The New East End

"Michael Young was a great sociologist who studied kinship and family in East London in the 1950s. And Geoff Dench updates the story to look at the sense of dislocation among the old East End working class created by immigration. It would also be good to mention his earlier book Minorities in the Open Society – a fascinating collection of essays and a really brilliant introduction to the issues, particularly the colonial story and its legacy in modern Britain. In The New East End , Dench has a thesis about how the East End came into its inheritance after the Second World War . It had been a pretty tough and excluded part of Britain, populated by outsiders – poor itinerants and immigrant groups, and the unskilled native working class who worked in the docks. Then in the Second World War the East End heroically kept the docks open, while being heavily bombed. But after the war it became an epicentre of the new Jerusalem. The working class was coming into its inheritance for all those centuries of being excluded. Finally they had their reward, but within a few years of the shiny new council estates being built, all these people from somewhere else turn up. Dench describes the enormous resentment, as if their reward had been taken away from them. There were big battles over public resources. That particular story is largely over. A lot of working class white people moved out anyway. But many of them went feeling as if they had been displaced by a new population – with a granny left behind who is suddenly isolated in a mostly Bangladeshi housing estate. Precisely. A Labour MP I know was telling me the other day about a constituent of his who had been in a minority part of East London. She walked for 20 minutes without seeing another white person. Then when she did see one she said they smiled in recognition, like you do when you see a British person on holiday. That is quite a nice way of putting it."