When I first came to London I used to stay with my sister on the Whitechapel Road. We’d drink in that stretch of pubs from Vallance Road – where the Krays were born – to the Blind Beggar, where Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell. For a while my sister worked behind the bar at the Star & Garter.
Apart from the Blind Beggar, all those pubs are now gone. A few of the signs remain.
In some ways the old East End of London was not a good place. My partner, who lived there before we met, used to help drive black voters to the polling station to escape the affections of the National Front who, on election day, would march up and down the Whitechapel Road, intimidating non-white voters.
But there were good sides. I remember the old boys in the Star & Garter, drinking Worthington White Shield, alongside doctors and nurses coming off duty at the London Hospital. They were good people – printers, dockers, market porters, tube workers, union men. Most held the NF in contempt. If they didn’t my sister wouldn’t serve them.
Where are they now? Where are their children? They can’t all have taken the Thatcher shilling, buying and selling their council flats, escaping to Essex? It’s as if they’ve been wiped off the face of the earth. All we’re left with, according to the Daily Mail, are the chavs. The old, East End, white working class, has vanished in a puff of Player’s No 6.
Most odd.
One thing’s for sure. Their middle class replacements, with their lofts and magnolia paint, their iPads and Eggs Benedict, their children named ‘Cecil’ and their sense of braying entitlement, are inferior in almost every way to the White Shield boys. Hey ho.
Immigration has played a massive factor. The sad truth is that many people feel uncomfortable living alongside people who are different to them in regards culture, dress, and, yes, skin color. I know plenty of “white working class” people, mainly wiht origins in SE london, who are now in sunny kent because 1) they became far better off than their fathers, and 2) SE london is no longer a desirable place for them anymore.
London, in my view, is now mainly lived in by white middle classes who were not born there, upwardly mobile youngsters, fresh out of uni, or still in uni, and immigrants from all over the world. Yes, it can be incredibly diverse and interesting, but there is part of me that is sad that there is no longer a large and meaningful white working class populace. That’s my roots, and in London, it’s gone.