Urban district between Stepney and Bow. The name ‘Mile End’ signifies the area’s distance from Aldgate, previously the easternmost gate in London’s Roman city wall and hence the original, and still conventional, western border of the East End. Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) worked for some time in the People’s Palace on Mile End Road, which today is part of Queen Mary University of London. Morrison, in A Child of the Jago (1896), makes the benefactors of the poor convening at the People’s Palace the target of pickpocketing forays carried out by his ‘Jago’ protagonists. Willy Goldman, in East End My Cradle (1940), recalls that the dance hall of the People’s Palace on Mile End Road attracted many Jewish youths of the Whitechapel area during the first decades of the twentieth century, and that many a delightful night had been spent there. Suresh Singh, the author of A Modest Living: Memoirs of a Cockney Sigh (2018), was born in Mile End Hospital in 1962.
For more, please see my entry entitled ‘Mile End’ in Kevin A. Morrison (ed.), London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2022).
Philipp Hunnekuhl 