Radinsky’s Place

Patrick Wright

  • White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings by Iain Sinclair
    Goldmark, 210 pp, £12.50, October 1987, ISBN 1 870507 00 2

In 1975 Colin Ward described Spitalfields as a classic inner-city ‘zone of transition’. Bordering on the City of London, the place had traditionally been a densely-populated ‘service centre for the metropolis’ where wave after wave of immigrants struggled to gain a foothold on the urban economy: Huguenot silk weavers, the Irish who were set to work undercutting them, Jewish refugees from late 19th-century pogroms in East Europe, and the Bengalis who have settled in the area since the 1950s. Since 1975, Spitalfields has achieved a national reputation as a reclaimable area of beautiful houses and exotic contrasts which has survived the levelling embrace of the welfare state.

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[*] The New Georgian Handbook, by Alexandra Artley and John Martin Robinson. Ebury Press, 1985.

Vol. 9 No. 19 · 29 October 1987 » Patrick Wright » Radinsky’s Place (print version)
Pages 3-5 | 4511 words