Yes. Fun fact: Orwell lived in a cheap hostel in Whitechapel known as Tower House, Stalin was another occupant. At the time it was next to a Jewish synagogue, these days that's closed down and it's behind London's largest mosque, next to a very well regarded (by Londoners) Indian restaurant. Later the building was abandoned and gained a reputation for drugs and violence... people used to throw themselves off the upper storeys to effect a quick suicide. Later on it was fixed but by a Cypriate real estate investor and carved up in to cheap units. I had a go at living there, and successfully sublet a room to a guy on the interest rate committee of the Bank of England. Hosting this social mobility in a hundred years ... not bad for a building on a backstreet!
More details on the Stalin, Orwell, Whitechapel connection. Jack London visited it as well.
Stalin "fetched up in London in 1907, living in a Jubilee Street tenement flat – the future home of Golda Berk."[0].
"Tower House was immortalised in 1933, when George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London, praised it as the 'best of all common lodging houses with excellent bathrooms'."[1]
"Jack London, the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang was first in the line of anarchists, authors and lost souls to shelter here. He christened it The Great Monster Doss House in his seminal work of living among the East End poor, People of the Abyss, in 1902."[1]
