after the VE Day celebrations in May 1945, the King and Queen visited Poplar and Stepney. This was, perhaps, the only way to probe the mood of people in the area, which XIX centuries was considered mysterious.
Even into the 1950s, large areas of the East End were still classified as "bomb-damaged areas"; Strange weeds grew there and children played games. As part of the temporary resettlement program, Nissen barracks [Nissen barracks are a prefabricated barracks with a semicircular roof made of corrugated iron.] and prefabricated one-story standard houses were erected; many of these dwellings were in use for twenty years or more. Other schemes for housing residents of the East End were also developed - most notably Professor Abercrombie's Greater London Project, which proposed relocating many Londoners to satellite cities outside the Green Belt. It was proposed to transfer there a large number of residents of Hackney, Stepney and Bethnal Green; however, the entire history of London suggests that such urban planning experiments can only be partially successful. Equally close attention was paid to rebuilding and redeveloping the devastated East End, as if its character could be fundamentally changed. But is it possible to erase three centuries of human life?
Despite all the changes that took place in the East End in the 1950s and 1960s, you only had to turn a corner to see a continuous terrace of standard dwellings built in the 1880s or 1890s; there were still Georgian houses and the planned "housing estates" of the 1920s and 1930s. The post-war East End was a real palimpsest. For those who cared about such things, there were dark water canals, gasworks, old footpaths, rusting bridges, breathing oblivion and decay; there were wastelands overgrown with weeds, abandoned factories, stone steps that led to nowhere. One could still find the ancient streets, lined with tiny yellow brick houses with a characteristic layout: a small common room, a corridor leading past it, from the front door directly to the kitchen with a window to the courtyard; There are two bedrooms upstairs and a basement downstairs. From Barking Road there were dozens of side streets - for example, Ladysmith Avenue, Kimberley Avenue, Mafeking Avenue, Macaulay Road, Thackeray Road, Dickens Road - where endless rows of suburban cottages were located at a slightly higher level than the terraces of Bethnal Green or Whitechapel easily retained the atmosphere of the end in the 1960s XIX century.
An example of dispersion and heterogeneity is the administrative district of Hackney. One study, pointedly titled Journey Through the Ruins: The Last Days of London and published in 1991, focuses on Dolston Lane. For Patrick Wright, who wrote the book, the symbol of administrative abandonment is “the forgotten corner municipal services building.” However, the old energy impulses are still felt, and Dolston Lane, with its factories, clothing stores and small businesses, "presents us with a motley mixture of building, commercial and industrial activity."
One of the most surprising features of the current East End is the economic vitality of modern versions of the small workshop. XIX century. Many of the major local arteries - such as Hackney Road, Rowman Road and Hoxton Street - are full of small businesses facing the street: TV repairs, newspaper sales, furniture upholstery, fruit sales, cabinet making services, and currency exchange. In the eastern part of the city, where land and real estate are historically cheaper than in the western part, vestiges of past decades still exist, slowly fading away.
There are curious corners in the East End where examples of a different continuity are visible. In Walthamstow, on Church Hill, just east of the High Street, a ghost of the countryside suddenly appears; It has a truly special atmosphere, with all the surrounding streets, including the High Street, Markhouse Road and Coppermill Road, being a typical East End suburb. However, on Church Hill the area itself seems to exude the spirit of its former rural surroundings. Many other areas retain their identity in a similar way. Barking, for example, has a rugged feel - nothing like Walthamstow; it seems that the indigenous population has remained here, and even in their posture there is a certain gloomy rigidity. The surviving part of the ancient abbey does nothing to dissipate this local atmosphere, which is powerfully maintained by the presence of the old stream, which was once the main source of livelihood for most of the local inhabitants. The area seems oddly isolated or inward-looking, and the London accent is particularly strong here. Pennyfields, home to Malays and Chinese more than a century ago, now has a fair number of Vietnamese. On Sclater Street in Shoreditch, which has been a red light district for centuries, people sell used porn literature. Green Street Market in East Ham captures the energy and spirit of medieval London. In general, the ancient commercial life of the city is now awakening (if, of course, it ever fell asleep) in such diverse areas as West Ham and Stoke Newington, Spitalfields and Leytonstone.
A walk around the East End will usually reveal one or two Georgian buildings, which may have housed some of the major mid-Victorian institutions and now house local services or welfare centres; remains of the end of the building have been preserved XIX century alongside council houses from the 1920s and 1930s; there are pubs and places where bets on horses are accepted, along with the ubiquitous non-specialist shops and a place where they sell newspapers; there are taxi agencies and establishments specializing in telephone calls to Africa or India; There are a variety of council housing blocks and estates, the oldest side by side with low-rise ones from the 1980s and nineteen-storey towers from the same period. There will certainly be an open area or park. In some parts of the East End, arches under countless train tracks are used for auto repair shops or storage of goods.
Of course, there were some serious changes. Poplar High Street was a busy thoroughfare lined with shops, stalls and grimy buildings on either side - it is now a spacious street lined with five-storey council houses, pubs and yellow brick shops. Instead of the buzz of a dense crowd and the hubbub of buying and selling, now only the intermittent noise of traffic is heard. That's how much of the East End is now. In place of motley, multi-style clusters of shops and residential buildings, “arrays” of buildings, uniform in size and texture, are now erected; The current city “highways” are replacing the endless continuous terraces of small houses. The changed parts of the city seem somehow lighter - perhaps because they have lost touch with their history. At the western end of Poplar High Street, just behind Pennyfields, Joseph Nightingale's coffee shop, which served, among other things, steak, kidneys, liver and bacon, was adjacent to James McEwan's horsemeat shop, which in turn , - to George Ayblard's barbershop; These buildings had dissimilar facades and varied in height. In recent years this corner has been developed with three-storey red brick council houses; There is a small street passing by - Saltwell Street. The former opium district of Limehouse is now home to a Chinese takeaway. In the past this was the site of Bickmore Street and there is a photograph from 1890 showing crowds of children posing outside arched window shops; on the site of this street there is now a playground.
It can be concluded that the noise and movement of life has disappeared from these places, if not from the entire East End. It may also be noted that the new or refurbished areas are similar to those in other parts of London; for example, the council housing estates of Poplar are not much different from those of Southall or Greenford. The desire for civil pacification led to the loss of local identity. But the greatest contrast of all, which stands out when comparing photographs from the 1890s and 1990s, is the decrease in the number of people on the streets. East End life retreated into homes. What caused this change - the telephone or the television - is not so important; the obvious fact is that human life on the streets has become much less colorful and less intense. However, this loss should not be overly dramatized. Yes, the east now seems bare, but it is no longer so poor; he is more withdrawn and not so humane - but he has become healthier. No one would voluntarily exchange a municipal apartment for a cell in the slums, even if there was more human community in the slums. There is no turning back.
There is an area in London called the West End. This is the most vibrant and fashionable part of London, usually associated with cultural life. Its main part is between Covent Garden and Leicester Square. It has the largest concentration of theaters and cinemas in the entire city.
I wondered why it was called that - "West End" - because in fact it is the very center of London. There is also the East End - the unattractive working-class areas where the famous Cockney dialect originated. Think about movies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
In general, London is a huge city. In area it is one and a half times the size of Moscow. The city is divided into 32 administrative districts (boroughs). Those places that are described in tourist guides are almost all located in two administrative districts located on the north bank of the Thames - Westminster and City.
The City is the historical center of London. It was here that a Roman settlement called Londinium arose in the first century AD, which then turned into a commercial, industrial and financial center. And the rulers decided to settle further away, in Westminster - around Westminster Abbey.
Therefore, Westminster is an area of palaces, parks and monuments - like this:
And the City - an area of banks and office buildings - is like this:
Once upon a time, factories and factories were located in the City. Since the wind rose in London is elongated in an easterly direction, to the east of the City - where the smoke was flying - there were the poorest areas - the East End (now these are the administrative areas of Tower Hamlets and Hackney). To the west of the City - that is, right in the middle between the City and Westminster - was the West End. It was the other way around - it was a place where the rich had fun.
So it remains - West End musicals, West End theatres, etc.
Our Wimbledon, by the way, is located in the administrative area of Merton. Look on the map in the southwestern part of the city.
Conventionally, the boundaries of the East End can be defined as follows: the area is bounded by the City of London wall in the western part, the Thames on the south, another river called the Lea on the east and Victoria Park on the north.
A little history
Historically, the East End, which occupies the eastern part of London, was the complete opposite of the luxurious West End. This difference is beautifully and accurately described in the works of Dickens and other writers of the Industrial Revolution.
The area was an industrial zone, with squalid slums where emigrants settled. Even the advent of the subway at the end of the 19th century, which strengthened connections with the city center and its western and eastern parts, did not help the East End get rid of the name of the “working” district. However, since the 80s of the last century, the area began to attract a wealthy public.
Once industrial buildings, as well as docks, acquired a new life at this time - pubs and restaurants began to open in them, which soon became some of the most fashionable in London. The Docklands quarter was allocated for expensive apartments with excellent views of the Thames. And nearby the Canary Wharf business center has grown up, where life does not stop around the clock.
East End today
Hoxton Street and Liverpool Street are by far the most culturally informed streets in England's capital.
The east end of London
It is home to many artists and painters, as well as an impressive number of art galleries, museums, cafes and restaurants. However, a somewhat gloomy situation still remains. The East End is the East End.
The number of emigrants has not decreased at all. Literally a stone's throw from Canary Wharf, behind the Odeon cinema, there is an Indian quarter, once in which you can hardly understand where you are - either in India, or even in England.
The East End also boasts markets that have gained fame throughout the UK. The market, located on Petticoat Lane, sells shoes and clothing. The quality, of course, varies greatly, but you can always find something suitable and at an affordable price. The market is open only on Sunday. The Spytafields market also sells clothes, but along with modern models you can buy retro ones here. In addition, you can buy antiques and groceries here.
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East End of London
The remarkable architectural ensembles of Hampton Court and Greenwich Hospital, the Palace of Westminster, Chelsea Hospital and many other buildings worthily adorn the Thames, this most important river in England. However, the world famous London docks and port, located in the eastern part of the city, brought it the greatest fame. Through the entire history of their development and every day of their busy lives, they are connected with the huge area of London, the East End.
East end
Even a relatively cursory acquaintance with only the main attractions of London requires a lot of effort and time. Ancient monuments, outstanding buildings and entire architectural ensembles, first-class works of art, excellent parks, squares and sparkling, noisy central streets - there are many amazing things everywhere that deserve close attention. However, no matter how amazing the Tower and the City, Westminster and the West End are, all this is clearly not enough to say that the acquaintance with the huge capital of the British Isles has taken place. You need to see with your own eyes another important London district, where there are no ancient cathedrals and amazing palaces, almost no greenery and magnificent squares, but there are many other interesting and instructive things that provide rich food for thought and allow you to see London from a different perspective. We are talking about the eastern part of the city, the “eastern end” - the East End. Getting to know it will not only give you new impressions that are different from those previously experienced, but will also allow you to understand and appreciate what you see in the business City and the rich West End in a completely different way. In short, without visiting the East End, you cannot yet consider that you have seen London.
The East End is an unusually large industrial and working-class area to the east of the City, centered around the docks and many of the businesses associated with them. Among the districts belonging to the East End itself, Poplar and Stepney stand out - the oldest industrial areas of London. It goes without saying that this does not mean that all or almost all industrial enterprises are concentrated only in the East End. There are quite a lot of them in other parts of the city, and the people working at these enterprises are scattered over a vast territory. That is why there are two concepts expressed by the same name, the East End - the working districts in the dock area as a geographical concept and the whole of working London from a social point of view.
The history of the East End goes back to London's distant past. The rapid industrial development of England in the 16th century turned London into the largest trading center through which, primarily thanks to the Thames, the majority of goods produced in the country were sold. All this required the creation of a huge merchant fleet. A large number of warships were built both to protect merchant ships and for naval operations in the wars that were fought at this time. After the defeat of the “Invincible Armada” in 1588, England, having ousted its former rival Spain from the seas, further expanded the construction of its fleet. The first dry dock was created in 1599 in Rotherhithe. A few years later, in 1612–1614, the East India Company docks appeared in Blackwall. Around them, on the north bank of the Thames, the working-class district of Poplar begins to grow. Intensive construction of the docks during the Industrial Revolution gives rise to the Stepney area.
Transportation, loading and unloading of goods, of course, required a huge number of workers. However, the docks themselves, as well as the numerous rope, weaving and other workshops associated with the construction and equipment of ships, needed even more workers. A huge number of artisans poured into London. These were peasants and rural artisans driven from their lands by enclosures, craftsmen from Flanders, France and other countries, persecuted for their religious beliefs and seeking refuge in Protestant, “tolerant” England. Historians note an almost catastrophic growth in the city's population. If in 1530 about fifty thousand people lived in London and only thirty-five thousand of them lived in the City, then by 1605 the capital already had about two hundred twenty-five thousand inhabitants. The old city, of course, could not accommodate all this human flow, and, in fact, did not want to do so. The City jealously guarded its privileges, and numerous government decrees prohibited settling, first within two kilometers of the City walls, and then this distance was increased even further.
Although the laws adopted were not always effective, nevertheless, a huge number of people were placed in exceptionally difficult living conditions. Living in poor neighborhoods, the majority of them ended up in bondage to their owners, because according to the English laws of that time, homeless people and those without work were subject to punishment and prison or houses for the poor, which differed little from prison.
On the streets of the East End
So in the 16th century, not far from the City, mainly to the east of it, the East End began to take shape, the name of which would become a household name for the entire working London.
Especially a lot of various types of industrial enterprises were built in the East End in the 18th century. And if dockers settled close to docks, piers and marinas, then workers employed at these enterprises naturally tried to find housing also not far from their place of work. Even now, two hundred years later, in an era of high technological development, the transport problem for multimillion-dollar London with its unusually large territory is one of the most acute. And at that time, having a job for a simple worker meant living right there, not far from the place of work. That is why one of the very first and most important signs that determine the face of today’s East End is the alternation and constant combination of enterprises and residential buildings in the same blocks. There is hardly any need for comment on how sad this neighborhood is for residents of the East End.
For the most part, the East End is low-rise. Many kilometers of streets are lined with two-story brick houses, blackened by soot and smoke, completely identical. Their dull monotony in dozens of blocks cannot but depress. There are also many apartment buildings with damp courtyards, wells, and open iron galleries, which serve not only as the entrance to the apartments, but also as a common place for drying clothes. Almost all of the East End neighborhoods are completely devoid of greenery, and this in a city that is famous for its huge and truly magnificent parks located in the center. The absence of gardens and squares further worsens the living conditions of the population of the East End, depriving them of rest and joy, making these areas dreary, especially during rainy and foggy times or on dry, hot summer days.
East End houses
Many emigrants have always settled in the East End. A characteristic feature of the entire region is the presence of many neighborhoods almost entirely populated by immigrants from one country. These neighborhoods usually live in their own way, preserving the customs and morals, language and religion of their people. Only most often these colonies of emigrants live in even worse conditions, crowded and much poorer than other inhabitants of the East End.
Quite a lot is said and written about the slums of the East End in England itself. But it should be noted that slum areas, where the poor and low-paid workers and employees live, are located not only in the East End, but also in many other areas of the city. When railways invaded the life of London in the 1830s–1850s, their stations and depots were built in different parts of the city, including the central areas. In the immediate vicinity of Bloomsbury with its British Museum, Euston Station was built in 1836-1849, King's Cross in 1851, St. Pancras in 1868-1879, and in 1850 a station appeared a little north of Hyde Park. Paddington. Just like dockers and workers in the East End, railway workers and office workers settled near their place of work and lived in the same poorly equipped houses as in the East End, often in the depths of “prosperous” neighborhoods, under the cover of their front facades. So slum areas began to appear to the west of the City. One of the worst slum areas, St. Giles, described by Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England, was located in the very center of the West End, close to respectable Oxford Street and Regent Street. It is interesting that even a century earlier, the outstanding English artist William Hogarth repeatedly chose St. Giles as the setting for his incriminating engravings. Charles Dickens wrote about the same area in Bleak House.
Historically, this area is the antipode of the West End. Even in English textbooks, it was customary to write that the West End was the center of the rich and entertainment, and the East End (located east of the City) was an industrial center, an area of slums for the poor, workers and immigrants. But since the 80s, the East End began to gain popularity among wealthy audiences. In former industrial buildings and docks, pubs and restaurants appeared, which became some of the most fashionable in London. In the Docklands area (accessible via the Docklands Light Railway) there are expensive apartments with access to the Thames, and nearby the new Canary Warf financial center with the offices of global companies located in skyscrapers. True, unlike another business center - the City, Canary Warf does not freeze for the night. The nightlife here is as active as the financial one.
The streets of Hoxton and Liverpool are among the most advanced in London. Artists live here, there are art galleries, fashionable cafes, and restaurants. Although these places still look rather gloomy.
Yes, despite all the changes, the East End is the East End. A huge number of emigrants (legal and illegal) live here, sometimes in absolutely unacceptable conditions. This is also an area of contrasts. So, next to the Canary Warf financial center there is an Indian quarter (across the road behind the Odeon cinema), and when you get there, you can hardly understand what country you are in - India or still England. Many immigrants from other countries made the East End their home.
The East End markets are famous. For example, the market on Petticoat Lane Market (open on Sunday) specializes in the sale of clothing and shoes. The quality varies greatly, but you can find interesting things at inexpensive prices. At the Spitalfields Market you can buy clothes (retro and modern), antiques, and groceries.
Traditionally, someone born in the East End is called a cockney, although a more strict definition of a cockney is someone born to the sound of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow in the City. Nowadays, Cockney is also the name given to the accent spoken by Londoners. It is characterized by changing some sounds or discarding them, for example, hi will sound like /i:/, head like /ed/. Features of the Cockney language are wonderfully shown in the play “Pygmalion” by B. Shaw and the musical “My Fair Lady”.
The East End also houses: the Docklands Museum, the National Museum of Childhood (in the poorest part of London, Bethnal Green), galleries of contemporary artists on Hoxton Square, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery.
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