Check out the excellent "Hayes Peoples History" here.
"The working class communities of Inner London had suffered badly during the depression of the 1920’s and 30s with its high unemployment and slum housing. Now they suffered the heaviest levels of devastation – large parts of Stepney, Bethnal Green, Poplar, West Ham, Bermondsey, Deptford, Lambeth, St Pancras & Westminster were destroyed...
...According to Phil Piratin (future Communist Member of Parliament for Stepney)
"That night the East End burned, the dockside was ablaze...........
it lit up a great part of East and South East London....... It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire."
Daily Worker journalist Fred Pateman writing in the 9th September 1940 edition of the Daily Worker stated
“Yesterday, I walked through the valley of the shadow of death –the little streets of London’s East End.....Along the main roads is a steady stream of refugees – men with suitcases, women, with bundles, children with their pillows and their own cot covers – homeless in the heart of London.
Maya Angelou - History despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived but if faced with courage need not be lived again"
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