The strange death of the East End

Instead of turning right and taking the usual route along Regents Canal toward Camden, this weekend we went left and ended up walking through east London, ending up at Victoria Park.

What struck me most was the proliferation of identikit warehouse-style apartments along the route and a strange sense of, well... suffocation.

Let's face it: the east has been a shit-hole for decades, in fact it has never not been a shit-hole until recently, and maybe that's what troubled me...

If the City is London's money-spinning head, then the East End has traditionally been its dirty heart.

But the conquest of wannabees high on the upper-class Cockney fetish of the Lock, Stock brigade and associations with Tracey Emin et al, now appears almost complete. Trouble is, modern Hoxton is as close to the East End of Tracey, Damien and original pioneers Gilbert & George as Montmartre is to the days of Picasso and Verlaine.

Warehouses are become loft apartments, shoe shops bars, and pie and eel shops pie and eel... restaurants.

Nothing wrong with this of course. The rich have got their ertsatz East End, the locals have buggered off to the seaside and only impoverished scribblers like me without the wherewithal to buy my own slice of loft living are left to snipe on the sidelines.

But isn't London without East End-squalor like a crime-free New York, or a Parisian-free Paris? Nice idea, but not quite the real tabasco?

Irony of ironies, the one thing that might save London from becoming ossified by self-satisfaction is the one thing designed to destroy it.

The Blitz may have torn vast chunks out of our housing stock but as a consequence the city is dotted with housing estates that all but the most intrepid trustafarian would hesitate to inhabit, thereby safe-guarding the diversity the city needs to keep its edge.

So thank you, Luftwaffe.