Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East-End Tenement Block 1887 - 1920

(Paperback)

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Description

Rothschild Buildings were typical of the "model dwellings for the working classes" which were such an important part of the response to late-Victorian London's housing problem. They were built for poor but respectable Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the community which put down roots there was to be characteristic of the East End Jewish working class in its formative years. By talking to people who grew up in the Buildings in the 1890s and after, and using documentary evidence from a wide range of public and private sources, Jerry White re-creates the richly detailed life of that community and its relations with the economy and culture around it. The book shows how cramped and austere housing was made into homes, how the mechanism of class domination, of which the Buildings were part, was both accepted and fought against, how a close community was riven with constantly shifting tensions, and how that community co-existed in surprising ways with the East End casual poor of "outcast London".

Reviews

Prize[d] for its rich, detailed insights into immigrant life in turn-of-the-century Spitalfields... Though White's commentary steers the reader and supplies valuable context, it's the interpolated quotations from tenants which bring the Buildings to colourful, tumultuous life * Time Out *
With an economy of language, without sentimentality, yet with a sensitive perception, rare for an outsider looking in on an alien world, Jerry White marvellously evokes the lost world of the immigrant 'greener' * Spectator *
A work of first-class history and a major contribution to the social history of Anglo-Jewry, lively, well-researched and eminently quotable * Jewish Chronicle *
We are never likely to have another account which sets these personal recollections so firmly in the physical environment in which people grew up, struggled and sometimes flourished. A whole historical episode is illuminated by the decision to focus on just a couple of streets and the people who lived there * Times Educational Supplement *
Jerry White has given us a book which deserves to be on every historian's shelf -- Paul Thompson * History Today *

Author Bio

Jerry White is the author of The Worst Street in North London- Campbell Bunk, Islington, Between the Wars (1986) and the award-winning London in the Twentieth Century- A City and its People (2001). Rothschild Buildings, his first book, won the Jewish Chronicle Non-fiction Book Prize for 1980. He is one of the three Local Government Ombudsmen for England and Visiting Professor at the School of History and Politics, Middlesex University, and is writing two books for Cape/Pimlico about London in the 18th and 19th centuries.