Into the heart of Bow

Cockney feet mark the beat of history, sang Noël Coward, as if he had ever been east of Holborn. Yet the sugary wartime sentiment finds a moving and resonant echo in Melanie McGrath’s new work of social excavation. The past casts an unusually deep shadow over Bow. And, cleverly, she has found a fresh means of exploring these striated layers of heritage: through the enduring local appetite for minced beef pie, mashed potatoes, and side orders of stewed eels.

G. Kelly’s Pie and Mash is the 100-year- old restaurant in question, on the Roman Road in Bow (there are branches elsewhere). Pie and mash served with ‘liquor’ (parsley sauce) and eels might be described as the forerunner of fried chicken: comfort food devised at a time when comfort was badly needed. It ought now to be an anachronism; yet demand seems consistent. What might this tell us about the broader flow of East End history?

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McGrath follows not only the Kellys, and those who worked with the firm across the generations — baking the pies, decapitating the skittish eels — but also the lives of their customers and the market traders all around. From the nerve-tearing insecurity of 19th-century occupations like matchbox making, to successive waves of new immigrant communities; from the multiple horrors of the Great War and the Blitz to a 1970s boutique called ‘Miss Boobs’, McGrath has listened closely to stories passed down. Even those that are slightly old hat come with gaudy new plumage.

The first V-1 flying bomb landed on Grove Road in June 1944; Ron Moss recalls how the blast sent a chemist’s supply of sanitary towels into the sky, and they then fell ‘like giant snowflakes’. In the late 19th century, women who worked at the Bryant and May match factory not only contracted the unspeakably painful and deadly bone-rotting condition ‘Phossy Jaw’; there was also ‘lavishly fluorescent vomit’.