London's Blackest Streets

Historian Arah Wise and Community activist Philip Green explore the history of 19th-century London’s most notorious slum and its transformation into the epicentre of the city hippest quarter.

The Old Nichol in Shoreditch had the worst reputation in Victorian London for criminality, chronic poverty and low life-expectancy in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Charles Booth coloured the Nichol's streets deepest black on his famous Poverty Map, and described it as 'deserving of destruction'. But was this fair? What did the people of the Nichol themselves think of their environment? SARAH WISE seeks to untangle myth and fact about this infamous spot and, among the clamour of outside observers, tries to locate the authentic voice of society's most outcast.

The Old Nichol rookery was demolished under pressure from social activists and in its place the radical model housing BOUNDARY ESTATE was constructed in the 1890s.The estate consists of beautiful multi-storey brick tenements radiating from a central circus. Long term resident PHILIP GREEN guides us through the history of the estate's life as social housing with huge social deprivations and divisions - and the political and economic pressures it faces as a consequence of the gentrification of the area