My grandma grew up on the Boundary Estate. About 10 years ago there was a documentary about it on iPlayer. I took my laptop round to watch it with her. My favourite moment was when she gasped and shouted “That’s my old sweet shop!” She hadn’t thought about it in more than 70 years.
How strange. I was sat under the shelter at Boundary Gardens just 2 nights ago wondering of the history of the buildings around. I wasn't expecting Jago Hazzard to fill me in just 2 days later.
His chief weapon is information...information and puns...puns and information.... His two weapons are puns and information...and a ruthless video release schedule.... His *three* weapons are puns, information, and a ruthless video release schedule...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Tube.... His *four* ...no... *Amongst* his weapons.... Amongst his weaponry...are such elements as puns, information.... I'll come in again.
Back in 1965, when I was 19 and a trainee in the GLC Legal Department, I had to investigate a tripping accident on some Boundary Estate stairs. Did I resolve it? Er, no. But I did meet a nonagenarian lady tenant who wanted to tell me her story. "Before the Great War, there were lovely German bands playing on the bandstand. "We had to kill them later, I suppose", she added. "Funny old world", was her conclusion, and I'll always recall her words.
A brilliant video, Mr Jago, sir. After seeing that odd bandstand used as a location on TV shows like 'Primeval', and 'Luther', I've always wondered where it was, and now, thanks to you, I know. I love the repurposed railway station benches on it as well. Many years ago, (1980's) when some 'remediation' (read: 'demolition') work was being done on a station in my town, three friends and myself 'liberated' a perfectly good station bench from a pile of rubble, and carried it, in triumph, through the streets in the small hours, to a friend's house. Not one person asked what we were doing. The bench, once repainted, and re-slatted, took pride of place in my mate's kitchen for years.
Ah-ha... My GW station seat (3.62m long) was bought from Shirley on the N.Warwickshire Line, however, this was legitimate and bought from BR being removed in person. Mine resides indoors in my conservatory.
There's a legend in my hometown (Uppsala, Sweden) about two students carrying a park bench between them being stopped by the police. They produced a receipt for the bench, and as things were perfectly legal, the police let them be. As the evening went on they got stopped more times by other policemen, and eventually the call goes out that two students carrying a park bench are not to be stopped since they have a receipt for it. By morning there weren't any park benches left in the parks!
I live on the Boundary Estate. I wasn't so crazy about my flat to begin with as it's sort of quirky in layout, with no proper hallways, so all four rooms - living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom - are basically right next to each other. But I've done it up nicely and now find it hard to imagine living anywhere else. I'm on the top floor of a five storey building and there's no lift but I'm used to that now, even if the delivery drivers aren't! Also, as it's a grade 2 listed building, there's no double glazing to retain the aesthetic integrity, so it's not the warmest flat in the winter. I think around half of the flats in my block of fifteen are now privately owned, which is a shame, as most are let out for eye watering rents. I consider myself to be very fortunate to be a council tenant with a secure tenancy and genuinely affordable rent.
Couldn't they fit secondary glazing inside behind the original windows? There are also now multiple ply glass panes available to convert original windows to double or even triple glazing without any alteration in appearance.
This was wonderful; I was raised on Old Nichol Street from 1971 to 1985 and only learned of the area's history many years after I left. It was quite a dive when we lived there but I have many fantastic memories.
@@caw25sha they are not even of a similar period to the buildings and completely off their home territory, aren't they? Maybe easier to source and cheaper that rare Great Eastern Railway benches...
Hearing this brings a lump to my throat, bringing to life the existence of my Great Grandfather, wife and 14 kids, only half of which survived out of childhood, living in London slums from about 1819 to 1863. It's no wonder that my grandfather (born 1860) joined the British Army as a bandboy, aged 12, to get away from the poverty and degradation that existed in Grays Inn Road (then Lane) , St. Giles and Seven Dials, just some of the areas that they inhabited.
@@adonaiyah2196 Thx. It's probably the story of most city-dwelling working class families in the UK at that time. It's just that you only find out by researching your family history. If one thing upset me, it was the death of two of their children within a week, a baby of 'Decline', when the actual cause of death was unknown to the doctor and one of smallpox, aged 7, thankfully eliminated from the world now. Much of the poverty was lack of birth control (or self-control!) and, therefore the need/cost of feeding so many children.
whilst slum clearances did somewhat relieve London of some of the Poverty by building better housing (and as stated moving workers generally one rung up the ladder), the main push was one to drive the slum-dwellers into the navy and colonies... one can with some fairness say, the real solution to slums came a few decades later & involved machine guns, gas and barbed wire... yes, that's extremely dark, but just like the Plague reduced medieval poverty & overpopulation of cities, so the Great War would be the only thing to end the squalor of impoverished masses post the Industrial-revolution.
@@adonaiyah2196 .....and, ironically, the possibility of pregnancies going wrong these days never gets mention by the medical profession, leading to high expectation, then devastation when things go wrong.
There is a sliver of truth in it though, as pulling oneself up by the bootstraps [especially back then] requires dedication, persistance and a lot of hard work. A little good luck too, as one chance application or good interview can change everything. Those whom turn to drinking excessively to drown their sorrows / escape the lousy state of their life for a few hours, ironically only make it all worse.
@@jimtaylor294 And I suppose those who may have been beaten, sexually abused or made mentally ill by other means might have shorter bootstraps and less strength to drag themselves up by.
@@jimtaylor294 @Jim Taylor There have been, and still are, many politicians, especially the one with the handbag, who have needed you to explain that to them.
Only half a million quid? Wow, in Melbourne (which has only two thirds the population of London), you won't get much within 10 km of the city for that price except the smallest and most run down flats.
Actually we have a quite different problem, housing being used as an investment not a place to live. Which is akin to burning £20 notes in front of homeless people. Thatcher did get one thing right with the Community Charge and that was a punitive tax for keeping a property empty. We need that back.
One of the largest noticeable changes in my lifetime has been the encouragement of people to become and own businesses. Property has always been king and some of the comments on here don’t need repeating to compliment that fact. Average joe never thought of owning a few properties but I can remember it starting with many things such as ‘ buying Nans flat’ etc.
That was brilliant - I never knew that place even existed. I must have a wander through there at some point because those buildings are gorgeous. The accounts of the slums reminded me of George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, but worse.
I've only just finished re-reading Terry Pratchett's Dodger, which features Angela Burdett-Coutts, and which could very well have been set around the area of the Old Jago.
I was born in old ford rd East london in 1958 and i can remember asking my grandad in the 60"s where he was born , My grandad was about 6ft 4 and had a tattoo on his hand and when asked he got down to my height and looked me right in the eyes and said in a chilling voice ........ ".I COME FROM THE JAGO LITTLE UN .. I COME FROM THE JAGO " I ran to my mum in tears scared to death of what the Jago was ... He was a bull of a man but i loved him to death .
I have been the milkman on the Boundary estate since 1983 when it had once again become a run down and neglected area. I have seen the improvements over the year's and watched the large Bangladeshi community move out and young hipsters move in. Sadly my last customer moved out last year and I've gone from serving 300 customers to none in the space of 38 years. I still have my memories of carrying 3 crates of milk upstairs in the bigger blocks in the heat of sweltering summer mornings and the wonderful Bangladeshi people who lived there. I even learnt some words of Bengali to communicate with the wives who spoke no English! PS: Only one of the original Old Nicole tenants moved back in when the flats where rebuilt, such were the high rents being charged.
A small correction: the "idle" poor had existed for a lot longer than the industrial revolution. Henry VII's poor laws and those supported by the parishes divided between the deserving (widowers, the elderly, those too injured to work) and the undeserving poor 3/400 years before this
Of course, many people with lesser-known or invisible disabilities were regarded as “just lazy” for those centuries while they told themselves it must be normal to feel like having a bad cold all the time, or for their joints to be on fire. “Too injured to work” is still applied far more restrictively than the spirit suggests, and that’s with much better medical knowledge.
Commendable - you have a natural aptitude for combining education and entertainment. And humour. Loved the 'walk-on cameos' of station benches right at the end: 'Look, no trains - and you didn't even miss them'.
Interesting to note that the changes came about because the rich were concerned about the impacts the slums could have on them and their businesses, and politics (disease, communism.) Great video. The book London Labour and the London Poor, written in Victorian England is a classic and should be required reading tbh.
I did a double-take at the brief mention of Seven Dials (in the St Giles area). Today, it's pretty upmarket, so it's funny to be reminded that it used to be one of London's most notorious slum districts.
Listeners to night time radio in the 1990's, and who were fans of Mark Radcliffe and Marc Riley (then known as 'Lard'), might have expected this as one of Mark Radcliffe's introductions, where it would be suffixed by Lard's cheery: "Hiya, Mark!" Cod fish battered balls etc.
Not all of Rotherham is unpleasant, far from it unlike (.............) insert the name of a random town you dont really know much about here , Leicester springs to my mind
0:09 "... the welkin was an infernal coppery glare". Can I beat the drum for more use of the word "welkin" please? It means "clouded sky" and because of the casting over, by association firmament or "heavenly vault". The word is related to the German for "cloud", "Wolke". Unlike "cloud", it has the spatial quality of being somewhere, so is actually a better word for the computer cloud than "cloud".
Just to pedantically clarify, "welkin" simply means "sky", not specifically "clouded sky". The welkin can be clouded, clear, or any condition you like.
@@dunebasher1971 Just to meta-pedantically clarify (the opportunity today for the first time in my life presented, there are clearly pedantries beyond pedantry, thanks for the link): Arthur Morrison cannot possibly have used this word in the casual way you (in this let-it-all-hang-out manner) espouse. Had the welkin been clear on that fateful evening, it would have been an open "SKY", which would NOT have reflected the raging fires of Shoreditch. Morrison referred literarily and thus by implication semantically to the etymological derivation of the word (see above), which ON ITS OWN enables the "coppery glare". Had he had to have recourse to the lexicon "sky", he would have needed to include an epithet. With the use of "welkin", he enabled a literary thrift which your schoolboyish carefreeness would (and why?) disallow.
Ah Jago, Many years ago when I was seventeen and working as a solicitors clerk I and my fellow clerk had to pick up a client from an area in Bradford. The taxi driver left his engine running and the doors open. We entered his slum property picked our way over the joists (he had ripped the floorboards up as fuel for his small grate). Things turned out ok for him. But still up and down our cites, in small pockets, the children of the 21st Century carry with them the haunting reminder of our love for money rather than care. So it was and so shall it ever be.
I was taking some photographs in a once well heeled area of Halifax and did the same, pointed the car towards the way out, left the engine running, nipped out to take my photos, got back in and sped away.
@@highpath4776 That's a lot of things to ponder about my friend. Does alcohol make you an alcoholic? Does owning a car make you a killer? And the poor as well. If nobody gives you a ladder or a rope how do you climb.
Thank you so much for the video, Jago. In 1908, my father was born on the Boundary Estate, in a building that overlooks the bandstand. I believe that his father was also born on the estate, but I'm not certain of that. I presume that Burdett Road, Bethnal Green, was named after the lady you mentioned.
Top quality video. There's something endlessly fascinating about the pre-20th century British slums, the tragedy of their very existence and the (usually) well-meaning tragedy of their removals. And I've now added another book to my "to read" list.
You dug deep in your research on this topic Jago, dear Sir. And I was captivated I assure you. Your cinematography was most impressive too. There is so much intriguing information wrapped up in the ageing inner suburbs of our cities that would be lost, if not for the passionate efforts of chaps such as yourself. I used to do refurbishing work for the Realty business in the inner suburbs of Brisbane, here in Queensland. Often I'd remove linoleum from floors to find the lino was laid on newspapers and magazines from yesteryear, and it was like opening up a time capsule. Keep digging and sharing Jago.
The idea of the "undeserving poor" is still pretty much a thing though. There's enough TV shows telling us that people receiving benefits are just being "enabled" to pursue their despicable underclass habits That's enough about me though..... Ta.
I never thought I'd see the Boundry Estate featured on RUclips. Back in the mid '60's I went out with a girl who lived on Camlet St. I thought her parents flat was quite posh, it even had a balcony, but then I lived in a Rachman slum.
One of my direct ancestors and his wife lived in the Old Nicol in 1841. A few years ago the area was featured in the documentary series "A Secret History Of Our Streets". Fascinating.
I always understood the name was an oblique reference to some mashup of the Jago and the Dukes of Hazard - guess you're going to keep us guessing a little longer. The videos just keep getting better btw.
I don't know if you'll ever get to read this puny comment but thank you. Thank you for years of remarkable content that have educated and entertained me beyond reasonable expectation. You have a tremendous way with your words (loved the zinger at 8:42) and your voice is captivating. I can only hope to one day give you a proper thank and a firm handshake. Perhaps a hug too. Keep up the good work!
'A child of the Jago' always springs to mind upon seeing your name, so for you to do the honour of a RUclips presentation relating to the story caused me to listen with keener ears. I was not disappointed. Your research is excellent and the many insights add warmth and colour to your speaking. Thank you.
I think it is this sort of thing that makes Victorian history so fascinating. It is often thought that it was the arrival of the railway which facilitated the move by people from the countryside to the towns and cities. But many of those who made that move did so before that railway arrived. People saw the chance to have a more stead income by working in a factory in a city rather then the often seasonal work of the farm. I have been doing some research into the arrival and effects of the railways on towns and cities during the 19th century and one thing that surprised me was what little the power the local corporations had on what the railways could and could not do. In fact it was people like that landowners and various influential groups such as business owners had that that would decide things.
Excellent! I enjoyed it a lot. Though diverting a bit from purely Tube-themed content, your typical style of how-did-this-come-about-actually made for a great video. I also like the topic you selected, people's history; I for one'd like more of this sort of thing.
Wow, what’s fantastic video. One of, if not the, best non tube video in my opinion. All new info for me and I’m 40 and from London. I loved it. Thank you.
@@annother3350 don't you mean capitalist globalisation? Personally i moan about people being offended on someone else's behalf, but that is another story.
It strikes me how similar people think today, for instance in the case of diseases; epidemiologists: We need to vaccinate the whole world. politicians: we can't afford that. epidemiologists: if you don't covid19 will mutate & return, possibly vaccineresistant. politicians: COVAX We live in a world where people die of hunger. We live in a Europe were people exist as slaves, mostly domestic or in sexwork, so unseen but still slavery. In the UK this evening children will go to bed hungry in flats that are so bad the walls are mouldy. It's already put on children's deathcertificate that the circumstances in which they lived contributed to their death. Poverty is always terrible, it puts a limit on what people can achieve. What's different to those days are unions & moral outrage which dammed the sheer scale of the problem. But the UK has politicians that seem to long(& work hard) to return to those days...
@@LeafHuntress in any welfare society there will be people who fall through the cracks but they are the exception, certainly in the UK. My qualifications for that assertion , my late mother was in social services all her working life, and she moved mountains when she came across crack slippers as she really cared. I might say unlike some of her colleagues who couldn't care less but were "ethnically sound " postive discrimination is never the answer to any problem!
Regarding the name, I just assumed you were related to the family that would go on to found the county in North Georgia where them Duke boys would go on to get into all sorts of trouble with the law.
@@thomasburke2683 Well, what I mean is - Hazzard Co. would have been named for some founding family. There would have been a Hazzard family that came over from England, bought a bunch of land, and those estates became Hazzard County. And then later a different family, the Dukes, moved in and lived there. So he's not a Duke, he's a Hazzard, you see. :)
Well, that was very interesting. Great stuff as ever. Does anyone else think that the flats look like large Victorian primary schools as though they’ve all come together from different parts of the city to meet at their AGM? 😀
Some looking through the minutes of the Friends of Arnold Circus committee, scattered over various websites, reveals that the Western Region bench was "rescued" by the committee at some stage in 2007, and the GWR bench was installed by Deena Omar in memory of her mother, Elizabeth, in November 2011. Unfortunately, personal outreach will probably be required to determine their provenance in more detail.
It's a tragic story throughout. The neglect, untimely death and subsequent erasure from existence of baby Looey is especially poignant and even Jerry Gullen's canary (actually a donkey!) is a pitiful creature. There is humour though, even in there darkest moments, like the descriptions of the fights and the way Dicky finds himself more and more indebted to Mr Weech despite giving him his plunder. The book is beautifully written and the prose is quite gorgeous. I find Dickens much more challenging to read.
"The blackest pit in London"? I can name a few places in London that that could describe. I've lived in two of them. Great video. Although, an unusual departure from The Tube, it was very enjoyable.
You need to read The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by WT Stead (editor of the Pall Mall Gazette - known as “Bed” Stead) which gives a description of how awful these slums really were. Stead campaigned also against child prostitution, and to demonstrate the truth of his articles, he “purchased” a 13 year old girl - the daughter of a chimney sweep.
Great video. I read A Child of the Jago as a teenager and then again a couple of years ago. In my opinion it's a lot more enjoyable than the Dickens' books I was forced to read in school. It's tragic but enlightening for anyone who grew up and lived their life in relative comfort. There are still a lot of Jago's around the world.
Very enjoyable. I knew about Peabody and Guinness, but not Burdett-Coutts - but of course as soon as you mentioned I remembered Burdett Road and the eponymous school. Grazie mille.
Back in the mid 70's I remember delivering to an estate in Borough. They were being modernised. Has I said this was mid 70's and they were sharing one toilet for two flats.
Back in 1964 my family moved to a newly-built estate in Brick Lane, a few streets away from the Boundary Estate. Fond memories of Arnold Circus bandstand, and the Brick Lane Beigel Bake. Thanks to "right-to-buy" it's mostly found its way into the private sector, and I doubt whether any of the kids I grew up with can afford to live round that way any more.
once again i found this such an education and an entertaiment all in one . I visited the Boundary estate a couple of times . I wish I had know the history then. Thank you Jago
Great telling of a fascinating period in London’s history. This part of the city has changed almost entirely and my missus and I (she being a keen genealogist and us both having family roots in London) enjoy retracing steps- or at least trying to make out where the f*** the steps might have been- of our ancestors. We’ve also got a number of maps and a copy of a Victorian Atlas of the area, all of which are lethal in terms of making me lose myself for entire days as I try to make sense of it all. Then again, even in the last 40 years the area has changed so much, so no wonder I struggle to keep up! 🤷🏻♂️ Really enjoyed this episode, fantastic stuff 😎👍🍻🍀
The Guiness family also built flats in London as did US store owner,George Peabody. Andrew Carnegie who made a fortune in steel provided housing for the mind: municipal libraries in the US and Britain which were responsible for the upsurge in literacy which powered Britain at the time.There was also Rowton house:single rooms for single workers.I discovered a renovated private hostel in Birmingham which was once their Rowton House
I used to stay in the estate in the mid-1980's. My best mate's sister lived there in a radical Lesbian household. I loved how the flats were so well designed and we used to pay for our board by cleaning up Arnold Circus bandstand. The other inhabitants were mainly Bengali families. There was a huge squat on Shoreditch High Street and I ended squatting off the Kingsland Road. There was a TV piece on the Boundary Estate in the 90's which said that Lenin visited it just after it's completion. I also remember saying to my mate's sister that all housing for the poor in Inner London will eventually become 'Des Res'. So she bought her flat for peanuts, had a shave and became straight, got married and pregnant, sold flat and moved back to home counties on the proceeds. Then Shoreditch gentrification pushed out the poor, the artists and squatters and made it's bearded way northwards up the Kingsland Road...
Just to the west of the Kent village of Higham where Charles Dickens lived, was the hamlet of Lower Shorne which basically consisted of a couple of roads. Two of these roads were, Burdett Avenue, and Coutts Avenue. I grew up in the former and always wondered where the names came from.
A fascinating deviation from the usual Tales of The Tube. Well read too. A voice like that could give any Book At Bedtime a run for its money on Radio 4. It keeps your interest. Could it do Robert Rankin justice, I wonder :)
Damm!. I thought I finally knew why "Jago Hazzard", then you dashed my peace in the last moments. Back to a useless Google, which didn't even come up with the book.
Fascinating. Thanks very much. An area of London I know little of. That said as a Building Surveyor, I did come access the work of Lady Coots at the Holy Lodge Mansions. Highgate. Homes (Some were Apartments and some were Flats for WWI widows, employee's of the bank. A idilic location, however one could almost feel the sadness in the Apartments. As built the estate also had Mansion Flats and a Dining Hall for the Apartment dwellers. It would make a very interesting topic for your examination.
I used to live there. I remember some of the local kids smashing in the window of the café next to Arnold Circus. The next day the owner wrote “why?” In big letters on the newly replaced window. The locals then smashed it again.
This is one amazing, long overdue commentary on an area that is very dear and near to me. A good read on this subject is; Outcast London by Gareth Stedman Jones. Well done for this video Jago. Kep up the good work!
My grandma grew up on the Boundary Estate. About 10 years ago there was a documentary about it on iPlayer. I took my laptop round to watch it with her. My favourite moment was when she gasped and shouted “That’s my old sweet shop!” She hadn’t thought about it in more than 70 years.
Delightful! Funnily enough I had a similar experience a couple of years back when I introduced my gran to the wonders of old footage on RUclips.
Is this the same grandma that you wanted to knock down her house in order to rebuild the Northern heights tube line?
@@shoutyshouty Yep!
Jay Foreman commenting on Jago Hazzard. Where's Geoff Marshall??
Jay - I worked for a company in Harrow called JATO and there was a Selwyn Foreman there. Any relation?
How strange. I was sat under the shelter at Boundary Gardens just 2 nights ago wondering of the history of the buildings around. I wasn't expecting Jago Hazzard to fill me in just 2 days later.
And I was wandering around the area earlier today (28-7-2021) and was equally surprised to see this when I got home. Another great Jago Hazzard video.
Thus proving once again that no one expects a Hazzard inquisition.
His chief weapon is information...information and puns...puns and information.... His two weapons are puns and information...and a ruthless video release schedule.... His *three* weapons are puns, information, and a ruthless video release schedule...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Tube.... His *four* ...no... *Amongst* his weapons.... Amongst his weaponry...are such elements as puns, information.... I'll come in again.
Steady on.
Back in 1965, when I was 19 and a trainee in the GLC Legal Department, I had to investigate a tripping accident on some Boundary Estate stairs.
Did I resolve it? Er, no.
But I did meet a nonagenarian lady tenant who wanted to tell me her story.
"Before the Great War, there were lovely German bands playing on the bandstand.
"We had to kill them later, I suppose", she added.
"Funny old world", was her conclusion, and I'll always recall her words.
I really enjoyed this fascinating tale. I can see a lot of research has gone into this. A production you should be proud of.
Thank you.
And thank you for the compliment!
A brilliant video, Mr Jago, sir. After seeing that odd bandstand used as a location on TV shows like 'Primeval', and 'Luther', I've always wondered where it was, and now, thanks to you, I know. I love the repurposed railway station benches on it as well. Many years ago, (1980's) when some 'remediation' (read: 'demolition') work was being done on a station in my town, three friends and myself 'liberated' a perfectly good station bench from a pile of rubble, and carried it, in triumph, through the streets in the small hours, to a friend's house. Not one person asked what we were doing. The bench, once repainted, and re-slatted, took pride of place in my mate's kitchen for years.
Ah-ha... My GW station seat (3.62m long) was bought from Shirley on the N.Warwickshire Line, however, this was legitimate and bought from BR being removed in person. Mine resides indoors in my conservatory.
There's a legend in my hometown (Uppsala, Sweden) about two students carrying a park bench between them being stopped by the police. They produced a receipt for the bench, and as things were perfectly legal, the police let them be. As the evening went on they got stopped more times by other policemen, and eventually the call goes out that two students carrying a park bench are not to be stopped since they have a receipt for it.
By morning there weren't any park benches left in the parks!
Also used in William and Mary a bbc program from early 2000's. Martin Clunes.
"Funny story: no, it isn't." Well, it was certainly a short story. :)
Doesn't necessarily stop it being a story though, does it? Or are we doomed eternally to wonder?
Oh he's a tease! Anyway very good video.
Fascinating account of the area and its history. A lot packed into less than 12 minutes! Thank you!
I live on the Boundary Estate. I wasn't so crazy about my flat to begin with as it's sort of quirky in layout, with no proper hallways, so all four rooms - living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom - are basically right next to each other. But I've done it up nicely and now find it hard to imagine living anywhere else.
I'm on the top floor of a five storey building and there's no lift but I'm used to that now, even if the delivery drivers aren't! Also, as it's a grade 2 listed building, there's no double glazing to retain the aesthetic integrity, so it's not the warmest flat in the winter.
I think around half of the flats in my block of fifteen are now privately owned, which is a shame, as most are let out for eye watering rents. I consider myself to be very fortunate to be a council tenant with a secure tenancy and genuinely affordable rent.
Couldn't they fit secondary glazing inside behind the original windows? There are also now multiple ply glass panes available to convert original windows to double or even triple glazing without any alteration in appearance.
It's sounds as if life in the Jago was a definite hazard.
You stole my joke!
Where does Boss Hogg fit in?
@@barneypaws4883 in Victorian London, he was probably a duke.
This was wonderful; I was raised on Old Nichol Street from 1971 to 1985 and only learned of the area's history many years after I left. It was quite a dive when we lived there but I have many fantastic memories.
I was at college just south of there, but never really ventured, the Cass foundation etc was formed supposedly to educate the local poor.
I lived there from 1971 till 1983. Loved it
I like the way you sneaked in those shots of former railway station benches at the end, under the radar...
I did start out wanting to make a video about them, but I got carried away.
@@JagoHazzard ...down an educational platform.. Interesting vid, sir!
I was wondering how they got dragged all the way from Paddington or wherever.
@@caw25sha they are not even of a similar period to the buildings and completely off their home territory, aren't they? Maybe easier to source and cheaper that rare Great Eastern Railway benches...
Hearing this brings a lump to my throat, bringing to life the existence of my Great Grandfather, wife and 14 kids, only half of which survived out of childhood, living in London slums from about 1819 to 1863. It's no wonder that my grandfather (born 1860) joined the British Army as a bandboy, aged 12, to get away from the poverty and degradation that existed in Grays Inn Road (then Lane) , St. Giles and Seven Dials, just some of the areas that they inhabited.
Thats an incredible story so glad to see your grandparents survived and to have a real life child of the Jago in the comment section
@@adonaiyah2196 Thx. It's probably the story of most city-dwelling working class families in the UK at that time. It's just that you only find out by researching your family history. If one thing upset me, it was the death of two of their children within a week, a baby of 'Decline', when the actual cause of death was unknown to the doctor and one of smallpox, aged 7, thankfully eliminated from the world now. Much of the poverty was lack of birth control (or self-control!) and, therefore the need/cost of feeding so many children.
whilst slum clearances did somewhat relieve London of some of the Poverty by building better housing (and as stated moving workers generally one rung up the ladder), the main push was one to drive the slum-dwellers into the navy and colonies... one can with some fairness say, the real solution to slums came a few decades later & involved machine guns, gas and barbed wire... yes, that's extremely dark, but just like the Plague reduced medieval poverty & overpopulation of cities, so the Great War would be the only thing to end the squalor of impoverished masses post the Industrial-revolution.
@@crossleydd42 it makes me so angry to see how high the mortality rate was for young people in the older days
@@adonaiyah2196 .....and, ironically, the possibility of pregnancies going wrong these days never gets mention by the medical profession, leading to high expectation, then devastation when things go wrong.
The idea that poverty is a moral failing of those it afflicts is the most tenacious and pernicious meme to emerge from the Industrial Revolution.
There is a sliver of truth in it though, as pulling oneself up by the bootstraps [especially back then] requires dedication, persistance and a lot of hard work. A little good luck too, as one chance application or good interview can change everything.
Those whom turn to drinking excessively to drown their sorrows / escape the lousy state of their life for a few hours, ironically only make it all worse.
@@jimtaylor294 And I suppose those who may have been beaten, sexually abused or made mentally ill by other means might have shorter bootstraps and less strength to drag themselves up by.
^ Facetious much?
Bit of a difference between victims of circumstance, and the bone idle / weak willed.
@@jimtaylor294 @Jim Taylor There have been, and still are, many politicians, especially the one with the handbag, who have needed you to explain that to them.
@@66PHILB Barbera Castle?
(she's dead XD)
That exact situation we got right now in London where everything is being knocked down and new expensive flats are priced at half a million a piece
500K is cheap, they are 625k around me (2/3 beds)
Show me a flat at half a million. I'll have my card ready.
Only half a million quid? Wow, in Melbourne (which has only two thirds the population of London), you won't get much within 10 km of the city for that price except the smallest and most run down flats.
Actually we have a quite different problem, housing being used as an investment not a place to live. Which is akin to burning £20 notes in front of homeless people. Thatcher did get one thing right with the Community Charge and that was a punitive tax for keeping a property empty. We need that back.
One of the largest noticeable changes in my lifetime has been the encouragement of people to become and own businesses. Property has always been king and some of the comments on here don’t need repeating to compliment that fact. Average joe never thought of owning a few properties but I can remember it starting with many things such as ‘ buying Nans flat’ etc.
I'm often asked if Jago Hazzard is a distant relation of the Dukes of Hazzard, them good ole boys not meaning no harm. No, he's not.
To be fair, Shoreditch is still like a horror story. You can hear the cry of almonds being ground for there milk all around the clock.
Wonderful comment.
*their
That was brilliant - I never knew that place even existed. I must have a wander through there at some point because those buildings are gorgeous. The accounts of the slums reminded me of George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, but worse.
You have done a wonderful job on this and I must thank you. Any more like this and it will be most welcome.
I've only just finished re-reading Terry Pratchett's Dodger, which features Angela Burdett-Coutts, and which could very well have been set around the area of the Old Jago.
I was born in old ford rd East london in 1958 and i can remember asking my grandad in the 60"s where he was born , My grandad was about 6ft 4 and had a tattoo on his hand and when asked he got down to my height and looked me right in the eyes and said in a chilling voice ........ ".I COME FROM THE JAGO LITTLE UN .. I COME FROM THE JAGO " I ran to my mum in tears scared to death of what the Jago was ... He was a bull of a man but i loved him to death .
I have been the milkman on the Boundary estate since 1983 when it had once again become a run down and neglected area. I have seen the improvements over the year's and watched the large Bangladeshi community move out and young hipsters move in. Sadly my last customer moved out last year and I've gone from serving 300 customers to none in the space of 38 years. I still have my memories of carrying 3 crates of milk upstairs in the bigger blocks in the heat of sweltering summer mornings and the wonderful Bangladeshi people who lived there. I even learnt some words of Bengali to communicate with the wives who spoke no English! PS: Only one of the original Old Nicole tenants moved back in when the flats where rebuilt, such were the high rents being charged.
Such a shame no one is buying your milk. As I understand it, here in trendy Reigate, milkmen are popular once again…
A small correction: the "idle" poor had existed for a lot longer than the industrial revolution. Henry VII's poor laws and those supported by the parishes divided between the deserving (widowers, the elderly, those too injured to work) and the undeserving poor 3/400 years before this
Think you mean widows, alas old men are undeserving
Fair point.
Sturdy beggars, as they were known.
The poor, sturdy or otherwise, are always with us. As are the rich, caring or not (Though usually not.)
Of course, many people with lesser-known or invisible disabilities were regarded as “just lazy” for those centuries while they told themselves it must be normal to feel like having a bad cold all the time, or for their joints to be on fire. “Too injured to work” is still applied far more restrictively than the spirit suggests, and that’s with much better medical knowledge.
Great video, Jago. I first became aware of The Child of the Jago through an episode of Rumpole of the Bailey.
Me too! Rumpole for the Prosecution 😊
Had the great privilege to be taken on a guided tour of this estate by local historian David Rosenberg. A fascinating history!
Commendable - you have a natural aptitude for combining education and entertainment.
And humour. Loved the 'walk-on cameos' of station benches right at the end: 'Look, no trains - and you didn't even miss them'.
Interesting to note that the changes came about because the rich were concerned about the impacts the slums could have on them and their businesses, and politics (disease, communism.) Great video. The book London Labour and the London Poor, written in Victorian England is a classic and should be required reading tbh.
I did a double-take at the brief mention of Seven Dials (in the St Giles area). Today, it's pretty upmarket, so it's funny to be reminded that it used to be one of London's most notorious slum districts.
"Next you'll be giving them free health care or something" 🤣🤣🤣
I wanted to thums up this video so many times, that was one of them. Gods & Goddesses, this video is good!
“A hopeless place of filth and deprivation….an inescapable black hole…” Ah……Rotherham.
Or the RUclips comments section
Listeners to night time radio in the 1990's, and who were fans of Mark Radcliffe and Marc Riley (then known as 'Lard'), might have expected this as one of Mark Radcliffe's introductions, where it would be suffixed by Lard's cheery:
"Hiya, Mark!"
Cod fish battered balls etc.
Not all of Rotherham is unpleasant, far from it unlike (.............) insert the name of a random town you dont really know much about here , Leicester springs to my mind
Milton Keynes?
I managed to escape Rotherham
For some reason, this is my favourite jago Hazard video. Im a train enthusiast, but there is something rather intriguing about this video.
0:09 "... the welkin was an infernal coppery glare". Can I beat the drum for more use of the word "welkin" please? It means "clouded sky" and because of the casting over, by association firmament or "heavenly vault". The word is related to the German for "cloud", "Wolke". Unlike "cloud", it has the spatial quality of being somewhere, so is actually a better word for the computer cloud than "cloud".
So, if a certain equipment manufacturer made their own cloud, we could get the Belkin Welkin?
Just to pedantically clarify, "welkin" simply means "sky", not specifically "clouded sky". The welkin can be clouded, clear, or any condition you like.
@@dunebasher1971 In Norwegian "sky" is cloud.
@@dunebasher1971 Just to meta-pedantically clarify (the opportunity today for the first time in my life presented, there are clearly pedantries beyond pedantry, thanks for the link): Arthur Morrison cannot possibly have used this word in the casual way you (in this let-it-all-hang-out manner) espouse. Had the welkin been clear on that fateful evening, it would have been an open "SKY", which would NOT have reflected the raging fires of Shoreditch. Morrison referred literarily and thus by implication semantically to the etymological derivation of the word (see above), which ON ITS OWN enables the "coppery glare". Had he had to have recourse to the lexicon "sky", he would have needed to include an epithet. With the use of "welkin", he enabled a literary thrift which your schoolboyish carefreeness would (and why?) disallow.
Apart from the impressive history content, I was particularly struck by the meticulous visuals - still and video. Thank you for your great video.
Ah Jago, Many years ago when I was seventeen and working as a solicitors clerk I and my fellow clerk had to pick up a client from an area in Bradford. The taxi driver left his engine running and the doors open. We entered his slum property picked our way over the joists (he had ripped the floorboards up as fuel for his small grate). Things turned out ok for him. But still up and down our cites, in small pockets, the children of the 21st Century carry with them the haunting reminder of our love for money rather than care. So it was and so shall it ever be.
I was taking some photographs in a once well heeled area of Halifax and did the same, pointed the car towards the way out, left the engine running, nipped out to take my photos, got back in and sped away.
Some of my neighbours are too alchol dependent , I blame the brewiers and distilleries, (and govt drugged on the taxes), Then there are the poor too
@@highpath4776 That's a lot of things to ponder about my friend. Does alcohol make you an alcoholic? Does owning a car make you a killer? And the poor as well. If nobody gives you a ladder or a rope how do you climb.
Thank you so much for the video, Jago. In 1908, my father was born on the Boundary Estate, in a building that overlooks the bandstand. I believe that his father was also born on the estate, but I'm not certain of that.
I presume that Burdett Road, Bethnal Green, was named after the lady you mentioned.
Top quality video. There's something endlessly fascinating about the pre-20th century British slums, the tragedy of their very existence and the (usually) well-meaning tragedy of their removals. And I've now added another book to my "to read" list.
"When the idle poor become the idle rich' is such a banger of a song from Finian's Rainbow--your comment reminded me of it!
You dug deep in your research on this topic Jago, dear Sir. And I was captivated I assure you. Your cinematography was most impressive too.
There is so much intriguing information wrapped up in the ageing inner suburbs of our cities that would be lost, if not for the passionate efforts
of chaps such as yourself. I used to do refurbishing work for the Realty business in the inner suburbs of Brisbane, here in Queensland. Often I'd
remove linoleum from floors to find the lino was laid on newspapers and magazines from yesteryear, and it was like opening up a time capsule.
Keep digging and sharing Jago.
The idea of the "undeserving poor" is still pretty much a thing though. There's enough TV shows telling us that people receiving benefits are just being "enabled" to pursue their despicable underclass habits
That's enough about me though.....
Ta.
Ah, Benefit Street. Channel 4 at its worst.
Almost like you can point all of the reasons provided at the Royal family and say exactly the same
I never thought I'd see the Boundry Estate featured on RUclips. Back in the mid '60's I went out with a girl who lived on Camlet St. I thought her parents flat was quite posh, it even had a balcony, but then I lived in a Rachman slum.
One of my direct ancestors and his wife lived in the Old Nicol in 1841. A few years ago the area was featured in the documentary series "A Secret History Of Our Streets". Fascinating.
I always understood the name was an oblique reference to some mashup of the Jago and the Dukes of Hazard - guess you're going to keep us guessing a little longer. The videos just keep getting better btw.
I don't know if you'll ever get to read this puny comment but thank you. Thank you for years of remarkable content that have educated and entertained me beyond reasonable expectation. You have a tremendous way with your words (loved the zinger at 8:42) and your voice is captivating. I can only hope to one day give you a proper thank and a firm handshake. Perhaps a hug too. Keep up the good work!
'A child of the Jago' always springs to mind upon seeing your name, so for you to do the honour of a RUclips presentation relating to the story caused me to listen with keener ears. I was not disappointed. Your research is excellent and the many insights add warmth and colour to your speaking. Thank you.
Fascinating as always Jago, interesting looking ghost sign at 4:25.
Ooh, now there’s an idea.
I think it is this sort of thing that makes Victorian history so fascinating.
It is often thought that it was the arrival of the railway which facilitated the move by people from the countryside to the towns and cities. But many of those who made that move did so before that railway arrived. People saw the chance to have a more stead income by working in a factory in a city rather then the often seasonal work of the farm.
I have been doing some research into the arrival and effects of the railways on towns and cities during the 19th century and one thing that surprised me was what little the power the local corporations had on what the railways could and could not do. In fact it was people like that landowners and various influential groups such as business owners had that that would decide things.
So, the same as it is now
Thank you! I read 'A child of the Jago' in secondary school, 50 years ago. It left a lasting impression.
Excellent! I enjoyed it a lot. Though diverting a bit from purely Tube-themed content, your typical style of how-did-this-come-about-actually made for a great video. I also like the topic you selected, people's history; I for one'd like more of this sort of thing.
Wow, what’s fantastic video.
One of, if not the, best non tube video in my opinion. All new info for me and I’m 40 and from London. I loved it. Thank you.
You’re very welcome!
One of the best you’ve done so far. Really liked the opening.
The first and potentially one the nicest looking council estates. Very interesting stuff as ever.
Internals are a bit small.
@@highpath4776 Really I'd get yourself a new washing machine or a visit to your Doctors
Great history lesson, I think in those days poverty really was terrible.
And people whinge these days over poor phone reception! How peoples values have changed.
No, I moan about the forthcoming globalist/communist takeover of the planet, known as build back better or the new world order...
@@annother3350 don't you mean capitalist globalisation?
Personally i moan about people being offended on someone else's behalf, but that is another story.
It strikes me how similar people think today, for instance in the case of diseases;
epidemiologists: We need to vaccinate the whole world.
politicians: we can't afford that.
epidemiologists: if you don't covid19 will mutate & return, possibly vaccineresistant.
politicians: COVAX
We live in a world where people die of hunger.
We live in a Europe were people exist as slaves, mostly domestic or in sexwork, so unseen but still slavery.
In the UK this evening children will go to bed hungry in flats that are so bad the walls are mouldy. It's already put on children's deathcertificate that the circumstances in which they lived contributed to their death.
Poverty is always terrible, it puts a limit on what people can achieve.
What's different to those days are unions & moral outrage which dammed the sheer scale of the problem. But the UK has politicians that seem to long(& work hard) to return to those days...
@@LeafHuntress in any welfare society there will be people who fall through the cracks but they are the exception, certainly in the UK. My qualifications for that assertion , my late mother was in social services all her working life, and she moved mountains when she came across crack slippers as she really cared. I might say unlike some of her colleagues who couldn't care less but were "ethnically sound " postive discrimination is never the answer to any problem!
Regarding the name, I just assumed you were related to the family that would go on to found the county in North Georgia where them Duke boys would go on to get into all sorts of trouble with the law.
If he was related, he would be Jago Duke of Hazzard county. Howdy Jago!
@@thomasburke2683 Well, what I mean is - Hazzard Co. would have been named for some founding family. There would have been a Hazzard family that came over from England, bought a bunch of land, and those estates became Hazzard County. And then later a different family, the Dukes, moved in and lived there. So he's not a Duke, he's a Hazzard, you see. :)
This is one of the best videos in a long while @Jago! Thanks! M
Well, that was very interesting. Great stuff as ever. Does anyone else think that the flats look like large Victorian primary schools as though they’ve all come together from different parts of the city to meet at their AGM? 😀
No disrespects to the London Underground, this is really interesting.
I approve of the GWR/BR(W) seats at the end. I wonder where these were taken from? They are a little far from home in the East End.
I was thinking that myself.
Some looking through the minutes of the Friends of Arnold Circus committee, scattered over various websites, reveals that the Western Region bench was "rescued" by the committee at some stage in 2007, and the GWR bench was installed by Deena Omar in memory of her mother, Elizabeth, in November 2011. Unfortunately, personal outreach will probably be required to determine their provenance in more detail.
I have always wondered about your relationship with that book!
I have that book - great story with a sad ending.
I think Great Stories aren't helped by happy endings.
It's a tragic story throughout. The neglect, untimely death and subsequent erasure from existence of baby Looey is especially poignant and even Jerry Gullen's canary (actually a donkey!) is a pitiful creature. There is humour though, even in there darkest moments, like the descriptions of the fights and the way Dicky finds himself more and more indebted to Mr Weech despite giving him his plunder. The book is beautifully written and the prose is quite gorgeous. I find Dickens much more challenging to read.
This has to be one of your best videos. Most informative, a reflection on the past, and beautifully filmed and narrated.
You have really excelled yourself this time. Well done on a quality piece of work!
"The blackest pit in London"? I can name a few places in London that that could describe. I've lived in two of them. Great video. Although, an unusual departure from The Tube, it was very enjoyable.
You need to read The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by WT Stead (editor of the Pall Mall Gazette - known as “Bed” Stead) which gives a description of how awful these slums really were. Stead campaigned also against child prostitution, and to demonstrate the truth of his articles, he “purchased” a 13 year old girl - the daughter of a chimney sweep.
2:43 - who else was expecting a mention of Charles Tyson Yerkes here?
Thank you for looking at an issue that is almost forgotten, and tracing the steps that sought remedies. Good work!
Great video.
I read A Child of the Jago as a teenager and then again a couple of years ago. In my opinion it's a lot more enjoyable than the Dickens' books I was forced to read in school. It's tragic but enlightening for anyone who grew up and lived their life in relative comfort. There are still a lot of Jago's around the world.
Absolutely fascinating story. Thanks.
fabulous history and telling. Well done.
Railway benches in a public square - you can't possibly leave us dangling like that! Another really informative video - thank you.
Wonderful presentation! Thank you
Interesting video - became aware of some of this when researching my family tree -My great grandmother lived in half Nicol Street in the 1850's.
Very enjoyable. I knew about Peabody and Guinness, but not Burdett-Coutts - but of course as soon as you mentioned I remembered Burdett Road and the eponymous school. Grazie mille.
Back in the mid 70's I remember delivering to an estate in Borough. They were being modernised. Has I said this was mid 70's and they were sharing one toilet for two flats.
I like your shots of the GWR and BR/WR platform seats at the very end!
Always a top notch doco. Many thanks.
Back in 1964 my family moved to a newly-built estate in Brick Lane, a few streets away from the Boundary Estate. Fond memories of Arnold Circus bandstand, and the Brick Lane Beigel Bake. Thanks to "right-to-buy" it's mostly found its way into the private sector, and I doubt whether any of the kids I grew up with can afford to live round that way any more.
once again i found this such an education and an entertaiment all in one . I visited the Boundary estate a couple of times . I wish I had know the history then. Thank you Jago
This is one of my favourite episodes yet. I enjoy it when you go way back in time. Well done as always :)
Great telling of a fascinating period in London’s history. This part of the city has changed almost entirely and my missus and I (she being a keen genealogist and us both having family roots in London) enjoy retracing steps- or at least trying to make out where the f*** the steps might have been- of our ancestors. We’ve also got a number of maps and a copy of a Victorian Atlas of the area, all of which are lethal in terms of making me lose myself for entire days as I try to make sense of it all. Then again, even in the last 40 years the area has changed so much, so no wonder I struggle to keep up! 🤷🏻♂️
Really enjoyed this episode, fantastic stuff 😎👍🍻🍀
The Guiness family also built flats in London as did US store owner,George Peabody. Andrew Carnegie who made a fortune in steel provided housing for the mind: municipal libraries in the US and Britain which were responsible for the upsurge in literacy which powered Britain at the time.There was also Rowton house:single rooms for single workers.I discovered a renovated private hostel in Birmingham which was once their Rowton House
Seeing this Tale of the East(end) reminds me of what the area around Mile End was like not fifty years ago, and how much it has changed in that time
I used to stay in the estate in the mid-1980's. My best mate's sister lived there in a radical Lesbian household. I loved how the flats were so well designed and we used to pay for our board by cleaning up Arnold Circus bandstand. The other inhabitants were mainly Bengali families. There was a huge squat on Shoreditch High Street and I ended squatting off the Kingsland Road. There was a TV piece on the Boundary Estate in the 90's which said that Lenin visited it just after it's completion. I also remember saying to my mate's sister that all housing for the poor in Inner London will eventually become 'Des Res'. So she bought her flat for peanuts, had a shave and became straight, got married and pregnant, sold flat and moved back to home counties on the proceeds. Then Shoreditch gentrification pushed out the poor, the artists and squatters and made it's bearded way northwards up the Kingsland Road...
Just to the west of the Kent village of Higham where Charles Dickens lived, was the hamlet of Lower Shorne which basically consisted of a couple of roads. Two of these roads were, Burdett Avenue, and Coutts Avenue. I grew up in the former and always wondered where the names came from.
Arnold circus has a vibe , a feeling of times past . Looks like it has had some care on the bandstand area , maybe one day a band will play hopefully
The older I get the larger my childhood looms.
'funny story - no it isn't' made me laugh so much
I enjoy your social history videos Jago. Thank you!
That mound under the bandstand will be an archaeologist's dream in 500 years!
I'm surprised Charles Yerkes wasn't involved in any of this!
Brilliant work Jago!
A fascinating deviation from the usual Tales of The Tube. Well read too. A voice like that could give any Book At Bedtime a run for its money on Radio 4. It keeps your interest.
Could it do Robert Rankin justice, I wonder :)
Damm!. I thought I finally knew why "Jago Hazzard", then you dashed my peace in the last moments. Back to a useless Google, which didn't even come up with the book.
Fascinating. Thanks very much. An area of London I know little of.
That said as a Building Surveyor, I did come access the work of Lady Coots at the Holy Lodge Mansions. Highgate.
Homes (Some were Apartments and some were Flats for WWI widows, employee's of the bank.
A idilic location, however one could almost feel the sadness in the Apartments.
As built the estate also had Mansion Flats and a Dining Hall for the Apartment dwellers.
It would make a very interesting topic for your examination.
You can spend years discovering bits of London . This series helps me do that from afar
A great achievement. Your videos keep getting better and better!
A very thought provoking video sir.
And here I was expecting a reveal at the end that Child of Jago inspired part of your channel’s name 😅
Probably just named after the clothes shop.
Your best work so far, Jago. Kudos.
Really interesting thanks. The Boundary estate was a much better version of slum clearance than the 60s high rises...
I used to live there. I remember some of the local kids smashing in the window of the café next to Arnold Circus. The next day the owner wrote “why?” In big letters on the newly replaced window. The locals then smashed it again.
Very interesting as always, so much packed into such a short video 🥰
This is one amazing, long overdue commentary on an area that is very dear and near to me. A good read on this subject is; Outcast London by Gareth Stedman Jones. Well done for this video Jago. Kep up the good work!