Economic focus shifted from mainstream farming produce for the City of London – through highly perishable goods production (market gardening), weaving, dock and building work and light industry – to a high proportion of commuters to city businesses, public sector/care sector roles, construction, courier businesses and home-working digital and creative industries.

In either case, the Dictionary of London Place Names supports a contraction involving hall or healh, noting h-dropping in local dialects, to Bethnal Green.

In 1855 Bethnal Green was included within the area of the Metropolitan Board of Works to which it nominated one member and the various local government bodies were replaced by a single incorporated vestry which consisted of 48 elected vestrymen.

In what would become northern Bethnal Green (known as Cambridge Heath) a tract of common land, which stretched to the east and west, a part of the Manor and Ancient Parish of Stepney.

[10] Stepney's Manor House (known as Bishopswood, later Bishop's Hall) was located in Bethnal Green from at least 1207,[11] on a site subsequently occupied by the London Chest Hospital.

The ballad recounts how Bess leaves Bethnal Green to seek her fortune, and stays a short time at the Queen's Arms inn at Romford.

There, her beauty quickly attracts four suitors, three of whom lose interest when she declares her background, while the fourth, a knight is unconcerned by her father's status.

The Blind Beggar public house, just on the Bethnal Green side of the historic boundary with Whitechapel,[15] is reputed to be the site of his begging.

Many of these mulberry trees may be a legacy of unsuccessful 16th and 17th century attempts to boost the weaving industries that Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Spitalfields and other East End districts relied upon so heavily.

Daniel Mendoza, who was champion of England from 1792 to 1795 though born in Aldgate, lived in Paradise Row on the western side of Bethnal Green for 30 years.

A downturn in the trade in 1769 led to the Spitalfield Riots, and on 6 December 1769, two weavers accused of "cutting" were hanged in front of the Salmon and Ball public house.

[28] The London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews built Palestine Place as Cambridge Heath began to be fully developed during the first half of the 19th century.

In 1841, the Anglo-Catholic Nathaniel Woodard, who was to become a highly influential educationalist in the later part of the 19th century, became the curate of the newly created St. Bartholomew's church on Buckhurst Street.

In 1843, he got into trouble for preaching a sermon in which he argued that The Book of Common Prayer should have additional material to provide for confession and absolution and in which he criticised the "inefficient and Godless clergy" of the Church of England.

[29] Globe Town was established from 1800 to provide for the expanding population of weavers around Bethnal Green attracted by improving prospects in silk weaving.

Both were opened by the Great Eastern Railway (GER) on the Lea Valley Lines in 1872 as part of a more direct route to Enfield Town.

[33][34][35] Bethnal Green was also formerly served by trains on the Great Eastern Main Line (GEML) via Stratford and saw two derailments in the later 20th century, similar to other contemporary comparators of busy, metropolitan junctions.

[40] In 1993, the Town Hall was vacated when the London Borough of Tower Hamlets moved its headquarters, and in 2007 the building was converted to a hotel which opened in 2010.

This forced the temporary relocation of the library into the unopened Bethnal Green Underground Station in order to provide continuity of lending services.

[45] It is estimated that during this war, 80 tons of bombs fell on the Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green, affecting 21,700 houses, destroying 2,233 and making a further 893 uninhabitable.

[47] On 3 March 1943, the air-raid civil defence siren sounded at 8:17 pm, causing a flow of people down the narrow staircase, with no handrail, of the uncompleted Bethnal Green tube station, wet from rain and only dimly lit due to blackout precautions, to shelter from bombs.

[54] In 2015, three children Amira Abase, Shamima Begum, and Kadiza Sultana appeared in the press, referred to as the Bethnal Green trio.

In the 1970s, Tower Hamlets Council decided to fence and lock up the area now known as Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, to protect it from fly tipping.

Its courses for depression, based on the mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy methodology of Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, featured in the Financial Times in 2008.

Founded in 1884, as one of the first "settlements" by Oxford University,[101] it has helped alleviate or remove the impact of poverty and today provides a programme of community classes, events and weekly activities.

[131][132] The Oval Space hosted Catfest in 2018, with guests having the chance to take photos with cats as well as sample street food and meet shelter kittens.

[133][134] A plaque was placed at the entrance to the tube station in the 1970s to commemorate the disaster there, one of the worst of the Second World War; and a larger memorial, "Stairway to Heaven", stands in nearby Bethnal Green Gardens.

This memorial was unveiled in December 2017 at a ceremony attended by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and Bethnal Green and Bow MP Rushanara Ali.

[142] Tower Hamlets Council had turned down plans for the Cambridge Heath Road development because of concerns over its affordable housing mix and design quality.

[144] In 2018 Sainsbury's opened what it claims was the country's first meat-free butchers, in the form of a traditional style butchers which was open for three days from Friday 21 June to mark World Meat Free Week, where it offered customers an array of cuts and joints derived from plant-based alternatives, such as mushroom, jackfruit and pea protein.