In this series of posts, I’m following the route taken on 26th July 1898 by a social investigator, George H. Duckworth, who was helping to compile Charles Booth’s Poverty Map for London (1898-1899). He was accompanied by a policeman, Inspector Fitzgerald, who accompanied him round a district that was

The investigator made detailed notes, supplemented by Fitzgerald’s observations, and I have been comparing these to my observations of the streets and buildings as they are today. I quote often from the original notebooks, so it’s worthwhile reading my introductory post and also familiarising yourself with the poverty map’s colour coding, listed to your left and explained in more detail here.

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Duckworth began his day at Homerton Station, so I head down there to look around. Then, as now, the platforms were situated just off Church Road, known since 1936 as Barnabas Road. When the investigator arrived in 1898 he saw a street that was moderately comfortable but bruised here and there with want; and whilst, today, he would no longer be able to look out for bootless children or straw-hatted rent collectors, he would immediately realise that this pocket of Homerton has been left to rot.

The Alma public house would still be one of the first landmarks he saw, but instead of a busy boozer under the stewardship of delightfully-named Fanny Finch, he’d be confronted with a neglected building, left dilapidated after an attempt to convert it into flats, its tiled entrance smashed out and then engorged with breezeblocks.

I find myself wondering how Duckworth would interpret the busyness of the glass telephone boxes, one either side of the station approach. As I walk past, both are in use; and as one person vacates his booth, another man crosses the road and enters it. Duckworth was a man who could whip out a moral judgement at moment’s notice (“Some slatternly girls. ‘No brothels now but there used to be.’ But it looked as though there might be still…”). Would he see people who lacked mobiles, or men who were chasing drugs, or whores, or both?

I can’t decide; but at least the kiosks aren’t smashed and I’ve not seen anyone piss in them.

From the station Duckworth and his escort, Inspector Fitzgerald, walked up Church Street and turned into Homerton High Street, examining in turn the fibrillae of roads and closes that splay off on its journey east. First on their route were Nisbet Place and Nisbet Street (which Duckworth spelled as ‘Nesbit’ throughout).

East down Homerton High Street to Nesbit Place, which has a block of model dwellings and some small factories of tables and pianofortes. Children were making a grotto in the St[reet]. Further east into Nesbit St, which the map marks as dark blue lined with black. From Fitzgerald’s account it would perhaps be dark blue but not black. It is evidently poor. Many children and costers barrows about (2.40). Two families in each house. Houses two-storied. “Prostitutes used to live here but do not now & it was never a notorious place” said Fitzgerald. One or two houses were noticeable for torn blinds and broken windows. The houses have 7 rooms and are let for 13/- to 14/- per week. They have yards rather than gardens at the back of them.

Neither Nisbet Street or Nisbet Place now exist: both were demolished as part of the slum clearances between 1935 and 1936. By then, it was becoming unacceptable to let people live in houses like these on Nisbet Street, pictured here in 1930.

Instead, those who knew best decided that the working classes needed didn’t just need homes, but an “experiment in the construction of a village in modern dress.” * Of course, that was just a good way of talking up a vast, crowded, six-storey citadel of 311 council flats. The year after they were built, they looked like this:

Imposing. Vast. A ghetto dressed up as Progress. Even King George VI and Queen Elizabeth dropped by to declare the place officially open:

Note how the families hang out of their windows to greet their royal guests: although there are over 300 flats, there are only 15 communal entrance points. That’s one door to the outside world for roughly every 20 families.

Little residue of that pride is evident today. The exterior walls show where channels of water have run unchecked down the bricks. There’s litter on the communal grass patches that face the street - visible from the flats, but accessible from none. A diamond shaped placard in one window declares

TOO
MANY
FREAKS

All the communal doors face inwards, into what was probably conceived as a spacious courtyard. It has a playpark in its centre, ensuring that a group of bored and slouching teenagers is the main focal point in this ill-conceived, patronising design. For the first time I realise that council blocks and state secondary schools have shared the same kinds of shape and function as the decades have evolved. Back in the 30s, inward-facing segregation was sold as utopia; these days both kids and residents get shoved in flimsy glass and steel structures behind a perimeter of metal fences, spied on all the while by CCTV cameras for their own ’safety’ and ‘protection’.

Surroundings like these poison human warmth. If planners and architects don’t trust whole groups of people to live like others, and they use bricks and mortar to force them apart, pride decays into neglect. Especially when their municipal landlord couldn’t care a prickly turd about the few symbols of shared purpose that are left to its tenants:

Four bolt holes of contempt.

Duckworth and Fitzgerald moved on from Nisbet Street to Tranby Place (now gone) and then into Crozier Terrace. It too was poor - “dark blue” - and

Its inhabitants are common labourers. The men work in the dust shoot in the marshes and the women go our charing at 2/6 per day or go out/take in to do washing. Houses two storied.

Today, one side of the street is blocked in by the doorless, eastern side of Nisbet House, its six stories dotted liberally, but not uniformly, with satellite dishes. No terraces remain, although there is a pub on the junction with the High Street, The Jackdaw and Stump, which looks as though it must have been built shortly after Duckworth’s tour. It is brightly painted, with slightly sagging net curtains forming a backdrop to a series of no-nonsense notices and placards. The imposing carved eagle above the main door suggests the place has changed its name at least once, but the back of the building is dilapidated with crooked pipes, rotting window frames and an off-kilter burglar alarm.

At the foot of the road, there’s a children’s nursery. But before you reach it, there’s a secure gate leading off to an unmarked complex of buildings. I see only two people exit from the gate, whilst a Dial-a-Ride bus is given access. Only later do I discover that the street is also home to a medium secure unit, a hospital for mentally disordered criminals.

The unit’s siting makes sense. When Duckworth left Crozier Terrace and turned right into Homerton High Street, he soon walked past the Hackney Union Workhouse which, in 1911, had a lunatic block built on its western side where today’s secure unit is sited. The Workhouse also had an infirmary and, when the site came under the control of London County Council in 1930 it became Hackney Hospital for the next 57 years.

I decide to take a closer look at the former workhouse later, and in the meantime I follow Duckworth’s steps round into Sidney Road (Kenworthy Road since 1939) where:

…came a block of newly made or half made streets round the Sydney [sic] Road Board School. They are on the top of the hill which goes down into the Hackney Marshes. Chevet Street. Swinnerton St: road hardly made or very badly kept. No pavement. 2 storied houses - purple in character. Women throwing slops in the street.

The Board School is now Cardinal Pole Roman Catholic School. As I approach, Wednesday afternoon lessons have just finished and pupils are making their way down the hill in groups, seemingly unaware or uninterested of the fact that they are forcing other pedestrians off the path. Despite the policemen stationed at the school gates on both Kenworthy Road and Swinnerton Street, I feel uncomfortable with the idea of taking my camera out of my pocket, so I decide to take photographs of this area at the weekend. Instead I look around and memorise what I see, from the mobile phone mast on the top of the school block, to the girl who, in full view of the police officer, whips out a marker pen and casually scribbles on a white patch of wall before vanishing into Kemey’s Street.

The collection of graffiti contains the usual declarations of love, musical affiliation and gang worship, but also - weirdly - has a streak devoted to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Emma love’s Darren Forever

E.9. Stikz

Swinnerton Street itself has improved little since the time Duckworth witnessed women throwing their slops into it. There are still a few two-storey cottages at either end, but the bulk of the road is lined by the back walls of houses belonging to the relatively modern Herbert Butler estate. This arrangement rips the character out of most of the road, reducing it to a sluice channel for windswept litter and schoolchildren.

One of the smaller roads, Mabley Street, which connects Swinnerton Street and Kenworthy Road, has fared better since Duckworth reported that it was “still in the course of building.” Yet the investigator would certainly have concluded that the houses on its north side showed signs of being more affluent than those on its south. The latter terrace has signs indicating two flats are being offered for rent, whilst black binbags are piled deep up the entrance steps to many of the houses. A window in one house has been boarded up, many of the buildings have flaking paintwork, and there are boxes of fried chicken, spilling bones out on to the pavement. I see one resident - a woman - poke her head out of a basement flat and quickly disappear again.

The north side of Mabley Road, on the other hand contains two properties for sale, has neatly-piled refuse (including a Marks and Spencer bag hangly elegantly off a railing) and one resident - wearing the heavy rectangular spectacles beloved of those who work in the media - smoking a cigarette outside his front door. Duckworth would have classed these houses pink to red, whilst those opposite would have been purple to pink.

I move on to the former Hackney Workhouse, which is less than a minute’s walk away. The block below, as seen from Chevet Street, is the infirmary complex that was built in 1882.

As I look upwards, an argument breaks out in the corner house that joins Kenworthy Road and Chevet Street, so I head off to a local pub to refresh myself and marvel at how Duckworth covered so many streets, in so much detail, in a single day.

Next: Up Glyn Road to Clapton Park where Duckworth finds many boys bathing nude in a ditch.