East End of London - Origin and Scope

Origin and Scope

The term 'East End' was first applied to the districts immediately to the east of, and entirely outside, the medieval walled City of London and north of the River Thames; these included Whitechapel and Stepney. By the late 19th century, the East End roughly corresponded to the Tower division of Middlesex, which from 1900 formed the metropolitan boroughs of Stepney, Bethnal Green, Poplar and Shoreditch in the County of London. Today it corresponds to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and the southern part of Hackney.

invention about 1880 of the term 'East End' was rapidly taken up by the new halfpenny press, and in the pulpit and the music hall ... A shabby man from Paddington, St Marylebone or Battersea might pass muster as one of the respectable poor. But the same man coming from Bethnal Green, Shadwell or Wapping was an 'East Ender', the box of Keating's bug powder must be reached for, and the spoons locked up. In the long run this cruel stigma came to do good. It was a final incentive to the poorest to get out of the 'East End' at all costs, and it became a concentrated reminder to the public conscience that nothing to be found in the 'East End' should be tolerated in a Christian country. —The Nineteenth Century XXIV (1888),

Parts of the London boroughs of Newham and Waltham Forest, formerly in an area of Essex known as 'London over the border', are sometimes considered to be in the East End. However, the River Lea is usually considered to be the eastern boundary of the East End and this definition would exclude the boroughs, but place them in east London. This extension of the term further east is due to the 'diaspora' of East Enders who moved to West Ham about 1886 and East Ham about 1894 to service the new docks and industries established there. In the inter-war period, migration occurred to new estates built to alleviate conditions in the East End, in particular at Becontree and Harold Hill, or out of London entirely.

The extent of the East End has always been difficult to define. When Jack London came to London in 1902 his Hackney carriage driver did not know the way and he observed, "Thomas Cook and Son, path-finders and trail-clearers, living sign-posts to all the World.... knew not the way to the East End".

Many East Enders are 'Cockneys', although this term has both a geographic and a linguistic connotation. A traditional definition is that to be a Cockney, one had to be born within the sound of Bow Bells, situated in Cheapside. In general, the sound pattern would cover most of the City, and parts of the near East End such as Aldgate and Whitechapel. In practice, with no maternity hospitals in the district, today few would be born in the area. The origin of the term is lost, but a plausible explanation is given by Websters. London was referred to by the Normans as the "Land of Sugar Cake" (Old French: pais de cocaigne), an imaginary land of idleness and luxury. A humorous appellation, the word "Cocaigne" referred to all of London and its suburbs, and over time had a number of spellings: Cocagne, Cockayne', and in Middle English, Cocknay and Cockney.

Its linguistic use is more identifiable, with lexical borrowings from Yiddish, Romani, and costermonger slang, and a distinctive accent that features T-glottalization, a loss of dental fricatives and diphthong alterations, amongst others. The accent is said to be a remnant of early English London speech, modified by the many immigrants to the area. The Cockney accent has suffered a long decline, beginning with the introduction in the 20th century of received pronunciation, and the more recent adoption of Estuary English, which itself contains many features of Cockney English.