East End of London in popular culture

[1] Crime, poverty, vice, sexual transgression, drugs, class-conflict and multi-cultural encounters and fantasies involving Jewish, Chinese and Indian immigrants are major themes.

Though the area has been productive of local writing talent, from the time of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) the idea of 'slumming it' in the 'forbidden' East End has held a fascination for a coterie of the literati.

This later group particularly became the subject of music hall songs at the turn of the century, with performers such as Marie Lloyd, Gus Elen and Albert Chevalier establishing the image of the humorous East End Cockney and highlighting the conditions of ordinary workers.

Alexander Baron (1917–1999) was born in Whitechapel and wrote of his wartime experiences in the Invasions of Italy and Normandy in the trilogy From The City From The Plough, There's no Home and The Human Kind.

A more realistic fictionalisation on the contemporary gentrification of the area, and the rise of the yuppie, is provided by Penelope Lively in Passing On (1989) and City of the Mind (1991) and by P. D. James in Original Sin (1994).

The programme is actually filmed at a purpose-built set at the BBC Elstree Centre in Hertfordshire, and the paradigms for the show are thought to lie beyond the East End, in Stratford and Walthamstow.

[3] These performers, in particular, saw the many honest people fighting poverty in lowly professions and established the image of the humorous East End Cockney as a part of their stage persona.