A trip down memory lane I remember when it was a Jewish area my mum used to do the shopping for Kosher food as our religion and surname were similar to the Jewish. We weren’t allowed to eat pork and our Sabbath started on a Friday night which meant no TV cooking or other worldly goings on until sunset the following day. Strange that.
....I WAS BROUGHT UP IN BETHNAL GREEN OLD FORD ROAD ...A BLOCK OF FLATS NEXT TO THE CHEST HOSPITAL ...WITH THE VIC PARK UP THE ROAD ....WE KIDS COULD GO ANYWHERE ...NO CRIME...NO PERVERTS...NO BLACK GANGS....OR PAKISTANIS....IT WAS A TIME THAT HAS GONE FOR EVER ....LONDON IS LOST ...ANOTHER THIRD WORLD SEWAGE CITY....MAKES ME SICK..... SOCIALIST TO BLAME....!!!
That's how I feel about NY lol well I wasn't alive in the 70s but that's how my dad felt and only times square lower east side and the Bronx were really bad now all of New York is just not worth it
@@LeahDyson-kq4bd Such a shame, I was recently in NYC after spending some time there in the 80s-90s and I agree; it's undoubtedly lost a large chunk of its soul.
I was 5 years old in Staffordshire and knew nothing about London. I grew up surrounded by the history of the Black Country. In the end I spent 3 years living in Forest Hill fairly recently and it was great to learn about some of the history in that area and compare it to what I knew of the Midlands.
there is film from Prinz Eugen of Hood blowing up. It is out on the internet. In that film Hood is shown miles away as a smoky smudge on the horizon. PoW can barely be made out, located where shell splashes are. It seems this is not a film of Hood's destruction.
In its modest way this was a revolution in documentary. Arthur Elton dragged his unwieldy 35mm camera down to the East End. Instead of reenacting scenes with 'real people' stiltedly speaking lines written by some Oxbridge cineaste, these cockneys were shot in situ, often in natural light, and allowed to voice their complaints forthrightly with little mediation. The little boy who shouts in the middle of his mother's speech would not have been left in if Grierson had supervised the production. 'Housing Problems' was a sponsored film, a very soft sell by a power and light utility. Its solution to the slum's evils has not aged well: deporting the locals to underresourced exurban estates and high-rise blocks where aerial living undermined the spirit of community. The ground-level neighbourliness we glimpse here was lost. The old East End was held together by mothers, and they do more of the talking here- another novelty in the 1930s.
Interesting to watch this in conjunction with "The Proud City", a 1946 film outlining the County of London plan to rebuild neighbourhoods with their own amenities to replace the slums.
@@pedrogarbanzo Yes, but unfortunately the neighborhoods too often went up without the amenities. Planners seemed to follow the principle of 'if you build it, the infrastructure will come.' Community facilities such as shops, meeting rooms and police posts were lacking. The growth of private motoring led to neglect of public transit. And the new high-rise blocks were too often shoddily built, so they had to be detonated a couple of decades after being occupied. Dispersal of slums and their kinship networks, television, package holidays abroad and the segregation of workplaces on industrial estates or office districts all played their part in weakening community ties; but architectural theories did not counteract the trend. Instead of becoming 'streets in the sky' for pedestrians, the elevated walkways and shared spaces such as lift entrances soon became vandalized, littered, scary after dark. People flitted quickly into their private domains, and when they reached ground level they fled in a dozen different directions.
