Old Nichol rookery In 1680, John Nichol of
Gray's Inn, who had built seven houses here, leased of gardens for 180 years to a
London mason, Jon Richardson, with permission to dig for bricks. The land became piecemeal with houses built by several sub-lessees. Many of the streets were named after Nichol, and by 1827, the estate consisted of 237 houses.
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. In the area, it was noted: Roads were unmade, often mere alleys, small houses without foundations, subdivided and often around unpaved courts. An almost total lack of drainage and sewerage was made worse by the ponds formed by the excavation of brickearth. Pigs and cows in back yards, noxious trades like boiling tripe, melting tallow, or preparing cat's meat, slaughter houses, dustheaps, and 'lakes of putrefying night soil' added to the filth. 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. The vicar of St 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 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.
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. For ecclesiastical purposes, the Old Nichol was part of the parish of
Holy Trinity, Shoreditch, from 1866. However, there was no church building and services were held in a hay loft above a stable. Eventually, a site on Old Nichol Street was built.
Demand for change began
slum clearance. 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.
Charles Booth had already noted the extreme poverty in the area in his study of London poverty. Nearly 6,000 individuals were crammed into the packed streets. The death rate from violent crime was 40 per 1000, twice that of the rest of
Bethnal Green, and four times that of London. One child in four died before their first birthday. Redevelopment had been resisted by members of the
Bethnal Green vestry, who owned much of the rookery and were responsible for electing the
Metropolitan Board of Works members. The powers of the vestries and board were limited to the
Torrens Act and the
Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act 1875 (Cross Act), which the Bethnal Green vestry refused to use. Jay persuaded
Arthur Morrison to visit the area, and the result was the influential
A Child of the Jago, a barely fictionalised account of the life of a child in the slum, re-christened by Morrison as
The Jago: "What was too vile for Kate Street,
Seven Dials, and
Ratcliffe Highway in its worst day, what was too useless, incapable and corrupt — all that teemed on the Old Jago." Journalist
Sarah Wise wrote that, according to historian David Rich, Morrison came up with the name Jago because "it's where Jay goes". Demolition began before the publication of the book. The
London County Council was created by the
Local Government (England and Wales) Act 1888, some 53 years after other major cities had been municipalised. It took responsibility for housing the working classes from the
Metropolitan Board of Works. In the first election, the progressives obtained a large majority. The Housing Committee secured from Parliament the
Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890 (
53 & 54 Vict. c. 70), which gave it powers to implement the Torrens and Cross acts and a legal basis for managing housing estates. LCC chose Boundary Street as their flagship scheme. Initially, they attempted to get the private sector involved but failed. In 1893, on the back of the Blackwall Tunnel Act 1892, they gained permission from the
Home Secretary to rebuild a small section of the scheme. The principle had been established.
The Boundary Street Scheme , Chairman of LCC The newly established
London County Council (LCC) decided to rebuild an area of some , including the Nichol and Snow estates, and a small piece on the
Shoreditch side of Boundary Street, formerly Cock Lane. What became known as the Bethnal Green Improvement Scheme displaced 5,719 people and demolished 730 houses. It was initially planned as a series of rectangular plots, but in 1893, a radial plan that would house more people was approved.
Owen Fleming designed the Boundary Street scheme. He retained only Boundary Street in the west and Mount Street in the east, though he widened both to . Old Nichol Street was also widened and extended to Mount Street, then renamed Swanfield Street. He designed . wide tree-lined streets to radiate from an ornamental space called Arnold Circus. The LCC architects designed 21 and
Rowland Plumbe, two of 23 blocks containing 10 and 85 tenements each. A total of 1,069 tenements, mostly two or three-roomed, were planned to accommodate 5,524 persons. The project was hailed as setting "new aesthetic standards for housing the working classes" and included a new laundry, 18 shops, and 77 workshops. Churches and schools were preserved. Building for the project began in 1893. The two schools, Rochelle School, which was built in 1879, and Virginia School, built in 1887, predate the estate. The new flats replaced the existing slums with decent accommodation for the same number of people, but the occupiers changed. The original inhabitants were forced further to the East, creating new overcrowding and new slums in areas such as
Dalston and
Bethnal Green. No help was offered to those displaced to find new accommodation, and this added to the suffering and misery of many of the former residents of the slum. The new blocks had policies to enforce sobriety; the new tenants were clerks, policemen, cigarmakers and nurses. Such was the success of the campaign that the
Prince of Wales officially opened the estate in early March 1900, saying ''Few indeed will forget this site who had read Mr Morrison's A Child of the Jago, and all of us are familiar with the labours of that most excellent philanthropist, Mr. Jay, in this neighbourhood''. The impresarios and brothers
Lew Grade and
Bernard Delfont (born Winogradsky) moved to the Boundary Estate in 1914 from nearby
Brick Lane and attended Rochelle Street School. At that time, 90% of children attending the school spoke
Yiddish.
Revival Tower Hamlets Council has proposed transferring the estate to a
housing association and upgrading the accommodation. Sprunt Architects carried out a full refurbishment of one of the blocks, Iffley House, to demonstrate how this might be achieved but a ballot of tenants rejected the proposal in November 2006. The estate radiates from a centrepiece roundabout, Arnold Circus, formed around a garden with a
bandstand. The Friends of Arnold Circus are now preserving it and have received regeneration grants. Restoration work on the bandstand was completed in 2010. Arnold Circus is also a landmark on several ley alignments, including
Alfred Watkins' "Strand Ley" and "The Coronation Line," which is curious, as before 1893, there was no intersection or feature here. One of the roads that links into the circus is the northern end of Club Row, a part of
Brick Lane market, well known as an animal market until this activity was closed down in 1983. ==Conservation area==