Touring the East End

12 September 2008

Today, Dwight, Zack, and I led several members of our group, including Professors Rudalevige and Qualls, on a tour around Spitalfields and Whitechapel in East London. If I had to say it in as few words as possible, the topic of our tour was immigration into the UK. Stated in more extensive terms, our tour was meant to discuss how different groups of immigrants from the French Huguenots in the seventeenth century to the Bangladhesis in the present have related to each other and to broader British society. I'm not terribly certain that we accomplished that aim. In fact, I'm not particularly sure that you would hear an identical or even a roughly identical response if you asked Dwight and Zack about the topic of our tour. But I thought it was interesting.

We began at Old Spitalfields Market, which is located just on the border between the City of London and the East End. From there, we proceeded by sundry backlanes and roads to Brick Lane, pausing for a moment to reflect over Christ Church, Spitalfields, a majestic Baroque church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the early eighteenth century to minister to the spiritual needs of the burgeoning population of the East End as well as impress the power and grandeur of the Church of England on the dissenting French Huguenots. We then headed south on Brick Lane to Whitechapel Road, which we followed eastwards until we reached the East London Mosque and the Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue. From there, we continued south passing a few more sites related to East London's now-extinct Jewish community and finishing up at St. Katherine's Docks and the Pool of London. It was really fascinating because so many of these sites had been used for widely varying purposes by the different groups that have settled in the East End; for instance, there was a mosque we passed on Brick Lane which been a Huguenot church, a Methodist chapel, and a Jewish synagogue at different points in its existence before finally becoming a house of worship to thousands of Bangladhesi Muslims in 1976. It's simply remarkable to be in a city that is supersaturated with history. And what a variety, too! Whether your pallet favours the raw, semi-civilised earthiness of Anglo-Saxons, the Elizabethan courtier with all his dainty pretensions, the sympathetic hypocrisy of the Victorian middle class, or even a plate of sweltering hot Chicken Madras, there's something for you in London.

After our tour concluded, which was around eleven-thirty in the morning, I returned to the Arran House where I slept and diddled on my computer for much of the afternoon. For those of you who have expressed interest in my imaginary country last year, you might be happy to know that I am flirting with writing a brief history of it. Whether it turns into a satire or a work of serious imagination, I have yet to determine. Other than the preceding, there hasn't been anything that has proven so compelling that I want to report here. On Wednesday, we attended Mayor's Question Time and visited with John Biggs, a member of the Greater London Assembly (GLA); and yesterday, we visited the East London Mosque where we shown around the place by a rather attractive young woman from Georgia who converted to Islam while she was in college because she found its many rituals and rules of behaviour to be "inspiring." I know that that sounded really unkind of me, but based on the discussion in a classroom session we had after the fact, I think everyone experienced no small measure of difficulty coming to terms with the facts (a) that this woman was an American, (b) that she had freely converted to Islam, and (c) that she seemed to embrace its tenets without any sign or token of internal conflict. Ask around. I'm not alone in this.

I'll probably write more later. I may even write a more complete account of the previous two or three days if I feel sufficiently ambitious. Anyway, we're attending a show at the National Theatre tonight, and later this week, we're going to see Billy Eliot. Only five more days in London. It's so hard for me to imagine.