Rodinsky's Room and 19 Princelet Street, Spitalfields, London

19 Princelet Street was built in 1714 and was the home of the French Huguenot Ogier family, who developed a very successful silk weaving concern.

In 1839 there was a synagogue on these premises, and now this Grade II* listed building is the Museum of Immigration and Diversity.

David Rodinsky (1925–69), a reclusive Jew who understood a number of languages and whose papers reveal a knowledge of cabbalism, lived above the synagogue for many years until his death in a psychiatric hospital in 1969, although this was not discovered until some time after his room – left suddenly, a little like Dennis Severs' imaginary family left their rooms in Folgate Street (see link below) – was unlocked in 1980.

The book Rodinsky's Room (1999) is written by Rachel Lichtenstein (whose Polish grandparents came to the East End in the 1930s) and Iain Sinclair (who wrote an early article on Rodinsky's room) in alternating chapters, although most is written by Lichtenstein, who slowly uncovers the mystery of Rodinsky at the same time as she discovers her own past.

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Dennis Severs' House (6-minute video)

Israel Zangwill in Bethnal Green, London

'ISRAEL

ZANGWILL

1864–1926

Writer and

Philanthropist

lived here'

This plaque is at 288 Old Ford Road, Bethnal Green, just opposite the Pavilion café by West Lake, Victoria Park.

Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was a Jewish feminist pacifist who devoted his life to the oppressed. He is perhaps most noted for his novel Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892) and his play The Melting Pot (1909), the latter of which popularized that expression, and is famous for the protagonist David Quixano's utopian dream of America:

'America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand [...] in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to – these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians – into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.'

The full texts of the books are here:
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Children of the Ghetto
The Melting Pot

Angela Burdett-Coutts and Charles Dickens, London

This Gothic drinking fountain in Victoria Park, Tower Hamlets, designed by H. A. Darbyshire, was a gift by Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906) to the people of the East End. Burdett-Coutts was heir to the Coutts bank fortune and a noted philanthropist.

Her relationship with her friend Charles Dickens is interesting from a literary point of view because, with Dickens, she established Urania Cottage (above), a refuge for 'fallen' women, in 1847. Urania Cottage was in Lime Grove, Shepherd’s Bush, London, and was funded by Burdett-Coutts's fortune. And Dickens may have collected material from the inmates of Urania Cottage for, say, the characters Em'ly and Martha in David Copperfield.

John Taylor, Water Poet, Spitalfields, London

The pub The Water Poet is at the corner of Folgate Street and Blossom Street, Spitalfields, and was formerly called The Old Pewter Platter. It is named after John Taylor (c.1578–1653), who called himself 'the Kings Majesties Water-Poet': Taylor spent much of his life ferrying passagers across the Thames. His book The Pennyles Pilgrimage (1618) describes in verse 'How he travailed on foot from London to Edenborough in Scotland, not carrying any Money to or fro, neither Begging, Borrowing, or Asking Meate, drinke or Lodging:
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The Pennyles Pilgrimage, Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor