ABSTRACT
The East End of London has represented much more than a geo graphical entity in modern British history. The area, with its imprecise borders has become a symbol of the ‘state of the nation’ - of social questions, poverty and physical deterioration, the threat of revolution and unrest, the blitz and Britain ‘taking it’, of ethnic pluralism and racial intolerance. The East End has been forgotten and then ‘redis covered’ and reinvented. In the process, myth and reality have become intertwined making the writing of East End history all the more difficult. Both left and right have used and abused the past of the East End and, in the process, exposed the dangerous area where critical history becomes an uncensorious ‘heritage’. Already, to many, the East End has become a historical ‘theme park’ yet the area continues to be occupied - indeed it was one of the few whose size of population is actually growing in the capital. To those who still inhabit the East End, poverty, racism, sweated labour, the housing crisis, the lack of schools and social facilities are of more pressing concern than ‘heri tage’ preservation. The writing of East End history and the creation of
its heritage provide a series of dilemmas both of a practical and theoretical nature.1
