Arnold Circus The Secret History of Our Streets

London in 1886.

Then, the largest city in human history

and the centre of the known world.

With its self-importance, its dirt, its wealth,

and awful poverty, it seems a mystery to us now.

It was a different world. An entirely different world.

But there is a guide to this human jungle.

Charles Booth, Victorian London's social explorer.

Booth produced a series of pioneering maps

that colour coded the streets of his London

according to the ever-shifting class of its residents.

Booth's maps are like scans, X-rays that reveal to us

the secret past beneath the skin of the present.

If people knew how many cattle was killed there,

I don't think they'd live there.

He wanted his maps to chart stories of momentous social change.

I was on the bottom. And those houses were the lowest of the low.

The ebb and flow between enormous wealth and terrible poverty.

How easily desirable or well-to-do neighbourhoods could descend

into the haunts of the vicious and semi-criminal.

And back again.

Now, the maps can help us reveal the changes that have shaped

all our lives and made the story of the streets the story of us all.

Oh, my goodness. The old toilet's gone.

So, we're going back to one of the tens of thousands of streets

that Booth mapped.

To the east end, to a ring-shaped street called Arnold Circus.

Home sweet home.

Oh, goodness me! It wasn't as posh as this when I lived here?

Oh, really, haven't they made a good job of it?

Arnold Circus was designed to improve the lives

of the poorest in the city. But, little here went according to plan.

Born losers, we are. Everything we touch turns to dross.

A mile north of the skyscrapers of the city of London,

just off Shoreditch High Street,

which is experiencing a property boom

based on art galleries and nightclubs.

This is where you find Arnold Circus.

For the people who live and work on this street, it's a haven,

an inner-city sanctuary.

It is a little bit of a secret.

You wouldn't know it was here unless you made a detour.

This is the only place I know as a home.

And I don't wish to live anywhere else.

When the Victorian social explorer, Charles Booth,

surveyed Arnold Circus in 1898, it was newly built.

He noted the five-storey blocks of flats with shops underneath,

including a neighbourhood grocer that still thrives.

Booth also noted two schools on Arnold Circus.

Only one is a school today.

The headmistress remembers the first time she arrived here.

It was like walking into, I don't know, somewhere so different

and I thought, I never knew this existed, almost.

It was like walking into a little, I don't know, oasis.

Something so different.

About 1,500 people live and work on Arnold Circus today,

in this Victorian model village in the East End of the city.

Booth classified Arnold Circus as pink fairly comfortable.

The blocks of flats provided modest homes

for the key workers of the Victorian city.

Just over 100 years later, more affluent residents are moving in,

like Richard Wallace.

He's created his ideal home here with his girlfriend, Kate Beckett.

We've got the door where we come in, over here.

We've got the living room on the left.

Typically, we just walk straight through,

but we have knocked out these walls here, as you can see,

into the living room over there.

If you walk through here, we've got the kitchen and bar area.

And essentially, the entire kitchen was moved.

Typical, putting in the kitchen, I guess, ripping it out,

putting in a new kitchen.

Original flatmate, Tom, named this the curry cupboard.

The reason is, if you open it, and you can smell it now,

you can actually smell the cooking from the flat downstairs.

Some days it's more pungent than others.

But that always puts me to shame.

In the flat below Richard and Kate live the Begems, a family of nine.

The Begems don't own their flat, but are council tenants.

That's the entrance.

Walk through here. This is the storage room.

Through here,

this is the living room.

And, that's the kitchen.

And this is the girls' room,

and that's my brother's room and my other two sisters.

-So how many people sleep in these rooms?

-Three and four.

I would like to have my own room as well.

Then I would get my own time.

I can do my homework quietly, stuff like that.

Arnold Circus today is both a sought-after place to live

and an inner-city council estate.

On this street, rich and poor live right alongside,

or above and below each other.

How this came to be

can be traced through the history of Arnold Circus.

But it's necessary to dig down deep into the past.

The rubble beneath Arnold Circus is all that remains

of what stood here before it was built.

These graceful blocks and their gardens

stand on the ruins of a slum, the direst poverty in Victorian London.

Slum is painting too bright a picture.

I think it was, for the people like us, it would have been hell.

It would have been absolute hell.

Alan Goffe's grandfather grew up in the 19th-century Shoreditch slum.

One of a family of seven living in one room in a hovel,

right where this plane tree grows now.

Over a century later,

the lost slum beneath Arnold Circus can still be examined.

Because Charles Booth not only mapped London

after Arnold Circus was built, he first came here years before.

His original 1889 map includes a description

of the city's rotten core.

This was in Shoreditch, where Arnold Circus is today.

So, using Booth's maps, it's possible to travel back in time

to the streets buried beneath Arnold Circus.

It was a maze of sunless alleys.

Booth coloured them dark blue for chronic want

and black, for the lowest class - vicious and semi-criminal.

Stop, thief!

Dickens' Oliver Twist

scared and thrilled Victorian London's respectable citizens.

Booth set out to find the truth behind the poverty fiction.

In 1889, when he first turned off Shoreditch High Street

and into the slum, Booth was stepping into an unknown world.

He discovered that streets once famed for silk weaving

had become a densely-populated warren.

A single house here contained 60 people.

There was barely any sanitation and the streets were filled

with human excrement, fostering deadly diseases.

Life expectancy for the poorest of Victorian Shoreditch was just 16.

Although there were two schools in the slum,

a teacher admitted that,

"School here is regarded as an interference."

Booth interviewed some of the slum dwellers

who lived where Arnold Circus is today.

One family whose grim circumstances he recorded in his notebooks

was the Goffes.

This is where my lot came from.

But they weren't criminals.

They were just spending all their time keeping body and soul together.

Booth found the Goffes in Half Nichol's Street,

which he would later mark dark blue for chronic want.

On their doorstep, he noted, "The body of a dead dog and,

"nearby, two dead cats, which lie as though they have slain each other."

Booth described the Goffes

as one of four families living on the ground floor.

Alan's great-grandfather was a cabinet-maker,

and had a wife and five children, all young.

"These people are very poor."

I take pride in the fact that my family came from the Nichol.

But, by God, you wouldn't want to have lived here

because it must have been the absolute pits!

I've got a birth certificate there of one of the kids

born in Half Nichol's Street, and three months later, she's dead.

They must've been bordering on starvation.

For many Victorians, the starvation of the slum

was a symptom of a greater sickness - poverty itself.

And by describing the deprivation here as chronic,

the suggestion was that these people were incurable.

Booth added his weight to a high-minded movement

for social reform that believed the state must intervene

to rid London of its slums.

OLIVER WHIMPERS

BLOWS FALL

Get up to bed.

In 1890, two years after Booth's visit to Shoreditch,

the newly-formed London County Council moved to compulsorily buy

every hovel in the Shoreditch slum.

It intended to demolish them all.

In their place, the LCC would build its own homes.

Unlike any private landlord,

the ambition was not to build for profit,

but to provide decent homes for the most miserable of London's poor.

This would be Britain's first council estate.

This was a matter of tabula rasa, razing things to the ground and starting again,

and in a way that made it quite an exciting project at the time,

and I think that was commented on.

There was almost a glamour, in terms of the simple scale of reconstruction.

Called the Boundary Scheme, work began in 1894 when almost

15 acres of the worst streets of Shoreditch were flattened.

The streets were rearranged to radiate out from one circular street,

named Arnold Circus, after an LCC official.

The man behind the layout was the chief architect of the Boundary,

Owen Fleming. He was just 23.

It's an incredibly exciting position to be put into.

Not just him, but the group of people he was working with

put in a huge amount of energy and imagination into the designs.

Finn Williams lives just off Arnold Circus.

Like Fleming, Finn works in a local authority planning office.

Owen Fleming himself is quite an idealist,

and probably in some ways quite naive.

He must be, cos he's so young.

Fleming raised the interior of the circus,

so its centre was hidden from people passing along the street,

while giving the residents garden views from their windows.

Just the greenness and the visibility of the garden,

which was very carefully planned so that everyone would have a view,

or as many people as possible would have a view of the gardens as possible,

just in terms of visual amenities, what we call it now,

as much as actually using it as a public space.

So just something pleasant to look at as well as something pleasant to use.

Surrounding the gardens are blocks of flats five storeys high.

There was no money for ornate plasterwork.

The structure itself was used for decorative effect,

as revealed in the original LCC plans.

What they were trying to do with these designs at the time is

give a sense of a block that wasn't simply a regimented, replicated sort of barracks.

They had details

like the way that these gables come up.

The way that the different windows vary in sizes.

The relationship of the doors.

If you go down to the street level,

quite a small and domestic scale.

So they were all ways of, I suppose,

breaking down the sense of being in a municipal housing block.

Fleming wrote,

"Blocks precisely the same, without any architectural feeling.

"The Eastender deserves better than that".

Rising out the ruins of an East End slum,

were buildings of a quality usually found in well-to-do West London,

in Kensington or Chelsea.

When Booth had first visited Shoreditch,

the population here had been recorded at just over 5,000.

On the new Boundary Estate,

there were 19 blocks, containing just over 1,000 flats in all.

There was the capacity

to accommodate everyone who had lived in the slum.

And the LCC was providing a home to them

that was designed to change their lives.

Fleming was trying to engineer a piece of new community,

a new society, by providing all the things that he thought

made up the perfect community,

the shops, the local bakeries,

the public space, the access to the churches.

The fact there weren't any pubs there.

They were all very carefully curated elements

of an ideal form of community.

Arnold Circus opened its doors in 1896.

For the Goffes of Half Nichol's Street,

a new dawn beckoned.

But they didn't take up residence in Arnold Circus.

Instead, they moved on to another miserable hovel nearby.

I know where our lot went, yeah.

Curtain Road,

which is where he moved to,

which was the centre of the cabinet-making trade.

In Curtain Road,

which never benefited from an LCC regeneration scheme,

the Goffes continued their hopeless slum lives.

Born losers, we are.

Doomed to failure.

Everything we touch turns to dross.

Perhaps the Goffes didn't move into Arnold Circus

because they couldn't afford the rent here.

Though intended for the poor,

this development had only been part-funded by London's ratepayers.

So, much of its cost was going to be recovered from the tenants.

Rent, on even a small flat here, was over ten shillings a week.

Four times the cost of a room in the slum.

Exorbitant for an unskilled labourer.

The Boundary had the capacity to house all the slum-dwellers.

But it was beyond the reach of the very poor.

This LCC map marks with a black dot

the final location of all the families made homeless

when the slum was destroyed.

It reveals how they circled around the Boundary,

but ultimately stayed in the miserable streets outside it.

Not a single former slum-dweller

moved into Arnold Circus.

The first council estate was built to improve

the lives of the most miserable in the Victorian city.

But the poorest didn't benefit at all.

Instead, Shoreditch entered a new era.

There's a sense that a building is complete when it opens,

which is ridiculous - it starts when it opens.

The rest of the life of the building is when it really gets used,

it's that sort of back and forth, that gives a building its interest

and its character, as it changes and evolves.

The first tenants of the two-bedroomed flat

presently occupied by young professionals

Richard Wallace and Kate Beckett

were Celia and Simon Finkelstein.

They were not from the slum.

They'd come to the East End from Russia,

sometime in the 1870s,

along with hundreds of thousands of Jews

fleeing religious persecution in Eastern Europe.

Simon Finkelstein had found work in the local industry

that was even older than the slum,

the garment trade.

By 1896, Simon Finkelstein was doing well enough out of tailoring

to afford to become one of Britain's first council tenants.

I could almost see my mother calling me now.

"Cos it's your birthday this week,

"and this is my present to you.

"To come back and say hello."

80-year-old Minnie Finkelstein

is the grand-daughter of Celia and Simon.

How do I get in?

When she was a child, Minnie and her parents

lived in her grandparents' flat.

She hasn't been back here for half a century.

The hundreds of times I used to climb these stairs -

home from school, home from playing with my friends.

I used to come up these stairs,

and I had some wonderful, fond memories.

This was my flat.

Home, sweet home.

Hello Mum, hello Dad.

Oh, goodness me.

It wasn't as posh as this when I lived here.

But this was our home and this was our front room.

This was our front room here.

And my bedroom was here.

My bedroom was just there.

Haven't they made a good job of it?!

Gosh - we hadn't had this. This is luxury.

Just off the kitchen in what is now a store room was a cubby-hole

that contained the flat's sole source of running water, cold only.

Oh, my goodness, me. Look at this!

None of the flats on Arnold Circus were built with baths or showers.

But the Finkelsteins were one of the few families here

to have a toilet in their flat.

Oh, look at this. It's phenomenal.

Down there, they used to bring the milk in

at four in the morning in big silver churns.

Thomas, his name was Thomas. Mr Thomas.

He had a dairy down there, that last one.

But I do remember the milk churns. They used to fascinate me.

At four in the morning he used to come.

We don't do that sort of thing now, do we? We go to Tesco.

The milkman and the coalman and the rag-and-bone man,

were much more than local tradespeople.

They were the characters who gave the street a human face.

They've now almost entirely vanished from the city's doorsteps.

In 1898, Charles Booth returned to Shoreditch.

He re-drew his map to incorporate the new street plan.

He described the people on these now fairly comfortable streets

as artisan class.

Census returns reveal that nearly all the Boundary's first tenants

were skilled tradesmen.

Many worked in the garment trade.

Tailoring is now kept alive on Arnold Circus by Jenny Schwarz.

I've been introduced to people before

and when they've actually found out where I live, they go,

"I've seen your light on all night long before."

Though a recent arrival on Arnold Circus,

Jenny feels a personal bond to the street's past.

I like being here because it's just so much history here.

It's always been in my family, tailoring,

and it's just something I grew up with.

My great-grandfather was a bespoke tailor.

He had his own shop and my nan is a tailor, my aunt is a tailor

so it kind of runs in the family.

I think that's where it comes from.

Especially around here, when you go out early in the morning

and nobody's around, it kind of feels like you're stepping back in time.

I like the feel of tradition and how it used to be, like when you think

about 100 years ago, even a tramp on the street was wearing a suit.

People were dressed differently,

especially men would spend a lot of their time and money on their appearance.

So for me, this is really interesting especially around here

which used to be a very poor area, that people still dressed up.

At the turn of the 20th century, Britain's first council estate

built a proud community in this once unhappy corner of the East End.

The people here were hard-working and well turned out.

According to Booth, poor but respectable.

In its first years,

proper behaviour was strictly enforced on Arnold Circus.

There was an estate superintendent.

The formidable Henry Webb

with the power to evict tenants for breaking any of his rules,

among which were,

"The stairs and landings shall be swept daily and washed every Saturday by the tenants in turn."

"No clothes or unsightly objects shall be exposed to public view."

"Tenants are requested to clean their windows at least once a week."

It sounds a bit kind of like a dictatorship.

Things now are completely different.

Mushtaq Osmani has been the housing officer on Arnold Circus for the last two years.

We've got caretakers that are expected to sweep up.

In terms of rent payments, there's a lot more flexibility now.

Eviction is usually a last resort.

We're trying to support the residents as much as we can.

But some things haven't changed.

There's no lifts in Boundary Estate.

I'm constantly going up and down the stairwells.

For some reason, I usually end up on the fourth floor, where all my problems lie.

Henry Webb climbed these stairs till it killed him, literally.

He died doing the job here on the Boundary.

But Webb left an important legacy.

He helped establish the council estate as respectable.

I remember my mother having to get my father once

because he had to do the stairs.

We had to do them, there was a notice on the board that isn't here now.

It was in Hebrew as well.

And in English, about looking after tenancy, on the board.

There was conformity, yeah, but we had that respect.

The Finkelsteins flourished on Arnold Circus.

Minnie's parents took over her grandparents' council flat.

Her father Harry worked nearby as a shoesmith.

He also spoke prayers for the dead at his local synagogue.

On Arnold Circus, the Finkelsteins climbed the social ladder

without losing touch with their Jewishness.

In 1900, one of Booth's researchers took social mapping in a new direction.

He mapped the Jewish population in East London.

Brick Lane, the centre of the garment industry, was blue,

over 95% Jewish.

Half a mile to the north is Arnold Circus.

Here, the blocks were individually mapped.

One is dotted blue, over 75% Jewish.

This is where the Finkelsteins lived.

The tiny Grand Palais kept a permanent Yiddish company.

SINGING IN YIDDISH

Yiddish was the accepted language in Whitechapel.

Street adverts, notices on pillar boxes and fire plugs were written in Yiddish.

Jewish immigrants often found themselves welcomed in the East End.

But in the 1937 local election, the anti-Semitic blackshirts

won 8,000 votes in the wards surrounding the Boundary Estate.

Arnold Circus, designed to exist as a world apart

from the streets around it, became a sanctuary for the East End Jews.

We all knew each other and we were all one people.

It was like living on an island, a precious island.

In the centre of Arnold Circus was an open space where everyone

rubbed along, whether Jews or gentiles like Joan Rose.

She grew up here before the Second World War.

Didn't acknowledge it, whether someone was Jewish.

Didn't mean anything to you, it wasn't important.

The spaces between each block of flats were called playgrounds.

They were named by the children.

"Come into our playground, I'm coming to your playground."

You draw a chalk line, play tennis,

boys would put three white marks and play cricket.

Very, very friendly. Very social.

If a child was crying, you could bet your life someone would look out

of the window and say, "Why are you crying, darling? Come here."

They would help you. Very caring community.

Joan Rose's family ran the estate greengrocers

and lived one floor below the Finkelsteins

in the flat presently occupied by the Begum family.

Very cosy. Very cosy. Used to love to come up here.

Joan now lives in Surrey.

Her family moved out of this flat when she was a teenager.

Sitting here...

I know that technology and everything in life moves on

but I'm sorry that there is not still the butcher's.

I'm sorry that's not still the delicatessen.

I'm sorry that's not still the rent office.

I'm sorry that's not still the doctor's.

I'm sorry that's not still Kossoff's the baker's.

And I wish that...

I wish somebody had a photo of it.

As was.

Cos I can actually see the families and that has come back to me.

Just sitting here, I thought, oh, yes, I remember Anita Brodie,

used to be friendly with the girls that lived there.

I remember Dr Murphy's son used to come

and buy tomatoes nearly every morning.

I used to think, that's a lot of tomatoes.

Now when I think back, I think he liked me

and he wanted to come over and see me.

That's being a bit vain, I know.

But you don't eat that amount of tomatoes, do you?

So, no, a good memory. A memory that makes you smile. Yeah.

Like the Finkelsteins, Joan's family

had been in Arnold Circus since the beginning.

When her grandparents Alfred and Phoebe Raymond took the lease on their grocery downstairs.

Joan remembers the shop in its 1930s heyday.

They had fruit and veg all the way along there

and that little corner here, we used to call it the office.

It's amazing because when you're a child, things look bigger.

That's where all the paperwork was done for the shop.

The Raymond's grocery was one of a parade of neighbourhood shops

on an avenue running off Arnold Circus.

This was the bustling high street of the council estate.

I'm just going to have a look and see if it's still there.

There's a fireplace somewhere and I'm sure it must be still there.

And here was the kitchen.

And it is! And in front of the fireplace was one gas ring.

You had to eat during the day

because this shop was open seven days a week.

Originally, as well as the open-all-hours high street,

there were two schools serving the community on Arnold Circus.

These were the only buildings to survive the demolition of the slum.

One of them is Virginia Primary.

-Come in.

-Thank you.

Oh, my goodness. It's changed.

This was one of my old classrooms.

It's lost a lot of character

although I see they have the old radiators.

I remember when they were installed. It was cold before that.

It was cold before that but we used to have gaslight here.

Aubrey Goldsmith grew up on Arnold Circus

and started at Virginia School when he was six in 1933.

Ah, yes.

The classes were shared, boys and girls together.

45 was the average class.

I had close friends that were Jewish and Christian.

Didn't make any difference.

We never heard of any... we weren't brought up with it.

We heard that it went on elsewhere but here, it was non-sectarian.

There was no problems.

Teacher was Sir or Miss. Always, Sir or Miss and that was it.

We learned all the time and the standards were high.

Disruption just wouldn't be tolerated.

If there was anybody disrupting,

the teacher had the capability of soon putting them to rights.

There was the old-fashioned walking stick cane

and you would get six of the best if you misbehaved.

It hurt and it left marks on your buttocks

cos most of us never wore underpants.

Aubrey's education introduced him to the world beyond Arnold Circus.

School trips took him out of the East End.

We went to places like

the Isle of Wight, to Great Yarmouth,

and we were taken on educational tours.

We went to places like Smith's crisps factory,

Colman's mustard factory.

We went to historic places and the whole thing was controlled.

The curriculum encouraged the children of the first council estate

to adopt the values of respectable citizens.

What started here helped you in your life.

The basis of it all was here.

I think we learned humanity.

We knew about wrong and right.

We learned to be responsible.

In 1939, Aubrey's education suddenly changed course.

During the Second World War, the schools closed on Arnold Circus.

The children were evacuated to safety.

With the war, when we were evacuated,

it opened up another world.

For example, I was evacuated to Cornwall.

They were very kind to us.

A lot of the Jewish kids for the first time in their lives,

they ate ham and things that they'd never eaten before.

It opened our eyes to a life outside of a council estate.

Remember, whatever this was, the oasis that it was,

it was still a council estate.

You realise that there were other ways of living.

German bombing raids damaged over 20,000 houses in Bethnal Green.

But Arnold Circus survived unscathed.

By 1945, most of the children had returned.

The shops, many of which had closed for the duration, opened up again.

Post-war Arnold Circus appeared to be picking up where it had left off.

Sue Stockwell moved into Arnold Circus in 1957.

Like moving to another country.

I only moved from up the road to here.

It was like moving to another world.

I loved it round here.

I liked all the cultures and the Jewish food. It was lovely.

Used to come out my door,

you could smell the doughnuts and the bread cooking.

It was just like living

with a big family.

Everyone knew one another in the shops.

Over here used to be Jack.

He was a Jewish man, used to have a sweet shop.

All the children used to buy his penny lollies

out them old-fashioned freezers.

It was like really solid blocks of ice with no taste in them,

but they was nice in the '50s.

You never went off your estate.

You played here all the time.

All this along here, we all used to play all the time.

This used to be our favourite road.

You could go up and down here with your skates on,

because it was smooth.

Everyone knew one another.

It was nice, because you'd come down,

the park used to be full of the Jewish women.

I used to know them all, and it was all like, "Hello, bubula."

They used to have a laugh.

They had such a funny sense of humour,

the cockney Jew,

they was like being entertained every day on the street corner,

cos they made you laugh, all of 'em.

SINGING AND LAUGHTER

The success of Arnold Circus in creating a respectable community

where slums once stood,

became a role model.

Across Britain, slums were cleared.

By the mid-'50s, three million new council homes had been built.

Becoming a council tenant was celebrated

as a step towards a better life.

-NEWSREEL:

-'Poplar's new Lansbury neighbourhood,

'which will be a complete little town when ready,

'welcomes the first tenant, Mr Albert Snoddy,

'to its first completed block of flats.'

Council homes built after the war came with all the mod cons.

Hot running water was standard.

The flats in Arnold Circus, with their single taps

of cold only,

now felt old-fashioned.

The elderly residents here,

who had never known anything else

accepted the basic amenities of Arnold Circus.

But to the new generation,

the promise of a more comfortable life elsewhere

proved irresistible.

Their sons got married.

The sons moved out.

Then the parents got older. Either one died,

and the other one lived,

and eventually, they all just moved away.

Gone to Stamford Hill, Golder's Green, Cricklewood.

With a strong hand, soon the last remnant will go.

And since its former patrons have moved away,

the Grand Palais puts on the odd Yiddish play only occasionally.

Between 1931 and 1961,

the population of Bethnal Green halved.

On Arnold Circus, for the first time in its history,

flats stood empty.

What breathed life back into Arnold Circus

was a radical movement that set out to challenge the basis

of property ownership in London.

The man who brought this revolution in housing to Arnold Circus

was Terry Fitzpatrick.

I'd say my politics are Left-Libertarian.

I believe in a small state.

I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves.

"I'm homeless." "Well, there's a flat over there.

"It's been empty for two years, Go and move into it."

MUSIC: "I Fought The Law" by The Clash

Terry was one of about 30,000 squatters in '70s London.

In the East End, around Arnold Circus,

many were in the properties of the largest landlord in the city -

the Greater London Council,

which had recently superseded the LCC.

There had to be a confrontation cos they were the dispensers of council property.

And they were bad managers, they didn't look after it.

In '74, there were 3,200 people on the waiting list and there were

sufficient empty properties in Tower Hamlets to clear it overnight.

Here, in the birthplace of council housing,

Terry's confrontation with the GLC would have a profound impact.

In the early 20th century, the council flats on Arnold Circus

had provided a haven for the East End Jews.

Here, they felt safe from anti-Semitism.

By the 1970s, in nearby Brick Lane,

a new immigrant community was settling in.

It was a nice atmosphere. Everyone knew everyone.

This restaurant, Nazrul, one of the oldest.

It used to be a cafe in the '70s.

Remember the jukeboxes.

We used to just come in here, have tea or coffee and listen to the jukebox.

The music was mostly Indian film music.

Rahim came to Brick Lane in 1971.

He featured in a documentary about the East End he had just discovered.

Rahim's family was one of thousands

that emigrated from Bangladesh to Britain in the '60s and '70s.

Many settled in the East End, drawn here by work in the garment trade.

In Bangladesh, Brick Lane is known to many people because

when people go back for a visit, often they talk about Brick Lane.

So there are people that have heard of Brick Lane.

By the mid '70s, Brick Lane's Jewish garment companies

were becoming Bangladeshi owned.

There were Bangladeshi shops, but the one thing

the Asian Eastenders didn't have was decent housing.

About 500 Bangladeshi families were crammed into a few privately rented rooms around Brick Lane,

living in squalor which echoed the 19th century slums.

That was when Terry Fitzpatrick first met Bangladeshis.

I found them very combative, in terms of... They would act collectively.

You could explain to them, you're not going to fight

the council on your own, and they understood that instinctively.

We try to mobilise people from this area

to have a deeper solidarity with our brothers in Hackney, right?

The meeting between Terry the squatter and the homeless Bangladeshis

was about to change the face of Arnold Circus.

-Put the stuff in.

-What about the police?

-They can't touch you.

Move fast.

This TV drama, King of the Ghetto, tells the story of a local builder

who organises Bangladeshi squats in the East End.

The angry and reckless hero is based on Terry Fitzpatrick.

There was no plan. One thing just led to another.

We'd help a homeless family, they'd got some relations, can we find them a flat?

There was never any shortage of a Bangladeshi prepared to squat.

Once the thing got rolling, once there was a momentum to it,

you could have squatted ten, 20, 30 families a day.

King of the Ghetto tells how Terry organised an unprecedented

mass squat, with hundreds of Bangladeshis.

I'll be back in a minute. I want a list of every family, all right?

Amazingly, this wasn't all dramatic invention.

Around the corner from Arnold Circus in 1976,

another Victorian block that the GLC had abandoned,

was occupied by Terry and 300 Bangladeshis.

One of those alongside Terry 40 years ago was Rahim.

THEY SPEAK BENGALI

Oh! How are you? It's been a long time.

I met Rahim in the summer of '76.

We'd just moved the first families in.

And Rahim said, "Well, this isn't very nice, particularly,

"where I'm living. Any flats down there?" And there was.

There was a one-bedroom flat and he moved in.

At first, I was a bit surprised

because I never heard of anything like that.

That you could just move in and squat in places

and I thought it's not legal, it's a crime.

In 1977, the squat's position became precarious.

The Tories won the GLC election, vowing to sort out council housing in London.

-We're bang on target for victory.

-Matters would soon come to a head.

'George Tremlett is an unusual Conservative councillor.'

George Tremlett, a young, ambitious Tory,

was put in charge of the GLC housing policy

and became the scourge of the squatters.

He soon heard about the occupation near Arnold Circus.

I went straight down and there were these 60 families of all ages

and lots of children, ragged, clearly very poor.

They didn't have windows or doors, just hanging curtains over the apertures and so on.

It was Dickensian, worse than Dickensian.

Under normal GLC policy, as it was, we would have gone to court

and got an eviction and thrown them out.

But George Tremlett had other plans for the mass squat.

Do you want to fight 60 homeless families who are living in poverty?

For what? Is that what life's about? I mean, you know.

I didn't take on the GLC housing job to do something like that.

Instead of evicting the squatters,

George made a complete U-turn in housing policy.

He offered to find council flats for every Bangladeshi in the squat.

George Tremlett said he admired squatters

because we were entrepreneurial, we didn't wait to be housed,

we went out and did it for ourselves.

The squatters were even offered a choice of where they might want to live.

They said, "Draw up a list of estates,

"and we will offer you accommodation on them."

We were gobsmacked. They just completely capitulated to everything we had been demanding.

The Bangladeshis drew a map to identify

the area of the East End where they wanted to live.

Arnold Circus was on this map.

I remember seeing a map.

I remember a long discussion about the history of the Jews in the area.

And how they had been assimilated.

We sort of talked about,

if it worked a couple of generations ago, it could work again.

Within weeks, 60 Bangladeshi families were allocated flats

in Arnold Circus and the other council estates they selected.

Everyone was rehoused. The whole building was cleared.

I had a seven-and-a-half tonne lorry

and we were up and down here every ever day moving families in.

For the first time in his life,

Rahim had somewhere he could legally call his own home.

He still lives in Arnold Circus today.

When you have your own flat to live in, I mean,

it's like it's your home, isn't it?

Now you're a tenant and you just live there as long as you can.

Rahim's story was just the beginning.

George Tremlett had set a precedent.

Giving Bangladeshis flats in selected streets, including Arnold Circus, became GLC policy.

But some newspapers accused the GLC of building ghettos.

I was appalled.

I was appalled because that had not been in our minds at all.

We had a ghetto. What I was trying to do was unwind it.

And enable the Bengali families in the area

to feel at ease within the community.

I didn't see it as ghettos at all.

Housing officers who were opposed to this wanted dispersal.

They had leaked the plan to a journalist

and that was the first time the word ghetto was used.

All the demands had been that people lived in safe areas.

We just demanded safer places where there were other Bengalis living in.

I never thought of being in a ghetto or anything.

The ghetto headlines inflamed racial tensions.

On the streets around Arnold Circus, violence erupted.

Three or four of them punched me.

These shops were broken by bottles and they ran all the way up here

and here at this point, give them a lot of opposition.

The violence was an attempt to make the GLC reverse its housing policy.

But nobody could stop the population change happening in the East End,

as was made crystal clear by the head of the GLC, Horace Cutler.

They'll be occupying a building or perhaps two or three buildings,

they'll be together, the language problem is got over.

Their habits, their customs will be acceptable within

their own community and I can't see any reason why

this piece of, what I would almost call, social engineering,

but it isn't that because it's not deliberate, it's a unique problem.

What will happen to the existing families who are already living

-in these blocks?

-Well, they have a choice.

Either they can stay there and live with them,

with the Bengalis, or they can go.

The GLC commitment to provide sanctuary for the Bangladeshis

utterly changed Arnold Circus within a generation.

This map was drawn in the 1990s by Tower Hamlets council.

It's now taken over the management of Arnold Circus from the GLC.

The map reveals the ethnicity of the borough 15 years ago.

Some streets, those in black, were over 70% Bangladeshi.

Arnold Circus was about 40%.

A summer evening in 2011. It's Ramadan.

Rushna Begum is preparing a ceremonial feast

that will begin at sunset.

So we're eating, then we're praying.

Whole night.

Then come back again and eat all the stuff.

Because it's a Sunday, Rushna's extended family has been invited to eat with her.

Most live nearby.

Yeah, this is my mum.

This is my oldest sister.

He is my nephew.

His name is Abu.

The older sister.

Weekends are always full of family, packed full of family, around here.

In this house and the other house, my gran's house,

we are always gathering together. We see a lot of each other.

For 20 years now,

a thriving Bangladeshi community has found sanctuary on Arnold Circus.

But this has always been a street of change.

Just as the slum dwellers and the Jews did before them,

Bangladeshis are now moving on.

Today, only about 20% of the households here are Bangladeshi.

Behind this latest movement is a complete rethink

of the role of council housing in Britain.

A social revolution that began 30 years ago.

MARGARET THATCHER: It was Anthony Eden who chose for us the goal of a property owning democracy.

But for all the time I've been in public affairs,

that has been beyond the reach of so many who are denied the right

to the most basic ownership of all, the homes in which they live.

In 1980, a law was passed,

giving council tenants the right to buy their homes at a discount.

Two pioneers of this legislation

were the GLC's Horace Cutler and George Tremlett.

There are five or six million council house tenants in this country, right?

Some of them will want to buy their own homes. We are making it possible for them to do so.

We're going to keep the rates down and we're going to use

the money to invest in the future of London.

It's very important, investment, you know!

If you're a GLC tenant, you'll soon be receiving this free booklet.

It tells you all about buying a home of your own.

In 1980, 40% of Britons lived in council homes. Now just 12% do.

On Arnold Circus, almost half the flats are now privately owned.

The parade of local stores

has become one of the most fashionable shopping streets in London.

It's good to see that the shops are now occupied and they're not empty.

It's a sadness to me that more thought hasn't got gone into making

those shops things that might be more relevant to the local people as well.

Arnold Circus even has an art gallery

in what used to be one of its schools.

This goes off for 15,000.

Across the circus, Virginia is still a school.

About 70% of its pupils are Bangladeshi.

The Begums could not afford to buy their flat.

But the flat above them was bought

and later sold for over a quarter of a million pounds.

It's now home to Richard Wallace and Kate Beckett.

Which one's mine? This one?

I like the fact it's real people who live around here.

I don't particularly care if it's a council building or not.

If you look at it from the outside, it's got character,

I don't know if it's Victorian or whatever it is, but it's something nice.

It looks like somewhere you could be sort of, not proud,

but happy to own it and think this is a good place to live.

The Victorian elegance of Arnold Circus

is the result of an extraordinary dream,

that urban planning could change people's lives.

Built for the very poor, it's been a haven for Jews, then Bangladeshis.

It's becoming a new kind of sanctuary today,

from the restless fury of modern city living.