Not only were housing conditions unhealthily unpleasant, the streets, waterways and workplaces were contaminated with waste and by-products of both people and their trades. Yet Samuel Pepys could still write, well into the seventeenth century, of enjoying visits to a pastoral east London, with friendly inns near the Lea, and of his pleasure at being the guest of his friend Sir William Rider at his mansion, Bethnal House, in Bethnal Green. It was to Rider’s home that Pepys escaped with his most-valued possessions, including his diary, during the Great Fire of London in 1666.
It was not until the effects and demands of the Industrial Revolution that the spread of the slums would result in the East End coming to resemble nothing less than a squalid hell, where people did what they could, or had to, to get by. That would not be experienced in all its wretchedness for several generations, but the embryonic pattern that had first emerged centuries earlier was now set, and would last for centuries: finance would be the business of the City; government and the retailing of luxury goods would be centred in the west; and the manufacturing, processing and finishing trades, in all their unpleasantness and with all their concomitant dangers, would be sited in the industrial quarter of the east.
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Towards the end of the sixteenth century, a lingering agricultural depression, affecting much of rural England, resulted in an influx of desperate farm workers flooding into London’s East End, seeking employment. As well as these domestic newcomers, there were increasing numbers of immigrants from overseas. A survey carried out for Queen Elizabeth in 1571, when the population of the whole of London was estimated at just 80–90,000 people, put the numbers of foreigners living in Stepney alone at around 700.
The petitioners of the queen, concerned about the potential problems of overcrowding, had been right and, regardless of matters of safety and comfort, the proximity of so many people meant that diseases could more easily spiral into epidemic proportions.
By the second half of the seventeenth century, the situation was becoming critical and, when the Great Plague took hold, almost 100,000 Londoners died during the terrible winter of 1664–5, when even the extreme cold, which froze the Thames, did not kill the contagion. Plague hospitals – the dreaded pest houses – were built, including one in Stepney, but even these were soon filled.
Spring and early summer saw unusually high temperatures and the death rate soared. Those who were able to, abandoned London for what they hoped was the safety of the countryside. Servants left behind by their masters survived by looting, or found work driving the carts full of dead to the plague pits which had been dug beyond the city limits – just as they had been during the Black Death of the fourteenth century, and in Roman times before that.
If plague was discovered in a household, all present were locked inside for forty days, during which time they would either die or survive to eventually emerge from their enforced quarantine. With the exceptionally hot weather and the standards of seventeenthcentury hygiene, it is hard to imagine how anyone survived.
Towards the end of 1665, the death rate finally dipped and, despite the appalling stench of putrefaction – the promise that all communal burial sites would be limed was never fulfilled – the situation was deemed sufficiently safe for the court to return to St James’s.
The population of the East End, having mostly escaped the devastations of the Great Fire of 1666, began to recover and, by 1700, the residents of Stepney – the parish which now included Mile End Old and New Towns, Spitalfields, Poplar, Bethnal Green, Bow, Limehouse and Ratcliff – numbered in the region of 50,000 people.
Accommodation for the labouring classes was more scarce than ever. Marshland, previously considered uninhabitable, was drained and built upon, some of it, even in this period, with fine homes for wealthy merchants and ship owners, but housing for the increasing ranks of workers was the growth area.
There were little, if any, controls and no overall plan, as cheap, insanitary workers’ housing, with no separation between industrial and residential use, was hurriedly erected as the demand grew and profits rose. The birth of what would eventually become known in the nineteenth century as the ‘City of Dreadful Night’ had happened.
From a population of less than 100,000 in the mid-sixteenth century, the suburbs east of the City had, in a little over 100 years, grown to approximately a quarter of a million, with many of the communities now of sufficient stature to warrant the building of their own neighbourhood churches. But there were still pockets of the East End relatively untouched by urban development. Even the very heart of the East End could, up until the eighteenth century, boast a fine nursery, noted for the excellence of its fruits, sited behind the lively Whitechapel High Street, on land bounded by what are now Old Montague Street, Brick Lane and Greatorex Street. There was also an impressive windmill and a ducking pond close to Brady Street, a facility which was apparently in ‘much request for curing shrewish wives, drunkards and other obnoxious persons’; and the country path leading to the hospital of St Mary’s in Spitalfields was still referred to as Hog Lane.
The capital continued to prosper, bolstered by the growth of English sea power and international commerce. Skilled craft workers, both local and foreign, were tempted to the capital by the new opportunities, with the busy port providing the point of entry for many. There were no restrictions on where the arrivals might live, but rules which operated in the City, with its strict guild system, meant the newcomers usually chose to settle outside the walls.
The Sephardic Jews elected to reside in Spitalfields, and also in the smart new developments around Goodman’s Fields and Mansell Street in Whitechapel. Here they dwelt alongside the German community, one of the oldest immigrant groups in London, who had lived close to the Thames from the earliest times. The Germans had, supposedly, been expelled from the country by Elizabeth I, but during James I’s reign immediately after there were still an estimated 4,000 Germans in London alone.
The descendants of the original Jewish settlers had been driven out, in their case successfully, by Edward I in 1290. They were, however, encouraged to return by Cromwell for the financial services they could provide. This invitation, contrasting with the intolerance they were experiencing in Spain and Portugal, saw many Sephardic Jews coming to England during the period of the Commonwealth.
The London community established their first place of worship since their thirteenth-century banishment close to the City boundary in a house in Cree Church Lane in December 1656, and their own cemetery – the Bethahaim Velho – behind what is now 243 Mile End Road in 1657. According to the 1695 census list, forty-one years after Cromwell’s death there were approximately 600 Jews living in the east London parishes.
Soon after the arrival of the first Sephardim, Ashkenazi Jews, from central and eastern Europe, also began arriving in London. On the whole, they were less affluent and sophisticated than their Sephardic co-religionists and, rather than conducting financial business, they took up small-scale manufacturing and street trading, establishing a lively and growing community around Petticoat Lane, an area which became well known for the second-hand clothing trade, which they dominated.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the Ashkenazi community was of sufficient size to warrant its own place of worship, the Duke’s Place Synagogue, and to have its own burial ground. But even this fast growth would seem negligible when compared with the two major moments of Jewish immigration in the nineteenth century.
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Spitalfields did not attract only Jewish settlers; it was an area, along with Soho, favoured by the Huguenot silk weavers, who generally, at this time, prospered, although their fortunes were to fluctuate.
Silk weaving was established in the East End before their arrival, with both local and foreign craft workers involved in the trade, but it was with the arrival of the Huguenots that the district became renowned for the manufacture of fine silks and brocades.
These predominantly urban, French-speaking weavers were, like the Je
wish newcomers, fleeing religious persecution, and, being Protestants, were attracted to London by Henry VIII’s split from Rome.
The Huguenots assimilated comparatively quickly. Such was the extent of their intermarriage with the host community that many modern family-history researchers seeking their East End roots will find at least one Huguenot blood-line in their ancestry.
The French refugees continued to arrive – it was the Huguenots who introduced the word refugee into the English language. Some of them were well off, being master weavers with thriving businesses and grand lifestyles, but the exiles came from across the whole social spectrum. At the end of the seventeenth century, Mile End New Town was created – causing Mile End itself, a place with comparatively fine houses, to become known as Mile End Old Town – as a hamlet within Stepney to accommodate the poorer of the textile workers. The first of 650 homes were built around Greatorex Street.
Regardless of personal circumstances, the Spitalnelds weavers became famed for their production of luxurious materials, elegant cravats and waistcoats, but the fashion for what were considered their superior talents made them unpopular with the established community of weavers, who resented the competition.
Huguenots did not confine themselves to the silk industry. They were renowned gold- and silversmiths, and excelled in areas as diverse as clock- and hat-making, bookbinding and wig-making, the manufacture of scientific instruments and other technological innovation. The flourishing economy of the seventeenth century, with its growing class of people able to afford and wanting high-quality goods and services, meant their skills were in great demand.
Not all were to excel as the Courtaulds, of the textile dynasty, had done, or the Dollonds, whose name is remembered in the Dollond and Aitchison optical business. Some who made less of an impression on their new country were eventually to suffer greatly.
As the weavers’ skills became obsolete, in the face of advancing technology and competition from new factories in the north of England, there was a constantly growing pool of labour swollen by new immigrants, such as those from Ireland, all trying to survive in the now poverty-stricken East End, all prepared to work for lower wages. The once-sought-after weavers protested, their grievances spilling over into anger and eventual rioting, and they became, like so many immigrant groups before and after them during tough economic times, targets of threats and violence. The tragic result of one altercation was two men being sentenced to hang outside the Salmon and Ball pub in Bethnal Green.
But their influence on the East End had been great. Evidence of their transitory dominance can still be seen in their elegantly proportioned homes, designed to let in the maximum light for working on their handlooms, and one particular building, on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street – itself a Huguenot name – is often cited as the physical embodiment of the waves of immigrants who have arrived in the East End, settled into a community and then left, making way for the next group.
Originally a Huguenot chapel, built by the French Protestants in 1743, the building was taken over in the 1790s by the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews; ten years after that it was serving as a Methodist chapel, a use which continued for eighty years; then, in 1897, it was reconsecrated, this time as the Great Synagogue for the Machzike Hadath community of eastern European Jews, who had fled the pogroms and were now working in the sweated garment trades. In 1976 the building found yet another group of worshippers, this time in the local Bangladeshi community, who bought the building and restored it to become what is now known as the London Jamme Masjid, a religious focus in a lively neighbourhood of shops, restaurants and galleries.
It is not only buildings and names that were left by the Huguenots; there are continuing reminders of their passions and pastimes, such as their fondness for growing and displaying flowers and for keeping songbirds and pigeons. An article in The Day of Rest, the Illustrated Journal of Sunday Reading dated 15 August 1874 regretted that, with little interest coming from young people in learning how to use the weavers’ traditional tools and methods:
London will remember her lost weavers only by the famous livestock market in Club Row – a market created by the love of all the French exiles for birds, dogs and pets of all kinds… [They] were all passionately fond of gardening, each having, if possible, a small garden – if only a patch of flowers – attached to his house. Another French attribute was noticeable, there being hardly one dwelling without its pigeon-house.
These traditions have lasted. George Bernard Shaw could write of the admired ‘cockney art of carpet gardening’, which he saw in the Victoria Park of his time, and today pigeon lofts, aviaries and colourful, neatly planted back gardens can still be seen around the housing estates which are now home to many east Londoners. But the majority of cockneys were to remain in the East End for a few more generations yet.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, London, with its growing class of wealthy financiers and industrialists, was entering a period of massive economic expansion. Trade trebled in volume and the capital had become the busiest port in the world.
Housing developments for the rich in London’s West End meant a demand in the luxury market for fashionable fittings, decorating and furnishings. There was some filtering down of wealth to specialist tradespeople and suppliers of the most exclusive goods, but the poorest experienced no such benefit and continued to suffer. As the population nearly doubled, rising from approximately 490,000 in 1700 to 950,000 in 1800, overcrowding and subsequent public health problems were now permanent features of their lives.
Some efforts were made to improve conditions, with measures such as better sanitation and the hard-surfacing of roads with cobbles, but these were directed towards the more affluent homes, districts and main thoroughfares. Conditions in the meaner areas continued to be of the most base quality, streets were stinking, congested and noisy, with the marshy areas closest to the river being the most unhealthy and unpleasant of all.
Travellers along the eastern route out of the City would have experienced the foul congestion of all the traffic servicing the trades and businesses, the herds of abattoir-bound beasts leaving their filth behind them, and all the other dirt and pollution in this overcrowded quarter. In the midst of all the commotion and chaos, they would have seen the Whitechapel hay market.
In existence until 1928, the hay market continued to operate as a relic of a time when the alleys and courts which peeled off the High Street were still serving their original purpose as the yards of coaching inns and taverns. Despite the area’s many poor residents, they did a thriving trade on the lively thoroughfare, with its many shops and houses and, according to Dickens’s Sam Weller, its ranks of oyster stalls that fed the poor:
‘It’s a wery remarkable circumstance that poverty and oysters go together… [there is] an oyster stall to every half-dozen houses. Blessed if I don’t think that ven a man’s wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in desperation.’
Whitechapel was also, at this time, beginning to earn itself a reputation for being the home of not just growing numbers of poor but also of less than desirable elements of society, who could disappear in the myriad lanes and turnings which lay behind its High Street facade.
By the Victorian period, Whitechapel had become notorious: a thieves’ kitchen, a refuge of whores and a place of shameful public exhibition of ‘freaks’ such as the unfortunate John Merrick, the Elephant Man, and the other hapless souls exhibited in cheap sideshows.
During this spreading urbanization, Bethnal Green was promoted from the status of hamlet to being a parish in its own right. It was still an area with three virtually separate identities, divided as it was between market gardeners, continuing with their almost rustic way of life; forbidding tenements, in which resided the poorest weavers and workers without the resources to live elsewhere; and even the occasional enclave of wealth, hints of the locality’s former glories. But, as with much else that happened in the industrial
history of the East End, once it started, the growth of Bethnal Green was quick and largely indiscriminate. By the end of the century it had taken on yet another identity, that of a district blighted not only by overcrowded slums and poverty but by a criminal fraternity as bad as those of the rookeries around Petticoat Lane and Hounds-ditch.
Further east still, Bow and Bromley, with their proximity to the Lea and the open countryside of Essex, preserved their village natures well into the nineteenth century, although neither was devoid of industry, with some of the most notable trades being cloth fulling and dyeing, brewing and distilling.
Across the border of the River Lea in Essex, the land in Newham was, in the eighteenth century, predominantly put to agricultural use and was renowned for its fine market gardens. Outsiders who found their way there were usually itinerant labourers – often poverty-stricken agricultural workers from Ireland or the outer reaches of the impoverished Essex countryside, displaced by the introduction of the new agricultural machinery – looking for stop-gap, seasonal employment at harvest time, or other casual work that would earn them enough for a bed for the night and something to satisfy their hunger.
Back upriver, the Thames-side, as opposed to Lea-side, districts were expanding as the import and export trade centred on the Port of London intensified.
Port business was originally carried out above the Tower, with the only dock being the one belonging to the East India Company at Blackwall, and that was used solely for building and repairs. Ships discharged their goods, sometimes directly, though most often via lighters, on to the so-called legal quays, but the escalating size and volume of traffic, and the lack of security on the river, made it necessary to create more adequate, and secure, facilities further downstream to the east.
My East End Page 4
