In Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, east London, there is a shop that sells handsome old-fashioned hardware – enamelled pots and wooden scrubbing brushes – at new-fashioned prices: beneath a sign in crisp, utility-style sans serif type, it makes what were objects of working-class use into middle class objects of desire. A few doors along are a cafe and patisserie whose coffee has been rightly hailed as among the best in London. In the same street are art galleries, an expensive clothes shop with a boutique cinema in its basement and another place selling a playful selection of antiques and faux antiques. In the same ownership as the latter is Les Trois Garçons, a nearby restaurant whose large windows, chandeliers and palpable campness heroically dare unreconstructed locals to put a brick through them.
Also close by are the Shoreditch House club for creative types, with its rooftop swimming pool and agreeable bars, and the mini-palazzi of successful artists, plus further fine restaurants and food shops too numerous to record here. Yet, a croissant's-throw away, there once stood, totteringly, the Old Nichol, the most miserable slum in a zone of London – the East End – world famous for its miserable slums. It was replaced in the 1890s by some of the first council housing in the world, the red-brick Boundary Estate, and its rubble was scraped into a picturesque mound, where mature trees now grow.
In another direction is Brick Lane, where in the 1970s Bangladeshis and anarchists fought violent battles with fascists. Just opposite Shoreditch House was the site of "London's great dustbin market", according to a writer of 1950, Robert Sinclair. It was a place where "I would be ashamed to take a west African villager… I could not face his laughter at the sight of one of the oldest corners of our civilisation filled with hundreds of human beings staring at rubbish. I could not admit that we still had in our midst masses of these dumb and disfigured people."
Redchurch Street displays with special intensity one of the most conspicuous changes in the East End, which is its gentrification – of parts, if not all. In external perceptions it has changed from a place of darkness to a place of opportunities.
Rushanara Ali, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, recalls that, when she was growing up in the area in the 1980s and early 1990s, "we hated journalists. Every time you picked up a paper it would be about how the area was deprived, or about racism. Now it has a more positive image." When she went away to university in the mid-1990s "people there were shocked to hear where I came from. When I graduated some of them started moving into the area."
The rise of natty coffee shops in places like Redchurch Street is a fragment of huge changes over the past three decades in the East End, a large area with vaguely defined boundaries, but a powerful personality and image. Under most definitions it runs roughly from the eastern boundaries of the City of London, Shoreditch and Aldgate, to Stratford, and from the north edge of the Thames to the southern parts of Hackney.
Its core, where most of its vivid stories have been generated, includes Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and Bow. It is among the most mythologised urban zones on earth, starting with the Victorian mire stalked by Jack the Ripper, whose residents (according to Sinclair) included "verminous paupers and gibbering foreigners" as well as "comfortable artisans". Its 20th-century version came to be one of sturdy communities, stoic in the Blitz, patronised by the then Queen, a place of diamond geezers whose close-knit structures took perverted but fascinating form in the activities of the Kray twins.
It is a place of arrivals – from the docks, historically – and it is not long in discussing the East End before someone starts rattling off its waves of migrants: Huguenots, Jews, Chinese, Bangladeshis, Somalis. With transience and poverty has gone political agitation: the Battle of Cable Street, and anarchist and socialist ferment in the early 20th century. Lenin used to lecture in the Stepney street where I have lived for 20 years, and Stalin briefly lived there.
It is persistently seen as other – as mysterious and threatening, as an orphan child prompting pity, as something unknowable which must therefore be tamed by stereotypes. It has lent itself to exploitation on a large scale, from the high-walled and ferociously defended docks, to Fortress Wapping, as the base of Rupert Murdoch's News International was once called. Grand gestures are repeatedly imposed from outside, whose aims are at once charitable and controlling.
In the early 18th century a series of churches of exceptional grandeur were built to the designs of Nicholas Hawksmoor, ordered by an act of parliament so as to illuminate the masses, but also to keep them from seditious atheism or dissenting sects. The Boundary Estate and philanthropic housing aimed to improve both living standards and moral behaviour. The Olympics are the latest of these benign/colonising interventions, an immense investment ordained from outside in the name of "some of the most deprived boroughs in the country".
Rushanara Ali in Bethnal Green, Hackney: 'Every time you picked up a paper it would be about how the area was deprived, or about racism. Now it has a more positive image.'
Thirty years ago the defining issue was the closure of the docks, and the unemployment and depopulation went that went with it. Once overcrowding had been the problem, with a population larger than Bristol's crammed into the borough of Stepney; now the place was hollowing out. Into this void marched the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), a creation of Margaret Thatcher's government, aiming to make the place hospitable to business through tax and rent incentives, and by relieving the bolshie local boroughs of planning powers.
The ambition was probably to achieve no more than the sheds and mid-grade offices that started springing up, but after a few years, as in a scientific experiment run out of control, the various incentives combined with the deregulation of financial services to produce in a flash of smoke a shining business city of implausible vastness, called Canary Wharf.
This development went bust in the early 1990s. It took a while for high-paying tenants to move there, and the main occupiers were newspapers like the Daily Telegraph and the Independent, marooned in a remote space station that poorly served their feeding and watering needs. But eventually the likes of HSBC, Barclays, Citigroup and JP Morgan moved in, to the extent that when articles are written about the City, they are often now illustrated by pictures of Canary Wharf.
Alongside the effects of grand government policies and initiatives have been the initiatives of individuals and independent organisations, which have led to such things as the influx of artists and designers. According to Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Gallery, there are now several thousand artists in the wider East End, of whom the likes of Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread and Cornelia Parker are the best known.
Blazwick says the primary makers of the modern East End include Space Studios and Acme Studios. Space, which Bridget Riley helped set up in 1968 and Acme, which started in 1972, are both charities for creating affordable studios and residences for artists, who both saw an opportunity in the redundant spaces left behind as industry receded from the area. They persuaded landowners and councils that it would be better to let artists take over and improve derelict buildings, than have them stand empty.
"Artists," she says, "are very good at taking what's there already and making something of it, at making the shabby shine", and so they moved into places like Beck Road, Hackney, where the rubbish heaps in the gardens "were as high as the houses". So started, as middle-class homebuyers and developers followed, the long re-evaluation of east London that would eventually lead to the exquisite coffee and handsome hardware shops of Redchurch Street. "Gentrification" is the usual word, but Blazwick says this is "too pejorative of what's going on. It's about making an environment we can live in. It's a relief to go down alleys without rats and garbage."
And then there is the question of race, always lurking in a place of migrations. In 2006 the Young Foundation published a book, The New East End, whose authors made some uncomfortable observations. Well-intentioned housing policies had combined with high levels of immigration, especially from Bangladesh in the 1970s and 1980s, to create deep resentments among longer established, mostly white residents. Council homes would be allocated on the basis of need, rather than for example by passing them from one generation to the next, which would tend to favour poorer recent arrivals and make older communities feel as if they were being excluded and pushed out. Structures of mutual support, a conspicuous feature of east London in the 1950s, were broken up.
Ali, who moved to London from Bangladesh at the age of seven, recalls some of the extreme expressions of racial antagonism, such as the hostility she would experience in Bethnal Green and Roman Road markets. She mentions a middle-aged Bangladeshi who remembers having milk bottles thrown at him from the tops of blocks of flats. In 1993 a white gang came out of a pub in the Commercial Road, beat up an Asian student and left him brain-damaged. The police were unable to secure convictions.
She believes, however, that the atmosphere has improved since the mid-1990s: "Now anyone can live anywhere, although there are still tensions in some areas". She tells a story of white market stallholder in Whitechapel Road, who at first made no attempt to disguise his dislike of Asians. But, perhaps realising his business depended on better relations, he learned some Sylheti – the language spoken by most East End Bangladeshis – so that he could banter with his customers.
Kate Gavron, one of the authors of the The New East End, is also cautiously optimistic. Although nothing in particular has been done to address the grievances described in the book, and it would be rash to say that all resentment and suspicion between communities has disappeared, she thinks that some kind of settlement or acceptance has occurred. Hostility, she says, is not usually at a personal level but towards government. There have not been, she says, "the terrible scenes" that there might have been, for which she gives some credit to the London borough of Tower Hamlets, an institution which is not usually praised for anything very much.
The history of east London, and its repeated interventions from outside – the Blitz, slum clearance, the LDDC – can be seen in its lumpy, patchy physical fabric. Fragments of brick terrace alternate with council estates, and voids left by industry and docks are awkwardly filled with regeneration. Canary Wharf rises with exceptional abruptness, as a sierra of wealth among what is still a dislocated and dingy hinterland.
Relics of philanthropy and exploitation survive side by side. Pieces of the huge dock walls, originally tools of aggressive control, are preserved as forlorn remnants. Unity, consistency and connective tissue tend to be lacking. Even at a small scale, it's a bit of a mess: Redchurch Street, for all its delights, is still raddled and shabby, as street maintenance and the quality of the buildings wait to catch up with their contents.
The Olympics have added new levels of lumpiness – the stadium, the aquatic centre, the velodrome, the athlete's village, and the Orbit are awaiting integration into the wider fabric. So is the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre, which was accelerated but not created (as the Games's boosters like to claim) by the Olympics. It will take a long time, if ever, before its uncompromising backside settles into any kind of harmonious relationship with its surroundings.
It is a similar story, unfortunately, for the line of repulsive housing towers built along Stratford High Street. Designed to cash in on whatever property bonanza the games might bring, they include a doppelganger of the prison ship HMS Weare, which was once moored in Portland Harbour, Dorset. Others are vertical sealed tubes where garish colours strive to make up for the absence of balconies or opening windows, but succeed only in making urban apartment living resemble a 24/7 Ryanair flight.
A short distance away, in the Olympic Park, projects were subjected to elaborate scrutiny by design panels of eminent experts, yet the same attention was not applied at all to large buildings in the same field of vision. In a colossal failure, or abdication, of planning, there is no evidence of any ambition to make a coherent whole, just a belated attempt to cheer things up with some globular light fittings and quite interesting bridge design. The hope seems to be that our eyes might pick out only these baubles, and not be scraped by the visual emery paper of the housing.
Further along the road, in the centre of Stratford, the public art looks worse than the car parks it is trying to improve, with screens of shiny diamonds in green, gold and silver, squishy and somehow lip-like, but in all events sinisterly, ferociously ugly. In the opposite direction, on Mile End Road and Whitechapel Road, things are subtler and better, as English Heritage has paid for historic pieces of street to be restored, and for garish shop signs to be replaced by hand-painted ones. There have also been thoughtful if under-funded improvements to parks and pavements, and a new Rachel Whiteread enhancement of the Arts and Crafts façade of the Whitechapel gallery, a work of glittering leaves playing off the terracotta decoration of the original.
These last projects are part of something called High Street 2012, a name given to the route from the City of London to the Olympic site. The idea was to smarten up the route of the marathon (which, as it turned out, was diverted to posher parts of London), and to demonstrate that the Olympics were, as promised, doing something for those deprived boroughs. The improvements did not in fact come from Olympic budgets, but I guess it's the thought that counts.
The messiness and lumpiness of east London is sometimes part of its attraction: its juxtapositions and surprises, its possibilities, the sense it has of being a place in motion, whose personality is still up for negotiation. Sometimes its built environment is plain depressing, a diagram of power which reveals the near-impotence of public authorities in shaping places, contrasted with the confidence and efficiency of Westfield and Canary Wharf.
More importantly, the built fabric is an image of the lumpiness of the social fabric. East London is a place that offers very different experiences to its different groups – such as recent migrants, Bangladeshis, white working class, incoming professionals, Canary Wharf bankers and Shoreditch creatives – that tend not to have much contact with one another. The high-priced coffee and patisserie of the new East End is not for all its citizens. A snap survey of Canary Wharf employees, by Bloomberg News, found most did not know what borough they were in.
The biggest issue is housing. Rising prices, combined with the effects of right-to-buy policies, mean that it is more and more difficult to find affordable homes. "There are 20,000 people on the Tower Hamlets waiting list," says Ali. "There is severe overcrowding: I get people coming to me because they are living in groups of six or seven in two-bedroom homes." There is not much sign of a policy that would improve matters.
The emblem of the successes and failures of the modern East End is Canary Wharf. It has created thousands of jobs, and helped pay for a public transport infrastructure that barely existed 30 years ago. Sir George Iacobescu, chairman and chief executive of owner and developer Canary Wharf Group, likes to stress the support it gives to local businesses and local charities, and how much it has transformed the whole area. "You wouldn't believe the number of people who used to say they would never go east of Tower Bridge. There has been an enormous, enormous change."
At the same time it is hard to ignore the contrast between the stupendous wealth within its boundaries and the lack of it a short distance away, a contrast underlined by equally great physical differences. It doesn't help that some of Canary Wharf's tenants and former tenants – like Barclays and Lehman Brothers – are now so little loved for their disastrous practices. Iacobescu acknowledges this contrast, but argues that "it takes time, it takes a lot of effort" to change a place. "The docks were the heart of the area and that heart died. We were a heart transplant. The benefits of that can't happen by trickle-down; you have to actively make the connection."
Ali says that "George's heart is in the right place" but "he can't control his tenants. What is quite scandalous is that the tenants could be much more ambitious about getting local graduates into jobs." East London has one of the highest levels of graduate unemployment in the country, and if the financial institutions wanted to hire more of them "they can just do it".
Ali doesn't want the changes of the last 30 years undone, for the Canary Wharf banks and their towers to disappear, along with new train and tube lines, the cafes and clothes shops, and the middle-class incomers. "When I was growing up it felt like a sink here, a dark place, a stuck community" and a positive aspect of gentrification is that it has "probably led to more mixed schools, and brought a wider range of activities and occupations. There is a feeling of more integration with rest of London."
Most of her constituents would probably agree with her. But, for all the grand projects enacted in the name of deprived East Enders, they have not usually been the primary beneficiaries. One might hope that, when the Olympics are over, the age of rhetorical gestures will pass, in favour of the less glamorous, more detailed, and more practical. One might hope, but not especially expect.
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With only 48 hours notice, it was announced Wednesday 1,200 more troops were told they would be protecting the Olympic games this year in what British Prime Minister David Cameron has now dubbed the “biggest security operation” ever attempted in the United Kingdom’s peacetime history. Event organizers LOCOG noted the additional soldiers will allow the games to continue “in just about any scenario”.
