Louis Heren was born the youngest of three children in Shadwell, a slum parish in the East End of London, in 1919. His father, who had been a printer on The Times, died when he was four, leaving his mother to run the City of Dublin Dining Rooms opposite the West Garden Gate of London Docks. Growing Up Poor In London is a wonderfully faithful picture of Cockney life in the East End of seventy years ago, with its gaslit streets, its regular 'London particulars' the joys of jumping lifts on the tailboards of carts, and the extraordinary courage of 'our mother', as the author always calls her.