EastEnders legend Anita Dobson says the area of London where she grew up has become ‘unrecognisable in a shocking way’ after she returned on a recent visit to the capital.
The actress, 76, grew up in Stepney Green in the East End, the daughter of a tailoress and a dress cutter – but now says the streets and the sense of community she knew as a child have long since changed.
On a recent return visit, she says she was able to spot the pub where she would go for a drink with her father, but failed to recognise much else.
Among the streets she no longer recognised was Brick Lane, once home to market stalls where she recalled her father buying books on a Saturday.
She told the Telegraph that she found the East End ‘completely unrecognisable in a shocking way,’ adding of Brick Lane: ‘It wasn’t as I remembered it. The shops were all different and even the street names were different so it was quite a shock.’
Brick Lane is now a strongly Bangladeshi neighbourhood and one of the UK’s top ‘curry capitals’ – though it has fewer restaurants than it did at its peak in the 2000s.
Anita, who now lives in Surrey with Queen rock guitarist husband Brian May, said she had asked her driver to make a trip through the East End as she headed into the capital on business for nostalgia’s sake.
She labelled the current East End as an ‘extraordinary mixture’ of its past as she remembers it and ‘the influx of what’s happened to England, to the world; that it’s much more cosmopolitan’.
Anita Dobson says she does not recognise some areas of East London where she grew up after returning there recently (pictured in April)
The actress said the East End was more ‘cosmopolitan’ and home to ‘many, many more different races and colours and accents and voices’ (pictured: signs on Brick Lane)
Anita Dobson is best known to millions as Angie Watts, the alcoholic landlady of the Queen Vic lovestruck by ‘Dirty’ Den Watts (Leslie Grantham)
The star added: ‘Now there’s many, many more different races and colours and accents and voices, and many more religions. So it has been good in a lot of ways but in some ways you lose something as well.
‘(We’ve lost) community. We’re not a society any more. We’re not social. People don’t talk to each other like they used to.’
She added that society had changed from when she was small, noting: ‘Mum would leave a key on a piece of string through the letterbox and you’d come home, pull the string up and let yourself in. You wouldn’t dream of doing that now.’
Anita is known to millions as the landlady of the Queen Vic Angie Watts – whose heartbreaking sparring with conniving husband Dirty Den, played by Leslie Grantham, kept viewers on the edge of their seats for three years.
The actress trained at Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in South Kensington and joined the soap at its inception in 1985 after a number of TV roles including presenting children’s show Play Away, but eventually left in 1988.
Despite being begged by producers she vowed she would never come back, saying: ‘Why tarnish the gorgeous creation that was Angie Watts?’
The character was killed off off-screen in 2002 – but she made a sensational return to the role earlier this year as a ghost appearing before her daughter, Sharon Watts.
As Sharon, played by Letitia Dean, lies in the rubble of an explosion in the Queen Vic, Angie appears to her and implores her to call for help – sending Ross Kemp’s Grant Mitchell to the rescue so she can live to fight another day.
She has since appeared in a wealth of other television programmes including Doctors, Holby City, The Bill and Casualty – and appeared opposite Ncuti Gatwa in Doctor Who as long-time foe The Rani.
She lives with rock star husband Brian May (pictured together in March) in Surrey after leaving London in 2021
The King and Queen visited Brick Lane’s Bangladeshi community in 2023. The community has been a hub of Bengali culture and food for decades
Signs at nearby Whitechapel Underground station were made dual-language in 2022 in recognition of the contributions made to the area by the Bengali community
She married Brian May in 2000 after meeting him at a film premiere in 1986; they lived in Kensington until 2021, when flooding wrecked their basement, when they relocated to Surrey, where she is helping him recover from a minor stroke last year.
Brick Lane has been London’s curry capital for decades, home to an ever-growing number of Bangladeshi restaurants – most of which proclaim themselves to be the best in the city.
A large number of families from Bangladesh emigrated to Britain after World War II and began establishing businesses including restaurants in a corner of the East End.
This eventually earned the area the nickname Banglatown, which was formalised by Tower Hamlets council in 1997 amid a regeneration boost to the area to firmly establish it as a cultural quarter.
The electoral ward in which it sits was also renamed Spitalfields and Banglatown in 2002.
Twenty years later, signs at Whitechapel Underground station were made dual-language in both English and Bengali in recognition of the contributions made to the area by the Bangladeshi community.
A weekly market is still held on Sundays and the street is also home to nightclubs, bars and its famous 24 hour Jewish bagel shops, Beigel Shop and Beigel Bake.
