Families would rent a living room, a bedroom and a kitchen – perhaps from an unscrupulous landlord. No one owned their houses in Whitechapel Road in 1935. There were perils on the street – assaults, broken windows – and this was a beleaguered community, which was another reason people wanted to leave." "If we'd been here in 1935 the walls would have been plastered with political posters and graffiti – fascists, communists and Labour were all very active here. Some things never change: just as the last general election saw east London facing the prospect of the BNP, so in 1935 this was an area bordered by strongholds of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. It's not a desperately poor area it's a thrusting, thriving commercial community." "The main wage earner would be making 50 shillings to £3 per week. "This is the area of the rag trade," White says. Anyone who made it moved out – east to Romford, west to Golders Green, north to Stamford Hill." And the means of making it out was through the area's dominant industry – tailoring, which supplied the Royal London Hospital, just across the street, with a regular supply of patients suffering from tuberculosis. But even in the 30s the Jews were moving away. Whitechapel has long been an area of immigrants and, 75 years ago, White says, "this would be an almost entirely Jewish area. The faces of both traders and shoppers are brown – we're in the heart of east London's Bangladeshi community. There's a buzz on Whitechapel Road in the middle of the morning with the street market in full swing, food and brightly coloured clothes and cloths piled high on the stalls along the north side of the road. You get some sense of legacy from the movement of the bohemians into Notting Hill in the 60s, or artists moving to Hackney and London Fields in the 70s." The only bohemian area 75 years ago, he reckons, would have been Soho. "You would have had artists clustering in areas of low rent but there would be no sense of fashionable legacy from that. "I think that's a pretty recent phenomenon," White tells me. We pass through Shoreditch and Hoxton, where the influx of artists and creative types ratcheted neglected areas into fashionability, and I wonder if there were equivalents in interwar London. You won't get a house for 50 quid around here these days: the website .uk lists the least expensive road in the Angel area as Gopsall Street, with the average price of a property being £125,286, and there are no gorgeous period terraces here. We head east, along the blue properties of the board, from Euston Road (originally an 18th-century London bypass), on to unlovely Pentonville Road, past the Angel – a slum when the game was launched, and now the southern border of fashionable Islington. White and I take a cab to the Royal London Hospital, on Whitechapel Road. To this day, I meet people who are convinced the game originated in London." "To decide on its street names, and his secretary travelled to London and spent a day canvassing the city to pick street names that corresponded in relative worth to the increasing values as one goes round the board," Orbanes writes to me. Our traverse of London is an unconscious echo of how the locations were decided, though I don't discover this until a few days later, in an exchange of emails with Philip E Orbanes, a former executive at Parker Brothers who is also the chronicler of the game's history. More to the point, perhaps, Monopoly is celebrating its 75th anniversary around the world this year – and who are we to poop the party? But Victor Watson, Waddington's general manager, got his first copy on a Friday in December 1935, and by the Monday he'd signed a deal with Parker Brothers to license the game for the UK. The Leeds firm Waddingtons didn't publish Monopoly over here until 1936. What White and I plan to do is roll our way round the board to discover how some of the areas of the London Monopoly board have changed in the intervening three-quarters of a century. The first foreign edition was the British game, with London streets, followed swiftly by versions in France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Italy and Austria, before it spread around the world. That first edition used the New Jersey resort of Atlantic City to supply its street names, as the US edition still does, but the game crossed the oceans almost immediately. It's 75 years since Parker Brothers, the Massachusetts-based games company, published Monopoly, the property speculation board game that has become one of the enduring staples of toy shops the world over. My companion in perambulation is London historian Jerry White, and he is preparing to roll the dice to determine the first stop on our journey around the Monopoly board. We are standing at Go – the Guardian's reception desk – with £200 to spend, and the capital is ready to unfold before us.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |