Sarah WISE

Voices of the Nichol

Police would not patrol there, even in daylight; no stranger would chance their arm there; it was a nest of cosh-carriers and prostitutes. The Old Nichol in central East London has had a terrible press over the past 150 years or so. But did it deserve it? Historian Sarah Wise has undertaken a close examination of surviving documentation – memoirs, police and court records, parliamentary papers, the archives of the London County Council, and Charles Booth's Life and Labour notebooks – which allows us to piece together a much more complex picture of life in the slum. And in the process, the Nichol legend dies a death.