City links: Tech-driven inequality, a mystery bedroom on the Berlin metro and the death of dive bars feature in this week’s roundup of the best city stories
“Prevent”? “PREVENT”?!? Do you know what a shithole the East End of London has been for over a hundred years, you miserable sanctimonious lefty hack?
103 years ago Infant mortality in the Shoreditch stood at 128 babies per 1,000 born [today it is 4.5 for the UK], which was nearly 50 per cent higher than the average for London. It was higher than it is in Afghanistan or Somalia today. “At our door, within a half-mile radius from our big red block of buildings, there lives a population of about 100,000, almost all on the border-line of poverty,” the Leysian Mission Annual Report commented in 1913.
In 1972 Kenneth Willims wrote in his diary, “At 2 o’c I walked through Shoreditch and returned via Old Street, Goswell Road and Mount Pleasant. Some of the areas are utterly sordid and the soulless concret blocks which are replacing the old slums have an equally depressing effect on the environment... When you see the filth and squalor of the East End you marvel that the year is 1972. One has come all this way, and supposed there had been civic enlightenment, but here it is as dark as ever.”
Now that the area is finally improving, for the benefit of everyone who has to make their way through its streets (even the ones without a pumpkin spice soy latte in their hand) you find a way to berate these improvements because they have not made a tech millionaire of every council housing inhabitant within the Bunfield boundaries. Shame on you.