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III the Breath of the East

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III the Breath of the East III The Breath of the East East and West may not intermingle. - Dr Petrie, in Rohmer (1985: 146) By the early 1930s a mythical, exotic idea of ‘Limehouse’ had been so widely disseminated in cultural texts that hundreds of well-to-do young people arrived in the area in search of mystery and thrills. So- called ‘Bright Young Things’ travelled across London to ‘slum it’, of- ten wearing dinner jackets and expensive dresses as signifiers of their class, wealth and perceived difference to the inhabitants of the strange, exotic space that they were visiting (Farson 1991: 100). Indeed, young West Enders would tour the “toughest, roughest streets, taverns and music halls in search of new excitements” (Bermant 1975: 188). In this chapter I want to try to chart representations of Limehouse that have together facilitated the endurance of a specifically eastern or Ori- ental idea of east London. In Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), George Orwell constructs a powerful vision of an East End of London of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Writing about the poor and homeless of the East End, he suggests that “this tramp-monster is no truer to life than the sinister Chinaman of the magazine stories” (1984: 178). So the writer clearly saw that Limehouse had come to function as a powerful spatial idea. But bearing this in mind, it is significant that Orwell moves eastward through London from the Waterloo Road in this text. One wonders whether he was drawn to the East End because of its powerful mythology rather than its status as just another poor, run- down area of the city. But when he arrives in Pennyfields he com- ments that “this was a typical lodging-house, like scores of others in London” (1984: 118). Orwell’s book displays, then, a strangely double view of the East End. It appears to have been influenced by what had become well established East End discourse. But it instead succeeds in suggesting that a number of areas around London displayed equal lev- els of poverty. Indeed, his attention focuses on workhouses, spikes 106 The Cultural Construction of London’s East End and lodgings not only in east London but also in Lambeth, Chelsea, King’s Cross, on the Embankment, even in Trafalgar Square. So Down and Out in Paris and London attempts, on the one hand, to de- mystify Limehouse and the East End. But when Orwell specifically turns his attention towards Limehouse, and effectively draws on the discourse of eugenics in order to mark the local women as exotically attractive and the male Oriental inhabitants of the area as ‘Other’, his text also constructs the East End as a ‘low’ space: “It was interesting to watch the crowds. The East London women are pretty (it is the mix- ture of blood, perhaps), and Limehouse was sprinkled with Orientals – Chinamen, Chittagonian lascars, Dravidians selling silk scarves, even a few Sikhs, come goodness knows how.“ (1984: 120) ‘Limehouse’ operates as a powerful, semantically-rich toponym here. It seems it needs little or no description. But in fact Limehouse remains to this day a relatively small area to the east of the Tower of London, nestling close to the River Thames. Despite its size and peripheral nature, representations of this space flourished between the First and Second World Wars. The sheer scale of the output of cultural texts that marked this space as a dra- matic, labyrinthine stage led Limehouse to function as a spatial idea against which another idea – that of a modern, progressive, bourgeois London – could define itself specifically in terms of ethnicity. As such, Limehouse came to function as a microcosmic manifestation of a wider idea of the East End of London which was, as I have shown, clearly in operation by the 1930s. Thomas Burke, an important figure in the formation of an idea of Limehouse, made this much clear in his book The Real East End (1932), where he reflects upon how far the “legend” of the East End had already been imaginatively constructed: Visions in the public mind of slums, vice, crime, sin and unnameable horrors. East End! [...] Dregs of humanity. Beggars and thieves. Bare- footed waifs. Outcasts. Drunkards. Jack the Ripper. Crimping dens. Dangerous streets. Policemen walk in twos and threes. Something worse than Chicago. Sidney Street. Limehouse. Opium dens. East End! [...] Hooligans. Diseased harlots. Public-houses at every corner. Thugs lurking in every alley. Sudden death. Well, leg- ends are like old soldiers […] Fact, set against legend, is a poor, pale thing, apathetic and incompetent and immortal; and the East End leg- end, I suppose, will last as long as there is any East End […] if my own early books have anything to do with nourishing the legend. […] I make no apology […]. I admit to using the East End for my own pur-.
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