Silvertown

<p>Melanie McGrath’s critically acclaimed East End family memoir now in paperback.</p> <p>In this remarkable book award-winning writer Melanie McGrath has given us a vivid and poignant memoir of the East End. McGrath spent years wondering about her East End roots. At the turn of the twenty-first century the places where her grandparents lived out their lives Poplar East Ham and Silvertown – are virtually unrecognisable; her grandparents Jenny and Len Page long since dead and already half forgotten.</p> <p>Silvertown teems with stories of life in the docks and pubs and dog tracks of the old East End where Melanie McGrath's grandparents scraped a living. Here are the bustling alleys and lanes of Poplar in 1914 where eleven year old Jenny watches the men go off to fight; the Moses sweatshop on the Mile End Waste; the London docks then the largest port in the world; and Jenny having her teeth pulled out on her seventeenth birthday. Here too is the Cosy Café opened full of hope by Jenny and Len – later a home to their troubled marriage – and an East End landscape which is altered forever by the closure of the docks and the disintegration of this close knit community.</p> <p>The places Melanie McGrath describes have largely vanished now. This evocative and deeply moving family memoir recreates the lost East End and the struggles of those who live there.</p>