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Rothschild Buildings
  • Published: 8 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446483060
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

Rothschild Buildings

Life in an East-End Tenement Block 1887 - 1920




'Jerry White has written a moving and richly detailed history of those times and those people. They are recalled like a lost tribe, revealing the extraordinary courage of ordinary people in their day-to-day battle for existence' - Guardian

Winner of the Jewish Chronicle Harold H. Wingate Literary Award.

Rothschild Buildings were typical of the 'model dwellings for the working classes' which were such an important part of the response to late-Victorian London's housing problem. They were built for poor but respectable Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the community which put down roots there was to be characteristic of the East End Jewish working class in its formative years.

By talking to people who grew up in the Buildings in the 1890s and after, and using untapped documentary evidence from a wide range of public and private sources, the author re-creates the richly detailed life of that community and its relations with the economy and culture around it. The book shows how cramped and austere housing was made into homes; how the mechanism of class domination, of which the Buildings were part, was both accepted and fought against; how a close community was riven with constantly shifting tensions; and how that community co-existed in surprising ways with the East End casual poor of 'outcast London'.

It provides unique and fascinating insights into immigrant and working-class life at the turn of the last century.

  • Published: 8 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446483060
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

About the author

Jerry White

Professor Jerry White teaches London history at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of London from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. His more recent books include Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison and Zeppelin Nights, a social history of London during the First World War. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by the University of London in 2005 and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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Praise for Rothschild Buildings

A work of first-class history and a major contribution to the social history of Anglo-Jewry, lively, well-researched and eminently quotable

Jewish Chronicle

As rich and informative a community study as one could hope to get

Urban Studies

Jerry White has given us a book which deserves to be on every historian's shelf

Paul Thompson, History Today

Prize[d] for its rich, detailed insights into immigrant life in turn-of-the-century Spitalfields... Though White's commentary steers the reader and supplies valuable context, it's the interpolated quotations from tenants which bring the Buildings to colourful, tumultuous life

Time Out

We are never likely to have another account which sets these personal recollections so firmly in the physical environment in which people grew up, struggled and sometimes flourished. A whole historical episode is illuminated by the decision to focus on just a couple of streets and the people who lived there

Times Educational Supplement

With an economy of language, without sentimentality, yet with a sensitive perception, rare for an outsider looking in on an alien world, Jerry White marvellously evokes the lost world of the immigrant 'greener'

Spectator