Avatar Posted by AndyEditor 268 days ago - Average Rating: 3.25 with 2 vote(s) (www.mernick.co.uk)
Category: archive and reference | Tags: bethnal green whitechapel spitalfields stepney wapping limehouse poplar bow bromley-by-bow shadwell ratcliff
Started by David Rich in 1998, Tower Hamlets On Line is now maintained by the East London History Society, and although there's nothing essentially ground-breaking on this site, it does contain a number of interesting texts from 19th century London.

Reading these primary documents does server to remind one of the old maxim: The more things change, the more things remain the same.

It's not that the appalling working conditions haven't been challenged by successive Parliamentary bills and organised workers, it's that the themes detailed here – crime, drugs, gangs, drinking and immigration – are still very much features on the 21st century London debating table.

No collection of accounts on 19th century London could be complete without Henry Mayhew – the father of investigatory journalism (and perhaps oral history?).

Tower Hamlets On Line has a Mayhew penned item entitled 'The curiosities of drunkenness', where the author lets the coal-whippers and coal-backers employed on the docks talk about their work and how they try to blunt its most horrendously hard edges – namely, through drink.

A voice of Victorian dissent is Annie Besant, leader of the infamous match-girls' strike of 1889. In this passage, taken from her autobiography, Besant recounts some of the organising activity of that year:

'Another part of our work was defending people from unjust landlords, exposing workhouse scandals, enforcing the Employers Liability Act, Charles Bradlaugh's Truck Act, forming 'Vigilante Circles' whose members kept watch in their own district over cases of cruelty to children, extortion, insanitary workshops, sweating, &c., reporting each case to me'

George R. Simms, writing in the later Edwardian period, recounts walking trips through the Jewish East End, or Alien-Land has he labels it.

Full of Yiddish voices, the crowded streets must have been made Simms feel like a stranger in a strange land. Here he wanders into the Spitalfields Synagogue:

'Passing from the Talmud school into the Synagogue itself, you are startled to find the Royal Arms of England, elaborately carved and coloured, standing out bold on the walls.

The mystery is solved when we learn that this was originally a Huguenot chapel, owned by French refugees who settled in Spitalfields after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. At one time the Huguenots were under special Royal favour, which may account for the display of the Royal Arms in their place of worship. The Jews acquired the building and converted it to a synagogue about ten years ago.'

Today the synagogue is a mosque which demonstrates the continuity of immigration into the East End of London.
Tower Hamlets On Line is worth a visit if you have a couple of hours of browsing time spare.
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