Tower Hamlets, London One Place Study

Date: 1800 to 1921
Location: Tower Hamlets, London, England
Surnames/tags: london england One_Place_Studies

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Contents 1 Tower Hamlets, London One Place Study 1.1 Geography 1.2 History 1.2.1 16th Century 1.2.2 17th Century 1.2.3 18th Century 1.2.4 19th Century 1.2.5 20th Century 1.2.6 Today 1.3 Districts 1.4 Population 1.4.1 Occupations 1.5 Notables 2 Sources

Tower Hamlets, London One Place Study

• Wikidata: Item Q208152, en:Wikipedia
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Given the long history of Tower Hamlets in its various forms, this place study will first focus on the time period from 1800-1921 before moving further back in increments in order to keep the workload manageable.

Geography

Continent: Europe

Sovereign State: United Kingdom

Country: England

County: Middlesex (historical)

GPS Coordinates: 51.516667, -0.05

Elevation: 16.0 m or 52.4 feet

History

16th Century

The earliest reference to "Tower Hamlets" is from 1554, when the Council of the Tower of London ordered a muster of "men of the hamlets which owe their service to the Tower". This covered a larger area than the current borough, and its military connection to the Tower likely dates back several centuries before 1554.

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17th Century

In 1646, the Hamlets of the Tower had to pay taxes for the militia.

The area once featured rural settlements clustered around the City walls or along main roads, surrounded by farmland, with marshes and small communities by the River serving shipping and the Royal Navy. Before formal docks, shipping landed goods in the Pool of London, but industries related to ship construction, repair, and victualling thrived from Tudor times.

The area drew many rural job seekers. Successive waves of foreign immigrants settled near where they disembarked after hazardous voyages. Among the first were Huguenot (French Protestant) refugees, who created a new extramural suburb in Spitalfields in the 17th century.

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18th Century

West India Dock

1799

West India Docks – building London's largest docks

The small medieval hamlets east of the Tower of London, once reliant on milling, agriculture, and fishing, evolved into maritime villages in the 16th century.

London's merchants historically operated from the Thames banks. From the early 15th century, slipways and wharves lined the river for building, repairing, and servicing ships trading with the Port of London. This activity grew in the 16th and 17th centuries with shipbuilding expansion. Increased trade and inadequate riverside facilities caused delays in unloading ships and led to theft of unsecured cargoes on quays. By the late 18th century, West India merchants pushed for secure, enclosed docks for their valuable cargoes.

The project started with land purchase on the Isle of Dogs. The marshy soil required costly drainage and flood prevention, making the land cheaper and one of the last areas in the Borough to be developed. The West India Docks were the first cargo docks built in the Port of London.

The West India Dock Act (1799) initiated construction of two large rectangular docks for the West India Company in 1802. The Act mandated that all rum, coffee, and sugar be unloaded at the West India Dock for 21 years, ensuring the docks' costs could be recouped through this monopoly.

The West India Docks were London's largest at the time, marking a new era in dock construction. They featured 6-storey warehouses and high perimeter walls for security. Constructed between 1800-1803, these nine warehouses once formed a continuous line over half a mile along the north quay of the Import Dock, creating an impressive sight.

Plan of the West India Docks
full zoom

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19th Century

1868

New borough map of 1868
full zoom

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20th Century

During the nineteenth century, London’s population expanded to four million, spurring a high demand for cheap housing in areas that became known as slums. The East End of London was one such area, notorious for overcrowding and unsanitary, squalid living conditions.

Many poor families lived crammed in accommodation without sanitation or proper ventilation. There were also over 200 common lodging houses, providing shelter for some 8,000 homeless and destitute people each night. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the East End of London was predominantly inhabited by the working classes, including the native English population, Irish immigrants, and immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, mostly poor Russian, Polish, and German Jews. Most of these groups lived in real poverty.

The slums of London are the central theme of this engraving 'Over London by Rail', by Gustave Doré in c1870.

Whitechapel

Whitechapel was the area to the west of Tower Hamlets bordering the prosperous City of London. In the mid-eighteenth century, it had been a relatively prosperous district, but by the second half of the nineteenth century, it was overcrowded and notorious for crime. The term ‘criminal classes’ was used to describe many of the people within the social group trapped at the bottom of society. Most offences, more commonly committed by young males, were petty thefts, drunkenness, and vagrancy. Most common offences committed by women were linked to prostitution and soliciting.

The Illustrated Police News, 6 October 1888

Whitechapel is also synonymous with 'Jack the Ripper', the anonymous serial killer. Between August and November 1888, he murdered at least five women — all prostitutes in or around Whitechapel. One of the more intriguing aspects of the Jack the Ripper murders is the amount of worldwide newspaper coverage that they generated. Journalists converged on the streets of the East End to report on the grisly scenes of the gruesome crimes.

The national press, which reported the Whitechapel murders in great detail, also revealed to the reading public the appalling deprivation and dire poverty of the East London slum dwellers.

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Today

The new East End embodies both the capital’s history and its future. London's global success in financial and digital services has been expanding eastwards, and Tower Hamlets lies at its centre.

This blend of old and new, along with award-winning parks, international cultural destinations, world-class educational institutions, and one of the UK's largest economies, makes Tower Hamlets a highly sought-after place to live, work, study, and visit.

Although Tower Hamlets is a young, vibrant, modern area, its history is still rooted in the hamlets surrounding the Tower of London.

Whether you are in Wapping, the Isle of Dogs, Spitalfields, Mile End, Bethnal Green, Canary Wharf, St Katharine Dock, Stepney, East India, Whitechapel, or Poplar, each area is a key part of London’s historical fabric.

Ultra modern Whitechapel Station on new Elizabeth Line CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Phil Gyford full zoom

The Isle of Dogs as seen from the River Thames, with Canary Wharf at its centre.

Known as London Docklands, this area has evolved into a second financial district, serving as a contemporary extension of the City of London.

Since the redevelopment that began in the 1980s, a new transport infrastructure has been established. This includes the London Underground Jubilee line, the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) network and the Elizabeth Line. The latter being a new state-of-the-art deep level railways opened in 2022, providing fast direct train connections from Tower Hamlets to central London, Heathrow Airport terminals plus West and East mainlines.

Districts

• Bethnal Green
• Blackwall
• Bow
• Bromley-by-Bow
• East Smithfield
• Fish Island
• Isle of Dogs & Canary Wharf
• Limehouse
• Mile End
• Poplar
• Ratcliff
• Shadwell
• Spitalfields
• St George in the East
• St Katharine's
• Stepney
• The Tower Liberty
• Wapping
• Whitechapel

Population

Occupations

Notables

Sources

Wikipedia: London Borough of Tower Hamlets