More from the London County Council Housing of the Working Classes Committee. . .

Internal memo from Thomas Blashill, LCC Architects’ Department:
3 February 1896

“During my visit to the Boundary Street area on 26 December I saw that the barrier at the end of Rochelle Street had been removed and that the whole estate in its unlighted condition was open to the free access of the public. I felt this could not be permitted, in the interests of the Council, and so I gave orders on emergency for a temporary barrier to be erected between Culham Buildings and the Board School. I have engaged a watchman to look after the Central Garden while Marlow and Shiplake are still in the hands of the contractor.

“I am bound to report that I am continually receiving representations from my assistant and clerk of works on the area as to the robberies and the undesirable occurrences which take place upon this area, which seems to need some sort of police supervision.”

This memo was written at the very time that Arthur Morrison was making daily trips to the area, to research his novel A Child of the Jago (it would be published in October 1896). The book purported to be an eyewitness account of life in the Old Nichol slum, upon which the new estate was being created. But in fact it was the LCC’s delay in constructing and peopling the area that had led to it being a crime spot – nothing whatsoever to do with the people of the Nichol, who had been decanted elsewhere.

For more on this, see my essay on the London Fictions website (book published by Five Leaves Publications) https://www.londonfictions.com/arthur-morrison-a-child-of-the-jago.html