"Did you eat my apple?" say the bells of Whitechapel - trad.

Dear friend or shareholder: we are pleased to announce the launch of a new subdivision of the Mr Internet Corporate Online Content Koncern (MICOCK). Strategies Against Architecture will be dedicated to my (largely uninformed) opinions about buildings I've seen. The first handful of these buildings appear on a specific set of routes described in a series of pamphlets about London architectural rubbernecking walks published by Open City which some friends kindly got me for my birthday, knowing how much my wife wanted me to get out of the house more I enjoy long walks and pointing at buildings and saying clever and interesting things like "that one is made of concrete".

Today's stroll takes us not too far from home - from Whitechapel to Wapping, the historic East End. Currently home to London's largest Bangladeshi community, the area previously boasted a large Jewish population (of which more later) and before that was the original location of Chinatown. This rather windy and, as I was leaving the house, increasingly wet Sunday afternoon adventure was soundtracked by the suitably greyscale sounds of local lad Evil Dust.

My first stop was Toynbee Hall, built in 1885 by the vicar of St Jude's (Commercial Street) and his wife, and named after their mate Arnold, a historian. Yes, that Arnold Toynbee: the grandfather of her from off of the Social Democratic Party and the SDP 2: The Electric Boogaloo. Useless piece of trivia: the Limehouse Declaration was issued a couple of miles further east in, well, Limehouse.

Toynbee Hall is closed on Sundays, but you can walk right up to it via a newish public parklet called Mallon Gardens. Apparently modelled on an Oxbridge style college, the main building doesn't really do it for me aesthetically, but there are a few interesting bits and pieces nearby, including a little clock tower and a red brick late 80s looking housing estate with that reliable PoMo trademark, coloured window frames (some blue, some green)

It began raining with slightly more intent as I head towards our next stop - Sugar House and a couple of slightly less ancient buildings - via Gunthorpe Street, a narrow cobbled (murder to cycle on) pedestrian street that comes out onto Whitechapel High Street. Pennine House isn't mentioned in the booklet but I couldn't walk past a geometric gem like this and not take a photo:

Or this typically nonsensical bit of 'public art':

I found Sugar House on the corner of Leman & Hooper, but as you can probably guess by now I was more interested in the Thatcher-era horrors across the road than this perfectly nice looking but anodyne late 19th century Co-operative Wholesale Society office. Still, I'm glad to see buildings like this preserved, if only to break up the increasingly monotonous glass & steel makeup of central London's built landscape. 1-7 Prescot [sic] Street, built 1933 and also once occupied by the CWS, was more my vibe. Historic England says "unusual example in Britain of the German expressionist style"; Strategies Against Architecture says "I like the bit with the people shaking hands above the door". Another thing 1-7 has going for it is a covered walkway linking it to 9 Prescot Street at the second floor. Number 9 looks like it's on the market but Google Maps says it's still home to the Co-operative Bank.

The next stop was on the other side of the tracks - specifically those that carry c2c and DLR services into the city or out to the east coast and Docklands respectively- gave me an opportunity to check if a certain grubby little shortcut weirdly positioned on the ground floor of a Travelodge was still open or if it had been bricked up. I was in luck:

One breezy traipse through empty cans and puddles of god knows what I emerged on Cable Street. Mr Internet's top lunch tip: on weekdays you can get a tasty and filling meal from a Brazilian joint called Pop Skewer, a bit further down under the bridge, past Enterprise Rent-a-Car.

If a building is an odd colour and has big circular windows, there's a very good chance I will stop to take a photo regardless of where I'm trying to get to or how grim the weather is getting:

Just beyond this delightful gem was my next port of call, a Peabody Estate completed in 1881 and extended in 2014. Neither were to my architectural taste but you can't fault the Peabody Trust's motives for building these estates: they were proto public housing half a century before it occurred to the government that having a roof over your head shouldn't depend on the charity of others (and over a hundred years before it was decided that it should depend almost entirely on the whims of the free market).

Someone once told me the interesting story of how these GLC-era "neighbourhood" signs came to be but I can't remember any of it.

After a ten minute walk down "The Highway", one of the most polluted and least architecturally interesting roads in East London, followed by a shorter and more pleasant walk through St George's churchyard, I arrived at a crucial piece of the city's history that I had somewhere never seen in person in the decade-odd I've lived here.

The Cable Street Mural is a monument to a time when we had better tactics for dealing with fascists than simply trying vote them out or writing strongly worded letters to the New Statesman: on 4th October 1936, Oswald Mosley and his blackshirted circus chimps planned to goosestep their way through what was then, as mentioned earlier, a largely Jewish area, in an attempted show of strength and intimidation. The locals (whose petition to ban the march was denied by the Home Secretary, John Simon) were having none of it and, along with socialist, anarchist, communist and trade unionist allies, took to the streets to give the British Union of Fascists a thoroughly necessary and well-deserved hiding. The events are commemorated by this 1978 mural which it was unfortunately getting too dark to take a decent photo of:

Back through the church yard and across that stinking great road I passed one of my least favourite clubbing venues in London, which I won't name here for no reason other than it seems to change from one generic "London E1" type name to another too frequently to keep track of them. Next door to that, however, is my penultimate stop: Tobacco Dock. Now we're fucking talking, my friends! Retaining its original 1813 name in the finest Thatcher-era tradition of knowingly and tastelessly giving buildings British Empire themes, my boy Sir Terry revived this sleeping beast in his own signature style in 1989: one of the late 80s Docklands redevelopment boom's last gasps. For two embarrassingly short years the vast,newly Farelled-up warehouse was a dismal shopping centre that might have had a little more success if it wasn't stranded halfway between two tube stops on the East London Line (at the other end of which sits the far more successful Surrey Quays shopping centre, which opened the same year, is still open and even had the local Surrey Docks station renamed after it). In recent years Baccy D has been best known as a clubbing venue (which I've still somehow never been to) and, for the heads, a temporary base for troops on standby during the Stratford Olympics in 2012. Behind the building sit a pair of replica ships built in the 60s to house a seafaring museum for kids, which the guide describes as "unused and decaying" and I would describe as "ripe for an unlicensed knees-up". Beyond them, the residential part of Wapping, which boasts something I can't believe more areas don't have: its own "ornamental" canal. And here we all are going to the park to look at waterfowl like chumps when the good people of Wapping can simply look out of their windows and see ducks, swans and Egyptian geese zooming serenely past.

Knowing there are plenty of interesting architectural nuggets to see along the canal I took a slightly longer root to the final stop:

My final destination was in what I would call old Wapping, a charming relic of the pre-Blitz Docklands with cobbled streets that I can personally attest are an utter misery to cycle on. I couldn't see much of the pier head but here is a nice autumnal bouquet just in front of it:

Obviously I had to make one last additional stop before heading home:

Tune in next week when I'll most likely be hoofing around the nerve centre of just about everything that is sick and depraved about this country: the Square Mile.