Whitechapel

It would be fair to say the Whitechapel Road is unlikely to be on any tourist's itinerary.It is busy and rundown.But the area has a comparatively long history and here is enough still around in the urban fabric to be worth exploring. And you are not that far from the City, so you can get some interesting views of a very different world if you look back down the road. This was the main road from London to Essex.

There s for example a quite superb drinking fountain (hard to get the perfect photo of this without large municipal bins in the shot). This was erected by the area's Jewish Community in honour of King Edward VII who was seen as at least being non anti-Semitic at a time when it was even worse than in the Labour Party under Corbyn. It is really a very fine monument that would grace a much nicer district.

You need to look above the run down shops around here to see the fine Victorian and Edwardian buildings in which they are housed. This, as you can just make just from the inscription below the top floor, is the wonderfully titled "Working Lads Institute". It was built to offer distractions to working boys over the age of 13. Interesting to see what was thought a suitable distraction - if you look closely at the inscriptions over the two archways on the ground floor, the one on the right is for the gymnasium and the left the Lecture Hall. I wonder how many youth clubs have a lecture hall....

This upmarket apartment block used to be a brewery, when you made commercial buildings to be handsome as well as utilitarian.

The Blind Beggar pub, a haunt of the Kray twins.

Then along the road there is a sliver of greenery in the form of the Mile End Waste (clearly not named by an estate agent). It is just an avenue of trees with several monuments to the Booths. William Booth formed the Salvation Army

William's statue faces that of his wife, Catherine.

Aral gem that has somehow survived the centuries are the Trinity Almshouses, built in 1695 for "decayed" shipmasters. This was a popular area for sailors in the 17th and 18th centuries - semi-rural but close to the docks. There are these two gatehouses (with ships flanking the roof) and in the middle a gate behind which there are the two rows of little terraced homes leading to a chapel at the end.

Next door is the Tower Hamlets Mission for the homeless. Eye-catching mural.

Bust of King Edward VII erected by East End freemasons in 1911

 The former Wickham's department store, from the era when every prosperous urban area had a department store. The unusual feature is the little white building in the second photo. The shop beneath it was a jewellers shop that predated Wickhams, and who refused to move out. So Wickhams had to built around it. To add insult to injury, Wickhams closed down in 1969 while the jewellers managed to hold out until the 1980s before the inevitable closure with the area going downmarket.