The home of successive waves of immigrants, from the Huguenots in the seventeenth century to the Jews in the nineteenth and Bangla-Deshis today, London’s East End has been the scene of its worst poverty and exploitation, and has inspired its greatest philanthropists, reformers and radicals. The East End is, and always has been, a place where conditions are tough, crime violent and work hard, but in which Cockney optimism and love of life are proverbial.
In this text, the area’s turbulent past and continuing traditions are accurately explored in text and pictures. If East End life has a character that transcends period and generation, it is vividly captured and delineated here, in a book which will delight and intrigue alike the citizen, the historian, the general reader and the visitor.