Sam Patterson (Bird) will be at Brick Lane Bookshop on Thursday 12th September from 7pm onwards signing copies of her new book, Stepney Then & Now.
Stepney is an area with many well-known associations and images from the poverty-stricken slums of the late nineteenth century to the iconic borough it became for architecture during the Festival of Britain. Stepney also had to soak up heavy bomb damage during the Blitz and sent her children away to safety in the Second World War. For those left behind they faced their own war. Among Stepney’s rich history there was the classical confrontation between Mosley’s fascists and the socialist left at the ‘Battle of Cable Street’, and the earlier dramatic ‘Siege of Sidney Street’ when Liberal Home Secretary Winston Churchill rooted out an anarchist cell. Here is Stepney as it was then compared to how we see it today.