Geography
Mile End is in a part of London known as the East End and home to the main campus of Queen Mary, University of London. Parts of Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry are also based on this campus. The main student halls of residence are also now located on this campus.
The area also boasts an unusual landmark, the "Green Bridge". This structure (designed by CZWG Architects, and opened in 2000) allows Mile End Park to cross over the Mile End Road and makes an interesting contrast with the more usual approach of building bridges for cars. It contains garden and water features and some shops and restaurant space built in below.
The Ragged School Museum, opened in 1990 in three canal side former warehouses in Copperfield Road, facing the western edge of the park, south of Mile End Road. The buildings previously housed Dr Barnado's Cooperfield Road Ragged School.
Mile End as a parliamentary constituency had a reputation as a Labour Party stronghold, but also sent Communist Member of Parliament (MP) Phil Piratin to the House of Commons between 1945 and 1950. At that time, it had a large Jewish population. The area now is covered by the Bethnal Green and Bow and Poplar and Limehouse constituencies. The Bethnal Green and Bow constituency continued Mile End's tradition for electing politicians outside the largest parties by electing George Galloway from the Respect Party in the United Kingdom general election, 2005.
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Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)