Did you start your nursing career at Tredegar House and sometimes walk to Whitechapel for your clinical experience?   If so, what kind of image do you carry in your head of the route - and when did you last update it?  Tower Hamlets has undergone many changes in the last ten years. The Mile End Road and Whitechapel Road are now a red route with many of the side streets being blocked off or with speed humps to deter the local 'boy racers'.

Most of the post-war gaps along the roadside have finally been filled with flats and housing. The south side of the road is still mainly housing with some new terraces and refurbishment on the Ocean Estate where flat roofs are being replaced with sloping ones. St Clements continues in use for the moment.

The old houses along the north side of Mile End Road between Tredegar and Mile End Tube station have been refurbished. The Coborn Road and Tredegar Square conservation areas have become 'much sought after' and therefore very expensive. The TA building is still there, but the cinema was demolished long ago and replaced with a modern office building.

The green belt at the junction of Mile End Road with Grove Road and Burdett Road is in the process of being transformed into Mile End Park. On the north side there will be an art area and ecology park including a small lake and hill garden, and a play area. South of Mile End Road will be a terraced garden, green space, an adventure play-park and large sports centre. Linking the two will be a 'green bridge' over the Mile End Road alongside the church. At the moment the site is fenced off and a sea of mud.  The whole park is to be linked with a solar-lit pathway catering for walkers and cyclists. Most of the new park buildings will be located underneath this undulating path. Millennium Commission funding has already contributed 12.3 million pounds. Community involvement in the planning and design has included four focus groups meeting monthly.

The Half Moon Theatre has become a public house after years of being 'dark' and a brief spell as a children's play space. Past Stepney Green Underground station the Mile End Baths have been transformed into the Globe Centre providing services for people in East London who have HIV or AIDS.  

The Headquarters offices of the Charringtons Brewery, built in the 1975 next to the Mile End Road are to be demolished and a large retail development built in the middle of the site. The plan is for parking to the front, refurbishment of the old Counting House built in 1872 on the corner of the site, a row of houses and a hostel to the rear of the site. The developers hope to attract hospital staff to the hostel. The local residents association campaigned for two years to get modifications to the building designs so they will look less like warehouses plonked down in a conservation area of early Victorian housing, which once catered for the brewery staff.

The rows of small shops have changed hands several times and now provide Indian, Chinese and Thai restaurants, betting shops, wholesale clothing shops, wholesale Asian grocers, betting shops and estate agents. The Trinity Almshouses are still intact but to their left and right are new residential housing areas. The former chapel at the back, built in 1695, provides a community centre.

If evidence was needed that East End aspirations are to go upmarket,  then it lies in East Mount Street.  Where the eggs were shelled there is now a restaurant and the Whitechapel Pottery.  Even the rear of the hospital, next to the Holland wing, is undergoing a visual transformation and carries its date (1996) in the brickwork at the top.

Denise Barnett

1. Ridge T. 1998. Central Stepney History Walk. Central Stepney Regeneration Board. Available for the Royal London Hospital Archives.

2. Ramsey WG. 1997. The East End Then and Now. London, After The Battle. ISBN 0-900913-99-1