Few places in London have engendered as many myths as the EAST END, a catch-all title which covers just about everywhere east of the City, but has its heart closest to the latter. Its name is synonymous with slums, sweatshops and crime, as epitomized by antiheroes such as Jack the Ripper and the Kray Twins, but also with the rags-to-riches careers of the likes of Harold Pinter and Vidal Sassoon, and whole generations of Jews who were born in the most notorious of London's cholera-ridden quarters and have now moved to wealthier pastures. Old East Enders will tell you that the area's not what it was - and it's true, as it always has been. The East End is constantly changing as newly arrived immigrants assimilate and move out.

The East End's first immigrants were French Protestant Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in the late seventeenth century. Within three generations the Huguenots were entirely assimilated, and the Irish became the new immigrant population, but it was the influx of Jews escaping pogroms in eastern Europe and Russia that defined the character of the East End in the second half of the nineteenth century. The area's Jewish population has now dispersed throughout London, though the East End remains at the bottom of the pile; even the millions poured into the DOCKLANDS development have failed to make much impression on local unemployment and housing problems. Unfortunately, racism is still rife, and is directed, for the most part, against the extensive Bengali community, who came here from the poor rural area of Sylhet in Bangladesh in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Vibe Bar, in the old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, is just one of a number of trendy bars that have opened up here and in the neighboring districts of Shoreditch and Hoxton, which have become something of an arty enclave on the edge of the City.

As the area is not an obvious place for sightseeing, and certainly no beauty spot - Victorian slum clearances, Hitler's bombs and postwar tower blocks have all left their mark - most visitors to the East End come for its famous Sunday markets . However, there's plenty more to get out of a visit, including a trio of Hawksmoor churches , and the vast Canary Wharf redevelopment, which has to be seen to be believed.

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