Paul Newland's illuminating study explores the ways in which London's East End has been constituted in a wide variety of texts - films, novels, poetry, television shows, newspapers and journals. Newland argues that an idea or image of the East End, which developed during the late nineteenth century, continues to function in the twenty-first century as an imaginative space in which continuing anxieties continue to be worked through concerning material progress and modernity, rationality and irrationality, ethnicity and 'Otherness', class and its related systems of behaviour.The Cultural Construction of London's East End offers detailed examinations of the ways in which the East End has been constructed in a range of texts including BBC Television's EastEnders, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, films such as Piccadilly, Sparrows Can't Sing, The Long Good Friday, From Hell, The Elephant Man, and Spider, and in the work of Iain Sinclair.

The East End is an iconic area of London, from the transient street art of Banksy and Pablo Delgado to the exhibitions of Doreen Fletcher and Gilbert and George. Located east of the Tower of London and north of the River Thames, it has experienced a number of developmental stages in its four-hundred-year history. Originating as a series of scattered villages, the area has been home to Europe's worst slums and served as an affluent nodal point of the British Empire. Through its evolution, the East End has been the birthplace of radical political and social movements and the social center for a variety of diasporic communities. This reference work, with its alphabetically organized cross-referenced entries and its original and historical photography, serves as a comprehensive guide to the social and cultural history of this global hub.

Bounded on either side by the river Lea and the City walls, London's East End has witnessed a wide variety of people and ways of life. Bountiful photos, drawings, maps, engravings, and an authoritative text weave a rich historical tapestry of the riversides where pirates once walked; the monasteries and slums east of the tower; and Shoreditch, where audiences cheered Shakespeare's plays. Over five centuries worth of anecdotes, folk tales, diary excerpts, court cases, newspapers, and letters capture this colorful neighborhood.

This volume contains a series of commissioned texts by artists, curators, and art historians on the subject of the evolution of contemporary arts, institutions and the spaces contained therein.

Many British films never make it to the screen. Obstacles of finance, censorship, distribution or creative breakdown can appear in their way, and they might even fail to get beyond the script stage. This book collects new essays by leading scholars that use archival resources to reconstruct the stories behind a range of films by prominent film-makers. These thwarted productions are all too often excluded from histories of British cinema, but the accounts of their unmaking contained in Sights Unseen provides an illuminating insight into the factors which have served to undermine the stability of the film industry in Britain.

Traditionally the scene of some of London’s poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, the East End of London has long been misunderstood as abject and deviant. As a landing place for migrants and newcomers, however, it has also been memorably and colorfully represented in the literature of Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. In Strangers in the Archive, Heidi Kaufman applies the resources of archives both material and digital to move beyond icon and stereotype to reveal a deeper understanding of East End literature and culture in the Victorian age. Kaufman uncovers this engaging new perspective on the East End through Maria Polack’s Fiction without Romance (1830), the first novel to be published by an English Jew, and through records of Polack’s vibrant community. Although scholars of nineteenth-century London and readers of East End fictions persist in privileging sensational narratives of Jack the Ripper and the infamous "Fagin the Jew" as signs of universal depravity among East End minority ethnic and racial groups, Strangers in the Archive considers how archival materials are uniquely capable of redressing cultural silences and marginalized perspectives as well as reshaping conceptions of the global significance of literary and print culture in nineteenth-century London. Many of this book’s subjects—including digital editions of rare books and manuscript diaries, multimedia maps, and other related East End print records—can be viewed online at the Lyon Archive and the Polack Archive.

The East End of London, as it has been known, was the home to Shakespeare's first theater and to the early stirrings of a mass labor movement; it has also traditionally been seen as a place of darkness and despair, where Jack the Ripper committed his gruesome murders, and cholera and poverty stalked the Victorian streets. This is a history of this area.