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Travel: East London's transformation

Once the domain of Jack the Ripper and gangsters, East London Cockneys now rub shoulders with artists and middle-class professionals
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When visitors to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games head from their central London hotels out to the Olympic Park, they may be surprised at how far they have to go.

Yes, they'll still be in London, but they'll travel a good way eastward, to the down-at-the-heels working-class suburb of Stratford (not to be confused with Shakespeare's "on Avon"), which not many decades ago was a mostly noxious light industrial area, and a few centuries before that a farming hamlet off in the middle of nowhere.

Today, it takes half an hour to travel from central London to Stratford on the tube (Central Line) and a little less by rail service.

Fact is, the City of London is using the much-coveted Olympic Games to reclaim and revitalize this unattractive, soil-contaminated and unvisited part of its vast metropolis.

But, in the past few decades, much the same process has taken place in what is commonly known as East London, just beyond the City of London walls (financial district).

It was here, in districts like Whitechapel and Hoxton, that Jack the Ripper made his name, and the Kray twins, Reggie and Ron, perfected a gangster lifestyle that put them in prison for murder and extortion while retaining the devotion of East London Cockneys.

Today the "gates" that once made it clear who lived inside and out (of the City) - such as Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Moorgate and Ludgate - are just names (or underground stations). "The meaning of the gates has been carted away with the brickwork," writes Ian Sinclair in his book on a still somewhat anarchist East London, Lights Out for the Territory.

Yes, today East London is hipper than hip. Thousands of artists live in Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Smithfield, Shoreditch, Hoxton and Bethnal Green. And handsome three-storey Georgian houses in the streets around Brick Lane and Liverpool Street station that a few decades ago were derelict, now cost maybe a million pounds. Said a friend from West London over cappuccino at a Whitechapel café: "Twenty-five years ago I'd never have dreamt of coming down here." Yet here we were, preparing to see the sights.

We walked past the Art-Deco Whitechapel Art Gallery (1899), into Brick Lane -still a scruffy commercial thoroughfare filled with curry restaurants and sari and fabric shops. This is Bangla Town, named for its large Bangladeshi community.

At the corner of Fournier Street stands a building "that pretty much tells you the history of the area," said my friend, an amateur historian. Built in 1743 as a chapel for Protestants from France, it eventually morphed into a Methodist church, then a synagogue for Eastern European Jews. Today it's the London Jamme Masjid ("great mosque"), serving Bengalis who mostly immigrated in the 1960s and '70s.

And London's East End remains home to Cockneys, still dishing out jellied eels and cockles from a couple of street wagons, and selling cheap clothes and fabric on Petticoat Lane and in the refurbished Spitalfields market (whose outdoor area is otherwise filled with funky clothing stalls and mid-range eateries).

Brick Lane, and the streets that run off it, are dotted with avant-garde clothing outlets and coffee houses, bakeries and wine bars. At one ultra-arty shop, the products are expensive trowels, work gloves and other tools as if they're new to the planet. On Sunday, Brick Lane turns into a giant flea market, specializing in antiques and junk.

We turned into Fournier Street, lined with Georgian houses built by Huguenot silk-weavers in the 18 th century. Today, artists and middle-class professionals use the light-flooded, roof-level lofts that once held the weavers' looms for studios or home offices.

Where Fournier meets Commercial Street stands the Christ Church Spitalfields, designed in the early 1700s by the famed Nicholas Hawksmoor. On the opposite corner sits the original red-brick-and-green-gabled Spitalfields market building.

To the northwest of Spitalfields nestles the oldest church in London, St. Bartholomew-the-Great. Scenes from Four Weddings and a Funeral , and Shakespeare in Love were shot in an interior that dates to the 12 th century. Nearby is the Victorian Smithfield (meat) Market, surrounded by pubs and restaurants, and the Charterhouse, a monastery rebuilt in Tudor times as an Oxford-like college.

The Dennis Severs House at nearby 18 Folgate Street recreates the life of a family of 18th-century silk-weavers with a tour that includes (on my visit) candlelight, the sounds of horses' hoofs on cobble, and the aroma of a roast on the fire.

The Geffrye Museum, a short bus ride from the Liverpool Street Station, is devoted to the best of English furniture making over the centuries. Once an enclave of almshouses for poor ironmongers, the complex was converted in 1911 to a museum "for the education of craftsmen." Today a series of galleries illustrate the major periods of English interior design, including Elizabethan, Jacobean and Stuart, Early Georgian and Edwardian.

Half a century ago, a majority of homes in East London lacked an indoor toilet. One of the poorest areas was Hoxton, widely known as a slum. Today Hoxton is known for its artists, musicians and what Time Out calls its "arrogant chic." The White Cube, a striking contemporary art gallery opened in 2000 in Hoxton Square, paved the way.

One night I ate near Liverpool Street Station. Two of us paid $75 for a pizza, salad and glass of wine. And eastward in Stratford - where this past summer, a pizza restaurant was about as fancy as dining got - you can be sure that by the summer of 2012 a pizza and wine will cost that or more.