London has been well served by historians. Roy Porter's London: A Social History (1994) and of course Jerry White's three volumes covering the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries (2001–12) have set the standard. John Marriott's Beyond the Tower is a timely contribution on the eve of the London Olympics and the major redevelopment of East London including the siting of the Olympic Park in Stratford. Marriott tells us that the book has been ‘thirty years in the making’. He has delivered a rich and densely woven tapestry bringing London ‘beyond the Tower’, in all its vivid complexity, to life.

Marriott tackles the vexed problem of geographical definition alerting us to the shifting boundaries used by earlier commentators – Walter Besant (East London, 1901), Robert Sinclair (East London: The East and North-East Boroughs of London and Greater London, 1950) and Millicent Rose (The East End of London, 1951). Marriott confines his East London to the boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Newham as far east as the River Roding and the eastern section of the North Circular Road. Like earlier writers, such as Jack London, he draws a picture of an unknown, almost foreign, territory. It is an ambitious project beginning in seventeenth-century Stepney which was a place of dissent beyond the old city walls where the poorer traders, craftsmen, seafarers and those outside society lived and survived. Subsequently, as East London grew up to its first natural boundary in the east, the River Lea, it became a reception centre for newcomers. First, there were Huguenots after 1685, who brought their specialist skills in silk weaving, followed in the eighteenth century by Irish migrants who worked as coal heavers establishing their reputation of strength and endurance. The confluence of resentments prompted anti-Irish riots in 1736. Later still, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the East End became a refuge for eastern European Jews fleeing from pogroms in Russian Poland in particular. The 1950s witnessed the arrival of African-Caribbeans, Arabs and Maltese. The later south Asian diaspora brought Pakistanis, Sikhs from the Punjab, as well as Indians from east Africa escaping from Idi Amin's Uganda in the 1970s. These have been followed by further waves of Bangladeshis and Bengalis. East London had always been a destination for black seamen, lascars and Chinese from the moment that East London had established itself as a maritime centre, but these late twentieth-century developments were the consequence of great global developments – decolonization, de-industrialization and the great flows of migrating humanity in search of a better life. Thus, East London's demography was radically transformed by the classic push-and-pull factors of international migration first because of London's position as entrepôt and imperial city, and latterly because of the forces of globalization. Marriott's deft touch and intuitive empathy for the people of East London illustrates a critical theme not only for London's history but also for post-1945 British history.

Marriott is at his surest when explaining the dichotomy between myth and reality. Thus, his dissection of the ‘Myth of outcast London’ and the emblematic Ripper murders explains how Whitechapel became a ‘site of gothic horror, depravity and fearful danger’. Whitechapel had had a central part in the popular imagination marked by its overcrowding, squalor and criminality. Even Charles Booth, that dispassionate social recorder, admitted that poverty was more acute in Bermondsey and Southwark but nonetheless accepted that Whitechapel was a place just outside the city walls where the struggle for life took place in a space ‘between civilisation and barbarism’. Based at the Raphael Samuel Centre, Marriott has written a vital contribution. East London's place as a social laboratory for the observation of societal change is securely captured, from the settlers at Toynbee Hall – Masterman, Tawney, Beveridge – to the later investigations of Michael Young and Peter Wilmott. However, his portrayal of Labour history is cast in the aspect of heroic resistance – Lansbury and Poplarism, the struggle against fascism and the Blitz. These are not unimportant issues but he eschews comparison of London with other metropolitan cities which would surely contextualize the complex urban processes associated with de-industrialization, immigration, underemployment, gentrification and so on. Moreover, he gives little space to the conflicts between immigrant groups for political power, such as the struggles in the late 1930s between the Jewish elements of East London's Labour Party and its Irish membership, for example. These conflicts emanated from the structure of the labour market and the place that particular migrant groups were able to secure within it. But these are minor criticisms. It is an excellent history, with evocative illustrations that make a vital contribution to the history of London.