Boundary Street Estate, London

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34Boundary Street Estate LondonThe original Boundary Street ran along the eastern boundary of an old priory. Unplanned and uncontrolled building on the land to the east of the street in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries turned what had been a rural hamlet on the fringe of London into the Old Nichol Rookery: a district whose name became a byword for poverty, crime, and disease. The slum took its nickname from land leased from John Nichol in 1680. Originally the site was used for brick making but the area steadily developed in piecemeal fashion to accommodate workers in the silk-weaving trade that spread eastward from Spitalfields early in the eighteenth century. When the weaving industry collapsed under pressure from cheaper Continental imports in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the tenements of the Old Nichol were subdivided and intermixed with backroom workshops and ‘manufactories’ where residents eked out a living making matches, matchboxes, clothes pegs, shoes, and cheap clothes. By the mid-nineteenth century the district had become notorious as one of London’s worst. In 1848 Hector Gavin, medical officer of health whose responsibilities included the Old Nichol, wrote that it surpassed the rest of the East End:... in filth, disease, mortality, and wretchedness ... it abounds with the most foul courts, and is character-ized by the presence of the greatest nuisances, and perennial foulness. Sanitary Ramblings, being Sketches and Illustrations, of Bethnal Green, London,1848, p. 42The Boundary Street Estate in Shoreditch is a landmark district in terms of both urban policy and urban design. It was one of the ear-liest social housing schemes and the world’s first local authority housing, revolutionary in its provision of facilities for residents. An article in the Illustrated London News on 24 October 1863 described the district as:... one painful and monotonous round of vice, filth and poverty, huddled in dark cellars, ruined garrets, bare and blackened rooms, reeking with disease and death, and without the means, even if there were The Boundary Street Estate is situated in London’s East End, just 1.5 km due north of the Tower of London.Boundary Street Conservation Area. The district contains twenty Grade-II Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest (in blue). Map extract after London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Boundary Estate Conservation Area (2007), p. 3.

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34Boundary Street Estate LondonThe original Boundary Street ran along the eastern boundary of an old priory. Unplanned and uncontrolled building on the land to the east of the street in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries turned what had been a rural hamlet on the fringe of London into the Old Nichol Rookery: a district whose name became a byword for poverty, crime, and disease. The slum took its nickname from land leased from John Nichol in 1680. Originally the site was used for brick making but the area steadily developed in piecemeal fashion to accommodate workers in the silk-weaving trade that spread eastward from Spitalfields early in the eighteenth century. When the weaving industry collapsed under pressure from cheaper Continental imports in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the tenements of the Old Nichol were subdivided and intermixed with backroom workshops and ‘manufactories’ where residents eked out a living making matches, matchboxes, clothes pegs, shoes, and cheap clothes. By the mid-nineteenth century the district had become notorious as one of London’s worst. In 1848 Hector Gavin, medical officer of health whose responsibilities included the Old Nichol, wrote that it surpassed the rest of the East End:... in filth, disease, mortality, and wretchedness ... it abounds with the most foul courts, and is character-ized by the presence of the greatest nuisances, and perennial foulness. Sanitary Ramblings, being Sketches and Illustrations, of Bethnal Green, London,1848, p. 42The Boundary Street Estate in Shoreditch is a landmark district in terms of both urban policy and urban design. It was one of the ear-liest social housing schemes and the world’s first local authority housing, revolutionary in its provision of facilities for residents. An article in the Illustrated London News on 24 October 1863 described the district as:... one painful and monotonous round of vice, filth and poverty, huddled in dark cellars, ruined garrets, bare and blackened rooms, reeking with disease and death, and without the means, even if there were The Boundary Street Estate is situated in London’s East End, just 1.5 km due north of the Tower of London.Boundary Street Conservation Area. The district contains twenty Grade-II Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest (in blue). Map extract after London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Boundary Estate Conservation Area (2007), p. 3.

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