The Old Nichol was one of the battlegrounds of the factory/workshop inspectorate, who sought to stamp out the appalling physical environments in which mass-market clothing and footwear were produced.

Tragedies such as those in factories in Bangladesh, in which at least 1,000 garment-workers have died, together with the November 2013 factory fire in Dhaka that killed 117 workers, have started debates that echo those of the late-Victorian era. We all laugh at Health & Safety and the Men from the Ministry; but it was all ushered in for a good reason.

Much earlier in the century, in 1850, Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies, wrote an influential polemic, Cheap Clothes and Nasty, about the sweated trades of the East End, which supplied the West End with cut-price consumer goods. The piece is available to read on Dr Marjorie Blay’s site The Peel Web, at
http://www.historyhome.co.uk/peel/economic/sweat.htm