Cable Street

David Rosenberg conducts history walks in East London. On Saturday afternoon we did the ‘Antifascist Footprints’ walk from Aldgate East station, outside the Whitechapel Art Gallery to Cable Street near Shadwell Station. Much of the inner east consists of a mix of dowdy post-war development, decaying 1970s buildings and vacant lots but Rosenberg brought the area to life. His brief was the 1930s and the rise of Oswald Mosley’s fascist organisation but he went back through the whole history of East London and its various waves of immigration and ended with a postscript on Mosley’s later doings.  The mural shown here is in Cable Street, the site of the famous confrontation on Sunday October 4, 1936, between the Metropolitan Police conducting a march by the British Union of Fascists and various local and antifascist groups (Jewish, Irish,  socialist, communist and anarchist). An early poem by Lee Harwood, ‘Cable Street’ details the event.