Extracts from "London's East End Life & Traditions" by Jane Cox
ISBN 1-85799-956-8
Where 19th and 20th century Raynhams were born, married, lived, worked and died & Bob Raynham spent the first 14 years of his upbringing.
"The area defined" (Page 11)
The East End is defined as the three-square mile triangle of land bounded by the River Lea on the east and the City of London on the west. It corresponds roughly to the old manor of Stepney, which became separated from Hackney in 1652.
By 1700 there were seven parishes, Stepney, Whitechapel, Shoreditch, Aldgate, Bow, Bromley and Holy Trinity, Minories covering this area. Within the vast parish Stepney were eight hamlets: Mile End Old Town and New Town, Limehouse, Ratcliff, Spitalfields, Wapping /Stepney, Poplar and Bethnal Green. Today all, with the exception of Shoreditch that belongs to Hackney, are part of the metropolitan borough of Tower Hamlets.
"Introduction" (Page 9)
The story of the East End did not start with the Victorian slum which, grew like an ugly boil, on the side of London. Nor is its earlier history the empty tale of winds whipping across empty marshland, or that prior to industrialization there was nothing but green villages on the city's eastern side.
Since medieval times the east side of the City has been London's backyard, with workshops and shipyards, bakeries and mills, breweries and distilleries interposed with allotments and market gardens. As early as the 14th century a commission was asked to look into the smell caused because the smelters of Wapping, East Smithfield and Southwark were using coal instead of charcoal. Lime kilns gave Limehouse its name at least 600 years ago. The Hearth Tax records from the time of Samuel Pepys reported that half the residents of east London were poor.
The City walls enclosed the wealth of London and any up-market development extended westwards along the Strand to Westminster. Outside of the City walls at Aldgate, Bishopsgate and by the Tower lived the "rag tag" folk as Shakespeare called them. However there were pleasant villages in the east, Stepney, Bow, Bethnal Green and Mile End. These at one time, amazing as it may seem today, were salubrious commuter belts, where merchants and politicians had fine houses.
In 1610 the windows of Stepney church glowed with the jeweled colours of thirteen coats of arms. However the inner suburbs of East Smithfield, St Katherine's Whitechapel outside Aldgate, Spitalfields and Shoreditch have displayed East End characteristics for at least 400 years.
"The Early Days Celtic twilight to the Middle Ages" (Page 12)
The Highway is one of the oldest thoroughfares in London, it runs half mile east of the Tower to what was once Ratcliff Cross and is now the entrance of an underpass to the Isle of Dogs. This effectively cuts Wapping off from Stepney and Whitechapel. The only reminders of the past today are the two churches of St. Paul of Shadwell and old St. George-in-the-East.
The two churches are 200 years old compared with 2000 years for the highway, and today has retained part of its old name; Ratcliff Highway. It has a very chequered history with its sailors ' cottages, chandlers' shops, brothels, sugar and starch works, gunpowder factories, alehouses and doss house, churches and chapels. Within living memory you would have heard the roar of tigers and the squawking of parrots and for ?60 a lion could be purchased as late as 1910.
The Romans arrived in 42 AD and built Londinium when they possibly took over an Ancient British settlement, any such settlement would have been a collection of huts set in a great windswept marsh. The River Thames would have been considerable wider than it is now, the flood plain extending up to Pudding Wood and as far south as Clapham. Bermondsey, Chelsea, Battersea and Westminster (Thorney Island) were islands at this time.
The Romans built a wall and enclosed 330 acres of what today is known as the City of London, access to the walled city was via six gates with Aldgate and Bishopsgate situated on the eastern side, the latter is where the Tower of London now stands. Within these walls some 40,000 lived as to what was happening on the outside is not clear.
It is thought that there may have been two or three roads leading out of the City to the east one was the Highway, going past the port of Ratcliff. Another turned off the Lincoln Road (Shoreditch High Street today), and followed the direction of Bethnal Green Road and the Roman Road, crossing the River Lea at the Old Ford. The third was the Colchester Road, the Whitechapel /Mile End Road, which left the City at Aldgate and crossed the Lea at the straight ford (Stratford ). It is thought that this was some "ribbon" development, maybe the first and the prelude to the great expansions of the 19th and 20th centuries.
From Roman finds it appears that people were living in Whitechapel, Shadwell, Spitalfields and Shoreditch, how many and what they did is not known. Possibly they were farmers and market gardeners supplying the City, corn would have ground in the area and bread taken through the Aldgate, as it was for many centuries thereafter.
Roman soldiers based at the Shadwall signal tower lived well with a diet of ox beef, mutton, chicken, goose and oyster shells have been found.
By the fifth century the Romans legions had withdrawn and fine four hundred year old City was battered by constant attacks from German pirates, who rowed up the river to raid, loot and stay. The City eventually fell into decay and grass grew over the well worn roads out of the City.
London was re-occupied by the Saxons and settled in the old Roman city; sometime in the 300 years following the Roman collapse German tribesman took over the East End and brought Christianity back to the country. Stibba came to Stepney from whence the name came, in the mid-tenth century a wooden church was founded by Dunstan, Lord of Stepney Manor.
This began the Church's 600 year rule in the east London. The East Enders came out from the City and in from the countryside with the church supplying the houses and marking out most of the streets.
By the time of William the Conquer Survey in 1086 Stepney combined with Hackney under the Bishop of London with 183 peasant households and perhaps 900 souls. Farming comprised of arable, pasture, and meadow land supporting 900 pigs. At the Domesday Survey only Stepney is mentioned it took several hundred years before others emerged from the medieval twilight. Some started as hamlets and grew into suburbs, others were the overspill of the City. All came together and merged into the "bottomless pit of decaying life" as described by Beatrice Webb less than a century age.
Geoffrey Chaucer in 1374 leased rooms in the massive twin-towered gatehouse that stood in Jewry Street, he would have witnessed the carts arriving from the east having to pay a toll to allow them to take the carts into the City. Herds of cattle were driven through, from the East End pastures to Smithfield, pigs were a familiar site, with two Hog Lanes at the time of Chaucer.
In between the noise and smells street vendors were selling rabbit and venison pies, roast pork, pheasant, bittern, hens, eels and fish. Just about every trade was being practiced in the area from bakers, butchers, gold-beaters, goldsmiths, brewers, and cordwainers to cooks, clerks, and chaplains.
The area appears to have prosperous with fine houses and farms, Bow had a chapel by 1311 and the wealthy had mansions at Bethnal Green and Stepney, even Poplar had a royal palace.
"Stepney The church and village at the heart of it all" (page21)
Medieval Stepney was a working village, inhabited by a mixture of rich and poor, farming folk and millers, silk weavers, coopers and brewers, gentleman and merchants. By the 16th century the village and the country round, of which Victoria Park is now the only reminder, was a favourite spot for wealthy citizens to build rural retreats. The Marquis of Worcester had a mansion just east of St. Dunstan's and to the west the Lord Mayor Sir Henry Colet lived at the mansion called Great Place. However life was perilous as of his 22 children only one, John survived. Thomas More would visit sailing from Chelsea and landing at Ratcliff Stairs.
Although the rich and famous which visited and lived it was the ordinary working people who populated the village of Stepney in large numbers, not the ones that Charles Dickens's observed but those of Shakespeare 's day. The parish records show that Sir Walter Raleigh's servant was buried at St. Dunstan's in 1596 and a dumb fortune-teller in 1628. It is estimated that the population of Stepney in 1600 was about 30,000, as with the later centuries recession and changes in farming methods brought thousands from the country to maritime Stepney.
Many immigrants to Stepney took employment on board ship where voyages to the New World could provide fortunes from tobacco and sugar, as well as the plunder from Spanish ships. They obtained employment as shipwrights, carpenters, ropemakers, anchor smiths, became watermen and lightermen and worked in the sugar and glass factories.
Life was tough many of the 1607 baptisms came from sailors and their wives from Limehouse and Bow and in the overcrowded and insanitary suburbs the child was lucky to survive a year. Within months the couple were back with a tiny coffin. St. Dunstan's was famous for its multiple baptisms and marriages, in April 1653 52 babies were baptised. In a 40 year period the population trebled to 48,000 by 1630, the Poor Law was over-burdened and there was much talk of "idle beggars".
The East Ender were seen as being a trouble maker and was a focus for religious discontent and political agitation, particularly when times were hard and would have supported the Parliamentarians during the Civil War of 1642-1646.
The plague bell would have been a regular feature of life in Stepney, in one year, 1665 alone nearly 9000 bodies were buried at St. Dunstan's churchyard, possibly the origins of "atisho, atisho, we all fall down." So for the poor East Enders Good King Charles's days were far from golden, these were threatening, dark days; with cart-loads of bodies rumbling up and down Whitehorse Lane, rumours of a Dutch invasion and the prospect of the Hearth and Poll Tax.
By 1700 the population had grown to about 50,000 and included Spitalfields, Mile End Old Town, Bow, Poplar, Limehouse, Ratcliff, Bethnal Green and the "new town" up at Mile End, the area had about 9000 houses. To accommodate the growing masses religious needs parish churches were established in nearly all the hamlets.
Shadwall in 1669, Wapping in 1694, Bow in 1719, St. George-in-the-East by 1727, Christchurch, Spitalfields followed in 1729, St. Anne's, Limehouse in 1730 and St. Matthew, Bethnal Green in 1743.
Stepney had become a busy, overpopulated place with the number of country East Enders arriving at the parish, however this would be seen as a trickle compared to swarms which invaded then led by the Irish in the 1840s. It was described in the late 19th century that the only gentlemen to be found in the whole of East End were clergymen---it had become "Not a wery nice neighbourhood."
"Along the Road to the East Aldgate and Whitechapel " (page 35)
The parishes of Aldgate and Whitechapel grew from the great thoroughfare to the east, which led from the old gate to the ford over the River Lea on to Colchester and Ipswich. The highway is accustomed to cars, lorries, trains, Hackney carriages, stagecoaches, hay wagons and carriers' carts. Petrol fumes overwhelm it today; it was sooty railway smoke in our grandparents' day and before that the Whitechapel Road was for the mud churned up by the continuous parade of horse-drawn traffic.
Unlike Stepney both the Aldgate and Whitechapel owed their being entirely to the City of London, having started as Roman shantytowns outside the walls and ribbon development along the road to Colchester. They were true suburbs of the City, there were no village greens, no heart and never were one. As the docks developed the parishes grew more roads to take the heavy loads of spices, sugar, timber, tea, coffee and other spoils of a trading empire.
From the days of Pepys, and perhaps before wagons would gathered three times a week for the hay market at Whitechapel. Brick Lane was described by Daniel Defoe, who grew in the area as a "deep dirty road" used, by carts to carry bricks "that way into Whitechapel"
By 1750 most of the roads to London had been improved by turnpikes and coach routes had the capacity of many thousand-passenger miles per week. The streets were busy with smiths, ostlers, farriers, wheelwrights and innkeepers plying their trades.
The Hackney cabs were expensive, compared with today a journey of a mile in 1820 would cost a shilling (5p), to go from Aldgate to Bethnal Green would cost 18 pence. Road development went hand in hand with commercial expansion and Commercial Road was constructed shortly after the opening years of 18th century to service the East and West India Docks; later Commercial Street swept up through Spitalfields.
Dickens in Pickwick Papers describes the journey to Ipswich, climbing on to the stagecoach at The Bull Inn out onto Aldgate High Street. The Bull was one of four establishments which stood near the Aldgate underground station of today, one of these The Three Nuns was the staging post for journeys to Halstead and Braintree and a pub of that name was still there in the 1960s. The Bull Inn was used for twice daily journeys to East Anglia in 1822.
People came and went, rarely putting down roots; families did not often stay for more than a few generations. Throughout the last 400 years Whitechapel has been a transit camp.
Very little of Whitechapel 's past can be seen, the ancient bell foundry is still there, with its 500 year old ancestry and elegant neo-classical fa?ade, located on its present since 1738 on the corner of Fieldgate Street, the old path to Stepney village. It was this foundry which recast the Big Ben bell. Goodman's Yard the site of a Tudor dairy farm, Crosswall, Tenter Street where the cloth workers used to peg out the fabric to bleach and Leman Street, developed in the 17th century by Sir William Leman.
Whitechapel has changed less of all the East London hamlets, with clothing manufactures dominate, populated by foreigners with its clothes stalls at Petticoat Lane: 100 years ago the place was notorious for its tailors ' sweat shops.
From the records at London Court in the period 1470-1473 it appears that the inhabitants were a loose-living brawling crew with a good deal of bonking among servants, prostitution and squabbling.
Life continued to be hard in but for some the East End has been a place of refuge, French weavers came into the area and Spitalfields their own Sephardic Jews from Spain and Holland, brought in by Cromwell preferred the newly developed area south of the High Street. The area around Brick Lane was overcrowded and the Great Plague arrived in 1665, a large pit was dug in the churchyard at Aldgate even before the plague arrived.
The housing population of two parishes in the 1690s was about 3000 and inhabited by a mixture "meaner" and the "middling" sort with a fair sprinkling of well-off Roman Catholics and Jews. Tailors, sailors and weavers made up the majority of the inhabitants; a contemporary report of the day describes one of the many lodging houses in Whitechapel.
In one lived a motley crew of people, a Welsh farmer and his wife who ran a "caf?", a Yorkshire labourer and his wife, an old Cornish widow and Margaret Ford, who may have been "on the game". A row broke out between the farmer's wife and Ford and both ended up in court.
Further immigrants had arrived in the 18th century with well off Jews at the forefront, one of these widow Demaza had a snuff house in Goulton Street, where Tubby Isaacs the jellied eel and shell-fish stall is today. The German sugar bakers arrived as well as Danish and Swedish sailors, and an influx of Irish and Scots. Even John Constable found time to stay with his mother's relatives at Aldgate in the 1790s.
By 1741 a hospital was starting life at Prescot Street, in an area full of brothels and taverns treatment given by the beadles for syphilis was primitive; mercury injections. The hospital "The London" moved to its present site in 1757.
18th century Whitechapel relied upon a watch house manned nightly, 16 headboroughs and a constable to keep things in order. The poor were overseen by four officials and there was a prison for small debtors, church rate, poor rate, watch, lamp and scavenger rates were collected, apparently without too much trouble, as was the Land Tax.
A good deal of thieving went on, however just how bad it was is not known. In 1736 a man was strung up at Tyburn for stealing a whip and clothes from an innkeeper, local hangings were popular with the authorities when they wish to make a point.
One cannot leave Whitechapel without commenting on the six murders committed by Jack the Ripper, all taking place within a one square mile over a three-month period of 1888. Each victim was a prostitute, had her throat slashed and her body mutilated by someone with knowledge of human anatomy.
On the 7 August Mary Turner, aged 35 was found in George Yard Buildings; 31 August Mary Ann Nichols, aged 42 found on the pavement of Buck's Row; 6 September Annie Chapman found in the backyard off Hanbury Street. 30 September Elizabeth Stride found in the backyard of a working men's club, Berner Street and a second victim Catherine Eddows aged 43 found in Mitre Square and finally on the 9 November Marie Kelly aged 24 found in her lodgings.
"East of the Tower St Katherine's and East Smithfield "
Outside Tower Hill underground station stands William the Conqueror's castle; it was a palace and for the Middle Ages locals a zoo. The polar bear who arrived from Norway in 1252 and the King of France's gift of an elephant a few years later, this remained the keeper of the Royal animals until their removal to Regents Park in 1834.
Before the Victorian slums the Tower was a place of punishment and royal revenge, damp, rat-infested dungeons and thick walls enclosing the screams of the tortured. From Edward 1V time public hangings and decapitations took place on Tower Hill as the old verse says:
"Here comes a candle to light you to bed
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head".
Even in medieval times this was a true East End, with its gambling dens, brothels, immigrants, with do-gooders struggling to clean up the place and help those in need. In the 1450s the main business seems to have been controlling prostitution, gambling and gaming. Off course today it has been cleaned up with roads full of traffic roaring around the office blocks and stop starting at the traffic lights.
Immigrants in Shakespeare 's day to the area continued with the Dutch and Flemings dominating with 285 aliens being noted in 1586, even in 1784 St Katherine's was an immigrant area with numerous Dutch, French, Danes, Polish, Spaniards, Scots and the odd Italian being noted. In 1808 the Royal Mint was erected there, with the most significant changes occurring with the opening of the London Dock in 1808 and the St. Katherine's 19 years later.
This particular development led to public outcry as houses; schools, workhouses, pubs, church and graveyards were to be demolished. But so no avail 11,300 lease holders and lodgers were thrown out without compensation, ten pounds was given to allow the reburial of bodies; gravestone removal was at the expense of the relatives. St. Katherine's Hospital was sent to Regents Park, the royal lions shortly followed and the area was engulfed in land of dark warehouses, colonies of filthy streets and alleys.
"Wapping, Shadwell, Ratcliff and Limehouse The riverside hamlets"
Once the river was the lifeblood of east London with Ratcliff its ancient port, Dickens in his youth around the1820s would visit and spoke of the area in his "Uncommercial Traveller". Press gangs operated in the Wapping area and were alleged to have visited the Bell alehouse at Execution Dock where Elizabeth Batts lived. In 1736 James Cook from Whitby was a customer at the Bell and was appalled to see the young sickly Elizabeth in this rough place, where sailors and colliers drank and lodged.
He vowed to marry the girl and this he did, he off course was Captain Cook one of the world's greatest explorers. After marriage they set up home locally but soon went upmarket to a bigger house at Mile End. Lodging at Wapping was Captain Bligh, John Newton; the slave shipowner lived locally as well as men who were on "The Endeavour" when Captain Cook discovered Australia. It was I fact Zachariah Hicks, the second lieutenant and a local Wapping man who first sighted Oz.
In Ratcliff on the a December night in 1811 Mr. Marr sent his maid to buy some oysters for his supper, whilst he closed his lace warehouse. On her return she could not gain entry and with the assistance of a constable broke in. Marr, his wife, their baby and a shop boy were found dead, killed with a ripping chisel and maul. 12 days later the landlord of the King's Arms, his wife and servant were discovered with fractured skulls and their throats cut. After false arrests a man called Williams was arrested but he hanged himself in prison.
His body was paraded past the homes of his victims and the body thrown into a pit dug on the corner of Cable Street and Cannon Street Road.
Between 1801 and 1861 the population of Ratcliff trebled, swollen by the arrival of poor Irish. The construction of Commercial Road in 1810 effectively cut the hamlet in half. As Dickens 's wrote in "Mutual Friend" describing the inhabitants this
"accumulated scum of humanity,
washed, as it were from somewhere else"
Executions were a common sight at the Execution Dock in Wapping where the hanging of pirates was a specialty; Tower Hill was the seen of the death of a dozen watchers in 1747 and the stand upon which they were standing collapsed.
Hangman were hired by the City of London sheriffs and one hangman, Derrick was himself sentenced to hang. The Earl of Essex whom he, Derrick later beheaded reprieved him. Derrick's other claim to fame was the gallows the derrick crane is named.
Public executions attracted large crowds and when a man was selling pies fell over in a crowd of 40,000 in 1807, the resulting panic and chaos left 100 dead or dying. From 1868 all executions were confined behind prison walls.
The area saw much damage from the Great Fire of 1666 and the 1940-41 World War 2 Blitz.
Limehouse
Limehouse, unlike the hamlets of Ratcliff and Whitechapel has a heart; the great white Hawkesmoor church built in 1724 and consecrated six years later. It is one of the tallest churches in the country; St. Anne stood head and shoulders above everything around before the tower of Canary Wharf dwarfed it.
Dickens was a familiar visitor to Limehouse where his godfather, Christopher Huffam lived in Church Row and worked in Narrow Street. Also Jerome K Jerome lived here in fine 18th century houses in the 1860s and the area was the first to attract gentrification, long before the advent of the new bright Docklands.
Limehouse probably started life as a fishing settlement in the little cove at the angle of the Thames later called Limehouse Hole. The name appears in 1367 as le Lymhostes", or limeoasts, this was the name of the kilns where chalk from Kent was burnt to make lime for London buildings.
Limehouse in 1703 was still an open countryside sort of place, with only two streets Limehouse, which ran along the river and Three Colts Lane. By 1730s Limehouse had grown enough break away from Stepney and have its own church. The new parish, absorbed part of Ratcliff was bounded by Mile End New Town on the north and Poplar to the east.
In 1781 the Limehouse Cut was opened, this connected the River Lea at Bromley with the Thames There were charity schools and charitable trusts which the poor and indigent of the parish quite decent, with reasonable outrelief and places in almshouses. How different it would all become in a 100 years.
The new century brought the opening of the West India Docks in Poplar and the arrival of the massive Commercial Road; this followed in the 1820s the Regent's Canal. Its route out of the west side of Limehouse, curving around London on the way to the Midlands coupled with the building of the London to Blackwall railway line would have signaled major changes for the inhabitants of east London.
The port of London brought with it Chinese to Limehouse steaming laundries and opium dens, all that is left today are the famous Chinese restaurants of The Friends and The New Friends.
Bethnal Green, Spitalfields and Mile End New Town
If it werent's for the weaving, what should we do" (page 106)
The area around Petticoat Lane 200 years ago was a prosperous part of town, with its Huguenots famous for their singing birds as well as their weaving. The visitors from all over the country, in the sedan chairs ordering dress lengths of brocade or figured silk. 12 to 15 thousand looms were kept busy when the silk industry was at its peak, with a labour force of 30,000.
The hamlets of Whitechapel, Mile End Old Town and Spitalfields had their heyday in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Of these Spitalfields, an hamlet of Whitechapel was best known as "weaver town", with Mild End New Town, a hamlet of Stepney, providing the accommodation. However the Mile End New Town today does not exist, being absorbed by Spitalfields and Bethnal Green. Bethnal Green had more looms than its two neighbours and was older of the three hamlets by some 500 years.
Bethnal Green (page108)
The earliest reference to Bethnal Green is an 8th century deed when a grant was made of a courtyard at Blithehall in St. Dunstan's parish to Mathildade le Vayre of Stepbonhethe. It is said that Blithehall means "Happy Nook" which would have struck the 19th century inhabitants, by then a dire of slums, as most ironic.
The settlement was almost certainly Roman in origin, perhaps a ribbon development along the road to the ford over the Lea, following the course of Bethnal Green Road and Roman Road. Although having no direct route into the City of London, there would have been cottages and the odd great house that serviced the Bishop's manor house nearby. The Green was the heart of the village, which centered on the area where the museum and Victoria Park are today.
Elizabethan Bethnal Green was a fine place with at three substantial properties. Rubens is thought to have stayed when he visited England from 1629 to 1630, at Sir Balthazar Gerbier house. This gentle suburban village became home to French silk weavers and took in the overspill from Spitalfields and Mile End New Town, the industrilisation of the weaving industry brought violence. On a chill December morning in 1798 two of them. John Doyle and John Valline were executed at the crossroads by The Salmon and Ball pub. Their crime was rioting and machine breaking.
The population had grown to 75,000 by 1800, with the influx of Irish and English country folk and this had risen to 130,000 by the end of that century. Living conditions were appalling and infant mortality rose to unknown heights.
The Gibraltar Row Cemetery opened to accommodate the number of corpses was filled with tiny coffins. Water was supplied to a serried ranks of cramped, look-alike urban cottages twice a week and for two hours at a time and at low pressure. The weaving cottage industry had all but collapsed by then and the inhabitants trooped off to the daily grind of the numerous factories, which were mushrooming up all around. Many to work in the furniture industry.
Out of this misery help came along in the form of the Salvation Army, they took over an old wall store in Three Colts Lane and by 1857 they had built a museum to bring some culture to light up the desperate bleakness. Everywhere the establishment put up great grim edifices these churches were never filled, however for some religion was an escape and comfort.
Anglo-Catholicism banished long ago started to come back; today it is a full house at St. Matthew's Church for the paternal festival of the 21 September. This is what was for those whose alternative was a dank back kitchen with babies crying and dying and water only available three times a week.
In 1841 the local lunatic loony bin, a mansion built in 1570 for John Kirby housed 587 inmates and 45 staff, the "patients" were a mixture of sailors, cabinet makers, a druggist, a lawyer, a tailor and many whose occupation was not known. It was replaced in 1843 and during World War One owners of German local shops were locked up there.
During the 1920, and 30s slum clearance brought in new blocks of flats, however the Second World War destroyed over 2000 houses and the population had dropped by half of its 1901 total. The migration of locals to the new towns of Essex the Bethnal Green population in 1964 was 46,420 people.
"Spitalfields and Mile End New Town " (page 113)
Spitalfields still has elegant houses left over from the good silken days and can be seen in the streets of Fournier, Princelet and Wilkes and some have been restored to the original splendour, a rarity in this London's backyard. There are still shops with their 18th fronts and this may be a consequence of the relatively rich Huguenots that arrived with money, status and a trade.
In 1399 the area was called "Spittlepond Spittlepond" " and had been a Roman cemetery, the area of Middlesex Street where the Sunday Petticoat Lane market is, there were fields. Hogg Lane, now Middlesex Street had pigs being driven up from Whitechapel.
Driven out of France in the last years of Charles 11 reign, 1685 15,000 Huguenots settled in London alone. The vast majority joined the earlier immigrant groups in the north of Whitechapel; a new town was built for the immigrant silk workers at the bottom of Brick Lane. It was a separate hamlet of Stepney in 1690 was given the name of Mile End New Town and henceforth the original Mile End became forever known as Old Mile End Town.
The hamlet was two miles in circumference by 1760 it had 620 houses, the first house went up in what is now Greatorex Street and Hanbury Street, very few houses survive from dating before 1800.
However by the 1830s the silk weaving had declined and weaving became a sweat shop industry, those that could left for the north, some to Essex however those that stayed started to experience the dire poverty that was to engulf the remaining East Enders by the 1880s.
A government report of 1831/32 found that of the 100,000 people in these three hamlets, half were engaged in silk manufacturer and 17,000 were loom weavers; almost all the rest were dependent on it in some way. By 1850 weaving was collapsed and the re-introduction of imported French silk was the death blow. Into this seething couldron of humanity the Eastern Jews, "the offal of the earth",as these were then called, were back.
In 1931 there were still two weaving firms in Bethnal Green, one of whom produced the robes for George V1's Coronation. The silk having been made in Braintree, Essex where Messrs Warner and Sons had moved from Spitalfields 40 years earlier.
Mile End, Bow and Bromley
The commuter belt" (page121)
By the time the stage coach, setting off from The Bull at Aldgate, passing through Whitechapel and the Mile End Gate the passengers would have arrived at the more salubrious hamlets of Mile End and Bromley and the larger village of Bow. Because of their distance from the City, they took longer to become absorbed into the East End proper.
"Mile End " (page122)
Mile End, a Stepney hamlet was as the name implies one mile from Aldgate; started at the Mile End Gate where the junction with Cambridge Heath Road is today. In 1800 the Whitechapel Road from the gate was a cluster of houses and market gardens, the village centre was around Stepney Green underground station, at the junction of with Broome Lane or as it now Globe Road.
This was Mile End Old Town, not to be confused with Mile End New Town which was north-west and a later 17th century creation. Mile End Green was a large common to the south of the main road, spreading east to Bow; the City 's "Hampstead Heath" The Poll Tax " riots of 1331 brought an army of 50,000 peasants to London led by Wat Tyler. The young Richard 11 rode out to confront and assure them on Mile End Green.
There is a mural at the junction of Copperfield Road and Bow Common Lane to commemorate the event.
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