It's Spitalfields, but not as we know it - at least, not as the millennials among us know it. Dodge the espresso stands and the fashionistas and you may get a glimpse of the ghosts haunting the old neighbourhood.
This area of the East End of London is where so many of our ancestors arrived as refugees, huddling into slum tenements, scratching a living from tailoring, trying to keep a culture honed in the shtetl intact.
The story of the massive wave of late 19th-century Russian-Jewish immigrants is dramatically documented in the novel Children of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill. Born and bred in Spitalfields, he brought the streets of the 1880s to life as vividly as Charles Dickens exposed the social divides of greater London. And now Zangwill's epic has been made into the next best thing to a movie - an app which allows visitors to listen to his words and experience the sights and sounds of the time as they tread the pavements of this still-crowded corner of Shoreditch.
How those shtetl Jews lived, preserving their religious, social and intellectual life while crammed alongside carts and cattle in the heart of the city, is summed up by Zangwill in his description of the house-cum-ersatz shul of his heroine, Esther: "The back window gave on to the yard and the contiguous cow-sheds, and 'moos' mingled with the impassioned supplications of the worshippers, who came thither two and three times a day to batter the gates of heaven," he writes.
Then, as now, prayer was only half the purpose of the synagogue: "They dropped in, mostly in their work-a-day garments and grime… it was their salon and their lecture-hall. It supplied them not only with their religion but their art and letters, their politics and their public amusements."
The fact these small, rudimentary shuls even existed was a source of embarrassment to the richer Jews of the West End, whose despair over the slavish attachment to the old ways of the new East End arrivals is one of the revelations of Zangwill's book. It prompted literary scholar Nadia Valman, of Queen Mary University, who developed the app, to include photographs of some of those sites which were synagogues inside houses.
"West End Jews, who were much more established, were anxious about their own status and keen to speed the Anglicisation of the East Enders," explained Dr Valman, whose own great-grandparents were part of the exodus and made their home near Brick Lane. "A key area was trying to reform worship practices to limit the small informal synagogues and attend larger, cleaner ones."
It was walking around Spitalfields with her students that made her realise how rich Zangwill's work was, and how new technology could enable a wider universe to embrace it while listening to sounds which evoke the place and period, from the clack of carthorse hooves to cantors' cadences carrying across the streets as well as the words of Zangwill and the recollections of Jewish residents.
Meanwhile, shots on screen tell the history of the neighbourhood from the old Jewish groceries to the grim and the sanitary new buildings put up by philanthropists, to the tally tickets poor Jews were obliged to present to the West Enders doling out free food to them at the soup kitchen. Much of the material came from the Jewish Museum, which sponsored the app and regards Zangwill as a key chronicler of the old East End. "He was right up there with Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens, and what he tells us about those times is so relevant to how we think about refugees coming over today," says museum director Abigail Morris.
Inevitably many sites important to the community are gone, like the Jews’ Free School on Bell Lane, replaced by a bland skyscraper. As for the old Princes Street Synagogue at 19 Princelet Street, one of the first East End shuls to have proper seating and windows, it still retains its pews, ark and bimah, although no longer used as a place of Jewish worship.
And where buildings still exist, their transformation for modern times seems quite shocking. The name and date of the Jewish soup kitchen on Brune Street are immortalised in brick. But the building now houses three flats; the area is so desirable, people now choose to live where the hungry once queued for charity with tin jugs.
Dr Valman has no idea who lives here but she is sure the inhabitants are anything but poor immigrants: "One of those flats went for £1.5m in 2014!" she said wryly.
