28 Feb 06 History of Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets
Unfortunately it’s practically impossible to recycle in the district we live in and I’ve been harrassing the Tower Hamlets council (only via email thus far) for information on how to get the mounting recyclables out of our flat. I’ve filed three official requests and still no resolution, but I’m determined.
This morning I discovered some brief historical info on Wikipedia about our borough of Tower Hamlets and more specifically our area of Whitechapel.
The Tower Hamlets page has an overview of the geography, demographics and politics of the area, which seems slightly skewed by the fact that the Docklands development is a part of it. Docklands is somewhat like Vancouver’s Yaletown, filled with upscale condos and the tallest buildings (bank towers) in London. By the way the tallest habitable building in London, and Britain, is 1 Canada Square.
Honing in on Whitechapel, though, some historical nuggets are interesting:
1888 saw the depredations of the Whitechapel Murderer, later known as Jack the Ripper. In 1902, American author Jack London, looking to write a counterpart to Jacob Riis’s seminal book How the Other Half Lives, donned ragged clothes and boarded in Whitechapel, detailing his experiences in The People of the Abyss. Riis had recently documented the astoundingly bad conditions in the leading city of the United States. Jack London, a socialist, thought it worthwhile to explore conditions in the leading city of the nation that had created modern capitalism. He concluded that English poverty was far rougher than the American variety.
Not long before our move here I finished reading How the Other Half Lives to learn more about New York history, so it seems logical I should now read The People of the Abyss. I doubt people in the neighbourhood were battling for recycling services at that time.
GET FED: