Boundary Estate
Soil from the foundations was used to construct a mound in the middle of Arnold Circus at the centre of the development, surmounted by an extant bandstand.
[2] The estate consists of multistorey brick tenements radiating from the central circus, each of which bears the name of a town or village along the non-tidal reaches of the Thames.
In 1680 John Nichol of Gray's Inn, who had built seven houses here, leased 4.75 acres (1.92 ha) of gardens for 180 years to a London mason, Jon Richardson, with permission to dig for bricks.
[3] Henry Mayhew visited Bethnal Green in 1850, and noted for The Morning Chronicle the trades in the area: tailors, costermongers, shoemakers, dustmen, sawyers, carpenters, cabinet makers and silkweavers.
In the area, it was noted: Roads were unmade, often mere alleys, houses small and without foundations, subdivided and often around unpaved courts.
Pigs and cows in back yards, noxious trades like boiling tripe, melting tallow, or preparing cat's meat, and slaughter houses, dustheaps, and 'lakes of putrefying night soil' added to the filth.
The Builder in 1863, noted the numbers inhabiting unfit cellars, the lack of sanitation and that running water was only available for 10–12 minutes each day.
The clearance of the slum houses of the Old Nichol Street rookery was the result of an energetic campaign by the local incumbent, Reverend Osborne Jay of Holy Trinity,[10] who arrived in the parish in December 1886.
The London County Council was created by the Local Government (England and Wales) Act 1888, some 53 years after other major cities had been municipalised.
[15] The newly established London County Council (LCC) decided to rebuild an area of some 15-acre (6.1 ha), including the Nichol and Snow estates, and a small piece on the Shoreditch side of Boundary Street, formerly Cock Lane.
The project was hailed as setting "new aesthetic standards for housing the working classes" and included a new laundry, 18 shops,[18] and 77 workshops.
[19] Such was the success of the campaign, that the Prince of Wales officially opened the estate in early March 1900, saying Few indeed will forget this site who had read Mr Morrison's A Child of the Jago, and all of us are familiar with the labours of that most excellent philanthropist, Mr. Jay, in this neighbourhood.
[20] The impresarios and brothers Lew Grade and Bernard Delfont (born Winogradsky) moved to the Boundary Estate in 1914, from nearby Brick Lane and attended Rochelle Street School.
Tower Hamlets Council has made proposals to transfer the estate to a housing association,[22] and upgrade the accommodation.
A full refurbishment of one of the blocks, Iffley House was carry out by Sprunt Architects to demonstrate how this might be achieved but the proposal was rejected by a ballot of tenants in November 2006.
The architect who oversaw this was E.R.Robson, a student of George Gilbert Scott.The two school houses on the Rochelle campus, juniors and infants, were early examples of Robson's work.
