Bethnal Green is an area that began around common green space as a Hamlet of Stepney before becoming its own parish in 1743 (Wikipedia). After many years of the enclosure movement and urban expansion, Bethnal Green came to be known as the quintissential East London slum. Bordered by Spitalfields (a formerly diverse, thriving market district) to its south, the inaction of local governors regular updating of maps and jurisdictions led to many construction and sewer encroachment disputes between Bethnal Green and its neighboring parishes (Spitalfields) . This only worsened the area's situation, as Bethnal Green was surrounded by swampy areas, and by 1848 the multi-centuries of working the land to acquire gravel and brick material rendered some portions near the marshes polluted yet overgrown with marsh muck -- totally vile (History of the County of Middlesex).
Bethnal Green's state as a swampy slum with a former market close by serves to set the stage well for Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem, "East London." In the poem, it's summer in Bethnal Green and the sun is beating down on swampy air so wet you would think a hurricane came through the night before. The speaker is walking on the street, pushing through the miasma of weather and economic difficulty, and looks through a window to see a weaver in Spitalfields losing the battle to depression and resignation. Further along the walk, the speaker comes upon a friendly preacher, whom the speaker asks "Ill and o'erwork'd, how fare you in this scene?" The speaker echoes the visual sentiments of the weaver beyond the window and asks a man of religion for guidance -- to which the preacher responds “Bravely! for I of late have been / Much cheer’d with thoughts of Christ, the living bread" -- the preacher says he is fulfilled with the glory of faith in Christ (Lines 6-8). The speaker deduces that as long as the human soul can assert itself in faith against the difficulty of an increasingly distasteful and depressing society, you will not be stumbling wastefully alone in the dark. Instead, you will build your heaven with head and hand.
While the picture for Bethnal Green was bleak, the situation was alleviated around 1900 when Bethnal was adopted as a metropolitan borough of London, and later in 1965 it was made part of the borough of Tower Hamlets (Wikipedia). As the Victorian era passed, Bethnal Green recovered from its dark spell that Matthew Arnold seemed to have a faith-based elixir against. Population wise, many French Huguenots fled to Bethnal fleeing persecution, then, Irish weavers fled their own declining national textile industry and set up shop, next, Dutch Jews moved there to settle and open buinesses, and eventually even Bangladeshis moved to Bethnal, cementing its strong contemporary diversity (Spitalfields). Spitalfields was reopened as a market in 1893 after large private investment and remains open today with all manner of goods from across the world for sale.
Works Cited
"Bethnal Green: Introduction." A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 11, Stepney, Bethnal Green. Ed. T F T Baker. London: Victoria County History, 1998. 87. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol11/p87.
"History." Spitalfields. 2022. https://www.spitalfields.co.uk/spitalfields-history/.
"Bethnal Green." Wikipedia. 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethnal_Green/.
Images
"Map of the Parish of Bethnal Green." Wikipedia. 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Parish_of_Bethnal_Green_1848.gif.
"Former Town Hall on Cambridge Heath Road." Wikipedia. 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Former_Town_Hall,_Cambridge_Heath_Ro….
"Bethnal Green Stairway to Heaven." Wikipedia. 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bethnal_Green_Stairway_to_Heaven.jpg.
