Bethnal Green has been described as London’s poorest slum, and I do not quarrel with the term. It is a very dreadful place. Yet the approach is not particularly disagreeable. Bethnal Green Road is a wide street; Cambridge Road, through which it passes, is a good thoroughfare; and even Green Street, into which it runs on its way to a bridge leading to the Roman Road of Bow, is not unpleasant. But on each side of Green Street lie dozens of small streets and alleys, ugly, mean, uncomfortable.
Bethnal Green is very patient; it endures a lot of misery in silence. Personally I think it is more utterly hopeless in summer than in winter. When the sun beats down on that wilderness of closely packed houses, it is as if you were in a tunnel with the roof off, and only one yard of blue sky above you.
From: “Victorian London - The Nineteenth Century”
In the twentieth century, many people from South Asia moved to East London. The Bangladeshi community forms part of a long tradition of settlement into the area, but it was only really after the Second World War that significant numbers of people started to arrive in the area. The East End was the first landfall for many of these original settlers, many of whom were ex- seamen from Sylhet, in what is now Bangladesh.
