Promotional Information

'Jerry White has written a moving and richly detailed history of those times and those people. They are recalled like a lost tribe, revealing the extraordinary courage of ordinary people in their day-to-day battle for existence.' Bernard Kops, Guardian

About the Author

Professor Jerry White teaches London history at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of London from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. His more recent books include Mansions of Misery- A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison and Zeppelin Nights, a social history of London during the First World War. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by the University of London in 2005 and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Reviews

Prize[d] for its rich, detailed insights into immigrant life in turn-of-the-century Spitalfields... Though White's commentary steers the reader and supplies valuable context, it's the interpolated quotations from tenants which bring the Buildings to colourful, tumultuous life
*Time Out*

With an economy of language, without sentimentality, yet with a sensitive perception, rare for an outsider looking in on an alien world, Jerry White marvellously evokes the lost world of the immigrant 'greener'
*Spectator*

A work of first-class history and a major contribution to the social history of Anglo-Jewry, lively, well-researched and eminently quotable
*Jewish Chronicle*

We are never likely to have another account which sets these personal recollections so firmly in the physical environment in which people grew up, struggled and sometimes flourished. A whole historical episode is illuminated by the decision to focus on just a couple of streets and the people who lived there
*Times Educational Supplement*

Jerry White has given us a book which deserves to be on every historian's shelf
*History Today*

As rich and informative a community study as one could hope to get
*Urban Studies*