Ripperland
Just a short walk from the Bank of England and the Mansion House there lies a fascinating area – London’s “East End”. Centred on Aldgate and Whitechapel it is the traditional home of the “cockney sparra” but waves of immigrants have found refuge here, from the Huguenot weavers of the seventeenth century to the Bangladeshi community of recent times. All have left their mark.

The area has suffered from much poverty, crime and prostitution. Dick Turpin, no less, escaped after a gun battle near St. Marks Street in 1737. In 1911 “Peter the Painter” and two anarchist associates held out for seven hours against 400 police and troops (directed by Winston Churchill) in the Sidney Street siege. In the “Battle of Cable Street” some 6,000 police struggled to keep fascist Blackshirt marchers apart from a vast crowd of communist and Jewish opponents. The notorious Kray brothers ruled the area up to 1969 when imprisonment overcame them. (Our lunch stop was in the pub where Reggie Kray shot dead George Cornell - and “no-one there noticed anything”!). Surely the most famous of all East End criminals must be Jack the Ripper who, in 1888, brutally murdered five (some say six) women.

Alongside the ill, much good has come out of the East End. In 1865 William Booth began his evangelical preaching close to our lunch-time stop but he soon perceived that bodies, as well as souls, needed help. With friends, he started to feed and help the destitute of the East End and, from this, grew the Salvation Army established under this name in 1878.

Dr. Barnado came from Dublin to study missionary medicine at the London Hospital, Whitechapel, but soon he was appalled by the plight of orphan children roaming the streets. His first act was to set up a “ragged school” in Ernest Street and then, with help from Lord Shaftsbury and others, he set up his first children’s home at 18 Stepney Causeway in 1870. Over the door was displayed for the first time the words “No destitute child ever refused admission - open all night”. Such was the demand that he soon set up other homes or “common lodging houses for children”. One occupied the former home of Jack the Ripper’s third victim, Elizabeth Stride.

Canon Samuel Barnett perceived that education was the key to improving the lot of the poor so he enlisted help from Professor Arnold Toynbee of Balliol College, Oxford. The Professor persuaded some of his under-graduates to devote spare time to living with, teaching, and doing general social work for, adults at a centre provided by Barnett in 1884 which he named Toynbee Hall. Many politicians and economists have supported the work of the Hall from Clement Attlee (one-time secretary around 1902) to John Profumo in more recent times. Toynbee Hall had a big part to play in the founding of such national organisations as the Workers’ Educational Association (1903), Workers92 Travel Association (1921), Youth Hostels Association (1931) and the Community Service Volunteers (1962).

Our walk covered the sites of all these events. We also visited the finest baroque church in Britain (Hawksmoor 1720) and you can browse the bargains on the stalls of Petticoat Lane street market.

Light lunches were taken in The Blind Beggar pub (2006 regional winner of best bar restaurant) and there is an open square with seating for picnickers nearby.

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Joan

Tony