You wouldn’t think it now, but London’s East End was once rather insalubrious. The wind, you see, blew eastward over the Big Smoke, making the city’s west a more pleasant place to live than the industrial east. And even though pollution was tackled with vigour in the 1950s, that same industrial DNA, from factories to the docks, had also made the east a military target.
Just look at it today. From the world-class creative and tech hubs of Shoreditch and the Silicon Roundabout to the financial nerve centre of Canary Wharf, with the state-of-the-art Elizabeth Line opening up new areas with a whoosh, the east is truly reborn.
