I organised a guided historical walking tour of the East End of London for seven members of staff, six of whom were PCS union members, after a number of colleagues expressed an interest in finding out more about the area we work in.

The tour took place in the evening of Friday, 25th September 2015 and fortunately the weather was fine and dry! The walk was entitled 'The Unknown East End' and it was led by Harry Jackson, a registered Blue Badge tour guide from London Walks Limited.

Our local HASSRA (Health And Social Security Recreational Association) Club very kindly contributed about half of the total cost of the walk, with the participating staff paying the other half. The cost per HASSRA member taking part worked out at just £6 each, which turned out to be excellent value for money.

The walk, which lasted a couple of hours, started outside Whitechapel Underground Station and it ended near to Old Spitalfields Market. It covered a wide range of topics such as the violent lives of the notorious Kray twins, the building where Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin once stayed in, the history of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the artists Isaac Rosenberg and Marc Gertler.

It also explained where the name ‘Whitechapel’ came from and touched on the working lives in the area, such as the history of Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the Royal London Hospital and Brick Lane - once the centre of London’s brick-making industry, along with the lives of famous residents including Joseph Merrick (the Elephant Man).

The East End has always been a melting pot of different cultures and the tour managed to also pack in the stories of Jewish refugees from mainland Europe and the origins of the Bangladeshi community in the area as well as scenes of social unrest such as, the Battle of Cable Street of 1936, and the Sidney Street Siege of 1911. 

Cable Street, built in the late 18th Century, was where ropes and cables were manufactured. The original street was only the length of a cable (600 feet) but the name was later extended to other streets. It now stretches from Royal Mint Street to Commercial Road. It became famous for the ‘battle’ which took place there on Sunday, 5th October 1936. Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley, planned to march through the East End taking in Cable Street en route. Left-wing parties and local inhabitants, many Jewish, decided to stop them. Barricades were built in Cable Street and fighting broke out forcing Mosley to cancel the march. 

Sidney Street was the scene of the famous siege on 3rd January 1911 when two foreign revolutionaries barricaded themselves into a house and fired at the police, fire brigade, and a detachment of Scots Guards. They both died when the house caught fire. Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, witnessed the battle.

It was amazing the amount of history in this small patch of London, and doing a walking tour of the area meant we were keeping fit whilst learning.

At the end of the tour, all the participants warmly thanked Harry for a most enjoyable, interesting and informative tour, and then we rounded off an excellent evening with a few drinks in ‘The Good Samaritan’, a local pub!