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

by Sarah Wise; Bodley Head 352pp; £20 "Recent years have seen a good deal of interest in the squalid living conditions of our ancestors," said Gillian Tindall in the Sunday Telegraph. Sarah Wise's new book is a distinguished addition to this genre of social history: it tells the story of a notorious London slum, "Old Nichol", which covered 15 acres of the East End. At the end of the 19th century the philanthropist Charles Booth drew poverty maps of the city, shading from red (the richest) through blue to black (the poorest of all).

The "blackest streets" were found just east of Shoreditch High Street, on the site of Old Nichol. Wise's book falls into two sections. First, we are familiarised with this world "of ramshackle alleys, with the petty trades, scams, crimes, gangs, incest, vagrancy, cruelties and loyalties it sheltered". Secondly, the attempts to reform the area: by trade unionists, anarchists, and most of all, by clergymen.

"The Blackest Streets is a revelatory book," said John Carey in the Sunday Times, "beaming the light of impartial historical research into the horrible dens and alleys." It "avoids the voyeurism" that such books often fall into: Wise describes the terrible conditions dispassionately, bringing out the resilience and self-respect of the slum-dwellers (all but the poorest took out insurance to cover funerals, since being buried in a pauper's grave was considered shameful).

The story has "a bittersweet ending", said Sinclair McKay in the Daily Telegraph. In 1888, the newly-established London County Council slowly set about demolishing the slum, replacing its cramped, derelict dwellings with the sanitary tenement blocks of Arnold Circus. However, these attracted the better-off labourers, while Old Nichol's residents were "displaced to God knows where".

FIRST POSTED JULY 24, 2008