The Challenge for Culture in East London

 Culture, housing and Kinship in East London- new opportunities for investment

The IdeA website http://www.ideaknowledge.gov.uk/  refers to the publication  of 'The new East End’, which examines how life in London’s inner East End has changed since the 1950s. Published by Profile Books, it draws on the 1957 book by Young and Willmott, ‘Family and kinship in East London’.  The authors of ‘Family and kinship’ argued that housing policy and the welfare state could undermine family structures and support networks. ‘The new East End’ examines relations between the white working class and British-Bangladeshi populations of Tower Hamlets.  The book looks at the causes of hostility to newcomers to the area; it concludes that the welfare state and well intentioned housing policies have inadvertently contributed to racial tensions.

Kate Gavron, one of the authors of the book says: 

" There is a sense of community, or communities. There is definitely a sense of community among the white working class families still living in Tower Hamlets, and a very strong sense of community among the Bangladeshis.  There are a lot of people who want to buy houses in Tower Hamlets; it’s a nice place to live and near the centre of London…..more and more Bangladeshi families will move further out of London. They almost certainly won’t be able to live near each other so there will be a scattering effect.

Among the older white people who expressed hostility, their only solution was for them to have priority over the housing. But for most of them it was already too late because their sons and daughters were perfectly happy living out in Essex. Nobody really had any answers, apart from the provision of more social housing. Which should have happened from the beginning of the right-to-buy process, in my view. After all, this was a place where there was already an acute housing shortage and gentrification, the right-to-buy and the development of Docklands, all happening within one decade.  

It will be interesting to see if there are any further large migrations of one group. The Bangladeshis, Jews, Irish and the Huguenots went to the East End because of the docks and because it was the poorest part of inner London. Now the docks are closed there’s no reason for any one group to end up there.

It’s no longer a cheap area of London, so there may be no more large new communities arriving en bloc. There are, however, likely to be lots of people arriving from all over, including migration from other parts of London and Britain.  

I think that local authorities and the Government – and other organisations like the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green – are thinking hard about building communities, including looking at housing design.

For example they are thinking about how to combine the housing of families with young children and old people, and about how to encourage a feeling of neighbourhood, rather like the old neighbourhoods.

Whether you can construct this remains to be seen; to try to create a ‘village centre’ feel is a considerable challenge, especially when people nowadays are so mobile. There is a long way to go to rebuild the community spirit of the past."

Mirador:

There are challenges for agencies involved in the development of culture in the East End. The first entails working closely with all sections of the community to create and helping to retain the sense of community. The second challenge involves the development of policies and strategies for investing in culture as an integral aprt of the planning process.

How is this going to be done? I intend to talk to one or two people who are leaders in developing the thinking in this area and have produced initial results.