The Little History of the East End E-Book

Dee Gordon

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 219

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The modern history of London's East End has been well-documented – but what of its ancient roots? From embryonic beginnings in the Stone Age, through Roman rule and civil wars, all the way to its jam-packed twentieth-century timeline, the East End has always been a place of innovation, diversity and change. Written by an East Ender with a love of her roots, The Little History of the East End is an engaging look at the area's history through the people that made it, one that will enthral and surprise both residents and visitors alike.

Leseprobe

First published 2020

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Dee Gordon, 2020

The right of Dee Gordon to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9578 8

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed in Turkey by Imak.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgements

1 From the Stone Age to the Romans

2 Saxons and Vikings

3 Normans

4 The Middle Ages

5 Tudors

6 Stuarts

7 Georgians

8 Victorians

9 The ‘Modern’ Twentieth Century

Select Bibliography

This book is dedicated to the best East End parents ever, George and Dora Winston

INTRODUCTION

This has been a fascinating book to research. Although I was born and brought up in Whitechapel, and have written a couple of books about the East End, not to mention reading many on the subject, I thought I was well acquainted with the area’s history. Not so! On this journey, I have learned such a lot about the area, its people, its shifting status, its highs and its lows. My affection for my roots is undaunted, and it is this affection I hope to share, from the East End’s embryonic beginnings to its twenty-first-century façade – and it is indeed a façade, for it is necessary to dig deep to find the true nature of the place.

I hope you will love learning about it as much as I did. You will notice that I have only touched on some of its more famous ‘stories’ – Jack the Ripper and the Krays for instance. This is for two reasons: the East End has a light side to offset the dark side, and there are a huge number of books and websites dedicated to such specific parts of its history. As you will see, the East End has a lot more to offer than criminals and, in a ‘Little History’ with its suggested limitations, the main focus is on local growth and change with just a nod to its elaborate and extensive political and religious history. It could have otherwise proved to be quite a daunting read, and that is not the intention. Apologies if I have left out your favourite bit of East End history!

To clarify, ‘my’ East End is bounded by the River Thames in the south, the River Lea in the east, the City of London in the west and Victoria Park on the Hackney border in the north. This represents postcodes E1, E2, E3 and – though it may sound odd, but I didn’t choose the postcodes! – E14.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am particularly indebted to the staff at the Tower Hamlets Local History Archive in Stepney, although the staff at the Museum of London, the British Library and the Museum of Docklands, as well as Dan Heather at the Royal London Hospital Archive, have also proved very helpful. Lesley Love and her Facebook community (East London Days Gone By) offered help, especially with images, as have some of the Flickr community especially Hornbeam Arts, Maggie Jones, Rob Higgins, Simon Harriyott, Richard Nevell and Tom Bastin. Images have been gratefully sourced via Wellcome Images, the Institute of Historical Research, the National Brewery Heritage Trust, the National Brewery Centre, Dr Neil Clifton, Neil Powell (battlefieldhistorian.com) and Robert Wynn Jones (lostcityoflondon.co.uk) in addition to more traditional sources. All copyright sources have been investigated and checked, apart from the anonymous postcards belonging to the author’s own collection. I would also like to thank Nicola Guy and the staff at The History Press in Gloucestershire; a long way from the East End, but with some empathy for the subject regardless.

Woolly mammoth. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 1890

1

FROM THE STONE AGE TO THE ROMANS

THE FIRST COCKNEYS?

No Bow Bells so no Cockneys, but a few early Ice Age wanderers as much as a million years ago were likely to have been travelling across what we now call Europe, from the African continent, with no North Sea to cross. Could pre-Neanderthals (homo erectus) have been hunting lions, bears, rhinos and even elephants in the area now known as the East End of London? Or did hunting only gather pace with the advent of woolly mammoths, reindeer and horses? Such animals would perhaps have been driven into the marshes in that vicinity to make them ‘easier’ to catch. Foraging for nuts and fruit would have added to a carnivorous diet. There are no confirmed signs of ‘human’ life, however, in and around London until after 110,000 BC, even though tools made by an early species of human were found less than 100 miles away, in Suffolk, from over half a million years ago.

The River Thames is thought to have been on its current course for half a million years, its formation and route dictated by ice sheets. The Lea Valley was formed, similarly, by flooding spreading southward as a result of glacial melt as late as c. 10,000 BC but was believed to be populated (if scantily) soon after. As the North Sea plains flooded, the resultant river valleys meant that early hunter-gatherers could pass through what is likely to have been dense forest, and the Thames would have been one of those rivers forced into a new route. Climate warming meant that the levels of the River Thames and River Lea rose over the next few thousand years, and the local landscape slowly changed, becoming more fertile around what is now Stepney, Bow and Bethnal Green. (Note the use of the popular spelling Lea rather than the often used Lee, to avoid confusion.) The Thames itself is now a shadow of its former, early self.

Historians certainly argue for the presence of early hunter-gatherers in the area from around 4000 BC, bearing in mind that various species of humans virtually disappeared with every recurrent Ice Age (every 100,000 years or so). The earliest skeleton found in the area covered by this book dates from as early as 3900 BC. This was found in Blackwall and, interestingly, was revealed to be in the foetal position – which could indicate either a ritual return to Mother Earth, or some need for a small grave. Early humans, as in other parts of early Britain, would have lived by hunting on the then marshy areas on the banks of rivers such as the Thames, the latter becoming more of a farming community once they started growing additional food around 3500 BC. Wheat grains were found in the Canning Town area which were dated to c. 3000 BC. Early finds of stone tools and weapons in the Thames Valley date from this period, then bronze finds followed by iron implements from around 800 BC (hence Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, of course). Excavations in nearby Hackney Brook revealed a plethora of tools dating from c. 4000 BC – the same area where the bones of woolly mammoths, and even a crocodile, pre-date modern humans.

A PLACE TO CALL ’OME SWEET ’OME

There was a prehistoric mound, known as Friars Mount, which some historians have regarded as being where Arnold Circus in Shoreditch is now, a suitable location for early dry and defensible settlement, although its specific origins are virtually impossible to date. What is a little easier to establish is that this area was the site of one of the principal springs of the now subterranean Walbrook River, one of over twenty tributaries of the Thames. Its swampy banks (i.e. Shoreditch), along with those of the Thames into which it drained, were ideal for the growth of old Roman London. The river’s wellspring was in what is now Shoreditch churchyard, marked by a pump.

A little more specifically, the remains of wooden trackways which were discovered just beyond the River Lea have been dated to 4000 BC (i.e. before the end of the Stone Age). These would certainly have been to enable travellers to cross the marshes and would have given hunters easier access to the rich wildlife. Incidentally, the East London Advertiser featured a Neolithic site uncovered in 2016 during a geophysics survey around Victoria Park between Old Ford and Hackney during Crossrail investigations. This details the existence of ninety stone monoliths between 20ft and 30ft high dating back 2,500 years before Stonehenge, in a circle four times its size. Sadly, the report is dated 1 April.

During the late Stone Age, and the Bronze Age which followed, any burgeoning society would not have been secular as it is today – we are talking of a primitive people more likely to be interested in looking after their gods and their dead than themselves, evidenced by burials accompanied by the practicalities of pots and flints for the journey. The dead and the great rivers were powerful spiritual forces between 4000 and 1500 BC, a time when plants were being cultivated, animals tamed, stones shaped, and when fire was being used to turn local clay into pots and rock into molten metal. Gifts of food, pots and flint and metal tools were placed in the river to honour spirits and ancestors, the reason why the Thames has been such a lucrative source of prehistoric finds, preserved by the wet conditions which excluded oxygen and prevented decay.

A number of archaeological surveys (see the Bibliography) explain how the lower sea level of the River Lea in the Bronze Age would have allowed exploitation and occupation of the riverbanks and the small islands within its boundaries as well as providing a navigable route.

FINDERS (NOT KEEPERS)

Locally, early finds – from the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age – were generally predictable: fragments of a jar found during excavations on Stepney High Street in the 1970s, for instance, and ‘worked’ flints revealed in a 1989 Limehouse dig. The Blackwall burial mentioned from the Stone Age had struck flints and pottery nearby, as well as yet more pottery fragments from the Bronze Age, along with early evidence of cereal growing. One stone axe-head from Blackwall on display in the Museum of London is dated between 4000 and 2200 BC. Interestingly, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary (22 September 1665) of the remains of an ancient forest here.

Not far away, in the Liverpool Street area, the twenty-first-century Crossrail development has unearthed plenty of Bronze Age tools, as well as Stone Age artefacts from other parts of the City and East London including the jaw bone of a mammoth found under Canary Wharf (on the Isle of Dogs) which dates from 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. A piece of amber found at this particular site is estimated by archaeologists to be 55 million (yes, million) years old!

Stone Age and Bronze Age trackways, along with wood peats, have been revealed at excavations (by the Museum of London Archaeology Service) on Atlas Wharf on the Isle of Dogs, the trackways crossing a major channel of the Thames where fast-flowing water predominated. The Thames Valley Archaeological Service has published details (in 2000) of prehistoric finds close by at Westferry Road, including the fragmented remains of the rear left leg of a horse, with other species such as cattle, sheep, goats and even a pig represented, seemingly domesticated species from a human settlement. This site also unearthed fragments of a copper alloy brooch and earrings which could date back as far as the Iron Age. Interestingly, the later, badly eroded, Roman pottery found here was in worse condition than the prehistoric. More generally, archaeologists believe that a large network of timber pathways was constructed across East London in the Bronze Age, allowing easier access for hunters to the abundant wildlife that would have lived on what was lush wetlands thousands of years ago.

Finds of animal bones in the Victoria Park area show that ancient Britons in this location were meat-eaters, and vegetation evidence shows a farming society as early as 3000 BC. Until further archaeological digs are authorised, nothing more specific is accessible.

It is believed that this wild landscape East of London (before there was a London) was tamed to some extent from around 1500 BC. It seems that the local gravelly soil, lightly wooded with open spaces, was not just fertile but easily cleared to produce timber for building and to grow corn. A plentiful supply of water from local springs and wells in addition to the rivers has been identified, adding to its potential. There is an impressive long bronze sword dating from 1150 BC in the Museum of London that was found at Millwall in 1835. Its grip, which would have been of wood or bone, had disintegrated as a result of its handling at that time, but what remains is attributed to a ‘warrior elite’.

It is the Tower Hill area, bordering what is now the East End, where a Bronze Age burial of cremated human remains was found together with a later Iron Age burial. Hundreds of years later, the first proper settlements in what became London are all believed to be on high ground above the water line, atop hills such as Tower Hill. Roman scribes wrote of warlike tribes defending their timber fortresses with ditches. Certainly, there were tribes settling all over Britain in the years before the Romans came, with communities in places like St Alban’s, Colchester and Canterbury, influenced by the Druids and their organised priesthood and by the later Celts. There are accounts of a Belgic tribe moving along the Thames and then the River Lea from their native Belgium in 50 BC (the Lea being effectively the eastern boundary of the real East End in contemporary thinking) ,although they seem to have settled a little further north.

MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE I’M A LONDONER …

The Tower Hamlets area would have been part of the territory of the Catuvellauni, a powerful Celtic tribe who invaded in the second century BC and who put up a strong resistance first to Julius Caesar on his expeditions in 55 and 54 BC and, of course, to the Romans who followed in his footsteps.

Roman map. Tower Hamlets Record Office

It was the arrival of the Romans in AD 43 that facilitated the growth of London, growing up around the banks of the Thames which rose in the swampy area now better known as Shoreditch. The founding of London (or Londinium, to use an earlier name) is regarded by many as being a stop-off route for the Romans between landing points in Kent and the garrison town of Colchester in Essex, a military encampment in a sparsely populated valley. In 1972 a defensive ditch (complete with a buried Roman sword) was located in the Aldgate area, probably constructed before any Roman roads. Although the location of the first crossing across the Thames has never been authenticated, it seems that the riverbank would have been less marshy in Roman times at the point around where the Tower of London now stands, not far from Aldgate. Certainly, a suitable and substantial crossing would have been a military necessity.

The original development (hardly a town at that stage) was pretty much wiped out by Boudicca and her tribe less than twenty years later, necessitating its rebuilding. This same area – more specifically Trinity Place, near Tower Hill tube station – was the location of a funerary monument dedicated to Classicianus, the man employed to revive Londinium after Boudica’s attempt at devastation – he died in AD 65 and the remains of his tomb can be seen at the British Museum.

Boudicca would almost certainly have had to cross the River Lea on her way to London. She and her 100,000 supporters – men, women and children – must have been an amazing sight for the few ‘locals’! She and the Romans are presumed to have used the Old Ford (the name still used) to cross the river, with a Roman road built in the area within ten years of their arrival and which lives on as … ‘Roman Road’. The original road is likely to have reached Londinium at one end and the site of Boudicca’s Iceni tribe (near Norwich) at the other.

It was no doubt the Romans who brought stone by barge from quarries in Kent for a defensive wall around Londinium, once the settlement grew into being the Roman capital by the early part of the third century AD. The newly built (or rebuilt) wall has been calculated as being 9ft thick, 22ft high and 3 miles long, guarded by fifteen towers each 40ft high, with five gates giving access to the major military roads. Londinium remained the Roman capital until their empire crumbled c. AD 410, when the town was almost literally abandoned.

Shoreditch High Street is one thoroughfare that started life as a Roman road, leading from Bishopsgate through East London up to Lincoln, often following the course of the River Lea – the name Ermine Street is used for the road, although this name is not Roman, but derived from a later Saxon name. Another Roman road led to Ratcliff, mooted as a suitable place for landing ships, with easy access to the Thames. This road evolved into Ratcliff Highway and subsequently The Highway.

More specifically, archaeologists during excavations in 2002–3 identified ‘a major Roman road’ running from east to west between The Highway and Cable Street, with an extensive Roman settlement ‘the size of a small town’ either side of Wapping Lane to the south of this road. A large bath house was discovered here, and the settlement was the source of some fascinating artefacts, not just pottery but golden jewellery and even a stove. An impressive dwelling suggests a major status building, perhaps a palace or military headquarters, with a Roman version of under-floor heating. Scattered oyster shells and geese, ox and beef carcasses give some idea of diet. The building was constructed of stone, i.e. was not intended as a temporary structure, and boasted the remains of what seems to have been a plunge pool. Timber buildings, clay and plaster walls and floors, the remains of wall paintings, coins and hairpins were also recovered nearby. The Romans’ perceived interest in spas and bathing was also endorsed by scraps of leather garments found nearby and described as being ‘bikini’ style with side ties. The author of Underground London speculates that this particular garment might have belonged to a female acrobat or even a gladiatrix at a Roman gladiator games, although no amphitheatre remains have been found (yet!) in this part of London.

BROWN BREAD (DEAD!) ROMANS

Burials were not permitted within the city walls by the Romans, hence the large graveyard discovered just outside the walls near Liverpool Street Station and stretching from Bishopsgate as far as Spitalfields. It was in the Spitalfields cemetery in 1999 that the late Roman sarcophagus, lead coffin, skeleton and artefacts of a young woman were unearthed. The Museum of London experts are convinced that this was a high-ranking female, given the evidence of gold thread and silk fragments and the presence of jet and glass trinkets. The scallop-shell design on the coffin lid indicated pagan belief in the underworld. Subsequent DNA tests have traced the woman to the Basque area of Spain. The skeleton of a child was also found in a nearby burial chamber, with an unparalleled array of glass vessels, also suggesting perhaps high status and indicating that this part of the cemetery could have been reserved for the higher echelons of Roman society. Some 150 Roman graves were found on the Spitalfields site, a quarter of them accompanied by grave goods such as jars, phials, beakers, wooden boxes or shale bracelets, one even with a chicken – for lunch on the onward journey?

Prescot Street, Aldgate, has revealed a significant number of Roman burials (more than 550) over the years, most of them accompanied by drinking vessels, with all that implies. A 2009 dig here uncovered a rare multi-coloured glass dish regarded as very expensive (worth many times the annual salary of a Roman soldier), part of grave goods in a wooden container. Human remains dating back to the first century AD have also been found close by in North Tenter Street, Alie Street and Mansell Street, suggesting a number of perhaps smaller cemeteries, with a range of artefacts surfacing, from a figurine of Venus to a late Roman official-looking belt. The diverse remains of hobnail shoes, a shale bracelet, glass beads and half of an inscribed gravestone were found in Hooper Street in 1988, just yards to the east, plus, of particular interest, a jet pendant in a grave, something often used to accompany burials because it was thought to have magic properties, and to protect the dead on their final journey. A flint structure found in East Tenter Street unearthed the same year may well have been part of a mausoleum. Exceptional finds (in Prescot Street), according to the London Archaeological Archive, were three unusual flagons which seem to have served a ritual or religious function. This whole area was known as Goodman’s Fields. A particularly detailed green marble tablet was dug up here in 1787, inscribed to the memory of Flavius Agricola of the Sixth Legion – ‘an incomparable husband’. (The Sixth Legion arrived in Britain in AD 119, led by the Emperor Hadrian.) As for the coffins themselves, these were mostly wooden so only traces survive, with the exception of some lead reinforcing strips found at West Tenter Street, displayed in the Museum of London.

Roman and Saxon burials. From the Steward Street report

Cremations have been unearthed a little further east at a Shadwell cemetery, dating back to the second century AD, and Roman coffins were discovered in Stepney in the seventeenth century and in Bethnal Green in the nineteenth, with evidence suggesting that there were more cremations than inhumations in Roman times. There was an article in the Illustrated London News of 5 April 1862 as follows:

As Mr Buckmaster, weaver, living at No. 13 Camden Gardens, Bethnal Green Road, was digging in a corner of his garden on the 8th ult., he uncovered a leaden coffin about 4ft from the surface. In endeavouring to lift the lid, he broke off almost a third part of it. The coffin was nearly filled with lime, through which a portion of a human skeleton appeared. Mr Rolfe of Bethnal Green, who describes the coffin, says that the contents had been greatly disturbed before he saw it, but from the lid alone he declared it to be Roman. The sides are plain, the ends have a well-known ornament, an X, and on each side an I … Instead of the usual cord or bead and two-line pattern, generally seen on Roman coffins, the double lines in this example are joined by curves turned inward, having the appearance of the spinal column of some fish, or a close-jointed bamboo. The left upper limb of the cross alone has three lines between the curves. There is no further ornament beyond a border of the same pattern around the overlapping lid. The dimensions are length 5ft 10in, breadth at the head 1ft 4in, at the foot 1ft 2in, depth about 10in. The weight is estimated at 4 cwt. There was an outer coffin of oak.

There were two jet hairpins in this coffin.

At the Tower Hamlets Local History Archive is a paper from the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarians in June 1910, detailing the discovery of a number of Roman burials in the area. Of these, the most detailed information is provided with regard to a coffin discovered in 1856 at ‘Mr Hemmings Iron Church and House Works’ in Bow, just north of Bow Road, having been broken in pieces by workmen. This was identified as Roman partly because of the use of lime to cover the skeleton, a fairly common practice at the time, though there has been some debate as to whether this was to preserve the remains or hasten their decomposition!

WHAT THE ROMANS LEFT BEHIND

There have been archaeological excavations in many parts of the East End, revealing far more than endless burials. One of these was the remains of a Roman civilian settlement found at Old Ford flanking both sides of the Roman road which led from London to Colchester, crossing the River Lea. Here were discovered the bones of cattle, which, together with the land’s historic fertility, evidence a farming community. (Some historians feel that the large amount of cattle butchering that was revealed indicated a level of surplus that could be sold in the larger settlements in what became London.)

In Armagh Road, Bow, a 1990 dig uncovered a quarry believed to have supplied rock for the Romans, but with additional evidence of plough-soil from farming during that period. Some twenty years earlier in Bow, Roman pottery remains had already been discovered.

It is also interesting to speculate about objects found in Mansell Street, Aldgate, especially with regard to the identity of the owners of the silver brooch, bone comb and the bronze belt and crossbow brooch, dating back to Roman times, but, according to the Museum of London, with a style appropriate for a high-ranking German. A German serving in the Roman army or Roman government – and his wife?

Although Roman tiles have been unearthed in various locations over the years, e.g. in the reconstruction of St Dunstan’s Church in Stepney in 1885, it has been established that such tiles were often re-used and do not indicate a Roman settlement. The area around St Dunstan’s, however, between two Roman roads, on high fertile ground only a mile inland from the ‘port’ at Ratcliff, seems more likely than most for Roman development.

At Shadwell, the remains of what may have been a Roman signal station have been found, a good location for a look-out for enemy ships approaching London, although the area would have been affected by the dramatic drop in water levels during the Roman occupation, i.e. from first to fifth centuries AD. Some theories in recent years actually suggest that this structure was more likely to be a mausoleum, and as more and more archaeological discoveries are made no doubt further evidence and fresh theories will surface.