Stop 1: Introduction
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Welcome to WORLDwrite's London Behind the Scenes alternative tour of Brick Lane and the Whitechapel area. This tour examines the impact of immigration over the centuries and the changing nature of ideas about race to the present day. The short films you can watch online combine footage from our on foot tours, studio commentary and historical archive.
On our tour we will consider how ideas about race have changed, from the Enlightenment thinking of the 1700s which for the first time considered human beings as equal, the pessimism of the late 1800s when attempts were made to apply Darwin's ideas and categorise people by race to present day ideas of cultural difference.
Our tour starts here in Brick lane, famous for its restaurants and curry houses and the waves of immigrant communities which have shaped it over the centuries. Built on top of a Roman burial ground, Brick Lane gets its name from the brick and tile manufacture situated here in the 16th century.
Geographically situated in the heart of Brick Lane is the Vibe Bar which exemplifies the way the area is known today as trendy and cool. Yet Brick Lane is full of paradoxes. The main artery of a part of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets known as Spitalfields & Banglatown, Brick Lane borders the City, the most famous financial centre in the world. Despite its physical proximity to London's shiny square mile, it is in fact one of the most deprived areas in the UK. Current hardships facing people living here are no recent phenomena either, over the past 300 years waves of immigrants settled here in Spitalfields in some of the poorest conditions.
The late 1600s saw the arrival of Huguenots from France fleeing Catholic persecution, waves of Irish immigrants fleeing starvation in the mid-1800s settled here and Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe arrived in the later decades of that century. Since the second world war this area has become home to a large Bengali population and Somali immigrants have also settled here more recently.
We hope by the end of this tour to share with you our understanding of the concept of race, the scourge of racism and what has changed. Discrimination against people according to the colour of their skin in fact has a recent history as in the past the British elite saw the entire East End as a foreign land. The poorest section of the white working classes were seen as 'a race apart' and were the original focus of racial thinking within the UK.
