The East End: Four Centuries of London Life

(Paperback, Main)

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The East End as an idea is known to every Londoner, and to many others, though its boundaries are vague. Alan Palmer's historical overview of the area (first published in 1989 and revised in 2000) takes its extent to be the traditional limits of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, Hoxton and Shoreditch, the docklands and their overflow into West Ham and East Ham. And at the heart of the East End lies Spitalfields, home to a transient, often radical and hard-working population. End has always been a diverse place: in the seventeenth century, Hackney was a pleasant country retreat; Stepney and the docklands a bustling world of sailors and merchants. The book traces the development of the area from these roots, through the nineteenth century - when the East End became notorious as the home of radicals, exiled revolutionaries and the very poor, its crowded streets the scene of murder, riot and cholera -to the bombing of the first and second world war; and the subsequent decline and regeneration of the twentieth century.

Author Bio

Alan Palmer was head of History at Highgate School, London for nineteen years before retiring early to concentrate on historical writing and research. He is the author of more than three dozen works: narrative histories; biographies; historical dictionaries ir reference books. His main interests are in the Napoleonic era, nineteenth century diplomacy, the First World War and Eastern Europe, although his Northern Shores is a history of the Baltic Sea and its peoples from earliest times to 2004. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1980. Of Alan Palmer, Sir John Keegan has written, ' Alan Palmer writes the sort of history that dons did before ''accessible'' became an academic insult. It is cool, rational, scholarly, literate.' Faber Finds is reissuing a number of his titles: Alexander I, The Gardeners of Salonika, The Chancelleries of Europe, The East End, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, The Lands Between, Metternich, Twilight of the Habsburgs.