Vladimir Nabokov always knew a book “of genius” by a feeling it gave him not in his mind, not in his heart, but in his spine. That’s the area in which I felt the genius of East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding when I first read it. This is the oral history work that historian Raphael Samuel undertook with a man who had spent the first ten years of his life in the Old Nichol during the slum’s final ten years of its life.

East End Underworld had an interesting genesis, as you can read on the following link. Although the exhibition mentioned in the text has now finished, Arthur Harding’s biography, My Apprenticeship to Crime (which Arthur bound in some left-over anaglypta), is still available to read in full at: https://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/archives-1/accessing-the-archives/our-archives-online/my-apprenticeship-to-crime

Also, a selection of the tapes Raphael Samuel made with Arthur can be listened to by appointment at the Bishopsgate Institute Archives
https://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/archives

Above: Arthur Harding, born and raised in the Nichol, pictured here in the late 1970s, towards the end of his life.
Below: Arthur jacketed his autobiography, My Apprenticeship to Crime, in some left-over wallpaper. It is now held at the Bishopsgate Institute.