Harper-Thames on the bandstand, the garden, and the history that most visitors walk past without seeing
By Harper-Thames
Arnold Circus is a circular garden built on a mound of rubble from the demolished Old Nichol slum, with a bandstand at its centre and Victorian social housing radiating outward from it in the spoke pattern that the London County Council’s architects designed in 1900 when the Boundary Estate — the first council housing project in London and one of the first in the world — was built to replace what Charles Booth’s poverty maps had identified as one of the most deprived areas in the city.
Most people who walk through Arnold Circus on the way somewhere else do not know this. The mound they walk up is made of the rubble of the houses that were demolished to build the estate that surrounds it. The bandstand where occasional concerts are still performed was built from the same project budget as the housing that surrounds it, because the architects of early social housing believed that public space and public beauty were components of the same programme as decent shelter, a belief that subsequent decades of social housing provision have not consistently shared.
Why This Place Matters
The Boundary Estate, of which Arnold Circus is the centre, is a conservation area and is one of the better-preserved examples of late-Victorian social housing in London. The flats are small by contemporary standards. The streets are quiet in a way that the surrounding area is not. The community that lives here has a different relationship to public space than the transient population that uses Shoreditch’s commercial streets, because they live here in the sustained way that makes public space meaningful rather than decorative.
I go to Arnold Circus regularly, particularly in the early evening when the light on the Victorian brick is the colour of the specific orange that makes London look its best, and I find it the most honest place in Shoreditch in the sense that it reflects what the neighbourhood was built from and what it was built for, rather than what it has become or what it is being marketed as.
How to Get There
Arnold Circus is a ten-minute walk from Shoreditch High Street Overground station, off Bethnal Green Road. It is free. The bandstand hosts community events through the summer, programmed by the Arnold Circus Neighbourhood Association. The Tower Hamlets park information lists events. The Spitalfields Life archive piece on Arnold Circus provides the historical depth. Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
