Blimey! Dickensian Slums Get Gentrified

LONDON —  At age 71, Monica Hearne has seen the East End nearly destroyed by German bombing. She has seen its thriving Thames River docks die. She has seen it fill with wave after wave of refugees.

But she has never seen it get rich -- until now.

The East End -- the world of Jack the Ripper, Dickensian slums, cockney English and British soap opera -- is being reborn in Europe’s largest urban renewal project. And in Hearne’s working-class neighborhood of Wapping, the results are evident in the yuppies and artists who have decided that this is a trendy place to live, even if it lacks a Starbucks.

“When I was a young woman, cabbies wouldn’t even drive me back to the East End at night, seeing it as a bad, unsavory area of foreign sailors and ladies of the night,” said Hearne, while shopping at P&J; Baker, her local mom-and-pop store.

“These days you’re as likely to hear posh English as cockney in the East End, and to see yuppies driving Range Rovers and living in luxury apartments on the banks of the Thames.”

She has mixed feelings about it -- haves and have-nots, gated communities. “Our mothers and fathers would turn in their graves if they saw what was going on here today.”

On the other hand, the public housing apartment she bought years ago for a pittance is now worth $300,000, meaning the former welfare recipient has something to leave to her children.

“The East End is undergoing an amazing transformation,” said Chris Hamnett, a professor of geography and sociology at King’s College in London. “Many young professionals now see it as exciting, cutting-edge, street-wise and sexy. Some even regard London’s posh West End as a boring geriatric ward by comparison.”

For such people, Soho doesn’t refer just to that famous nightlife strip of central London, but to “South of Hoxton,” an up-and-coming East End area of cafes, nightclubs, bistros, wine bars, ethnic restaurants and art galleries.

Cockney, that oddball slang and pronunciation that once was as East End as jellied eel and pie-and-mash shops, is now considered hip in many parts of class-conscious England.

Gentrification has come in fits and starts, beginning in the 1980s with loft conversions of derelict Thames-side warehouses.

A narrow band of wealth has spread all the way down the meandering river, from the Tower of London to the Isle of Dogs and the gleaming skyscrapers of Canary Wharf. The wharf, named after a dock that imported Canary Islands bananas, has become the capital’s second financial center.

The rebirth still has a long way to go. Across much of the East End, and a larger area known as East London, public housing projects and slums suffer some of the nation’s worst unemployment, crime, poverty and outbreaks of long-term illnesses such as tuberculosis.

Still, even in deprived areas such as Stratford, which has suffered drug-related drive-by shootings, property speculation is underway. The drive is fueled by record low mortgage costs, congestion and troubled public transport that have turned central London into a commuter’s nightmare, and the government’s bid to hold the 2012 Olympics in East London.

In 2007, Stratford, one of Britain’s poorest and most ethnically diverse areas, is to get a new terminal for trains linking Britain to the continent. That has prompted private developers to propose building a virtual city of 4,500 new homes, 2,000 hotel rooms, three department stores and swaths of public space.

The East End’s revival is part of a dramatic postindustrial transformation of the city of 7.2 million since the 1960s, from manufacturing to financial and business services.

In Victorian times, the East End spawned Jack the Ripper. In the 1960s it gave Britain the gangster-chic of the Kray twins, vicious underworld bosses. And to this day it is the setting for “EastEnders” and “Coronation Street,” soap operas watched by a quarter of the nation. But London’s center of gravity -- the real one, not the soap opera one -- is shifting east, and who can complain?

As a third-generation East Ender, Monica Hearne has seen it all.

Night after night early in World War II, she hid with her mother in a shelter under a Thames wharf as the German blitz laid waste to much of the East End. She saw industrial pollution trigger a flight to the suburbs after the war. The ports that survived Hitler’s onslaught collapsed under the weight of modernization and militant unions, leaving thousands of dockers jobless.

In the blitz, the East End became a symbol of British fortitude. Few gestures boosted the nation’s morale more effectively than King George VI visiting the wreckage. Hearne says her father refused to go into the bomb shelter, seeing it as cowardice.

Today, the East End remains filled with urban folklore, stories about its spirit of defiance, and the matey togetherness of its extended families and tight-knit neighborhoods.

Broadly defined, the heart of London twists with the Thames from the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben through the law courts area and the City, London’s Wall Street, to an amorphous sprawl of districts collectively known as the East End.

East End place names resonate through history: Whitechapel and Shoreditch, Wapping and Limehouse, Stepney and Bow -- “an evil plexus of slums that hide human, creeping things, where filthy men and women live on penn’orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye and never combs his hair,” to cite Arthur Morrison’s “Tales of Mean Streets.”

Morrison was writing in 1895, only seven years after the Ripper’s reign of terror.

The Thames’ docks and basins once made England the greatest maritime nation. Beyond them, row after row of slaughterhouses, glue factories, soap boilers, breweries and tanneries blighted the East End. Rats, fleas and untreated sewage were a source of epidemics that devastated the city.

The city’s prevailing winds and the eastward tidal flow of filthy Thames water kept the pollution away from what would become the fashionable and aristocratic West End.

In 1662, William Petty wrote of the “fumes, steams and stinks of the whole easterly pile.”

In 1888, roaming the smog-clouded streets by night, Jack the Ripper killed and mutilated at least five prostitutes. He was never caught.

Nowadays, tourists retracing the Ripper trail also see evidence of the immigration that has changed the East End again and again. For instance, the building on the corner of Fournier Street and Brick Lane was a Huguenot chapel in 1743, became a synagogue in 1898 and a mosque in 1976. Bangladeshis are so numerous around Brick Lane that its nickname is Bangla Town.

A shop on Whitechapel High Street once displayed wax models of Ripper victims and housed a freak show whose main attraction was Joseph Merrick, aka the Elephant Man. It now sells saris.

Today the river is cleaner. The thousands of barges that nudged their way under the Thames’ many bridges and filled the warehouses to bursting are gone. The river often is nearly empty except for a few tourist and commuter boats chugging by.

One of the most striking shifts of gravity came in 1986, when Rupert Murdoch defied powerful British unions and moved his newspaper operations out of Fleet Street, historically the city’s publishing row, and into the East End. Other media giants followed.

The riverbank has become one of London’s hottest places to live, and that has been a boon for the East End. But it also accentuates the rich-poor divide. The endless bank of luxury waterfront apartments often blocks any view of the Thames from the housing projects behind. In some areas overlooking yacht-filled marinas, efforts are under way to evict longtime houseboat-dwellers.

At Execution Dock in Wapping, where many criminals, including the pirate Captain Kidd, were publicly put to death, there are pub signs displaying a noose or scaffold. Some East Enders are unimpressed. Tourist pubs, they sniff, pointing out that the new gentry stay off the streets after dark and go to their country homes on weekends.

In Wapping, where some streets are still cobblestoned, Hearne and other East End veterans must face the fact that the old neighborhood is too expensive for first-time buyers, including their own children and grandchildren.

Gentrification doesn’t always take hold. An effort to create a swanky Tobacco Dock shopping mall there years ago failed. But despite that, real estate agents say two-bedroom apartments facing the Thames cost as much as $665,000.

“Twenty years ago, if I had said I was going to buy a flat in Wapping, people would have thought I was mad,” said Alan Fitzgerald, 53, a real estate agent and East End native.

“It was a dump. But thanks to gentrification it is now considered trendy,” he said.

Still, Fitzgerald said, many of his yuppie customers ask for properties as far as possible from the housing projects, making him doubt whether the area will become a middle-class community in his lifetime.

But even East Enders who complain about a yuppie invasion can’t help proudly pointing out which pop star or TV actor lives in which luxury apartment.

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Town with a past

Some key events in East End’s history:

* A.D. 43-50: Roman conquerors create Londinium, small walled city on the River Thames. Becomes trading center, with river as main highway for hundreds of years.

* 14th century: Heavy industry begins to develop in the east. Bubonic plague, “The Black Death,” kills one-third of London’s population.

* 17th century: Great Plague and Great Fire devastate London. “Cockney” becomes nickname for Londoners; later refers only to lower-class London dialect. Waves of Huguenot immigrants begin arriving in East End, escaping persecution in France.

* 18th century: East London becomes industrial and trade suburb with increasing commerce on Thames. River piracy, smuggling, gin addiction become widespread.

* 19th century: New docks open in East End as British empire expands. Factories with steam power expand, making rubber, soap, cloth, matches, beer, rope and cables. Population of London explodes. Dense fog, soot cloud East End. Middle classes flee west to escape poverty, pollution, prostitution, child criminals. Untreated sewage causes cholera epidemics. Trade unions begin to form, mount strikes. Jewish immigrants fleeing Russian pogroms arrive in waves.

* 1910-1939: Big improvements to docks in East London in last days of empire. Area becomes focus of political tensions between fascist and socialist groups. Jewish and Irish East Enders stop fascist marches down Cable Street. Government tries to relieve poverty, overcrowding with big housing projects farther east.

* 1940-41: German blitz. Using Thames as guide, warplanes destroy many East End homes, docks, warehouses, factories, offices. Port never completely closes during attacks.

* 1950s-1960s: Government slum clearance brings high-rise public housing projects across East End.

* 1960s-1970s: Many factories begin to close in London and other English cities during sharp swing from industries to service sector. London’s docks shut because of labor troubles, inadequate equipment for large container ships. Big influx of Bangladeshi immigrants, fleeing violence as their nation is separated from Pakistan.

* 1980s: Margaret Thatcher’s government allows public housing dwellers to buy apartments. Docks in East End moribund. Government-sponsored redevelopment begins gentrifying warehouses, eventually creates Canary Wharf. Several newspapers flee Fleet Street in central London to Wapping and Canary Wharf to exploit new technology and break unions. London City Airport built over protests by locals.

* 1990s-2000s: Gentrification of warehouses, old housing for workers takes off along Thames, spreads inland into East End areas such as Whitechapel, Hoxton, Shoreditch.

Source: Associated Press

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