The Real East End. Burke Thomas

last to London; and tales to be heard of families that came from the farms of Norfolk and Lincolnshire and Suffolk, and made their first home here, with hope of better things that never reached the happy terminus of fact. And there are the daily stories, to be heard at every door, of how the hard times are being met.

      All these tales the casual wanderer of the right sort may gather in passing. In the streets and the shops and the restaurants, he may have much good talk, for, as I have said, the true Bohemian spirit operates here. There is no hesitation or withdrawal, nor that cold repetition of parrot-phrases by which the standardized Englishman fences with the stranger until he proves him an equal, the sort of man one can introduce. Talk, once opened, is free and personal; unbosomed; and I, for one, find this talk, in its way, a good balance to talk with the polite. It is talk based on reality and on the immediate experience of those who live close to the elemental things. In mean streets people have to live singly, not play at living with the support of supers. They have to get down to life, not walk on its edge. Hence, mean streets hold a variety lacking in the noble streets. The noble streets, being noble, are mostly reticent. But the mean streets, filled by creatures who see life straight and live it straight, instead of through a wadding of book-culture, have a thousand points of interest.

      Not that the East End is without its noble street. It has one that can stand comparison with any of the great London highways, and one that is full of common interest. This is the Whitechapel Road and Mile End Road, the great Roman highway which runs to-day, as it did centuries ago, straight into London from the Roman settlement at Colchester. It is as broad as the entrance to a great metropolis should be, and it puts to shame the poor pinched entrances at the centre of town of the Dover Road, the Brighton Road, and even the Great North Road. For the greater part of its length, it is lined with trees. Its story deserves a volume to itself; indeed, the story only of that section between Stratford and the City calls for a historian. It was one of the earliest roads into London, and while many of its contemporaries have been supplanted, and have disappeared or become grass-grown tracks dimly perceived on the outskirts, its traffic, from its first years, has never eased. An echo of its past importance may be found in the number of Yards which were once the yards of inns. Most of the inns have vanished, but the yards remain; in several of them the bedroom galleries may still be seen, and in one of them the coach office still stands. The best example is Nag’s Head Yard.

      Thick as its life was, it goes on to-day thicker than ever, full of importance and yet with time for the little intimate things of every day. For a secondary highway, there is Commercial Road East, the Tilbury road. This has not the dignity of Mile End Road, but it is an important road for London. It is a road from many docks, and along it comes much of the material that supports the life and the industries of the greatest old city of the world.

      These two roads, converging and meeting Leman Street and Commercial Street at Gardiner’s Corner, one of the busiest junctions of all London, make two major veins through the body of this quarter; and from them goes all the life that feeds the ramification of hamlets and streets which have grown out of them and which make what we call The East End. One may say of them, with more truth than of Mona Lisa’s head, that upon them all the ends of the world are come.

SPREAD EAGLE YARD, 1931

from my studio window