why is it considered canon that tom is from the east end? It’s hardly the only working class neighbourhood in london and unless I’m mistaken the one piece of textual evidence we have for where he grew up is the diary, which was procured in lambeth. Given that londoners pretty much don’t cross the river going south unless they live there, doesn’t it make more sense for him to be from vauxhall or bermondsey or elephant and castle? (I might just be biased by the idea of bb tom riddle running around doing odd jobs for alice diamond and her gangster friends lol)
I think it's mostly due to East End being more notorious and known globally. At least that would be my guess on why that's the assumption. I actually, too, always assumed Wool's was in the East End, but I wanted to check what we actually know of Wool's location.
Also, as we don't really know how Tom got the diary, he didn't necessarily live in the area the diary came from. So I don't consider it hard evidence either way.
What we do have, is JKR's tendency to write accents and whatever descriptions we are given of Wool's.
Honestly, the orphanage is really odd, since regardless of where in London it was, Tom would not have a room just for himself there, but I digress. What we are told about its location doesn't give us much besides, a little barren, rundown, and looking pretty grim in a bustling street (which fits a lot of places in London, so, unhelpful).
So, we'll look at Tom's accent in his first meeting with Dumbledore:
“You can’t kid me! The asylum, that’s where you’re from, isn’t it? ‘Professor,’ yes, of course — well, I’m not going, see? That old cat’s the one who should be in the asylum. I never did anything to little Amy Benson or Dennis Bishop, and you can ask them, they’ll tell you!”
(HBP) - That's the passage with the most "accent" I could find from him.
This suggests a working class accent to me (not a Brit myself, so I'm working off internet research here). Both for the slang used and the general informality of it, and the words used, but I didn't find something that would really suggest the accent is Cockney specifically (like dropping 'H's or the use of "ain't" or certain vowel shifts).
(Cockney accent is the one historically associated with the East End)
I looked at Mrs. Cole's dialogue as well (to cover my bases), as it's pretty similar to Tom's and they should be from the same area, and while it's definitely working class, I couldn't find strong indicators of Cockney either:
“I remember she said to me, ‘I hope he looks like his papa,’ and I won’t lie, she was right to hope it, because she was no beauty — and then she told me he was to be named Tom, for his father, and Marvolo, for her father — yes, I know, funny name, isn’t it? We wondered whether she came from a circus — and she said the boy’s surname was to be Riddle. And she died soon after that without another word. “Well, we named him just as she’d said, it seemed so important to the poor girl, but no Tom nor Marvolo nor any kind of Riddle ever came looking for him, nor any family at all, so he stayed in the orphanage and he’s been here ever since.”
(HBP)
And there is a character that JKR wrote very obviously with a Cockney accent, and that's Stan Shunpike:
“ ’Choo lookin’ at?” said Stan. [...] “Woss that on your ’ead?” said Stan abruptly. [...] “Yep,” said Stan proudly, “anywhere you like, long’s it’s on land. Can’t do nuffink underwater. ’Ere,” [...] “you did flag us down, dincha? Stuck out your wand ’and, dincha?”
(PoA)
The above experts have basically all the markers of a cockney accent. Shifting vowels, 'H's go missing, words like "'choo" and "dincha", replacing "th" with "ff", etc.
But he doesn't always speak this casually and he does speak more formally when giving Harry the initial introduction to the Knight Bus:
“Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. Just stick out your wand hand, step on board, and we can take you anywhere you want to go. My name is Stan Shunpike, and I will be your conductor this eve —”
(PoA)
So, it's possible Tom and Mrs. Cole are from the East End, but JKR didn't write them with clear Cockney accents like she wrote Stan. I mean, Mrs. Cole got quite drunk in her conversation with Dumbledore, if she had a Cockney accent I would have expected to see letters dropped and vowels shifted like in Stan's first dialogue expert.
So, yeah, Tom grew up in a working class area, but his accent doesn't seem to be Cockney, so you can place Wool's in various areas in London and it's up to your headcanon/iteraputation. Lambeth is actually a very possible location based on the accent and description of Wool's, but there are other possible locations, so, yeah.
