East London’s moment
From slums to social experiments, waves of immigration, and the Olympics building boom, the East End has seen it all. Now it has the Olympics and a building boom. Hari Kunzru returns to see what has become of his old haunts
By Hari Kunzru
In the introduction to his 1894 bestseller “Tales of Mean Streets”, the novelist and journalist Arthur Morrison rehearsed what was already received opinion about east London:
The East End is a vast city…a shocking place…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 none ever combs his hair.
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