The Olympics: East London’s Moment
From slums to social experiments and waves of immigration, the East End has seen it all. Now it has the Olympics and a building boom. The novelist Hari Kunzru returns to see what has become of his old haunts…
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.
Unhygienic, drunken and startlingly tangled, this part of London has long been a magnet for social reformers and modernisers of every kind. It is a place that has always seemed to be crying out for intervention—from architects and planners, engineers, policemen, social workers—all hoping to make the irrational rational, to bring order to the moral chaos. Morrison’s own work contributed to the razing of a notorious Bethnal Green slum called the Old Nichol, and the erection in 1900 of the Boundary Estate, the world’s first council housing. The slum clearance created a set of neat blocks, arranged around a little mound with a bandstand, which can still be seen today. Of the Old Nichol’s 5,719 evicted residents, just 11 could afford to move in to one of the 900 new homes. The rest flooded into neighbouring slums in Shoreditch and Dalston.
The subsequent history of east London essentially consists of repeats of this process of reform, erasure and displacement, whose agents have included the old London County Council, the Luftwaffe and the young British artists of the 1990s. Throughout it has remained a poor place: despite pockets of wealth, the boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham routinely top statistical tables for child poverty and other indices of social deprivation. Now the area is to host the 2012 Olympics, a festival which has, apart from sport, become synonymous with the idea of “regeneration”, the transformation of neglected urban areas into centres of economic activity. In 2010, in his first major speech as prime minister, David Cameron promised to “make sure the Olympic legacy lifts east London from being one of the poorest parts of the country to one that shares fully in the capital’s growth and prosperity”.