My East End: A History of Cockney London - Hardcover

O'Neill, Gilda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670870773 ISBN 13: 9780670870776

Publisher: Viking, 1999

Synopsis

The East End of London - familiar for its bejewelled cockneys, characterful criminals, flourishing markets with cheeky barrow-boys, gutsy pub singalongs, dog-racing, jellied eels and pie and mash. At once appealing and unruly, comforting and incomprehensible. O'Neill, herself an East Ender, shows that there is more to this area than these cliched images. She traces its story from the misty moments of pre-history to the petty crime and scandal of the Victorian underworld; from the Golden Age of the East End of living memory to the recent encroachment of the sparkling steel and glass wonders of Docklands. Through a collection of memories and stories she brings to us, with wit and honesty, the real story of London's East End.

About this title

Review:

The heart of the East End has always been Tower Hamlets; Gilda O'Neill is enough of a partisan to regard even Hackney as a bit out of bounds. My East End starts with the earliest times--the East of London has always been where dirty industry congregated, downstream from the Court and Parliament, and it has always been where incomers started, from Flemings in the Middle Ages to Bengalis today.

The greater part of this excellent book, though, is not a competent academic run through of the sources, but an invaluable collection of oral history, in which pensioners talk about the classic East End of late Victorian times and the inter-war period, a time when grinding poverty could just about be survived with luck, when people were forced to live in each other's pockets and children played around the open door of their homes until all hours: "There was always a jigsaw on the go and everyone that called had a go at putting some pieces in. Nanny usually came round on Friday nights and always brought a bag of sweets--winter warmers--and, as she was going home, she would call out 'Goodnight, kidlets'. I said that when I grew up I would go out singing in the streets and buy her a pair of blue bloomers."

O'Neill is fascinating about both the positive and negative sides of a way of life that went forever when families were moved out to housing estates on the fringes of London and about the parts of it that have survived into a new multi-cultural East End; My East End is a good book because it has an unsnobbish respect for the voices it draws on. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

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About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0670870773
• ISBN 13: 9780670870776
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352