eighty-strong mob of skinheads emerged from nearby pubs and headed for the crowd outside the centre, chorusing ‘Rule Britannia’. One threw a milk bottle, which smashed among his opponents. As police broke up the ensuing scuffles, inside the building the election result was quietly confirmed. Derek Beackon, an unemployed van driver and candidate for the British National Party, had won the Millwall by-election by just seven votes.
It may have only been one local council seat out of thousands – and two fewer than were held at the time by the Monster Raving Loony Party – but the election of a BNP candidate sent ripples far beyond the Isle of Dogs. Over the days that followed, news crews and reporters descended on this little spit of land that sticks out into the Thames from London’s East End. They wanted to know why 1,480 of its residents had voted for a man with a twenty-year history of involvement in racist street politics, whose campaign leaflets complained that ‘our children are being forced to learn the languages and religions and cultures of Asia, forced to eat their food’, demanded ‘Rights for Whites’ and promised to ‘put the British people first’.
Was this an aberration, ‘a nasty little local difficulty’, as the Daily Mail put it? Academics were wheeled out to explain the East End’s association with far-right movements, stretching back almost a century, via the National Front and Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, to the British Brothers’ League of 1902. This part of London had for centuries been a stopping-off point for immigrants, something that had long made it a target for demagogues seeking to whip up hatred. Now, just as newspapers were reporting preparations for the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s defeat, voters in one of the areas hit hardest by the Blitz had delivered a stinging rebuke to the establishment by electing a fascist.
And perhaps there was more to come. ‘The people of East London have always been known for their tolerance and easygoing temperament. Recently some of them, and there are many more, have got fed up with being undermined,’ warned one letter-writer to the local paper. ‘They voted for the one who had the guts to speak on their behalf.’1
What, though, was being undermined?
‘I was the last registered stevedore in Millwall Dock,’ George Pye told me, as we sat in his office at St John’s Community Centre, a small room dominated by a painting in which a square-jawed docker thrust a piece of paper under the nose of his cowering boss. ‘When they closed the dock – or murdered it, I should say – I was on holiday. All the other dockers went to Tilbury but when I came back, I refused.’
Pye, a fifth generation ‘Islander’, as many locals here refer to themselves, was describing the devastation visited upon his neighbourhood when the docks that had sustained it closed in 1980. ‘When we opened this place [in the early 1980s], it was packed. You used to get lots of families down here because you could bring your kids. Now the only ones left are pockets of older people.’ It was a Friday night, but the streets outside were almost deserted, and the centre’s function room was nearly empty, with only a handful of elderly white men and women drinking and playing darts. Were it not for the towers of Canary Wharf that loomed nearby, you might never have guessed that this place had been at the crossroads of an empire for more than two centuries – or that Pye’s story was proof of the destruction it could leave in its wake.
Lying just a couple of miles from the City, the Isle of Dogs, a marshy peninsula surrounded by water on three sides, was transformed into a hub of international trade with the opening of the West India Dock in 1802. As Britain’s empire grew, so did the docks, and migrants from Britain, Ireland and Europe were drawn to work there, their fortunes tied to the booms and slumps of the global economy. Slum conditions and precarious employment led to the formation of the modern trade union movement at the end of the nineteenth century – and a tradition of protest that is still celebrated in East End legend. The ‘Island’ was severely damaged by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War, but those inhabitants who stayed were rewarded with a huge programme of council house building.
When the London docks began a slow but steady decline after the Second World War, hit by a fall in manufacturing exports and the rise of containerization, the East End was bereft. In 1955, they had given work to 31,000 people – by 1975, this had fallen to 9,800. And the industries that supported shipping were cut adrift, too: 75,000 jobs were lost in East London between 1971 and 1981.2 Islanders, cut off from the rest of the East End (literally so, when the swing bridges at the north end of the peninsula were raised to let ships pass) were particularly hard hit, voicing their discontent in 1970 when a group of local campaigners issued a ‘Unilateral Declaration of Independence’.
The final blow was delivered by the Thatcher Government in 1980 – a move that Pye, like many of his colleagues, saw as political. ‘It was like with the miners, Maggie took the unions on in stages.’ Pye was hardly a militant – he told me, proudly, that his union branch had only ever gone on strike twice in three decades – but even today, he is adamant that the docks could have been saved. ‘What makes me so bitter is that all this time, they were saying, “We need to move into the twenty-first century.” Well we had containerization here, we had a bigger berth for the bigger ships, we had cruise ships docking here. The apple and pear trade from New Zealand and Australia was guaranteed for another three years. Everything they was talking about we were doing.’
Instead, the government’s solution was a combination of top-down diktat and economic laissez-faire – the essence, perhaps, of what became Thatcherism. In 1981, the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) was established as a private company; the following year, a huge swathe of London’s riverside, stretching east along the Thames Estuary was designated an Enterprise Zone, offering low tax rates and lax planning regulations to property developers. The idea was to transform Docklands, as it was rebranded, into a world financial centre, focused on Canary Wharf. Former dock land was sold off for development, prompting land values to soar; a new gold rush from which the Islanders were excluded. Despite £6 billion of public money being spent on ‘regeneration’, unemployment remained 20 per cent on the Isle of Dogs. ‘There was a missed opportunity here,’ said Pye, who today works as a pierman, unloading boatloads of tourists and City workers at Canary Wharf. ‘The finance stuff is fine, but they put all their eggs in one basket. It’s crazy not to use water when you’ve got the Thames on your doorstep.’
Islanders were furious: they were watching steel and glass palaces rise in front of them, yet their children couldn’t find jobs or, increasingly, a place to live. The Right to Buy scheme – a Thatcher Government policy introduced in 1980 that gave council tenants the right to buy their homes at subsidised rates – was eating away at the number of council homes available, and the LDDC was actively hostile to building more social housing, preferring to encourage developments aimed at affluent professionals. In July 1986, protesters from the Association of Island Communities released thousands of bees and a flock of sheep into a tent where the cream of the world’s finance industry had gathered to watch the governor of the Bank of England turn the first sod of earth to mark the beginning of construction work at Canary Wharf.3 Beyond a few colourful headlines, their protest was ignored.
One year later, a new dimension would be added to this already fractious situation. My conversation with Pye took a pause, as he attended to two Asian women in headscarves who had come to book the function room for a wedding. ‘I’ll give you a discount, as you won’t be needing the bar, I take it?’
In 1987, sixteen-year-old Syeda Choudhury, along with her parents, brother and sister, became one of the first Bengali families to move on to the Isle of Dogs. ‘It was scary,’ Choudhury told me, her accent a mix of Cockney and Bengali, when we met in 2011. ‘We lived up by Commercial Road [in Whitechapel, north-west of the Isle of Dogs], where lots of other Bengalis lived. A lot of people had told us that the Isle of Dogs was not a nice area, but at that time the council made only one offer for housing, so you had to take what you could get.’ The Choudhurys took up residence on the Barkantine estate, whose pointy-roofed tower blocks still stand today, a stubborn objection to the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf. The ‘Islanders’
