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Stephen P. Ryder
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 2923
Registered: 10-1997
| | Posted on Monday, January 12, 2004 - 10:01 am: |       |
From CNN.COM:
London: An East End transformation
LONDON, England (AP) --At age 71, Monica Hearne has seen the East End nearly destroyed by German bombing. She has seen its thriving Thames River docks die. She has seen it fill with wave after wave of refugees.
But she has never seen it get rich -- until now.
The East End -- the world of Jack the Ripper, Dickensian slums, cockney English and British soap opera -- is being reborn in Europe's largest urban renewal project, and in Hearne's working-class neighborhood of Wapping, the results are evident in the yuppies and artists who have decided, even though Starbucks hasn't yet moved in, that this is a trendy place to live.
"When I was a young woman, cabbies wouldn't even drive me back to the East End at night, seeing it as a bad, unsavory area of foreign sailors and ladies of the night," said Hearne, while shopping at P&J Baker, her local mom-and-pop store.
"These days you're as likely to hear posh English as cockney in the East End, and to see yuppies driving Range Rovers and living in luxury apartments on the banks of the Thames."
She has mixed feelings about it. Haves and have-nots, gated communities -- "Our mothers and fathers would turn in their graves if they saw what was going on here today."
On the other hand, the public housing apartment she bought years ago for a pittance is now worth $300,000, meaning the former welfare recipient now has something to leave to her children.
"The East End is undergoing an amazing transformation," Chris Hamnett, a professor of geography and sociology at King's College in London, said in an interview. "Many young professionals now see it as exciting, cutting edge, street-wise and sexy. Some even regard London's posh West End as a boring geriatric ward by comparison."
For such people, Soho doesn't refer just to that famous nightlife strip of central London, but to "South of Hoxton," an up-and-coming East End area of cafes, nightclubs, bistros, wine bars, ethnic restaurants and art galleries.
Cockney, that oddball slang and pronunciation that once was as East End as jellied eel and pie-and-mash shops, is now considered hip in many parts of class-conscious England.
Long way to go
Gentrification has come in fits and starts, beginning in the 1980s with loft conversions of derelict Thames-side warehouses.
A narrow band of wealth now spreads all the way down the meandering river, from the Tower of London to the Isle of Dogs and the gleaming skyscrapers of Canary Wharf. The wharf, named after a dock that imported Canary Islands bananas, is now the capital's second financial center.
The rebirth still has a long way to go. Across much of the East End, and a larger area known as East London, public housing projects and slums suffer some of the nation's worst unemployment, crime, poverty and outbreaks of long-term illnesses such as tuberculosis.
Still, even in deprived areas such as Stratford, which has suffered drug-related drive-by shootings, property speculation is under way, driven by record low mortgage costs, congestion and troubled public transport that have turned central London into a commuter's nightmare, and the government's bid to hold the 2012 Olympics in East London.
In 2007, Stratford, one of Britain's poorest and most ethnically diverse areas, is to get a new terminal for trains linking Britain to the Continent. That has prompted private developers to propose building a virtual city of 4,500 new homes, 2,000 hotel rooms, three department stores and swaths of public space.
The East End's revival is part of a dramatic postindustrial transformation of the city of 7.2 million since the 1960s, from manufacturing to financial and business services.
Shifting east
In Victorian times, the East End spawned Jack the Ripper. In the 1960s it gave Britain the gangster-chic mystique of the Kray twins, vicious underworld bosses. And to this day it is the setting for "EastEnders," a soap opera watched by a quarter of the nation. But now London's center of gravity -- the real one, not the soap opera one -- is finally shifting east, and who can complain?
As a third-generation East Ender, Monica Hearne has seen it all.
Night after night early in World War II, she hid with her mother in a shelter under a Thames wharf as the German blitz laid waste to much of the East End. She saw industrial pollution trigger a flight to the suburbs after the war. The ports that survived Hitler's onslaught collapsed under the weight of modernization and militant unions, leaving thousands of dockers jobless.
In the blitz, the East End became a symbol of British fortitude. Few gestures boosted the nation's morale more effectively than King George VI visiting the wreckage. Hearne says her father refused to go into the bomb shelter, seeing it as cowardice.
Today, the East End remains filled with urban folklore, stories about its spirit of defiance, and the matey togetherness of its extended families and tight-knit neighborhoods.
Broadly defined, the heart of London twists with the Thames from the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben through the law courts area and the City, London's Wall Street, to an amorphous sprawl of districts collectively known as the East End.
East End place names resonate through history: Whitechapel and Shoreditch, Wapping and Limehouse, Stepney and Bow -- "an evil plexus of slums that hide human, creeping things, where filthy men and women live on penn'orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye and never combs his hair," to cite Arthur Morrison's "Tales of Mean Streets."
Morrison was writing in 1895, only seven years after the Ripper's reign of terror.
The Thames' docks and basins once made England the greatest maritime nation on Earth. Beyond them, row after row of slaughterhouses, glue factories, soap boilers, breweries and tanneries blighted the East End. Rats, fleas and untreated sewage were a source of epidemics that devastated the city.
The city's prevailing winds and the eastward tidal flow of filthy Thames water kept the pollution away from what would become the fashionable and aristocratic West End.
In 1662, William Petty wrote of the "fumes, steams and stinks of the whole easterly pile."
Jack the Ripper's trail
In 1888, roaming the smog-clouded streets by night, Jack the Ripper killed and mutilated at least five prostitutes. He was never caught.
Nowadays, tourists retracing the Ripper trail also see evidence of the immigration that has changed the East End again and again, like the building on the corner of Fournier Street and Brick Lane that was a Huguenot chapel in 1743, became a synagogue in 1898 and a mosque in 1976. Bangladeshis are so numerous around Brick Lane that its nickname is Bangla Town.
A shop on Whitechapel High Street once displayed wax models of Ripper victims and housed a freak show whose main attraction was Joseph Merrick, aka the Elephant Man. It now sells saris.
Today the river is cleaner. The thousands of barges that nudged their way under the Thames' many bridges and filled the warehouses to bursting are gone. The river often is nearly empty except for a few tourist and commuter boats chugging by.
One of the most striking shifts of gravity came in 1986, when Rupert Murdoch defied powerful British unions and moved his newspaper operations out of Fleet Street, historically the city's publishing row, and into the East End. Other media giants followed.
The river bank has become one of London's hottest places to live, and that has been a boon for the East End. But it also accentuates the rich-poor divide. The endless bank of luxury waterfront apartments often blocks any view of the Thames from the housing projects behind. In some areas overlooking yacht-filled marinas, efforts are under way to evict longtime houseboat-dwellers.
Haves and have-nots
At Execution Dock in Wapping, where many criminals, including the pirate Captain Kidd, were publicly put to death, there are pub signs displaying a noose or scaffold. Some East Enders are unimpressed. Tourist pubs, they sniff, pointing out that the new gentry stay off the streets after dark and go to their country homes on weekends.
In Wapping, where some streets are still cobblestoned, Monica Hearne and other East End veterans must face the fact that the old neighborhood is now too expensive for first-time buyers, including their own children and grandchildren.
Gentrification doesn't always take hold. An effort to create a swanky Tobacco Dock shopping mall there years ago failed. But despite that, real estate agents say two-bedroom apartments facing the Thames cost up to $665,000.
"Twenty years ago, if I had said I was going to buy a flat in Wapping, people would have thought I was mad," said Alan Fitzgerald, 53, a real estate agent and East End native. "It was a dump. But thanks to gentrification it is now considered trendy."
Still, Fitzgerald said, many of his yuppie customers ask for properties as far as possible from the housing projects, making him doubt whether the area will become a middle-class community in his lifetime.
But even East Enders who complain about a yuppie invasion can't help proudly pointing out which pop star or TV actor lives in which luxury apartment.
Stephen P. Ryder, Editor
Casebook: Jack the Ripper |
R.J. Palmer
Inspector
Username: Rjpalmer
Post Number: 266
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 - 12:31 am: | |
Do you remember that old Robyn Hitchcock song?
"Nobody seems to know how long
All of these buildings belong
Till they become part of you...
My favourite buildings are all laid to waste
One might as well sculpt a statue from toothpaste
And some day I could have a fifty inch waist
It's all free
For my favourite buildings and me." |
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