I grew up in East London at a time when it described in certain newspapers as a place people came from, not a place people chose. Stratford, Beckton, Plaistow, Manor Upton Park. The kind of postcodes that made people on the other side of the city raise an eyebrow.
That East London no longer exists. Or rather, it does but the story being told about it keeps changing, depending on who needs a villain.
In the summer of 2024, far right rioters tore through towns across England, fuelled by a lie. Three children had been murdered in Southport and within hours, false claims spread online that the attacker was a Muslim migrant. The violence that followed was not spontaneous. It was the logical conclusion of years of rhetoric that has consistently pointed to communities like East London’s and said, this is the problem.
The “left behind” narrative is not new. It says that white working-class communities, once the backbone of East London’s docks and markets, have been displaced by waves of immigration. There is real pain underneath that narrative. There always is. But pain does not make a story true.
The East End has always been a place of arrival
Before Bangladeshis, before the Windrush generation, before the somalians, East London absorbed Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. Before them, the French Huguenots. Successive waves of people built new lives in a place that did not always welcome them warmly, but which they made their own regardless.
What changed was not the arrival of new communities. What changed was deindustrialisation, the collapse of the docks, and decades of political neglect that affected working class communities of every background. The far right found a convenient target.
Now look at who East London is producing
Walk into the University of East London today and you will find students from Newham, Barking and Dagenham, Tower Hamlets, many of them first generation university students, many of them from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, working harder than almost anyone I have encountered in this industry to break into some of the most competitive fields in the country.
They want to be Filmmakers, Broadcasters, Storytellers, Content creators.
The statistics should embarrass the industries they are trying to enter. Black journalists make up just 0.2% of the UK journalistic workforce despite standing for 3% of the population. Across the creative industries, there are widespread concerns about representation, retention, and progression for people from ethnic minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. The door is not simply ajar. For many of my students, it has barely been opened.
And yet they keep pushing. Not because the system rewards them for it, but because they have stories to tell that no one else will tell if they do not.
The media has a role in all of this
I have worked at an array of British and international mainstream TV stations. I know what it feels like to walk into a newsroom and be the only person who looks like the community you are reporting on. I know what it feels like to pitch a story about the Nigerian diaspora and be asked whether it is relevant to a mainstream audience.
When anti-immigration rhetoric is treated as a legitimate concern rather than what it so often is, it shapes not just public opinion but editorial decisions. Which stories get commissioned. Which communities get humanised. Which voices are handed a microphone.
East London’s diaspora communities have been on the receiving end of that editorial failure for decades. My students are trying to change that. So have I, throughout my career. Simply telling the truth about who we are is more radical than it should have to be in 2026.
If you are young and from East London, the question is worth asking
The difficulty of breaking into journalism or the wider creative industries is well documented. It is not evenly distributed. Research consistently shows that careers in these fields are shaped by social, cultural, and financial capital, the kinds of capital that postcodes like ours have historically had less of.
That is worth sitting with. Not as a reason to be discouraged, but as context. The barriers are structural, not personal. Understanding the difference matters, especially when the same industries that are slow to open their doors are simultaneously hungry for authentic voices and stories, they have never known how to find themselves.
East London is full of those stories. The question of who gets to tell them, and on whose terms, is still as open as it has ever been.
