Gentrification has for several decades followed a familiar pattern. It starts when “artists move into an area with cheap housing and studio space, then developers follow – and longstanding communities are forced out,” the Guardian reported. “Little thought is given to the people who have lived there for […]
For the Daily Mail in 1901 Dorset Street was “the Worst Street” in London.” The notorious stretch in Spitalfields was somewhere that “boasts a murder on average once a month, of a murder in every house, and one house at least, a murder in every room,” it wrote. […]
When the social researcher Henry Mayhew reported on Spitalfields in 1849, the living conditions that he discovered in some people’s homes was shocking. In one weavers’ house in the East London neighbourhood he found “spread a bed, on which lay four…. boys, two with their heads in one […]
Where does the City of London end and the rest of the capital begin? The quick answer can of course be determined by tracing the boundary on maps – or in certain places painted bollards. But for Londoners and visitors alike these official demarcations are meaningless for most […]
An abandoned terraced house in south London seems a fitting setting for such dark a story. Amongst the peeling walls and bare floorboards of this crumbling Peckham property, unfolds the tragic events of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 when Catholic mobs attacked protestants, known as Huguenots, […]
“Save Norton Folgate,” shouts the large black print on a white banner flapping in the wind above a fine Georgian terrace a few minutes walk from Liverpool Street station. Four decades on from when Dan Cruickshank, Sir John Betjeman and many dedicated others fought a long hard battle […]
Past In The Present 