Читать книгу The Real East End - Burke Thomas - Страница 10

EAST END! . . . Visions in the public mind of slums, vice, crime, sin, and unnameable horrors.

East End! . . . Dregs of humanity. Beggars and thieves. Bare-footed waifs. Outcasts. Drunkards. Jack the Ripper. Crimping dens. Dangerous streets. Policemen walk in twos and threes. Something worse than Chicago. Sidney Street. Limehouse. Opium dens.

East End! . . . Hooligans. Diseased harlots. Public-houses at every corner. Thugs lurking in every alley. Sudden death.

Well, legends are like old soldiers. But old soldiers do eventually fade away, and that is more than legends do. Fact, set beside legend, is a poor, pale thing, apathetic and incompetent to hold its own. Facts fade away and die, but legends are invulnerable and immortal; and the East End legend, I suppose, will last as long as there is any East End. Because the East End did misbehave itself in the forties and fifties of last century, the decent and kindly East End of the twentieth must go on paying for misbehaviour with which it was never concerned. The People are like that; they will cherish their traditions against all truth and all disproof. They will speak of singers as great singers long after the singers’ voices have gone to rags. They will applaud once-fine actors who have lost all ability to act. If a man has once had a term of prison he is for ever after an ex-convict. If a man is once charged with a crime and proved innocent, he is remembered for ever as “the man who was charged with——” They love labels and will keep their faith in them long after the print of the label has faded. They will give a politician a good name, or a dog a bad name, and no matter what politician or dog may afterwards do, the label is never changed. So with the East End. They have fastened on the legend and ignored the fact; and if my own early books have had anything to do with nourishing the legend among them, I make no apology. It is their own fault, as I have said elsewhere, for taking imaginative Arabian Nights fictions as though they were newspaper-reporting. I admit to using the East End for my own purposes, and dramatizing it to what I wanted it to be, as many authors have done before and since with the territories of their choice.

The public’s muddled notions on the social life of the East End are accompanied by equally muddled notions on its topography, and even on its location. Many people think that the whole of the East End consists in a district called Limehouse. To a still larger number it means, topographically, any part of London east of a line drawn from Islington to Camberwell, and, sociologically, any quarter where the poor live. You have only to say to these people “slums” and “poor” and “Communism,” and they think at once “East End.” They do not know that Vauxhall, Camden Town, North Kensington and Battersea are much more truly representative of what they think they mean by the term. Even the Press often goes astray in the matter. My friend, Ernest George, who wrote that moving play, Down Our Street, keeps a bookshop in Hackney. Every press paragraph that I have seen about him states that he keeps a bookshop in the East End. In the nineties Arthur Morrison published his Tales of Mean Streets, the scene of most of the tales being Hoxton. That book is still described as a book of East End stories. Some time ago I published a tale the scenes of which were Clerkenwell and Kingsland Road. That, too, was reviewed as a tale of East End life.

In truth, the East End is as definite a quarter as the West End. Hammersmith and Notting Hill are West but they are no part of the West End, nor are Edgware Road, or Bayswater, or Paddington, though they are more West than any part of the West End. The East End, then, is only one part of that half of the metropolis which is called East London. The East End itself is the vast Metropolitan Borough of Stepney. That borough begins at Aldgate Pump and ends at Poplar, with Bethnal Green as its northern boundary and the river as its southern. Within its lines you have all those districts which compose the East End, and their names are Aldgate, Whitechapel (the Ghetto), Spitalfields, Ratcliff, Shadwell, Wapping, Mile End and Limehouse; the Tower Hamlets, in short. This is the true East End, and these are the names which, to the uninformed ear, still carry an odour of misery and evil. But it is, as I say, an odour only, with no substantial source. The East End of Blanchard Jerrold and Doré and James Greenwood perished in their lifetime, and many courts and alleys near the City border, which once were nests of hovels and the haunts of desperadoes, now hold the solid buildings of commerce and industry. Warehouses, wholesale shops, factories, and the offices of small businesses may be found occupying the houses that once were crimping dens and gambling dives. The great god Business has accomplished in a few strokes all those reforms which the philanthropic groups spend many years and tons of other people’s money in talking about. If you think you will find here any fruity samples of what is called “low life,” I recommend you to look elsewhere—to look off City Road and around the minor streets of certain Midland and Northern and Scottish towns.

None the less, the East End is dramatic. It is peculiarly rich in atmospheres and in variety of human types. It is as respectable as Brixton, but it is not Brixton. It is as well-clothed as Pimlico, but it is not Pimlico. It is right on the edge of the City; in fact, the City merges into it; but it is not affected by the City. Independent of each other and without warfare, the bleak, brittle life of the City marches with the warm, casual life of the East End. London has many souls, and the East End is its dramatized soul, for it is built of all nations. Its townscapes, if not pleasing, are affecting. All have quick lines of character, for souls from all parts of Europe have wrought this quarter into what it is and have left their impress upon it. Its hundreds of rheumatic courts and alleys, blocked in and left as they were two centuries ago, are charged with exotic atmosphere. Its dusk and its night are apart from the dusk and night of other quarters. Its life may be ugly to those who see modern art as ugly, but, like that art, it is inspired by a gusty strength which comes out in later generations, full but mellow. Its young people are the common plants from which after long breeding our garden flowers come. They take what is; the general tone, though free, is respectable. It has the genuine spirit of Bohemia. It proves what the artists have not yet learnt—that one can lead the Bohemian life, if one wishes to, in strict decency, and that muddle and drunkenness are no necessary part of it. There is no deliberation about this. It does not spring from pose or from poverty. It is the East End’s natural way of living. As for poverty, though it can show much of this, you will find deeper poverty in North and South London; and as for drunkenness, you will see much more of that in Shaftesbury Avenue and Jermyn Street than here. If it is crime you want, then again you must look elsewhere. There is today no “crime quarter.” Crime has become a recognized industry, with depots in all parts of London, and if it flourishes a little more in some parts than in others, those parts are the West and the Far West. Scarcely any of “The Boys” belong to the East End. Study police-court reports for a few days and note the addresses of the smash-and-grabbers, the hold-up men, the car thieves, the burglars. You will note very few East End addresses. There is once in a way a little disorder, created mainly by one small gang, but no more than occurs in any other district. This gang seldom does anything worse than indulge in that kind of outrageous and irritating horseplay common to all spirited and half-grown creatures; and if that kind of thing is to be called Crime, then Oxford and Cambridge are dead-black centres of crime. Such mild disorder as happens is mainly traceable to overcrowding and lack of room-space, which leads to nervous tantrums and the desire to break out. The East End has always been, and I suppose always will be, overcrowded. It is the cheapest quarter of London for living, and it acts as a magnet to the poor of all places. Progress never succeeds in clearing it, for with progress of one class goes retrogression of another. As fast as the younger generation grows up, and makes material progress, and moves to the outer suburbs and rears its children to standards a shade more middle-class, a new host of peasantry from the counties, a new host from the impoverished plains of Europe, and a new set of drifters from other parts of town come in and take their place. And these marry when they are not financially fit for marriage, and set up in one room, and so the overcrowding goes on. But they bear it well, and the horse-play of the one small rough element is rather ebullient than corrosive.

Those comfortable folk who do not cherish the East End legend of violence and depravity cherish one equally unfounded. They link the East End with misery. Misery! There are numbers of places where this may be perceived, but the East End is not one of them. A straight face does not imply personal misery any more than an ever-smiling face implies personal happiness. Yet the legend persists. A week or so ago, a daily-paper gossip-writer, presumably just out of school, described to his readers his adventure of a bus-ride through the East End, and told them that from what he saw he felt that there could be joy in life even (even!) for those who lived in the East End. The acute observer! People of this sort must have got their minds clogged when they were young and never have cleaned them. This attitude to the East End is akin to that attitude which at the words “artist’s model” thinks “immorality”; which thinks of Paris as “gay,” and dull Antibes, that inferior Torquay, as delightful because the Right People go there; and a walk over the Pyrenees as “romantic” in comparison to a walk over the Pennines. I remember one of our sleekly prosperous West End novelists telling me with a sort of sad despair that after reading some London-byway sketches of mine he felt that it was useless to try to help These People. (He did not call them These People with any intent of sneering; he used the term instinctively as a zoologist naming an “order.”) He pointed his remark with a personal experience. He had, it appeared, with his natural kindness, ventured out of his West End, and had gone Down There to give assistance at some kind of entertainment, and had found that These People displayed no signs of misery or privation, and expressed no gratitude to him for the sacrifice of his time. When I smiled he seemed unable to perceive where the joke lay. There were actually three jokes.

Another legend is that of the ignorance and illiteracy of the East End people. A brilliant young Cambridge man lately wrote a newspaper article satirizing the working classes as our future rulers, and exposing their ignorance of current affairs. He took his example (of course) from the East End—a Council School boy of fourteen. The article held the usual patronizing tone of the University boy towards the Council School boy; yet this young man must know quite well that ignorance of general matters is not confined to East End boys of fourteen. This ignorance could have been equally well illustrated by scores of examples from among our other “future rulers”—boys of eighteen of his own social rank. If the author thinks all boys of good family are enlightened, and all working-boys dense, any employer can correct him. Again, one of our “intellectual” novelists recorded recently, with a note of wonder, that on his visiting a Whitechapel home the daughters of the house were reading Marcel Proust and a volume of Tchekov’s comedies. Why the wonder? Would he have expressed wonder if the same thing had happened in Hampstead? If not, why in this case? Was it due to that ignorance of actual life which is the cause and essence of the intellectuals? Or was it a virtuous presumption that all those who were not lucky enough to be born in “nice” quarters are necessarily witless; that grace and culture are to be expected only in the sons of Balliol? Last year an amiable Divine surprised all informed people by a similar attitude. He announced, with some show, that he had been “Down” to the East End, and had made a discovery. He had discovered that the East End girl washed herself and dressed neatly!

But there are plenty like these people, clotted with half-formed prejudice, and unable to see anything outside their preconceived notions as any part of the real world; always “discovering” things which other people have always known. While the amiable Divine was about his exploring, he might have ventured a little farther into the terrible jungle. He would not then have told the story he did tell of a young girl of to-day, which began with her addressing another girl—“O crikey, ’Arriet . . .” There may be some very aged women in the East End whose name is Harriet, but I will bet the Divine all my cigarette coupons that he can’t produce a young East End girl of that name, or one who uses the slang of thirty years ago. The names current in the East End to-day are the names current in any other part of London, and the young girls are mainly Joans, Bettys, Viviens, Dorises, Barbaras, Sylvias, and Evelyns. He also put the word “spicy” into the mouth of an East End girl. That again he could not have heard. Any girl of to-day, whether East End or West End, who wanted to convey what that word used to convey, would use a word borrowed from an American talkie.

The Shadwell or Spitalfields girl is, indeed, no different from any other London girl. You will see her any day in the offices of the City and the shops of the West—bright, pretty, shingled, lipsticked and celanesed; and you will see nothing about her to suggest the awful Shadwell or Spitalfields of your imagination. You may see one type of her in the evenings, setting out from her East End streets, with other girls and young men, all in full evening clothes, for a West End restaurant or a West End dance-hall. And if you exchanged her cheap frocks for the real thing, and put her in the hands of a Bond Street hairdresser, and then set her among a number of the Bright Young Things of Mayfair, the only notable difference would be that the Bright Young Things would have uglier and noisier manners. You may label her “East End Girl” if you like, but the phrase has no more significance than “Clapham Girl” or “Hampstead Girl” or “Wimbledon Girl.” If you can perceive anything that does mark her, it is that she is a little sharper and more common-sensible than her fellows from some other quarters. These virtues are of her streets.

It is the custom in all cities that the rich select for residence the western end of the city, leaving the poor and the strugglers to camp in the east. Something symbolical here, perhaps—the moving process of the suns. Certainly there is a tang of morning about these haggard streets, and their social note, derived from the people, is one of temperate jubilee. The stronger element is the people, and you feel that at any moment this element is likely to wipe the haggard streets from the vision and achieve complete jubilee. Seldom do you see here the frigid, bored faces that you see west of the Royal Exchange. The people are not expressive; their acceptance of life is never vocal, and neither their faces nor their figures are effervescent. It is in the strong, rough-shod tone that you perceive their rich vitality and their gusto for living. They are never tired of life, for they never try to accelerate its tempo. They take it as it comes, and every day is a promise and not a mere repetition of a thousand yesterdays. Watch the crowds coming from the Rivoli or the People’s Palace, or from the Palaseum or La Bohème cinemas. Calm faces. Firm pulses. Delight in everyday things. No need of cocktails to whip up energy or interest. No need of the dull prod of freak parties or foolish treasure-hunts. No cold withdrawal from their neighbours. Life has not spoilt their humanity by a blunting variety of interest; they are openly concerned about each other and about you. No outer signs of poverty. They haven’t much money, but they do see life, and they keep an appetite for it. The girls, as I say, are marcelled and are dressed in quick copies of Hanover Square—fashion travels even more swiftly than bad news—and the young men are dressed in smart “suitings,” perhaps a shade too smart, and have had smart hair-cuts. Only the elderly are dowdy, and many even of these run to furs and Ciro necklaces. There may be no solid background to this outer smartness, but in itself it is a sign of a vitality that is making the tired and overburdened middle classes wonder. Out of this district came the vital minds of H. M. Tomlinson, of Alfred Wolmark, artist, Solomon, pianist, James Rodker, critic, David Bomberg, artist, Noah Elstein and Ernest George, dramatists, Moysheh Oyved, Yiddish poet, Clare Cameron, nature essayist, and Professor Thomas Okey; and more are coming and will continue to come. For further proof of the intelligent impulses that operate here independent of the missionaries, you have only to visit the Bethnal Green and Whitechapel Art exhibitions of the pictures of local working-men. Many of the pictures originally shown there are now in national art collections. The assumption that the East End is peopled by illiterates is dispelled by a brief glance at the facts. The free libraries, of which Stepney alone has four, are always busy; they have nearly 90,000 volumes in constant circulation. Various literary and social circles, composed of young people who support the more popular literary papers, hold regular meetings through the winter season at which some serious writer is the guest, and the People’s Palace concerts of chamber music and modern orchestral works are always packed.

Enterprise and genius are born of the mixture of breeds, and in these streets all European races and some Asiatic races have mingled and married outside their race. This bit of London has always been the first bit of London that the poor immigrant saw, and it is the instinct of the wanderer to make his first camp where he lands. So here, in the Tower Hamlets, they camped, meaning to move to the hinterland next week. But they didn’t move, and the camp became a settlement in which they built some shreds of their own country, if only with national musical instruments and national song, and national forms of religious worship. And here they are to-day—Russians, Danes, Jews, Syrians, Egyptians, Armenians, Chinese, Hindoos, Malays, Germans, Roumanians, Swedes and Irish—so mixed and so married that the district is a small America, and the young East End man of to-day may have a Syrian grandfather and an Irish grandmother, and a German Jew for a father. Hence the vitality and the alert perception and the talent.

Its most visible commodities are food, clothes, and jewellery, and these almost give the history of the district. They show the mind of the immigrant, of the wanderer at last ashore. His first thought is for food to maintain strength. Then clothes for warmth. Then jewellery as a handy means of carrying his wealth. Then, when his life is more or less settled, these things assume another proportion; they represent his standing in the community—good feeding, good clothes, and decoration. And so these three commodities become basic commodities and the lowest common measure of success or failure.

I have said that its dusk and its night have a quality of their own, and indeed for me they have. Night, which is everywhere mysterious, is here something more. It is evocative. This may derive from the presence of the river and its long-travelled ships of all countries, or from the fact that more of the old London survives here than elsewhere; or from its peculiar topography. Look at the map and mark how its streets and lanes wander and twist in purposeless convolutions. If the reeling English drunkard made the rolling English road, then the streets and alleys of the East End must have been blazed by a lunatic who had been bitten by Tarantula. Or maybe they were born of the errant footsteps of the first foreign refugees wandering blindly across the marshes for some friendly spot where they might set down their bundles and rest untroubled. However they came, there is no mistaking their effect. The curling alleys, the interlocking courts, the beetling gables and solitary lamps, the blank walls and lakes of silent darkness and the river’s black majesty, do create an atmosphere of impending event. Darkness here is true darkness, opulent and velvet. Its beauty is not destroyed, as in the West, by multitudes of arc lamps and glittering night-signs. Lamps, away from the main streets, are few, and night here may be felt in its natural quality. Cities and places are best seen at night. By day a city is engaged in its affairs, but at night it has time to talk to you. And at night vision is restricted to the immediate. One can see only a part, and the part, properly seen, is always greater than the whole. There is no obtrusion of the commonplace whole to distract the attention; there are no clear-cut landmarks of the obvious. There is your visual radius, and beyond that, marked only by melting shadows, the unknown world. At daylight, this unseen and unknown will be merely a mile of Commercial Road or Whitechapel Road or Cambridge Road—explored and known; but at night it is uncharted space in which the part stands out individual and arresting. Within one’s little night-bound radius one can truly see the East End; and every corner seems to hold its story.

Fog, too, may be known here in something of its full strength, and in all hues—from white through cobweb grey, yellow and purple to a black more black than darkest night. It has a way of coming suddenly, up from the river, and in a few minutes the aspect and character of the streets are changed, and a rushing multitude of people is transformed into a crawling mass of phantoms. You are going about your affairs at the street’s natural pace, and the rhythm of the traffic is at full swell, when, with scarcely a hint of trouble, all honest noise is muted into furtive murmur. The lamps, quickly lit, are no more than glow-worm sparks; human creatures are twisted into shapes of menace; the main streets become sightless gorges, and the shortest alleys stretch into infinitude. Your natural dramatic townscapes have become, in a brief space, melodramatic; and if you wish to know what fog can really be, and the dumb baseless terror it can inspire, you should experience it here. The general night atmosphere of impending event becomes, with fog, impending catastrophe. Darkness is kind, but fog is wicked.

There is the darkness of the riverside, and the darkness of Stepney, the darkness of Limehouse and the darkness of Spitalfields. Each has its quality and its peculiar accompanying life. You may wander about these parts, through the winding and doubling alleys, and see little save varying hues of darkness and lighted windows and shadow falling upon shadow; but you will hear much. You will hear many accents and many tongues and many musics. You will hear gramophones and wireless in Stepney, and the rich Cockney accent. By the river you will hear pianos and concertinas and the hooting of tugs and the ripple of chains. In Limehouse you will hear the liquid accents of Canton and the mournful sound of reed instruments, and in Spitalfields you will hear the guttural Yiddish and old songs of Russia. In the darkness of Stepney you can feel the ordinary London home. By the river you can feel the port and the sea and the sea’s wanderers. In the darkness of Limehouse and Spitalfields you can feel the spirit that troubled the air around the waters of Babylon.

As places are better seen at night, so these things are more keenly to be felt at night than at day. Night brings not only cessation of labour, but a calm of its own, to which the neighbourhood of the river and the docks lends fluency; and in this calm the elusive spirit of place can rest and make itself known. Side streets and courts are no longer side streets and courts, but great gulfs of Night. Within those gulfs the movements of human creatures cease to be human and become spectral. From out of them come now and then to the keen ear the muffled vibrations of deep experience. Under mist or moonlight these groupings of courts and alleys and straggling streets become sternly beautiful and potent with awe. They have lived long, and have housed their millions. They have known birth and death, love and lust, suffering and joy; they have acquired something from all their creatures, wholesome and sinful, and have given something of themselves. In the bald daytime they are dumb; they are mere rows of houses; only at night do they give some hint of all that they have been and are. But the hint is nothing more than an awareness of the ache of life; that ache which is with us in pleasure as in pain, and which here is the ache of simple poor people living out simple lives as workers, wanderers, exiles and housewives. In this dramatic country and under this brooding darkness they sleep, each kind with its separate dream, and give the night a more poignant quality than the night of any other London quarter knows. Midnight darkness here is charged with everything of the strange and the awesome. It is useless to tell yourself that these alleys are inhabited by quiet, simple, working people, who have to be abed in order to be at work at six o’clock in the morning. Your skin knows better. They are inhabited by all man’s desires and thronged with whispers. There is melancholy in the fall of a shadow; grief in the single pale gas-gleam which makes the darkness more awful than utter darkness. The spell of grue is upon you, and you know again the night-fears of childhood.

MIDNIGHT IN LIMEHOUSE CAUSEWAY

Nothing, I think, has held a larger place in my imaginative life than this country. I love other parts of London more, but the East End, for me, has always been all cities crystallized. Long before I knew it, it was part of my mind. When I was seven years old, and attending my first school, I sat beneath a large-scale wall-map of London, and even then the place-names—Ratcliff, Isle of Dogs, Shadwell, Limehouse, Spitalfields—fascinated me, as Trebizond and Samarkand fascinate others; and the street-names ran in my mind like a recondite rune. I would repeat them to myself in bed—Goodman’s Stile, Gracie’s Alley, Sweet Lilac Walk, West India Dock Road, Amoy Place, Juniper Street, The North-East Passage, Kent and Essex Yard, Salmon Lane, Cinnamon Street, Coverley Fields, Ropemaker’s Fields, Oriental Street, Cuba Street, Frying-Pan Alley, Elbow Lane, Green Bank, Maize Row, Cotter’s Green, Drood Yard, Flower-and-Dean Street, Folly Wall, Blue Anchor Fields, Island Row, Three Colt Street, Havanna Street, Canton Street, Mutton Walk, Houndsditch, Drum Yard, Irish Court, Malabar Street, Silver Street, Gold Street, Assam Street, Manilla Street, Ocean Street, Cadiz Street, Glasshouse Fields, Tobago Street, Wapping Wall. Though I had never seen them I knew these streets in dreadful dreams and pleasant imaginings. In sleep, I met lovely sweethearts in Flower-and-Dean Street. I had heart-tearing escapes in Drood Yard, and dare-devil adventures in Frying-Pan Alley. Nightmares brought me hideous minutes in Elbow Lane, and in Gracie’s Alley I played the heroic saviour. When, later, while still a child, I made actual acquaintance with Spitalfields and Shadwell, they became the setting of my earliest and most ardent experiences. So much so that if ever, far away from London, I think unwittingly of London, it is those winding streets and clotted courts that I see and those meagre companies of lamps. I first saw them with the eyes of boyhood and only at night; thus they made an impression which twenty years of daylight acquaintance have not been able to eradicate. There, for the first time in my life, a girl turned at a corner and smiled at me, a drunken man at an upper window roared at me. There I first realized the magic of a street organ playing in the darkness. There I saw Rabbis, and for the first time saw foreigners from distant lands, and there I first felt the poetry of lamplight and the splendour of ships and the greatness of rivers. In time it became for me a land where stories could be picked from the air, or snatched, as I have said, at every corner. In the crowding and various life of this quarter, they grow in dozens, where the stereotyped life of “betterclass” districts yields scarcely one. And they should, for all the folk tales of all the seven seas have been carried here and told upon the evening air; tales of Russia and Roumania and Palestine; tales of India; tales of Scandinavia, tales of Cathay, tales of ships and storms, and tales of London and of the English countryside.

And tales are still to be gathered here, though they seldom appear in the local Press. They are not to be gathered by busy news-gatherers. They await the idle ear. Every ship has its news, no longer strange, perhaps, but still news; news of things seen in other cities and of the events of the passage. In the inner parts, around Whitechapel, there are foreigners with whispered news of how they entered London without passport. In the coffee-shops and lodging-houses there are newcomers with tales of Russia and of Poland and Germany, and of the domestic or economic disaster which led them to pack up and seek new fortune in London. There are men in hiding. There are tales to be heard from aged Cockneys who have seen Stepney grow to what it is, and who knew the Highway when it was what it was. There are old men with tales of sailing-ship days which they will tell in their cottages whose front rooms are massed with tenderly carved models of ships and pictures of ships. There are tales to be heard in the Ghetto, in rooms dressed with the emblems of Judea, of the many wanderings that led the family at last to London; and tales to be heard of families that came from the farms of Norfolk and Lincolnshire and Suffolk, and made their first home here, with hope of better things that never reached the happy terminus of fact. And there are the daily stories, to be heard at every door, of how the hard times are being met.

All these tales the casual wanderer of the right sort may gather in passing. In the streets and the shops and the restaurants, he may have much good talk, for, as I have said, the true Bohemian spirit operates here. There is no hesitation or withdrawal, nor that cold repetition of parrot-phrases by which the standardized Englishman fences with the stranger until he proves him an equal, the sort of man one can introduce. Talk, once opened, is free and personal; unbosomed; and I, for one, find this talk, in its way, a good balance to talk with the polite. It is talk based on reality and on the immediate experience of those who live close to the elemental things. In mean streets people have to live singly, not play at living with the support of supers. They have to get down to life, not walk on its edge. Hence, mean streets hold a variety lacking in the noble streets. The noble streets, being noble, are mostly reticent. But the mean streets, filled by creatures who see life straight and live it straight, instead of through a wadding of book-culture, have a thousand points of interest.

Not that the East End is without its noble street. It has one that can stand comparison with any of the great London highways, and one that is full of common interest. This is the Whitechapel Road and Mile End Road, the great Roman highway which runs to-day, as it did centuries ago, straight into London from the Roman settlement at Colchester. It is as broad as the entrance to a great metropolis should be, and it puts to shame the poor pinched entrances at the centre of town of the Dover Road, the Brighton Road, and even the Great North Road. For the greater part of its length, it is lined with trees. Its story deserves a volume to itself; indeed, the story only of that section between Stratford and the City calls for a historian. It was one of the earliest roads into London, and while many of its contemporaries have been supplanted, and have disappeared or become grass-grown tracks dimly perceived on the outskirts, its traffic, from its first years, has never eased. An echo of its past importance may be found in the number of Yards which were once the yards of inns. Most of the inns have vanished, but the yards remain; in several of them the bedroom galleries may still be seen, and in one of them the coach office still stands. The best example is Nag’s Head Yard.

Thick as its life was, it goes on to-day thicker than ever, full of importance and yet with time for the little intimate things of every day. For a secondary highway, there is Commercial Road East, the Tilbury road. This has not the dignity of Mile End Road, but it is an important road for London. It is a road from many docks, and along it comes much of the material that supports the life and the industries of the greatest old city of the world.

These two roads, converging and meeting Leman Street and Commercial Street at Gardiner’s Corner, one of the busiest junctions of all London, make two major veins through the body of this quarter; and from them goes all the life that feeds the ramification of hamlets and streets which have grown out of them and which make what we call The East End. One may say of them, with more truth than of Mona Lisa’s head, that upon them all the ends of the world are come.

SPREAD EAGLE YARD, 1931

from my studio window