This book is the first single volume history of Stepney in modern times. It sets out to provide a vivid and yet scholarly portrait of an iconic London borough situated in the heart of the East End. Stepney is an area with very many well known associations and images, from the horrifying murders of “Jack the Ripper” to the soaking up of the heavy bomb damage during the Blitz, from the classical confrontation between Mosley’s fascists and the socialist left at the “Battle of Cable Street,” to the dramatic “Siege of Sidney Street” when Liberal Home Secretary Winston Churchill rooted out an anarchist cell. Beyond these dramatic episodes, Stepney witnessed the perennial struggle for subsistence among the many poor, the rise and fall of the great local docks, the immigration of large numbers of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the growth of the Labour Party and the surprising local ascendancy of the Communists, the desperate drive to improve public housing, the evacuation of a large proportion of its children at the start of World War II, and much more besides. This is a truly ground-breaking, very readable book that fills a surprising gap in our knowledge and greatly enhances our understanding of London, urban, working-class, inter-ethnic, industrial and British 20th century history.
The East End of London has one of the bloodiest histories in Britain. From the beginning, the East End was known as ‘outcast London’ – it was a space beyond the city wall, where London’s unwanted or undesirables lived. East-Enders were blamed for the Great Plague of London; Jack the Ripper prowled here, as did the Ratcliffe Highway murderer and the gunmen of the famous Sidney Street siege (attended by a top-hatted Winston Churchill). Communists, Fascists, strikers, Suffragettes and Skeleton Armies have all fought running battles through its streets. Then the East End weathered the worst that the Nazi bombers could throw at it during the dark days of the Blitz. Historically viewed as a ‘den of iniquity’, and once teaming with opium dens, prostitutes (known locally as ‘tigresses’) and paupers, all living amidst the horrendous poverty depicted by Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, this is a story of dreadful odds and of determination, filled with horror, grim British humour and hundreds of incredible years of history.
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