A bend in the river - Page 5
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Barbara Gunnell
THE EAST END OF THE PAST is fertile ground for England's burgeoning passion for family history. Countless books seek to record the ‘real East End'. These memoirs, written by the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of ‘real' East Enders, add wonderful human dimensions to history's grim catalogue of the consequences of imperial wealth and expansion. But they also sentimentalise and glamorise. Just as the phrase ‘real East Ender' has too often been used to mean ‘white', so the word ‘vibrant' too often precedes ‘community', and means Bangladeshi or black neighbourhoods. Now, at least, internationally acclaimed writers like Monica Ali, who tells the story of a woman from Bangladesh arriving in Brick Lane, the title of her book, are demonstrating that the ‘real East End' shifts, constantly reinventing itself.
When sentimentalists lament the loss of old solidarities and scorn gentrifiers and yuppies in ‘their' traditional East End, they fail to acknowledge that most new waves have gentrified, if that means coming to a poor, rundown area hoping to improve it. The Huguenot silk weavers were gentrifiers in the seventeenth century, bringing the manners and skills of Protestant France to Spitalfields; so are the Bangladeshis, now a third of the population. And so were the Poles, whose work ethic during the recent boom years alarmed the more relaxed local plumbers, decorators and carpenters.
Unlike those in the soap opera, today's East Enders do not live lives of multiracial solidarity. Poverty does not encourage harmony. The British National Party is feeding a residual resentment among locals at the failure of governments to help them share in the years of plenty. My first address in the East End was off Brick Lane, then a dingy street of curry houses where the last Jewish shopkeepers were moving out and the first-generation Bangladeshis were developing what is now a chic lunch-hour destination for City workers. At that time, in the 1970s, the neo-fascist National Front sold its newspapers at one end – carrying on a tradition from Oswald Mosley's blackshirts, calling for wogs, waps and Jews to get out of the East End – and the Socialist Workers Party distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets at the other.
My second address, three decades ago, was in Mile End, where I still live. A young neighbour, then about thirty, lamented the loss of the East End of her 1950s childhood. ‘They used to call this [Mile End Old Town] the Cohens and Kellys,' she told me, having correctly identified that I was neither Jewish nor Irish. She moved soon after to North London, like many ‘Cohens' before her. Three connected families across the road had lived in the street since the first of hundreds of World War II flying bombs to blitz East London hit the nearby railway. When London house prices soared in the 1990s, two of them sold quickly and moved to Essex. Now my neighbours are Chinese, Polish, Sri Lankan. As teenagers, the sons of a family of second– or third-generation British Sikhs adopted the accents of North London black rappers, rather than a Cockney twang – which, despite living in the heart of the East End, I now seldom hear. Their father talks as I do: southern, slightly lazy. And there's another sound I seldom hear: the EastEnders signature tune ends with a cheerfully whistled phrase. Now the only whistler is the ‘East End' window cleaner. Probably a ‘Kelly', he drives in from Essex.
A SECOND POPULAR TELEVISION program uses the signature East End image of the bend in the river. Here the credits show a helicopter clattering over the water and the high-rise landscape of Canary Wharf, towards a tower-top helipad. All is steel and glass and money. This is The Apprentice, a ‘reality' show where ambitious young men and women compete with each other to become an ‘apprentice' to the business tycoon Sir Alan Sugar. He is the son of an East End tailor (and, since June, enterprise adviser to Gordon Brown's benighted government) and talks with an improbably authentic Cockney accent, pouring scorn on their attempts to impress him with their business acumen. The Apprentice has proved hugely popular – partly because of Sir Alan's barked put-downs and partly because of the unashamedly raw capitalist energy of the competitors, many of them second-generation Asians. Canary Wharf is the right visual cue for this program. Over two centuries the former marshland on which the Wharf now sits has delivered hundreds of chancers their fortunes. It has done so mostly in a sea of deprivation.
That this particular bend in the river should again become the crucible for generating global wealth is an accident of geography. But the collocation of plenty and poverty is no accident. Muck and money are proverbial bedfellows. Those who need money and those who worship it find each other. The desperate arrived in London, welcomed in periods of boom and reviled when times were hard. Desperation and alienation breed lawlessness which, for rich and poor, has been a continuous thread in the East End's story.
For all the sentimental literature on the old harmonious East End, the stronger narrative is one of resilience. For a while, the life of the river and of the dockers who found their voice did provide cohesion and solidarity. But loyalties here have always been frail. Tower Hamlets has no centre; it groups together Mile End, Stepney, Poplar, Bow, Whitechapel, Millwall, Wapping, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, Shadwell, Aldgate, Spitalfields. Each hamlet has significance to its inhabitants, but no administrative coherence. The 2012 Olympics, the continuing development downstream of the Isle of Dogs and Lord Mawson's Water City will shift London's commercial centre further east. The East End could become central. The East End, with its rump of a name, could become the hub. The coming decade might be the first time – after centuries of poverty and substandard health, and of providing labour and services to enrich others – that East Enders get something back. They will not be the same East Enders, not even their descendants, quite probably not even with ancestors from the same continent. But it will be something to celebrate. ♦
