Visiting The Site Of One Of Victorian London’s Worst Slums

Skimming over the East End of London on Google maps (or your maps provider of choice), you will notice the generally pretty jumbled, but organic, street pattern. Winding roads, little lanes, diagonals and dog-legs. This is an area that has been developed piecemeal over the centuries, with no overarching organisation. That is until you come to Arnold Circus in Shoreditch: a perfect circle with seven spokes spurring off from it.

This is something you are more familiar with seeing in the West End, where whole areas of the city were laid out in one go; deliberate developments generally planned on the land of lucky aristocrats or wiley speculators. 

Turning off the busy and usually quite frenetic Shoreditch High Street into the streets and, then, peaceful green centre, of Arnold Circus, it is hard to imagine you have just entered a place that was once one of the worst slums of Victorian London. The unusual street pattern is, in a way, a clue to this area being different, as well as a particular street name: Old Nichol Street. 

The ‘Old Nichol’

This area was once predominantly gardens belonging to the nearby monastic institutions: the Nunnery of St John the Baptist, Holywell and the Priory of St Mary Spital (that gives Spitalfields its name). After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, the land passed into private hands, then sold off in parcels. In 1680, for example, a lawyer called John Nichol, who had built seven houses here, leased roughly five acres, to be dug for bricks. His name was then remembered in a couple of the street names.

The population of the East End exploded throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and the fields were rapidly swallowed up for housing. The roughly five acre area that became the Old Nichol slum was bounded by Mount Street to the East, Boundary Street to the West, Old Nichol Street to the South and Virginia Road to the North.

Many properties that had been built initially for one family, were now split up into multiple dwellings. The backyards and open spaces were filled in with shanty-style housing. As demand grew, wealthier landholders moved out and subdivided their plots. The area subsequently became incredibly densely populated. Many houses were also makeshift workshops, with people scratching a living making matches, matchboxes, shoes or clothes. 

‘Vice, Filth And Poverty’

In Charles Booth’s late 19th century poverty maps of London, the Old Nichol was recorded as one of the most poverty stricken areas of the metropolis. 

By the 1880s, roughly 5,700 people were living in a tight rabbit warren of around thirty streets, courtyards and alleyways. The violent death rate was 40 per 1,000 – twice as high as the rest of Bethnal Green and four times that of the city as a whole. Infant mortality and cases of domestic violence were also tragically high. 

The Illustrated News gave the below description of the Old Nichol slum on the 24th October 1863: 

‘The limits of a single article would be insufficient to give any detailed description of even a day’s visit. There is nothing picturesque in such misery. It is but one painful and monotonous round of vice, filth and poverty, huddled in dark cellars, ruined garrets, bare and blackened rooms, reeking with disease and death, and without the means, even if there were the inclination, for the most ordinary observations of decency and cleanliness.’

Something Had To Change

Although many were aware of the situation, those in power did nothing about it for many years. The Bethnal Green Vestry were responsible for electing members to the Metropolitan Board of Works, established in 1856 for large infrastructure projects. Many of the board’s members were actually landlords in the Old Nichol. Despite the conditions, the rotting dwellings were some of the most lucrative in the capital.

An influential character in bringing change to the area was a local Reverend called Osborne Jay. He moved to the parish in December 1886 and saw just how dreadful the conditions were. He raised money to build a new church, social club, gym and lodging house. However, he also thought that something more dramatic was needed and started campaigning to have the slum demolished. 

Jay also invited a writer called Arthur Morrison to look around the Old Nichol. Morrison subsequently portrayed it in his seminal novel: A Child of the Jago. He described the Old Nichol as ‘for one hundred years the blackest pit in London’. This helped to shine light on the conditions of the poor of the East End.

It was, in the end, published after the demolition works had begun, but became synonymous with how people thought about the Old Nichol.

The turning point came when the London County Council (the LCC) was established in 1888. Pushed by Jay, they chose Boundary Street and the Old Nichol as the spot for a new flagship housing scheme. 

The Boundary Estate Is Born 

The Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890 gave the LCC the power to demolish slum housing. Between 1894-1900 15 acres of slum housing was demolished here in Shoreditch. The Boundary Estate was constructed on the site: the country’s first large scale council estate.

The design and amenities were revolutionary for the time. A central open area has seven wide and well-drained, tree-lined streets radiating off from it, inspired by the design of West End developments, such as Seven Dials.

Designed by Owen Fleming in an Arts and Crafts style, the handsome red-brick buildings are grouped into twenty blocks, with each five storeys high. The layout of the blocks was designed to maximise light and air, with common areas between. As well as the flats, small workshops were included to promote local business and employment. 

In the centre is Arnold Circus, a circular street with a raised garden area and a bandstand at its heart.

When I visited there were a few people seated on the benches, chatting, eating their lunch. Arnold Circus is named after Sir Arthur Arnold, who was a county alderman on the newly formed LCC and then chairman from 1895-1897. 

The rubble from the demolition work was actually used to create the mound. It can therefore be seen as a monument to the history of the area: the pioneering estate literally being raised from the stories and archaeology of the Old Nichol.

It Was Not All Happy News

The second tragedy is that, sadly, many of the previous residents of the slum were not rehoused in the estate. The scheme had been expensive and rents, although kept low, were too high for many of the previous residents. 11 families remained, but most simply moved to other areas to continue living in, no doubt, terrible conditions. This led, unsurprisingly, to overcrowding in other areas of London. The ‘industrious poor’, as they were seen, rather than the ‘idle poor’, moved in to the Boundary Estate. 

Charles Booth was, quite rightly, outraged: ‘Thus, although the council managed the estate efficiently it failed to assist those who needed decent housing the most’. 

Today

Nearly all the major buildings of the estate are Grade II listed today, for their architectural uniqueness and historical significance. 

The estate consists of around 500 flats with roughly two thirds still owned and run by Tower Hamlets Council. A third are privately owned, having been purchased by residents through the Right To Buy scheme since the 1980s. Unsurprisingly, as Shoreditch is now a trendy area of London, flats here are expensive. At the time of writing, for example, there is a two bed flat for sale on the estate for £685,000. 

They have a strong community and many of the residents are very fond of their home. There are apparently however complaints that the care of the buildings and residents has sometimes been neglected by the council.

There is a fantastic book, The Blackest Streets by Sarah Wise, for those that would like to read more.

Thank you for reading, more of London’s history below!