East London’s CultureLine

Let’s hear it for the East London rail line, reborn this May as a splendid retro-orange limb of the Overground network, linking the capital’s transport-starved south and east to Hackney.

It also connects Goldsmiths art kids with Shoreditch scenesters; some of London’s poorest, yet culturally rich communities; good music bars (Vortex Jazz club in Hackney, New Cross’ Amersham Arms) with music lovers; and an abundance of cheap, tasty cuisine (Turkish in Dalston, Bangladeshi in Whitechapel) with adventurous foodies.

But if your fix is culture, the line has also widened access to many overlooked museums, which have recently got together under the banner ‘CultureLine’. Among hundreds of now-easier-to-reach curiosities are George Washington’s false teeth at the London Hospital Museum, Africa’s largest mask at the Horniman Museum and the purse of the suffragette who threw herself under King George V’s horse at the Women’s Library.

The Library, a few minutes’ walk from the area’s celebrated Whitechapel Gallery, turns out to be one of the network’s most notable, if under-appreciated, gems. It’s displaying artworks inspired by the centre’s historical archives, and one film showcases a vocal composition sung from the point of view of female witch-hunters, crusaders’ wives and plague-stricken women. The results are darker and more compelling than an Aphex Twin video (don’t miss the composition being performed live on September 23).

Another overlooked venue takes us straight to the heart of the train line itself. Were it not for the Brunel museum, there might be little to remind blasé passengers that the new line passes through one of the first river tunnels in the world, painstakingly dug by oxygen-starved workers by the light of oil lamps, while raw sewage dripped onto their heads.

The museum, housed in Brunel’s original engine room, shows that before being sold to the railway, the subway between Rotherhithe and Wapping was the setting for what director Robert Hulse calls ‘the world’s first multi-cultural underwater festival’. Indian dancers, Chinese singers, sword swallowers and show-horses all performed in the tunnel, which also housed shops and a banquet hall, before its dark spaces were overtaken by the area’s notorious prostitutes and thieves.

Brunel’s ambitious project chimes with another Victorian wonder that once stood further south: The Crystal Palace, a magnificent glass and iron building designed to house the Great Exhibition in 1851, moved here from central London. The neighbourhood museum tells us how exhibits were brought from all over the world to amaze crowds of millions.

But life wasn’t all wonder and bedazzlement in the east in those days. The Geffrye Museum (conveniently situated next to Hoxton Station and one of the last stops on my museum tour) reminds us that Shoreditch has come a long way since Victorian times, when communities of foul-mouthed, semi-criminal hawkers purportedly dumped rubbish into the grounds of its humble but beautiful almshouses, built for poor pensioners, now painstakingly restored for visitors. On this side of town, the wondrous has never been far from the grimy, but that’s all part of its charm.

For more information, visit: www.cultureline.org.uk