![]() ![]() ‘They never assimilate our habits or become Englishmen,’ the Reverend G.S. Politicians and commentators saw them as hostile strangers. Like immigrants before and after them, they were not at all sentimental about the area, or at least not until decades after they had abandoned it. ![]() Some saw East London as a mere interlude, a brief stopping-off point on the way to North London or even their intended New Jerusalem: Manhattan. And in 1882, following the pogroms in Russia, East European Jews began to settle in the area and to make what was already a ghetto their own. ![]() Huguenot refugees, many of them silk weavers, had been arriving there since the start of the 18th century to escape French persecution. As early as 1736 there were anti-Irish riots, fuelled by the resentment of local workmen who believed that Irish builders were undercutting them. It has also been a home for those who have been pushed out of their homes. ‘A land of blood and beer,’ a rector of Hawksmoor’s Christ Church once called it. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for poverty and violence. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. For centuries it was part of a Roman burial ground, an unclean extremity lying beyond the walls of the City of London. Brick Lane used to be the home of the dead. ![]()
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