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This paper explores the performance of spoken word poetry at three venues in East London through an attention to the ways in which participants experience and conceptualize these expressive events. Drawing from observation at events and interviews with performers, this paper illuminates the most commonly reported motivations behind the uptake of this genre of performance: achieving emotional healing and providing coping tools to others. By investigating these motivations, this paper considers how spoken word performance can become a personal and collective process of care, where performers overcome individual struggle through shifting bodily orientations and attitudes, while attuning affectively with others through pedagogical caretaking relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the employment experience of workers at the Eastern Palace Cinema in East London, in 1934. In August 1934, a member of staff murdered the cinema's manager. The witness statements taken in the subsequent criminal investigation give a unique insight into the operations of 1930s cinemas and the working conditions of the people who were employed in them. The statements give voice to a group of service staff that had limited means of relating their lived experience. The article contrasts these statements with contemporary advice on cinema operations from guidebooks and trade papers to explore how trade advice translated into reality. It also draws on archival sources to excavate the backgrounds of cinema staff across roles. This adds to our understanding of the experience of staff employed in the most popular leisure industry of interwar Britain, an area that has not yet been extensively researched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The British Yiddish writer Katie Brown wrote humorous stories and sketches for the London Yiddish newspapers Di post (The Post) in the 1930s and Di tsayt (The Times) in the 1940s. The stories, set in London’s Jewish East End, concern the day-to-day effects of immigration, poverty, and Jewish culture in Britain. After the Second World War, in a bombed-out East End where Jewish migration to the suburbs was accelerating, Brown did not write entirely new sketches, but rather edited versions of her prewar stories. Looking at the earlier and later stories together, we get a sense of the changes happening to London’s Jewish community: the decline of Jewish culture and religious practice, the changing relationship with the Eastern European homeland, and the decline of the Yiddish language. Through close reading and analysis, this article gives historical background to Brown and the social, cultural, and political context of her stories. It situates Brown as the only female journalist writing regularly for the press and identifies her unique perspective in making poignant interventions into Jewish debates of the day through stories of small incidents in family life. She raises questions around how to maintain a Jewish identity in England and visibility as a Jew in a Christian world, and traces change through two decades by describing the tension between the immigrant generation and their children. Using a range of neglected source material in Yiddish, this article throws new light on the Jewish East End in its twilight years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban intensification is a key planning strategy in the UK, but one that is frequently resisted by local residents objecting to transformations of urban character. This paper is concerned with the factors that underlie such resistance, and with the opportunities for addressing them through the planning process. The paper relates a case-study of the East London district of Dalston where a mixed-use redevelopment project, strongly supported by local authorities, was fiercely resisted by residents who claimed that the existing character of the locality was being violated. Reflecting on the case through theories of place, gentrification, and planning process, we argue that resident resistance was not simply a case of self-interested NIMBYism, but a product of important differences in the ways that character was variously constructed and valued by local authorities and community members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The minority ethnic population of Britain has grown rapidly in recent decades, but the percentage of minority ethnic pupils has increased more rapidly. This is particularly the case in inner London where over 50% of secondary school pupils are now from minority ethnic groups. The paper examines the issue of schooling and ethnic mix in East London with a focus on parental perceptions of school ethnic mix and parental decision making. It draws on secondary data on school ethnic mix and in-depth interviews with parents. It shows that, while most parents are happy with some degree of ethnic mix, the mix found in many schools is far from their ideal mix, particularly for White parents, and influences their decision making, possibly intensifying the segregation of ethnic groups in schools. The situation is made more complex by an element of class avoidance and attraction to schools with a strong aspirational and attainment ethos, irrespective of their ethnic mix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital industries cluster known as Silicon Roundabout has been quietly growing in East London since the 1990s. Rebranded Tech City, it is the focus of huge public and government attention. National and local policy makers wish to accelerate the local area's development: such cluster policies are back in vogue as part of a reawakened interest in industrial policy. Surprisingly little is known about Tech City's firms or the wider ecosystem, however, and cluster programmes have a high failure rate. We perform a detailed mixed-methods analysis, combining rich enterprise-level data with semistructured interviews. We track firm and employment growth from 1997 to 2010 and identify several distinctive features: branching from creative to digital content industries; street-level sorting of firms; the importance of local amenities and a lack of conventional cluster actors such as universities or anchor businesses. We also argue that the existing policy mix embodies a number of tensions, and suggest areas for improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]