Regeneration Without End

Urban and Social Change in the East of London since the 1890s

In this essay I look at the transformation of the poorer East End of London over the last 115 years in order to reflect on current policies and practices of city making. I attempt to track aspects of the poorly-understood relationship between physical and social regeneration. Having slowly dismembered the supports of community life, policy makers and practitioners are left to look for new supports in vastly changed circumstances.

Public housing 1890–1980: from ‘cottages’ to apartments, from ‘rookeries’ to estates:
The East of London has long been the poorest and most ethnically mixed part of the city. Downwind and downriver from the rest of the metropolis and its pollution, the presence of the docks made a place both of labour and immigration. Its status within nineteenth century London is demonstrated in Charles Booth’s poverty map of 1889, a typically monumental document of the phil an thropic campaigns of the time. Dividing the population into seven income classes, from ' Upper-middle and Upper classes: Wealthy' to ‘ Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal ', it shows with great clarity the disparities in income between the city’s west and east ends. Where the wealthy are spread across the west end, the East End - the three miles between the City and the River Lea - is mapped in the colours of the honest working classes, crossed by ribbons of shopkeeper red, an d interspersed with patches of black – alleys, courts and street networks damned under the name of ‘rookeries’.

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