The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum

Sarah Wise writes a detailed and varied account of the Old Nichol, a 15 acre East End slum in Victorian London, a place of desperate poverty yet brave and stoic community. She uses personal stories and varied sources to chronicle the depths of the problems: from filthy sewage contaminated streets and houses, to rising child mortality, malnutrition and overcrowding, whole families often forced into single room accommodations below ground and sharing with their donkeys and animals. She also exposes the ironic fact that the landlords making money out of this abysmal poverty were often London’s richest, including members of the peerage, lawyers and churchmen.

“The Nichol’s thirty or so streets and courts of more or less rotten show more early-nineteenth-century houses were home to around 5,700 people, of whom four-fifths were children. Its death rate was almost double that of the rest of Bethnal Green, the very poor East London parish at whose western boundary the Nichol stood….The annual mortality rate of the Nichol in the late 1880s was 40 per 1,000 people; Bethnal Green’s hovered between 22 and 23 per 1,000 for these years, not much above the London (and, indeed, the national) figure of 19 to 20 per 1,000. (Today, the death rate for England and Wales is 5.94 per 1,000.) One-third of all these London deaths were those of babies and infants. Bethnal Green’s death rate for babies under the age of one was in line with the average figure for England and Wales of 150 per 1,000 live births; in the Nichol it was a horrific 252 per 1,000….the Nichol was for many an East Ender a final stopping-off point before entry into the dreaded workhouse, and the less-dreaded death therein.”

Wide also turns her attentions to the efforts of the wealthy to “rescue” the poor, a scope which spans from the ludicrous and self-aggrandizing to the truly altruistic. The philosophies range from socialism, religious fervour, to a belief that the poor are so because of their own moral vices, a hatred and contempt towards them, sometimes backed up by pseudoscience such as eugenics. She looks at various characters working within the Old Nichol such as the larger-than-life Father Jay of Holy Trinity with his boxing clubs and shelters. Finally the only plausible solution seemed to be demolition. The London City Council was created and began the building of a model new housing called Boundary Estate, which ironically when it was finally built, displacing thousands from the Old Nichol, only housed eleven of the original inhabitants due to being either unaffordable for them or unsuited to their needs.

I found this to be a highly informative, honest and sympathetic account which I appreciated as an insight into the real day-to-day lives of some of my ancestors who were unfortunate enough to live in the Old Nichol. Thank you Sarah Wise. show less