NOTES TOWARDS A WOMEN'S WALKING TOUR OF  THE EAST END

Based on research by Clare Manifold 1979; published in 'Reclaim our Past’ Spare Rib #87 October 1979

Begin at Three Colt Bridge over the Hertford Canal, 
Victoria Park, Hackney

Gunmakers Lane was where the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) had taken over the Gunmakers Arms in 1915 and turned it into a childrens' day nursery with 40 places. They renamed the place The Mothers Arms.

St Stephens Rd to Tredegar Rd was where the infamous Bryant and May factory was, the beginning of the year long matchgiris strike in 1888.

South to Bow Rd has a clock in commemoration of Minnie Lansbury, the assistant secretary of the ELFS, and one of the Poplar councillors sent to Holloway Prison in 1921 for refusing to lower the poor rate. She died at the age of 32, her health ruined.

South to Fern St where Clara Grant, a Bow school teacher, set up a children's settlement providing cheap breakfasts, dental and Invalid care and a penny shop.

South to Dod St was the site of many a radical meeting where Eleanor Marx and Annie Hicks used to speak.

South to East India Dock Rd contains the old Poplar Borough Town Hall where the councillors were arrested in 1921.

Further sites of Interest

Jubilee St was where Rose and Milly Witkop used to live, young Jewish anarchist sisters. Lillian Wolfe another anarchist lived here too.

Cressy Place was where Milly Witkop lived In 'free union' with Jewish anarchist Rudolf Rocker [typist's note: Rocker was in fact not Jewish, though he learned yiddish and worked almost exclusively with jewish workers while in the East End] and where Paris Commune leader Louise Michel visited exiled Russian anarchist Kropotkin. Presented with a fur coat by the local Jewish Tailors Union, Louise Michel gave it away to a flower seller.

Mile End Waste, another public speaking site for Eleanor Marx.

Whilechapell Rd was where pacifist nurse Edith Cavell 
trained in the London Hospital. Shot by firing squad 
in WW1, she declared 'patriotism is not enough"

Angel Alley, Whitechapel High St is the home of Freedom Books and Press, the site of many active anarchist woman [inc. Charlotte Wilson]. Eleanor Marx describes a hostel for battered wives here in her novel In Darkest London.

Commercial St sees Christchurch Hall where Annie Besant met the unions to try and get support for the matchgirls then on strike.

A pamphlet containing a round walk of about fifty East End sites with maps and illustrations is probably still deposited in the Tower Hamlets Local History Library, Bancroft Rd E1 or try the Fawcett Library, Whitechapel College.

Reclaim Our Past

Women's history walks are catching on - last year in Bloomsbury, next month in Birmingham. This summer Mary Woodward went on a sponsored walk in the East End of London.

There aren't many things duller than a wet Sunday in July, the sort of endless day that's usually spent on the papers or finishing off removing the old wall paper in the hall (a job began fourteen years ago) or
trying to get a decent picture on the telly for a 1962 film. Walking through the East End was a lovely alternative - combining a bit of fund raising for the
Rights of Women Law centre with a bit of political history and exercise. Enough other women felt the same for a group of about 60 to assemble in Victoria Park by 11.00, varied in age and appearance
and including small children in sou'westers (creche was available), one man in gold wellies with lots of flash cameras (he didn't come on the walk), and a
splendid black and tan mongrel called Dalston (who did).

The day began with a piece of street theatre from the organisers - Corrie's Dream - a loud, energetic mock opera aimed at the Corrie bill, full of admirable bad taste and enthusiasm and making lots of important points very clear - not just to us but also to the less automatically sympathetic audience of passers by.

Then we pushed off down the Old Ford Road, an eccentric if not chic parade of cycle capes, anoraks and dungarees, odd combinations of anything waterproof that had come to hand. It was to be at least an eight mile walk with stops at 50 historical landmarks, outlined in a handbook complete with maps and illustrations. This had all been researched by Clare Manifold with help

Many of the early parts of the walk were scenes of the East London Federation of Suffragettes' activity - places like the pub in Gunmakers' Lane that had been taken over by ELFS in 1915 and turned into a day nursery with 40 places (changing its name from the Gunmakers' Arms to the Mothers' Arms). Then there was Bryant and May's factory in Tredegar Road presenting as sinister a view today as it must have done in 1888 - the year of the matchgiris' strike against their appalling working conditions.

There were very few people about as we came up to Bow. Road, though by now we'd attracted some pretty horrible little boys on choppers who provided a sort of Bash St. Gang escort. Nina, Lisa and I were getting hungry but lunch was sternly mapped out for Stepney Green, way ahead. The dog Dalston was doing well, having no lead but never crossing streets on his own and casting back a wary eye now and then for his owner.
We strode on up Bow Road, passing the Minnie Lansbury clock on Electric House - a reminder of the woman who'd been an assistant secretary of ELFS and one of the Poplar women councillors sent to Holloway in 1921 for refusing to lower poor relief; she'd died at 32, her health ruined. It's a pity there isn't a bit more information on the building to remind people what the clock's for. Then through Tower Hamlets cemetery to Fern St where Clara Grant, a Bow school teacher, set up a children's settlement providing cheap breakfasts, dental and invalid care, and a penny shop. Feeling even hungrier and by now,
a bit tired (though nothing to grumble about compared with the hours women used to work around here - 8.00 am to 11.30 pm for a milliner in 1884) we ambled on down Dod Street - once a site for East End radical meetings where Eleanor Marx and Annie Hicks used to speak. Down East India Dock Road (getting comments and questions a bit more now that people were out for a Sunday drink) and past Poplar Town Hall where the women councillors had been arrested in 1921, to Commercial Road.
By now some of our number had quietly legged it off into a pub. Still, this was an interesting bit - with an
1870 creche at Stepney Causeway, established to free older children from babysitting to attend the new schools set up by the 1870 Education Act, and
the Troxy cinema where the first English showing of King Kong was, and the East End Maternity Hospital shut down in 1967 (I'd like to know why - it didn't look too bad to me). Round about here we had a turn carrying the purple and white ROW banner, the weather was still wet and dull but the history took a glamorous turn to free-living anarchism in Jubilee Street, with reminders of Rose and Milly Witkop, young Jewish anarchist sisters, and Lilian Wolfe, a suffragette anarchistwho could still be seen as a very old woman selling Peace News in the Charing Cross Road in the early 1960s. Then into Cressy Place, past Cressy and Dunster Houses - model dwellings for artisan tenants - where Milly Witkop lived in a 'free union' with the amazingly named Rudolf Rocker and where Louise Michel (a leader of the Paris Commune)
visited the exiled Russian anarchist Kropotkin and was presented with a furcoat by the Jewish Tailors' Union which she then gave away to a flower seller (my favourite historical anecdote of the whole day). Not before time we reached Stepney Green for lunch,
finished off with toffee apples from a street seller - nothing historically romantic about him, crash-helmeted on a Vespa, though his street cry of
'torfeeee.... aaaaa......." 	had a historically convincing lack of intelligibility. Lunch over, there was a brief debate on the moral aspects of whether or not to take a short cut back. Virtue and endurance won the day and we struck out on the long way past Mile End Waste (another site for Eleanor Marx' speeches - I've only just really grasped how active and public a figure she was) and then past Sidney Street, down Whitechapel Road and past the London Hospital which trained Edith Cavell, the nurse shot in World War 1 who said “patriotism is not enough”. Many patients here at the turn of the century were girls and women destroyed by the impossible hours they were expected to work.

Now the weather brightened up a little and we all felt better for having eaten. Down Whitechapel Road, through an alley connected with a Jack the Ripper killing (macabre pub in this area with his name and ornate list of details of his nasty career outside .... apparently it changed its name from The Ten Bells in 1975 to catch the tourists). A detour into Angel Alley, once the home of prostitutes, then a hostel for battered wives mentioned in Eleanor Marx' novel In Darkest London and now the place where Freedom the anarchist journal is produced… hence all the graffiti commemorating Peter Kropotkin. It would be nice to hear more about the women anarchists.

Up Commercial street to Christchurch Hall where Annie Besant met the Unions to try to get support for the matchgirls in 1888. Nearly a hundred years on and it's still often a struggle for women workers to get any solidarity from male dominated unions. We were all pretty tired now and glad it was cool rather than the sort of thunderous heat of the week before: what was nice was to have marched so far in this sort of group without a constant police escort… in fact the whole day had a really free and unharassed air, with only the NF graffiti spoiling things.		
The last stretch of the walk brought us through Spitalfields, once home of the silk weaving industry, where women worked in conditions that denied even the opening of window lest the colour or weight of the silk be affected. Past Holly Bush Gardens where there had once been a whitelead works (these, like matchworks, were a source of death and disfigurement to the women who worked there) and finally back into the Old Ford Road, learning more about local working conditions for women as we went. it's a pretty depressing set of facts and all the more depressing if you suspect that quite often it's not really that much better today. What's work like for the Asian women round Brick Lane? We didn’t see them… we saw their husbands and kids, but the women themselves weren’t out strolling and talking in the street.  Still, there’s a whole new chapter of radical struggle beginning with the Asian communty in the East End and a large part will doubtless be that of the little girls we saw on Sunday.
Back in Victoria Park with even the trusty Dalston looking finished, we sorted out our sponsorship forms and handed over money for ROW to carry on and extend their work. They held another history walk last year, through Bloomsbury and central London, Both guidebooks are still available at 50p from ROW, 374 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1 ‑ so You can take yourself on a walk too. 

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
The following is taken from “Our Sisters’ London”, Katherine Sturtevant, (1991) Women’s Press.

THE EAST END

The two excursions suggested in this chapter ‑ a walk through Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and an outing to Victoria Park ‑ barely begin to explore the East End, for the area is vast. As the traditional home of the poor and working classes of London, the East End has also been home to wave upon wave of immigrants. The first immigrants were Sephardi Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal; later Ashkenazi Jews sought refuge from persecutions in France, Germany, and Poland. But it was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that bloody pogroms in Russia and Poland brought Jews to London's East End in truly staggering numbers.

The women who arrived at the docks were often poor and spoke no English; they were a vulnerable target for procurers who offered cheap lodgings or claimed to be delivering messages from relatives, in order to kidnap the women into a slavery of prostitution. The Hebrew Ladies' Protective Society regularly sent representatives to the docks to warn new arrivals against this danger. In 1909, a conference of the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women reported that there had been 222 cases of women 'who have taken to immoral lives' during the years 1903‑1909. Many of these women had disappeared completely from the country.

By the time of the great Jewish influx the French Huguenots had been completely assimilated into Britain, but the Jews competed for jobs with a more recent immigrant group ‑ the Irish, who had come in large numbers at the time of the potato famine in 1848. Irish girls often sold flowers or vegetables, or, if an unwed loss of virginity resulted (as it usually did) in social ostracism, they turned to Prostitution. Street‑walkers wore red bandanas about their necks and carried canes for easy identification. Ratcliffe Highway, near Limehouse, was their particular haunt, and a newspaper article of 1857 complained of women “who, wildly drunk, are walking [six] abreast occupying the whole of the footway, and singing, or rather screeching, snatches of obscene songs at the very tops of their voices.”

The most recent wave of immigrants came from Bangladesh. The men came first, arriving in the fifties as guestworkers to help solve the labour shortage. Later, they sent for their wives and families.

The East End has been the site of much exciting feminist activity on the part of working class women, some of which centred around the East London Federation of Suffragettes, founded by Sylvia Pankhurst. (1882‑1960). Originally a chapter of the Women's Social and Political Union, from the beginning the Federation didn't quite fit in with the rest of the WSPU. For one thing, the chapter made its decisions democratically, whereas Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst liked women who took their orders from the top. For another thing, it was WSPU policy to stand apart from other political causes, whereas the Federation naturally took an interest in certain issues central to the fives of the working women who were its members, and made many allies among the socialist and labour movements.

In January 1914, Sylvia was summoned to Paris (where Christabel was in hiding from the police) to meet with her mother and sister, and was there informed that the East London Federation was to be expelled from the WSPU. Christabel argued that working women, because of their poverty and their lack of educational opportunities, were the weakest segment of the women's movement. “We want picked women, the very strongest and most intelligent!” Sylvia quotes her as saying.

The 'weak' women in question renamed themselves the East London Federation of the Suffragettes and continued their programme of sending speakers into the drawing rooms of society women in Mayfair and Kensington. Among their speakers were Charlotte Drake, who had been a barmaid and a sewing machinist, Melvina Walker, who had been a lady's maid; Mrs Pascoe, a charwoman who supported her tubercular husband and the orphan child she'd adopted; Mrs Schlette, who was a suffragist in her sixties; Flora Buchan, who was sacked from her job at a jam factory because of her suffragist activities, and Mrs Cressell, who later became a borough councillor.

WALK ONE

Begin: Liverpool Street tube station
End: Aldgate tube station

Liverpool Street station [1] is itself a spot of historic importance, for the station stands on the site that Bedlam ‑ more properly known as Bethlehem Royal Hospital ‑ once occupied. Bedlam specialised in looking after 'distracted people' as early as the fourteenth century. Such caretaking included flogging, cold water dunkings, and being kept chained against the wall. In the seventeenth century the hospital prospered from the donations of the many visitors who came to laugh at the antics of the inmates. (The hospital had by that date been moved to a site in Moorfields.) But in the next century, attitudes toward mental illness began to change, and gradually more humane practices were introduced.

Hannah Snell (1723‑1792) of Wapping was one unhappy inmate who died in Bedlam, although she first led an exciting and eventful life on the outside. Married at 20 to a Dutch sailor who deserted her, Snell left a baby at home to go in search of her husband. Disguising herself as a boy, she joined the army and marched against the Stuart rebellion in Scotland. According to her autobiography, she received 500 lashes in Carlisle on a disciplinary charge trumped up by her sergeant because she refused to help him in the criminal seduction of a young woman. After deserting the army she signed up as an assistant cook on a navy vessel bound for East India, and was involved in various battles and shipwrecks before returning to England. She at length discovered that her husband had been executed; she therefore felt at liberty to marry again ‑ twice.

Snell took full advantage of having led an adventurous life: she appeared in uniform upon the stage and later kept a pub in Wapping known as The Female Warrior.

From the station, proceed east along Liverpool Street into Bishopsgate where you will straight away see St Botolph's Church. [2] It was here in 1919 that Maude Roydon  was asked to preach at a three‑hour service but was prohibited from doing so by the Bishop of London. She had been invited to preach by the Reverend Hudson Shaw whom Maude had first met when she was newly out of university. They remained lifelong friends, marrying after almost 40 years following the death of Hudson Shaw's wife. (The three had always been on excellent terms.) At the back of the church, on what is now St Botolph's Church Hall [3], you can get an excellent close‑up of two Coade Stone figures, a boy and girl dated 1825.

Continue north along Bishopsgate into Brushfield Street and Spitalfields Market [4]. The present market dates from 1928, but the original fruit and vegetable market on the site was established during the reign of Charles II. In the early eighteenth century the market became the centre of the world‑famous Spitalfields silks industry. The labour was provided by French Huguenots, while the designs were provided by Anna Maria Garthwaite, a parson's daughter from. Lincolnshire, among others.

If you turn into Crispin Street, you will see a large structure of brownish‑yellow brick with three tiers of

hooded windows. This is the Providence Row [5] homeless shelter, founded by the Sisters of Mercy in 1868. The night refuge had 112 beds for women. It is now run by the Providence (Row) Families Association.

Return to Brushfield Street, then turn left into Commercial Street. You are now near the spot where Mary Kelly, final victim of Jack the Ripper, was last seen alive. The famous murderer is believed to have been responsible for at least six deaths, and for some months during the year 1888 the East End lay under a siege of terror. His victims were all prostitutes, and they were all murdered in a horribly brutal manner. Their bodies were found with multiple wounds, often disembowelled or with their wombs ripped out.

Large sections of the populace, looking for a scapegoat, believed that the murderer must be a Jew, perhaps a 'shochet’ ‑ a Jewish ritual slaughterer of meat. Anti-Jewish feeling ran high, and there were some incidents of violence. Another rumour claimed that the killer was a Russian anarchist. The truth was never discovered, as the Ripper was never caught: one popular theory today holds that he was a member of the aristocracy.

  Turn right into Hanbury Street, [7] once the site of the Sugar Loaf public house. At the turn of the century the Sugar Loaf was a gathering place for Jewish anarchists who were involved with the Arbeter Fraint movement led by the German Rudolf Rocker. A newspaper article of 1894 said gravely: “The Sugar Loaf, in Hanbury Street, [is one of the] favourite resorts of the East End Anarchists, who get up the weekly discussions that tempt poor flies into the trap. Too lazy to work, they find in the mischievous propaganda they spread a capital means of bringing grist to their own particular mills.”

Rose Robins (1885‑1971) was often at the Sugar Loaf. 'Red' Rose, as she was known, emigrated from Kiev with her parents, travelling in a cattle boat. The conditions were filthy, and the immigrants were fed on salt herring brought around in barrels by a sailor. When she became involved in Rocker's group her parents were appalled: he had been known to lecture on the importance of free love. They tried locking her out of the house one night when she'd been to a meeting as a warning, but she simply left home and moved in with her married sister.

On 8 June 1906, strikers marched through the streets of the East End, pausing at each tailor's workshop and calling to workers to join them. 'Red' Rose was the first one out of her workshop. 'I was glad to join the strikers,' she said in later years. “My wages then was three shillings and sixpence a day.”

Another frequenter of the Sugar Loaf was Millie Witkop, who lived in 'free union' with Rocker. The two tried to emigrate to New York but were turned away when they refused to go through a marriage ceremony, as they did not believe that love ought to be a matter of law. Millie's sister Rose Witkop was a feminist as well as an anarchist; in 1922 she was prosecuted under obscenity laws for publishing Family Limitations, Margaret Sanger's work advocating birth control.

Judith Goodman was also part of the Arbeter Fraint group that held forth at the Sugar Loaf. Another Russian emigre, Goodman always wore a wig because her hair had been tom out by Cossacks. A socialist revolutionary with strong views about class warfare, she eventually changed her mind about the use of violence, and became a non‑violent agitator in New York City.

Turn right into Brick Lane and you will shortly cross

Princelet Street [8], which between 1886 and 1887 was the site of the first Yiddish theatre in London, run by Jacob and Sarah Adler (1858‑1953). It produced plays based on biblical episodes, cast with young men and women of the district. The Adlers eventually moved on to New York City and became celebrated for their work in Yiddish theatre, but the tradition they began in the East End continued to thrive for many decades. 

Turn right into Fournier Street, which still boasts a number of Georgian buildings. The structure immediately on your right‑hand side is emblematic of the changes that Spitalfields has seen over the years. A French Huguenot chapel [9] was built here in 1742 ‑ it was one of 16 in the Spitalfields area ‑ and the site has since been occupied by a Methodist chapel and a synagogue. Today the building serves the local Muslim community.

Turn back into Commercial Street, and on your left you will see Christ Church Spitaffields [10], designed by the famous architect Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1720, and restored in the nineteenth century after being struck by lightning. Over half the names in the graveyard are those of French Huguenots and their descendants. The gardens attached to the church, which used to be much larger, were once known to the homeless who made it their refuge as 'Itchy Park.' Jack London's The People of the Abyss (1903) describes his visit to the gardens at three 0 ' clock one afternoon:

“A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor with anyone looking after it. Next half‑a‑dozen men, sleeping bolt upright or leaning against one another in their sleep.. . . On another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, and another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents.”

London notes that as the iron railings prevented people from sleeping there at night, the homeless were obliged to sleep by day.

Christ Church Hall was the site of many strike meetings and radical gatherings. Annie Besant (1847‑1933) spoke there frequently during the famous matchgiris' strike at Bryant and May, in July 1888. Besant, a socialist and campaigner for birth control, had become incensed by the working conditions at Bryant and May. The factory workers were constantly exposed to yellow phosphorous, still in use 20 years after it became known that the substance resulted in an industrial disease called 'phossy jaw' which caused the deterioration of the jawbone. Besant publicised the long hours, poor pay, and hazardous working conditions of the match girls in a series of articles, and was threatened with a libel suit by the match company, Bryant and May. She and fellow socialists distributed leaflets to the women workers as they left the factory. Bryant and May sacked three workers as a result of this activity, and on 5 July 1888, 672 women went out on strike. Due to widespread public support generated by Besant's publicity, the match girls won their strike within two weeks. After the successful strike, Desant was elected president of the executive committee of the newly formed Match Makers Union.

Continue south along Commercial Street, and you will find Toynbee Hall [11], the famous settlement house of the East End. The present building is a postwar replacement of the original structure. Founded by Samuel Barnett in 1884, Toynbee Hall began as a place where university graduates came to live among the poor and working people in the East End while they collected social data and experimented with ways of ameliorating the extreme poverty of the community around them. Associated with Barnett in his work at Toynbee Hall was his wife, Dame Henrietta Barnett (1851‑1936). She began working with the reformer Octavia Hill before her marriage at the age of 21, and continued her work in public service throughout her life. She helped bring the settlement movement to the United States, raised money for the preservation of 80 acres of land that are now part of Hampstead Heath, and formed a trust to purchase 240 acres that became the experimental community of Hampstead Garden Suburb (originally a development with a mix of social classes which also provided a variety of public services). She helped to establish the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants and to organise afternoon classes for young women who were past school age (over 13) but not yet in factories or in service. Today the hall still houses volunteers engaged in social work.

In Whitechapel High Street is the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which was established in 1901 by Henrietta Bamett, her husband, and others at Toynbee Hall as part of their plan to bring culture to the East End. When she was 72 Bamett decided to expand her interest in art; at that time she began painting, and one of her pictures was hung in the Royal Academy.

It’s worth noting that Whitechapel was also home to a few members of Britain's one involuntary immigrant group ‑ black slaves. In 1717 a black woman who was the wife of John Caesar petitioned the court, claiming that her husband had served Benjamin and John Wood, printers and embossers in Whitechapel, for 14 years without wages and had been cruelly treated and sometimes imprisoned. She herself was very poor, and might soon become chargeable io the parish if her husband wasn't allowed to work for wages, she pleaded. One wonders if it was this last argument that convinced the court, which ruled that the ‑Woods must pay Caesar wages, and fixed the amount.

Directly opposite Aldgate East tube station is the site of No. 1 Commercial Road [13], the birthplace of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Although the family moved to Aldeburgh in Suffolk when Elizabeth was still a young child, she returned to the East End in 1863, living in nearby Philpot Street while training as a nurse at Middlesex Hospital.

Old Castle Street, off Whitechapel High Street, is home to the Fawcett Library, a delight to all researchers of women's history. Enter the Polytechnic by its main doors and follow the yellow signs to the Fawcett Library, which will lead you through corridors, up and down stairs, into lifts eventually depositing you in the basement.

The Fawcett Library calls itself the British Museum of the women's movement, and the claim is a just one. It includes about 40,000 books, pamphlets and leaflets, over 700 periodical titles, and 500 boxes of archives, including the personal papers of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Theresa Billington‑Greig and Helena Normanton. In addition to its research facilities, the library has memorabilia from the suffrage movement and sells wonderful postcards which reproduce both portraits of British suffragists and anti‑suffrage cartoons.

The library began as the archives of the London Society for Women's Suffrage, founded in 1867. It was later affiliated with the non‑militant National Union of Women Suffrage Societies, founded in 1897 by Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (after whom the library is now named) and led by her until women secured the vote in 1918. It was in the 1920s that the collection began to be organised, and in 1926 Vera Douie was appointed the first full‑time librarian. She stayed on until 1967, and made the Fawcett Library the major research facility it is today. During the Second World War the library's holdings were evacuated to Oxford ‑ a fortunate move, as the building which had housed it was bombed. In 1977 the library became part of the City of London Polytechnic.

Return to Whitechapel High Street and turn right, continuing west until it becomes Aidgate High Street. Here you will find St Botolph's Church, Aldgate (steps) [15]. The original church on this site was one of four London churches dedicated to St Botolph during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. During the Great Plague over 5000 victims were buried in the churchyard here. The present structure dates back to the eighteenth century, with major changes to the interior in the nineteenth century, but among its most modem furnishings is a statue donated by its sculptor, Connie Cook, of the Virgin Mary holding in her disproportionately large hands the crown of thorns. The church is active in providing social services for the homeless, including the growing number of homeless women. Female staff and volunteers are available to offer support services, and a women's sitting room is provided during the evenings.

Turn up Duke's Place and follow it until it becomes  Bevis Marks [16]. The oldest synagogue in London, called the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, can be found in a courtyard to your left just past Heneage Lane. The Jews, expelled from England in 1290, returned under Oliver Cromwell in 1657, an'd the area around the synagogue was settled at that time by Sephardi Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. The present synagogue was built in 1701. Its ornate wood carving and gleaming candelabra show that the community was prospering at the time it was constructed. At the front of the synagogue, on the left‑hand side is a chair marked with the name of Simon Montefiore, a noted philanthropist and advocate for his people. It was his wife, Lady Judith Monteflore (d. 1862), who endowed a school for rabbis once located in the East End. (The school is still in existence, but has been moved to the West End of London.) Lady Montefiore, of course, sat in the women's gallery, above, and as the synagogue is an Orthodox one, she would sit in the same place today during worship.

From the synagogue, you can return to the Aldgate tube station, or head north to Bishopsgate and the Liverpool Street tube station where you began.

WALK TWO

Begin and end: Bethnal Green tube station

From Bethnal Green tube station, pass the fascinating Museum of Childhood [1] and continue on to Old Ford Road. (If you have children with you, or possibly even if you haven't, you may want to have a look at the museum's dolls, puppets, trains and board games, some of which date back to the seventeenth century.) To your left you'll see the York Hall Baths [2], where working women often used the communal laundry in the 1920s. East of the green itself, the Bethnal Green Asylum stood in 1815, and a report made that year observed that 'several of the pauper women were chained to their bedsteads naked and covered with only an hempen rug.'

The occupations practised by women in Bethnal Green were described in 1861 as those of hawker, sempstress, and prostitute. In 1901 a more official report on the women workers of the borough of Bethnal Green accounted for 2275 tailors, 1516 boot and shoe makers, and 408 French polishers. By 1914, many hundreds of Bethnal Green women had linked their names to the cause of the East London Federation of Suffragettes.

Proceed east along Old Ford Road for approximately half a mile, and you'll come to Victoria Park.

The park has long been a debating ground, an assembly point for marches, and the site of public meetings. Women's organisations who used the park included the WSPU, the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), the London Match Girls' Union, and the Tailoresses' Union. In October of 1906, an East End crowd was addressed on the suffrage issue by Hannah Mitchell (1871‑1956). Mitchell, who came from a poor, rural background and had been to school for only two weeks, was a suffragette and a writer and campaigner for the Labour Party.

Annie Kenney (1879‑1953) was another speaker that day. By the time she was 13 years old, Kenney was working full‑time in a Lancashire mill, and she turned early to the labour movement, helping to organise unions in her own and other mills. When she was 26 she met the Pankhurst family; she soon became a speaker for the WSPU and eventually became one of the most prominent leaders of the organisation, often running it when the Pankhursts were in prison. She herself was arrested and imprisoned many times.

Fanny Goldberg of Whitechapel used to sell the socialist paper Justice in Victoria Park. She was a suffragette, campaigned against the suppression of birth control literature, and was a founding member of Great Britain's Communist Party.

If you enter by Crown Gate (East) on the far side of Grove Road [3], you'll be near the spot where Sylvia Pankhurst suffered one of her more spectacular arrests, on 24 May 1914. The occasion was a 'women's May Day', complete with maypoles, to be held in Victoria Park. Sylvia was subject to arrest under the 'Cat and Mouse' Act, by which suffragettes who endangered their health by hunger strikes in prison were released only long enough to regain their strength before being rearrested. Sylvia marched from the Women's Hall (once at No. 400 Old Ford Road) to the gates of the park at the centre of a chained guard of 20 women. Over 50 plainclothes detectives had penetrated the ranks of the marching crowd by the time they reached the park gates. There the police made a fierce attack on the crowd, dragged the chained guard into the boating enclosure, and locked the gate behind them. They used truncheons to smash the padlocks on the chains. “We received many a blow during the process,” Sylvia Pankhurst wrote, “and any woman who attempted to hinder the work had her face pinched, her hair pulled, arms twisted and thumbs bent back, whilst her tormenters gave vent to most lurid epithets.” Meanwhile, outside the park gates, police were charging the crowd with horses. Eventually, however, the crowd broke down some of the railings and streamed into the park by that means, and the meeting was held as planned. Sylvia Pankhurst, of course, was taken off to prison.

The six‑sided pavilion with the pointed roof in the centre of the park is the Victoria Fountain [4], an enormously expensive drinking fountain which was donated by the eccentric heiress Angela Burdett‑Coutts (1814‑1906). Angelds wealth made her a much sought‑after bride, but in her youth she rejected all offers and concentrated on her wealth, which she administered herself. (She did, according to one story, propose marriage to her friend the Duke of Wellington, when he was 78 and she was 33. He declined gently, and their friendship survived.) She knew everyone who was anyone in the arts and sciences, and was a close personal friend of Dickens. Her most intimate friend,, however, was her former governess, Hannah Meredith Brown.

The Victoria Fountain was the least of Angela's philanthropic enterprises, which included educational endowments. model villages, a home for 'fallen women', contributions to Florence Nightingale and Dr Livingstone, meal tickets for the poor of the East End during its cholera outbreak in 1886, and the unsuccessful Columbia Market in Shoreditch (gone). Baroness Road, in its vicinity, commemorates her contribution, for in 1871 Queen Victoria bestowed a peerage upon her, and she became the first woman in England to be made a Baroness in her own right.

If you leave the park at the Gunmakers Lane exit [5], you will be opposite the spot where a pub called the Gunmakers' Arms once stood. It was taken over by ELFS in April 1915, renamed the Mothers' Arms, and used as a dayeare centre and clinic. 40 children were cared for in the facility, run by Lucy Burgis. The clinic, run by Dr Alice Johnson, Dr Tchalkovsky, and Nurse Hebbes, also provided lectures in hygiene and nutrition. Hebbes was later the first nurse at the birth control clinic of Marie Stopes.

Between Gunmakers Lane and Grove Road, on Old Ford Road, the Women's Hall once stood [6]. It opened on 4 May 1914, as the headquarters of the East London Federation of Suffragettes, though it was also at first the home of Sylvia Pankhurst and several other ELFS leaders. In addition to being a meeting place, the centre was used as a milk distribution point and a babies' clinic, and in August 1914 it was turned into a cost‑price restaurant operated by ELFS. Mrs Ennis Richmond, one of the women who ran the kitchen, was much criticised for insisting upon the nutritional value of potato skins.

If you don't fancy walking back to the Bethnal Green tube station, the No. 8 bus will get you back to central London. To find the bus stop, turn right into Old Ford Road and left immediately into St Stephen's Road.