Harry's Place

But as we stood on this corner reflecting on the changing face of the East End I hadn’t prepared for the comment that was to follow. One participant looked at the mosque, shook his head, and sighed, “It breaks my heart what it’s used for now.”

After a sharp intake of breathe I decided to deal with it with a light-touch and pointed out how little its function had indeed changed – large groups of people went there to pray to their god as they had done since 1743. The prayers were pretty similar but the people were different.

Sorry but he’s right. He’s right because its HIS emotion, memories and observation – not yours. It breaks MY heart to see the nature of change in the East End and Petticoat Lane where I worked. It breaks my heart that the E&A Salt Beef bar at Stamford hill has gone. It breaks my heart that Bagels are no longer baked on long wooden slats in wood-fired ovens while I watch them being made.

Across the country people’s hearts are broken when they see the changes in their communities. That is what has also lead to the rise of the BNP.

No-one says it should stay the same but nostalgia is always valid and should be respected when expressed by elders.

after a sharp intake of breath – usual multiculti PC blather from HP.

Hey Rosenberg have you ever attended the Jamme Masjid mosque? Thought not, maybe you should, and admit to being Jewish while you are at it. How do you know what sermons are preached in this mosque, how can you be sure they are not radical or apologetics for radicalism? oh wait you just know (maybe through your powers of clairvoyance), or maybe you don’t think it matters.

After all let’s not let inconvenient facts get in the way of your rainbow dreaming all-cultures-are-the-same blather, let’s just hold hands and paly pretend. Pathetic.

Pathetic indeed. You must live in a very odd world that such a mild remark could result in a sharp intake of breath.

Larry, thanks for confirming my original response at this PC “sharp intake of breath”. Why are you doing the walk if it ISN’T about nostalgia. Is the purpose of your walk to educate a load of curious people into accepting a multi-culture or to simply remind us of a heritage that is being dissolved. Be respectful of seniors who lived there and who suffered Mosley’s antisemitism to rise and live in Hendon – escaping the East End ghetto.

As a pivotal point in you post it seems you are trying to make a PC point. Don’t!

Pathetic indeed. You must live in a very odd world that such a mild remark could result in a sharp intake of breath.

4.00-4.40 Bengali politics in London’s East End (Ansar Ahmed Ullah)

4.50-5:15 Streets in the East End you used to be safe walking down but are no-go areas if you are an “Infidel” (map provided)

5.20-5,55 Self-Defence for Jews walking in the East End (do’s and dont’s)

Pathetic racist whineing above, completely missing the point. Are racists just unable of any creative thought? Cant you lot ever escape your fear of brown skin? All this talk of saving the pork pie is just your way of making the unacceptable sane. You are all sad and mad.

Pathetic racist whineing above, completely missing the point.

I’m not a racist. Olease elaborate on the point that ‘racists’ are missing.

Across the country people’s hearts are broken when they see the changes in their communities. That is what has also lead to the rise of Oswald Mosley and the BUF

Across the country people’s hearts are broken when they see the changes in their communities. That is what has also lead to the rise of the BNP.

I’ve been feeling this way since 1632. You can’t even get a decent silk-worm in the east end since those methodists and jews moved in.

“After a sharp intake of breathe I decided to deal with it with a light-touch and pointed out how little its function had indeed changed – large groups of people went there to pray to their god as they had done since 1743. The prayers were pretty similar but the people were different.”
But the God they worship is very different. The God of the Koran commanded his last messenger to kill non believers.
“Pathetic racist whineing above, completely missing the point. Are racists just unable of any creative thought? Cant you lot ever escape your fear of brown skin?”
My son has got brown skin as has my wife. I am not scared of them.
Is English your first language? I do hope not if you don’t understand the word racist.

Proove u r not racist, cookiecutter!

Can’t expect much better from the JSG. Anyway, David, I thought you would’ve grown out of all the garbage you used to spout in Ilford County High School. Seems like the record’s scratched.

That passing huguenot arriviste can take his or her silk worms back to where they came from. We were quite happy here with our woad and worship of trees until the Romans came over here taking over our jobs and sacred spaces. As for the Angles and Saxons and Vikings and Normans they can sod off and all. It breaks my heart that they built there temples on our sacred groves and destroyed the market in flint.

@ Cookiecutter

4.00-4.40 Bengali politics in London’s East End (Ansar Ahmed Ullah)

4.50-5:15 Streets in the East End you used to be safe walking down but are no-go areas if you are an “Infidel” (map provided)

5.20-5,55 Self-Defence for Jews walking in the East End (do’s and dont’s)
————-

1. The Brick Lane mosque, despite its misguided campaign to build a minaret on the pavement outside, is a welcome and moderate counterpoint to the Jamaati-controlled East London Mosque. No radicalism there (yet, at least).

2. Do your homework on Ansar Ahmed Ullah before you spout your bile. Better still, turn up to the day school and learn.

Across the country people’s hearts are broken when they see the changes in their communities. That is what has also lead to the rise of the BNP.

That’s the left in a nutshell, exhibiting that characteristic de haut en bas sense of superiority. A special lefty gene enables them to undersand what the people want, like and fear better than the people themselves. And this special awareness into the contents of the pleb mind, enables them to understand what is best for the people. Democracy really is too much for the proles to cope with.

David Rosenberg: I was taken on a personal East End tour by your hero and mentor Bill Fishman some years ago. And do you know, even if he did not use those actual words, his response, on showing me the building and recounting its journey was pretty much of that order. There was no mistaking the sorrow and regret in his tone and words. And whenever we passed a woman in niqab he shook his stick in rage at what he perceived as this disempowerment of women.

Vertovian is Exhibit A, of the Hundal school of never criticising any perceived brown-skinned person ever.

It is Vertovian who is the racist fuck here, making excuses for clerical fascists because of their skin colour.

Proove u r not racist, cookiecutter!

I can’t. Its not possible for anyone to write anything here that proves they are a racist or are not a racist.

Am I supposed to use MY sensitivities to suggest that by writing “Proove u r not racist” – misselling and using groovy text that YOU aren’t a racist? Prove to me that you aren’t a racist.

I am happy and comfortable to state that it is the right of anyone with a long association with an area of the UK to express regret and sadness as to how that community has changed.

As a previous resident of Hackney, Clapton, Stoke Newington I look at those communities and regret that they have changed. Its MY right. Its NOT a racist comment but one of nostalgia.

1. The Brick Lane mosque, despite its misguided campaign to build a minaret on the pavement outside, is a welcome and moderate counterpoint to the Jamaati-controlled East London Mosque. No radicalism there (yet, at least).

2. Do your homework on Ansar Ahmed Ullah before you spout your bile. Better still, turn up to the day school and learn.

My comment was ZERO to do with this particular Mosque. It was a general reflection on how the character of the East End has changed and how there are no-go areas for non-Muslims. I do remember a previous walk in the East End by a group of Jews who were stoned by a group of Asians (presumed Muslim by demographics) http://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/content/towerhamlets/advertiser/postbag/story.aspx?brand=ELAOnline&category=postbag&tBrand=northlondon24&tCategory=postbagela&itemid=WeED15%20Jan%202008%2022%3A07%3A28%3A083

Is this an article that is legitimate debate? http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3537594.ece

I don’t think I am on the wrong side of this debate.

CookieCutter—

The piece in the East London Advertiser was sensationalised. A handful of fine gravel was lobbed over a fence by laughing idiot kids and made out to be a racist stoning.

Could you please point out the no-go areas in the East End? I will boldly go there this afternoon and report back. Go on, please tell me. I live here. In fact, if you like I’ll go there with you and we can discuss.

Cookie.

Can you name some of these “no go areas for non-muslims?”

Genuine question.

Cleryman attacked http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/3682261/Christianophobia_comes_to_the_East_End/

Quick answer reflecting sectarian violence. I am googling for other items.

In a general sense this idea of no-go areas was stated by Bishop Nazir Ali. The incident I remember were the two evangelists who were told by a policeman NOT to go into a Muslim area as they might get beaten up.

BTW PLEASE don’t try and label me BNP – I most definitely am not. My point started out from the general theme that it is wrong to criticise someone who has regrets as to how the places they grew up have changed. I am 100% convinced that any small Jewish community in the East End would now feel under new pressure and prejudices.

I don’t propose to suggest any street because I am convinced that the wrong place and time will result in a racist and religious charged abuse and violence. You are asking me to get stabbed so I can prove that people would get stabbed.

The more relevant question would be to ask some local people if they would dare venture down some streets at certain times.

I believe this is true of other places in London and not just due to Black and Asian people but also white thug scum. A recent Panorama showed a Muslim couple being regularly abused by the White Trash (not in London). I’d be the first one down there with the Scum Catcher Mobile Crusher.

There are streets in London where no-one feels safe irrespective of the ethnic and religious nature of the area. I don’t feel that’s a point I have to defend.

Christ, you are all as wounded and affronted and angry as Lee John Barnes, the BNP and the EDL — You are utter middle class hypocrites for denying them *their* voice as ethnic British Anglo Saxons ( and in EDL’s case, mixed race integrated British too ) , whilst you all clearly want your UK the way it *should be* for you aswell : You seem happy to assert “Oooohhhh, why isn’t Stamford Hill safe for MEEEEEEE any more ? Why can’t I buy the old style bagles anymore”,but you’d sneer at an ehtnic white Celt/Anglo Saxon guy who asked the same for his neighbourhood, and label him a goose stepping Goebels.

Don’t knock LJB next time he’s on then.

Why is it you all hate working class/lower middle class Anglo Saxon/Celts so much ?

“Oooohhhh, why isn’t Stamford Hill safe for MEEEEEEE any more ? Why can’t I buy the old style bagles anymore”,but you’d sneer at an ehtnic white Celt/Anglo Saxon guy who asked the same for his neighbourhood,

I expect most people would laugh and not exactly sneer at an “ethnic white Celt/Anglo saxon guy who was asking why he couldn’t buy old style bagles in his neighbourhood.

Cookie—

Canon Michael Ainsworth himself did not believe the attack on him was motivated by faith; two youths were convicted of assault, not faith hate. The clergyman was beaten up because he dared tell some youths messing about and drinking at the back of his church to keep quiet. As they hit him they shouted abuse because he wore a clerical collar.

You clearly don’t know any no-go areas in the East End so you were full of bull weren’t you?

As I said, I’m a local person and there is nowhere I wouldn’t venture because it was a Muslim ghetto.

My grandmother was a semi ‘rags-to-riches’ story that emerged from the East End. The youngest daughter of a large family whose mother died when she was 6 months old, all her stories of growing up were of community kindness and care.

Tuberculosis was rife pre-WWI (my grandmother was born in 1911) and there were children without mothers whose fathers had to leave home in the early morning to go to work. My grandmother was one such child who’d skip to school, buttons on frock and boots undone, and whose teacher would duly do them up, brush her hair and generally ensure she was ready for the day. My grandmother only ever remembered her teachers for their care and kindness to her rather than anything related to school work itself.

She remembered her own father cooking and giving her meals to take to widows/widowers or grieving families as WWI continued to decimate the male population, and of people pawning things they didn’t immediately need (even shoes!) to help others who couldn’t pay the rent.

The most mischevious thing she could recall doing was making faces at Isaac, the shoe-mender, who would sit in his window, mouth full of nailes repairing shoes. All the kids did it – not because of anti-anything, but because they wanted to make him laugh in the hope all his nails would fall out of his mouth.

My grandmother belonged to a community which has been lost, not just in the East End, but almost everywhere. No one would want to see the poverty, hardship and illnesses like TB return, but from the stories my grandmother told me, the way they looked after each other, regardless of money, race, colour or creed is the lesson we should re-learn and aim at re-building all over the UK.

I literally live opposite Toynbee Hall.

Well I’ve just returned from taking a mixed group (men, women, Jews, non-Jews, black, white, Irish, East European) around the “no-go” area this morning. Judging by the crowds of people from different backgrounds in and around Spitalfields – it seems much more a “yes-go” area.

Amie, I’m sure Bill retains a progressive view on empowerment of women, but what I always saw when walking with him was him greeting Bangladeshi shopkeepers, people on the street, or emerging from the mosque with “assalamu aleykum”.

Especially in his book “The Streets of East London” Bill shows how everything that he feels warm and positive about in the Jewish East End of yesteryear – the values, the community feeling, the workplace culture, the street life, has been reproduced and continued within the Bangladeshi community. In my conversations with him he has always valued the changing nature of the East End while missing some of the particular characters from different communities that the area has produced – he would miss characters like the community organiser Tassadeq Ahmed as well as missing the poet Avrom Stencl.

Where I have picked up inferences of regret from him is when he talks of suburban Tory Jews who look back with embarrassment at their famiies’ humbler origins in the East End. For Bill the message of the East End experience of the different communities is support and care for each other and fight poverty.

Health permitting, Bill will be coming at lunchtime the event to sign copies of his books.

ronronron thanks for responding to the ignorant remarks about Ansar. He has done great work locally over the years and I ‘m sure his talk will be fascinating.

large groups of people went there to pray to their god as they had done since 1743.

Different God entirely, though I will change my mind the next time a Jew blows himself up on the tube.

It is natural for older people to look back at advantages they grew up with, and regret that those things are no longer there for the younger generation. I am not a Londoner, but I look around my own home town here in the north, with a tinge of sadness and regret. It’s like seeing a fragment of handwriting of a loved one who has died.

Different God entirely

No I am not.

Now repent. For I am a jealous God.

There’s no ‘different God’.

Please read some Aristotle and follow it up with some Aquinas, Maimonides and Averroes.

Thanks for this post, David. I am determined to go on another one of your walks some day!

Of course people have a ‘right’ to be nostalgic.

But such conservatism seems a tad pathetic when it reeks of looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, of a fear of any sort of social change, or of grumpy internet miserablists simply venting their frustration with the world around them.

Spot on CookieCutter and Larry Moonsong- you are a fool David R.

David Rosenberg. I wish I could come along with you sometime, I am sure I would gain much from the experience and you. Good Luck.

These areas of London are a kaleidoscope of histories and surely, that history is not at an end? The descendant’s of those who came and settled here have moved on and integrated (by choice) into the rest of society. This process is well known and observed.

Almost all the negative comments above about Islam and the east end of London can be replicated in newspaper articles and letters written about ‘Hebrews’ coming to live in London in large numbers in the final years of the 19th century. Prejudice – let us be frank about it – has a pedigree too.

I have some sympathy with those who return to familiar haunts and find themselves alienated by what they see. I had a similar experience visiting that part of London where I was born and brought up sixty years ago. I found that Yuppies and speculative developments had robbed me of my life as I stood and tried to remember the raggedy kids playing in the street now lined both sides with smart cars. No longer tiny old women dressed in Edwardian era widows weeds or some fat man, braces worn over vest, wandering to the corner shop on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

you really need to change the accusations and tricks. “you are a racist no u r racist no u racist” no longer works

Thanks Larkers – hope you will get along sometime – although this post was mainly to promote the event on November 15th more than my walks!

Absolutely right that the history is not at an end though I think that because large numbers of people are no longer physically arriving for settlement at the docks by the East End that we won’t see that particular square mile of East London – where it meets the city – being identified culturally with one particular group much more than others, as it has been in the past. Go to Brick Lane these days, and while many of the shops/eateries in the middle section are largely Bangladeshi you will find people of many backgrounds and languages walking and inhabiting the street.

You are spot on about the pedigree of racism – but to look at it positively, that racism has been challenged in the East End, when Jewish workers and some left wing groups challenged the British Brothers league at the turn of the 20th century, through the united efforts of Jewish and Irish communities against Mosley, to the 1970s and 80s, when Altab Ali was murdered and Bengali youth with many allies from white communities challenged the NF neanderthals who used to stand outside a Jewish shop on the corner of Brick Lane and Bethnal Green Road on a Sunday morning.

Where are the NF/BNP types now in the East End? They barely get a look in. though no doubt they would be a bit cheered by some of the more ignorant comment here.

One of the points about the November 15th event is that it does bring together people across different communities/backgrounds/identities who are committed to the common humanity of the people of the East End past and present and believe we have something to learn from our experiences and from each other.