Whitechapel Gallery & Gardiner's Corner
Why is it significant?
Look up at the narrow stone front of the Whitechapel Gallery, with its big arched doorway and two stubby towers, and you will see a scatter of golden leaves across the facade, like a tree shedding in autumn.
Key Facts
| Place | Whitechapel Gallery & Gardiner's Corner |
|---|---|
| Address | 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51620, -0.07030 |
| Part of Walk | Four Waves of Newcomers: Whitechapel, Spitalfields & Brick Lane in London's East End |
| Generated | Generated |
Look up at the narrow stone front of the Whitechapel Gallery, with its big arched doorway and two stubby towers, and you will see a scatter of golden leaves across the facade, like a tree shedding in autumn. They were made in 2012 by the artist Rachel Whiteread, to fill a space where a decoration had been planned in 1901 and never paid for.
The gallery opened in 1901, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, and its founders, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, held an idea that was radical for its time: that the poorest people in London deserved to see the best art in the world, free, on their own high street, not just in the West End. Their Whitechapel was a district of sweatshops and overcrowded tenements, and the exhibitions were packed.
In early 1939, Picasso's Guernica, his enormous scream of grief at the bombing of a Basque town in the Spanish Civil War, was shown here to raise help for the Spanish Republic. The price of admission was not money but a pair of boots in good condition, to be sent to the soldiers at the front. Imagine the rows of boots piling up beneath one of the greatest paintings of the century. Later this little gallery gave London landmark shows of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Frida Kahlo, and the young David Hockney's first big retrospective.
Just outside, the busy junction by Aldgate East station used to be called Gardiner's Corner, after a department store that stood there. On 4 October 1936 an enormous crowd, often estimated at a hundred thousand or more, gathered here to stop Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists from marching through the Jewish East End. Jewish tailors, Irish dockers, trade unionists and neighbours stood shoulder to shoulder, and when the police tried to clear a route through nearby Cable Street they met barricades. The march was called off. People remember it as the Battle of Cable Street, and the slogan was borrowed from Spain: they shall not pass.
So art and protest stand side by side on this corner. Now walk east for a minute, along Whitechapel High Street towards Whitechapel Road, to a small green park on the south side of the road with a lacy iron arch at its entrance.