Category
Blackest Streets
(Even) More from the London County Council Housing of the Working Classes Committee. . . 2 November, 1910, S Burgess, housing manager on the Boundary Street Estate, writes to the Committee: “I regret to report that Mr Gentry, one of… Continue reading →
Arthur Pillans Laurie (1861-1949) was a chemist who pioneered the dating of paintings by analysis of their pigment composition. He would go on to become principal of Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh. As a young man, Laurie had wanted to learn… Continue reading →
A reader from the north of England wrote to me: “My late father was born and grew up in Bethnal Green and his forebears all came from the Old Nichol. In fact, his grandmother, Cordelia Craig (née Shearing), was born… Continue reading →
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… Continue reading →
Only one of the original Boundary Street blocks has been demolished. Streatley Buildings (below) stood on the eastern side of Swanfield Street, opposite Taplow and Sunbury Buildings. It was one of the very earliest blocks to be completed in the… Continue reading →
Shortly before Streatley Buildings was demolished (see story below), its neighbour on Swanfield Street, St Philip’s Church, was also pulled down, along with its rather terrifying vicarage (a home from home for Norman Bates and his mom). There are a… Continue reading →
These pictures were taken much later than you might think at an initial glance. This was the 1960s, and these women had inherited an original problem of the Boundary Street Estate: the London County Council had decreed that there was… Continue reading →
The photographs below show the interiors of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College mission settlement on Old Nichol Street, not long after it was opened, in 1898. Many public schools and some Oxbridge colleges were opening mission houses in poor areas of… Continue reading →
In the summer of 2009, the Museum of London’s Archaeological Service (MOLA) dug a trench on the Arnold Circus hillock, close to the bandstand. The gardens at the centre of the Boundary Estate had been closed for a big replanting… Continue reading →
Billie was born on the Boundary Estate in 1932. Her parents, Jack and Alice Sivill, were fully involved in local politics and her mother became the mayor of Bethnal Green. Sivill House is named in honour of Alice and Jack… Continue reading →