The gentrification of EastEnders: How life has changed for people in the real Albert Square

Even those people who rarely watch EastEnders – or, gasp, prefer Corrie – will be familiar with the show’s opening credits, the blue ribbon of the Thames swirling as the camera pans over a map of London. Today’s title card shows the end result of 40 years of building and gentrification: denser buildings, open spaces hemmed in. Somewhere in the title card for the first episode, then with areas of the East End showing simply as black smudges, lies the true heart of EastEnders. My job is to find that heart: past, present and future – which means following the trail from postcode to postcode.

The present: E17

Walthamstow, if you choose to believe one strand of EastEnders folklore, gave Walford the first part of its name. They just got a Gail’s Bakery here – a chain so achingly middle-class the Liberal Democrats apparently used its presence in a town centre as a sign voters might dig them. The Guardian managed to get three articles out of the event. Backlash or not, it’s busy. There’s a market, fruit and veg in plastic bowls, caffs, textiles shops. If you like your gentrification metaphors extra-strong, the old L Manze pie and mash shop has found a new life selling sushi, with the old decor kept intact.

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The past: E8

Albert Square’s residents introduced themselves to the nation on 19 February 1985. The Beales and the Fowlers and the Queen Vic. “Nobody is wasting time being Dallas-beautiful or wise or bothering to be sweet and understanding. What’s on the lung is on the tongue in EastEnders,” wrote one reviewer after the barnstorming first episode.

The show set out to tackle bad housing, unemployment, and the rich characters of the East End, creators Julia Smith and Tony Holland told the Hackney Gazette’s man in the week before it launched. They’d spent a year going round boroughs like Hackney “to research the current cheers and fears of the Cockney community”. It was never the throwback East End of the Kray twins and pearly kings and queens, but a slice of community thrown into the middle of Thatcher’s transformation.

What viewers know as Albert Square exists as a set in Elstree Studios, Borehamwood. But Albert Square really does exist. Sort of. The EastEnders pilot episode was filmed in Fassett Square, between Dalston and Hackney, which the show’s creators used as the template for Albert Square, legend goes, with house dimensions and all.

“It’s lovely living round here,” says one Fassett Square resident, who’s lived here since she was six years old. The residents get out in the communal garden in the middle of the square, cutting trees and having fireworks displays. “Everyone keeps in touch.”

The main difference, she says, was the lack of kids playing out. Sitting among the Victorian terraces is a newer block. This, the resident tells me, used to be a derelict German hospital, with guards. “We used to sneak in and get chased out,” she says.

The garden itself is now locked, although all Fassett Square residents get a key. Another resident, aged 22, obviously with no memories of the original episode, tells me it was open to all until a few years ago. “The square was getting a bit crackhead-y,” he says.

The square is quiet – and not in the something-bad-about-to-happen way. You can quantify this kind of niceness: £1,670,000 for a three-bedroom semi-detached house. The going rate for a two-bed flat in the old German hospital seems to be around £650,000. A three-bed will leave you little change from a million. And these are prices from 2022.

Housing statistics can tell a lot of the story about Hackney. The borough lies at the absolute extremes of the ways England counts and ranks where we live. As of 2021, it had the highest percentage of social rented dwellings of any local authority in the country, at 40%. At the same time, it had the lowest proportion of owner-occupiers – in other words, people who own the house they live in – in England, at 28%. In Castle Point, the opposite end of the spectrum, that figure stands at 81%.

£1.6m for a three-bedroom house might explain that. Not that renting is a nice, cheap alternative. The median monthly rent for a three-bed in the borough is £2,900 – compared to a London median of £2,200. A single room in a house-share will set you back £951 in Hackney, and £787 in the mythical average part of London.

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Katy McBrierty reckons she lives in the only house-share on Fassett Square. “It’s really communal, everyone goes out into the middle of the square,” she says. Her rent is well below the borough’s average, but her living here four years might explain that, because the pandemic had put some slack into London rentals. As she tells me, “It’s so quiet.” 

I realise I haven’t found the true spirit of EastEnders here. Conscious of the need to find someone to talk about “the good old days” while I stew over a new way to tell you pints are expensive in London, the pub beckons. I know a spot. Then I have a better idea, and soon find myself crouched over some microfilm on the top floor of a library.

If you want to find the real 1985 East End, a version can be found in the archives of the Hackney Gazette, the local paper. On the day of that first transmission, the front page brought readers tales of financial crisis at a day nursery, the death of a baby with a hole in his heart, a flasher with a white dog, thieves knocking down an old man and spending cuts falling on the shoulders of council tenants. 

Later that week, “have-a-go hero Sid Stevens was blasted in the stomach as he grappled with armed raiders in a Whitechapel post office”, and con men posed as council officers. A theft of £60 was front page news. All in all, not too far from the chaotic BBC vision of the East End. Perfect fodder for a writer of soaps.

The adverts were equally revealing. The Pembury Tavern, now renowned for serving up some of London’s best pizza, advertised its Sunday lunchtime entertainment: “COMEDIAN, STRIPPERS, DISCO.” A Tesco advert boasted of strawberry yoghurt for 14p, a loaf of bread for 38p. A three-bed house on Rushmore Road could be yours for just £49,950; a three-piece suite for £499.99.

Another vision of life in the 80s was uncovered nearly a decade ago. When Andrew Woodyatt (any relation to Ian Beale?) took over the Rio cinema with a group of collaborators, he decided it might be nice to build a second screen in the basement.

“When we were clearing that out we came across an old storeroom, and kept coming across photographic slides and wondered what they were,” he says. That trove was 12,000 images of Hackney in the 80s, part of a project called Tape/Slide. The pictures show life as captured by the community: Young men sitting by Dalston Kingsland station. Pensioners in the pub. Boys watching TV. A protest against cuts to a playgroup, complete with children in makeshift hats.

“We did a load of detective work and managed to find the original people who ran the project,” says Woodyatt. That was Sandra Hooper. With backing from Hackney Adult Education, the project was a way for young unemployed people to be part of the community. Give them cameras and tape recorders, send them out to document the world as they saw it, then come back and cut it all together into reels to be shown at the Rio cinema.

“It was telling the news from people who lived within the communities that were described, and the activities that were being reported on, they were being reported by people actively involved in them, rather than an outside view,” says Hooper.

The community journalists showed the East End they lived in, through covering the controversial deportation of a Turkish family, the death of Colin Roach inside Stoke Newington police station, or cuts to local hospitals.

“It was all reflective of the community we were operating in. It was hospitals, it was schools, it was childcare, it was housing,” she said. “It was just quite a normal thing then. Youth activities, community centres, arts projects, funding from local authorities, meant it wasn’t that special.”

For a sense of where we are now, how much has changed, lies another part of EastEnders mythology, just up the A10. Walford supposedly gets its name from Walford Road in Stoke Newington – although both this and the Walthamstow/Stratford connection surely cannot both be true. They’re getting a Gail’s Bakery in Stoke Newington, and they don’t seem very happy about it. 

But on the corner of Walford Road, above the Yucatan pub, there’s an example of how far London’s housing crisis can push. In 2022, Hackney Council fined landlord Ibrahim Has £285,000 for turning the space above the pub into 13 cramped flats. Some were smaller than a parking space, with tenants charged up to £1,250 a month.

The future: E20

E20. This used to be a fictional postcode, reserved for Albert Square. Then the Olympics came and they decided to give it to Stratford. This seems a fitting place to round off the search – a vision of the future after a tour through history.

The area around the Westfield shopping centre, leading up to the Olympic Stadium, feels eerily like the CGI render it no doubt existed as once. It’s what would happen if you put your town centre into a witness protection scheme. It could be absolutely anywhere. But we are in East London. Look back to the title crawl from the very first episode of EastEnders, and where I stand appears as a black splodge.

The games transformed the area, with £12.5bn of investment pouring in. The result is clear in the identical blocks of glassy flats. West Ham play in the Olympic Stadium now, and I’ve never spoken to anyone who likes the new ground. Too far from the pitch, no atmosphere, though it might make the club rich. That’s the dream, I guess, of all of this. But it’s all so anonymous. Until something reminds you where you are: a highlighter pink sign, stuck on the side of a path, with two words in bold black letters: BOBBY MOORE.

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