East London

“ East London is such a ghetto, where the rich and the powerful do not dwell, and the traveller cometh not, and where two million workers swarm, procreate, and die.
It must not be supposed that all the workers of London are crowded into the East End, but the tide is setting strongly in that direction. The poor quarters of the city proper are constantly being destroyed, and the main stream of the unhoused is toward the east. ”

“ East London is, as I have said before, above all things the city of the working-man—the greatest city of the respectable working-man in the whole world. Fortunately he is, for the most part, in good and steady work. ”

“ THE MEMORIES OF THE PAST I HAVE so often insisted that East London must be regarded as a city of many crafts—the working-man’s city—that it may seem contradictory to call attention to another aspect. That part of East London with which we have been most concerned is the densely populated part lying north of the river and including all that part west of the river Lea as far north as Dalston, Clapton, and Hackney, and east of that river, including Bow, Stratford, Walthamstow, Wanstead, Forest Gate, Bromley West, and East Ham and Barking. ”

“ The horrible thing in East London is not what can be seen and smelt, but its unbounded and unredeemable extent. Elsewhere poverty and ugliness exist merely as a rubbish-heap between two houses, like an unsavoury nook, a cesspool or unclean offal ”

“ I do not venture, for the obvious reason of ignorance, upon comparison with American cities, but I should think that we have in East London, with its vast population of working-people of all kinds, ranging from the highly-paid foreman to the casual hand, the lad of the street, the wastrel, and the wreck, a mass of humanity which is not paralleled anywhere, and a corresponding amount of philanthropic endeavor which it would be impossible to equal elsewhere. ”

“ A remarkable characteristic of East London is the way in which the industrial population is constantly recruited from the country. I shall speak of the aliens later on. I mean, in this place, the influx from the country districts and from small country towns of lads or young men and young women who are always pouring into East London, attracted by one knows not what reports of prosperity, of high wages, and greater comforts. ”

“ James’s; there are roads of noble breadth; there is the ample river; there are the crowded docks; there are factories and industries; there are men and women in East London who give up their lives for their brothers and their sisters; and beyond the city, within easy reach of the city, there are woods and woodlands, villages and rural haunts, lovelier than any within reach of western London. ”

“ This should be a very remarkable city for its numbers alone; the population is greater than that of Berlin or Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or Philadelphia. As a crowded mass of humanity alone it should demand serious consideration. In other respects, however, it is more remarkable still. You will acknowledge with me that in these respects and from these points of view, no other city in the world is like East London. ”

“ Along the main thoroughfares of London, from the West to the East, from the North to the South, there is never the intense loneliness of the streets that lie off the track. There the late Londoner and early Londoner divide the night between them, and as the late brougham or cab bears the tired pleasure-seeker home to rest, the carts and the wagons begin to wend their way to the markets and the docks and the great railway stations. ”

“ If the American visitor to London desires to see a real old-fashioned slum—one where all the surroundings, physical and moral, are, to use the mild word of the day, absolutely “insanitary”—I would recommend him not to try East London, where he would have to search long for what he wants, but to pay a visit to Guy’s Hospital on the south side of the Thames and to seek the guidance of one of the students through the courts of crime and grime which still lie pretty thickly round that fortress of the army of health. ”

“ The chief difference between the present “City,” properly so called, and East London is that in the City everybody—principals, clerks, servants, workmen, all go away as soon as the offices are closed, and no one is left; in East London the employers go away when the factories are closed, but the employees remain. ”

“ The much-talked of East London is made up of miles of mean streets, whose inhabitants are in no want of bread or even of better houses; here and there are the courts now made familiar by descriptions. They are few in number, and West-End visitors who have come to visit their “neighbours” confess themselves—with a strange irony 104on their motives—“disappointed that the people don’t look worse”. ”

“ You may take it for granted that East London is not healthy. My own practice, and it is the practice I encourage as much as possible among all my workers, is to go away right out of town for twenty-four hours every week, and have a night s sleep in the country. Life in the East End is un doubtedly very lowering. When I first came all the clergy were down-hearted and despondent ; now there are some of the keenest workers in existence to be found in East London, and the more effec tive and visible results of their labours keep them in good heart, and spur them on to greater exertions. ”

“ The West End has all the money and all the leisure; the East End monopolizes most of the labour, and nearly all of the dirt. The West End numbers a few thousands of floating population; the East End, a million or so of pretty constant inhabitants. Yet, by some strange association of ideas, it is to this small "West End" that we allude when we speak of "all London," and to which the daily papers refer when in August and September they assure us that "there is absolutely no one left in town." ”

“ Having turned out of the main thoroughfare, you proceed down one of those characteristic East End streets where every small householder lives behind an elaborate bright green door with portentous knocker, going on until an arch of the Great Eastern Railway spans the road. Arriving at this point any time between the hours of eight and half-past nine on a Monday or Tuesday morning, you have no need to be told that [69] this is the East London Slave Market—supposing you knew such a thing as a slave market was to be seen in East London at all. ”

“ The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an unfit place in which to live. Where you would not have your own babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life and the things of life. ”

“ Homes and schools for the boys and girls, hospitals for the adult, there remain the aged. Dotted about all over London there are about a hundred and fifty almshouses; of these about half are situated in and about East London. Not that the people of East London have been more philanthropic in their endowments than those of the west, but, before there was any city of East London, almshouses were planted here on account of the salubrity and freshness of the air and the cheapness of the ground. ”

“ East London birds are early birds, and to catch them at their bath you must be literally up with the lark. Towards six o'clock is the most fashionable hour for our metropolitan Pactolus; and, as it is some miles distant from what can, by any stretch of courtesy, be called the West End, and as there are no workmen's trains on a Sunday morning, a long walk or cab drive is inevitable for all who would witness the disporting of our amphibious Orientals. ”

“ There is another part of London of which we have not yet spoken. We have heard of the City and of the West End—the City, where business men work, and the West End, where rich people live; but there is also the East End, lying beyond the City, and the people who live here are nearly all poor. If you asked any of the children of the East End if they had seen Madame Tussaud's or the Zoo, they would grin, and say, 'Garn!' and if you told them about these things they might say, 'Ye're kiddin', ye're,' which is their way of saying they don't believe you, and think you are telling stories. ”

“ There is therefore no sensible diminution in the population on Saturdays and Sundays; the streets are never deserted as in the City. The manufacturers and employers of East End labor live in the country or at the West End, but for the most part in the suburbs beyond the river Lea, on the outskirts of Epping Forest, where there are very many stately houses, standing in their gardens and grounds, occupied by a wealthy class whose factories and offices are somewhere about East London. ”

“ If the East End is worthy of no worse title than The City of Dreadful Monotony, and if working people are unworthy of variety and beauty and surprise, it would not be such a bad place in which to live. ”

“ Especially is this increase remarkable in East London, which, as a home of industries, hardly existed seventy years ago. It is now especially a city of the newer wants, the modern crafts, the recent inventions and applications.
East London is, to repeat, essentially and above all things a city of the working-man. The vast majority of the people work at weekly wages, for employers great or small. But the larger employers do not live near their factories, or among their people ”

“ I desire, however, to insist very strongly upon the fact that the keynote of East London is its industrial character; that it is a city of the working-classes; and that one with another, all except a very small percentage, are earners of the weekly and the daily wage. I would also point out that not only are the crafts multiplied by the subdivisions of contractors, but that every 29new invention, every new fashion, every new custom, starts a new trade and demands a new set of working folks ”

“ It is curious how widely spread is the reverse idea. Many times have I been asked if I am not ‘afraid to walk in East London,’ and an article on the People’s Entertainment Society aroused, not unjustly, the anger of the East London people at the writer’s descriptions of them and of her fears for her personal safety while standing in the Mile End Road! One lady, after a visit to St. George’s-in-the-East and Stepney, expressed great astonishment to find that the people lived in houses. ”

“ It is delightful to realize the fact that while the West End of London is flaunting its splendors and the East End in struggling with its miseries, these great middle-class communities are living as comfortable, unpretending lives as if they were in one of our thriving townships in the huckleberry-districts. ”

“ A Typical Street in Bethnal Green.
What appearance does it present to the visitor? There is, again, in this respect as well, no other city in the world in the least like East London for the unparalleled magnitude 15of its meanness and its monotony. It contains about five hundred miles of streets, perhaps more—a hundred or two may be thrown in; they would make little difference. In his haste, the traveler who walks about these streets for the first time declares that they are all exactly alike. ”

“ OLD "OXFORD HOUSE."
As a matter of fact, East London is probably, by daylight or by night, one of the safest parts of London, except in a very few selected streets, well known to the police; and one of my predecessors, the much-lamented Bishop Billing, was quite right when he used to say to the West-End mother, anxious about her daughter's safety, if she came to work in East London, "See her as far as Temple Bar, and then she will be all right."
What strikes one at first is the extreme brightness and cheerfulness of the people, often under very adverse circumstances. ”

“ When one is asked, then, what is the matter with East London, and what lies behind those great thoroughfares, which look so broad and inviting on a fine summer's afternoon, one can only reply by taking one's questioner away from the broad thoroughfares into the crowded streets and alleys which lie behind them and between. Here is a photograph of a crowded back street, which gives an idea of what is going on, say, of a Sunday morning during the Bird Fair in Slater Street, or the Dog Fair at the top of Bethnal Green Road, or the old clothes sale down by Petticoat Lane. ”

“ And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which,
filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women. It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw. Much of it is untellable. But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a fearful slime that
quickened the pavement with life, a mess of unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the nightly horror of Piccadilly and the Strand. ”

“ I thundered. "Drive me down to the East End, and at once!"
It was evident that he did not understand, but he withdrew his head and grumblingly started his horse.
Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject poverty, while five minutes' walk from almost any point will bring one to a slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending slum. The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. ”

“ In this respect, one or two of the East London suburbs are richer than those of the west or the south because they are older. Hackney and Stoke Newington, Stepney and Tottenham, were villages inhabited by wealthy people or noble people when the suburbs of the south were mere rural villages, with farms and meadows among their hanging woods. ”