London: The Biography

And where does the “East” begin? According to certain urban authorities the point of transition was marked by the Aldgate Pump, a stone fountain constructed beside the well at the confluence of Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street; the existing pump lies a few yards to the west of the original. Other antiquaries have argued that the real East End begins at the point where Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road meet. The taint of poverty, already apparent in the late medieval period, was in any case gradually extended. Stow observed that between 1550 and 1590 there was “a continual street or filthy strait passage with alleys of small tenements or cottages built … almost to Ratcliffe.” The road from the pump of Aldgate to the church at Whitechapel was by this date also lined with shops and tenements, while the adjoining field to the north was “pestered with cottages and alleys.” In similar manner there was “a continuous building of small and base tenements for the most part lately erected” from Bishopsgate to Shoreditch, and even beyond that there were mean buildings “a good flight shot” as far out as Kingsland and Tottenham. By the end of the sixteenth century the eastern portions of the city were being defined as “base” and “filthy,” their squalor and stench emerging despite proclamations and parliamentary Acts. The area of Spitalfields, laid out along more regular lines between 1660 and 1680, also soon acquired a reputation for poverty and overcrowding. The houses were small and narrow, while the streets themselves were often only fifteen feet wide. That sense of diminution, or of constriction, exists still. As the houses, so their inhabitants. A report of 1665 described the overcrowding created by “poor indigent and idle and loose persons.” So the “filthy cottages” of Stow’s report were being filled with “filthy” persons. It is the story of London.

The industries of the eastern neighbourhood gradually became filthy, too. Much of its trade and commerce came from the river, but in the course of the seventeenth century the region became steadily industrialised. In the vicinity of the Lea mills, malodorous manufactories were introduced. In 1614 a local court records that “The jury present Lancelot Gamblyn, lately of Stratford Langthorne, starchmaker, because by unlawful making of starch such a stink and ill favour continue and daily arise.” Less than fifty years later Sir William Petty was lamenting “the fumes, steams, and stinks of the whole Easterly Pyle,” and indeed for hundreds of years after that the “Easterly Pyle” became the home of what were known as “the stink industries”; all forms of corruption and noisomeness were fashioned there. It represented the focus for London’s fear of corruption and disease. Nor were these fears entirely ill-founded, either; demographic surveys revealed a remarkably high incidence of consumption and “fever” in the eastern reaches of London.

So the flight westward continued. From the seventeenth century onward the laying out of streets and squares moved inexorably in that direction; the wealthy and the well-born and the fashionable insisted upon dwelling in what Nash called “the respectable streets at the West end of the town.” The topographical divide, or rather the obsession with the West over the East, could be seen in minute particulars. When Jermyn Street was completed in the 1680s, the London Encyclopaedia observes that “the west end of the street was more fashionable than the east.” Another line of demarcation ran through Soho Square, where “every minute longitude east is equal to as many degrees of gentility minus,” as an American visitor put it, “or towards west, plus.” Of the newly fashioned Regent Street it was noted that “there are many squares on the eastern side of this thoroughfare, and some good streets, but rank and fashion appear to avoid them.”