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Title: The East End: Four Centuries of London Life by Alan Warwick Palmer, Peter Ackroyd ISBN: 0-8135-2826-7 Publisher: Rutgers University Press Pub. Date: April, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: The Soul of London
Comment: For Americans who know London's East End only from Bob Hoskins' movies (e.g., "Mona Lisa") and the BBC (e.g., the "EastEnders" soap opera), Alan Palmer's "The East End: Four Centuries of London Life" interjects needed reality and perspective by surveying the East End since the 1600s.

Now, I would have appreciated more on the first two of those four centuries -- Palmer rushes so fast to the 1800s that his subtitle should be "Two Centuries of London Life." Still, he locates the essence of the East End in its people and public meeting places when much of the private property was on church land. Absentee ownership prevented long-term leases, encouraged short-term hangouts, and deterred investments that could've renovated the area. But through the centuries, Palmer makes plain, the one constant in the East End has been the creative tension produced by generation after generation emigrating from around the world. Thus it's long been more akin to New York City than to the quiet villages or university towns of English novels and their Masterpiece Theater dramatizations.

Palmer is a good writer, with a style at once spirited and blunt -- the two character traits of the archetypal East Ender. I especially appreciate Palmer's treatment of the 1990s, a decade during which the East End's blue-collar pubs and poverty were contrasted by glassy new Thameside skyscrapers and white-collared wine bars.

This book was brought to my attention when Amazon.com listed it under the name of Peter Ackroyd, who wrote its literate introduction. As complements to Palmer's history, Ackroyd's biographies and novels are surely the greatest contemporary writings on the story of London: on East End themes for the 17th century, read Ackroyd's "Hawksmoor"; for the 19th century, "The Trial of Elizabeth Cree" (American title for the British "Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem"). For the 21st century, read either of these Ackroyd novels, as he typically creates fictions where present-day London fuses with historical London. In this manner, we find agreement with "The East End" because Alan Palmer, too, describes the timelessness by which four centuries' worth of East Enders join in a communal effort to create what Palmer makes feels like the soul of London.

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