Five minutes from the cocktail bars stands the first council estate in the country, and it is still doing its job
Arnold Circus: The Bandstand Built on the Rubble of London’s Worst Slum
There is a small round garden a few minutes’ walk from Shoreditch High Street that most visitors never find. It sits on a mound, ringed by tall plane trees, with a bandstand at the top. Seven streets lead away from it like the spokes of a wheel, each lined with handsome red-brick mansion blocks striped in bands of paler brick. On a weekday morning it is quiet enough to hear the pigeons. It is, in my opinion, the most remarkable place in the neighbourhood, and its story is the one I tell every newcomer whether they have asked or not.
The garden is Arnold Circus. The blocks around it form the Boundary Estate. Together they are widely regarded as the first council housing estate in Britain, and among the earliest in the world. The mound under the bandstand is not a natural hill. It is made from the rubble of the slum that stood here before.
The Old Nichol
In the late nineteenth century, this patch of ground held a district known as the Old Nichol. It was a warren of courts and alleys in which several thousand people lived in conditions that shocked even Victorians, who were not easily shocked by poverty. Families occupied single rooms. Houses were damp, dark and crumbling. The death rate was far above the London average, and for small children it was dreadful.
The area gained wider notoriety through a novel. Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago, published in 1896, portrayed a thinly disguised Nichol as a place of violence and hopelessness. The book was a sensation. Later historians have argued that it was unfair to the people who lived there, most of whom were not criminals but ordinary workers in the furniture, shoe and clothing trades, getting by on very little. Either way, the name stuck and the reputation with it.
A New Kind of Landlord
The clearance of the Nichol was taken on by the London County Council, which had been created in 1889 and was eager to show what a city-wide authority could do. Under new housing legislation it demolished the slum and built in its place something no public body in the country had attempted on that scale: decent homes to let, designed and owned by the council itself.
The estate was opened in 1900 by the Prince of Wales, shortly to become Edward VII. The architects, a group of young men in the council’s housing department influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, gave the blocks steep gables, tall chimneys and decorative brickwork. The buildings were named after towns and villages along the Thames. There were shops, workshops, a laundry and two schools. Light and air were treated as necessities. The blocks are now listed, and the record of them kept by Historic England explains why.
The Awkward Truth
There is a part of the story that is told less often, and honesty requires it. Very few of the people cleared from the Old Nichol were rehoused on the Boundary Estate. The new rents were higher than they could manage, and the tenancy rules were strict. The flats went largely to better-paid workers: clerks, policemen, skilled tradesmen. The poorest residents moved into neighbouring streets, which became more crowded as a result.
It is a pattern anyone who follows housing in London will recognise. An area is improved, and the improvement is real, and the people it was meant to help find they cannot afford to stay. The Boundary Estate was a noble experiment that also displaced the poor. Both statements are true, and regeneration schemes ever since have struggled with the same contradiction.
The Bandstand
The bandstand was added a few years after the estate opened, and for decades there were concerts on the mound. By the late twentieth century it had fallen into a sorry state. It was brought back by local people, who formed a group of friends of the circus, raised funds and worked with the council to restore the gardens and the structure. Today there are brass bands again in summer, along with picnics, a community festival and children racing round the paths.
The circus was always meant as a common garden for the tenants, and it is still used as one. I have sat there on warm evenings and watched three generations of a family share a meal on a bench while, two streets away, people queued to pay a great deal for small plates. I know which looked like the better night.
Who Lives There Now
The estate lies in the borough of Tower Hamlets, close to the boundary with Hackney, which gives it its name. Its population has changed many times. It was heavily Jewish in the early twentieth century. Bangladeshi families arrived from the 1970s and remain a large part of the community. Since the right to buy was introduced, a share of the flats have passed into private hands, and some now sell or rent at prices that would have astonished the council that built them.
That has brought tension. Long-standing tenants and newer leaseholders do not always want the same things, and the shops on Calvert Avenue, once a parade of useful local businesses, now include some of the smartest boutiques in east London. But the majority of homes are still social housing, the tenants’ association is active, and the estate has resisted being hollowed out more successfully than much of the area around it.
Why It Matters Today
London is once again in a housing emergency, and the arguments heard in the 1890s are being had again almost word for word. Who should build homes for people on modest wages? What standard should they be built to? Who gets to live in them? The men who designed the Boundary Estate thought that working people deserved beauty as well as shelter. More than a century later their buildings are still standing, still handsome and still lived in.
Many later estates did not last half as long. If there is a lesson, it may be that building well is cheaper in the end.
Anyone can visit. Walk up from Shoreditch High Street, take a seat by the bandstand and consider that you are sitting on top of a slum. For readers who like a smile with their history, the British satirical news desk and NewsThump have had much to say about London housing, and the old street language of the East End is preserved in the guide to Cockney rhyming slang. The essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not draws the line between that work and this. More of my local reporting is on my author page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
