Identifier: eastlondon00besa (find matches)
Title: East London
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Besant, Walter, Sir, 1836-1901
Subjects: Poor
Publisher: New York, The Century Co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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her, with a slight advantagegiven to the longer side. You are not perhaps interestedin the construction of the bridge, but you must own thatthere is no more splendid gate to a port and a city towhich thousands of ships resort than this noble structure.The bascule swings up about seventeen times a day, butthe ships are more and more going into the docks below,so that the raising of the arms is becoming every day ararer event. It is a pleasant sight to see the huge arms risingup as lightly as if they were two deal planks, which the greatship passes through; then the arms fall back gently and noise-lessly, and the traffic goes on again, the whole interruptionnot lasting more than a few minutes—less time than a blockin Cheapside or Broadway. Beyond the Tower are the docks named after St. Kath-erine. They are so named to commemorate an ancientmonument and a modern act of vandalism more disgracefulperhaps than any of those many acts by which things ancientand precious have been destroyed.
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The Water-Gate of London : Tower Bridge from the East Side of the Tower. THE POOL AND THE RIVERSIDE 65 On the site of those docks there stood for seven hundredyears one of the most picturesque and venerable of City foun-dations. Here was the House cahed that of St. Katherineby the Tower. Its first foundress was Matilda, queen ofStephen. She created the place and endowed it, in the spiritof the time, in grief for the loss of two children who diedand were buried in the Church of the Holy Trinity Priory,Aldgate. Later on, Eleanor, Queen of Edward I, added cer-tain manors to the little foundation, which had hitherto beenbut a cell to the Holy Trinity Priory. She appointed andendowed a master, three brethren, three sisters, the bedes-woman, and six poor clerks. Fifty years later, a third Queen,Philippa,wife of Edward III. increased the endowments.We should hardly expect this ancient foundation to surviveto the present day, but it has done so. The house was sparedat the Dissolution; it was

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