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Silvertown: An East End family memoir - Hardcover

 
9781841151427: Silvertown: An East End family memoir
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Silvertown is the story of one East End family, across three generations, living on the fringe of the Thames.

Silvertown itself is a ribbon of marshland that sits beside the King George VI dock near Bow Creek. In 1944 Melanie McGrath's grandfather Lenny, bought the Cosy Café in Silvertown. From here Lenny, his mistress, his wife and his daughter served egg and chips, liver and bacon, eels and jellied custard to the passing trade from the thriving docks. Business was good. By the late forties Lenny was the only café owner in the East end to drive a Cadillac.

Like many others on the fringes of the Thames in East London, the story of Melanie McGrath's family is a tidal one. Originating from other parts, her family spilled into the area to take advantage of the docks and, having made a little money spilled back out to the west again, headed for a better place.

Fifty years on, Silvertown stares the Millennium Dome square in the eyes. In the past half-century the Docklands terrain has been bombed, rebuilt, renovated, slum-cleared and finally razed pending 'regeneration'. Overlooked by successive enterprise projects that have created the City Airport, Canary Wharf and the Dome itself, the waters of Silvertown sleep, awaiting a future that remains undecided.

In Silvertown Melanie McGrath has, through the story of her family, recaptured this slip of land from it's post-industrial depression, and with it the traditional heartlands of east London before each fades quietly from memory.

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Review:
Silvertown is the story of the life of author Melanie McGrath's grandmother, Jenny Page. As McGrath acknowledges, "It was the kind of life that could have belonged to a thousand women living in the mid years of the twentieth century in the East End of London. Except that it didn't. It belonged to Jenny". McGrath's achievement in the book is to make Jenny's very commonplace, circumscribed life not only believable and moving but also to turn it into a mirror in which the reader can see the changes that the century visited upon the East End. When Jenny was a young girl, the London docks were the biggest port in the world, teeming with life and industry. By the time she was an old woman, all the docks were closed and the old East End was a part of history. Not that Silvertown encourages nostalgia. The descriptions of Jenny's impoverished childhood, of the pulling of all her teeth on her 17th birthday, of the sweatshop where she worked, are enough to make readers throw away any rose-tinted glasses they might be tempted to use. Very occasionally the dialogue in the book lapses into the "Cor, blimey, strike a light, guv'nor" kind of Cockney heard in so many bad British films of the black-and-white era. Largely, both dialogue and narrative combine to provide a remarkably convincing and lively portrait of an ordinary life rescued from oblivion and of a world that's gone.--Nick Rennison
Review:

'McGrath tells her story in a novelist's idiom, and the result is extraordinarily powerful and curiously resonant. Like much of the East End, Silvertown today is in the process of an astonishing transformation. The curse on the area has been lifted. But McGrath has beautifully recorded the old Silvertown just before it disappears for ever.' Sinclair McKay, Daily Telegraph

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  • PublisherFourth Estate
  • Publication date2002
  • ISBN 10 1841151424
  • ISBN 13 9781841151427
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages256
  • Rating

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