Martyrs, lunatics, workers and Poor Man's Earl

When you come to Stratford by tube and you want to get to the High Street, you go through the shopping centre. Emerging, to your left you see a church behind the fence. The church area is the last remnant of Stratford Green. In front of the church there is a monument to the Catholic martyrs, burnt on stake during the Marian persecutions (during the rain of King Henry VIII daughter, remembered as Bloody Mary, not without reason...).


The memorial and was built in the 19th century and paid for by public subscription. The opening ceremony speech didn't encourage reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics. A newspaper commented on it:
"Language of this sort is better calculated to wound the feelings of many good people than to break down barriers that already too effectually divide the different denominations." (Wiki)

Lord Shaftesbury was strongly involved in many social and political reforms. He reformed the lunacy laws having visited many mental institutions on behalf of a special committee he represented. Here is what he found at the Bethnal Green madhouse called The White House:

The patients were chained up, slept naked on straw, and went to toilet in their beds. They were left chained from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning when they were cleared of the accumulated excrement. They were then washed down in freezing cold water and one towel was allotted to 160 people, with no soap. It was overcrowded and the meat provided was "that nasty thick hard muscle a dog could not eat".  (Wiki - click here to read more about the man of whom one of biographers wrote: "No man has in fact ever done more to lessen the extent of human misery or to add to the sum total of human happiness".)
....
No time to write about a train engine seen at the exit from the station, nice people at Newham College, a good man who sold me delicious apples although he was already closing the stall for the night and a mysterious old building in the state of serious disrepair.