For all the redevelopments of the East End in the 1950s and 1960s, you had only to turn a corner to encounter a row of terraced housing erected in the 1880s or the 1890s; there were still Georgian houses, as well as laid-out “estates” from the 1920s and the 1930s. The postwar East End was a palimpsest of its past. For those who cared to look for such things, there were the dark canals and the gasworks, old pathways and rusting bridges, all with the exhalation of forgetfulness and decay; there were patches of waste ground covered with weeds and litter, as well as deserted factories and steps seeming to lead nowhere. The old streets of tiny yellow-brick houses were still to be found, with their characteristic pattern of a small front parlour and a passage leading past it from the street door straight into the kitchen, which looked out upon a small yard; two small bedrooms above, and a cellar beneath. Along the Barking Road were scores of side-streets-Ladysmith Avenue, Kimberley Avenue, Mafeking Avenue, Macaulay Road, Thackeray Road and Dickens Road form one sequence-in which row upon row of suburban villas, albeit one grade higher than the terraces of Bethnal Green or Whitechapel, effortlessly retained into the 1960s the atmosphere of the late nineteenth century.
The borough of Hackney epitomises sprawl and heterogeneity. One account, evocatively titled A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London, published in 1991, took Dalston Lane as its centre of enquiry; here the author, Patrick Wright, discovered “a street corner of forgotten municipal services” as a token of civic neglect. Yet its old energies remain, and “Dalston Lane is a jumble of residential, commercial and industrial activities” with factories, clothiers, shops and small businesses.
One of the most surprising aspects of the contemporary East End is the extent to which it has maintained its economic life in the equivalent of the nineteenth-century small workshop; a number of the main thoroughfares, from the Hackney Road to the Roman Road and Hoxton Street, are populated by store-front businesses ranging from television repairers to newsagents, upholsterers to fruiterers, cabinet-makers to money-exchangers. In the East, where historically land and property have been less valuable than in the West, the relics of lost decades linger and are commonly allowed to decay.
There are curious regions of the East End where other continuities may be glimpsed. In Walthamstow, just beyond the High Street to the east, some spectral image or atmosphere of the countryside suddenly pervades Church Hill; this is indeed a peculiar sensation since all the streets close to it, including the High Street, Markhouse Road and Coppermill Road, embody the characteristic patterns of the East End suburbs. Nevertheless the old presence of a once rural neighbourhood seems to issue from the territory itself. Many areas in that sense preserve their identity. There is a harshness about Barking, for example, which makes it dissimilar from Walthamstow; here a native population seems to have maintained its presence, with a kind of bleakness or hardness of attitude. The survival of part of the ancient abbey in no way diminishes that atmosphere, which is powerfully sustained by the presence of the old creek from which the majority of the population once earned their living. It remains a strangely isolated or self-communing neighbourhood, where the London accent seems peculiarly thick. In Pennyfields, where the Malays and Chinese dwelled more than a century before, there is now a large population of Vietnamese. Second-hand pornography is sold in Sclater Street, Shoreditch, in what has always been a red-light district. The market of Green Street, in East Ham, recalls the energy and spirit of medieval London itself. In fact the ancient mercantile life of the city has been reawakened (if indeed it ever really slept) in areas as diverse as West Ham and Stoke Newington, Spitalfields and Leytonstone.
A typical journey around an East End neighbourhood will disclose one or two Georgian houses with perhaps some large mid-Victorian establishments, now turned into council offices or social security centres; there will be remnants of late nineteenth-century housing together with council housing of the 1920s and 1930s; pubs and betting offices, together with the ubiquitous small general store and newsagent; mini-cab offices, as well as shops specialising in long-distance telephone calls to Africa or India; a variety of council blocks, the oldest estates alongside low-rise estates of the 1980s and the nineteen-storey tower blocks of the same period. There will be an open space, or a park. In some parts of the East, the arches beneath the innumerable railway bridges will be used for car-maintenance or for storage.
Yet there have of course been changes. Poplar High Street was a crowded thoroughfare, with a plethora of shops and stalls and grimy buildings on either side; now it is an open street bordered by five-storey council-house estates, pubs and shops of yellow brick. The sound of people thronging, buying and selling has now been replaced by the intermittent noise of traffic. Much of the East End has followed that example. Where there was once a collection of shops and houses in a variety of styles, there will now be a “block” of uniform texture and dimensions; as a substitute for rows upon rows of terraced houses, there are major roads. The altered neighbourhoods seem somehow lighter, perhaps because they have lost touch with their history. At the extreme western end of Poplar High Street, just beyond Pennyfields, Joseph Nightingale’s coffee rooms, with signs for steak and kidney or liver and bacon, used to adjoin the horseflesh shop of James McEwen which in turn was next to George Ablard the hairdresser; the buildings had different frontages and were of varying height. In recent years that corner has been taken up by three-storey red-brick council dwellings and a small thoroughfare, Saltwell Street, runs by it. The opium quarter of Limehouse is now represented by a Chinese take-away. Here was once a street known as Bickmore Street and an extant photograph, taken in 1890, shows crowds of children posed outside a number of bow-windowed shopfronts; in its place today stands part of a recreation ground.
It might be concluded that the clutter and clatter of life have gone from these areas, even if they exist elsewhere in the East End. It could also be suggested that the rebuilt or renovated neighbourhoods resemble those within other areas of London; the council estates of Poplar, for example, are not so very different from those of Southall or Greenford. So the aspiration towards civic contentment has led to a diminution of local identity. The greatest contrast of all, evinced in photographs taken from 1890 to 1990, lies in the diminution of people in the streets. The life of the East End has gone within. Whether the telephone or television has effected this change is not the question; the salient fact remains that the human life of the streets has greatly diminished in exuberance and in intensity. Yet it is important not to sentimentalise this transition. If the East seems a more denuded place, it is also a less impoverished one; if it is more remote, or less human, it is also healthier. No one would willingly exchange a council flat for a tenement slum, even if the slums were filled with a communal spirit. You cannot go back.
CHAPTER 72. The South Work
That was how Southwark received its name, from the “south work” of a river wall to match its northern counterpart. Its origins, however, remain mysterious. Along the Old Kent Road, at the junction with Bowles Road, were discovered the remnants of an ancient settlement which manufactured flint tools. “Within the weathered sands,” reported one investigator in the London Archaeologist, “were many finds associated with the activities of prehistoric people.” No doubt it would be fanciful to connect this long history of human settlement with the air of exhaustion, of spent life, which seems to pervade the vicinity. There is, after all, another explanation: the roads of the south were decorated with funereal monuments, and the memory of these important emblems may in part account for the sense of transience associated with the neighbourhood. Three inhumation burial sites have been found close to each other, the first along the present Borough High Street. Their significance lies in their rarity, the only other burial of an equivalent date being close to the Tower of London, but also in the fact that two Roman burials of a similar nature were found a few yards to the south-east. The whole area of Southwark is in fact rich in Roman burial sites, with a cluster of inhumations in the area where Stane Street and Watling Street once diverged from what is now Borough High Street; the lines of the streets still exist under the names of Newington Causeway and the Old Kent Road. Another cluster of burial sites can be found to the north-west, beside another great Roman road leading from the bridge across the river. That is why travellers met in Southwark, in order to continue their journeys southward, and of course it represents the starting point of the Canterbury pilgrimage narrated by Chaucer. There have always been taverns and inns here for the welfare of those passing through; hospitals congregated here, also, perhaps in some atavistic homage to transitoriness.