The German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in 1903 how the city functions as an alienating environment that is strikingly different from the village or the town: in the city the individual has to adjust to the “metropolitan rhythm of events.” Simmel’s proposition that the nature of the urban setting means that every street crossing creates an intensified tempo “of economic, occupational and social life” is examined here to see the way in which East London functioned – as it has done so now over several centuries – to provide a specifically urban setting for incoming religious minorities to settle and form a community. This chapter focuses on Whitechapel in the year 1899, around a decade later than Charles Booth’s first poverty survey and in the year in which the update to his great map of poverty was drawn up
