The Blackest Streets

US: Vintage Publishing, 2009. Paperback. Good. A brilliant new book about the seedy side of Victorian London by a talented young historian. In 1887, government inspectors were sent to report on the horrifying, often lethal, living conditions of the Old Nichol, a notorious 15-acre slum in L ondon s East End. Among much else, they found that the rotting 100-year-old houses were some of the most lucrative properties in the capital for their absent slumlords. Peers of the Realm, local politicians, churchmen and law yers were making profits on these death-traps of as much as 150 per cent pe r annum. Before long, Old Nichol became a focus of public attention: its 6, 000 inhabitants were condemned for their drunkenness and criminality. The s olution to the problem lay in internment camps, some said, or forced emigra tion even eugenics. The Blackest Streets focuses on the last fifteen years of the nineteenth ce ntury, a turbulent period in London s history, when revolution was very muc h in the air when unemployment, agricultural depression and a crackdown on parish relief provided a breeding ground for communists and anarchists. Sarah Wise explores the real lives behind the statistics, excavating the Old Nichol from the ruins of history, laying bare the social and political conditions that created and sustained this black hole at the very heart of the Empire.