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

I’ve been raving about Sarah Wise’s brilliant book The Blackest Streets so thought it was about time that I wrote a blog post about it. The book is a social history of Victorian London’s poorest and most notorious slum, the Nichol, a densely populated part of East London, tucked in between Shoreditch High Street and the western boundary of Bethnal Green. For me the brilliance of this book comes not just in the rich descriptions of the terrible material conditions of life in the slum (not least through the voices of the people who lived there, most notably Arthur Harding), nor in the exposure of the exploitation of the poorest by rich and often noble Victorian landlords, but in Wise’s critical (rather than unquestioning) perspective on often celebrated social scientists and reformers of the time.

[Charles Booth's poverty map of the Nichol via Wikipedia ]

 The book takes its name from Charles Booth’s poverty map of London which literally colour coded London streets based on a survey of the economic and moral condition of people who lived there. The Nichol was labelled ‘black’ because, as described on the legend on the map, people of the ‘lowest’ ‘vicious’ and ‘semi-criminal’ class lived there. Not to downplay the progressive social reforms that Booth contributed to, it is interesting to think about how his work very definitely fit into, and perhaps contributed to creating, categories of ‘deserving’ and ‘un-deserving poor’ which underlay social reforms at the time and arguably still do today. The poor were seen to have fallen down to the lowest level not because of socio-economic inequities or exploitation by scrupulous landlords, but because of their own failures. According to Wise, Booth and other social reformers, including the Reverent Osborne Jay of Holy Trinity church who lived and worked in the slum at the time, subscribed to the idea that poverty and deprivation could literally be ‘bred’ out of society through eugenics. This reading is a warning not to focus energy on the "moral failings" of a supposed underclass which comes to obscure more fundamental economic, social and political issues behind poverty and social inequality.

[Boundary Estate, copyright Rodney Burton via Geograph]

Such a perspective may lead to the clearance of poor quality housing but can also come to justify the forced clearance of people too. In the late 1800s the Nichol was cleared and replaced by the Boundary Estate, but many of the Nichol's residents were forced on and did not benefit from the new housing that was built in its place. Unfortunately this is an all too familiar story - the same can be said of some regeneration schemes that have happened over the last two decades, including the planned redevelopment of the Aylesbury Estate in South London as illustrated by Loretta Lees' work with residents there; and the demolition of homes in Kensington, Liverpool as shown by  Chris Allen’s study of Housing Market Renewal.