By the 1840s it had been decided that two factors would improve life in the squalid East End of London, the creation of a public park and the creation of main roads driven straight through the overcrowded area. The latter now seems strange given that roads are now seen as a threat to health and wellbeing. The theory then was that main roads would enable air to circulate more readily around the area, this tending to disperse the foul stagnant air present in the passage ways, alleys and haphazard speculative-built streets.
The person given the task of overseeing this radical policy was the architect and civil servant J. Pennethorne (later Sir J. P.). The London A-Z shows the series of wide roads driven through the East End to connect the City with the then eastern suburbs – Hackney Road, Bethnal Green Road, Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road.
Victoria Park in the borough of Hackney was Pennethorne’s other creation, 218 acres bought by the Crown Estate (making Victoria Park technically a Royal Park initially) and opened in 1845, one of Britain’s first public parks. Much of this land had previously been marshy scrubland with a disreputable reputation and known as Bonner’s Fields, so named after Edmund Bonner (1500-1569) Bishop of London and instrumental in the executions of un-submissive Protestants during the reign of Mary I as he had then owned the land.
Despite the good intentions of Pennethorne’s work it’s as well to remember that those persons displaced by the demolitions that preceded both projects were made homeless and had to seek accommodation themselves.
The picture above, taken from the Internet, shows Christ’s Church, Spitalfields, a Wren church, the Spitalfields area of the old East End standing between Bethnal Green Road and Whitechapel Road.
(To be continued).