(John Murray, £16.99)
East End Chronicles by Ed Glinert
(Allen Lane, £20)
An Acre of Barren Ground by Jeremy Gavron (Scribner, £14.99)
In 1888, the year of the Ripper murders, my maternal grandfather AE Coppard was sent to work in the east end. "A pale boy of pinched appearance," according to his autobiographical story "The Presser" (published in a collection of 1928), he was soon to be seen "slouching early every morning along the Mile End Road towards the streets of Whitechapel." He was only ten years old.
After lighting the fire, his first job was to sweep the workshop clean of its "countless fragments of cloth and cotton." "It was his unending task," he writes of his alter ego Johnny Flynn, "to sort these into their various kinds. The pile never lessened, it seemed to grow with absorbent inexorable growth. Sometimes he could scarcely enter the door to get into the room; and the implacable mountain of rags was watered with the tears of his childish hungers and despairs."
"The Presser" paints a simple but deeply felt picture of a world where poverty, hunger, domestic violence, child labour and tensions between gentiles and Jews were not "issues" but everyday facts of life. Yet by the time he came to write his autobiography, It's Me, O Lord! (1957), Coppard was depicting the east end as a picturesque backdrop, where: "In summertime there were fruit and flowers from basket and crate, ice cream from florid Italian barrows, and all over the road, dodging dangerously among the traffic, were the lads in red jackets scooping up the ever-dropping dung."
Three of the most celebrated books about the east end were written within 15 years of my grandfather's arrival. The Russian pogroms of 1881 launched a great wave of Jewish immigration to London. Israel Zangwill's bestselling novel Children of the Ghetto (1892) put the case for them, claiming that the community was already becoming Anglicised, that "respectability" has "blurred the vivid tints of the East into the uniform grey of English middle-class life."
Arthur Morrison, by contrast, wrote of the east end's "mean streets"—a phrase he seems to have invented. A Child of the Jago (1896) thrilled his readers with its stories of a notorious slum, "for one hundred years the blackest pit in London."
Far more impressive is Jack London's The People of the Abyss (1903). When friends could not help with his plans to "sink myself down into the east end," he turned to Thomas Cook. Yet the celebrated international "path-finders and trail-clearers" could only tell him: "We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the east end… and we know nothing whatsoever about the place at all." London eventually dressed up in old clothes, lived among the poor and produced a classic piece of reportage, which influenced Orwell.
These books promote three key images of the east end—as home to a vibrant, poor but decent community, as spine-tinglingly dangerous, and as almost off the map, even for most Londoners. All assume a high level of anxiety about the area, although Zangwill wants to reassure his readers, Morrison to chill them and London to radicalise them. But the focus of much 20th-century writing was the changing Jewish experience. In 1967, Emanuel Litvinoff wrote a marvellous essay called "A Jew in England." Examining a school photograph of 1929, he recalls the evenings when "The fat started to sizzle in fish-and-chip shops, thumping pianos sounded from pubs, brilliantined young fellows in sharp suits stared with insolent lust at the plump buttocks of high-stepping girls, and crowds skirmished around the picture-palaces trailing peanut shells wherever they went." He describes growing up in "a tribal community… a village remote in spirit from the adjacent cosmopolitanism of the great city of London." It is the huge achievement of Litvinoff's autobiography, Journey through a Small Planet (1972), as of the early plays by Arnold Wesker and Bernard Kops, to look back at that community with clear-eyed nostalgia, seeing both the idealism and the small-mindedness, the family warmth and the loveless marriages.
A memorable scene in Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair's Rodinsky's Room (Granta, 2000) might be said to mark the end of the old Jewish east end. The book traces Lichtenstein's search for the mysterious, reclusive figure of David Rodinsky, who once lived above the synagogue at 19 Princelet Street. Scouring the area to interview surviving locals, she chances upon a druggy "art performance" in another disused synagogue, where "two women dressed in baby pink vinyl" sit behind a pile of old books on a desk, "stamping [them] with large rubber implements and then elegantly ripping pages out of them and tossing them on to the floor." Horrified to discover that the books are records of the local burial society, she leaps in to rescue them, and thus unavoidably becomes part of the event!
Two of the books reviewed here focus on Brick Lane, and Ed Glinert's East End Chronicles comes to a strange mystical conclusion there. Brick Lane is a road where many people go for clubbing, curries and cappuccinos, and perhaps an edgy arts event, so it no longer makes sense to describe the area, in the style of Jack London or Arthur Morrison, as uncharted territory or like the wild west. Monica Ali's Brick Lane (Doubleday, 2003) brought new slices of immigrant experience into mainstream British fiction and showed us the reality of life on the council estates just beyond the touristy façade of "Banglatown." But what is there left for white middle-class authors to write about?
All of them say something about how the City has been encroaching on Spitalfields and slowly devouring parts of the old east end. But none of them seem to be genuinely rooted in either City boardrooms or the mean streets beyond. All run the risk of literary "slumming," of turning poverty and violent crime into "local colour." And all are highly self-conscious, as if they have come too late, after the real stories have been told, yet still need a brightly coloured east end as an imaginative counterweight to the drabness of their own lives. Jack London, Emanuel Litvinoff and my grandfather had an eye for the poignant, sharply observed detail which illuminates the wider dramas of poverty and immigration. The new writers often seem to be trying to impose significance from the outside.
Tarquin Hall rewrites Jack London in the style of Bill Bryson. Returning to London after a decade abroad, he finds he can only afford accommodation in the east end. Salaam Brick Lane offers an account of his year there.
The book describes many desperate lives: "the nowhere people," refugees refused asylum but not deported; a girl who falls into the hands of an Albanian pimp; a former hooligan turned Whitechapel library autodidact who dreams of selling his first edition of The Grapes of Wrath to get his mother off her sink estate. Yet Hall can never resist a garish description, colourful stereotype or funny accent. A cheerful soul, he is well aware that his financial hassles are pretty trivial amid real deprivation, but that also means that nothing very much ever seems to be at stake.
For Ed Glinert, the east end has "a history of strangeness and savagery, of mystery and mayhem." He gives a notably sour account of postwar municipal socialism and a sympathetic account of the regeneration of Docklands under Thatcher. He brings together some fascinating material about music halls, air raid shelters, opium dens, river pirates, protection rackets and race relations. Yet he also wants to see the history of the east end in terms of "one overriding theme," mystically linking Brick Lane, Wren, the Romans and "the mysterious quasi-religious ephemera connected with the local Jack the Ripper murders."
Jeremy Gavron's astonishing "novel," An Acre of Barren Ground, also laces together dozens of stories, real and imagined, linked to different buildings in Brick Lane. All are vivid and gripping, many interlock ingeniously, and they are told in every conceivable style: photo-essay, brief graphic novel, bald chronology of a church's history, pastiche 17th-century "newsbook," authorial reflections on archival research and many more. We are taken into the world of naive Jewish immigrants from Russia; the inspector puzzling over the Ripper murders; a nun's illicit love affair; Huguenot weavers "operating their silk machines to the songs of linnets or woodlarks"; and lascar sailors on shore leave after running the U-boat blockade. Union activists and temperance campaigners may be familiar east end characters, but Gavron wants to extend our sympathies—and his elaborate network of narratives—back to a prehistoric mammoth hunt, down into the sewers and up into the air, as "the windblown seeds of the rosebay willowherb and the Oxford ragwort… float down by silky parachute" on to buildings just blasted by the Blitz. An Acre of Barren Ground is a virtuoso achievement, which tells us much about human hopes and disappointments, and even more about the nature of storytelling. But I am not sure that it really illuminates a particular place. When I think back to the scene of my grandfather crying into huge heaps of cloth, all these books seem as ephemeral as silky parachutes.
