Fabulous I like the light and shade Howard

Thanks for posting to the group
www.ipernity.com/group/churches

Thanks for posting your wonderful picture to

www.ipernity.com/group/buildings

I would have preferred a landscape ratio on this one. What's wrong with the east end?

Its ugliness, grottiness and high crime rate, basically, but in recent years Docklands at least has become more upmarket, though I myself wouldn't want to live there.

Ah! The square now seems to have changed shape! A definite improvement.

The East End (of London) wasn't grotty until they started demolishing the old terraces and filling it with ugty new carbuncles. I suspect the crime rate was relatively low just a few generations ago, when the indigenous and assimilated still lived there, but things have been going rapidly downhill since "diversity" took over.

Depends what you mean by grotty. The slums of the East End (and most of it was slums) until the late 19th Century had no running water or sanitation, the houses were damp and vermin-infested and grossly overcrowded, with whole families living in small, single rooms. And that was those who had rooms to live in. They were regularly stricken by Colera and other diseases, and life expectancy was low. I have many books on the subject. And crime, violence, drunkenness and drug dependency were comparable to that in the worst slums anywhere, including those populated only by the indigenous and assimilated. www.hsomerville.com/meccano/Articles/JacobsIsland.htm was a case in point; in these respects it was not unusual.

I'm not talking that far back. I meant the 50s and 60s, and even as late as maybe the mid-80s, before 'white flight' started and The Money moved into places like the Isle of Dogs. The East End had character and community.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that all the houses demolished during the slum clearances were actually slums. They were people's homes, and many would have been quite adequate if money had been spent on fitting them with bathrooms and damp courses etc. The area where I live was saved from slum clearance back in the sixties and some of the little terraced houses are now fetching half a million. Crime, violence, drunkenness and drug dependency happen just as much, or maybe more, on modern estates.

I agree absolutely about the unnecessary destruction of traditional housing and the destruction, in the process, of communities. But cheaper Georgian housing was often jerrybuilt, and when after 100+ years not only the timber and plaster, but the bricks themselves were completely rotten and crumbling, damp courses would not have been enough to save them. The fabric of such buildings was not only infested by rodents, cockroaches and the like, but often imbued with human and animal excreta - unfit for human inhabitation and completely beyond economic repair.