A Journey of Discovery

As a born and bred Londoner I am bound to say that my natal city is the greatest in the world. I fully realise how subjective this statement is, I doubt there is a person alive (or dead) who has managed to visit every city on the planet in order to make comparisons, and I am a particularly impoverished international traveller. However, I stand by what I say simply because London has everything I want and still has the power to surprise and excite me after half a century of living in the bosom of the Great Wen. I also feel as I grow older that the city feels more organic, and that I am part of it, whether this is the premature onset of senility or something more profound I do not know, but I love the idea that all that has passed here is just waiting to be resurrected by an inquisitive mind and that the knowledge to be gained will make me even more of a Londoner than I already am. This particular adventure started in the London section of Foyle's bookshop on the Charing Cross Road on a balmy August Saturday in 2010, I picked up a book call London Plaques by Derek Sumeray and John Sheppard and, as I leafed through the information packed pages it felt like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle was falling into place. I instantly purchased the book and repaired to the Angel public house on nearby St Giles High Street for a pint and a perusal. Like most Londoners I was aware of the blue plaques celebrating the lives and achievements of the capital's finest citizens, now I had in my hands a guide to all of these, and more; Plaques erected by organizations as diverse as the Dead Comics Society and the London Hellenic Society; and not only people, there are plaques commemorating places long gone, especially in the City of London, and these in particular have the power to bring the past alive; some1,800 plaques in total. I decided there and then that I would attempt to visit and photograph them all. My first two forays into the field were made using detailed itineraries compiled from the book planned to include all the plaques in any given area, but I found this approach strangely unrewarding so now I leave the book at home, using it only as a reference tool and just wander the streets photographing the plaques as I find them; using this method it will obviously take more time to visit all of the plaques on offer, but I am not in such a great hurry and, as the good doctor said: when a man is tired of London.......

Wednesday, 30 March 2011

The BATTLE of CABLE STREET


3 - 5 Dock Street, E1 (Tower Hamlets Environment Trust)

Europe during the 1930s was no place to be if you belonged to an ethnic minority; a civil war was already raging in Spain the outcome of which would keep the country in the grip of the fascist dictator Franco until his death nearly 40 years later in 1975; National Socialism was sweeping Germany and Benito Mussolini and his thugs from the Fasci de Combattimento were taking control in Italy. In Britain, mass unemployment following the great depression left people feeling angry and betrayed, foreigners were blamed for taking jobs and a new party, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) lead by the charismatic aristocrat Sir Oswald Mosley was growing in popularity. The east end of London had long been a refuge for immigrants fleeing persecution in Europe, from French Huguenots in the 16th century to Jews escaping the pogroms in Russia in the early 20th century.The Whitechapel and Shadwell areas of Tower Hamlets in particular were home to thousands of Jewish immigrants and it was through this area that Mosley's blackshirted fascists planned to march. As unbelievable as it seems today this march was legal, but the good people of the east end were determined to prevent the fascists from marching, their slogan "they shall not pass" echoed that of the republicans fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War "no pasaran", and Irish navvy stood shoulder to shoulder with Jewish tailor and West Indian docker to repel the blackshirts, The Battle of Cable Street was actually fought between the anti-fascists and the police who were trying to clear the streets so that the march could go ahead, but the people held firm and the march had to be abandoned. A large mural depicting the battle is painted on the end of a house about 300 metres east of the Dock Street plaque, a fitting tribute to the day the people said no.
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