Bethnal Green
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Bethnal Green is an area in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, in the East End of London. Bethnal Green is located 3.3 miles (5.3 km) north east of Charing Cross.
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[edit] History
[edit] Early history
A Tudor ballad about the 'Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green' tells the story of an ostensibly poor man who gave a surprisingly generous dowry for his daughter's wedding. The tale furnishes the parish of Bethnal Green's coat of arms. According to one version of the legend, the beggar was the son of Simon de Montfort, who then lived nearby.
The local gymnasium and leisure centre, York Hall, is notable for its boxing. Boxing has a long association with Bethnal Green. Daniel Mendoza, who was champion of England from 1792 to 1795, though born in Aldgate, lived in Bethnal Green for 30 years. Since then numerous boxing greats have been associated with the area.
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[edit] Modern history
In the nineteenth century, Bethnal Green was characterised by its market gardens and by the silk-weaving trade. Having been an area of large houses and gardens as late as the eighteenth century, by about 1860 Bethnal Green was mainly full of tumbledown old buildings, with many families living in each house. By the end of the nineteenth century, Bethnal Green was one of the poorest slums in London. Jack the Ripper operated at the western end of Bethnal Green and in neighbouring Whitechapel.
By 1900, the Old Nichol Street Rookery was demolished, and the Boundary Estate opened on the site, near the boundary with Shoreditch. This was the world's first council housing, and brothers Lew Grade and Bernard Delfont were brought up here.
On March 3, 1943 at 8:27PM the unopened Bethnal Green tube station was the site of a wartime disaster. Families had crowded into the underground station due to an air raid siren at 8:17, one of 10 that day. There was a panic at 8:27 coinciding with the sound of an anti-aircraft battery (possibly the recently installed Z battery) being fired at nearby Victoria Park. In the wet, dark conditions, a woman slipped on the entrance stairs and 173 people died in the resulting crush. Although a report was filed by Eric Linden with the Daily Mail, who witnessed it, it never ran. The story which was reported instead was that there had been a direct hit by a German bomb. The results of the official investigation were not released until 1946.[1] There is now a plaque at the entrance to the tube station, which commemorates it as the worst civilian disaster of World War II.
During the 1960s, famous gangsters, the Kray twins, lived in Bethnal Green, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Bethnal Green, in common with much of the old East End, began to undergo a process of gentrification.
The former Bethnal Green Infirmary, later the London County Council Bethnal Green Hospital, stood opposite Cambridge Heath railway station. The hospital closed as a public hospital in the 1960s and was a geriatric hospital under the NHS until the 1980s. Much of the site was developed for housing in the 1990s but the hospital entrance and administration block remains as a listed building. Marcus Garvey was at one time buried here, before his body was returned to Jamaica.
[edit] Places of interest
- Museum of Childhood, part of the Victoria and Albert Museum
- Centre for Recent Drawing
- London Buddhist Centre
[edit] Trivia
- Most of the sketches of Andy & Lou in Little Britain are filmed in Bethnal Green.[citation needed] The shop where they buy the snake is actually Magri's pets, a shop at 205 Roman Road owned by former boxing champion and East End boy Charlie Magri.[citation needed]
- Bethnal Green is famous for the staple cheap London meal, pie and mash with jellied eels.[citation needed] The most famous pie and mash shop is Kelly's.[citation needed] They have two outlets in Bethnal Green.
- It is also famous for the street market on the Roman Road, which specialises in fashions.[citation needed]
- The other very famous market is Columbia Road Flower Market, where people have been known to come from all over the UK for the extensive array of gardening items, from plants to ornaments.[citation needed]
- The 7th model of Lara Croft - Karima Adebibe comes from and lives in Bethnal Green with her family.[citation needed]
- In the fictitious videogame The Getaway, Bethnal Green is presented as the hub of cockney gangster activity.[citation needed]
- The 1947 Ealing Studios film It Always Rains on Sunday was set in Bethnal Green, with extensive filming in the local area.[citation needed] It provides an excellent insight on post war East London, showing bomb sites and slums before most were swept away during the redevelopment in the 1960s and later. The area is now very close to the planned Olympic Games of 2012. The film is now available on DVD.
[edit] Transport
[edit] Nearest places
[edit] Nearest tube stations
- Bethnal Green tube station
- Whitechapel tube station
- Stepney Green tube station
- Shoreditch tube station
