Sarah Wise

At a meeting of the Bethnal Green Board of Guardians of the Poor (ie the local welfare office), two vicars objected to the harshness of the regime that required unemployed men to break rocks in the parish stoneyard (in the… Continue reading →

A few posts ago, the insanitary goings-on at a Clerkenwell ice-cream depot were revealed. Now here’s a broader, pan-London follow-up investigation, as published in Public Health magazine. Grossly unfair on guinea pigs, by the way. Tweet

This tiny court of nine houses was known variously (even in official documents and maps) as Myring or Myrings or Mirings Place. It stood on the north-east edge of the Old Nichol slum, approximately where the small 1970s houses are… Continue reading →

This ditty about the deteriorating atmosphere in London appeared in Household Words, 25 May 1850 – the magazine edited by Charles Dickens. It’s not by him, but it does match his fury at the failure of the authorities to clean… Continue reading →

I accidentally caused a bit of a stir among certain sections of the Victorian East End local history scene when I tweeted a low-res version of the photo below. I’ve now obtained a better-quality scan of this 1895 shot of… Continue reading →

Alan, who lives in Canvey Island, Essex, and who has several ancestors who lived in the Old Nichol, got in touch with me to point out that Britney Spears is another “child of the Jago” — someone whose forebears can… Continue reading →

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Below is a sample of the information I took from Notebooks B/77 and B/80 in the Booth Archives at the London School of Economics. The notebooks are the combined work of Reverend Arthur Osborne Jay of Holy Trinity, Old Nichol… Continue reading →