The Cultural Construction of London's East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness

The Cultural Construction of London’s East End Spatial Practices An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Ge...

Author: Paul Newland

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End

Spatial Practices

An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature

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General Editors:

Robert Burden (University of Teesside) Stephan Kohl (Universität Würzburg) Editorial Board:

Christine Berberich Christoph Ehland Catrin Gersdorf Jan Hewitt Ralph Pordzik Chris Thurgar-Dawson Merle Tönnies

The Cultural Construction of London’s East End Urban Iconography, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness

Paul Newland

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Cover image taken from Nocturne (Emily Richardson, 2002), with very kind permission. Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISSN: 1871-689X ISBN: 978-90-420-2454-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

The Spatial Practices Series The series Spatial Practices belongs to the topographical turn in cultural studies and aims to publish new work in the study of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: symbolic landscapes and urban places which have specific cultural meanings that construct, maintain, and circulate myths of a unified national or regional culture and their histories, or whose visible ironies deconstruct those myths. Taking up the lessons of the new cultural geography, papers are invited which attempt to build bridges between the disciplines of cultural history, literary and cultural studies, and geography. Spatial Practices aims to promote a new interdisciplinary kind of cultural history drawing on constructivist approaches to questions of culture and identity that insist that cultural “realities” are the effect of discourses, but also that cultural objects and their histories and geographies are read as texts, with formal and generic rules, tropes and topographies. Robert Burden Stephan Kohl

For my family

My Streets are my Ideas of Imagination - William Blake, ‘Jerusalem’

CONTENTS

Introduction

13

I

Development

37

II

Apotheosis

57

III

The Breath of the East

105

IV

From Bauhaus to the Blitz and Beyond

129

V

After Ronan Point: Re-imagining the Territory

149

VI

Docklands: The Clearing of the Misery?

183

VII

After Empire: Tourism, Immigration and Colonisation

227

VIII Neo-Victorian Urban Visions

249

Bibliography

275

Filmography

297

Index

305

Acknowledgements This project could not have been seen through to its conclusion without the help of a great many people. The Arts and Humanities Research Council generously saw fit to award me a three-year scholarship for the PhD research from which this book is primarily drawn. I owe a huge debt of thanks to Colin MacCabe and Duncan Petrie for their guidance of my work at the University of Exeter. My examiners Charlotte Brunsdon and Steve Neale read my work very carefully and offered numerous suggestions about how it might be developed or improved. It is to their credit that they both continue to offer me support and guidance. But it makes me very sad that Chris Brooks, who initially encouraged the project with his characteristic energy and enthusiasm, did not live to see this book published. I hope he would have liked it. I would like to thank my editors, Stephan Kohl and Robert Burden, for their encouragement and belief in my work. Warm thanks to Elke Demant, Sophie Pfriem and Angelika Schreiber who produced the typescript. I also want to extend my appreciation to the staff at the Guildhall library, the Whitechapel library, the Tower Hamlets Archives, the Museum of Docklands, Exeter Library and the Bishopsgate Institute for their attentiveness to my requirements. I especially want to thank Kathleen Dickson, Steve Tollervey and Michael Caldwell at the British Film Institute. A large number of people have supported me over the last few years. Many have taken the time to read and comment on my work, to share ideas, to point me in new directions, or to enter into correspondence about their interest in the East End and my project. Others have simply offered friendship and encouragement when I most needed it. Here I would like to thank Brian Baker, Jenny Bavidge, Bridget Birchall, Anthony Caleshu, Sunie Fletcher, Anthony Fothergill, Regenia Gagnier, Ollie Garrett, Helen Hanson, Susan Hayward, Mary Jacobs, Pietari Kääpä, Cora Kaplan, Joe Kember, Gavrik Losey, James Lyons, Claire Monk, Dafydd Moore, Dan North, Sean Pepper, Julian Petley, Chris Pittard, Angelique Richardson, Emily Richardson, Amy Sargeant, Andrew Shail, John Smith, Max Stites, Sarah Street, Helen Taylor, Simon Topping, Anne Witchard and Paul Williams. I would also like to thank Julia Davey, Dawn

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The Cultural Construction of London's East End

Teed, Nela Kapelan and Morwenna Hussey for their invaluable help during my time at Exeter. My parents Roy and Mary continue to offer much love and support. I also owe a great debt to Peter Nellist and Elizabeth Nellist for their support and friendship during the writing of this book. And a number of very good friends have also encouraged me along the way – especially Will Stone, Sid Stronach, Steve Woodger and Kevin Head. Finally, words cannot adequately express how grateful I am to Kate, without whom this book would not have been possible, and to Annabel, who has punctuated the process of writing the final draft by making her magical presence increasingly felt in our family. To them I owe everything. Exeter, July 2007

P.N.

Introduction Masses are other people. - Raymond Williams (1960: 300)

Medals and Atrophy In the seminal British crime thriller, The Long Good Friday (Dir. John Mackenzie, 1979), an East End gangster, Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), dreams of building a new city in his ‘patch’, the old run-down dock area of east London. The centrepiece of his grand scheme is to be an Olympic village, which is to be constructed in time for the fictional 1988 Olympic Games. Harold Shand’s interest in redeveloping the body of the East End of London for the Olympics has proved uncannily prescient. In 2004 details of the London bid for the 2012 Olympics emerged, including plans for the major redevelopment of the post-industrial wastelands of the Lea Valley in east London, which, it was promised, would become home to an impressive new Olympic stadium, an Olympic village, and other related sports venues. 1 The ongoing redevelopment of Stratford as a major transport hub of the city (with its new station connecting east London to the Eurostar train service out of St Pancras) was seen as a central selling point in the bid, primarily because it appeared to demonstrate the commitment of a thriving, multicultural London to Europe and the wider world. This redevelopment has necessarily erased seemingly unsightly blemishes from the face of the city. But rather than celebrating the eradication of these dark urban spots and post-industrial scars, a number of writers and filmmakers have suggested that ‘value’ might instead be found in these sites. Some have even mourned their passing. The experimental filmmaker Emily Richardson, for example, working 1

For more on the London 2012 bid see Cohen (2005).

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with the writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair (a central figure in this study), sought to document what was being lost to east London in her seven-minute film installation, Transit. When this film was first exhibited in a space beneath Smithfield Market in London in June 2006, desolate eastern spaces, filmed from all four sides of a slow moving car, were projected onto three screens. Sinclair provided three simultaneous, taped, magus-like commentaries which, characteristically, brought to light the hidden histories of these seemingly peripheral spaces. These three voiceovers together produced a strange one-man babel, from which the occasional fascinating fact about the city would make itself audible. Interestingly, similar projects to capture the loss of older, seemingly unvalued spaces in east London had been undertaken before this. In the mid-1990s, John Smith trained his camera on terraced houses which were being demolished in order to make way for the M11 motorway extension through Leytonstone (close to where the Olympic park would come to be situated) in his short film, Blight (1996). Moreover, back in 1962 Robert Vas filmed The Vanishing Street. Artists, developers and the public, then, have long been engaged in an imaginative tug of war over the ownership of the body of east London. Writing about the rapid development of the city during the Victorian period, Lynda Nead has suggested that “the overgrowth of London may be compared with that of the […] human body” (2000: 15). Indeed, Nead notices that by the nineteenth century the virtues of respiration and circulation shaped attitudes to urban reform and modernisation. The metaphor of circulation enabled health reformers to conceive of the city’s water supply, drains and sewers as its arteries and veins” (2000: 16).

Elizabeth Grosz has similarly argued that “the city is a reflection, projection, or product of bodies” (1998: 44). In other words, bodies “reinscribe and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment so that this environment both produces and reflects the form and interests of the body” (1998: 42). Grosz further argues that in many ways cities and bodies have come to shape each other: “the city is made and made over into the simulacrum of the body, and the body, in its turn, is transformed, citified, urbanized as a distinctively metropolitan body.” (43) Indeed, a number of celebrated urban planners and architects have clearly imagined cities in corporeal terms. Frank Lloyd Wright,

Introduction

15

for example, remarked that plans of large cities resembled “the crosssection of a fibrous tumor”, and Le Corbusier imagined Paris as a diseased body (R. Fishman 1982: 12). It was hardly surprising, then, that the rhetoric of London’s 2012 Olympic bid was so clearly grounded in the discourses of bodily development and renewal. As Jude Kelly, in her capacity as the chief co-ordinator of the arts and culture component of the bid, told an interviewer in The Times (20 November 2004): “The first thing is what is going to happen in the East End, a quarter of the capital city. It will be a recovered lung – London will breathe differently, and it will get back its personality.” (Naughtie 2004: 16-7) It seemed, rather ironically, then, that this atrophied part of the body of the city might be brought back to life if and when well-developed athletic bodies from around the globe were injected into its veins. The watching world would then see a London at the peak of fitness; its withered muscles and organs impressively redeveloped. Indeed, the homepage on the London 2012 website has suggested that “overall, the Olympic Games would speed up the rebirth of the Lower Lea Valley by six or seven years, cleaning up polluted land and reclaiming the area for the benefit of the whole of London”. This argument displays a continuing hegemonic desire to plan and control the city. It appears to have been based on a view of the city ‘from above’, so to speak. This view would appear, on the face of it, to affirm the viewer’s belief that he or she holds a position of authority – that they have the knowledge and the power to shape the body of the city. As Ben Highmore has argued, “it is a small step from claiming that the health of the city depends on efficient circulatory systems, to suggesting forms of aggressive surgery” (2005: 4). The withered Lea Valley will indeed be cut open and operated upon by urban planners and architects who will no doubt believe that they know what is best for the body of the city. But will this surgery really bring this part of the city back from the dead? Indeed, ‘is’ it dead? As I intend to show, the East End of London has often been discussed within the discourses of degeneration and regeneration – discourses which, of course, offer ways of seeing both the human body and the body of the city. Through these discourses, the complex body of the city has been made legible. But these discourses, while making the city decipherable, more often than not fail to fully demystify or decode the ontological properties of recondite urban spaces

16


such as east London, and the esoteric, knotty narratives that continue to hold these spaces together. Kevin Robins has advocated that “now, in a world in which inter-urban competitiveness operates on a global scale, cities are propelled into a race to attract increasingly mobile investors (multinational corporations), consumers (tourists), and spectacles (sports and media events)” (1993: 306). The London bid strongly argued that the 2012 Olympics, centred on east London, would provide this ‘world city’ with the chance to remodel (and thus to re-sell) itself on the global stage. But a project to re-brand the East End had already been underway for some time before this bid emerged. Indeed, tourist pamphlets produced by Tower Hamlets Council have suggested that the area now offers a rich mix of social history, culture and the arts. It seems that aspects of the darker history of east London (specifically, shadowy spaces wrapped in mystery that resound to exotic, vague, often hidden narratives) have been repackaged as objects of nostalgia. Carefully designed walks around the previously neglected, run-down Spitalfields encourage tourists to look for the Dutch Synagogue in Sandy’s Row, a night shelter which was run by the Sisters of Mercy in Artillery Passage, the Brune Street soup kitchen, and the London Jammie Majid (the mosque on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street). Ripper tours regularly steer groups through the narrow lanes and backstreets of Aldgate and Whitechapel, past late-Victorian murder sites now changed beyond all recognition. It seems that once-drab street markets have now become the epitome of cool. In contemporary east London you can view the work of top artists living in local lofts, enjoy award-winning Indian cuisine and delicious bagels, drink with your friends in cutting-edge bars, purchase clothes from über-hip designers, and enjoy rock, pop, classical and Bhangra music at a variety of trendy clubs. But even in the face of these seemingly rich cultural developments, a nebulous East End somehow manages to retain its powerful mythic status as sick, diseased and cancerous part of the body of the city. It is precisely this myth that the Olympic bid has so cleverly exploited. After all, it appears to make absolute sense that London should seek to display its socio-cultural and economic health on a global scale by focusing the attention of the world’s media on the developments being made to what has long been regarded as an atrophied organ in this otherwise-healthy urban body.

Introduction

17

A Howling Sea of Human Wreckage A labyrinth, an encyclopaedia, an emporium, a theatre, the city is somewhere where fact and imagination simply have to fuse. - David Harvey (1990: 5)

In geographical and topographical terms, some argue that the East End remains a relatively small space situated to the east of Aldgate, Bishopsgate and the financial heart of the City of London, bounded by the River Lea to the east, the River Thames to the south, and Victoria Park to the north (Glinert 2005: x). This territory incorporates places such as Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Shoreditch, Stepney, Poplar and Bethnal Green. Others argue that the East End stretches to Hackney in the north and past Stratford towards East Ham in the east. This is approximately the extent of the zone captured in one of the opening sequences of episodes of the BBC Television soap drama, EastEnders (1985- ), as a camera positioned high above the city rotates and pulls back from a close-up of the River Thames in order to reveal a characterless, grey, unplanned urban sprawl stretching out to the east of London. Others argue that Walthamstow and Leytonstone, nestling on the edge of Epping Forest to the north-east of the City, remain archetypically ‘East End’ spaces, and that Ilford and Romford in Essex should be considered to be parts of the East End, too. It could be further argued that Southend-on-Sea and much of the urban sprawl on the northern side of the Thames estuary is full of ‘East Enders’, and therefore has developed a strong relationship with a spatial phenomenon that has become known as the East End. Perhaps even Chelmsford and Colchester in Essex have something of the ‘East End’ about them. These disagreements over the materiality of the East End aptly demonstrate how far it remains a profoundly amorphous, ambiguous space – a space that has never been clearly or adequately defined, delineated or drawn. It is not, and has never been, a village, town or borough. But if it is not a mappable material space, it certainly functions as an enigmatic imaginative space. This book, which will offer an examination of the multipartite ontological properties of the East End, will try to demonstrate the ways in which material and imagined east Londons have come to inform each other as a mythical, enduring idea of the East End has come into being.

18


The East End, “a howling sea of human wreckage” according to Arthur Morrison, writing in the late-nineteenth century (1982a: 164), has become a mythic space, a spatial metaphor, a socio-cultural and historical referent and a symbolic territory. It has been depicted as a terra incognita; as an ill-favoured, stigmatised social space; as the antithesis of order, civility and decorum – long associated with evil, darkness, the primitive and the uncivilised. It has been marked as a space populated by faceless, voiceless, homogeneous figures. And it has been seen to be home to stereotypical East Enders – individuals who together form a proud urban working class. But it has also been marked as a space of exotic, alien ethnicity. While east London, at least, can be said to exist in a ‘real’ material sense, then, I want to suggest that the East End has perhaps been more obviously ‘imagined’ into existence. It has acquired a personality – a reputation constructed around a repertoire of narratives and images. Through the aspersions cast by these texts it has become an object of horror; but also, more recently, an object of nostalgia. Its continued imaginative power testifies to the fact that literary and filmic texts, as well as journalistic texts and other popular cultural texts, continue to facilitate the development and perpetuation of structures of spatial power in cities and elsewhere. The personality of the East End is highly complex and fluid. But it often appears, in significant ways, to have little changed. The Cambridge-educated Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman, a Liberal MP from 1906 to 1914, became involved in social work in London at the turn of the twentieth century. In From the Abyss (1902) he wrote the following: Our streets have suddenly become congested with a weird and uncanny people. They have poured in as dense black masses from the eastern railways; they have streamed across the bridges from the marshes and desolate places beyond the river; they have been hurried up in incredible number through tubes sunk in the bowels of the earth, emerging like rats from a drain, blinking in the sunshine. (Masterman in Keating 1976: 241)

This passage, echoing countless other nineteenth-century, twentiethcentury and twenty-first-century texts (as I hope to show), exemplifies the personality of the East End by imaginatively linking a homogeneous mass of people to a distinctly drawn geographical and topographical space.

Introduction

19

Writing about the East End of London, Phil Cohen has remarked that “no area in Britain has been more written about, more exploited as a source and site for the projection of public anxieties about the proletarian combination or sexual promiscuity, the state of the nation or the degeneration of the race” (1996: 173). I will examine a broad selection of these representations in order to try to understand how and why the East End has come to function so clearly within the symbolic spatial economy of London, and, indeed, on a broader level, within the symbolic spatial economy of England. It is surely no coincidence, for example, that the British version of the highly successful board game, Monopoly, developed by John Waddington Limited from Parker Brothers’ American version (originally designed by Charles Darrow) during the 1930s, features Whitechapel as one of the lowest-rental spaces in the city. It seems appropriate that in a game that effectively re-imagines and remaps London as a space of ruthless commercial activity and economic exchange, the Whitechapel Road and its southern neighbour, the Old Kent Road, are colour-coded brown. These ‘low’ eastern topographies have, after all, long been imagined as parts of the body of the city in which waste has been produced, sent and/or contained. In this book I will explore what I see as the enormously complex relationship that exists between what we might want to think of as the ‘real’, material, geographical, topographical east London and its inhabitants, and an ‘imagined’, mythical, symbolic, discursively constructed East End. But I want to try to avoid the crude dualism of concepts of the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ city. Rather, I want to examine the ways in which representations of the East End can be seen to operate in constant dialogue with the innumerable ‘real’ lived experiences that occur in this social space. Indeed, the anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss has suggested that a city can be understood as a “social work of art” (R. Fishman 1982: 18) – an interwoven structure produced by innumerable minds. The East End has indeed been, to a certain extent, imaginatively produced by individuals who have lived in east London. But the East End of the imagination would also not now exist without the impact of a plethora of cultural texts. Indeed, it seems almost impossible now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to experience the material, concrete space to the east of London without tacit acknowledgement of the shroud of representations that keeps an idea of the East End alive.

20


Central to this book runs the argument that a powerful spatial idea of the East End can be understood to function as a product of the formation and rise of a distinctly English bourgeois self-image. 2 My argument here tries to develop aspects of the path-breaking work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), Stallybrass and White, building on Bakhtin’s much discussed work on the carnivalesque, argue that the cultural ‘low-Other’, its symbolic importance radically heightened, became an eroticised constituent of fantasy life and, as such, facilitated the “inner dynamic of the boundary constructions necessary to collective identity” (1986: 13). So the grotesque ‘low-Other’ can be seen to play a defining role in the construction of a collective identity: in this case, that of the dominant middle class in England. 3 The terms ‘middle classes’ and ‘working classes’ were in common usage in Britain by the 1840s, as Raymond Williams has shown (1993: 64). And the East End has certainly traditionally been understood to be a space of the working classes. But an ‘idea’ of the East End of London has also been seen to operate as a manifestation of middle-class anxieties concerning the possible rise of these working classes. Indeed, in his hugely influential book, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), E.P. Thompson argued that “class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs” (1991: 8-9). The East End, as a potent and enduring spatial idea, has facilitated the emergence of the imagined ontological norms, “common experiences”, or structures of feeling (to borrow Raymond Williams’s term) of an English middleclass ‘community’ through its apparent spatial opposition to this community. Thompson further argues that “the working class did not rise 2

3

See R. Williams (1960: 323-5; 1993: 45-8; 60-69). Williams notes the difficulty of employing the term ‘bourgeois’ in English and applying it to British social life. He also notes that the complications between the tripartite division of working class, middle class and upper class in Britain do not adequately correspond to the Marxist concepts of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. But his contention that ‘bourgeois’ is a term that refers to the ruling class serves my purpose here. James Donald (1993: 172-184) examines the work of Stallybrass and White in detail. See also Walkowitz (1992: 20).

Introduction

21

like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.” (1991: 8) 4 This point seems to suggest that the English working class has not had the sole control of the formation of its own sense of identity. This is an important and, perhaps, for Marxists especially, controversial idea. If there is any truth in it, it would seem to suggest that the English working class has been formed, at least in part, by cultural discourse. It has been produced, at least in part, by those who have had the power to tell its story. As Raymond Williams advocates, “the man in the street is a collective image, but we know, all the time, our own difference from him” (1960: 299). So it seems that the English working class has been imagined from ‘without’ as well as developed from ‘within’. Harold Perkin has examined the rise of what he terms the English ‘Professional Society’: Between 1880 and 1914 class society in Britain reached its zenith […]. The middle classes, ever more graduated in income and status, came to express those finer distinctions in prosperity and social position physically, both in outward appearance, in dress, furnishings and habitations, and even in physique, and in their geographical segregation from one another and the rest of society in carefully differentiated suburbs. (1999: 27)

4

Francis Sheppard argues that the metropolitan working class evolved through “processes of political convergence and social divergence which culminated in the critical years of the 1880s” (1998: 294). The first stage, culminating in the passing of the Reform Bill in 1867, saw the extension of the parliamentary franchise to thousands of middle-class men in 1832. The debate surrounding the bill led to the formation of the National Union of the Working Classes (NUWC) and the middle-class National Political Union (NPU). Working-class men, disappointed at not securing the parliamentary franchise by political means, engaged in trade union agitation in 1833-4. Chartism grew outside the metropolis in the late 1830s, gaining support in London in the 1840s, when it became “a more explicitly class-conscious movement” supported by its own working-class press (1998: 295-6). The demonstrations of 1866-7 led to the Second Reform Act, which increased the franchise (though still mostly excluding women), bringing a “degree of political inclusiveness” (1998: 297). But “at the same time social divergence was widening, and the climate of political opinion was changing” (1998: 297), leading to the increased awareness of the working class of its own identity and the awareness of more acute social tensions with this working class felt by the middle class.

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The spatial segregation of an idea of the East End can thus be understood to have taken place alongside the emergence and imaginative segregation of an English middle class. Perkin later points out that “as class society reached its zenith, the working class, after the relative quiescence of the mid-Victorian social peace, rose once again in a resurgence of class consciousness and class conflict” (1999: 101). As this book will try to show, the period that I term the ‘apotheosis’ of the idea of the East End effectively occurred at the same historical moment as Perkins’s “zenith” of English class society. This, it seems, was no coincidence.

Landscaped Citizenship The social life of the eastern side of the city has long been the subject of study. Since the end of the Second World War, one book in particular, Family and Kinship in East London (1957), by Michael Young and Peter Willmott, has helped to develop the discursive power of social observation. In order to do this, this publication took an ethnographic approach to east London in order to build up a picture of the social deprivation that could be found at the heart of the post-war British capital. Young and Willmott interviewed a number of residents of Bethnal Green, and came to the conclusion that strong family units, often run by strong women, had a significant influence on the ways in which the wider community functioned. But as a sociological document this book has proved highly controversial. A number of commentators have argued that it provides a sentimentalised and romanticised view of the East End (Bunting 2007: 1). The long quotations in the book, gleaned from interviews with ‘real’ East Enders, often have the effect of making these individuals appear like characters from lateVictorian slum novels. And Young and Willmott’s prose often echoes countless other fictional East End texts that construct an ‘Otherly’ labyrinthine space inhabited by faceless characters and/or strong families; a space of the past – unmodernised and unreformed. As James Winter has suggested of the liberal Victorian view of London, progress and modernisation tended to mean “making the irregular straight, the cluttered orderly, the unbridled controlled, the communal impersonal, the narrow wide, the dark light” (Winter 1993: 32). One

Introduction

23

can detect this view of urban reform still in operation in the work of Young and Willmott almost one hundred years later. Young and Willmott, exploring east London in the midtwentieth century, certainly mark it as a backward space, both in terms of its spatial configuration and the unreformed social life that it apparently provides a home to. But they also reflect upon the movement undertaken by a number of East Enders out of this space and into new suburban homes situated a dozen or so miles to the north, in a place named ‘Greenleigh’ (actually Debden, a couple of stops from the eastern end of the Central Line on the London Underground). 5 The planners of such new spaces believed that landscaped citizenship could potentially be open to all. But this new social life “depends for its selfdefinition on a vulgar other, an anti-citizen whose conduct, if not open to re-education, makes exclusion necessary” (Matless 1998: 62). These anti-citizens were the type of people who continued to be depicted inhabiting a “vulgar” East End. It is the enduring power of this hegemonic view of east London that this book seeks to critique.6 I want to argue, then, that the East End’s imagined ‘Otherness’ can be best understood situated within a dialectical paradigm of ‘self’ and ‘Other’, where the ‘self’ encompasses a rising English middleclass self-image which, in the process of being distilled through cultural values and social customs, seeks at all costs to protect its codes of normative behaviour. Regenia Gagnier has usefully argued that “‘the self’ is not an autonomous introspectible state – a Cogito or a unique point of view – but is instead dependent upon intersubjectivity, or the intersubjective nature of language and culture” (Gagnier 1991: 11). In other words, subjectivities are inherently social. From this we might surmise that the identity of the English middle class is also dependent upon the intersubjectivity of language and culture; that is, it has been formed (and continues to exist) through a fluid process of intersubjective dialogue. The East End, as an idea, then, can be understood to function as a discursive domain in which intersubjectivities 5

6

Michael Young and Peter Willmott named this space ‘Greenleigh’ in order to “conceal the identities” of their informants (1969: 13). Four decades after his study with Willmott, Young returned to the East End with Geoff Dench and Kate Gavron in order to investigate the territory again. The resulting publication, The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (2006), described the lives of Bangladeshis living around Brick Lane.

24


come into conflict or work through aspects of difference. As such, it has provided a space in which anxieties concerning aspects of English identity continue to be worked through. Another way of thinking about the East End in terms of the ways in which it has facilitated the spatialisation of aspects of Englishness is through Freud’s theorisation of the unconscious. Interestingly, as Freud sought to analyse the unconscious he chose to think in distinctly topographical terms. He writes of “psychical topography” (Gay 1995: 578); of the “localization of mental processes” and “regions in the mental apparatus” (Gay 1995: 579). Developing his theory, Freud suggests that the unconscious and conscious minds are topographically separated. But he also considers the possibility that “an idea may exist simultaneously in two spaces in the mental apparatus – indeed […] if it is not inhibited by censorship, it regularly advances from one position to the other, possibly without losing its first location or registration” (Gay 1995: 578). Freud’s analysis of the topographical nature of the unconscious, conscious and pre-conscious mental apparatus gains in complexity as he begins to consider the ways in which repression operates on the borders of these topographies. As such, it is tempting to map Freud’s work on the unconscious on to the development of an idea of the East End. Indeed, the concept of a spatialised mental apparatus becomes highly suggestive if we consider the development of an English middle-class consciousness. One can certainly read the developing idea of the East End as a spatialised manifestation of a past, pre-modern, conceptual London that haunts a present, modern London (see Highmore 2005: 4). Its imagined status as a ‘ruined’ London signals what a wider London might once have looked like or, perhaps (more horrifically) what it might one day return to in the future. So, just as unconscious material impinges upon the individual’s experience of the present, an idea of the East End can be seen to function as a symptom of the latent material of the past that lurks in the dark, unmapped depths of the middle-class mind. It seems that if such a thing as middle-class consciousness can be understood as a landscaped space, the middle-class unconscious has often signalled its presence through the endurance of an imagined, distressful, dreadful East End.

Introduction

25

The ‘Real’ East End? But if we are to concentrate on the ways in which the East End has come to function as a middle-class imaginative phenomenon, we should of course always be alive to the fact that the real social life of east London has played a significant role in this project of spatialisation. Indeed, individuals who have mobilised around the identity of the East End have not just been sociologists or other outside observers, but also the proud urban working class, political groups and immigrant communities (Keith and Pile 1993: 225). These individuals have together no doubt had a profound effect on the ways in which east London has come to be ‘seen’. But, as Peter Brooker suggests, “an almost instinctive non-conformity, attracted to the eccentric, idealistic, populist, and anti-rational has been associated with the area” (2002: 98). The East End of London has been defined not only in terms of class but also in terms of race, and, specifically, the imaginative impact of immigration. East London’s population is, and has been, one of the most ethnically diverse in England (Rustin 1996: 1). Protestant Huguenots arrived in the seventeenth century. By the time of the census in 1851, the eastern end of Cable Street, then known as ‘Knockfurgus’, was home to a robust Irish community. Russian and Polish Jews fleeing the pogroms arrived later in the nineteenth century. Chinese, Malaysian and African communities have also settled by the docks, and since the 1950s immigrants have arrived from old British colonies in the West Indies, India and East Africa (Holmes 1988). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets accounted for up to eighty percent of the population. Contemporary east London, then, echoes to voices speaking in Sylheti, Bengali and Arabic as well as English and innumerable other languages. Issues of immigration, ethnicity and race have always been central to the discourse of the East End, and, as such, the East End, as a concept, has often functioned in very similar ways to the Orient. Edward Said’s hugely influential and much-discussed book Orientalism (1978) demonstrated the ways in which the Orient became one of Europe’s “deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (1995: 1). To paraphrase Said, English middle-class culture can be said to have gained in strength by setting itself off against the East End as a sort of

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surrogate and underground self (1995: 3). Moreover, more recently, Salman Rushdie has written that clearly the Other is to be feared. Images of him-her-it often use motifs of night, or of invisibility, which is a night of the watching eye; or of sexual threat (Beauty and the Beast); or of malformation (Frankenstein’s monster). Very frequently the Other is foreign; only very, very rarely is it presented as an object of sympathy (1992: 144).

The East End, as an idea, then, has often been defined in terms of immigrant ethnicities which have served to facilitate the construction of a mythological English middle-class self-image. This self-image steadfastly refuses to acknowledge its own heterogeneity. As Rushdie writes: “the dream-England is no more than a dream. Sadly, it’s a dream from which too many white Britons refuse to awake.” (1992: 18) It seems that we continue to live in spatial ideas like the East End: “Through images we seek to comprehend our world. And through images we sometimes seek to subjugate and dominate others.” (Rushdie 1992: 146) One of the other primary reasons why the East End of London has been regarded suspiciously as a source of danger by middle-class observers is because it has, at various historical moments, operated as a spatialised manifestation of fears concerning popular unrest and political resistance. East London played an important role in the impact of Chartism in the 1830s, for example, as well as the rise of ‘New Unionism’ in the 1880s and 1890s which led to the formation of a predominantly working-class Labour Party in 1900. It has also been home to communist and anarchist movements primarily drawn from the German and Russian populations of the area. For example, Aaron Lieberman, a figurehead of the anarchist movement, lived in Gun Street, close to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields. Liebermann and his group founded the Hebrew Socialist Union in 1876, which agitated to unite East End Jews and the Irish in order to gain decent wages and working conditions. Jewish anarchists sporadically operated in the area, publishing material and organising strikes under the leadership of people like Morris Winchevsky and Rudolph Rocker. In 1904 anarchists had meetings violently broken up by Jewish gangsters, the Bessarabians. Later, the so-called ‘Siege of Sidney Street’ in January 1911 saw the police and Scots Guards involved in a vicious battle with an anarchist gang. Indeed, through newspaper re-

Introduction

27

porting of such events, anarchism became a countrywide imagined threat. 7 In 1911 and 1912, Ben Tillett led 100,000 striking dockers to meetings on Tower Hill (Palmer 2000: 114). Communism thrived in east London up to and during the Great War of 1914-1918. Interestingly, figures such as Maxim Gorky, Lev Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) and Joseph Stalin arrived in east London for a congress in 1907. The General Strike of 1926 profoundly affected life in the docks, and east London saw the impact of George Lansbury’s arrival in Poplar Town Hall and the subsequent spread of ‘Poplarism’ (a moralist rather than a Marxist form of socialism). As support for communism slipped, fascism gained support in the area. The British Union of Fascists opened an office near Bethnal Green Road in 1933, and held public meetings and demonstrations. When Oswald Mosley arrived and the Blackshirts gained in confidence, anti-Semitic attacks grew, leading to the famous ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in 1936. 8 Criminal gang-based turf wars continued with the reign of the infamous Kray twins in the 1960s. The impact of the activities of these political movements and criminal gangs on the discursive construction of a spatial idea of the East End cannot be overestimated. Foreign troublemakers and power-crazed killers have long been imaginatively linked to the East End. But it should be remembered that agents of positive change have also mobilised around an idea of the East End. The Labour Party, developing the post-war Welfare State, had firm roots in east London. Indeed, Michael Young (who, with Peter Willmott, published Family and Kinship in East London in 1957) was head of Labour Party research, and set up the Institute of Community Studies in Bethnal Green in 1954. But, as I hope to show, the stories about the East End that have developed these associations in print or on cinema screens have been overwhelmingly middle class in origin. As Peter Ackroyd has argued: “All the anxieties about the city in general then became attached to the East End in particular, as if in some peculiar sense it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life.” (2001: 678) So the area has long functioned as a metaphor: “The East End was in that 7

8

These events were brought to the cinema screen as The Siege of Sidney Street (Dir. Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman, 1960) and documented by Emanuel Litvinoff in his novel A Death out of Season (1973). This history of the East End has been covered in great detail elsewhere. See Ackroyd (2001); Palmer (2000); Glinert (2005); Rustin (1996: 2-3); Inwood (2000: 750-3).

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sense the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery. It represented the heart of darkness” (2001: 678-9).

Theorising Urban Space, Social Life and Cultural Production As this wave of memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands - Italo Calvino (1997: 14)

What is a place? How do we come to know a place? Dolores Hayden has usefully pointed out that “‘Place’ is one of the trickiest words in the English language, a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid. It carries the resonance of homestead, location, and open space in the city as well as a position in a social hierarchy” (1997: 15). A ‘place’ is essentially somewhere we might imagine ourselves to be (or not to be). Indeed, places allow us to imagine who we are, where we belong, where we have come from and where we wish to get to. As such, places can become vessels of ideology. The expression “Knowing one’s place”, after all, implies not only spatial meanings but also political meanings (Hayden 1997: 16). A number of theorists have grappled with the relationship between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ cities. James Donald has persuasively argued that the city can be understood as a physical location that is imaginatively produced, experienced and lived (1999: 27). There is much more to the city, then, than its physical, material dimension, or what Donatella Mazzoleni has termed the “visible and tangible part” (1993: 285). Cities essentially develop in two ways – materially and imaginatively. But these two orders of development should not be thought of as in any way separate or distinct from one another. Rather, the material city and the imagined city are always actively engaged in the process of informing each other, of producing each other, of breathing life into each other. Indeed, the real, material city could not exist without the construction of cities of the imagination. Conversely, cities of the imagination could simply not exist without recognition of the topographical aspects of real, material urban spaces. This relationship appears to be reciprocal. As architects and urban planners imagine new, modern city spaces (often placing them in juxtaposition with the old), and as these new spaces are physically constructed and begin

Introduction

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to exist in a material sense, they always effectively remain spaces of the imagination – the imagination of their designers and builders, but also the imagination of the innumerable city dwellers who begin to register their presence. A number of cultural geographers have argued that our sense of place can be best understood as a biological response to our physical surroundings as well as a cultural construction (see Tuan 1977: 6). Moreover, many working within the discipline of cultural landscape studies have focused on the evolution of places; that is, the ways in which people shape places and become attached to them. 9 Likewise, a number of theorists have explored the power of place as a source of memory (Hayden 1997). In his examination of marginal spaces that function as products of modernity, Rob Shields has argued that “the social ‘Other’ of the marginal and low cultures is despised and reviled in official discourse of dominant culture and central power while at the same time being constitutive of the imaginary and emotional repertoires of that dominant culture” (1991: 5). As such, Shields usefully uncovers the importance of what he terms ‘place-images’ to the culture of modernity. He goes on to suggest that “social divisions and cultural classifications are often spatialized, that is, expressed using spatial metaphors or descriptive spatial divisions. As an ensemble, these are incorporated into ‘imaginary geographies’”. (1991: 29) The East End of London can be considered one such ‘imaginary geography’. It has been “hypostatised from the world of real space relations to the symbolic realm of cultural significations” (Shields 1991: 47). Through the continued existence of a spatial idea of the East End, ideological divisions between classes, ethnic groups and religions can be conveniently placed, positioned, named, and worked through. Bearing in mind these differing and fruitful approaches to concepts of place, the East End of London can be thought of as one of the most highly complex and contested of urban places. As I hope to show, the East End offers an exemplary example of the ways in which social histories can become embedded in urban landscapes, and, conversely, how urban landscapes come to inform not only social histories but also individual behaviour and the development of collective 9

Hayden (1997: 16). See also John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1970; 1984; 1994); Meinig (1979).

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imaginations (Hayden 1997: 43). Indeed, the endurance of an idea of the East End also clearly demonstrates just how influential cultural production can be on the construction of our sense of place. The relationship between the social history of east London and cultural production which utilises the East End as its backdrop is highly complex. But it is this dialectical relationship, feeding off the developing material urban landscape and geography of east London, which has facilitated the creation and maintenance of an ‘idea’ of the East End. Literary theory has also offered us ways in which we might think about the cultural construction of London’s East End. I want to turn here to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical work on ‘chronotopes’. The spatial idea of the East End could certainly be thought of as a chronotope, or as a “time-space” (Bakhtin 1981: 84). For Bakhtin, “every literary image is chronotopic” (1981: 251). He is specifically concerned with how the form of the novel produces chronotopes. But his emphasis on the literary ‘image’ seems to suggest that films can perhaps also provide the ideal cultural site for the exploration of chronotopes (Stam 1989). Indeed, all forms of writing (or, for that matter, all texts) contain junctions between space and time, or, as Bakhtin puts it: “A literary work’s artistic unity in relationship to an actual reality is defined by its chronotope” (1981: 243). Accordingly, ‘real’ historical time and space and ‘imagined’ or ‘fictional’ time and space are always necessarily articulated in relation to one another, or are, in Bakhtin’s terms, in dialogue (see Sennett 1990: 191-2; Smethurst 2000:12). In other words, the ‘real’ world and the ‘represented’ world are in “continual mutual interaction […]. The work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world as a part of the process of its creation, as well as a part of its subsequent life” (Bakhtin 1981: 254). Chronotopes, then, are time-spaces in which the conscious mind frames and organises the ‘real’; or, indeed, disorganises and represents the ‘real’ (Smethurst 2000: 5). As such, they can operate as metaphors that serve to condense socio-cultural histories for the purposes of narratives. This theoretical underpinning of the chronotope offers a way in which to approach the East End as a spatio-temporal as well as a textual phenomenon. As Bakhtin asserts: “The chronotope is where the knots of narrative are tied and untied […] Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete,

Introduction

31

makes them take flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins.” (1981: 250) He further suggests that “the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space, emerges as a center for concretizing representation” (1981: 250). An enduring spatial idea of the East End of London, fully crystallised in the late-nineteenth century, can be understood, then, as a chronotope in which powerful, ideologically-loaded narratives have been positioned and contained. One can think of the East End, then, as a highly complex representational field. The chronotope can also be seen to perform another function, as Bakhtin contends: “It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions” (1981: 85). If genres can be understood to be codifications of distinct time/space relations that crystallise concepts particular to given times and given socio-cultural spaces, then they can be said to operate in very similar ways to chronotopes. Moreover, chronotopes can be said to determine genre. Indeed, Tzvetan Todorov has suggested that the terms ‘genre’ and ‘chronotope’ are “synonymous” in the work of Bakhtin (1984: 83). In cinema, as I will show, this can be seen in the recurring properties of the topography and historical setting of so many Ripper films. In these texts, generic signifying practices and temporal and topographical motifs remain of central importance to the narrative framework. Indeed, narratives are effectively positioned in space and time when they clearly embrace the visible generic conventions displayed by these films. But Ripper films can also be said to exist within a Bakhtinian dialogical framework that has developed through the constant citation of other films and literary texts which fall within a wider East End chronotope. Another valuable way of thinking about the complex, dialogical spatial relationship between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ East Ends can be found in Michel Foucault’s work on heterotopias. Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces” (1967), comprising lecture notes which were published after his death in 1984, provides an introduction to an approach to spatial thinking that he terms ‘heterotopology’. 10 Writing in the late1960s, Foucault argues that “the anxiety of our era has to do funda10

Foucault also outlined his original idea of the heterotopia in The Order of Things (1966). Edward W. Soja explores Foucault’s concept of heterotopology in detail in his book Thirdspace (1996: 145-163).

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mentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time” (1986: 23). His intellectual project, then, at that moment, foregrounded space over time: “We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (1986: 22). For Foucault, “other sites” can be defined as those which “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect” (1986: 23). Foucault distinguishes these “curious” sites as utopias, “fundamentally unreal places”, and heterotopias – real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the every founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all other real sites that can be found in the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. (1986: 24)

Foucault then employs the mirror as a device that can throw light on his concept of the heterotopia, arguing that the mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place […]. But the mirror is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction to the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. (1986: 24)

Thus a heterotopia can be understood to be a discursive, imaginary space of difference in which the uncanny or the disturbing can be effectively contained. To borrow Foucault’s concept, the East End of London has often been imagined as a ‘crisis heterotopia’ or as a ‘heterotopia of deviation’. In this study I hope to show how far a spatial idea of the East End has come to function as a metaphorical mirror in which a vast number of people (usually not resident in east London or without an acknowledged east London family history) have come to see aspects of themselves, or their ‘Other’. But before moving on, it should be pointed out that the East End has also recently developed a consanguine spatial idea.

Introduction

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Journey into Essex In my yellow jersey, I went out on the nick South Street, Romford, shopping arcade Got a Razzle magazine, I never paid - Ian Dury and the Blockheads, ‘Razzle in my Pocket’ If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness Take the A road, the okay road, that’s the best Go motorin’ on the A13 - Billy Bragg, ‘A13 Trunk Road to the Sea’

It seems that an idea of the East End has gradually segued into an idea of Essex. Essex is an English county, and as such can be considered to be a clearly mapped and controlled space. But it has also been widely imagined as a ‘low’ county within a socio-cultural spatial hierarchy in which other so-called ‘Home Counties’ such as Surrey and Berkshire reign supreme. Essex and the East End now appear, in popular mythology, to be essentially part of the same imaginative body. Indeed, the toponym ‘Essex’ has come to operate as a signifier of violence and criminality; the home of ‘Essex Man’ and ‘Essex Girl’; the mythical location of a kind of philistine, post-industrial Thatcherite working class – people of a seemingly ‘low’ culture who are traditionally located on the political ‘Right’ (voting Tory rather than Labour), and who might or might not have real or imagined links with the East End (Dave 2006: 152-3). Ian Dury’s song ‘Razzle in my Pocket’ captures aspects of this culture, marking as it does the emergence of the originally utopian, modern 1960s shopping development at Romford in Essex as a site of the type of petty criminal behaviour and disturbed sexual fantasy that has traditionally been linked to an idea of the East End. And Billy Bragg’s ‘A13’ employs the musical form of a 1950s American rock n’ roll number in order to ironically link the south Essex trunk road to Route 66 in the US, as if to suggest that, while the American road might promise to take you towards the American dream, the Essex road will merely take you through sites of ‘low’ culture which are increasingly defined by multi-national capitalism and, specifically, American cultural imperialism. Both Dury and Bragg view Essex from the inside, so to speak. And, as such, their work belies their fondness for their territory. How-

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ever, in his book London Orbital (2002), an ‘outsider’ in Essex, Iain Sinclair, remarked that the A13 trunk road is “New Jersey-going-onCanvey Island”, and that “The A13 draws East London’s wound” (Sinclair 2002b: 39-40). Elsewhere, Sinclair describes Tilbury (a town off the A13) as “a single street, and it is shut […]. And yet more mini cabs. The chief industry of the place is providing the means to escape from it.” (2002a: 6) Here Sinclair comes across the junkman, a figure who makes a living dealing with “brutalized and deserted dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and tumble driers” (2002a: 15). The junkman, though, like the many working-class Essex people represented in contemporary texts, demonstrates bourgeois pretensions. His house is described as a detached residence that backs on to the railway track at East Tilbury; heated swimming pool, cocktail lounge, pebble-dash portico, closed circuit security system, Mercedes: and a panoramic view across the biggest rubbish dump in Essex to the Romano-British settlements now tactfully concealed beneath river mud. (2002a: 16)

Matthew D’Ancona has also described aspects of this socio-cultural phenomenon in his novel Going East (2003): “The old working class of the East End, or at least those who could afford to, evacuated their dying homeland, founding new pebble dashed colonies in Essex and beyond.” (2004: 157) And a similar move is made by a character in Mike Leigh’s film Meantime (1983), Barbara (Marion Bailey), who, with her husband John (Alfred Molina), manages to escape run-down urban east London by moving to leafy, suburban Chigwell in Essex. Here she enjoys an American-style consumer lifestyle while members of her extended family (including Colin and Mark, played by Tim Roth and Phil Daniels) remain struggling in the inner city. This reimagination of contemporary Essex as a rogue American state in which the working classes of east London have relocated reoccurs again in Sinclair’s novel Dining on Stones (2004). It seems that the A13 trunk road has come to exemplify this space, providing East Enders with an escape route that turned out to be a dead end. It has appeared elsewhere in contemporary cultural texts. For example, Arnold Wesker’s Boerthel’s Hill (1988) was a play commissioned to celebrate the 40th birthday of Basildon new town in Essex, situated just off the A13. It engaged 125 members of the Basildon community to tell the story of former East Enders who had moved out to Essex.

Introduction

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At the turn of the twenty-first century, an area that has become known as the ‘Thames Gateway’ has been earmarked by the British Government for massive redevelopment. It seems that the lorry depots, industrial units, defunct factories and waste zones of east London and southern Essex will gradually make way for huge housing developments. The area has been marked as prime for regeneration. But the decisions to build on this land in order to cater for the growing population of south-east England appear to have been driven by the belief that there is nothing of worth here – that southern Essex is a cultureless wasteland (Hunt 2007). This view of the area ignores the fact that the communities that live here have rich histories. It also ignores the fact that places that might otherwise be highly-valued by a heritageobsessed, nostalgic English middle class, such as Tilbury Fort, Greensted Church (the oldest wooden church in the world), the Saxon church St Peter-on-the-Wall near Bradwell-on-Sea, and Cressing Temple, litter this space. It also seemingly forgets that the area is home to some extraordinary modern architecture, such as Tom Bata’s east Tilbury shoe factory and Ove Arup’s Canvey Island seawall restaurant. And it forgets the rich Roman and Viking history of this space. East London and Essex remain imaginatively undervalued. It is my task to consider the reasons for this. While this book is broadly chronological, it does not constitute a definitive history (or, indeed, cultural history) of the East End. Rather, I hope it manages to suggest how far an idea of the East End has been culturally constructed alongside a modern London, and how both the material development of east London and the rich social life that has developed in the area have impacted upon this idea. The first chapter traces early representations of east London, and examines the ways in which a distinct idea of the East End developed during the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 offers an exploration of numerous latenineteenth-century texts which I argue together constitute the apotheosis of this idea. Chapter 3 looks in more detail at the ways in which the East End has come to operate as a space of ‘Othered’ ethnicity, and focuses specifically on its imaginative links to the ‘Far East’ and the ‘Orient’. Chapter 4 further reads the East End as a product (or biproduct) of modernity, by drawing out its complex imaginative relationship with the new spaces of modernity and modern architecture and urban planning in particular. Chapters 6 and 7 ask questions about how far representations of the East End have altered the ways in

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which we see contemporary London, and how far the spatial developments of postmodernity have either instigated further re-imaginings of east London or reflected the effects of the increased globalisation (and localisation) of this territory. Chapter 7 builds on this work by looking at postcolonial representations of the East End alongside ‘yuppy’ visions of Docklands. Finally, Chapter 8 looks at a number of late-twentieth-century visions of east London that mark it as a neoVictorian space and/or employ it as a suitable backdrop for dense examinations of postmodern identities in crisis.

I Development Some say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets, And mingle freely there with sparse mankind; And tell of ancient woes and black defeats, And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined: But others think them visions of illusion, Or even men gone far in self-confusion; No man there being wholly sane in mind. - James Thomson (“B.V.”) (1914: 18)

The Growth of the Easterly Pyle It seems that there was a time when the spaces to the east of London were regarded as areas to escape to when the great city began to overwhelm you. This was certainly the view held by Sir Thomas More in the early-sixteenth century, when he suggested that “if the discommodities of the city offend you, yet may the country about your parish of Stepney afford you the like delights to those […] wherein you now keep” (J. Cox 1994: 7). In the antiquarian John Stow’s huge Survey of London, published in 1598, east London was depicted as a varied patchwork of apparently undesirable properties and relaxed, peaceful, agrarian spaces (Collinson 2001: 27-51). The lack of any significant urban development to the east of the city before the end of the sixteenth century is also made evident in Braun and Hogenberg’s map, Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572), which shows fields still existing to the north and east of the Tower and the Roman wall, and a few minor buildings dotted along the old Roman road to the east which would later become Whitechapel High Street (Harding 2001: 117-143). But Stow was clearly concerned about the possibility of the further expansion of London towards the east. He recorded the encroachment of “filthy cottages” (1908: I: 72) into green fields and was worried about the seemingly rapid development of the road between St Katherine’s and Wapping. He wrote that there “was neuer a house standing within

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these 40 yeares”, but “a continuall streete, of filthy straight passage […] almost to Radcliff, a good mile from the Tower” (1908: I: 70-1). By Elizabethan times, London was a city of upwards of 200,000 inhabitants (Inwood 2000: 158), but no more than 21,000 people lived in the area to the north and east of the Tower (Merritt 2001: 1-24). At that historical moment, then, many toponyms now firmly established as powerful signifiers of the East End still only existed as small hamlets and villages. But this broadly agrarian space still managed to capture the imagination of a number of writers. Ben Jonson, imprisoned for writing Isle of Dogs, a satire (now lost) which apparently contained “very seditious and slanderous matter” (Drabble 2000: 540), wrote the play The Devil is an Ass (1616), in which the Vice Iniquity takes Satan on a journey to the parts of town in which he will feel most at home. It is significant that in Act I, scene 1 Jonson offers a Devil’s-eye view of east of the city (Happé 1994: 11): We will survey the suburbs, and make forth our sallies. Down Petticoat Lane, and up the Smock Alleys. To Shoreditch, Whitechapel and so to Saint Katherine’s. To drink with the Dutch there, and take forth their patterns. (1994: 61)

Jonson’s text demonstrates the ways in which east London had clearly grown, and notices the area’s broad ethnicity, even in those early days. 1 The eastern side of the city, then, can be seen here to be already taking on a distinct imaginative identity. But significantly, Jonson imagined the whole of London (not just the eastern side) as the site of an intense moral struggle (Happé 1994: 12). In his diary of 1665, Samuel Pepys offers a varied view of the eastern reaches of the city. He suggests that a number of these areas were not pleasing. Indeed, after a trying journey home from Deptford on 31 July 1665, the diarist writes: “So we were fain to stay there, in the unlucky Isle of Doggs – in a chill place, the morning cool and wind fresh, above two or three hours to our great discontent.” (1972: 175) Pepys’s language here clearly marks the low, marshy Isle of Dogs as a place best avoided. But capturing the events of the Great 1

For more on the similarities and differences between the developments taking place in the eastern and western sides of London during this period see Power (1978: 167-185).

Development

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Fire of London, Pepys writes in his diary entry for 3 September 1666 that he had sent a cart “to carry away all my money and plate and best things to Sir W. Rider’s at Bednall greene” (1972: 272). Here, Bethnal Green, the site of Kirby House and the home of his friend, the merchant Sir William Rider (Davies 1988: 74-5) is imagined as a safe haven spatially positioned outside London (Tomalin 2003: 230). This area, now broadly imagined as part of the East End, was still, in Pepys’s eyes, then, a green, pleasant space. But by the time that Pepys was writing these diary entries, London was beginning to spread rapidly eastwards. Wapping grew in size during the 1620s and 1630s as the London docks quickly expanded. Shadwell was increasingly swallowed up by London during the 1630s and 1640s. Spitalfields was developed during the 1660s and 1670s as Huguenot immigrants arrived from France. By 1700 London stretched out to Mile End, Goodman’s fields had been built upon, and Wapping marsh had been covered (Porter 2000: 141; Inwood 2000: 185-7 and 257). Many of these areas soon became overcrowded and quickly gained reputations as “base” and “filthy” slums, rife with disease (Ackroyd 2001: 676). In the partly journalistic, partly fictional A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Daniel Defoe remembers the effects of the plague on London in 1665. The narrator, a saddler known as ‘H.F.’, appears very familiar with the topography of the eastern side of the city. He gives his address as “without Aldgate about mid-way between Aldgate Church and White-Chappel-Bars, on the left Hand or North-side of the Street” (2003: 9), perhaps not far from the spot where Aldgate East Underground Station and the Whitechapel Art Gallery now stand. At first, H.F.’s Aldgate remains free from the plague. Indeed, inhabitants of the western reaches of the city initially flood across to the east to escape the grip of grim death, as the Distemper had not reach’d to that Side of the City, our Neighbourhood continued very easy: But at the other End of the Town, their Consternation was very great; and the richer sort of People, especially the Nobility and Gentry, from the West-part of the City throng’d out of Town, with their Families and Servants in an unusual Manner, and this was more particularly seen in White-Chapel; that is to say, the Broad-street where I liv’d […]. (2003: 9)

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So, at this time, the broad thoroughfare of Whitechapel was evidently the place to be, even for the rich living to the west of the city. But eventually the plague made its way across to the east “by the Parishes of Clerken-Well, Cripplegate, Shoreditch, and Bishopsgate; which last two Parishes joining to Aldgate, White-Chapel, and Stepney, the Infection came at length to spread its utmost Rage and violence in those Parts” (2003: 16). Interestingly, H.F.’s broad knowledge of London’s ‘real’ material topography segues into a haunted ‘imagined’ geography of the plague in order to construct an ‘idea’ of London (Wall 2003: xxv). This relationship between a ‘real’ material space and an ‘imagined’ space constituted by powerful, enduring narratives can be seen being developed over and over again in representations of the East End. Through the work of Defoe, then, the narrative of the plague comes to define particular streets as mythical locations – as spaces of pain and death. Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year clearly demonstrates, then, the ways in which narratives can facilitate the discursive formation and construction of urban spaces. This text foreshadows the later construction of the East End as a conceptual space of death by highlighting the ways in which fields to the east of the Roman wall were employed as burial sites for the plague victims. In other words, it seems that the East End has been literally and conceptually built upon the plague dead. But the area to the east of the wall had been littered with corpses long before the eighteenth century. In Roman London the eastern fields had been utilised as a vast graveyard. Indeed, a Roman burial ground was found in Spitalfields, on the current site of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, in 1576 (J. Cox 1994: 15). During the historical period that stretched from the ‘plague year’ to the mideighteenth century, the growing suburbs to the east of the city were not yet known as the ‘East End’, or, indeed, imagined as a distinct territory (Shoemaker 2001: 146). But John Rocque’s map of 1746 clearly shows that a significant acreage had been built upon to the east of the Tower, and that some development had taken place along the Whitechapel Road and the Ratcliffe Highway. Although this eastern aspect of the city was often regarded as dark and menacing at this time, the East End had not yet been fully crystallised as an idea. That would occur later. Samuel Johnson’s poem, ‘London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal’ (1738), offers a bleak vision of a corrupt city

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that clearly echoes Juvenal’s famous vision of Ancient Rome (Wain 1974: 86). For Johnson, London was “the needy villain’s gen’ral home”. But it becomes clear in this poem that the eastern and western sides of the city have not been separated within the poet’s spatial imagination. For Johnson, it is across the whole of London that “a rabble rages” (1964: 53). As such, London is envisioned as a space that is becoming unmanageable, unwieldy and grotesque. But it is still essentially imagined in its singularity and entirety. Johnson sees London as a city, then, that embodies a broad socio-cultural milieu encompassing wealth and privilege as well as extreme poverty. This city is apparently doomed; but also, conversely, full of life (Wain 1974: 86).

Visions of the Rabblement As the work of Johnson and Pepys demonstrates, the Isle of Dogs has often been depicted as a primitive, uncanny space. 2 Indeed, in his poem ‘Jerusalem’ (1804), William Blake associates the Isle of Dogs with the Dogs of Leutha, whose purpose was to destroy their masters (Glinert 2000: 259; Sinclair 2002a: 269), alluding perhaps to the King’s kennels which many believe lent the Island its name (Ackroyd 1999: 330-4). Blake’s importance as a writer of London cannot be overstated. He understands that the relationship between the real, material city and the city of the imagination is highly complex. Indeed, he actively develops this relationship. In ‘Jerusalem’, Los, Blake’s god of the poetic imagination, journeys downwards, from higher to lower ground: He came down from Highgate thro Hackney & Holloway towards London Till he came to old Stratford & thence to Stepney & the Isle Of Leuthas Dogs, thence thro the narrows of the River's side And saw every minute in particular, the jewels of Albion, running down The kennels of the streets & lanes as if they were abhorred. (1988: 194) 2

I employ the term ‘uncanny’ here as it is formulated by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny’, where he describes the feeling of uncanniness as one of “intellectual uncertainty” (1985: 335-376).

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Los carries the sun as a lamp, his “globe of fire” (1988: 194), as he moves through the dark city. Although this downward movement along a vertical spatial axis distinctly echoes biblical journeys into Hell, Blake’s London retains a visionary wholeness. Place names are poetically linked through alliteration, formally echoing the rhythmic momentum of Los’s journey. Crucially, the journey here is a journey into the imagination: “My Streets are my Ideas of Imagination” (1988: 180). Indeed, there is no mistaking the imaginative power of the Isle of Dogs – its low-lying marshes echoing to the howl of hounds. This imaginative power has remained, as I will show in later chapters. Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1798-99) captures another vision of early modern London. Like Blake, Wordsworth was profoundly disturbed by the extraordinary growth of the city and the loss of intimacy that had previously characterised knowable communities. The seventh book, ‘Residence in London’, captures the poet’s vision of the city in the late-eighteenth century as a space defined in terms of capital, consumerism and exchange, peopled by “the throng”. This throng, described elsewhere as a hellish “hubbub” of “less distinguishable shapes”, is also defined in terms of its heterogeneity and multiethnicity: As we proceed, all specimens of man Through all the colours which the sun bestows And every character of form and face: The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south, The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote America, the hunter Indian; Moors, Malays, Lascars, the Tartar and Chinese, The Negro ladies in white muslin gowns. (1979: 238)

Wordsworth’s emphasis on the broad ethnic diversity of London here would become a familiar trope in descriptions of the East End that appeared almost a hundred years later. Wordsworth’s vision of the carnivalesque nature of the London streets in The Prelude can be usefully read through Mikhail Bakhtin’s much-discussed critical work on the writer Rabelais. In the influential book Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin expresses the importance of the carnival as a form of popular culture that can ridicule dominant discourse by unmasking and disclosing truths held under a veil of falseness. He points to the potentially subversive nature of

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laughter, which “builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state” (1984: 88). Wordsworth’s poem captures radically free and open cultural expression operating in London. The potentially politicised performance of the “rabblement” would later become central to many aspects of an imagined East End culture, visibly manifesting itself, for example, in the music-hall tradition (Bailey 1989; Bratton 1990), regular working-class trips to fairs in Epping Forest, the appearance of a Saville Row-suited gangster culture and Pearly King and Queen parades that effectively mimicked those in positions of power and authority. During the nineteenth century this carnivalesque city culture was seen by increasingly bourgeois Londoners to be potentially revolutionary. So in Wordsworth’s poem we can see how the carnivalesque London “rabblement” was imagined before it later became associated with a distinct territory that would become known as the East End. The early-nineteenth century saw further developments to the material fabric of the eastern edge of the city that helped to facilitate the growth of an idea of the East End. Rapid industrialisation and the construction of vast docks led many locales to be swallowed up by the expanding city. Indeed, in Daniel Defoe’s earlier novels, Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), Stepney and Hackney had still been referred to as rural villages (Davies 1988: 76). But by the earlynineteenth century, so-called ‘stink’ industries were to be found situated to the east of the city, especially along the banks of the River Lea. Just as, in 1662, Sir William Petty had noticed “the fumes, steams, and stinks of the whole easterly pyle” (Ackroyd 2001: 676-7; R. Williams 1975: 220-1), this “easterly pyle” became imaginatively constructed in the early-nineteenth century as a foul-smelling space – the home of factories manufacturing goods such as glue, matches and sugar. Due to the prevalent westerly winds, the noxious odours produced by these businesses usually dispersed over Essex and the Thames estuary. But when the wind changed they were blown over the West End, and, as such, the east’s imagined foulness, fever and corruption made itself horribly present to bourgeois west Londoners (Davies 1988: 76; Ackroyd 2001: 676-7). Indeed, these smells were often imagined as a miasma – as a cloud of filth which might carry contagious diseases. As such, it seems that many west Londoners, breathing in these fumes,

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grew to believe that they could become infected by the diseased and degenerate cultural practices of an emergent East End. The western side of the city attained a higher level of social status during the early-nineteenth century, partly due to John Nash’s development of large areas of Mayfair and beyond (from 1818) into neat squares and elegant houses which proved popular with the emerging merchant classes. Regent Street, with its classical colonnades, epitomised the emergence of a new, Regency London (Highmore 2005: 36). But it should be pointed out that at this time (and, indeed, later) the eastern side of the city was also home to wealthy merchants, shipbuilders, industrialists, lawyers and doctors, who lived in very comfortable terraced accommodation around Stepney Green and Mile End, much of which is now, ironically, a controlled conservation area (Marshall 1968: 33).

The Perilous Region In his historical study of the East End, Point of Arrival (1975), Chaim Bermant points out that “there is nothing like a grisly murder to put a place on the map and early in the nineteenth century the East End experienced something like a massacre” (1975: 17). The apparently motiveless killing of seven people in two houses on or around the Ratcliffe Highway in December 1811 produced a wave of discourse that had a profound effect on the ways in which the East End became widely known and imagined. 3 Newspaper coverage focused on the bestial nature of the crimes. The brutal violence endured by a family in their home shocked readers in London and across the country. Indeed, on 21 December 1811 The Times offered a reward of £500 for information leading to the conviction of the killer, while the Prince Regent offered a further £50. These hideous crimes, along with the dark claustrophobic territory of the killer, soon became elided within the popular imagination.

3

The first murders took place at 29 Ratcliffe Highway. The second murders took place at the King’s Arms in Old Gravel Lane (now Wapping Lane). See Palmer (2000: 53-4); Inwood (2000: 590); Ackroyd (2001: 274 and 678); Glinert (2005: 53-70).

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Interestingly, in his essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827), Thomas de Quincey presents the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 as a performance. The urban sprawl to the east of the old docks appeared to constitute the ideal mise-en-scène for this criminal narrative. Indeed, in de Quincey’s essay, John Williams, the man accused of the murders, makes a dramatic appearance on the stage of east London: “People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed – a knife – a purse – and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of the nature.” (1924: 263) In this passage, de Quincey anticipates many of the visual elements of a conceptual space that was to become known as the East End. His prose certainly foreshadows the countless cinematic representations of the East End that I will explore later. De Quincey depicts John Williams, then, as the brilliant creator of his own murderous narrative, but also as the creator and imaginative controller of a spatial idea that was becoming defined in terms of violence and fear. 4 In ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, de Quincey connects the eastern side of the city with the criminality and poverty that was beginning to define this apparently darker side of London. He describes the Ratcliffe Highway as “a most dangerous quarter”, a “perilous region” (Glinert 2000: 252-5), and thus helps to set up a way of seeing east London that has become dominant.

The Devil’s Drawing Room During the early- and mid-nineteenth century, writers began to make clear spatial distinctions between the eastern and western reaches of London. Shelley depicts the whole ‘imagined’ city of London as hellish in Peter Bell the Third (1819), satirising Wordsworth: “Hell is a city much like London – A Populous and a smoky city.” (1977: 330) But significantly, the devil appears “like a slop-merchant from Wapping” (1977: 329). Shelley, then, employs an early east London stereotype in order to personify the Devil, and, as such, imaginatively 4

De Quincey’s account of the Ratcliffe Highway murders influenced Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and P.D. James's The Maul and the Pear Tree (1990) (see Glinert 2000: 252-255).

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imbricates the poor workers of the area with unspeakable evil. This would also become a familiar trope of East End discourse. Byron’s Don Juan (1818- 24) also imagines London as a hellish space. The hero, Juan, is “trapped inside both Byron’s orderly recollection of his own English experience and the narrator’s firm intention of taking him first to London” (Beatty 1985: 38). Juan’s first view of the city appears in the tenth canto: The sun went down, the smoke rose up, as from A half-quenched volcano, o’er a space Which well beseemed the ‘devil's drawing room’, As some have qualified that wondrous place. (1984: 395)

The narrator refers to the whole of London here as viewed from Shooter’s Hill, a high point to the south-east of the city on the road between London and Dover. This spot affords the first glimpse of the metropolis for the traveller from the Channel ports. 5 Significantly, when viewed from this height, east London is closer than west London. It is undoubtedly the eastern aspect of the city that is captured here: A mighty mass of brick and smoke and shipping, Dirty and dusty, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts, a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea coal canopy, A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool’s head – and there is London town! (1984: 395)

In these lines, central London is viewed in the distance, beyond an early industrial eastern space. This space is effectively employed as an optic through which the hellish nature of the whole city can be made visible. Juan sees the dome (“cupola”) of Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral across a “wilderness”, and Hawksmoor’s thrusting, elegant white church steeples also appear incongruous in the “sea coal” darkness. The coal metaphor here also signifies the dark, dirty nature of this fuel 5

Shooter’s Hill can be clearly seen on Plate 2 of Jean Rocque’s An Exact Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster […] and the Country near Ten Miles Around […] (1746).

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as well as the labourers who carry it to shore. The marshes of the Isle of Dogs are imagined as a prehistoric, pre-human, uncivilised space. East London is also likened to a wild forest (prefiguring Joseph Conrad’s later visions of the urban jungle, discussed later), which is contrasted with Wren’s great cathedral. But if the noun “cupola” is understood to mean ‘furnace’, it resonates in other ways, allowing Byron to again introduce the poetic imagery of Hell into his rich vision of early modern London.

Gin and Opium Contrary to the opinions of W.J. Fishman and Peter Ackroyd, who both place the earliest printed use of the capitalised ‘East End’ in the early 1880s, the term appeared much earlier. It is in operation in Pierce Egan’s novel, Life in London (1821), for example. Egan’s narrative captures the Regency vogue for ‘slumming’, as it follows young swells, Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn, and the Oxonian, Logic, on their rambles across the city. One memorable scene sees the friends travel from ALMAKS in the West End to ALL-MAX in the East End, as they go in search of “‘a bit of Life’ at the East End of the Town” (1924: 225). Egan’s footnote points out that ALL-MAX was a nineteenth-century synonym for gin. The boys enjoy a drink or two in an exotic space only a short carriage ride from the West End. The scene is described by Egan’s narrator as follows: The group motley indeed; m – Lascars, blacks, jack tars, coal-heavers, dustmen, women of colour, old and young, and a sprinkling of the remnants of once fine girls, &c. were all jigging together, provided the teaser of the catgut was not bilked of his duce. Gloves might have been laughed at, as dirty hands produced no squeamishness on the heroines in the dance, and the scene changed as often as a pantomime, from the continual introduction of characters. (1924: 227-8)

Employing slang terminology here, Egan clearly constructs a carnivalesque East End. This space is marked as a stage on which a “pantomime” takes place – a performance originally characterised not by words but by gesture and movement. Importantly, then, these East End ‘characters’ are not fully developed – they are not given a voice. As such, they cannot enter into bourgeois discourse. P.J. Keating has

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advocated that Egan established the contrast in the public mind between east and west London (1973: 588). Furthermore, Keating makes another crucial point: “As Tom and Jerry discover, each half of the city is enjoying the same pleasures, albeit in entirely different trappings.” (1973: 588) In Egan’s text, then, the East End effectively begins to make visible what must remain invisible within the seemingly higher-class, Regency socio-cultural milieu of the West End. An idea of the East End can, then, be seen becoming distinctly clearer in this novel, as Egan draws distinct socio-cultural differences between two halves of London, while also (ironically, of course) noticing the similarities. Writing at approximately the same time as Egan, Thomas de Quincey, in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), depicted specific labyrinthine spaces in London in which the opium eater rambled as “terrae incognitae”. De Quincey suggests that a “tangible, ordered, and knowable London which is mapped in modern charts exists beyond these circumscribed regions” (Mighall 1999: 35). Parts of London, it seems, remained uncontrollable.

‘Not a Wery Nice Neighbourhood’ In a number of Charles Dickens’s famous early- and middle-period representations of London, the East End cannot be said to exist as a fully formed spatial concept. The eastern reaches of the city remain, rather, very much integral parts of the phenomenon that Cobbett, in Rural Rides (1830), termed the “Wen” (1987: 218) – a benign slowgrowing cyst on the face of the country. Rather than crudely producing the binary opposition of east and west that would so often be employed in literary works of the late-nineteenth century, Dickens imagines a city characterised by the close spatial proximity of wealth and deprivation, and the potential for dramatic narrative energy that this produces. As such, Dickens’s earlier visions of London capture a broad sweep of socio-cultural difference. But many incidental representations of eastern locations in these novels do clearly impact upon the discursive formation of an idea of the East End. For example, in The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), Mr Pickwick and his cockney servant Sam Weller ride in a coach up the Whitechapel Road on their way out of London towards Ipswich.

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The narrator highlights the tensions that exist between the coach and the poor people lurking in the street: “And away went the coach up Whitechapel, to the admiration of the whole population of that prettydensely populated quarter.” (1977: 383) As they ride up the Whitechapel Road, away from the Bull Inn (1977: 378), Sam says to Mr Pickwick “not a wery nice neighbourhood this, sir” (1977: 383). This could be a knowing, ironic move on his part. Perhaps Sam likes the area or feels at home there. Perhaps he imagines he is telling Mr Pickwick what he wants to hear, presupposing that a man such as he would have received notions about this eastern side of the city. The genteel Pickwick replies: “It is indeed, Sam”, and the narrator continues: “said Mr Pickwick, surveying the crowded and filthy streets through which they were passing” (1977: 383). Here, through the voice of the narrator, Dickens offers Mr Pickwick’s view of this urban scene. Pickwick does not look at the street; he surveys it. He rationally examines and records what he sees. It seems that as Pickwick looks down on this street scene he in effect spatially reaffirms his own classbased identity. Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-9) also depicts London as an entity; as a complete imagined space, fissured but not yet fragmented within the bourgeois imagination. However, one passage in the novel goes some way towards introducing many of the generic, thematic elements that have facilitated the construction of a dark idea of the East End. In the following scene, Fagin is making his way through labyrinthine Whitechapel towards Spitalfields: The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung over the streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and everything felt cold and clammy to the touch. It seemed just the night when it befitted such a being as the Jew to be abroad. As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal. He kept on his course, through many winding and narrow ways, until he reached Bethnal Green; turning suddenly off to the left, he soon became involved in a maze of the mean and dirty streets which abound in that close and densely-populated quarter. (1976a: 186)

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Dickens links Fagin’s ethnicity to the primordial darkness of this urban space. His cultural ‘Otherness’, manifesting itself through his reptilian corporeal characteristics, is spatially mediated by a swamp-like east London which is effectively depicted as pre-human. This is a place, it seems, that has little changed since the dawn of time. The Jew is thus marked as a pre-human or sub-human being crawling through primordial slime. Indeed, Fagin demonstrates the uncanny ability to blend into his surroundings. He is “too familiar with the ground he traversed to be at all bewildered either by the darkness of the night, or the intricacies of the way” (1976a: 186). The suggestion here, of course, is that the narrator (and, perhaps, the reader) would be lost in this ‘low’ environment. This passage serves to spatialise London in terms of differing sensibilities (Mighall 1999: 63-4). Through the figure of Fagin, Dickens examines the highly complex relationships that can develop between individuals and urban environments. This relationship is not just imaginative, then, but corporeal. Fagin’s body helps to form this environment. Indeed, his body and the urban body somehow serve to produce or construct each other. The human body and the body of the city are thus seen to become mutually constitutive. If the East End is depicted as an extension of Fagin, it comes to mirror aspects of his personality. The bodily knowledge of a specific dark part of the earth on display in this text pre-figures many representations of Jewish immigrants living in the East End that would appear towards the end of the century, as well as the expressionism of Weimar films of the 1920s and 1930s, as I will demonstrate in Chapter 4. 6 In Barnaby Rudge (1841), Dickens documents the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, and emphasises the east-to-west spatial progression through London of the first wave of the rioters: “The first detachment, carrying by way of banners, some relics of the havoc they had made in Moorfields, proclaimed that they were on their way to Chelsea, whence they would return in the same order, to make of the spoil they bore, a great bonfire, near at hand.” (1975: 489) This passage prefigures the threat that many middle-class west Londoners 6

G.W.M. Reynolds’s highly successful The Mysteries of London ran in weekly parts from 1844 to 1848. The first chapter, ‘The Old House in Smithfield’, constructs a dark, Gothic labyrinthine space, not unlike Fagin’s territory in Oliver Twist, in which the narrow and dirty streets serve to produce feelings of anxiety in the youth who wanders through them (see Maxwell 1977 and Mighall 1999: 27-33).

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would come to feel from rioters flooding in from the eastern side of the city during the late-nineteenth century. It is clear that during the Gordon Riots more looting and burning occurred to the west and north than to the east of the city (Palmer 2000: 21; Porter 2000: 191-2; Inwood 2000: 401-4). 7 The East End historian Alan Palmer has argued that for the propertied classes of London, these riots left a lingering suspicion and irrational dislike of people living in the east (2000: 22). East London also features in Dombey & Son (1847-8). In this novel, Dickens captures the growth of the docks. Captain Cuttle lodges at No.9 Brig Place, “on the brink of a little canal near India docks, where there was a swivel bridge which opened now and then to let some wandering monster of a ship come roaming up the street like a stranded leviathan” (1976b: 178-9). This vessel can be seen to symbolise monstrous ‘Otherness’ – the potential threat of the invasion of strange immigrant cultures and social practices into London and England via the East End docks. This threat of invasion was often imaginatively linked to a perceived threat of infection. Indeed, in lateVictorian texts, the bourgeois body and mind would often appear to come under attack from dark, irrational, anti-Enlightenment forces moving out of (or through) the territory of the East End. London novels of the 1850s, including Dickens’s mid-period works, were being written at a historical moment when, for the first time, the urban population of England exceeded the rural population (R. Williams 1975: 217). An apparently darker side of city life became more and more visible in these novels. Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), for example, describes a grim sweater’s den in east London. Other publications covered similar ground. George F.R.S. Godwin’s book London Shadows; a Glance at the “Homes” of the Thousands (1854) and its sequel Town Swamps and Social Bridges (1859) attempted to throw light on the terrible living conditions endured by many poor Londoners. In The Woman in White (1859), Wilkie Collins depicts east London as a territory that has been clearly marginalised from the socio-cultural power bases to be found at the centre of the city. In this novel, the East End provides convenient cover for Walter Hartwright, 7

In Barnaby Rudge Dickens also disrupts this perceived spatial threat from the east when the narrator points out that the second detachment of rioters sets out to destroy chapels at Wapping and East Smithfield as well (1975: 489).

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Marian Halcombe and Laura Fairlie as they attempt to hide from Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde. Indeed, in his narration, Walter describes the reasons for choosing east London for this purpose: The sense of this serious peril – a peril which every day and every hour might bring nearer and nearer to us – was the one which guided me in fixing the place of our retreat. I chose it in the far east of London, where there were fewest idle people to lounge about and look about them in the streets. I chose it in a poor and a populous neighbourhood – because the harder the struggle for existence among the men and women about us, the less the risk of having the time or taking the pains to notice chance strangers who came among them. (1959: 389)

Interestingly, Walter views East Enders as a homogeneous “them” – a mass of poor, uncivilised creatures living in a space imaginatively projected far away from a civilised West End. Indeed, east London becomes, for Walter, the “far east”; a spatial extension of the Orient – a distant dominion which comes within the governance of England while at the same time being defined in terms of its ‘Otherness’ to perceived bourgeois socio-cultural norms. Collins’s spatial employment of the eastern side of the city in The Woman in White, then, facilitates the construction of an idea of the East End that would develop further during the late-nineteenth century. The severe winter of 1860-1 led to bread riots in east London, and during the winter of 1866-7 a combination of bad weather and an economic depression caused 100,000 people to march on Hyde Park, an event which clearly contributed to the passing of the Second Reform Bill (S. Joyce 2003: 156-7). Henry Mayhew’s empirical examination of the so-called ‘outcast’ class of London was published in four volumes between 1861 and 1862 as London Labour and the London Poor, “an Ur ethnography – a middle-class representation of the poor” (Gagnier 1991: 64). 8 Mayhew had initially written a series of articles and published a number of interviews with the London poor in the Morning Chronicle in 1849, a paper which “had liberal, reformist leanings” and “responded to the growing middle-class interest in problems of poverty and urban life in general” (Nord 1987: 128). Although Mayhew, a proto-anthropologist, certainly found poverty and crimi8

For more on Henry Mayhew see Humphries (1984) and Gagnier (1991: 6298).

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nality in east London, he clearly acknowledges in London Labour and the London Poor that these social problems were in fact London-wide. As a “traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor” he witnesses “the vice, the ignorance, and the want that encompass us on every side”. So Mayhew shows us that there were slums in Blackfriars as well as Whitechapel during the 1850s. Interestingly, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have suggested that “the reformers” (especially Chadwick and Mayhew) “were central in the construction of the urban geography of the bourgeois Imaginary. As the bourgeoisie produced new forms of regulation and prohibition governing their own bodies, they wrote ever more loquaciously of the body of the Other – of the city’s ‘scum’.” (1986: 126) Furthermore, the bourgeois spectator “surveyed and classified his own antithesis” (1986: 128). Mayhew, Chadwick and John Hollingshead were important and influential figures, then, in what became a distinctly middle-class spatial idea of outcast London. But while the East End had not yet fully developed as an idea that spatially encompassed these outcasts at this time, it was certainly beginning to come into focus through the work of these men, as well as writers such as Dickens, Collins and Egan. Hollingshead’s findings were published in Ragged London (1861), where he argues that “of all the districts of that ‘inner ring’ which surrounds the City, St George’sin-the-East is the most desolate” (Porter 2000: 333). So Hollingshead also notices the poverty in east London, but his study, like Dickens’s earlier novels, clearly resists positioning the East End against a wealthy West End within the now familiar binary spatial paradigm. In Ragged London the ragged are to be found almost everywhere: In the west there is Knightsbridge, rendered filthy and immoral by the presence of its large military barracks, with Chelsea and Brentford; in the south there is Lambeth, Walworth, embracing Lock’s fields, and the Borough, with its notorious Kent Street; in the north there is Agar Town, built on a swamp, and running down to the canal in every stage of dirt and decay, with Somers’ Town, Kentish Town, and Camden Town, each contributing its share to the general mass of misery; and in the east there are St George’s, Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, and overgrown Shoreditch. (Inwood 2000: 499-500)

Hollingshead’s findings of 1861 were echoed by Dickens’s vision of London in Our Mutual Friend (1864-5). However, this novel clearly constructs Limehouse as a space that is somehow different to the rest

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of London. Indeed, it is in Our Mutual Friend that Dickens really begins to draw a distinction between the character of east London and other areas of the city. After they are interrupted during the banquet at the bourgeois Veneering’s house with news of a body found in the Thames, Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood take a coach to Gaffer Hexham’s lodgings by the docks. Describing this journey between two imaginatively opposed spaces, the narrator clearly positions east London within a hierarchical spatial paradigm encompassing high and low: The wheels rolled on, and rolled on down by the Monument and by the Tower, and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe; down by where the accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher ground, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river. (1976c: 63)

The emphasis here on downward movement on a vertical axis towards a space of death obviously draws on the Judaeo-Christian concept of Hell, while also echoing Dante’s descent into the underworld in The Divine Comedy and, to a certain extent, Los’s journey in Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’. Franco Moretti has argued that Dickens unifies the two halves of London, thus seeing the city as “a whole, as a single system” (1998: 116). But this whole systemic city is comprehended as anthropomorphic, with the eastern side of the city symbolically positioned as the back side of the urban body (see Highmore 2005: 3-4). Moreover, Dickens’s description of a flow of humanity from higher to lower ground offers a direct analogy with the newly built London sewage system proposed by Thomas Cubitt in his Suggestions for Improving the State of the River Thames and the Drainage of London (1843) and designed and constructed by Sir Joseph William Bazalgette, the Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works. It is important to remember that this huge development – altering, in a sense, the spatial economy of London – was taking place at the same historical moment that Dickens was writing Our Mutual Friend. Indeed, the Prince of Wales opened the new Southern Outfall Works at Crossness on Erith Marshes in 1864, the same year that the final instalments of Dickens’s novel were published (Porter 2000: 312-24). The symbolic link made by Dickens in this section of the novel between the unwanted effluent of the human body and the unwanted socio-economic effluent of the

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body of the city, flowing downwards from the west to the east, marks the beginnings of what I want to call the ‘apotheosis’ of a culturally constructed idea of the East End. Indeed, when the Thames to the centre and west of London no longer accepted the vast bulk of the waste of the city, new, impressive west London developments such as the Embankment, Victoria Street and the extended Oxford Street further separated the west from the east within the imaginative spatial economy of the city (Baumgarten 2001: 106-7). During the 1860s, the poor in east London began to be viewed within distinctly Darwinian terms. John Bright coined the epithet ‘residuum’ during the Reform Bill debate of 1867, marking the poor as social residue, and imagining them as a mass of waste material. He argued that because of their “hopeless poverty and dependence” they should be excluded from any extension to the franchise, as Matthew Arnold also advocated in Culture and Anarchy (1869) (1993: 232). Interestingly, this ‘residuum’ was often imaginatively linked to sewers, germs, dirt and pollution (P. Cohen 1996: 174). So it was widely believed that the body of the city could become as filthy and unhealthy as the body of the low city-dweller. But some specific spaces were deemed to be lower than others. In Our Mutual Friend, Mortimer declares: “This is a confoundedly out-of-the-way place” as he arrives at Gaffer Hexham’s lodgings, a pre-modern hovel that is described in low-bodily terms: “The low building had the look of having once been a mill. There was a rotten wart of wood upon its forehead that seemed to indicate where the sails had been, but the whole was very indistinctly seen in the obscurity of the night.” (1976c: 63) Interestingly, the hovel is imaginatively endowed here with anthropomorphic characteristics. It takes on the face of the low ‘Other’. Dickens’s last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), is a central text within Victorian East End discourse. In one brief passage, as the narrator follows John Jasper on his way to an opium den in Shadwell, Dickens clearly evokes a journey towards a conceptual Orient: “Eastward and still eastward through the stale streets he takes his way, until he reaches his destination: a miserable court, specially miserable among many such.” (1976d: 266) On arrival at the den, the narrator describes the interior of the building: “He ascends a broken staircase, opens a door, looks into a dark stifling room and says: Are you alone here?” (1976d: 266) Again, Dickens suggests the ways in which a building can anthropomorphically reflect aspects

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of the characteristics of those who might use it. But interestingly, F.S. Schwartbach has argued that in this novel the “nightmare city has become internalized, translated into the tortured, labyrinthine interior space of John Jasper’s mind” (1979: 219). In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the physical, material environment of the city certainly reflects the emotional states of its occupants. This appears to be the case with the famous opium den, which is depicted as an exotic, evil, corrupt space, much like Gustav Doré’s famous coeval engraving, published in London: A Pilgrimage (1872). Franco Moretti has argued that “Dickens’ middle class occupies a triangle loosely comprised between Islington, the City, and Soho” (1998: 118), a space which falls between the “fraudulent arrogance of the West End and the physical violence of the docks” (1998: 117). In Dickens’s later books, the eastern reaches of the city start to function as a mysterious low space against which the middle classes could effectively define themselves. I now want to explore the ways in which this imagined spatial economy of London became fully crystallised in the late-nineteenth century by focusing on texts that together ushered in the ‘apotheosis’ of an idea of the East End. 9

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A number of other publications of the period also examined the experience of the London poor, including James Greenwood’s witty books The Seven Curses of London (1869), The Wilds of London (1874) and Low-Life Deeps: An Account of the Strange Fish to be Found There (1876) which told the stories of drunks, beggars and thieves living in the capital, and featured striking illustrations by Alfred Concanen.

II Apotheosis The Whitechapel Road […] is a sort of portal to the filth and squalor of the East. - Brewer (1888: 66)

An Utterly Unknown Town An East End that has entered popular mythology – the impoverished, criminal, horrific and threatening urban space of the late-Victorian imagination, reached its apotheosis during the 1880s and 1890s (Stedman Jones 1971: 15-6). As Raymond Williams has pointed out, it was only late in the century that a physical contrast, which had long been developing, became generally available as an interpretative image. By the 1880s everyone, it seemed, could see the East End and the West End, and in the contrast between them see the dramatic shape of the new society that had been quite nationally and generally created. (1975: 220)

One of the most important texts that facilitated the crystallisation of this contrast within the spatial imagination of the Victorian middleclass was Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story (1882). This novel offers an account of how a young middle-class brewery heiress, Angela Messenger, manages to live undercover in the East End, where she begins work as a philanthropist. In style, voice and subject matter, All Sorts and Conditions of Men was clearly influenced by Dickens’s more famous representations of London. It highlights the gulf between the Victorian urban rich and poor within the formal framework of a popular bourgeois ‘love’ narrative. In the novel, Angela, and the man she eventually falls in love with, Harry, both claim to have roots in the East End, although they are clearly middle class. The novel, then, primarily concerned with highlighting the socio-economic status of the inhabitants of east London, represents the East End as a distinctly exotic, ‘Othered’ space in

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which the courtship of the bourgeois hero and heroine can be played out. The novel thus “helped to shape the image of the East End in the imagination of the late Victorians” (Beckson 1992: 308). At the beginning of the novel, Angela is situated in her rooms at Cambridge University. She discusses her plan to live among poor East Enders with her loyal companion, Constance. After Angela talks of her plan, Constance clearly becomes concerned for her friend’s safety, and asks: “‘But – alone? You will venture into the dreadful region alone?’” (Besant 1902: 7) We can deduce from this comment that Constance probably has no empirical knowledge of the East End, but is instead aware of its status as a conceptual or imagined space. Later in the novel, as Angela and Harry walk through east London streets, it becomes clear that their knowledge of this space has also been culturally constructed. Consider the following exchange: “‘Now, this,’ he said, as they walked along, ‘is a more interesting place. It used to be called Ratcliffe Highway, and had the reputation of being the wickedest place in London. I dare say it was all brag, and that really it was not much worse than its neighbours.’” (1902: 99) Harry appears fully aware here of how far mythical narratives can impact upon our knowledge of urban spaces. His understanding of this space has clearly been informed by reports of events such as the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Perhaps he has even read de Quincey. As they continue walking, the couple stumble upon a garden that Harry describes as a “little piece of Eden” (1902: 100). This space sits in stark contrast to the urban hell that surrounds it – a space in which, as Angela suggests “‘the ignorant, contented joylessness […] weighs upon one’” (1902: 101). Besant’s narrator, however, clearly acknowledges the East End’s spatial status (opposed to the apparently civilised bourgeois West End) by describing, in great detail, a mass of poor, potentially criminal, cultureless people: Two millions of people, or thereabouts, live in the East End of London. That seems a good-sized population for an utterly unknown town. They have no institutions of their own to speak of, no public buildings of any importance, no municipality, no gentry, no carriages, no soldiers, no picture-galleries, no theatres, no opera – they have nothing. It is the fashion to believe they are all paupers, which is a foolish and mischievous belief, as we shall presently see. Probably there is no such spectacle in the whole world as that of this immense, neglected, forgotten great city of East London. It is even neglected by its own citizens, who have never yet perceived their abandoned condition.

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They are Londoners, it is true, but they have no part or share of London; its wealth, its splendours, its honours exist not for them. They see nothing of any splendours; even the Lord Mayor’s show goeth westward: the city lies between them and the greatness of England. They are beyond the wards, and cannot become aldermen; the rich London merchants go north and south and west; but they go not east. Nobody goes east, no one wants to see the place; no one is curious about the way of life in the east. Books on London pass it over; it has little or no history; great men are not buried in its churchyards, which are not even ancient, and crowded by citizens as obscure as those who now breathe the upper airs above them. If anything happens in the east, people at the other end have to stop and think before they can remember where the place may be. (1902: 18)

This description of the East End of late-nineteenth-century London resounds with the concerns that drove Cambridge-educated Besant to engage in philanthropy; and, specifically, his development of the People’s Palace on Whitechapel High Street. This building was designed to provide culture for the inhabitants of the East End (Weiner 1989; S. Joyce 1996: 513-538). 1 In Besant’s novel, Angela builds her own pleasure dome, the ‘Palace of Delight’, an establishment designed with the express purpose of bringing the culture of the West End to its uncivilised ‘Other’, and to “awaken in dull and lethargic brains a new sense, the sense of pleasure” (1902: 134). But although the novel imagines great changes coming to the area, it still marks the East End as a space defined in terms of lack (Keating 1973: 590). The East End depicted in All Sorts and Conditions of Men is, then, a pre-modern or anti-modern space. The narrator captures the nascent modernity of a West End defined in terms of the effects of consumerism, where “people have leisure; people do not look pressed, or in a hurry”, a space which is imaginatively set against the East End, where there “are no strollers” (1902: 62). Where the West End is defined in terms of its new department stores, the East End displays the characteristics of a pre-modern Bartholomew Fair: “All day long and all the year round there is a constant Fair going on in Whitechapel Road.” (1902: 62-3) This description of the East End echoes, as I mentioned in my consideration of Wordsworth, Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnivalesque. But elsewhere in Besant’s novel the narrator de1

Toynbee Hall was also opened in 1884, under the direction of Samuel Barnett, a Church of England curate, providing a focal point for middle-class charity work in the area (Pimlot 1935; Briggs and Macartney 1984; Meacham 1987).

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scribes the East End as a “Joyless City” (1902: 132). Angela and Harry attempt to bring civilisation into this space in order to counter, on one hand, its unmanageable carnivalesque characteristics and, on the other, its seemingly joyless nature. Whether or not they succeed in doing this is open to debate – but they certainly do import hegemonic cultural values into this space in the form of a set of distinctly middleclass mores which aim to replicate a socially constructed sense of normality. As such, Angela and Harry can be seen to be actively engaged in cultural imperialism, to borrow Edward Said’s term. 2 Furthermore, they display an Arnoldian view of the redemptive power of culture. That is, they see culture as a positive virtue that can offer a means of dealing with the cultureless anarchy of the East End. Their initial view of this space is shared by other characters in the novel. When the upper-class West Ender, Lord Jocelyn, travels into the East End, he is described plunging “into the labyrinthine streets of Stepney, like one who dives into the dark and devious ways of the catacombs” (1902: 225). The style of language here, echoing John Bright’s concept of the ‘residuum’ (which became more familiar in later representations of the East End), imaginatively elides death, darkness and criminality. But Lord Jocelyn cannot navigate through this space. He cannot read it: “the place was strange to him” (1902: 225). Angela and Harry’s project, it seems, is to make the East End ‘less strange’ – to make it mappable and controllable. Besant’s novel was a best seller, and by the mid-1880s, largely because of this and other widely read narratives, the East End became regarded as a “heathen,” “outcast” space. For many late-Victorian middle-class readers, Angela’s style of philanthropy appeared to offer one method of avoiding a potentially revolutionary uprising – a clash of cultures and classes in London. Indeed, P.J. Keating has suggested that the image of the East End created during the 1880s was “a mixture of passivity and suffering [...]. Yet the form taken by lateVictorian politics – an inevitable movement towards mass democracy – gave this passivity a now terrifying aspect.” (1973: 593) In the popular literature of the 1880s the East End tended to be depicted as a distinct space that appeared passive but had the potential to become dangerously active. In a number of narratives, ‘brave’ middle-class 2

In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said critiques “notions about bringing civilization to primitive or barbaric peoples” (xi).

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characters like Angela Messenger were seen to cross over or pass from civilised space into an inchoate East End in order to attempt to instigate peaceful change. The philanthropic love story became something of a genre in late-Victorian slum fiction. In William Black’s Shandon Bells (1893), for example, Mary Chetwynd becomes a voluntary worker in Whitechapel. As the narrator of the novel notes: “It seemed strange for this King’s daughter to spend the best part of her life in Whitechapel” (1893: 369). The narrator goes on to highlight the ways in which Mary describes the area to her lover, William Fitzgerald: Moreover, it was not very picturesque – as she had forewarned him. Very rarely was the wretchedness tragic; it was merely mean and commonplace; existence in these foul-smelling lanes and desolate grimy squares seemed a lack-lustre kind of thing; occasionally the people were suspicious rather than grateful; and always they misplaced their h’s. (1893: 389)

Earlier in the novel, a “nigger minstrel” is described as “very drunk”. Another is described as a “capering soot-faced idiot in [a] dress-coat, white breeches, and vast pink collar, singing snatches of doggerel, or begging for money with a sort of drunken facetiousness” (1893: 192). This kind of racism also became a staple of slum fiction. 3 P.J. Keating has argued that “by crystallizing complex issues into over-simplified yet still valid images the popular novelist becomes an invaluable middleman, skirting the rational debate, of which he is an off-shoot, and appealing, often in the name of reason, directly to the emotions” (1973: 586). Black’s novel, like Besant’s, certainly seemed to suggest that the East End was a problem that could best be solved by decent, courageous, middle-class individuals. Indeed, both novels influenced a 3

‘Slum novels’ that appeared in the wake of Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men included The Scripture Reader of St. Marks (1895) and Father Hilarion (1897) by K. Douglas King, All Men are Liars (1895) and The Madness of David Baring (1900) by Joseph Hocking, A Fatal Reservation (1895) by R.O. Prowse, Maurice Quain (1897) by Morley Roberts, Slum Silhouette (1898) by J. Dodsworth Brayshaw, Lucky Bargee (1898) by Harry Lander, Hilda! A Study in Passion (1898) by Harley Rodney, Wine on the Lees (1899) by John A. Steuwart, Unholy Matrimony (1899) by John le Breton, and Neighbours of Ours (1895) by Henry Nevinson. See also East End Idylls (1897) and In the Image of God (1898) by Arthur St John Adcock, and A Son of the State by William Pett Ridge (1900) (Keating 1973: 599).

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number of journalists and writers who became eager to engage with the urban hell that they depicted. After the publication of All Sorts and Conditions of Men, the terrible living conditions of the urban poor received extensive coverage in the Daily News (founded by Charles Dickens in 1846), which ran two regular columns, ‘Homes of the London Poor’ and ‘Evenings with the Poor’. A series of articles was also published in Pictorial World in June 1883 reporting on ‘How the Poor Live’. The writer of these tracts was George Sims. Echoing the discourse of colonial exploration, Sims wrote in one report: I propose to record the result of a journey into a region which lies at our own doors – into a dark continent that is within easy walking distance of the General Post Office. This continent will, I hope, be found as interesting as any of those newly-explored lands which engage the attention of the Royal Geographical Society – the wild races who inhabit it will, I trust, gain public sympathy as easily as those savage tribes for whose benefit Missionary Societies never cease to appeal for funds. (Sims in Keating 1976: 5-6)

There can be no mistaking who the “us” is in this sentence – the literate, forward-thinking middle classes. Between the autumn of 1883 and the spring of 1884, the problem of housing the working classes gained wider print coverage. 4 An anonymous twenty-page tract was published as The Bitter Cry of Outcast London in October 1883, under the auspices of the London Congregational Union (Wohl 1970: 13). It has long been agreed by scholars that this was the work of the Reverend Andrew Mearns, the secretary of the Union. This tract effectively shook the complacency of the Victorian middle classes by documenting the horrific living conditions found in London rookeries, and employing the apocalyptic, fire-and-brimstone linguistic flourishes of the Old Testament (W.J. Fishman 1988: 1; Porter 2000: 333-4). It seems that the dramatic title of the tract was carefully worded in order to evoke feelings of guilt and anxiety in the reader. Here Mearns also imaginatively elided poverty, darkness and the bestial, and suggested a link between ethnicity, morality and wealth in London. Writing about the Christian 4

The working-class poor and their housing was the “subject of the day” according to the Daily Telegraph, 31 October 1883.

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mission to aid the poor in the city, he suggested that “only the merest edge of the great dark region of poverty, misery, squalor and immorality has been touched” (1970: 55). Mearns employed Manichean rhetoric that defined socio-political problems in terms of their radical difference to broadly-held concepts of civilised middle-class British life: “the churches are making the discovery that seething in the very centre of our great cities, concealed by the thinnest crust of civilization and decency, is a vast mass of moral corruption, of heart-breaking misery and absolute godlessness” (1970: 55). Mearns employs capital letters, too, for added emotional effect: “THIS TERRIBLE FLOOD OF SIN AND MISERY IS GAINING UPON US.” He also evokes biblical imagery which appears more to appeal to the fear of the middle and upper classes of drowning in the un-holiness of their neighbours than to instigate a properly Christian response to the chronic economic and cultural rupture that was occurring across lateVictorian society. This symbolic flood of sin and misery became a dominant trope for articulating the fears of the middle classes (Highmore 2005: 27. See also P. Jackson 1992: 142-4). Mearns even suggested that non-attendance at worship was the real reason that the poor are suffering, and that God was punishing them for their lack of belief (1970: 57). Although he was concerned about a wide area of London, Mearns’s focus soon fell on east London – on Shadwell and Ratcliffe, as well as Bermondsey (also to the east, but south of the river). These were the areas that apparently offered a “revolting spectacle”, a “dark vision” and a “ghastly reality”. As such, Mearns did his best to mark east London as monstrous. His civilised Christian readers, then, were encouraged to imagine themselves in distinct opposition to this unholy rabble, just as the upper and middle classes had begun to define themselves against ideas such as the East End. Indeed, it should be remembered that this highly descriptive sociological work was published in the middle-class press, and that these ‘explorers’ were traditionally educated middle-class men and women (Gagnier 1991: 118). Mearns’s text gained the attention of the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W.T. Stead, who published sensational leading articles dealing with the depravity of the East End that also garnered countrywide attention: ‘Is it Not Time?’ on 16 October 1883 and ‘Outcast London – Where to Begin?’ on 23 October 1883. These articles helped to reinforce irrational bourgeois fears of a mass of feral, diseased brutes beginning to manifest itself collectively as a spatialised ‘East End’

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within the middle-class English imagination. This fear was intensified through press coverage of a series of political demonstrations that occurred after the arctic-like winter of 1885-6. On 8 February 1886, a meeting called by the Fair Trade League in Trafalgar Square culminated in a riot involving 20,000 unemployed dock and building workers in Hyde Park (The Times 9 February 1886). Windows were smashed in shops stocked with luxury foods. In November 1887, after another harsh winter and a miserable spring and summer (and the conspicuous display of wealth at the Lord Mayor’s Show), a large demonstration organised by the Social Democratic Federation was held in Trafalgar Square. For many in bourgeois London, this event signalled the beginning of the coming revolution (W.J. Fishman 1988: 2-3). This protest followed the infamous ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Trafalgar Square on 13 November 1887, when a crowd protesting about coercion in Ireland was brutally broken up by the police (Palmer 2000: 92). Many of these demonstrations have merged into one imagined mythical battle between primarily Irish working-class protestors from the East End and the agents of civilisation, the West End police. Moreover, Alan Palmer has suggested that this heavily mythologised event, in reality made up of several disparate demonstrations, also produced a heightened political awareness among the casual poor of east London (2000: 92). But the Victorian bourgeoisie, picking up their newspapers every morning, were certainly made aware of a potential threat to their way of life. These meetings demonstrated new kinds of social and political organisation in east London. As Friedrich Engels suggested at the time: “That immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago” (1968: 370). Engels believed that ‘New Unionism’ had brought the area back to life, producing a “revival of the East End of London” (1968: 371). Many in the middle and upper classes seemed to believe that these political demonstrations and the rise of ‘New Unionism’ in east London might bring about an apocalyptic battle. It was feared, then, that the East End might become a force of nature; that the socio-economic disaster that had produced the ‘residuum’ could somehow segue into an ecological disaster – a biblical flood, perhaps – that could rise up and drown English civilisation.

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After the East End? In his extraordinary 1885 novel, After London, or Wild England, Richard Jefferies imagines a future world in which London has become marshland and much of southern England has disappeared under a vast lake. The antediluvian nature of Jefferies’s depiction of the city in this novel echoes, of course, the story of the biblical flood and its attendant washing away of a corrupt culture, as the decadence of lateVictorian London is replaced by Jefferies’s vision of a ‘wild’ country. But there can be no doubt that this post-apocalyptic vision of London exploits aspects of the geography of the eastern side of the city – specifically its marshy, low-lying characteristics. Jefferies’s future London sees its binary spatial politics effectively reversed: “Hitherto the stream of human life had directed itself to the westward, but when this reversal of magnetism occurred, a general desire arose to return to the east.” (1980: 16) If the east symbolises the past, then, it also evokes the primitive aspects of human experience that many had hoped had been left behind in the pursuit of Enlightenment ideals such as liberty, autonomy, rationality and progress. The title of the first section of the novel, ‘The Relapse into Barbarism’, suggests the full extent of the fall of English civilisation that becomes central to the narrative. Jefferies’s imagined, atavistic London is peopled by “Bushmen” who demonstrate a “mere thirst for blood” (1980: 20). This focus on animalistic violence recurs in the appendix to the novel, ‘The Great Snow’, where the novelist explicitly links his vision of a future England to the threat of a rising urban working class which was, at the time the novel was published, clearly seen to be manifesting itself through political activism in east London. But, interestingly, Jeffries seems to suggest that these ‘low’ people should be feared as a force of nature. In a future London experiencing severe climate change, “The Thames was frozen, and on the 2nd March the ice was seven feet thick off the Tower” (1980: 245). This ecological disaster leads to a breakdown in law and order: During the first days of this visitation a stupor fell upon the millions of London. The upper and middle classes shut themselves up in their houses. The poorer ranks flooded the taverns in crowds, and drank in silence huddled round the fires. But in a short time the pressure of hunger made itself felt.” (1980: 245)

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The familiar flood imagery employed here also echoes, of course, Andrew Mearns’s phrase: “THIS TERRIBLE FLOOD OF SIN AND MISERY IS GAINING UPON US” (1970: 55) and thus appears to reinforce an eschatological fear of the ‘residuum’. As supplies of meat, bread and ale begin to dry up, Jefferies re-mobilises the binary spatial paradigm of East End and West End in order to exploit the fears and anxieties of his readers: “The East rose and threw itself en masse upon the West. The fashionable quarters were invaded by an army of ravening wretches who had climbed over the mounds of frozen snow, and in a moment the houses were swept clean of anything eatable.” (1980: 246) As the political and ecological threats become imaginatively linked, the East End begins to function in the novel as the domain of malefic creatures that threaten the social life of bourgeois Londoners. Smith’s description of these hordes appears to have been clearly influenced by the discourse of anthropological studies and the pseudoscience of phrenology which proved popular in certain circles in midVictorian England: “Their faces I shall never forget. The temple seemed drawn in, and the cheek bone protruded: the teeth showed like a dog’s about to bite, the lips being drawn back, and the gums blue with cold and lack of blood.” (1980: 246) As such, evidence of sociocultural difference is found here in the physiognomy of these ‘creatures’. It is located in their corporeality – the strangeness of their skulls, their eyes, their movements and gestures. Indeed, this marking of the body as a site of difference also becomes a familiar trope of East End discourse (Highmore 2005: 28-9). The hordes are described later in the novel as “metropolis gangs of wolves in human shape” (1980: 247), prefiguring, perhaps, the rampaging urban therianthropic beasts that would feature in Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days Later (2002), a text which also explores anarchic events in London caused by a seemingly ‘natural’ phenomenon. The fear that modern bourgeois civilisation could degenerate into a malevolent jungle fuelled countless narratives that appeared during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. And the bestial, irrational violence that was seen to so threaten a cultured idea of London was often imagined originating in the East End in the years after the publication of Jefferies’s novel. But these imagined fears collided with real events in 1888, when a dark figure was reported stalking the streets of Whitechapel, brutally and indiscriminately murdering prostitutes.

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The Year of the Ripper In Jerome K. Jerome’s novel Three Men in a Boat: to say nothing of the dog! (1889), the “four of us” (1994: 7) – the narrator, George, William Harris and the dog, Montmorency – seek to escape the city and modern life for a few days. As the narrator points out: I agreed with George, and suggested we should seek out some retired and old-world spot, far from the madding crowd, and dream away a sunny week among its drowsy lanes – some half forgotten nook, hidden away by fairies, out of reach of the noisy world – some quaintperched eyrie on the cliffs of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint. (1994: 11-2)

Their decision to take a trip upriver on the Thames can be read as an attempt to escape from what had been happening downriver, to the east of the city, during 1888. Their trip would take them to calmer waters, away from the choppy waves to the east, where the river darkens and deepens. 5 But the spatial movement of the characters in this novel also has to be understood in terms of the author’s intense dislike of the East End. Jerome K. Jerome had been forced to live in east London as a young man after he moved south from Walsall with his parents. He later wrote about his experience of this part of the capital in his autobiography, My Life and Times, where he describes the East End in terms of “a haunting terror that is to be found nowhere else” (Davies 1988: 79). This desire to escape the dark, periculous parts of the city could be seen manifesting itself elsewhere in the fiction of the period. In George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), for example, Jane Snowdon, her grandfather and Sidney Kirkwood also escape the city, but in the opposite direction, taking a train out of Liverpool Street Station (the main terminus to the north-east of the City) on their way to

5

The River Thames was a busy thoroughfare in much literature published during 1888 and 1889. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, for example, Sherlock Holmes and Watson chase Jonathan Small and a murderous Andaman Islander in Small’s steam-launch, the Aurora, down-river from the Westminster Wharf on the evening of 20 September, 1888, passing the Pool, West India Docks and the Isle of Dogs, and, perhaps, the Ripper, lurking somewhere in the dark alleys on the north bank of the river.

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Chelmsford in Essex. The train travels through Bethnal Green and Bow, carrying them over the pest-stricken regions of East London, sweltering in sunshine which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of the damned, such as thought never conceived before this age of ours; above streets swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwanted light of heaven; stopping at stations which it crushes the heart to think should be the destination of any mortal; the train made its way at length beyond the utmost limits of dread, and entered upon a land of level meadows, of hedges and trees, crops and cattle. (1974: 164)

The employment of the noun ‘pest’ in this passage evokes the lingering myth of the plague of the seventeenth century (Latin pestis: plague) which had been developed by Defoe, and still informs twentyfirst-century representations of the streets of east London. But it also marks homogeneous, imagined, native East Enders as destructive subhuman insects that could potentially swarm across into the civilised, bourgeois West End. Indeed, Gissing’s characters would certainly have been aware of one infamous pest roaming the streets of east London during 1888. 6 In his book East End 1888, the historian William J. Fishman suggests that by the end of 1888, the East End had become a “national institution” (1988: 3); an impoverished, criminal, horrific urban space that was forcing itself on the late-Victorian bourgeois imagination. Between 26 December 1887 and 13 February 1891 a series of murders occurred in the Whitechapel area of east London. The victims were women – up to eighteen perhaps, but the actual number killed is still being debated. The generally accepted view is that five of the women murdered during 1888 were the victims of a figure who became known as Jack the Ripper. These women were Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols (found in Bucks Row, near the Whitechapel Road on 31 August 1888), Annie Chapman (found in Hanbury Street on 8 September), Liz Stride (found in Berner Street, just off Commercial Street on 6

George Gissing’s novel, The Nether World, draws heavily on Dickens by vividly portraying a life in a Clerkenwell slum. Although the topography depicted in The Nether World and Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) is usually that of north London – Islington, Clerkenwell and Farringdon – these works are often critically elided with other East End novels primarily because of the sociocultural worlds that they bring to life.

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30 September), Catherine Eddowes (found in Mitre Square on 30 September), and Mary Jane Kelly (found in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street on 9 November). The cultural ebullition surrounding the Ripper murders has played an absolutely central role in the discursive construction of the East End. Just as writers and historians have helped to create a conceptualised, mythical idea of the East End, so too have they created the figure of the Ripper. The idea of the East End and the figure of the Ripper have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Their myths have become imaginatively intertwined. Fictional texts, newspaper reports, police files, graphic representations, novels and films have kept the figure of the Ripper alive within the popular imagination (Colville and Lucanio 1999: 1). Indeed, Judith Walkowitz has pointed out that “no single criminal has appeared so tirelessly in literature, drama, opera, television, and motion pictures” (1992: 3). Through this exposure, the figure of Jack the Ripper has taken the place of a metaphysical Satan as the “manifestation of iniquity in contemporary culture” (Colville and Lucanio 1999: 156). The Ripper myth has managed to retain its extraordinary potency because it encapsulates a neurosis that strikes at the heart of progressive concepts of modernity and Western civilisation. Indeed, the Ripper became “a blank space into which people could project anyone they didn’t like” (Jukes 1990: 49). The murders committed between August and November 1888 triggered what could be described as an industry. Indeed, obsessive ‘Ripperologists’ are still attempting to produce the definitive theory of who was responsible for the horrific murders of east London prostitutes over a hundred years ago. In the Pall Mall Gazette on 1 October 1888, W.T. Stead wrote: “There is only one topic throughout all England.” Indeed, Chaim Bermant has pointed out that by now, the “public had a fixed idea on the scene, which conjured up instant visions of squalor and which was confirmed by a series of dramatic events in the final decades of the century” (1975: 6). This idea was cemented within the bourgeois imagination by representations of the horrific murders that appeared in newspapers and journals. Indeed, Lynda Nead has uncovered interesting links between the sensational press coverage of these murders and historically contingent notions of obscenity:

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End Cheap literature and images cultivated a new, excited sensibility. They sold sensation and created dangerously motivated and suggestible audiences [...]. Obscenity was also a spatial problem. It was seen to originate in particular locations within the city, which were most resistant to the economic, social and aesthetic ideals of the modernisers. (2000: 149)

Nead persuasively argues that notions of obscenity helped to create a spatial economy in the city that set the centres of official power against their transgressive ‘Other’, and that the judicial pursuit of this obscenity throughout marginalised urban spaces generated a conceptual framework in which Londoners could effectively position themselves (2000: 150). This was facilitated by what she sees as a cultural revolution in which the experience of the city was shaped by the narratives provided by popular cultural texts. For example, on 8 September 1888, the Daily Star reported that “London lies today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate – half beast, half man – is at large, who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenceless of the community.” This darkly atavistic, primal figure – so well drawn by newspaper journalists – has segued into the essentially unchanging, mythical figure of the Ripper. Newspaper stories depicted the Ripper as one step ahead of the game. During the police investigation into the murders, a letter addressed “Dear Boss” was sent to the central news agency on 27 September 1888 and published in the Daily News on 1 October. This notorious epistle also stoked the fires of the Ripper myth (Begg, Fido and Skinner 1991: 210). Indeed, the Ripper letters “helped to establish the murders as a media event by focussing social anxieties and fantasies on a single, elusive, alienated figure” (Walkowitz 1992: 200). The huge expansion of print readership and the widening publication and distribution of newspapers and journals during the nineteenth century helped to produce what Benedict Anderson has argued were collective, shared identities. Anderson suggests that there is a “profound fictiveness” in newspapers (1991: 33). He highlights their status as mass-produced commodities, and the ways in which they can have imaginative effects on their readers: the newspaper is merely an ‘extreme form’ of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity. Might we say: oneday best-sellers? The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing […] creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost

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precisely simultaneous consumption (‘imagining’) of the newspaperas-fiction. (1991: 34-5)

In Victorian London this “mass ceremony” was acted out by a primarily middle-class readership. Indeed, newspapers had a profound effect on the ways in which readers came to imagine a bifurcated London. The promotion of the sense of social threat in daily newspapers was based around a set of very clear objectives, because “the stressing of disaster prepares the way for drastic measures: the insistence on the twilight of humanity can actually be a springboard for the assertion that what is passing away is ‘their’ world, and what is dawning is ‘ours’” (Jay and Neve 1999: xv). Through the growth of an idea of the East End of London, “their world” could be imaginatively located in space. Through this model of sensational press coverage, the East End and the Ripper were more often imagined from ‘without’ than from ‘within’. Judith Walkowitz has further outlined the ways in which newspaper coverage helped to reinforce the East End’s spatial significance: The first element underscored by press coverage of the Ripper murders was their setting: Whitechapel, a notorious, poor locale, adjacent to the financial district (the City) and easily accessible from the West End by public transportation and private carriage. Part of London’s declining inner industrial rim, Whitechapel stood at the edge of the vast East End, London's proletarian center, a ‘city’ of nine hundred thousand. To middle-class observers, Whitechapel was an alien place, a center of cosmopolitan culture and entrepôt for foreign immigrants and refugees, whose latest wave consisted of poor Jews escaping from the pogroms of Eastern Europe in the 1880s. (1992: 193)

The East End encountered by the literate, growing middle classes, then, was a distinctly dramatic space. This drama could be seen being played out from thousands of miles away or a stone’s throw away, as people picked up their daily newspapers in New York and Notting Hill. Indeed, a dramatic style of newspaper coverage also became prevalent across the Atlantic, where similar anxieties about the immigrant poor dwelling in New York’s East Side manifested themselves in seemingly mythical, demonic, criminal activity. But on 30 September 1888, the New York Times focused on London, describing Jack the Ripper as a “fiend”. Two days later American journalists were referring to the murders as a “carnival of blood”, linking these despicable

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crimes to theatrical performances. Once again, then, journalists codified the details of the murders through the discourses of entertainment. But importantly, the crimes also captured the imagination because they appeared not to be economic in nature (Rumbelow 1987: 3). It seems that newspaper readers could not comprehend how such acts could be committed without a clear motive (or at least the potential for financial gain). So the murders appeared to be profoundly irrational. But so too was the imagined space in which they took place. While this drama was being played out in the press, lateVictorian theatre productions were also borrowing thematic elements from the Ripper myth. But many of these elements had already been in wide currency before the murders had occurred. Theatre troupes throughout the nineteenth century performed a variety of Gothic fantasies which involved monstrous characters, and three-act plays such as Spring-Heeled Jack; or, the Terror of London were familiar Victorian melodramas long before the terror of 1888 (Meikle 2002: 23). Furthermore, the theatre version of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (a novel perhaps informed more by Calvinist morality and aspects of the Edinburgh underworld than its setting, London) opened in the West End of London in August 1888, and starred Richard Masefield. This tale imagines an eldritch London of dark alleyways – spaces of criminal potential, influenced, no doubt, by Stevenson’s knowledge of the topography of the Old Town wynds of Edinburgh. Strangely, Masefield was so convincing in the lead role that he was even accused of being the Ripper by some correspondents (Walkowitz 1992: 207). Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and the play that followed it, captured the imagination of bourgeois Londoners precisely because it appeared to offer an extended metaphor for their divided city, one in which refined, sophisticated notions of behaviour and rationality were seen to be opposed by atavistic, feral, violent forces (Curtis 2001: 35). The novel famously depicts a man who transforms from the respectable, morally upright, bourgeois Dr Henry Jekyll into his repressed ‘pleasure principle’, the ‘low’ Edward Hyde (Highmore 2005: 42). Robert Mighall has argued that “the model of evolutionary progress with the modern middle-class male as its summit and goal was dependent upon the ‘primitiveness’ of savage peoples” (1999: 146). So, in Stevenson’s novel, “Hyde therefore originates as an idea in Jekyll’s class-conditioned conscious-

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ness” (1999: 146). Indeed, Jekyll can only conceive of himself as middle class by recognising his profound difference to Hyde within a hierarchical structure of identity that has been informed by the discourses of psychiatry and criminology. But, of course, seeing themselves as potential Jekyll and Hyde figures was almost unthinkable for bourgeois readers and theatregoers. The brute nature of this figure was instead projected elsewhere – on to the imagined figure of the East Ender. However, Mr Hyde was clearly a Londoner, and, as such, perhaps terrifyingly, might be one of ‘us’, after all. In a sense, the figures of Mr Hyde and Jack the Ripper became elided with the culturallyconstructed figure of the East Ender within the late-Victorian bourgeois imagination. All three figures tended to operate within a distinctly familiar type of topographical space. Indeed, in Stevenson’s novel Mr Utterson hears the “low growl of London” (1979: 38), and Mr Hyde then appears out of the city: “The steps drew swiftly nearer, and swelled out suddenly louder as they turned the end of the street” (1979: 38). He thus remains hidden in the labyrinth before he makes himself visible. He remains as unknowable and uncontrollable as the streets in which he operates, much like the Ripper and the stereotypical ‘low’ East Ender. Stevenson’s prose echoes the dramatic language of the widespread newspaper coverage of the Ripper murders, and can also be read alongside an illustration published in Punch on 29 September 1888 entitled ‘The Nemesis of Neglect’ (Fig. 1), which clearly shows a horrific, wraith-like figure materialising out of the very fabric of the city. The streets themselves, then, form a dark, broken, backward, criminal space that somehow produces the figure of the ‘Nemesis’. Out of the uncontrolled waste spaces of the city appears an uncontrollable force, with ‘Crime’ written over its mad, glaring eyes. The Nemesis of Neglect appears to function as a nightmarish amalgam of Dickens’s Fagin, Jack the Ripper, Mr Hyde and the ‘low’ East Ender. This eidolon hovers; ready and willing to cut open the over-indulged, prejudiced bourgeois heart. This image appears to have exploited the middle-class readership’s wish for the social-economic problems of the city to be personified, and thus denied, it seems, any semblance of realism (Colville and Lucanio 1999: 9).

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Fig. 1. Punch, 29 September 1888

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Fig. 2. Punch, 13 October 1888

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Fig. 3. Punch, 13 October 1888

Like Mr Hyde and the ‘Nemesis of Neglect’, Jack the Ripper appeared to vanish into the walls of Whitechapel. Interestingly, on 13 October 1888, Punch published an illustration entitled ‘Horrible London; Or; The Pandemonium of Posters’ (Fig. 2) which depicted a devilish fig-

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ure plastering an advertisement on to a wall. Here the figure of the Ripper is imaginatively elided with the shady individuals, working for the growing number of London billposter companies, who were employed to plaster the walls of the city with advertisements. Punch went as far as to suggest a corollary between these shocking advertisements and the Ripper murders (Hewitt 2000). After all, evil deeds require advertising, as such, if they are to fully infiltrate the bourgeois imagination. But what is interesting about this image is the way in which it marks the fabric of the city as a site of narrative. Walls operate as texts. The city not only produces narratives and provides the stage on which narratives might develop, but also displays the traces of these narratives within its very materiality. A similar link between ‘low’ life and ‘low’ buildings is suggested by another illustration published in Punch on 13 October 1888 (Fig. 3), which shows two shady members of the ‘criminal class’ stealthily evading the view of a policeman. They appear to merge into the darkness of the alleyway – perfectly framed by the neglected wall and the narrow window.

Mapping the Urban Body Socio-cultural aspects of the Ripper’s territory were also explored in the first volume of Charles Booth’s vast undertaking, Life and Labour of the People in London, published in 1889. In this study, Booth notices how far the East End had already been mythologised. He recognises its dramatic quality, and appears to understand the ways in which it had already been imagined and visualised. Indeed, Booth even goes as far as to suggest that powerful images were already being effectively projected on to the East End: EAST LONDON lay hidden from view behind a curtain on which were painted terrible pictures: – Starving children, suffering women, overworked men; horrors of drunkenness and vice; monsters and demons of inhumanity; giants of disease and despair. Did these pictures truly represent what lay behind, or did they bear to the facts a relation similar to that which the pictures outside a booth at some country fair bear to the performance of show within? This curtain we have tried to lift. (1902: I: 173)

Booth can be seen here to be drawing an analogy between the strong visual aspects of an East End mythology and a nascent, modern visual

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culture that was blossoming at this time. Indeed, writing in 1892, Montagu Williams Q.C. pointed out that the Ripper murders quickly found their way into visual representation: “The Whitechapel murders were favourite subjects for representation […] one enterprising member of the fraternity dealt exclusively with the whole series by means of illuminated coloured views, which his patrons inspected through peep-holes [...] celebrities lived again on the canvas screens” (1892: 89). Both Montagu and Booth appear to acknowledge, then, the ways in which mythical narratives were already impacting upon knowledge of the social life of this area. But, interestingly, they also signal how far these images were being visualised; that is, how far an idea of the East End was already, in some senses, operating as a proto-cinematic phenomenon. Booth employed a wide range of data in order to produce exact social profiles and typological classifications of poverty in London. In Life and Labour of the Poor in London, he records the fact that in 1887, 909,000 people lived in east London (1902: I: 32-3). These people are divided into eight classes, ranging from Class A (the lowest class) to Class H (upper-middle class). His eight subdivisions of London social classes incorporate four above and four below the poverty line, and his impressive maps show that while there were certainly many poor families living in the backstreets of east London (as there were across west London), the lowest class (Class A) accounted for only 1 per cent of the population (Porter 2000: 335-7). Indeed, the wider thoroughfares of the Whitechapel Road and the Commercial Road are clearly inhabited by people of some means. Their houses are coloured red on Booth’s map, connoting families that are ‘well-to-do’. Booth’s findings show that while there certainly was appalling poverty in the backstreets and alleyways of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, the East End’s status as a distinctly poor relation to the rest of London was already, broadly speaking, a myth by 1889. Indeed, in Booth’s findings the worst concentrations of poverty were to be found in the riverside areas of south London, Southwark and Bermondsey (Inwood 2000: 501). But in addition to this, Booth advocates that the irrational bourgeois fears of the East End which had developed by this time were essentially unfounded: “The hordes of barbarians of whom we have heard, who, issuing from their slums, will one day overwhelm modern civilization, do not exist.” (1902: I: 39) So, the late-Victorian middle-class belief that the East End of London was the antithesis of

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civilisation had been effectively manufactured. Booth shows us that a middle-class, culturally-constructed, spatial idea of the East End was essentially built on fear. During 1888 and 1889 a wave of strikes occurred in east London. The famous Bryant and May match girls strike took place at the company’s factory in Bow in July 1888, causing the East End to hit the headlines once more (Palmer 2000: 93). This action was organised in part by Walter Besant’s sister-in-law, Annie Besant, who received help from the playwright George Bernard Shaw, among others. It encouraged the growth of ‘New Unionism’ among the dockers, and by late August 1889 the Port of London was being severely disrupted by strike action (Palmer 2000: 95-99; Glinert 2005: 34-36). In September 1889, after obtaining agreement to a wage of sixpence (a ‘docker’s tanner’), a large procession of dockers marched from the Commercial Road to a rally in Hyde Park. These events appeared to prove to many middle-class observers that a dark force was out to attack their way of life. And through the reporting of these events, a conceptual space which had become known as the East End came even more clearly into cultural focus. At the same time, a wide range of fictional texts also exploited the dramatic potential of the East End of London. Writing under the pseudonym ‘John Law’, Margaret Harkness published A City Girl in 1887, a novel which tells the story of the seduction of a young Whitechapel woman, Nelly Ambrose, by a middleclass man, Arthur Grant, who lives in Kensington, west London. Harkness’s novel Out of Work followed in 1888, a fictional account of the opening of the People’s Palace by Queen Victoria in which “reporters were busy at work concocting stories of the royal progress through the East End for the Monday papers” (1984: 1). This novel tells the story of Jos Conley, a young man whose plans fall apart as he falls into alcoholism and poverty. In Darkest London: Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army followed in 1889. 7 In this novel Harkness’s narrator describes the Whitechapel Road as “the most cosmopolitan place in London” (2003: 3). One feels that the term ‘cosmopolitan’ is being employed here in the pejorative sense. Harkness cer-

7

In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army was reissued by William Reeves in 1891 to capitalise on the impact of General William Booth’s In Darkest England.

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tainly evokes a space encompassing many exotic cultures which, it seems, had no place in a traditional, mythical concept of England.

Utopia, Dystopia, Suburbia One writer famous for his connections to the East End, Arthur Morrison, published a collection of stories, Tales of Mean Streets, in 1894. This book included the tale, ‘Without Visible Means’, which took the “autumn of the Great Strikes” as its backdrop (1983: 49) – a period when “East London was very noisy and largely hungry; and the rest of the world looked on with intense interest, making earnest suggestions, and comprehending nothing” (1983: 49). This book was followed by A Child of the Jago (1896), To London Town (1899) and The Hole in the Wall (1902) – novels that captured a view of working-class life in the East End praised by critics and embraced by a wide late-Victorian readership. Strangely, Morrison often denied that he was born in Poplar, east London. He continually clouded his status as an East Ender, and spent most of his life trying to escape the area (Keating 1982: 1136). But, somewhat ironically, it was his attachment to the East End and the writing that this inspired that financed his eventual retreat to the countryside of Essex; a spatial move out of the area that would be followed by many working-class families who, over the next century, managed to accumulate enough capital to attempt to escape the area’s mythic pull. But Morrison’s novels rarely leave the East End of the imagination, and the East End of the imagination would arguably never leave him. In 1887 he worked as a clerk at the People’s Palace in Mile End (where he met Walter Besant), and he went on to act as a sub-editor of the Palace Journal (Keating 1973: 597). Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets begins with a powerful ‘Introduction’ that first appeared as an article entitled ‘A Street’ in Macmillan’s Magazine in October 1890. Here, Morrison effectively attempts to debunk the emergent spatial idea of the East End and the mythology surrounding it: This street is in the East End. There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand of man has made. But who knows the East End? It is down through Cornhill and out beyond Leadenhall Street and Aldgate Pump, one will say: a shocking place, where filthy men and women live on

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penn’orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none combs his hair. The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to the unemployed. And the unemployed is a race whose token is a clay pipe, and whose enemy is soap: now and again it migrates bodily to Hyde Park with banners, and furnishes adjacent police courts with disorderly drunks. Still another knows the East End only as the place whence begging letters come […]. Many and misty are the people’s notions of the East End; and each is commonly but the distorted shadow of a minor feature. Foul slums there are in the East End, of course, as there are in the West […]. (1983: 19-20)

This passage clearly demonstrates that although Morrison’s work has often been understood as formative in the construction of the East End as a concept and idea, it can also be said to critique the spatial relativism of the area’s imagined relationship with the West End. Writing not long after the Ripper murders and the political upheavals of 1888 and 1889, Morrison understands that an idea of the East End had come to represent a distinct threat to civilised middle-class London. While he constructs a claustrophobic space in which characters utter short, profane epithets and engage in incoherent dialogue, Morrison also appears to demonstrate a nuanced view of what the East End is (or might be), and how far it had come to function imaginatively for a wide range of people. Regenia Gagnier has argued that “to middle-class readers, Morrison drained the category of the human, with its contemporary liberal associations of human spirit overcoming its trials” (1991: 125). But in some other respects the books also self-reflexively acknowledge their own status as East End texts. Morrison chooses to focus on the experience of working-class, native East Enders, rather than the higher-class philanthropists of Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (Keating 1973: 598). Three of Morrison’s East End novels, A Child of the Jago, To London Town and The Hole in the Wall, feature a central character who struggles to survive in this space. In A Child of the Jago, Dicky Perrott lives in an East End in which working-class life, darkness and criminality become imaginatively elided. The Old Jago slum, once situated off Shoreditch High Street, is described by Morrison as “for one hundred years the blackest pit in London”, an infested jungle in which “the human population swarmed in thousands” (1982a: 45). In The Hole in the Wall, a child, Stephen Kemp, goes to live with his Grandfather Nat at the grim public house of the novel’s title which is situated “on the

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river’s edge at Wapping” (1982b: 7). Stephen proves to be a keen observer of the ruffians and rascals haunting the dockside. But in To London Town, Essex-born Johnny May comes to live in an East End which affords him the opportunity to better himself – to serve an apprenticeship and to rise in the community. Morrison’s East End novels, then, offer a broad socio-cultural view of this much maligned urban space. And his work proved extremely influential – inaugurating, after Besant, the literary trend for East End slum fiction that grew throughout the 1890s. 8 Arthur Morrison’s escape from the East End to Essex eventually took him north out to Epping Forest. He retired in 1913 to a house in High Beech, now situated a couple of miles inside London’s orbital M25 motorway. But by this time London had grown up to the edges of the ancient woodland, some eight to ten miles to the north-east of the city. Indeed, the city stretched out past Walthamstow and Chingford by the beginning of the twentieth century. Morrison’s retirement was spent, then, not far from the area in which William Morris spent much of his childhood. While Morrison perhaps longed to become an Essex man, Morris was effectively born one, in Walthamstow in 1834, which at that time was a small village in semi-rural surroundings to the north-east of London. Morris’s biographer, J.W. Mackail, describes the family house in Lombard Street as being situated “in pleasant Essex country overlooking Lea Valley”. But this area developed during Morris’s youth into a “brick and mortar wilderness” (1922: 4). Indeed, Walthamstow gradually became imagined as an extension of the East End, both materially and culturally. Rows of new terraced houses were built during the late-nineteenth century, and the growing town effectively became a suburb when it was linked to Liverpool Street Station by rail in 1874 (Porter 2000: 275). Lewis Mumford has argued more generally that “the suburb was a one-class community” (1938: 215). But as Walthamstow was invaded by an upwardly-mobile working class, many of these individuals still found it difficult to shake off the mythical East End culture that they were trying to escape, and to fully assimilate into Mumford’s vision of a one-class suburbia. Interestingly, Mackail employs familiar antedilu8

P. J . Keating (1973: 599) pointed out that Henry Nevison’s collection of short stories, Neighbours of Ours (1895) had its publication delayed and was beaten to the press by Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets. As such, Neighbours of Ours has been denied the same level of critical attention.

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vian language in his biography which echoes Bright’s ‘residuum’ in his 1899 biography of Morris, as he describes the growth of east London towards Walthamstow: “Within the last twelve months the advancing tide of building has swept over it.” (1922: 5) But Morris’s father was a City broker, and, as such, his son enjoyed a fairly comfortable middle-class upbringing. Indeed, young William managed to escape the encroaching East End by gaining a place at Oxford University. In Morris’s famous work, News from Nowhere (1890) – a text, as Malcolm Bradbury suggests, “where the disorderly metropolis, reformed, becomes charged with medievalism” (1991: 182) – the writer’s utopian vision of a London of the future effectively imagines the East End out of existence. Recounting a history that the narrator 9 has strangely missed, Old Hammond remembers the slum clearances: Once a year, on May-Day, we hold a solemn feast in those easterly communes of London to commemorate The Clearing of the Misery, as it is called. On that day we have music and dancing, and merry games and happy feasting on the site of some of the worst of the old slums, the traditional memory of which we have kept. On that occasion the custom is for the prettiest girls to sing some of the old revolutionary songs, and those which were the groans of the discontent, once so hopeless, on the very spots where those terrible crimes of classmurder were committed day by day for so many years. (1995: 69)

Looking back, Hammond describes a territory popularly known as the ‘old’ East End, lying to the east of Aldgate: “the houses are scattered wide about the meadows there, which are beautiful, especially when you get on to the lovely river Lea” (1995: 70). This territory, then, is imagined in the future as it was back in Stow’s time – in an agrarian state. Through Hammond, Morris offers a utopian vision of postindustrial docks which can now be fruitfully read against the material redevelopment of the same space by the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) during the 1980s: When you get down to the Thames side you come to the Docks, which are the works of the nineteenth century, and are still in use, although not so thronged as they once were, since we discourage centralization 9

In the notes to News from Nowhere, Krishan Thomas notes that the identity of the narrator in the novel is not always clear, but the narrator here appears to be William Guest.

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End all we can, and we have long ago dropped the pretension to be the market of the world. About these Docks are a good few houses, which, however, are not inhabited by many people permanently; I mean, those who use them come and go a good deal, the place being too low and marshy for pleasant dwelling. (1995: 70-1)

This re-imagination of the docks prefigures much of the work of the writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair, especially his novel Downriver (1991) – I will explore the ways in which Morris’s vision of a postcapitalist employment of this space sets up tensions with Sinclair’s visionary readings of the area in detail in later chapters. In News from Nowhere, as Hammond reels off toponyms like Canning Town and Silvertown, the narrator admits: “The names grated on my ear, but I could not explain why to him.” (1995: 71) It seems that the narrator, then, has knowledge of these spaces gained from narratives that he finds hard to shake from his cultural memory. Indeed, familiar East End place names can be seen to inform the toponymic spatial knowledge of characters who appear in a number of other famous novels of the late-nineteenth century. ‘Whitechapel’ and ‘Wapping’, for example, became place-names rich with discursive possibilities. They began to stoke the fires of the bourgeois English imagination.

A Very Important Problem Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) imagines the East End as a decadent playground – a space in which exotic middleclass fantasies can be played out. Dorian visits “dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields” and notorious spaces off the Ratcliffe Highway near Shadwell. Strangely, he feels the need to perform differently in this space. In order to facilitate this, he travels to the East End in disguise: There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately-scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little illfamed tavern near the Docks, which, under an assumed name, and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul. (1985: 142)

It is rumoured later in the novel that Dorian is seen “brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of

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their trade” (1985: 156). Interestingly, the narrator reads these spatial transgressions as “extraordinary absences” that take Dorian outside “society” (1985: 156). Clearly this “society” does not extend to the East End. This much becomes clear earlier in the novel, when the territory is discussed at Aunt Agatha’s house in the West End over lunch, as if it were a troublesome far-off dominion of the Empire. Indeed, Mrs Vandleur and Aunt Agatha speak of the “grave responsibilities” of the upper classes. However, the Duchess of Harley responds dismissively that “I take no interest at all in the East End” (1985: 47). But Aunt Agatha has philanthropic pretensions. She makes regular trips to Whitechapel to play the piano for East Enders. And Sir Thomas Burdon, the radical MP, points out that “the East End is a very important problem”. But Lord Henry counters this by suggesting that “it is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves” (1985: 46-7). Lord Henry’s Africanisation of the East End is an example of a darkening or blackening of the area that occurred in the late-Victorian imaginative geography of London, England and the British Empire. In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry’s view of the East End as a jungle reflects what Joseph McLaughlin has termed an “irritation to metaphor”: A range of writers came to be ‘irritated’ by a particular urban artefact – late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century London – and scratched that imaginative itch by deploying a particular metaphoric discourse – ‘the urban jungle’ – in order to read the increasingly mysterious nature of their metropolitan world. (2000: 1)

McLaughlin further argues that this method of describing the social life of spaces on the periphery of the British Empire became an effective strategy for imagining the ‘civilised’ imperial centre. These discursive practices effectively facilitated the construction of the idea of the East End as an urban jungle. This imaginative geography links spatial metaphors such as the East End with the spatial imagination of the Empire. As such, civilised, refined London was cast as an enlightening agent attempting to bring light into the darkness – whether this darkness was to be found in Africa or in nearby east London. Indeed, the travelogues of Victorian explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley and the tales of Africa offered by writers such as H. Rider Haggard helped to develop the self-knowledge of readers who were effectively

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able to imagine themselves as civilised and cultured when they compared themselves to their uncivilised ‘Other’. But in the Daily Telegraph, on 2 October 1888, a journalist wrote that “the majority of the inhabitants of West and Central London know as much (about the East End) as they do of the Hindoo Kush or the Northern Territory in South Australia” (McLaughlin 2000: 1-26; Brantlinger 1988: 3-45, 173-97, 255-74). Moreover, in his best seller, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), General William Booth (who had long links with east London, founding the Christian Revival Society and Salvation Army in Whitechapel) effectively cemented the Africanisation of the East End within a bourgeois imaginative geography of London. This text attempted to garner sympathy for the inhabitants of the area while at the same time hoping to engage the wealthier inhabitants of the city in charitable and philanthropic activity. But, again, the employment of jungle imagery had the effect of further constructing the East End as an uncivilised spatial idea – sinful and diseased – dangerous to enter and harder to leave: As there is a darkest Africa, is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest? But the stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the ghastly devastation is covered, corpselike, with the artificialities and hypocrisies of modern civilisation. (W. Booth 1970: 11-2)

William Booth rewrites the London slum, then, as an African jungle full of “dwarfish de-humanized inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected, their privations and their misery” (1970: 12). In Booth’s terms, darkness connotes bestiality, exotic sexuality and degeneration, while lightness connotes Enlightenment rationality, reason, and progressive aspects of modern bourgeois life (R. Williams 1975: 215-32). Interestingly, Booth employs grand architecture here as a signifier of a great civilisation. Large “cathedrals and palaces” are seen to signify human achievement. They become architectural markers that emphasise the low, backward nature of the East End ‘pygmies’. Darkest England is thus seen to be under-developed, both in terms of its buildings and those who inhabit them. Their low-cultural ‘Otherness’ is

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seemingly reflected by their squat living quarters. The spatialisation of aspects of Englishness is thus facilitated here by the discourses of architecture and urban development. This also becomes a common trope of the discourse of the East End.

In the Ghetto The Jewish journalist and novelist Israel Zangwill was born in 1864 and brought up in Spitalfields. 10 He published Children of the Ghetto in 1892, a book which offers an account of Jewish experience in the East End and the tensions that developed between an ‘Othered’ ethnicity and Western concepts of modernity from the perspective of an ‘insider’ (Kalman 1981; Berrol 1994; Godley 1997). This successful novel was effectively the founding text of an indigenous Jewish East End writing tradition. 11 Children of the Ghetto has been considered by 10

11

For more on Israel Zangwill see Adams (1971); Leftwich (1957); Wohlgelernter (1964). A number of Jewish writers following Israel Zangwill explored the sociocultural milieu of east London from an ‘insider’s’ perspective. Isaac Rosenberg grew up in Cable Street in Whitechapel and Jubilee Street in Stepney, but is better known for his First World War poetry, examples of which include ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ and ‘Marching’. He died on patrol in April 1918. Bernard Kops wrote the play The Hamlet of Stepney Green, set in east London, as a response to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). It was successfully staged at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East by Joan Greenwood and Gerry Raffles. Harold Pinter, born in Hackney in 1930, also drew on his East End roots in many of his plays, picking up on the rhythms of colloquial London speech in, especially, The Birthday Party (1958) and The Caretaker (1960). Indeed, The Homecoming (1965) specifically deals with an all-male East End household. The Jewish playwright Arnold Wesker also dealt with an area of London that he knew well. Chicken Soup with Barley (1958) parallels the anti-fascist demonstrations of 1936 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956 with the disintegration of a family. Annie Wobler (1982) is a one-woman play in which an old tramp remembers her life in the East End. Wesker also employed the East End as a dramatic space in Groupie (2001). Emanuel Litvinoff’s Journey Through a Small Planet (1972) recalls his childhood in the East End in the 1920s and 1930s, documenting the close-knit Jewish community and the rise of the Communist Party in the area. And as I have previously mentioned, in his A Death out of Season (1973), Litvinoff produced a novel out of the events surrounding the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911. Furthermore, in East End Radicals 1875-1914 (1975), the historian William J. Fishman examines the East End as the birthplace of the Jewish social-

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critics to offer an accurate and authentic representation of East End immigrant life at the end of the nineteenth century (Rochelson 1998: 19). It certainly attempts to gain a sympathetic understanding of the problems faced by Jews living in Whitechapel and Spitalfields at that time. But although this text essentially offers an insider’s view, the powerful representation of the alien ghetto can certainly be said to reinforce the identity of the East End as an ‘Othered space’. For example, in his ‘Proem’ to the book, Zangwill writes: Not here in our London Ghetto the gates and gabardines of the olden Ghetto of the Eternal City; yet no lack of signs external by which one may know it, and those who dwell therein. Its narrow streets have no speciality of architecture; its dirt is not picturesque. It is no longer the stage for the high-buskined tragedy of massacre and martyrdom; only for the obscurer, deeper tragedy that evolves from the pressure of its own inward forces, and the long-drawn-out tragic-comedy of sordid and shifty poverty. Natheless, this London Ghetto of ours is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality; a world which hides beneath its stony and unlovely surface an inner world of dreams, fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the Orient where they were woven, of superstitions grotesque as the cathedral gargoyles of the Dark Ages in which they had birth. (1998: 61)

In this passage Zangwill clearly acknowledges the East End’s growing mythic qualities. He appears to demonstrate an understanding of the ways in which particular narratives, producing “signs external”, have already formed an imaginary East End, an “inner world” that functions as a dramatic space in which human tragedies can be played out. He also interestingly links this drama to the Orient, as well as to the uncanniness of the Gothic. Indeed, he goes on to demonstrate the ways in which the ghetto has facilitated the formation of a collective consciousness: The particular Ghetto that is the dark background upon which our pictures will be cast, is of voluntary formation. People who have been living in a Ghetto for a couple of centuries, are not able to step outside merely because the gates are thrown down, now to efface the brands upon their souls by putting off the yellow badges. The isolation imposed from without will have come to ist and libertarian movement. For more on the Jewish literary tradition in East London see Worpole (1999).

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seem the law of their being. But a minority will pass, by units, into the larger, freer, stranger life amid the execrations of an ever-dwindling majority. For better or for worse, or for both, the Ghetto will be gradually abandoned, till at last it becomes only a swarming place for the poor and the ignorant, huddling together for social warmth. Such people are their own Ghetto gates; when they migrate they carry them across the sea to lands where they are not. (1998: 61-2)

There is the suggestion in this passage, then, of the internalisation of the ghetto; of the socio-cultural and economic isolation of a physical space translating itself into the consciousness of an individual. But the migration of this ghetto consciousness from Eastern Europe to London had monstrous consequences in a famous Gothic text published a few years later.

Contamination and Transformation Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) helped to reinforce the seemingly alien, ‘Other’ qualities of the eastern reaches of London within the imagination of a largely bourgeois readership. 12 It is significant that in Dracula, as in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a decadent bourgeois English culture appears fearful not only of reverse-colonisation (Arata 1990) but also of macabre physical transformations and ‘degeneration’ – a concept that gained broad cultural currency during the last years of the nineteenth century following the publication in English of Max Nordau’s Degeneration in 1895 (Schmitt 1997). This fin-de-siècle anxiety grew out of the discourses of Darwinism, social anthropology and psychology. These new ways of conceptualising identity invoked constructed notions of selfhood that could easily become fractured or contradictory. In an attempt to counter this, identity was often defined and imagined within negative or contradictory terms. In tales of a threatened, decadent bourgeois London culture, for example, individuals who were spatially positioned within a conceptual ‘east’ tended to be represented as alien or ‘Othered’.

12

For an account of urban Gothic see Mighall (1999).

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Indeed, in Stoker’s novel, Count Dracula is roused from the ‘east’ – from the Carpathian mountains, described in Jonathan Harker’s journal as “one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe” (1993: 8). As such, Dracula comes to represent a malevolent eastern force that threatens the civilised Occident. His is a foreign, contaminating presence. Crucially, then, Count Dracula is an immigrant. He threatens to infect the English race (Arata 1990; Warwick 1995). 13 It is no co-incidence that he arrives in England on the east coast, in the shadow of the ruins of the Gothic abbey at Whitby, and that he chooses to set up his London base at Carfax Abbey, near Purfleet, to the east of London on the Essex marshes, close to where the M25 orbital motorway now crosses the Thames over the vast Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. 14 Indeed, Harker describes the estate at Carfax to its purchaser, Count Dracula, as an ancient, dilapidated structure surrounded by trees that “make it in places gloomy” (1993: 35), with a lunatic asylum situated next door. Again, levels of degeneracy are imagined within architectural terms. Where a modern England is going through the process of being ‘constructed’, this ‘development’ is imagined against ruined spaces in which, it seems, ‘backward’ or ‘low’ ways of life continue to flourish. Recalling Dickens’s descriptions of Fagin in Oliver Twist, Harker describes Count Dracula as lizard-like: “What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man?” (1993: 49) Judith Halberstam has persuasively argued that Stoker’s Dracula resembles stereotypical anti-Semitic, nineteenth-century representations of Jews (1995: 248-66). It is significant that in Stoker’s novel, Harker imagines that Dracula’s antediluvian body will allow him to feel at home in the ruined, misty reaches of east London – spaces already defined by the malevolent figure of the Ripper within the imagination of bourgeois Londoners. But the east of the city was also, of course, known to be a space inhabited by immigrant Jews, many of whom were fleeing the pogroms in eastern Europe. Halber13

14

The belief that the urban crowd could carry contagion gained credence during this period. Gustave Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules (translated as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind in English in 1896) caught the mood. See Highmore (2005: 28-9). In London Orbital (2002), Iain Sinclair noticed the symbolic potency of Dracula’s base at Carfax at Purfleet in Essex, where “distribution of blood has now become distribution of (Esso) petrol” (2002b: 166).

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stam points out that the nineteenth-century discourse of anti-Semitism and the myth of the vampire share a Gothic economy in their ability to “condense many monstrous traits into one body” (1995: 249). Furthermore, Dracula’s Jewishness is developed in his relationship with money, his parasitism, his degeneracy, and his lack of allegiance to a fatherland (Halberstam 1995: 252). But the Count’s bloodsucking sexual deviancy can also be read as analogous to the Ripper’s wild rampage of 1888. Again, east London provides the space on to which repressed bourgeois sexual desires can be projected. It is again marked as culturally backward. For example, as the final chase begins, Harker searches out Thomas Snelling at his house in Bethnal Green, and finds a drunken East End working-class stereotype who “had begun too early on his expected debauch” (1993: 336). Harker discovers that Joseph Smollett has taken one of Dracula’s earth boxes to “197, Chicksand Street, Mile End New Town” (1993: 336). As such, Harker presumes that the Count intends to confine himself to the territory to the east of the city. Significantly, too, the threat only becomes real to Harker when he realises that “the very heart of fashionable London in the south-west and west” (1993: 337) is under threat. In Dracula, then, east London is marked as unclean. It is clearly opposed in spatial terms to a west London which, it seems, represents the heart of urban, bourgeois English civilisation. Richard Marsh’s novel The Beetle, also published in 1897, features a metamorphic creature inhabited by the soul of an Egyptian princess which terrorises late-Victorian London. This novel, as such, elides the Orient in London with a transgendered, sub-human body. The creature is not explicitly linked to the East End, but it is chased to Limehouse – an Orientalised cultural space (explored in the next chapter) – where it is strangely described in a police report looking like “an Arab with a big bundle on his head” (1994: 265). This appears to show, as Cannon Schmitt has pointed out, that “comparative and negative definitions of English selfhood are invoked with greater frequency as the Empire comes into contact with and subdues more and more foreign peoples” (1997: 14). Foreignness is seen to lurk in the East End, which, again, effectively remains part of London while also being widely considered to be ‘not London’. These texts successfully exploit a central fear of bourgeois readers: that foreignness might indeed reside very close to, or indeed, within the dark heart of an increasingly modern vision of England.

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A Vision of Disaster Joseph Conrad’s early novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) captures a vision of the eastern reaches of the Thames and the docks which lays the foundations for the writer’s later, more famous, nuanced exploration of imperialism, place and consciousness – Heart of Darkness (1902). As the ‘Narcissus’ reaches the mouth of the Thames after its long and eventful journey from Bombay, the narrator describes a dark, menacing dock area that Cedric Watts has argued can be seen to be “antithetical” (1989: xxiv) to the commerciality of London: On the riverside slopes the houses appeared in insolent groups – seemed to stream down the declivities at a run to see her pass, and, checked by the mud of the foreshore, crowded on the banks. Further on, the tall factory chimneys appeared in insolent bands and watched her go by, like a straggling crowd of slim giants, swaggering and upright under the black plummets of smoke, cavalierly aslant. She swept round the bends; an impure breeze shrieked a welcome between her stripped spars; and the land, closing in, stepped between the ship and the sea. A low cloud hung before her – a great opalescent and tremulous cloud, that seemed to rise from the steaming brows of millions of men. Long drifts of smoky vapours soiled it with livid trails; it throbbed to the beat of millions of hearts, and from it came an immense and lamentable murmur – the murmur of millions of lips praying, cursing, sighing, jeering – the underlying murmur of folly, regret, and hope exhaled by the crowds of the anxious earth. The Narcissus entered the cloud; the shadows deepened; on all sides there was the clang of iron, the sound of mighty blows, shrieks, yells […]. A mad jumble of begrimed walls loomed up vaguely in the smoke, bewildering and mournful, like a vision of disaster. (Conrad 1989: 121-2)

In this passage, the vast industrial architecture of the East End docks takes on anthropomorphic, degenerate human characteristics. It is markedly different to the “cathedrals and palaces” invoked by William Booth that were seen to epitomise English civilisation. These dock buildings are instead described as “insolent”, “swaggering” and “straggling” on the shore, while the human inhabitants of this space remain invisible and voiceless. 15 They are represented as creatures 15

The East End docks also feature heavily in the stories of W.W. Jacobs. Many of these tales utilise the cockney dialect, such as ‘Bill’s Paper Chase’ in The

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that “murmur”, that can be heard “cursing, sighing, jeering”. Their mere bodily presence, like jungle creatures, creates the low steam clouds that close in on the ship. As such, they have corporeal presence, but not linguistic presence. They exist outside the discursive framework of western culture. The narrator describes the dock: “Brick walls rose high above the water – soulless walls, staring through hundreds of windows.” (1989: 122) As such, the homogeneous creatures of the East End are specifically related to the “grimy houses” (1989: 128) they inhabit. They are seen to be small, dark and dirty: pressed together to form one seamless whole: “The shadows of soulless walls fell upon her, the dust of all the continents leaped upon her deck, and a swarm of strange men, clambering up her sides, took possession of her in the name of the sordid earth. She had ceased to live.” (1989: 122-3) The docks, then, provide a home to the unwanted dust of humanity – the dead skin swept under the carpet of refined English society. This part of London is seen to be a space of death. Interestingly, these descriptive passages, depicting the East End docks at the end of the nineteenth century, can be read alongside Conrad’s descriptions (through the voice of his narrator, Marlow) of the Congo in Heart of Darkness: We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. (2000: 54)

Marlow’s journey up the Congo in Heart of Darkness curiously mirrors the journey of the Narcissus up the Thames in Conrad’s earlier novel. Moreover, back on the Thames, oppressive jungle imagery is also employed in Conrad’s The Mirror of the Sea (1905): This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks is to other watersides of river ports what a virgin forest would be to a garden. It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the confused, varied, and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore, not according to a planned purpose, but as if sprung up by acciLady of the Barge (1902): “We got to our berth in the East India Docks at last, and after we were made fast we went below to ‘ave a wash and change into our shore-going togs.” (1902: 73)

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End dent from scattered seeds. Like the matted growth of bushes and creepers veiling the silent depths of an unexplored wilderness, they hide the depths of London's infinitely varied, vigorous, seething life. (1921:107-8)

Joseph McLaughlin suggests that in this passage Conrad offers “an urban vision of the irrational, the untidy, and that which defies knowledge and insight” (2000: 143). But Conrad clearly aligns this irrationality with the East End’s seemingly “unplanned” growth and architectural insignificance. Of course, there is a profound ambiguity to be found in Conrad’s work in the relationship painted between the civilised individual and the savage, so the seemingly jungle-like properties of the East End are being mobilised here in order to highlight the potential for the West End to return to savagery, as such; or at least to suggest that savagery already lurks as a latent force within the cultural unconscious of the bourgeoisie. McLaughlin further suggests that Conrad wants his reader to see the urban and the jungle as coterminous (2000: 144). In Conrad’s novels and novellas, then, the urban and the jungle enjoy a symbiotic relationship. It has often been understood that the ‘urban’ defines itself against the ‘jungle’, just as the West End defines itself against the East. But Conrad notices that this relationship is far more dialogically complex than this. Modern civilisation requires the jungle in order to see itself. But what does modern civilisation see when it sees itself? Conrad invites us to ask such questions. In his late essay, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, Conrad admitted that he was addicted to “map-gazing” at an early age, and that his attention was usually drawn to “exciting spaces of white paper” which represented the “regions unknown” in the “heart of Africa” (1926: 19-20). Interestingly, Harry Beck’s early iconographic maps of the London Underground railway system (first sketched in 1931) left a vast white space where much of the East End was thought to exist. On the 1933 map, the East London Line is marked, as is the District Line (although only as far east as Mile End, where further stations are listed in a small box). But a vast white area to the east of Liverpool Street Station clearly shows that much of east London was still largely unserved by the Underground before the eastwards extension to the Central Line (Pike 2002: 101-119). This blank space might remind us of the blank, unmapped space that Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness, Marlow, is speaking about when he utters the famous line, “and

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this also […] has been one of the dark places of the earth” (2000: 18). McLaughlin argues that this line refers to a “more generalised or greater London” (2000: 142), to the savagery at the dark heart of civilisation, but the crucial words in Marlow’s sentence, “has been”, point to a potential Nietzschean ‘return’ to past experience – the possibility that savagery might return at any time and in any place, or, indeed, perhaps, that savagery is in fact ever present. Furthermore, Marlow suggests that his own experience and vision of the Congo can be seen to be analogous to the conquering Roman commander’s first vision of Britain from the Thames, “nineteen hundred years ago” (2000: 18); a Britain that was then imagined largely peopled by savages. Marlow imagines the Roman on the Thames, looking across the Essex marshes: “here – the very end of the world” seeing “Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages” (2000: 19). The Roman is described, then, as a positive agent of civilisation, marching into the unknown darkness: “Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed around him, – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.” (2000: 19-20) Marlow, like Conrad himself, “had a passion for maps […] especially for the blank spaces on the earth” (2000: 21). In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said reads Marlow’s interest in maps in Heart of Darkness as a demonstration of a “geographical appetite” which “could also take on the moral neutrality of an epistemological impulse to find out, to settle upon, to uncover” (1995: 216). This can also be said to be true of the ways in which a number of writers have approached the East End. To paraphrase Edward Said, there has been an impulse to find out, to settle upon, or to uncover the ontological properties of the East End – to discover the East End – to agree on its geographical, topographical and socio-cultural identity. In Conrad’s 1913 novel, Chance, the East End of London is again imagined as a space that is clearly distinct from the West End. The docks are once again central to this narrative, and Conrad offers lengthy descriptive passages in which the status of the narrator remains strangely unclear. In a long central chapter, ‘On the Pavement’, this narrator, walking with Fyne, describes a by-now typical East End scene:

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End The broad interminable perspective of the East India Dock Road, a great perspective of drab brick walls, of grey pavement, of muddy roadway rumbling dismally with loaded carts and vans lost itself in the distance, imposing and shabby in its spacious meanness of aspect, in its immeasurable poverty of forms, of colouring, of life – under a harsh, unconcerned sky dried by the wind to a clear blue. (1925: 204)

Marlow then remembers a similar scene: Every moment people were passing close by us singly, in twos and threes; the inhabitants of that end of the town where life goes on unadorned by grace or splendour; they passed us in their shabby garments, with sallow faces, haggard, anxious or weary, or simply without expression, in an unsmiling sombre stream not made up of lives but of mere unconsidered existences whose joys, struggles, thoughts, sorrows and their very hopes were miserable, glamourless, and of no account in the world. (1925: 208)

Conrad, then, appears to have understood the reasons why his readership might continue to be interested in such exotic subjects. His novels and novellas provided readers with knowledge of faraway places – the Orient, Africa, and the East End, while at the same time suggesting the profound ‘closeness’ of such spaces to the heart of bourgeois England.

The Black Plains We are striving to readjust our stable ideas. But within there is a cloud on men’s minds, a half stifled recognition of the presence of a new force hitherto unreckoned; the creeping into unconscious existence of the quaint and innumerable populations bred in the abyss. - Charles Masterman 16

Charles Masterman was the Liberal MP for Stratford and West Ham when he published From the Abyss in 1902, a text that managed to articulate the developing middle-class fears of the East End. But the early-twentieth century saw the publication of two other texts that set out to explore the phenomenon of east London. Walter Besant’s literary-sociological study, East London, and the American writer Jack 16

Charles Masterman cited in Dyos and Woolf (1973: 328).

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London’s The People of the Abyss, were both published in 1903. Besant’s East London is an illustrated book which effectively explores the area in an empirical fashion. In the first chapter, ‘What East London Is’, Besant echoes his earlier novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, by stating that “with East London there is no necessity to speak of history” (1903: 3). He goes on to argue that “the modern city, the growth of a single century, – nay, of half a century, – has no concern and no interest in the past; its present is not affected by its past; there are no monuments to recall the past; its history is mostly a blank.” (1903: 3) This sense of blankness is again reinforced by Besant in his description of the geographical features of the area: “the parts now lying along the bank of the river were formerly either foreshore or marshland, overflowed at every high tide, and lying below a low, natural cliff” (1903: 3). East London, then, has been built on shifting, unstable ground. Indeed, when Besant later speaks of the “submerged” (1903: 229-251), echoing Bright’s descriptions of the ‘residuum’, he seems to suggest that these ‘low’ unfortunates come from low swampy spaces. Besant states that the population of east London at the beginning of the twentieth century was nearly two million, and then appeals to his reader: “You will acknowledge with me that in these respects and from these points of view, no other city in the world is like East London.” (1903: 8) This is primarily because, for Besant, east London is defined in terms of lack. It is a place with “no centre, no heart, no wards […] no public buildings of its own […] no police of its own […] no cathedrals […] no public or high school […] no colleges for the higher education and no university […] no East London paper except the smaller and the local kind” (1903: 8). But incredibly, “in a city of two millions of people there are no hotels! Actually, no hotels! […] That means of course that there are no visitors.” (1903: 9) This, of course, was not strictly true. The American writer, Jack London, visited the East End in 1902. He follows a tradition of exploratory East End narratives by paraphrasing Dante in his ‘Preface’ to The People of the Abyss: “I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer. I was open to be convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who had seen and gone before.” (1903: vii) London opens his book with an imagined conversation between himself and

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friends (which echoes the similar dialogue between Angela and Constance in Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men) concerning his plan to explore the far reaches of east London: “‘But you can’t do it, you know,’ friends said, to whom I applied for assistance in the matter of sinking down into the East End of London. ‘You had better see the police for a guide,’ they added.” (1903: 1) London’s response to the fears of his friends is to approach a travel agent for guidance: But O Cook, O Thomas Cook & Son, pathfinders and trail-clearers, living sign-posts to all the world and bestowers of first aid to bewildered travellers – unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet, but not to the East End of London, barely a stone's throw distant from Ludgate Circus, you know the way! ‘You can’t do it, you know,’ said the human emporium of routes and fares at Cook’s Cheapside branch. ‘It is so – ahem – so unusual.’ ‘Consult the police,’ he concluded authoritatively, when I persisted. ‘We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place at all.’ (1903: 3)

Of course, London really believes that he is not a tourist, but a romantic figure – an explorer (McLaughlin 2000: 105). He eventually persuades a cabby to take him “into that human wilderness of which nobody seemed to know anything” (London 1903: 5), and the lengthy descriptive passages that follow provide some of the most famous depictions of the East End: (the) region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending slum. The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit […]. Not a hansom did I meet with in all my drive, while mine was like an apparition from another and better world […]. (1903: 8)

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Journeying onwards into the ‘underworld’, London begins to fear for his safety in the face of the ‘residuum’: “It was like the fear of the sea; and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea, lapping about me and threatening to well up and over me.” (1903: 8) His immediate response to this fear is to adopt a disguise (like Wilde’s Dorian Gray) – to purchase some old clothes which will allow him to anonymously plunge into this mass of humanity: “In the end I selected a pair of stout though wellworn trousers, a frayed jacket with one remaining button, a pair of brogans which had plainly seen service where coal was shovelled, a thin leather belt and a very dirty cloth cap.” (1903: 10) London refers to this outfit as a “costume” (1903: 13), highlighting, then, his aim to perform on the stage of the East End. He becomes a dramatic player in this theatrical space. He pretends to be “one of them” (1903: 13). London’s exploration of the East End can also be read as ethnographic (McLaughlin 2000: 104). Indeed, McLaughlin has noted that London’s methods of participant-observation and his use of photography echoed patterns found in detective narratives and the discourses of exploration that were prevalent in the late-nineteenth century. London, then, sees himself as “an investigator, a social student, seeking to find out how the other half lived” (1903: 86). He notices the “wretched” sanitation, a “general foulness” and a population that has “saturated” the district (1903: 24-6). London’s landlady, a “woman of the finest grade of the English working class” demonstrates a stereotypically racist response towards newcomers in the area: You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the others do. We need more room. The others, the foreigners and lower-class people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only get one. So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford. It is shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this neighborhood was just as nice as it could be. (1903: 28)

The landlady’s comments here demonstrate the bigotry of a conservative working class or lower-middle class that still apparently seeks to define itself in terms of its difference to its foreign ‘Other’. Jack London offers an account of the ways in which upwardly-mobile families like the landlady’s seek to move away from this space:

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End I looked at her. Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English working class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowly engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers that be are pouring eastward out of London town. Bank, factory, hotel, and office building must go up, and the city poor folk are a nomadic breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and degrading neighborhood by neighborhood, driving the better class of workers before them to pioneer on the rim of the city, or dragging them down, if not in the first generation, surely in the second and third. (1903: 28)

In London’s book the police detective Johnny Upright and his wife also feel in danger of being forced out of their accommodation by unwelcome newcomers. But, ironically, the Uprights themselves are also seen as a threat by families that have already moved out of the East End towards the east: Far, far out, on the fringe of the city, live the small business men, little managers, and successful clerks. They dwell in cottages and semidetached villas, with bits of flower garden, and elbow room, and breathing space. They inflate themselves with pride and throw chests when they have escaped, and they thank God that they are not as other men. And lo! Down upon them comes Johnny Upright and the monster city at his heels. (1903: 29)

Class clearly becomes spatialised here, with distinctions being made between the working-class inner city and lower-middle-class suburbs. But the inner city (specifically the East End) is still clearly marked as ‘monstrous’. It retains its late-Victorian identity as a space of horror. At approximately the same time that Besant and London were exploring the East End, Ford Madox Ford was searching for the ‘soul’ of London. Whereas Besant had bemoaned the lack of an east London history, Ford’s aim was to “make the Past, the sense of all the dead Londons that have gone to the producing of this child of all the ages, like a constant ground-bass beneath the higher notes of the Present” (1995: 4). Ford’s London, then, is profoundly modern, in the sense that it resists totalisation. Life in Ford’s London “was at the mercy of vast, uncontrollable, impersonal forces” (Mepham 2002: 85). Unlike many earlier representations of the city, Ford’s London cannot be seen “as a whole” (1995: 9). It is, instead, a “ragoût of titbits so appealing and so innumerable” (1995: 10) that “tolerates all the types of mankind. It has palaces for the great of the earth, it has crannies for all the

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earth’s vermin” (1995: 12). As such, for Ford, then, modern London also comes to be defined in terms of the spatial divisions of class: “There are crowds of philanthropists who make swallow flights into slums, the mechanics who dream of their own carriages. There is room for millenialists who strive to create Garden Cities, for socialist prophets who read in the skies signs of approaching Armageddon.” (1995: 17) And these class divisions are drawn across a by-now familiar spatial economy of the city: A man may have passed right across London in his life; he may have dropped as it were from the ledge to ledge; he may have been born in Mayfair to fall in his traces, a sodden beast outside a public-house of the Tower Hamlets. Or he may have been born in the fifth of a room in a Whitechapel ghetto, to die in a palace of Park Lane. (1995: 18)

It is in the third chapter of The Soul of London, entitled ‘Work in London’, where Ford distinctly aligns working-class labour with the “black plains of the East End” (1995: 73): Those invisible ropes – they are strong enough in all conscience – seem to be the only tie between these two classes of workers, between these two great camps set one against another. It is astonishing how different London looks from one or from the other end. Speaking broadly, the man who expresses himself with a pen on paper sees his London from the west. At worst he hopes to end with that view. His London of breathing space, his West End, extends from say Chiswick to say Portland Place. His dense London is the City as far as Fenchurch Street, his East End ends with what he calls ‘Whitechapel’. The other sees his London of elbow room extend from say Purfleet to say Blackwall. He is conscious of having, as it were at his back, the very green and very black stretches of the Essex marshes dotted with large solitary factories and small solitary farms. His dense London, his City, lies along the line from Blackwall to Fenchurch Street. Beyond that, the City proper, the city of the Bank and the Mansion House, is already a place rather of dilettante trifling. Its streets are tidied up, its buildings ornamented and spacious. The end of the West End is for him the Piccadilly Fountain, and this latter quarter of large, almost clean, stone buildings, broad swept streets and a comparative glare of light, is already a foreign land, slightly painful because it is so strange. That, further west, there may be another enormous London never really enters his everyday thoughts. (1995: 48)

Ford argues, then, that the cultured bourgeois West Ender “does not want to think about several dark towns of a million or so east of

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‘Whitechapel’. It is an unpleasant thought. Given ill-luck, a craving for drink, disease or one or other of the fatal falls of humanity, he might too have to sink into those gloomy and shadowy depths.” (1995: 49) As such, Ford also approaches London as a psychological phenomenon, profoundly split or divided: “These two types, in their mass very human and very comprehensible, are in general very foreign and hostile the one to the other. Yet upon their combined workings the life of London depends.” (1995: 49) Drawing on Jewish stereotypes, Ford describes inhabitants of Whitechapel as “dark and hook-nosed men” living amid “a stench of humanity” (1995: 51). His critique of the alienation of London labour, then, employs the East End as an emblem of a cultureless workshop: I must confess to finding that thought the most exciting and the most sinister that can come into one’s head in those parts of the vast city. They are grim, they are overhung with perpetual miasma, they lie low in damp marshes. Square and stumpy chimneys rise everywhere in clusters like the columns of ruined temples overhung with smirchings of vapour. Great fields are covered with scraps of rusty iron and heaps of fluttering rags; dismal pools of water reflect on black waste grounds the dim skies. But all these things, if one is in the mood, one may find stimulating, because they tell of human toil, of human endeavour towards some end with some ideal at the end. But the other thing is sinister, since the other influences are working invisible, like malign and conscious fates, below the horizon. (1995: 68-9)

In The People of the Abyss, Jack London gives similar details of what he sees when he witnesses the Coronation procession of Edward VII: “Here were not many who came from that quarter. The East End, as a whole, remained in the East End and got drunk.” (1903: 139) Here he again turns impassioned political commentator: And as it was thus at Trafalgar Square, so was it along the whole line of march – force, overpowering force; myriads of men, splendid men, the pick of the people, whose sole function in life is blindly to obey, and blindly to kill and destroy and stamp out life. And that they should be well fed, well clothed, and well armed, and have ships to hurl them to the ends of the earth, the East End of London, and the ‘East End’ of all England, toils and rots and dies. (1903: 140-1)

In some of his descriptions of the East End, then, London falls back on the familiar sensational discourse of the late-nineteenth century. He

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paraphrases the title of a famous poem by James Thomson (“B.V.”), The City of Dreadful Night (1874), terming the East End “The City of Dreadful Monotony” and “The City of Degradation” (1903: 211). And for all of his apparent concern for the inhabitants of east London, Jack London still writes statements about the area such as: “No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole of the ‘awful East,’ with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks. The color of life is gray and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty.” (1903: 227) So, the revolutionary potential of these working people remains dormant in London’s account of the area. Instead, individuals are depicted as “beasts”, “creatures of prey that prowled up and down”, “gorillas”. Drawing on the by now well understood imagery of the urban jungle, London describes East Enders thus: Their bodies were small, ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited. But there was a strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch and gripe and tear and rend […]. They possess neither conscience nor sentiment […]. They are a new species, a breed of city savages. (1903: 285)

London’s representations of the corporeality of these city-dwellers move between the bestial and the monstrous: “And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types of sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating carcasses, the living deaths.” (1903: 286) Indeed, in the last chapter of The People of the Abyss, ‘The Management’, Jack London asks a series of questions, the first of which is: “Has Civilization bettered the lot of the average man?” (1903: 311) Here, London compares the lives of the poor English with Inuit people living on the banks of the Yukon River. His answer finishes the book: There can be no mistake. Civilization has increased man’s producing power a hundred fold, and through mismanagement the men of civilization live worse than the beasts and have less to eat and wear and protect them from the elements than the savage Innuit in a frigid climate who lives today as he lived in the stone age ten thousand years ago. (1903: 317)

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London appears to be offering a critique of the Enlightenment project, modernity and its attendant civilising processes. He argues that civilisation is ultimately a chimera – an imagined construct which, from the Renaissance until the twentieth century, had been discernable in specific changes in bodily codes and modes of ‘normal’ conduct. Norbert Elias articulates similar concerns in his two-volume The Civilizing Process (1939), where he argues that the civilising process is not always painless, but that instead “it always leaves scars” (1978: 244). So by the beginning of the twentieth century, an idea of the East End was fully operating as a metaphysical screen onto which the psychological anxieties of an urban English middle class could be projected. This screen would often display images that would emphasise the ‘eastness’ of the East End. I want to move on now in order to consider how and why the ‘Otherness’ of the East End developed a specifically Oriental flavour.

III The Breath of the East East and West may not intermingle. - Dr Petrie, in Rohmer (1985: 146)

By the early 1930s a mythical, exotic idea of ‘Limehouse’ had been so widely disseminated in cultural texts that hundreds of well-to-do young people arrived in the area in search of mystery and thrills. Socalled ‘Bright Young Things’ travelled across London to ‘slum it’, often wearing dinner jackets and expensive dresses as signifiers of their class, wealth and perceived difference to the inhabitants of the strange, exotic space that they were visiting (Farson 1991: 100). Indeed, young West Enders would tour the “toughest, roughest streets, taverns and music halls in search of new excitements” (Bermant 1975: 188). In this chapter I want to try to chart representations of Limehouse that have together facilitated the endurance of a specifically eastern or Oriental idea of east London. In Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), George Orwell constructs a powerful vision of an East End of London of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Writing about the poor and homeless of the East End, he suggests that “this tramp-monster is no truer to life than the sinister Chinaman of the magazine stories” (1984: 178). So the writer clearly saw that Limehouse had come to function as a powerful spatial idea. But bearing this in mind, it is significant that Orwell moves eastward through London from the Waterloo Road in this text. One wonders whether he was drawn to the East End because of its powerful mythology rather than its status as just another poor, rundown area of the city. But when he arrives in Pennyfields he comments that “this was a typical lodging-house, like scores of others in London” (1984: 118). Orwell’s book displays, then, a strangely double view of the East End. It appears to have been influenced by what had become well established East End discourse. But it instead succeeds in suggesting that a number of areas around London displayed equal levels of poverty. Indeed, his attention focuses on workhouses, spikes

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and lodgings not only in east London but also in Lambeth, Chelsea, King’s Cross, on the Embankment, even in Trafalgar Square. So Down and Out in Paris and London attempts, on the one hand, to demystify Limehouse and the East End. But when Orwell specifically turns his attention towards Limehouse, and effectively draws on the discourse of eugenics in order to mark the local women as exotically attractive and the male Oriental inhabitants of the area as ‘Other’, his text also constructs the East End as a ‘low’ space: “It was interesting to watch the crowds. The East London women are pretty (it is the mixture of blood, perhaps), and Limehouse was sprinkled with Orientals – Chinamen, Chittagonian lascars, Dravidians selling silk scarves, even a few Sikhs, come goodness knows how.“ (1984: 120) ‘Limehouse’ operates as a powerful, semantically-rich toponym here. It seems it needs little or no description. But in fact Limehouse remains to this day a relatively small area to the east of the Tower of London, nestling close to the River Thames. Despite its size and peripheral nature, representations of this space flourished between the First and Second World Wars. The sheer scale of the output of cultural texts that marked this space as a dramatic, labyrinthine stage led Limehouse to function as a spatial idea against which another idea – that of a modern, progressive, bourgeois London – could define itself specifically in terms of ethnicity. As such, Limehouse came to function as a microcosmic manifestation of a wider idea of the East End of London which was, as I have shown, clearly in operation by the 1930s. Thomas Burke, an important figure in the formation of an idea of Limehouse, made this much clear in his book The Real East End (1932), where he reflects upon how far the “legend” of the East End had already been imaginatively constructed: Visions in the public mind of slums, vice, crime, sin and unnameable horrors. East End! [...] Dregs of humanity. Beggars and thieves. Barefooted waifs. Outcasts. Drunkards. Jack the Ripper. Crimping dens. Dangerous streets. Policemen walk in twos and threes. Something worse than Chicago. Sidney Street. Limehouse. Opium dens. East End! [...] Hooligans. Diseased harlots. Public-houses at every corner. Thugs lurking in every alley. Sudden death. Well, legends are like old soldiers […] Fact, set against legend, is a poor, pale thing, apathetic and incompetent and immortal; and the East End legend, I suppose, will last as long as there is any East End […] if my own early books have anything to do with nourishing the legend. […] I make no apology […]. I admit to using the East End for my own pur-


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poses, and dramatising it to what I wanted it to be, as many authors have done before and since with the territories of their choice. (1932: 15)

Burke clearly acknowledges here how far writers had taken liberties with any ‘real’, ‘material’ or ‘factual’ East End that might have existed by “using” it for their own purposes. He concedes that his own books about the area, especially Limehouse Nights (1916) and More Limehouse Nights (1921), might have played an important role in the cultural construction of the East End. I want to examine these texts in detail here in order to consider the ways in which Limehouse, otherwise known as ‘Chinatown’, found its status as a signifier of the Orient and Oriental culture firmly established within a spatialised middle-class English imagination during the first half of the twentieth century. Clement Attlee, the future Labour Prime Minister, was the Member of Parliament for Limehouse from 1922 to 1950, and his political links to the area certainly guaranteed it publicity. But it was the apparently Oriental nature of Limehouse that really captured the imagination of writers, readers, filmmakers and audiences.

Supporting the Orient The golden West is ever the Land of Promise. - Besant (1902: 77)

In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said outlines the ways in which the Orient came to function as an imaginative space on to which the West projected its own anxieties about the exotic and the unknown. He argues that “the West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behaviour” (1995: 109) and that the Orient is “an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (1995: 5). The same can be said to be true for Chinatown or Limehouse. This was certainly the case during the 1920s, when the area became widely imagined as a geographical (as well as a socio-historical) entity that functioned as an ‘Othered’ space on the doorstep of English civilisation. Just as Edward Said suggests that the European fantasy about the Orient was a “created body of theory and practice in which, for many

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generations, there has been a considerable investment” (1995: 6), a wide variety of texts, beginning with the publication of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), facilitated the formation of an idea of Limehouse that has been endlessly and uncritically propagated from ‘without’; that is, driven by the tastes and anxieties of a distinctly middle-class readership and an increasingly middle-class film-going public. 1 This idea has functioned according to “a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections” (Said 1995: 8), and has worked to ensure the maintenance of middle-class, bourgeois ideology as the dominant, hegemonic ideology. Said suggests that European culture “gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (1995: 3). When read through the critical optic of Said’s Orientalism, an idea of Limehouse can be seen to operate as an ideologically-loaded vision of an urban space that brings to light the profound sense of difference felt by those who considered themselves to be living within the culture of a modern English city to those who, living close by, embodied their strange, exotic ‘Others’. Indeed, it was precisely the spatial proximity of the ‘Other’ to the apparently elegant culture of middle-class London – its uncanny familiarity – that energised the idea of Limehouse. This spatial proximity to the heart of the Empire effectively made it possible for West Enders to enjoy daily imperial encounters. But Orientalist Limehouse texts also fuelled an eschatological fear of invasion. Within this discourse, then, Limehouse became a territory in which aspects of Englishness could be contested. Indeed, in these narratives, English identity is openly questioned, because “if Englishness is created through relations with elsewhere and through internal differentiation, then it is also a subject for change” (Matless 1998: 20). But what were the realities of social life in Limehouse during the Victorian and Edwardian eras? And why did these facts so fuel the 1

Jostein Gripsrud suggests that “by the 1920s the cinema was well established as the major form of entertainment for the larger part of the population in all Western countries” (1998: 204). He goes on to point out that in Britain specifically, “the statistician Simon Rowson conducted the first systematic survey of cinema attendance in 1934, and […] other surveys were also conducted throughout the decade” (1998: 207). With the establishment of MassObservation in 1937, cinema audiences were further scrutinised and found to be increasingly middle class.


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imagination of the English middle classes? The trading relationship between England and the Far East had existed for centuries, but was consolidated by the establishment of merchant steamship companies from the 1860s such as the Blue Funnel Line (Witchard 2004: 5). Hundreds of Chinese sailors signed on in China’s treaty ports, and many ended up in Limehouse on arrival in England, setting up home there. Chinese from Shanghai tended to settle in Pennyfields, while those from Canton and Southern China often chose the area around Limehouse Causeway (Palmer 2000: 108). So a small Chinese community grew up in Limehouse. But the byname ‘Chinatown’ was not coined until around the time of George V’s coronation in 1911. The area became home to Chinese shops, clubs, a Confucian temple and a Christian mission to the Chinese Londoners (Palmer 2000: 108). The Chinese population in Limehouse probably did not grow to more than 500, and began to fade by the late 1930s (White 2002: 13-4). Instead, an ‘idea’ of the Chinese community in Limehouse continued to develop, as many became fascinated with the apparently exotic nature of this space, the bachelor culture of Chinese men, the drug culture of ‘opium dens’, and the low culture of the gambling dives (Palmer 2000: 108-9; Farson 1991: 93-100; Case 2000: 27-48). Many became fascinated, too, with the apparently closed nature of this community (Ackroyd 2001: 709-10). In the early-twentieth century a series of police raids on unlicensed lodging houses uncovered the practice of opium smoking. But these raids often appeared to have been driven by suspicions aroused by the seemingly exotic culture of this space rather than by any reliable factual information. Restrictions on the sale of opium were introduced from 1908 and tightened during the First World War. As the historian Jerry White has pointed out (2002: 114), when the details of the inquest into the death of the West End actress Billie Carlton were sensationally published in newspapers during the winter of 1918-19, Limehouse was further cemented as a spatial idea within the bourgeois imagination. 2 Carleton apparently died of a cocaine overdose in the East End. But the press concentrated on the immoral behaviour and goings-on at drugs parties and illicit orgies that were apparently taking place in the area, and 2

See especially The Times, 4 December 1918, 13 December 1918, 14 December 1918, 21 December 1918, 3 January 1919, 17 January 1919, and 24 January 1919.

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placed the blame for her death squarely on Limehouse itself, as such. Indeed, a number of observers believed that clear connections could be drawn between the drug-fuelled nightclub world of the West End and the Chinese community in the East End (Inwood 2000: 500, 7723). It was widely understood that heroin and cocaine were being smuggled into the country by the Chinese, who stored it in the docks and then distributed it to fashionable West End clubs (Witchard 2004: 1). But Jerry White has persuasively argued that the impact of the Chinese community in Limehouse on the imagination of Londoners was “out of all proportion to its size” (2002: 113). In reality, the Chinese population in Limehouse further declined during the 1930s, primarily due to the passing of a law which made it illegal to sign on a Chinese crew in a British port (Glinert 2000: 257; Farson 1991: 99). So the imaginative impact of Chinese Limehouse, when considered alongside the quotidian realities of the social life in the area, seems to show how far this space came to function as a cultural construction. Although Limehouse was to become extremely well known during the early- to mid-twentieth century through the imaginative impact of popular novels, songs and films, writers had frequently employed it as an exotic backdrop to their narratives during the nineteenth century. Famously, in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tale, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, Dr Watson visits Limehouse in June 1889. He witnesses exotic and terrifying Malays and Lascars haunting the dark dens behind the wharves on the eastern river, and finds an opium den situated between “a slop-shop and a gin-shop”, where he encounters Holmes in disguise (1906: 230). And Oscar Wilde recognised the dramatic potential of the area, employing it in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Charles Dickens, too, featured a Limehouse opium den in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), and two years later, Gustave Doré published an engraving of an opium den in his collection, London: A Pilgrimage (1872), which was coproduced with Blanchard Jerrold. In mid-Victorian London a number of examples of images of Chinese life and culture had also been available to the public. These included a Chinese junk moored at Blackfriars Bridge, which offered guided tours, and various examples of dancing, acrobatics, and firework displays. The late-Victorian and Edwardian theatre also em-


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braced Chinoiserie romances and musical comedies, including the enduring Aladdin pantomime, and shows such as A Trip to Chinatown (1894), San Toy (1899), A Chinese Honeymoon (1901), The New Aladdin (1906), See See (1906), The Chinese Lantern (1908), Kismet (1911), and Chu Chin Chow (1916) (Witchard 2004). These cultural products paved the way for the impact of the publication of Thomas Burke’s controversial Limehouse tales. In 1916 Burke published Limehouse Nights, a collection of tales depicting the exotic lives of the Chinese community living in east London. Limehouse Nights essentially built on and reinforced an idea of Limehouse that had gained cultural currency through the work of de Quincey, Dickens, Wilde, Conan Doyle, and others. Many of the tales in Limehouse Nights appear to have been influenced by the work of Arthur Morrison in particular, especially his collection of short tales, Tales of Mean Streets (1894). Indeed, Morrison’s ‘Lizerunt’, a tale of a young “factory girl from Limehouse” (1983: 31), appears to directly inform many of Burke’s representations of young white working-class women. But as a distinctly Orientalist text, Limehouse Nights reveals “the dialectic between the individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a contribution” (Said 1995: 24). Limehouse Nights was a popular bestseller, and soon became notorious. Burke’s Limehouse tales also echo the ‘Yellow Peril’ discourse of the fin de siècle. 3 They re-engage with anxieties concerning urban degeneration, immorality, imperial decline, miscegenation and the increased political and sexual freedom of women. 4 A number of com3

4

The ‘Yellow Peril’ is a term that originated in Germany in the late 1890s, a period during which there was widespread concern that the Chinese and Japanese races would rapidly increase in population and overrun white, western territories. This ‘Peril’ was also felt in Europe and America. In America, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 in order to stem the tide of Chinese immigrants. And US presence in the Philippines in the late-nineteenth century also fuelled fears of ‘yellow people’ entering the United States. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 saw western missionaries slaughtered in China. The Japanese victory in the war with Russia in 1905 further cemented this scare in Britain and America, as this was the first major Asian military power that had defeated a western power. The Cable Act of 1922 revoked the right of American citizenship for any American woman who married a foreign national. In Degeneration (1892, translated into English in 1895), Max Nordau examined fin-de-siècle anxieties concerning the impact of industrial society and ur-

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mentators found Burke’s tales brutally realistic, sexually explicit and dangerously immoral. But others found his work poetically charged, and argued that it featured wonderful descriptive passages that appealed to all the senses. In the follow-up publication, More Limehouse Nights (1921), Burke continued to focus on the Chinese community in Limehouse. He developed this successful theme through the publication of East of Mansion House (1926), A Tea-shop in Limehouse (aka The Pleasantries of Old Quong, 1931), Night-Pieces: Eighteen Tales (1935), and Dark Nights (1944). Limehouse Nights and More Limehouse Nights offered middle-class readers imperial encounters with alterity; or an “exploration and a representation of a world at the boundaries of ‘civilization’” (JanMohamed 1995:18). With a rudimentary knowledge of eugenics, these readers could encounter the ‘Othered’ cultural life of colonial subjects living on their imaginative doorstep. Burke’s tales of Limehouse effectively constructed an Andersonian ‘imagined community’, then. But this community appeared to uncannily exist at the centre of the Empire. In Burke’s Limehouse Nights and More Limehouse Nights, several characters reappear in more than one tale, lending these publications the feel of collections that could have been previously published in periodicals. His London characters are often drawn as crude, inarticulate caricatures, and are given memorable names or sobriquets which go some way towards describing their stereotypical behaviour, such as ‘Battling Burrows’. The tales also feature the recurring themes of racism, violence, brutality, broken families, troubled relationships between fathers and daughters, anxieties surrounding inter-racial sexual activity (especially between Chinese men and young white childwomen), prostitution, the ambiguous blurring of ethnicity and the mixing of blood, and the cross-cultural movement of characters known as ‘narks’ who carry messages for money between the criminal fraternities of an imagined Limehouse and the authorities. White working-class men are invariably cast as drunkards, as is the case with Battling Burrows in ‘The Chink and the Child’ – a figure described as “a mixture of athleticism and degeneracy”, a “bully” with “the vices ban living on the degenerate mental and physical life of many city-dwellers. The notions of racial and cultural degeneration discussed in this book were based on Darwinian theories of evolution, and, as such, ideas of progress were increasingly countered by fears of cultural and racial decline (as suggested by the Limehouse discourse). See Ledger and Luckhurst (2000: 1-2).


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of a French decadent” (1921: 16). Chinese men are usually described as sensuous creatures (as opposed to rational, cerebral, Western humans) with narrow eyes and yellow skin, involved in activities such as the peddling of drugs and the seduction of white girls. In other words, they seemingly lack the clear moral framework of the English middle classes. The Chinese community is also linguistically ‘Othered’, as it usually remains unable to enter into the master discourse of Westerners. In ‘The Chink and the Child’, for example, Cheng’s conversation with Lucy, the object of his affections, is described as follows: “She knew his words were sweet, though she did not understand them. Nor can they be set down. Half that he spoke was in village Chinese; the rest in a mangling of English which no distorted spelling could possibly reproduce.” (1921: 24) And in ‘Tai Fu and Pansy Greers’ (Limehouse Nights), Mohammed Ali swears “in a bastard dialect compounded of Urdu, Chinese and Cocknese” (1927: 151). But in ‘A Family Affair’ (More Limehouse Nights), Burke exploits this notion of linguistically ‘Othered’ Chinese by allowing a Chinese man to surprisingly demonstrate linguistic power over a white cockney, when, at the end of the tale, the Chinese speaks with a polished English accent (1921: 128-9). However, it should be remembered, of course, that the white cockney already operates as a linguistically ‘Othered’ figure. He, too, cannot fully speak the language of Burke’s imagined, bourgeois English reader. Burke often depicts Chinese men as uncontrollable. They display illicit sexual urges, especially towards very young white women. Indeed, this provides the central theme of ‘The Chink and the Child’, ‘The Father of Yoto’, ‘Gracie Goodnight’, ‘Tai Fu and Pansy Greers’, and ‘The Sign of the Lamp’. The age of these women (often as young as twelve) marks Chinese men as corrupters of innocent white flesh. This move, of course, further exploits anxieties concerning cross-genetic fertilisation, degeneration, racial purity and, more broadly, English cultural identity. The theme of a potentially disastrous mixing of blood, sexual discharge and more broadly, Eastern and Western culture, recurs again and again in Burke’s tales. For example, the criminal in ‘The Cue’ (Limehouse Nights), Cheng Brander, is described as follows: “Approached from behind, he looked English, but his face was flat, and his skin was a murky yellow. He had almonds for eyes. His hair was oily. He was a half-caste: the son of a Shadwell mother

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and a Chinese father.” (1921: 100) Likewise, ‘The Father of Yoto’ is a tale concerning the birth of a child and the argument that ensues between three Chinese men and a white man over paternity. The tale ends with Tai Ling, acknowledged as the father after the infant is first seen, “yellow-white, with almond eyes […] unmistakeably the child of Tai Ling” (1921: 55), happily married to the white mother, Marigold. But Burke’s narrator adds: “they have no right to be.” (1921: 56) Also, in ‘The Dumb Wife’ (More Limehouse Nights), the woman of the title is the child of an English mother and a Chinese father. This woman would “run to the door and strive for speech to the point of paroxysm, and utter anomalous noises, and make wild gestures” (1927: 78). As a mixed-race individual she is thus marked as backward and unintelligent, and would no doubt be unable to enter into bourgeois London culture.

Immoral Landscapes Burke’s tales, then, develop an idea of the East End which had originally been a product of the nineteenth century. The following extract is taken from ‘The Father of Yoto’ in Limehouse Nights: You know, perhaps, the East India Dock, which lies a little north of its big brother, the West India Dock: a place of savagely masculine character, evoking the brassy mood. By day-time a cold, nauseous light hangs about it; at night a devilish darkness settles upon it. You know, perhaps, the fried-fish shops that punctuate every corner in the surrounding maze of streets, the ‘general’ shops with their assorted rags, their broken iron, and their glum-faced basins of kitchen waste; and the lurid-seeming creatures that glide from nowhere into nothing – Arab, Lascar, Pacific Islander, Chinky, Hindoo, and so on, each carrying his own perfume. You know, too, the streets of plunging hoof and horn that cross and re-cross the waterways, the gaunt chimneys that stick their derisive tongues into the skies. You know the cobbly courts, the bestrewn alleys, through which at night gas-jets asthmatically splutter; and the mephitic glooms and silences of the dockside. You know these things, and I need not attempt to illuminate them for you. (1927: 41-2)

In this passage Burke’s narrator speaks directly to an imagined bourgeois reader presumed to have knowledge of an Orientalist idea of Limehouse. Interestingly, this idea also develops the relationship be-


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tween an anthropomorphic urban space and its inhabitants. The docks are imagined as fraternal bully-boys, lurking in the devilish darkness of night. Chimneys stick their tongues into the skies, evoking atavistic, uncultured low-‘Others’. The topography of this part of the city is again marked as uncivilised. Importantly, Burke’s visualisation of this space draws heavily on urban iconography that was already well known by 1916: There are minds to which the repulsive – such as Poplar High Street – is supremely beautiful, and to whom anything frankly human is indelicate, if not ugly. You need, however, to be a futurist to discover ecstatic beauty in the torn wastes of tiles, the groupings of iron and stone, and the nightmare of chimney-stacks and gas-works. Barking Road, as it dips and rises with a sweep as lovely as a flying bird’s, may be a thing to fie the trained imagination, and so may be the subtle tones of flame and shade in the byways, and the airy tracery of the Great Eastern Railway arches. But these crazy things touch only those who do not live among them: who comfortably wake and sleep and eat in Hampstead and Streatham. The beauty which neither time nor tears can fade is hardly to come by east of Aldgate Pump; if you look for it there and think that you find it, I may take your seat at a St John’s Wood breakfast table, and stay there. (1927: 43)

This passage effectively critiques some of the ways in which the East End had garnered the interest of the middle classes. Burke seems to be suggesting here that to outsiders, the vast industrial architecture and railway arches of east London can be seen to be things of great power and beauty. For some, this topography might inspire powerful emotions or, even, spiritual awe. The immensity of these structures and their essential difference to buildings found in the City and across much of west London might thus elicit feelings of amazement. But this architecture might instead be more accurately described as sublime rather than beautiful. Indeed, if we consider Edmund Burke’s distinction (as set out in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful [1757]), Thomas Burke seems to be suggesting that the same feelings of awe generated by these East End sites might in fact more accurately be described as terrifying. In some ways, then, the material East End can be seen to be operating as a force of nature in Burke’s tales – Barking Road evokes the movement of a flying bird, after all. It is highly significant, of course, that Burke’s imagined reader is spatially positioned in the distinctly middle-class area of St John’s Wood, west London. They are thus invited,

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as outsiders, to become imaginative travellers in this awe-inspiring but terrifying, Gothic urban space. Burke’s Limehouse tales, then, are constructed around a clearlydrawn spatial idea of Limehouse and the East End of London. Indeed, many of the tales in Limehouse Nights and More Limehouse Nights begin with a setting of the scene which carefully details the imaginative topography of the area. The streets and buildings of Limehouse thus develop a performative function in these narratives. It is significant that the Blue Lantern pub lies at the centre of Burke’s imagined Limehouse. The iconic corner pub comes to play a very important role in the construction of an imagined East End in a number of texts. Burke’s Blue Lantern, for example, clearly foreshadows the Queen Victoria pub, which plays an absolutely central role in the highlysuccessful BBC Television soap opera, EastEnders (1985- ), situated as it is in the heart of Albert Square (discussed in detail in Chapter 6). These pubs perform clear spatial roles. Both operate as the imaginative nexus of an insular agora. Burke carefully describes the pub in the introduction to the tale ‘The Little Flowers of Frances’ in More Limehouse Nights: They’re a sorry crowd, the reg’lars of the Blue Lantern. Even the brightest of them, the flash boy and girls, carry their terribly new store clothes with a bedraggled air. The others are nakedly downcast, without clothing of bravado to cover them or weapon of spirit to arm them. The Blue Lantern stands on Chinatown corner, where the missionaries love to prowl. It is kept by an ex-bruiser known to his reg’lars as Dickery Dock. It is to Limehouse what the village green is to the rural community. It is the centre of past history and of current endeavour. In its bars new friendships are formed, and old scores bloodily wiped out. There hot, hard words and vociferous debate lead to blows and the police court, or end, more ignobly, with shocking beer-shed. (1921: 133)

A regular viewer of EastEnders would surely recognise this scene. The pub functions as the topographical and imaginative centre of this Andersonian ‘imagined community’ – a community centred on the shared experience of the consumption of alcohol. As such, the pub provides the focal point for collective spatial knowledge. If the cultural meanings of architecture and urban spaces can be so clearly exploited for the purposes of narrative, so too can toponyms. Burke is often careful to name specific spaces in east Lon-


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don. In the tale ‘The Sign of the Lamp’ in Limehouse Nights, for example, he writes: “She lived in the tactfully narrow Poplar High Street, that curls its nasty length from Limehouse to Blackwall.” (1927: 136) In More Limehouse Nights, the first tale begins with another setting-of-the-scene: “The shape and soul of Shadwell are reflected in its name. Shadwell! Cold, grey, stony syllables, without lustre or savour; flat to the eye and the palate. It lies derelict between the river and Commercial Road.” (1921: 11) Burke acknowledges here that powerful myths have developed around particular places in east London. These myths are already so potent that they appear to resonate somehow within the very toponyms themselves. As such, place names pack a powerful semantic punch. They operate as Barthesian second-order signifiers (Barthes 1993: 109-159), overflowing with significatory power. Whereas, in Edward III’s time, Limehouse was a small hamlet in which lime burning took place (Palmer 2000: 9), this toponym, at the level of metalanguage (Barthes 1993: 115), has come to signify much more – the criminal and the exotic. In ‘Beryl and the Croucher’, also from Limehouse Nights, a white working-class figure known as ‘the Croucher’ moves through a distinctly-drawn urban space: “From Pennyfields he drifted over West India Dock Road, passed a house where a window seemed deliberately to wink at him, and so swung into that Causeway where the cold fatalism of the Orient meets the wistful dubiety of the West.” (1927: 113-4) Again, toponyms are loaded here with significatory power. But interestingly, too, in this description of urban space (distinctly echoing Conrad), anthropomorphic buildings take on the genetic ‘Otherness’ of the Chinese. The windows are imagined as narrow yellow eyes which aggressively stare at the white intruder. In a tale from Limehouse Nights, made more famous in D.W. Griffith’s 1919 film adaptation, Broken Blossoms, ‘The Chink and the Child’, Burke offers another clear description of topography and architecture which somehow evokes the seemingly exotic characteristics of the Orient: It was Wednesday night in Limehouse, and for once clear of mist. Out of the coloured darkness of the Causeway stole the muffled wail of reed instruments, and, though every window was closely shuttered, between the joints shot jets of light and stealthy voices, and you could hear the whisper of slippered feet, and the stuttering steps of the satyr and the sadist. It was to the café in the middle of the Causeway, lit by the pallid blue light that is the symbol of China throughout the world,

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End that Cheng Huan came, to take a dish of noodle and some tea. Thence he moved to another house whose stairs ran straight to the street, and above whose doorway a lamp glowed like an evil eye. (1927: 21)

In this paragraph Burke employs synaesthetic narrative strategies in order to capture the reader’s imagination. He evokes a confusion of sight, sound and smell in order to reinforce the confused ‘Otherness’ of this urban space. 5 In ‘The Cue’, another Limehouse Nights tale, Burke describes Wapping thus: “The acrid tang of the East hung on every breath of air.” (1927: 99) And another More Limehouse Nights tale, ‘The Dumb Wife’, begins: “Dark is this tale of love with woe as dark as the malefic arches that shut out light from the streets about the water-side […]. Here the narrow kerbs make boundaries for the puckered lives of their people; and feet fall without echo on their stones.” (1921: 77) Here, again, the dark narrowness of the streets appears to reflect not only the corporeality of many of the residents of Limehouse but also perceptions of the narrowness of their vision, culture, and systems of knowledge, especially when imagined in juxtaposition with the so-called enlightened culture of the bourgeois ‘West’. As such, Burke’s prose sets up tensions between urban landscapes and urban culture. The characteristics of the topography of Limehouse appear to reflect the social and architectural conduct of the individuals residing within this territory (Matless 1998: 10). In ‘The Little Flowers of Frances’ Burke again emphasises the fluid ambiguity and irrationality of this space, where “streets melted into shadow, and shadow took on body” (Burke 1921: 134). So Burke’s Limehouse can be seen to operate as a debased moral landscape. But this landscape only becomes distinguishable because it is imagined against a landscape of dignity, composure and fitness – the West End (Matless 1998: 47). So while the topographical and architectural character of Limehouse rests upon cultural judgements concerning who or what resides there (Matless 1998: 10), it is a space imagined in juxtaposition with another space which encompasses a vision of an English London. This is another moral landscape – an imagined landscape occupied by Burke’s 5

Carol Watts explores the melodramatic properties of Burke’s tales and D.W. Griffith’s film, Broken Blossoms, arguing that in Burke’s ‘The Chink and the Child’, “the story works by bringing the reader into close proximity to a realm of sensory assault which centrally involves the affective impact of race” (2002: 37).


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imagined reader. In these tales, then, Burke’s imaginative debt to the spatial politics of the discourse of the East End of the late-nineteenth century becomes clear. A number of Burke’s descriptions of Limehouse emphasise its apparent lack of modernity, while others depict it as a space that springs up at a point of collision between the modern and the premodern. A tale in More Limehouse Nights, ‘The Affair at the Warehouse’, for example, describes the area thus: “Commercial Road East is a loud London thoroughfare, packed with poor shops and stalls. In it the modern jostles the antique, and the antique shames the modern. A few tawdry cinemas throw upon it a thin festal glow.” (1921: 155) This passage suggests that the culture of the modern world is creeping into a broadly pre-modern or anti-modern space from elsewhere. But as the ‘modern’ is symbolised by the cinema, it is not only associated with technology and mass communication but also with the growth and spread of popular culture. Indeed, in the tale ‘Mazurka’ (More Limehouse Nights) Burke writes: “The cinemas were ‘now showing’, vehemently, Lillian Gish and Nazimova.” (1921: 186) But other tales clearly describe the East End as a more obviously pre-modern or antimodern space. For example, ‘A Game of Poker’ (More Limehouse Nights) tells the story of Archie Plumpton, a minor criminal known as ‘Plum-Plum’, who is abducted by Chinese men (“Chinks”) after he leaves the Blue Lantern pub and wanders towards the “meagre lamps and […] waist-high mist” of Plaistow Marsh (1921: 36). In this tale, then, the East End and Essex are again marked as prehistoric, unmapped, potentially dangerous spaces. Burke’s tales mobilise a mythical vision of the East End in order to articulate fears concerning what might happen if modern London were left to develop unplanned and unregulated. While Burke’s literary style broadly resisted the more radical approaches employed by modernist writers of the city such as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, his prose exploits anxieties that were circulating during the modern period concerning changes to the English landscape – whether these changes were moral or material. His stories show that landscapes – the geographies and topographies of urban areas and the countryside – can facilitate the formation of cultural identities (and vice versa). David Matless has written of the sense of crisis surrounding the politics of landscape that occurred during the 1920s, a period during

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which differing visions of the city, the country and the suburb were seen to be competing with one another (1998: 14). There was the real sense at this time that the country should be preserved, but also planned. This reflected a particular type of modernism which was committed to order and design: “Preservationists subscribe to a modernism of orderly progress driven by planning; this is hardly the modernity of flux and transition embraced by some forms of literary and artistic modernism” (1998: 51). Unseemly landscapes, then, such as those imagined existing in the East End by Thomas Burke, should, it was argued, be radically altered. Indeed, not long after Burke’s tales were published, preservationist geographers such as Vaughan Cornish held that London should be replanned. Cornish proposed a high-rise garden city of “steel-framed buildings on one-third of the space” with greenery in between (1937: 46). Meanwhile, Geoffrey Boumphrey developed a Le Corbusierian vision of a new London in which architectural modernism should serve to maintain town and country (Matless 1998: 34). He wanted 85% of London to be green open space. It is no coincidence that the London suburbs were rapidly growing at this time. In these new spaces, aspects of Englishness that might have been threatened by multi-cultural spaces such as the Limehouse imagined by Burke could, it was hoped, effectively find a new home. In the series of Fu Manchu novels published between 1913 and 1959, Sax Rohmer (aka Arthur Ward), like Thomas Burke, effectively reinforced the idea of Limehouse as an exotic Oriental, backward space, and as a centre of the hysteria surrounding the ‘Yellow Peril’ (Clegg 1994). Indeed, James Donald has described Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu (1913) as “one of the most dementedly racist works in English popular literature” (1993: 173). Early in the novel, Nayland Smith describes his nemesis, Dr Fu Manchu, as “the yellow peril incarnate in one man” (1985: 19). Rohmer’s representation of Fu Manchu elides the exotic with evil (Clegg 1994: 4). And Rohmer’s novel, like Burke’s tale ‘A Game of Poker’, articulates fears concerning the possibility of a viral infection flowing from the ‘east’ into the great English city: A breeze whispered through the leaves; a great wave of exotic perfume swept from the open window towards the curtained doorway. It was the breath of the East – that stretched out a yellow hand to the West. It was symbolic of the subtle, intangible power manifested in Dr


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Fu Manchu, as Nayland Smith […] was symbolic of the clean British efficiency which sought to combat the insidious enemy. (1985:85)

Just as in Burke’s vision of Limehouse, the mystical Orient is evoked here by a series of pervasive exotic aromas and mists which float unmanageably towards civilised Western nostrils. The “breath of the East” is thus marked as sexual and pernicious. Fu Manchu’s power remains intangible because it cannot be rationally understood. As such, his power echoes that of other elusive eidolons associated with the East End such as Jack the Ripper and the Golem – a figure reimagined by Peter Ackroyd in the novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) as a “thing without form” (1998: 4) and a “transparent gentleman” (1998: 7). 6

The Portal of the West In 1919 the American filmmaker D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms was released by United Artists, after two of Griffith’s partners in the company, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, recommended that he read Thomas Burke’s tale ‘The Chink and the Child’. Griffith’s adaptation of Burke’s tale crystallised ‘Yellow Peril’ fears for a widening cinematic audience, but it also appealed to the American inter-war appetite for stories which encouraged pacifism in the face of brutality (Watts 2002: 31-46). Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Cheat (1915) had already depicted an exotic Asian man, Tori (Sessue Hayakawa), seducing a young white woman, Edith (Fannie Ward). But Griffith’s Broken Blossoms re-situated this fear of miscegenation, through the 6

Not all representations of Limehouse in the 1920s appeared to be negative. But it should be pointed out that even apparently positive views of the area still facilitated the endurance of an idea of Limehouse within the bourgeois imagination. For example, consider Arnold Bennett’s vision of the Limehouse of 1925: “I went to Chinatown last night with Beaverbrook and Ashfield. Pennyfields is the name of the chief street, Limehouse. We went to Limehouse Police station first. It took us exactly fifteen minutes (from the West End) to drive from Ciro’s. Great change in a short time […] we entered two Chinese restaurants (11pm) where lots of people were drinking tea. Humble people. All very clean and tidy indeed, and the people looked decent. A few nicelooking prostitutes – chiefly Jewesses […]. We saw no vice whatsoever. Inspector gave the Chinese an exceedingly good character.” (Vansittart 1992: 155-6)

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work of Thomas Burke, specifically in east London. In the film, Cheng Huan, the ‘Yellow Man’ (Richard Barthelmess), leaves China for Europe, with the aim of spreading his Buddhist message of peace to the West. A number of years later he ends up in Limehouse, where he opens a shop. He then becomes infatuated with a local young girl, Lucy (Lillian Gish). When Lucy is severely beaten by her brutal father, the prize-fighter Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), Cheng takes her to his quarters, cares for her, and falls in love with her. In a final, harrowing showdown, Battling Burrows discovers the whereabouts of his daughter and rushes to Cheng’s quarters, where he viciously beats Lucy, killing her in the process. He is then shot by Cheng, who, after taking his revenge, takes his own life. Carol Watts has argued that in Griffith’s film the “brutality of the East End” forces the Buddhist pacifist to “take up a gun” (2002: 35). In other words, Cheng is somehow moved to commit his crime by a malevolent East End space itself. The film thus effectively spatialises evil within an imagined London. In order to do this, the designers did not recreate ‘real’ east London locations, as such, but instead chose to construct a dramatic space imaginatively resounding to the dark narratives that had already become synonymous with the East End. D.W. Griffith instructed his chief carpenter, Frank Wortman, to construct a large indoor set on which to shoot the film, in order to guarantee total control of all aspects of the production design, and, specifically, the stylistic employment of artificial light and shadow. Indeed, Broken Blossoms set a precedent for the construction of elaborate sets which would serve to visualise an idea of the East End in cinema and on television. Much of the photography by Billy Bitzer is in soft focus, evoking the dreamy ‘Otherness’ of this imagined East End space (M. Williams 1980: 111). And Griffith employs coloured, tinted film in order to alter the mood from scene to scene. What emerges on screen, then, is a dramatic space which draws heavily on previous literary discourse which had so effectively produced an idea of the East End, as well as the stylised graphic imagery of urban spaces which had appeared in illustrations in Punch and the Illustrated London News, and Doré’s famous engravings of Whitechapel, Houndsditch and Bishopsgate (McArthur 1997: 34). By doing this, Griffith’s film also helped to inaugurate the emergence of a cinematic genre, “the gaslight thriller” (Watts 2002:37), which often utilised the East End as its imagined territory.


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A central aspect of Griffith’s film, then, is its representation of urban space. Shot from eye level, the main cobblestone street in Broken Blossoms appears narrow and dark – the low archway crossing it in the middle distance helping to evoke feelings of claustrophobia (Fig. 4). This, then, is a closed space. While the film spectator is offered an ‘imaginative tour’ of this space, to borrow Giuliana Bruno’s

Fig. 4. Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith, 1919)

term (1997: 17), there is no obvious route out for its inhabitants. Importantly, the space is depicted as pre-modern or anti-modern. As such, it can be read as antithetical to the space which would usually have been occupied by the spectator of the film. There are no automobiles on the streets, no sign of electricity, no bustling crowds, and no huge advertisements. Indeed, there are few obvious visible signifiers of the products of modernity. In this modern moving picture, then, we see very little movement. Only the occasional slow-moving idler brings the screen to life in the exterior shots. Moreover, in a film that depicts twentieth-century London, the spectator is not offered a familiar landmark or street by which to imaginatively navigate off-screen (or extra-diegetic) space. This representation of Limehouse, then, ef-

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fectively reproduces an imagined, pre-modern or anti-modern idea of a conceptual urban past. This onscreen space visually reproduces a mythical idea of the East End which has been imaginatively fixed within a late-nineteenth-century chronotope. Lucy’s father, Battling Burrows, is introduced with the intertitle “Battling Burrows – an abysmal brute – a gorilla of the jungles of East London”. Here, Griffith specifically borrows from the wild, tropical imagery of the East End that had been employed by William Booth in the late-nineteenth century and later reworked in more complex ways by Joseph Conrad. Burrows is a burly, violent, drunken, working-class East End stereotype who lives in a two-storey wooden shack on the river. The exterior shot of this dwelling initially positions the spectator as an ‘imaginative tourist’ floating on the Thames off Limehouse (Fig. 5). This shot also captures the irrational, unplanned nature of this architecture, which again connotes the irrational, unplanned nature of a

Fig. 5. Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith, 1919)

wider East End space. In later shots in the film we discover that the interior of the building is also pre-modern or anti-modern, featuring stone floors, bare brick walls, a single bed, one wooden table and


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chair, and an open fire in the corner. The designers may well have been influenced by the description of Gaffer Hexham’s quarters on the eastern river in Our Mutual Friend, described by Dickens’s narrator thus: “There was a wooden bunk or berth in a corner […]. Two or three old sculls and oars stood against the wall, and against another part of the wall was a small dresser, making a spare show of the commonest articles of crockery and cooking vessels” (1976c: 63-4). Earlier scenes in Broken Blossoms are set in China, and show the locals happily interacting with American soldiers. This intermingling of cultures continues in the Limehouse scenes. One intertitle in the film offers clues to the ethnic politics of this space: “Chinese, Malays, Lascars. Where the Orient squats at the portals of the West.” The inhabitants are thus marked as subservient outsiders. In the scenes in the opium den (an intertitle calls this building a “scarlet house of sin”), Griffith depicts mixed-race encounters between an Indian and a white girl and a Negro and another white girl taking place in the smoky haze of this dark, exotic room. Here, anxieties concerning miscegenation are again fruitfully exploited. Griffith employs nowfamiliar aesthetic strategies such as smoke rising from pipes and fog rolling through narrow streets in order to evoke the seemingly uncontrollable nature of these cultures. Indeed, the final chase scenes are held against a backdrop of worsening fog (the intertitle calls it “The cloaking river mist”), as if to restate the uncontrollable, recondite ‘Otherness’ of this space and the characters inhabiting it. 7 This sense 7

At the beginning of Bleak House (1852-3) Dickens famously writes: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.” (11) Jonathan Raban has pointed out that “for the Victorian writer, the industrial fog which hung over London for so much of the year was very much more than a chemical inconvenience, or even a romantic effect; it was the supreme symbol of the city’s capacity to make people disappear inside it” (1988: 132). Peter Ackroyd has also pointed out that “it can be said that the fog is the greatest character in nineteenth-century fiction” (2001: 434; see also Pirie 1974: 108). The London fog was originally imaginatively connected to the whole of London (as in Bleak House), but later, more specifically, it came to signify the East End. After all, fog could provide cover for theft, violence and rape, but it also signified sickness. In the later Sherlock Holmes/Ripper movie, A Study in Terror (Dir. James Hill, 1965), Homes (John Neville) tells Watson: “Fog to the murderer is what the jungle is to the tiger, Watson. It conceals him from all until he pounces and then he is evident only to his victim.”

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of irrational ambiguity is also reinforced by the unclear, unknowable topography of the labyrinthine streets of the set. Indeed, Griffith keeps the film spectator guessing as to where one location is in relation to another. So, again, the space constructed in the film appears to constitute an imagined space which reflects the emotional or psychological state of the characters inhabiting it (Allen 1999: 144). This space is profoundly irrational – it resists mapping and, therefore, control. These labyrinthine, foggy urban spaces constitute a visual metaphor which reoccurs in many of the generic cinematic representations of the East End which followed Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. One such film was Curlytop (1924), directed by Maurice Elvey in America, and also adapted from a Thomas Burke tale (this time by the screenwriting team, Frederic and Fanny Hatton). It tells the story of Big Bill Brannigan (Wallace MacDonald), a Limehouse bruiser who leaves his girl, Bessie (Diana Miller), when he falls in love with the innocent Curlytop (Shirley Mason). In a jealous rage, Bessie cuts off Curlytop’s long curls. Newly shorn, Curlytop runs away and gets a job as a waitress on a barge owned by Shanghai Dan (Warner Oland), the head of a Chinese criminal gang. Bill eventually saves Curlytop from Dan, who had attempted to hypnotise her. Similar themes are explored in another American film released two years later, Twinkletoes (1926), directed by Charles Brabin (also adapted from a Burke tale). This film stars Colleen Moore as the dancer heroine, Twinkletoes, and Kenneth Harlan as Chuck Lightfoot, a prize fighter. Brabin went on to revisit similar thematic territory in The Mask of Fu Manchu in 1932. Herbert Wilcox’s British film London (1926), featuring a screenplay by Thomas Burke, tells the story of a Limehouse waif, Mavis Hogan (Dorothy Gish), adopted by a wealthy dowager, Lady Arbourfield (Daisy Campbell), who mistakes her for her own dead daughter. Mavis falls in love with Arbourfield’s nephew, Geoffrey (John Manners), but returns to the slums when another woman falls for the same man and successfully solicits his attention. Interestingly, Broken Blossoms was remade in Britain in 1936 by the director John Brahm. This film features Dolly Haas as Lucy and Arthur Margetson as ‘Battling’ Burrows. Other films covered similar ground. The Hollywood musical Ziegfeld Follies (Dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1946) features a dance routine which showcases the talents of Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer. In this film, Limehouse is again depicted as a bleak, foggy dockside area populated by an uncontrollable Chinese community (McArthur


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1997: 34). And No Way Back (1949), directed by Stefan Osiecki (another Burke adaptation), stars Dennis Val Norton as Harry and Eleanor Summerfield as Beryl in another Limehouse tale. So, a generic visualised spatial idea of Limehouse and the East End was clearly constructed in the American and British cinema of the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, this irrational, pre-modern or antimodern idea of the East End increasingly became a transnational idea when it was envisioned in other European films of the period. E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly was filmed in Britain and released in 1929. Arnold Bennett’s screenplay formally echoes Griffith’s Broken Blossoms in several key ways. Building on the Limehouse discourse of Thomas Burke and films such as Curlytop, Twinkletoes and London, it tells the story of a young Chinese scullery maid, Shosho (Anna May Wong), who, when she is discovered dancing in the kitchen of his West End club by the owner, Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas), is offered the chance to dance for the titillation of a largely bourgeois, white audience. The resulting performance proves a sensation, and causes Valentine’s other star dancer and lover, Mabel (Gilda Grey), to brood jealously as she sees her man gradually wooed by his exotic new protégé. The film sets up, then, a distinct spatial division between the West End (marked as a modern space of wealth, leisure and consumption) and the East End (marked again as foggy, premodern, anti-modern and ethnically ‘Othered’). The West End is symbolically embodied by the tall, powerful, fashionable masculine figure of Wilmot, while the East End is embodied by Shosho, an uncontrollably dangerous and subversive feminine sexual force that manages to infiltrate the culture of the West End. As such, the film exploits continuing fears concerning miscegenation by suggesting that any sexual relationship between two distinctly marked and drawn cultures will almost certainly end in tragedy. Indeed, in Piccadilly we see the relationship between Wilmot and Shosho set off a series of violent and destructive events. Wilmot and Mabel break up and Shosho is eventually shot dead in her rooms in Limehouse by her Chinese lover, Jim (King Ho-Chang), who is driven mad by jealousy, and ends up, like Cheng in Broken Blossoms, shooting himself during a scene in a courtroom. Dupont, then, invites the film spectator to suspect that the feminine Shosho – an exotic, sexually predatory, confident and mischievous Oriental woman – embodies a dangerously degenerate ‘Othered’ culture that lurks in the East End of London. Wilmot, the

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embodiment of rational, white, phallic masculine power, is seduced by this feminised culture, and drives Shosho home one night in his Rolls Royce. This spatial transgression symbolises his sexual and racial transgression. Indeed, this film demonstrates what Ella Shohat has termed “the inclination to project the non-Occident as feminine” (1997: 23). Shosho, representing Limehouse and the Orient as sites of sexual excess, can be understood to work in this film as a product of a gendered gaze. She operates as the embodiment of a primitive, feminised landscape (both virginal and carnal) which is penetrated by the masculine, imperial Westerner. Indeed, the phallic Wilmot can be seen to enter into Limehouse culture in the scene in which he enters a crowded pub with Shosho, who, by now, is dressed in impressive outfits which symbolise Wilmot’s colonisation of her. Moreover, the impressive design in Piccadilly, the work of Alfred Jünge, captures the grandness of the West End culture of Piccadilly, which is clearly juxtaposed with the drab powerlessness of the East End and Limehouse. 8 I now want to move on to suggest that the pre-modern or antimodern nature of this visualised spatial idea of the East End, and the complex designs that brought this idea to the screen, can be fruitfully read alongside developments in modern architecture and urban planning that were occurring at this historical moment. In order to do this I want to briefly sketch these developments, before exploring the questions of how and why European filmmakers during the late 1920s and early 1930s (including Dupont) continued to see the mythic discursive idea of the East End as the ideal space in which their narratives could unfold.

8

Other films of the period that recreated a generic vision of an idea of the East End as a space in which illicit thrills could be experienced (in opposition to the West End) include The Sign of Four (Dir. Maurice Elvey, 1923), an adaptation of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tale, ‘The Passionate Adventure’ (Dir. Graham Cutts, 1924), Blink Eyes (Dir. George Pearson, 1926), another tale of Chinatown, and London Love (Dir. Manning Hayes, 1926), which caricatures the East End Jewish community. Piccadilly (Dir. E.A. Dupont, 1929, aka Nachtwelt in Germany) shared a release with Alleycat (Dir. Hans Steinoff, aka Nachtgestalten in Germany) and Eine Nacht in London (Dir. Lupu Pick) (Sargeant 2005).

IV From Bauhaus to the Blitz and Beyond Over the earth the shadows creep with deepening gloom, wrapping all objects in a mysterious dimness, in which all certainty is destroyed and any guess seems plausible. Forms lose their outlines, and are dissolved in floating mist. The day is over, the night draws on. - Nordau (1993: 6) The film “viewer” is a practitioner of viewing space – a tourist. - Bruno (1997: 17)

In many ways, an enduring idea of the East End can be understood as a product or bi-product of modernity; or, more accurately, modern concepts of urban space, architecture and urban living. As modernity flourished in Western cities during the 1930s, it became clear that some spaces were being imaginatively privileged over others (Smethurst 2000: 2-3). After all, new spaces, signalling as they did a rush towards the future, could only be conceptualised if they were placed against undeveloped spaces or spaces of the past. As I argued in the previous chapter, D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms visualises one such space – an East End of London apparently untouched by the project of modernity. Indeed, an essentially pre-modern or antimodern idea of the East End has been continually exploited by filmmakers who have sought to explore the unconscious drives of modern humanity and the uncannily primitive, atavistic qualities of seemingly modern, rational individuals. Interestingly this vision of the East End has become increasingly transnational.

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Weimar London G.W. Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) (1928) tells the story of Lulu (Louise Brooks), who dreams of marrying her lover, the newspaper editor and widower, Dr. Peter Schön (Fritz Kortner). Towards the end of the film Lulu finds herself marooned in east London (Fig. 6), where, living in a run down slum, she again makes a living as a prostitute. Pabst’s iconographic vision of the East End strongly recalls that of D.W. Griffith and E.A. Dupont, featuring as it does cobblestone streets, dark alleyways, bare brick walls, and sharp shadows looming across broken windows. On Lulu’s arrival in the East End on a foggy dock, tension builds as the camera focuses on a poster that reads:

Fig. 6. Pandora’s Box (G.W. Pabst, 1928) ATTENTION! WOMEN OF LONDON! For some time a man has been attempting to lure young girls and women into dark areas to murder them. Unfortunately, in four cases he has succeeded. Therefore, all young girls and women are warned against going outside at night without protection. The man is de-


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scribed as being just under six feet tall, pale with unusually small shoulders and small, unsteady eyes.

– The Mayor Later, in a strikingly composed shot, we see a man in a hat appearing out of the foggy gloom. He approaches Lulu. It soon becomes clear that he fits the description of the killer. Her customer turns out to be none other than Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl). As Lulu lures him to her quarters, they mount a dark staircase. Chiaroscuro lighting reinforces the sense of terror lurking in the shadows. This film, then, depicts the East End as an expressionistic space. Indeed, Pabst’s screenplay for Pandora’s Box (based on the Lulu plays by Frank Wedekind) makes it absolutely clear how urban London was to be re-imagined in the production design of this film: Fade in to a Slum Street in London. [Through thick winter fog, shadows pass. Only their movement betrays that they must be people. From somewhere an invisible street-lamp squeezes a faint beam of light through the swathes of fog.] A shadow approaches, slowly assuming a shape. As it crosses the wedge of light, it becomes visible as a human face. (1984a: 125)

So Pandora’s Box was expected to recreate a specific vision of urban topography. For example: “The man goes round a corner and stands in front of a small square, cosily ringed by houses.” (1984a: 129) Lulu’s quarters are described in the screenplay as follows: “Inside a Garret, the fierce wind blows a flimsy ragged covering from the skylight window, and through the missing or broken panes the icy cold penetrates the room. Lulu, now gone to seed, unkempt and almost in rags, climbs onto a packing-case to nail the rag back over the opening.” (1984a: 127) The garret, described containing an iron camp bed, a tattered mattress, a coarse wooden table and an old paraffin lamp, is faithfully reproduced in Andrei Andreiev’s set design. 1

1

Andreiev worked on a number of important films, including Raskolnikov (Dir. Robert Weine, 1923), Dark Journey (Dir. Victor Saville, 1937), The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (Dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1942), The Raven (Dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943), The Man Between (Dir. Carol Reed, 1953), Alexander the Great (Dir. Robert Rossen, 1955) and Anastasia (Dir. Anatole Litvak, 1956).

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German Expressionism widely employed stylised décor and lighting (Elsaesser 1996: 137) in order to affect feelings of terror, nightmares, inner torment, moral dilemmas or dark fantasies in the audience (Eisner 1969; Kracauer 1974). As such, Weimar cinema came to epitomise a twentieth-century Germany profoundly ill-at-ease with itself and troubled by the potentially darker sides of modernity (Elsaesser 2000: 3). Interestingly, these were overwhelmingly middleclass concerns (Kracauer 1974: 8). During these inter-war years, bourgeois Germans “eagerly tended to withdraw from a harsh outer world into the intangible realm of the soul” (Kracauer 1974: 67). In films like Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, this troubled, irrational world of the German soul was thus projected elsewhere, through time and space, on to a well established idea of the East End. Strangely, German cinema frequently viewed London as the archetypal capitalist metropolis (Sargeant 2005: 1). Indeed, writing about the final scenes of Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, Thomas Elsaesser has suggested that “the London episode is here doubly ironic. It takes us back to the world of the lumpen-proletariat, a world outside Weimar bourgeois society.” (2000: 276) The culturally constructed idea of the East End depicted in Pandora’s Box not only takes the German spectator to a world outside bourgeois society, but also places them in a discursive space which is profoundly at odds to the visions of urban spaces that were offered by a number of other German city films of the period, such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). After the success of Pandora’s Box, Pabst returned to the discursive territory of the East End for his film version of Die Dreigroschen Oper (The Threepenny Opera), an adaptation of the musical by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. The version of the film released in German stars Rudolph Forster as the gangster Mackie Messer, the captain of the so-called London Apaches. He falls in love with Polly Peachum (Carola Neher), the daughter of the King of the Beggars. The couple marry and enjoy a sumptuous, carnivalesque wedding feast staged by Mackie’s gang with stolen goods at his warehouse headquarters. For these headquarters, Andrei Andreiev came up with an elaborate construction arranged over three floors, featuring steep flights of steps, raised platforms and doors that lower on to the riverside. Writing about this film, Paul Rotha noticed the important role that the sets and the spaces that they constructed performed in the development of the aesthetics of the film: “Instead of an eighteenth-


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century London, we have substituted a most delightful, fantastic underworld set in a district approximating to Soho in the ‘nineties, which is close to a romantically conceived dockland, with gay-life cafés and the most naughty yet highly diverting houses of ill-repute.” (1984: 9) Indeed, the East End imagined and constructed in Pabst’s films was a space that also clearly reflected the psychological health of the characters inhabiting it (see Barnwell 2004: 21). Furthermore, Paul Rotha noticed that Pabst’s employment of a moving camera gave “assistance in establishing the relationship of the characters with their environment” (Rotha 1984: 12). Andreiev’s sets, as such, allowed spectators to become ‘imaginative tourists’ of the East End (Fig. 7). But it is also clear that Andreiev’s vision of the architecture of the East End can be seen to be radically different to the plans that were being developed by a number of European architects working during this period.

Fig. 7. The Threepenny Opera (G.W. Pabst, 1931)

One of the Swiss-born modern architect Le Corbusier’s aims was to herald in a new ‘Age of Reason’ in order to purge the past. Indeed, while Andreiev was constructing a vision of the old East End in Ger-

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many, Le Corbusier and his contemporaries were seeking to impose rational order on what they saw as the chaos of European cities in order to bring about the freedom of their inhabitants. In Vers une Architecture (1923), Le Corbusier laid great emphasis on the necessity for cleanliness and hygiene, arguing that “the primordial instinct of every human being is to assure himself of a shelter. The various classes of workers in society today no longer have dwellings adapted to their needs […]. It is a question of building which is at the root of social unrest of today; architecture or revolution.” (Frampton 1997: 178) Le Corbusier’s solution to the problem of modern housing was to design buildings suited to mass production, such as the Ville Radieuse block. In Germany, the Bauhaus movement (1919-1933) also formulated modern architectural ideas that celebrated radical new methods and materials. They published their principles in the Bauhaus Proclamation of 1919, declaring “together let us conceive and create the new building of the future” (Frampton 1997: 123). The first Bauhaus exhibition in the Weimar Republic was held in 1923. The movement set out to impose rational order on urban chaos by advocating simple, geometric designs for housing (Harvey 1990: 31). Their concept of Existenzminimum established minimum standards for housing and urban life (R. Fishman 1982: xiii). Walter Gropius in particular encouraged the design of light, clean house units (Frampton 1997: 140). And with Henri van de Velde, Hannes Meyer and, later, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius helped to develop what became known as the International Style of architecture across the west, a style that became prevalent in the design of major architecture such as public buildings and offices. 2 It is also interesting to note that in 1928 (the year that Pandora’s Box was first exhibited), European architects came together to form the C.I.A.M. (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) with the purpose of championing modern architectural projects for the benefit of the people of modern Europe. When the C.I.A.M. met in Frankfurt in Germany in 1929, ultra-efficient pre-fabricated housing was discussed extensively. Indeed, it has been argued that the 2

The first ‘International Exhibition of Modern Architecture’ was held in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932, and exhibited work by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, who were heralded as the leading figures in the new ‘International Style’ of architecture. However, the term ‘International Style’ came from the name of the exhibition catalogue prepared by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock.


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C.I.A.M. Athens Charter of 1933 defined modern architectural practices for the next thirty years (Harvey 1990: 32). The C.I.A.M., then (and particularly the ideas of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe), had a profound influence on the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ rebuilding of the war-torn cities of western Europe. Paolo Portoghesi has termed this movement “the golden age of functionalism” in architecture (1999: 308). During this period, rational, modern housing projects for the working classes sprang up across a number of Western cities. The drive to construct these new spaces appeared to develop out of similar ideological positions to those articulated in the Weimar East End films of the period – namely, that run-down inner city spaces might breed a degenerate race more suited to pre-modern spaces than the great cities of a progressive, modern Europe. In other words, modernism could and should renew and reshape the lives of the urban poor. London did not escape aspects of this modernising impulse. The architect H.H. Peach, for example, visited the Bauhaus in 1927, and on return to England followed the ‘fitness for purpose’ philosophy of W.R. Lethaby and the functionalism of the advanced design and social philosophy of the Deutsche Werkbund, originally founded in 1907 (Matless 1998: 51). Furthermore, Frank Pick, an executive member of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England from 1926 until his death in 1941, became the Head of London Passenger Transport Board, and proved a key figure in developing radically new, modern designs for the London Underground (Matless 1998: 51). Pick was a champion of Walter Gropius, providing an introduction to his translated The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (1935). So, in a sense, “England could be presented as the historic and contemporary home of a modern spirit, thereby able to accommodate the international modern and shape it through its own modern tradition” (Matless 1998: 52). In England, then, the ‘Machine Age’ appeared, to some, to promise open, ordered cities that might work alongside a rich countryside. Controlled harmony was very much seen to be the order of the day. Indeed, Geoffrey Boumphrey also dreamed of roads as arteries running the length and breadth of the body of the nation which would increase circulation (Boumphrey 1937: 180), in a move which, in some ways, foreshadowed the corporeally-aware discourse of the regenerative London 2012 Olympic bid. But while these major modern urban projects were being dreamed up, planned and executed, coeval cinematic representations

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of the East End provided images of an urban space which had apparently been bi-passed by these seemingly positive, progressive aspects of modernity. These films, such as Pandora’s Box and The Threepenny Opera, featured pre-modern, pre-machine age, pre-mass production housing and unplanned slum developments. The onscreen visualisation of an idea of the East End thus tended to construct a space that had not yet succumbed to what Marshall Berman has termed the “tragedy of development” (1997: 40) or, indeed, Nietzsche’s Dionysian “creation of destruction” (Harvey 1990: 16-7). As such, this visualised cinematic space was antithetical to the future space that had been described by the Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia in his Messaggio (1914): “but to raise the new built structure on a sane plane, gleaning every benefit of science and technology […] establishing new forms, new lines, new reasons for existence solely out of the special conditions of modern living and its projection as aesthetic value in our sensibilities” (Frampton 1997: 87). Modern urban developments felt new because they were so radically different to under-developed or ruined spaces. Moreover, it seems that this way of seeing modern cities – placing them against their pre-modern antecedents – was becoming an increasingly transnational and primarily bourgeois phenomenon. In The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), David Harvey enters into a useful discussion concerning what he sees as the defining characteristics of modernity. When examining the ways in which modern artists and architects confronted the chaotic change engendered by what Jürgen Habermas has termed the ‘project of modernity’, Harvey argues that if modern life is indeed so suffused with the sense of the fleeting, the ephemeral, the fragmentary, and the contingent, then a number of profound consequences follow. To begin with, modernity can have no respect even for its own past, let alone that of any pre-modern social order […]. Modernity, therefore, not only entails a ruthless break with any or all preceding historical conditions, but is characterized by a never-ending process of internal ruptures and fragmentations within itself. (1990: 11-2)

This ruthless break of modernity from the past effectively involved a movement away from what Harvey terms “the irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition […], the arbitrary use of power as well as […]


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the dark side of our own human natures” (1990: 12). It is precisely these apparently irrational sides of what some took to be ‘human nature’ – so powerfully challenged by the modern planners – that resurfaced in visions of the East End constructed in a number of European films in the 1920s and 1930s. Marshall Berman has argued that modernity is a mode of experience which has been shared by men and women all over the world. But for Berman this experience of modernity has also been profoundly dialectical (1997: 15-17). His thesis echoes the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), written in the aftermath of the Nazi holocaust, explores the ways in which the idealistic hopes of the Enlightenment and the technological and scientific progress encapsulated by modernity had in fact resulted in a new kind of barbarism. One section of their study offers a critique of urban developments which gives insights into the ways in which modern architectural projects defined themselves as progressive by steadfastly emphasising their imagined difference to the slum areas they rose beside during the 1920s and 1930s: The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, towards which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centers look like slums […]. (1997: 120)

A cinematic idea of the East End has often been mobilised as a clear example of the apparently darker, irrational aspects of a profoundly dialectical experience of modernity. In many 1920s and 1930s representations of east London, a dark, chaotic and irrational urban space – the product of the uncontrollable forces of the Industrial Revolution – was visualised in stark contrast to the totalising plans of the ‘city as machine’ that were being offered by modern architects. So it seems that, in some ways, an idea of the East End came to operate as a symptom of unconscious fears of modern Western modes of living. In the 1920s, especially, the East End provided the perfect chiaroscuro space on to which narratives in which people still clearly lived with brutality and fear could be projected. As David B. Clarke has pointed out,

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modernity “was marked by a powerful obsession to impose a thoroughly rationalized order on to the world, an order that would efface all the traces of the ambivalence that characterized earlier modes of life” (1997: 3). If Le Corbusier’s rationalist, modern style of architecture was driven by his concept of a house as a “machine for modern living” (Harvey 1990: 23), such houses certainly did not exist in the cinematic representations of the East End in the 1920s and 1930s.

Proud City? It seems that fictional tales from the East End ‘abyss’ markedly fell away during the Second World War. There are a number of possible reasons for this. The war provided much-needed employment for many working-class east Londoners, and the area became a powerful symbol of the war effort and stoic resistance to the Germans, especially during the Blitz. In the East End, it seemed, the whole of England could be seen to be pulling together. Indeed, “visions of egalitarian peace fed on a sense that initially the establishment was prepared to countenance an unequal degree of suffering according to class” (Matless 1998: 184). Moreover, the war also saw the popular mobilisation of the figure of the cockney as a national hero. As the Ministry of Information put it, “nothing has affected the unconquerable optimism of the Cockney nor has anything restricted his ready if graveyard humour” (Ministry of Information, Front Line 1940-41: The Official Story of the Civil Defence of Britain, 65; in Matless 1998: 188). But visions of the East End as a ‘low’ space did not die away completely. Nigel Balchin’s novel Darkness Falls from the Air (1942) clearly elucidates the differing wartime experiences felt by those living in the East End and West End of London. Indeed, during the Blitz the East End formed the Luftwaffe’s ‘Target Area A’, while west London became the strategically inferior ‘Target Area B’ (Palmer 2000: 139-40). The major bombing of east London began on 7 September 1940. Subsequent raids on 15-16 October and 15-16 November 1940 and 19-20 March, 19-20 April and 27-28 July 1941 also concentrated on this area of London, and industrial sites and terraced houses were swept away. Interestingly, Alan Palmer has remarked that during the war a number of cultural frontiers were crossed in London. For example, the


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working classes began to drink in the saloon bars of local pubs – spaces which had more often than not been designated for toffs and swells who were there ‘doing the East End’, so to speak. The working classes also enjoyed a surprisingly wide range of culture, including jazz, classical music and drama. Indeed, the Saddler’s Wells Ballet performed in Victoria Park in the summers of 1942 and 1943 (Palmer 2000: 145-6). After the war, a number of films attempted to bring east London to the screen. For example, the area featured in a corpus of British documentary films (Bullock 1997: 52-61; Gold and Ward 1997: 5982). 3 Housing Problems incorporated face-to-face interviews with residents of bombed-out East End slums and others who had been rehoused in a new block, Lea View House, in Hackney (Gold and Ward 1997: 64). In Proud City (Dir. R. Keene, 1945), the British architect and urban planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie is pictured leading the spectator through aspects of the County of London Plan (1943) and the Greater London Plan (1945), pointing at diagrams and maps where slum clearances were felt to be required, and presenting a model of the Stepney Reconstruction Area in east London that features a collection of modern towers (Bullock 1997: 56; Gold and Ward 1997: 67-9). Indeed, Abercrombie planned a rebuilt city, as well as the construction of new towns such as Harlow and Basildon for up to 60,000 Londoners each, and new, modern transport links (Matless 1998: 204). Likewise, the reconstruction of heavily damaged areas of West Ham was reported in Neighbourhood 15 (1945). But just as these documentary films captured the reconstruction of the ‘real’ material fabric of postwar east London, a wave of fictional films appeared during and after the Second World War which effectively exploited the ‘spirit’ of the East End. One such film was The Bells Go Down (Dir. Basil Dearden, 1943), starring Tommy Trinder as Tommy Turk and James Mason as Ted Robbins, which follows a set of volunteers in the London Auxiliary Fire Service called up to supplement the regular fire service during the Blitz.

3

These films include Housing Problems (Dir. Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton, 1935), The Smoke Menace (Dir. John Grierson, 1937), The City (Dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, 1939), Land of Promise (Dir. Paul Rotha, 1946), New Town (1948) and Planned Town (1948). See Gold and Ward (1997).

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Released by Ealing Studios into this post-war socio-cultural climate, It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), directed by Robert Hamer, tells the story of an escaped convict, Tommy Swann (John MacCullum), on the run from Dartmoor Prison, who, on arrival in Bethnal Green, gains shelter from an old lover (Googie Withers) whom he finds married to a dull older man, George Sandigate (Edward Chapman), and struggling to raise his children. Scenes in the film set in a ramshackle, busy East End street market (mainly recreated in the studio) again foreground the essentially pre-modern nature of this space. We see horses and carts (but few cars), and coarse cockney dialects pepper the soundtrack. We are invited, then, to imagine this to be a parochial space in which everybody knows everybody else. Just as in Thomas Burke’s Limehouse tales, a pub is situated at the centre of this imagined community. Outside this pub a lone blind trumpeter plays. A Salvation Army band moves through the streets. We see an organised political march pass by on its way to Hyde Park. Long shots of these urban spaces, recreated in the studio, clearly draw on the established visual iconography of a well developed idea of the East End (especially Doré’s engravings of steam trains rattling over high railway bridges), and again evoke the closed, insular nature of this space (Fig. 8). At other points in the film, location footage shot in the Petticoat Lane street market near Aldgate is employed as if to claim documentary-style realism for the narrative. Indeed, critics at the time the film was released suggested that the East End setting offered the film a distinct authenticity (Brunsdon 1999). Everyday life in the family house of George and Rose Sandigate is characterised by strict, gendered codes of conduct and behaviour. As an East End housewife, Rose is expected to run the house, to cook and to clean, while George sits at the head of the table, is bathed by his wife in front of the fire, and is expected to discipline their errant teenage daughters. One of these girls, Violet (Susan Shaw), dreams of becoming a famous singer, and is seduced by a Jewish music shop owner and entrepreneur, Morry Hyams (Sydney Tafler), who promises her stardom. It soon becomes clear that Hyams and his upwardly-mobile family dream of moving to Stamford Hill in north London. Indeed, at one point in the film, Bessie (Jane Hylton) asks Morry: “What’s wrong with the East End, anyway?” To this question, Morry replies: “It smells.” The East End, then, is again marked here as


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a low space – a space to avoid or escape. It is also implicitly linked

Fig. 8. It Always Rains on Sunday (Robert Hamer, 1947)

with criminality through the return of Tommy Swann, the convict. But the film also blurs distinctions between petty criminals, gangsters and the police, as many of the men who would fall into these categories are drawn as well-dressed figures in suits. Boxing and wrestling are also placed at the centre of a clearly masculine, pugilistic East End culture as they are in No Way Back (Dir. Stefan Osiecki, 1949), a film that features a character named Johnnie ‘The Cruncher’ Thompson (Terence de Marney), who could well be the bastard offspring of Thomas Burke’s Battling Burrows. Immoral sexual activity between working-class East Enders is also featured in It Always Rains on Sunday, as Tommy and the now-married Rose briefly renew their affair. And when Tommy eventually turns on Rose, the violence of a working-class man towards a woman appears especially suited to this constructed East End space. Carol Reed’s A Kid for Two Farthings (1954), adapted from a screenplay by Wolf Mankowitz, tells a story, set in Petticoat Lane, of

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a young boy (Jonathan Ashmore) who, mistaking a one-horned goat for a unicorn, believes his miraculous find will bring good luck to his struggling family, friends and neighbours. Reed’s film appears, like It Always Rains on Sunday, to have been influenced, at least in part, by the Poetic Realism of directors such as Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné. It recreates Petticoat Lane in the studio, but combines these scenes with footage shot on location in and around Middlesex Street. These location shots show a street market full of life, packed with stalls selling all kinds of goods. Indeed, in one shot, the famous Tubby Isaacs fish stall is featured. Other shots recreate the market in the studio and depict a dirty, chaotic, carnivalesque East End. Much of the action in the film centres on a Dickensian tailor’s shop run by a kindly old Jew, Mr Kandinsky (David Kossoff). As such, the film interestingly depicts an East End Jewish community that was gradually dying out in the aftermath of the Second World War. 4 Wilfred Shingleton’s art direction focuses on the claustrophobic working conditions faced by East Enders, even in these supposedly modern times. A muscular young man, Sam (Joe Robinson), works for Kandinsky and sits like an exhibit or statue at a large machine press by the shop window. Sam is a bodybuilder. A sub-plot in the film follows his courtship of a beautiful young blonde woman, Sonia (Diana Dors), who works in a shop up the street. Under pressure to make some money so that he can marry her, Sam is seduced into taking part in lucrative wrestling bouts at Blackie Isaac’s Gym, a local hall. The evenings in Reed’s Petticoat Lane are spent dancing to jazz in the street under colourful neon lights. These scenes hark back to a period during the war when, in ‘Double Summer Time’ (from 1941 the clocks remained two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time in May, July and August), individuals could enjoy the light evenings after work (Palmer 2000: 145). It is during one of these outdoor scenes in the film that a successful older wrestler approaches Sam with a proposal. A big finale is set up at Blackie Isaac’s Gym, and in some well-staged fight scenes, Sam beats the larger and older man. He earns enough money not only to marry Sonia but also to buy Mr Kandinsky a brand new tailor’s press.

4

This is a vision of the type of vanished community that Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair would search for during the 1990s – a search documented in their co-authored book Rodinsky’s Room (1999).


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Carol Reed employs striking colours in the film in order to emphasise the colourful culture of post-war east London, but the narrative following Sam and Sonia strays away from Poetic Realism, as the film perhaps anticipates a film-going public more interested in a nascent American-influenced youth culture than gritty reality, by offering them a British Marilyn Monroe in the shape of Diana Dors. The film foregrounds, then, an enduring English working-class fascination with post-war American popular culture, and suggests the ways in which this once potentially revolutionary working class could perhaps be bought off by a growing consumer culture. Indeed, in one shot we see Diana Dors gamely sucking Coca-Cola through a straw as a neon sign flickers with the brand logo of the manufacturing giant above her head.

Rubble and Ruin In Charles Crichton’s Ealing comedy, Hue and Cry (1947), filmed soon after the Blitz, the ruined warehouses of the East End docks appear to offer the promise of a new world peopled by an energetic and imaginative urban youth (Fig.9). In this film, a group of feral young kids, the ‘Blood and Thunder Boys’, uncover the workings of a criminal gang that uses a popular boy’s weekly magazine as a means of communication. The film stars Alastair Sim as the magazine writer, Felix H. Wilkinson, Harry Fowler as Joe Kirby (the schoolboy who uncovers the conspiracy), Jack Warner as Kirby’s boss, Nightingale, and Jack Lambert as Detective Inspector Ford. The kids run amok in ruined architecture. On one level, then, Crichton’s film seems to suggest that this generation of inner-city youngsters is in danger of ending up as broken as the buildings in which they play. But these youths manage to spectacularly assert themselves as the narrative progresses. And the chase scenes that take place in bomb-damaged docks effectively signal the emergence of a cinematic sub-genre – the East End ‘rubble film’. Films that might be included in this sub-genre, such as Sparrows Can’t Sing (Dir. Joan Littlewood, 1962), A Place to Go (Dir. Basil Dearden, 1963) and Bronco Bullfrog (Dir. Barney PlattsMills, 1969), employ bombed-out and dilapidated east London spaces in order to examine the ways in which many of the rules of controlled,

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rational, modern urban living have been imposed or, indeed, can be challenged or subverted. Sparrows Can’t Sing (1962) was directed by Joan Littlewood, well known for her Workshop productions at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. The film was shot mainly on location in parts of east London, and features several actors who would go on to become household names in Britain. It stars James Booth as Charlie, a merchant seaman who returns to the East End after a period at sea, only to find that his house has been demolished and that his young wife, Maggie (Barbara Windsor), has had a child, left him, and moved into a flat with a new boyfriend in a brand new, modern tower block. This film, then, captures east London at a moment of radical change, as parts

Fig. 9. Hue and Cry (Charles Crichton, 1947)

of it develop from a post-war Blitz-damaged wasteland into a new, optimistic, modern space characterised by the gleaming new tower blocks that the film places at the centre of the narrative. This change appears especially radical because an East End chronotope had for so long been imagined as essentially unchanging. Sparrows Can’t Sing,


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then, is a film about modern architecture and its socio-cultural effects on a space or place that has more often than not been imagined as backward, pre-modern or anti-modern. Location shooting in the film foregrounds the spatial tensions that were developing between the varying architectures of a changing East End. At one point early in the narrative, the returning Charlie asks an old man, “Oi! Where are all the houses?” and says “But this used to be my street!” Rummaging through the rubble, he shouts “This used to be my kitchen!” Charlie appears amazed at the pace of change in the area. As he searches for his wife in corner pubs and street markets – spaces in which everybody appears to know him (even after his period of absence) – his journey takes him into an old house in which we see a Sikh family living in one room, Turks in another room, and a jovial African family in another. The East End, then, is clearly depicted here as a space that still attracts immigrants. As such, the film manages to evoke the fragmentation of the British Empire, offering evidence of the migration of its postcolonial subjects to London. After these striking shots, Littlewood cuts to shots of Maggie (Barbara Windsor) wandering around a modern supermarket. This space operates as a slice of 50s Americana, replete with bright, clean aisles piled high with consumer goods. This supermarket stands starkly opposed to the ruined spaces found by Charlie as well as the terraced streets and corner pubs. It operates as a sign of a nascent consumer culture that would facilitate the blurring of working-class and middle-class English identities during the decades ahead. As such, the placement of this establishment in the middle of the East End signals a radical change in socio-economic relations as well as spatial politics. The same can be said for the gleaming tower blocks – phallically fetishised by Littlewood’s low camera placement – which clearly come to operate as signifiers of upward mobility in the film. Maggie’s flat in the new block is a Le Corbusierian ‘machine for modern living’. It is light and airy, positioned high above the old, pre-modern, cobbled East End streets. In one memorable shot, young women on ground level are pictured gazing longingly up at these colossal new buildings. Interestingly, these optimistic new urban developments are also characterised by authoritarian attempts to control them. For example, the newly installed caretaker of the tower block is quick to employ his powers by attempting to regulate the public spaces around the build-

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ing. He makes a fuss about the illegal parking of bicycles and cars on the landscaped lawns and walkways, and attempts to enforce metropolitan by-laws. And later, Charlie’s mum hints at the snobbery of the high-rise inhabitants, telling him that “people get funny when they move round places like that”. But Sparrows Can’t Sing also clearly exploits a number of East End stereotypes. Everybody apparently knows Charlie, a charming, quick-witted, happy-go-lucky, fly-by-theseat-of-his-pants, wheeler-dealer type who is full of energy and banter. But he is also a problem drinker who can turn violent towards men and women. The white working-class East End socio-cultural milieu depicted in the film also appears centred on a pub (in this case the Red Lion) in which men and women know their place, gallons of alcohol are consumed, songs break out around an old upright piano, and fights break out before the songs are finished. This culture is also depicted as masculine and pugilistic, centred as it is, again, on boxing and wrestling matches held in local halls. But other working-class men in the film are also caricatured as lazy, unemployed loafers, such as Charlie’s brother, Fred (Roy Kinnear). And women are generally shown to be confined to the kitchen, out shopping, pushing prams, working behind the bar of the pub, singing with the jazz band, or acting promiscuously. Basil Dearden’s film A Place to Go (1963), based on Michael Fisher’s novel Bethnal Green, was shot on location in and around Bethnal Green, and also captures an east London undergoing rapid change during the years after the Second World War. The narrative centres on the Flint family: the father, Matt (Bernard Lee), mother, Lil (Doris Hare), and son, Ricky (Mike Sarne). The ‘place to go’ of the film’s title is a hideout in a bombsite, where Ricky takes his girlfriend, Cat (Rita Tushingham). The narrative follows the family through scenes of progressive violence and crime, until Ricky and Cat’s ‘place to go’ is demolished by bulldozers and returns to rubble. This bombed-damaged, ruined East End space was returned to several years later in Bronco Bullfrog (Dir. Barney Platts-Mills, 1969), a film that stars Sam Shepherd as Jo Saville (aka Bronco Bullfrog), Del Walker as Del Quant and Anne Gooding as Irene Richardson. It tells the story of a trio of working-class teenagers who experience gang warfare and the rise of juvenile delinquency in the shadows of the new modern tower blocks. The undeveloped bombsites in the area, effectively unregulated and free from surveillance, prove once again


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to provide younger characters with refuge from their elders (the generation that took them to war). Bronco Bullfrog, like Hue and Cry, Sparrows Can’t Sing and A Place to Go, places youth in broken spaces, away from the watchful eye of this older generation, as if to encourage this new generation to take control of a new London which might rise from the ashes of the war-damaged city. Thus, the idea of the East End is once again mobilised as a potential site of resistance; as a site imaginatively set in opposition to a spatialised English middle-class self-image. I now want to begin to consider how far visions of the antimodern East End captured in these films began to give way to more highly-complex visions of this space, as the spatial politics of London and broader concepts of space and ‘the urban’ began to shift in intriguing ways during the late 1960s and 1970s.

V After Ronan Point: Re-imagining the Territory The past is fluid, a black swamp; dip for whatever you need. - Sinclair (1998d: 26) A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city. - Certeau(1988: 93)

In the field of architecture it has been argued that the ideas of the modernisers of the C.I.A.M. began to give way to a set of more diverse architectural concepts from about 1972, when significant changes in perceived spatial divisions within cities and elsewhere were seen to occur (Marcuse and van Kempen 2000: 2). David Harvey has suggested that at this historical moment a movement can be detected away from a modern idea of urban planning and development that focused on “large-scale, metropolitan-wide, technologically rational and efficient urban plans” towards a postmodern urbanism which “cultivates, instead, a conception of the urban fabric as necessarily fragmented, a ‘palimpsest’ of past forms superimposed upon each other, and a ‘collage’ of current uses, many of which may be ephemeral” (1990: 66). Moreover, Charles Jencks has argued that postmodern architecture and urbanism can be defined in terms of how far contemporary communications have collapsed the “usual space and time boundaries” that have defined modern urban areas, facilitating the dispersal, decentralisation and deconcentration of urban forms (Harvey 1990: 75-6). So distinct changes in the ways in which cities are conceptualised, imagined and built can be detected occurring during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Interestingly, Charles Jencks has dated what he sees to be the symbolic end of modernism and the passage into the postmodern (in terms of architecture and urban planning in Britain) to the ‘cumulative collapse’ of the Ronan Point tower in Canning Town in east London in 1968 (2003: 459). With this tragic event the dream of a modern life

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for the working classes offered by the tower blocks so eagerly embraced by Maggie (Barbara Windsor) in Joan Littlewood’s film Sparrows Can’t Sing (1962) was literally seen to fall apart. After the collapse of Ronan Point, “the era of town-hall big-spending was over. Housing programmes were cut and cut again, public properties deteriorated, private house prices in Greater London zoomed, and more people quit London altogether.” (Porter 2000: 431) It is certainly significant that modern solutions to housing in Britain were seen to fail so spectacularly in the East End – a space still so often imagined as essentially pre-modern and backward. In this chapter I want to examine how, during the 1970s, a number of representations of the East End began to reflect this postmodern ‘spatial turn’ (that is, a movement away from viewing urban space as a distinctly mappable, plannable and controllable phenomenon), in order to begin to understand the ways in which a traditional idea of the East End has been challenged or, indeed, reinforced by these developments. Up until this historical moment, as I have tried to show, the East End, as an idea, had been broadly imagined as a distinctly pre-modern or anti-modern space – unplanned, unenlightened and irrational. But the rhetoric of progressive urban planning, often driven by an emancipatory ideology, had in fact altered much of the material fabric of east London, peppering it with Bauhaus-style blocks and Le Corbusierian towers. The partial collapse of Ronan Point in 1968 came to symbolise, for many, the collapse of these grand ideals. This event, coupled with the apparent distrust of metanarratives such as ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’, and the collapsing of space and time boundaries that for many signalled the arrival of postmodernity, was to have a profound effect on the ways in which the East End of London was depicted in cultural texts. Contemporary postmodern urbanism has seen “a spatial concentration within cities of a new urban poverty on the one hand and of specialised ‘high-level’ internationally connected business activities on the other, with increasing spatial divisions not only between each of them but also among segments of the ‘middle class’ in between” (Marcuse and van Kempen 2000: 3). From the 1970s, then, the division between rich and poor within urban spaces was seen to become far more complex than previously been understood. This proliferation of social or physical, material boundaries or divisions was understood to have been created and perpetuated by significant changes in the


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global economy. Furthermore, the spatial sea change detected by many commentators in global economic relations has been seen to disrupt previous patterns of power and domination, whether they be real or imagined. Michael J. Dear has written lucidly about these spatial developments in terms of what he sees as the emergence of a postmodern urban condition: Old spaces are being defiled, and new spaces are being defined, including those associated with deindustrialization, environmentalism, reinvigorated nationalisms, diminished democracies, cyberspace, NIMBYism and minority-led social movements. Paralleling these shifts is the creation of different kinds of urbanism, characterized by edge cities, gated communities, and a global hierarchy of new ‘world cities’ that is a key to understanding the burgeoning geopolitical order. (2000: 1)

It has been suggested that from the beginning of the 1970s, London began to develop into one of these so-called ‘world cities’. But at the same time, the ‘imagined’ centre of London shifted eastwards during the 1980s, as the financial district in the City grew rapidly towards Spitalfields, Shoreditch and Aldgate, and the Docklands citadel sprang up on the Isle of Dogs (A. Gibson 2003: 293; P. Baker 2003: 327). With the redevelopment of Docklands in east London during the 1980s (discussed in the next chapter), this area of the city, previously imagined as an uncivilised backwater, became, for many, an archetypally postmodern space. In this chapter I want to look more closely at how and why an idea of the East End began to draw the attention of a new generation of writers and filmmakers during the 1970s and 1980s. Postmodernity is, of course, a highly contested term, and I employ it here with caution. I should state that, for the purpose of my argument, my conception of postmodernity, following Lyotard, is essentially as a continuation of modernity, but also as a response to radical material changes and changes in the perception of space and time which have taken place during the late-twentieth century. I take postmodernity, as a critical term, then, to embrace the perceived homogenisation of space under global capitalism, the increasing grip of multi-national corporations on spaces, and a general shift from industrial to information-based societies in the west. As Thomas Docherty has pointed out, “it would be a futile and pointless exercise to offer

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any simple definition of the term itself; indeed, much argument arises over the question of precisely how the postmodern should be defined” (1999: 1). If the experience of modernity was broadly constituted by the age of machines and the sense of speed produced by the railways, automobiles and aeroplanes which contributed to the sense of a shrinking globe (Kern 1983), then I would concur with the widelyheld definition of postmodernity that holds that it is a continuation of this process towards globalisation (Rykwert 2004: 8). In Globalization and its Discontents (1998), Saskia Sassen argues that an incipient transnational capitalist system can be seen to be evolving, one in which international financial business centres are globally linked in cyberspace. But at the same time a new geography of marginality has formed in which the gap between the rich and poor is widening. Sassen contends that globalisation and transnationalisation do not signal the demise of the traditional nation state, but instead lead to a loosening of traditional loyalties, including those linking individual identity to nation and community. One effect of the increasing homogenisation and heterogenisation of place which has resulted from the global cultural economy, increased globalisation and localisation, has been the perceived collapse of spatial indicators such as inside/outside. To many it seems that the abstract and sharply delineated spaces of modernity are apparently no longer distinct. This has led to a sense of placelessness (Smethurst 2000: 33). For other commentators, the combined economic and political imperatives of globalisation appear to generate common outcomes everywhere, producing growing ethnic, racial and cultural heterogeneity and social and spatial polarisation (Öncü and Weyland 1997; Giddens 1990; Featherstone 1995). It has been frequently argued that allied to this focus on the fluidity of the borders and boundaries between nation states, ethnic groups and public and private spheres, has been a complex criss-crossing of flows of capital, culture, and labour. For many, then, the contemporary postmodern world has been increasingly imagined as borderless. The work of Sharon Zukin can offer insights into how the East End of London has been imaginatively and materially transformed during recent decades, as established concepts of place have been increasingly challenged. Zukin has developed the useful notion of ‘liminal spaces’. She asserts that the localism of the modern city (the clearly delineated urbanism of distinct areas, zones, or neighbourhoods) has been transformed. According to Zukin, we can now ex-


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perience postmodern transitional spaces which are “betwixt and between”; which “complicate(s) the effort to construct spatial identity” (1992: 222). For Zukin, liminal spaces are fluid and ambiguous. They slip between the global and the local, between the public and the private, work and home, commerce and culture. She also suggests that landscapes can be seen being re-made in the image of capital, reinforcing the economic base/cultural superstructure paradigm (Keith and Pile 1993: 7-8). A similar point has been made by Michael Keith and Steve Pile, who argue that “old loyalties of class or gender or race fragment, dislocate, rupture, disperse; new loyalties of class and gender and race interrupt, disrupt, recombine, fuse. No one is quite sure of the ground on which they stand, which direction they are facing, or where they are going.” (1993: 3) Moreover, Zukin advocates that these so-called liminal landscapes can produce fragmented images, and, as such, can evoke a host of competing spatialities. We might choose to think of the contemporary East End in a similar way. In many ways it has effectively become a liminal space, “betwixt and between” the global and the local, wealth and poverty, differing ethnic cultures, and an imagined past and an imagined future. As postmodernity began to manifest itself in London, the East End was rediscovered by a number of writers and artists. What has become traditionally thought of as an exotic, unknown, unmodernised territory became ripe for exploration by a new generation (Baker 2003: 327). I now want to begin to look at the work of the most important East End writer (or re-writer of the East End) since the latenineteenth century – Iain Sinclair. Sinclair’s work stands at the centre of what I want to call contemporary neo-Victorian East End discourse. His writing and filmmaking not only capture the radical material changes that have occurred in the East End during the last decades of the twentieth century, but also bring to the surface the enduring myths that keep a spatial idea of the East End alive within an English middle-class consciousness. His work articulates the possibility that in any landscape there are simultaneously present multiple enunciations of distinct forms of space, “and these may be reconnected to the process of re-visioning and remembering the spatialities of counter-hegemonic cultural practices” (Keith and Pile 1993: 6). As such, as I hope to show, Sinclair’s work has profoundly influenced the ways in which

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other writers and artists have chosen to represent postmodern London, and the postmodern East End in particular. 1 Andrew Gibson has recently remarked that “the period that runs from Punk to Blair has seen boom-time for – not to say the fetishization of – the London writer” (2003: 292). Gibson also points out that two of the most visible of contemporary London writers, Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, have had a kind of “face-off” as their own literary territories have overlapped. But both writers can be situated at the vanguard of what has essentially become a sub-genre of contemporary British fiction – the postmodern or neo-Victorian East End novel. The eastern reaches of the city have come to represent again, just as they did in the late-nineteenth century, a spatial idea – a highly complex socio-political and economic microcosm of urban England. The East End has been depicted in contemporary neo-Victorian literature and film, then, as a dense space torn between a future of global US-style capitalism and an intense nostalgia for mythical narratives of the past. It has been shown to be a space traditionally aligned with the white working class and immigrants, but also now aligned with an upwardly-mobile middle class, artists and bohemians. Gibson argues that “both Ackroyd and Sinclair are bidding to be memoralists of a London that, in many respects, seems to be on the wane, a London that is vanishing” (2003: 292). Contemporary East End discourse highlights the tensions produced by this desire to articulate old mythical narratives and recondite histories on the one hand and the battle to re-colonise this space on the other.

On an Eastern Arc Iain Sinclair, born in Wales in 1943 but long resident in Hackney – an increasingly gentrified, “patched and restored” (Sinclair 1998d: 36) area situated a couple of miles north east of the City of London – has been undertaking an immense cultural excavation of London since the early 1970s (Brooker 2002: 96-119) which has fuelled “an obsessive focus on the repressed history of the contemporary landscape” (Mengham 2002: 56). Another contemporary London writer, Patrick 1

For more on the work of Iain Sinclair see Bond (2005) and Bond and Bavidge (2007).


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Wright, has usefully argued that “Sinclair carried out the poetic realignment of London” in the face of the comprehensive plans for redevelopment put in place by the Greater London Council (GLC) (1991: 162). By reading Sinclair alongside and through contemporary theoretical discourse on the nature of space and place I intend to show how far his work can facilitate an understanding of what, if anything, now distinguishes the East End as a spatial idea from a wider, nebulous idea of postmodern London. Sinclair began publishing poetry and exploring the East End in the early 1970s while he was working in a variety of jobs in east London (including brewery worker, cigar packer, and parks gardener). After running the Albion Press during the 1970s – a venture that allowed him to publish his own Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge as well as collections by Brian Catling and Chris Torrance – Sinclair eventually found critical acclaim and a larger readership with the publication of his first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, in 1987, which was the sole runner-up in the Guardian fiction prize of that year. White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings draws on the mythological discourse surrounding the Whitechapel murders of 1888 as it follows the occult adventures of a number of book dealers who haunt London and South-East England. Sinclair’s second novel, Downriver, followed in 1991. This is a dense text which examines the socio-cultural impact of the redevelopment of Docklands. Radon Daughters was published in 1994. The critically acclaimed Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London was published in 1997 – a record of Sinclair’s psychogeographical perambulations around London. London Orbital, published in 2002, records another psychogeographical walk – this time around the M25 motorway. With this book and Dining on Stones, or The Middle Ground (2004), Sinclair continued to cement his reputation as a leading visionary writer of London. But he has also worked as an experimental filmmaker, and the aesthetics of film and a broad knowledge of cinema history inform his written work. Indeed, he has continued to make films that have largely focused on east London, such as The Cardinal and the Corpse (or a funny night out) (with Chris Petit, 1992), Asylum (with Chris Petit, 2000), and London Orbital (also with Chris Petit, 2002). Iain Sinclair is primarily interested in what he sees as a hidden London (Perrill 1997: 309). He uncovers marginal traces of London’s culture by, in his words, “allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern

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to assert itself” (1998d: 4). This London is, for Sinclair, as Rod Mengham has pointed out, “a state of mind, a stratum of feelings, a set of memories, and the evidence for it is to be found quite precisely in the streets” (2002: 60). But it is highly significant that Sinclair’s imagined London has its nexus to the east of the city. His vision, then, moves “on an eastern arc” (1998d: 13). Sinclair is an East End writer. Indeed, Peter Brooker suggests that “Sinclair mythologizes a new gallery of East End types: the Kray twins patrolling their manor, survivors of the ‘swinging sixties’. Minor personalities of showbiz and the criminal underground, itinerant bibliophiles, out-of-print pulp writers, sometime movie-makers, anarchists, avant-garde poets and artists.” (2002: 98) Brooker further argues that Sinclair mobilises the force of these figures into a “cultivated disorder,” along with the mythical Jack the Ripper and Elephant Man, Gothic visions of the East End, and his counter-culture acquaintances, in order to confront his enemy, ‘the Widow’, Margaret Thatcher (2002: 99). But Sinclair’s writing on London can also be situated within the discourse that has constructed an idea of the East End around a “distinctive (spectacularized) history and myth” (Cunningham 2007: 137-8). His work thus fits into an ongoing discursive tradition that continues to imagine, re-imagine and mythologise this space. Indeed, the East End continues to exist through Sinclair’s work, even if it has now, in some senses, materially changed beyond all recognition. Sinclair’s imagined East End is a palimpsest – a text which is forever being rewritten (or over-written). And this palimpsest is haunted by familiar figures. Julian Wolfreys, who has written widely on Sinclair and London, argues: “The act of writing the city is, then, for Sinclair, always an act of responding to ghosts, to the traces of ghosts. Writing London involves acts of fidelity to memories which are not our own.” (1998a: 140) Wolfreys outlines elsewhere some of the reasons why Sinclair’s work on London is so important: “Sinclair’s publications engage with particular Londons through mapping, affirming, and bearing witness to the singularity of specific urban spaces and their multiple temporal traces, which have no other connection than the fact that particular events or types of events have occurred in the same location.” (2004: 162) Wolfreys sees the spectral, ghostly nature of Sinclair’s writing as analogous to Jacques Derrida’s interest in textual hauntings. For Wolfreys, Sinclair’s rewriting of the


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city demonstrates the ways in which the ghosts of the city haunt the urbs – the material fabric of London. Interestingly, Sinclair’s texts appear themselves to be haunted by the work of Blake, Defoe, Dickens, Conrad, Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, James Thomson (“B.V.”), Gerald Kersh and V.S. Pritchett, among many others. 2 And Sinclair’s texts can in turn be seen to haunt the work of contemporary writers such as Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, Justin Cartwright, Penelope Lively and Matthew D’Ancona. Themes and concepts occur and reoccur like musical riffs throughout Sinclair’s dense and often difficult novels. In some of his stylised paragraphs the language flows seamlessly like the wide arterial roads out of the city. Others are as chaotic as the West End shopping streets on a weekend. Sentences stutter and grind to a halt like gridlocked London taxis. Others tail off mysteriously like the dark, dead-end alleyways of Whitechapel. By railing against the formal conventions of poetry, prose, criticism, journalism and autobiography, Sinclair adopts a polygeneric, liminal narrative form which is as endlessly fascinating and challenging as the fluid, liminal, postmodern city space it depicts. But his formal debt to modernist poetry and prose can also be clearly detected. His books, after all, manage to capture the polyphony of the city in a way that is not too dissimilar to Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. As such, Sinclair might be considered a modernist (or neo-modernist) writer exploring the margins of postmodern London. Like the ‘high modernists’, Sinclair demonstrates an understanding of the potentially powerful and controlling nature of myth. Indeed, in Suicide Bridge he argues that the need for the old myths is a confession of our failure to handle the world, to be on terms with the life-spill of this moment. We want back to what was never there. Immediate parentage is denied. Deeper & deeper into the sand […]. Myth is breech: faces backwards. The Siamese twin is place. They are seen together & cannot be separated, dependent systems. Man is the messenger substance between them. He is a raised tube, opened at the crown of head & base of feet – so that it

2

Sinclair often refers to the work of these writers in his novels. But he also refers to the work of forgotten, re-forgotten or out of print London writers. Rod Mengham has suggested that this is tantamount to “the setting-up of an alternative canon” (2002: 63). For more on Sinclair’s debt to Conrad see Hampson (2007).

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End flows through him, conscious or unconscious, the power, the surge, the tachyonic voyage. (1998a: 149)

What we see in Sinclair’s work on London, then, is a complex exploration of the ways in which myth informs place and narratives impact upon our experience of space. This, it seems, is why his vision primarily falls on the East End – a space framed by one of the most potent and enduring of all urban mythologies. Building on this mythology, Sinclair creates his own mythology in Lud Heat by speculating on how far specific buildings and other key sites across London are linked by a complex web of forces. I now want to look at how, by detecting and archiving these traces of the imaginary resonances of the city in order to offer a discourse resistant to the impact of the hegemonic forces of global capital on the city – or, in the words of Julian Wolfreys, the “globalizing urban refit” that “seeks to enforce a politics of forgetting” (2004: 164) – Sinclair’s mythology of the city builds on the traditional discourses of an ‘Othered’ idea of the East End, and, as such, serves to reinforce the enduring, or, indeed, eternal mythical power of this idea. As David Cunningham has pointed out, Sinclair has perhaps become more alert to the dangers of “complicity with the forces of investment capital” (2007: 138). That is, his poetic construction of this place-myth might, through its opposition, actually ironically facilitate the Thatcherite reconstruction and regeneration of east London. His presentation of east London thus, in some senses, might further mark it as a space ripe for renewal. Perhaps Sinclair’s increasingly self-reflexive writing and his “self-demotion” (James 2007: 160) as an authorial voice can be understood in terms of an attempt to unyoke himself from the cultural construction of London (and the East End in particular). Bearing these caveats in mind, I want to briefly sketch some of the theoretical, methodological approaches to space and place that might facilitate a greater understanding of Sinclair’s work on the city, and, specifically, his position as a writer/re-writer/mythologiser/deconstructor of the East End.


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Stalker London is whatever can be reached in a one-hour walk. - Sinclair 3

In Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997), Sinclair outlines his peripatetic approach to London. In this work, walking the city becomes textual praxis: “London is begging to be rewritten.” (1998d: 141) His walks often re-write the city, write onto the city, or attempt to re-map space. An example is the V-shaped journey he makes from Hackney, south-east to Greenwich and then north-east to Chingford in Lights Out for the Territory. Sinclair outlines his view of the relationship between walking and writing at the beginning of this text: “I had developed this curious conceit […] that the physical movements of the characters across their territory might spell out the letters of a secret alphabet. Dynamic shapes, with ambitions to achieve a life of their own, quite independent of their supposed author.” (1998d: 1) Every walk, it seems, picks up on the textual nature of the city – street signs, graffiti, bill posters, shop fronts, and transport timetables. But textuality is also projected on to the fabric of the city, as signs, memories and histories flow into and inform each other. Sinclair sees walking as the “best way to explore and exploit the city” (1998d: 4), suggesting that “drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie” (1998d: 4). Sinclair’s concept of drifting here echoes the Situationist International’s strategic notion of the dérive – a kind of “delirious or drunken drifting that tore up the tyranny of the ordered and abstract space of the city planners” (Luckhurst 2003: 337; see also Brooker 2002: 96-105). Indeed, as Guy Debord once wrote: “From the dérive point of view, cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry or exit from certain zones.” (Knabb 1981: 50) The dérive was effectively a politically engaged reformulation of Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur (as theorised by Walter Benjamin). But whereas the flâneur was a solitary figure exploring a modern city full of commodities, the dérive ignores these commodities and chooses instead to drift with the currents of the 3

Sinclair and Atkins (1999: 40).

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city in order to find out where one ends up. That is, the dérive is not interested in the achievement of tangible goals. 4 Intriguingly, Phil Baker has uncovered the Situationist International’s interest in the East End and ‘Jacques L’Eventreur’, noting that the group held its Fourth Conference in September 1960 at the British Sailor’s Society in Limehouse as L’East End, quartier célèbre par ses criminels. As Baker rightly points out: “Psychogeography and Jack the Ripper seem enduringly linked.” (2003: 327-8) Walter Benjamin once argued, “let the many attend to their daily affairs; the man of leisure can indulge in the perambulations of the flâneur only if as such he is already out of place” (1992: 169). But Sinclair is more than a born-again flâneur. His walks are not really purposeless drifts, but instead “dictated by the city in advance of expedition” (Wolfreys 1998a: 147). They are, more accurately, preplanned stalks across an urban text that seek to re-write this text. As Rod Mengham has pointed out: “These wanderings are not like the solitary adventures of the nineteenth-century flâneur, nor are their reveries highly subjective but collaborative, symbiotic attempts to discover and tap into the collective memories and shared experiences that energise particular buildings and patches of ground.” (2002: 60) Sinclair’s status as a flâneur, then, segues into that of the psychogeographer or dérive. The city becomes a psychological entity. It takes on “the characteristics of a map of the mind” (Jenks 1995: 154). Psychogeography uncovers the “emotional and behavioural effects of the environment, and its ambience” (Baker 2003: 323). Charles Jencks has suggested that we all carry with us a museé imaginaire in our minds, drawn from personal experiences of other spaces, or through the discourses of tourism or popular visual culture (Harvey 1990: 87). Sinclair explores the city of representation and the city of memory, but 4

Phil Baker makes this distinction. The Situationist International, active from 1957 to 1972, was a subversive artistic and political movement that grew out of the Lettrists, drawing on the avant-garde aesthetics of Dada and Surrealism. Under Guy Debord they published an annual journal Internationale Situationniste from 1958-1969. In the first issue of the journal, ‘Formulary for a New City’ by Ivan Chtcheglov (aka Gilles Ivain) was published, in which Chtcheglov wrote about a new experimental city in which inhabitants would spend their time in a “continuous dérive”. See Shields (1996: 244-5). The group has had a profound influence on psychogeography and its questioning of the relationship between an individual and their spatial environment. See Sadler (1999).


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his psychogeography of the London of the imagination is always contingent upon the material characteristics of the hard city, the urbs beneath his feet. Phil Baker points out that “psychogeographical history often tends towards a combination of the esoteric and arcane with the deviant and sordid, or antiquarianism with crime and low life” (2003: 325). We can begin to see, then, how and why Sinclair’s psychogeography has tended to remain focused on the East End of London. Interestingly, Sinclair has more recently developed an ambivalent attitude to psychogeography as a concept or praxis. Now, instead, Sinclair has more accurately become a ‘stalker’ of London. As Julian Wolfreys points out, a stalker is a walker “with a purpose but without a goal” (1998a: 147). For Sinclair, then, stalking is walking and drifting “with a thesis” (Sinclair 1998d: 75). He elaborates further on this conceit: “We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent […]. The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how.” (1998d: 75) But Wolfreys suggests that “what is being stalked by Sinclair is nothing less than the condition or spirit of London which haunts Sinclair” (1998a: 148). Sinclair’s stalking of the city, his re-reading and rewriting of the city, is a ghostly process. But, of course, ghosts exist outside any rational, controllable framework of experience. It is significant that many of the spectral phenomena that Sinclair encounters across the city appear to be manifestations of a well-defined spatial idea of an irrational East End, such as the Ripper and his victims, or the Kray twins and their victims. It seems that Sinclair mobilises an idea of the East End in its guise as an oppositional space and employs its mythical irrationality in order to resist the hegemonic rational discourses of redevelopment, regeneration and renewal in east London. Sinclair’s psychogeographical reading and writing of London, then, offers a challenge to city planners. His cognitive mapping offers a mode of resistance to the rational mapping, privatisation and control of contemporary urban space. In this sense, Sinclair’s writing can be subversive and contrary. In his hugely influential book, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Fredric Jameson reads Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960) as a seminal text on cognitive mapping that demonstrates the political possibilities of it as critical praxis. For Jameson, the act of dis-alienation in the traditional city or the practical reconquest of the sense of place can be problematical, but it remains rich with possibilities. Reading Lynch

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through Althusser’s Lacanian redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence”, Jameson argues that a cognitive map can be called upon to “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (1992: 51). He recognises that “we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national, and international class realities” (1992: 52). But he also outlines the theoretical difficulties inherent in cognitive mapping: “An aesthetic of cognitive mapping – a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system – will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice.” (1992: 54) Jameson offers a means of critiquing Sinclair’s work, then, in terms of its employment of cognitive mapping as a potential tool of resistance in a postmodern world: The new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale. (1992: 54)

Although it is perhaps inevitable that Sinclair would not see the aims of his work within the terms articulated here by Jameson, it certainly appears valid to read Sinclair’s cognitive mapping of the East End as an articulation of a means of resistance to the perceived pernicious influence of multi-national capital on this now archetypally postmodern space. In his highly influential text, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau suggested that a totalising view of the city from above, in the form of the view from the top of the (now destroyed) World Trade Center in New York, produces a fictional understanding of the city that obscures quotidian, lived experience


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through a controlling gaze. Critiquing this view of space – held by many urban planners and those in authority running the city – he asks: “Is the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything other than a representation, an optical artefact?” (1988: 92) De Certeau pointed to two methods of imagining the city. The first is the ‘concept city’ of rational urban discourse – the view of those who wish to hold power over the city’s inhabitants, defined through the “production of its own space (un espace propre): rational organization must thus repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it” (1988: 94). This is, of course, the view of east London that has primarily been adopted by the planners of the 2012 Olympics. But for de Certeau, the second, potentially subversive method of imagining the city is the dreamlike approach to spatial practices adopted by those on the streets who, through what he terms ‘pedestrian speech acts’, can reclaim urban space: “In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.” (1988: 117) He elaborates further: “Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places.” (1988: 118) If the city, then, is to be understood as a palimpsest, its re-writing can be facilitated by de Certeau’s conceptual Wandersmänner, “whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (1988: 93). Wandersmänner perform phatic acts. They walk and write the city. When de Certeau suggests that “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered” (1988: 97), he could well be calling for a writer like Sinclair who might embrace walking as praxis that could provide a “space of enunciation”: “What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one’s own vicinity; it is a fiction. Which moreover has the double characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacement and condensation.” (1988: 107) De Certeau sees the emancipatory potential of this approach to the city and recognises its possibilities for local resistance to hegemonic forces, suggesting that “the concept city is decaying” (1988: 95). Sinclair’s spatial practice of stalking, then, echoes the phatic movement of Michel de Certeau’s Wandersmänner. Sinclair demon-

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strates a rhetoric of walking – a planned resistance to the discourses of city planners who seek to transform east London, and the panoptic control of the authorities that govern this space through technologies of surveillance. But Sinclair’s phatic stalking of London appears in many ways to merely reconstitute a familiar territorial idea. Sinclair re-writes the East End as a nebulous spatial idea that resists rational interpretation. As such, in Sinclair’s work the East End can be seen to regain its mythical identity as a subversive, transgressive space that sits in radical opposition to the rational city. It becomes a territory that fulfils Sinclair’s needs. It allows him to critique the destructive nature of multi-national capitalism while at the same time romanticising and exploiting the area’s rich past of ‘Otherness’. It is worth noting here that the flâneur’s ability to interpret and write the city has been critiqued as the preserve of a few middle-class white men with the free time available to indulge in this activity. Just as Judith Walkowitz has suggested that nineteenth-century flâneurie was essentially a male affair (1992: 16), Sinclair’s twentieth-century explorations can be critiqued in a similar way. It is important to acknowledge, then, that Sinclair’s personal history – his race, class and gender – necessarily inform his phatic encounters with the city. While, through his extraordinary writing, Sinclair seeks to counterpoint hegemonic discourses of the city, his texts have now, in a sense, become canonical themselves. I now want to focus specifically on the ways in which Sinclair’s re-imagination and re-writing of the East End has acknowledged (and drawn upon) the discursive nature of this space.

The Architectural Uncanniness of Christ Church, Spitalfields The shadow of Christ’s Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and in the shadow of Christ’s Church, at three o’clock in the afternoon, I saw a sight I never wish to see again. - London (1903: 61)

While he was exploring the heart of London’s East End at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jack London was shocked to find dozens of homeless people sleeping rough in the environs of Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields (Fig. 10). Almost a century


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later, Iain Sinclair, stalking the same streets, noticed that little had changed: “The east London churches still draw the meths-men and derelicts, fire-alcohol devotees, to the attendant parks.” (1998a: 20) I want to examine Sinclair’s interest here in what he suggests is the uncanny nature of the architecture of Christ Church, Spitalfields, and its uncanny ‘territory’ – a psychogeographical space that draws heavily on a mythical idea of the East End – by concentrating on Lud Heat, first published in 1975. By tracing the influence of Sinclair’s trademark psychogeography of the East End on subsequent texts, including Peter Ackroyd’s novel, Hawksmoor (1985), Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell (1996), and Matthew D’Ancona’s novel, Going East (2003), I will try to show how far tensions can be seen to exist between an essentially late-Victorian East End chronotope and the many contemporary neo-Victorian re-imaginings of this idea. Firstly I want to specifically situate Sinclair’s writing within East End discourse. In Lud Heat Sinclair writes: “Christ Church rises out of Spitalfields, which was excavated in 1574 when the brick-fields, from which Brick Lane gets its name, were being dug. Bone masses were then discovered; cartloads. Ashes. Powder. Skulls. Stone coffins.” (1998a: 27) Here, Sinclair’s psychogeographical reading of Christ Church, Spitalfields evokes the imagery of death and burial, clearly recalling H.F.’s description of the impact of the plague on east London in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Sinclair’s language also echoes formative descriptions of a spatial idea of the East End that can be found in the works of late-Victorian writers discussed earlier in this study, such as Arthur Morrison, Walter Besant, William Black and Margaret Harkness, Charles Booth, Andrew Mearns, and Jack London. Indeed, Lud Heat’s Blakean re-‘vision’ of east London specifically draws on this East End discourse by gesturing towards the Ripper murders of 1888 and de Quincey’s representation of the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811: I spoke of the unacknowledged magnetism and control-power, built-in code force, of these places; I would now specify […] the ritual slaying of Marie Jeanette Kelly in the ground floor room of Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, directly opposite Christ Church […], the Ratcliffe Highway slaughter of 1811, with the supposed murderer, stake through the heart, trampled into the pit where four roads cross to the north of St George-in-the-East […]. (1998a: 21)

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Fig. 10. Christ Church, Spitalfields, 2007 (photograph by the author)

This text, then, elides the perceived bestial criminality of these horrific murders with the area’s well-known history of poverty and social deprivation. As such, Sinclair’s psychogeography picks up on traces of these earlier east London narratives, and speculates on how they might


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reverberate around (or impact upon) contemporary, quotidian experiences of this material urban space. Iain Sinclair’s East End, then, remains an uncanny, haunted space. But there is also a distinctly uncanny quality to Sinclair’s work. In many of his novels, poems and films evidence can be found of doubling, déjà-vu, the inexplicable and unexplainable, the supernatural, the appearance of ghosts or revenants, and examples of ‘recurrence’ and ‘return’ (Mengham 2002: 59). Before I examine Sinclair’s representations of the uncanny spatial idea of the East End and the uncanny Christ Church, Spitalfields in particular, I want to briefly outline some useful definitions of the uncanny. In his 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche), Sigmund Freud suggested that the uncanny “is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror” (1985: 339). The phenomenon can be understood as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (1985: 340). Moreover, the uncanny is that which appears to be profoundly ‘unhomely’ (unheimlich). At first, Freud follows Friedrich Schelling’s definition of the phenomenon, “everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (1985: 345). But Freud also suggests that the heimlich and the unheimlich should not be seen within a purely oppositional, binary paradigm. He instead argues that “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich.” (1985: 347) Nicholas Royle further clarifies this point by suggesting that the uncanny can be seen as “a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar” (2003: 1). In his essay, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1995), written before Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, Ernst Jentsch proposed that uncanny feelings effectively result from intellectual uncertainty or insecurity (die intellektuelle Unsicherheit). Freud later argued that this notion of an uncertain or undecidable experience was insufficient as a theoretical explanation of the uncanny. But Nicholas Royle makes an important point about the resistance of the uncanny to interpretation when he argues that “Intellectual uncertainty is not necessarily or simply a negative experience, a dead-end sense of not knowing or of indeterminacy. It is just as well an experience of something open, generative, exhilarating (the trembling of what remains undecidable).” (2003: 22)

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Iain Sinclair revels in this open, undecidable nature of the uncanny. He notices the ability of uncanny phenomena to resist rational interpretation. As such, it seems that he recognises the uncanny East End’s potentially subversive imaginative presence in the fabric of postmodern London. But the exploration of the East End’s uncanny irrationality in Sinclair’s work also appears to be premised upon its mythic identity as a horrific, ghostly, irrational or intellectually uncertain space. Moreover, Peter Brooker has argued that Sinclair essentially re-imagines the East End through a distinctly “white male consciousness”, a consciousness that can be seen to bear an uncanny relationship with hegemonic discourse (2004: 8). Sinclair’s writing effectively critiques postmodern London while at the same time reinforcing the status of the East End as a neo-Victorian ‘Othered’ spatial idea. I want to now show how this idea is effectively crystallised, once again, in Lud Heat. Book One of Lud Heat, ‘The Muck Rake’, begins with a prose poem entitled ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor, His Churches’. Hawksmoor designed and built six churches across London following the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711. These were St Anne, Limehouse; St Alfrege at Greenwich; St George-in-the-East; St Mary Woolnoth; St George, Bloomsbury and Christ Church, Spitalfields (Goodhart-Rendell 1924; Downes 1959; Kidson, Murray and Thompson 1965). But in Lud Heat these buildings are imagined as elements of Hawksmoor’s greater plan to “rewrite the city” (Sinclair 1998a: 14). Sinclair suggests that “eight churches give us the enclosure, the shape of fear […] erected over a fen of undisclosed horrors, white stones laid upon the mud and dust” (1998a: 13). Sinclair’s primary concern here is with what he sees as the uncanny geometry of the churches: “We can mark out the total plan of the churches on the map and sift the meanings.” (1998a: 16) He imagines the buildings forming occult patterns of meaning, systems of triangles and pentacle stars that form invisible lines of influence, a “system of energies” (1998a: 19) within the city. This system of energies “underscores an alternative history of the city” (Murray 2007: 76). But this history appears analogous to the mythical history of the East End. It is a dark, grotesque history – a history that many in London would rather not remember or, indeed, even acknowledge. Sinclair imagines that Hawksmoor’s churches and other markers in the city both conceal and display this history. But they also evidently produce psychic energy. He not only invests the architectural design


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of the individual churches with uncanny characteristics but also speculates on how the churches appear to aggressively lay claim to the spaces that they occupy; how they produce “an unacknowledged influence over events created within the shadow-lines of their towers” (1998a: 20). Sinclair’s psychogeographical reading of the churches can be usefully approached through Jonathan Raban’s notion of the ‘soft city’ and Kevin Lynch’s concept of ‘imageability’. In Soft City (1974), a text that proved highly influential on ways of thinking about the postmodern city, Raban suggested that “the city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics” (1988: 10). Furthermore, he argued that “inside one’s private city, one builds a grid of reference points, each enshrining a personal attribution of meaning” (1988: 167). In an earlier text, The Image of the City (1960), Kevin Lynch similarly argued that “every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings” (1960: 1). For Lynch, the city has to be ordered into a coherent pattern by the individual in order for it to become legible. And this pattern relies on the ‘imageability’ of the city; that is, on visual markers in urban space. But Lynch also suggested that “nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences” (1960: 1). Major buildings and monuments in the city, then, can act as agents of memory, as markers in the city’s fabric as well as visible reference points and aids to navigation. Furthermore, Richard Sennett suggests that “the cathedral was a place of precision in a chaotic world” (1990: 26), noticing the importance of religious buildings as visual markers and agents of memory, but also, it seems, gesturing towards the ways in which structures are continually imposed on chaos, whether they be religious, institutional or architectural. Indeed, even Freud described the uncanny in spatial terms, as “something one does not know one’s way about in” (1985: 341). Interestingly, Freud’s spatial (or topographical) understanding of the uncanny echoes lateVictorian descriptions of the East End as a chaotic, uncontrollable urban jungle. It appears to be based on the rational premise that if you cannot find your way through a space, you cannot control that space. Sinclair’s psychogeographical reading of Hawksmoor’s churches effectively attempts to make illegible space legible. But by

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bringing to light the irrational force of the churches, examining their relationships with the territory they occupy, and speculating on their magnetic pull on narratives of poverty and crime, Sinclair can also be said to be returning to (and thus re-writing) an enduring spatial idea of the East End. Indeed, in Lud Heat, the history of east London, has once more been replaced with a surrogate ideology which devalues the cultural status of this area and marginalised, ‘Othered’ subjectivities. While Sinclair clearly flags up the significance of all of Hawksmoor’s London churches within his system of energies, it soon becomes clear that one church, above all, is “an active place, a high metaphor” (1998a: 20). Lud Heat not only positions Christ Church, Spitalfields as a topographical marker within the rational, material city, but also as a nodal point (or nexus) in Sinclair’s ‘soft city’. Building work began on Christ Church, Spitalfields in 1714. It was consecrated in 1729. It stands on the eastern side of Commercial Street and on the southern side of Fournier Street, overlooking the increasingly hip and middle-class Spitalfields. Facing west, it now appears to ward off giant postmodern office buildings on Bishopsgate which continue to spread eastwards from the City of London (and, in one case, literally into and above the fabric of the old market place). 5 Indeed, these buildings appear to be encroaching into Christ Church’s territory, or trespassing, as such, in an idea of an urban past. In Lud Heat, a text written before much of the redevelopment of Bishopsgate but prophetically preparing to counter it, Sinclair excavates East End histories in order to disrupt the potential impact of hegemonic forces on this space. As such, he alleges that Christ Church was “magnet to the archetypal murder myth of the late 19th century […]. The whole karmic programme of Whitechapel in 1888 moves around the fixed point of Christ Church.” (1998a: 21-2) Sinclair argues that Christ Church has not only witnessed horrific and uncanny events but has also somehow absorbed their narrative power. His imagined, ‘soft city’, in other words, responds to the church as a centripetal location which manages to retain knowledge of the narratives that have unfolded within its shadow. But, Sinclair also suggests that the church is somehow complicit in the activity that takes place around it. It is, after 5

The Bishop’s Square development (Foster and Partners) features offices that have been built above and behind existing older buildings on Brushfield Street. See .


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all, a “magnet” that attracts murder and misery. Furthermore, Sinclair argues that Hawksmoor’s architectural interest in dark, irrational, mystical forces has somehow engendered these uncanny happenings. It is this uncanny speculation that has essentially fuelled the ongoing literary interest in Christ Church. But Sinclair was not the first to notice the uncanniness of Christ Church, Spitalfields. Writing in 1924, the architecture critic H.S. Goodhart-Rendel suggested that Nicholas Hawksmoor had sought to engineer an emotional response to his work: “Hawksmoor’s great superiority over his contemporaries […] lies in his greater consciousness than theirs of the emotional values of architectural forms. They were versifiers and he a poet, they were sophists and he a philosopher.” (1924: 17) Aspects of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s English Baroque design also caught the attention of another architecture critic, Kerry Downes, who, writing in 1959, argued that the church produces an “effect of emotional assault” (1959: 167). Downes also suggested that “we feel in or before most of Hawksmoor’s buildings that our emotions are being directly attacked” (1959: 46). He argued that the architect’s aim had been to employ rational design and building techniques in order to construct a church that produces, exudes or attracts irrational, unknowable forces. According to Sinclair, Hawksmoor’s plan succeeded: “It shocks every time you glimpse one of the towers.” (1998a: 20) In the following passage, Kerry Downes demonstrates how far the architecture of Christ Church, Spitalfields appears to uncannily appeal to the emotions: The portico has the generative power of a symbol, being, like an object in a dream, a transformation […]. The whole west front becomes at once a geometrical exercise and a sophisticated visual conceit, smothered with a Tuscan order and slabs of masonry, leaving an emotional charge which is powerful even for us, and of which the taste of the eighteenth century could make no sense of at all. (1959: 183)

The design of the building certainly demonstrates the Baroque movement’s free use of classical motifs, dynamic lines and huge masses. But it also incorporates Gothic influences, especially in its towering spire. Downes argues that Christ Church “suggests the structural grandeur of ancient Rome, particularly through the portholes over the main windows, like tunnels into the masonry” (1959: 181). These eye-like portholes suggest the type of corporeal uncanniness that is often re-

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vealed in descriptions of haunted houses. Indeed, the uncanny in literature can be traced as an aesthetic outgrowth of Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime through to its manifestations in the haunted house tales of writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe. It might be useful here to briefly compare the description of a paradigmatic haunted house in Poe’s so-called ‘Germanic’ tale, The Fall of the House of Usher with Sinclair’s description of Christ Church in Lud Heat. The first quote is from Poe: “I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit […]. I looked upon the scene before me – upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain – upon the bleak walls – upon the vacant eye-like windows.” (1986: 138) In Lud Heat, Sinclair writes: “We cannot leave Christ Church without mentioning the curious detail of the windows […] the pull that is set up by the sequence of small circular portholes above tall narrow lower windows” (1998a: 22). Sinclair’s perception of the uncanny corporeality of the church has the effect, then, of reinforcing a vision of the space in which it is situated as a haunted territory. In Lud Heat, this uncanny building becomes the nexus of an uncanny, re-imagined idea of the East End. In his 1992 book, The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler drew on Freud’s work in order to demonstrate the ways in which architecture and urban spaces have often been understood to operate as reflections of modern anxiety. But Vidler argues that uncanniness is essentially projected onto buildings; that the effects produced are not always intentional or purely of design: If actual buildings or spaces are interpreted through this lens, it is not because they themselves possess uncanny properties, but rather because they act, historically or culturally, as representations of estrangement. If there is a single premise to be derived from the study of the uncanny in modern culture, it is that there is no such thing as uncanny architecture, but simply architecture that, from time to time and for different purposes, is invested with uncanny qualities. (1999: 11-2)

As I have suggested, Sinclair invests Christ Church and its territory with uncanniness in order to resist and subvert the hegemonic discourses of the city. But by doing this, Sinclair effectively re-imagines the East End as a chaotic, irrational space situated on the margins of


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an imagined, rational, enlightened, civilised vision of middle-class London. In Peter Ackroyd’s neo-Victorian novel, Hawksmoor (1985), 6 Christ Church functions as an uncanny centripetal nexus around which characters appear to experience a profound sense of dislocation, as traditional, rational understandings of subjectivity become disrupted. 7 As such, the novel borrows heavily from Sinclair’s psychogeography of the East End. 8 Here the church also appears emblematic of a lateVictorian East End chronotope, representing, as it does, “all that was dark and immutably dirty about the area” (1993: 34). Hawksmoor is a labyrinthine text that playfully intertwines factual and fictional events, locations and characters. The novel is constructed around two narratives. 9 The first is a first person narrative set in early-eighteenthcentury London, told in the voice of a character named Nicholas Dyer. Dyer is an architect building a number of churches across London after the great fire of 1666, of which, Christ Church, Spitalfields becomes the most important. His churches replicate ancient patterns and the spatial configurations of Druid sites such as Stonehenge in their layout, and they quote older faiths by incorporating pyramids adorned with ancient inscriptions within their grounds. Dyer even follows mystical rites and ceremonies, including blood sacrifice. His method is based on what he sees as the “art of Shaddowes” (1993: 5). But Dyer positions Christ Church very carefully within a space that has great social and historical significance: My Church now rises above a populous Conjunction of Alleys, Courts and Passages, Places full of poor People, but in those Years before the 6

7

8

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For a discussion of the work of Peter Ackroyd see Onega (1998). For more on the similarities between the work of Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair see Hartung (2002). Patrick Wright argues that with Hawksmoor, “Ackroyd resolves Sinclair’s writhing city into a fable of failed enlightenment: an atmospheric pastiche that fits in perfectly with contemporary ideas about the death of history and the failure of the Welfare State” (1991: 165). Ackroyd gratefully acknowledges Sinclair’s influence at the end of Hawksmoor: “I would like to express my obligation to Iain Sinclair’s poem, Lud Heat, which first directed my attention to the stranger characteristics of the London churches.” Paul Smethurst (2000: 180-193) offers a reading of the postmodern chronotope constructed in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor.

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End Fire the Lanes by Spittle-Fields were dirty and unfrequented: that part now called Spittle-Fields Market, or the Flesh-Market, was a Field of Grass with the Cows feeding on it. And there where my Church is, where three roads meet […] was open ground until the Plague turned it into a vast Mound of Corrupcion. (1993: 23)

The second narrative in the novel is omniscient and set in latetwentieth-century London. It follows the attempts of a detective, Nicholas Hawksmoor, to solve the mystery surrounding a series of murders that take place in or around Dyer’s churches. Hawksmoor, the detective, employs modern, rational, scientific methods in an attempt to understand the crimes, but finds that he is increasingly thrown off course. Hawksmoor’s experience of space and time – his chronotopic experience – becomes severely disrupted. It soon becomes clear that he has an uncanny relationship with Dyer. Indeed, the two characters double each other to an increasing extent throughout the novel. In the first chapter the stonemason’s son, Thomas Hill, is invited to lay the highest and last stone of Christ Church. But before he can do so he mysteriously falls from the steeple to his death. In the second chapter, set in contemporary London, another boy named Thomas Hill becomes trapped and dies in labyrinthine tunnels under the church. Over the course of the novel it becomes apparent that the murder victims found in or around the churches in the contemporary narrative come to double Dyer’s sacrificial males. By lending the character of the detective the name of the real architect of the churches (Nicholas Hawksmoor), Ackroyd effectively writes an uncanny ‘double history’ of London. If Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor employs a double time-frame (Smethurst 2000; Gibson and Wolfreys 2000; Onega 1998), one aspect of the novel appears to remain fixed, however: the seemingly timeless and eternal form of the churches. Christ Church, Spitalfields, in particular – the site of the first death and the “apex of the triangle” in the detective Hawksmoor’s map of the murders – resists the disturbed chronotopes of the text. Despite his gradual descent into madness, Hawksmoor still manages to engage in a form of psychogeography. He relates locations to historical occurrences. Echoing both Jack London and Iain Sinclair, he speculates on how locations may have a hand in producing events, and how vagrants, prostitutes and murderers appear to be drawn, over and over again, to the same places:


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It did not take any knowledge of the […] celebrated Whitechapel murders, all of them conducted in the streets and alleys around Christ Church, Spitalfields, to understand, as Hawksmoor did, that certain streets or patches of ground provoked a malevolence which generally seemed to be quite without motive. (1993: 116)

By the time that Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor was published, the spatial dynamic of the fabric of east London was clearly changing. Multinational capital was beginning to facilitate the regeneration of Bishopsgate and Docklands (discussed in the next chapter). Indeed, in the novel, a tour guide sees “the outline of a large office building, the cloudy surface of its mirror-glass reflecting the tower of Spitalfields church” (1993: 27). The tour guide then draws on spatial history by recalling the area’s dead: “Where we are standing now would have been open fields, where the dead and the dying came.” (1993: 27) This echoes Sinclair’s interest in burial in Lud Heat: “The Hawksmoor churches have a close connection with burial sites, Roman and preRoman. The Romans regarded east London not as a place for the living but as a necropolis for the dead.” (1998a: 27) In Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor the narrator notices the tour guide’s status as a re-writer of the East End: “Her enthusiasm now diminished as she tried to recall more facts about this neighbourhood: and if I can’t remember any, she thought, I’ll just have to invent them.” (1993: 27) By projecting uncanniness onto Christ Church, Spitalfields and its territory, Ackroyd ‘invents’ the contemporary East End as a space that begets anxiety. But, like Sinclair, he fails to register the broad cultural diversity of the area. Ackroyd’s neo-Victorian Hawksmoor, then, borrows the uncanny psychogeography of Sinclair’s Lud Heat, but it also employs many more uncanny themes, including doubling, burial alive and hauntings, in order to fully exploit the East End’s discursive history of monstrous ‘Otherness’. In his rigorously researched and sophisticated graphic novel, From Hell: being a melodrama in sixteen parts (1999), 10 Alan Moore places Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields at the heart of a reimagination of the Jack the Ripper myth. I will explore Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) shortly. Sinclair also tell10

Alan Moore’s From Hell, featuring artwork by Eddie Campbell, was published as a collected edition in 1999. Previously chapters were published individually.

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ingly describes From Hell as an “epic deconstruction of previous Ripper scholarship” (1998d: 125-6). Much of Moore’s book centres on the character Sir William Gull – Queen Victoria’s surgeon – who was

Fig. 11. From Hell (Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, 1999)


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named as Jack the Ripper in Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, as well as Steven Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1977). 11 Gull is depicted as an intellectual who is prepared to question Enlightenment philosophy. Indeed, he embraces the mysterious, uncanny powers of the occult. His meditations on human experience largely take place in or around Christ Church, Spitalfields (Fig. 11). And the church also appears in the dreams of several characters throughout the text. Speaking of the church, Gull tells his colleague, Hinton: “Perhaps some places do indeed possess vitality. They dream and feed and propagate themselves.” (Moore and Campbell 1999: 28) The East End, of course, has often been described as an organism growing out of control. But interestingly, the suggestion here is of a place feeding greedily on the discursive mythology that informs it, while at the same time somehow producing this mythology. Christ Church, Spitalfields also appears in other contemporary, neo-Victorian East End novels. In Going East (2003), for example, Matthew D’Ancona tells the story of a young middle-class woman, Mia Taylor, who moves to the East End in an attempt to recover from a personal tragedy. She too becomes ensnared by the uncanny power of Christ Church: First, though, she would perform the little pilgrimage she always made after a bad night. Turning down Fournier Street she walked towards the church, the Hawksmoor she had learned to love. To approach Christ Church from the east was to appreciate its marvellous Gothic monumentality, especially at this strange hour when street-lamps and natural light competed eerily to reveal its brooding magnificence, she […] stood for a few moments by the railings and looked up at its portholes, the eyes of the stone beast glowering over its dominion. (2004: 81)

D’Ancona’s vision of Christ Church as a glowering beast also effectively rewrites an idea of the East End as a hellish urban jungle, and echoes, as such, representations of the area that appeared in late-nineteenth-century texts such as William Booth’s In Darkest London and the Way Out (1890). It has been argued that Iain Sinclair’s vision of the East End as spatial detritus uncovers and reinterprets marginal and repressed histo11

Moore’s annotation to From Hell’s prologue gives details of Knight’s suggestions as to the killer’s identity. See also Sinclair (1998b: 56-67).

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ries. While this certainly appears to be the case, Sinclair’s urban vision continues to return, in the Freudian sense, to many of the uncanny characteristics of an essentially late-nineteenth-century East End chronotope. In Lud Heat, the uncanniness of Christ Church, Spitalfields cannot be understood without reference to the discursive mythology of terror that has grown up in the streets that surround the building. The sense of unease provoked by Christ Church in Lud Heat, but also in Hawksmoor, From Hell and Going East, appears to operate as a symptom of unconscious bourgeois fears. As I pointed out in my introduction, spaces have often been understood within the Enlightenment paradigm of darkness and light. As Michel Foucault has suggested, dark spaces “prevent(s) the full visibility of things, men and truths” (1980: 153). The East End of Sinclair’s Lud Heat is just such a dark space. In Sinclair’s work, then, the East End is once again designated as a space in which undesirable, ‘different’ socio-cultural activities can be imaginatively placed by a hegemonic middle class. Sinclair’s inside/outside relationship with this hegemonic discourse remains profoundly uncanny.

Labyrinth Iain Sinclair’s first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, was published in 1987. It builds many of the thematic preoccupations of Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge into a text comprising a number of narrative strands in which Sinclair self-reflexively critiques the authorial function. Indeed, he points out in his “Acknowledgements” that the novel “closes the triad” begun with the two previous publications (1998b: 211). White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings revolves around a central narrative that follows the adventures of grizzled, itinerant book dealers, Dryfeld, Nicholas Lane, Jamie and the narrator (who appears closely linked to Sinclair but is never named as Sinclair) who search the dusty shelves of the bookshops of England for interesting and potentially profitable new stock. Around this narrative Sinclair weaves other labyrinthine narratives that transgress the generic boundaries of autobiography, history and fiction by imaginatively constructing a space that appears, in part, to be defined by the cultural impact of the Ripper murders and the endurance of these myths within a spatial idea of the East End. Indeed, echoing much of the theoretical discourse on the


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postmodern ‘spatial turn’, Sinclair writes: “Our narrative starts everywhere.” (1998b: 61) The narratives in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings also resound to another famous narrative: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. One character in Sinclair’s novel, J. Leper-Klamm, owns Europe’s largest holding of editions of A Study in Scarlet, and longs to own “every copy that ever existed” (1998b: 88). Another character, Nicholas Lane, comes across a coverless copy of Beeton’s Annual, in which the tale was first printed, in a bookshop. With the date of publication altered to the year of the Ripper murders, 1888, this appears a unique and valuable book, and this chance find has a powerful effect on the text. A second narrative in the novel begins in Chapter 2, and features another narrator who tells the story of the childhood and adolescence of a William Gull, Queen Victoria’s future surgeon and a Ripper suspect (cf. Alan Moore’s From Hell). Aspects of Gull’s early experiences uncannily bleed across into the experiences and dreams of the contemporary characters. The text also features fictional letters from James Hinton (Gull’s assistant) to his sister that formally echo Jonathan and Mina’s correspondence in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The narrator in Chapter 2 of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings describes the effect of narratives on individuals who believe themselves to be situated (or present) at a fixed point in time and space: “You allow yourself to become saturated with this solution of the past, involuntary, unwilled, until the place where you are has become another place; and then you can live it, and then it is.” (1998b: 31) But the space they find themselves drawn into appears to be imaginatively linked to the labyrinthine characteristics of not only the material east London but also the dense mythology that has constructed the East End as a chronotope. When the booksellers are promised a sale at Whitechapel they are drawn “into the labyrinth” (1998b: 14), materially and textually. But it soon becomes clear that this labyrinth is, in fact, a familiar discursive territory, defined in terms of distinctly ‘Othered’ cultures, capitalist detritus and death: The zone was gradually defined, the labyrinth penetrated. It was given limits by the victims of the Ripper […]. Circling and doubling back, seeing the same sites from different angles, ferns breaking the stones, horses tethered on wastelots, convolvulus swallowing the walls, shadowed by tall tenements, chicken’s feet in damp cardboard boxes, entrails of radio sets, slogans on the railway bridge, decayed syna-

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End gogues, the flash and flutter, cardamom seeding, of the coming bazaar culture, the first whispers of a new Messiah. (1998b: 35-6)

This discursive labyrinth is also defined in terms of criminality and the mythology surrounding real East End criminal lives. “Ron and Reg” Kray are linked to the Carpenters Arms pub by one character, Dryfeld. And the imagined space in which the booksellers find themselves is described as home to “the legendary backs of lorries that things fell off of” (1998b: 38). Later in the novel, Detective Superintendent Clark and Policewoman Dudley, walking their beat in the East End, “revolve between the pub, which is the busiest brothel between Cable Street and Whitechapel, black guy running white women, disgusting, and the half-squat, a warren of garment outworkers, raincoat button-holers, kite dyers” (1998b: 43). Sinclair’s discursive labyrinth thus remains a space which exists somehow unchanged. In the narrative that follows Gull’s childhood in the early-nineteenth century it is noted that “the communal water-pump at Broad Street had been infected, sewage and water running together, harsh summer, the strings hanging from the boxes in Spitalfields Market were black with flies” (1998b: 45). In the contemporary narrative these flies take on human form, as brewery workers squeeze into a Sikh-run pub (the Seven Stars on Brick Lane) in order to watch a striptease. So White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings creates a visionary Blakean labyrinth, then, defined in terms of criminality, illicit sexual activity, drunkenness and poverty. But, strangely, the narrator appears to delight in this filth, and mourns its potential passing: The dwellings on the south side of the Jewish Burial Ground have been evacuated by keyholders, occupied by derelicts and vermin; doomed, the whole zone is doomed; the stones will be razed, brick from brick, their histories flattened, buried in dust mounds. The geology of time is available to us now, at this moment, this afternoon, and will be gone, will be forever unreachable. Unredeemed. (1998b: 52)

In this passage one can detect something of Sinclair’s own fear that the redevelopment of these run down, under-developed, backward areas of London might erase the histories that inform his own discursive labyrinth. If this is the case, what are we to make of his position? We might want to consider how far Sinclair’s enduring East End topophilia is helping to keep these ‘imagined’ histories alive, as the ‘real’ material fabric of the East End is steadily redeveloped. Indeed, as a


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narrator in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings watches a television programme about the Whitechapel murders, The Ripper File, he acknowledges that “the hair starts to rise on the scalp, there is some sort of recognition, names known, places known” (1998b: 54). Sinclair relies on the knowledge of his readership of the mythical qualities of the space that he so effectively re-imagines. But he does recognise his ludic complicity in this enduring mythology. After all, as Joblard suggests when discussing the Ripper murders, “there’s something inherently seedy and salacious in continually picking the scabs off these crimes, peering at mutilated bodies, listing the undergarments, trekking over the tainted ground in quest of some long-delayed occult frisson” (1998b: 57). The past is understood to be a body here, but also as a discursive territory in which things are done differently. And the idea of the East End is, of course, a discursive territory that encompasses a conceptual past that existed before urban modernity. It endures as a territory that evokes a broadly-held vision of a dark urban past. This idea, as Sinclair’s narrator acknowledges, has been kept alive through cultural production – the discourse of Conan Doyle, Stevenson, and now Sinclair himself: “The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave shape to some pattern of energy that was already present.” (1998b: 129) A narrator describes Hinton’s travels through the nineteenthcentury East End: “He walked through dockyards and wharfs that became forests; sunlight shafted the clearings with an estranged symbolism.” (1998b: 122) Later, the contemporary narrator describes the same space at a moment of change: “Make shift through the last traces of the old streets; the hulks are crumbling to dust. We will never get back. The warren is detonated. They disguise it, cover it over with respect, modesty, forward planning: destroy it, utterly. You will never rebuild the city from these words. You would rebuild a monster.” (1998b: 146) Sinclair, then, critiquing the plans for the material redevelopment of east London, appears to be suggesting that they might attempt to cover or eradicate the myths of the old East End. By changing the material body of this part of the city, it seems that the stories which have long defined this space might be in danger of being erased. Rod Mengham has suggested that Sinclair’s books “have a double focus: on the ghosts of old buildings, lost imprints in the landscape, vanished rivers, missing earthworks; and on the record of what is disappearing every day, anticipating what will be remembered after

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its extinction, and what will be irremediably forgotten” (2002: 162). But Sinclair’s novel goes some way to ensuring that this vanishing spatial idea of east London will be remembered or kept alive; will continue to inform imaginative responses to the city. Interestingly, a section in the novel that meditates on the promise of personal selfrenewal offered by gyms can also be read as a critique of plans to improve – to make better, healthier, or more attractive – the body of east London: “The massacre of the previous self, the willed annihilation of past histories of accepted limits and boundaries, continues. Thoracic expansion driving out images of repression […]. It is not that anything new emerges – but that old inhibitions are removed.” (1998b: 195) Joblard appears to understand the ways in which the body of the East End can be kept alive in the face of such material change. He argues that Lies are the only way of getting at the truth. What we know is so stamped down, walked over, familiar – its power is gone. We can’t just carry on repeating the same myths: until we arrive at a fresh version. An authentic replica of our own making. We must use what we have been given: go back over the Ripper text, turn each cell of it – until it means something else, something beyond us. Otherwise we never over-reach ourselves. We’re doomed not to relive the past, but to die into it. To abandon the ambition to keep alive what never was, and what never will be, unless we make it so. (1998b: 197-8)

But like the bodybuilder, like the urban planner seeking to build up the body of east London, you can “make your past a lie, but you do not eliminate it. Nor the fall to future decay.” (1998b: 198) I want to now move on to look specifically at how far the planning of the ‘real’ material fabric of east London which produced the space that has become known as Docklands has specifically impacted upon an enduring spatial idea of the East End, and how older visions of the Isle of Dogs still hold imaginative power over contemporary representations of this area of the city.

VI Docklands: The Clearing of the Misery? The barges wash Drifting logs Down Greenwich reach Past the Isle of Dogs. Weialala leia Wallala leialala. - T.S. Eliot (1990: 33) As we go on steaming up the river to London we meet its refuse coming down. Barges heaped with old buckets, razor blades, fish tails, newspapers and ashes – whatever we leave on our plates and throw into our dust bins – are discharging their cargoes upon the most desolate land in the world. - Woolf (1982: 9) Flood tide. Flood barrier. The fear of inundation. The pattern of growth is changing. Signs of old industry lie derelict and broken. - The narrator (John Hurt), Thames Film (Dir. William Raban, 1986)

In the James Bond film The World is Not Enough (Dir. Michael Apted, 1999), starring Pierce Brosnan as 007, there is an impressive chase sequence featuring two powerboats on the River Thames. Shot from cameras situated in helicopters, in other boats and on the banks of the river, the Thames is envisioned as a distinctly post-industrial waterway. There is little evidence of barges carrying the detritus of the city from west to east, as captured in Eliot’s poetry or Woolf’s prose. As Bond’s boat and the boat he is pursuing make their way from the West End (the chase begins at the 1995 MI6 building on the south bank of the river at Vauxhall) downriver, past the iconic Palace of Westminster, on through the narrow waterways of the docks towards the site of the finale of the chase (the roof of the Millennium Dome on the Greenwich peninsula), London is depicted as a progressive global city, with impressive postmodern architecture springing up alongside familiar tourist sights/sites on the banks of the Thames. As such, it is also shown to be a city that is looking forward as well as back to its

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past; a city defined by new technologies as well as the mythical histories and iconic landmarks that continue to fuel the discourses of its tourist industry. During this boat chase, one close-up shot of the control panel on Bond’s boat shows a computerised map of the Isle of Dogs. As Bond momentarily loses sight of his prey, we see the computer rapidly calculate a speedier route for him to take through this space. The fact that Bond requires a computer to guide him through the docks can be read in interesting ways. Firstly, the elegant man in the tuxedo, working for the British establishment, cannot apparently draw on any prior topographical knowledge of what, for him, remains an unknown space. He requires a computerised map to guide him through the heart of darkness. But on entering this space, Bond suddenly appears at home, throwing his boat around the regenerated docks, past new restaurants and elegant apartment blocks. Indeed, in one shot we see his boat destroy a bijou restaurant on the redeveloped dockside. This film demonstrates, then, the extent to which a previously unmappable swamp, the Isle of Dogs, had been colonised by the English middle classes by the end of the twentieth century, and how far the dock area had been interpolated back into the fabric of a wider idea of London. This sequence, then, making good use of the newly regenerated waterways of the docks and the impressive new postmodern architecture of Docklands (a high-tech, high-rise citadel within the city) effectively facilitates the re-connection of the eastern and western sides of London within the popular imagination. London, as a whole, imagined space, is depicted as a carefully measured mixture of old and new. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how and why the East End of London has continued to function as a spatial idea, even as east London has been seen to materially change (in Docklands at least) beyond all recognition. Building on my work on the contemporary theoretical work concerning the nature of space and place, I will examine the ways in which the regeneration of Docklands and concomitant changes to the spatial economy of London have shaped cultural texts, and how these texts have in turn dialogically shaped a re-imagined East End chronotope. It is significant that the reclaimed spaces of postmodern Docklands witnessed in The World is Not Enough so clearly recall the tourist-trap waterways of Venice. In his 1991 novel, Downriver (a corus-


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cating response to the redevelopment of Docklands), Iain Sinclair makes the same connection: “This deregulated isthmus of Enterprise was a new Venice, slimy with canals, barnacled palazzi, pillaged art, lagoons, leper hulks: a Venice overwhelmed by Gotham City, a raked grid of canyons and stuttering aerial railways.” (2002a: 265) For Sinclair, Docklands – a doomed, sinking city like Venice – has come to be defined through the impact of corporate architecture and the privatisation of new social spaces (see Groes 2007). He is intrigued by the ways in which these new spaces pastiche older, established urban spaces. But it is also important to recognise that Sinclair reads this space through film history. It is a cinematic visual feast. For Sinclair, the ‘real’ Docklands skyscrapers recall the ‘imagined’ buildings in Tim Burton’s neo-Gothic film, Batman (1989), for example. But he also meditates on what he sees as the erased histories of the Isle of Dogs (the site of Docklands): I knew what the Isle of Dogs meant. An unlucky place, anathematized by Pepys; and identified by William Blake with the Dogs of Leutha, whose only purpose was to destroy their masters. Even the nineteenthcentury maps register a desert occupied by three houses: Folly, Chapel, Ferry (Insanity, Prayer, Escape). The island has always been shunned or exploited for its dark potential. (2002a: 269)

Sinclair again mobilises the strategies of psychogeography here in order to resist the colonisation of this space by multi-national corporations operating within an increasingly global economy. But interestingly, this potential erasure of the history of the East End had been prophesised by writers almost a century before Downriver was published. In the tale ‘The World Set Free’ (1914), for example, H.G. Wells presciently imagined the docks destroyed by bombs, and the palimpsest of the East End thus wiped clean. Indeed, after this disaster a character in the tale explains that “the great hole in the east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and very like the north and south […]. It will be possible to reconstruct most of it […]. It is wanted.” (1914: 299) Furthermore, in the imagined future of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (as I pointed out in Chapter 2), Old Hammond speaks of the process of the “Clearing of the Misery”, and the commemorative feast celebrating the eradication of the slum dwellings that used to exist to the east of a now utopian London (1995: 69). Bearing in mind the prescient nature of these texts, I want

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to offer a brief history of the redevelopment of Docklands before further exploring cultural responses to the spatial change brought about by this development. As the East End ‘rubble films’ so clearly show, the Second World War saw the destruction of large swathes of the docks in east London. The Blitz damage was immense, and many parts of the docks remained derelict for decades, primarily because it was considered not to be economically viable to completely rebuild them (Keith and Pile 1993: 11). However, the County of London Plan predicted that the docks would expand, and in the early 1960s the South-East Study determined that the Port of London should remain operational (Risebero 1996: 219). But the docks still lost trade. This was for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there was an overcapacity of upstream docks and warehouses. Secondly, many companies had moved out of the Blitzdamaged East End. Infrastructure also remained of a poor standard. As many of the functions of the docks were relocated to Tilbury in Essex, investment in the east London docks gradually fell away. The East India Dock ceased activity in 1967. The closure of St Katherine’s Dock and the London Dock followed in 1969. However, some areas of the East End were reconstructed. Indeed, Poplar became “the largest Comprehensive Development Area in Britain” (Risebero 1996: 219). Designs for the Lansbury Estate in the 1960s drew on the modernist architectural theories of the Bauhaus School, and these material changes to the fabric of the city seemed, for a while at least, to signal the potential for immense and positive social change (Risebero 1996: 222). Moreover, with other vast tracts of wasteland lying so close to central London, London’s docks and the land around them were identified during the 1970s as “the largest opportunity for redevelopment in Europe” (Keith and Pile 1993: 2; see also Ambrose 1986: 218). After the rise of the Conservative Party to power in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher, the then Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, proposed the setting up of Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) – bodies granted access to state funding. With the passing of the Local Government, Planning and Land Act in 1980, planning controls were relaxed, enabling the compulsory sale of public land with inducement for private capital (Keith and Pile 1993: 13). The vast reconstruction of areas of east London suddenly became a possibility when the London Docklands Development Corporation


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was formed in 1981 and the Royal Docks ceased operation in 1982. 1 The material, ‘real’ east London, then, began to rapidly change. But crucially, this change, or regeneration, did not always seem to be suited to the needs of local people who were not allowed direct access to decision-making (Keith and Pile 1993: 13). Indeed, the creation of the LDDC effectively led to the removal of local democracy in east London. A number of locals did attempt to fight many of the proposals, and plans of resistance were drawn up. But many of the spectacular plans of the LDDC still went ahead. Writing about the socio-cultural impact of the centrepiece of the Docklands development, the 800ft tower at Canary Wharf (Cesar Pelli & Associates, 1991), the historian Alan Palmer has suggested that “the forty-eight floors of One Canada Square seemed to offer little to native East Enders” (2000: 168). Despite much resistance to this development, the tower has since struggled to become a landmark (although not, of course, linked to a ‘heritage’ London) – a status explored in William Raban’s short film Sundial (1992), in which the tower is shot from dozens of angles, making it appear like an uncanny obelisk transplanted from another world (Fig. 12). Writing about the impact of this building on the landscape of east London, Bill Risebero has pointed out: It is a conspicuous statement that something significant has happened in East London, that ‘regeneration’ has occurred. Once again, the appearance belies the reality. Canary Wharf is merely a continuation of a long and discredited post-war trend, that of office speculation for profit. Socially, it changes nothing, regenerates nothing. (1996: 224)

For Iain Sinclair, the Docklands redevelopment created a geography dictated by market forces. It was essentially a “city state built on self regard” (1998d: 41). Furious property speculation “went off the scale of human greed, and into some borderland of wallowing swine demons” (Sinclair 2002a: 266).

1

For more on the redevelopment of Docklands, see Bentley (1997); Brownhill (1990); J. Foster (1999); S. Williams (1993); Williamson, Pevsner and Tucker (1998). For the earlier history of the docks, see Broodbank (1921); Brown (1978); Greeves (1980); Kennedy-Cox (1939); Pudney (1975); Levenson (2002).

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Fig. 12. Sundial (William Raban, 1992)

This development attempted to redefine east London, then, by overwriting a space Sinclair seemingly regarded as the old East End. It soon became clear that the Docklands development was sealing itself off from the local communities that surrounded it, while at the same time providing the platform for London’s businesses to reach out to an increasingly global marketplace. Stalking the regenerated Docklands, Sinclair recorded the following in Downriver: The avenues! Treeless, broad, focussing on nothing. Dramatic perspectives leading to no revelation: no statues of public men, no fountains, no slogans. Nothing. No beggars, no children, no queues for buses. This city of the future, this swampland Manhattan, this crystal synthesis of capital, is already posthumous: a memorial to its own lack of nerve. It shudders and lets slip its ghosts. I swallow the world’s dross. Isle of Dogs, receiving station of everything that is lost and without value. A library of unregarded texts. (2002a: 276-7)

But as this development radically altered the materiality of east London by planting monolithic office buildings in a post-industrial wasteland, an idea of the East End enjoyed a cultural resurgence.


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Global Markets and a Market Place Exiting Canary Wharf Station today, in the early twenty-first century, it feels like you are being catapulted up into a future world in the middle of east London. Wide paved spaces separate soaring glass skyscrapers. Fashionable new bars and restaurants bustle with office workers. The old docks have effectively become a giant water feature. One thing is for certain – this space does not feel like east London. According to popular myth, the eastern edge of the city should feel backward, exotic and dangerous. Of course, some spaces to the east of the Tower of London can be said to retain aspects of these characteristics. But standing in this specific part of the Isle of Dogs today it certainly feels like east London has transmogrified. While Docklands was under construction during the 1980s, another vision of the East End was being reconstructed and re-imagined elsewhere. A traditional marketplace was being “repackaged and sentimentalised” across London, at the BBC studios at Elstree (Donald 1999: 177). On Tuesday 19 February 1985, at 7pm, with the first airing of Simon May’s now seminal theme tune, EastEnders became the BBC’s first bi-weekly, year-round television serial since the 1970s (Buckingham 1987). Seventeen million people watched the first episode, and viewing figures remained healthy for years, dipping slightly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Indeed, EastEnders has been the BBC’s most consistently successful show since its launch (Brake 1994: 7). The production designer Keith Harris began working with producer Julia Smith and script editor Tony Holland in 1984. This team initially toured east London looking for possible sites for location shooting, but none were found to be suitable, primarily due to the prohibitive costs involved (Brake 1994: 12). One possible site suggested for Albert Square was Fassett Square in Hackney. But the BBC took possession of the Elstree studios, and Walford, a fictional borough in the East End created for the show, was designed and built as an impressive set. This set incorporates aspects of the grubby, neglected Victorian architecture of real East End locations – the type of buildings found around the street markets of Petticoat Lane and Walthamstow and the corner pubs of Mile End and Bethnal Green. Indeed, the set features a number of real brick buildings, working drains and phone boxes (Brake 1994: 15). But, interestingly, some of the more picturesque

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parts of Borehamwood, Edgware, Elstree and Radlett have also doubled for Walford in episodes over the years (Brake 1994: 20). And it is worth pointing out that the soap has developed a number of characters who have clearly displayed middle-class pretensions. But while these characters are allowed the occasional glimpse of white urban middleclass culture (a drink in a wine bar, a meal in a posh restaurant, or a trip ‘up west’), they are more-often-than-not dragged back into what essentially remains a grim agora – the working-class ‘square’ – a space that the designers wanted to look as authentic as possible (Street 2004: 364). But in almost every episode of EastEnders broadcast to date, the writers and production designers of the show have all but eschewed knowledge of the developments going on in Docklands, or, more broadly, the spatial developments of postmodernity. As Kathryn Dodd and Philip Dodd have argued: “The East End that is featured on the map which opens and closes each episode is no longer – if it ever was – a homogeneous working class area, thanks to the Docklands City Development and gentrification.” (1992: 126) A similar point has been made by Gareth Stedman Jones, who suggests that EastEnders “depicts the ‘cockney’ street market and pub community at precisely the moment when City expansion, ‘yuppy’ invasion, the disappearance of the docks, and racist hostilities have turned its location into a historical make-believe” (Feldman & Stedman Jones 1989: 273). While a number of pseudo-yuppy characters have appeared in the show, EastEnders still works to keep a mythical idea of a traditional working-class East End socio-cultural milieu alive. Indeed, the show “provides the last bastion of community in a fictional ‘Walford’ square” (Dodd and Dodd 1992: 129). As such, EastEnders evokes an East End chronotope that retains strong imaginative links to a conceptual urban past. Importantly, the Elstree set provides an effectively unchanging place which guarantees a sense of continuity for the ongoing narratives of the show (Barnwell 2004: 22-3). While a large number of characters have come and gone, others, like the Queen Vic pub, remain effectively fixed. Writing about the practice of set design, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron have argued that “décor becomes the narrative’s organising image, a figure that stands for the narrative itself. Whether the set is a repeated figure, a persistent figure or a ubiquitous figure it is inseparable from the narrative.” (1995: 158)


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The EastEnders set, then, has become “as familiar as the characters, with the audience returning each week to a set that spatialises family and community” (Barnwell 2004: 38). This set, along with the narratives developed in the show, works to ensure the integrity of the spatial logic of Walford. Indeed, allied to this, the editing of the show generally offers viewers access to a remarkably small number of interdependent locations, all of which tend to be centred on Albert Square. 2 It seems that Albert Square has been carefully constructed in order to emphasise the sense of stasis and claustrophobia felt by many of its inhabitants. Like other successful film and television sets, it produces a “powerful dramaturgical charge” (McCann 2004: 375). The designers appear to have understood that architecture and urban spaces can be said to mirror aspects of the lives of individuals (Raskin 1974: 3). As Georges Bataille once argued: “Architecture is the expression of the very being of societies, in the same way that human physiognomy is the expression of the being of individuals.” (1997: 21) In Albert Square, the specific qualities of the shape, colour, texture, surfaces, edges, openings, scale and proportion of the visible architecture serve to spatialise individuals and the wider community. External shots in the ‘Square’ often frame individuals in tight spaces, against angled walls, between stationary objects, or under low bridges that effectively cut off any view of an outside space (or a space beyond this space – a distant horizon). Moreover, most of the houses in Walford appear small, run down, shabby and depressed-looking. They have narrow windows and greying, grimy walls. As such, they can be read as the uncanny doubles of their inhabitants. We need just to think here of the houses which have been inhabited over the years by characters such as Dot Cotton (June Brown), Pat Butcher (Pam St Clement) and Pauline Fowler (Wendy Richards). Gaston Bachelard once suggested that a house, even more than a landscape, is a “psychic state” (Bachelard 1994: 72). In other words, a house somehow reflects the psychological health of its inhabitants. But so too does the street in which the house is situated. In order to produce and exploit a sense of place, then, EastEnders strategically mobilises a particular type and style of architecture. Importantly, as Christine Geraghty has pointed out, the 2

I would like to thank Joe Kember for sharing his ideas about the construction of space in EastEnders.

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Albert Square architecture primarily operates on a human scale (Geraghty 2000: 180). But it is also, now, the architecture of the past. Borrowing elements from the designs of nineteenth-century terraced houses, these buildings remain distinctly pre-modern (at least in architectural terms). Patrick Wright has suggested that Albert Square is an “inwardlooking development” (1991: 189). Indeed, the small square consists of a narrow road that forms a circle, as if to symbolise the lack of any possibility of progression in the lives of the majority of the inhabitants of this space. But while the EastEnders set evokes a localised working-class spatial idea of the East End of the past, the outward-looking Docklands development has of course come to symbolise a progressive London of the future. Docklands, after all, operates as a manifestation of a global market economy, with its focus on distant financial centres in other global cities, rather than on the quotidian struggles of communities living in council blocks which crouch just outside its heavily policed and guarded territory. Indeed, Peter Ackroyd has suggested that the regeneration of Canary Wharf represents the single most important shift in urban topography for many centuries; the commercial and social pressures had always edged westwards, but the development of Docklands has opened up what has been called London’s ‘eastward corridor’ which in historical and structural terms offers passage and access to Europe at a time when London’s economy is becoming more closely associated with the continent. (2001: 765)

So, while the redevelopment of Docklands has facilitated an openingup of east London to global capital, EastEnders continues to effectively eschew knowledge of this citadel. Instead, while purporting to capture aspects of the social life of a real contemporary east London (and in some ways, of course, succeeding in doing this), the show still exploits the enduring character of the East End as an inward-looking space of the past. In EastEnders, the invisible global marketplace in which Docklands operates has been replaced by a visible, backward-looking marketplace. Citing the work of Jean-Christophe Agnew, Sharon Zukin has pointed out:


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Historically, of course, market and place are tightly interwoven. At its origins, a market was both a literal place and a symbolic threshold, a ‘socially constructed space’ and ‘a culturally inscribed limit’ […]. But markets were also inextricably bound up with local communities. In feudal times and beyond, local markets occupied a specific place and time […]. (1991: 6)

Zukin is suggesting here that in the past, traditional market practices had a profound effect on a sense of place, defining streets and quarters “as well as the rhythm of daily life” (1991: 6). But through the growth of modern industrial towns, “place began to internalize market culture” (1991: 7). The marketplace in EastEnders, then, can be said to operate as an historical throwback to pre-industrial and pre-modern forms of trade. In Albert Square, market and place remain visibly connected. But in Docklands, market and place have become opposed. By centring its narratives on the nexus of the Albert Square market, then, EastEnders effectively helps to recombine market and place in postmodern London. Zukin also argues that “as markets have been globalized, place has been diminished” (1991: 12). EastEnders, then, textually renegotiates the spatial politics of London and urban England. The show imaginatively reconnects with the power of place, just at the moment that this power is becoming increasingly challenged by the socio-cultural processes of globalisation. The Albert Square set in EastEnders, then, while signalling the endurance of a number of small, localised markets in London, also facilitates the endurance of the cultural meaning of an idea of East End in the face of the development of the protean, material spaces of Docklands.

Profitable Progress In the film The Long Good Friday (Dir. John Mackenzie, 1979), an East End crime boss, Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), holds a party on his yacht on the Thames for his financial backers, the American Mafia. Harold outlines his hubristic plans to rebuild part of the docks in time for the fictional London Olympics of 1988, and is pictured admiring a model of his dream citadel. In a film that thematically echoes The Long Good Friday in many ways, Empire State (Dir. Ron Peck, 1987), an American businessman, Chuck (Martin Landau), is flown into the dock wasteland by helicopter by young executives who, seek-

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ing his investment, show him an impressive scale model of their plans for the massive regeneration of the area. I want to examine here how far the representation of the contemporary East End in these highlyprescient films (Hill 1999: 163) can be fruitfully read alongside J.G. Ballard’s novel, High-Rise (1975) – a text that documents the degenerate, violent, feral behaviour of middle-class individuals who move into Docklands blocks not unlike the buildings Harold Shand plans to build in The Long Good Friday and the young British, middle-class architect, Wellington Horne-Ryder (Tim Brierley) plans to build in Empire State. The Long Good Friday depicts an east London in flux, and suggests possible links between Thatcherite free market enterprise and the underground culture of gangsters (Hill 1999: 161-2). By blurring distinctions between criminality and legitimate business, the film demonstrates how far criminal organisations had become increasingly global during the 1970s (Dear 2000: 270). Indeed, Charlie Gere has suggested that the film is “an allegorical anticipation of the dislocations about to be wrought by a decade or so of capitalist deregulation, unfettered development and globalization” (2003: 117). The externalised violence demonstrated by characters in the film certainly appears to mirror internalised acts of violence committed by developers towards the lower-class inhabitants of east London during the coming period of regeneration. Harold Shand’s yacht is initially moored by St Katherine’s Dock, a couple of hundred yards east of Tower Bridge. Captured on film in the late 1970s, this still appears to be a run down urban space. It has not yet succumbed to redevelopment or gentrification. Shand and his girlfriend, Victoria (Helen Mirren), cut an incongruous presence in this post-industrial territory. They are pictured lounging in chairs on the deck of their yacht, sipping cocktails, and complaining about the snobbery of the upper classes and the vanity of Americans. While Victoria’s clipped accent, measured gestures and general demeanour suggest an upper-middle-class background, Harold Shand, a rough-talking cockney, is depicted as an archetypal working-class proto-Thatcherite, apparently ready to fully embrace the free market and increasingly globalised economy and to lift himself away from the spatiality of his class background. Perhaps courting Victoria is the first stage of this journey.


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At a party on the yacht which is attended by corrupt policemen, gangsters and investors, Harold makes a rousing Churchillian speech framed by Tower Bridge (Fig. 13). 3 This landmark retains considerable symbolic power. Indeed, during the Blitz the bridge came to symbolise London’s capacity to withstand attack. But in the context of Harold’s speech, the bridge also symbolically divides the Thames into its eastern and western reaches. As a gateway, this structure has long been imagined repelling ambitious, subversive or potentially revolutionary East Enders from central and west London. Interestingly, the Victorian design and construction of the bridge is profoundly Janusfaced, as the mock Gothic, medieval cladding disguises the modern technology that facilitates its opening and closing. It is significant, then, that this structure – a symbol of a mythical London of the past as well as of modern London – should provide the backdrop to a speech

Fig. 13. The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1979)

by an East Ender who also appears Janus-faced – nostalgic for a mythical England while also determined to play a key role as a builder and shaper of an England of the future. Ironically, after it was built, 3

Tower Bridge also features in a series of shots at the beginning of the film The Pool of London (Dir. Basil Dearden, 1950) that serve to emphasise its symbolic power.

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Tower Bridge became “quickly assimilated into representations of ‘Old London Town’, ably assisted by the mists and fogs of the river” (Gilbert and Henderson 2002: 127). One wonders whether Harold would like his proposed Olympic development to become part of this imagined ‘Old London Town’ rather than an outpost of a global economy effectively controlled from elsewhere. Employing Thatcherite rhetoric, Harold calls for “profitable progress” – the free flow of capital across traditional boundaries of nation and class – and makes a toast to an increasingly global capitalism: “Hands across the ocean.” But the developing narrative soon invites the spectator to consider whether he really stands by this progressive rhetoric. Harold masquerades as a moderniser. He presents his plans for the regeneration of the east London docks by uncovering an architectural model of his proposed high-rise buildings – a series of International Style, modern blocks. In this scene, Harold’s ambition perhaps echoes that of the architect and urban planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie, who, captured in the film Proud City, also demonstrated his plans for regenerating post-war London by referring to a series of scale models. But Harold, as a stereotypical East Ender, is also apparently a figure with at least one foot in the past. In another scene, commenting on the state of London, he remarks that it “used to be the greatest docks in the world at one time, this”. For Harold, Britain was the first truly global nation, and the east London docks performed an absolutely crucial role in the maintenance of the British Empire, just as he hopes they will for the maintenance of his own empire. But it is his nostalgia for a great imperial Britain of the past that appears to drive his ambitions, not a clear-sighted recognition of the ways in which Britain’s role in the world has changed since the war. As Harold’s tragedy unfolds we see that it is this old, ‘Great’ Britain that he really wants to be a part of, not a Britain that was beginning, in the 1970s, to be characterised by the free flow of global capital. Indeed, one of the American gangsters, Charlie (Eddie Constantine), appears to recognise Harold’s folly, telling him: “Things change, Harold. Don’t get nostalgic. Look to the future.” Of course, Harold’s plans for the Olympic development in the East End constitute a looking-to-the-future, but it soon becomes clear that these plans are being driven by his hubristic desire to place Britain (or, more specifically, England) at the centre of world affairs once more, as it was at the time that Tower Bridge was constructed. His plans do not ulti-


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mately succeed because the East End is no longer his “manor”, as the corrupt Inspector ‘Parky’ (Dave King) reminds him: “Not any more it isn’t. They’ve taken it away from you.” Ron Peck’s film Empire State (1987), a “curious hybrid of film noir, melodrama and social comment” (Hill 1999: 168), is also set in liminal spaces around the docks that appear on the verge of transition. The film features an East End nightclub, the ‘Empire State’, that functions as a microcosm of American youth culture. It stands in a contested East End territory threatened with radical change as ‘yuppies’ flood in and attempt to gentrify the area. The film features a considerable amount of location shooting, which, when viewed from a historical perspective, allows us to experience the remarkable material changes that have taken place to the fabric of east London since the 1980s. Impressive shots from a helicopter looking down on London clearly demonstrate the spatial difference that still existed at that time between the built-up financial heart of the City and the run-down, under-developed wasteland of the docks. But the film also suggests that the docks were effectively envisioned as a tabula rasa by the developers – a blank space into which, it seemed, capital and bourgeois culture might flow. In one shot, the new Docklands Light Railway can be seen snaking its way across the old docks, and buildings appear to be rising slowly from the rubble. This point is re-asserted by a voice-over that accompanies these shots. It remains unclear whether this is the voice of a disembodied advertising executive or one of the young businessmen accompanying the American investor, Chuck (Martin Landau), to the site of potential redevelopment. But the speech certainly satirises the yuppie ideology of progress: You must forget about what it used to be like here. There’s a new Britain emerging; fitter, leaner, hungry to compete, ready to assert itself on the world’s financial and commercial arenas. A new nation needs a new kind of city. So we’re building it. The whole of the East End is being cleared out and cleaned up, streamlined with new roads, railways, airstrips, wired up to the new technologies. ‘What about the unions?’ They’ve been given a sound thrashing and now they’re seeing sense. What we are attracting here is a new breed altogether: tough, motivated, ambitious, anyone who wants to stay in the race for the 21st century is moving in now!

This speech presciently foreshadows, of course, much of the discourse surrounding the London 2012 Olympic bid: specifically in its imagi-

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native imbrication of the body of the city and the bodies of its inhabitants and visitors. After the helicopter lands by the docks, Chuck is escorted into a meeting at the British Futures site, where he is shown around an impressive scale model of the development planned for the docks that recalls the models demonstrated by Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday. This model resembles what would become the Canary Wharf development in Docklands. On the face of it, Chuck appears initially impressed with the plans. The young architect, Wellington Horne-Ryder (Tim Brierley) tells him that the plan is to turn this part of London into a “Venice for the modern era”. But Chuck responds by advocating that Venice already exists, and is in fact in danger of sinking into the sea. So when Chuck says, “I see you’ve managed to blow up those housing projects which would be unsightly”, he is ridiculing the greedy young English middle-class money makers. Wellington Home-Ryder responds: “Oh, the Council estates; yes […]. So what I have tried to do through whole scale landscaping of the area is to effectively screen them from view so that the hotel and the apartment complexes which are to be stepped and terraced from the water will have […].” But Chuck finishes his sentence for him: “[…] a picturesque view of the river and the harbour.” Chuck, then, is clearly not impressed with this grand plan to regenerate the docks, and after walking across the post-industrial wasteland and witnessing old council tower blocks being prepared for demolition, he leaves the country without investing in the project. Empire State, then, also captures east London on the point of radical change. The film highlights the potential influx of US capital into the area by drawing attention to the Americana of the nightclub and Johnny’s (Lee Drysdale) preferred method of travel: a large 1950s American convertible. Indeed, the name of the nightclub signals that this might soon become a new outpost of American cultural imperialism. But the film also continues to mark the East End and the docks as dangerous, marginal, subcultural spaces in which resistance to change and suspicions of newcomers can lead to brutal violence. As such, the tensions that still exist between an old Victorian East End chronotope and a new socio-cultural space emerging in east London in the latetwentieth century are effectively worked through in this film. The owner of the club, Frank (Ray McAnally), fighting off potential investors, is portrayed as a stereotypical, middle-aged cockney gangster. His age and experience link him, like Harold Shand in The


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Long Good Friday and Vic Dakin (Richard Burton) in Villain (Michael Tuchner, 1971), with a London of the past, while other, more youthful protagonists around him signal a potentially globalised, multicultural, classless and buoyant London of the future. One of these characters, a young Asian male, Paul (Ian Sears), tells Frank: “You see, Frank, this part of London is changing; it’s coming back to life. There’s a new class of money moving in.” But the illegal boxing match, the sense of sexual danger, and the drug-taking and violence in the club also show us that an imagined East End culture remains very much alive, even in the face of massive material change. So in this film, the theme of multi-national capital and American culture infiltrating an old idea of the East End is further developed. What both films (The Long Good Friday and Empire State) demonstrate is that any attempts to modernise the East End or to create a completely new socio-cultural milieu in this space might not fully erase the mythical narratives that have facilitated the cultural construction of this territory. It is in J.G. Ballard’s highly prescient novel, High-Rise (1975), that we can witness a future vision of a postmodern East End fully redeveloped but still somehow existing as a space that begets degeneracy. The novel tells the story of the gradual descent into madness of the affluent inhabitants of a new tower block situated near the docks, designed by an architect named Anthony Royal (who also lives in the building). Dr Robert Laing (the playfully-named physiologist) lives in a studio on the 25th floor. The novel immediately deconstructs bourgeois cultural norms, opening as it does with Laing reflecting on past events while eating the “roast hindquarter of (an) Alsatian” (1993: 1). It soon becomes clear that he has sold his house in Chelsea, west London, and “travelled forward fifty years in time, away from crowded streets, traffic hold-ups, rush-hour journeys on the Underground” (1993: 3). This ‘Docklands’ building, then, is marked as a futuristic space that is temporally and spatially distant from west, central or, indeed, ‘real’ London: The elegant forty-storey tower block features a thousand apartments, swimming pools, shops and other services, described by the narrator as a “small vertical city” (1993: 3). This tower is one of five identical units in the development and the first to be occupied, set “in a mile-square area of abandoned dockland and warehousing along the north bank of the river” (1993: 2-3). As such, the

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development distinctly echoes Le Corbusier’s plans for “the Radiant City”, “a city worthy of our time” (R. Fishman 1982: 10). It should be noted that the spatial fields constructed in much of Ballard’s fiction are often not related to specific ‘places’, as such. They instead tend to be depicted as generalised non-places, like the spaces that have also been brought to our attention by Marc Augé – motorways, airports or suburban shopping malls (1995: 78-9; see also Cunningham 2007: 141). Indeed, the building in High-Rise is essentially seen, like the docks in The Long Good Friday and Empire State, to be a blank socio-cultural space – as a Lockean tabula rasa: “He had come to the high-rise to get away from all relationships.” (1993: 8) The high-rise, then, is a space that provides a “neutral emotional background against which the most intriguing relationships might develop” (1993: 12). In other words, it is effectively situated in a Ballardian non-space, or ‘nowhere’. But by so clearly situating the tower in High-Rise in the East End of London, Ballard’s ‘non-place’ is always in danger here of being overwhelmed by the fecund cultural geography of this territory. The high-rise and its inhabitants might well be dislocated, but their location retains an overwhelming discursive power. Indeed, it soon becomes clear that aspects of the type of degenerate behaviour traditionally aligned with the East End of London can be seen to bubble to the surface of life in the building. Moreover, Ballard’s narrator clearly situates this development on the northern side of the Thames, to the east of the City, where, after the publication of this novel, the redevelopment of Docklands would take place: The massive scale of the glass and concrete architecture, and its striking situation on the bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the rundown areas around it, decaying nineteenthcentury terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation. For all the proximity to the City two miles away to the west along the river, the office buildings of central London belonged to a different world, in time as well as space. (1993: 3)

This tower, and the space it occupies, are not imagined to be located in a central part of London, but elsewhere – in a distinctly ‘Other’ space. As the building and its inhabitants degenerate, the narrator, meditating on the future plans of Anthony Royal, the architect, and his wife, Anne, points out: “As soon as they found a house in London


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they would leave.” (1993: 80) Interestingly, Wilder looks back to the City from the building, as if back through time, and sees that “the distant arm of the river stretched towards the darkening outline of the city, a signpost pointing towards a forgotten world” (1993: 69). But the high-rise, while distinctly modern in its architectural design, is also thought of as a bestial body by Mrs Steele, who refers to it as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events. There was something in this feeling – the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain. (1993: 41)

The psychological impact of this brutalist building on its residents is also explored in detail by the narrator: “All the evidence accumulated over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and high profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky against the real needs of their occupants.” (1993: 55-6) Here Ballard appears to be critiquing the plans of modern urban developers and architects such as Patrick Abercrombie. But it is significant that it is ennui-stricken middle-class individuals who inhabit this building. This narrative, then, can be seen to articulate the horrific possibility that the social problems already evident in the brutalist council blocks in east London inhabited by the working classes and the underclass could conceivably move across classes if bourgeois residents came to occupy similarly-designed buildings. Indeed, the narrator points out that “living in high-rises required a special type of behaviour, one that was acquiescent, restrained, even perhaps slightly mad” (1993: 56). Indeed, in Ballard’s high-rise building affluent inhabitants are driven to an irrational orgy of destruction, fulfilling primal urges and surrendering to “a logic more powerful than reason” (1993: 65). Living in this archetypally modern environment, then, the bourgeois inhabitants of the high-rise experience a breakdown of their enlightened culture. The middle-class mores to which they have become accustomed soon become irrelevant, as, situated in this radically ‘Other’ space, their behaviour gradually degenerates. Cocktail parties turn into

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battles. Consumer goods become barricades. Indeed, Helen Wilder, the wife of a television producer who has also purchased an apartment in the building, remarks: “There’s too much hostility. It’s always been there, but now it stands out.” (1993: 49) The suggestion here is of a latent degeneracy concentrated deep in the unconscious of a west London middle-class culture that is beginning to manifest itself in this series of terrifying events. It seems that something primeval and sinister has somehow been reactivated in these individuals by the architecture of the building and the territory in which it sits. The narrator suggests that the violent incidents in the building “reflected deep-rooted antagonisms that were breaking through the surface of life within the high-rise at more and more points” (1993: 27). As such, Ballard effectively (if unconsciously) re-mobilises an old enduring spatial idea of the East End as the ‘Other’ of a civilised, enlightened middle-class West End. Employing a metaphor familiar to representations of the East End in the nineteenth century, the narrator asserts that “a pleasant carnival atmosphere reigned” (1993: 28). This carnival atmosphere incorporates illicit sexual liaisons, drunkenness, hostility, and, ultimately, savagery. This may be a modern building, then, a ‘machine for modern living’, but rather than engendering a positive sociocultural outlook, it becomes, instead, jungle-like, a “malevolent zoo” in which “terraces of vertically mounted cages contained creatures of random and ferocious cruelty” (1993: 115-116). The descent into barbarism that takes place in the building is described, then, in terms of a move away from the enlightened, rational socio-cultural practices that the building was designed to accommodate: “These civilized and selfpossessed professional men and women were moving away from any notion of rational behaviour.” (1993: 104) Crucially, Dr Laing’s descent into barbarism essentially remoulds him as a familiar, stereotypical, degenerate East Ender: He picked at the thick rims of dirt under his nails. This decline, both of himself and his surroundings, was almost to be welcomed. In a way he was forcing himself down these steepening gradients, like someone descending into a forbidden valley. The dirt on his hands, his stale clothes and declining hygiene, his fading interest in food and drink, all helped to expose a more real vision of himself. (1993: 112)

The narrator points out that “all he was doing was rearranging the dirt” (1993: 113). As such, it seems that the stereotypically normal so-


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cial practices of the English middle-class are transformed by the discursive history of this territory. Ballard’s imagined construction effectively prefigures the hitech, high-rise ‘megaprojects’ that became prevalent throughout the world at the end of the twentieth century. These buildings, forming ‘citadels’, have become examples of middle-class ghettos or ‘macrosocieties’ (Marcuse and van Kempen 2000: 252-3). Significantly, however, the architectural style of these buildings has often remained essentially modern (of the International Style), while also featuring postmodern finishing or details. Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen argue that the design of these citadels ostensibly reconstitutes modern spatial politics: “Fashions in styles may vary, but the representation of power, of wealth, of luxury, is inherent, as is the isolation, the separation, the distancing from the older urban surroundings.” (2000: 253) As such, Docklands can be understood to be both a modern and a postmodern space. It operates as a highly controlled utopian, middle-class citadel which, uncannily, at the same time, attempts to erase the discourses previously associated with this space, while keeping elements of these discourses alive. We can begin to see here, then, the ways in which the East End continues to function in an imaginary sense as a heterotopia – as a spatial idea that has, in many ways, ‘counter-acted’ visions of a middle-class London. In ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986) Michel Foucault highlights what he sees as the two main categories of heterotopia: one of “crisis”, and the other of “deviation”. Crisis heterotopias, linked to “so-called primitive societies”, are “privileged or sacred or forbidden places”. Again, an enduring spatial idea of the East End can be read here as a ‘crisis’ heterotopia. Foucault claims that crisis heterotopias are being increasingly replaced by heterotopias of deviation – spaces in which deviance from “required” norms can be placed. Furthermore, heterotopias are linked to what Foucault terms heterochronies – slices of time. As such, heterotopias often constitute an “absolute break” with linear temporality, or can appear to preserve time and culture. This too can be seen functioning in an enduring spatial idea of the East End. Foucault elaborates further: Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory […]. Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned in this manner. (1986: 27)

It is interesting to note that Foucault ends his lecture by declaring that the ship is the “heterotopia par excellence”, as it is a free-floating space, a “place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea” (1986: 27). This distinctly echoes Ballard’s descriptions of his imagined Docklands high-rise building, which can also be read as a heterotopia, “as part of that unconscious conspiracy to shut out the external world, no visitors came to the high-rise” (1993: 86). Indeed, at one point in the novel, Ballard’s narrator describes the building as a “ship of lights” (1993: 103). This also echoes Michel Foucault’s reimagined ship of fools – the image of the Narrenschiff , discussed in Madness and Civilization (1967) – the strange drunken boat “that conveyed their insane cargo from town to town” (1995: 8) in the Europe of the early Renaissance. 4 Indeed, for Foucault, ‘reason’ identifies its ‘Other’ as ‘madness’, and then excludes it by imprisoning it. Aspects of this can be seen working in Ballard’s High-Rise, when the building – a symbolic ‘ship of fools’ in the docks – imprisons its mad inhabitants: “the apartment lit up like a drunken liner” (1993: 155). Ballard’s building, then, displays the socio-cultural characteristics of the irrational disquiet that Foucault suggests began to dawn “on the horizon of European culture at the end of the Middle Ages” (1995: 13). It is also significant that the central, crazed protagonist in The Long Good Friday, Harold Shand, is depicted living on a boat on the Thames, as his madness, driven by the failure of his hubristic business plans, conspiracies, and ongoing attacks by the IRA, ultimately sets him apart from the rational, enlightened middle-class culture that he so desperately wants to be a part of. It should be remembered, too, that the heterotopian image of a boat on the River Thames often recurs in 4

In Radon Daughters (1994), Iain Sinclair echoes Foucault’s heterotopic ‘ship of fools’ in his description of the London Hospital at Whitechapel as “a ghost ship” (1998c: 67). But the hospital “anchored the whole district” (1998c: 68). The spatial idea of the East End is further reinforced in this novel when Sileen is described making his way through east London, “the Whitechapel Road solid with demented plebs” (1998c: 100).


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literature as a site from which narratives that challenge rationality can develop. One need only think of famous vessel-bound scenes in the novels of Joseph Conrad. At the time Ballard’s novel was published, London’s first wave of high-rise building was coming to an end. As I have pointed out, the partial collapse of Ronan Point in 1968 heralded the decline of these system-built high-rises as providers of social housing (Kerr 2003: 189). Ballard’s High-Rise appears especially prescient, then, because it predicts the renewed burst of high-rise building that would take place in Docklands during the 1980s. More recently, then, high-rise housing has become increasingly popular with affluent Londoners (Kerr 2003: 195-6). In Ballard’s High-Rise, the narrator notes the troubled history of high-rise living, suggesting that “in principle, the mutiny of these well-to-do professional people against the building they had collectively purchased was no different from the dozens of well-documented revolts by working-class tenants against municipal tower blocks that had taken place at frequent intervals during the postwar years” (1993: 77). A clear link, then, can be made between Ballard’s ‘imagined’ East End tower and the social history of the ‘real’ modern blocks that were built in east London after the Second World War. Patrick Wright’s A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London (1991) features a chapter entitled ‘Abysmal Heights’, in which Wright documents the socio-cultural impact of the brutalist modern estates built in Hackney during the 1960s and 1970s: “I’ve been looking at the Holly Street Estate for years. Its four, nineteenstorey tower blocks are widely deplored on this side of Queensbridge Road as monstrous eyesores that should be blown up. We survey the burned-out flats with their shattered windows and we shudder. We read of the drug-dealing, the murders.” (1991: 68) Wright’s text, like Ballard’s, captures the apparent degeneracy of the dwellers of these archetypally modern buildings situated in east London. He offers further descriptions: The litter drifts in the air, and one or two dispirited-looking residents prop themselves up on benches in dishevelled simulation of those tiny model citizens who still tend to grace the open spaces around architectural marquettes. Rowan Court sits on its stretch of green void, with a stinking puddle of brown liquid oozing out of the ‘textured’ (i.e. marked by the coarse imprint of shuttering boards) concrete latticework at this base. The external doors are missing, and there’s a cavity

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End where the intercom was ripped out within a few days of being installed. (1991: 69)

For Wright, these Hackney towers stand as tombstones of the Welfare State.

The Last of the East End? Before the major regeneration of the docks in east London was underway, the rubble-strewn landscape of the Royal Docks was employed as a metaphorical wasteland in Derek Jarman’s critically acclaimed film, The Last of England, which stars Tilda Swinton and features a voice-over by Nigel Terry. 5 In this film, the decay of the docks comes to symbolise what Jarman sees as the cultural and political decay of contemporary England (O’Pray 1996: 155). But the punk aesthetics of the film also evoke the desolate beauty of this peripheral wasteland. As Jarman’s figures inhabit the margins of English society, it seems appropriate that they find themselves huddled around a fire on the edge of an east London dock – a space that has traditionally operated on the margins of an imagined London. As Michael O’Pray has pointed out: “The protagonists are scattered on the edges where if they are fortunate they can find comfort in their shared misery; the centre is defined negatively as where they are not.” (1996: 158) These images of the disused docks are juxtaposed with footage shot by Jarman’s father during Derek’s childhood – images of a happy family at home in the 1950s full of hope and optimism for the future. This film, then, sets up spatial tensions between images of an idyllic past captured in a distinctly middle-class socio-cultural milieu and disturbed images of the present, peripheral, post-industrial dock space and the peripheral figures inhabiting this space. Indeed, Jarman has commented that “the film is a documentary. I’ve come back with a document from somewhere far away.” (O’Pray 1996: 161) In The Last of England, the post-industrial docks, then (yet to be redeveloped), still appear to exist at a distance (in time and space) from the imagined centres of middleclass English culture. I now want to turn to the question of how far the 5

A similar east London landscape in Beckton was employed by Stanley Kubrick to double as a bombed-out Vietnamese city in the film Full Metal Jacket (1987). See Edensor (2005: 37-40).


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spatial complexities of postmodern London have further impacted upon an enduring spatial idea of the East End. For many commentators, then, the immense redevelopment of London’s Docklands signalled the emergence of a postmodern London, and, as such, a postmodern East End. The pre-eminent postmodern geographer Edward W. Soja has argued: “Every contemporary city is to some significant degree also a world city in much the same way as it is postmodern. Everywhere the global is becoming localized, giving birth to another of those neologisms that attempts to describe the distinctive results of contemporary restructuring processes, the concept of ‘glocalization’.” (1996: 131) With the impact of these spatial developments, as I have shown, the long-held spatial signifiers such as ‘East’ and ‘West’ became arguably no longer as clearly distinguishable as they once were, as postcolonial migration further impacted upon the spatial politics of so-called ‘world cities’. Immigrants have, of course, always peopled cities. But as David Morley and Kevin Robins have contended, “places are no longer clear supports of our identity” (1993: 5). These developments in spatial politics have also been interrogated by Sharon Zukin, who has argued: “The spread of national and even global cultures tends to weaken local distinctiveness […]. At the same time places have become more differentiated.” (1991: 12) In the postmodern world, then, places are less easily distinguishable from their surroundings than they perhaps once were. Moreover, so-called ‘world cities’ often appear strangely alike, due to the visual impact of the branded identity of multi-national corporations, and the uniformity of shopping malls and international restaurant and clothing chains. In other words, postmodern spaces have been understood to lack the differentiation that produced the seemingly clearer identity of modern spaces. Nowhere has the spatial conflict between globalisation and localisation been more apparent than in east London. Indeed, Phil Cohen sees a postmodern East End overwhelmed by the processes of globalisation and its concomitant increased flow of images and information: In the post-Fordist spatial economy, locational decisions and identities have been transformed into fluctuating variables determined opportunistically by the space of information flows, and/or the logic of flexible accumulation rather than being tied to locally embedded structures of historical circumstance and geographical constraint. (1997: 73-4)

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I want to further interrogate representations of London’s Docklands here in order to demonstrate not only the ways in which they reflect or subvert these spatial developments, but also how, through these changes, a Victorian East End chronotope has managed to imaginatively endure. In a number of contemporary novels, the postmodern East End has been represented as a space that is still perceived as homogeneous to many outsiders. But it has been imagined elsewhere to be a highly complex, heterogeneous space in which individuals and groups find themselves fragmented; that is, divided from (or in conflict with) one other. In other words, the territory of the contemporary East End has often been imagined as broadly unchanged since the late-nineteenth century, or has instead been seen to be fragmenting into innumerable pockets characterised by class, ethnicity, wealth and gender. Indeed, as the new private development in Docklands has imaginatively collided with an enduring, culturally constructed East End chronotope, east London has increasingly become a textual battleground. Paul Smethurst has made similar points: In postmodern literature, the organization of multiple, seemingly disconnected worlds might be read as reaction to globalisation, deliberately resisting it through a process of re-differentation. It might also be read as a neo-realist representation of tensions and conflicts in social space, and the experience confronting the individual as s/he encounters postmodern placelessness. (2000: 34)

I am particularly interested here, then, in the question of how far an idea of the East End has been deconstructed or has survived in postmodern cultural texts. In order to examine the representation of postmodern placelessness and the enduring East End chronotope in contemporary neo-Victorian novels, I first want to sketch developments in postmodern geographical and spatial theory in order to attempt to throw some light on these complex questions.


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Thirdspace Things are not defined by their physical boundaries anymore. - Tschumi (1993: 318)

Postmodernity has signalled the disruption of the relationship between what we might think of as the ‘real’ world as a historical and geographical referent and representations of this ‘real’ world; that is, ‘imagined’ discursive or textual worlds (Smethurst 2000: 3). In other words, postmodernity has brought about a perceived loss of the ‘real’, as the modern capitalist requirement for material objects and individuals to be able to move around in material space has been all but effaced by new technologies of electronic media and cyberspace, “leaving its traces on the surfaces of the new ‘real’ world of electronic simulacra” (Smethurst 2000: 3). For Paul Virilio, a new postmodern urban era has been characterised by the use of telecommunications to support what he calls an “urbanization of real time”. This follows the previous “urbanization of real space” of the modern era. Indeed, Virilio has located what he terms the ‘overexposed city’ in which spaces are joined by semi-permeable membranes, exposed to flows of information (Robins 1993: 318). For many theorists, as I pointed out at the beginning of Chapter 5, this ontological shift signalled what has been termed the postmodern ‘spatial turn’ – a movement of critical emphasis away from the concepts of time that characterised many materialist accounts of modernity towards a reassertion of the dialectics of space in postmodernity (Smethurst 2000: 7). 6 I should state here that this ‘spatial turn’ should not be read purely as a shift in critical emphasis away from time towards space, but rather as a shift in complex spatiotemporal relations (Smethurst 2000: 36). One of the most important thinkers to have engaged with these developments is Henri Lefebvre. In his highly influential book, The Production of Space (1974), Lefebvre defined space as shifting, contested and multi-coded, charged with emotional content, mythical meanings, symbolism and historical significance. For Lefebvre, space can never be empty, but is always instead culturally inscribed with meaning. He argues that there 6

Marxist critics have of course considered the apparent loss of historicity that comes with the postmodern ‘spatial turn’ as largely negative. See Jameson (1992).

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are an indefinite multitude of spaces, and suggests that all space is lived before it is received, and produced before it can be read (Dear 2000: 52). He further argues that space should not be understood as passive. In other words, space is not produced in a vacuum, but is instead produced and related to the local and the global. It is constructed by different sets of social relations working on a wide variety of levels. So, his work demonstrates how far space can also be effectively deconstructed, and how far the ideological implications of representations of space can be also deconstructed. Lefebvre sought to break down or fuse the systems of binary thinking that produced the crude binary of notions of ‘real’, ‘objective’, physical space, and ‘imagined’, ‘subjective’, mental space. He instead suggested that ‘real’, ‘objective’ or physical space and ‘imagined’, ‘subjective’ or mental space should be fused into conceptual social space, and that this system, rather than forming a rigid dialectic, should be understood as fluid and open (Soja 1996: 62). Furthermore, Lefebvre argues that every critical method of thinking about space, including the physical, the mental and the social, should be seen as simultaneously ‘real’ and ‘imagined’, concrete and abstract, material and metaphorical (Soja 1996: 64-5). In this vein, Lefebvre formulated his concept of the trialectics of spatiality. Appealing to those familiar with the epistemology of Marxism, Edward W. Soja recalls the old shibboleth that asks “Is it consciousness that produces the material world or the material world that produces consciousness?” and suggests that Lefebvre’s answer in terms of his concept of trialectics would be “yes” to both alternatives (Soja 1996: 65). Lefebvre conceived, then, of a spatial triad at work (une dialectique de triplicate) – three aspects of social space: ‘Spatial Practice’, or ‘perceived’ space (espace perçu); ‘Representations of Space’, or ‘conceived’ space (espace conçu); and ‘Spaces of Representation’, or ‘lived’ space (espace veçu) (Lefebvre 1991: 38-9). Firstly, Lefebvre formulates what he calls ‘Spatial Practice’ (espace perçu), as materialised, socially produced, empirical space; in other words, the spatial medium and the outcome of human activity, behaviour and experience. This is the space that is the “traditional focus of attention in all the spatial disciplines” (Soja 1996: 66). We might want to think of this as ‘real’ space, or as what Soja re-describes as ‘Firstspace’. Secondly, Lefebvre formulates ‘Representations of Space’ (espace conçu), or conceptualised space, as idealistic, conceived, planned space; tied to


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the relations of production, control and surveillance. Espace conçu, then, offers rationally interpretable significations of space that tend to arise in reaction to espace perçu. This, then, might also be thought of as ‘imagined’ space, or, as Soja re-labels it, ‘Secondspace’. In terms of this study, and its interest in the ways in which the East End of London has come to function as a conceptual spatial idea that has been discursively conceived, drawn and designed by writers and artists, Lefebvre’s concept of espace conçu would seem to incorporate the vast majority of representations of the East End – representations that effectively seek to construct and then control the image of this space. Soja marks this ‘Secondspace’ as “the primary space of utopian thought and vision” (1996: 67), so it follows that the enduring representations of the East End as a dystopian space can also be said to fall within this spatial category. However, thirdly Lefebvre formulates what he terms ‘Spaces of Representation’ (espace veçu), the ‘lived’ space of social relations, which can be understood as distinct from but also a combination of espace conçu and espace perçu. As such, espace veçu is always partially unknowable and mysterious. Espace veçu, then, can be understood as space as it is directly lived; as a combination of the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’, and, importantly, the terrain of counterspaces, or as Soja puts it, “spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalised positioning” (1996: 68). However, this ‘Thirdspace’ should be thought of as being more than purely the result of dialectical synthesis. Instead, it disorders and deconstructs its binary antecedents while at the same time reconstituting the presumed totalisation of the dialectic in order to produce a radically open spatial alternative. Each of the aforementioned categories are in themselves fluid and, at times, contradictory. Lefebvre’s complex trialectic of spatial knowledge, then, seeks to produce a distinctly different way of thinking about space that can challenge materialist, relativistic interpretations, while at the same time highlighting the radical potential of thinking about space as limitless and open (Soja 1996: 65). As far as this study is concerned, I am not only interested in how far Lefebvre’s concept of l’espace conçu offers a theoretical and critical paradigm through which examples of the literary and cinematic East End of London can be approached, but also in how far his concept of l’espace veçu might offer a means of critically approaching literary texts that choose to depict the contemporary East

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End as a radically open, postmodern space. As Soja points out, “spaces of representation contain all other real and imagined spaces simultaneously” (1996: 69). Furthermore, Michael J. Dear has suggested that “Lefebvre the postmodernist calls for a retreat from the errors and lies of the modernist trio of readability, visibility, and intelligibility” (2000: 61). Indeed, working from Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the potential of cognitive mapping, Dear argues that “one urgent task is to discover the co-ordinates of the new postmodern hyperspace, by exploring the spaces of the built environment, the mode of production, and culture. The techniques of cognitive mapping will assist in this task.” (2000: 62) Edward W. Soja’s work, after Lefebvre, reinvestigates ideological constructions of space. Building on significant new ways of thinking about space and spatiality from a radically postmodern critical perspective, Soja insists that spatiality should attract the same amount of theoretical rigour and in-depth analysis as socio-historical phenomena. His work is influenced by the critical developments of poststructuralism, and, in particular, deconstruction; that is, the radical restructuring of long-established modes of knowledge formation as well as conventional modernist epistemologies, and the critique of master narratives and totalising discourses that limit the scope of knowledge formation (Soja 1996: 3-4). Soja argues for a greater consideration of the “social construction of our embracing spatialities” (1996: 1). He advocates that “perhaps more than ever before, a strategic awareness of this collectively created spatiality and its social consequences has become a vital part of making both theoretical and practical sense of our contemporary lifeworlds at all scales, from the most intimate to the most global” (1996: 1). His work, then, is driven by a requirement to theorise the shifting spatial politics of the postmodern world. Indeed, as he argues, “the demystification of spatiality and its veiled instrumentality of power is the key to making practical, political, and theoretical sense of the contemporary era” (1989: 61). He dismisses an epistemological approach that relies on rigid binary thought, and, instead, following Lefebvre’s spatial trialectic, formulates what he terms ‘thirding-as-Othering’, a radical spatial perspective that draws “selectively and strategically from the two opposing categories to open new alternatives” (1996: 5). Soja’s concept of ‘Thirdspace’, then, is a “creative recombination and extension” that builds on a ‘Firstspace’ perspective focused


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on the ‘real’ material world (a redefinition of Lefebvre’s ‘Spatial Practice’) and a ‘Secondspace’ perspective that interprets ‘reality’ through discursive representations of spatiality (a redefinition of Lefebvre’s ‘Representations of Space’) (1996: 6). As such, Soja focuses his attention primarily on Lefebvre’s espace veçu, or lived social space (‘Spaces of Representation’), the habitus of social practices, which he sees offering more theoretical and critical possibilities than Lefebvre’s concepts of espace perçu (perceived space) and espace conçu (conceived space) (1996: 64-68). Soja suggests that espace perçu – the representation of space by the architect or cartographer, or the textual mapping of the material form of objects in space – offers little more than a “realistic illusion” of space, and, as such, gives no account of the ways in which spatial practice shapes subjectivity and social behaviour. For Soja, the trialectic, espace veçu, combines the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’, the individual, subjective experience of space and the imagined representation of space. Soja argues that lived social space, espace veçu, can become the territory from which marginalised social groups and the individuals who together form them can begin to articulate their alterity. As such, it can constitute “the space of radical openness, the space of social struggle” (1996: 68). Soja further outlines his concept of ‘Thirdspace’ as follows: Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history. (1996: 56-7)

Rather than passively accepting exclusion, then, a group or an individual can, within ‘Thirdspace’, actively choose marginality. Thus, the perceived difference of the group or individual can be demonstrated not to be a sign of weakness but, instead, a sign of strength. As such, the margin can become a site of resistance to hegemonic forces. With ‘Thirdspace’ functioning as a site of resistance, then, ‘thirding-asOthering’ can become radically empowering, as traditional, binary notions of self/other, inside/outside and centre/periphery are deconstructed. Soja notes that by choosing marginality, the writer bell hooks, for example, chooses ‘Thirdspace’ (or something very much like it) as a “strategic location for exploring postmodern culture and

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seeking political community among all those oppressively peripheralized by their race, class, gender, erotic preference, age, nation, region, and colonial status” (1996: 106). Indeed, hooks has written that “I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as a site of resistance – as location of radical openness and possibility.” (1991: 153) hooks’s chosen position on the margin has been echoed by Homi K. Bhabha, who, as he explored the nature of cultural difference and what he terms the ‘location’ of culture, has suggested that “it is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond” (1994: 1). He elaborates further: “We find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.” (1994: 1) To be “beyond”, then, is to occupy a space that offers the potential for intervention. I now want to try to demonstrate how far Iain Sinclair’s novel Downriver (1991) effectively articulates aspects of this espace veçu, or Soja’s conceptual ‘Thirdspace’. Sinclair has pointed out that he has become “less interested in texture and fabric […] than in noticing everything” (2002a: 4). This “noticing everything” in ‘Thirdspace’ facilitates Sinclair’s critique of the spatial changes occurring in east London, while, at the same time, keeping a Victorian East End chronotope alive. Downriver charts the effects of the dramatic changes taking place along the River Thames during the 1980s, and the impact of Thatcher’s period in power on the spatial economy of London and on the development of Docklands in particular. The formal complexity of the novel blurs distinctions between literary genres, fiction, journalism, history, philosophy, literary and film criticism, travel writing and autobiography. As such, this text, in its apparent formal irrationality, sets itself on the margins of the hegemonic, archly rational discourse which has constituted both the material redevelopment of the ‘real’ east London and the vast majority of ‘imagined’ textual constructions of the East End. While Sinclair is not, strictly speaking, articulating his own alterity, or, even, his own position on the cultural periphery, he can certainly be said to be mobilising something like ‘Thirdspace’ as a means of articulating the spatial complexities of the postmodern East End. His narrative aims to construct a ‘radical openness’ from which he can


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effectively challenge the hegemonic remapping of the espace perçu and espace conçu of contemporary east London. In Downriver, Sinclair certainly moves “beyond”, to paraphrase Bhabha, time and space; beyond a straightforwardly historical understanding of the East End or rational, geographical mappings of east London. Although Sinclair has become a less marginal writer in terms of his critical recognition and the breadth of his readership, Downriver certainly functions as a text that positions itself on the margins of English culture. It appears to celebrate its textual ‘Otherness’. As parts of east London have been materially re-organised (or re-written) by the LDDC, and as rational order has been imposed upon aspects of the East End, Sinclair demonstrates in Downriver how far this espace conçu offers a distorted view of east London that overlooks certain geographical, topographical and socio-historical phenomena. Sinclair’s writing in Downriver, then, rages against spatial control and totalising spatial closure. It highlights the variable, shifting, changing nature of spaces to the east of the city. As such, Downriver can be read as a text that articulates a radical spatial consciousness situated in a ‘Thirdspace’ which incorporates and subverts the ‘Firstspace’ of this ‘real’ material fabric of urban space and the ‘Secondspace’ of the Docklands planners and much of the textual re-imagining of the East End. Iain Chambers has argued that the city exists as a series of doubles; it has official and hidden cultures, it is a real place and a site of the imagination. Its elaborate network of streets, housing, public buildings, transport systems, parks and shops is paralleled by a complex of attitudes, customs, expectancies, and hopes that reside in us as urban subjects. We discover that urban ‘reality’ is not singular but multiple, that inside the city there is always another city. (1986: 183)

Sinclair’s writing in Downriver uncovers a multiplicity of urban realities that are tied to the postmodern East End, and excavates hidden cultural discourses in order to critique the emergence of the newly dominant culture of multi-national capitalism in this space. As such, his work can be said to embrace the new postmodern cultural and spatial politics as defined by Edward Soja: In […] postmodern recontextualizations of contemporary life, the great modernist narratives that connected ‘fixed’ community […] with emancipation (if not revolution) are shattered. Another spatiality is

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End recognized, one which cannot be so neatly categorized and mapped, where the very distinction between mind and body, private and public space, and between who is inside or outside the boundaries of community, is obliterated and diffracted in a new and different cultural politics of real-and-imagined everyday life. (1996: 116)

Iain Sinclair’s Downriver charts, as David Harvey would have it, “incommensurable spaces that are juxtaposed or superimposed upon each other” (1990: 48). Downriver marks a moment of transition in the history of the material, ‘real’ East End, as its industrial past is effectively erased. In this novel, an uncertain, post-industrial, postmodern east London appears to be struggling to find an identity. But Sinclair seems to be suggesting that East End histories and narratives are far too powerful to be completely erased by the development of new material structures: “Pastiched catastrophes overwhelm the dusty traces of true archival pain.” (2002a: 277) There is the sense in Sinclair’s work, then, that all attempts to change this urban space are ultimately doomed to fail: “The elevated railway provided the first cinema of poverty – open-city realism – as the trains cut through the otherwise impenetrable warrens of metropolitan squalor.” (2002a: 162) This is a description of east London as seen from the Docklands Light Railway; or, as Sinclair describes it, “the only illuminated path over the Plains of Darkness” (2002a: 164). The new infrastructure merely provides a cinematic view (hence a constructed view) of this urban wasteland. So while Downriver can be said to articulate aspects of what Soja has termed ‘Thirdspace’, it also reveals the fluid slippage that occurs within Soja’s spatial trialectic. By focusing at times on traditional East End narratives, or the ‘Secondspace’ of the ‘imagined’ East End, Sinclair’s narrators manage to challenge a spatial idea of the East End as well as the rationalisation of this space by the Docklands planners, while, at the same time, effectively reinforcing this spatial idea. In his earlier novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), Sinclair issued a call for simultaneity in a passage that echoes, in many ways, the spatial trialectic developed by Lefebvre and Soja, and the concept of ‘Thirdspace’ in particular: “We have got to imagine one stupendous whole wherein all that has ever come into being or will come co-exists, which, passing slowly on, leaves in this flickering consciousness of ours, limited to a narrow space and a single moment, a tumultuous record of changes and vicissitudes that are but to us.”


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(1998b: 112) The theme of simultaneity is touched upon again in a passage in Downriver that distinctly echoes Paul Virilio: “Absence of boundaries, a liquid matrix, a schizophrenic actuality that contains the fascinating possibility of finding ourselves placed in postmodern Docklands and quattrocentro Florence, at the same time. So that all those greedy pastiches have become the only available reality, real fakes, if you like. (2002a: 297) For Stephen Graham, directly recalling Virilio, the future of the phenomenon of the city is under threat from the extraordinary developments in an area of human life that arguably led to the construction of the earliest cities and the rapid expansion of modern urban centres like London – namely, communication: Ideas of bounded, integrated and mechanical cities, separated from each other by the fictional effects of distance, no longer capture the meshing of urban functions into pervasive lattices of real-time functions that criss-cross the globe based on computer networks. This leads to a sense of the opening up of urban elements to be tied intimately into global flows, rather than through intense place-based ‘relational webs’. (1997: 35)

The possibility of positioning oneself within a ‘Thirdspace’ from which to counter and resist such spatial changes to east London is later reiterated in Downriver: “We had to believe more strongly in some other reality, a place beyond this place. To feel the curvature of time, which is love: to resolve the bondage of gravity. To make out along that curve, to have the courage to make that jump.” (2002a: 295) Whether or not Sinclair successfully articulates a means of resisting hegemonic cultural forces in Downriver remains unclear. But what does become apparent is the fact that in this novel, Sinclair effectively keeps an ‘imagined’ East End ‘Secondspace’ alive. Kevin Robins has suggested that “if modernism was about abstraction and functionalism, then postmodernism is about the renaissance of tradition and re-enchantment of place” (1993: 306). The East End of London, of course, as Sinclair knows, has tradition in abundance. But his work continues to constitute a re-enchantment of this place. So the radically open narrative of Downriver remains haunted by ghostly, mythical narratives that exemplify an enduring nineteenth-century East End chronotope. If the traditional, mythical concept of the East End is spatially imagined in opposition to the West End, Downriver, while engaging with the so-called postmodern ‘glocalization’ of space

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(as Soja would have it), still effectively manages to do this. It seems, then, that even in this time of extraordinary spatial complexity, the ‘local’ still holds a considerable hold over the imagination for a large number of people. That is, even if many east Londoners now live in what Virilio sees as a “liquid matrix”, or what Lefebvre terms l’espace veçu and Soja terms ‘Thirdspace’, the ‘local’ can still be imaginatively mobilised in order to facilitate the construction of their cultural identity from ‘without’.

Discursive Re-Cladding The socio-cultural impact of the development of Docklands, then, has had a profound impact on the imagination of a number of writers and filmmakers. Indeed, the beginning of the 1990s saw the publication of a number of books that explore the changing face of London, the gentrification of Docklands, and the promotion of a heritage ‘idea’ of London. Justin Cartwright’s Look at it This Way was published in 1990, and Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind, Patrick Wright’s A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London, and Sinclair’s Downriver, were all published in 1991. Like Downriver, Look at it This Way imagines a London going through the process of major spatial change. Cartwright’s contemporary city is inhabited by rich, successful young executives working in banking and advertising, trans-Atlantic broken families, and anachronistic working-class characters who come to embody the endurance of an imagined London of the past. But Cartwright’s London is also marked as a jungle. Indeed, this metaphor becomes a distinct theme of the narrative, as a banker in his early thirties, Miles, finds himself suddenly out of work, in debt, involved in criminal activity, and eventually eaten by a lion that escapes from London Zoo. Look at it This Way attempts to engage with and portray a complex moment in the spatial history of London, as the city, Janus-faced, appears torn between a mythical identity located in a distant conceptual ‘past space’, and its uncertain future on the global stage. But Cartwright’s characterisation often draws on familiar cultural stereotypes. Unlike Sinclair’s radically disjunctive formal representations of the postmodern East End, this novel offers a clearer, more obviously realistic, essen-


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tially bourgeois vision of contemporary London that masquerades as an enquiry into postmodern urbanism and cultural geography. The novel is split into two narratives. The first narrator is Tim Curtiz, a rich writer living in Holland Park who is employed to produce journalistic work on London for the Manhattan magazine in New York. So it is his job to sell an idea of London to America. As such, he is actively engaged in writing and re-imagining London as a ‘Secondspace’, to re-employ Soja’s terminology. In one description of the city, Curtiz writes: The City is changing, too. The streets are a bedlam of building works and excavations. ‘Cladding’ is all the rage. Brutal sixties office blocks of leprous concrete with blue panels of a plastic compound called ‘quartzite’, once fashionable, are being ‘re-clad’. This requires a glamorous new glass skin and a pediment on top of the building to hide the lift shaft and services. (2000: 4)

Curtiz’s description of the postmodern regeneration of modern architecture serves to underline how far an ‘imagined’ London, and the East End in particular (as a culturally constructed spatial idea) has been ‘re-clad’ with new myths and narratives. Cartwright’s novel demonstrates, then, that the Docklands regeneration project has not radically altered the East End of the imagination, but has merely clad an old, familiar, mythical, culturally constructed idea of the East End with a postmodern narrative sheen. In other words, the degeneracy that came to define the old East End is not being erased, but merely covered. The novel suggests that there is always the danger that this degeneracy might break through to the surface at any moment, like a weed bursting through new pavement. One working-class character in the novel, Cochrane, lives in an old, run-down East End building. Tim Curtiz notices that: “All around the tenement, old buildings were undergoing wonderful transformations into more desirable and up-todate accommodation.” (Cartwright 2000: 11) These buildings are also being re-clad. Tim appears to acknowledge this, even if he imagines the East End and its inhabitants in broadly homogeneous terms: To me, despite the refurbishment, the yuppie mice nibbling at the edges of the huge stale cheese, the East End is a solidly blank, depressing place of crumbling, weeping buildings and exhausted little shops selling third-rate goods. Its inhabitants seem equally tired; if they are white, they are crushed by the realisation that they will never

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End be able to afford to get out, and if they are Asian, they are exhausted after the struggles of emigrating from Bangladesh. (2000: 20)

It seems that if an East Ender does manage to escape this territory, like the lion from the zoo, he or she will evidently discover that they are unable to shake off its mythic pull. Tim Curtiz meditates further on this point, suggesting that the “old money” of Kensington “has grown by leaps and bounds in the last ten years as everything, the very fabric of the country, has reached the point of critical mass” (2000: 59). The ‘old money’, then, remains untroubled by the ‘new money’: “They don’t really approve of the wide boys and the barrow boys in the City becoming rich too, but they can see the irony of that position and anyway none of these new chaps owns thousands of acres or whole streets of Georgian houses. They will never catch up, in fact.” (2000: 59-60) In this essentially bourgeois novel, then, the East End and the West End are still imaginatively drawn apart. Tragic occurrences are directly linked to (or caused by) a cross-pollination of cultures, as a number of characters manage to transgress this imagined spatial divide. Before they split up, for example, the doomed bank dealer, Miles, and his advertising executive girlfriend, Victoria, live in a Docklands apartment. But, for Victoria, no amount of regeneration can remove her home from the mythical topography it occupies: “For the people who lived down here, the indigenes, Belgravia and Chelsea were as far away as Rawalpindi or Cincinnati.” (2000: 38) She blames Miles for the move to Docklands: “For a start it had been his idea to buy somewhere down here, a million miles from civilization.” (2000: 32) Later, in Tim’s car, driving through the West End, she replies to his question “Where do you live?” rather rudely: “God, I live miles away. In up-and-coming fucking Docklands.” (2000: 58) The omniscient narrator, capturing Victoria’s point of view, barely disguises a racist sensibility here: The East End had thousands of acres, perhaps even square miles, of dereliction. Miles’s mistake had been to assume that the logic of the Nikkei Index applied in this disordered topography. No upwardly mobile Japanese in his right mind would want to live down here. Nor did Victoria. She wanted to live in South Kensington or Hampstead, back among the English. Nothing personal. Perhaps a few years ago she would have found it interesting, even challenging, to live among peo-


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ple who, in their swampy homeland, had barely seen a tap and lived exclusively on rice. (2000: 34)

Another character in the novel, Bernie, an actor, is presented as an authentic East Ender who appears proud of who he is and where he comes from. Bernie views the regeneration of Docklands in quite different ways to the bourgeois settlers, as Tim recalls: On the way back from Billingsgate we drove through Docklands on what Bernie, predictably, said was the Yellow Brick Road. We turned a corner and the skies parted. The sun had not yet risen but it had done something more beautiful: it had leaked out behind the ribs of a cloud […]. In front of this luminous backdrop, the gantries of a hundred cranes rose into the sky and a railway carried a toy train high above the dock between the cranes and the middle distance. It was a scene from Metropolis, yet the sky was unmistakeably by Turner as it melted into the glowing water of the dock. (2000: 26-7)

Curtiz recognises that powerful ideas of London have developed through cultural discourse. For Curtiz, then, London can be understood as l’espace conçu. He notices that this new architecture displays the influence of the history of cinema. This is a utopian London of the future witnessed forming in the present – an ambitious construction that recalls the imagined future city depicted in the modernist German film Metropolis (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1926) and the otherwordly Oz in The Wizard of Oz (Dir. Victor Fleming, 1939). Penelope Lively’s novel, City of the Mind (1991), adopts more obviously psychogeographical approaches to comprehending the rapidly changing spaces of the city. The novel tells the story of an architect, Matthew Halland, who is involved in building a ‘new’ London in Docklands, while he also attempts to rebuild his own life after a failed marriage. The novel is concerned, then, with the construction and destruction of cities, but also the construction, destruction and fragmentation of personal identity, families, and other social relationships. The omniscient narrator effectively tells Matthew’s story, and presents a London seen from his point of view. This narrational focalisation offers the reader insights into how this intelligent, middle-class professional white male responds to the contemporary metropolis. We effectively gain access to his ‘city of the mind’. These visions of Matthew’s ‘soft city’ appear profoundly influenced not only by Jonathan Raban’s psychic journeying through the London of the early 1970s but

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also by Iain Sinclair’s psychogeography of the postmodern East End. Indeed, Matthew tells a colleague: “This city […] is entirely in the mind. It is a construct of the memory and of the intellect. Without you and me it hasn’t got a chance.” (Lively 1991: 7) But as an architect, Matthew also recognises the importance of the ‘imageability’ of the material fabric of the built environment in the formation of this ‘city of the mind’. Interestingly (bearing in mind the theories of ‘Thirdspace’), Matthew’s city is also a city of simultaneity: “For this is the city, in which everything is simultaneous. There is no yesterday, no tomorrow, merely weather, and decay, and construction.” (1991: 24) This view recurs throughout the novel, aligning the narrative with the discourses of contemporary postmodern urban theory – for example: “Distance, like time, is inconstant […]. It is not distance which separates us from others; space, like time, has its own elasticity.” (1991: 209) And “time and space are illusory, and the city itself absorbs and reflects, so that here and there, at crucial points, it is both the same and different” (1991: 211). Indeed, this simultaneity profoundly affects Matthew’s experience of the city: And thus, driving through the city, he is both here and now, there and then. He carries yesterday with him, but pushes forward into today, and tomorrow, skipping as he will from one to the other. He is in London, on a May morning of the late twentieth century, but is also in many other places, and at other times […]. Thus he coasts through the city, his body in one world and his head in many. He is told so much, and from so many sources, that he has learned to disregard, to let information filter through the mind and vanish, leaving impressions – a phrase, a fact, an image. He knows much, and very little. […] He thinks only of eyes seeing, million upon million pairs of eyes, recording the same world, the same images. He thinks of all these conjunctions of knowledge and experience, these collisions of what is known and what is felt which flame within the head to create a private vision, but a vision which is coloured by the many visions of other people, by fact and error and received opinion and things remembered and things invented. We can see nothing for itself alone; everything alludes to something else. (1991: 2-3; 9)

This is also a constructed, cinematic view of the city: the city is witnessed as an abundance of images:


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The city, too, bombards him. He sees decades and centuries, poverty and wealth, grace and vulgarity. He sees a kaleidoscope of time and mood: buildings that ape Gothic cathedrals, that remember Greek temples, that parade symbols and images. He sees columns, pediments and porticos. He sees Victorian stucco, twentieth-century concrete, a snatch of Georgian brick. He notes the resilience and tenacity of the city, and its indifference. He sees, too, that the city speaks in tongues: Pizza Ciao, King’s Cross Kebab, New Raj Mahal Tandoori, Nepalese Brasserie. And he hears another clamour, a cacophony of sound that runs the whole gamut from Yiddish to Urdu, a global testimony reaching from Moscow to Sydney by way of Greece and Turkey and remote nameless birthplaces in Ireland or India or the Caribbean. The resonances of the place are universal. (1991: 3)

So, for Matthew, postmodern London is a not just a global city, but also a divided, localised city. Significantly, again, the East End and the West End remain imaginatively opposed. In Matthew Halland’s city, then, the East End functions as a space in which he witnesses a collision occurring between variegated cultures, as well as a fusing of an imagined past and an imagined future: “There was a silence. They were in Whitechapel Road now; tower blocks cohabited with the struggling remnants of the old East End. Asian Supermarket; Bangladeshi Welfare Association; The Horse and Jockey. A new development like a clutch of shining white stilos rose above a grubby nineteenth-century terrace.” (1991: 12) As Matthew arrives in Docklands, Lively’s narrator carefully describes this topography: It is a landscape of simultaneous decay and resurrection; glass, steel and concrete rear from the mud and rubble of excavation. The meccano outlines of cranes preside as far as the eye can see, the completed buildings are monolithic glass structures in whose serene surfaces of smoky grey and greenish-blue there float the soft mountain ranges of the clouds. Below them, the few surviving terrace houses of Limehouse, of Poplar, of Shadwell seem to crouch in some other timeband. (1991: 13)

While east London has irrecoverably changed, aspects of a nineteenthcentury East End chronotope remain. Throughout the novel, the East End is also clearly marked as the low ‘Other’ of a distinctly bourgeois west London. As Matthew’s colleague, Tony, declares: “Nothing would induce me to live down here.” (1991: 12) The white middle-class idea of home is positioned

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here not only within an imagined West End but also within a mythical idea of a great London of the past. This point is further highlighted by the spatial opposition of Matthew’s Docklands development (a thirtystorey tower at Blackwall) and another architectural project he is involved with, located in Cobham Square, west London. This West End building, originally erected in 1823, is in the process of being regenerated, and appears to have the potential to endure, as Jobson, a site manager, points out: “What we’re putting up now will see out the next hundred years. More than I can say for your glasshouses down in Docklands.” (1991: 25) Matthew sees this work on Cobham Square as a “making over” (1991: 25). This recalls the re-cladding that takes place in Cartwright’s Look at it This Way. Interestingly, this architectural process effectively mirrors what these writers are doing with an idea of the East End. Instead of constructing radically open, new narratives around this discursive territory, they are instead “making over” or “re-cladding” an existing, culturally constructed spatial idea in order, it seems, to imaginatively preserve the East End as an ideological construct against which an increasingly anxious white English middle class might continue to define itself. It seems that the new, glossy, shiny East End rising in Docklands can easily be peeled away to reveal aspects of an older chronotope, just as façades can be peeled away to reveal old buildings and the narratives which remain hidden underneath them: “The buildings have been stripped down to the bone, and are reborn. Somewhere behind that surface of new plaster the brick records the soot-stained spine of fireplaces.” (Lively 1991: 186) Lively describes the construction site on the Isle of Dogs as a “delicate forestry of cranes” (1991: 40). But, marked as a forest in a description that echoes both Byron and Conrad, this uncanny space is still denied civilised status. Even the immense new buildings springing up in east London cannot challenge an idea of this space that has been forged over a substantial period of time: “A city is an organic growth and here the profoundly arrogant assumption was being made that you can bulldoze the past, replace it with new constructions and expect the result to be anything other than the semblance of a place.” (1991: 90) Back in Spitalfields, a collision between old and new worlds is felt again: “This is the frontline all right; here the warring factions of unbridled progress and entrenched nostalgia face each other across the barricades.” (1991: 93) The restoration and refurbishment of Georgian terraces in Spitalfields


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is seen to provoke cultural tensions between so-called ‘new money’, the money of the City, and the poor, multi-ethnic population of the area. In a postcolonial London, these wealthy middle-class invaders of Spitalfields are not merely colonising space. They are also colonising a mythical idea of an English past. Indeed, in After Theory, Terry Eagleton argues that “the rich are global and the poor are local – though just as poverty is a global fact, so the rich are coming to appreciate the benefits of locality” (2003: 22). There is the sense in both Look at it This Way and City of the Mind that the psychogeography of the protagonists offers evidence of the decadent self-indulgence of the rich and solvent, who, after all, can afford to think ‘globally’. They can choose to move between spaces; into and out of the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ East Ends. Others cannot.

VII After Empire: Tourism, Immigration and Colonisation Home is not just a place; it is also what goes on there. A place becomes a home, by virtue of the habits that domesticate it. - Scruton (2006: 9)

Spatialising Nostalgia Andrew Motion’s poem ‘Fresh Water’ captures the experience of a middle-class family approaching contemporary London as if it were a museum, an exhibit, or an historical artefact: Now the children are old enough to see what there is to see we take them to Tower Bridge and explain how the road lifts up, how traitors arrived at Traitor’s Gate, how this was a brewery and that was a warehouse, how the river starts many miles inland and changes and grows, changes and grows, until it arrives here, London, where we live, then winds past Canary Wharf (which they’ve done in school) and out to sea. (1999: 59)

Canary Wharf, the latest icon on the London skyline, is worth pointing out to the kids, who have perhaps learned about the regeneration of their city in school. But, to the poet, this new development apparently exists in a liminal, marginal space that is not to be imagined as an integral part of the ‘museum of London’. After all, London is “where we live” (my emphasis). In the poet’s spatial imagination, the River Thames moves out of ‘London’ and “winds past Canary Wharf”. Whereas Tower Bridge constitutes a major landmark in the famous city, Canary Wharf is clearly not worth taking the kids to see. But the Tower of London remains a potent signifier of an idea of London popularly found in history books and tourist brochures (Gilbert and Henderson 2002: 121-36). It is the Tower of London, after all – a site that has come to evoke specific (often nostalgic) aspects of English-

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ness. As such, it has an imaginative presence in the city that the Canary Wharf tower will doubtless never achieve. The poet writes that the Tower of London was once where “traitors arrived”. But it is now a stop-off site for the endless stream of buses and coaches touring the capital. It seems that there might be a historical connectivity between these people. The London sought by the family in this poem is the London that is still, more often than not, depicted in mainstream British films and the films of Hollywood. It is the London of a mythical, idealised English past – a fairy-tale city of delights (Murphy 2001: 296-300). But it is significant that in these popular texts there is often little or no visible evidence of the diasporic communities that have redefined London as a postmodern or, indeed, a postcolonial city. We need only think of Four Weddings and a Funeral (Dir. Mike Newell, 1994), Notting Hill (Dir. Roger Mitchell, 1999), Bridget Jones’s Diary (Dir. Sharon Maguire, 2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Dir. Beeban Kidron, 2004) here as examples of films that effectively clean up London for a global audience. The nostalgic, postcard image of London is often considered, of course, as a positive virtue that can be exploited to fuel the economy of the neo-liberal city. 1 Indeed, as Italo Calvino has contended, “If the traveller does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one.” (1997: 30) Making a similar point, David Harvey has charted the growth of “museum culture”, suggesting that postmodernism and the heritage industry can be seen to be linked (1990: 62). Britain, then (and England specifically), can be seen to be fast turning to the manufacture of heritage and nostalgia as its principal industry (Hewison 1987). As Iain Sinclair argues in Downriver, this constitutes “our current obsession with colonizing the past – as the only place where access is free” (2002a: 62). If the adventurous tourist in twenty-first-century London decides to venture to the east of Tower Bridge, as Jack London did at the beginning of the twentieth century, they might choose to follow a Ripper tour around Whitechapel in order to experience a ‘heritage East End’. Indeed, we might now think of the enduring late-Victorian East End chronotope (the haunt of the figure of the Ripper) as another 1

For a useful study of contemporary British cinema with specific reference to London films see Leach (2004: 219-234).


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space of nostalgia – a space in which a dark, disturbing vision of an English past can be effectively placed, packaged and consumed. In his book, The Tourist Gaze, John Urry suggests that “the protection of the past conceals the destruction of the present” (1990: 99). He goes on to point out that “there is an absolute distinction between authentic history (continuing and therefore dangerous) and heritage (past, dead and safe)” (1990: 99). Moreover, James Donald argues that “the living space of the city exists as representation and projection of experience as much as it exists as bricks and mortar or concrete and steel” (1999: 182). This “experience” is chiefly governed by the imagination. James Donald usefully recalls J. Hillis Miller’s notion of the ‘atopical’. For Miller, we cannot imagine space as such. What we imagine is instead always an event or events taking place. Our spatial imagination, then, is narrative based. Miller argues that the ability of the individual to fully grasp the city at a microscopic level, let alone a totalised one, appears all but impossible. But Donald suggests that through Miller’s ‘atopical’, “the past exists as the projection back of present concerns” (1999: 184). The past, then, is imaginatively located in narratives, and these narratives are chronotopic; that is, spatial as well as temporal. For Miller, this re-imagining of the past is crucial to our understanding of who we are. It profoundly informs our sense of identity. Donald also argues that “these imagined events are a working through of current desires and anxieties, a way of managing them by staging them as a narrative” (1999: 186). The imaginative endurance of a nineteenth-century East End chronotope testifies to the fact that the past can be thought of as a spatial phenomenon as well as a temporal phenomenon. For many in the English middle class, then, the East End of London has become an object of nostalgia. To others, it remains a space of the ‘unknown’. In his neo-Victorian ‘memoir’, Salaam Brick Lane (2005), for example, Tarquin Hall – a native of Barnes more familiar with “Chiswick, Kew, Putney, Richmond” (2005: 6) than Whitechapel – is moved to live in Brick Lane because he cannot find affordable housing in his more familiar patch in west London. He initially admits that the “East End in particular was one huge blank spot”, and that “my impression of the place was still coloured by childhood images of fog-bound streets stalked by Jack the Ripper, Bill Sykes, and the notorious Kray Twins” (2005: 7). Moreover, Hall begins his book by describing himself reading a copy of Jack London’s

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The People of the Abyss, and discussing a passage with a local Shia letting agent, who instantly recognises the 1902 scene being described: “it has not changed much around here” (2005: 11). Hall’s book received a good deal of critical praise for the ways in which it sought to record the lives of real ‘foreigners’ living so close to the centre of contemporary London. But the writer sees himself as an explorer (not unlike Jack London), reporting back to civilisation from an exotic hinterland. Consider this early description of a familiar topography within a familiar chronotope: A muddle of architecture lined the wet, clinker pavements. Crumbling Victorian terraces stood shoulder to shoulder with dilapidated warehouses and empty 1950s office blocks, which bled rust down their façades. A few houses stood empty or gutted, their tiled roofs sagging, their chimney pots leaning perilously. Pigeons flew in and out of broken windows. Walls served as canvases for local graffiti artists. In doorways, soggy pizza flyers lay among nests of rags and cardboard boxes made by the homeless. (2005: 4)

Once again, we can see anthropomorphic architecture being mobilised here in order to evoke aspects of the ‘low’ characters inhabiting this space. They appear strangely familiar: The bakery to the right appeared to be the more popular of the two. A queue snaked through its door out onto the pavement where customers stood devouring bagels oozing with cream cheese. They shared the space with five tramps who were drinking cans of Fosters and bumming cigarettes and change off passers-by. The loudest of them was a man with a mane of filthy black hair and a face as rough as a catscratched chair leg. He stood on the pavement raising his can of lager to passing drivers and making incomprehensible toasts punctuated by the word ‘fuckers!’ (2005: 5)

After at first feeling like a traveller or tourist in this space, Hall begins to feel more like “an immigrant in a strange and unfamiliar landscape” (2005:26). But both positions serve to reinforce what he obviously continues to consider to be his quintessentially middle-class Englishness, and, as such, of course, the ‘Otherness’ of Brick Lane. So, it seems, for a number of writers of postmodern, postcolonial London, aspects of the spatial politics of the late-nineteenth century remain familiar. A late-Victorian way of seeing the East End clearly endures.


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Bangladeshi Brick Lane? In Monica Ali’s hugely successful and critically acclaimed novel, Brick Lane (2003), contemporary east London is viewed through quite different lenses – the eyes of newly arrived Bangladeshi immigrants. Ali’s novel sets out to present an authentic, ethnically diverse east London, and, specifically, to capture the quotidian experiences of immigrants struggling to survive in this area of the city. The central male protagonist in Brick Lane, Chanu, aphoristically sums up his own experience: “To be an immigrant is to live out a tragedy.” (2003: 91) In Ali’s novel, the tourist London sought by the family in Andrew Motion’s ‘Fresh Water’, the ‘Other’ London discovered by Tarquin Hall, and the postcolonial London experienced by the immigrant, all come together. As it moves into the twenty-first century, tourists and immigrants continue to bring London to life. 2 But the city has of course always been a city of immigrants – east London in particular (even if this status continues to be clouded by the essential ‘whiteness’ of the BBC’s EastEnders). In Brick Lane, Chanu acknowledges the immigrant status of his family, and clearly understands that the East End remains a space defined in terms of the impact of immigration: Do you know how many immigrant populations have been here before us? In the eighteenth century the French Protestants fled here, escaping Catholic persecution. They were silk weavers. They made good. One hundred years later, the Jews came. They thrived. At the same time, the Chinese came as merchants. The Chinese are doing very well. (2003: 388)

In Ali’s novel, then, the East End once again effectively performs the role of an ‘Othered’ space. It takes up its role once more as a cathected zone in which a tragic narrative unfolds. It is set up once more in imaginative opposition to the West End. But the novel also complicates the relativism of this imaginary, binary spatial economy of London (an economy that has, as I have suggested, been problematized by the spatial developments of postmodernity) in interesting 2

For more on the immigrant experience in east London see Kershen (1997); Rix (1996: 20-60); Eade, Fremeaux and Garbin (2002: 159-176); Panayi (2003: 67-71). See also Dench, Gavron and Young (2006).

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ways. As the perceived socio-cultural localism of Bangladeshi Brick Lane and the East End is made plain in the text, so too are the effects of globalisation on a wider idea of London. Brick Lane examines the socio-cultural complexities of the increasingly diasporic movement of individuals away from former British colonies. But as it does this it also shows how far immigrants living in east London can become torn between real, material spaces and imagined spaces and communities. It seems that for a number of Ali’s characters, the spatialised relationship between their bodies and their imaginations (and specifically, their sense of home) become disjunctive. I should emphasise here that the recent literary interest in Brick Lane and its territory appears to have been driven by an essentially neo-Victorian bourgeois vision of this area as a zone in which distinctly drawn cultures can be seen to collide. Brick Lane, like Limehouse before it, thus comes to operate as a chronotope in which an imagined ‘East’ can be seen to meet an imagined ‘West’. Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, not unlike the slum novels of the late-nineteenth century, then, provides readers with a safe way to experience a postcolonial world that they might anxiously feel is in danger of inundating a mythical idea of English culture that provides them with a sense of ‘place’. 3 As Peter Brooker has pointed out, inhabitants of the ‘real’ Brick Lane no doubt “live out the complexities of being BritishBengali, Bengali-British, Muslim British-Bengali, swung between imagined pasts and futures, the remembered land and promised city, the family home and personal freedom, the competing traditions of arranged marriages and romantic love” (2004). This is certainly the experience documented by Ali in her novel. But this will surely not be the experience of many readers of the novel in a post-9/11 world. Ali’s Brick Lane, then, imagines an East End space in which the colonial ‘Other’ has their presence registered, and in which Islam’s apparently incongruous presence in a western city can be imaginatively registered and contained. Since the end of the Second World War, the increased migration of peoples from former British colonies to London has certainly altered the human and urban geography of the city (McLeod 2004: 4). 3

In 2005, Jeremy Gavron also drew readers’ attention to Brick Lane, publishing his novel An Acre of Barren Ground; Or, the History of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Brick Lane.


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Since 1979, the presence of immigrants in London has become increasingly visual, as ethnic minority groups, often accepted by older established communities, have grown, in some respects, increasingly self-confident (Panayi 2003: 68). But, of course, racism has continued to blight east London, as the success of the British National Party (BNP) in the Millwall by-election on the Isle of Dogs in 1994 so clearly demonstrated (Cohen 1996: 170-196). Contemporary fictional texts that explore east London often overlook the racial tensions that continue to affect this area of London (see EastEnders), or choose instead to present immigrants as a homogeneous, ‘Othered’ cultural mass that inhabits a liminal space in the imagination of central, white protagonists. For example, in his novel, Radon Daughters (1994), Iain Sinclair writes of Sileen: “He bullocked through flocks of chattering Bengali sweatshop girls.” (1998c: 18) There is the sense in many representations of contemporary east London offered by white writers that they are imaginatively trespassing in spaces peopled by the dark faces of cultural ‘Others’ not fully developed as characters in these narratives. Moreover, a number of writers have chosen to ignore the multicultural nature of the contemporary city almost entirely. Indeed, in the novels of Sinclair, Ackroyd, Lively and Cartwright, it is difficult to pick out a well defined or drawn character from an ethnic ‘minority’. In Justin Cartwright’s Look at it This Way, for example, Asians in east London are effectively depicted as non-characters. Tim Curtiz, the West End-based writer protagonist of the novel, admits: “In ten years here I have hardly met a person of colour. None of my friends is starving. You can’t go out looking for these people; they live on another planet but pass around the edge of our lives occasionally.” (2000: 17) Later in the novel, the narrator expands on this theme: She pulled her overcoat over her nightdress and set off to get the newspapers from the corner shop. The white locals called it the ‘Paki’ shop although the proprietors were dark, furtive people from Bangladesh. The popular myth was that the Bangladeshis were simply a new generation of upwardly mobile immigrants to the East End of London, an area which had – in this mythology – played host to waves of immigrants over the centuries in some inexplicably altruistic fashion. (2000: 33-4)

One can detect in this passage the fear of inundation mentioned by John Hurt’s narrator in William Raban’s Thames Film (1986) – an es-

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sentially white middle-class fear of the flow of low immigrant cultures into their imaginative territory, and, as such, into their Andersonian ‘imagined community’. Indeed, the narrator in Look at it This Way bears this out: “The City was growing daily. The lanes and alleyways led to Banks of Baroda and Brunei and Bangalore. Every nation in all the world was represented here.” (Cartwright 2000: 124) It is plain, then, that immigrants often continue to be imagined as representatives of ‘Other’ nations. As such, they must struggle to become properly assimilated into the hegemonic culture. London may well be a multicultural, postcolonial city, but for many it continues to remain starkly divided. In Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind, Bangladeshi immigrants also effectively remain unwritten, existing instead within the peripheral vision of white middle-class characters. In the following passage, the architect, Matthew Halland, notices the stark socio-cultural difference between the new, essentially white world of Docklands and the colourful, apparently pre-modern world of Whitechapel and Spitalfields: “A pervasive smell of curry – Bengal Cuisine, Imran Restaurant, Halal Meat Groceries and Provisions. This is a world in which business and domestic life are carried on cheek by jowl; people live here as they would have lived in the eighteenth century – or, of course, as they would live in Dacca or in Calcutta.” (1991: 91) I have shown how white middle-class writers like Sinclair and Ackroyd have imaginatively colonised Spitalfields. But in Look at it This Way, the territory around Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields, is presented as a space that is in the process of being physically colonised by the white middle classes, as Bangladeshis are gradually pushed out. Indeed, the protagonist, Halland, clearly witnesses this phenomenon occurring: “Here, in the streets beneath Hawksmoor’s spire, the houses are poised on the brink of extinction or transition.” (Cartwright 2000: 92) Halland heads “for the heartlands of restored Georgian Spitalfields, where frontages are dressed with canaries in cages and, allegedly, the more fastidious residents scorn electricity and live by candlelight” (2000: 93). The white middle-class settlers, like white middle-class refugees such as Mia Taylor in Matthew D’Ancona’s Going East, who, in the East End, “found a bolthole whose attractions she would never have understood before” (2004: 99), can, of course, choose an exotic or pre-modern way of life. However, the Bangladeshi families in Ali’s Brick Lane exist like Lively’s


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trapped exotic birds. They are effectively placed on display for the bourgeois reader. Writing about Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Ian Jack has suggested: “I […] think we liked the book because we (none of us Bengalis from east London) felt that it showed us a glimpse of what life might be like among one of the largest and least described non-white communities in Britain.” (Jack 2003: 7) It is important to note that Ali’s novel, while hugely successful with a predominantly white middle-class readership, was roundly criticised by Bangladeshis living in east London, who suggested that it offered an inauthentic portrayal of their community. Writing in December 2003 in The Guardian, Matthew Taylor pointed out that “community leaders from the neighbourhood in the East End of London that inspired Monica Ali’s Bookernominated first novel, Brick Lane, have branded her work a ‘despicable insult’ to Bangladeshis living in the area”. Taylor also pointed out that the Greater Sylhet Welfare and Development Council (GSWDC), representing some 500,000 Bangladeshis, wrote an 18-page letter to Ali outlining their views concerning the ways in which the novel portrays Bangladeshis in Brick Lane as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated. Indeed, a spokesperson for the GSWDC said that “[Brick Lane] is a completely stereotypical view of Bangladeshis living in Brick Lane and one we simply do not recognise”. This criticism of the novel by the GSWDC raises interesting questions concerning the socio-cultural position of the author, Ali, in relation to her characters. Moreover, the formal mode of narration employed in the novel is worth examining at this stage. The omniscient narrator of Brick Lane appears to focalise through the consciousness of Nazneen, Ali’s ‘heroine’ – the central protagonist in the novel. The reader is thus invited to share her point of view, and, through the narrator, gain privileged access to her thoughts, and later, her ‘soft city’. Nazneen, then, operates as an imaginative looking glass or mirror – a character through which the reader can witness the operations of an ‘Othered’ culture. But, at the same time, the reader is also invited to see, to paraphrase Edward Said, their “surrogate or underground” selves (1995: 3) reflected in Nazneen, her family and the Bangladeshi community.

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The Broken Mirror Salman Rushdie has recognised the problems faced by a writer of Asian heritage living and working in London and, indeed, writing London: “I would say that I write ‘for’ people who feel part of the things I write ‘about’, but also for everyone else whom I can reach.” (1992: 20) He elaborates further on this point: Let me suggest that Indian writers in England have access to a second tradition, quite apart from their own racial history. It is the culture and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group. We can quite legitimately claim as our ancestors the Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews; the past to which we belong is an English past, the history of immigrant Britain. Swift, Conrad, Marx are as much our literary forebears as Tagore or Ram Mohan Roy. (1992: 20)

Rushdie, born in Bombay in 1947 but long resident in Britain, provides extremely useful criticism of white British racist attitudes. But he also makes insightful suggestions concerning how far writers might choose to formally present their ‘imaginary homelands’: “Our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.” (1992: 10) Interestingly, Rushdie also argues that “it may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost” (1992: 10-11). But, “the broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed” (1992: 11). The broken mirror thus holds fragmented memories: “The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities.” (1992: 12) For the Asian writer, then, the broken mirror can become “a useful tool with which to work in the present” (1992: 12). The “physical fact of discontinuity” of the writer, his “present being in a different place from his past, or his being ‘elsewhere’” can “enable him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal” (1992: 12). Rushdie expands on this theme: “Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other


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times, that we fall between two stalls. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy.” (1992: 15) Rushdie had of course already explored this territory in his own work. In his highly controversial novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), the London sections of the narrative are set in the fictional Bangladeshi community of Brickhall (1998: 148-9). This fictional toponym imaginatively combines two major Asian areas of settlement in London, Brick Lane and Southall, and, as such, views them in a broken mirror (McLeod 2004: 148). But Rushdie’s novel also features central characters with hybrid identities who operate as “the site of struggle between purity and impurity, the sacred and the profane” (Keith and Pile 1993: 20). As such, The Satanic Verses can be seen to explore a multiplicity of spatialities simultaneously present through a radical contextualisation that would appear to echo the theoretical work of thinkers such as Lefebvre and Soja. That is, the novel explores the radical openness of a ‘Thirdspace’ and thus avoids an overly-simplistic binary spatial relativism that might continue to mark ‘the West’ as a linguistic condensation of the cultures of powerful European, American and Australasian economies and ‘the East’ as its condensed, linguistic ‘Other’ (Keith and Pile 1993: 22-40). But by focusing on an imaginative vision of the ‘real’ Bangladeshi community in a ‘real’ Brick Lane, and deciding to draw distinct characters in time and space who appear to operate with clear identities but also function as rhetorical devices, Ali’s Brick Lane chooses not to interrogate the immigrant experience in a Rushdian ‘broken mirror’. Indeed, Ali eschews the so-called ‘magic realism’ or ‘hysterical realism’ of Rushdie, or, indeed, Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth (2000). Instead, the formal construction of the narrative broadly follows the mimetic tradition of classic realist English novels. So, rather than commenting on or critiquing previous (especially late-nineteenthcentury) realist East End novels from a postcolonial spatial perspective, Brick Lane, another neo-Victorian text, instead serves to reinforce the traditionally bifurcated spatial politics of London as imagined in these earlier texts. Monica Ali’s novel depicts a Muslim Bangladeshi community in east London characterised by violence, infidelity, and alcohol and drug addiction. Characters suffer debt problems aggravated by usury,

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and live in cramped conditions, as Chanu points out: “Overcrowding is one of the worst problems in our community. Four or five Bangladeshis in one room.” (Ali 2003: 273) Bangladeshis are depicted surviving on low-paid work, and are constantly struggling against racism. 4 Brick Lane is presented, then, as a space in which the Bangladeshi community chooses to live on arrival in England, but soon finds that it can never escape. Indeed, at one point in the novel the narrator suggests that Nazneen feels imprisoned, that she “came to London to sit day after day in this large box with the furniture to dust, and the muffled sound of private lives sealed away above, below and around her” (2003: 18). While the narrator focuses on the alienation of the families living in council accommodation, the Bangladeshi community is also shown to be a closed community. Indeed, echoing many other fictional East End communities, everybody apparently knows everybody else: “Mrs Islam knew everything about everybody. She had been in London for nearly thirty years and if you were a Bangladeshi here, what could you keep secret from her?” (2003: 21) Moreover, as Chanu explains, “they know each other from the villages, and they come to Tower Hamlets and they think they are back in the village” (2003: 21). Chanu elaborates further on this point to Dr Azad, who has coined the term ‘Going Home Syndrome’ for disillusioned Bangladeshis in London: “They don’t ever really leave home. Their bodies are here but their hearts are back there. And anyway, look how they live: just recreating the villages here.” (2003: 24) There is the suggestion here that the immigrant’s body is localised, while their heart or mind is, if not global, then certainly ‘elsewhere’. The suffering of the Bangladeshis in Brick Lane in the novel is always, in some sense, related to the effects of the infiltration of a ‘glocalized’ white culture and capital into their territory. Indeed, Mrs Islam is all too aware of the processes of gentrification: “The block off Alder Street, the council sold it off. Do you know how many flats inside there now? Eight! Each one the size of a cricket pitch. Only one or two people living in each flat. How are they going to respect us, living ten to one room?” (2003: 369) The narrator also describes Nazneen encountering the process of gentrification:

4

For more details on the Bangladeshi community in east London see Eade (2000: 91-109); Gilbert (2002: 159-176).


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Three-storey houses, old houses but the bricks had been newly cleaned and the woodwork painted. There were wooden shutters in dark creams, pale greys and dusty blues. The doors were large and important. The window boxes matched the shutters. Inside there were gleaming kitchens, rich dark walls, shelves lined with books, but never any people. (2003: 209)

The narrator draws the reader’s attention here to the effects of white money on the Bangladeshi community: “Out of the estate and onto Commercial Road, past the clothes wholesalers, up Adler Street and left onto the brief green respite of Altab Ali Park where the neat, palefaced block of flats had picture windows and a gated entrance, from which the City boys could stroll to work.” (2003: 392) At another point in the novel, Karim (Nazneen’s idealistic young lover) tells her that he believes the drug problem on the estate has been fuelled by the process of gentrification: “But then, what happened, this area started going up. And the City started coming out towards Brick Lane. You got grant money coming in, regeneration money. Property prices going up, new people moving in, businesses and that. And we started to do well, man.” (2003: 257) Karim, then, believes that the influx of white capital could perhaps become beneficial to the local Bangladeshis. It is through the character of Karim, especially, that we can begin to see some of the socio-cultural tensions brought about by the globalisation and localisation (or Soja’s ‘glocalization’) indicative of the spatial politics of postmodernity being worked through. But other characters in the novel work through these tensions, too. When Chanu buys a computer, the narrator remarks: “On his computer, Chanu could access the entire world.” (2003: 164) And in her letters to her sister, Nazneen, Hasina, who is still living in Bangladesh, offers evidence of the spread of postmodern Western culture into the villages on the sub-continent, when she writes: “You have seen this Britainy Spear?” (2003: 185) Hasina’s mistranslation here – her elision of the white American pop singer Britney Spears and the country, Britain, that colonised her own country – is a telling symptom of postcolonial experience. If Britney Spears is the pop goddess of a Westernised global youth culture, Hasina sees this culture as very much a white culture, just as British culture, for her, will no doubt remain a predominantly white culture.

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But as middle-class whites are lured into the East End by its exotic ‘Otherness’ and cheaper properties, the area is shown in Ali’s novel to be a space in which cultures come into conflict. Indeed, Western culture is often seen to be infiltrating (or colonising) Bangladeshi Brick Lane: In between the Bangladeshi restaurants were little shops that sold clothes and bags and trinkets. Their customers were young men in sawn-off trousers and sandals and girls in T-shirts that strained across their chests and exposed their belly buttons […]. A girl at a wooden table on the pavement bent the screen of a laptop computer back and forth to angle it away from the sun. Nazneen thought of Chanu’s computer, gathering dust. (2003: 208-9)

Moreover, in another scene in the novel, Chanu argues with Dr Azad’s wife: I’m talking about the clash between Western values and our own. I’m talking about the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one’s identity and heritage. I’m talking about children who don’t know what their identity is. I’m talking about the feelings of alienation engendered by a society where racism is prevalent. I’m talking about the terrific struggle to preserve one’s sanity while striving to achieve the best for one’s family. I’m talking […]. (2003: 92)

However, Shahana, the eldest daughter of Chanu and Nazneen, enthusiastically embraces western culture: “She wanted to wear jeans […]. If she could choose between baked beans and daal it was no contest. When Bangladesh was mentioned she pulled a face.” (2003: 147) Moreover, when away from the gaze of her husband, Nazneen also dares to perform as a Western woman: “For a glorious moment it was clear that clothes, not fate, made her life. And if the moment had lasted she would have ripped the sari off and torn it to shreds.” (2003: 230) It is clear, then, that western culture remains the hegemonic culture, even in this space. As the novel captures the build up to and aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the effects of these events on Muslims living in London, it goes at least some way towards exploring the tensions that continue to exist between a global Islamic struggle documented (and, in a number of cases, sensationalised) by a global media, and localised, microcosmic struggles that continue to occur in pockets


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of so-called global or ‘world’ cities. Indeed, at one point in the novel, Karim, active in Islamic resistance, picks up on these spatial tensions: “We are for Muslim rights and culture. We’re into protecting our local ummah and supporting the global ummah.” (2003: 198) In Brick Lane, Jihad, too, can be seen to be a global phenomenon that is also fought locally. The novel clearly shows, then, how far the contemporary East End can still function as a spatial idea created through a complex dialogue between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ spaces in which fears, anxieties and desires concerning Englishness can be played out. In this sense, the East End, as a conceptual spatial idea or as a chronotope, has little changed since the late-nineteenth century. While Brick Lane depicts young Asian women attempting to adopt aspects of Western culture, while at the same time remaining acutely aware of their Bangladeshi cultural heritage, the narrator also notices a British white underclass that remains trapped in the East End. This underclass, like the Bangladeshis in Look at it This Way and City of the Mind, is marked as faceless. Characters are not fully drawn: Nazneen waved at the tattoo lady. The tattoo lady was always there when Nazneen looked out across the dead grass and broken paving stones to the block opposite. Most of the flats that closed three sides of a square had net curtains and the life behind was all shapes and shadows. But the tattoo lady had no curtains at all. Morning and afternoon she sat with her big thighs spilling over the sides of her chair, tipping forward to drop ash in a bowl, tipping back to slug from her can. She drank now, and tossed the can out of the window. (2003: 12)

Indeed, the tattoo lady remains in this position of stasis for much of the novel: The tattoo lady leans forward, watching the yard and drinking. Her hair slides down the sides of her head like an oil slick. She has dyed it, but it remains unwashed. She is wearing a man’s vest. Her breasts, patched with dark ink, flop against it. Her thighs run over the chair. She transfers her can from one hand to the other and back again. How can she just sit and sit? What is she waiting for? What is there to see? (2003: 70)

These faceless and nameless white characters are, in some senses, situated lower than the Bangladeshi community within the sociocultural hierarchy of Brick Lane. As such, they can be read as direct

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descendants of primitive, feral, lower-class characters who appeared in late nineteenth-century East End slum novels. Indeed, Chanu suggests that “television, pub, throwing darts, kicking a ball. That is the white working-class culture.” (2003: 210) Even for struggling Bangladeshis living in Brick Lane, white East Enders are seen to be the lowest-of-the-low; people who have not yet managed to escape this hellish, ‘Othered’ space. During the novel the reader is offered several lengthy descriptions of the topography of the city and city spaces that formally echo similar descriptions of east London that can be found in the work of writers such as Dickens, Morrison and Harkness. For example, the narrator offers the following description of Bethnal Green Road: Nazneen looked up at the grey towers, the blown-by forgotten strands of sky between them. She watched the traffic. There were more cars than people out here, a roaring metal army tearing up the town. A huge truck blocked her line of vision, petrol on her tongue, engines in her ears. The people who passed walked quickly, looked ahead at nothing or looked down at the pavement to negotiate puddles, litter and excrement. The white women wore clinging trousers, like tights with the feet cut out. They pushed prams and their mouths worked furiously. Their children screeched at them and they screeched back. (2003: 33)

The following is another example of a carefully crafted visual description of a distinct topography: “Behind her a door slammed. She reached the stairwell and cantered down. The overhead light was fierce; she could feel its faint heat even as the concrete cold crept into her toes. The stairs gave off a tang of urine.” (2003: 42-3) So, the architecture of the buildings in which Bangladeshis are trapped has a performative function in the novel: “And the streets were stacked with rubbish, entire kingdoms of rubbish piled high as fortresses with only the border skirmishes of plastic bottles and grease-stained cardboard to separate them.” (2003: 43) The narrator follows Nazneen across this space: “She crossed the rasp of land that had once sprouted a playground, a swing and a slide and a roundabout. Now the tarmac was rotten and split, it seemed, by blades of grass which sucked huge strength from this black grot but wilted on the lawns.” (2003: 230) Effectively colonising Nazneen’s consciousness, the reader, as an ‘imaginative tourist’, gains privileged access to these strange, exotic topographical spaces: “Nazneen turned her head. Through an open door,


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down a flight of concrete stairs, she glimpsed a row of sewing machines beneath a low yellow ceiling. A woman stood up to stretch and touched the ceiling with her palms.” (2003: 391) The well-worn image of the spatial idea of the East End as an urban jungle is also mobilised in the novel: The sun is large and sickly. It sweats uncomfortably in a hazy sky, squeezed between slabs of concrete. There is barely enough sky to hold it. Below, the communal bins ring the courtyard like squat metal warriors, competing in foulness, contemplating the stand-off. One has keeled over and spilled its guts. A rat flicks in and out of them. (2003: 70)

At other moments in the narrative, the reader is offered more imaginative tours through this highly exotic, dramatically-charged space: It was dark, and cosy with lamp-posts. The people were tucked into big coats, and steamed as they walked. Headlights and red rear lights turned the road into a crawling carnival. The bus bumped along. The shops were lit up still. Leather shops, dress shops, sari shops, shops that sold fish and chips and samosas and pizzas and a little bit of everything from around the world. (2003: 81)

This section of the narrative formally echoes the sensational urban naturalism of Emile Zola, suggesting as it does a link between the environment and the actions of the protagonists. The East End, just as in novels of the late-nineteenth century and films of the mid-twentieth century, is described here in a way that reflects the psychological disposition of the characters inhabiting it. There are two distinct scenes in Brick Lane that foreground the complexities of the spatial economy of postmodern, postcolonial London. The first scene follows Nazneen as she wanders away from her familiar territory around Brick Lane: Nazneen walked. She walked to the end of Brick Lane and turned right. Four blocks down she crossed the road (she waited next to a woman and stepped out with her, like a calf with her mother) and took a side street. She turned down the first right, and then went left. From there she took every second right and every second left until she realized she was leaving herself a trail. Then she turned off at random, began to run, limped for a while to save her ankle, and thought she had come in a circle. The buildings seemed familiar. She sensed rather than saw, because she had taken care not to notice. But now she

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End slowed down and looked around her. She looked up at a building as she passed. It was constructed almost entirely of glass, with a few thin rivets of steel holding it together. The entrance was like a glass fan, rotating slowly, sucking people in, wafting others out […]. The building was without end. Above, somewhere, it crushed the clouds. The next building and the one opposite were white stone palaces. There were steps up to the entrances and colonnades across the front. (2003: 44)

This passage follows Nazneen on foot away from Brick Lane, moving west through Aldgate and into the City of London. Although less than a mile from her home, Nazneen feels completely lost in this strange zone. The new corporate architecture and the older neo-classical office buildings, seen by her as “palaces”, are distinctly private, closed spaces that she is not permitted to enter. They symbolise the City itself – the financial heart of London that she, too, feels she is trespassing in. But she is no flâneur. Indeed, feminist critics have argued that the viewpoint of the flâneur cannot be open to a woman in the city (let alone an Asian woman). Nazneen, after all, is not a white middle-class woman of leisure. She does not enjoy the anonymity of the crowd or experience kaleidoscopic images of the city. Instead, as an ‘Othered’ dérive, the city for Nazneen becomes a terrifying space that reflects the terrifying culture she feels estranged from. What follows is a description of the inhabitants of this territory that thematically echoes T.S. Eliot’s famous vision of the modern city in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ section of The Waste Land: Men in dark suits trotted briskly up and down the steps, in pairs or in threes. They barked to each other and nodded sombrely […] every person who brushed past her on the pavement, every back she saw, was on a private, urgent mission to execute a precise and demanding plan: to get a promotion today, to be exactly on time for an appointment, to buy a newspaper with the right coins so that the exchange was swift and seamless, to walk without wasting a second and to reach the roadside just as the lights turned red. (2003: 44 - 5)

It is significant that Nazneen’s spatial imagination, formed in the agricultural countryside of Bangladesh, becomes overwhelmed when confronted with the modernity of the City of London: “The clouds rushed at the tops of buildings as if they would smother them in a murderous rage. The buildings stood their ground, impassive as cows.” (2003:


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47) The city can only be imagined through (or alongside) the imagined ontology of her countryside home. In other words, although she has tried to make a home in London, she can only view the city through the imaginative prism of her distant birthplace. Nazneen’s movement through this ‘Other’ territory, then, remains the movement of an immigrant drifting through an alien, unknown space.

Time to See the Sights/Sites During a major section of the novel, the Bangladeshi family are depicted going ‘on holiday’ to west London. As the narrator puts it: “Thirty or so years after he arrived in London, Chanu decided that it was time to see the sights.” (2003: 239) These sights, and this ‘London’, are clearly imagined as elsewhere, away from Brick Lane and the liminal spaces of the East End. The suggestion here, of course, is that there are no tourist sites of worth around Brick Lane. Interestingly, John Urry has pointed out that the phenomenon he terms the ‘tourist gaze’ is “constructed through difference” (1990: 1). He advocates that “the (tourist) gaze therefore presupposes a system of social activities and signs which locate the particular tourist practices, not in terms of some intrinsic characteristics, but through the contrasts implied with non-tourist social practices, particularly those based within the home and paid work” (1990: 1-2). In his careful description of the characteristics of the social practices labelled as ‘tourism’, Urry also highlights the importance of the notion of the ‘journey’ here. Indeed, he suggests that “there is a clear intention to return ‘home’ within a relatively short period of time” (1990: 3). This journey is usually made towards a space that fulfils certain criteria: “Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures […]. The tourist gaze is directed to features of landscape and townscape which separate them off from everyday experience.” (1990: 3) In Brick Lane, Nazneen’s drift into the City, then, can in no way be termed tourism, primarily because the places that she gazes at are not chosen or ‘daydreamed’ beforehand. For Urry, tourism is a “marker of status” too – often thought “necessary for good health” (1990: 4). Indeed, he goes on to suggest that “it is a crucial element of modern life to feel that travel and holidays are necessary” (1990: 5). The scenes in Brick Lane in which the

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family visit the famous iconographic tourist landmarks of west London effectively foreground the tensions that exist between the characteristics of the figures of the immigrant and the tourist in the contemporary city. These scenes demonstrate that the apparent mobility of individuals in the postmodern, postcolonial world must be considered to be a profoundly ‘imaginary’ mobility, perhaps rather more than a ‘real’ mobility through space and time. So Chanu chooses to escape from the ‘real’ conditions that his mobility has introduced him to as an immigrant in east London by touring the ‘unreal’ attractions of a tourist ‘idea’ of London. Indeed, Chanu performs his role as a tourist/fool, as the narrator clearly points out: “Much equipment was needed. Preparations were made. Chanu bought a pair of shorts which hung just below his knees. He tried them on and filled the numerous pockets with a compass, guidebook, binoculars, bottled water, maps and two types of disposable camera.” (Ali 2003: 239) Chanu makes clear, rational decisions about what he wants to take his family to see: “He made a list of tourist attractions and devised a star rating system that encompassed historical significance, something he termed ‘entertainment factor’ and value for money.” (2003: 239) He seeks an authentic London, then – a London that he feels he should have migrated to, but has not yet found. Indeed, Chanu even admits that “I’ve spent more than half my life here […] but I hardly left these few streets” (2003: 239). These East End streets, though, of course, constitute a very ‘real’ London. The family make their way away from these streets towards Buckingham Palace, situated in the heart of the West End. The palace is a distinct object of knowledge. It is a powerful signifier of tourism – famous, in a sense, for being famous. But it is also an imaginative centre, not only of London, but also of England, Britain, the British Empire, and a wider conceptual ‘West’ (see Urry 1990: 12). Chanu offers his family information about the building that is gleaned from his guidebook in an attempt to gain them imaginative access to the London that they originally believed they were migrating to. Their day out in ‘London’ provides the family with a chance, then, to free themselves from their own imaginative territory and to enter a tourist idea of London. As such, they spend the day performing the role of a Western family. We might want to think of these tourist immigrants in contemporary London as paradigmatic postcolonial or postmodern figures. John Urry argues that “the tourist gaze is intrinsically part of contem-


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porary experience, of postmodernism, but the tourist practices to which it gives rise are experiencing rapid and significant change” (1990: 74). The daydreaming that is central to tourism is also, as Urry points out, important to all forms of consumption, and “is socially organized, particularly through television, advertising, literature, cinema, photography and so on” (1990: 74). This ‘daydreaming’ is fupopular culture. Indeed, at one point in Brick Lane the narrator remarks: “The television was on. Chanu liked to keep it glowing in the evenings, like a fire in the corner of the room.” (Ali 1990: 27) By imagining Chanu’s window on the postmodern media-driven world as a pre-modern jungle fire, Ali’s novel notices the incongruity of certain aspects of a global culture in backward spaces, but also considers the ways in which consumption has come to define the globalised Western cultural imagination. However, the novel does not successfully break down the enduring relativistic binary spatial economy of London. Boundaries are crossed, sometimes transgressed, but never entirely dissolved. Furthermore, Brick Lane does not adequately articulate what Homi Bhabha has termed “the moment of culture caught in an aporetic, contingent position, in-between a plurality of practices that are different and yet must occupy the same space of adjudication and articulation” (1992: 60). The novel also fails to fully represent what Michael Keith and Steve Pile have termed “multiple spatialities”. It instead restates the symbolic opposition of a broadly homogenised concept of Islam and the East to ‘the West’, a spatial idea that Keith and Pile term “a linguistic condensation of the globally powerful” (1993: 22-6). Moreover, as Bhabha has argued: Colonial power produces the colonized as a fixed reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible. It resembles a form of narrative in which the productivity and circulation of subjects and signs are bound in a reformed and recognizable totality. It employs a system of representation, a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to realism. (1986: 156)

Brick Lane effectively reproduces the ethnicity of the ‘Other’ as a recognisable cultural sign, and, as such, as a potential object of hegemonic knowledge. Indeed, while the novel does create a number of memorable, likeable, and well drawn Bangladeshi characters, the nar-

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rative appears driven by a distinct pessimism, marking as it does the essential failure of differing cultures to progressively evolve towards heterogeneity and hybridisation (as postmodernists would have it). We can read Brick Lane, then, as an essentially neo-Victorian bourgeois cultural product that seeks to re-imagine the East End in terms of spatial relativism – as an exotic ‘Othered’ cultural space that is home to white daydreams and Asian nightmares.

VIII Neo-Victorian Urban Visions I hate seeing cockneys in films. Anyway, what is a cockney? - Rose, in Lessing (1993: 112)

In the concluding chapter of this study I want to explore a number of contemporary cinematic representations of the East End. I have chosen to approach these films through debates surrounding film genre in order to consider how and why a generic spatial idea of the East End continues to function in cinematic representations of London. It is my contention that contemporary East End films can be loosely divided into two sub-genres. In the first sub-genre, a late-Victorian idea of the East End – or a late-nineteenth century East End chronotope that I have been discussing in this study: often carefully reconstructed by designers in film studios – provides a familiar setting in which dark, formulaic narratives unfold. However, in the second sub-genre, the ‘real’ contemporary eastern side of the city – the transitional space that can be seen to be changing materially while also remaining haunted by the discourse of an enduring late-Victorian idea of the East End – is depicted as a liminal ‘Thirdspace’. In other words, while the first sub-genre of films repackages an idea of the East End for the cinema, the second sub-genre also often does this, while at the same time subverting or disrupting generic expectations of this familiar territory. However, I want to emphasise here that I do not see these two subgenres of films as discrete or fixed, but instead informing and energising each other through dialogical correspondence and play. 1 The first sub-genre of contemporary East End films includes, for my purposes, the Hughes Brothers’ From Hell (2001) and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), while the second sub-genre in1

Robin Wood has argued that genres should not be read as “givens” or as discrete. Instead, he posits that genres are rooted in ideological contradictions and oppositions. He argues that “at best, [genres] represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions” (1999: 671). I draw upon this distinction in my discussion of genre.

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cludes Aki Kaurismäki’s I Hired a Contract Killer (1990) and David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002). But while I draw clear distinctions and points of convergence between these sub-genres, I also want to suggest, importantly, that all of these films employ ‘real’ or ‘imagined’ urban topographies and architectural backdrops in order to facilitate characterisation. That is, the apparent absence of back-stories offered in the narratives for characters inhabiting familiar spaces is effectively mediated by the semantic function of their surroundings. As a corollary to this I want to show how these outsider figures are in effect drawn by or constituted by the urban spaces in which they are positioned – spaces that continue to be marked as distinct from those that have been defined by bourgeois notions of socio-cultural normality. In this respect, these films have much in common with countless earlier depictions of the East End.

Back to Jack A film crew arrives, on a costly location shoot for Jack the Ripper. It’s a crowded night. Intent on atmosphere, they’ve cluttered the alleys with urchins, trollops and guttersnipes who drift to the waterfront when they’re not working and gaze across at the biggest, emptiest office block in Europe and its undefendable, passing light. - Greenlaw (1999: 71)

In this section of her poem ‘River History’, Lavinia Greenlaw imagines a film crew arriving in the east London streets to film a Ripper movie. She neatly captures the collision between an enduring, constructed ‘atmosphere’ of the East End that spatially characterises the Ripper movie sub-genre and the new, imposing architecture of Canary Wharf in Docklands. This poem, then, evokes the spatial complexities of the postmodern East End – a space, as I have shown, that encompasses the global and the local and an imagined past, present and future. The imagined past suggested by this space continues to be defined, of course, by the figure of Jack the Ripper. There have been literally dozens of films and television shows that have re-told the story of the Ripper and his dark territory. These include Jack the Ripper (Dir. Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman,

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1959), A Study in Terror (Dir. James Hill, 1965), Hands of the Ripper (Dir. Peter Sasdy, 1971), Jack the Ripper (Dir. Jésus Franco, 1976), Time After Time (Dir. Nicholas Meyer, 1979), and Jack’s Back (Dir. Rowdy Herrington, 1988). 2 All of these films, when considered together generically, present stereotypical characters performing within a familiar framework of conventions. They are also set, of course, in a very familiar location (Braudy 1999: 613), and work to articulate “a coherent and systematic set of expectations” (Neale 1980: 54-5). Ripper films certainly tend to fully anticipate audience expectations in terms of their production designs, and their generic properties serve to evoke particular worlds that provide a “framework for comprehension” (Ryall 1998: 336). Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman’s film Jack the Ripper (1959) features a pre-credit sequence that reproduces an imagined urban space which has become absolutely central to the enduring mythology of the Ripper and a late-Victorian East End chronotope. Inspired perhaps by similar shots of London in Hitchcock’s seminal The Lodger (1926), this sequence begins with the camera tracking across cobblestones in a foggy street. A title establishes the familiar time and place: “Whitechapel 1888”. Incidentally, J. Hillis Miller, writing about Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, has suggested that “many meanings are elliptically conveyed just through toponymy” (1995: 105), further arguing that “Dickens’s exact naming of streets and hotels is characteristic of his topographical circumstantiality. He assumes his readers will have a detailed map of London in their minds.” (1995: 105) The use of the place name ‘Whitechapel’ in Jack the Ripper constitutes, in Miller’s terms, performative toponymy. Filmmakers have come to understand that ‘Whitechapel’, operating as a potent spatial signifier, invariably evokes a distinct, coded visual image of late-Victorian urban squalor. As the title “Whitechapel 1888” fades from the screen, the camera follows a young prostitute as she leaves a pub, and effectively stalks her as she makes her way through the dark, narrow, potentially dangerous alleyways. Alone and vulnerable, she is confronted by a dark figure in a cape, springing out of the shadows (or, perhaps, out of the very walls of the city). This sequence can be seen, almost unchanged, in the British Ripper movie A Study in Terror (Dir. James 2

For a detailed account of the figure of the Ripper in cinema history see Meikle (2002).

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Hill, 1965), Murder by Decree (Dir. Bob Clark, 1979), Time After Time (Dir. Nicholas Meyer, 1979), and From Hell (Dir. Albert and Allen Hughes, 2001). It has been copied (or, indeed, parodied) dozens of times in popular films and television. Baker and Berman’s film displays, then, many of the generic conventions of the Ripper film. Interestingly, Robert Warshow has argued that “genre films refer not to historical reality but to other genre films and they evolve according to the rules of generic production” (1970: 129-30). Moreover, Jean Baudrillard has advocated that “Cinema plagiarises and copies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes silent films more perfect than the originals, etc” (1999: 195). The generic cinematic figure of the Ripper and his urban hunting ground, the East End, can be seen to be commenting on (and thus reflecting) previous cinematic representations and simulations of this discursive zone, while, at the same time, clearly reflecting ‘real’ historical figures, events, and, indeed, a ‘real’ urban topography. There is something about the East End and the figure of the Ripper, then, that continues to fire the imagination. This much is made clear in the Hughes brothers’ From Hell (2001), another Ripper film that examines the irrational, violent, carnal sexuality of this seemingly darker side of the late-Victorian city. Writing about aspects of production design, Charles Tashiro has argued that “we know the past did not look the way the present does […]. Our knowledge that our reality does not appear as it does on screen immediately marks the historical image as stylised, thus fictional.” (1998: 64) The Hughes brothers’ From Hell (2001) clearly demonstrates this. The film recreates a generic spatial idea of the East End. It stars Johnny Depp as Inspector Abberline, a character based on the real West Country policeman who investigated the Whitechapel murders in 1888, and features Heather Graham as the Irish prostitute and final Ripper victim, Mary Kelly. The Hughes brothers’ film is a loose adaptation of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel, From Hell (1989-1999). It follows Moore’s text and Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution by identifying the Ripper as Sir William Gull, physician to Queen Victoria and the royal family. It, too, depicts Gull (played by Ian Holm) as a crazed character, driven to commit his diabolical deeds by occult forces that forge his sense of destiny as the man who will “give birth to the twentieth century”. In the plot, though, Gull’s task is essentially to mask a conspiracy that


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seeks to cover up the fact that the Queen’s son, Prince Edward (Mark Dexter), has fathered the child of a Whitechapel prostitute, Annie Crook (Joanna Page). In the Hughes brothers’ film, Edward catches syphilis, the child is taken by the authorities, and in order to silence her, Annie Crook has a lobotomy performed on her by Dr Ferral (Paul Rhys), and is sent to an asylum. The opium smoking, clairvoyant Inspector Abberline (Depp) has stoned visions of the Ripper murders and begins to unravel the conspiracy. He closes in on Gull and a Masonic brotherhood that stretches to the very top of British society, while, at the same time, slowly and implausibly falling in love with the Ripper’s final victim, Mary Kelly. The Hughes Brothers’ screenwriters, Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, chose to make From Hell into a straight crime drama that would depart considerably from Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s darkly dense, occult narrative in order to appease the studio’s box office demands. As Denis Meikle has suggested: “From Hell has demarcated Jack’s cultural persona for a new generation, if for no reason other than the scale of the project and reach of the potential audience.” (2002: 207) The film, though, was only a moderate success at the box office, and was critically panned. The period Whitechapel depicted in From Hell has a distinctly museum-like quality about it. The employment of bright colours, especially in the clothing of the prostitute victims of the Ripper, lends the film a cartoon-like, pop culture, throwaway aesthetic quality. The film successfully revisits the cinematic “Whitechapel 1888” chronotope, and operates at least on one level, then, as a celebration of previous Ripper movies, by incorporating or exploiting so many of the signifying practices of the sub-genre. Indeed, the director of photography, Peter Deming, has admitted that he sat down to watch dozens of Ripper movies for research. The Hughes brothers decided to shoot the film in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. The original idea behind this choice of location was financial, as production costs in eastern Europe amounted to much less than those in Hollywood or the United Kingdom at the time of production. But importantly, the Baroque and Gothic architecture of the city also attracted the directors. However, on arrival in Prague, the decision was made to film interiors in the great buildings of the city, while, at the same time, a large set was

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built in a field twenty miles east of Prague by production designer Martin Childs and his team. Using police and press photographs of the real murder sites, Childs attempted to construct an authentic East End of the late-nineteenth century. Great care was taken to replicate certain topographical markers, most notably Christ Church, Spitalfields, and the Ten Bells pub, situated on the corner of Fournier Street. 3 In this film (as in Moore and Campbell’s graphic novel, Peter Ackroyd’s novel, Hawksmoor, and Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat), Christ Church appears to provide a ‘centripetal’ force in the narrative (Bakhtin 1981: 425). That is, the building operates as a device that somehow draws the East End chronotope to it and anchors it, while also coordinating the action in spatial terms. The From Hell set, then, was built around the ‘imageability’ of the urban space to the east of Bishopsgate and the City of London, to re-employ Kevin Lynch’s useful term (1960: 1). But interestingly, the ‘real’, material layout of the East End streets was manipulated in order to create a set that could also perform a more obviously expressionistic function. For example, the replication of Fournier Street, rather than following the north wall of Christ Church in a straight line from west to east as it continues to do in the ‘real’ east London, can be seen in From Hell to curve away into a narrow alleyway. And the murder locations, while authentically recreated in terms of their immediate spatial characteristics and visual details, were also topographically manipulated in order to bring them closer together, locating them all a very small distance from Christ Church and the Ten Bells pub. The From Hell set, then, invested the architecture of the East End with an expressionistic function that goes far beyond realism. It offered the filmmakers a restrictive, narrow, enclosed space with no apparent way out for its lower-class inhabitants (but plenty of ways in for the camera). It provides the perfect cinematic backdrop, then – the ideal mise-en-scène for this generic Ripper narrative. So From Hell translates images of architecture, not architecture itself, into set design. In this sense, Martin Childs’s vision of the East End follows in the tradition of sets such as those designed by Andrei Andreiev for G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box and The Threepenny Opera and Keith Harris for the BBC soap EastEnders. It is important to ac3

The Christ Church steeple was not built on the set, but added with CGI digital special effects.


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knowledge, then, that the From Hell set functioned as no more than a simulacrum of the ‘real’ urban space in which the murders occurred in 1888. Indeed, as Iain Sinclair has suggested, the set is “more real than the real” (2002c). Cobblestones were borrowed from Polish breweries and civic buildings in order to make the set more ‘realistic’ (Sinclair 2002c). But I also want to restate the importance of the fact that the maze-like quality of the streets was over-determined in order to produce what Linda Nead has termed the “characteristic experience […] of disorientation, as opposed to purposeful movement” (2000: 4) in the diegetic spaces of the film. The From Hell set had many other antecedents. An exhibition installed in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks museum in London in 1980, for example, employed concealed refrigerators in order to bring temperatures down to that of a foggy winter’s night. This imagined, period urban space was designed to reproduce a distinctly visual, cinematic psychological experience, as Judith Walkowitz has pointed out: “Newspaper accounts of Tussaud’s street represented it as a movie set designed from the male point of view, despite the fact that women and children also walked through the exhibit.” (1992: 1) But this was not the first time that this space had been reconstructed for viewing pleasure, and it would not be the last. Montagu Williams Q.C., who recorded a visit to a waxwork exhibition soon after the Whitechapel murders in 1888, wrote: In the body of the room was a waxwork exhibition, and some of its features were revolting in the extreme. The first of the Whitechapel murders were fresh in the memory of the public, and the proprietor of the exhibition was turning the circumstance to some commercial account. There lay a horrible presentment in wax of Matilda Turner, the first victim, as well as one of Mary Ann Nichols, whose body was found in Bucks Row. The heads were represented as being nearly severed from the bodies, and in each case there were shown, in red paint, three terrible gashes reaching from the abdomen to the ribs. (1892: 6)

Moreover, at the International Health Exhibition of 1884, held in South Kensington a few years before the Whitechapel murders, the most popular exhibit was a full-scale reconstruction of a medieval London street that gave visitors the opportunity to experience a filthy, unhygienic, pre-modern space in a safe, museum-like setting, while, ironically, similar scenes were readily available for viewing in dark corners of the ‘real’ city (Nead 2000: 34). The endurance of this cen-

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tral irony in the cultural construction of an imagined East End cannot be overstated. The apparently pre-modern city, put on display for the reader, film viewer or tourist, always, of course, bears an uncanny resemblance to their ‘real’ city. Thus the imagined pre-modern city becomes an important aspect of the modern city – it gets caught up in the dialectic of modernity. Indeed, Peter Ackroyd has pointed out that soon after the Ripper murders in 1888, “sightseers were flocking through Berners Street and George Yard and Flower and Dean Street; a Whitechapel ‘peep-show’ even provided wax figures of the victims for the delectation of the spectators. Such is the force of the area, and of its crimes, that several daily tours are still organised.” (2001: 273) Although they appear distinguishable, the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ cities (or the city of an imagined past and the city of an imagined present) are in fact almost indistinguishable. It is significant that wax figures were used for the bodies of the victims in the Hughes brothers’ From Hell, as such figures have traditionally been employed in representations of murder victims. The film draws, then, on a broad history of generic representations of the Ripper murders. But it also incorporates other myths connected to the East End in order to fully exploit this discursive territory. For example, the film features a scene in which Joseph Merrick, known as ‘the Elephant Man’ (played by Anthony Parker), is unveiled in front of a distinguished bourgeois audience at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. While adding nothing to the main thrust of the plot, this scene works to elide as many mythical East End narratives as possible within the chronotope constructed (or reconstructed) in the film. But this scene can also be read as a direct quotation from David Lynch’s second feature film, The Elephant Man (1980).

The Disfigured Urban Body Writing in his 1926 pamphlet, ‘The Elephant Man’, Frederick Treves, the surgeon who ‘rescued’ Joseph Merrick (commonly known as the ‘Elephant Man’) and set him up in rooms in the London Hospital, Whitechapel, reflects on the circumstances surrounding Merrick’s death in April 1890. Treves believed that Merrick had merely attempted to rest his deformed head on a pillow “like other people”. His head “must have fallen back-wards and caused a dislocation of the


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neck” (Howell and Ford 1980: 210). Merrick’s “other people”, we must presume, were the London bourgeoisie of the period, some of whom he got to know over tea while living in the London Hospital. For these people, Merrick would certainly have appeared to be an ‘Other’ type of person living in an ‘Other’ type of space to the controlled, domestic spheres of their homes. David Lynch’s film, The Elephant Man (1980), starring John Hurt as Merrick and Anthony Hopkins as Treves, also conjures up visions of the East End as a pre-modern or anti-modern urban space blanketed with fog and smoke. As such, the film can also be said to fall within the sub-genre of contemporary East End films that reconstruct a late-nineteenth-century East End chronotope. Indeed, Stuart Craig’s production design reproduces familiar generic signifiers of the East End, such as the narrow cobblestone streets, horses and carts, damp brick walls and gas-lit rooms. Lynch’s East End streets are effectively represented as a carnivalesque freakshow, and play a major part in plot development and character development. The Elephant Man documents the fascination with Merrick’s diseased, ‘freakish’ body – a fascination shared first by the working classes and then by the middle and upper classes. Hurt’s extraordinary body make-up, designed by Christopher Tucker, faithfully and authentically reproduces Merrick’s diseased frame. Joseph Merrick suffered from the rare disease multiple neurofibromatosis which, as Richard Combs has suggested, is “still regarded as incurable and basically untreatable” (1980: 192). But in The Elephant Man, Merrick’s diseased body also operates as a clear metaphor for the diseased urban body in which he becomes positioned – the East End. But there are other possible readings of this film. When Treves asks for a private unveiling of Merrick’s body, Anthony Hopkins produces a wide-eyed, tearful look of amazement and wonderment, captured in close up, that suggests Treves’s epiphany – his sudden acknowledgement of his own degeneracy and the internal ugliness and, perhaps, looming death of his bourgeois culture. But interestingly, Treves initially places himself in darkness at the edge of the room in this scene in order to get a better view of Merrick. As such, the scene can be said to mirror the process of cinematic exhibition. We see Treves, after all, as a spectator drawn into Merrick’s visual narrative, just as we, too, as spectators of the film, are drawn into the narrative by being invited to fetishize Merrick’s deformed body. Indeed, Lynch

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seems to be suggesting that the “real freaks are those who jeer at Merrick or exploit his abnormality” (Edelman 1980: 567). In The Elephant Man Lynch concentrates on the relationship between Treves and Merrick, and especially on how Merrick is first taught to speak (thus entering into the Lacanian symbolic discourse of the bourgeoisie). But we can also read the relationship between Treves and Merrick in terms of uncanniness, and, specifically, doubling. Merrick begins to demonstrate, through the influence of the bourgeois Treves, an interest in the high arts, good tailoring and things of aesthetic beauty. At one point in the film, Merrick insightfully suggests that “people are frightened by what they don’t understand”. The enduring spatial idea of the East End can be seen as a prime example of how things that people “do not understand” can terrorize them. The East End of London, long imagined as an atrophied organ of the body of the city, finds its perfect human representative in Merrick. Bruce Kawin has written of the “convincing sets” in The Elephant Man and Freddie Francis’s “dark, sharp, black-and-white cinematography – a claustrophobic and depressing view of the Industrial Revolution as a circle in Hell” (1981: 22). The black and white photography also serves to lend The Elephant Man an art-film seriousness, creating at least some generic space between this film and the many low-budget thrillers and horror films which, as I have shown, had previously chosen to attempt to authentically recreate a latenineteenth-century East End chronotope. But Freddie Francis had already directed horror films for Hammer in Britain (Chion 1995: 51). And the chiaroscuro cinematography of The Elephant Man also gestures towards the European ‘London’ films discussed in Chapter 4, especially a number of German Expressionist visions of the city (Fig. 14). It also recalls Gustave Doré’s engravings of London, and the many other well-known illustrations that appeared in journals and other publications during the second half of the nineteenth century. This is especially true of the sets in the film. For example, the Isolation Ward in the hospital in which Treves keeps Merrick is reached by walking through a cage-like gate and up some steep steps. His room, apparently underneath the bell tower, is extremely claustrophobic, featuring as it does low, slanting ceilings that recall, in particular, Andreiev’s design for Lulu’s London garret in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.


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Fig. 14. The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)

David Lynch’s The Elephant Man also engages with the dialectical experience of modernity by suggesting the existence of a profoundly bifurcated late-nineteenth-century bourgeois urban imagination. At one point, Treves declares “abominable things, these machines. You can’t reason with them.” The film foregrounds, then, the potentially destructive nature of modernity and the creative destruction brought about by the Industrial Revolution by focusing on the ways in which the body of the city can become freakishly deformed through the unchecked growth of capitalism. The abstract opening sequence of the film, evoking Merrick’s birth, in which Lynch gives us images of Merrick’s mother, elephants and a blurred younger Merrick screaming, is accompanied on the soundtrack by the dull thud of machinery, suggesting a link between the ugliness of Merrick and the ugliness of the industrialised areas of the city in which he becomes infamous. 4 By situating Merrick’s deformed body in this generic city space, then, (even though his deformities are not specifically linked to capitalism or industry), The Elephant Man examines the relationship between the self-satisfied but also profoundly anxious bourgeoisie and the out-of-

4

The sound design in The Elephant Man is by Alan Splet.

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control, industrialised urban body (and the working-class bodies inhabiting it) that existed at the time that Merrick was alive. 5

The Criminal Urban Body If The Elephant Man captures the diseased urban body in the shape of an imaginative merging of Merrick and Whitechapel, a number of British films have also exploited the figure of the cockney gangster in order to suggest the criminal status of this urban body. Villain (Dir. Michael Tuchner, 1971), for example, stars Richard Burton as Vic Dakin, who is a “well known East End sporting personality”, according to a character in the film. Dakin clearly resembles a combination of the infamous Kray twins. As such, the film draws on the coeval media interest surrounding the trial of the brutal brothers, and prefigures the success of John Pearson’s book The Profession of Violence (1972) and the plethora of texts on the topic that would follow. The Krays (Dir. Peter Medak 1990) is a biopic that stars Martin and Gary Kemp (of the British pop group Spandau Ballet) as the brothers Ronnie and Reggie, and features Billie Whitelaw as their strong, doting mother, Violet. This film brings to the screen the lives of the notorious twin gangsters who ruled the East End in the late 1950s and 1960s, and draws on the generic narrative conventions of horror films in order to exploit the dense mythology surrounding the terror that the brothers brought to London. The initial shots of the birth of the twins feature a dream-like voice-over that introduces Ronnie and Reggie Kray as figures who, like Jack the Ripper, have 5

In White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Iain Sinclair also draws on the melancholy tale of Joseph Merrick. In a section of the novel which brings to the mind’s eye the gothic chiaroscuro imagery of Lynch’s film, Sinclair fully exploits the imaginary power of this East End myth, presenting Treves entering ‘Othered’ space: “He went into the streets, into the warrens, rat holes, spikes, spielers, caves: strolling with horror […]. Treves walking seven times through the labyrinth, from right to left, so the body grew dark, red like fire.” (1998b: 108) Sinclair also writes that as Treves gained control of “the creature […] he made himself God. But equally, Merrick controlled him; appearing in the seductive guise of pure deformity.” (1998b: 109) And Sinclair also explores the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, by remarking that by gazing at Merrick, “the eyes of the audience are brought to this place to look into themselves” (1998b: 111).


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now entered East End folklore. As the twins grow into men, their initiation into East End culture sees them entering the boxing ring and almost killing each other. This scene marks the brothers as another East End freak show, like Siamese twins or the Elephant Man, effectively placed on view for the paying public. Medak’s The Krays, like Performance (Dir. Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, 1970), 6 Villain, and The Long Good Friday, also has young male cockney gangsters mimicking upper-class English gentlemen in an attempt not only to subvert traditional hierarchies of power in the city but also to gain the admiration and respect of their families (especially their mothers), friends, colleagues and contemporaries. In these representations of young urban working-class men, the well tailored Saville Row suit and top-of-the-range British car become visible signifiers of class and prestige that work as a subversive means of resistance to elected authorities and the Metropolitan Police, but also as a means of terrifying the suburban middle classes into believing that the urban working class might be visibly ‘on the rise’. Indeed, The Krays, whilst attempting to tell the ‘real’ story of the rise to power and fall from grace of the twins, is very much a tragedy of the upwardly-mobile working class in the East End. When these figures come into money they are eventually destroyed by infighting, jealousies and decadence. These criminals are seen to ultimately fail – captured and imprisoned by the suited figures in authority they have effectively been mimicking. The film invites spectators, then, to witness the brute force of an East End working class which is seen to rise up and take over London, but to ultimately fail. The Krays myth clearly influenced the British cockney gangster genre that appeared later in the 1990s, which encompasses films such as Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000), and David A. Stewart’s film, Honest (2000), featuring All Saints pop star sisters Nicole and Natalie Appleton.

6

David Litvinoff, an associate of the Krays, is credited on Performance as ‘Dialogue Consultant and Technical Advisor’. Part of his role was to act as James Fox’s voice coach.

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Liminal London The Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki shot the film I Hired a Contract Killer (1990) in a number of real locations in London (notably in east London) during the late 1980s. 7 Much is made in the film of the under-developed, transitional nature of this urban space, and specific shots recall similar post-industrial locations that feature in The Long Good Friday, The Last of England and Empire State. But the film’s employment of a run-down, transitional topography also echoes earlier East End ‘rubble’ films such as Hue and Cry (1947), Sparrows Can’t Sing (1962), and A Place to Go (1963). Where in these films the bombed out East End became a space in which youth could hide, by the late 1980s, as the infrastructure of this material space had begun, in places, to radically change, this imaginative territory became more obviously contested. I Hired a Contract Killer tells the story of a lonely, monosyllabic, prematurely middle-aged Frenchman, Henri (Jean-Pierre Léaud). It is Henri’s lack of youthful energy – his lack of understanding of his immediate cultural and material environment and his linguistic ‘Otherness’ – that mark him as profoundly different to many of the younger characters in earlier London ‘rubble’ films. After working as a low-level clerk in the London Waterworks office for 15 years, Henri is unceremoniously made redundant when the government privatises the office. We then witness his botched attempts to commit suicide in his dark, drab flat. After he fails to kill himself, we follow Henri into an East End wasteland and eventually into the incongruous Honolulu bar, where he tells the local crime boss that he wants to take out a contract on his own life. Disbelieving at first, the gangster sees the colour of Henri’s money and agrees to make a deal. But after he meets a flower seller, Margaret (Margi Clarke) in a local pub, Henri decides that he wants to renege on the agreement, and tries to shake his wouldbe killer (Kenneth Colley) loose. The film’s preoccupation with death, loneliness, and the tensions created between an improbable love affair and the spiritual violence of late capitalism appears perfectly suited to liminal London spaces, and to the backstreets of the late-1980s East End in particular. Kaurismäki’s East End is a kitsch, stylised space shot in near-dark7

For more on I Hired a Contract Killer see Kääpä (2004).


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ness. In this film, then, the East End, caught between desolation and renewal, is employed as a charged, dramatic space in which scenes of existential drama and dark comedy can be played out. Indeed, the opening static shots in the film capture liminal spaces to the east of the city that serve to defamiliarize the London so often seen in mainstream films, in which the city is usually depicted as a spatial celebration of neo-liberal capitalism (Dave 2006: xiii). In these early shots the camera focuses on dilapidated buildings in an east London wasteland, and, as such, foregrounds the imaginatively peripheral nature of these ‘real’ urban spaces in the city. But these sites of dereliction are charged spaces – they offer evidence of both a vanished fecundity and an uncertain future (Edensor 2005: 7). We can see for ourselves the impact of a distinct lack of investment on these material spaces. If we consider the radical spatial developments in Docklands, in which previously dead spaces had once again been colonised and thus made ‘productive’, the undeveloped spaces captured in I Hired a Contract Killer remain apparently unproductive, dead spaces of little or no value, that serve to frame essentially unproductive, spiritually-dead characters who also, it seems, feel that they are of little or no value. So these spaces act as metaphors for social devastation and individual decay. They are scars on the face of the late-capitalist city. Tim Pulleine has suggested that Kaurismäki’s London has “a recognisable atmosphere that manages completely to avoid familiar landmarks” (1991: 46). This atmosphere can be accounted for through traces of familiar, generic East End narratives that not only haunt these streets but also the film’s narrative. As the camera focuses on a sign that announces Henri’s workplace, ‘Her Majesty’s Waterworks’, Kaurismäki may well be offering a pun on this area’s long-held identity as a space in which socio-cultural, human and material waste has gathered. John Ebden’s production design, then, clearly exploits the East End as a discursive territory. The office interior is architecturally pre-modern, recalling many of Dickens’s darkest working places. In what appears to be no more than a damp, converted warehouse, old desks are seen to nestle close together in neat rows. Middle-aged men in suits work in silence. They are ciphers – ground down by the monotony of their labour. This is not a modern office designed in the International Style. Nor is it an office that takes pride in its appearance, such as the offices of the commercial banks and insurance companies

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situated in the nearby City. Instead, it is a stylised space that appears to exist outside historical time. Kaurismäki employs a series of cinematic strategies, then, that present London (and the postmodern East End in particular) as a distinctly alien, foreign, ‘Other’ space. Henri’s back-story, never made clear in the narrative, is effectively provided by his surroundings. That is, the spaces in which he exists – the run-down office, his drab flat, the poorly lit, damp streets – aptly reflect his experience. Henri is profoundly displaced – physically and psychologically. Indeed, much is made of his foreignness during the scene in which he is made redundant. If he is completely isolated before his redundancy, he also appears emotionally isolated afterwards, even after he meets Margaret (an equally isolated, existential figure living on the fourteenth floor of an anonymous 1960s brutalist tower block in east London). One way to approach this film and the ways in which it presents the East End is through theories of genre. Nigel Floyd has amusingly suggested that the film plays “like an Ealing comedy on downers” (1998: 419). The film certainly recalls the more eccentric aspects of a film like The Ladykillers (Dir. Alexander Mackendrick, 1955) in its strange characterisation, its use of a mixture of real London locations and studio set ups, and its emphasis on dark, farcical comedy. Indeed, we might even read the Eiffel Tower paperweight on Henri’s desk at the Waterworks as a direct quotation from another famous Ealing comedy, The Lavender Hill Mob (Dir. Charles Crichton, 1951). Moreover, in its use of urban space, Kaurismäki’s film also recalls Hitchcock’s London films, most notably The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). However, the incongruous employment of music on the soundtrack – bursts of jazz and blues featuring artists such as Billie Holiday and Little Willie John – also recalls European art cinema (especially the work of Jean-Luc Godard), as does the stylised employment of bright colours which, again, effectively serves to defamiliarise quotidian urban spaces. The film is also infused with dark Nordic humour that owes much to the lighter moments of Ingmar Bergman. Tim Pulleine has also suggested that the film can be read as “mock-Kafka”, and that it features “spoof B-picture iconography” (1991: 46). The exploration of the criminal underworld of gangsters and hit men certainly draws on Hollywood gangster movies, but also on earlier British cockney gangster films such as Villain and The Long Good Friday. As such, the film’s playful subversion of acknowledged cinematic


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genres places it in a liminal generic-space, which is, to paraphrase Sharon Zukin, “betwixt or between” cinematic genres. As such, the film formally echoes not only the liminal urban spaces in which the narrative unfolds but also the liminal experiences of the major characters. However, as Henri’s stalker begins to hunt his prey down, and we begin to see a lone killer stalk the east London streets and alleys once more, the film also clearly draws on aspects of the Ripper film sub-genre. Indeed, after Henri is almost framed for the shooting of a jeweller, we see a newspaper headline that reads “Whitechapel Murderers Caught”. This re-employment of Whitechapel as a semantically-rich toponym that evokes murder and criminality allows the spectator to imaginatively draw on the dense extra-diegetic discourse surrounding the Jack the Ripper myth. So I Hired a Contract Killer, while telling the story of a lonely man living in the post-industrial wasteland of contemporary London, also draws on the enduring, dense discourse of a spatial idea of the East End.

The Schizophrenic Urban Mind No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. - Sebald (2001: 33) History is on our heels, following us like our shadow, like death. - Augé (1995: 26-7)

Patrick McGrath’s novel Spider was published in 1990. For his film adaptation David Cronenberg worked from a screenplay by McGrath, who adapted his own novel for the screen. I want to first look at McGrath’s novel here before examining its adaptation in detail. In its central protagonist – Dennis Cleg, aka ‘Spider’ – the novel creates another memorable East End figure. While his ethnicity is not made clear, he describes himself as having “long, spidery fingers […] the nails are hard and yellowy and hornlike, and come curving over the ends like hooks” (McGrath 2002: 13). As such, his corporeal characteristics clearly echo Dickens’s Fagin in Oliver Twist, and appear, then, to signal his Jewish ethnicity. Spider, as narrator, presents his story as a series of blurred memories written down in an old notebook.

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It becomes clear that this is the narrative of a man who demonstrates many of the symptoms of advanced schizophrenia. His unstable narrative captures the deterioration of a personality and its withdrawal from quotidian reality through hallucinations and delusions. Spider has little or no concept of linear temporality, and, as such, admits that he might be an untrustworthy narrator: I’ve always found it odd that I can recall incidents from my boyhood with clarity and precision, and yet events that happened yesterday are blurred, and I have no confidence in my ability to remember them accurately at all. Is there some process of fixing, I wonder, whereby time, rather than causing memories to decay (as you would expect) instead does the opposite – it sets them hard, like concrete, the very reverse of the sort of fluid mush I seem to get when I try to talk about yesterday? (2002: 9)

In the novel, Spider stays in an old halfway boarding house in east London run by Mrs Wilkinson which is inhabited by other seemingly damaged individuals. The novel is set in the 1950s, with Spider looking back on his childhood earlier in the twentieth century. The East End that he is describing, then, is the East End that had been heavily bombed during the Blitz. But Spider also appears to understand the underlying ghostly quality of the enduring idea of the East End: No, I prefer the streets, for I grew up in this part of London, in the East End, and while in one sense the changes are total, and I am a stranger, in another sense nothing has changed: there are ghosts, and there are memories, and they rise in clusters as I catch a glimpse of the underside of a familiar railway bridge, a familiar view of the river at dusk, the gasworks – they haven’t changed at all – and my memories have a way of crowding in upon the scene and collapsing the block of time that separates then from now, producing a sort of identity, a sort of running together of past and present such that I am confused, and I forget, so rich and immediate are the memories, that I am what I am, a shuffling, spidery figure in a worn-out suit, and not a dreamy boy of twelve or so. It is for this reason that I have decided to keep a journal. (2002: 10)

Spider returns to an area in the East End in which he grew up after a period of twenty years. His acknowledgement that “nothing has changed” demonstrates just how far this area of London, more than any other, has become effectively fixed within the popular imagination in a late-nineteenth-century chronotope. The ghosts and memories


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that Spider speaks of here are not only those of his own personal experience but also those of the dense web of images and narratives that have come to define the discourse of an enduring idea of the East End. This becomes clear in his description of the house in which he was brought up in Kitchener Street: Kitchener Street was blackly contaminated long before any of these events occurred, every brick of the place oozed time and evil, and not only Kitchener Street, the whole festering warren was bad, bad from the day it was built. […] how much darker the brickwork was, how much more it oozed, how much more it had absorbed the moral squalor such an architecture invariably breeds in its tenants. (2002: 92-3)

Kitchener Street is a fictional street, but, as David Cronenberg’s film adaptation (2002) clearly shows, it is supposedly situated in E1, the Whitechapel postal district. Once again, then, we can see the performative toponymy of this area of east London in play. A place name is again employed as a signifier of a space that begets evil. In the novel Spider is too afraid to revisit the house at first, as he fears it will lead him to revisit events in the past: “I feel apprehensive about crossing the canal and seeing again those blackened bricks, imbued as they are in my memory with the sounds and smells of the tragedy that occurred there.” (2002: 17) Indeed, he goes on to hint that it is the mythology of the East End itself that could be fuelling his memories and madness: “I might even move away from the East End altogether – the memories it arouses are so relentless, somehow, and so grim, for the most part, perhaps if I was away from here I could think about the past with more detachment?” (2002: 45) As Spider’s narrative progresses, it becomes clear that this untrustworthy narrator is telling the story of how his father started an affair with a prostitute, Hilda Wilkinson, and subsequently murdered his wife, Spider’s delicate and likeable mother. 8 This (imagined) murder takes place some time during the mid-1930s. In McGrath’s novel the topography of this city space is described as damp, deserted and shabby. These descriptions, of course, draw on the dense discourse of a generic spatial idea of the East End 8

In Cronenberg’s film, Ralph Fiennes plays Spider as a thin, gaunt, chainsmoking, threadbare outsider. Gabriel Byrne plays his father, Bill Cleg. Miranda Richardson plays both Spider’s beloved mother and his father’s ‘replacement’ of his mother, the impostor, Hilda.

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in order to facilitate the construction of a charged dramatic space that aptly reflects the characteristics of the novel’s principal protagonist: I walked home slowly through the wet empty streets. It had begun to rain earlier in the afternoon […] and the drizzle had persisted for several hours now. […] on I went as the damp day thickened to dusk, past a long series of grimy brick arches, a smoke-blackened viaduct supporting the railway lines that slice across the East End streets, many of the arches bricked up now, or sealed off with sheets of corrugated tin behind which scrapyards and garages did their furtive business. (2002: 31)

Like the territory captured in Kaurismäki’s I Hired a Contract Killer, these spaces, in their dead or ruined state, evoke a postmodern Gothic sensibility. One can perhaps detect, here, then, nostalgia for the industrial activity that once typified this part of the city, or, more generally, nostalgia for a time when boundaries between people, communities and places felt rather more secure. But the bricked-up arches and corrugated sheets also suggest the existence of industrial ruins that stand as evidence that capitalist progress is, in fact, no more than an elaborate myth (Edensor 2005: 13). The use-value of these spaces has evidently disappeared. But their ruined emptiness also lends them a potentially transgressive status. Because they are not obviously under direct control, they might be employed for any number of unorthodox activities. It is these types of spaces that provide the ideal background for McGrath’s examination of his central protagonist’s transgressive chronotopic experience. This carefully described territory also evokes more familiar, late-Victorian visions of east London. After all, Spider ‘sees’ his father wandering through a “maze of streets and alleys that fall away over toward the docks, whence through the fog comes the mournful hooting of the ships” (2002: 73). Indeed, fog also plays a familiar generic role in Spider’s narrative: “All was strange in a fog, buildings grew vague, human beings groped and became lost, the landmarks, the compass points, by which they navigated melted into nothingness and the world was transfigured into a country of the blind.” (2002: 67) So, these familiar signifiers firmly situate this narrative within the discourse of a late-nineteenth-century East End. Andrew Sanders’s production design for Cronenberg’s film certainly draws on and emphasises the generic visual imagery of the


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cinematic East End. It too features cobblestone streets, two-up twodown terraced houses with outside toilets, and a lively corner pub that recalls the Queen Victoria in EastEnders. But adapting the novel into a film, Cronenberg made the interesting decision to alter the time frame, admitting that “there was a timeless element which I was conscious of wanting to capture without being coy. We chose a period that was slightly different from the book – in the book it’s closer to the war.” (Jackson 2003: 12) Moreover, talking about Cronenberg’s decision, Ralph Fiennes, the actor who played Spider, disclosed that “he wanted a generic London in which we don’t quite know where or when we are” (James 2003: 15). An enduring East End chronotope performs this diegetic function in the film. As it exists seemingly unchanged within the bourgeois English imagination, it can function onscreen as an apparently unchanging space. And it is precisely the unchanging nature of this topography that enables Cronenberg to bring Spider’s disturbing experience of the breakdown of linear temporality to the screen. In other words, while the topography employed in the film remains essentially unchanging and familiar, the apparent fluidity of time and the breakdown of individual consciousness experienced by Spider (or his spatio-temporal, chronotopic transgression) can be fruitfully explored. The director often frames Fiennes dwarfed by the huge, imposing, web-like steel structure of the gasworks. This structure, importantly, unlike the streets in which it is situated, is forever visibly changing. Spider is drawn to this structure precisely because of its fluidity, its very changeability. It directly mirrors and speaks to aspects of his transgressive spatio-temporal experience. The representation of architecture in Cronenberg’s film, as in the Hughes brothers’ From Hell, curiously mixes authentic, naturalistic elements with expressionistic elements. As such, the spaces in which Spider’s internal drama is played out effectively evoke his mental landscape. In other words, aspects of Spider’s subjectivity are reflected by this topography. This fusing of a character’s psychological health with his or her surroundings marks this film generically, then, as a traditional East End film. It follows such films as Pandora’s Box, Jack the Ripper and The Elephant Man in this regard. However, in Spider, as I have pointed out, the central protagonist experiences ruptures in time at distinct points in space. This echoes the Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov’s assertion that in a city one “cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends.

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We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past.” (1996: 14) Indeed, Spider’s return to other specific topographical points, like the pub and his old house, facilitates his experience of a Freudian ‘return of the repressed’, as the past violently erupts and re-emerges into the present at the same point in space. As such, we might want to think of Spider as a disturbed psychogeographer, or, indeed, as a dérive who appears to drift into his own past. But interestingly, in Cronenberg’s film we sometimes see the young Spider and the middle-aged Spider occupying the same diegetic space on screen. This spatio-temporal transgression works so successfully in the film because the unchanging, generic topographical space – the space in which he is positioned – can be so easily imagined, because of its rich intertextuality, by the spectator of the film. It is important to remember that the film adaptation of Spider examines the relationship between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ East Ends through the experience of a schizophrenic. By disrupting linear, historical time, the film explores the status of narratives alongside the experience of ‘real’ events. Spider’s schizophrenic psychological splitting leads him to experience a dialogue between different selves that is linked to his experience of non-linear time, or, indeed, his temporal displacement. In response to this, he attempts to weave together the disparate threads in his textual maze. But these threads remain web-like. They trap him. In a sense, then, the film explores the mutability of the postmodern subject by demonstrating how far contemporary structures of identity refuse to stay in place. Furthermore, by creating a parallax chronotope for Spider, the film openly questions the socio-cultural constructions of time that underpin the concepts of western reality that can also be said to inform a middle-class selfimage. But with this dislocation of identity comes the dissolution of spatial boundaries. Paul Smethurst argues that in postmodern chronotopes, history slips its anchor, the fixed pole moves, and the backcloth slips, and so the play of representation extends from the fictional into the historical. Furthermore, in the postmodern novelistic chronotope, the loss of privilege suffered in the historical dimension is also felt in the geographical plane, where space and place cannot always be relied upon to determine exactly where we are. (2000: 5-6)


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For Smethurst, postmodern texts either “deconstruct the mimetic function” or instead position themselves as neo-realist, “retaining the mimetic function to present postmodern worlds” (2000: 6). Both McGrath’s novel Spider and Cronenberg’s film adaptation can clearly be said to deconstruct the temporal mimetic function while at the same time retaining the spatial mimetic function. That is, the production design of Cronenberg’s film can be said to be essentially mimetic in that it recreates a generic idea of a ‘real’ East End topography, and, as such, it recreates a spatial idea of the East End as a chronotope. But Spider’s schizophrenic consciousness produces what Smethurst terms a ‘postmodern chronotope’. His space-time becomes ‘untied’, while, at the same time, the film itself becomes ‘untied’ from genre. Spider, as his name suggests, attempts to tie up the loose ends of powerful but shifting narratives that continue to shape his experience into a fixed chronotopic web. For Spider (and therefore for the film spectator, who is granted access to his disturbed point of view), these narratives become blurred, as past and present fuse together and become incoherent. It becomes unclear whether the harrowing events of his life (some of which we witness taking place) transgress the boundaries of the ‘real’ or the ‘imagined’. In several scenes in the film, we see Spider literally create a web-like structure in his room with a ball of string, as if to symbolically articulate the impossibility of ever attaining either a fixed identity or narrative closure. Like the string, all points of his personal narratives appear linked or entangled. His life experience has resulted in his representational field becoming tied up in knots. As an archetypically postmodern figure, then, Spider’s chronotopic experience problematises the possibility of a legitimate linear historical process – a temporal movement towards personal or shared goals, or, on a broader level, as Lyotard puts it, “modernity’s claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating as a whole through science and technology” (1991: 34). Spider, as a schizophrenic postmodern figure trapped in a web of narratives and images, is located within a postmodern chronotope that is examined in both the narrative form of the novel and the film within a distinct, mimetic geographical and topographical space. This conventional, unchanging generic space, so familiar to readers and film spectators, performs the function, then, of anchoring Spider’s postmodern chronotope within another, more-easily comprehended, late-Victorian East End chronotope.

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Italo Calvino has written that “memories, images, once they are fixed in words, are erased” (1997: 87). Although we see him try, frantically scrawling illegibly in a grubby notebook, Spider’s inability to capture his experiences linguistically (or in a language recognisable to others) aptly demonstrates Calvino’s point – that the city as we imagine it (effectively in terms of chronotopic narratives) might feasibly have little to do with ‘real’ material spaces that exist in this city. Moreover, in postmodern worlds of signification, access to a ‘real’ city has become more difficult. In Calvino’s terms, as cities become increasingly constructed through discourse, their material realities can become markedly less tangible. Indeed, cities can evidently vanish under the weight of representations that serve to construct them culturally. As the narrator in Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) points out, “London was the first metropolis to disappear.” At the beginning of this book I set out to demonstrate how far an idea of the East End of London has been culturally constructed. I want to conclude by making a couple of final points about this idea. As Cronenberg’s Spider demonstrates, it often appears that many of the iconic signifiers of this spatial idea have little changed since the late-nineteenth century – narrow streets, corner pubs, poverty and misery, for example. But while its image as a dark, foreboding, backward and/or exotic space seems to have become ingrained within what we might want to call the popular English imagination, the East End of London also remains an ever-changing, metamorphic concept. While, in a sense, the East End functions as one idea, this idea has segued into a series of related or subjacent ideas. In other words, the idea and ‘ideas’ of the East End have developed in new ways at different historical moments – often, it seems, in order to respond to fresh anxieties concerning what it means to be English (specifically, English and middle class). The status of the East End as a broadlyimagined spatialised referent of Otherness has more-often-than-not remained intact, but aspects of this Otherness have, at different times, taken on more clearly distinct characteristics. It has been the low space of the residuum; a criminal space; a sexual space; a space or adventure; an uncultured space; a working-class space; a space of revolutionary potential; an ‘Eastern, Oriental space’; and an Asian space, for example. Moreover, it is surely no co-incidence that while class and race, in particular, continue to pull at notions of Englishness, the East End of London endures as a complex web of images. Like a spi-


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der’s web (or, indeed Spider’s web), these images (or concepts) often make themselves clearly visible. At other times, when they might be absent, they can still be easily conjured up in the mind’s eye. So an image, concept, or idea of the East End still lurks in the corner of the room – in the corner of England – or in the corner of ‘home’– in the darkness, gathering dust. Sweep it away and its presence can still be felt. Sweep it away and it is sure to return.

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Filmography The Alley Cat. Dir. Hans Steinoff. Photo. Nikolas Farkas. Script. Joan Morgan. Art Dir. Franz Schroedter. Perf. Jack Trevor, Clifford McLaglen, Mabel Poulton, Shayle Gardner. British and Foreign Films, Orphid-Film, 1929. The Bells Go Down. Dir. Basil Dearden. Prod. Michael Balcon. Ed. Mary Habberfield. Dir. of Photo. Ernest Palmer. Screen. Roger MacDougall. Art Dir. Michael Relph. Perf. Tommy Trinder, James Mason, Philip Friend, Mervyn Johns, William Hartnell, Finlay Currie, Philippa Hyatt, Meriel Forbes. Ealing Studios, 1943. Blight. Dir. John Smith. 1996. Blinkeyes. Dir. George Pearson. Prod. George Pearson. Photo. Percival Strong. Adapt. George Pearson. Perf. Betty Balfour, Tom Douglas, Frank Stanmore, J. Fisher White, Hubert Carter, Pat Aherne, Dorothy Seacombe. Welsh, Pearson and Company, 1926. Broken Blossoms, or the Yellow Man and the Girl. Dir. D.W. Griffith. Prod. D.W. Griffith. Ed. James Smith, Rose Smith. Photo. Billy Bitzer. Scenario. D.W. Griffith. Set. Frank Wortman. Perf. Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp. United Artists, 1919. Broken Blossoms. Dir. John Brahm. Prod. Julius Hagen. Ed. Ralph Kemplen. Photo. Curt Courant. Screen. Emlyn Williams, Thomas Burke. Art Dir. James Carter. Sets. Paul Minine. Perf. Emlyn Williams, Dolly Haas, Arthur Margetson. Twickenham Film Studios Productions, 1936. Bronco Bullfrog. Dir. Barney Platts-Mills. Prod. Andrew St. John. Ed. Jonathan Gili. Dir. of Photo. Adam Barker-Mill. Screen. Barney Platts-Mills. Perf. Del Walker, Anne Gooding, Sam Shepherd. Maya Films, 1969. The Cheat. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Prod. Cecil B. DeMille. Photo. Alvin Wyckoff. Scenario. Hector Turnbull, Jeannie MacPherson. Art Dir. Wilfred Buckland. Perf. Fannie Ward, Sessue Hayakawa, Jack Dean, James Neill. Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, 1915. Curlytop. Dir. Maurice Elvey. Photo. Joseph Valentine. Script. Fanny Hatton, Frederick Hatton. Perf. Shirley Mason, Wallace MacDonald, Warner Oland, Diana Miller, George Kuwa, Ernie Adams, Nora Hayden, La Verne Lindsay. Fox Film Corporation, 1924. Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Dir. Roy Ward Baker. Prod. Albert Fennell, Brian Clemens. Ed. James Needs. Photo. Godfrey Godar. Art Dir. Robert Jones. Perf. Ralph Bates, Martine Beswick, Gerald Sim. Hammer Film Productions/ EMI Film Productions, 1971. The Elephant Man. Dir. David Lynch. Prod. Jonathan Sanger. Ed. Anne V. Coates. Dir. of Photo. Freddie Francis. Screen. Christopher de Vore, Eric Bergren, David Lynch. Art Dir. Robert Cartwright. Set Dec. Hugh Scaife. Perf. John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, John Geilgud. Brooksfilms, 1980.

298


Empire State. Dir. Ron Peck. Prod. Norma Heyman. Ed. Chris Kelly. Dir. of Photo. Toni Imi. Screen. Ron Peck, Mark Ayres. Art Dir. Val Wolstonehome. Perf. Ray McAnally, Cathryn Harrison, Martin Landau, Emily Bolton, Lee Drysdale, Elizabeth Hickling, Lorcan Cranitch, Jamie Foreman, Jason Hoganson, Ian Sears, Jay Simpson. Team Pictures/British Screen/Cine-Film/Film Four International, 1987. Fly a Flag for Poplar. Dir. Roger Buck, Caroline Goldie, Ron Orders, Geoff Richman, Marie Richman, Tony Wickert. Prod. Roger Buck, Caroline Goldie, Ron Orders, Geoff Richman, Marie Richman, Tony Wickert. Ed. Roger Buck. Photo. Ivan Stasburg. Perf. Alice Maloney, John Maloney, Andrew Tuck, Joe Mitchell, Bill Pyne. Liberation Films/British Film Institute, 1974. From Hell. Dir. Albert and Allen Hughes. Prod. Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher. Ed. Dan Lebental and George Bowers. Dir. of Photo. Peter Deming. Screen. Terry Hayes and Raphael Iglesias. Prod. Designer. Martin Childs. Art Dir. Jindrich Koci, Astrid Sieben, Martin Bittner Rosser. Adam Alexander O’Neill. Perf. Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm, Robbie Coltrane. TwentiethCentury Fox/Underworld Entertainment, 2001. Full Metal Jacket. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Prod. Stanley Kubrick. Ed. Martin Hunter. Screen. Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford. Prod. Designer. Anton Furst. Art Dir. Rod Stratfold, Leslie Tomkins, Keith Pain. Perf. Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey. Warner Bros/Natant Films, 1987. Hands of the Ripper. Dir. Peter Sasdy. Prod. Aida Young. Ed. Chris Barnes. Dir. of Photo. Ken Talbot. Screen. L.W. Davidson. Art Dir. Roy Stannard. Perf. Eric Porter, Angharad Rees, Jane Merrow, Keith Bell, Derek Godfrey, Dora Bryan. Hammer Film Productions, 1971. Hangman’s Wharf. Dir. Cecil H. Williamson. Prod. E.J. Fancey. Dir. of Photo. Cecil H. Williamson. Screen. Cecil H. Williamson. Perf. John Witty, Genine Graham, Campbell Singer, Patricia Laffan, Gerald Nodin, Frederick Allen. E.J. Fancey Productions/D.U.K. Films, 1949. Honest. Dir. David A. Stewart. Prod. Eileen Gregory, Michael Peyser. Dir. of Photo. David Johnson. Screen. David A. Stewart, Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Karen Street. Prod. Design. Michael Pickwoad. Perf. Nicole Appleton, Natalie Appleton, Melanie Blatt, Peter Facinelli. Honest Productions Limited/Seven Dials/Pandora Cinema/Pathé Entertainment/European Script Fund, 2000. Housing Problems. Dir. Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton. British Commercial Gas Association, 1935. Hue and Cry. Dir. Charles Crichton. Prod. Michael Balcon. Ed. Charles Hasse. Dir. of Photo. Douglas Slocombe. Screen. T.E.B. Clarke. Art Dir. Norman Arnold. Perf. Alastair Sim, Jack Warner, Valerie White, Frederick Piper, Harry Fowler, Douglas Barr. Ealing Studios, 1947. I Hired a Contract Killer. Dir. Aki Kaurismäki. Prod. Aki Kaurismäki. Ed. Aki Kaurismäki. Dir. of Photo. Timo Salminen. Screen. Aki Kaurismäki. Prod. Designer. John Ebden. Art Dir. Mark Lavis. Perf. Jean-Pierre Léaud, Margi Clarke, Kenneth Colley. Villealfa Filmproductions Oy/Svenska Filminsti-

Filmography

299

tutet/ Finnkino/Megamania/Channel Four/Esselte Video/Pyramide Films/ Pandora Filmproduktion/Suomen Elokuvasäätiö/First City Features, 1990. Also known as J’ai engagé un tueur. It Always Rains on Sunday. Dir. Robert Hamer. Prod. Michael Balcon. Ed. Michael Truman. Dir. of Photo. Douglas Slocombe. Screen. Robert Hamer, Henry Cornelius. Art Dir. Duncan Sutherland. Perf. Googie Withers, Jack Warner, John McCullum, Edward Chapman, Jimmy Hanley, Susan Shaw, John Carol, John Slater, Sydney Tafler, Alfie Bass, Patricia Plunkett. Ealing Studios, 1947. Jack’s Back. Dir. Rowdy Herrington. Perf. James Spader, Cynthia Gibb, Rod Looms, Rex Ryon, John Sutherland. Cinema Group Pictures/Tim Moore/Cassian Elwes, 1988. Jack the Ripper. Dir. Robert S. Baker, Monty Berman. Prod. Robert S. Baker, Monty Berman. Ed. Peter Bezencenet. Photo. Robert S. Baker, Monty Berman. Screen. Jimmy Sangster. Art Dir. William Kellner. Perf. Lee Patterson, Eddie Byrne, Betty McDowall, Ewen Solon, John le Mesurier. Mid-Century Film Productions, 1959. Jack the Ripper. Dir. Jésus Franco. Script Jésus Franco. Dir. of Photo. Peter Baumgartner. Perf. Klaus Kinski, Josephine Chaplin, Andreas Mannkopff, Freidrich Schönfelder, Herbert Fux, Lina Romay, Ursula von Wiese, Francine Custer. Elite-Films SA, 1976. A Kid for Two Farthings. Dir. Carol Reed. Prod. Carol Reed. Ed. Bert Bates. Dir. of Photo. Ted Scaife. Screen. Wolf Mankowitz. Art Dir. Wilfred Shingleton. Perf. Celia Johnson, Diana Dors, David Kossoff, Joe Robinson, Jonathan Ashmore. London Film Productions/British Lion Film Corporation/Big Ben Films, 1954. The Krays. Dir. Peter Medak. Prod. Dominic Anciano and Ray Burdis. Ed. Martin Walsh. Dir. of Photo. Alex Thomson. Screen. Philip Ridley. Prod. Designer. Michael Pickwoad. Art Dir. Mike Buchanan. Perf. Martin Kemp, Gary Kemp, Billie Whitelaw. Fugitive Features, 1990. The Last of England. Dir. Derek Jarman. Prod. James Mackay and Don Boyd. Ed. Peter Cartwright, John Maybury, Angus Cook, Sally Yeadon. Dir. of Photo. Derek Jarman, Christopher Hughes, Cerith Wyn-Evans, Richard Heslop. Perf. Tilda Swinton, Spencer Leigh. Anglo International Films/British Screen/Channel 4/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, 1987. Limehouse Blues. Dir. Alexander Hall. Present. Adolph Zukor. Prod. Arthur Hornblow Jnr. Ed. William Shea. Photo. Harry Fischbeck. Screen. Cyril Hume, Arthur Phillips. Art Dir. Hans Dreier, Robert Usher. Perf. George Raft, Jean Parker, Anna May Wong, Kent Taylor, Montagu Love, Billy Bevan, Robert Loraine. Paramount, 1934. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Dir. Guy Ritchie. Prod. Matthew Vaughn. Ed. Niven Howie. Dir. of Photo. Tim Maurice-Jones. Screen. Guy Ritchie. Prod. Design. Iain Andrews, Eve Mavrakis. Perf. Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Moran, Vinnie Jones, Jason Statham, Steven Mackintosh. SKA Films/HandMade Films/Paragon Entertainment, 1998.

300


The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Prod. Michael Balcon, Carlyle Blackwell. Ed. Ivor Montagu. Photo. Geatano Ventimiglia. Screen. Alfred Hitchcock. Art Dir. Wilfred Arnold, Bertram Evena. Perf. Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, Miss June, Malcolm Keen, Ivor Novello. Gainsborough Pictures, 1926. Also known as The Lodger, The Case of Jonathan Drew. The Lodger. Dir. Maurice Elvey. Prod. Julius Hagen. Ed. Jack Harris. Photo. Basil Emmott, Sydney Blythe, Billy Luff. Script. Ivor Novello, Miles Mander, Paul Rotha, H. Fowler Mear. Art Dir. James Carter. Perf. A.W. Baskcomb, Ivor Novello, Elizabeth Allen, Barbara Everest, Jack Hawkins. Twickenham Film Studios Productions, 1932. Also known as The Phantom Fiend. The Lodger. Dir. John Brahm. Prod. Robert Bassler. Ed. J. Watson Webb Jnr. Dir. of Photo. Lucien Ballard. Screen. Barré Lyndon. Art Dir. James Basevi, John Ewing. Perf. Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Laird Cregar, Cedric Hardwicke, Sara Allgood, Aubrey Mather. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1944. London. Dir. Herbert Wilcox. Prod. Herbert Wilcox. Perf. Dorothy Gish, Adelqui Migliar, John Manners, Hubert Carter, Bibb McLaughlin, Margaret Yarde, Elissa Landi, Daisy Chapman. British National Pictures, 1926. London. Dir. Patrick Keiller. Prod. Keith Griffiths. Ed. Larry Sider. Script Patrick Keiller. Perf. Paul Scofield. BFI/Konick/Channel 4, 1994. London Love. Dir. Manning Hayes. Photo. William Shenton. Original novel. Arthur Applin. Gaumont Company, 1926. Also known as The Whirlpool. The Long Good Friday. Dir. John Mackenzie. Prod. Barry Hanson. Ed. Mike Taylor. Dir. of Photo. Philip Meheux. Screen. Barrie Keeffe. Art Dir. Vic Symonds. Perf. Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Dave King, Bryan Marshall, Derek Thomson, Eddie Constantine. Black Lion Films/Calendar Productions, 1979. Lost in Limehouse. Dir. Otto Brower. Prod. Lou Brock. Ed. Sam White. Photo. Nick Musuraca. Screen. Walter Weems, Reynolds Harrington. Perf. Laura La Plante, Walter Byron, John Sheenan, Olaf Hytten, Charles McNaughton. RKO Radio Pictures, 1933. Also known as Lady Esmerelda’s Predicament. The Mask of Fu Manchu. Dir. Charles Brabin. Prod. Hunt Stromberg. Ed. Ben Lewis. Photo. Tony Gaudio. Screen. Irene Kuhn, Edgar Allan Woolf, John Willard. Art Dir. Cedric Gibbons. Perf. Boris Karloff, Lewis Stone, Karen Morley, Charles Starrett, Myrna Loy, Jean Hersholt, Lawrence Grant, David Torrence. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Cosmopolitan Productions, 1932. Meantime. Dir. Mike Leigh. Prod. Graham Benson. Ed. Lesley Walker. Dir. of Photo. Roger Pratt. Art Dir. Diana Charnley. Perf. Marion Bailey, Phil Daniels, Tim Roth, Pam Ferris, Jeffrey Robert, Alfred Molina, Gary Oldman. Central Production/Mostpoint/Channel 4, 1983. Murder by Decree. Dir. Bob Clark. Prod. René Dupont, Bob Clark. Ed. Stan Cole. Dir. of Photo. Reginald Morris. Screen. John Hopkins. Prod. Designer. Harry Pottle. Art Dir. Peter Childs. Perf. Christopher Plummer, James Mason, David Hemmings, Susan Clark, Anthony Quayle, John Geilgud, Frank Finlay, Donald Sutherland. Saucy Jack Inc, 1979. Also known as: Sherlock Holmes and Saucy Jack, Sherlock Holmes: Murder by Decree.

Filmography

301

No Way Back. Dir. Stefan Osiecki. Prod. Derrick de Marney. Dir. of Photo. Robert Navarro. Screen. Stefan Osiecki, Terence de Marney. Art Dir. George Paterson. Perf. Terence de Marney, Eleanor Summerfield, Jack Raine, John Salew, Shirley Quentin. ConCanen Productions, 1949. O Lucky Man! Dir. Lindsay Anderson. Prod. Michael Medwin and Lindsay Anderson. Ed. David Gladwell. Photo. Miroslav Ondrícek. Screen. David Sherwin. Art Dir. Derek Cracknell. Perf. Malcolm McDowell, Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts, Arthur Lowe, Helen Mirren, Dandy Nichols. Warner Bros/Memorial Enterprises/SAM Productions, 1973. Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora). Dir. Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Prod. Heinz Landsmann. Ed. Joseph R. Fleisler. Photo. Günther Krampf. Screen. Ladislao Vajda. Art Dir. Andrei Andreiev. Perf. Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, Carl Götz, Gustav Diessl. Nero-Film, 1928. Also known as Lulu, Loulou. The Passionate Adventure. Dir. Graham Cutts. Prod. Michael Balcon. Photo. Claude McDonnell. Screen. Alfred Hitchcock. Art Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Alice Joyce, Marjorie Daw, Clive Brook, Lillian Hall-Davis. Gainsborough Pictures, 1924. Performance. Dir. Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg. Prod. Sandy Lieberson. Ed. Anthony Gibbs, Brian Smedley-Aston, Dir. of Photo. Nicolas Roeg. Screen. Donald Cammell. Art Dir. John Clark. Perf. James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg. Warner Bros/Goodtimes Enterprises, 1970. Piccadilly. Dir. Ewald André Dupont. Prod. Ewald André Dupont. Photo. Werner Brandes. Script. Arnold Bennett. Art Dir. Alfred Jünge. Perf. Anna May Wong, Jameson Thomas, Gilda Grey, Charles Laughton. British International Pictures, 1929. A Place to Go. Dir. Basil Dearden. Prod. Michael Relph. Ed. John D. Gutheridge. Dir. of Photo. Reginald Wyer. Screen. Michael Relph. Art Dir. Bert Davey. Perf. Rita Tushingham, Mike Sarne, Bernard Lee, Doris Hare. Excalibur Films, 1963. Pool of London. Dir. Basil Dearden. Prod. Michael Balcon. Ed. Peter Tanner. Dir. of Photo. Gordon Dines. Screen. Jack Whittingham, John Eldridge. Art Dir. Jim Morahan. Perf. Bonar Colleano, Susan Shaw, Renée Asherson, Earl Cameron, Moira Lister, Max Adrian. Ealing Studios, 1950. Proud City. Dir. R. Keene. Greenpark Productions in association with the Film Producers’ Guild for the Ministry of Information, 1945. The Siege of Sidney Street. Dir. Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman. Prod. Robert S. Baker, Monty Berman. Ed. Peter Bezencenet. Photo. Robert S. Baker, Monty Berman. Screen. Jimmy Sangster, Alexander Baron. Mid-Century Film Productions, 1960. The Sign of Four. Dir. Maurice Elvey. Perf. Eille Norwood, Isobel Elsom, Fred Raynham, Norman Page, Humberstone Wright. Stoll Film Company, 1923. The Sign of Four. Dir. Graham Cutts. Prod. Rowland V. Lee. Ed. Otto Ludwig. Photo. Robert G. Martin, Robert De Grasse. Script. W.P. Lipscombe, John Paddy

302


Carstairs. Design. Clifford Pember. Perf. Arthur Wontner, Isla Bevan, Ian Hunter, Miles Malleson, Herbert Lomas. Associated Radio Pictures, 1932. Snatch. Dir. Guy Ritchie. Prod. Matthew Vaughn. Ed. Jon Harris. Dir. of Photo. Tim Maurice-Jones. Screen. Guy Ritchie. Prod. Design. Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski. Perf. Benicio Del-Toro, Dennis Farina, Vinnie Jones, Brad Pitt, Jason Statham, Mike Read. Colombia Pictures/SKA Films, 2000. Sparrows Can’t Sing. Dir. Joan Littlewood. Prod. Donald Taylor. Ed. Oswald Hafenrichter. Photo. Max Greene, Desmond Dickinson. Screen. Stephen Lewis, Joan Littlewood. Art Dir. Bernard Sarron. Perf. James Booth, Barbara Windsor, Roy Kinnear, Avis Bunnage. Carthage Productions, 1962. Spider. Dir. David Cronenberg. Prod. David Cronenberg. Ed. Ron Sanders. Dir. of Photo. Peter Scuchitzsky. Screen. Patrick McGrath. Prod. Designer. Andrew Sanders. Art Dir. Arvinder Grewal, Lucy Richardson. Perf. Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne. Spider Productions Ltd, 2002. A Study in Terror. Dir. James Hill. Prod. Henry E. Lester. Ed. Henry Richardson. Dir. of Photo. Desmond Dickinson. Screen. Donald Ford, Derek Ford. Art Dir. Alex Vetchinsky. Perf. John Neville, Donald Houston, John Fraser, Anthony Quayle, Barbara Windsor. Compton-Tekli Film Productions/Sir Nigel Films, 1965. Also known as Fog. Sundial. Dir. William Raban. 1991. Thames Film. Dir. William Raban. Cam. William Raban and Begonia Tamarit. Bow Visions, 1986. The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschen - Oper). Dir. Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Prod. Seymour Nebenzal. Ed. Jean Oser. Dir. of Photo. Fritz Arno Wagner. Screen. Leo Lania, Ladislao Vajda, Belá Balász. Art Dir. Andrei Andreiev. Perf. Rudolph Forster, Carola Neher, Fritz Rasp, Reinhold Schünzel. Tonbild-Syndikat, Warner Bros/Nero-Film, 1931. Also known as L’Opéra de Quat‘ Sous. Time After Time. Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Prod. Herb Jaffe. Ed. Donn Cambern. Dir. of Photo. Paul Lohmann. Screen. Nicholas Meyer. Perf. Malcolm McDowell, David Warner, Mary Steenburgen, Charles Cioffi, Kent Williams, Andonia Katsaros. Warner Bros/Orion Pictures, 1979. Together. Dir. Lorenza Mazzetti. 1953. Transit. Dir. Emily Richardson. 2006. Tunde’s Film. Dir. Tunde Ikoli and Maggie Pinhorn. Prod. Maggie Pinhorn. Ed. Nick Lewin and Robert Frew. Dir. of Photo. Paddy Seale. Screen. Tunde Ikoli. Perf. Harry Curran, Lesley Easteale, Colin Hennessey, Tunde Ikoli. Basement Films Project Group, 1973. 28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. Prod. Andrew MacDonald. Ed. Chris Gill. Dir. of Photo. Anthony Dod Mantle. Screen. Alex Garland. Prod. Designer. Mark Tildesley. Art Dir. Patrick Rolfe, Dennis Schnegg. Perf. Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Megan Burns, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Ecclestone. DNA Films Limited/Fox Searchlight Pictures/Film Council/East London Film Fund/European Regional Development Fund, 2002.

Filmography

303

Twinkletoes. Dir. Charles Brabin. Photo. James van Trees. Scenario. Wilfred Dunn. Perf. Colleen Moore, Kenneth Harlan, Tully Marshall, Warner Oland, Gladys Brockwell, Lucien Littlefield, John Kolb, Julanne Johnston, William McDonald. John McCormack Productions/First National, 1926. Underworld. Dir. Josef von Sternberg. Prod. Hector Turnbull. Photo. Bert Glennon. Screen. Robert N. Lee. Set Designer. Hans Dreier. Perf. George Bancroft, Clive Brook, Evelyn Brent, Larry Semon, Fred Kohler, Helen Lynch. Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, 1927. Also known as Paying the Penalty. The Vanishing Street. Dir. Robert Vas. Ed. Robert Vas. BFI Experimental Film Fund, 1962. Villain. Dir. Michael Tuchner. Prod. Alan Ladd Jr, Jay Kanter. Ed. Ralph Sheldon. Photo. John Harris. Art Dir. Maurice Carter. Screen. Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais. Perf. Richard Burton, Ian McShane, Nigel Davenport, Donald Sinden, Fiona Lewis. Anglo-EMI/Winklast Film Productions, 1971. Waxworks/Das Wachsfigurenkabinet. Dir. Paul Leni. Photo. Helmar Lerski. Script. Henrik Galeen. Art Dir. Paul Leni, Alfred Jünge, Fritz Maurischat. Perf. Wilhelm Dieterle, Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, Olga Belajeff. Neptun-Film, 1924. The World is Not Enough. Dir. Michael Apted. Prod. Barbara Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson. Ed. Jim Clark. Dir. of Photo. Adrian Biddle. Screen. Robert Wade, Bruce Feirstein. Prod. Designer. Peter Lamont. Perf. Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle, Denise Richards, Robbie Coltrane, Judi Dench, Desmond Llewellyn, John Cleese, Samantha Bond. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1999. The Ziegfeld Follies. Dir. Vincente Minnelli. Prod. Arthur Freed. Ed. Albert Akst. Photo. George Fosley, Charles Rosher. Art Dir. Cedric Gibbons, Memil Pye, Jack Martin Smith. Perf. William Powell, Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, Lucille Bremer, Fanny Brice, Judy Garland, Kathryn Grayson, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1946.

Index Abercrombie, Sir Patrick 139, 196, 201 Ackroyd, Peter 154, 157, 233-234; Hawksmoor 45, 165, 173-175, 178, 254; Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem 121; Blake 41; London: The Biography 27, 39, 43-44, 109, 192, 256 Adorno, Theodor W. 137 Advertisements/advertising 77, 123, 197, 218, 247 Affron, Charles 190 Affron, Mirella Jona 190 Africa/Africans 25, 85-86, 94 - 9 6, 98 Agnew, John A. 192 Albert Square (EastEnders) 116, 189, 191-193 Albion Press 155 Alcohol 116, 146, 165, 237 Alder Street 238 Aldgate 16-17, 39-40, 80, 83, 115, 140, 151, 244 Aldgate East tube station 39 Ali, Monica; Brick Lane 232, 235, 237-238, 246-247 Allen, Michael 126 Altab Ali Park 239 Ambrose, Peter 186 America/American culture 33-34, 42, 111, 121, 125-127, 143, 193, 196-199, 219, 237, 239 Anarchists/anarchism 26-27, 60, 66, 156 Anderson, Benedict 70, 112, 116, 234 Andreiev, Andrei 131, 133, 254, 258 Animals/beasts 26, 52, 66, 70, 90-93, 101, 103, 113-114, 177, 202 Anthropomorphism 54 - 55, 92, 115, 117, 230

Anti-Catholicism 50, 231 Anti-Semitism 25, 27, 50, 71, 90-91 Appleton, Natalie 261 Apted, Michael; The World is Not Enough 183 Arabs/Arabic 25, 91, 114 Arata, Stephen 89-90 Architecture 77, 86, 134, 149, 191, 230, 244, 254, 267, 269; premodern & industrial 87-88, 92, 115, 124, 192, 253; Georgian 165, 171-172; Victorian 189, 230; modern 35, 128-129, 133-135, 138, 145, 202, 219, 243; postmodern 143, 145, 149, 172, 183-185, 200, 219, 221, 250 Arnold, Matthew 34, 55, 60 Art cinema 264 Artillery Passage 16 Arup, Ove 35 Ashmore, Jonathan 142 Asia/Asians 121, 199, 220, 223, 233, 236-237, 241, 244, 248, 272 Astaire, Fred 126 Athens Charter (1933) 135 A13 trunk road 33-34 Attlee, Clement 107 Augé, Marc 200, 265 Automobiles/cars 123, 140, 146, 152, 242 Bachelard, Gaston 191 Bailey, Marion 34 Bailey, Paul 43 Baker, Brian 11 Baker, Phil 151, 153, 160-161

306


Baker, Robert S.; Jack the Ripper 250-252; The Siege of Sidney Street 27 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 20, 30-31, 42, 59, 254 Balchin, Nigel; Darkness Falls from the Air 138 Ballard, J.G.; High-Rise 194, 199-205 Bangladesh/Bangladeshis 25, 220, 223, 231-247 Barking Road 115 Barnwell, Jane 133, 190-191 Baroque 171, 153 Barthelmess, Richard 122 Barthes, Roland 117 Bartholomew Fair 59 Basildon, Essex 34, 139 Bata, Tom 35 Bataille, Georges 191 Baudelaire, Charles 159 Baudrillard, Jean 252 Bauhaus 134 - 135, 150, 186 Baumgarten, Murray 55 Bavidge, Jenny 11 Bazalgette, Sir Joseph 54 Beasts (see Animals) Beatty, Bernard 46 Beck, Harry 94 Beckson, Karl 58 Beeton’s Annual 179 Begg, Paul 70 Belgravia 220 Bengal/Bengalis/Bengali 25, 232-235 Benjamin, Walter 159-160 Bennett, Arnold 121, 127 Bergman, Ingmar 264 Berkshire 33 Berman, Marshall 136-137 Berman, Monty; Jack the Ripper 250252; The Siege of Sidney Street 27 Bermant, Chaim 44, 69, 105 Bermondsey 63, 78 Berners Street 256 Berrol, Selma 87 Besant, Annie 79 Besant, Walter 79-80; All Sorts and Conditions of Men 57-62, 81,

97-98; East London 79-82, 96-97, 100, 107, 165 Bessarabians 26 Bethnal Green 17, 22, 27, 39, 49, 53, 68, 91, 103, 140, 146, 189 Bethnal Green Road 27, 242 Bhabha, Homi K. 214 - 215, 247 Bhangra 16 Bishopsgate 11, 17, 40, 122, 170, 175, 254 Bitzer, Billy 122 Black, William 61, 165; Shandon Bells 61 Blackfriars Bridge 110 Blackshirts 27 Blackwall 101, 117, 224 Blair, Tony 154 Blake, William 7, 41-42, 54, 157, 165, 180, 185; ‘Jerusalem’ 7, 41, 54 The Blitz 138-139, 143, 186, 195, 266 ‘Bloody Sunday’, Trafalgar Square (1887) 64 Blue Funnel Line 109 Bodies 13-16, 19, 33, 50-55, 66, 77, 90-91, 103, 107, 118, 135, 163, 181-182, 186, 189, 198, 201, 213, 216, 222, 232, 238, 255-260 Bodybuilder 142, 182 Bombay 92, 236 Booth, Charles; Life and Labour of the London Poor 77-78 Booth, James 144 Booth, Reverend William; In Darkest England and the Way Out 68, 92, 124, 177 Borehamwood 190 Boumphrey, Geoffrey 120, 135 Bow 68, 79 Boxing 141, 146, 199, 261 Boyle, Danny; 28 Days Later 66 Brabin, Charles; The Mask of Fu Manchu 120-121, 126; Twinkletoes 126-127 Bradbury, Malcolm 83 Bradwell-on-Sea 35 Bragg, Billy 33

Index Brahm, John; Broken Blossoms 126; The Lodger 126 Brake, Colin 189-190 Brantlinger, Patrick 86 Bratton, J. S. 43 Braudy, Leo 251 Braun and Hogenberg London map 37 Brecht, Bertolt 132 Bremer, Lucille 126 Brentford, Middlesex 53 Brewer, John Francis 57 Brick Lane 16, 23, 165, 180, 229-230, 234 - 235, 237-248 Bridget Jones’s Diary (Maguire) 228 Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Kidron) 228 Bright, John 55, 60, 83, 97 ‘Bright Young Things’ 105 British National Party (BNP) 233 British Sailor’s Society 160 British Union of Fascists (BUF) 27 Broad Street 39, 180 Broken Blossoms (Brahm) 126 Bronco Bullfrog (Platts-Mills) 143, 146-147 Brooker, Peter 25, 154, 156, 159, 168, 232 Brooks, Louise 130 Brosnan, Pierce 183 Brown, June 191 Brune Street soup kitchen 16 Bruno, Guiliana 123, 129 Brunsdon, Charlotte 140 Brutalist architecture 201, 205, 264 Bryant and May match factory 79 Buckingham, David 189 Buckingham Palace 246 Buddhism/Buddhists 122 Bullock, Nicholas 139 Burke, Edmund 115, 172 Burke, Thomas; Limehouse Nights; More Limehouse Nights 107, 111-120; The Real East End 160; ‘The Chink and the Child’ 112-114, 117, 121 Burton, Richard 199, 260 Burton, Tim 185

307 Byron, Lord George Gordon 46, 224; Don Juan 46 Cable Street 25, 87, 180 Battle of Cable Street (1936) 27 Calcutta 234 Calvino, Italo; Invisible Cities 28, 228, 272 Cambridge University 58 Camden Town 53 Campbell, Daisy 126 Campbell, Eddie; From Hell 175-177, 252-254 Canary Wharf 187, 189, 192, 198, 227-228, 250 Canning Town 84, 149 Canvey Island, Essex 34 Canvey Island seawall restaurant 35 Capitalism 33, 47, 84, 132, 151-152, 154, 161, 164, 179, 194, 196, 209, 215, 259, 262-263, 268 Carlton, Billie 109 Carné, Marcel 142 ‘Carnivalesque’ 20, 42-43, 47, 59-60, 132, 142, 257 Cars/automobiles 14, 123, 140, 146, 152, 220, 242, 261 Cartwright, Justin; Look at it This Way 157, 218-219, 224 - 225, 233-234, 241 Case, Shannon 109 Catholics/Catholicism 50, 231 Catling, Brian 155 Census (1851) 25 Central Line (London Underground) 23, 94 Chambers, Iain 215 Channel (English) 46 Chapman, Annie 68 Chapman, Edward 140 Chartists/Chartism 21, 26 The Cheat (DeMille) 121 Chelmsford, Essex 17, 68 Chelsea 50, 53, 106, 199, 220 Chigwell, Essex 34 Childs, Martin 254 China/Chinese 105-111, 116-117, 121-122, 125, 128

308


Chingford, Essex 82, 159 Chion, Michael 258 Chiswick 101, 229 Christ Church, Spitalfields 26, 40, 164 -178, 234, 254 Christianity/Christians 54, 62-63, 86, 109 Christian Revival Society 86 Chronotopes (Bakhtin) 30-31, 124, 144, 165, 173-174, 178-179, 184, 190, 198, 208, 214, 217, 223-224, 228-230, 232, 241, 249, 251-258, 266, 269-272 Chtcheglov, Ivan 160, 269 Cinema 27, 31, 45, 78, 119-122, 126127, 132, 135-138, 143, 155, 185, 211, 216, 221-222, 247, 249, 252-258, 264-265, 269 Cinematography 258 The City of London (the ‘City’/the ‘Square Mile’) 17, 39, 53, 56, 67, 71, 101, 115, 151, 154, 161, 169-170, 197, 200-201, 220, 225, 239, 244-245, 254 Clark, Bob; Murder by Decree 252 Clarke, David B. 137 Clarke, Margi 262 Claustrophobia 123, 191 Clegg, Jenny 120 Coal 46-47, 99 Cobbett, William 48 Coca-Cola 143 Cockneys/cockney rhyming slang 48, 93, 113, 138, 140, 190, 194, 198, 249, 260-261, 264 Cognitive mapping 161-162, 212 Cohen, Phil 19, 55, 207, 233 Colley, Kenneth 262 Colchester 17 Collins, Wilkie; The Woman in White 51-52 Collinson, Patrick 37 Colville, Gary 69, 73 Combs, Richard 257 Commercial Road 78-79, 117, 119, 239 Communists/Communism 26-27 River Congo 93, 95

Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (C.I.A.M.) 134 Conrad, Joseph 47, 92-96, 117, 124, 157, 205, 224, 236; The Mirror of the Sea 93; Chance 95; The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ 92-93; Heart of Darkness 92-95 Conservative Party 186 Constantine, Eddie 196 Consumerism/consumer culture 16, 34, 42, 59, 143, 145, 202 Cornish, Vaughan 120 Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CFPRE) 135 County of London Plan (1943) 139, 186 Cox, Jane 37, 40 Craig, Stuart 257 Cressing Temple 35 Crichton, Charles; Hue and Cry 143144, 147, 262 Crime/criminality/criminals 27, 33, 44 - 4 5, 52, 57- 60, 66, 68-73, 77, 81-83, 106, 112-113, 116117, 122, 126, 141, 143, 146, 156, 160-166, 170, 174, 180181, 193-194, 218, 253, 256, 260-265, 272 Crisp, Donald 122 Cronenberg, David; Spider 250, 265272 Crossness 54 Cubitt, Thomas 54 Cunningham, David 156, 158, 200 Curlytop (Elvey) 126-127 Curry/curry houses 234 Curtis, Perry, L. Jnr. 72 Czech Republic 253 Dacca 234 Daily News 62, 70 Daily Star 70 Daily Telegraph 62, 86 D’Ancona, Matthew; Going East 34, 165, 177-178, 234 Daniels, Phil 34 Dante; The Divine Comedy 54

Index Darkness 18, 28, 46, 49-50, 60, 62, 77, 81, 85-86, 95, 114, 178, 184, 216, 257, 273 Dartmoor Prison 140 Darwin, Charles 55, 89, 112 Dave, Paul 33, 263 Davies, Andrew 39, 43, 67 Dean Street 256 “Dear Boss” letter 70 Dearden, Basil 139, 143, 146, 195; The Bells Go Down 139; A Place to Go 143, 146-147, 262; Pool of London 195 Dear, Michael J. 151, 194, 210, 212 Debden 23 Debord, Guy 159-160 De Certeau, Michel 162-163 Defoe, Daniel 39-40, 43, 68, 157, 165; A Journal of the Plague Year 39-40, 165; Moll Flanders 43; Roxana 43 De Marney, Terence 141 DeMille, Cecil B.; The Cheat 121 Deming, Peter 253 Depp, Johnny 252-253 De Quincey, Thomas 45, 48, 58, 108, 111, 165; Confessions of an English Opium Eater 48, 108 Dérive 159-160, 172, 244, 270 Derrida, Jacques 156 Detective fiction 99-100, 143, 174 Deutscher Werkbund 135 The Devil/Satan 38, 45-46, 69, 76, 114-115 Dexter, Mark 253 Dickens, Charles 48-57, 62, 68, 73, 90, 110-111, 125, 142, 157, 242, 251, 263, 265; Barnaby Rudge 50-51; Oliver Twist 49-50, 90, 265; Dombey and Son 51; Our Mutual Friend 53-55, 125; The Mystery of Edwin Drood 55-56, 110; The Pickwick Papers 48-49, 251; Bleak House 125 Diessl, Gustave 131

309 Disease/Plague 15-16, 39-40, 43-44, 63, 68, 77, 86, 102, 106, 165, 174, 257-260 District Line (London Underground) 94 Docherty, Thomas 151 Docklands/docks 13, 25, 27, 39, 43, 45, 51, 54 - 56, 79, 82-84, 9296, 103, 110, 114 - 117, 126, 130, 133, 143, 151, 155, 175, 181-225, 268 Docklands Light Railway 197, 216 Documentary films 139-140, 206 Dodd, Katherine 190 Dodd, Philip 190 Donald, James 20, 28, 120, 189, 229 Doré, Gustave 56, 110, 122, 140, 258 Doré and Jerrold; London: A Pilgrimage 56, 110 Dors, Diana 142-143 Dover 46 Downes, Kerry 168, 171 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 67, 110-111, 128, 157, 179, 181; A Study in Scarlet 179; ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’ 110 Drabble, Margaret 38 Dravidians 106 Dreams 13, 26, 33, 88, 101, 122, 130, 135, 140, 149, 163, 171, 177, 179, 193, 245-248, 260, 266 Drunkenness/alcohol 56, 61, 77, 79, 81, 91, 98, 102, 112, 116, 124, 146, 159, 165, 180, 202, 204, 237 Duncan, James S. 11 Dupont, E.A. 127-128, 130; Piccadilly 127-128 Dury, Ian 33 Dutch Synagogue, Sandy’s Row 16 Dystopia 80-84 Eagleton, Terry 225 Ealing Studios 140 EastEnders (BBC) 17, 116, 189-193, 231, 233, 254, 269 East India Dock 93, 96, 103, 114, 186 Ebden, John 263

310


Ecology/ecological disaster 64 - 66 Eddowes, Catherine 69 Edelman, Rob 258 Edensor, Tim 263, 268 Edgware 190 King Edward VII 102 Egan, Pierce; Life in London 47 Egypt/Egyptians 91 Eisner, Lotte H. 132 Electricity 123, 234 Elephant Man 156, 249, 256-261, 269 The Elephant Man (Lynch) 249, 254 260 Elias, Norbert 104 Eliot, T.S.; The Waste Land 157, 244 Queen Elizabeth II 38, 90 Elsaesser, Thomas 132 Elstree (BBC Studios) 189-190 Elton, Arthur; Housing Problems 139 Elvey, Maurice 126; Curlytop 126; The Sign of Four 128 The Embankment 55, 106 Empire State (Peck) 193-194, 197200, 262 Engels, Friedrich 64 English Channel 46 The Enlightenment 51, 65, 86, 104, 137, 173, 177-178 Epping Forest 17, 43, 82 Erith, Kent 54 Essex 17, 32-35, 68, 80-82, 90, 95, 101, 119, 186 Ethnography 52 Eugenics 106, 112 Europe 13, 25, 71, 89-91, 107-108, 122, 133-135, 137, 186, 192, 204, 237, 250, 253 European art cinema 264 Eurostar 13 Evolution 29, 112 Existenzminimum 134 Expressionism (German) 50, 131132, 254, 258, 269 Fairbanks, Douglas 121 Fair Trade League 64 Farringdon 68 Farson, Daniel 105, 109-110

Fascists/Fascism 27 Fassett Square 189 Featherstone, Mike 152 Feldman, David 190 Fido, Martin 70 Fiennes, Ralph 267, 269 Fire of London (1666) 39 First World War 87, 109 Fisher, Michael 146 Fishman, Robert 15, 19, 134, 200 Fishman, William J. 47, 62, 64, 68, 88 Flâneur/flâneurie 159-160, 164, 244 Fleming, Victor; The Wizard of Oz 221 Florence 217 Floyd, Nigel 264 Fog 125-127, 130-131, 196, 229, 251, 255, 257, 268 Ford, Ford Madox; The Soul of London 100-102 Forster, Rudolph 132 Foster, Janet 187 Foucault, Michel 31-32, 178, 203204; Madness and Civilization 204; ‘Of Other Spaces’ 31, 203 Fournier Street 16, 170, 177, 254 Four Weddings and a Funeral (Newell) 228 Fowler, Harry 143 Fox, James 261 Frampton, Kenneth 134, 136 France/French 39, 113, 231, 262 Francis, Freddie 258 Franco, Jésus; Jack the Ripper 251 Frankenstein’s monster 26 Frankfurt 134 Freud, Sigmund 24, 41, 167, 169, 172, 178, 270; ‘The Uncanny’ 41, 167 From Hell (Hughes and Hughes) 249, 252-256, 269 Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick) 206 Fu Manchu 120-121, 126

Index Gagnier, Regenia 11, 23, 52, 63, 81 Gangsters 26, 141, 194 - 196, 260261, 264 Garden Cities 101 Gas/gaslight 114 - 115, 122, 257, 266, 269 Gavron, Jeremy; An Acre of Barren Ground 232 Gay, Peter 24 Gender 91, 128, 140, 153, 164, 208, 214 General Strike (1926) 27 Genre 31, 61, 122, 143, 154, 214, 249-253, 257, 261, 264 - 265, 271 George Yard 256 Georgian architecture 220, 223-224, 234 Geraghty, Christine 191-192 Gere, Charlie 194 German Expressionism 132 Germany/Germans 26, 111, 132, 134, 138, 221, 258 Gibson, Andrew 151, 154 Gibson, James 174 Giddens, Anthony 152 Gilbert, David 196, 227 Gilbert, Pamela K. 238 Gin 47, 81, 110 Gish, Dorothy 126 Gish, Lillian 199, 122 Gissing, George; The Nether World 67-68; New Grub Street 68 Glinert, Ed 17, 27, 41, 44 - 4 5, 79, 110 Globalisation 36, 152, 193, 207-208, 232, 239 Godard, Jean-Luc 264 Godley, Andrew 87 Godwin, George F. R. S.; London Shadows; Town Swamps 51 Gold, John R. 139 The Golem 121, 275 Goodhart-Rendel, H.S. 168, 171 Gooding, Anne 146 Gordon Riots (1780) 50-51 Gorky, Maxim 27 Gotham City (Batman) 185

311 Gothic: architecture/literature 50, 72, 88-91, 116, 156, 171, 177, 185, 195, 223, 253, 260, 268 Graham, Heather 252 Graham, Stephen 217 Great Eastern Railway 115 Greater London Council (GLC) 155 Greater London Plan (1945) 139 Greater Sylhet Welfare and Development Council (GSWDC) 235 Great Fire (1666) 173 Greenlaw, Lavinia; ‘River History’ 250 Greensted Church 35 Greenwich 142, 159, 168, 183 Greenwood, James; Seven Curses of London; The Wilds of London; Low-Life Deeps 56 Grey, Gilda 127 Griffith, D.W.; Broken Blossoms 117118, 121-130 Gripsrud, Jostein 108 Groes, Sebastian 185 Gropius, Walter 134 - 135 Grosz, Elizabeth 14 The Guardian 155, 235 Gull, Sir William 176-180, 252-253 Gun Street 26 Haas, Dolly 126 Habermas, Jürgen 136 Hackney 17, 31, 43, 87, 139, 154, 159, 189, 205-206 Halberstam, Judith 90-91 Hall, Tarquin; Salaam Brick Lane 229-231 Hallucinations 266 Hamer, Robert; It Always Rains on Sunday 140-142 Hands of the Ripper (Sasdy) 251 Happé, Peter 38 Harding, Vanessa 37 Hare, Doris 146 Harkness, Margaret 79-80, 165, 242; A City Girl 79; Out of Work 79; In Darkest London 79, 177

312


Harlan, Kenneth 126 Harlow, Essex 139 Harris, Keith 189, 254 Harvey, David 17, 134 - 138, 149, 160, 216, 228 Hawksmoor, Nicholas 168, 171, 174 Hayakawa, Sessue 121 Hayden, Dolores 28-30 Hayes, Manning; London Love 128 Hayes, Terry 253 Heart of darkness 28, 184 Hebrew Socialist Union 26 Hell 42, 45-47, 54, 58, 62, 177, 242, 258 Henderson, Fiona 196, 227 Heritage 35, 187, 218, 228-229, 236, 240-241 Herrington, Rowdy; Jack’s Back 251 Heseltine, Michael 186 Heterotopias (Foucault) 31-32, 203 Hewison, Robert 228 Hewitt, John 77 High Beech, Essex 82 Highmore, Ben 15, 24, 44, 54, 63, 66, 72, 90 High-rise flats 120, 146, 184, 196, 200-205 Hill, James; A Study in Terror 125, 251 Hill, John 194, 197 Hitchcock, Alfred; The Lodger 251 Ho-Chang, King 127 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 172 Holiday, Billie 264 Holland Park 219 Holland, Tony 189, 219 Hollingshead, John 53 Holloway, Lewis 41 Holly Street Estate 205 Hollywood cinema 228, 253, 264 Holm, Ian 252 Holocaust/Nazis 137 Home Counties 33 Honest (Stewart) 261 hooks, bell 213-214, 265 Hopkins, Anthony 257 Horkheimer, Max 137 ‘Horrible London’ (Punch) 76-77

Houndsditch 122 Housing 35, 62, 134 - 1 3 6, 139, 150, 198, 201, 205, 215, 229 Housing Problems (Anstey and Elton) 139 Howell, Michael 257 Hue and Cry (Crichton) 143-144, 147, 262 Huguenots 25, 39, 236 Hunt, Tristam 35 Hurt, John 183, 233, 257 Hyde Park 52, 64, 79, 81, 140 Hylton, Jane 140 I Hired a Contract Killer (Kaurismäki) 250, 262-265, 268 Ilford, Essex 17 Illustrated London News 122 ‘Imageability’ (Lynch) 169, 222, 254 Immigrants/immigration 25-26, 39, 50-51, 71, 88, 90-91, 111, 145, 154, 207, 227-248 India 16, 25, 42, 67, 93, 96, 103, 114, 117, 125, 186, 223, 236 Industrial Revolution 137, 258-259 Institute of Community Studies 27 International Health Exhibition (1884) 255 International Style (architecture) 134, 196, 203, 263 Inwood, Stephen 38-39, 51, 53, 78, 110 Ipswich, Suffolk 48 IRA (Irish Republican Army) 204 Ireland/Irish 25-26, 64, 223, 236, 252 Isaacs, Tubby (fish stall) 142 Islam/Muslims 232, 237, 241, 247 Isle of Dogs 38, 41-42, 47, 67, 151, 182-185, 188-189, 224, 233 Islington 56, 68 It Always Rains on Sunday (Hamer) 140-142 Jack, Ian 235 Jack the Ripper 16, 31, 67-73, 76-78, 81, 90, 106, 121, 125, 131, 156, 160-161, 165, 175-182,

Index 228-229, 250-256, 260, 265, 269 Jack the Ripper (Baker and Berman) 250 Jack the Ripper (Franco) 251 Jack’s Back (Herrington) 251 Jackson, Kevin 269 Jackson, Peter 63 The Jago 80-81 James Bond 183-184 Jameson, Frederic 161-162, 212 JanMohamed, Abdul R. 112 Jarman, Derek; The Last of England 206, 262 Jay, Mike 71 Jazz 139, 142, 146, 264 Jefferies, Richard; After London 6566 Jencks, Charles 149, 160 Jenks, Chris 160 Jentsch, Ernst 167 Jerome, Jerome K.; Three Men in a Boat 67 Jerrold, Blanchard 110 Jews 25-26, 71, 88, 90-91, 231, 236 Jihad 241 Johnson, Samuel; ‘London’ 40-41 Jones, Gareth Stedman 57, 190 Jonson, Ben; The Devil is an Ass; Isle of Dogs 38 Joyce, James; Ulysses 157 Joyce, Simon 52, 59 Jukes, Peter 69 Jünge, Alfred 128 Jungle 47, 66, 81, 85-86, 93-95, 103, 124 - 125, 169, 177, 202, 218, 243, 247 Kääpä, Pietari 11 Kafka, Franz 264 Kalman, Ronald 87 Kaurismäki, Aki 250, 262-264, 268 Kawin, Bruce 258 Keating, Peter J. 18, 47- 48, 59-62, 80-81 Keene, R.; Proud City 139 Keiller, Patrick; London 272

313 Keith, Michael 25, 153, 186-187, 237, 247 Kelly, Mary Jane 69 Kemp, Gary 260 Kensington 79, 220, 255 Kentish Town 53 Kern, Stephen 152 Kerr, Joe 205 Kersh, Gerald 157 Kew 229 Kidron, Beeban; Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 228 Kidson, Peter 168 King, Dave 197 King Edward VII 102 King George V 109 King’s Cross 106, 223 Kingsley, Charles; Alton Locke 51 Kinnear, Roy 146 Knabb, Ken 159 Knightsbridge 53 Knight, Stephen 177, 252 ‘Knockfurgus’ 25 Kortner, Fritz 130 Kossoff, David 142 Kracauer, Siegfried 132 The Krays (Medak) 260-261 Kray twins 27, 156, 161, 180, 229, 260-261 Labour Party 26-27 Labyrinths 17, 22, 48-50, 56, 60, 73, 106, 126, 173-174, 178-180 Lacan, Jacques 162, 258 The Ladykillers (Mackendrick) 264 Lambert, Jack 143 Lambeth 53, 106 Landau, Martin 193, 197 Lang, Fritz; Metropolis 132, 221 Lansbury Estate, Poplar 186 Lascars 42, 47, 106, 110, 125 The Last of England (Jarman) 206, 262 The Lavender Hill Mob (Crichton) 264 Law, John (see Margaret Harkness) River Lea 17, 43, 83 Lea Valley 13, 15, 82

314


Léaud, Jean-Pierre 262 Le Corbusier 15, 134 - 135 Lee, Bernard 146 Lefebvre, Henri 209-212, 216, 218, 237 Leigh, Mike; Meantime 34 Lessing, Doris; In Pursuit of the English 249 Lethaby, W.R. 135 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 19 Leytonstone 14, 17 Liberal Party 18, 96 Lieberman, Aaron 26 Limehouse 53, 91, 105-128, 140, 160, 168, 223, 232 Little Willie John 264 Littlewood, Joan; Sparrows Can’t Sing 143-145, 150 Lively, Penelope; City of the Mind 157, 218, 221-225, 233-234, 241 Liverpool Street Station 67, 82, 94 Local Government, Planning and Land Act (1980) 186 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Ritchie) 216 The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Hitchcock) 251 ‘London’ (Johnson) 40-41 London (Keiller) 272 London (Wilcox) 126 London Auxiliary Fire Service 139 London Dock 39, 186, 196, 206 London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) 83, 186 London Hospital (Whitechapel) 204, 256-257 London, Jack; The People of the Abyss 97, 102-103, 230 London Jammie Majid mosque 16 London Underground 23, 94, 135, 199 London Zoo 218 The Long Good Friday (Mackenzie) 13, 193-200, 204, 261 Lord Mayor’s Show 59, 64 Lucanio, Patrick 69, 73 Luckhurst, Roger 159

Lulu plays (Wedekind) 131 Lynch, Kevin 161, 169, 254 Lyotard, Jean-François 151, 271 MacCullum, John 140 MacDonald, Wallace 126 Machen, Arthur 157 Mackail, J.W. 82-83 Mackendrick, Alexander 264 Mackenzie, John; The Long Good Friday 13, 193-195 Macmillan’s Magazine 80 Madame Tussaud’s 255 Madness 174, 199, 204, 267 ‘Magic realism’ 237 Maguire, Sharon; Bridget Jones’s Diary 228 Malaysia/Malaysians 25 Mankowitz, Wolf 141 The Man Who Knew too Much (Hitchcock) 264 Margetson, Arthur 126 Marsh, Richard; The Beetle 91 Marshall, Dorothy 44 Marshes 54 Marx, Karl 236 Marxism/Marxists 20-21, 27, 210 Masefield, Richard 72 The Mask of Fu Manchu (Brabin) 126 Mason, James 139 Mason, Shirley 126 Masterman, Charles Frederick Gurney; From the Abyss 18, 96 Match girls strike (1888) 79 Matless, David 23, 108, 118-120, 135, 138-139 Mayfair 101 Mayhew, Henry; London Labour and the London Poor 52-53 Mazzoleni, Donatella 28 McAnally, Ray 198 McArthur, Colin 122, 126 McCann, Ben 191 McGrath, Patrick; Spider 265-268, 271 McLaughlin, Joseph 85-86, 94 - 95, 98-99

Index McLeod, John 232, 237 Meantime (Leigh) 34 Mearns, Andrew; The Bitter Cry of Outcast London 62-63, 66, 165 Meikle, Denis 72, 253 Mengham, Rod 154-157, 160, 167, 181 Mepham, John 100 Merritt, J. F. 38 Metropolis (Lang) 132, 221 Metropolitan Board of Works 54 Metropolitan Police 261 Meyer, Hannes 134 Miasma 43, 102 Middle Ages 204 Middle Class 20-27, 35, 50-53, 56-57, 60-65, 71-73, 78-83, 96, 99100, 104, 107-109, 112-115, 145, 147, 150, 153-154, 164, 170, 173, 177-178, 184, 190, 194, 198, 201-206, 221-230, 234 - 235, 240, 244, 261, 270, 272 Mighall, Robert 48, 50, 72 Mile End 39, 44, 80, 91, 94, 189 Millennium Dome 183 Miller, Diana 126 Miller, J. Hillis 229, 251 Millwall; 1994 by-election 233 Ministry of Information 138 Minnelli, Vincente; The Ziegfeld Follies 126 Mirren, Helen 194 Miscegenation 111, 121, 125, 127 MI 6 183 Modernism: literary/cinematic/architectural 119-120, 135, 149, 157, 186, 212, 215, 217, 221 Molina, Alfred 34 Monroe, Marilyn 143 The Monument 54 Moore, Alan; From Hell 165, 175179, 252-256 Moore, Colleen 126 More, Sir Thomas 37 Moretti, Franco 54, 56 Morley, David 207

315 Morning Chronicle 52 Morris, William; News From Nowhere 83-84, 185 Morrison, Arthur; To London Town 80-82; A Child of the Jago 80-81; The Hole in the Wall 80-81; Tales of Mean Streets 80, 111 Motion, Andrew; ‘Fresh Water’ 227, 231 M25 London Orbital Motorway 82, 90, 155 Mumford, Lewis 82 Murder/Murders 16, 44 - 45, 58, 6673, 77-78, 81, 83, 130-131, 155, 165-166, 170-171, 174 175, 178-181, 205, 244, 252256, 265, 267 Murder by Decree (Clark) 252 Murphy, Robert 228 Murray, Alex 168 Music halls 105 Muslims/Islam 232, 237-241 Narks 112 Nash, John 44 Naughtie, James 15 Nazis 137 Nead, Lynda 14, 69-70, 255 Neale, Steve 251 Neher, Carola 132 ‘The Nemesis of Neglect’ (Punch) 73 Neve, Michael 71 Newspapers 64, 69-71, 109, 183, 233 New York 71, 162, 219, 240 New York Times 71 Nichols, Mary Ann ‘Polly’ 68, 255 Nietzsche, Friedrich 95, 136 9/11 attacks on New York City 232, 240 No Way Back (Osiecki) 127, 141 Nord, Deborah Epstein 52 Nordau, Max; Degeneration 89, 111, 129 Norton, Dennis Val 127 Notting Hill 71 Notting Hill (Mitchell) 228

316


The Occult 155, 168, 177, 181, 252253 Oland, Warner 126 Old Testament (The Bible) 62 Olympics (2012) 13, 16, 163 Öncü, Ayúe 152 One Canada Square 187 Onega, Susana 174 Opium 47-48, 55-56, 106-110, 125, 253 O’Pray, Michael 206 Orientalism 25, 95, 107-108 Orwell, George; Down and Out in Paris and London 105-106 Oxford Street 55 Oxford University 83 Pabst, G.W. 130-134, 254; Pandora’s Box 130-136, 254, 258, 269; The Threepenny Opera 132133, 136, 254 Page, Joanna 253 Palace Journal 80 Pall Mall Gazette 63, 69 Palmer, Alan 27, 51, 64, 79, 109, 117, 138-139, 142, 187 Panayi, Panikos 233 Pantomime 47, 111 Paris 15, 105-106 Parker, Anthony 256 Peach, H.H. 135 Pearly Kings and Queens 43 Pearson, John 260 Peep shows 256 Pelli, Cesar 187 Pennyfields 105, 109, 117, 121 The People’s Palace 59, 79-80 Pepys, Samuel 38-41, 185 Performance (Cammell and Roeg) 261 Perkin, Harold 21-22 Perrill, Simon 155 Petit, Chris; London Orbital 155 Petticoat Lane 38, 140-142, 189 Petty, Sir William 43 Philanthropy/Philanthropists 57-61, 81, 85-86, 101 Photography 99, 122, 247, 253, 258

Phrenology 66 Pianos 85, 146 Piccadilly (Dupont) 127-128 Pick, Frank 135 Pickford, Mary 121 Pictorial World 62 Pike, David L. 95 Pile, Steve 25, 153, 186-187, 237, 247 Pinter, Harold 87 A Place to Go (Dearden) 143, 146147, 262 Plaistow 119 Platts-Mills, Barney; Bronco Bullfrog 143, 146-147 Poe, Edgar Allan; The Fall of the House of Usher 172 Pogroms 25, 71, 91 Poland/Poles 25 Police 26, 64, 69-70, 77, 81, 91, 97100, 106, 109, 116, 141, 180, 192, 195, 252, 254, 261 Poplar 17, 27, 80, 115, 117, 186, 223 Poplar Town Hall 27 ‘Poplarism’ 27 Port of London 79, 186 Porter, Roy 39, 51-54, 62, 78, 82, 150 Portoghesi, Paolo 135 Postcolonial London 225, 228, 230231, 234, 243 Postmodernism: literary/cinematic/architectural 36, 136, 149157, 161-162, 168-170, 179, 183-184, 190, 193, 199, 203, 207-209, 212-219, 222-223, 228-231, 239, 243, 246-248, 250, 264, 268, 270-272 Prague 253-254 Preservationists 120 Pritchett, V.S. 157 Production design/set design 122, 131, 189-190, 251-257, 263, 269-271 Protestants 25, 231 Proud City (Keene) 139, 196 Psychogeography 160-161, 165-166, 173-175, 185, 222, 225 Psychology 89, 167

Index Public houses/pubs 82, 101, 106, 116, 119, 128, 140, 146, 180, 190, 242, 251, 254, 262, 269-270 Pugilism/boxing/wrestling 141-142, 146, 199, 261 Pulleine, Tim 263-264 Punch 73-77, 122 Punk 154, 206 Purfleet 90, 101 Putney 229 Queen Elizabeth II Bridge 90 Queen Victoria 79, 176, 179, 252 Queen Victoria pub (EastEnders) 116, 269 Queensbridge Road 205 Raban, Jonathan; Soft City 125, 169, 221 Race 19, 25, 62, 81, 90, 98, 111-114, 118, 125, 128, 135, 152-153, 164, 214, 233, 236, 272 Racism 61, 99, 112, 120, 190, 220, 233, 236, 238, 240 Radlett, Hertfordshire 190 Railways 18, 34, 94, 115, 140, 152, 179, 185, 197, 216, 221, 266, 268 Raskin, Eugene 191 Ratcliffe 54, 63 Ratcliffe Highway 40, 44 - 45, 58, 84 Ratcliffe Highway Murders (1811) 58, 165 Realism: cinema/literary 73, 140-143, 208, 216, 218, 237, 247, 254, 271 Reed, Carol; A Kid For Two Farthings 141-143 Reform Bill (1867) 21, 52, 55 Refugees 71, 234 Renoir, Jean 142 ‘Residuum’ 55, 60, 64, 66, 83, 97, 99 Rhys, Paul 253 Richards, Wendy 191 Richardson, Emily 11, 13 Richmond, Surrey 229 Riots 50-52, 64

317 The Ripper 68-78, 81, 90-91, 106, 121, 131, 156, 160-161, 165, 175-182, 228-229, 250-253, 256, 260, 265, 269 Ripperologists 69 Risebero, Bill 186-187 Robins, Kevin 16, 207, 209, 217 Robinson, Joe 142 Rochelson, Meri-Jane 88 Rocker, Rudolph 26 Rocque, John 40 Roeg, Nicolas; Performance 261 Rohmer, Sax; The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu 105, 120 Romans/Roman London 34 - 35, 37, 40, 95, 175 Romford, Essex 17, 33 Ronan Point 149-150, 205 Roth, Tim 34 Rotha, Paul 132-133 Rotherhithe 54 Royal Docks 187, 206 Royle, Nicholas 167 Ruins 24, 90, 102, 136, 143-146, 205, 218, 268 Rumbelow, Donald 72 Rushdie, Salman; The Satanic Verses 237; Imaginary Homelands 26, 236 Russia/Russians 25-26, 42 Rustin, Michael 25 Ryall, Tom 251 Rykwert, Joseph 152 Said, Edward; Orientalism 25, 95, 107-108, 111, 235; Culture and Imperialism 60 St Alfrege, Greenwich 168 St Anne, Limehouse 168 St Clement, Pam 191 St George, Bloomsbury 53, 168 St George-in-the-East 53, 165, 168 St John’s Wood 115 St Katherine’s Dock 186, 194 St Mary Woolnoth 168 St Pancras Station 13 St Paul’s Cathedral 46 St Peter-on-the-Wall 35

318


Salaam Brick Lane (Hall) 229 Salvation Army 79, 86, 140 Sanders, Andrew 268 Sandy’s Row 16 Sant’Elia, Antonio 136 Sargeant, Amy 132 Sarne, Mike 146 Sasdy, Peter; Hands of the Ripper 251 Sassen, Saskia 152 Satan/the Devil 38, 45-46, 69, 76 Saville Row 43, 261 Schelling, Friedrich 167 Schizophrenia 217, 266, 270-271 Schmitt, Cannon 91 Schwartbach, F.S. 56 Scruton, Roger 227 Sebald, W.G.; Austerlitz 265 Second Reform Bill (1867) 21, 52, 55 Second World War 22, 106, 138-139, 142, 146, 186, 205, 232 Sennett, Richard 30, 169 Set design/production design 122, 131, 189-190, 251-257, 263, 269-271 Seven Stars pub 180 Sewers 14, 55 Sexuality 19, 26, 33, 86, 91, 111-113, 121, 127-128, 141, 180, 199, 202, 252, 272 Shadwell 39, 55, 63, 84, 113, 117, 223 Shaw, George Bernard 79 Shaw, Susan 140 Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Peter Bell the Third 45 Sheppard, Francis 21 Shields, Rob 29 Shingleton, Wilfred 142 Shoemaker, Robert 40 Shohat, Ella 128 Shooter’s Hill 46 Shopping 33, 146, 157, 200, 207 Shoreditch 17, 38, 40, 53, 151 Shoreditch High Street 81 Siamese twins 157, 261 Sidney Street Siege (1911) 26, 88 Sikhism/Sikhs 106, 145, 180 Silvertown 84

Sim, Alistair 143 Sims, George R. 62 Sinclair, Iain; Lud Heat 155-158, 165-175, 178, 254; Suicide Bridge 155-157, 178; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings 155, 175-181, 216, 260; Radon Daughters 155, 204, 233; Lights Out For the Territory 155, 159; Downriver 84, 155, 184, 188, 214 - 218, 228; London Orbital (book) 33, 90, 155; London Orbital (film; with Chris Petit) 155; Dining on Stones 34, 155; Transit (with Emily Richardson) 14 Sisters of Mercy night shelter, Artillery Passage 16 Situationist International 159-160 Skinner, Keith 70 Skyscrapers 185, 189 Slums/slum clearances 22, 39, 47, 53, 61, 78, 81-83, 86, 98, 101, 105-106, 126, 130-131, 136139, 185, 232, 242 Smethurst, Paul 30, 129, 152, 173174, 208-209, 270-271 Smith, John 11; Blight 14 Smith, Julia 189 Smith, Zadie; White Teeth 237 Smithfield Market 14 Snatch (Ritchie) 261 Social Anthropology 89 ‘Soft city’ (Raban) 169-170, 221, 235 Soho (London) 56, 133 Soja, Edward W. 31, 207, 210-219, 237, 239 Soup Kitchen, Brune Street 16 South-East Study 186 Southall, Middlesex 237 Southend-on-Sea, Essex 17 Southern Outfall Works 54 Southwark 78 Spandau Ballet 260 Spears, Britney 239

Index Spitalfields 16-17, 26, 39-40, 49, 78, 87-88, 103, 151, 164 - 180, 224 - 225, 234, 254 Spring-Heeled Jack 72 Stalin, Joseph V. 27 Stallybrass, Peter 20, 53 Stam, Robert 30 Stamford Hill 140 Stead, W.T. 63, 69 Stepney 17, 37, 40-44, 60, 87, 139 Stevenson, Robert Louis 72, 73, 89, 189; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 72, 89 Stoker, Bram 89-90, 179; Dracula 89-91, 179 Stow, John 37, 83 Stratford, east London 13, 17, 41, 96, 144 Street, Sarah 190 Stride, Liz 68 Strikes (1889) 79-80 (1911-12) 26 (1926) 27; match girls (1888) 79 The Sublime 115, 172 Summerfield, Eleanor 127 Sundial (Raban) 187-188 Surrey 33 Surveillance 146, 164, 211 Swinton, Tilda 206 Sylhet/Sylheti 225, 235 Synagogues 16 Tafler, Sydney 140 Tashiro, Charles S. 252 Taylor, Matthew 235 Television 17, 69, 116, 122, 181, 189, 191, 202, 242, 247, 250, 252 Ten Bells pub 254 Terry, Nigel 206 River Thames 17, 35, 43, 54 - 55, 65, 67, 84, 90-95, 106, 183, 193, 195, 200, 204, 214, 227, 233 Thames Film (Raban) 183, 233 Thames Gateway 35 Thatcher, Margaret 33, 156, 158, 186, 194, 196, 214 Theatre Royal, Stratford East 87, 144

319 ‘Thirdspace’ (Soja) 31, 211-218, 222, 237, 249 Thomas, Jameson 127 Thompson, E. P. 20 Thomson, James (“B.V.”) 37, 103, 157; The City of Dreadful Night 103 Tilbury, Essex 34 - 35, 186 Tilbury Fort 35 Tilbury shoe factory 35 Tillett, Ben 27 Time After Time (Meyer) 251-252 The Times 15, 44, 64, 109 Todorov, Tzvetan 31 Tomalin, Claire 39 Topophilia 180 Torrance, Chris 155 Tourism/tourists 16, 98, 124, 129, 133, 160, 183-184, 227-231, 242, 245-247, 256 Tower blocks 144 - 146, 150, 198199, 205, 223, 264 Tower Bridge 194 - 195, 227-228 Tower Hamlets 16, 25, 101, 238 Tower Hill 27 Tower of London 37- 40, 54, 65, 106, 189, 227-228 Toynbee Hall 59 Travelogues 86 Treves, Sir Frederick 256-260 Trinder, Tommy 139 Trotsky, Leon (Lev Bronstein) 27 Tuan, Yi-Fu 29 Tuchner, Michael 190, 260 Tucker, Christopher 257 Turkey/Turks 145, 233 Tushingham, Rita 146 The Unconscious 24, 94, 129, 202, 213 Underclass 201, 241 Underground/London tube system 23, 39, 94, 135, 199 Unemployment 64, 81, 146 Unionism/unions 21, 26-27, 62-64, 79, 197 United Artists 121

320


Upper Class 20, 60, 63-64, 85, 194, 257, 261 Urry, John 229, 245-247 Utopia 32-33, 80, 83, 185, 203, 211, 221 Vampires 91 Van der Rohe, Mies 134 - 135 Van Kempen, Ronald 139-140, 203 The Vanishing Street (Vas) 14 Vauxhall 183 Venice 184, 198 Queen Victoria 79, 176, 252 Victoria Park, Hackney 17, 139 Victoria Street 55 Vidler, Anthony 172 Vikings 35 Villain (Tuchner) 190, 260-261, 264 Virilio, Paul 209, 217-218 Wain, John 41 Walker, Del 146 Walkowitz, Judith 69-72, 164, 255 Wall, Cynthia 40 Walthamstow 17, 82-83, 189 Walworth 53 Wapping 37-39, 45, 51, 82-84, 103, 118 Wapping Lane 44 Ward, Fanny 121 Ward, Stephen V. 139 Warner, Jack 143 Warshow, Robert 252 Warwick, Alexandra 90 Waterloo Road 105 Watts, Carol 118, 121-122 Watts, Cedric 92 Waxworks 255 Wedekind, Frank 131 Weill, Kurt 132 Weimar Republic (Germany) 50, 130135 Weiner, Deborah E. B. 59 Welfare State 27, 206 Wells, H.G.; ‘The World Set Free’ 185

Wesker, Arnold 34, 87; Chicken Soup with Barley; Annie Wobler; Groupie 87 West Ham 96, 139 West India Dock 67, 114, 117 Weyland, Petra 152 Whitby Abbey 90 White, Allon 20, 53 White, Jerry 109-110 Whitechapel 11, 16-19, 38-40, 49, 53, 61, 66-71, 76-79, 84 - 88, 101103, 122, 155-157, 170, 175, 179-181, 204, 228-229, 234, 251-256, 260, 265, 267 Whitechapel Art Gallery 39 Whitechapel High Street 37, 59 Whitechapel Road 19, 40, 48-49, 57, 68, 78-79, 204, 223 Wilde, Oscar; The Picture of Dorian Gray 84 - 85, 89, 99, 110-111 Williams, John 45 Williams, Martin 122 Williams, Montagu Q.C. 78, 255 Williams, Raymond 13, 20-21, 43, 51, 57, 86 Williams, Stephanie 187 Willmott, Peter 22-23, 27 Winchevsky, Morris 26 Windsor, Barbara 144 - 145, 150 Winter, James 22 Witchard, Anne 11, 109-111 Withers, Googie 140 Wohl, Anthony S. 62 Wohlgelernter, Maurice 87 Wolfreys, Julian 156-158, 160-161, 174 Wong, Anna May 127 Woolf, Virginia 119, 157, 183; Mrs Dalloway 157; The London Scene 183 Wordsworth, William; The Prelude 42-45, 59 Working Class 18, 20-22, 25-26, 3334, 43, 62-65, 80-82, 91, 99101, 111-112, 117, 124, 135, 138-139, 141, 143, 145-146, 150, 154, 190-194, 201, 205,

Index 218-219, 242, 257, 260-261, 272 World Trade Center (New York City) 162 Wortman, Frank 122 Wrestling 141-142, 146 Wright, Frank Lloyd 15 Wright, Patrick; A Journey Through Ruins 155, 173, 192, 205-206

321 ‘Yellow Peril’ 111, 120-121 Yglesias, Rafael 253 Young, Michael 22-23, 27 Zangwill, Israel; Children of the Ghetto 87-89 Zola, Emile 243 Zukin, Sharon 152-153, 192-193, 207, 265

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