London Folk Tales – review

London Folk Tales by Helen East

Ah London. What can one do but gasp on seeing its glories strung out along the river and down the ages? It is like a civilisation in itself, so multilayered and complex. We are subsumed by it.

The more you learn about London, the more is revealed, yet something always seems curiously out of reach, and even those who’ve lived here all their lives get lost in it.

Storytellers thrive on this intimation of secret worlds, the little Londons within London. Dickens understood this, hence his love of ancient taverns. So did practitioners of oral storytelling, who ruled the roost before the novel.

This inkling that there is a parallel, fantastical realm alongside the everyday world of Prets, corporate dreariness and the grinding daily commute runs through London Folk Tales by Helen East, who is fascinated by the spirit of places and has been telling stories professionally since 1979.

It is a collection of suitably demotic tales ordered roughly chronologically from the foundation myth of Gog and Magog (England’s equivalent of Rome’s Romulus and Remus) to a sweet story from the Windrush generation describing the city as a secret cooking pot that mixes up and infuses different tastes and cultures over time but loses its magic if it gets washed.

In between we hear stories about Southwark Geese (prostitutes), toshers (sewermen) and shapeshifting rats, the Tyburn Tree (the “three-legged mare” or gallows) and London’s legendary highwaymen.

You’ll also see place names differently once you have read this book. Bromley was once Brembel Lega, the “bramble meadow land”, Stepney was Stebenhythe, a simple landing place, and Hackney Wick was “just a kink in the bank, a place where small boats could harbour”.

In her introduction East writes of how her grandfather was born “in earshot of the Bow Bells. Hence he was a cockney, which some say is an egg laid by a cockerel and others a Londoner with a liking for doggerel. He’d tantalise me with words of double meaning and stories that went nowhere… His stories made me reach across the centuries and touch another time.”

The same can be said about the stories in this book, which are in fact very simple and yet suffuse the city with new meaning.

They remind you real London – as opposed to the one seen by tourists, temporary residents or those who think it is just another city – can be a tough place to know but contains glimmers of magic.

London Folk Tales by Helen East is published by The History Press, ISBN:978-0-7524618-5-4, RRP £9.99.