Where have all the East Enders gone?
Ahead of a BBC documentary about the Cockney heart of London, Joe Shute sees how migration has changed a community
It’s Tursday afternoon, and in the upstairs ballroom of the East Ham Working Men’s Club, the weekly tea dance is in full swing. A dozen or so elderly women whirl slowly about the dance floor as others sit, sipping tea from china cups.
One of the first up is 86-year-old Mary Elliott, unbuttoning her blue coat and leaving her walking stick behind. Like many of the women here, she was born and bred in the area, but now lives alone. Her husband Ronald died 12 years ago, and a few years later her only son, Paul, moved with his wife and son to Canvey Island in Essex after their house was broken into.
“That made their minds up,” she says. “We always scrubbed our flagstones and cleaned every weekend. You would leave your front door open so people could come in and out. Nowadays I don’t even know my neighbours, and that is the truth.”
Mary lives in a part of Newham called Custom House, named after the docklands that once employed thousands, including her father, Joseph, who worked as a stevedore.
The area is unrecognisable from those days, she says – not least in the block of 50 flats where she lives, where only four other families are white. Her neighbours, new or old, aren’t taking up tea dancing: in the past six years, membership has halved to 42 and, of those remaining, three are over 90 and none under 70. The organiser, Eileen Kerslake, an 88-yearold from Canning Town, says she has tried to no avail to appoint a successor.
Old customs are disappearing as fast as the once tight-knit community in this part of the East End. Across the road from the working men’s club sits Upton Park, the home of West Ham for the past 112 years, which the football club has just vacated for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Stadium, four miles away in Stratford. Bunches of blue and burgundy flowers are tied to the main railings, symbols of the bereavement felt locally.
The vacated stands are to make way for 842 flats built to accommodate Newham’s burgeoning population, which has rocketed by more than 64,000 in a decade, and by 2031 is expected to reach 375,500.
But the boom belies an even more startling figure: as record numbers of new arrivals move in, the families who gave this area its cockney culture and soul are decamping, en masse, to Essex and Kent.
Newham’s white British population fell from 82,000 to 51,000 between 2001 and 2011. In 1991, white British (and Irish) comprised 56 per cent of Newham residents. By 2001 that proportion had plummeted to 34 per cent and by 2011 halved again to 17 per cent, the lowest percentage of any borough in Britain. Of the 147 languages today recorded in Newham, one would struggle to hear a cockney voice among them.
The transformation of Newham at such staggering speed is the subject of a new BBC documentary, Last Whites
of the East End. Those upping and moving say it is because their families’ way of life has disappeared: but the more that leave, the less the borough feels like home for those, such as Mary, who stay behind.
Downstairs from the tea dance, Peter Bell sits in the members’ bar of the working men’s club, a place he dubs “the elephant’s graveyard”, to rib the old timers sipping their pints. Bell, wearing a dapper suit with white handkerchief poking out of the blazer pocket, has been club secretary for 27 years. In that time, membership has fallen from 1,900 to 900, with most of those only paying their annual £40 subscriptions out of nostalgia as they have long since left the area.
“All I can say is this borough has changed like you would never believe and definitely for the worst,” Bell says. “It’s a slum and you wouldn’t want to live round here. We’ve got older people who’ve lived here all their lives and don’t want to go anywhere else. But they feel threatened and frightened to come out of their doors. Why should that be allowed to carry on?”
Newham Council, led by elected Labour mayor Sir Robin Wales since 2002, has long pursued a policy of inclusion among its diverse population. The council makes a point of not funding any event that benefits a single particular ethnic group. The outcome is a sprawling mass of different cultures, 73 per cent of whom, according to the BBC documentary, are classed as black or ethnic minority.
“London is a great international city, with people all over the world coming,” Sir Robin says. “If you want to live in London, you have to understand that things change.” The mayor added: “We will be hugely disappointed if this programme is as negative about the borough as the reports suggest. This would mean the BBC is broadcasting the kind of sensationalist stories that just stir up tensions across communities.” At a car wash on the Barking Road, Meddi Kizito, 43, explains how he came to the UK from Uganda and started this busines and a family. Kizito – who arrived six years ago – travelled alone from Africa. He says he enjoys living in the East End because it reminds him of home but he has some sympathy for the native Cockneys. “Everybody has the right to feel safe and secure in their own culture,” he says. “I would feel the same.”
Further down the road, Ginny Bailey, 43, runs a pie-and-mash shop set up by her mother. Two pubs nearby have long closed so she has been forced to branch out for her business to survive. Now she runs deliveries to bankers in nearby Canary Wharf and has considered starting to serve up halal meat pies, though fears her old regulars would not approve.
Next door, Jimmy Hatton runs a garage that has been in his family for 57 years. His relatives go back generations in the area and include the famous boxer and one-time gangland bodyguard George Walker. Hatton keeps the garage forecourt immaculate and covered in pots of flowers in honour of his parents. “All of my friends have moved out,” he says ruefully. “But it was my dad’s wish to never sell this building.”
Over at Silvertown, in the shadow of the Tate and Lyle sugar factory, which in 2008 celebrated 130 years of production but today employs a fraction of the workforce it once did, Usmaan Hussain echoes the lament.
The 35-year-old restaurant manager’s family emigrated from Bangladesh to England after fighting in the Second World War, and he has lived on the same street since 1993. When he was growing up, his was one of only two Asian households on the street and he remembers being subjected to appalling racism. In spite of that, Hussain says he misses the old area terribly. His two daughters attend nearby Drew Primary School, where 43 different languages are spoken.
“They are exposed to multiculturalism, but if you don’t know the British way of life then what is the point of living here?” he says. “There are so many communities within a community. I’m a Muslim but whichever country you’re in you should be receptive to learning about their religion or their culture.
“The Britishness has gone. And I don’t think it will ever return.” Last Whites of the East End is on BBC One on Tuesday at 10.45pm