![]() One child in four died before his or her first birthday. ![]() The death rate was twice that of the rest of Bethnal Green, and four times that of London. Nearly 6,000 individuals were crammed into the packed streets. Charles Booth had already noted the extreme poverty in the area in his study of London poverty. ![]() The clearance of the slum houses of the Old Nichol Street rookery was the result of an energetic campaign by the local incumbent, Reverend Osborne Jay of Holy Trinity, who arrived in the parish in December 1886. The 1896 novel A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison is set in a fictionalised version of Old Nichol.īoundary Street in 1890, three years before London County Council began slum clearance. The Builder in 1863, noted the numbers inhabiting unfit cellars, the lack of sanitation and that running water was only available for 10–12 minutes each day. Philip's, the church serving the Nichol, quoted by Frederick Engels, stated that in 1844 "conditions were far worse than in a northern industrial parish, that population density was 8.6 people to a (small) house, and that there were 1,400 houses in an area less than 400 yd (370 m) square" and in 1861 John Hollingshead, of The Morning Post, in his Ragged London noted that the Nichol had grown even more squalid in the last 20 years as old houses decayed and traditional trades became masks for thieves and prostitutes. In about 1860 in A Visit to the Rookery of St Giles and its Neighbourhood, he mentions the area again and uses the term rookery. Pigs and cows in back yards, noxious trades like boiling tripe, melting tallow, or preparing cat's meat, and slaughter houses, dustheaps, and 'lakes of putrefying night soil' added to the filth. An almost total lack of drainage and sewerage was made worse by the ponds formed by the excavation of brickearth. Roads were unmade, often mere alleys, houses small and without foundations, subdivided and often around unpaved courts. Henry Mayhew visited Bethnal Green in 1850, and noted for The Morning Chronicle the trades in the area: tailors, costermongers, shoemakers, dustmen, sawyers, carpenters, cabinet makers and silkweavers. Many of the streets were named after Nichol, and by 1827 the 5-acre (2.0 ha) estate consisted of 237 houses. The land became built up piecemeal with houses, built by a number of sub-lessees. In 1680 John Nichol of Gray's Inn, who had built seven houses here, leased 4.75 acres (1.92 ha) of gardens for 180 years to a London mason, Jon Richardson, with permission to dig for bricks. The estate consists of multistorey brick tenements radiating from the central circus, each of which bears the name of a town or village along the non-tidal reaches of the Thames. Soil from the foundations was used to construct a mound in the middle of Arnold Circus at the centre of the development, surmounted by an extant bandstand. ![]() It was built on the site of the demolished Friars Mount rookery in the Old Nichol, with works begun by the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1893 and completed by the recently formed London County Council. The estate, constructed from 1890, was one of the earliest social housing schemes built by a local government authority. Boundary Street continued to form the boundary between the two new local authorities. In 1965 Bethnal Green merged into the new London Borough of Tower Hamlets, while Shoreditch merged into the new London Borough of Hackney. It is positioned just inside Bethnal Green's historic parish and borough boundary with Shoreditch, which ran along Boundary Street, on the western edge of the estate. The Boundary Estate is a housing development in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, in the East End of London. The Boundary Estate bandstand at Arnold Circus, built from soil beneath the Old Nichol slum, is the centrepiece of the estate
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