The Cultural Construction of Londons East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness (Spatial Practices, 5)

Paul Newland's illuminating study explores the ways in which London's East End has been constituted in a wide variety of texts - films, novels, poetry, television shows, newspapers and journals. Newland argues that an idea or image of the East End, which developed during the late nineteenth century, continues to function in the twenty-first century as an imaginative space in which continuing anxieties continue to be worked through concerning material progress and modernity, rationality and irrationality, ethnicity and 'Otherness', class and its related systems of behaviour. The Cultural Construction of London's East End offers detailed examinations of the ways in which the East End has been constructed in a range of texts including BBC Television's EastEnders, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, films such as Piccadilly, Sparrows Can't Sing, The Long Good Friday, From Hell, The Elephant Man, and Spider, and in the work of Iain Sinclair. The Cultural Construction of London's East End......Page 4 CONTENTS......Page 12 Acknowledgements......Page 14 Introduction......Page 16 I. Development......Page 40 II. Apotheosis......Page 60 III. The Breath of the East......Page 108 IV. From Bauhaus to the Blitz and Beyond......Page 132 V. After Ronan Point: Re-imagining the Territory......Page 152 VI. Docklands: The Clearing of the Misery?......Page 186 VII. After Empire: Tourism, Immigration and Colonisation......Page 230 VIII. Neo-Victorian Urban Visions......Page 252 Bibliography......Page 278 Filmography......Page 300 Index......Page 308 Paul Newland. Originally Presented As: Thesis (ph.d.)--exeter University. Filmography: P. 297-303. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [275]-295) And Index.