Sarah Wise

The great pet market at Club Row, immediately south of the Old Nichol/Boundary Estate, was shut down in 1983, after a protracted battle between animal-rights campaigners and market traders whose families had had pitches there for decades. The first picture… Continue reading →

These drawings were done in the 1880s when some Romany folk came to rest temporarily on Hackney Marshes; the man top left is a knife-grinder, at work at his portable lathe. In the late 19th century, certain parts of London… Continue reading →

The creation of the London County Council in 1889 decided the ultimate fate of the Old Nichol slum (and what a fate). But the Council was a long time in the making: satirical magazines such as Moonshine (below right) and… Continue reading →

Two of the things that the schoolteachers in the Old Nichol slum were up against were persistent truancy, and the appalling state of health and sometimes semi-starvation among their pupils. With the former, children were sometimes crucial to very-poor families’… Continue reading →

Violence (on both sides), the beating of children and the calling in of the police featured in some of the tussles between the London School Board and a number of parents who resented yet more authoritarian intrusion into their lives…. Continue reading →

In 1895, at the prompting of the Medical Officer of Health for Islington, one Dr Klein made a bacterioscopic investigation of ice creams sold from barrows. Dr Klein visited one site of manufacture, in the Italian community on and around… Continue reading →

While researching The Blackest Streets I was informed that no picture of Reverend Robert Whatwood Loveridge had ever been found. And then Richard Read goes and finds one among his late parents’ belongings. Richard emailed: “The photo was used as… Continue reading →

The LCC surveyed its social housing tenants in 1899, 10 years after the Council came into being. This  table shows who was living in its first blocks and estates. Tweet

The London County Council surveyed the people of the Old Nichol in 1890, just as the Council was coming to a decision to demolish the slum in its entirety. The occupations given are those of the head of the household;… Continue reading →

These pictures are from the book Ten Years in a London Slum: Being the Adventures of a Clerical Micawber by High Church Anglican priest Desmond Morse-Boycott. Boycott joined a brotherhood attached to St Mary the Virgin, Seymour Street (today’s Eversholt… Continue reading →