Doing Me Crust In

"Marriott dates the first stirrings of the myth to the mid-eighteenth century, when wealthy manufacturers and professional men who had previously lived over the shop, so to speak, began to migrate to the fashionable squares of London’s West End, thus reshaping the social landscape. Even in the sixteenth century, though, Bethnal Green and Stepney were widely regarded as existing beyond the civilised pale. Outside the city’s official boundary, untouched by censorship and tax-gatherer alike, they were a hot-bed of radical politicking and religious dissent. Huguenots fleeing persecution in France brought a distinctive culture ('serious, intellectually vigorous and virtuous') of mutual aid organisations and learned societies. Governments tried desperately to limit the number of people crammed into the ramshackle alleyways and fetid courts: not on humanitarian grounds, but because more inhabitants meant more deaths and more orphan children for whose upkeep local parishes became responsible."

In The New Republic, D. J. Taylor reviews John Marriott's Beyond the Tower: A History of East London.