Old East Enders by Jane Cox – review

Old East Enders: not so much Jack the Ripper as pirates and Roundheads

“What, like Dot Cotton?” one might ask on hearing the title of this book, but in fact it is an impeccably researched history of Tower Hamlets from Neolithic times until the dawn of the Georgian era.

Its author, Jane Cox, is the former Principal Assistant Keeper of Public Records, and she has filled virtually every page with entertaining facts about London’s most evocatively-named borough. She is also a great writer. Old East Enders brings to mind Gillian Tindall’s history of Kentish Town, The Fields Beneath – another book that went way beyond the pedestrian plodding that characterises too much local history.

Tower Hamlets, as its name suggests, comprises a bunch of independent hamlets, each with its own identity. Cox tells tales of wharfs, warehouses, whores, plagues, popery and pastures. Overall, one is left with the impression of the East End as an engine of London’s history. It is older than west London and has for so long been incredibly populous (apparently in 1680 a third of Londoners lived in “the eastern suburbs and hamlets”). Yet the East End has never really been given its due. Relics of its past have been swept away with an abandon that would never have been sanctioned in the west.

Though focussed on just seven square miles, this book reads like a run-through of English history as a whole. Here was the stage for Parliamentarian fervour during the Civil War, there a focal point during the dissolution of the monasteries.

Most stereotypes about the East End stem from the Victorian era, by which time the hamlets where well and truly absorbed into London, and in her introduction Cox explains why she purposefully eschewed this well-worn material in favour of illuminating what life was like in the area in earlier times.

But some things were ever thus. Cox writes of a woman who, in 1491, was attacked by a man who claimed she had promised to marry him. After throwing her would-be suitor in a ditch, this woman threatened that she “morowe shalt make hym to puysse above his gydylsted.”

“This,” the author translates, “must surely mean a kick in the balls.”

Old East Enders is published by The History Press. ISBN: 9780750952910. RRP: £25 (hardback)