The key to this book is a famous story about a wartime firefighter who watched a bomb fall on the Jewish cemetery in Whitechapel, East London, opened the gates and saw, to his astonishment, a party of elderly prophets seated in the early morning mist at the far end of the burial ground: ‘The bomb had blown people out of their graves and their body parts (were) everywhere.’

The physical impact of that bomb seems relatively minor compared to the flux and chaos caused in the East End by exploding timebombs over the past century and more.

Rachel Lichtenstein has spent the past 10 years retrieving the severed parts and piecing them back together. She grew up watching her grandparents re-create the Polish world they left behind them when they arrived in the early 1930s to set up a clock-and-watch shop on Brick Lane.

Yiddish was the language commonly spoken then in the shops and on the street. For children born in Brick Lane between the wars, it was often a shock ‘to discover there were people in the world who were not Jewish’.
Lichtenstein interviewed the survivors of a generation whose parents came from Russia in the 1880s to work as tailors, cutters, seamstresses, hunched over their sewing machines for up to 18 hours a day, rearing large families in tiny tenement rooms with no heating or indoor sanitation.

When the Chief Rabbi died in 1912, 20,000 mourners lined the streets for his funeral at the Brick Lane synagogue. Nostalgia for those days lasted well into the 1960s, when people still came from miles around to eat at Bloom’s restaurant just for ‘the rudeness of the waiters’ or to hear the Brick Lane bagel ladies ‘curse so nicely’.
By this time, the old shtetl had long gone, leaving the area disheartened and demoralised. 

Here to stay!
A new wave of Asian immigrants defended their patch against drug dealers and gangs of skinheads who spat at them on the street, kicked their heads in and smashed their shopfronts. Family businesses folded, shops were boarded up and the Jewish waiters abandoned Bloom’s. In 1975, the synagogue became a mosque, serving another strong, fierce, increasingly cohesive community of Bengalis and Somalis.

In those days, it was still possible to spin back through time to the Brick Lane described by Daniel Defoe as a ‘deep, dirty road’ used for carting building bricks into the City from kilns in the surrounding countryside. The Truman brewery claimed to have dispensed beer to firefighters in the Great Fire of 1666.

The brewery’s back gate opened in the 1970s on to fields and stables, ‘a wild, meadowy space often with horses on it and Georgian buildings’.

The 1990s saw the arrival of the artists, always a warning sign. Poor students rented cheap studios in disused buildings, including the Truman brewery. Lichtenstein, who was one of them, joined a small force of note-takers, record-keepers and oral historians confronting a much larger invading army of commercial developers. As the street disappeared beneath scaffolding, art installations jostled with designer boutiques, DJ bars, coffee shops and upmarket curry houses.

The pavements were ripped up to make way for fake cobbles. ‘Jack the Ripper’ tours roamed the area and film crews filled the side streets with synthetic fog. Prices soared. Celebrities moved in. Inmates of the new luxury flats and gated riverside communities petitioned to close down the ancient Sunday market. “During the time I spent looking for it,” writes Lichtenstein, “Brick Lane changed for ever.”

Now and then...
“If the old-timers got up and saw there was flats going there for half a million pounds,” a local complained mournfully, “they wouldn’t believe it.” The same would be true of each successive generation of street people since the indigenous inhabitants first told their stories to reporters like Henry Mayhew in the 1860s, shortly before Jewish immigrants started settling in filthy, stinking, verminous Brick Lane because no one else would live there except scavengers, petty criminals and half-starved streetwalkers.

One of their descendants, an anonymous shoe shop man in flat cap and anorak, recalled with pride supplying skinheads with Britain’s very first Doc Martens. “I feel sad being an East End Englishman,” he said. “I’ve lost my roots. I’m a foreigner in my own country now... my Brick Lane has gone.” His was only one of many. “There is a tidal wave of sound and memory rushing down that street,” a local poet told Lichtenstein, whose useful and instructive book catches time’s riptide once more on the turn.

The Guardian
On Brick Lane
by Rachel Lichtenstein
Hamish Hamilton £20, pp352