Introduction:The River to the World

By Dylan Potter

 

Once again, it started with the Romans. Londinium wasn't their capital, but it was a fundamental port-city from which they could import and export trade with and beyond their Empire.

 

London's history is richly intertwined with its river, the Thames. For this was the route from which its explorers and colonial ships set sale, along which Kings and Queens departed for war, up which invaders sailed inland, upon which slaves were imported from Africa and prisoners exported to Australia. It is also the route by which exotic foods, spices and dazzling treasures first entered the nation.

 

Upon the edge of the old, walled Roman city, William the Conqueror, the new French King of England imposed his statement of French superiority over the old Saxon ways: the White Tower, the first Tower of London. Spreading out eastwards from this point grew a series of villages (or hamlets) and docks; Whitechapel, Wapping, Stepney, Limehouse and Bow, which became collectively known as the 'Tower Hamlets.'

 

Over the years, these areas of what would become known as East London, were informed by cultures from around the world. At the docks, on the Isle of Dogs, ships off-loaded cargoes from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Far East and tobacco from America. Great explorers like Sir Walter Raleigh and Captain Cook (who lived in Stepney) set sail from here.

 

And for hundreds of years, migrants arrived here. From the Chinese who settled in Limehouse, to the Jews who settled in Whitechapel, to the Asians and Africans arriving since the ‘60’s, to the Poles and Russians who come here today. Far from a collection of small villages, Tower Hamlets, as an emblem of London, can truly be called a multi-cultural 'world city'.

 

For this, the second stage in our journey across the nation’s history, our tales are intended to shed light on perhaps little-known journeys to and from the city. We follow the invading Normans who, like the Romans, marched upwards from the south, bringing with them yet another European culture that re-shaped the English language.

 

We peek at the animals in the Tower Menagerie, who symbolised a world still being discovered. We re-tell the true story of Pocahontas’ famed visit to London and look at the long history of the Jewish people; their migrations in and out of the nation through waves of persecution that many of today’s refugees might find parallels with.

 

In the bicentenary year of the abolition of the slave trade, we look at the traumatic journeys of Africans kidnapped into slavery aboard the infamous slave ship La Amistad – including the African slave Cinque – and consider the journeys of freed black men and women, who in the early 1800’s, were shipped off to Sierra Leone in an ill-fated,
ill-conceived venture to ‘re-settle’ black people in an Africa they’d never been too!

 

London is a city in which history sits alongside the present. It is a place where medieval churches crouch beneath towering skyscrapers. And it’s also possible, to see a reflection of the people of the past in our modern, multi-cultural city. For today, London, and especially Tower Hamlets, is a new home for so many who have journeyed here from across the whole world.