Sarah Wise

Architect Charles Canning Winmill (1865-1945) designed some of the loveliest of the Boundary Street Estate blocks when the Old Nichol was demolished – Molesey (1896), Clifton (1897), Laleham and Hedsor (both 1898). In 1900, Winmill, along with his boss, Owen… Continue reading →

Belinda Norman-Butler (1908-2008) was Charles Booth’s granddaughter and author of Victorian Aspirations, a biography of Charles and his wife Mary. Back in 2006, before getting stuck in to the Booth Archive (I wanted to use extensive quotations in The Blackest… Continue reading →

Evidence gathered from pilot schemes reveals a rise in levels of concentration and achievement among children who are given free school lunches. This phenomenon was recognised in the last years of the nineteenth century, and the schools of the Old… Continue reading →

Intrigued by the false hillock at Arnold Circus, on Shoreditch’s Boundary Estate, artist Thor McIntyre-Burnie sent a microphone probe down into the soil and created a site-specific sound installation called Rubble Music https://vimeo.com/16022911 On the recording, sadly there were no… Continue reading →

The Boundary Street Estate is often described as the first council estate to be built in London. But in fact, Beachcroft Buildings (pictured below) – being smaller and less ambitious – was completed by the London County Council by September… Continue reading →

Arthur Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago (1896) is, among other things, the most impressive of literary re-brandings of a district in London history, perhaps even in world history. Morrison had exaggerated the awfulness of life in the real… Continue reading →

As mentioned in the post below, novelist Arthur Morrison was mysterious about his early life. The late Stan Newens, former MP and local historian of London and Essex, broke new ground in 2008 with his excellent biography of Morrison –… Continue reading →

In any overbuilt, cramped urban environment, roofs play a special role: fresh air and light being at a premium at ground level in a Victorian slum, the roof gave easy access to both. And that is why late-Victorian municipal school… Continue reading →

Peter Must is the great grandson of Reverend Robert Loveridge, the heroic but very modest vicar of St Philip’s, Mount Street (today’s Swanfield Street), who was scandalised by the publication of Charles Booth’s Poverty Map, in 1889: the depiction of… Continue reading →

The St Giles slum just north of Covent Garden was one of the very poorest parts of London. This letter to The Times, printed in the edition of Thursday 5 July 1849, was a joint endeavour by locals to try… Continue reading →