 LOCAL HISTORY BOOKS EAST END PAST by Richard Tames Cheery and cheeky, grim and grimy, or vicious and violent - the East End usually provokes a strong reaction of some sort. Yet for nine-tenths of its history London's backyard was largely a rural retreat of fields and farms, marshland and market gardens and a suitable setting for hostelries and hospitals, almshouses, academies, and asylums. London's rise as a centre of global commerce then lined its river gateway with a labyrinth of docks and warehouses through which the world's wealth flowed, though little remained in the close-packed streets where sweatshops, factories, mills and yards have made everything from silks and porcelain to dog-biscuits and Dreadnoughts. Notorious for alleged poverty of body, mind, and spirit, the East End became celebrated as a training- ground for leaders of church and state and a breeding-ground for millionaires. Irish and Jews, Huguenots and Germans, Chinatown and Little Warsaw were crammed together to create a city within a city, which outsiders investigated in fear, wonderment, or disgust. As its inhabitants' struggle for survival moved from riot to strike to socialism, the East End became a laboratory for do-gooders and a battleground against fascism. Between the wars local leaders experimented with do-it-yourself devolution in defiance of government. After the Blitz, they found a false dawn in high-rise blocks until the docks became Docklands and yesterdays 'aliens' gave way to new peoples seeking Utopia down Brick Lane. Captain Cook and Dr Bernardo, Culpeper the Herbalist and Jack the Ripper, Gandhi and the Krays, the birthplace of boxing and the Salvation Army - the real East End has defied both caricature and cliche in its drive to reinvent itself perpetually.
ISBN 0 948667 94 X (please enquire for postage & packing rates to your location) EAST HAM & WEST HAM PAST by Jim Lewis East Ham and West Ham, now the London Borough of Newham, have seen some dramatic changes since the beginning of the 19th century. Already at that time much used by industry as obnoxious trades were pushed out of the capital, these two Essex townships, which lay between the useful river Lea and the river Roding, saw the construction of the Royal docks and then of the massive Beckton gasworks. Industry moved fast and speculative builders even faster putting up many mean terraces in the south part of the area. In the north, Stratford became a major rail junction and soon very little green space was left. West Ham became one of the most populous boroughs in England. This book tells the story since agricultural days of the horticultural gardens which once gave pleasure to many, and of the characters, especially Quakers, who were notable residents, and of the wealthy abbey that was the centre of West Ham's medieval life. It then takes us on to the industrial era, the bad labour relations, the pollution and the precarious way of life, until in modern times everything changed with the closing of the docks and the gasworks. And, of course, the enormous damage done by both the last war and the subsequent redevelopment.
ISBN 0 948667 93 1 (please enquire for postage & packing rates to your location) |
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