Motley Talk about the East End
The East End of London. From fields & monasteries to slums & poverty, to becoming an expensive, funky district.
Dear Motley officers, crew & friends, Londoners refer to the different parts of London as: The City, North London, West London, South London, Central London (often called the West End), and the East End. Most Londoners stick to one part of London and rarely move to another area.
For instance, I lived for many years in the centre of London. Then I tried South London, but it did not suit me, so I swiftly moved to West London where I have lived ever since. Like most Londoners, I visit the centre (“going into town”) and occasionally go to the City. But to me, and most Londoners, the river is the great divide, and we rarely visit the opposite side of the river - apart from the South Bank, which is seen as part of the centre. As for the East End, I don’t know it at all, and I expect most East Enders rarely visit West London. Time to find out more about the East End.
Mayfair was and is considered the rich area of London, and the East End was the poor area of London, notorious for its poverty and overcrowding. But the East End most people think about started with Victorian industrialisation in the 19th Century and ended after World War II. The East End starts at the walls of The Tower of London – but then it is a rather fluid area depending on who you talk to.
Before the 16th Century London was confined within the city walls and to the east of the city there were farms and flour mills that supplied the city, some fishermen, monasteries and marshland. The development of the East End came about because of the river and the wind.
The River. The Thames had brought trading ships into London since Roman times; the ships sailed into small docks near the city. But the larger ships of the 19th Century needed bigger, safer docks. Building docks just below the city, to the east of London, was convenient for the transfer of goods, and kept the noise away from rich Londoners in their West End houses. The docks were created by draining low-lying marshes, which also allowed housing to be built in the area. Workers streamed into the East End, to work in the docks and the shipbuilding industries that had started in the area. There were also huge warehouses built along the river, to store the goods.
The wind. Because the wind usually blew downstream, away from the City and towards the sea, the East End was also considered a good place to build factories. These heavy industries were usually noisy, smelly and polluted the area; they included metal working, ship building, tanning (preparing leather), breweries, slaughterhouses, match producers, lime kilns, and soap & candle works.
In most cities immigrants by necessity move to the poorest part of the city. In this time period there were many South Asian & Chinese sailors, employed on ships of the East India Company, who settled in the East End; the first Indian restaurant was opened in London in 1810. The Irish had been coming to London since the Middle Ages, but the numbers increased after the Great Famine in Ireland from 1845 to 1849. German immigrants arrived because of civil unrest and economic hardship in Germany. Then many Russian Jews, who suffered terrible persecutions in the 19th Century, emigrated to London. And of course, there were other immigrants from all over the world, especially seamen, arriving and continually adding to the over population of the East End.
The East End was not a good place to be. London was overwhelmed by the Industrial Revolution, and the five million folk who flocked to the city in the 19th Century. Even for those with means, the city struggled to provide houses and services. For the poor, crammed into hovels in the East End, with high unemployment in the area and without welfare state support, life was dire.
The slums were terrible places with badly constructed, damp, vermin riddled buildings, with no amenities such as a bathroom. And besides, the houses were packed with people, often several families in one room. Everyone lived on the streets, in all weathers.
“Roads were unmade, often mere alleys, houses small and without foundations, subdivided and often around unpaved courts. An almost total lack of drainage and sewerage was made worse by the ponds formed by the excavation of brickearth. Pigs and cows in back yards, noxious trades like boiling tripe, melting tallow, or preparing cat's meat, and slaughter houses, dustheaps, and 'lakes of putrefying night soil' added to the filth”. London Labour & London Poor (1851) by Henry Mayhew.
Henry Mayhew was a journalist and social reformer. His four books were a thorough and influential survey of London’s poor, who were mostly based in the East End.
Mayhew categorised the population as those who would work, those who could not work, those who would not work, those who did not need to work, prostitutes – a lengthy worldwide history of prostitution (he was clearly fascinated), thieves, swindlers and beggars.
Men and women who worked in the docks or at other gainful employment were not well paid, had terrible, unsafe working conditions and uncertain prospects, but while employed they had a regular income. The many who did not have employment tried to make a living in a huge variety of ways. The streets of London, and particularly the East End, were heaving with people in the 19th Century.
There were street sellers, of everything you could possibly imagine. Jews were well known to be sellers of second-hand clothing. And street ‘buyers’:
“The bone-picker and rag-gatherer may be known at once by the greasy bag which he carries on his back. Usually, he has a stick in his hand, and this is armed with a spike or hook, for the purpose of more easily turning over the heaps of ashes or dirt that are thrown out of the houses and discovering whether they contain anything that is saleable at the rag-and-bottle or marine-store shop”1.
Then there were street performers, dancers, artists, musicians and singers. People who ran street games like ‘pick the card’, often with a gambling aside. Customers could buy goods, or have them made or mended, all on the streets by poor folk who could not afford to rent a shop.
There were street labourers, such as the ‘nightmen’, so named because they were only allowed to work after midnight. They emptied the cesspools of human waste. A ‘holeman’ got into the cesspit and filled a bucket, which the ‘ropeman’ pulled up so the ‘tubmen’ could load it into a cart, which was driven to a city dump that accepted waste, stored in fields and sold as fertiliser to farmers, or dumped in the river.
The knocker-upper would tap a long stick on a bedroom window to wake the occupants (who woke the knocker-upper?). The knocker-upper was especially important for dockworkers, who had no alarm clocks and whose working hours changed according to the tides.
The street advertisers wore bill-boards to advertise, and there were also stencillers, who would write adverts on walls and pavements. Street servants, among them the cab drivers and boys, would hold the horses if a carriage stopped, and street-porters. Costermongers sold goods, especially fruit and vegetables, from handcarts.
There were many children roaming the streets, trying to survive by selling the leavings of adult traders, but often starving. Their parents were too poor to support them, but they were usually orphans.
Though the Victorians did not have a welfare state they were great philanthropists. Sadly, they were also very judgemental. Mayhew categories the 37 charities (also called agencies) as:
Curative Agencies. Religion “by its restraining influence and converting power, presents the only true antidote, and the only safe barrier to the existence or progress of crime”. The ‘Institution for reading aloud the Word of God in the open air’ sold bibles from open air carriages.
Preventative Agencies, for the “removal of peculiar forms of temptation …[and] causes of vice.” The National Temperance Society advocated complete abstinence from alcohol, but they failed to impose national prohibition in England, as in the USA.
Repressive and Punitive Agencies, “seek to diminish its [criminal] influence, or curtail its power by the application of legal provisions and compulsory measures”. The Society for the Suppression of Vice tried to close disorderly houses (pubs & brothels) and ensure fortune-tellers were punished.
Reformative Agencies included “all such measures as are employed to effect an external change of character, and render those, who are vicious and depraved, [to become] honest and respectable members of society”. In London there were 21 homes providing accommodation for about 1,200 inmates (usually ‘fallen’ women who were prostitutes or alcoholics). Note that men were not considered ‘fallen’ when they used prostitutes. Many of the houses were little better than prisons, where women were preached at to reform, and made to do menial work, but they were given shelter and food.
Things improved in the 20th Century, though there were still slums and high unemployment. The East End was badly bombed in the second world war, in an attempt to destroy the docks and industries in the area. After the war many residents of the East End were moved to new housing estates because of the bomb damage to their homes, and to clear the slums. In her book, ‘My East End: Memories of Life in Cockney London’, Gilda O'Neill talked to the older East Enders who remembered:
“We had one another. And you can’t beat that. We were all in the same boat, see, you had bugger all, and you didn’t care what the neighbours had, cos they had nothing - same as you. But if one of you needed help, they were there. You could depend on one another. We lived in rows of terraced houses … wedged close together. We were much less private than we are today, but it built in us a feeling of comfortable community.”
When the East Enders were moved into new housing estates they finally had the bathrooms and other amenities we now take for granted, but it broke up that close-knit community.
From the 1960s the docks started to close as the new, huge, container ships used the deeper docks near the mouth of the river. The warehouses were turned into loft style apartments, artists opened galleries and the East End is now expensive and fashionable.
The illustrations by French artist Gustave Doré are from a book called ‘London: A Pilgrimage’ published in 1872. Doré was commissioned to produce an illustrated record of the ‘shadows and sunlight’ of London. The illustrations show daytime scenes, but there is little sunlight, as the fog & pollution make it seem like nighttime. You can see more of his illustrations on the British Library site.
As always, any links are provided to give the reader more information. I do not make any money from these links. Where possible permissions have been sought for the use of images and text, unless they are in the Public Domain. If there is an issue with copyright, please contact me. I am an amateur historian covering a wide range of subjects. I do careful research using secondary sources (books, articles, videos and a little bit of Wikipedia). If there are any mistakes I apologise and please let me know.
London Labour & London Poor (1851) by Henry Mayhew.
My favourite post so far. The impact of slum clearances is very interesting - lots of lessons to learn about the unintended consequences of policy decisions.