Fine silks and fiery curries

Genial, erudite and companionable over most of its 760 pages, this stout Georgian brick of a neighbourhood history at length flings itself in fury through a toff’s window. Much of Dan Cruickshank’s book has shown with learned charm how, in its tangle of ancient streets just east of the City of London, Spitalfields has always hosted the rough with the smooth, tumult beside elegance. The East End patch where he has lived for four decades — his own 1720s home, a finely embellished history of inner London in itself, gets 15 loving pages — has ‘constantly embodied paradox: great wealth alongside appalling poverty, beauty juxtaposed with squalor’.

As he nears his finale, the twin streams of this urban microcosm join. The patrician and pleb, the gentleman aesthete and the riotous rabble-rouser, meet. He presents a quietly mutinous indictment of the latest villain to threaten these beloved streets with ‘huge and irredeemable change’ in the name of the profit-hungry redevelopment that has convulsed this area ever since, in 1539, the Dissolution began to break up the great estate of St Mary’s Priory and its hospital: Spitalfields.