Old Nichol Street Rookery

The Old Nichol, also known as the Nichol or the Old Nichol Street Rookery, was an area of housing in the East End of London, between High Street, Shoreditch, and Hackney Road in the north, and Spitalfields in the south. The main streets within the Old Nichol were Boundary Street, Old Nichol Street, Half Nichol Street, The Mount and Church Street. The slum was located in the western boundary of Bethnal Green, with six of its streets across Boundary Street located in Shoreditch. The Old Nichol was home to 5,719 people, living in a dense network of about 30 streets and courts. The late 18th-century houses included workshops and stables.

In Victorian Britain of the 1880s, the Old Nichol was London’s most notorious slum. The “evil” reputation of the Old Nichol owed much to Arthur Morrison’s fictionalised account of it in A Child of the Jago (1896), and to sensational articles by Rev. Osborne Jay of Holy Trinity Church, known as Father Jay, on whom Morrison relied for information.

With the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, the garden and fields on the land that became the Old Nichol passed into private hands. The Preston Gardens were created on what would later become the southernmost part of the Old Nichol, and the Swan Field would become Mount Street, today's Swansfield Street. Crock Lane, later Boundary Street and Church Street, was established in an L-shape, with narrow alleys running from it, established the original topographical characteristics of the Old Nichol. In the 1670s City of London merchants and lawyers started buying small freeholds behind St Leonard's, Shoreditch. The Gray's Inn lawyer John Nichol bought nearly five acres of land, bounded by the two arms of Cock Lane, on which he built seven houses. In 1680 he leased the land to Jon Richardson, a mason, who dug clay for brick-making during the London Restoration-era building boom, and then sublet his land to builders who constructed houses on the land. In the 1680s and 1690s Nichol Street, later Old Nichol Street, was developed, with Nichol Row being added in 1703, New Nichol Street between 1705 and 1708, and later Half Nichol Street. A high number of the 25,000 Protestant Huguenots who arrived from France in the late 1680s and 1690s and settled in Spitalfields and south Bethnal Green were silk weavers. This led to many houses in the north of the Old Nichol featuring "long lights", also known as weaver windows, so as to maximise daylight in the upper storey of the house where handloom weavers worked. Virginia Row, Virginia Road and (Old) Castle Street were built in the 1680s, while Mount Street and Rose Street existed by 1725. Until the 19th century, when the Old Nichol was established, the area between Mount Street, Rose Street and Half Nichol Street was fields. Late 17th-century housing was eventually demolished and speculative new building created Nelson, Vincent, Collingwood, Trafalgar, Mead, Christopher and Sarah Street, with numerous courts in between. In the 1870s the street names in the north of the Old Nichol were changed in order to protect the memory of Admiral Nelson, in whose honour the streets had been named, from negative association with the slum.

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