“LAND OF PROMISE"

Southland Times, Issue 20042, 2 December 1926, Page 11

“LAND OF PROMISE"

IRONY IN STREET NAME. GATEWAY TO POORHOUSE. Of all London’s thousands of streets, the most ironically named is surely “Land of Promise, NJ.,” says a London paper. It is nothing more than a gateway to the poorhouse, down which come the aged, the sick and the heavy-laden, to be received as guests of the Shoreditch Guardians. Time has, indeed, played a poor joke. Once there were six cottages and a block of workshops in “Land of Promise.” Now there are neither houses nor workshops, just the side walls of the Poor Law offices and a public-house. You walk down the few yards of “Land of Promise,” and the hospital gates are gaping. These faded people who have passed through the grim portal have not always seen the joke. So “Land of Promise” is soon likely to disappear. One of the Shoreditch’s councillors, Mr Stanley Belcher, has raised the matter of this inappropriate name, and officials of the council are to see what can be done. It has taken 32 years for the Shoreditch people to move in the matter, for it was in 1894 that the cottages and the workshops were bought to make easier acess to the workhouse door. Londoners, in their curious unheeding way, have passed by hundreds of times without noting the street down which generations of the poor have passed. Will they rename it? It seems scarcely worth while, though it would be truer to actual fact to change “Land of Promise” to “Vale of Tears’”